The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

by Craig M. Mullaney

  “Craig, will you show me how to shave?” he asked. Gary had barely three whiskers on his chin, but after my stories, he was petrified of anything that might draw fire from the Beast cadre.

  “Hold it like this,” I said and helped Gary hold the razor at the correct angle to his face. We stood together in the tiny first-floor bathroom, barely enough room for the two of us to fit.

  “Start at your sideburns.”

  Gary swiped down along his cheek and then rinsed the razor under the hot water.

  “Good. Now the jawline. I always do the right side first,” I said.

  I leaned in closer for this critical step. His jaw, at eye level to me, had an extra thick crest of shaving cream, looking like a fake Santa beard. His large hand dwarfed the small razor.

  “No, no, no,” I interrupted, grabbing his wrist. “You want to go in the opposite direction, against the grain.”

  “Huh?”

  “Like this.” I flipped his wrist around and corrected his technique. “Go slow and keep your skin taut with your other hand.”

  “Ow.” He nicked his chin. “Sorry.”

  “I nick myself all the time. Don’t worry about it.” I passed him the aftershave. “Slap this on.”

  “It stings.”

  “That’s the point,” I said. “It puts hair on your chest.”

  “Hey, that’s what Dad says.” Gary frowned.

  “I know. Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” said Gary as he rinsed the razor under the hot water. I reached over, shut off the faucet, and watched as the milky water swirled in the drain.

  I turned and gave him a bear hug, thumping his back with my fist. “I love you, Gary.”

  II

  Soldier

  The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.

  SIR WILLIAM FRANCIS BUTLER

  20

  Master the Transitions

  Small wars are conceived in uncertainty, are conducted often with precarious responsibility and doubtful authority, under indeterminate orders lacking specific instructions.

  SMALL WARS MANUAL,

  U.S. Marine Corps, 1940

  DEPLOYING TO AFGHANISTAN WAS A SLOW IMMERSION, like Dante’s descent into the Inferno. The journey began at Fort Drum’s rapid deployment facility—an airport terminal with X-ray scanners, uncomfortable seats, and television sets tuned to Major League Baseball games. Apart from the boots and body armor, we could have been at the Syracuse airport.

  The wait was interminable. Soldiers did what soldiers do when any delay passes the fifteen-minute mark: They fell asleep. Six-foot-tall Mitchell Markam curled into the fetal position with an unloaded pistol firmly in his grip. Markam’s Connecticut upbringing clashed with the gangster persona he tried to project to the rest of the platoon. A digital photo of this pose set his cause back several months. After perhaps four hours, Markam awoke to the sound of a dozen soldiers carrying large insulated vats of food. Thoroughly embarrassed, he joked with a hint of gallows humor that this was our “Last Supper.” Servers gave us each a rubbery T-bone, spicy Mexican rice, and three brownies. After dinner an Air Force sergeant ushered us into a holding area behind a big blue curtain decorated with the 10th Mountain Division crest and its motto, “Climb to Glory.”

  The platoon folded into seats before the projector screen. The much-awaited intelligence briefing began with a list of the dangers awaiting us in Afghanistan: camel spiders running faster than thirty miles an hour, cobras, ticks. I gave a half-comical, half-serious look at Markam and another soldier snickering in the back row about giving each other tick checks. Our next briefing curiously interposed the threat of dehydration with the perils of flash flooding.

  We knew more about Afghanistan’s flora and fauna than the tribes inhabiting the districts we patrolled. We could identify the Hindu Kush Mountains and the Helmand River on a map of Afghanistan, but knew little about the dry riverbeds surrounding our bases. We knew politics at a national level, but not at the local level where it mattered. We had Arabic phrase books that were useless in Pashto-speaking provinces. Success in Afghanistan wouldn’t hinge on our ability to thwart camel spiders.

  We walked out of the terminal and stretched in a long line across the shimmering hot tarmac toward an enormous cargo plane. Its cavernous fuselage slowly swallowed our small profiles. The departure for Afghanistan lacked the Hollywood drama I had expected. There was no flourish of trumpets and drums to send us off, no cheering crowds. Whatever nervousness I had had about the deployment dissipated during the countless delays, briefings, and speeches we were subjected to for weeks. Even the youngest privates approached the journey overseas as a novelty rather than a life-changing embarkation. If they were nervous, they hid it well, perhaps eager not to show their butterflies before the nonchalance of the veteran sergeants.

  Two long columns of webbed seats stretched toward the cargo pallets loaded high against the rear ramp of the plane. Fort Drum’s summer humidity baked us as we waited to taxi. I fought the impulse to undress, remembering from previous flights how cold an unheated cargo plane gets as it reaches altitude. Before long we were airborne to Frankfurt, Germany. Soldiers splayed out in the aisles and on the web seats, wearing earphones and earplugs to dull the roar of the jet engines. As the temperature dropped, soldiers unpacked poncho liners and wrapped themselves in the soft quilted camouflage. I drifted off to sleep, thinking of the last thing Meena had told me before we said good-bye: “Keep me in your heart and know that however great the distance, I am with you always.”

  TWO FLIGHTS AND SEVEN thousand miles later, we walked off the back ramp of the cargo plane and into Afghanistan. The heat nearly knocked us over, sucking the oxygen out of the air and leaving us breathless. It was like walking into a furnace. My boots felt as if they were melting into the black tarmac. The sky was a red canvas of dust obscuring the setting sun. As we deplaned, soldiers standing guard at posts scattered around the airfield scanned the horizon. Beyond them, barely visible through the choking haze, a ring of barren mountains stuck up out of the flat plain like shards of glass embedded in concrete.

  As if on cue, a soldier materialized out of the dust and introduced himself. I asked him the temperature.

  “One hundred twenty-eight in the shade, sir.”

  KANDAHAR AIRFIELD HAD A confused appearance. Built in the early 1960s by American contractors, the terminal’s scalloped bays arced in a wide semicircle. Peeling paint and vacant gates made it resemble a disheveled version of Dulles Airport. Along the airfield bomb-blasted hangars bulged with American helicopters.

  Beyond the hangars we followed a grid of dirt roads lacing together rows and columns of tents. Industrial air-conditioning units hummed as they pumped cold air through bright yellow ducts into the tents. Above, a spider’s web of electrical wires powered video games and DVD players inside. Banks of dust hovered everywhere in an ochre fog. Porta-Johns hosted long lines of soldiers with rifles slung over their backs. The soldiers’ desert uniforms made them nearly impossible to see. We stood out with our fresh uniforms, body armor, helmets, and rucksacks. The soldiers at Kandahar had disposed of those impediments months before.

  After dropping our rucksacks at our designated tent and replacing our heavy Kevlar helmets with the floppy “boonie caps” everyone else was wearing, we headed toward the smell of hot food. We were soon lost among the tents, passing the same volleyball and basketball courts for a second and third time. Eventually, we reached a complex of large tents with a line extending fifty yards outside the door. Before we could enter the chow hall, we decontaminated our hands at portable hand-washing stations. The scene inside was more Ponderosa than Beetle Bailey. A civilian contractor checked ID cards and marked a sheet for each hungry mouth. Before us was a spread of unimaginable variety. Mountains of mashed potatoes surrounded slabs of pork and chicken bathed in barbecue sauce. Inside the r
efrigerator were ice-cold Cokes, Snapples, and Gatorades. We ate on real plates with real forks and knives. By the bulging bellies of some infantrymen in the room, it was clear that tonight’s meal was no exception. Markam rushed up to me with a mile-wide smile and a super-sized cup of soft-serve ice cream.

  “Sir, you can eat here four times a day!” He waited for a reaction. “They even have a midnight meal. Can you believe it?” Markam rushed off to tell the other men in the platoon.

  I walked back by myself and collapsed facedown onto a dusty cot with my boots still on.

  “WAKE UP, MULLANEY.” I turned on my side and recognized Captain Worthan, my company commander, standing over me. I sat up and dug the dust out of my eyes.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We’re going on the next bird to Gardez. Get your ruck and let’s go.”

  “Roger, sir.” I glanced at my watch. I had been asleep for only twenty minutes. “Sir . . .”

  “Yeah?”

  “The whole platoon?”

  “No. Just you. Your guys will meet you there.”

  “Yes, sir.” I fumbled in the dark and put my body armor on over my uniform. I hoisted my rucksack on my shoulders and grabbed my weapon. On the way to the airfield I exchanged my empty magazines with seven fully loaded ones. Real bullets weighed more than blanks. My blood began to pump faster. Here we go, I said to myself. The adventure begins.

  In the dark I tried to match Worthan’s long strides toward the airfield. A crew chief ushered us aboard one of two Vietnam-vintage Chinook transport helicopters creating a hurricane on the tarmac. The Chinook lurched off the ground in the pinkish hue of a dusty dawn, and we surged toward the ring of mountains I had observed earlier. Apache attack helicopters buzzed like mosquitoes protecting our flanks, scanning for threats as the parched desert floor slid beneath us.

  Our flying flotilla sped just two hundred feet above the highest peaks, emerging on the far side at a dizzying height over broad valleys and steep gorges. The landscape was almost devoid of vegetation. In places, the ground cracked like old parchment. Between infertile plots stood the isolated square shapes of Afghan family compounds with high walls and guard towers. An occasional grain silo stood silent sentry between hulks of old Russian tanks visible even from our altitude. Long lines of dots like giant anthills extended from the mountains toward the valley floors. These were the vertical ventilation shafts of a medieval system of underground irrigation tunnels. As we flew farther and farther from Kandahar, it seemed as if we were rolling the clock back from the twenty-first century. The view from this height probably hadn’t changed much in six hundred years.

  21

  Dust

  In a few years hence, when the present generation of turbulent intriguers shall have been swept away, the task will be comparatively easy. As it is, the progress we have made towards pacifying . . . is perfectly wonderful.

  SIR WILLIAM MACNAGHTEN, Kabul, 1841

  OUR CHINOOK SCREAMED ABOVE RIPPLES OF ROCK jutting out from scorched earth. The midday sun banished every shadow except our own silhouette, like a flying carpet beneath us. We were only minutes away from Gardez, but at the time I knew almost nothing about the place where I was about to spend the first months of my combat tour.

  Gardez is the capital city of Paktia Province, an area roughly the size of Vermont. It sits astride two important and ancient trade routes. From north to south, Gardez connects Kabul with the city of Khost. From east to west, Gardez lies between the Tora Bora mountain complex on the Pakistan border and the ancient city of Ghazni. The dominant Pashtun tribe in Paktia had fought every conquering force from Alexander the Great’s army to the motorized regiments of the Soviet Union. Eventually, all foreign forces had been routed in battle or quit in frustration.

  Above the roar of the rotors, Captain Worthan yelled into my ear as he pointed out the Shahi-Kot Valley beneath us. I picked out the familiar shapes I had stared at on maps during that veterans’ guest lecture at Fort Benning. The Whale. Roberts Ridge. The Finger. Against a thousand al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters dug into caves on these steep ridges and fearsome peaks, coalition forces had suffered more than eighty casualties. Seeing the peaks and ridges with my own eyes, the battlefield looked even harsher than I had imagined back in Benning’s air-conditioned auditorium.

  As a cadet, my visits to Normandy and Bastogne had helped me decide to join the infantry. There had never been any risk of a German sniper picking me off while I wandered among old foxholes, debating tactical decisions with academic detachment. The battlefield below me now was no historical artifact. This war was still a work in progress, and these ridges still harbored enemies intent on killing my men and me. My gaze narrowed on the rifle barrel between my legs, and the helicopter banked into its final approach to Gardez.

  “HOP IN OUR GHETTO sled,” joked a blond lieutenant wearing shades. I shook the lieutenant’s hand, and he tossed my rucksack into the backseat of a cannibalized Humvee. The ghetto sled had no hood over the dust-crusted engine block and was missing its doors. Most notably, there were no windows or roof. Markam later proposed that we send a picture to General Motors as a concept design for a Hummer convertible.

  The “airfield” we had landed on was a straight stretch of Paktia Province’s only asphalt road, blocked off on both ends by two Humvees in only slightly better condition than our improvised airfield shuttle. We kicked up a whirl of dust as we rumbled along the dirt road from the landing zone toward our new home. Along the perimeter of the base were Hesco barriers stacked like giant five-foot-tall Lego blocks. These dirt-filled mesh and wire cages were topped with triple-standard concertina barbed wire. A sandbagged guard post concealed a machine gun and a pair of soldiers.

  Inside the perimeter loomed an impressive compound. Leased from a local farmer by American Special Forces at the beginning of the war, the firebase was a traditional Afghan home. Twenty-foot-high dirt walls connected medieval watchtowers at each corner of the rectangular compound. The entrance was a pair of steel gates eight feet high and painted with an assortment of Technicolor flowers. A smaller door was inset in the left gate, and soldiers passed in and out like petitioners entering a cathedral.

  The curtain wall was several feet thick, insulating the perimeter rooms from dramatic temperature shifts and making the building nearly invulnerable to rockets and mortars. The inner courtyard held a small orchard of fruit trees surrounded by a path of crushed stones neatly corralled between painted rocks. (Someday an anthropologist will marvel at painted rock artifacts and wonder what totemic power they held for the military. It was the military custom: If it moves, shoot it. If it doesn’t, paint it.) A long, open-air tent in the middle of the orchard hosted 82nd Airborne soldiers who were grunting as they pulled and pushed barbells and spun recycled gym exercise bikes. The Texas state flag fluttered above one of the watchtowers, and a songbird lilted from a hidden nest.

  After dropping our bags in a tent, Worthan and I hurried to the mess hall for a series of introductory briefs. An officer turned on the projector and began with a rapid-fire overview of our mission. Since neither of us had known exactly where we would be located upon arrival in Afghanistan, this brief was the first we learned of our specific mission. We had two responsibilities. Our first priority was to protect the Gardez Provincial Reconstruction Team. The team comprised a dozen or so Army reservists from Texas, one itinerant government aid worker, and a single State Department political officer. In theory, this small team managed the reconstruction contracts for the entire province. They needed my infantry platoon to guard the base and escort them on their routine inspections of school and clinic construction projects. Our second mission was to “show presence” in the city of Gardez. This meant patrolling the city a few times every day to intimidate the “bad guys.” The next slide was a map of Gardez with checkpoints and routes superimposed in bright reds and greens. It looked straightforward, logical, and simple. Patrolling this area was not going to be so hard, I thought. Only later would I learn the f
irst rule of Afghanistan: The closer you look, the less you understand.

  Our intelligence briefing followed. The white board was a scribbled maze of dotted lines that looked like the board game Chutes and Ladders. Stick figures represented local thugs, rival police chiefs, and mayors past and present. Happy faces indicated good guys, and frowns signaled bad guys. The new police chief went into the good guy column, but the old police chief was still around and apparently was a bad guy. Police aligned with both factions wore indistinguishable uniforms. Then there were the Afghan soldiers. On the one hand, the Afghan Militia Force was effective but couldn’t be trusted. The Afghan National Army, on the other hand, was loyal but ineffective. The good news was that we would at least be able to recognize them by their American forest camouflage. That wasn’t the case for the average thug.

  “How do we know who’s a bad guy?” I asked.

  “They speak Arabic.”