The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

by Craig M. Mullaney

  WHEN I LEFT THE United States, I hadn’t expected to communicate with friends and family. At best I thought I might get a letter off once a week. My expectations were wildly off the mark. Mail was regular in Gardez and arrived with almost every helicopter flying in from Kandahar. Meena sent tea and trail mix and a steady stream of Bollywood films to screen for my platoon. Charlie Hooker’s five-year-old mailed a hand-drawn birthday card and a huge bag of beef jerky. Katie Larson bundled magazine articles. My sister Bridget sent her special brownies (they lasted exactly seven minutes). Every week I received a ten-day-old copy of the Sunday New York Times from the mother of Liz Young, my Oxford and West Point classmate. Packages also arrived from random charities. Mountains of PowerBars and Twizzlers towered in the tents. We acquired a curious collection of sanitary napkins (we were an all-male infantry unit). As the deployment wore on, we shared more and more of our loot, keeping just a few choice items for ourselves from every package.

  There were odd restrictions. Meena received a sharp directive from Captain Worthan’s wife not to send “any matter depicting nude or seminude persons, pornographic or sexual items, or non-authorized political materials.” Meena found the warning hilarious and wrote to tell me about it: “Craig, I’m not sure which was more bizarre, the prohibition against swim-suit pinups or the juxtaposition of politics and pornography.” (My men had no problem acquiring porn. It was ubiquitous.) Meena sent novels and history books, inscribing encouragements to continue challenging my mind. On slow days I could open a camp chair and escape Afghanistan through the books she sent. With an iPod and headphones, it was easy to close my eyes, drift back in time, and hear Hayden snapping his fingers along with the saxophone and clarinet of Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”

  The same elaborate network of satellites and gadgetry that synchronized our GPS locators and allowed us to talk with jets thirty thousand feet above the deck also enabled soldiers to reach home with relative ease. Each of the tents in Gardez had an Ethernet cable, and many of my soldiers had brought laptops. Twice a day I checked my email and downloaded the digital photos my family sent me. We had a half-dozen satellite phones at our disposal. I got particular satisfaction from calling friends on weekends. One morning I called Bryan, who was working in San Francisco that summer.

  “Bryan, what’s up? It’s Craig.”

  “Craig?” I could just make out his confusion above the loud music in the background. “Hold on a second.” The bass line thumped uuntz, uuntz, uuntz. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine. Just thought I’d give you a ring on the satellite phone.” Bryan’s end of the line went quiet. “You still there?” I asked.

  “I’m here. I’m just trying to wrap my head around getting a phone call in a club from a friend in Afghanistan.”

  “Reach out and touch somebody, right?”

  COMMUNICATION WAS A TWO-WAY street, however, and I didn’t always want to know what was going on outside of my corner of Afghanistan. In particular, I didn’t want to deal with my parents’ divorce, but it kept reaching out to me from the other side of the world. A few weeks after arriving in Afghanistan, I received a letter from my father. He asked the usual questions about how I was doing and what Afghanistan was like. He said nothing about the divorce or why he had walked out on our family in the first place. There wasn’t a word of contrition in the letter. As I read it, I got angrier and angrier at the pedestrian tone of the letter, as if nothing had happened. The pain seared again as much as it had before I had left for Afghanistan.

  My father couldn’t have picked a worse time to desert my family, but I was helpless to do anything about it. I grabbed my notebook and wrote a short response to my father. I answered none of his questions but gave him an ultimatum instead: No communication would be possible without a full explanation and an apology. I folded the letter in thirds, stuck it in an envelope, and dropped it in the cardboard box that served as our mail bin. Then I tore up his letter and burned the scraps.

  BEYOND AFGHANISTAN, THE NIGHTLY news brought us images and sounds from a newer battlefield—Iraq. I watched with shock as the first roadside bombs in Iraq rocked Baghdad’s streets. Intelligence reports confirmed that daily attacks there dwarfed those in Afghanistan in scale, frequency, and geographic spread. I worried about Trent, the Parsons twins, and Major Nagl. They were busy enough (not the good kind of busy) that my messages didn’t get replies for months. We were stretched thin in Afghanistan, both in terms of boots on the ground and resources. The growing insurgency in Iraq would stretch us even further.

  VIPs began to visit Gardez with frustrating frequency. Gardez represented the new model of armed nation building. We had new schools and clinics open for inspection and a new unit of Afghan soldiers to showcase our handover of responsibilities to the Afghan government.

  One night in September we got word that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was arriving the next day. Our patrols were canceled, and we spent the day raking stones, sweeping tents, and hiding the “semi-nude” pictures on the wall. Sergeant Grenz followed the instruction a little too literally.

  Scott Grenz, despite his chubby cheeks and unassuming demeanor, was a natural leader in the platoon, perhaps a result of his growing up as the oldest of five boys in rural Nevada. Grenz had two hobbies back home: motocross bike racing and hunting. He could shoot a beer can at three hundred yards with one eye closed and an empty six-pack by his side.

  “He’s fully clothed, sir,” responded Grenz when I looked incredulously at his practical joke. He had replaced a Penthouse centerfold with a clothed pinup of Leonardo DiCaprio.

  “Keep it up,” I said, secretly hoping it might provoke a response from Secretary Rumsfeld.

  “Another fucking drive-by visit,” Markam chimed in. More accurately, they were “fly-by” visits; driving to Gardez was too dangerous (for them, not us). The routine was identical every time.

  The delegation arrived by helicopter, an hour late as usual. The reconstruction team met them at the airfield (not with the ghetto sled, though) and escorted the mob of television cameramen and perfectly coiffed news correspondents toward the base. They wore “combat casual”: khaki cargo pants, boots, and safari vests. And carried cameras, of course. Inside our dining hall they received a twenty-minute PowerPoint presentation. The commander, when asked, reported shortages of critical parts and requested a dedicated helicopter to get around the province. The VIPs nodded, and aides jotted notes on their dusty legal pads. As far as I could tell, these requests evaporated on the return flight from Kabul to Washington.

  After a half hour, lunch was served. All morning the cooks had slaved in the kitchen to perfect culinary masterpieces. There was demi-glace for the steak and drawn butter for the lobster. This visit even merited a layer cake. I was always allowed to send three soldiers to join the lunch. With so many visits it was possible for nearly every soldier to rotate through the feasts, enduring dumb questions (Do you miss home? Is it very dangerous?) in exchange for good food. We never ate better than when politicians visited.

  As the clock ticked on the two hours allocated for their tour of the front lines, the delegation got antsy. A lackey applied hairspray to a reporter’s mussed hair and handed him a fresh bottle of Evian. After lunch came the photo op. A large American flag hung on the mud wall. I stood with two other soldiers while our executive officer read our promotion orders. By the authority of the president, I now had the double silver bars of a captain. Secretary Rumsfeld shook my hand. He was shorter than I had expected.

  As the secretary’s delegation returned to a waiting helicopter, his aide left behind a handful of enamel coins for me to distribute to my men (a military tradition to express gratitude or reward performance). During the visit, most of my men had sat in their sweltering Humvees, staring out from the perimeter at passing dust devils.

  Despite the rosy picture painted for visiting delegations, reality wasn’t a PowerPoint slide show. They didn’t see that the Afghan soldiers they inspected weren’t
reliable enough to take on patrol or that they sold their uniforms and equipment on the black market because they weren’t getting their paychecks from the government. They didn’t drive through the streets and see the glaring eyes of current and future insurgents or the total absence of police to lock them up. There was certainly strategic value in having the media and American politicians see the good work the reconstruction team was doing in Gardez. With luck, they’d pen articles and return to Congress inspired to fight for reconstruction funding. And the focus on new schools and clinics would signal to Afghans that the American mission was as much about helping Afghans as it was about capturing and killing the Taliban. Yet I couldn’t help but be frustrated with the necessary brevity of these visits and the disruption they caused at a tactical level. An hour on the ground just wasn’t long enough to get any real sense of its contradictions, challenges, or opportunities.

  After the helicopter lifted off, I handed out the coins. Grenz thumbed his and asked whether anyone had inspected the tents.

  No. There wasn’t time.

  25

  Hearts and Minds

  And they will hammer their swords into plowshares and their spears into pruning hooks. Nation will not lift up sword against nation, and never again will they learn war.

  ISAIAH 2:4

  OPERATION DOOLITTLE. THAT IS WHAT THE HEAD of the reconstruction team dubbed our upcoming missions. With my troops providing security, the mission called for a small detachment of physicians and veterinarians to provide health care and vaccinations to the nomadic Kuchi tribes assembled near Gardez. We planned to set up a mobile clinic in a different location each day for five days.

  We had done dozens of convoys before, but I still spent an hour talking the team through our standing procedures for responding to a roadside bomb or ambush. The speed at which each squad leader could rattle off the steps was a testament to their training. If we ever had to respond, I was confident they would act immediately and appropriately. Each squad leader briefed me on the routes and checkpoints as well as the primary and alternate radio frequencies we would use for communications. As for the clinic locations, we knew the various sites well after five weeks of patrolling Gardez. Developing a perimeter security plan was a simple matter of positioning our vehicles to cover every possible approach.

  Our first destination was Dara, a tiny village along a famous mountain pass to our east. The Satakandow had a storied past. As the only pass over the Hindu Kush Mountains between the Afghan cities of Gardez and Khost, its strategic importance made it a valuable piece of real estate during the Soviet-Afghan war. When the Russians first tried to seize the pass, an entire battalion of Soviet motorized infantry was destroyed in an ambush, having fired from their personnel carriers until all their ammunition ran out. Mujahideen control of the pass continued to stymie the Russians until the winter of 1987-88, when more than two divisions of Soviet paratroopers and special forces fought a tooth-and-nail battle to relieve the siege of Khost. At great cost in Soviet lives, Operation Magistral was a success, but only temporarily. Soon after, the mujahideen regained control of the pass, and in April 1988 the Soviets began a phased withdrawal from Afghanistan. Even during our deployment, the pass remained dangerous for American forces. We slowly crawled up the serpentine bends of the road to an altitude of over nine thousand feet. Above us, silhouettes of soldiers and guns stood atop the ridges, vestiges of the combat scarecrows that the mujahideen had placed to spook the Russians.

  We arrived safely at a half-completed, two-story school, and I began to set up our perimeter. I placed trucks facing down the road in each direction and another truck behind the school facing the hills. One squad of soldiers remained inside the waist-high courtyard of the school playground to search male patients one by one before the doctors saw them. There was a separate tent for women. In the field beside the school, two shelters were set up for the veterinarians and their boxes of vaccines. I hadn’t realized until then that the Army even had veterinarians.

  It was still early in the morning when we finished setting up for the day. As the sun rose higher behind the mountains, what looked like rivers of refugees streamed toward our makeshift clinic. Clouds of dust hovered above herds of sheep, goats, donkeys, and camels. As they got closer, their thundering hoofs and bellowing brays and snorts combined with shepherds’ sharp commands to form a cacophonous din.The trucks began to report in over the radio: “I am surrounded by goats. What do you want me to do?” I walked over to McGurk, whose squad manned the gate into the courtyard. Outside the gate was a crowd of men jostling for position. Chuck was trying to shoo them into a line with gentle prods of a large stick he had found.

  Since joining the Army, I had practiced dozens of ambushes and raids. At Fort Benning I had devised elaborate defensive perimeters with trip wire triggers, booby traps, and planned artillery targets. But I had never, not once, practiced a humanitarian mission like this. I was prepared to make a final stand if surrounded by communist hordes. I was not at all sure what to do when surrounded by a herd of goats or a mob of locals speaking an alien tongue.

  Semper Gumby. Chuck quickly discovered that his curses were unintelligible to the tribesmen and found a better solution. He found the oldest man with the most elaborate turban, handed him the stick, and in a matter of minutes the situation was under control. The men soon lined up along the wall, sitting on their haunches in what looked like an incredibly uncomfortable but certainly unthreatening posture. The gunners on the Humvees took their hands off their heavy machine guns, pulled out their phrase books, and mimed a standing push-up to the shepherds while exhorting them to “move away, please.” The result was like Moses parting the Red Sea.

  As the hours passed, I moved among my Humvees, the gateway, and the makeshift clinic inside the school. The line of patients never dwindled. The half-dozen Afghan and American doctors worked without rest, conscious perhaps that they were the only medical hope for this underserved population. Unfortunately, they lacked all but the most basic medicines. Logistical delays meant that hundreds of doses of lifesaving vaccines were unavailable. All they had to give them was aspirin.

  In the afternoon an elderly man arrived carrying his paralyzed wife on his back. He had walked nearly ten miles. There was little our doctors could do. Another young man came limping to the makeshift clinic, his lower leg lacerated with shrapnel. He had stepped on one of the thousands of land mines littering these mountains. During the 1980s, the Soviets had carpet-mined entire ridgelines to deny their use to the mujahideen. Many of the minefields remained unmarked, and only a fraction of the known mines had been removed. An Afghan medical student removed the visible shrapnel, applied an antibacterial cream, and bandaged the leg, giving careful instructions on how to keep the wound clean.

  Outside, the field looked like the Washington County Fair that my father used to take me to when I was a kid. He would lift me up so I could pat the cows and brush the horses’ manes. We wore identical work boots as we tramped through the fair, stopping every so often for Dell’s frozen lemonade or a stuffed quahog. Twenty years and seven thousand miles later, I stood before hundreds of animals of every shape, size, and smell. Bobbing above the fray like bright buoys were the vibrant orange, yellow, and red head scarves of eight-year-old shepherdesses and the floppy boonie caps of soldiers. The veterinarians were dressed in khaki overalls and managed the pandemonium with ease, clearly in their element. I joined the assembly line for the task of shooting syringes of deworming medicine into the mouths of bleating sheep. As we counted sheep, a civil affairs soldier made a tick on his clipboard and branded each sheep with spray paint—U.S. The vets handled the larger animals: camels, donkeys, and horses. They set broken bones, shoed hooves, and bandaged wounds. I turned to see one vet with his arm up the ass of a cow as far as his bicep. Now that is love of country, I thought. While the doctors were able to treat only a couple of hundred people, the vets handled more than five thousand livestock. The Kuchi depended on their herds for sustenance,
clothing, and shelter. The value of a dairy cow or camel was a family’s life savings and insurance. In winning the hearts and minds of the tribes, Army vets were worth their weight in gold.

  Later in the afternoon, I sent a small patrol out beyond our perimeter. About an hour into their patrol, I received a report on the platoon radio frequency: “Gator 1-6, this is Gator 1-1. You better come check this out.”

  “What you got?” I asked.

  “It looks like a cache of ST-1’s. We might want to blow them in place. It could be too dangerous to move them.”

  I had no idea what an ST-1 was but didn’t want to relay my rookie ignorance. “I’ll be right there. Send your location, over.”

  I walked the half mile to the grid coordinate they gave me and found Sergeant Huber, as serious as a caretaker. “Let me see.”

  Huber gestured with his arm at the ground ten feet away. I heard a snicker from Red, but when I turned back to the group, everyone was scanning his slice of the perimeter. I looked again where Huber had gestured but couldn’t see anything other than a few rocks and fire ants.

  “There are more caches like this farther up the hillside, sir.”