The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education

by Craig M. Mullaney

  “I’m not sure what you’re talking about Huber. Where are those ST-1’s?”

  “Right there, sir, like I told you. A whole pile of S-T-O-N-E-S. We found some T-R-double E’s as well.”

  Everyone burst out laughing. “Fuck,” I said under my breath and hoofed it back to the compound. When I left the platoon, one of the gifts they gave me was a half-pound stone with ST-1 stenciled on its side.

  The following days had the same pattern. On day two I watched our company executive officer, the senior lieutenant in the company, go for a ride on a pony, falling off a couple of times without a saddle and bridle to keep his balance and control. A hockey player from Boston, he was no equestrian. I asked an interpreter if I could mount one of the camels and pose for a photo. He found the ugliest camel and negotiated with its owner. With my helmet, body armor, and rifle slung over my back, I sat right on top of the single-humped camel reclining in front of me. The owner nudged me gently to slide farther back on the camel and to wrap my arms around the bulging hump. I did as instructed, and the camel stood to full height, thrusting me six feet off the ground. A crowd of children and adolescents began to gather around, laughing and pointing at the “helmeted one” sitting on a camel. I smiled as one of my guys took photos with my camera. This will be a good one for Meena, I thought. No danger here, just a petting zoo. I reached back with my left arm as if I were going to slap the camel’s butt.

  Bad idea. Thinking I really intended to ride the camel, the kids started striking the camel’s butt with small sticks. Before I knew it, the camel was running off at a gallop with me holding on for dear life. Camels move a lot faster than you think. Behind me, a mob of kids and teenagers ran along laughing and continued to spur the camel on faster and faster. I tried to maintain my cool, conscious that America’s reputation and my own was at stake. But how to stop a galloping camel? The camel knew how. While still running, it started snapping its head back toward me with teeth bared and its odious breath overpowering me. Again and again the head snapped back, now with its teeth biting. Are camels carnivores? I had no option but to dismount before being eaten. I attempted a Mary Lou Retton dismount but instead landed in a yard sale on the ground, helmet upside down, rifle in the dust, and my heart racing with adrenaline. The kids lifted me back up, placed my helmet on my head, and began cheering. The adolescents attempted to lift me to their shoulders for a glorious (or mocking) procession. Fifty yards away my soldiers were bent over laughing.

  Our third day’s mission took place at a compound used by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. At lunch I discovered a dozen Afghan contractors in kurta pajamas playing volleyball on a dirt court. They were playing better volleyball than the varsity team at West Point. Every serve was blistering, and each volley was a perfect bump, set, and spike. Where did these guys learn to play? I yielded to the urge to join them for a few points, reliving my one season on the men’s volleyball team in high school. Despite my poor play, they invited me to break with them for lunch. Anything was better than an MRE, I thought, and joined them.

  Lunch featured a potato and chickpea curry with the standard mountain of naan bread and bottomless cups of green tea. I gorged myself and answered their questions—some in German, some in Urdu (in spoken form, nearly identical to Hindi), and some in broken English. Along with their unintelligible Pashto, there were four languages being spoken at once. I showed them the photo of Meena I kept as a bookmark.

  “Meri patni hai,” I told them, meaning “my wife.” I didn’t know how to say “fiancée.”

  The picture went around the circle. All agreed that she was bohut khubsurat (very pretty).

  “Pakistani?”

  “No. Indian,” I corrected. “Tamil Nadu.” That was where her parents had grown up.

  “Children?”

  “No,” I said as their eyes shifted down in sympathy, “but soon, hopefully.”

  “In sh’allah.” God willing. Before long we had moved past family questions to singing Bollywood anthems and then on to American celebrity gossip. I knew it was time to go when they asked me to sing Britney Spears songs. There are some things no self-respecting Army officer can do.

  At the end of every mission we dispersed blankets, food, farming tools, and backpacks filled with school supplies. At first we handed the items out from the back of the truck. This was a dumb move, and my men had to intervene to prevent the truck from being overtaken by the desperate wave of tribesmen. We grew smarter with experience. By day three we had learned to sit the various tribal chiefs in a line by themselves. In front of each one we placed a small pile of humanitarian items. If one of the chiefs grabbed anything from the pile before we said so, we removed him from the distribution line. As the piles grew larger, we lined up our convoy to return to base. Hoarding and fighting were bound to happen, but we weren’t staying behind to separate the Hatfields and McCoys. With engines ready, we bolted from the scene as soon as we gave the command to the khans to take their loot. In the rearview mirror, one man picked up his hoe and swung it at the head of another khan, knocking him out cold and taking his pile. There must be a better way, I thought to myself.

  An Army photographer later provided me with copies of the photos he took during the mission. In one, an adolescent girl is sitting on her heels and staring at the camera, her bright pink dress standing in stark contrast to a strand of barbed wire and an olive drab tent. In another, a grandmother with deep wrinkles on a sunburned face holds a young boy in her arms. His eyes are sapphires glittering in the desert sun, but his empty stomach is distended from parasites.

  These photos stand side by side in my office with pictures of the battlefields on which we fought and sacrificed. War is not only terror and exhilaration, courage and cowardice. It can also be the protection and comfort provided to the innocent. For a few days that is what we were able to do for regular Afghans caught in the cross fire of a war they never asked for. While I may never be able to point to a tangible result of our countless patrols and brushfire skirmishes, my soldiers will always be able to look back on that mission as a time when we put our weapons down and helped heal a broken country. It made me proud to be an American soldier.

  26

  Marking Time

  Patience is bitter, but its fruit is sweet.

  AFGHAN PROVERB

  WHEN I TOLD MY MEN THAT WE WERE GOING ON A three-day mission to Ghazni, they were nearly as excited as I was. Three days away from the routine at Gardez was an appetizing proposition. Unfortunately, I had to leave half the platoon behind in Gardez to protect the base. Our mission was to escort a dozen members of the Gardez reconstruction team as they performed a reconnaissance of Ghazni. At the time there was no American presence in Ghazni Province, an enormous territory to our west that was home to nearly two million Afghans. Our goal was to find a location in Ghazni suitable for another provincial reconstruction team and perhaps a larger infantry battalion to patrol and extend the central government’s influence.

  The day before we departed, we learned of a vicious attack along the route we planned to travel. The Taliban had stopped four Afghan employees of a Danish relief organization, tied them up, and shot them. Their bodies had been left to rot in the sun. The attack underscored the difficulties of rebuilding Afghanistan. The communities that needed the most help were by definition the most remote and least secure. Humanitarian organizations, without armed protection, made tempting targets on lonely back roads. The easiest way to discredit the central government was to stall the delivery of government services to rural areas and reinforce the perception of violent instability. As we drove the fifty miles between Gardez and Ghazni, I was keenly aware of our vulnerability even though we were better armed than our predecessors. Along one stretch we snaked downhill on forty-foot switchbacks with steep cliffs on either side leaning over us. If ambushed, we would have had zero mobility. Killing us would have been as easy as shooting fish in a barrel.

  As the convoy rumbled into Ghazni’s outskirts, her famou
s Towers of Victory stood in the distance. Built in the twelfth century, the pair of minarets were over a hundred feet tall and featured elaborate geometric designs along the raised brick surface. They looked like outsized grain silos. We soon turned onto the best road in Afghanistan, the centerpiece of the international reconstruction effort. Its renovation had cut the driving time in half between Kabul and Kandahar, spurring the recovering Afghan economy and providing thousands of jobs to construction workers along the route. It was a hard-won accomplishment, costing the lives of many brave Afghans and foreign construction managers who had been terrorized by insurgents eager to detour the ambitious project.

  The new road had no potholes. There were even streetlights and sidewalks. It was as if we had moved from the horse-drawn nineteenth century to the automobile twentieth century. Finishing a daylong convoy with a victory lap on a real freeway was exhilarating. The presence of American Humvees must have been a surprise to the locals, given our conspicuous absence until now. As we drove, a group of three women walked along the sidewalk in long robes and veils. Markam became giddy in the gunner’s turret. Then I saw why. The women had lifted their veils to look at us. Markam was sure they were flirting.

  “That was full facial nudity, sir. Seriously.”

  We pulled into a modern compound with twenty-foot walls and guards posted on either side. We had arrived at our destination—the Governor’s Guest House. We gaped open-jawed as we wandered on the premises.

  My first requirement was relieving myself. I asked in Pashto where the toilet was, expecting to be pointed to a moderately odious outhouse. I received a response in the Queen’s English: “You will find the toilet on the first floor, sir, next to the stairway landing. Would you like me to show you?”

  I was led to an immaculate bathroom. Its temperature was 20 degrees cooler than outside. Richly painted tiles covered the floor and walls, and a modern toilet sat like a throne at the back of the room. There was a beautiful porcelain sink with hot and cold taps, and the fixtures were a freshly polished brass. This was the lap of luxury after two months of camp living. My standard for luxury had probably dropped, but by any comparison, the Guest House was a nice place to spend a couple of nights.

  There was nothing to do for the rest of the day except relax and wait for dinner. I took out a book, planted myself in the center of the governor’s rose garden, and read contentedly for several hours. I lifted my eyes from the book occasionally to enjoy the rose blooms, the melody of songbirds, and a curious miniature deer roving the grounds. At intervals, a servant brought out glasses of rosewater, lemonade, and green chai.

  In the evening, servants led us to a long room with beautiful hand-woven carpets running down its length. European chairs lined the edges of the room, but we were encouraged to sit cross-legged on the rugs. Twenty-five of us perched eagerly in anticipation of the food. Servants sprang into action, delivering bushels of pilaf rice, steaming ladles of rich stew, and racks of lamb chops seasoned with mint and coriander. We ate ravenously, but the spread before us never diminished. Neither did our glasses. We consumed gallons of green tea and a delicious yogurt drink with a hint of cucumber.

  One by one, each of us leaned back from the food and reclined on our elbows. Someone flipped on the television. and a special about Massoud was playing. Ahmad Shah Massoud, “the Lion of Panjshir,” had been the most famous Afghan mujahideen leader, surviving countless attacks on his mountainous redoubts northeast of Kabul. Just two days before al-Qaeda stunned the world on 9/11, a suicide bomber linked to al-Qaeda killed Massoud. As the leader of Afghanistan’s Northern Alliance and a folk hero on the scale of Che Guevara, many Afghans felt his assassination keenly.

  Afghanistan’s history, whether its ancient past at the crossroads of many empires, or its recent guerrilla and civil wars, illuminated the war we were fighting. We could expect skill and tenacity from warriors who had mountain fighting in their blood. Their capacity to endure environmental hardship was unbelievable. They had reserves of patience that had outlasted Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, the British Empire, and the Soviet Union. And even though the United States wasn’t interested in acquiring Afghanistan as an imperial territory, history forecast different challenges. The Afghans had always been able to unite in order to eject outsiders. But without the unifying prospect of invasion, Afghanistan had most often fractured into warring tribes and regions. Geography reinforced those divisions, separating communities between mountain peaks so that neighboring valleys often spoke mutually incomprehensible dialects. The practical reach of a central ruler was limited. Stability was the exception in Afghanistan, not the rule.

  THE PROPOSED SITE FOR the new Ghazni reconstruction team was an uninspiring building outside the city. We drove there and provided security while the Gardez delegation examined the compound. Satisfied with the location, they determined that it was sufficiently far from the highway to reduce the risk of a car or truck bomb. Their caution was wise. Although these were rare tactics in Afghanistan in 2003, they would increase dramatically starting in 2006. Instead of returning immediately to the guest-house, the reconstruction team decided to go on a shopping trip in central Ghazni.

  “I don’t think this is a good idea,” I protested.

  The team leader responded, brushing aside my safety concerns. I thought of my trip to India and Tim Strabbing’s excursion to Kashmir. Oh, come on, guys. Who would kidnap a Marine?

  We drove through streets that grew narrower and more crowded the closer we got to the central bazaar. We made a brief stop to get cash. I handed our interpreter two hundred U.S. dollars—the amount my men wished to exchange for Afghanis, the local currency. This represented three months’ wages for the average Afghan. I decided to send a couple of guys with guns to watch his back as he made the transaction in a dark alley. The interpreter returned with an enormous bundle of Afghanis. All we were missing was a black briefcase. I divided the money among my solders in the amounts they had contributed. This involved much more math than I was comfortable with, especially while holding about eight thousand tattered bills.

  Our next move was to place the vehicles at either end of the bazaar. I planned a rotation so that everyone would get a chance to buy a souvenir. When it was my turn, I brought Private Joshuah Howe along with me to the nearest stall selling fabric. Walking down the street, it was as if everyone was watching me with hidden daggers ready to strike. I knew I was being paranoid, and reasonably so. There was no cavalry to call if something happened; we would have to fight our way out of the busiest part of the city. I hurriedly picked out a few yards of pink and emerald silk to bring home for Bridget and Meena. I turned to see Howe eyeing a burqa.

  Howe was my radio operator, my ears and mouth when we went into the field. Everywhere I went, Howe tagged along two steps behind with a twenty-pound radio strapped to his rucksack, usually humming Lynyrd Skynyrd or Ozzy Osbourne. Howe was the youngest private in the platoon, an eighteen-year-old from a small town in New Hampshire. He had joined the Army because he believed it was an obligation for every American male to serve. The maturity of his commitment contrasted with the baby fat clinging to his waist. Before we left Drum, I signed a pass for him to return home for his girlfriend’s senior prom. They married shortly thereafter.

  As we returned to the Humvee, Howe handed me the headset of the radio.

  “What’s up?” I asked the squad leader over the radio.

  “Some fifteen-year-old just asked me how many Americans were in the bazaar.”

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Of course not, sir.”

  “Anything else unusual?”

  “The same white pickup truck has driven by us a few times.”

  I thought through the evidence as my pace picked up. We were being sized up for an attack, possibly involving a car bomb in a busy bazaar. I blasted a command across the radio to rally at the Humvees for a rapid withdrawal.

  “Let’s go, Howe. Shopping trip’s over.”

  We ran thro
ugh the bazaar with our cheap plastic shopping bags in one hand and weapons in the other and got back in the Humvees. My driver stepped on the gas, and we barreled through the streets back to the governor’s house. I’ll never know whether we escaped an attack or just bugged out unnecessarily.

  BEFORE LEAVING GHAZNI, I had time to show my men the history they were shaping. From the governor’s house, the ancient citadel of Ghazni loomed in the distance like the Parthenon in Athens. We drove up a steep dirt track through the ruins until we were nearly at the apex. There was a Soviet tank buried up to the top of its treads. We crawled in and around the tank, taking photos in the bright summer sun. I took out the Afghan history book I had brought along and glanced through my notes.

  Ghazni was one of Afghanistan’s most strategically important cities. Located along the main highway between Kabul and Kandahar, it had played a pivotal role in Afghan and Asian history. The earliest records of Ghazni noted that it was a Buddhist city in the seventh century. In the first of many sackings, it was conquered by Islamic Arabs and subsequently became the seat of the great Ghaznavid Empire. Under the leadership of Sultan Mahmud, the Ghaznavids became the scourge of central and southern Asia. They conquered territory stretching from Iraq and Iran through Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India, bringing with them a zealous, iconoclastic version of Islam. On dozens of raiding parties into India, Mahmud captured and brought back to Ghazni a celebrated treasure of gold and jewels. The treasure allowed Mahmud to build the citadel and sustained his successors. They were the ones responsible for the hundred-foot towers we had seen earlier. Unfortunately, Ghazni was razed by another tribe, the Ghorids, rebuilt, and razed again by Genghis Khan.