The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan

by Hastings, Michael

  “We rolled out the red carpet for him,” Andersen said of Klein. “And he repaid us with a bad story.”

  The story was about a soldier from Task Force 1-12 struggling to get a school built. I’d read it, thought it was a great story, and it seemed fair. But Klein had questioned McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy, later noting “the level of optimism emanating from General Stanley McChrystal’s headquarters stands in near delusional contrast to the situation in Kandahar.” The real problem for Andersen, though, wasn’t just the content of the story—it was who had read it. High-ranking figures in Washington, mainly, proving that both shit and bad publicity roll downhill. National Security Advisor Jim Jones personally called McChrystal after reading the story. McChrystal was in Paris at the time—he told me he wasn’t pleased with Klein, either. McChrystal passed the word to Andersen: You fucked up.

  Duncan asked him when we could get out to the combat outpost JFM. That’s where Israel Arroyo was stationed.

  “I don’t think it’s a very good idea to go out there,” Andersen said.

  Andersen had deep lines under his eyes, a face like a well-worn canvas punching bag. It’d been a long tour, he explained. The latest death was Sergeant Michael Ingram Jr., and he handed me a printout sheet showing the pictures of the fifteen soldiers the battalion had lost during the tour. The Time magazine story wasn’t the first time he’d caught McChrystal’s attention. In fact, it was the third time Andersen had been reprimanded from Kabul—his unit had been involved in two high-profile civilian casualty incidents that got him chewed out. Then Arroyo sent the e-mail to McChrystal. When Andersen learned McChrystal was coming down to visit TF 1-12, he thought he was going to be fired. He didn’t get fired, but the message was clear: Get on board with counterinsurgency and follow the rules of engagement. Andersen told me that he didn’t quite get the whole counterinsurgency thing—“I mean, we’re infantry, we’re knuckle-draggers, it’s not something we can just switch off overnight, you know,” he said. He said he didn’t quite understand the rules of engagement, either—but to be safe, he made it clear to his soldiers that they should rarely use force, which seemed to confuse everyone even more.

  “No, we’d like to go,” Duncan said.

  Andersen looked resigned to a thankless fate. Like he knew either decision he made would lead him to the same place: face-first into a shit-stained blast wall. Tell the headquarters guy to fuck off, and he risked the wrath of headquarters. Give Duncan what he wanted—and allow him to bring a reporter, shit—and he knew the result would almost certainly be bad, too.

  “It’s pretty raw out there,” Andersen insisted. “You’re likely to get a lot of rants about how they don’t like rules of engagement.”

  “Hey, Duncan, it’s cool with me if we just stay here,” I said. I knew the unit had just lost a soldier the week before. They had only a month left in their tours. I’d been in a similar situation in Baghdad a few years earlier. I figured they were going to be angry and depressed. I knew they wouldn’t welcome a reporter. I didn’t know if I wanted to see it—my story didn’t need it, I thought. I had the very antijournalist instinct of not wanting to immerse myself in someone else’s trauma. I did want to meet Israel Arroyo, but I’d be able to do that tomorrow, when McChrystal was scheduled to pay them a visit.

  But Duncan wasn’t going to be deterred. “No, we’d like to get out there for the night.”

  “Okay, whatever you want,” Andersen said.

  We spent an hour or so hanging out at Andersen’s office. I stood under a concrete bunker smoking cigarettes. We walked over to Charlie Company’s headquarters—Charlie Company was in charge of JFM, and they were supposed to give us a ride over there.

  The Charlie Company captain came out. He introduced himself as Duke Reim. We knew each other, sort of. He’d been a lieutenant in Iraq in the 172nd Stryker Brigade, a unit I’d spent a month embedded with in Baghdad in the summer of 2006. My photographer friend Lucian Read—who’d also been there in 2006—had just left Duke and his guys after another long embed. We laughed—it was a small war.

  Charlie Company had three large MRAPs parked outside the headquarters tent. A dozen soldiers milled around, checking out Duncan and me. We didn’t pass the test.

  I started bullshitting with one of the soldiers. I asked him if Israel Arroyo was out there.

  He told me no.

  “Arroyo left fucking today, man,” he said. “He had to escort another soldier back to Germany. That fucking guy had been going around saying he was going to kill an Afghan or kill a fucking interpreter. He was acting fucking nuts, so they let him go home. Arroyo went with him to make sure he didn’t do anything fucking stupid.”

  Arroyo was gone. Very weird. He was the guy I wanted to see. I changed the subject.

  “I’m sorry about Sergeant Ingram,” I said.

  “He’s fucking Corporal Ingram to us,” the soldier answered. “Rank you get after you die don’t count.”

  It was a point of pride, he said. Ingram wouldn’t want to be known as a sergeant.

  I pulled opened the MRAP door. Pronounced em-rap, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle entered the war to replace the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee. The bombs got bigger, and the three thousand pounds of armor on the Humvee was too easily shredded. The MRAP, though, was about the worst kind of vehicle one could have imagined for the terrain in Afghanistan: mountainous, wadi-filled, and roadless. It was slow, easily got stuck in the mud, and required paved roads to be most effective. The entire country had only one major highway. It also fell far short as the primary ride in a military campaign dedicated to swaying a local population. The twenty-two-ton vehicles were intimidating and loud and frightening and difficult to drive without regularly causing severe property damage. The MRAP underscored the alien nature of our presence. Add a life support system pumping oxygen into the metallic caverns and you might as well be cruising around in a tank on occupied Mars. Rather than project strength, the MRAP perversely sent another message: the complete fear and hatred the Americans had for the people they were supposedly there to protect. The MRAP was there to save us, not them. (It did so: There was an 80 percent better chance of surviving an attack in an MRAP compared to a Humvee.) The network of roads we were building in the country—the humanitarian projects of approximately 720 miles of asphalt over ten years, at the staggering cost of about $600,000 per mile—had a dual purpose in making it easier for us to drive around the country to kill the disgruntled peasants.

  I climbed up in the MRAP, and Duncan squeezed in next to me. The door looked extremely heavy—the hatch on the tanklike MRAP weighed at least 120 pounds. There was a warning on the locking mechanism that said it could cause serious injury or death if you weren’t careful.

  We were heading into a very intense situation. One soldier evacuated for going crazy, another killed ten days ago. Of the twenty-five original members of the platoon at JFM, only seven were still left—the rest had been killed, wounded, or lost their minds.

  The MRAP door slammed shut.

  36 INGRAM’S HOUSE

  APRIL 28–29, 2010, COMBAT OUTPOST JFM, ZHARI, AND KANDAHAR AIRFIELD

  The twenty-two-ton MRAP bounced up and down along a narrow dirt road, crawling at a speed of around ten miles an hour. It was like riding in the back of a garbage truck.

  I looked out the window. Combat Outpost JFM was only a few kilometers outside the wire from FOB Wilson. It was startling to see just how close the war was being fought to the large American base. JFM had seen some of the heaviest fighting so far—a NATO operation launched a few years earlier had killed hundreds of Taliban and dozens of NATO troops. What was left behind resembled the Biblical past or a postapocalyptic vision of a distant future, dust storms and gray clouds overhead, signs of colonization in splashes of gravel and barbed wire, Jawa-like figures making strange sounds scavenging about the rubble, every few miles marked with a handful of armed men huddled for survival in cold stone bunkers.
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  The outpost appeared before us, a concrete citadel, a moat of Hesco barriers filled with dirt and blast walls. A soldier swung open the gates. We moved down the driveway, passing a pit of burning trash, smoldering with black smoke and ash. It was getting close to dusk.

  Combat outpost JFM

  There was an edgy, animalistic feel to the place. A group of about ten soldiers gathered around a mortar pit like it was a campfire, the focal point of the small base. There were two large guard watchtowers, a sandbagged headquarters made from plywood, a few trailers for bunk beds, and a line of Porta-Johns. One soldier was sitting in a foldout chair next to the mortar tube, getting his head shaved; the others talked among themselves. No one made eye contact.

  Duncan and I were more or less ignored. We threw our bags into one of the trailers, which looked like a shipping container. They were called CHUs (pronounced choos), for containable housing units.

  A Short Timer’s calender inside JFM

  Lieutenant Graham Williams commanded the platoon at JFM. He wasn’t impressed by our presence, either. He gave me a tour of the base. I climbed up one of the guard towers behind him. He pointed off to a small house in the distance.

  “That’s where Ingram got hit,” he said.

  I wasn’t making much progress in my conversations with the soldiers. They clearly didn’t trust us, didn’t appreciate our being there. They were still reeling from the trauma of Ingram’s death ten days earlier and the frustration of a year at war. I felt I had to do something to gain their trust. I asked Williams if they were going on a patrol tonight. The lieutenant said yes. I asked if I could join them. He said I could if I wanted. He said he didn’t give a shit.

  It was a strange reaction. Most of the time, a reporter on a patrol is welcomed, or at least the soldiers pretend to welcome him. But by this point in the tour, a reporter had just become a hassle, something else to worry about. They didn’t even bother worrying.

  It got dark.

  Staff Sergeant Kennith Hicks and Lieutenant Williams were going to lead the patrol. I slipped on my body armor and helmet and borrowed a pair of eye protection with clear lenses from one of the soldiers who was staying behind.

  The soldiers gathered around Hicks for the pre-patrol briefing. Hicks stood about five feet nine and had close-cropped blond hair. He spoke in a language where ums and uhs were replaced by fucks and fuckings.

  “Obviously fucking threats are out there, dismounted,” he said. He mentioned Ingram without mentioning Ingram. “You all know what happened. You know what’s out there. You know what you’re coming up against. Be extremely fucking careful, look for markings on the ground.”

  Lieutenant Williams added, “There’s no hurry. Scan the surface, look for hot spots. Make slow fucking movements. Don’t feel like you got to rush through there.”

  “We should give out diseased blankets to them, like we did to the fucking Indians,” said one soldier.

  “Fucking give them immunization but instead make it AIDS,” said another.

  Leaving the patrol base, we crept along the Hesco barriers on a small footpath with a deep drop-off down to a muddy drainage ditch. We started walking down the road. The moon backlit the patrol through the overcast sky. I could make out each soldier clearly as they staggered themselves out, S-shaped, keeping enough distance between themselves so if one stepped on a mine, maybe only one would die.

  We got about two hundred meters away when the soldiers took up position in the ruins of an abandoned house. I crawled up the wall and kneeled down on the second floor. It was white and gray, all crumbling rock, like an empty housing project from the world of the Flintstones. All the houses had the appearance of bunkers and combat positions, not homes—meant to kill or hide, not to live in.

  Lieutenant Williams saw something move a hundred meters away at another house. Cars had been driving up and pulling away over the last hour, more activity at the house than they’d seen in weeks.

  Across the field and down the road, a flashlight flicked on and off.

  The light flashed again.

  “There’s somebody in there,” Lieutenant Williams said. “In Ingram’s house.”

  He crawled down from where we were kneeling on the second floor. He waved Hicks and another soldier over to him.

  They started to walk down the road.

  They disappeared.

  THWUMP, THWUMP.

  The sound of illumination mortar rounds fired from the base.

  The sky lit up.

  I looked to my left and right, checking who was next to me. Four silhouettes outlined: three soldiers and an Afghan interpreter, standing and kneeling on the second floor and staring out to where Williams and Hicks had vanished.

  The wind started to pick up. There was lightning in the distance. A bad storm was moving in and the dust mixed with the darkness. It was hard to see.

  There was no sound coming from Ingram’s house.

  I waited for the explosion. For the automatic rifle fire to follow. For the adrenaline to dump and the yelling to start. For our entire universe, three hundred meters of limited visibility, to stop all motion, then hit warp speed, the rhythm of violence and death.

  There was just silence.

  Three figures came back down the road. Williams waved us down from the second floor. We climbed down. They hadn’t found anything in Ingram’s house.

  “We have no medevac support because of the weather, so we’re going back,” Williams said.

  We walked back to the base, slowly, watching our step. The patrol lasted one hour and ten minutes.

  The soldiers threw off their gear. The tension eased. The patrol was over and nobody was dead. They gathered around the mortar pit. I started to talk to them.

  Twenty-one-year-old Private Jared Pautsch told me his story. His brother Jason had been killed in Baghdad in 2007. Jared spoke at his funeral. Jared signed up to get revenge. To kill the fuckers who killed his brother. He told me that he thought counterinsurgency was bullshit. I asked him what he thought of McChrystal coming down to speak with them tomorrow.

  He laughed.

  “Fuck McChrystal.”

  He told me that the men blamed McChrystal and his rules of engagement for Ingram’s death. The unit had asked for months to destroy the house that Ingram had been killed in, but they kept getting the permission to do so denied. They were told that they weren’t allowed to destroy the home because it would anger the local Afghan population. The soldiers argued that it wasn’t a house—it was a fighting position. Nobody lived there. The Taliban just used it to fight and hide bombs.

  Pautsch started talking about Ingram. He’d been there when he died.

  On April 17, 2010, Arroyo led the squad into the house. Arroyo and Pautsch went one way; Ingram and the unit’s medic went the other. An explosion of brown dust. Ingram had stepped on an IED, a small landmine. The military had a new acronym for them, VOIED—victim operated improvised explosive device.

  Ingram was bleeding heavily.

  It took thirty minutes for the medevac helicopter to arrive. Ingram was “packaged up” and put on the bird, the soldiers said.

  In Arroyo’s e-mail to McChrystal, he had said Ingram’s last words were about McChrystal. I told this to Pautsch.

  Pautsch laughed. Arroyo, he said, was taking poetic license.

  “More water, more morphine,” Pautsch said. “Those were some of his last words.”

  I told him that Arroyo had written that McChrystal had inspired him.

  “Ha, shit, did Arroyo write that? That’s funny. Ingram thought all this COIN stuff was bullshit, too. Maybe he did start to look up to McChrystal, but he sure as fuck didn’t tell me about it.”

  Pautsch pulled a small laminated card from his pocket. It was the rules of engagement they’d been given.

  “Look at this,” he said. It had a list of rules that the soldiers were supposed to follow.

  One said: “Patrol only in areas that you are reasonably certain that you will not have t
o defend yourself with lethal force.”

  “Does that make any fucking sense?” Pautsch asked me.

  It didn’t make much sense. Asking infantrymen to patrol where they weren’t going to get shot at was like asking cops to patrol in places where there was no crime.

  “We should just drop a fucking bomb on this place,” Pautsch said. “You sit and ask yourself, What are we doing here?”

  Rules of Engagement for JFM

  Hicks agreed. “My guys keep asking me: What the fuck is the point?”

  Hicks explained why he thought the rules of engagement had become so watered down: Because the battalion commander, Andersen, had kept getting his ass chewed out for killing civilians, he’d sent out guidelines that were even more restrictive than what McChrystal had proposed. The guidelines 1st Platoon were given were a way for the higher-ups to cover their asses—to avoid having civilian casualty incidents that could get them in trouble with ISAF HQ in Kabul.

  “Ingram was a real fucking success story,” Hicks said. Hicks served three combat tours, including two in Ramadi. “He had so much fucking potential. He always made everybody laugh, was willing to learn. He was a good fucking soldier. I mean, this is war, we could get fucking blown up sitting here talking right now, fucking rocket could drop on our fucking heads. Fuck, when I came over here and heard that McChrystal was in charge, I thought we could get our fucking gun on. I get COIN. I get all that. McChrystal comes here, explains it, it makes sense. But then he goes away on his bird, and by the time his directives get passed down to us through Big Army, they’re all fucked up either because somebody is trying to cover their ass, or because they just don’t understand themselves. But we’re fucking losing this thing.”

  After talking for a few more hours, I headed to my trailer to sleep. Around midnight, there was a loud boom. More outgoing mortar rounds from the mortar pit.