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

by Hastings, Michael

  “You check out your M4 already?” Irving asked his copilot, looking in the small armory, where the pilots hung their rifles and pistols.

  “Got it,” said Price, picking up the rifle. “If you ain’t Cav, you ain’t shit,” he said under his breath, the unofficial motto of the unit.

  Before the briefings started, the pilots dropped off their gear at their helicopters. The helicopter runway had been built out in recent months, part of an $850 million expansion, taking over land that used to be an old Soviet minefield.

  Price and Irving were weighed down by almost thirty pounds of gear: rifle, pistol, ammo, water, night vision goggles, a med kit, PowerBars, body armor, binoculars, and flight helmet. Price had a pair of gloves, the same kind NASCAR drivers used, made by Southwest Motorsports.

  They started walking out to their bird.

  Irving, a father of two, thirty-four years old. There was a reason he’d been chosen to lead the mission that the reporter and photographer were on. He didn’t give any hint of that wild-man culture that Kiowa pilots were known for. What’d he think about the poker game the warrant officers were playing the other night? I don’t know anything about that, he told me. (Gambling is against the rules.) How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Ten hours, he said, because that’s more or less what the regulations say he has to sleep, even though I find it hard to believe. He has a crew cut and he’s on his third combat tour—one in Iraq, two in Afghanistan. When I asked him to tell me a war story, something hairy, something nuts, he did—but it was all very technical, methodical, on-message. He doesn’t even swear, which is an incredible feat in this environment where fucks and shits and motherfucking cocksuckers pass for transitional verbs.

  They got to the helicopter they were flying. Price nicknamed it Gertrude.

  The preflight ritual: Irving cocked his pistol and put it in his side holster. They loaded up their M4s, which were strapped to the dash—not as a last resort in case they wreck, but loaded up with tracers so they could get into rifle range, lean out the door, take aim, and shoot. (“Some of these guys have confirmed kills just shooting the M4 out the aircraft,” a helicopter mechanic told me.)

  Irving explained that pilots gauge enemy and friendly areas by the reaction of the Afghans they fly over. Friendlies wave and smile. Enemies throw rocks and show the bottoms of the soles of their feet, an insult in the Muslim world.

  Price and Irving wrapped up the preflight check.

  On the way back for the briefing, Price and Irving talked about an attack last week on a nearby American base. The Kiowas were called in to prevent the base from being overrun.

  “They attacked the American base, ran a SVBIED [a car bomb, or Suicide Vehicle–Borne Improvised Explosive Device] through the wall, and tried to send two insurgents through the breach with suicide bombs,” Irving said. “But as soon as Josh flew overhead—”

  “The bomber paused and looked up. We saw a big explosion. A pink mist,” said Price. The suicide bomber had prematurely exploded, killing only himself.

  We passed through the tactical operations center on the way to the first briefing. There were two clocks on the wall. One had a sign underneath that said CLARKSVEGAS, set to the local time of their sleepy Tennessee hometown, Clarksville. The other clock next to it had a sign that said HELL. It was set to our local time in Kandahar. It was five A.M.

  At 0645, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Taylor arrived at Banshee troop headquarters. He stood in front of a map of the area and explained the mission for today: Two Kiowas would go out and scout for improvised explosive devices along Highway One, and then be on call in case any American or Afghan troops came in contact. Lucian and I were going to be with Taylor in a Blackhawk, following along to be able to observe the Kiowas on their mission. Another Blackhawk was following with what was essentially a well-armed search-and-rescue team inside.

  Taylor was about six feet five, thick. He’s what folks in the military call a hard charger.

  “Do your normal business,” he told the eight pilots gathered in the room. “Be safe. This is not just a flight from Bagram or KAF. This is a combat zone out there, and there are people trying to shoot us down every day.”

  Taylor left and passed the brief over to Irving to get into the specifics. The briefing lasted thirty minutes. Irving compressed years of information and training into a language almost indecipherable to an outsider.

  “Twenty-three June, scouts weapons, two, UH-60, 0800 to 1300, QRF at the back end. Risk assessment? You signed? Maps? Primarily one change, call sign Hard Luck Two-Three-One. I have one of the new pilot packs, with new calls signs, briefs, pod locations. Anybody tired? No. TAC charge. No change to that. No change to the EGI bridges, weight point loads, current as two-zero June. NVGS, should have them, spare batters. Camera. PCI on the camera. Data card, battery. Task work, lead scout aircraft nine-nine-six parked on foxtrot one long knife one-two. Config is rocket-rocket. Chuck’s in the right seat, Quinn’s is the left seat. We’re going to match laser codes. One-one-one-seven. Load one is six-three. Alternates one-one. Load two is one-zero-zero-two. Trail Kiowa zero-two-one parked on alpha two long knife two-two. Got fifty cal and rocket. Josh is right seat. I’ll be in left seat. Zero-one-five on road two. Mr. Bailey, your configuration today?”

  Lucian and the pilots went to go get breakfast. I passed out on the couch on the porch, trying to catch another hour of sleep.

  I woke up. The helicopters were ready. Time to fly.

  I climbed into a Blackhawk, sitting across from Taylor. Next to me sat the unit’s intelligence officer. I was glad they were going to take us up, but I didn’t expect much. Originally, I’d wanted to go up in the actual Kiowa, but I wasn’t allowed to for safety reasons. They wanted two people who knew how to pilot in the craft at all times. And, with the growing heat of the McChrystal story, it started to look like this assignment might be a total bust.

  All of that went out of my mind as the helicopters took off.

  Here we go.

  The Kiowas flew low along Highway One, checking out a few places along the way where they believed insurgents might be placing possible IEDs. We were a few hundred feet above the birds, watching as they dropped up and down, zipping above telephone poles, following the road, every few minutes hovering to get a closer look at a car or a gathering of people. The doors to the Blackhawk were open, plastering our faces with wind. The Kiowas peeled off to the east, swooping over the red desert, endless blood-colored dunes and steep cliffs. We headed away from the villages, into the mountains, so the Kiowas could make sure their weapons were working. They took turns letting off rounds into the craggy mountainside: rockets and fifty caliber machine guns.

  We passed over the city of Kandahar. “It’s a bustling city,” Taylor said. “When I was first here a few years ago, the place was dead. Now the industry is booming.”

  We’d been flying around for about an hour and nothing had happened. I was hot and tired. I was beginning to think I was screwed. This story wasn’t going to happen, and with the way the things were playing out with McChrystal, I wondered how long it would be until reporting on Kandahar Airfield became impossible. I needed to see combat. I needed to see explosions. I needed to get close to the fighting. I needed to wrap this shit up and get the hell out of southern Afghanistan.

  It was the twisted sickness of the war junky: There I was, waiting to witness death and destruction.

  I started to fall asleep, doze off. Thinking about how I should get back to Kabul. Thinking about the e-mails I needed to return and the phone call I needed to make to Eric at Rolling Stone. I was starting to think that this flight was just a dog and pony show, that I was being kept away from the fighting and it was a total waste of time. I started worrying that my tape recorder and phone were going to fly out the door. (It was a strange fear I always had on helicopters—not about crashes or heat-seeking rockets, but that my laptop or notebook would fall out of the open door.) I searched for the best pocket to store my notebook so it d
idn’t drop out if I fell asleep. I was thinking about keeping up to date with what was happening. Had McChrystal made it back to Washington? Had anyone else released any statements? What was the White House going to say…

  The Kiowa helicopters buzzed low in the distance. The thwump of the Blackhawk blades lulled me to sleep.

  My eyes closed. My head started to bob up and down.

  “Troops in contact,” Taylor yelled over the radio.

  I woke up. Like a true professional, I dropped my pen. It rolled back under the Blackhawk seat. The soldier next to me handed me a new pen.

  Along Highway One, I saw a convoy of American MRAPs. They’d been ambushed. Price and Irving, flying the tail helicopter, started to head in that direction. They were five minutes away from the firefight. Information about the enemy came in over the radio: They were heavily armed, with heavy machine guns and RPGs.

  Already Irving was thinking tactically, he would tell me later. What was the best way to arrive without giving his position away to the enemy (usually flying very low, then popping up at the last second)? Because once the Kiowas showed up, the insurgents often fled. They needed to retain the element of surprise. I watched Irving’s Kiowa shoot low across the ground.

  Two minutes out, Irving raised the ground troops on the radio. They told him that they’d dismounted from their MRAPs and had pinned down a group of insurgents in an orchard. They were still taking heavy fire. Irving was focused. The adrenaline was racing. He was thinking: Where are all the friendlies? Where is the enemy and what are his capabilities? How can I take them out or suppress them—or, as he would put it, “maximize ballistic effect on the enemy”?

  I was thinking tactically, too: Shit, if this is a real shoot-out, then that means I have my story, I have my scene. I can get the fuck out of Kandahar.

  The Blackhawks pulled up in the air to give us a view of the battle. Taylor pointed to a puff of red smoke that was rising up.

  “Five to eight insurgents, small arms and RPG,” Taylor said.

  The soldiers on the ground had tossed a can of smoke to mark the position of the insurgents.

  Another pop of smoke—this is yellow.

  “My position is the yellow smoke,” the ground element called up over the radio.

  The two Kiowas dove down for a final look over their target. Price picked out where the insurgents were believed to be hiding—the orchard. Irving grabbed the control stick. He moved the yellow button over to the right, switching from rockets to his fifty caliber machine gun.

  “Friendlies one o’clock low. Tally friendlies. Turning left. Enemy in sight. Roger in sight. Roger. Clear to engage…” Irving said over the radio.

  Irving pressed the yellow firing switch, the trigger. The recoil was deafening. The helicopter shook, as did Irving’s jaw, as he would later describe the moment to me.

  For about five more minutes, the Kiowas stuck around, making sure the American patrol could continue.

  “Two insurgents confirmed KIA,” Taylor told me, by aircraft fire. “Scout weapons team two engaged, disrupted the enemy.”

  We returned to base. Two insurgents confirmed killed. That was good enough for me. Two faceless dead guys, the enemy, with all the Americans coming home. A perfect story.

  I was wide awake now. Now I could leave Kandahar without feeling guilty.

  Back at the base, one of the pilots told me a public affairs officer was looking for me.

  I found the public affairs officer. We talked. We agreed it was best if I left Kandahar. I’d become a distraction and I was distracted. More important, I had gotten my story. We agreed on that, too.

  It was usually difficult to get on a flight leaving Kandahar. The public affairs officer told me not to worry. There was a seat waiting for me on the next plane out.

  I checked my e-mail at the media affairs center. Eric at Rolling Stone asked me to write up a blog post. McChrystal had arrived in Washington and they wanted to put something up on the web before he met with Obama.

  I typed out a blog post on e-mail.

  Right when I was about to hit send, I heard two loud booms.

  “Rockets!” someone yelled.

  Everyone in the media center dove to the floor. I was flat on my face under a desk.

  The all-clear alarm sounded a few minutes later. I went back to my e-mail. The computer screen was dark. The power had gone out. I lost my blog post.

  I needed to get to a computer where I could use e-mail. A young public affairs officer told me there wasn’t time to waste. I was going to miss my flight. I said okay. I grabbed my gear and they drove me down the road to the passenger terminal. It was another nondescript building, two floors. It was a weird imitation of a normal airport terminal; they even had a security check to scan the bags, despite the fact that the majority of the passengers would be armed with assault rifles.

  After I got through security, I asked if I could use a computer to send off my blog post. The public affairs officer showed me a back room where the two Air Force personnel who ran the terminal were sitting in an office.

  Both were looking at their computer screens when I came in. They were reading a story called “The Runaway General.”

  The Air Force woman minimized her copy and let me sit down.

  “Have you seen this story?” she asked me.

  “Yeah, I wrote it,” I said.

  “No shit.”

  She thought it was pretty hilarious. She was a fan of The Rachel Maddow Show, which I had been on the night before over the phone. Coincidentally, I had a brand-new Rachel Maddow baseball cap with me, which I gave her.

  I finished typing up my blog post and sent it to Eric. By that time, a few other soldiers had printed out copies of the Rolling Stone story and asked me to sign it. I joked that it wasn’t going to add to any eBay value, feeling less nervous.

  I waited on the second floor of the terminal for the flight to arrive. Thirty minutes later, another air force sergeant called out that there was a C-130 flight to Kabul boarding now. Everyone heading to Kabul lined up in a row, slinging their rucksacks on their backs and putting on their body armor and helmets. We walked in single file across an airstrip, the sun just beginning to go down. I carried my computer bag over my shoulder and a Kelty backpack on my back. I walked up the ramp of the C-130 and took a seat near the front of the cabin, strapping myself in with the metal clasps, sitting on the sagging red canvas jump seats.

  I looked around the cabin of the plane. Three other soldiers were reading printout copies of the Rolling Stone story.

  The plane was delayed.

  “Why are we waiting?” a soldier asked.

  “We’re waiting for a one-star,” the soldier next to him responded.

  “Shit, he might be running this thing soon enough,” a third soldier said.

  I tilted my helmet down over my head. I’d never seen a story take off so quickly around an American military base overseas. The soldiers seemed to be reacting pretty positively to the story, too. The general sense that the war was totally fucked was so widespread, not many disagreed with the thesis. (A poll would later find that one out of three veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan would say the wars weren’t worth fighting.) But I had the feeling that inside the cabin wasn’t the best time for me to identify myself. I fell asleep. The flight to Kabul took forty-five minutes. My security guard picked me up and took me back to the CNN bureau.

  E-mail was working. My phones were working.

  The news broke.

  President Barack Obama had accepted Stanley McChrystal’s resignation.

  He’d been fired.

  Obama named General David Petraeus as his replacement.

  There were thirty-eight missed calls on my phone.

  PART IV

  THE GRACEFUL EXIT

  41 “VERY, VERY BAD”

  JUNE 22–23, 2010, KABUL AND WASHINGTON, DC

  At two thirty A.M. on June 22, 2010, a close aide to General Stanley McChrystal walks up the stairs to t
he general’s hooch above the situational awareness room. It’s Spartan quarters, a single cot with a few wooden bookshelves and industrial-strength green carpets with a treadmill outside to work out on. The staffer knocks on the door and wakes up the general. The Rolling Stone story is out, the staffer tells him. “It’s very, very bad,” the aide says, according to an account in The Washington Post.

  The A.P. is already running with the story, the aide explains—quoting him saying that the Eikenberry memo left him feeling “betrayed.”

  That’s just the beginning of it. Biden—“bite me.” Making fun of the French, making fun of Ambassador Holbrooke. And then the troops: The scene down south with the soldiers looks like they are in near mutiny. It doesn’t look good. The night in Paris—“totally shit-faced.”

  He did have that fucking tape recorder running all the time. Can we attack him? It’s going to be hard to deny the Paris night. Duncan had been telling the story to everyone who would listen.

  McChrystal gets on the phone. He calls Bob Gates. He apologizes. What’s the best way to handle it?

  Preempt it. This too shall pass.

  Holbrooke’s phone rings. He’s staying at the U.S. embassy across town in Kabul. He’s half-asleep. He’s had a brutal twenty-four hours; his helicopter had been fired upon while he was flying across Helmand. He’s pissed that he’s been woken up, not really understanding why. McChrystal tells him there’s a Rolling Stone story coming out, and that he’s said some embarrassing things in it. McChrystal apologizes to him.

  “Stan, don’t worry about it,” Holbrooke tells him.

  “I’ve submitted my resignation to Bob Gates.”

  “What?”