American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  Bullets were hitting the vehicles and the ground all around them, and set a bag of ammunition on fire in the lead vehicle. Dan grabbed one of the Afghan soldiers cowering behind him with a rocket-propelled grenade and told him to fire it. Air Force A-10 jets flew over and lit up the insurgent positions with Gatling guns. But the boulders were impervious, and the enemy onslaught continued.

  Then Dan heard a call over the radio. It was the team sergeant, Master Sgt. Al Lapene.

  “Chris is spark,” Al said.

  Shit! Dan thought. His head reeled. He felt as though he’d been punched in the stomach. Spark was the code word for “dead.”

  “Is there anything I can do?” Dan radioed back.

  “No,” Al said. Chris had been shot in the head in his gunner’s turret and killed instantly.

  Blood was everywhere in Chris’s vehicle. Al was having a hard time getting Chris’s body down from the turret. Scott was the only soldier firing a heavy weapon at the time. Meanwhile, the enemy fire intensified. Dan saw the Humvee twenty yards ahead of his hit by a burst of bullets that struck the gunner’s ammunition, setting it on fire. The gunner, Sgt. 1st Class Cliff Roundtree, had to scramble out of the turret down behind his vehicle, temporarily leaving his gun to escape the flames.

  “We have to fucking move out of this kill zone!” Dan yelled to Cliff, taking cover behind the hood of his Humvee as he returned fire.

  Al got in the turret where Chris had been, and the team pushed out of the kill zone toward a small village. They went into the village shooting but found it was empty, and took cover there, as darkness was arriving soon. The soldiers set up a hasty security perimeter and began furiously reloading ammunition. After they took up position, Dan asked Al: “Where is Chris?”

  “He’s in the back of the vehicle, under a poncho,” Al said.

  Dan winced. Chris was the youngest member of the team. They were all close to him.

  I’ll take care of him, Dan thought. I don’t want anyone else looking at him. Dan steeled himself, took a black canvas body bag out of his vehicle, and walked over to the vehicle where Chris was lying. He slowly lifted the poncho off Chris, exposing his blood-smeared, pale face.

  “God, brother,” Dan whispered, tears welling up in his eyes. He placed his hand softly on Chris’s cheek. He checked for any signs of life, just to be sure. Then he looked at Chris’s wound. He was filled with an indescribable sadness. He had seen many dead bodies before, but never the lifeless form of a person he was so close to. With others he was able to distance himself, and depersonalize them. With Chris, that was impossible.

  This is unreal. This can’t be, he thought.

  After a minute he pulled himself away, mechanically going through the steps of preserving his comrade’s body. He knew there was more fighting ahead, and he tried to stifle his tears. He had to stay strong for the team, and mentally prepare for the attacks to come. Dan spread out the body bag, and carefully lifted Chris onto it. Then he zipped up the bag, tears streaming down his face. He secured the body bag in the backseat of the vehicle. No helicopter was coming to evacuate Chris. They had to drive him out.

  The ordeal for ODA 316 was not yet over. After a tense night on guard at the village, they hit another ambush, taking heavy fire from insurgents in nearby orchards who shot at them with rocket-propelled grenades and machine guns. The team fired back with rifles, machine guns, and an antitank weapon. The vehicle Dan was driving lost all brake and steering fluid after a round severed a line, and the Humvee ahead of his was disabled. Dan had to ram it repeatedly to get it out of the kill zone. Finally, the patrol limped back to their firebase. In fifty-six hours of battle, the team had proved its mettle like never before. For their bravery, Scott and Tony earned Silver Star medals and Dan a Bronze Star with V for valor. Chris was given a Silver Star posthumously. But the team didn’t recover from the loss of Chris.

  “The team was never the same after that,” Dan said. “It couldn’t be.”

  Anger simmered over what Dan and the rest of the men perceived as faulty decisions by their command, including a lack of resupply. Had it not been for Jim’s training, Dan said, the casualties might have been far worse.

  “The only reason we didn’t go black [dangerously low or empty] on ammo was it was our SOP [standard operating procedure] to carry massive amounts of ammunition,” Dan said. “It was the fight Jim always talked about, and it came true. Jim was there in spirit.”

  Jim was proud of his old team but devastated by Chris’s death and tormented that he had not been fighting alongside his men as they faced their biggest battle. After all, he had forged and molded the team—Chris died with a Spartan lambda tattoo on his left arm. As the Afghan war dragged on and the casualties increased, Jim began racking his brain for a better strategy. He knew that Taliban insurgents were making gains nationwide, including in Konar Province, the home of Noor Afzhal and his tribe in Mangwel. Would Noor Afzhal survive and hold the line against the Taliban until Jim returned? He wasn’t sure.

  CHAPTER 12

  MALIK NOOR AFZHAL PUT on the silver-gray turban reserved for important gatherings, picked up his best walking stick, and shut the heavy wooden door to his mud-walled home. Then he stepped into an old yellow taxi with his son Azmat and rode down a bumpy dirt path out of the village of Mangwel in Konar Province south toward the city of Jalalabad.

  The seventy-five-year-old elder of the Mohmand tribe looked out the window as the car wound up a steep hillside above the Konar River, which shimmered as it coursed past fields of ripening wheat and corn. Mountains green with vegetation rose abruptly on either side of the narrow river valley.

  The car descended again to the riverbank and slowed as it met with a herd of sheep coming up the road. A skinny boy wearing a skullcap and sandals shooed the animals out of the way with a stick. A woman covered from head to foot in a flowing blue burkha walked by, followed by a girl in an embroidered violet dress carrying a jug of water on her head.

  They continued for miles through the territory of the Mohmands, a proud and unified Pashtun tribe whose lands extended far south into Nangarhar Province and east into Pakistan. Passing through one Mohmand farming village after another, Noor Afzhal spotted familiar faces of fellow tribal elders. But this day he did not stop to chat and drink green tea.

  The car crossed over the river on a partially collapsed concrete bridge called Zire Baba that dipped in the middle, and headed down the main road to Jalalabad. Carts piled with ripe watermelons lined the way, and boys waved down travelers, seeking contributions for their village mosques. An hour later fields gave way to market towns and the thronged city of Jalalabad came into view.

  It was August 22, 2010, and Noor Afzhal was ignoring the warnings of other maliks and elders by making the dangerous trip to the main U.S. base in Jalalabad to meet with an American military officer. Taliban insurgents had more than doubled their attacks in Konar in the past year and were moving with greater impunity from the valleys where they took sanctuary through lowland villages such as Mangwel. The Taliban commanders had little regard for tribal leaders and regularly vowed to kill them and their people for cooperating with the Americans. Noor Afzhal and his sons often received death threats. That day, he worried that the call he had received from an Afghan contact in Jalalabad about the meeting might have been a trap laid by his enemies, and braced for an ambush along the road. Would the American officer be there? Noor Afzhal could hardly believe he would be. But he would not turn back. He considered the meeting a matter of personal honor. The American he remembered as a young Army Special Forces captain named Jim, whom he had protected as a son, had promised seven years earlier to return to Afghanistan to see him. Noor Afzhal had to take the risk.

  At the base in Jalalabad, Jim pulled on a light blue Afghan tunic, or khamis, loose pants, and a cylindrical white cap, and rehearsed again in Pashto what he would say to Noor Afzhal. For Jim, the reunion was one of the most anticipated moments of his life. He had worked for years to return to Konar
and make good on his pledge to see the tribal leader again, haunted by the prospect that Noor Afzhal would die before he could reach him. Now that fear was gone, and he felt a deep sense of relief and gratitude that bordered on the spiritual. It was as though the moment was a gift from God, or the gods, for all his sacrifices—allowing him to keep the last promise he would ever have to make as a warrior.

  But Jim had another purpose. He wanted to ask Noor Afzhal, one of the few people in the world he trusted, for his wisdom on the tribal strategy. Would it work? Would it help the people? Jim believed it would, but at this decisive moment he wanted to hear from Noor Afzhal. Another critical question was whether Noor Afzhal would support testing the strategy in Mangwel. Nagging at Jim, too, despite the high-level support from Petraeus on down, was the question of American staying power. Would the U.S. military enlist the tribes, only to abandon them before the war was won? He wrestled one last time with whether to go ahead, and decided that Noor Afzhal would make the decision.

  Jim waited outside a secret meeting room at Jalalabad Air Field ( JAF) as a car pulled up and Noor Afzhal stepped out. Jim approached and kissed Noor Afzhal’s hand, and the two men embraced for a long time.

  “I have told people that this day, this moment, after I saw you again, I could die a happy man,” Jim said. “I told you I would see you again. Do you remember?” he asked.

  “Ho. Yes,” Noor Afzhal replied, beaming. “What took you so long?”

  Jim laughed and grasped the older man’s hand more tightly. They spoke for a minute about each other’s families, and Noor Afzhal asked about Jim’s father, who years before had sent him a knife and asked him to look after his son. Noor Afzhal had promised the father that not one hair on Jim’s head would be harmed while he was with the tribe.

  “You are my father,” Jim said.

  Noor Afzhal looked at him, his expression both kind and wise.

  “From the bottom of my heart, you are my son,” he replied. “And you have returned.”

  Holding hands, as is the custom among Afghan men, they walked to the meeting room and sat down. Noor Afzhal’s son Azmat put a tsera, a garland of red paper flowers, a traditional gift for pilgrims returning from Mecca, around Jim’s neck.

  As they drank tea, they spoke of their years apart. Jim studied Noor Afzhal and saw that his health was weak. Although the elder man stood tall, as he always had, he walked with difficulty. In fact, Noor Afzhal had a serious untreated heart ailment, Jim later learned. Noor Afzhal, too, saw how the intervening years of warfare had taken a heavy toll on Jim, who appeared far older than the cocky Green Beret who had rolled into his village seven years before. At the same time, Noor Afzhal noticed something more serious about Jim.

  Jim showed Noor Afzhal a copy of “One Tribe at a Time,” with photographs of the tribe and Jim’s Special Forces team in Mangwel. Then he spread out a large map of eastern Afghanistan and began to explain his plan for raising tribal forces.

  “Mohmand territory is here, and this is where Safi territory starts,” Jim said, tracing his finger along the map.

  “Yes, the Safi lands are across the river and from Asadabad to the south and into the Pech valley,” Noor Afzhal said. Like most rural Afghans, he had rarely seen a map, but looked on with interest as Jim described the locations of different tribes.

  “Here is the Pakistani border,” Jim said.

  Then he outlined in broad strokes his strategy to train, arm, and pay tribesmen to defend their villages against the Taliban. He would begin in Konar and from there expand south. As security increased, so would funds and resources for development. Jim turned to Noor Afzhal.

  “Do you think this plan can succeed?”

  Running his hand through his long white beard, Noor Afzhal was silent for a minute.

  “The tribes have always fought to protect their territory, and they will again. But the Taliban is a problem,” Noor Afzhal said.

  “How strong is the Taliban in your area?” Jim asked.

  “They are everywhere now,” Noor Afzhal said soberly. The insurgents had steadily gained strength in his area in recent years, he said, and had infiltrated the local police and district government. They conducted limited but lethal attacks—mainly aimed at U.S. troops—and moved through the tribal territory unhindered. The tribe had a tacit understanding with the Taliban: they could transit the Mohmand area if they kept the fighting out of there. U.S. military units had further weakened the tribe, he explained, by repeatedly sweeping through Mangwel and other villages and taking away their weapons—a shameful event for the Pashtun men.

  “We can do something about that,” Jim said. “I would like to start by bringing a team of Americans to live with your people in Mangwel, and give your men guns and training. What do you think?”

  Noor Afzhal looked down, deep in thought. His people had suffered greatly in recent decades. During the Soviet occupation of the 1980s, Russian aircraft had bombed Mangwel, causing almost the entire population of the village to flee to Pakistan. The Soviet withdrawal was followed in the early 1990s by the lawlessness of mujahideen rule. After that had come the zealous and oppressive Taliban. Noor Afzhal did not want a Taliban comeback. But to ask the tribe to invite Americans into their village? That would make Mangwel a Taliban target. Some of the tribal elders were sure to oppose it, including ones who were already maneuvering behind his back to succeed him.

  “I must go back and talk with my people,” Noor Afzhal said.

  “Of course, I understand,” Jim said. The tribes had their own traditional form of democracy. All important decisions had to be deliberated in a gathering of elders, or jirga. Jim believed that Noor Afzhal had the stature to sway a final decision, but he was not sure.

  “There is one more thing I must tell you before you speak with the tribe,” Jim said. “The U.S. military will not be here forever. Most American troops will begin to leave next year. My commanders tell me the Special Forces will stay for five or ten years, not more. But this is an opportunity.”

  They continued speaking for an hour, and then it came time for Noor Afzhal to leave. But before the elder man left, Jim felt the need to unburden himself to the Afghan father who had seen a side of him—the essence of who he was as a warrior—that his own father never had.

  “Father, I have killed enough,” Jim said simply. “I am here to help.”

  Noor Afzhal looked into Jim’s eyes. “You are not just a fighter anymore,” he told Jim. “You are nangyalee.”

  In a verse by the seventeenth-century Pashtun poet Khushal Khan Khattak, nangyalee refers to a brave man who also has honor and who never gives up. “A brave man has only two options in the world, to fight to the death or secure victory,” went the famous line.

  But Noor Afzhal explained the term to Jim as meaning a champion who is both brutal and compassionate. “Nangyalee is a warrior who rides a white horse, and when he sees someone who cannot protect themselves, he rides there with his men and fights for them,” he said. Jim was deeply moved.

  NOOR AFZHAL RETURNED TO Mangwel, and the next day called a meeting of elders at his house. In strode Malik Mir Salaam, one of the tallest men in the village, his very long gray beard a sign of seniority. Following him were two other elders, Malik Qayum and Malik Angur. They sat cross-legged in a circle and were joined by Noor Afzhal’s younger brother, Dost Mohammed Khan, an educator who had spent years living away from Mangwel in the Afghan capital, Kabul, and other provinces. Noor Afzhal’s sons Asif and Azmat sat at one end of the greeting room, while other young male relatives served tea.

  Noor Afzhal opened with an appeal.

  “You have known me for many years. I have always made wise decisions for the tribe. I have always been fair and just, even when it came to punishing my own family,” he said.

  The other maliks in the room murmured and nodded.

  “Since the first Americans came to Mangwel in 2003, I have sided with them. There have been problems, I know, but our tribe has stayed united. Every day, though
, I see the people becoming more afraid of the Taliban. In Jalalabad, I learned of an opportunity that will make us stronger.” Noor Afzhal outlined Jim’s plan. “Now I will listen to you,” he said.

  Immediately Malik Mir Salaam spoke up in dissent.

  “If the Americans come to Mangwel, the Taliban will fight them here. Our village will be hit by rockets and mortars!” Mir Salaam said in a booming voice. “How can you claim this will help our people?”

  “I agree, the Taliban will retaliate,” said Noor Afzhal’s brother, the most educated and urbanized of the group. “And surely we can’t do this without a piece of paper from the government?” he said.

  “Yes, the Taliban may try to attack us,” Noor Afzhal agreed. “But we have always protected our village and we always will. We will have our guns back, and the American soldiers will have machine guns and mortars,” he said. “Men in the village will have jobs with pay. They will not have to work in Jalalabad or Kabul far from their families.”

  “But how can we trust anything the Americans tell us? Didn’t they help our fighters kick out the Russians and then leave?” Dost Mohammed said.

  At that, Noor Afzhal’s face grew flushed with anger. “Trust? All of you remember Commander Jim. He built our school and clinic. He is the only American we can trust, the only one to keep his promises to us!” he said. “We will welcome him to live in Mangwel!”

  The room fell silent. No one said another word.

  Just as he had when he first met Jim in 2003, Noor Afzhal followed his instincts and used the force of his will to bring the tribe along with him.

  In coming days, Jim received word from Noor Afzhal that the people of Mangwel were ready and willing to supply fighters for a tribal force. Jim was excited, and traveled to Mangwel once more to make sure the tribe accepted the plan for a U.S. team to embed in the village. It was a rare opening, the one Jim was looking for.