American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  “We need security—that is our number one priority now,” he told them. “So what is your most important task today?” he asked. They began rattling off a list: better fighting positions, sectors of fire, sandbagging enclosures in case of mortar attacks, observation posts. “All good,” Jim said. “But you’re missing what is most important.” The men were silent; they didn’t get it. “Your top priority is to set up a heated tent for the arbakai so they can rest as comfortably as you did last night,” he said, using the Pashto term for traditional tribal police. (The force was officially called “Afghan Local Police,” but they called themselves arbakai, or sometimes mahali police, which means “local police” in Pashto.) “We must live like they do.”

  The message, one Jim would drill into his men over and over in coming days and weeks, was that their lives depended on the relationships they would build with the arbakai in particular, and beyond that with the people of Mangwel. Many of Jim’s men arrived in Afghanistan with the mind-set, reinforced by military training videos, that no Afghan was to be trusted. To some of them, Afghans were barely human. Afghans, they believed, were out to kill them, to stab them in the back. So the idea that relationships with Afghans would keep them alive was counterintuitive. Moreover, it was a deceptively simple concept, but difficult and complicated to carry out. To forge true friendships with Pashtun tribesmen meant sitting patiently with them for hours, studying their language, culture, mannerisms, humor, and proverbs. It meant grasping on a visceral level what was important to the tribesmen. It also meant being genuine and knowing themselves. “Relationship building is the weapon, time is the bullet,” Jim would often say. Paradoxically, in order to be understood as Americans, they had to become to a degree Afghan. Jim, who had spent years honing his ability to connect with foreign fighters, saw the bonds deepening in stages, ultimately leading to cultural assimilation—signaled when the Afghans began adopting some American ways.

  The Americans set up the tent for the arbakai that day. But wariness and mistrust lingered in the days after their arrival—on both sides.

  Some tribesmen were suspicions about the Americans and their intentions. One villager named Ehsan Ullah, a relative of Noor Afzhal, had lobbied to keep the Americans out of Mangwel, believing their presence would draw more Taliban attacks. Once he learned they were coming anyway, he maneuvered to become the commander of the three hundred arbakai in the district of Khas Kunar. He lied and separately told Noor Afzhal, Jim, and Burns that the others had each picked him. It was, it turned out, a typical Afghan method of deceit. Jim knew that the average Afghan would lie to him, often very skillfully, and that he was operating in a world of gray. A part of him admired their ability to deceive, and he enjoyed the challenge of unraveling fact from fiction. But Ullah went too far. With a beak-like nose and high forehead, he often wore his shirts unbuttoned, revealing a mat of chest hair, and spoke and walked with a certain swagger. He had an abrasive personality and rubbed Jim and others the wrong way. In a culture that revolved around hospitality, he managed to be rude. Worse, his son, who then was an interpreter at COP Penich, was reporting to the insurgents on Jim’s movements. Before long, Jim and everyone else, including Noor Afzhal, were calling Ullah “Shitty Man.”

  Within two days of the Americans’ arrival in Mangwel, Ullah told Jim that the arbakai were not going to guard the qalat—that it was not their job. In the Pashtun context, it was a direct affront to Jim’s honor and power. Jim knew that if he did not respond forcefully, that one incident had the potential to undermine his entire mission. If the arbakai followed Ullah or sensed he was a stronger leader than Jim, it would be over. Jim immediately kicked Ullah and all the arbakai off the camp. Shaming him in the Pashtun way, Jim refused to meet with or speak to Ullah. But by the next morning, the twenty arbakai assigned to guard the qalat returned on their own and apologized to Jim. Ullah was effectively marginalized.

  Not long after that, Ullah was driving from Mangwel to the Khas Kunar district center down the road from Mangwel when he came under attack from Taliban insurgents firing machine guns, rifles, and rocket-propelled grenades. He took cover and survived the ambush. After that, he rarely returned to the qalat.

  In the wake of the showdown with Ullah, Noor Afzhal, acting at Jim’s request, named his third son, thirty-two-year-old Azmat, to command the roughly eighty arbakai in Mangwel. It was the one and only time Jim requested that a specific person be put in charge of one of the tribal forces. Jim was keenly aware of the need to let the tribe make its own decisions, but the leadership of the arbakai in Mangwel was too important to be left to chance. He trusted Azmat completely.

  Azmat was good-natured and loyal. His thick eyebrows framed a round face that always bore a ready smile. A wheat farmer, at the age of twenty-seven he picked up his own weapon to police Mangwel, taking charge of a checkpoint on the edge of the village. The Taliban attacked the checkpoint repeatedly using heavy machine guns, killing or wounding some police, but each time Azmat and his men managed to fight them off. Once a member of the police tied to the Taliban let the insurgents into the checkpoint tower at night. They wounded three policemen in a brutal attack that lasted several hours. Azmat and his men managed to hold the checkpoint and gather the wounded. But the Taliban took control of the winding stretch of road opposite Kawer, effectively cutting off the route to the closest hospital in the main town of Asadabad, which was across the river. So they loaded the three wounded men onto a jala, an Afghan raft, and crossed the Konar River to reach the road to Asadabad. One of the men perished on the way.

  Azmat knew that taking charge of the arbakai put him at risk of retaliation from the Taliban, but he said he could fight as well as they could. “I’m not scared of the threats,” he said. “If I die one day, I die. I don’t care what they say. They can’t keep me from doing my job.”

  With the command of the arbakai more solid, Jim and the team set to work with the tribe establishing security in and around Mangwel. They built a firing range using earthen barriers and trained with the arbakai on basic marksmanship and qalat defense drills. Together they reinforced the guard towers with sand bags, and put in a metal gate on the qalat. Jim was careful, however, to place all the fortifications inside the walls so that—seen from the outside—their camp looked like any other Afghan qalat. They practiced first aid, putting bandages and tourniquets on one another. To extend the security perimeter around the qalat, they went on long foot patrols in the mountain valleys surrounding Mangwel. One moonless night after heavy rains, about two dozen arbakai and Americans walked high into a valley until they reached a stream so swollen they could not cross it. Seeing how easily the Afghans in sandals outpaced them moving up and down the mountainsides, the U.S. soldiers realized that if they wanted to be able to pursue Taliban insurgents over the hilly terrain, they had to shed their body armor. Jim never wore his, and many of them chose to follow suit.

  Jim constantly practiced the kind of close and loyal relationship he expected his team to build with Afghans, talking and joking with the arbakai in Pashto, treating them when they fell ill, and rolling out the gate to aid them at the first sign of trouble. He often wore Afghan clothes and hats and carried an AK-47 on missions, and went out of his way to mirror Afghan customs and show respect for their Islamic faith. He made it clear to everyone that the team’s three Afghan interpreters were trusted advisors and comrades and would be treated as such. The interpreters, Ish, Ibrahim Khan, and Imran Khan, were brothers from a large and influential family from Konar Province, and all had combat experience with the U.S. military. Ish was with Jim from the start in Mangwel. A couple of weeks later, Ish’s older brother, twenty-nine-year-old Ibrahim, nicknamed “Abe,” arrived. Ish had told Jim over and over that Abe would be his right-hand man. Immediately Jim could see from the way that Abe talked, walked, and carried a weapon that he was a fighter. He could operate all the weapons systems, the radios, and the vehicles as skillfully as any Special Forces soldier Jim knew. Over time Jim grew to feel he ha
d never met anyone who was as similar to himself as Abe. Only later did Jim learn that Abe was with Army Special Forces Staff Sgt. Robert Miller and his team when they were surrounded by enemy fighters in a treacherous January 2008 battle near the border of Konar and Nuristan provinces. Abe saw Miller gunned down and killed leading a charge against insurgents that saved the lives of his teammates, and later helped recover his body. Miller was awarded the Medal of Honor. Abe received no recognition. From then on either Abe or Ish was with Jim on almost every mission. Imran, the youngest brother, arrived last. A scholar and a romantic, he was the most earnest of them all. Jim considered Ish, Abe, and Imran his brothers and he would not tolerate them being slighted in any way.

  Soon every day, the U.S. soldiers, now also wearing Afghan clothing, began walking through Mangwel in twos or threes together with an equal number of arbakai to get to know the villagers and become a more steady presence. Like the Afghans, the Americans patrolling Mangwel wore no helmets or body armor, which would have signaled mistrust. Before long, everywhere they went, they were invited into Afghan homes.

  Day after day, the Americans and Afghan tribal fighters ate the same food, rice and beans prepared in a cement-floored hovel by a slight, cross-eyed Afghan cook named Salim, who seemed to put the same Pakistani spices in every dish. Afghan workers arrived and at one end of the qalat built a row of Afghan-style latrines, crude outhouses with a key-shaped hole designed for squatting over. They built a simple shower and well, and an earthen pit where they cooked thick rounds of flatbread each day.

  Many nights, at Jim’s urging, the U.S. soldiers gathered to sit cross-legged around a long plastic mat and eat and drink tea together with the tribesmen. Afterward, they held informal Pashto-English classes. They taught each other greetings, numbers, and how to tell time. “This,” Jim said during one of the sessions, “is where the war is won.”

  For the American soldiers, some of whom had never before set foot outside of the United States, the experience was life-altering. It was like living on another planet. Jim himself described feeling as though he were “walking on the moon.”

  Seemingly small and insignificant moments, multiplied dozens of times, created unbreakable bonds between the Americans and Afghans. One afternoon, Justin climbed into a guard tower to speak Pashto and English with one of the arbakai named Ghani Gul, nicknamed “Honey” by the Americans. It was cold and rainy, and they spent two or three hours just sitting and talking. There was something about Ghani’s willingness to learn and to teach that gave Justin comfort. Looking out over the wintry landscape of snow-capped mountains and lowlands shrouded in gray, Justin knew he would never forget the Pashto word for rain—baran—and also from that moment, he began to believe that Jim’s strategy would work.

  Within weeks, a security regime was well established at the tiny camp, occupied by the roughly twenty arbakai, three Afghan interpreters, fifteen Americans, and a few dogs. In the ultimate sign of trust, Jim gave the arbakai in the towers M240B machine guns. No Special Forces team in Afghanistan had so quickly integrated itself into a village, or relied so exclusively on the local people to protect them and warn them of insurgent activity or attacks. At times in coming months, there were days when only three or four Americans stayed on the qalat, their lives completely in the hands of local Afghans.

  Jim made sure his men stayed on their toes.

  Boom! A smoke grenade tossed by Jim exploded in the center of the qalat and began spewing red vapor to simulate an attack.

  “We’ve been hit!” Jim yelled.

  Several arbakai and U.S. soldiers grabbed their rifles, threw chest racks of ammunition over their T-shirts, and raced to reinforce the guard towers.

  “Vehicles! Come on!” Jim screamed. Azmat and several other arbakai jumped into two white Afghan Local Police trucks. Staff Sgt. Ryan Porter, a twenty-seven-year-old former paratrooper with multiple tours in Iraq, scrambled into the back, and they rolled out the gate. Other U.S. soldiers mounted the team’s two Humvees and followed.

  Jim designed training in Mangwel to be as close to actual combat as possible, which meant taking risks and firing live ammunition in close proximity to one another. It was a radical departure from the training his soldiers had received in the conventional Army. The challenge was magnified because Jim had given his men wide leeway in deciding which jobs they wanted to fill, and constantly pushed them to take the initiative. “Don’t be a private,” he reminded them over and over. Chris, a communications soldier, had no experience with the Special Forces radios and signals gear he was expected to operate, and learned how to use them on the fly. Harvey, a medic, had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan but had never worked without the supervision of a physician’s assistant. And every drill was more complicated because the men could never lose sight of their role working with and for the Afghans. Alongside scores of tribesmen in native clothing carrying AK-47s, the threat of friendly fire was increased exponentially.

  Jim held meticulous critiques of training and missions, or “after-action reviews,” in which he solicited views from the team on what went right and wrong, and invited questions about his decisions. That night, he held the session together with the arbakai and made sure to hear from Azmat and his deputy commander, Shamsul Rahman.

  After a blow-by-blow assessment of the drill, Jim appealed to the Afghans in language they understood best.

  “We have the best tactics in the world, the best equipment in the world, the best plan in the world, but when this happens it’s going to come down to ghairat, your bravery and your courage to fight,” Jim said. Ghairat—one of the words tattooed on Jim’s wrist—was a core tenet of Pashtunwali, the code of behavior by which Pashtun tribespeople lived. It meant personal honor and valor, and was perhaps the most important measure of the character and manhood of a Pashtun tribesman. The arbakai nodded.

  Finally, Jim asked Noor Afzhal for his thoughts. Wearing a white tunic and a 9 mm pistol in a shoulder holster with shiny bandoliers of ammunition framing his chest, Noor Afzhal stood tall and spoke sternly.

  “You are here for us. We will protect you and this qalat, whatever the cost. We will fight to the last man,” Noor Afzhal said, raising a hand and stabbing the air with his finger.

  “The qalat is yours,” Jim said.

  “And if we have more guns and ammunition, the entire Pakistani military can cross the border and we will fight them off!” Noor Afzhal said, flashing a smile of sheer bravado.

  The entire room burst into applause. Jim looked at his soldiers sitting cross-legged among the Afghans and knew they had earned their call sign: Tribe 33.

  CHAPTER 17

  IN THE EARLY DAYS after arriving in Mangwel, Jim made it a habit to venture out of the qalat alone. Wearing an Afghan tunic and pants and carrying an AK-47, he headed into the village and surrounding hills either on foot or on horseback. The horse was intended to transport caches of water and ammunition into the mountains for operations. Another appeal of the horse for Jim was Noor Afzhal’s description of him as nangyalee, the warrior on the white steed. The horse turned out to be old and scrawny, but he rode it anyway.

  Jim wanted to explore, to take in the sights and smells and sounds of the Pashtun countryside, and to blend in among the people as free as possible from the trappings of a U.S. military officer. He also sought to project an image that would resonate and enhance his influence with the local Afghans—one of a man who was brave and would walk in their shoes. If he appeared eccentric, a bit wild, that was good, too. He wanted people to believe he was capable of both unusual compassion and violence. Indeed, to the casual observer Jim’s interactions with Afghans might seem spontaneous and unscripted, but the opposite was true. He meticulously planned his words, gestures, and clothing based upon whom he was meeting and what he wanted to achieve. He weighed, for example, where to sit among a roomful of tribal elders, whose hand he should kiss, and whose he should refuse to touch. He decided when to pull out a string of prayer beads, conveying respect for Islam
, or to clean his teeth with a wooden stick that he kept in his pocket in the Afghan style. He reflected on whether or not to drink chai or take a dip of opium-laced naswar, popular among Afghan men. Clothing also sent messages; he donned his finest Afghan jami suit in a show of respect, or wore a dirty, ragged one as an insult. Sometimes he dressed all in white, the preferred color of the Taliban, to subtly let people know that he understood his enemy.

  When on foot, Jim wrapped himself in a woolen blanket, or tsadar. With his beard and round pakol hat, from a distance he was indistinguishable from the tribesmen. Sometimes he stopped to drink tea, but often he just walked for miles, to clear his mind. He passed through villages that smelled of smoke from ironwood fires and got to know the barks of dogs at different qalats. He crossed fields on raised dirt paths or along irrigation canals, watching men farming and children playing and fighting. He imagined how it would feel to be Afghan—to endure the bitter winter cold without a heated tent to return to, or to swelter in the summer sun with no chilled bottled water to quench his thirst. He returned to the qalat and told his men: “Don’t judge these people because they steal wood or trash. You are going home to the United States. They are not.”

  Word spread quickly up and down the Konar River valley that Jim was back, that he had moved into Mangwel bringing guns and money and was improving life for the people there. Security in the vicinity of Mangwel and beyond improved almost overnight, as the arbakai, wearing black vests bearing the Afghan flag, became a visible presence safeguarding their homes and villages. Mangwel started out with fifty arbakai, and Jim and his men soon trained some thirty more, giving Mangwel the largest force out of the total of three hundred arbakai in Khas Kunar District in early 2011. Jim drilled into both the arbakai and his U.S. soldiers a clear and simple mission statement: “Protect the qalat, protect the village, protect the valley, and expand village stability operations.” What made all the difference was that the Americans were not commuting to Mangwel from a U.S. military base but were living there. This was a basic counterinsurgency tactic, but only a small fraction of the teams engaged in the local defense initiative were practicing it. One beauty of the strategy was that once Tribe 33 was inside the village, the Taliban would have to attack Mangwel—to fight their own people—to get to the Americans. Moreover, residing in the village, the small American team was able to hear and immediately respond to gunfire or any other signs of trouble. Tribe 33 came with a lot of firepower: an 81 mm mortar system, .50-caliber machine guns, armored vehicles, and access to aerial reconnaissance, attack aircraft, and medical evacuation. The team reacted to not only insurgent threats such as suicide bombers but also to family feuds, floods, and fires.