American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  After searching everywhere for the triggerman, Jim and Abe walked to a shop down the road and within view of the IED location. Outside, the shopkeeper was lying on his cot under the trees.

  “You are now my enemy,” Jim said, his eyes wild and intense.

  “I didn’t see it. I don’t know anything,” the shopkeeper protested. Then, to his great misfortune, he smirked.

  In one swift move, Jim pulled out his knife, swept the shopkeeper’s feet out from under him, pushed him down on the cot, and put the knife to his throat.

  “I will cut your fucking head off!” he screamed, his face crimson and spit spewing from his mouth. “The IED went off a hundred meters away from this shop. You can’t tell me you didn’t know about it! I will kill you, motherfucker. I will kill everyone here!”

  A crowd of Afghans was watching. Jim released the shopkeeper, leaving him shaken, and stormed away past them. The Afghans could have dismissed Jim as a crazy American soldier—but they all knew him. He had drank tea with them and bought things in that shop.

  For Jim, the psychological blow of not having spotted the IED was profound. It was only the third IED that had gone off behind him in his military career—but those were the ones that kept him up at night. It turned out the IED was powerful and highly unusual. It consisted of about a hundred pounds of homemade explosives placed not in the road but in a tree and detonated by remote control. The top of the tree was blown off. Still, Jim felt a crushing sense of failure mixed with anger.

  Jim’s rage was all the more intense because he could not help but see the incident through the lens of Pashtunwali, as an unforgivable blow to his honor, to his namoos. They had attacked his family, his wife.

  “I feel as though you have been raped in our home,” Jim told me later. “And I could not protect you.”

  A few days later, Jim and Abe returned to the scene after dark with a can of gasoline and set the remnants of the blown-up tree on fire. The red flames flew into the night sky, the sparks rising until they disappeared high above the valley.

  CHAPTER 26

  EARLY ONE MORNING IN Mangwel, Jim dreamed that he awakened in his bed, rolled over, and opened his eyes. The windowless shipping container that served as his room was dark but for a sliver of sunlight coming through a crack above the heavy wooden door. Each day that stream of light beckoned to him from across the room, reminding him of where he was and the enormous task before him. Often he slept fitfully and woke up weary, his body, mind, and soul exhausted after months in combat.

  Voices chastised him. Get up! Get up!

  All he had to do was make it to the door and look out. Then he would see the arbakai in his guard tower at the far corner of the qalat, smell the smoke from Salim’s kitchen, and catch sight of the mountains, and he would once again find the strength he needed.

  Jim pulled on a white Afghan tunic and pants and slipped on his sandals. Then he pushed open the door and stepped outside.

  Right away, he noticed the tower was empty.

  The arbakai must be changing shifts.

  It was oddly quiet. Jim’s footsteps crunched loudly as he walked from his room down the gravel path beside the qalat wall. On the other side of the wall was the makeshift shooting range. That was silent, too, but it was early in the day for training.

  He walked farther down the path. He could not even hear the distant whirring of the village flour mill. Then he turned into the courtyard.

  No one.

  A wave of panic swept over him. He ran down to the metal door of the qalat, swung it open, and stepped through.

  The scene in front of him was ghastly.

  In the tree across from the qalat gate, a small boy in Afghan clothes hung lifeless from a rope. His feet were bare, his arms and legs limp. His head drooped to one side and his eyes were closed. Jim recognized the figure immediately and rushed toward it.

  As if hearing the footsteps, Little Malik raised his head and opened his eyes wide.

  “Why did you do this to us?” he pleaded in Pashto, looking at Jim. “Wailay? Why?”

  Horrified, Jim turned away. Then he saw them, a short distance down the path that led from the qalat to the center of the village. Lying in the dirt were three beheaded, bloodied bodies. He walked closer. Then let out a scream of agony and desperation. They were the bodies of Noor Afzhal, Asif, and Azmat. Mangwel was empty, deserted.

  Jim cried out again and sat up in his bed, sweating. Not that dream.

  Troubled, he got up, made a cup of coffee, and checked in on the operations center tent. Then he walked out to the armored vehicle in the qalat and began his daily 5:00 a.m. guard shift, using the sight of the gun mounted on a truck to scan the hills surrounding the qalat. But even as he scoured the area through the gun sight, images from his dream kept assaulting his mind. He trusted his dreams. The possibility that he could bring such harm to Little Malik and his family was extremely disturbing. He tried to focus but he could not shake the vision off. Later that day, he and Abe went to see Noor Afzhal alone in his house and told him.

  Noor Afzhal put down his glass of green tea, looked at Jim intently, and then spoke as father to son.

  “Do not tell anyone about your dream,” he said. “I know what you must do. Come with me.”

  Picking up his cane, the tribal elder climbed into Jim’s pickup truck and directed them down a bumpy dirt road through the village of Chamaray toward the Konar River. When they reached the river’s edge Noor Afzhal told them to stop, and they got out. The sun glistened on the swiftly moving water and the breeze blew softly through the reeds on the grassy green bank.

  “Go,” Noor Afzhal told Jim, motioning to a path that led beside the river toward a long, stone retaining wall. “Tell the river your dream, and ask the river to carry it away.

  “Do not rush,” he added. “The war is not going anywhere. We are not going anywhere.”

  Jim walked alone along the water’s edge. Then he sat down on the wall and gazed toward the cool, flowing water, his mind lost in thought. His eyes traveled to the far side of the river. Just then, a large U.S. military convoy started to pass on the road that hugged the opposite side. He turned away, not wanting to spoil his conversation with the river, which to him felt almost spiritual. He closed his eyes and recounted aloud his nightmare, casting it into the current.

  One evening after that, Jim and I ate dinner with Noor Afzhal. His youngest son, Raza Gul, spoke more of Pashtun beliefs about dreams, seeking to reassure his brother.

  “I had a dream last night that you were taking a boat across the river, and I jumped in to get you,” he said. “The good dreams are at four in the morning. They will come true.

  “But,” he warned, “if you dream during the day it will be the devil’s dreams.”

  Raza Gul’s words were reminiscent of another man, another time, and another betrayal: “The dreamers of the day are dangerous men,” wrote T. E. Lawrence. “For they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”

  For several weeks after he went to the river, the demons left Jim alone.

  AS JIM’S SENSE OF foreboding over the mission deepened, he reacted by pushing himself and his team even harder. As Obama’s clock ticked down and the withdrawal of combat troops was well under way, Jim felt time gripping him like a vise. The Taliban were converging on Mangwel, as were other tribal elders, but Jim’s command was hell-bent on extracting itself from Afghanistan. Jim and everyone on his team were tired. The unbearable stress he felt rubbed off on everyone around him. Dan, who had recently arrived at Mangwel, noticed how Jim was constantly on edge, and mentioned it to me. I was relieved Dan had arrived to become Jim’s right-hand man, his second in command. Jim, too, knew he needed backup. His nerves were frayed. He felt incredibly exhausted, yet found it impossible to relax. The only way he could sleep at all was with the heavy use of sleeping pills, usually mixed with a little liquor.

  One night, after taking the pills, Jim put on a headlamp and walked out the door of our room i
nto the darkness. He often went to check on his men one last time before going to bed, so I didn’t think much about it. Several minutes passed. Then the door swung open again and Jim stumbled in, a dazed look on his face. He walked unsteadily toward the bed and crawled in. Then he fell asleep, with his headlamp still on.

  What I didn’t find out until later was that Jim had gone to the operations center on the qalat. Inside, two of his men sat working and Jim checked his email. But as his sleeping medication kicked in, Jim unexpectedly fell into a stupor. As he got up to leave he stopped and pulled his AK-47 rifle out of the wooden rack by the door where he always kept it at the ready. Then he picked up the rifle and, before his men could stop him, he put the barrel in his mouth and pulled the trigger. As usual, Jim had kept the rifle unloaded in the operations tent and so there was no bullet in the chamber. Then he set the rifle back down and with an unsteady gait walked out the door.

  By sunup the next morning, word of the incident had spread from man to man around the camp. The morning cool had all but dissipated when Dan walked up to Jim and me as we stood talking outside the operations center. Dan looked the most serious I had ever seen him.

  “Jim, I’m going to say this in front of Ann,” Dan started, his face stern. “Someone came up and told me you put an AK in your mouth last night. It made him uneasy, but he wouldn’t tell you. Brother, I’m your friend. I am here because you want me to be here. So I am telling you.”

  Jim gave Dan a look that was cold, emotionless. He had little doubt he had done what Dan said, although he had no recollection of the incident.

  “If you want to send up an email, just send it,” Jim said, staring at Dan. “I don’t give a fuck.”

  “Please listen,” Dan said. “I need you to understand.”

  “Why wouldn’t they tell me?” Jim snapped. It pissed him off that his men—the ones he’d spent months leading, loving, and protecting, the ones for whom not long before he’d plunged his hand into a pile of dirt and yanked out the wires of an IED—would turn to Dan first.

  Dan looked straight at him. “You are one intimidating motherfucker. That’s why,” he shot back. “The pressure here can be cut with a knife. The guys are coming to me and saying they can’t deal with it much longer. You are so angry. You are not the same Jim Gant I have known all these years. I am not sure I want to stay here with you anymore if some things don’t change.”

  Jim said nothing. He turned and walked away, leaving Dan and me standing there. Then he grabbed his AK-47 and left the qalat, walking through Mangwel and into Kawer. For more than an hour he sat next to an irrigation ditch that overlooked Zombieland, thinking. Dan’s words had devastated him. He was unsure what to do. Should he contact his command and tell them he had enough and wanted to return to the United States? Should he tell Dan to pack up and go back to Bagram? He trusted Dan and knew his words had merit. But Jim also believed Dan did not fully grasp—and perhaps never would understand—just how difficult it had been to push the mission as far as he had with an inexperienced infantry team.

  That evening, Jim asked Dan to come to our room in the shipping container. After dinner, Dan knocked on the door. Jim pulled it open, and the two men sat down cross-legged facing each other, as they had so many times before.

  “Dan, I needed to hear that, as a person, as a commander, and, most importantly, as your friend,” Jim began. “Your friendship means more to me than anything you do here. You have earned that a thousand times over with me. You have nothing to prove to me. The bottom line is that I don’t want you to leave, but I understand if you do. I am sorry I have let you down. I have no excuses for you.”

  Dan’s response was immediate. “Jim, I don’t want to leave. I just want some things to change.”

  “I know. Brother, I know,” Jim said. His heart was broken, and Dan and he both knew it.

  Jim spoke to his team about the incident and assured them he was not a threat. But he offered no apology.

  For my part, I hadn’t known what Jim did with the AK-47, but I was not surprised. A few days earlier, I had walked into our room and found Jim lying faceup on the floor in a daze with a 9 mm pistol in his hand. I took the pistol and put it back in its usual place, stuck between the mattress and wooden frame of our bed. It was the first time that had happened, and I was concerned, but I didn’t believe Jim was a danger to himself or others. He sometimes did crazy things. After Dan spoke up, I wondered whether I was too close to the craziness.

  LATE ONE NIGHT JUST before Christmas in 2011, Jim was working in the operations center in Mangwel when FRAGO 27 showed up in his official military in-box.

  It was a fragmentary order issued by Wilson, a multipage document updating the assignments for Special Forces units in eastern Afghanistan. Buried in the fine print was an abrupt change of mission for Jim’s team: Tribe 33 was to close down its base in Mangwel no later than January 15, 2012.

  Jim was shocked. No one in his chain of command had consulted or even informed him in advance about the withdrawal plan. The order gave his team about three weeks to leave—no time to prepare the tribe. It described the move as part of the overarching U.S. military transition to the Afghan government and security forces in preparation for the withdrawal of most American forces by 2014. The team was ordered to move into the Khas Kunar District Center for a few months in an effort to shore up the local government before departing completely by May or June. On that timeline, Jim believed the plan was premature and nothing less than abandonment.

  At the time FRAGO 27 came down I was back in Washington, writing and conducting interviews and doing my best to support Jim from seven thousand miles away. We spoke at least once every day.

  We agreed that as a strategy, pulling out of the Mohmand tribal area and leaving behind the Afghans who had most steadfastly supported the arbakai program from the very first—when the risk was greatest—made no sense. It reflected a catastrophic misunderstanding of the importance of the hard-won relationship with the tribe and the advantages of maintaining that tie. The Mohmands and Mangwel had set the example that other areas and tribes wanted to follow. The arbakai in Mangwel and the rest of the district were the most powerful security force in the area. Jim’s bond with the tribe was what created the potential for expanding the arbakai into other areas and winning over former Taliban. Reaping those benefits required a long-term commitment. He knew he could not remain in Mangwel forever, but his team had been in the village just ten months.

  Jim and I worked together on a memo that urged Wilson to postpone shutting down the Mangwel base, arguing that it could undermine security in the area and pointing out that the district government was ineffective and corrupt. The Afghan official who was to be empowered by Jim for security, a district police chief named Jungee, was embezzling funds and giving the insurgents intelligence on Jim and his team. The six Afghan National Police stationed near Mangwel were reporting on Jim’s movements. Jim told Wilson that. Still, Wilson refused to slow the departure from Mangwel, but he did allow more time for the team to move to the district center.

  “I want the ALP to be fully integrated into the District security plan and to be self-sustaining prior to your departure,” Wilson said. “We are supposed to be working with the Afghans.” In fact, Wilson’s own headquarters was about to return to Fort Bragg, and the short, rigid timeline was largely based on his desire to realign units—like so many plastic soldiers in a sandbox—before he left. He stated that Jim’s team and another team would leave and not be replaced. But in an Orwellian flourish, he insisted that this did not represent abandonment. “We are not withdrawing!” he wrote. “We are not abandoning them!”

  Jim’s sense of betrayal over the decision was intense. He felt he had been a fool to trust that his command or the U.S. government would back up its promises to the villages and tribes with a long-term commitment. In his view, his current command no longer wanted to “win”—if it ever had. He blamed himself for naively believing otherwise. After all, he had predicted this
very thing on the last page of his paper “One Tribe at a Time.” Under the heading “What Scares Me Most,” he wrote:

  On a personal note, my gravest concern is that a Tribal Engagement strategy in some form will indeed be adopted and implemented, but that the U.S. may eventually again abandon Afghanistan—and the tribes to whom we have promised long-term support will be left to be massacred by a vengeful Taliban.

  This is by far the worst outcome we could have.

  It is immoral and unethical to ask a tribe to help us and promise them support and then leave them to defend themselves on their own. If our forces do withdraw from Afghanistan, we should decide now to arm the tribes who support us with enough weapons and ammunition to survive after we leave.

  Jim’s anguish over the betrayal was doubly strong. Based on early assurances he had received that top commanders backed his strategy, he believed Special Forces would remain on the ground in Afghanistan in significant numbers for many years. So he had personally recruited the tribes, rallied his men behind the mission, and persuaded Taliban to switch sides—all at the risk of their lives. He had pledged his loyalty to them, and to a degree they were all fighting for him. They trusted him. Now an order from above was making him break that trust. Worst of all, he felt he was being forced to abandon his own family and the only place that to him truly felt like home.

  Jim dreaded breaking the news to Noor Afzhal. For two days he struggled with what he would say. Then on Christmas Eve, he asked Noor Afzhal, Asif, and Azmat to come meet with him, Dan, Ish, and Abe at the qalat the next morning.

  It was sunny but cold and Noor Afzhal could see his breath as he walked toward the tent wearing a heavy coat and vest. Jim came out and hugged him. Asif took hold of Jim’s right hand with his left—the one mangled by the threshing machine. Only a few weeks earlier, Jim had experienced one of the proudest moments in his life when Asif had nonchalantly offered him his disfigured hand for the first time. Jim felt a pang in his chest.