American Spartan

by Tyson, Ann Scott

  They entered one of the qalat tents and sat down on the red carpet.

  There is no good way to do this.

  “You all know how much I love you,” he began. “You are my family. I want you to listen to what I am telling you, and tell me honestly what you believe.”

  Jim pulled from his pocket a copy of FRAGO 27.

  “The U.S. military is ordering me to leave Mangwel. They gave me no warning,” he said. He read the order verbatim to Noor Afzhal.

  “So now I am asking you all. The U.S. military is ordering me to move away from Mangwel. Should I leave Afghanistan and go back to the United States, or stay? Father, you have always given me your best advice. Tell me what would be best for you and your people,” Jim said.

  Noor Afzhal’s face dropped. His first thought was that the tribe had somehow let Jim down. All he wanted was for Jim to leave with his honor. But as he listened to Jim he understood that it was an order, that the tribe had done nothing wrong.

  Noor Afzhal looked at Jim. His eyes were resigned but his shoulders as determined as ever. He was to the point, and spoke from the heart.

  “I want you to stay, as close as you can,” he said. “If you must leave Mangwel, stay in Khas Kunar. If you leave Khas Kunar, stay in the province. If you leave Konar, stay in Afghanistan.”

  Asif was next. His eyes were clear and piercing but not angry. They were serious and very sad. Strangely, it was the same look Asif had had a few weeks before, when he and Jim were at the district cricket championship in Mangwel. Scores of people were playing and laughing around them, and Jim grabbed Asif’s hand.

  “We’ve come a long way, brother,” he said.

  “Yes, we have,” Asif replied, and then for a reason neither of them fully understood, he added, “I will miss you when you go.”

  Now Asif looked both sad and distraught.

  “You should stay,” he told Jim.

  And so it went around the room. No one, including Dan, Abe, or Ish, believed Jim should leave.

  The next day, Jim patrolled down to Chamaray and sat down over tea for a frank talk with his arbakai commanders: Azmat, the former Taliban Niq, and the Chamaray ALP commander Mohammed Ghul.

  “Make no mistake, we are leaving,” Jim told them.

  “Jim,” said the burly Niq, “you are the only American who has spoken of our future in an honest manner. I understand now. We will only have what we have when you leave. After that we will be on our own.”

  “Yes, Niq, you are right,” Jim replied.

  Niq was quiet, his face solemn, as the truth sank in.

  Then Azmat spoke. “Jim until you came, we were not together. Now we can talk. We have guns that are legal. What you have asked of us is not easy, but it is our duty as Pashtuns. We can protect ourselves. If the Taliban comes and kills ten, we will kill one hundred.”

  Then Niq spoke again, his eyes steady and voice strong. “Jim, what you have done for us is without words. You look Afghan, yes. You understand our language, yes. You follow Pashtunwali, yes. But you are a great warrior with a great heart. I would happily fight and die alongside you. It is my duty. But,” he added, “it is not your duty to be here. You are here because you want to be. Please know that if you are killed here it will bring great, great dishonor to all of us.”

  Jim smiled and took Niq’s hand, and for a moment his heart felt relieved. “Your words mean more than you know,” Jim said. Once again, Jim could count on the Pashtuns. Having lost faith in his U.S. military commanders, Jim was basing his decisions on the needs of the tribe, his tribe.

  Toward his command, he felt only anger. FRAGO 27 was a slap in the face. It afforded him no respect, no honor. He felt used and tortured, like a caged beast, prodded with sticks and only occasionally let out to kill. Tormented by guilt, he could no longer keep the monsters and demons that taunted him out of his mind; he had lost control of that space.

  “Ann, I feel like I’m just going to break,” Jim told me one night on the phone. “I feel like something in my head is going to snap, and I won’t be able to make sense of anything anymore.”

  I could tell his mental state was precarious, that the situation was threatening to overwhelm him. After a year and a half in the war zone, with his life and those of his men constantly at risk, and now the undercutting of his mission by his command, Jim was struggling to hold everything together.

  “I’m switched on all the time. My emotions are frayed. I am so tired. And the deceit on top of all of this . . . ,” he said.

  We agreed that I would return to Afghanistan earlier than planned, and meanwhile I encouraged him to pace himself and focus on the essentials.

  After several sleepless nights, he knew what he had to do: fight, on his terms. He would fight to get all his Americans home alive. And he would fight to get Abe, Ish, and Imran and his old interpreter from ODA 316, Khalid, out of Afghanistan. We were extremely concerned about the dangers the Afghans faced as a result of working so closely with Jim and other Special Forces teams. All four men and their families had faced specific death and kidnapping threats from Taliban insurgents. The Taliban called the two Khan brothers “infidel Abe” and “infidel Ish” in intelligence intercepts. Khalid had been wounded in battle. Abe had acted courageously in the firefight in which his comrade Staff Sgt. Robert Miller was gunned down and for which Miller posthumously received the Medal of Honor. We believed that, along with other U.S. military interpreters, these Afghans had sacrificed more and risked more for the U.S. mission than many of their compatriots and that they should not be left behind to fend for themselves by the United States. Jim had felt the same about his interpreter from Iraq, Mack. Jim had helped Mack and his new bride, Amal, escape Iraq for the United States in 2007, and brought them to live in his home in Fayetteville for nearly a year. Mack and Amal since had two children and were on their way to becoming American citizens. Mack embodied what Jim had fought for in Iraq, just as Abe, Ish, Imran, and Khalid did in Afghanistan.

  Finally, Jim decided he would ready his Afghan tribal allies for a total loss of U.S. support. He would prepare them to defend themselves, by stockpiling weapons and ammunition for the tribesmen and killing or capturing as many insurgents as possible. It was the only way he could ever leave with his honor intact.

  “SENATOR McCAIN, AS WE pull out of these places, the Afghan government—at least in some places, I would argue in many parts of Konar—is not prepared,” I said, cradling my cell phone as I typed at my computer. “They cannot pay their people. They cannot supply them with fuel. They just can’t do it.”

  “I agree with you, Ann.”

  “Well, so what’s our obligation here?”

  There was a pause on the phone line. I looked out the window of my house in Bethesda into the gray December morning. I always enjoyed interviewing Senator McCain. He did not dodge questions, and he spent a lot of time downrange, seeing things for himself. McCain and two other senators had traveled together to Mangwel in July 2011 and were deeply impressed by the relationship Jim and his small team had forged with the tribe. Petraeus had told McCain and the other senators that Jim was the best counterinsurgent in the Army. Before McCain left Mangwel, Jim asked him one question: “Sir, are we still trying to win?” McCain had looked troubled. “I knew when Petraeus was here. Now, I just don’t know.”

  I was curious to hear what McCain would say now.

  “Well, I think our obligation is to fulfill the commitments we have made,” McCain told me. But, he said, President Obama overruled the recommendations of his military leaders to keep troops in Afghanistan longer. As a result, he said, he worried that Afghanistan would “become a cockpit of competing influences” from Iran, India, and Pakistan, and “deteriorate into a situation not unlike after the Russian withdrawal . . . It does not bode well for the people of Afghanistan.”

  Then he added, “I am glad you are interested in this issue, Ann. It needs to be talked about. A realistic assessment of this situation needs to be rendered by someone.”
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  “Senator,” I went on. “I know you have been on the ground a lot, and I have, too. I have covered the wars.”

  “I know you have, yes.”

  “I believe there is some morality in war. I believe that we have asked people to risk their lives for us in a very profound way, and to not at least make sure that they can fend for themselves when we leave is—”

  “A tragedy,” McCain interjected, “and a stain on the honor of the United States of America. And I’d like to remind you, Ann, there was another time in Vietnam where we left some people—some of them were called Hmong, as you might recall—and we were able to get a bunch of them to the United States, but a hell of a lot of them were slaughtered by the Vietnamese.”

  The image sent shivers down my spine.

  “Sir, I have a very specific personal request for you. There are some very brave Afghans who have been working with Major Gant—and he has sacrificed an incredible amount in his own career, with many years away . . .”

  “He’s an amazing man, yes,” McCain said.

  “He asked me if I would ask you if you could possibly try to help get out of Afghanistan a couple of the Afghans who have worked side by side with him, fought side by side with him, who you may have met while you were there. That is the only thing he will ever ask anyone for.”

  “I would be honored to do so.”

  SNOW LAY THICK ON the Hindu Kush Mountains in mid-January 2012, as Jim’s Afghan mechanic, Shafiq, steered our car along a rocky, twisting road above the Konar River toward Mangwel.

  We passed a man cloaked in a woolen blanket herding a flock of sheep, and descended into the lowlands, where barren fields stretched out under a cold, gray sky.

  I sat in the back covered with a blue burkha, and Jim rode in the front passenger seat in Afghan clothes with his AK-47 resting against his legs. The burkha had felt suffocating when I last made the journey in July, but now it afforded a welcome extra layer of warmth. It made me think of a poem by the Pashto poet Khushal Khan Khattak called “The Coming of Winter”:

  When Libra travels from the sun, then does winter come.

  The world, once weak with summer’s heat, grows strong again;

  Man eats with joy and finds the taste of water sweet;

  Lovers embrace again, arms and lips entwined.

  The warrior welcomes now his coat; the horse, his winter trappings;

  The one feels not his armor; nor the other his saddle’s weight.

  From Swat the falcon now returns, like traveled a yogi coming home;

  And in the radiant moonlight hours comes the heron screaming in the sky.

  My arrival in Mangwel this time was bittersweet, with all the comings and goings.

  Jim’s first team of soldiers from the Kansas-based 1st Infantry Division had finished their yearlong deployment and departed before Christmas. They had bonded with the arbakai and villagers and together improved life for the people in Mangwel. To a man, they believed in the mission and it had changed them profoundly. Miah, Sonny, and Kyle planned to alter their Army careers and try out for Special Forces or Civil Affairs, branches of the military that partner closely with foreign people. Drew and others were leaning toward quitting the Army, knowing no future deployment could match this one. Mitch loved Mangwel and had begged his command to let him stay. Everyone was sad to see them go. As he dropped them off at the helicopter landing zone, Jim grabbed each one of them, hugged them, and whispered in their ear: “Be great. Meet your potential. I won’t forget what you did here. Strength and honor.” Then he walked away and did not look back. For Jim, it was a relief to again send all his men back to their families alive, but he missed them badly.

  After days with only a handful of U.S. soldiers at the qalat, a new group of infantrymen arrived from the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Infantry Regiment, part of a Stryker brigade based at Fort Lewis, Washington. They came just in time to begin shutting down Mangwel and moving to COP Penich. As a result, they had little motivation to learn about the tribal people. For Jim, starting from scratch to break in a new team was particularly disheartening—along with the knowledge that it would be the last group of men he would ever command in combat. The nominal leader of the soldiers, 1st Lt. Thomas Roberts, was a 2010 West Point graduate on his first deployment, and his inexperience led immediately to insecurities and friction as his men gravitated toward Jim’s leadership. The first red flag was that Roberts refused to sign Jim’s initial counseling packet. “I am uncomfortable with some things you said,” the bespectacled Roberts told him as the team prepared for weapons training at Mangwel. “I don’t know if you meant it or it was just a speech.” That infuriated Jim, but for the first time ever he let it pass. He had no confidence his command would back him up if he sent Roberts packing, and he lacked the time and energy to deal with Roberts. He expected that some mentoring would eventually bring Roberts around. So Roberts moved back to Penich with about half of the new team of soldiers, while the rest stayed in Mangwel with Jim.

  The atmosphere on the qalat felt more subdued. The morning after I arrived I sat outside the kitchen drinking milk tea with Sher Ali, a young, boastful arbakai who wore sleeveless shirts with ammunition belts crisscrossed over his chest.

  “Jim came a year ago and brought a big change here. No one shot at us because we had good security in Mangwel. The Taliban were scared of us,” Sher Ali said. “I am very sad he will leave. No one will support us like Jim supports us,” he said. “Everyone is worried the Taliban will take revenge.”

  Hakim Jan, an older arbakai with a long tanned face and thick eyebrows who resembled Anthony Quinn, agreed.

  “Before we came to this qalat we had a lot of bad guys in Kawer and Zombieland, and the Taliban could move freely through Mangwel and Chamaray,” he said as he stood in the guard tower with his AK-47 over his shoulder. “Now if that happened someone would call us because we have a relationship.

  “If Jim leaves and the Taliban attack us, we don’t know what will happen. We have a small ANP checkpoint but it is not strong. The ANP guys are calling the Taliban,” he went on. “We are very unhappy he is leaving.”

  Squinting in the winter sun, Hakim Jan looked out over Mangwel and proposed a tribal solution. “If Jim wants to stay, we have a lot of elders in the village. We will send them to Kabul to talk with the American generals,” he said.

  As a farewell for the arbakai, Jim invited musicians from Jalalabad to play one evening in a tent on the qalat. Everyone crowded into the tent as the long-haired musicians warmed up their rabab (lute), accordion, keyboards, and handheld drums. Younger arbakai taught a few of the new soldiers to dance in the Pashtun style, holding out both arms and shimmying their shoulders, while Abe tossed wads of Pakistani rupees in their direction. Salim, the cross-eyed cook, belted out a forlorn love song, and Chevy, the orphan boy worker whom Jim had taken in, danced until his face was red. Noor Afzhal reclined on a pillow next to me and Jim. But as the night wore on and the musicians sang a long ballad about fighting the Russians, Jim retired to our room.

  When I joined him, he was lying on the bed looking at the ceiling. I sat down next to him, and he took hold of my hand.

  “We are going to leave. I am going to leave these people. And when I do, I will take with me the hope I have given them,” he said. “What I have accomplished here will be as insignificant as a mosquito landing on a still pond in the early morning. It will be like when you stand on an ocean beach with violent, crashing waves, pick up a handful of sand, and toss it little by little into the water. You rub your fingers together and the last grains fall away until there is only a single, tiny grain between your fingers. It will be like that. Nothing I have done here will be sustained. I have made no difference.”

  “You have shown them what is possible, but now they must do it themselves,” I said. “You have done so much. What more could you give them?”

  “That is an easy answer,” he said. “My life.”

  The next morning, it was chilly and overcast. Clo
uds hung low over Mangwel, obscuring the tops of the mountains. It was raining lightly in the early afternoon when Jim came to me and asked me to go with him on a walk. He wrapped a thin, cream-colored wool blanket around my shoulders over my Afghan dress, then took an identical wrap for himself. He told his men we were leaving the qalat, and we set off toward the village.

  I delighted in our strolls through Mangwel, although I never knew when or where we were going. I had learned not to ask. It was part of our agreement after the IED strike on my vehicle. Jim understood that, as a war correspondent and writer, I wanted to go everywhere to document unfolding events. He knew I was not afraid. But although I had been on countless combat patrols with infantry units in Afghanistan and Iraq, my situation in Mangwel was different. I was under the protection of a man who loved me, who held my life dearer than his own. He was responsible. So he decided where I could go—especially in the wilds of Konar.

  We set off across some empty fields on the edge of the village, instead of heading toward the center of Mangwel. Jim walked slightly ahead of me, as usual. The rain was making small puddles in the rocky, sandy soil, and I stepped over them.

  “You know that when we met, I was not looking for you,” he began. “But I fell for you very quickly. One of the reasons was that I felt you, and your care for me.”

  We began to climb a narrow dirt path that led in switchbacks up a large hill overlooking Mangwel.

  “Then when you came here and I saw your bravery, and how you risked your life to be with me, I fell more deeply in love with you,” he said. “I trust you.”

  I knew that for Jim and men like him, trust was an act of extreme courage. It was not until I had walked in his steps in Afghanistan and become a true comrade that he could trust me completely. It reassured him that I would still love him after witnessing the person he was in war, and that I would be there when he got off the plane. After eighteen months in Afghanistan, the constant swirl of lies, deception, and outright treachery by both Afghans and Americans made trust seem at once impossibly naive, laughingly quaint—and more important than ever.