I wanted to hold his hand, but I could not. Only a few people were out in the rain, and they were far below us in the village. But we knew they were watching. To hold his hand publicly would have been extremely shameful for us and for the tribe. He knew that, and walked on a few steps in front of me.
The trail brought us up the side of a large hill to a flat patch of earth from which we could see all of Mangwel stretched out before us. The fragrant smoke of ironwood fires wafted from some of the mud qalats, which disappeared in the distance into a soft, misty tree line.
Jim squatted down in the Afghan style, looking out at Mangwel, and I did, too. Raindrops were falling on our faces. Our hands were bundled in the blankets against the cool air.
“You can think about this if you need to,” he said, looking at me. “You do not have to answer me right now.”
I nodded.
“Ann, will you marry me?” he said.
I looked into his eyes and smiled.
His face was very serious, but his eyes smiled back.
“Yes,” I said simply, “I would be honored to be your wife. I believe in you and us. You make me happy.”
He reached into his pocket and pulled out a clear box holding an engraved gold ring on a pillow of red velvet. He put the ring on my finger and closed his hand around mine. My eyes filled with tears. We wanted to embrace, but we could not.
At that moment, a single shot rang out in the distance and echoed across the valley. It was not aimed at us, but it required a response. We stood up to leave, and Jim walked a short way farther up the path. He raised his AK-47 rifle and fired two rounds toward the mountain behind us. Then he paused, listening and scanning the village below.
“Are you all right?” he asked, leading the way back down the path.
“Yes,” I said, following behind.
FORTY-EIGHT HOURS LATER, JIM was riding through Zombieland at the head of a slow-moving patrol including a crane and two Afghan cargo trucks transporting gear from Mangwel to COP Penich.
He was irritated about the move. The short timeline forced his team to be out on the road far more than usual, exposing them to increased risk from roadside bombs. Jim had gone to extremes in recent days to clear the route, even walking it on foot. Still, everyone by then knew about the move, including the Taliban. Jim’s departure from Mangwel gave the insurgents a huge incentive to strike so that they could claim to have pushed him out.
Knowing the threat was high, Jim was riding on the hood of the lead Humvee to better spot IEDs. The patrol twisted through Kawer, secured by Niq’s force of local police. It then entered an area called Mygon that lay beyond Niq’s control.
Jim’s Humvee pulled into a turn where the road hugged a rocky face on the right and dropped off into fields on the left.
Right side road, Chris— Jim waved his arm in a signal to his driver, Spec. Chris Clement.
Jim glanced to his left. He noticed movement in an unusual place in the field and was just about to react when—boom!
Chris gripped the steering wheel as the left side of the Humvee flipped up and came crashing down.
“Contact! Contact! Contact!” he shouted.
A blast of dirt hit Jim’s gunner, Pfc. Jonathan Salyer, and machine-gun ammunition flew out of the can into his face.
“Get ready for the follow-on attack,” yelled Salyer, a twenty-year-old from Columbia City, Indiana.
Chris pulled forward in the Humvee and stopped.
“Where the fuck is Jim?” he shouted.
Jim was gone.
ABE BURST THROUGH THE wooden door in the qalat wall and ran toward me. I was sitting outside our room, writing.
He had heard the boom and called Ish, who was on the patrol.
“Jim’s vehicle hit an IED,” he told me. “He was on the hood.”
My heart stood still.
“Is he okay?” I asked frantically.
“I don’t know,” he said.
“Stay here. I’ve got to go.”
I went into our room, grabbed my camera and notebook, and quickly followed Abe to the courtyard.
Noor Afzhal was waving his cane, shouting at Abe.
“Get going, get out of here!” he yelled, urging Abe to go to Jim’s aid with some of the arbakai.
Abe was shaking.
“Not yet,” he told the elder firmly. “My brothers are out there. But Ish told me to wait.”
Abe turned to the dozen Afghan workers in the qalat and told them to take cover in the mortar pit. He realized there could be a two-pronged attack—with Jim and his men hit outside, the Taliban could strike the undermanned qalat. Tribe 33 had rehearsed the defense drill many times, and Abe knew the qalat had to be secure. He also knew Jim had a brand-new team of U.S. soldiers.
Together with the arbakai, the soldiers were climbing into the guard towers to reinforce security.
I ran to the tower beside the front gate and clambered up the wooden ladder to the top of the wall, making sure not to trip in my flowing Afghan clothes.
I peered out the tower down at the road, desperate to see something, anything that would let me know Jim was all right.
DAN WAS COMMANDING THE vehicle about three hundred yards behind when he heard the blast and saw the cloud of the explosion hit Jim’s vehicle. He pushed forward and passed the big bomb crater on the left side of the road. When he didn’t hear Jim on the radio, Dan ordered his driver to back up while he dismounted.
Then he heard a faint voice and saw him.
On the side of the road up against a wall of rock, Jim was lying facedown. He had been thrown over the road by the blast and landed on his left side.
Dan ran over.
“Jim!”
Jim was breathing.
“Hey, Jim!”
Jim moved a little and then tried to push himself up. Dan grabbed his arm and helped him onto his feet. For a moment Jim was dazed and unsteady as he watched the world spin before his eyes. His head was throbbing and he couldn’t understand what Dan was saying. Then everything came into focus.
“Are you all right?” Dan shouted again, shaking him.
“I’m good,” Jim said.
“What do you got?” Dan said.
Shrapnel was stinging Jim’s left arm, leg, and head. But he had to lead.
“Charlie Mike—keep the patrol moving!” Jim said, using Army lingo for “continue mission.” “You need to push up to Penich and get this stuff downloaded. I will secure the scene.” Halting the patrol, already slowed by the unarmed Afghan trucks, would be even more dangerous.
Soon Niq’s fifty arbakai and about fifty more led by Azmat were swarming the area.
Jim told Ish to let Abe roll with more reinforcements. Abe drove to the blast site as fast as he could. Together he and Jim found the IED’s long, thin command wire and traced it into the field. They found a pair of sandals and excrement left by the triggerman, who must have been watching the road for at least a day, waiting for precisely the moment to strike.
The Taliban wanted Jim dead.
UP IN THE TOWER, the radio crackled.
Then I heard Jim’s voice.
“Sustained significant damage to the lead vehicle—break—one pax with superficial wounds—break—everyone is good to go,” he told a soldier in the Tribe 33 operations center. “We have about a hundred ALP in the area—break—they are going to search five qalats. Request no CAS [close air support], no medevac, and I am in contact with the ground battlespace owner. How copy?”
A soldier in the operations center repeated back what Jim said, but left out some details.
“Okay, close, but no cigar,” Jim said.
I burst out laughing, relieved and amused. The worse things got, the more calmly Jim spoke on the radio. He prided himself on that.
Jim made the soldier get it right.
“Roger, good copy,” he said at last. “Get that up to Bushman 33, time now,” he said, referring to the call sign for the Special Operations Task Force–East, commanded by Wilso
n.
On Jim’s orders, Dan and the rest of the team completed the mission to Penich, while he and the arbakai pursued the insurgents. When Jim finally returned to the qalat, he was bleeding where shrapnel had pierced his arm, leg, and head. He had a bad headache and his ears were ringing. But he downplayed the injuries, not wanting to be forced to leave his men for medical treatment.
The next morning, he called his team together for an after-action review on the IED strike. Apart from appraising his team’s performance, he wanted to show his men that he was all right.
“This is war. This is what you came here to do,” he told them. “If not, you are fucked up.”
He was also concerned about the atmosphere at COP Penich and complaints some of the soldiers who had remained there were making about Lt. Roberts.
“Be loyal to one another,” Jim said. “There are serious loyalty issues at Penich.”
Then he pulled on a shoulder harness loaded with ammunition and grenades, picked up his M4 carbine, and climbed back on the hood for another mission.
But back at the Bagram SOTF-E command, news of the IED hitting Jim was greeted with more disparaging remarks.
“Finally,” one soldier remarked, “the Great One got his.”
IT WAS DUSK ON January 18, two days after the IED strike, when Jim and his team packed up the vehicles and prepared to leave the qalat for the last time.
Concerned about a Taliban attack, Jim made sure Noor Afzhal was at his home. Earlier in the day, he visited the tribal elder and told him he would see him soon. He also had gotten word from the son of Mohammed Jalil, the Taliban sympathizer whom he had visited in jail, on the possible IED trigger puller, as well as a warning that another IED was in place.
Back at the qalat, Jim hugged Asif, Azmat, and the arbakai, who were busy loading up goods from the camp, and walked toward his vehicle.
A small figure ran toward Jim and embraced him. It was the arbakai Umara Khan. He was sobbing openly. He would not let go.
Jim looked into those intense green eyes, and saw the heartbreak of an entire people. At that moment, he knew, it was over.
A few days later, Noor Afzhal stood in the deserted, gutted qalat and felt numb, in shock. It had happened so quickly.
The scene reminded him of his return to Mangwel from Pakistan many years before, finding it a desolate ghost town. But though his people had suffered foreign invasion and occupation, massacre, and exile, they never forgot their tribal homeland. Now, he thought, they had to stay united.
He felt like crying, but he knew he had to be strong.
“It is not in his hands,” Noor Afzhal told the tribesmen gathered around him. “It is his command making him do it,” he said. “He is still our brother, and we will see him.”
CHAPTER 27
SITTING IN OUR ROOM at COP Penich before a board covered with butcher paper, Jim used colored pens to draw an elaborate map of Konar. Having lost faith in his U.S. military superiors and their commitment to the war, he continued to push forward his own tribal expansion plans. The Safi tribe led by Haji Jan Dahd was a critical building block for the security of Konar. A foothold with the Safis in Chowkay District would allow for further expansion north into the dangerous Pech valley and beyond. To the south, it would create a buffer for the Mohmand tribe. Jim was plotting his own course to empower Noor Afzhal, Jan Dahd, and other tribal leaders so that they could protect their people from whatever came their way—Taliban retaliation or the full-scale Afghan civil war that he believed was coming. He wanted to make sure Niq, Azmat, Noor Mohammed, and other ALP commanders who had sided with him had the supplies they needed to defend their communities. From now on, he would ignore whatever rules got in the way of carrying out the mission as he envisioned it. His commanders fell into a by now familiar pattern—they let him keep operating because, as wary as they were of Jim, they realized that no other Special Forces team leader on the ground had anything close to his experience, knowledge, and connections in Konar. He used that fact to his advantage.
“I’m dangerous now,” he told me, “because I don’t have anything to lose.”
The four hundred Afghan Local Police that Jim worked with in Khas Kunar were already emerging as the biggest and most robust security force in the district. Jim set out to make them even stronger. In violation of U.S. military rules, he gave them heavy weapons, ammunition, and fuel for their vehicles that the Afghan government was not supplying. He also fixed broken vehicles and weapons for them. Without the fuel Jim’s team provided, the arbakai would not have been able to keep their vehicles running reliably. The weapons he handed out included scores of repaired AK-47 rifles, eight rebuilt PKM machine guns, and half a dozen RPGs, together with tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition. Without such weapons, the ALP could be outgunned by the Taliban. The ALP began to prove their aggressiveness and strength well beyond village defense.
Meanwhile, yet another change of command created an unexpected opening for Jim. In February Wilson left and was replaced by Lt. Col. William Linn, an intelligent but by-the-book officer who had never served in Afghanistan. In Jalalabad, Maj. Kent Solheim replaced Maj. Eddie Jimenez. Solheim, a thirty-nine-year-old combat veteran from Oregon City, Oregon, had earned a Silver Star for valor in Iraq during a battle in the height of the fighting there. Solheim saved the lives of several comrades, but his wounds cost him a leg. Jim met with Solheim in early February in his office at Camp Dyer, the Special Forces headquarters at Jalalabad.
“Schwartz really dislikes you. He’s said a lot of bad things about you,” Solheim told Jim. Schwartz’s disparaging comments in meetings had tainted Linn’s attitude, he said. Linn was known as a black-and-white thinker. “Linn told me, ‘Jim Gant is not operating in my battlespace. I can’t have someone who doesn’t know his left and right limits,’ ” Solheim said.
But Solheim told Jim that he had realized a lot of information Jimenez and others gave him was flat wrong. Keeping an open mind, he asked Jim to provide his own assessment of the situation in Konar. Impressed by Jim’s knowledge, Solheim peppered him with questions, which Jim answered in an exhaustive four-hour briefing and a series of memos. Jim explained why the Afghan Local Police initiative had worked so well in Mangwel and surrounding areas, and outlined for Solheim his expansion plan, starting with the Safi tribe in Chowkay. Solheim encouraged all his Special Forces team leaders to learn from Jim’s approach.
Two days later, on February 8, Solheim was on a patrol near the town of Pashad when the RG-31 mine-resistant vehicle he was riding in was hit by a massive IED. The explosion flipped the vehicle on its back end and tore off a large chunk of the front. The blast was so great that it blew one of the tires through a qalat wall about forty yards away. As soon as he heard about the IED, Noor Mohammed and some twenty of his arbakai raced to the scene and helped secure the scene, which was in his area of operations, followed soon after by Jim.
Jim approached Solheim, relieved to see he and his men were unhurt.
But Solheim’s first remarks to Jim had nothing to do with the IED. Instead he praised Noor Mohammed and his men.
“I love ALP,” Solheim said. Then he surveyed the wrecked armored vehicle. “They can have my leg,” he added, “but they can’t kill me.”
“I hear you, man. Fuck them,” Jim said, then added, “It’s good to see you.”
What Jim was thinking, but didn’t say, was that Solheim was fortunate to be alive. He had put himself and his men at unnecessary risk by patrolling the area without alerting Jim; had he done so, Jim and the ALP could have cleared the route and probably prevented the attack. The area had long been dangerous—it was the same place where Jim’s team hit the IED in 2003 that cost Luke Murray his leg. Still, Jim was glad Solheim saw the rapid ALP response to the IED.
Solheim was sold on the effectiveness of the ALP and the importance of expansion. Both he and Linn were eager to have more Special Forces teams living in rural villages and working with ALP, as Tribe 33 did in Mangwel. But other teams
were having great difficulty moving into villages—including the ODA that was then living on Forward Operating Base Fortress, a U.S. military base in Chowkay. Together, Solheim and Jim discussed a plan by which Jim would lead a team to embed with the powerful Safi tribe in a village in Chowkay, train and mentor three hundred ALP there, and then hand off the location to another team.
“In sixty days, we’ll have three hundred ALP and an embed site,” Jim told Solheim.
There was only one obstacle: Schwartz had to sign off on it.
Schwartz’s criticism of Jim had intensified and grown more open. In February, after Jim evacuated his driver, Chris, for treatment for back pain as a result of the January 16 IED strike, Schwartz implied that Jim was slow in acting and should “take better care of his men.” After the extreme sacrifices Jim had made to protect his soldiers, the verbal attack was particularly galling. Yet despite Schwartz’s seeming concerns about Jim and his men, he agreed to give them a mission no other Special Forces team had been able to execute.
Solheim gave Jim the news, telling him in an email, “Pack your bags.” He was to move into Chowkay as quickly as possible.
This was it. After twenty months in combat, he had landed the most complex, challenging, and risky mission of his life. The Safis were the strongest and most dissident tribe in Konar, and Chowkay was a highly contested district. We would be living in a small qalat in the middle of the tribal lands. Mangwel had proved that Jim’s tribal engagement strategy could work; Chowkay would be the ultimate test.
CHAPTER 28
METHODICALLY PACING INSIDE THE dimly lit wooden B-hut at COP Penich, Jim wore a tan baseball cap with a ghairat honor patch, his lower lip full of Afghan dip.
“We may not all make it out,” he said. He spat into an empty water bottle, screwed the top back on, and slapped the bottle against his hand for emphasis. “There’s going to be some fighting,” he went on, but “that doesn’t mean we’re failing.” In fact, if the team didn’t have to fight to get in there, he said, then “something is wrong.”
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