Broken Bodies, Shattered Minds: A Medical Odyssey From Vietnam to Afghanistan

by Ronald Glasser M. D.

  There were other lessons that should have been learned in our seven years in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The areas that had been chosen for our outposts were linked by rutted trails easily blocked and sabotaged, while Wanat itself could only be reached quickly by helicopter.

  Those at Wanat never had the construction equipment to build adequate fortifications for, as the report explains, a “defensible outpost,” while a lack of fresh water and currency to buy favors and win the support of the villagers surrounding the outpost had been contributing factors to the lack of military preparedness.

  More importantly, there was a lack of an increase in air surveillance once the commanders had made the mistake of attending a village council uninvited. It made clear, to anyone who understood the local customs, that the Americans were not welcomed there.

  The numbers of killed and wounded civilians from air strikes over the preceding eight years had added an element of revenge to the centuries-old dislike of any foreigners. There is an Afghan expression that has not changed in some 3,000 years: “You might decide whether or not you come into our valley, but we will decide if we let you out.”

  At times during the daylong battle of Wanat, there were sustained individual firefights at distances of less than ten meters. During the later part of the battle, Taliban fighters managed to work their way through the concertina wire that was the only defense against an attack, killing the platoon commander with a volley of AK-47 rounds. The morning after the battle, what remained of the 173rd was pulled out of Wanat. The outpost was simply abandoned.

  For those who remembered, it was all eerily similar to “Hamburger Hill” in Vietnam. The 101st Airborne fought the North Vietnamese to a standstill, suffering more than 500 casualties, only to pack up and go back to their base camp the next day, giving whatever it was that they’d been fighting for back to whomever had held the mountain the day before the battle began. There is some thought now, as part of the surge in Afghanistan and for tactical reasons, of sending the Marines back to Wanat, though whatever unit they send back will not have an easy time of it.

  The Marines though, did learn something about how to fight in Iraq, and have begun to use that learning as they have been shifted to the mountains and plains of Afghanistan. In war, as in education, it is never what you teach, so much as what you emphasize, that is important.

  The Marine lobbying had paid off and units were moved out of Iraq into Helmand Province to re-supply U.S. bases that had already been there. The Marines understand that while you might have to show a friendly and helpful face, someone is still going to have to do the fighting and in Afghanistan those fights would be difficult and deadly. That whole “First in and Last out” hasn’t changed in some 250 years. But as Jake’s father had learned, and now Jake was to find out, neither had basic training.

  Basic training for the Marines has remained what it has always been. It is the “tear you down and then build you up again” process, only this time as a marine. Whatever else might be said of the Marines, they are not very good at mending fences and would rather be respected or feared than liked.

  For Jake, it was not so much that a new person emerged, but rather that the Jake who had always been there gradually took over. Still, there are very few eighteen-year-olds who will not grow up a little by learning that, when someone tells you to do something, they expect you to do it. Life is supposed to be, and usually is, a very serious and demanding place. That in itself could become the Marine’s motto.

  Jake took his thirteen weeks of basic training at the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in San Diego. He didn’t feel the training was as difficult, or as trying, as his father had warned. There had been some tough moments though, when sleep-deprived and exhausted, he barely managed to keep going; a few times, he almost didn’t. But in the Marines, “almost” doesn’t count. If you do it, you do it. In the world of the Marines, the real things are sometimes just that simple.

  But even with that, Jake felt that things had been turned down a notch to get everyone through the thirteen weeks. In a way he was right. Some Marine units had already been deployed five or six times to Iraq. The Corps was feeling the strain and needed all the men and women they could get, even if they weren’t quite ready yet.

  Everyone in Jake’s class—with the edge taken off of the most difficult parts of the training—made it through Basic, though there were a few that he wasn’t so sure would be there if things went wrong. What he did learn from the Drill Instructors, what all of them learned, was that if you don’t fight back you are doomed. The assumptions they’d all grown up with, that if you were nice to people, they would be nice to you, was a lie, and that the best response to force was force, a preparation for the moment, maybe months away, when people they didn’t even know would be trying to kill them. It was sobering, and he understood that is was realistic. It was an attitude, if not yet an understanding, that would soon save his life and the lives of others around him. In the end, Marines break things and kill people or they die.

  From Basic Training, Jake went on to Marine Combat Training at Camp Pendleton. It was deadly and impressive. The Marines had never believed the message of “Mission Accomplished.” Since the invasion of Iraq, the training had grown more focused and more intense. Whatever else was going to happen in Iraq, the enemy would have to have more than good planning or luck to kill a bunch of Marines. Jake told his father with absolute confidence during one of his phone calls home that no one could stand up to a 50-caliber machine gun. “You can’t even hide from one.”

  Jake’s father heard the respect and awe in the very calmness of his son’s voice. Whatever else was might be happening, his son was growing up. In Afghanistan, the 50 was to become Jake’s favorite weapon. It would be the weapon that would save his life and the lives of those around him.

  At the end of MCT, Jake received an MOS as an Audio Communication Specialist and went on with a small group of trainees to the Marine base at Twenty-nine Palms, California for six weeks of training as a field radio operator, ending up with an “0261” or MOS of Field Radio Operator.

  After Basic and MCT, the six weeks at Twenty-nine Palms weren’t all that hard. It was mostly classroom work and Jake became a gym rat. Somehow he knew that being in shape was as much a part of being a marine as was the whole issue of survival and being able to use a weapon better then your enemy. He didn’t want to have to blame himself if things went bad or went wrong. Besides, they had gone far enough in their training to begin hearing stories about Afghanistan from those who’d been there and had managed to make it back home.

  These weren’t quite cautionary tales, but reality stories of having to carry fifty pounds of body armor at times moving straight up, while the bad guys wearing sandals and carrying some water and an RPG or AK-47 with a dozen rounds of ammunition, jumped from rock to rock like billy goats.

  Following Communications School, Jake slimmed down and buffed out. He went back to Pendleton not only unable to fit into the T-shirts he’d been issued the first day of Basic, but having to find pants two sizes smaller at the waist. He learned how to communicate with most of the world at the same time that he’d become able to protect himself and defend the nation.

  He took the communications training very seriously. A First Sergeant told him at the very beginning of his training that in a battle or a firefight, the radio is going to be yours and your unit’s most important weapon.

  “You call in what you need—artillery, gunships, fighter-bombers, reinforcements, med-evacs. Without the radio, you may not be killed but you will be fucked.” Jake was ready to be a Marine and not just act like one.

  At Pendleton, he was assigned to the 1/5 (1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division). The day he received his unit patch, a helicopter flying through the Kunar Valley in Helmand Province, ferrying a reduced company of Marines to an outpost near the Kaligal River, was shot down. It was the exact same spot where, twenty years before, Russian helicopters were shot down ferrying Russian tro
ops into that same river basin. It was close to the bridge destroyed 2,300 years earlier by Afghan tribesmen who had trapped half of Alexander the Great’s Army, forcing him to marry the daughter of the local tribal chieftain to get what was left of his troops out of Afghanistan and into India.

  A week into Pendleton, the newly regrouped and outfitted 1/5 went back to Twenty-nine Palms to spend a month at Mojave Viper, an exact replica of an Afghan village set out in the desert. Those marines already in Iraq were being sent to Helmand Province in Afghanistan, along with the new deployments from the States.

  Jake thought the four weeks at the village was useful. It certainly seemed real enough, but there was way too much lecture stuff. You didn’t have to spend a whole afternoon in a classroom doing diversity training to figure out that Muslim villagers still living in pre-biblical times had different views on common courtesy and how women should be treated. You could also be pretty sure that a villager of any age or sex might not like Christian soldiers walking around behind sunglasses, armed to the teeth, looking for all the world like Imperial Storm Troopers out of Star Wars—even if they were handing out candy and offering to build better roads and new schools.

  The 1/5 left for Afghanistan on May 28, 2009. Jake called his parents to say good-by and tell them not to worry. Jake’s father managed to wish him good luck without his voice cracking. His mother didn’t do so well.

  The 5,000 marines of the 1/5 flew into Manas Airbase in Kyrgyzstan and from there to Bagram Airbase near Kabul. They were put into trucks and taken to Camp Leatherneck, the large Marine base in Helmand Province. From there, the 1,300 Marines in Jake’s headquarters supply company moved out to their operational area some eighty miles north of Camp Leatherneck.

  Despite the 110-degree heat, they wore full body armor, their M-4’s locked and loaded as they took off in their armored Humvees, armored personnel carriers, and MRAPs for the Forward Operating Base (FOB) Geronimo in the Grit Valley, a supply route into Helmand Province and eventually the city of Kandahar. They were to protect the supply convoys to and out of Geronimo. No marines had been in the area since the war had shifted to Iraq in 2003.

  The week before Jake’s unit had left for Geronimo, the Taliban in Pakistan had blown up a major bridge leading into Afghanistan. They then systematically destroyed a convoy of some forty stranded tankers that were carrying gasoline and aviation fuel to the military bases in Western Afghanistan, including their FOB in the Grit Valley. They’d be short of fuel for a month once they got to Geronimo.

  Jake looked at the map of Helmand Province at Camp Leatherneck and figured that his company would be covering an area of a couple of hundred square miles—until someone told him that Helmand Province itself was over 78,000 square miles. Looking again at the map, Jake was surprised to find that Afghanistan was literally twice the size of Iraq and apparently had 10 million more people. And as far as he could tell, there weren’t more than three cities in the whole country.

  There was a legend on one of the maps that stated there were more than 45,000 villages scattered across the country and up into the mountains bordering Pakistan. It didn’t take a genius to realize that 13,000 troops, 50,000, or even half a million, could easily get lost here. What Jake didn’t know was that others looking at similar maps through all the centuries had much the same feelings.

  When it became clear to the Russian generals that they were failing in Afghanistan, they recommended that the majority of the Russian Army, some 5 million troops, be sent there. The Soviet Government, realizing the foolishness of that recommendation, simply said no. Three years later the Russians were gone, having left for home. But it wasn’t only the Russians. After the whole British Expeditionary Force of over 20,000 men were killed in Afghanistan in 1842, Kipling wrote these lines: “If you find yourself wounded on the Afghan Plains and the women come out to cut up what remains; then roll to your rifle and blow out your brains and go to your Gawd like a soldier.” It was neither irony nor poetic license. It was the truth.

  If Jake felt alone on those first few supply convoys, he understood that the marines out in the villages in platoon-sized outposts were in a worse situation. If they were attacked, it would be life or death from the first shot. The only way to survive out there would be for the villagers to help, or at least warn the different garrisons about an impending attack. Without warning or constant overhead air surveillance, the Taliban could be on top of you before you knew it.

  At least at Geronimo, they’d had the equipment to bulldoze the dunes around the base into a reasonably effective barrier. All they took as incoming was the occasional mortar round or some poorly directed sniper fire. Jake’s orders took his company, their trucks, his Humvee, his radio command net, and his 50-caliber machine gun out over the most dangerous roads, river basins, and plains in the world.

  It was terribly hot, during the middle of the day upwards of 120 degrees, and dusty, the kind of dust that got into your mouth, your food, all the equipment, wheel hubs, and gear trains. For weeks, no Taliban were seen.

  But in the mountains, it was different.

  The marines up there were always being ambushed. There were almost daily probing movements around the perimeters of their outposts. Some of the mountain areas were almost impassible. It was all straight up and straight down with sixty pounds of gear on your back, and you couldn’t see very far and you couldn’t see very much.

  The Taliban had time to organize a battle plan, stockpile weapons and ammunitions, and attack the bases and outposts where and when they wanted. The mountains also made the use of helicopters and fighter-bombers problematical. The helicopters didn’t work well above nine or ten thousand feet, the air is too thin at those heights for good lift and in the hot weather with the hot air rising, even less so. You couldn’t get med-evacs in, so at times the marines would have to carry the wounded down off the mountains on stretchers. Even with their own medics, they lost a number of wounded by not getting the right care during that golden hour after being hit.

  But it wasn’t only the thin air, the Taliban could easily shoot down gunships in the narrow passes leading to the valleys. Any chopper flying into and out of the valleys would have to come dangerously close to the sheer cliffs of the canyon walls. It was the perfect place to bring down a chopper that could not maneuver and had to take only one path in or out through the mountains.

  The need for re-supply, as well as the widely scattered and difficult-to-defend outposts, left marines everywhere scrambling just to hang on. With the choppers always flying out at the edge of their “specks” and the danger of being shot down in the steep mountains and narrow canyons always a concern, most of the supplies had to come in by road.

  And that was a problem where the roads were easily sabotaged. Supplying 30,000 troops by trucks on roads coming in from Pakistan was already a problem. Jake heard that some of the marines in the mountains had run out of ammunition, while others, who had to keep firing during what were prolonged fire-fights, had burned out one M-4 barrel after another until they’d run out of barrels.

  But in the wide expanses of Helmand Province, it was IEDs. Around Geronimo, the Taliban didn’t have to show and run the risk of being killed by attack helicopters or bombing runs of the fighter planes. They could plant the IEDs without being seen, or pay villagers to do it for them.

  The open plains of Helmand Province, along with the hundreds of miles of deserts and dry riverbeds, gave everyone a wide view of the surroundings. They could plant their IEDs, be able to see where you were from a distance, and set off the explosives at just the right time to do the most damage and kill the most marines.

  As far as Jake could see, for the 1/5 and the convoys they guarded, as well as the marines in the different outposts, winning simply meant surviving. He remembered how back at Camp Leatherneck, some sergeants mumbling that the only way they’d be able to pull this off was to have a lot more troops on the ground.

  The immediate problem the 1/5 faced were the roadside bombs, whi
ch could be buried anywhere. There were no paved roads, so planting an IED meant simply digging a hole and putting in the explosives with a detonator plate, or hooking it up to some detonator cord that you cover with dirt and set off from half a mile away.

  Holes and ruts on the roads were everywhere. It was impossible to tell what was recently dug. Even in the short time that Jake was there, the Taliban had begun using more powerful bombs and were clearly becoming more sophisticated in their use. It didn’t seem to matter to them if it was armored vehicles or foot patrols. They were out to simply kill Americans.

  The book The Good Soldiers describes exactly how it happens and it happened all the time.

  “They drove with headlights off and night-vision goggles on that at 12:35 a.m. flared into blindness. Here came the explosion. It came through the doors … it was perfectly aimed and perfectly timed, and now one of the soldiers was on fire…”

  When they’d first arrived in Helmand Province, the Taliban had set the IEDs to explode when a vehicle passed over the pressure plate. When they started to use rollers out in front of the armored vehicles to set off the explosives, the Taliban reset the plates with a time delay so that the explosive charge would not go off under the rollers, but under the vehicle.

  The explosive charges were themselves becoming more sophisticated and more powerful. Jake had seen 40-ton MRAPs turned over, with everyone inside having either broken bones or head injuries. As for the foot patrols, if the Taliban spaced the charges just right, with a good view of the path the Marines were taking, and judged their distances correctly, they were sure to kill or wound everyone in that squad and most likely cause a concussion in everyone, if it were a platoon.

  A large IED took out one of their armored vehicles during a convoy patrol. Everyone inside except the gunner and the driver were killed. The chopper on the med-evac was shot down coming in to take out the wounded. Jake could swear that he had seen the smoke trail of a rocket coming out of the hills near them a moment before the chopper exploded. It was amazing, but even without the med-evac their medic managed to keep the two alive, having to do a tracheotomy on the gunner right there on the side of the road.