Fuck you.
Fuck you.
Get back.
The Afghan soldiers parted. Viper Two’s processional reached the road and turned north, walking in the dark.
* * *
I. On September 17, another infantry platoon, Viper Three, wounded a man in an ambush near a bombed-out house that militants used as a fighting position. The range, about 200 meters, was not short. The man escaped. First Lieutenant John Rodriguez, who kept records of the company’s activities, remained unsure whether he was a Taliban fighter, a spotter, or a civilian.
II. Firebase Restrepo was named for Private First Class “Doc” Juan Sebastián Restrepo, a soldier in the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team who died of gunshot wounds received in the village of Aliabad on July 22, 2007. Firebase Vimoto was named for Private First Class Timothy R. Vimoto, a soldier in the same unit, who died of gunshot wounds received in the valley on June 5, 2007. Combat Outpost Vegas took its name from Las Vegas, part of an earlier American post-naming scheme that borrowed city names from the United States. Although Vegas was formally a combat outpost, the soldiers of Viper Company called it Firebase Vegas, including painting the informal name on the outpost’s sign. (Firebase Vimoto was originally called Firebase Phoenix.)
III. Al Qaeda’s presence in Kunar Province during the busiest period of American involvement there featured large in some contemporaneous news reports but appears to have been small. Of the nearly 2,600 active militants the Afghan intelligence service claimed to have documented in the province, roughly 50, about 2 percent, were in al Qaeda. More than 75 percent, in contrast, were aligned with the Taliban, many of them in the valleys of the Pech River system. The Qaeda fighters were concentrated in and near the Watapur Valley, not far from the Korengal. The numbers above are taken from “Anti-Coalition Militia Order of Battle, Konar Province, Afghanistan,” prepared by the U.S. military, with information from the Afghan Directorate of National Security, in 2009. The document provided a roster of the militants’ leadership down to squad-sized fighting groups.
IV. “Many Men (Wish Death)” by 50 Cent.
V. In mid-August, First Lieutenant John Rodriguez, who led Third Platoon until becoming Viper Company’s executive officer, examined the trends for Taliban action in the valley. The reports showed that from November 2007 to July 2008, one of the previous company’s platoons had been in thirty-eight fights, roughly four a month. In the few weeks since Viper Company arrived, the pace had increased manifold. “We have had 29 since we’ve been here,” he wrote in his journal. It worked out to several gunfights each week, and some days more than one, for a single Viper platoon.
VI. Sergeant Penich was awarded the Silver Star for his actions that day. The medal was awarded posthumously; by the time it was approved, Penich had been killed by American mortar fire in a mishap on October 16.
VII. The Department of Defense deployed euphemism to describe the downing, announcing that Dawson died after an aircraft “made a hard landing under combat conditions.”
VIII. Different soldiers recall hearing “Delta rasha” and “Delta lashka.” One plausible explanation is that a surviving gunman was trying to round up other survivors, using the Pashto phrase dalta raasha, which means “come here.”
IX. Among the Taliban weapons and equipment later turned over to Viper Company’s intelligence section were thirty box magazines for Kalashnikov rifles. Of these, seventeen contained ammunition identical to that purchased by the United States for issue to Afghan security forces. This was a bitter revelation and pointed to more problems. Ammunition supplied to Afghan allies was leaking to the Taliban. American logisticians were indirectly supplying America’s foes. Much more of the ammunition may also have been purchased by the United States, but was of types that were more common in Afghanistan and could not be conclusively linked to Pentagon procurement. (Personal survey of the ammunition by the author.)
American troop numbers in Afghanistan in 2010 were rising toward 100,000, giving commanders more ground units to clear some of the most dangerous areas of the country—places where previously overstretched forces had rarely gone. Troops called the push into Taliban badlands another surge, this one for Afghanistan. In Iraq, the American military withdrawal was accelerating. Units were packing up. The last combat brigade was to depart the country during 2010. The remaining troops were primarily for training and advising roles, and force numbers were to be reduced below 50,000 by the end of the year. The switch was clear in the casualty numbers. In 2009, the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan exceeded the number killed in Iraq for the first time since the war began in Iraq.
TEN
* * *
* * *
THE PUSH
Lieutenant Jarrod Neff and a Battle to Turn the Tide of the War
“No lieutenant has ever had to learn faster.”
FEBRUARY 14, 2010
Marja, Afghanistan
First Lieutenant Jarrod Neff woke in the blackness before dawn, switched on a headlamp, and looked around the cold room where he had slept. It had been dark when he unrolled the sleeping bag a few hours before, and he had been so tired that he noticed little more than that he was in the company of Marines. Now he discovered that he had passed the night face-to-face with the skinned head of a goat. It stared up from a bowl beside him, guarded by mewling cats. Its cold eyes glittered in the flashlight beam, welcoming Neff to Valentine’s Day.
The Afghan home where he had passed the night, listed on his map as Building 187, was a mud-walled compound in a field near a dirt road. It was one of two temporary outposts held by the infantry unit Neff commanded, First Platoon of Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines. The Marines knew little of the place beyond that they had chosen it for its location. A day before, helicopters had brought Kilo Company to the poppy fields of northern Marja, an irrigated area of Afghanistan’s southwestern steppe, and much of Neff’s platoon had rushed into Building 187. Before the aircraft touched down, a study of satellite imagery told them that from inside they would be able to watch over a bridge and a cluster of shacks to the north. The shacks served as a bazaar, a small retail market for families on the farmland. The shacks and bridge were Kilo Company’s conventional military objectives, the terrain it had been ordered to seize as part of the start of Operation Moshtarak, the most ambitious operation to date in the Marine Corps’ Afghan campaign.
In a time of confusing counterinsurgency doctrine, in which American military actions typically were carried out on a small scale and with an ostensibly light touch, Operation Moshtarak was old-school stuff. It sprang from the conventional playbooks of an earlier generation: a helicopter insertion and an overland assault into a Taliban sanctuary to demonstrate that no place lay beyond American reach. Its ambitions were total: a riflemen’s sweep of enemy-held ground to kill those who dared resist, the introduction of national police forces and a new governing order, the beginning of the end of the area’s entrenched opium poppy trade. Among senior Marines, Moshtarak was spoken of with a sense of purpose resembling reverence and fate, a case of the Corps leading NATO to a new and higher crest in President Obama’s Afghan surge.
Kilo’s opening piece was simple. The bridge and bazaar near Building 187 were controlled by the Taliban. Kilo’s Marines were to take them away. Such thinking matched an infantry unit’s mentality and skills. Sergeants could circle the objectives on a map, go there, fight, and run up a new flag. To this straightforward action the military in Kabul had added a twist that blended public relations with a doctrinal shift. The ultimate purpose of the attack, it said, was to protect the Afghan population—whether the population wanted the protection or not.
Neff and his Marines were assigned a central role in January when they were told they would participate in the largest Marine helicopter assault since Vietnam. Their destination had an imposing aura. Marja, the briefings said, was an impregnable no-go zone, one of the most defiant Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan, and a challenge to the idea that the Cor
ps could fully exert influence over Helmand Province. Its fall would augur a turning point in the war and fill new chapters in Marine Corps lore, signaling to the world that Afghanistan could be lifted from decades of conflict with the smart application of Western force.
The operation’s opening day had been less violent than expected, and provided Neff with his first views of Afghanistan outside of bases and training ranges. Building 187 offered a picture of Afghan rural agrarian life, a meager assortment of dented pots, threadbare rugs, chests of brightly colored clothing, and a few pieces of furniture shared by a multigenerational family. There was no electricity. Outside, where a few goats and chickens ignored the Americans who had crowded in, the air was dry and bitingly cold. The platoon had converted the home to military use, superimposing over it the feel of a patrol base. Dim light rose from flashlights and plastic chemical light sticks as Marines engaged in the ordinary activities of troops in the field. Some snored as they slumbered on the dirt floor, getting two or three hours of sleep. Others were on watch at portable radios. Marines stood outdoors on post, weapons ready, facing out. A few hacked and coughed. For more than a week, a barracks infection had gripped the ranks.
Neff slipped into his equipment: flak vest with bulletproof plates, harness laden with a first-aid kit, ammunition and grenades, topographic map, and black-and-white satellite photographs of the roads and buildings outside. He looked at the goat head and guessed it had been left behind by the Afghan family that First Platoon had displaced the day before. The family must have killed it shortly before the Marines arrived.
The family had no way of knowing the home had been designated a Kilo Company objective at Camp Leatherneck, the big Marine Corps base. They did not know that the bazaar would be within range of the M240 machine guns, making their home a “support-by-fire” position, from where one set of grunts could watch over the bazaar while others advanced across open ground. But to the Marines this was Tactics 101, and so early the previous morning a group of Neff’s Marines and several Afghan soldiers had hustled from the helicopters to the compound’s door. The family spanned three generations: an elderly man, an adult son, and their wives and young children. They gazed at the Americans.
Neff had a platoon to run. He was supposed to be sweeping the ground between the other platoons and the bridge. Kilo Company’s executive officer, First Lieutenant Cory Colistra, met with the family’s elder, Haji Mohammad Karim, to explain what was happening, and why a foreign military force had just commandeered a private home. Via an Afghan interpreter, Colistra said the Marines planned to stay briefly and would leave once the bazaar was secure. He offered the family sole use of a few of the house’s rooms, and promised they would be undisturbed.
“You’re safe here,” he said. “We will be here. We will not look at or talk to your wives, and we will respect you.”
The Afghan men listened. Colistra waited as they conferred.
Marines had searched the home and not found any weapons.
They’re farmers, Colistra thought.
These men might work with the Taliban or local drug bosses, but there was no outward sign of them being combatants. They were the people Operation Moshtarak was supposed to help.
Colistra hoped they would accept his offer. Kilo Company had fanned out from multiple landing zones, and Colistra knew the plan. Most of them would converge around these fields soon. Fighting was inevitable, but no Taliban force was going to overwhelm the Americans in strongpoints like the one Neff’s platoon had made in Building 187. If the family left, they would be at greater risk outside. Colistra told the elder that the Marines meant him no harm.
“We are here not to hurt you but to help you, to protect you from the Taliban,” he said. “We need to find the Taliban and neutralize them.”
Mohammad Karim was composed. His demeanor betrayed neither fear nor outrage. The interpreter provided Colistra his reply.
“We are farmers and we don’t know any Taliban, and we need to get the women and children out of here,” he said.
Colistra said he could not allow the younger man to leave, and if the women and children departed, they would be on their own. He asked them to reconsider.
Mohammad Karim was firm. The women and children would move, he said, until the Americans left.
After the sun rose, the women gathered the children and hurried out the gate. They were about ten people. Some of the children were small—toddler-sized or just older. They proceeded across the fields to the next building, Building 284 on the Marines’ map. It was perhaps four hundred yards away. The road and trails outside were empty, devoid of human life. The population was hiding. Brushed by wind, the landscape seemed ghostly.
Officially, the Marines called Marja a town, sometimes even a city. It resembled neither. It was an expanse of lone compounds and small hamlets surrounded by flat steppe that had been made arable by irrigation canals built with American Cold War funds decades before. The canals carried water from the Helmand River, which ran a serpentine course through the province. As part of the project, Pashtun families had been given land grants in the newly tillable fields. Generations later their descendants remained, and the project had taken an unforeseen shape, enabling crime at an international scale. Marja was an opium poppy belt. The latest generation of American officials, the inheritors of a problem a previous generation of American officials had made, said the opium trade served as an economic engine for the Taliban, and was guarded and ruled by fighters. Colistra called it a hornet’s nest, necessitating a large Marine attack for the Afghan government to move in.
After the women and their children left, Neff moved with First Squad, led by Sergeant Wesley Laney, through clusters of crude buildings surrounded by fields. Many fields were bare. Others were covered with the ankle-high leaves of recently sprouted poppy plants. Neff and his squad walked briskly. They were scouring for the Taliban, waiting for the rest of Kilo Company to appear.
* * *
By the ordinary means that the Marine Corps manages its officers, Neff was not supposed to be there. He was an intelligence officer by profession, not an infantry officer, and had not been placed in charge of a platoon when he joined Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, in late 2008. The battalion had recently returned from Iraq. Neff took up duties as a staff officer working in its intelligence shop and had no thought of commanding a rifle platoon. Even an Afghan tour was not ensured. Throughout 2009, rumors circulated that the battalion might be sent on a six-month rotation in Okinawa and miss the Afghan war outright.
Even wars managed by bureaucracies are prone to surprises. Late in 2009, as the battalion was in its final pre-deployment preparations, the infantry lieutenant leading Kilo Company’s First Platoon was stopped by the police in North Carolina and charged with driving while intoxicated. Neff was passing a night as the duty officer at the headquarters when the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Brian Christmas, showed up at his door.
Christmas was an energetic man with a strong Marine bloodline. His father had commanded a rifle company during the Battle of Hue City in Vietnam, was gravely wounded, and was awarded the Navy Cross for heroism. He rose to the general ranks. Both Brian and his brother James had become Marine infantry officers, too. Brian had an offer for Neff.
“We have a platoon commander position opening up,” he said. “Do you want it?”
Neff knew which platoon was available, and why. He also knew that the colonel’s offer was a vote of confidence. The Marine Corps infantry worked like a club; not just anyone was allowed in. He did not let emotion run ahead of him.
“It depends, sir,” he said. “It depends on what we’re doing.”
Neff asked if the battalion was going to Afghanistan. If it was, he said, he was interested. If it was headed to Okinawa, he was not.
Christmas looked displeased. He told Neff that he did not know where the battalion would deploy, but either way the platoon needed to be led. He gave Neff until the end of the day to decide.
* *
*
Neff was different from many Marine officers. He had signed up in search of something beyond the Corps, and had no plans for a military career. A native of Everett, Massachusetts, he played four years as a linebacker and tight end on his high school football team, and thought often of joining the military. His father had served two tours in the Army Air Cavalry in Vietnam, including one as a door gunner. Neff was raised watching war movies, intrigued and excited about enlisting, too. He and a friend had discussed joining the Corps after graduation in 1998. His friend signed up. Neff opted out. He had been recruited to play football at Stonehill College in Easton, Massachusetts, and enrolled in the criminal-justice degree program there. He was six feet two inches and 200 pounds, and planned to pursue a law-enforcement career.
He graduated to a tight job market and a country fighting two wars. Neff submitted applications to local police departments but came nowhere near getting hired. Two uncles and two cousins had jobs as police officers or firefighters in Massachusetts. Insider connections did not help. He took a position as a security guard, hoping it would gain him the experience needed for a police job. He worked for two years as an unarmed guard at the Prudential Center, then started as an armed guard at the John F. Kennedy Federal Building in downtown Boston. But as the years passed, his prospects grew worse. The departments to which he was applying gave preferential points to military veterans, and by 2005, when Neff had two years of security-industry experience, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were churning out war veterans. Neff could not compete. He was passed over repeatedly.
In late 2006, Neff was at work with two former Marines who were in line ahead of him for Massachusetts police jobs. One of them suggested that if he really wanted to be hired then he should do a military tour, too. Neff accepted the advice and opted for the hardest route he knew: joining the Marines. If he were to do this, he would do it full bore. In early 2007 he met with a Marine captain who ran the Corps’ officer recruiting in Boston. The captain had him step on a scale and told him he would have to lose ten pounds to meet weight standards. Neff put himself through preseason football routines and in March showed up to his physical at 230 pounds, within the weight standard allowed for his big frame. He was offered a slot at officer candidate school in June.
The Fighters Page 27