Viper waited for a reply. At last a letter came back, saying perhaps the Taliban and the Americans could work out a deal, but only if the Americans would convert to Islam. Until that time, Nasrullah said, New York and London would have to burn.
Rodriguez did not think this was necessarily a bad start. At least Nasrullah had replied.
Soto knew nothing of this. He was busy with the patrols and his duties as the platoon radio operator. He noticed the difference in Viper’s tactical posture. His platoon moved more by darkness and less by light, and no matter the prohibitions from Kabul about entering Afghan homes, its soldiers sometimes searched homes in the deep of night, trying to capture the able-bodied men who formed the bulk of the local insurgency.
These missions reaped few results. The houses almost always held only women, children, and elderly men. But many soldiers appreciated doing them. Night raids made them feel like they were fighting rather than role-playing a failed doctrine. They beat walking on presence patrols by daylight to talk with elders who gave scripted responses.
In the spring a new crop of soldiers showed up at the outpost. They were from the Fourth Infantry Division, assigned to replace Viper Company. Soto watched their numbers grow. They were neatly shaved and noticeably fit, wore clean uniforms, and carried new rucksacks and CamelBak water bladders. They looked fresh, charged with an energy Viper Company faintly remembered about itself. Soto felt a mix of sadness and goodwill. I want them to succeed, he thought. We all want them to succeed. But there was so much to tell them and not enough time, and some of them, self-conscious about filling in behind a seasoned unit, bristled at instruction. Viper took them on patrols, and in June the two groups pored over inventory sheets together and Viper handed over much of its equipment. These are your radios now, Soto thought. These are your vehicles.
He felt especially keyed up in the last weeks. A photograph of him running out of the kill zone seconds after Dewater had been killed had appeared on the front page of the New York Times. Word of his combat service rushed through his circles in the city. Friends wrote him on Facebook and email. For almost a year Soto had shrunk his world to a grunt’s regimen. Sometimes he assumed a fatalistic view and was all but certain he was going to be killed in the valley. This made his job easier. He had accepted that he would not be going home. Now he felt pressure not to die. He passed the last days with a heavy understanding: The new unit was not going to win over the locals, much less quell their resistance. Some missions, including one when the platoon was instructed to search for bombs along the road, still seemed like a suicide lottery.
In mid-June, Soto walked his final Afghan patrol beside his replacement, giving advice. He was packed. All that was left was a helicopter ride to Bagram. It would be by darkness, to reduce the chance of having another aircraft shot down. That night he and a small group of Viper troops sat on the dirt of the landing zone, under a bright moon, the seats of their pants on gravel and dust, their backs pressed against stuffed rucksacks. They were near the mechanics bay, where the remains of their peers who had been killed had waited in body bags for their own flights home. Soto was outwardly still. His mind churned. The very nature of his existence, the routine by which he stayed alive, was changing. It was minutes from being over. My life is not going to be the same, when everything is calm and I am supposed to act normal, whatever that means, he thought. Something did not feel right. He was jolted when he realized what it was. I know I am going to miss this place, for some fucking crazy reason.
A soldier gave them a heads-up that the aircraft was inbound. Soto heard the low thud growing to an engine noise, which became louder and was joined by the aircraft’s high-pitched whine. Just before it landed, the company first sergeant appeared. He was handing out unit coins. It was dark. Dust swirled as the aircraft descended, and no one could see anyone else’s face.
The first sergeant grabbed Soto and shouted at his helmet.
“Who’s this?”
“Soto!” he shouted back.
“Soto?”
The first sergeant pressed the coin into his hand. “Man, you really deserve this.”
Soto cherished the words. He had been respected. This was worth more than any medal. It was authentic, unlike so many medals he had seen.
He belted himself into his seat in the aircraft and switched on his iPod. The bird lifted away. It banked and accelerated down the valley.
Soto felt momentarily jittery—This is where they shoot—but the helicopter cleared the danger area quickly and settled into a fast, even flight.
Back at Fort Hood, he adjusted poorly to garrison routines. The base seemed a hot and dusty wasteland. His peers gradually departed, either leaving the Army or heading off with new orders. He asked for an assignment to jump school and a transfer to the 82nd Airborne Division, so he could get back into the action. The Army granted his requests and in early 2010 he checked into his new unit at Fort Bragg. Soon after arriving, he overheard that one of its brigades had been assigned to earthquake relief duty in Haiti. He volunteered the same day and was sent to Port au Prince.
Soto was in Haiti when the Army announced that it was closing the Korengal Outpost and withdrawing from the valley. On one level, he understood. American plans for the Korengal had failed and American lives were being lost in a pointless stalemate. But he was crushed. Multiple units had passed through the valley, losing lives. And now the Army had decided, Never mind? Why had it taken years to acknowledge mistakes?
When he returned to Fort Bragg in the summer, Soto did not fit in. The 82nd could seem like a ceremonial unit on post, invested in toy soldiering. In 2011 his unit was sent to Iraq for Operation New Dawn, to help with the withdrawal of American equipment and combat forces. He was a sergeant now and leading a fire team. His Iraq was nothing like his Afghanistan. His team was part of a base security force with a narrow mandate, and spent much of the time guarding the perimeters of airfields as planes carried away troops and whatever else the Pentagon wanted to keep. He never patrolled in nearby villages and had almost no exposure to Iraqis. The country had entered a period of relative calm. The insurgents appeared to have decided to let the Americans go. Soto saw no direct action but had learned to doubt official military narratives. When he flew to Kuwait in late 2011, among the last of the American soldiers to leave Iraq, he did not feel as if peace had been assured.
Soto separated from the Army with an honorable discharge in 2012. In 2013 he moved in with his grandmother in the Bronx and enrolled at Monroe College. In 2014 he transferred to Columbia University and graduated in 2017 with a degree in Political Science underwritten by the GI Bill. He was back to chasing the dream he had held before enlisting: a career as a performer. He was twenty-seven years old, gaining distance from the war and traction in his life. War had come to his city when he was a child. Now he was a soldier returned home. He was ready to try peace.
* * *
After Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, pushed south and avenged the killing of Private First Class Currier, most of its Marines returned to the village where Captain Biggers had made his command post. Their stay lasted only days.
Lieutenant Neff was given a few last missions near the landing zones and bridge. His platoon cleared a hilltop with a radio tower, unwittingly crossing through a belt of IEDs that had been badly made and failed to explode. The hilltop was a former Russian military position where a cracked and empty inground swimming pool was ringed by trenches. Another Marine, Matthias Hanson, from Second Platoon, was killed in a gunfight the same day. More Marines were pouring into Marja overland, including combat engineers with heavy earthmoving equipment and lumber, who began constructing crude outposts. The first position, Forward Operating Base Hanson, was made just below the hill and radio tower, near the intersection and bridge that Kilo Company had been ordered to clear. It looked directly upon Haji Mohammad Karim’s home, where the HIMARS rockets had struck.
The company was ordered east, along the road that connected Marja to
Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, to another newly constructed outpost at Five Points, a road intersection in open farmland. The Marines spread out, with platoons on each side of the dirt track and a convoy of trucks proceeding down the center, but they were delayed when a vehicle broke down and by the slow process of clearing the road of hidden bombs. It was two days before they filed into the outpost. Another Marine company was there and had the place under guard. For the first time since being helicoptered into the landing zone almost ten days before, Kilo could relax. Its Marines fell asleep on bare ground.
Five Points, and a string of small observation posts along the road between it and Forward Operating Base Hanson, became Neff and his Marines’ world for much of 2010. Spring came. Temperatures climbed, then became stifling. The poppy crops rose around them, and bloomed in fields of red flowers. Neff and his platoon rotated through duty in the observation posts and walking small patrols. Often they were drawn into quick gunfights. There was a lull in May, when Afghans harvested poppy for the opium trade, but by late that month the violence resumed.
Kilo Company’s presence kept the road open and its frequent patrols created a reasonably safe corridor in a stripe of farmland on either side. Outside this belt and similar areas around other Marine outposts, the countryside remained thick with Taliban fighters. The road to Lashkar Gah, Neff thought, was “the Wild West.” A British and Afghan army outpost out that way had limited influence, and felt isolated, too. To the south, the other Marine battalion was engaged in regular fighting also. Marja had not been quieted. It was a perilous combat zone, not a liberated community grateful for a foreign military presence.
The American government chose not to interfere with the poppy harvest; senior Marine officers said they would nudge local farmers into growing alternative crops the following year. Their decision was a concession. If the Americans took on the poppy farmers, they’d face open warfare from the people the generals said they had come to Helmand to protect. Neff let others worry about plans. He and his Marines focused on patrols. He was suffering from large painful cysts, including one on his tailbone that could make it hard to walk. He refused to take time for treatment. He would not miss a day while his Marines were outside the wire. In July an Afghan soldier at the British outpost attacked the British command post, killing three members of the Royal Gurkha Rifles. The attack sent a chill through Kilo Company, which suffered strained relations with the Afghans living at Five Points. This was the real Marja. By the time First Platoon’s tour was over, the conditions the Corps had said it would create—a Taliban on the run, an economy uncoupled from the drug trade, Afghan security forces capable of independent operations—sounded in retrospect as naïve or dishonest as the propaganda of Soviet Union’s Afghan try.
Not long after Kilo rotated home, Neff turned over his platoon to a new lieutenant, checked into a hospital, and had the cysts removed. He was on medical leave until November, when his time in the Corps was almost over. He hung around Kilo Company’s office for a few weeks, a lieutenant without a job. No one knew what to do with him, but among many of the Marines who had fought in Marja he was accepted—the officer without officer ambitions, who sought no perks, trusted enlisted Marines, and shared every risk. He kept to his original plan: to go home and pick up his life where he’d left it, and to become a cop.
Neff checked out of the Corps in early 2011 and spent much of the year in the gym and on the beach in North Carolina, living on his savings while pursuing police jobs in Massachusetts and growing closer to his girlfriend, Brittany Everett, whose family lived outside the base gate in Sneads Ferry, where they had worked for generations in commercial fishing. Neff filled out applications, took tests, and underwent background checks for police jobs near Boston. This time, with his veteran’s status, his application was viewed differently. He was hired by the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority before the end of the year and started the police academy in 2013. He graduated on a Friday in July, proposed to Brittany at a Red Sox–Yankees game in Fenway Park that Sunday, and started on the police force the next day. (The Red Sox won, in extra innings.)
In 2017, Neff and Brittany moved back to North Carolina, and he began a job as a civilian police officer on Camp Lejeune, where he remained in the Marine Corps reserves.
By then Marja had flipped to Taliban control. The place was as dangerous as it had ever been, and maybe more so.I The American government was again debating what to do about Afghanistan. Many of the Marines from Kilo Company were civilians. Some wondered why they had been asked to do what they had done. Questions lingered, too, including about the HIMARS strike on Valentine’s Day, which the Corps never bothered to explain to the young men left to clean up. Niall Swider, who was shot in the first days of the fighting, remembered the pre-assault pep talks from the generals, the sell. It was as if the brass had decided before the operation that Marja was to take its place beside Tarawa, the Chosin Reservoir, and Hue—a battle to be recorded as institutional legend. Forever you will be known as Marja Marines, they had said. Many units passed through the same fields. The Taliban outlasted them all and reasserted its primacy when the Corps drew down. Except for abandoned outposts that stood over the fields where Marines like Currier and Hanson had died, and for the loss of Afghan civilians killed by errant fire, the place was little changed. What changed was the Marine Corps’ enthusiasm for the place. Swider said that when so-called Marja Marines mentioned their campaign, senior Marines “told you to shut the fuck up.”
Neff took an accommodating view. He accepted that the Marja push had not been a strategic success. He kept his thoughts on his platoon, a group of tough grunts he had come to know only because another officer was arrested for driving drunk. They fought hard and looked out for one another. As he saw it, that was all a grunt could do. Higher-ups had failed. They had not. He was proud.
* * *
Layne McDowell’s break from the Afghan war did not last long. The USS John C. Stennis and the aviation squadrons aboard returned to the United States in early 2012, and McDowell became the commanding officer of VFA-41 soon after. By summer the Navy notified its units that the Stennis strike group would sail back to the Middle East ahead of schedule. McDowell and VFA-41 turned around fast and were back on another deployment late that August, this time for eight months.
Soon he was above Afghanistan again, flying his third tour over the country. The American war effort had crested. A troop drawdown was at hand. The Taliban had not been defeated. It remained part of the Afghan social, political, and military fabric. Aircraft could punish its forces when they dared mass, and the aircraft’s presence also helped prevent remote outposts from being overrun. But these were supporting roles. The war had hardened into patterns that F/A-18s could not break. Sophisticated targeting sensors, guided munitions, and tactics refined through a dozen years of air-to-ground war could not change facts on the ground. There was no clear end to any of it, and few people had expectations otherwise.
On one flight north of Kandahar, McDowell and the other aircrew accompanying him were not assigned to a ground unit. He was flying in his kill box, scanning the ground through his FLIR, when he saw an American convoy making its way down a road. One of the vehicles was hit by an IED. McDowell saw the flash.
The vehicle stopped.
Troops rushed out.
High above them, McDowell wanted to help. But they were not part of his mission and he did not know their call sign or the radio frequency they were communicating on.
There was a building near where the troops scrambled. McDowell suspected someone inside had detonated the bomb.
He wondered if the Americans were wounded.
For a half hour he tried calling nearby ground controllers and the air traffic authorities, to volunteer his services. He never managed to make contact with the soldiers on the ground. He was not even sure the troops realized he was watching. They were looking at the same things at the same time, but apart. He ran low on fuel and left them to fight thei
r own war.
It was the closest he came to dropping ordnance on that tour. Some of the younger F/A-18 pilots in the squadron had not released a single missile or bomb in combat during two deployments overseas.
McDowell never dropped a bomb again. The Stennis returned to the States in mid-2013 and the aviators departed once more for their airfields. McDowell led his squadron home in a thirteen-aircraft flyover formation in the shape of a spade. That summer he turned over command of VFA-41 in a two-plane flyby that marked his last flight as a strike fighter pilot.
The rules that codified restraint were malleable, and did not last. As McDowell finished his career in the cockpit, the Islamic State was rising in Syria and Iraq, asserting its presence and gathering strength. Upon its breakout in mid-2014, when it drove American-trained Iraqi forces from much of the Sunni territory in Iraq and seized the city of Mosul, the group occupied a large swath of territory in two countries. From this self-declared caliphate, it held American and European hostages, produced snuff films and other extreme forms of online propaganda, and trained jihadists for international terrorism and war—all while fighting a ground war on multiple fronts. Soon it was claiming responsibility for terror attacks across the world, including in the United States. The group, forged in Sunni insurgency during the American occupation, had not existed before the United States invaded Iraq in 2003. Eleven years later, and roughly three years after McDowell and his fellow pilots had been told they had closed the door on the Iraq war, it drew the United States back into Iraq amid a broader conflict in the Middle East. The new campaign was pursued with less restrictive rules. Calls for warheads-on-foreheads were back.
The Fighters Page 38