by Bing West
The valley cut a deep V slice out of the ridgeline. At the bottom of the V, jingle trucks were jammed against each other like a massive traffic accident. Three twelve-wheelers were lying on their sides, burning. Four others, banged up, were parked at crazy angles. Mixed among them were four U.S. Army MRAPs—big armored vehicles—and an armored Humvee.
PKMs and AKs were hammering down on this mess, with little return fire. It would be crazy to drive into that tangle of vehicles. Bokis was on the MK19 on our truck. He couldn’t shoot because of the angles of fire.
Richards stayed in the driver’s seat while I advanced on foot by bounds into the wreckage. Our Askars ran forward with us, but their light M16s didn’t impress the Taliban machine-gun crew. I was quickly pinned behind a disabled truck. Looking up, I could see the PKM was shooting from a thick stone house two hundred meters upslope. Excited to have a target so close, I fired about five shells from my grenade launcher before my common sense kicked in.
What am I doing? I thought. I’m outmatched by a machine gun, but there’s an Army Humvee sitting next to me with no one in the .50-cal turret!
I signaled to Capt. Bryant, who had taken shelter behind another jingle truck.
“Why isn’t that truck returning fire?” I yelled.
Bryant shrugged, as baffled as I was. Kerr was hunkered down, radioing for air. He was famous for bombing the shit out of insurgents. Gunny Devine and Sgt. Hall were shooting with little effect at the PKM position. I ran over to the Army truck and banged on the hatch. There were bloody handprints all over the door, where the poor Afghan drivers had been banging and begging to be let in.
“Man your .50-cal!” I yelled.
“We’re logistics,” came the muffled reply. “We don’t fight.”
Some supply guys can’t wait to get into the action, but not this gang. I wasn’t worried, though. Wild Man Kerr would soon have air on station.
Bodies were scattered all over the road, all civilians. Lying facedown next to me alongside the Army truck was a skinny teenager in a T-shirt, bleeding from shrapnel in his chest and left arm. With the American soldiers and Askars putting hundreds of rounds downrange, my M4 wasn’t needed. I slung my rifle, wrapped a tourniquet around the kid’s arm, picked him up, and carried him back to my Humvee. He had a tracheal deviation and a sucking chest wound. I plunged a decompression dart into the pleural cavity below his third rib and foul-smelling air hissed out his lung. As I was doing this, Specialist Charles Tomeo, the medic in Kerr’s platoon, ran up and shoved a plastic tube up the kid’s nose to open the airway.
He was a pathetic sight, sprawled on his back in his filthy brown shorts, an orange-tipped needle protruding from above his heart and a plastic stopper shoved up his left nostril. He didn’t weigh as much as I ate in a day. His hands and feet were uglier than dirt from his efforts to crawl out of the line of fire. He wasn’t old enough to grow a beard, but he had a full shock of black hair. Not a bad-looking kid. Once he was cleaned up at the aid station and had some ice cream, he’d be OK.
I felt good. In fact, I was pumped. I had applied dozens of tourniquets, but this was the first time I had smelled death hiss out. I had saved a human being, a poor, scrawny kid eking out a living by driving a banged-up truck past known ambush sites. Would he eventually join the Taliban and betray an American convoy? I had no idea. Sure, some of the villagers at Ganjigal had been real pricks. But why should I hold that against this kid?
I ran back down the road, hoisted up another wounded truck driver, and carried him back. Then I stopped to check on the skinny kid. I wanted to pat him on the shoulder to make myself feel good for my supposedly wonderful deed. Only he was dead. He had bled to death from the wound to his left arm. The crew in the Army truck had let him bleed out, not five feet away, because he was an Afghan and they were afraid. Damn it!
I went back to the wreckage and carried another truck driver back to our truck, where Tomeo bandaged him up. We placed the two wounded in our two trucks, and I put the kid’s body on the hood.
When I got back to the messed-up trucks, the enemy fire had slackened because Kerr was directing a Kiowa helicopter overhead. The Afghan drivers were huddled together in a ditch by the river. The ambush had been sprung about ninety minutes earlier. By now they had pissed themselves dry and had nowhere to go. I banged my rifle butt on the Army truck, yelling to the soldiers to open up.
“At least give me some water for those poor bastards!” I shouted.
A sheepish medic got out of the truck with several bottles of water and his medpack and ran over to the ditch. I knelt there, looking at the mud bloodstained from the kid, right beside the truck door.
I banged on the steel door again. It opened a crack.
“Fuck you!” I shouted at the captain inside.
I had placed a firecracker up my ass. I figured the shocked captain would light the fuse as soon as we got back to Monti. Don’t ask me why I did it.
By now, Kerr was directing rockets from the Kiowas to provide aiming points for an F-15 and was gleefully bombing the slopes. But we had to unsnarl the traffic mess to get the Army convoy—and my newest buddy, the captain—out of there. Capt. Bryant was yelling at the Afghan drivers to get back in whatever trucks would move. They were looking at him as if he were crazy. Bryant then came up with a brilliant idea.
“Hey, Meyer,” he yelled, “get behind the wheel of that big truck, drive it to the edge of the river, and hop out! When they see that, they’ll move the others.”
I liked Paco Bryant, but there was no way in hell that was happening.
“No, I’m not doing that.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’ll drown.”
“Okay, put a rock on the gas pedal and hop out.”
“No. How about you get in the truck and I’ll watch?”
He thought for a moment.
“You got a point,” he said. “Get one of those drivers to do it.”
I crawled over to a driver and threatened him with my rifle, pointing at the truck. We were still taking some light incoming. He just gestured for me to shoot him, as he preferred that to drowning. I laughed and he smiled back.
So we waited until a big wrecker arrived from Monti that quickly shoved aside the smoking wrecks. That still left a U.S. MRAP stuck in a ditch. Devine and I watched as a soldier hopped down from the wrecker and casually attached chains to the MRAP. We both liked this soldier, a hard worker who grumbled about how roughly grunts treated his beloved trucks.
“Better stay under cover, bro,” Devine said.
Instead, the mechanic, with no armor, stood on the road and slowly lit a cigarette.
“No biggie, Sergeant, I got this.”
Cigarette dangling from his lip, he signaled to the wrecker with both hands. Mr. Cool from a Camel ad. Very smooth, very much in charge—and very exposed.
Crack!
“I’m hit! I’m hit!”
Mr. Cool was down. We rushed him into the ditch and cut open his right trouser. He’d been drilled through the thigh. The bullet had passed through like a sizzling branding iron.
“Son of a bitch!” he screamed. “Son of a bitch!”
Understandable statement. The pain truly burned and Mr. Cool was definitely hurting. The bullet, though, had missed the femoral artery. A quick tourniquet, a fifteen-minute ride, and he’d be tucked inside clean white sheets, soon on his way to Germany and strawberry ice cream.
At the moment, though, he didn’t see the upside. Instead, he was screaming, convinced he was dying. Gunny Devine started to giggle, and I broke out in short snorts. Kerr ran over, took one look at the wound, and hooted.
We weren’t heartless. If he had been dying, we would have promised him he was going to live.
As the traffic jam was sorted out, Col. Yoo and I walked back to our Humvee. The dead kid lay on the hood and rather than ride to base with a corpse between us, we wedged the body in the trunk.
Sometimes you laugh, and sometimes you want to cry.
The captain in charge of the logistics convoy did not press charges, although she may have suggested I was too high-strung. The psychologists were keeping an eye on me, calling me in for chats that went round and round.
The weeks crept by. Every now and then, an enemy sniper climbed a few thousand feet above our camp and fired a few rounds. The odds were way low that anyone would be hit, and the camp commander didn’t want to place sentries on top of the hill, requiring a three-hour hump each way. A few bullets were like a few falling stars you couldn’t do anything about.
Those shots bothered me more than the others. They taunted me. I was sitting in my hooch in October when a high-velocity bullet cracked past the open door. There were shouts in Pashto and the scuffling of running feet. A machine gun in a sentry post fired a short return burst. Then a second bullet snapped by.
I didn’t think consciously about it. I just ran outside and hopped in the turret behind a .50-cal. Bokis got behind the wheel and skidded around a corner to give me a clear line of sight. When the sniper took a third shot, I roughly knew his location—a rocky knob about eight hundred meters away. I returned fire, walking a red arc of tracers up to the knob. The sniper stopped shooting, probably hunkered down.
The whole deal pissed me off, being cooped up behind the wire, playing defense and buying time. For what?
A few days later, a farmer showed up on base to complain that bullets had struck his chicken coop. The date matched when I had fired the .50-cal. The farmer claimed he lost five hens.
The civil affairs officer gave him two hundred dollars—forty dollars for each scrawny chicken. The sniper on the farm tries to kill us, and we pay extortion?
Before dropping a shell down a mortar tube, the gunner levels the bubbles on his sight. If he loses the bubbles, then the tube is pointed at a crazy angle. Forty dollars for a chicken? The figure went around and around in my head. After Ganjigal, I was losing the bubble.
Chapter 16
CHEERLEADERS
Standard procedure after an engagement: investigators gather sworn statements. The defeat at Ganjigal generated a lot of paperwork. I wrote a few paragraphs, as did the others. Sgt. Maj. Jimmy Carabello, the top enlisted man in Battalion 1-32, took a personal interest in the battle and reviewed the statements.
I didn’t care what happened one way or the other, as long as I stayed far out of his way. Carabello reigned supreme on Joyce. Every soldier in the battalion had a Carabello story. He meted out punishments like ordering a soldier to write a two-thousand-word essay on “Why I should not roll my eyes when my sergeant tells me to do something.”
He built a hooch with a veranda where he smoked his cigars in the evening, watching basketball games on the court he’d built a few feet away. He thought the soldiers spent too much time by themselves on their iPods, so he insisted every unit on base field a team.
That wasn’t enough. He wanted his soldiers to see real, beautiful cheerleaders. He contacted the USO agent for the cheerleaders for the New England Patriots, who were on tour in the rear. Somehow he persuaded the agent to book an afternoon tea at Joyce with his soldiers. The event went smoothly until a warning via radio intercept. Carabello and the soldiers waved good-bye to the cheerleaders half an hour before rockets slammed into Joyce.
When the sergeant major put his mind to something, you couldn’t deflect him. Somehow, after reading the investigation statements, he decided to assemble packets recommending Will Swenson and me for the Medal of Honor. My packet was sent up the Marine channel and Swenson’s up the Army channel. I didn’t care and neither did Swenson. We were both getting out of the military and we were both furious about Ganjigal.
I’d heard there had been a hasty investigation about Ganjigal that found some shortcomings and “poor battle management” by a captain in the TOC at Joyce. That was a whitewash by higher headquarters, called Joint Task Force 82. It was like saying Lincoln was assassinated because an usher left a theater door unlocked.
My boss, Maj. Williams, had put out the word not to talk to the press. That made sense. I had assumed headquarters would cover for themselves. And why should there be any medals when my team was dead? The hell with it all.
I was up at Monti, far from anybody or anything. My only thought was how to get three hours’ sleep so I could function the next day. In return for a forty-dollar chicken, I deserved to shoot somebody.
I walked into my hooch one October day to find a journalist chatting with the other advisors. He had just returned from an operation with Lt. Kerr, who had insisted that he talk with me. We had barely shaken hands when the base took some incoming and I left to check things out. Later that day, I bumped into the writer again.
“One question before I leave,” he said. “Any truth to those stories that you were left on your own at Ganjigal?”
“My team would be alive today if we’d gotten artillery,” I said.
“You’d tell that to the high command? You’d say that to a general?”
He was straight up about it. I knew that what I said next would be reported high up the chain of command. Maj. Williams—and probably a lot of others—would be furious that I spoke out as a corporal without informing them first. I understood what I was doing before I replied.
“I’d tell that to any general,” I said. “We were screwed.”
Once I said it, I felt relieved. I had told the truth, the way my dad and the Corps had taught me. Swenson and others had said the identical thing in their statements that were first hidden from public view and later heavily redacted. I knew there would be repercussions for speaking out publicly.
But I didn’t expect a few weeks later to be told the Marine general in charge of Afghanistan was flying in to have lunch with me. He was also scheduled to meet privately with Capt. Swenson. I didn’t need to be a genius to know that Ganjigal would be the subject.
Lt. Gen. Joseph Dunford was easy to talk with. He had a quiet presence and seemed to know everything about infantry tactics. He was interested in what I thought about dealing with the Askars. I told him that I thought that the American advisors should be infantrymen, and I told him that we were let down at Ganjigal. When we call for fire, we deserve to get it. He didn’t ask one word about the investigation and never expressed an opinion, one way or the other. He just listened and left.
I later learned that the Commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. James Conway, was furious about the superficial nature of the JTF-82 investigation. He believed his Marines had been let down, and he let his feelings be known. Joint Task Force 82 was the command above the advisors and Battalion 1-32. JTF-82’s commander, Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Scaparrotti, ordered a second investigation, jointly conducted by a Marine and an Army colonel.
I wasn’t asked to testify. In late November, the two colonels submitted their findings that eventually were published on the Internet with all names blanked out. Gen. Scaparrotti said the lessons learned had been sent to his subordinate commands. Up at Monti, I never heard one lesson.
The fuzziness of the investigations angered me, but I was running on autopilot—training Askars, taking naps, and advising on a few missions outside the wire. My Afghan company—down to fifty-six men—was going through the motions with us advisors. They knew it and we knew it. I got along fine with the Askars, but they were mostly a different bunch. What with Ganjigal and the usual monthly turnover, less than a dozen were left from our high-spirited crew of last summer. It was a different atmosphere with a different group of Afghans. Those who survived Ganjigal were scattered, mostly gone from the army.
We advisors had lost clout because we couldn’t get fire support—that was obvious. After Ganjigal, our Afghan battalion commander insisted on joint patrols, with each Askar close enough to grip the belt buckle of an American soldier. My days of hopping behind a .50-cal and driving into a different village each day had come to an end. Except for an occasional foray, we abandoned Dangam.
I did enough chores to keep me busy during the day. At night, th
e mental barriers of being awake crashed down and the demons crept in. I didn’t want to sleep. The Army psychologist I had bumped into down at Joyce kept visiting Monti. She claimed the visits were routine; I knew better. She was talking to some of my friends about me. She had a quiet way that encouraged men to talk, and some felt I was tightly strung after Ganjigal. I didn’t want to discuss my feelings with her.
She sent me twice to a psychiatrist back in Jalalabad. There was this theory called ego depletion. As explained to me, the brain gets depleted after making too many hard decisions. In extreme cases, the mind shuts down and refuses to make decisions. That’s called shell shock. That wasn’t me. Or the brain takes shortcuts and acts impulsively. That’s called reckless behavior. Maybe that was me, a little.
I didn’t think my behavior was reckless at Ganjigal, just persistent. In the ambush at Dab Khar, I did curse a captain, and that was maybe reckless. As for blasting that hillside to get a sniper, I was pissed off, and what are you supposed to do when someone is shooting at you?
It’s true I didn’t feel connected with others. The Askars were smoking hash, jabbering on their cell phones, and wandering around in flip-flops. The American soldiers were playing video games, stuffing themselves at dinner, and laughing too loudly at nothing.
We weren’t fighting a war; we were holding a few acres of dirt while the war swirled around outside our barbed wire. There were dushmen in every valley. Drink tea with the villagers? Pay forty dollars for a chicken? We were in Kunar to fight. Let’s get it on.
That was my attitude. The psychologist insisted I go back to the States for treatment. No, thanks. As a captain, she had the rank to make her recommendation stick, but she wanted my agreement. So she challenged me: We would play a game of Ping-Pong. If I won, I could stay.
I lost by one point. She was very good, and she really was worried about me and cared about me. I knew that.
It was my turn to go home.
* * *
I flew out from Camp Joyce in December of 2009. Gen. Scaparrotti would tell the press several months later that his command had made progress in eastern Afghanistan, but I didn’t see it. Harassing attacks along the paved routes were more frequent. Dangam, where we had guarded the election, was now Taliban territory. The district chief had been killed and the dushmen were getting bolder, lobbing mortar shells and still sniping at Monti. As I was leaving, Battalion 1-32 made yet another effort to win over Ganjigal. Over one hundred American soldiers, supported by gun trucks and helicopter gunships, marched up the village. Declaring they had come in peace, the Americans handed out Korans and prayer rugs. I hope someone prayed for my team.