All the Ways We Kill and Die

by Brian Castner

  The total number of IEDs in Afghanistan doubled between April 2006 and April 2007. Then doubled again by April 2008, then again by the following spring, an 800 percent increase in three years. The president added more forces, to push to new territories previously unpatrolled, and the number of IEDs increased yet further.

  The more rocky trails the soldiers walked, the more qalats they searched, the more IEDs grew like some hidden fungus spreading underground. That’s where the devices were now, buried in the dirt and mud. Every footfall became suspect.

  IEDs had devolved back to the simple, perfectly suited for the terrain and target. It was an ecosystem dominated by a single life form, but a species that existed in an infinite variety of permutations, adapted for the geology, soil type, available hardware, weather, time of year, and latest poppy crop. In the rainy season, soldiers saw different models of pressure plates than during the dry. In rocky soil versus dirt. In the desert versus muddy roads. Where wood was plentiful, planks formed the support pieces for the opposing contacts. When landmines were available, they were used as the trigger for an even larger main charge. And just as the jammer drove IED evolution in Iraq, the soldier’s handheld metal detector inspired new pressure plate designs. When American basic landmine sweepers discovered hidden steel ordnance, the mujahideen switched to homemade explosives and put it in plastic jugs. When those metal detectors were tuned so they could still find the wires of the pressure plate, the Engineer developed devices that used carbon rods invisible to American scanners.

  During those times of peak IED growth—in Iraq from 2003 to 2007, in Afghanistan from 2007 to 2010—the trend lines in both theaters were clear. Seventy-five percent of all fatalities and injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan were due to explosions. Every day the war got a little deadlier. The rate of casualties on both sides rose. The number of IEDs rose. The number of patrols and Predator sorties and air strikes and named operations and suicide attacks rose. Like adjusting the brightness and contrast on your television, the picture stayed the same, but every day the colors deepened and became more pronounced. Far back in October of 2003, the US Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, asked if we were making more enemies every day than we killed. For years, in both theaters, the answer was yes.

  We needed to do something different. And so in Iraq in early 2007, and in Afghanistan in late 2009, we implemented a new strategy. We decided to focus on people, protecting the population and hunting men like the Engineer, and we called this the Surge.

  ON AUGUST 6, 1896, the parliament in Paris declared Madagascar a French colony and immediately dispatched forty-seven-year-old colonial counterinsurgency veteran Général de Division Joseph-Simon Gallieni to the island to put down the insurrection that was sure to follow. Gallieni had experience fighting the native people of lands known today as Mali and Vietnam and was well-armed with a tested theory of how to beat back such uprisings. He set up a central administration with a Malagasy face that determined national policy and then broke the island into seven cercles (circles), further divided into secteurs (sectors) and sous-secteurs (subsectors). French officers were given great autonomy to conduct operations in each sous-secteur, commanding both French and indigenous forces, as long as none of their policies contradicted the will of the titular central administration.

  Gallieni’s network prevailed, thanks to the initiative of his commanders and the co-opting of local tribal chieftains, and the monarchist rebels were pushed to the margins. The territory’s pacification advanced “slowly from the center to the periphery, according to the method of the oil slick,” wrote Gallieni in 1908. By then, one of Gallieni’s lieutenants, Hubert Lyautey, had taken the tache d’huile, the oil slick, to Morocco to quash further colonial rebellion. The French toted it to Algeria and Indochina in the 1950s, the British used oil spots in Malay the same decade, and American Marine Lieutenant General Victor Krulak called for ink blots in Vietnam in 1964.

  Appropriately enough, they would be called oil spots again when other American generals were “clearing” and “holding” towns and villages in Iraq and Afghanistan during each war’s respective Surges in the late 2000s. Announce the intention to reclaim Fallujah or Marjah or Sadr City, allow the civilian populace to flee, kill every insurgent left inside the town, bring back the population, and the newly free town will ooze stability and commerce radially. Create enough oil spots, and their edges start to merge, the surface tension breaking as one success blends with another, and eventually Iraq and Afghanistan are left with a pleasing oily sheen.

  But this was only half of the Surge strategy. Upon reflection, American generals and think-tankers realized that this model could be applied in two different ways. The oil spots they were seeking to establish were the mirror image of the insurgent networks they were trying to crush. Terrorist cells could be described as oil spots as well, and this insight provided a theoretical framework on which to hang new ideas about how to fight insurrections that, after half a dozen years of war, were still resolutely refusing to die, or, in some cases, still growing.

  In numerical fact, five or ten million military-age males lived in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in practical terms, each contained an infinite number of potential trigger pullers. The democratically elected United States government, exercising the will of the American people, could not fight a war of attrition that condoned the elimination of two generations of boys and men. Killing the average insurgent eventually became counterproductive; one man inclined to help the militias became eight, as his previously unaffiliated brothers, cousins, and sons took up arms. Would you kill those eight? The sixty-four that followed? The village? The valley? The clan? The United States could not kill its way out of either country.

  Enter a new oil spot method, where Gallieni is turned inside out, and every terrorist network is modeled as an oil spill three rings deep. With the photo negative flipped, now insurgent influence is to be curbed, rather than stability spread. The central daub of petroleum, Gallieni’s administration, the impetus for expansion, is the core of ideological zealots and financiers. The next, intermediate level would be the fixers and cell leaders, the weapons stockpilers and smuggler kingpins, the enablers who were sometimes family members of the innermost core. The outer ring was the general population of either country, the poor farmer who fell easy prey to the lure of ten dollars to tote a gun or place a bomb, an unemployed (and unemployable) youth who was nine years old when the towers fell and had lost half of his cousins to a childhood of gunfights. Both sets of oil spots—insurgents and stability—need this outer ring to grow, which is why any public policy debate about the relative efficacy of the protection of local populations versus the hunting of terrorists—counterinsurgency versus counterterrorism, or COIN vs CT, in the military’s jargon—missed the point. Not only would we do both in the Surge, spread our own oil spots while undermining the opposition’s, but each effort was the yin to the other’s yang.

  The first ring provided the money and policy. The second ring organized and taught and equipped. The third did the dirty work. There would always be more dirty work, and so killing the doers of it did little to stop the spread of the stain. Ask any American soldier to describe their country’s new Surge strategy in one sentence, and he or she would have responded with this catchphrase: “The people are the prize.” Killing the poor and desperate alone ends no modern war.

  The central core of the insurgency was in hiding, hard to find, and so needed to be lured into the open to be caught. Thus it was in the identifying and killing of the second level where success lay. Relatively few know how to design a bomb, few know the right proportions with which to mix homemade explosives, are trusted to buy the guns for the smugglers, to acquire mortar tubes, to plan the rocket attacks on lonely American outposts. Kill the second level, kill the Engineer, kill the nephews of the fatwa issuers, and the ideologues are cut off from the general population. They will eventually have to show themselves to recruit more, putting their own neck on the headman’s block, and when
they emerge, a Predator will find them.

  Everyone thinks war is dehumanizing, but they’re wrong. War is personal, deeply personal. Every soldier at some point realizes, “They’re trying to kill me.” But in modern war, rather than kill any person, we kill that person. That particular person, but not another. War has always been personal, but now it is individual, specific to the associated alias and photo and fingerprint and DNA sample and dossier.

  The point is this: some people are worth killing more than others.

  TO SPREAD GALLIENI’S oil spots, to implement the first part of the new strategy, the generals said we needed to walk around. A simple order but a problem, because before the Iraqi Surge, there was a saying. “Death before dismount.” Not everybody said it, but enough, across divisions and units of all types and around the country, and this is what we meant: I’d rather die than get out of this truck.

  The conflict in Iraq was—and is, in the fight against the Islamic State—primarily an urban war. The resistance was spawned in the cities, the sectarian conflict pitted neighborhood against neighborhood, and some of the fiercest fighting occurred house-to-house, in small farm towns dotted like rest stops along the infamous MSR Tampa, main Highway 1. The IED construction cells largely kept to the blacktop, and we were happy to accommodate them. A war is more convenient when one can drive to it; not only do you arrive armored, but you can bring all the guns and explosives and robots you want.

  By the time the Surge began, the IEDs and small arms and mortar fire had grown so thick that survival meant minimizing exposure to the outside world. For a mission to clear a car bomb, the average Iraqi would often see six gun-trucks arrive. Jammed inside those vehicles would be twenty or twenty-five men and women. But many times that local civilian would only see the helmets of four of those US soldiers, the poor gunners stuck in the turrets. No one would get out. The soldiers were hidden behind a wall of laminated glass, and as far as any local could tell, as robotic as the one-armed bomb-defusing machines they employed.

  The Iraq Surge upended that model. For those in combat, the Surge was never so much about numbers as methods. Out of the trucks, out of the main-hub Forward Operating Bases, the FOBs, on foot patrols to little posts established in back alleys. Even if the average solider could drive through a neighborhood, it was better to walk, to meet the locals, know their concerns and loyalties, hear what happens at 0300, gain their trust, build a relationship beyond once-a-week tea-drinking sessions and visits for car bomb detonation investigations.

  The generals said to get out of the truck. So we did, and it worked, but at a price. In 2007, during the main thrust of the Iraq Surge, 904 US soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines died, a 10 percent jump and the highest yearly tally for the war.

  In contrast, Afghanistan was never an urban war. The few main cities were seized and pacified quickly, but President Hamid Karzai was derided as the Mayor of Kabul because peace barely extended to the suburbs. The fight was always in the mountains and across poppy fields and in clusters of mud hovels that appeared on no maps.

  Iraq was dangerous, but when considering the basic structures of society—roads, buildings, government, utilities, attitudes, culture—it was fundamentally Western. In comparison, using those metrics, Afghanistan might as well be the far side of the moon and accessible only by time machine.

  And so every aspect of the Afghan Surge was comparable but magnified in challenge and complexity. It focused on going to the parts of the country US and NATO forces had never been. But they had never gone because they couldn’t get there: no roads, treacherous flying, long humps on the trail. The solution was to go once and stay, establish tiny fire bases throughout the frontier. IEDs followed.

  The number of casualties produced by the Afghan Surge’s mass movement of soldiers out of armored trucks was staggering, and proportionally far worse than Iraq. By mid-July 2008, after almost seven years of war and before the Surge, Afghanistan had claimed five hundred American lives. The Surge began a year later, and by May 2010 the total death toll was at a thousand. That number doubled in the next twenty-seven months, the two-thousandth death coming in August of 2012, just before the Surge officially ended. Seven years to lose five hundred. A loss of fifteen hundred in a three-year Surge. The killed-in-action rate, per capita, was double that of Iraq and equal to the Vietnam War overall.

  A similar death toll would play out in the EOD community, and for reasons related to the second aspect of the new Surge policy. To get inside the insurgent oil spot and find the Engineer, JIEDDO said we needed to move “Left of Boom.” JIEDDO, the Joint IED Defeat Organization, was a Washington bureaucracy charged with demystifying the IED and killing it, and their theory, moving left of boom, provided us the tools to make the war individual.

  Envision a timeline where the past stretches to the left and the future to the right. Now place an IED on that timeline. In its normal life cycle, as time moves forward to the right, the IED will detonate and sow havoc and chaos. If a US soldier or local civilian finds the device before it detonates, we may be able to stop it, but our actions are still clustered chronologically around the placement of this bomb.

  But imagine the chain of events that led to the placement of that IED. Someone had to put it under the bridge. Someone had to build it in a secret factory. Someone had to purchase the circuit board. Someone had to raise the money to buy the materials. Further and further left of boom we go. If we could interrupt the chain, if we could stop the Engineer from designing new bombs or teaching others to make them, then the device would never get out to the roadside in the first place.

  And so this is how we would come to know the Engineer, by his bombs and the little they left behind. The first step in moving left of boom is to collect all of the forensic evidence of the IEDs themselves, and to do that, initially we used robots.

  Two main platforms dominated: the Talon and the Packbot. The Talon was a shoddy, indestructible tank, a bedraggled hobo of black plastic and rubber wrapped in a worn felt carpet. Its arm operated via a bike chain and lacked the sophistication to break regularly. In contrast, the Packbot was half the weight and twice as sleek, a delicate vision with Apple-esque curves. It was thin and silver, and its arm came from a space alien, an extra joint and a camera at the elbow. The Packbot’s manufacturer, iRobot, was a robotics company first and a defense contractor second; style was as important as substance. The Talon shrugged and pressed grimly on, rammed IEDs until they fell apart.

  Those robots were our champions. We named them after porn stars and UFC fighters. We covered them in flags and posters and pinup girls. We loved them like a gambler loves a lucky pair of dice, kissed before rolling craps, and treated them with a mix of superstition and respect. They searched dark culverts and basements. They reached inside car bombs. They were impervious to nightmare and disease and fear. EOD and al-Muhandis, each of us sent our anointed surrogate into the arena to fight in single combat for a human master hundreds or thousands of meters away.

  The Talon and Packbot were too large to lug any great distance, and so in Iraq we stayed mounted, encased in the best armor, carrying our technological counterpart to battle in a 47,000-pound chariot. But in Afghanistan, we had run out of roads, and so EOD techs were finally forced to abandon their trucks in large numbers and fight a war on foot in the mountains. Robots could no longer be our first and greatest shield.

  The Surges were deadly for the average soldier, and within the EOD community, an equally grim tally played out. The initial years after 9/11 were relatively easy. We didn’t lose a Marine EOD technician until 2004, a Navy or Air Force one until 2006. But that was the year—in the midst of the arms race up the spectrum between IEDs and jammers, when more and more robots were fielded, when new armor was only starting to be widely available—that the death toll started to mount. Fifteen in 2006, then eighteen at the height of Iraq Surge in 2007. We got a break in 2008, when the Iraq War started to wind down and the Afghanistan Surge had not yet begun, but then it increased
again in earnest. Fourteen in 2009, seventeen in 2010, fifteen in 2011, sixteen in 2012. More deaths between 2009 and 2012 than the previous eight years combined.

  WHEN MATT SCHWARTZ arrived in Camp Leatherneck in Helmand province in October of 2011, it was a red-hot cauldron that had long ago reached full boil. The IED and casualty statistics would not have been news. His eyes were wide open, and he knew the score of the game. He had even seen this coming, noted the danger increasing on each of his deployments, but still he went back. Why?

  Sure, for the money, for the job security, because he was ordered to at some point. But he could have found a new military job. Could have faked an injury. Could have told the mental health counselor he was crazy, and it might have even been true. He could have done many things that would have kept him off that Afghan road on January 5, 2012. Why be there?

  Roughly eight billion people ate and drank and slept and breathed and loved and did the best they could on the planet Earth the bright Afghan morning that Matt died. And out of those eight billion people, the three EOD technicians sitting in that JERRV that day were the best qualified to be on that route clearance mission, to perform that particular task at that particular moment, to clear that road, at that time, of all of the bombs that lay before them.

  After more than a decade of war, the American military boasted the best trained and equipped EOD force yet produced by any nation at any time in history. Schwartz and Seidler and Bell had been in-country for months. They knew the road they drove. They knew the Engineer worked their sector, and they had learned his preferred tactics. They knew each other and worked as a team. They were in the toughest truck available for bomb clearance work. And unlike their brothers humping the Hindu Kush on a foot patrol, they had every robot and bomb suit and type of explosive they wanted. So many ways to die, but they had every advantage possible and they knew it; such confidence allows you to slip into your body armor every day.