by Phil Klay
I can say it will be dangerous. That I have learned things about the region her professor can’t know. I could tell her about Representative de Salva, about Jefferson Paúl López Quesada, or about my meeting with that loathsome lawyer in the exquisite dining room of a five-star hotel, where we were served wine that cost more than the monthly salary of most Colombians, and the lawyer, fat, his face flushed from a life of decadence, waved his chunky fingers and belched greasy words into the air, making promises I ignored and divulging information I held tight. But that would heighten the appeal for her.
As with Che, it is best to fight with the truth. Deception is always shaky footing. And though she had started by telling me about the dangers of idealism, it is clear she is motivated by something else, something worse, something I have lied to her about my whole life. The first step, then, is to come clean.
“God. Jesus Christ,” I say. “We send you to church because that’s what a young woman is supposed to do. Are you really telling me you believe in all that shit?”
7
MASON 2007
It started with the fireworm, a five-kilometer-long convoy in Helmand, everything we had in one beastly formation, the only American force in the district, civilization descending into the wilderness, lighting up the first few Taliban brave enough to fire on us, chalking up the first couple of deaths to the deployment tally before hitting the turnoff for Highway 611, turning due east, off-roading into the desert, heading parallel to Sangin and then, exactly at noon, flooding the town, taking it without a fight.
With a base of operations established, the colonel adopted a strategy of sending out small teams, twelve Americans plus some Afghans to draw the Taliban out so we could call in air support on them. Our deadliest weapon, as per usual, was our radio. And all of us were glad to be back in the thick of things, even if sometimes it took its toll.
“Fucking bullshit,” Carlos told me as I handed him a few Motrin. “I forgot about the goddamn headaches.”
“Everybody only remembers the cool parts of combat,” I told him. I’d forgotten them as well—the headaches, the sleeplessness, the frayed nerves that were all part of the game.
We lost people. In May, a Chinook got shot down. Eight died in the crash, and we had to fight a running gun battle to get through to recover the bodies. In June, an IED took out Cliff Weeks, a well-liked team sergeant from another ODA. July, two more dead, one from small arms fire and another from a pressure plate rigged to an artillery shell, an old-school IED method, one of the classics that never goes out of style. And that’s not counting the injuries, the gunshots, shrapnel wounds, and lost arms and legs and fingers and eyes. If there’s a heaven for limbs, a waiting room in paradise where the severed parts await reunion with their owners, we put in some work filling it up.
We gave better than we got. After one battle in Zerikow, 136 dead. Amazing, at the time, to think battles that big were still happening, that the Taliban was still sending so many people, so many of them so young, into our meat grinder. Hovering above that wonder, the knowledge that they were sending so many to their deaths time and time again because they could. Blood, as they say, makes the grass grow. In Afghanistan, it grew tall.
Benjy, our new engineer, said, “All the guys we’re killing, you think the Taliban would be collapsing.”
All Jefe had in response was, “It takes time.”
“We’ve been at war here for six years,” Benjy had said. “By year six, World War Two was over.”
Back then, there was a grand total of thirty thousand troops in the country. The army was gearing up to pour bodies and equipment into Iraq because of the “surge,” while out in rural Afghanistan it took two months to get mission critical replacement parts because “Iraq.” Even if we’d decided to forget about 90 percent of the incredibly rural Afghanistan and just secure the big cities—Kabul, Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif, and Kandahar—we couldn’t have done it. So how do you secure Afghanistan, cede zero territory to the Taliban, promote local governance, and develop local forces and courts and economic growth with thirty thousand troops? You don’t. So we didn’t promise the Afghans money for roads, or schools, or improved health care, or better governance. Everybody, especially the Afghans, knew that wasn’t what we were there for.
The best we could do as far as the traditional ODA mission set was concerned was work with a contingent of ANA, a little group of Afghans living and fighting with us out of a firebase near Sangin. Their senior sergeant, an illiterate Afghan named Azad Khan, had whipped the unit into unusually good shape. According to the outgoing ODA, Azad Khan was not just a great soldier, but something of a legend.
In 2004, he’d been blown up and left for dead by his unit after an ambush where an IED had torn off pieces of his face and mangled his legs. Despite injuries that would have killed most people, Azad Khan found his way back to his unit and back to the fight. And the month before we’d arrived he’d secured the love of his soldiers after an incident in which a young interpreter had been shaken down for money by a group of Afghan National Police at a traffic checkpoint. They’d beaten the terp badly enough to puncture a lung. Azad Khan had told his unit that an attack on the terp for their attached ODA team was an attack on them all, and then he led his soldiers on a raid of the police checkpoint, capturing the ANP who’d shaken down the terp, bringing them back to the firebase, beating them bloody, and then stringing them up by their hands and feet from poles over empty fire pits.
The outgoing ODA’s intel sergeant, who was telling us the story, laughed. “We said, ‘What the fuck is this, Azad?’ And he said, ‘We told them we were going to cook them and eat them, like the Americans taught us.’ But, you know, they didn’t do it. I guess our human rights classes are working.”
After all that, I was expecting much more than the squat, ugly, barely five-foot-tall Afghan we met at the firebase, sitting in a loose white shirt, beaming at us “longbeards,” as the Afghans call Special Forces, and then urging us to dance with him to celebrate our arrival.
“Za! Za!” he yelled at me, as I started awkwardly moving my limbs around to the music. Ocho pulled out a camera, trying to catch me mid-dance move so he could use the photo to humiliate me for the rest of the deployment. When Azad saw that, he grabbed me by the shoulder, pointed at the camera, and then put up his fist with his index and little finger extended, like he was at a heavy metal concert.
“All right,” I said, making the same gesture and mugging for the camera.
“Raaarrrr!” he said.
“Raarr!” I said.
He laughed at me, and patted me on the stomach.
“Longbeards,” he said, and gave a thumbs-up.
Later that first night I was checking out one of the guard towers with Ocho, who was shirtless, big muscles and belly fat and scars and tattoos exposed to the cold air, and he pulled out his dick and started pissing out into the desert beyond our firebase.
“This kind of deployment is what I joined the teams for,” he said. “Out in the fucking wilderness, alone and unafraid.”
“I thought you joined to chase Pablo Escobar and sleep with Colombian whores?”
“Hmmm . . .” he said. “This is better. This is so much better.”
It was a deceptively good beginning to the deployment.
* * *
• • •
“I like it here,” I wrote Natalia. “I like the mission. We rarely see the enemy, mostly it’s calling in air strikes on piles of rocks. But there’s something unbelievably fulfilling about being in a place where you can count on getting into gunfights.”
We mostly relied on letters. “I want to hear your voice,” Natalia told me before I went out, “but I’m not gonna make it if you’re calling me every day and telling me everything.” I was relieved to hear her say it. One of the many ways my wife is wiser than me.
We ended up working out a deal where each of us wo
uld try to tell the real stuff in letters. That way we wouldn’t be putting the other person in the position of having to respond to whatever intense shit we were going through, whether it was our daughter or money or combat, in real time. And it meant I didn’t have to switch from war to Bragg in the space of a minute. On the phone, it’s so easy to lie, especially about things that have just happened, things you haven’t figured out in your own head yet, so you just gloss over them, or tell half-truths, or worse than half-truths, you tell the SITREP version of events, the who did what where and when without the emotions, the list of events recited and dumped on your wife’s lap without context or meaning because the whole thing doesn’t quite make sense to you yet either, like how funny it was after you crawled through a sewer ditch with the rest of your team and you shot one muj and Carlos shot the other and they fell in just the perfect way, Muj One shot through the pelvis, abdomen, and heart so shit and blood pooled together, and Muj Two spun around by the bullet before face-planting into his friend’s blown-away and undoubtedly now dickless crotch, the two of them dead but Muj One with this expression of total shock and pain almost indistinguishable from extreme pleasure, so it really did look like he was receiving a blow job from his friend and it was too funny, really. Not in the moment, because fighting at close range you don’t know if you’re going to die and it’s scary as shit, but afterward, in that next moment when you know you’re alive and you know you’re going to stay that way and so is the rest of your team, you look over and see Muj One and Muj Two and it’s so fucking funny. I mean it almost disturbed me how funny I found it, how the memory made me smile and would come to me unbidden and how that’s not really the kind of guy I am but there it is, we all laughed about it, we laughed about so many things. Our job is too serious to take seriously, so we laughed about a lot of things that weren’t funny at all, or wouldn’t have been so funny if they hadn’t also been so terrifying, and here was this pure joke displayed before us, so great that Carlos tried to take a picture before Jefe, ever professional, stopped him.
How to tell that on a phone? Instead, I wrote letters, each word deliberate, though at first I wrote almost nothing of missions. My early letters avoided all that, papered over war, and instead talked about our girl, about what she meant to me, and what it meant being a father and being away from her. Without regular access to the phone, I felt what older generations of warriors must have felt when they wrote home, a sense of separation and of precariousness, of the need to communicate something such that the time here, whatever happens, will be anchored and preserved among those I love. And by writing about my girl and not about war, I was bringing my girl here, letting my wife know, and maybe someday Inez as well, that she was with me, she was essential to me, that even here the most important thing in the world was that I was her father. Which was mostly true.
In return, Natalia sent me more packets of photos like she’d done when I was in Colombia. First came less than a month in. My little lady dressed in a polka dot dress, with lacy frills. With a bow tie. Her fat, happy face smiling up into the camera. Adorable, you understand, a happy sight to see. Something to miss, not just the little girl but also the lost time. Unlike the memory of those dead muj, the photos rarely made me smile.
“The sad thing about what we do,” Jefe told me one night as we smoked cigars, dropping the same tired wisdom I’d heard from other team guys but hadn’t expected from Jefe, “is that we go home to our wife and kids and know that we can never really explain this to them, what it’s like to do this job. That they’ll never understand.”
I didn’t like what he said, but I kept my silence. I knew I was just supposed to nod, as if it were something profound. Was it true? Would my daughter ever understand me? Would Natalia? I’d always thought she knew me better than I knew myself. She sees things so clearly, and has a hardheaded way of cutting through the bullshit team guys like to tell themselves. It would later occur to me that if our wives never came to understand us, it wouldn’t be because they couldn’t, but because we would never tell them.
* * *
• • •
The largest operation of the deployment was Operation Adalat, where we threw the Special Forces rule book out the window. The plan was to pin a bunch of Taliban in the Shah Wali Kot valley, head in with a column of Canadian armor (seriously), and kill them.
Shah Wali Kot has only three exits. One team blocked the exit in the north, another team blocked the second exit, and the rest of us moved up with two hundred Canadians in six Leopard tanks, thirteen light armored vehicles, and thirteen support vehicles. The plan was to assault up a mountain against dug-in Taliban positions. “This is some straight-up World War Two shit,” Ocho told me excitedly. We weren’t all as giddy, but it was pretty fucking cool. After our time as professionals in Colombia—all training, no fun—here was our chance for a mission that was no training, all fun.
By this point we’d also had enough time with the Canadians and ANA to feel comfortable working together. Especially to feel comfortable with Azad Khan, who’d lived up to his reputation and then some. Not long before Adalat we’d set up a traffic checkpoint north of Sangin to try to snag roadside bomb makers. It was the sort of thankless mission where you didn’t expect to snag much—the people pretty reliably reported all our movements to the local Taliban, but midway through a beat-up Toyota appeared around the bend, then suddenly stopped, and went screaming into reverse. Since Azad Khan had hidden himself in a security position up ahead in an irrigation ditch, he was able to jump out and fire a burst directly into the car’s engine block as it passed him, sending it to a rolling stop. I watched as Azad put his rifle to the ready and approached the car, which had three passengers. Then I heard the driver yelling, cursing Azad Khan, calling him a dog. Our pint-sized Afghan Rambo roared and dove into the car.
“Shit!” Jefe shouted, and we raced over. Two muffled cracks went off, and we stopped and aimed in on the vehicle, waiting for movement. Azad Khan slowly wiggled himself back out of the car’s window and turned toward us, his face covered in blood and bits of brain. He was beaming. The driver had tried to pull a gun, his third mistake of the day, and Azad Khan had wrestled it from him, driven it under his chin, and pulled the trigger twice.
The other passengers were very compliant after that, and in the trunk we found an RPK, ball bearings, wiring, mines, and blasting caps. So we went into the Shah Wali Kot feeling very confident about Azad Khan.
The op started with the Canadians calling in artillery strikes in the fields and mountains around the villages to warn local civilians to leave the planned engagement area. So we sat on our asses while we made empty fields explode, and then we waited as a mass of Afghans started trickling past us.
They came not in ones and twos, but as whole families. The first one, a tall, older man, walked with a stoop and held hands with a little boy of eight or nine, who in turn was holding hands with a little girl of seven or eight, and she was holding hands with an even littler girl, and behind the two of them, two women in beautiful, flowing robes that covered them head to toe, even their faces. It was strange to see women, and I was struck with the bizarre desire to walk up and smell them. Azad Khan nudged Jefe and jerked his head toward the women, grinning, then said, “Hubba-hubba.” You couldn’t see a single, solitary inch of their skin, but I knew exactly what he meant.
More and more people flowed out of the valley. “No young men,” Jefe said to me. It was true. There were a few old men, men on crutches. And many, many children, followed by those flowing, mysterious and arousing robes—but almost none of what the army calls “military-age males.” All these families, their young men were waiting for us. And as I watched them pass, my excitement about the coming fight curdled into rage. I wanted to grab one of the old men, and shout at them, “We are the best fighters in the best army in the world! We have heavy machine guns and Mark-19s and LAWs and snipers and artillery and close air support and tanks and light armored v
ehicles and a bunch of surprisingly badass Canadians and a crazy Afghan named Azad Khan and we are going to kill everybody! We are going to slaughter your young men, your boys, your children, and their deaths will mean nothing!” Getting angry can be good preparation for a fight.
Ocho scooped some Copenhagen into his mouth, a clear sign he was feeling jittery, anxious for the damn thing to start. Carlos racked the charging handle on his Browning. Benjy smiled up at me. Diego and Jason bullshitted. Jefe checked and rechecked his kit. I cradled a machine gun, tapped the rifle I had slung over my back, checked my magazines, rockets, water bottles. Touched them all again. Then looked out at the civilians trickling to the district center, and the ANP directing them. Things would kick off in an hour and everybody knew it—no surprises for us, no surprises for the Taliban. Everybody in the valley knew what was about to happen. And then we moved.
Those of us in the gun trucks were supposed to assault uphill, through enemy lines, then turn and assault again, pinning the insurgents while the armored force hammered them from the south with tank and artillery fire, eventually pushing them into the blocking forces. This is, more or less, what happened, with the main assault force of our unit putting up an awesome amount of firepower. Far up ahead, I saw one of the Canadian tanks disappear an enemy position in a mud hut, just totally obliterate it.
Diego raised his arms, delighted. “Are you not entertained!”
“I’m entertained,” Benjy said.
“Motherfucking tanks!” Ocho shouted. “Those things are useful.”
Early stages went pretty much according to plan. Worst moment for us came a few hours in as we spread out up the valley to clear a few buildings and irrigation ditches behind a berm that hadn’t been visible on the three-year-old imagery Jefe had briefed us off of. Behind the berm was a U-shaped building up an incline of about eighty feet. We drove toward it, moving off the main road to avoid IEDs, then dismounting while Carlos fired away on the Ma Deuce. Jefe was calling out Pashtun commands, and Azad Khan started setting up Afghan machine-gun teams. I saw some rusty old Soviet trucks, a water tank, a few small vehicles. We sprinted toward the berm while Jefe gathered the ANA machine gunners and moved them in line with our position. Rounds were exploding all around, tracers burning laser lines through the sky close enough I could have reached a hand up and strummed them the way you would the strings on a guitar. Most of the rounds were coming from the U-shaped building.