“Or Maryland, sir.”
Jacobabad was a spook fest. A different team of scruffy-looking commandos lived in each revetment. “Lockheed and Boeing contractors” — masquerading CIA and Delta Force operators — mingled with Royal Marines, Special Air Service troopers, Air Force pilots, SEALs, and others. A maintenance crew patched bullet holes in a helicopter, while another group played touch football on the taxiway next to them.
One of the MEU’s recon teams manned a position atop a hangar, and we climbed up for a look around. The air was hazy, filled with dust and smoke from a thousand burning trash piles and cooking fires. Scrubby trees ringed the runway, but otherwise the ground was bare, baked into cracks and fissures by the relentless sun. Nothing moved. Rudy Reyes and another Marine wore T-shirts caked with white sweat stains. With sunglasses and zinc- covered noses, they could have been lifeguards. Binoculars, a radio, and a sniper rifle lay between them. Recon Marines trained as observers. Sitting atop the hangar in Jacobabad was a perfect observation mission, albeit without the drama of snooping through enemy territory in the dark.
“You guys ever see anything interesting up here?” Marine asked as if he doubted the answer could be affirmative.
“There’s an ambulance casing us,” Rudy said. He stood and I noticed a drawing in his hand. He was sketching the airfield’s perimeter, recording azimuths and distances to landmarks so he could call in mortars or air strikes with precision. “It has a red crescent on the door, and the shades are always drawn. They come by every day, and a guy with a camera snaps pictures from behind the shades. ISI, probably.”
The Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence agency had helped put the Taliban in power. We knew they were no friends of ours, but I was surprised to hear their surveillance was so bold. Officially, no American forces were operating in Pakistan at that time. When pressed, defense officials had acknowledged a small U.S. presence but stated that it was there only to provide logistical support or to launch search-and-rescue missions. We knew there was precious little difference between search-and-rescue and search-and-destroy.
“Do they watch you watching them?” Marine’s interest was piqued.
Rudy shook his head. “We try to stay cool about countersurveillance. Only two Marines up here at a time during the day, and we keep a low profile. The real work happens at night. We patrol out near the town, plant motion sensors, that kind of thing.” Recon’s mystique had grown out of clandestine missions like those.
To daytime observers, like the men in the ambulance, the air base would have looked nearly deserted. Most Americans slept in the cool shade of the hangar, and the Marine positions on the lines were well camouflaged. Members of the Pakistani air force puttered around on scooters, selling cold glass bottles of Coke.
At night, the charade stopped. A full day’s work was crammed into the frantic ten hours between sunset and sunrise. Aircraft landed at five-minute intervals, sometimes having flown nonstop all the way from the United States. Most of them were big cargo planes, carrying supplies for the war in Afghanistan. Jet fighters came and went, and so did Predator reconnaissance drones flown by the Air Force and the CIA. I was always unnerved to be walking down a taxiway and have the pilotless Predator roll past, eyeballing me with its movable cameras. Nighttime also brought more activity outside the airfield’s walls. Strings of red tracer fire reached into the sky, and explosions rocked the dark town. Pakistani officers invariably claimed that these were wedding celebrations and cars backfiring. But we were under no illusions — Pakistan’s support for the United States didn’t extend much below President Musharraf. Life at Jacobabad took on the tone of spy versus spy.
A week into our stay, on an otherwise indistinguishable drowsy afternoon, a man wearing a traditional Pakistani dishdasha knocked on the door of the building serving as our company headquarters.
“I must speak to the senior American present.”
Captain Whitmer was in a meeting, so I identified myself.
“Sir, there is a telephone call in our offices. Please come with me.” His speech was exceedingly formal and lightly accented. A slight bow of his head followed the request.
I went with him across the field to a building I had not yet entered. Whitewashed rocks lined the walkway, and a Pakistani flag was painted on the bed of stones surrounding a small sign announcing this as an operations center of the Pakistani air force. I knew the general story of the United States’ relationship with Pakistan’s air force. After paying the U.S. for twenty-eight F-16 fighters, it had received none of them following Pakistan’s 1998 nuclear tests. But I hadn’t realized the intensely personal effect this soured deal still had on Pakistanis.
Entering the dim ready room, I paused to let my eyes adjust from the sunlight outside. A dozen pilots in green flight suits lolled in chairs, smoking. Conversation stopped, and they stared at me. Taped to the walls were dozens of pictures of F-16s: flying, landing, taking off, flames shooting from afterburners. It looked like an eight- year-old boy’s bedroom. The hangars at Jacobabad had been built for the expected jets. Now they sat empty. These pilots had been trained and transferred here to fly them. Now they sat idle.
I picked up the phone, overly conscious that I personified my nation’s diplomatic bludgeoning. The line was dead. When I told my escort, he shrugged.
“What unit are you from?” This didn’t sound like idle curiosity.
“The U.S. Marines.”
“Which unit specifically? How many machine guns do you have?”
I pushed past him and back into the sunlight.
After nearly two weeks at Jacobabad, we were all getting restless. The company received warning orders for three different missions, but none of them launched. Everyone had a different euphemism for Afghanistan — “up north” or “over the mountains.” We were fixated on it. On the ship, we had wanted to go ashore. But sitting at Jacobabad wasn’t enough. We were so close but not doing anything. We felt like the second string and imagined other units doing all sorts of missions across the border. Our generation had been reared on the hundred-hour war, and we feared this one would end without us.
Early one evening, Jim and I sat on the porch of the building we used as our headquarters. It was incongruous, lounging there on wooden chairs in the dusk, looking out across a baked field to a distant line of trees. Except for the pistols strapped to our thighs, we could have been anywhere. A field ration heater gurgled at my feet, warming a ham omelet for dinner. I took a bag of M&M’s from the MRE pouch and tore it open, reading a printed advertisement on the inside of the bag.
“I can enter to win tickets to the Olympics.”
“Which ones?” Jim had opted to pass on dinner and was drinking coffee instead.
“Summer Games. Barcelona. 1992. This fucking MRE is ten years old.”
“Enjoy that omelet, bro.”
Captain Whitmer joined us. He had just come from the nightly commander’s meeting, and he was smiling. We were leaving Jacobabad as abruptly as we’d come. The next morning, the Army’s 101st Airborne Division would relieve us, and we would fly back to the ship and prepare for a follow-on mission in Afghanistan. The Twenty-sixth MEU, sailing from North Carolina, was cutting through the Suez Canal to join us. Together, the two MEUs would be known as Task Force 58, commanded by Brigadier General James Mattis. I sat upright. Task Force 58 had been the name of my grandfather’s unit at the Battle of the Philippine Sea. That night, we packed our gear, excited finally to be going up north, over the mountains.
“Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. Celebrate it on your own time.” The
In spite of all the competing demands on everyone’s time, the
