“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
