War

granted permission by the brigade commander to destroy it with cannon fire from a Spectre gunship. Later, a B-1 bomber drops 2,000 pounds of high explosive on a ridgeline, where more insurgents had been observed positioning themselves for an attack.

The men of Second Platoon walk most of the night to the rip and boom of ordnance farther up the valley, and at dawn they find themselves close enough to human habitation to hear roosters crowing. A surveillance drone motors endlessly overhead. The men move slowly and awkwardly along the hillsides under their heavy loads but eventually come out onto a corduroy road built of squared-off timbers that serves as a skidway for the enormous trees that get cut on the upper ridges. The walking is easy but they’re wide open and after a while they leave the road and climb a brutally steep hillside to a grassy upland plateau. First Platoon comes into contact from a farm complex above town and they return fire, and then Second Platoon clears the buildings and waits in the bright fall sunlight while chickens peck past them in the dirt and cows groan from the alleyways.

Eventually a delegation of village elders tracks down Piosa and his men and leads them to a house with three children with blackened faces and a woman lying stunned and mute on the floor. Five corpses lie on wooden pallets covered by white cloth outside the house, all casualties from the airstrikes the night before. Medics start treating the wounded while Piosa’s men continue sweeping the village for weapons. They find eight RPG rounds and a shotgun and an old German pistol and some ammo and a pair of binoculars and an old Henri-Martin rifle — all contraband, but not the huge cache they were expecting. Prophet picks up radio traffic of one Taliban fighter asking another, “Have they found it, have they found it?” Obviously, they have not.

The civilian casualties are a serious matter and will require diplomacy and compensation. Second Platoon spends the night at a hilltop compound overlooking Yaka Chine, and the next morning Apaches come in to look around and then a Black Hawk lands on a rooftop inside the village. Ostlund jumps out like a strange camouflaged god and climbs down a wooden ladder to the ground. With him is a member of the provincial government — the first time a representative of any government, past or present, has made it past the mouth of the valley. Kearney arrives with Ostlund and quickly moves to the front of twenty or thirty locals with the weapons arrayed at his feet. There are old men with their beards dyed orange and eyes like small black holes and young men who don’t smile or talk and are clearly here to see, up close, the men they’re trying to kill from a distance, and young boys who dart around the edges, seemingly unmindful of the seriousness of things. Kearney is unshaven and shadowed with dirt from two nights on Divpat. The Americans are by far the dirtiest men there.

The locals sit with their backs against a stone wall and Kearney crouches in front of them to speak but soon stands back up. “I’m here to tell you guys why I did what I did. I’m Captain Kearney, the U.S. commander for the Korengal,” he says, and waits for the translator to finish. “When I come into villages and I find RPGs and weapons that are shot at myself and at the ANA, that indicates that there’s bad people in here. Good people don’t carry these weapons.”

Every few sentences Kearney stops to let the translator catch up, and spends the time pacing back and forth, getting more and more heated. “I can walk into Aliabad and not get shot at and not find any weapons… and I come into your village and I find RPGs.” He picks one up and waves it at the elders. “I bet I could give this RPG to any one of these younger kids and they’d know how to fire it — and they probably don’t even know how to read.”

He points to a young man seated in front of him. “You know how to shoot this thing?”

The kid shakes his head.

“Yeah, right.”

Kearney looks around. “You guys have insurgents here that are against myself and against the ANA and against the government. And they’re going to cause you guys to be hurt if you don’t help me out. I was able to pinpoint fifty insurgents that were in and around your village. The first building I engaged, the next morning when I get there I find five RPGs in it. So I know there’s not only good people in the building, there’s also bad people.”

Hajji Zalwar Khan, the wealthy and dignified leader of the valley, sits cross-legged on the ground directly in front of Kearney. He’s got a white beard and a handsome face and a narrow, aquiline nose that would easily pass for French at a Paris cafe. Kearney finishes by asking him point-blank for help: he wants Zalwar Khan to bring representatives from Yaka Chine to the weekly shura at the KOP. The old man says that Kearney will have to supply the fuel for the trip, and Kearney is about to agree but catches himself.

“I already told you: one Dishka and I’ll pay for your fuel,” he says. “When you tell me where a Dishka is, I’ll give you fuel for every single Friday for as long as I’m here.”

Zalwar Khan laughs. Kearney pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head.

“Hajji, I trust you,” he says. “I trust you.”

Ostlund is up next. He stands there bareheaded and clean-shaven, looking more like a handsome actor in a war movie than a real commander in the worst valley in Afghanistan. His style is respectful and earnest and he appeals to the men before him as husbands and fathers rather than as potential enemies.

“We came here with a charter from the U.S. government with direction from the Afghan government and the Afghan national security forces,” he says. The translator delivers the sentence in Pashto and then stops and looks over. “And we were asked to bring progress to every corner of Afghanistan. Somehow miscreants have convinced some of your population that we want to come here and challenge Islam and desecrate mosques and oppress Afghan people. All of those are lies. Our country supports all religions.”

The translator catches up. None of the expressions change.

“All of my officers are trained and educated enough that they could teach at a university,” Ostlund goes on. “I challenge you elders to put them to work; put them to work building your country, fixing your valley. That’s what they’re supposed to do — that’s what I want them to do — but they can’t until you help us with security.”

The translator is good; he delivers Ostlund’s points with nuance and feeling and looks around at the old men like he’s delivering a sermon. They stare back unmoved. They’ve seen the Soviets and they’ve seen the Taliban, and no one has made it in Yaka Chine more than a day or two. The name means “cool waterfall,” and it’s a truly lovely place where you’re never far from the gurgle of water or the quiet shade of the oak trees, but it’s no place for empires.

“You can be poisoned by miscreants and they can tell you that America is bad, that the government’s bad, but I ask you this: what have the people who run around with this stuff” — Ostlund waves a hand at the weapons — “done for your families? Have they provided you an education? Have they provided you a hospital? I don’t think so. I would say, shame on you, if you follow foreign leaders that leave their beautiful homes in Pakistan and come here and talk you into fighting against your own country, and they do nothing for you.”

He stops so that the translator will get every word, then goes on:

“The ACM that comes in and gives you five dollars to carry this stuff around the mountains and tells you you’re doing a jihad, is doin’ nothing for you except making you a slave for five dollars. These foreigners won’t fight my soldiers; they hide on a mountain in a cave under a rock and talk on the radio and pay your sons a small amount of money to go ahead and shoot at my soldiers. And my soldiers end up killing your sons.”

ACM means “Anti-Coalition Militia” — essentially, the Taliban. It’s a good speech and delivered with the force of conviction. That night a dozen or so fighters are spotted moving toward Kearney’s position on Divpat, and an unmanned drone fires a Hellfire missile at them. They scatter, but the Apaches won’t finish them off because they can’t determine with certainty that the men are carrying weapons. The Americans fly out of Yaka Chine, and valley elders meet among themselves to decide what to do. Five people are dead in Yaka Chine, along with ten wounded, and the elders declare jihad against every American in the valley.

2

DAWN ON THE ABAS GHAR, SOLDIERS CURLED ON THE ground wrapped in poncho liners or zipped into sleeping bags. The platoon has made a cold camp in a forest of small spruce after walking most of the night chasing heat signatures on the upper ridges. The signatures turned out to be embers that were still burning from artillery strikes days earlier. When the men kick out of their bags the sun is already over the eastern ridge and the Afghans have started a twig fire in a patch of bare open ground to warm their hands. There are stumps of huge trees cut