NO REGRETS ~ An American Adventure in Afghanistan (7 page)

Chief replied, “Five dollars each truck?”

The Afghan actually managed to look offended by Chief’s question and then answered, “Oh, no! Five dollars each valve stem.”

The Bagram maintenance crew showed up a few minutes later. They had everything we needed to get the vehicles back to base. Chief all but told the Afghan guy to screw off and to shove the valve stems up his ass. Within a half hour, the trucks were up and running. One wouldn’t start and had to be towed. We drove the others back to Bagram proper.

I was a bit disappointed in the vehicles we had received. They were all old green Air Force trucks that looked like they’d been buried in a graveyard for thirty years. I swear one of them was from World War II and held together with bubble gum and finger nail polish. This was how the United States was equipping its elite fighting force. Of course, this was before they started the mass movement to get our military equipped with UAH HMMWVs and ultimately, the MRAP.
¹⁰
The vehicles before us were all thin-skinned and not one of them was trustworthy. They were issued with the proviso that they not be used off base. I don’t think any of them lasted much longer than six months.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting with Rashawn at the Bagram Central Issue Facility (CIF). Rashawn supervised the CIF, which was the storage and issue point for theater-specific gear that soldiers were given to conduct their mission in Afghanistan. CIF issued desert tan winter boots, cold weather parkas, and “polypro” undergarments. When new Army uniforms or other specialty gear came out, the CIF facilitated the issuance of those as well. Rashawn and I were sitting in one of the containers used for storage when an Army major walked up on us. The guy seemed agitated.

“Why won’t you issue gear to my soldiers?”

Rashawn gave me one of those “Here we go again” looks and told the major, “Sir, all issues have to be approved by the PBO.
¹¹
Without his signature, I can’t issue anything. If that’s a problem, you’ll have to talk to Chief.”

“I don’t give a damn what Chief says. My men are going out on mission tomorrow. No contractor is going to make my guys go on mission without proper gear.”

“Like I said, sir, you’ll have to obtain approval from Chief. It’s not my decision.”

“Look, you idiot. You goddamn contractors work for me.” With that, the major started poking Rashawn in the chest and backing him into the container.

I jumped in, “How about I get Chief and you can talk to him?”

He ignored me. Almost screaming, the major continued, “You fuckin’ contractors are always dickin’ everything up. I don’t know why the Army thinks we need you sorry fucks.”

“Rashawn, don’t do anything stupid. I’m going to get Rob and Chief.”

I quickly walked over to the office. “Chief, Rob … you guys better come with me now. There is some asshole major poking and screaming at Rashawn. If we don’t get there quick, Rashawn might knock out the ignorant bastard.”

Rashawn was a short dude who was built like a bulldog with huge shoulders and biceps. He was a retired U.S. Army sergeant first class and had a quick temper. He and I had gotten into a few arguments. In one of them, I thought for sure that he was going to swing at me. He didn’t but I hadn’t been cursing at him, poking him in the chest, and backing him into a corner.

Chief and Rob walked out to the container. Chief asked, “What seems to be the problem here?”

“Your fucking CIF contractor won’t issue my men their gear.”

“Did anyone bring the documents to my office for signature? I haven’t had any requests today.”

“My supply sergeant told me that he’d done everything today. He said that he couldn’t get the gear from your contractors.”

“That’s correct. If he hasn’t brought the docs to me for approval, my contractors will not issue gear to anyone. Have your men follow the proper procedures and they’ll get the gear they need.”

The major stormed off. It turned out that his supply sergeant had come to the CIF and asked for gear. Rashawn told him the procedures that he needed to follow. Instead of going back to his desk and filling in a few lines on a document, the supply sergeant complained to the irate major that the contractors at CIF had refused to service him.

Chief lodged a complaint against the major for his belligerent behavior to no avail. The whole incident was buried and forgotten. If Rashawn had knocked the guy out, KBR would have asked him “aisle or window?”

¹⁰
MRAP—Mine Resistant Ambush Protected—vehicles are designed to survive IED attacks and ambushes.

¹¹
PBO—Property Book Officer.

Fallen Soldiers: The Pat Tillman Story

April 2004

John was a friend from my Army days. We were in TOG—The Old Guard—in Washington, D.C. together. I’d left D.C. to head off to Egypt to be part of the Multinational Force and Observers, the peacekeeping organization tasked with acting as a barrier between Egypt and Israel. John was infantry and sometime after TOG, he had gone on to Special Forces, alternately known as the Green Berets. When I ran into him in Bagram, he was wearing civilian clothes and had a full beard. I asked him what he was doing in Afghanistan. He told me that he was Civil Affairs and then asked me if I wanted some booze.

“Dude, when did you go SF?”

“I didn’t say shit about SF.” I always get a chuckle out of SF types. In the rear, they’re a bit too freakin’ obvious. They try to be all
Secret Squirrel
. It rarely works. We talked about the good old days in D.C. and he asked me again, “So, you want some booze or not?”

That’s one of the boons of being SF. Those guys always had booze.

A few weeks later, John showed up again and asked, “Dave, did you hear?”

“Hear what?” I asked.

“Pat Tillman got killed.”

“Shit John! Everyone’s heard about that. I heard last night. They say it was a Taliban ambush. Up near Khost.”

John shook his head, “Taliban my ass. Dave, don’t believe everything you hear.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“I can’t say but it’ll come out soon enough.”

I jumped up from my chair. “Dude, you can’t leave me hangin’ like that. What the hell are you talking about?”

John crossed his arms and took a deep breath. “Dave, they’re going to make him out to be a hero. Probably give him a medal or two. I’m hearing that they’re going to posthumously promote him to sergeant. But the truth will come out and it ain’t gonna be pretty.”

“What do you mean?

“Can’t say right now. You know how the Army is. They’ll throw up propaganda … smoke screens. Pat got fucked and they burned all of the evidence!”

“I can’t argue that one. The Army is FUBAR HQ,
¹²
man. That’s why I got the fuck out but I still have no idea what the hell you’re talking about?”

“Can’t say, brother. I’ll bring you a bottle of JD tomorrow.”

Pat Tillman was the NFL player who famously enlisted in the U.S. Army a few months after the Twin Towers fell and whose death was notoriously fabricated into heroism by General Stanley McChrystal and his cronies in the Pentagon. These guys claimed that Tillman was killed by enemy fire. The Army brass made everyone involved maintain silence and put Tillman in for battlefield commendations, posthumously promoting him for bravery in an action fully concocted from thin air by his chain of command. Later, it came out that Tillman had been killed by friendly fire, i.e., by U.S. soldiers in Tillman’s own platoon. Unofficial records of the autopsy allegedly show that Pat was triple tapped to the forehead and that the rounds were in a sniper-like close shot group. A “triple tap” means three rounds in a tight-shot group. A shot like that is difficult. It suggests a professional sniper of the sort that are only extant within elite military and paramilitary groups. Meanwhile, there were rumors that a CIA team was accompanying Tillman’s platoon the day he was killed, giving rise to legitimate questions surrounding Tillman’s death. There are rumblings in the conspiracy theory underground that Tillman was murdered by the CIA because he was about to become a potent symbol for the anti-war movement. Tillman had contacted Noam Chomsky while he was on mid-tour R&R. He supposedly wanted to share his views and experiences on what he had seen in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Chomsky is one of America’s most outspoken war critics. Good old Noam’s been going strong with his anti-establishmentarian (anti-West, anti-Israel, anti-war) quest since the ‘60s. The theory goes that Bush, and his henchman Cheney, didn’t want Tillman to become a rallying point for the anti-Iraq war crowd. In this fantasy, the CIA was in on the hit and triple tapped Tillman while he was out on patrol. After the hit, the CIA made up the Taliban ambush to cover up their alleged treachery. It’s a crazy sounding theory. Personally, I don’t put anything past our government. America can be, and has been, a treacherous nation. We have been known to eat our own.

I thought the Army screwed the pooch on Pat Tillman early on. There’s no way that Tillman should have been enlisted. He should have been encouraged to go for Officer Candidate School (OCS). The guy might still be alive and he’d probably have saved lives. He had leader written all over him. An enlisted Tillman was a waste of talented leadership. I’m not surprised that they got the guy killed. The Tillman military episode was a tragedy in waiting from the day he enlisted in the Army because Army leadership was and is inept. If they wanted a public relations bonanza from his enlistment, they should have made the guy a lieutenant and sent him into Iraq or Afghanistan as a leader of soldiers. “Lieutenant Tillman, the platoon leader,” would have been inspirational. Private Tillman was laughable.

Tillman enlisted in the military to fight in a war (Afghanistan) in which he believed but served under a president for whom he did not vote. He then went off to Iraq to fight in a war that he came to believe was being illegitimately waged. These were acts of selfless service and patriotism. Not ugly nationalistic jingoism, but the selfless patriotism of a person who loves his country. Once he’d been in the Iraq conflict and saw the insanity of it, he supposedly planned to come out against the war. Yet, he was willing to defer going public until after he left the military. This was leadership exemplified. The guy made Bush, Kerry, Clinton, and that whole merry band of miscreants who serve as political leaders in America look like fools and cowards. He was a leader and one of the few
true
heroes of this era. His death came as no surprise to me. The Army is nothing if not a bungling bureaucratic machine of ineptitude.

A day or so after Tillman’s death, his body was delivered to the airfield to be flown to the States. The act of taking the bodies of soldiers killed in action (KIA) to the flight line for the homeward journey is called the “Fallen Soldier” ceremony. It’s heartbreaking, but many of us at Bagram made it a point to participate. The tactical operations center would e-mail out the ceremony times base-wide. The route was always the same. Starting at the BAF morgue, the body would be loaded into the back of a vehicle. The vehicle would drive at a stately pace. Soldiers and civilians would line the sides of Disney and the road to the flight line. As the vehicle carrying the body passed, soldiers would salute. Civilians removed their hats and placed their hands over the hearts. There were always tears flowing in these moments. Units sometimes came out in formation to attend. The body or bodies of the KIA(s) would be offloaded from the vehicle and then loaded into the rear of a C130 or C17 for the return journey to their families.

It’s a deeply personal experience to see a fellow countryman driven off in this manner. The long goodbye, I called it. It seemed that there was at least one of these ceremonies a week at BAF. It got to be too much after a while. After you’ve watched a guy whom you knew in life being driven by in a casket, it can be depressing.

The day that they took Tillman’s body out, there were no gaps along the road. Everyone on base turned out, or so it seemed. It was a sad day and already the rumors were flying that something fishy was afoot concerning his death.

Due to the hard work of the Tillman family, the U.S. government was forced to investigate the events around the Tillman battlefield death. The investigation revealed high-level officials in the Bush administration were aware from the beginning that Tillman’s death was the result of fratricide. The Army from the top down to the company command lied, and General McChrystal engaged in a massive cover-up in an attempt to profit from Pat’s death. A few years later, I watched the Tillman documentaries and read about the events surrounding his death. Tillman deserved the medals and the promotion. He stood up waving off his comrades as they shot at his team. He covered the guys who were with him and made sure they stayed under cover as he attempted to save them from the incompetence of his own platoon. His actions that day were those of a warrior who risked his life for his fellow soldiers. Perhaps a
First Lieutenant Tillman acting as platoon leader
would have avoided that fate and saved the lives of others as well. We’ll never know. The Army was too ignorant, unimaginative and its leadership lacked the foresight and common sense to have made such a thing a reality.

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FUBAR—fucked up beyond all repair—is a military slang term.

Balkans Invasion

Early Summer 2004

When I first joined KBR at Bagram, there were a few employees from the Balkans area. These were folks whom KBR had employed on contracts in Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania during the Clinton campaign against Milosevic in the mid- to late-1990s. Those contracts were still ongoing at the start of Operation Enduring Freedom.

A few of the local national employees from the Balkans were brought over to work in Afghanistan. The early hires were test cases because after a few months there was an influx of employees from the Balkans. At about this same time, KBR started tightening up on its rules. People were constantly harassed and a few were sent home over silly rule violations that had been overlooked in the past. Most of the folks being fired were Americans. When an American quit or was fired, the replacement was nearly always a person from somewhere in the Balkans. If KBR could find a way to put a foreign national into the slot, that was the preference of the management team.