The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (33 page)

I asked what he had on his Kindle. “I’m in the last chapter of
The River War
, by Winston Churchill. That’s an account of an operation in the Sudan. Annie just gave me two:
Game Change
, the political story of the campaign, and the Edwards political memoir,” written by a former aide to John Edwards, about how he’d helped the former presidential candidate cover up an affair.

“Who’s going to write your biography?” I said. “Have you thought about how you’re going to be remembered in history?”

“No,” he said. “We joke about it, but I’ve never sat down and thought about it. I’m not sure thinking about what the sportswriters are going to
write about the game afterward makes you play better. And I can’t control it.”

Duncan jumped in. “You’re coming up on June 13; it’s going to be a year [you’ve been in command]. How would you grade yourself?”

A good question.

“Wow,” McChrystal said. “Thanks, Duncan, I thought you worked for me.

“I would grade the team very well,” McChrystal said. “I give us high marks for most of what we’ve done accumulatively. That said, that doesn’t predict the future necessarily. That doesn’t mean we won or are on the verge of winning.”

Did he believe in the great man theory of history?

“I read about Julius Caesar—and I’m not comparing any of us to Julius Caesar—but he was very fixated on the leadership aspect. We think of him as a tactician, but in reality, he had the ability to identify other leaders and make them effective.”

We’d been talking for thirty-five minutes. I only had a few minutes left. I stumbled forward with a question about the reality on the ground versus the reality in Washington—how, I felt, the reality of Washington often trumped what was actually happening in Afghanistan.

“It’s reality at every level. It goes back to the young soldier who is in position to accept risk or not. His reality is, it may or may not make sense to accept risk in a situation because it’s his personal risk. As you raise it multiple levels, it’s more strategic. America sends soldiers here knowing there was risk and making the decisions it was worth the risk. We didn’t decide to lose that particular soldier, but we knew there was the risk. What is a reality at one level, tactical, is very different at another level. It doesn’t make either wrong. The DC reality is informed by the politics there.”

And what did he think of DC politics?

“Politics are informative,” he deadpanned. “And sometimes entertaining.”

The interview was over—Duncan jumped in with a last question.

“What
Rolling Stone
really wants to know is how you put Dave Silverman in charge of so much,” Duncan said.

We shared a laugh.

“It makes great copy,” I said. “It’s like six chapters in my memoir already.”

We landed at the Kandahar Airfield. Known as KAF, it had the distinction of being the busiest airport in the world, with five thousand flights a week, transporting two hundred shipping containers a day. It stretched for ten miles, housed some thirty thousand personnel, and included a T.G.I. Friday’s knockoff and a floor hockey rink the Canadians built. One portion of the base was called the Boardwalk, a pavilion where soldiers could sit and drink lattes and get wireless access to the Internet.

Duncan and I got out of the plane—we weren’t here to stay. We grabbed our bags and ran to another helicopter that was waiting for us, splitting up from McChrystal and his team. We took off over the southern Afghanistan desert. Twenty minutes later, we touched down at Forward Operating Base Wilson.

FOB Wilson was originally a Canadian and Afghan base. The Afghans had lived in a dilapidated concrete building without electricity or phones. The Americans had revamped everything over the past year, putting Uncle Sugar’s stamp of approval on the base. It didn’t look much different from other FOBs I’d been at in Iraq or Afghanistan—military architecture had the unique ability to obliterate geography in the same way staying in one Holiday Inn was more or less the same as any other. Gravel, cement walls, rows of Porta-Johns, the rumbling of generators, tents with leaky air-conditioning, plywood huts constructed with nails sticking out, the wafting scents of raw sewage and chlorine, a mess hall reeking of cleaning fluids and cabbage. All had buildings where the tour guide, usually a low-ranking officer, would show you where a rocket landed just last week.

We were met by Lieutenant Colonel Reik Andersen, commander of
1st Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, or Task Force 1-12. He didn’t look thrilled to see us—a reporter and a guy from headquarters. He’d just had a negative experience with another journalist, he said,
Time
’s Joe Klein, and his relationship with Kabul had been rocky.

“We rolled out the red carpet for him,” Andersen said of Klein. “And he repaid us with a bad story.”

The story was about a soldier from Task Force 1-12 struggling to get a school built. I’d read it, thought it was a great story, and it seemed fair. But Klein had questioned McChrystal’s counterinsurgency strategy, later noting “the level of optimism emanating from General Stanley McChrystal’s headquarters stands in near delusional contrast to the situation in Kandahar.” The real problem for Andersen, though, wasn’t just the content of the story—it was who had read it. High-ranking figures in Washington, mainly, proving that both shit and bad publicity roll downhill. National Security Advisor Jim Jones personally called McChrystal after reading the story. McChrystal was in Paris at the time—he told me he wasn’t pleased with Klein, either. McChrystal passed the word to Andersen: You fucked up.

Duncan asked him when we could get out to the combat outpost JFM. That’s where Israel Arroyo was stationed.

“I don’t think it’s a very good idea to go out there,” Andersen said.

Andersen had deep lines under his eyes, a face like a well-worn canvas punching bag. It’d been a long tour, he explained. The latest death was Sergeant Michael Ingram Jr., and he handed me a printout sheet showing the pictures of the fifteen soldiers the battalion had lost during the tour. The
Time
magazine story wasn’t the first time he’d caught McChrystal’s attention. In fact, it was the third time Andersen had been reprimanded from Kabul—his unit had been involved in two high-profile civilian casualty incidents that got him chewed out. Then Arroyo sent the e-mail to McChrystal. When Andersen learned McChrystal was coming down to visit TF 1-12, he thought he was going to be fired. He didn’t get fired, but the message was clear: Get on board with counterinsurgency
and follow the rules of engagement. Andersen told me that he didn’t quite get the whole counterinsurgency thing—“I mean, we’re infantry, we’re knuckle-draggers, it’s not something we can just switch off overnight, you know,” he said. He said he didn’t quite understand the rules of engagement, either—but to be safe, he made it clear to his soldiers that they should rarely use force, which seemed to confuse everyone even more.

“No, we’d like to go,” Duncan said.

Andersen looked resigned to a thankless fate. Like he knew either decision he made would lead him to the same place: face-first into a shit-stained blast wall. Tell the headquarters guy to fuck off, and he risked the wrath of headquarters. Give Duncan what he wanted—and allow him to bring a reporter, shit—and he knew the result would almost certainly be bad, too.

“It’s pretty raw out there,” Andersen insisted. “You’re likely to get a lot of rants about how they don’t like rules of engagement.”

“Hey, Duncan, it’s cool with me if we just stay here,” I said. I knew the unit had just lost a soldier the week before. They had only a month left in their tours. I’d been in a similar situation in Baghdad a few years earlier. I figured they were going to be angry and depressed. I knew they wouldn’t welcome a reporter. I didn’t know if I wanted to see it—my story didn’t need it, I thought. I had the very antijournalist instinct of not wanting to immerse myself in someone else’s trauma. I did want to meet Israel Arroyo, but I’d be able to do that tomorrow, when McChrystal was scheduled to pay them a visit.

But Duncan wasn’t going to be deterred. “No, we’d like to get out there for the night.”

“Okay, whatever you want,” Andersen said.

We spent an hour or so hanging out at Andersen’s office. I stood under a concrete bunker smoking cigarettes. We walked over to Charlie Company’s headquarters—Charlie Company was in charge of JFM, and they were supposed to give us a ride over there.

The Charlie Company captain came out. He introduced himself as Duke Reim. We knew each other, sort of. He’d been a lieutenant in Iraq in the 172nd Stryker Brigade, a unit I’d spent a month embedded with in Baghdad in the summer of 2006. My photographer friend Lucian Read—who’d also been there in 2006—had just left Duke and his guys after another long embed. We laughed—it was a small war.

Charlie Company had three large MRAPs parked outside the headquarters tent. A dozen soldiers milled around, checking out Duncan and me. We didn’t pass the test.

I started bullshitting with one of the soldiers. I asked him if Israel Arroyo was out there.

He told me no.

“Arroyo left fucking today, man,” he said. “He had to escort another soldier back to Germany. That fucking guy had been going around saying he was going to kill an Afghan or kill a fucking interpreter. He was acting fucking nuts, so they let him go home. Arroyo went with him to make sure he didn’t do anything fucking stupid.”

Arroyo was gone. Very weird. He was the guy I wanted to see. I changed the subject.

“I’m sorry about Sergeant Ingram,” I said.

“He’s fucking Corporal Ingram to us,” the soldier answered. “Rank you get after you die don’t count.”

It was a point of pride, he said. Ingram wouldn’t want to be known as a sergeant.

I pulled opened the MRAP door. Pronounced
em-rap
, the Mine Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle entered the war to replace the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, or Humvee. The bombs got bigger, and the three thousand pounds of armor on the Humvee was too easily shredded. The MRAP, though, was about the worst kind of vehicle one could have imagined for the terrain in Afghanistan: mountainous, wadi-filled, and roadless. It was slow, easily got stuck in the mud, and required paved roads to be most effective. The entire country had only
one major highway. It also fell far short as the primary ride in a military campaign dedicated to swaying a local population. The twenty-two-ton vehicles were intimidating and loud and frightening and difficult to drive without regularly causing severe property damage. The MRAP underscored the alien nature of our presence. Add a life support system pumping oxygen into the metallic caverns and you might as well be cruising around in a tank on occupied Mars. Rather than project strength, the MRAP perversely sent another message: the complete fear and hatred the Americans had for the people they were supposedly there to protect. The MRAP was there to save us, not them. (It did so: There was an 80 percent better chance of surviving an attack in an MRAP compared to a Humvee.) The network of roads we were building in the country—the humanitarian projects of approximately 720 miles of asphalt over ten years, at the staggering cost of about $600,000 per mile—had a dual purpose in making it easier for us to drive around the country to kill the disgruntled peasants.

I climbed up in the MRAP, and Duncan squeezed in next to me. The door looked extremely heavy—the hatch on the tanklike MRAP weighed at least 120 pounds. There was a warning on the locking mechanism that said it could cause serious injury or death if you weren’t careful.

We were heading into a very intense situation. One soldier evacuated for going crazy, another killed ten days ago. Of the twenty-five original members of the platoon at JFM, only seven were still left—the rest had been killed, wounded, or lost their minds.

The MRAP door slammed shut.

APRIL 28–29, 2010, COMBAT OUTPOST JFM, ZHARI, AND KANDAHAR AIRFIELD

The twenty-two-ton MRAP bounced up and down along a narrow dirt road, crawling at a speed of around ten miles an hour. It was like riding in the back of a garbage truck.

I looked out the window. Combat Outpost JFM was only a few kilometers outside the wire from FOB Wilson. It was startling to see just how close the war was being fought to the large American base. JFM had seen some of the heaviest fighting so far—a NATO operation launched a few years earlier had killed hundreds of Taliban and dozens of NATO troops. What was left behind resembled the Biblical past or a postapocalyptic vision of a distant future, dust storms and gray clouds overhead, signs of colonization in splashes of gravel and barbed wire, Jawa-like figures making strange sounds scavenging about the rubble, every few miles marked with a handful of armed men huddled for survival in cold stone bunkers.

The outpost appeared before us, a concrete citadel, a moat of Hesco barriers filled with dirt and blast walls. A soldier swung open the gates. We moved down the driveway, passing a pit of burning trash, smoldering with black smoke and ash. It was getting close to dusk.