We had the Watches. They had the Time: A Witness Account of the War in Afghanistan 3031413032, 9783031413032

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RENEWING THE AMERICAN NARRATIVE

We had the Watches. They had the Time A Witness Account of the War in Afghanistan Carol Burke

Renewing the American Narrative

Series Editor

Sam B. Girgus Nashville, TN, USA

​ his series calls for new visions, voices, and ideas in telling the American T story through a focus on the creative energies and generative powers of the American narrative. As opposed to assuming a fixed, inherited narrative for the total American experience, this series argues that American history has been a story of inclusion and conflict, renewal and regression, revision and reversion. It examines the values, tensions, and structures of the American Idea that motivate and compel rethinking and revising the American narrative. It stresses inclusion of so-called “others” – the marginalized, the unseen, and the unheard. Rather than simply repeating the slogans of the past, the series assumes the American story demands and dramatizes renewal by engaging the questions, crises, and challenges to the American story itself and to the democratic institutions that cultivate and propagate it.

Carol Burke

We had the Watches. They had the Time A Witness Account of the War in Afghanistan

Carol Burke School of Humanities University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA, USA

ISSN 2524-8332     ISSN 2524-8340 (electronic) Renewing the American Narrative ISBN 978-3-031-41303-2    ISBN 978-3-031-41304-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Credit line: laurentiu iordache / Alamy Stock Photo This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Carol Burke. (Photo credit: Ebrahim Safi)

The opinions expressed in this book are my own and not the opinions of the US Army or the University of California, Irvine In Memory of Staff Sgt Scott Burgess Staff Sgt Michael Lammerts Joakim Dungle Joakim Dungle, a human rights lawyer with the UN team stationed in Mazar-i-­Sharif, was killed on April 1, 2011. Staff Sgts Scott Burgess and Michael Lammerts, both serving the 1st Battalion, 84th Field Artillery Unit, 170th Infantry Combat Team, died three days later while guarding their commander, who was meeting with the leader of the Border Police in Maymana, Afghanistan.

Dedicated to my team: Aziz, Marc, Sam, & Spiker

Other Books by Carol Burke

Camp All-American, Hanoi Jane, and the High-and-Tight: Gender, Folklore, and Changing Military Culture Vision Narratives of Women in Prison The Creative Process (with Molly Tinsley) Plain Talk Back in Those Days (with Martin Light)

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Acknowledgments

I had written about militaries and war for twenty years before I embedded with troops during the Iraq War and later with two U.S. Army combat units as a cultural advisor in Afghanistan. Those experiences were different. In Iraq, I was there to observe, and to do that I’d go outside the wire with any unit that would take me. In Afghanistan, I worked for the U.S. Army and directed my fieldwork to answer the questions commanders had about the Afghans who lived and worked in the areas their units occupied. Before I deployed to Afghanistan, I enrolled in language instruction. Then I went through four months of Army training, followed by ten months of deployment. Only in Afghanistan did I learn what it meant to be part of a team. My team members taught me that. They are the ones I owe the greatest debt. I am grateful to all who were willing to comment on their lives downrange. I saw the ways they personalized their Spartan living quarters, listened to the jokes they told, joined them in the call shack as we all strove to keep relations back home from deteriorating, exchanged greetings with the night shift on their way to their bunks as I made my way to breakfast, joined the memorial services for fellow soldiers, and watched how some of these fellow travelers tried to raise the spirits of others. I am grateful to have been welcomed into their communities on large bases with fast food joints and on small outposts in hostile territory. The officers I worked with and for offered me valuable insights and showed their appreciation for the fieldwork my team conducted. A special thanks to Lt Gen Bill Burleson, Lt Gen Patrick Matlock, and Col Kyle Marsh. xiii

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When I returned from Afghanistan, it was at first difficult to make sense of my year away, let alone write about it. Three opportunities, however, allowed me to step back and gain some perspective on what I had experienced. A year after returning to my faculty position, I was invited to direct Humanities Core, a year-long lecture course, and companion writing seminars dedicated to a specific topic. Although I was keen to lecture on war, I wasn’t certain that I could find eight other colleagues in the School of Humanities willing to commit to the topic. I soon discovered that I had sold my colleagues short. These fellow faculty joined me not just for one year of the course on war but for three, and from them I learned a great deal. I wish to express my appreciation to the faculty who contributed their expertise on the history, literature, and cinema of war: George Van Den Abbeele, Jane Newman, Oren Izenberg, Rodrigo Lazo, Michael Szalay, Alice Fahs, Jim Herbert, and Gail Hart. The Humanities Core Writing Director, Larisa Castillo, masterfully invented a writing curriculum and coordinated the writing seminars taught by tenured faculty, lecturers, and advanced graduate students. We were a battalion-size force, learning from each other, and determined to make some sense of our complex topic. At the same time, I also had the opportunity to become part of a yearlong faculty colloquium in which we discussed the work of other scholars on war and presented for each other’s critiques our own work in progress. Art Historian Cecile Whiting was a member of that colloquium, and at the end of the year the two of us sought a grant from the Mellon Foundation to focus on Documenting War. Mellon’s generous funding allowed us to teach undergraduate and graduate courses on the topic, invite guest speakers, mount exhibitions, sponsor the research of graduate students, and award a post-doc fellowship. A Fulbright Fellowship in 2019 took me to India. Since the American efforts at counterinsurgency in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan did not lead to victory, I thought that the U.S. Army might have something to learn from the Indian Army, a force well-seasoned in the art of counterinsurgency. I am grateful to the United Service Institution of India, a defense think tank that hosted me during this fellowship. I wish to extend special thanks to USI Director Maj Gen B.K. Sharma (Retd), Dr. Roshan Khanijo, Lt Gen G.S. Katoch (Retd), Brig Narander Kumar (Retd), Maj Gen Ian Cardozo (Retd), and Gaurav Kumar. I owe a great debt to Jerome Christensen and Elaine Lawless, scholars who generously read several chapters of this book and offered helpful

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suggestions. My thanks also to Sam Girgus who invited me to join this Palgrave Macmillan series. Thanks also to the editors at Palgrave Macmillan, especially Camille Davies and Esther Rani who were extremely helpful in shepherding this project from manuscript into book. I am grateful, too, for the encouragement and support of the fitthough-few fellow folklorists interested in military culture: Lydia Fish, Bruce Jackson, Linda Pershing, Tad Tuleja, Eric Eliason, and Rick Burns. The fieldwork and the writing of this book have taken more than ten years, and I could not have done it without friends and colleagues who stuck with me even when they viewed my journeys to combat zones as somewhat bizarre. I wish to thank Ellen Burt, Victoria Silver, Laura O’Connor, Michelle Latiolais, Irene Tucker, Jayne Lewis, Jami Bartlett, Erika Hayaski, Rodrigo Lazo, Nancy St. Claire, and R. Radhakrishnan. A very special thanks to my daughters Kate and Elizabeth and my sister, Joan, who kept me moored during deployments. They sent their love to Afghanistan in their warm emails, in a box of two dozen chocolate-covered coconut macaroons, my favorites, and in a bigger box of Lunar New Year decorations from Los Angeles’ Chinatown. When I hung all the red and gold lanterns, all the tassels, and all the bright happiness flowers, my side of the room looked as glittery as an Afghan jingle truck!

Contents

1 Introduction  1 2 Training for COIN (Counterinsurgency)  7 3 What We Leave Behind and What We Take to War 29 4 Going Downrange 51 5 Going Way Downrange 65 6 Band of Brothers and Sisters 95 7 Women On and Off the FOB107 8 Sex on the FOB123 9 Under Western Eyes145 10 Who Tells Stories On Deployment?161 11 The Burning of a Quran175

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12 Coming Home187 13 Afterward: Looking Back201 References215 Index221

Abbreviations

AIHRC ANP ANA AO COP CRC D-FAC FET FOB GIRoA ISAF IED KLE MRAP PRT Psyops RIPTOA SIGAR UNAMA

Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission Afghan National Police Afghan National Army area of operation command outpost Continental US Replacement Center or CONUS Replacement Center dining facility female engagement team forward operating base Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan International Security Assistance Force improvised explosive device key leader engagement mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle provisional reconstruction team Psychological Operations relief in place/transfer of authority, also “right seat/left seat” During a RIPTOA, the personnel of the incoming and outgoing units overlap Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The stories about any war, any phase of a war, even any single event in a war reflect their tellers’ temporal and geographic proximity to the events and are influenced by the actors they choose to feature in the drama: the governing bodies who launch a war, the generals and admirals who give the orders, those boots on the ground who carry them out, or the combatants and noncombatants upon whose soil the war is fought. Tellers bring to their telling their personal attitudes toward the war: whether they see the war as just or unjust and whether they are open to changing attitudes if evidence points to the contrary. Western philosophers and legal scholars have grappled with the determination of the justice of wars since the early Christian theologians Augustine and Aquinas first argued that although Christianity forbids the killing of ones’ fellows, killing can be justified when a set of conditions are met: other forms of conflict resolution have been tried and failed, the war is undertaken for a just cause (e.g. to fend off an attack) by an appropriate authority, there is a reasonable possibility of success, and peace is the ultimate goal. An even earlier text, the Hindu epic The Mahabharata describes a similar set of conditions. Just war theory today is generally applied to defend going to war. It implies that if the cause is just and the war proportionate to the threat, civilians protected, and any prisoners well treated, then that war can be

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_1

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considered just. The problem is that war is not static and can morph over time from one type of war into another. Although the reason for going to war may be just (jus ad bellum), conduct within war (jus in bello) may be unjust. An important concept in just war theory is proportionality. Indiscriminate bombings of cities, for example, that target combatants and noncombatants alike are considered a violation of just war. Captives are noncombatants and must be well treated, a concept clearly stated in the 1949 Geneva Convention.  Recent wars, however, have served up ample examples of the unjust treatment of prisoners of war.  And  how much unjust conduct calls into question the ultimate justice of a war? Furthermore, tellers of war stories often speak or write about what they know and from what side of the conflict they come. Certainly an American colonist fighting for freedom from British control would write a different story about the Revolutionary War than a British officer, far from home trying to put down what he believes to be an insurgency threatening to destabilize a legitimate government—his British monarchy. In writing an account of a war that took place in the distant past, writers have the official records and, if they are lucky, the personal reflections of participants or chroniclers, noting what these participants and witnesses saw and heard at the time or upon reflection. In deciding how to read the preserved documents of war, writers must always ask what has, in fact, been preserved. By whom? And why? Whose perspectives do they document? Whose do they omit? Understandings of conflicts change over time. New documents appear and individual recollections fade, replaced often by collective narratives. In representing war, a writer can focus on the part or the whole. Those who examine a small piece of a war, often concentrate on a single battle, a single unit, a single scandal, or, in my case, a single year in a two-decade war. The historians and political scientists who examine the whole consider its political and economic causes, the strategies that determined the victors, and the changes a war made to the world or to a part of it. In recent American wars, we can easily see how the geographic proximity of the participants affects their experience of a war. On another level, consider the experience of two groups of pilots operating in a war: those who fly fighter jets and those who pilot drones. Fighter pilots, called to provide air support for ground troops engaging with insurgents, watch their digital screens from inside their cockpits and look out at the vast stretch of landscape. Drone pilots, on the other hand, drive from their homes to a base, where, from a cubicle, they prepare for

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and carry out targeted killings. They keep those they target under surveillance often for weeks, studying the habits of their prey and focusing on the fine detail of all who come and go. Former Air Force drone pilot Brandon Bryant describes it this way: I felt like a pervert a lot of the time. I am sitting in this cold, dark bunker, an air-conditioned steel box, in the middle of the Nevada or New Mexico desert, watching people live their lives out, while I’m behind a computer screen like the f**king Matrix. I had no life of my own. (Mitchell)

After delivering their deadly payload, drone pilots often circle back to ensure that the desired target was hit and to report any collaterals taken out in the operation. The fighter pilot flies a more “dangerous” mission, but the drone pilot comes visually much closer to the bloody reality of war. This explains, I believe, why drone pilots have such elevated rates of job-­ related psychiatric symptoms. They not only drop their bomb, but they see in fine detail its destructive power. Fighter pilots take the long shots; drone pilots the close-ups. Consider, too, the intelligence soldiers and civilians who sit in front of multiple computer screens twelve hours a day and never leave a headquarters base except for rest and recuperation (R&R), or the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team members who know the danger they face in diffusing an improvised explosive device (IED) along a rural road, or the Army medics and the Marine corpsmen who tend to the wounded until they can be medevac’d to a field hospital or on to Germany if the injury is serious enough. Although all of these groups share a general mission, their views of the war are radically different, as if they inhabit different wars. Journalists, who go to war to describe it for those who don’t go, have more choice about proximity than members of the military. They can report from secure areas or from volatile ones, locations the Army calls “kinetic.” In our last two wars, some reporters arranged to embed with frontline forces or found a driver who would take them close to the action while others reported from the relative safety of Kabul or from Baghdad’s Green Zone. While awaiting a helicopter ride to the unit I was to embed with, I spent Christmas day and two other long and eerie days in the Baghdad compound for journalists, the dark basement of a parking garage with a line of small white trailers located inside the well-fortified and heavily monitored Green Zone, Baghdad’s ten square kilometers of palaces and government buildings, surrounded by concrete walls and secured by

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US troops. To write about the war from a safe press haven like this one, a journalist must rely for the meat of her stories on the frequent military press releases written by unit public affairs officers, scattered on bases throughout the country, reporting the news they want to share with the world. On the other hand, reporters who venture out into the thick of the war can see for themselves as long as they find a unit willing to take them off-­ base on a routine patrol or a planned mission. They face a different problem from those who never venture far from safety. Can they be sure that their narrowed focus on a single incident with a single unit isn’t simply an idiosyncratic glimpse of the war? Their concern, however, is less about whether the truth they report says something about the whole; their job is to deliver on a tight deadline a story of the war that readers of their dailies or their weeklies will eagerly consume. Journalists, historians, sociologists, political scientists, even folklorists and ethnographers like myself write about war, and as we engage in our tasks of research and writing, the questions we ask are informed by our training. Some of us do fieldwork while embedded with combat forces. Some conduct interviews back in the States. Others rely on reports issued by national and international groups, including nongovernmental agencies. Some of us work in the weeds; others rise above the fray to take the long view. I focus on the former, investigating how our own forces spend their time in deployment, how they interact with those they perceive to be friendly and those they regard as hostile, and how, in some instances, it can be hard to make such distinctions. All writers bring to any topic their personal interests, their previous experiences, their attitudes, even their prejudices. Those of us who get close to those we write about, sharing sleeping quarters, sharing meals, sharing close calls, even performing tasks for the group, know that pure objectivity is elusive. In my career, whether I’ve been collecting the stories of Midwestern farmers, inmates in maximum security prisons, or members of the armed services, I’ve welcomed opportunities to get to know as individuals those with whom I interacted. In this book about the War in Afghanistan, I’ve traded the arm’s length view, grounded in historical accounts and interviews with participants for the intimacy of living and working with troops on FOBs, on remote command outposts, and on missions off-base into sometimes calm, sometimes hostile territory. With that proximity, I have tried to tell the story of what played out before me along with the cultural contexts of those I observed. I readily acknowledge that

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every account, every story about a war or a single event in that war is an interpretation, and every interpretation a simplification. I believe that there is no single truth about a war, but there are many honest ways of describing it, and I have tried to follow one of those paths in this first-­ person description of what I witnessed and participated in. I have observed life in deployment, listened to what others shared with me, on and off-­ base, and offered cultural context to what I saw and heard. No stranger to military institutions, I taught for six years and received tenure at the US Naval Academy before accepting a position at Johns Hopkins University, where I continued my research on military culture. Over the years, I have conducted research on military culture in America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, England, India, and while embedded with the US Army in Iraq and Afghanistan. In addition to research in scholarly collections, I have also gathered ethnographic information from observations and interviews at military bases throughout the United States and abroad. I serve as the Director of the Military Culture Archive, a collection of personal recollections and memorabilia contributed by veterans. Throughout my scholarly career, I have written about military culture, both its official traditions and its unofficial folk customs.  I have written about the power of military culture to transform the citizen into the soldier, to define insiders from outsiders, and to instill a class structure in a rigidly controlled hierarchical institution. I have written about the ways in which cultural assumptions and practices in the military have historically retarded change, particularly when it came to welcoming women in the ranks. For the past decade and a half, my writing has examined the experiences of members of our all-volunteer military, particularly those “boots on the ground” who have been sent on repeated deployments to wage wars of counterinsurgency. In 2008, I embedded with the 10th Mountain’s 3rd Brigade in northern Iraq to write about the US Army’s use of cultural advisors. In 2010–2011, I took a leave from the University of California, Irvine to serve as a cultural advisor to two US Army combat units (the 10th Mountain’s 1st Brigade and the 170th Infantry Brigade) in Afghanistan. In this book, I examine the ways in which culture complicates counterinsurgency, both the military culture that troops bring with them and the cultures they encounter when they leave their bases and engage with the population in an area in which insurgents vie for control. The book opens with the Army’s four-month training program for cultural advisors, my pre-deployment preparations, and my travels downrange to arrive at the beginning of an Afghan winter. I write not only about the routine life on

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a secure headquarters base but also about the Spartan and unpredictable life on a rustic, remote combat outpost in the middle of an insurgent-­ controlled district from which I ventured “outside the wire” to interview local farmers and merchants trying to survive and to provide for their families’ survival in the middle of a multi-year drought and a decades-­ long war. I examine the relation between the sacred and the profane in war and about the deaths of two sergeants in my unit who often protected me when I went into harm’s way, deaths that would not have taken place had not an American evangelical pastor video-taped his burning of a Quran. I write about the ease with which technicians manning surveillance devices in hostile areas can misinterpret what they see because their training has included little about Afghan culture. The book’s last formal chapter examines my own return from war, subsequent PTSD, and the power of narrative to suture the memory of an event with the emotions it produced, emotions that at the time were bracketed by the numbness that allows one to soldier on.

CHAPTER 2

Training for COIN (Counterinsurgency)

“In the Army, there are both meat eaters and plant eaters. You are the plant eaters,” Captain Chris explains to an audience of trainees. Those who complete this four-month training program will form small teams of cultural advisors to embed for a year with either an Army brigade in Iraq or one in Afghanistan. On the one hand, Captain Chris knows that it’s nearly impossible to describe life on a FOB to the few civilians in his audience who have never lived it. On the other hand, he knows that anything he might say to the larger group of veterans, many who outrank him and several who have lived far more of the downrange dark and dirty than he has, will ring as cliché. So he opts for the clichés and directs his comments to the neophytes. “You’re not about the red [bad guys]; you’re about the green [civilians].” With a dose of the disgruntled and the disinterested, this slightly disheveled, cynical young officer is clearly marking the days till he can leave his current assignment. He’s speaking to the three dozen of us in a basement classroom in a large brick building that in its heyday housed thriving retail businesses but now is home to a few low-inventory shops and the Tampico Mexican restaurant that seems to serve only a few patrons, no matter the time of day. The rent for classroom space in downtown Leavenworth is probably the only thing that’s cheap about this four-month training program. Although the Army is footing the bill for lodging in extended-stay hotels © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_2

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and rental cars for all trainees, British Aerospace Systems (BAE) is the contractor hired to manage the program. Formed in 1999 in a merger of British Aerospace and a subsidy of General Electric, within a few years BAE expanded into one of the largest international defense contractors. It’s baffling to think that a defense contractor developing Typhoon aircraft for the Royal Saudi Air Force, new products of cyber-warfare, and “cutting-edge autonomous platforms that will shape the air, land and sea markets in the future,” could lend any expertise to the cultural understanding of Iraqi and Afghan civilians whom the coalition forces have committed to protect and whom we have come here to learn more about. A glossy 16-page BAE brochure we receive on the first day offers little clarity. It opens with a statement by Chief Executive Ian King characterizing his corporation as one “with an absolute commitment to Total Performance.” How can a commitment to “total performance” distinguish this corporation from any other? What company would ever commit to “partial performance” I wonder. But maybe Chief Executive King, or the PR firm he hired to generate the company puff, should have used the word “dominance.” “Performance” suggests efficiency and productivity, whereas “dominance” describes a corporation aspiring to lift its status among the top ten defense contractors, maybe muscling out one of the old reliables like Northrop Grumman, General Dynamics, Raytheon, Boeing, or Lockheed Martin by broadening its focus from hardware and technology to “the human terrain,” from the meat eaters to the plant eaters. It is a little confusing initially to those of us without defense contractor backgrounds to understand how the corporate and the military mesh, but Mark, the BAE representative in his late thirties who manages this training program, makes it clear. He puts his corporate spin on our task by explaining how to win friends and influence commanders. Like those selling the machines of war to various defense departments, we, in our small ways, will “sell” what we learn of the culture and history of our small slice of the war zone to our commanders. Mark doesn’t stress courage in the face of danger or the ethical waters that some of us may find ourselves having to navigate. No, armed with a bachelor’s degree from Iowa State, an online MBA from the University of Phoenix, and a license in real estate sales, Mark speaks with the confidence that he represents one of the giants in the military—industrial complex that Eisenhower warned about in his final address to the nation. He explains that although every brigade has a different character, we must regard the one we join as our “customer” and “sell them products

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that they can use.” And we learn, too, that a good product (e.g. an informative report, a new insight, or a smart analysis) is not enough. “It’s all about the way you package your product,” according to this BAE representative. By packaging, he doesn’t mean the format in which we write; he’s referring to the corporate diplomacy we display in the delivery: “Practice a smile and a nod in front of the mirror. Be flexible, semper gumby. Have your elevator speech ready.” Particularly irritating are the comparisons between trainees and his fourteen-year-old daughter. He cautions us not to be like his daughter, who occasionally neglects her homework. In stressing the importance of security, he says, “Don’t be my 14 year old by putting all the information you receive on Facebook.” This doesn’t seem to irk the retired senior officers and enlisted in our group who merely sit quietly, having learned in their military careers to ignore the patronizing attitudes of the insecure. He reminds us, “Always be on time for things because you always represent the company to the customer.” When Mark declares one local bar as off-limits because a previous class of trainees got into an altercation with the locals, it’s the first place people head for a beer at the end of the day’s instruction. The corporate fliers we’re given stress BAE’s commitment “to delighting our customers with services and solutions of the highest quality.” To further that goal, BAE invites us to communicate our suggestions for improvement through their “whosyourpal” site. I resist the inclination to go on line and recommend that BAE change the name of this site. Sounds more like an invitation to the forlorn and the friendless than a place to leave notes of constructive criticism. And there’s always the chance that someone, somewhere has the job of collecting the names and addresses of the “un-pal-like” in the organization. I assume that after these four months we will be reporting on what we see and hear and speculating on its significance, but BAE speaks the only language it knows and tells us that when we deploy, we will be engaged in what the Army, after the latest fashion in bizspeak, calls “knowledge management” and “business intelligence.” In this “business of war,” as Halliburton might fondly call logistical and tactical support, we will be expected to produce digital “products” for commanders with colorful graphs that streamline trends that will augment the brigade’s efforts at “knowledge continuity” and “system interoperability that will make sense out of data so that the data can be mined for knowledge discovery.” For someone like me, unfamiliar with corporate lingo, that sounds a little

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fuzzy. Does it imply a marketer’s strategy to package data into products that are pushed across platforms until everyone is finally convinced to buy­in and mount-up? What does become clear, though, in these early briefings is that before we can share our understanding of the culture of the Afghans or Iraqis, we must first adapt not just to military culture but to the “customer-focused” corporate culture to which the Army has outsourced this training. We are quickly disabused of the notion that we might be speaking truth to power, unless public relations qualifies. Our task, we learn, is to practice the social skills necessary to move from outsider to insider, from tag-along unit to teams whose opinion and services are sought. We have to be willing to practice what the midshipmen I taught at the Naval Academy called “smack” or ass-kissing. “Never, never,” another briefer emphasizes, “quash a scheme that your commander has championed,” and always “work to strengthen the prestige of your leader.” Retired Army Ranger and BAE employee John explains that the military is trained to look at everything “through camouflage lens.” “When I had on the uniform, I thought everybody was a bad guy until he showed me that he wasn’t. After I took off the uniform, I started to see people differently.” He and others remind us that we must continually demonstrate our utility by collecting information of use to the command and by keeping in mind the fact that every time we strap ourselves into one of the six-ton mine-­ resistant vehicles (MRAPS), some made by BAE, and leave the base, we are taking the seat of a “trigger-puller.” And like BAE Mark’s rhetoric, Ranger John’s is also dipped in corporate-speak. “You need to pay the bill and make yourself relevant to the customer,” he says, although why the seller must pay the bill of the customer in order to be relevant is a question that might baffle even a marketer with the gladdest hands in the business. He tells us that our written and oral communication must be clear and to the point. “If you cannot collect and present information to your customer, from the private to the general, you’re of no use to us.” Although the corporate-speak seems gratuitous, the message is a sensible, if familiar, one—remember your audience. We are told to jot down everything we witness because “a short pencil is better than a long memory,” write in short sentences and short paragraphs, start with the “BLUF” (Bottom Line Up Front), and practice the “three B’s: be brief, be brilliant, be gone” in all reports and in all PowerPoint presentations. Championed by the “PowerPoint Rangers,” PowerPoint briefings have been enthusiastically embraced by the Army. As standard now as daily

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weather reports, they have become the preferred way of communicating up and down the chain of command. Yet enthusiasm is not universal. While reporting on the Iraq War in 2008, I purchased a “Death by PowerPoint” patch at a small shop on an American base. Generals McMaster and Mattis have been outspoken critics of PowerPoint presentations, arguing that these snazzy show-and-tells can be mind-numbingly dull, look polished while belaboring the obvious, and obscure a complex situation or set of problems with a gauzy veil of simplicity. In response, the Army has introduced “storyboarding.” Army storyboards typically pack more information (images, text, maps, even videos) onto a single slide or a short sequence of slides. A form of storytelling invented by Disney, a storyboard employed in filmmaking today offers the director of photography or the camera operator a quick guide to a series of shots, each indicating the kind of shot and how to frame it. In filmmaking, the production of a storyboard is preliminary to shooting, and the person constructing the storyboard knows the narrative the film will take. In war, contingencies can complicate plans for the future, contingencies that are difficult to represent in a single slide with text and imagery. Thus, the storyboard is often used to report what has already taken place: the movements of enemy forces in the past weeks, months, or years, the incidences of IEDs on a given route, even a botched encounter with the enemy. In his discussion of the latter, Army storyboard designer Peter Molin outlines how a single slide, a storyboard, can become the official reconstruction of what took place: Imagine a one-page powerpoint slide packed with as much relevant information as possible. All white space disappears as maps, pictures, text boxes, graphic symbols, timelines, diagrams, and analysis are compressed into one relatively easy to comprehend slide. The completed storyboard then constitutes the de facto official record of the event. Longer reports may get written, but probably not—there’s just not enough time, and events pile up rapidly.

The battle rhythm of a unit in a highly kinetic area moves swiftly from incident to incident with little time for reflection. The lessons learned will be either sorted out at headquarters or taken up when the unit returns home, but probably not, so the storyboard format is a natural. Reductive and ideally designed for the summary, the storyboard purports to show the whole all at once, affording no space for alternative interpretations.

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The storyboard is just part of the Army’s embrace of new media. In its venture to attract new recruits, it developed an online video game. It fashioned gaming platforms as trainers, and with the University of Southern California and the entertainment industry, it built the Institute for Creative Technologies in Los Angeles, an impressive research center that specializes in virtual reality. Media critic Robert Stahl, who coined the term “militainment,” looks at the flow of military ideas in one direction, from the Pentagon to popular culture. Equally important is what Stahl doesn’t consider—how popular culture is changing the way we wage war. In the late 1990s, when I was interviewing the scientists and engineers who were designing the devices that future soldiers might carry or wear, I visited the US Army Soldier System Center in Nadick, MA. The design team responsible for their “Future Warrior” uniform admitted that they had designed it in a rush. They had nothing impressive to display at an upcoming trade show, so they asked a temporary employee, hired to help with computing needs and known to be an avid sci-fi fan, for suggestions. Pressed for time, they went with the drawings he had produced, and the generals loved them. From sci-fi to R&D, the Future Warrior program enjoyed years of funding to enable them to attempt to operationalize snazzy devices imagined for TV and motion pictures. Scientists at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory once received funding for a “beam me up Scottie” metal badge inspired by the popular television show, Star Trek. Although medical devices for amputees and disabled veterans have seen impressive advances since World War II (WWII), the development of motorized exoskeletons got a boost when the Alien films of the 1980s showed the amazing power that Sigourney Weaver could muster when she put one on. Like another Sigourney Weaver character, Grace in James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, I am booked to travel with a military unit to a foreign culture in some part of Afghanistan. Although I won’t be lulled into cryosleep, made ten feet tall, given brilliant blue skin, and transported to verdant Pandora, I will enter this world with a military unit in a war fueled by corporate interest, specifically building pipelines to transport oil and natural gas from the west to the east. In the 1990s, American oil giant Unocal, along with Iraq and the Soviet Union, vied for the right to build the new Silk Road that would transport energy to Asia. The corporate interests still haunt this war in the form of contractors who immediately profit through hefty military contracts and those who hope to harvest the valuable minerals yet to be claimed. But my job is much more narrowly defined. I will

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simply have to apply the ethnographic methods I have used during my scholarly career and the linguistic skills I have practiced in order to document as accurately as possible the local concerns of those living in a particular region. I will then seek to report on those issues to the military commander and attempt to situate them within the context of the region’s history, social structure, and current economic and political constraints. I suspect that after 30 years of war in which central control has weakened, tribal alliances will have become more crucial to settling disputes and maintaining order. I fear that without buy-in from the local tribal leaders, it is likely that America will conclude its war in Afghanistan, like the British and the Soviets before us, with little to show from our expenditure of lives and tax-payer dollars. In our training program, we sit through long days of briefings, some so tedious that half the class is standing in the back of the room (military protocol to avoid nodding off at your seat), but then thankfully an instructor comes along with a little humor. He tells us how not to behave on a forward operating base, a “FOB.” He warns us about the “shower princess,” a male or female who takes showers that last more than the regulation two-minute combat showers (take one minute to get wet, turn off the water and soap up, then one minute to rinse off) and “Capt Studly Hung Well” with nothing better to do than look hot. To illustrate those who breach the norm and stand out in the cultural world of the base, he shows slides from the cartoons of Staff Sgt A.J.  Merrifield, who drew his first cartoon of life on the FOB while serving in Iraq in 2005. Merrifield’s unit called itself “Task Force Band of Brothers” or Task Force B.O.B. for short, and he began a series of “Bob on the Fob” characters who were recognizable to those serving on almost every large base. The first was a “fobbit,” a soldier who will never go outside the wire and spends his days behind a computer screen, sending emails, playing computer games, and working on powerpoints. His “Geardo” cartoon pictures a soldier arrayed to the hilt in the latest gear he’s ordered from military supply catalogues: $180 delta sunglasses, high-speed boots supposedly worn by Army Rangers, a collapsible baton he has no use for, a s.a.w. pouch in case he is ever given a squad automatic weapon (s.a.w.) to carry, even special ops underwear. Merrifield’s “Good Idea Fairy” features a soldier with butterfly wings whispering good ideas into the ear of another officer or NCO. A “TOC Roach” is a desk jockey in the tactical operations center (the TOC) who scarfs up any food left out before others have a chance to sample it and takes the last cup of coffee without making more.

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The gentle mockery of these images is aimed at those who do the Army’s desk jobs and service a large base while rarely venturing outside the wire. Whether career officers or civilians who have only seen the army operate in the movies, all members of our training group sit through Army 101, a series of lectures whose major focus is on the Military Decision Making Process (the MDMP), an analytical planning tool that involves input from all or most of the staff divisions. Many of the retired officers in the audience could themselves teach the course; in fact, Juan, the retired lieutenant colonel I sit next to, explains during our break that when he assumed a billet at the Pentagon, one of his assignments was to teach the then Vice President Al Gore the MDMP. Its virtues include standardization, with the officers in every command trained in the same system, the consideration of multiple solutions, and for each course of action, each “coa,” the anticipation of second- and third-order effects. In practice, the MDMP is best implemented when there is adequate time for all units to contribute. In hostile areas, where decisions must be made quickly, the MDMP can seem wooden and inhibiting, a system that fetishizes form over function. At the end of the lectures, the instructor gives each team two different coa’s and asks us to “wargame” them: (a) to speculate about how each staff, from personnel to intelligence to operations to civil affairs, might need to be involved; and (b) to discuss possible secondary and tertiary effects. For the retired colonels and lieutenant colonels in this four-month training program, military culture is second nature. They plan to serve as team leaders and liaise with the brass. In briefings I always sit next to Juan, a former tank commander in Desert Storm, and Stu, a retired Marine who now makes his living as a permanent military contractor deploying to all parts of the globe. When an instructor lards his sentences with military speak, one acronym after another, I jot a note to either Juan or Stu requesting a translation and am sent back a note with the explanation. A few of the former enlisted troops among us, most sergeants, are eager to return to a life in deployment that seems more normal than the “dwell time” they’ve spent at home between deployments. Others have found no way of transforming their warrior skills into meaningful civilian jobs, and, with families to support, they consider this an opportunity to make a lot more than they can at their current jobs in this sour economy. Civilians, who make up about a quarter of this training class include those whose first languages were Arabic, Persian, Dari, or Pashto; fresh college grads with degrees in political science, international relations, and

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anthropology hoping to land an eventual post in the State Department, the CIA, or with one of the big military contractors; and the rare academic like me who has taken a leave without pay from my university to be of use and to learn more about how the Army understands the cultures of those who live in the lands they occupy. Will is one of the more interesting young civilians. After college, he volunteered on John McCain’s presidential campaign and became so smitten with the process that he decided to run in his home state’s congressional race. The defeats, both Will’s and McCain’s, left him undaunted. Still fresh-faced, eager, and filled with an overabundance of confidence that sometimes only the inexperienced can muster, Will can be counted on to join any discussion and raise questions while the rest of us down our flasks of coffee trying to stay awake during the daily lectures. Over beers after class one day a few of us talk about whether teams are jelling or not, and one classmate expresses his frustration at Will’s know-it-all attitude. There’s not a subject that Will doesn’t feel qualified to speak about. But one of the team leaders, a chill, no-sweat retired lieutenant colonel, says, “What Will needs is to punch someone in the face, someone who really deserves it.” Not much chance of that happening since of all the male and female members of the class, Will is the slightest trainee of the lot. Our roles on small teams of five or six are prescribed. Downrange, a team leader, typically a retired colonel or lieutenant colonel, will engage with the brigade staff and appear at the commander’s daily briefs and other meetings at headquarters. The social scientist, my perspective role, will design the fieldwork projects, go on missions in local areas, some welcoming, some potentially hostile, and oversee any reports generated by the team. The research manager, a veteran with previous deployment to a combat zone, will serve as the IT specialist on the team and sometimes join the fieldwork team on missions. The others, those like Will, will serve as analysts who conduct background research and go out on missions with the social scientist. To practice our various roles, we frequently fan out in the Leavenworth area to observe and interview the locals willing to speak with a small group of Army trainees. Overall, it appears that our training is designed to: (a) identify those who aren’t up to the task, (b) introduce the military way of thinking to the civilians and the civilian way of taking the cultural bearings of a population to any who haven’t done it before, and (c) rehearse what will be required on deployment. We train as teams, are continually evaluated by other teammates, and look out for one another. We understand that at any point

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in the training, we can be asked to leave for performance that is deemed unprofessional, for a security clearance denied, or for behavior that lets down the team. “If you don’t know teamwork, you won’t make it,” says one of our briefers, a retired colonel who has served in Afghanistan as a team leader before and returned to help with the training of new teams. When many in the Army talk about teamwork, they highlight research done by psychologist Bruce Tuckman, a pioneer in group dynamics. In 1965, Tuckman identified four stages a group can pass through as it develops into a productive team. In a small group’s initial phase, one Tuckman calls “forming,” team members get to know one another and what will be asked of them. Then many groups pass through a stage he calls “storming” in which differences and conflicts appear before passing on to “norming,” a stage in which differences are either resolved or set aside so that the team can begin to work collaboratively. Initially, “performing,” a stage in which the group is highly productive, was the desired state, but later Tuckman added a fifth, “mourning” to mark the final phases in which individuals begin to leave their group. We are given examples of teams that have imploded because of rifts between the team leader and the social scientist. These differences have a striking gender component: older male team leader and younger female social scientist. I take note. The Army’s hope is that our teams will be able to pass through these stages to join the well-oiled operation that the Army likes to see, teams that will not only be cohesive on their own but will be able to integrate with the brigade staff, the battalion staff, or the company commander with whom we work. Teamwork has always been central to operating a military force, yet efforts to attract young recruits into an all-voluntary army have often focused instead on the individual. Throughout the 1990s, the US Army had followed a steady course of recruiting young enlistees for an all-­ volunteer force with ads touting the army as the land of opportunity. Toward the end of the 1990s, the pitch was getting old, and the Marine Corps’ swashbuckling, Indiana Jones style ads lured young recruits seeking adventure and risk rather than stability. In July 2000, the Army dropped its tried and true recruitment slogan, “Be All that You Can Be” and its old Madison Avenue partner, Young and Rubicam, for Chicago’s Leo Barnett and a high-tech Internet-based advertising blitz crowned with the slogan “An Army of One.” Active duty soldiers and Army veterans voiced their criticism and pointed to the absence of any missions employing only one soldier.

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Bait-and-switch they charged, knowing that the primary purpose of Army basic training is to erase individuality and inscribe a group identity. They expressed their anger at the new slogan in letters to the Army Times. It flew in the face of one of the fundamental aspects of Army culture—teamwork. Defenders of the multi-million dollar campaign of print and video ads for “Army of One” claimed that it pragmatically targeted a generation of self-absorbed recruits more interested in sitting alone in front of computer screens than in becoming one of the fit-though-few. Others, less enthusiastic, pointed to the irony that it was, in fact, a branding statement borrowed from a poster for a Clint Eastwood movie that described outlaw Josey Wales as “an army of one.” The film depicts a Missouri farmer, played by Eastwood, whose family is brutally murdered by union soldiers in what would today be called a war crime, and he sets out to exact his revenge as an “army of one.” But most recruits would not have been born in 1976 when the film hit the theaters. Maybe the Madison Ave. marketers thought that enough time had passed for the slogan to be repurposed, but it wasn’t repurposed for long. It was soon replaced by the slogan that would be used for more than a decade: “Army Strong.”  As cultural advisors, we plant eaters are not expected to be Army Strong nor proficient in kinetic warfare, even though the veterans among us have certainly been trained in the fine art of trigger pulling, and some have even demonstrated their skill against hostile forces on deployments in current conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the First Gulf War. The Army leaves the decision about whether to arm cultural advisors up to the commander of the brigade with which we embed. If the forward unit is willing to arm us, and we are willing to carry, then we strap on an M9 or lug around an M16 everywhere we go on base and off, including to the porta john. Because the Army has planned to include no weapons training in these four months, a concerned enlisted veteran in our class invites the few gun rookies like me to the range for a couple hours one weekend. We pay for the rounds, and he provides the weapons and basic arms training. I haven’t lifted a rifle since a girlfriend and I signed up for a hunter safety course at our high school. Both of us were 16, hopelessly bored and eager to test the gender norms in our small mountain town. Neither of us really wanted to hunt, but we learned the basics, received a certificate that came with a year’s membership in the NRA, and afterwards borrowed a shotgun and headed to a clearing for target practice. The pleasure of shooting at tin cans lost its allure after about twenty minutes, and neither of us saw the

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point of killing a squirrel even if we could have actually hit one. More daring and exciting in the contemplation than in the execution, it was like the time we petitioned the principal of our high school to allow us to take electrical shop instead of home economics. When he finally relented, we found ourselves the first girls enrolled in a course in the subterranean world of “shop,” a world in which guys relaxed, talked about sports, and copied our answers to quizzes. At the shooting range outside of Leavenworth, our teammate gets ready to demonstrate the M9 and the M16. The former, a compact handgun looks like it might be the most suitable in the event that I need to defend myself, and I imagine myself, a holster strapped to my thigh packing heat. As I practice with the M9, however, I keep missing the human paper target at the end of the range. When I express my frustration to the sergeant and ask if I am aiming too high, too low, too far right or left, he gently responds, “Well, Dr. Burke, you might want to open your eyes when you discharge your weapon.” Despite my repeated efforts and my encouraging teacher, I am unable to fire without closing both eyes, not exactly the recipe for an effective offense or defense. I am aware, too, that if the unit I’m downrange with gets into a firefight, the last thing they’ll need is someone who shuts her eyes every time she pulls the trigger. So the illusion that I’ll be able to contribute kinetically to any fight dissolves. Fortunately, nobody is evaluating my ability to brandish a firearm, but everybody, from instructor to fellow trainee, is evaluating my performance in the Army’s “360-degree feedback” program. Widespread in business, this system solicits feedback from multiple sources and then follows with counseling sessions in which a supervisor discusses the anonymous feedback from peers, subordinates, and superiors. Although many within the US Army implement the system, few know that it was invented by the Nazis to improve the performance of German officers and soldiers in WWII. In addition to subjecting our own performance to continual review, we must evaluate every aspect of the training we receive. You can tell how tired the instructors are of all the evaluation. One captain puts it this way, “Some of the surveys are absolute shit, like a bucket full of hemorrhoids with all the pretty ones picked out.” A tall, fit, and cynical first sergeant with an impressive set of tattoo sleeves down to his wrists, briefs us on “spillage,” the careless movement of secure information onto unclassified devices (e.g. thumb drives, cds, and laptops). You can tell that he gives the same jaded briefing to each class of trainees and receives the same useless

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feedback, but he tries again, and says, “On your evaluation, don’t just say ‘this sucks.’ Give me a degree of suckatude. Give me a suck point, the specific point of suckiness!” So we do our best. We all arrived at the beginning of training assuming that because our application had been accepted, the Army had admitted us into the program, pending only approval for security clearance. We quickly learn, however, that another round of applications is required; applications that will be reviewed this time by federal officials not by the military contractors who stand to make profits from our participation in the training. Several weeks after submitting our second round with more lengthy applications, we receive the results and witness the first culling of our numbers. No explanation for the dismissal of some members of our training class is given either to those who are let go or to those of us still remaining. Some who are sent home have quit jobs in order to join this program. Others have left graduate school. One speaks several languages. Another has dual citizenship. They have been with us for over a month and then are gone in a single day. I would have expected that those who have problems receiving security clearances would be similarly let go, but no, they stay on for weeks, even months as the Army conducts a more thorough review. Some, still waiting clearance after completing their 4 months of training, help prepare a subsequent class till the difficulties are resolved. Not only are all of the trainees under scrutiny, but the program and the Army itself have received negative PR and harsh criticism for this program. Some American anthropologists have described the program as “weaponizing anthropology.” In 2007, the American Anthropological Association criticized the program as an “unacceptable application of anthropological expertise.” In 2008, the program suffered the deaths of three social scientists. Michael Bhatia was killed by an IED in Afghanistan. Nicole Suveges, who had served as an Army reservist in Bosnia, died along with eleven others while attending a meeting at the Sadr City District Council Building. Paula Lloyd encountered an Afghan man carrying a fuel jug, a common sight in a small city in Afghanistan. She asked him about the cost of petrol, and the man, whom locals later described not as Taliban but as deranged, doused her with the petrol and lit her on fire. He ran and was subdued and flexicuffed. A few minutes later, when a teammate of Lloyd’s, former Army Ranger Don Ayala, was told what had happened to his friend, he shot the Afghan in the head, killing him instantly.

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Ayala was charged with second-degree murder, pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter, and received five years’ probation and a fine of $12,500. In sentencing Ayala, US District Judge Claude Hilton opted against prison time because, he said, "The acts that were done in front of this defendant would provide provocation for anyone" and because the incident “occurred in a hostile area, maybe not in the middle of a battlefield but certainly in the middle of a war." What was probably also in the back of the judge’s mind was the impressive “leniency video,” made with the help of Hollywood filmmakers, who collected the statements from Ayala family members, friends, and members of Paula Loyd’s family. Together these statements presented a moving portrait of the former Army Ranger, former Karzai bodyguard, and all-round upright citizen who worked to help the local police in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. The criticism from anthropologists continued, and the program suffered other negative publicity. An Iraqi-American and member of a team in Iraq would often leave the base to stay with relatives in the area. During one of his absences, the man was captured by Al Qaeda forces and photographed in an American Army uniform. The photo raised even more questions about the program and those running it. Later, evidence of sexist behavior, allegedly condoned by the team’s leader, went viral. There were stories of team members who spiced up their deployments by having sex with others—both foreign and US personnel. Rumors circulated within the program about a team leader whose friendship with Wali Karzi, the “King of Kandahar,” the president’s brother and reputed drug kingpin, had led to some arms deals on the side. Were these examples of questionable performance not enough, critics pointed to the fat contractor salaries that team members received. This led to a redefinition of the program’s personnel as Government Service employees with drastically reduced salaries, making it easier to police behavior by enforcing the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Subjecting civilians accompanying military units to the UCMJ and possible court martial has been the right given to commanders since the Civil War. In 1970, however, that authority was restricted on appeal in United States v. Averette. Averette, a military contractor in the Vietnam War, was court martialed and convicted of theft by a military court under the rule that allowed for civilians accompanying military units to be tried in military courts “in time of war.” Since Congress had never declared the conflict in Vietnam a war, however, the verdict was overthrown on appeal. Knowing that Congress had abdicated its right to declare war since WWII,

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even though America has sent hundreds of thousands to fight in foreign lands, the National Defense Authorization Act passed by Congress in 2006 included an amendment to 802(a)(10) of the UCMJ to permit the court martial of civilians “in time of declared war or a contingency operation.” (Vladeck) Barack Obama, then an Illinois state senator criticized the decision to send an invasion force to Iraq as “rash” and “dumb” at an antiwar rally in October 2002, and candidate Obama in July 2008 spoke about ending the war in Iraq and concentrating US efforts on Afghanistan: “The central front of the war on terror is not Iraq, and it never was.” Obama promised to take the fight to Afghanistan, and he did in the form of a troop increase from 50,000 in May 2009 to 100,000 in August 2010, in the form of full-­ blown counterinsurgency. This commitment to counterinsurgency would, ostensibly at least, help the fledgling government grow sturdier roots, stand up a national army capable of protecting the country, install a national police force, rebuild some of what had been destroyed in thirty years of war, and foster a rule of law strong enough to rival the self-­interests of tribes and former war lords. To prepare us for our part in these wars of counterinsurgency, the program offers a very basic course in “research methods.” It’s taught by two anthropologists: an applied anthropologist, Marilyn, who, when she’s not teaching such courses, runs focus groups, and Greg, an anthropologist who has conducted research on HIV prevention in third world countries for the Centers for Disease Control. Only three of our now group of thirty have actually done any fieldwork before. Academic anthropologists who have not been part of the program have raised important ethical issues about: (a) the freedom of people to give their informed consent or opt out of interviews in a conflict area, (b) whether the occupying force can ensure that all who disclose information will suffer no ill-effect from such disclosure (obviously they can’t), and (c) who stands to benefit from the perceptions gathered in such interviews. When asked to address these questions and how this kind of research might be brought in line with professional standards, Marilyn explains, “You are pretty much on your honor. Your context does not allow all these formal conventions.” The team leader and ultimately the brigade commander have authority to green-light any fieldwork, and my guess is that few commanders will be familiar with the ethical standards of research. To the credit of the two anthropologists teaching the course, they routinely emphasize the need to preserve confidentiality

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and to refrain from collecting any personal identifying information, thus ensuring anonymity to the extent possible. Our class on research methods covers the rudimentary techniques of observation, survey collection and analysis, and the aggregation and display of data. Before venturing out into the field, we practice on each other. First we pair up and conduct an interview of our partner from which we will prepare a profile of our subject in the form of a PowerPoint brief. My subject is the young, stunningly handsome, biracial Aaron, who insists that people call him by his nickname, “Girth” (“Girth of Girthistan”). All people, that is, but me. I tell him that I’m going to refer to him by his given name, and he grants me dispensation. I am, after all, the age of his mother. A rebellious kid, Aaron enlisted in the Marine Corps right out of high school. His intelligence and skill identified him to superiors as a good candidate for the Marine Corps’ elite scout-sniper program, so Aaron went on from basic to a more rigorous round of training. Like other selectees, called “P.I.G.s,” short for Professionally Instructed Gunman, Aaron received a heavy sandbag, his “baby pig,” which he carried with him at all times. He learned to maneuver in rough terrain and to practice his “skull dragging” by moving through a terrain with his face to the ground. He learned that the best way to survive in enemy territory is to avoid the typical byways and opt instead for the swamp not taken, affectionately referred to as “the pig pond.” He learned to hit targets a half a mile in the distance. By the end of their training program, roughly one-­ third of his class had failed to qualify. Toward the end of Sniper School, the sleep deprivation and grueling physical tests combined, according to Aaron, to produce vivid hallucinations in most of the trainees. For example, while filling out a form, he kept brushing off his paper. When asked what he was doing, he responded that it was raining on his paper, and he was just trying to keep the water off so he could complete the form. Of course, seated at a desk inside a building, the only place it was raining was in Aaron’s exhausted mind. As he and fellow trainees were out on one of their strenuous runs, a fellow trainee said to Aaron, “The leaves are ninjas.” “Yeah,” said Aaron, “and do you see those pirates laughing at us from behind the trees?” During that run, both he and his friend really believed they saw pirates and ninjas in trees mocking them. After his service in the Marine Corps, Aaron earned a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in regional studies (Middle East) from Harvard.

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Although the interview exercise allows us to see a different side of our teammates, I know, having taught fieldwork techniques, that there’s only so much practice that can take place in the classroom. You learn to do fieldwork by getting out in the field, and for this training program, our “field” is the city of Leavenworth. When most people think of Leavenworth, they think of the massive federal penitentiary that has housed gangsters, bank robbers, spies, assassins, serial killers and drug traffickers or the US Army Disciplinary Barracks, whose recent inmates have included Chelsea Manning, who released classified documents to the media; Charles Graner, sentenced for abuses he committed on Abu Ghraib prisoners; and Robert Bales who, on a rampage, left his base in Afghanistan and killed 16 civilians in a nearby village, over half of them children. These prisons, along with two other local penal institutions, are home to 4000 inmates, providing jobs for many of this city’s 35,000 residents. Leavenworth enjoyed an impressive past. Situated on a bend in the Missouri River and established in 1854 as the first incorporated city in Kansas, Leavenworth grew into a vibrant Midwestern city. Home to coal and steel, it became an important manufacturing center of stoves and furniture. In WWII, Leavenworth was one of two centers in the nation for the production of military landing craft. The shipyard continued after the war until it launched its last tugboat onto the Missouri River in 1983. The story of its dwindling downtown is similar to other industrial hubs—urban blight punctuated by revitalization efforts that were no match for the flight to the suburbs. There are still quaint lunch spots in downtown Leavenworth, an old soda fountain, the King Solomon Masonic Lodge, a river walkway, and a couple of museums, and it’s clear that many of the locals have worked hard to secure what’s left and to keep it from eroding further. One of our first assignments is to go on “mounted patrols,” not in military vehicles but in a couple of cars for each team, and conduct “windshield ethnography” in the neighborhoods in Leavenworth without leaving our vehicles. As one instructor notes, “When you go out with a team that’s hoppin’ and poppin’ you don’t have time to interview.” So, on our mounted patrol we take notes of the people and places we pass: the Sweetwoods Bar & Grill, the Cyclone Bar that’s clearly seen better days, Ross’s Bar & Grill, which we later learn advertises itself as “The Husband Day Care Center” and is famous for its burgers and pork tenderloin. Along the way we discover that Leavenworth is the sister city to Wagga Wagga, Australia, a fact proudly displayed on a large sign down the street from the

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local fortune-teller. We pass the many houses of worship: the Bethel Missionary Baptist Church, Trinity Lutheran, Church of Christ, New Beginnings Baptist Church, Calvary Baptist, First Presbyterian Church, and Kingdom Hall. The Payday Loan office, along with two other places for quick cash, all located on S. 4th Street, indicate that many residents have a hard time living paycheck to paycheck. We pass the middle school, situated next to the Lancing Correctional Facility as if its location were part of a scared straight program warning teenagers with wayward tendencies that they might end up in the big house next door. After these brief glimpses, we “dismount” from our vehicles and organize a team report of our observations. A couple of days later, each team is assigned a city block and asked to combine observation with interviews to see what we can learn about downtown Leavenworth. We explain our assignment to shop owners and pedestrians passing by to see if they might agree to tell us a little about their city. Although our impressions are still pretty perfunctory, we manage to acquire enough information, combined with what we can learn from online sources, to put together a PowerPoint brief. Although this is similar to some of the exercises I assign my journalism students, we make a point to inform local residents that we are not journalists but are in a training program with the US Army and that this is an exercise. We’re clearly not the first group to descend on the streets of Leavenworth, so many of the shop owners are familiar with the drill. The general advice given about the reports we produce is to “always under promise and over deliver.” Although we have had no opportunity to under promise, we try hard to deliver what is expected. Our fieldwork exercises culminate in a week-long project overseen by a consulting group flown in from Texas, a group of military buddies for whom this assignment is a welcome opportunity to get together. None has sociocultural experience, but they know the inner workings of a typical brigade staff and will oversee our progress as we fan out to our assigned cities, conduct online research, prepare and then deliver our report to the retired officer playing the part of an impatient brigade commander. My team’s “AO” (area of operation) is Platte City, Missouri, population 4700, the county seat for Platte County, located along the Little Platte River and I-29, and an easy half-hour commute to Kansas City. Platte City boasts the longest running county fair west of the Mississippi and a deadly 1933 encounter between the police and the infamous bank robbers Bonnie

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Parker and Clyde Barrow in a shootout that the robbers won but suffered serious injuries. As if preparing for a mission downrange, all the teams gather at the crack of dawn (or “POC” in Army speak for Point of Contact) at St. Mary’s University parking lot on the outskirts of Leavenworth, provide a list of names, blood types, social security and cell phone numbers to the Army captain handling the logistics of this event. The only problem is that our feckless team leader for this culminating event is a no-show. He’s overslept and won’t be joining us until later in the day. That failure to show is what results in his expulsion from the program. But in the Army, when one leader falls, the next in line takes his place, and our fellow team member Army Major and ex-cop Chip, smoothly assumes his new role, checks to see that each has the other’s cell phone numbers, assigns an order to our convoy of three rental cars, and reviews our plan for the “foot patrol” down the streets of Platte City. We divide into two groups, and one checks out the shops on the left side of the street, the other on the right side. We explain to the local shop owners and shoppers what our assignment is, and we find the people of Platte City congenial and willing to tell us their stories of the simpler older days, of today’s problems with drug trafficking along I-29, and of the struggle to maintain a downtown business district while the big box stores up the highway underprice them at every turn. One shop clerk characterizes Platte City as “a city in which there is no shortage of crazy people.” A local elected official expresses his exasperation with the “concerned citizens” whom he defines as “people with big mouths and small voices.” Another gentleman discusses his frustration with the increase in drugs in the area and the fact that Platte City’s major meth dealer still isn’t behind bars even though everybody knows who he is. Our interviews with Platte City business owners, local leaders, and the average men or women on the street allow us to collect a little history-­ from-­below. To discover the news that doesn’t travel by word of mouth, we head down Main Street to the storefront office of The Landmark, a weekly newspaper located on the Main Street that has been publishing “the news you need to read” for all of Platte County since 1865. The old hot type letterpress stands where it probably has for over a hundred years. Although the old press is now gathering dust, the county paper has not fallen into the “ad rag” that so many other small newspapers have. The Landmark still manages to report on city and county politics, local business, crime, corruption, and lost dogs.

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Whereas we won’t report on the lost dogs of Platte City, it occurs to me that the brief interviews and quick observations of a place we are asked to collect are methods more akin to journalistic reporting than to the sustained, in-depth observation and analysis of anthropology, an art and science that strives to make claims about the whole by looking in depth at a part. Although designed by an anthropologist interested in sending out collectors to gather insight for scientific claims, the program might have attracted more skilled fieldworkers had it sought to attract out-of-work journalists. In a course on “mapping the human terrain” we receive minimal experience on two cultural mapping software systems designed to be linked in order to present maps of the information cultural advisory teams gather (e.g. food insecurity, inflation, agricultural data, tribal distribution, location of sacred places). These software programs, which the Department of Defense (DOD) has spent millions to develop, are frustratingly difficult to use and come with no instructions. According to the mapping instructor, “Neither of these programs is a program of record, so no company wants to go to the expense of writing a manual.” This multi-million dollar system is supposedly an improvement over the older multi-million dollar system that was designed a couple of years ago to be run on its own heavy consoles that, when carted downrange, only a couple of the research managers could make work. Our frustration is acknowledged by the instructor in the short course on “MAP HT.” He says, “At the end of the day, you will feel that your brains are leaking out your ears.” He’s being paid to demonstrate a system that will have limited application. We are being paid to try to find our way through the thicket of this software in order to present the most rudimentary information on the screens on the desktops in front of each of us. It all seems like just another cha-ching for the defense contractors with little accountability. The Army has hired a public relations firm (a retired army colonel who has  worked in public relations, his journalist daughter, and a cameraman). So that we will know how to perform in encounters with the media, they tape an interview with each of us. They play the part of the reporters, and we play the part of the cultural advisors trying to do our jobs in a volatile environment. In 2008, I embedded with a military unit in the Iraq War and have experienced both the reserve and the candor that fighting forces display for journalists. I know, too, how fond one can become of those with whom one eats, shares tents, travels on dangerous highways, and whose protection one counts on. Embedding for an extended period

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of time wins one access, but it can also threaten objectivity. The retired colonel from this public relations firm defends the practice of embedding reporters, “Embedded reporters will lose their objectivity, and that’s a good thing. That’s why we love it.” Presumably, with their objectivity forfeited, journalists will then be less critical. Most of the training we receive at Leavenworth is pretty elementary, defended by one instructor as “designed to develop brain Velcro, something that will stick and serve you downrange.” In addition to the courses and briefings presented in the basement classrooms in Leavenworth, I complete with a passing grade over 20 online courses. I learn how to recognize an IED; how to detect both industrial espionage and terrorism (in the same course); how to spot trafficking in persons and Internet phishing; how to ensure day-to-day operation security; how to treat head wounds; and how to prevent everything that might make a deployment worse, including weather injury, sexual harassment, imprisonment, and suicide (both mine and others). To survive as a POW, I learn that with a tube of crazy glue I can suture a wound and that my ordinary tube of toothpaste can be put to over 20 uses. Although I find this really interesting, I seriously doubt that the Taliban will offer me a toothbrush, toothpaste, and floss or that they would let me keep my tube of crazy glue. But I may be wrong. In a class called Subversion and Espionage (SEADA), we are cautioned against posting on networking sites and hear about terrorists who sometimes send coded messages through the banter on game sites. We are also warned, of course, against providing intelligence to the enemy. An instructor covers the case of Albert Sombolay, who gave a Jordanian intelligence officer information about the buildup to the First Gulf War, a disclosure that netted him $1300, a conviction for espionage, and a sentence of 34 years. Col George Tofimoff, we learn, received a life sentence for spying for the Russians. The cautionary tales are several, and it’s clear that our instructor delights in telling them. There’s David Sheldon, a NSA employee who sold secrets to the Russians only to receive a 24-year sentence, and Lawrence Franklin, who transferred classified documents to Israel and was sentenced to 14 years (though later reduced to eight). If on our respective deployments we encounter individuals with “weak social ties” who “have become alienated from a former life” and violate security procedures, we are sternly informed of our duty—ring up the security hotline: 1-800-CALL SPY. A criticism of programs concerned with culture in the War in Vietnam was the lack of a “reach-back center” with researchers who could answer

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sociocultural questions requiring more research. The Army set up such a center at Fort Leavenworth to support this program with researchers who could answer questions about regions of Afghanistan and Iraq. A common criticism by those who have been downrange is that the research requested wasn’t generated in time to meet the “battle rhythm” of the brigade. Their help was, as one former team leader said, “a day late and a dollar short.” After receiving our assignments and having been granted the necessary security clearance, some of us want to see what the reach-back center might have on our areas, but we are still denied access. It’s not until we get to the Center for Afghanistan Studies at the University of Nebraska Omaha in our final month that we have full access to the Afghan archives held there and a special collections librarian willing to help. Although the classes in Afghan history and Islam at the University of Nebraska are elementary, the language review is useful and the lectures by geographer Professor Emeritus Jack Shroder on the environmental changes in Afghanistan, recorded over three decades of satellite imagery, are invaluable. By presenting evidence of diminished water reserves and deforestation, this geographer suggests another layer to the war in Afghanistan, one that has rendered some regions even more fragile. Many of us would have welcomed a four-month country-specific training program rather than a few weeks tacked onto the end. At the end of four months, most of our cohort of trainees will head off to Fort Irwin for an additional three months of training in the simulated Afghan villages at the National Training Center in the Mojave Desert. Five of us, two women and three men, have deployed before and so are allowed to waive the Fort Irwin training and move up to the training class closer to completion. That means that I can take my two weeks leave and fly home to California before returning to complete additional paperwork and swearing in.

CHAPTER 3

What We Leave Behind and What We Take to War

Death Letters For two months before heading off to Afghanistan to embed with the 10th MTN, 1st Brigade in November 2010, I experience recurring nightmares that always end in death—my death. In some dreams a sniper, perched atop a nearby building, takes me out. As if cross-cut for a movie, this dream offers dual perspectives. I can both watch myself from the sniper’s point of view and feel the force of his precision shot. In others, a suicide bomber extinguishes us both. In one of these dreams a young boy, maybe eight or nine years old and dressed in white, comes up to me with his hand out, and as I look into his sweet eyes, an enormous blast consumes us both. From each dream I awake abruptly, relieved to be still alive but dreading future rehearsals of death that may visit me in dreams. I am not a stranger to war. In 2008, I traveled to Iraq as a journalist. While there, I quickly became accustomed to the evening alarms that signaled “incoming” fire at the base from the beds of insurgent “gun-and­go” pickups. These were never sustained attacks. After firing, the pickups quickly retreated for cover into a nearby village. More often than not, the insurgents launched their attacks when most of us were at dinner. On one of the larger bases, which featured four different salad bars, a taco bar, a baked potato bar, two main lines, and two “healthy lines,” at the sound of the alarm, we would drag our trays and chairs against the safest wall and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_3

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finish our meal, wait for the all-clear signal, then return our chairs and help ourselves to dessert. But this deployment to Afghanistan will be different. I will be there as a cultural advisor not as a journalist. I will be gone for longer and regularly venture “outside the wire” into hostile territory, so I want to prepare for everything that can go wrong, and I act as if that’s really possible. I practice my Dari. I read everything I can on Afghan history and geography. As the departure day draws closer, I increase my life insurance and pre-pay household bills. Despite my preparations, the death dreams persist. I don’t mention these troubling dreams to my husband or family. I don’t want to ignite fears in them that I have no way of soothing. Instead, I invoke a form of magical thinking. If the people I care about, I tell myself, buy my effort to downplay the risk, then my characterization of it as “nothing to worry about, I’m going to be with military units who will protect me,” might actually be true. And, to a certain extent, I do convince myself. Yet despite my reassurances, the nightmares continue to give ghostly substance to my fears of an extended deployment. On my last weekend home after training, I do something I did not do before heading off to Iraq: I write farewell letters to my loved ones “to be opened in the event of my death,” letters I hope will never be read. For centuries, soldiers have written letters intended to be read after their deaths. Sometimes they called them “goodbye letters.” Or “death letters.” They typically began, “If you are reading this…” and express confidence in the cause and the sacrifice it necessitates, confirm courage, express contrition for past slights, and issue injunctions against excessive mourning. Take, for example, what Major Andy Olmstead (aka blogger G’Kar) wrote in a post he’d arranged to be uploaded should he die on deployment: What I don’t want this to be is a chance for me, or anyone else, to be maudlin. I’m dead. That sucks, at least for me and my family and friends. But all the tears in the world aren’t going to bring me back, so I would prefer that people remember the good things about me rather than mourning my loss. (If it turns out a specific number of tears will, in fact, bring me back to life, then by all means, break out the onions.)

Olmstead was killed in Iraq on January 3, 2008, when he tried to persuade two armed insurgents to put down their weapons rather than be killed. While trying to make the case for surrender through an interpreter, one of

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the cornered insurgents shot and killed him. The next day his post was uploaded by fellow blogger “Hilzoy.” Like the “death letters” written by soldiers from other wars, mine thank those I love most in the world for enriching my life and conclude with the fanciful hope that I could somehow extend my love beyond the grave. I tell one daughter, “From the day you were born, I’ve delighted in seeing the world afresh through your eyes, through all the curiosity and creativity you shine upon it. Because of you this world has been a much richer place in which to dwell all these years.” I write to the other, “Your gift of empathy revealed itself even before you started school, and watching you interact with others in kind and thoughtful ways has taught me a good deal. I guess that we all want to believe in a consciousness after death. If there is a way of looking back at those left behind, please know that I’ll be smiling as I see you put your gifts to good ends helping others.” When I was a year old and my sister seven, a mining accident took our father’s life, so we were raised by our mother, who is no longer living. To my sister, I write: If Mom was the still point of my turning world, you, my only sister and dear friend, were the force that encouraged me to explore the world beyond our little mountain village. You were the one who taught me to drive, who took me to visit colleges, and whose example I tried to live up to. I hope that you take my place at the weddings and births of children I will miss. On those occasions, be sure to hug my girls twice—once for you and once for me.

Writing these letters produces a cluster of confusing emotions. On the one hand, they require me, imaginatively at least, to mourn my own death, a burden from which the actual dead are blissfully free. On the other hand, they force me to anticipate the loss that those I care about might suffer, pain from which the dead are similarly exempt. Death letters give form to an all-important connection between the living and the dead. On July 14, 1861, just days before the first battle of Bull Run, Major Sullivan Ballou wrote to his wife Sarah: If the dead can come back to this earth and flit unseen around those they love, I shall always be with you in the brightest day and the darkest night … always … always. And if there be a soft breeze upon your cheek, it shall be my breath, or the cool air fans your throbbing temple, it shall be my spirit passing by.

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Major Ballou died in that battle. For me, writing these letters is like an out-of-body experience. I do the best I can to adopt the posthumous persona and compose the words that I want to ring in the minds of those I love: words of thanks, words meant to inspire confidence, words to be one final comforting embrace. I ask my daughters to care for each other, and my husband to look forward rather than backward and to seek the comfort of friends. I implore them all, in various ways, to set down the burden of loss when the time feels right and to walk forward into a full life, a life I would hope to occasionally intrude upon as a fond memory. During today’s deployments, nobody ever speaks of these letters, as if mentioning them might destroy their magic. And some leave these letters on the laptops they take downrange to their corner of the war zone, knowing that the words will be found in due time by a parent or spouse. Still others don’t write them at all, considering the act a sign of bad luck. Some make videos of their goodbyes to be discovered among their effects returned in a special shipment following the transport of their bodies. They know that a couple of buddies will pack up all their possessions for return, toss out any porn or tobacco (the latter for those who have either taken up or resumed chewing or smoking during deployment) and carefully preserve anything intended for loved ones. After writing these letters, I seal them and put them in a fire-proof document box. Death letters offer final words cherished by their recipients. In her book The Letter: my Journey Through Love, Loss, and Life, Marie Tillman recounts opening the letter from her husband, Army Ranger and NFL player Pat Tillman, which she read on the day she learned of his death in the mountains of Afghanistan: Nothing about the day seemed real except for this letter that I could touch and feel. It was both precious and awful—the last communication I’d ever have with Pat. I sat holding it for many minutes. Then I carefully opened the seal. My breath caught, and I paused another moment with my eyes closed.

In this letter, Pat Tillman made one request to his wife: “Through the years I’ve asked a great deal of you, therefore it should surprise you little that I have another favor to ask: I ask you to live.” At a time when all she wanted to do was to give up, his “just in case letter” was the one she reread the most because it offered her the guidance she needed to go on.

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In the days before my deployment, I feel relieved after writing my death letters. I have completed an act that, in all its ritual exactness, leaves me with a strange sense of protection. The prophylactic move makes it easier to enter the bizarre world of war. After writing these letters, to my astonishment and relief, I never again dream of my own death.

The Things We Take to War After two weeks of leave, I discover that only two members of my training class are cleared for early deployment: Special Forces soldier J.A. and me. The other three will await the return of their classmates now sweating it out in the Mojave Desert Afghan village full of Afghan-Americans playing the roles of village elders, insurgents, and women, speaking Dari or Pashto. J.A. and I join five others from the class ahead of ours who have been cleared to leave for Continental US Replacement Center (the CRC) at Fort Benning, Georgia for our final week in the States. Sergeant Roger, our nervous, skinny minder for the week, introduces himself to the five of us as someone who doesn’t fit into either of the two groups to which he belongs, the Army and the nature-loving avid cyclists: I’m an outsider to the tree-loving outdoors cyclists because I am willing to kill, and I’m an outsider to the soldiers who just want to go out and kill anything, because I like trees. Now I have no problem killing scumbags, and if I have to burn the tree down to get to the scumbags I will.

Sergeant Roger is tickled by his own jokes and seems very uncomfortable in his fit trim body. His banter is continuous, interrupted only when listening to a question from one of the tall guys in our group. At Fort Benning we join a motley group of 440 deployers: those returning to the fight after leave; those prevented by illness or injury from deploying earlier with their military units; those military contractors who are overwhelmingly male and veterans, those who will pull down the lavish salaries; Afghan-American and Arab-American interpreters; and a handful of Government Service people like J.A. and me. It’s here that the physicals we had at the beginning of training, the ones that the BAE rep told us cost the Army $1500–$2000 apiece, are scrutinized, and we receive ample supplies of prescription meds, prescription glasses, bottles of malaria pills, and shots. We take an updated course in improvised explosive device (IED) recognition, sit through more briefings, and receive some excellent first

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aid training on how to treat gunshot wounds and head wounds in the field. And just before we depart, we travel by bus from our barracks to a large warehouse where we walk from station to station so that military contractors can load us down with vast amounts of clothing and gear, the same gear that soldiers receive. We receive three sets of grayish green ACUs (army combat uniforms); three pairs of G.I. boots that will mold to our feet, I’m told, if we first wear them into the shower; a canteen and cover, a trenching tool, a “Gerber” (one of those spiffy multi-tool devices that collapses to the size of a small pair of pliers), and gloves. The workers hand us both goggles to protect from sandstorms and sunglasses (“eye pro”) that are only marginally more stylish. The contractors who process us load us up with wet weather gear, jackets and fleece for cold weather, even subzero weather gear and insulated underwear. The outerwear is of high quality, but soldiers complain that the basic uniform is far too heavy for sweltering summer heat. We pick up our helmets with their 19 layers of Kevlar, pads, straps, and covers. Our body armor, the 27-pound Personnel Armor System for Ground Troops (with attachments for neck, shoulders, and groin) comes with hefty “small arms protective inserts” (SAPI plates) that fit into the vest and protect against high velocity rifle rounds. The workers, whose goal is to get us out of their warehouse as quickly as possible, toss us two sleeping bags—one for warm weather, one for colder weather with the option of fitting the former inside the latter. Then there’s the “bivy,” the bivouac sack that insulates the sleeping bag from the cold and wet. Veterans of this process explain that the only way to sleep in army sleeping bags is nude so that body heat will be reflected off the synthetic bag. We also carry an air mattress, a rain poncho, ammo pouches, a laundry bag, a waterproof washing bag, more protective gear, a camelback, and eating utensils. Everything, along with a few personal items, fits snuggly into one large rucksack, three hefty duffles and an “assault pack,” a backpack for toiletries, laptop, underwear, socks, and towel for the several-day trip to our destination. Among the personal items, some take books for the online courses they will complete during their year away and extra sheets to transform a bunk bed in a tent shared with 12–24 others into a private space. We take pictures of lovers, husbands, wives, children, and metal bracelets with the names of fallen comrades from previous deployments. Because most FOBs, especially the larger ones, maintain generators to heat and cool every tent and plywood structure and to keep the lights on, the computers

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working, and the showers hot, we all pack earplugs to drown out the constant drone of generators. Some need more help in getting to sleep, and they take along white noise machines and doctor-prescribed medication to counteract the psychological scars from previous deployments. Deploying soldiers sport their current unit’s patch on their left shoulder and the patch from a previous deployment on their right shoulder. That’s on the outside; on the inside they bring their freshly inked deployment tattoos or the tattoos commemorating previous deployments. Marines typically have themselves inscribed with the Marine eagle, globe and anchor or the motto “Death Before Dishonor” as “visible reminders of who they are,” according to retired Marine Corps commander, Col Mike. Other soldiers wear images of skulls, flames, and weapons attesting to their power to vanquish whatever menace might come their way. Some soldiers who have come downrange to Iraq and Afghanistan have brought with them an extra set of dog tags, what they refer to as their “meat tags,” an exact image of their official dog tags inked onto their torsos. Since the single most deadly weapon in the insurgent’s arsenal in these conflicts is the improvised explosive device, many soldiers make sure that their body, should it be blown up by an IED, can be distinguished from the remains of others. The stated purpose, however, is probably not the real function this practice serves. First, every squad leader and platoon leader knows who is going out on every mission and would instantly know who is missing. What’s more, bodies would likely be charred and the “meat tag” unrecognizable were the explosion to leave only a torso. No, the ritual of going with buddies to get such a tattoo allows soldiers to acknowledge the worst that might happen, note that harsh fact on their flesh, and then get on with the mission. Meat tags function in the same way as death letters and macabre battlefield humor; they symbolically inoculate the soldier against thoughts that might otherwise incapacitate. Those seasoned deployers who have been this way before, bring tales of other deployments. Sometimes they are simply short descriptions of a character they’ve encountered. One Marine, who has served some hard time on previous deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan, has learned the real pain of war in the loss of close friends, but, nevertheless, tells stories that reveal his fondness for the locals he’s encountered. One of these colorful characters was affectionately named “Tooth” because he appeared to have only one tooth in his mouth, holding on to it as if it were a survivor’s medal. Tooth, a ground’s keeper at the US embassy in Kabul, loved all Marines, and those who worked at the embassy were fond of him,

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giving him one of their extra rank pins or a challenge coin. He sported them all. Whenever he spotted a Marine, Tooth would holler a jovial “Hey Jarhead!” or “Hello Devil Dog!” One day the Marine said, “Hey Tooth, how old are you?” The man didn’t know. “Were you ever a soldier?” the Marine asked. “Of course,” said Tooth. “Did you fight the Russians?” said the Marine. Tooth dropped the lighthearted demeanor and looked seriously at him and said, “Yes.” “Did you kill some Ruskies?” asked the Marine. Tooth paused then answered, “I’ve killed more Russians than cancer.” Not only had Tooth fought the Russians; he had resisted the Taliban takeover as well. Because of his resistance, the Taliban came to his home and killed every member of his family in front of him. He was being tortured and would have been killed as well had a small unit of Marines not rescued him.

Personal Protection in the Face of Danger As we go off to war, we leave families, civilian friends, favorite hangouts, and favorite possessions, and once at our FOB, we will enter a walled community separated from the local population, whom we will regard as potentially hostile. It’s a place where the unexpected is to be expected, where there is little one can do to mitigate risk other than rely on skills learned in training, stay alert, and keep a clean weapon. Even so prepared, there are no guarantees. War is about hidden danger waiting for the opportune time to present itself. In today’s wars of counterinsurgency there is no territory to be taken, no mass of troops to eliminate. There are only the hearts and minds of a population to win. In areas where insurgents still maintain strength, the sympathies of this population are, of necessity, split. Despite their overwhelming military superiority, occupying forces in these regions cannot protect the residents of every small village, so those villagers, who typically want little more than to work their land, to feed their families, and to see their children grow and prosper, must live with what they cannot change. To move outside the protection of their base, Americans wear the best body armor, carry the best weapons, and ride around in the best patrol vehicles. In spite of this, an insurgent can for a few bucks construct an IED that will erase the advantage. In the face of such unpredictable danger, those who deploy carry protective objects brought from home or acquired while “incountry.” Taking such personal tokens to war is not unique to twenty-first-century conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. Spanish soldiers in

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the late 1800s carried charms with “détente bala” (stop bullet) written on them. World War II Japanese soldiers wore 1000-stitch belts that sisters, mothers, or wives had patiently assembled. According to tradition, every stitch of these belts had to come from a different person, so Japanese women would stand at the entrance to a busy market or at an intersection asking passersby to make a simple stitch. Most displayed no pattern to the stitches; they simply fell in rows across the cloths, typically worn by soldiers around their waists or heads. Some of these gifts came with a special pocket in which could be inserted a good luck saying or a good luck coin—a sort of amulet within an amulet. Other Japanese soldiers took with them sendoff banners emblazoned with the rising sun and inscribed by relatives or friends who wished the soldiers well. All were believed to bring protection to the wearer and ensure his return. Talismans have also been used in Thailand. On February 2, 2011, journalist Saksith Saiyasombut reported in the Bangkok Post that Thawatchai Samutsakhon, Second Army chief in the Thai Army, feared that the Cambodian troops stationed just across the border from his Thai guards might be sending curses their way, so he decided to give his soldiers extra protection. He issued all of them talismans with the image of a Thai monk whom the army chief revered, and instructed his Thai soldiers to wear the protective devices on top of their body armor so that the monk’s image would face the enemy. The Cambodians on the other side would not confirm the use of such unconventional weapons, but they would not deny it either. Their spokesman said that the Cambodian soldiers would likely perform rituals at a nearby temple in order to counteract the magic of the Thai talismans. Although designed for border soldiers, such protective devices are also showing up on the body armor of soldiers charged to face down antigovernment forces in Bangkok, the capital.

You Don’t Have to Believe for the Magic to Work Many soldiers, Marines, and officers bring to war the religious objects of their faith. As Marine Col Mike explains, “I wore a miraculous medal as a visible symbol of my faith, a touch stone.” Although he obtained his medal on a trip to Lourdes with his wife, most amulets of war, including religious artifacts, are not purchased but are given by a friend or family member. Col Mike, himself, gave a young man about to deploy to Afghanistan a St. Michael medal. The archangel who tramples Satan, together with St. Christopher rank as the most popular saints among both Catholic and

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non-Catholic deployers. The gift of an amulet circulates from one soldier to another, one officer to another, one Marine to another as a token of a bond between those who have served and those who are currently serving. Like Col Mike and other religious American military personnel, Afghan soldiers also carry with them objects that represent their faith. They wear necklaces inscribed with a verse from the Quran and necklaces with a gold or silver cylinder that holds a small scroll with a Quranic verse. They typically receive these tokens of their faith from a mother or grandmother. The wearing of these necklaces, like praying to saints, was outlawed during the reign of the Taliban in the late 1990s, and the practice still invites controversies in some Islamic communities. Along with any religious artifacts that Afghan soldiers bring with them, they experience daily reminders of their faith. Although exempt from reciting their required prayers when out on a mission, Afghan soldiers on base typically stop what they are doing, pull down their prayer rugs, and recite their prayers in answer to the call to prayer that broadcasts from the base loud speaker five times a day. American troops have their own verbal magic. In a conversation one night with a crusty Sergeant who served multiple deployments, I mention that I had gone off-base with a patrol convoy and that we had returned via the wadi. A wadi is an Afghan word for a waterway that is typically only full of water during the spring snow runoff. In dry months, Afghan wadis double as large-vehicle highways far easier to navigate than small dirt roads designed for cart, donkey, and motorcycle. The Sergeant stops me, “Ma’am, we don’t use that word anymore. We say “arroyo because shit happens in the wadi.” The words one uses come with their own magic. Prayers before missions, unit chants, traditional songs that a unit plays either before or during a dangerous mission offer their own form of protection. There’s a Norwegian saying, “Luck is always borrowed never owned.” Military personnel don’t always bring all the protection they need from home. Sometimes they acquire it “downrange.” On the night before we leave Kansas City for Fort Benning, my three teammates and I go out for dinner, and I tell them that I am collecting stories of the good luck charms that deployers share. Chip, a major in the Army Reserves who has deployed to Afghanistan three different times says, “I’ll tell you one,” and he pulls out of his pocket a set of Islamic prayer beads. He talks about his second deployment in volatile Eastern Afghanistan, where he was training Afghan police officers. He explains that after a terrifying encounter with

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insurgents, his commander took him aside. The commander reached into his pocket, took out a set of Islamic prayer beads, handed them to Chip, and said, “I think you need these more than I do.” Every foray after that, Chip took the beads with him and credits them with keeping him safe. Neither Chip nor his commanding officer is a Muslim, neither knows that the beads are called “subha” or “misbaha,” and neither could either recite the 99 names of Allah or the prayers of praise that the beads remind the believer of. The magic of the beads came from the fact that they were a gift, and the accumulation of days that Chip carried them without injury added to their power. Like Chip, other members of the military attribute the power of protection to a religious object of a faith that they may not share. When Army Captain Marc was on his second deployment in Iraq, he was stationed in Baghdad working with a civil affairs unit. One day he took a small group of soldiers off-base, outside the protected Green Zone, to conduct an assessment of a substation, which was at the bottom of a small hill. Without warning, his unit began taking small arms fire. The fire continued, trapping them inside the substation. When he could sneak a look outside, he noted that they were being fired on from multiple directions. Marc’s call to the battalion commander was heeded, and the commander came to the scene accompanied by other soldiers. The commander ordered Apache helicopters to circle above, dispersing their attackers. When Marc returned to his base, his friend Ray took off the LDS dog tag he wore and passed it to Marc, saying, “You need this more than I do.” A fellow lieutenant, a devout Mormon, Ray was working at a desk job on base and passed along the sign of his faith to his friend. Marc concludes his account of receiving the talisman and says, “This story ends sadly, however, when my friend was killed in Afghanistan in 2010.” One side of the silver oval of the LDS dog tag reads, “In case of need notify LDS Chaplain or member” above an image of the famous Mormon temple in Salt Lake City. The reverse says, “I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints.” Marc is not a Mormon nor does he intend to become one, but he attached the amulet to his key chain and never goes into harm’s way without it. His friend gave him an object that attested to his own faith and with the gift came the object’s power, regardless of the faith of the receiver. The power resides with the object, a material thing that can be given away. Protective objects are, in the eyes of their owners, special because of their gift status, not so much in the Maussian sense of gift as a commodity implicitly demanding a reciprocal exchange,

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but more akin to the giving of a medicine bundle intended simply to protect the receiver. Both of these stories are what I call, “you need this more than I do stories,” and they illustrate not just the power of an object to protect but also the bonds formed between those who go to war. Marc’s friend Ray did not deliberately lay down his life for his friend by handing over his amulet, but his generosity, perhaps a fatal one, suggests that he would have made such a sacrifice. On one layover at Bagram Airbase, I encounter hundreds of transients trying to catch a flight that will take them home for Christmas or like me, simply trying to find their way back to their home base after duties took them elsewhere in Afghanistan. Those coming from or going on R&R always have priority; the rest of us sometimes spend days in what disgruntled soldiers awaiting a connecting flight, call Bagram—“Trashcanistan.” When I am not waiting in the cement terminal on one of the metal chairs or drinking coffee at the USO across the street, I either crash in temporary billeting, in a room I share with others, or eat at one of the handful of chow halls at Bagram. One night while having dinner at the Dragon Dining Facility, I start a conversation with the Air Force officer seated next to me. When he’s not deployed to Afghanistan, this officer teaches English at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, and since in a previous life I taught English at the Naval Academy in Annapolis, we swap stories. We discuss our scholarly interests, and I tell him that I’m currently collecting information on the good luck charms that soldiers and civilians take to war. All of these discussions end the same: the person I’m speaking with pulls out his or her protective token to show me, and I, in turn, show a gold cross my grandmother gave my father before he went to war and a silver Catholic medal a friend sent with me as I headed off to Afghanistan. She had given me another from her collection of medals when I went off to Iraq in 2008–2009, and since I came back from that encounter in one piece, I gratefully accepted her medal for this longer deployment. An Air Force master sergeant seated across the table at this dining hall at Bagram, silent until then, pulls out his “coin,” a commemorative coin that he had been given at the end of a short assignment at the Pentagon. One side of the coin reassures the owner that, “God Will Protect,” and the other displays the crest of a unit in which he served. The coin is worn, and he tells me that he never deploys without it. Most military units mint their own “challenge coins” and give them out as tokens of respect and appreciation to individuals who have been of help. The tradition associated with

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these coins comes from a common barroom practice. One person pulls out his coin, slaps it on the bar, and challenges all others to produce their coins. The person who fails to produce one of these commemorative coins must buy a round of drinks. If all present can slap the counter with a coin, the challenger must buy a round for all. Although all challenge coins are gifts, they are not all taken on deployment as tokens of good luck. The master sergeant who pulls out his good luck coin says, “But what I really always find are hearts—scraps of paper in the form of hearts, pieces of tin in the shape of hearts, and heart-shaped stones.” I reply, “You clearly see the trees for the forest, like those people who can always spot the four-­ leaf clovers in the grass.” We soon conclude our cordial conversation, and while I gather my paper plate and plastic silverware to take out to the trash, the sergeant reaches into his pocket, pulls out a small heart-shaped rock, and hands it to me. On every mission after that, I carry the rock in a small pouch on the outside of my body armor. Amulets not only have power; they also acquire it. Every time one goes outside the wire and comes back without incident, the more power the amulet is perceived to have. Hostile situations demand adjustment. Anyone going outside the wire into dangerous environments on a regular basis must put aside fear. Nancy, a civilian cultural advisor, speaks candidly about the adjustments she went through during her six-month deployment to Iraq in 2008–2009: I became very superstitious about the items that I wore. I had a system every morning in which I put various items in certain pockets of my ACU [Army Combat Uniform]. These items included an angel figure in the lower left pocket and a particular coin (with a religious saying) in my upper right pocket. Other items, such as my knife and my ID, had to go into particular pockets as well. It was very OCD, which is not like me. I knew that it made no rational sense, but my thought was this was the way I had done things so far, and it had kept me from harm—and I didn’t want to jinx myself by messing up the routine.

Before she deployed, Nancy’s fiancé gave her a gold rosary, which she never took off. Then her Iraqi interpreter gave her a pendant in the shape of Iraq with a cross in the middle, and she added that to the dog tags and rosary around her neck. Then her teammate and friend, Jean, bought matching cartouches, hieroglyphs that in ancient Egypt had been fashioned to protect the royal wearer from evil spirits after death. Jean had

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these inscribed with the Arabic word “habibiti” or “dear friend.” Jean added her cartouche to the angel necklace that her son had given her before she deployed, and Nancy added hers to the amulets she already wore around her neck. During deployment, the loss of a prized charm can be very disturbing. Once Jean left the angel necklace that her son had given her in the bathroom. She was very upset because she considered the loss a bad omen. She put a sign in the bathroom explaining that the necklace was very special to her because it was from her son, and surprisingly, someone brought it back to her, someone who shared the inherent understanding that these tokens are to be regarded as sacred. Sometimes amulets continue to serve their purpose after deployment. Everyone who deploys passes through a period of readjustment and assimilation upon return, and during this time, the protective token/s may help ease the adjustment. Nancy notes how reluctant she was to be without all those items that she had worn continuously during deployment: When I came back, I wore these combinations of necklaces for a long time because it felt ‘wrong’ to take them off. It also felt very odd and wrong to take off my dog tags because these too became part of my “talisman” even though all of this “bling” was a crazy amount of jewelry around my neck.

Nancy’s good luck charms. (Photo credit: Nancy)

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Stuffed Animals Girlfriends and boyfriends left at home send soldiers and Marines off with their stuffed animals, or they mail one in a care package. If favored possessions, these stuffed animals will carry the scent of the loved one. In fact, some wives and girlfriends spray the stuffed animals with their favorite cologne so that the object comes with the scent of the giver. There may be more than mere sentimentality to this practice. Christopher Peterson, who teaches psychology at the University of Michigan, took a poll of his class of 250 asking for the hands of those undergrads who had come to college with a stuffed animal. Over 80% of the females in his class admitted to bringing a stuffed animal to college with them, whereas less than 10% of the males did. Peterson speculated that the oxytocin, known as “the cuddle hormone,” stimulated by humans touching other humans and petting animals may, in fact, be generated by contact with the soft facsimile of an animal. Far more clinical studies of oxytocin have been conducted on women than on men. This is, no doubt, a function of the drug’s historical use in stimulating labor. One study, however, in which both men and women participated, showed that oxytocin fostered social affiliation, empathy, and stress reduction in both men and women (Rodrigues). Although I observe stuffed animals in many tents in Afghanistan, those that soldiers take on missions as protective amulets typically fit neatly in a pants pocket. Just before one Marine officer was about to deploy to Afghanistan, her five-year-old son gave her his favorite toy, a small green floppy frog. She asked if he was sure he wanted to part with such a precious toy, and he agreed that she could take it for her first month away. Every couple of days during that month she took the frog out of one of the pockets on the leg of her pants, photographed the frog, and emailed the picture to her son. He saw his frog on a commercial aircraft chartered by the DOD bound for Kuwait, in her tent in Kuwait passing the time till she could catch a flight to Afghanistan, on the troop transport airplane to her headquarters base, in her new makeshift office, in her small rustic sleeping quarters, at the chow hall, and on all of her travels within Afghanistan. After a month downrange, the officer’s son was so delighted at having sent his own delegate to accompany his mother, that he wanted the frog to keep his mother company until they both returned. She called his toy “the frog of war,” and photographed him throughout Afghanistan.

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I meet this particular Marine Corps officer at a four-day meeting at Camp Julian, a US base just outside Kabul where delegates from various ISAF (International Security Assistance Force)  units gather in January, 2011 to recommend to General Petraeus the type of training program that the Army should undertake in order to prepare female engagement teams, those small, all-female units whose task it is to engage local women. The Marine Corps was the first to demonstrate the success of its female engagement teams, originally referring to them as the “lionesses of Iraq,” and subsequently improved its training program. The Marine teams, trained and commanded by this female major with her son’s green stuffed frog in her pants pocket, have a good deal to teach an army eager to implement its own program. At the top of a steep hill overlooking Camp Julian stands the lovely “Queen’s Palace,” still majestic despite the Soviet attack on the structure in 1979 that left its roof in disarray and its interior ripe for the looting. Each of us participating in the four-day event, at one time or another, skips a meal or sneaks out of a meeting on the base below to hike up to the Queen’s Palace to walk through the abandoned royal dwelling. It is here that I encounter the frog of war as it poses for more photos—on the dusty but elaborate staircase, in the stately meeting rooms, in the royal bathroom, and on the walls surrounding the palace.

Elite Units: Even the Strong Need to Hedge Their Bets The uniformed services are by no means uniform. Not only is Army culture quite distinct from Air Force culture, and the Marine Corps emphasis on small group solidarity quite different from the corporate Navy of which it is a part, but within every branch of the military vibrant subcultures thrive. West Point and Annapolis, for example, borrow many aspects of their culture from the British boys’ schools upon which service academies were modeled. Army Special Forces, the “snake eaters” of the army, operate as small squads, often far from headquarters for long periods of time, and enjoy freedoms that other units do not. They maintain relaxed grooming standards and modify their uniforms in ways that would draw rebuke from the commander of a regular unit. When a Marine completes the grueling training program to become a Scout Sniper, one of the proud-though-few, he becomes a “H.O.G,”

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short for Hunter of Gunmen, and accepts with pride a traditional “hog’s tooth,” a sniper bullet through which a hole has been drilled and a line of 550 cord threaded to make a necklace. Tribal in practice, the totemic hog’s tooth marks an elite cohort and sets its members apart for life. A distinguished military subculture, scout snipers can quickly investigate anyone’s claim to membership by getting on the network of fellow elite Marines. The hog’s tooth is a mark, according to Aaron, my friend from training, “that serves as a reminder of what I’m capable of. It was the toughest thing I ever earned. My Harvard degree doesn’t even compare.” While returning from a civilian deployment in Iraq, Aaron was wearing his hog’s tooth when he encountered one of the sailors working the customs tent at Ali Al Salem, the American base outside of Kuwait City. The vigilant sailor, thinking the hog’s tooth might constitute a live round, demanded that this former sniper surrender his hog’s tooth. “I refused,” said Aaron, “and was seriously ready to turn right around and spend a thousand dollars to fly commercial just to keep it. The sailor saw I was serious and said, ‘OK, just this once.’” These are the guys for whom the rules are bent. According to tradition, the hog’s tooth represents the bullet intended for its wearer, and as long as he possesses it, it can never be used against him. The hog’s tooth holds power like that of the familiar Indo-European amulet with the image of an eye believed to nullify all evil glances that might cause harm. Although the hog’s tooth signals the accomplishment of the wearer, its potency can be transferred. Another Marine scout-sniper friend told me that the 14-year-old son of one of his buddies from the Iraq War had developed brain cancer. The boy’s dream was to someday be a scout sniper, so the Marine parted with his hog’s tooth and sent it to the boy along with a ghillie suit, a piece of camouflage clothing that allows the sniper to blend in with the foliage in his area. The boy survived. This transference of the object from the Marine to the future Marine illustrates the importance of traditional objects that link one generation of warriors with another. Even though the object is a sign of one man’s accomplishments, it holds its own magical power that can be used in another war— battling a life-threatening disease. One Italian Special Forces platoon commander who served two tours in Bosnia-Herzegovina, one in Mozambique, two in Iraq, and three in Afghanistan bought a “Ranger” brand cigar at the PX and smoked it before going out on a dangerous mission. The mission went well, and although not particularly superstitious himself, he kept up the tradition

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and soon discovered that the magic was contagious. When his men saw him smoking a cigar before a mission, he noticed that they were happy because they believed that the mission would be successful. His “Ranger” brand of cigars was available in Bosnia-Herzegovina and in Iraq, but when he was stationed in Afghanistan and Mozambique, he had to opt for a new brand, “Swisher Sweet.” The switch was fine, and his luck held, he believed, as long as he stuck to the same brand throughout the deployment. His platoon now has a reputation throughout the Italian Special Forces community as a lucky unit; they have faced close call after close call, and every time they somehow manage to cheat death. Eleven years have passed without the loss of a single life, so this commander keeps smoking his pre-mission cigars. Who is he to mess with tradition?

What Money Can’t Buy Why would people who don’t typically consider themselves superstitious perform a good luck ritual or wear a good luck charm? In today’s asymmetric wars, Western forces hold the visual advantage, the panoptical advantage to borrow a term from Jeremy Bentham, by way of Foucault and Virilio. From visual devices aloft, we can spot not only a child picking a flower in a field but what kind of flower it is. Despite this impressive technological superiority, the enemy still has the stealth advantage. When a typical military unit moves, it hops into a convoy of heavily armored vehicles, which can exceed ten tons each, and lumbers noisily off the base. The enemy, on the other hand, zips up and down the roads and pathways in a convoy of motorcycles, two to a vehicle, much faster and quieter than US troops, with the possible exception of a Special Forces unit. Despite our technological advantage, our forces have seen their freedom of movement severely limited both in Iraq and Afghanistan by a small, easy-to-­ make device, an IED, which costs only a few dollars but can produce impressive destruction. Although war is always plagued by unpredictability, IEDs have increased that unpredictability tenfold. In response, the ordinary soldier hankers for a comforting sense of certainty—if I do this then that will happen, if I carry this charm with me then I will be safe. Amulets inoculate the soldier from uncertainty and fear. Like cleaning a rifle, they give troops something to do that adds an element of personal control. By putting something on, by carrying a certain image, or by playing a certain song before heading outside the wire, they can create at least the illusion of control, a hedge against the danger.

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In Sex, Culture, and Myth, Bronislaw Malinowski points to the prevalence of magic in the face of danger and emphasizes that what we call “superstition” in others is often the very thing that we refer to as “belief” in ourselves (188). He examines the way in which a magical practice can psychologically “lead to a mental integration, to that optimism and confidence in the face of danger which has won to man many a battle with nature or with his human foes”(189). According to Malinowski, religion gives man “mastery of his fate” and science gives him “control of natural forces,” but magic offers him “the grip of chance, luck and accident.” (265). Malinowski made these observations 60 years ago, and today there is still much we do not know about the brain chemistry associated with personal objects believed by their owners to hold some power; however, two studies provide impressive empirical evidence that devices and practices believed to bring good luck can positively affect performance. Lysann Damisch, a German psychologist, gave people in her study a putting iron, one ball, and ten tries to sink the ball into the hole as many times as they could. Half of the group was given a golf ball and told that it was the ball that everyone before them had used. The other half was given a ball and was told that it was a “lucky ball.” Those in the latter group performed 33% better than those in the former group. In a related study, Damisch et  al. invited individuals to bring a lucky charm with them. When they arrived, staff members collected the charms and told participants that they were putting them in another room. They were then divided into two groups. The staff returned their lucky charms to the members of one group but not the other. Each group was given a standard memory test. Those who had their lucky charms with them scored better on the test than did the group without them. Taken together, these experiments suggest that a magical object increased manual dexterity, memory, puzzle-­ solving, and self-confidence (Damisch). The magic of the talismans that soldiers take into harm’s way confers confidence by linking the individual with those who have taken this perilous journey before them or with those to whom they hope to return.

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What Will We Bring Back With Us? Leslie Burkett, who calls herself a “very proud Marine mom,” wrote on a website www.grunt.com for Marines and their family members during the Iraq War: My Marine son just returned from Iraq two weeks ago. The first thing he wanted to do was go skydiving—which he did. The next thing he did was to get a tattoo that included the names of the fallen Marines in his Company. I was touched that my ‘tough Marine’ wanted to have such a permanent memory of his fellow Marines that will stay with him no matter where his life leads him.

A former Marine commander jokes that after a week home from deployment, the Marines in his unit would have “a new car, a pregnant wife, and a tattoo.” These are not just any tattoos; they are memorials to their fallen friends. Typically, returning soldiers will go with a buddy or a group from the same unit to have identical tattoos. Not only will they honor the fellow Marine and friend they lost, but they will further cement the bond among survivors. Those of us returning from this deployment will bring home Afghan souvenir rugs with images of AK 47’s, helicopters, and soviet tanks woven into them. A few will bring home flimsy belly dancing costumes with the hope that a wife or girlfriend will show what the see-through yellow or pink costumes with coins dangling from them look and sound like on a real woman. We will bring home crudely polished Afghan lapis lazuli, cloudy emeralds, and mysterious black diamonds. Some will even bring blue burkas to show a wife what she’d have to wear in public were she an Afghan woman and have her carry on a conversation through the small crocheted grill work in the front, a conversation they never could have with an Afghan woman.

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A souvenir rug. Although woven in 2010, the weapons represented are all Soviet weapons from a war over 20 years earlier

We will come back with the residue of the war in our lungs from the plastic trash that’s burned on base. Some will bring home biceps inflated from the hours lifting weights because there’s nothing better to do and from the vats of powered protein they’ve downed to look good for each other and buff for those at home. We will return with dry skin from the months of showers in water that’s not really clean but that will clean, water with calcium hypochlorite to neutralize the most dangerous parasites. We will bring home a new regard for our command—either a seasoned respect or a quiet disdain. Some will bring home embarrassment at having spent

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their days in a cubical at headquarters where the only danger was dying of boredom when their families imagined them humping the Hindu Kush. We will bring home nightmares and wounds that nobody can see. We will bring photos that document a time and a place that is strangely out of time and out of place, photos that only our fellow travelers will understand. Even though such a practice is in violation of the UCMJ, a few will even bring back war trophies that might in future deployments morph into talismans. We will bring the intimate knowledge of what really happened when one of our soldiers died rather than the official account, cleaned up to disguise the blunders, then sent up the chain of command. We will bring home the conviction that it just doesn’t pay to look too deeply into things or to remember with too much precision. We will bring back the expectation that things at home will be just as we left them, that we will slip smoothly back into the slot that was left empty when we deployed. And after our long stint away, we will bring home the small tokens we carried throughout our deployments, the special items that, along with our skill and our alertness, helped us survive. We will put these aside until we need them for the next deployment, or until we give them to the next generation to go into harm’s way.

CHAPTER 4

Going Downrange

After completing the additional stateside training and packing up all the Army-issued gear, I am eager to head downrange with dozens of other deployers: those returning to the fight after leave; those prevented by illness or injury from deploying earlier with their military unit; those military contractors, who are overwhelmingly male and veterans and who will pull down the lavish salaries; Afghan-American and Arab-American interpreters; and a handful of Government Service people like myself. We wait six hours before we board a low-end charter flight on Omni Air from Lawson Army Airfield at Fort Benning, Georgia. I know from my time in Iraq that there’s no fixed departure time for military flights; there’s a “show time” and a check-in followed by several hours of waiting when nobody can leave the containment area. Four-and-a-half hours after boarding, we land in Bangor, Maine where appreciative veterans, many in their 60s and 70s, and supportive civilians greet us as we deplane to await our connecting flight. These self-appointed greeters welcome every military flight, day or night, sometimes ten in a 24-hour period. As we pass through their gauntlet, they thank us for our service, even before we’ve performed it. I’m cordial and shake the hands extended to me, but I feel embarrassed because I have done nothing for which to merit a thank you. Young soldiers, first-time deployers, generally appreciate the encouragement, but some heading to their fourth or fifth or even sixth deployments, especially those who have lost friends on a previous © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_4

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deployment, harbor mixed feelings. One Marine told me that he always just walks past the greeters without making eye contact and without shaking hands. The thanks, he believes, should be reserved for those who must live with the wounds of war and the families of those who have lost spouses, children, and parents. To him, the platitude “Thank you for your service” seems cheap, spent so frequently that it has been drained of its value. Of course, this greeting has a context. Our contemporary attitude toward the soldier as one who sacrifices on behalf of the nation has its roots in the Vietnam War. In that war only the POWs received any official welcome home, and the country honored them not as heroes but as victims of a failed war. Vietnam War veterans know that no one greeted them as they returned one-by-one from their 365-day tour in Vietnam. They know the alienation they felt from a civilian population unwilling to shoulder the moral responsibility of a war that their nation sent them to fight on its behalf. They know how lonely they felt returning from such an unpopular war. The “Thank you for your service” greeting, as generic as it is, seeks to separate the soldier from any judgment of the wars he or she fights—to suspend judgment, neither lauding them as heroes nor dismissing them as victims. For some in today’s all-volunteer military, who have traveled to the dark side of war, the refrain of generic thanks can do the opposite of its intent by robbing them of their agency and, by default, reducing them to the position of victim, a position they seek to keep at bay. Once past the greeters, we look for a good place to rest or a snack to purchase. Because we have been reminded so many times that the consumption or the purchase of alcohol, luminous on the Duty Free shelves, is off-limits to us, none partake. The long dry spell has begun. After two hours of empty waiting time, we reboard for the flight to Shannon, Ireland, where we wait for refueling and ordinary maintenance before heading on to Kuwait. When we land in Kuwait, a day and a night later we touch down on an airstrip in the middle of miles and miles of sand. We debark into the hot darkness, load our gear onto awaiting buses, and climb aboard for the ride to Ali Al Salem, the US Army’s tent city for military and civilian personnel who are either heading to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or back to the States. A couple of years ago, when both wars were in full swing and I passed through Ali Al Salem on my way to Baghdad, the tent city was lively. Most of the 216 tents (24 rows of nine tents each) were full of those passing to and from war. I had to wait in line 30 minutes to send a message home, but it didn’t matter; I was full of excitement then. I had written about

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military culture for two decades and had collected veteran accounts of deployment to war zones, but I had never gone to war myself. Like the rookie enlisted soldiers and young lieutenants, I was keen to observe everything. Every detail of this way station fascinated. Shops at the base bazaar were then crowded with soldiers either getting their last bit of gear to take downrange or picking up souvenirs to take home: scarves, patches that humorously summed up their deployments, patches not for their uniforms but for their civilian caps and jackets, with sayings like “I know I’ll go to heaven ‘cause I’ve served my time in hell,” “God will judge our enemies. We’ll arrange the meeting,” “Shit Bag,” and “Infidel” in Arabic or Dari. What caught the eye of all who passed then was the same as it is now, two years later: the display of a Harley Davidson cycle, dazzling in its shiny American chrome. Some soldiers can’t resist its allure and sign the contract to buy one of these gleaming muscled machines on credit and waiting for them when they get home. The high-speed freedom it promises is deserved compensation, they reckon, for their deprivation downrange. For those young soldiers who return to a wife and children, this purchase, equal to a new car or the down payment on a home, and the debt that rolls in with it, is often an unwelcome disclosure, often one among many. Harley Davidson loves the US military, and the DOD loves Harley Davidson. The company sold their motorcycles to the War Department in World War I (WWI), and then American units took Harleys to WWII with them. In recent wars, Harley posters of stunning machines like the “Super Glide,” the “CVO Screamin’ Eagle,” and “Fat Bob” and “Fat Boy” decorated the cafeterias on many of the large bases. Named to sell to members of the military community, active duty and veteran, Harley’s “CVO Screamin’ Eagle” takes its name for the 101st Army Airborne Division, otherwise known as the Screaming Eagles because of their patch with an enraged bald eagle. “Fat Bob” and Fat Boy” allude to the nicknames for the atomic bombs dropped in WWII over Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the bikes incorporate detailing from the bombs themselves. “Fat Bob” features its “Tommy Gun style” twin exhaust pipes. Even Harley’s acronym for its owners’ group (H.O.G.) is the same as the name for an elite Marine Scout Sniper or Hunter of Gunmen. With the average age of Harley owners on the rise and with most of them baby boomers, the company has directed its marketing efforts to recruit foreign riders and younger US riders. What better place to find consumers than in the military?

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Since my last time through Ali Al-Salem, the soft-sided processing building has been outfitted with semipermanent hard sides, but the ordered rows of tents are still the same, only scruffier from the years of grinding sand storms. The sand at Ali Al Salem is so fine that it can easily ruin a laptop outside of its plastic container, so fine that it can’t be made into cement, something that wasn’t anticipated by the planners back home. After choosing Ali Al Salem for their personnel way station, the US Army discovered that it couldn’t use any of the sand surrounding it for miles; they had to import sand thick enough to make cement for the platforms its generators now sit on. When I passed through in 2008 and 2009, I interviewed the overworked chaplains who tend not only the grief-stricken soldiers on “compassionate leave,” who travel home for the funerals of loved ones, but also those angry returnees who experienced a disappointing, crisis-ridden leave and who balk at going back to the fight. While interviewing one chaplain, we were interrupted by a cursing young specialist who ranted about a wife whom he discovered had been unfaithful while he was “in the shit out here.” I discreetly left and waited outside the chaplain’s “office” with its heavy green tarps for walls. After the chaplain listened to his rant, settled the soldier down, and sent him on his way, I returned and we resumed our conversation until 30 minutes later when a military police officer ushered in another agitated soldier, one who discovered while on leave that his wife had spent all his hard-earned savings, had taken out new credit cards, and had accumulated a pile of debt in less than a year. On another interview attempt, I waited outside the tented office while a distraught female soldier yelled, “I’m not going back there. I’m not going back and take that abuse again.” Her complaint, it seems, was about a superior who treated her as “his shit screen.” After a three-week leave that the soldiers had been looking forward to for months, a leave that soured, and a long plane ride that provided ample time to consider the rotten unfairness of their situations, maybe even down the last bottle of booze they’ve smuggled along for the journey, these soldiers must return to the land of the sand, furious at the betrayals they have discovered. Their distance from the problems defeated any attempt to remedy the situation. Chaplains do provide some help to those passing through, but they are therapists with a divided loyalty. Although empathetic and eager to help the individual soldier, their primary obligation is to the Army; it is their job to get the soldiers back to where the Army needs them, on the next flight back to the fight.

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Some of the transients seek the comfort of American fast food. At all hours they line up outside food joints at Ali Al Salem that sell McDonalds’ burgers (you can eat one while sitting on a bench next to a life-size Ronald McDonalds with legs crossed and an arm around your back), Pizza Hut “personal pans,” and the “finger-lickin’ good” Kentucky Fried Chicken, home of one of America’s highest ranking fake vets, “Colonel” Sanders, whose brief career in the Army lasted only four months. But in a place like Ali Al Salem, even the fake can double for the real. After completing in-processing, I join my travel buddy Army Special Forces Sergeant J.A. He and I transport our duffle bags to the luggage tent, sling our assault packs over our shoulders, and check in at the billeting station where we receive bedding and an assigned tent—his all male, mine all female. The Army leaves little to chance at Ali Al Salem where, whether day or night, there is always someone arriving, always someone leaving, and always someone asleep in every tent. To prevent new arrivals from stumbling in the dark, tent lights blaze 24 hours, and the veteran deployers either sleep through glaring light or keep their sleeping masks and earplugs handy at the top of their packs. Every couple of hours a base sound system barks out some call loudly enough to be heard in all of the 216 tents. After a few days at Ali Al Salem, it’s easy to feel sleep-deprived. I’ve tried different strength earplugs in my stays at Ali Al Salem, but none was capable of shutting out the penetrating broadcasts. I guess that’s the point. It’s early November, and most of us at Ali Al Salem wait not to head west to Iraq, where most US forces have withdrawn, but east to Afghanistan and the war that President Obama has defended as the one worth fighting. The troop surge has upped the demand for cultural advisors in Afghanistan. Oddly, though, this surge creates no congestion at Ali Al Salem, a place that, with its expanse of vacancy, feels more like one of those malls about to go under: the big box stores have pulled out, and you walk around wondering why you’ve come to this place on the verge of extinction. There are fewer strangers walking the dusty paths that separate the lines of tents, a shorter wait for a washing machine, and less competition for a seat in front of a TV monitor that broadcasts professional wrestling for hours at a time. After four days at Ali Al Salem (a brief stay as these things go), we board the buses back to the flight line and file into the fat gray belly of a troop transport plane, eager to get on with the journey. Since Army units travel together, they board first, from colonel to private, the former claiming the

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comfortable seats (in the Army every comfort is relative), five abreast, that line the body of the cabin. Civilians ride “Space A” (for “available”) and pull up the rear. The only seats available are those that line the metal sides of the plane, seats of red loosely woven straps the size of seatbelts—no head rests, no ability to recline, no choice but to sit bolt upright. J.A. and I form the smallest unit, and so we file to the rear of the plane after all the middle seats are taken and strap ourselves in. An hour into the flight, the copilot announces that the shitter is full and that those who need to can use the “relief station,” a funnel hose, and pail in the rear, located right next to our seats. The urinal at least offers a more civilized alternative to the guys who need to go. Although some women deploy with “Go Girl” or “Travel Jane” funnels designed to collect urine and transfer it to a water bottle or some other container, no woman ventures back to the relief station on this flight. At first, for those guys who elect to relieve themselves, there is just the embarrassment to put up with. Every time someone walks to the back and stands at the urinal, heads turn in his direction, but after a couple of dozen soldiers venture to the back seeking their relief, nobody bothers to glance back. The only problem is that the more piss added to the pail, the more pungent the smell becomes, so bad eventually that it spreads through the back third of the plane, annoying all but the mouth-breathing snorers. We finally end our smelly flight at Bagram Airfield, the largest American base in Afghanistan, built by Americans in 1950 and home to the major detention facility of the war that houses the hardened Taliban fighters, Afghans arrested for minor offenses, and those rounded up by mistake. The journalist William Fisher, writing for the Asia Times called Bagram “the other Gitmo” (1/16/08). Major General Douglas Stone in a 2009 report commissioned by General David Petraeus estimated that two-thirds of the detainees at the Bagram Prison were either petty criminals or wrongfully incarcerated and should be released. As the wide mouth of our enormous troop transport yawns to release us from our confinement, we inhale the fresh air deeply, and we silently wait for all the pallets of gear to be unloaded before proceeding two-by-­ two, to in-processing. Once inside the hanger, we waste no time in heading to the restrooms. Emblazoned with graffiti, my stall sports the sardonic greeting that one departing American has loudly scribbled for her replacements: “Afghanistan is the only country to make you wish you were back in Iraq.” Although I have not yet reached that state, I’ve gotten a good whiff of what she means.

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We present our papers one more time, are cleared, claim our gear, secure rooms, and look for some food. The closest dining facility (D-FAC) is a short walk down “Disney Drive,” the main street on the base. I can’t help but think of Kubrick’s ending to Full Metal Jacket, a film set during the 1968 Tet Offensive when North Vietnam forces launched surprise attacks on cities throughout South Vietnam, on South Vietnam military bases, and on US bases. The film’s main character Joker, played by Matthew Modine, is a public affairs soldier assigned to write stories for Stars and Stripes. Sent north to Hue to cover the offensive, he discovers his best friend from basic training, Cowboy, only to watch him die from a sniper bullet shortly after their reunion. When the unit finally wounds the sniper, they discover the sniper’s identity—a small Vietnamese girl who begs to be killed. Joker must finally relinquish his smirk, and with it the irony that removes him from the carnage. He adopts a visceral “war face” to shoot the girl. In Kubrick’s film, it’s reasonable to ask whether this was a revenge killing or a mercy killing. I think too of Kubrick’s large Vietnamese billboard that appears several times in the film advertising toothpaste, depicting the head of a Vietnamese man who seems to know more about the occupiers than they know about themselves and whose broad smile when it appears later near the end of the film seems to mock the American enterprise. I also recall the TV crew that Kubrick parades across the frame in the middle of intensive fighting while the 1963 tune of “Surfin’ Bird” that gives way to the theme song to the Mickey Mouse Club, the “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E” song that American GI’s sing as they retreat. For a moment, Disney Drive on this dark night in Bagram feels as if we might be in a movie. These way stations leave plenty of time for reflection. I not only wonder what I will encounter but take stock of what I have left behind. I know that all of us going to war have left people we are close to at home. I know, too, that separation puts pressure on any relationship, especially when communication must often be brief and casual. J.A. has left a wife who’s threatened to divorce him at least three times because of his long and often unpredictable deployments that leave her without someone to share family responsibilities: to help with the chores, to make sure that his daughter keeps up her grades in the next year so she’ll get into a good college, and to help his high school son complete the requirements for his eagle scout rank, the son who dreams of a spot at West Point. Like J.A., I know what it’s like to leave a spouse and children behind. I know that my marriage is not too stable, and that my husband, who was supportive at

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first of my going to Afghanistan, became increasingly hostile to the idea as the time to leave grew closer. Although one of my daughters has a good job and the other is at university, leaving them is hard, and I wonder if I should have stayed at home. While previously traveling from base to base in Iraq, I met many rookie deployers, some still teenagers who sought the excitement promised by Hollywood films and exploited by Army recruiters eager to fill their quotas. None is ever prepared for the monotony of life on the FOB, their forward operating base, while awaiting the action they both crave and dread. Some spend their days on bases so large you have to hop a bus to get from one side to the other. Many divert themselves by engaging in digital missions on their laptops and fighting video game wars that reward with minute-to-minute clean and easy kills. Edited out of these digital wars are the fatigue of long, hot foot patrols, the dread that one misstep will explode an IED and the remorse for a wrong kill, one that mistakes a civilian for an insurgent. Competitions between war video gamers have been routinely held on large bases with good connectivity, and game designers from Bungie even rolled out their first-person shooter, Halo 3, on an American base in Iraq before releasing it in the States. Thus, those who never get to see real action can at least wage a pristine facsimile. By their second or third deployments, many soldiers have relinquished the quest for action and the noble purpose that filled the sails of their first voyage and have resigned themselves to a 6-, 9-, or 12-month job to do. They recognize the enthusiasm of younger first-timers as a quaint fantasy that they once shared. Gone are illusions of glory; the vets merely hanker to endure, to stay safe, to get back home, and to bring back those under their command. But there are other seasoned deployers who soon find the monotonous and lonely “dwell time” at home intolerable. They miss the camaraderie and the purpose, wrapped up in discipline, that deployment promises, and after a time, they become anxious to return. Some who have experienced real combat try to bracket any haunting recollections. And still others, the fit-though-few, zealously seek to recover the exhilarating experience of life on the edge; they crave the action as one of the purest forms of being. As someone who has spent so much of my career collecting stories of combat from veterans and writing about them, I simply want to see it first-hand for a sustained period. I want to become the participant observer. Bagram is where my friend J.A. and I part ways. He moves into the Special Forces compound on Bagram, a base-within-a-base off-limits to all

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but SF troops, and I join my new teammate Marc with whom I will wait until we can catch a flight to the north where we will join our team leader Duke who has arrived a month ahead of us at Camp Spann, an American base located outside Mazar-i-Sharif. Marc is a tall handsome Army Captain who served in the Iraq War and now fends off the demons of past deployments as best he can with sleep aids. He left behind his current mundane DC job and his reserve Army status to volunteer for deployment, a decision motivated by his belief in the cause we advisors have set our course by. He wants to make a difference. An Eagle Scout and Virginia Military Institute graduate, Marc knows that the only way to do that is to get close enough to the fight to understand what’s really happening. It’s an illusion that many share. My fear is that the closer we get, the more confounding understanding will become. As we wait to catch a flight to Regional Command North (RC North), Marc and I meet up with the team of cultural advisors stationed at Bagram in the hope of learning from their successes: how best to prepare for uncertainty when we go “outside the wire,” how best to practice diplomacy with the command, and how best to represent the concerns of the local populations we will find ourselves among. Instead, we learn of one team member’s quest for the perfect colonic, the best R&R destinations, and what I have come to call “blame the bitch” stories, accounts of cultural advisor teams that implode when a female (and it’s always a female in these stories) social scientist screws up. We heard these first as cautionary tales in training. The one we are told at Bagram features a social scientist in her late thirties who carried a stuffed animal, what she called her “mission monkey,” on her back every time she went out to engage the population. It broke the ice, she claimed, but its presence inflamed her team leader. Some could reasonably argue that this woman appeared other than squared-away and that she lacked judgment in failing to take account of Afghan attitudes toward monkeys. An argument that others might make, one that was never broached in our training, is that the episode might instead highlight a struggle between social scientist and team leader, driven in part by gender prejudice—perhaps on both sides. During my time in Afghanistan, I will encounter this woman’s team leader when he comes to “welcome” a young smart and eager African-­ American analyst who has traveled to join his team. During her active-duty time with the Army as an enlisted soldier, her high scores qualified her for language school, and she became fluent in Arabic. Why the Army would send her to Afghanistan instead of Iraq is perplexing to all, including her,

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but her time in the Army has convinced her not to look for reasons. She’s ready to jump in, be part of a team, and work hard. As if to demonstrate his authority, this reserve Army colonel keeps her waiting in a hanger on base for nearly three hours before coming to pick her up and then greets her with an indifference that soon slides into hostility. He makes no effort to help her load her gear into his up-armored vehicle; my teammate Marc and I do. After a couple of months of his slights and lack of support, this young woman leaves the program of her own accord. Whenever I go to the remote and volatile areas of our area of operation, our AO, or when I return, I will spend a day or two at this base. Whenever I run into this team leader, I will feel the sharp edge of his disdain. His is not a simple sexism; he treats all on his team, males as well as females, with arrogance and rudeness. On the last night before he leaves his post to return to the States, for example, he throws himself a farewell party, a barbeque complete with juicy steaks, potatoes, and a vat of ice cream he’s secured from his friend at the main dining facility on his large base. All the officers, enlisted personnel, and civilians who work in his building are invited, all except his own team members. Such deliberate slights just deepen his team’s relief to see him gone. Team leaders in this program have sometimes had problems juggling all their required tasks: facilitating the fieldwork conducted by the social scientist, resource manager, and analysts; ensuring the safety of all on their team; and winning the respect of both their teams and the command of the Army unit with whom they have embedded. These retired Army officers, many from the reserves, many who may even share the rank of the base commander to whom they report, and many who are the oldest people on base, must learn to adapt to a military structure in ways they haven’t before. Some, like this guy, alienate team members in the interest of soothing their own egos. Others sit back, surf the web, collect their hefty paychecks, and move from team to team on multiple deployments. Still others manage to be effective. Marc and I appreciate the fact that our team leader, Duke, a retired Army Reserve colonel, arrives on the evening convoy from Camp Spann to greet us, and when the American unit is ready to head from this German base back to brigade headquarters, we throw our gear into one of the vehicles for the hour’s journey to Spann, home to 2000 military personnel, most of them Americans, a base separated by a wall from the 8000-­personnel Afghan base, Camp Shaheen. Together these two bases share a small corner of a vast dusty plain that stretches out at the foot of

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the Hindu Kush Mountains. When we arrive at Spann it’s late, so Duke shows us where we are bunking and saves the base details till the next day. I settle in to the small cement room I share with two other women, one on leave and the other I will rarely see because she works the night shift and I the day. After an early morning walk around what is a relatively small and safe headquarters base, careful not to twist an ankle on the jagged rocks, some the size of my fist—what the miners in the company town where I grew up would call “cob rock” but what my military colleagues refer to as “river rock.” I see the plaque in honor of Johnny Michael Spann. A former Marine Captain, Mike Spann was serving on a Special Ops group for the CIA in November 2001, and had gone to the nearby Qala-i-Jangi prison to interview prisoners of war held by the Northern Alliance on the grounds of a nineteenth-century fortress. While there, an uprising took place, and Spann was killed. I am struck by the way in which the naming of what has been a hastily constructed base intended for only a few years’ use can define a sacred space, memorializing the sacrifice that Spann made in this protracted conflict. Like most brigade headquarters, Camp Spann offers a small bazaar with shops that sell pirated videos, rugs, blankets, scarves, electric fans, knives, porn, and if you know the right vendor, I later learn, you can purchase steroids and pot; a post office; a laundry; an MWR (morale, welfare, and relaxation) with a pool table, foosball table, and books; a computer and phone room for keeping in touch with those at home, and a trailer that serves as a PX and makes its money on candy bars and cigarettes. What’s most peculiar about our particular FOB is its lack of sandbags. A base without sandbags is either a safe base or one under construction, without time yet to reinforce the tents and plywood buildings with added protection. Duke, my team leader, tells me that the only other killing on this base happened in 2009. A 35-year-old Navy lieutenant in PT gear (loose short-sleeved t-shirt and baggy shorts almost to the knees) who was out jogging on the road that surrounds our base and intersects with the neighboring Afghan base, Camp Shaheen, was killed by an Afghan soldier offended by her immodest attire. Otherwise, there have been no artillery attacks since the beginning of the war. I don’t know Duke well enough to know if his story about the female Naval lieutenant is a cautionary tale or if he’s trying to explain why there is no memorial to her sacrifice but there is to Spann’s. I assume the former.

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Without sandbags and with the plywood buildings all painted white, our base looks a little like a summer camp run by the Shakers, orderly and pristine, or like some missionary outpost. Are we “plant eaters,” as Cpt Chris called us in training, assuming the role of sequestered missionaries expected to leave our compound and save the locals from themselves? Or are we just here to bide our time and then mosey on home? Regardless, security is always present this close to the flagpole. In an asymmetric war, a smaller, less powerful enemy could achieve more destruction by striking outposts secured by only a company of 70–80 soldiers, dozens of miles from other American units, than at a headquarters base. Some who spend their deployment close to the flagpole welcome this and see their deployment home for 12 months as a haven. Others feel the uncanny calm and look for excuses to leave. One of the latter, I am eager to leave headquarters the day I arrive. When I’m at Camp Spann I feel like I’m in an episode of The Twilight Zone, as if either this quiet well-ordered place shouldn’t be here or that I shouldn’t. I know that Afghans live in the nearby city but can only interact with those who have been screened, searched, and permitted inside the wire. Duke is really good at the details and has done what he can in advance of our arrival. He’s ordered the desks, office chairs, filing cabinets, computers, and equipment we will need for our team’s small headquarters’ office. During our first week on base, all three of us work like an Ikea assembly crew to get the office in shape. Other than the occasional complaint when something doesn’t fit together properly, Marc and I maintain a concentrated silence during our work. Duke, on the other hand, sustains a constant banter about his own achievements, as if eager to establish his right to be our team leader. A friend, who went through training with Duke, summed him up, “He’s hairy, smelly, and repeats his stories over and over; other than that he’s OK.” Duke, a short guy in his 60s, looks charmingly like a leprechaun, and when he laughs, and he laughs a lot, the apples of his cheeks redden. The only problem is that he often laughs at things nobody else laughs at. His jokes are lame, but he really delights in retelling them. “Who knows who John Crapper is?” he asks us, even though he’s told us this twice before, but rather than embarrass him, one of us always responds, “Who?” He chuckles with delight, and he says, “Why John Crapper invented the crapper; don’t you know that?” We pretend to relearn it at every telling. We also know that it really wasn’t John Crapper because the first time he told the joke, someone looked it up online and learned that it was Brit Thomas Crapper who invented the

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flush toilet, but we never mention that, knowing that Duke has simply linked the slang words for toilet, “john” and “crapper,” for the name of the inventor; and besides, only nerds correct those who tell jokes. One day, apropos of nothing, Duke asks us if we know what to do to get a bull mad, and one person looks up from his computer screen and says, “No, what?” “Well when you want to get a bull mad,” he says while he chuckles, “you put his balls in a sack and yank that sucker tight, and you really got him upset.” Duke laughs so loudly after he says that, he doesn’t realize that nobody else is laughing.

CHAPTER 5

Going Way Downrange

When Duke, Marc, and I meet with the brigade commander to discuss the questions he might have about those who live in his AO (Area of Operation), he tells us about the two areas with the greatest insecurity, places that keep him up at night: Kunduz, 100 miles to the East, and Ghormach, 200 miles to the west, and says that he knows more about Kunduz than about the wild and wooly Ghormach, a district that a year earlier was turned over from the Norwegians to the Americans because of increased insecurity. He admits, too, that his battalion commander at Kunduz might be less willing than the battalion commander in the west to use “this asset.” This asset, I learn, is Marc and me. At the end of the meeting, it’s clear that Marc and I will be heading out on our first fact-­ finding mission to Ghormach. I feel so relieved to be leaving Spann that I don’t think much about the dangers that await. We hop on a helicopter for the short 19-mile trip to Camp Marmal, the spiffy large German base and the headquarters of RC North (Regional Command North), a base with paved streets and sidewalks, with accommodations for the German soldiers that look more like dorm rooms than deployment barracks, with a comfortable restaurant and even a wine bar where Americans can visit but not imbibe, unless they are contractors, American civilians not subject to the UCMJ (Uniform Code of Military Justice). Clearly, if you are German, Marmal makes a pleasant place to sit out the war. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_5

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After a decent German dinner with something you don’t find in American dining halls, china plates and metal utensils, not paper plates and plastic forks, in a spotless D-FAC (dining facility), we walk to the perimeter of the base to spend an uncomfortable night in an unheated tent for transients like us. The next day, we catch a small fixed wing 159 miles west to the Norwegian base near Maymana, the provincial capital of Faryab Province and a city founded in the fifth century BCE by Jews fleeing the Babylonian sacking of Jerusalem. We spend the day reading novels and playing cards till we can catch a late afternoon convoy to the nearby US battalion headquarters, FOB Griffin, home of the 10th MTN 3-6 FA (Field Artillery). Of the 400 who make up the battalion, about half are stationed at Griffin, with the other half split between two small bases: Qeysar and Ghormach. On the convoy from the Norwegian base to Griffin, I ask the corporal in my vehicle if he can tell me something about his battalion commander we’re about to meet, Lt Col K. “He is the best battalion commander in Afghanistan. He’s fair, he’s honest, he respects us, and we respect him,” the corporal tells me with enthusiasm, as if he’s seen other commanders he doesn’t regard so highly. High praise from an enlisted soldier with only three months left on his tour. I hear similar enthusiasm for Col K from his officers. Even his interpreters work hard to please him, and he lets them know how much he values their help. Commanders, who have hundreds of details to keep track of with so many subordinates risking their lives to execute their commands and who know that every day holds the possibility of at least ten things that can go tragically wrong, often forget to acknowledge the contributions of those whose efforts can easily be taken for granted. According to this corporal, Col K never does. After a few days in Maymana, Marc and I join a convoy loaded with supplies and headed from FOB Griffin to COP (short for Command Outpost) Ghormach, a place I will come to call “the back of beyond.” Marc rides in one of the other heavily armed MRAPs, and Col K invites me to ride in his vehicle. I’m not sure if he wants to keep an eye on me, the only woman traveling to a base where there are no women, or if he’s a little leery of this university professor who just landed in his backyard. I hop in the back, and Col K introduces me to the others on board: the driver, the same corporal who picked us up at the Norwegian base, a quiet private first class in the back with me, and our gunner Sanchez. Sanchez, like all soldiers, wears a tab on the front of his uniform with his surname; only it’s not his real name. This young Afghan-American soldier could

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easily have sported the alias “Smith” or “Jones,” so I suspect that the choice of “Sanchez” probably has more to do with Americans’ racial projections than those of Afghans. Were “Sanchez,” however, to wear his real name like his fellow soldiers, locals would instantly have recognized him as Afghan, making him more of a target for insurgents. In his introduction, Col K expresses his gratitude not only for the soldier’s fast and full translations but for the times he’s been able to advise on the subtleties of exchanges with tribal leaders and government officials in what the army calls key leader engagements or “KLE’s” or with commanders of the Afghan military and police force. Since very few native Pashto speakers are assigned to the North and since the hot spots in our area of operations are all Pashtun, Sanchez is essential. As a gunner, he protects his battalion commander in the front passenger side from would-be attackers. In meetings with local government officials and tribal elders, he protects his boss by translating in his fluent Dari or Pashto. Sanchez, a specialist, just one step up from private first class, has both the impressive linguistic skills for every situation and the deep awareness of cultural context. Later, with Sanchez out of earshot, Col K offers an example. In a recent meeting with the head of the local Afghan National Army, Col K criticized the Afghan soldiers under this commander, soldiers who were supposed to help the Americans defend their position during an insurgent attack but failed even to show up. The ANA commander excused the actions of his soldiers, worked up an indignant lather in the process, and demanded that Col K apologize for insulting his soldiers and, by extension, the Afghan commander himself. Col K refused, and the ANA commander insisted again on the Lt. Colonel’s apology, but before he translated the demand, Sanchez turned to Col K and said in English, “When I translate this, you are going to get up and walk out of the room.” So when Sanchez relayed what the ANA commander had said, Col K followed the advice of the enlisted soldier, got up and without another word walked out of the meeting. “It turned out,” K said, “that action had more effect than anything else I had tried for months.” Later that month, the soft spoken and confident Sanchez was named soldier of the month. One rarely hears an account like this, one by a lieutenant colonel praising the skills of a lowly specialist. Col K trusted this young man to apply his rich cultural understanding of the ritual bartering postures of Afghan men and was comfortable enough to defer when it made sense and humble enough to relate the story of this smart young soldier who understood the right move when his commander did not. The tactic worked, and the

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negotiation ended in the Americans’ favor. Sanchez’s insight is what distinguishes an excellent interpreter from a good one. Col K’s story is what distinguishes an officer confident in his authority from one compelled to demonstrate that authority to all he commands and, as if by extension, to himself. It’s a lovely sunny December day when we head off to Ghormach, and we stop first at the small COP (Command Outpost) in Qeysar.  Col K invites me to a meeting with a friendly tribal leader, one who expresses his anger toward a rival tribe in the area, one he claims has killed his brother. He shows us both a picture of his brother, not in life but in death, a corpse photo like those that almost every Afghan with a cell phone will whip out to illustrate his personal story of the war. He carries it as proof of injustice done and as a reminder that there is still a price for the perpetrator to pay and that it is his responsibility to see that justice has been done. The brother, I learn, was the local leader who helped maintain security for the construction on the last section of the Ring Road, the chief development project of the war. Assessing the root cause of a tribal conflict is often very difficult for occupying forces. Did historical grudges inflame the contemporary situation? Did a rival tribe want their share of the work? Was the rival tribe collaborating with insurgents determined to frustrate any efforts to complete these final miles of the two-lane paved Ring Road because they knew that, once completed, it would weaken their control of the district by linking all the major cities of the country: Mazar-i-Sharif in the north, Herat in the west, Kandahar in the south, and Kabul in the east? The completion of the Ring Road would give the central government more authority over the provinces and make it easier to restrict the transport of opium and guns. The construction of the paved  Ring Road  on the site of an ancient route dating from the fourth century BCE, began with funding from the United States and the Soviet Union in the late 1950s and into the 1960s as a way of stimulating economic development in this land-locked nation. Rich in valuable minerals and agricultural products like grapes, melons, nuts, and wheat, Afghanistan could, with this single national highway, more easily transfer these goods from one part of the country to other parts and to markets outside its borders as in days of old when it formed the well-traveled Silk Road, the trade route connecting east and west. The construction of this 2000-kilometer, two-lane highway has been the cornerstone of international development efforts, with the largest contributions coming from the United States. In a Februrary 15, 2007 address to

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the American Enterprise Institute in Washington DC, President George W. Bush described it this way: Where the roads end in Afghanistan, the Taliban begin. In other words, roads promote enterprise, enterprise provides hope, hope is what defeats this ideology of darkness.

Not only was the Ring Road intended to promote economic development, but once this twenty-first-century war got underway, the completed sections of the Ring Road offered supply routes connecting coalition bases, scattered across the country. And with the completion of new sections of the road came new targets of opportunity for insurgents: military convoys, trucks bringing supplies to small rural military bases, and construction crews working mile by mile to complete this massive project. Over time, insurgents learned lessons from the war in Iraq and buried IEDs along this route. They became cleverer and developed IEDs that don’t detonate when a donkey cart or a motorcycle rolls over them, but deliver their deadly explosions when a multi-ton military vehicle sets them off.

Map of the Ring Road showing the unpaved portion in Ghormach District. (Photo credit: Nations Online Project)

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The Ring Road became the cornerstone of coalition development efforts in a country sorely in need of development. The three billion dollars from America and coalition nations  resulted in a highway that was almost complete. A Chinese engineering firm, China Railway Shisiju Group, funded by the American-backed Asian Development Bank, took on the construction of the northern part of the ring and was successful in linking Mazar-i-Sharif with Maymana and Qeysar in Faryab Province, but their efforts came to a halt east of Ghormach, and the firm pulled out in 2010. They blamed poor security and, indeed, the construction crew housed at “the Chinese Camp,” a few miles from the Ghormach US and Afghan army bases, faced attacks, threats, and kidnappings. Incompetent and ineffective Afghan National Police (ANP), stood up by the central government for the crew’s protection at the developers’ expense, didn’t help matters when two ANP officers partnered with the Taliban to kidnap the chief Afghan engineer on the project. The expense for additional security and the many layers of corruption, both on our end and their end, funneled money away from the project and into the pockets of the well connected. This last strip of unpaved road needs more than just grading and paving. With the spring thaw come sections of this dirt road that completely wash out, so bridge construction is vital. Sadly, in the history of international development, Ghormach offers a cautionary tale full of cost overruns, corruption, and frequent failure. In 2002, the United States began a serious effort to finish the Ring Road. USAID awarded the Louis Berger Group a hefty contract to complete the Kandahar to Kabul section of the ring, a distance of 480 km. The final cost, $300 million (or $625,000 a kilometer) was double the estimated cost. Louis Berger Group was later found to have defrauded the government by over-billing hundreds of millions of dollars for reconstruction and was ordered to make full restitution to USAID, institute ethics training for employees, and pay fines, both civil and criminal, totaling $69.3 million. With funds from China, South Korea, the United States, Turkey, India, even Iran and Saudi Arabia, the completed sections of the Ring Road began showing the signs of a long war and of neglect within ten years of construction. One only needs to take the 24-hour drive from Kandahar to Kabul, a distance of nearly 300 miles, or the 15-hour drive from Kabul to Mazar, a distance of 250 miles, to see the toll that weather, war, and zero maintenance can produce.

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A 2018 report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) would detail how much was spent in an effort to complete the final 144-mile section of the Ring Road from Qeysar in Faryab Province, through Ghormach and on to Laman in Badghis Province and how little was accomplished. Between 2005 and 2017, $249 million was spent on the final 144-mile section of the Ring Road with only 22 miles to show for the effort, a cost of $11.3 million per mile (SIGAR 18-57-SP). After our meeting at the small American base in Qeysar, I jump back into Col K’s vehicle, and our convoy heads out onto the newest section of the Ring Road. We pass scattered villages in the distance, cemetery mounds on the hillsides with their tattered flags honoring local “saints,” those who during their lifetimes performed selfless tasks for a village, were respected teachers, individuals of integrity, the profoundly devout, or those who displayed special abilities. Afghan saints, these country folk believe, can assist the humans in the challenges of daily life. Legends sometimes circulate about these saints, legends recounting an extraordinary accomplishment during their lifetime or their assistance in the lives of the survivors who now pray to them. Although Islam discourages ancestor worship or devotion to saints as an affront to Allah, locals in these rural areas still leave prayer flags at the graves of revered members of the community not just after their deaths but for many years, sometimes even for generations. In rural Afghan cemeteries, there are no grave markers like there are in city cemeteries, just mounds. The higher the mound, the newer the burial. Over the years, the wind will scour off the top layer of dirt leaving only a small covering of stones to anchor the burial site. This area of Afghanistan has been stripped of most of its trees in the last 50 years, and erosion cuts the hills that rise from the Ring Road. With little vegetation left and winter on its way, everything is beige. I wonder if I stay long enough whether my mind will become beige, scrubbed of all difference, all highs and lows, so that even fear will dissolve into a beige numbness. As we climb a steep hill on this newly paved two-lane highway and round one of the hairpin turns, our convoy pulls to a sharp halt. A motorcycle and a donkey-drawn cart have collided. Col K, Sanchez, and the medic dismount, and the rest of us watch from our armored vehicles. The medic begins treating the wounded. It’s clear that the motorcycle driver got the worst of the collision, so the medic starts with him. He then moves to the wife, who has the most lacerations, but her uninjured husband insists that his son receive treatment first, then his daughter, and finally his wife. After everyone is patched up, the cart and its family, along with the motorcycle driver head to the next village, and we get back on our way.

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Twenty minutes later, our convoy slows as an old man with a long white beard and dirty brown shawl, draped over his beige loose pants and tunic, walks up to the highway from the barren field with nothing but the wreck of a Soviet tank from the 1980s. The earflaps from a vintage Soviet Army winter hat, an Ushanka, blow in the breeze on both sides of his head, and he wears a pair of rubber swimming goggles with orange color-tinted lens. But for the glasses, this man, with his own form of camouflage, could have melted into the endless beige. The drivers of our vehicles honk their horns, and some call out to him, “As-Salaam-Alaikum Obi.” The last vehicle in the convoy slows, lowers its back ramp and leaves a box of MREs and a supply of bottled water for the man they call Obi wan Kenobi, provisions he will take down the hill into the abandoned rusted Soviet tank that he calls home until the next convoy rolls past in a couple of weeks. To be greeted by Obi wan Kenobi is a good sign on this otherwise abandoned section of the Ring Road, reassuring us that no IED has been implanted on this stretch of the new highway. Were there one of these lethal devices in the vicinity, the hermit would certainly know and would stay within the safety of his tank home. When they travel this way, convoys always keep their eyes peeled for their Jedi Master. In a war of counterinsurgency, troops understand that their role is to protect the population, but they don’t really know how to go about that. Obi makes it simple. At the end of the paved section of  Ring Road, our massive military vehicles slow to a crawl as they navigate the small and rough dirt road designed for donkey carts and motorcycles, not for our massive armored vehicles. Eventually our convoy fords a river, crosses a wide plain at the foot of the hills, and see COP Ghormach on the distant hillside overlooking the market town less than a mile away. Military life at this outpost is more humble than it is at brigade or battalion headquarters. Throughout the coldest months of the last year, the 10th MTN Company stationed here went without heat. Even now, all at Ghormach eat dry cereal for breakfast every day, MREs (meals ready to eat) for lunch, and whatever the kitchen chuck wagon can cook up for dinner while their brothers and sisters in arms at headquarters enjoy three hot meals along with impressive salad bars and freshly baked desserts. Despite the deprivation, the cooks of the 10th MTN, Army regulars rather than contractors, serve the tastiest dinners in the brigade with limited supplies. One of the Ghormach sergeants tells me that in April, six months before any of my team had arrived, the “mayor,” the enlisted sergeant who maintains quality of life for all on a forward base, walked between the tents with a bull horn proclaiming that finally running water had been installed and

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that a small trailer with a few shower stalls and another with toilets were open for business. Soldiers cheered because they were fed up with the porta johns and with heating water for any shower in a galvanized pail atop a burn barrel, mixing it with a pail of cool water in a jerry can and hoisting that up onto the frame of a platform surrounded by the felt that lines the hescoes, the dirt and stone-filled gabions that surround and protect the base. Sadly, the running water only worked for a few hours, and everyone went back to the grubbiness they had endured for months. The 10th MTN soldiers stationed at Ghormach managed to make the best of a bad situation because many had seen worse and suffered more losses in previous deployments. They knew how not to take themselves too seriously. They held a contest, for example, to see who could wear his uniform the most days without washing it. “You wear a uniform long enough,” a seasoned sergeant and one of the final three contenders for the title told me, “and when you go to bed you can stand the fuckin’ thing up right next to your bunk.” This trip is just a day-long meet-and-greet. Marc and I make plans with the  Ghormach  company commander to  return for a much longer stay when we will go into the neighboring villages and talk with the locals. We sit in on meetings that the company commander has arranged for Col K with Afghan Army commanders and local officials. After dinner, we hop back into the MRAPs for the return convoy back to battalion headquarters. Col K tells the corporal, who has been his driver, to shove over into the passenger’s seat, and he takes the wheel. The first part of our journey is the most dicey. Our heavily armored vehicles are designed with a V-shaped hull so that passengers and crew can survive the blast of an IED, but they aren’t the most agile vehicles for rough terrain, and many have tipped over even without an explosion. By switching from the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle, the “Humvee,” to the Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected light tactical vehicle, the “MRAP,” the Army has traded economy and maneuverability for safety. “Up-armored” Humvees with added plating and mine protection cost less than $200,000 and weigh about 3 tons, whereas the average MRAPs cost more than $600,000 and weigh between 14 and 20 tons. The former is nearly four times more fuel-efficient than the MRAP (Martin, 127). The enormous weight of the MRAPs and their higher center of gravity make them much more prone to getting stuck when not on paved roads, to rollovers, and to tangling with low-hanging power lines. To prepare troops and civilians heading downrange, the DOD encourages

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all who pass through Bagram Airbase on their way downrange to sign up for a class on rollovers with a stint in the MRAP simulator. The Army’s MRAP Vehicles Handbook explains that most MRAP rollovers are due to road conditions: deep ruts or potholes, soft shoulders, or the side of a bridge that gives way under the vehicle’s weight. It advises drivers to use extreme caution and maintain a slow speed. The fear of getting stuck in the muck and becoming the perfect stationary target for a firefight in an area known to be under insurgent control is no doubt the unspoken tension in all of the vehicles in our convoy, but Col K clearly knows what he’s doing and manages to turn a tense trip into a fun one. He starts beat boxing, and soon all of us are joining in. Here we are, on this moonless night in a caravan through hostile territory, and we trade in our anxiety for the devil-may-care pleasure of each other’s company. When we finally reach the relative security of the paved highway, I understand the method to K’s wonderful madness, the way he put us all at ease, and when we get further from Ghormach and back onto paved road, we resume the conversation we had started on the way out. I know that in a couple of months his unit will be heading back to the States, and I want to learn as much as I can about his understanding of the area, of the tribal disputes, the reconstruction efforts in the face of attacks, and of the Taliban’s threatening night letters continuing to be distributed in these areas, one of which ends in a poem, loosely translated: The authors [of this letter] will be rough With those who are malevolent And gentle with those who are soft, Those who have goodness in them.

On this night and in many conversations before his battalion’s departure, I will ask Col K about American frustration with the Afghan National Army’s seemingly different concept to time and their frequent response, “Inshallah,” “God willing.” Often, when Afghan troops are ordered to gather for a joint patrol at an early hour or to assist American forces in a dangerous mission, their commander often responds, “Inshallah,” turning “yes” into “maybe.” I will ask him about the local hostility in Ghormach to the newly installed police force, of the tug of war between insurgents and the central government, and the difficulty in deciphering the allegiances of locals. Maybe it’s the uninterrupted time we have, but it becomes clear as he fills me in, how thoughtful, how reflective, and how smart this commander is. After our trip to Ghormach, Col K always invites

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me to ride in his vehicle because, he says, “Nobody asks me the questions you do.” And no other officer I encounter answers my questions with such thoughtful answers. In the next nine months, I will have many more questions to answer, questions whose answers commanders don’t know and whose answers can only be learned from the local residents. I’ll take many more trips to Ghormach and stay much longer, but for most of those trips, a team member or two will join me, and we’ll catch a lift on a Blackhawk or larger helicopter ferrying supplies, personnel, or mail to this outpost. Although coalition forces know that there are 141 villages in Ghormach District and three tribes (the Achakzai, the Zamanzai, and the Tokhi), they know little about their history or whether these tribes are equally distributed throughout the district or whether there are villages made up of only single tribes. To understand more about the tribal makeup of this area, Marc and I, and later Samantha, set about gathering information for a tribal map of the district. Sam flushes it out with cell phone numbers for the arbabs (respected leaders and elders or “khans,” a term in this part of the country for large landowners or rich people), mirabs (local officials supported by the central government to ensure the sharing of water resources and the maintenance of water conduits), huqooqs (local officials who represent the Ministry of Justice in the resolution of civil disputes), and other important village leaders. We’ll get to know some of the residents of Ghormach District, 97% of whom are Pashtun, in a province with a majority Tajik and Uzbek population. A few years ago, this volatile district, which had had its long-term home in rural Badghis Province, was absorbed into neighboring Faryab Province where those in the Karzai government hoped it would be better governed and easier to control. To maintain security in this violent area, the US Army sent 60 men to aid the under-trained Afghan National Army who occupy the adjoining base. Most residents of Ghormach are farmers who tend their sheep, till their small farms, plant their crops, harvest them, and sell their yield at the local bazaar. Those in this poor rural area of Afghanistan exist at the mercy of the spring mountain runoff when the wadi (river) fills and is diverted through irrigation channels to the fields. And that spring runoff can be fierce, flooding parts of villages. American commanders, who look at a map of the area, often wonder why they find multiple villages with the same name. For example, there are three villages in Ghormach District named Petaw in close proximity to one another. It makes sense that people would settle near the water they collect daily for drinking and cooking, but

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in a winter with a particularly heavy snowfall, the spring runoff can destroy parts of villages, displacing some residents either to higher ground on the same side of the river or to the opposite side. The first and second time a part of their village was flooded, a village elder explains, Petaw residents saw the need to resettle but not to change the name of their village, and the map makers, who left no explanation, simply assigned these villages names: Petaw 1, Petaw 2, and Petaw 3. Other villages are named after an important ancestor, a saint locals believe can intercede on their behalf, and still other villages are given the name of a living member of the community whose stature is recognized. One such village is Asal Jan, a living local leader. “Jan” (pronounced “john”), is the Dari term for someone who is one’s friend. District governors, none Pashtun, appointed by the government in Kabul, come and go in Ghormach, but Asal Jan, a Ghormach native and local leader paid by whoever is in control, continues as the deputy district governor. Even the insurgents don’t seem to mess with him: he is, after all, the only Pashtun in a district of Pashtuns who has managed to stay in power. A short thin man, Asal Jan probably weighs less than 100 pounds. With one eye missing from an accident rather than combat, he wears an eye patch, sports a long white beard, always dons a longee or turban made from a long scarf, and dresses in the traditional shalwar kameez, what some of the American soldiers call “man jams,” a long loose shirt over baggy trousers. As if this slight man might float away, he wears a bandolier fully loaded with AK-47 rounds slung over one shoulder that anchors him. His whole outfit is finished off with a long loose, buttonless vest in warm weather and a Western-­ style sports jacket when it’s cool. When he comes to the American base, Asal Jan knows that his AK47 will be taken and returned to him when he leaves, but this wily, old codger has special permission to bring his bandolier on base with him. Without it, he wouldn’t be Asal Jan, political apparatchik, ersatz warrior, and survivor of one regime after another. Trusted by the Soviets, enlisted by the Taliban when they were in power, and now the friend, “the Jan” to us. Just as the name of the entire province, Faryab, comes from a geographical feature (a Persian word that means farm land irrigated by a nearby river), several villages in Ghormach claim the name of a geographical feature: Du Abi means “two waters” where two tributaries merge and Jar e Saih, literally “black ditch,” lies in the canyon between two steep hills. Any village with the word karez in its name (e.g. Karez Ali Mullah, Karez Kakar, Karez Mohammad Jan, and my favorite Karez Dewana or “crazy karez”) indicates the presence of karezes, man-made underground

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tunnels open to the surface by a series of round holes dug down to the water table. Invented by the Persians 3000 years ago, these karezes have allowed the citizens of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Iran to collect subsoil water used for drinking and irrigation.(Macpherson) Workers dig a series of vertical shafts in a straight line that will permit the easy evacuation of the pails of dirt and rock removed in construction, ventilation for workers, and access for the yearly cleaning of the karezes. From the air, these shafts can be mistaken for bomb craters by coalition forces flying over the area, forces who assume that these craters were left by Soviet aerial bombardment in a previous war. The trick in karez construction is keeping a straight line so that diggers on one end of a section will meet those coming from the other end. My guess is that when the Karez Dewana tunnel was built, it was not too straight, thus the name Karez Dewana, Crazy Karez. Local villages maintain their section of these karezes. For centuries, the work of the fall harvest done, villagers have gotten together to clean the debris that collects in these karezes, making them ready for the unobstructed flow of the precious water in spring and throughout the summer. What for centuries existed as a collective local responsibility has now become, in some areas, a compensated activity paid for by an American army whose commanders look for ways to spend their CERP (Commanders Emergency Response Program) funds. It makes sense from an American perspective. Even after the Afghan foreman or government official skims off his cut, funds will actually go to local Afghans. There’s no way of knowing, however, if the paid workers will only come from the foreman’s tribe or if the workers will actually be insurgents looking to pick up some fast cash. What is certain is that occupying forces have traded cash for custom. Even before 1996, when the Taliban destroyed what few schools there were in Ghormach District, only 11% of the male population and 7% of the female population were literate. When I visit one small rural village, a spokesman for the villagers comes out to speak with me and tells me that what’s needed most is a school and asks if we will build a school in a village whose male children haven’t had access to education for over 16 years. Knowing how difficult it would be to relocate a teacher to this rural and violent area I ask, “If a school were to be built, are there any people in your village who can read and write and can help with the teaching?” He says, “No.” “What about the mullah?” I ask. “No, the mullah can’t read either,” he answers. One becomes a village mullah in this area of Afghanistan not by reading the Quran but either by being the son of a

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mullah or by memorizing a portion of the Quran in its original Arabic, even if one doesn’t understand a word of Arabic. And maybe there’s something about its indecipherability that makes it more magical, more transcendent.

Who’s in Charge of Ghormach? When we ask the farmers and the merchants about local governance, they explain their system of village shuras. The males of their villages select trusted locals to sit on their village shuras, men who meet whenever there is an issue to resolve. Their decisions are consensual. At the next rung in the political ladder, the district level, two Ghormach shuras mirror one another. Each holds an equal number of representatives from the three main tribes, but one is sponsored by GIRoA (Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan) whose authority comes from Kabul, whereas the other is run by the Taliban and reports ultimately to its headquarters, just across the Afghanistan border in Quetta, Pakistan. So everyone who lives here knows that there are two governments to satisfy: one headed by a district governor sent from Kabul, a governor who may have little in common with the local residents, whose ethnicity, whose customs, and whose language he may not even share, and a shadow government that is sometimes more efficient and less corrupt than its official counterpart. The elders who sit on the village shura have known war from the Soviet invasion of 1979 until the Soviet departure ten years later, followed by civil war and by five years of exploitation, extortion, and abuse by powerful warlords and their posses, until thousands of young men, talibs (students) inculcated with a puritanical form of Islamic fundamentalism in Pakistani madrassas and with the martial skills needed to capture major Afghan cities in 1994 set up a central government that was toppled in 2001 with the invasion of American and British troops and the help of the Northern Alliance, a loose confederation of militia opposed to the Taliban. Many of these villagers still recall the violence of the Northern Alliance and one of its most brutal leaders, Uzbek General Abdul Rashid Dostum, who took the district from the Taliban in 2001. Although defeated as national rulers and temporarily driven deeper into the even more remote Badghis, the Taliban returned to Ghormach District followed by other insurgents, squeezed north by the 2010 surge of an additional 30,000 American troops deployed to the south. The new Ghormach district government, presided over by a Karzai appointee from outside the district,

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boasts a modest district building headquarters and a small police station at one end of a long open-air bazaar with over 200 stalls that on market day attracts the male residents from the nearby rural villages. The opposite end of the bazaar hosts a medical clinic and a small police tower. On a hill a mile away, the small American base and its adjacent Afghan National Army base offer the only security there is in this volatile district. Although it might seem that all the villages for miles around are up for grabs, we learn by speaking to the farmers that there’s a real distribution of control between the GIRoA government and its “shadow” counterpart. In fact, the Taliban government manages successfully to exercise some of its control in two important ways: taxation and rule of law. The last time farmers in Ghormach remember paying taxes to the central government was during the reign of King Zahir Shah, who was deposed in 1973. Although many resent the taxes extorted from them by the Taliban in the name of religion, they all know that harvest time is tax time when one of every 40 lambs slaughtered and two out of every 100 bushels of wheat must be handled over to the zakat collector, a Taliban official. A very old tradition and one of the five Pillars of Islam, zakat (ushur in Arabic), the tithe or alms-giving practice intended to purify one’s yearly earnings was typically collected in order to redistribute to the poor. By defining their insurgency as holy, insurgents claim sacred traditions and make them their own. Not only has the Taliban installed a thriving tax system in the areas they control while the central government has failed to impose any tax and remains totally dependent on funds from America and other coalition partners, but the Taliban has come to preside over a system of rule of law that, at least in this district, aims to merge with the traditional system of dispute resolution, a system that weathered the storms of Soviet occupation, warlord tyranny, Taliban rule, and coalition occupation. That centuries-­ old system favors local autonomy, brings together respected individuals, affirms consensus, and emphasizes restorative justice over punishment. At a local shura, male elders hear all sides of a dispute and then determine on whose side justice will sit and what sort of redress is appropriate. They consider land claims, irrigation disputes (who diverted someone else’s water), civil cases, and criminal cases. The central government, with help from USAID, has attempted to replace this traditional system, whereas the Taliban has shored it up. When I ask a “former insurgent” living at a reintegration center what he believes to be the Taliban’s greatest accomplishment in his years with

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them, he responds without hesitation, “the legal system,” and he describes a justice system in which a group of 10–15 Taliban will travel from village to village and join local elders in shuras to consider cases from assaults to livestock disputes, ensure that the decisions of locals don’t favor one tribe over another, and back up whatever decision is made with the promise that on their next visit, they will ensure that the shura’s decision has been carried out. In this war, we have heard of itinerant “motorcycle judges” in the south of Afghanistan whose justice is swift, certain, and regarded by many as fair. With the promise of installing justice in a war-torn nation plagued by rampant warlordism, the Taliban began their takeover in 1994 and captured Kabul in 1996. Since then, it appears that they have developed a more subtle legal system, evolving from the days of punishment theater with public floggings and executions of their first years in power, into a system that concedes more power to the older customary local dispute resolution that has never been beholden to Kabul. On the other hand, the new national legal system, implemented by representatives of the coalition-backed Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) looks unsurprisingly Western. At the top of the pyramid of courts rests the Afghan Supreme Court (“Stera Mahkama”) consisting of nine members, appointed by the president and confirmed by the Wolesi Jirga, literally “house of the people,” the major law-making body in the central government. Below the Stera Mahkama are High Courts as well as Appeals Courts and District Courts. At the local level, this new system is designed to replace the local dispute-­ resolution shuras with government-appointed judges and prosecutors and to give more power to the central government. In a criminal case, for example, the Afghan National Police are supposed to apprehend a suspect and initiate an investigation with the input of the prosecutor within 72 hours of apprehension. Although only 15 days are allotted for an investigation, the police may request an extension. Ultimately, the prosecutor prepares the case, and the judge hears it. The judge can either render a verdict or return the case to the prosecutor if he feels that it is incomplete. Although some judges hold law degrees, many do not, and prosecutors often receive very limited training. One prosecutor tells me that he has attended some training sessions, including instruction at a religious madrassa and completed a four-week course offered by the International Court of Justice. In making a decision, a judge may consult books on various kinds of law (e.g. traffic violations, civil law,

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Sharia law, Egyptian law, the basis for an earlier Afghan penal code, and even a reference book on the Taliban rule prior to 2001). This new legal system is backed by the Constitution of 2004 and Penal Code. The Constitution of Afghanistan is a clear and intelligent document. Although we can certainly fault its weak stand on human rights for women, these flaws lie less in theory than in practice. Marc and I set out to discover how this new system was designed to work and how it actually does work through meetings with those American and German contractors hired to implement it and with the Afghan judges, prosecutors, police, and a few defense attorneys who work within this system. I also visit two detention centers, one a juvenile center where girls have been detained and another, a jail with a section for convicted women and the children they bring with them. Applying the law always involves making decisions that affect people’s lives. One judge tells us that he found people’s fear of the Taliban to be the biggest challenge to the formal legal system. “They are simply too afraid to speak up” he said. Successful judges often work with local representatives like arbobs and huqooqs, those local officials who receive complaints, particularly regarding land disputes. In this area of Afghanistan, where little has been retained in written record, when a farmer wants to sell land to another farmer, no papers are signed; he simply asks a few elders to witness the transaction, and they all meet at the property so that the deal can be made in the presence of others. Where the new system is in place, land disputes (either civilian vs. civilian or civilian vs. government) far outnumber all other claims. This may be attributable to a number of factors, including: (a) the lack of written records, (b) dislocations due to 30 years of war (i.e. moving away and returning to find that a neighbor or even a family member has appropriated one’s plot of land), and (c) governments that have appropriated common land to the ownership of one tribe. As long ago as a century and as recently as 2001, Afghan governments have rewarded loyal Pashtun tribes with rural land in Faryab Province, land that had often been used as common grazing land by the Tajiks and Uzbeks whose ancestors used the land for generations. These programs of “Pastunization,” while they may have kept the peace in Kabul, destabilized the population in Faryab. Uzbeks and Tajiks saw their common land doled out to interlopers. Resentment of this large redistribution of land in the province, combined with recent waves of displacement over the last four decades will undoubtedly result in a host of land disputes into the future, whoever is in charge.

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Many of the residents we speak with would welcome a formal justice system, but they regard the GIRoA justice as prone to protraction and rife with corruption. A rural Afghan seeking redress can wait for years for justice through this government system. To the extent that police, prosecutors, and judges seek to collaborate with the local complaint handling huqooks and validate the decisions of local shuras, providing these shuras are composed of honest and fair citizens, the smoother the transition from informal, customary justice to a formal justice based on written law will be. In Pashtun Ghormach, the police force is made up of Uzbeks and Tajiks trucked in from other parts of the province. These ANP (Afghan National Police) officers man stations at both ends of the Ghormach Bazaar. Another encampment of ANP sits next to the dirt road that vehicles coming to and from the bazaar must take. As we pass this police station on one trip with Col K, he notices that the driver of the overloaded truck ahead of us, one clearly bound for the bazaar, has handed over money to a couple of ANP officers who are stopping everyone who passes. Like the insurgents and warlords before them, the police stationed here have set up a road block not to check for explosives but to extort money. Col K asks his interpreter Sanchez to confirm this by speaking with the truck driver, and we learn that this “tax” is demanded every market day. Other groups of ANP officers who are not assigned to these two ANP bases live in groups of five or six sequestered in small hilltop outposts with guard dogs, large and ferocious mastiff breeds, to warn of anyone’s approach. A couple of former American police officers working as contractors for DynCorp, train the Afghan National Police recruits in this district. No matter how much these Americans communicate the need for local patrols, no one listens. Forget community policing; these young ANP guys just want to be alive at the end of their deployment to Ghormach. They will listen to their DynCorp instructor, but both he and they know that they will never be able to put in practice what they have been taught, at least not in Ghormach. Most of these trainees don’t even speak Pashto, the language spoken by the majority of local residents, but all of them know that they share with the locals both fear and mistrust. These are not their communities to protect; they are just biding their time, collecting their pay, and assuming the role of onlookers rather than vigilant security forces. One day while I’m at Ghormach, an Afghan in his 20s who works as general handyman on the base and who had previously served as an ANP officer tells me the story about how he ended his brief service in the

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ANP. After initial training, he and four other police recruits were posted at a small compound on an isolated hilltop. One moonless night he was on guard duty until 2:00 A.M., when another recruit, an older man, came to relieve him. He went to sleep, along with his three sleeping companions, only to be roused by 30 insurgents who burst into the compound, their Kalashnikovs drawn. The four sleepy police recruits were clearly no match for the insurgents who ordered them to get some clothes on so that they could leave. The older man on guard, it turned out, had sold to the Taliban for a price of 100,000 afghanis (about $2000) the entire compound and everything with it: ANP uniforms, plenty of provisions, many weapons, the characteristic green ANP pickup, and his four fellow recruits. While on duty, the older man had signaled the nearby insurgents that the coast was clear and, after selling his fellow officers hurried off with the cash while the others were taken into Taliban custody. For the insurgents, this transaction turned out to be a profitable one, netting a tenfold return. They gained a perfect outpost with 360-degree visibility of the surrounding area and easy access to the road below where they could set up a checkpoint. With the ANP uniforms from the compound, they could, at least for a while, extort fines from all who traveled along the road below. Insurgents beat and blindfolded the four young police officers for 45 days. Their blindfolds and bindings were removed only to eat meager provisions and to go to the bathroom. On more than one occasion, insurgents took the three outside the compound, told them that they were going to be killed, and instructed them to call their families and beg for the ransom. Their poor families said that they had been trying to raise all the money and begged the insurgents for more time. After 45 days, the elders of the villages where these men resided brought the required ransom (250,000—300,000 afghanis for each man or $4,800— $6,800) to secure the release of these three. At their release, insurgents threatened that if any of them chose to work for the government again, he would face a certain and brutal death. This Ghormach handyman never did go back to the ANP, but he found work on our small base. In Afghanistan a ransom paid is a ransom owed, and this young man is working on base to raise the money and make good on his debt. He calculated that the payoff would be completed in two years, two years of never leaving the base for fear of capture and death. What his imprisonment became was a way of generating insurgent money, the flip side of a government detention system that exists, at least in this area of Afghanistan, as a way of making money for those government officials also on the take.

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The official legal system, newly implemented, feels the taint of corruption with judges paid to rule on behalf of who pays the most, prosecutors who supplement their government pay with bribes to throw a case, and chiefs of police who release jailed individuals for payoffs. Clearly, if the coalition-backed government justice is to win the support of the population, it must hold accountable its own members who break the rules and exploit their positions for gain. This is a major frustration for coalition forces, who, for example, get the goods on a local insurgent and bomb-­ making expert and who, with their ANP counterparts apprehend the individual and take him to the local jail to be held till trial, only to discover that he was released. Two Afghan men in a local village talk about security in the area, and one tells the other that he knows someone who was sentenced to six months in jail for a violent crime, but before he was taken to jail, his family went to the prosecutor’s house, gave him 35,000 afghanis (about $700), and the convicted man’s record was burned so that he did not have to spend a day in jail. The first group of national police to appear in Ghormach didn’t win much support from anyone other than the Uzbek merchants who traveled to the bazaar on market days. After all, they, like the Americans, were an occupying force. Other merchants complained about intimidation and brutality, and in one altercation, an ANP officer was killed. In response, the national police ratcheted up their brutality toward merchants and their customers. It is only when the young Army captain, who commands the American base at Ghormach, tightens his control over the police and takes citizen concerns to the police that the police begin to curb their abuse of civilians in the bazaar. In Ghormach District, there is only one remaining provisional reconstruction team (PRT), whose headquarters is located in the bazaar. PRTs were intended to assist in local governance, rehabilitation, and development by combining the funding and expertise of the military (specifically Civil Affairs) and civilian authority to support the fledgling central government. The single remaining PRT in Ghormach, ACTED (Agency for Cooperation and Technical Development), funded by the Norwegian government, had coordinated efforts with the Norwegian force, but when security worsened in 2009 and early 2010, the Americans replaced the Norwegian force. The local representative of ACTED complains to my team of ongoing police abuse of civilians. He explains that at 5:00 P.M. one afternoon, his nephew, who is deaf, was stopped at one of the police checkpoints near the village of AbGhormach. When the boy did not hear the command to exit his vehicle by a police officer (whom this gentleman claims is a former

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Taliban member), and the boy did not respond with the illegal toll demanded of him, the police officer dragged him from his vehicle and beat him. Although complaints were registered with the police chief, nothing was done. This PRT had planned to build a school near the three villages that make up Petaw, but the Taliban opposed it, so the district governor advised the PRT to build the school near the site of the existing school, located just off the bazaar. With each new delivery of school construction materials to the site, the national police stationed in Ghormach come around to claim a share of the delivery, load it up, and take off in one of their pickups, no doubt to resell the construction materials. One police officer justifies the illegal checkpoints, the demands for extra provisions, and excess petrol to resell this way, “If you’re away from your family not making enough money, not getting your pay on time, and even when you get paid, it is not the right amount of money and you need money, you have to get it somewhere. That’s why some [police officers] ask for money everywhere in Afghanistan not only in Ghormach.” The police compound at the far end of the bazaar is next door to the Ghormach medical clinic, built and supplied with coalition funds. When I first arrived at COP Ghormach, I was told that the Taliban had attacked the Medical Clinic as if to intimidate the nurse-midwife who works and lives at the clinic with her family. When I ask her about this, I learn that the Taliban didn’t bust the windows of the clinic, the Afghan national police did, not intentionally but in their overexuberant exchanges with insurgents. Although clinic workers know that they are not the targets of such fire, they, nevertheless, want it to stop. They say that whenever insurgents attack the police compound, the clinic receives collateral damage. Even a single mortar that doesn’t hit anything will generate a fierce, all-­ out police response. Unfortunately, their aim is generally pretty poor, a fact that even the officers at COP Ghormach confirm. To this predicament, my team recommends that, at the very least, the ANP apologize and repair the windows they have broken. Better yet, we advocate a meeting with representatives of the ANP that would include governmental representatives, the director of the clinic, and a delegation from the merchants in the bazaar to be chosen by them with ample Pashtun representation. Since the merchants already trust the Afghan Army, we recommend that they be present at such a “shura.” Curbing ANP abuse is a game of whack a mole: you think you’ve eliminated one form of abuse, and another materializes. A few months earlier,

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as winter approached, the United Nations (UN) decided to distribute thick warm blankets to those in need. The UN workers did what you are supposed to do in an effort to give the fledgling central government credit. They asked the help of the ANP in distributing the blankets. The police did show up to maintain order and hand out the blankets, but they took every fourth blanket and threw it into their pickups instead of distributing it to the locals. When the UN representative complained, he was hit and knocked to the ground by a police officer. Regardless of this rebuff, the UN in the area tried another time to enlist the help of the government to distribute bags of rice to villages where food insecurity had been identified. This time, they avoided the police and went instead to the provincial governor soliciting his help. He willingly agreed, but he had another use for a truck full of rice. Taliban threats to his life had been coming pretty consistently, so he made a deal with the insurgents; he would give them the rice, and they would promise to issue no more threats on his life.

An officer takes a closer look at the local flora

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Corruption flows through every governmental agency in Afghanistan, and the Afghan National Army is no exception. An Afghan Army soldier stationed near Kabul describes life as good, so good that he can now afford to build a house. When asked how he could build a house on an enlisted soldier’s small income, he answers, “Every night we make 40,000–50,000afs ($900–$1100) from the fees we charge motor vehicles. We have to pay 80% of what we collect to our sergeant commander.” For someone who earns $250 per month, the nightly haul is impressive. So much goes to the commander, he explains, because “that poor guy, he has to pay ten others their cut, starting with his boss all the way to his bosses’ superiors” (translated from Ishansh). Not everyone, though, is sitting back and adjusting to this new normal. For the past four years, a group of 25 young Uzbek professionals working in Maymana (lawyers, doctors, nurses, teachers, and engineers) has been meeting in an effort to draw attention to the needs of education in the area, to expose corruption, and to work through peaceful means for a government more responsible to the people rather than one filled with officials out for their own gain. Every month they publish Ishansh, which means “belief.” In an interview with me, the paper’s publisher, Firoz, explains that the name has no religious connotation but is intended to encourage people to believe or to hope for a better, more honest, and more just future for their city and nation. The aim of this group is not to dismantle existing governmental structures but to populate them with public servants willing to put public good before personal gain. These are members of a new middle class. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Afghanistan witnessed the evacuation of its middle class, followed by a subsequent exodus in the mid-1990s. Some (like Ashraf Ghani) returned, but most did not, leaving a country with few educated leaders and skilled bureaucrats. This Maymana group represents the closest thing that Faryab Province has to such a group. If not engaged and groomed for future leadership, they, too, are likely to become the latest generation of professionals to leave. Because this group has condemned the corruption it says is committed by those in important provincial offices, its members have been repeatedly threatened. One of their writers, while shopping at the Maymana bazaar, sustained multiple broken bones and stab wounds in retaliation for an article he wrote critical of the National Directorate of Security (NDS)’s Quick Reaction Force, a small group of heavily armed, masked fighters in NDS uniforms established by the NDS Security Chief. According to

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Ishansh, it behaves like a group of thugs who threaten the population, undermine the Afghan National Police operating in the city, and target intellectuals and professionals in the community to demonstrate the power of the local NDS, Afghanistan’s intelligence agency, its FBI and CIA rolled into one. Ishansh argues that instead of appearing on the streets of Maymana as “masked bandits from the movies, and threatening law-­ abiding citizens, NDS needs to shift its attention to the serious security concerns that trouble the highways between Maymana and Mazar-i-Sharif to the east and Maymana and Herat to the west, areas that remain under the control of insurgents from dusk till dawn” (Ishansh). These young professionals point out that while money is flowing to support security, the central government has neglected education, made dire by the lack of teachers and books, especially in the fields of science and math. Because of the shortage of teachers, instruction in several areas in the province is limited to three hours a day. In others, instruction only takes place one day per week. In still other areas, schools no longer exist. Probably the most consistent theme of Ishansh is the drive that propelled this group of professionals to organize in the first place—corruption. Issue 44 (May 2011) points out how pervasive bribery has become. It says that the old terms for bribes, “sherini” (candy) and “dastkhoshi” (tip), terms once shrouded in shame, are disappearing in favor of today’s “baghal-e-­ boghol” (one’s inner pocket), an expression that is now openly demanded by public servants who have come to take it for granted as an expected supplement to income. Governmental officials don’t always ask for bribes outright. An Afghan who comes to a governmental office in need of a form or a signature may face delay after delay till he gets the point and forks over the cash. The first time it will be “Come back in a week.” Another time, the citizen will be told, “The manager is not in a good mood.” Then, “Go now, it’s time for prayer,” and later, “Your case is very difficult.” When a clerk says to another clerk, “Paida nanpaida?”, translated literally as visible/invisible and pretends to ask whether the manager is available, he’s tipping off the person making the request that a bribe is expected. The expectation of supplemental income from corruption is what fuels the selling of government positions. The higher the position, the more extra income it will generate in bribes. According to Ishansh, the fee paid for government positions starts at 100,000 afghanis or about $2000 and rises to as high as 5 million afghanis or nearly $100,000. Positions in counter narcotics and criminal justice are the most costly because the

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holders of these positions stand to generate, according to Ishansh, as much as five times their governmental salary in illegal payoffs. Some government jobs require special skills, but with the right bribe, that preparation can be overlooked. They report that one teacher in a rural school had formerly served as a janitor, was illiterate but had bought his government post as teacher: Many people obtain their government jobs without a single day of schooling. I know somebody who had been working as a school janitor. When I asked him how he was doing, he answered, “Thank God! I am a teacher now.” I replied, “But you haven’t gone to school, even for a day!.” He said, “At least I can fool the children between 1st and 4th grades as long as the other teachers aren’t around. I can tell fairy tales to them and keep them calm.” I know others in positions requiring education who still use their thumb print on paydays. Fake certificates can be purchased, and even the votes of members of Parliament, according to Ishansh, are for sale. In a culture this riddled with corruption, nothing is as it seems, and everyone is in someone else’s pocket. Locals in both Maymana and Ghormach complain of the pervasive corruption. My teammate Aziz suggests that we think hard about the Afghan saying, “Sometimes water is dirty from the top.” Aziz has seen the way this graft has infected development efforts not just in our area of operation but in other parts of Afghanistan where he’s served: ISAF [Islamic State Assistance Force, Americans and their coalition partners] wants to build a school for a village and is told by the government in Kabul that the school will cost $1 million to build. Legitimate Afghan contractors don’t get that amount; the minister in the government gets the money. He then asks the second person if he can build the school for $400,000, and that official agrees. He, in turn, goes to a 3rd person who agrees to build the school for $300,000, and then to the last person who agrees to build the school for $200,000, who instead of using prime cement will construct a school with 10 or 20% cement and the rest filler. The corruption results in poorly made buildings and roads.

This is what we expect happens in Ghormach District. The military group I’m working with as well as the residents in two neighboring villages in the area eagerly await the completion of a school in the district. Plans are readied for the grand opening, but during the night two days before it is due

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to open, the entire cement roof collapses. Had children been attending class, the damage could have been so much more tragic. The day after the collapse, American military in the area, local residents, and the police go to the site to discover that the structure is in total ruin. Those responsible for the construction blame the destruction on the Taliban, but the police, whose post is just a few yards from the site of the new school, heard no explosion during the night, and our EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) specialists can find no evidence of a bomb. It perplexes all. The next day I hop on a Blackhawk and fly from Ghormach back to Maymana with interior and exterior photos of the school before its demise. At dinner that night, I show them to one of the older Afghan-Americans at Maymana, an interpreter who has helped me with some translations and with whom I’ve shared dinner before. He’s told me that before retiring, he worked as a civil engineer inspecting building construction for the city of San Diego, California. In that capacity, he would make several site visits to inspect the building process and to certify that construction could continue, ensuring at every stage that the building could withstand a seismic event. He took one look at the photos of the completed structure prior to its collapse and told me that it was no surprise that it collapsed. He pointed out all the places where more support was needed for the heavy cement ceiling. It struck me as such a shame that the command hadn’t bothered to learn anything about the interpreters who work for them. Maybe if this battalion, whose project this was, had brought him out to Ghormach, he could have spotted the shoddy construction early-on. But by now, the money is spent, the district is sliding into greater insecurity, and the command isn’t going to invest in another school project.

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Tailor shop at the Ghormach Bazaar. (Photo Credit: Aziz Razawi)

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Store keeper selling vegetables, Ghormach Bazaar. (Photo Credit: Aziz Razawi)

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The only hotel at the Ghormach Bazaar. Note the white surveillance balloon on the left side of the structure. (Photo Credit: Aziz Razawi)

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Grandfather helping his grandson with homework in the stall he owns at the Ghormach Bazaar. (Photo Credit: Aziz Razawi)

CHAPTER 6

Band of Brothers and Sisters

Our team leader Duke is the man who takes more vitamins than anyone on base, orders them from the Internet by the vat full, and boasts that he downs “43 vitamin pills a day.” Baffled, I respond, “How could any body absorb that many vitamins?” “Well,” says Duke, “I just piss away what I don’t absorb.” “Guess that makes your piss the most valuable in the brigade then.” Generally, though, none of us responds to his pronouncements. Duke’s is an authority that needs to be insisted upon. When those of us who conduct fieldwork are back at our makeshift office at headquarters, Duke seems eager to have an audience and talks a lot, but sadly, his monologue is often larded with malapropisms or offers a statement that he intends to be pithy but that falls well short of the mark, statements like “The skeleton is in the bones” and “The events become windows of vulnerability.” It’s almost as if he begins a cliché, for example, “the skeleton in the closet” or “windows of opportunity” and then forgets how it ends, substituting whatever pops into his head. One day he reports, as he often does, what the commander said in his morning brief, and then heads off to another meeting. When he returns from that, he says, “The only thing I had to put out I told you this morning, so why practice bleeding?” Out of kindness or perplexity, we all look intently at our computers. More disabling than his inability to manage a punch line is Duke’s incapacity to grasp complication. His fervent pronouncements are simple, inflamed by certainty, and he interjects remarks with passion into © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_6

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conversations, often without regard for how offensive they might sound to his audience. One day when we are discussing the growing pains of the Afghan National Army, Duke points to the successful integration of African Americans in the US military. It’s pointed out that although African Americans are well represented in the lower enlisted ranks, their representation falls off considerably in the commissioned ranks. Frustrated to have his point contested, he editorializes in heated tones, “The only person who could have done anything for blacks was killed in 1968, and what were left were two pimples on the ass of Martin Luther King, Jesse frikin’ Jackson and Sharpton, and they have pimped out their entire race. That’s the problem.” Not wanting to extend this conversation, no one responds; we all just turn to our computers in silence. One day back at headquarters, those of us who have just returned from Ghormach, talk about the challenge of winning the trust of the majority Pashtun residents in that remote district, a district in which the central government in Kabul has newly installed an Uzbek police force and a Hazara district governor. After listening to our conversation and without ever having taken even one step outside the wire in this district, Duke proclaims, “I will tell you that there is not anything necessarily wrong with an Uzbek being the district governor in a Pashtun area. It will depend on his inner relation in the past.” Nobody asks for clarification because we don’t expect any. And when we discuss the Afghan Army’s complaints that the equipment provided by Americans in this remote district is in need of replacement, he chimes in again, “If I have a piece of equipment that’s been running hard for twenty years and put it away wet, then I’m gonna run it too hard. You break it, you buy it.” The cliché solves the problem in Duke’s mind because it is a cliché, which he believes is authoritative regardless of the context. What starts out sounding relevant to the conversation ends up baffling any listener into silence. When Duke sticks to the military side of things, is present at all the commander’s daily briefs and then returns with the weather and security reports, he’s most effective. In the month before Marc and I arrived at the large base that would serve as headquarters, Duke managed to secure the office space, supplies, computers, and double and triple-bunked sleeping quarters for both of us. He secured for himself a coveted private spot in a hard-sided b-hut partitioned into small rooms with thin plywood walls that do not reach the ceiling. I share my quarters with two civilian female “mapping experts” who rise for showers, grab their first meal of the day

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and prepare for their midnight-to-noon shift when I am retiring to my bunk after a 12-hour day from 8 AM to 8 PM followed by dinner. Their deployments are only for four months, so when my roommate with the needlepoint “Jesus” on her bedside table returns to the States, taking her crocheted Jesus doily with her, I appropriate her bunk in the corner, her bedside crate that doubles as a table for my battery-operated reading lamp, and, most importantly, her mattress that is by no means pristine but that at least is without any exposed springs. I understand the Pentagon’s desire to procure supplies from local businesses, but in a country whose population sleeps on comfortable stuffed mats on the floor rather than on mattresses, the DOD has insured every soldier’s discomfort by requisitioning thousands of box springs without top mattresses. Most deployers, therefore, send out their order for Memory Foam in the first week in-country. In addition, I do what many base dwellers sharing rooms and tents do; I buy an Afghan bedspread to drape around the sides of my bunk forming a private room with fabric walls, a room-within-a-room which serves me well till I can leave the flagpole, traveled to contested areas, and begin my fieldwork. Although here on this safe base in the north we are not bothered by “incoming” alarms, my room is next to a large generator, one that blasts like a jet engine day and night. The good thing is that the loud sound never varies and actually doubles as a sleep aid, the sound of war’s industrially soothing monotony. Duke knows that long deployments invite the transformation of shared space into private spaces and the personalizing of that space by erecting plywood partitions to divide tents, making bedside tables out of crates and boxes, and painting images on their walls. At headquarters where soldiers and civilians have access to a shop with construction tools, they find spare sheets of plywood to construct desks, closets, even entire tents with partitions and doors to each separate space. When Duke arrives at Camp Spann, he measures his small “room” in the b-hut and designs meticulous plans for the perfect combination of plywood cabinet/cupboard in which to stash his things and from which he can operate his joystick to fly the simulation software of a single-engine plane. Rather than build it himself, he requisitions the shop personnel to build it for him. He proudly shows us drawings of his design, and after delivering the plans to the wood shop, he makes several visits to ensure that the guys know exactly what he wants and can execute it properly. Week after week he returns to the shop to see if they have begun work on his project, and when they have, he goes over every day to examine the progress. You can tell that he’s excited as the

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construction of his masterpiece of architectural efficiency nears completion. When done, he arrives to claim the finished plywood piece of art, only to learn that earlier in the day someone in the shop inadvertently gave the piece of furniture to a young female officer who had requested a similar piece. Furious, as Duke tells it, he heads to her quarters “to berate her” for taking what is rightfully his, what he has personally designed. After discovering that she has already squeezed it into her room, he tells us, “I decided to be the gentleman and commission a new one.” He returns to the shop, berates them instead, and receives an apology and the promise to complete the project in three days. None of us finds Duke abusive, just annoying. That said, I’m sure that I annoy him as well when the officers on base address me as “Dr. Burke” but don’t address him as “Colonel.” In a world ordered not by merit but by rank, it must seem unfair to him. I know that I annoy him when I correct his writing, which is quite poor. He knows this and therefore emails most of what he has to write to his wife, an English teacher. I’m sure that I annoy him when I object to a sexist comment he makes or when he insists that Fox news is the only news worth listening to, or when he says, “Maybe the Afghans should just be bombed back to the stone age.” Marc, Duke, and I form the beginning of a team that will, after the first three months, welcome three others: Samantha, Spiker, and Aziz. Samantha, the youngest member, learns languages like they are simple arithmetic. Bright, fearless, generous and trusting, she makes easy friends with fellow smokers and the young Afghan nationals who serve as local interpreters. When we travel to another base, within 24 hours Samantha finds out what’s really going on at that base, and when we can’t get off base, she’ll get the scoop on what’s happening on the other side of the wire from her local interpreter friends, zoned to their own tent or plywood building but free to leave the base in their off-hours and mingle with the locals. This isn’t her first trip to this war; a couple of years earlier she worked for the Red Cross at Bagram Airfield, notifying those stateside of a missing or injured family member. Sam tells me that she deploys for love, for the romantic encounters that elude her back in the civilian world, and she manages to find the male companionship she craves. If you’re female, heterosexual, and interested in romance, the odds are in your favor. There are plenty of male soldiers and contractors to choose from, but the most willing and available for romance are the 20-something local interpreters whose repressive culture has restricted their encounters with young women to the formal tea at the

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girl’s home, overseen by adults, when the young man visits the woman’s home before the arranged marriage is agreed to by all parties. Technically, the girls have the right of refusal, but generally all the vetting has been done, and the tea is just a formality. Young men often have to postpone marriage and work for many years before they save the money to cover the cost of an Afghan wedding. It’s not unusual for Afghan men to wait to marry until they are in their 30s. They do this not out of choice but out of financial necessity. In families with multiple sons, parents who are able will help the oldest son cover the cost of his wedding, but it is often his responsibility to help his next youngest brother raise the funds for his wedding. He in turn will help the next youngest. Samantha, a friendly American in her 20s, will step into the cultural divide that separates liberal Western occupiers from their Afghan partners. On her first trip to one of the brigade’s battalion headquarters, Walid, a friendly Afghan interpreter, professes his love for her, but a week later she explains to Walid that she is attracted to another—Sohail, a tall, attractive Afghan. Investing far more seriously in their relationship than Samantha, Sohail assumes that they will be married and gives her his lapis ring, and she, with no ring with which to reciprocate, offers Sohail one of her two dog tags. Military identification tags have been given to soldiers since WWI, and two tags are now standard for soldiers and those like us who embed with these army units. Typically one tag is taken from a killed or wounded soldier, and the other stays with the body. Giving personal identification to a foreign national, even a friendly one, is risky, and when Sam tells me this, I respond, “How could you do that; your dog tag has your social security number on it, and Sohail may be honest and may care about you, but how do you know that your information is safe?” Because our jobs require that we go outside the wire often, we have been advised to remove from our body armor the Velcro tab with our last name and substitute one with our first name, making it harder for insurgents to track us down. At least one other cultural advisor in our program discovered that his American identity had been tracked, and his family became the recipient of a threatening letter. I think that Sam has taken my admonishment to heart when she vows that on our new trip out to his base, she will ask Sohail for her dog tag back, but the real motivation for such a request may have less to do with my caution and more to do with the fact that her attentions have again shifted, this time from Sohail to Nasir. On the first night we return to Sohail’s base, Sam returns his ring and asks for the return of the love token

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she has given to him because she is attracted another. He returns her metal tag and throws the returned lapis ring over the fence, swearing that he will never fall for anyone again because these things just don’t end well. Both of these young Afghan men are friendly and attractive, but whereas Sohail is naïve, Nasir is more worldly wise, coming from an educated family and holding an engineering degree from an Afghan university. He’s fluent in Dari, a language related to Persian and the lingua franca of Afghanistan; in English; and in his native language Uzbek, the close cousin of Turkish. Sam and Nasir become a couple for the rest of her deployment, and they even fantasize about marrying. Sam proposes that they move to Germany where she imagines that they will both attend university to work on master’s degrees. She is fluent in German, but Nasir is not. When he can’t get a visa, he opts to go to Turkey where his fluency in multiple languages will serve him well and where he can work as a translator for the US troops in Turkey, and she will join him there for almost two years till he gives in to pressure from home to take an Afghan Muslim bride, a situation, he insists, should not alter their relationship: he promises to regard Sam as “wife number 1” and the new bride as “wife number 2.” A relationship that sails through the perils of war runs aground on the shoals of culture. Soldiers often describe their experience of war as months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, but deployment romances interrupt the monotony in a different way. Intensified in the face of danger, these romances always come with impermanence gnawing at their edges, but it’s the impermanence and the efforts at secrecy required to sustain them, the scouting out of unmonitored areas for encounters and the sneaking into tents through the back flap when others are asleep that defy the monotony. Determined to preserve my own long marriage, I rebuff one suitor, a loud-mouthed major whom my teammates kid me about. At headquarters, a simple plywood partition divides our small building down the center: our team’s space on one side, this major and the low-ranking enlisted soldiers who report to him on the other. The partition is so thin and his pronouncements so loud that we can hear every word. While reprimanding a young soldier for the brevity in his reports, the major says, “You hold it in; that’s where shitty ideas come from.” A few days later, he mentions that the television he’s ordered for the office should soon arrive, “Next week we’ll be watchin’ fuckin’ TV here. Every day you’ll fuckin’ get up, fuckin’ jack off, and watch fuckin’ TV again.”

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Even if I could imagine having sex with this officer, I know that he couldn’t resist telling someone, and within 24 hours, I’d never be able to live it down. Maintaining my fidelity to my husband and good standing with my team are more important than a little of the creature comfort we all crave. I can’t say that I don’t admire the lovely male bodies lifting weights in the gym where I use the treadmill every day that I’m at headquarters. They perform, and I serve as their appreciative audience. Having been on the receiving end of infidelity and recalling its pain dampens any appetite I harbor for a fling. Two new members, Aziz and Spiker, soon complete our team. Aziz, an Afghan-American in his mid-50s, grew up in Kabul in a Tajik household and started at one of the two universities in Afghanistan at the time, eager to become a journalist. Soon after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, those plans were aborted when, like many middle-class Afghans, his family fled the country for Pakistan where they spent several months awaiting a visa to the US. They landed in San Francisco, and Aziz worked hard to learn English, to attend a community college and acquire the skills in photography and video production needed to land him jobs, many of them freelance like food photographer for restaurants, wedding videographer, and DJ. He even owned his own Afghan restaurant and has done and will continue to do many jobs for the DOD: stateside playing the role of an Afghan commander for troops preparing to head to Afghanistan and, while deployed, working as a translator, as a radio host of the popular program, “Voice of the North,” that operates 24 hours a day from a base in Kunduz, and as the creator of a hotline so that local residents can call for help or report suspicious activity they fear might threaten their villages. When Samantha, Marc, Aziz, and I leave Spann and travel to the boonies of the brigade’s AO, we notice that Aziz is almost old enough to be a village elder, is fluent in Dari, and easily wins the trust of Afghans, who speak more freely around him than around the rest of us. They communicate their mistrust in the government in Kabul and their dismay that Americans seem blind to its faults. One man tells him, “The Americans don’t support us; they support the crap government.” While the four of us conduct fieldwork, Spiker and our team leader Duke spend most of their time at headquarters fighting the boredom by searching for the latest weapons for sale online. Duke attends meetings with brigade staff, and Spiker works out all the details of our travel throughout the brigade’s AO, secures the equipment we need, even the

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equipment we don’t know we need, and works the system like a star quarterback. Every team needs a scavenger and fixer, and Spiker is ours. He “rescues” cases of Gatorade and outfits those of us who often go outside the wire with whatever survival equipment he can lay his hands on. One day, he comes into our plywood “office” with nine jumbo rolls of olive-drab duct tape, each at least three times the size of an average role of duct tape. This strong rubberized tape with adhesive and “duck cloth” backing, invented by Johnson & Johnson in WWII to keep ammo cases dry, has resulted in some of the most inventive solutions to a soldier’s problems. “Hey, Marky Marc,” says Spiker, “give me your belt,” and Marc unbuckles his woven Army-issue belt and slips off the attached cumbersome stiff, uncomfortable plastic holster that cradles his M9 and hands over the belt. Spiker then sets to work on a project. It’s clear that he’s done this before, and I look on as he carefully fashions a DIY duct tape holster, one that’s lightweight, fits snuggly to the body, and doesn’t cut into his side, one that Marc carries for the rest of his deployment. Spiker makes sure that both Samantha and I have our own very compact supply of duct tape, folded as small as a pack of cards. A week later, Spiker comes in with the largest tangled mass of 550 cord (“paracord”) in the war, one that I’m certain the American units that succeed us and the Afghan soldiers after them will be untangling till the war’s end. This nylon cord that the DOD originally intended for parachutes has captured the creative imaginations of soldiers and Marines for years as they have used it to secure gear and stake down tents. Inside the cord’s nylon sheath are from 16 to 44 woven strands, depending on its strength, that soldiers sometimes expose to use as sewing thread or in extreme cases to suture a wound. Some versions of 550 cord even have a thin strand of wire that can be fished out and strung as a protective perimeter or tripwire. Now a standard knotting technique is used to weave several feet of 550 into a compact survival bracelet or belt that can be easily unfurled when needed and used as a tourniquet to stop bleeding, to replace warn shoelaces, to secure a splint, to fashion a sling, or to tie branches together to form a shelter. The bracelets, in particular, have become part of military fashion. Some elite units have even ritualized the process: each service member makes a 550-cord bracelet for another, a bracelet whose closure is one of his military buttons. The bracelets are only removed when all return safely from a particular mission or when all return at the end of deployment. If they don’t, then the bracelets are worn as memorials to those who didn’t return. Such cord bracelets, like the metal bracelets first

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distributed during the Vietnam War and inscribed with a buddy’s name, commemorate the sacrifice of those who did not return. Spiker invites us to join him in his detangling effort, but after each of us has unknotted the 50–100 meters we think we need, we tire of the task, having made no observable reduction in the massive tangled pile, and one civilian contractor in our office drapes himself in the tangled cord as if it were a “ghillie suit,” a military and hunting camouflage named about the Scottish fairy Ghillie Dhu believed to have wandered in the forest and, according to legend, occasionally appears covered in moss and leaves. There is a boyishness to young men on deployment, and like the high school friends eager to play with the most popular athlete in the neighborhood, Spiker’s buddies come by at the end of the day to see if he can come out and toss around a football. These are the simple acts that bring normalcy to the life of war. Pets do that as well. Every base I’ve been on in either Iraq or Afghanistan has a few pets. In Iraq I saw several cats: in Afghanistan it is dogs who pass through a hole in the perimeter and sometimes give birth to a litter of pups. Base dwellers care for them, play with them, and keep them fed either with food brought back from the D-FAC or from dog food ordered on the Internet. Afghans who do have dogs view them as dirty, never bring them into a home, don’t domesticate them, and use them as guard dogs to signal an intruder. Spiker adopts a pup from a litter, trains him, and keeps the pup as his constant companion. We watch the dog grow into a well-behaved gentle dog over several months of Spiker’s care. One day, when I return to headquarters after a couple of weeks in the back of the beyond, I greet a subdued Spiker, but his trailing canine partner is nowhere to be seen. While I was away, it turns out, the 170th, a stickler for the rules, declared that because dogs can present a health hazard, any dogs on base would be rounded up and killed. Offers by those who had adopted and nurtured these strays to pay their airfare back to the states were refused. That was the day our dogs were executed. Certainly no one wants rabid dogs on a base, and officially “adopting as pets or mascots, caring for, or feeding any type of domestic or wild animal” violates General Order 1A (section 2-i, Dec 19, 2000), but Jon Rabiroff, reporting for Stars and Stripes, summarizes Marine Lt Col Matthew Reid’s take on the issue, “He has said he has a lot more important things to worry about in the life-and-death world of a war zone than who might be sneaking a puppy or kitten into their bunk at night.” Rabiroff affirms the morale boost that an adopted pet gives a combat unit

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and reports occasions when taking one of these base dogs out on patrol has saved human lives. Is it really the health risk that troubles the 170th or the drive to follow the letter of the law without fail, or the need to demonstrate command authority by banishing anything that could be understood as nurturing on a FOB? The US Army has in their ranks trained veterinarians whose tasks have been to treat the many military working dogs and to conduct veterinarian civic action program clinics (vet caps) to which local farmers would bring their sheep, goats, and cattle for routine worming, vaccination, and treatment. After local Afghan providers complained that these vet caps were taking business away from them, the vets deployed to Afghanistan rolled up their efforts to assist the locals, and Army veterinarians were often assigned other tasks. One day while waiting to hitch a lift on a helicopter going to a nearby base, I meet an army veterinarian who tells me that without the possibility of engaging with the local farmers, she’s now been assigned the task of inspecting base dining facilities, a job that fails to use her skills. Clearly this vet would gladly spend a couple of hours neutering and vaccinating the few dogs on our base, a task that wouldn’t interfere with her assigned duty of watching our cooks prepare meals. The loss of his canine companion doesn’t inhibit Spiker’s hunting and gathering instinct. One day he announces that the brigade is having a “fire sale” of old equipment left in a large metal shipping container (a “connex”) by the previous brigade, and that he intends to see what he can rescue. Later, with a group of enlisted soldiers, he returns driving a base truck loaded with a never-used, high-quality DVD projector and 15 upholstered seats with attached backs for desk chairs. Whoever got the army’s office chair contract should be sued. The seats and backs are fine, but every week or so another chair base falls apart and must be replaced, leaving just the tops, the seats and backs, piling up. Spiker’s enlisted buddies realize that they have the makings of an impressive outdoor theater, a “sit-in” rather than drive-in, where they can gather with chips and soda and project onto the white-washed side of a b-hut the latest-run DVDs that sell for $2 at the bazaar on base. So one warm night in May, these guys set up the seats, each with one sandbag in the back and one in the front to keep the upholstered chairs from tipping over onto the river rock, connect a speaker system and the DVD projector, and enjoy their first screening until a disgruntled first sergeant passes by and, noting the innocent enjoyment, yells, “NO, NO, NO.  You obviously don’t have enough to do. If you need some guard duty to keep you busy, I can see the Sergeant Major about getting you

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some.” Spiker, the only civilian in the audience, apologizes and claims full responsibility, endearing himself even more to the soldiers but putting him on First Sgt. Killjoy’s shit list. Spiker looks out for all of us who go into harm’s way. One day I mention to him that my body armor is old and messed up. It holds the sapi plates, short for “small arms protective insert plates” fine, but a ball of disintegrating Kevlar liner pools at the bottom. After an hour ride in the back of an MRAP, it gets pretty uncomfortable. Despite the discomfort, I assume that the worn body armor is mine for the deployment and that I need to just suck it up. A day after expressing my frustration, Spiker arrives with another set of body armor, complete with plates to insert. The vest is smaller and fits perfectly. He doesn’t tell me what soldier it belonged to, nor do I ask. Spiker has seen far too much combat than is healthy for any young man, but it’s his religious faith and a loving wife at home that have soothed the violence and loss he experienced in the bloody battle in Fallujah, in his exploits as a military contractor, and in a previous deployment in this program. Many of the research managers throughout Afghanistan participate in fieldwork projects, but Spiker intends never to leave headquarters except to go on R&R.  Technically, his job doesn’t require it, and he made a promise to his wife that he wouldn’t go outside the wire on this deployment, a promise he intends to honor. When some of the young soldiers on the FOB ask Spiker about his Marine Corps days, he tells them that he was in the Supply Corps, didn’t get off base much, and saw nothing that might be the subject of a war story. Nothing can be further from the truth. In contrast to all of Spiker’s humility, our team leader and storyteller Duke celebrates his past. His active duty days in the Army were followed by a civilian life in sales, management, and construction, and he served as an Army Reserve colonel for a single deployment in the Iraq War where he oversaw the construction of American base barracks, medical buildings, and temporary office buildings. Some of his stories celebrate the times he’s stood up to superiors and put down subordinates, relating the latter with a certain glee as if intended as cautionary tales for the members of his team. Other stories of his stress his teenage exploits and how much trouble he got into, but the lack of specificity in these narratives suggests that he might not have been the tough young dude he describes. Still others go a little too far, like the times when he brags about an old flame, one who was “so good at blow jobs she could suck the chrome off a fender” or tells us that he and another team leader stationed in the south of Afghanistan

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share phone conversations in which they exchange erotic fantasies about a woman I knew in training. At these points, it’s my job to tell Duke that we don’t want to hear any of this. And he does stop until the next time that he tries in his clumsy fashion to seem virile and young again. Pricked by insecurity, he showers strangers he meets with his monologues, more bluster than narrative, as if wanting to claim all the air before the stranger could snatch it from him. One day, a Special Forces sergeant who has spent time at one of the dangerous outposts we will be frequenting comes by to fill us in, but Duke dominates the conversation, lecturing rather than listening. He never asks questions; he only makes pronouncements, trying to turn the obvious into the profound. Sadly, we learn nothing from the encounter. What bothers Duke most, though, is that he’s a man without a weapon in a town where every man is expected to carry a weapon: to the gym, to the chow hall, to the plywood hut that is his office, to his sleeping quarters. And because he never goes outside the wire but stays near the flagpole, Duke really doesn’t need a weapon. Still, every day he’s at Spann, he feels the want of an M-9 and regularly asks the brigade for one. When the brigade fails to understand why he needs one, he demonstrates for the young, “cherry” first-timers his warrior prowess with the “tactical tomahawks” he has brought with him. Because Marc, an army captain, is active duty, he is immediately issued an M-9 like fellow officers in the brigade. One day while Marc sits at his desk in our plywood building loading the magazines he will take out on our next mission, Duke makes a joke about what he perceives is the caressing way Marc handles his magazines. When nobody laughs, Duke informs us that he really wanted to go to the south where the action is but was told when assigned to Spann that he was needed to start up a new team. I know that it must be hard for him, parked on one of the safest bases in Afghanistan. I know that masculinity is something that must often be insisted upon rather than assumed, and I know, too, that if Duke weren’t such a self-promoter, he’d be easy to feel sorry for. In his free time, Duke surfs the web for the latest deployment gear, flies a small digital plane from the controls of his joystick, watches old episodes of JAG, his favorite TV show, or gets together with “the smoking club,” a few older dudes, though none as old as Duke, who gather to enjoy their favorite brand of cigar. Duke’s, as you might guess, are fat and long. “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” Freud tells us. In Duke’s case, sometimes it isn’t.

CHAPTER 7

Women On and Off the FOB

The Saddest Soldier in the Brigade Every time we travel from headquarters out to Ghormach, we stop off at battalion headquarters in Maymana, a city of 80,000, for a week or two. On one of these stopovers, Samantha and I encounter the saddest soldier in the brigade, a soldier whom others in her unit have called “the angriest sergeant in the brigade.” No one knows whether she resents the fact that she’s forced to bunk in “the kids’ tent” with soldiers whom she outranks just because there’s only one female tent on base, whether she resents yet another deployment, or whether she suffered some personal betrayal before she came downrange. No one knows the cause of her sorrow or her anger or her bitterness because she talks to no one, not even the other female sergeant who shares her rank. That sergeant seems terrified of her. Those women who share her tent, those she outranks, keep their distance, fearing that were she to take a personal dislike to one of them, that private’s life would be hell. From what I observe, this loner doesn’t single anyone out; she’s indiscriminately hostile, as if striving to keep all at a distance. She eats with no one, barks her orders to subordinates, and acknowledges any orders she receives from superiors with as few words as possible. She refuses any exchange with the lower-ranking female soldiers who bunk in her tent.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_7

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When her unit first arrived, her rank ensured her the first pick of bunks, and she chose the one at the back of the tent, moved it two feet from the tent’s side wall and four feet from the back wall, laying claim to the largest chunk of real estate, her very own tent-sprawl. She knew that she’d need much more space than others. By contrast, the only other sergeant in this tent full of privates and specialists made no such conspicuous claim in these tight quarters; she simply selected a bunk in the middle of the tent. All others then hoisted their ruck, their duffles, and their assault pack onto the empty top bunk, ready for their year’s deployment to begin. The saddest soldier put her gear at the end of her bed, encroaching on common space and restricting the movement of the occupant of the bunk across from her, a bunk which, as if by her design, nobody claimed. Soldiers preparing for a long deployment, often repurpose a crate or a packing box into a bedside table, cover it with a scarf, and set on it the picture of a loved one or a battery-operated lamp. In her first week at Griffin, the saddest soldier ordered ready-to-assemble side tables for each side of her bunk and a table that fit behind the head of her bed, a table topped with a set of shelves. These orders come quickly to a base like hers with regular mail deliveries, and she began fortifying her private corner of the women’s tent. Since their arrival, nobody in the tent, not even the other sergeant, has wanted to get in the way of this woman, even while she sleeps. “Even after a shower,” one specialist whispers, “you can smell her anger.” Samantha and I fly out to Maymana fairly often, but we never know where we will be bunking—in the transient tent with others passing through, in one of the private rooms of a b-hut, or in an empty connex. We don’t complain; just take what’s available. On one visit to the Maymana base, FOB Griffin, the base “mayor,” the sergeant who oversees housing, the latrines, and workspaces on base, directs us to the women’s tent, where we see two empty bunks. Samantha claims the one near the door, and I take the only other bunk available, the one in the back of the tent, the bunk that the saddest soldier has shoved up against the tent’s sloped wall. It doesn’t particularly bother me, since I know I’m only a temporary tenant. Because I opt for the bottom bunk, the slope of the side of the tent is of little consequence. The problem comes a couple days later when a new young soldier and first-time deployer arrives fresh to “The Stan.” I offer this rookie my upper bunk and tell her that I expect to be leaving in a week or two, so she’ll soon have a lower bunk. To give our new resident a little more headroom,

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I ask the saddest woman if I can rearrange a couple of her boxes, gear or furniture in order to move my bed out a little from the sloped side of the tent and give our new resident more than six inches of head room, but when I ask, the saddest woman responds with a hostile “Fuck No!” When the saddest woman is out of the tent, I seek the help of the other sergeant in the tent, and she says, “I’m not going to move her shit.” So I offer the new arrival the lower bunk; after all, I’m the short-timer, not her. Not wanting to be the newbee private who draws attention to herself, she refuses. The saddest woman has arranged my bed as well as hers to accommodate the walls she’s created to fortify the two exposed sides of her bunk. I learn later that these 80+ care packages have been sent from family and church members (not empty ones but boxes full or partially full). Most soldiers receive a care package from home every month or so, but this soldier receives a care package every day or two, and on holidays they came at an even faster clip. Typically when soldiers open their packages, they take out a couple of prized gifts and share the rest with friends or take the box over to the MWR (Morale Welfare and Relaxation) shack to share with others. The saddest woman never shares anything, not even a hint of the reason for her funk. A few weeks later, I return to Maymana where I learn that the well-­ liked and respected interpreter I’ve gotten to know is soon due back from the states in a couple of days and will be coming here to FOB Griffin after surgery for a wound she received in an insurgent attack. One night, while stationed at FOB Connolly in Nangarhar Province, the base was attacked, and Mary, running for shelter, was wounded. She was so pissed off that she stopped, raised her fist in the air, and cursed the “motherfuckers firing in the dark like cowards.” Much of that shrapnel from her wound was removed, but even after surgery, one piece is still lodged in the side of her face. Unfortunately, our government doesn’t give purple hearts to civilians. A civilian contractor, an Afghan-American mother, grandmother and a devout Muslim, Mary will, given use of a kitchen, prepare a wonderful Afghan meal for friends. But mainly she translates at meetings on- and off-­ base and takes phone calls at all hours from insurgent moles and frightened villagers alerting the base to threats, imminent attacks, and rumors. While in Maymana, Mary will recruit the battalion’s best intelligence source, an Afghan villager she’s never seen but calls “my little man” because she imagines him to be small and a little chubby. He, in turn,

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refuses to communicate his warnings of insurgent movements in remote villages and planned attacks to anyone but Mary. An American citizen, Mary tells a life story of survival—first at the hands of an abusive husband who, when she finally filed for divorce in California, took their two young children back to Kabul and threatened that if she went through with the divorce, she’d never see them again. Mary returned to Afghanistan to regain custody of her children and filed paperwork for divorce in Afghanistan. The magistrate agreed to discuss her case, invited her into his office, but asked her to leave her father, who was accompanying her, in the waiting room. Once inside his office, he told Mary how beautiful she was, groped her, and tried to rape her. Mary fled in tears. Even then, Afghanistan, a country in which a man is allowed up to four wives, permitted women to seek divorce, but securing custody of children was a rite reserved only for fathers. She retained an Afghan lawyer and continued to fight until she realized that her husband had the legal upper hand regarding custody of the children. She agreed to drop her pursuit of a divorce, he gave the children back to her, and she returned to Northern California where she raised her children on her own on the wages from her retail job at J.C. Penny’s. Mary is one of the remarkable regulars in this war, agreeing to go wherever she’s needed, from highly kinetic areas to calm headquarters bases. When she arrives at Maymana, I have already taken up temporary residence in the women’s tent in the bunk that nobody wants. The young private who, on my last visit slept on my upper bunk, has moved to a lower bunk closer to friendly neighbors and joined the sorority of chatty young women who don’t resist making comments about the male “hotties” they admire. In the back of the tent, the walls of care packages surrounding the saddest woman’s dwelling have grown higher and thicker with enough goodies for a whole company of soldiers. Fellow tent mates tell me that at first they were envious of this woman’s conspicuous display of love from home, but now they abide by all the warning signs of her gruffness and keep their distance. Mary claims a bunk in the front the tent that’s recently become vacant, and she starts unpacking. She asks me for the FOB’s snail mail address, but I don’t know it because none of my mail comes to this base. Determined to answer her question, I explain that we can certainly find the proper address on one of care packages piled in the back. Mary grabs a small notebook and pen, follows me to the back of the tent, and bends down to copy the address on one of the packages neatly stacked to cocoon this

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misanthrope. Unbeknownst to me, the saddest woman is at that moment in her cave, headphones on, silently watching a video. Either through a crack in her carefully constructed wall or because she has x-ray vision, she spots Mary bending down to copy the FOB’s address and gruffly yells from behind her barrier, “What the fuck are you doing copying something off my boxes?” The walls are taller than my 5’7” frame, so I find a crack in the walls of boxes to look at her while I explain calmly that Mary is new to Griffin and just wants the mailing address for this FOB.  The saddest woman in the brigade grunts another curse and puts her headphones back on. Some of the younger soldiers speculate about what she’s hoarding. Late at night they hear the crinkle of cellophane and the rustle of what might be delicate paper cups holding luscious chocolates. Some joke that they hope that someday she’ll receive a few uppers rather than the downers that seem to be deepening her resentment as the deployment drones on. Her boxes and the small fortress that she’s erected are, I think, just her makeshift bunker, her wall against the war. They set her apart, mark her space off-limits to others and allow her to reach out any time she wants, open one of the dozens of boxes, and partake of the love from home.

The Hidden Fifty Percent The plight of American women on long deployments who must live and work in close quarters with a malcontent can seem like a major problem until compared with the challenges that most rural Afghan women face. Outside of the largest cities in Afghanistan, women are rarely seen in public, and when one does see a woman, she is typically shrouded in a blue burka. She can see out of the crocheted grillwork, sort of, but no onlooker can see in. I say “sort of” because the burka limits peripheral vision. Each year Afghan women are hit by vehicles while trying to cross streets because their burkas prevent them from seeing traffic approaching from one side or the other. To meet with rural Afghan women, I first must secure the approval of male village elders, and when I do, I find these women initially a bit shy, but after an awkward initial conversation, they often become warm and open. They tell me things that men do not. Whereas rural men might be willing to mention the poor wheat harvest, women will detail how that is affecting daily life and which families are going hungry. These women enjoy few freedoms. There are no schools for girls in Ghormach District. Women are not free to shop at the bazaar. The only

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woman I have ever seen at the Ghormach bazaar is a Kuchi woman selling what she calls “looks” at the veiled young teenager she says is her daughter. Kuchis are nomadic shepherds who, along with their sheep and goats, move with the seasons from north to south looking for greener pastures and markets where they can sell their goat’s milk, lamb, wool, and metal filigree jewelry embossed with colored glass and semi-precious stones. Unlike other Afghan women in this remote region, Kuchi women typically do not wear burkas. They cover their heads but not their faces, so the young girl in a white embroidered robe with a white veil is a rare sight. When I approached them, the older woman lifts the girl’s white veil giving me a free look at the pretty young girl fully adorned with lipstick, rouge, and eye shadow. I ask the woman who she hopes will pay for the “looks” she’s selling, and when she sees that neither I nor any American with me is willing to engage in such a transaction, she quickly moves to another part of the bazaar. Rural Afghan women are not free to choose their own partners. Some girls are even given from one family to another in transactions to pay off debts or to settle grievances. One defense attorney told me that he knew a government judge who was asked to settle a recent dispute in which one young man had accidently killed another. Although all acknowledged that this was not a heinous intentional killing but an unfortunate accident, amends had to be made to the father who had lost his son. The judge decided that it was only fitting for the family of the young man responsible for the accident to give one of their daughters to the father who had lost his son so that he could take the girl as his second wife. This pre-Islamic practice of compensating wrongs done to families by the forfeiture of daughters as if they were property to be exchanged in lieu of money is called baad, a crime under Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution but a practice that has continued in this rural area. We have seen this practice on the rise with the dramatic increase in poppy production, Afghanistan’s major export and the fuel that sustains the insurgency. Farmers, who have borrowed at planting time to cover the cost of seeds and fertilizer, may be unable to repay their loans in a year of intense drought and crop failure. They have little other choice, as they see it, and will give a daughter to the money lender to cancel their loan. There’s even a term now for these girls: “opium brides.” In Afghanistan, men are allowed up to four wives and women only one husband. The age of consent is 16, but a girl can be legally married at 15 with her father’s consent, and few marriages take place at any age without

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a father’s consent. In this area of Afghanistan, if a girl refuses a marriage arranged by her family and runs away with someone she prefers, she will likely face the charge of zina, despite the fact that the 2004 constitution outlawed this crime. Those charged with zina, a crime that, according to Islamic law, applies to several forms of “unlawful” sex, including adultery, pre-marital sex, sodomy, fornication, bestiality, rape, incest, and homosexuality, are generally women and girls. Authorities do not typically apprehend girls and women suspected of zina. A father, husband, or brother usually delivers the girl or woman to the jail or juvenile facility sometimes even when no sexual act has taken place. One woman incarcerated in the prison at Mazar-i-Sharif did not run away with a spouse she preferred; she simply refused to become the second wife of her sister’s husband, her brother-in-law. In the face of such defiance, her father brought her to the authorities to be charged with zina. If a wife runs away from a husband who beats her, she will also likely be charged with the crime of zina. Forced marriage and domestic violence are the major contributors to the high rate of female suicide in Afghanistan. The Afghan Human Rights Commission estimates that 60–80% of marriages are forced marriages and that half of Afghan girls are married before they turn 18. Urban areas often have a nonprofit that provides shelter to girls and women fleeing oppressive and violent homes, but protective shelters don’t exist in rural areas, and few girls and women living in these areas have an education. Rape is a crime that brings dishonor not only on the victim but also on her family, and the rape victim is often further victimized by local authorities and forced to submit to “virgin exams,” charged with the crime of zina, and forced to serve time in prison. A penal code, enacted in 2017, would for the first time criminalize the rape of a woman (except if that woman is the wife of the rapist), a man, or a juvenile (female or male) and prohibit the charge of zina in the instance of rape. The 2018 State Department’s human rights report on Afghanistan, however, claims that judges and prosecutors in rural areas don’t generally enforce these statutes because they are either: (a) ignorant of the changes in the law, (b) pressured by threats of harm, (c) paid bribes, or (d) influenced by religious leaders who have pronounced these new laws “un-Islamic.” Even if a charge of rape does make its way to authorities, it is extremely difficult to prove in a system that regards the testimony of a man as worth twice the testimony of a woman. In Afghanistan, it takes the testimony of at least two women to equal the testimony of one man. A new legal code, enacted

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in Kabul, can  grant rights to women, yet  customary practice continues to frustrate its implementation. Everyone in rural Afghanistan knows that a son is more highly valued than a daughter. The work that women and girls do, no matter how strenuous, is viewed as labor of little worth, whereas the work of men and boys, rearing of livestock and the planting and harvesting of crops, is prized as labor that can be converted to cash at the bazaar. In addition, a daughter will cost the family a dowry paid at the time of her marriage, whereas a son will require none. Even in celebrating the birth of a newborn and the survival of its mother in this place where the maternal and mortality rates are high, rural Afghans slaughter a single goat to mark the arrival of a baby girl and two goats for the birth of a baby boy. All the girls detained at the Maymana Juvenile Detention Facility are under 18 and are all charged with some form of zina. One refused to marry a man her father’s age and was turned over to authorities by a member of her family. Another ran away from a husband who regularly beat her. The girl’s husband denied the accusation and maintained that he was the injured party because his 16-year-old wife had enlisted the help of a male family friend to give her a lift to the next city, thereby dishonoring him when she rode in a car with a man who was not her husband and was, therefore, guilty of zina. Her family would not shelter her because she had dishonored them as well by running away from her husband. And so the penal system offered the only shelter available. Another incarcerated girl ran away from a physically abusive mother-in-­ law. The mothers of young men exert considerable influence in the selection of a bride for their sons. With high birth rates and three or four generations living within the same family compound, there is a good deal of daily domestic work to be done, so it makes sense for a mother to select for her son a girl who will be compatible with the family, one who will complete the work expected of her without complaint. Not only does a young woman have to be a good wife and mother, but she must also be a good daughter-in-law who can contribute in sweat equity to the domestic economy. Some mothers-in-law encourage their sons to marry underage girls because they are easier to train as personal servants who will take over the domestic chores from their mothers-in-law as these older women did when they were married. These young girls at the juvenile detention facility are confined to two small rooms, one windowless and the other with a small curtained window looking not to the outdoors but to the courtyard in the facility. They

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spend their days doing hand sewing while the boys in the other part of the facility go to classes and play soccer in the open courtyard. Although the nurse, who tends to the health needs of these several dozen boys and the handful of girls, has access to aspirin and some antibiotics, she lacks the tools of basic health care. There isn’t even a thermometer for the 50 children detained here, so when the nurse suspects a child is running a fever, she will go home at the end of her workday and slip her personal thermometer into her purse so she will be able to take it to work the next morning. I offer to see if I can find her one she can keep at the juvenile facility. With all the med tents on the bases I pass through, I assume this will be a simple task; however, it proves otherwise. I can’t find a single thermometer at the local bazaars, and the base clinics have only digital thermometers, fueled by what for Afghans are pricy imported batteries. After a few weeks of trying, a medic at Camp Spann tells me that he’s arranged for a box of “antique” thermometers to be sent up from Bagram. After that, whenever I visit a clinic or school, I leave a couple of these simple devices. One day while back at headquarters, I accompany a small group of Army women designated as the 170th’s female engagement team to the prison in Mazar. We are escorted past the cramped group cells of men with between 10 and 15 prisoners in each to a small, cordoned-off area for nearly 30 women and their children. Sleeping mats, one next to the other on the cold cement floors, fill three rooms. A fourth room, a nurse’s office, features a small metal desk, a simple hygiene station (metal cart with bowl and water pitcher), and a tall locked metal cabinet that nurse Sonia unlocks to show us the drugs she can dispense: ibuprofen, aspirin, a few antibiotics, and sleeping pills. We learn that many of the women complain of insomnia, and Nurse Sonia tells us that at first each woman with sleeping problems was given ten pills and instructed to take one each night, but some of the women took all ten at the same time, so she now only gives out one or two per day. We learn that those suffering from sexually transmitted diseases are properly diagnosed and treated, and that those who give birth while incarcerated are taken to the hospital and returned to the prison with their newborns. The prison kids (aged four months to ten years old) remain with their mothers, which is pretty common in the Afghan prisons that house women. They receive no education, and no activities are planned for them. Whether it is hot or chilly, the children play out in the small cement and dirt courtyard where the women collect their water and wash up.

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A couple of months ago, prison authorities took all but the infants and toddlers to an orphanage in Mazar for half of the week, returning them to the prison for the other half. The experiment of separation was unsuccessful and lasted only two weeks. The children complained, and the mothers insisted that their children remain with them, a place that most now regard as home. An older man, a handyman, watches over the women and dotes on the children, making it feel a little more like an extended family. As in many Afghan prisons, those awaiting trial are housed with those already convicted. Some women are serving time for theft and assault. One faces a charge for murdering an abusive husband and another for killing a husband who, the woman explains, was trying to rape their 15-year-­ old daughter. Over one-third of the women in this prison and none of the men are incarcerated for the crime of zina. When I ask if there is something these women need, other than the legal assistance I am not skilled to provide, they all identify the same items: firewood, soap, and shampoo. Although bringing them wood to burn in the small stoves that produce the only heat they have on these cold winter nights is difficult when the nearby American, German, and Swedish bases all run on gasoline, the procurement of soap and shampoo is a simple request. In fact, not only do we deliver them boxes of excess toiletries sent to American soldiers from well-wishers in the States, but the Germans heading up the Psychological Operations (Psy Ops) for Regional Command North (RCNorth) also deliver toiletries to these women. A couple of weeks after visiting the incarcerated women, I learn about the Germans’ gifts to the women in this prison. The American brigade commander at Spann asks our team’s opinion of a draft poster designed by the German Psy Ops office, a poster intended to encourage Afghans to turn in insurgents. We look it over, and I communicate our consensus that what’s written on the poster and what’s pictured send contradictory messages. When I meet with the Germans, I ask if they ever vet their propaganda with Afghan women. “Of course we do,” the female officer in charge says. I ask where they find these women for their Psy Ops focus groups and whether the women are literate. Sheepishly, the German officer admits that her female focus groups are made up of incarcerated women whom she rewards with the coveted soap, toothpaste, and shampoo. “Just so,” I think, “Hell, I’d like your posters too if you brought gifts every time you came.” Islam is at the center of Afghan life, and at the center of Islamic worship are men, who dictate where women can observe their faith. Even in the

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cities, women’s place in city mosques is restricted to the outskirts of the assembled faithful. Prior to the Taliban takeover in 1996, Wednesdays were women’s days at the famous Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif. The Dari (and also the Uighur) word for burial site or shrine is “mazar,” and this shrine contains the bodies of several important people, including the king who built the mosque, a prince, the first famous female Persian poet, Rabia Balkhi, and, according to legend, Ali, the cousin and son-in-law of the prophet Mohammad. Ali served as Islam’s fourth caliph, and Shia Muslims regard him as the rightful successor to Mohammad. Wednesdays at this holy site offered women not only one day in seven when they could practice their devotion, time every week when they could socialize with other women. They would chat as they strolled around the stunningly beautiful fifteenth-century mosque built after an earlier shine was destroyed during the early thirteenth-century invasion of Mongol Emperor Genghis Khan. With the women came fortunetellers with their dice and celestial almanacs who set up shop on the sidewalks that surround the impressive mosque. Obviously, they wouldn’t have come on Wednesdays had women not been some of their best customers. Observing the entrepreneurial efforts of fortunetellers and the convivial gatherings of women unaccompanied by men, when the Taliban took over Afghanistan in 1996, they soon forbade the presence of both the fortunetellers and the women  from the area outside the mosque. They saw the circular walk around the shrine as idolatrous, straying dramatically from their strict Islamic tradition, which reserves the circumambulation of a sacred place for Mecca, where Muslim pilgrims on their hajj, circle seven times around the Kaaba, that most sacred of Muslim sites. Although women in Mazar went back to walks around their mosque after the Taliban was replaced by a civilian gov, those in remote areas rarely went to  the mosques in their villages. Instead, their religious practices remained familial rather than communal, taking place in the family compound. Although Muslim, rural Afghan women are more likely to turn to assorted intermediaries, including offering prayers and food to Fatimah, the daughter of Mohammad; Mary, the mother of Jesus; or deceased teachers and religious leaders and saints for help facing the challenges in their lives, practices the Taliban proscribe. Learning how women live, where they gather, and what challenges they and their children face is essential to understanding any culture. For example, although the movements and opinions of women may be severely restricted, many have turned out during the national elections under the

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governments of Karzai and Ghani. They also influence the attitudes of their children, the next generation of Afghans. But the norm in many places is to view a woman not only as physically weak and in need of protection but also as spiritually vulnerable. A particularly dangerous time for a woman is pregnancy. The local women I meet tell me that a pregnant woman should avoid walking in the dark, being around unclean or immoral people, and hearing harsh or loud voices. They should avoid cemeteries, which may be the haunts of the dreaded jinn. Sometimes clever, sometimes beguiling, and sometimes dangerous, jinn function as the South Asian and Middle Eastern trickster figures and shape shifters. Accounts of jinn predate Islam and persist in today’s Islamic diaspora. These creatures inhabit a parallel dimension; they can see us, but, unless they take on the form of a human or animal, we cannot see them. According to the Quran, Allah made angels out of light, jinn out of fire, and lastly humans out of clay. Afghan lore tells of  one jinn, Satan, who rallied others to rebel and subvert established order, but not all jinn joined him. Like humans, jinn possess free will. In jinn lore, the danger from and the fascination with jinn are often associated with women. Like fairy princes in Anglo-Irish lore, jinn can seduce the susceptible virgin and impregnate her. Rural South Asian communities sometimes attribute out-­ of-­wedlock pregnancies to jinn, thus averting dishonor and punishment. It’s easier to say that a young woman gave birth to “a jinn baby” than it is to cast her out, or worse, for bringing dishonor on her family. Jinn, churail or churel (the haunting female spirit who died giving birth), and sheeshak (the independent, destructive woman) are feisty spirits that frequent the margins, vernacular beliefs that exist alongside orthodox creed. Islamic fundamentalists or “Islamists” regard these folk beliefs (including fortune-telling, the wearing of talismans, and the practice of both “white” and “black magic”) as un-Islamic. Although we can rationalize these attitudes toward dangerous spirits as resulting from low life expectancy, high maternal death rates, and high infant mortality rates, they are, nevertheless, closely held beliefs, particularly among rural Afghans. Often ignorant of the perceived vulnerability of pregnant women, Western soldiers have throughout this long war forced their way, often at night, into the inner compounds of Afghan households to search for suspected bomb-making supplies, weapons, or insurgents, not realizing how likely there is to be a pregnant woman among the extended family and how likely any problems the mother or baby experience will be attributed to the  Western intruders, caused by their violation of domestic space, a practice that Karzai repeatedly condemned.

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Women serve important functions in Afghan funerals even though they are excluded from some ceremonies. Their dramatic, even frenzied demonstration of grief may seem exaggerated to Western eyes, but their wails, laments, and keening externalize the sadness that all are feeling. Like the men in the community who serve as washers of the dead bodies of other men, women prepare female bodies for burial. They recite specific prayers and wash the body of the dead woman in a prescribed direction. Once washed, the woman’s hair is braided into three braids, and her body is wrapped in clean winding sheets, two more for women than for men. When I ask an Afghan woman who is explaining all of this to me why there are two more sheets for women, she responds, “Because women have more private areas to cover. One is her hair.” The coverings are further secured with strips of cloth tied around the body. While men transport the dead to the cemetery and oversee burial, women prepare the food for the mourners, sometimes as many as a hundred or more who will need to be fed for several days. Relatives are expected to pay off any debts accrued by the deceased. Even though rural Afghan women don’t typically die with debt, their relatives often give needles and thread, naan (bread), sweets, and socks to the friends of a deceased woman in case she has borrowed these objects and neglected to return them. In a patriarchal culture based squarely on the protection and inviolability of women, female security and well-being are paramount. Any governing body or occupying force that blinds itself to the plight of only half of the population courts failure. Not only are the villagers watching to see that women and children are protected in this war of counterinsurgency, but war watchers in the United States and abroad are using women as a litmus test for this multiyear, expensive engagement, a test that we are doomed to fail. The repression of Afghan women wasn’t invented by the Taliban; it predates them.

Female Engagement Teams (FETs) For a cold rainy week in January, I join a group of US military women training at Bagram Airbase to become members of US Army female engagement teams, teams tasked with engaging the 51% of the Afghan population often off-limits to Western males. This training is predominantly designed to make us more effective in conversing, through interpreters, with local women. For two days, we attend briefings on the economic challenges Afghan women face, on their limited access to the

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legal aid, on their lack of educational opportunities, on the modest but effective efforts to train Afghan women in beekeeping and poultry farming, on a Goldman Sachs sponsored program that teaches basic business skills to entrepreneurial women, on the work of USAID and a number of NGOs reaching out to women, and on the health issues these women face at all phases of what to Westerners seem like incredibly short lives. We receive the most basic instruction on gender differences in Afghan culture. We learn, for example, how an Afghan father, faced with a son addicted to opium, must decide whether (a) to dismiss the problem as a youthful indiscretion that his son will outgrow or (b) to get him help. With a daughter’s addiction, however, there is often little choice but to hide the situation because if known, it will ruin the father’s reputation. In a country where opium and depression are in ample supply, the rates of female addiction and suicide have risen sharply since the invasion of Western forces in 2001. Some of the briefings are informative; others less so. As an example of the latter, one command sergeant major contributes his cautionary two cents to those of us who are or will be gathering with women, “You will see horrific things—spousal abuse, child abuse—but there’s nothing you can do about it. We have to keep our place. Eventually they will evolve.” It’s hard to give this patronizing attitude coming from a military spokesman with little or no experience of Afghan homes much respect. To our surprise, we discover that the US Marines were the first branch of the military to train and send out female engagement teams. The idea for these teams, some as small as two female Marines plus an interpreter, emerged not from the altruistic desire to assess and meet the needs of local women in their AO but because of a single lethal encounter. A Marine unit was clearing all women and children from a compound from which the Marines were receiving fire. Per their orders, this all-male unit refrained from searching the burka-clad females who were commanded to leave the building. What the Marines didn’t plan for were the disguised Afghan insurgents who, when near the squad of Marines, hoisted their burkas, aimed their Kalashnikovs, and opened fire on the Americans in an encounter that resulted in multiple Marine casualties. As a result, the Marine Corps female engagement teams now go through several weeks of rigorous training, whereas the US Army FETs train for only a week. Although not all US forces have been enthusiastic about female engagement teams, the Marine Corps has noted that the use of FETs can diminish the likelihood of violence. Not only can female military personnel search Afghan women, but they can sit down and speak with them, whereas foreign men

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cannot. One Marine officer and FET leader reported that a Marine unit intercepted an insurgent radio communication in which a Taliban commander noticed that a group of female Marines was entering a village and ordered other insurgents to stand down. During the breaks at our FET training, conversations on the lot of Afghan women cause some American military women to reflect on the gender disparities they also confront. One Blackhawk pilot, for example, bemoans the fact that her male counterparts receive more direct and varied missions whereas she serves “as a luxury taxi driver, flying colonels and generals to luncheons.” She points out that an hour flight on a Blackhawk costs $8000, including manpower, fuel, and equipment. A lieutenant colonel suggests that rank, swagger, and the deep pockets of American funding are the real ways to confront the discrimination. She boasts of her own authority over lower-ranking officers, “I will not tell a commander how to suck an egg. I will give him the command to suck an egg.” When the issue of the headscarf comes up, she says with bravado, “I come with the money and the patch [pointing to her rank], and I can get away with things. I don’t wear a head scarf.” Any member of the US Army can instantly read the rank of a stranger in uniform, but to an Afghan, Army sergeants with their inverted Vs might actually appear to outrank lieutenants with their single small bar. When another woman reports that the local women in her district have said that they love it when the American women wear their scarfs, the lieutenant colonel chimes in again, “You are the almighty holder of the cash. They are going to respect you whether you wear a scarf or not.” The almighty dollar may win respect, but it hasn’t won the war. After two days of listening in a classroom, we make our way through the muddy pathways and the cold drizzle over to the Egyptian hospital that has, since 2004, offered a free walk-in clinic for anyone who can make it there by foot, bus, auto, or motorcycle for treatment. Patients start arriving as early as 4:00 AM and wait in the bitter cold at picnic tables in a fenced area with only a corrugated roof overhead but no sides. On this January day, women tend to sick kids and older children who have walked for miles. The female engagement team at Bagram has brought coloring books and crayons for the children, and some of us chat with the kids and their parents. Dianne, an older, career Army American sergeant from our training group, spots a boy shivering by himself with a thin sweatshirt, no socks, and only plastic sandals on his feet. All the interpreters are busy, so she can’t talk to the boy, but she moves over close to him, unlaces her

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boots, takes off her thick army-issue socks, hands them to him and puts her boots back on—a simple but nevertheless impressive act of kindness that no one else has thought to perform. Her gesture contributes nothing to ending the war, nothing to reconstructing a nation in disarray, nothing to mitigating the suffocating corruption that threatens the viability of this fledgling government America supports. Sure, she has other socks to replace the pair she’s given away, but so do the rest of us who look on with a mixture of shame and admiration.

CHAPTER 8

Sex on the FOB

In February, members of US Army 170th, “the bayonet brigade,” arrive at Camp Spann to relieve the war-weary 10th Mtn-1st Brigade. Although this fresh unit calls itself “the bayonet brigade,” the only bayonets they bring with them are those they wear on their unit patches. They are “cherry”; many have never deployed to a war zone before, but as the soldiers and officers of the 10th MTN watch their arrival, they can’t help but admire the latest in Army fashion, which members of the 170th sport, the Army’s new combat uniforms (ACUs), the new “multicams.” Fresh out of their plastic, these brown, green, and gold camo uniforms blend much better with the brown hills of Afghanistan than do the tired gray-green “universal camouflage pattern” worn by the 10th MTN. The 10th MTN’s older pixelated design, sometimes called “digicam,” resembles a computer screen more than it does any natural environment. Designed to accompany the soldier from mountainous terrain to desert, the digicam pattern matches neither. Much about the 170th is fresh and untried. Before leaving their permanent station in Baumholder, Germany, they were issued a new name, the 170th as part of the “Grow the Army Plan,” a scheme designed to decrease American military presence in Europe by moving units back to the US so that they could be deployed elsewhere. With the new patch, the new name, and new uniforms comes an old history for this fledgling brigade,

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_8

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the history of a rump unit that had previously  been activated in WWI, WWII, and the Vietnam War and deactivated once these wars were over. The 10th MTN forces they replace look as tired as their uniforms and are ready to head back home even to a gray, cold Watertown, New York winter. By contrast, members of the 170th appear clean, neat, and ready for action. For a couple of weeks the base swells with personnel as the two units overlap in a ritual the Army calls a “riptoa,” an acronym that stands for Relief in Place/Transfer of Authority, otherwise known as “right seat/ left seat,” in which the new unit shadows their counterparts from the outgoing unit. The 10th MTN personnel brief the rookies, letting them know what they might expect in their next year: that those stationed at headquarters, “at the flagpole,” will enjoy a relatively safe and cushy deployment while those relegated to the small outposts will trade the comforts and service on the large base for the deprivation and danger of “real war,” combat in one of America’s twenty-first-century counterinsurgencies. Colonel P., the brigade commander of the 170th is a West Point graduate and proud of the brigade he commands. Even before his brigade left Germany, he had made it his mission to ensure that his command would maintain high standards of hygiene and military appearance. Every brigade commander sports his own style, and even before the 170th arrives in Afghanistan rumors circulate warning about this commander’s insistence on a squared-away look. Even when his unit goes downrange, Col P wants no one to lose their garrison look. By contrast, if officers of the 10th MTN had been working out at the gym before the colonel’s daily brief, they came to that briefing in PT gear—baggy black shorts and gray t-shirt. They showed up in the chow hall that way as well. Anyone who has ever served under P knows that proper appearance is his measure of good order and discipline. Those who are stationed at brigade headquarters, located 18 miles from Mazar-i-­ Sharif, a base unbothered by insurgents, quickly learn that if their commander spots a soldier in line for chow, en route to pick up laundry, or heading for a shower without proper “eye pro” (protective glasses), displaying a collar out of kilter or sleeves rolled up just a little, that somebody would have to pay. One day Col P spots a soldier without his Army-issued goggles and orders him to stand at attention in full gear in front of the chow hall and display for all who line up for dinner the proper attire, eye pro and all. On another evening, a soldier stands outside the chow hall at attention yelling the soldier’s creed. Late one night Spiker spots a sergeant walking around

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the base in full “battle rattle” (Kevlar helmet, body armor, knee pads, weapon, amo, the whole 9 yards), and asks, “Are you going on a night mission?” “No,” says the sergeant, “Today Sergeant Major found that one of my young soldiers had his sleeves turned under just once and ordered him to patrol the base every night for a week looking for uniform violations. Since I had allowed this soldier who worked under me to do this, I thought it was my place to do the punishment instead of him.” So for four hours every night the sergeant patrols the base in search of such deviance. Even those who serve in the hinterlands of the brigade’s AO, 200 miles from brigade headquarters on the small dangerous COP Ghormach, learn how important it is to Col P that his soldiers maintain their “squared away” look, even when the temperature tops 100 degrees and the Taliban flexes its muscles in a full-blown summer offensive in the hills beyond the base. On a day that P is due out at Ghormach but before he drops down on his Blackhawk for the day’s visit, all the soldiers, who have previously done their work on base in t-shirts, slip on their multicam “blouses,” designed to be worn in cool weather as jackets and constructed of heavy anti-rip fabric stiffened with insect repellent and flame retardant. When he disembarks, all the 170th soldiers at Ghormach have sleeves unrolled and tightly velcroed at the wrists and their gloves and proper eye pro properly donned. In the 2009, President Obama ordered his surge, bringing the total of US forces in Afghanistan  to 100,000  by August 2010. The new troops are deployed to Southern Afghanistan, squeezing insurgents out of the south and into the north, insurgents who migrate in ever-increasing numbers each month to the Pashtun safe havens in the remote provinces of Ghor and Badghis, and in the district of Ghormach. The safety zone around COP Ghormach, the circle that American troops can travel before encountering a fire fight, keeps shrinking from 12 kilometers to 10 kilometers, to 6 kilometers until July 2011, when the safe zone is only 1 kilometer from base. Reluctant to send any of his men into harm’s way, the 170th commander at Ghormach keeps most hunkered down on base. Whereas the 10th MTN had assigned one knowledgeable Human Intelligence soldier to go “outside the wire” and engage with the locals, the 170th has brought two to Ghormach who rarely venture off-base, choosing instead to interview locals willing to come to the base. When there aren’t any, which is most days, they spend their

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days playing video war games in their tent on the large screen TV they ordered from the States. The 170th represents a shift in a war that has gone on so long that many have given up the conviction that they can adequately protect the population from insurgents. In Ghormach, the insurgents are part of the population. Few Americans believed any more in the reconstruction projects that US taxpayers have underwritten because they witness the corruption that these projects spawn. So the 170th company in Ghormach becomes a purer occupying force. They sit on base to occupy the terrain, reluctant to engage. Trained fighters seeing little point in fighting, they sit in place electronically patrolling their AO and waiting for their year to end. Of course when you have a brigade of soldiers trained for war, on large bases and small, with little fighting to do, you face other challenges. Deterioration of morale and order of large groups of 18–25-year olds with time on their hands has to be prevented. Within a few weeks of the 170th’s arrival at Camp Spann, a large open box of condoms appears in the women’s latrine next to the box of toiletries sent from anonymous well-wishers in the States. It just seems to be another manifestation of the good order and hygiene discipline of the 170th—don’t ask, don’t tell, just supply. It doesn’t take long for the supply of condoms to dwindle until one day, only five or six dot the base of the box. The following day, sure enough, a new supply arrives in its place. I ask two of my male friends, one military and the other civilian, whether the boxes of condoms in the male latrines disappear so quickly. They look puzzled because they have never seen condoms in any of the male bathrooms on base, but that doesn’t prevent their speculation. They conclude that either someone is stockpiling the condoms to hand out later or that someone is gathering them to sell on the Afghan market. And those suspected of selling the free condoms are, of course, the Afghan workers who clean the latrines. Deployed Army and Marine privates and Air Force airmen no longer clean the latrines, cook the chow, maintain the generators, or do the laundry on large FOBs; those tasks are contracted out. On our base, there is a hierarchy: handsomely paid American contractors tend the generators, solve electrical problems, and operate the large equipment; Bosnian men and women, holdovers from the last war, run the laundry but send it out by van each day to a local laundry, and male Afghans clean the bathrooms and showers. I doubt that the Afghan latrine workers are taking the condoms, since Afghans leaving the base at the end of the day are often searched. When I ask one of the officers from the 170th, why his brigade

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doesn’t put boxes of condoms in the male bathrooms as well as the female bathrooms, he answers, “Cause if we do, these guys will be fuckin’ each other right and left,” as if the only thing that might prevent homosexual encounters is the lack of protection, of inadequate hygiene. The fidelity, the friendship, the love of men for other men in the combat arms catches the institution in a contradiction. On the one hand, the Army inculcates the value of sacrifice above self, and through rigorous discipline, it teaches the individual that honor is only secured and the warrior self only discovered in the forfeiture of autonomy. On the other hand, the Army has historically either repressed or punished the sexual expression of the love of one’s mates fostered in the face of disaster in order to keep undisturbed conventional heteronormativity. In today’s Army, women are serving alongside men, and openly gay male and female soldiers are troubling that ambivalence. By leaving condoms only in female latrines, the 170th is aiming to prevent the physical expression of homosexual desires as well as pregnancy, proscribing one kind of sex while tacitly permitting another.

Military Regulation of Sex The sexual behavior of military personnel on and off bases and its health consequences have always been a concern of the US military. Revolutionary War medical reports document the number of lost days due to venereal disease in the Continental Army. By the end of the Civil War, over 74,000 cases of syphilis and over 100,000 cases of gonorrhea were diagnosed (Rasnake). In WWI, an estimated 7 million person-days were lost by US troops afflicted with venereal disease, with 400,000 cases reported by the end of the war (Rasnake). Some commanders tolerated prostitution as an unavoidable consequence of transporting thousands of young men far from home to hostile locations, while others who tried to curb prostitution saw their efforts thwarted. After the Union Army captured Nashville, for example, the commander, Major General William Rosecrans took note of the thriving business of prostitution and ordered that all the prostitutes be gathered up and taken out of the city. All hundred and eleven of them were transported against their will by steamboat to Louisville. But soon after the departure of these white ladies of the night, their black counterparts took their places (Serratore). After the fall of Naples to the Allies in 1943, military personnel came by both land and sea and found a city where they could enjoy a little R&R

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despite the destruction wrought by an extensive bombing campaign. While in Naples, soldiers discovered the brothels that had only recently been frequented by German and Italian forces. Fearing the spread of disease, a US Army medical team inspected the brothels and certified some of them open to Americans. When a soldier went to one of these “licensed” brothels, he was first inspected for venereal disease and if found to be afflicted was taken to a special VD unit for treatment; if not, he was allowed to buy what he had come to buy. Before leaving, however, a medic treated his genital area with a “prophylactic.” To purchase sex more cheaply and to avoid the hygiene inspections before and after sex, many soldiers shunned the licensed brothels and procured sex from the freelancers who walked the streets of a war-torn city where food was in short supply. Despite efforts to prevent disease, it spread with such fury that after two months, the Army closed even the brothels they had previously declared safe. Neither the license to frequent certain brothels nor the prohibition cured the problem. VD continued to flourish in Naples until the end of the war. The average US soldier who served for the duration of WWII had sex with an estimated 25 women, and 80% reported having regular sex, but only half used condoms. In WWI, the Germans issued condoms to their troops, but the Americans and the British did not. Instead, they gave out packets of calomel, mercury chloride, and advised soldiers to apply the treatment after sex. Judging from the 400,000 cases of venereal disease, the treatment didn’t live up to its promise, or soldiers simply refused to treat themselves with the mercury chloride. By WWII, allied troops were regularly promoting the use of condoms. Even Donald Duck, presumably beguiled by the exotic sleeping beauty in this poster from the Australian medical corps, regrets that he doesn’t have his protection. Along with the distribution of prophylactics came cautionary warnings from the War Department in the form of pre-deployment training films, messages printed on matchbook covers, and pamphlets distributed to all recruits and draftees. Both the American and British militaries distributed posters meant to dissuade soldiers from having heterosexual encounters while deployed, posters that pictured attractive women but warned that these objects of desire were likely carriers of contagion. These posters displayed warnings like “Loose women may also be loaded with disease,” “He picked up more than a girl,” “98% of all procurable women have venereal disease,” “She may look clean—But,” and “Sailor beware! She might be a liberal but liberals HAVE V.D.” Some even featured verse:

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The victory girls are on the loose And soon will cook some poor guy’s goose. The G.I. Joes must be more wary Of the diseases they may carry. Venereal disease is on the rise So take your pro. Be well and wise. (Costello, 119)

Some units issued free “Pro kits” containing either a urethral syringe or an ointment containing a combination of calomel and a sulfa drug to be administered after sex to every soldier; in other units, soldiers could request one of these from their unit medics. Many units also made them available at the post exchanges and offered free treatment at signposted “prophylaxis stations.” In the upper corner of one WWII anti-VD poster stands a beauty queen in a bathing suit and crown with a banner across her chest that reads, “Miss G.I. pick-up of ’44.” At the bottom of the poster are Adolf Hitler and Japanese Admiral Yamamoto singing their celebratory “Duet to Defeat”: She is our sunshine our only sunshine. She makes us happy through bombings blue. Though Russians rush us or Yankees crush us She’ll give the V.D. To you … you … an’ you.

If the enemy didn’t get you, warned these posters, venereal disease would. As WWII neared its end, new posters reminded the soldier that treatment for VD could delay his homecoming. In one, a blonde bare-­ chested G.I. with wrists and ankles chained to two letters taller than himself, a V and a D, stands on the dock with the red letters in caps, DELAYED! printed across the poster. In another, the soldier is coiled in the letters, V and D. Even women on the home front were cautioned about the unwanted war souvenirs that returning soldiers might bring with them. Although the message was the same, the gender difference was telling. Posters intended for men warned of strange women likely to infect, whereas posters intended for women cautioned against sex with the familiar men returning from war. One depicting a train station with a crowd of G.I.’s disembarking is titled “SYPHILIS” with a subtitle at the bottom of the

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page: “ALL OF THESE MEN HAVE IT” and a cautionary message in smaller letters: “Women: Stay Away from Dance Halls.” The military’s warning against sex appears also in humorous soldier folklore. In one song, the figure of a dangerous polluted woman surfaces as a common motif. Military culture has ironically celebrated both the testosterone-fueled heterosexual American male who gets a pass on wayward behavior abroad (“What goes TDY [temporary duty] stays TDY”) and also cautions against behavior that could endanger the individual or embarrass the unit. The exotic foreign women who might look alluring can also sting. Soldier revisions to popular songs illustrate this. Take the popular ditty “Gertie from Bizerte,” recorded in 1943 for Decca Records, that begins, “Oh Gertie from Bizerte, you’re as purdy, purdy, purdy as can be.” It describes the American soldier’s fascination with the exotic beauty whom he kisses but nothing more: “Tho’ your lingo I don’t know, when we kiss, you make me holler “Bingo!” But when WWII soldiers serving in North Africa didn’t find the beautiful Gerties waiting for them, they coined their folk version of the popular song, a particularly bawdy version that continued to be sung by American soldiers in training decades after the war. Their Tunisian Gertie was a particularly sinister one: Dirty Gertie from Bizerte Hid a mousetrip ‘neath her skirtie, Strapped it to her knee-cap purty, Baited it with Fleur-de-Flirte, Made her boyfriends most alerte! She was voted Miss Latrine of 1930.

Although Gertie only “hid a mousetrap ‘neath her skirtie,” the Sicilian, “Filthy Annie from Trapani, stashed a razor up her fanny.” You can hear an echo of this fascination with anal sex and its danger in a popular marching chant sung by midshipmen at the Naval Academy in the 1980s and 1990s: The cabin boy, the cabin boy That naughty little nipper. He lined his ass with chards of glass And circumcised the skipper.

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Legends circulated among military personnel during the Vietnam War that told of prostitutes, working secretly for the Viet Cong, who put barbed wire in their vaginas, a soldier version of the classic vagina dentata tale. American soldiers also exchanged stories about a new, antibiotic-­ resistant form of venereal disease called “the black clap.” Sufferers of the black clap, so the legend goes, were put on a ship, a flying Dutchman of sorts, to sail the seas till they died. A marching chant that emerged in the 1960s adapted a calypso song celebrating the massive polluted Lulu: Rich girl uses Vaseline, poor girl uses lard But Lulu uses axle grease and bangs ‘em twice as hard. Chorus: Bang Bang Lulu. Bang away all day. Bang Bang Lulu. Who ya gonna bang today? Rich girl uses tampons, poor girl uses rags But Lulu’s cunt’s so goddamn big she uses burlap bags.

Bawdy chants like this one were officially banned in the 1980s, and they ceased to be sung in public, but like other misogynistic lore, they persisted for many years, sung in all-male groups and chanted on long runs far from headquarters. The US government worked on two fronts to ensure that the readiness of troops was not compromised by sexually transmitted diseases. It waged the cautionary campaign I have discussed, and it struck deals with governments such as Korea and the Philippines to provide R&R locations, safe zones for members of the military in which the “Yankee princesses” and “juicy girls” purchased for sex by American G.I.’s would be free of disease. Because Korean prostitutes were tested for STDs weekly, the likely carriers of infection were not the women but the G.I.’s who had sex with unlicensed women, many of whom were young girls. The women purchased by G.I.’s had been relegated to a form of servitude. Some were lured from their villages with the promise of clerical positions; others were trafficked. In her book Maneuvers: the International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives, Cynthia Enloe discusses the situations in both Korea and the Philippines. In her 1997 book Sex Among Allies: Military Prostitution in U.S.-Korean Relations, Katherine Moon gives a thorough account of the complicity of the Korean government in prostitution. When soldiers fighting in the Vietnam War left on vacation, they went to Thailand, Malaysia, Australia, and the Philippines where prostitutes

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awaited them. The only approved R&R destination to require VD screening of soldiers coming from Vietnam was Australia, so those going elsewhere often carried their infections with them. Married men, who wanted to meet up with their wives, usually opted to go to Hawaii on their break to avoid the brothel scene.

Sex in Today’s Wars The wars in Iraq and Afghan saw American troops swiftly topple the Taliban and Saddam Hussein governments and begin two long wars of counterinsurgency, whose goal was to win the hearts and minds of the people. Early on, Pentagon planners decided that if locals saw American forces consuming alcohol or patronizing brothels (the image of the American soldier as “overpaid, oversexed, and over here”), all the hearts and minds would turn against the occupying infidels. Knowing that the consumption of alcohol and the patronizing of prostitutes often go hand-­ in-­hand in military culture, they banned it both on and off foreign bases in these countries. The problem in both Iraq and Afghanistan was that the ban was not a total one. The rules applied to members of the US military, but not to allied forces, not to US State Department employees, and not to the employees of large corporations like Dyncorp, whose contracts granted them immunity from prosecution. A February 2010 report by the State Department’s Inspector General discusses the Kabul Embassy Employee Association (KEEA), an organization that, according to the report, provides “several important services that contribute to the morale and welfare of the embassy community. These include a logo store, which sells alcohol, meal tickets, and souvenir merchandise; a small club facility; and lease agreements with local vendors for sales of groceries and sundries.” The alcohol sales, the report goes on to say, “account for a considerable portion of total association sales.” It identifies the daily limits for personal alcohol purchase: “Current limits are one bottle of liquor, three bottles of wine, and two cases of beer per day.” In other words, alcohol flowed freely in some areas of the war while US military personnel were ordered to abstain. Instead of allowing military personnel access to businesses in nearby villages, the United States established small bazaars run by preapproved local merchants who sold DVDs of first-run movies, many before the DVDs were available in the States, blankets, rugs, radios, sim cards for cell phones, and batteries, but never alcohol. Although many soldiers would

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have liked a beer at the end of a hot day, no US bases offered anything other than “beer-without-the-buzz” like O’Douls. Only the German, Italian, and French soldiers in Afghanistan could purchase beer and wine in their canteens at the end of the day. An American soldier on one of these bases could face charges if he or she purchased a glass of wine or beer in the company of other coalition forces. Even in relatively safe areas, soldiers were prohibited from leaving the confines of their bases, secured on all sides with wire reinforced gabions and topped with razor wire. Just because US military bases in Iraq and Afghanistan are declared alcohol-free, that didn’t mean that some soldiers won’t smuggle in booze. Word soon spread that mouthwash containers afforded the best delivery system for contraband booze. Hygiene products are the most common objects sent to soldiers, and a big bottle of mouthwash can contain nearly a quart of liquor. Before heading “down range,” soldiers might arrange for a buddy or spouse at home to send a care package with crackers, salami, toothpaste and a bottle of Listerine filled with bourbon or a Scope bottle of vodka with green food coloring. During deployment, every soldier is granted a couple weeks of R&R. Most fly home, but since DOD offers a free round-trip ticket anywhere in the world, others head for vacation spots on commercial airlines. It isn’t easy to bring back a bottle of liquor in scanned luggage, but once on the plane, they can collect the small one-­ serving bottles of liquor to take back “inside the wire.” Some units avoid policing infractions, but others do it with a ferocity that startles even those who understand the long arm of the command. To celebrate the twenty-first birthday of one member of a platoon, a couple of enlisted soldiers present the birthday girl with two small bottles of liquor they had saved from a flight back from R&R.  She consumes them, her infraction is discovered, and she is sent home on the next flight out. She has violated General Order One, as have the two male soldiers who gave her the alcoholic gift, but they only receive a reprimanded; she is discharged. General Order One prohibits not just the purchase, transfer, sale, or consumption of alcohol by military personnel and the civilians employed by the Armed Forces while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but it also outlaws the possession of pornography. Sexual relations are also proscribed—except for married couples deployed at the same base— because they are viewed as harmful to cohesion and morale. The DOD certainly knows how flagrantly this rule is violated, or why would the 170th have supplied all those condoms? And it knows that soldiers are having sex with fellow soldiers and with the civilians who make

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up over 50% of the residents on many bases. A nurse at one of the larger bases in Iraq told me that the medical unit would fill a large industrial-size salad bowl with condoms, and every day or two they would have to refill it. The DOD clearly wants to insist on celibacy through its official rules, but it also wants to maintain hygiene and prevent scandal. Large bases in Iraq and Afghanistan have held, at various times, between 20,000 and 30,000 people, with active duty, reservists, contractors, and government service employees all living 24/7 “inside the wire” in these hastily erected cities. Many never leave except for their R&R break once or twice a year. Free from daily commutes, free from family obligations, free from most of the distraction of life in the states, they have time on their hands and sexual appetites to satisfy. American contractors come to these wars for the money. Americans who work in low-paying jobs in the United States or who are retired can deploy as interpreters and pull down salaries between $200,000 and $250,000 a year. American plumbers, electricians, construction workers, mechanics, police officers, even accountants flock by the thousands to work for government contractors like KBR, a division of Halliburton, because they can make three or four times what they make in the states. The plight of foreign workers, many from the Philippines, Fiji, Bangladesh, Kenya, Bosnia, and Sri Lanka, is quite different. They sign up to work in kitchens, laundries, lavatories, beauty shops, post exchanges, and at the Popeyes, Taco Bells, and Pizza Huts on the large bases. According to Sarah Stillman’s June 6, 2011 New Yorker article, “The Invisible Army,” most of these foreign workers never receive the wages they were promised. Recruiters hire workers with the promise of jobs in places like Dubai, but then take these workers to Iraq and Afghanistan instead. Since the hiring companies often require an up-front commission to be paid out of wages earned, some of these workers live as indentured servants in inferior facilities and with inadequate food. They work long hours at very low pay for the corporations to whom the DOD has awarded lavish contracts. It shouldn’t be surprising that some would supplement their meager wages through prostitution. In 2008, at Ali Al Salem in Kuwait, a few young foreign men, hired to work in the dining facility during the day, solicited at night. The Uzbek and Kazak women giving massages in the curtained off areas of the Bagram and Ali Al Salem beauty shops offer extra services like the “happy endings” that soldiers can add for a charge. Soldiers living on the large bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, who desire companionship and intimacy but do not want to pay for it, sometimes

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advertise on Craigslist. The practice started on the Baghdad Craigslist’s “Casual Encounters” page but soon spread to many of the large bases in Afghanistan. In an article in The Army Times, Stephen Houserman reports that the military is cracking down on postings for sexual hook-ups by deployed personnel. According to Houserman, the hundreds of postings by both officers and enlisted were primarily ads by men looking for men. One Marine lance corporal at Camp Leatherneck, a base that has housed as many as 26,000 personnel, posted an ad in 2012, and instead of meeting up with the Marine he expected, the lance corporal encountered an undercover agent from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. Fewer postings proposed heterosexual encounters. A male soldier on a big base advertised for a woman to keep him company. With a description of his physique and a disclaimer that he was married and therefore not interested in a long-term relationship, he sent a photo of his genitals. The exchange of nude selfies might be considered flirtatious behavior on social media, but it can surface as evidence in a court martial. In 2010, the Army hired a civilian lawyer to consult with jag officers handling complaints of sexual harassment and sexual assault. Stationed at Bagram, this tall, attractive woman in her late 40s stood out in a unisex world where even a woman with long hair had to hide it in a tight bun at the back of her neck. Lest a lock of hair might fall out of place, women in uniform often mat down the sides with hair gel. The goal of a military institution is that all in uniform, both male and female, appear as standard government-issue soldiers, GIs distinguished by the patches that identify surname, rank, unit, and war specialty. Most deployed civilian American women dress as if they were going on a camping trip—casual jeans or khakis and a nondescript shirt or sweater. Those who, like me, go “outside the wire,” wear loose-fitting, cotton Afghan tops and loose-fitting pants so as not to appear inappropriately dressed in a conservative culture. This civilian lawyer works hard to preserve the feminine accouterments that most women leave behind when they deploy. She regularly frequents the beauty shop for hair color touchups and highlights, for repairs to her expertly decorated press-on nails, and for her pedicures, to look, in short, her feminine best in the middle of a war zone. Her morning preparations take longer than anyone else’s. After showering and blow-drying her long hair, she slips into her tight leggings, tall leather boots, and attractive sweater or blouse. She applies false eyelashes, face makeup, and eye shadow, all quite tastefully executed. Although she looks as if she had walked out of one play and into another with no change of costume, I can’t help but

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admire the work she does to keep up appearances in the heart of a dreary base, in the heart of a violent and costly war. When a base in another part of the country calls about a soldier-to-­ soldier case of sexual assault or harassment, she boards a helicopter to answer the call. After a week or two, she returns to Bagram and to her ripped former Special Forces contractor boyfriend. One case she assisted with involved a young female soldier infatuated with a slightly older male soldier. This young woman had sent the male soldier email messages suggesting sex, and when those produced no reply, she added naked pictures to her online solicitations. The male soldier made a formal complaint, and the evidence resulted in the woman’s conviction. The lawyer’s theory about all of the proscribed heterosexual behavior on these bases is that these young enlisted soldiers have missed out on the four years of experimentation that college provides. “Their college,” she says, “is their deployment.” Although General Order One explicitly prohibits sex between those on base, General Order 134, signed by President George W. Bush in 2005, made clear that prostitution and the procuring of a prostitute is a crime, punishable under the UCMJ, because it threatens the “good order and discipline” of the unit. Regulations that forbid soldiers from frequenting prostitutes have done less to curb the practice than a powerful scare story—the prostitute who will give you HIV.  In 2008, just outside the back gate on FOB McHenry in Hawija, Iraq, a Sunni insurgent stronghold, sat a small and inconspicuous pink cement building, the only brothel around. It took the 1-67th Armor Regiment stationed there a couple of months to realize that not only were their neighbors, Iraqi soldiers on the adjoining base, frequenting the brothel, but a few of their own soldiers were as well. The command became quite alarmed when one of these soldiers tested positive for HIV. Whether apocryphal or not, the cautionary tale kept all from going “outside the wire” on any unauthorized missions for the remainder of their deployment. Even more effective than either the orders from commanders or the fear of infection in discouraging soldiers from sneaking off base to engage local prostitutes has been the insurgent weapon of choice in the Iraq and Afghan wars—the improvised explosive device (IED), the weapon responsible for over 50% of coalition deaths. Insurgents quickly realized that the cheap devise, properly placed, afforded leverage in these otherwise asymmetric wars. Insurgents in both Iraq and Afghanistan observed the routes that American soldiers took as they left their bases on foot patrols and in

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armored vehicles, and implanted their IEDs along those routes. No soldier wanted to risk stepping on a small piece of balsa wood hiding a pressure plate and ending his life or leaving his legs behind. Outgunned, outmanned, and with no ability to wage an air war, insurgents could at least restrict the movement of coalition forces to well-planned foot patrols and heavily armed convoys. The only surprise attacks in the latter years of the wars came from the air when Special Forces troops dropped into a village to capture or kill known insurgents. If one is resigned to having sex on a crowded FOB or an even smaller COP, it can be difficult to find a private place. In Iraq many soldiers and officers lived in trailers or “chu’s” (containerized housing units), and privacy was a little easier to come by. In Afghanistan, where most share tents or makeshift plywood buildings, private space is rare. On most bases in Afghanistan, the commander alone enjoys private sleeping quarters. Most military personnel and civilian contractors live in 6–8 person “b-huts” or in 12–24 person tents. Although the swiftly constructed plywood b-huts have the look of privacy, no one can have a conversation in one part of the building without being overheard in every other part. Scarcity is the mother of invention, and one needs ingenuity to find a private place. A supply tent on a small remote base can serve as a site of a sexual liaison. Regardless of how clever people are, however, someone always discovers their secret, and that someone tells someone else, and within 24 hours, everyone who lives in the closed community of a base is chewing on the story. When at headquarters, I share a room with two other women. On the other side of the plywood building is another room similarly arranged with three female officers. The partition that separates our rooms is so thin that we can hear each other’s conversations. If one of the women on the other side of the partition calls home for some passionate cell phone sex with a lover at home, everyone in our room puts in her ear buds and turns up the jazz or the country or the heavy metal, but certainly nothing slow, balladic, and melancholy. Although pornography, like alcohol, is officially banned on forward bases, phone sex is not. In fact, some chaplains actually encourage it between spouses as a way of keeping a marriage alive and well. In the stories of sex on base, porta johns figured prominently—cramped quarters granted, smelly certainly, but the one place where nobody is watching. A friend, a single woman stationed at the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) headquarters located at Kabul International Airport, tells me that she has gotten to know someone whom she is

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attracted to. The officer she favors shares her feelings, and he suggests that they get together for sex. Although she’s keen to have sex with him, she can’t imagine a place where they could be private and safe from detection. After all, hers is the base from which General Petraeus and his generals are fighting the war and on which commanders and their staffs from all the coalition partners were crowded. Every square foot of her base that is not sleeping quarters is under constant surveillance. It is a base so cramped that in rooms that would have comfortably slept two, six are bunked. She has never deployed before, or she would not be startled when the guy she favors suggests that they meet in one of the porta johns. Although his requirements for a special rendezvous and hers clearly differ, porta johns do offer privacy, providing of course that the two individuals are slim. We would all learn much later that about the time that this young couple was contemplating how they might indulge their sexual desires, General Petraeus, living on the same tightly packed base, was indulging his own. With rank certainly comes the privilege of keeping an affair private, for a while at least. Porta johns also offer privacy for the solitary sport of masturbation. Masturbation does not disturb good order and discipline, and it offers an alternative to on-base prostitution and both heterosexual and homosexual “fraternization,” so most commanders ignore it, except when the masturbators foul the porta johns for others. One sign, emblazoned with official insignia, posted at the large Marine Corps base Camp Leatherneck, the base where the lance corporal got caught arranging a meet-up, begins “ATTENTION MARINES” and commands, “Stop using the porta-­potties as a masturbation facility.” It announces, “There have been several reports of illness caused by bodily fluid discharge in these facilities. Any male or female caught masturbating in this facility will face disciplinary action under Article 92 UCMJ.  COMPLIANCE IS MANDATORY” Article 92 does not explicitly prohibit masturbation, but it does permit disciplinary action for disobeying any lawful order, and presumably a command’s decision to prohibit masturbation in the porta johns is a lawful order. Military masturbation has long been both the subject of humor and of concern. An Australian soldier fighting in the trenches in WWI wrote, “Formerly my wife was my right hand, now my right hand is my wife” (Hirshfeld). Soldiers today often use slang for masturbation borrowed from civilian speech (“jack off,” “choke the chicken,” “tug job,” “rub one off,” “slap the salami”), and they describe the sock used to catch the discharge as their “happy sock” and write “byobf” (short for “be your own

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best friend”) in emails. Deployed soldiers have also invented their own G.I. slang. A “combat jack” or a “combat jerk” is masturbation performed while in a firefight. If, upon entering a shower and discovering that the person who showered before had left a token of his masturbation, a soldier might call the residue “combat jellyfish.” Some soldiers designate a special curtained-off bunk of their tent as a “jack shack,” the place where one could go to masturbate. One soldier reported that, although he felt the need for privacy at the beginning of a long deployment, he grew accustomed to masturbating in less private areas as the months passed. “It was no big deal,” he said, “for two soldiers to masturbate in the shower with their backs to each other.” Today’s military online satire magazine, Deadspin, even posted a “Field Guide to Masturbating in Afghanistan” that includes instructions for constructing a “pocket pussy” out of “a water bottle, a glove from a first aid kit, a sock, and a dollop of lube from a corpsman’s pack” and advises that awkwardness when masturbating while riding in a mine-resistant, ambush-­ protected vehicle (MRAP) can be avoided by sharing the experience with fellow soldiers: “Everyone jerks; nobody talks”(Deadspin). Another military satire site, duffleblog.com, advises the purchase of a “flesh light,” a sex toy in the shape of a flashlight with the opening of a mouth, vagina or anus. Although such masturbation sleeves are officially banned, many deployed males receive one in a package from home. For most military personnel deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, sex is a DIY activity. Although masturbation itself isn’t forbidden, where and when one could perform it are (ala the porta john prohibition), and masturbation aids are severely limited. The DOD criminalized pornography, like alcohol, on all FOBs, but despite the risk of a UCMJ violation, soldiers bring downloaded porn on their laptops, access it through Internet services, acquire it from fellow soldiers and civilian workers on base, and purchase pornographic videos at the bazaar on base. I’ve never seen an on-base shop that openly advertised pornography, but soldiers know which merchants carry it and will ask discreetly to purchase it. On some bases, steroids and other drugs are available the same way. As long as one keeps porn for one’s self or shares it with a friend, there are typically no consequences. If a soldier who possesses child pornography is discovered, however, he will likely face discharge. The less sex people enjoy, it seems, the more they talk about it. Often a rumor of an attraction on base morphs into stories about where so and so had sex and with how many people. Base dwellers who feel deprived of the

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comforts and pleasures of life at home take delight in the stories of private intimate acts made public. Their telling, in turn, functions as a form of leveling with the fortunate few who have managed to have sex in so restricted an environment put back in their places through humor. On one trip to Bagram Air Base, the story that greeted me was about an American unmarried civilian female who shared an office in one-half of a small plywood hut with two others. Late one night, her coworkers had gone to their bunks, and she and a married male officer she fancied returned to the vacant office for their tryst. They thought that at last they’d found someplace to be alone, and soon their friendly banter progressed to affection and finally their affection to enthusiastic lovemaking. The next morning, the chaplain, who happened to have been working late on a sermon that night on his side of the thin plywood wall, complained to the Colonel to whom this woman reported. Both she and her partner were reprimanded, but neither suffered more than a scolding. It is not unusual to find women who deploy for romantic reasons. Successfully looking for love in all the wrong places, they find men eager for their attention. One of the most common jokes I hear women tell is either delivered in a catty way or with a sense of resignation. For example, I was riding in a convoy with three enlisted women chatting with each other about another female in their unit who was romantically involved. “She just doesn’t realize,” one said, “that she’s two flights away from being ugly again—one to Kuwait, one home. Sometimes the tales of sexual encounters of residents on base come with illustrations, a form of base-generated porn. Two lovers on a base in Herat thought that they had located a private spot on the roof of the base hospital, but unfortunately, they had forgotten that modern warfare is about surveillance, discovering the enemy before he discovers you. The US eyes in the sky designed to spot insurgents planting IEDs within ten kilometers of a base and other suspicious enemy activity, also keep tabs on what might be happening on base, particularly at night. A couple on a base in Herat thought they had secured some privacy for an intimate encounter under the stars on the roof of the tallest building on base only to learn the next day that their lovemaking had been preserved in a video that provided entertainment for others at their expense. The fellow soldiers, deprived of their own sexual pleasure with a partner, could at least take comfort in the fact that they were not the ones caught, embarrassed, or reprimanded, thus leveling the relations that had been disturbed by the exclusivity of the two.

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Sex on the FOB is like being a child again; doing something that is forbidden and hidden until the all-seeing institution spots it. And like all parents who know that their children will sexually experiment, the command knows that although the army has tried to mandate celibacy and proscribe fraternization that such prohibitions will only be partially successful. The point of the command, at least as it is realized by the 170th, is not to eliminate the infraction; the point is to expose and discipline those who committed it.

From Low Culture to High What we can see in the everyday life on FOBs large and small is very different from what one discovers in military discourse about “core values.” The latter typically subordinates the notion of individual dignity to the concept of honor. An official US Army online publication states, “Of all the Army values,” the Army insists, “honor is the one that embodies all the others” (Gibson). To display honor, according to the Army, is to respect both one’s self and others, to maintain personal integrity and thereby elicit the trust of others, and to display selfless service and courage. For this system to work, so the argument goes, each member must know one’s place in the great chain of command.

When a soldier enlists in the US Army, he or she swears an oath to “obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of

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the officers appointed over me.” With membership comes a certain basic honor, an honor that a member can either buff or blemish. Of course, the flip side of such an honor culture is shame. To bring dishonor upon one’s self can, as if by synecdoche, bring dishonor “upon the uniform” or “upon the Corps.” Only in recent years, as the DOD has instituted programs aimed at combatting sexual harassment and sexual assault has the term “dignity” slipped into military discourse. Adm. Jonathan Greenert, Commander of Naval Operations, quoted by Elliot Fabrizio in America’s Navy, puts it this way: No more of the sexist jokes. No sexual harassment. That’s out. We’ve got to get down to that deckplate level and say, “Hey look, I’m just not going to tolerate this anymore.” … We don’t have time for what some call ‘jackassery’. … We are a serious business. We need dignity, respect and trust, so that we can get out there and do the job that we need to do.

The week before the 10th Mtn was due to turn over the battalion headquarters at Fob Griffin to the 170th, this sign appeared in the women’ restroom

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This sign appeared in the men’s restroom

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CHAPTER 9

Under Western Eyes

Fed up with the corrupt practices of warlords, in 1995, many Afghans welcomed the young, idealistic invaders from across the border in Pakistan. Schooled in two strains of fundamentalist Islam (Deobandism from India and Pakistan and puritanical Wahhabism from Saudi Arabia) and proficient in basic military tactics, the Taliban swiftly eliminated the despised checkpoints, set up by warlords, where locals were routinely stopped and ordered to pay fees or robbed before they were allowed to continue on their journey. But the fervor of these talibs (translated as “students”) soon came with further prohibitions of activities considered “Western” and therefore impure or practices considered pre-Islamic like the many traditional forms of Afghan music and dance. Although DVDs were banned, Afghans found ways of smuggling them in from India. In addition to the usual Bollywood fare, the most popular Hollywood pirated film during the Taliban reign was the 1997 film Titanic, popular not because young men could swoon over the attractive Kate Winslet but because they were enraptured by Leonardo DiCaprio. He was the object of their fascination and so popular among teenage boys that they had their hair cut in DiCaprio style, slicked back for important occasions and loose over one eye for everyday, a tribute to the beautiful DiCaprio and a subtle rebellion against their oppressive occupiers. Many teenage boys in Afghanistan during the late 1990s saw fathers flee to Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan, leaving them to look after their mothers, © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_9

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grandparents, and younger siblings. They found themselves with adult responsibilities in a world with new rules, rules designed to relegate to the dustbin of culture the secular freedoms that the Soviets had sought to foster in the 1980s. Mothers who had previously worked, lost their jobs and sent their sons to do the shopping in the bazaar. Faced with the dangers of day-to-day living, these boys would bring out the DVD player from its hiding place in the evening, turn the sound down low and perform the secret and defiant act that would, if they were caught, result in certain punishment. When they gathered with their male friends and secretly watched a pirated copy of Titanic, how were these boys viewing Hollywood cinema? In her 1975 groundbreaking essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” film theorist Laura Mulvey offers a way of understanding Hollywood cinema as a terrain in which the audience’s perspective is dominated by what she coins “the male gaze,” a voyeuristic, gendered subject position that always objectifies the woman on the screen. Mulvey later modifies this rigid gender binary to include, as others have before her, the carnivalesque, that performative inversion of class and gender. In the carnival ritual, the king plays the role of the pauper, the pauper dresses as royalty, men dress as women and women as men. A Freudian, Mulvey sees in these “rituals of resistance” a way in which class and gender can be subverted, but she fails to address the role of culture in any construction of gender. Mulvey has little to offer that can help us understand the male objectification that these Afghan boys enjoyed as they gathered clandestinely to swoon over the handsome DiCaprio. Were they looking, in fact, with a female gaze, with what Steven Druckman calls a “gay gaze,” or simply with a non-Western gaze? One need only turn to Gilbert Herdt’s work on ritual initiation among the Sambia of Papua New Guinea to discover the complicated ways in which gender is culturally constructed. Herdt explains how homosexual fellatio functions in the transformation of boys into heterosexual men. Or consider examples closer to home: the fraternity pledging process in which young pledges are made to dress up as women or Marine Corps boot camp, a rite of passage that has historically sought to infantilize and feminize male recruits. To refute the limits of gender and sexual preference as binary, one must move toward an understanding of gender as performance, as Judith Butler has argued. To do that, I would like to leave the scene of young Afghan fans delighting in the mother of all disaster films while the repressive,

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starkly masculine Taliban troops patrol the streets and examine the traditional Afghan practice that does enact gender transgression, a practice that has been resoundingly condemned by Muslim leaders, both within and without the Taliban, and by the civilian government of Afghanistan, first under Hamid Karzai and later under Ashraf Ghani. Despite consistent efforts to eliminate it, it has persisted. Bacha bazi, translated literally as “boy play,” refers both to the performance of dancing boys and to the keeping of attractive boys and young men as sexual partners. Not only does this practice trouble the conflation between spectatorship and identity, but it also invites us to consider multiple perspectives: the gaze of Afghan men who watch live performances of dancing boys with appreciation and sometimes arousal and those who buy DVDs of such performances as well as the uncomfortable gaze of coalition forces who view live performances, video recordings, and hear the tales that circulate. Bacha bazi celebrates the homoerotic attraction for boys, some as young as 11 and others in their teens, by adult males. It enjoys a long history in Afghanistan, especially as it pertains to dance performance. Writing about his sociocultural research in northern Afghanistan in the 1880s, Eugene Schuyler tells how the rumor of a performance by a dancing boy would “draw great crowds to the garden where it was expected to take place” (Schuyler 133). He goes on to describe the audience reaction to the dancing in which more than one dancing boy performed: Every movement they made is followed and applauded, and I have never seen such breathless interest as they excite, for the whole crowd seems to devour them with their eyes, while their hands beat time to every step. If a batcha condescends to offer a man a bowl of tea, the recipient rises to take it with a profound obeisance, and returns the empty bowl in the same way, addressing him only as Tdxir “your Majesty,” or kulluk “I am your slave.” Even when a batcha passes through the bazar all who know him rise to salute him with hands upon their hearts, and the exclamation of “Kulluk” and should he deign to stop and rest in any shop it is thought a great honour. (Schuyler 133)

According to Schuyler, most men of rank or position in large towns kept one of these dancing boys, while men of lesser means would sometimes pool their money and share a bacha. According to ethnomusicologist John Baily, not only does the viewer “devour” the bacha with his eyes, but

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during the dance, the dancer also reciprocates the gaze by “kneeling before a guest and gazing deeply into his eyes” (Baily 144). Typical dance moves in a bacha bazi performance include: Use of Indian hand dance gestures Eye movements combined with other body movements Shaking of shoulders to oscillate a padded breast Holding onto one end of a long silk scarf and executing circles underneath it Dropping slowly backwards onto the floor with legs folded back in a submissive posture Dropping with one arm up and the other down, hands moving to look like a huge mouth opening and closing. (Baily 142)

The most elaborate, full-dress versions of a bacha bazi performance take place within a circle of men sitting or reclining while a couple of musicians play and sing romantic love songs with repeated lyrics like these collected by anthropologist Louis Dupree: A beautiful boy with a bottom like a peach stands across the river and I can’t swim! (Dupree 198)

And another from the documentary film The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan, a film based on the reporting of Afghan journalist Najibullah Quraishi: His body is so soft. His lips are so tender. He’s touching the boy with his cotton clothes. Where do you live, so that I can get to know your dad? Oh boy, you have put your lover on fire.

The gathered men clap and cheer as the bacha performs for their pleasure. Some bachas dress in drag, wearing makeup, fake breasts, female clothing, and ankle bells that keep time with the music; others carry only a gauzy female headscarf over their male clothing as a token of the gender fluidity they enact. Still other bachas perform in customary male attire, the loose-fitting trousers and tunic. Absent the drag, the length of the solo dance, the shoulder shimmying, and the long sequences of twirls, a young man dancing in a circle of men is typical of Afghan dance even in non-bacha bazi performances. In most

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of Afghanistan, boys and men never dance with girls and women; they dance with other males. A circle of men moving or clapping to the beat watch as one or two men come into the center, perform for the group and then go back to the circle while the next dancer enters the circle. Just like the bachas, they don’t touch when they dance but move their hips, shoulders, arms, and hands in expressive, often delicate ways. After the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1989, bacha bazi enjoyed a resurgence. With no central state power, US-funded Mujahideen tribal warlords divided the country into territories over which they enjoyed autocratic rule. The all-powerful warlords debased the idealized version of bacha bazi, a form of boy/man love documented in Persian and Pashtun poetry (Lindholm 1982, 225) in which older men wooed the objects of their affection by taking them on as protégés or bestowing gifts. Too often, warlords simply sought no approval from parents, paid no boy price, and abducted the boys they desired (Smith 2002). They did this with such brazen disregard in Kandahar that parents complained that they could not let their sons go to the market for fear they would be kidnapped. In 1994, so the story goes, Mullah Omar, who would become the reclusive leader of the Taliban for nearly 20 years, rescued an abducted child and killed the warlord who had abducted him. The Taliban’s Islamic fundamentalist prohibition of music and dance, one might argue, was an effort to prohibit bacha bazi. When the Taliban defeated the warlords and established their Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996, they officially criminalized bacha bazi, insisting that the performances of dancing boys went hand-in-hand with the consumption of drugs and alcohol, which it often did. Despite the official ban, the practice went temporarily underground with some men keeping their chai boys hidden and their alliances secret. After the defeat of the Taliban in 2001, it did not take long for bacha bazi to become more public in Afghanistan. British journalist Tim Reid writing for the Times of London in 2002 describes the liberated streets of Kandahar: Now that Taleban rule is over in Mullah Omar’s former southern stronghold, it is not only televisions, kites and razors which have begun to emerge. Visible again, too, are men with their ‘ashna’, or beloveds: young boys they have groomed for sex. Kandahar’s Pashtuns have been notorious for their homosexuality for centuries, particularly their fondness for naive young boys. Before the Taleban arrived in 1994, the streets were filled with

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t­ eenagers and their sugar daddies, flaunting their relationship. It is called the homosexual capital of South Asia.

Alarmed by the resurgence of bacha bazi, the Western-backed government of Afghanistan ordered that no bacha bereesh (beardless boys) be allowed to reside in police stations, on military bases or in commanders’ compounds (Smith 2002). Regardless, in the years since the US 2001 invasion, former warlords, government officials, shop owners, and police commanders have taken in poor or orphaned boys whom they provided with food, clothing, and shelter. In exchange, the boys typically contribute to household chores, serve as “chai boys,” work as shop apprentices, and, in some households, sleep with their masters. Possession of a bacha is a sign of status and affluence that is displayed in dances performed for guests. In 2016, Newsweek would report that nearly all of Uruzgan Province’s 370 local and national police checkpoints maintained at least one bacha. Some police officials consider a bacha to be a necessary perk for deployment to remote locations. The Taliban, they would also discover, have used bachas to infiltrate police headquarters and commit attacks—six alone between January and April 2016 (Noori). The most professionalized bachas are those trained by tutors in specific dance moves and in the playing of musical instruments. When their training is complete (from several months to a year), their masters take them to perform at bacha bazi parties and weddings. The dancing boys earn money for their masters and tips for themselves. While they perform, an admiring man will often throw afghanis, the paper currency of the country, over the boy’s head. Sometimes two admiring men will vie for the favor of the boy by competing in the money they throw. For an amount, sexual favors can be procured. Some dancing boys continue performing into their 20s, but most retire when they become too manly to pass as juveniles. Men and boys are free to play, work, and worship in public; women in rural Afghanistan live, work, and worship inside family compounds walled off from passersby. For a man to gaze at a woman in conservative regions of Afghanistan is an insult to her and to her family. Boys grow up in Afghanistan literally having “seen” only those young girls and women who live in their family compound. Where gender separation is rigorously enforced, signs of affection between men and women are never witnessed outside of the home. It is easy, on the other hand, to see outward displays of male-to-male affection—one man sitting with his arm around another man, one with his hand on a friend’s thigh, or two men walking together

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holding hands. Although the Westerner might read these displays of affection as evidence that the men are homosexual rather than heterosexual, the Afghan does not. In academic discussions of gender, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and Uma Narayan point out the patronizing way in which Western scholars have collected all non-Western cultures into the massive basket they call “Third World,” failing to consider the complexity of the many cultures, the many traditions, the many identities that inform gender roles (Mohanty 1984; Narayan 1997). Although the term “Third World” has been replaced by descriptors like “developing nations” and the “Global South” since Mohanty and Narayan’s early criticism, the point they make about the need to account for particular cultures is relevant today. In discussing the transgressive practice of bacha bazi, it’s important to acknowledge that while most Afghans view it as abusive exploitation of children, many see no remedy to this regrettable yet inevitable practice in times of insecurity. In her work, Mohanty insists that we understand that just as what it means to be a woman is culturally constructed, what it means to be a man is as well (Mohanty 2003). And in Afghanistan, that is not simple. Even men who support young attractive bachas and who sleep with them will rarely call themselves homosexuals. In 2014, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC), an organization founded in 2002 and disbanded in 2021 with the Taliban takeover, would review the laws that prohibit rape, pederasty, and degradation and conduct interviews with bacha bazi perpetrators, victims, and witnesses, concluding that there is no relationship between marital status and bacha bazi. They find that 78% of the perpetrators surveyed are married, and of those 89% report that they are either “completely satisfied” or “partially satisfied” with their marriages (AIHRC, 7). Although 86% of the perpetrators report that the arrangements are mutually satisfactory and that the boys are happy, not surprisingly, 87% of the victims interviewed disagreed. There is an oft-quoted Afghan saying, “Women are for children; boys are for pleasure.” Journalist Maura Reynolds interviewed a young Afghan who has sex with men and not with women but who does not consider himself a homosexual: In his 29 years, Mohammed Daud has seen the faces of perhaps 200 women. A few dozen were family members. The rest were glimpses stolen when he should not have been looking and the women were caught without their face-shrouding burkas. “How can you fall in love with a girl if you can’t see

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her face?” he asks. Daud is unmarried and has sex only with men and boys. But he does not consider himself homosexual, at least not in the Western sense. “I like boys, but I like girls better,” he says. “It’s just that we can’t see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful.” (Reynolds)

Even the dancing boys who perform for older men and have sex with them, rarely identify as homosexual. Even for those who perform in drag, dressing as a woman and dancing for men, regard this practice as something they do, not someone they are. Dancing boys often assume that if they are discreet, when their dancing days are over, sometime between age 18 and 20 they will marry and have a family. In fact, the pimps who recruit these boys and market them to perform at private parties and at weddings often promise that they will give these boys money for their own weddings. Afghan weddings are expensive, multi-day affairs with hundreds of guests to feed and entertain. The groom must not only pay for the food and entertainment; he must also furnish a dowry and buy expensive jewelry for his bride. Consequently, the promise of covering the cost of a wedding is a powerful lure. The men who profit from these boys or who merely keep them for their own pleasure, these bachabaz (men who play with boys), keep intact an Afghan honor system dependent on the inviolability of women, not of boys. Even young Afghan men who are not in the bacha bazi business, unmarried men with heterosexual desires, may choose the available young attractive males in place of celibacy and the frustrated desire for the unattainable veiled woman. Only in marriage can they act on heterosexual desire. They may find, as many of the bachabaz do, that even when married, they hanker for the young males who were their first loves. It is important to note that although such gender fluidity is typically practiced by males, there is an important exception in which young girls dress and act as boys. The practice is called bacha posh, meaning “to dress as a boy” (Norberg). Families without sons may escape the social stigma of failing to produce a male heir and select one of their daughters to perform the role of a son: cut her hair, give her a boy’s name, dress her always in boy’s clothing and expect her to perform the tasks of a son by running errands, going to the bazaar, playing soccer with boys, and attending school or working outside the home. On the one hand, such

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transformation will often grant the bacha posh freedoms that other girls are denied. On the other hand, she will have to forfeit those freedoms when puberty makes the disguise harder to sustain. At puberty a bacha posh typically transitions back into a girl, allowing a younger sister to assume the role of son. Occasionally, a bacha posh elects to maintain the male role beyond puberty (Avilon, Barmak).

A Western Perspective In America’s twenty-first-century wars, infantry units trained to engage with and destroy the enemy have been asked to simultaneously operate as peacekeeping forces, protecting the population, gaining their trust, gathering important intelligence, and helping, where possible, the work of reconstruction. According to the Army’s 2007 Counterinsurgency Field Manual, “the decisive battle is for the people’s minds” (Nagl 46). Every action, including uses of force, must be wrapped in a bodyguard of information. While security is essential to setting the stage for overall progress, lasting victory comes from a vibrant economy, political participation, and restored hope. Particularly after security has been achieved, dollars and ballots will have more important effects than bombs and bullets. This is a time when “money is ammunition.” Depending on the state of the insurgency, therefore, Soldiers and Marines should prepare to execute many nonmilitary missions to support COIN efforts. (Nagl 49)

One form those nonmilitary missions take is sitting down with local representatives in “key leader engagements” (KLEs). Afghans are comfortable with such gatherings; they have for generations assembled together in a circle in tribal council meetings to settle local disputes. Some American commanders embrace their new role, learn something about the people they are there to protect, and discover the ways in which such discussions can mitigate the use of force. Others reluctantly attend these meetings, listen to the complaints of the locals with skepticism, and doubt the utility of such exchanges. The closer military personnel get to the Afghans, the more they observe cultural practices that puzzle or disturb them. Although most inhabitants of a FOB have never seen a bacha bazi performance of dancing boys, most know the story of a young commander, in many versions a captain or lieutenant, and his fellow junior officers and sergeants invited by a local leader

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or a chief of police to a dinner or a party, only to be shocked by the entertainment—boys dancing to the excitement of men. Each of these stories ends with the Western guests not knowing whether to stay or to leave and fearing what might follow. Their training never prepared them for such a performance, but it has circulated widely as a humorous story. In 2009, a US Army commander stationed in Helmand Province had heard the accounts and asked his civilian Human Terrain Team (AF-6) to investigate such sexual practices. Their report, written by social scientist AnnaMaria Cardinalli, “Pashtun Sexuality,” circulated for several years to other US and British units stationed in Afghanistan. It attributes homosexual and pedophilic preferences among Afghan men to the strict isolation of women. Because women and girls are not available in the workplace, in schools, and in public places, so the argument goes, men will find other men and boys willing to serve as the submissive partners they desire: serving tea during the day, sleeping with the man who keeps them at night. Although I have never encountered young boys serving tea on Afghan National Army bases, I see them at Afghan National Police headquarters and working at local tea shops. I assumed that the latter are likely the sons of the proprietors working in the family business, but since the Afghan Police officers deployed to areas outside the big cities live and work in their compounds and never bring their families with them, the Afghan boy who serves me tea may not, in fact, be a local kid earning a few afghani. Cardinalli’s report astutely concludes the Afghan understanding that having sex with other men or boys does not confer a particular identity, labeling one as gay or homosexual. Although the work of anthropologist Tom Boellstorff focuses on homosexual practices among consenting adults and not with children, he observes a similar fluidity of identities and refusal to adopt rigid gender binaries of the gay and lesbians he studies in The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia: While most gay and lesbi Indonesians marry “heterosexually,” they tend not to see themselves as bisexual, not only because biseks is still a rather academic term in Indonesian but because they see marriage as, so to speak, another island of desire. (Boellstorff 99)

For American troops, understanding the sexual preferences of some Afghan men, particularly those in positions of power, it is easier to pay little attention when confronted with adult consensual sexual practices

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than when they suspect children are being exploited. The 2010 Frontline documentary The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan, based on the reporting of Najibullah Quraishi, made deployed forces even more aware of bacha bazi and the sexual exploitation of boys. But watching a film and encountering young boys acting as servants to local police chiefs are two different things. Typically, these young American officers are either incapable or unwilling to challenge those whose support they are attempting to win. Most bracket the practice as “Afghan culture” and go about the business of patrolling their areas and gathering intelligence. Some American forces do respond when they learn of the sexual abuse of children. In northern Kunduz Province, another sector of my brigade’s AO, Special Forces Captain Dan Quinn and Sgt First Class Charles Martland discover that a local police commander, whose unit they are training, has abducted a boy, chained him to a bed, and repeatedly raped him. When the boy’s mother goes to the police commander to demand her son’s release, she, too, is beaten. When the injured boy is later released, the mother fears that he will be taken again, and so she asks the American troops in the area for help. When Captain Quinn confronts the local commander, the latter just laughs and admits to the abuse. Quinn knocks the police commander down, and both he and Sgt. Martland punch the commander and tell him never to go near the boy again (Goldstein). This is not the first time that Quinn has acted in an effort to help an Afghan child. Previously, he reported another Afghan police commander to the police chief of the province for raping a 14- or 15-year-old girl working in a nearby field only to discover that the commander’s punishment amounted to one day in jail and a forced marriage between the girl and her rapist. For that reason, Quinn decides to seek no more justice from the Afghan authorities. When Quinn’s and Martland’s officer in charge of his unit learns what they have done to the local police commander who raped the boy, Quinn is relieved of his command, sent back to the States, and eventually leaves the military. In 2015, the Army decides to discharge Sgt Martland in November, but four months later after some critical press coverage, the Army reverses the decision and reinstates Martland. Joseph Goldstein, writing about Quinn and Martland for the New York Times, invites Col Brian Tribus to give the Army’s view on this issue, and Col Tribus responds with the standard response, “‘Generally, allegations of child sexual abuse by Afghan military or police personnel would be a matter of domestic Afghan criminal law … there would be no

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express requirement that U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan report it.’” (Goldstein). What the example of the Afghan tradition of bacha bazi shows us is that the performance of gender lives in a rich cultural context. Afghans have condemned, tolerated, or embraced the practice and the abuses that go with it for at least 200 years. Occupying forces serving in Afghanistan either look the other way or attempt to intervene, and even when they look they don’t see as Afghans see because they cannot inhabit the Afghan imaginary, cannot see what Afghan men see (or what Afghan women see through the crocheted grillwork of their burkas): not only with regard to young dancing boys but with regard to the enemy they are ostensibly protecting the population from, the Taliban. Western troops come to Afghanistan thinking that they understand their enemy. On one occasion, when my team is unable to secure transportation from our headquarters in Mazar out to Maymana, Qeysar, or Ghormach, we decide to ask the Afghan Army troops on our adjoining base, the Germans housed in their own compound in one small section of our base, and our own American troops the simple question we were planning to asked local Afghans: “Who are the Taliban?” When, after a couple days, we obtain transport, we ask this question of Afghan male civilians: some illiterate, some with a basic education, a few college educated, farmers, and merchants. The responses we gather are telling. The American and German forces typically describe a homogeneous enemy, the vast majority of whom they characterize as religious radicals, impervious to change, driven by a fanatical ideology. Afghans, on the other hand, both Afghan Army regulars and civilians, explain that the Taliban has changed from an ideologically driven group of talibs, student fighters, into three main groups: (1) True religious zealots they estimate to constitute 10–20% of the total, (2) The large group of 50–60% who were criminals engaged in the drug trade (3) Those who join because they are poor. These “reluctant insurgents” include poor, unemployed city dwellers and farmers whose crops have failed in a multiyear drought. These reluctant insurgents are simply trying to earn money to feed their families. The Taliban in Ghormach, we discover, offers recruits a slightly higher wage than the Afghan National Army or National Police. The simple conclusion: by 2011, we still don’t understand our enemy.

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American Eyes in the Sky With little appreciation for the Afghan notion of the inviolability of the extended family compound, American forces in the course of the War in Afghanistan have repeatedly broken into family compounds to gain intelligence, to detain either a suspected insurgent, or to question someone suspected of having given aid to an insurgent. Americans generally view their actions as both necessary and restrained, intended to take suspects alive, to capture weapons’ stashes, and to remove bomb-making equipment. Afghans view such forced entry, one that typically takes place in the middle of the night with women present, as the height of barbarism. Such raids jeopardize civilians, violate an entire family, and often win the insurgency fresh recruits. When, in 2011, an elderly relative of Afghan President Hamid Karzai is killed while emerging from his home to see what is happening in the raid of a neighbor’s home, Karzai demands that such raids cease, a demand that he has made over and over during his presidency. For a Hollywood illustration of this kind of disabling paradox, see the 2017 film War Machine, starring Brad Pitt as Gen Stanley McChrystal. After 2010, many small remote bases in volatile areas of Afghanistan are equipped with a helium-filled blimp, an aerostat made by Lockheed Martin for $6 million and floated far above the base. These surveillance devices, carrying powerful cameras, deliver precision real-time video of the area in living color in the daylight and in greenish night-vision images in the dark on jumbo screens in the front of the tactical operations center tent (“the TOC”). They allow a viewer to see just about any kind of furtive or peculiar behavior, whether by men who mean to cause damage or men who seek comfort or release. For example, one night, at the command outpost in Ghormach, the contractor operating the aerostat and gulping coffee to make it through his night shift, spots a shepherd having sex with one of his sheep. The operator calls over to the few others in front of their computer screens, and they share a laugh. Mediated distance can turn potential disgust into comedy. The live-and-let-live attitude may be fine when applied to observed bestiality, but no laughter is generated a couple of months later in response to a scene broadcast on the jumbo screens at the front of the TOC. The guys on the night shift watch with horror as two men near the base rape a young boy. To witness such brutality and stand by doing nothing seems unconscionable, so they wake the Captain, who elects not to intervene. He tells those who have watched the assault that what they saw was not the business of occupying forces, and he goes back to bed. The handful of

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guys in the TOC that night identify not with the perpetrators but with the victim. The American military gaze revealed to these onlookers not the Western warriors coming to the rescue but their powerlessness, the dark heartless core of another unwinnable war. They concluded that the scene they watched with horror on the nightshift was only a crime under Western eyes. Similarly, without those eyes there would be no insurgency, a conflict concocted from differences among “countrymen” that is a function of the mediated vision of occupying forces. These Western forces must divide the population between insurgents and non-insurgents, between brother and brother, nephew and uncle, in order to sustain the fantasy of building a democratic, peaceable, prosperous society while wearing military uniforms, carrying weapons, and killing people who are sometimes indistinguishable from the people we are supposedly transforming into young democrats and republicans. The military officer called on the night the boy was raped outside his base had no authority to enforce Afghan tribal law and needed to make a choice to see those men as either insurgents, who are assaulting a friendly—even though he knows that in the daytime the same men might count as allies against the “real” insurgents—or to see them as civilians. This is a choice that, if implemented as policy, would turn the normal irrationality of our occupation into sheer chaos, where any friend at any time could prove to be an enemy. The officer instead adopts the radical culturalist option that what enters our Western gaze, which might violate our moral principles and laws, is rendered impotent by becoming invisible or, as in the case of the distant, mediated, sheep-fornicator, comical. I have broken with Mulvey’s psychoanalytic model of the gaze and substituted a culturally materialist technological model that can legitimately be called the “American gaze,” both because it is applied to unknowing subjects, the Afghans, by American occupiers and because the Afghans do not have the technological infrastructure to return, resist, or even recognize that gaze. The American gaze cannot inhabit the Afghan imaginary, cannot see what Afghan men see (or what Afghan women see through the crocheted grillwork of their burkas)—not only with regard to young dancing boys but with regard to the enemy they were ostensibly protecting the population from, the Taliban.

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An Afghan National Police officer and American soldier walking through the Ghormach Bazaar. (Photo by Samantha)

CHAPTER 10

Who Tells Stories On Deployment?

I know that with war comes a rich lode of personal narratives, firsthand accounts by those who have seen war up close. As a student of military culture, I have read many of these stories and collected even more from the veterans I interviewed, often several years after their wartime experiences. Theirs are stories that celebrate survival in the face of adversity and acknowledge the painful loss of friends less fortunate, stories that tell of close calls, of extraordinary teamwork, of incompetence, and even of encounters with the mysterious or the uncanny in such close proximity to death. As civilians, we often grant those who have witnessed war bragging rights to tell us of their adventures and misadventures. For soldiers, the chance to exercise these coveted rights by reliving their experiences may be one appeal of military service itself. Shakespeare provides testimony to this allure in his account of the Battle of Agincourt, fought between English and French forces on St. Crispin’s Day (October 25, 1415). In Henry V, young King Henry inspires his outnumbered troops by promising that their bravery and their manhood will live “from this day to the ending of the world” in the stories they tell and that others tell about them after they are gone. Welcoming those who join him in battle as his “band of brothers,” he marshals support for what looks like a hopeless encounter with a superior force by imagining those who survive as aged veterans:

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_10

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He that outlives this day, and comes safe home, Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam’d, And rouse him at the name of Crispian. He that shall see this day, and see old age, Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours, And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian.” Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day”… This story shall the good man teach his son; And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by, From this day to the ending of the world, But we in it shall be rememberèd. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers

This stirring invitation has the desired effect. English yeomen vanquish the mighty French cavalry, and Shakespeare’s version of Henry’s speech comes down through history as one of the great battle speeches in the English language. It is still being used effectively nearly 350 years later, when Laurence Olivier delivers it in the 1944 film version of Henry V, a project made at the urging of Britain’s Ministry of Information and intended to strengthen the morale of British soldiers preparing for the invasion of Normandy. But Henry’s speech gives a conventional picture that captures only one response of those who wage war. In fact, the expectation that those who fight wars will go on to celebrate their actions in heroic narratives—that is, to strip their sleeves and show their scars—is not always realized. What I discover on this deployment in Afghanistan is that although survivors of war win the right to tell their version of it, they also win the right to remain silent, unable to shape their memories into stories until years later. Before my deployment in Afghanistan, I understood abstractly that many who step into the world of war quickly learn that only a laboriously constructed armor of numbness can shield them from the normal reactions to violence, fear, loss, and anger. Only during my deployment in Afghanistan do I come to appreciate the comfort that numbness can bring with its ability to protect from pain, dissolve fear, stave off any debilitating anxiety, and transform the hazardous into the everyday. Only after my return will I learn that the numbness that protects one in harm’s way can fend off the healing that requires the cautious reconnecting with what we experienced, what we saw, and what we should have felt but didn’t. Many returnees need time, sometimes years to shed the carapace and open

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themselves to family and friends. There are others who return from today’s wars with stories they can’t share with civilians.

Remaining Silent: Censors and Sensibilities It is appealing to imagine that deployment in a war zone, which entails months of confinement on base, save for infrequent missions “outside the wire,” might be the perfect stage for telling war stories. One thinks of seasoned soldiers and Marines enthralling rookie privates and lance corporals with tales of heroic firefights and close encounters with an enemy of the most barbaric kind. But that quaint image of unit cohesion forged by legends and legacies fails to take into account the fact that all branches of the military discourage fraternization between the ranks. Officers, non-­ coms, and grunts sleep in separate tents, sit at different tables in the chow tent, and shield their casual conversation from outsiders. Sergeants and officers might be admired or even liked by privates, but they are never friends, and casual conversation rarely takes place across ranks. As a result, there is actually little opportunity for a “newbie” to hear old timers’ tales. There is even less opportunity, at least in the war zone, for common soldiers to hear tales from SEALs, Special Forces, and other “special ops” personnel. These “meat eaters,” or “snake eaters” as they are often called, doubtlessly could relate harrowing stories of dangerous engagements with the enemy, but while at headquarters, they typically billet in their own secured areas off-limits to other soldiers. These high-speed guys function as assets to the commanders of regular units, and they helo to remote bases to fulfill specific missions. When they do, they generally talk with the commander, the sergeants familiar with the area, and with those responsible for intelligence. They rarely socialize with the rank and file and almost never share their experiences with rookie regulars. Even on small remote bases, they generally occupy their own tent. For longer stays, they may bring their own supplies and local cook. This isolation inhibits dissemination of their adventures to a wider community. Not that there isn’t an appetite for special ops narratives. On the home front, these are so much in demand that many SEAL and Special Forces memoirs have become bestsellers. Among the most successful have been Doug Stanton’s Horse Soldiers, Marcus Luttrell’s Lone Survivor, and Mark Owen’s No Easy Day. In the field, the special ops’ derring-do is no less celebrated. The Army regulars I live among regard them with awe, and on COP Ghormach, where a unit of Navy SEALs arrives for a few weeks, the

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Army privates and specialists spray-paint their black M-16s beige in imitation of the SEALs they so admire. These rookies even cut a dolphin stencil and spray-paint their khaki t-shirts with the classic SEAL logo. Were the SEALs willing to share their war stories, they would have an eager audience, but as talkative as they can become as memoir-writers, downrange the SEALs, like other “quiet professionals”—Marine scout snipes, Army Rangers, and Delta Force soldiers—opt to maintain their aloofness. If war stories are not exchanged across ranks during long deployments, are they communicated via email and Skype to a home front audience? The simple answer is No, and the reason is a variant of the WWII warning to military personnel who engage with talkative civilians: “Loose Lips Sink Ships.” All deployed units today receive from their commands a similar warning about relaying war stories to their families. It’s safe to assume, they are told, that the enemy intercepts all phone and online communication. On the one hand, deployed military personnel in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have enjoyed more frequent contact with children, spouses, and parents. On the other hand, because the calls and Skype chats can transform the personal into the public, standard institutional censorship can easily become self-censorship on both sides. The system suppresses intimacy and defers sorting out difficult problems until the return home. What soldier would, for example, complain about a superior or a peer with a spouse when that conversation could be overheard? And what spouse would report financial problems or a teenager expelled from school when their soldier might be in harm’s way? Particularly stressful for both the deployed soldier and his or her family is knowing that when a unit sustains a loss, a blackout of all communication with home is imposed. The base “mayor” padlocks the door to the computer shed until the families of the dead are notified. This communication lockdown may last for days. In the meantime, those at home have heard about the incident but don’t know if their soldier or their officer is among the injured or killed. When it’s reopened, the MWR fills, and a flurry of communication goes home—not necessarily as a way of processing the event but simply to reassure those at home that their soldier is fine. A soldier may be anxious about something his or her unit is about to undertake but must refrain from mentioning anything regarding an impending mission in communication home for fear that such information might tip off the enemy. Even recapping a difficult mission with family and friends is discouraged. It is only safe to discuss life at home, and as long as

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that home life is sunny, communication is fine. The one deployed often feels helpless to address a spouse at home who feels abandoned or the stress of doing the parental tasks that are typically shared. Although some at major bases secure costly Internet services and others purchase local cell phones and pay the steep price of international calls, most communicate with family and friends through email and Skype at the computer shack where as many as 20 others do the same, all within earshot of each other; all pretending not to hear anyone else’s conversation. One winter night at Camp Spann that pretense is shattered. All the phones and computers are in use, so after signing the roster, about ten of us sit on plywood benches in the plywood computer shack awaiting our 20 minutes of Wi Fi or phone in a numbered plywood cubicle. From their three-sided stalls, some mumble when they converse. Others exchange mundane pleasantries with spouses and kids. Still others keep their communications silent but for the clicking of keys. On this night, an animated private first class is Skyping with his wife, excited to have her guess the special gift he’s ordered online for her, one that should arrive at her house soon. He tells her its color and then its dimensions, but she can’t guess what it is. As his enthusiasm grows so does the volume of his voice. “It’s great Honey,” he says. “You’ll love it; it turns fuzzy just like my weener.” All of us in the room, the regulars, who for months have maintained the fiction that all conversations are private, and the newcomers, itinerants mostly who travel from one base to the next, erupt in applause. Embarrassed, the young soldier quickly ends his conversation, signs out, and slips away, hoping, no doubt, that members of his platoon won’t get wind of the attention-grabbing fuzzy weener story.

Talking Too Much: Wannabes and Confabulators So if it’s not the active-duty soldiers who regale underlings with true or exaggerated accounts of past deployments, then who, in the liminal world of deployment, relates narratives of their past adventures? In my experience, the people most ready to invoke their bragging rights—sometimes bragging about things that never happened—are the civilian contractors who have been as numerous in our recent wars as our official fighting forces. After 2003, to fight wars in two parts of the globe without initiating a draft, military planners augmented our all-volunteer active duty forces with reserve units in unprecedented numbers and with civilian contractors. In 2011, as American troops are pulling out of Iraq and the

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Afghanistan surge is underway, there is rough parity between the military and paramilitary groups: 150,000 troops to 155,000 contractors. Contractors hired by the notorious Blackwater firm  (to be renamed “Xe” and later “Academi”) and other defense specialists serve as security forces. DynCorp sends former American police officers to train local police in Iraq and Afghanistan. KBR (Kellogg, Brown, and Root), a subsidiary of Halliburton, employs civilians to clean the latrines, keep the generators running so that the tents can be warm in the winter and cool in the summer, drive the buses and vans to shuttle personnel from one side of a large base to the other, launder soldiers’ uniforms and bedding, deliver pallets of bottled water, and work in the large chow halls. Military contractors, many of them veterans, also pilot personnel between bases, conduct lie detector tests, run the PX, the base  bank, and the  gym on large bases, operate heavy equipment, interrogate prisoners, serve as interpreters, and aid in what will prove to be budget-busting reconstruction projects. Contractors pull down hefty salaries. Consider an American in a job that pays $40,000 a year. With no food, lodging or transportation costs to cover, this same worker can take home $200,000 a year as a defense contractor. Some in that position explain their large salaries as adequate compensation for the hard work they do and the dangers they face. Many do valuable work; some are wounded or killed while deployed. Others, though, are just there for the cash, and some of them inflate their military pasts in part, I suspect, to justify the windfall they receive from American taxpayers. Eager to impress young first-time deployers and civilians like me, sometimes over dinner in the D-FAC or in the hours between “show time” and boarding a flight in a drafty hanger where the cement floor is often more comfortable than the chairs, they spin out harrowing stories of previous deployments, stories likely to be fabricated or highly embellished. Stories just too good to be true. Take, for example, a gentleman I meet at Ali Al Salem, Kuwait while waiting for a flight downrange to Afghanistan. All at Ali Al Salem wait to be called to board a large troop transport and make their way to the conflict or home from it. It’s not unusual to appear in the middle of the night for a flight and sit for hours only to be told to come back the next night. And the next. And the next. Before my teammate Spiker arrives in Afghanistan, he spends 15 nights doing this. One feels the irony of this place of comings and goings during the hours of waiting. Most of the strangers one encounters at Ali Al Salem look blankly and straight ahead as if refusing to admit that the base is a real place and its inhabitants are

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anything other than shades slipping through the rows of tents in the beastly hot days and the chilly nights. So when I meet someone who is friendly and wants to talk, I pay attention. The man who chats me up on one of those chilly nights when there is nothing to do but listen, tells me that he’s a contractor and a Vietnam War veteran. Unlike the Vietnam War veterans I know, guys who got a belly full of war and are reluctant to entertain strangers with their tales of “Nam,” this one is excited to regale me with the horrors of jungle combat. I know that the average infantry soldier in the Vietnam War saw over 200 days of combat during a 365-day deployment, so I’m not surprised to hear about the fierce fighting this talkative gentleman recounts. But then he explains that although a soldier was required to head for home after receiving three Purple Hearts, he had, in fact, stayed on to receive a fourth. That sounds suspicious, but I let him go on with his story. He complains about today’s Army officers, who, he insists, care more about their promotions than about those who serve under them. As evidence of his loyalty down the chain of command, he insists that he had never asked anyone he commanded to do anything he wouldn’t do himself. He says, “When I was a captain and got my own squad, I went out with my men.” Thinking I’ve misheard him or that he misspoke, I ask, “Did you say when you were a corporal?” “No,” he says, “I was an officer, a captain.” The four purple hearts had been questionable, but when he says he’d gotten his own squad as a captain, I can smell the stink of his story. A sergeant and on occasion a corporal, but not a captain, typically commands the 8–10 soldiers in a squad. A lieutenant leads a platoon (15–30 soldiers), and a captain generally leads a company of 60–120 individuals, not a single squad. Only Special Forces have captains commanding small units, and had this man been a Green Beret or Army Ranger, I’m certain he would have introduced his tale with this fact. War stories that are too good to be true usually come apart when a single thread is pulled, causing the whole garment to unravel. With this guy, I detect two threads in ten minutes. It seems clear that he is, if not simply a liar, at least the type of “inventive” storyteller that folklorists call a confabulator (Long 1973). There are plenty of these wannabe heroes around—so many, in fact, that in 2013 Congress felt obliged to pass a law, the Stolen Valor Act, that makes it a crime to lie about receiving military awards. For several years I followed V-WAR, a listserv created by folklorist Lydia Fish at Buffalo State University, which allowed Vietnam veterans to

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reconnect with buddies and exchange reminiscences of their in-country experiences. From time to time a fake would be exposed. Typically, he had been a regular on the site for a long time, but in just a single post would make a mistake about a piece of equipment, a type of ordnance, or the name of a particular village that would shatter his disguise, and the vets on the list would shame him off the site. I often wondered why the fake wouldn’t just trot out his stories in the civilian world where the disguise could be maintained, but I answered my own question when writing an article about a fake veteran who pretended to be “Hank Higgins,” a pilot who had been decorated in the Vietnam War and who was still alive when the imposter “adopted” his war record (Burke 2006). For several years, almost every day, this wannabe joined his online friends, many of them retired from the Air Force, some of them Air Force and Navy pilots, and almost daily he risked discovery. I’m convinced he took that risk because he needed affirmation from real veterans, those who could be persuaded that he was the person he pretended to be. As long as the disguise worked, as long as he passed, he could see himself as a member of the band of brothers whose acceptance he so desperately craved. In fooling them, he could go on fooling himself. Sometimes a confabulator is so polished that he even fools an experienced professional. In his well-known article “The Perfect Informant,” Marine Corps veteran and seasoned fieldworker Bruce Jackson (1990) shows how he was taken in by “Jim,” an excellent storyteller who also masqueraded as a Vietnam vet. Jackson’s experience with Jim sets him on a new trajectory and to the publication of his book The Story is True, in which Jackson seeks to resolve the dialectic between what Tim O’Brien calls “story-truth” and “happening-truth” in his famous book The Things They Carried. O’Brien’s narrator explains the difference: I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth. Here is the happening-truth. I was once a soldier. There were many bodies, real bodies and real faces, but I was young then and I was afraid to look. And now, twenty years later, I’m left with faceless responsibility and faceless grief. Here is the story-truth. He was a slim, dead, almost dainty young man of about twenty. He lay in the center of a red clay trail near the village of My Khe. His jaw was in his throat. His one eye was shut, the other eye was a star-shaped hole. I killed him. (179–180)

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O’Brien’s work never claims to record the exact details of lived experience; rather it presents a collection of stories that convey the absurdity, the loss, and the guilt of war. Jackson’s “perfect informant,” on the other hand, claims the ethos of a legitimate Vietnam War veteran and a special forces soldier, when he has actually spent his service in Germany not in Vietnam, has never seen combat, and has never been a member of the special forces. He recounts his experiences to Jackson and others with such skill and energy that even those who suspect that he never set foot in Vietnam still delight in his tales. Jackson understands that “our stories are always in flux,” that they are not very good at telling us “exactly what happened at that moment” in the past, and that the most we can expect is that stories can serve as “a primary indicator of what’s happening now” (Jackson, ST, 36). O’Brien’s stories were created; Jim’s were pieced together from the told stories of veterans, from their written accounts, and even from scenes in feature films. Both the crafted stories by the skilled author and the orally narrated accounts of the confabulator meet the audience’s desire to know a little of the “story-­ truth” of an inscrutable war. In my quest for the “story-truth” of our recent wars, I listen to all willing to share their experiences. The Navy Seals hang to themselves, keep their weapons clean, and have little to say to me or anyone else at Ghormach. The Army Rangers, who like the Seals, often sleep in their own tents and sometimes even eat separately, keep themselves aloof from the enlisted soldiers in the unit to which they are attached, but they are always willing to exchange observations with me and my team. To them, culture is not a foreign word, and the perceptions of locals are worth paying attention to. Seals fly in and fly out, or, like hired guns, they fire from half a kilometer away and move on to the next target. Because Rangers enter the population, they eagerly learn whatever they can in order to read it properly, to understand, for example, the ways in which tribal animosities might shape hostilities in an insecure area. I listen to the first-time deployers, who, when they arrive downrange, are fresh and eager for action. With the passage of months of boredom, punctuated, for some of them, with brief episodes of terror, the thoughts they had of heroic action begin to fade. I listen to officers, who, on the intell side, spend their 12-hour shifts analyzing reports of facts on the ground that come to them daily from sergeants taking their soldiers on patrols, from other coalition forces, and from my small team that relates what we hear from the locals. Other officers stuck on large headquarters

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bases try to keep the troops under their charge in shape and out of trouble. Some respond to the request for supplies from the battalions and companies throughout the brigade. The lot of commissioned officers is often a lonely one; they can neither befriend superiors nor subordinates, but they must always make decisions even when the way forward is murky. As one captain put it, “We live in a gray world, and my job is to make it black and white so that I can make a decision.” I listen to the veterans who make up a large part of the contractor ranks and who work hard to stay safe. Those who embellish or invent a past they wish they had lived don’t always narrate a warrior past. Some claim degrees they have never earned. I encounter veterans and civilians who report that they are completing doctoral degrees from online universities that do not even grant doctorates. One cultural analyst, an Afghan-American in his 50s, refers to himself as an orthopedic surgeon. During the training of Female Engagement teams at Bagram Airbase, he interrupts in a patronizing way as a female Afghan doctor discusses the common health problems rural Afghan women face. In a discussion on securing opportunities for Afghan women, he insists that Afghan women don’t want any freedoms. Each time he begins with the announcement that he is an orthopedic surgeon. One day when I am on his headquarters base in the office of the cultural advisory team, I ask him if he retired before coming to Afghanistan. “No,” he insists, “I just took a leave to help out my home country.” He tells me that his wife is also a physician, a gynecologist at Columbia University Hospital, “who treats only Afghan women.” I ask how Columbia would allow her to treat only Afghan woman, thinking that the answer might be that they are short of Dari or Farsi speakers. “She is invaluable to them, so they allow her to do this,” he says. I learn later that although his brother is a physician in New Jersey, his wife has never been to college, and he has no MD degree, let alone a specialization in orthopedic surgery. Other deployed civilians tell me that they earned bachelor’s degrees when they had, in fact, dropped out of college after a year. In such cases the “worked material” is different, but the motivation seems the same. The dropout who wants to be thought intelligent, like the fobbit who wants to be thought courageous, uses “resume enhancement” to acquire the qualities he or she lacks. Some bring their fabricated pasts back to the civilian world. Before I deployed and before I learned how fluid pasts become in the ambiguity of deployment, I interviewed a contractor who had served in Afghanistan on

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one of the Army’s first Human Terrain Teams. In the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, these small groups were made up of contractors, pulling down huge salaries for either working on base or going “outside the wire” to interview civilians about issues of importance to them. On every team a social scientist designed the projects the team conducted, determined the questions to be asked in interviews, and analyzed the data collected. The social scientist on one of the first teams was a young Army veteran I’ll call Amy, who after a few months in Afghanistan returned to train others. When I asked Amy about her educational background, she said that she had graduated from West Point, served as an Army officer, and had subsequently received a PhD.  She explained that she had withheld the detail about her PhD from her resume in order to “protect my mentors.” I asked her who directed her dissertation and the topic she investigated, but she told me that she couldn’t answer any questions about what she called her “lineage,” implying clearly that her research, the professor who supervised it, and even the institution who granted her doctoral degree were too secret to divulge. By that time, I had served on the faculties of three major research universities, but this was the first time I had heard of a graduate student engaged in such a top secret dissertation. Although Amy wouldn’t give me any details of her graduate career, she stated emphatically more than once, “There are very few women with my skill set. They are in the single digits.” It was never really clear to me what skills made up her “skill set.” They were, I surmised, as top secret as the title of her dissertation. A month later, in a phone interview with Dr. Montgomery McFate, the DOD senior social scientist who had helped create the Human Terrain System, I mentioned that I had interviewed Amy and understood that she held a doctoral degree. McFate stopped me: “Oh, she doesn’t have a PhD.” Lying about academic credentials may seem quite different from lying about combat experience, but Amy was doing a dance that was similar in spirit to that of the military imposters I’ve encountered. Some of these were veterans who never deployed but who touted their Ranger and SEAL pasts and invoked secrecy when my questions sought too much detail. They would insist, “I was black ops” or respond with a knowing smirk and the cliché, “If I told you, I’d have to kill you.” Amy did not embroider her military past (she had graduated from West Point and served as an Army officer), but in fabricating her civilian credentials, she too characterized

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her work as cloaked in secrecy. In her embellished narrative, she insisted that she was protecting the black ops of academia.

Remaking the Self American identity has always been mutable. We are a nation deeply committed to the notion that if we don’t like our social status, our job, the side of the tracks we grew up on, we can always remake ourselves—by going West, by getting more education, by joining the military, by liposuction here, a few tucks there, by inventing a new online self. Or, like a former president, by remaking himself as a fighter pilot coming in for an impressive landing on an aircraft carrier. Six weeks after US forces rolled into Iraq in March 2003, President George W. Bush staged a made-for-the-media “tailhook landing” on the USS Abraham Lincoln, which was moored off the coast of San Diego. As a huge crowd awaited his arrival, he emerged from a jet aircraft that had his name stenciled under the pilot’s window, dressed not as a distinguished guest but as the pilot himself. His parachute straps, tight on his thighs, highlighted his crotch and made him look pretty sexy, according to anti-­ feminist Schiffren, former speechwriter for Dan Quayle and Wall Street Journal reporter: After a long day of hauling the kids to playdates and ballet, I turned on the news. And there was the president, landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, stepping out of a fighter jet in that amazing uniform, looking— how to put it?—really hot. Also presidential, of course. Not to mention credible as commander in chief. But mostly “hot,” as in virile, sexy and powerful.

The presidential groin appeared much larger than those of the pilots who actually flew the mission. Impressive enough to rival any Elizabethan codpiece, it did not escape the attention of Richard Goldstein writing in The Village Voice either. In his article, Goldstein says, “Clearly Bush’s handlers want to leave the impression that he’s not just courageous and competent but hung.” Those unfamiliar with his military past might have reasonably assumed that he had managed the daring carrier landing himself. As he stood in front of an enormous banner that read “Mission Accomplished” and declared an end to combat operations in Iraq, the visual message was clear:

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The Commander-in-Chief was a high-speed warrior himself. Only he wasn’t. The carrier landing was a bit of patriotic theater that told an inspiring but inflated story about the president’s abilities. In the Vietnam War era, Bush had learned to fly in the Texas National Guard, but he had never qualified to make carrier landings, and his flight status was revoked during his service when he failed to show up for a physical. His dramatic exit from the fighter jet onto the carrier deck was a visual story that did more than celebrate American might and masculinity. It deflected questions about why he had served stateside in the Guard rather than in Vietnam and about whether he had actually completed his service duty. Without saying so outright, Bush presented himself as a combat veteran and sold that story to a public hungry for reassurance from such triumphalist displays. His tailhook landing stunt wasn’t lying, exactly. But it was media-supported confabulation at the highest level. A little digging would easily have revealed that George Bush was no more a fighter pilot than the veteran I met at Ali Al Salem had been a captain commanding a “squad.” But that fiction captivated an audience, at least temporarily, for the same reason that Bruce Jackson’s perfect informant captivated him: He told a story too appealing to be undone by mere facts. Creative manipulation of the past is more common and easier to pull off when the teller is at some distance from the events being embellished. Uniformed military personnel, both active duty and reserve, wear their rank on their uniforms and often deploy with others familiar with their pasts, so for them fabrication and embellishment are pretty difficult. For the non-uniformed contractor, on the other hand—or for those reimagining a war that ended decades ago—contemporary conflicts offer a screen upon which one can project a past one wishes had been true and become, in the telling as least, “All that One can Be” in the armed services.

CHAPTER 11

The Burning of a Quran

An Incendiary Act In July of 2010, Terry Jones, the pastor of a Gainesville, Florida church with fewer than 50 members, threatens to set ablaze 200 Qurans on the anniversary of Sept 11, 2001. After pleas from President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, the then Commander of Forces in Afghanistan General David Petraeus, and religious leaders across the globe, Jones backs down. Unfortunately, he is not dissuaded for long. The proposed construction of an Islamic Center near Ground Zero in lower Manhattan once again ignites Jones’ zest for publicity and his zeal to perform the act of desecration he temporarily put on hold. He declares that March 20, 2011, will be “International Judge the Quran Day,” a day in which the holy book will be put on trial and if found guilty, executed. In anticipation, Jones claims that he has taken a poll of hundreds to determine the fitting punishment for the Quran should it be convicted at the March 20th trial, ideas that include drowning the holy book and death by firing squad, but the hands-­ down favorite among Jones’ fellow travelers is setting the sacred text ablaze. On March 20, after a six-hour trial in which Jones plays the part of judge, he pronounces the book guilty of “crimes against humanity.” Because he has appointed himself judge, Jones later tells me, he cannot

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also act as executioner, so he calls on one of the 30 church members who witnessed the six-hour trial to place a single copy of the kerosene-soaked text, sacred to 1.5 billion Muslims, in a $79 portable fire pit. With a spark from a plastic barbeque lighter comes the fire that will produce plenty of shock but little awe in Muslim communities throughout the world, especially in Afghanistan. In contrast to the media coverage lavished on Jones when he first threatened a bonfire of Qurans, the American press displays uncharacteristic restraint by refusing to publicize the incident. With such limited coverage, how does the news spread through Afghanistan? Al Jazeera broadcasts several balanced reports of this off-­ again–on-again story: a threat from Jones followed by a denunciation from Obama or another prestigious critic. Oddly, a statement by Afghan President Hamid Karzai broadcast on all the Afghan TV and radio stations on March 24 is the first that many Afghans hear about the Quran burning. Karzai condemns Jones’ act and calls for American authorities to arrest “the infidel.” In turn, Karzai is criticized in the West for helping to fuel the flames of anger against America. Whether Karzai is using the opportunity to curry the favor of the religious right in his own country or whether, as the leader of an Islamic nation, he feels bound to stress the seriousness of this insult, his condemnation alone would probably not precipitate the tragic events of April 1 and April 4 in northern Afghanistan. The first violent reaction to the Quran burning is precipitated by the reactionary Sunni religious leader named Mawlawi Abdul Qahir Zadram, who incites an aggressive demonstration during Friday prayers on April 1 at the Blue Mosque in Mazar-i-Sharif, the famous shrine to Hazrat Ali (Mohammad’s warrior son-in-law, Muslim caliph and, according to some, one of the scribes who recorded the Prophet’s revelations into what would become the Quran). Zadram and other conservative religious leaders incite worshipers, angry at the news of the Florida Quran burning, to march to the nearby headquarters of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA). Determined to do more than peacefully demonstrate their outrage, a small group within the larger protest—including several former insurgents who have renounced their past and are living at a government safe house— attacks and kills the four Nepalese guards on duty along with three diplomats: a Swede, a Norwegian, and a Rumanian. The only male UNAMA staff member in the courtyard alive after the violence is one who recites

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the shahadah, the fundamental statement of belief by Muslims that there is but one God and that Mohammad is his prophet. Why was UNAMA targeted? In the days after the April 1 killings, I ask over 50 Afghans (some illiterate, some literate, others college-educated) if they know what UNAMA is doing in Afghanistan. Nobody does. They believe that UNAMA is an American organization and, therefore, finds itself on the receiving end of retaliation for the Quran burning. Ironically, one of UNAMA’s main goals in Afghanistan is the prevention of civilian casualties, and when they do occur, the investigation and subsequent reporting of them. Joakim Dungel, a 33-year-old Swedish human rights lawyer who worked on the war crimes tribunal at The Hague, was a recent addition to the UNAMA staff. I worked with him to brief female soldiers training to become members of female engagement teams. Dungel taught them about the United Nation’s role in this region of Afghanistan, and I instructed them in the cultural differences they might encounter. On March 28, just four days before the attack, Dungel and two other UNAMA workers had flown out to northwestern Afghanistan where they investigated the recent death of an Afghan civilian. I was impressed with the tough questions they posed to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander’s executive officer in whose area the death had taken place. Shortly after, Dungel returned to Mazar–i-Sharif, and on April 1, became a civilian casualty himself. The final death toll from the violent protest in Mazar-i-Sharif was 17. Ten Afghans were killed at a similar protest in Kandahar. The chill of the war is getting closer. We don’t speak of it, of the uncanny sense that if this war can take a young man who came not to wield force but to hone his diplomatic skills, then it can claim any of us. We know that an IED could leave us with traumatic brain injury. While venturing into remote areas, we know that a sniper on a hill could easily pick off one of us. While sleeping, we know that a mortar might fall on our tent rather than on one of the Afghan National Army tents on the adjoining base, but we never utter the possibility. We know that were we to open the door to this uninvited guest, our fear, he would never leave, and we would be frozen in place. Instead, we speak the parts scripted for us. It’s easier that way.

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Hills overlooking FOB Griffin, Maymana

On Monday morning, April 4, I leave my tent as the sun is just rising, grab a coffee and climb the steps to the shipping container that serves as my team’s temporary office at battalion headquarters in Maymana, 184 miles from our brigade’s headquarters in Mazar-i-Sharif. Other than tents and a few plywood structures, these shipping containers, or “conexs” as they are called, often piled one on top of the other, offer the only architectural diversity on FOBs. When the supplies they carry are unloaded, they become living and working spaces, the tiny houses of war. From our second-­story container perch, we can look out on the lovely countryside, green from a snow melt that will fill the wadis with much needed water for irrigation, cooking, bathing, and, when the village wells run dry, for drinking. These hills will soon be planted with some of the sweetest melons I’ve ever tasted. As I finish my coffee and watch the sun come up, this place feels removed and, in some strange way, protected from the Friday killings in Mazar, as if there were no war going on. The lieutenant colonel in command of this US Army base in Maymana prepares to head to the center of the city for a typical meeting at the

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Afghan Border Police base in the city. A Lacrosse player for West Point, this commander is more comfortable in his PT gear than in his uniform, his “multi cams.” The large flat screen TV in his office, always turned to ESPN, runs continually, even when there is no one there to listen. With a coach-like lingo, he instructs subordinates to “find the likely courses of action so we’re not just spit-balling,” and when they do, to “get fuckin’ hot.” Uncomfortable with ambiguity, he instructs a staff member who is not sure what his commander wants him to report to headquarters, “Relay what I just said; don’t look at me like I’m a fuckin’ retard.” Talking about the threat of insurgents, he says, “We need to get them while they’re in the locker room before they come back for the second half.” On this sunny April 4th Monday, three days after the murders in Mazar, the western hills in the distance, the lieutenant colonel jumps into the passenger seat of one of the battalion’s massive Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles (MRAPs) and joins a small convoy that will taxi him the few blocks to downtown where he will engage in a routine meeting with local leaders.

Shop in Maymana

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The big vehicles lumber through the city’s colorful bazaar, down the streets I have traveled many times, where shop owners artfully display their wares: gold jewelry, televisions, and dentures. The more modest shops set out their furniture, stacks of colorful tin trunks, canned goods, traditional men’s clothing (what soldiers refer to as “man jams”), the Western attire of jeans and backpacks, wedding decorations, hardware, produce, fresh baked nan, almonds, pistachios, and raisins from the grapes grown on neighboring farms. Each morning as the butchers hang their freshly slaughtered meat on their stalls, a governmental official with a bull horn walks through the bazaar announcing the fixed price per kilo of lamb, chicken, and beef, a hold-over from the days of Soviet influence. Although the government’s intent is to keep meat affordable, everyone knows that the butchers will charge whatever they can get because the government enforcer is paid off with a loin of this or a brisket of that. This small northwestern city is regarded as safe, a “soft hats city” by this battalion. After all, the American base hadn’t been fired on in seven years, and residents seem to appreciate the paved roads and streetlights brought to them by American taxpayers. It feels a long way from the anger that raged just three days earlier in Mazar-i-Sharif. There is nothing out of the ordinary about the commander’s meeting with leaders of the Border Police at their downtown compound. He meets regularly with the heads of the local Border Police, the National Directorate of Security (Afghanistan’s intelligence organization), and the Afghan National Police to discuss security threats in the area. I’ve sometimes accompanied him and the battalion commander before him on these routine visits, but on this Monday I am on base finishing a report. Some of his soldiers guard the vehicles left on the side of the street, others go inside with him, and two sergeants stand guard outside the building. Suddenly, without warning, one of these sergeants is shot in the head and the other in the neck. The deaths of these seasoned soldiers who had survived previous deployments in Iraq make it tragically clear that attitudes have changed, and that the high-profile Quran incident in Florida has sparked far-reaching anger that will not subside any time soon. After the bodies of the American service members are evacuated, the Afghan Border Police commander calls roll. The only border police officer who doesn’t answer is a man named Samaruddin. The head of the Afghan Border Police and the commander of the American battalion both believe that this handsome young member of the force, a trained sniper, is the

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assassin who took aim from his elevated guard position, shot and killed both Americans, dropped his rifle, and fled. The deaths of the two American soldiers and the name of their assailant are published. A lockdown on base prevents my team from getting out and gathering the local reaction to this event. In less than 36 hours, Samaruddin is located sleeping in a car at the residence of Shahazada, a reputed crime boss who, locals allege, has ties to powerful governmental figures, a fact that counts for little to the American battalion commander when the mission is to hunt down the killer of two American soldiers. The next day, the provincial governor of Faryab Province announces to the media that a small group of Afghan commandos found and killed Samaruddin, an account intended, no doubt, to give the Americans cover, but the story fails to convince local residents. Eyewitness reports spread throughout the city that the assassination of Samaruddin had been an American operation. From conversations with Army officers and local Afghans, I am able to piece together what had happened. After learning that Shahazada had given Samaruddin what the fugitive thought was safe haven, the battalion commander and a small group of soldiers went to Shahazada’s home, approached the car Samaruddin was in, and ordered him to exit. When he finally did emerge, Samaruddin allegedly came armed with a knife and was quickly shot and killed. The American officer conducting the subsequent investigation sums up the death of Samaruddin; “It was,” he says, “what police officers in the states call suicide by cop,” the violent death of a suspect who refuses to be taken alive. The morning after the raid that resulted in Samaruddin’s death, I see an Afghan Border Police jacket hanging on the coat rack in the battalion commander’s office—a trophy that proves that justice has been delivered. But while the American story surrounding the incident may have ended, the Afghan saga is just beginning. At Samarrudin’s funeral, hundreds gather to protest the American presence in Afghanistan and to praise Samaruddin’s pious revenge for the burning of the Quran. The protests continue for weeks, and, according to local residents, Al Qaeda recruiters from as far away as Uzbekistan infiltrate the city and begin their recruitment of young unemployed men. One local resident sums up the shift in attitude toward our presence, “Before the killing of Samaruddin, 80 percent of the people were pro-ISAF [International Security Assistance Force] with only 20 percent opposed. Now it is the opposite. 80 percent are opposed.”

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Images of Samaruddin that appeared on the cover of a DVD that celebrated his martyrdom

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Martyr poster of Samarruddin, the Ghormach bazaar

Within days, my team discovers copies of a Samaruddin martyr poster in shop windows in Maymana. Then we spot them in a city 40 miles away, and a week later, we find them 110 miles west in remote Ghormach. Cell phone stores sell videos about the martyr’s life and death, and Afghans download his photo onto their phones. Some local residents believe that Samaruddin was a lone wolf who in the aftermath of the Quran burning wanted justice for all Muslims, and so he took out his righteous indignation on the two American sergeants. Others, mainly Uzbeks, insist that although Samaruddin

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was enraged about the Quran and wanted to retaliate against the Americans, he was acting on behalf of the alleged criminal leader, Shahazada. They even speculate that there was an Uzbek–Tajik struggle behind the killing. Relations between the two major ethnicities in the area have always been tense, and several years earlier they were killing each other in the streets. Shahazada, a Tajik, had in the past been incarcerated for crimes of murder and kidnapping but always managed to get off. Many believe that his connections to those in government, leaders in Mazar-i-Sharif and Kabul, will secure his freedom no matter what heinous crime he commits. Although these locals are willing to talk about these issues with the Americans, nobody is listening; the Americans believe there is nothing left to discuss. Fighting a war is about simplification, boiling everything down to pros and cons and making speedy decisions to act or not act. In Afghanistan we create that simplicity, in part, by ignoring the role of Islam. American and allied military leaders, schooled in the doctrine of counterinsurgency, know that their responsibilities include protecting the population and supporting the government. They also know after spending even a month in the country that the government we have helped create is riddled with corruption, yet they see no other option than engaging secular leaders and hoping for the best. When they do make efforts to reach out to a religious leader, they gesture to the mullah assigned to the Afghan National Army base adjacent to their own. Religion infuses every aspect of life in Afghanistan—I see it firsthand. In areas far from headquarters, religious leaders inform those in their villages not only on religious matters but on political matters as well. They sit on local shuras, the only viable rule of law in many districts, and help resolve disputes. In an election, they advise villagers on how to vote and persuade people how to view the foreign occupiers and the local insurgents. The Soviets tried to ignore the importance of religion during their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan and, so it seems, does the United States in this latest war. The majority of insurgent leaders in Afghanistan preface their names with “Mullah” or “Malawi,” but our ardent secularism prevents us from seeing the virtue of religious engagement. In Mazar-i-Sharif, the American military spent nearly $600,000 of American taxpayer money to improve the Blue Mosque near our brigade headquarters in Mazar-i-Sharif, the site from which the protesters launched their tragic assault on the UNAMA headquarters. If expensive Herat tiling doesn’t buy us any good will, then what will? We know that simple mosque kits (which include carpeting and a speaker system to broadcast the call to prayer five times a day), available to

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any military unit within two weeks, can make an extraordinary impression. In one volatile area, a 10th MTN battalion commander gave a mosque kit to a poor village and began an effective relationship with the local mullah, the elders of the village, and the tribal leaders in the region. However, there is little consistency. What one unit is willing to do, its successor is not. After the 10th MTN returned home in February 2011, a less experienced unit replaced them in one of the two most volatile districts in the north. This new unit’s commander has little interest in engaging religious leaders in the area, so three of the four mosque kits which the 10th MTN ordered remain in a tent on base despite the offer from a respected elder and secular leader to help distribute them. Although we invest millions in the big projects, we often miss the small opportunities that even the Army’s own Counterinsurgency Field Manual touts as chances to change attitudes for the long run. We fail to explain to local religious leaders how un-American it is to burn anyone’s holy book, and we fail to tender a meaningful apology for action of a single American who is more interested in spreading his incendiary message than engaging in meaningful exchange. Tragically, the vicious cycle will continue. A year later, American soldiers in Afghanistan will dispose of Qurans from the prison at Bagram Air Base by throwing them into a burning trash pit. When a couple of local Afghans working at Bagram discover this, they yell for the soldiers to stop and reach into the fire to pull out the singed Qurans. The following day, Gen John Allen, the ISAF commander in Afghanistan at the time, orders an investigation of the incident and vows that such desecration will never happen again. Then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta also apologizes, and on February 23rd, his Deputy Defense Secretary Ashton Carter meets with Afghan leaders in Kabul to deliver a written apology from President Obama assuring the leaders that the desecration of the Qurans was “inadvertent” and that “we will take the appropriate steps to avoid any recurrence, including holding accountable those responsible.” Although President Karzai calls for restraint when the incident first becomes public, he later refers to the Quran burning as a “Satanic act” and calls for a 2013 withdrawal of all foreign troops, a demand he later retracts. He does, however, appoint a group from the Ulema, a council of senior Afghan scholars, to conduct its own investigation into the Quran burning. After their investigation, the Ulema refuses to accept the apologies offered by the President and US military leaders for what these clerics characterize as an “evil act” warranting a public trial. The Taliban also rejects the apologies, claiming that such words are mere “show,” and they call on Afghans

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to take revenge until “those who do such inhumane acts are prosecuted and punished.” They encourage Afghans to attack foreign bases and convoys and to kill and beat foreign soldiers as a lesson so that they will never again “dare to insult the Holy Quran.” That call is heeded, and the two weeks following the February 2012 Quran burning at Bagram are plagued with widespread demonstrations, violence, and death. Meanwhile, the American  candidates running for President in the Republican primary, save Ron Paul, seize the opportunity to make political hay out of the president’s apology: Rick Santorum calls Obama’s apology “unacceptable,” Newt Gingrich describes it as “an outrage,” and Mitt Romney, the man whose autobiography is titled No Apology, insists that such an apology offers further evidence of Obama’s bungling of the war. Obama, on the defensive, justifies the apology as something tendered to “make sure that our troops who are there right now are not placed in further danger.” Secretary of State Clinton defends the Obama apology, likening it to apologies offered by President George W Bush during his tenure. Most notable is probably Bush’s apology for the lack of swift governmental action in the wake of Katrina. In Afghan culture, apologies for offences committed against others enjoy a long history. Grievances are brought before local jurgas or shuras, which function like juries; they hear both sides and determine not only if a wrong has been committed but who is at fault and what the guilty party should do to make the victim whole again. It’s a criminal and civil system rolled into one, a system based on restorative justice, one that offers an effective antidote to the fierce eye-for-an-eye-style honor code that once prevailed. It is only the new Western-style legal system (bought and paid for by Western funds and riddled with corruption) that fails to acknowledge the role of apology in Afghanistan. We know from recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that toppling a regime in power can be accomplished more easily and more swiftly than the insurgency that follows. We defeated the Taliban in a matter of weeks. For 20 years after that we would try to win a protracted war of counterinsurgency, America’s longest war. Contemporary counterinsurgency theory is based on a Maoist/people’s revolution rather than on the kinds of wars we fight in the twenty-first century. These are wars in which religion plays a starring role. Our Western secular bias sometimes blinds us to the power of religion to define the enemy we seek to subdue and the populace we seek to protect till it is too late, till all we have is a hollow apology to offer. There is a familiar Afghan proverb that is apt here, “Avoid what will require apology.”

CHAPTER 12

Coming Home

Before I leave Camp Span for the long trip home, I take one last walk around this headquarters base. I pass the old D-FAC and the new one, the mayor’s shack, the wood shop where Duke’s custom-made sleeping quarters were completed, the neat rows of tents too worn to stand at attention, past the small white plywood chapel with it’s simple white cross perched on top, a place of worship not far from the room set aside as a mosque for the Afghan workers and interpreters who live on base, the container that serves as the base PX, the gym full of treadmills, mats, and weights, and the brass plaque that memorializes Johnny Mike Spann, the young man for whom this base is named and the first American to lose his life in this terribly long war. I walk into the command center, and in the corridor leading to the offices, I pause one last time before the photos of the dead, among them Staff Sergeants Lammerts and Burgess, two young men lost not just to this newly spun-up brigade and the soldiers they commanded but to the families who will always feel their absence. The photos, like the others on the wall, are spit-and-polish army portraits that record the official story. Scott Burgess’ photo, for example, doesn’t show his characteristic tan line visible when he took off his cap, revealing his shocking white bald dome atop a brown neck, or that he was the shortest guy with the fastest walk in the battalion, or that he was a regular at the computer shack where he spoke to his wife and two daughters as often as he could, or that he was on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_12

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his second deployment, or that as a kid he spent summers on his grandfather’s farm helping plant and harvest soybeans and corn, or the hundreds from his hometown of Franklin, Texas who gathered at the First Baptist Church on April 15, 2011, to give him a final send off. Michael Lammerts’ memorial photo doesn’t mention that he played football in high school and was a regular at the gym at FOB Griffin, or that he was given the nickname “Turbo” because even on the hottest day or the longest patrol, he could always pick up the pace of his unit when needed, or that a couple weeks before his death he told his guys that he wanted Tim McGraw’s “If You’re Reading This” to be played at his funeral, or that he left behind a three-year-old daughter and a one-and-half-year-old son. I remember their moving memorial service out in Maymana, not because of the video featuring the details from their Army lives, not because of the speeches given by the battalion and brigade commanders, but because of the chilling roll call at the end of the service. One after another, the soldiers who reported to Burgess and Lammerts answered a loud “present” as each of their names was called. When “Sergeant Burgess” was called, a silence followed. Then “Sergeant Scott Burgess” was called and a longer silence. When the third call, this time for “Sergeant Scott H. Burgess,” an emptiness rang through the room, one that was only deepened when the three calls for Sergeant Michael Lammerts received no “present.” They were gone, given to a war that none of us understood the why and the how of. All of us were, like Burgess and Lammerts, just trying to do our best with the hope that that best would keep us alive. To quiet the horror of death, war comes with practices and places that  acknowledge loss: the memorial services performed by individual  units, the ramp ceremonies that offer tribute as the bodies of the dead are transferred from one means of transport to another on their journey home, the names of the dead emblazoned on concrete walls, the small round “Fallen Comrade” tables in every chow hall with their single place setting, a slice of lemon in the middle of the plate, an overturned empty glass, and a bud vase with a single artificial rose. As I leave the headquarters building, I’m struck by the fact that the finishing touches were just being put on this two-story building when I arrived, four months before Burgess and Lammerts did. I don’t know for sure whether American soldiers deployed to this country are protecting America, but I do know that these two sergeants gave me protection as I traveled to meet with Afghan officials, Afghan workers, Afghan women, and the former insurgents who had stepped out of the war to spend a few

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weeks at the local reintegration center. What’s harder to reckon with than their loss is my freedom to slide back into the life I left behind. Throughout my deployment, I was always eager to escape the boredom of our team’s quiet headquarters base, Camp Spann. As I take my last walk around the place, I’m struck by what a safe base it is, seemingly without need of memorials to the fallen, save for a tribute to its namesake Johnny Mike Spann, the sandy-haired father and husband whose image is frozen in bronze. As I walk past the plaque to Spann, I recall the memorial to the dead at the battalion headquarters where I spent time in Hawija, Iraq, FOB McHenry, 30 miles south of Kirkuk and home of an Army unit that called themselves the “Death Dealers,” a unit that proudly displayed its testosterone-infused grim reaper standing ready to lower its scythe on any enemy in its sight. Also on display was its almost-life-size Nordic-looking Darth Vader mascot. The Death Dealers had come to the area that just a year earlier was known as “Anbar North” on a mission called “Operation Restore Peace VI,” a name, one might argue, that didn’t quite fit their profile of dealers of death. They came to Hawija as part of that operation to offer disgruntled and hostile Sunnis an alternative—decent paying jobs protecting their villages and manning checkpoints. This program, called the “Sons of Iraq” program or “The Awakening,” was successful because it gave back to the disenfranchised in a region known as “The Arab West” some control over their own security. Although McHenry continued to receive an incoming mortar every few nights, hostilities had impressively diminished. Fewer IEDs hindered the unit’s travel, making it easier to go outside the wire and meet with the locals. They gathered with local leaders to celebrate the opening of a women’s clinic funded by American taxpayers. They had dinner with a local Sheik and other prominent members of the community, attended the Iraqi Army’s birthday celebration, and sent a representative to the women’s council, an organization that heard the plaintive requests of widowed young women whom the war had left with little means of support. Even though conditions were better by the end of 2008, no one ever forgot the sacrifices of those who were killed while stationed at McHenry. We couldn’t. On every trip to the D-FAC, we passed a handmade memorial to the soldiers who had died while deployed at McHenry—a large plywood wall in black with the names of the deceased painted in red. The display of names made for sober reflection, and jokes were curtailed and cursing restrained as everyone passed the wall of names. This crudely

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constructed memorial reminded us that the Americans whose names we passed had walked the same paths we had, even slept in the same tents and chu’s (trailers), sandbagged in place. It reminded us that the American flag hoisted on the flagpole and our presence in this makeshift fortress might require future sacrifice to defend. No one needs to be told that the American flag hoisted on a flagpole enjoys the reverence and respect that we often reserve for religious objects. But why is that so? Philosopher and historian of religion Mircea Eliade offers an explanation. According Eliade, for “the religious man,” his world, his “cosmos” was created out of chaos and its stability is, in some fundamental way, connected to the divine. Eliade illustrates the connection by examining an aboriginal creation story in which the god Nambakulla (whose name means both “out of nothing” and “always existing”) creates the world and the first humans to inhabit it, and then he plants a pole, climbs it and disappears. Everywhere these nomadic people roam, they carry a special pole with them, one that marks the center of their world and before which important rituals are performed. This sacred pole (in some cultures it’s a sacred tree or sacred mountain) marks the center of the world and links the temporal to the timeless and a group of mortals to the divine. Although powerful, this axis mundi alone, according Eliade, does not guarantee perpetual peace; monsters occasionally emerge from the surrounding chaos and require humans to intervene and secure their world through blood sacrifice. Even in an era of high-tech equipment and asymmetric warfare, war is never without its blood sacrifice. Nations inevitably spend the lives of some whom we send to fight on our behalf. Those who accompany them will witness their slaughter. We need to bear in mind what a profound thing it is to witness the death of a fellow soldier. No matter how moving the unit memorial service, no matter how dignified the ramp ceremonies performed on every flight line, no matter how hard the institution works to elevate the profane to the sacred, the horrible death to the noble sacrifice, there remains for many witnesses the deep and unutterable loss they carry with them until some later time when at home they can give it meaning. War unites the sacred and the profane in critical ways. I used to joke with the chaplain at McHenry that he was the only chaplain I ever knew who sported a “Death Dealer” cap, but we both knew that dealing with death was not this man of the cloth’s mission alone; it was the mission of every one of us.

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Somewhere Between War and Home There’s a folktale collected in Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and even Russia about a soldier who returns from war. This man knows nothing but soldiering, can find no work after the war, and even his family turns him away. In his wanderings, he meets the devil, who proposes a deal, as devils often do. If the soldier doesn’t wash or pray and goes around in an old bear’s skin for seven years, the devil will keep him supplied with all the money he wants during this seven years of wandering and, if the soldier fulfills his part of the bargain, for the rest of his life. The soldier is accostumed to being dirty and doesn’t really cotton to praying, so he accepts the Devil’s offer. Bearskin, our veteran, is a generous man, and although he is not allowed to pray, he gives money to the poor with the request that they pray for him. He even helps out a man who has lost all his money and can’t even pay his hotel bill. Bearskin pays the bill and gives the man a bag of gold. In return, the man offers Bearskin one of his three lovely daughters in marriage. The two eldest refuse to have anything to do with the appallingly filthy creature, who to them appears more animal than man, but the youngest daughter sees how generous this stranger has been to their father and agrees to the engagement. Bearskin still has three years on his contract with the devil and so continues his wandering, careful to observe the prohibitions against praying and washing. At the end of the seven years, the devil returns, and Bearskin insists that the devil clean him up, transforming him back into not just a man but a handsome and rich one. Having exchanged his old bearskin for a snazzy velvet coat, he rides to the home of his bride-to-be in a carriage drawn by white horses, but nobody recognizes him. The two oldest daughters vie for his attention while the youngest, dressed in black, awaits the return of her disheveled Bearskin. When the handsome rich man reveals that he is none other than Bearskin, the two oldest daughters are so angry and distraught that they didn’t accept his offer when it was first offered, that one hangs herself, and the other drowns herself. The devil is happy (he’s gotten a two-for-one deal), and the youngest daughter’s faith in goodness is rewarded. Many folktales recount deals with the devil, some even to secure a beautiful wife, but this one is also a story of a soldier’s return, a journey that continues long after the fighting. Only after that period can he be truly washed clean of the past. Classic epics document the ritual bath given to the returning warrior. Even today, there are purification rituals

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performed to erase the veteran’s “blood guilt” and to help ease the transition back into a citizen. For the past 20 years, I have taught, read, and written about military culture, about the transformation of the citizen into the soldier, airman or Marine, about an institution configured according to a rigid hierarchy, about the hardships faced in war, and about the challenges that face those who return from harm’s way. I know how the veterans of the Civil War lobbied for better treatment of their brothers-in-arms who returned with the scars of the war written on their bodies. I know how the veterans of WWI returned only to find themselves the victims, a decade later, of a devastating Depression that would rob them of work, of their homes, and of their farms. By the thousands they joined the ranks of the Bonus Army and camped out in DC to demand from Congress the bonuses they had been promised. I know how those of “The Greatest Generation” returned from Europe and the Pacific to a jubilant nation more eager to celebrate than to commiserate. I know what happened to Vietnam War veterans returning one at a time to a country unwilling to shoulder the moral responsibility of the war they were asked to fight. And I know, too, that some of the soldiers and Marines who return after five and six deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan come home having lost friends they care about and for some, even a part of themselves. I know that many soldiers describe deployment as a death from which some are resurrected and return home and others are not. I’ve heard the stories of soldiers who return from deployment to find an unfaithful spouse who has fallen into the arms and the bed of another. I know all of this, and yet I naively assumed when I deployed that my maturity, my psychological well-being, and a couple of months in Iraq covering the war there would return me from nearly a year’s deployment in Afghanistan exactly the person who had left. That was the tale I told myself. Before leaving Camp Spann, I pack all the Army gear I’m required to return  along with the long-sleeved cotton blouses and scarves I wore when going outside the wire, and the small heart-shaped rock given to me for good luck. I give my roommate the mattress that was given to me by a former roommate when she moved from our brigade to another. I remember how fond I was of the nearly new mattress without broken springs or torn covering, a rare find on any US base in Afghanistan. I say my goodbyes to Aziz and Spiker, the only two team members who haven’t yet returned home. After a few months at Spann, Duke transferred to the bureaucratic hub of our program where he would sit out his deployment in the cramped headquarters of this war but where he’s been given a

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handgun. I give to Spiker the small DVD player, a birthday gift I received many months earlier from my team. When it’s time to catch the helicopter that will take me to the large headquarters base of Regional Command North, Spiker appears with a truck he’s borrowed from who knows where, helps load up my gear, and drives me to the landing zone. When I came to Afghanistan, I had two daughters, but I am leaving with two sons as well, Marc and Spiker. Later in the day, I will catch a fixed wing to Bagram Air Base, wait a couple of days for a lift on a C130 troop transport to Ali Al-Salem in Kuwait. By chance, at Ali Al-Salem I meet up with three civilians who, like me, have served as part of cultural advisor teams, and we talk about what we expect to find back in the States. And, with our thoughts focused on home, we say little about what we’ve seen and nothing about what we’ve felt in this war. Finally, after several days in the sandy tents of Ali Al-Salem, we board our freedom bird home, an Army chartered flight that will take us back to Fort Benning, Georgia. Most of us are pretty war-weary and eager to get back to the States, and we don’t care where we sit, but the Army has an order for everything: colonels and dog handlers with their prized canines occupy first class, then other officers by rank, then the noncommissioned officers, on down to the young privates and specialists in the rear. We are all making the trip back to Fort Benning, home to the CRC, the Continental United States Replacement Center, where we return our sleeping bags, warm fleece sweat shirts, down jackets, the Army Combat Uniforms (ACUs), gloves, gas masks, first aid kits, Gerbers, parachute cutters, all our Army-issued gear save underwear and boots, the unwearable GI boots that most of us have already given or thrown away. It’s a numbing process and feels that we, like our equipment, are simply replaceable parts in this long war. Once we have returned the gear that the Army will repurpose for other deployers, we share a cab to the Atlanta Airport, ready to head to our final checkout in Newport News, Virginia. On the ride from Fort Benning to the airport, I am struck by the brilliance of the Georgia August green. There is just so much of it, and I put on my sunglasses even though it is an overcast day. I chalk it up to the simple sensory shift from the monochromatic brown and gray world of deployment. The Afghan males with whom I interacted wore brown and gray; the women were most often sheathed in faded blue burkas. The Afghan hills for miles around were overgrazed and brown. The fields, which in a good year would be planted

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with wheat that farmers would harvest and sell to feed their families for the year ahead, displayed brown stalks that failed to thrive in the third parched summer. After a brief spring runoff, the wadi in Ghormach had dried to a sandy brown, and we sometimes used it as a highway for our heavy vehicles. The rural villages featured small mud buildings surrounded by courtyards with mud walls too high to see over, and when glanced from a distance at dusk, they dissolved into the surrounding brown hills as if they had never existed. Going weeks at a time without bright colors had numbed my senses, a response I imagined as similar to the experience of someone who has spent the year living in the arctic white and returns to a verdant summer. My American companions in the taxi with me, I assume, must feel similarly assaulted by the color that greets them upon their return, but no one admits to it. Strangely, what bothers me more than the natural color is the artificial. Soon after my return, I go into a supermarket just to pick up a few groceries, but the boxes and bottles, so carefully displayed with labels facing front scream their glare at me. The greens and blues recede a little, but the reds and yellows are too intense to look at. Overwhelmed, I leave, having purchased nothing. I had learned in the blandness of a combat zone to open my eyes wide and to be attentive to the most minor details. I had been trained that when I went beyond the protection of the base to be hyper alert, to look up for snipers posted on the tops of buildings, to be cautious about anyone who appeared around the sides of buildings, and to avoid approaching strangers who seem to have no other purpose than to engage me. This wasn’t a form of combat paranoia; it was standard precaution. We received reports, for example, that a suicide vest or a car full of explosives had arrived in Ghormach and would, when the time was right, be set off in the village where we often interviewed merchants and shoppers or delivered supplies to the medical center.

Back Stateside When family and friends inquire about my time in Afghanistan, they always ask, “Weren’t you afraid?” And I always respond, “Early on there was one time, my first night at the small remote base in “Taliban Territory” when I felt fear, but after that I was never afraid again.” Even as I say it, I know how bizarre it sounds. And I know on some level, that I can’t explain it to others because I don’t understand it myself. All I can report is that even though I was fired upon more than once, I never again felt anything like

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fear. Was it reason over emotion? A personal flaw, an indifference, a callousness? Was there just too much to process that night in Ghormach? Is this what some soldiers experience? In a strange way, I don’t feel entitled to claim the trauma that soldiers experience; I don’t carry a weapon, and I consider myself more observer than participant. Clearly, though, the raw terror I felt that night was unambiguously that of an inescapable participant. As I think about the experience from the safety of my home in Southern California, I know that it’s something that separates me from the friends I returned to, some kind of strange truth that can’t be uttered in the real world. My lack of fear was not something I willed. Like all around me, it became the normal way of behaving in a fiercely abnormal world. With fear out of the way, everything grew clearer. There were patterns to what I observed and what I wrote about in my cultural reports to the brigade colonel. The longer I stayed and the more data I collected from the local Afghans, the more focused I became. I loved this hyper focus, this fieldworker’s dream and, despite all the discomforts, I would have stayed had I not had a husband to whom I wished to return. I had left behind the problems in my marriage to understand the problems in my little area of the war: its layers of history, of tribal practices and disputes, of gender differences, of climate change, of food insecurity, of rule of law, of governmental corruption. I was pleased to stay for the ten months that I did because in that strange clarity, I could see how the layers of this new world fit together. The clarity of war fades when I return. During my first few months back home, there are moments when I feel removed, like a stranger looking in through a window at scenes from another life. I know that this dissociation, this image of peering into a life that seems more performance than reality, isn’t right, and it’s certainly not helping me address the difficulties in my marriage. In the years before deployment, both my husband and I acknowledged that there were problems in our marriage, but acknowledging them and solving them are two different things. I had fantasized that upon my return, we could suture our long marriage back together. I seek counseling of my own, and my husband and I make an effort at marriage counseling. Unfortunately, at the end of that year at home we begin planning for divorce. Tempting death in a combat zone comes with both its own horror and its own beauty, going outside the wire in an insurgent-controlled area is both humbling and exhilarating, and although I left much of that in the

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wild west of my brigade’s AO, I find that I bring back bits of both the horror and the beauty. Hell, I had survived all this; I certainly can get through a divorce. The divorce is pretty amicable compared with the stories of bitter divorces I hear and read about. I feel no bitterness, no anger, just a profound sadness in which I grieve the loss of our long marriage. What saves me is work: preparing lectures, grading papers, and tending to the committee assignments that I had left behind but that are awaiting me upon my return. After the divorce, I buy my own house, tend to the renovations, and spend more time with old friends and work to make new ones. When two people, whom friends have always regarded as a couple, divorce there’s an inevitable choosing of sides. Some friends maintain their friendship with the husband, whereas others decide to go with the wife. I’m not sure if they fear that remaining friends with both might place them in the center of a divide they don’t want to inhabit, or that after a divorce they feel that they can only demonstrate their loyalty to one partner, or that they seek to avoid any expressions of resentment. They needn’t worry about that from either my husband or me. We still care about each other and still wish the best for each other. One night three years after returning from Afghanistan, I sit down after dinner to write about my experiences in Afghanistan. Why I begin with Ghormach and the first night I spent on that remote volatile base, I can only guess. The story of that night is, after all, the story I tell everyone who asks the fear question. The story of that night is the only story with a small frightened me at its center; it seems in many ways the most straightforward story to tell. I start my story in the med tent when the gray-haired doctor closes the curtain that separates Samantha and me from him and his two medics, signaling bedtime at Ghormach. After sundown, all lights on our base and the adjoining Afghan National Army base are killed. Even flashlights must be switched from white light to red light so they won’t attract mortar fire. Either the generator heating the tent we’re in has a malfunctioning thermostat or the doc wants his dreams to transport him to the equator in the middle of this chilly Afghan winter. It’s at least 80 degrees in our tent. Samantha, who can’t stand the heat, grabs her two sleeping bags, one designed to fit inside the other and both then wrapped in a water-proof bivy, and tells me that she’s moving to a vacant, unheated tent nearby, one that we have been told we could use as our “office”. Carrying her body armor, helmet, cigarettes, and lighter to the new location, she tucks herself in, cinches the head covering tight and settles in to a night whose

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temperature has fallen into the 30s. More tolerant of the heat and more used to obeying a commander’s instructions, I stay in the hot med tent, stretched out on top of one sleeping bag on a rickety cot. With the light of my headlamp, I begin another chapter of a Sue Grafton mystery about Kinsey Milhone, Grafton’s spunky and cynical private eye. I read the next chapter, but before going on, I put on my boots and army-issue parka and go to the unheated tent to check on Samantha. She’s cocooned in her sleeping bags; the only skin visible, her nose. She assures me that sleeping in the cold is so much better than the sauna that is the med tent, so I return to my cot and my mystery. I leave the work on my Ghormach story there and head to my own bed in my newly renovated master bedroom. Propped up with pillows, I sit in bed reading a novel when, without warning, I can’t see the page of my novel or even the bedroom around me. A brilliant flaming ball takes up my field of vision, except for the flat black border that surrounds it. I look right and left, but the walls of my bedroom have dissolved into the thick blackness that frames the flames. I want to stress that this is not a memory that comes and saunters off. It doesn’t leave; I am a captive of its world. Certain that I am shaking, I touch my arms, but they are still. The sensation of shivering continues. On some level maybe, I know that I am both here and back there at the same time. I don’t understand why I do what I do next, other than that I was just trying in my writing to construct a narrative of my experiences in this dangerous place I was recalling and that I’ve read too many articles on the therapy for soldiers suffering from PTSD, therapy that assists them in piecing together the story of the traumatic event they experienced. It’s not correct to say that I “decide” to ride the wave of this bizarre event because I have little agency to summon, but while it is happening, I start telling myself aloud the story of what happened that first night on this austere outpost at Ghormach, Faryab Province. The story I tell in second person goes something like this: You are reading one of those Sue Grafton mysteries at the part where Kinsey Kinsey Millhone discovers a body when there’s a loud boom that seems to shake everything on the base. You quickly fumble getting on your boots, body armor and Kevlar [helmet], and as you run from your tent, Samantha comes to join you. You are relieved because even though you and Sam have just arrived on the base a few hours before, she has managed to scout out the closest bunker. With your kevlar and your body armor half fastened, the two of you run through the tent rows to the rear of the base while red

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t­ racers fly just over your heads, so low, in fact, that you fear that if you don’t lower your head, a live round will hit it. They feel so close that you’re certain that insurgents have climbed onto the hesco walls that surround the tiny base and are firing at you. You are even too scared to piss your pants. You make it to the bunker in what seems like minutes not seconds, slide inside on one of the wooden benches, and Samantha sits beside you. You’re afraid of what might happen next but are grateful to have Samantha there. You’re shaking, and Samantha removes her gloves hanging from one of the carabiner clips on her body armor and hands them to you. Even though it’s a cold night, you know that your shaking is not from the cold; it’s just raw fear. Samantha’s gesture is a simple one; its kindness is its warmth. Gradually your arms stop shaking.

Let me just add a postscript to my story: Once inside the bunker, the 10th MTN soldiers cursed the trigger-happy Afghans next door. Although insurgents had mortared our base, they were not the ones firing the rounds just over our heads; the Afghan National Army next door was. While we waited in the bunker for the attack to end, the young rookie deployers leaned out of the bunker like a group of excited kids on the fourth of July exclaiming at the impressive fireworks display. Several even moved outside the bunker to get a clearer look. A remote location, Ghormach was a place soldiers described as “kinetic.” Those who spent the duration of their deployment at Ghormach found that although the lack of running water, the freeze-dried meals rather than hot ones, and the showers under a jerry can, got old quickly, the artillery displays on cloudless nights were always new and riveting, small but appreciated compensation for their hardship. The first time this flashback blazes before me, and I recount aloud both what I saw that night at Ghormach and what I felt as I moved from danger to safety (from inside the Med Tent to the bunker), the frightening image persists. Only on the sixth or seventh telling do my bedroom walls reappear. At first this vision comes at monthly intervals, then every three months, then every six months, and at each episode I tell myself the story above, repeating it as many times as it takes to get out of glare of the frightening image. With each flashback, it takes fewer tellings to make the fireball go away, until only one or two are sufficient. I should add that the story I always tell myself is in present tense. When the flashback first appeared, I told the recollection as a second-person narrative. At some point, I can’t tell you when, the account shifts to first-person, the “you” becomes the “I” as it makes its gradual journey, I now see, from haunting

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flashback to memory. Either that or I just get bored with my own story. Although the last time this frightening scene appeared in all its vivid technicolor happened eight years ago, I occasionally even now awake to the sensation of shaking. Each time, I touch my arms and discover that my body is, in fact, still. What remains of that cold night in Ghormach is now just the dim echo of that fear, the shaking that is just a sensation. I’m not sure why I never felt afraid after that night in Ghormach; I probably need a little more shrinkage to figure that out. I certainly experienced other mortar attacks and was fired on while off the base. What I will say is that I discovered quite quickly how easily one reads the cues from others and adapts accordingly. Like many who deploy, my emotional body armor was the numbness I put on after that night in Ghormach; it wasn’t a conscious decision, but it became a habit, a way of being in combat. Facing danger head-on was the new normal. There was no courage involved; it was simple resignation that every time I went outside the wire I was in danger, and on nights when I came back to the base I was also in danger. But danger permits the repression of some emotions and the flowering of others. As we close the door to fear and its cousin loss, another door opens permitting the respect and even love of one’s teammates. I knew that those on my small team would risk their lives to save mine, and I theirs. The power to operate in the face of danger is collective, but finding one’s way back home, as Bearskin discovers, is a solitary journey of wandering.

CHAPTER 13

Afterward: Looking Back

When a Graveyard of Empires Is Just a Graveyard It is important to test the merits of inherited generalizations about any nation or any conflict and to ask whose narratives these generalizations serve. Calling Afghanistan “the graveyard of empires” might serve a British, Soviet, or American account of past wars in Afghanistan because it conjures images of a geography too rugged to be subdued and a population too fiercely independent to be dominated by any super power, but it doesn’t stand up to historical scrutiny. It fails, for example, to account for the earlier empires that did, in fact, subdue and maintain control of Afghanistan. The Achaemenid Empire, under the reign of Cyrus the Great exerted power over Afghanistan for over 200 years till its defeat by Alexander the Great. After Alexander’s conquest, Afghanistan came under the control of one empire after another, and with this dominance came the spread of Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and finally Islam, the latter over a 200-year conversion. What we see from any look backwards is not a graveyard of empires but the sights empires have had on this land-­ locked nation that lies strategically between east and west. Even today, Afghanistan lives within borders imposed in the 1880s by empires. The British and Russians determined that the Amu Darya, a river in the north would serve as one national border, and the British, seeing Afghanistan as a buffer state in the “Great Game,” charted the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 C. Burke, We had the Watches. They had the Time, Renewing the American Narrative, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41304-9_13

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country’s eastern and southern borders, called “the Durand Line” after a British diplomat. As with the northern border, the British did their best in plotting the eastern border to followed rivers, but they paid little attention to the people actually  living there. The colonial border they devised divided the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan, the Pashtuns, forcing them to inhabit two nations. This border, in particular, remains contested to this day and makes it easier to understand how a group of Pashtun Taliban might easily find safe haven in the largely Pashtun area of western Pakistan. If the oft-repeated characterization of Afghanistan as “the graveyard of empires” fails to shine any light on the recent war and our part in it, then we must step back and seek to understand Afghanistan’s historical context. Twentieth-century Afghanistan began with the death in 1901 of strongman Amir Abdur Rahman, the Pashtun leader who ruthlessly exterminated rivals and either displaced or sold into slavery over half of the minority Hazara population. The British bought his cooperation with handsome yearly allotments and weapons. A third British–Afghan war in 1919 resulted in the Treaty of Rawalpindi, and a year later Britain recognized Afghan independence. Infighting and coups followed efforts at modernization until the reign of Mohammad Zahir Shah, who ruled from 1933 until 1973. A 1978 coup, supported by the People’s Democratic Party of Afghanistan (PDPA) led to a decade of Marxist–Leninist reforms that sought to diminish the power of religion, tribal control, and tradition. During this period, the government tried to establish strong centralized power, opening education opportunities to women and implementing a plan to redistribute land. Backlash against these radical changes erupted in armed resistance. At the invitation of the Afghan government, the Soviets moved troops into Afghanistan in 1979 to prop up their fledgling communist neighbor. The Soviet force would grow to 100,000, prompting the United States, afflicted with Cold War fever and the desire to protect its interests in the area, to arm militias controlled by warlords, collectively called the mujahideen (those who conduct jihad). Particularly effective were the anti-aircraft weapons that allowed the insurgents to confront Soviet air power. In 1989, after one million civilians, 90,000 mujahideen fighters, 18,000 Afghan Army troops, and 14,500 Soviets had been killed, the USSR signed an agreement with Pakistan and the United States to withdraw (Taylor). The communist government in Kabul was soon toppled, and without a fierce outside enemy to fight, there was little to unite the

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mujahideen. With the withdrawal of Soviet forces division deepened. The civil war that followed did not pit two groups against each other for control of the nation; it divided Afghanistan into a default position of regional factions, all with their own strong men and loyal posses, groups who operated more like gangs eager to protect their regions than like forces competing for control of the whole nation. That was until a group trained in Pakistan, who were Salafi-indoctrinated and Saudi-funded Islamic fundamentalists, took control of much of the country and established the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan in 1996. Most of the world refused to recognize the Taliban as the new government of Afghanistan. Importantly, though, three countries did formally recognize Taliban legitimacy: Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and United Arab Emirates. When American forces invaded in 2001, they toppled the Taliban within two months, and a war of regime change became a protracted war of counterinsurgency, COIN for short. A similar scenario of overthrow giving way to a sustained counterinsurgency followed in Iraq as well after removing the regime of Saddam Hussein. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, American commanders realized that although American forces were well trained for kinetic warfare, they were not prepared in the art of counterinsurgency. We had tried it in the Vietnam War, but it didn’t win the war. Throughout this protracted 20-year war in Afghanistan that America and our partners waged against an insurgent force, the merits of counterinsurgency warfare were hotly debated. Were the billions spent to train and sustain an Afghan police force and an Afghan army going to create national institutions that could maintain security? Without adequate security and with systems of corruption that profited more Afghans by the year, were the billions spent on infrastructure development and job creation making a difference? Could American troops, trained in kinetic, high-tech warfare, succeed at a war of counterinsurgency requiring massive reconstruction efforts? That’s the debate from above, but what about the war in Afghanistan when seen from below, from the “grunt level”? These soldiers didn’t give much thought to the characterizations of historians. They didn’t know or particularly care about the defeats of the British and the Soviets. They weren’t in Afghanistan to assert imperial control. What they did know, though, was that Afghanistan was, in fact, a graveyard, one in which they would see in repeated deployments the mounting deaths of the Afghan soldiers they trained, the Afghan civilians they failed to protect, the insurgents they would eliminate only to witness new ones take their places, and

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their fellow coalition soldiers whose lives would be given for a goal that, with each deployment, seemed more remote. American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan whom I got to know in 2011, like their 20 something counterparts in the United States, were fascinated with zombies.  In their free time on base they played video games, killing as many zombies as they could.  They exchanged zombie jokes and memes. One of these images featured an enlisted soldier in uniform carrying a M-16 with an attached chainsaw, described in the subject line of the email as “the zombie slayer,” referring to the weapon not the soldier. Some of these soldiers read H.P. Lovecraft novels and Max Boots’ 2006 World War Z, which would later be made into a popular zombie Hollywood film starring Brad Pitt. The film even has its own spinoff video game. These deployed soldiers exchanged copies of the latest zombie films they purchased at the video shops on large American bases for a buck or two each. Most of the zombie films they watched were low-budget films like the cult classic, George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead. Romero’s film and the older zombie films scattered through the 1930s and 1940s seemed to have been relegated to the archives of horror until the subgenre reemerged to greater enthusiasm in 2001. These soldiers also watched new episodes of The Walking Dead, an extremely popular American series launched in 2010. The series follows a group of survivors on the run from flesh-eating former humans looking for their next meal. These zombie/vampire hybrids, reanimated corpses, had become infected with a pathogen for which there was neither cure nor treatment, just the power to infect other humans. Even for those humans who sustained a single zombie bite, death would soon follow, and shortly thereafter the ravenous zombie version of a former self would set out to feed. In the post-apocalyptic America of The Walking Dead, all institutions have collapsed with no national, state, or local governments, no police force, no Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and no government or university research labs to design a cure. All but the remaining few humans, forced to flee their homes like migrants, have been “zombified,” resulting in a war of the few, far from their homes, surrounded by the ever-­ increasing many: zombies and criminals out to exploit the situation. The war depicted in these fictional accounts is an asymmetric war that bears similarities to the conflict American soldiers in Afghanistan were asked to wage. The gothic and its dark mixture of both the frightening and the fascinating lurks in the shadows of any war, but why did this form of popular

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culture and the Afro-Caribbean folklore from which it borrowed captivate American soldiers? Like other Americans, they felt the dread of a global pandemic that might be even worse than the Aids epidemic. Pandemic films like Virus (1999), Outbreak (1995), Twelve Monkeys (1995), Cabin Fever (2002), the Resident Evil (2002), Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004), Resident Evil: Extinction (2007), Resident Evil: Afterlife (2010) gave shape to this fear, a fear that the Hollywood blockbuster Contagion would further ignite when released in local movie theaters in 2011. They knew that a few years earlier (2007–2009) millions of Americans had lost their jobs, their homes or both in “The Great Recession,” and they sensed that the country’s economy was transforming from one that produces to one that, like the marauding zombies, consumes. The labor unions that had secured a good living for their working-class fathers had lost their power and could no longer guarantee their generation the same well-paying working-class jobs. That’s why many of these soldiers joined the army in the first place. And most importantly, in the two decades of their lives, they had seen images of  the 2001 dramatic attacks on their homeland, attacks directed at the center of American commerce, New York City; at the heart of American military power, the Pentagon; and, had the third attempt not been foiled, at the very center of American government Washington DC. Thick and tall hesco walls topped with barbed wire surrounded the bases they occupied, bases further secured by the latest electronic surveillance. Outside the wire, terrorists, like the fictional zombies, lay in wait. These soldiers knew that they were fighting one war and that the insurgents were fighting another, the kind of war whose major weapon was a cheap and simple IED, hidden on the roads these American forces traveled, a weapon that could render their technological sophistication strangely obsolete in the post-apocalyptic world they were inhabiting. They knew that the illusive insurgents could hide among the population, an option never available to them. As in the Vietnam War, these soldiers found it hard to distinguish enemy from friendly. They fought what would become America’s longest war, not against a single identifiable insurgent group but against several loosely affiliated groups of insurgents. Interestingly, Afghans had a graveyard lore  of their own. Their cell phones preserved the slaughter of loved ones as evidence of the war’s toll on their family. Protest CDs celebrating the death of an insurgent as a pure martyr’s death were available at most cell phone shops in areas subject to insurgent control or partial control. These often included pictures of

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victims killed in  the  attacks by coalition forces and long funeral videos complete with inflammatory rhetoric from the local mullahs. In the years since the fundamentalist Taliban enforced its prohibition of all music, insurgent songs proliferated, available for download, songs that the Americans referred to as “Taliban Fight Songs.” But graveyard legends spread widely from one Afghan to another. One even appeared in an Afghan newspaper. It reported that the corpses of insurgents, unlike the corpses of members of the Afghan Army or coalition forces, did not putrefy but instead  emitted a sweet smell.  These insurgents claimed that  even when it took a couple of weeks to get back to the scene of the firefight and bury their dead, the sweet smell of the dead was the perfume of their martyrdom. Only their dead, and not the dead of the Western forces, would join the holy legions in eternal life.

Negotiating “Peace” Efforts to end the War in Afghanistan did not begin with the Trump administration. The Karzai government indicated a willingness to begin talks with the Taliban as early as 2007, but the Taliban refused, citing opposition to talks while occupying forces maintained so great a presence in the country. In 2012, the Taliban opened an office in Qatar and indicated a desire to move toward a dialogue that would end the war, but then they withdrew that offer. When President Obama announced that the United States would shift its role to one of training Afghan security forces with more limited  Special Forces operations to counter  terrorism, the Doha talks resumed. He later called for major troop withdrawals between 2014 and 2016, at the end of which roughly 9000 would remain, an impressive drawdown from  the high of 102,000 troops in 2011 (USA Facts). The civilian government of Afghanistan made its own efforts to engage with the Taliban between 2010 and 2018. A few discussions about ending the war took place between the Taliban and the Karzai government and between the Taliban and members of the Karzai family, but nothing materialized from these attempts. With the dramatic pullout of American troops from Afghanistan, like the pullout of American forces in Iraq and before that in Vietnam, we witnessed swift incursions of enemy forces. In contested areas like Ghormach, insurgents swooped in repeatedly to attack the Afghan Army troops stationed at COP Ghormach until they were ultimately overwhelmed. Insurgents took over the district government headquarters

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building, the most visible link to the central government in Kabul. In 2015, they attacked the Ghormach police headquarters. The police stationed at Ghormach resisted until their ammunition ran out, leaving 22 officers dead and 19 taken prisoner (Mujib). Insurgents took control of Kunduz, a major city in the north, and in 2019, they controlled over 50% of country. Ashraf Ghani, who succeeded Hamid Karzai as President of Afghanistan, publicly offered to recognize the Taliban as an official Afghan political party and incorporate them into the government, an offer they rebuffed. It was clear to anyone watching the events in Afghanistan that the Taliban had no interest in sharing power. Had this offer been tendered in 2003, it probably would have been accepted. In 2018, insurgents held the advantage. Afghan security forces had suffered devastating losses, and the government in Kabul struggled to resupply their Army units with new recruits, provisions, and weapons. Afghan soldiers and police were not re-enlisting when their commitments were up. Many had deserted. Payments to troops were often delayed for months or never came. Highway transport of supplies grew increasingly insecure, and without the air supply that the United States had provided, many Afghan Army and Police forces were abandoned. With insurgent attacks on the rise, with fewer coalition forces to help, and with Afghan security forces in the lead, the more dead and wounded they suffered. Every year, the numbers increased with the death toll rising in 2016 to over 8000 Afghan security forces killed that year (Nordland). That’s when the United States and the Afghan government agreed to stop reporting the number of Afghan security forces killed. Insurgents, on the other hand, held large swaths of the country  and enjoyed firm control of a thriving drug trade. Despite the insistence of the Afghan government that talks be Afghan-­ led, the United States went ahead on its own to negotiate with the Taliban in Qatar in January 2019, thereby conceding to the Taliban a position they saw as rightfully theirs as the legitimate rulers of their country. Just as the Taliban asserted the right to speak for all insurgents, the Russians, still eager to reclaim some influence in the country, held their own talks with the Taliban in February 2019. Unlike the Americans, the Russians included representatives of the Afghan government  representatives in their talks with the Taliban. Wanting to take control of the “peace process,” the United States, under President Trump, seemed willing to make an agreement at any cost, not even stipulating that talks be contingent on a ceasefire. The ceasefire

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was something left to the fictional notion that the Taliban, after securing the promise of an American pullout, would start negotiating with the Afghan government they regarded as an illegitimate Western puppet government. American negotiators also promised to begin the diplomatic process of removing Taliban members from the sanctions list. In exchange for hefty American concessions, the Taliban agreed not to use Afghan territory as a staging ground for any attack against the United States. The deal was agreed to by US negotiators and the Taliban in September 2019, but after a suicide bombing that took the lives of 12, including one American, President Trump abruptly called off any further talks. Two months later, on a three-hour surprise Thanksgiving visit to Afghanistan, Trump just as abruptly announced that the negotiations with the Taliban were back on, reportedly to the surprise of the Taliban (Crowley). This time, though, they would be preceded by a ceasefire. Addressing American troops gathered in a hanger at Bagram Airbase, Trump said, The Taliban wants to make a deal. We’ll see if it’s a deal. It’s gotta be a real deal, but we’ll see if they wanna make a deal, and they only wanna make a deal because you’re doing a great job. That’s the only reason they wanna make a deal. … If they do they do, and if they don’t they don’t. That’s fine. … And we’re going to stay until such time as we have a deal or we have total victory.

Sadly, the only victory won was by the insurgents. Of course, the Taliban wanted to make a deal, particularly one this attractive. There’s a saying I heard many times while in Afghanistan, “You’ve got the watches; we’ve got the time.” What’s interesting, though, is that no Afghans ever said this to me, even though I regularly left our base to meet with ordinary Afghans. It was an American expression that summed up frustration with this protracted war. The enemy wasn’t going anywhere; this was their country after all, and they knew that they would still be here after the last troop transport flight lifted off the tarmac. As they persisted, the insurgents used the tools of terrorism to erode Afghans’ belief in their civilian government while establishing their own tax collecting system in regions like Ghormach and building their drug trade to produce the country’s chief export. America’s head negotiator at the Qatar talks, Zalmay Khalilzad, insisted that what the Taliban had agreed to was “a peace agreement not a

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withdrawal agreement; a peace agreement that enables withdrawal.” Regardless of the Khalilzad spin, the details of the reported deal looked a lot like an exit strategy for America and a let-the-chips-fall-where-theymay option for Afghanistan. By failing to insist on the participation of members of the Afghan civilian government, a government we had supported for nearly 20 years, we handed the country back to the enemy we had toppled in 2002. Clearly, the restoration of Taliban control signaled an end to democracy, albeit an imperfect one, in Afghanistan, an end to the freedoms that women in several Afghan cities had gained since 2002, an end to efforts aimed at establishing a secular legal system, an end to the Afghan constitution, and the installation of a totalitarian government. For America, it would signal yet another enormous defeat. Emboldened by the negotiations with the Trump administration and capitalizing on a war-­ weary national security force, insurgents toppled a fledgling democracy that America, our Western partners, and Afghans had built on the unstable foundation of warlordism. The fall of Kabul to the Taliban on August 15, 2021, and the debacle that followed in a desperate attempt to evacuate all the Americans and those Afghan civilians who had worked for coalition forces, USAID, and nongovernmental agencies marked a dismal end to America’s longest war. Photos and videos of chaotic scenes at the small Kabul Airport in the two weeks that followed displayed for the world America’s inability to effect an orderly exit. These were images that looked shockingly like the pullout to a previous war, the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Afghans, like the South Vietnamese who had aided coalition forces in that tragic war, rushed to be evacuated. Military and civilian planners failed, as they had in that earlier war, to properly estimate how quickly security would erode. Those of us who spent time in Afghanistan during the war, like our American military and civilian counterparts in that previous war, left behind many who had worked with and for us. America, the outside occupier in the middle of a civil war, failed once again to win a war of counterinsurgency. Our leaders failed, as they had in Vietnam, to understand the complexity of the war they had chosen to fight. They failed to understand that our enemy in Afghanistan was not a single monolithic Taliban but different groups of insurgents. Whereas the Taliban understood the Pashtun tribal structures and rivalries that operated just below the surface, most Americans in Afghanistan did not. Then there were the Al Qaeda affiliates who, locals would tell me, would come and go, speaking languages the  locals didn’t understand. Today’s rival to the Afghan Taliban is

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Daesh/Islamic State—Khorasan Province (referred to as IS-KP, IS-K, or ISIS-K), the Afghan/Pakistani branch of ISIS in Syria, who have joined with Taliban forces, particularly the Haqqani Network in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan, when it has  suited their purpose and who have perfected the art of suicide bombings to promote their fundamentalist purity, a purity that will always trump any pragmatism the current Taliban leaders in power might muster. IS-KP, for example, views Hazaras, a large ethnic minority who practice Shia Islam, as infidels guilty of apostasy. IS-KP does not simply focus on Salifist fundamentalism; it promises to rival the Taliban in its control of mining in Afghanistan. Our leaders failed to understand how thoroughly this war was driven not just by pressures in Afghanistan, but also by the support of its neighbor Pakistan. After all, the three major groups of Taliban located their headquarters in Pakistan: the Peshawar Shura, the Quetta Shura, and the Niranshah Shura. The latter was and is the headquarters of the notorious Haqqani network. In her book The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan 2001–2014, Carlotta Gall makes a compelling case that Pakistan and not Afghanistan was the real enemy of this war. Without understanding Pakistan’s role, it’s impossible to explain how Osama bin Laden, architect of the 9–11 attacks, could have enjoyed safety, ensconced for several years in a mansion in Abbottabad, half a kilometer from a large Pakistani military base. Portraying bin Laden as a renegade from the House of Saud avoided having to follow the money trail from our good friend in the Middle East, Saudi Arabia, to our partner in South Asia, Pakistan. Rather than taking on the complexity of these relationships early on, America went with the simpler narrative. It is clear now and should have been clear when the Trump delegation negotiated American’s end to this war that without an agreement with Pakistan, “an honorable peace,” to borrow Nixon’s words, remained as impossible to achieve in the 21st Century as it had been in the 20th. Many of the American forces who deployed to Afghanistan failed to understand the civilians they were there to protect. They sometimes made fatal mistakes because they didn’t know, for example, that rifles were often fired to celebrate a rural Afghan wedding. Thinking these shots were evidence of insurgent attacks, they called in air support. Even when Army officers made an effort to learn about the history and tribal rivalries in the  regions they occupied  and even when they won the trust of the local population during a 10- or 12-month deployment, they were rarely

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sent to the same area on a subsequent Afghan deployment to resume the trusted relations with local Afghans they had worked so hard to foster. The US Army maintains a mechanized personnel model: one unit will perform the same as any other similarly trained unit. That makes sense when it comes to the operation of military hardware but not when it comes to winning the trust of locals, critical to progress in any counterinsurgency. Because American forces early in the war had ceased tackling poppy harvesting, refining, and transporting, plans for hobbling the enemy did not include the intricate overlay of drug trafficking that fueled the insurgency, that linked the War in Afghanistan to international drug cartels. Afghanistan continues to supply 85% of global opium through routes that go north through “the Stans” (Kyrgistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tajikistan) and on to Russia, west through Iran and Turkey to Europe,  south through Pakistan  and Iran and on to the Persian Gulf region and Africa (UNODC) (Stone). Without that understanding, our troops were simply battling one head of the hydra. What’s more, those leading the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan were more eager to put a positive spin on our efforts than in relating the chilling truth. In his book Dereliction of Duty, H.R.  McMaster tells the story about the failure of leaders, military and civilian, in the Vietnam War to face the hard truth of the war. Reporter Craig Whitlock looks behind the curtain at the candid assessments of leaders of the War in Afghanistan in The Afghanistan Papers: A Secret History of the War, based in large part on interviews with military and civilian leaders of the war, interviews that the Washington Post sued the Office of the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan (SIGAR) to make public. These interviews clearly reveal the grave reservations these leaders held and for some, the enormous gulf between their public pronouncements about the war’s progress and their true assessments of our failures. The SIGAR project was called “Lessons Learned.” Tragically, the lesson we learn from these interviews is that the Department of Defense learned little about counterinsurgency warfare from Vietnam. Let us hope that we don’t find our nation in another one. There’s a harder question to ask than what lessons our nation can learn from this war so that it can fight smarter in the future. The more important question is whether, after all, this war was worth it. Just put aside the whopping $2 trillion spent on this war, a debt that will have to be paid down by our children and grandchildren, and consider all the lives lost: 2324 American service members, 3917 American contractors, 1144 of

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our allies’ service members, 69,095 members of the Afghan National Police and Army, 46, 319 Afghan civilians, 52,893 opposition fighters, 444 aid workers, and 72 journalists, plus another 66,545 lives lost across the border in Pakistan (Crawford & Lutz). Other than the millions our defense contractors have made in this war, what has the country gained? More security? The 9/11 attacks gave the impetus for this war, but not a single hijacker was Afghan. And why didn’t we leave after Osama bin Laden was finally tracked down in his compound in Pakistan in 2011? A plausible answer might be that nobody wanted to reveal the truth behind the official progress reports, that nobody wanted the collapse to happen on his watch. We certainly could have orchestrated a better exit than Biden’s folly on August 15, 2021 by holding onto Bagram Airbase as our exit site rather than the small Kabul Airport. We never officially handed Bagram over to the Afghan security forces; secretly, in the night on July 1, 2021, we simply abandoned the base. Six weeks later, Taliban forces took control of Kabul. What did Afghans gain from our war? Before the war, 62% suffered from food insecurity; after the war 92% do. Before the war, 9% of Afghan children under the age of five suffered from acute malnutrition; after the war 50% do. Before the war, 80% of Afghans lived in poverty; at this writing the figure is 97% (Watson Center). Before the war, Afghans were controlled by a repressive Taliban; they are again today. There are many ways of trying to make sense of a war, and in this afterward I have suggested but a few: by testing a common cliché; by looking at the way in which folk and popular culture combine in a description of the zombie war that played out in the imaginations and on the laptops of American soldiers at war; by laying out the negotiations to end this war, negotiations more ceremony than substance, that secured nothing but a return to the status quo of 20 years ago. There is nothing to celebrate about this war, just as there was at the end of the Iraq and Vietnam wars. We can welcome the fact that American troops are no longer in harm’s way, that those of us who took part in the war effort worked long hours far from home to contribute what we could, and that we came to value those closest to us and to respect those who gave us protection. But finally we must account for the fact that America brought this war to Afghanistan, a country that had already endured nearly two decades of war and was, in 2001, under the yoke of an oppressed Taliban force. We saw ourselves as liberators dedicated to building a new Afghanistan with elected officials

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and a legal system like our own, equipping and training an army and police force that could ensure security, bringing hope to girls that they, like their brothers, could receive an education, and working with the Afghans to develop an economy that could one day support the country. We need to accept the fact that our failure at nation building is the most important lesson we can learn.

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Index1

A Afghan National Police, 85–86 Alien, 12 Al Qaeda, 181 American Anthropological Association, 19 Avatar, 12 Ayala, Don, 19, 20 B Baad, 112 Balkhi, Rabia, 117 Ballou, Maj Sullivan, 31, 32 Bearskin folktale, 191 Bentham, Jeremy, 46 Bhatia, Michael, 19 Blue Mosque, Mazar-i-Sharif, 117 Boellstorff, Tom, 154 British Aerospace Systems (BAE), 7–11

Bryant, Brandon, 3 Burgess, Scott, 187–189 Burial rites, 119 Bush, George W., 69 Butler, Judith, 146 C Carter, Ashton, 185 Challenge coins, 40, 41 Clinton, Hillary, 175, 186 Continental U.S. Replacement Center, Fort Benning (CRC), 33 Corruption, 70 D Damisch, Lysann, 47 Dancing Boys of Afghanistan, 148 Davidson, Harley, 53

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Death letters, 35–39 Doha talks, 206 Druckman, Steven, 146 Dungel, Joakim, 177 DynCorp, 82

K Karzai, Hamid, 147 Karzai, Wali, 20 Khalilzad, Zalmay, 208, 209 Kubrick, Stanley, 57

E Eliade, Mircea, 190 Enloe, Cynthia, 131

L Lammerts, Michael, 187–189 Leavenworth, Kansas, 23–25 Lloyd, Paula, 19 Lovecraft, H.P., 204

F Female engagement teams (FETs), 115, 119–122 Fish, Lydia, 167 Fisher, William, 56 Foucault, Michel, 46 Franklin, Lawrence, 27 Future Warrior, 12 G Gall, Carolotta, 210 Ghani, Ashraf, 147 Gingrich, Newt, 186 H Haqqani network, 210 Herdt, Gilbert, 146 I Institute for Creative Technologies, 12 Islamic State—Khorasan Province (IS-KP), 210 J Jackson, Bruce, 168, 169 Jinns, 118 Johnny Michael (Mike), 61 Jones, Terry, 175–176

M Malinowski, Bronislaw, 47 Mattis, James, 11 McMaster, H.R., 11 Merrifield, Sgt A.J., 13 Militainment, 12 Military Decision Making Process (MDMP), 14 Mohanty, Chandra, 151 Molin, Peter, 11 Moon, Katherine, 131 Mulvey, Laura, 146, 158 N Nambakulla, 190 Narayan, Uma, 151 National Training Center, 28 O O’Brien, Tim, 168–169 Olmstead, Andy, 30 Outlaw Josey Wales, 17 P Panetta, Leon, 185 Peterson, Christopher, 43 Petraeus, David, 175

 INDEX 

Provisional Reconstruction Teams, 84–85 Psychological Operations (Psy Ops), 116 Q Qala-i-Jangi Prison, 61 R Rahman, Amir Abdur, 202 Reid, Tim, 149 Ring Road, 69–72 Romero, George, 204 Romney, Mitt, 186 Rule of law, 21, 79–81 S Samaruddin, 180–184 Santorum, Rick, 186 Schiffren, Lisa, 172 Shah, Mohammad Zahir, 202 Shahazada, 181–184 Sheldon, David, 27 Silk Road, 12 Sombolay, Albert, 27 Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), 211 Spillage, 18 Stahl, Robert, 12 Stillman, Sarah, 134 Storyboard, 11 Suveges, Nicole, 19

T Taliban taxation, 78–79 360-degree feedback program, 18 Tillman, Marie, 32 Tillman, Pat, 32 Tofimoff, George, 27 Trump, Donald, 207, 208 Tuckman, Bruce, 16 U United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA), 176, 177 Unocal, 12 U.S Army Soldier Systems, 12 U.S. National Defense Authorization Act, 21 V Virilio, Paul, 46 W Walking Dead, 204 Whitlock, Craig, 211 Z Zadram, Mawlawi Abdul Qahir, 176 Zakat, 79 Zina, 112–114, 116 Zombie, 204

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