Robert Kaplan - Imperial Grunts

Also killed in the incident were Sgt. Brian Cody Prosser of California and the team sergeant, Master Sgt. Jefferson Davis of Tennessee. Robin Moore’s book The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger (New York: Random House, 2003) fills a significant gap in war coverage by detailing this and much else.

The sector of Bagram where the JSOTF was located was called “Camp Vance,” after Sgt. First Class Gene Arden Vance, a West Virginia National Guardsman killed in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area in May 2002.

See the Prologue, p. 10.

The Economist, Mar. 22, 2003, p. 28. (Also footnoted in Chapter 2, p. 56.) In fact, that statistic was inflated because tax laws encouraged many troops to declare their residence in those two states. The real truth is that many more came from other states of the Old South, and fewer from Texas and Florida.

In the history of modern imperialism this was not unusual. At the turn of the twentieth century in the Sahara Desert, the French military found it necessary to shift from “sedentary infantry to mobile, camel-mounted troops.” Douglas Porch, The Conquest of the Sahara (New York: Knopf, 1984), p. 251.

Pro-Soviet Afghan rulers Nur Mohammed Taraki, Hafizullah Amin, and Najibullah, and anti-Soviet radical mujahedin leaders Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Rasul Sayyaf were all Ghilzais, prompting one expert to note that in the latter part of the twentieth century power in Afghanistan had passed from the Durrani Pushtuns to the Ghilzai Pushtuns. See Ludwig W. Adamec’s Historical Dictionary of Afghanistan (London: Scarecrow, 1997), pp. 123–24.

Johnston was one of a handful of 19th Group National Guardsmen at Gardez. Because 19th Group is Utah-based, its ranks are filled with westerners.

Maulvi is a Pushtun honorific to denote a respected imam or religious personage.

The Hazaras are a people of Mongolian origin who live in the mountains of central Afghanistan, and were converted to Shiism several hundred years ago by the Safavid rulers of Iran.

Some weeks later, Special Forces finally got permission for a direct hit on Jalani’s compound. Because it was part of a larger, more conventional offensive, Jalani might have been tipped off in advance and was not found at the compound. The intelligence provided to Special Forces indicated that there were no noncombatants inside, but there was a heavy machine gun which could have destroyed the U.S. helicopters taking part in the mission. Tragically, the intelligence was wrong—there was a group of children in the compound who were killed in the attack. Special Forces captured large amounts of explosives in the attack. Because of the attack, many people in the area began turning in their arms caches for destruction. Among the items recovered were five complete, functional SA-7 portable surface-to-air missiles.

The more familiar, Arabic term is qanat.

At the time of his death, Sweeney was promotable to sergeant first class.

Sgt. Sadler, an 18 Delta medic in Vietnam, also wrote a song, “Spit and Polish,” making fun of REMFs who cared only about what a soldier looked like.

Obviously, military correspondents—a small part of the media—were an exception to this rule.

Greater New England means New England proper and regions of the country like the northern Midwest and parts of the Pacific Northwest that had been settled by New En-glanders. See Michael Lind’s Vietnam: The Necessary War: A Reinterpretation of America’s Most Disastrous Military Conflict (New York: Free Press, 1999). Chapter 4 presents a penetrating, statistically backed exegesis on the religious, ethnic, and regional divisions over Vietnam and other American wars. For a more general but equally profound observation on the differences between the South and the North regarding military affairs, see Samuel P. Huntington’s mid-twentieth-century classic The Soldier and theState: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957), pp. 211–21.

Nearly a year later, an Annenberg Public Policy Center study concluded that 51 percent of the military thought it proper to show flag-draped coffins of troops: a much lower percentage, I suspect, than civilians in New England. Also note that the Special Forces and marine infantry communities tend to be more conservative than other branches of the armed services.

This idea was not exclusively mine, but originated in comments made by Gen. Geoff Lambert, former commander of all Green Berets before becoming commandant of the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center.

The Coast Guard fell under the newly created Department of Homeland Security.

“Rack” is the naval term for bunk. The Marines, being part of the fleet, use Navy lingo.

This was a useful simplification. For example, while a company had three “line” platoons, there was often a fourth “weapons” platoon. Moreover, fire teams had four men almost as often as three.

Platoons in the Marine Corps, like Special Forces A-teams, varied in size. With only twenty-nine marines, this was a small platoon.

MOPP: mission-oriented protective posture—gear for chemical and biological attacks.

At retirement gatherings, marines who had known each other all their lives still addressed each other by rank.

The gunnery sergeant was also the last rank in the Marine Corps before the noncom command structure branched off: toward the leadership-oriented sergeant major and the technical-oriented master sergeant.

The Ranger Handbook was the smart sheet for individual tasks; its equivalent was the Guidebook for Marines. The FMFM 6-5 concentrated on squad-level operations.

Indeed, a religious map of the region put out by the Pentagon showed Eritrea as a separate category all its own, with a single national identity rather than separate religious identities.

The reputation for crime was somewhat undeserved because crime was limited mainly to Nairobi.

Whereas Maj. Gen. Mattis, a two-star general, commanded the ground combat ele-ment of I MEF, the MEF itself was commanded by Lt. Gen. James T. Conway, a three-star general.

The Marines were a naval force; the medics in each Marine platoon were not marines but “Navy corpsmen,” hence the reference to sailors.

Lt. Gen. Griffith also earned the Navy Cross on Guadalcanal in September 1942 for “extreme heroism.”

Michael Gordon, New York Times, Dec. 12, 2003. Gordon adds: In the Al-Fallujah area, the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division had been replaced by the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which was replaced in turn by the 2nd Brigade of the 3rd Infantry, which handed it back to the 3rd Armored Cavalry and then back to the 82nd Airborne again.