Robert Kaplan - Imperial Grunts

One of the detainees did talk, though. As a result of the information he had provided, we were suddenly going out on a nighttime hit of a compound just outside Gardez. There would be no time for the steak and shrimp dinner that had been prepared.

Every aspect of these hits was planned, and written up on either a 5-W form for low-risk operations, or in a con-op (concept of operation) for a higher risk attack: what vehicles would be in the convoy, what their order would be in the lineup, where exactly everyone would sit in each vehicle, the blood types and social security numbers of everyone, the communication frequencies (commo freeks) to be used, and so forth. This particular convoy would be searching for a large cache of weapons being held at the home of a sister of a Taliban subcommander who was an HVT—high-value target.

This time I was in an up-armor driven by Sgt. First Class Matt Costen of Austin, Texas. In the darkness the world was consumed by dust and the sound of rumbling engines. “Last piss break before we leave,” someone shouted. I was squeezed in the back with sharp points of metal everywhere. My elbows were jammed between the armored door and the ammunition boxes. The dusty boot of the gunner riding on top dangled down into the vehicle, right in my face.

“It’s okay to have diarrhea of the mouth, so long as I copy you clearly,” a voice said over the multiple-band intra-team radio.

“And away we go, boys and girls,” Sgt. Costen announced.

Soon we were amidst bazaar music and nighttime crowds of destitute people who were strolling under weak, flickering lights in the streets of Gardez. We turned into a gridwork of alleys separated by high mud walls. Then it happened like a play in slow motion. Green Berets fanned out of the vehicles covering their assigned fields of fire. Several men in black turbans and beards were PUCed under a high-wattage light along a wall, then made to sit in squatting positions, which they assumed stoically. A terp came out to interview them. When nothing unexpected happened, these operations had little more drama than pulling over to fix a flat tire on the road at night.

Our Humvee was assigned a blocking position. Thus, we spent two hours standing around in the cold as another team entered the compound. I noticed Sgt. Costen’s ball cap, “Heritage Firearms.” He explained, “It’s the place I buy my guns from.

“I was in 5th Group in active duty,” he told me, “then worked as a substitute teacher and as a cop in black projects. I’m very religious. I believe we’re all from the same creator. After 9/11, Alex Marco—you know, the 18 Delta [medic]—called me and asked if I wanted to join him and Henry [Peraza] and a group of other guys in an A-team, in the 3rd of the 20th [3rd Battalion of the 20th Special Forces Group]. It was because of Alex and Henry that I rejoined the National Guard.

“See those PUCs,” Costen went on, “they’re probably innocent. Just happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The real object of the mission is to treat them respectfully, so that after they are released they’ll tell their families how different the Americans are from the Russians. They know we have to detain them; it’s how we treat them that counts. That’s what I learned working the black projects: build up rapport in the community.” Sgt. Costen then looked up at the brilliant starscape, pointing out the Seven Sisters and Taurus the Bull, with the wound made by Orion the Hunter, which lay near the horizon.

The operation yielded only a few grenades, det cords, and AK-47s. But one of the PUCs would turn out to be a Taliban general who had fought against the Americans in Operation Anaconda in December 2001. The other detainees were released immediately. “The Russians would have shot them,” Costen said. Having covered the war in the 1980s, I knew that he had a point.

Everyone was disappointed. “If you want big fish, we need to be over the border in Pakistan; that’s where most of the bad guys are,” someone repeated yet again. Back at the chow hall we devoured the steak and shrimp that the cook had kept warm, washed down by Gatorade. There was a discussion about which Gatorade flavor was better, the Cool Blue or the purple Riptide Rush. It was almost like discussing different wine vintages. The cold was so severe we could see our breaths.

One of the team sergeants announced: “All right, guys, the general and the colonel are coming down from Bagram to see us tomorrow. So hide your porn and hide your booze, and hide them well. They’ve got a hard-on for that stuff.” That set off a series of complaints against REMFs (rear-echelon mother-fuckers: a World War II acronym, actually). “Will tomorrow be a dog-and-pony show?” I asked. “Worse,” I was told, “a real ECE [equestrian-canine extravaganza].”

It wasn’t that bad, actually. Col. Herd flew down the next morning with Brig. Gen. Gary Jones, who was visiting from Fort Bragg. Brig. Gen. Jones, the quintessential towering Texan, had recently assumed Maj. Gen. Geoff Lambert’s old job as the commander of all Green Berets, and was himself slated for promotion to major general. Along with Col. Herd, Gen. Jones telegraphed his awareness of all the jokes and ribald complaining at his expense. It was part of the process, they both knew. National Guardsmen were particularly unintimidated by the brass, because as civilians they were even less career-oriented than active duty noncoms, who themselves cared little about their reputation except among their fellow NCOs. What made these guardsmen so valuable was that they had no motives whatsoever to be anything but brutally honest. The general and the colonel knew that, and appreciated it.

Maj. Holiday arranged a convoy to take Gen. Jones and Col. Herd two hours south by dust-wracked road to the Special Forces firebase at Zurmat. There, I asked one of the Special Forces trainers about the quality of the newly emerging Afghan National Army.

He told me, “They’re better than the Hondurans I’ve trained. They can do their own night patrols. They hate the Paks, which is good. They really want to mix it up and fight over the border. They’re disciplined; they’re not thugs. They won’t beat you up and steal your money. Wherever we put them, peace breaks out. The bazaar in Zurmat has doubled in size since we deployed them. The only problem is that we need more of them.”

Accompanying Gen. Jones and Col. Herd was Lt. Col. Marcus Custer of Mobile, Alabama. “The area where I’m from we call the Red Neck Riviera. Now I know what you’re thinking,” he told me in laughter. “Yeah, I’ve got relatives who live in trailers, who’ve never been thirty miles from their home. I eat grits.” In fact, Lt. Col. Custer was an ethnic Cuban who had been separated from his family because of Castro, and was adopted by southerners. “So I’m not really related to the Gen. Custer.”

Lt. Col. Custer had shown up just as it had become clear that the SEAL mission had been canceled, so he and I moved into my old tent, where we had many late-night bull sessions. Rather than return to Bagram with Gen. Jones and Col. Herd, he had remained at Gardez in order to, as he explained, “help Maj. Holiday get approval for a mission.”

Lt. Col. Custer was a 19th Group National Guardsman and a customs officer in civilian life. Like the other guardsmen, his lack of ambition made him doubly honest. “You see,” he told me, “there is almost nothing that goes on at these firebases that Maj. Holiday and the other majors are not fully capable of deciding on their own. But that’s not how the system works. As a lieutenant colonel, merely by being here I can add a little weight to his request.”

One night while cleaning an old Lee-Enfield rifle on a Bukharan carpet, Custer provided me his theory on the problem with the War on Terrorism, as it was being currently waged in Afghanistan. Later, I checked his theory with numerous other sources on the front lines, and it panned out. It wasn’t really his theory so much as everyone’s—that is, when people were being honest with each other. Sadly, it was a typical American story.