All In (36 page)

Petraeus was impressed by how Gant had blended soldiers from the Iron Rangers, the 1st Battalion of the 16th Infantry Regiment, 1st Infantry Division—an infantry unit Petraeus had (over the objections of some other senior officers) assigned to the Special Operations Task Force to augment the nationwide Village Stability Operations effort—into his Special Forces A-Team. This unusual partnership had helped “thicken” the Green Berets, the nickname for Special Forces troopers, so that Special Forces ODA teams like Gant's could multiply, covering more terrain. It remained to be seen whether the conventional military units could adapt to the Special Forces culture, or merely provide security and support. They wore the “modified” uniforms Gant favored and sported beards, some quite wispy on young men barely old enough to shave.

Malik Noorafzhal, whom Gant had given the nickname “Sitting Bull,” told Petraeus that he needed jobs for young men in his tribe. He wanted Mangwal to be connected to the electrical grid, and he requested both an expanded local force and an assurance that local forces would be robust enough to keep the Taliban away. Petraeus left impressed by Gant and the malik.

The Taliban's first big attack in their spring offensive came in the south, that same day, May 7, as if to remind the general that the gains his troops had made in Kandahar were indeed fragile. Teams of insurgents, including suicide bombers, fanned out across Kandahar and opened fire on a series of government buildings. The fighting shut down the Taliban's onetime home city. The insurgents never came close to regaining control of the city, though their ability to drive bomb-laden vehicles through the streets suggested that they had had some inside assistance. The Taliban's new reliance on assassinations—and their infiltration of Afghan police and military units—illustrated the enemy's resilience. As Petraeus and his forces planned for transition, so did the Taliban.

Vowell and the No Slack battalion returned to Fort Campbell in May. Vowell was convinced they had left their replacements in a much better position than they had been in a year earlier, thanks to all of the Taliban they had killed and cleared and their work with the district governments in Kunar. With Operation Strong Eagle III, he believed they had preempted the Taliban's spring offensive.

Vowell was firmly of the opinion that the war would be won at the district level. It was the same point his friend Doug Ollivant had made to Petraeus a year earlier. The United States had spent enormous amounts of money on the central government, Vowell believed, and had little to show for it beyond Kabul. No one had ever truly governed effectively at the district level. The notion of Afghanistan as a modern state was more of a concept than a reality, Vowell had come to realize.

He had lost eighteen soldiers and had nearly two hundred injured. The price, he thought, was almost too high. The three key districts they'd fought to secure, Noor Gul, Khas Kunar and Sarkani, continued to be examples of effective and independent local governments. As Vowell had counseled Campbell and Ollivant back in the summer of 2010, they never had to be reinforced to progress on their own. Two Afghan battalions had been added to No Slack's area of operation over the winter, and by the time the battalion left, the Afghans were taking the lead for daily security in many areas of the valley.

Upon his return to the United States, Vowell learned that the hardest part of the deployment was knowing how to talk to the wives of the six soldiers killed in Operation Strong Eagle III. They wanted to know why it had been necessary for Vowell to take on this mission a month before rotating home. Why hadn't he just sat tight? He had no immediate answer, except explanations of military necessity that he knew didn't translate to young women who had lost their husbands. He remembered something Petraeus had said when he visited the battalion in the aftermath of those six deaths: Do everything humanly possible to reduce the risk of casualties on the battlefield. “I now understand what General Petraeus was getting at: Casualties are inevitable, but the cost is expensive,” Vowell said. “Whereas we move on in the military and our own lives, our families pay that burden forever.”

Vowell vowed to take time to remember, on Memorial Day and Veterans Day, his men who lost their lives. “With their names inscribed on bracelets I now wear, I will remember and reflect. Then it'll be time to put them away and focus forward until the next holiday, where I'll bring their names out and remember yet again. It is how I will cope.”

Vowell now serves as operations officer on the 101st Airborne Division staff, a post once held by David Petraeus. Vowell's picture hangs on the wall a few places down from Petraeus's at division headquarters. “Not a day has gone by,” Vowell said, “that I don't try to live up to his legacy and what would most certainly be his expectations.”

ALONE AND IN LIMBO,
Major Fernando Lujan walked a hot and dusty road with Afghan forces from the 215th Corps in Nad-e Ali, Helmand Province, near Marjah. Like the handful of other integrated advisers on the ground, Lujan had developed a nuanced feel for the capabilities of the first Afghan forces patrolling independently in the transition sectors Karzai had identified in March. The security investigation Colonel Tanzola had initiated against Lujan and his colleagues on the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team (CAAT) had been quietly buried, but so had the offending twenty-page report on his Zabul embed. Nonetheless, relations with the Marine colonel had improved. Tanzola had agreed to start processing Afghan-CAAT memos and including Afghan advisers like Major Kosh Sadat, Petraeus's Afghan special forces aide, in CAAT communications. But Lujan had not yet succeeded in getting a Special Forces officer to replace himself in his work with the Afghans. He had little confidence that anything he had built over the past year would remain when he returned after rotating back to Washington.

A year earlier, as the Marines fought to solidify their hold on Marjah, Nad-e Ali had been a particularly bad place. U.S. and other NATO troops would almost surely draw fire once they'd moved a couple of hundred yards off any base, but now Lujan moved freely across the countryside, embedded in Afghan units, without incident. The poppy harvest was just ending, which meant the fighting season was about to resume. Lujan kept waiting for some spectacular attack, but it hadn't happened—yet. He traveled from base to base with Afghans in a single Ford Ranger. This was totally counter to ISAF rules, which required him to move only in armored vehicles or MRAPs. Tanzola was under the impression that this was what Lujan was doing, but Lujan knew that waiting for armor to arrive would completely erode his credibility with the Afghans. He was taking more risk than he really wanted to, in terms of both his safety and his career, but he was doing what he needed to do to accomplish the mission. Besides, no one had said no.

He also knew that he had only one chance to make an impression on the Afghan commanders of the 215th Corps, who had seen plenty of U.S. advisers before him. After one embed with Afghan forces, Lujan was beside a stream when a group of Afghan soldiers surrounded him. They were curious about this American in an Afghan uniform who spoke their language and treated them respectfully. The hair on Lujan's neck stood up. They pummeled him with probing questions.

“Are you a spy? What do you think of America? Are you trying to control our country? You're an infidel.”

Lujan stayed calm. He responded in Dari. “No, I am not here to tell you what to do,” he said. “And we're not leaving soon. I'll be here for years,” he continued, trying to explain the Afghan Hands initiative. “I work for the corps commander, and I want to learn from you.” The situation was defused, but he remained cautious. Nobody knew exactly where he was right now, and he had very limited communication capability. But these were risks he was willing to take to build rapport and illustrate to the Afghan troops that he trusted them and genuinely wanted to help.

He'd been received by the 215th Corps commander in Helmand only because the commander of the 205th Corps, in Kandahar, with whom Lujan had bonded, had sent word to Helmand that “Jagaran (Major) Farid”—the nickname he'd been given—could be trusted. Lujan's initial briefing in Dari did the trick. He was in with the commander. For the embed, Lujan asked for two officers to work with him—one from operations and one from intelligence. The ops officer, an older man, wore a belt buckle with a Soviet hammer and sickle—he had helped ambush the Soviet unit as a mujahideen fighter back in the 1980s. The intelligence officer had been in the military since he was fourteen and was skilled at mining intelligence from everyone he met on the streets and in villages. He spoke Pashto, Dari and Uzbek. If only the U.S. government had a cache of officers who could do the same, Lujan thought.

In his travels, Lujan had spent time observing the relationship between British troops and the Afghans. The Brits were trying what Lujan thought of as “tough love” with the Afghans, attempting to foster independence and avoid a dependency culture. But Lujan thought the disparities in living conditions were hard to justify. The British operated from bases with tents, air-conditioning, Porta-Johns and satellite television. Next door, the Afghans lived with open latrines and trash burning in open pits, the smoke blowing into the soldiers' sleeping areas. The Brits told Lujan that the disparity didn't affect their relationship. The Afghans asked him, “Why won't they help us?” Lujan thought the Brits would be better off doing what Flynn had done in the Arghandab River Valley, treating the Afghans as equals and partners. He also thought the Americans and other international partners could do more to improve logistical support for Afghan troops. The theory at work was that denying the Afghans the matériel support ISAF received would keep them from becoming dependent on the foreigners. But Lujan thought the inequities were troubling in their own right.

Some aspects of the Afghans' performance were troubling as well. He didn't think the Afghan soldiers spent enough time communicating with Afghan villagers to understand their needs. Several Afghan officers told him that they would never sit and have tea with the locals, because it would invariably be a trap, or they would be poisoned. Lujan also came away from the embed feeling that these Afghan forces were overconfident. They would walk the same routes day after day, a poor operational practice they had adopted merely because they hadn't been hit recently. They had a good intuitive feel for the countryside, but whenever Lujan would ask them precisely where they were on a map, they were always a mile or two off, which would have made calling in a quick-reaction force or artillery in the event of an attack a nightmare.

But Lujan believed ISAF and its Afghan partners were clearly winning. In his mind, there was no denying that they had taken terrain, and the initiative, from the Taliban. He heard this from Afghans everywhere he went: “‘Things are better. Last year we couldn't even move two hundred meters down the road without being fired upon or hitting an IED. Now we can move all over our area. The Taliban are much weaker here. Local villagers are starting to be brave enough to send them away.” The change was real and palpable. Lujan also noticed a big difference between older Afghan officers and the new generation of younger ones. The younger officers were incredibly brave, throwing themselves into battle and sleeping on tiny bases with little but wire barriers protecting them. They were truly committed, and they gave him hope.

AS ISAF BEGAN
to focus on the disruption campaign in the rugged mountains along the Pakistan border southeast of Kabul, the Currahee Brigade of the 101st Airborne joined forces with the Duke Brigade of the 1st Infantry Division in Paktika Province to clear terrain and shut down two infiltration routes from Pakistan. This area would not be ready for transition to Afghan control anytime soon, but the disruption mission remained critical until ISAF could reinforce the economy-of-force effort there. It was critical that the insurgents be forced to fight their way into Afghanistan and suffer losses as they did so.

A large-scale air assault launched the last major engagement fought by the Screaming Eagles in 2011. Captain Ed Churchill's D Company of the Currahee Brigade's 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, were flown into forbidding terrain on May 14 aboard twin-rotor Chinook helicopters. Insurgent fighters watched, gathered their weapons and prepared to ambush their visitors. At 1:15
P.M.
on May 16, insurgents opened fire on the company's 3rd Platoon with machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades and small-arms fire from four positions along a steep ridgeline. The barrage was so intense that Sergeant First Class Adam D. Petrone could see bullets striking rocks and shrubs around him as he dashed from position to position, desperately attempting to gain some semblance of fire superiority.

Churchill's Dog Company had been assigned the task of securing two engagement areas and shutting down one of the infiltration routes, called “Route Civic.” Churchill was almost a mile away, on a hilltop overlooking the battlefield, when the insurgents opened up on 3rd Platoon. Just three hundred yards from the Pakistan border, Sergeant First Class Petrone left his fortified position and bounded across twenty-five yards of open ground to where Private First Class Christopher W. Mioduszewski was manning the only machine gun between the insurgents and his platoon's exposed flank. Petrone showed him the insurgents' positions, and Mioduszewski opened up with his MK-48, firing on multiple targets with his weapon set on cyclic, then rapid. Under fire himself from twenty-five insurgents, he covered a sector of nearly sixty-five degrees for three minutes, enabling 3rd Platoon to regain the initiative, move to covered and concealed positions and return fire. After Mioduszewski's barrage, Petrone dashed back to his original position and radioed Captain Churchill with a battle update.

Insurgents continued firing a machine gun from the ridge, pinning down his men in three positions. When Petrone finally figured out where the fire was coming from, he marked the location with tracer fire for Private First Class James R. Morrison, the platoon's best shot with a recoilless rifle. Morrison ran twenty yards through enemy fire to a spot from which he could set up his weapon, crouched and then fired two quick shots at the insurgents, who were as close as fifty yards away. The initial ambush was broken. Sporadic fire continued throughout the day as Churchill and Petrone called in air strikes and 105-mm artillery. But the insurgents, dug into caves and other rock formations on the side of the mountain, were shielded from 30-mm cannon fire and 2.75-inch rockets. At 7:00
P.M.
, Churchill called in an attack by a fighter bomber, which dropped a five-hundred-pound GPS-guided bomb on the insurgents' position. When the bomb malfunctioned, the plane dropped another, silencing the enemy for the next several hours.