[For the
government, the new post represents a palpable extension of its reach, a
triumph however modest. But not one without some cost. Before the Afghans could
claim Ugly Hill, two marines had to sweep it for mines. Joshua Lee, a
26-year-old sergeant from Arkansas
By Luke Mogelson
For years, in the village
of Juz Ghoray Helmand Province
For the government, the new post represents a palpable
extension of its reach, a triumph however modest. But not one without some
cost. Before the Afghans could claim Ugly Hill, two marines had to sweep it for
mines. Joshua Lee, a 26-year-old sergeant from Arkansas
In the morning, while searching a compound at the base of
Ugly Hill, the marines discovered three more fully assembled I.E.D.’s,
containing 100 pounds of explosives. When technicians set charges around the
bombs, detonating them in place, a six-foot crater was left where one of the
compound’s buildings had stood. The following evening Echo Company continued
south, making camp on a plateau of hard-packed gravel; as the desert night grew
frigid, a small convoy arrived to resupply the men with food and water. Turning
to climb the steep escarpment, the lead vehicle hit yet another bomb. Its
mine-roller — an extended axle of weighted wheels that tests the ground ahead —
absorbed the brunt of the blast. Walking nearby, a young platoon sergeant,
Jacob Maxwell, was knocked off his feet as rocks and wreckage from the
obliterated roller struck his legs and back.
This was Maxwell’s fifth deployment. During a single tour
in Iraq
The Marines didn’t arrive in force in Helmand until
2009. Previously, the British controlled the region. Undermanned, ill equipped
and far too thinly spread, they were unable to contain the Taliban revival
already proliferating through Helmand by 2006. Only as recently as 2010 did coalition forces,
bolstered by Obama’s troop surge, try to cauterize what Gen. Stanley McChrystal
called the “bleeding ulcer” of Marja — a town just outside the provincial
capital where the Taliban presided unmolested over a lucrative opium industry.
Today the Taliban in Marja have been killed or vanquished to sparsely populated
desert regions, and Afghan security forces have assumed most policing
responsibilities in the town. Successful as it is, the taking of Marja was
accomplished with an immense commitment of men and resources that could not
realistically be brought to bear elsewhere in the province. An analogy often
invoked across Afghanistan Helmand has shifted upriver. There, in places like Kajaki and
Sangin and Musa Qala, after 10 years and 821 coalition deaths and thousands of
wounded, the insurgency perseveres.
Year after year, month after month, Helmand has
ranked as the deadliest, most violent province in Afghanistan America Helmand than in the eastern provinces. During the coming year, the
number of marines there will shrink by the thousands; as early as this summer,
many Marine positions will be shuttered or handed over to the Afghan Army and
the police. No one expects the insurgency to be defeated by then. The issue has
long ceased to be how we can decisively expunge the Taliban — we can’t.
Instead, the question is: How can we forestall its full-fledged resurgence upon
our departure? Toward the end of this year’s fighting season, just before the
winter rains, I spent seven weeks with marines across much of Helmand , and
everywhere the answer was basically the same. First, leave behind a proficient
national security force. And second, win them as much breathing room as time
allows.
The Marines’ push into Juz Ghoray was part of this plan.
Adhering to a provincewide blueprint for withdrawal, Echo Company had recently
closed two of its patrol bases, which in turn permitted longer-range
operations, previously impossible, like the taking of Ugly Hill. “Essentially,
we’re trying to consolidate American forces and turn over positions to the
Afghans in order to facilitate deeper operations,” Lt. Nikolaos de Maria, the
platoon’s commander, told me shortly after the I.E.D. attacks that injured Lee
and Maxwell. “So the center will be the Afghan Police. The next wave, around
that center, will be the Afghan Army. And then for us, we’re trying to operate
a lot deeper. So that would be a third concentric ring. We would be on the
outside, ready for a harder fight.”
Later that afternoon, a local man claimed that insurgents
had buried three I.E.D.’s in the dry riverbed crossed by the marines on their
way to Juz Ghoray. After they found and detonated one of the bombs, several
marines stayed to watch the area during the night. In the morning they were
attacked by machine guns and artillery clattering from unseen positions to the
east. Hearing the exchange back at Ugly Hill, de Maria rallied the rest of his
platoon and the Afghan Army soldiers. As they donned their flak jackets and
shouldered their radios and loaded their carbines, the men were charged by the
usual electricity — but there was something else too: relief at the promise of
actually confronting whoever had been trying so hard to blow them up. “We’re
bringing the hammer,” de Maria said over the radio.
Cpl. Brandon Sisson led the platoon down the hill and
through the deserted village. Thin and scrappy, with a penchant for brawling,
Sisson should have been a sergeant, but in Iraq Germany Iraq
Just then two Afghan soldiers strutted by holding their
weapons like folded umbrellas. They seemed entirely unconcerned by the fact
that people were shooting at us. I recognized one of them. In lieu of a rifle,
he humped a rucksack full of rocket-propelled grenades. The marines loved him
for this and had nicknamed him R.P.G. Others were less popular: because they
were lazy, because they complained, because they smelled, because they stole,
because way too often they were way too stoned — the list of grievances ran
long. In the end, though, what mattered most was that one item never made the
list: cowardice. They delighted in fighting.
If you had to name the principal difference between Afghan
soldiers and United
States
“Yes, this one,” the Afghan said. “We must search this one
now.”
Sweet had become a marine by accident. After being arrested
for driving while stoned, he dropped out of college during his first semester,
was evicted from his apartment and soon found himself back in Nebraska Fort
Collins , Colo.
In Juz Ghoray, he shrugged and followed the Afghan soldiers
into the compound. No one was home. As Sweet scrupulously searched room after
room — opening ornate chests, shaking out heavy blankets, rifling through piles
of hay, sniffing plastic fuel jugs — I noticed one of the Afghans hurry across
the courtyard with a large propane tank. Then another ran by carrying a metal
cooking pot. Finally came a third, making a basket of his shirt that bulged
with fresh eggs. A few minutes later, Sweet and I found the whole squad huddled
in the livestock pen. A shaggy-haired soldier sporting a Che-style beret
grinned at us a little sheepishly. “Breakfast?” he said.
Now, as bullets clapped toward us in the muddy poppy field,
R.P.G. gave a thumbs up. “Taliban good!” he said.
Corporal Sisson returned the gesture. “Hopefully, Taliban
dead.”
We pushed past a cornfield toward another village farther
east. Whole families were running away. Sisson noticed, on a distant ridge, the
silhouette of a lone figure and the glint of something metal catch the sun.
“We got a spotter,” he told de Maria.
Bullets kicked the dirt near several of the marines, and
the platoon pressed through the village to a wide, white-rocked creek on its
other side. This was as far as they were authorized to go. From the edge of an
eroding embankment that dropped precipitously, the marines watched a train of
people fleeing toward the eastern hills. The figure on the ridge vanished, and
soon two men on motorcycles appeared among the villagers.
“They’re screening themselves with the women and kids,”
Sisson said. As the marines struggled to find a clear line of sight on the men
with motorcycles, someone peeled away from the exodus and began walking toward
us. It was a young boy, maybe 9 or 10, and he trailed a voluminous black scarf
held high above his head. The cloth flapped in the hot wind.
Sisson spat. “They’re doing this on purpose.”
The boy walked all the way to the creek, where he seemed to
waver, regarding the marines and the Afghan soldiers shouting at him to stop,
turn around, get out of the way. Then he kept coming. He crossed the stream; he
scaled the embankment; he passed right through the ranks of frantically yelling
soldiers. All the while he held up his scarf as if it were a flag. The men on
motorcycles came and went: now picking people up, now dropping others off —
tauntingly, or so it felt. Soon the sun began to dim. It made of the men vague
shapes receding deeper into a country where they knew the marines could not
follow. When I looked around for the boy, he was gone, too.
The men on motorcycles and the train of villagers fled in the direction of Kajaki,
a small district on the Helmand River
The Kajaki Dam, made of terraced earth rising more than 300
feet, blocks a narrow ravine in the upper Helmand River to form a massive lake
whose bays and fingers reach deep into sheer-walled coulees. Controlled outflow
from the lake provides electricity for much of southern Afghanistan Camp Leatherneck Afghanistan
While an infantry battalion breached the district from the
south, two platoons from Ritchie’s battery were inserted by helicopters into
its northern woodland, long held by the Taliban. “We put a fence in the dirt,
literally,” one platoon commander told me. “Put concertina wire down and said,
‘You’re not going to get north of this area.’” Between the two fronts of
marines, the officer said, “during the three to four days that we were there, I
think we killed about 30 of them. They quit picking up their casualties.” The
sole escape for the insurgents was to ford the Helmand River
When I arrived in Kajaki in early November, a few families
had begun trickling back to the villages below the dam, returning for the first
time after six years to find out whether their homes might still be standing.
By then, Captain Ritchie was finishing up his seven-month deployment and a new
unit had just arrived to begin theirs. Now that the road from Camp Leatherneck Helmand River
About a half-dozen Afghan policemen shared the Shrine with
a squad of marines, who rotated in and out. Perhaps because of the forced
intimacy of the tiny outpost and the shared experience of coming under constant
attack, the marines and Afghans stationed there enjoyed an uncommonly
functional, even fraternal, relationship. They knew one another’s names, shared
responsibilities, laughed and joked and sometimes ate together. All of the
police officers on the Shrine were Tajiks or Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan
The following morning, a squad from the new unit showed up
for its first week at the Shrine. The squad leader, 25-year-old Erick Granados,
is a first-generation American whose parents immigrated to the United States El Salvador Afghanistan Afghanistan U.S.
I would learn that marines from the previous battery also
had a flag. Invariably, they said, whenever it went up, the Shrine came under
attack.
This time, the insurgents waited until dark, firing on the
outpost with automatic weapons a little before midnight . Jalani and the other Afghan police officers sprinted to
their machine guns in sandals and T-shirts, spraying bullets haphazardly into
the dark. Using thermal optics, Granados was able to locate two men as they
descended into a narrow canyon that snakes through an area called Chinah in the
Taliban-occupied country north of the Shrine. After calling in illumination
rounds that burned slow trails through the night, radiating pools of
incandescence across the black expanse, the marines concentrated several
volleys on the canyon. Staff Sgt. Vincent Bell seized the opportunity to
observe a policeman firing a PK machine gun. Bell Iraq Afghanistan Bell Bell
Eventually, the gunshots petered out. But a couple of hours
later, a marine noticed two men digging with shovels near the road that
connects the Shrine to the main base at the dam. He alerted Sergeant Granados,
who magnified their images using a remote-controlled camera mounted atop a
tower that relays infrared video to a monitor at its base. After watching the
men excavate a hole, place an object inside and bury it, Granados radioed his
superiors and requested permission to shoot them. The permission was denied.
“They want to see components,” Granados complained. “They want to see wires,
jugs. We saw something getting put into the ground. To them, that isn’t good
enough.” The marines watched the men toss a handful of branches over their
project, then flee quickly back to Chinah.
Intermittent gun battles continued until dawn, when the sun
bloomed from behind a series of serrated ridgelines, and the whole wasted
valley — the cattails that crowd the river’s banks, the yellow pastures where
ragged camels graze, the wind-bent corn against the western desert — emerged in
bright relief. I was drinking tea with Jalani when two trucks, loaded with
farmworkers heading out to harvest the last of the year’s crop, came bumping
down the road leading to the outpost. As they reached the place where the two
men were seen digging in the night, a tremendous explosion echoed off the hills
and the trucks vanished in a geyser of erupted earth. Thirteen passengers,
including women and children, had been crammed into the trucks, but somehow
none were killed or badly hurt. A few minutes later, carrying satchels and
tools, the Afghans continued toward their fields on foot.
“Where are they going?” I asked Jalani.
“To work,” he said.
That afternoon, another squad from Granados’s platoon, led by Sgt. Samuel
Windisch, conducted its first foot patrol in Kajaki, north and west from the
Shrine, into an area called the brown zone, where lawless Zamindawar abuts the
territory controlled by the Marines. The purpose of the patrol, Windisch told
me, was “to test the enemy’s forward line of engagement. We’re looking for a
fight, basically.” In 2005, Windisch was shot by a sniper in Fallujah. The
bullet caught the upper right corner of his chest plate, knocking him down with
a force that he said felt like someone hitting him with a sledgehammer. He
re-enlisted nonetheless, and two years later he did another tour in the same
city. When I asked whether the outgoing marines offered him any advice about
the route he planned to take today, Windisch replied, “Yeah: ‘You’re gonna get
shot at.’ ”
Following behind Joshua Gray, a young lance corporal who
swept the path for I.E.D.’s, Windisch and his squad headed for Devon Hill, a
steep knoll jutting from the western desert. Passing through the
coalition-friendly village of Kanzi
After rounding the northern slope of Devon Hill, the
marines glimpsed for the first time what lay on the other side: mud-mortar
homes crowding the edge of a meandering gulch, women hanging laundry out to
dry, children chasing one another over rooftops, men reaping fields of wheat
with scythes — entire communities, not a quarter-mile from the Shrine, cut off
from the Afghan government, untouched by its laws, its army and police.
Soon Gray halted the patrol once more. This time he spotted
the barely visible edge of what appeared to be a piece of hand-carved wood
poking out among some rocks. A corporal with a long-handled sickle joined Gray
at the front and lightly scored the earth around it. The ground there was rough
and the sickle blade accidentally bumped the object loose. What came up was a
carefully constructed apparatus consisting of a cylinder and a sharpened dowel:
a nonmetallic pressure switch. If depressed, the wooden spike would have struck
a highly combustible powder that would have activated a detonation cord,
triggering a main charge — a plastic fuel jug packed with homemade explosive —
buried deeper underground. After recovering the first one, Gray spotted a
second, identical wooden switch barely protruding a few feet away.
While Windisch and his executive officer, First Lt. Terence
Sawick, reported Gray’s find to headquarters and plotted their next move, the
squad’s Afghan interpreter, a soft-spoken and frail-framed young man, whom I’ll
call Mukhtar (he doesn’t want it known among Afghans that he works with
Americans), nervously surveyed the village. Mukhtar had been working with the
Marines in Kajaki ever since they succeeded the British. His English was
impeccable, the best of any linguist I’ve encountered in Afghanistan Kabul United States
“Get down! Get down!”
“Where’s it coming from?”
A sharp declivity separated the rear of the patrol from
those farther up the hill. Cpl. Michael Subu, the assistant squad leader
(recently promoted to sergeant), yelled at the marines pinned below to bound
for higher ground. “Get up here now!” The bullets continued in bursts, snapping
overhead; each enemy position had at least one machine gun. Spotting muzzle
flashes, the marines sited their rifles on “murder holes,” narrow gaps in
compound walls designed to accommodate barrels aimed from the inside out.
Someone spotted four men with AK-47’s rushing through a house less than 50
yards away. Subu delivered a rapid series of rounds through its windows as his
team moved uphill behind him. Unable to lay his heavy weapon on the downward grade,
Joshua Donald, the squad’s 22-year-old machine-gunner, brought it to his hip
and directed a steady stream of automatic fire toward another compound farther
north. Windisch and Sawick radioed headquarters, asking for artillery support.
But the squad was situated in between the targets and the mountains from which
the howitzers and mortars would be fired. If ordnance fell short, it could land
on the marines.
“We gotta move!” Subu called.
Gray stood up and began quickly sweeping a path with the
metal-detector down the east side of the hill. The marines followed as closely
as they could while kneeling, reloading and returning fire to the north. As the
slope leveled off into short, tilled terraces, a new sound joined the melee:
heavy weaponry clattering from somewhere high above us.
“What is that?”
“It’s the Shrine!”
From up on the outpost, about a quarter-mile away, Granados
radioed Windisch and asked him to mark a target. Windisch aimed his
rifle-mounted grenade-launcher at one of the compounds where he’d seen
consistent muzzle flashes. The grenade slammed into the compound wall, blowing
open its metal door. A moment later, the marines on the Shrine unleashed a rain
of ammunition.
Not far from the bottom of the terraces stood a low,
mud-mortared wall. But to get there, we had to cross an open field in full view
of the gunmen. Over the field, bullets audibly split the air. Gray popped two
canisters of smoke and tossed them in the dirt. As the yellow clouds poured
out, meeting in a thick, obscuring pall, the squad sprinted for the wall.
Crouching behind it, Subu recognized more insurgents shooting from a tree line
a couple hundred meters off. Windisch shouldered a rocket launcher, and we
ducked and plugged our ears as its blast threw debris against us. The rocket
soared long, exploding just beyond the trees.
“We’re moving!” Sawick yelled. “Keep moving!”
One last stretch of exposed terrain remained, a shallow
wadi we had crossed to get to Devon Hill. When Sawick, Windisch and Subu
stepped into the streambed, a burst from a machine gun nearly took them out.
Bullets skipped off the stones around them, ricocheting past their heads. By
now, the marines on the Shrine had intercepted enemy radio communications: two
insurgents were moving heavy guns to flank us from behind.
“Keep going!” Sawick urged. The enemy fire followed us all
the way to Kanzi, despite incessant pounding from the Shrine. When we finally
reached the village, a group of farmers were standing outside, surrounded by
children. The men cheered and gave thumbs-up to the marines, while the children
ran to them, pleading for chocolate. Sawick had Mukhtar tell the eldest of the
men to lead us the rest of the way. The farmer was understandably reluctant.
Sawick insisted, and the marines fell in behind him as he guided us through the
fields, turning unexpectedly, zigzagging this way and that, following some
unmarked route he knew by heart.
At the base of the Shrine, the marines lighted cigarettes
and congratulated one another. Except for Staff Sergeant Bell, Sergeant
Windisch and Corporal Subu, it was the squad’s first taste of combat. As a
22-year-old in Kunar Province
That night was unusually quiet in Kajaki. According to
village scuttlebutt, five Taliban had been killed. “I think we gave them enough
hell for a while,” Windisch predicted. But the next evening several Afghan
policemen found a fight on the riverbank, and in the morning Granados raised
his flag again. In fact, he climbed onto the bunker roof and waved it at the
northern desert before planting it in place. I was eating breakfast with one of
the younger marines, who laughed and said, “It’s about to get crackin’!”
Fifteen minutes later, an 82-millimeter mortar round whistled over our heads
and slammed into the hillside, unearthing a small crater not far from the
half-sunken pipe that the squad urinated into.
After the ambush on Devon Hill, the marines suspended
further patrols into the north. “There’s no tactical advantage to going up
there other than getting in a firefight,” one officer told me. “We can spend
another 10 years in Afghanistan
My last night on the outpost, I had dinner with Ghulam
Jalani. “We need the Marines to stay here,” he told me again. “We might not be
able to defend this area.” Indeed, it’s hard to imagine a half-dozen Afghans
holding onto the Shrine without the camera tower, the thermal optics, the
high-powered binoculars, the heavy machine guns, the illumination rounds, the
sniper rifles and the nearby mortars and howitzers that the Marines need to
defend it now. It’s also hard to imagine that, deprived of these assets, Jalani
and his men would not choose to return north, where their wives and children
wait for them, instead of risking their lives for a Pashtun population that
doesn’t speak their language.
After dinner, one of the policemen loitered near my cot,
watching me pack my bag. He seemed to be working up the nerve to speak.
Finally, I asked him what he wanted. He explained that the days were getting
cold now, and he had no socks.
A week and a half later, Staff Sgt. Vincent Bell stepped on an I.E.D. and was
killed.
When I heard about Bell Iraq Bell
In a combat zone, each of a variety of threats instills its own corresponding
fear. Unique to the fear of I.E.D.’s is a sense of powerlessness. For marines,
this fear, above every other, rates the most acute. Forgoing tactical
formations, they often walk in single file behind engineers with
metal-detectors. They overturn suspicious rocks with hooks affixed to bamboo
stalks. They mark every turn with lines of shaving cream or baby powder in the
dirt. They travel over rooftops, laying ladders across alleys to cross from
house to house. After dark they leave a trail of chemically treated Q-tips that
glow under night-vision goggles. And they study every step they take for signs
of tampered ground. But despite these precautions, there remains a limit to the
degree of safety that vigilance affords, and ultimately it is chance that kills
or spares you. This fear — the fear of chance and your helplessness to affect
it — is a constant companion to the grunts conducting daily foot patrols across
the bomb-littered country of northern Helmand .
Nowhere has the I.E.D. been put to deadlier and more
ubiquitous use than in Sangin, a central transit hub on the Helmand River Kandahar Pakistan Vietnam
Today the fight in Sangin has changed; knowing they will
always lose, the insurgents who remain seldom ambush the marines, or engage
them with small arms. Rather, they rely almost entirely on I.E.D.’s — and at
this they have grown terribly adept. Most of the bombs in Sangin are fashioned
from materials with a low-enough metallic signature to go unnoticed by
hand-held detectors. Plastic jugs filled with potassium chlorate, a few
nine-volt batteries offset from the charge, old speaker wire connecting to a
pressure plate of wood and copper, anti-tamper devices made with clothespins,
brake lights or hypodermic needles and improvised blasting caps — this is all you
need. In October, the same unit that replaced the British in 2010, the Third
Battalion, Seventh Marines, returned to Sangin for another tour. I visited them
toward the end of November, and already four marines had been killed by
I.E.D.’s, with another 17 severely injured, 10 of them amputees.
The prevalence of hidden explosives, the daily fact of
them, has engendered in the war-weary residents of Sangin a kind of defiant
apathy. My first day in the district, I arrived at a small base shortly after a
squad of marines had left on a routine patrol. About 600 meters outside the
wire a young boy stopped them to point out the location of a nearby I.E.D. I
was in a tent with the platoon commander, who found the squad on the
remote-controlled camera and zoomed in on the boy. He looked about 12. “He
wants to bring it to us,” the squad leader radioed back to the lieutenant.
“No,” the lieutenant told him. “Do not do that.”
But the boy had already bounded off, retrieved something
from the tall grass and was carrying it back to the marines. “It’s just the
pressure plate,” the squad leader said over the radio. And then: “Correction.
He has the whole I.E.D.”
The marines yelled: “Put it down! Put it down!” Eventually
the boy tossed the device — a jug, plate, wires — roughly to the ground. He
seemed to do it with a shrug. The lieutenant shook his head and told me this
had happened several times before.
A few days later, I accompanied a patrol with another
squad, led by First Lt. Matt Perry, during which we were invited into a
compound by a young man caked from head to toe with splattered mud. The man,
Kareem Dada, was building additional walls for his home, which he’d recently
inherited from his father. Nearby, as he and Perry spoke, Kareem’s 9-year-old
brother leaned on a pair of old crutches, shifting his weight from armpit to
armpit, adjusting the burden on his single leg. Three months ago, the boy and
two other brothers had triggered an I.E.D. while playing in an alley near their
house. The blast killed one boy and badly maimed the two survivors, who were
taken to Camp Leatherneck Helmand River
“Who do you blame?” Perry wanted to know.
“The Taliban,” Kareem answered automatically. “I hate them.
Look at what they did to us.”
As the marines left the compound, they found the third
brother, who was maybe 13, waiting outside in a wheelchair. Both of his legs
were amputated above the knees. He glared at us with naked loathing. He cursed
us in English as we passed.
Back at the base, I asked Perry why he thought the third
brother’s attitude toward the marines had been so different from Kareem’s. The
lieutenant held up his hands. Maybe they weren’t who they said they were. Maybe
Kareem’s whole story was a fabrication and they’d been involved in placing an
I.E.D. that accidentally detonated. This felt plausible, if disturbing. But
then Perry offered another explanation, which seemed to suggest a paradox
inherent to any counterinsurgency: “They feel like if we weren’t here, bombs
wouldn’t be in the ground.”
When the Americans
replaced the British, there were only a few patrol bases outside of the
battalion headquarters, and each was perilously embattled. Since then the
Marines have established dozens of positions throughout Sangin and driven the
Taliban from the district center. This, however, has not completely prevented
insurgents from carrying out attacks. “The bottom line with the enemy we’re
facing is that he’s in civilian clothes, he’s riding a motorcycle and he’s
unarmed,” Lt. Col. Seth Folsom, the Marines’ battalion commander, told me. “The
way he operates is through the use of caches. He’ll move from one cache to
another, get the materials he needs and emplace I.E.D.’s that way. . . . They
know we’re not going to just start mowing down guys on motorcycles. So even
though we cast a wide net, a lot of fish still get through.”
Most of the caches are believed to be scattered through
desert regions beyond the district center, particularly to the east, near the
border of Kandahar Kandahar
For four days they hiked the desert, sweltering in the
afternoon and bitter cold at night, sleeping in villages, searching each house
and hole they crossed. They had anticipated opposition, but they found instead
a conspicuous, almost eerie, absence of military-age men. “It’s like when you
turn on the lights, the cockroaches all disappear,” Folsom said one afternoon.
“When you turn off the lights, they all come right back out.”
No insurgents, only traces of them everywhere. One day,
searching a compound far from any village, the marines discovered four jugs of
explosives, rolls of white speaker wire, casings from U.S.
Two days later, on a sandy ledge, one of the technicians
registered something with his metal detector. A sergeant probed around the
ground with his knife and exhumed a bulky object wrapped in tire rubber.
Cutting through the rubber and the patterned cloth beneath it, the sergeant
unveiled a Russian-made machine gun; as he assembled its parts, another marine,
farther up the bank, called out, “I got something else here.” It was an AK-47
buried just below the surface. A couple of minutes later, several loaded
magazines were found. Then a burlap sack containing 130 pounds of ammonium
nitrate. Then a plastic bag with 17 pounds of a mixture of aluminum nitrate and
ammonium powder. Then some pressure plates. Then two-way radios used as
triggering devices. Then carbon rods, detonation cord, blasting caps and
speaker wire.
Very close to the caches stood a compound. The day before,
the marines asked the owner if they could spend the night inside his walls. The
owner, who struck some as suspiciously hostile, refused. By the time the caches
were discovered, he was gone.
Another local, another night, welcomed the entire company into his
compound. As 70-odd marines unrolled their sleeping bags in the compound’s dirt
courtyards among goats, cows and chickens, the Afghan security forces drank tea
and shared peanut butter and crackers with the host and several of his sons in
a small mud room. Haji Abdul Rahim, the ruddy, bright-eyed owner of the
compound, turned out to be a Koranic healer: in exchange for livestock, he
treated illnesses and injuries by reciting over them appropriate passages from
the Muslim holy book.
That night we stayed up late, listening to Rahim speak of
miracles. His grandfather had been a revered spiritual leader in Sangin. After
he died and was buried in a cemetery not far from Rahim’s home, wild deer would
regularly visit the slab of white stone that marked his grave. Faithful from
all across Afghanistan
“In this country, you will see many strange things,” Rahim
said, holding up a finger. “Lots of miracles happen here.”
At dawn, as the marines rolled up their bags and shouldered
their rucksacks, Rahim approached the company commander. One of his daughters
was in pain. She’d twisted her ankle and it was badly swollen. Did the marines
have any medicine?
A corpsman dug out a few Ibuprofen, for which Rahim was
very grateful.
On a recent afternoon at Camp Leatherneck Afghanistan
To be sure, the United States Afghanistan Afghanistan
“People ask me all the time, ‘Can the Afghan National Security
Forces hold what we’ve got and maintain security?’ ” General Toolan told me. “I
say, absolutely: they’re better-trained, better-equipped and better-liked than
the insurgency. They can do it. However, what is important is their will. Their
will is a function of their leadership. And their leadership is oftentimes
susceptible to corruption.” This perhaps would be the greatest tragedy of all:
if the gains earned in Helmand by the coalition since 2006 were lost because of a lack of
will. For what would the British and Americans have sacrificed so much? To what
end would we be able to say 821 of them gave their lives?
Before I left Sangin, I attended a memorial service for two
marines who were killed a week earlier by an I.E.D. The centerpiece of any memorial
for a marine is the formal construction of his battle cross. The rifle stuck
bayonet down, the helmet set atop the butt stock, the dog tags draped on the
pistol grip, the boots placed on the ground. The end result is a movingly
person like assemblage of the dead man’s essential gear. What holds it all
together is the rifle. Clearly, the rifle is meant to symbolize a kind of
linchpin — the singularly vital thing. Yet somehow, it is the boots, their
laces neatly looped and tied, that are most affecting. It is the boots, not the
rifle, that most evoke an absence. It is the boots that young marines reach out
to touch when they kneel before it all.
