The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (26 page)

In Dubai, in room 1725 of the Palm, I closed my eyes but I didn’t sleep. If I did, I wouldn’t think of what happened last time. I was now less than twelve hours away from returning.

In October of 2008, I’m in Afghanistan for the first time. The sun is out and the soldiers at a small outpost near the Pakistani border are preparing their trucks for a two-day mission. The outpost looks like a ski lodge. Mountains surround it. They’re fueling up vehicles and loading supplies onto their trucks—citrus-flavored Rip It energy drinks, PowerBars, MREs, crates of water bottles. I’m making phone calls on my T-Mobile, pacing in the gravel yard. I hang up. There is a huge blast right outside the guard tower, about seventy-five feet away. A funnel of smoke shoots to the sky.

The private in the guard tower screams over the radio: “Oh, God, we’ve been hit by a suicide bomber!” and everyone starts to move, throwing their body armor and helmets on and sprinting toward the tower. There is gunfire from an AK-47, though it’s impossible to see who it’s directed at.

The Afghan guards come stumbling through the gate, carrying a teenager who looks like he’s dying. Blood runs down the face of an older Afghan police officer. Doc Allen, the unit’s medic, tells them to put the two men down and he starts working on them, taking off their clothes, trying to find where all the blood is coming from. The kid has about forty or fifty small holes in him, made by the ball bearings that exploded out of the suicide vest. Doc Allen takes off the kid’s pants to make sure he hasn’t been hit in the groin, and the kid’s lying there naked and bleeding on a slab of concrete outside the motor pool, a white bandage pressed over his penis. One of his friends is kneeling by him and holding his hand.

Outside the gate, Sergeant Joseph Biggs is making sure no one else is hit. Biggs is a twenty-four-year-old from Florida. He has over a dozen tattoos, including one on his left arm that says
WAR
and one on his right
that says
KILL
, and another on his bicep that spells out the Arabic word for
INFIDEL
. Biggs has been blown up twice before, two Purple Hearts. He has silver hair and his head sometimes starts bleeding randomly. He dates a waitress from Hooters. In Afghanistan, he’s sleeping with a female helicopter pilot, referred to by her made-up radio call sign Sexy-Six. He points to a live grenade on the ground, near one of the severed legs of the bomber. “He was about to throw that,” he says.

For forty-five minutes, Doc Allen keeps the kid alive. A Blackhawk helicopter comes in, stirring up a dust storm, and the two men are loaded on. Doc Allen saves their lives. Doc Allen mutters that he’s touched way too much Haji cock in his lifetime. His best friend was killed in Fallujah, his fiancée was later hit by a car. He thinks reporters are bad luck.

The unit meets in the tactical operations center, where Captain Terry Hilt is trying to piece together what happened. Hilt says that the suicide bomber approached through the valley between the two hills, a group of five or six boys running up and surrounding him as he got close. The children are eight or nine years old and are regulars at the base. They come over most days after school and the Americans give them chores to do, like filling sandbags or gathering up golf balls that have been hit into the valley. Most of the guys here like having them around.

The base’s security cameras capture the attack. On the footage, we see the bomber get close to the gate (the kids, at this point, have run away, taking a seat on the Hesco barriers near the burn pit that have been set up as backstops out on the firing range). The bomber stops outside the barbed-wire fence, and the young guard stands up and calls to him to stand where he is and wait to be searched. On camera, the guard moves across the screen from right to left, and offscreen the suicide bomber pulls out a grenade. The guard stops and backs up, cocking his AK-47 and lifting it up to fire, and that’s when the suicide vest explodes. Smoke fills the screen and the guard disappears, then reappears, staggering backward and screaming before falling to the ground.

“We’re going to need to clean that whole yard,” Hilt says. “Once everyone is inside, I’ll talk to everyone real quick. We’re going to try to HIIDE him [identify using a retinal or fingerprint scan], if we can find the head. Hey, Sergeant Biggs.”

“Hooah,” Biggs says.

“You said the head was out there?”

“No, just the scalp, just the hair.”

“The flesh out there,” another soldier adds, “it’s everywhere.”

“I guess we don’t bring them kids back no more,” Biggs says. “I always said with the kids around, there’s going to be some shit like that. The kids are the ones who brought him over here, the little terrorist bastards.”

The rest of the soldiers gather in the living room (or the morale welfare and recreation area, MWR, as it’s called), where at night they watch DVDs and play the video game Rockstar.

“Everyone knows what just happened,” Hilt says to the group. “A suicide bomber at the front gate blew himself up. A couple things are going to happen: The kids that typically hang around were walking with the guy prior to detonating. They won’t be coming back here. The mission is going to be off. Hey, what typically happens after one bomber?”

“Another one,” the soldiers answer in chorus.

“There are body parts all over the place, all through the district center,” Hilt says. “Doc, we got plenty of rubber gloves? We’re going to get some and do a police crawl across the DC. If you find fingers, any of that stuff, don’t touch it. Call for one of the HIIDE guys. We might be able to get it to hit on the HIIDE system.”

Hilt pauses and then adds, “Pictures. Do not be taking pictures of friggin’ body parts. You’ll get in a lot of trouble if you try to take pictures of body parts home. We got really lucky. Stay vigilant.”

The soldiers pull on rubber gloves and go outside and begin walking slowly over the gravel, looking for pieces of the bomber. One soldier scrapes up a chunk of flesh with a shovel.

“Mmm, pancakes,” he says. “Why the fuck couldn’t they have used a car bomb? I don’t mind cleaning up after car bombs. Everything’s burned up.”

They dump the body parts in a clear plastic garbage bag. The bomber’s legs are still there near the gate, intact from the knee down. His legs are hairy. He was wearing white high-tops with a yellow stripe. The scalp is on the ground next to a Hesco barrier, a blood-wet mop of black hair.

Staff Sergeant Daniel Smith spots a blackened finger hanging off the concertina wire, and Sergeant Aaron Smelley, who’s in charge of identification, takes it and places it on the portable HIIDE machine and presses hard to get a scan. After a few tries, he gets a reading, but the fingerprint doesn’t match any known terrorist in the database. Smelley carries these memories with him, like last month, when they had to pile the bodies of seven dead insurgents into a truck. The insurgents had been killed by an attack helicopter. The troops take pictures. There’s one of Smelley kneeling down over a body. The face of the body is pale. There’s a bloodstain behind the head, making the grass red. Smelley takes the picture home with him—his friend texts me it years later. This is what fucked Smelley up, he writes in the text.

The Afghan police bury the leftover body parts a few hundred meters away from the base in a small cemetery. They place a pile of rocks on top to mark the grave, then lay the bomber’s yellow-striped high-tops next to the rocks. This is shrugged off as some kind of Muslim tradition, but who knows. Later that afternoon, two Afghan men from one of the nearby villages come to look at the gravesite. As they start to walk away, one of them turns back, picks up the high-tops, and takes them for himself.

That night, wild dogs bark and fight over the bits of flesh that flew so far from the base they were missed during the cleanup. The soldiers are under orders to kill the dogs.

I called room service at the Palm at four thirty
A.M
. I ordered a pack of Marlboro Reds, whole-grain cereal, a grapefruit, eggs, a bread basket, and
an iced coffee. I turned off most of the lights and I turned on the television. I found a music channel, some version of MTV, and I turned up the volume. Lady Gaga’s song “Telephone” came on.

Two hours later, I stumbled through airport security back at DXB. I looked up at the departures monitor. The monitor listed names of unfamiliar capitals, places where slim guidebooks devoted a warning to something called “civil unrest.” Mashhad, Dhaka, Shiraz, Erbil, Kabul, Baghdad, Bishkek, Kandahar, Karachi, Khartoum… I found the Kabul flight leaving at noon. The airport lounge was filled with mostly Americans and Europeans. The smaller smoking lounge, just outside the gate, overflowed, cigarette fumes escaping from the disgusting Plexiglas cell. The Americans lined up at the desk with Harley-Davidson jackets, North Face fleeces, military-issued rucksacks in digital green camouflage or tan, mustaches and tattoos and buzz cuts, a few with a U.S.-issue government ID hanging around their necks in canvas badge holders with inscriptions like O
PERATION
E
NDURING
F
REEDOM
and U.S. E
MBASSY
B
AGHDAD
. The Europeans wore suits and skinny jeans. The Afghans, too, had a few seats on the flight.

 1950–2010, ALGIERS, SAIGON, WASHINGTON, DC, BAGHDAD, AND KABUL

In the mid-1950s, a thirty-seven-year-old French officer named David Galula spends two years fighting rebels in Algeria. The rebels are trying to overthrow the colonial government that has ruled the country since the 1840s. The French will lose to the rebels in 1962.

Galula learns a few valuable lessons, though: that Arabs have a “notorious inability to organize,” an observation which he apologizes for (“I sound no doubt terribly colonialist, but it’s a fact”); that there isn’t a good doctrine for him to follow to fight the insurgents; and, by the time the French get around to figuring out how to fight them, the war has already been lost. (“Too little too late,” he’ll write. “France was always several steps behind the demands of the situation on the military front.”) He writes two books about his experience, one called
Pacification in Algeria, 1956–1958
, written in 1962, and another called
Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice
, written in 1964.

If America hadn’t entered Vietnam, Galula’s work would have been left in the dustbin of history. Galula is part of the school of French military officers associated with
guerre revolutionnaire.
The school’s ideas are
completely discredited in France. Losing three consecutive wars will do that to the military class: getting steamrolled in World War II, then getting decimated at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam, and, finally, losing Algeria in a massively humiliating defeat, ending with the exodus of one million Frenchmen from North Africa.

Rather than accepting defeat, Galula’s contemporaries in the military blame the French government for wimping out. A group of French officers form a secret terrorist organization, called the Organisation de l’Armée Secrète, or OAS, which is linked to a number of fascist groups, like Franco’s Falangists in Spain. An OAS sympathizer tries to assassinate French president Charles de Gaulle and fails. The fascists in OAS promote the same kinds of theories Galula likes to write about. They’re also implicated in the brutal torture regime France conducted in Algiers, which makes their counterinsurgency ideas “tainted,” according to one writer.

Unable to find work in France, the French counterinsurgency gang discovers a receptive audience in America. Under President John Kennedy—concerned with figuring out ways to counter communist revolutions—the United States foreign policy and military establishment catches their first bout of counterinsurgency fever. From 1960 to 1963, there’s an “explosion of interest” in COIN, writes Ann Marlowe, an analyst who’s written the most definitive account of Galula’s life. In 1960, Galula attends the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia. In 1962, Vietnam War architect General William Westmoreland gets him a research position at Harvard, where he becomes friends with Henry Kissinger. Galula lasts a year in Cambridge before another American counterinsurgency expert—General Edward Lansdale, a man darkly parodied in Graham Greene’s novel
The Quiet American
—tries to help him get a job at Mobil Oil company. Galula’s career never quite takes off in Washington, though there’s evidence of his thinking in some of the Vietnam War’s biggest debacles and boondoggles, including the Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program (CORDS;
his book
Pacification in Algeria
will be cited in a previously classified USAID study laying out the principles for the program) and the controversial Phoenix Program, which assassinates more than twenty thousand suspected Vietcong sympathizers. (One of the American minds behind the Phoenix operation, Nelson Brickham, would carry Galula’s other book around Vietnam, pushing it on his friends.) Galula returns to Paris in 1964.

Over the next eight years, the United States military adopts a variety of counterinsurgency tactics in Vietnam, such as physically separating the local population from the insurgency in the strategic hamlet program, which required the forcible removal of peasants from their villages. After leaving over three million Vietnamese dead and 58,195 American soldiers killed, the United States withdraws from Southeast Asia, failing to accomplish its goals of defeating the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. After the war ends, counterinsurgency becomes anathema in American military circles. The backlash, according to historian Andrew Birtle, was due to the fact that COIN had been “overblown and oversold.” In 1984, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger pens what is seen as official repudiation of the U.S. strategy in Vietnam. The doctrine states the U.S. should only get involved in conflicts with limited engagements, clear exit strategies, and use overwhelming force. A decade later, Weinberger’s policy is updated and enshrined by General Colin Powell—himself a Vietnam veteran—in what becomes known as the Powell Doctrine.