The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan (40 page)

My phones kept ringing. It was triggering some strange kind of post-traumatic stress. I was in a war zone. I was not in a comfortable place. I felt like I had when I was fifteen and had eaten two tabs of acid and a bag of mushrooms at a warehouse in downtown Montreal. As the skyline had started to collapse, I put on Pink Floyd’s
Dark Side of the Moon
, which, in retrospect, had been a mistake.

I was, in the parlance of the times, about to be in the middle of a “media firestorm.”

I got another text. McChrystal had issued an apology.

They weren’t denying it—which would have been difficult to do anyway because of the tape recordings and notes I had of the interviews. And they weren’t personally attacking me yet, either. By apologizing, they had confirmed the validity of the story. I was relieved.

I had to calm down. This was me doing my job. In a media firestorm, I knew I needed to be clearheaded and rational, yet the excitement and adrenaline and fatigue conspired to put me at my least clearheaded and rational. The bigger the wave a story makes, the bigger the receding tide of bullshit is likely to be. McChrystal apologized and he’d been ordered back to Washington, so the media hadn’t gotten around to training its fire on me yet.

At around midnight, I hung up the phone after another interview. I’d been on the phone for almost ten hours straight, talking.

Lucian pulled me aside. “Mike, earlier, you sounded good. That time, not so much.”

I needed to get out of Kandahar. I kept getting warnings from friends and other colleagues in the media: It’s not safe for you there. Someone might try to take you out or attack you. They meant Americans. I thought the fears were overblown, but it added to a sense of insecurity in an already insecure place.

At three
A.M.
, one of the pilots came over to pick Lucian and me up. I drank a Red Bull to stay awake. We picked up the other pilots from their barracks across town and piled into the van.

Captain Stephen Irving got into the van last. He was leading the mission. The temperature had dropped to a bearable 75 degrees. Floodlights and kicked-up dust lent the black sky an eerie pinkish tint, giving the flattened air base the feel of an empty fairground after the carnies have cleared out. The hum of diesel generators and the overflight of jets were a constant background noise.

We crawled along the road. There was a ten-mile-per-hour speed limit on base, and it was well enforced.

I found a certain kind of peace: Focus on the story with the Kiowa pilots.

“You’ll get a ticket if you don’t have your civilian driver’s license from the states on your person,” said Chief Warrant Officer Joshua Price, Irving’s copilot.

“Oh shit, I forgot my PT belt, too. I wonder if they’re going to shoot me,” another pilot chimed in. He was talking about the bright orange or yellow reflective belts that U.S. troops are required to wear on base so they don’t get hit by vehicles. Like the speed limit, it was one of those strange rules in a war zone—rockets might be landing every night, a Taliban dude with an RPG might be preparing, right now, to blow your tail rotor off, but you can’t leave home without a bright orange reflector belt.

“If we get pulled over, you should know we’re prepared to throw you under the bus,” Officer Price told the pilot who’d forgotten his belt. Price
was from Alabama and spoke in an expansive southern drawl. “We should make it our mission in Banshee troop to get so many tickets they run out of fucking paper.”

The van arrived at Banshee troop headquarters. There was a plywood porch with a leather couch and a flat-screen television, which opened up into a briefing room with a large table and maps. A line of the pilots’ old-school cavalry hats—worn with dress uniforms, like what Robert Duvall wears in
Apocalypse Now
—were hung up along the top of the wall, complete with sets of honorary silver and gold spurs.

“You check out your M4 already?” Irving asked his copilot, looking in the small armory, where the pilots hung their rifles and pistols.

“Got it,” said Price, picking up the rifle. “If you ain’t Cav, you ain’t shit,” he said under his breath, the unofficial motto of the unit.

Before the briefings started, the pilots dropped off their gear at their helicopters. The helicopter runway had been built out in recent months, part of an $850 million expansion, taking over land that used to be an old Soviet minefield.

Price and Irving were weighed down by almost thirty pounds of gear: rifle, pistol, ammo, water, night vision goggles, a med kit, PowerBars, body armor, binoculars, and flight helmet. Price had a pair of gloves, the same kind NASCAR drivers used, made by Southwest Motorsports.

They started walking out to their bird.

Irving, a father of two, thirty-four years old. There was a reason he’d been chosen to lead the mission that the reporter and photographer were on. He didn’t give any hint of that wild-man culture that Kiowa pilots were known for. What’d he think about the poker game the warrant officers were playing the other night? I don’t know anything about that, he told me. (Gambling is against the rules.) How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Ten hours, he said, because that’s more or less what the regulations say he has to sleep, even though I find it hard to believe. He has a crew cut and he’s on his third combat tour—one in Iraq, two in Afghanistan. When I asked him to tell me a war story, something hairy, something
nuts, he did—but it was all very technical, methodical, on-message. He doesn’t even swear, which is an incredible feat in this environment where
fuck
s and
shit
s and
motherfucking cocksucker
s pass for transitional verbs.

They got to the helicopter they were flying. Price nicknamed it Gertrude.

The preflight ritual: Irving cocked his pistol and put it in his side holster. They loaded up their M4s, which were strapped to the dash—not as a last resort in case they wreck, but loaded up with tracers so they could get into rifle range, lean out the door, take aim, and shoot. (“Some of these guys have confirmed kills just shooting the M4 out the aircraft,” a helicopter mechanic told me.)

Irving explained that pilots gauge enemy and friendly areas by the reaction of the Afghans they fly over. Friendlies wave and smile. Enemies throw rocks and show the bottoms of the soles of their feet, an insult in the Muslim world.

Price and Irving wrapped up the preflight check.

On the way back for the briefing, Price and Irving talked about an attack last week on a nearby American base. The Kiowas were called in to prevent the base from being overrun.

“They attacked the American base, ran a SVBIED [a car bomb, or Suicide Vehicle–Borne Improvised Explosive Device] through the wall, and tried to send two insurgents through the breach with suicide bombs,” Irving said. “But as soon as Josh flew overhead—”

“The bomber paused and looked up. We saw a big explosion. A pink mist,” said Price. The suicide bomber had prematurely exploded, killing only himself.

We passed through the tactical operations center on the way to the first briefing. There were two clocks on the wall. One had a sign underneath that said C
LARKSVEGAS
, set to the local time of their sleepy Tennessee hometown, Clarksville. The other clock next to it had a sign that said H
ELL
. It was set to our local time in Kandahar. It was five
A.M
.

At 0645, Lieutenant Colonel Hank Taylor arrived at Banshee troop
headquarters. He stood in front of a map of the area and explained the mission for today: Two Kiowas would go out and scout for improvised explosive devices along Highway One, and then be on call in case any American or Afghan troops came in contact. Lucian and I were going to be with Taylor in a Blackhawk, following along to be able to observe the Kiowas on their mission. Another Blackhawk was following with what was essentially a well-armed search-and-rescue team inside.

Taylor was about six feet five, thick. He’s what folks in the military call a hard charger.

“Do your normal business,” he told the eight pilots gathered in the room. “Be safe. This is not just a flight from Bagram or KAF. This is a combat zone out there, and there are people trying to shoot us down every day.”

Taylor left and passed the brief over to Irving to get into the specifics. The briefing lasted thirty minutes. Irving compressed years of information and training into a language almost indecipherable to an outsider.

“Twenty-three June, scouts weapons, two, UH-60, 0800 to 1300, QRF at the back end. Risk assessment? You signed? Maps? Primarily one change, call sign Hard Luck Two-Three-One. I have one of the new pilot packs, with new calls signs, briefs, pod locations. Anybody tired? No. TAC charge. No change to that. No change to the EGI bridges, weight point loads, current as two-zero June. NVGS, should have them, spare batters. Camera. PCI on the camera. Data card, battery. Task work, lead scout aircraft nine-nine-six parked on foxtrot one long knife one-two. Config is rocket-rocket. Chuck’s in the right seat, Quinn’s is the left seat. We’re going to match laser codes. One-one-one-seven. Load one is six-three. Alternates one-one. Load two is one-zero-zero-two. Trail Kiowa zero-two-one parked on alpha two long knife two-two. Got fifty cal and rocket. Josh is right seat. I’ll be in left seat. Zero-one-five on road two. Mr. Bailey, your configuration today?”

Lucian and the pilots went to go get breakfast. I passed out on the couch on the porch, trying to catch another hour of sleep.

I woke up. The helicopters were ready. Time to fly.

I climbed into a Blackhawk, sitting across from Taylor. Next to me sat the unit’s intelligence officer. I was glad they were going to take us up, but I didn’t expect much. Originally, I’d wanted to go up in the actual Kiowa, but I wasn’t allowed to for safety reasons. They wanted two people who knew how to pilot in the craft at all times. And, with the growing heat of the McChrystal story, it started to look like this assignment might be a total bust.

All of that went out of my mind as the helicopters took off.

Here we go.

The Kiowas flew low along Highway One, checking out a few places along the way where they believed insurgents might be placing possible IEDs. We were a few hundred feet above the birds, watching as they dropped up and down, zipping above telephone poles, following the road, every few minutes hovering to get a closer look at a car or a gathering of people. The doors to the Blackhawk were open, plastering our faces with wind. The Kiowas peeled off to the east, swooping over the red desert, endless blood-colored dunes and steep cliffs. We headed away from the villages, into the mountains, so the Kiowas could make sure their weapons were working. They took turns letting off rounds into the craggy mountainside: rockets and fifty caliber machine guns.

We passed over the city of Kandahar. “It’s a bustling city,” Taylor said. “When I was first here a few years ago, the place was dead. Now the industry is booming.”

We’d been flying around for about an hour and nothing had happened. I was hot and tired. I was beginning to think I was screwed. This story wasn’t going to happen, and with the way the things were playing out with McChrystal, I wondered how long it would be until reporting on Kandahar Airfield became impossible. I needed to see combat. I needed to see explosions. I needed to get close to the fighting. I needed to wrap this shit up and get the hell out of southern Afghanistan.

It was the twisted sickness of the war junky: There I was, waiting to witness death and destruction.

I started to fall asleep, doze off. Thinking about how I should get back to Kabul. Thinking about the e-mails I needed to return and the phone call I needed to make to Eric at
Rolling Stone
. I was starting to think that this flight was just a dog and pony show, that I was being kept away from the fighting and it was a total waste of time. I started worrying that my tape recorder and phone were going to fly out the door. (It was a strange fear I always had on helicopters—not about crashes or heat-seeking rockets, but that my laptop or notebook would fall out of the open door.) I searched for the best pocket to store my notebook so it didn’t drop out if I fell asleep. I was thinking about keeping up to date with what was happening. Had McChrystal made it back to Washington? Had anyone else released any statements? What was the White House going to say…

The Kiowa helicopters buzzed low in the distance. The
thwump
of the Blackhawk blades lulled me to sleep.

My eyes closed. My head started to bob up and down.

“Troops in contact,” Taylor yelled over the radio.

I woke up. Like a true professional, I dropped my pen. It rolled back under the Blackhawk seat. The soldier next to me handed me a new pen.

Along Highway One, I saw a convoy of American MRAPs. They’d been ambushed. Price and Irving, flying the tail helicopter, started to head in that direction. They were five minutes away from the firefight. Information about the enemy came in over the radio: They were heavily armed, with heavy machine guns and RPGs.

Already Irving was thinking tactically, he would tell me later. What was the best way to arrive without giving his position away to the enemy (usually flying very low, then popping up at the last second)? Because once the Kiowas showed up, the insurgents often fled. They needed to retain the element of surprise. I watched Irving’s Kiowa shoot low across the ground.