The War I Always Wanted (4 page)

We walked back outside, almost bumping into another company's commander. When he recognized us, he stopped and asked if we'd heard the news yet. I said, “No, what?”

“Your streak of days with nothing to do but lift weights and jerk off,” he said, “is over.”

It turned out that the 101st and 10th Mountain soldiers had been inserted into the mountains below al Qaeda positions, allowing the defenders to fire on them from above. Then it had gotten worse when an air force AC-130 shot up the main column of attacking Afghans and Green Berets, causing the Afghans to quit the fight.

Only then, with the operation unraveling, did we get the call in Jacobabad.

We received AT4s, claymore mines, and hand grenades. When I was handed my grenades, it occurred to me that I hadn't held one since I'd been in infantry school nine months earlier.

I held the first one up, inspecting the pin and the spoon. The steel sphere was cold in the night air and, as usual, heavier than it looked. It reminded me of a bloated egg sac, mature and ready to burst at any second. I tore off a piece of tape and wrapped it around the pin and spoon of the grenade. There
was no point in taking chances. Accidentally getting one stuck on some equipment and having it explode on the airplane would have made for a less-than-optimal start. The guys with claymores went diligently through the carrying cases in which they came, checking to make sure each one had the mine, the wire, the clacker, and the test kit. While I was tying down all my equipment inside my ruck, I listened to the din of voices in the night air. I heard somebody laughing. Then, over the sounds of packing and anxious conversation, I heard Collins' voice: “They shouldn't have told
me
that in basic training,” he said, “because
I
have a gun. And I
will
travel.” There was some more laughing. They were cheerful at least.

After the weapons had been issued, guys started putting together packages of stuff to mail home. It was everything you wanted to keep, but didn't have room for in Afghanistan. I threw one together that consisted of an old MRE box filled with all the mail I'd received, a letter to my parents, and some books I'd read. I gave the box to a soldier we were leaving behind along with a twenty-dollar bill and told him to keep the change.

I lay shivering on my cot late that night, staring up at the ceiling of the hardened aircraft hangar in which we lived. I had no idea who we were really going after in Afghanistan. Thus far they were only being vaguely described as “terrorists.” I did know, however, that if these were the same people who had helped launch the September 11 attacks, they were serious about their business. Because those people, whoever they were—their hatred had been pure. That much I knew. I had tried to dismiss them as insane, but in the end, couldn't talk myself into it. And that was the disturbing part. They weren't
insane. Insane people couldn't have pulled off an operation like that. These were intelligent, reasoning beings so consumed by the most crystallized strain of hatred that they were willing to kill themselves along with other men, women, children, Muslims and non-Muslims whom they'd never met. I contemplated what would make a person become like that. And if this was indeed the same group of people, I wondered how they would react to those who weren't unarmed airline passengers or unsuspecting high-rise office workers. I wondered how deep this hatred went.

For the second time in four months we were headed for the unknown. My mind drifted to something I'd heard one of my soldiers say earlier in the day: “What's that, Lassie? The Rakkasans are coming?” As I lay there on the creaking cot, I imagined a cave.
Inside are two terrorists. One is wearing a turban; the other wears a field jacket and carries a radio in his right hand. They are talking to each other. All of a sudden Lassie walks in the entrance of the cave and stops in front of them. They stop talking. Lassie barks . . . twice. The terrorists look at each other and say something in Arabic. I see subtitles in English. They say, “What's that, Lassie? The Rakkasans are coming?”
Under the cover of my thin poncho, I finally fell asleep.

There are only a few windows on a C-130, and even those are just small holes in the fuselage about eight inches in diameter. There was one near me and, if I craned my neck just the right way, I could see out. Through this tiny porthole I was able to view the vast stretches of Pakistan's western desert. Almost immediately after takeoff, the surface of the earth below us began to crinkle and rise up, in ridge after ridge of rugged
mountains. It was not only a spectacle of enormousness, but also one of uninhabitable desolation for as far as the eye could see. There were no roads; there were no buildings; there was nothing to suggest people had even
been
to this part of the world. For nearly two hours I stared down, mesmerized, at the alien landscape. At some point, as we flew north over this seemingly boundless stretch of wasteland, we crossed into Afghanistan.

4
 
Bagram, Afghanistan

March 2002

My first thought was:
Those can't be real
.

Some several hundred million years ago, the Indian subcontinent started its slow geologic crash into Asia. The wreckage is spectacular—an arc of torn, folded, and cantilevered stone that roughly tracks the border of northern India and Pakistan. Its eastern leg is the higher and better-known Himalayan Range, stretching across India, Nepal, and China. The western leg, which reaches across India, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, is known as the Hindu Kush.

In the middle is a small town on the Shomali Plain with a long, Soviet-built runway. Fought over by the Russians and the mujahideen, the Tajiks, the Taliban, and the Americans, the battle-scarred town is surrounded on three sides by these geologic cathedrals that rise nearly twenty thousand feet.

The first thing I was told when I stepped off the plane in Bagram was, “Don't step off the concrete. Mines everywhere.”
A generation of fighting in and around the airfield had left it littered with every conceivable kind of unexploded ordnance. Wandering the demined areas, I found myself in a warped Wild West. Tents bristling with antennae had cropped up amidst shattered mud-brick buildings, and bearded Special Forces soldiers with laser range finders and satellite phones milled about with Afghans who had drifted off the pages of a nineteenth-century storybook.

I was standing beside my ruck when a good friend of mine on the battalion staff approached me. I could tell by the look on his face that things weren't going well.

He had been watching live footage of the battle, beamed directly from a Predator drone. He told me that seven hours earlier a combination of army rangers and Navy SEALs had attempted to insert a team onto the mountain that dominated the eastern side of the Shah-e-Kot Valley. The Afghan name for the twelve-thousand-foot peak was Takhur Gar; the U.S. Army had dubbed it Objective Ginger. They had gone in to establish an observation post on the high ground in order to regain flagging momentum. Just like the 101st and 10th Mountain before them, they landed in a hornet's nest of al Qaeda fighters. A Navy SEAL fell out of his helicopter and they were trying to get him back. We didn't know that he had already been executed.

“Do you know how lucky you are to be able to lead an infantry platoon into a fight like this?” my friend asked. “I would trade places with you in a heartbeat.” He was trying to be upbeat about the whole thing.

Lucky is when you win the lottery. This was not lucky. I knew he was trying to help, but for the first time, I was starting
to stress. So I just said with a wry smile, “Speak for yourself, dude.” What I wanted to say was, “You're not going in. It looks different from this angle.”

I left Sergeant Collins with the platoon and began to meander about with Sam Edwards and our boss, Captain Rob K. All we knew was that a battle to which we had been invited was raging, and we were late. Walking aimlessly among tents and buildings, we came to the realization that everyone with information was either on a radio, glued to a television screen, or fighting in the valley itself. Eventually we stumbled into a green tent with a sign outside that said in block letters: SECRET. Inside, we found a scale model of the operational area.

The sand table (as they're called) displayed two prominent ridges on either side of a wide valley. The western ridge, the smaller of the two, was marked “The Whale;” the valley, “Shah-e-Kot.” The eastern ridge had placards on a number of spots. Each label was a separate objective area, and they all had women's names. I knew of “Ginger,” the looming anchor of the eastern ridge, but now, as I scanned the model from north to south, I saw “Amy,” “Betty,” “Cindy,” Diane,” “Eve,” and “Heather.”

Captain K. thrust at Sam and me two crappy, photocopied maps he'd received from somebody. He also gave us each a transparent overlay and told us to start copying the objectives from a large map hung on the wall of the tent. Another glance at the map I held in my hand, and I knew it was a waste of time. It was unreadable and using it wouldn't have made any sense at all. But Captain K., who had only assumed command of Bravo Company a month earlier, was intent on going through the motions.

Now, upon being commissioned as an officer all the way through my army schooling, I always had this irrational fear of being shot in the back in combat by one of my own guys. It shaped the way I tried to lead. I always took the attitude that my men didn't work for me, but that I worked for them. My
job
was to provide for
them
, to make sure they received proper training; that they had the right equipment; that they knew what to do in a firefight; that they had good food to eat; that they were safe; that they could call home; that their families were taken care of. I reasoned that if I concentrated on those things, they would take care of the hard stuff—closing with and destroying the enemy, thereby allowing all of us to go home in one piece.

I tried not to be the guy who thinks he's smarter than his men just because he went to college. Or the boor who gets off on being “in charge.” Or the glory hunter who thinks his men exist for the sole purpose of helping him to propel his career. I thought it was more important to impress the guys below me than those above me. Hearing my commander say, “Friedman is a good officer who really keeps his men in line,” is nice. But I would much prefer to overhear one of my privates say, “You know, Lieutenant Friedman sure is goofy, but I'd follow him anywhere. You know
he'd
take care of us.”

That idea of being scorned by forty dedicated infantrymen kept me awake at night. This, however, was not something that seemed to concern our new commander.

Captain K. was a big, serious-looking guy with a permanent scowl on his face. He accused me in his office once of being “too happy-go-lucky.” Captain K. was long on infantry tactics, but short on people skills. And he always excused his inability to communicate
with others by calling it “tough love.” The way I saw it, his tough love was based out of the insecurity that people wouldn't think he was tough
enough
. Whereas most soldiers kept pictures of their wives and girlfriends inside their helmets, the single Captain K. kept his dog's collar in a zip lock bag. More commando than ladies' man, I guess he thought that affection for a carnivorous animal, bred for hunting with fangs and claws, would dissuade anyone from questioning why he was single.

Once, after eye surgery (the irritatingly painful photorefractive keratectomy, or PRK), I was eating breakfast across the table from him at the chow hall on Fort Campbell. The doctor had ordered me not to run or work out for my first full week back at work after the surgery. My medical profile stated that the most I could do was to “walk at own pace and distance.” Still doped up on Percocet, that was about all I could manage anyway. Over scrambled eggs, Captain K. asked me what I'd done for PT that morning. Since we usually scoffed at such medical profiles, especially those with the kinds of instructions I'd received, I responded, half-jokingly, that I'd walked at my own pace and distance. Captain K. had authorized the surgery, so I assumed he'd get it.