Non-Sequitorial Afghanistan
Junger reports on paratroopers plugging a gap in Afghanistan. Vanity Fair:
Little gouts of dirt erupting from the ground. The workman-like hammering of a heavy machine gun. A soldier named Miguel Gutierrez is down.
“up on the fuckin’ ridge!”
“how many rounds you got?”
“he’s in the draw!”
Everyone is yelling, but I hear only the parts between the bursts of gunfire. The .50-caliber is laboring away inside the bunker and Angel Toves is taking fire from the east and trying to unjam his machine gun and spent shells are vomiting in a golden arc out of another machine gun to my left. We’re getting hit from the east and the south and the west, and the guy to our west is putting rounds straight into the compound. I duck into the bunker, where Sergeant Mark Patterson is calling grid points into the radio and the platoon medic—the one who replaced Restrepo—is hunched over Gutierrez. Gutierrez was on top of a hesco when we got hit and he jumped off and no one knows if he took a bullet or just broke his leg. Three men dragged him into the bunker under fire while Teodoro Buno hit the ridge with a shoulder-fired rocket and now he’s lying on a cot, groaning, with his pant leg slit up to his knee.
“Guttie’s fuckin’ hit, dude,” I hear Mark Solowski say to Jones, deeper in the bunker. There’s a momentary pause in the firing so Rice can figure out what’s going on, and the men are talking low enough that Guttie can’t hear. I ask Jones what happened.
“We just got fuckin’ rocked,” Jones says.
The most immediate threat is a grenade attack from the draw, and someone has to make sure that whoever is down there is killed or pushed back before he gets any closer. That means leaving the cover of the outpost and shooting—completely exposed—from the lip of the draw. Rice moves to the gap in the hescos and steps into the open and unloads several long bursts of gunfire and then steps back and calls for 203s, which are grenades shot from an M16-attached launcher. Steve Kim sprints to the bunker and grabs a rack of 203s and a weapon and sprints back and hands them to Rice. Bravery comes in many forms, and in this case it’s a function of Rice’s concern for his men, who in turn act bravely out of concern for him and one another. It’s a self-sustaining loop that works so well that officers occasionally have to remind their men to take cover during firefights. The rounds snapping in over the sandbags can become an abstraction to men who have been too well drilled in the larger, violent choreography of a firefight.
Rice was once reprimanded for smoking during a firefight. He’s not smoking now, but he might as well be. He walks into the open like he’s in his bathrobe going out to get the morning paper and pumps several rounds into the draw and then steps back to cover. He’s aiming close, the detonation coming almost immediately after the shot, and, after he’s finished, retreats to the bunker to check on Guttie.
Somewhat non-sequitorial political asides include Junger’s brief, unelaborate but pessimistic assessment of Afghanistan and a subsequently KIA paratrooper’s GOP-Obama shift. Also, significantly, what I’d consider anecdotal evidence of Afghanistan’s best hope. The common sense of people very tired of war and interested in what you can do for them:
American forces are far more sensitive to humanitarian concerns than the Russians were—and far more welcomed—but they still make awful mistakes. In June, jumpy American soldiers in Korengal shot into a truck full of young men who had refused to stop at a local checkpoint, killing several. The soldiers said they thought they were about to be attacked; the survivors said they had been confused about what to do. Both sides were probably telling the truth.
Faced with the prospect of losing the tenuous support that American forces had earned in the northern half of the valley, the battalion commander arranged to address community leaders in person after the accident. Standing in the shade of some trees by the banks of the Pech River last June, Colonel William Ostlund explained that the deaths were the result of a tragic mistake and that he would do everything in his power to make it right. That included financial compensation for the grieving families. After several indignant speeches by various elders, one very old man stood up and spoke to the villagers around him.
“The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive.”
It was probably no coincidence that the site chosen for this meeting was the foot of a steel bridge that the Americans had just built over the fast, violent Pech. According to Colonel Ostlund, there was a possibility that the Taliban had paid the driver of the truck to not stop at the checkpoint when ordered to. By the colonel’s reasoning, the Taliban would win a strategic victory no matter what: either they would find out how close they could get a truck bomb to an American checkpoint, or there would be civilian casualties that they could exploit.
Interesting that the Koran points this guy to the Americans, possibly with the recognition that Koran-thumping Taliban offer nothing but death. And torture.
Topics: Afghanistan, military
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 10:14 am on Wednesday, December 26, 2007
2 Responses to “Non-Sequitorial Afghanistan”
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December 26th, 2007 at 11:37 am
I thought Afghanistan was the one we could all set aside our domestic political differences and get behind. Guess not.
And the “Brutal Afghan winter” of lefty journalistic quagmire lore is what, 6 years overdue? As I recall, the NYT had Afghanistan forecast as the Lost Battalion, the Bulge and Chosin all rolled into one big Kwanzaa prezzie for America haters.
Thank heavens for global warming, eh?
December 26th, 2007 at 3:03 pm
Non-sequitors aside, Junger’s a great reporter and journalist and I am real thankful for his look (and that of his photographer’s) at our guys in Afghanistan. (and of course thankful for them mainly). We need more reporting like this - clearly the goodness of our men comes through here perfectly. Junger talks about how his stereotypical view of the soldiers is shattered - sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the case with a lot of folks on the left. It’s hard to not to feel an overwhelming sense of pride in our fighting men after reading this. I hope we can help them better.