[R-G] Battle Company Is Out There

[Anthony Fenton]

February 24, 2008
Battle Company Is Out There
By ELIZABETH RUBIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/24/magazine/24afghanistan-t.html? 
_r=1&oref=slogin&ref=world&pagewanted=print

Correction Appended

WE TUMBLED OUT of two Black Hawks onto a shrub-dusted mountainside.  
It was a windy, cold October evening. A half-moon illuminated the  
tall pines and peaks. Through night-vision goggles the soldiers and  
landscape glowed in a blurry green-and-white static. Just across the  
valley, lights flickered from a few homes nestled in the terraced  
farmlands of Yaka China, a notorious village in the Korengal River  
valley in Afghanistan’s northeastern province of Kunar. Yaka China  
was just a few villages south and around a bend in the river from the  
Americans’ small mountain outposts, but the area’s reputation among  
the soldiers was mythic. It was a known safe haven for insurgents.  
American troops have tended to avoid the place since a nasty fight a  
year or so earlier. And as Halloween approached, the soldiers I was  
with, under the command of 26-year-old Capt. Dan Kearney, were  
predicting their own Yaka China doom.

The Korengal Valley is a lonely outpost of regress: most of the  
valley’s people practice Wahhabism, a more rigid variety of Islam  
than that followed by most Afghans, and about half of the fighters  
confronting the U.S. there are homegrown. The rest are Arabs,  
Pakistanis, Chechens, Uzbeks; the area is close to Pakistan’s  
frontier regions where Osama bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other  
Al Qaeda figures are often said to be hiding out. The Korengal  
fighters are fierce, know the terrain and watch the Americans’ every  
move. On their hand-held radios, the old jihadis call the Americans  
“monkeys,” “infidels,” ‘’bastards” and “the kids.” It’s psychological  
warfare; they know the Americans monitor their radio chatter.

As far as “the kids” are concerned, the insurgents are ghosts — so  
the soldiers’ tactics often come down to using themselves as bait.  
The insurgents specialize in ambushes, harassing fire and hit-and-run  
attacks. NATO’s military advantage in such a war is air power. The  
soldiers don’t hesitate to call in Big Daddy (who, in today’s  
military, often flies in with the voice of a female pilot). But while  
these flying war machines are saviors to the soldiers, they cannot  
distinguish between insurgents and civilians.

I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our  
technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of  
September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was  
causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths — 350 by the  
coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents. The sheer tonnage of  
metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds  
between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million  
in all of 2006.

After a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper  
problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American  
soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion.  
Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I  
spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar  
province alongside soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions  
almost every day — decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and  
of civilians.

Subduing the Valley

OVER THE LAST two years, the Americans have steadily increased their  
presence in Kunar province, fanning out to the small platoon-size  
outposts that have become the signature of the new counterinsurgency  
doctrine in both Afghanistan and Iraq. The Korengal Outpost,  
nicknamed the KOP, was built in April 2006 on the site of a former  
timber mill and motel. The soldiers of Battle Company of the 173rd  
Airborne Brigade Combat Team live there in dusty tents and little  
wooden huts. They now have hot food and a small chow tent with an  
Internet linkup and a few phones for calling home. But the place was  
protected by not much more than concertina wire and sentries. Nearly  
every time I arrived at the KOP our helicopter was greeted by sniper  
fire or the dushka — a Russian-made antiaircraft gun.

Dan Kearney was essentially lord of the Korengal Valley. A self- 
described Georgia army brat, he grew up idolizing his warrior dad,  
Frank Kearney, and wanted to move in his father’s world of covert and  
overt operations. (His father is now a lieutenant general in Special  
Operations command.) Kearney often calls himself a dumb jock, playing  
the crass, loudmouthed tough guy with his soldiers. He had been in  
Iraq and told me he had gone emotionally dead there with all the  
dying and killing, and stayed that way until the birth of his son a  
year ago. His hardest day in Iraq was when a close friend, Rob Shaw,  
was severely wounded by an improvised explosive device that killed  
his first sergeant and a bunch of their friends — and the next thing  
he knew their colonel was asking Kearney to step in for Shaw and lead  
the company.

But as hard as Iraq was, he said, nothing was as tough as the  
Korengal. Unlike in Iraq, where the captains and lieutenants could  
let down their guard in a relatively safe, fortified operating base,  
swapping stories and ideas, here they had no one to talk to and were  
almost as vulnerable to enemy fire inside the wire as out. Last  
summer, insurgents stormed one of the bases in a nearby valley and  
wounded 16.

And unlike every other place I’ve been in Afghanistan — even the Pech  
River valley, just an hour’s drive away — the Korengal had no Afghan  
police or district leaders for the Americans to work with. The Afghan  
government, and Afghans down the valley, seemed to have washed their  
hands of the Korengalis. As Kearney put it to me one day at the KOP,  
the Korengal is like a tough Los Angeles neighborhood, “and we’re the  
L.A.P.D. kicking in the door, arresting guys, demanding information  
about the gangs, and slowly the people say, ‘No, we don’t know  
anything, because that guy in the gang, he’s with my sister, and that  
other guy, he’s my uncle’s cousin.’ Now we’ve angered them for so  
many years that they’ve decided: ‘I’m gonna stick with the A.C.M.’ ”  
— anticoalition militants — “ ‘who are my brothers and I’m not gonna  
rat them out.’ ”

So what exactly was his job out here? To subdue the valley. It’s a  
task the Marines had tried, and then the soldiers of the Army’s 10th  
Mountain Division — a task so bloody it seemed to drive the 10th  
Mountain’s soldiers to a kind of madness. Kearney’s soldiers told me  
they’d been spooked by the weird behavior of their predecessors last  
May: near the end of their tour, many would sit alone on the fire  
base talking to themselves. Privates disobeyed their sergeants, and  
squad leaders refused to step outside the wire to show the new boys  
the terrain. No one wanted to be shot in the last days of his tour.

Kearney kept his soldiers on a tight leash at first. Col. John  
Nicholson, a brigade commander with the 10th Mountain Division, had  
promised the Afghans he would not bomb their homes. When Kearney and  
the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team officially took over from the  
division’s 3rd Brigade Combat Team on June 5, they kept that promise.  
“My guys would tell me they didn’t know which houses they’re shooting  
from, and I’d tell them they can’t shoot back into the villages,”  
Kearney recalled. “They hated me.” The insurgents were testing the  
new captain, he suspected, by deliberately shooting from homes. On  
July 10, the Korengalis ambushed his soldiers from one house they  
often used — a three-story mansion on a fertile outcropping, with  
balconies overlooking the valley, that belonged to Haji Matin, a  
timber baron turned insurgent leader. It had been the scene of  
fighting in the past.

When Kearney’s moment of decision came, two of 2nd Platoon’s  
sergeants, Kevin Rice and Tanner Stichter, had been shot, and the  
fight was still going on. Kearney could see a woman and child in the  
house. “We saw people moving weapons around,” Kearney told me. “I  
tried everything. I fired mortars to the back side to get the kids to  
run out the front. I shot to the left, to the right. The Apache” — an  
attack helicopter — “got shot at and left. I kept asking for a bomb  
drop, but no one wanted to sign off on the collateral damage of  
dropping a bomb on a house.” Finally, he said, “We shot a javelin and  
a tow” — both armor-piercing missiles. “I didn’t get shot at from  
there for two months,” Kearney said. “I ended up killing that woman  
and that kid.”

Kearney could often sound cold-blooded, like when he’d march into the  
mess tent in shorts, improvising rap lyrics about killing bad guys.  
But then he’d switch to counselor, trying to salvage a soldier’s  
marriage, or he’d joke with a Korengali elder about arranging a  
marriage between his own infant son and the elder’s daughter to make  
peace. The performances steeled him against shouldering so much  
mortality. As he put it, “The only reason anyone’s listening to me in  
this valley right now is ’cause I’m dropping bombs on them.” Still,  
he wasn’t going to let himself shoot at houses every time his unit  
took fire: “I’d just create more people that hate me.”

A Blood Feud

IN LATE 2001, the B-52 symbolized, for many Afghans, liberation from  
Taliban rule. They wove images of the plane into their carpets. Urban  
legends sprang up about the B-52’s power, how the planes glided along  
unscathed, even as the Taliban barraged them with antiaircraft fire.  
Kabulis spread the story that the B-52s had dropped thousands of  
leaflets saying, “Hit us if you can!” — and afterward the Taliban  
didn’t waste their bullets on the B-52s.

But the jets that defeated the Taliban were wiping out innocent  
families as well. In July 2002, Special Forces in the mountains of  
Oruzgan thought they were destroying a high-value Taliban target, but  
instead they rocketed and bombed an engagement party. About 40  
Afghans were killed and nearly 100 were wounded.

Such mistakes have continued, though the causes can change. The  
insurgents regularly use civilians as shields, children as spotters  
and women as food suppliers. NATO killing civilians is great  
propaganda for the Taliban. At the same time, to Afghans with little  
technological sophistication, the scale and impersonality make the  
accidents seem intentional. Many are convinced the Americans are  
deliberately bombing them and even deliberately aiding a Taliban  
comeback. The reality is that bombs are only as accurate as the  
intelligence on the ground — and since 9/11, the U.S. and NATO have  
used air power as a substitute for ground troops.

By now, seven years of air strikes and civilian casualties,  
humiliating house searches and arbitrary detentions have pushed many  
families and tribes to revenge. The Americans then see every Afghan  
in those pockets of recalcitrance as an enemy. If you peel back the  
layers, however, there’s always a local political story at the root  
of the killing and dying. That original misunderstanding and  
grievance fertilizes the land for the Islamists. Whom do you want to  
side with: your brothers in God’s world or the infidel thieves?

In the case of the Korengal Valley, the story began about a century  
ago, when the tribesmen now known as Korengalis were kicked out of  
the province of Nuristan (immediately north of Kunar province) and  
settled in the Korengal, which was rich with timber forests and  
farmland. Over time they made an alliance with one branch of the  
large Safi tribe, which once dominated Kunar politics. But down the  
road along the Pech River valley, the rest of the Safis opposed the  
Korengalis.

As the Afghans tell the story, from the moment the Americans arrived  
in 2001, the Pech Valley timber lords and warlords had their ear.  
Early on, they led the Americans to drop bombs on the mansion of  
their biggest rival — Haji Matin. The air strikes killed several  
members of his family, according to local residents, and the  
Americans arrested others and sent them to the prison at Bagram Air  
Base. The Pech Valley fighters working alongside the Americans then  
pillaged the mansion. And that was that. Haji Matin, already deeply  
religious, became ideological and joined with Abu Ikhlas, a local  
Arab linked to the foreign jihadis.

By 2007, the Americans understood what happened. Last year, the  
governor of Nuristan even sat them down with the Korengali elders to  
try and mediate between the two sides. Nothing came of it. Kearney  
tried to dig deeper, sending e-mail messages to anthropologists and  
Afghan experts to get their guidance. He spent hours listening to  
Haji Zalwar Khan — who acted as the valley’s representative to the  
Americans and the government — talk about history and grievances.  
Haji Zalwar, a jihadi veteran of the anti-Soviet fight, bore the  
valley’s burden almost alone and had the grim demeanor to prove it.  
Kearney met as many villagers as possible to learn the names of all  
the elders and their families. But he inherited a blood feud between  
the Korengalis and the Americans that he hadn’t started, and he was  
being sucked into its logic.

“Serious P.T.S.D.”

LAST AUTUMN,, after five months of grueling foot patrols up and down  
the mountains, after fruitless encounters with elders who smiled in  
the morning and were host to insurgents in the evening and after  
losing friends to enemy fire, Captain Kearney’s men could relate to  
the sullen, jittery rage of their predecessors in the 10th Mountain  
Division. Many wondered what they were doing out there at all.

Kearney refused to entertain that thought. He would tell his  
visitors, whether generals or reconstruction teams, that his campaign  
plan was clear, if modest: “It’s World War II Pacific-island hopping,  
turning one village at a time.” Over five months, he had gained about  
400 yards of terrain. When some generals and colonels had flown in  
for a quick tour, and Kearney was showing them the lay of the land,  
one officer said to another, as Kearney later recalled it, “I don’t  
know why we’re even out here.” Another officer jumped in to talk up  
the logic of the operation. Kearney told me he thought: Sort your  
stuff out before you come out here. My boys are sucking it up and  
dying. . . . For besides being lord of the valley, he had another  
role to play — motivator, disciplinarian and confidant to his  
soldiers. “It’s like being in charge of a soap opera,” he told me. “I  
feel like Dr. Phil with guns.”

One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut  
with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage.  
He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks,  
the garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. “I hate this country!”  
he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. “He’s on  
medication,” Kearney said quietly to me.

Then another soldier walked by and shouted, “Hey, I’m with you, sir!”  
and Kearney said to me, “Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour.”  
Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. “Medicated,”  
Kearney said. “Last tour, if you didn’t give him information, he’d  
burn down your house. He killed so many people. He’s checked out.”

As I went to get some hot chocolate in the dining tent, the peaceful  
night was shattered by mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire banging  
and bursting around us. It was a coordinated attack on all the fire  
bases. It didn’t take long to understand why so many soldiers were  
taking antidepressants. The soldiers were on a 15-month tour that  
included just 18 days off. Many of them were “stop-lossed,” meaning  
their contracts were extended because the army is stretched so thin.  
You are not allowed to refuse these extensions. And they felt  
eclipsed by Iraq. As Sgt. Erick Gallardo put it: “We don’t get  
supplies, assets. We scrounge for everything and live a lot more  
rugged. But we know the war is here. We got unfinished business.”

For sanity, all they had was the medics’ tent, video games and movies  
— “Gladiator,” “Conan the Barbarian,” “Dogma,” Monty Python. Down the  
road in the Pech Valley, soldiers played cricket with Afghan kids and  
had organized boxing and soccer matches. Lt. Kareem Hernandez, a New  
Yorker running a base on the Pech River, regularly bantered over  
dinner with the Afghan police. Neighbors would come by with tips. But  
here in the Korengal, the soldiers were completely alienated from the  
local culture. One night while watching a scene from HBO’s “Rome” in  
which a Roman soldier tells a slave he wants to marry her, a soldier  
asked which century the story was set in. “First B.C. or A.D.,” said  
another soldier. The first shook his head: “And they’re still living  
like this 800 meters outside the wire.”

At the end of the summer, Kearney told his dad, “My boys are gonna go  
crazy out here.” The army sent a shrink, and Kearney got a wake-up  
call about his own leadership. He discovered that half his men  
thought he was playing Russian roulette with their lives and the  
other half thought he stuck too closely to the rules of engagement.  
“The moral compass of the army is the P.L. and the C.O.” — the  
platoon leader and the commanding officer, Kearney told me. “I told  
every one of my P.L.’s that they have to set that moral standard,  
that once you slip to the left, you can’t pull your guys back in.”

Operation Rock Avalanche

ON OCT. 19, Kearney and Battle Company were air assaulted into the  
insurgents’ backyard for a mission that many thought insane. It was  
called Rock Avalanche and would last about six days. One of its main  
targets was the village of Yaka China.

Kearney, being the good soldier, tried to pump up his boys with the  
promise that they would be going after insurgents who had killed  
their friends and whose grizzled faces were plastered on their bad- 
guy family-tree wall at the KOP. They would upset the guerrillas’  
safe haven and their transit routes from Pakistan. They would  
persuade the villagers to stop harboring the bad guys by offering an  
$11 million road project that had just been approved by NATO and  
Kabul and would be built by the Kunar Provincial Reconstruction Team.  
And they’d complete the “human terrain mapping” that is part of the  
new counterinsurgency doctrine — what families dominate, who’s  
married, who’s feuding, are there divisions to be exploited?

It was a lot to ask of young soldiers: play killer, cultural  
anthropologist, hearts-and-minds winner and then killer again. Which  
is why, just hours before the mission was to begin, some soldiers  
were smearing black-and-green war paint on their faces when their  
sergeant shouted: “Take it off. Now!” Why? They’d frighten the  
villagers.

It seemed a moot point as Rock Avalanche got under way. Apache  
gunships were scanning the ridges for insurgents. Other helicopters  
were dropping off more soldiers. An unmanned drone was whining  
overhead as it sent infrared video feeds to a large screen back at  
the battalion’s headquarters, Camp Blessing, six miles north of the KOP.

Almost immediately, high on a mountainside looking down on Yaka  
China, Kearney had to play God. In a ditch to his left, Jesse  
Yarnell, a young intelligence officer, along with John, an Afghan  
interpreter, were intercepting insurgents on their two-way radios  
saying, “We see them, we’re going to wait.”

“They’re right down there!” said Kevin Caroon as he gazed out of his  
night vision. Caroon, from Connecticut and a father of two, was an  
Air Force JTAC — the joint terminal attack controller who talks the  
combat pilots onto their targets. “See that? Two people moving south  
400 meters away from us,” Caroon said, pointing down the mountain  
face. More insurgents were located nearby.

“Sir, what do you want to do?” Caroon asked Kearney.

“I want them dead,” Kearney said.

“Engage them?”

“Yes. Take ’em out.”

Caroon radioed the pilot his instructions, “On-scene commander’s  
intent is to engage.” And that was it.

A sudden wail pierced the night sky. It was Slasher, an AC-130  
gunship, firing bullets the size of Coke bottles. Flaming shapes  
ricocheted all around the village. Kearney was in overdrive. The  
soldiers back at the KOP were radioing in that the drone was tracking  
10 men near the tree line. Yarnell was picking up insurgent radio  
traffic. “They’re talking about getting ready to hit us,” someone  
said. The pilot could see five men, one entering a house, then, no,  
some were in the trees, some inside, and then, multiple houses. He  
wanted confirmation — were all these targets hostile? Did Kearney  
have any collateral-damage concerns? Cursing, Kearney told them to  
engage the men outside but not to hit the house. The pilots radioed  
back that men had just run inside. No doubt there would be a family.  
Caroon reminded Kearney that Slasher had only enough fuel to stay in  
position for 10 more minutes.

“What do you want to do, sir?” Caroon asked him.

Kearney radioed his soldiers back at the KOP to contact his boss, Lt.  
Col. Bill Ostlund. Ostlund, a Nebraska social scientist who could  
switch effortlessly from aggressive bomber to political negotiator  
talking family values with Afghan tribal elders, was in the crowded  
tactical-operations room at Camp Blessing watching the drone’s video  
feed and getting the same intelligence. He signed off on collateral  
damage, and Kearney turned to Caroon: “Take out the compound. And  
anyone that comes out.”

Flaming rockets flashed through the sky. Thunder rumbled and echoed  
through the valley. Then there was a pause. Slasher asked Caroon  
whether the insurgents were still talking. Kearney shouted over to  
Yarnell in his ditch, “You picking anything up?” Nothing. More  
spitting rockets.

The night seemed incomprehensible and interminable. Slasher departed  
and Gunmetal — an Apache helicopter — swept in. Radio communication  
kept breaking down. At one point the crew of Gunmetal, sensing no  
hostile intent, refused Kearney’s orders to fire. Then suddenly  
Gunmetal was rocketing at figures scattering for cover. Then Slasher  
was back in the sky doing more “work.” In the predawn light Bone —  
the nickname for the B-1 bomber that seemed to be the soldiers’  
favorite — winged in and dropped two 2,000-pound bombs above the  
village. Finally, around dawn, a weary Kearney, succumbing to gallows  
humor, adrenaline and exhaustion, said: “O.K., I’ve done my killing  
for the week. I’m ready to go home.”

Kearney estimated that they killed about 20 people, adding: “I’m not  
gonna lie. Some are probably civilians.”

In the logic of war, the best antidote for the menacing ghostliness  
of the ambushing enemy is killing and knowing you’ve killed them. The  
soldiers in the Korengal almost never had that kind of satisfaction.  
Any insurgents, if they were killed, would be buried fast, and all  
that was left in their wake were wounded civilians. That morning,  
after a long night of fighting, was no different. Within an hour or  
so, Lt. Matt Piosa, an earnest, 24-year-old West Point grad, and his  
patrol were in Yaka China. They radioed that the village elders were  
asking to bury their dead. They’d also collected wounded civilians.  
The tally was bad — 5 killed and 11 wounded, all of them women, girls  
and boys.

Kearney radioed Camp Blessing the bad news and dropped his head  
between his knees. Killing women and children was tragedy enough. But  
civilian casualties are also a political issue. If he didn’t manage  
to explain his actions to the Yaka China villagers and get them to  
understand his intentions, he could lose them to the enemy.  
Meanwhile, Yarnell and his team were intercepting radio messages  
like: “Be very quiet. Move the things over here. Pray for us.” At  
least some of the insurgents from the previous night’s fight had  
survived to fight again. The planes were tracking them hiding along a  
creek. But after the civilian casualties of the night before, senior  
commanders were refusing to give Kearney clearance to bomb or rocket  
them.

The short day was fading. The sun dropped behind the peaks. The cold  
winds rattled our bones. The soldiers tried to make light of their  
conviction that they’d be attacked by those insurgents dissolving  
into the villages. Their fears were realized.

Hearts and Minds

TO TRY TO ACQUIRE allies, Kearney and some of his men flew down the  
next day to Yaka China. With nowhere else to land, the Black Hawk  
helicopters descended on the roof of a house not far below the  
compound that Slasher, the AC-130, had rocketed the night of the  
19th. Dust and dried grass whipped across the house and the  
villagers’ faces. Just to endear themselves even more, the soldiers  
from Battle Company had to step on harvested corn as they climbed  
down; it was drying on the second story.

The adversaries faced off in the courtyard as chickens sprinted in  
and out. On one side were Kearney, Ostlund and Larry LeGree, a naval  
nuclear engineer and head of the Provincial Reconstruction Team,  
together with their entourage, including interpreters, all in  
futuristic high-tech gear. On the other side were the Korengali  
elders, who looked as if they stepped out of “Lord of the Rings” with  
their crooked walking sticks, beards dyed red and blue eyes framed by  
kohl. With no Afghan government out here, the elders are the only  
channel for communication. The younger men sat on the ground, wrapped  
in shawls and bold indifference.

Kearney squatted and told the Korengalis that when he came to this  
region he hoped to walk into Yaka China and find out what the  
villagers needed. Instead, he found that there were some 50  
insurgents in and around the village. He pointed to the evidence —  
military radio batteries that his men had found, binoculars, rockets,  
an old pistol, a small pamphlet titled, in Arabic, “How to Kill,” and  
one in Pashto, “The Concise Book on the Virtues of Jihad” — that had  
been collected in the general area by Afghan soldiers and Americans.  
It was not a very incriminating haul, and everyone knew it.

The day before, a U.S. medevac had airlifted out the wounded  
civilians from the village. Humanitarian assistance was air-dropped  
in, including concrete for retaining walls, rice and blankets for  
winter. The provisions were not compensation, Kearney told the  
elders. “It’s what the government does for their people when there is  
security here,” he said. He asked them to tell him where in the  
mountains the insurgents were hiding their supplies. “That way I  
don’t have to come in here and shoot at you and identify the good  
guys from the bad guys,” he said.

To keep his bearings amid the hostile faces, Kearney kept appealing  
to Haji Zalwar Khan, the leading go-between among the valley’s  
elders. He made his fortune in the timber trade and blamed the  
Americans for shutting it down. He tried to placate both the  
Americans and the insurgents. He was not about to side with Kearney  
in public. “How can I know where you found these things?” he asked,  
referring to the jihadi items. “In the mountain? The house? How do I  
know whom they belong to?”

Kearney smiled. He was getting used to the routine between the  
Americans and the villagers — miscommunication and deception. The  
encounter felt as much performative, a necessary part of the play, as  
substantive. And I wondered how Kearney was going to keep his sanity  
for 10 more months.

Just a week or so earlier, I had been at the KOP when villagers from  
Aliabad — a mile south of the KOP, and the home village of Haji  
Zalwar Khan — complained to Kearney that some ordnance had hit a  
house. Later they sent up the homeowner’s teenage son to wrest  
compensation from Kearney. As we walked to the KOP’s entrance to meet  
the boy, a shot rang out, then another. The bullets smacked the dirt  
in front of us. Kearney shoved me into a shack where an Afghan was  
cooking bread. A few more shots were fired. It was “One-Shot Freddy,”  
as the soldiers refer to him, an insurgent shooter everyone had a  
theory about regarding the vintage of his gun, his identity, his  
tactics — but neither Kearney’s scouts nor Shadow the drone could  
ever track him. I accidentally slashed my forearm on a nail in the  
shack and as I watched the blood pool I thought that if I had to live  
with Freddy and his ilk for months on end I, too, would see a forked  
tongue in every villager and start dreaming of revenge.

Kearney was angry. “Taliban shot your house?” he asked the boy from  
Aliabad. An interpreter translated.

No, said the boy, Americans did.

“What’d we shoot with?”

“I don’t know the weapon, but there’s little holes and two big holes.”

“I didn’t shoot into Aliabad,” said Kearney, adding that if one of  
his soldiers had, it was because insurgents were firing from the  
village.

“No one shoots from the village,” said the boy, though everyone knew  
insurgents had wounded several of Kearney’s soldiers by shooting from  
the mosque, the cemetery, the school. . . .

The boy changed course, “God knows better than me,” and that sent  
Kearney on a riff: “Yes. God does and God talks to me and told me  
they do.” And by the way, hadn’t the boy noticed that the bad guys  
always start shooting first?

“O.K., then shoot them, not our house,” the boy said.

“Then tell me where the bad guys are,” Kearney said. The boy said he  
didn’t know. What he knew was that the Americans were always shooting  
at the village.

This went on for some time. When the boy again protested that no one  
shoots from his village, Kearney interrupted him. “Aminullah does,”  
he said. Aminullah was a native of Aliabad and a rising figure in the  
valley’s insurgency.

The boy smiled.

“You’re smiling because you know I’m right,” Kearney said.

“You’re right,” the boy said. “So shoot the cemetery, not our house.”

Kearney moved closer to him. “Look, if you want help with your house,  
all you have to do is ask. But don’t accuse us every time something  
goes wrong.”

The boy laughed and repeated that he didn’t know where the bad guys  
were.

“It’s crazy, man. They must be ghosts!” Kearney said, laughing.

“Aminullah doesn’t come to Aliabad anymore,” the boy said, perhaps  
trying to give Kearney a bone.

Kearney leapt at it. “So Aminullah is bad?”

“Yes.”

“Ah! Finally! We’re getting somewhere.” Kearney took off his helmet  
and squeezed his hands together and rocked as he sat on a wall. “What  
about Mohammad Tali, he’s a good guy isn’t he?” Kearney asked.

Smiling again, the boy looked at the dirt: “No. You already told us  
he’s a bad guy.”

“Ah!” Kearney said, throwing up his hands. “So you were down there in  
the village when I gave radios and food. But instead you say I shoot  
at you all the time?” Kearney swung his legs back and forth. “Hey  
dude, ask yourself. Why would I bring you radios and food and shoot  
at you? Does Aminullah? No. What happened that day after I left?” The  
boy said all he knew was that the villagers went home and “they”  
started shooting. “Where?” Kearney asked, “from your village?”

“What can I say? The Americans were in my village.”

“Yeah, so I was doing good stuff for you guys and they shot at me.  
And what I’m trying to say is they could have shot at you again. And  
if I shoot at your house I’ll help. We’ll fix up that wall. I’m not  
here to hurt you.”

Everyone was getting restless in the little check post. Kearney tried  
to lighten up a bit. He asked the boy what he thought about the  
Americans.

“You build roads and clinics and schools and are here to help,” the  
boy said.

“Cop out,” Kearney shouted, chuckling. “Easy answer. Hey dude, you  
can say we’re rotten and messing up your lumber trade.” The boy  
laughed. Kearney laughed. Pfc. Michael Cunningham, the radio  
operator, and Sgt. Taylor White, who always manned the check post,  
both laughed.

“See, I knew it,” Kearney said. “That’s what you really think. Think  
I want to be here?”

“Yeah,” the boy said. “I think so.”

“Dude. I got a wife and son. I came here to help you out. If you give  
me as much help as possible I’ll get out of here a hell of a lot  
faster.”

Kearney told him to enjoy Ramadan, and then shouted, “Where’s my  
fuzzy friend?” as he looked about for Jericho, the puppy whose ears  
were chopped off by an Afghan worker: it was pre-emptive preparation  
for dog fighting — the ears would just give an enemy dog something to  
grab onto. “I need someone to make me happy. Jericho, I need some  
love.” Jericho appeared, leaping about. Kearney picked him up. “Hey,  
what’s up buddy? You’re a good boy. You smell like dirt.”

Kearney turned to Cunningham and White and said, “Well, he’s the  
first to admit Aminullah’s bad.” And give or take a little unreliable  
information shared here and there, that was the Korengal routine.

Fight Time

THE DAY AFTER the meeting with the elders of Yaka China, Yarnell and  
John could hear insurgents trying to pinpoint where Kearney and his  
men were. The helicopters had moved us to a ridge line, about 8,400  
feet high, straddling the Korengal and Shuriak Valleys. The  
insurgents used the deep caves, boulders and forests as hideouts and  
transit routes between Pakistan and Afghanistan. We could hear  
someone who called himself Obeid saying he’d do whatever the Yaka  
China elders decided — whether to cooperate with the Americans or  
take revenge. By evening the elders had apparently reached their  
verdict. It was fight time.

Kearney, too, had reached a verdict. He would fool the insurgents,  
feigning a troop extraction when the helicopters came for resupply  
and pushing out his best guys in small “kill teams.” We heard the  
insurgents say, “We have wolves on them,” meaning spotters. A hoarse,  
whispering insurgent had eyes on either Sgt. Larry Rougle and his  
scouts or on Lieutenant Piosa and his rear guard. There was joking  
that Rougle and Piosa should dance and see which one the whisperer  
was spying on. Then nothing happened for almost 24 hours.

Rougle — who was called Wildcat — was on his sixth deployment since  
Sept. 11, 2001. He was with the first group of Rangers in  
Afghanistan. Even his rough background was something of a legend; he  
would tell how he grew up in a South Jersey gang, shot a guy, went to  
“juvie,” and there taught himself Russian (though he was estranged  
from his Russian father), taught himself politics, history, zoology.  
At night out in the woods, he’d tell his fellow scouts, “You know  
penguins are monogamous?”

I hung out with Piosa and his crew. His white skin, red hair and blue  
eyes belied the months of constant warfare he and his platoon had  
scraped through. It was a beautiful autumn afternoon and the soldiers  
were joking around, heating up Meals Ready to Eat, spitting gobs of  
Copenhagen and then, in a moment, recess was over. The insurgents  
were on them. Bullets ricocheted all through the woods. A strange  
silence fell as everyone scrambled for cover. Three of us crouched  
behind a skinny pine tree. And the silence broke: curses, shouting.

“Where’s it coming from?”

“Where are my guys?”

“Jones, are you seeing things?”

More bullets. Cracks against the tree trunks. Bits of confusing  
information were coming in on Piosa’s radio.

“They’re comin’ up the low ground at 2-4” — Sergeant Rice’s call sign.

“One W.I.A. hit in the arm.” Then there was panic and screaming.

“The enemy’s overtaken the hill,” bellowed Pvt. Sterling Dunn from  
further down the trees.

“2-4 is hit” — that was Rice.

“Wildcat is run over the hill” — that was Rougle.

“Get a team to run up there and take that hill. They pushed Wildcat  
over the hill!” Piosa shouted, trying over and over to reach Rice and  
Rougle, but getting no answer. The battalion surgeon, Capt. Joel  
Dean, and a sergeant sprinted up the hill to get to the wounded. As  
the first Americans neared Rice and Rougle’s positions they were  
fired on from those same positions. What was going on?

I followed Piosa through the brush toward the ridge. We came upon  
Rice and Specialist Carl Vandenberge behind some trees. Vandenberge  
was drenched in blood. The shot to his arm had hit an artery. Rice  
was shot in the stomach. A soldier was using the heating chemicals  
from a Meal Ready to Eat to warm Vandenberge and keep him from going  
into shock.

Piosa moved on to the hill where the men had been overrun. I saw big  
blue-eyed John Clinard, a sergeant from North Carolina, falling to  
pieces. He worshiped Rougle. “Sergeant Rougle is dying. It’s my  
fault. . . . I’m sorry. . . . I tried to get up the hill. . . .”  
Sergeant Rougle was lying behind him. Someone had already covered him  
with a blanket. Only the soles of his boots were visible.

“There’s nothing you could do,” Piosa said, grabbing Clinard’s  
shoulder. “You got to be the man now. You can do it. I need you to  
get down to Rice and Vandenberge and get them to the medevac.”  
Clinard wiped his face, seemed to snap to and headed off through the  
trees.

Two of Rice’s squad mates appeared, eyes dilated. They couldn’t  
believe they’d seen, up close, the ghosts they’d been fighting for  
the last five months. “I saw him in the eyes,” Specialist Marc  
Solowski said. “He looked at me. I shot him.” He and Specialist  
Michael Jackson had crawled up the hill twice trying to retake it.  
Each time the insurgents in “manjammies” whipped them back with  
machine-gun fire. There was blood on the stones around us. Some  
thought they saw blood trailing down toward the village of Landigal,  
where they were sure an insurgent had dashed into a cottage.

“We’re not losing this hill again,” Piosa shouted. “This hill is  
ours!” He wanted bombs to be dropped immediately.

“There’s women praying in that house,” Dunn shouted back.

I was fixating on Rougle’s black hat, lying by the bloodied rock  
patch where Dunn was sitting, when Sergeant Stichter, Dunn’s senior,  
appeared, out of breath and shaking, back from tending to  
Vandenberge. He needed water. The F-15 known as Dude was en route,  
the Apaches were chasing men and Kearney — who had bolted down the  
mountain, throwing grenades in caves — was barking orders. Kearney  
was badly shaken. He adored Rougle, and he’d broken down when he saw  
his big old buddy Rice bleeding at the landing zone. Rice comforted  
him and then lumbered to the helicopter, just asking to talk to his  
wife before they put him under.

The insurgents had run off with some of Rougle, Rice and  
Vandenberge’s stuff — ammunition, communication equipment, night  
vision goggles, machine guns. Kearney wanted the equipment back. He  
wanted to punish the valley. Stichter had his eyes on a guy pacing a  
rooftop in Landigal and wanted to blow his head off. Specialist  
Mitchell Raeon, whose uniform was now soaked in Rougle’s blood, had  
the guy in his scope but couldn’t range that far. “That’s a female,”  
Dunn said.

Kearney had identified insurgents who’d dashed into a house and  
wanted to hit them, but Stichter got back word from Camp Blessing  
saying the target was too close to other houses. Kearney sent back a  
reminder — you let some guys get away the other night. It was  
impossible to know for sure, but Kearney believed they were the guys  
who had killed Rougle, and now, he said, you’re going to let another  
group get away?

Someone cursed, then said, “They’re all leaving the house.”

Kearney radioed down to one of his lieutenants at an observation  
post. “Where are they going?” Yarnell heard the insurgents say they  
were coming back for the rest of the equipment. And then, with no  
warning, an F-15 dropped a bomb on Landigal, but off target, or so it  
seemed. Kearney was furious. He was sure headquarters had  
intentionally missed the house he had wanted hit.

I noticed Raeon was packing and unpacking Rougle’s things. Rougle’s  
scouts were in disarray, rudderless, and admitting it. Raeon said he  
kept seeing in his mind Rougle’s face alert and then dead, switching  
back and forth; he wanted it to stop.

The next day brought another brief firefight, and Rougle’s scouts  
rallied swiftly. They said they felt him watching and proud. There  
were more bomb drops and refusals to drop bombs, and then Becky,  
everyone’s favorite Apache pilot, swept in. Not only did she offer  
the comforting voice of a woman seeping right into their ears, but  
Becky was one of the most aggressive shooters. She flew up and down  
the canyon walls seeking out and rocketing insurgents. We heard them  
on the radio again boasting about retreating to safety under fire.  
They talked about the strike in Landigal that they thought might have  
killed Azizullah — “a real bad guy,” the radio operator told me.

Kearney was watching a crow flying above us. “Taliban are right,” he  
said. “Like they said yesterday, follow the birds, they follow the  
Americans. I wish I was made as strong as haj” — their nickname for  
insurgents. “They were balls to do what they did. And guess what? I’m  
not gonna lie. They won.”

Killing Together

AS WE WAITED for dusk to get back to the KOP, we all knew the  
insurgents were nearby, eyes on Kearney, eyes on the soldiers down in  
the valley. Even nightfall was no comfort because the full moon was  
floodlighting the Korengal. I returned to the KOP by helicopter with  
Kearney, while 1st and 2nd Platoons had to make the long trek back on  
foot. As soon as 1st Platoon set off, the insurgents struck with a  
devastating L-shaped ambush. All Kearney could do, back at the KOP,  
was calm his boys on the radio, get in the medevac and invoke the  
gods of war. The Apaches, Slasher and Bone dropped bombs all night.  
The soldiers and insurgents were so close that when Slasher, the  
AC-130, flew in, the pilot coordinated not with the JTAC but with  
Sgt. Roberto Sandifer, the platoon’s forward observer, who at that  
moment was under fire watching one of his guys die.

Around midnight, 1st Platoon filed into the KOP, eyes bulging,  
drenched in sweat, river water and blood. They were hauling the  
belongings of Mohammad Tali, a high-value target. Specialist Sal  
Giunta had killed him.

The next day I climbed up to the KOP and found Specialist Giunta, a  
quiet Iowan lofted into a heroism he didn’t want. His officers were  
putting him up for a medal of honor. Giunta told me the story of that  
night, how they’d barely moved 300 yards before they were blasted.  
Giunta was fourth in the file when it happened, and he jumped into a  
ditch. He couldn’t figure out why they were getting hit from where  
Joshua Brennan and baby-faced Franklin Eckrode should have been  
leading up ahead. He knew it must be bad, but as he leapt up to check  
he got whacked with a bullet in his armored chest plate. It threw him  
down. They were taking fire from three sides. He grabbed some  
grenades: “I couldn’t throw as far as Sergeant Gallardo. We were  
looking like retards and I decided to run out in front of the  
grenades.” He found Eckrode with gunshot wounds. “He was down but  
moving and trying to fix his SAW” — a heavy machine gun — “so I just  
kept on running up the trail. It was cloudy. I was running and saw  
dudes. Plural.”

He couldn’t figure out who they were. Then he realized they were  
hauling Brennan off through the forest. “I started shooting,” he  
recalled. “I emptied that magazine. They dropped Brennan.” Giunta  
scrambled up to Brennan. He was a mess. His lower jaw was shot off.  
“He was still conscious. He was breathing. He was asking for  
morphine. I said, ‘You’ll get out and tell your hero stories,’ and he  
was like, ‘I will, I will.’ ”

They were still taking fire. No one was there to help. Hugo Mendoza,  
their platoon medic, was back in another ditch, calling: “I’m  
bleeding out. I’m dying.” Giunta saw Brennan’s eyes go back. His  
breathing was bad. Giunta got Brennan to squeeze his hand. A medic  
showed up out of the sky. They prepared Brennan to be hoisted to the  
medevac in a basket. Soon he would be dead.

As the medevacs flew out, Sergeant Sandifer had talked in air cover:  
Slasher, the AC-130. The pilot was a woman and, Sandifer later told  
me, “It was so reassuring for us to hear her voice.” She spotted guys  
hiding and asked if she was clear to engage. “ ‘You’re cleared hot,’  
I told her. And we killed two people together.” But, at this point,  
the killings were no consolation to Sandifer.

As Giunta said, “The richest, most-trained army got beat by dudes in  
manjammies and A.K.’s.” His voice cracked. He was not just hurting,  
he was in a rage. And there was nothing for him to do with it but  
hold back his tears, and bark — at the Afghans for betraying them, at  
the Army for betraying them. He didn’t run to the front because he  
was a hero. He ran up to get to Brennan, his friend. “But they” — he  
meant the military — “just keep asking for more from us.” His  
contract would be up in 18 days but he had been stop-lossed and  
couldn’t go home. Brennan himself was supposed to have gotten out in  
September. He’d been planning to go back to Wisconsin where his dad  
lived, play his guitar and become a cop.

Sandifer was questioning why they were sticking it out in the  
Korengal when the people so clearly hated them. He was haunted by  
Mendoza’s voice calling to him: “I’m bleeding out. I’m dying.” He  
worried that the Korengal was going to push them off the deep end. In  
his imagination it had already happened. One day an Afghan visited  
their fire base, Sandifer told me. “I was staring at him, on the  
verge of picking up my weapon to shoot him,” he said. “I know right  
from wrong, but even if I did shoot him everyone at the fire base  
would have been O.K. We’re all to the point of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ”  
And they still had 10 months to go in the Korengal.

I wondered how Kearney was going to win back his own guys, let alone  
win over the Korengalis. Just before I left, Kearney told me his  
biggest struggle would be holding his guys in check. “I’ve got too  
many geeking out, wanting to go off the deep end and kill people,” he  
said. One of his lieutenants wanted to shoot every Afghan in the  
face. Kearney shook his head. He wished he could buy 20 goats and let  
the boys beat and burn them and let loose their rage. He tried to  
tell them the restraints were a product of their success — that there  
was an Afghan government with its own rules. “I’m balancing plates on  
my goddamn nose is what I’m doing,” he said. “All it’s gonna take is  
for one of these guys to snap.”

But leave the Korengal, as the colonel had suggested, and let some  
other company deal with it? No way. He’d spent five months learning  
the valley, getting involved in it; he couldn’t just pull out. At  
least he would keep the insurgents busy here so the other companies  
could do hearts and minds unimpeded down along the Pech river. “I  
lost seven dudes here,” he told me. “It’s too much blood. I don’t  
want to give this up. This is mine.”

To Be Continued

COLONEL OSTLUND and his officers, and the governor of Kunar and his  
officials, held an all-day meeting with the Korengali elders. The  
elders wanted to talk about Rock Avalanche and the devastation that  
had rained down on them. Colonel Ostlund told them, “If anything  
should happen to Captain Kearney, pain and misery will knock on many  
doors in the Korengal.” He gave them 10 days to pick sides — the  
insurgents or the government. Only then would he consider going ahead  
with the road project. Their answer came back. They would leave the  
valley altogether. But they didn’t, and 10 days later insurgents  
pulled off another ambush of a platoon from the 173rd. The entire  
patrol went down, either wounded or killed. Kearney told me recently  
that they had wounded Abu Ikhlas and killed some other bad guys. He  
said he was pretty sure that Haji Matin, the embittered timber lord,  
had been killed, too. But the dialogue with the Korengalis was pretty  
much the same as it had been. Only the winter snows have brought some  
minor respite to the valley.

Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer, has reported extensively on  
Afghanistan, most recently in a two-part series for the magazine on  
the revival of the Taliban.

Correction: February 26, 2008
A front-page picture caption on Saturday with the “This Weekend”  
summary carried an erroneous credit in some editions. The photograph  
of a wounded soldier in Afghanistan was by Lynsey Addario for The New  
York Times, not by Joshua Lott.