The Fifth Act, page 1
ALSO BY ELLIOT ACKERMAN
2034 (with Admiral James Stavridis)
Red Dress in Black and White
Places and Names
Waiting for Eden
Dark at the Crossing
Istanbul Letters
Green on Blue
PENGUIN PRESS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © 2022 by Elliot Ackerman
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
Portions of this book originally appeared in a different form as “Winning Ugly” in Foreign Affairs and as “The Botched Afghanistan Withdrawal Exposes a Dangerous Fault Line in Our Democracy” on time.com.
MERCENARY SONG
Words and Music by STEVE EARLE
© 1994 WARNER/CHAPPELL MUSIC LTD.
All Rights in the U.S. and Canada Administered by WC MUSIC CORP.
All Rights Reserved
Used by Permission of ALFRED MUSIC
FOR OUR 100% CONTROL
Images 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26: courtesy of the author; 27, 28, 29: courtesy of Matthieu Aikins; 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38: courtesy of Chris Richardella; 39: from The Washington Post. © 2019 The Washington Post. All rights reserved. Used under license; 40: photo by WAKIL KOHSAR/AFP via Getty Images; 41: AF archive/Alamy Stock Photo; 42: AP Photo/Malcolm Browne
library of congress cataloging-in-publication data
Names: Ackerman, Elliot, author.
Title: The fifth act: America’s end in Afghanistan / Elliot Ackerman.
Other titles: America’s end in Afghanistan
Description: New York: Penguin Press, 2022.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022007217 (print) | LCCN 2022007218 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593492048 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593492055 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Afghan War, 2001–2021—Evacuation of civilians. |
Paramilitary forces—Afghanistan. | United States. Central Intelligence Agency. | Afghan War, 2001–2021— Personal narratives, American. | Afghan
War, 2001–2021—Peace. | Disengagement (Military science) | United States. Marine Corps. Marine Regiment, 8th. Battalion, 1st. | Ackerman, Elliot.
Classification: LCC DS371.413 .A25 2022 (print) | LCC DS371.413 (ebook) |
DDC 958.104/745—dc23/eng/20220316
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007217
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007218
ISBN 9780593653029 (international edition)
Cover design: Darren Haggar
Cover photograph: Christopher Bangert / laif / Redux
Cover art texture: Shunli Zhao / Getty Images
Book design by Daniel Lagin, adapted for ebook by Cora Wigen
pid_prh_6.0_140609986_c0_r0
For my friends,
alive and dead,
in these pages
Let a play which would be inquired after, and though seen, represented anew, be neither shorter nor longer than the fifth act.
—HORACE, ARS POETICA
CONTENTS
ACT I
The Convoy of 109
ACT II
The Second Convoy
ACT III
The North Gate
ACT IV
The Abbey Gate
ACT V
The Fifth Act
ACT I
THE CONVOY OF 109
Americans are asking: What is expected of us? I ask you to live your lives and hug your children. I know many citizens have fears tonight, and I ask you to be calm and resolute, even in the face of a continuing threat.
—PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH
JOINT SESSION OF CONGRESS
SEPTEMBER 20, 2001
PROLOGUE
A hotel room, Rome, at night
The war has always been there, even though I don’t go to it anymore. It is older than my children, who sleep in the room next door. I learned to love it before I learned to love my wife, who fits her body beside mine in the bed. The war is ending—has been ending for some time. And it is disastrous.
Kabul fell five days ago.
But even before that, my phone had begun ringing. The calls have built in urgency and followed me here, unexpectedly, on a long-planned summer holiday with my family. Today, I toured the sights with my children—the Colosseum, the Forum, the Baths of Caracalla. They complained about all the walking. They are too young to appreciate the ruins of an expired empire; still, I tell myself they’ll remember walking these ruins.
All day, I lagged behind my wife and children, tapping out text messages, taking calls. I am working most closely with Nick, a friend and journalist who has organized a convoy of four minibuses for tonight. There are 109 people manifested on these buses. They are Afghan interpreters, activists, journalists. In the early morning hours, they will gather at the Serena Hotel in Kabul and board the buses for the airport. Another journalist has negotiated the convoy’s safe passage through the Taliban’s newly established checkpoints in Kabul. My job is to ensure the convoy’s safe passage through the American checkpoints, specifically one gate at the airport. On the map, it is listed as the “Unnamed Gate.”
Afghan paramilitaries are manning the Unnamed Gate. An old friend of mine, Jack, runs the CIA program that pays these paramilitaries. In our twenties, while in the Marines, Jack and I went through training together. He has made a career at the CIA and now oversees a vast network of paramilitary operations around the world. It takes me all morning to get through to him. Eventually, he returns my call. Hat in hand, I ask for his help. He deadpans, “I’m kinda busy right now.” When I ask again, he says simply, “I’ll see what I can do.”
My wife’s aunt, who has since passed away, was by all accounts a very glamorous woman and for many years was married to an equally glamourous Roman named Benito. That afternoon, once we’d finished touring the ruins, he came to our hotel with his daughter to meet us for a drink. Benito is in his nineties and was once ranked among the greatest professional bridge players in the world, winning tournaments from Monte Carlo to Las Vegas. We sit outside on the terrace overlooking the swimming pool. His memory is faded, but he wants to see the children, who play nearby chasing pigeons that peck the food from our table. Then Nick calls and I excuse myself. He explains that the US embassy has issued an advisory for an imminent terrorist attack at the airport. We debate whether we should postpone the convoy by a night. Nick isn’t sure whether the Taliban will let us through tomorrow. All day long I’ve been trying to get some confirmation from Jack that our convoy will be allowed to enter the Unnamed Gate. Nick wants to know if I’ve heard anything else from him. How confident am I that Jack will come through for us? I tell him that I don’t know. We decide to stick to the original plan and go tonight.
When I return to the table, my wife asks if everything is all right. I find myself apologizing to Benito and his daughter. I begin to explain what’s going on, figuring there’s no one they’re going to tell. They listen attentively. Benito’s eyes are upturned for a moment as if he is making calculations on my behalf. Then he says, “That is a difficult situation.” His daughter frowns. A brief silence settles between us.
Now it’s time to go. The buses are loading at the Serena Hotel. I’m monitoring their progress on my phone, in a chat room on Signal. I’ve gotten up from the bed where my wife sleeps, and I’m sitting at the hotel room desk. The lights of the city suggest themselves from behind the translucent curtain. Aside from that and the screen of my phone, the room is dark. Most of the passengers on the buses are strangers, but one family is not. My interpreter, Ali, and I fought alongside each other more than a decade ago in Shkin, a mud-walled firebase along the Pakistani border. Our Counter Terrorist Pursuit Team (CTPT) manned the southeasternmost outpost in the country. People called it “the end of the line.” Our CTPT had T-shirts made up. Ali lives in Texas now. His mother and father in Kabul have received death threats from the Taliban, phone calls and a letter delivered to their house. They are on the bus, along with his two sisters, who, he reminds me, are “still young and very scared.” Floating ellipses paired with the word typing often appear beneath his profile as he composes anxious messages that he never delivers; instead, he mostly responds to my updates with a simple ok.
The buses are leaving the Serena Hotel, 109 people in all.
Still no word from Jack. They are headed to the Unnamed Gate.
SCENE I
Fort Story, 2002
The sand hill was called Loch Ness. It rose out of the Virginia coastal flats like the hump on that mythical sea dragon. Every conditioning hike at the Marine Corps Amphibious Reconnaissance School—known as ARS—ended with a sprint up Loch Ness. The instructors watched us closely, and if you stumbled or your rifle touched the sand like a crutch, they would push you down the hill and tell you to start again. Temperatures hovered in the nineties that summer. More than once I vomited in the sand. Mos t of us did. Years later, a friend of mine who graduated the course kept a glass Coke bottle filled with Loch Ness sand on the mantel above his fireplace. He said he kept it there as a reminder for when things in his own life got difficult. Written in black Sharpie on the bottle was the word Perspective.
Jack and I met at ARS not even a year after 9/11. The war was new then. No one understood how long it would last or where it would take us. We even worried we might miss it. I was a year from finishing college and had talked my way into attending the course, where we lived in a squat barracks atop the hill. Jack was about to take command of an elite force reconnaissance platoon. Every week or so, the instructors would give us a night or even a whole day off. We would drive into town in Jack’s car, a beat-up, sand-brown Jeep Cherokee his parents had given him when he graduated college. Because I was only an ROTC midshipman and he was a commissioned officer—a first lieutenant—I called him sir. The Marine Corps is a funny place, the type of place where you call your friends sir.
Jack is a southerner, raised among the Blue Ridge Mountains. In college he minored in creative writing. He likes to talk about Faulkner and Walker Percy. He’s a fan of the poet James L. Dickey. For years, Dickey worked in advertising. He wrote copy for Coca-Cola and Lay’s potato chips while writing poetry after work. Later, Jack tells me something Dickey once said about writing poetry: “I was selling my soul to the devil all day and trying to buy it back at night.” At ARS, Jack used to string a poncho around his bunk so he could read late into the night with a headlamp. He would keep his books stacked beneath his bed, alongside his combat boots. In Afghanistan, years later, guys would call him the American Pashtun. I think he liked this. He spent so much time in Afghanistan that the Musa Khel around Khost would eventually grant him tribal membership. Two decades ago, driving out the gate onto Route 60 toward Chili’s or Applebee’s, after days spent training in the Virginia woods, I remember the Steve Earle CD he would play. The album was 1995’s Train a Comin’ and the track was “Mercenary Song.” It goes like this:
Me and old Bill there, we both come from Georgia
Met Hank out in New Mexico
We’re bound for Durango to join Pancho Villa
We hear that he’s paying in gold
I guess a man’s got to do what he’s best at
Ain’t found nothing better so far
Been called mercenaries and men with no country
Just soldiers in search of a war
And we’re bound for the border, we’re soldiers of fortune
Well, we’ll fight for no country, but we’ll die for good pay
Under the flag of the greenback dollar
Or the peso down Mexico way
Neither one of us suspected our wars would go on for twenty years. That we would become like the professionals Steve Earle sang about. When the Taliban-led government refused to turn over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 and President Bush sent the first US combat troops into Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, it took only two months of fighting for the Taliban to collapse. The war—as we understood it then—had proven swift. The summer Jack and I met, the US-backed Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was formed, and even though bin Laden had escaped, the media was debating whether the time had come to declare victory in Afghanistan. This triumphal air soon vanished.
Of the many fatal mistakes made in our Afghan tragedy, the Bush administration would soon make the first: it would begin the war in Iraq. Within a year, Jack would be in Iraq leading a platoon during the invasion. Within two years, I would also be in Iraq, leading a platoon in Fallujah. Afghanistan is the older war, but for both of us Iraq was our first war; we deployed there first because Bush had made Afghanistan a second-tier priority. As the Iraq War raged, the lack of US focus in Afghanistan set conditions for the Taliban to reconstitute in neighboring Pakistan. By 2005, a Taliban-led insurgency reestablished itself in Afghanistan. President Bush’s fixation on Iraq allowed this. What neither of us knew as we suffered through training in 2002 was that the Bush administration was laying an architecture that would sustain twenty years of war.
To wage war, America has always had to create a social construct to sustain it, from the colonial militias and French aid in the Revolution, to the introduction of the draft and the first-ever income tax to fund the Civil War, to the war bonds and industrial mobilization of the Second World War. In the past, a blend of taxation and conscription meant it was difficult for us to sustain war beyond several years. Neither citizens nor citizen soldiers had much patience for commanders, or commanders in chief, who muddled along. Take, for example, Washington reading Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis as a plea to his disbanding army before they famously crossed the Delaware (“These are the times that try men’s souls . . .”), or Lincoln, whose perceived mismanagement of the Civil War made his defeat in the 1864 presidential election a foregone conclusion to many, until Atlanta fell to the Union two months before the vote. The history of American warfare—even the “good” wars—is a history of our leaders desperately trying to preserve the requisite national will because Americans would not abide a costly, protracted war. This is no longer true.
After 9/11, in the opening act of the wars that followed, the Bush administration engineered a new type of war, one that is ahistorical—and seemingly without end. Never before had America engaged in a protracted conflict with an all-volunteer military that was funded through deficit spending. By the end of the Afghan War, our national debt hovered at around $28 trillion, with approximately $6 trillion being the bill for our post-9/11 wars, by far America’s longest. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was no serious public debate about a war tax or a draft. Our leaders responded to those attacks by mobilizing our government and military, but when it came to citizens, President Bush said, “I have urged our fellow Americans to go about their lives.” And so, by the summer of 2002, as Jack and I were listening to “Mercenary Song,” the war effort had already moved to the shopping mall.
For those who fight in a never-ending war, you must choose to leave it or to finish it. A decade in, when I made this choice, it nearly ended my friendship with Jack. And that night, in Rome, I wonder if he’s forgiven me when I ask him for one last favor in Afghanistan.
SCENE II
Khost, 2011
The CIA base at Shkin is a satellite of Khost Base. The two are tucked into the high desert of the Hindu Kush. The CTPT that I advise in Shkin is several hundred troops strong. The CTPT at Khost is several thousand strong. For the past year, Jack has been riding a desk at Langley, having left the Marines for the CIA several years before. He oversees the schedule of who goes where in Afghanistan and when. He has taken good care of me and my career by placing me in Shkin. But his desk-riding is about to end. In a couple of months, he’ll take over the mammoth task of overseeing what is—basically—a secret army at Khost Base. In preparation, he is flying in from the United States to get a measure of the place. When he takes over in a few weeks, I’m scheduled to be his deputy in Khost. I hop on a helicopter and fly an hour north from Shkin to meet him. The entire flight, I feel like I’m going to be sick, because I know that when I land, I am going to tell Jack that I’m not coming to Khost with him, that I’m leaving the war, that I’m done.
In the Marines, Jack was my big brother. Every place I served, he vouched for me. The summer after we’d met at ARS, I attended the Marine Corps Basic School in Quantico. When I arrived, Jack had already told his friends who were instructors that we’d gone to ARS together and that I would make a good infantry platoon commander. Later, at my first infantry battalion, he vouched for me with the staff noncommissioned officers, telling them that I was a solid, competent lieutenant. He did the same when I went to Marine special operations. When my formidable team sergeant, Gunnery Sergeant Willy “Bare Knuckles” Parent III from South Boston, called Jack to ask whether I was “a piece of shit or a good dude” (because you were either one or the other in that community and nothing in between), Jack again vouched for me, and shortly thereafter Willy and I got on famously. And, lastly, when it came time to leave the Marines, to head to the CIA, he was already there, ready to place his reputation beside mine and vouch for me. He had hand-walked my application through Langley. Every time I thanked him, he would laugh it off, say it wasn’t a big deal, that I was good at my job and so he wasn’t doing me any favors. He would also say, “Someday we’re gonna run this place.”
