What the Taliban Told Me, page 17
I still don’t understand what happened that day, not really. I don’t understand who I, or we, killed. I don’t understand why we, or I, killed them. I know some of the reasons: The JTAC was scared and angry; he had intelligence that we didn’t; killing them was easy. And I know that killing feels good, and righteous, and there is no better way to be sure that you’ve accomplished your goal. But none of that knowing means I understand.
I do think I understand what happened after, even though I don’t know. Because while I don’t know whether some men, or better yet (from the Taliban’s POV), some boys wound up joining the Taliban because of our choice, I understand that they didn’t have to go that far, didn’t need to become full-on insurgents. The Taliban didn’t need converts, just doubters. Doubters of the American process, America’s “good intentions,” America’s propensity to do the right thing. With enough doubt, we couldn’t win hearts and minds. And the Taliban could just take them.
I found myself, again, wishing I’d been on a real gunship, because then we’d have gotten the squirter. If we had, Bad Guy B would have died in the field, alone and afraid. But I wouldn’t have to care about that, because there wouldn’t be any question of his innocence; it too would have seeped into the soil, mixed with his blood. But when Guy C rescued Guy B, it was a little like watching a saint survive the cauldron of boiling oil. Maybe Guy B was meant to survive, and God was protecting him. I mean, I guess not, ’cause he still died, but even God’s best laid plans and all.
I didn’t have to care about these deaths, or so I was told. But I did. It was too hard to listen to a man die and finish listening to that conversation without caring. It didn’t matter that I didn’t actually listen to him die, I just heard his last breath come out of his friend’s mouth. Somehow, that was harder.
FEAR, OR YOU CAN’T GO HOME AGAIN
BY THIS POINT, the Whiskey crews had developed their own dialect of gunship language. I spoke it with them that day. Sort of. I had to, or I’d become a pariah. You can’t fly on a gunship, even a Whiskey, without being excited about killing. And it was still doable, during a mission, to get riled up when shit went down. Adrenaline is pretty good at knocking down moral quandaries; I guess they must be upregulated by the parasympathetic nervous system. But with the post-killgasmic clarity came more and more shame and unease. It was getting harder and harder to care about the missions like the rest of them. But then, there was the problem. Where before, after all my hard work and training, it had been us, now it was them.
I’d had my moments of questioning what we were doing. During my first deployment, after my Mission, back in America, when James told me how well he could see my naked heart, and now, when Kasady lasted all of two weeks on his fifth deployment before getting sent home, his risk of suicide finally deemed too high to keep using him. But I’d always been able to find answers. I saved more people after my Mission, and supposedly this would all add up to counteract that day. James and others had looked into that same distance and were doing fine. Kasady was just overworked, underappreciated, and burned out.
But then, so was Timothy. And Jim. And Conor. And Chris. And Chandler. And Trevor. Ed was nuts, but there was no way he was going to stop giving Big Blue his everything. Schmidt fucking hated it, and his blood pressure showed it. Alexi spent his time reading the Russians; I guess focusing on their despair was good protection from dealing with your own. There were the true believers, like Vince, who had never been on a mission where he didn’t feel supremely confident that what he was doing was right. He was tired of deploying, sure, but he wasn’t tired of being. And there were others, neither disciples nor apostates, apparent agnostics who were to all appearances fine. They didn’t need certainty one way or the other, and without it, they could filter, compartmentalize, and not worry about whether what we were doing was just. The more I thought about it, the more I saw that lined up with what the apostates had told me, the more I worried that I would soon be joining them.
What had been moments of questioning were becoming hours of obsessive circling, both in flight and out. I found myself again and again thinking of my Mission. And of the guy in the wheelbarrow. And another big battle we’d been on out east, way up in the mountains. I’d been concerned on the way over that I wouldn’t be able to understand much of the local dialect, but for whatever reason the Taliban were speaking crystal-clear Pashto. Alarming Pashto. These guys were organized, carrying fucking flags as they marched down the side of a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain (to the extent that one can march down the side of a fifteen-thousand-foot mountain). It felt like something out of history, a phalanx of men walking into battle, heads held high, ready to confront their enemy face-to-face. I’d never seen anything like it, and neither had anyone else on the plane. What the fuck were these guys thinking?
“Walaaaahu akbar.”
“Are you in position yet? Make sure the DShK is ready!”
“We’re almost there. It’ll be ready!”
“It will be! God willing, we’re going to kill many Communists today.”
“CSO, DSO. Taliban have a DShK and are getting it set up.”
“A what?”
“Big fucking machine gun. Tell the JTAC, he’ll know.”
“Jaguar, Recoil, enemy is preparing a DShK.”
“Copy, Recoil.”
A DShK (pronounced dushka) is a .50-caliber machine gun designed by the Russians before World War II. During that war, and in Vietnam, it was primarily used as an anti-aircraft weapon; it, and guns like it, were responsible for most of the destroyed aircraft in Vietnam. DShKs are fucking scary. It wasn’t clear that these guys had an honest-to-god DShK, as the Taliban routinely exaggerated the level of weaponry they had (Americans aren’t the only ones who are good at propaganda), but they did most likely have some sort of serious machine gun.
I was worried that they might have a real DShK, though, given their labeling of us as Communists. This was one of those rural legends you heard, that there were Afghans who still thought they were at war with the Russians, twenty years after the last Soviet soldier had pulled out of the country. For the most part, this wasn’t true, but we made a point to talk about it, as it was yet another way that we could deride those dumb, backward Afghans who didn’t even know who they were fighting. I didn’t for a second think that these guys really thought we were Russians, but I did know that this meant they were in fact something out of legend; they were fucking muj.
Muj, short for mujahideen, were those “freedom fighters” who fought against the Russians during the Soviet invasion and occupation of the 1980s. They weren’t actually “freedom fighters.” That’s just what we called them, as the American public likely wouldn’t have been quite as supportive of their government funding “doers of jihad”—which is what mujahideen actually translates to—as they were of supporting these noble savages who were trying to stop the spread of Communism (though, maybe it would have been fine; I feel like in the eighties we as a country would have fully embraced the concept of fighting a holy war against those God-hating Commies).
The mujahideen are legendary for good reason. They weren’t organized in any meaningful way, and they likely couldn’t have accomplished what they did without the billions of dollars that we gave them, but they really did drive a goddamn superpower out of their homeland. They’d been driving off Western armies since the days of Alexander the Great (who, in a letter to his mother, was alleged to have called the Afghans a “leonine and brave people,” who made “every foot of the ground like a wall of steel.” He almost certainly said no such thing, but these quotes still made their way into my language school curriculum). They’re the reason we routinely joked that Afghans are immortal (which I thought was a common phrase before I started writing this book, but after many a deep dive into the pages of Google, turns out it isn’t).
So it wasn’t that these guys were happily marching into a suicide mission, like I’d initially thought. Or that they were stupid and uninformed, still, in their minds, at war with the Russians. (It’s also worth noting that they weren’t likely to still be “real” mujahideen, that movement having long since been sublimated, in name anyway, by the Taliban.) They simply had decades of experience fighting, and no matter how advanced, or numerous, or really, who their enemy was, they knew that one day, like every invader who had come before them, these enemies too would leave.
But until then, the muj would fight.
They were making their way down into the valley, toward the small village where our ground team was. The team had figured there would be resistance, hence we’d been called in, but I don’t think they were expecting this level of opposition. No one was. So far, though, we were lucky that they weren’t shy with their comms, and I was hopeful that I’d be able to pass more useful intel.
And then someone’s jammer went on (I know whose, but classified material and all). We, DSOs that is, fucking hate jammers. The logic of jamming, or interfering with the electromagnetic spectrum in such a way that certain devices no longer work—devices like, say, the radios that the Taliban used—was that by preventing communication between fighters you make them less effective. This was a very modern military-centric way of looking at things. If someone jammed our comms, yeah, we’d all be fucked. We wouldn’t be able to tell the JTAC what we were seeing or hearing, the JTAC wouldn’t be able to tell us to fire, we wouldn’t be able to coordinate with all the other aircraft flying in the area—everything would devolve into a total clusterfuck. It was nice for the Taliban to be able to coordinate, sure, but they didn’t have planes to direct or intel to pass. All they had to do was shoot at the enemy. Don’t need radios for that.
We DSOs hated these jammers because (1) they made us functionally useless, (2) we knew that the Taliban were still going to fight just as hard, and (3) the tradeoff of us being able to hear what the Taliban was planning was well worth any sort of increased effectiveness they might gain from being able to talk to one another. I don’t know that we ever won this argument. To do so would have invalidated the mission of the people doing the jamming, and you could see how they might not want to be told to not do their job, for many of the same reasons we didn’t want them to. Everyone wants to feel like they’re doing something, which really was the perfect metaphor for us being in Afghanistan.
The next few hours of that mission have blurred together in my memory, given that I personally couldn’t do anything, and we as a plane also weren’t of much use. The narrowness of the valley, combined with the presence of the drones flying lower than us, meant that we were never going to be cleared to fire any of our missiles. We quickly got relegated to running command and control, which is military-speak for us being turned into a very expensive communications relay. There are highlights, like the few minutes we spent tracking some movement down the side of one of the mountains. We were worried it was a sniper, or a guy with an RPG, basically some sort of lone wolf skirting the edge of the battle, hoping to go unnoticed before he inflicted some serious damage. The mountain was lush, though, and it was difficult to see through all the trees and brush. And it was strange how fast this guy was moving; it was like he was gliding down. Or rolling? The movement was so fluid as to be almost, like, graceful.
“What the fuuuuuuck?”
“What? What is it?”
“It’s… it’s a cat?”
I looked up, and there on the screen, in beautiful high definition, was a snow leopard.
“Dude, no, that’s a snow leopard!”
“A what?”
“A snow leopard! They’re really rare, Afghanistan is one of the last places they live. We learned about them in language school.”
“Huh. What the fuck is it doing in this shit show?”
“I dunno. Maybe it’s trying to get away.”
“Wrong direction, buddy.”
“Yeah…”
We watched it for a couple more minutes, fascinated by how quickly and easily it flowed down and across the mountainside. But it wasn’t a Talib, so the CSO had to move his camera back to the action.
Later, I remember a drone firing a missile, and I remember hearing that it was a good strike, but the details didn’t stick out, didn’t seem important. Couple of dead dudes, no big deal. Toward the end of the mission, after the battle, the JTAC went to assess the damage of said missile. It turned out that some lucky/skilled drone operator had managed to get a Hellfire directly into a building with a bad guy in it, seemingly though a window, which was honestly quite impressive. So when the JTAC came on the radio and was laughing so hard he could barely talk, we were confused. Finally, he composed himself, and managed to choke out, “Oh man, the guy’s leg is stuck to the wall!” Apparently, the Hellfire had blown the guy inside to pieces, and the heat from the explosion had melted his leg to the side of the building. We were no longer confused, and so we all laughed too.
* * *
It wasn’t that we had done anything wrong on any of these missions—at least, not wrong per se—but said missions didn’t sit right, if they sat at all. Instead it felt like they were running around in my head like coked-up toddlers who’ve just realized that they do, in fact, have endless energy. A side effect of this cognitive dissonance was that I found myself hearing things differently. I had by now realized that any conceptualization of “The Taliban” as some cohesive, centrally organized entity was misleading at best. More realistically, this representation of them was an excellent effort by the American government to drum up hatred of the entity that justified our decades-long occupation of yet another country.
Afghanistan is a country roughly the size of Texas, but with a population of 40 million people. (Texas has around 25 million.) Slightly more than 20 percent of Afghanistan’s population lives in major cities, with the other 30 million people being spread out through the imposing mountain ranges that cover the country. If the world’s most advanced military, using satellites, drones, spy planes, you name it, can’t communicate and organize well enough to accomplish anything meaningful in such a place, how the fuck were a bunch of rural, agrarian men using high-powered walkie-talkies supposed to? (The Taliban did manage to get their shit together in 2021, well enough to retake the country, but this was only once America had announced its withdrawal, and when they could mostly walk into a given city and be handed the keys.)
Back in 2011, though, things were more disorganized. There were the occasional big battles, like my first one, or the Battle of Kamdesh, which my buddy Dex flew on (though that was in 2009), but for the most part, the firefights that happened were reactive in nature. When the Taliban did commit acts of terror, or at least horror, it was more a reaction to a threat than some sort of methodical malevolence. If one of our planes got close enough to the ground during an airdrop, they’d take some potshots. If we showed up at a village to talk about some infrastructure project, they’d shoot at the soldiers and Marines as they were leaving. When we did a middle-of-the-night no-knock raid, if their spotters saw the helos coming in early enough, the local Talibs might try and lay an ambush. Whereas before, during my first deployment, I had been able to level my rage solely at the Taliban, now when I listened to them coordinate these sorts of attacks, I wasn’t just mad at them. I was mad at us too.
Because while the language the Taliban was using was still simple, it was becoming increasingly less hackneyed. At this point, whenever I listened to them, I didn’t have to do much active thinking about what I was hearing. And without that thinking about thinking getting in the way, their stories became a little clearer. Yes, they were shooting at planes dropping supplies. But who and what were those supplies for? Not Afghans. Those supplies kept the enemy forces clothed and fed. The enemy forces who, I was beginning to see, were invaders, overthrowers, and occupiers of a formally independent country—this, despite the fact that not a single Afghan had been involved in the attacks that were supposed to justify the thousands and thousands of deaths in Afghanistan. Maybe those infrastructure projects were designed not only to make the Afghans like us but also to make them dependent on the United States. These no-knock raids, alleged to almost always result in the capture or killing of “high-level Taliban,” were increasingly based on “intelligence” from some guy who’d heard this other guy talking about how his friend’s cousin told him that his neighbor’s daughter’s soon-to-be husband said that a guy in the next village over talked to a Talib once. This is a natural consequence of how many raids we were doing, somewhere around six a day. There are only so many actual Talibs. But we were deeply invested in our game of Afghan Pokémon, determined to catch ’em all.
My anger only grew when I was switched over to the U-boats in the second half of my deployment. Whatever excitement I had had about finally being back on the gunship was gone. Some of this was my growing disenchantment, and some of it was the fact that I was now on the back end of the deployment, the light of leaving growing every brighter. I’d also, to my dismay, sort of become a Whiskey guy. I could still keep up with the grossness, the strange combination of homophobia and homoeroticism, and the general distrust of DSOs on the U-boats. (Many gunship guys were still firmly in the “a DSO isn’t worth the weight of his equipment” camp; they’d rather have had more fuel and more bullets than some weirdo nerd who didn’t appear to be doing anything most of the time, and even though I mastered the art of ingratiating myself to a crew, my presence on any given flight was more of an accepted nuisance, sort of like your friend’s younger brother that their mom insists tag along wherever you go, who turns out to be occasionally funny and mostly not annoying.) But the gunship didn’t feel like home anymore. I no longer wanted to live among the memitim, to aspire to Azrael. I was tired of killing people.
