The Afghanistan memento that means the most to me is a sector sketch—the base defense plan—of Spera Combat Outpost.  It’s drawn on a cardboard box originally used to package individualized servings of Apple Jacks, Corn Pops, and Cocoa Krispies.  The person who gave me the plan taped a note on the backside of the sketch:

“Sir:  This sector sketch was one of the first (173^rd ABN) for Spera COP…. Thought you would like to have it.  –Nick”

Nick wasn’t wrong.

I knew service in Afghanistan was going to be intense, but nothing prepared me for ownership of a tiny fortress on the Pakistan border manned by eight of my soldiers and a company of ANA.  Spera COP was so remote you couldn’t drive to it without going into Pakistan—which meant that all resupply was by helicopter.  It was almost out of reach by radio, too, so transmission of reports and requests for help were also fraught.  Knowing that the enemy used Pakistan as a safe haven and that the Pakistan military couldn’t be trusted made things even more precarious. 

Worst of all, insurgents didn’t want us at Spera COP.  To find and exploit weaknesses, they attacked it almost daily.

In July 2008, insurgents overan a much larger COP at Wanat in Nuristan.  In October 2009, another American outpost in Nuristan was also overwhelmed.  It was never not on my mind that the same could happen at Spera COP.

At the end of my time in Khowst, Spera COP still stood.  No thanks to me, all praise goes to the hardcore soldiers who manned its defenses based on the plan drawn on the back of this piece of cardboard.

The US Army has now relinquished control of Spera COP to the ANA, but I’m still not comfortable publicly displaying the sector sketch.  I wish you could see it, though.  Crude yet eloquent, it is understandable even to laymen.  The area around the COP is broken into “engagement areas”–think “kill zones”–named Martina, Dee Dee, Katherine, and Destiny–funny/sad names that evoke  the tumult of desire, fear, connection, and loss in the hearts of stout Spera COP defenders.

NOTE:  “Nick” mentioned above is MAJ Nick Fleischmann.  He is featured in a TV documentary on Spera COP, link below.  It’s made by Aljazeera, so go figure.  It’s good, but 45 minutes long, so give yourself some time. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPNnlVGEVXA

Also, a lot of chatter about Spera COP at the “Defenders of Spera COP” Facebook page:

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=141471615869496#!/group.php?gid=141471615869496&v=info

An Afghan soldier and an American ETT in the hills around Spera COP.

According to one US soldier interviewed on his way out of Iraq, “We didn’t even tell our Iraqi counterparts we were leaving.”  Now I’m sure he meant that his specific unit didn’t divulge exact movement times for security reasons, but read figuratively or extrapolated into a statement of policy, the statement is eye-opening.

Where national decision makers and spokesmen have faltered, artists have rushed in, eager to help shape and reflect understanding and significance.  Most of us know The Hurt Locker, a movie I enjoy greatly for its imaginative vision, if not its adherence to the most exact standards of realistic military detail.  Even more I like the photographs and commentary of Benjamin Busch, a Marine captain whose photos taken on two tours of Iraq can be found at:

http://wlajournal.com/19_1-2/busch.pdf

Busch writes of trying to portray the Iraq war’s human cost without photographing actual people, an aesthetic approach that seems especially appropriate now that that the American military has departed.  The picture below–”Disneyland”–contains a human figure, along with two cartoon figures, but renders Busch’s ironic perspective about his twinned role as artist-soldier.

“I went into a building near the entrance of an abandoned amusement park to take a picture of Mickey Mouse that was painted on a window from the inside. As I focused the lens on the series of American cartoon characters, a Marine appeared in the missing window that I had come through. There is an innocent wonder in his expression and despite his weapons and combat equipment he seems to be what he is, young and misplaced. An American child grown into armed maturity who still looks into the room, empty aside from me, for something that he expects to recognize. To see an Iraqi interpretation of an American icon next to the reality of American occupation made this photograph important to me. In the window beside Mickey is a cartoon image of an Indian, our Native American. This makes the triptych even more powerful as our own nation, America, began as an occupation of theirs.” (Benjamin Busch, 2010)

Above all I like the poetry of Brian Turner, who as early as 2005’s Here, Bullet began to accurately measure the Iraq war in its personal, military, political, cultural, and historical dimensions.  Turner saw the war (as does Busch) most of all for its ability to create beautiful ghosts,  sublime nightmares, and nostalgic memories animated by pain and loss–oxymoronic phrases that speak suggestively to a love affair with death played out in the Mesopotamian new millennium:

To Sand

To sand go tracers and ball ammunition.
To sand the green smoke goes.
Each finned mortar, spinning in light.
Each star cluster, bursting above.
To sand go the skeletons of war, year by year.
To sand go the reticles of the brain,
the minarets and steeple bells, brackish
sludge from the open sewers, trashfires,
the silent cowbirds resting
on the shoulders of a yak. To sand
each head of cabbage unravels its leaves
the way dreams burn in the oilfires of night.

(Brian Turner, 2005)

This Afghan battalion commander was one of our favorites. An IED blew up in his face in Sabari district, peppering him with shrapnel and nearly blinding him. A week later, he was out of the hospital and back in the fight.

New York Times A-team Afghanistan writer Eric Schmitt turned his attention this week to Sabari district, Khowst province.  In the linked article, the Times reports that Sabari remains under a total vice grip control of insurgents even after many years of effort by American and legitimate Afghan forces to dislodge them.  Recently, Haqqani clan militants beheaded ten Sabari residents in a show of force they assert they can repeat with impunity as often as they desire.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/29/world/asia/haqqani-militants-use-death-squads-in-afghanistan.html?_r=2&ref=world&pagewanted=all

So yea, things are bad up Sabari way.  No shit.  They were bad when I was there, too.

It was, for example, an absolute given in 2008-2009 that a trip through or into Sabari district would result in enemy contact.  Once, insurgents blew an IED in a culvert just in front of one of my team’s trucks.  No one was hurt, but the truck returned to Camp Clark with its flat surfaces covered with five-to-ten pound chunks of asphalt.  If the insurgents’ timing had been better, the truck and its occupants would have been toast.  The next time out, we detoured off the road to avoid the culvert.  Two feet off the hardball, the armored truck in front of me detonated a pressure-plate IED powerful enough to split the vehicle in two at the firewall between the engine and the troop compartment.  Thank God almighty the soldiers in the truck suffered only minor injuries, because the insurgents clearly had set a trap for us.

Those are two of a dozen or more stories that I could tell about Sabari, all of which speak to the intransigence of militant clan-based Muslim fundamentalism in Afghanistan.  It’s not hard to imagine how Sabari in the eyes of the Times writers and many of its readers (judging from the comments posted to the article) represents the hopelessness of our mission there.

Except… except… except….

Khowst City wasn’t Sabari.  Tani district elsewhere in Khowst province wasn’t Sabari.  Mondozayi district wasn’t Sabari.  Bak and Jaji Maydan districts, which you had to drive through Sabari to get to, weren’t Sabari, either.  There were other places in Khowst that were like Sabari, but most were not.  In the places that weren’t Sabari, you could drive and even walk around relatively safely.  You could find people who would speak with you, people who weren’t afraid to express their hopes for a progressive, Western-style pan-Afghan unity, people who organized themselves to fight back against the Haqqani clan and other enemies of the people and the state.  People who saw Sabari as an aberration, a horrifying blight on the good name of Afghanistan.

People who dreamed of a democratic, united Afghanistan and placed their faith in American and Afghan forces at great risk to their own lives and fortunes.  Knowing that those people and those places exist for me puts the dire portrait of Sabari painted by the Times in perspective.  It’s the truth, but not the whole truth, and not nothing but the truth.

UPDATE:  The link below takes you to a great story of a sniper team in action against IED emplacement cells in Sabari district.  The unit featured was in Khowst in 2011, two years after I left Afghanistan, but the article describes well cat-and-mouse games I was familiar with during my time there.

http://www.longwarjournal.org/archives/2011/09/army_sniper_kills_ie.php

All respect for the old-timers who marched in New York’s Veterans Day Parade, but the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America contingent was the funnest and liveliest of them all. In the midst of what was already a festive celebration, one ex-Marine raised the ante exponentially by proposing to his ex-Navy girlfriend on the corner of 5th Avenue and 34th.  O youth!

And the IAVA afterparty wasn’t too shabby either….

UPDATE:  The theatrical courtship pictured above reminds me of another scene of public war-related romantic exuberance, portrayed in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Times Square photograph from VJ Day, 1945:

Still…. 

In June 2009, the gunner in my truck was killed when we were caught in an ambush while on patrol in Khowst province.  The gunner died suddenly; much as Melville writes of a similarly unexpected death in Moby-Dick, he was “bundled off unspeakably quickly into eternity.” In his last minute alive, the gunner had fired over 70 rounds from his .50 caliber machine gun.  Now somebody else had to man the weapon.  When the battle was over and we arrived back at base, we removed the gunner’s body from our truck and prepared it for evacuation by helicopter.  

Later that day, a number of senior officers, counselors, and chaplains visited our camp.  All were well-meaning and their activity testified to the fact that the death of an American is treated, as it should be, as a big deal.  Some offered advice on how to cope.  One in particular said something I remember:  “You will not want to talk to everybody about what happened today, but you will need to talk to someone.”

Late that night, I returned to my hooch.  Hours from sleep, I turned on my laptop.  Waiting were the contemporary indicators of love, friendship, and support:  Hotmail (5).  Facebook’s friendly orange and red squares with white names and numbers, like miniature Texas or Alabama football jerseys.  People far away geographically but right there digitally and emotionally. 

What was I going to say to them?  What were they going to say to me?

The nostrum, “Be kind, for everyone you know is fighting a big battle,” seems appropriate.  Karl Marlantes describes the internal scream more bluntly:  “So ask the now twenty-year-old combat veteran at the gas station how he felt about killing someone.  His probably angry answer, if he’s honest: ‘Not a fucking thing.’  Ask him when he’s sixty, and if he’s not too drunk to answer, it might come out very differently….”

After World War II, the greatest generation created an archipelego of American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars outposts.  That was smart.  There, for over fifty years, ex-fighting men commiserated and drank out of public eye.  Most of us probably didn’t even realize what was going on.  Vietnam vets didn’t find this support system as comforting, and many took to the streets and hard drugs for community and solace. 

Now, the Longest War is winding down.  On what terms will we allow the veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan to rejoin our lives?  On what terms will they decide to live among us?

No Marines served in Khowst or Paktya, but I often crossed paths with them going in or out of country.  On this day three years ago, for example, I was bunking in a big but near-empty 200-person tent on Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan when it suddenly filled up with a Marine unit on its way to Kandahar.  My dominant impression was that the Marines appeared much younger than Army soldiers and were very healthy, fit, clean-cut, and energetic yet still orderly.

About three hours later, their leader, a young captain whom I had nodded to briefly on his arrival, woke me from a nap and invited me to dinner.  Not just a dinner, but a celebration of the Marine Corps birthday.  Somehow the captain had quickly arranged for the mess hall to bake a cake and set aside space for its ceremonial joint cutting by the oldest and youngest Marine present.

And I, as the highest ranking officer the Marine captain could find, was to be the honored guest, the only non-Marine in the room, without a thing to say or a part to play except that of invited dignitary and witness.  The event was soon over, and within another day, we were once more on our separate paths to our Afghanistan fates.

I felt privileged to be part of the ceremony, like I had snuck an inside view at a culture more noble than my own.

I’m thinking that whatever meaning the day holds, it probably has something to do with change.  No one I’m sure wants me or any other vet to be anything other than pretty much like we were before we deployed. But it’s not that easy, and two years on seems like a good time to stop and measure what changes might have occurred.  So let the process begin….

By chance today I found a story I wrote soon after I returned from Afghanistan. I was inspired by a play that portrayed modern versions of the myths in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which I had been reading for class then and had begun to read again today.  Metamorphoses… yeah… transformation… change. Thinking I’d try my hand at the same task, I chose the story of Ceyx and Alcyone for adaptation. You probably don’t know the myth, but it’s a sweet, sad tale of true love. Find it and read if you can, but you don’t have to to understand my take, which is called “Cy and Ali”:

    Cy busied himself with the by–now routine activities of a combat patrol: gathering his personal gear and stowing it in the truck, drawing the big .50 caliber machine gun and mounting it in the gun turret, setting the frequencies and security codes on the radio, helping out the other crew members and being helped by them in turn. As he waited for the mission commander to give the patrol brief, he thought about his wife for a few moments. Ali had not wanted him to go on this deployment; he had had options that would have kept him in the States, at least for a while longer, and she could not understand why he had been so eager to return to Afghanistan.

     “I think you are crazy,” she had told him. Left unstated was the suspicion that he liked the idea of going to war more than he liked the idea of being with her. She loved him dearly, and though he professed his love for her, too, she couldn’t help but feel that he didn’t value their relationship as much as she did. Cy also wasn’t sure what to think, either then or now while he waited for the patrol brief to begin. Returning to Afghanistan had been very important to him, but beyond his claims about needing to be with his unit and doing his duty, he sensed that there was a cold hard nugget of selfishness about his willingness to jeopardize his marriage—not to mention his life—for the sake of the deployment.

     Rather than give Ali an excuse or an explanation, he had offered a compensation. “When I get back, I promise I’ll make it up to you,” he had said, “I’ll go back to school, or find some job where I won’t have to deploy again anytime soon.”

     The offer seemed lame, even to Cy, like he had thought about it for two seconds, but Ali acceded to it anyway. She loved Cy in part because he was a soldier, but some things about being a military wife were really bad. Now she busied herself with her own classes, her part-time job, and her friends and family. But she worried a lot, and had a premonition that things might not end well.

     The day’s mission was nothing special: accompany an Afghan army unit while they resupplied three of their outlying outposts. The mission commander explained that the Americans’ role was to inspect the readiness of the Afghan outposts, and to provide artillery and medical support in case anything happened along the way. Cy’s job was gunner on the mission commander’s truck, which was to be third in the order of march behind two Afghan trucks. From the truck’s exposed turret he was to man the .50 cal while keeping an eye out for suicide bombers, IEDs, and ambushes. But nothing was expected to happen; “There has been no enemy activity on the planned route in the last 48 hours,” the mission commander informed them. They had traveled the day’s route many times before with nothing more serious occurring than a vehicle breakdown. Sure they planned well and rehearsed diligently, but that was all the more reason the actual mission was probably going to be not much.

     Which is why what happened, at least at first, had an unreal feel. Three miles out, on Route Missouri, Cy saw the two lead Afghan trucks come to abrupt halts and their occupants pile out. The Afghan soldiers took up firing positions on the right side of the road and pointed their weapons back to the left side. Because he had headphones on and was chattering with the other truck occupants, Cy was unable to immediately distinguish the sound of gunshots, and it took him a moment to comprehend that the Afghans had stumbled into an ambush. Other Americans also soon gleaned what was going on and suddenly the intercom crackled with questions, reports, and commands.

     “Action front…. Scan your sectors….. Anyone have positive ID?…. There they are…. 11:00 200 meters. Engage, engage!”

     Cy identified three turbaned gunmen firing at the Afghan army trucks from behind a low wall. He charged his machine gun and began to shoot. He had fired the .50 cal dozens of times in training and thus was surprised by how far off target were his first two bursts. But very quickly he found the range, and was rewarded by seeing the big .50 caliber rounds chew up the wall behind which the insurgents were hiding. Dust and debris filled the air; Cy couldn’t tell if he had hit anyone, but surely the fire was effectively suppressing the enemy. By now, the other American trucks had identified the gunmen and were firing, too. Still, it was so hard to figure out exactly what was happening. That the three insurgents behind the wall were capable of resisting the torrent of fire unleashed on them by the American and Afghan soldiers seemed impossible, but no one could tell if there were other enemy shooting at them from somewhere else.

     Soon, however, the sound of explosions began to fill the air. Again, it was not immediately clear that the Afghan army soldiers and the insurgents were now firing Rocket Propelled Grenades at each other. “What’s going on up there, Crazy?” Cy heard the mission commander ask him through the intercom. Loud booms resounded everywhere, both from the discharge of the weapons and from their rounds’ impact. Cy next heard “RPG! RPG!” echo through the intercom as the Americans understood that they too were now under attack. A round exploded against the truck to his left and Cy felt the blast wave wash over him. How could the enemy engage them so accurately?

    As the battle unfolded, Cy realized the situation was serious, no joke. The rest of the crew was protected inside the armored truck, but he was partially exposed in the machine gun turret. He continued to fire the .50 cal, doing his best to punish the insurgents who were trying to kill them. The noise was deafening, but in the midst of the roar of his own weapon and the other American guns, as well as the cacophony of human voices on the intercom, he discerned that enemy fire was pinging around him and sizzling overhead. Though he was not scared, he thought about his wife.

     Ali had felt uneasy throughout the day. She had not been able to communicate with Cy, which in itself was not so unusual. She understood that sometimes missions made it impossible for him to call or write. Still, she sent him emails and texts and the lack of a response for some reason felt ominous. That night, she had had a terrible dream. Cy appeared, looming over her, silent and reproachful, and Ali had awoken with a start. Nothing like this had ever happened before, not even close. She didn’t know what to do, so she watched TV for a while and then began surfing the Internet. She thought about calling her husband’s unit rear-detachment commander, but decided not to. There was no one she could talk to who wouldn’t think she was overreacting, so she didn’t do anything except continue to worry. 

     The next morning two officers appeared at Ali’s door. “The Secretary of Defense regrets to inform you that your husband has died as a result of enemy fire in eastern Afghanistan,” one of them intoned. It was all too true, but for Ali the reality of the situation dissolved in a swirl of chaotic thoughts and physical sickness. 

     Ali waited on the tarmac at Dover Air Force Base with Cy’s parents. An honor guard was also present, as well as a contingent from her husband’s unit, and a general whom she had never seen before and whose name she didn’t catch. Everyone was very nice to her, but Ali was confused. She didn’t know if she was supposed to be strong and dignified or to collapse in a pool of tears. She also didn’t know if she was angry with her husband, angry toward the Army, or just some strange combination of sad and proud. As her husband’s casket emerged from the plane, Ali felt herself drawn toward it. First she was taking small tentative steps, as if she were nervous about breaking some kind of rule or protocol. Then she was running, moving quickly toward the casket while the others in attendance waited behind. She was barely aware of what she was doing, but her feet seemed to no longer be touching the ground. It was as if she were floating or flying, and her arms were beating like wings of a giant bird. “O, Cy, is this the homecoming you promised me?” she thought, or maybe said aloud. Then she remembered throwing her arms around the casket, but at the same time she also felt herself rising into the air, in unison with her husband, who now was alive again and also seemed a magnificent, noble bird. Together, Cy and Ali soared upward, and the plane and the honor guard and the onlookers whirled beneath them as they circled in the sky.

http://www.armytimes.com/news/2011/09/military-dakota-meyer-will-swenson-ganjgal-afghanistan-091311w/

So now we have a Marine general recommending an Army officer for a decoration that the Army didn’t see fit to award in the first place.

Among the many reasons the story intrigues me is that CPT Swenson was a fellow member of Embedded Transition Team Class 55, the advisor training course I went through at Fort Riley in the fall of 2008.  He lived with his 15-man team in the same open bay barracks as my 15-man team.  I did not live with the two teams, but I was in their bay often enough.  And our teams usually partnered for the training events arranged for us.

CPT Swenson, who had two previous deployments under his belt, affected the long hair and sideburns—as far as the regulations allow and then some–that many badass veterans of multiple combat tours sport these days.  Prickly and aloof, he was contemptuous of those who hadn’t seen as much action as him.  I suppose he found most of us naïve and the training beneath him.  I don’t remember speaking with him, and my guys didn’t like him much.  Too cool for school, they thought.

Captain William Swenson. Photograph by Jonathan S. Landay/MCT

But let’s not dwell on trivial personal matters. 

In Afghanistan, CPT Swenson was an advisor for an Afghan Border Police (ABP) unit.  Talk about independence, adventure, danger.  ABP ETTs were just out there every day, aligned with the shakiest of Afghan Security Force units, in and out of the most precarious situations, and with support and relief far away and hard to get.  Not much compared, really, certainly not my position at relatively comfy Camp Clark.

I’m thinking CPT Swenson relished his outlier status while also using it to hone a righteous anger at the bureaucratic Army, the soft Army, the garrison and FOB-bound Army.  That’s the impression one also gets from Bing West’s The Wrong War, which profiles CPT Swenson and the big battle he performed so heroically in.

The cost of all that independence—which any sane person in the Army actually craves—can be high.  For CPT Swenson, the bill came due in Konar when his repeated calls for artillery support from the big American unit in sector went unheeded.   He paid a second time when he left Afghanistan and then the Army without recognition for his courageous exploits. 

For the record, I fully support all initiatives to recognize CPT Swenson for his heroism on 8 September 2009.  Whether he eventually receives the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star, or a Bronze Star with V Device, we will face the slightly uncomfortable scenario of one of our Army poster boys being a certified contrarian, one whom, though I don’t know for sure, but suspect, can hardly bring himself to say anything good about the Army.  We’ll have to live knowing that it took the Marines—Semper Fi—to recognize the bravery of one of our own.

Oh well.  The Army will just have to suck that one down. 

Finally, I salute SFC Kenneth Westbrook, another Class of 55 ETT who died with four US Marine advisors in Konar on 8 September 2009.  RIP SFC Westbrook.

I’ve refrained from naming names in this blog, but if there is any soldier with whom I served who deserves recognition it’s Sergeant First Class Kevin Dupont, who died of wounds following an IED blast while on patrol in the Khowst-Gardez Pass in Afghanistan’s Paktya province.  Below is the speech I gave at SFC Dupont’s memorial service, held in the Camp Clark gymnasium in June 2009. I’m publishing it here because I want to honor SFC Dupont, and because I think it renders well the flavor of our service as advisors to the Afghan army: 

“We are here today to honor the life of SFC Kevin Dupont, who has passed away of wounds suffered in an IED attack on 8 March of this year.  With SFC Dupont, there is much to honor, for he lived a rich life and made a difference in many people’s lives.

“Those of us in the room today knew SFC Dupont as a member of the Roughrider Embedded Transition Team, and that is an important last chapter in his life.  But there are other chapters, too, and I will touch on them first.  He was the devoted husband of L___, with whom he shared the last years of his life.  He is survived by his parents, R___ and G___, who knew him and loved him first.  He was an ex-Marine, an experience that toughened him and filled him with pride.  He was a long-time member of the Massachusetts National Guard, where he had many friends and many adventures.  He was a member of an anti-drug task force in New England, where he battled a scourge that plagues the towns and cities of the region he loved so much.

“For those of us who have read the testimonials posted on the website dedicated to SFC Dupont, it is clear that he had deeply touched those he met in each of these endeavors.  For those of those who knew him here in Afghanistan, it is easy to see why.  SFC Dupont was wise, he was competent, he was funny, and he was sociable.  He made friends easily, and naturally sought to unite people into teams, families, and communities.  He was always eager to help, to share any danger or hardship, to adapt to any new situation, and determined to have a good time while doing so.

“These qualities made SFC Dupont a perfect Embedded Transition Team member.  Being an ETT is a strange thing.  We are plucked from more traditional units and places in the Army, organized into ad hoc units with no history or lineage, processed through two months of training at Fort Riley, deployed into theater, and then reorganized into new teams with the challenging assignment to improve the armies of our allies in the War on Terror.   SFC Dupont exemplified the qualities it takes to succeed in such an assignment.   First, he was brave and feared nothing.  Though old—older than me—he was strong of body and young at heart.  More importantly, he was mature, thoughtful, and open to new experiences.  I first met SFC Dupont at Riley, when I gathered his team together because I knew that some of them would serve with me here in Afghanistan.   The rest of the team was from Virginia, and I couldn’t figure out how this ancient, silver-haired New Englander had bonded so well with young men from the Blue Ridge Mountains.   But it was clear that he had.   In Afghanistan, SFC Dupont was assigned to the 2/1 Kandak team, comprised mostly of California and Illinois men, and again he used his good cheer and positive outlook to make his presence felt strongly within their ranks.   In particular, SFC Dupont proved his mettle on the night of 8 February 2009, when he stood side-by-side with his ETT and ANA brethren in gun-battle with anti-Afghanistan insurgents in the town of Shimbowat.  SFC Dupont never flinched or wavered, and his courage spread through the ranks of both Americans and Afghans.

“Next, SFC Dupont was assigned to FOB Wilderness, where Coalition Forces and the Afghan National Security Forces battle insurgents trying to block construction of the Khowst-Gardez highway.  At FOB Wilderness, a conglomeration of Hescos and Bhuts as desolate as its name suggests, SFC Dupont found his final community, his final home, his final family.  The crown prince of Wilderness, SFC Dupont was known and respected by all the disparate residents of that lonely but strategically important outpost.   Two Coalition task forces, a PRT team, and a PMT team learned what the Roughrider ETTs already knew:   if something needed to be done, if a problem needed to be fixed, if a helping hand was required, SFC Dupont was always ready and willing to assist.

“SFC Dupont’s team chief, MAJ C___, and I assigned SFC Dupont to FOB Wilderness because we knew it was a tough mission.  Remote and austere as Wilderness is, duty there would challenge even the best of the units.  2/1 Kandak is a new unit, and it’s no secret that they were struggling to accomplish even the most basic tasks and missions.  Even worse, the morale of 2/1 soldiers was at rock-bottom, in particular because of a devastating friendly fire incident that occurred weeks before our arrival that resulted in the death of eight of its members.   It was these challenges MAJ C___ and I hoped to reverse by sending SFC Dupont to reside and work at FOB Wilderness.  I am glad to report that we succeeded—that SFC Dupont succeeded–beyond expectations. 

“It was clear from my visits to Wilderness that the ANA soldiers with whom SFC Dupont served adored him.  They would do anything he asked them, and they dreaded letting him down.  They called him “Baba”—or beloved old man—in view of his age, but they did so with respect and because they enjoyed his company to no end.  SFC Dupont, in his short time here, learned more Dari and Pashtun than any ETT on our team.  He used this skill to great effect, continually laughing and joshing—often extremely profanely—with his ANA partners.  All this came naturally to SFC Dupont, for he loved people in all their varieties, but it also enabled him to be enormously effective.  From friendship and camaraderie came trust and respect, which enabled SFC Dupont to chide, coach, correct, and encourage 2/1’s Wilderness soldiers to re-commit themselves to the mission, to keep their standards high, and to learn once again to depend on their United States Army partners. 

“So here’s to you, SFC Dupont.  You may well have been the best ETT of us all, and when this War on Terror is finally won, it will be because of the contributions of great men and women like you.  I only wish you had been able to complete your tour with us, and then return to your friends and family in New England.  You gave every bit of yourself to the mission, and set an example for us all to aspire to.  You were a great American, which means you were a great man period, and the good Afghans for whom you sacrificed your life recognize that fact as clearly as we do.  Rest in peace now my brother, and we’ll see you on the other side.

“Roughriders, Ride ‘Em Hard.”

If any friends or family of SFC Dupont see this post and want to contact me, please do so.  I would love to share more memories with you.

If you will bear with me, I will twice quote West at length, and then make a point or two.   The first quotation describes a Special Forces captain—a West Pointer at that—named Matt Golsteyn:

“The Special Forces commander, Capt. Matt Golsteyn, nodded to me the next morning as he rushed by.  During the next hour, he assigned the day’s tasks to his team sections, reviewed the routes to be cleared of IEDs, paired up Afghan officers and advisors for three combat patrols,  briefed everyone on the frag order he had received from higher, set prices for buying a goat and chickens for dinner, approved payment for a schoolteacher, decided how much money to offer an informant, cleaned his M4, chatted over the radio with the regimental commander, pecked out an e-mail to his SOF commander, studied the photomap of his area, practiced a Pashto phrase with his terp, and rushed off to confer with the Afghan battalion commander.  He was the Energizer Bunny with a scruffy beard.”

The second description is of Siad, a native-born Afghanistan interpreter for US forces:

“Siad was typical of the local interpreters.  They all tried hard, and most worshipped the grunts they served loyally.  Their thirst for absorbing American culture never ceased….

…At the squad level, there were thousands of Siads, overachievers who had learned pidgin English memorizing old soaps playing on black-and-white television sets.  Incredibly hardworking, inevitably they were adopted into the rough fraternity of the grunts.  Their skills were marginal, no matter how hard they tried.  Their hearts were huge.  Anyone who doubted the magical image of America in the minds of millions of Afghans had only to spend a day under fire with a U.S. squad and the local terp.”

West marvels at human dynamos like Golsteyn and Siad, but he doesn’t exactly approve of the fact that so much befalls upon them.  I think I know where he’s coming from.  I met plenty of officers who possessed Matt Golsteyn-like senses of responsibility and multi-tasking and information processing abilities.  I knew even better exactly how loyal and brave Afghan interpreters could be when bullets were flying.  What West doesn’t make clear is that in Afghanistan commanders like Golsteyn and interpreters such as Siad always come in pairs.  When and where you see one, you see the other.  They rely on one another and without each other would barely have a function.

The image of the (usually) white boss-man and his dark-skinned sidekick is actually a classically American one:  think of Natty Bumpo and Chingachgook of The Leatherstocking Tales, Moby Dick‘s Ishmael and Queequeg, Twain’s Huck and Jim, the salt-and-pepper cop buddy teams of dozens of movies.  Now here it reappears again, reincarnated, transported 14,000 miles, and put to the service of Afghan democracy and American foreign policy.

But I don’t want to be cynical or literary here.  We’re talking real life and a real war.

If you have trouble conceptualizing what is going on every day in Afghanistan, imagine thousands of Golsteyn-Siad teams energetically, purposefully, and cheerfully fighting back the Taliban, training the Afghan security forces, mentoring local government officials, fostering economic development, engaging with the populace, and taking care of their own.  Compared to their passionate application of human talent and will to the problems at hand, the contributions of the legions of soldiers under them and officers above them, important as they are, pale.  When the war is won, and to the extent that it has succeeded at all so far, it will be in large part due to the superhuman efforts of these ad hoc, essentially amateurish commander-terp dynamic duos. 

They’re not just carrying their fair share of the load and then some.  The whole damn thing depends on them.