It was clinical at first, but this last day, the tone of some of the instructors began to change from the deadpan style they had projected since our arrival. A drill sergeant got quiet and stared into the distance for a moment before naming a friend who was killed in Iraq, leaving a wife and five kids. “They have to live with that every day now.” He went on, brotherly, reminding us that we were being trained to know what to do if action finds us, but were not supposed to look for combat if we didn’t have to.
“Remember, if you get killed, the war’s over for you. But the people you leave behind, they’ll be fighting it for the rest of their lives. So before any of you decide to go off and be a hero, think about that shit for a minute.” And we all did, uncharacteristically quiet, until the bus came to take us back to the barracks to pack.
15
“The War’s Over”
As soon as my war began, I wondered when and how it would end. Hopefully in September, when my orders were supposed to conclude. And hopefully by then there would be further signs of success in the American mission. But I had only been on the ground for a few days when someone told me to leave the idea of winning and losing behind.
Smoking Gurkha cigars around the firepit with my new colleagues, I was still finding my social bearings as we swapped stories in the light of a Weber grill filled with scrap wood. This being an intel unit, they had of course looked up the new guy before I arrived, but by now most of the interest and amusement over my own backstory had already run its course. We were back to talking, as usual, about the war and where it was headed. I had volunteered some ideas about what it would take to win in the border regions when Rob, an analyst, leaned back in his chair and laconically interrupted me: “The war’s over, Pete.”
For a quiet moment the words hung in the air with the cigar smoke and the dust of Bagram Air Field. My blood pressure rose as responses flowed through my mind. What do you mean, the war is over? If the war’s over, why are you here? Why am I here? If the war’s over, what the hell was that rocket attack last night? If the war’s over, then somebody should tell whoever keeps shooting rockets at us, they might like to know.
But I held my peace, trying to mimic the affect of the others, that tired ease and casually annoyed humor of resting soldiers, as we sat and smoked and glared at the fire. I got up to fetch more firewood from our pile of chopped-up old pallets. I wasn’t prepared to argue with the most respected analyst in our unit, bearded and world-weary so that it was easy to forget he was my age, possibly even younger, and who had been working on the Haqqani network for years. Besides, he wasn’t wrong. His point was that America wouldn’t confront Pakistan over ISI support to fighters wreaking havoc on the Afghan side of the Durand Line. The U.S. wasn’t going to endanger its strategic, sixty-year relationship with Pakistan over some little thing like the Afghanistan War. It was 2014, and we might still be getting rockets shot at us from time to time, but there was only so much America could or would do about it. If winning the war meant sinking our relationship with Pakistan, then yes, the war might as well be over. And yet, here we were on a cold night in dusty Parwan Province, because wars like this one don’t just end. I would spend the rest of my deployment wondering exactly what it means for one of today’s wars to be truly over, and how anyone would be able to tell.
BY APRIL, AS THE SNOW was melting on the mountains over Bagram, I had been moved to Kabul and was starting to feel like I had my feet on the ground as an officer. As the admiral had foreshadowed, I got out more than you would expect for an intelligence analyst. I might have planned to spend my time behind a sophisticated computer terminal in a secure area somewhere, and sometimes that’s just what I did. But it turned out my services were more often needed as a driver or vehicle commander on convoys moving people or gear in and around Kabul for my unit. In a ritual to be repeated dozens of times, I would heave my armored torso into the driver’s seat of a Land Cruiser, chamber a round in my M4, lock the doors, and wave a gloved goodbye to the Macedonian gate guard. My vehicle would cross outside the wire and into the boisterous Afghan city, entering a world infinitely more interesting and ordinary and dangerous than our zone behind the blast walls at ISAF headquarters.
On the streets that spring and summer, I obtained the strange mental balance required of anyone operating outside the wire in a conflict zone. In order to figure out how to conduct yourself, you must hold two contradictory truths in your mind. Truth number one: The vast majority of people you see through the windshield are just regular people, just like at home, trying to get through their day, out to shop and work and study and do all the things people do. You have a moral as well as a strategic obligation to respect them, to drive carefully so you don’t hit a kid on his way to school or a widow begging in the street or someone’s uncle carrying home a watermelon, to act in such a way as to help or at least not harm them in their daily routines. Truth number two: With your rifle, your gear, your vehicle, and your passengers, you are quite obviously an American soldier (or sailor, in my case), and accordingly you must recognize that a small but nontrivial number of the people you see around you are spending their every waking minute figuring out how to kill you and your passengers, and will do so if given the slightest opportunity unless you avoid them or kill them first.
My first couple times out, I had prepared by practically memorizing the regular driver’s briefings, page after page of information on the latest threat streams, the suspicious vehicles, the rumors and reporting. But soon I gave up on trying to understand the details of the threats. The warnings on known VBIEDs (vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices) usually boiled down to this useless advice: watch out for the white Corolla. In Kabul, pretty much everyone drives a white Corolla. So I fell back on my training from Camp McCrady, eyes out for the known signs that we were about to get blown up. A suddenly empty neighborhood. A nervous-looking lone driver of a vehicle with a heavy trunk load. An obviously male hand coming out from underneath a woman’s blue burqa.
Quickly, I learned how to drive at war. But what I saw through the windshield didn’t look like a war. It looked like a city. A lively, energetic, smelly city full of children and merchants hawking things and students and businessmen with papers under their arms hustling to wherever it was they were going. Children were everywhere, and I wondered how it came to be that this boy was herding a flock of sheep grazing on piled garbage near a busy intersection, while that one was in a crisp blue oxford shirt in his own flock of identical blue-shirted classmates, charging across a four-lane road toward school. I wondered what was on the minds of the girls in black dresses and white headscarves, holding their notebooks to their chests like so many twelve-year-old girls do, never seen on the streets except in these little groups in their school uniforms.
Inevitably, I also thought of municipal services and scanned Kabul with a mayor’s-eye view. I gauged what seemed to be done well (curb painting and lighting), poorly (trash pickup), and not at all (animal control). I thought of home, where people would be crisscrossing South Bend with no thought at all given to how they might obtain clean water, whether trash would ever get picked up off the side of the road, whether there were any bombs nearby.