Contrary to what I’d been told, the traffic had its rhythm, a sort of order dressed in chaos, as in Italy. Roundabouts had their flow and sometimes a counterflow, donkeys competed with tanker trucks, everyone beeped, and if you paid attention it all followed a certain logic. In the middle of it all, always there were street sweepers, anachronistic in neon-orange safety jackets with straw brooms, clearing the ubiquitous dust off the road between Massoud Circle and the airport, sweeping it nowhere in particular, never looking up at me or anyone else swerving to avoid them, heads down, fearless or oblivious. Did they think the war was over?
Of course, there were checkpoints, sandbags, soldiers, a bomb site where broken glass dangled in storefronts for weeks. And the war was busy claiming lives. One day an American duty driver got caught up at a checkpoint on the airport road (as I sometimes did) and got out to argue with the Afghan soldiers (as I occasionally would), and a Talib passing by on a motorcycle or bicycle noticed him, stopped and got off his bike, cut his throat, got back on his bike, and left while the American soldier bled out. That night, the local TV news reported the killing, showing the street sweepers with their heads down as always, sweeping bloody sand out of the roadway toward the median.
The longer I was there, unable to answer the question of how you can tell when a war is over, the more a second question rose in my mind alongside it. If you manage to get killed in a war that’s “over,” what does that make you?
THAT MAY, PRESIDENT OBAMA finally made his drawdown announcement after weeks of rumors. The American troop strength would fall to ninety-eight hundred by the end of the 2014, to be cut in half the year after that, and then out. The gunny sergeant walked into the office, a modified shipping container he called our tuna can. He took a seat and put his feet up, inspecting his pistol while I glanced at emails and fiddled absentmindedly with my knife. “I feel sorry for the people coming in 2015,” he said. “If you’re here now and something happens to you, then fine, we’re late in the game but everyone understands we’re here for a reason. But being here after we’ve said we’re leaving? Getting shot at when everyone at home doesn’t even think the war’s going on still? Then why the fuck are you even out here, dog?”
I tried to figure out if the president’s announcement meant that the “real” war was to end in 2014 when “Operation Enduring Freedom” turned into “Resolute Support” (just as “Iraqi Freedom” turned into “New Dawn” in 2010) or in 2016 when the troops would (we thought) all be gone, or some other date. Most Americans get our first understanding of wars from history books, starting with the dates each war began and ended. As with a human life, the span of a war is there in parentheses right after its name. The implication is that wars, like people, go from nonexistence to being and then back to nonexistence, all at a precise time and date. We grow up assuming wars have beginnings and endings. But that date is only the object of consensus after the fact, if at all. In the days after I had announced my deployment orders publicly, I occasionally got a puzzled response from people who seemed confused or even irritated by the idea that I would be going over. “I thought we were getting out of there,” they’d say, as if I should be calling the Navy back to check if it was some kind of mistake.
At the outset of the mobilization, I had felt a sense of purpose, maybe even idealism, that can only be compared to the feeling of starting on a political campaign. I thought back to 2004 and John Kerry’s presidential run, and then remembered that it was during that campaign that I saw the iconic footage of his testimony as the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, long-haired and still in his twenties. “How do you ask a man,” he had asked the senators then, “to be the last man to die for a mistake?” I did not believe the Afghanistan War was a mistake. But as I weighed my place in a war most people at home seemed to think was already ending, I couldn’t stop wondering, how do you ask a person to be the last to die for anything?
THE RHYTHM OF DEPLOYED LIFE brought busy days and slow ones. Even with the extra time I spent keeping up with the home front, carrying a laptop and a cigar up to the roof at midnight to pick up a Wi-Fi signal and patch via Skype into a staff meeting at home, there was more time for reflection and reading than I was used to back home. For every day punctuated by a rocket attack or explosion, there were five dominated by meetings, emails, and workouts. Between calls home, convoys, and meals, I sat at the computer in my tuna can and looked up the history of wars beginning and ending.
I read about how World War I ended at eleven in the morning on November 11, 1918. The armistice was signed at five in the morning, but set to take effect at eleven. In those six hours, there were thousands of casualties. An American soldier was killed at 10:59 after he decided to use the last sixty seconds of the war to charge a German position. If the armistice had been agreed on the tenth of November, or the twelfth, would anyone have bothered to set a time instead of letting it take immediate effect? Did the negotiators place any weight on the loss of life required for their tidy numerology?
By August, as my unit’s only remaining officer at the thinning ISAF headquarters in Kabul, I was told in no uncertain terms that my mission now had less to do with running our little station there than with shutting it down. The gunny sergeant, my right-hand man, went home to rejoin his wife and four boys in South Carolina, leaving me with one analyst. In the fluorescent-lit chow hall with officers from another unit, I would end meals by rising from the table with mock self-importance, saying: “Well, time to go check on my troops.”
This was the cue for one of the others to ritually supply the punch line to that joke: “You mean, your troop.”
But the mission, which had to do with blocking the flow of narcotics funding to the insurgency, still mattered. So even as I worked to dismantle our shop, I got busy looking for people to take up pieces of ongoing work that we could hand off—a British law enforcement partner who might still be there in a year working out of the UK Embassy, a State Department civilian whose head didn’t count against the ninety-eight hundred, some special units with a mission to stay throughout the retrograde, or one of the Afghan officials I had met who were going to wind up owning these problems anyway.
Letting go of the mission did not come easily, but clinging to it raised other concerns. What if I was doing something wrong by pushing too hard, risking my life and others’ to keep going outside the confines of the base in order to see the mission through, while being told from on high to wrap it up? I owed it to anyone who got into a vehicle with me, and their spouses, to make sure we weren’t taking any unjustified risks. In my eagerness to finish strong, how could I be sure I wasn’t entering the grim tradition of officers—like the ones who had ordered those deadly advances that November morning in 1918 in order to get a few more inches of turf by eleven—who didn’t recognize when their job was done, their war over?