They were talking about us, the overwatch team, and they had a giant Russian machine gun poised with .50 caliber bullets ready to fire on us. I started looking around for a place to hide if our position got sprayed with bullets that could effortlessly slice through a brick wall. There was nothing but bushes, barely even a ditch deep enough to conceal us. We were wide open.
As day turned to dusk, Kearney focused his attention on the activity in and out of a house in the valley below. The overwatch team could see it with their night-vision goggles; they were also being fed information through drone feeds. Attack aircraft—Apaches and AC-130s flying overhead—waited for directives on what to shoot. Insurgent chatter was continuously spewing from the radio. Kearney’s commander back at the TOC, Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund, radioed him the go-ahead to attack. Minutes later the sky rumbled with firepower.
But the hostile chatter and the activity continued in the house across the valley, like a little bees’ nest. Before dawn a B-1 bomber swooped in and dropped two two-thousand-pound bombs on Yaka China. I lay on my back, listening to the guttural sounds of combat, the bombs, the smashing and crackling, the roar of a jet engine. I was so frustrated by my inability to work, my inability to photograph in the blackness of night, I decided to go back to sleep.
By daybreak Lieutenant Piosa, who was in charge of Second Platoon, radioed from the village that there were civilian casualties. And there I was, stuck with the overwatch team clear across an impassible valley, unable to document the human cost of war. I was there to bear witness but not witnessing anything at all. I envisioned my colleagues Tim and Balazs documenting the bodies of the civilians, the destruction of the houses, the terrified women and children, while I sat on the side of a mountain freezing my ass off, photographing the overwatch team and their ancient forest-green equipment.
I begged Kearney to get me across the valley. Couldn’t we just patrol across? I was so physically strong from weeks of hoisting thirty, forty, fifty pounds on my back and walking up and down mountains for hours a day that I was sure I could endure anything but the prospect of missing the photo. Kearney refused: It was completely hostile territory, and there was a vertical drop we couldn’t pass. I was twitching with anxiety. The day inched on, and the Taliban intercepts continued: They were watching us, they were getting closer to our positions, and they were going to spray us with machine-gun fire from across the valley.
Kearney, a new father, was gutted by the news of civilian deaths and trying to figure out what to do next. In his normal area of operation, he met regularly with the village elders and worked hard to gain their trust and explain their mission. Yaka China was an openly hostile village that his men had never before entered, and now he had to contend with having killed and injured women and children the night before. I couldn’t imagine how he handled the weight of these decisions, how he was responsible for both the lives of his troops and Afghan civilians, at the tender age of twenty-six. Aware that Elizabeth had years of experience in Afghanistan and a solid understanding of the culture, he turned to her for advice. Elizabeth talked through options with Dan and recommended that they fly into the very village they had bombed the night before and explain to the village elders why they attacked. Captain Kearney and Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund decided to heed Elizabeth’s advice. The plan was to explain to the Afghans why they had attacked and to apologize for the casualties. They were going to work on winning the hearts-and-minds-of-the-Afghans part of the war.
Our helicopter landed on the dung roof of a Yaka China home, spraying villagers’ hay and fodder and crops around like a tornado. Everyone gathered in a residential courtyard surrounded by homemade clay walls—Afghan men with craggy faces, Lieutenant Piosa, and his men from Second Platoon. I linked up with Tim and Balazs, who looked as if they had been through hell and back but were happy with their work.
“How was yesterday?” I asked.
“It was pretty bad.” Balazs was a man of few words.