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LOGAR PROVINCE, Afghanistan – Staff Sgt. Marcus Jimenez was pissed. On March 19, he had led a force of U.S., Afghan and Jordanian soldiers into the village of Pakhab-e'Shana, in eastern Afghanistan, with what Jimenez considered the best of intentions.
David Axe spent six weeks in Afghanistan, on the war's dangerous and largely forgotten eastern front.
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While the Americans conferred with village elders, the Jordanians and Afghans would inspect the town's four mosques, to see if there were any repairs NATO and the Afghan government might help pay for. In addition, the Americans and Jordanians had some soccer balls to hand out.
But the elders greeted the soldiers with what looked like cool indifference. And the village's legions of children greeted them with rocks, hurled artillery-style over mud walls. A rock struck one of Jimenez's American gunners in the face, drawing blood.
The stocky staff sergeant stormed to the nearest elder, Pashto interpreter in tow. "They hurt one of my guys!" Jimenez yelled. He demanded the elder "get control of" his people.
Three minutes later, Jimenez had calmed down. He grinned. "Kids will be kids," he said. "We can't forget that most people here are good."
An hour later, Jimenez would be dragged, barely conscious and badly hurt, from the twisted wreckage of an armored truck blown up by an improvised explosive device just a stone's throw from Pakhab-e'Shana. I was lucky – and so was a medic named Michael Sario. We were sitting in the very back of the vehicle, farthest from the explosion. I escaped with gashes and, later, a minor case of the shakes. Sario was rattled but apparently otherwise OK.
Jimenez, three more soldiers and the interpreter were not. They were injured in the blast, and had to be evacuated by helicopter.
The attack was a setback in a province where NATO is still hoping to win hearts and minds. Across Afghanistan, NATO has largely shifted from a "soft" counterinsurgency strategy to a more lethal counterterrorism approach.
But in many parts of Logar, COIN still rules. Gen. Stanley McChrystal highlighted Logar's Baraki Barak district two years ago as a model for the whole country. Today, McChrystal is gone, replaced by his former boss Gen. David Petraeus.
Under the more aggressive Petraeus, Logar is less a model than the exception. But even in one of the last bastions of counterinsurgency in Afghanistan, the dangers remain very real. And the personal cost to NATO troops and, yes, embedded reporters – too high.
An Eternity in Two Seconds
Elders had been met, mosques inspected, soccer balls handed out. It was early afternoon when the Americans and their Afghan and Jordanian allies piled into blocky mine-resistant ambush-protected, or MRAP, trucks and armored Humvees for the short ride back to Forward Operating Base Shank, 50 miles south of Kabul in an agricultural valley stitched by irrigation canals.
I climbed into a MaxxPro MRAP commanded by Jimenez (pictured above, left). I'm finicky about my comfort. During my last visit to Logar in late 2009, I fractured my tailbone – i.e., broke my ass – possibly while bouncing around in the back of a MaxxPro MRAP.
So these days I make sure I get the most comfortable seat. That meant stealing a place from Jimenez's Pashto-speaking interpreter. I felt like a jerk. But at least I wasn't keeled over in pain.
I had just polished off a small bag of nacho chips when there was a very loud clanging sound and, in an instant, the whole world shrank into a space roughly the size of a utility closet, went white, and angled rightward with an awful, heavy momentum. I knew, even then, that the pallor was from the dust shocked out of a hundred nooks and crannies by the force of a massive IED. The world's weird angle was from the vehicle's roughly 15-ton armored body being hurled forward and sideways by the blast.
I hung there in dusty space for what felt like forever, but was probably only two seconds. It was more than enough time to decide I was dead, marvel at the strangeness of being dead, then realize I was still alive – and fear I might not be when this metal sarcophagus stopped flying.
We struck the ground: seven men and their equipment crunched into an unforgiving heap. The gunner, a kid named Glenroy Martin, was lying on top of me, screaming and cussing. The interpreter cried out in accented English, squinting against the blood streaming down his face.
Sario, pinned in his seat by weapons and bodies, blinked and gaped. In the front of the vehicle, where Jimenez and the driver sat, there was a ghastly silence.
My glasses were gone. I would find them later, broken in half and wedged under a radio. My cameras, strapped to my chest, seemed OK. I grabbed them – first my still camera, then my video camera, and began documenting the worst thing that had ever happened to me. You can see some of the results in the rough video montage above.
Never Alone
Sario reached for the radio strapped to his shoulder and pleaded for help. There was no response. For a moment, I feared that we had survived the blast but everyone else in the convoy had died, leaving us all alone on this wretched road, so far from home. But that was absurd: No IED is that big. In time, Sario would discover that his radio's batteries were dead – that, in fact, we were never alone.
Amid the crying and cussing, Sario managed to free himself from the writhing, knotted flesh and metal and throw open the MRAP's top hatch. At the same moment, Sgt. Matthew Armstrong appeared in the circle of sunlight framed by the hatch.
Like a thinly mustachioed Jesus, he reached down to offer us salvation.
Sario went first; I followed. From atop the charred truck, I saw people everywhere: American, Afghan and Jordanian soldiers and, in the distance, a gathering crowd of civilian spectators.
The soldiers swarmed around the truck. Some aimed their weapons outward to protect against any follow-on attack. Others worked to pull Jimenez and the driver out of the truck's smashed front half. The rest held their hands up to me, offering to help bear me down to the ground. I landed at the lip of a kiddie-pool-sized crater and the remains of a motorbike that had apparently been parked next to the buried bomb.
I was bleeding from several cuts on my arm and face, but I felt no pain. That would come that night and the next day. As I write this, 24 hours after the attack, I feel worse than at any point during the incident itself.
My knees feel hollow. Every muscle aches. When I'm not using them, my hands shake. But on the ground after the explosion, I was as focused on my job as the soldiers were on theirs.
I took photos until my poor, abused digital camera gave up the ghost. I switched to video-only. Looking back on the heady minutes after some anonymous insurgent asshole tried his best to kill me, I recall it in MTV-style quick cuts:
Soldiers bearing stretchers.
Injured men leaning against a wall.
A soldier bumming a cigarette and a Jordanian offering a light.
Afghan soldiers saying something very, very important to me – in Dari that I could not understand.
A young medic named Jennifer Schwartz tying bandages on my arm and asking me to repeat lists of words as she assessed whether I had a brain injury.
And then, looping around us like Heaven's dragonflies, two Blackhawk helicopters. One at a time, they landed, snatching up everyone from the MRAP except me and Sario. Two Apache gunships covered the Blackhawks' departure.
'You Are My Brother'
The two Arab armies in Afghanistan are usually reticent about interacting with the media, but as I stumbled from the landing zone back toward my wrecked MRAP, Jordanian Lt. Ibrahim Al Jawarneh (pictured above, left) put his hands on my shoulders, looked into my eyes and told me we were brothers.
Despite being a blast victim himself, medic Sario had helped patch up and evacuate the wounded. Now we stood and talked about vacations we were planning for coming months. I told him I was going to Japan – wait, no, China. That night, a kind-faced medic at the base aid station would assure me that some confusion is normal after a big shock.
All the same, the Army has been keeping a close eye on me. Outside Pakhab-e'Shana, Schwartz checked on me periodically as the cleanup began and afternoon became evening. "Don't fall asleep," she told me. That night, she would shepherd me and Sario into the aid station and fend off verbal assaults by a FOB paper-pusher more interested in proper procedure than the actual bomb survivors standing before her.
It took a while to remove the destroyed MRAP. In the meantime, I sat in an undamaged vehicle and listened to my iPod. Recalling the embarrassing musical accompaniment to my last bombing, I was careful this time. I selected Mumford & Sons' "The Cave." Through the window, I watched the Jordanians and Afghans spool out prayer rugs and bow toward Mecca. I fixated on these lyrics:
When Schwartz conducted my brain exam, the first thing she asked was my name. I said it like it was something amazing I'd just discovered, like the words were proof that this, even this, could not kill me. I said, "I'm David Axe." And I meant it.
Nighttime
It's been a full day since I survived one of the 1,300 IEDs that target NATO troops every single month in this decade-old war. Compared to the five people air-evac'ed from the blast site, I'm lucky.
I am standing. I can think straight.
But I do not feel well. And for only the second time in my seven-year career as a war correspondent, I am afraid to do my job.
I read over these words I've written, and I worry that I've focused too much on my own fragmentary experiences, my own frenetic feelings. But then I assure myself there's no other way to write about getting blown the hell up.
What's more, the experience of surviving an IED is a tragically common one for U.S. and allied troops – though thankfully more common than dying of one. When we send our Jimenezes, Martins, Sarios and Schwartzes to war, this is what we ask them to endure. The shock. The pain. The terrible prospect of a damaged mind.
Every American must appreciate these consequences, plus one other: the guilt of emerging relatively unharmed when others don't. I fought for my comfy seat on the MRAP and, as a result, I was relatively unhurt in the explosion. The man I displaced, I last saw crushed in metal and streaked in blood. I worry I will dream about him.
Video, photos: David Axe
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