Security

Battered Soldiers, Broken Plan: Afghanistan in Video and Photos

The cargo hold of the massive airlifter has been converted into a makeshift intensive care unit. Metal stanchions hold collapsible stretchers fitted with heart monitors. Defibrillators, pumps, intubation kits, oxygen bottles and other equipment lie ready in their hardened cases. For the seven-and-a-half hour flight between Afghanistan and this U.S. air base near the Pentagon, the seven men and women of the Air Force’s 10th Expeditionary Aeromedical Evacuation Flight and their attached critical-care team will try to keep their patients alive. But for now, they wait, shuffling foot-to-foot under the cargo hold’s glaring lights.
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RAMSTEIN AIR FORCE BASE, Germany — The 88-foot-long cargo hold of the massive airlifter has been converted into a makeshift intensive care unit. Metal stanchions hold collapsible stretchers fitted with heart monitors. Defibrillators, pumps, intubation kits, oxygen bottles and other equipment lie ready in their hardened cases.

David Axe spent six weeks in Afghanistan, on the war’s dangerous and largely forgotten eastern front.

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For the scheduled seven-and-a-half hour flight between Afghanistan and this U.S. air base near the Pentagon’s Landstuhl hospital, the seven men and women of the Air Force’s 10th Expeditionary Aeromedical Evacuation Flight and their attached critical-care team will try to keep their patients alive. But for now they wait, shuffling foot-to-foot under the cargo hold’s glaring lights.

The 11 patients arrive at 3 a.m. on an overcast Afghan night, delivered by airmen driving white buses emblazoned with big red crosses. The first patients are able to walk on board: four minor injuries, plus one psychiatric case.

‘Don’t be afraid to hold their hands,’ the nurse says.

Next, the airmen throw open the buses’ rear doors and gently unload six men who truly represent the rising cost of the nearly decade-old Afghanistan war: 1,524 American troops dead and 10,944 wounded, as of April 15, in a conflict that by the most conservative measure has cost the U.S. taxpayer more than $395 billion.

These last patients are on litters. Two have mangled legs wrapped in gauze — bombing victims, apparently. Both are unconscious, or nearly so. One of them lies on padding stained with blood. Another is intubated: The plastic tube running from his throat connects to pumps and monitors lying on the litter by his feet.

This man is the most serious case, classified “urgent.” All night, a doctor will sit by the patient’s side in a plastic lawn chair, carefully monitoring his vitals. For the duration of the flight across Central Asia to Western Europe, the man will not make a sound or move on his own.

All the same, Maj. Deeforast Schloesser, the aeromedical team leader, encourages one Army officer hitching a ride on the C-17 to stand with and talk to the patients — even the unconscious ones. “Don’t be afraid to hold their hands,” Schloesser says.

That’s the point at which I almost lose it.

A Turn on the Stretcher

I’m sitting next to the officer, my eyes glued to the patients on their stanchions directly opposite me as I meditate on the six weeks that I’ve just spent in two of eastern Afghanistan’s most violent provinces.

In a whirlwind media embed with the U.S. Army (see photo slideshow at top), I first ran the gauntlet of the Taliban’s escalating assault with improvised explosive devices on Logar, a key agricultural province just south of Kabul. Having narrowly survived a massive bomb explosion that sent several injured soldiers to Ramstein on their own C-17s (see video below), I then continued south to Paktika province on the Pakistani border.

There, I visited a company of the 101st Airborne Division that had endured a 12-hour assault by hundreds of Taliban in October.

I don’t want to take my turn on that stretcher. But If I’m a good war reporter, what choice do I have?

Today, the war-weary soldiers of Fox Company, 2-506 Parachute Infantry Regiment, are on the bleeding edge of the U.S.-led alliance’s last-ditch effort to seal off the Afghan border against thousands of insurgent fighters who use Pakistan’s lawless tribal region as a home base.

Fox Company’s paratroopers are some of the bravest, most fearsome young men I’ve ever met, but they are not winning — and each lives every day with the knowledge that he could easily be the next one intubated on a stretcher in a C-17 cargo plane like this one.

I struggle not to weep, sitting there in that cargo plane in the silent company of soldiers who very nearly gave everything in the course of a war I believe we are losing. My tears are for the hurt soldiers and their families, and for the friends and families of the dead.

My tears are also for myself. As long as Americans are fighting in Afghanistan, I will periodically travel to the war zone to tell their stories. My confidence shattered into a million pieces in the noise and pressure of that massive IED blast. I now believe it’s only a matter of time before I’m counted among the dead or wounded.

I don’t want to take my turn on that stretcher. But if I’m a good war reporter, what choice do I have?

The Logar Bombing Gallery

I began my journey with the 541st Engineer Company, assigned to clear Logar’s roads of increasingly deadly IEDs using a variety of tactics and equipment.

With a rising tide of 1,300 bombs a month, the Taliban and other extremists have turned huge swaths of Logar and other contested provinces into veritable “bombing galleries,” all but denying these areas to routine NATO patrols. It’s the 541st’s job to fight back against the bombers and clear a path for other NATO forces.

The alliance strategy for Logar and other on-the-fence provinces hinges on development and governance — essentially, winning hearts and minds. But the bomb threat is making the development work harder to pull off, and more expensive.

No one has identified the inflection point where military-led development ceases being worth its rising cost and danger. If the alliance has not yet reached that point, it’s no doubt imminent.

Route clearance surely counts as some of the hardest work in Afghanistan, and the most dangerous. To keep ahead of NATO countermeasures, the Taliban employ a bewildering arsenal of bomb types. Most are made of metal, but there are wooden and plastic variants, too. The explosive filler could be military-grade or something cooked up using nitrate fertilizer. Every bomb type requires a different method of detection. Each type poses a unique risk to the men whose job it is to detect it.

The back-to-basics bomb detection represented brilliance — or desperation.

This spring the 541st had reverted to the most basic bomb-detection methods imaginable: walking while scanning with metal detectors and probing the ground with bayonets.

“Slow and methodical,” was how Capt. Brandon Drobenak, the 541st commander, described the approach. These back-to-basics techniques were either evidence of brilliant reductive thinking on the Americans’ parts — or desperation.

In any event, the brute-simple tactics weren’t perfect. A route-clearance patrol the third week of March missed the bomb that would later destroy the armored vehicle I was riding in. And the 541st itself would come under attack just four days after I accompanied them on patrol. There was an IED blast followed by rockets and gunfire and, in the aftermath, Staff Sgt. Joshua Gire and Pvt. 1st Class Michael Mahr lay dead.

Fortress Districts

With mounting casualties and financial costs colliding with war weariness in the armed forces and at home, NATO has reached the peak of its anticipated strength in Afghanistan. The 30,000 troop reinforcements U.S. President Barack Obama deployed last year should begin coming home in July.

With violence unabated and fewer and fewer troops for operations, NATO has begun to prioritize. The alliance has identified around 80 “key-terrain” districts that will receive a growing proportion of the troops, cash and development effort in coming years.

“You have to pick your priorities,” said Army Capt. Paul Rothlisberger, former commander of U.S. troops in Baraki Barak, Logar’s sole key district.

The effect is a deepening division between NATO-occupied “fortress” districts benefiting from improved security, better governance and more jobs — and the remaining 300 districts that could be essentially abandoned to lawlessness or, worse, the Taliban shadow government.

But even in key districts such as Baraki Barak, Afghan forces must be prepared to fully take over from NATO troops as the alliance’s withdrawal accelerates. The handover is complicated by the wide technological gap between superbly equipped foreign troops and their Afghan counterparts with more basic gear.

‘I have no idea what’s going to happen after we leave,’ the soldier said.

The week after being in the midst of the bombing, I went on a night patrol in Baraki Barak (see video above). Soldiers from the U.S. 10th Mountain Division and Afghan cops squabbled after the night-vision-equipped Americans left the Afghans behind while pursuing a suspect.

In his eagerness to appease the temperamental Afghans, Staff Sgt. Andrew Odland gave up on actually looking for the Taliban and focused all his attention on the cops’ bruised egos.

“This did not go as planned,” Odland admitted.

The Fox Company troopers in Paktika, my next stop after Baraki Barak, were more blunt. “I have no idea what’s going to happen after we leave,” said Pvt. 1st Class Bryan Schlund after one poorly trained Afghan soldier came close to blowing up most of Fox Company’s officers while fumbling with a malfunctioning rocket launcher.

Borderline

That uncertainty is palpable in Paktika, one of Afghanistan’s poorest and most remote provinces. Paktika’s mountainous border crossings, both legal and illicit, are the insurgents’ main routes into Afghanistan from their winter bases in Pakistan.

“My biggest concern is … every night, what comes back and forth [across the border]?” said Col. Sean Jenkins, Fox Company’s brigade commander.

Historically, no counter-insurgency succeeds as long as the resistance possesses safe havens in neighboring countries. Until last year, just half a brigade of U.S. troops, around 2,500 men, patrolled all of Paktika — too few to even see, much less stop, even a tiny fraction of the border traffic.

The Obama surge more than doubled the U.S. presence in Paktika — and just in time. A few weeks after Fox Company replaced a single platoon at a tiny outpost in the border town of Margah, several hundred Taliban attacked the base under the cover of darkness.

What followed was one of the biggest sustained firefights of the whole war, and a decisive battlefield victory for the Americans. The sun rose over 92 dead Taliban strewn around the outpost; no Americans died.

But in a counter-insurgency, “you can’t shoot your way to victory,” as Maj. Steve Battle, Jenkins’ development officer, noted. Six months after the Margah battle, the extremists have reinforced and re-equipped and are now as strong as ever in Paktika.

As winter turned to spring, Fox Company and its sister units pushed out into parts of Paktika that haven’t seen NATO troops in years, in a last-ditch effort to tamp down on border traffic before the alliance’s withdrawal once again gives the Taliban and other groups total freedom of movement in Afghanistan’s mountains.

In early April, I accompanied Fox Company’s 2nd Platoon, commanded by a stocky lieutenant named Sean McCune, on a patrol to the town of Baqer Kheyl (see video above). The Taliban ambushed us just a couple miles from the outpost, peppering us with gunfire and rockets then scurrying down a mostly dry riverbed, surviving to wage war another day.

In a quiet moment the day before the ambush, McCune had confessed to me that he was tired of the fighting. “I’ll be happy if not another round gets fired,” he said.

‘I’ll be happy if not another round gets fired,’ the lieutenant confessed.

I share the sentiment. After seven years of war correspondence, I’m tired, too — and not just on a personal level.

I dread the effect on my country if our ambitions in Afghanistan continue to exceed the resources we’re willing to devote to the conflict. Equally, I dread grand visions of nation-building that seem to have little to do with finding and disrupting Al Qaeda and other international terror groups.

Our strategic aims seem pointless. And we lack the will to properly execute the strategy, anyway. It’s in that murky expanse between what we think we should do and our stomach for actually doing it that U.S. troops needlessly suffer. As I sit in the C-17-turned-flying-hospital, watching men and machines labor to keep our wounded soldiers alive, I find myself craving the wisdom of someone much older than me.

I ask Schloesser, the 55-year-old aeromedical leader, how he copes with seeing so many hundreds of injured troops, day after day. “You learn to live with it,” he says.

But that’s exactly what I hope doesn’t happen.

Videos and photos: David Axe

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