Eagle Down

by Jessica Donati

  Tina had refined the process of waiting into a fine art, and the girls would have to learn too. She planned to fill the time with activities, trips, and school events, breaking down the June-to-February deployment into increments, like a relay race. She felt extremely sad and tired but chalked it up to moving home and their time in California coming to an end. It was the longest she and Hutch had spent together since college.

  She had met Hutch in his second year at West Point, at a formal ball, before the concept of war had seemed real to either of them. The cadets attended in uniform, and their dates wore fancy dresses. She had gone with a friend as someone else’s blind date, but Hutch immediately fell for her. She was dressed in black and looked incredibly exotic to him. Friends had warned her that he was an excessive partier, so she resisted his advances as advised and refused to surrender her phone number.

  Hutch was enamored with the idea of warrior culture at West Point, which involved drinking, partying hard, and fighting to the death, though at that point neither he nor his classmates had ever seen a war. After much persuasion, he finally managed to extract Tina’s AOL messenger handle and spent six months wooing her before he managed to get her phone number. She made him laugh. He was hooked. The next time they met, with a group of friends at a dive bar in Manhattan, they spent the night deep in conversation, oblivious to everyone else.

  Hutch watched the September 11 attacks happen on live TV while he was in class at West Point. He had just attended the Affirmation Ceremony, a rite of passage for cadets that committed them to at least five years of military service. He later watched the invasion of Iraq while sitting on Tina’s couch; she was in college, and they weren’t yet married. It hadn’t meant much then. It still wasn’t real. He hadn’t even decided to try out for the Green Berets at that point.

  He graduated from West Point with a degree in Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic, and deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, soon afterward. It didn’t take long for him to abandon his romantic notions about war—that happened during his first deployment in 2004, when it seemed that their only strategy was to drive around and wait for something to hit them so they could fight back. When he tried out his Arabic on the locals, they would look perplexed or run off to find the guy that had lived in Germany and spoke some English so they could communicate.

  He learned that shrapnel and bullet trajectories didn’t follow the rules he’d studied in class. One soldier survived a bullet that shot clean through his helmet but barely grazed his head, while another was decapitated by shrapnel—from a bomb blast that didn’t even hit his vehicle. The soldiers were afraid. Deaths and injuries whittled down their numbers, and fighting alienated the people they were supposed to be securing.

  After the bitter experience in Iraq, Hutch decided to give military life another chance and try out for the Green Berets, which he hoped would allow him to train in a foreign language and use his understanding of local culture and history to be more effective. He hadn’t even known that Special Forces really existed until meeting some of their members at West Point. They were a legendary division that inserted behind enemy lines and worked alongside native forces in small, independent teams. Tina encouraged him to apply. He wanted the freedom to make decisions and interact with local populations.

  He went through Special Forces Assessment and Selection, one of the most grueling selection processes in the army, alongside one of his classmates from West Point. They competed against each other at every step. Hutch admired him for his sharp mind and athleticism. Hutch was sure that his classmate would make the cut. He wasn’t so sure about his own chances. But the soldiers were separated into two groups at the end—pass and fail—and Hutch saw his classmate standing next to him.

  “Thank god,” he thought. “If he’s standing here, I must be through.”

  The Special Forces Qualification Course, known as Q-Course, included foreign-language training and took up to two years to complete. It was a multistage program for entry to the US Army Special Forces. Hutch graduated from the captain’s career course and was assigned to 3rd Group. It was historically oriented toward Africa but had turned to the Middle East and Central Asia to cope with the demands of fighting the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  Hutch had found his place in the Green Berets. He’d been interested in the military since childhood. He had read about every war in his father’s Encyclopaedia Britannica and had joined the military book club at thirteen, absorbing everything from military manuals to war-related literary classics. The scale and drama of war seemed so powerful, beyond any other human experience. The people and battles that shaped the fate of nations seemed much more exciting than anything on offer in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois.

  His father, an accountant, was strict with money. The family’s only extravagances were sending Hutch and his brother to a private Catholic school and indulging in some travel between school terms. The family’s history of military service was limited to Hutch’s grandfather, who had been drafted against his will during World War II and sent to fight the Nazis in Europe. When Hutch announced plans to go to West Point, the prestigious military academy, both his parents protested against him joining the army.

  His father relented eventually and took him to spend the night at West Point to try out life as a cadet. Hutch was thrilled. He submitted his application to the local congressman, and recruiters asked him just one question during the physical test: How many pull-ups did you do? Pull-ups happened to be his greatest strength. He had done twenty-three. The aides put him at the top of the list.

  He called it one of many times that luck had prevailed in his life.

  At Pope Army Airfield that summer afternoon in 2015, as the plane waited on the tarmac, Tina said goodbye. She and Hutch were among the few couples that had survived the steady pace of deployments through the years. She was used to him leaving but realized that she felt sadder than usual this time. When he was finally called to board, she hugged him, kissed him, and took the two girls back to the car. Kate, the youngest, started crying and didn’t stop for the entire twenty-minute journey home.

  Hutch was off, heading first to Jordan and then assigned to another military flight bound for Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

  Footnotes

  1 In movies and popular culture, a Special Forces team may be better known as an “A-Team.”

  2 But in Afghanistan, military alliances are fickle. The VSO program was effective in some places but fueled long-standing grievances in others. A short timeline further undercut the mission. The UN and other rights groups recorded a catalog of abuses linked to US-backed militias, including the militia led by Azizullah and trained by Hutch’s team.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Helmand Job

  CALEB

  CALEB BREWER was excited about the upcoming trip to Afghanistan. It would be his first combat tour as a Green Beret, and he had just qualified as an intelligence sergeant. Although he was new, it was a senior position on the team. He was almost thirty, with light brown hair and blue eyes, and he looked more like a surfer than a soldier. He knew his work wouldn’t change the course of the war, but he was eager to make a difference and help the Afghan commandos.

  Caleb’s team was part of the National Guard’s 19th Group. They trained in Utah’s Rocky Mountains, and, like him, many of its members were experienced climbers. The high altitude and cold weather created conditions similar to those found in Afghanistan’s vast Hindu Kush mountain range. When they found out they had been assigned to Helmand as part of a last-minute reshuffle, the group of climbers laughed. They were going to a part of Afghanistan with no mountains.

  Helmand was a vast, mostly desert province fed by a large river that irrigated farmland used to grow poppies, and it held a deep emotional significance for the US military, particularly the US Marine Corps. It was the focus of the eighteen-month surge authorized by President Obama, which had brought the US presence in Afghanistan to a peak of one hundred thousand troops in 2011. The surge aimed to turn
the tide against the Taliban after the insurgency had made gains while the US was focused on Iraq. But the Taliban fought hard to control the narcotics-smuggling routes that sustained the insurgency. By the time the last US troops left the province in 2014, more than 450 US Marines and soldiers had died in battles for the villages running along the Helmand River.

  Despite US efforts to curb poppy farming, output in Helmand province alone exceeded that of the entire country of Myanmar, the next major producer after Afghanistan. By mid-2015, Helmand was mostly under Taliban control once again. The local government had a presence in the provincial capital and district centers but exerted little control over the population and was widely believed to profit from the booming narcotics trade in the province.

  After four months of preparation for the mission, including three at Camp Williams in Utah and a final month of collective training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina, a serious rift had emerged between team members and leadership. Some of the more experienced team members complained that the team’s leaders were ignoring their input, and that the training scenarios were poorly designed and would put them in danger. They also warned the lack of cultural training could put them at risk of an insider attack, when Afghans turned on their American partners, sometimes for as little as a perceived slight against their honor.

  Caleb was concerned, but he said nothing and focused on his role of gathering intelligence to prepare his team for the deployment. He was an optimist by nature and tried to focus on the positive. He had become a Green Beret to make a difference, to operate at the tip of the spear, and this was his chance. In Afghanistan, each team was tasked to work with a partner force of elite Afghan commandos, or with one of the specialized police units, and was expected to function with minimal supervision to achieve its goals for the campaign.

  Caleb’s team, ODA 9123, belonged to Bravo Company, based in Utah, but they were deploying as an attachment to Alpha Company, based in Washington State. Alpha Company was short of complete teams. The National Guard companies of the US Army Special Forces were always short-staffed because the soldiers led civilian lives and sometimes fell behind on their certifications or had other commitments.

  Alpha Company commander Major Ronnie Gabriel was their new boss. Caleb happened to know Maj. Gabriel from the Special Forces Qualification Course. He didn’t discuss his concerns about unity on the team out of loyalty to his teammates. The team was handpicked for the deployment, and dynamics were best handled internally. ODAs, or A-Teams, were the building blocks of the Special Forces, and there were usually six to a company. Each one was coded with a four-digit number, and every job on the twelve-man team was coded with a number and letter. The intelligence sergeant was the 18F or “Fox.”

  Caleb felt like everything in his life was falling into place after a succession of experiments, including a trip to Iraq with the US Army, a stint in the police, and two unfinished college degrees.

  When he departed his home in Tucson, Arizona, Caleb found it hard to say goodbye to Ashley, his wife, and their daughters. The youngest was barely six months old. He tried not to think about all the milestones he’d miss. Ashley was a force of nature. She had resolved to be independent at an early age. She studied engineering, got a job straight out of college, and had bought a house by age twenty-one. Even with Caleb gone for most of the year, she felt confident about juggling two small children and a job. There wasn’t a problem she couldn’t solve. It was just how she operated.

  Caleb said that he knew from day one, the moment he saw Ashley in the hallway during their senior year in high school, “Yep, she’s the one.” Their first date was dinner at Red Lobster, after which they went back to her house to watch Super Troopers. Caleb got a job at the same pizza place where she worked, just to have the opportunity to flirt with her and show off. It worked. Ashley joked that he didn’t know how good-looking he was when they started dating. Caleb teased that she only liked him for his car: a ’67 baby-blue Mustang. They married in Hawaii several years later.

  Ashley hadn’t worried much about Caleb’s tour in Iraq because he wasn’t on the front lines. This new assignment was a different story. Even so, she had supported his decision to join the Green Berets and his recent talk of transferring to active duty. Caleb found it hard to hold down a day job and keep up with the long list of 19th Group premobilization requirements. There were medical training, language proficiency, close-air-support certification, and a zillion other things. He had to travel from their home in Arizona to Utah for each training. At least if he was an active duty soldier, his family could live near the base, and the steady paycheck would help.

  IN AUGUST 2015, Caleb flew with his team to Kandahar Airfield in southern Afghanistan and spent the night there before traveling to Camp Antonik in Helmand province for the handover with 7th Group. US Special Forces maintained an on/off presence at Camp Antonik; officially, the mission didn’t exist, because the United States was supposed to have left Helmand a year earlier. The old US military headquarters, Camp Leatherneck, once home to forty thousand people, was now a ghost town. The Afghan army didn’t have the resources to maintain the base.

  The 7th Group soldiers seemed dismissive. Caleb thought they respected his team less because they were part of the National Guard. The handover operation, also known as the relief in place, should have lasted several days, but it was over in hours. He got a thirty-minute briefing with their Fox, the intelligence sergeant, who answered questions and then left for Kandahar Airfield. Caleb’s takeaway from the conversation was that things were going badly and were expected to get worse.

  In the spring, the Taliban had made sweeping gains in several districts. They had surrounded the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. In Kajaki, they were encroaching on an unfinished $260 million USAID1 project to expand an existing hydroelectric dam. In Sangin, they had come close to seizing the governor’s office, and in Musa Qala, they had set the district headquarters on fire. The Taliban had captured the district center of Now Zad and raised the white Islamic Emirate flag over the administrative buildings only a month prior to the arrival of Caleb’s team.

  Morale was low among Afghan security forces. The Taliban dictated when and where battles took place. The Afghan army, unable to rely on conventional forces or the police to hold ground, instead pushed the elite commando units out to the checkpoints. But without US air support, casualties among the Afghan commandos, who were partnered with US Special Forces, were surging as well, and the commandos resented being used like cannon fodder. The Fox warned Caleb to watch out for an insider attack, fueled by resentment.

  Caleb thought the situation in Helmand resembled a giant game of Risk. He wasn’t surprised that the calculations for the Afghan commandos had changed. Their fate didn’t align with the Americans’ any longer; their allegiance was to their families and their tribes. He didn’t blame them for feeling abandoned. His optimism was already beginning to drain. The province had refused to be pacified by twenty thousand US Marines. What was one ODA spread across all of Helmand supposed to do?

  Nor was Caleb surprised when the team’s captain announced that Camp Antonik in Helmand was to be their permanent home, and there would be no more trips back to Kandahar Airfield. The US Army Special Forces battalion wanted them to keep an eye on things. There were serious concerns that the Taliban could capture Helmand before the end of the year. Camp Antonik had been stripped of basic amenities because it was meant for expeditionary missions only, not as a permanent base. It was missing key resources like reliable generators and working vehicles, so getting it up and running was their first, and urgent, task.

  Footnote

  1 USAID stands for the United States Agency for International Development, an independent agency of the federal government responsible for administrating civilian and foreign aid.

  CHAPTER 3

  Gridlock in Washington

  PETER LAVOY had worked at the White House as senior director for South Asia at the National Security Council since April 2
015. He was a tall, polished man who favored tailored suits, a rarity in Washington, brightened with a red or pink tie. He came from the intelligence community and had recently worked out of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, at the National Intelligence Council.

  At the White House, he had the unenviable task of coordinating the various government agencies on US policy in South Asia, a region that included Afghanistan. He considered himself something of a veteran in policy-making circles, and yet the disunity among the departments and agencies over the White House’s plan to bring all US troops home surprised him. He made it his goal to get everyone to agree on the way forward and began to prepare a review of the policy.

  President Obama had mapped out the US timeline for Afghanistan in a Rose Garden address the year prior. He said the United States would decrease its presence to ninety-eight hundred troops by 2015, reduce that number by around half during the year, and reach a normal, embassy-only presence in 2016. The Department of Defense was making a case for delaying the withdrawal, and the CIA and State Department were also pushing for some form of expanded presence. The national security adviser, Susan Rice, was strongly opposed to any idea that did not constitute withdrawing all US troops before the president left office.

  Lavoy had worked on Afghanistan intermittently during his career in the intelligence community and at the Pentagon, and he took the view that the terrorist threat—the reason the United States had invaded in the first place—was still strong enough to warrant a continuation of the mission. He was especially concerned by the rise of militants linked to Islamic State, who pledged allegiance to the main group in Iraq and Syria. The United States had withdrawn all its troops from Iraq in 2011, and swaths of the country had fallen under Islamic State control.