by Ed Darack
The change began during 3/3’s Afghan tour and quickly accelerated toward the end of the Third Battalion’s deployment with First Lieutenant Justin Bellman and his Blessing Marines’ outreach to the locals of Nangalam and beyond. When ⅔ arrived, Matt Bartels—the keenly perceptive, gregarious, and ever-welcoming twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant whom Rob Scott had hand-selected to run the show at “the tip of the spear”—took off not running, but sprinting, to continue the building of close ties with the villagers of the historic region. Often working with Kinser on patrols and operations outside the base’s wire, Bartels took note of the young children of Nangalam, who often mobbed the Marines, always looking to make eye contact and conversation, and often offering tea and sometimes even flowers—a welcome surprise to the grunts on patrol. Adult villagers also quickly warmed up to the always-smiling Bartels, and most would get to know the lieutenant on a first-name basis.
Deciding from day one that he was going to leave an indelibly positive mark on the war-ravaged area, Bartels set out to better the lives of the area’s people through any means at his disposal. While Task Force Devil’s Provincial Reconstruction Teams kept busy with construction and improvement of wells, roads, schools, and mosques, Bartels focused on the locals’ simple day-to-day needs and wants. A village elder who came to the entrance one morning to speak with him noticed the lieutenant drinking from a paper cup; the local asked Matt if he could have the cup once he was finished. “No,” Bartels replied, disappearing momentarily, “but you can have eight hundred unused, brand-new ones for you, your family, and your village,” and with that, he handed over an unopened case to the stunned elderly Afghan. The lieutenant also made personal friends with a number of the area villages’ merchants and craftsmen, including a local baker, whose son—whom the Marines knew as “C-Put”—would bring fresh “sugar bread” to the camp every morning and often stuck around the camp and followed Matt, who helped the eight-year-old learn English. Matt also ensured that word got out that anyone in need of medical care should immediately come to Camp Blessing, where the camp’s “saints”—the tireless Navy Corpsmen—diagnosed problems, doled out appropriate medication, set broken bones, disinfected blisters and lacerations, sutured deep wounds, even saved an elderly man during a heart attack, medevacing him to Bagram Air Base for emergency heart surgery. The corpsmen didn’t limit their work to humans, either, stitching up the leg of a villager’s donkey after a fall on a steep trail one afternoon.
Recognizing that a clothing staple Americans take for granted was one of the commodities most coveted by the region’s men—shoes—Bartels jumped online and registered a request with a number of websites that organize aid drives to deliver care packages to deployed American troops, stating that he wasn’t procuring for Marines, but for the locals of Nangalam and the Afghan warriors who fought side by side with the grunts on missions. Shoes, sizes seven to nine (the most common range for men in the area), poured in; Matt and the Blessing Marines immediately distributed them to the grateful locals. He then continued the shoe drive through his friends and family, who donated both brand-new and used sneakers and boots. Still short of the village’s needs, the lieutenant used his own money to purchase a final fifty pair from a major discount shoe company through its online store.
The Blessing Marines’ most notable outreach achievement came from providing items not to adult Afghans, however, but to young girl students of the school adjacent to the camp’s entrance, which often took the brunt of Shah’s rocket and mortar attacks during the terrorist’s spring offensive. Noting the girls’ lack of basic supplies—pencils, paper, uniforms, and backpacks—as he watched the storage facilities of Blessing bulge with the unused care packages delivered by Sabre’s Big Windy Chinooks during weekly mail runs, Bartels hatched a plan to ensure that the students of the Nangalam Girls’ School would never be without their vital matériel. He e-mailed friends, family, even distant relatives and old classmates, asking for both financial donations and shipments of pencils, pens (a treasured implement for both adults as well as children throughout the mountains of the Kunar province), backpacks, folders, and notebooks in lieu of typical care packages. The resourceful lieutenant, whose father served a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in the southern African country of Lesotho before driving a Volkswagen Beetle from that landlocked country to Afghanistan in the late sixties, also noted that he had a surplus of money distributed to him from Task Force Devil for “base improvements.” Well, he figured, improving the girls’ school is a clear improvement of the base. The request for donations spread like wildfire back home. Churches held fund-raisers, businessmen friends of Bartels’s father kicked in, even the National Football League ponied up some supplies. The Big Windys had to make extra trips in mid-June to handle the influx. By late June, through combining the “base improvement” funds with donations from home, Bartels had five hundred schoolgirls’ uniforms crafted locally, paying five thousand dollars for their manufacture. The students proudly showed up at the school in brand-new outfits, carrying their brand-new school supplies in brand-new backpacks that sported such team logos as the Steelers, Jets, and Broncos. It was an almost tearful sight to behold for the Marines.
One of Bartels’s most important assets in his campaign to improve the lives of the locals of the Pech region arrived one rainy June afternoon in the front seat of a white, slumped-suspension Toyota Corolla. To glean information about anticoalition militia weapons caches in the region, Bartels had been working with a local elder named Nawab (who had proven to be instrumental in bringing in Najmudeen during 3/3’s tour, and with whom Bartels and the Blessing Marines would continue to work to outwit the area’s bad guys during ⅔’s deployment). “This is pretty shady stuff,” he told his small security element before meeting an information source brought in by Nawab. “I’m gonna be carrying just my Nine [Berretta M9 9 mm handgun], that’s it. No helmet, no flak. I’m gonna have to get into the small car with this guy, his driver, and the source’s terp, and if the car takes off, light up its tires with the 240 and the SAW. If somethin’ happens to me—if I’m killed—light the entire car up. If things go bad and I make it outta the car, light it up on my mark,” Bartels coolly instructed his M240G light machine gunner and his squad automatic-weapon gunner, punctuating his order with a wry grin. He also had Ronin for support, with Keith on the M40 sniper rifle, prepositioned to take out individuals inside the car if things went south. Nervous, but never showing it, he sprinted through the pounding monsoon rain and hopped in the backseat next to his contact. As if the shutting door were his cue, the man sitting in front of the lieutenant spun around, and with a wide, toothy, and gummy smile, exclaimed, “Hello! I am Sultan! I am the interpreter!”
“Your English—it’s perfect!” Bartels responded, stunned.
“Yes, that is right!” the hoarse-voiced man stated, sporting an ear-to-ear grin below a shock of jet-black hair. Bartels, who had been suspicious of two of the five terps attached to the base whom he felt to be corrupt, had been on the lookout for new translators, ones without recent ties to Pech region (Matt figured outsiders were less susceptible to nepotism-inspired corruption).
“What’s your story? Where you from?” The lieutenant fired off questions to Sultan, ignoring the man sitting next to him—the one he’d arranged the potentially dangerous rendezvous in order to meet. Bartels learned that Sultan grew up in Asadabad during the seventies and eighties; but he, like many of the Kunar, fled to Pakistan during the height of the Soviet occupation.
“My brother, when I was seven, was executed. Right there!” He pointed toward the building that housed Camp Blessing’s Afghan Security Forces contingent.
“Huh? Right . . . there?” Bartels gestured toward the building. “Inside the camp perimeter?”
“Yes! The schoolhouse. The Russians tortured and then shot my brother in the head!” Sultan emotionally responded, his voice beginning to quiver. He explained that for years, he and his family had survived a number of wretched Pa
kistani refugee camps, where he taught himself English by reading newspapers and magazines (although not broadly spoken, most major print media use English, Pakistan’s official language). When he was sixteen, Sultan stowed away on a Canadian military C-130 cargo aircraft and made his way to Toronto. “I lied, and told them I was eighteen. The crew was nice to me. They brought me to Canada, feeding me potted meat on the plane. Once there, I got citizenship while I worked in a factory, and brought my family over.”
Bartels stared with incredulity at his new friend—as Eggers pegged his M40’s scope on the driver’s head and the SAW and 240 gunners kept their weapons’ iron sights trained on the Corolla’s tires. As cold, heavy drops of rain thumped against the car’s thin exterior, Sultan told Matt of his childhood aspiration of gazing at New York City with his own eyes, to trace Manhattan’s brilliant night skyline from the shores of the Hudson River, a view he’d seen reproduced in a magazine he found in a refugee camp. The Afghan stowaway saved enough money from his factory job to buy an old Honda Accord, then made the long trip to New York to find a job in the shadow of the skyline of his childhood dreams. The resourceful Sultan quickly landed work as a night-shift worker at a fast-food chicken outlet. Deep into the night, he served up greasy deep-fried thighs, legs, wings, and breasts from behind thick bulletproof glass—but always with an ebullient smile—and quickly rose in the company’s ranks to become a regional manager, overseeing a total of eleven restaurants in Brooklyn and Queens, as well as adjacent spots such as Elizabeth, New Jersey. But Afghanistan’s ruggedly beautiful Kunar never left his mind. Inspired and invigorated by America’s 2001 liberation of Afghanistan from the Taliban—who not only oppressed the people of his birthplace, but aligned themselves with those responsible for the permanent gash in the skyline he’d journeyed so far to experience—and with a healthy chunk of savings, he returned to Asadabad, began construction of a home, and repatriated his family. “I never want to leave now. I see the hope of the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaeda fuckers. I’m never leaving my home again. I kill them all myself—maybe with a little help from you Marines . . .” Sultan folded his arms and struck a confident grin, lifting his thick, dark eyebrows.
“Whatever they’re paying you as an interpreter, I’ll triple it right now. You’ve got two days to get back to Asadabad to let your family know that you’ll be working in Nangalam, then get your ass back here to be my personal terp.”
“Right, sir. I can stay right now. I’ll let my family know with a phone call. Fuck this shit I’m doin’ now for this guy.” Sultan motioned with his head toward the sweaty, overweight “source” sitting next to Bartels in the Corolla’s backseat. “I’m with you now, my man!”
Word of the Marines’ magnanimity quickly spread throughout the valleys surrounding Nangalam, including the Shuryek. During a patrol in late June, while assessing the need for a MEDCAP in the village of Matin, a quiet, slightly built man approached Bartels, extending his hand in a show of friendship as he drew a confident grin. Matt shook the villager’s hand, then began to introduce himself, but the local cut him off. “Commander Matt!” the villager blared, nodding excitedly. “Commander Matt!” Through Sultan, the lieutenant learned the villager’s name: Gulab; Mohammad Gulab Khan, of the village of Salar Ban.
“He says he’s scared to talk to the Americans. He hasn’t had good experiences with them from Asadabad, but he knows of what you have done with the Nangalam Girls’ School, and he and the other villagers of Salar Ban want to know you,” Sultan translated.
“Tell him that he’s welcome anytime. He is our friend now. Come to Camp Blessing. Our home is his home.”
“Yes . . . yes . . . yes!” Gulab exclaimed after Sultan translated Matt’s words. “My friend! My friend! My friend!” As the convoy roared back to Blessing, Matt felt a deep sense of gratitude for the unexpected rewards of his deployment in Afghanistan. And those gains would extend broadly through the region—beyond the Marines themselves—inspiring feelings of goodwill for American forces of all services.
Marcus Luttrell—dehydrated, bleeding, and literally shot full of holes—made the grueling descent down the northeast gulch of Sawtalo Sar in a superhuman push. With each step, more of the village of Salar Ban, three miles “up-valley” from Matin, emerged into view. Struggling to maintain consciousness, Luttrell sought shelter from the enervating sun under a shade tree just outside a cluster of mud-and-rock homes on the morning of the twenty-ninth. Then, rounding a bend in a nearby trail, a local emerged—of all people, it was “Commander Matt’s” new friend Gulab, who immediately recognized Luttrell as an American. The Navy SEAL brandished his weapon and a hand grenade; Gulab, seeing that the American was in dire need of aid, raised his hands and gestured to Luttrell that he wanted to help, then led the SEAL to his home in Salar Ban, where he fed and rehydrated him. Surmising that the lone American was being pursued by men Gulab knew to be linked to the outside forces of the Taliban or al-Qaeda, he brought Luttrell into his home and pledged to treat and protect him just as he would close family in the tradition of Pashtunwalli, a “blood code” passed down through generations of Pashtuns.
Luttrell had used his corpsman training and first-aid kit to treat his own wounds, but still required extensive medical attention; with deep-tissue injury and unknown amounts of shrapnel lodged in his body, every minute counted—most people would have been long dead by this point. Gulab, who made his living primarily as a goat herder, but was also a farmer and woodcutter, knew that whoever had assailed the American would very likely continue to hunt for him in Salar Ban, and pledged to stick by Luttrell’s side until rescuers arrived, providing anything within his means to help him survive.
Luttrell pulled out a three-by-five inch all-weather “Rite in the Rain” notepad and scratched a quick message, then tore off the green page and handed it to Gulab, asking him to take it to the Americans at Asadabad, an easy (for a local) jaunt down the Pech Road. But Gulab refused to leave Luttrell’s side; instead he called on the service of a distant relative, an older man named Shina, who dwelled in another part of Salar Ban. Gulab instructed Shina to go not to Asadabad, but directly to Commander Matt at the American base at Nangalam, a longer, more grueling journey to the opposite end of the Pech Valley from Asadabad. Gulab and others from the Shuryek, having endured decades of brutality at the hands of outside forces, viewed the American military at Asadabad with suspicion, having had just a few experiences with them. Shina, hesitant even to leave the Shuryek, much less make the arduous trek to the Marine base at Nangalam, finally acquiesced to the pleas of Gulab, who even paid his elder relative a thousand afghanis (about twenty U.S. dollars) to make the trip to see Bartels. And so on the night of the twenty-ninth, the lone Afghan, carrying the small piece of green paper in one of his pockets, journeyed down the meandering trails of the Shuryek Valley into Matin, where he hired a cab to drive him along the Pech Road to Nangalam.
“Commander Matt! Commander Matt!” Sultan ran into the COC at Blessing around midnight. “There is a man at the gate saying that there is a dying American! In Salar Ban! He wants to talk with you! He is very scared of the Americans, but he wants to see just you, and not anyone from Asadabad. For him to come in the middle of the night is pretty crazy around here.”
Matt, unaware of the SOF tragedy that had unfolded just a few miles from Blessing, sprinted to the camp’s entrance, where he met the gray-bearded Shina. “Sultan, make some tea, and get this guy a blueberry muffin or something. He looks tired.”
“Yessir,” Sultan gruffed. Matt led Shina into what Bartels knew of as the “tearoom,” where he took all camp guests to converse about a range of topics, from a family member’s medical needs to the location of an ACM weapons cache. Sultan bounded through the door just as Matt and Shina sat down on red-and-yellow floor mats, with the lieutenant pouring tea and handing Shina one of the chow hall’s blueberry muffins. The initial meeting lasted just minutes, Matt learning through Sultan that an American “doctor” was hiding in Gulab�
�s home, somewhere in Salar Ban.
“An American doctor?” Bartels shot a puzzled look to Sultan.
“Yes, and he says that he is shot, bleeding a lot. Dirt all over his face. Very bad condition. He is a doctor who is doing work on himself !” Bartels immediately realized that the survivor must have been a Navy Corpsman—possibly connected to the search Kinser was awaiting orders to undertake from his patrol base at Kandagal, many miles and thousands of feet of elevation gain from Salar Ban, but still closer than any other American troops in the region. Shina then remembered the note. He handed the folded green paper to Matt.
“I can barely read this . . . what is this? It isn’t even legible,” the lieutenant muttered to himself. After a few moments, Bartels managed to decipher the glib message scratched in black ink:BEEN SHOT
VILLAGE PEOPLE TOOK ME IN
NEED HELP
SIGNED
Below signed, he read the name Marcus and then struggled with what he thought spelled “Little” or “Lateral.” Is this some sort of a hoax? Is someone trying to lure us up the Shuryek? the lieutenant wondered. Bartels, intimately familiar with U.S. military protocol for “blood chits,” knew that all units, conventional or SOF, mandated the inclusion of some uniquely identifying personal information, such as mother’s maiden name, name of a first pet, name of a high school, etc., in order to confirm the identity of personnel in duress; the lieutenant even looked for some hidden message, but couldn’t decipher anything. Still, he sprinted to the COC with the note, where he immediately scanned it, then sent it by SIPR (secure e-mail, pronounced “sipper”) to Rob Scott and Tom Wood, and then called the OpsO.
