The Tender Soldier: A True Story of War and Sacrifice

by Gezari, Vanessa M.

  East of the half-built American bases and north: In a 2001 account of the battle, Ali Jalali, a former colonel in the Afghan army who served as Afghan interior minister in Karzai’s government, and Lester Grau of the Foreign Military Studies Office described the British defeat at Maiwand as “one of the major military disasters of the Victorian era.” The authors write that, for the British public, the combined impact of the defeat in Maiwand and another loss the previous year in the Zulu wars was similar to what Americans felt after Custer’s defeat at Little Big Horn. Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces: Superior Technology Defeated—The Battle of Maiwand.”

  “a military rat-trap”: Personal Records of the Kandahar Campaign, by Officers Engaged Therein, edited and annotated with an introduction by Major Waller Ashe (London: David Bogue, 1881), 57. The same British officer described Kushk-i-Nakhud, the Maiwand district center where the American base overlooked the ruins of a British fort, as a place “where a clever and artful enemy knowing the country could give or refuse an attack at discretion. The ground when I saw it last year was cut up with small canals, watercourses, small but frequent stone walls, gardens, vineyards, and ruined houses, affording every facility for a sudden attack, and placing the attacking party, from the scattered nature of these obstacles, on a complete equality with the defenders.” Personal Records, 56–57.

  On a blistering summer day in 1880: Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces,” and Personal Records of the Kandahar Campaign, 71. The British force included 2,599 combat soldiers, six nine-pound cannons, some 3,000 “service and transport personnel,” and “[m]ore than 3,000 transport animals—ammunition ponies, mules, donkeys, bullocks and hundreds of camels—[which] were required to move the baggage. The animals required drovers, usually locally contracted Kandaharis. There were many other noncombatants, including cooks, water carriers, tailors, servants and stretcher-bearers.” Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces.”

  Local volunteers had joined Ayub’s forces: The British also lost some two thousand Afghan forces to Ayub after they mutineed and crossed the Helmand River to join him. Personal Records, 48–52, 68–70. For other tribal fighters joining Ayub and details about their weapons as well as the significance of the ghazis’ white clothes, see Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces.”

  By the day of the battle, the Afghans: Jalali and Grau write that the differential was not so severe, about 5,500 British troops (including Indian and Afghan forces) facing about 8,500 Afghan troops and irregular volunteers loyal to Ayub. But other accounts suggest that the number of Afghan irregular forces was higher. See Sarah Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban (New York: Penguin, 2006), 128.

  They hid in shallow wadis, surprising the British: Personal Records, 74–82. For the story of Malalai, see Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces,” 12. Malalai was killed in the fighting and buried in her native village of Khik, in the northern part of the plain, where a domed shrine stands in her memory. See also “The Second Anglo-Afghan War 1878–1880: Malalai, Afghan Heroine of Maiwand,” http://www.garenewing.co.uk/angloafghanwar/biography/malalai.php, accessed August 1, 2012.

  The Afghans rolled over the British line like a wave: Nearly two thousand mostly Indian soldiers on the British side were killed. Those left alive fled in terror toward Kandahar city. Jalali and Grau, “Expeditionary Forces,” and Personal Records, 78–85. One British officer wrote that the defeat was a result of “the same overweening confidence in our invincibility, the same contempt of an unknown foe, the same attempt at scientific strategy, when the simplest old-fashioned British tactics would have won the day.” Personal Records, 75.

  A century later, a pious peasant arrived: This account of Omar’s early life closely follows Ahmed Rashid’s in Taliban, 23–25. See also John F. Burns and Steve LeVine, “How Afghans’ Stern Rulers Took Hold,” New York Times, December 31, 1996, and Steve Coll, “Looking for Mullah Omar,” New Yorker, January 23, 2012. In the lawless era between 1989 and 1996, warring militia commanders killed some forty thousand people in Kabul alone. “Every warlord had a fief, and every fief had its own checkpoint, where neither a man’s cash nor his daughter was safe.” Filkins, The Forever War, 23. See also Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, 70–73. Omar’s first companions in his fight against the warlords were his religious students, or Talibs, from which the movement takes its name. Today, Singesar lies in Zhari, a new district created after the U.S. invasion, but when Omar lived there, Singesar was in Maiwand.

  In the beginning, there had been a sense of possibility: Anyone who spent time in Afghanistan in the early years after the invasion experienced this widespread optimism. Of a moment just before the U.S. invasion Chayes writes that Afghans “were electrified by the belief that, with American help, the nightmare was going to end, and they would at last be able to lay the foundations of the kind of Afghan state they dreamed of: one united under a qualified, responsible government.” Immediately after the invasion, Kandahar “shimmered with a breathless hope.” Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, 20, 105.

  In 2001, the American-supported governor: Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, 63–68, 73–75, 77, and James Traub, “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” Foreign Policy, May 19, 2010: “Like AWK, Sherzai was deeply implicated in the drug trade, had shadowy relations with the insurgents, and ran roughshod over the concerns of Kandaharis, making him a loathed figure. But he had men and trucks at his command and delivered intelligence the Americans trusted.” In addition, when I was reporting in Afghanistan in 2002 and 2003, at least one U.S. official, among other sources, discussed Sherzai’s ties to the drug trade with me.

  Sherzai’s chief factotum: This is based on my own meetings and interviews with Pashtoon in 2003, but Pashtoon’s power with the Americans is borne out by other accounts. According to Chayes, Mohammad Akram Khakrezwal, a former police chief in Kandahar and Mazar-i-Sharif, told her: ‘The Americans were such amateurs. They were honest to the point of simplemindedness. Anyone Shirzai or his interpreter told them was a Talib, they would take it on faith—and act on the accusation’ (77). On Pashtoon’s role as Sherzai’s “interpreter” and his closeness with the U.S. Special Forces, see Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, 78–79.

  But many powerful Afghans and their allies: Governor Sherzai “applied all of the well-meaning Western aid—lavished on him in his role as a representative of the Afghan government—to the purpose of building up a personal power base. . . . Gul Agha Shirzai diverted much of the plunder he extracted from his own province, and much of the subsidy he extracted from international representatives.” Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, 169. For the specific targeting of rural people on the outskirts of Kandahar and especially in Maiwand, Hajji Mohammad Ehsan, Maiwand district representative to the Kandahar Provincial Council, interview by author, October 12, 2010.

  With the Taliban gone and the soil parched: Ehsan, interview by author, October 12, 2010. Chayes recounts that after the American invasion, when she was helping to rebuild a village outside Kandahar that had been destroyed by American bombs, she went to Governor Sherzai’s office to ask for stone from a quarry he controlled. While there, she saw among the petitioners a “sinewy old man” who tried to get an official’s attention by “positively begging—kissing his fingertips and touching them to his own eyes in entreaty—saying he had come three days in a row, please give him his opium back.” Chayes, The Punishment of Virtue, 165–66. She also mentions the visit of an Amnesty International delegation “asking a lot of uncomfortable questions about the treatment of prisoners in private jails.” Chayes, 167.

  Afghans connected to the Kandahar government also ran a kidnapping scheme: Ehsan, interview by author, October 12, 2010.

  The road and its tributaries cut east to west: Although opium cultivation fluctuates from year to year, it reached a record high in 2008, the year the 2–2 arrived in Maiwand. By 2010, opium production in Helmand had decreased significantly, but the province nevertheless remained Afghanistan’s
largest opium producer, responsible for 53 percent of the country’s total opium cultivation. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), “Afghanistan Opium Survey 2010: Summary Findings” (September 2010), 10. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/30_09_10_opiumsurvey.pdf, accessed August 2, 2012.

  The U.S. military called it Highway 1: The United States was the biggest funder of the Kandahar to Herat section of the highway, contributing about $200 million to pave 325 of its 556 kilometers. Saudi Arabia and Japan also contributed about $50 million each to rebuilding this section of the road.

  It was so quiet—more truck stop than town, an in-between place: Lieutenant Kirsten Ouimette, one of the sharpest officers I met in Maiwand in 2010, supplied an apt description of the place: “You’re driving down the highway and you stop at a gas station, and there’s a little town just to support this one truck stop. That’s what this feels like on Highway 1.” Ouimette, interview by author, October 2, 2010. Before the arrival of the 2–2, the Americans and their main coalition partners in that area, the Canadians, had paid Maiwand little attention in comparison to places closer to Kandahar city, where fighting was heavier. International troops, mostly Canadians and U.S. Special Forces, had occasionally conducted raids there. Lieutenant Colonel Hurlbut, the battalion commander in Maiwand in 2008 and 2009, described these to me as “either intelligence-driven operations or just because they knew they needed to come out here. They would do very focused, very short-duration operations, but then would go back to wherever they were originally at. So you had this effect of the people not really having faith in the government, not having faith in the coalition, because we weren’t there long enough to make any kind of true change.” The 2–2, by comparison, wanted to move in and stay. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009.

  The soldiers of the 2–2 landed: Major Cale Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009.

  As the first American unit deployed there: Although the 2–2 was on fifteen-month orders, the battalion got to Maiwand in mid-August and planned to be out of the district by June. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009. By the time I got to Maiwand in March 2009, about 700 people lived on Ramrod and a company element of 100 to 130 people lived on each of the smaller bases, Hutal and Terminator. Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009. The 2–2 was a one-thousand-soldier task force, but because of leave schedules and missions back to Kandahar, it is unlikely that all of those soldiers were in Maiwand at any one time. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009.

  That was the vision, at least: Hurlbut told me: “When we got here, we expected we’re going to do one month of driving everywhere for the first time meeting everybody, another month of some security ops where we’re going to kill all the bad guys and let ’em know who’s in charge of the neighborhood. Do a quarter of building up some government structures so we can get that working and then the last quarter we’re going to bring a whole bunch of money in and build roads and projects. Not happening. It took six, seven and a half months for the district leader to start hugging me. That’s just one example. So the people I’m not talking to on a weekly basis out there in no-man’s-land, their time horizons are much longer than we can conceive of.” Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009. See also Rajiv Chandrasekaran, “Troops Face New Tests in Afghanistan,” Washington Post, March 15, 2009.

  The flat earth over which they sometimes walked: This description of the bombs is based on my interview with an Explosive Ordnance Device team leader in Panjwaii District, just east of Maiwand, September 24, 2009. In addition to explaining how bombs were made in that part of the country, he showed me the remains of several explosives his team had unearthed in recent months.

  Every day, it seemed, someone got hit: Don Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009. Ayala told me that during the time he and his teammates spent in Maiwand, there were “IEDs like crazy every day. The wreckers would have to go pick up one of our vehicles because it was blown on the side of the road every day. We got hit by IEDs every day. Even our wreckers and the sweep team from Darkhorse would go out, and their vehicles would hit an IED.”

  A Humvee blew up, killing a soldier: A private was killed and four other soldiers were hurt in the attack on September 4, 2008. The burned lieutenant was Sam Brown, a platoon leader and West Point graduate. Major Trevor Voelkel, interview by author, February 12, 2013, and Jay Kirk, “Burning Man,” GQ, February 2012.

  For a time that fall, more buried bombs: Brown, interview by author, March 22, 2009: “There was a stretch up through December [2008, when] we were averaging an IED find or an IED strike at least every other day. Significant. We crunched the numbers in December and we were, like, ‘We’re the most heavily IED’d place in Afghanistan, and not just Afghanistan, but Iraq, too.’ ” This statistic was widely known in the battalion, and several other soldiers and officers mentioned it to me, including Lieutenant David Ochs, interview by author, April 6, 2009.

  Their mission was to win Afghans away from the insurgency: Ochs, interview by author, April 6, 2009. Observations in this section are based on interviews and patrols with soldiers from the 2–2 in March and April 2009, especially a mission to Zhari on April 6, 2009, when we saw the man cleaning his teeth, glowering and spitting, and overheard insurgents talking about us on the radio.

  But Maiwand was so far from being controlled by U.S. forces: Ayala, interviews by author, May 4 and August 19, 2009.

  “She didn’t necessarily feel that the protection was as good”: Stacy Crevello, interview by author, December 17, 2012. Ayala told me that Loyd agreed that Maiwand was rough and insecure, but that didn’t keep her from wanting to be out there. “We did have our disagreements,” Ayala told me. “She was so excited about getting projects ready to go for this area, her vision was optimistic, but also very futuristic. I was just a little disappointed with [the 2–2]. They were focused on doing a wheat seed program, and I’m going, ‘It’s not going to work, this is going to get into the hands of the merchants, who are going to sell it for profit.’ ” In Ayala’s view, “the military need to come [into Maiwand with the] Afghan army, Afghan police, kick out the [Taliban] shadow government, then bring in Human Terrain and civil affairs. But these decisions are made not in the field, but in the Pentagon, back in D.C., where people eat good and sleep warm at night.” Ayala, interview by author, May 4, 2009.

  She wanted to teach farmers about drip irrigation: At Loyd’s suggestion, the 2–2 was building a sample farm to showcase the results of drip irrigation and other progressive farming methods, Hurlbut told me. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009. “She’d been in the country a long time, and she was an absolutely phenomenal asset,” Hurlbut told me. “The other thing she brought to the table was the development piece. . . . She opened our eyes to how you [have to] give the people other ideas [about how] to do things.”

  Don’t treat the locals badly: Ayala told me that the soldiers “were so frustrated that their guys were getting hurt, but they can’t find the bad guys. . . . We came up with a solution for these frustrated soldiers and educated them. [We] said, ‘Listen, guys, you’re not going to see them. They’re going to blend in. They’re playing the game. They know what your rules of engagement are. They’re taking advantage of that.’ I said, ‘They’re going to be right there in broad daylight looking in your eyes with no weapons in their hands. They know that you can’t touch them.’ But in the meantime, we advised them, ‘Do not create more enemies. Don’t get frustrated where you’re just going to treat everybody like shit.’ I go, ‘Build rapports. Be patient. They’re going to start pointing out to you who the enemy is once they trust you, because they want them out of their villages, because they know it’s going to be trouble later on. So build rapports, have patience and they’ll give us the enemy.’ That’s the advice we’d give them. You know we discussed it with Paula, discussed it with Clint.” Ayala, interview by author, August 19, 2009.

  Tim Gusinov: Gusinov was born in what is now Azerbaijan but moved
to Moscow with his mother when he was a toddler. Unless otherwise noted, quotes and biographical information about him in this section are from Gusinov, interview by author, June 18, 2011.

  Trained as an Afghan area specialist and Persian linguist: At the military academy, Gusinov and other students were assigned to master a pair of languages. His were Farsi, of which Afghan Dari is a dialect, and English. He spent his first tour attached to an Afghan army division in Ghazni and began his second tour with another Afghan unit in Gardez until the Spetsnaz poached him.

  When a Human Terrain System recruiter called: The recruiter was actually from BAE, the defense contractor that handled recruitment and hiring for the Human Terrain System.

  Observing that the Americans: Gusinov, interview by author, June 18, 2011; Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009; Cooper, interview by author, April 22, 2010.

  “He’s like a rock star”: When he first met Gusinov, Hurlbut’s impression was different: “We’re, like, ‘Dude, I can tell you’re a Soviet by your accent. There is no way we’re going to put you in front of any Afghan,’ ” Hurlbut told me. But Gusinov’s Dari and his ease with Afghans ultimately impressed Hurlbut and his fellow officers. Hurlbut, interview by author, March 26, 2009.

  Indeed, Gusinov had been trained by the Soviets: Gusinov’s Soviet training prepared him for work as a “linguist-area specialist,” a job he described as “much more intel and targeting, especially when you are attached to a Special Forces unit.” Gusinov knew that as a member of a Human Terrain Team he wasn’t supposed to actively seek out intelligence, but the distinction struck him as theortetical. “On one occasion we captured a young guy who was suspected of putting IEDs on the road, and he was scared to death,” Gusinov told me. “He thought he would be killed. And I spoke to him, like, ‘Calm down. If you’re frank to me I might be able to help you.’ And he told me, ‘I’m a young man. I want to have nice clothes. I want to have a radio. I want to smoke nice cigarettes. A phone. There are no jobs, and I’m not Taliban but they paid me two thousand Afghani for planting an IED on the road.’ . . . I spoke with him when he was back in the base. . . . I was always giving this information or I was even writing a short note to our S2 [intelligence] officer.” Gusinov, interview by author, June 18, 2011.