The Pentagon’s failed campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan left a generation of soldiers with little to fight for but one another.
Second Platoon did not hide its dark mood as its soldiers waded across the Korengal River in the bright light of afternoon. It was early in April 2009 and early in the Pentagon’s resumption in earnest of the Afghan war. The platoon’s mission was to ascend a mountain slope and try to ambush the Taliban at night. They were about 30 men in all, riflemen and machine-gunners reinforced with scouts, a mix of original platoon members and replacements who filled gaps left by the wounded and the dead. Many of them considered their plan foolish, a draining and dangerous waste of time, another example of a frustrated Army unit’s trying to show activity for the brass in a war low on focus and hope. They muttered foul words as they moved.
Specialist Robert Soto had been haunted by dread as the soldiers left their base, the Korengal Outpost. His platoon was part of an infantry unit that called itself Viper, the radio call sign for Bravo Company, First Battalion of the 26th Infantry. Viper had occupied the outpost for nine months, a period in which its soldiers were confined to a small stretch of lower valley and impoverished villages clinging to hillsides beneath towering peaks. Second Platoon had started its deployment with three squads but suffered so many casualties that on this day even with replacements it mustered at about two-thirds strength. With attrition came knowledge. Soto knew firsthand that the war did not resemble the carefully considered national project the generals discussed in the news. He had enlisted in the Army from the Bronx less than two years before, motivated by a desire to protect the United States from another terrorist attack. But his idealism had turned swiftly into realism, and the war had become a matter of him and his friends surviving each day as days cohered into a tour. He was doubtful about the rest, from the competence of the war’s organizers down to the merits of this ambush patrol. There’s no way this works, he thought. The valley felt like a network of watchers who set up American platoons, relaying word to those laying traps.
Soto sensed eyes following the patrol. Everybody can see us.
He was 19, but at 160 pounds and barely needing to shave, he could pass for two years younger. He was nobody’s archetype of a fighter. A high school drama student, he joined the Army at 17 and planned to become an actor if he survived the war. Often he went about his duties with an enormous smile, singing no matter what anyone else thought — R. & B., rap, rock, hip-hop, the blues. All of this made him popular in the platoon, even as he had become tenser than his former self and older than his years; even as his friends and sergeants he admired were killed, leaving him a burden of ghosts.
He faced the steep uphill climb, physically ready, emotionally spent. We’re just trying to get out of here in two months, he thought. He and his fellow soldiers had been in the valley long enough that they moved in the sinewy, late-deployment fitness of infantry squads seasoned by war. Sweat soaked his back. His quadriceps and calves drove him on, pushing him like a pack animal for the soldier beside him, Specialist Arturo Molano, who carried an M240 machine gun. The two fell into a rhythm. One soldier would get over a hard patch, turn around and extend a hand to the other. “Hey, man, you good?” Soto would ask. Molano would say he was fine. “You want me to carry the gun?” Soto would offer. Molano declined every time. Soto considered Molano to be selfless and tough, someone who routinely carried more than men of much larger size. He liked being partnered with someone like this.
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After a few hours, Second Platoon reached the crest, high above the valley. The soldiers inhaled deeply, taking in the thin air. Away from the outpost’s burning trash, the air tasted clean. Image Sgt. First Class Thomas Wright, Specialist Robert Soto and Second Lt. Justin Smith in April 2009.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
A few soldiers went forward to check the trail before the rest of the platoon moved to the ambush site. With little more than whispers, the soldiers arranged themselves in a triangle astride a mountain footpath. Second Lt. Justin Smith, their platoon leader, put Molano at one corner and a second man with an M240 at another, with their machine guns angled back toward each other so their fire could create an interlocking zone of flying lead. Other soldiers set claymore mines on small stands.
Everything was ready before dark. The air was chilly and the ridge raked by gusts. Soto was shivering. He pulled a dry undershirt and socks from his pack, changed clothes, ate a protein bar and washed it down with water. He saw his company’s outpost below, across the open space, and realized this must be what it looked like to militants when they attacked. A distant call to prayer floated on the mountain air.
In early October, the Afghan war will be 17 years old, a milestone that has loomed with grim inevitability as the fighting has continued without a clear exit strategy across three presidential administrations. With this anniversary, prospective recruits born after the terrorist attacks of 2001 will be old enough to enlist. And Afghanistan is not the sole enduring American campaign. The war in Iraq, which started in 2003, has resumed and continues in a different form over the border in Syria, where the American military also has settled into a string of ground outposts without articulating a plan or schedule for a way out. The United States has at various times declared success in its many campaigns — in late 2001; in the spring of 2003; in 2008; in the short-lived withdrawal from Iraq late in 2011; and in its allies’ recapture more recently of the ruins of Ramadi, Falluja, Mosul and Raqqa from the Islamic State, a terrorist organization, formed in the crucible of occupied Iraq, that did not even exist when the wars to defeat terrorism started. And still the wars grind on, with the conflict in Afghanistan on track to be a destination for American soldiers born after it began. EDITORS’ PICKS What the Mystery of the Tick-Borne Meat Allergy Could Reveal An Extremely Detailed Map of the 2016 Presidential Election Opinion Make Your Daughter Practice Math. She’ll Thank You Later.
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More than three million Americans have served in uniform in these wars. Nearly 7,000 of them have died. Tens of thousands more have been wounded. More are killed or wounded each year, in smaller numbers but often in dreary circumstances, including the fatal attack in July on Cpl. Joseph Maciel by an Afghan soldier — a member of the very forces that the United States has underwritten, trained and equipped, and yet as a matter of necessity and practice now guards itself against.
On one matter there can be no argument: The policies that sent these men and women abroad, with their emphasis on military action and their visions of reordering nations and cultures, have not succeeded. It is beyond honest dispute that the wars did not achieve what their organizers promised, no matter the party in power or the generals in command. Astonishingly expensive, strategically incoherent, sold by a shifting slate of senior officers and politicians and editorial-page hawks, the wars have continued in varied forms and under different rationales each and every year since passenger jets struck the World Trade Center in 2001. They continue today without an end in sight, reauthorized in Pentagon budgets almost as if distant war is a presumed government action.
As the costs have grown — whether measured by dollars spent, stature lost or blood shed — the wars’ architects and the commentators supporting them have often been ready with optimistic or airbrushed predictions, each pitched to the latest project or newly appointed general’s plan. According to the bullhorns and depending on the year, America’s military campaigns abroad would satisfy justice, displace tyrants, keep violence away from Western soil, spread democracy, foster development, prevent sectarian war, protect populations, reduce corruption, bolster women’s rights, decrease the international heroin trade, check the influence of extreme religious ideology, create Iraqi and Afghan security forces that would be law-abiding and competent and finally build nations that might peacefully stand on their own in a global world, all while discouraging other would-be despots and terrorists.
Aside from displacing tyrants and leading to the eventual killing of Osama bin Laden, none of this turned out as pitched. Prominent successes were short-lived. New thugs rose where old thugs fell. Corruption and lawlessness remain endemic. An uncountable tally of civilians — many times the number of those who perished in the terrorist attacks in the United States in 2001 — were killed. Others were wounded or driven from their homes, first by American action and then by violent social forces American action helped unleash.
The governments of Afghanistan and Iraq, each of which the United States spent hundreds of billions of dollars to build and support, are fragile, brutal and uncertain. The nations they struggle to rule harbor large contingents of irregular fighters and terrorists who have been hardened and made savvy, trained by the experience of fighting the American military machine. Much of the infrastructure the United States built with its citizens’ treasure and its troops’ labor lies abandoned. Briefly schools or outposts, many are husks, looted and desolate monuments to forgotten plans. Hundreds of thousands of weapons provided to would-be allies have vanished; an innumerable quantity are on markets or in the hands of Washington’s enemies. Billions of dollars spent creating security partners also deputized pedophiles, torturers and thieves. National police or army units that the Pentagon proclaimed essential to their countries’ futures have disbanded. The Islamic State has sponsored or encouraged terrorist attacks across much of the world — exactly the species of crime the global “war on terror” was supposed to prevent.
Almost two decades after the White House cast American troops as liberators to be welcomed, large swaths of territory where the Pentagon deployed combat forces are under stubborn insurgent influence. Areas once touted as markers of counterinsurgency progress have become no-go zones, regions in which almost no Americans dare tread, save a few journalists and aid workers, or private military contractors or American military and C.I.A. teams.
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Across these years, hundreds of thousands of young men and women signed on in good faith and served in the lower and middle ranks. They did not make policy. They lived within it. Image A soldier on patrol in the valley.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
Robert Soto was 10 on Sept. 11, 2001, when his teacher at Middle School 118 said that an aircraft had hit the World Trade Center. His morning became a slow-motion evacuation in a rising nervous pitch. Name by name, Soto’s classmates were announced over the intercom. Soto’s turn came after most of the others had left. His father stood in the corridor and explained that the United States had been attacked. Soto sensed fear, something he had never detected in the man before.
His urge to understand what happened was irresistible. A few months later, Soto sneaked away from the Bronx with an 11-year-old friend. The two rode the 4 train to Lower Manhattan and walked to the rubble at Ground Zero, where the towers had been. Soto made up his mind standing there. He would protect the United States. When he was old enough, he would enlist.
The neighborhood outside his home was rough, and Soto was already carving out his place on the street — since age 8, he had been selling AA batteries on the curb. As his childhood passed, he watched friends drift into crime. Some joined Dominicans Don’t Play, a Latino gang in a violent rivalry with another, the Trinitarios. His father, who worked as a doorman in Manhattan, had custody of him and his brother. The family shared an apartment with Soto’s grandmother, Haydee Madera-Soto, who moved to New York from Puerto Rico in 1962 and lived in the same building on Morris Avenue for decades. She watched from her second-story window as if hovering above him, calling him inside when she sensed trouble. When he tried evading her, she learned his routes over rooftops and down staircases into other buildings on the block, and knew which staircases to charge up to intercept him and lead him home. Soto did not want to disappoint her. In eighth grade, he played Iago in a school production of Shakespeare’s “Othello.” The role helped him enroll at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan in September 2003, not long after the United States invaded Iraq.
Soto never quite fit in. Most of his classmates were neither skirting gang involvement nor inclined toward military service. They were almost all bound for college and seemed to be able to dissociate themselves from the memory of New York being attacked. Soto felt as if he were from another world and moving in a different direction. He graduated in 2007 and enrolled in summer classes at Lehman College, but something did not feel right. America was fighting two wars. Each was going badly. What was he doing sitting around? He walked out of math class and into an Army recruiting office, where he told the first soldier he saw that he wanted to sign up. He volunteered for the infantry — his sense of the hardest, most dangerous job. His grandmother was visiting her village in Puerto Rico when he took his oath. She was despondent when she heard. “If I had been here, I wouldn’t have let him go,” she said.
In August, when Soto arrived at Fort Benning, Ga., for One Station Unit Training, a pipeline to combat divisions, he was given as simple a label as a human being can have: Roster No. 242, written on tape on his plain green helmet. Several sergeants who trained him had been to Iraq and Afghanistan; he regarded them as the most impressive people he had ever met. Soto returned home for the holidays with orders to report in January 2008 to Fort Hood, Tex., and join the First Infantry Division, which was bound for a rotation in Afghanistan. The war in Iraq had entered a less violent phase. The Pentagon was shifting attention to defeating the Taliban, which had reasserted itself after being forced from Kabul in 2001. It had cut off remote outposts and was challenging the American-backed government across much of the country.
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At Fort Hood, Soto was greeted by a Viper Company squad leader, Staff Sgt. Nathan Cox. At 32, Cox was older than is typical for his rank. He had a deeply furrowed brow, a hint of graying hair, a college education and an aura of confidence rooted in previous tours in Bosnia and Iraq. He welcomed Soto in a straightforward manner, with a politeness that reflected his Catholic-school years in Iowa. Soto immediately liked him. Cox was a tattooed bookworm with a pensive side. After working under the tutelage of drill sergeants, with their outsize personas, Soto was drawn to his quieter, more composed and reflective demeanor. The platoon sergeant, Sgt. First Class Thomas Wright, assigned Soto as an ammunition bearer in a machine-gun team, a position for an F.N.G. — “fucking new guy” — on a fast track to war.
The company was busy readying for Afghanistan and spent weeks in the field, conditioning with long marches under heavy rucksacks and training with weapons. The more Soto came to know Sergeant Cox, the more fortunate he felt to work for him. Cox served in the Army in the ’90s, then returned to civilian life and studied for his bachelor’s degree. Like Soto, he was deeply affected by the terrorist attacks in 2001, and he began talking of serving again. But he was raising two stepchildren and an infant daughter with his wife-to-be, Annie, and did not want to disrupt their family while they had teenage children in school. He waited until 2005, as his stepdaughter was graduating from high school, to take his oath for a second time, returning, like Soto, to the Army as an infantry volunteer. Cox did a tour in Iraq before reporting to Fort Hood with Annie and their toddler, where he became a squad leader. In this role, he was expected to shape a new batch of soldiers into a fighting team. Like Soto, he was also an artist. Soto sang. Cox drew. Sometimes he sketched officers as they gave briefings, filling pages of his tactical notebooks with renderings in real time.
By spring, rumors circulated that Viper Company was being sent to the Korengal Outpost. It was in one of the most violent spots on the Afghan map, nicknamed the Valley of Death. Soto tried to keep others’ anxiety from gripping him. The company assumed a harsher edge. Warnings to pay attention were constant. I’m already paying attention, he thought. His attitude and seriousness were noticed; the company sent him to a course that trained backup medics, leading to an increase in his duties and role. Cox continued to impress him. As other sergeants showed signs of stress, there was no drama around the man. He projected a clear message: “This is what we’re doing, we know what we are doing and we are going to keep doing it.” He’s not clouding anything with that Korengal legend talk, Soto thought.
Late that spring, Cox hosted several young soldiers at the home on Fort Hood he shared with his family. It was one-half of an Army-managed duplex, a place in such poor condition that Annie and he referred to it as a government slum, the ’hood of Fort Hood. The battalion’s soldiers were being granted leave before flying away for a year, and the party, on a concrete patio outside their back door, was a chance to gather away from work and relax. Annie prepared food and welcomed her husband’s charges into her life. Cox grilled meat and served drinks and offered his out-of-uniform human side, impressing on his squad that each soldier was part of a team, and that he needed them, and that soon they would all need one another in profound ways.
There were things he did not share. Although few of his fellow soldiers knew it, Cox did not have to deploy to Afghanistan; he had been recruited to serve as a PsyOps soldier, and there was a position for him in the PsyOps field. He turned down the opportunity, confiding in Annie that he could not let his squad go to Afghanistan without him. He had been telling his soldiers they had to be there for one another. He intended to live by his words.
On the flight from the United States in July, Cox got his soldiers seated, then tried to relax. He ate and read part of a book but felt his wartime self settling over him, that blend of exhaustion and intensity, as he headed into his third war. “Saying goodbye was hard, took it out of me emotionally,” he wrote in his journal. “Flight gives way to deployment mind-set + compressed brain.” Image A soldier working his way along the rocky terrain of the Korengal.CreditTyler Hicks/The New York Times
The helicopter pounded up the Kunar River Valley, wide and green among forested slopes. When the aircraft turned up the Pech Valley, the world narrowed among peaks. At the turn into Korengal, as the helicopter roared up the canyon in which aircraft often came under fire, Soto’s heart beat fast. The aircraft touched down inside a perimeter of bunkers around plywood shacks. The soldiers charged out to a barrier wall. Soto reached it, noticed the grim faces of his sergeants and went down to one knee, rifle in hand, brow beading sweat. The grunts from Battle Company, who were rotating out as Viper Company rotated in, laughed.
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Viper. The name sounded impressive. They were F.N.G.s now.
At the moment Soto and his fellow soldiers arrived in the valley, the United States had been in Afghanistan almost seven years — longer than America’s Civil War and involvement in World War I combined. The war’s objectives and the military’s roles had shifted across the years. The rush into the country to punish the perpetrators of the 2001 attacks had evolved into something else: an open-ended occupation. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s leader, were at large, and elite counterterrorism units remained in the country, fighting a shadow war against Al Qaeda and its allies. But larger conventional American units were engaged in a war that swapped urgency for a mesh of military, development and political aims. Combat tours to Afghanistan now blended military and civil assignments, including holding down remote outposts, organizing infrastructure projects, helping Afghan ministries with tasks like registering voters and training and outfitting Afghan soldiers and police officers, to whom the Pentagon insisted security would one day be entrusted.
No one had a firm idea of when that day might be, and hope for decisive momentum on any of these propositions had been undercut by the campaign in Iraq, which began diverting Pentagon attention soon after Bin Laden escaped over the mountain passes near Tora Bora in late 2001. In mid-2008, as Cox’s squad arrived, the United States had more than 140,000 troops in Iraq and about 33,000 in Afghanistan. Many lived in an archipelago of small rural positions, around which the Taliban had long ago established ambush points and planted hidden bombs. This encirclement made ground patrols perilous and in some places rendered resupply by road impossible. These positions were kept alive by replenishments dropped with parachutes or carried by helicopters, themselves in short supply. All the while, the United States, pitted against enemies adept at terrorist attacks and guerrilla warfare, was field-testing a reboot of Western counterinsurgency doctrine, with an emphasis on protecting civilians and providing services while tightening rules that dictated how troops could fight. A phrase from Vietnam was circulating anew — “winning hearts and minds” — even as units of hard-helmeted conventional troops spent large fractions of their time guarding their outposts and keeping themselves provisioned in distant, rugged terrain. A darker slang developed in the lower ranks. Afghanistan was the “welfare war.” Forlorn outposts, often built near villages resentful of foreign occupiers, were “bullet sponges.”
Americans occasionally ventured up the Korengal’s banks in the first years of the war, and they often met armed resistance. But the valley did not gain larger notoriety until 2005, when three Navy SEALs were killed in an ambush and a helicopter rushing to their aid was shot down, claiming 16 more lives. In 2006, an Army brigade situated the outpost on a low ridge with a gently sloping crest, beginning the phase of the American effort that Soto’s platoon was cycling through. On a tactical level, establishment of the outpost could seem to make sense. The place was defensible, in an officer-school way — a position overlooking the river and lower trails with enough space for helicopters to land. On a social level, it could not have been much worse. It was an unforced error of occupation, a set of foreign military bunkers built on the grounds of a sawmill and lumber yard formerly operated by Haji Mateen, a local timber baron. The American foothold put some of the valley’s toughest men out of work, the same Afghans who knew the mountain trails. Haji Mateen now commanded many of the valley’s fighters, under the banner of the Taliban.
Military minds had chosen the place. Standard military tactics would have to defend it. Troops built smaller posts so their occupants could watch over more of the riverbed and support one another with machine gun and mortar fire. NATO officials spoke of forging alliances between government and people. The American presence in the Korengal felt more crude fortress than diplomatic expedition, out of sync with ideas of protecting populations or courting hearts and minds.
At first Soto found the valley breathtaking. The riverbed formed a green stripe of cropland. Terraces of stacked stone climbed the lower hills. Villages clung to ledges. Farther up the mountains rose escarpments of stone, buffeted by wind. This was not the arid steppe or brown hills that dominate much of the Afghan landscape. It was ancient forest bisected by cascading mountain streams that fed a river with a haunting name, a place beyond the imagination of a teenager from the Bronx.
Soto soon saw the ground through another lens. Using aerial photographs, the Americans had charted every building in every village. The valley no longer seemed to him a land that time forgot. It was as intricately mapped as almost any place on earth. Hilltops, ridges, livestock sheds. Each was a precise spot that American weapons were ready to hit, a number on a targeting template overwritten on homes, ready for retaliation against any place from where an attack might emerge. Many attacks followed patterns. The outpost was reachable by a single dirt road from the Pech Valley. The Army had used this overland path for more than a year, sending cargo trucks accompanied by helicopters and armored Humvees. Often a route-clearance platoon led the slow drive, looking for bombs. These practices were well known by all sides and allowed the Taliban hours to prepare. Without irony, the Army had given its dirt track a name: Route Victory.
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