BRING THEM ALL HOME NOW, ALIVE

The labeled coffin containing U.S. Army soldier Jason Nunez, shortly before his funeral, at the military cemetery in Bayamon, Puerto Rico, April 4, 2007. Of the 82nd Airborne Division, Nunez was killed last week in a bomb attack against his convoy near Baqubah, Iraq. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

"Leadership Doesn’t Care About Us"

"They Don’t Give A Shit About Us. We’ve Been Shorted Everything We Needed"

"You Told Us If We Helped You, The Americans Would Not Harm Us.  We Are Prisoners In Our Villages Now!"

"They Know Who Is Ambushing Us And When It’s Going To Happen, But They Won’t Tell Us. They Have Us By The Balls And They Know It."

A soldier sleeping in Kamdesh, Nuristan, Afghanistan.  Photo: Sergio Caro

[Thanks to Phil Gasper, who sent this in.]

Feb. 27, 2007 By Matthew Cole, Salon.com [Excerpts]

At 9 p.m. on my first night at the U.S. Army base in Kamdesh, I was shaken awake by a 105 mm howitzer round.  Then a symphony of incoming and outgoing fire sounded. BO-OM! BO-OM! BO-OM! Tat! Tat! Tat! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop! Pop!

From the pine- and cedar-lined mountain slope that loomed over the base, several insurgents were firing down on us with rocket-propelled grenades and AK-47s.  The line of Humvees ringing the base spotted the insurgents and began shooting back.  For 10 minutes U.S. forces blanketed the ridgeline above with machine-gun and rifle fire and RPGs.  A soldier manning a thermal-imaging device (LRAS) spotted the silhouette of Afghans and began pulling the trigger of his machine gun.

After the first round of fighting, the soldier yelled that he had confirmed at least one death. "I saw that motherfucker through the LRAS!" he screamed, breathing heavily, his adrenaline high.  "I saw him explode into a bunch of pieces!  Parts were everywhere!" He smiled.

As the volleys began to subside, Sgt. Matthew Netzel guessed aloud that roughly five insurgents had been killed.  "I think there are more up there, but we’re not certain yet, 'cause we don’t know how many there were to begin with," he said.

As they fired, U.S. forces launched slow-falling flares that lit up the wooded area they were firing upon, hoping to illuminate the insurgents’ positions.  But there were no more insurgents to be seen.  The echo of automatic-weapons fire stopped bouncing through the valley and most of the soldiers went back to sleep.

It was just another night in Kamdesh.  The base averages three attacks per week.

The next morning, a group climbed up the mountainside to look for casualties but found none.

"They usually clean their bodies up before we can get to them," Lt. Benjamin Keating, a 27-year-old from Maine, told me.  "They will pull the bodies, scrub bloodstains, and sometimes they pick the shells up too. 

"We never know how many we killed or who they were.  They’re like ghosts."

The inability to know how many and who was killed has made it hard for U.S. forces to identify whom they are fighting -- Arabs, Afghans or other groups. When they can, a confirmed kill requires a digital photo of the dead man’s face. But those are few and far between.

In November, I traveled with the Army’s 10th Mountain Division to Afghanistan’s Kunar and Nuristan provinces, the region where Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have been sighted over the past three years, to see how American forces were fighting the "other" war.

What I learned is that the war in Afghanistan is going badly.

Three years after U.S. forces secured much of the country and helped 10 million Afghans vote in a presidential election, the country has slid back into a dangerous power vacuum, with the Taliban again competing for control of significant sections of the country.

Our gains, once held firmly, have been lost and the coming year may portend Afghanistan’s future, with ominous rumors floating down from the mountains about a spring offensive by insurgents.

The region is one of the most wild and ungoverned areas of Afghanistan.  The Americans pushed north last summer, part of Operation Mountain Fury, trying to seal off the Pakistan border and find al-Qaida’s Arab forces.  The border’s invisible line, soldiers say, allows high-value targets, like bin Laden, to find sanctuary and a base of operations.

What I saw was a skilled but unprepared U.S. force battling literally uphill against an unidentified enemy.  2006 was the deadliest year for coalition forces since the war began, with 191 dead.

The Kamdesh base is the northernmost American outpost in Afghanistan, in an area of Nuristan so remote that local villagers asked American troops in August, when they arrived, if they were Russian.

The base itself is not more than a quarter-mile wide, on a valley floor, next to a clear, trout-filled river.  Three-thousand-foot mountains rise above the base on both sides of the river. A row of Humvees, all mounted with grenade-filled Mark-19 machine guns, face the closest mountain, which nearly hangs over the front of the base.

When I was there the soldiers hadn’t yet named the base, and had made up their own name, Warheight, for the imposing peak. From Kamdesh, a small outpost near the Pakistani border, to Naray, a larger base 25 miles south, to another border outpost called Camp Lybert, the 10th Mountain Division’s 3rd Squadron, 71st Cavalry -- the so-called 3-71 -- was supposed to control a 220-square-mile triangle of territory.

The U.S. forces in Nuristan have a multipart mission.  First, they are supposed to seal the province’s border with Pakistan, an invisible 1,500-mile line that crosses peaks topping 15,000 feet. Second, they are to create security village by village by rooting out insurgents.  Third, they are supposed to provide Nuristan with potable water, electricity, schools, passable roads and bridges.

The base in Kamdesh was installed in August 2006 as a provincial reconstruction team, one of 12 in Afghanistan.

As soon as I arrived on the base, a soldier warned me not to talk openly or loudly about incoming or outgoing convoys.  "The workers here are listening," he said. "They don’t know much English, but they’re reporting troop movements."

Just before I got to Kamdesh, the insurgents had nearly killed several soldiers at the base, including the commanding sergeant major from the 3-71’s forward operating base in Naray. He had flown in by Chinook helicopter.

After a five-minute tour of the base, during which his Chinook never slowed its rotors or refueled, the sergeant major got back on the chopper.  As soon as it lifted off the ground, a rocket erupted from a nearby ridge and hit the spot where the helicopter had been idling.  The air shook, concrete and rock flew into the air, but the Chinook, after wavering, didn’t come down.

The attack injured no one, but was successful nonetheless.

In a guerrilla war, where the measure of victory can simply be preventing the occupiers from winning, an attack like the one in Kamdesh can have far-reaching effects on how the U.S. military operates.

The near downing of the sergeant major’s helicopter was too close for the Army’s comfort.

The brass immediately issued an order that helicopters would no longer be allowed to land at the base.

The supplies and equipment that the soldiers in Kamdesh needed would now have to travel the 25 miles from Naray via Humvee and truck, a six-hour drive.  The insurgents hadn’t killed anybody with their rocket, but they had further isolated an already isolated base, limiting how quickly buildings could be built, money distributed and local projects completed.

When I first arrived in Kamdesh, I came by Chinook, but I wasn’t allowed to fly directly to the base either.  I had to land at night at another location and walk three hours through the darkness down dusty ravines.

The Americans believe the forces attacking the base are a combination of local militias and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s Hezb-e-Islami fighters, estimated at 300 strong. Hekmatyar, the CIA’s leading recipient of mujahedin funds during the 1980s, has since aligned himself with bin Laden and become a "high-value target."

The U.S. believed the attacks on the base were being mounted and organized by Hezb-e-Islami cell leaders Abdul Rahman and Abdul Haq.  A few nights before I arrived, U.S. forces planned and executed a raid in the neighboring village of Kamdesh, where they killed Rahman and three others and captured Haq.  The mission, according to Army officers apprised of the operation, was a success.

Showing me around the Kamdesh base was Ben Keating, a blue-eyed tree trunk of a young lieutenant on his first foreign deployment. Keating was proud of the 3-71’s mission, but thought time was not on the Americans’ side.

"We’ve been up here for less than seven months," he told me.  He held up a thick book on Alexander the Great’s travails in the Hindu Kush mountains. "We have a couple of thousand years of history against us. You do the math."

Keating was a history and political science major in college. "I’m not saying we’re not doing any good -- we are -- but how long do we plan on staying? And what is the 82nd going to do with the progress we’ve made?  How do you maintain the successes we’ve achieved?"

On my first night came the attack that left no bodies.

On my second night in camp, half a dozen Afghans were preparing a rocket to fire at the base when U.S. soldiers spotted them.  The Americans fired at them for five minutes, then the insurgents climbed the mountainside and retreated into Kamdesh, a village of 20 homes and a mosque several thousand feet uphill.

The U.S. troops called for helicopter backup and an Apache arrived within 10 minutes.

As the insurgents took cover in a village home, several women and children fled the house, knowing the Americans would likely attack.  The Apache, nearly invisible against a starlit sky, flew toward the village, its nose pointed downward a few degrees to get a better aim.  For 45 seconds the Apache fired several hundred 30 mm bullets into the house, a steady barrage that lit up the darkened village.

The shots killed all the insurgents and also injured six of the fleeing women and children.

In a five-day span, U.S. forces had killed roughly 15 insurgents and injured several more.

Local villagers, however, including several I spoke to, believed the Americans had killed an innocent man in the earlier Rahman and Haq raid.

"Ahmed was a good man," said a 30-year-old man named Khalil Nuristani. "He was not al-Qaida."

In Afghanistan’s north, locals use al-Qaida to refer to any anti-U.S. insurgent, a name that came to them by way of the Americans. Nuristani said the innocent man had a childlike intelligence and had been taken advantage of by the insurgents, followers of Rahman and Haq who used his house for operational planning. They had tried to hide there during the raid, which cost Ahmed his life.

An intelligence officer on the base disputed Ahmed’s innocence, but declined to give an explanation.

The villagers were further incensed when the second Apache raid injured women and children.  The afternoon after the raid, they called a shura, or tribal council, with Lt. Col. Feagin and a CIA officer to discuss the security and operations conducted in the valley.

The Americans had been feeling good about their progress.  But it was clear that all the collateral damage had further strained a relationship with the locals that was already tense.

The shura, a collection of middle-aged men from all the nearby villages, arrived complaining of the deteriorating situation.  Forty strong, in stained salwar kameez and flat hats, they sat in rows of white plastic chairs inside an uncompleted building on the base.

One man after another stood up to direct his anger, through a translator, at Feagin and the CIA officer. "You told us when you came here that you would not hurt innocent and peaceful people," said a man with an ink-black beard stretching to the middle of his chest.

"You have big guns and helicopters with good technology, surely you can tell the difference between those who are innocent and those who are not.

"You told us if we helped you, the Americans would not harm us.  We are prisoners in our villages now!" Several of the men nodded their heads as the man sat back down.

Lt. Col. Feagin, whose chest seemed to point upward, sat still on an unfinished stone wall facing the shura. "There was no intent to target anyone but our enemy," he told them. "If the enemy continues to fight us, many more will die. I am certain." A few gunshots echoed in the valley.

Feagin pointed to the direction of the noise and said, "This is part of the problem. The only thing the enemy can bring is fear, intimidation and death."  Feagin informed the shura that the injured villagers had been flown to Bagram Air Base to get "the best medicine and treatment the Army has to offer." He then offered to hire more fighting-age men for the Afghan army unit that would soon be posted in the valley.

Lt. Dan Dillow, executive officer of the 3-71’s Bravo Company, later told me the counterinsurgency model was the only way to fight the war in Afghanistan.  "I don’t like civil affairs" -- building roads and schools, offering jobs -- "but you need it out here," he said.  You have to give them something.  You can’t defeat the Nuristanis.

"They know who is ambushing us and when it’s going to happen, but they won’t tell us. They have us by the balls and they know it."

Next to speak was the CIA officer, a man I’ll call Arnold.  He was dressed like a toy soldier, with black "Terminator"-style sunglasses and an Under Armour T-shirt that even with elastic was stretched to its limits by his muscle.

He looked like he should have been lifting weights in a gym.

He told the Nuristanis a convoluted story about a wild dog he had killed near his farm in the United States.  He had asked the dog’s owner, his neighbor, to put the dog down.

After several attempts to reason with the neighbor, and with the dog still running amok, Arnold killed the animal.  The Nuristanis, he said, were his neighbors, and the Pakistani-trained insurgents were the wild dogs.  If the locals didn’t take responsibility for keeping insurgents out of their villages, he would be forced to kill the insurgents in their midst. "These (fighters) only know war in their heart," he said, giving his left breast a double tap with a closed fist to make his point.

The shura members responded by looking at the translator quizzically.  Later I asked the translator what the villagers had thought of the CIA officer’s comments. "They didn’t like it" was all he would say.

The 10th Mountain, meanwhile, has suffered its own losses to "wild dogs."

Thirty-nine soldiers from the 10th have died since May 2006, 25 by enemy fire, making them the hardest hit U.S. division in the history of the Afghan theater.  Camp Lybert is named for Staff Sgt. Patrick Lybert, who fell in combat.

But the troops in Nuristan have also suffered from sheer isolation and the topography of the Hindu Kush.

At Lybert (altitude 6,500 feet), the 3-71’s Charlie Company had gone 70 days without a hot shower or a hot meal.

They have sustained deaths and injuries from hiking and falling.

Soldiers who have served in both Iraq and Afghanistan before said their current living conditions are much worse.

"Leadership doesn’t care about us," said one officer, who requested that his name be withheld to avoid punishment for his comments.

"We’ve gone on mission after mission after mission where we’ve gone black (run out) on food and water.  They tell us, 'Pack light, your mission will only be four days tops.’ But then we end up stuck on a mountaintop for two weeks.  We didn’t have anything, not even tents.  If you can’t get us off a mountain, don’t put us on there."

Several soldiers and officers I spoke with told me they were unprepared for their mission in the north of Afghanistan.  No one, it seems, told them they would have to fight a Vietnam-style war at high altitudes.

One officer told me the 10th Mountain’s limited resources and poor planning frustrated him. (He also asked that his name be withheld for fear of retribution.)

"Leadership has failed us," he told me. "They don’t give a shit about us. We’ve been shorted everything we needed. Our training didn’t prepare us for this terrain or this mission. We’re doing the best we can but we’re not getting support."

He said the summer of 2006 had been filled with air-assault missions in which Chinooks delivered 20 to 30 troops to a ridgeline with little food or water, and no plan to pick them up.

Adding to Charlie Company’s frustration, it cannot go on manned patrols in the villages below.  Capt. Mike Schmidt, the commanding officer, told me the location of the base and size of his troop limited how much he could do. "We depend a lot on locals walking up from the neighboring villages to give us information," he said.

Again and again soldiers referred to insurgents as "the enemy" or "the bad guys."  But the lack of detailed knowledge about whom they were fighting, and why their adversaries were fighting in turn, is troubling.

In the north, for instance, the Taliban are weak and unwelcome.  And while al-Qaida has local fighters in some valleys, their reach, according to U.S. intelligence officials, has been diminished.  Though Army officials quietly say the insurgents are religious fighters, some evidence shows the disputes are local and have little to do with jihad.

A translator named Abdul who has worked for the CIA and the Special Forces told me that the biggest threat to American troops in the north, a man named Haji Usman, had been nothing more than a rich timber smuggler before the war. "Now he’s enemy No. 1," Abdul said. "He was not a nice guy, but he was not fighting a jihad. He wasn’t fighting the Americans.  But they took favor with his biggest smuggling competitor, and now he’s the No. 1 enemy. I do not understand this."

Back at Kamdesh, the base was gearing up for an incoming convoy.

Humvees and LMTVs (for light medium tactical vehicle, a 2.5-ton truck) would be arriving from Naray, carrying ammunition, food, fuel and water along a winding, rock-strewn dirt road. In 2006, insurgents had ambushed many convoys with RPGs, light arms and improvised explosive devices, along a stretch that 3-71 had come to call "Ambush Alley." Several supply trucks driven by Afghans had been torched and pushed into the river. Some U.S. soldiers had been killed, and dozens had been injured in a three-month span. Sometimes security precautions meant it took nine hours, instead of six, to cover the 25 miles between bases.

Soldiers began to intercept radio communication between insurgents.  A man speaking the local Nuristani language began to yell "Allahu akbar!" -- "God is great!" -- before directing his men to attack. "Do not miss. Be accurate. Do not worry, they don’t have any planes."

He was right.

Close air support, the element that gives U.S. forces the biggest advantage over the insurgents, didn’t seem to be nearby, and even if planes and choppers were on their way, the radio traffic didn’t identify where the insurgents would fire.

One of the military intelligence officers who helped relay the information to the convoy expressed frustration. "We know they’re going to try to fire, but we don’t know from where, so we can’t help the convoy out much," he said.

Within a minute, the Americans were hit with several RPGs and rifle fire.

A Humvee flipped and was evacuated.  A group of soldiers sat around the radio at the Kamdesh control post, listening, hoping the platoon could make it through the "kill zone" without taking casualties. They did.  Hours later the convoy reached camp, and there had been only a few minor injuries.

However, the convoy had lost another vehicle in addition to the Humvee, and there were signs that the insurgents were trying new tactics.

For the first time, instead of one firing position, the ambush had come from three positions on a mountainside, creating more fire of longer duration and hitting more vehicles.

The insurgents had had another success, and had isolated the PRT base even further.

Lt. Ben Keating, for one, admitted a grudging admiration for his adaptable foes.  "They’re smart.   They keep low, never expose themselves for more than 30 seconds to a minute, and then disperse. It’s frustrating."

A few nights after I left Kamdesh, word came that a soldier had died in an accident.

A team was attempting a lights-out, nighttime convoy to return a truck.  The 2.5-ton truck flipped off of a cliff, tossing its two passengers 300 feet down to a riverbank covered with boulders.

The Kamdesh soldiers knew the drive would be dangerous. The truck was large and unstable going over a poorly constructed road littered with rocks, boulders and craters.

It was the main section of Ambush Alley that Lt. Col. Feagin had ordered rebuilt. But four months later, it was still in bad shape.

By the time a group of soldiers got the injured back up the cliff and to a medevac helicopter, one of the passengers, Lt. Keating, had died from his fall, at the age of 27.

The men of the PRT base renamed it Camp Keating.

IRAQ WAR REPORTS

First Quarter '07 Deadliest Of War For U.S. Troops

Apr 9, 2007 by Rowan Scarborough, The Examiner

The first quarter of 2007 marked the first time that 80 or more Americans were killed in action in each of three consecutive months.

January, February and March combined for the deadliest first quarter, with 244 deaths compared with 148 in 2006, 200 in 2005 and 119 in 2004, according casualty counts by the Web site icasualties.org.

Local Soldier Killed In Iraq:

Kennedy Attended Xaverian Brothers High

April 9, 2007 WCVB-TV

BOSTON -- Army Sgt. Adam Kennedy, a rock climbing enthusiast and Norwich University graduate who began his first tour of duty in Iraq last fall, was killed by a blast from an improvised explosive device south of Baghdad, his family said Monday.

Family members didn’t immediately know any additional details of the circumstances of Sunday’s attack, his father, David Kennedy, and mother, Nancy Smyth, said by telephone from the family home in Norfolk.

Kennedy, 25, served in a 4th Brigade infantry division based in Fort Richardson, Alaska, and was sent to his first tour in Iraq in October.

"His lifelong ambition was to be in the military," his father said. "He really loved the discipline, and the physical conditioning."

Kennedy’s unit provided security for an Army colonel, clearing hidden explosives and otherwise ensuring safe passage for convoys. The work frequently put Kennedy’s unit in danger - a reality that became clear to his family when he returned for a 10-day leave late last year.

"He was obviously subdued, and changed by the danger," his father said.

David Kennedy said his son telephoned him last Thursday, and told him he would be on special duty requiring him to be out of contact for about a month.

Despite the risks, in December Kennedy made a commitment to remain with the Army for another six years, his father said.

Kennedy, who was single, graduated from Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood in 2000. He graduated from Norwich University, a private military college in Northfield, Vt., in 2004, majoring in computer science, according to a statement from the university.

At Norwich, he spent time away from his studies rock-climbing in the Green Mountains, and participated in a cold weather rescue team, his parents said.

Although he had little background as a runner, last year he finished a marathon during a break from military training in Alaska.

"He ran a respectable time his first time out," his father said.

Arrangements for a funeral in Norfolk were pending.

Norman Soldier Killed In Iraq

Spc. Ryan Scott Michael Dallam, 24, a third-generation Army soldier from Norman, Okla., died April 6, 2007, in Baghdad, Iraq, when the Humvee he was driving hit an improvised explosive device, his father Scott Dallam said Monday. (AP Photo/Dallam Family Photo)

April 09, 2007 Norman (AP)

The family of a Norman soldier says their son died Friday while serving in Iraq.

Scott Dallam of Norman says his son -- 24-year-old Army Corporal Ryan Dallam -- died in Baghdad along with two other soldiers.

Ryan Dallam grew up in Norman, but recently lived in Arizona, where he graduated from Show Low High School in 2002.

He also had attended Oklahoma City Community College.

He was a member of the Headquarters Company, 1st of the 18th Infantry, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division that was deployed to Iraq.

Dallam’s father says his son was scheduled to come home on leave next week.

A memorial service for Dallam is planned for 4:30 p-m Thursday at First Christian Church in Norman.

Soldier, 22, Dies

"He Didn’t Believe The Military Presence Was 'Doing A Lot Of Good’"

"Dad, I Feel Like We’re Fighting Ghosts.  There’s Nobody Out There To Fight"

April 7, 2007 Henry K. Lee, San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer

Pfc. James Coon was under consideration for a Bronze Star after risking his own life in an attempt to save two wounded Army buddies after their unit was hit by a bomb in Iraq. Now, the honor would have to be awarded posthumously.

Coon, 2