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Beginning of article
At the gate
Bagram, Afghanistan
The majority of American soldiers in Afghanistan serve support functions - laundry, logistics, accounting - on sprawling, city-like bases. For one American military police officer, the front line of the war on terror is the front gate.
American MPs at Checkpoint 5, a labyrinth of barbed wire and concrete barricades that is the main entrance to Bagram Air Base, have interpreters to help them talk with Afghan nationals. When "terps" are unavailable, the soldiers fall back on cheat sheets in Dari, with helpful phrases such as "stop," "keep moving," and "the dog will bite you."
Staff Sgt. Kirby West, an MP from Andrews, Texas, oversees security at the gate with the help of Sadou, an 80-pound German shepherd. Together, they inspect trucks for explosives and check day laborers for weapons. The safety of everyone on base depends on Sergeant West's vigilance and Sadou's phenomenally sensitive nose.
In dealing with Afghan laborers, West, clean-cut, with a linebacker's build, is courteous but quietly forceful. In some cases, Sadou helps him keep order.
"People start to listen a little more, because the dog is barking," West says.
Conflicts at the gate arise between American soldiers, who see the need for security as paramount, and Afghans civilians and military, who say they feel bullied. With the help of interpreters, West has learned that Americans are considered rude and overly aggressive. Militiamen provided by a local warlord to help police the gate resent having to ask permission to enter a base that was a free-fire zone before the Taliban fell. An especially helpful point of cross-cultural sensitivity regards a notion common among Afghans pertaining to dogs and the afterlife.
"They believe that if they have been bit by a dog, they will not go on to see God," West says.
With inspections at the gate going smoothly, West decides to make a run by the garbage dump. To people from nearby villages, the dump is a rich source of construction materials and discarded MREs, but it is strictly off limits to Afghans. Earlier that morning, a trash truck was swarmed by scavengers, forcing an American soldier to fire her weapon into the air. Villagers sometimes fend off American soldiers with rocks and "MRE bombs" (each MRE container can also be rigged into a crude explosive device). The last time that happened, one of West's colleagues released his dog for what's ominously known as "bite work." An Afghan stone thrower was hospitalized with deep puncture wounds.
West pulls up to the dump in his pickup truck and releases Sadou from a kennel in back. Sadou strains at the leash.
"He smells all that food," West says. West and Sadou patrol around mounds of garbage and trucks offloading still more rubbish. About a dozen Afghans sort through a mountain of trash, even as it is consumed by flames. At the sight of West, they scatter. Two men shuffle away with a box brimming with metal envelopes of food rations. A straggler hides behind a mountain of dirt that has been pushed up by bulldozers. West whistles, and points to the gate.
As an MP, West interacts with Afghans more than most US soldiers do, but he doesn't expect to make many friends.
"When they curse at you in English, it's a real friendly type deal," West says. "When they revert back to their own language, that's how we know they're angry."
Meanwhile, back at the ranch
Kunduz, Afghanistan
Special Forces units occupy "safe houses" - unfortified bases - in every corner of Afghanistan, but the term may be misleading. Some soldiers fear that even their homes back in the US aren't necessarily safe.
The Special Forces safe house in Kunduz is a boxy two-story building on a dusty side street in a residential neighborhood. A gravel lot in front is crowded with all-terrain vehicles and pickup trucks that have been converted into gunships. Indoors, the walls are stacked to the ceiling with cases of cereal, MREs, and water. The livingroom is carpeted with Afghan rugs and lined with pillows. In keeping with local customs, combat boots, sandals, and running shoes are left in a pile by the door.
Chief Warrant Officer John, a medic, a demolition expert, and a sniper, occupies a corner room on the ground floor. He has jet-black hair and arched, inquisitive eyebrows, and often wears a United Airlines cap while on operations, a reminder of the 9/11 attacks. A handmade wooden cabinet houses his fishing magazines (John brought a rod and reel with him, not knowing that fishing in Afghanistan would be as simple as tossing a hand grenade into a river in the company of a local warlord), along with letters from home and a diary, which he keeps meti-culously. Pinned to the wall are photographs of John's family and a "death letter" he has written to his wife.
"That's a letter I hope she never reads," John says.
Special Forces bases, especially in eastern Afghanistan, come under rocket and mortar fire so often that the shelling, inaccurate as it may be, has become routine. The safe house in Kunduz has yet to come under attack, but in the event it does, John's room doubles as an excellent fighting position. Tear down the West Virginia flag in one window, and John has a clear shot to the front gate. Behind an American flag, another window doubles as a shooting port over the front door. The window sills are stacked with sandbags and lined with hand grenades and cartons of ammunition. In case of evacuation, John will burn his diary, the letters from his wife, and his store of plastic explosives and pull the pin on a thermite grenade he has placed on his cabinet. "If it gets to that point, they're probably killing me anyways, so I wouldn't want them to get any benefit out of it," John says.
While a stick of C-4 could easily be used to rig a booby trap, and the diary of a soldier with a high security clearance could yield useful information to an enemy combatant, it's not immediately clear how letters from home could have any strategic value. But in a fight against terrorist organizations, with their predilection for soft targets, many Special Forces soldiers worry that spouses and children back home could become unwitting actors in the war on terror.
"Worst-case scenario, somebody goes to your house and kills your family," John says. Such attacks have never materialized, though US military officials say they were threatened by Saddam Hussein during the Gulf War.
Nonetheless, information security has become institutionalized in the US military. Garbage dumps like the one at Bagram are strictly off limits. At the US Army post office in Uzbekistan, return addresses are routinely cut out of pieces of mail before they are forwarded to soldiers in the field. Even so, forward-deployed troops are encouraged to burn their mail after it has been read.
Because of the sensitive nature of their missions, and because they are often collocated with even more covert groups, such as the CIA and the Army's Delta Force, Special Forces soldiers are drilled in "operational security."
But the average Special Forces soldier isn't much of a blab. Like most Green Berets, John describes himself as a private person. Back in the States, most of his friends are fellow soldiers. His wife socializes with "Special Forces wives." Even when he goes to a restaurant, he takes care to sit in the back corner, so he can cover the door.
Some of John's precautions seem excessive even to members of his unit, but other Green Berets are even more circumspect. For them, the 9/11 attacks produced a world where everything is potentially dangerous. Even as he is searching out Al Qaeda remnants in remote corners of northern Afghanistan, John is forced to consider the possibility that Al Qaeda will come to the US and find him and his family instead.
"You're hunting them, they're hunting you," John says. "I don't want to be the first to find out how serious this war is going to get."
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TOM BROWN - STAFF
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