The Prozac war in the Korengal Valley
NYT Magazine contributing writer Elizabeth Rubin spent some time with the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team in the Korengal Valley, located in Afghanistan’s Kunar province. She found a place where — from my reading – a My Lai-like situation could be just one more ambush away.
This is a must read.
For openers, here’s some maps to set the scene:
Here’s the original UN map of Afghanistan.
Here’s the original AIMS map of Kunar.
And here’s a photo of the Korengal Valley:
The view from a gun position at Firebase Phoenix overlooking the Korengal Valley. Paratroopers from Company B, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment (Airborne), 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, occupy several small firebases along the valley in one of the most hard-fought areas in Afghanistan’s Regional Command –East area of responsibility. (U.S. Army photo)
See this American Forces Press Service article for a hi-res version of the photo.
Residents of the upper Korengal Valley adhere to the Wahhabi school of Islam, a more austere form than what most Afghans follow. There are lots of foreign fighters (Chechens, Uzbeks, Pakistanis) in the area, although as you can see from the above maps, it doesn’t sit right on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border.
You might also want to see this post: Afghanistan, frame by frame. Photojournalist Tim Hetherington won a 2007 World Press Photo Association award for his coverage of some of the vicious combat there.
The region is about 450 to 500 kilometres northeast of Kandahar province, where Canada’s troops are operating.
I went to Afghanistan last fall with a question: Why, with all our technology, were we killing so many civilians in air strikes? As of September of last year, according to Human Rights Watch, NATO was causing alarmingly high numbers of civilian deaths — 350 by the coalition, compared with 438 by the insurgents. The sheer tonnage of metal raining down on Afghanistan was mind-boggling: a million pounds between January and September of 2007, compared with half a million in all of 2006.
After a few days, the first question sparked more: Was there a deeper problem in the counterinsurgency campaign? More than 100 American soldiers were killed last year, the highest rate since the invasion. Why were so many more American troops being killed? To find out, I spent much of the fall in the Korengal Valley and elsewhere in Kunar province alongside soldiers who were making life-and-death decisions almost every day — decisions that led to the deaths of soldiers and of civilians. …
She describes the job of Capt. Dan Kearney this way:
So what exactly was his job out here? To subdue the valley. It’s a task the Marines had tried, and then the soldiers of the Army’s 10th Mountain Division — a task so bloody it seemed to drive the 10th Mountain’s soldiers to a kind of madness. Kearney’s soldiers told me they’d been spooked by the weird behavior of their predecessors last May: near the end of their tour, many would sit alone on the fire base talking to themselves. Privates disobeyed their sergeants, and squad leaders refused to step outside the wire to show the new boys the terrain. No one wanted to be shot in the last days of his tour.
Insurgents would often shoot at Kearney and his men from inside homes. Here’s what happened on July 10, during one such incident:
When Kearney’s moment of decision came, two of 2nd Platoon’s sergeants, Kevin Rice and Tanner Stichter, had been shot, and the fight was still going on. Kearney could see a woman and child in the house. “We saw people moving weapons around,” Kearney told me. “I tried everything. I fired mortars to the back side to get the kids to run out the front. I shot to the left, to the right. The Apache” — an attack helicopter — “got shot at and left. I kept asking for a bomb drop, but no one wanted to sign off on the collateral damage of dropping a bomb on a house.” Finally, he said, “We shot a javelin and a tow” — both armor-piercing missiles. “I didn’t get shot at from there for two months,” Kearney said. “I ended up killing that woman and that kid.” …
Here’s more on the psychological toll:
LAST AUTUMN, after five months of grueling foot patrols up and down the mountains, after fruitless encounters with elders who smiled in the morning and were host to insurgents in the evening and after losing friends to enemy fire, Captain Kearney’s men could relate to the sullen, jittery rage of their predecessors in the 10th Mountain Division. Many wondered what they were doing out there at all.
One full-moon night I was sitting outside a sandbag-reinforced hut with Kearney when a young sergeant stepped out hauling the garbage. He looked around at the illuminated mountains, the dust, the rocks, the garbage bin. The monkeys were screeching. “I hate this country!” he shouted. Then he smiled and walked back into the hut. “He’s on medication,” Kearney said quietly to me.
Then another soldier walked by and shouted, “Hey, I’m with you, sir!” and Kearney said to me, “Prozac. Serious P.T.S.D. from last tour.” Another one popped out of the HQ cursing and muttering. “Medicated,” Kearney said. “Last tour, if you didn’t give him information, he’d burn down your house. He killed so many people. He’s checked out.” …
At the end of the summer, Kearney told his dad, “My boys are gonna go crazy out here.” The army sent a shrink, and Kearney got a wake-up call about his own leadership. He discovered that half his men thought he was playing Russian roulette with their lives and the other half thought he stuck too closely to the rules of engagement. “The moral compass of the army is the P.L. and the C.O.” — the platoon leader and the commanding officer, Kearney told me. “I told every one of my P.L.’s that they have to set that moral standard, that once you slip to the left, you can’t pull your guys back in.”
Here’s one soldier’s reaction after a vicious ambush and firefight that saw two of his comrades die:
(Sgt. Roberto) Sandifer was questioning why they were sticking it out in the Korengal when the people so clearly hated them. He was haunted by (platoon medic Hugo) Mendoza’s voice calling to him: “I’m bleeding out. I’m dying.” He worried that the Korengal was going to push them off the deep end. In his imagination it had already happened. One day an Afghan visited their fire base, Sandifer told me. “I was staring at him, on the verge of picking up my weapon to shoot him,” he said. “I know right from wrong, but even if I did shoot him everyone at the fire base would have been O.K. We’re all to the point of ‘Lord of the Flies.’ ” And they still had 10 months to go in the Korengal.
I get the impression that Rubin was there in October, but I haven’t come across reports of a major bug-out from the soldiers in the piece, so I’m assuming it hasn’t happened — at least not yet. :(
One can’t generalize the Korengal situation to Afghanistan as a whole, but FWIW, Kunar province as a whole is a Pashtun-dominated area. What isn’t clear to me is whether the rest of the province is as Wild West a place as the Korengal Valley, or if the insurgency is more subdued. And how about the other Pashtun provinces, which run roughly from Nuristan (just north of Kunar) down to Nimroz in the southwest?
Those remain the most troublesome areas for ISAF and U.S. forces. When does ISAF and the U.S. think the Afghan security forces will have enough control over that ground to keep it from domestic and foreign militants?
Finally, if the insurgents are willing to sacrifice their women and children to drive the Americans out, I find it difficult to believe that the U.S. will eventually triumph in that contest of wills.
And the ongoing loss of civilians as part of the violence will make winning hearts and minds as difficult as climbing the hills or navigating the myriad number of caves of the Korengal Valley itself.
I leave you with this snippet of dialogue from Apocalypse Now Redux, the screenplay written by John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola.
In this scene, towards the very end of the movie, Col.Walter E. Kurtz (played by Marlon Brando) is holding forth in his compound in Cambodia, with Capt. Benjamin L. Willard (Martin Sheen) his captive audience — and I mean that literally. There are live Montagnards and dead bodies everywhere:
I’ve seen the horrors. The horrors that you’ve seen.
But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have the right to kill me. You have a right to do that. But you have no right to judge me.
It’s impossible for words to describe what is … necessary, to those who do not know what “horror” means.
Horror.
Horror has a face, and you must make a friend of horror.
Horror and moral terror are your friends. It they are not, then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies.
I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We’d left the camp after we had inoculated the children for polio. And this old man came running after us, and he was crying. He couldn’t say. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. They they were, in a pile. A pile of … little arms. And, I remember, I, I cried, I wept like some … grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget it.
And then I realized, like I was shot, like I was shot with a diamond — a diamond bullet right through my forehead.
And I thought, My God, the genius of that! The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized, that they were stronger than we. Because they could stand it.
These were not monsters. These were men, trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who have families, who have children, who are filled with love … that they had the strength, the strength … to do that.
If I had 10 divisions of those men, then our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral, and at the same time, who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling, without passion. Without judgment. Without Judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.
Here’s a YouTube clip of that scene:
If the clip ever doesn’t work trying searching YouTube for Apocalypse Now Kurtz Horror. That should help you find a replacement.
I am a soldier serving in the Korengal Valley with the 173rd Airborne and it is suprisingly worse than most people portray it. Roughly half the soldiers out here are medicated on some for of drug, and the other half need to be. In a recent visit by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, our chain of command would have the militaries officials believe that these recent news reports are false and that everyone out here is fine. We are not, however. More than 30% of the people out here have been shot. In rough numbers, it is 7 US killed, and between 40 and 50 wounded. There is roughly 130 of us out here, so you can see how we might be having a hard time dealing with it. The unit we replaced, 10th Mountain, was ready to break and be completely incapable of fighting after only 5 months of being here. We are coming up on our 1 year mark, and we still have roughly four months left. We have been in over 300 firefight in that year, while the average soldier in Iraq will experience between 25-50, and the average soldier in Afghanistan will come across 5-20. To answer your question about the rest of the Kunar province, it varies. Along the Pech River Valley, there is sparse fighting and mostly long range engagements. It is still pretty crazy, but because of the milder terrain, they are far better supplied and equiped. At the outlying bases along the Pech, the average soldier will be able to enjoy a hot meal and shower daily, and many of the bases have phones and internet. We, however, spent the first 8 months without electricity and running water, managing to shower maybe once a month and calling home whenever we could make a trip back to our main base. All things considered, the likelyhood of us making permanent progress with these people is slim, if at all existant. They don't want us or the government here and prefer to be isolated from the rest of the country. Many even believed us to be the Russians, coming back to try and take over the country again. They are uneducated and have no desire for things to change, so all we are doing is bringing war and suffering to their families. Unfortunatly, the only thing we share with the Korengalis is the question in our mind as to why we are here.
I am a soldier serving in the Korengal Valley with the 173rd Airborne and it is suprisingly worse than most people portray it. Roughly half the soldiers out here are medicated on some for of drug, and the other half need to be. In a recent visit by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, however, our chain of command would have the militaries officials believe that these recent news reports are false and that everyone out here is fine. We are not, however. More than 30% of the people out here have been shot. In rough numbers, it is 7 US killed, and between 40 and 50 wounded. There is roughly 130 of us out here, so you can see how we might be having a hard time dealing with it. The unit we replaced, 10th Mountain, was ready to break and be completely incapable of fighting after only 5 months of being here. We are coming up on our 1 year mark, and we still have roughly four months left. We have been in over 300 firefight in that year, while the average soldier in Iraq will experience between 25-50, and the average soldier in Afghanistan will come across 5-20. To answer your question about the rest of the Kunar province, it varies. Along the Pech River Valley, there is sparse fighting and mostly long range engagements. It is still pretty crazy, but because of the milder terrain, they are far better supplied and equiped. At the outlying bases along the Pech, the average soldier will be able to enjoy a hot meal and shower daily, and many of the bases have phones and internet. We, however, spent the first 8 months without electricity and running water, managing to shower maybe once a month and calling home whenever we could make a trip back to our main base. All things considered, the likelyhood of us making permanent progress with these people is slim, if at all existant. They don't want us or the government here and prefer to be isolated from the rest of the country. Many even believed us to be the Russians, coming back to try and take over the country again. They are uneducated and have no desire for things to change, so all we are doing is bringing war and suffering to their families. Unfortunatly, the only thing we share with the Korengalis is the question in our mind as to why we are here.
Hey soldier:
Thanks very much for taking the time to write.
I'm very sorry to hear of the tough tour being experienced by you and the fellow members of your unit.
If you guys are getting shot at every day, that can't even be called “counterinsurgency.” That's just war, plain and simple.
The stuff you mention about the Korengalis just wanting Afghan and U.S. troops to stay out of their valley is something I've come across in other reportage on Afghanistan.
One theory I've had about the war there is that perhaps the strategy should be developed by those who understand hillbilly culture. Maybe part of the deal should be not going where the locals genuinely don't want you.
OTOH, the U.S. military (accorging to the Vanity Fair article) has determined that the Kunar Valley is seen by al Qaeda has having great strategic value.
Which leaves you guys in the shit. :(
When your tour ends, I hope you and your buddies get to come home to your loved ones alive and in relatively good shape, considering the nasty situation you're in.
Here's to better times ahead.
Just a note to those who are interested in our guys serving in Kunar with the 173rd; when their tour there ends, they will go home…to the 173rd home base in ITALY. In order for these guys to come back to America for a brief visit, they will have to purchase, out of their own pockets, plane fare from Italy to the US. Cost for this ticket is usually over 1,000 usdollars.
Hey soldier:
Thanks very much for taking the time to write.
I'm very sorry to hear of the tough tour being experienced by you and the fellow members of your unit.
If you guys are getting shot at every day, that can't even be called “counterinsurgency.” That's just war, plain and simple.
The stuff you mention about the Korengalis just wanting Afghan and U.S. troops to stay out of their valley is something I've come across in other reportage on Afghanistan.
One theory I've had about the war there is that perhaps the strategy should be developed by those who understand hillbilly culture. Maybe part of the deal should be not going where the locals genuinely don't want you.
OTOH, the U.S. military (accorging to the Vanity Fair article) has determined that the Kunar Valley is seen by al Qaeda has having great strategic value.
Which leaves you guys in the shit. :(
When your tour ends, I hope you and your buddies get to come home to your loved ones alive and in relatively good shape, considering the nasty situation you're in.
Here's to better times ahead.
Just a note to those who are interested in our guys serving in Kunar with the 173rd; when their tour there ends, they will go home…to the 173rd home base in ITALY. In order for these guys to come back to America for a brief visit, they will have to purchase, out of their own pockets, plane fare from Italy to the US. Cost for this ticket is usually over 1,000 usdollars.
To the fine men of the 173rd: the 10th Mountain Division 1/32 spent 15 months at the KOP and the Korengal Valley. They had 22/23 killed and over 130 wounded. They took over 50% casualties, had no shower facilities, slept on the ground for months, yet they are making their way back in “the real world.” I know all this because one was my son. What angered me then and I am sure angers you is that the U.S. is not aware of the fighting conditions in the Korengal, it is under reported, and the rules of engagement favor the enemy and not the U.S. soldiers. The NATO forces (the Coalition) do all they can to keep what is really happening from the public in general and the U.S. public in particular.
This all said, I am so proud of what the 10th and the 173rd has endured and overcome. It is warfare, there are great hardships, many frustrations, but through it all, most will survive and be better soldiers to help the next army for America's future. You are so much better than we were in Vietnam, just as frustrated, but somehow better. Get through this, help each other (your officers, included), and know we will prevail. God bless for your endurance and courage. Don't try to second guess the REMFs. They will never have a clue.
John P. McAfee, author of Slow Walk in A Sad Rain.
To the fine men of the 173rd: the 10th Mountain Division 1/32 spent 15 months at the KOP and the Korengal Valley. They had 22/23 killed and over 130 wounded. They took over 50% casualties, had no shower facilities, slept on the ground for months, yet they are making their way back in “the real world.” I know all this because one was my son. What angered me then and I am sure angers you is that the U.S. is not aware of the fighting conditions in the Korengal, it is under reported, and the rules of engagement favor the enemy and not the U.S. soldiers. The NATO forces (the Coalition) do all they can to keep what is really happening from the public in general and the U.S. public in particular.
This all said, I am so proud of what the 10th and the 173rd has endured and overcome. It is warfare, there are great hardships, many frustrations, but through it all, most will survive and be better soldiers to help the next army for America's future. You are so much better than we were in Vietnam, just as frustrated, but somehow better. Get through this, help each other (your officers, included), and know we will prevail. God bless for your endurance and courage. Don't try to second guess the REMFs. They will never have a clue.
John P. McAfee, author of Slow Walk in A Sad Rain.
If true, that's outrageous.
Hi Mr. McAfee:
Thanks for stopping by and adding your thoughts.
Bill D.
If true, that's outrageous.
Hi Mr. McAfee:
Thanks for stopping by and adding your thoughts.
Bill D.
I SERVED WITH 4TH BAT.,173RD AIRBORNE BRIGADE (sep.), VIET NAM, 1969 —- IT'S DEJAVU.
I WAS INCOUNTRY FOR ONE TOUR AND STILL HAVE “FLASHBACKS”. MOST INFANTRY UNITS TODAY HAVE SERVED TWO, THREE AND FOUR TOURS OF COMBAT DUTY “DOWN RANGE”. THIS
WAR ON WHOEVER FOR WHATEVER WILL TAKE A VERY, VERY HEAVY TOLL ON THOSE WHO SURVIVE THAT MUCH CARNAGE. MAY GOD BLESS THEM ALL.
I SERVED WITH 4TH BAT.,173RD AIRBORNE BRIGADE (sep.), VIET NAM, 1969 —- IT'S DEJAVU.
I WAS INCOUNTRY FOR ONE TOUR AND STILL HAVE “FLASHBACKS”. MOST INFANTRY UNITS TODAY HAVE SERVED TWO, THREE AND FOUR TOURS OF COMBAT DUTY “DOWN RANGE”. THIS
WAR ON WHOEVER FOR WHATEVER WILL TAKE A VERY, VERY HEAVY TOLL ON THOSE WHO SURVIVE THAT MUCH CARNAGE. MAY GOD BLESS THEM ALL.
Thanks in great measure to the sacrifices of the 173rd, the Korengal is much quieter now. I know because my son is a Platoon Leader in the 2-26 Infantry that just relieved the 173rd last month. The 173rd made tremendous strides with the Korengalis and in making the KOP a vastly better place to live. Hooah!
Yes, this place is vastly underreported, I didn't know about until my son was assigned there. But then the media generally choose to report what fits their own political agenda.
And I for one am thankful that the Army has started to use more tools to help soldiers cope with combat and be more effective. Yes, medications can help. Could we please not trash the Army for doing more to decrease PTSD?
Thanks in great measure to the sacrifices of the 173rd, the Korengal is much quieter now. I know because my son is a Platoon Leader in the 2-26 Infantry that just relieved the 173rd last month. The 173rd made tremendous strides with the Korengalis and in making the KOP a vastly better place to live. Hooah!
Yes, this place is vastly underreported, I didn't know about until my son was assigned there. But then the media generally choose to report what fits their own political agenda.
And I for one am thankful that the Army has started to use more tools to help soldiers cope with combat and be more effective. Yes, medications can help. Could we please not trash the Army for doing more to decrease PTSD?
i was attached to the members of battle company as an engineer for about 6 or 7 months. much of that time i was at vegas and the kop. when i first arrived there i was amazed at how they were living and we busted our ass for the battle company soldiers. i'd gladly live along side those guys again :)
i was attached to the members of battle company as an engineer for about 6 or 7 months. much of that time i was at vegas and the kop. when i first arrived there i was amazed at how they were living and we busted our ass for the battle company soldiers. i'd gladly live along side those guys again :)