Hella Nation - Evan Wright [13]
The soldiers’ attitudes toward the people are more complex, and it would seem more decent, than their prankish humor indicates. American soldiers are more willing than other coalition forces in Kandahar to mix with the locals. Canadian recon units, which conduct their patrols in tanklike armored vehicles, seldom stop unless by prearranged plan. Steve Marty, a master corporal in a Canadian patrol unit, says, “We know what they did to the Russians. They’d invite them in and give them food laced with hepatitis. The Afghans in the villages still have all their weapons. If we got into a fight, it would be six of us against a whole village. We don’t stop unless we have to.”
The soldiers in the Fifth, many of whom share dog-eared histories of the Russian defeat in Afghanistan, are as aware as anyone else of the dangers posed by the villages they patrol, but their wariness is tempered by the particularly American faith, bordering on naivete, that most people can be brought around if, as Quast says, “you treat them with respect and dignity.
“First time we came to one village, the Canadians had been patrolling before us,” says Quast. “A man hopped out on one leg, giving us the finger. Kids came out with rocks. Our gunner locked and loaded the fifty-cal on a little kid who was aiming to hit him with a rock from a slingshot.” The soldiers defused the tense situation by taking a direct approach. “We had our translator ask what they were so mad about. Turns out the patrols had been speeding through the village, kicking up dust, waking everyone up.” The Fifth Platoon promised to drive more slowly through the village.
The Humvees stop about seventy-five yards from Mowmand’s outermost wall. While Farrar and Swinehart remain in the gun turrets of each Humvee, Quast steps out of the lead vehicle. Following procedure, he will stay here and send in a couple of soldiers to make contact with a village elder. Sergeant Jeremy Ludweg, twenty-four, from Louisville, Kentucky, will go on, along with the ATF translator and a soft-spoken twenty-four-year-old art-school dropout from Detroit, Specialist Sean “Doc” Murphy, the platoon medic.
Murphy normally doesn’t tell villagers he is a medic. “I don’t have enough supplies for villagers,” he says. But during a previous patrol, a man who lives outside the village invited Murphy into his house, telling him his children were sick. At first, Murphy kept quiet, but then the man’s daughters came into the room. Their hair had fallen out, and their scalps were bleeding. “They just needed some iodine,” Murphy says. “So I decided to bring some.”
Even though more than a thousand people live in Mowmand, a spooky silence radiates from the village walls, broken only by the braying of donkeys. Ludweg has never been inside Mowmand before and doesn’t trust locals as much as some of the other men do. A wiry redhead who wears small gold-frame glasses and speaks with a mild Kentucky drawl, Ludweg is famous in the platoon for nearly calling in a strike on two rabbits running through the perimeter of the Kandahar Airfield, which he mistook in his night-vision scope for Al Qaeda infiltrators. Ludweg is due to ship home in fewer than twenty days, leave the Army, marry his fiancée, finish college and find “a job where I never wear a uniform again.” For obvious reasons, he wants to play it safe. “Doc, we’re not going in, are we?” Ludweg asks, scanning the village