Hella Nation - Evan Wright [16]
ONE MORNING JUST PAST DAWN, the Fifth Platoon is ordered back to the airfield. The men are told they will be taking part in a helicopter assault on two villages near the Pakistani border. For the next thirty-six hours, the men practice field drills while battalion commanders speak confidently of taking on “a significant concentration of Al Qaeda forces.” But Apache Snow II quickly runs into difficulties, and the Fifth Platoon is cut from the assault. (When Apache Snow II is finally launched ten days later, the two hundred U.S. troops who land in an armada of choppers find villages filled only with women and children, a few boxes of rifle ammunition and three rocket-propelled grenades given to them by a village elder. A suspicious facility in one village, which military-intelligence analysts speculated might be a terrorist weapons plant, turns out to be a lumber mill.)
After being cut from the mission, the soldiers in the Fifth feel let down. “We just want the chance to do what we train for,” says Ramos. Alone in the tent, D’Angelo seems the most disappointed. “I joined the Army to do extreme things,” he says. “In this kind of war, the Air Force comes in, blows the shit out of everything. The Special Forces does their thing. The infantry comes in and we just guard what’s already been taken.” D’Angelo spits a stream of brown tobacco into an empty Gatorade bottle. “I think about leaving the Army and going into the real world. But sometimes I think the corporate world is cold. You won’t measure up, they fire you. In the Army, if you fail at something, they try to rebuild people. Once you’re in, they’ll always find something for you. The Army is almost addictive. Everything is taken care of for you. My brother was telling me I should become a cop in the New Jersey Highway Patrol. I wouldn’t know how to do that. If I saw someone was speeding, I’d just shoot him.”
WHEN THE PLATOON GOES BACK on patrol, military intelligence passes down a report to D’Angelo that the route they had used to deliver medicine to Mowmand was mined after they left. According to the intelligence report, a man was spotted planting a mine on the road and told a local villager, “This mine is for the Americans.”
Quast volunteers to take a patrol to a village near Mowmand to inquire with the locals if they have heard anything about mines being planted.
Within minutes of reaching Morgan Kechah—the village where they hope to obtain intelligence about the alleged mining incident—Quast and his ATF translator find a villager named Abdul Raheem. “He wants us to come to his house for tea,” Quast tells Ludweg, the other TC on the patrol. “We can’t turn down an Afghan’s hospitality. It’s an insult.”
Quast insists that all the men come, including Ludweg. They squeeze through the four-foot-high entrance to Raheem’s adobe home and are joined by two bearded, turbaned elders. Ludweg flashes a curt smile and hunches lower on his M-203.
Quast peels his armor off as he sits on the floor. Raheem reaches up to a high shelf molded into the adobe wall and takes down a plastic bottle of Khoshgovar, an Iranian brand of cola. A young man, out of breath from a sprint to a neighboring village, brings in ice in a bucket made from an old antifreeze jug. Raheem picks up several glasses. He ceremoniously inspects one glass and observes a spot. He cleans it by delicately clearing his throat and hocking some spit into it. He wipes it on his dirty robe.
Ludweg’s eyes bug out. But when the beverage is served, he and the other American soldiers raise their glasses and drink. After exchanging awkward pleasantries, Quast brings up the topic of land mines. He