• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 506 0

work; the buildings cost more because they were earthquake resistant. In reality, most of the money probably got chewed up along the way. USAID contractors like Louis Berger spent a lot of money on highly paid U.S. staff and couldn’t supervise projects in difficult areas, increasing the likelihood of fraud. And even though Louis Berger hired Afghan contractors, those companies often subcontracted to someone else, who sometimes subcontracted to someone else. Corners were cut. Many buildings were already falling apart. Some roofs had caved in from heavy snow.

We sat with the elders at their new clinic.

“Do you use it?” an American staff sergeant asked.

“Well … we have no medicine,” an Afghan answered, then added, almost as an afterthought, “And we have no doctor.”

In other words, no, they did not. I went on these missions when the soldiers did them, but sometimes they didn’t, and sometimes they didn’t invite me, like when it seemed too dangerous. Their mood was the opposite of the mood on my embed the year before, when I wrote primarily about the forgotten war. The men still felt like no one was paying attention to Afghanistan, but here they knew that their enemy was serious, and that someone should have maybe figured that out earlier.

On the base, conditions were so backpacking basic, we were all reduced to the same sexless, miserable, dust-covered robots, amused by fights between camel spiders and scorpions held in cardboard boxes. The soldiers filmed the fights and replayed the highlights, much like they watched videos of their recent firefights. The winner in Ultimate Fighter Afghanistan was a particularly large camel spider, which practically ripped the head off any scorpion found to challenge it.

I was occasionally bored, yet constantly exhausted. I rested in my cot and read my neighbor’s bad spy novels involving heroic Americans with names like Jimmy and Ace. I couldn’t watch videos or write. I couldn’t risk taking my computer out of my backpack, because of the omniscient and omnipresent wind, which carried the dust with it. The wind was always in the room, a participant in every conversation. The dust coated soldiers when they napped for an hour, and by the time the morning came around, all of us looked gray and dead. Not that we could sleep, for the heat, for the wind. Putting in contact lenses every morning was like scraping my corneas with a bunion remover.

One night I escaped to the only dustless place in the whole base, the TOC, to talk to the man in charge about everything that had happened. He was interrupted by a whisper about a TIC in the TOC—in other words, troops in contact that could be monitored in the tactical operations center.

In addition to Musa Qala, a satellite U.S. base had been set up in the north. That evening, the Taliban had attacked a U.S. patrol near there. The troops retaliated, backed by a B-1 bomber. Soldiers then spotted fourteen Afghans fleeing to an alleged known Taliban safe house. A Predator filmed the men running into the house, which was surrounded by mud walls. In the well-lit control room, we all watched the grainy Predator feed of the safe house on a large screen on the wall. The captain I had been interviewing verified the target with the men on the ground. He called his superiors; he was approved. So he told the B-1 bomber to drop a five-hundred-pound bomb. Yes, a five-hundred-pound bomb seemed a bit of overkill for a mud hut, but that was the only ammunition the B-1 had, and the Predator had nothing. On the screen, we watched the bomb hit, sending up a giant plume of smoke. The men cheered briefly. Then the smoke cleared.

The bomb had missed the house by about two hundred and twenty yards, a large gap that no one was able to explain, destroying a patch of trees, perhaps some animals, and hopefully no human beings.

“He missed,” the officers in the room said softly, incredulously, almost in unison. A few men put their heads in their hands. Then, slowly, everyone turned their heads toward me, the reporter standing in the room like an elephant. I held up my hands.

“What