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By Root 1402 0

base in the battalion’s area of operation. After a brief stay in Bagram, the lieutenant colonel experienced the blast-furnace summer heat and choking dust of Jalalabad Airfield, then made a quick visit to the forward operating base at Mehtar Lam in Laghman province, home of Fox Company. An ardent tactician, forever observing the strengths and weaknesses of both friendly and enemy personnel and facilities, Donnellan carefully noted the condition of each base he visited. The massive Bagram struck him as virtually impenetrable—a small city complete with a Taco Bell, Pizza Hut, and other fast-food restaurants, a huge PX, and, of course, a miles-long heavily defended perimeter encircling aircraft, weapons, and personnel of all types. JAF, too, he found to be well fortified and defensible, as did the forward operating base at Mehtar Lam. A week and a half after the official 15 July change of command, Donnellan ventured northeast from ⅔’s COC at JAF to Camp Wright in the frontierlike town of Asadabad, lying in the heart of the Kunar Valley barely eleven straight-line miles due east of Sawtalo Sar. Surrounded by the sepia faces of the steepest mountains on which he’d ever laid eyes, the stoic Donnellan didn’t quite know what to make of the scene at “A-Bad.” Flip-flop-clad Afghans in combat fatigues worked on heavy machine guns mounted to old Toyota pickup trucks; bearded, M4-toting SOF types in civilian garb coolly gazed at passersby from behind expensive black wraparound sunglasses; OCF (Other Coalition Forces—a term for CIA, DEA, etc.) mulled around, often toting leather briefcases; Special Forces soldiers zipped by on quad runners; even regular Army—and of course, Marines—counted in the ranks at A-Bad. While well defended, the camp—an accretion of tents, zigzagging rock walls, old stone buildings, all stitched together by concrete bunkers—struck Donnellan as a heavily armed trailer park.

“We can’t help you with security outside of Asadabad,” Kunar’s provincial leader, Governor Wafa, told him during a meeting with the battalion commander after visiting Camp Wright. “We need more money for police here.”

“How often do you visit Nangalam?” Donnellan asked.

“Never been there. Hear it’s interesting, though. Haven’t been past Watapor. Wouldn’t travel that road. Especially if I were you!” The cagey Wafa, whom Donnellan quickly began to think of as the “mayor of Asadabad,” responded through an interpreter. Even the open-minded Donnellan, who’d been warned about Wafa from the provincial reconstruction team commander at A-Bad, quickly felt uneasy about the man. “Really, we need more money for police here in Asadabad before we can get out into those other areas. I don’t know why you even go out there. I wouldn’t go on that road if I were you.” The evasive Wafa seemed almost complicit with the ACM—maybe not directly, but possibly through intentional ignorance of their activities. Or maybe he did have direct ties to insurgent cells; maybe even Shah’s. Donnellan couldn’t read minds and afforded the governor as much benefit of the doubt as was reasonable. He loaded into his Humvee and his convoy headed west, into the Pech River Valley, bound for the last of the bases on his list, Camp Blessing.

Partway into the chasmlike Pech Valley, the convoy stopped at Watapor, a village designated as one of the ballot centers for the September elections. Out of a plume of dust, the line of six Humvees pulled off the deeply gashed dirt road next to a small complex of buildings—an old schoolhouse and a police station. To the east, a matrix of boxy rock houses stacked one atop the other on the face of a steep cliff loomed above a field of corn that swept to the edge of the road the Marines had just exited. To both the north and south, the minuscule specs of man-made structures dissolved into the furiously honed Hindu Kush; to the west, the brilliantly sunlit Pech Valley melted into pitch-darkness. The convoy drivers powered down their diesel engines and the passengers dismounted for a brief meeting with the locals and Afghan National Police in the small