Cleared Hot - Powered By BRCC - Episode 187 - Wesley Morgan

Episode Date: June 28, 2021

Wesley Morgan is a freelance journalist in Washington, DC, Iraq and Afghanistan, contributing stories to The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Atlantic and other publications. He recently published a book titled The Hardest Place, the American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Pech Valley. https://www.Manscaped.com https://www.Athleticgreens.com/clearedhot https://www.Drinklmnt.com/clearedhot https://www.Betterhelp.com/clearedhot  

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BetterHelp that they are recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states. 10% off your first month at BetterHelp.com slash cleared hot. And that is all on the business side of the house. My guest today is a journalist and author Wesley Morgan, and he wrote a book called The Hardest Place, the American Military Adrift in Afghanistan's Petch Valley. I've been to this valley in out of the valley, not an extended period of time. Wesley has spent substantially more time there and done much more research than I ever had. I actually learned more about the country that I deployed to sitting down and speaking with him and reading his book than I had actually walking around with my own two feet looking around. Wesley's story to me is crazy. At 19,

instead of, you know, going off to college, he, you know, started going off to Iraq to do reporting and then went back to Iraq and then back to Iraq again and then Afghanistan and forth and then to Afghanistan multiple times. He was actively seeking out places that most would choose to not go. He wrote a book about his experience and the U.S. experience in the Petch Valley and I cannot recommend it enough, especially for those who served there. It will give you a better perspective of what the U.S. has been doing right and what the U.S. has been doing wrong. And I will leave you with that. Episode number 187 with Wesley Morgan.

Enjoy. I'm looking at danger close now. Dude, I'm glad you're here. Round two of trying to get you up here. Yes. Yeah, I apologize for the delay last time. For being sick. Yeah, I don't think you can do apologize for being sick, especially in a pandemic.

Yeah, fair enough. Yeah. How long have you lived in D.C.? I lived there like a decade. Okay. Yeah. which it seems like it's about how long you spent in Afghanistan, which we will get to that. What led you to D.C., though? Where'd you grow up?

I grew up in the Boston area, Watertown, Massachusetts. Okay. Are you a mass hole or a normal person? You know, I'd say I'm a non-practicing Massachusetts sports fan. I was raised in that faith, but haven't practiced in a long time. They go deep. Potentially deeper than blood ties. I love Boston. I actually, did a few trips up near the Boston area when I was at Development Group. It's a place. There's a, I don't want to say Boston proper because, although we did fly little birds, pretty much directly through downtown, which was awesome, at night, so we didn't cause too many issues.

But it's a busier training area than you might think. Yeah, they call it a rut, a realistic urban training. Interesting. That's what they used to call it. I have no idea what they call it now because I am what they call in the dictionary, dated. Right. Yeah, my current knowledge of what's going on in the military is limited. So born and raised in Bean Town,

yep. Always wanted to be an author? No. I mean, I guess that's something I was interested in, but I just was interested in military history. I was a military history nerd since I was a little kid. It all seemed kind of theoretical until I was like 13 when 9-11 happened. Did your military history passions start with G.I. Joe's?

They are a big part of it. I can tell you what my favorite G. Joe's worse still. Did you play more G.I. Joe or Cobra side of the house? I would, I adapted G.I. Joe's for Vietnam scenarios. Oh, really? So, Cobra guys became VC. Okay, fair enough. You know, painting with model paints and so on involved. Did you ever get your hands on the generation of G.I. Joe's before the, like, the three and a half inch tall ones? The big boys? I had like a few of the big ones, but I was always much more into the little guys. one of my fondest memories growing up, my grandmother, who has passed long, long ago, and her husband

who passed, man, I have long enough ago that I have fleeting memories. That's how young I was. Both Army, both officers in the Army, one on the medical side, one on the supply side, they had some bitching full-sized GI Joe's. And for people right now are probably like, what in the fuck are you talking about? What would you say they're about a foot tall? Yeah, about a foot, yeah. But we're talking fabric, actual uniform. with buttons, webbing belt, canteens. I don't think, maybe you could have actually put water in the canteen. Now I'm trying to think.

Maybe. Yeah, but it was amazing. It's funny because they made in the 90s, like when I was a kid, they made 12-inch ones again, but they look really different. Really? Yeah, like they're huge and jacked compared to the, like, sort of skitty 60s G. So they're more of, I would call that, the Marvel superhero G. Yeah.

Yeah, actually, that's an interesting point because I remember those, they were, it's not like they were. out of shape, but they were normal proportions, as opposed to the tortoise shell abs and deltoids and neck that are just connected. Gee, I wonder why they did that. I wonder where the influence came from. All right, so that's good. You started off with G.I. Joe. That was a very, that was a very deep portion of my life as well. I remember one Christmas I woke up, I got the G.I. Joe base. Oh, totally. I remember, yeah, Christmas of, like, third grade. My dad had gone to some G.I. Joe convention and found all this, like, all this neat stuff for me. Yes. And then, one Christmas I got, I swear it was based off like the SR-71 Blackbird, that plane. I think it was a

cobra plane, though. It was a bad guy plane, yeah. I remember that one. And it had the little plane in the back that came off the tail. That's right. That's right. It's no big deal. The guy of a cousin who had that one, yeah. Can you, I mean, I can't speak for you. I know I don't have any of these anymore, and I'm pissed. I didn't collect. I mean, I don't know if my kids would have been interested in it, but that shit was cool. I would, uh, I regret it. I like, I tore them all apart to, you know, turn them into a little, you know, mix and match so that they look more like a little Mac V-Sog guy or a VC guy or something. So nothing would be preserved in, you know, collectible form. But you might find an audience for your modifications.

They might have even, they'd either be worthless or have an even greater value. Did your interest in the military? Did your parents serve at all? Do you have a family history of military service? Nope. I mean, both my grandfathers served in kind of the immediate post-World War II era briefly. It was sort of more important part of one grandfather's identity than the others. Neither of my parents, my parents are kind of, you know, post-Vietnam generation liberals

where they did not expect war obsessive to be something they raised. Well, you took a different path with it for sure. You might, I mean, again, I can't speak for you, but based on the book that you wrote, you're more, you're obsessed with warfare for sure, specifically the Pesh Valley, which I was thinking about this the past few days. I don't even know how you describe that place, to be honest. It's hard to do verbally. It's hard to do with the written word.

I think there's been some good documentaries, you know, the Coringall, which is obviously not exactly. Like it's neighboring pretty goddamn close. Right. I considered it. For the book purposes, I considered it sort of the Pesh Valley system, you know, because all these tributaries play. I mean, they connect largely, you know, at the, it's up at what would it be, Abad? Which one's more north? Abed or J-Bad? It's been a while. J-Bad's down in Nagarhar.

Yeah. And then Abad is the confluence of the Kunar in Petch Rivers. Yeah. And then the Kornigal joins the Petch at what became Cop, Michigan. Yeah. So I don't know how to describe it. But I think you're more obsessed with, I mean, I was obsessed as a young person with wanting to go into the military. Right. I think you sound like, or based off my reading of your book, you're obsessed with,

the military and the history of the U.S. military, which I think I can speak for both of us is full of blunders along the way. Perhaps repeated mistakes? There have been some that you see repeat themselves over and over, whether it's this book or any other book about Afghanistan that takes the long view. I think you'd see a lot of the same things. But you don't get a book like this unless you are obsessed. So I think that's a really good thing. I'm curious, though, how your parents received it when you started actually going over to Afghanistan. They were actually completely supportive and cool about it. I think I got some insight in later years about how unbelievably stressed out this made them

and how they kind of kept that to themselves. But yeah, I first went to Iraq as a 19-year-old freelancer in 2007, the summer of the surge. And I think, you know, they were pretty worried, but they never tried to stop me or anything like that. Well, what exactly did you tell them you were going to be doing? I told them I was going to go cover the surge for the Daily Princetonian. So you left some of the, well, you may not have known some of the finer details, but you painted it with a broad brush, which probably helped them. If you had gone into any level of specificity, they might have actually lost their minds. I mean, I had no idea what to expect.

I sort of had gotten this weird invitation from the four-star general in the theater at the time to, to come over and cover the surge. But I sort of assumed you're not going to let a 19-year-old kid out and embed with infantry units and stuff. They're going to keep me at MNFI headquarters in Baghdad or something like that. But no, this was the height of the embedding era. And they treated me like any other embedded journalists.

They said, you know, go pick your infantry battalions, go see what's going on. So I want to dive super deep into that, but before we do, I want to talk about how you arrived at being a journalist in the first place. So having a passion for military history is, I think it's awesome. I certainly had it as well. like I said, for a different expression.

You went, you know, born and raised in Boston, I'm assuming high school, then college for journalism, specifically. There were college journalism courses that I took. We didn't have a major in journalism. So I got a public policy degree, which just was kind of the program that allowed me to take a bunch of classes and a bunch of different stuff. Yeah, that's smart. Yeah. From a small college called Princeton, right? Right.

Yeah. Mostly online? Now it is. Yeah, no, it is. What is it? Yeah. No, that's, yeah. My higher education stopped at the 12th grade, just so we're clear when we're having this conversation.

It's funny, people say, well, yeah, where'd you go to school? And I would say, Santa Cruz High School. Yeah. They're like, no, no, after. I'm like, yeah, that's it. Have you ever heard of a glass ceiling? I hit my head on top of that thing. Well, you have that interesting officer program.

I'd never heard of that until, you know, reading about your bio. Yeah. Many hadn't, which is probably, if I'm being honest, why I got selected. I feel like they had more billets available than applicants. And I took advantage of that in a year that, hey, they're like, you know, we need to promote some more. And these people all have a pulse. And I don't know if you found this out in your military journeys and studies. But if you have a pulse and you stay in the military long enough, it'll get you far.

The caller device will change on your shoulder or the middle of your camis, depending on what service you in or the uniform. Okay. So you get out of that. Hold on, though. There's no way you could have finished all that and still be 19. Well, so I started doing it during college. I was going to say. Actually, the first, the first patch trip was between my junior and senior years of college.

But so I went in 2007, Iraq, 2008. I took a year off between my sophomore and junior years of college because, I mean, I think in an impulse that a lot of people with experience in these wars can probably empathize with, I was afraid of missing it and had no idea that there was no real danger of missing anything. The phone was going to go on forever and ever and ever. So I was in the initial invasion of Iraq. 2003.

The, God, I can only speak for myself. I'd be very clear when I talk about anything military related. I can only express my experiences and what I felt. I felt like many people thought it would be wham-bam and then we were done. So we got to get it all in. And we never know when there's going to be another one. So this is it or nothing.

Right. Fast forward more than a decade. I mean, obviously we were incorrect. But I think that feeling was everywhere from active duty people, people wanting to join the military. Yeah, it was real. It was palpable. And I think that FOMO has kind of presented itself at every stage along the way of these wars. Because we always think it's going to end or it's we're drawing down or the mission is changing.

And you see that in the patch. You even see that with these big infantry battalions that sometimes they're kind of like, hey, this is the last rotation. We can do the big air assaults. Let's get them in. Yeah. But inevitably there are more later. Countless more for sure. Okay, so you're 19, and the military reached out to you?

Well, the story is that I got in touch with David Petraeus, who was then the, at the time, was a three-star at Fort Leavenworth. And he has a PhD from Princeton. He's very loyal to the institution. How did you get in touch with Signor Petraeus? I looked up his email address in the alumni directory. Because I was starting to write for the school paper, and they said, go interview an interesting. alum and I was aware of who he was. It didn't seem it didn't seem at that point like he was he and Rumsfeld were on the outs supposedly. It didn't seem like he was going to keep on advancing.

So I, you know, did this interview with him for the school paper about the counterinsurgency manual and all that. And then, which for people listening, he had a huge input on, we call it internally coin, or as you just described it, the counterinsurgency, really manual slash doctrine. And And it started that implementation was in Iraq, and then they eventually tried to apply that to Afghanistan. I was actually in 2010, it was my last deployment, and they really were trying to replicate the success that they had found with that in Iraq, in Afghanistan. Very different results.

Yeah. You can certainly say that. Yeah. I mean, it's interesting to see over the course of the wars, you see these kind of top-down efforts to impose that type of counterinsurgency, and then you also see bottom-up efforts all along the way of, you know, this green beret. team or this army brigade or this Marine Battalion that kind of read all the same stuff back in 2004 or 2005 before there was a coin manual and start doing it on their own with, you know,

various degrees of success. Well, the concept, if you can take out the geography and topography, the concept seems like you should be able to take it wherever you want to. You have probably been to the pech. Actually, I know for a fact you've spent more time in the Pesch than me. You know, one of the key components of counterinsurgency is you have to provide security for the local populace, pack a lunch. Right. In Iraq, not easy, but in the major areas of, you know, Baghdad or even Fallujah or Marzul, you know, the were of the Western Newfraidy River Valley, I find those challenges

far more surmountable than trying to do any of the stuff that is littered throughout the book of, I'm going to call it a failed operation after failed operation after failed operation, largely because of the terrain. They can't even get to the places that they want to provide security. So therefore, you can't even achieve one of the primary steps that you have to do

for counterinsurgency. Again, on paper, if you take away the geography and the topography, probably should work. Yeah, I mean, the deepest, there's so many problems that you wind up seeing with coin

that in 2007 and 2008 in its heyday weren't obvious. I mean, they were probably obvious to deeper thinkers than I was at the time as a kid just starting to see these wars. But it was easy to be excited about what seemed like after years of just like, you know, Iraq falling apart, no results in Afghanistan. During the surge in Iraq, you saw what

seemed like, you know, real success. But the trick was that it was, it was not, it was, it was, it was short-term success. It was creating security. And then whether it worked or not, depended on whether you could hand it off to somebody, whether there were Iraqi or Afghan troops who could sustain what you'd gotten going. And almost, you know, almost universally, the answer has been no, although in Iraq, things have come full circle again, and Iraq seems to be doing better. It does. Two decades later. Which, it's another important point when it comes to counterinsurgency. Time should not be mattered in days, weeks or months. It's years at best, if probably not decades. Right. But there's a flip side to that, too, which is, you know,

something that I observed with the patch is that, yeah, on the one hand, you think, okay, the only way to do coin is to commit long term. But there also is this phenomenon. on anywhere that you've got foreign troops in an alien landscape, alien population, where there's kind of a half-life on people's willingness to deal with you. You know, as units rotate in, you kill people, you kill the wrong people, you kill the right people,

but their relatives don't like it. After a pretty short time, people are not willing to forgive or forget the kinds of mistakes that often they were willing to forgive or forget during the first few units that come through their neighborhood. And when we're talking specifically about Afghanistan, you have to rewind to a previous generation and a previous occupying nation. Right.

It's not as if the Americans that were there and are still there to some degree where the first military that the Afghans have seen come through there. Yeah, right, absolutely. I didn't count up, but there were references to, you know, well, actually, yeah, when we first got over there, Russian maps. Right. Yeah, I wonder why we were using them because they had more experience than we did. Or roads or towns that were named differently because that was the Russian name for it as

opposed to the local name. So yeah, it's not only the mistakes that the American made or the Americans made, but there were, I'm sure there were people there who lived through the Russian occupation as well. I'm like, here we go again. Their tolerance is going to start at zero. Yeah, absolutely. Okay, 19 years old, communicating with David Petraeus. It's amazing to me sometimes how accessible certain people are, because he was, what, a three star at that time? He was a three star at that time, yeah. You think they keep him in a glass vault somewhere. Like don't talk to 19-year-olds, even though, of course, you were vetted by the university. So you're talking to him.

And then how the hell do you end up on Iraq? I get an email in January or I guess it must have been February of 2007 shortly after he had arrived in Baghdad for what I think would have been his third stint there to become the four-star when Bush named him to head up the surge. I get an email from him saying, what are you doing this summer? Not an email I would ever think to get from Petraeus. It's in some ways, in some ways kind of makes sense for him, though. I mean, one of his great strengths in the period when he was, I think, at his best, was just cultivating a huge range of connections with all kinds of different people, including Iraqis, including people outside the military.

And I think that was, you know, that was one of the best things that he did in that, in that 2005, 6, 7, 8 era in Iraq. So basically, I'm going to call that an open invite from the man. Right, right. But where does it go from there? I mean, I get like, what a great invite, a great email to receive. What are the mechanics to actually get over there, though? Well, so the basic framework was that at this time in the war, there was this whole program that existed that the Bush administration had put in place at the beginning of the war is the embedding system.

It doesn't exist anymore. It disappeared during Obama's second term and, you know, the Trump administration had no desire to bring it back. Nor is the current administration. But basically there was tremendous access for journalists of all types to U.S. military units, conventional military units for the most part, some special operations units as well. But really, it was this system where they were pretty low overhead costs for anybody from a national news publication to a freelancer to a small town publication whose local community has had a National Guard unit mobilized to get over there. and plug in with these units that you're interested in for various reasons, whether it's because it's your community's unit

or because it's the big battle of the year, Talaafar Ramadi, something like that. Yeah. And you really could just, it was extremely, it was extremely widespread. I mean, you'd bounce around through these battalions and almost none of them would you be the first reporter they'd dealt with unless they were pretty early in their tour.

So that was, I mean, basically you'd fly into Kuwait or into Baghdad, depending on kind of the route you were doing. Commercial flight, I'm assuming? Yeah, into Kuwait. Yeah, commercial flight. And then at some point you would kind of enter the military ecosystem, whether that was in Baghdad or in Kuwait. You know, you'd cross into the wire and start looking at it from the way the military was looking at it, looking from inside the fobs and inside the cops and inside the convoys and travel around within their ages.

So I don't want to derail this, but I'm curious as to what was the reasonings for shutting down the embed program in the Obama administration? That's a good question. I have my opinions about it. I don't have, I don't think there's sort of, there's never been a real reported history of kind of the embedding program and what happened to it. Was there a catastrophic accident or they just decided to end it? No, it, it's sort of, it died slowly. And it's not, it's not like it ever truly died. I mean, there still is access that is provided under certain circumstances in a much more limited fashion to, to journalists to American troops on the battlefield. But what it coincided with was the first Afghanistan drawdown when the Obama, administration was transitioning everything from, you know, U.S.-led big combat operations to, we're advising the A&A, we're putting the A&A out front. Were we, though?

Well, but- Were we? I mean, great question, but that was sort of the, I mean, I think the administration's impetus was we want people looking at the A&A. Yeah. We don't want people looking at-Afghan national army, everybody. Right. We don't want people looking at our guys anymore who've been fighting this war before because now we have this new policy.

We're making this Afghan-led Afghan face. so we'd rather see reporters covering that. So you started to see more kind of restrictions of, oh, well, actually, we don't want you to go to that battalion. We've got something we want you to see in Ghazni. And it just stopped being useful. It was incredibly frustrating. And it was a very stifling of the American public's and the media's ability to cover what was actually going on in Afghanistan. What level, in your opinion, as a journalist, what level of access and transparency is due to the American people?

That's a great question. There has to be a line somewhere, right? There's, I can understand why we don't want, you know, embedded reporters running around with special mission units, right? On the other hand, a lot of the arguments that you, you'll hear now from the Defense Department about, oh, why we can't do this anymore are, you know, they'll say, oh, we can't have, we can't have people with Green Berets. Well, I spent time with Green Berets when I was 21 in Wardak.

It was fine. So I think. Do they say why, or they just, they slowly start carving up? other communities they don't feel comfortable with, you know, with reporters having access to. It's sort of in the same way that you see in the book and in the war in Afghanistan, you see this as units and people rotate through, everybody is just used to what's there when they arrive in their position. And there's a current generation of public affairs officers who have no experience with.

Oh, for sure. I have never seen that work. And it's kind of almost incomprehensible to them that it could work. Yeah. You could just have reporters out wandering around with troops talking to them without, you know, mind or looking over their shoulders. Personally, I think that the American public is due a very, very high level of transparency. And I think that they should be shown the ugly, you know, as well as the, as the beautiful, whatever, you know, the opposite of the ugly would be prettier, this successful.

But how else can we really, as a society, take a temperature of the impact and effect that we are having unless we show both sides of the. those. It really, it worries me when people say, I need you to look over here because we can't show you what's going on over here, but let's just look over here. Like, well, is there any way that we could talk about what's going on here? We don't need to release current operations. You know what I mean, there's ways, even when it comes to SMUs, there are ways, there are ways that transparency could be achieved. And I think they should be. I think we'd be better for it as a nation. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I give the military huge credit for the way that it did handle embedding in its heyday. I think it gave the American public a look, a real-time look at the war that kind of we haven't seen

in other conflicts or other stages of this conflict other than Vietnam when reporters really in a less formalized way were embedding constantly with very few restrictions on them. I feel like they just showed up. Yeah, that was much more the case. Like, hey, guys, do you mind if I go into the jungle with you? And I'm like, fuck it, you're probably going to die. Right. Yeah.

It's probably better that we have a structured system. So when you entered into, as you described at the military ecosystem, did you have a lot of latitude to kind of go where you wanted to? I mean, obviously, you're not there to interrupt military operations, but could you hop around from different units? And then when you did attach to a unit, I mean, I guess I'm kind of, the mechanics of it is fascinating to me. I never had any real interaction with any type of media embed at all. Right. So I'm just fascinated. Like who were you responsible to take care of yourself?

Did you have a guy who was like, hey, man, you have to follow me at all times? The only time I ever had a guy where it was like, he's my escort, he's my minder, was an embed I did with Green Berets in 2009. And the Green Berets I was visiting actually were very understanding and separated me from this minder because they could see that he was frustrating and inhibiting sort of my ability to see what was going on. So, yeah, back in the heyday of kind of embedding, with infantry and cavalry units around the battlefield, basically you'd, you'd kind of work your way down

the chain of command. You'd show up at the big headquarters, right? Like MNFI in Baghdad or ISAF in Kabul. You'd deal with the public affairs staff there. You'd tell them where you wanted to go. If you didn't know where you wanted to go, which there were plenty of reporters who didn't, you know, they would pick things for you.

But if you did know what you wanted, if you said, okay, I want to do three weeks with 40 Commando and Sangan, and then I want to do two weeks with 3-187 Infantry in Pactia, And then I want to do two weeks with 1-502 infantry and Zari. They would make it happen unless there were sort of some real logistical reason why it couldn't happen. It was they'd help you, you know, get the flights. They'd help you get onto the flights, you know, walk you to the Pax terminal or whatever.

Yeah. And then, you know, from there, you just, you'd fly by C-130 or helicoptered or wherever it was you were going. You'd check in with, you know, the brigades, the Army brigades would have a public affairs officer, you know, an officer and a few NCOs, kind of doing public affairs for them, putting out products for the families and stuff like that. And they would also, they would be kind of your point of contact when you showed up with this brigade level unit. You might do kind of an in-brief with the brigade commander and his intel officer and operations officer and Sergeant Major and so on. And then I would try to just, I would usually, in any given brigade, I would go to a battalion. And then within that battalion, I would bounce around for a couple weeks from company to company.

Try to visit a few different outposts, spend a few days of time at different ones, just to kind of get a flavor of what was going on in, you know, what looks like one war, but is really many, many small wars with very different flavors and tactics and terrain and so on. I was going to say it's like saying Iraq is all the desert. Right, exactly. And Afghanistan is all mountains. Because if you say that, you've never been down to Koundahar. Right. The Parsons of Afghanistan are like, holy shit, I'm in South Dakota. I've never seen anything so flat my entire life.

Yeah. Yeah. And in some ways, what I saw in Iraq in those early years was more of a uniform experience. I mean, kind of the differences between what U.S. troops were experiencing in Mosul versus Ramadi versus Baghdad. I mean, they differed, right? They're dealing with Sunni insurgents in one area, the Makti army in another area, you know, more intense violence in this area, less intense violence in that area. There was rural and urban divide. But it was a lot more kind of the same stuff happening from AO to area of operations to area of. operations. Whereas, yeah, when I started going to Afghanistan in 2009, you realize right away that what you see in Helmand is going to be just wildly different from what you see in Kunar. Yeah, it's, oh, don't even give me started on Koonar. God damn. I've gone on some hikes there,

and they sucked. It's the only time I've ever actually hit an objective wearing assless chaps. And I wasn't actually, I mean, actually, I should just say chaps, because I believe all chaps are assless. I think that's right. I think that is correct. Let's just say we went really far up and then on the way down I spent most of the time sliding and my pants did not make the journey all the way to Target. Fortunately, I wasn't alone. It was, man, we could have been shooting a different kind of movie that day if, you know, the angles and the lighting was correct.

Do you remember what year that was? Oh, God. We've been pretty early on, right? Five. Yeah, five, yeah. Yeah. It, again, I really, I was thinking about my experience in Afghanistan. And again, I couldn't be more serious when I say that I'm dated.

I went to Afghanistan late 2002 back and forth all the way to mid-200, yeah, 2005. I honestly, half the time don't even know where the helicopters were landing. Sure, yeah. Because it would be an objective or we would get briefed on where we were going. I know I've spent time up in Koust. My last deployment in 2010 was at Team 3, so a conventional CL team. We were in Navajar the whole time in Zobul. Did not travel around at all because we were driving side by side.

But other than that, we'd base out of Bogum and we'd be getting on helicopters. I stopped paying attention to what province we were. Right. I remember Kunar because they couldn't land the goddamn 47s. And we ended up jumping out of the back on this particular night. And I remember it was a far enough fall I'm looking at it through the Night Vision Goggs looking at it, I'm like, this is okay.

And I jump and I had time to start rolling up the windows. And in your head, when you start doing that, you should be thinking, oh no, because it's boom! That was like halfway. I mean, people were just piling on top of me, walked all night long up, came down. Absolute shit show. And we were supposed to head home like 48 hours later.

It was supposed to be a turnover. Of course, the people that we were after heard us the instant that the helicopter made it near the valley. So they were gone anyway. We hiked all night long for nothing, destroyed a excellent pair of pants that it served me well up into that point. I think I just spiked every piece of clothing that I was wearing into the garbage can, took a shower, and we left. But it's, I don't know how to describe the difficulty of that terrain. Yeah, and there's not very many ways around it. I mean, this is one of the, one of the first things U.S. troops from, you know, from J-S. saw when they arrived in Kuhnard in the spring of 2002.

I mean, I opened one of the early chapters of the book by talking about Tom Greer, you know, now deceased, but he was the Delta Force officer who also was known as Dalton Fury and wrote this book about the Battle of Torabora. First off, Dalton Fury, amazing name. Like if there's names to either give yourself or be given? You're curious who thought of that one. I never asked him that. Secretly, he might. If I wanted that name, secretly, I would think of it and then pay somebody else to give it to me. Right. Yeah. But he describes, you know, the first American military unit to come up into Kunar in the spring of 2002, about six months after 9-11, was some seals from your old organization and some other guys tagging along with them. Yep.

Just a real little team. Basically, these little AFO, advanced force operations units were spreading out over the east, trying to figure out where the Arabs had gone after Toribora, because where there were other Arabs, there might be Bin Laden or there might be somebody who could tell you something about bin Laden. Yeah. And one of these teams shows up in Kunar. Greer goes up and visits them shortly afterward because he was responsible for, you know, a sector of these AFO teams. And he described remembering, you know, getting to Assadabad, looking up at the hills around it, which are kind of nothing compared to the ones that you see, you know, a little higher up. Yeah. And thinking this is going to be a terrible place for helicopters. I mean, maybe the only way to describe it so people listening to this could imagine it is it's the Himalayas.

Yeah. I mean, it's not Everest, but Everest is in the same range. Right. That's the type of stuff that we're talking about. It's incredibly jagged mountains. And what you see up there that you don't see in a lot of parts of Afghanistan is the forest. Yeah. Which presents this whole other layer of challenges to U.S. helicopters, U.S. drones, U.S. everything.

Yeah. You know, because down in the valley floors, you've got these lush green ribbons of sort of cultivated territory in these little narrow valley floors. And from down there, the mountains look pretty brown, right? There's this lower scrub forest, these evergreen oaks, and then above that, it just looks kind of brown. But what you can't see is that from down there is that if you keep hiking up into those mountains, you're going to hit this conifer forest with these huge pines and furs and cedars, just enormous trees that sometimes, you know, guys wouldn't even wouldn't be aware that that stuff was there until the first time they did an air assault mission from their outpost and the Chinooks dumped them up in this

forest. Yeah. And, you know, the range of things that guys would compare it to, some guys would say, oh, it looked like the Pacific Northwest. I was just going to say that at PNW. Yeah, exactly. There's one of your former, not squadron mates, I guess, but Jimmy Hatch. Yeah, I know Jimmy well. He described it as looking like his native Utah.

And then, you know, other guys would say it looked like Endor from Return of the Jedi. Yeah. Yeah, you know, briefly, I spent time up there. We would try to, you know, get in and out in the cycle of darkness. Which is not easy. Right. Before we get in Afghanistan, though, we got to go backwards to Iraq. You're 19.

You show up in Iraq. How long did you spend for your first time there? The first trip was not much more than a month. Okay. Kick that microphone in front of your face. Just push the whole, there you go. Just push the whole thing towards me. Bam.

For you. There you. There you go. Perfect. Better? Yep. So just about a month. Yeah.

It was maybe five weeks in and around, all in and around Baghdad, that first trip. Would they allow you to go out on combat operations with them? Yeah, I mean, it was, again, they just, as far as they were concerned, a reporter had showed up, they'd had other reporters show up before, this was the drill. So, you know, I think the first unit that I visited was in the rural belt south of Baghdad, then spent like a week or two with a striker unit that was in downtown Baghdad on Haifa Street. Then an infantry battalion that was in the southwestern part of Baghdad dealing with the EFP problem, these Iranian explosives. formed projectiles. And then another striker battalion that was in the rural northern belt, just north of the city.

And so, yeah, what I would do is I just would, you know, you'd show up at one of these outposts that's occupied by, you know, a company of 150 infantrymen or maybe by just a platoon of 40 infantrymen. And you would just kind of get to know their daily routine and go with them where they went. You know, the platoon would go out in a patrol. You'd tag along with them. And you'd kind of figure out, well, okay, do I stick by?

the, you know, where do I sort of sit in the formation? You kind of figure out, talk to these guys before you go outside the wire about kind of what you're going to be doing and ask them, you know, so that they can express their preferences about what they want you to do when you take contact or something like that. So usually what I would wind up doing is I would find a, you know, a squad leader, kind of a mid-level NCO who seemed to know what he was doing, often one who didn't seem to want me around because I feel like they usually knew their business, and just stick to them like glue. And that would be a good kind of vantage point. to see everything that was going on.

Because they're, you know, he's going to be talking with the platoon leader. He's going to be talking with the platoon sergeant. He's also, you know, moving his guys around and I can go see them and take pictures of them and talk to them and everything. Do you find that most people were willing to be pretty open with you? Yeah. I mean, I felt like back in that era, any new outposts that I showed up at, it kind of felt like there was maybe a 10 or 20% of people who really were just like, oh, man, reporters here.

I want to talk. I want to talk all about what's going on. Another 10 or 20 percent who were just like, I'm not talking to that guy. I don't want anything to do with the media, whether it's because of just, you know, general perception of the media or a bad experience they've had with the media. And then everyone else kind of in the middle, kind of the majority of people are just like, well, this guy's here. You have, you know, back in that era, you would have all kinds of attachments would be coming through visiting these units, whether it's, you know, some intelligence contractor or an asymmetric warfare group contractor or there just there would be, there would be, these sort of individual people who would show up and tag along with these units patrols. And, you know, I sort of found that over time, generally people became more receptive rather than less. And it could happen pretty quickly. You know, it could just be, you know, a couple days in some intense place. And people who didn't want to talk to you the first day are pretty happy talking to you the third day. Did you ever get to experience frontline combat? Yeah. I mean, over the years, I think I probably embedded with about 20 different infantry battalions. and cavalry squadrons in many different parts of Iraq and Afghanistan.

I never was in kind of like house clearing combat, right? Which is a good thing. Probably not the best place for you. I'm fine with that. Fall a little bit farther back in the train, as we say. You would, in the surge era in 2007, 2008, you would go on night raids, which regular infantry units did back at that time, much more than they would in later years in Afghanistan. A battalion might have kind of a designated platoon that does night raids. So I'd tag along on those.

More often than not, they were quiet. You know, I saw places in southern Afghanistan. Some of the scariest places I've ever been were places in southern Afghanistan, where it was just these dismounted IED fields. You just felt like you're walking through minefields. Sang in with the Brits. You know, Zari in the Argonab Valley with 101st. Places where casualties just happened routinely.

I mean, they just lost guys a lot. So those were kind of the... the scariest places, I would say, and then places like the patch were kind of more exciting. You know, there's just, there's constant gun battles and artillery barrages and everything, but there's not quite that same level of just dread that you get when it's just walking out of the minefield every day. Well, at least, I mean, for me, if I had to choose between a gunfight or walking around where I thought there are IDs, I'm going to gunfight every single time. Yeah. Because at least you feel like you have some level of control. Whether or not you do,

it was probably arguable because it depends on the aim and another human being. But yeah, IEDs, I think, scare me more than anything else. Absolutely. And I think for conventional forces that fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, and they got really used to this routine of, okay, we have our sector, we drive and walk around in it waiting to get blown up, showing the flag. Kuhner could present this really exciting alternative view of what the war could be like. And for a lot of units and guys, it kind of felt right. I mean, a bunch of different guys described it to me as the Koonar syndrome. where you get up there and you're really fighting the enemy. You're not just sort of waiting to be killed by the enemy.

And it could be really satisfying and even addictive, you know, and get guys to find ways into the next unit going back to Kunar, stuff like that, which, you know, I wouldn't hear about so much with Sangan or the Argonab. I mean, certainly there are people who wound up going back to those places over and over again, but not so much seeking it. You got to be careful with that too because there are ways or I should, well, maybe ways isn't the best way to say it. If you take it too far, you'll end up physically leaving that valley, but never mentally.

Yeah, absolutely. It'll destroy you for the rest of your life. I mean, I certainly know people like that. Yeah. You know, I encountered a fair number of people like that in, you know, interviewing several hundred American veterans to patch for this book. There are a lot of guys who, yeah, in some ways, just have this really deep nostalgia for this horrible time in their lives.

It's because they never left. Yeah. I would imagine a lot of them equate sights, sounds, experiences, feelings. They'll use what happened when they were. in the valley, that's their reference to go back to. Yeah. There's a part, you know, and maybe it happens to everybody to some degree. Some, I think, a lot more than others.

And I don't know why that is. I don't know if it's because the person that you are before you go in or the experiences that you have when you're, I don't, you know what I mean? Who fucking knows? There's so many variables. But some people, it becomes the flag in their life. And I would imagine for a lot of people you were talking to in the conventional army, we're talking early 20s at best.

Right. that flag in your, they'd go back if you'd let them go back. And it would be to the detriment of who they are as a person, physically, mentally, emotionally, all of those things. I don't know how to decouple them from that. I know a couple people who have, they drive their car looking in the rearview mirror as opposed to out the windshield. Right. They get an accident's a lot. Yeah.

Right. It's a tough one. You also see it. I mean, another flip side of that phenomenon is guys who keep chasing it, you know. They've had this unbelievable experience sometime in their 20s as a, you know, you also. you know, team leader or platoon leader in the Petch Valley or the Koringall, somewhere like that. And then, you know, their next deployment is somewhere like the Argonob. And it's just dull and full of dread and horrible. And they wind up finding ways to sort of, you know,

whether it's going to the Ranger Regiment, going to special forces, going to some other more specialized unit, finding, finding ways to sort of try and keep chasing the dragon of trying to get that experience again, which you kind of never really can. Yeah, I think it's tough. And I hope that those people are able to at some point in their life shift their gaze elsewhere. Yeah. Because the military will chew you up and spit you out. I don't think necessarily maliciously. The military has a mission.

They have a mission statement. They go and they execute that mission. And at some point, you'll either time out, your body will quit. And they will move on without you. Yeah. I mean, I remember talking to one officer, Army officer, Army infantry officer, who had been a lieutenant in the Coringal for a very eventful period in 2006, 2007, and him telling me that he had, essentially he had nightmares for years about the Coringal every night when he slept,

except during his 90-day Ranger rotations forward. Really? And that was kind of like the reprieve for a period of time. That's horrible. When you were embedded and the units you were with would take contact, what did they expect you to do? Or what would you do as a reporter? Because I'm not a professional photographer,

I didn't have to kind of, I could make myself small. I just take cover. I just try not to get hurt or get anybody else. hurt. Try not to get hit by pointy things. Exactly. That was the job was, you know, number, you know, don't, don't get hurt and don't get anybody else hurt. Yeah. So just, you know, don't go running off somewhere. Don't do anything stupid. Stick by that, that squad leader or whoever it is that you have sort of decided you're going to stick with. And if they tell you to do something, do it. More often than not, they won't. They're just busy. And if you

are just kind of being an unobtrusive presence, then nobody even really notices your presence that much. I mean, that's sort of the goal. Yeah, stay in their hip pocket a little bit. Did you notice, I'm curious, because I'm sure you, as you said, there were times where you were involved in taking contact. And then there was those groups of people, you know, this 10% that, hey, this is who I am. I want to talk to you, 10%, like, why don't you beat it? And everybody else in between. Did you find that there were times that you could talk with them where they would be more open? I'm thinking, because I'm thinking about the mental escalation and de-escalation and the hormonal escalation and de-escalation of being in a,

I'm just curious if you found that they'd be more receptive and open to talking in certain situations or instances. It's a good question. I'm trying to think back on examples. I'm thinking of an incident in Mosul in 2008, which was the first time that I was with American troops when they took casualties and lost guys killed. And I remember talking, you know, I wasn't in the, as the event was happening and casualties were being evacuated and everything, I wasn't trying to talk to people during that.

Matt, right? Probably not a big time. But afterward, you know, and during that circumstance, again, as someone who I'm not a professional photographer, I don't need to be kind of snapping pictures the whole time. I can do whatever is somebody needs me to do. I can, you know, put a tourniquet on somebody's leg if that's needed. I can, you know, help carry one one leg of a stretcher. You know, those were things that I did at various points in Iraq and Afghanistan just to try to, you know, make yourself useful in some small way, given that you're there. But then, yeah, afterward, sometimes after a really traumatic event, I would find that people were kind of were much more open to talking to you than previously.

That doesn't surprise me, actually. Yeah. Which was likely very cathartic for them. In some cases, yeah, I think so. And also, in some cases, I think it was, you know, I'm thinking now about sort of the commanders, the company commanders and battalion commanders, I think in many cases, particularly in Afghanistan, it could be, it was just like nice to have somebody who you weren't in charge of to talk to. talk to for a few days at one of these outposts.

You know, I mean, in Baghdad, if you're a battalion commander, you probably were living on a big base with half a dozen other battalion commanders. You have peers that you can go and see and talk to. If you're that battalion commander at Fob Blessing or the company commander at Copp, Michigan in the patch, it's a pretty lonely kind of, it's a lonely job. And it can be sort of, it can be nice, I think, to just sort of have somebody else come into the office who, you know, it's maybe you don't drop the facade or the mask of command. but it's just different than being your subordinates or your superiors.

There's a fine line. There was another famous general who maybe crossed that line with his laissez-faire attitude with reporters. We can leave him unnamed if you want to. Got in a little bit of trouble, appeared in the pages of Rolling Stone. That would probably be the far example of maybe got a little bit too comfortable. Because you do have to remember at the end of the day, you're a military officer in an official capacity and sure there is some modicum of professionalism that should be maintained and I'm not intimately familiar with what happened in that previous situation people can go research it on their

own yeah it sometimes I have talks to you know to military units whether it's a green green beret company that's getting ready to deploy or an RTC detachment or something that are just kind of military in the media talks like you know what to expect and you know for the one of the things I tell them now is well you're not going to deal with the media I mean the age of embedding is over. But speaking from kind of a place of if you were dealing with them, it's just important to be kind of literate about who you're dealing with. Understand the kind of reporter you're dealing with. Understand kind of where they've been and what they've done, whether they're a TV reporter or a print reporter or a photographer makes a huge difference. Or a 19 year old kid on their first trip.

Yeah, so, you know, props to everybody who was willing to, you know, take a chance and talk to me then. But it's amazing how fast you kind of, in this perennially young organization, the infantry, I mean, by the time I was like 25 in Afghanistan in 2013, I to some, you know, to 18 and 19 year old guys on their first deployment. You were the war reporter, you know, he's been around. When you were the very first trip that you did, are you using like cassette or digital recorder? Are you taking notes? I mean, how are you encapsulating or documenting the things that you're seeing? Yeah, I learned over time kind of how to how best to do it.

Eventually what I would do is I would, I carried a digital recorder everywhere. Initially would just use that for interviews, but eventually kind of learned to just put that on at the beginning of the patrol. And then, you know, if it was in patrol where nothing happened, you'd delete the recording. But if it was a patrol where something did happen, that's a really useful record that can tell you exactly how long it lasted when your mind is not, can't tell you how long it lasted. it may have felt much longer or shorter than it really was. And also just take pictures constantly. Because, again, not a photographer, but that's a really helpful just visual record to have as you then sit and write about it later.

What kind of camera were you using? I used, on my early trips, I used a, what was it called? I think it was a Canon S-90. It was a little sort of point-and-shoot digital mini-SL thing. And it took beautiful photos. My favorite photos that I ever took were on that little thing rather than any larger SLRs that I carried on some later trips. Wow. So how was it coming back?

I'm assuming you're still 19 when you came back from your first Iraq trip. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was funny. It was because I would be, I would be, you know, in some cases, jumping right back from, you know, the surge in Baghdad into classes. How was that for you? It was strange.

But I also hadn't been there for that long, right? It's not like I had just spent 15 months, you know, in the shit. Yeah. These trips were always kind of, I was always on the move. I was always bouncing around, spending a few days kind of in some nice air-conditioned place, and then a few days out in some horrible little outpost. Yeah, but see, some people describe that as just going on vacation with their family. They would use the same terminology.

Yeah, we stayed in some place with some AC, the hotel. And then we went to some shitty place where they stayed in a tent. So, yeah, you were moving around, but you have to take into context where you were moving around. Right. At the age that you were moving around. I'm saying in comparison to your peers, I think the experience was probably slightly. different. It's a different type of study abroad, yeah. Did your classmates ask you questions about what you saw? Yeah, for sure. I mean, people were always really interested. I think there could be

kind of a detachment from anything about the wars on, you know, an isolated college campus in New Jersey. But any little touchpoint that made them more real, people were curious about. I mean, maybe not everybody, but I definitely didn't find that people, you know, didn't want to hear about it. Yeah. Did you find that? it transitions home to be relatively easy for you? I did. Yeah. I mean, I was, yeah. I never had any real problems. I'm sure your parents came back from the first one. They're like, cool, hope you got it out of your system. Exactly, right.

Yeah, mom and dad about that. I'm going to take a year out from college. I'll be heading to Mosul. So you did that first month, came back, how long before you went back a second time? Well, I went back to school for my sophomore year, and then I had met, you know, I had met a bunch of real war reporters. over in Baghdad during that first trip. I had met... I like how you said real, as if you weren't over there doing exactly the same thing.

But I had no idea what I was doing. I'm going to go out and say some of them didn't either. Perhaps, but some of them really did. But some of them really did. And, you know, two guys that I met on my first trip were Evan Wright from Rolling Stone, who wrote the book Generation Kill about First Recon Battalion in Iraq.

And he became a friend and a mentor. And then Michael Gordon, who at the time was this crudgeon, old New York Times correspondent, now crotchety old Wall Street Journal correspondent, who just despite his sort of grumpy old exterior would just, he would just go bounce around to absolutely the roughest places you could imagine and plug in with these units and embed with them for however long it took to kind of understand what was going on. And he kind of gave me the opportunity. He was he was beginning to write what at the time was his third Iraq book. He and a retired Marine General named Mick Trainer had written a book about Desert Storm back in the early 90s. They had then written a big bestselling book about the buildup and invasion of Iraq called Cobra 2.

And then they were getting to work on a third book that was going to be initially was kind of going to be about the surge. But it grew into being a whole, this massive tome about sort of the post-2003 U.S. occupation of Iraq. and you know Michael basically Michael and I reached an arrangement where I was going to go and do these embeds freelancing but that I would also be doing research for him at the same time and in return I mean he was paying me and he would he would sort of grease the wheels for me to be able to in between embeds go and get some downtime at the New York Times Bureau in Baghdad and crash there for a week and you know go through my notes and write stuff up which was you know a good kind of break especially I was doing started to do longer trips at this point.

Like I think it was about three months in the fall of 2008. When you did your second one? The second one, yeah. So when you are reporting, I should have asked this about your first month over there too. Do you write when you get home or are you publishing things while you are overseas? I was publishing things as they happened kind of, maybe not immediately afterward, but within a couple weeks after they happened, depending on what I was, you know, whether it was a story about a particular event or whether it was more of, well, this is what's going on in Ramadi at this

point in time. But yeah, I would do it as I was over there. And where do you publish that too? Well, again, so I was, you know, I was a freelancer. So the way it worked back then was the military would take you as an embed, provided you had sort of a letter of accreditation from some publication saying that they were going to take your stuff. You didn't have to be a staff reporter for that publication. They just had to know that you had an arrangement with them. So I would, for different trips, I would do it for different publications. At one point, I was writing stuff for the Long War Journal. At another point, eventually was the New York Times

had this site that has since been revived and then since disappeared again called At War, which was kind of an online additional war coverage site that was a... I'd never heard of that. It was great. It was a good venue, both for freelancers, and it was a good venue over the years for a lot of veterans, you know, getting out of the military to write about their service. But so that was one of the first sort of big places that I wrote for was, you know, while I was doing these trips reporting for Michael Gordon for his book, I would stay at the New York Times Baghdad Bureau. And I guess actually, yeah, before it was called at war, this vertical, this site within

the New York Times was called Baghdad Bureau because it was, everything was so Iraq focused in 2007, 2008. It wasn't until 2009 that people started paying attention to Afghanistan again. unless you were deploying to Afghanistan. Absolutely. Or lived there for that matter. You're right. Also, good point.

Touche. Yeah. Did you notice any major differences between year 2007 and year 2008 time over there? Yeah, huge differences. I mean, this was, to kind of explain the timeline here, I mean, 2005, 2006 was when Iraq had burst apart at the seams, just descended into absolute chaos and civil war, which you saw. 2007 was the year of a variety of events that changed what Iraq looked like. One of them was the surge where U.S. forces doubled down, brought in 30,000 extra troops to try and secure this greater Baghdad area and pull it back from the brink.

2007 was also the year that the awakening took off, that all these little Sunni groups all around central Iraq kind of either flipped sides or depending on, you know, the flavor of the particular town or district. They might have been insurgent groups that had been fighting Americans and now they were taking American pay and digging up the IEDs that they had previously put in. Or they might be groups that had been fighting against the Soviet insurgents all along. But there was this, you know, there was this popular resistance against the al-Qaeda in Iraq, forerunners of ISIS that changed the flavor of what was going on in Iraq. And so by 2008, I mean, it was a lot quieter. There was a really precipitous drop-off in violence. in Sunni areas of Iraq in 2008,

and then in Shia areas as well after this massive spring rebellion that happened with the Madi army in the spring of 2008. So by the fall of 2008, Iraq was pretty quiet with the exception of Mosul, which remained a very violent place.

Yeah, for quite some time. Yeah. I can't imagine going over there just to sit back, not to sit back, that's it. Not a good way to describe it. Just be there and be involved, but just to report and not be able to have a finger on the pulse of the outcome.

It's, it's, I take my hat off to you for that, man, for being willing to go over there. And I'm glad that people like you exist that are willing to do that. Like I said, I do believe that the American people are due, a level of transparency. And the details, again, can be figured out by people smarter than me. But I think, I think it's important. I think one of the worst things that we can do is hide the actual cost of what war does, not only to the nation that you are invading, but to the people who are there wearing the flag on their uniform. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I mean, I certainly think that more transparency and more reporting is better.

I should also, I mean, I should be clear that I think embedding is only a part of that. I mean, embedding was an incredibly useful vehicle for me kind of starting out in my journalism career. And it also was fantastic in that it provided an avenue for a lot of smaller outlets that wouldn't have been able to cover the war otherwise to cover it. You know, if Idaho's 116th brigade goes and gets mobilized from National Guard and goes to Iraq, now the Idaho statesman or whatever the paper may be can send a reporter to go cover them. But it's a small slice of the war that you're seeing. You're seeing it from this one narrow American perspective. So for organizations that have the resources to really cover the war, embedding needs to be one part of what they're doing. They need to have people covering the politics of it, people out covering the law.

lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. Ideally, people in some way covering the insurgency, covering the lives of local security forces, because in any of these conflicts, even at our peak involvement when there was something like almost 170,000 U.S. troops in Iraq in 2007, we're one actor in really complex wars. Oh, yeah. How would you cover it from the insurgent side? Do you know any reporters that have been able to embed on that side? Absolutely, I do. I mean, one guy who appears in the book, there's a guy named Paul Refstahl, who's a Norwegian journalist, video journalist, who he had, like a lot of Western reporters, had spent time with the Mujah Hadin in the 1980s. And like a smaller number of Western reporters, he kind of revived those ties during the post-2001 era. And he had some, I mean, really on the edge experiences.

Does he have trouble walking due to his massive balls? He probably does. I mean, does he just carry a wheelbarrow with them everywhere? I mean, there's obviously, I mean, I would almost be, well, my experience with the enemy that we were fighting, one of the biggest things that you would worry about, or not worry about, but having the back your mind is capture's not an option, knowing what would likely happen if that were to occur. Maybe the consequences would be different for a journalist, even though, what was the journalist who got his head sawed off at the beginning? It depends where you are and who captures you.

That's what I'm saying. I mean, there's some consequences to aligning yourself with the wrong people. Yeah, and that's, I mean, that's what Paul, I describe, you know, Paul talking about in one of the chapters of this book is that he, in 2009, he went back and he essentially embedded with a local Salafi insurgent commander in the patch, you know, wealthy local guy named Mullah Dauron, who he had known in the 80s during the jihad against the Soviets. and he he did two visits, I think, to Dauron. The first one went great from his perspective. You know, Dauron was a very accommodating host. I think the scariest moments were there actually was, I was able to reconstruct based on the timeline of Paul's visit

and the timeline of like WikiLeaks reports. There was a Red Squadron raid that he actually, he kind of, that was on Dauron's group that Paul. was not at the target site, obviously, but at kind of the next area over. And he describes kind of in the night, you know, hearing the AC130 and, you know, Dauron being like, hey, everybody, time to go, you know, up into the forest. Yeah. And it turned out the next day that the Red Squadron had killed Dauron's second in command during this little raid. But then during a subsequent visit, he went and met up

with a subordinate of Dauron's who was less accommodating and essentially kept him captive for a period of time. And the bizarre thing was that they were in this area north of the patch where there were all these different insurgent groups operating in the area, including outsiders, Al-Qaeda guys. And Paul recalls basically being told by his hosts slash captors, hey, if the Al-Qaeda guys come and fight us, you better be prepared to pick up a weapon because you're not going to like it if they capture you. At all. Yeah. I think that might be the toughest aspect to, well, hell, I don't know much about reporting at all. but I would think that that would probably be the more difficult aspect to try to capture. I mean, that was, I would say, you know, there were many challenges in trying to write this book.

That's one of the ones that I think I was least successful at is capturing the enemy side. I mean, I did what I could. I did talk to some former Taliban combatants, mostly kind of local guys who had who had been up in these villages who I didn't initially know they had fought against the Americans. I was just sort of interviewing groups of men from these villages, and eventually they might kind of volunteer and explain why they had, why they had fought against U.S. troops. Do you ever try to interview DT&Es? No, I never. I mean, so, I mean, I tried to, yes. In particular, there's a, my white whale who I still would love to talk to is a man who's alive in an Afghan prison somewhere named Abu Ghlaas al-Masri, who's an Egyptian Al-Qaeda figure who was captured in 2010 after kind of being the,

the bright flashing light that U.S. Special Operators and the CIA were hunting for in Kunar for, you know, about nine years. And that's a guy who, you know, I've seen bits and pieces of his interrogation reports. I've talked to people who talked to him once he was in the Bogram internment facility. And, I mean, that's, you know, he would be a, he would be a tremendous resource, I think. Sure he's still alive? Supposedly. He was as of a couple years ago. Sure he's still in Afghanistan? Yeah.

I think he might have a few stamps on his passport, depending on how high up the tree that he went. When did you start shifting your lens from Iraq to Afghanistan? I first went to Afghanistan in the spring of 2009. And it was another of these shorter trips. It was like five or six weeks. I spent part of it in Wardak province south of Kabul with a green beret team or a few green beret teams. And then part of it in Helmand province, which at the time was U.S. Marines were. were just starting to show up.

It was still a British show. And so that 2009 trip, I spent some time with this Illinois National Guard police advisor team who were, they were just out there living on the edge in, you know, a little tiny American element in this British sector going and running around visiting Afghan police outposts and, you know, helping them get what they needed and figure out what they needed. What were your first impressions of Afghanistan when you landed there? I'm trying to think. And so what were the mechanics?

How would you get over there? What was the journey look like? Afghanistan was, I would fly commercial into Kabul through either through Dubai or through Istanbul. Once I tried a different way than flying commercial and it resulted in a kind of a visa and passport fiasco that was... Try to avoid those at all costs.

But so, yeah, you'd fly into Kabul International Airport, Hamid Karzai International Airport. And then you would kind of, you know, you would have some place. to stay lined up, whether, there were all these guest houses for Westerners at the peak of U.S. and NATO involvement. For press, you mean? I mean, there was so much more than press.

I mean, press was some of it, but there were so many, I mean, aid workers and contractors working for, working for aid organizations, contracts, working for, God knows what else. Should we just call it the military industrial complex? It was quite the, you know, motley, motley assortment of, you know, and I never spent much time in that sort of that Kabul expat world. I later saw the trailers for that Tina Fey movie, and it looked like a lot of fun, and I kind of was sad that I missed it, you know,

because I remember getting a glimpse of it during my first trip, where I had, you know, I flew into Kabul, immediately went over to whatever Camp Eggers or whatever base was that I went over to and kind of plugged into my embeds. But then at one point on the way out or between embeds or something, I was coming up from Helmand, and I flew via either British or U.S. C-130 back into Kabul Airport,

kind of crossed the fence from the military side to the civilian side of the airport and went over to this place, the Gandamak Lodge that was the little hotel guest house place that I was staying. And this place was just bizarre. It's like it eventually was shut down because the way these places would run afoul

of the Afghan government was over liquor and stuff like that. But this place, the Gandamack Lodge, it had kind of this dark basement where there might be like former SBS guys who wouldn't tell you what company they were working for who were, you know, drinking. And then I remember, like, showing up and going and, like, showering and dropping my dirty body armor and then, like, coming back out.

And there were all these people in tuxedos in the yard, like drinking gin and tonics. And it was, evidently, it was June 18th, Waterloo Day. And this was an important day for the British expat community in Kabul. Okay. God, what a trip. And how old were you at this point? I would have been 21. Yeah, you know, 21, just dropping off my dirty body armor, throwing on the old bowtie for a G&T.

I did not have my tux. I do think I got a, I probably got the, an overpriced G&T and a terrible hamburger out of that evening. Yeah. Do you ever head over to the Ariana Hotel? Yes, I remember the Ariana Hotel. Yeah, great spaghetti there. Is that right? Yeah, Bolognays, since they have amazing bolognays.

I've had to know it. Yeah. Yeah, there might have been some people who got in a tough. of trouble there too for alcohol consumption. We'll leave it at that. Yeah, that was an interesting. The whole, oh, Kabul, such an interesting place. How long were you in Afghanistan your first time? That was maybe a five or six week trip in 2009. Okay. How many times have you been total? Total to Afghanistan, four times, I think. Okay. I may be missing one. I think four times. Okay. And then how about to Iraq?

Two times Iraq. Okay. Yeah, I mean, that's a substantial amount of time. And then... I mean, I should be clear, though. I mean, these are typically your short trips. These are not like, I'm never going and like living there for 15 months, like guys on deployment or something like that. Or like the correspondence who, you know, the Kabul correspondent of the New York Times or whatever organization who just, you know, live there for a period of years. Yeah.

But yeah, it added up over time. When did you start developing your interest in the Patch Valley? So I went in 2010, my second Afghanistan trip. trip, it was the summer of the big surge in Afghanistan when President Obama had committed. So we were both there at the same time. I was there from February until August to 2010. Yeah, we both were there. I never made it to Zobel, but I spent part of that summer in Kandahar. But it was, you know, that was the summer that things were going big, right? It was the war was becoming conventional. It was, when Obama took office, there was something like

33,000 U.S. troops in the country. By the end of 2010, there were pushing 100,000. U.S. troops in the country. So he tripled the size of the U.S. presence. And summer 2010 was, you know, the summer that all these, all these pieces were coming into place and all these U.S. units and, you know, allied units from ISAF, the International Security Assistance Force, the NATO coalition were just, they were on the march. They were pushing out every which way, building new outposts and paving new roads and trying to secure more districts and try to do the coin thing, right? They were trying to replicate in Afghanistan what they'd done in Iraq. To use a phrase from your book, the ink blot.

The ink plot theory. Exactly. Where you slop some ink and it spreads and then, you know, where you get to the edges of that, you throw down some more ink and the goal being eventually, you got it all. And that's what they were trying to do. And part of what fascinated me right off the bat about the patch was, so I think I visited four infantry battalions that summer in different parts of the country. And pretty much everywhere you went, it was the commanders would tell you,

you know, the battalion commander on your in brief would kind of explain. how, you know, we're expanding. We're building, we've built this number of new outposts, we're going to build this number more, we've spent X amount of reconstruction money, just kind of throwing all the great inputs at you to demonstrate how much they were doing. Yeah. And then I went to the patch, which I didn't actually know a lot about. It was, so I had sort of picked all these other embeds, but some embed had fallen through for some logistical reason and somebody had suggested, well, try, try going to 1327 in Kunar since 2327 is and you can't go to them.

And that wound up being a really good happenstance because I flew into, flew by C. 130 into Jolabat airfield, horrible, humid place. I just like, I remember being stuck at Jalalabad airfield for like a week waiting for a helicopter to go up to the patch. Basically feels like where you live, D.C. in summertime. Worse though. If anything could be worse, it's like, it's like the rainforest exhibit at the zoo in D.C. Yeah.

But slightly hoarded. As a person who wears glasses, I remember, like, during this week, like, stuck there, like, go out of the tent in the middle of the night and my glasses would immediately fog up. And then, you eventually, you know, wait around at Jalalabad, get a helicopter up to forward-operating base blessing, the battalion headquarters in the patch. It's much cooler up there. On the flight end, you immediately kind of see the terrain that you've been hearing about, you know, realize this is something very different from the war in the south and other parts of the east.

What were your first thoughts, the first time you saw it? Good question. I don't know. I mean, I remember just being struck by, yeah, by the terrain, by how green things were, by animals. I remember there was like a big monitor lizard that I had to step over to get to the trine at one point, like the first night. It's like, well, that's different. Were you shocked by the Afghan's ability to build their houses and structures in terrain that is almost that vertical? on shit that is 100% not permitted or OSHA approved.

I mean, it's incredible, yeah. And you see even in the... It defies gravity sometimes. Even in the towns right around Fobb Lessing, which is really the valley floor, the houses are stacked on the mountainside in this way, like little Lego bricks or, you know, there's one guy quoted in the book

who describes it as like an Ewok village. But yeah, they're on these stilts, just perched up on these mountain sides. Every house looks like it should be slothed. lighting off at the moment it rains or something like that. But yeah, noticing that. And then before I even, you know, kind of left the wire and went and visited one of the smaller outposts, I remember going in for kind of the, you know, the typical end brief with the battalion

commander who, you know, I didn't know him. I'd never exchanged emails with him or anything else like that. And there was just such a different tone with this guy than with, you know, all the other units that I've been seeing during the surge because he basically was saying, look, we've been here for a few months already, you know. and this isn't a place where the coin stuff is working. This is a place where the time for expanding is over. And he was very frank and upfront about that,

which was surprising to me and really interesting to me and kind of an immediate hook for, okay, what's going on in this place? And then, you know, the next day, drive out with his sergeant major to cot Michigan at the mouth of the Coringall Valley, and you, you know, within the first few hours, you see it. You know, the company commander of first sergeant says, well okay be prepared for you know two or three you know attacks from all these surrounding mountains during a day during your during your stay here you know next one will probably be at about 7 p.m.

And lo and behold, that's exactly what happens. And you realize, yeah, it's just a very different kind of fight. It's these little outposts are they're in fish bowls on the valley floor. They're like these little concrete fortresses, concrete and Hesco barriers. But the enemy can see everything that's going on inside of them except if it has camouflage netting or a roof over it because the enemy is just in the hills above. Yeah, which doesn't stop bullets or RPGs. Right. And yeah, and just there was just this routine of, you know, two or three times a day.

In would come the, you know, it might start with a bunch of RPGs either on the outpost or at the little A&A observation post on the hill above. And then there would be recoiless rifles. There'd be, there was an AGS-19, I think it was called like Soviet grenade launcher, automatic grenade launcher. Essentially the AGS-70 is whatever was, is the equivalent of a market. 19. Yeah. Which is a 40 millimeter awesome grenade hucker. Right. So this thing would be peppering caught Michigan with, you know, with fire from the mountains. And it was just a very high volume of incoming fire and also a very high volume of outgoing fire. I mean, I think I probably saw, almost certainly saw

more artillery and mortars fired during that trip to Kunar than during all of my cumulative every other embed and every other place in Iraq and Afghanistan combined. It's not surprising to hear, actually. Did you notice a difference in just the demeanor of the soldiers in those areas? Yeah. I mean, in some way, I mean, I'm thinking of, in the summer of 2010, I was coming from having been in Sangan earlier in the trip, which was the most horrible place I've ever been, and where these British Marines really were just, they were just sucking down. They were just so many IDs, a guy's stepping on them all the time. It was just this routine in the district.

So in some ways the Pesh kind of felt like a relief from that. I mean, it was just this whole different thing with the type of fighting. But like I remember being struck by just kind of how routine it was to the guys at this little outposts to Cod, Michigan. It was like they were dealing with weather, you know, the way they'd talk about it. Think about how amazing it is for you yourself, having experienced this, to describe going from an IED-infested area. to a place where you're in the low ground receiving plunging fire as a relief or a break. But the funny thing about it is... It provides some insight into the situation with which you became normalized, too.

Right. No, it's true. But these guys were much more normalized too, right? Like, I remember, you know, it would be a kind of thing where I remember, like, during one firefight, during an evening one night at Michigan, I was tagging along with the company First Sergeant wherever he went as he ran around the base. checking on different, you know, the mortar pit and this and that. And I remember, like, one of the mortarmen being like, first sergeant, you're not running a route out in this, are you? And it sounded like he was talking about, like, hail or heavy rain or something.

Or, you know, being in the little MWR trailer where guys could check their, you know, check their email and stuff. And one of these attacks kicking off and, you know, hearing two guys talking about, like, I think I'm going to stay inside for this one, you know? It's a light drizzle. of lead. That's what it sounded like. I mean, they were very attuned to the difference between a light drizzle attack and a, you know,

in a heavy downpour attack. And similarly, though, the enemy was very attuned to the U.S. response. And this was what was, you know, pretty immediately clear looking at the Petch in 2010 and then going and reading news articles about the Pesh a few years earlier, was that the war had really changed there. These outposts, they had started their lives as much more precarious little positions with much less kind of cover and much less separation between you and the population that you're living around from the respective of the U.S. troops.

Because they were supposed to be these coin security bubbles. Yeah. They're supposed to be, you're not supposed to live on your outpost. You're supposed to sleep there and patrol from it constantly. And by 2010, that wasn't what these, wasn't what was happening anymore. What was happening at that point was these were little fortresses, troops. They ventured out, you know, on foot patrols, was like going into space. or they would get in their big armored vehicles and, you know, these big MRAPs.

And there wasn't, you know, there was not this kind of, the same kind of friendly, close interaction with the local people that there had been a few years earlier. And you could tell, even not having been there before, you could tell this is a place where kind of things have grown cold between the U.S. troops who live there and the people. And so, you know, from the enemy perspective, you could just imagine it's so predictable for them, too. in the same way that the U.S. company commander knows, like, okay, next attack's probably going to be around seven. The enemy knows, okay, from the moment that we start shooting, we have X minutes until the outposts mortars start hitting, then X more minutes until the 155 howitzers from Blessing start hitting, and X more minutes until Apaches show up, and X more minutes until, you know, the $2,000 bombs from the fixed wing planes start hitting. So you really got the impression.

I mean, it's like, you know, this was a dangerous place, Codd, Michigan. But it wasn't dangerous like these places had been a few years earlier in the sense that this had all been come this this all was a drill now and there was so much fortification and cover That you know guys were being hurt and killed I mean there was a mechanic was killed on caught Michigan shortly before I visited I remember at least one guy was wounded you know lightly during during that visit But it wasn't you know it wasn't what had had been a few years before and similarly you had to you had to know that up in the hills the enemy knew exactly when to step under that boulder, they probably were not taking a real beating from this, you know, this massive barrage of firepower.

There was all this ordinance being expended, but both sides were pretty, you know, they kind of had it down what their role in this play was. And then who's stuck in the middle is the people that live there. You'd have to imagine, too, that the enemy had a pretty good idea of the capabilities of both the aircraft, manned or unmanned, that the U.S. had. The weather conditions that could affect it,

days where the low-hanging fog completely, I mean, even in my own limited experience in those areas, when you realize, as a U.S. service member, like, shit, we're kind of limited right now with our assets and our support, shocker, we're getting attacked. Today's the day we're getting more. Like, they get it too. You know, underestimating your enemy and their ability to keep track of those things has led to more than one person's downfall. Yeah. I mean, and the most ferocious fights that I describe in the book, you know, not from my own perspective, not that I wasn't there for those, but from, you know, reconstructing big operations, key points along the way with guys who fought up there, the worst stuff would happen in periods when there was weather

that was keeping aircraft away, periods when it just, it was early in the war and aircraft were farther away to start with. There are some hard limits to kind of the air power advantage that the terrain and the weather and the vegetation up there pose. There are, you know, we like to think of, we can think of, you know, reapers and predators as these kind of all-seeing eyes that let you not, you know, look at the battlefield, but they're really not, and they especially weren't early on, and they especially weren't for conventional units, which only had them as kind of like a rare luxury, rather than as like, okay, every time we go out, we've got an AC-130 and a reaper looking over our shoulder. And so there really, there were a lot of moments over the course

of time up there where U.S. infantry platoons found themselves locked into very intense, It's very close range combat with a very ferocious and disciplined enemy in the pine forest, you know, kind of just in a place where air power is not going to help you. One of the things that surprise me about the book, again, I've spent time in Afghanistan, but like I was saying, when we started, half the time, it's just like I just get in the 47. And when the 47 gets off, I look for the structure that looks like the one that's on this GRG that I have on my hand. The number of repetitive operations into the same area that had the same result, it's not all inspiring.

No, it certainly isn't. And I don't know if that's a lack of information or after action reports or them not having the ability to share information. But there was some catastrophic loss of life, specifically when they were trying to go deep into the patch. I forget the names of the exact areas, but they would go to these same areas. And, you know, there would be senior members in the Army, in the country, not directly involved in that, but it had tried the same thing before, got their ass handed to them, which is the only way that you can describe it. And then here American forces are trying it again with the exact same result. That type of stuff to me, it's a tough pill to swallow.

Yeah. I mean, there's a place called the Waterpour Valley in particular, where U.S. troops, They never built an outpost, but the enemy kind of had a sanctuary up there. It's the place where the enemy took Paul Revstahl when they had him captive or during his sort of visit slash captivity. This is the guy who has the wheelbarrel? Exactly. Yes. But so this was, you know, way up in the Waterport Valley up in what they called the Gambier Jungle, you know, really thick forest.

The enemy just, they were safe up there. They, early on, U.S. troops, when there were sort of fewer restrictions on them, U.S. infantry platoons would hike up there or go up there on ATVs or pickup trucks. But over the years, as the U.S. force becomes heavier and heavier, first it's kind of locked into its Humvees, now it's locked into its up-armored Humvees, now it's locked into its MRAPs. And for people listening, a lot of that was theater guidance, meaning you didn't have a choice. Exactly. You knew that a dirt bike or a horse or an ATV would be better, but you literally would get guidance

saying you're not leaving the wire unless you are in a armored vehicle that can withstand this level of protection or charge. No, that's exactly right. It's because as the IED threat had grown, there was this constant back and forth between mobility and protection. The enemy gets better and better at the bombs. You get better and better at the armor and the countermeasures, but what you lose is mobility, unless you're willing to, you know, take losses.

And there's an interesting parallel here. Maybe parallel isn't quite the right word, but to the Soviet experience in KUNAR. Because we have, I think we as Americans, especially, you know, Americans who have spent time around the military and around Afghanistan, we often have what I think is a pretty false impression of the way the Soviets behaved, at least in this part of the country, up at Kunar, where we think they were this blundering, armored behemoth that just would get sucked up into these valleys and chopped up and lose hundreds of soldiers. And I think we get that perception from Afghans because that's who we talk to about it. That's who, you know, the DIA people and the reporters

were talking to in the 80s about it. The Victor gets to tell the story. Right. Or the only person left behind. Exactly. But so the reality, I mean, going back and looking at, you know, translated Russian Soviet documents, you know, finding, finding Soviet veterans at this place to talk to, Soviet veterans forums, I mean, the equivalent of like Facebook groups that that American Korngal veterans maintain for themselves. The Soviets went through this evolution in Koonar where they came in blundering and heavy like that in their big armored vehicles, but they adapted and became flexible. And they increasingly spent time in, small little foot patrols way up in the mountains, you know, days and weeks at a time,

almost more like mac v. Sog kind of looking stuff than what you wind up seeing U.S. troops doing. And so U.S. troops undergo the opposite evolution. You know, they show up light and flexible and small numbers of, you know, green berets and Rangers and Seals and Marines in the early years. And then over time, as casualties mount and as it's become, it's very clear that, you know, our country and our national leadership has no appetite for these casualties. more and more of these rules are, when restrictions are imposed on these units so that by 2010 it's, okay,

vehicles leaving the wire, it has to be at least four MRAPs. Whereas in 2006, it was, well, yeah, go up to Gambier and your ATVs. When I first went over 2000, like I said, my first trip there was 2002. That was for Carzai's Security Detail, though.

Then 2003, we were back over there. We were all around in high lux. Right. Which is like a, what did you say, like a Tacoma-ish, basically truck, but they're badass. They're like a Tacoma, but actually badass. And I actually really like Tacoma's, but Highluxes are awesome. Thinskinned, a bullet of any caliber will zip right through that thing. And no protection from explosives, but they are so incredibly mobile.

And then it became Humvees and Raps. And by the time I went back in 2010, it was side by sides. And we went to the most inhospitable terrain in the hopes that there would be no IEDs buried. because it's the only way we could escape the IAD threat. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, in the Pesh, the evolution that you see is, as the U.S. forces become more roadbound,

more stuck in their MRAPs, the only way to get up to these places where the enemy lives starts being with big helicopter air assaults. Now, ideally, these conventional forces would be doing it something more like how special operations forces did it, right? Like sort of quick, responsive raids with small forces. But there's so few helicopters in the theater for conventional. forces, that they are this closely husbanded resource. Everything, you know, this is true of the, you know, of the Chinooks that are the only helicopters

that really are going to, you know, haul guys in any numbers up into these mountains. It's true of the Apaches that escort them. It's true of the reapers and predators. And it winds up being the case that the only way for a conventional infantry battalion to get access to these resources is to plan far in advance a big named operation, as they call it, an air assault operation with multiple companies of guys going up into the mountains with a cool code name. And so this becomes the routine.

Which take weeks of planning coordination. And for people listening, when we're talking about Chinooks, think of a 46 or 47 that they look like a school bus with two rotor blade pylons on the top versus you're a traditional Black Hawk, which would oftentimes, especially if they're, the 160th birds have the fuel probes

actually coming out of both the 47s and the 60s. But Black Hawk, literally just go look up a Blackhawk versus a Chinook, two very different things. Chinook's much more powerful, two rotor blades, a lot of people. I think their forward speed is actually faster if it was a race, but they take longer to slow down, they take longer to speed up, and they are oftentimes bullet and RPG sponges. Right. They present a really big target for the enemy at the best of times, but especially up in these

forests where there are only a very small number of clearings that are big enough to accommodate a Chinook. And the enemy knows that. They know exactly where these clearings are. They get used over and over again in these different missions. And, you know, as units rotate through, it's just this game of, you know, it's a game of telephone kind of. You know, each unit knows what the previous unit told it. And then it kind of doesn't really know anything back beyond that for the most part.

So you may, you get this reinvention of the wheel over and over again, right? Unit A comes in and takes A approach. Unit B comes in and says, well, that wasn't working. We're going to take B approach. Unit C comes in and says, well, that didn't seem like. like it work. Let's do unit A, let's do approach A again. Yeah. And I mean, while the local populace is sitting there looking at you going, what the fuck?

Right. Like you said, exhausted, maybe generationally exhausted, like we were saying, maybe they live through the Soviet invasion. And, yeah, you get to some of these areas, and you can tell, by the way, that they look at you that you're not in friendly territory. Right. For sure. And there's a real evolution that you can see, both in talking to people who lived up in the patch, and Americans who serve there in the attitudes that people have toward U.S. troops. I'll give the example of there was a Green Beret team in the first Green Beret team to live at Fob Blessing in the Petch Valley in 2004, sort of toward the end of their six months had a tragic accident where one of the Green Berets shot one of these, you know, mangy horrible dogs that was kind of menacing him on patrol.

And the bullet went through the dog, hit a rock, ricochayed, and killed a local shopkeeper. And the Greenberry team captain thinks, well, shit, this is it, this is it. You know, they're going to kick us out of the firebase. We're going to have to close down operations that people aren't going to stand for this. But in fact, the community does stand for it. And the local elders kind of help him organize the right way of sort of paying condolence, making amends with the family. There are some demonstrations, but the local leaders kind of calm it down, explain, look, the guy who did this was a guy you all know. because it was a good faith mistake.

But over time, too many good faith mistakes don't sit well. And over time, as these units rotate through, every one of these units, you know, it does, whether it's six months or 12 months, they have a rough first few weeks. And we often think about that in terms of, yeah, the first few weeks are really dangerous for U.S. troops as they kind of get their feet under them and learn what they're doing. But those first few weeks are really dangerous for the local people around the U.S. troops, too. as U.S. troops kind of figure out what is and isn't a threat. And often that's when you would see, you know, escalation of force incidents when somebody, you know, machine gunner shoots through the window of a pickup truck or an incoming car that probably, you know, they were within their rights to do it.

But by the end of the deployment, maybe they wouldn't have because they understand the patterns of life better. Yeah, they haven't allowed, they don't have enough experience to understand how it breathes. Right, exactly. The ebb and flow of the interaction and what looks out of place. because when you're brand new, everything looks out of place. I'd actually say the first 90 and the last 90, well, depending on the duration of your deployment. Maybe the first 30 and the last 30. First 30, because you don't know shit, last 30 because you're bumping up against complacency.

Yeah. And just wanting to turn over and get the hell out of there. There's an interesting phenomenon that you see kind of play out in the Coringal. You see it play out in lots of different places, but the Coringal is a good example, where, you know, the war in Afghanistan, it kind of works on an annual cycle in a lot of ways, in a few ways, right? in one way, U.S. troops often were there on, you know, U.S. Army units were there on one-year rotations for a lot of the war. So they'd arrive in the spring and then they'd go home the following spring or they arrive in the fall, go home to the following fall, whatever the particular, you know,

rotation pattern in that province was that's kind of set up by chance earlier in the war. Similarly, the enemy kind of comes and goes in a seasonal pattern. There are year-round fighters, and depending on the area you're looking at this, maybe more or less true, but there are a year-round fighters who just are people who live there or are kind of real pros who just stick it out the whole time. And then there are all kinds of out-of-area fighters who come in, you know, from across the border from Pakistan for various purposes. And Koonar sometimes it was, it seemed like it was kind of the equivalent of a capstone exercise or to get their combat infantry badge, you know, their Taliban, CIB. Similar to why people were finding their

way to Iraq as well. Right. And so, but something that you, and then a lot of that, and then this is, this is affected by the seasons too, right? like the winters can be pretty harsh, the summers can be pretty miserable. But during the winter, like in the south, there's less vegetation for an enemy to hide around. So it makes sense to just not stick around. Up in, you know, up in Kunaar, like there can be a ton of snow up in those mountain passes that make it hard to move around. Yeah. So something you see with these big aerosults is, and with the, you know, the rotation of units coming through is, you know, in the Kornigal, an infantry company would deploy in the spring or summer.

They'd have a really hard first few months. They'd take guys killed. They'd kill a lot of bad guys. In the fall, they'd get a big air assault operation in, kill a lot of bad guys. Then things would quiet down. And the question would be, okay, well, are things quieting down because we killed a lot of them and inflicted losses that they're not quickly recovering from? Or are they quieting down because this is the natural rhythm of when the enemy goes back to

Pakistan to hibernate and do what they do in Pakistan? And then in the Koringal, what you'd see happen was in the spring, then it would stay quiet. So the infantry company would think, okay, it really was us. We have turned the tide in this place. We've gotten things. We've made real progress. And then they'd go home and a new infantry company would come in and immediately get slammed.

Because the enemy is just way, the enemy doesn't want to fight you at the end of your tour when you really know what you're doing with a company. Yeah, they want to fight the new guys. Yeah. And so then you see it repeat itself. And because it's this one-year cycle, it happens over and over again. And, you know, U.S. units don't really absorb. the pattern because they're not there for it.

Yeah. Yeah, and there's not that, there's not a great transmission of that experience, whether it be written or verbal, because you're lifting and shifting entire units out of the area. And who knows if anybody who's coming in, whether they're, you know, National Guard, active duty, where they're from, what they specialize in. I mean, it's kind of a, it's kind of a crapshoot to a degree. Yeah, and sort of the passing knowledge down was one of the real weak points. I mean, the military tried, and it did a lot of different It took a lot of different approaches to trying to make institutional knowledge work in this war of unit rotations. But the war of unit rotations is kind of inherently crippled by that, right?

Because you've got these big groups of people just, you know, leaving and coming and going and coming and going. And, you know, in some units like the Ranger battalions or other soft units, they may wind up coming back to the same place, right? Like, you know, the past 10, 20 years, you know, Ranger units have been rotating in and out of Afghanistan on a very predictable pattern. It is true of your old unit too, although it's sort of had more of a geographic diversity. But with conventional units, it would be they'd deploy to this place and then they'd never see it again. And so, you know, all you had was the two-week overlap period with the outgoing unit. And they try to, if they were, you know, if they were good, they'd try to dump as much information into you guys' brains as they possibly could during that two-week period. But there's really only so much that can be dumped in during that two-week period.

As some of the heroes of the story, I think, are there are people who had the long view. There are interpreters who had the long view. You know, Afghans who were working with the U.S. military who didn't go home at the end of a year, who just, they lived in the, they, you know, they were on an interpreter contract, and they worked for this unit for its 12 months, and then they worked for the next unit, and they worked for the next unit. And so if you had good interpreters and were willing to listen to them, they could be a really good sort of institutional knowledge resource. And then also there was this army unit that was a blend of contractors and soldiers called the asymmetric warfare group. And AWG is a funny organization that, I mean, I think some people have, you know, have had experiences with them in Iraq and Afghanistan where they didn't seem to be very useful. It wasn't clear what they were doing there. But in the patch, they were real value added.

There were, you know, a series of very senior, very experienced former operator type guys for the most part who took it upon themselves to plug in during these. transitions and kind of shepherd the new unit through and try to, you know, accustom them more than the two-week turnover period allowed to all the nuances and tricks of fighting in this particular area. Now, this didn't translate into, you know, these guys having an effect on, you know, the outcome, right? Like, they didn't make units kind of do better, but they saved lives. And I think at this sort of this micro-tactical level of fire teams and squads and platoons, you know, surviving their early. months, the AWG guys were really, really useful. And their, you know, their story is one that hasn't been told so much. And I tried to try to do a little bit of justice to that in the book. Well, the continuity between those leaving and those coming in over multiple rotations is,

like, that knowledge is gold. Right. Whether or not the person you're trying to pass that knowledge on to, that's the variable. Right. You see it a little bit, you know, if people want to go and get a visual representation of that a little bit or maybe even what living and fighting in these valleys might be like. I could be interested your take on it. But there is a pretty good documentary, Restrepo. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Restrepo is a phenomenal, phenomenal film. It shows the isolated nature of where they are, how it's, they're defending where they are. They go out on these patrols. Nobody's happy to see them. They're not necessarily happy. The U.S. isn't necessarily happy to see anybody. They're not happy to see the U.S. But there's that, you know, that isolates.

installation, the geographical, topographical. But there's also, it shows up a few times in the Shura or the key leader engagement where the senior officer now says, that was the old guy. Right. This is the way we're doing it for it. And I have to believe that every person who is filling that person's shoes says the same thing. Absolutely. I look at it through the lens of myself. How many times would I be willing to tolerate being told that, but not having it live up Yeah, you can see, I mean, the guy, and so Restrepo is sort of a depiction of a year in the life, basically, one infantry company doing the Koringal thing, living at this little series of outposts. And the guy in command of that company during that rotation is a guy named Dan Kearney, who's one of several kind of recurring characters in the book, because he winds up in the Ranger Regiment and having further involvement with the patch through that organization. But yeah, you can see him in the documentary. You can see his kind of frustration with a in this place where the people already hate him.

Was he the captain, the one who was saying, I want that building destroyed now? Yes, that's, that's, yeah, then Captain Kearney. Okay. Is he still in? He is still in. I believe he's in 06.

He's a bold word colonel now. He's going to say 14 star general by this point. No, but he did, he went, he took a battalion back as an 80-second airborne battalion commander a couple years ago. And yeah, he's a, he's a colonel now. Yeah, because I believe he was a captain in that, which is an 03 for the army. Yeah, that's right. He was, that was his second deployment.

He had been a platoon, leader in Mosul as a lieutenant in 2004, 2005, something like that. And then he was this battalion's youngest company commander during the 15 months that the 2503 infantry, this paratroop battalion, spent in the Pesh and the Khorngal. And yeah, you can see, you can see him kind of navigating all the stuff you're talking about. Talking to these local elders and just being like, hey, forget about what happened with Captain McKnight and attack company before me. Like, I'm here now, battle company is here now. Let's forget about what happened.

And in their head, they're like, yeah, but the guy before you told us that, who told us that before the guy but told him that, and they're just like, eat all the dicks. And there sometimes are these scenes, like there's one scene that was recounted to me by a bunch of different guys who were present for it, where it's the next unit after Kearney's battle company is

a unit called Viper Company from the first infantry division, which in many ways was a much less well-prepared unit that really the Army did a terrible disservice to by putting in this part of the country. I mean, it was a brand new infantry unit, stood up from nothing with NCOs who were kind of dragged in from all different places in the Army, guys who had had deployed, guys who were coming from mechanized infantry units. So, you know, great brand new soldiers, great brand new officers, really not a lot of senior NCOs with any kind of experience.

And they have a really tough time early on, but they go through this same cycle where, you know, they have a tough time. They kind of eventually get their mountain legs under them. They really put the hurt on the enemy, and in the spring, it's quiet again. And in that space in the spring, sometimes you would see kind of more candid interactions between the officers and interpreters of these companies, on the one hand, and the elders who they're dealing with, in which the elders kind of let down the mask a little bit and talk more candidly about the Soviet experience and things like that. So there's this one scene that I recount in the book where essentially it's, you know, it's Viper Company's spring. They've only got a couple months left in their deployment. And

And one of these elders, Zalwar Khan or Shamsher Khan, who are these sort of the two, the bigwigs that the Americans would interact with directly at the Coringal Outpost during these weekly meetings, they're sitting down with the, you know, the company commander. And basically they tell him like, hey, like, look, we've been, we've been through all this before. Like, you say you're building a road, but you don't really build the road. So we sit and talk to you because you're here. We sit and talk to the Taliban because they're here. We sat and talked to the Soviets because they were here. And it being, you know, the company commander guy named Jimmy Howell describes that as being a pretty eye-opening interaction for him. I mean, just getting that level of Canada.

Yeah. First off, I'd like to meet the person who could build a road there. Right. I want to meet the engineer and the construction company that could actually, without being attacked by P.K.M. and RPG fire. Let's take that out of the equation. Right. Could build a road there that's going to stand up to what that valley has to offer. Well, that's the trick.

You can build a road there, but you can't keep a road there. That's what I'm saying. That would stay for the long term. Right. And that is the fatal flaw in all of this U.S. funded road building that happened up in the Petch and its side valleys is it needs to be a road that then once Americans are all gone and there's very limited local budget can be sustained. I'd love to see it. Yeah. And in the early 90s, I mean, there were NGOs that were working up in Kuhnard that were trying to do that.

They were trying to put roads that were sort of locally built. and sustained in places where they could be sustained. And, you know, those places did not include the Coringale Valley. That's not one of the places they tried to do it. Not by choice. By topography. Right. And you see, I mean, the road thing is so fascinating.

I mean, we mentioned the phrase, you know, inkblots earlier, because this is one of the mantras of counterinsurgency that we get from, you know, the French in the late 19th century is ink blots or oil splots. The idea is you kind of, you put down a little presence of counterinsurgents and they gradually spread their bubble of influence. And around 2005, 2006, there was a variation on this that was very in vogue in the U.S. military in Afghanistan that was ink lines. The idea is the roads are going to be the blots. Oh, the arteries for the ink.

Yeah, and the roads are going to be kind of, you know, the government influence will spread from the roads. And there, you know, there winds up being some truth to this, but also there are communities that don't want the roads and that will ferociously resist the arrival of the roads. And the Coringal is one of these places. You see this evolution from, it's again, as units come and go, there's mission creep that happens. You know, the first unit that decides they want to pave a road in the Coringal does it for very limited practical reasons. Essentially, they have built this outpost in the middle of the Coringal, the Coringal Outpost. There are not a lot of helicopters in theater, and they need to be able to resupply the outpost. So the idea is widen and flatten this existing kind of dirt and gravel.

track that leads from the mouth of the valley to the Coringale Outpost so that larger vehicles can handle it and so that it's easier to spot IEDs, harder to plant IEDs. But over time, this idea, the concept of the road grows. So the next unit that's in, you know, a year later has a totally different idea of what this road is there for. It doesn't think it's there as like kind of this narrow counter IED supply route. It thinks this road is sort of, this is going to bring the writ of the government into the valley and transform the valley.

And not only that, but we're going to push it way up the back of the valley, and it's going to come down the other side of the valley through these mountain passes, you know, 8,000 feet up. And that's not something. That was a wild dream, essentially. Like I said, I'd like to meet the architect, engineer, and construction company that could do that. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of incredible some of the stuff that the military thought it could accomplish.

But there's... I would choose a different word, but I'll go with that one for today, incredible. I think there's a lot about... the culture of the army and the culture of army leaders that makes it hard to say no makes it hard to recognize when missions are not accomplishable. I mean, there's this paratroop battalion 2503 that you see in Restrepo and that takes up a couple chapters of the book. They have, it's almost like too perfect for, you know, to be believed, but they on their on their PowerPoint slides for all their con ops for operations and their briefings about roads and briefings about outposts and

briefings about handing out beanie babies and whatever, they have, If it's possible, it's been done. If it's impossible, we'll do it. And that really is the attitude that a lot of these units went up there with was no task is too hard for us. We're the United States Army. And in some ways, it takes a very different kind of unit and a very different kind of commander to change the direction that the ship is going. You get in 2008 to 2009, you get this first infantry division battalion that gets sent up there, the blue spaders, who are in no way, shape, or form prepared for what they're getting into.

They're this brand new unit that I was referring to a minute ago, and they have a really hard time, and their battalion commander is not a guy who is on his ways to General Stars, and he knows it. He's a guy who had previously been passed over for Battalion Command, and then gets one because the Army builds a bunch of new battalions, and it, you know, it is so it's good. Sweet.

But he's the first guy who looks at this place and says, no, this isn't doable. which I think is, you know, it says something really fascinating about the Army and the qualities that it kind of, that it looks for in its leaders, right? Is that it takes this guy who is kind of, was on a very different path to look realistically

at the Coringall Valley and what it had become and tell his higher leaders, we need to get out of this place. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that he knew that he could see the end of the tracks in his own personal career, that he felt more empowered or emboldened to speak honestly. I have a hard time believing that the other military leaders at some point at the back of their head

weren't going, son of a bitch. Like I hear what you're saying that we should be doing. However, a rational human being looking at this, are you telling me after you spend a year embedded there in that valley that you're still going to have these aspirations of a road winding through it

up and over the top? I don't think that you actually are. But if you have aspirations of stars, perhaps you are more reserved in the feedback that you give and the way that you portray yourself. Who knows? I can't speak for anybody in that situation. I think you can also believe your own Kool-Aid. You can really, if you think- Well, the Army and the military is going to teach you to think like that. Don't talk to me about what can't be done. Come to me the solutions. And there's a value to that. Right. So let's call it a knife. It can cut you as well as it can

cut something else. So it's a tool that I think perhaps has to be used a little bit more judiciously. because you talk about it in the book. At some point, the U.S. military, I'm not going to say they threw their hands up, but they started realizing, we need to get the fuck out of here. Right. And what year was that? Did it really change? It changes in increments.

The first place that they look at it and they say, wait a minute, we extended too far, is the Wigall Valley north of the patch. So one of the opposite side of the patch from the Koryngal. So in the Koryngal, they've built a bunch of outposts. In the Yagall, they've built a bunch of outposts. And at the same time that they're saying, we're going to pave the road over the top of the mountain in the Coringal, the same unit and the same commanders look at the Weigal and say, I think we have extended a little bit too far here for comfort. This realization comes about after a battle in August 2007, where the farthest, the most remote, most northerly one of these outposts, which is called the ranch house.

It's on this above this little mountainside town called Aran's, you know, just one of these towns that is just looks like it should slide down the mountain. and one morning this outpost gets slammed. And insurgents get inside the wire, like the kind of stuff that you read about from Vietnam, right? They were throwing hand grenades back and forth at each other. Exactly. Inside the base. And miraculously, no Americans are killed in this assault. The A10s arrive and save the day.

But that one is a wake-up call for the 173rd Airborne Brigade leadership at Jalalabad. And they say, okay, let's get out of the Y goal. And correct me if I'm wrong, for whatever. reason they were it took a long time for them to get reinforcements which I think might have been that aha moment right we can't do this anymore there was no road access yeah that's right it was a helicopter only helicopter only outpost yep and even the next nearest outpost Bella um was a helicopter mostly outpost basically um but so what winds up it winds up being much harder to get out of these places than it was to get in and that's a you know a recurring theme of the story is you know early in the

war when there's not a lot of rules and you can go wherever in ATVs and there's There's not IEDs everywhere yet, and the insurgency is just sort of more of a low-key simmering thing. It's really easy to say, okay, we're going to put an outpost up on this mountain way north of the Petch Valley. And, you know, send a company up there, and they do it. And they start building the outpost. But then three years later, it's a lot harder to leave. Yeah. Well, you have a lot of infrastructure.

Right. Generators. Generators. There are treadmills that need to come out. There's, you know, just all kinds of stuff. Typically, the outpost has grown in terms of the size of the garretors. person, because enemy resistance has gotten more, so you need more troops to fight it off. You've had guys die there. Sometimes the outpost is named after one of those guys, and it becomes

something that has to be decided by the four star general back in Kabul, whether we can leave this outpost. And it requires all these resources, you know, it requires all the same kinds in-demand resources that these units are all competing over for their air assaults, Shuna helicopters in particular, are the same resources that you. you need to come out of these outposts. And it's always really hard for these, you know, for division headquarters or wherever to prioritize kind of a retreat from somewhere over all these air assaults that all these battalions in the country are clamoring to do. So it winds up taking forever to get out of any of these places. You know, the ranch house takes, it's like a, you know,

in theory they know they want to come out of it. Then the battle happens. And it's just sort of by the grace of God that no Americans are killed in the battle. Even from then, it takes like another six, seven weeks to close that outpost. Then it takes until the following spring to close the next outpost. And then you see it happen again in the Coringal with the subsequent unit. The subsequent unit reaches the same conclusions about the Coringal. This guy, Colonel Jenkinson, the commander who changed the course of the ship and the Coringal. He spends his whole deployment, you know, yelling to his superiors about, we need to get out of the Coringol, we need to get out of the Coringol.

And it essentially seems to him the whole time like nobody's listening. And in fact, his superiors are listening, but they're not accepting his recommendations. And in part, that's because there is this, by that point, after, you know, three years of U.S. rifle companies living in the Koringal and guys being killed in the Koringal, there's this emotional attachment at that point. There's this, we don't want to admit retreat. You know, this road is paved in blood. We can't just leave. You know, this outpost is named after this paratrooper, or are we going to abandon it to the enemy? And it's, you know, it's the sunk cost fallacy.

And it takes, so it takes only, it takes until the next unit in 2009 to actually get approval to come out of the Coringal. And then it takes until the spring of 2010 to actually do it. Because it takes months and months and months to muster the resources to actually close these outposts. How far did they actually back out? I know you talked about it in the book, because they pulled out of, was it past blessing? So, yeah, so it happens in stages. In 2010, they leave the coringal, but they're still in the patch. Yep.

And again, these valleys, they all lead into the patch, right? Right. It looks like if you imagine a leaf, and it has all these little branch, all these little spines leading into the, you know, the central spine of the leaf. That central spine is the patch, and then all these little arteries coming into it are the tributaries like the Weigal and the Coringal and the Shariac and so on. And so they leave these little tributaries before they leave the patch. By the summer of 2010, when I first visit the patch, it's down to the four main outposts on the patch proper. It's Fobb Blessing, Cop Michigan,

cop Able Main, and Cob Hanukkah Miracle. So cop is combat outposts, fob is forward operating base. Cop being smaller than a Fob. Exactly. They're sort of there not well-defined terms, but Fob is bigger than cop. Yep. And so summer of 2010, what's happened is, you know, this 101st Airborne Division unit that I'm visiting. It's called the 1327 Infantry Battalion, the Bulldogs. It's led by this Colonel Joe Ryan, who's the guy who kind of, I described being really interested by how candid he was about it being time to leave this valley when I talked to him during the visit. The backdrop is they've come in in the spring, and the previous unit has just finally extricated itself. from the coringal after spending all year trying to do it, trying to muster the resources

and get all the approvals and everything to come out of the coringal. But what you see happen in the weeks after the coringal pull out is all that intensity of combat, intensity of enemy attacks that was focused on the coringal outpost and its little sister outposts for strep-ovamoto deep in the coringal valley. Now that those outposts are gone, all that coringali energy and ordinance gets focused on Codont Michigan at the mouth of the valley. It's like water slamming up against the next obstacle. Exactly.

And so what happens now is the war has come to the Petsch Road. You know, in 2006, 2007, the war was up in the tributaries. The fighting was up in the Wigal and the Coringal in these little remote outposts. And they were providing kind of space and time with what these guys would call, military guys would call white space for this development and nation building to happen down on the Petsch Road. You know, there wasn't an American killed on the Petch Road between, I think it was June or July 2006. and then it wasn't until the summer of 2009 that they started taking losses down on the Petch Road itself again. Now by the summer of 2010, that's where all of the fighting is, because that's where all the

U.S. troops have left there. So it's just right along this road, this beautiful, shiny new road that has been built over the preceding years and actually has caused a real kind of economic boom in the Petch Valley, but now the fighting has come down to challenge it. And that's the point where these are no longer, you know, the little, the outposts are longer the center of kind of bubbles of security for the population. Really they are bubbles of danger. They are, these outposts are drawing in the fighting rather than, you know, providing security.

Well, we should talk for a second, too, when you say they're drawing in the fighting, because it is, if you build it, they will come type scenario. The fighting, in your experience and your research there, who was doing the fighting on the other side? Is it the locals? Is it Taliban? Is it people? We should also kind of unpack a little bit, I think, where the past.

Petch is. Maybe we should have done it two hours ago. But to put the flag in the ground, and you can provide much more detail to me, it's on the eastern side of the country. Most people would probably be surprised how close it is to Pakistan. Right. You know, Afghanistan itself, you know, bordered on the east by Pakistan, west by Iran, a bunch of other stands up north, Turkestan, Uzbekistan, what else is up there?

Tajikistan. There's some stands. There's some stands up there. So it's surrounded by all this. but the Pesh itself east of Kabul north of, and it whips up north from Jabad to Abad up the valley. Correct? Right.

Good enough for, to plant the flag in there? So it's about, this place is about 100 miles northeast of Kabul. Not right on the Pakistani border, but pretty close to it. Pretty close, which is why I asked who's doing the fighting, because foot traffic, 100% possible. Right. So, and that's the big question as U.S. forces are, you know, living there over the years, is who are we fighting?

And it's not obvious to most of the U.S. US units that are up there. And some of them have very, in retrospect, wrong impressions of who they were fighting. You know, the assumption, because initially they're not fighting anybody, right? I mean, the first US units that go up there in 2002 don't really get in firefights or anything. I mean, they're hunting for basically fugitives. Yeah. And the Taliban was, you know, the Taliban and al-Qaeda were not really in Kunaar before 2001. It's kind of an important thing to understand about this, right? Like, down in Kandahar,

in Afghanistan. That's the Taliban heartland. They're dug in deep there. It's where they had hosted al-Qaeda and its training camps and everything. But there were no al-Qaeda training camps in Koonar, and there was no real Taliban reach in Koonar. They had kind of, they had gotten control of the provincial capital in the couple of years before 9-11. But out in the patch, they had never managed to bring things under control. They had kind of gotten some local strong men to take their side, but other local strongmen were fighting against them. So it's not like this, was, you know, natural Taliban country. In fact, it's, um, uh, the, there's a, there's a high proportion in Kunar of people who

are Salafi Muslims, which is, uh, a whole different strain essentially, um, of Islam than the de abandhi strain strain that the Taliban comes from. So there are kind of real ideological differences between what people believe up in Kunar and what the Taliban believe. Sometimes this can look like very superficial things. Yeah. Um, it can look like, um, you know, what people do with the Taliban. their hands when they pray, but it's deeper than that.

But didn't the Salafi branch also wasn't Dish or Daesh born out of that as well? Yes, exactly. And so that's, you know, I think we may get to this later if we have time, but there's eventually sort of the, the coda to the story is that eventually, even though this area never really was a natural fit for the Taliban, eventually it becomes quite a natural fit for ISIS. And that's the story of kind of the more recent years in the people. Petch. Yeah, okay. But yeah, so essentially, you know, U.S. troops show up there. There's not an insurgency

right off the bat, right? There's a pretty strong willingness in KUNAR among people to deal with the Americans. But, you know, they make mistakes. They detain the wrong people. They kill the wrong people. There are some really famous instances of it that people still talk about today. And over time, there starts, you know, some people start to take up arms just out of sort of anger at, you know, what they see as abuses by by U.S. troops, mistakes by U.S. troops. And then the Taliban capitalizes on that. So in 2005, it's when you really see the Taliban come into Kuhnir and kind of attach themselves onto this growing local insurgency.

They were winning or fighting a campaign for the hearts and minds just like we were. Right. And there's, you know, one of the key things that you see is, you know, U.S. forces make mistakes. Some of these are just, you know, just, um, he's. to the moment, battlefield mistakes that could happen to any kind of unit. But some of the more, some of the worst things are when U.S. forces essentially get used as proxies by the local allies that they're dealing with. Are you saying that maybe one family would hold a grudge against another and then come in with some hot intel that might be at one of their family enemies compound?

We fought with this in Iraq. It happened in Afghanistan. Yeah, trying to separate the wheat from the chaff of like, is bin Laden really staying at your neighbor's house or three generations ago did he kill your goat? Exactly. And Kunar and the Pesh are rife with examples about this. You know, it happened all over Afghanistan and Iraq as well, but it can be really hard to find good examples of like, oh, actually this was the grudge and this was, you know, and the CIA got told to do this and it believed it and it did this and it was a disaster.

One of these examples, I'll give two examples. One is the town of Iran's where the ranch house battle winds up happening in 2007. When those paratroopers and 10th Mountain guys show up there in 2006, 2007, there's already an American legacy in that valley that they don't know about. Because in 2003, the CIA's local informants had told it, had told the CIA that Gobod and Hekmattyar was staying at a compound near Iran's. Gobindon and Hekmattyar was a former Prime Minister of Afghanistan, very sort of radical Islamist warlord. basically, who was tight with bin Laden and who we know in retrospect, in fact, was the guy who helped facilitate bin Laden's escape from Toribora and escape from Afghanistan.

So the idea that where Hekmatia was, bin Laden might also be, was not crazy. The CIA and JASOC were on the right track with that. But in this instance, on October 30th in 2003, the CIA gets played by its local sources into bombing a place where Hekmatier is not. And in fact, who does live there is the family of a really, prominent person who was exactly the wrong person to, you know, make enemies with. A guy named Mullahulam Rabani, who was this really respected kind of elder figure in Kunar, who in the past had been kind of a peacemaker between Mujahideen factions when they would get at

each other's throats and fight each other. He was kind of the guy that everybody respected up in Noristan province north of the Pesh. But what it seems to have happened is that, you know, the CIA, when it came into Afghanistan, it inherited basically the intelligence apparatus of the Northern Alliance, the northern Afghans that it had been dealing with against the Taliban in the years before 9-11. And this kind of this intelligence apparatus, a lot of it consists of, strangely, people who had been trained by the KGB in the 1980s and 1970s as part of the Soviet-backed communist government's intelligence apparatus.

And what winds up happening in 2003 is two of these KGB trained guys who had been on the communist side during the jihad. They back then had been opponents both of Hekmatia and of Mullahui Ghulom Rabani because both those guys were fighting in the anti-Soviet anti-communist jihad. And they see an opportunity in the fall of 2003 when the CIA is desperate to find out where bin Laden is gone, to find out where Hekmatier is. They see an opportunity to settle a grudge. And this isn't, you know, this isn't, this wouldn't make it through a court of law, but it's a, it's a pretty, you know, I know the names of these two guys. They, they were members of the NDS, the CIA-backed National Directorate of Security. They, you know, people saw them in the valley, you know, around the time. And they, I should make clear that, you know, the CIA and the military, they were really strapped for people they could trust up in these valleys, right? because it's a really linguistically diverse area. Like just having somebody who speaks Waigali, not easy. So if you've got somebody who speaks Waigali,

it's pretty easy to put all your eggs in that guy's basket. And that seems to be what happened in this case. Especially if they're telling you what you want to hear. Right. They're telling you what you want to hear. You've got pressure from the Bush administration back in D.C. to kind of, you know, we've like shit. We've dropped the ball on bin Laden.

We've got to pick it back up. This pressure is filtering down through Secretary of, Rumsfeld. It's filtering down through George Tenet, the CIA director. And it filters down to this decision in October 2003, which actually both diplomatic and military sides recommend against doing this airstrike because they think the intelligence is dubious. But the pressure is such that the CIA does order the airstrike. It kills quite a bunch of women and children in this family. and this kind of becomes the original sin of U.S. involvement in the Wigal Valley. Because, you know, there are no U.S. troops on the ground at that point.

This is just a thing that has happened from the air. And then three years later, when U.S. troops do show up in the Ygal Valley to stay and to build outposts, they don't know anything about this because this wasn't a military operation. It was a CIA operation. All they know about it is what local people tell them, and they don't know whether to believe that, you know, any more than the CIA guys knew whether to believe their sources. So that's one example of kind of U.S. air power being used to settle a score. Another is the Coringal Valley, where, you know, what you see in Restrepo, you just see

U.S. troops and insurgents who are sort of presented as Taliban duking it out. That's what you see. In the background, sometimes you see piles of lumber, and those piles of lumber are pretty important because they're really the reason that the U.S. troops wound up stuck in the Kornigal Valley. And it's this story of U.S. troops being brought in as muscle by people who had a commercial relationship and dispute with Khorengali timber merchants. And then the Khoringalis, in return, bringing in the Taliban as muscle. And then it kind of becoming this arena in which the Taliban in the U.S. duke it out in this place because they're there and it's convenient, but in which

both sides really have been respectively brought in as part of this commercial dispute over this cedar wood that is, you know, very valuable. I didn't realize what role that would play in the economy of the Coringal. Yeah, I mean, I didn't either. You knew a lot of the infantry companies that fought up there. They knew, I mean, they knew, it was inescapable that this was, that this conflict had a lot to do with the cedar. I mean, you could see it all around you. The outpost that they were living at, the Coringall outpost was a lumberyard of one of these, you know, the big timber baron of the valley. And it was very, very clear that the, you know, that the people selling the timber were also the people fighting you.

But the sort of the complexities of what role it was playing took a long time for the military to figure out. It really took them until they had left to figure it out. And in the meantime, it's the dynamic that got them sucked, that sucked them deeper and deeper into the Koringal as they went along. What year did it switch more to an air campaign? Or I should say, not necessarily even air. a remote strike campaign. Yeah, so U.S. troops finally pull out of the patch in 2011. They kind of get sucked back in again later that year.

Yeah, because they tried to do a hand over to the ANA, right? Right. So they try to hand things over to the Afghan National Army in 2011. They, in fact, do that, but then the A&A fall apart. And U.S. forces are brought back out into the patch in kind of a more limited advisory capacity. And it takes them a couple more years to then fully extract themselves, again, having sort of set the A&A up to do a better job. In the meantime, while the conventional forces are doing this on the valley floor, leaving,

going back, leaving again, J-Soc, the Joint Special Operations Command that Dev grew and the Rangers and Delta Force all work for, it starts this air campaign called Operation Haymaker, up in the mountains surrounding the Pesh. And the reason it does this is that there's sort of this irony in the story where, you know, U.S. forces went up to Kunar in the first place, J-S.-C-Suk guys. in 2002, trying to find bin Laden and other al-Qaeda operatives. They didn't find him because they were only passing through. But then in subsequent years, because the U.S. presence in these valleys

snowballs and spirals out of control and all this fighting happens and it draws in the Taliban, then the al-Qaeda guys start to show up because this place becomes like this gladiatorial arena by 2009, 2010 for a very picturesque combat that's great for propaganda videos, was great for kind of proving your bona fides. Much like Iraq. People coming, flowing through Syria or making their way. There are basically anybody who wanted to fight Americans. It wasn't very hard to find him.

Exactly. And there's a Qatari national named Farukal Katani, who he comes there as a young Arab who wants to sort of prove himself as an al-Qaeda operative. And he really does prove himself. He's involved in a lot of fighting against American troops in 2009, 2010. And when Red Squadron of Dev Guru kills Bin Laden and drags a bunch of documents out of his compound, one of the things that we find out that the CIA finds out from the documents, and many of these documents have since been declassified,

which is why I was able to use them for the book, is that at the time of his death, bin Laden and his senior subordinates who were in the Waziristan tribal region where the CIA was hunting them with its own drones, they really were feeling like Waziristan was. not going to be a sustainable place for them to continue running al-Qaeda from because of the CIA drone campaign. We should describe what Waziristan is because it doesn't even show up on a map?

Yeah, north and south Waziristan. There are parts of the federally administered tribal areas. The fatwa. Yeah, exactly. And so let's just call it the Wild West. Sure. Where Pakistan and Afghanistan are both like, yeah, that's ours, but at the same time, we don't want any part of this.

Right. And where the U.S. military can't go. Correct. With very rare exceptions that involve your former. unit. Yeah. But if you do go, stand by, because there were often very committed, very serious individuals, were ready to receive you. But so what this leads to is, you know, during the first term of the Obama administration, the CIA launches this really ferocious drone campaign against al-Qaeda's sanctuaries that it's built up in this part of...

In Waziristan. In Waziristan. And so that's where, you know, this sort of the drone war that we all think of from the Obama era, it's focused on Waziristan. And it really, you know, you You can see in the correspondence between bin Laden and his kind of middle managers that it was really having an effect. And they were very constrained in what they could do, when they could go outside even to, like, practice on the rifle range or something. I mean, they just, they were, they were, you know, it was, it was tough to live there. They were feeling the pressure.

They were really feeling the pressure. And in these documents, you can see them talking about, well, the American military is pulling out of this part of Afghanistan called Kunar, Koonar and Nuristan, where the Pesh Valley is. we've got a guy up there. His name's Farouk. He's a good guy. Maybe we can start relocating some of our leaders up there. And this is revealed in what they call the DocX, the document exploitation, you know,

dump of files that gets pulled out of the Abbottabad compound. And it's very inconvenient, right, for the United States because it's, okay, so just as we have gotten fed up with this horrible part of Afghanistan, we're realizing that actually maybe our number one target on the Afghan side of the border is in it, and maybe he's going to be bringing in other, even higher, bigger fish from the Pakistani side of the border. So at the same time that the conventional military is washing its hands of the patch and leaving, the CIA is telling Jaysock, hey, you guys have to think of some other solution for this kind of wild part of the country with all the forests and everything like that. But it comes at this time when, you know,

for the generals and admirals in charge of J-Soc, they know this place, and they don't like him. Pretty much anybody who's been there doesn't like it. And by this point, they've lost a lot of guys up there, you know? I mean, there have been, not just in combat either, right? There are just, there are endless helicopter crashes just because of the terrain and the trees and the weather. It's just a really, really dangerous place to operate. So there is this scar tissue that's built up in kind of the J-Soc leadership where they say,

okay, we're not leaning back into, you know, ground raids up in, up in the tributaries of the Pech Valley. Ben there done that. It's too dangerous. The juice is not worth the squeeze. Yeah. But so at this moment, it sort of happens to be when, in part because of the CIA air campaign in Pakistan, sort of the technology and tactics of drones and the, you know, the surveillance

and strike complex that uses drones have really matured to a point where. you know, it's still not an all-seeing eye by any means, but it's a lot better than it was early in the war. And it's good enough that the J-Soc leadership decides, okay, this is going to be our tool from here on out in these mountains, is we're going to do this the drone way. Yeah, it certainly does reduce the risk to a lot of the other things that you mentioned. It has real drawbacks, though. Of course it does. And one of these is you kind of, you pretty quickly stop having good intelligence because you're incinerary. the intelligence as you do these strikes.

Yeah, destroy and everything. You're not taking detainees, you're not gathering documents, you're just whacking people. And this, when Operation Haymaker starts, there are some initial really exciting results. Like in 2012, they kill a bunch of genuine Arab al-Qaeda guys up there. Not Faruq al-Qatani, but people who know Faruq al-Katani and work with him and are his associates. And it seems like, man, this is really, okay, Operation Haymaker is really, it is making hay. It's really working. But in the couple of years that follow, it kind of runs out of steam.

They run out of good targets. The guys they're looking for kind of find ways to ensconce themselves deeper and do their communication security better and all this. But the drone campaign keeps going. And it's going after lower and lower level people. It's kind of working its way. It's just hitting what it can hit. It's a hammer searching for nails.

Almost in the same way that the conventional infantry battalions were hammers searching for nails. in the war. Only now there aren't Americans, you know, dying as part of it, which in some ways, you know, from an American perspective, makes it very, much easier to just to keep it going. Yeah. So they're kind of, they're just hitting lower and lower level guys, you know, we can't find the Arabs anymore, so we're going to, you know, go after the local guides who help the Arabs move between valleys. You know, this month, there's, you know, there was a one J-Suk officer who's quoted in the book describes, look, it eventually became. came, if the only guy we could find on SIGant that month was like a machine gunner, then we'd

call him objective box cutter and we, you know, use the nation's resources to kill him. And so there are these kind of diminishing returns with Operation Haymaker. But eventually they do get their guy. It just takes a long time. In 2016, in the final weeks of the Obama administration, they do kill Faruk al-Katani, who had been kind of a real sort of high-level source of alarm among, you know, the CIA deputy director at the time was very alarmed about Faruq al-Katani. There were hints that he might have been using these mountains north of the Petch to bring in people from Pakistan to train, not just to fight in the war around there, but to do international attacks with, which was the,

you know, that's the thing that makes any individual al-Qaeda figure rise to the attention of the national level. The national level. Was it a haymaker strike that got him? I think by that point, they were no longer calling it haymaker, but it's a continuation of the same operation. Yeah. I was shocked when I was reading the book at how many of those strikes actually occurred. The frequency with which they were able to metaphorically pull the trigger on that. Yeah, I mean, 2013 was the peak. 2013 was the peak, and it was really, it was like, it was the same pace really that at the height of the CIA campaign in Pakistan. It was like, it was a real air campaign. It wasn't all, it wasn't necessarily all drones doing the strikes.

I mean, there are F-15s and F-16s involved in this also, but it was a real air campaign that J-Soc, that Rangers and Seals were running, which is something that, you know, I think can be strange for people who have sort of conceptions of what special operations forces do and what they look like, They kind of are based on like Black Hawk Down and the Bin Laden Raid and stuff like that. Well, they still do those things. They still do those things. In that particular instance, that's not what was called for. But a huge component of what they have done over the past decade in particular is run these air campaigns. And that's, you know, that's a large part of what these, you know, Ranger Regiment and SEAL Team 6 headquarters were doing in Afghanistan during these years was, you know, was finding these targets and ordering airstrikes on them.

So explain to me the evolution. How do you say it? Is it Daesh? Daesh? And how they came to come or how they came to be in the Pesh? Yeah. So I'm just going to call it ISIS. Perfect. You know, for simplicity here. So we were talking a little earlier about how the people in Kunar and the Pesh, they have this, there's this different religious flavor to them than the Taliban has. And the religious flavor that exists up in Kunar is Salafi flavor. So it's kind of like real. like we want to exist on principles of from the time of the prophet, Islam. And it actually was influenced by Saudis because, you know, as far as the Petch is from Saudi Arabia, a fair number of Saudi fighters had come and fought there during the jihad against the Soviets in the 80s. And also a fair number of Kunari commanders in the Mujahideen had sought Saudi money and Saudi backing.

And as part of that had adopted this Saudi-style solifism. This is also where the Daesh ideology comes from. So what happens is you've got all these local commanders running around Kunar who they've made alliances of convenience with the Taliban because they're both fighting the Americans. They may even have formally joined the Taliban in some cases. But they're not Taliban like, you know, Kandahar, Taliban, Heartland Taliban. And when in 2015, 2016, the Islamic State arrives on the global scene, and they sort of, it's a natural opportunity to raise the black flag of the Islamic State, lower the white flag of the Taliban that you were only flying out of convenience, and kind of embrace this movement that is more your speed for some of these people. So you see sort of small-time local commanders who had been fighting U.S. troops, you start seeing them appear on like Treasury Department, you know, ISIS sanctions lists. And it's this strange thing because it's, on the one hand, ISIS is a, it's a global terrorist organization like Al Qaeda.

But on the other hand, the particular form that it takes in Kunar in the Petch is much more of just kind of a rebranding of a local insurgency. It's the same old guys that we've been fighting up there now calling themselves ISIS. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, though. The Taliban and ISIS don't see eye to eye. They do not. Not at all. And so what winds up happening is in the more recent years of the conflict, I mean, since the U.S., since U.S. troops left on the ground, it's been this three-way struggle between the government, the Taliban, and ISIS, all fighting each other.

and the Taliban and the government sometimes reaching accommodations with one another to fight against ISIS. And it gets weird enough that so in February 2020, the Trump administration made the Doha agreement with the Taliban to allow or withdrawal from Afghanistan.

And that's basically the framework under which U.S. troops are now as we speak, tearing down Bogram-Hare-filled and withdrawing from Afghanistan. But in the months leading up to the Doha agreement, there was this weird thing going on where at the same time that the J-Soc task force and U.S. air power were hammering the Taliban in every other part of the country to try to kind of bring them to the table in Doha, get them to agree to favorable terms. In Kunar, in some cases, they were using their same old

intelligence collection tools not to strike the Taliban, but to figure out what individual Taliban commanders needed at a low level against ISIS and then deliver that to them. So what you're saying is, to a degree, removed, perhaps U.S. weapons of war aligned with the Taliban to fight ISIS. Yeah, I mean, the Rangers, the Rangers at Bogram, they joked that the particular little Team East, they called it, the little cell that was doing the, you know, the targeting up in Kunar. They jokingly called it the Taliban Air Force. And they joked that the, I can't even wrap my head around this. It was one of it's spoiler alert. This is one of the last things he talks about in the book.

When I read that, I had to reread it a few times. Like, okay, wait a minute. We are now providing air cover to a degree to the Taliban, an organization that has fought the United States tooth and nail in the Pesh Valley for a decade and a half coming up on two decades. Okay. You can imagine this kind of, you know, offering a queasy feeling to the Ranger NCO in the, in the jock who, you know, who's spent his whole career fighting the Taliban, right?

Yeah. But, you know, when I was interviewing guys about this development as I was finishing up the book, I mean, you know, one of the things that one of these, one of these rangers said was, hey, like, look, everybody would like to be out there fighting the war still. But we also recognize that it hasn't been working. Yeah. And that, you know, there may be some more creative solutions required. Now, whether that's a good solution or not, I think there's a big gamble on sort of which is the greater danger to the United States.

The Afghan branch of ISIS, which it's a branch of a global terrorist organization, but it really is this kind of very local, localized flavor of that terrorist organization. Or is it the Taliban, which continues to host al-Qaeda just like it always has? Is there an option C? Because option A and B both suck. Right. Yeah. I mean, yeah, option A and B both suck is certainly the situation that we're in in Afghanistan, right, that the United States, that both the Trump and Biden administrations have faced is that, I mean, we can continue what we're doing, which isn't working, obviously. Or try something new.

Try something new. That something new may make it much harder to strike anybody inside the country. Yeah. What was it about the patch that got you in a place where you wanted to write a book about it? Of all the places in Afghanistan, why there? It was, I mean, the combination of just how kind of unique the fighting was. The interesting kind of moment that I first visited at where it was U.S. troops are, you know, spreading out and being aggressive everywhere else in the country, but they're kind of recognizing that this same strategy has failed here in this part of the country. And that was kind of a, you know, a dichotomy that I was interested in.

I mean, initially it wasn't that I wanted to write a book about it. It was initially, it was just like, I wanted to find out how each of those outposts got there. Like, how did Kot Michigan get there? How did Fob Blessing get there? How did the Asada Bad Base get there? Because when you visited in 2010, nobody could really tell you. You know, I mean, as far as the company commander at Kot Michigan is concerned, or the first sergeant or whoever, outpost was there when they got there. It was there when the company commander and first sergeant before them got there. Pretty sure it was there when the company commander and first sergeant before them got there. And beyond that, I mean, it kind of doesn't matter to the execution of the job that they're doing, which is a difficult enough to ask on its own without thinking about how did this get, you know,

doing a research project about how did this get started. But that's what I wanted to do was figure out how and why each of these outposts got built. And it wound up being this much more complicated and interesting story than I was expecting or anticipating in terms of, you know, the role of the CIA and J-Soc and trying to figure out where bin Laden had gone. And then the way that that almost with a mind of its own, just snowballed into bigger and bigger and more ambitious versions of the mission. What do you think it looks like? We'll talk about Afghanistan as a whole in a minute,

but just in the Petch Valley, in that area as the U.S. winds down their presence and leaves. Do you think they can hold it on their own? So it's interesting. I mean, in some ways, I think the Petch always is a few years, a couple years ahead of everywhere else in Afghanistan. U.S. forces really have already wound down their presence in that part of the country. They've been out for some time.

They did not go back in in any kind of substantial way during the 2017 to 18 to 19, you know, Trump administration mini-surge. So I think we're in some ways we're already seeing the post-U.S. presence play out in this part of the country. And in this part of the country, the government troops are holding on. Now, the question is, is that because of very unique circumstances, in Kunar that are not applicable elsewhere in the country, one of them being the presence of ISIS, right? So in recent years, the Taliban and the government, even as they are at each other's throats all over the rest of the country, they have found common cause against ISIS and

the Pesh. ISIS in the Pesh has kind of waned. It's largely been defeated and gone underground again. So I think the question is kind of will this, you know, will that kind of quiet and calm that's been present in the Pesh in the past couple years, will there, will there, that remain? Will the Taliban, I mean, does the Taliban care about the Pesh? We're going to see in the, you know, in the coming year kind of what the Taliban prioritizes as it retakes territory, right? Like right now, there's a huge Taliban offensive going on in northern Afghanistan, a part of the country that for most of the U.S. presence there was pretty quiet and not really a place that a lot of U.S. troops did a lot of fighting. But now it's, you know, really ferocious fighting

going on up there. What is Kuhnar in the Pesh to the Taliban? I don't know. Maybe in the big picture it's not much to them. And it may be that for that reason the Pesh kind of gets spared. That again, maybe not. I mean, in March, there was a big attempt to take one of the district centers in the Pesh, Chabadara District Center. So, yeah, and we'll see. What are your thoughts on the withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan? Sam? I mean, it's hard to watch, not because I don't want U.S. troops to leave, but just because this is kind of the world that I've spent my adult life immersed in and watching. And it's almost, it's hard for me. You know, I hear from Rangers who are part of the, you know, basically

the exit crew at Bagram Airfield. And that's just kind of mind-boggling to me to think about Bogger-Merefield being torn down. Are they turned it down right now? Yeah. Yeah, they're just about out. I mean, all that's left now is Bogger-Marefield, which they've got, you know, the deployed Ranger Battalion is sitting around watching get torn down. And then there's the embassy complex in the, in the, and the, in the, in the,

Hamid Karzai International Airport in Kabul. That's what it's down to. They closed Jalalabad a couple weeks ago. They closed fobbed wire down in Helmand, a couple, you know, over the past couple weeks. So it's really, it's in, it's in its final weeks here. Have they closed Kandahar? Yep. Candahar's gone.

I wonder what they did with the Timmy Hortons, and the fucking Domino's pizza. That had been gone for a while. That had been gone for a while. I think that's actually the only Tim Hortons I've ever been to is the one at the boardwalk on Kandahar Airfield. Oh, shit. We don't have time to get into all the food offerings

at the Outback Steak House and Kandakar. Yeah, even though there wasn't an outback people. I'm joking. It was TGI Fridays. What do you think the future will hold for Afghanistan? Like once the U.S. is up and out, Do you think it'll go back largely to the way it was, even after almost two decades of us being there? I don't know. I mean, I think it's a really unknown quantity how well the Afghan security forces are going to hold on once they really don't have U.S. air power backing them up.

I mean, they've had sort of a lot of test cases, but it's not real till it's real in terms of they're just not being air power to back you up. Right now, things don't look good. I mean, there are districts falling in northern Afghanistan like crazy. there the Taliban is sort of at the gates of some of some cities. I don't, you know, I don't know that that's a foregone conclusion that it's going to turn out that way, that the Taliban is going to just roll into these cities. I mean, there are definitely our Afghan security forces that are fighting really, really hard, as well as ones that are quitting. I mean, there's an Afghan commando unit that in a district called Dalatabad in northern Afghanistan

this past week, they, you know, it's a unit that was, you know, U.S. trained, backed for all these years, really good unit that fought and took really ferocious losses. They were sent in to take this district. They failed. They lost either 21 or 26 guys killed, including their commander, a very charismatic figure who was well known in Kabul. So, I mean, there certainly are Afghan units that are going to fight really, really hard. I think the bigger question will be kind of how does the government use them?

Does it use them well? Does it waste, you know, or does it waste these lives? Yeah. What are you going to write about next? I've got a project underway that I'd be interested in talking to you more about, but that's about basically it's some stuff that came out of the book, but they didn't really fit into the book about ways that organizational culture of different military units has been affected by the war in Afghanistan. Interesting. The wear and tear of it. How, you know, just the wear and tear of it parallels to the Australian Barreton Commission report in terms of That was the SAS, SBS guys? Yeah, their Australian SAS regiment that seems like it's going to have some guys charged with murder.

Yeah. Yeah, so I've got a project that I'm working on that's going to be kind of about that. I mean, culture in different military units, what leads to war crimes, what leads to resilience against war crimes, that kind of thing. That is a very murky topic. Yeah, I can say that again, yeah. Fuck. but fascinating at the same time. I would love to, yeah, we can talk offline about that if you'd like to.

The book was great, man. Thanks, I really appreciate it. How long has it been out? It came out in March. Okay. It was going to come out in October. Real good job. Release a book in a pandemic. Actually, maybe that's the best time ever to release a book.

Well, it's funny. It was supposed to come out in October, but then there were these pandemic publishing delays because of like, there could only be so many people in the publishing warehousing and this and that. And I was like really pissed and upset that. it got delayed, you know, when it was like, you know, six weeks from coming out. But then it got, the publication date instead became March. And thinking of like the context that it comes out in, would I rather that it came out, you know, four weeks ahead of, you know, the most contentious

presidential election ever in which Afghanistan was a non-issue? Or would I rather that it came out, you know, essentially four weeks ahead of the Biden administration coincidentally announcing the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the country after all this time. The timing has been good. I mean, The book ends, you know, basically a year before that. It ends with the Doha agreement in 2020. Yeah. But I think there are, and there are a lot of unique things about the patch that don't apply in other places in Afghanistan. But the, you know, the winding down of U.S. involvement there and questions about the future of U.S. involvement there have definitely made people interested and have drawn, you know, drawn some attention to it.

And it's been really gratifying to hear, you know, to get feedback, both from guys who fought in the patch and are reading this book. guys who fought in the patch and are giving copies of it to their dads or their wives or loved ones to kind of help explain what their war was about. But then also it's been fascinating to see people who never set foot in the patch, but who see a lot of residents with other places that they fought in Iraq and Afghanistan that it couldn't look more different, but where you see some of the same dynamics play out and where they see their wars reflected in these pages as well. It's a great book, man.

I can't thank you enough for making the travel out here too. really dig in on it. I actually learned more about that area by reading the book than I did in my time spent over there because like I said, I'm not exactly sure where I was most of the time. Right. Sometimes I was very positive. Other times it's just like, hey, wake me up and we're on short final. So where can people find you? And the book. Yes, so you can follow me on Twitter at, it's my handle is Wesley S. Morgan. The book, you can buy anywhere. You know, buy it on Amazon. I I prefer that you buy it at your local bookstore or bookshop.org is a good venue for, you know, for buying books kind of through independent bookstores. By the way, it's called The Hardest Place.

The Hardest Place, the American Military, Adrift in Afghanistan's Petch Valley. I thought of that title. I'm pretty happy with that title. I like that title very much. Thanks. Yeah. Random side note, how did you meet or come into contact with Jake, the guy who connected us? He'd read the book and he sent me a note. He said, you know, I liked the book.

The power of connectivity. Yeah, exactly. Perfect. Yeah. I'll let you close it out, man. Closing thoughts by Wesley. I mean, it's been a weird time to have a, you know, a book that I worked on for a decade come out, right as U.S. troops are coming out of Afghanistan and Afghanistan is kind of back in the national eye. It's, in some ways, it's, you know, couldn't have been more perfect timing. I mean, if I'd closed the book out like two years ago, there would really not be a very satisfying kind of conclusion to it at all. In some ways, there still isn't, though. I mean, the book, the book ends with basically

in some ways the same question now that the Bush administration faced in the immediate aftermath of 9-11, which is who's the enemy and how seriously do we take them, right? You know, we've got al-Qaeda's still in Afghanistan. We know that because they get rolled up by Afghan special forces units embedded who, and they want, you know, that are targeting the Taliban. So al-Qaeda is still there. The Taliban hasn't broken from them. The question is kind of how serious are they? and what kind of al-Qaeda are they, which may seem like a weird question, but I think is, um, you know, one of the lessons of, of the book in Afghanistan is not all al-Qaeda is created equal. Like Abu Qlaas, the Egyptian guy that they chased for years, when they caught him, I mean, he basically turned out to be an al-Qaeda green beret. He was, he was in there training and advising local forces. He wasn't the big international boogeyman. Yeah. For Rukh al-Katani, he's dead, you know, never going to really know what he was, but he seemed to be more of the international al-Qaeda flavor. Um, So the question is going to be, you know, the Al-Qaeda guys that are up there, what kind are they?

And it's going to be a harder question than ever before to answer because we're losing, and in many cases have already lost, the means of intelligence collection that we've relied on over the past 20 years to keep abreast of that question. Hopefully we don't find ourselves back there in the next 20. Yeah. Maybe leave it on that. We'll see. Awesome. Thanks for your time, man. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you.

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