Part 28 (2/2)

He sighed and rubbed his temples with one hand, the other hand on the steering wheel. ”Liv, if I don't come home-which won't happen, but if I don't make it-all I want is for you to be happy,” he said, speaking slowly. ”That's all I want. I don't want you to be sad without me. And you are going to have to be strong, honey.

”And one day I want you to have kids, live in a nice home,” he told her. ”Don't wait too long to have kids. Because I know you, honey, you will wait till you're in your thirties, and then you'll be too old. More importantly, I want you to find someone who will treat you better than I do and better than I ever have, because you deserve that, Liv,” he said. ”You deserve someone who is going to treat you like a queen, baby, and if he doesn't, then he doesn't deserve you. But most of all, Liv, I just want you to be happy, baby. As long as you're happy, then I'll be happy.”

Olivia was stunned. He'd obviously given this speech a great deal of thought. Hardt had been just an infant when his own parents got divorced, and he'd always wanted to have the family-a mom, a dad, a kitchenful of kids-that he personally had never experienced. But even more than that, he wanted Olivia to have all of that. The only response she could think of was to correct him. ”First of all, I don't want kids right away,” she said, ”and I definitely won't want a husband or a boyfriend for a long time!” She paused. Was she really contemplating a world without her husband? She was only twenty-two; he was twenty-three. She found it utterly impossible to imagine herself simply moving on, starting over. ”I really hate talking about this,” Olivia declared. But he wouldn't let it go: he kept repeating how much he wanted her to be happy, how he wanted her to have the family he'd never gotten to have.

Hardt had joined the military only because he couldn't figure out what else to do with his life, and Olivia's mother was encouraging him to find a way to support his wife-not a particularly surprising suggestion for a mother-in-law to make. As it turned out, though, he liked the action and the thrills, and he was an excellent soldier. Whenever the action started, he and Josh Kirk were always the first ones suited up and out the door. But Hardt didn't like Afghanistan, and it was a tougher deployment for him than Iraq. He and Kirk might be quick to action, but the truth was that Joshua Hardt was scared on this tour, and fundamentally less gung-ho than he had been in the past. He didn't like Captain Porter; he didn't like Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown. He was a Red Platoon team leader, and he felt that his troops were being neglected. It made life difficult for him, and it made him long for his wife in a desperate way. Right now, he just wanted to go home and be a normal husband and have a nine-to-five job.

To: Olivia Fr: Joshua hi baby i miss you so much, im so bored and going insane here i just want to be home with you. i think about you all the time and cant wait to see you. we just filled out our leave time and im still on for feb. it might change but for now thats when i will be able to see your beautiful face. i love you so much, i was trying to sleep but i couldnt stop thinking of you. i want to do something when i come home something with just me and you and mean it we always talk about doing something but we never do so this time we will. G.o.d i had so much to say but now im drawing a blank. i just miss you so much baby your my world honey and all i want to do is wake up to your beautiful body and that unbelievable smile of yours. that smile has gotten me since the day i met you and will never go away. anyways i miss you so much and hope your doing alright and dont worry we will be together soon

Afghanistan had consumed Joshua Hardt's selflessness, the best part of him. He didn't have as much access to phones and computers. His insecurities feasted on his psyche. Once, he called Olivia and she didn't answer-she'd left on vacation to spend some time with her parents. He had trouble understanding how her world could go on without him there. Intellectually, Hardt knew that she needed a break from working full time as a preschool teacher while also attending school at Colorado State University at Pueblo. But even so, he felt resentful that she could even think of relaxing without him. ”You have it easy,” he told her in a surly voicemail in which he chastised her for not answering his call when she knew he was in a war zone, knew that he could die at any moment. ”You don't give a s.h.i.+t about me,” he said in another of the many nasty messages he left her while she was away with her parents. ”I'm busting my a.s.s, and you're having fun.”

”Baby we just got [off] the phone tonight after patching up another argument, which of course was my fault,” he wrote her by hand on July 24, 2009. he wrote her by hand on July 24, 2009.

I love you so much and I always worry about you. It's hard to explain, baby. I had guard tonight and it felt like time stood still for me.... Please don't get any ideas about leaving because I need you so much.... I truly want you to have fun. I just get nervous and really weird and become this jerk. I'm trying to control it but it's hard it's something that will work in time.... I love you so much honey. Your my angel. An angel that keeps me safe and watches over me and protects me.

Joshua and Olivia Hardt were far from alone in their struggle to keep a marriage alive with one spouse in a war zone. But sometimes it sure felt that way.

By the time Brown and 3-61 Cav arrived in country, the Taliban didn't just control the road near Combat Outpost Keating; they also owned the one around Forward Operating Base Bostick at Naray. The jingle trucks that had once made their way north every two weeks in a relatively casual convoy, unarmed, now had to run a much more sinister gauntlet, laid down by an unholy alliance of insurgents and local gangsters who stopped the convoys at random checkpoints to exact ”tolls.” Often the drivers would simply flee, leaving their vehicles to be picked apart like dying cattle in a desert. Fuel trucks were a particularly coveted target. Contractors began paying the Taliban not to attack them as they delivered their goods, but locals ultimately refused to drive to Forward Operating Base Bostick without a U.S. escort them both ways.

Brown felt besieged. His home base, FOB Bostick, was itself rarely attacked-it was an island of security-but his squadron was fighting for its life whenever its men went beyond the wire. In Naray, he had only one platoon of eighteen guys and a single company commander-and that area was the only one in his larger area of operations with any prospect of success, any likelihood of being worth the fight. Trying to determine how best to manage the situation, Brown reached out via email to previous commanders. Officers from 1-91 Cav insisted that everything had been great until 6-4 Cav replaced them and screwed it all up; the officers of 6-4 Cav said that things had been going to h.e.l.l anyway, and that 1-91 Cav had just gotten out when the getting was good.

It didn't really matter to Brown whose fault it was, and anyway, he imagined that the truth lay somewhere in the middle. An influx of American development funds intended to help locals pave the main road had ended up in the hands of Taliban fighters who ”taxed” local contractors through extortion. With that source of income, combined with the proceeds from an alliance with timber gangsters, the Taliban was offering young local men a fairly lucrative way of life. Brown certainly admired the work Kolenda had done with the Hundred-Man Shura, but ultimately that coalition had been a fragile one and would not survive Kolenda's departure. The Afghan authorities had made no meaningful effort to take over his role or to empower a capable government official to try.

To Brown, Kolenda's success seemed evidence that a gifted American commander could make himself a ”viceroy” in Afghanistan, at least for a while. But that history was almost irrelevant to the immediate needs of 3-61 Cav: Brown, with an insufficient number of troops, was now confronted by a major Taliban surge in Kunar Province. In late June, some of his soldiers with C Troop were out on a mission with ANA soldiers when they were ambushed. The ANA commander-without question the best officer in the 6th Kandak, or Afghan National Army battalion-was sprayed by shrapnel from an RPG. Evacuated from Forward Operating Base Bostick, he never came back. A couple of weeks after that, a platoon from C Troop was ambushed in the same spot; the twenty-nine-year-old platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Cla.s.s Jay Fabrizi of Seffner, Florida, was killed74, and several others wounded. In August, Brown sent troops to meet up with a convoy of twenty-three fuel tankers headed to Naray from Forward Operating Base Fenty, but by the time the convoy reached the linkup point where 3-61 Cav would a.s.sume security, only one tanker was left; the rest either had refused to leave Combat Outpost Monti, which lay in between Forward Operating Bases Fenty and Bostick, or had been attacked and burned on the way. During the next convoy security mission, Fabrizi's replacement, Sergeant First Cla.s.s Johnny Weaver, was wounded by RPG shrapnel, as were two other men, one of whom ended up losing a leg.

By the middle of August, Forward Operating Base Bostick was running terrifyingly low on fuel for its helicopters. Colonel George authorized the closure of Observation Post Hatchet, in Kunar Province, to free up a platoon, and he and the Support Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Law, agreed to start running convoys at night, with air support, surveillance drones, and U.S. military accompaniment.

All of this-the ambushes, the casualties, the extraordinary risk-meant that Brown was even more anxious to close the smaller outposts, including Combat Outpost Keating, whose closure would allow Black Knight Troop to come to Kunar to join his fight. It also meant that throughout the summer, he focused on the areas where his men were dying, and not on Combat Outpost Keating.

There had been little preparation made at Camp Keating for the August 20 elections beyond receiving the ballots by air a few days beforehand and planning patrols to keep the enemy from attacking the voting location at the Afghan National Police station. The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds left early in the morning and set up at the Northface, high and low, to watch over the camp and the police station. Red Platoon guarded the perimeter. The Americans didn't see a single person visit the voting booths. Not one.

Truth was, they didn't really care. Troops from 3-61 Cav were more interested in the enemy's B-10 recoilless rifle than they were in this anemic version of the free and fair exercise of democracy. As the sun began to set, the polling station closed. The troops figured that about four people had voted, yet somehow, as they were later told, all of the ballots had been filled out. Even fis.h.i.+er were the numbers in Barg-e-Matal, where U.S. forces counted only 128 voters, though around twelve thousand votes were said to have been ”cast.”

The initial results had Karzai winning with 54 percent of the vote, though the election was immediately a.s.sailed as being fraught with fraud. In what was now familiar Afghan fas.h.i.+on, the organization charged with keeping the process clean and fair-the Independent Elections Commission-was itself accused of corruption. An American diplomat working for the United Nations in Kabul, Peter Galbraith, would be fired by U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki Moon after he later accused his boss, U.N. special envoy Kai Elde, of covering up Karzai's rampant fraud; Galbraith estimated that almost a third of the votes for Karzai were phony. Karzai was hardly alone: Brown heard that allies of Karzai's opponent Abdullah Abdullah had stuffed ballot boxes as well, and paid off elders in Naray to deliver thousands of votes for him. (As was their wont, the Naray elders were said to have taken the cash from Karzai's opponents but then actually voted for Karzai, who subsequently began an expensive construction project to build a three-story mosque in Naray.) The election fraud meant less to the men of Combat Outpost Keating than did the further evidence provided by the ANA soldiers, around this time, that they were worthless-or, as per Jonathan Hill, ”garbage.” They refused to follow orders during an election-day mission to take care of that recoilless rifle, though this was merely the latest angry note in the cacophonous earful Brown would get every time he talked to most of his captains: the Afghan troops wouldn't patrol, they wouldn't share information, and when pushed by the Americans, they would say ”You're not my commander!” and walk off in a huff. The Afghans' weaknesses were exacerbated during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which in 2009 began on Friday, August 21 and would end on the evening of Monday, September 21. During Ramadan, Muslims attempt to achieve spiritual rejuvenation by reading the Quran and abstaining from food and drink during daylight hours. Hungry and thirsty, hot in the late-summer sun, the ANA troops were exhausted and irritable. They would refuse to patrol, making an already inferior platoon completely combat-ineffective. Their attrition and AWOL rates were disastrously high through the summer and got even worse during Ramadan. However much the ANA troops endeared themselves to G.o.d, or Allah, during that period, they did not win any friends among the Americans at the outpost.

”So what are you doing there?” Amanda Gallegos asked Sergeant Justin Gallegos over the phone. ”Are you building schools?”

Gallegos laughed. His ex-wife was so naive sometimes.

They were from two different worlds. When they met, she was a student at the University of Arizona, an Alaskan transplantturnedsorority girl with a Honda. He was a big, brash local employed by a water vending-machine company, who had lost two older brothers, both killed while engaged in gang-related activity. He did not care a lick what others thought of him, his decisions, or his behavior. Justin showed Amanda a side of Tucson that excited her, took her to parties full of drugs and violence. They clicked. However tough he acted toward the rest of the world, he was soft and sweet with her. Yet as soon as it became clear that they were going to stay together, Amanda tried to whip him into shape. She told him he had a choice, boots or books-the Army or college. He chose the former. And right around then, Amanda got pregnant. Their son, Macaidan, was almost five now.

Sergeant Armando Avalos and Sergeant Justin Gallegos. (Photo courtesy of Amanda Marr) (Photo courtesy of Amanda Marr)

Gallegos returned from his second deployment to Iraq with posttraumatic stress disorder. He had always been aggressive, sometimes a jerk, but this was something else. If anyone looked at Amanda ”wrong,” he'd become irate. He promised her he'd take a mood stabilizer, told her a physician's a.s.sistant had prescribed him Zoloft, but that was a lie; instead he drank too much, became destructive, went to jail for fighting. Every night ended in violence of some sort. Amanda barely recognized him anymore; he was like a pit bull locked in a bas.e.m.e.nt, and all anyone had to do was open the door to unleash the fury.

Gallegos was a loyal friend, but he was a nasty drunk and enjoyed causing trouble, and his Army buddies-fellow Red Platoon soldiers Tom Rasmussen and Stephan Mace, sometimes Sergeant Eric Harder from the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds-weren't the kind of friends who helped a guy stay on the straight and narrow. One night, while drinking at a bar before the unit's deployment to Afghanistan, Gallegos clumsily spilled his beer. The waitress came over, bent down to wipe up the mess, and got the rest of Gallegos's beer poured on her head for her trouble. The bouncers escorted him to the parking lot, but he made his way back through the kitchen, sat back down at the same table, and had another beer. It took probably twenty minutes for the bouncers to figure out that he had made it back in; they threw him out again.

Harder had his own crooked story. Growing up in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, he never knew who his father was. He was raised by his mother, with his grandpa Jerry Carlson-his mother's stepdad, a Korean War veteran-teaching him how to be a man. When Eric was thirteen, Grandpa Carlson died of throat cancer. That was the teenager's first encounter with death before he joined the Army. It wouldn't be his last.

When he was eighteen, Harder talked about joining the military with his close friend Matt Logan. One summer's day, the two of them decided to jump into the St. Croix River, separating Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was illegal to jump in on the Minnesota side, but driving the ten minutes to get to the Wisconsin side was a ha.s.sle, and once there, you had to pay for parking-so the Minnesota side it was. Harder jumped first-it was about a thirty-five-foot drop-and began swimming. Logan followed him. The undertow was strong, and it pulled on both of them, but Harder managed to escape it and swim to the Wisconsin side. When he clambered out and looked back, he saw that Logan was only halfway across the river.

”I'm f.u.c.king drowning,” Logan called. Harder thought he was joking at first, but then he realized his friend was legitimately having difficulty keeping his head above water. Harder jumped back in and swam to him, but it was too late: Logan had been sucked under. His body was found three days later. Harder had a motorcycle-a blue-and-white Ninja 500-and on the way back from Logan's funeral, distracted, he hit the back corner of a car and messed up his knee. He did stucco work for the next five years. Then he snapped out of his stupor and joined the Army in 2005.

Physically, Gallegos and Harder were men, but emotionally, they were something else. Was it because of the PTSD, the camaraderie, their youth? Amanda didn't know, but after a while she didn't care. She divorced Justin, though she sometimes hoped it might be just a temporary thing, until he got his act together.

Then his orders came in to go to Afghanistan.

”You know that I'm not coming home from this one, right?” Gallegos said to her.

Amanda would laugh; it was ridiculous. But Gallegos would say things to Macaidan, preparing him to be the man of the house, and not just for the year of his deployment. ”When I'm not here, you take care of your mother,” he'd say to his four-year-old son.

”This is not going to go well,” Gallegos told his ex-wife. ”We're going to be in a f.u.c.king valley.”

She'd laugh. They tried to have a sense of humor about things; it was the only way they'd gotten through his two previous deployments. ”It sounds like a horrible idea,” she said.

”Yeah, it's awesome,” he replied.

And then he went there. He'd email her photos of the fishbowl he now called home. ”Doesn't this look like the perfect situation?” he'd write. But it wasn't funny. When he used to call from Iraq, there were times when he'd seemed perfectly relaxed. This was different. At Combat Outpost Keating, he was always on edge. Gallegos told Amanda that he'd had a lot of bad days in Iraq, ”but here,” he added, ”it's all all bad days.” bad days.”

Sergeant Vernon Martin was stressed out, and Specialist Damien Grissette didn't really understand why. They were on guard duty together, and Martin was trying to explain to him about something deep and powerful, something incredibly important that was going on in his life, but at the same time, he wouldn't say precisely what it was.

”I need to get right with the man upstairs,” Martin kept saying to Grissette, over and over.

The two men had first bonded at Bagram Air Base; they were on their way to Combat Outpost Keating and saw a number of caskets on their way out. Inside were the remains of the Americans killed at Bari Alai on May 1. Martin, Grissette, Specialist Ian MacFarlane, and Specialist Andrew Stone were all support staff-mechanics, water, and maintenance. The sight of those caskets badly spooked them. ”We're all going to get out of here together,” they pledged to one another.

Sergeant Vernon Martin. (Photo courtesy of Brittany Martin) (Photo courtesy of Brittany Martin)

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