If you missed it over the holiday break, Greg Jaffe’s Washington Post Dec. 27 dispatch from Afghanistan’s Pech Valley makes for riveting, horrifying and ultimately depressing reading. It’s a story about young Americans fighting, and dying, with little faith in their commanders and scant belief that their mission makes any sense. Here’s a grueling excerpt:
On the morning of their third day in the mountains, Broyles’s soldiers discovered a building full of combat medical supplies and Taliban weapons. Broyles’s platoon, dirty, filthy and tired, took cover in buildings that the Afghans used to keep their animals. Goat and chicken manure covered the floor….
Pfc. Christian Warriner, 19, of Mills River, N.C., sat just outside the building on guard duty.
“After all the [expletive] I have survived I’ll be pissed if I die today,” he drawled, according to Spec. David Jones, the platoon medic.
“If you are dead you won’t be pissed,” Jones said. “You’ll be [expletive] dead.”
A few hours later, as many as 150 Taliban fighters struck back at the Americans. Warriner was shot in the forehead. One of his fellow soldiers stuffed the wound with gauze and called for help….
After about 45 minutes, Warriner died. On the radio, Petrosky and Broyles heard reports that their sister platoon had suffered four more dead. In three days of fighting, six Americans and three Afghan soldiers had been killed….
Later that evening Petrosky huddled under a blanket with Pfc. Dustin Riedemann, who had stuffed gauze into Warriner’s wound. Riedemann kept talking about the look in Warriner’s eyes after he was shot….
He was angry at the Afghan soldiers who had left most of the fighting on the mountain to the Americans, and he was furious at his commanders. No matter how many Taliban his platoon killed, it wasn’t worth the life of any more of his friends. “Why are we still here?” he recalled saying. “We should have been off this mountain two days ago.”
The story makes for a fitting, if grim complement to the also riveting documentary Restrepo, which I can’t recommend highly enough for anyone interested in, or opining about, the Afghanistan war.