Target Practice
The first rocket attack unnerved me to the point that, afterwards, I questioned if I would be able function in my new role as a paid target. A target is a thing — tangible or otherwise — designed and created to be hit by another thing. A target does not respond to the hitting, or even the attempt. A target’s purpose is to enhance the skills required of the hitter to hit the target. Since 2003, the USA has provided targets to her enemies around the world, but especially in Afghanistan. Almost two decades ago, the USA responded to a single day of ineffable carnage by sending a few hundred men to the origin of the carnage. Their mission in Afghanistan in 2001 was to destroy the al Qaeda sanctuary by displacing the Taliban government. If displacing meant killing anybody and everybody who claimed membership in the Taliban, fine. Much thought by senior leaders in the US government went into deciding how to rid Afghanistan of its Taliban government. The decision to send Green Berets as the main effort proved to be the best course of action, and they were not sent to be targets.
Originally, the men we sent were willing to walk among the Afghan people as the Taliban did. The first of the US soldiers we sent in 2001 ate as Afghans, shivered from the cold, got wet in the rain, and walked or rode Afghan horses to get around just like ordinary Afghan folk.
I like to think of those first months of our current war as the efforts of organic gardeners, partnering with other gardeners, those from the local area, trying to achieve something good. Together, the US and Afghan gardeners considered the field and determined who were the weeds and who were not. Then, they pulled the weeds by hand. To wit, one US team on the ground in 2001 reported walking out of firefights with the Taliban and finding themselves splattered with Taliban blood. One has to be really close to be splattered with the other guy’s blood.
The results of this intimate approach to killing were psychological and political. The psychological result was the Taliban were astonished and scared the US had fighters willing to live and die on the ground. No tanks, no armored cars, few if any helicopters or planes. The rubble of the World Trade Center was still smoldering, and the US response to the attacks was having a devastating impact on those who had caused it and at the most important level, namely the minds of the people. The US soldiers on the ground knew they had to have the Afghan people behind them, or the soldiers were dead. Also, the Taliban leaders were certain that the Afghan people would reject such foreign influence. That the Afghan people accepted the presence of foreign fighters might have something to do with the Taliban’s practice of stoning those accused of crimes during half-time at soccer games. (“Anybody has got to be better than this.”) Regardless, the people did not reject us, and this fact fed a political shift.
The Taliban could no longer rule, and in effect lost their own sanctuary. By the end of 2001 — call it 110 days from the events of 9/11 — the US had achieved its stated goals to displace the Taliban government and destroy the al Qaeda safe-haven.
The world cheered us. We, the imperfect victors of World War II, humbled by nineteen men on four airplanes, had responded with measured force and vanquished our amorphous foe. No mushroom clouds, no carpet bombing, no cruise missiles. We sent men to a bare-knuckled fist fight, and they came back wearing their opponent’s blood.
As despicable and atrocious as wars are, if they must be fought, our fight in the early days of Afghanistan was the model. For the most part, in the 99th percentile broadly speaking, everyone who was hurt in the opening salvos of our current war knew they were in the fight. Nobody died due to a stray bomb (except the fratricide of some of those American soldiers when their own request for a bomb brought one on them). The internal organs of children were not liquified by the blast wave of a precision strike. (I encourage everyone to practice wincing when they hear the term “precision strike” and see a picture of bomb going into a target. There is nothing precise about detonating 2,000 pounds of high explosive in a city where non-combatants are present.) Nobody blew up a hospital full of volunteer doctors and nurses. No group of girls between the ages 9 and 14 years died collecting firewood and detonating an anti-tank mine as happened when I was there. If there was ever a clean fight absent the blood of innocents, it was the one that started the 21st century. That fight is memorialized in the Horse Soldier statue erected near ground zero of the former World Trade Center today. Whatever anyone sees when considering that statue, the word “target” should not come to mind.
And how we have lost our way since then.
Fast forward to 2012. For reasons beyond the scope of my effort here, the US politicians and, yes, the senior military planners (some of whom I called friend) in the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Joint Staff decided that the successful approach of 2001 should be abandoned for a more conventional one. As if their study of the US involvement in Vietnam was the review of a successful adventure for us, the US decision-makers took plays from that disaster and said through their actions, “We think this will work this time.” (I can’t prove it, but my hypothesis runs along greed and ego as the root causes of the catastrophic course change.)
Thanks to domestic and international efforts to keep terrorists from ever repeating the events of September 11, 2001, the cities of the US are for the most part out of the reach of the likes of al Qaeda and its offspring the Islamic State, which like the Holy Roman Empire is none of the components its label describes. Almost as an accommodation to those terror groups, we built bases (aka cities) for our enemies to attack. In Afghanistan, particularly, we built large (as in ones with fence lines of over twenty miles) fixed facilities that we filled with targets (aka people) who waited (and wait) to be attacked. And what were (are) we waiting for?
Why, for the Afghan people to awaken from forty years of nightmarish constant combat and suddenly behave as if they have access to functioning cities with running water, waste treatment facilities, reasonable law enforcement apparatus, roads without bombs, and other living conditions people in the west take for granted. Suffice it to say, we will be waiting a long time on our current course.
While we wait, our enemies have regrouped and taken us up on the offer to attack us. In 2012, ten years after the global standing ovation for winning our initial bout in a comparatively sterile fighting ring — without much if any innocent blood on our hands — we stood in the light and dared other contenders, nay, the whole world audience to try something while we started other fights. Illuminated and alone in the ring, we watched as new opponents and the audience started throwing things at us. One of those things, in the physical realm at least, was (and still is) a roughly 100-pound rocket known as a Katyusha.
One summer morning in 2012, in the target area known as Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, I ran for a bunker when I heard the Russian-made Katyusha rocket making its way toward towards me. The season for fighting (which the Taliban observed every year) had finally reached my location. It had been twenty-one years since I had really been shot at, not since the first Gulf War in 1991. The sun turned the sky pink and purple over the Hindu Kush, ringing the base as I moved like a rabbit to the hole that brought me into a concrete shelter set upon the sand and gravel yard. I was a veteran, a retired Green Beret, had been lots of places, had done lots of things. Now I was a government civilian, a federal employee whose office was in a 360-degree shooting gallery. How I — then a 49-years old grandpa wearing body armor, a helmet, and carrying a rifle — got there is less important than my response to being subjected to life as a target.
I was shaking. Alone in the dark bunker, I shook. I had never been a target. I had never lived in a war zone behind the wire. Two thoughts louder than all the others came to me.
“What is wrong with me? I know how to deal with this.” And, “If I’m reacting like this, what are the kids who have never left the wire feeling?”
Underpinning my mindset at the time was the yet-to-be-reckoned, fresh as new dirt on a grave understanding that my son drowned. I received the call a few weeks before the shaking spell while standing in a motel about to begin the second leg of a journey that brought me to the bunker. I put his memory in an urn, stuck it in a corner of my mind, and hoped it wouldn’t open until I could deal with it without worrying about rocket attacks.
Still, I had experiences to draw from, mental gymnastics to perform to quiet my nerves. I was thankful to be alone in the bunker, thankful to deal with my fear absent observation. Everyone else was still in bed in buildings ostensibly made to withstand direct hits, or they were on shift in the 24-hours operation center, itself a bunker surrounded by two-story concrete blast walls. (Nothing says successful counterinsurgency like row-upon-row of T-walls pocked with scars from things thrown at them. Yes, nothing.) I found I was rusty at the gymnastics. Like really rusty. My shaking continued as the rockets did. After a few minutes, I quelled my fear with a laugh precipitated by the base’s early warning system. After I heard what turned out to be the last rocket scream in and detonate, a man’s voice boomed over the loudspeakers throughout the base, a sprawling complex of buildings arrayed along a runway where large passenger jets could land. “Incoming, incoming, incoming.” Just as the attack ended, the automated early warning informed us it was about to begin. It is the stuff of Joseph Heller.
I focused on my breathing while waiting for the same voice to announce the ‘all clear.’ Daylight shown through the aperture of the bunker before the signal came that I could come out. I emerged disgusted with myself. To those I saw emerging from buildings and other bunkers, I gave them a liar’s grin, pretending all was right with me in a world where people shot rockets at other people on their way to breakfast. My disgust grew to a seething anger, and then a resolve to go back to being the person who knew how to thrive in chaos. If war be hell, then I should become, again, a demon, since they seem to know best how to function in such circumstances. Demons are already damned and have nothing to lose. The person with nothing to lose is the most dangerous of all, and with a dead son I felt closer to that condition than any other. I wanted to be dangerous again, because I knew that dangerous people didn’t shake in the dark waiting to die. Before my pursuit of that resolution finished, I would go to a place best described as suicidal.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
