Hopeless but Optimistic by Douglas A. Wissing

Author:Douglas A. Wissing
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2016-03-20T16:00:00+00:00

TWENTY-ONE

Geronimo

THE SURVEILLANCE DIRIGIBLE IS SAGGING OVER FOB Geronimo, a small, Hesco-warrened marine base in Helmand’s Nawa-I-Barakzayi District. The large deflating aerostat seems to match the soldiers’ slumping enthusiasm for the war. Both are running out of gas.

A few years before, the Taliban-governed opium-poppy stronghold of Nawa was the target of the marines’ massive offensive, Operation Strike of the Sword, the corps’ biggest offensive airlift since Vietnam. The surge offensive was a very expensive and bloody media event to demonstrate that the United States could shift the war’s momentum. Of course it didn’t. The Taliban fighters just withdrew to their Pakistan safe havens to wait out the Americans. Nonetheless, Nawa was a grand public relations victory: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullin strutted around Nawa without his body armor to tout the improved security. Commanding General Stanley McChrystal and President Hamid Karzai followed a few weeks later for their photo ops. It was a short photo opportunity. The Taliban were soon back, and by the next spring fighting season, McChrystal was calling Helmand “a bleeding ulcer.”

The vaunted “government-in-a-box” Afghan officials are long gone, having fled for the relative security of Kabul and Lashkar Gah. Nearby Trek Nawa, the heart of darkness incarnate, is totally devoid of government presence. Now the Geronimo soldiers stand on their little bastion’s defensive berms and watch the plumes of exploding IEDs all around, the dust and smoke climbing hundreds of feet into the sky. “It’s so common,” the major says, “you get used to them.”

The major is my keeper. He’s an earnest guy, exacting, hardworking, responsible. A Pennsylvania farm boy who followed the sun to South Carolina, he’s got a university job when not out doing WHAM work in Helmand. He’s doing his job, doing his best. The marines reluctantly approved my embed with the major’s National Guard development team. But the marine PAO had a dictate: “Keep him the fuck away from my marines.” So the major and I are the base’s Bobbsey Twins. When I go to the DFAC, he goes, carefully steering me to tables far removed from grousing jarheads. Same for the gym, even the showers. It’s tough for him—he works late into the night; I get up early. Goes that way for a few days until I suggest a deal: I will promise, absolutely promise to not talk to any marine, if he will trust me to go to breakfast, early morning workout, and shower by myself. We are both relieved. (And I resolutely stick to my side of the bargain. I am happily the FOB Geronimo pariah, except when with my small, hospitable development team.)

The National Guard soldiers are good soldiers. Helmand may be a lost cause, but they stick to their agricultural development mission. The combat-happy marines are reluctant counterinsurgents at best. But the Pentagon ordered them to win some fucking hearts and minds, so they brought in the National Guard’s citizen-soldiers to do it, damn it. The colonel who commands the team says, “When

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