John Kerry’s question about the last man to die was not a theoretical one for Sgt. Paul Connelly. A 32-year old Army veteran with five deployments under his belt, Connelly led an engineer platoon of 31 soldiers tasked with clearing Taliban improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, from the roads, dirt tracks, and cowpaths of Panjwai. The area is farm country west of Kandahar City and a hotbed of Taliban insurgent activity. For U.S. soldiers, it is "Indian country." Taliban IEDs – unexploded artillery shells wired with detonators, fertilizer bombs, abandoned Soviet anti-tank mines – are responsible for 60% of all U.S. casualties in Afghanistan.
Connelly began to see how bad things could get in the Horn of Panjwai when he was briefed by a fellow sergeant and platoon leader whose unit was rotating out of Afghanistan. As Connelly listened, he recalls a lump forming in the back of his throat. The departing sargeant’s battalion, normally 800-strong, had taken 120 casualties during its 9-month deployment. Many of them were double- and triple-amputations from IED explosions.
The message came through loud and clear. “This is the real deal, I knew this was going to be like no other deployment,” Connelly told me in late September at Forward Operating Base Zangabad in the Panjwai district.
Clearing mines and roadside bombs was what Connelly did, most recently in Iraq’s Diyala Province some 50 miles north of Baghdad. He had felt he could do the same job in Afghanistan “standing on my head.” No longer. He picked up the phone and arranged special training for his unit. He led a convoy to FOB Zangabad two weeks before their deployment began.
The Panjwai is an area of fertile farmland shaped like a rhinoceros horn west of Kandahar City, bounded on the north by the Arghandab River and the Dowri River in the south. Its vegetable farms, grape arbors, pomegranate trees, and poppy fields are crisscrossed by irrigation ditches and narrow dirt paths. Paved highways and dirt roads are often bordered by dried mud walls or farm buildings owned by wealthy Pashtuns in Kandahar City. Many local laborers, many of them quite young, were Taliban sympathizers or fighters paid up to $200 to smuggle explosives and weapons up Highway 4 from Pakistan. With its blind corners and narrow roads, Connelly saw why Panjwai was a paradise for Taliban bombmakers.
In April, his uneasiness only increased with reports that Staff Sgt. Bales had inexplicably gone on a rampage through two Panjwai villages. In addition, disturbing details were emerging about the death of Danny Chen, a young Chinese private from New York City who shot himself in a nearby guard tower. Members of his platoon admitted to brutally hazing him for his shortcomings as a soldier; Chen’s platoon leader was later charged with dereliction of duty and dismissed from the military. To Connelly, Bales’s rampage and Chen’s suicide hinted at a level of tensions well beyond the usual stresses of combat.
Suicide was already a major recruitment liability for the Army. Connelly and his superiors knew it. By the end of 2012, the number of U.S. military suicides for the year – 349 – would far surpass the total number of American soldiers killed last year in Afghanistan – 229. Along with a virtual epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, the Army knew it had serious problems.
Sgt. Connelly was really fighting three wars in Panjwai. As platoon commander, he was on the front lines of an internal Army campaign to get soldiers home from war healthy and whole, mentally as well as physically. That did not always square with his second daily battle: making sure their morale did not flag despite the risks they took every day in combat. In his war with the Taliban, Connelly already had several strikes against him. His heavily armored, sixteen-ton Stryker vehicles, fixed with mounted rollers forward to detect buried roadside bombs, could not maneuver when hemmed in by the ditches, narrow local roads, mud buildings, or grape arbors of Panjwai.
Unable to maneuver, the Strykers became sitting ducks for Taliban IEDs and rocket-propelled grenades. As often as not, commanders had to order infantrymen to “dismount” and patrol the tree-lined fields and farm country on foot, making them vulnerable to insurgent surveillance and gunfire.
A Different Kind of Fight in the Horn of Panjwai
The fight in Panjwai was different than any Connelly had ever experienced. Insurgents seemed to bring a bitter personal enmity to every engagement. The Taliban had eyes everywhere. In early May, Connelly’s unit had been forced by tight terrain to dismount and was in the midst of a bomb-clearing operation when they came under fire from a group of Taliban fighters. When the shooting stopped, one of Connelly’s squad leaders corralled several soldiers at the side of the road and secured the perimeter. Then he made a mistake: He shouldered his M-4 and took a knee for a much-needed breather.
The squad leader didn’t know what hit him. His knee came down on the pressure plate of a mine buried in the road, detonating an explosion that blew his legs off. The sergeant next to him was riddled with shrapnel wounds and bleeding badly. The platoon’s staff sergeant standing nearby was sent sprawling by the blast and knocked unconscious. Somehow he shook off the impact of the blast and set about treating the wounded. He would later be diagnosed with traumatic brain injury.
Connelly and his staff sergeant policed the blast area, collected weapons and backpacks scattered about, and stripped the body armor off the wounded. It took several soldiers, each weighed down by 40 lbs. of their own body armor and weapons, to lift the desperately injured squad leader and the blood-soaked sergeant over a succession of mud walls back to their Stryker. Connelly took the abandoned weapons and gear back to the base, and cleaned the blood away as best he could.
The two junior officers were the first major casualties suffered by Connelly’s platoon. The squad leader and young sergeant “got it right off the bat – the boys took it hard,” Connelly said. But both lived. Connelly tried to keep his soldiers focused on their jobs. But he was also careful to keep them in the loop about the medical progress of the two. He felt the updates were critical both for the morale of those who got away unscathed and the two recovering leaders. But they also brought back to soldiers vivid images of the explosion and suffering that day.
The staff sergeant who had been knocked out began behaving erratically. Connelly’s concern about the effect of the explosion on him worked its way up to battalion and finally brigade commanders, who sent a combat stress team and a flew in a chaplain to talk to the staff sergeant and the others about the aftermath of the IED explosion. The chaplain convened an experimental group, called a Warrior’s Huddle, which included Connelly, the staff sergeant, and other members of the platoon, to talk about the experience.
To Connelly’s astonishment, the chaplain turned to the shaken and subdued staff sergeant and asked him how he felt seeing his squad leader get getting blown up. The sergeant did not respond well. When the session was over, Connelly angrily pulled the chaplain aside. “There’s a right way and a wrong way to do this,” he told the chaplain, inches from his face. “You just did it the wrong way.”
Capt. Yoonwhan Kim, the South Korean-born chaplain of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, remembered well the trauma Connelly’s unit went through in April. But he saw it differently. He had been through countless after-action counseling sessions with soldiers. “I offer them an ear, I like to bear witness to what they’ve been through,” he said. “Trauma can stay in the mind in a disorganized way, and talking puts order to the chaos.”
Still, he found that it was best to restrain some soldiers from talking too much. “That can open up a can of worms that can affect mission-readiness,” he explained. Unless they have some common understanding with their fellow soldiers, “just having to go back through the experience is isolating,” he said. “That only reinforces a common feeling of isolation out here. Even I felt it during this tour, where most of what we do is not news back in the States, so there’s a lot of civilian ignorance and lack of awareness.” That only heightened the sense of isolation and vulnerability.
Kim is a fan of the Warriors’ Huddle, an innovation inspired by the downtime World War II veterans spent on troop ships headed home talking through their wartime experiences with other soldiers. For most troops today, flights home are usually isolated two- or three-day affairs as individual soldiers head for scattered destinations. To Kim and advocates of Warriors’ Huddle therapy, it’s critical to give psychologically bruised soldiers a chance to get their feelings out. Kim’s experience is that soldiers who can’t or won’t discuss deeply upsetting incidents within 30 days are prime candidates for PTSD.
But the sessions, he conceded, can go south quickly. If soldiers are intimidated by tough-talking officers or NCOs ventilating about the hopelessness of the Afghanistan war or the rigidity of Army life, they often clam up. “The Army can be dehumanizing,” said Kim. “My job is to try to humanize this experience for soldiers.” Contrary to Army denials, Kim believes that multiple deployments have taken a psychological toll on many soldiers, which may help explain the outsized number of suicides and cases of PSTD.
Since last July, Command Sgt. Maj. Eric Volk, the 1st Battalion’s top enlisted officer at Zangabad, has focused on how the Army can help soldiers make the transition from high-tempo, high-stress combat conditions to the slower pace of home and family. He was bullish on Kim’s work, both for keeping up soldiers’ battlefield morale and easing their ‘reintegration’ into civilian life. “The best asset we have is our chaplain,” said Volk. “In every difficult case we’ve had, the chaplain was usually first on the scene.”
Going home has been difficult for many Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, as it has been for veterans of other wars. Many combat veterans are so addicted to the physical and psychological effects of surging adrenaline, Volk explained, that they find it impossible to take life at a saner civilian pace. Soldiers too often have turned into thrill-seekers wrecking cars and motorcycles, handling guns carelessly, drinking excessively and taking drugs, getting into family fights, and even committing murders. “We know this is going to be an issue,” said Volk. “The transition is not something you can turn on and off.”
He is one of a growing number of senior NCOs who believe soldiers must have time to air out their problems and understand potential setbacks before they go home. “If they say they don’t have fears or nightmares, they’re lying,” he said. “What they are feeling here is normal because of what they face.” Officers and NCOs have learned and adapted since 9/11 by working to keep soldiers connected with their Army buddies. “We understand better who we are addressing now. We talk more now than we ever have.”
“It’s hard getting up every morning knowing it may be your last.”
Despite the support and counseling they received, Connelly’s platoon had a rough deployment. One non-commissioned officer mysteriously broke his hand to avoid combat. Another soldier had recurring nightmares and was flown to Kandahar Airfield for combat stress therapy. He was eventually mustered out of the Army. A 19-year old woman developed acute anxiety problems after seeing one of her squad killed in a firefight. She was one of a group of soldiers Connelly either did not assign to patrols or rotated so that she never had to leave her Stryker. She too was finally sent home. He admitted his job came down to playing the strengths and weaknesses of platoon members off against one another to get the unit’s daily missions done.
Connelly also made it a point to lead dismounted patrols from the front, despite the danger, to boost the confidence of his troops. By last September, he had led 75 such missions, one for 11 days straight. He confessed he had become superstitious enough to wear the same Velcro unit patch every day to ward off bad luck. “It’s hard getting up every morning knowing it may be your last,” he told me. “After eleven years of war, this tour has been more personal than anything I’ve ever done.”
Like many good NCOs, Connelly is a careful observer of his soldiers. He sees a different quality of recruit in the Army since 2006, when only one out of four young lieutenants of the 3-2 Stryker Brigade left the Army. “After 2006, the brigade took a lot of hits, including many naturally gifted soldiers who got out,” he said. “The Army definitely lowered standards.” The “overall” problem, he felt, was that the new wave of recruits had a harder time than their predecessors “accepting or understanding authority.”
“Some get it,” he concluded. “Some never do.” As the war in Afghanistan winds down, said Connelly, “my boys are a mixed bag. Some are getting pressure from their families, or wives, or mothers to get out. Right now I have two squad leaders who are staying in and two who’re getting out.”
Has the situation on the ground in places like Panjwai improved, thanks to the hard work and heartache of Connelly and officers like him? His successors have stepped back to let their Afghan army partners take the lead in most recent operations, and that may be a step forward. But as any good American officer will tell you, as soon as U.S. operations stop, and already limited U.S support for Afghan operations is withdrawn, the Taliban will begin to return. The intimidation and murder of Afghan villagers, mullahs, and local officials who still don’t see it the Taliban’s way will begin anew. Replacement American units fighting in Panjwai had lost three officers or NCOs to Taliban IEDs by mid-January during a dismounted patrol. If anything, the Taliban has punched up the fight since then.
