Thursday May 3, 2012
Today we fly north, towards the mountains in the northernmost reaches of Helmand Province. Our destination is COP Musa Qa’la (“moose ah kayla”), the headquarters of the 2nd Battalion, 5th Marines (2/5), under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Perry.
An 0345 wakeup, quick shower and then we pack up for an expected 2 nights in the field. The team assembles for a bus ride to the DFAC at 0430, breakfast at 0500 and then back to the landing zone for our chopper ride north. This time we fly in a civilian helicopter flown by contractors (or spooks?) and a second chopper takes our food and supplies and Harvey, who is always looking to be special / different in some way. Our flight to Musa Qa’la is 30-45 minutes in length and we land on an LZ that is at the top of a hill within the walled area of the COP. This COP is considerably larger than Coutu and is populated primarily by battalion headquarters and supporting units. There is also a British civil governance advisory team on the COP as well as some ANA. Our plan here is to cook for upwards of 300 Marines.
The COP is, as in Coutu, surrounded by Hesco walls and the Marines are, for the most part, billeted in large air conditioned tents. The COP is in the middle of a developed area – I didn’t get the name of the city – that serves as the district seat of government. To my best understanding, a district is the rough equivalent of a county in the US with a district governor appointed by the national government. All of the significant public officials, it seems, are patronage appointees of the Karzai regime and are, we were told, both corrupt and incompetent. They are, however, “hooked on American crack” as one Marine colonel at Leatherneck told us. They live off of the money and economic activity our military and civilian programs pump into the region like heroin into the vein. Withdrawal symptoms are likely to be severe, I fear.
Here in Musa Qa’la we met an Army Lieutenant Colonel, a lawyer, who is working as a criminal law advisor to the Afghan government. One of the cases he is working is the prosecution of the killer in the Camp Coutu “green on blue” killing of the Fox Company Marine. He is advising / supporting Afghan prosecutors. He seemed to feel pretty confident in a conviction.
We had another great day with the Marines. We talked to them about their hometowns, how they came to become Marines, what they feel about their work, what their plans for the future are, etc. These represent a cross section of America, certainly, but they seem to me to share some traits: they joined the Marine Corps to have a different experience than that of the common American. They wanted to break out of their home towns, see something of the world, serve their country, earn educational benefits and experience combat. They are articulate, polite, well disciplined. Most are white or Hispanic. We saw relatively few African Americans in the forward deployed, “trigger pulling” units. Many are well educated, with a surprising (at least to me) number of enlisted soldiers with college education and degrees. They know their business and know they are good at it. They understand their mission and they respect their unit leadership, while maintaining a healthy skepticism about “higher.”
For the most part, they have little respect for the enemy and his tactics. They see him as undisciplined and cowardly. They are frustrated by rules of engagement that they see as overly restrictive. They are humble to a fault, soft spoken and possessed of a wry and sometimes fatalistic sense of humor. They are not chest beating, blood and guts, killing machine caricatures of Marines. They are, for the most part, bored by the day to day monotony of life on a COP. I am humbled by their service and sacrifice.
The day ended well, with a nice presentation of a certificate and a US flag that had flown over the COP today. Lieutenant Colonel Perry, the Battalion Commander, presented each member of the team with a dog-tag shaped commander’s coin as a thank you.
We departed Musa Qa’la via the same helicopters that had transported us this morning and headed for COP Shir Ghazay and LZ Hillary, only a few kilometers away. Two companies operate out of Shir Ghazay: Echo Company, 2/5 Marines and A Company, 1st Tank Battalion. A total of just over 300 Marines on the COP. We are escorted to our billets for the evening – cots and a 10-12 man tent – and treated to dinner of field rations consisting of rice, beans and tamales. Not too bad. Perfect, in fact.
