On Monday, The Washington Post published a damning report about the mind-boggling dishonesty employed by the U.S. government in the service of prolonging the war in Afghanistan. The U.S.-led campaign, ridiculously named “Operation Enduring Freedom,” is approaching its third decade, has cost more than $2 trillion, and has resulted in 2,400 American and over 100,000 Afghan lives lost. It is hard to conceptualize the scale of the squandered money, deception about the war’s progress, and wanton destruction of that landlocked nation, but I have witnessed a sliver of this colossal waste and corruption.
In 2014, I deployed to Camp Leatherneck in Helmand Province as a first lieutenant, untested by combat and enjoying the base’s amenities while serving as the assistant future operations officer for Combat Logistics Battalion 1 (CLB-1). Combat logistics battalions are structured around supporting infantry units, and CLB-1 had a number of attachments to our standard transportation and maintenance capabilities, like combat engineers, Navy doctors and nurses, explosive ordnance disposal, and food service. Our mission was, simply put, a drawdown: to facilitate the redeployment of personnel and equipment before turning the base over to the Afghan National Army.
Besides the logistical convoys dismantling forward operations bases, we had the long-term task of collaborating with the other British and American units to get us all out by the closure date of October 31, 2014. I was dispatched to meetings all over the base. It was an unglamorous job, but it exposed me to the broad workings of the bases and how the withdrawal would be executed hour by hour—matching personnel requirements to essential equipment, and how functions like laundry and port-o-john servicing would be transferred from third-country nationals, the low-wage contractors from impoverished countries, to U.S. Marines.
The base was a sprawling city built with plywood, corrugated metal, and concrete—and without windows. By the time CLB-1 arrived in July 2014, many buildings that once supported the peak population of 26,000 were already knocked down. By the time we left, only half of Leatherneck’s 600 or so structures remained. The wide, straight streets, C-wire topped fencing, concrete roadblocks, and barriers delineated the ten square miles of the base into sectors, most of which were vacant by the time CLB-1 arrived.
THE MARINE CORPS’S logistics doctrine is based on self-sufficiency and moving quickly. Leatherneck was built in 2008 and operated on disposables until its closure six years later. At its peak, Leatherneck had no fewer than six dining facilities, each capable of making 5,000 to 7,000 meals daily, served on throwaway trays with plastic cutlery. I don’t think Marines should suffer for suffering’s sake, but pre-deployment training is difficult and prepares us for half a year without garrison luxuries. Despite no operational need, at its peak Leatherneck had a juice bar, KFC, and a 10,000-square-foot PX, earning it the derisive nickname “Pleasureneck” from saltier units living austerely in remote forward operating bases. Pallet upon pallet of 12-ounce water bottles were stacked all around base under wooden awnings that resembled bus shelters and shaded the pallets part of the day, but the thin plastic started disintegrating in the brutal sun. Crinkled bottles were discarded everywhere, half full of water or dip spit. (The Washington Post reported that 420,000 of these bottles were left behind, enough to form a 50-mile line of flimsy plastic.)
Gregory Bull/AP Photo
A Marine’s bag upon returning from Camp Leatherneck, 2011
We were leaving the base to the Afghan National Army to continue fighting the Taliban, who were waiting for us to leave. It was widely understood the Taliban would ramp up their operations and take Leatherneck for themselves as soon as we departed. Locals who had allied with us feared for their lives. The offensive patrols outside the perimeter were routinely engaged in combat until our withdrawal, but the last attack on the base entailed an inconsequential shipping container blown up by a rocket, in early summer of 2014.
I’m not sure what equipment the Afghan army already had on Shorabak, their base adjacent to Leatherneck, but the equipment list we left them with was farcical. Afghan soldiers were hastily trained, but top Marines said they would be incapable of even maintaining generators or fueling heavy armored vehicles.
We left them instead with a fleet of John Deere Gators, outfitting them with the tactical equivalent of golf carts. We left them weight-lifting equipment and thousands of televisions, but the world’s biggest arms exporter left the Afghan army zero bullets. Despite leaving them desperately unprepared to face the Taliban, pointless tasks were prioritized. The ranking supply officer catalogued hundreds of desks and chairs in the remaining buildings, not a single one of which would have a computer. The Afghan army was left the landfill, wastewater pond, and garbage we couldn’t incinerate in time. Actually, “landfill” is a bit of a misnomer, as the trash was left directly on the ground. About the size of a soccer field, it was haphazardly piled with building materials, paper, plastic furniture from Marines’ barracks, canvas linings from tents and Hesco barriers, untouched crates of food, bicycles, garbage from the dining facilities, and those ubiquitous water bottles. Being on the periphery of the base, it was a security vulnerability, as Afghans would sneak over the dirt embankments to salvage the useful items. They did the same with the on-base ranges, collecting the brass for scrap.
Once a building was demolished, its materials were thrown out or sold as scrap to the locals in dusty Helmand Province. Other trash was cremated by two school bus–sized incinerators that worked through an ever-growing pile as tall as a house in a gymnasium-sized pavilion. One of the biggest orders the incinerators faced was the burning of over 10,000 expired meals, ready-to-eat. MREs are expensive, but this $100,000 is both a pittance compared to the money hemorrhaged during the war, and emblematic of the criminal neglect of taxpayer money.
Not everything we deemed the Afghans unable to manage could be burned, sold, shipped back to the United States, or discarded in the open landfill. One of CLB-1’s recurring missions was the disposal of live ammunition. Weather and sloppy storage had deteriorated its packaging to the point where sending it anywhere would have been cost-prohibitive. Civilian contractors had been burning the excess 800,000 pounds of ammo in amounts small enough to dispose of on base, but once they departed Leatherneck, it fell to the explosive ordnance disposal (EOD) company attached to CLB-1.
In three separate missions, CLB-1 convoyed in darkness, miles outside base, where EOD blew up the ammo. Armored vehicles and trucks that get single-digit mileage to the gallon trundled out into the open desert, forklifts and diggers in tow, where a huge security perimeter would be established to prevent locals from rushing the site following the explosion to salvage the scrap. Each controlled detonation involved 7,000 to 11,000 pounds of explosives. Forklifts lowered pallets of it into a hole 15 feet deep and 30 to 40 feet across. The first detonation startled me awake in the early-morning hours. It shook the building and the boom rippled through the air from miles away. The platoon commander, another first lieutenant and one of my roommates, told me Afghans on motorbikes circled the convoy with cellphones out. She was certain they were attempting to detonate improvised explosive devices but were thwarted by the signal jammers mounted in the trucks. What if one of those explosive-laden trucks had been blown up? Marines would have died for their country taking out the trash.
FOR ONE OF SEVERAL operations briefs, unit representatives pointed with a broomstick on a dance floor–sized map where their unit would be throughout each phase of the tactical withdrawal. A rehearsal for this brief included, absurdly, a catered lunch in a windowless two-story office building. This 64,000-square-foot compound, which had cost $33 million and had never been used, has become a symbol for contractor grift and excess. Commanders asked to cancel construction of the “Taj Mahal” of command-and-control centers three months after its funding was allocated. Yet there it was, and for one afternoon about 30 senior enlisted and officers had the overhead fluorescents turned on as we practiced handing the broomstick off and picked through trays of sandwiches ordered from the last open dining facility. This building, nestled in concrete barriers and surrounded by a tall perimeter of chain-link fence topped with concertina wire, was not torn down. It was a gift to the Afghan army capable of holding 1,000 people, but bereft of any useful infrastructure and incompatible with the Afghan electrical system. A couple of my fellow lieutenants and I wandered the first floor of offices, but couldn’t venture far down the long hallways without headlamps.
David Guttenfelder/AP Photo
A kitchen worker waits to use a portable toilet inside Camp Leatherneck, June 2009.
The final days were a meticulously choreographed tactical withdrawal of endless sorties shuttling equipment and people to Kandahar 200 kilometers away. Concurrent to the stream of large aircraft cycling between the two bases was the falling back of Marines from guard posts and disassembly of security systems. As Leatherneck’s population dwindled, the surveillance blimp was taken down and replaced with an unconvincing decoy that became untethered shortly after its launch. The base’s hospital was disassembled; any last casualties would be treated in Kandahar. While all of this was going on, flights of journalists arrived to photograph and wax poetic on “the last Marines in Afghanistan” and enjoy an extravagant meal flown in from Kandahar after the ceremony retiring the British and American colors. The whole production was inane and self-indulgent.
What were we leaving behind? A woefully ill-prepared ally that we were washing our hands of after 13 unproductive years. Afghan National Army leadership attended the ceremony, but hadn’t been invited to the operations briefs for withdrawal, in which their soldiers were to assume guard posts as Brits and Americans amassed at the airfield.
My deployment offered a glimpse of how the United States goes about the business of war. Not what we see mythologized in cinema—I never fired my weapon or rode in convoys, and I felt more tangibly threatened by the predatory men on base than by the Taliban (women were warned to not walk alone at night).
The machinations of war mirror domestic American consumption, disregard for immigrants, environmental havoc, and corporate profiteering. It is mind-bendingly wasteful. The American military squanders with arrogant abandon taxpayer dollars, environmental resources, and the civilian lives of whatever country we have invaded—and then lies about all of it. The average American is divorced from the realities of military service, but a civilian transplanted onto a base like Leatherneck would recognize the trappings of our overconsumption that demands ongoing exploitation of service members, and foreign resources and people.
And what of the civilians of the nation invaded and terrorized for a generation by U.S. warcraft? The background noise of taxpayer money pissed away and gross overconsumption of the United States military pales in comparison to the two-decade massacre of a country, which we then effectively abandoned. We can conveniently quit wars when the American public no longer finds them palatable and the ruling class justifies moving the violence elsewhere, drawing up trillions’ worth of new contracts for more weapons, vehicles, planes, and ships. The military-industrial complex gets richer and we forget about maimed children, dead parents, and destroyed society in our wake, if it’s even possible to forget something that was never on our minds anyway.
In turn, we knowingly left the Afghan National Army piteously ill-equipped, exposing the folly of what were we doing there in the first place.
The command headquarters was a plywood compound that branched off into multiple windowless wings. Its official entryway was filled with rows of framed portraits of every killed Marine in the command’s operating area. Most were memorialized with the standard photo from boot camp. The walls were tiled with recruits in slick dress blues, young and clean-shaven. Squarely facing the camera, they stared solemnly, if not a little bewildered, in front of a backdrop of the Marine Corps and American flags. Regardless of when they were blown up or shot, these pictures rendered them forever 18 years old—the very age of this forever war.
