Sean Parnell - Outlaw Platoon: Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan

February 5, 2006

Eastern Afghanistan

T HE SNOWCAPPED RIDGES STRETCHED FROM HORIZON TO horizon, a vast dragons back of peaks and valleys. An hour before, as we had left Bagram Air Force Base, the landscape had been salted with villages and walled qalats interspersed with the ruins of ancient fortresses constructed during Alexander the Greats time. As we choppered eastward, such signs of civilization began to vanish. The qalats and farms grew sparse. Finally, even the Kuchi nomads and their tent camps disappeared.

Towering mountains, their rocky cliffs wrinkled like an old mans face, flanked the red-brown flatlands where not a road could be seen. Here the earth was untransformed by human endeavor. I found beauty in its pristine hostility. It was perhaps the last place on the planet that had defied the efforts of man.

I found it lonely too. I wished my men were with me in this helicopter. Our battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Toner, had ordered us platoon leaders to fly out a few days ahead of our men to our assigned base on the Pakistani border. We were to be briefed by the unit we were replacing, learn the area, and prepare the way for our platoons arrival. After the orientation, we would begin combat operations. In the meantime, a hollow sense of loneliness remained ever present.

I was sitting in the back of a Boeing CH-47 Chinook, the venerable Flying Banana that harkened back to the Vietnam War. The airframe of that bird was older than I was. Eighty feet long and powered by two jet engines mounted on the back pylon, the Chinook looked about as aerodynamic as a metropolitan transit bus with rotors. We entered and exited via an aluminum ramp in the back of the cargo bay.

The Chinook crews were a breed apart. They usually flew with the ramp down and the flight engineer sitting on the end of it like a kid fishing off an old dock. Except instead of a pole and Zebco reel, he wielded an M240 machine gun capable of spewing out up to 950 bullets a minute. In an age of Mach 2 jets and satellite-guided munitions, going to war at about ninety miles an hour with your feet dangling in space seemed old-school hard core.

Beyond the flight engineer, the ranks of ridges marched out behind us. Two months before, I had been home in Pittsburgh enjoying Christmas with my family. My six-year-old cousin, Freddie, was hovering close. He had been in a strange mood all morning, alternating between excitement over gifts and anxiety over my pending departure. Finally, in the midst of present opening, he asked, Sean, are you gonna die over there? Leave it to a kid to voice what everyone was thinking. The hubbub drained away, replaced by a shocked, uneasy silence. I had pulled Freddie close, No, no. Ill see you next Christmas. Ill be fine.

My Italian grandfather, Frederick Sciulli, whose fingerless right hand (the result of a childhood fireworks accident) had never ceased to fascinate me as a kid, observed the moment with somber eyes. Hed never missed a day of work in fifty years, but after retiring, his health had finally started to fail, and he had spent much of the fall in the local ICU. Only a few days before Christmas, hed been released from the hospital, and we were all in the mood to celebrate that.

Sean, he said softly, you just be careful.

How does an infantry platoon leader respond to that? It is our job to set the example in combat, and that meant I would have to take risks, expose myself, and place myself in the center of any fight we found ourselves in. My grandfather was not a man to bullshit. Freddie had squirmed out of my arms and pounced on a gift. I remember watching him send strips of wrapping paper flying and smiling at his innocent enthusiasm.

Sean, my grandfather said again, you be careful.

I turned to look at him. He was the greatest man Id ever known. Medically disqualified during World War II, he had spent his entire adult life working a printing press. On nights and weekends, he had earned extra money as an usher at Steelers and Pirates games. Hed hung out with a bunch of blue-collar throwback Italians with nicknames like Vinnie the Creep and Fast Eddie. The nicknames were deceptive. They were the men upon whose backs this country was builthardworking, principled, and devoted to family and company. I never saw him lose his temper or even heard him raise his voice. He loved his wife with singular passion, and my grandmother returned it with an intensity Id not seen in any other relationship.