Matt Zeller - Watches Without Time: An American Soldier in Afghanistan

Matt Zeller brings a soldiers view and a keen analysts eye to his memoir. He helps us understand why the training he and his unit received did not prepare them for the challenges they faced in the vital eastern region of Afghanistan. More importantly, by showing just how difficult it is to train the Afghan security forces, he illuminates the fundamental flaw in ISAFs withdrawal plan from Afghanistan: it is a fools errand, utterly beyond the militarys ability to carry out effectively. Watches Without Time is a crucial contribution to understanding why the war is a doomed effortnot today, but years ago.

JOSHUA FOUST

Senior Fellow, American Security
Project author of Afghanistan Journal:
Selections from Registan.net

Watches Without Time is the heartfelt memoir of an American soldiers Afghan War experience. From training to deployment to combat, Zeller painstakingly lays out his experiences, his emotions, and the lessons he learned in a way that humanizes todays combatant and reveals the multifaceted complexities of prosecuting the war in Afghanistan.

BENJAMIN TUPPER

author of Greetings from Afghanistan,
Send More Ammo and Dudes of War

Matt Zeller was an idealist caught in a profoundly unsatisfying war. In Watches Without Time , he tells the story of how the United States Army has struggled to find solutions to the problems inherent in helping our allies fight their own wars--and to the problems our soldiers face when they come home. This is a raw, brutally honest memoir of combat and its aftermath.

JOHN NAGL

Minerva Professor at the US Naval Academy
and veteran of both Iraq wars

A BOUT

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For Precila,
my rock,
my best friend,
my wife,
my love.

All text in this work, all the photographs in the book interior, and the photo used on the cover: 2012 Matt Zeller.

Foreword, 2012 Edward S. Walker.

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Typesetting by Jane T. Sickon for Just World Publishing, LLC.
Cover design by Lewis Rector for Just World Publishing, LLC.

Publishers Cataloging-in-Publication
(Provided by Quality Books, Inc.)

Zeller, Matt.
Watches without time: an American soldier in
Afghanistan / by Matt Zeller ; foreword by Edward S.
(Ned) Walker.
p. cm.
Includes index.
LCCN 2012935474
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-935982-20-3
Ebook ISBN: 978-1-935982-25-8

1. Zeller, MattCorrespondence 2. Afghan War,
2001Personal narratives, American. I. Title.

DS371.413.Z45 2012 958.1047092
QBI12-600069

Contents

A list explaining the identity of the military units and the American and Afghan personalities who are featured in the book can be found online at http://bit.ly/K9xaoB

Foreword

Matt Zeller was my student at Hamilton College, just over a decade ago. Two things stood out about him in addition to his natural intelligence and sensitivity. One was his skepticismhe had critical thinking down patand the other was his ability to analyze a situation and write very convincingly about it. If you read this book, which is a compilation of the e-mails he sent home to family and friends while serving as a junior officer with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan in 2008, I think you will agree with me. You may or may not agree with everything that Matt says in the book, but you will come away from this account with a much better appreciation of the challenges and responsibilities we are placing on our young men and women who have been doing the fighting in Afghanistan.

The prime strength of this book is that it provides an almost photographic account of what an American officer goes through as he or she tracks American policyin this case, the counterinsurgency programafter it filters down from the top commanders, through the colonels and lieutenant colonels, and finally comes down to the men and women charged with implementing it on the ground. What was envisioned at the highest levels and passed down, like the childs game of whisper-down-the-lane, may have little to do with the original vision. At the end of the line, however, it brings the men and women who are tasked with implementation face-to-face with life and death situations. Matt draws a helpful distinction between the ducks and the turtles, with the turtles representing those who have been engaged in combat and the ducks being those who never get beyond the wire. He does not have a lot of time for the ducks. And when you read his account, you can see why.

I respect the approach Matt chose as he wrote these dispatches to the home front. He raises questions, but they are not disloyal to the top commanders or to the soldiers who worked alongside him or reported to him.

He can be irreverent, but he is not cynical. He expresses his pride in what he and his fellow soldiers are doing. This book is not M*A*S*H or Heart of Darkness . The central concern that arises in his writing is that he believes we could be doing more, and doing it better, to gain the support of the Afghan people and to achieve an honorable exit from Afghanistan. He still believes in the mission, as fewer and fewer Americans do these days. But if the doubters and naysayers were to read this book, they would very likely come away with a new perspective and perhaps even a little hope. One of his most heartfelt observations is, We have a more coherent strategy on how to lose this war than win it. And he wants to change that situation.