Combat and Community

By DAVID BROOKS
NYT

Wardak Province, Afghanistan

You drive up to the forward operating base in Wardak Province in an armored Humvee, with the machine-gunner sticking up through the roof and his butt swinging on a little perch just by your head. Outside there’s a scraggly downtown, with ragamuffin Afghan children, almost no old people (the median life expectancy is 45) and dust everywhere. The dust of Afghanistan piles up in front of the storefronts and covers the ruins of the buildings destroyed during the Soviet period, or during the civil war or during some lost conflict from centuries past.

The Humvee takes the serpentine path through the checkpoint and you pass a double line of soldiers heading out on foot patrol. There’s a soldier that looks from a distance like a child in gear, but it turns out to be a tiny American woman smiling under her armor, pack and rifle, and you think that of all the great powers who’ve humped their way over these mountains, not another one sent out warriors as unlikely or effective as these.

After the checkpoint, there’s a parking lot with great lines of heavy vehicles. For years, the coalition forces fought this war on the cheap, but that’s changing. The U.S. has just increased troop levels tenfold in Wardak. The parking lots are bursting with hulking machinery, the avalanche of metal America brings to a war it takes seriously.

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