The Difficult, Dangerous, Expensive Journey of "Getting Out of Afghanistan"

By the time we thought about leaving Afghanistan, we’d been tossing gear into the country for more than a decade. This is the story of how we moved out.

By E.B. Boyd

The convoy of army trucks, cranes, and flatbeds has been chugging its way under cover of darkness through the craggy mountains of eastern Afghanistan for hours. Now just a few miles from its destination, an outpost in the town of Chamkani, a stone’s throw from the border with Pakistan, the sun is beginning to uncloak the convoy’s movements. The gunners are swiveling back and forth atop armored trucks, searching the steep mountain walls for signs of an ambush. Combat engineers at the front of the line—the bomb hunters, known as sappers—scour the road for signs of IEDs. The soldiers are pretty sure they’re going to get hit. They just don’t know when.

No one in this convoy is looking for a fight. They’re mostly logistics guys, the United Van Lines of the U.S. Army. Their mission is to pack up the last of the gear from Combat Outpost Chamkani so that the place can be handed over to the Afghan army. America’s longest war is over for U.S. troops for the most part. All these guys want to do is bug on out.

Too bad the enemy around here doesn’t care. As long as there are Americans in the area, they’re going to keep hunting. When the Soviets tried to leave in the 1980s, the mujahideen trapped soldiers on narrow mountain roads just like this one and massacred them. Today’s insurgents have even more reason to attack. They’ve got PR points to score—every successful attack on the Americans moves them up the global jihadist scoreboard.

The sappers halt the convoy. They want to reconnoiter a patch of road on foot, maybe peek into a culvert to see if the Taliban have left them a present. The soldiers further back are on guard. Military intelligence officers warned them there’s a fighter around here who can hit convoys from the mountainsides. A few months ago, he slammed a round into a truck belonging to another unit, slicing a soldier in two. Not moving like this, the soldiers are sitting ducks. As the sappers inspect the road, the gunners keep scanning the mountain walls. Not finding anything, the sappers climb back into their trucks. The soldiers up and down the column let out a collective breath as the trucks start rumbling forward again.

And that’s when they get hit.

Leaving Afghanistan has become one of the most difficult operations the U.S. military has ever undertaken. "Certainly in our lifetime, it’s one of the biggest, if not the biggest operation in terms of complexity, size, and cost," said Lt. Gen. Raymond Mason, who headed Army logistics until he retired last year. A Pentagon official called it a "nightmare," and the colonel in charge of packing up Afghanistan last year called it "a logistics Super Bowl."

Packing up a war is never easy. Anyone who’s ever moved house can relate. There inevitably comes a moment when you stare at all your stuff and wonder, What is all this crap? The process of dealing with it all—deciding what to take, what to post to Craigslist, and what to simply toss out on the curb—can overwhelm even the sturdiest of souls. When it came to packing up Afghanistan, the military had that problem on steroids.

""Every single convoy was handled as a combat operation.""

What began in 2001 as a special operations mission to go after Al Qaeda progressively expanded to become a full-scale war. Along the way, we spread out across the country, building up more than 500 bases and outposts. And these weren’t flimsy M*A*S*H-style encampments either. They were small villages and medium-size towns, as well as giant bases that could rival small American cities. They had roads and streets and the equivalent of city blocks, packed with wooden structures and cement buildings, trailers, and three-story-high, industrial-grade hangars. There were dining facilities packed with hot lines and short-order grills, salad bars and sandwich bars, and glass-fronted refrigerators crammed with sodas, sports drinks, and even flavored soy milk. The gyms had weights and treadmills and stationary bikes. On the larger bases, you could shop at stores, eat popcorn at a makeshift movie theater, and get your hair done at beauty parlors where 300-pound men dipped their fingers into manicure bowls.

And then there was the actual military gear. Command centers packed with arena-style seating, video-conferencing systems, and giant screens for monitoring the war. First-aid stations and hospitals outfitted with operating theaters, CT scanners, and MRI machines. And miles of generators to power it all. Along with traditional weaponry, like howitzers, mortars, and Apache helicopters, we dispatched miniature robots, thermal imagers, electronic listening systems, and blimps to keep watch over bases. And drones—big ones flown by pilots back in the States and small ones so easy to operate that young grunts could launch them single-handedly from remote outposts.

More of long article...photos, etc. Continued at:

http://www.fastcompany.com/3041147/getting-out-of-afghanistan#!