War is human failure of the worst order.
And few are the places where the failures are more evident than on a battleground.
On one hand, a combat zone can produce the highest of achievement and the most spiritual of camaraderie. Such esprit de corps was visible among the Marines living in trenches through 60-degree days and 28-degree nights opposite a field of hidden enemy mines at Kandahar International Airport, the Taliban’s once-prized asset in the high desert of mountains and caves.
But the same battlefield also was a theater of the absurd.
The United States used bombs and Marines to take over the airport, which stands to be as meaningful to rebuilding southern Afghanistan as O’Hare is to maintaining Chicago’s vitality.
Its takeover earlier this month was a major event in the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan, occurring a week after the Taliban surrendered its stronghold city of Kandahar.
The airfield has become a symbol of triumph–and irony.
Consider the airport’s sole runway, a 10,000-foot-long strip that runs north-south, parallel to a majestic mountain range in the distance.
The U.S. military had wanted the airport destroyed. So bombs away. The runway was rendered pockmarked and unusable.
Weeks later, the Marines claimed it as U.S. property, for now. And then the U.S. military set out to resurrect that which it had successfully crippled.
Problem was, the Navy Seabees didn’t have any material to fill 12-foot-wide craters that reached 4 feet deep in the middle of the runway.
What did they do?
They used the bits of asphalt that had been blown out of the ground by another U.S. bomb on the taxiway.
“We’re robbing from Peter to fix Paul,” said Navy Lt. Cmdr. Len Cooke of the Seabees, standing on the runway as a roller smoothed the patched crater.
The circle of destruction and reconstruction epitomized our ever-so-human folly.
When asked about the irony, Cooke smiled but played the good soldier.
“It’s different phases of the operation,” he explained. “The first phase was disabling the offensive capability of the Taliban. The second phase is establishing this forward operating base.”
At one time, Kandahar airport was maintained with love.
It was built during the 1970s, amid a generous U.S. foreign aid campaign. In fact, a U.S. firm apparently developed it, for its electrical and plumbing systems all bear instructions in English and the brand names of U.S. companies, including one from Chicago.
Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan, like so many before, and they, too, left behind their own Cyrillic and hardware legacies in the power room and control tower when they were chased out of the country in the late 1980s.
A tour of the airport is like a visit to a small-town airfield in Middle America. It’s a vast, open field (granted, there are no mountains in the Midwest), and the small terminal resembles Meigs Field’s, where you have to walk onto the tarmac and climb a movable staircase to board a plane.
By one wing of the terminal was a nursery of cactuses in terra-cotta pots.
The gardeners, whoever they were, took great effort to nourish life.
But those cactuses, sitting in the middle of a sidewalk next to one military unit’s newly established post, were all but booted by the passing Marines, Navy Seabees and allied forces.
In the heart of the terminal was a courtyard with a shallow pool. Contoured like the petals of the neglected rosebushes nearby, the basin was empty. Someone had grand plans for this sunny space, but now it was desolate.
A splendid rose garden thrived outside the front entrance of the terminal. It was even irrigated with a well dug right in the middle of the patch.
“During a war, it’s said there’s always someone stringing pearls on a beach,” Brig. Gen. James Mattis said as he stopped to chat with reporters and smell the roses. “That’s what this rose garden looks like.”
When the Marines arrived, however, they dug their latrines in the garden. It may very well have been the only naturally perfumed latrine in the war.
But the latrines sat atop the well’s aquifer. One Navy Seabee tried to downplay the bad move.
“The earth is the best filter there is,” he explained as if there was nothing wrong.
Later, speaking with a subordinate, the same Seabee said: “I would like that [latrine] moved if we are going to use this as a water source. The farther we can take it from this area, to that parking lot, the better.”
About 200 yards away, a wheat field had been nurtured by someone who cared enough to dig deep to find an irrigation well. There was also a cistern nearby, as wide as a subway tunnel and so deep that a long ladder was needed to descend to where the actual cistern began. A pipe from the pit led to a concrete retaining basin that once nourished more horticultural life that had since disappeared.
Across the road, a small, one-story hospital featured a courtyard with another garden and murals on the brick walls about 8 feet high. While bright and colorful, the murals outside the hospital could hardly have cheered up patients; they featured military helicopters, jets and the airport terminal.
Taliban souvenirs
Whether the Taliban made all these extra personal touches was unclear. It did leave souvenirs, including the regime’s memo-size letterhead. Its blue ink said, in English, “Afghanistan Talibano Islami Tehriq. Kandahar International Airport,” and the heading contained a matching amount of Arabic script, presumably a translation.
Fleeing Taliban or Al Qaeda fighters apparently thought the hospital’s surgical room would make a good spot to dump ordnance and firearms.
“It looks like it was abandoned in a hurry,” said one Marine who discovered the cache.
Then there was the minefield around parts of the distant airport perimeter. The Soviets apparently laid the mines more than a decade ago against the mujahedeen, whom Osama bin Laden also supported, when they were U.S. allies and the Soviets were U.S. enemies.
Today, the former Soviets, now Russians, are our allies, and bin Laden is America’s Public Enemy No. 1. In fact, the Russians were recently planning to give U.S. forces a map of the minefield, one official said.
How unfortunate that the map didn’t come sooner. A contingent of Marines on a mine sweep discovered the hard way that some of the mines were the most vicious of booby traps: They detonate only after five or so people have walked on them. One Marine lost his foot, and two others received shrapnel injuries; all three will receive Purple Hearts for the injuries spawned by another country’s war.
And reality seems only more skewed during the holidays.
About 25 sailors, including a choir, were celebrating mass on Christmas Eve in a small chapel aboard the USS John C. Stennis in the Arabian Sea. But that vessel and the USS Theodore Roosevelt were launching fighter jets round-the-clock to support the ground forces at Kandahar airport and elsewhere.
Christmas, a time of peace on Earth, was far from it.
It seemed that every time the name of God–and the birth of Jesus–was invoked, another war machine roared on the flight deck, either taking off or landing. Bombs were being prepared.
The priest put a miniature of baby Jesus in the Nativity’s manger. A warplane roared and shook the vessel’s steel skeleton.
“Glory to God in the highest and peace to his people on Earth,” sang the congregants.
“Christmas is a time of joy because God is one of us,” the priest said. Another warplane rumbled. Its engines overwhelmed word and song.
And so went what should have been a sacred time.
The chaplain came upon a way–wittingly or not–to transcend the cruel ironies of the moment.
“I want you to say Merry Christmas to one another,” Father Al Concha told his flock. “I want you to celebrate the gift of one another.”
