The Biden administration has announced a Sept. 11, 2021, date for the withdrawal of all U.S. military forces from Afghanistan.
I imagine that many in our military and intelligence communities are reflecting on their time spent in this distant land. What Rudyard Kipling and many others called the “graveyard of empires,” and James Michener beautifully described as an exotic and mysterious land, Afghanistan has perplexed warriors, diplomats, and spies for generations. I am not here today to extol the virtues of remaining in Afghanistan, nearly 20 years after the first CIA teams entered that nation only weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. Nor will I call for us to leave outright, putting a final bookend on a war that has taken more than 2,400 U.S. lives. Instead, having spent a year of my life in eastern Afghanistan a decade ago, I simply reflect on my personal stories, particularly the recollection of heroes that I served with, both American and Afghan.
My time as a base chief in Afghanistan was the definition of servant leadership. There was no finer group of men and women than those that I sat around fire pits with night after night. We were the very tip of America’s counterterrorism spear. All I wanted to do was lead them honorably, with nobility, and without failure. The ties I forged with this group remain unbreakable. My team still gathers each year at the venerable Vienna Inn, a local watering hole in Northern Virginia that has been a friendly face for the intelligence community for decades. Memories of Afghanistan remain vivid, funny, tragic, and sad and are recounted annually over beers and chili cheese dogs. Here are some tales from that time.
After a wild Afghanistan-Pakistan border firefight with the Taliban and al Qaeda, I was visited by a U.S. three-star general from Kabul. He wanted to know what had occurred and was both curious and offering of support. I responded that our Afghan partners, our indigenous units, or “indig,” had performed heroically. They were, I said, the “finest fighting force in eastern Afghanistan.” I believed that to be true, as we owed our lives to the indig time and again. They were consistently waxing the enemy in battle. We lived with them side by side, with a sense of complete trust and brotherhood. I worry now about their futures after a U.S. withdrawal. I realize that we cannot stay only to protect our former partners, but I would be morally and ethically bankrupt if I did not fear for what will become of them (rest in peace to members of these units, including one legendary Afghan commander, who tragically died under my watch).
Courage for compassion.
My mother died while I was “in country.” It would take a multimode, multiday trip of over 5,000 miles to get me home for her funeral in New Jersey. The helicopter picked me up in terrible weather in eastern Afghanistan, and it was unclear if we would make it through a cloud-covered mountain pass to our next destination. Our pilots, veterans of U.S. military special operations units, remained calm. I asked them to turn back. They refused. After we landed, I asked them why they took such a risk for me. “Chief, your mother passed, and it was our job to get you back home. That simple.” I have tears in my eyes thinking of that day, and those heroes that helped me eventually bury my mother.
American compassion extended beyond other Americans.
A young Afghan boy stepped on a Soviet-era landmine outside our base. I watched in awe as our medics saved his life, just minutes before he bled out. Many of us had children the same age as the boy, so his suffering hit hard. One of the proudest moments of my career was that day. I remember choking up while addressing our medics as the U.S. Army medical evacuation helicopter lifted off with the boy and his father on board. They were heroes to a young Afghan boy. He has now grown up, and I hope he remembers the men and women who saved his life.
We looked out for each other, past and present.
Several years prior to my arrival in Afghanistan, two CIA officers had been killed near our location. We knew the Taliban perpetrators, and they were planning to kill more Americans. Instead, the killers met their demise. It took specific information to get us there, however. Information we painstakingly collected. But in the end, it was perhaps our finest moment in a yearlong tour. Never was there a more satisfying feeling as that night, when we raised a toast to our fallen. We had avenged their deaths and saved innocent lives who would otherwise have been victims of future attacks. All of us knew that if we ever fell in battle, our colleagues would move heaven and earth to track down who was responsible.
We were brothers and sisters.
Hardly a night went by without the team gathering around the fire pit, what we called “caveman TV.” This was time to decompress, to laugh, to learn about each other. It is not a coincidence that years later, I built a fire pit in my backyard in Virginia. Every time I sit around a fire, I am taken back to cold winter nights in eastern Afghanistan. In the darkest moments of my year in Afghanistan, and there were several, I knew that we would regroup and rally as a unit once together at the fire pit. My family wonders why I often sit alone at night now, in our backyard, by the fire pit. This is why.
Morning chats.
Every morning, for nearly six months, Taliban and al Qaeda teams would launch volleys of 107 mm rockets from across the border, in Pakistan, at our Afghan base. I never used an alarm clock: 6 a.m. was our wake-up time from this indirect fire. At least, the enemy was consistent, as I never was late for anything the entire year! We knew the attacks were coming and always found shelter. The running joke in my family came during morning Skype calls back home. We would continue chatting as the base was hit and my small laptop and entire sleeping area were shaking. Indirect fire is not funny, of course. But the fact that we found humor in this daily ritual was likely a coping mechanism. It was coupled with the overall absurdity that CIA families must endure when loved ones are on the front lines.
Don’t mess with the agency’s zoo.
We collected animals at our base: monkeys, camels, turtles, rattlesnakes, and even a mysterious animal called a jerboa. The jerboa is a kangaroo-type creature that one of our officers found in our helicopter landing zone. We once asked the locals for a snow leopard, which at the time sounded quite reasonable. Alas, I also remember “Curly,” the stray dog we adopted, quite unjustly shot by our co-located Special Forces team for allegedly biting the leg of an operator. This caused quite a rift between our two units, with one of our most fearsome paramilitary officers as mad at our Special Forces brothers as he was at al Qaeda. Rest in peace, Curly (I still have a picture of him).
As the Biden administration makes its next moves, these memories of Afghanistan reappear in my sleep. For many who have served there, I imagine such feelings are running through their heads as well. I am deeply proud of my tour, and I will never forget the year of my life I spent there. Nor will I forget the sacrifices that were made by both Americans and our Afghan allies. We all walked taller after our Afghan service, and no one can ever take this from us. It made me a better person and undoubtedly a better leader. I did not retreat from the fight when I returned, I redoubled my efforts to pursue the counterterrorism mission in other capacities.
Michener described two U.S. Marines as they left the country in the post-World War II era: “And in the years ahead they would relate such memories of Afghanistan as would inspire other young men to serve in distant nations.”
Marc Polymeropoulos is a former CIA senior operations officer. He retired in 2019 after a 26-year career serving in the Near East and South Asia. His book, Clarity in Crisis: Leadership Lessons from the CIA, will be published in June 2021 by HarperCollins.
