As U.S. leaves Afghanistan, former soldiers reflect on their time there

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As U.S. leaves Afghanistan, former soldiers reflect on their time there
By: Torsten Ove - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette News 05-30-21
Re: https://www.post-gazette.com/news/na...s/202105280103

Photo link: https://9b16f79ca967fd0708d1-2713572...1622332029.jpg

After 20 years of fighting, America is pulling out of Afghanistan.

The U.S. and its NATO allies plan to leave in July, ahead of President Joe Biden's original withdrawal deadline of Sept. 11.

The September date was symbolic, certainly, but regardless of when the last Americans actually depart, there will be no victory parades, no "mission accomplished" signs, no celebrations.

Instead, Afghanistan seems likely to fade into history as "the forever war," as Mr. Biden has called it, another inconclusive engagement with nebulous goals and lost American lives, 2,312 at last count.

Members of the U.S. military who served in Afghanistan know there is no neat, clean end to this war, and many remain ambivalent about the pullout and what their service meant.

On this Memorial Day, three soldiers from the Pittsburgh region — Adam Zaffuto, Summer Rogowski and Damien Gabis — offer their perspective on whether America's longest war was worth its cost.

Mr. Zaffuto enlisted out of a sense of duty and was a self-described "grunt" who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, engaging Iraqi insurgents in 2009 and 2010 and then the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2013. Ms. Rogowski, who grew up in a military family, served in Army intelligence in Iraq and Afghanistan, trying to recruit local Afghans as sources and later analyzing improvised explosive device data to look for patterns and save U.S. troops. Mr. Gabis, searching for purpose in his life, joined the Army, served in combat for eight months and ended up wounded by a car-born bomb on a remote Afghan road, becoming one of more than 20,000 U.S. veterans wounded in Afghanistan.

All are proud of their service.

But they also wonder about the future of the war-torn land — the "graveyard of empires" — they left behind.

Adam Zaffuto

Army veteran Adam Zaffuto lives in Imperial these days, some 6,700 miles from Afghanistan, but his mind is often still there.

A friend once asked his wife, "Does Adam still think about the war?"

Well, yes. Every day. All the time.

During a recent interview, he wore a T-shirt bearing the image of Ahmad Massoud, "The Lion of Panjshir." Massoud is revered in Afghanistan as the mujahideen commander who fought the Soviets in the 1980s and the Taliban in the 1990s before his assassination in 2001.

"He's a hero to the Afghans and a hero to me," Mr. Zaffuto said.

He feels kinship with warriors like Massoud because he too fought for a free Afghanistan.

Now his country is withdrawing after two decades and, like many veterans, he isn't sure how he feels about it. To him, America went into Afghanistan without an endgame.

"How did we not think about the future?" he said. "I feel like we can't stay there forever."

It's time to get out, he said. But at the same time, he's concerned about the plight of women under the Taliban once America leaves.

"We're not going to make substantial changes in what Afghanistan is," he said. "There will not be women's rights under the Taliban."

Mr. Zaffuto was a freshman at Hampton High School on 9/11 and felt a need to do something. He had a grandfather who fought in North Africa in World War II. He wanted to serve, too.

After high school he enrolled at Indiana University of Pennsylvania but felt adrift and dropped out after 18 months. He wanted adventure and purpose. So he joined the Army and asked for the infantry, knowing he would end up in combat.

"It didn't matter where they sent me," he said.

He deployed to Iraq in 2009 and 2010 as a rifleman with the First Armored Division based near Hawijah, heading out on patrols in six-wheeled Caiman vehicles.

"We were attacked easily two dozen times, once or twice a week," he said. "Two guys in my platoon got Purple Hearts."

The nature of the fighting was such that insurgents would emerge from a crowd, toss a grenade or open fire, and disappear before the Americans could react.

"It was very much hit-and-run, it was lightning quick," Mr. Zaffuto said. "They would melt away into the crowd."

Afghanistan combat was different. He arrived in 2013 and was based near Kandahar. From there, his unit traveled to Helmand Province in support of the Afghan Army.

He quickly learned about the tenacity of the Taliban.

"Rolling along the road, we heard bullets pinging off the Strykers [armored vehicles]," he recalls. "That was my welcome to Afghanistan. That is Helmand. Everybody is shooting at everyone. It was like the wild west."

Mr. Zaffuto's unit provided illumination fire for the Afghan Army at night. But it was slow going against the Taliban.

"It was supposed to be a five-day mission, but five days turned into 30 days, "Mr. Zaffuto, a mortar team leader, recalls. "We watched this Afghan battalion get chewed up over the course of weeks."

Unlike the insurgents in Iraq, the Taliban fought for territory, much like a traditional army.

"The intensity with which the Taliban will fight and hold ground is something people don't understand," Mr. Zaffuto said. "We don't control Afghanistan. The Taliban will just hold onto the ground."

He said the terrain is difficult to negotiate and the "border is impossible to secure." There's a reason, he said, that foreign armies have met disaster in Afghanistan.

He said America also underestimated the Taliban. He heard a TV commentator say the U.S. was fighting "cavemen with RPGs and AK-47s." But Mr. Zaffuto said the Taliban, far from cavemen, are "incredibly ingenious."

As an example, he said their IEDs were often designed so that they would not explode at first contact but would go off after the 14th or 15th man in an American unit stepped on them. The Taliban used packing tape to wrap the triggers to make them waterproof, and the trigger devices were made from nonmetallic materials so metal detectors would not pick them up.

"They had very simple, ingenious ways to defeat our modern technology," Mr. Zaffuto said.

After his tour in Helmand, Mr. Zaffuto spent most of his time on base, training the Afghans on how to use mortars.

Although the Afghan Army often needed prodding to engage the Taliban, the soldiers were brave once they did. He recalls watching on a surveillance video as a lone Afghan soldier walked down a road while firing a machine gun, completely exposed to enemy fire and fearless of the outcome.

"Every American soldier has seen examples of that," Mr. Zaffuto said.

"The basic tenets of the Afghans is that 'We're going to fight,'" he said. "They are a warrior people. It's part of their culture to be brave."

But with Americans now leaving, will they continue to carry on that fight? Was the war worth the cost in American lives?

Like many veterans of Afghanistan, Mr. Zaffuto is undecided. He sees parallels with the Indian Wars of America's early history and with Vietnam.

"Do they want democracy? That's not how they developed. Afghanistan is a tribal culture," he said. "You can't stay there for 20 years."

Protecting women will remain a challenge. He saw the patriarchal societies of Iraq and Afghanistan firsthand. In Iraq, he visited a girls' school where the bathrooms were so overrun with feces that he vomited. Nobody bothered to clean them. His unit was ambushed at that school when someone threw a hand grenade, injuring three soldiers, and then opened up with machine guns.

The attackers had no regard for the girls in the school; they didn't count for anything.

"I was running down a hallway and hearing hundreds of little girls screaming," he said. "That's a memory that sticks with me — those little girls who just moments earlier had been giggling and smiling."

In Afghanistan, it was even worse, especially in the southern regions.

"Women are property," he said, like livestock, in places such as Kandahar and Helmand. "They do all the work while the men sit around drinking tea."

Yet if Afghanistan can be saved, it will be Afghan women who do it. When Mr. Zaffuto first arrived in Afghanistan, he was fighting for his country, he said. Later he felt he was fighting for women's rights.

"Afghan women can change that country for the better," he said. "It's going to have to be women standing up for their political rights."

He said the Afghan Army can do only so much.

His approach would be to leave some special forces there as a multiplier and expand the Special Immigrant Visa for Afghans to resettle elsewhere. But he said large American forces cannot stay in Afghanistan any longer.

"I just don't know if it's worth it," he said. "Cultures have to change from within."

Mr. Zaffuto is out of the military these days and works for a Pittsburgh drone mapping company. He served his time. But he'll be watching from afar.

"I fear for the future of Afghanistan," he said.

Summer Rogowski

On Summer Rogowski's first day at the U.S. military base at Torkham Gate in 2005, a young Afghan man brought his sister to the compound perimeter. She'd been shot in the leg and was bleeding to death. The brother wanted the Americans to help her, but she refused.

"She didn't want our [male] medic to touch her or see her," said Mrs. Rogowski. "She wanted help but needed a woman to treat her. She wanted me to do everything."

If the Taliban or even her own family found out she'd been seen by a man, she could be disowned or even killed.

Mrs. Rogowski, an Army counterintelligence agent, was trained in combat life-saving techniques. But she couldn't save the woman herself. She needed the male medic.

"I was holding her arms straight to get the IV in her and I kept holding her shoulder down. She kept trying to push him away," she recalled. "I held her down so she could be treated. I held her hand. She said, 'You're my angel.'"

The woman and her brother were flown to Bagram Air Force Base. She survived.

"That was my welcome to Afghanistan," said Mrs. Rogowski, 36, of Canonsburg.

She served in Army intelligence in Afghanistan and later Iraq. After she left the Army in 2010 she went back to Afghanistan as a contractor in 2011, where her job was to analyze IED data in an effort to keep American soldiers safe.

But it was her first experience in Afghanistan in 2005 that was the most rewarding.

Her job was to venture into villages as part of a small team to talk to the locals, ask what they needed, build a rapport and hope to recruit them to help in the fight against the Taliban.

"We would just go out and talk to people and get them to come over to our side," she said.

At the time, the Taliban was burning down schools and hospitals. That's no longer happening. Change, incremental and halting, has come to Afghanistan. After two decades, it's time for America to leave, Mrs. Rogowski said.

"I don't feel like it's an abandonment," she said of the American withdrawal. "[The Afghans have] worked hard to stand on their own two feet. I don't know what else we can do. I think we spent too long, especially after [Osama bin Laden] was killed."

The U.S. tracked down bin Laden in 2011 in Pakistan.

Mrs. Rogowski grew up in East Stroudsburg, Monroe County, and comes from a military family. Her brother fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, her father fought in Vietnam with the 101st Airborne and both of her grandfathers served in World War II. She was still a teenager when she decided to join.

"I wanted intel," she said. "I wanted to go out and talk to people."

She learned to interrogate in the Army and then shipped off for Afghanistan, where she was attached to the 321st Military Intelligence Battalion near the Pakistan border. The unit staffed vehicle checkpoints and, dressed in polo shirts and khakis, entered villages to make contact with locals.

Mrs. Rogowski spoke through an interpreter and tried to develop sources among the Afghans. Many, she discovered, were motivated by a genuine desire to help their country.

"More often than not I found altruism. Most of my [sources] didn't want money," she said. "Ultimately we were looking for [bin Laden]. They were happy to know that we were there. But some did not want us there."

She also felt some discomfort being a woman in a society that treated women as male property.

"I'm not going to say it wasn't difficult," she said. "They would make comments about marrying me off, things like that. One said he wanted to put me in a cage until he could marry me."

In one area, her unit had parked near a village, and curious locals emerged. One man approached her.

"He wanted to give my team a camel for me," Mrs. Rogowski said. "He was serious. He kept on about it."

Eventually her special forces colleagues dissuaded the man.

Mrs. Rogowski came home at the end of 2005. She enrolled in Point Park University's intel program and then deployed again to Iraq in 2008, this time serving with a military police unit. Her job there was to question detainees, mostly Al-Qaida fighters captured in battle, but she spent most of her time confined to base.

She left the military in 2010 and finished her degree, then returned to Afghanistan as a contractor in 2011.

Having been in Afghanistan twice, she said the idea of American presence there was to help the Afghans help themselves, knowing that America would eventually leave. Was the war worth it?

"It's hard for me to say, as an individual, but I do think it was worth going over for what I saw personally. I think it was worth going over to attempt to help," she said. "Our presence was a deterrence to some degree."

Now, she said, it's up to the Afghans.

Mrs. Rogowski has moved on with her life since her service. She has a 7-year-old and a 7-month-old, and she and her husband run a business that trains people in firearms safety.

Damien Gabis

Among Damien Gabis’ tattoos is one of a tiger on his left arm.

It's the insignia of an Afghan special tactics unit that he fought alongside in Afghanistan as an infantryman with the 3-69 Armor Battalion.

That's the level of reverence he has for the elite Afghan soldiers who battled the Taliban.

But he also carries with him the knowledge that it was an Afghan National Army soldier, supposedly fighting with the U.S. and for his country, who opened fire on his own allies and killed an American infantry squad leader and a U.S. special forces captain.

This is the dichotomy of Afghanistan, where Mr. Gabis spent nine months in 2012 and 2013.

With Americans now leaving, he's still not sure how he feels about his service, what he accomplished or how history will remember the war.

"I'd say I'm conflicted at best," Mr. Gabis said. "I'm glad we're not invested in more violence."

On the other hand, he said, "It seems kind of arbitrary to leave now. It seems anti-climactic."

And what will happen to Afghanistan without American support?

"I would say it's very vulnerable," he said. "It's called the graveyard of empires for a reason. It's very hard to gain any ground there. ..."

He was a gunner and a driver on daily patrols in the rugged terrain of northeastern Afghanistan. In his eighth month, a suicide bomber in a Toyota Corolla rammed into his truck, burning his face and wounding five other men in his vehicle. He came home a month later with a Purple Heart and tried to get on with his life as best he could.

A Wheeling, W.Va., native now living in Economy, Beaver County, he grew up in an academic family — his father was a cardiologist — and earned an English degree in college. But like many young men, he wasn't sure what he wanted to do and he had his share of personal problems.

So he joined the Army.

"I wanted to have a purpose," he said. "I wanted to do my part."

He trained in Georgia and shipped off for Afghanistan in 2012 as an infantryman embedded with U.S. Special Forces in Kapisa Province, north of Kabul. His unit did "village stability operations," training Afghan police and military forces. Mr. Gabis' role as an infantryman was to provide security for the Special Forces operators as they made their contacts with local villagers.

During his time in Afghanistan, he said women had made some progress shaking loose from the shackles of the Taliban.

In Kabul, he said, he saw a woman wearing jeans, out for a stroll, like a woman in any American city.

Will that progress continue after America leaves? It could go either way, he said.

"The goal was to secure the future," he said. "I'm not sure how to it's going to play out. It's tenuous."

He said he's not sure if there is a future in Afghanistan. The country was making progress toward modernity in the 1960s and ’70s. That effort could continue or Afghanistan could devolve again into primitive tribal and religious conflict.

Mr. Gabis also is uncertain about what to make of his own service and his wounds. The bombing that injured him was just something that happens in war, he said. Some soldiers get wounded, others don't. It's mostly chance. When the Corolla hit, his first thought was, "I'm dead.".

Video of the incident shows him dazed by the blast while machine-gun fire erupted all around as the unit defended itself from an ambush. Mr. Gabis remembers little of it.

No one was killed in the attack. Mr. Gabis suffered burns, a perforated eardrum and other injuries. Treated at Bagram Air Base, he was put on light duty for a month and then came home with his unit.

Living at home with his parents again, he fell into depression. For a time, the incident on that road in Afghanistan consumed him.

"It was something that became my whole identity," he said.

In time he got a job in the oil and gas industry, then as a federal prison guard. Eventually he got his master's degree to become a social work and now is employed at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Oakland.

He's moved on with his life, but part of him will always remain in those remote mountains of Afghanistan.

"I feel for the Afghan people," he said. "It's going to take time to secure a stable future for their country. There are so many good people there."

First Published May 30, 2021, 5:00am

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Personal note: Yep - in every war/conflict the US has been in - there will be soldier's - sailors - and airmen - who will always remember their service in Afghanistan - as do all those who were in all the many US War's and Conflicts over the many years. It goes to say Freedom isn't free it comes at a cost. Ask the soldier's of the USA - they know better than anyone!
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