Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts

^FIVE NATO’S RAGGED SOUTHERN EDGE ^{WITH ARMY SPECIAL FORCES} Algeria, Summer 2005

From Guam in the western Pacific, I made my way to Central Europe. Stuttgart, Germany, was the headquarters of European Command (EUCOM). The Pacific might have been the great, emerging military theater of the early twenty-first century, but as I had seen the previous summer in Niger, the U.S. military, with EUCOM then as its executive arm, was expanding in Africa in a manner that, because it went largely unseen, embodied power projection at its most efficient—the antithesis of Iraq.

EUCOM’s home was the U.S. Army base of Patch Barracks, an assemblage of sloping, red-roofed buildings graced by birch and oak thickets at the edge of the Black Forest. Constructed in 1936 and 1937, these baronial structures had once housed the men of the Wehrmacht’s 7th Panzer Regiment, who took part in the Nazi invasions of Poland and France. In the middle of the Cold War, when I first visited West Germany, American military bases seemed natural to the German landscape. Now, amid the soporific prosperity and attendant pacifism of a united Germany, the sight of U.S. soldiers was an anomaly, a flickering vestige of a bygone era—an heirloom almost. In the early 1970s, when you met U.S. soldiers here, they spoke highly of the host country whose dark soil it was their mission to defend. A third of a century later, Germany was just a place where American troops happened to be located, a place whose population was viewed as politically hostile, while the military mission had become the near abroad: at first the Balkans, then the Caucasus, and now the bone-dry Islamic regions of sub-Saharan Africa. When American officers did look at Europe, it was usually to probe the Islamic terror cells breeding within it.

Sixteen years following the collapse of the Berlin Wall, it was almost as if Germany—whose defense had once been NATO’s principal mission—had become a neutral; whereas a country such as Algeria, formerly the hub of the officially neutral but hostile “nonaligned” movement, had become, almost, a friend. As it happened, the Algerian government was on the brink of destroying an Islamic insurgency over a vast territory, three and a half times the size of Texas, in an endeavor that constituted a mini–Global War on Terrorism. While Germany’s center-left government in the summer of 2005 was proving feckless in the hunt for terrorists at home and abroad, an Algerian government recovering from decades of radicalism was providing the U.S. military with a stream of intelligence tips.

Because both Algeria and the United States wanted to stamp out the growth of al-Qaeda offshoots in the African Sahel—on the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert—a U.S. Army Special Forces A-team was about to deploy from EUCOM to the extreme south of Algeria. Unlike the previous summer, when the Marines had taught basic soldiering skills to a company-sized element of the Nigerien Army, this was not a Security Assistance mission officially run by the State Department. Rather, it was a JCET (Joint Combined Exercise for Training) mission run by the Department of Defense. The bureaucratic distinction was vital. It implied an equality between the American and Algerian militaries. Not only did Algeria boast a far more sophisticated army than Niger’s, but in regard to the hunt for Islamic insurgents, its troops might have as much to teach the Americans as the Americans had to teach them.

The Algerians had killed, divided, and co-opted an extremist movement that specialized in abducting large numbers of civilians and slitting their throats. Like the Muslim Filipino fanatics of Abu Sayyaf, the Algerian ones had imported high-end violence from a cadre trained in the terrorist hothouse of pre-9/11 Afghanistan. The Algerian authorities had demonstrated a high level of aptitude and historical patience. Slowly, meticulously, they had infiltrated terrorist cell structures with operatives who were under little pressure to achieve immediate results. Absolute ruthlessness had been followed by general amnesties, so the number of insurgents in the country had dropped from 27,000 to 1,500. Helping the regime had been a population tolerant of a veritable police state: a police state that was more open-minded, accessible, and favorable to economic growth than any alternative on the horizon. The U.S. military was impressed.

As was often the case, the insurgents still out there were the most hard core. The GIA (the French acronym for the Armed Islamic Group) had morphed into the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat, the same Salafists that the Marine mission to Niger the previous summer had been designed to suppress. The Salafists were heading “offshore,” in American military lingo, to the “under-governed” countries of the African Sahel and to the “over-governed” countries of Europe.

In the Sahel, the Salafists were leveraging a north-south divide that pitted Arabs (who lived closer to the Mediterranean) against less prosperous, darker-skinned desert tribesmen such as the Tuaregs—smugglers of cigarettes, drugs, arms, and people. It was to the Tuaregs that the Salafists had affixed themselves. Northern Mali was now a Salafist sanctuary of the first order, Niger still a major access portal. While people in Washington, in the words of a EUCOM official, were obsessed with “wandering Pakistani preachers” and “Saudi Arabia as the root of all evil,” EUCOM was “not turning up much of that order.” Rather, it was turning up an inextricable relationship between Islamic fervency and community self-help: a universalist ideology grafting itself onto the local problems of the world’s poorest countries.

“The pacifist governments of Europe,” in the words of another EUCOM briefer, “believe only in rebuilding societies in Africa. That’s a slow, linear function,” he went on. “You’re going to have to pour a lot of water into the Sahara before any boat comes off the bottom.” In the meantime, all you needed was a few insurgents to instantly puncture such a dreadfully gradual trend.[68] Meanwhile, inside Europe itself, the Salafists had joined terrorist cells dominated by ethnic North Africans with European passports and quasi-European identities. Said yet another briefer: “Forget blond, blue-eyed Swedes. The new face of Europe is darker skinned, with hybrid names and passports ensuring easy entry to the U.S. People are going to come at us out of places you never dreamed of.”

So here I was, in a forested German fortress of a long-defunct Nazi Panzer unit, with American military officers talking feverishly about shadowy and turbaned tribesmen in the Sahel at the southern fringe of the Sahara Desert, and their offshoots within working-class sections of European cities. However serious the Salafist threat turned out to be, one thing was clear: without major terrorist attacks in the heart of Europe—of a type and scale that would make the average German once again embrace the American military—these corridors would in the foreseeable future become twice haunted, as they emptied themselves of another army.

As one general told me, “I’d relocate U.S. forces south or east of the Alps: to Tunisia or Morocco, perhaps. But I’d get out of here.” The setting up of Africa Command in 2008, which might eventually replace EUCOM, could only quicken this process.

Near Patch Barracks was Panzer Kaserne, once home to Erwin Rommel’s 8th Panzer Regiment. Its cobblestone roads had supported the weight of World War II–era tanks. Eagle crests adorned lintels. I noticed a partially chipped-away swastika. Here was located the barracks of the forward-deployed 1st Battalion of the U.S. Army’s 10th Special Forces Group.

Tenth Group was the original SF group, established in 1952 at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, as one of the successors to the Office of Strategic Services, (OSS). Manned at first by East European immigrants, 10th Group’s domain had always been Europe. In the early days of the Cold War, it worked actively to destabilize the Soviet Union. Now based at Fort Carson, Colorado, in recent years it had been kept busy in the Balkans and the Caucasus.

Special Forces groups, as I had learned in Latin America, the Philippines, and Afghanistan, took on personalities peculiar to the region in which they operated. In 10th Group’s case, the European theater had given it a slightly more formal, cerebral tinge than, for example, the more physical, salsified Spanish speakers of 7th Group in Latin America, at least as far as the officers and the most senior noncoms were concerned. Whereas submariners were math geeks with tattoos, SF officers from 10th Group had a tendency to be wine connoisseurs with tattoos.

Yet Algeria was new, exotic terrain for the A-team from Bravo Company of the 1st of the 10th. The team leader, Army Capt. Michael Adorjan of Canton, Ohio, was typical. A strapping, dark-haired twenty-nine-year-old, fluent in German and Hungarian, he had an intense and affectingly awkward intellectual curiosity that, because it was not calculated, left an overall impression of gangly innocence. He had grown up on a family farm and came from a central European immigrant family of soldiers: his great-grandfather had served in uniform for the Austro-Hungarian monarchy; his father was a Vietnam veteran. He had been educated at Catholic schools, and in 1998 he was in the last all-male graduating class at the Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina.

“I’m a nostalgic sort of guy with a romantic love of history,” he told me when we met at Panzer Kaserne. “The southern military tradition just appeals to me. The Citadel is weaker academically than West Point, but it makes up for it with a particularly hard physical regimen. It prepared me well for Army Ranger school.” Later, as a member of the 10th Mountain Division, Adorjan worked in a civil affairs unit in Bosnia, where he learned that if you did not drink slivovitz with the locals, did not know an East European language, and did not know the local history, “you just didn’t get it. The Big Army certainly didn’t get it,” he said, “so I joined SF.”

Capt. Adorjan’s apartment in the Swabian town of Leonberg told you about him. There was no television. Instead, there was a library about the Habsburg empire, next to other books on army tactics. Paper currency from the days of the Dual Monarchy in Austria-Hungary and the Kerensky government in Russia lay beside World War II bayonets and Citadel memorabilia. A wall map of the Holy Roman Empire hung near a portrait of John Wayne. Adorjan was an avid gun collector. He owned forty guns, he told me, even as he had a volume on ancient Greek history on his bedside table. In short, he was a typical 10th Group team captain, a mixture of history buff and good old boy.

His eleven-man A-team would constitute the first U.S. military mission to Algeria since its independence in 1962, and the most important there since the Allied invasion of North Africa twenty years before that. “The aim is to grip-and-grin, drink a lot of chai, forge bonds with their officer elite, and Adorjan and his team are the best used-car salesmen we have. It’s impossible not to like him,” remarked Chief Warrant Officer III Bill Gunter, the 1st of the 10th’s gruff, ball-of-fire noncom from Roanoke, Virginia, himself fluent in several central European and Slavic languages.

For U.S. Army Special Forces (also known as “Green Berets”) to be invited to Algeria represented, in its own modest way, the ultimate triumph of America’s liberal vision over the totalitarianism of the former Soviet Union and its allies in the developing world. In the 1970s and early 1980s, when I had last visited Algeria, the capital of Algiers, with its sprinkle of white stuccoed art nouveau buildings majestically fronting the Mediterranean, had been the throbbing heart of third-world radicalism, just as the Syrian capital of Damascus was at the same time the throbbing heart of Arab nationalism.

Until the late nineteenth century, both Algeria and Syria had been little more than vague geographical expressions, their very place-names carrying more significance to European travelers than to local tribesmen. Because the borders of the Algerian and Syrian states that emerged in the mid-twentieth century contradicted ethnic ones, the new polities gave rise to extremist, universalist ideologies that carried the benefit of traversing such regrettable artificial frontiers. The anti-Western rhetoric that emanated from Algiers and Damascus, it now turned out, had been necessary to compensate for seething tensions just below the surface of these unhappy societies. Both states claimed to be nonaligned, even as each was a veritable tool of the Soviet Union.

Algeria’s secret-police regime—with its steel grip over the local economy that undermined every Arab entrepreneurial tradition—had its origins in the bloodiest colonial war ever fought: a grisly struggle against France from 1954 to 1962 that left a million Muslims dead and a million French settlers homeless. It was the last great war of European imperialism. From its ashes arose an Arab political cadre that was as paranoid as it was perverse, even as it enjoyed a unique moral standing throughout the newly independent countries of Africa and Asia. Nevertheless, despite all the talk about the Algerian regime’s moral and ideological purity, there was the little inconvenient fact that the army ran the country—period.

The “Zionism is racism” resolution that the United Nations General Assembly passed in 1975 was a partly made-in-Algiers affair. It would turn out to represent the high-water mark of Algeria’s worldwide diplomatic influence under its austere and remote leader, Houari Boumedienne, over whom the world media gushed for a time in the 1970s; and who, it should be said, provided his people with free education and medical care, which prodded the creation of a middle class. By 1978, Boumedienne was dead: According to some rumors, he had been poisoned. According to others, he had been poorly attended to by his Soviet patrons in a Moscow hospital, where he had gone to be treated for what turned out to be a rare form of cancer. In 1980 and 1981, Algeria briefly regained the media spotlight when it served as a conduit for the Carter administration to the radical regime in Iran, thus aiding the release of the American hostages on the eve of Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration. “But the only reason the Algerians were able to be helpful,” a State Department official explained to me, “was because they were friends with the worst sort of people.” From then on, Algeria followed a path of deterioration that bore striking resemblance to what was transpiring in the Soviet Union.

Like the Soviet Union, Algeria was a sprawling, geographical mess of a country. It stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the deepest reaches of the Sahara Desert, with not only Arabs but also unruly Berbers and Tuaregs living secure in their mountain fastnesses. The stability and consequent political moderation that Morocco, Tunisia, and Egypt enjoyed along the southern littoral of the Mediterranean had been the gift of civilization clusters that reached back to antiquity, whereas Algeria and Libya—the two radical states of North Africa—represented only weakly governed transition zones. Algeria essentially had no national identity until the war to oust the French.

My last sojourn in Algiers in 1982 had coincided with the final glimmer of the regime’s trendy, revolutionary zeal. Back then, the lovely cityscape of wrought-iron balconies and fiery white facades was already bursting at the seams with hundreds of thousands of migrants from the desert, merely a day’s bus ride away. Exactly a decade later, concurrent with the collapse of the Soviet Union, an Islamic uprising erupted in Algeria that was a partial reaction to the regime’s socialism and fierce secularism, even though the immediate cause had been the abrogation of a second round of voting by the army, after the first had threatened to bring to power an Iranian-style theocracy. Chaos reigned in this country of 32.5 million as the regime was revealed for what it always truly was: a secular, ideological abstraction that the military indulged. Well over a hundred thousand people were massacred. By the end of the 1990s, the regime, tempered and having lost much of its radicalism, was able to regain control over most of the country, something partly legitimized by an ongoing democratic process. It was a stunning feat to which Western militaries had paid close attention.

The day I departed for Algeria with the A-team’s advance element (composed of Capt. Adorjan and his warrant officer) six other A-teams were also departing Stuttgart to fan out across the African Sahel: to Mauritania, Mali, Niger, and Chad.[69] They were following up on the Special Forces and Marine training missions of the previous summer. One Romanian and one German special forces team were also included in the exercise. Despite frustrations with a leftist German government, EUCOM had not given up on the German military, whereas Romania’s was always grasping at opportunities like this one. Running it all was a Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (C-JSOTF), whose purpose was to get the military elites of the individual African countries to coordinate operations and information-sharing with one another under a EUCOM umbrella. The location for the C-JSOTF was Dakar, Senegal, the westernmost point on the African continent, where European imperialists, arriving by sea, had begun their conquest of the interior.[70]

In the middle of the nineteenth century, the French had successfully exploited Senegal as a base for the takeover of the Sahara Desert, creating the structure of weak West African states that the U.S. military was now trying to shore up. France’s strategy, the Victorian-era explorer Richard Francis Burton writes, was “to shake hands with Algeria, to link the North African possessions with their future conquests south of the Sahara, and eventually with the rich mineral lands lying east of Senegal.”¹ Without seeking to govern or conquer anything, the American military’s strategy of security linkages was identical to that of the French 150 years back.

The strategy also bore comparison to the hub-and-spoke Bismarckian arrangement in the Pacific. Company-sized EUCOM elements located in Dakar and the Malian capital of Bamako were to reach out to smaller units scattered throughout the region, which would, in turn, work with specially trained indigenous forces in each country. Because most of these countries had little or no military tradition to speak of, they were easily moldable by American noncoms. To further ease penetration, there would be humanitarian activities such as MEDCAPS (medical civil action programs) and VETCAPS (veterinary civil action programs). Thus had imperialism progressed from something all-encompassing to something spare and lean—from an intricate and lavish oil painting to minimalistic modern art.

Ultimately, this is how NATO planned to move south. No permanent bases would be needed, just contractor-supported cooperative security locations owned by the host country, and used quietly and austerely by the Americans.

Capt. Adorjan, his warrant officer, and I stopped first in Algiers: vaster than I remembered it a quarter century before, and grayer thus, on account of more undressed concrete. Yet, it was still an architecturally stunning city, especially by the harbor. The American ambassador’s residence was a jewel of Andalusian magnificence, graced by delicious unruly gardens, though sadly surrounded by high walls and concertina wire. From the outside, the embassy compound, where we spent the night after a series of meetings, might well have been a prison. But the ambassador was determined to get his people out and about town and to bring back dependents after years of a security lockdown, now that the civil war was over.

The next day we left the Mediterranean behind and flew to the far south of the country, to Tamanrasset: to Africa. We arrived there late at night, greeted on the tarmac by a team of Algerian Army majors and colonels. I knew one of them, a former exchange student at the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where I lectured periodically. He was Brahim Gouasmia of Souk Ahras, in northeastern Algeria, near the Tunisian border (the boyhood home of Saint Augustine). Maj. Brahim commanded the 41st Algerian Special Forces Company, with which Capt. Adorjan’s A-team would train. Like other Algerian officers I would meet in coming days, he had learned English at the Defense Language Institute on Lackland Air Force Base outside San Antonio, Texas. Afterward, he had attended the Special Forces Qualification (Q) Course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, before studying at Fort Leavenworth. The experience of driving with their families from one American military base to another, and taking automobile holidays at Disney World, had given these Arab officers a familiarity with the South and southern plains that many Americans from other parts of the country lacked.

Soon we pulled up in a procession of Land Cruisers to a military guest house with Mediterranean motifs, a small indication of just how much the Algerian Army was a stranger here in the Sahara Desert, which was dominated by ethnic Tuaregs. As I would discover, there was little civil authority. We had to travel everywhere in a heavily armed convoy. Algeria, in a real organic sense, had ended much farther north.

Over a four-course midnight meal, the Algerian officers, Capt. Adorjan, and Chief Warrant Officer II Orlando D’Amelio of Queens, New York, slipped easily into a bull session about topics of mutual agreement: the desire for male children; how air force pilots everywhere were prima donnas; the need to control the northward flow of economic migrants from Mali and Niger into Algeria, and from Mexico into the United States; the necessity of fighting and killing terrorists; and the beauty of Russian women. Algeria’s army was still dependent upon Russian equipment from the Cold War era, and some of the officers had visited Moscow; and Chief D’Amelio had married a Russian girl he had met in Germany.

There was already talk of future, more extensive exercises between U.S. and Algerian special forces detachments. The conversation drifted. We took up the tactical relevance of America’s nineteenth-century Indian Wars to the War on Terrorism, as two of the Algerians had studied not only at Fort Leavenworth, but at Fort Huachuca in Arizona, the advance headquarters of the U.S. Cavalry during the Geronimo campaign of the 1880s.

The Algerian officers’ open enthusiasm for the two American soldiers—the opposite of the suspicion with which I had thought they would be greeted—harked back to the enthusiasm evinced by Romanians and Bulgarians upon their first contacts with the American military after 1989. I thought, too, of Libya, where the first American tourists in decades reported being mobbed by friendly people. The anti-American radicalism proclaimed by the Algerian and Libyan regimes during the Cold War was a flimsy facade that had never reached beyond the governing class.

Algeria’s historical experience made it particularly amenable to a relationship with the American military. Algerian officers associated imperialism with France, not America. Moreover, the local military had just successfully concluded a decade-long struggle against an Islamic insurgency that for years seemed unwinnable, with little or no help from the outside world, including from their fellow Arabs. “Even before 9/11, we knew terrorists were importing tactics and weapons from Europe, but in the 1990s nobody wanted to listen to us,” an Algerian colonel told me.

The next morning there was a larger welcoming ceremony for Capt. Adorjan and Chief D’Amelio at the regional military headquarters, with heaps of almonds, tea, and fruit juices. Adorjan apologized for his lack of French and Arabic. He candidly told the officers assembled on boxy sofas that the mission had been originally assigned to the 3rd Battalion of the 3rd Special Forces Group, which had many French and Arabic language speakers.[71] But that battalion had been diverted to Afghanistan. The truth was that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were cutting into more effective democracy-stabilization exercises elsewhere, even such a historically ground-breaking one as this. But with the Balkans at peace, however tenuously, Adorjan was assuming an Africa orientation for 10th Group and he consequently planned to recruit an Arabic speaker or two into his detachment.

He went through the program for the coming weeks, including visits to Tamanrasset by EUCOM officials, with help in the details from Chief D’Amelio. The perfect SF warrant officer, who had worked training missions everywhere from Spain to Azerbaijan, low-key Orlando D’Amelio, who looked more like a schoolteacher than a commando, liked to operate quietly behind the scenes, whispering in people’s ears.

Next we hit the airfield to await the arrival of the vehicles, equipment, ammunition, and the other nine members of the A-team. On the way I got a look at Tamanrasset, perched a mile above sea level, at the foot of the Hoggar—those crazy black and twisted Alps of the Sahara, soaring up several thousand feet. From here the trans-Saharan highway linked Algiers 1,200 miles away to the north, while a network of unmarked trading routes stretched in other directions deep into Mali, Niger, and Libya. I was as close to the Gulf of Guinea as to the Mediterranean, yet the Algerian border with Niger was still two hundred miles to the south.

Tamanrasset was not an oasis; water came from a nearby aquifer. There were no date groves to soften the landscape, only pine and some eucalyptus trees planted in the style of a colonial outpost.² The bleak streets, lined with one-story cement structures in crude Arab and African patterns, were mainly populated by Tuaregs, with an interspersing of black Africans. The Algerians called the Tuaregs the “blue men,” on account of the color of their dazzling robes and the blue vegetable dye (nila) they smeared on their bodies. With their camels and immense helmet-like turbans that covered half their faces, they once again—as they had in Niger—reminded me of figures out of a medieval tapestry. Tamanrasset was their capital. They controlled everything here that the over-governed West considered illegal, and which the under-governed third world considered, well, just commerce. The Tuaregs knew the desert, where it was better to have a Tuareg with you than a GPS (global positioning system) device.

The massive U.S. Air Force C-17 Globemaster snuck down onto the runway. The rear hatch opened and out slid the pallets and Humvees, followed by Adorjan’s team wearing tan desert uniforms, looking like a bunch of big, overgrown farm boys. There was no ammunition, though. The French had not allowed it across their airspace until more paperwork was filed. It was petty, but not unusual. “The other European countries do it to us all the time,” Chief D’Amelio told me. “That’s why we want to get out of those places and move elsewhere.”

The convoy began its one-hour movement northwest into the desert, which began past a new military base that Kellogg, Brown & Root was building for the Algerians. “Immense, beautiful, sudden, savage and harsh; one gropes inadequately for the right adjectives to describe the country,” writes the British historian Alistair Horne about Algeria.³ We were smack in the middle of the Sahara, the crucible for Algeria’s instability as a nation, and for Europe’s social instability in the foreseeable future. Tamanrasset marked the first major way station for the clandestine movement of immigrants north from sub-Saharan Africa to countries like Germany and France. Because many of the migrants got delayed here, and needed money for the onward journey, they drifted into smuggling and prostitution. Tamanrasset accounted for half the AIDS cases in Algeria.

Through the pasty dust I saw the broken vertebrae of buttes, mesas, and slag heaps, like indecipherable symbols, or faces emerging from the past. The vast bleached distances between each vertical eruption created a shimmering curvature of landscape, empty except for swirling patterns of blackish, apricot-colored sand. One mesa, an Algerian officer told me, reminded him of a Tuareg lying on his back with his elbows extended. Upon seeing a Tuareg with his camels by a water well, marked only by a stone, Maj. Brahim remarked that the Tuaregs subscribed to KISS. A U.S. military acronym that I had first heard from marines in Djibouti, KISS meant “Keep it simple, stupid.”

The Land Cruisers and Humvees now left the asphalt and rumbled deeper into the desert, where the sand was like cigarette ash blotched with black, volcanic outcroppings. After fifteen minutes of more driving came ranks of pointed green canvas tents, our home for the next three weeks. The temperature in the late afternoon when we arrived was 105 degrees, but that was only because of the cloud cover. Tomorrow it would be hotter. For a year now, it had been two kinds of extremes for me, those of the world’s largest ocean and its largest desert. Among other things, great power projection was about the regulation of vast amounts of space—space that was not necessarily livable.

Assembled upon our arrival at the camp were the 103 troops, or four platoons’ worth, of the 41st Algerian Special Forces Company, with whom the eleven-man A-team would train. They were dressed in dark green and maroon uniforms, clashing with the tan of the Americans. Early the next morning the Stars and Stripes was raised alongside the green-and-white Algerian flag with its crescent and star. It was the first time that the American flag had flown over a military base in this country since Operation Torch, the 1942 American-led sweep across the Maghreb.

The A-team and I began to settle in, getting accustomed to the clammy puddles of body sweat that would soak our cots for the next twenty days. Staff Sgt. James Lewis of Middletown, Rhode Island, the team’s 18 Echo (communications specialist), was frustrated. The communications had gone “tits up”—that is, they weren’t working the way they were supposed to. “The Army can’t make a radio without a cascading matrix of things that can go wrong,” he said. That got us into a discussion about how the U.S. military was becoming too dependent on “toys,” even as the real base of soldierly knowledge, like using a map and compass, was dissipating. The communications weren’t the only problem. “My computer took a shit so I had to download my CDs on my iPod,” said another team member. Nevertheless, the strawberry milk-shake powder in the MREs was fantastic. As someone exclaimed, “That bitch is banging.” The conversation shifted next to relationships: “I married a liberal, but I’m going to take her back to North Carolina, teach her how to shoot, and make a good Republican out of her.” There were nods of approval throughout the tent.

Such interludes notwithstanding, there was also wholesome talk about family and being good parents. “My wife’s the boss in our house, I admit it. I don’t take a big decision without talking it through with her,” said Sgt. 1st Class Mike Salzwedel of Marshfield, Wisconsin, the 18 Charlie (demolition engineer), the most massive member of the team. “Despite all my talk,” he went on, “I’m just a cuddly bear.” Everyone agreed that the kind of father they all hated was the guy who showed up at his kid’s sports game in a business suit and then loudly humiliated his son or daughter for not playing well. Because most of Operational Detachment Alpha 023—the bureaucratic designation for this particular A-team—were parents themselves, and had experienced real violence as part of their work, behind the profanities lay an innate maturity.

It was now 108 degrees in the tent, so hot that on the nearby volcanic slag heap the lava rocks were cracking, and we were sweating out through our pores the onions that we had just eaten in the Algerian army mess. “It’s hot as balls,” Chief D’Amelio wrote on the dry erase board. The Saharan wind came through the flaps like bad breath. Even though the Algerians had provided four tents for the SF hootch, the team wound up cramming all the cots and much of the equipment into one, so conversation—“jaw-jacking,” as team members called it—never flagged. Nobody decided it, but moving the cots and equipment to spend three weeks in crowded proximity to one another, rather than enjoy a little more privacy and space in separate tents, was instantaneous, unconscious, and collective, every bit as much so as listening to CDs of Creedence Clearwater Revival, the favorite sixties band of the American military. For the team to split up, if only for sleeping, would have led to a decline in morale.

Because of their small size, SF A-teams were highly intimate affairs. Unlike the Navy, Marine Corps, and regular Army, SF guys called themselves by their first names, or just “dude.” Like, “Hey, dude, where’s my Copenhagen [chewing tobacco]?” Even Capt. Adorjan was addressed as “Mike” and Chief D’Amelio as “Orlando.” (Unlike in the Marines or the surface and sub-surface navies, nobody here called me “sir.”) This was mainly why nobody in SF wanted to admit women to their ranks. Objective reasons be damned, it would have meant separate sleeping quarters for team members, and consequently a threat to morale.[72] An SF team was one inextricable organism or it was nothing. If you had to be polite, if you had to watch your language, or in any way edit what you said while jaw-jacking, the warrior spirit would have suffered, it was believed.

“Once we get our ammo tomorrow we’ll be happy,” said the team sergeant, Master Sgt. Ken Butcher of Springfield, New Hampshire. Staff Sgt. Michael Hair of St. Paul, Minnesota, the 18 Bravo (weapons specialist), cut in derisively, “Any soldier who doesn’t like to shoot all the time should leave the Army, and unfortunately there are a lot of those around.” “Everyone in America should own at least five guns,” someone else said. More nods.

Master Sgt. Butcher owned thirty-eight guns. Everyone agreed that whenever you read in the newspapers about a kid shooting someone with his father’s gun, it was because the father kept the gun in a closet and told the kid never to touch it—which of course he would! Rather than a working gun, it served as a macho item that the father owned to show off to his friends. With one or two exceptions, these sergeants all owned working guns and had taught their sons and daughters gun safety. “My son is too young to shoot,” Ken Butcher explained, “but whenever he hands me his plastic cap gun, he knows to disarm it first.”

Ken Butcher had handled humanitarian and military emergencies in seventy-three countries in the course of seventeen years in the Army. Accepted to Dartmouth, he enlisted instead, and never regretted it. He never even wanted to go to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning, Georgia. He had worked with anti-Saddam Kurds in northern Iraq. Then, for nearly a decade, he was all over the former Yugoslavia, interrogating local politicians and suspected war criminals, helping Romanian and Hungarian elements of the international security force, providing protection for visiting heads of state, and so forth. He was in Zaire in 1997 when it fell apart; in Liberia in 2004 when it, too, disintegrated. He was in Sierra Leone twice during mayhem there, and had tutored the cabinet of Azerbaijan in disaster management. He had called in a JDAM strike in Spinboldak in eastern Afghanistan in 2001, helped Armenia recover from an earthquake, and traveled on horseback and snowmobile through Canada’s Northwest Territories, among a plethora of other assignments and experiences that would make Harrison Ford drool.[73] (Months later in Mali, I would mention Butcher’s name to an SF buddy of his, who told me how Butcher had “MacGyvered” a solution to a frozen fuel line on a snowmobile using only a Leatherman.) This all was after guarding Pershing-II nuclear missiles in Germany in the last days of the Cold War. Butcher’s musculature seemed slightly crushed in, on account of years of rucking and parachute jumps. Under short, dirty blond hair, he had a blunt, ground-down, rural New Hampshire way of speaking that recalled the poetry of Robert Frost. This was enhanced by a no-bullshit expression that at proper moments turned wistful, reminding me of tough and reserved kibbutzniks of yore. Butcher was happiest embracing the suck.

As our first evening in the desert drew near, a light breeze cut the heat down into the nineties. A game of beach volleyball commenced. Rather than the Americans playing the Algerians, again there came another collective, unconscious decision on both sides—in favor of mixed teams. Following the game, I took a hike to the top of an outcropping, and saw a sandy sea as stormy and endless as the Pacific. With me were Sgt. 1st Class Buck Wilford of Cleveland—the 18 Delta (team medic)—and Capt. Habib Akermi, the supply officer, who, like Maj. Brahim, came from Souk Ahras. The three of us were still strangers to one another, but that was to change. You became intimate by doing things with people, especially in an isolated setting like this one.

Buck Wilford, especially, turned out to be a real character. He was big, with a large-sized head that was always nodding and stamped with a smile, as though he were in a permanent state of laughter. Buckley Erie Arthur Roy Wilford, to give him his full name, had joined the Army to pay his way through Bible college. He had a tattoo of Jesus wearing the crown of thorns on his right shoulder, one of the Lion of Judah on his right thigh, and a Pentecostal cross on his left shin. He had been a street-corner preacher in Columbus, Georgia, when he was stationed at Fort Benning. He owned twenty-seven guns, and was an active Mason. Buck’s church was the evangelical Assembly of God. But he warned me, “I’m not the man I was. I’ve fallen since.” Yet having married, and given up drinking and dipping and cussing, he now had more money in the bank with a child at home than he had had when single. “Oh Lordy” was the worst language I ever heard him use. An Army Ranger before joining SF, Buck had been in the thick of the fighting in Mogadishu, Somalia, on October 3–4, 1993, when nineteen American soldiers were slain, a battle made famous by the book and movie Black Hawk Down. Yet he harbored no resentment toward the Somalis. Buck was just a good soul.

Capt. Habib Akermi, on the other hand, was as small and sinewy as Buck was big and fleshy. While Buck was quietly competent and easygoing, Akermi seemed as if he had something to prove. His hospitality could sometimes appear overbearing, in a particular Middle Eastern way. But he was also fast, nimble, indefatigable through the worst, hottest parts of the day, and frighteningly driven. I could imagine him in the army of the indigenous warlord Jugurtha, 2,100 years ago, fighting the Romans in the naked hilltops and savannahs of the Tunisian-Algerian borderland. His pride caused him to conceal his vulnerabilities, so he was almost impossible to imagine as a civilian. Buck didn’t mind, though. He liked Akermi, just as he would like all the Algerians he came across—without knowing barely a word of Arabic. You could conquer the world peaceably with an army of Bucks, I thought.

A pattern of daily existence emerged, as we got used to hitting the shitters a hundred yards away from our tent in the sand that was infested with scorpions and camel spiders, washing our faces and clothes in sinks filled with moths and grasshoppers, sweating through the afternoons when the tent affected the aura of a tropical disease ward, and washing our own trays and eating utensils after every meal in the Algerian mess. Living exactly like the Algerians helped break down barriers.

Following a two-mile run and breakfast, the eleven A-team members laid out their toys for the host-country soldiers to inspect. The summer before in Niger the Marines had only M-16s and basic communications and medical equipment. That had formed one kind of bond with the troops of a backbreakingly poor country, who saw that you did not need fancy stuff to be good. But the Algerian military was more advanced than the one in Niger, and was looking for a stronger, deeper relationship with their American counterparts: an appetite that the morning display whetted.

There was the small and light M-4 assault rifle with a rail system that included the latest EOtech hologram sight and PEQ-2 infrared laser for calling in close air support at night. There was the ballistic eyewear, body armor, pistol rigs, CamelBaks (hydration backpacks), MBITRs (multi-band intra-team radios), various types of shotguns and machine guns, and enough medical equipment to do minor surgery, including partial amputations, intubations, tracheotomies, and gun debridements—all of which Buck Wilford and the team’s other medic, Sgt. 1st Class Kevin Carlson, were experts at.[74]

Trouble was, it meant that each SF soldier had to carry fifty pounds of weapons and web gear, plus a rucksack that might weigh as much as ninety pounds. Whenever I’d ask an American soldier how much he carried, he’d always reply, “Too much.” SOF equipment was getting to be like information technology: every year a new gadget was introduced that soldiers felt they couldn’t do without. Yet to carry as much as they did made it impossible to fight efficiently.

The A-team was aware of the problem, which resulted in another jaw-jacking session. The Americans were struck by two things during the early days of the deployment: how little equipment the Algerians had compared to them, yet how good at soldiering they seemed to be. An Algerian soldier out on a counter-terrorist mission in these desert borderlands might carry only a Russian-designed AK-47, water, and some food—usually dates. He would be neither protected by body armor nor slowed down by it. In any case, in this heat body armor made a soldier on the move virtually worthless. The first few days here, the hulking SF troops, who could drop a bad guy at several hundred yards, were somewhat intimidated by the 120-pound Algerians in dark camouflage and bush hats, who could run up and down hills in the middle of the day, turn somersaults with their guns in the sand, jump through burning tires, throw knives expertly, and, most importantly, did not need to drink nearly as much water in the desert as the Americans did, dependent as the Americans had become on their CamelBaks. Maj. Brahim and Capt. Akermi noticed this weakness on the part of their guests immediately.

The Algerians, who had fought a full-fledged counterinsurgency war throughout the 1990s, clearly were a different class of third-world army than any I had experienced while traveling with SF and the Marines. The first full training day the Algerians were unflagging. It became a test of wills as to which side would cry uncle first in the shadeless heat and dust. Finally, after eight straight hours in hundred-degree-plus heat, the two armies began the police call: picking up the brass cartridges that signaled the end of range work. Everyone was smoked.

“Holy sheep shit, Batman. Jesus Christ, it’s hot,” said one American to another, when the thermometer hit 110. But this came more in the way of joking than complaining. Said Mike Hair, the weapons specialist: “It could be worse, we could be training with some other African armies. The Algerians are motivated. They’re full of ambition. They keep getting at the back of the line to shoot again and again.”

Part of what had lured me here was the advanced nature of the training, compared to the simple skills taught by the Marines in Niger. Yet the first day was basic rifle and pistol work. Trying out the American M-4s with the rail systems, the Algerians were impressed by their lightness and precision, and their night-fighting capabilities. But the M-4 was difficult to maintain compared to their own AK-47, which was a simpler, more forgiving instrument, and worked even if you dropped it in the mud. Again, the American way was to seek a technical solution to every challenge, even as the Algerians demonstrated that victory in the desert in the early twenty-first century could also mean fighting with less on your back and unique cultural skills in your head.

Cameras were everywhere that first day and all the ones following, as individual Algerian soldiers took Polaroid photos to show off to friends and family how each had trained with the Americans. There were also military cameramen documenting the mission for the Algerian Army.

The next day the training lasted even longer, as one ammo case after another—each containing eight hundred pounds of “whoop-ass”(7.62mm rounds)—was used up in firing the Americans’ 240-Bravo Belgian-manufactured medium machine guns. The Algerians, who were short on ammunition, appreciated the unlimited quantities provided by SF. It was already 3 p.m. when the Americans demonstrated transitioning: shooting with an M-4 rifle and then a 9mm Beretta in one fluid movement. The Algerians preferred the Italian-made Beretta (which held fifteen rounds) to their own Russian Makarov, which held only ten.

“The way you’re firing, you’ll hit only two things, jack and shit,” one Green Beret remonstrated an Algerian. But later on, impressed with the Algerian’s improvement, he said, “You turned that steel target into lingerie.” And after using one of the Algerians’ Russian-made Draganov sniper rifles, this Green Beret provided the ultimate compliment: “When I get back home to the South, I’m going to buy me one of them.”

When we returned to the camp before sunset, the sky was the color of salt from the heat. By then each of us had consumed four large bottles of mineral water since breakfast, almost without having to urinate. At night, after washing my clothes and eating dinner in the Algerian mess—and observing the Green Berets stomp around in the powdery dust and close air of the tent, preparing to clean their weapons—I was gripped once again by the grim, poverty-stricken world of the American soldier. Buck Wilford, whose cot was the second over from my own, had just found a large scorpion at his feet. This was after a brief but ferocious sandstorm, succeeded by gucky rain. Oily guns and smelly socks and underwear lay all around, mixed with electric cables and communications gear. The only luxury we had was the locally made soda sold at the Algerian PX, which we all shared out of the same large bottles since we lacked cups.

The saving grace in all of this continued to be the company: simple, uproariously funny noncommissioned officers, who could not be calculating and selfish if they tried. Buck Wilford never stopped smiling even after discovering that scorpion. If you didn’t like Buck, it was you who had the problem. It was nearly the same with other members of the team. Yet why would anyone with the possibility of a reasonably high income and good chances in life want to have anything to do with such an existence? Here and there, reporting on the Army and on the Marines, I had met people from prosperous, upper-middle-class families, and from prestigious schools. But their numbers were too small to constitute a trend.

Noncommissioned officers—the sergeants of the Army and the Marine Corps, the chief petty officers of the Navy—were sort of like writers. Because they loved what they did so intensely, career advancement was not their most important priority. This made them at times naïve about the competitive world outside their own domain. Here was one member of the team, a former marine who had worked as an embassy guard: “State Department people pretend to like each other, even while they’re stabbing each other in the back. They take quiet pleasure in watching one of their own fall. I want no part of that.”

The most well-educated, well-traveled, and linguistically adroit noncoms were precisely the ones most critical of the diplomatic and relief aid establishments. After all, they knew much of what the diplomats and NGOs knew, occasionally more. But because of their hardscrabble backgrounds and military experience, they just interpreted reality differently. Rather than a disadvantage, the hands-on circumstances of their own upbringings helped break down barriers with host-country nationals. Mike Adorjan, Ken Butcher, Mike Salzwedel, and Kevin Carlson had all grown up in a vanishing rural America. Butcher had raised oxen in New Hampshire as a boy, and worked as a logger. Salzwedel had worked on a succession of pig farms in Wisconsin. Carlson’s family had only sixty-three acres to raise corn and soybeans in Iowa. This was an economically tenuous existence not that far removed from the men of the Algerian Special Forces company. Over lamb couscous one day with Master Sgt. Butcher, Maj. Brahim noted a truth familiar to classicists: “The best soldiers have been farmers.”

Army Special Forces still depended upon a backbone of rugged individualists who constituted the last remnants of the continental frontier in North America, the type historically associated with agriculture, exploration, and soldiering. But as America’s urbanization, subsequent suburbanization, and finally ex-urbanization proceeded apace, I questioned whether the warrior spirit of these elite units could survive. While Special Forces needed to evolve, with more racial variety and women—for the sake of operating unconventionally in a more coffee brown–mestizo world—that was not necessarily an argument for a weakening of its aggressive mindset.[75]

One long day rolled into another. On day three, the two countries’ special forces units spent eight hours firing RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades), LAWs (66mm light anti-tank weapons), AT-4s (84mm anti-tank weapons), and M-2HB .50-caliber heavy machine guns. The Algerians insisted on teaching the Americans how to use their own Russian-made RPGs, and the Americans, who already knew how to use them, pretended to learn. Just as diplomats regularly practiced diplomacy by means other than negotiations, so did SF.

The barrels of the .50-caliber heavy machine guns became so hot from firing that they had to be separated from the rest of the firing apparatus and put in the shade to cool off, a process that took hours in the 110-degree heat. My open palms registered the intense heat of the barrels three inches away. Touching them was like touching a flame, so they could be handled only with heavy gloves. It made several members of the team bring up the consequences that would have befallen the American military had Operation Iraqi Freedom been delayed a few more weeks, from spring to early summer 2003, when the temperatures in the Mesopotamian desert would have been comparable to the Sahara.

“The diplomats at the U.N. don’t know or care about small things like gun barrels,” said Staff Sgt. James Lewis, who in addition to handling the communications was one of the team’s two snipers.[76] “Yet they complain whenever American troops don’t perform perfectly.”

On day four, the Algerians did have a lot to teach the Americans: about booby traps used by their own domestic terrorists; jerry-rigged anti-personnel mines set off by syringes in the road; and bombs concealed in coffee thermoses, gas containers, and Korans even. “The very people blaming us for mistreating the Koran think nothing of making booby traps out of them,” Buck Wilford remarked. For their part, the Americans demonstrated how to make a bomb out of white, taffy-like C-4 plastic explosive. It turned out to be as easy as hanging a picture or making scrambled eggs.

The subject of Guantánamo Bay (“Gitmo”) and the alleged abuses of prisoners there by the U.S. military, including the desecration of prisoners’ Korans, would not go away. “Shouldn’t it be taken into account,” implored James Lewis, during another bout of jaw-jacking, “that we’re allowing these prisoners to pray five times a day, and providing them food that is not contrary to their religion? Shouldn’t it be regularly reported how much worse they would be treated in their own countries?”

Lewis had enlisted in 1993, at the age of nineteen, burdened by mounting bills despite holding down four part-time jobs. His father and uncle had each spent a lifetime in the Navy. His way of being an individual was to join the Army. He appreciated the discipline it enforced on him, as well as the fact that he could now pay his bills. Because he did not want to mark time, he volunteered for Special Forces. The truth was that in his late twenties he had suddenly become ambitious after becoming aware of his own ignorance. “I realized that I could be influenced by a lot of things other than just the people around me.” Thus he began to read, and read more—about history and politics. What he had learned, he told me one night when the heat in the tent made it impossible to sleep, even as some of the other team members were “cutting logs” (snoring), was that while he himself had lived a narrow-minded existence growing up working-class in Rhode Island, so did a lot of higher income people who, at least in his mind, saw the world as a playground for their comfortable views. He said that when he left Special Forces, it wasn’t a commendation or a plaque he wanted, just an official Green Beret Yarborough knife.[77]

At 5 a.m. one day during the second week of training we awoke to a sandstorm. Even after sunup, the sky was like a death shroud, grimmer than the blackest part of the night. A convoy of American and Algerian special forces drove out to a rocky field in the desert that sloped down into a coarse, sandy bottomland studded with pine copses—indication of a nearby underground water source.

“Bad weather like this is great for fighting,” Maj. Brahim told Capt. Adorjan and Master Sgt. Butcher. Brahim related how in 1994, south of Algiers, his platoon had killed fifteen terrorists whose hideout was lightly guarded because they never expected an assault in fog and rain.

We surveyed the sandy area before the Algerians and the Americans took turns assaulting an imaginary terrorist hideout in one of the pine copses. The imaginary hideout was typical of real ones in Algeria: the places for cooking, ammunition storage, and headquarters command were all separated, so that the smell of food would not necessarily give away the exact location of the terrorists; nor would the fall of one area in the compound necessarily mean that of the others. Brahim said that the smaller the number of the assault team the better; the more personnel you used in an attack, the less control you had as a commander, for this was not a war between two armies.

From then on opinions diverged. The Algerians were going to assault the compound in single “Indian file,” the lead man armed with a portable minesweeper. The Americans favored a lateral sweep with each man responsible for watching out for mines. “After contact [the first shot], you spread out anyway, so you might as well start wide apart,” Ken Butcher told the Algerians. Still, he wasn’t dogmatic about it. “Tactics are like assholes,” he remarked. “Everybody has one.”

Using blank bullets, the Algerians commenced their attack. It looked like something out of a Hollywood movie, with men firing all around. It was confusing to follow. The Americans were not impressed. “I would not feel safe fighting with those guys,” Buck confided. “Guys in the rear were firing in the same direction as their teammates in front of them. There was no way they could have avoided friendly fire with real bullets.” He explained that the Americans, upon contact, employed the buddy system: two-man teams advanced and dove on the ground in sequence, with only the guy in front firing.[78] But Capt. Adorjan, the diplomat, congratulated the Algerians on a “great performance” as they lined up in formation after the mock raid. Then one of the Algerian soldiers let out an AD, or “accidental discharge,” on full automatic, with several bullets blasting into the ground. He had not put his AK-47 back on safe. Even with blanks, in the U.S. military that would have led to a judicial proceeding. Not here.

Fundamentally, it was the same problem that I had noticed with other third-world militaries: weak noncoms who never offered advice up the chain of command to their officers, so the officers had to manage everything and every man, and thus did so badly. Meanwhile, the same officers were loath to admit mistakes. You needed squad and platoon leaders—sergeants and staff sergeants—to discipline corporals and privates, not captains and majors to do it. The more decentralized the nature of command, the better a unit performed.

“How should you guys look during your assault?” I asked Buck’s buddy, Staff Sgt. Tim Haines of Placerville, California, an 18 Charlie (engineer). He was a huge, dark-complexioned twenty-five-year-old who had played junior college football in Nebraska. “We should look simple, boring,” Haines replied. “That Hollywood crap doesn’t work.”

Chief D’Amelio gave the brief before the Americans’ attack. “We’ll be using live bullets, not blanks,” he said. “The emphasis will be on accuracy of fire: one shot, one kill.”

The American A-team separated into two “splits” of several men each. One hid in a pine cluster while the other moved out along a dried riverbed to flank the imaginary hideout where targets had been set up. This second split stopped at the LCC (last place of cover and concealment). Suddenly a barrage of fire erupted, including that of a 240-Bravo medium machine gun. Unlike the Algerian attack, where there was a lot of confusing movement and sporadic fire, now there was an intense explosion of firing and nothing to see, since the second split had completely concealed itself.

Now the first split, which hadn’t moved since the beginning of the exercise, suddenly swept around behind the imaginary hideout, executing IMTs (individual movement tactics)—that is, buddy teams advancing in tandem so that despite the live fire, no one accidentally got hit. It was easy to follow, with not much to see, dull and efficient as Tim Haines had predicted. When the targets were pulled out of the hideout, they were completely shredded with bullets like “lingerie.” The fire had been that accurate.

The Algerians were stunned into silence. For the first time since the JCET had commenced over a week ago, they realized just how good this SF team was, and how much they themselves had to learn, despite the fact that they were better acclimated to the harsh landscape. It wasn’t a bad performance for a bunch of clowns who, while adjusting their web and communications gear prior to the assault, were carrying on about the cartoon series South Park, and such inane comedies as Team America and Office Space.

A few days later, the Algerians performed more impressively, as they demonstrated with live fire how to react to an ambush. Indeed, it was something that occurred several times a day in Algeria during the 1990s. One moment a convoy of several vehicles would be moving un-exceptionally along a road; the next moment there would be a series of explosions, with smoke everywhere. A barrage of fire would ensue seconds after that. After another forty-five seconds, it would be as though the gun battle had been raging for an hour.

The A-team followed up with a “down driver drill,” in which the driver of a lead vehicle was “killed” after the detonation of an improvised explosive device. Another soldier took his place and led the convoy out of the kill zone, while engaging the enemy ambush from a steadily lengthening distance. Again, because the Americans boasted better equipment and more accurate fire, their response to the ambush was less kinetic and visually less spectacular than that of the Algerians, yet more effective. Rather than leave their vehicles and dive into a defilade position like the host-country troops, they remained inside their up-armored Humvees and nailed the ambushers with medium machine gun fire, even as they used smoke grenades to conceal their movements while withdrawing. If they had to leave the vehicles, as they did in a follow-up drill, they took the medium machine guns with them. Because the .50-caliber heavy machine gun could not be transported by one man, it was one team member’s job to remove the trigger mechanism from it so that it couldn’t be used by the ambushers if they captured the Humvee. All this was standard operating procedures. The Algerians had their breath taken away.

As the Algerians and the Americans complimented each other in exercise after exercise, and played more volleyball as well as dominoes together, the relationship strengthened. The Americans rode camels. Some had their hair cut by an Algerian barber. They ate Algerian MREs, better than U.S. ones, as they were essentially French with tins of tuna and fondue instead of oversalted meats. One day we all walked around Tamanrasset, bargaining for Tuareg trinkets, then eating couscous at a local restaurant that was decorated with native rugs, swords, beaten brass, and a large reproduction of the Mona Lisa. “And I thought the real Mona Lisa was in Paris. Who would have known it was here all along?” Buck joked, with his trademark broad smile.

I saw that the ratty cafés in town were never more than a quarter filled. Tuaregs and shady characters in cheap Western dress sat around with sullen expressions and thousand-yard stares, listening to scratchy music. It was like one big bus station. An ashen veil of dust robbed the streets of color. If you were a traveler who had just arrived from the desert, you might luxuriate in the small air-conditioned supermarkets filled with fresh cheeses, fruit juices, and ice cream. Otherwise, Tamanrasset was a mournful place at the edge of nowhere.

In the afternoon we drove with the Algerians in a convoy of Land Cruisers deep into the Hoggar, through towering curtains of basalt, shale, and limestone, and along prehistoric riverbeds where we encountered Tuaregs with their camels, busy baking bread in holes beneath the sand. The majestic back-of-beyond peaks brought to mind Father Charles de Foucauld, the ultimate imperialist: French soldier, missionary, linguist, and eccentric.

A modern Saint Augustine, “Père Foucauld” was half mad with visions of evangelizing the whole of Saharan Africa, so as to reverse the Islamic conquest that had come in the wake of Augustine’s death. Chronologically he was a man of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; spiritually he was closer to the fourth-century Byzantine monks of the Egyptian Thebaid, like Saint Anthony. Born in Strasbourg in 1858, Foucauld studied under the Jesuits at Nancy and Paris before attending the Saint-Cyr Military Academy. His first experience of the Maghreb was at Sétif, in Algeria, where he was sent as a young officer in 1880. Discharged for indiscipline, he was reinstated in the French Army to help against a native revolt south of Oran near the Moroccan border. There, he became infatuated with the Arabs. He resigned his commission and moved to Algiers to study Arabic and Hebrew, before traveling throughout Morocco as well as through southern Algeria and Tunisia. Back in Paris, writing up an account of his travels, he slept on a native carpet wrapped in a North African burnoose. Later he would live the ascetic life of a solitary monk: first on the Moroccan-Algerian border, where he dreamed of Christianizing Morocco; and finally in Tamanrasset, where he arrived in 1905 and lived at first in a zeriba (reed hut). After moving into a mud house, he devoted all of his time to prayer and writing a lexicon and grammar for Tamachek, the language of the Tuaregs. In 1916 he was killed by Tuaregs who had come under the influence of invading Senussi tribesmen from Libya. His was the imperial experience taken to its logical extreme, in which a solitary individual cast away all personal ties to his homeland and withdrew into a remote and hostile landscape—an act of nihilism almost—while attempting to remake this same hostile landscape into a moral likeness of what he had left behind. Imperialism could be a form of escape.

That evening in the tent, Buck and Orlando decked themselves out in Tuareg headdresses and Saharan tunics that they had purchased in Tamanrasset, waxing enthusiastic about how well they were being treated. The following night, the Algerians translated two French-and Arabic-language movies for the Americans, The Stick and the Opium and The Battle of Algiers, about the rural and urban aspects of the independence struggle against the French. Among the last black-and-white films of the 1960s, they were much less graphic than the films of today; for that reason their effect was more powerful. They captured in extraordinary vividness the existential hatred between the French settlers and the Arab inhabitants of Algeria. Painting the French as the bad guys went over well with the SF team.

In the context of The Battle of Algiers, a pretty young Arab woman calmly placing a bomb in a crowded discothèque filled with French teenagers seemed perfectly normal; the same when a crowd of French adults beat unconscious a little Arab boy who they assumed had planted another bomb. What struck me about both movies was how much Algeria had changed since both films were made. The carnage and hatred of the 1950s and 1960s had given rise to a quarter century of dysfunctional, radical regimes that ruined the country’s economy—to say nothing of its social peace—so all the population now cared about was security and material improvements. “The young people don’t want to hear old men talk about the great struggle anymore,” one Algerian soldier told me, “they just want a better life.” In part, it was such mundane desires that were forcing the government into a closer relationship with the Americans.

Capt. Akermi saw little irony in pointing out to me the similarities between the tactical situation that the French had faced against Algerian freedom fighters in the 1950s and the one faced by the Algerian Army against Islamic terrorists in the 1990s. In each instance, he confided during the screening, the challenge was to pin down guerrillas who had indigenous inhabitants on their side. Another Algerian officer told me that it had taken a month to clear a village of booby traps, with local women eerily warbling in the streets against the government army, just as they had done against the French over three decades earlier.

At the beginning of the third and last week of training, a south wind arrived that blew sand for several days straight. The sky was a gaseous, daguerreotype yellow, like the atmosphere of a distant planet in a science fiction movie. Dust was everywhere, yet despite the constant wind the heat did not abate. But with limited time left, the training continued.

A tape drill for military operations in urban terrain (MOUT) provided another example of the differing mentalities of the two armies.[79] The American way of entering a hostile room was counterintuitive and methodical: several soldiers assumed interlocking sectors of fire while seeking points of domination, even as they ignored someone standing directly in front of them, since the person you saw was not the problem, it’s the person you didn’t see who would kill you. The Algerians were more impulsive, going for the first person they saw. They were obsessed with booby traps and suicide bombers in terrorist-occupied buildings, because that had been their experience in the 1990s. As they told us, their terrorists rarely stood and fought, but fled on contact and set traps instead.

Yet the Americans demonstrated their way, and the Algerians were impressed. Burly and red-haired Mike Salzwedel, the farm boy from Wisconsin, told them, “Once you’re in the building you have to be methodical, you can’t be terrified of bombs. That’s why you and we are special forces.”

The debate about tactics continued after the morning training. Adorjan, Butcher, Brahim, Akermi, and a few other Americans and Algerians stood around, underneath their two countries’ flags, exchanging stories and ideas. Butcher told about how in Sarajevo he had learned never to stop his vehicle wherever it looked as if the road had recently been repaired—a telltale sign of a bomb. Adorjan explained how to plant minefields and lay obstacles to turn the enemy in the direction you wanted him to go. Brahim mentioned that the first thing you did when you found out that terrorists were in a building was to cut off the electricity, which terrorists used to set off bombs. An Algerian captain with much combat experience in the 1990s remarked that tunnels were a popular escape method for local terrorists. Everyone agreed that perfection was the enemy of good enough. Said Adorjan: “A plan that is 70 percent complete today is better than one that is 98 percent complete tomorrow, because the sergeants can use the extra day to rehearse. It is only through rehearsal that nitty-gritty problems are exposed.” Nods all around. Capt. Akermi added: “If you win, it is always because of fire-power. If you lose, it is always because of comms [failure to communicate].”

The discussion continued for an hour in the midst of the sandstorm. There was never enough of a break in the conversation for someone to suggest moving inside. Officers and senior noncoms on both sides were that comfortable with one another.

A field training exercise was the culmination of the JCET. It entailed a more complex assault on a make-believe terrorist hideout than the one ten days before. Both the reconnaissance and assault teams would be composed of Algerians with a sprinkle of Americans. The Algerians would plan the operation. A few days earlier, Maj. Brahim had taken the A-team to the exercise site thirty-five miles north of the hootch, pointing out the hills from where his forces would stage the assault. The Americans would have done it differently, they told me.

As I knew from my own experience in southern Afghanistan, you would never have had the luxury of taking an entire assault team ahead of time to the site of an attack. Instead, you would have rehearsed and rehearsed at your own base, even as you sent out a two-or three-man sniper team to hide for forty-eight hours close to the actual site. The snipers would be armed with telephoto lenses, and would have the ability to electronically send photos of the site and surrounding terrain back to the A-team. They would also be able to call in air strikes, if necessary, before the main assault. But the Algerians did not have such technological assets, nor such faith in two or three individuals. Their way, rather than wrong, was simply a reflection of their own strengths and weaknesses. For example, in order to guard against an ambush with hills on both sides of a road, the Americans employed a “bounding overwatch,” pulling a vehicle off to a side to provide cover for the others. But the Algerians couldn’t do that, because it slowed down a convoy, and they had thousands of miles of desert to patrol, with such hills everywhere.

I stuck with Ken Butcher, who was part of the exercise’s reconnaissance element. We arrived at the assault site as dawn was breaking. With the Algerians there was noise, confusion, and a lot of milling around. “They should have been inserted silently in the middle of the night,” Butcher confided. “When these things go right, they happen fast. You un-ass the vehicles, hit the high ground, and set in.” Worse, the helicopter bearing the actual assault squad landed too far up the valley, and the overwhelmingly Algerian squad made too much noise in the process of advancing toward the objective. There were also three accidental discharges.

“What the hell is going on down there? It looks like a cluster fuck,” Butcher said over the intra-team radio. As I climbed down the hill at the conclusion of the disappointing exercise, I spotted the battalion commander of the 1st of the 10th, Lt. Col. Scott Eaddy of Knoxville, Tennessee. He had flown in the night before from Mali, by way of Algiers. The A-team gathered around the tall lieutenant colonel with the clean tan uniform (unlike everyone else’s) as he listened to their complaints. But then he had to listen even longer about the things that had gone right over the past three weeks:

Of course, the biggest problem (that led to all the others) was the noncoms who did not make decisions. And Algeria had it in spades, a consequence of authoritarian Arab culture made worse by Soviet influence. Because officers did not delegate, nothing happened until the last minute, thus constant delays and confusion, like this morning.

But as this was a familiar headache to 10th Group Green Berets—from past experience training Albanians, Romanians, and other ex-communist armies—they weren’t particularly bothered by it. They knew, for example, that producing a proud noncommissioned officers’ corps took many years and lots of money—years to train competent staff and first sergeants to run platoons and companies; money for the benefits that good noncoms required for their families. Thus, the bitching (like Ken Butcher’s remark about the “cluster fuck”) was just something the guys did all the time. I would be suspicious of any SF A-team (or Marine platoon for that matter) if I had walked into its hootch at night and did not hear a flamboyantly vulgar litany of complaints.

That evening over chai and Pepsi, Lt. Col. Eaddy and Capt. Adorjan met with several of the Algerian officers and visiting higher-ups about more and bigger JCETs in the near future. There was a suggestion from one Algerian general about joint American-Algerian operations against Salafists in the Sahara. The Americans did not need to remain focused on training exclusively in Algeria’s border areas like Tamanrasset, where every bad guy in the vicinity soon knew about their presence. Rather, they could be housed in permanent army bases like the one farther north in Biskra, the home of Maj. Brahim’s 41st Special Forces Company, from where helicopters could transport both them and the Algerians on joint missions close to Mali and Mauritania. “The great benefit of this country,” one American soldier observed, was the state-controlled media, which would allow such operations to remain low-key, if not altogether secret.

Later, over in the A-team’s tent, the noncoms condemned “the dicks” in the U.S. Air Force who still hadn’t made arrangements for their flight home. “I wouldn’t say they’re totally worthless…,” said one team member, “but their planes always seem to develop mechanical difficulty when the crews are over a nice spot like the Canary Islands.” The conversation turned to “the generals and other fuckheads in Mother Army,” who cared more about whether SF troops were wearing nonregulation ball caps than about what SF was accomplishing in the field.

“They told us to always wear name and rank on our DCUs [desert camouflage uniforms] down here,” said one team member, his anger and sarcasm building. “So what happens when they open the hatch of the C-17 on the tarmac at Tamanrasset? The Algerian military has its cameras rolling. Who’s to say Al-Jazeera doesn’t have our names and faces matched up by now?” To SF, Al-Jazeera journalists were synonymous with international terrorists. “But Mother Army doesn’t care about that,” he continued, “as long as in the photos we’re not wearing ball caps.”[80]

It was a good JCET, in other words. The grumbling of the noncoms was directed at their own higher-ups, not at the host-country troops.