Imperial Grunts: The American Military on the Ground

^{CHAPTER THREE} PACOM ^{MONGOLIA, SPRING 2003 WITH NOTES ON MACEDONIA, BOSNIA, AND TAJIKISTAN}

In the early spring of 2003 an American-led host, spearheaded by the First Marine Expeditionary Force (I MEF) and the Army’s 3rd Infantry and 101st Airborne divisions, captured Baghdad, racing from Kuwait across 350 miles of hostile Mesopotamian desert to the Iraqi capital, seizing it and other cities along the way, and doing so with greater speed and efficacy than German Panzer divisions moving across Russia in 1941 and the Israeli Defense Forces moving across Sinai in 1967. Because conventional war played to the strengths of the Pentagon brass, they outdid the military achievements of Xenophon at Cunaxa in 401 B.C. and of Alexander the Great at Gaugamela in 331 B.C., both of which lay along the invasion paths. The three-and-a-half-week campaign would be comprehensively documented by hundreds of journalists who were implanted with the Marine and Army divisions.[22]

But while the public at the time identified America’s imperium with an expeditionary force of several hundred thousand troops in Iraq, more often than not this empire was being created and maintained elsewhere by just a few individuals here and there. Mongolia, whose obscurity did not render it unimportant, was the best example of that.

As I MEF and the 3rd Infantry, assisted by Special Operations Forces, tried to consolidate their hold over Iraq following the collapse of Saddam Hussein’s despotic regime, a small event went unnoticed. A contingent of 175 Mongolian soldiers made plans to deploy to Iraq, to assist American troops in policing that conquered country. It constituted the first entry of Mongol troops into Mesopotamia since 1258, when Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, exterminated most of the population of Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid caliphate.

Hulagu also destroyed the irrigation system, reducing Mesopotamia to a malarial swamp from which it never quite recovered. Tamerlane, another Turkic-Mongol, reconquered it in 1400. Mesopotamia next became a battleground for Sunni Turks and Shiite Persians, with the Turks eventually consolidating it as a backwater of the Ottoman Empire. The collapse of the Ottoman sultanate at the end of World War I led to a British-created state that threw Kurds together with Sunni and Shiite Arabs. Following the British departure, one Iraqi ruler violently toppled another. Only the most ruthless of dictators could contain Iraq’s sectarian passions, hence Saddam.

The arrival in Mesopotamia of America’s liberal world empire was an attempt to reverse that doleful historical pattern. The fact that America did, in fact, constitute a world empire was best demonstrated by distant Mongolia’s inclusion in it. “Mongolia is a vast country completely surrounded by two anti-American empires, Russia and China,” S. Galsanjamts, a member of Mongolia’s National Security Council, told me. “It is therefore a symbol of the kind of independence America wants to encourage in the world.”

Before seeing how one good man encouraged that independence, it is necessary to set the stage with some history.

For nearly a millennium, from before the collapse of Rome to the dawn of the Renaissance, Inner Asia—Mongolia in particular—was the source of much of the destruction and epochal change wrought upon Europe and the Middle East. Pouring out of a desolate steppe prone to extreme temperatures and hemmed in by the Altai, Pamir, and other mountain ranges, Turko-Mongol nomads recurrently descended upon sedentary peoples lying to the south and west. Between the fourth and twelfth centuries, Huns, Avars, and Magyars, as well as Khazar, Petcheneg, and Cuman Turks, all beat similar paths out of North-Central Asia into southern Russia, the Great Hungarian Plain, and the Balkans.¹ China, too, which lies to the southeast of Mongolia, suffered the whirlwind onslaughts. The Great Wall was less a defense against men than against their horses, without which the nomads were powerless.²

But the barbarians of Asia’s interior tableland were shrewd, making a pact with one Chinese faction against the other, or siding with an exiled pretender. In his definitive tome, The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia, the French scholar René Grousset writes that the “periodic descents by the hordes of the steppe… became one of the geographic laws of history.”³

There was an opposing law, too, which brought about the “slow absorption of the nomad invaders by ancient civilized lands.”⁴ To wit, the Moghul Empire in northern India, with its sensuous fusion of Persian-Turkic architecture, was the by-product of stationary anthills of civilization being invigorated, rather than ravished, by steppeland nomads, founded as the Moghul Empire was by Muhammad Babur, an early-sixteenth-century Mongol king and descendant of Tamerlane. History in Eurasia had always been determined by large-scale migrations. And that was something the United States had to keep in mind, given that as the earth’s largest landmass Eurasia was still the heart of geopolitics.

Of all the Turkic and proto-Turkic multitudes that washed out of the high plateau of North-Central Asia, the most notable came from just north of the Gobi Desert: the thirteenth-century Mongols led by Genghis Khan who, as Grousset writes, “integrated the steppe… and became the steppe incarnate, from Peking to Kiev.”⁵ It was Genghis—the “Great Khan” and “Lord of the Earth”—who replaced clan-based battle units with mixed squads of ten, which allowed for a monolithic cavalry that crossed tribal lines and represented all the peoples of Central Asia.⁶

Following his imperial election in 1206, Genghis (a Persianized spelling, actually; he is called “Chingis” by Mongols) required only twenty years to unify the steppe and begin his conquest of sedentary China and Iran. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the conquering squadrons of his descendants would cover 90 degrees of longitude across the swath of Asia, a quarter of the earth’s circumference.⁷

The descriptions of the thirteenth-century Mongols by the Chinese annalists and the medieval French traveler William of Rubruquis are, in fact, strikingly similar to those of the fourth-century Huns written by the Roman historian Ammianus Marcellinus: they were short and stocky, with broad faces, leathery skins, straight black hair, flat noses, and eyes like thin crevices. History may record nothing so terrifying as the sight of a Mongol cavalry, in all its stench and ugliness, girdling the horizon, and advancing “at a jog trot in an awe-inspiring silence,” before charging with “diabolical shrieks and yells.”⁸ Tuluy Khan, the most brutal of Genghis’s sons, in 1221 killed several times more people in Merv, in Turkestan, with swords and axes than the 225,000 killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.⁹ Up to 30 percent of the population of Central Asia and adjacent areas was decimated by this Mongol war machine.

Still, the great civilizations of northern India would never have come into being without these Turko-Mongol incursions. It was the Mongols who unified Cathay and Mangi, respectively the northern and southern empires of China. Kublai Khan, another of Genghis’s grandsons, established China’s Yuan dynasty, with Beijing as its capital. In 1267 he began to construct a new complex of palaces to the northeast of Beijing, known as the “City of the Khan,” Khanbaligh, the Cambuluc of Western travelers to Kublai’s court, whose luxury was celebrated by Marco Polo.

The late-eighteenth-century English historian Edward Gibbon, who considered these Central Asian hordes the “remote authors of the fall of the Roman empire,” writes thus in defense of the Mongols:

Under Kublai Khan’s reign in China, Gibbon continues, “letters and commerce, peace and justice, were restored,” and “the great canal of five hundred miles was opened.”¹¹ Kublai’s Chinese khanate lasted no more than a century, though, as the Mongols lost their old nomadic hardiness and slipped into the decadence of sedentary life. They were subsequently toppled by their Chinese subjects, even as China’s civilization had been revitalized by the steppeland occupiers. “Conquering a country while mounted is easy,” Genghis had said, anticipating the problem with China, “dismounting and building a nation is difficult.”¹² It was something the U.S. would learn in Iraq eight hundred years later.

Following Genghis’s conquests, the process of dismounting and nation-building was truly begun by Ogodai Khan, the most intelligent of Genghis’s offspring. Ogodai, who completed the Mongol conquest of northern China, Iran, and southern Russia, settled in the city of Karakorum in the center of present-day Mongolia (the region where the Hsiung-nu, or Huns of antiquity, had their capital), and in 1235 surrounded it with a defensive wall.¹³ Gibbon observes that a “change of manners is implied in the removal… from a tent to a house.”¹⁴ In Karakorum, the sterile immensity of the plateau and forest was tempered by painting, sculpture, silverware, and the mosques and Nestorian churches of foreign traders.

Karakorum was visited by the Franciscan William of Rubruquis, who set out from Constantinople in May 1253 on a mission from Louis IX of France (Saint Louis) to Mongka Khan, yet another of Genghis’s grandsons, who had taken up the Nestorian faith and turned his grandfather’s empire into a functioning bureaucratic state. By mid-summer, Rubruquis had traveled east from the Black Sea and Crimea, penetrating the heart of the Mongol imperial domain at its western edge in present-day Kazakhstan. In late autumn, he had rounded Lake Balkhash, and crossed into northwestern China and then Mongolia proper. Having arrived at the ordu (tented palace) of Mongka Khan, Rubruquis was granted an audience with the sovereign on January 4, 1254. In his account, he writes:

Karakorum, which Rubruquis would reach the following April, and where he would meet a Parisian goldsmith, represented, along with Kublai Khan’s Cambuluc, the high-water mark of medieval Mongol civilization, when the empire founded by Genghis stretched from Hungary to Korea, and as far south as the Persian Gulf and Vietnam: the largest land empire in history.

Later the Mongol Empire unraveled to the point where the Mongolian heartland itself became disunited by tribalism. By the end of the seventeenth century it was incorporated into Manchu China. There Mongolia languished until the seismic political shocks of the early twentieth century: the crumbling of the Manchus’ Qing dynasty in 1911 and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that tore imperial Russia apart.

The weakening of central authority in both Beijing and St. Petersburg led to Outer Mongolia declaring its independence, even as Inner Mongolia to the south remained a part of China. It would be in Inner Mongolia in the following decade where the celebrated American explorer and China scholar Owen Lattimore, in the words of his son, David, experienced “a kind of epiphany.”¹⁶ Seeing a camel caravan alongside a railway track, Lattimore wrote:

In Outer Mongolia, that steam-driven future had already led to a political maelstrom. First the Chinese tried to reclaim it. Then in 1921 came the “Mad Baron,” Roman Nicolaus Fyodorovich von Ungern-Sternberg, a thirty-four-year-old Baltic soldier-baron, Buddhist convert, and paranoid alcoholic. Ungern-Sternberg, who with his disheveled blond hair and exhausted expression resembled a figure in a Byzantine icon, believed himself the reincarnation of Genghis Khan brought back to earth in order to re-create Greater Mongolia.

The Mad Baron’s ragged army of Cossacks, czarist White Guards, Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war, and other war-criminal types pillaged Urga, the Outer Mongolian capital, after having driven out the Chinese. He and his troops gang-raped women to death, baked people alive in ovens and in the boilers of locomotives, fed ethnic Chinese to wolves, and stripped Jews naked in the bitter cold and mutilated their children, among other well-documented atrocities.¹⁸

Yet, by ousting the Chinese from Outer Mongolia, the Mad Baron unwittingly opened the door to Lenin’s Red Army. Though he vowed to erect an “avenue of gallows” from Urga to Moscow, from which would “swing Bolshevik and Jew alike,” the Bolsheviks captured and executed him later in 1921 in the course of establishing the Mongolian People’s Republic.¹⁹ Urga thus became known as Ulan Bator, “Red Hero,” more recently spelled as Ulaanbaatar. For seven decades thereafter, Mongolia languished in the limbo of a Soviet satellite, the second country in the world after Russia itself to become communist.

It was in the turbulent period of 1922–30, a time when the Soviets were still establishing themselves in Mongolia—when the Gobi was still accessible to Americans—that Roy Chapman Andrews of the Museum of Natural History in New York conducted several expeditions there, scouring the desert for dinosaur fossils. Chapman Andrews was a charismatic, larger-than-life big-game hunter and scholar-adventurer who uncovered the first skeleton of Velociraptor, the star dinosaur in Steven Spielberg’s movie Jurassic Park. Chapman Andrews would later become the prototype for the fictional archaeologist-explorer Indiana Jones in the movies of George Lucas.²⁰

Three quarters of a century later, after central authority had once again dissolved in Russia upon the dissolution of the Soviet Union, even as China was continuing to reemerge as a great power, an American Army officer in the style of Roy Chapman Andrews was dispatched to Mongolia to make it a military ally of the United States. The deployment of this particular American officer occurred against the following backdrop.

Mongolia, with one of the world’s lowest population densities, was being threatened by the latest of Eurasia’s great historical migrations—that of an urban Chinese civilization determined to move north. The Chinese coveted the oil, coal, uranium, and empty grasslands of their former Manchu possession. Given that a resurgent China had already absorbed Tibet, Macau, and Hong Kong on the mainland, Mongolia, which on the map looked like a big piece of territory that had been bitten away from China, was fast becoming a trip wire for judging future Chinese intentions.

Cognizant of Mongolia’s geographic encirclement by Russia to its north and by China to its south, west, and east, the American secretary of state James Baker III had pointedly told Mongolians during a visit in July 1991 to consider the U.S. “your third neighbor.” But that bold vision languished for a decade, until the arrival of regular Army Lt. Col. Thomas Parker Wilhelm.

Lt. Col. Wilhelm was determined to make the descendants of Genghis Khan the “peacekeeping Gurkhas” of the American Empire. It was an apt metaphor. The Gurkhas, the fighting tribes of Nepal which had won the respect of the British on account of their toughness and adaptability, were originally of Mongolian origin.²¹

Of average height with a sturdy, fireplug build, Tom Wilhelm was a perpetually exploding canister of energy. His forceful manner and animated voice communicated ready, aim, fire in each sentence. He walked fast and his train of thought was faster still. Either way, I found it hard keeping up with him. Everything about him was a series of exclamation points. His eyes under his dark, short, slightly receding hair literally drank up the Gobi landscape. He could quote from memory Robert Service’s poetry of adventure and wanderlust. In e-mails to me before I came out to Mongolia, he went on about Central Asian history and the medieval traveler William of Rubruquis, before ending his missives with “GO ARMY, BEAT NAVY! CHEERS FROM THE STEPPE, TOM.”

Wilhelm had a maniacal laugh. In his office at the American Embassy in Ulaanbaatar he kept two saddles and a tent. He hunted. He fished. He owned a World War II–vintage motorcycle with a sidecar. He traveled with a jar of McIlhenny’s Tabasco Brand Pepper Sauce that he used liberally. I remember him popping hot green peppers into his mouth at a Mongolian border post while talking up the benefits of Harris Falcon-II Series tactical hand-held radios to a Mongolian colonel. “They’re the best radios in the world, they’ll last forever, you’ll love them,” he said. “Tom Wilhelm,” a friend of his in Washington had warned me, “is what happened when Huck Finn grew up.”

As with other American officers and noncoms I had met, for Tom Wilhelm the mission was everything. Not to take bureaucratic risks—or to shade the truth for the sake of a diplomatic or career advantage—was in his eyes unmanly, the worst of offenses. “I’m the guy who gutted the DOD’s [Department of Defense’s] environmental program for Mongolia, because it was unimplementable, and I didn’t see what we were getting out of it,” he told me as soon as we had met in Ulaanbaatar, just after he had been promoted to a full bird colonel. “Gutting the environmental program was the first policy step towards getting Mongolian peacekeepers on the yellow brick road to Baghdad.”

When Wilhelm had arrived in Mongolia in 2001, there was no focus to defense relations, only a hodgepodge of unrelated aid and training programs that had not been staffed out in detail in either Washington or Ulaanbaatar. Nor did Mongolia’s post-communist military have a realistic vision of its own future. It wanted a modern air force, but it was unclear just what such an air force would do, even as there was no expertise to maintain and sustain transport planes or fighter jets.

Wilhelm, with the active support of Ambassador John Dinger (like Colombia, this was another example of interagency cooperation), implemented a “three pillars” strategy for Mongolia, to which he convinced the Mongolian military to sign on.

• Secure Mongolia’s borders not against a conventional military threat from China, which was impossible to do, but against illegal border incursions including Chinese migration and transnational terrorism—for example, the Turkic Uighurs of western China. Aided by the Chechen mafia and al-Qaeda, the oppressed Muslim Uighurs conceivably represented the future of terrorism in Central Asia.

• Prepare the Mongolian military to play an active role in international peacekeeping, in order to raise its profile in global forums and thus provide it diplomatic protection from its large, rapacious neighbors. The planned dispatch of Mongolian troops to post-Saddam Iraq elicited shrill cries of annoyance from Russia and China, which had opposed the U.S. invasion. But it was the first building block of this pillar.

• Improve Mongolia’s own capacity to respond to internal disasters.

To achieve these goals, Wilhelm scrapped existing aid programs and added new ones that would support the three pillars, such as a humanitarian dental project in a key Mongolian-Chinese border area. Even as a lieutenant colonel, Tom Wilhelm was a policymaker by another name.

But there was another reason that I traveled to Mongolia to meet Wilhelm. Tom Wilhelm—known as “Mean Mr. Tom” to warlords in Bosnia, and “Aga Tom” to aficionados of the civil war in Tajikistan—had witnessed the messy collapse of communism in Eurasia on the ground in several theaters, where his very presence indicated the consequent rise of American power. Fluent in Russian, he was the ultimate area expert for the former Soviet empire and its shadow zones, from Yugoslavia to Mongolia.

Ulaanbaatar, where Wilhelm and I met, was a composite of any number of ex-communist capitals that I had seen in the Balkans, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, with an added touch of bone-chilling Anatolian-like bleakness. Dominated by gray cement and brown dirt, it had barely a tree in sight. The apartment blocks resembled penitentiaries. The stench of lignite lasted deep into spring. Yaks fed on weeds in garbage-strewn lots on the city’s outskirts, where people inhabited traditional gers (circular felt tents). Underground utility pipes housed the homeless and shipping containers functioned as kiosks. Because of the SARS epidemic, people went about with white masks over their mouths and noses, adding a strange, futuristic element to the cityscape.[23]

Ulaanbaatar was a far cry from the town founded in the mid-seventeenth century as a trading post at the junction of several caravan routes, known as Urga. Roy Chapman Andrews, observing Mongol horsemen mingling with camel drivers from Turkestan in Urga’s dusty streets, compared it to “an American frontier outpost of the Indian fighting days.”²²

The American Indian analogy went far in Mongolia, for the Plains Indians were descendants of the very peoples who had migrated from this part of North-Central Asia across the Bering Strait and down into North America. Gen. Joseph Stilwell, the American commander in China during World War II, remarked that the “sturdy, dirty, hard-bitten” Mongols all had “faces like Sitting Bull.”²³ The Mongolian long-song took you back to the chants of the Sioux and Apaches. Helping matters were the cowboy hats that Mongolians wore along with their traditional robes. As Wilhelm never stopped saying, “Mongolia is real Injun Country.”

There was other romance, too. Ulaanbaatar was once the Sacred City of the Living Buddha. The Buddhist lamaseries of Gandantegchinlen Khiid and Daschoilon Khiid, revived since the fall of communism, were cavernous, dusky red and leafy gold worlds of chanting, saffron-robed monks and hammered brass prayer wheels. Sculptures of frightening servant deities sat in dilapidated wooden cases sanctified by dust, reminiscent of faded black-and-white photos in an antiquarian’s library. The seventy-five-foot-tall gilded gold statue of Buddha at Gandantegchinlen Khiid, built to replace the one destroyed by the communists, was a loud, happy spirit of beauty and wonderment. It was a welcome contrast to the bone gray steppe, apartment blocks, and statues of local communist bosses that had curiously not been torn down, and which people passed by in silence.

The American Embassy in Ulaanbaatar was different from the American embassies in Sana’a and Bogotá. It was a small building, with less imposing security, befitting the threat assessment. Mongolia had been under the Soviet jackboot for seventy years, a generation longer than the satellite states of Eastern Europe, so public opinion was particularly pro-American. There were no anti-war demonstrations at the time of the invasion of Iraq. On the walls of the embassy’s corridors were splendid old photographs of Chapman Andrews’s expeditions in the Gobi in the 1920s, with the Stars and Stripes snapping in the breeze above Fulton trucks.

Newly promoted Col. Tom Wilhelm greeted me in a gray suit, white shirt, tie, and suspenders. His jobs included defense attaché, Office of Defense Cooperation chief, and liaison for Pacific Command. Actually, he was an Army FAO (foreign area officer), part of a cadre of U.S. military experts in local cultures that blended the role of soldier and diplomat.

The morning I arrived, Col. Wilhelm was busy with a number of tasks. He had to personally thank the parents of a Mongolian-born U.S. Marine fighting in Basra, Iraq, and plan for the visit of the chief of the Mongolian military, Maj. Gen. Tsevegsuran Togoo, to Washington, and the visit of fourteen American brigadier generals to Mongolia. Also due to arrive here was the Third Marine Expeditionary Force commander, Lt. Gen. Wallace Gregson. That last visit was the most important. If there were ever a land invasion of Asia, in the Korean Peninsula for example, III MEF would play a role just as prominent as I MEF had played in Iraq.

The majority of Mongolia’s foreign military training and assistance came from the U.S., and Wilhelm was only one of three full-time defense attachés here. The other two were Russian and Chinese, and they rarely left the capital. Americans were uncomfortable with the idea of empire, even as the responsibility was thrust upon them in places like this.

“I chose to come here, and not to work on the JSTAFF [joint staff] at the Pentagon, because in Mongolia I knew that I could make a difference,” Wilhelm told me as we packed for a nine-day trip along the Mongolian-Chinese border. “Mongolians are the only optimistic people in post-Soviet Central Asia,” he went on. “In the Stans they’re all cynical.”

The Stans—Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and so forth—were an assemblage of dysfunctional one-man dictatorships, in which Brezhnevian-era central committeemen were behaving like medieval khans, searching for a glorious past that eluded them because of artificial borders drawn by Stalin, which had resulted in ethnically divided populations. In Mongolia, by contrast, a place with few ethnic tensions, the greatest of the true khans, Genghis, had been reborn as a unifying national hero following the Soviet collapse. Genghis, unlike Hitler or Stalin, was not burdened by any racist or utopian ideology. He was simply a conqueror, albeit among history’s bloodiest, so given enough centuries he could metamorphose into a useful and benign symbol.

The Soviets detested the legacy of Genghis Khan’s thirteenth-century Mongols. It was their destructive onslaughts that had orientalized Russia, denying Russia the experience of the European Enlightenment. Because the Communists had banned all public displays of veneration for Genghis, after the Soviet Union’s collapse he became a luminary instantly. His visage now appeared on carpets, altars, the currency, and beer and vodka bottles. Because his presence overshadowed that of every politician in this fledgling democracy, it discouraged any of them from trying to become big shots, or dictators; thus was democracy strengthened here.

For that and other odd reasons, Mongolia seemed full of promise. So was our mood as Wilhelm donned his baseball cap, suspenders, and cargo pants in the style of an Austrian mountaineer, and slipped oriental prayer beads into one of his pockets for good luck. Next he stuffed his BDU (battle dress utility) into his Army kit bag, in order to wear it at upcoming meetings with Mongolian officers at the Chinese border.

Like any good policymaker—for that was what, in essence, he was—Wilhelm relied on a vivid ground-level sensibility regarding the country in question. Such ground-level sensibility was not a matter of squeezing a large number of meetings into a day or two of travel outside the capital. The keenest insights could never be had by efficient management of time. You refined your instincts about places like Mongolia—or Colombia or Yemen, for that matter—by, in effect, wasting a lot of time. You needed to be able to forget about the capital and slip into the bizarre and tedious inefficiencies of the countryside, with its monotonous travel and meetings that often didn’t go anywhere, in order to have a better understanding of what you were dealing with. That is what Wilhelm meant to do on this trip, though he never put it that way.

Ulaanbaatar’s train station was a poured-concrete neoclassical pile that for a third world train station was surprisingly quiet and well organized. Our Russian-built train reeked of lignite as a shapely female conductor, wearing a white mask against SARS, had the stove already going for tea. Joining us in the compartment was Maj. Dabarch Altankhuu (Golden Sun), our translator. Mongolians, like American Indians, had naturalistic names. Maj. Altankhuu, dressed in jeans and a work shirt, was a young, stocky, and clean-cut officer who had learned English at the Defense Language Institute in San Antonio, Texas.

As the train slipped out of Ulaanbaatar, Wilhelm, wearing a little boy’s smile, declared: “I just love train travel.” Being dinnertime, he whipped out from his rucksack a bottle of red wine, black Russian caviar, soft-boiled eggs, cheese, and pickles, and we had ourselves a feast. Then he proceeded to pump Maj. Altankhuu for information on the up-and-comers in the Mongolian military. I looked out the window at bark-brown and tungsten-hued ridges streaked with snow beyond the last of Ulaanbaatar’s scrap metal junkyards.

Mongolia constituted a vast spectacular emptiness: Mars except with oxygen to breathe. Only 2.5 million people lived in this country two and a quarter times the size of Texas, and close to a million of them were in Ulaanbaatar. For Peter Fleming, that most intrepid of early-twentieth-century British travelers, Mongolia was a barren tableland of “little horses and great frosts.”²⁴ Here geology mattered more than civilization. Unfolding like a streamer before my eyes was a steppe of gaunt and grumbling hills. Not a tree or piece of scrub was in sight, not even a ger. One of the pretty conductors brought tea.

Deep inside East-Central Asia, Mongolia is dominated by a “basin-like plateau,” much of which lies from three thousand to five thousand feet above sea level.²⁵ Looming to the north are the Khangai and Altai ranges, rising to fourteen thousand feet. The climate is among the world’s most extreme, with temperatures in Ulaanbaatar varying from 100 degrees in summer to -43 degrees in winter. “It was a desolate country,” writes Roy Chapman Andrews, “for every wave in this vast land-sea was cut and slashed by the knives of wind and frost and rain, and lay in a chaotic mass of gaping wounds—canyons, ravines, and gullies, painted in rainbow colors, crossing and cutting one another at fantastic angles as far as the eye could see.”²⁶

Today’s Mongolia, the former Outer Mongolia, has the elongated shape of a sheepskin. We were headed southeast—and downhill—from Ulaanbaatar, into the warmer lowlands of the Gobi Desert, as far as Zamyn-Uud on the Chinese border. This was close to where Marco Polo had passed en route to China in the thirteenth century.

For much of history, the overwhelming majority of Mongolia’s inhabitants were nomadic herdsmen. The Khalka tribe formed the majority in an ethnic mosaic that included Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Buriats, and Torgots. The Chinese began settling here in the early eighteenth century by order of the Manchu emperors. The current hostility between the Mongolians and the Chinese dates from this time. While the Mongolian was at home on the back of his pony, the Chinese infiltrated through agriculture. As Chapman Andrews writes,

At sunset we saw a signature image of Mongolia’s nomadic spirit: galloping across the hard, baked steppe and keeping up with the train was a lone horseman, standing upright in his unpadded wooden saddle, wearing a pointed fur cap. “It’s like the Great Plains 150 years ago,” Wilhelm exclaimed. After two years here his enthusiasm hadn’t abated. When darkness reduced the world to the rumbling sound of the train, he began to tell me his life story.

Tom Wilhelm was born in 1959 in Evansville, Indiana. His father worked for Martin Marietta, a defense contractor. His job brought him to Orlando, Florida, soon after Tom’s birth. “I grew up in Orlando, B. M.—Before the Mouse,” he said, referring to Disney World. “It was a quiet little town back then, with a lot of veterans always talking about World War II. The military was an important part of our lives. I was a nationally ranked backstroker and class president with good grades. You know,” he continued, sounding embarrassed, “the typical high achiever, and got into West Point. When I got there I found out I was Joe Average.

“West Point’s official motto is ‘Duty, Honor, Country,’ but the everyday mantra is ‘You Must!’ Electives at other colleges are required subjects here. You take a full load of engineering, math, science, history, psychology, philosophy, foreign languages, and other hard courses besides the military training that continues through the summer. For me that included airborne training and jungle warfare school in Panama. If you flunk just one class, you get a bus ticket home the same day. You don’t even get to spend the night in your dorm room. It was certainly an experience, but it was only a moment. As soon as you’re commissioned you’re just another second lieutenant in the U.S. Army. The only information that appears on your uniform is your last name, WILHELM. You never mention that you went to West Point. The Army hates elitists.”

After West Point came something harder still: Ranger school at Fort Benning, Georgia. The Army Rangers hark back to Rogers’s Rangers, organized in 1756 by the New Hampshire native Maj. Robert Rogers, who recruited nine companies of American colonists to fight for the British during the French and Indian War. Rogers was the first to incorporate the guerrilla fighting methods of the frontier into an organized military doctrine, the nucleus of today’s Ranger Handbook.

“At Ranger school you learn what you’re capable of,” Wilhelm continued. “It’s where you meet yourself, stripped of illusions. When we’d run up a hill in full kit a school bus would follow beside us, to pick up stragglers, who got shipped out immediately—without even a chance to wash off the sweat and dust. You swam rushing rivers in winter with a full pack, boots, and rifle. The Ranger Handbook has been my bible ever since. In the Army infantry, without that Ranger patch on your BDU, you’re suspect.”

Having become an Army Ranger, Wilhelm was appointed a platoon leader of an air assault infantry unit of the 101st Airborne Division, stationed in Fort Campbell, Kentucky. It was the early 1980s, the last years, it would turn out, of the old Vietnam War Army. Robbery and drugs were still rife in the barracks. Disciplining soldiers was a big part of his job. “That was all gonna change. I’ll get to that later.” In 1983 he was sent to helicopter flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, and afterwards assigned to the 172nd Infantry Brigade, based in Fairbanks, Alaska.

After a tour as an Army bush pilot, Wilhelm commanded an arctic infantry company, patrolling the Aleutian Islands with Eskimo scouts, occasionally spotting signs of SPETSNAZ (Soviet special forces) units which operated in remote parts of Alaska, a little-known aspect of the Cold War. Fighting in the Arctic demanded a unique set of infantry skills. “When the temperature is forty below,” Wilhelm explained, “you can’t afford to break a sweat, because once you stop sweating you’ll turn into a Popsicle. You’ve got to stay dry, even when you’re pulling a sled loaded down with gear. Therefore, everything has to be planned and carried out far more methodically than in temperate climates. It was the best job of my life.” But that’s what he said about all the jobs he had in the Army.

In 1985 he was sent to the Canadian Land Forces Command and Staff College at Kingston, Ontario, a bastion of British colonial tradition where you wore a tie after six and were given your own napkin ring at mess. “There was a lot of esprit. Everything was deliberate, meticulous, with a fierce sense of a warrior ethic, despite the lack of opportunities Canada had to prove it. I never worked harder writing op orders. The Canadians didn’t blink; they just kept demanding more detail. I get angry whenever someone belittles the Canadian military.”

About this time Wilhelm decided to become a foreign area officer (FAO) for the Soviet Union and its environs. Henceforth he would be a soldier-diplomat, a risky career choice given that the regular Army’s main mission was fighting wars, not diplomacy. Total immersion in Russian at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, and graduate school in Russian and Eastern European studies at the University of Kansas followed in quick succession. Then, on his own initiative, and with his own money—with a wink and a nod from the U.S. Army—Wilhelm applied and got accepted to Leningrad State University. “I’ve built my career in the gray areas,” he explained.

He slept in the dorms with Soviet students and queued at neighborhood buffets for sticky rice, black bread, and sour milk. “But the ice cream made it worth it. Russian vanilla ice cream is the best vanilla ice cream in the world!” he exclaimed. Like everyone else in Leningrad, he learned to chase down rumors about consignments of fresh fruit. Waiting in line once in a rainstorm for bananas, he saw the heavyset woman in front of him turn completely naked as the cheap cotton slip she was wearing stuck to her body and became transparent. She laughed along with everyone around her.

It was a life spent learning specific skills—the Russian language, arctic survival, helicopter piloting—rather than theoretical constructs. And there was no letup. At the Russian Institute in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany, Wilhelm studied Soviet mapmaking and Soviet arms control mathematics, which he soon learned had nothing to do with mathematics.

“The Cold War was a sequence of tactical responses,” he explained. “Each side developed a new weapons system to negate the other side’s. The Soviets had reduced the whole process to various math equations. Then I learned about ‘Coefficient K,’ which stipulated that the Politburo always had the power to revise all the other math.” For example, toward the end of the Cold War the Soviets came out with the T-80 tank, which they touted as superior to its American counterparts. In that case, responded the Americans, the Soviets would have to reduce their forces in Europe to compensate for the imbalance created by the new tank. The Politburo then revised the math data and indicated that maybe the T-80 wasn’t such a breakthrough after all. “This was my first hard lesson in the politization of warfighting,” he said.

Wilhelm was thirty years old and an Army captain when the Berlin Wall fell, an event that would change his life. At first he was made a leader of an on-site inspection team for policing arms control agreements between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that had been accelerated by the wall’s collapse. The following decade would take him all over the former East Bloc, and to war-torn Tajikistan, Macedonia, Bosnia, and back to Tajikistan. His knowledge of Russian and other Slavic languages would get him repeatedly into war zones, something the Cold War likely never would have.

I went to sleep in the dark and rattling train compartment amidst smells of cheese, lignite, and dirty socks, remembering the China scholar Owen Lattimore’s phrase about the melancholy of travel: “a winelike melancholy, tenuous but soft, like the delicate, plangent, muted syllables of Verlaine, fortuitously remembered in a Mongolian sunset.”²⁸ I awoke to a full moon at dawn, with snow like powdered sugar glinting on the wrinkled face of the desert. We were now in the real Gobi (Mongolian for “gravel-covered plain”). A Bactrian camel, hairy from the long winter, stood silhouetted at a lonely station platform. Wilhelm, playing with his orange prayer beads and adjusting his ball cap after a few hours of sleep, said, “Now where would you rather be: here, or stuck in traffic, staring at the car ahead of you on I-395 going to work at the Pentagon?”

The train pulled into Zamyn-Uud. Scanning the compartment one last time, Wilhelm, quoting the next-to-last page of the Ranger Handbook with Maj. Rogers’s own standing orders, declared, “Don’t forget nothing.”

The new station building sat like a stage prop against the gravel steppe. Waiting for us at the foot of the platform in the freezing April cold were three Mongolian officers wearing dress greens, leather coats down to their ankles, and ridiculously large service caps in standard Soviet style, dubbed “satellite dishes.” They shunted us into a Russian-made jeep called a UAZ, short for the Uralski Aftomobilni Zavod (Ural Automobile Factory). Noting that it was a large-sized and late-model UAZ, Wilhelm declared, “Looks like we’ll be living in tall cotton.” The UAZ was about as big as a small SUV, but without the amenities and with none of the comfort.

Our hotel was two hundred yards farther along the railroad tracks, a poured concrete blockhouse with hard beds, hideous furniture, and cracked windows. Wilhelm quickly changed into his BDU with its Ranger and paratrooper insignias, and black beret with the U.S. Army flash, along with an eagle, the insignia of his colonel rank.[24] We all gathered in Wilhelm’s room. Col. D. Battsengel, the leader of the Mongolian delegation, ordered breakfast brought up: buuz, or mutton ball dumplings in goulash, fatty cold cuts, and salty camel’s milk tea. We cleaned the plates.

“The American military will eat anything, anywhere, anytime,” Wilhelm pronounced to our hosts. Maj. Altankhuu translated. (Though Wilhelm’s Russian was fluent, his Mongolian was basic.) They all laughed. Asking the name of a Mongolian officer a second time, Wilhelm apologized, “I always ask for a name twice. When I remembered a woman’s name the first time, I knew she would be my wife.” Laughter again. Wilhelm’s friendly banter and broad smile never let up.

After small talk about wrestling and martial arts, Col. Battsengel told us he was from northeastern Mongolia, where Genghis Khan was born and was likely buried. Col. Battsengel told us he was opposed to the current search for Genghis’s remains by archaeologists, saying it was bad luck. I noticed the endless knot of eternity, a Mongolian shamanistic symbol, on his dress greens. Wilhelm, pointing to another shamanistic symbol on Battsengel’s uniform, mentioned that it appeared on a cloth given him by an old man who had traveled to the U.S. Embassy from an outlying village. The symbol, according to the old man, would force “your Iraqi enemies to bow down to you in supplication.”[25]

Formally welcoming us to East Gobi Province, Col. Battsengel said that the tempo of development was about to pick up dramatically with the establishment of an economic free zone, manufacturing plants, and a casino on the border that would increase the population of Zamyn-Uud from ten thousand to thirty thousand. The Chinese were pushing hard for a casino gambling industry in Mongolia, which favored their business acumen and organizational skills. The Chinese had other plans, too.

The Chinese wanted to start large-scale animal husbandry operations in southern and eastern Mongolia, which would ruin the earth’s last uninhabited steppe. They had their eyes on the Gobi’s mineral deposits. They wanted to build a modern road network into Mongolia’s Gobi Desert from Inner Mongolia, and they were underbidding everyone else for construction projects. Meanwhile, northern Mongolia was being deforested; every other freight train we saw was filled with logs headed for China.

Despite seven decades of virtual Soviet occupation, Mongolians were less afraid of the Russians than of the Chinese. This was less because of the long Manchu occupation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than because of the threat China now represented. Russia’s was the disintegrating empire, China’s the rising one, with the Chinese migrating in large numbers into adjacent Russian Siberia.[26] Having once conquered Mongolia by moving the line of cultivation northward, China was poised to conquer Mongolia through globalization. The Chinese border post was in eyesight of our hotel: a brightly lit, well-engineered arc, signifying the post-industrial monolith encroaching on Zamyn-Uud’s sprawl of felt tents and scrap iron huts.

The Chinese had flooded Inner Mongolia with Han Chinese immigrants, just as they had flooded Tibet and the Turkic Uighur areas of western China’s Sinkiang Province. The Mongolians worried that they would be next. Uppermost in their minds was the fate of the Tibetans, co-religionists with whom they shared the same form of Buddhism. Mongolia’s national security doctrine had a phrase about “ethnic purity,” reflecting its fear of Manchu-like penetration.

The paranoia in Mongolia about SARS, a disease which seemed to come from China, was telling. In Mongolian minds, it might take only one epidemic to wipe out a substantial part of this sparsely populated country, easing the path for another Chinese demographic conquest. The Mongolians had been particularly grateful for American diplomatic support in encouraging the Dalai Lama’s visit to Ulaanbaatar the previous November, a visit the Chinese tried to block by temporarily cutting rail and air links to Mongolia.

“In my blood I don’t like the Chinese,” declared a high-ranking Mongolian official in an interview I had conducted in Ulaanbaatar. “The Russians dominated our politics for seven decades but did not incorporate us into the Soviet Union. The Chinese have the possibility to absorb us utterly.” I recalled Gen. Stilwell’s comment in 1923 about the Mongols’ determination never again to be incorporated into China.²⁹

But greater than the fear of a strong China among Mongolians was the fear of an internally weak China, or a breakup of China even.

To wit, to Mongolia’s southwest lay China’s Sinkiang Province, populated heavily by Muslim Uighur Turks, who harbored a Balkan-like hatred of their Han Chinese overlords. Throughout history, China’s control of this desert region bordering Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the ex-Soviet Stans ebbed and flowed. In the minds of Muslim Uighurs, western China was really “East Turkestan.” In the early twentieth century the Uighurs had even set up an Independent Muslim Republic of East Turkestan headquartered in Kashgar, in western China, with hazy Pan-Islamic ideals.³⁰ A weakened China, along with continued instability in the former Soviet Stans and the North Caucasus, spelled trouble for Mongolia, we were told. It conjured up the prospect of Central Asian terrorism and drug trafficking spearheaded by Uighurs and Chechen criminals.

Col. Battsengel drove us beyond the last border checkpoint. Here in no-man’s-land there was only a plinth marking the frontier. A Chinese officer a few feet away on the other side of the plinth watched silently as Col. Wilhelm in his BDU and black beret went right up to it, careful not to step beyond for fear of provoking a diplomatic incident. Cameras clicked away at us from a window on the Chinese side.

This was a border that mattered. It would matter more as China loomed over the horizon—beyond the present conflagrations in the Middle East—as the greatest conventional challenge to American power. Yet America’s response was often subtle, as I would see.

We returned to Zamyn-Uud, where, in a nondescript house amid a sprawl of gers and huts, we found a long line of Mongolians waiting in a hallway in traditional dels, or robes. Many were children accompanied by their parents. In an adjacent room, U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Dan Elliot of Huntington Beach, California, greeted us. He was the chief of a four-person dental mission dispatched to this side of the Mongolian-Chinese border by Pacific Command. The mission fell within the humanitarian component of Col. Wilhelm’s three pillars strategy. By treating an average of a hundred patients daily in this and nearby border towns, Mongolians saw the benefits of American self-interest.

Sgt. Elliot briefed Col. Wilhelm. First he introduced the other members of the team, who nodded as they were busy with patients: Dr. Mark Uyehara, an Air Force lieutenant colonel from Honolulu; Dr. Charles F. Craft, a captain in the U.S. Public Health Service from Lincoln, Nebraska; and Air Force Tech. Sgt. Lorrin Savage from Newport News, Virginia.

“The goal here, sir,” Sgt. Elliot told Col. Wilhelm, “is load-light, low-tech, small footprint.” He meant that here in the Gobi more good could be done by traveling with minimal equipment, using the most basic technology least compromised by power outages, and keeping the mission as unobtrusive as possible. Slip in, slip out, take five minutes to set up and pack up, spend the rest of your time and energy with your patients. “We stay low-key and crank out patients, sir.”

Sgt. Elliot pointed out the cheap hardware store lamps for illuminating patients’ mouths and the locally purchased gas burners for hot water sterilization. The dental chairs came from nearby shops and offices. The team had advertised its mission to the community through the local radio station. All the equipment fit into six small trunks, including presents for the kids treated along the way. It was like battlefield surgery. The American military was most impressive when it knew how to be low-tech, the same way as guerrilla fighters.

In Colombia, high-tech items were less significant than training on basic tactics like peel-back retreats and direct charges into ambushes with old-fashioned grenades and assault rifles. Each war, each training mission, brought with it new lessons that had little to do with technology. Because America, under all its post–Cold War presidents, was active militarily overseas, its armed services were improving tactically by leaps and bounds.

Wilhelm complimented Sgt. Elliot and the rest of the team on the good work. As we were leaving, Elliot said, “Drink some of that camel’s milk, sir. It’s what keeps people’s teeth here so healthy.” With his fair face, unblinking eyes, and organizational skills, Sgt. Elliot was another example of America’s superb cadre of noncommissioned officers.

Later, at Col. Battsengel’s office, we were plied with camel’s milk, greasy mutton, and horse meat for lunch. There was a portrait of Genghis Khan, but none of our beloved leader, as in all the other Central Asian countries I had visited that venerate the current dictator. Mongolia, miraculously, still comprised a traditional culture that remained undiluted and uncompromised by communism or globalization. The diet, even at the upper levels of the military, was still a purely nomadic one: meat and milk products with no fruits or vegetables, for nomads lived off their animals and did not stay long enough in any place to cultivate the land. The only foreign cultural import was vodka.

After lunch we piled into the UAZ and headed southwest along the border from Zamyn-Uud. This part of the Gobi, inside no-man’s-land, was flat, featureless, and gravel strewn, utterly disorientating. No matter what direction I fixed my eyes, it all looked the same. Here I got my first intimation of how the Gobi abounded with wildlife, more so than anyplace I had seen in sub-Saharan Africa. There were swarms of finches, ruddy drakes, and black-tailed gazelles (Asiatic antelopes), the last of which we used the UAZ to chase down, barely catching them at forty-five miles per hour, exactly as Roy Chapman Andrews had described doing in his book Across Mongolian Plains. The horizons were so far you intuited the curvature of the earth. On a one-foot rise, the only landscape feature in this flat emptiness, stood a golden eagle about two feet tall. Next we came upon herds of goats, horses, and Bactrian camels guarded by a few border police. The goats, enclosed in a corral of sheep dung, were a source of food; the horses and camels were used for patrolling.

The Bactrian camels, with their cartoon-like faces and thick winter coats that they shed in blanket-like masses, appeared almost prehistoric. They were far more imposing than the single-humped, smooth-skinned dromedaries of the North African and Middle Eastern deserts. These homely queens of the desert, with heads like floor mops, got their name from the ancient kingdom of Bactria, between the Oxus and the Hindu Kush, that was easily subdued by Alexander the Great. Mongolia and the Gobi in particular contained most of the world’s surviving Bactrians.

Near the corral was a ger inhabited by a family of nomads. They invited us inside for camel’s milk and homemade vodka. The ger, ubiquitous throughout Mongolia, is a large, round felt tent. Everywhere else in Central Asia it is known by its Turkic equivalent, yurt. We were careful not to step on the door board as we entered; that brings bad luck and was a crime punishable by death in Genghis’s time. Continuing with the prescribed etiquette, we walked to the left, or clockwise, around the side of the tent to the back, the place for honored guests. This made sense as the kitchen—a few pots on a stove fueled by dried dung—lay off to the right of the door. The center of the sloping roof was open to the sky. From there hung the ceremonial blue scarf, or khatag, which blessed the ger. The spokes of the roof frame, or toono, represented the wheel of life. The altar behind us, fragrant with juniper incense, included a small carpet with a portrait of Genghis. There was a clean pagan simplicity to it all.

“I’m culturally at home,” Wilhelm announced to the gathering, as he sprinkled vodka in the air three times in Mongolian fashion before swallowing a small glassful. “I’m in the Gobi, among Mongolians, and among soldiers.” The statement, like so many others he made, endeared him to the locals. It demonstrated, too, how imperialism can entail the aesthetic appropriation of a foreign landscape. The tradition of British literary travel writing would have been impossible without the British Empire. Tom Wilhelm was a man of empire here in Mongolia. He was a more grounded, less mystical version of Francis Younghusband, the early-twentieth-century British army officer and Central Asian explorer who had led a military expedition to Tibet as a preventative to Russian infiltration there.

Heading back to Zamyn-Uud for the night, Wilhelm continued telling me about his life.

His arms inspection team had worked out of a “cheesebox” on Rhein-Main air base in Germany, on call for surprise inspections in recently liberated East Bloc countries. Then in the summer of 1992 came Provide Hope, a humanitarian program for giving away excess military supplies (pallets of winter clothes, blankets, tea, etc.) to the victims of the civil war in Tajikistan, a war which would result in more casualties proportionate to the population than any other civil war in the second half of the twentieth century.³¹ Wilhelm, as a Russian foreign area officer, was dispatched immediately to Dushanbe, the Tajik capital in the midst of a descent into anarchy, where he would link up with CARE International.³²

Now a captain, the only order he got from his superiors was “Don’t get yourself killed.” The rest he had to figure out on his own.

Capt. Wilhelm now found himself the leader of a different sort of team, one of young and inexperienced civilian relief workers pining for discipline and organization. “I had to figure out who needed to be bribed in order to get our relief supplies out of the railway station in Dushanbe and into secure warehouses.” Without a functioning government, and with thousands of ethnic Russians fleeing the country, the railway station was a place of chaos. “Over tea and vodka with the stationmaster, I realized that my team had something he could use. The SeaLand containers holding the humanitarian supplies were exactly what the Russians needed to get their possessions out. Because I controlled the market on storage, we struck a deal.”

Wilhelm next had to get the stuff into the countryside. “I got no intel out of the capital. The only useful intel came from the Russian troops nearest to the latest shoot-out.” He found himself writing battle doctrine for humanitarian convoys that needed to be escorted by Russian Hind helicopter gunships through terrain so rugged distances were more vertical than horizontal: from canyon floors to high mountain passes. (The last helicopter Wilhelm would pilot in his career was a Russian Mi-8 in Tajikistan, in order to survey the autonomous region of Gorno-Badakhshan.) “If your relief convoy is escorted by local militia and someone attempts to rob one of your trucks, do you ask the militiamen to shoot? At what point does a threat to a humanitarian convoy necessitate losing lives in a firefight?” he asked himself.

This was a question for which the Ranger Handbook provided no guidance. The Ranger Handbook is about combat: how to kill and avoid being killed. “Nobody much spoke about ROEs until the humanitarian and peacekeeping operations of the 1990s,” Wilhelm explained, “since during the Cold War we were either in an armed conflict or we weren’t. Now we needed subtle rules for subtle situations.”

That summer of 1992 saw fighting in Yugoslavia spread from Croatia to Bosnia, while the Caucasus, Moldova, Transdniestria, and Tajikistan all erupted in civil wars and rebellions. For untold millions across the southern swath of a former communist imperium, it was among the bloodiest and saddest times in history, even as many Americans turned away from the world in semi-isolationist ignorance.

Yet a pivotal drama had begun to unfold for both the Russian and American militaries. The collapse of the Soviet Union was causing civil conflict on the communist empire’s periphery. Throughout its history, the Soviet army had been a top-down institution in the most extreme sense. Because of the totalitarian nature of Soviet society, the lower ranks did little more than follow orders. That tendency was reinforced by the terms of the bipolar nuclear standoff, which necessitated that all key decisions be made at the highest levels in Moscow. But what had begun in Afghanistan now spread to the Caucasus and Tajikistan, places where the Soviet military found itself in the midst of dirty little wars. Consequently, in Wilhelm’s words, “The generals in Moscow had to rely on their twenty-six-year-olds in the field to figure out what to do.”

Figuring out what to do meant that these young Russian officers and noncoms had to overcome an iron law of Russian bureaucracy, initsiyativa vsegda nakazevema (initiative is always punished).

Wilhelm bonded with these young Russians, because he was in a similar position himself, writing a new rule book for what a Cold War American military, with its fixation on Armageddon in Germany’s Fulda Gap, had not prepared him for. It would be in the Balkans where that learning process would continue for him, and for the American military.

Following several months in Tajikistan, Wilhelm, now a major, was suddenly pulled back to Rhein-Main to lead more weapons inspections in the former East Bloc. Flying on a C-130 transport from one country to another, he watched the noses of MiG fighter jets cut off and steel wrecking balls destroy tanks. But his career was in danger. He had had too much education and not enough infantry experience. He became a “major non-select for the CGSC,” meaning he was not among the majority of middle-ranking officers selected to study at the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, which automatically put him in the bottom 20 percent of all majors slated for future promotion. The U.S. Army, still in its Cold War mode, was not impressed by his hybrid soldier-diplomatic-academic–relief worker career pattern.

To balance out his résumé, Wilhelm was assigned to the 3rd Battalion of the 12th Infantry Division, stationed in Baumholder, Germany. As the executive assistant to the commander, he worked long hours, seven days a week. “Like Ranger school, it was another meet-yourself experience. I loved it.” He kept the job for three years, during which time he continued to develop doctrine, based on his experience in Tajikistan, for MOOTWA—military operations other than war.

Then, in 1995, his unit was assigned to the United Nations peacekeeping force in Macedonia.

The next morning in Zamyn-Uud we woke to rain and freezing weather. The day before we had driven on well-worn desert tracks made by other UAZs. Now we headed out on a longer excursion southwest along the border and left the dirt tracks entirely. Here the Gobi only appeared flat; the vast ocean of stubble fields was so bumpy my head was constantly banging against the roof. After an hour we came to a zastaf (border fort), a few single-story barracks with distempered white walls and leaden green roofs. Before alighting, we drove on a little further to pay homage at an ovoo, a shamanistic cairn for making offerings to the gods.

Wilhelm, I, Maj. Altankhuu, and the other Mongolian soldiers with us walked around the ovoo three times, clockwise, throwing stones at it, in the traditional manner. Then we sprinkled camel’s milk on it—a truly sacred gift—and placed the juniper incense, tea bricks, candies, and small vodka bottles that we had brought into the ovoo’s crevices, just as other worshippers were doing. Finally, we lined up in single file to tie khatags (ceremonial scarves) around the uppermost stones. “It’s a pretty good ovoo,” Wilhelm said, nodding like a connoisseur.

A fat Mongol woman in a black del and orange sash was on her hands and knees in supplication. This ovoo had been a stop on the Silk Road long before the Mongolian-Chinese border existed. Destroyed by the communists, it had been rebuilt in 1990. Ovoos were pre-Buddhist. They represented the purest and ultimate form of worship, signifying less superstition than a stark and simple submission to larger forces. Now that we had paid it the proper respect, we would be welcomed at the zastaf.

A young soldier wearing a fur hat and greatcoat, with frostbite on his cheeks, saluted smartly as we entered. Then came the dress parade, with a dozen or so troops, a few officers and their wives and children, and the post dog all standing at attention for review. It was like a frontier fort of the Old West. This was not merely a military base but a small community in the wilderness, something that Wilhelm truly admired. Protecting a remote border was seen in Mongolia as a vocation, a way of life. Such an outpost would not be considered complete without at least some women and children.

In a bare and freezing room, the officers’ wives served us tea mixed with salt, mutton fat, and camel’s milk. The women were thin, wore tight blouses, and were quite attractive. While we shivered inside our heavy jackets, they looked comfortable in shirtsleeves. Wilhelm took notes as the zastaf officers complained about how the cold weather shortened battery life for their Kenwood walkie-talkies, about the shortages of spare parts and diesel fuel, and how their solar panels didn’t work in bad weather. Wilhelm said he would try to get them new FM radios. In place of solar panels, he suggested wind generators.

The neat and frigid barracks were lined with maps and shamanistic designs. The border guards used old-model Kalashnikovs, with wooden stocks rather than collapsible metal ones. Outside, several dozen horses stood stoically in a freezing drizzle; the afternoon desert sky looked as dark and dreary as coal. A network of concrete trenches and pillboxes indicated the closeness of the Chinese border. Gen. Purev Dash, the deputy commander of the border patrol service, whom I had met in Ulaanbaatar, told me that his men used camels and horses for patrols “not because we are poor and primitive, but because such animals offered the surest means to scout the desert.” Wilhelm’s plan was for a mobile patrol force mixing fast ponies and Bactrian camels with light, high-tech communication gear.

“You arrived with the rain, that is a blessing,” Lt. B. Altanzul (Golden Flame), a lively and inquisitive fellow, told us after several vodka toasts. We were tired and a bit drunk, so we just let the conversation flow. Owen Lattimore writes that “nothing shuts off the speech of simple men like the suspicion that they are being pumped for information; while if they get over the feeling of strangeness they will yarn as they do among themselves,” revealing “the rich rough ore of what they themselves accept as the truth about their lives and beliefs.”³³ Lt. Altanzul was not a simple man, yet after we sat and got a little drunk with him, without directly asking him a political question, he began to talk about the U.S. and Iraq, the issue of the moment.

“I saw the demonstrations against the war on television,” he remarked suddenly, “yet America acted anyway. As a military man, that impressed me.” When another officer asked us if the U.S. would defend Mongolia, as it had Kuwait in 1991, Wilhelm replied bluntly, “Probably not. The U.S. can only help Mongolia defend itself. That’s the reality.” Wilhelm loved Mongolia, but his primary concern was U.S. interests, and he was honest about that.

Driving back to Zamyn-Uud, Wilhelm talked about northeastern Macedonia, where U.S. and combined-Nordic battalions were patrolling the border with Serbia in the early 1990s.

“I was a major; my bosses called me an ‘iron major,’ no damn joke, the deputy commanding officer on the ground. ‘This is great,’ we all told ourselves, ‘we’re in a war zone,’ what all soldiers live for. There were American generals saying the Balkans were a waste of time, that we should have been doing Bradley fighting vehicle exercises in Germany instead. What a bunch of crap! Finally, we’re actually using our training, and these Cold War dinosaur generals want us to train for a war that would never happen. I’ll bet you the reenlistment rate for the soldiers who served in the Balkans was greater than that of those who stayed in Germany. The Balkan deployments were the best thing for the morale of U.S. soldiers at the time. They paved the way for how we fight now.”

Wilhelm’s men monitored the smuggling of fuel across the unmarked Serbian-Macedonian border. They tracked Serb patrols. They learned to integrate themselves with the Finns, who were part of the Nordic battalion but not part of NATO. They patrolled in full kit several times a day. “The Scandinavians started patrolling without weapons because the atmosphere seemed peaceful. Not us. Our sergeants, who didn’t have poli-sci degrees, were smart enough to insist that we lock-and-load all the time. We were defining real peacekeeping, which is like war-making, since you monopolize the use of force in a given area.

“Macedonia,” he went on, “was the dictionary definition of exotic: dark-eyed women, little teahouses, intoxicating music, and no laws or rules. It was paradise after Germany. Somalia was over. Bosnia for us hadn’t started yet. Macedonia was the only game in town. Majors and master sergeants were defining national policy at the fingertip level. It was really in the post–Cold War years that you started hearing the term ‘iron major.’”

The full flowering of the middle ranks had its roots in the social transformation of the American military which, according to Wilhelm, happened a decade earlier, when the rise of Christian evangelicalism helped stop the indiscipline of the Vietnam-era Army. “This zeal reformed behavior, empowered junior leaders, and demanded better recruits,” he said. “For one thing, drinking stopped, and that killed off the officers’ clubs, which, in turn, broke down barriers between officers and noncommissioned officers and changed the recipe for junior leader development. Our noncoms gained the confidence to do the jobs that those of higher rank and experience had previously done. Our majors do the job of colonels in other armies; our sergeants perform like captains. The moral fundamentalism,” continued Wilhelm, a liberal who voted for Al Gore in 2000, “was the hidden hand that changed the military for the better. But you try to get someone to admit it! We never could have pulled off Macedonia or Bosnia with the old Vietnam Army. It lacked the discipline and talent to abide by the restrictive ROEs and complex political-military battlefield.

“In Macedonia,” Wilhelm said, “I brought the broom back to the Wizard of Oz. The Army demanded I get experience as a field grade officer. Well, I did.”

On December 14, 1995, Wilhelm, who hadn’t seen his family for the better part of a year, was on leave in Peoria, Illinois. He had just finished cutting down a Christmas tree with his father-in-law when he saw on television that the Dayton Peace Accords had been signed. He was summoned the next day to the Balkans by Maj. Gen. William Nash, who was about to assume command of Task Force Eagle, with responsibility for the northeast sector of Bosnia.

In Macedonia, Wilhelm had learned the evolving, unwritten doctrine of insertion of forces in a zone of separation. In Bosnia he built on that. He established joint military commands in these zones between the Serbs and the Bosnian Muslims.

Establishing a joint military command, Wilhelm explained, meant “finding the top thug in each village and his counterpart on the other side of the ethnic divide, then finding a secure, neutral place for them to meet, and putting in place the force protection so that each of these local warlords could get to the meeting without being assassinated. The real purpose of the first meeting,” he went on, “was not to talk, but to show the thugs who was the boss—and it was us, not them. It was to teach them that unless something was facilitated by us, it wasn’t going to get done.

“ ‘We’re the foremen,’ I’d say to each local warlord, ‘and you’re the workers. Without all of our hands on the wheelbarrow, it ain’t going to move.’ Once they realized the fighting was over, they began making demands on us for water and electricity, which was exactly what we wanted.

“We’re still in 1995 now,” he continued. “Bosnia was a cold, muddy place, and the people were cold and muddy, too. There wasn’t much brotherly love. They had just shot the shit out of each other and were living in the rubble they made for themselves. They seemed tired, though. Their morale was low. That was all good news. Those were things we could exploit.”

Wilhelm got wind that the diplomats had worked out a deal for the Russians to join the peacekeeping force. The Russians would be subordinate to Maj. Gen. Nash, who assigned Wilhelm the role of integrating them with the other NATO peacekeepers. “The reason you’re here, corporal,” Gen. Nash told then-Maj. Wilhelm, “is to keep the Russians out of trouble.” Nash had meant the word “corporal” as a generic term for lower- and middle-ranking officers. “Nash had given me a one-sentence mission, which implied that he trusted me to figure the rest out. He knew that I knew that the Russians were professional and well disciplined, and would work well within the brigade. My job was to incorporate them into this complex, fast-moving machine of ours, and to protect them from our own media that was constantly looking for mistakes.”

Wilhelm broke off talking as the UAZ pulled into Zamyn-Uud. It was dark and we had another meal of meat and camel’s milk and vodka toasting to endure. Peter Fleming had been continuously hungry during his trip across China to India in 1935. That seemed easier to endure than being force-fed meat and alcohol all the time.

The next morning Wilhelm and I went for a walk. Zamyn-Uud’s clapboard houses, with their uneven sidings and dumb ornamentation fronting the dust-blown desert, reminded us of the bad construction that each of us had seen throughout the ex–Soviet Union and its former communist satellites. “It’s like everything in sight was put together by a high school shop class,” Wilhelm remarked. But then his zest returned, as he fingered his prayer beads.

“The values the Mongols have are those of our pioneer forebears 150 years ago, when they settled the frontier. They were full of optimism and busy with chores, emptying the wash pail, getting the fire started in the morning. What a tough life it was—freezing in a wagon train threatened by Indians. Yet few regretted it. Anything could happen and it was all good—that was the central tenet of the pioneer spirit.” Wilhelm’s parting gift to Col. Battsengel was a lavish coffee table volume of Frederic Remington’s paintings of the nineteenth-century American West.

Battsengel introduced us to Col. Kh. Ranjinnyam, a bearish, scruffy, and friendly-looking man who would be our guide on a northeasterly journey along the Chinese border, into an area where Mongolia sticks out into Manchuria. Col. Ranjinnyam’s UAZ followed ours until we had driven a few miles beyond Zamyn-Uud. Then we got out and, in the midst of the desert, toasted farewell to Col. Battsengel with a few glasses of Absolut, the only high-quality vodka we had on the journey.

Following final farewells, we transferred to Col. Ranjinnyam’s UAZ and set out over a tableland of sagebrush and tumbleweed, stopping after twenty miles at a zastaf. I was freezing despite my long underwear. The outhouse was an eighth of a mile away in the ceaseless wind. This zastaf had the same spartan minimalism as the one we had seen the day before, with the floors painted a lovely autumnal yellow, and the smell of fresh bread and drying jerky on the roof, a bit of which a petite girl in a blue smock put in our soup along with horse meat. Horse meat, I had decided, tasted as good as beef.

Another twenty miles brought us to another border post and another line of soldiers in fur hats and greatcoats holding ancient AK-47s and standing at attention alongside women and children in the bleating wind on a knife-carved steppe. Here Wilhelm gave yet another short speech of thanks, on behalf of the people of the United States of America.

It turned out that the meal at the previous zastaf was only a pre-lunch snack. Here we were brought veritable masses of food. Eyeing the beds beside the eating table, Col. Ranjinnyam announced that it was time for a nap. Within a moment he was snoring loudly. Wilhelm, Maj. Altankhuu, and I followed suit. When I awoke Col. Ranjinnyam was already sitting up in bed, his hair and uniform in disarray and pouring himself another glass of vodka, like a character out of a Russian short story. “It’s time to go,” he announced.

More zastafs and lonely soldiers looking like throwbacks to the czarist army. The landscape of the Gobi kept shifting: small glaciers and glinting streams that wove through gravel fields beside volcanic slag heaps, followed by horizonless uplands of igneous rock engulfed in late-afternoon shadow. Then came vast dirt expanses that gradually shed their stubble, so that by dusk there was nothing in sight but empty sand, with the desert unfurling like a long, haunting echo, a warbling note held at the back of the throat until eternity. I thought of the sound of a morin khuur, the traditional Mongolian fiddle capable of the most astonishing sounds with only two horsehairs.

We stopped for the night at Ulaan-Uul (Red Rock), a regiment-sized encampment for the border force. Wilhelm and I shared a small icy room where he continued his reminiscences of Bosnia. I didn’t ask questions. I just let him talk. Homer must have been a middle-ranking officer like Wilhelm, I thought, a great oral historian.

“The Russians were in Uglevik, Republike Srpske, to patrol a sector in the U.S.-led area of operations,” Wilhelm said. “They had American brigades on either side of them. They had their own JMCs [joint military commands] to set up. Again, there was no doctrine for this. Daily patrols were the guts of the Dayton agreement, and I went on many patrols with the Russians, enduring their combat rations of tinned fish and buckwheat. Their BTR-80s [Bronetransporter, the Russian armored personnel carrier] dispelled the myth of cramped and clunky Red Army fighting vehicles. They were quite comfortable and user-friendly, with plenty of room for a squad in full kit to prep equipment and swap positions.

“We went to one village where the church had been destroyed,” Wilhelm went on, “and the Serbs had their headquarters on the wrong side of the street. They had had twenty days to move it to the right side of the street, as stipulated by Dayton, and they hadn’t. I took out the copy of Dayton that I carried around with me and read it out loud. The Russian lieutenant with me repeated it to the Serbs. I told the Serbs we would bomb their headquarters with an Apache if they didn’t move it. I called in an Apache to do a flyover. The Serbs were in disbelief that they couldn’t drive a wedge between us and the Russians. ‘Let’s go now,’ my Russian companion told me. ‘Let’s give them their own space to absorb the bad news.’ An American would have stayed and drunk tea with the Serbs. But the Russians live more in an ambiguous world of negotiations without rules, especially because of their experience with civil wars in the Caucasus and Central Asia. They have a better sense of these things.

“My Russian lieutenant and I seized weapons that were hidden in haystacks,” Wilhelm continued. “We destroyed anti-aircraft guns mounted on trucks. We called in Apache missions. That’s when I started to be called ‘Mean Mr. Tom,’ because I kept threatening both the Muslims and Serbs with Apaches if they didn’t abide by Dayton by disarming and dismantling their checkpoints.

“I’ve logged more hours in a Russian ACV [armored combat vehicle] than in an American one over my lifetime,” Wilhelm said. “I was taken in and accepted by a brotherhood that had seen exceptional combat in Chechnya and Afghanistan, and listened to them bitch about lousy chains of command and problems in Russia. Many national armies in Europe wouldn’t fight when push comes to shove. I’ve seen them corrupted by too much U.N. work and not enough real combat. But hell, the Russians would fight! Nothing about the American military in Bosnia impressed the Russians so much as our own sergeants whipping out GPS devices, which the Russians didn’t have, and calling in Apache strikes. Through us, the Russians learned the real power of technology, not the false power of it.”

The real power of technology, Wilhelm went on, is that it provides an objectivity even an enemy trusts. It has a calming effect. Because of the GPS devices, there were no arguments about whether this or that outpost was on the wrong side of the cease-fire line. “The false power of technology,” Wilhelm believed, was exemplified by the nuclear chains of command, which were elaborate theoretical constructs never meant for actual use. “The Cold War wrought a whole bureaucratic culture that had no battlefield reality. The Cold War armies were not great armies because all the decisions were made by generals and politicians. In great armies the job of generals is to back up their sergeants. That’s just my opinion, but I know I’m right.”

That was the other thing about American sergeants whipping out GPS devices in Bosnia which had impressed the Russians. Even if they had GPS equipment, in the Russian military calling in an air strike would be a decision only a colonel would make. Yet the Russians, in Wilhelm’s opinion, had middle-level officers almost as good as those in the U.S. military, the result of combat experience in complex environments like Transdniestria, Ossetia, Abkhazia, and Tajikistan, not to mention Chechnya and Afghanistan. And because their empire was collapsing, the Russian military found itself frequently in combat situations that, in turn, were encouraging reform at the lower and middle levels. “I would have followed Col. [Alexander] Lentsov into combat anywhere,” said Wilhelm, referring to his Russian commander in Bosnia. “On a tactical level, we have more in common with the Russians than with many of our allies.”

But while the lower levels of the Russian military, according to Wilhelm, were dealing with the reality of contemporary conflict, the general staff in Moscow remained locked in a Cold War mindset. In fact, it was becoming even more conservative because of the bitterness over an American-dominated unipolar world. It saw missions like Iraq not as potential learning experiences, but as deployments to be opposed simply because the Americans were leading them.

In the spring of 1996, Wilhelm left Bosnia. By the fall he was back in Tajikistan.

The next day we entered a landscape of rolling hills speckled with scree and yellow stubble grass. Between the blackest shadows, grazing in an ethereal light, was a herd of bighorn argali, or Marco Polo sheep—the “supreme trophy of a sportsman’s life,” according to Roy Chapman Andrews, because even in the 1920s they were so rare.³⁴ A hunting license in Mongolia for one of them now cost $20,000. They were as large as horses almost. Wilhelm was ecstatic: “All we need now is to see a snow leopard.” We followed them in the UAZ to the edge of a range of clay hills, where below us the great Mongolian plain fell away as if into the sky. Wilhelm gave me his Russian-made monocular to get a closer look. It was like peering back in time, as if seeing the light of a distant star. Marco Polo had seen these sheep in his travels through the Gobi. He described their horns as a “good six palms in length.”³⁵ They were now practically extinct, and would certainly be so if this desert were exploited for its oil and coal. A little while later we saw a khulan, a wild ass with large, funny ears that was also extremely rare.

That day Wilhelm and I had to endure large meals at six zastafs, with vodka toasts at every one. This was in addition to drinking the blood of a black-tailed gazelle that Col. Ranjinnyam had shot with his Makarov pistol from the UAZ. Having swallowed a glass of blood and eaten the animal’s testicles and eyeballs, Wilhelm told me, “Like I said, this is better than rush-hour traffic on I-395 en route to the Pentagon.” He never tired, never stopped laughing and slapping the Mongolian officers on the back. Maj. Altankhuu confided to me, “Col. Wilhelm is a great man. He makes us like America so much.”

According to Mongolian lore, the three manly sports are horse racing, archery, and wrestling.³⁶ At the turn of the twenty-first century, racing gazelles with a UAZ and target shooting with Makarovs and AK-47s had become variations of horse racing and archery; thankfully, I had no wrestling to endure. But we stopped for a marksmanship contest at a spot in the desert where we all got ticks, so we didn’t reach the next border regiment until 11:30 p.m. As I threw my pack on the bed, in the adjacent dining room I heard Wilhelm let out yet another maniacal laugh. Walking over I saw a large roasted pig, head and eyes and all, placed on the table, and Col. Ranjinnyam imploring us to eat. “The liver of the gazelle I shot will be served to you at breakfast,” he said, apologizing.

“You have to understand,” Wilhelm told me, “that in this culture food is a gift. And they are showing respect for us and for America by showering us with gifts.”

Thus, we ate, again.

The next morning, while eating the gazelle liver, Wilhelm talked about his second posting to Tajikistan. It began in October 1996 when he became America’s first defense attaché to the newly independent post-Soviet republic, whose four-year-old civil war had finally begun to wind down. The ethnic Pushtun Taliban had just captured the capital of Kabul in neighboring Afghanistan. Central Asian leaders, not to mention Russia and the Shiite clerisy of Iran, were fearful that the Taliban, aided by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, would try to spread its ideology of Sunni fundamentalism throughout the region. Thus, they demanded an end to the Tajik civil war because it was getting in the way of containing the new Taliban regime: Tajikistan was now needed as a rear base to help the ethnic Tajik guerrilla leader Ahmad Shah Massoud recapture Afghanistan. The fact that the civil war in Tajikistan had descended into localized warlordism gave the various faction leaders, who were fast losing control, a further incentive to stop the fighting.

But the Tajik capital of Dushanbe still constituted one of the lower circles of hell when Wilhelm arrived back there. Much of his time was spent keeping up with the activities of a colorful cast of warlords: Rakhmon “Hitler” Sanginov, Jagga “the Sweeper” Mirzoyiev, Makhmud “the Black Robin Hood” Khudoberdiev, Abdumalik “the Shark” Abdullojonov, Khurshed “Tyson” Abdushukurov, and Yakub Solimov, who played the theme song from The Godfather whenever he received guests at his home.

The Tajik economy consisted of a cotton monoculture, one aluminum smelting plant, and heroin, which all of these men fought over. “In Tajikistan,” Wilhelm said, “I learned that warlords are not the products of great, scheming political minds. Our intellectuals have described them as far more complicated than they really are. They are just simple opportunists, who aren’t distracted by larger thoughts about national security or anything else.” For example, Makhmud Khudoberdiev, a captain in the Soviet army in Afghanistan in the 1980s, happened to have the keys to the armory in Kurgan-Tyube in southern Khatlon Province. “The fact that he had the keys to the armory made him a warlord. He got three tanks running; that’s all it took to make him famous.”

Wilhelm attended the “final” fall of the town of Tursunzade near the border with Uzbekistan three times, once lying in a ditch in a vicious firefight. “On the firing range, bullets make one kind of sound; when they’re coming at you they make another.” Wilhelm’s wife, Cheri, and their two young children, Parker and Daley Alice, had come with him to Tajikistan. “I had been separated from them for so long because of the deployment in Bosnia and other assignments. We were all finally together in a war zone. There was no electricity, no heating; it was so cold we all slept together in the same bed to keep warm. The tap water was the color of Coca-Cola. We shared a toilet with our armed guards. I went boar hunting occasionally. It was the greatest time of our lives.”

As the war ended and the infamous Sodirov brothers—Rizvon and Bahrom—were cut out of the peace deal, they began taking Western hostages. The Wilhelms were evacuated two times. During one of the evacuations, Wilhelm was sent to Tampa, Florida, the headquarters of Central Command, which was soon to incorporate the former Soviet Central Asian republics into its domain. Wilhelm was summoned to meet the CENTCOM commander in chief, Marine Gen. Anthony Zinni.[27]

“I found Zinni in the weight room, pumping iron,” Wilhelm related. “A typical Marine general, I thought. He had only one question for me, the big one. Given that I was a force protection risk—after all, my family and I had to be evacuated—what was I doing in Tajikistan in the first place that made me so necessary there? I told him that I was the only guy that he had on the ground in a country with a civil war and next to a country where the Taliban were fighting a collection of warlords called the Northern Alliance. Fine, he told me. Go back to Tajikistan then. That’s a good general: If he gets the right answer to the right question he’s finished with you. He trusts you to figure out the rest.”

Wilhelm returned with his family to Tajikistan one last time, until a contract was put out on his life, forcing them to leave for good. He had been promoted to lieutenant colonel. He then found out that he had been short-listed for a battalion command, placing him in the top 10 percent of his peer group. He never got that battalion command. But the fact that he had risen from the bottom 20 percent—unselected for the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth—to the top 10 percent through

such an unconventional career path constituted proof of how the Big Army had changed since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

“I’ll never be a general, so this is the only band I’ll ever have,” Wilhelm remarked, as the small border force band banged out a variation of a Red Army tune from the 1940s. The detritus of a dead empire was apparent in other ways, too, at this regimental outpost. Near the parade ground was a row of rusted and wheelless armored personnel carriers from the days

when the Soviets had used Mongolia as a buffer against China, in the wake of the Sino-Soviet split. Out here there was no way to crush these vehicles, break them down, or recycle them in any way. They were literally ruins of a gone age.

After reviewing the band, we packed our gear into the UAZ and continued our journey northeast along the Chinese border. The plan today was to stop at a few ovoos en route to Shiliin Bogd Uul, an extinct volcano considered by the Mongolians to be holy. “What’s the point of all this, militarily speaking?” I half complained to Wilhelm.

“None,” he replied, smiling. “Col. Ranjinnyam and the others want us to climb the holy volcano. It’s real important to them, so we have to do it. These are the kinds of things the Chinese and Russian defense attachés would never do with the Mongolians. That’s why they trust us. Yesterday was a Roy Chapman Andrews day; today will be a Bruce Chatwin or Peter Fleming day.” Yesterday, he meant, was given over to Boys’ Own activities of hunting gazelles and target shooting. Today we would savor the aesthetics of landscape and culture.[28]

We stopped to inspect a pair of shattered Turkic statues, standing like mysterious totems in the midst of the desert. They may have been built by the Hsiung-nu (Huns) and dated apparently to the early centuries of the Common Era. No one seemed to know. The guidebooks contradicted each other. We also came upon a statue of Toroi-Bandi, a local bandit who had harassed the Manchu Chinese. Symbolically, the statue faces the Chinese border. It had been turned into a holy site next to an ovoo, to which we gave offerings.

We then passed a region of giant crescent-shaped sand dunes rising over a felty marshland. The Gobi was the most varied desert I had ever seen. It had everything: dunes and marshes; hard dirt steppes and gravel plains; pure sandy desert and slag heaps; clay hills, mountains, and glacial slopes. In the late afternoon we arrived at the sacred volcano of Shiliin Bogd.

The gaunt, hump-shaped rock that we ascended granted a view to the south and east of a shimmering desert, knobbed with the ranks of many dead volcanoes and scarred with moraine ice, as if the moon were coated in sawdust with the black rims of its craters sticking through. This was the

western edge of Manchuria, the point where the last vestige of the Western classical world—with its Hun, Turkic, and Mongolian hordes that had ravaged Rome and its shadowlands—gave way to Sinic civilization. “It is a paradise for wolves,” Col. Ranjinnyam said.

We circled the ovoo at the summit three times, then prepared a barbecue with the ducks that Col. Ranjinnyam had shot earlier in the day, and which Wilhelm had dressed. In a toast to Wilhelm, Col. Ranjinnyam said that he respected the American and Russian armies above all others “because they suffered and won World War II. I want soldiers like Genghis,” he went on, “but, of course, without the cruelty of those days.”

At the end of the meal we passed around hot rocks from the barbecue to juggle in our hands, a local tradition that Mongolians claim is good for the upper-body joints. Then we took the shoulder blade of a sheep and punched a hole in it, so that no one could cast a spell on us. Wilhelm enthusiastically explained all these traditions to me. “I love my job,” he repeated.

Completing our visit to the border regiments, Col. Ranjinnyam accompanied us in his UAZ for the long drive to the town of Choir, located in central Mongolia, southeast of Ulaanbaatar. Outside Choir was a deserted Soviet air base that Wilhelm wanted to inspect, with an eye toward its future use by the United States.

The two-mile-long runway needed only modest repairs and could handle any kind of fixed-wing aircraft in the U.S. arsenal. Beside it was a long line of hardened aircraft shelters, reinforced-concrete bunkers in the shape of semi-pyramids to protect fighter jets from aerial bombardment. A gigantic sign proclaimed “Praise to the Communist Party Central Committee.” The Choir base had been built in the 1970s, a consequence of the Sino-Soviet split a few years earlier. It constituted a forward front for the U.S.S.R. in a possible conflict with China.

Why in the world would the U.S. ever need a base in Mongolia? one might ask. In the 1990s, Wilhelm had thought the same thing in regard to Tajikistan. Then came September 11, 2001, and back-of-beyond Tajikistan, with its southern border facing Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, suddenly became a possible staging area for U.S.-led coalition operations. “That’s when I learned never to say ‘never,’” Wilhelm said. With Mongolia’s eastern border only five hundred miles away from North Korea across Manchuria, in an unpredictable, fast-changing strategic environment an air base here could be an asset.

There was no thought of making Choir an American base, the way it once had been a Soviet one. Rather, for a relatively small amount of money the runway and a building or two might be repaired and kept up, so that American planes and Air Force personnel could use them at any time. Given the political instability throughout Central Asia, the Pentagon was intrigued by a Eurasian “footprint” strategy in which the U.S. would have basing options everywhere, without having a significant troop and hardware presence anywhere.

Choir itself was nothing but a series of skull-like concrete tenements surrounded by steppe. A building complex that had once housed 1,850 Soviet military families, including a theater and shops, had been stripped of all its windows and heating pipes. “It used to be so lively,” said Maj. Altankhuu, “it was the place where all Mongols wanted to go in the evening.”

Overlooking a field of broken glass, where the last tenement block met the flat and empty Gobi, was a concrete statue of a generic Soviet commissar strutting forward in the sneering, aggressive style of Lenin. The statue of Father Soviet had begun to flake and crumble, though, on account of its gargantuan size, it might be here forever: the ultimate Ozymandias, with only a few yaks and stray dogs to admire it.

The statue brought to mind not just brutality and domination, but also cheapness. “Another thing constructed by a high school shop class,” Wilhelm observed, laughing.

“We should be careful of our own ambitions,” I said. “We don’t want to end up like the Soviets.”

“There is nothing we need to build here,” he answered, “except relationships.”