“It’s a War, Right?”

Soldiers in war have to kill — but often they only have to kill time. Many of them no longer think the war in Afghanistan will end successfully; what they fear is another Vietnam.

The sign “Chicks” is spray painted in pink on the latrine door. Inside it reeks of chemicals, sand crunches everywhere, and the mirrors are scratched. The toilet seems deserted. Of the approximately 1,500 soldiers stationed at this base, only 60 of them are female.

The helicopter trip from Kundus to Ghazni took an hour. Feeling relieved at long last, I discover that I’ve lost my way. I’ve no idea where my group is. That feeling of inattention would be my constant companion during the rest of my travels. I hear guesses that the Americans probably didn’t pay for my ticket here; we’re embedded journalists.

We, that is, a group of two American journalists, colleagues from Istanbul, Paris, London and myself, the only female in the group, were invited by the respective U.S. embassies to take part in a six-day fact-finding trip to Afghanistan.

We really have no business here; we’re supposed to continue on to an entirely different Forward Operating Base (FOB). The soldiers there have been briefed on what they can tell us when we interview them, but nobody is prepared for us in this sandy camp. Our pilots, employees of a private security firm working for Embassy Air, have apparently misread their flight maps, set us down and then promptly taken off again.

I’ll call my assigned snitch Michael because I don’t want to get him into trouble with his sergeant for being too open with me. Michael has hairy legs, wears shorts and no socks. His bare feet are stuck into a pair of Nike sport shoes and he wears a black T-shirt bearing the word “Army” in gray letters. He will tend to me the whole four hours prior to our return flight. We have to be on time because we’re scheduled to have dinner with U.S. Ambassador Carl Eikenberry that evening. The information we’re given there will be a lot more regulated.

Out here, we go past gray sandbags, empty containers and wooden shacks. The only colorful flashes come from the items of clothing for sale behind blackened windows: t-shirts, sports jackets and underwear with Christmas designs.

Michael picks me up just as he’s leaving the fitness center. Madness. Even the most posh gyms in Berlin look like workout rooms in government-run old folks’ homes in comparison. It’s apparent that Michael runs and lifts weights, does stretching exercises and breaks a sweat regularly. “Two hours, three times a day whenever I can,” he says. Everybody does likewise. “We have to kill a lot of time here,” he adds.

Later, the 26-year old soldier from Virginia tells me he’s on his fifth deployment. He was in Iraq three times and is on his second tour in Afghanistan. And, yes, he also had to kill people in Iraq as well: “It’s a war, right?”

It occurs to me that this is the first time in my life I ever met anyone who has killed another human being. I say that here, in this surreal spot. There’s no hint of guile in Michael’s blue-gray eyes when he asks, “Really?” I hadn’t thought about my own grandfather in a long time.

Meanwhile, we’re sitting in a windowless wooden shed. Michael brought me to his headquarters on purpose. My colleagues are already here, sipping steaming coffee. Nobody seems worried. Hmm.

The commanding officer, a veteran of 17 years service, is talking loudly on the telephone, trying to find out why we’re all here. It’s the same brand of telephone we use at die Tageszeitung offices on Rudi-Dutschke-Street in Berlin. It’s a globalized world. He seems to be having difficulty hearing. Who knows how many skirmishes he’s already survived by the skin of his teeth.

There’s an impressive “morning stand up” with General Petraeus that takes place in the Situational Awareness Room daily at 0730 hours. Here, the war is marketed with the help of videos taken in various regions. Michael has no questions.

Michael knows Petraeus from his service in Iraq. The same boss, the same strategy. “It didn’t really work in Iraq and that was at least a country. Here, there are only individual tribes and regions.” The veteran sergeant no longer thinks there’s much hope for a successful end to the mission in Afghanistan. “It can’t be won. It will be our new Vietnam.”

The officers we meet during our travels try desperately to present a different picture. With lots of PowerPoint slides, handouts and large chalkboards, they explain to us why the number of victims may presently be on the increase, but will begin to reverse the trend by August of next year at the very latest. That’s when central points in Afghanistan are expected to be free of terrorists. My colleague from Turkey was embedded here five years ago. Back then, he says, they were saying, “Now we’re approaching the turning point.” Apparently, there hasn’t been enough PowerPoint.

And meanwhile, the Americans have now been here about three weeks longer than the Soviet army was in total. But the international force is just now getting everything together; now they have the right strategy with Petraeus as the right commander and support by the local population is at least picking up somewhat in this region or that.

Michael has a different take on it. The Afghans support whoever pays them the most. “If they make more by raising poppies than they do by growing vegetables, it’s no contest.”

Later in the week, the Americans are scheduled to meet with representatives of various civilian organizations as well as with a group of male journalists. These paint a much dimmer picture. To them, corruption is the major problem. “How can we ever hope to succeed with a leader that no one trusts?” asks Barry Salam, a radio broadcaster and human rights activist. People are deeply frustrated. They spent years outside their homeland and have returned over the past five years to rebuild.

Representatives of women’s organizations also have little hope and have no positive stories to report. On the contrary, conditions for women have again begun to deteriorate, not only in the provinces but also within the government. Afifa Azim, head of the Afghan women’s union, says that quotas have been abolished and now the same old warlords are again making the money and dividing it up among themselves. An embassy employee invited to attend will later tell me that even most of the people at this meeting are far removed from the population’s everyday problems and that their effort is to get young, unencumbered executive leadership into government in order to have their voices heard.

We get lucky at noon and are invited to attend negotiations with the Ghazni district administrator. He wants to discuss expansion of the cold storage facility. We ask him what he most urgently needs and he graciously produces a list: parking places on both sides of the street and more museums. Ghazni is a city with a rich cultural history. The soldiers roll their eyes: Next year, he wants about $190 million to spruce up the city.

We lunch together at a sumptuous buffet. The cooks come from Poland. It all tastes just like home. Coke Light out of a can doesn’t stand a chance against the rich, brown gravy.

Michael earns $3,800 a month in the Army. If he were employed by a private security firm, he would easily be making six times that, he tells me. Plus he would have far better equipment and a lot more vacation time.

He gets 15 days off per year and the clock doesn’t begin to run until he’s on U.S. soil. Soldiers also have plenty of time to kill when they fly. They often hang around the airport for days waiting for an available seat.

I ask him if he would prefer to be home at Christmas and whether he was homesick on Thanksgiving. He doesn’t remember what he was doing this Thanksgiving or even if the Polish cooks served turkey or not. He has no girlfriend. He doesn’t think spending two weeks at home and then having to return to Afghanistan would be such a good idea.

Michael shows the first sign of being angry. His parents, simple people, have to pay for this war out of their meager earnings. He admits he volunteered to “keep the terrorists out of his family’s yard” but he says he finds it tough to stand by and watch how much money is being wasted here.

Just outside the base, the U.S. spent $1.5 million to build a laundry run by local civilians, part of the attempt to rebuild the local infrastructure. When he took his clothes there to be washed, he only got half of them back. But he was able to buy his underwear back in the local shops for double the original cost.

At departure time, we hug. My “Merry Christmas” seems out of place.

As the helicopter circles over the Forward Operating Base, I mentally say “Thanks.” Even from up here one can recognize the huge roof of the fitness center. I wonder if it will be especially full on Christmas Eve.