SOLDIERS IN AFGHANISTAN

FIGHTING AND FEASTING: ON THE GROUND IN AFGHANISTAN

Joe Klein

Time, December 9, 2010

On a moonless, pitch-black but impossibly starry night in early December, I traveled with a U.S. Army patrol through the town of Senjaray, in the Zhari district of Afghanistan's Kandahar province. Our mission was to attend a dinner party at the local police station. The soldiers, members of the 1-502 regiment of the 101st Airborne Division (famously known as the Black Hearts), were led by their executive officer, Captain Cullen Lind. He, and they, assumed the dinner was a celebration of recent events in the district: after an extremely tough fight, the Taliban had been driven out of the area. The summer fighting season was over; there had been only one violent incident in the past two weeks.

When we arrived at the mud-walled police fort, the soldiers were surprised by the elaborate nature of the party. There were musicians; there was a feast — lamb and rice, fresh bread and vegetables, deliciously prepared. "We've never seen anything like this before," Lind told me. As the musicians, who were excellent, played the desultory Afghan national anthem, a ragtag row of a dozen police officers — some in uniform, some not; some with rifles, others not — stood at strict attention. "The song is good for our national spirit," said Karim Jaan, the local police chief. "It is a way to build power."

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