A Soldier's Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism

This Man's Army
by Andrew Exum

The first combat memoir of the War on Terrorism: the gripping story of a young man's transformation into a twenty-first-century warrior.

Born into a family with a long history of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, Andrew Exum enrolled in Army ROTC to pay for his Ivy League education. Shortly after graduation in 2000, he joined the infantry, then endured the grueling rigors of Ranger School before becoming a platoon leader with the storied 10th Mountain Division. He thought that perhaps, if he was lucky, he and his men would see action on a peacekeeping mission. Then came the fateful events of September 11, 2001.

Called to action as a twenty-three-year-old, he led his troops into Afghanistan to root out the hard-core remnants of Osama bin Laden's forces. Thrown into the maelstrom of modern war, Exum contended with Afghani warlords, cable news correspondents, and the military bureaucracy while hunting a desperate enemy in a treacherous land and on a mountain ridge in the Shah-e-Kot Valley he would confront and kill an al-Qaeda fighter. After returning home, Exum struggled to come to terms with the media coverage and public perception of the war while seeking to make peace with the man he had become.

By turns harrowing and reflective, this powerful memoir gives voice to a generation of soldiers that has risen to confront the threats of a dangerous new world.

March 2002

Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan

The sun rose over the mountains to the east, flooding the valley with light. While it remained dark, we could still tease ourselves into thinking that the job we had to do today was some way off. But the sun, creeping up over the Hindu Kush, reminded us of the immediacy of our fate. We knew that the time had arrived for us to be brave, so that we might continue to believe that we were, even if we should face the worst.

We quickly formed up in the new sunlight, walking in a line toward the waiting helicopters. We moved with great labor, each of us carrying nearly his body weight in weapons and equipment.

It was an ungodly amount of gear. I personally carried ninety pounds of equipment in my rucksack as well as 210 rounds of ammunition, a radio, a set of maps, a compass, a handheld global positioning system, and two quarts of water. I had an array of other assorted supplies strapped to the nylon webbing on my body armor, including four grenades with phrases like "Duck!" and "You Should Have Dodged Left!" scribbled on them in black Magic Marker. I wondered how well I was going to move at ten thousand feet above sea level with all this crap on my body. We helped one another down off our feet in order to sit on the tarmac while waiting for our CH-47 helicopters to fuel. Then we sat silently, watching the planes and attack helicopters take off a few hundred meters away.

Finally, it was our turn to load the helicopters, and each man struggled to his feet under the weight of his equipment. One of my friends from another platoon walked over and shook my hand before he went to board his own helicopter. He didn't say anything, just squeezed my gloved hand in his and forced a tight-lipped smile. Another friend in his group threw me a cocky wink, too far away already to walk over.

It took a while to load the bird. We packed in tight, and because I would be one of the first on the ground, I was one of the last to board. Few of us had awakened early enough to eat anything in the hours before sunrise, and those of us who did had not been able to eat much. After we settled into the helicopter, a few men tugged at their pockets for energy bars or granola they had stowed away in their shirts and camouflage cargo pants. Most looked around nervously, their helmets swiveling from left to right. The curved night vision mounts strapped to their foreheads made them look like rhinos from the neck up.

I almost fell over when the helicopter took off. There were more than thirty of us inside, and like me, many were on the floor, sitting on their rucksacks. The body armor wrapped around my torso made me feel awkward and off-balance, and when the helicopter lifted off, I latched onto Flash, my radio operator, to steady myself. Once the helicopter was in the air and on its way, we righted ourselves and settled down for the ride into combat.

The helicopter had machine gunners on both sides, as well as one on the back ramp, which was down. The gunner in the back sat on the very edge of the ramp, confident he would not fall because he was tied down to the helicopter by a four-foot tether. We got our first good aerial view of the base as we left. Below us, rows of tan tents shuddered under the rotor wash of the helicopter blades. Behind them, we could see the bombed-out airplane hangar that had become the division's headquarters.

I looked around me at the men to my right and left. They were my men, and I could feel them looking at me as well. Some of them looked scared, others simply looked anxious, and still others feigned sleep in an effort to show how cool they could be, how detached they were about what we were about to do. Many were still just kids, no more than eighteen years old, yet they carried a dizzying array of machine guns, shotguns, explosives, and other weapons. Only one man in the platoon, my platoon sergeant, was much older than thirty, and he was sitting near me by the ramp, next to the mortar rounds we had loaded onto an ATV that was lashed to the floor of the helicopter.

The helicopter gathered speed, cruising over the hills and through the valleys of eastern Afghanistan. The only good view was out the back, but it was spectacular. A few minutes after we left the base, we began to ascend and crested a ridge, only to swoop down the other side, flying low and close to the ground. It made for a heck of a ride. We soon leveled out, and I could see power lines stretching from east to west. I knew we must be near Kabul, the capital city. No other place in the country had any power lines, much less any other utility.

We made our way south of the capital and then headed due southeast toward Gardez and into the valley to that city's east, the Shah-e-Kot Valley, where American and allied forces had been fighting with Taliban and al-Qaeda forces for the past week. As we got closer, the terrain grew more mountainous. The ride got rockier too, as the pilots protected their helicopters from snipers and rockets by hugging the ground, flying what they called "map of the earth."

We had been in the air for over an hour when one of my soldiers, Noodles, unceremoniously puked his meager breakfast up into a plastic bag between his legs. (He had been given his name by the platoon for the way his thin arms shook like wet noodles when he tried to do push-ups.) The other soldiers in the helicopter roared in approval, shouting and cheering Noodles on as he vomited. The crew chief had just enough time to throw the bag out the back of the helicopter before another soldier, Tayo, also puked, losing it into a Ziploc bag that had just a few seconds earlier contained one of my team leaders' cans of Copenhagen. Once again, the other soldiers cheered Tayo, wildly yelling and egging him on. It reminded me of the times I had been about to jump out of an airplane and seen motion sickness spread through the plane, with guys puking into the little yellow bags the air force hands out prior to takeoff.

I knew that today it was more than motion sickness. Despite the hooting and hollering, the embarrassed grin on Noodles's face, and Tayo's brave shouts back to his platoon mates, I saw the raw fear behind the smiles. Fear was behind the yelling too, a welcome release for the other soldiers in the helicopter, who now had something to take their minds off the fact that we were about to be dropped into the middle of a suspected al- Qaeda stronghold and that some of us might not make it back to the place we had just left.

I was scared too. I had lived with and led these men for more than a year. We had become a family, and they were my brothers. White, black, Hispanic, Asian - we looked like the United Colors of Benetton and yet were as close as any group of men can be, more so than any athletic team I ever played on and more so than even the friends I had grown up with back home in Tennessee. I knew everything about the guys around me - their hometowns, the names of their brothers and sisters and girlfriends, their favorite bands, what their parents did for a living, how old they were when they lost their virginity, the color of their first car. Everything - even the stuff I had no interest in knowing.

I was pretty damn sure I had the stomach to kill or be killed, but I wasn't sure if I could watch anyone else in this helicopter die. I looked at my platoon sergeant. Sergeant Montoya looked back at me, eye-to-eye, and we instantly knew we were thinking the same thing. The soldiers in the platoon called him Yoda behind his back because he knew everything and had lived to the incredibly advanced age of thirty-four. He had prayed over me the night before, asking God to give me the judgment and skill necessary to bring the platoon back safely. We were both professional soldiers, but the men under our care were more than Department of Defense cannon fodder to be indiscriminately thrown to their deaths. We cared for these men more than we cared for ourselves, and we were resolved to bring them all back alive.

I broke away from Sergeant Montoya's gaze and began to tie a piece of string to my right wrist. It had become a combat ritual for me, beginning with the first mission we had run a few days earlier. Before we landed, I tied a piece of parachute cord to my wrist. At home today, I have a collection of string bracelets I fashioned before missions, and there are enough to cover much of my forearm.

I closed my eyes to pray. I told God I was about to take leave of my faith for a few days. When I opened my eyes, I would be a new person, a person outside myself.

A while later, my radioman, Flash, reached back and tapped me on the shoulder.

"Sir," he said. "We're close."

I struggled to reach my feet and leaned over Junk, one of my machine gunners, to get a view out of one of the Chinook's tiny side windows. I saw small dark figures on the ridge to the helicopter's left and knew these were our allies, Canadian soldiers who had landed before us and were securing the landing zone. I then helped Flash to his feet and worked hard to remain upright as I put my rucksack on and then secured Flash's radio to his back.

As the Chinook settled down, the dust flew up, obscuring everything and blinding us all. We felt a sharp jolt, and Flash and I grabbed onto each other again to keep from falling over. The back ramp filled with dust, and the machine gunner on the ramp moved to the side.

We couldn't see a thing, but it was time. I pushed the men ahead of me, pulling Flash with my left hand, and before I knew it, I was out of the helicopter, under its spinning blades.

I had just set foot into the Shah-e-Kot Valley.

Copyright © 2005 Andrew Exum

About the Author

Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Andrew Exum is a veteran of Operation Anaconda. He reached the rank of captain with the U.S. Army Rangers before leaving the service in May 2004. He currently lives in Beirut, where he is studying Arabic at the American University.