Dan Berschinski
The yellow jug, emptied of its cooking oil and refilled with crudely made yet highly effective ammonium nitrate explosive, was waiting to fulfill its purpose. Exactly how long it had been hidden in the footpath, buried slightly to the right of center, is impossible to know. In all likelihood, it had been placed there days or even weeks earlier. An insulated copper wire snaked through the dirt and undoubtedly emerged someplace out of sight a few yards away—probably on the other side of one of the seven-foot-tall adobe walls that flanked the trail. The wire would have been left alone until just before American troops appeared in the town. Then a Taliban soldier, or an angry farmer, or the widow of a man killed by American bombing, or some young kid paid or coerced into service would have run out ahead of our advance and plugged the wire into a nine-volt battery. Now the bomb was primed, armed, and ready to do its damage.
Walking down the dirt trail through a collection of mud-brick buildings in a remote, unnamed area of Kandahar, Afghanistan, I was fulfilling my purpose. Nearly eight years after 9/11, I was one of roughly seventy thousand American soldiers sent to occupy and fight in Afghanistan for the ostensible mission of bringing security and stability to the country. I was a twenty-five-year-old first lieutenant—more specifically, a US Army infantry platoon leader, responsible for the actions and the lives of thirty-five soldiers. I loved my job, I loved my soldiers, and yet I fully believed that the war I had volunteered to participate in was unnecessary and unwinnable. So why was I on that dirt trail, 7,534 miles from home, my feet taking their last steps on this earth? Let me explain.…
When the terrorist attacks of September 11 occurred, I was a senior at a public high school in an idyllic suburb on the outskirts of Atlanta, Georgia. In considering my next step after high school, it was a foregone conclusion that I would be attending college. But while I was smart enough to be enrolled in a few Advanced Placement classes, I wasn’t driven enough to take them very seriously. So I knew I wouldn’t be able to follow in my older brother’s footsteps by attending an Ivy League school. I did think, however, that I could put together an application that would give me a shot at getting into a different kind of prestigious college: one of our nation’s military academies.
Veterans, including graduates of the United States Air Force and Naval Academies, were not at all unusual in my hometown—Atlanta is the main hub for Delta Air Lines—and my high school typically sent three or four kids off to the Air Force Academy every year. It was less typical for my high school to send a graduate to West Point, which piqued my interest.
By the end of the day on September 11, 2001, my mind was made up. It’s not that the terrorist attack ignited any particular sense of patriotism: I had already been thinking of West Point as my first-choice school. Rather, I realized that the military, an institution that I had not thought about very deeply, was probably going to be involved in something significant in the near future. Teetering on the edge of adulthood, I was mature enough to glimpse the implications for our nation, yet also young enough to miss what these would mean for those charged with carrying out the nation’s orders.
My application to West Point received a “soft rejection”: the admissions team wouldn’t take me right out of high school, instead suggesting that I spend a year at Marion Military Institute, a small military junior college in Marion, Alabama. At Marion, I received my first taste of military training, and I loved it. I loved the physical challenges, I loved learning infantry skills in the woods, I loved learning about weapons and how they are best employed, I loved leading teams and being a part of a team. It all just made sense to my eighteen-year-old self.
Two-thirds of the way through my year at Marion, I reapplied to West Point and was accepted. I entered West Point’s class of 2007, a freshman once again, and began a four-year journey of rigorous academic study and military training.
By the time I was a junior, our military had successfully invaded and then transitioned into an occupation of Afghanistan, and we were one year into our invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq as well. The ongoing events of the two wars, which to most Americans might have been interesting but not at all related to their daily lives, were front and center for me as both a cadet and a student majoring in International Relations. Many of my classes—Constitutional Law, National Security Policy, Just War Theory, Politics and Government of the Middle East, and so on—took on a new urgency. My professors, military and civilian alike, pulled no punches when bringing the wars’ realities into the classroom.
I left West Point with a conflicted mindset. I was excited to graduate and even more excited at the prospect of leading soldiers in combat. But I had also become convinced that both our ongoing wars were ill advised and structurally incapable of concluding in anything resembling success. I felt that America’s initial invasion of Afghanistan, aimed at degrading al-Qaeda’s ability to conduct more terrorist attacks in the aftermath of 9/11, was justified and reasonably prudent, but the mission creep toward nation-building and the ever-increasing footprint of our forces were not in the best interests of our country. As for Iraq, I did not think our initiating that war was justified in the first place, and I believed that our continued presence there was similarly ill advised and contrary to our national interests.
If the seeds of my dissent were planted during my studies in college, they germinated during my first year in the Army. While moving through the standard pipeline of infantry officer training—parachuting out of planes at Airborne School, advanced patrolling tactics at Ranger School, mounted operations in the Mechanized Leader Course—I met soldiers who had recently returned from deployments to Iraq or Afghanistan. A few had even served in both. I had tremendous respect for their firsthand experience; the individuals at the tactical and operational levels, it seemed to me, were handling difficult situations to the best of their abilities. At the same time, I began to see that the Army was like a running machine with no visible off switch. It was training and deploying its soldiers to wars whose goals were never even clearly stated, let alone achievable. The leaders at the strategic level—the generals and senior civilian leadership alike—were either unwilling to acknowledge the hard truths about these wars or, even worse, blind to those truths.
As a kid, I had always gone to my parents for advice when I needed it, and this time, early in my Army career, was no different. My father, despite never having served in the military himself, actually had quite a bit of experience in dealing with his own ill-advised war. In 1968, at the height of Vietnam, he was kicked out of his home—his father was a naval officer—and out of his high school because of his work as a full-time antiwar organizer for the Southern Student Organizing Committee. Growing up in New Orleans, he had loved watching mighty ships move up and down the Mississippi River. A precocious history nerd, he read military history and even thought that one day he might apply to the Naval Academy for college. But increasingly appalled by his still-segregated city and by America’s folly in Vietnam, my dad decided that the most patriotic thing he could do was to oppose America’s involvement in that war.
My father wasn’t anti-military, he wasn’t anti-America, he wasn’t even antiwar in the broad sense. He just didn’t think that America should be spending its resources—blood and treasure alike—in a conflict on the other side of the world when it had its own problems at home that needed work. Needless to say, I saw plenty of parallels to the current day.
When my dad was summoned before his local draft board at the age of eighteen, he told them that he wouldn’t avoid service, but that if drafted he would continue speaking out against the war while in uniform. His number was never called. So instead of serving, my dad organized with those who had. His best friend during those years was a former Green Beret who had served two tours in Vietnam before returning home and becoming active in the antiwar movement. The two of them traveled around the Southeast organizing students against the war. Just as I felt now about Iraq and Afghanistan, their quarrel wasn’t with the individual soldiers who participated in the Vietnam War—not with those who volunteered and certainly not with those who were drafted—but with the top military brass, and the national political leaders who had started the war but didn’t seem capable of finding any reasonable way to end it. The more my dad and I talked, the more comfortable I became with my service—and the more I began to see the glimmer of a purpose that might extend beyond my profession.
I arrived at my unit—Bravo Company of the 1st Battalion, 17th Infantry Regiment, in the 5th Brigade of the 2nd Infantry Division—in the fall of 2008. I took command of Bravo Company’s second platoon. After one year of prep school, four years at West Point, and a year of training at Fort Benning, I was finally doing my job.
My platoon was about a half-and-half mix of brand-new privates on one hand, specialists and NCOs with combat experience on the other. Many of them had been to Iraq and a few to Afghanistan. Demographically, my platoon was pretty much what I had expected it to be: mostly white guys with a handful of Black, Latino, and Pacific Islander soldiers mixed in. Some hailed from big cities, some from small towns; most, including myself, had grown up in the suburbs.
The Army had officially slated the 5th Brigade for deployment to Iraq, but sometime in January or February 2009 we were told that in July we would be deploying to Afghanistan instead. This wasn’t quite a surprise; rumors to that effect had been circulating for many months. (Indeed, I had deliberately arranged to be assigned to the unit based on those rumors: I preferred to serve in Afghanistan, where the war had at least been initially justifiable, rather than in Iraq, which had been bullshit from the very start.) At the same time, though, the switch was more than a little disconcerting. All of the prior year’s preparation had focused on Iraq. Our “language-enabled” soldiers, infantrymen given a crash course in a foreign language, had been taught Arabic—useful in Iraq but far less so in primarily Dari- and Pashto-speaking Afghanistan. Our unit was outfitted with Stryker eight-wheeled armored personnel carriers, and our training had heavily emphasized mounted operations—but Afghanistan was known to be an almost exclusively dismounted fight. By this point, the military had been fighting in Afghanistan for eight years. So how and why in the world were Army planners making a substantial mission change for a brigade-sized combat unit—four or five thousand soldiers—so close to our deployment date? It was yet another sign that our strategy for these wars lacked any semblance of coherence.
A few weeks after arriving in Afghanistan, my company moved into a newly established combat outpost located in an expansive patch of desert about fifteen kilometers west of the city of Kandahar. On our very first patrol, my platoon and I were providing flank security to a team of engineers sweeping a dirt road for IEDs when their vehicles unintentionally triggered a string of three hidden bombs, causing minor casualties. Later that same day, a fellow platoon leader and I led two of our squads (each numbering seven to nine infantrymen) into a nearby town. Shortly after entering the town center, our column nearly walked headfirst into an ambush. The town’s tight quarters limited our ability to maneuver, but thankfully also limited the enemy’s effectiveness. The local Taliban fighters let off a belt of machine gun fire and immediately retreated. One of our soldiers took a round straight into his armored chest plate; fortunately, that was the worst of the damage. We had been incredibly naïve and got incredibly lucky.
Over the following days, I led my platoon on numerous patrols within our new area of operations. Some patrols included Afghan soldiers. Many did not. We never received guidance in much more detail than just “get a lay of the land,” and we were never issued the metal detectors or given access to the bomb-sniffing dogs that were so essential given the enemy’s tactics.
On August 18, a little over a month into the deployment, I was given an order to take my platoon into a new part of our area of operations. There wasn’t much logic or reason for the mission other than for us to see what was out there. The mission that had originally been planned for that day entailed partnering with a local Afghan National Army unit and checking out a few locations that were to be used as polling sites in the upcoming national election. But when my men and I woke up that morning, we learned that our Afghan partners had left the base during the night, fearing an uptick in Taliban attacks in our area as the voting approached. Eight years into our collaboration with the Afghan government, we could not rely on their army to secure their own national election. And so, the plan was changed. The new mission called for my platoon and another platoon from a sister company to move roughly in parallel for two or three kilometers through a few small villages and into some orchards. We’d then link up in the middle and depart together.
Little more than an hour into the patrol, with the other platoon about a kilometer away, we heard an explosion followed by machine gun fire. It was clear that the other platoon was in a fight. I halted my platoon, consulted the map, and chose a path that would take us to their location as quickly as possible. A quick radio message to the other platoon let them know we were en route to reinforce their position. Within minutes we had reached the edge of the town and were steadily moving toward a large orchard with our weapons at the low ready. One of my squad leaders jogged over to me and said, “Sir, this place is too quiet. Something is going to happen. You need to be ready.” I nodded, and he jogged back into position.
Now our path funneled us toward a handmade footbridge stretching over an irrigation canal. I ordered one squad across the bridge to secure the far side. Then I crossed the bridge, followed by my forward observer, Jonathan Yanney, and my radio telephone operator, Roger Garcia—for calling in artillery and air strikes. I took a couple of steps on the far side of the bridge, and the world went dark. A bomb had gone off within yards of where I stood. My ears were ringing with a muffled yet high-pitched tone. I could hear rifle fire in front of me but could see only a couple of feet in any direction: there was a cloud of dust all around.
I knew that Garcia and Yanney were the soldiers closest to me, and thus probably also closest to the blast. I crawled on my hands and knees through the dust until I bumped into Garcia, who was lying on the ground. Getting my face close to his, I began speaking to him. It was clear that he was deafened and couldn’t hear me. I patted him down to check for injuries, and he seemed to be in one piece. His face had some superficial cuts, which wasn’t much of a problem, but I also noticed blood dripping out of his ears, which was a sign of more serious injury.
I then turned my attention back down the trail to the bridge. To where the bridge used to be, that is. As the dust settled, it became apparent that the bridge was now gone, replaced by a large and oddly dry crater. The blast had dammed up the canal to the left and the right. While all of this unfolded, my squad leaders were doing a head count. Within a minute we had accounted for everyone except Yanney. Yelling from the other side of the canal, one of my squad leaders said that Yanney had been on the bridge when it blew.
Time froze. We weren’t being engaged by enemy fire, so there was no fight to direct. The men were automatically forming a security perimeter. My brain began to operate on autopilot. Get on the company radio net and submit a report? Find Yanney and treat him? Call in a medevac helicopter request? But we don’t know where Yanney is—what’s the medevac request procedure for that? With these thoughts racing through my mind, I slid down into the crater and clambered across.
My squad leaders moved toward me. Silently, we looked down at our feet, and that’s when we all came to the same realization. Yanney was dead, and very small pieces of his remains were all around us. We could keep searching the area—and we would do that—but we all understood that Yanney was literally gone. And that’s when something remarkable began to take place, in the midst of this horror. A squad leader simply said, “Sir, what do you need us to do?” There was no chatter, no swearing, not a single unnecessary word. It was all on me. I gave my orders and everyone got to work.
The platoon pulled back into a tighter perimeter. We breached every building nearby, hoping to find more of our friend’s remains. Once a reinforcement unit arrived, I asked their platoon leader, one of my best friends, to assume security so my guys and I could continue the search. Having cleared the structures around us, we needed to push forward into the orchard, all the while aware that the trails and bridges—and who knew what else—were potentially booby-trapped. My soldiers formed a line, shoulder to shoulder. No metal detectors. No bomb-sniffing dogs. No explosives experts. Despite the obvious risk, no one complained and no one hesitated. It was a demonstration of professionalism, competence, and brotherhood in the obscenest of situations. It was the proudest moment of my life.
And later that night, in a nameless hamlet of adobe buildings about a kilometer away from the site of Yanney’s death, my right foot stepped on the trigger of that yellow jug lying in wait for me—filled with homemade explosives, hidden in the dirt. My legs were instantly ripped off above my knees, my left hand and arm were mangled, my jaw was broken, and both eardrums were blown out. My time in Afghanistan was over. My men would continue on with eleven more months of their deployment. America would continue to pour tens of thousands more soldiers and hundreds of billions more dollars into an unwinnable war for eleven more years.
Since then I have endured countless surgeries and years of physical therapy, and I have attempted, as best as possible, to reinvent myself and move on with a new career and a fresh purpose. In the Army, my purpose was to lead soldiers in an ethical and effective manner. Out of the Army, my purpose has been to bring what attention I can to the wastefulness and ineptitude that these last twenty years of war have revealed. I have written opinion pieces and spoken candidly to students, church groups, Rotary Clubs, Kiwanis Clubs, and retirement communities. I have delivered remarks at Veterans Day events, Memorial Day observances, and even once at a Christmastime service for a small town’s first responders.
In 2019, I was invited to give the keynote speech to the graduating class of the Army’s Infantry Officer Basic Course at Fort Benning—which I myself had attended a dozen years earlier. In that speech, I told the newly minted infantry officers that their job was to be the best and most trustworthy platoon leaders that they could be, and that the soldiers they were privileged to lead deserved their finest efforts. I also told them that they were entering an Army whose leadership had failed the nation. If and when they reached positions of higher rank and responsibility, our nation needed them to be better than their predecessors. I told them that the war that I had fought in, and that they were likely to fight in as well, was wasteful, unnecessary, and unwinnable. The lieutenant colonel who’d welcomed me onto the stage at the beginning of my speech refused to shake my hand when I finished. But more than a few of the lieutenants, and a lot of their family members, did come up and shake my hand. And they thanked me for what I had said.
America is a country with many faults, and our military, likewise, is far from perfect. But for better or for worse, as it stands, it is the only institution we have that brings Americans from all walks of life together for a single nation-sized purpose. It is also the single best way we have for an underprivileged American to advance their socioeconomic status. I wish there were another option. I wish there were another form of national service that we could offer as an alternative to the military. But until the day when that alternative is available, young Americans will continue to serve in uniform—and our national leaders, I fear, will continue to frivolously spend that precious resource.
I dissent because I have seen the wastefulness firsthand. I am a dissenter because I am an American, and I need our country to change.