The Changing Face of Battle

The search of Amar Gul’s hut was yielding little until Pfc. Andrew Johnson happened to notice a poster on the mud-brick wall. There, smiling benevolently, was the face of Osama bin Laden.

“Hey, sergeant, you gotta see this!” Johnson shouted to his squad leader, Sgt. 1st Class Wylie Hutchison.

Hutchison confronted Gul, a tall ethnic Pushtun with a wild black beard. Gul claimed that the poster belonged to his uncle. It was a mere advertisement, Gul said, a Bin Laden endorsement of a lottery in Pakistan. He was certainly no supporter of Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda network.

Hutchison snatched the poster from the wall and crumpled it. “I don’t believe you, man.”

With that, Amar Gul became a PUC -- a “person under control,” one more small fish caught up in the wide net cast by the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division in its pursuit of Al Qaeda and Taliban holdouts in the unforgiving mountains that hug the Pakistani border.

Like most Afghans detained by U.S. forces, Gul was interrogated and released. And so the hunt wore on, day after day, night after night, as paratroopers of the 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment swept through high-desert villages.

Wrapped in body armor, their M-4 automatic rifles locked and loaded, the soldiers are the vanguard of an evolving U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Slowly but deliberately, the U.S. military is shifting the troops it is using from unconventional to conventional forces. Even with U.S. policymakers preoccupied by Iraq, large numbers of American soldiers are now at work along the dangerous Afghanistan-Pakistan border in combat operations virtually unknown to the American public.

Instead of deploying from the sprawling U.S. bases at Bagram and Kandahar, hundreds of soldiers are mounting assaults from a forward operating base in the border region -- the area where Bin Laden, if he is still alive, is thought to be hiding. Rousing villagers in the middle of the night, poking through their belongings and questioning women as well as men, they are attempting to destroy the infrastructure of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters and sympathizers and the way stations they use to move weapons, ammunition, equipment and people between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Although the Americans often come across hidden weapons, enemy fighters have usually slipped away. The troops work hand in hand with small Army Special Forces teams in a sometimes contentious partnership. For months, Special Forces “A teams” have lived among Afghans, cultivating relationships and developing intelligence on the hundreds of enemy fighters they believe are in the region. Now the 82nd is acting on that intelligence, searching villages and compounds in massive sweeps backed by mortars, artillery and helicopter gunships.

The Special Forces teams have provided brains, guile and expertise. The 82nd units offer muscle and brute force, softened by a patina of civility and public relations.

After sometimes bitter complaints from Special Forces teams that the 82nd was intimidating and alienating civilians, the soldiers now explain their intentions to village elders. They ask permission to search homes, and have female soldiers search women in a patriarchal Pushtun culture obsessed with keeping women hidden and unpolluted by the gaze of Western men. They are replacing smashed locks with new ones. And they are accompanied by civil affairs teams offering humanitarian aid and basic medical care.

Commanders of the 82nd say the tactics are paying off. Searches in recent weeks have yielded caches of mines, machine guns, explosives, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades, artillery shells, armor-piercing rounds, automatic rifles, radios and documents. In some cases, these commanders say, Afghan civilians have directed soldiers to the caches.

Officers and enlisted men camped at the new base endure a charged existence of anxiety and adrenaline, punctuated by intervals of stupendous boredom. They are under constant threat of attack by an unseen enemy. Almost every week, bases in the region are rocketed. Soldiers live in fear of land mines, truck bombs or a grenade tossed into a vehicle.

While on combat missions or reconnaissance patrols, the soldiers drive through gantlets of hostile and suspicious Afghans. Some people wave and shout, “How are you!” But others glare and curse and show the Americans the backs of their hands -- a grave insult. Children beg for bottled water or pens, but a few pepper the soldiers’ armored Humvees with stones.

At the camp, soldiers wearing towels around their waists and scuffling through the dirt in flip-flops carry their automatic rifles to and from showers and latrines. Even when they’re tossing a football or playing cards, their weapons are within arm’s reach.

Secrecy is paramount. A sign next to the telephone where soldiers line up to call home reads: “Do not discuss classified material over the phone. We’ll be home when we get there.”

The battalion commander, Lt. Col. Martin Schweitzer, is the son of a career soldier. He is tall and rangy, his face often smeared with grime from the day’s combat mission and his eyes red and swollen from dust storms. “Our task is to destroy and kill Taliban and Al Qaeda forces, and our purpose is to deny them sanctuary,” he said. “We’re not into nation-building.”

The colonel and his men had just returned one recent night from a mission that uncovered weapons now lying in the dust outside the operations center: AK-47 assault rifles, boxes of ammunition, mortar fuses, land mines and rocket-propelled grenades. There was also a large wall hanging printed with a computer-generated photo depicting the World Trade Center, the Sears Tower and other potential Al Qaeda targets. The cover of an Al Qaeda propaganda cassette showed Bin Laden wielding an automatic rifle and President Bush with blood dripping down his face.

Some of the soldiers complained that their commanders were showing too much deference to women. Earlier that day, they said, a grenade had tumbled to the floor of a hut from inside a woman’s burka. Soldiers grabbed it before it could be detonated. Of the 29 grenades recovered that day, they said, two-thirds were found on women. On three previous missions, female soldiers discovered hand grenades strapped to women’s thighs, cell phones strapped to their breasts and rocket-propelled grenades hidden beneath burkas.

Schweitzer said the practice of segregating women, then using female soldiers to search them and their living areas, struck a proper balance between security and respect for cultural sensitivities.

“We can’t go in there and violate their cultural norms,” he said. “We own the terrain with their permission.”

*

Operation Village Search

Earlier on the morning that Amar Gul was detained, the battalion seized the terrain around the hilltop village of Zakar-Khil near the Pakistani border. Intelligence gathered by Special Forces teams indicated that Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters had moved weapons into and out of the village. Journalists who accompanied soldiers on this and other missions agreed to restrict reporting of certain classified details.

A convoy of trucks and Humvees reached the village at dawn, arriving in a storm of dust. Field radios squawked, and platoon sergeants screamed out orders. Overhead, the rotors of Apache gunships beat a steady whump, whump, whump.

Delta Company was in first, establishing an “isolation ring” around the village. Then came the paratroopers of Bravo Company, grunting under the weight of their body armor as their boots pounded the rocky soil. They fanned out and set up a perimeter, their weapons aimed down alleys and into doorways.

Like most villages in this heavily Pushtun region, Zakar-Khil had been a Taliban stronghold. Many men in the area are Taliban supporters, and some even fought for the movement. They did not disappear with the fall of the Taliban; they merely faded into prosaic village life.

“The folks here really blend in,” said Col. James Huggins, the regiment commander. “You can’t really tell the difference between an Al Qaeda or a Taliban operative and a villager.”

The reaction in Zakar-Khil to the sudden invasion of Americans in body armor was typical. The men and boys were sullen, suspicious and resentful, the women fearful and wary.

Dogs barked and cows bellowed as 1st Lt. Roman Skaskiw gathered the village elders. Each wore a filthy shalwar kameez, the baggy tunic and pantaloons favored by Afghan men. They were sleepy-eyed, their black kohl eyeliner smeared and their henna-streaked beards wet with sweat.

With the help of a helmeted “terp” -- an Afghan interpreter -- the lieutenant explained that he had come to search for Al Qaeda and Taliban gunmen and weapons. He asked the men to gather their women to be searched by a female lieutenant. He ordered them to bring out any weapons. Personal weapons would not be seized, he explained, but any hidden weapons would be confiscated and their owners detained.

One of the elders produced a photocopied note signed by “Capt. Jeff, U.S. Army.” The note, written in English, said the village had been searched and cleared of weapons.

“Gotta be ODA,” the lieutenant said. He meant Operational Detachment A, or a Special Forces team.

Such notes are photocopied and passed from village to village in hopes they will prevent searches. Skaskiw shrugged and handed the note back. Then he ordered his men to begin the sweep.

House by house, the soldiers ducked into doorways as fellow soldiers provided cover. They poked through old ammo crates crammed with dishes, teacups and clothing. They looked under beds and inside cupboards and unrolled long straw mats and bedding.

They were coming up dry. Some of the soldiers muttered under their breath. They had come to Afghanistan to kill the enemy, they said, not to rattle around in people’s bedrooms.

“That’s the problem,” Hutchison said. “These people won’t come out and fight us. They just hang back and blend in.”

As the search wore on, Maj. Bill Bailey, a soft-spoken civil affairs officer, huddled with the village headman. He asked about wells, schools and medical needs in the area. Civil affairs teams have repaired schools and bridges, dug wells and set up tuberculosis clinics in areas where Afghans have cooperated with the searches.

“Rule No. 1 for civil affairs is ‘Never promise anything,’ ” Bailey said later. He’s a reservist, a correctional officer from Penfield, N.Y. “But I do tell them that once the area is cleared of terrorists and those who support terrorists, there’s a strong possibility that their needs will be provided for.”

Bailey carries a color-coded map of Afghanistan depicting various regions as “cooperative,” “noncooperative” and “attitude unknown.” Much of the country remains “attitude unknown.”

By midmorning, the search had unearthed a .50-caliber armor-piercing round, a few suspicious passports with entry stamps from hostile Arab countries such as Iraq and a walkie-talkie -- which could be used to detonate land mines. The soldiers seemed heartened when a villager hauled out four huge 107-millimeter artillery rounds.

“Hey, engineers!” a sergeant shouted to a group of combat engineers. “You want to blow these up?”

“Hoo-ah!” the engineers hollered, using the all-purpose rallying cry favored by paratroopers and U.S. Army Rangers.

“You want to blow them right here?”

“Absolutely!”

Some recovered munitions are blown up on the spot for security reasons. Others are passed on to headquarters. Some automatic rifles and ammunition are given to the new Afghan army that is being formed with the help of American military trainers.

As the troops withdrew from Zakar-Khil, engineers detonated the shells with an earth-shattering explosion and a flash of brilliant orange that left behind a clink of falling shrapnel and a tall mushroom cloud of dirty gray smoke. The villagers watched, awed and fascinated.

The next target was Amar Gul’s village, a collection of mud-brick compounds next to a dry riverbed. Villagers had complained to a Special Forces team that a local gunman had set up an illegal checkpoint, extorting money from passersby and confiscating their weapons.

“We’re gonna have a little talk with this guy,” said Capt. Clay Novak, the intense Bravo Company commander.

A villager led the search team to Amar Gul, a fit young Pushtun taller and heavier than most Afghan men. He carried himself with an air of authority.

Questioned by Bailey, Gul admitted operating a checkpoint near Sardak but denied intimidating anyone or confiscating weapons. He said the checkpoint was intended to block any infiltration by Al Qaeda fighters. In fact, he said brightly, he could certainly use a radio to make his self-appointed mission easier. Could the Americans give him one?

Bailey ignored the request.

“We’ve been told you’re stockpiling weapons. We’re going to search your compound and find out,” he said.

“OK, I used to have eight machine guns I collected from people,” Gul confessed suddenly. “But then the people decided I should give them back, so I did.”

A search of Gul’s mud-walled home produced nothing. But in an adjoining room that Gul claimed was used by his uncle, soldiers found the Bin Laden poster. Gul was frisked and detained.

In the next compound, soldiers found three grenades, two clips of AK-47 ammunition and a few silver-tipped bullets.

“Look -- armor-piercing rounds,” said Staff Sgt. Damon Ritz. “Not so nice.”

After two hours of searching, the soldiers left with their tiny haul. After questioning, Gul was released.

He approached Bailey.

“You have come and searched our homes, and this I don’t mind,” he said. “I’ve given you every kind of service you need.” He seemed about to ask for a radio again, but Bailey cut him off.

“We’re grateful,” he said and began walking toward the convoy of waiting Humvees and trucks.

A village elder chased Bailey down and, through the translator, made a request: Could he have one of those notes saying the village had been searched and cleared?

*

A Nighttime Mission

Back at the base, Maj. Mike Richardson was hunched over a laptop computer inside the command center. He was finalizing plans for a nighttime sweep of four border villages that would involve several hundred soldiers and a huge armored convoy.

Richardson is the battalion S-3, or operations officer. Mannerly and precise, he is a calm, orderly presence trailing in the wake of the more volatile Schweitzer. Richardson helps Schweitzer and his top officers make the most of intelligence

Commanders are careful to vary the time and scale of combat sweeps in order to keep the enemy and its sympathizers off balance. Each sweep can be a rich source of intelligence.

“When we go into an area, we create a big splash, like dropping a big rock into a pond,” Richardson said. “As the ripples go out, we follow the ripples to see where they go.”

Since the forward base was established in late August, Schweitzer said, the battalion has disrupted the movement of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters and supporters back and forth across the border. That, he said, is as significant as the number of weapons seized or PUCs interrogated.

“As long as we’re preventing them from operating, we’re in their decision cycle,” Schweitzer said, chopping the air with his big hands for emphasis. “And I think we’re definitely in their decision cycle to the point where they are very uncomfortable.”

But the enemy is able to take sanctuary in Pakistan’s lawless Pushtun tribal areas of Waziristan, just across the border. Small groups of Special Forces and CIA and FBI agents reportedly operate inside Pakistan, but U.S. commanders say no conventional forces are there. Schweitzer said U.S. rules of engagement permit his troops to cross into Pakistan under certain circumstances, such as after attacks on U.S. forces by enemy fighters fleeing into Pakistan or firing from inside that country.

Inside Afghanistan, sweeps are planned in conjunction with Special Forces teams. Both Schweitzer and his superior, Huggins, acknowledge friction between the 82nd and Special Forces teams.

“When we come into an area, we make their job harder,” said Huggins, a trim, silver-haired officer. “They’re in there, small signature, small focus, working with indigenous folks on gathering intelligence to conduct an operation. When we come in, it’s with a big signature. We isolate an entire area, and it almost upsets their battle rhythm, their mission.”

After the 82nd has left an area, Huggins said, Special Forces teams “have to rebuild relationships because all of a sudden, you know, there were an awful lot of U.S. soldiers in here.”

Even so, he added, “we absolutely complement each other because they’re gathering the intel, and it’s us who’s going in and doing the dirty work.”

Shortly after Huggins spoke, an armored convoy rumbled out of the base and headed to another mission, this time to a collection of walled compounds near the border. For more than a week, someone in those compounds had been “painting” helicopters flying into and out of the base -- lighting them up with a spotlight. Schweitzer feared that the enemy was practicing for an attempt to shoot down a helicopter. He wanted the light source found and shut down.

The job fell to Novak, a 29-year-old officer from Illinois. At dawn, after Delta Company had moved in to seal the area, Novak’s Bravo Company began searching the compounds.

Soldiers used bolt cutters to take a thick lock off a towering metal gate at the first compound and were stunned by what lay inside. They were accustomed to mud huts. This, by comparison, was a palace -- a two-story villa with marble floors, verandas, indoor plumbing, televisions and a satellite dish.

It was the same at several other compounds. The owners of these homes were hardly the illiterate peasants the soldiers usually interrogated. They were the area’s elite -- prosperous shop owners, doctors, bankers. They were cooperative; they seemed to appreciate the gentle way that Novak’s subordinate, 1st Lt. Manny Ramirez, asked them to collect their women in one room and bring out their personal weapons.

Through the interpreter, Martinez asked one plump homeowner, “Where are the bad guys?”

“Some time ago, Al Qaeda and Taliban were here,” the man said. “In the last two months, they all went to Pakistan.”

Over the radio came Novak’s voice: “Remember to keep asking about the spotlighting. They’ll be heroes if they tell us who’s doing it.”

Martinez said to the homeowner: “We’ve seen spotlights illuminating our aircraft. We don’t appreciate that. If it continues, we’ll be back till it stops.”

“OK, OK,” the man said. “We understand.”

Searches of the compounds produced very little -- a few AK-47s, a machine gun, grenades and several century-old British Enfield bolt-action rifles. The soldiers grew less tense. Some chatted with a gathering swarm of children, who jabbered in their schoolbook English.

“Hey,” one soldier joked to a boy. “Where’s the anthrax at?”

At one compound, soldiers tried not to laugh as Mohammed Zahir, a thin man in flowing robes, made an elaborate show of welcoming them. He fluttered through the compound, his arms flailing as he shooed women into a back room and ordered his son to make tea for the soldiers.

“I am a banker!” Zahir kept shouting in English. “But still, I am such a poor man!”

Zahir proudly showed Martinez his AK-47 and ammo belt, along with a brick-sized stack of blue afghani notes. He launched into a long story about holding the money for other people. Martinez smiled and said he could keep it.

“Sorry for the inconvenience,” Martinez said as the soldiers completed their search.

“Yeah,” a soldier said, “you’re the friendliest guy we’ve met yet.”

By midday, the operation was over. The men filed into Humvees and trucks for the bone-jarring ride back to base, disappointed that they had not found more.

But Schweitzer was pleased.

“Maybe we didn’t find out who’s been painting our aircraft, but we’ve had seven aircraft land today and not one has been painted,” he said that night. “So I think they got the message.”

*

A Final Rehearsal

On the afternoon before the four-village sweep that the battalion was planning, Schweitzer ran his officers and noncommissioned officers through a final rehearsal.

Across a dusty patch of ground behind the command center, the four targets were represented by cardboard signs. White tape that was stretched across the ground showed attack routes. Empty bottled-water boxes represented 105-millimeter artillery and 81-millimeter mortar positions, and a two-sided cardboard sign that read “Afghanistan” and “Pakistan” marked the border.

At the far edge of the layout were the remote positions of scouts, who would hike to mountain ridges with laser sights and scopes. There, they would radio the main force if they spotted anyone trying to escape -- or setting up an ambush.

The men literally walked through their paces, with the leaders of each unit striding over ground that represented the miles they would cover early the next morning. The Black Hawk crew chiefs walked over the routes they would use to haul in troops. The Apache gunship chiefs rehearsed their positions.

Capt. Patrick Willis, the S-2, or intelligence officer, warned that Pakistani militias were just across the border. Poorly paid and poorly led, they were known to allow Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters passage in exchange for money. The militias were also poorly disciplined, so Willis reviewed the effective kill range of their mortars and cannons.

This mission was particularly dangerous because it was the battalion’s first night sweep. The targets were within a mile or two of the border, so commanders decided to strike while villagers slept, in hopes of preventing the removal of weapons to Pakistan. Under nighttime conditions, only soldiers with life-threatening wounds would be airlifted out; “routine casualties” would be treated in the field until the 22-hour mission was over.

Schweitzer spoke to his troops about dealing with civilians roused from sleep.

“They’re going to be groggy, not as receptive as daytime,” he said. “We have to be more considerate and precise going in. When you go into someone’s house, it’s a forced intervention. They may say you’re welcome, but they don’t mean it. It’s an unwelcome event.”

The troops made one final walk-through -- the contingency rehearsal in which they reviewed their responsibilities in the event of casualties, accidents or foul weather. It was a thorough, crisp workout.

“Well done!” Schweitzer said when it was over. “Now let’s take another great opportunity to go out and get these .... “

Throughout the hot, dry afternoon, soldiers in their tents prepared for the mission. In their constricted world, day or night has become irrelevant. They are on Zulu time, or Greenwich mean time. They have no fixed sleeping or eating patterns. They might eat dinner at 4:30 p.m. local time, fall asleep around 7 p.m. and rise at 3 a.m.

*

Off-Duty Life

Between missions, they do what soldiers have done for centuries: They grouse and curse and complain. They moan about RON missions -- remain overnight, sleeping on the ground. They fantasize about cold beer, for alcohol is prohibited. They speak endlessly of women, with the handful of female soldiers on base the objects of boundless fascination.

Food is another obsession. “T-rats,” or T-rations, the dense slabs of prepared meals, are compared, unfavorably, to dog food. “MREs,” or meals ready to eat, are viewed more benignly, primarily because the sealed plastic bags contain candy, peanut butter and sweet beverage powders. Mothers across America would be horrified to know that their boys often start their days with Tootsie Rolls, Skittles and a bag of dry cocoa powder.

In the airless, crowded tents, there is an elaborate code of behavior. Intestinal distress, a common malady, should never be attended to within the confines of the tent.

Filching the candy or other coveted items from MREs -- and leaving someone stuck with, say, pressed and formed meatloaf -- is a fighting offense.

This is a war for the young. Some paratroopers are 18 or 19, barely removed from high school days of drinking beer and chasing girls. There is frequent belching, spitting, chomping of chewing tobacco or snuff -- and elaborate bursts of profanity.

The soldiers look fearsome and automated with their body armor and high-tech weapons, but most are very young men fighting off fear or exhaustion or trouble back home. They might have a worried mother, a hospitalized father, a wife cracking under the strain of loneliness or a girlfriend weary of waiting. Army psychologists say the Dear John letter -- now the Dear John e-mail -- is as devastating as any form of combat stress.

There is also the frustration of being armed and primed, with no one to attack. Actual contact with an armed enemy is infrequent. Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters are outnumbered and outgunned. Instead of fighting pitched battles, they rely on stealth, roadside bombs, land mines and terror.

The soldiers are outfitted with the latest technology, much of it superior to equipment used as recently as the 1991 Persian Gulf War. They have streamlined M-4 rifles with infrared laser sights that put a red dot on the target. They have NODs, night optical devices, that turn night into day, laser pointers that spotlight targets for attack aircraft, thermal imaging devices that detect body heat and global positioning systems accurate to within a yard.

“We own the night,” Schweitzer said just before the mission. As the hour to launch the mission approached, he was certain that there were plenty of enemy fighters within the border target area, if only his troops could flush them out.

“We believe it’s a target-rich environment,” he said.

*

Hitting Them Hard

The convoy from Task Force Panther pulled out in blackness, lights out, NODs on. It was just after 7 p.m.

The chaplain, Capt. Thomas Helms, had just delivered a prayer: “If we are engaged, we pray that we carry out our duty, that we make the U.S. a safer place.”

First Lt. Steve Messenger, a slender, cerebral Delta Company platoon leader, was worried about reaching his assigned target along rocky, winding dirt tracks in the mountains. A reconnaissance patrol had driven the route in daylight the day before, but Messenger had checked the satellite imagery, and not all the trails matched up.

And he had to find the way at night. He knew from the patrol that some of the switchbacks were dangerously narrow and unstable.

“Hug the walls, not the frigging sides,” Messenger ordered his Humvee drivers. “We’re not going over the frigging side!”

One especially skilled driver, Spc. Joshua Sheehan, performed a remarkable three-point turn on a high mountain pass, maneuvering his armored Humvee completely around only inches from a sheer drop of a couple of hundred feet.

It took seven hours of driving to reach a site that the patrol had reached in three hours in daylight. But they arrived in time to set up their assigned blocking position, and they settled in to await the arrival of the Black Hawks ferrying Bravo Company to a landing zone in a dry riverbed.

It was well before first light when the helicopters roared in, disgorging soldiers in full battle gear. The mortar and artillery teams set up their positions. The scouts were waiting on the ridgelines.

Nearby, over the target village of Masi Kalay, the Black Hawk pilots ferrying Alpha Company spotted 20 to 30 men fleeing toward the border. They could not tell whether the men were armed, but they assumed they were enemy fighters or supporters. The men reached Pakistan before Alpha Company could intercept them.

Over the next several hours, soldiers searched the village, finding little of interest. But just after 8 a.m., someone noticed a locked door inside a stone compound. The woman who owned the compound claimed that she didn’t have a key. Soldiers broke down the door.

Stacked inside were land mines, hand grenades, 250 rocket-propelled grenades, thousands of rounds of heavy machine-gun ammunition, and mortar rounds still tucked inside their original foam packing. The woman claimed that the weapons belonged to her dead husband, who she said had fought the Soviets in the 1980s.

A military intelligence officer didn’t believe her.

“Are you gonna stop lying to me?” he asked her. “Are you gonna tell me who this belongs to?”

Finally, after the woman had been interrogated for nearly an hour, her daughter confessed that the weapons belonged to her brother, the woman’s son. She said he was in Pakistan, out of the Americans’ reach.

Though they had not captured anyone, the soldiers had uncovered a significant arms cache. And there was more: A village elder told them that another big weapons cache had been moved two days earlier to a nearby village.

That village turned out to be Alpha Company’s next target: the hamlet of Golamkhan Kalay, less than two-thirds of a mile from the Pakistani border. Hoping to reach the hamlet before villagers could haul the weapons to Pakistan, commanders radioed the forward base, where the Black Hawks had returned. They ordered Charlie Company airlifted to Golamkhan Kalay.

Charlie Company was the quick-reaction force, on alert at the base for just such a contingency. The Black Hawks quickly ferried the company to the hamlet.

As Charlie Company paratroopers searched Golamkhan Kalay, Pakistani militiamen watching from ridges across the border hiked down and accused the Americans of crossing into Pakistan.

The paratroopers swung their weapons toward the Pakistanis. Schweitzer radioed for air support and ordered the mortar teams to prepare a warning round. The Pakistanis left.

The search resumed, and soldiers soon uncovered an enormous cache. It took two typewritten pages to list it all: 319 boxes of machine-gun ammunition, 79 mortar rounds, 17 artillery rounds, a Russian-made missile, 269 rocket-propelled grenades. Particularly worrying were 40 antipersonnel mines and four antitank mines capable of destroying an armored Humvee.

Some of the munitions were blown up on the spot. The rest were loaded up for transfer back to base.

It had been a good day. The soldiers marched out, weary but satisfied.

They hiked to a plateau to await the Black Hawks. Some of them flopped on the rocky ground, their huge rucksacks still strapped to their backs, and fell asleep.

At Bravo Company’s landing zone a mile away, some of Novak’s men were dozing too. They had searched several compounds and caves at two border target sites but found little. The captain took off his rucksack and rested on one knee. He knew his men were frustrated. He was frustrated too. He was missing his wife and 13-month-old daughter, not to mention his chocolate Labrador retriever and duck season. And now his company’s first night mission had not produced much.

“Not our day,” he said. “But Alpha and Charlie turned up some good stuff, so everybody’s happy about that.”

He felt bad for his men.

“These guys came over here to kill people threatening America, and so far they haven’t really done that,” he said. “But we’re causing the enemy all kinds of problems, and that’s important too.”

At dusk, the Black Hawks swooped in and took everyone back to base. Soldiers unloaded the day’s haul at the operations center, where Schweitzer stood and stared at the big stacks of weapons and ammo.

He was filthy and exhausted, and the lines in his face looked deep in the dim light.

The mission had taken 22 hours, and nobody had slept since two nights earlier. But there was a smile above the stubble on Schweitzer’s jaw.

“Damn, we hit ‘em hard today,” he said. He smacked his fist into his palm. “And we’re gonna go back and hit ‘em again.”

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Decades at the Ready

History

The 82nd Airborne Division, now based at Ft. Bragg, N.C., has had its share of famous soldiers, from Sgt. Alvin C. York to Gen. James M. Gavin.

All-Americans

The 82nd Infantry Division was formed Aug. 25, 1917, at Camp Gordon, Ga. Since members of the division came from all 48 states, the unit was given the nickname “All-Americans.”

World War I

In the spring of 1918, the division deployed to France. In nearly five months of combat, the 82nd fought in three major campaigns. The 82nd was demobilized after the war.

World War II

With the outbreak of World War II, the 82nd was reactivated on March 25, 1942, at Camp Claiborne, La., under the command of Maj. Gen. Omar N. Bradley.

Major Deployments*

* World War II

Normandy invasion

Operation Market-

Garden

Occupation of Berlin

* Vietnam War

Tet Offensive

Saigon

* Persian Gulf War

Operation Desert

Storm

* Since World War I

*

Source: 82nd Airborne Division