It’s more than a little weird, participating in one of these PR walkarounds. Self-congratulation is the inevitable theme. The bubble can get pretty thick. For me, at least, it’s almost impossible to grok the street reality. Are things going great or are we all lining up to drink our own Kool-Aid?  For all I can tell, the sullen, hood-eyed bandits eyeballing our procession have been cutting loose AK rounds at Marines twenty-four hours earlier—and may be doing it again three days from now. Not that that means anything. Earlier in the trip, Gen. Mattis, speaking of Iraq and the Anbar Awakening, had credited British general Graeme Lamb with the philosophical breakthrough that made that turnaround embraceable by the field commanders, the battlespace owners.  “Gen. Lamb’s mental model divided the Iraqi population into two groups—those who were reconcilable and those who weren’t.  The trick was to reintegrate the first group into the life of the nation–and to kill or chase the second bunch out of Dodge.”

Gen. Mattis with an Afghan commando in Marjah, 28 Feb 2010

That would be the next phase here in Marjah and in the succeeding towns and cities on the Marines’ clear-hold-build list.  Will it work?  Can the ANA pull it off?  Can the police from the new “government in a box?” Two days earlier we’d been in a meeting in Kabul with LtGen. William Caldwell, commander of the NATO Training Mission, and his staff, who had been tasked with bringing the ANA and ANP up to speed.  I didn’t envy these officers; they had definitely drawn the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

Here’s how good intentions go wrong: the Pentagon has decreed that the job of training the Afghan National Police be outsourced. Contractors will do it. So the bids go out; one company wins. But wait, a spurned bidder files a protest. “Now we’re set back,” says Gen. Caldwell, “for however long it takes to settle the dispute. Meanwhile the individual contractors—retired American law enforcement officers, police chiefs and so forth—can’t stick around waiting half a year. They’ve taken other jobs.”  Gen. Caldwell’s original wish list calls for over 2000 trainers; now he’s down to 400+, and it’s no sure thing that he’ll get even those.  “And this,” notes on staffer, meaning the train-up of the ANP, “is the centerpiece of the whole counterinsurgency operation!”

The Machine giveth and the Machine taketh away.

9. Lashkar Gah is our next stop. The name means “camp of the warriors.”  Alexander the Great’s warriors. His columns came through here in 330 B.C., skirting the Dasht-e-Margo, the Desert of Death, before setting up the tent city that would become Kandahar and trekking north across the Hindu Kush into the Bactrian plain. I peer down from our vertical-take-off Osprey. You can’t tell me much has changed in 2300 years. Below are mud-walled compounds, irrigated fields divided into squares, dark-eyed men in shalwar kameezes. The tribes even have the same names. Alexander and his generals sat around planning tables just like our ISAF commanders, trying to dope this theater out. The great conqueror employed the same tactics we’re using—he hired his enemies for pay, treated them with respect and sought to make them friends. He invested fortunes, built towns and cities, cut off cross-border sanctuaries (or tried to) and ran operations constituted of assault forces and blocking elements, aiming to trap the foe in between. I’m talking to a Marine colonel. “Alexander’s mother Olympias wrote him a letter once,” the officer tells me, “getting on his case for taking so long to knock off these primitive, poverty-stricken Afghans.  So Alexander captured three tribal chiefs and sent them back to Macedonia, each one carrying an offering of soil from his own tribal homeland; they were supposed to deliver these tokens to Olympias as a gift from her son. But waiting outside the queen’s palace door, the three chiefs got into a fight and killed one another. Alexander’s Mom wrote back: ‘Now I understand, my son.’”  I’m not sure what that story means in the current context, but I’m pondering it as we fly back to Kabul at dark.

Alexander would recognize some of the residents of Marjah

A Marine KC-130 is a cavernous, workhorse cargo plane powered by four turbo-props. You board via a rear ramp. The interior can be configured to ferry troops, in canvas seats facing inboard along the airframe wall with others facing outboard down the centerline, or for cargo on roller pallets. For this flight it’s fifty-fifty. Our nine-man troupe is joined by a platoon of Afghan commandoes, fresh out of the fight at Marjah. What a fine-looking bunch they are. The commandoes, Maj. Raymond of Gen. Mattis’ staff explains to me, are the cream of the ANA, way beyond the regular line troops.  These guys are all young, no one above 22 is my guess. They look like fighters. Obviously this is their first plane ride. They’re trying to be cool, but as the huge, clamorous KC-130 starts rattling and banging into takeoff, all palms are turned heavenward in a quick prayer. Maj. Raymond shakes hands with a half a dozen of these young men; they light up with big, Chiclet smiles. The Taliban, a number of Marines have told me, haven’t stood up to our guys yet.  Is the momentum shifting to the Coalition side? The enemy will mount a spring offensive,  says Gen. Scaparotti of the 82^nd Airborne.  “He has to, because our side is getting so much traction.  If the enemy lets us keep doing what we’re doing now, we’ll hit a tipping point and it’ll be over for him.”

10. Could this be true? Here, for what it’s worth, is how I see it after my trip inside the bubble:

The campaign has two extremities. At the top-end is the NATO/ISAF/American Machine. This Machine is made up of men and money, of massive bases and O’Hare-sized airfields, of vehicle parks and tarmac aprons chockablock with MRAPs and Black Hawks and C-130s and Tomcats. Its elements include drones and laser-guided missiles, satellite imaging and biometrics. It is thousands of tons of supplies and construction materials; rooms full of captains and majors manning laptops; it is PowerPoints, flow charts and projections, focus groups, think tank treatises. The Machine is also constituted of a can-do attitude, a fierce and dedicated work ethic, a commitment to integrity and transparency and an attitude of good intentions that no one who has seen it can ever doubt. All of it is powered by a will and a level of professionalism that is without peer for putting a man on the moon or a thousand-pound bomb down a chimney. That’s the input end of the dynamic. That’s the Machine.

At the bottom, at the receiving end, is the villager, the tribesman and the Afghan man in the street. From where he stands, the Machine is a marvel. It is rich beyond imagining. It can call down death from the sky or beyond the horizon; it can see in the dark and strike without warning out of nowhere. Its intentions are good. Its heart is in the right place. But what can it do for him? He has seen clever men manipulate the machine and wicked men take vengeance on those who have been reckless enough to befriend it.  He may be illiterate, this man of the village or the street, but he is not stupid. He has seen great powers come and go. In his own or his father’s lifetime he has lived through domination by the Soviets, the Afghan communists, the warlords and the Taliban. Now the NATO Machine has come. If our man can tap this apparatus for a job or a contract, he will. Every little bit helps. Most Afghans, we are told, view the Coalition presence favorably. I would too. The Yanks and their allies bring in cash and development projects, and they’re a far more benign presence that Genghis Khan or the Brits or the Russians, who were there for reasons of conquest or self-aggrandizement. The Americans just want to help. The Machine wants to bring security, development, education. It wants to get Afghanistan up on its feet. Can it?

An Osprey comes in over Marjah. Note the .50-caliber machine gun aft. In foreground, beneath camo netting, are the tents where the Marines have temporarily set up camp.

In the middle lies the space between the Machine and the man of the village, the man of the tribes. Here is the payoff point. This ground is occupied by the Marines and Army troopers and allies who man the frontier posts in the mountains, who hold down the outposts in the south and east. This space is held by the Marines in Helmand who fight and camp with their Afghan counterparts, who wash in the canals and eat the same lentils and flatbread, who haven’t had a shower in the past twenty-one days and won’t have one for the next three months. These are the guys who put a human face on the Coalition effort. They’re the young warriors who make friends and learn the lingo and constitute the person-to-person payload that the Machine above (which is as remote to them as it is to the Afghans they operate beside) has come halfway around the world to deliver.

My question is: are there enough of them? Have they penetrated deeply enough? Will they stick around? Does the Coalition possess the patience and political will to give their efforts time to bear fruit?

[Part Four wraps up tomorrow.]

[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]

6. Kabul is a Third World city, squalid as mud and dirty as hell. Every building that’s above the level of the people is built like a fortress; compounds with high walls topped with razor wire, AK-toting guards out front and security cameras atop Y-shaped posts. At the airport, guard towers are set in onion fields with police asleep or tending little vegetable gardens or heating tea over propane stoves. They’re keeping watch, supposedly, over cyclone fences topped with concertina wire and protected at ground level by rolls of the same, so no one can crawl under. Hesco barriers are squarish barrel-like containers made of super heavy duty cardboard and wire; fill them with rock or gravel or dirt and they make impenetrable blast walls.  Stack them three or four high around a perimeter: instant Fort Apache. On bases, the quonset-shaped living tents are surrounded by sandbags piled four and five feet high. Checkpoint guards are TCNs–Third Country Nationals–from Fiji, Mongolia, Bangladesh. We circle Massoud Square again and drive past the famous Serena Hotel. “Why is it famous?” I ask SSgt Barr, our security team leader. “Because,” he says, “the Taliban keep trying to blow it up.”

The Marine Osprey aircraft can fly like a helicopter or a fixed-wing. That's BG Nicholson, back to us, in the foreground.

On the street: boys and men manning wheelbarrows, contracting themselves out; guys selling phone cards; flat wooden handcarts balance on two car tires, selling oranges and onions; goat meat hanging in sidewalk stalls.  Every street is muddy, with shallow brown lakes and piles of dirt, rubble and stone ten feet high every fifty feet.  Local police in beat-up Ford Rangers with machine guns guard every roundabout; they help the convoys go through. A typical run of traffic will be yellow cabs (Toyota Corollas), Toyota mini-buses carrying ten people sardine-style, hitchhikers getting picked up by kind-hearted Samaritans, motorcyles, convoys from the UN or ISAF (the International Security and Assistance Force), Tata trucks and Mercedeses and Russian Kamazes, lots of bicycles, a few horse carts, many people walking. Shops are corrugated tin sheds or mini truck containers with roll-down metal doors. Plastic jugs and jerry cans in a stack serve as a signboard for an auto repair shop or a parts fabricator. Energy comes from propane tanks, big ones, five feet tall, which you see singly on the street or in stacks of four or five, rusty and dirty.  The vendors and mechanics use torches to work metal or primus-style burners to cook up lunch. We pass coffee and tea shops, carpet stores, women’s apparel shops, more than one bodybuilding gym with drawings of muscle men our front, video stores, phone emporia; signs are all hand-lettered, in Arabic (or is it Dari?) and English. Billboards advertise education: learn computing, accounting, vehicle repair. Streets are laid out like this: a main vehicle boulevard with traffic running both ways, separated by a median of mini-concrete barriers and sometimes a lane of forlorn-looking mulberry trees; then, to each side, an unpaved, muddy frontage road, on the outboard margin of which is a sunken runoff ditch. You cross by footbridge to the shops on the far side. I’m speaking theoretically of course, for us Yanks; we’re in the Bubble and nobody’s letting us out. Eating establishments look nasty but tasty: Brothers Restaurant and Hamra are two whose names I jot down. We pass good-looking women packing knockoff iPhones and Blackberries, Gucci-esque bags studded with geegaws.  You see wives in burkas but not many.

My own feeling on Day One is one of apprehensiveness and Third World bummerdom. But after a few jaunts around town, even in body armor, you start getting the hang of it. You begin to see the city, grim and muddy and conflict-ravaged as it is, as a vibrant metropolis–poor as dirt, yes, but with a lot of action going on.  Maj. Nelson and I share the back seat of Chase Two. “In the sixties and seventies,” he says, “Kabul used to be part of the Hippie Trail that ran across Central Asia to Katmandu.” Young Brits and Americans and Euro-freaks would backpack and bunk in villages, carrying only a few dollars; locals were friendly in those pre-Soviet days.  Kabul looked good.  “I bought some postcards when I was deployed here a few years ago that showed these boulevards back in the day. There were cafes and shops, the trees hadn’t been all blown up.”

7. What happens in Gen. Mattis’ meetings? Reports are given quickly, efficiently. There’s a lot of laughter. These officers know each other; they’ve dodged bullets together and gotten drunk together and lost good men together. When they greet each other today, though they’re all wearing stars, they go back instantly to when they were lieutenants and captains in the field–in Desert Storm and Ramadi, in Baghdad and Camp Rhino and Kandahar. Then they get down to business.  It’s like the most efficient American or British corporation imaginable. “How can I help you?” Gen. Mattis asks. “What do you need that you don’t have?”

The background is always COIN theory–counterinsurgency–and the alteration in priorities from “kill the enemy” to “protect the people.” CIVCAS is the military acronym for civilian casualties. All hands are hyper-conscious of avoiding this. But there’s still plenty of killing to be done and a long fight ahead. Gen. Scaparotti commands the 82nd Airborne Division; his AO, Area of Operations, is Regional Command East, the run of provinces between Kabul and the Pakistani border. He tells Mattis of successes and setbacks.  Gen. Scap’s State Dept. counterpart is Dawn Liberi; she’s the civilian equivalent of a three-star general and they work together as a team. Both are tremendous. Tactical victories, COIN strategy says, must be followed up at once by actions that support the people and increase good governance. They’re talking about marble deposits in one province, rail transport in another, and a particularly robust harvest of grapes in a third.  “General,” I ask, “when you were a young trooper jumping out of airplanes, did you think that one day you’d be getting excited about the size of grapes?”

Marjah and surrounding countryside, seen from a Marine Osprey aircraft

8. Marjah.  Day Three, we fly by KC-130 to Kandahar, then by Osprey to Camp Bastion, the huge British base and airfield adjacent to Camp Leatherneck, in Helmand province. The area is thick with history–Alexander, the Silk Road, Persian adventures–and populous. The Marine Osprey takes us down to Marjah, where the big U.S.-Afghan push has been going on for two weeks or more.  The tilt-rotor aircraft touches down vertically in a field of winter grass, after jinking and juking on the approach to make it tougher on any RPG gunner to line the plane up in his sights from below.  We leap off like infantry and sprint/stumble over an irrigation ditch with a footbridge to the compound where the victorious Marines, Afghan National Army and U.S. Army Special Forces have set up shop. BrigGen. Larry Nicholson commands the overall operation. Morale is sky-high. The compound is Hesco’ed up, with a half dozen or so MRAPs (IED-proof armored vehicles the size of two Humvees that cost about a million bucks each) and a machine gun nest on the roof.  The gate entry has been sandbagged so you have to zig-zag to get in and out.  The outer gate is sealed by an MRAP parked sidelong and a Marine sergeant operating concertina wire like a collapsible gate.

Eight Marines have been killed taking Marjah. It’s too painful for anybody to think about so the emotion is choked down to be dealt with later. In a bare dirt room, a young major gives Gen. Mattis a quick map briefing. Marines and ANA and Afghan commandoes are still involved in “kinetic” action, meaning shooting and getting shot at, a few miles ahead. But here it’s pretty much over; the stability operation has begun.  Reporters are on the ground—the excellent Tony Perry of the L.A. Times, whom I know by e-mail but have never met in person, and a pair from Germany or England, a pretty girl in a head scarf and a cameraman. Marines and Afghan army commanders are gravely solicitous about each other’s casualties. This is no joke. An Afghan soldier was killed several days ago. Gen. Nicholson ordered his body to be flown by Marine KC-130, all by itself, to Kabul to the soldier’s family. Among Muslims immediate burial is of the highest spiritual importance. A tough-looking young major tells Gen. Nicholson how word of his gesture has made the rounds of the Afghan platoons, making a deep impression. Gen. Nicholson is delighted. “This is their boy’s victory,” he says, meaning the Afghans’, “as much as it is ours. Maybe more.”

We walk several miles up the dirt road that serves as Main Street in the part of town we’re in. Flat fields stretch to the horizon. Mud walls surround compounds constructed like forts. The street itself is deeply rutted and potholed. Your boots sink ankle-deep in dust the consistency of talcum powder.  It’s a market town road, the country version of the boulevards in Kabul—traffic down the middle, irrigation ditches on one side, shops and stalls on the far side of the ditch and the dry side too.  Tobias Elwood, our young British MP, is an expert in post-conflict stabilization operations. He’s already trying to rally the troops to re-do this road. “Hire local people, do it all by hand; pay as many people as we can. It doesn’t matter if it’s a perfect job by Western standards; what counts is to get the people involved and let them see real change happening right now. Every hour we dither increases skepticism about our intentions and our capabilities.”

As our party of generals, colonels, majors and reporters trudges along, protected by ANP (Afghan National Police) and Marine infantry providing 360-degree security, local boys and men eye them from market stalls, rooftops and margins of fields.  We have heard that in another part of Marjah, the Taliban had set up such an efficient government of their own that streets were paved, homes were electrified and there were full-time courts of law.  Maybe the locals aren’t too pleased to see the Marines and the ANA. “We’ve got work to do in that part of town,” says the young major running the show.

Coming home: a family returns to Marjah

One thing that doesn’t come across back home in TV coverage of the army and Marines is what great-looking, superbly-professional guys they are. There’s no way, I’m thinking, that the Marjah locals can look at these young men and not be impressed.  Tremendous fighters as these Marines clearly are, it’s also obvious that they aren’t here to conquer the place or rape the resources; they’ve come to help and they intend to.  Still the locals are giving us the stink-eye, skeptical about how long this new boss is gonna stick around or if they even want him to. A big farm tractor is rumbling down the road toward us like Tom Joad’s jalopy, overloaded with people, at least twenty–a big extended family, we are told. Where are they going?  “Coming back,” says the interpreter.  Returning to their homes now that the Taliban are gone.  The family itself is a wonderful-looking bunch—boys and girls with lively, intelligent eyes; young men looking smart and strong and ready to laugh; elders who look like … like Afghan elders.  The grown women are bundled up, but their eyes are quick and savvy too. Stalls in the bazaar that have been vacant or shuttered are open again and more are opening every few minutes, as in Nawa nearby where, we heard, Marines and ANA troops have done the same thing. We squint down the talcum-powder road. Here comes another tractor, also overflowing with returnees.

[Part Three continues tomorrow.]

[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]

1. Jim Mattis is a four-star Marine general. He doesn’t go out of his way to be quotable; he just can’t help himself.  Here, from Iraq 2004, are his instructions to the Marines under his command on how to conduct themselves with the natives they will encounter.

Gen. Mattis in Marjah, Helmand province, 28 Feb 2010

Be polite.  Be professional.  But have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

In the first battle of Fallouja, Gen. Mattis commanded the Marines assigned to take the city. There came a point during the fighting when Mattis had to negotiate with the Sunni sheikhs and Baathist ex-army officers who claimed they wanted to quit, but whose acquaintance with the truth had been a little dubious.

I come in peace.  I didn’t bring artillery.  But I’m begging you, with tears in my eyes, if you fuck with me, I will kill you all.

Who would be an historical counterpart to Gen. Mattis? My pick would be Epaminondas, the great Theban general (like Mattis, a bachelor) who beat the Spartans at Leuctra in 371 B.C.  When he retired, Epaminondas took nothing home but his clothes and his books.  Gen. Mattis will be packing it in in November. He’ll go home to Washington State and hike the high country. Will he write his memoirs? “No way.” Such a document might break trust with the military and political leaders who expect private, candid counsel from their senior military colleagues and depend upon those colleagues keeping the content of such discussions in confidence. We’re in the library of Gen. Mattis’ spacious, columned quarters, the Virginia House, on the naval base at Norfolk, and I’m trying to talk him into reconsidering. I’m a student of history; I want to hear those stories. The current era is important, and Mattis was there at the center of it. But he won’t budge.

It’s February 24^th and Gen. Mattis has invited me to accompany his party on a four-day burst to Afghanistan. I’ve never been there. I want to go. So I’ve flown to Norfolk from Los Angeles, where I live. We take off in the morning.

2.  A couple of disclaimers before we plunge into this narrative. I’m not a journalist, and the piece that follows doesn’t purport to be journalism. It’s not a war story.  Nobody got shot at or blown up. We didn’t live with the tribes or sleep in the field alongside the Marines and the Afghan National Army. We traveled in a bubble and most of what I saw was glimpsed through a bubble-distorted lens. So take what follows with a grain of salt. Here’s what I saw and how it struck me.

3. What’s the first thing you think about when you realize you’re going to Afghanistan? Warm clothes. Good boots. Immunizations. For me the big deal was medical insurance. It took some doing (“I’m sorry,” says the rep at my company, “we do not cover injuries sustained in a war zone”), but my quest ends happily at an outfit called Global Underwriters, via Lloyds of London, that insures reporters and filmmakers who travel to places where bombs sometimes go off.  Bottom line: fifteen hundred bucks for what (I hope) will cover my butt if the shit hits the fan.

4. The day comes. We’re “wheels up” over the Atlantic. How does a four-star general travel? By Gulfstream 5, it turns out. It’s like Mick Jagger but without the girls. The party is fourteen, including pilots, security team, aides and communicators. The other guest besides me, is the Hon. Tobias Elwood, an up-and-coming member of Parliament and a former Royal Green Jacket infantry officer. We’ll pick him up in London. Over the Atlantic it’s Gen. Mattis and me, in seats facing each other, up front in a compartment with a banquette berth and a fold-down table. Gen. Mattis currently heads JFCOM, Joint Forces Command; it’s his job to integrate the all-forces team—Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines—and prepare it for joint operations.  He travels to the front regularly, to check with the commanders face to face and see how they’re doing and how he can help.

Bring briefed in Marjah by BG Larry Nicholson. Member of Parliament Tobias Elwood is next to Gen. Mattis. That's me, obscured in "deep background."

I had imagined we’d fly all the way in one long, spine-crunching haul. But the trip is broken up into two days because the crew stays with the plane; safety regs require that they rest. We stop in London at Stansted Airfield. A four-star general is a serious piece of gear, as the Marines would say. He is a key component in America’s defense apparatus and has to be on call 24 hours a day. Security teams escort the party everywhere. When we land, cars are waiting with the advance team. Zip, we’re in the hotel. Special Agent Jim Rivera is the security chief. He’s NCIS. “Like the TV show,” he says. “Only real.” Our bags appear; our passports are taken care of. The only snag for me is I’m having trouble sleeping. It’s the time zone change. And I’m keyed up. By Day Two, after we’ve picked up Tobias and are flying over the Black Sea, with

TEHRAN

and

BAGHDAD

on the cabin trip monitor, this jaunt is starting to feel serious. Darkness falls.  There’s Kabul below. It looks like a regular city but without the street lights. What was I expecting? Stalingrad? Pluto? The banquette in the forward cabin is now heaped with flak jackets and helmets. Everyone is suiting up. Magazines are being slotted into 9mm Berettas and M-4 carbines. Tobias and I are the only ones not packing heat. The plane doesn’t come down in a death spiral to avoid rocket fire. It’s a regular landing, just like at O’Hare. KAIA is huge and we taxi for a long time, up to the WELCOME TO KABUL sign and down the stairs to a four-vehicle convoy of armored Suburbans and Expeditions. I’m with Maj. Tom Nelson, Gen. Mattis’ special assistant, in “Chase 2.” Again, I’m not sure what I expected–stopping for flat bread or lamb kebob on the streets? Apparently not. We zig and zag along muddy back tracks for what seems like half an hour, then past a skein of security points and out into actual Kabul. We’re heading for Camp Eggers, which is in the city, not far. I’ve never worn a flak jacket before. It’s heavy. By the time you’ve donned helmet and gloves and wedged yourself into the back seat of a Chevy Suburban, you feel like Spam in a can or a turtle inside its shell. How secure can Kabul be if we have to schlep around like this? Answer: it ain’t. As our vehicles circle the roundabout at Massoud Square with Afghan taxis and Hi-Luxes jostling on all sides, it’s clear that the “security environment” is a free, open city. Risk is accepted by everyone, included the women waiting in the crosswalk and the kids kicking a soccer ball across a field.

We enter Camp Eggers through a maze of chicanes and checkpoints. Signs says NO JAMMERS and TURN OFF ECM–Electronic Counter Measures, i.e. signals to jam cell phone transmissions that might be used to trigger IEDs. The camp itself is smack in the middle of the city, carved out of  … what? Existing shops and apartments? Our quarters are a nest of rooms at the end of a souk-like passage past security doors and concertina-wire-topped walls. It’s warm and raining.  Kabul sits in a bowl at 6000 feet with the Hindu Kush mountains invisible behind dense smoke and fog in the distance. The team sets up its office at one big table in their desert-tan t-shirts.  Everyone is here to serve Gen. Mattis, to keep him on schedule and in touch with whomever he has to be in touch with. “Why have you chosen Mr. Pressfield and me to accompany you?” Tobias asks.  “Because I like you both,” the general answers. “And I want your fresh eyes. I can get all the predictable responses I want already. You gentlemen will give it to me straight.”

5. Breakfast. Before dawn in the chow hall (which is two cramped rooms run by KBR contractors), we hear a bang in the distance. “Did you hear that?” The blast will turn out to be part of a coordinated Taliban attack, including suicide bombers and a VBIED, a vehicle-borne IED, that will leave sixteen dead and dozens wounded. We don’t know that yet, though, as we head out to the day’s round of meetings.

Over two days, Gen. Mattis will be conferring with BrigGen. Jeff Smith, BrigGen. Gus Gilmore, LtGen. David Rodriquez, ViceAdm. Robert Harward, LtGen. William Caldwell, MajGen. Curtis Scaparrotti, and four-star Gen. Stanley McChrystal.  These guys are the real deal. Here’s one instructive civvie comparison: Col. Joe Felton whom we meet on the second day (Commander of the Counterinsurgency Advisory and Assistance Team) has a Ph.D. in Political Science from Stanford and an MPA from the Kennedy School at Harvard–and he’s out there fighting the Taliban. We’re supposed to meet Ambassador Eikenberry but that falls through, as does one get-together I had circled on my calendar–with British LtGen. Sir Graeme Lamb. It was Gen. Lamb’s concept of “reconcilables” versus “irreconcilables” that set the mental model for the Anbar Awakening that turned the tide in the Iraq War.

After these meetings we’ll fly down to Marjah in Helmand province, where the Marines are fighting right now. That will be the highlight, for me anyway. But for now, we’re suiting up and heading back out into the capital …

[Part Two picks up tomorrow.]

[Photos by 1LT Joshua Diddams, MEB-A Media Officer.]

The following is another installment of the Tribal Engagement Tutorial series, written by Major Jim Gant and MAC McCallister. It is a long post, so stick with it. It describes key differences between a shura and a jirga, as well as guidance on when to call for one, how to prepare, how to act, what to say, and so on. Thank you to both of them for pulling this together.

According to NATO’s military chief of intelligence in Afghanistan, the Taliban now maintain shadow governors in thirty-three out of thirty-four provinces. While we like to see the world in black and white, the complexities of relationships and alliances in the village and valley make it anything but a straightforward contest between two parties. The U.S. strategy of stripping away Taliban loyalists is not easy in a very complex socio-political landscape. This landscape includes different types of traditional authority, local rivalries and the various configurations of social power in each village and valley.  

The rubber of U.S. strategy meets the road in the village assembly. It is in the local assemblies where Coalition Forces speak directly with the local inhabitants and indirectly with the shadow governors of the Taliban. Identifying ahead of time the familial, sectarian, security, economic and political alliances represented in a given village or valley assembly will assist in identifying how these alliances might influence group decisions. We must also contemplate, identify and differentiate between two very different village assemblies: the jirga and shura.

JIRGA

 MAC McCallister:

The jirga is an assembly of village elders and reflects the rituals of the Pashtun traditional assembly in which village and valley notables gather to discuss and resolve disputes and make collective decisions about important social issues.

What follows is a simple model of the types of decision-making makers found in the jirga. The jirga is likely comprised of three major decision-making powers: “the elders,” “those with grey beards,” and “people with white turbans” or mullahs. The grey beards are knowledgeable in “folk Islam” or narkh, i.e. customary law of the village or valley. The elder, the grey beard, and the mullah each represent a distinct center of social power. This does not mean that younger inhabitants of the village or valley are excluded from power or the decision-making process. Remember, this is a simple model. Not every grey beard is a Khan, malik, tribal chief or leader of a solidarity group. Some mullahs are closely aligned with a particular village or valley leadership, some are not. Before I am accused of overly simplifying the complexity that is the Afghan village, my advice is not to get hung up on titles. The model provides a simple framework to start you off. Watch how individuals interact with one another; listen before speaking. Apply your emotional intelligence to identify those individuals that are considered credible and legitimate voices in the community. Don’t forget that the “powerful send messengers.”

Major Jim Gant:

It is also sometimes used by other neighboring ethnic groups. Jirgas are most common in Afghanistan and among the Pashtuns in Pakistan near its border with Afghanistan. This definition comes straight from Wikipedia and is as good as any. The key thing to understand is that it is a tribal mechanism.

It is also important to note that there are three types or levels of jirgas: a maraka (local jirga), a qawmi (tribal jirga) and a loya jirga (national assembly).”

SHURA

MAC McCallister:

Shura is an Arabic word for “consultation” or “council”. The word itself can describe an assembly, an organized body of participants, an administrative body or council, or may describe a decision-making process.

Islamic scholars consider decision-making via Shura as either obligatory or recommended. The shura is considered obligatory by those Islamic scholars who choose to emphasize the Quranic verse: “…and consult with them on the matter” (3:159). The shura is recommended by those Islamic scholars who emphasize the verse “…those who conduct their affairs by council are praised” (43:38). One can’t help but notice the religious subtext when requesting that a shura be held in an Afghan village or valley.

Deciding to Request a Jirga or a Shura

MAC McCallister:

If Coalition Forces request an assembly, consider the differences in effect between calling for a jirga or shura. If you seek to focus on the legitimacy and credibility of the village elders and grey beards, request that a jirga be held.

If you seek to focus on the legitimacy and credibility of the mullah, request that a shura be held.

Since you may well be negotiating with a representative of the Taliban shadow government, take care not to inadvertently help the Taliban by adding temporal power (prestige) to the spiritual, especially if you request a shura when a jirga will suffice.

A strategy that seeks to strip away the followers of a local powerbroker requires an understanding of a very complex socio-political landscape. A mental model that informs in terms of shame and honor, segmentation, patronage and territory may help pierce this fog of complexity.

Major Jim Gant:

Ensure you understand the difference between a jirga and a shura. A shura is not purely tribal, but is a political assembly that involves representatives from different levels of government as well as the security forces.

Top ten “golden rules” of a jirga 

1. “De Pakhtu lar ba neesu”
 It means “I am speaking to you as a Pashtun”…I want to see these issues as a Pashtun…or what I call seeing the perspective of the Pashtun.
2. Keep their culture. Know the customs. Know the culture. Know the people.
3. Listen. Listen. Listen. DO NOT TAKE NOTES.
4. Never “cut” anyone off. Ever.
5. Be honorable.
6. If you think you are “better” than them (smarter, stronger, etc) DON’T GO. SEND SOMEONE ELSE.
7. Be patient. Take your watch off. “How saylah”
8. Do not make promises you cannot keep.
9. Talk slowly and only when you understand the implications of your words.
10. Pa Pakthu ba ye khalasswoo”…We will end this in the Pastun way…

Planning considerations for a jirga:

 1. Security Measures:

a. The tribal chief that you attend the jirga with must understand that you are turning your “close-in” security over to him.

b. You must accept risk here. There might be hundreds of men in and around the area that you do not know.

c. Do not “advertise” your presence with multiple armored vehicles and heavy weapons systems all over the place.

 2. Talk to your tribal chief about an agenda. Ensure it is HIS agenda, not yours.

 3. Determine who will attend with you. I attended two jirgas. I went on my own to one, and to the other, I took one man with who moved around outside and kept an eye on the site.

 4. If possible, find out the location of the site, so you can better prepare over-all security.

5. Be prepared to brief past, present, and future “accomplishments/plans” to the entire jirga, if asked. Also be prepared to answer questions about the ENTIRE U.S. plan for Afghanistan and its goals. Think this through carefully.

6. If possible, and if the chain of command supports it, you can use this as a platform to announce a new project.

Possible reasons to attend a jirga:

1. At the request of the tribal leadership
2. To establish a personal/professional relationship with the tribal leadership
3. Some type of conflict resolution
4. Discuss TET abilities and limitations
5. Discuss procedures for developing “pillars” for the tribes at all levels
6. How to improve over-all security measures
7. Discuss threat activity
8. Discuss all boundaries
9.  Establish positive US influence
10.  Discuss what THEY need
11.  Plan future projects/operations
12.  Ensure cooperation between TET and bordering tribes
13.  Emphasize “Unity of Effort” with open dialogue
14.  Plan and coordinate projects/operations in conjunction with coalition forces

Remember, the TET gains “influence without authority” through its ability to build relationships with the tribe. The personalities of the tribal chief, as well as the influential members of the tribal elders, are very important. YOU MUST BUILD REAL RELATIONSHIPS WITH THESE KEY PEOPLE.

The jirga influences tribal members or other tribes to accomplish goals by providing purpose, direction and motivation. Purpose gives the tribe the reason why; direction tells them what must be done; and motivation gives the tribe the will to do everything they are capable of to accomplish their goals, in some cases at great risk to themselves and families.

Historically, in Afghanistan tribal leaders have been recognized as leaders within a specific sphere of influence. This sphere can expand and shrink. Ensure you know where this influence is “on the ground” and over whom he has influence. The TET should then help him with any shortcomings he may have or with other issues if requested.

Within regards to conducting security and offensive operations, the tribal leader should be responsible for the following:

• Appoint or recognize subordinate Arbakai or tribal security force (TSF) commanders
• Prepare the overall plan to accomplish the mission and goals of the tribe
• Collects supplies from local sources
• Resources and supplies from external sources (the TET will advise him on their capability)
• Allocates and distributes resources to his Arbakai commanders (you should never do this. Let the tribal chief do this himself, or set up a system to do so.)

The TET MUST support the tribal chief however they can. Additional elements may or may not be available to assist the TET.

1. Never promise anything you cannot deliver.
2. Give the tribal chief what he needs and wants.
3. Do not ever “take credit” for anything. The TET does not want dependence but is striving for cooperation.

Lastly, always remember your presence gives the tribal chief legitimacy. Legitimacy is power. Be prepared: your decisions and your actions could have not only tactical effects, but strategic effects, as well.

MAC McCallister

The Shura, excerpted from “COIN and Irregular Warfare in a Tribal Society Primer“

1. Shura is an Arabic word for “consultation” or “council”. It is the method by which Arab tribes select leaders and make major decisions.

2. The term has caused much confusion for it is used extensively by tribal leaders to describe an organized body of participants, administrative body, tribal council or consultative and meditative process. In essence, all consultative bodies organized to bring tribal leaders and representatives together are called a shura.

3. For simplicity sake, a shura should be considered a higher level of tribal representational organization that includes the leaders, councils, advisors and principal lieutenants of multiple tribal groups for the purposes of consultation and mediation among tribes.

a. The Shura reflects a decision making process — consultative decision making — that is considered either obligatory or desirable by Islamic scholars. Those scholars who choose to emphasize the Quranic verse: “…and consult with them on the matter” (3:159) consider shura as mandatory. Islamic scholars who emphasize the verse “those who conduct their affairs by counsel (43:38) are praised”, consider shura as recommended.

b. A shura is an arena in which each individual tribe voices its concerns and pursues its interests and is not in the Western sense a disciplined interest group representing one party platform.

c. A shura is not a political party. If a political party is desired, members of the shura will form a political party distinct and separate from the shura.

d. Decisions are reached by consensus and reflect the ability of tribal leaders to build alliances and persuade other tribal sheikhs. ‘Ability to attract’ vice ‘enforce’. Decisions based on consensus not majority rule.

e. Persuasion, mediation and negotiation are basic tenets of tribal politics and diplomacy, not the use of force or intimidation. The shura has no “leader” in the Western sense of the word. A respected family based on lineage and bloodline will be named to act as moderator, spokesman or representative for the council.

f. Note: any dissenting tribe can decide to remove themselves from the shura, in essence “vote with its feet”, and form its own shura.

g. Identifying the networks of familial, tribal, security, economic and political relationships composing a given shura will assist in identifying how these networks influence group decisions.

 

Listening Points during visit to the tribal house/shura

a. Designate “observers” and “listeners” to gather atmospherics throughout the visit.

b. Observe and note which other sheikhs (tribes) have also been invited. Note the distance they sit away from paramount sheikh and the order in which they present themselves to him during the initial gathering. This information will assist in developing an understanding of present and potential alliances developing among the tribes.

c. Note the groupings of sheikhs as they meet and talk to each other and the general body language, and approximate length of time they converse with one another.

d. Note the groupings of sheikhs as they approach the paramount sheikh periodically to present petitions or to engage in conversation to determine which sheikhs (sub-tribes) may be aligned for specific objectives.

e. Designated listeners now listen for pledges of loyalty and or petitions that address security, political or economic issues or general exchange of pleasantries to indicate relationships.

f. Listen for concerns in regard to present provincial governance and administration/distribution of resources (patronage building).

g. Observe participant’s body language if discussion involve sectarian political parties, provincial council, and elections.

h. Observe groupings of sheikhs during discussions and note those that speak favorably and those that do not (also take note of those that do not express an opinion) concerning the subject matter of interest.

i. Observe body language and facial expressions if topic involves security, security forces and role of Ministry of Interior (MOI), Ministry of Defense (MOD) or any other central governmental agency. Pay particular attention to side-bar discussions.

j. Designated observers judge body language and facial expressions (after translation) of comments made by U.S. military representative. Especially “key” comments crafted by the U.S. military representative designed to make a point, recommendation or achieve a specific effect.

What does it mean to write for a star? Writing for a star means create a role that a star wants to play. Your story may be dynamite, your structure may be sound, your theme profound and involving. But the first question a producer is going to ask is, “Who can I cast in this thing?”

Moviemakers want scripts that attract stars. Because stars make movies happen.  If we’ve got Matt Damon, the bank will write us a check. If Sandra Bullock says she’s in, the studio gives us a green light.

Stars put asses in the seats. If you and I go to a basketball game, we want to see Lebron. We came out for Kobe. I have zero interest in “the field” at the Masters this spring; I’m tuning in for Tiger.

Products too can be stars. Nobody does this better than Apple. The iPod is a star. The iPhone. Steve Jobs is rolling out the iPad now and every move his marketing and ad departments make is designed to make it a star. Steve Jobs himself is a star.

Style can be a star. Hemingway. Or sound. Phil Spector. Look can be a star. Lady Gaga. Even absence can be a star: J.D. Salinger.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we throw all artistic considerations to the wind and pander to some glam/slam concept of attention-grabbing. What I am suggesting is that, at at least one point during its evolution, we evaluate our material by asking ourselves, “Who’s the star here? Do we have one? Who (or what) supplies the bizazz that we need to make this material stand out?”

If we’re opening a restaurant, who’s our star? The chef? The look? The crowd?

What’s the star of our clothing line? Our non-profit? Our start-up school?

If our script, our opening, our business venture doesn’t have a star, how do we create one? Hollywood’s rules might help us here. Consider these bonuses reserved only for stars:

Stars make entrances.

Stars get star lighting.

Stars get the best lines.

Stars get Moments. Meg Ryan’s fake orgasm, Clint Eastwood’s “Make my day.”

Stars’ roles go somewhere. Stars’ characters change and grow.

Stars power the movie. In the climax, the star’s actions decide his own fate and define the meaning of the movie.

Even the tiniest scenes can be star moments. Did you ever see True Confessions, starring Robert Deniro? It’s a period piece, set in Los Angeles in the forties, in which Deniro plays a high-powered monsignor who is torn between the faith he wishes he could embrace and the wheeling-and-dealing he does all day long on behalf of the diocese. The legend goes that during production Deniro asked the director, Ulu Grosbard, if he could have one scene where the audience sees where his character sleeps. The director gave it to him. It’s a scene you might miss if you’re not paying attention. Deniro simply comes home from a long day among the city’s movers and shakers, mounts the stairs in the priests’ living quarters and enters a spartan room that contains nothing but a bed and an armoire. The actor has no dialogue; all he does is hang up his cardigan sweater (on a wire hanger) and sit down silently on the edge of the bed.

That’s a star scene. Only stars get Moments like that.

If we as writers are true to our calling, we’ll imbue even our most minor characters with stardust. As Francis Ford Coppola did with The Godfather. Clemenza. Johnnie Fontaine. Even Pauly. They all got to do what stars do–answer Stanislavski’s questions: Who am I, why am I here, what do I want?

I was working with a male action star when a rival’s movie came out. The new film had a scene in which the rival star was captured by the bad guys and tortured. Next morning my star demanded a torture scene too. At the time I thought he was crazy. But he was right. A star needs a Torture Scene. It lets the audience know he’s the star.

Writing for a star is a deep topic. Much can be said, including the possibility that we ourselves are the star. But let’s leave our resolution at this for the moment:

At least once during our process (writing our novel, launching our bistro, founding our charter academy) we will ask ourselves, “Who is our star? Do we have one? And if we don’t, how can we create one?”

We’ll imagine living, breathing actors standing before us, each one representing one of our characters (or products or points of interface with our audience). Each will demand from us an answer to the following questions: “Where’s my Moment? Where’s my Torture Scene? Dude, gimme something I can play!“

How do you know how crazy you are? By how genuinely nuts you get when you’re NOT doing (or not being allowed to do) what being crazy makes you want to do in the first place.

But this state of mind isn’t really crazy. It comes from the gods. It’s a species of divine madness. Socrates called the poetic variety of this condition “possession by the Muses” (and rated it superior to technical mastery), though he could have referred with equal accuracy to seizure by any Olympian deity. When this kind of nuttiness grabs us, we are possessed by forces we can’t name and can’t see, can’t measure or quantify, and whose very existence is doubted by much of the conventional world.

But this state of possession is real, as anyone who has experienced it will testify–and so are the forces that inflict it on us. What do these forces demand? First and foremost, they want depth. They require of us passion, authenticity, courage, stubbornness and commitment over time. They want us. They want everything we’ve got.

In return, these forces grant us peace of mind (at least for a few minutes), a modicum of honor; they gift us with self-respect and integrity, and they endow us with gravity. Most important of all, they ground us in a source, which may be mysterious and ineffable but that grants meaning and significance to our lives and work.

None of us asks for this. There’s no chain of intention or rational choice. The thing grabs us. We can run as far as we like, like Jonah did into the belly of the whale, but in the end we either surrender to this force or it kills us. I am not employing hyperbole.

What specifically is depth of work? We know it when we see it, don’t we? Julia Child had it, and so does Meryl Streep. Sam Maloof had it; Steve Jobs does and so does Elmore Leonard. So do thousands of writers and artists and entrepreneurs whom nobody but their own friends and fans have ever heard of.

Tweeting is the opposite of depth of work; so is gossip and reality TV and Facebook and 99.9% of blogging. Mainstream TV news is the definition of shallowness of work; if a journalist at NBC or CBS ever dared to go deep, she’d be fired on the spot. The Daily Show does go deep, and so does the Colbert Report.

Depth of work comes from immersion. A thousand physicists worked on the same problems that Einstein did. There’s something unbalanced about going that deep. It isn’t normal; it isn’t regular. But that’s what we’re looking for. That’s why we have to find within ourselves.

The guts to get to that place.

When actors work on a scene in rehearsal with a director, the first pass is always the shallowest. Why? Because it’s easy to stay on the surface. It doesn’t hurt. There’s no risk and no exposure. But the fun begins when the actors start digging. They’ve got this cryptic map–the playwright’s words and stage directions. But what does he really mean? What does the writer intend that even he didn’t know? What is this freakin’ piece about anyway? Why is each of us here? How do these character beats advance the story? What is the story anyway?

So the actors start at eight and work till eleven, and they come back the next night and keep digging into the same words and the same stage directions. It’s like therapy. It’s like bench pressing. It’s like training in short-track speed skating.

What’s the difference between being in shape and being out? A trainer once told me it was all in the capillaries. When we train hard, day after day, we force blood deep into our muscles; this “push” compels the circulatory system to create new capillaries, so that oxygen and nutrients can be carried to every tiny mitochondria of muscle and so that waste products can be borne away. When we’re out of shape, our network of capillaries is small and constricted; when we’re in shape, those little creeks and runnels are branching out everywhere. You can tell when someone’s in shape by the aliveness of their skin. Capillaries close to the surface give it that healthy glow.

Depth of work is like that. Pain is involved, and will and effort and motivation. But so is joy and strength and stamina and self-empowerment.

Have you ever seen those software programs that help writers flesh out their stories? The formulaicness sounds robot-like, I know, but in fact the concept has tremendous power. The programs compel you, the writer, to answer the hump-busting questions: What is your story about? What does the protagonist want? What does this mean? These are the privately-experienced, gloryless, bone-crunching, capillary-expanders that, when you confront them successfully, produce depth of work.

How deep can you go? If we’re Francis Ford Coppolla and we’re writing the screenplay of The Godfather from Mario Puzo’s novel, we have to go as deep as Mr. Puzo did and keep drilling even after that. What is this story about? Family? A code of honor? Crime? Evil? An oppressed and despised tribe within a greater and even more corrupt society? How do we get to these answers? Instinct, inspiration, head-banging rationality? All of the above? But if we can drill down deep—to answers that are universal and that address not just the parochial dilemmas of the Corleone family and the society that surrounds it, but that speak to universal human themes … then we’ve got something. Then we have achieved depth of work. And then we really reach the audience, even if they don’t know why or how.

This is killer work and you gotta be nuts to do it. You have to want it for reasons a lot of people are not going to understand. There aren’t many Francis Ford Coppollas and this is why. It’s hard to go deep. It hurts. There’s a price to pay and maybe most people don’t want to pay it or even think about. Are we willing to pay that price? Am I? Are you?

I read Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried right after it was published, and it blew me away. It is powerful-capturing the emotions, internal conflicts, and bravery of not just the Vietnam generation, but today’s soldiers and Marines, too. I’ve recommended it to many people since its release, and the responses I’ve received from those who have read it have always been moved and moving. It is an honor and privilege to do a Q&A with Tim, on the 20^th anniversary of the publishing of The Things They Carried.

The Things They Carried received France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1987, O’Brien received the National Magazine Award for the short story, “The Things They Carried,” and in 1999 it was selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of the Century edited by John Updike.

Tim is also the author of Going After Cacciato, which received the National Book Award in fiction; In the Lake of the Woods, which received the James Fennimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was named best novel of 1994 by Time magazine; If I Die in a Combat Zone; Northern Lights; The Nuclear Age; Tomcat in Love; and July, July. His short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper’s, The Atlantic, Playboy, and Ploughshares, and in several editions of The Best American Short Stories and The O. Henry Prize Stories. O’Brien is the recipient of literary awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Guggenheim Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He has been elected to both the Society of American Historians and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. O’Brien currently holds the University Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Texas State University. He lives with his wife and children in Austin, Texas.

S.P.: When it comes to generating ideas, what’s your process? Solitary? Collaborative? Is it fun, is it grueling? How, exactly, do you work?

T.O.: Ideas seem to come (and go) as if by their own volition. A tantalizing story possibility will sometimes pop to mind, either out of memory or imagination, and I’ll begin writing as a means of exploring the idea – its mysteries, its meanings, its facets, its moral import. The process of exploring and extending an “idea” through storytelling is for me wholly solitary. The process is collaborative only in the sense that the idea and I seem to work together on some occasions and at utter cross purposes on other occasions. I’m mostly a poor and pitiful supplicant, begging the story to reveal itself more fully. This process is sometimes fun, more often grueling, since I’m at the mercy of a story with its own secret purposes, ambitions, and desires.

Tim O'Brien

S.P.: Do you experience Resistance (meaning self-sabotage, procrastination, self-doubt, etc.?) In what form does Resistance present itself?

T.O.: I work every day on a very rigorous schedule. I do not procrastinate. Sometimes the work goes well, in which case I might end up with a paragraph or two of decent prose; other times the work goes badly, in which case I end up with a foul temper. But the habits of regularity and discipline are necessary, at least for me. The resistances I encounter come in many forms and sizes – a truculent phrase, a noun that will not disclose itself, a character who refuses to utter anything but cliches, a turn of event that is neither interesting nor surprising, a story that will not take a single faltering stride out of the starting gate. And so on. And so on. A completed novel, in my experience, can be viewed as an unbroken chain of resistances overcome or evaded.

S.P.: How do you overcome Resistance? Do you have a specific technique or metaphor that you employ to fortify, encourage or inspire yourself?

T.O.: As Joseph Conrad wrote, or said, somewhere: “. . . the sitting down is all.” I take that to mean – even if Conrad didn’t – that creative resistance can only be overcome, or artfully evaded, by the repetitive act of making oneself present. A writer must be there – at work – and not at a bowling alley.

S.P.: Once you have an idea, what’s your process for taking it to a finished form? How do you decide whether an idea is worth pursuing? Is there a series of steps that take you from “germ” to “finished product?”

T.O.: Sad to say, but I have no conscious process by which I advance an idea toward its finished form. From the instant I embark on a story or a novel, I’m in search of some approximation of a “finished form.” It’s a quest, not a process. I may find an aspect here, another aspect there, but there is no method to it beyond trusting in my own story. To trust in story is to trust in something beyond the intellect, beyond “process,” and beyond the sort of planning that an architect or an engineer or a plumber might do. I go to work each day trusting that my characters will utter interesting bits of dialogue, or that they will behave in interesting ways, or that might come up with interesting physical or linguistic replies to the moral paradoxes of being human.

S.P.: What do you do when you hit plateaus? How do you keep advancing? Is there one example of plateauing that you can share-and how you grew through it?

T.O.: When I hit plateaus, I head for the mountains. By that, I mean (or think I mean) that I do all I can to point a story or a novel toward its central human drama, toward its essential human mystery. Often, I’ve found that “plateaus” are the product of ill focus-an individual tree is in sharp relief, but the forest is blurry.

S.P.: Tim, much of what you wrote in The Things They Carried was based pretty closely (I assume) on actual events. Yet, being a fiction writer myself, I know that too intense an attachment to things-as-they-actually-happened or people-as-they-actually-are-or-were can work against the success of a story. How you do you handle the fact/fiction conundrum? Do ethical issues enter the equation, e.g. fidelity to an actual friend, in the sense of being reluctant to fictionalize anything he did … or simple fidelity to the truth of actual events? In your writing philosophy, what is the proper relation of fact to fiction?

T.O.: Since my work is very conspicuously labeled “fiction,” I don’t fret about issues of factuality. I would feel quite free, for instance, to write a story in which Germany wins World War Two, or in which Richard Cheney is an angel of the Lord. My fidelity is to the story. To the story alone. As a fiction writer, I’m interested not only in what “is,” or in what “was,” but also in what might have been or what almost was or what might still be or what should have been.

S.P.: I’ve been recommending The Things They Carries for years. If you have time, go check out Tim when he visits one of the following locations. Read the book.

San Francisco area
Berkeley Arts & Letters, March 16, 7:30 pm
First Congregational Church of Berkeley

Los Angeles
Los Angeles Public Library, March 18, 7:00 pm
Central Library

New York City
Barnes & Noble, March 22, 7:00pm
Union Square

Philadephia
Free Library of Philadelphia, March 23, 7:00pm

Washington, DC
Politics & Prose, March 24, 7:00 pm

Boston
Harvard Bookstore, March 25, 7:00 pm
First Parish Church, Cambridge

Chicago
Oak Park Reading Series, with The Book Table, April 8th, 7:00pm
Unity Temple, Oak Park

Online
“Selected Shorts”
Will rebroadcast the reading of The Things They Carried on public radio stations nationwide between March 18^th – 24^th.

Live Webcast
Wednesday March 24^th, 1-2pm EST: Tim O’Brien in conversation with Nathanial Fick broadcast from Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C.

NEA’s Big Read

American Place Theater’s “Literature to Life” program: http://www.americanplacetheatre.org/stage/

This is a topic I plan to address in a series of posts over the next few weeks. But first I want to thank every correspondent who took the time to write in response to last week’s “Help!” post. As I type this, we’ve had 69 Comments. This is absolutely amazing, and I thank everybody. Particularly for the detail of the responses. It really helps me. I’m traveling this week and the next so I won’t be able to send out signed “War of Arts” yet in gratitude, but I will as soon as I can. Gracias, everybody, for the overwhelming and very helpful response!

Now to Depth of Work—and a confession. I’m not sure if it’s evident from my posts over the last couple of months, but I’ve been going through a crisis in my own work (see “Self-Doubt” and “Wrestling an Alligator,” among others.) Much of it has to do with depth of work, or rather the lack of it.

I’ve been shallow. Resistance has beaten me much too often. The culprit, oddly enough, has been success—and the urge that public recognition engenders to “expand.” If you glance around at this blog page, you’ll see that I have plunged over the last year into a cause that is partly political, partly military, and largely involves the attempt to influence events in the real world through direct personal participation. I love this cause, it’s a passion of mine; it has brought me great new friends (and we, by our efforts together, may even have nudged the pea a few centimeters down the trail.) But this type of enterprise is not healthy for a writer. I didn’t know that six months ago, or even two months ago.

Depth of work. This is where satisfaction comes from for people like me and you. This is the fun of the game; this is what it’s all about. This is why we all got into this business.

What is depth of work? Have you ever had one of those days at the gym where you go around yakking to your buddies, schmoozing and chilling. That is NOT depth of work. Have you ever tweeted, or checked your Facebook page, or succumbed to serial e-mailing? That ain’t depth of work either.

Jon Naber won four gold medals in swimming at the ’76 Olympics, all in world record times. I saw an interview with him right afterward. The reporter asked a very insightful question about a sport where thousandths of a second separate gold from everybody else: “What’s the difference between a good swimmer and a great one?” John Naber answered as follows: “In competition, almost immediately after you hit the water, you enter the Pain Zone. It hurts–and it gets worse every meter you go. The great swimmers,” John Naber said, “are the ones who can go deeper into the Pain Zone and stay there longer.”

That’s depth of work. In my experience, depth of work consists of two components. The first is recklessness; the second is discipline. Dionysian; Apollonian. Passion;reason.

Recklessness means putting out of your mind all thoughts or fears of the opinions of others—and even the opinion of yourself. It means jumping off the cliff. In acting, it means uncorking a fearless performance, where you risk looking like an absolute fool in an effort to get to the deepest, truest levels of the character. In writing, it means letting it rip on the page, trusting the Muse and following your instincts. It means spewing sometimes. Free-associating. Going for it.

Then comes the hard part: appending reason. Discriminatory intelligence. Now we have to ask the really hard questions. What is this stuff all about? What am I trying to do? What is the deepest truth underlying this?

I read a story once about Barbra Streisand at a recording session. She did take after take of the same song. The reporter telling the story said he couldn’t tell the difference between Take One and Take Two, or even Take One and Take Nine. But, he said, he could tell the difference between Take One and Take Sixteen. Obvious Ms. Streisand could tell. That too is depth of work.

What we’re talking about here is head-banging, non-glamorous, nut-busting labor. It’s lonely. It hurts. It drives everybody else crazy. It requires tremendous professionalism and courage (or, perhaps more accurately, stubbornness and mulishness) and control of our emotions and our fears.

The analogy of the gym is a good one, I think. Because one thing the gym teaches is that “you have to train to be able to train.” Meaning you can’t go in, Day One, and start bench-pressing the same weight Reggie Bush benches. You have to build a base of strength slowly, over time, being careful not to set yourself back by injury, impatience or boredom.

In other words, depth of work requires—in addition to recklessness and reason– commitment over time.

I’m reading a really interesting book right now by Michael Bungay Stanier called Do More Great Work. Mr. Stanier starts by citing Milton Glazer’s axiom that we all do three kinds of work: bad work, good work and great work. One of the “map exercises” in the book (a very interesting graphic technique that helps you understand what you really think or really want) asks you how much great work you’re doing. It’s a pie chart. I thought about myself. I’m doing about 0.01 great work right now. It’s such a tiny sliver of the pie, I can’t even draw it.

Another exercise in the book asks you to recall a time when you were doing great work. Here’s one for me: I had taken a month, by myself, and was renting a cottage on a farm in the highlands of Scotland. I was writing Tides of War then, which was a really difficult book about a ridiculously obscure subject. I loved it. I would work in my freezing little room in the cottage the morning, then play golf in the afternoon. It was great. I got in some really intense, long work sessions (because the days are so long in Scotland, you can play golf in the summertime till nine at night.)

Those mornings were depth of work. I had momentum, I had commitment over time; I was busting my butt and really going deep, into a subject that I loved and that I didn’t care whether anybody else was interested in or not.

Those days seem distant to me now. I’m shallow these days; my focus is scattered. I’m schmoozing at the gym; I don’t have momentum. I hate it. It sucks. I have to change. I have to get a handle on this and dig myself out.

I’m not complaining. Don’t get me wrong. I’m sharing this state of mind here on this page, so that anybody who has read The War of Art and imagines that the guy who wrote the book has conquered Resistance (while he, the reader, is still struggling with it) will be disabused of such a silly notion and will not beat himself up over it. I’m as human as the next guy and I take the gaspipe too sometimes just like everyone else.

Working deep is the answer for me. To be happy, to feel good about myself, to not feel guilty about sucking up my share of oxygen on the planet. I have to get back to it.

Friends of Writing Wednesdays, I’d like to ask for your wisdom and feedback. I’m taking a little survey, and you can be of real assistance to me if you’d answer, in the Comments section below, some of the questions I’d like to pose to you. (It’ll be my pleasure to send a signed copy of The War of Art to the half dozen commentators whose advice is most helpful.)

The original "silver bullet" hardcover from Rugged Land Books

Here’s the issue. I’m thinking about writing a follow-up to The War of Art. Sort of a War of Art 2.0. Some things I’d like to know from your perspective are:

1) Would you be interested in such a book? (Tell the brutal truth; don’t be kind.) Would you consider buying it?

2) In what ways would such a book be most helpful to you? As a motivational aid? A kick in the butt? For further insights on Resistance? On professionalism? Something else?

I have my own ideas on these issues, but it would help me a lot to hear what you think.

3) If War of Art 2.0 could be exactly what you want, what would it be? If it had three main sections, what would they be? If the book could deliver a specific feeling as you closed the final page, what would that feeling be?

Would it be like the original War of Art or would it be different? In what ways?

5) Does it matter to you if the book comes out in hardcover? (It doesn’t to me.) Would paperback be just as good? What if it was released as an eBook that you had to download and print out–is that worthwhile or a pain in the butt?

I’m thinking of constructing the book so that it could be read on an iPad–in other words, including video or links along with the text. If you were reading it on an iPad or other such device, what type of videos would you like to see included?

How about personal stuff? When I write, in Writing Wednesdays, of various personal struggles and challenges that I’m dealing with, is that helpful to you or does it get in the way?

Thanks, you guys. I hate surveys as much as the next man, so I appreciate anyone who takes even a couple of minutes to respond to this.

And anybody under thirty who has some brilliant web-based marketing strategies … I’m all ears!

Back to real Writing Wednesdays next week. Thanks!

There’s a theme to all of these Writing Wednesdays posts, and the theme is Resistance: what it is, how it attacks us, how we can beat it. Here’s an insight that struck me with blamm-o impact last week:

I was in Washington, D.C., with Maj. Jim Gant of the U.S. Army Special Forces and Chief Ajmal Khan Zazai, a tribal chief from Paktia province in Afghanistan. We were speaking on the subject of “tribal engagement”—a new military/cultural strategy for Afghanistan—at the Naval Academy, Marine Corps University and several think tanks. (If you’re at all curious about this, click on “One Tribe At A Time” in the header of this page or scan through the “Interview w/Tribal Chief” posts.)

What “tribal engagement” entails, at least the way our threesome was positioning it, is that a small team of U.S. troopers embeds itself with an Afghan tribe and becomes part of the community, living with the tribe, working with it, supporting it, fighting and dying alongside it. It’s a bottom-up strategy for producing security, justice and good governance. Maj. Gant had achieved success using this strategy with his Special Forces team on a prior tour in Afghanistan. That was what he was speaking about to the Marines and midshipmen last week. Onstage, he was trying to be cool and objective, presenting the concept in an impartial, professional manner. But his passion kept getting the best of him.

Maj. Gant at the girls' school in Mangwel, Konar province, Afghanistan

Midway through each speech, Maj. Gant started recruiting. He started firing up the troops. His eyes got big and the veins popped out on his neck. “You gotta be great! You have to be great every day or you’re dead and so am I. Don’t lie. Don’t ever lie, because they [the Afghan tribesmen] will see right through you. They know you better than you know yourself. If you promise something, deliver—because if you don’t you will lose everything including your life.”

Maj. Gant’s mission wasn’t to enlist anybody. The Tribal Engagement program isn’t even in place yet. But he couldn’t help himself. “I want three years from you. That’s your commitment. Not seven months, not twelve months. I’ll send you home for thirty days a year and then you’re back with me in the shit.”

It won’t surprise you, I’m sure, to hear that, each day, as soon as Maj. Gant finished, he was swamped by Marines and midshipmen. “I’m in, Major.” Sign me up, sir!” At night, when he got home to his quarters, his inbox was overflowing with e-mail addresses. “Take me, sir.” “Here’s where you can reach me.”

Now: what does all this have to do with writing or art or entrepreneurship?

Attitude. Attitude in the face of Resistance.

Each day, when we stateside warriors confront our fears of failure (or success), of exposure, of loss or humiliation, of all the outcomes that terrify us in our art and our lives, why not call on Maj. Gant’s attitude?

“You gotta be great! You can’t settle for mediocre, or almost-good or half-assed. Every day you have to be great or people are gonna die.”

Watching those Marines and midshipmen jump out of their seats and swarm around Maj. Gant, it was clear to me that young men and women’s hearts today (and some of us who are not so young) are starving for challenges worthy of their secret, limitless capacities. They’re ravenous for a call to greatness—even in something as obscure and potentially thankless in terms of public recognition as being part of a team of infantrymen slogging into the back of beyond to help people who may in the end only hate us and even murder us.

Who’s going to be your Maj. Gant? Who’s mine? There’s only one inspirational leader for either of us, and he or she is staring back every morning from the mirror.

One definition of leadership is the capacity to recognize the aspiration for exceptionalness in the souls of our troopers—and then put words and deeds to that imperative. Summon it. Call it forth by action and exhortation. Maj. Gant did that last week for those young Marines and midshipmen—and each of us needs to do it too, for ourselves. Inspire ourselves. Call ourselves out. Self-initiate, self-motivate, self-validate.

“We gotta be great!”

Sign me up, Jim (no, wait … make that Steve). I’m ready to go.