By Caitlin Janelle Foster
Reading the words and envisioning the attack feels like watching a fast-cutting movie montage. Each image lasts mere seconds: A platoon of soldiers on foot patrol. One of the uniformed men opens fire, hitting several of the soldiers on his own side. The bullets stop and the dust clears. A soldier screams into his radio. Minutes pass until a helicopter comes into view. The men who can still stand load their wounded into its belly and in less than 10 minutes the helicopter takes off. On the ground, several men are taken into custody. The scene cuts to the helicopter’s landing, where the wounded are offloaded. Then, the screen fades to black.
The original report of this attack gives incomplete and sporadic details. It is one of thousands of official documents from the war in Afghanistan, anonymously leaked and compiled in the WikiLeaks collection known as the War Diaries. The details provided by these reports are like the outer edges of a thousand-piece puzzle: They provide the most logical starting point for assembly, but even with the frame complete, the picture of what really happened in this incident is still missing.
Here are the details from the report: At 0932 GMT on Oct. 2, 2009, a United States Marine radioed in a request for a medical evacuation of several of his platoon members. They had been targeted by a member of the Afghanistan National Police (ANP) in what the military labels a “green on blue” attack, a term used to describe instances in which members of Afghan forces turn their weapons on Coalition troops assigned to provide security training.
It is unclear whether the ANP were patrolling with this or another Coalition unit. At the time of the call, the Marine did not know the extent of the casualties. Details about the attacker were also unknown. Several updates to the original report fill in only part of the missing picture.
The helicopter performing the evacuation left base only 16 minutes after the request; by that time, troops on the ground reported three wounded soldiers with one “expectant,” a term used in triage to indicate a victim likely to die before reaching medical facilities.
While the report lists milestones of the helicopter’s flight, no further details surrounding the attack emerge until after its return to base. At that time, less than an hour after the action occurred, the report shows that the attacker was not an official member of the ANP but someone who had donned the organization’s uniform. This points to a major question regarding the nature of green on blue attacks and the men who perpetrate them – whether these are members of the Taliban who have successfully infiltrated, or radicalized security personnel, or simply ANP men who have become disgruntled with the U.S.-led Coalition. The report suggests that its author had suspicions about this detail, as he noted the ground troops “do not know how they know that information.”
Shortly thereafter, a medical update indicates two expectant patients.
The attacker is only mentioned once more, when the report’s author indicates uncertainty regarding his fate. “Do not know if he is detained or dead,” the report states. Further updates indicate confusion on the ground regarding the fate of the ANP platoon, which allegedly included the perpetrator of this deadly attack. Members of the unit were detained for questioning; the updates provide conflicting numbers before settling on eleven Afghan policeman taken into custody.
Another update indicates two members of the attacker’s own unit had been killed in the attack. The next states that was reported in error: “Now getting report that no ANP are KIA.”
This report epitomizes the nature of combat: Confusion. Suspicion. Death. From its contents, readers may be able to piece together an idea of what occurred that day. Or maybe they cannot, due to undefined military terms and acronyms: KIA. WIA. ANP. AUP. What is clear is only the skeleton of the event. A person, wearing the uniform of the Afghanistan National Police, opened fire on a platoon of Marines. At the conclusion of the event, it was still unclear whether he was actually a member of the ANP or whether his unit had useful information. The only clear facts are the reported casualties: Three men wounded. Two men dead.
Searching through the War Diaries provides no shortage of reports like this, each one providing no shortage of confusion and doubt. Piecing them all together, one still does not have a clear view of the circumstances or motivations behind this attack. The resulting scene, a murky compilation of questionable details, suggests that the fog of war extends beyond the battlefield.