'This is going to be bad'

When Glen Heape reflects on what’s happening in Afghanistan, it’s upsetting.

“Yesterday I was very mad,” he said Friday. “Thirteen Marines lost their lives. I just know what that means. That means 13 families’ lives were changed forever and that’s the part that really bugs me. That was preventable.”

Nathaniel Miller of Hayden, sitting next to Heape at an office in Post Falls, is equally dismayed.

“(August) 31st is going to come and go, we’re going to pull out our troops and there’s still going to be people left behind,” he said. “It’s going to be a humanitarian nightmare. Not just for American citizens, but for Afghans who helped us.”

Both men served in the military and spent time in Afghanistan. Heape is a retired Army colonel who served 25 years and was there in 2013.

Miller, Petty Officer Second Class, spent nearly six years in the Navy and was stationed in Afghanistan in 2009 and 2010.

Each has been following the situation in Afghanistan. Both expressed alarm at the United States’ decision to pull out of the country and as it turns out, the Taliban took over much quicker than expected and routed the Afghan National Army in a week. After 20 years of U.S. occupation, the Taliban was back in charge.

Both men were disheartened at the loss of American lives to a suicide bomber at the Kabul airport.

Combat

Heape, of Post Falls, was a Lt. Col. Battalion Commander in Afghanistan and led counter-terrorism efforts by supporting and training the Afghan National Army.

“The plan then was for us to build up their capacity and capability for the Afghan army so we could pull out,” he said.

The Afghan National Army, he said, was “very capable back then.”

“But there was a lot of harassment by the Taliban, a lot of engagements. It was still a very dangerous environment,” he said.

Heape was stationed at Jalalabad, near the Kunar Valley and Pech River Valley, a mountainous terrain.

“It was difficult to fight the enemy there,” he said.

“The Taliban are a very capable fighting force. It’s their territory. They know how to use the terrain, how to attack.”

He had 65 aircraft under his command, including 16 Apache helicopters.

“My role there was to protect, facilitate, the units on the ground. With the Apaches we provided security,” he said. “If they got into gunfire we provided overwatch.”

They performed missions with the Afghans and let them take the lead.

“It was kind of this crawl, walk, run training methodology we were having with the Afghans at that point,” he said.

Objective

Miller spent six months at Forward Operating Base Salerno, seven miles from the Pakistan border.

“They called it rocket city. Every night we’d take three to four rounds of incoming fire,” he said.

He said U.S. troops did their job well.

“If there is someone out there doing harm, we can make sure that they don’t go do harm to his fellow countrymen, to the Afghans and that was always something I kept very near and dear to me,” he said. “That’s what I was doing when I was out there.”

“Some days there was nothing to do. Other days I worked my tail off because there were guys out there doing stuff and I was helping justify the risk, I was helping to exploit the rewards. That’s kind of the way I felt about it," he said.

Even then, Miller questioned the U.S. objective. Was it no more Taliban? A stable government? A western set-up democracy?

But no one knew what the end was, Miller said.

“The best answer I ever got was, “When Congress tells us to go home,” he said.

Progress

Heape, too, said he was “very proud of the service that I did and everybody under my charge, I had about 460 soldiers that worked for me. The tactical mission that we went over there for, we accomplished. I feel very good about the progress we made.”

He saw more Afghan citizens at markets, walking around, going to school and graduating.

“When the Taliban were in control, you couldn’t do those things,” he said.

“That small time I was there, I saw progress."

But he was stunned when he learned the U.S. military abandoned Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan — about 40 miles from Kabul — in July, “in the middle of the night” without informing its Afghan allies.

“Immediately, I knew this was going the wrong direction when I heard about us leaving Bagram. That base was amazing. It’s bigger than Post Falls.”

The airport at Bagram, he said, is more isolated and would have been much easier to defend than Kabul, which is in an urban area.

“I thought, ‘This is going to be bad,’” Heape said. “Anybody that’s over there, knows the enemy is going to exploit that opportunity.”

Words, he said, don’t matter with the Taliban.

“You have to have an overwhelming force for them to understand,” he said.

Heape said part of the problem with the withdrawal is “naive people” are making key decisions.

“The way we’ve treated it is a very a naive view of Afghan culture and a naive view of the Taliban and their capabilities,” he said.

He said the U.S. withdrawal could have been better planned and executed so it would not been so chaotic and with the loss of lives.

“This is not how we do things,” he said.

In National War College, he said they planned, set a course of action, and had contingencies.

“And everything is, priority one is nobody gets hurt,” he said.

Disheartening

Miller shared similar thoughts. The U.S. military leaving Bagram in the middle of the night, then leaving Afghanistan as it is now, isn’t something he thought he would ever see.

“That’s not how we operate. That’s not how America operates,” he said.

In time, Miller thought Afghanistan might become like Germany, Italy and Japan in its relationship with America.

“Those countries were not our friend when we first got there,” he said. “And now we have tens of thousands of troops stationed there.

“I always kind of assumed that eventually Afghanistan would get to that point,” he said.

“So to see this, yeah, it’s insanely disheartening,” Miller said. “I don’t think it represents the U.S. as a country and it certainly is disgraceful that our military has been put in this position where they had to abandoned their allies."

Miller paused.

“To see this on a huge scale, I don’t even have the words for it," he said.

Miller said there is an honor among warriors.

“You erode all of that when you start just giving away, when you leave in the middle of the night. That’s not what a warrior does.”

He’s expressed doubt about chances of success of U.S. talks with the Taliban and what will happen to those still in Afghanistan.

“Nothing I’ve ever ever seen about the Taliban has ever suggested they are reasonable, that they adhere to any sort of logic, any sort of truth, words are nothing, people are barely something to them.”

He said there are already reports of the Taliban going door to door, looking for those who cooperated with American forces.

“Certainly that is 100 percent the MO of the Taliban. We’ve seen it again and again and again," Miller said. "There’s absolutely no reason to doubt that that’s what’s going to happen.”

What's next?

What would Miller like to see happen next? He hopes troops stay until everyone can get out.

“If the rest of NATO wants to get involved in that, great. But we don’t leave until everyone who wants to leave, leaves," he said.

“We negotiate from a position of authority where we are dictating terms,” he said. “But I don’t have a lot of confidence in that.’

Miller said he feels like the military was “hamstrung” in Afghanistan.

“We’re not even out of the country, we’re not even past our deadlines yet, and already a third party terrorist group is attacking and killing Americans,” he said.

Miller said when he watches the news and sees what’s happening in Afghanistan, he picks up his 2-year-old son and holds him.

He had hopes at one point it might become a place where his family could visit. Not anymore. He fears for the country's future.

“I hope it’s resolved before my kids have to deal with it,” he said.

Hurt

When Heape reflects on the past 20 years of the U.S. in Afghanistan, and then looks at what’s happened in the past week, it's sad.

“We don’t have much to show. The Taliban now controls Afghanistan more than they did 20 years ago, they’re better equipped than 20 years ago.”

It would be difficult to go back, he knows, but he said that’s what he would like to see. Don’t adhere to a pullout deadline and put an overwhelming force for security.

“But it’s going to cost a lot of money, a lot of lives, potentially, to do that, and then stand the Afghan National Army back up. I don’t think that’s very likely at this point," Heape said.

“Get everybody out as safety as possible. I think that’s the only logical and realistic solution at this point,” he said.

He shakes his head at the U.S. pullout and the speed of the Taliban takeover.

“It’s a little embarrassing to see,” he said.

Heape said the Taliban want "tyrannical control, so they’ll say and do whatever they need to with us right now. They know we have zero leverage basically.”

While acknowledging he doesn’t have all the information the country’s leaders have, he said “to get to a point where we are negotiating with the Taliban, just seems so foreign to me because we were in a position of control over the country for so long that we would never ask or plea or request anything from the Taliban. We would tell them what’s going to happen.”

“And so the whole situation is just kind of, I’m in shock, really, how everything is transpiring,” he said.

Heape knows Americans who gave their lives in Afghanistan.

“That’s what really hurts,” he said.