Word: battalion
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Landing in the middle of an al-Qaeda stronghold wasn't the way this mission was supposed to go. "If we had known they were there," says Grippe, the top enlisted man in the 1st Battalion of the 87th Infantry Regiment, "we would have landed someplace else." The U.S. troops didn't have the men or firepower to scale the rocks and wipe out the enemy fighters. But Perez and the others in command remembered the 1993 Somali fire fight--a panicky retreat in which 18 Americans were killed--and they decided to dig in. "We didn't run from...
...population of 27 million--believed to be armed, new recruits have plenty of experience at target practice. Getting guns for practice, however, is another matter. "Believe it or not, we have difficulty getting weapons here," says Lieut. Colonel Kevin McDonnel, commander of the American special-forces battalion tasked with training the nucleus of the army. The privates often have to settle for weapons simulation. During practice, they yell "Bang!" instead of firing blanks. As TIME has reported, U.S. troops have raided Afghan villages hoarding Taliban weapons to get guns for training the new army. Afghanistan's Ministry of Defense...
Raising the new force is proving as tricky as arming it. More than 500 men signed up for the first battalion. Most were flown to Kabul from provincial recruitment centers; others arrived on horseback or on foot. One 14-year-old boy, an orphan, tried to sign up; the Americans turned him away. But by graduation, more than one-third of the trainees had dropped out. Many had arrived with the idea that they would be training in the U.S. or Turkey, then quit when they realized that they were destined only for the battle-scarred Afghan Military Academy outside...
...hopes to have 3,000 soldiers trained by December and 13,000 by the end of 2003. That means the instructors have to work fast. "I'd rather have six months to one year" to train each battalion, says a U.S. instructor. "Ten weeks is what I've got to deal with. It's not a hopeless objective, but it's a difficult one." And even that might not be fast enough. Donald Rumsfeld has acknowledged that the pace of training may be too slow: "We are thinking about ways that it can be done faster." With the warlords...
...other two alleged killers were not fresh from combat. Master Sergeant William Wright led investigators to his wife's strangled corpse on July 19. He had gone to Afghanistan in March with the 96th Civil Affairs Battalion, a unique unit that helps countries rebuild after war. Civil Affairs folks usually spend more time talking than shooting. The fourth alleged killer, Sergeant Cedric Griffin, who is accused of stabbing his wife nearly 50 times, had never been deployed to Afghanistan or anywhere else. He is an Army cook...