Word: stopping
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Ellis did one tour in Iraq, and that was enough - for him, but not for the Army, which stop-lossed him (the term of art for officers is involuntary re-enlistment). He seems to have stowed any anger or resentment he may have had; his devotion to the mission in Senjaray seems absolute. "We're down to the last few months of our deployment - and that's a dangerous time," Ellis told me, sitting in his office, a rude plywood cabin at Combat Outpost Senjaray. "The natural tendency is to get careless and defensive. To keep them safe, I need...
...from the Taliban" - but that doesn't make them easier to enforce. Just after the fatal IED attack in February, a man on a motorcycle emerged from a crowd in south Senjaray and seemed to charge a U.S. patrol. "They shouted at him, tried to get him to stop, but he kept coming - faster, it seemed. Finally, they fired a warning shot into the ground, but it bounced up and hit the guy in the hip. What the soldiers couldn't see was that he had two kids on the cycle with him. The bullet passed through...
...rarely heard. Just an occasional boom - as an IED went off. Sometimes the Taliban blew themselves up, attempting to set the bombs; occasionally, Americans were the victims. On Feb. 21, one American was killed and another severely wounded in an IED explosion just south of town. "I decided to stop the patrols down there after that," Ellis says. "Given the rules of engagement, it was just too dangerous to keep going there and getting blown...
...these," Ellis told me, tossing a fat sheaf of directives onto his desk. "Some of these are written by freaking lawyers, and I'm supposed to read them aloud to my troops. It's laughable. We can't fire warning shots. We can't even fire pen flares to stop an oncoming vehicle. If a guy shoots at you, then puts down his weapon and runs away, you can't fire back at him because you might harm a civilian." (See Joe Klein discuss why Stanley McChrystal was a 2009 Person of the Year runner...
...Conversation It was unimaginable that the higher-ups - those in "echelons above reality," as Ellis liked to say - would actually stop the Pir Mohammed project. He figured it would be delayed a day or two and decided to move ahead with his plan. He needed to have some troops in place, in an observation and listening post near the school, on the night before the operation took place. On Sunday, April 4, Ellis joined the 2nd platoon on a patrol to scout locations...