First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance
400
First Platoon: A Story of Modern War in the Age of Identity Dominance
400Paperback
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Overview
This is a story that starts off close and goes very big. The initial part of the story might sound familiar at first: it is about a platoon of mostly nineteen-year-old boys sent to Afghanistan, and an experience that ends abruptly in catastrophe. Their part of the story folds into the next: inexorably linked to those soldiers and never comprehensively reported before is the U.S. Department of Defense’s quest to build the world’s most powerful biometrics database, with the ability to identify, monitor, catalog, and police people all over the world.
First Platoon is an American saga that illuminates a transformation of society made possible by this new technology. Part war story, part legal drama, it is about identity in the age of identification. About humanity—physical bravery, trauma, PTSD, a yearning to do right and good—in the age of biometrics, which reduce people to iris scans, fingerprint scans, voice patterning, detection by odor, gait, and more. And about the power of point of view in a burgeoning surveillance state.
Based on hundreds of formerly classified documents, FOIA requests, and exclusive interviews, First Platoon is an investigative exposé by a master chronicler of government secrets. First Platoon reveals a post–9/11 Pentagon whose identification machines have grown more capable than the humans who must make sense of them. A Pentagon so powerful it can cover up its own internal mistakes in pursuit of endless wars. And a people at its mercy, in its last moments before a fundamental change so complete it might be impossible to take back.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781524746674 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Penguin Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 01/25/2022 |
| Pages: | 400 |
| Sales rank: | 156,747 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.10(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
The Panopticon
In the summer of 2012, a group of young men, who at the time were American soldiers, found themselves in one of the most dangerous and treacherous places in the world. Thinking they were on one kind of mission, they really were unwittingly part of something much bigger and, perhaps, even nefarious. It was June 4, 2012, and there, on the northern slope of the Arghandab River in Zhari District, Afghanistan, in the village of Payenzai, the soldiers from First Platoon, Charlie Troop, 4/73rd Cavalry Regiment, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, were getting ready to head into battle, as millions of soldiers had before them, in countless wars across thousands of years. Private 1st Class Samuel Walley remembers the day indelibly, because it was his birthday, and only once in a per‑ son’s lifetime do you turn twenty years old.
“We captured the number two most wanted Taliban in [the] South,” Walley recalled. And though time and priority have diluted the significance of this most‑wanted catch, it was important for a number of reasons. “We captured him,” said Walley, “by getting his fingerprints.”
Private Walley grew up in Georgia on four acres of land, climbing trees and jumping in rivers. His family was military stock. He was raised to be rugged. Turn problems into solutions. In the second grade, he developed a lisp and other kids made fun of him. He willed what was wrong with him away by speaking with a British accent, like James Bond. Now he was twenty years old, six foot, one inch tall. He had green eyes, sandy‑brown hair, and weighed 185 pounds. He was fit; he ran a six‑minute mile and bench‑pressed 240 pounds. Sit‑ups were his weakness. He had two atomic bombs tattooed on his left arm with the word “Chaos” written beside them, a nickname from what felt like forever ago but was only last year: high school. His platoon, First Platoon, had been in southern Afghanistan for a little more than three months. Today, Walley carried the biggest weapon on first squad, the M249 Squad Automatic Weapon, a belt‑fed killing machine capable of firing 900 rounds per minute. He checked and rechecked his gear. Everyone was ready. It was time to go.
The soldiers lined up in a staggered file formation, originally designed for road marches but adapted for goat paths and grape rows in southern Afghanistan. It was baking hot. Already more than 100 degrees. One of the Afghan National Army soldiers opened Strong Point Payenzai’s plywood gate and out the American soldiers went, one after the other, leaving the zigzagged entry control point spaced ten feet apart. The soldiers headed east, then north, into Sarenzai Village, a community of mud‑brick buildings and labyrinthine walls located roughly two football fields from the strongpoint. They knew the village well. They patrolled the terrain here two times every day, five or more hours at a time, or until something went wrong.
“Payenzai and everything around it was a hellhole,” Walley remembered.
Life here resembled existence after an apocalypse. Decades of war had left Zhari District in a state of collapse. Anarchy and terror had long since vanquished the rule of law. The villagers here had no electricity, no running water, no shops or food stores of any kind. “Mud‑brick buildings bombed‑out and long abandoned,” remembered company commander Captain Patrick Swanson. “No fertile fields, no marketplace, no schools.”
“Our minds are dark—we don’t know anything, and our children can’t even write their names,” district governor Niyaz Mohammed Sarhadi told the State Department’s Jonathan Addleton in 2012.
At the Pentagon, war strategists called life here “simple and Hobbesian—nasty, brutish and short.” State Department estimates put the villagers’ life expectancy at forty‑four. It was understood by everyone in the American chain of command that the area around Strong Point Payenzai was ruled by a network of Taliban insurgents and that improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, were sewn into the terrain—into the roads and pathways and farmers’ fields. Insurgents stockpiled homemade explosives in the abandoned compounds across this area of operations (AO) and recruited new members from among local villagers. Assassinations and murders were commonplace. In 2012, bomb production was on the rise. The Taliban ran IED assembly and distribution across the terrain. The buildings reduced to rubble around here served as bed‑down locations for fighters coming in from Pakistan, trafficking weapons and materiel to make more bombs.
After more than a decade of losing this war, in more ways than it could count, the Defense Department believed it had found a technology‑based solution to the human problem of insurgency. All across Afghanistan, U.S. military forces were capturing biometric data: electronic fingerprints, iris scans, facial images, and where possible, cell swabs of DNA. The Pentagon believed that through mass biometric collection, it could bring the rule of law to this land where insurgents reigned. The effort was called Identity Dominance. The product was biometrics‑enabled intelligence. The battlefield component of this data‑driven mission fell to combat infantry soldiers in the field. One member of the platoon, the Company Intelligence Support Team member, the COIST, handled technical collection. The rest of the platoon supported the COIST’s efforts with varying degrees of military presence and force.
It was still early in the morning on June 4 as the platoon entered the village of Sarenzai. The temperature had already hit 102 degrees. First Platoon set up a security perimeter. Some soldiers took off their helmets. Others sat down.
“We had the biometrics on maybe one hundred of the military‑age villagers in the area,” said Captain Swanson, years later in 2019.
“Some of them . . . they had been biometrically enrolled by me on more than one occasion. They were usually working the fields around the area,” Private 1st Class James Skelton, the COIST, would later tell a military judge.
Private Walley spotted a man nobody recognized. “He had a white beard, a dark turban, and was maybe forty or fifty years old.”
“He looked tired,” remembered Specialist Anthony Reynoso.
“I didn’t notice him at first,” Specialist Dallas Haggard said.
Walley made eye contact with the man. “He was walking in one direction, then after he saw me, he kind of veered off and pretended he was going to the water pump.”
Walley gave 1st Lieutenant Dominic Latino a nod. “The lieutenant saw him too.”
As platoon leader, Latino was the highest‑ranking soldier on the patrol. Off Walley’s look, Latino called for an Afghan interpreter, who ordered the man to stop.
Lieutenant Latino began asking the man questions according to protocol. Did he live here in the village? Was he just visiting? If so, for what reason? The man’s answers were suspicious. Private Skelton would now use the army’s newest biometric collection device, the Secure Electronic Enrollment Kit, the SEEK, to capture the man’s biometrics.
Skelton set down his backpack and pulled out the SEEK, a portable piece of military hardware the size of a small shoebox used to electronically capture fingerprints, iris scans, and facial images from civilian villagers and suspected insurgents alike, all across Afghanistan.
Fingerprint matching is a precise science. In order to capture clear, non‑smudged friction ridges from a human fingertip, the fingers must be clean. “Most of the farmers’ hands were very dirty, and it would sometimes take a package of baby wipes to get a good scan,” remembered 2nd Lieutenant Jared Meyer. Scanning each fingertip was an art. The COIST needed to apply slight but consistent pressure for each fingerprint rolled. Thumbs needed to be rolled toward the subject’s body, from one end of the nail to the other, but fingers needed to be rolled away from the subject’s body, with the knuckle going in, up, and out from the device. The SEEK’s collection screen, called a silicone platen, had to be entirely free of smears, dirt, grease, or dryness before each fingerprint scan; the COIST was re‑ quired to take prints of all ten digits. Uncooperative detainees could be flex‑cuffed with their hands behind their backs and fingerprinted that way, but the COIST needed to remember there were different protocols involved when using the SEEK upside down.
Scanning the irises with the SEEK came with its own list of dos and don’ts. Eyelids had to be up, not down. Iris and pupil had to be imaged together with no glare. Direct sunlight rendered the image obsolete. If the person was dead, iris capture needed to happen “within thirty minutes post‑mortem,” or problems could arise.
Capturing facial images had its own set of technical requirements. A neutral background was necessary, “showing no additional personnel or maps, equipment, vehicles, [or] vessels.” Criminal enrollment photos needed to include images of the person from front, right and left profiles, and right and left 45‑degree‑angled images. “Capture subject’s face expressionless and with the mouth closed and eyes open,” COIST members were told. And the camera lens needed to be held at the subject’s nose height to prevent distortion. There, in this dystopian environment that made Afghanistan one of the poorest, most corrupt, most dangerous and ungovernable nations on Earth, nearly two dozen soldiers of an approximately thirty‑man platoon stood in the hot sun waiting and watching while Private Skelton took the man’s biometrics. In a war zone, a second can last forever.
After Skelton finished, there was another period of time to wait. The SEEK had the capacity to match new data inputted by the COIST against classified data in the Defense Department’s biometrics‑enabled watchlist, the BEWL, but there were limitations. The full BEWL was too large to fit on the SEEK, official documentation warned. As a workaround, the Pentagon developed what it called “mission specific BEWLs,” meaning watchlists that had been customized for individual terrorists thought to be operating in certain districts or villages.
“Mission specific BEWLs may be loaded onto handheld collection devices,” an unclassified monograph reveals, “allowing an immediate alert to be triggered if the sought‑after individuals are encountered during identification or verification operations.” Which, shocking as it may seem, is precisely what happened next. The SEEK compared the digital fingerprints of the man in the dark turban to the preexisting biometric identities stored on its own drive—and delivered a match‑hit.
“The lieutenant did a quadruple take,” Walley recalled. “He looked down at his [information]. Checked and rechecked it. The man was the number two most wanted Taliban in [the] south.”
The privates flex‑cuffed the man. “A woman and a bunch of children came running out of a doorway from one of the compounds,” Walley remembered. “One of the kids started beating on me. The woman was shrieking and screaming because we were taking her husband away.”
The man was marched back to the strongpoint. From there, he disappeared into a world guided by the Defense Department’s monolithic charter on how to handle detainees. Eventually, he would have been taken north, to a newly renovated American prison next to Bagram Airfield and called the Detention Facility in Parwan. Detractors called this prison Afghanistan’s Guantánamo Bay.
Across the 82nd Airborne, the capture of the man in the dark turban was hailed as a success, celebrated at the battalion level, at Combat Outpost Siah Choy, and above it at the brigade level, at Forward Operating Base Pasab. But for the soldiers of First Platoon, catching a middle‑aged man at a water pump hardly felt like a bat‑ tlefield victory in war. And, as it went with so many combat infantry platoons in Afghanistan, this small measure of success was almost immediately overshadowed by a dark turn of events.
“I thought we were in Afghanistan to jump out of airplanes and kill Taliban,” Walley told me—looking back through the lens of hindsight, in 2019.
“I thought we were in Afghanistan to kill Taliban and build schools,” said Walley’s platoon mate, Private 1st Class James Oliver Twist.
“We patrolled hard, knowing we were walking into a minefield every day,” remembered Captain Swanson. “From a counterterrorism perspective, we were grasping at straws. We were on a beat, like local cops.”
Except they were not police officers, they were soldiers, which made what they were doing less like law enforcement and more like martial law.
Sectioning off an area, registering inhabitants, limiting their freedom of movement, and enforcing compliance with threat of detainment or imprisonment but under the guise of the rule of law is reminiscent of a draconian system of control implemented across Europe in the Middle Ages to fight bubonic plague. This period of time began before the era known generally as the Age of Reason and Enlightenment.
In the 1600s, a series of civilization‑threatening plague epi‑ demics gave birth to one of the most heavy‑handed surveillance states in the Western world. These were the worst outbreaks of plague since the Black Death ravaged Europe between 1347 and 1351. Urban centers were particularly hard‑hit. In London, for ex‑ ample, in a three‑month period in 1665, 15 percent of the population died, akin to modern‑day New York City suffering 1.3 million deaths over the summer. To combat the epidemic, many villages across Europe were put under quarantine, partitioned into quadrants, and placed under control of a government official. In France, this process was called quadrillage. At a town’s gates, an observation post was constructed. Freedom of movement was prohibited; only the government’s sentries and administrators were allowed to walk the streets. Michel Foucault, philosopher and historian of ideas, tells us what happened next, in his 1975 lectures and subsequent book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison.
In order to impose the rule of law, the government ordered the full‑scale cataloging of people. A medieval version of biometrics‑ enabled intelligence. “At the start of the quarantine,” Foucault writes, “all citizens present in [every] town had to give their name. The names were entered into a series of registers. The local inspectors held some of these registers, [and] others were kept by the town’s central administration.” Name, age, and sex of villagers became identifying data for the sick and the healthy alike. Once the infected were identified, these plague‑ridden citizens were removed, carted off by government workers. Remaining healthy family members living within each quadrant were required to stay indoors or face punishment, even death.
State‑sanctioned rations of food were hoisted into homes by pulleys and baskets. The tracking of people was required; this is what the underlying catalog was for. Every day, twice a day, every member of each family was required to put his or her face in the front window of their home as a designated sentry passed by. “All the information gathered through the twice‑daily visits,” writes Foucault, was then “collated with the central register held by the deputy mayors in the town’s central administration . . . in a kind of pyramid of uninterrupted power.”
What this meant was that the location of each individual was to be constantly known to the state, “observed at every point . . . [his] slightest movements are supervised . . . all events are recorded [to include] death, illness, complaints, irregularities.” Power was exercised without restraint. “Surveillance had to be exercised uninterruptedly.” The state’s reasoning for the draconian measures was simple: it had to contain the plague. It had to make sure no newly infected, or sick, were concealed from the state. Hiding an infected person could bring new outbreaks of disease.
Table of Contents
Part I
Chapter 1 The Panopticon 3
Chapter 2 The Two Will Wests 14
Chapter 3 The Hijacker's Fingerprints 31
Chapter 4 The Biometric Belly Button 42
Part II
Chapter 5 Geography is Destiny 61
Chapter 6 Kabul is Burning 72
Chapter 7 Murder, Mayhem, and Consequence Management 82
Chapter 8 Battle Damage Assessment 97
Part III
Chapter 9 Strong Point Payenzai 113
Chapter 10 The God's-Eye View 124
Chapter 11 Abdul Ahad 141
Chapter 12 The Three Ieds 152
Part IV
Chapter 13 Getting a Platoon 171
Chapter 14 C-Wire 180
Chapter 15 July 2, 2012 192
Chapter 16 The Man in White 203
Chapter 17 Double Murder 218
Part V
Chapter 18 The Clue Trail 237
Chapter 19 True Identities 248
Chapter 20 The Genetic Panopticon 264
Chapter 21 The Court of Public Opinion 277
Acknowledgments 297
Interviews and Written Correspondence 301
Notes 307
Bibliography 345
Index 373
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