The Fifth Act

Description

“The American betrayal of Afghanistan took twenty years. Elliot Ackerman, a participant and witness, tells the story with unsparing honesty in this intensely personal chronicle.” —George Packer
A powerful and revelatory eyewitness account of the American collapse in Afghanistan, its desperate endgame, and the war’s echoing legacyElliot Ackerman left the American military ten years ago, but his time in Afghanistan and Iraq with the Marines and later as a CIA paramilitary officer marked him indelibly. When the Taliban began to close in on Kabul in August 2021 and the Afghan regime began its death spiral, he found himself pulled back into the conflict. Afghan nationals who had worked closely with the American military and intelligence communities for years now faced brutal reprisal and sought frantically to flee the country with their families. The official US government evacuation effort was a bureaucratic failure that led to a humanitarian catastrophe. With former colleagues and friends protecting the airport in Kabul, Ackerman joined an impromptu effort by a group of journalists and other veterans to arrange flights and negotiate with both Taliban and American forces to secure the safe evacuation of hundreds. These were desperate measures taken during a desperate end to America’s longest war. For Ackerman, it also became a chance to reconcile his past with his present.
 
The Fifth Act is an astonishing human document that brings the weight of twenty years of war to bear on a single week, the week the war ended. Using the dramatic rescue efforts in Kabul as his lattice, Ackerman weaves a personal history of the war’s long progression, beginning with the initial invasion in the months after 9/11. It is a play in five acts, the fifth act being the story’s tragic denouement, a prelude to Afghanistan’s dark future. Any reader who wants to understand what went wrong with the war’s trajectory will find a trenchant account here. But The Fifth Act also brings readers into close contact with a remarkable group of characters, American and Afghan, who fought the war with courage and dedication, and at great personal cost. Ackerman’s story is a first draft of history that feels like a timeless classic. “[A] haunting memoir . . . a harrowing portrait of chaos and collapse . . . Writing in evocative, gripping prose . . . Ackerman provides a clear-eyed indictment of America’s failures in Afghanistan while paying homage to the soldiers who fought there. The result is a moving elegy for a blighted struggle.” —Publishers Weekly 
“Making sense of chaos is never easy, but this powerful book does much to explain why America’s debacle in Afghanistan ended the way it did . . . Courage and folly, dedication and tragedy: Ackerman deftly captures all dimensions of a protracted foreign policy failure . . . A must-read account of the end of America’s longest war.” —Kirkus (starred review)
“The history of the American invasion and occupation of Afghanistan is only beginning to be written, and it will likely be decades before a fuller picture emerges. But an early and important voice in that story will be that of writer and veteran Elliott Ackerman, who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The history of any war will always be an ongoing collation of subjectivities—as such Ackerman brings his own deeply personal perspective as a marine (and later as a CIA paramilitary officer) who returns to Afghanistan on the eve of its return to the Taliban to help in impromptu, large-scale evacuations. Ackerman then works backward to look at 20 years of American misadventure in the Middle East, and the deep impact it has on two decades of his life.” —Literary Hub“Powerful testimony to what went wrong despite the bravery of American military personnel and our Afghan Allies . . . Ackerman’s tales are compelling and heartfelt; this title will stand the test of time as a warning against further military misadventures.” —Booklist“The quality of the writing stands out . . . From the opening lines, clean, clipped sentences have the quality of simplicity . . . The Fifth Act’s contribution to understanding the war lies foremost in passages of reflection and well-chosen quotes . . . They give pause and offer a window into deeper thought.” —Washington Post
“The quality of the writing stands out. . . . part of a distinguished and growing literature by American veterans trying to understand the experience of those who served. . . . The Fifth Act’s contribution to understanding the war lies foremost in passages of reflection and well-chosen quotes . . . They give pause and offer a window into deeper thought.” —Washington Post
“When it comes to parsing the complexities of our modern wars—Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan—and articulating the cost of so many strategic lapses and sheer moral failures, no one compares to Elliot Ackerman . . . He has a unique ability to center his and his comrades’ lived experience within the larger historical continuum.” —Washington Review of Books“If you want to understand how the war in Afghanistan became such a debacle, this book is indispensable. Elliot Ackerman brilliantly explores last year’s fall of Kabul through his own experiences on the battlefield, expertly interwoven with his dramatic attempts from afar to evacuate, and thus keep from falling into the hands of the Taliban, Afghan nationals who had worked with the U.S. How much he succeeds in this endeavor gives the book its narrative tension, and along the way Ackerman reflects persuasively on who is to blame for the Taliban takeover.” —Air Mail“The American betrayal of Afghanistan took twenty years. Elliot Ackerman, a participant and witness, tells the story with unsparing honesty in this intensely personal chronicle.” —George Packer, author of The Assassins’ Gate: America in Iraq and The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New America“Ackerman is thoughtful and regretful, a man who cares deeply for the people he believes he and his buddies in the Marines and the CIA fought for . . . Ackerman scours his WhatsApp and Signal threads in a vivid retelling of the failures and successes that provided the all-too-human dimension of the evacuation efforts. The tension and drama unfold like a movie script: a pacey, urgent, heart-in-throat, will-they-make-it-this-time narrative.”—Foreign Policy
“All of Ackerman’s works are essential reading for various reasons, but The Fifth Act is at the top of the list.” —Tulsa People
“Elliot Ackerman’s The Fifth Act may be the first great book about the Afghanistan war . . . This is the work of an outstanding writer.” —The Objective Standard“Ackerman is one of the finest writers of his generation, having brilliantly penned literary reflections on war and meaning—a quality that carries through to his latest book. It is not often that I finish a book in one sitting, and even rarer that I put a book down and know it will stay with me long after I finish it. Ackerman’s The Fifth Act does both. It is powerful, poignant, personal, and painful. His personal narrative of combat and how it stays with him today—especially during the effort to evacuate Afghans in the run-up to the collapse—is haunting and should be widely read.” —Diplomatic Courier Elliot Ackerman is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels 2034, Red Dress In Black and White, Waiting for Eden, Dark at the Crossing, and Green on Blue, as well as the memoir Places and Names: On War, Revolution and Returning. His books have been nominated for the National Book Award, the Andrew Carnegie Medal in both fiction and nonfiction, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize among others. He is both a former White House Fellow and Marine, and served five tours of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, where he received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star for Valor, and the Purple Heart. He divides his time between New York City and Washington, D.C. Scene I
Fort Story, 2002
The sand hill was called Loch Ness. It rose out of the Virginia coastal flats like the hump on that mythical dragon. Every conditioning hike at the Marine Corps Amphibious Reconnaissance School-known as ARS-ended with a sprint up Loch Ness. The instructors watched us closely, and if you stumbled or your rifle touched the sand like a crutch, they would push you down the hill and tell you to start again. Temperatures hovered in the nineties that summer. More than once I vomited in the sand. Most of us did. Years later, a friend of mine who graduated the course kept a glass Coke bottle filled with Loch Ness sand on the mantel above his fireplace. He said he kept it there as a reminder for when things in his own life got difficult. Written in black Sharpie on the bottle was the word Perspective.
Jack and I met at ARS not even a year after 9/11. The war was new then. No one understood how long it would last or where it would take us. We even worried we might miss it. I was a year from finishing college and had talked my way into attending the course, where we lived in a squat barracks atop the hill. Jack was about to take command of an elite force reconnaissance platoon. Every week or so, the instructors would give us a night or even a whole day off. We would drive into town in Jack’s car, a beat-up, sand-brown Jeep Cherokee his parents had given him when he graduated college. Because I was only an ROTC midshipman and he was a commissioned officer-a first lieutenant-I called him sir. The Marine Corps is a funny place, the type of place where you call your friends sir.
Jack is a southerner, raised among the Blue Ridge Mountains. In college he minored in creative writing. He likes to talk about Faulkner and Walker Percy. He’s a fan of the poet James L. Dickey. For years, Dickey worked in advertising. He wrote copy for Coca-Cola and Lay’s potato chips while writing poetry after work. Later, Jack tells me something Dickey once said about writing poetry: “I was selling my soul to the devil all day and trying to buy it back at night.” At ARS, Jack used to string a poncho around his bunk so he could read late into the night with a headlamp. He would keep his books stacked beneath his bed, alongside his combat boots. In Afghanistan, years later, guys would call him the American Pashtun. I think he liked this. He spent so much time in Afghanistan that the Musa Khel around Khost would eventually grant him tribal membership. Two decades ago, driving out the gate onto Route 60 toward Chili’s or Applebee’s, after days spent training in the Virginia woods, I remember the Steve Earle CD he would play. The album was 1995’s Train a Comin’ and the track was “Mercenary Song.” It goes like this:
Me and old Bill there, we both come from Georgia
Met Hank out in New Mexico
We’re bound for Durango to join Pancho Villa
We hear that he’s paying in gold
I guess a man’s got to do what he’s best at
Ain’t found nothing better so far
Been called mercenaries and men with no country
Just soldiers in search of a war
And we’re bound for the border, we’re soldiers of fortune
Well, we’ll fight for no country, but we’ll die for good pay
Under the flag of the greenback dollar
Or the peso down Mexico way
Neither one of us suspected our wars would go on for twenty years. That we would become like the professionals Steve Earle sang about. When the Taliban-led government refused to turn over Osama bin Laden after 9/11 and President Bush sent the first US combat troops into Afghanistan on October 7, 2001, it took only two months of fighting for the Taliban to collapse. The war-as we understood it then-had proven swift. The summer Jack and I met, the US-backed Islamic Republic of Afghanistan was formed, and even though bin Laden had escaped, the media was debating whether the time had come to declare victory in Afghanistan. This triumphal air soon vanished.
Of the many fatal mistakes made in our Afghan tragedy, the Bush administration would soon make the first: it would begin the war in Iraq. Within a year, Jack would be in Iraq leading a platoon during the invasion. Within two years, I would also be in Iraq, leading a platoon in Fallujah. Afghanistan is the older war, but for both of us Iraq was our first war; we deployed there first because Bush had made Afghanistan a second-tier priority. As the Iraq War raged, the lack of US focus in Afghanistan set conditions for the Taliban to reconstitute in neighboring Pakistan. By 2005, a Taliban-led insurgency reestablished itself in Afghanistan. President Bush’s fixation on Iraq allowed this. What neither of us knew as we suffered through training in 2002 was that the Bush administration was laying an architecture that would sustain twenty years of war.
To wage war, America has always had to create a social construct to sustain it, from the colonial militias and French aid in the Revolution, to the introduction of the draft and the first-ever income tax to fund the Civil War, to the war bonds and industrial mobilization of the Second World War. In the past, a blend of taxation and conscription meant it was difficult for us to sustain war beyond several years. Neither citizens nor citizen soldiers had much patience for commanders, or commanders in chief, who muddled along. Take, for example, Washington reading Thomas Paine’s The American Crisis as a plea to his disbanding army before they famously crossed the Delaware (“These are the times that try men’s souls . . .”), or Lincoln, whose perceived mismanagement of the Civil War made his defeat in the 1864 presidential election a foregone conclusion to many, until Atlanta fell to the Union two months before the vote. The history of American warfare-even the “good” wars-is a history of our leaders desperately trying to preserve the requisite national will because Americans would not abide a costly, protracted war. This is no longer true.
After 9/11, in the opening act of the wars that followed, the Bush administration engineered a new type of war, one that is ahistorical-and seemingly without end. Never before had America engaged in a protracted conflict with an all-volunteer military that was funded through deficit spending. By the end of the Afghan War, our national debt hovered at around $28 trillion, with approximately $6 trillion being the bill for our post-9/11 wars, by far America’s longest. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was no serious public debate about a war tax or a draft. Our leaders responded to those attacks by mobilizing our government and military, but when it came to citizens, President Bush said, “I have urged our fellow Americans to go about their lives.” And so, by the summer of 2002, as Jack and I were listening to “Mercenary Song,” the war effort had already moved to the shopping mall.
For those who fight in a never-ending war, you must choose to leave it or to finish it. A decade in, when I made this choice, it nearly ended my friendship with Jack. And that night, in Rome, I wonder if he’s forgiven me when I ask him for one last favor in Afghanistan.