Fighting a Hard, Half-Forgotten War

Encouraged, Stammer instructed an Afghan interpreter to ask the village elder if the soldiers could rent a compound for the night. Abdul Satar, a man with a long beard and white turban, readily agreed.

As soon as he reached the courtyard, Stammer, a tall, broad-shouldered man who looks like a football coach, took off his helmet and beckoned his host's children to gather around as he pulled donated stuffed animals and pencils from his backpack.

"Where are the girls?" Stammer asked, as a throng of little boys pressed around him. "I want to make sure the girls get these, too."

The women of the household huddled in a dusty corner, peeking out from under the bright red and green scarves with which they traditionally hide their faces from strangers.

"Okay, now let's lay a little love on the grown-ups," Stammer said, and ordered his radio operator to call for an air drop of supplies including blankets and sacks of beans.

Next, he asked the battalion's doctor, Maj. Brian Sleigh, and some of the medics to offer their services. The villagers eagerly lined up. Most had curable ailments -- diarrhea or viral infections in the case of the children, cataracts in some of the men. But Sleigh noted that even if he could arrange for drugs to be delivered, there was no doctor or pharmacist to administer them. Instead Sleigh mostly handed out painkillers.

"I can't cure you, but I can give you something to help with the pain," he said to patient after patient.

By now, Stammer judged the ice sufficiently broken to instruct an interpreter to ask Satar the question on everybody's mind: "Have you seen any Taliban around here?"

"He says the Taliban haven't been through for months," the interpreter responded.

The assertion was nonsense, Stammer said. "But that's okay," he added peaceably. In a region where informing could cost a person his life, Stammer said, a villager who lied about the militia's whereabouts was not necessarily a Taliban supporter.

So Stammer moved on to what he called his "unity" speech. He stressed that the U.S. military was there only to help the Afghan people, and he urged Satar to organize villagers to present their needs to Zabol's governor and vote for an official representative in parliamentary elections scheduled for September.

Satar smiled and nodded. But one of the interpreters said afterward that the elder later confided to him that even this modest proposal was too risky.