Fighting a Hard, Half-Forgotten War

"He told me, 'If I do that, I won't stay alive very long,' " the interpreter recounted. "He said, 'You guys are very nice. But you only come around once in a while. The Taliban will come here as soon as you are gone.' "

Within hours of the unit's arrival, the village men were pressing green tea and freshly baked bread on their visitors. Some even started trying on the soldiers' helmets, wrapping their turbans around them to hearty chuckles all around.

Stammer was pleased, but also a touch suspicious.

"Why are these people being so nice to us?" he muttered to the operations officer, Maj. Doug Vincent. "We've been in villages where people wouldn't spit on us if we were on fire in their living room. But these people are being over-the-top nice."

"I don't know, sir," Vincent said. "Do you think maybe they have someone in town and they don't want us to do a cordon and search?"

"Think about that," Stammer said. "Also think about whether they are trying to set up an ambush."

Stammer and his men had ample reason to be wary. Several soldiers on the mission had been on patrol with 14 Afghan policemen on May 3 when they stumbled upon a gathering of 60 to 80 Taliban fighters, triggering one of the most intense battles in Afghanistan since 2001.

As that fight unfolded, the U.S. team of six scouts and a medic, in two armored Humvees, was ordered to keep the enemy from retreating before ground and air reinforcements arrived. The team managed to do it during 2 1/2 hours of relentless fighting, during which no one was killed but one Humvee was hit by a rocket and burst into flames.

Yet even once the battalion's reaction force was flown in, the Taliban fought on for four hours, killing one Afghan policeman and wounding six U.S. soldiers and five Afghan police officers.

In the end, the American and Afghan forces prevailed, killing nearly 40 Taliban fighters and capturing 10. Battalion soldiers who participated said they felt proud to have put their training to use.

But many now carry the sort of memories that often haunt veterans of major wars -- the surprised, all-too-human look on an enemy fighter's face as seen through a rifle scope just before he is blown apart, or the stress of repeatedly driving into hails of rocket fire with no expectation of surviving.

"Afterward, my wife asked me what was going through my head," said Sgt. Michael Ortiz, the medic who was with the ambushed scout team. "I told her, 'Everything. Just every single thing you can imagine.' "

Back in Badamtoy, Stammer and his men were settling in the next morning for a long wait for a helicopter to ferry them back to the base when their banter was interrupted by one of the radio operators. A report had just come through that Akundzada might be in a village called Kawti, just a few miles north.

Stammer instantly switched into battle mode, directing his men to draw up plans for a multi-pronged assault including Afghan security forces and to arrange for Chinook helicopters to transport them to the site.

A few hours before sunset, the group trekked up a hill to board a Chinook. But the new village turned out to like the previous one: a series of humble, mud-walled compounds occupied by passive, if slightly less welcoming, farmers. Akundzada had slipped through their fingers again.

Soon, Stammer was back on the radio, ordering another food drop to win over the people of Kawti while his men searched for smooth ground on which to unroll their sleeping bags.

Ortiz steeled himself for a long night of watching the stars. Like many soldiers who experienced the fierce fight of May 3, he had been unable to sleep for several nights afterward.

Now, Ortiz said, he had no trouble falling asleep indoors. "But not outside. Not where I know someone is out there watching me."