From Atherton to Afghanistan

First Lt. Peter Dixon of Atherton is sitting in the front room of a building made of mud in a town in the southern Afghanistan province of Farah, surrounded by a group of town elders — “gray beards,” as he affectionately calls them.

He wears fatigues; the men he’s talking to wear colorful coats and hats or turbans. Most are more than twice his age. Everyone’s sitting in the dust, feet tucked under their coats. And Lt. Dixon is about to tell a story.

His platoon — Lt. Dixon is a first lieutenant in the Marine Corps, in charge of some 70 troops — will be replaced by an older group of National Guardsmen over the holidays, and he is trying to assure the leaders that the older men will be as effective as the young soldiers under his command.

He begins, as any storyteller worth his salt would, by setting the scene: A father and son are out on patrol in the desert in the middle of the night, when they come upon a lonely campfire. Taliban members are huddled around the fire, their AK-47’s stacked at a short remove.

The son gets excited. “Dad, they don’t know we’re here,” he says. “Let’s start shooting!”

The father, however, knows better. “No, we won’t shoot from here,” he says. “We’ll sneak up close, and then we’ll shoot them all.”

Lt. Dixon, a 2001 graduate of Menlo School, smiles a little as he recalls the scene over coffee at a Menlo Park Starbucks. He is visiting family in Atherton, where he grew up, and is on a month-long leave from the Marines after a nine-month tour of duty.

“(The elders) were comforted” by the story, he says. “They could picture it, they knew what I was saying.”

Instead of constructing a rational argument weighing the sagacity of age against the virility of youth, he knew to encode the sentiment in a parable, to give his audience something “visceral” to take away.

It would often take two hours to do 15 minutes of business in these meetings, he says, but he “had fun with it.”

Winning people over to the American cause is a central component of the United States’ mission in Afghanistan, and Lt. Dixon maintains that developing a relationship with the various tribes is all-important. Kicking a soccer ball around with kids and chatting with villagers might save lives, he says, if people become comfortable enough with the soldiers to drop a hint about the Taliban’s movements.

He will be back in Afghanistan soon enough, but for now he is trying to enjoy his vacation. He took a trip to Las Vegas with friends shortly after returning to California on Dec. 4, went on a wine-tasting tour in Napa Valley, and has plans to ski at Tahoe before being re-deployed.

“Fort Apache”

Upon arriving in Afghanistan, Lt. Dixon’s platoon was first stationed to a massive, abandoned town named Now Zad. The Taliban had flushed the residents out, and the Army set up a base and fought the Taliban in the otherwise deserted village. (Lt. Dixon compares Now Zad to the desolate fort in the John Ford-helmed combat/Western film “Fort Apache,” featuring John Wayne).

In August of 2008, the platoon moved northwest to Bala Baluk, a town in the Farah province with a population of around 100,000. There, Lt. Dixon would spend “a couple hours a day” talking with village elders and explaining the Americans’ intentions — conversations that would often have “a direct impact on the battlefield,” he says.

His emphasis on the importance of negotiating with village leaders suggests other parallels to “Fort Apache” — John Wayne’s character makes a number of trips to meet the Apache chief Cochise, and finds that learning about the tribe’s culture and getting to know the man goes a long way toward soothing tensions between Cochise’s warriors and the American cavalry.

But Lt. Dixon didn’t use Hollywood to imagine what the war might be like during the year and a half he spent in training before his unit was deployed, he says, maintaining that he only mentions films as a reference point to help people understand the situation in Afghanistan.

He draws more upon his education at the University of North Carolina, where he double-majored in political science and peace, war and defense — an interdisciplinary program that combines aspects of military history, psychology and philosophy. His subject list included a class on the media’s coverage of war, and one on classical military tactics; another addressed the topic of whether war can be just.

Lt. Dixon has also studied Afghan history and culture, and he says that when dealing with elders or developing strategy, he will take a cue from literature he’s read about the country.

“A warrior culture”

The precondition in the so-called “battle for hearts and minds” is winning military battles, according to Lt. Dixon. Before Afghans are willing to embrace the United States’ mission there, the military needs to convince people that it will be able to rout the Taliban.

No one wants to ally himself with the losing side, he says.

“It’s a warrior culture,” he says of the Pashtun, the country’s largest tribe. “We were able to show them that we were warriors, and they respected that.”

He cites American exceptionalism as the key to his platoon’s success in the country, saying that the Taliban isn’t used to fighting forces as aggressive as the American soldiers. The platoon was supposed to spend most of its time training Afghan police to fight the Taliban, but his troops’ “natural aggressiveness” compelled them to go after the Taliban themselves, he says, and “take the fight to the enemy.”

He acknowledges that there have been civilian casualties, but says that if village elders believe the war is just, they are willing to accept a limited number of civilian deaths as inevitable collateral damage.

He maintains that the villagers understand and abide by the Americans’ rules of engagement. He recalls an incident when an Afghan man was riding a motorcycle toward an American outpost. It was clear from the man’s expression that he wasn’t paying attention to where he was going, so an American soldier used the butt of his rifle to knock the man off the bike instead of shooting him, which would have been standard operating procedure in such a scenario.

But if the man had been killed, villagers would not have held it against the Americans, Lt. Dixon says. Instead, they would have blamed the motorcyclist for not heeding the rules.

He sees civilian casualties as inevitable, to a certain extent. It’s hard to tell civilians apart from Taliban members, he says, because they dress the same. But he praises the “discipline” the troops in his command have displayed in minimizing civilian deaths.

Rules of engagement

The Americans’ adherence to their own military code has “tied our hands” in certain situations, Lt. Dixon says. For instance, the Army will send soldiers into a deserted village like the one his platoon was first assigned to, rather than bomb it — even if it’s relatively confident that there aren’t any civilians there.

He points out that Taliban members tend to hew pretty closely to Pashtunwali, an ancient code of behavior that dictates social mores for the Pashtun — though he pointedly notes that Pashtunwali does not necessarily align with the Geneva Conventions. The American Army has learned to use that code to its advantage, he says. For instance, ridicule and banishment of a Taliban member at the hands of a village elder can be just as effective as locking the man up.

Even in a “guerilla war” like the one his platoon has been fighting, he thinks it is possible to adhere to rules.

“In a morally gray world, we are doing things the moral way,” he says. “My men’s honor is clean.”

At one of his daily meetings with village elders, he implored them to help an old man afflicted with palsy. “The only thing that separates us from him are the fortunes of God,” he told the men. “If we don’t help this man, we will find ourselves in his shoes.”

The men were visibly moved. One of the elders regarded Lt. Dixon for a moment, then said something to the translator.

“These Americans are really good Muslims,” the translator relayed. Lt. Dixon took the phrase to mean that the elders recognized they shared a set of cultural values with the Americans. He saw the comment as a sign that the military was starting to win over the townspeople.

Coming home

Lt. Dixon has enjoyed being home, seeing his friends and family and “doing normal things for a change” — like a recent game of paintball he played with his family.

“Everybody wanted to be on my team,” he says with a cautious smile.

It feels good to be able to kick back and have a beer with friends, he says; it’s nice to be able to let his guard down. Though his experience has been different than that of his high school classmates, the dynamic with his friends hasn’t changed much, and it’s been easy to slip back into his old routine.

Lt. Dixon says he probably won’t pursue a military career, but that it’s been “tremendously rewarding” work.

He arrived at Chapel Hill as a freshman in the fall of 2001, planning to major in journalism. The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center spurred him to join the Marines — though he waited until graduating to sign up.

He felt he had to do something about the “2 percent” of people who try to “oppress the other 98 percent,” he says. He portrays the Taliban as a loose association of hard-nosed criminals, mercenaries and opportunistic crooks, rather than a centralized organization with a coherent ideology.

“All other politics aside, these ruthless people are trying to rule the good 98 percent,” he says. “Without rough men ready to visit violence onto them, they’ll never stop.” If the United States allows the Taliban to promulgate, he says, it won’t be long before we see the consequences in our own backyard.

Lt. Dixon maintains that if Taliban factions want to lay down their arms and negotiate for peace, the federal government should try to accommodate them, by all means. But for those who refuse to negotiate or surrender, he believes a war of extermination is the military’s only recourse.

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