‘Basetrack Live,’ the Story of a Marine’s Deployment, and His Return Home

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Tyler La Marr, a former Marine Corps sergeant, left, plays the role of Cpl. A. J. Czubai, right, in "Basetrack Live" at BAM Harvey Theater. Teresa Fazio
Voices

No millennial worth his iPhone remembers life before social media. While previous generations’ warfighters wrote letters or phoned home over spotty connections, Marines today can post on Instagram photos of themselves sitting atop cans of ammunition. In 2010, the photojournalist Teru Kuwayama and his collaborators embedded in Afghanistan to start a Facebook page for the First Battalion, Eighth Marines to communicate with loved ones. Far from resulting in just another live-stream of minutiae, their Basetrack project became a way for deployed troops to maintain relationships with their families. The resulting trove of photos and videos provide ample fodder for “Basetrack Live” — the onstage story of one corporal’s deployment and homecoming, and the effects on his family.

For both the battalion and a nation’s artists, self-reflection occurred stunningly quickly through the use of social media. Anne Hamburger, executive producer of En Garde Arts, the company behind “Basetrack Live,” said she felt it was important to document the human side of going to war, without sensationalizing the experience.

“The issues are so complex” when an ordinary person deploys, Ms. Hamburger said. Her biggest challenge for the production, which is showing at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and will be going on a national tour, was paring down the “incredible wealth of material,” she said.

Ms. Hamburger reached out through Facebook, gathering more than 100 respondents and conducting three dozen interviews to cull images and video for the project. Every word in “Basetrack Live” is taken from interviews with Marines or members of their families.

This citizen journalism captures the truth of troops’ feelings during deployment, including graffiti about pornography, and profane, funny rules for standing watch and cleaning toilets. The images chosen for the production reflect the Marines’ brotherhood, including an impressive assortment of tattoos. Because of the authentic, emotion-rich material, the Marines are painted neither as heroes nor victims.

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Marines Remember Falluja, 10 Years Later

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Marines of the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment responded to enemy contact in Falluja, Iraq, in November 2004. Courtesy of Thomas James Brennan
Voices

On Nov. 6, 2004, NATO forces launched an assault on Falluja, a city north of Baghdad that had become a magnet for Sunni insurgent forces. Thomas Brennan, then a 19-year-old Marine Corps lance corporal, was one of the infantrymen with First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment who would participate in the attack. The battalion suffered numerous casualties in the battle, one of the bloodiest for American forces since Vietnam. Now a journalism student, Mr. Brennan recalls the battle with the help of some of the Marines and sailors he fought beside.

Grains of sand floated through motionless air as beams of light crept through sandbagged windows. Young men sat mesmerized by the words echoing from walls scarred by years of war.

Through cigarette smoke and desert confetti, Doug Bahrns, who was then a Marine second Lieutenant, exuded confidence and trepidation as he explained over two hours the details of our mission and what should happen when — not if — we were wounded. He paused often, gazing into the darkness above our heads. He knew he wouldn’t bring us all home.

Now a major assigned to Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia, Major Bahrns recalled recently the weight he felt leading Marines “into such a large-scale fight where it was inevitable someone was going to get killed.”

“Nov. 10, 2004, is one of the most significant days of my life, changing not only my life, but other’s lives,” Major Bahrns said. “It put into perspective life, death and the brotherhood within military service. That was the first day, alongside my fellow Marines, that I truly felt I’d cemented my place among them.”

Ten years ago, roughly 13,500 American, British and Iraqi forces attacked Falluja, Iraq, where roughly 4,000 insurgents fought from trenches, tunnels and houses, using improvised explosive devices, rifles, rockets and machine guns. During the 46-day battle, roughly 2,000 insurgents were killed and 1,500 captured. By Dec. 23, 107 members of coalition forces had died and 613 were wounded. Alongside Lieutenant Bahrns, in Alpha Company, First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment, 17 died and 102 were wounded. It was the heaviest urban combat since the 1968 Battle of Hue City during the Vietnam War.

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Helping Homeless Veterans Locally, and Thinking Bigger

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Joseph Gotesman, right, and other VetConnect workers made rounds in the Hunts Point section of the Bronx in May. Ozier Muhammad/The New York Times

Under the tracks of a northbound 5 train, Joseph Gotesman pulled a sandwich from a plastic bag and approached a man sitting near a jumble of boxes. His query was crisp and succinct: “Excuse me, sir. Are you a veteran?”

Mr. Gotesman, 22, leads VetConnect, a Bronx-based organization devised to combat homelessness among veterans. Since it started work in January, the small group has made contact with dozens of veterans living on the streets in and around the Bronx. VetConnect has helped five veterans get permanent housing, including one who needed it to get much-needed surgery, and has worked with others to find employment.

Such small numbers might seem paltry in a city where the ratio of homeless people to people who have homes is the third highest in the nation, but a spokesman for the Department of Homeless Services says that every little bit helps.

“Many of our partners started out as small, neighborhood-focused organizations. We value every effort, however small, to reach out to a homeless man or woman and connect them to services,” Chris Miller, the spokesman. “It makes a difference.”

The strength of VetConnect, said Mr. Gotesman, is its grass-roots nature. “We’re local,” he said. “You can’t get more local than community members reaching out to their own. And as we grow, it will be community members reaching out to their own as well. You won’t see me at a VetConnect excursion in an L.A. or a Boston community excursion.”

And that is exactly where the organization is heading. In the last few months, VetConnect has begun the process of putting together teams in other states where homelessness among veterans is high, such as California and Texas. In September, VetConnect was awarded a $5,000 grant from the Arnold P. Gold Foundation, which will assist the organization in, among other things, expanding, conducting research and distributing materials.

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Lessons for a Grandfather, Unexpectedly Deployed to Afghanistan

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Lt. Col. James Gleason Bishop, right, interviewing the project manager of a non-government organization in Kabul in July. Navy LT. Peter Buttigieg

“You know you won a free round-trip ticket to Afghanistan?” a perpetually busy chief master sergeant asked me one warm winter evening. We were at the gym at Robins Air Force Base in Houston County, Ga., after a day spent serving on a panel of public affairs chiefs.

“You’re kidding,” I said. Weights clanked behind us. “I saw my name on a deployment list, but there was a question mark beside it.” All afternoon, my hopes had hung on that question mark.

“No question sir. You made the list. You’re going to ISAF headquarters in Kabul,” he said, referring to the United States-led international force in Afghanistan. He beamed like he was handing me a winning lotto ticket. It was January 2013. I was scheduled to deploy in 15 months.

To him, deployment amounted to the opportunity of a lifetime. At that moment, it seemed to me like some surreal theft. I’d miss another New England summer, every birthday in my immediate family and my 33rd wedding anniversary. As a 30-year Air Force Reserve veteran, I’d spent months away from home, but never deployed to a war zone. So I was a decade overdue. But while the Air Force Reserve asks for volunteers to go overseas, I had assumed they don’t involuntarily deploy 53-year-old grandfathers.

They do.

When I called my wife, Debby, that evening to tell her the news, she said, “Aren’t you a little old for that?”

I felt old. I took a walk around the gorgeous Georgia base, grateful to be away from the frigid New England winter, feeling alternately numb and angry to be “non-vol’d.” The crepe myrtles bloomed and the sun warmed my arms as the notion crept up my spine: I’m going to Afghanistan.

In the evening, after opening the Gideon Bible to the 23rd Psalm and glancing at the familiar words – “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want …” – I slept in fits until about 3 a.m., then not at all. In the dark, short, violent movies kept looping in my head. Somebody would burn another Quran and 40,000 protesters – 1 percent of Kabul’s population – would storm the gate. An Afghan would come to work and start shooting, like what happened when a colleague was killed at Kabul International Airport. Looping, like bad songs that won’t stop.

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An Iraq Veteran’s Experience With Chemical Weapons

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Roberto Schmidt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Voices

We found chemical weapons my first week in Iraq.

At Contingency Operating Base Speicher, I was a lieutenant working in the operations department for an explosive ordnance disposal battalion. We were responsible for the entire northern sector of the country, about 50,000 square kilometers (or roughly 19,300 square miles) of ground touching the Syrian, Turkish and Iranian borders.

The information came to me in an otherwise benign email, alongside the dozens of field reports that hit my inbox every hour. After just a couple of days as the new guy on the team, the reports showing the aftermath of vehicles and soldiers torn apart by explosives started feeling routine. I’d been expecting them.

But this one showed something I didn’t see coming: M110 shells, which are American-designed 155-millimeter artillery projectiles. These had tested positive for sulfur mustard, a blister agent.

“Chem rounds.”

I looked away from my screen, and not 10 feet away from me was Chuck, an Army E.O.D. technician who’d already served tours in Kosovo and Afghanistan. He was the kind of noncommissioned officer every lieutenant hopes for: a smart, talented young soldier who trained you up and made you better. I was already relying on Chuck for everything.

Here, I turned to him in disbelief.

I told him that the team had found chem M110’s and that the shells had tested positive for mustard.

He was unimpressed.

I persisted. As far as I knew, we’d just made the first “WMD find” of the war.

But it turned out there was a lot I didn’t know.

He cut right to the chase.

Chuck turned to me and peered over the eyeglasses low on his nose. He looked at me for a while without blinking.

“LT, let me let you in on something,” he said. “We find three or four of those things a week up north here. Everybody knows about them. And nobody cares.”

I was stunned. “You got to be kidding me.”

“Nope.”

As good noncommissioned officers do, Chuck got me up to speed quickly but also didn’t hesitate to give me swift reality checks when needed. This was one of those times.

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Helping Veterans Find Their Place, This Time on Campus

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As bow-tied waiters cleared plates and emptied coffee cups inside a plush meeting room at the Yale Club in Midtown Manhattan earlier this month, about 30 veterans from nearby community colleges listened to representatives from Yale, Dartmouth, Wesleyan and Vassar describe their veterans programs and answer questions about academics, financial aid and housing.

Rob Cuthbert, an enlisted Army veteran and member of the fiduciary board of the Yale Veterans Association who helped to organize the event, said the session was an attempt to address a phenomenon he referred to as an “exigent crisis”: the small numbers of veterans attending elite four-year colleges and universities.

“Numbers from the Department of Labor suggest that there are at least 1.4 million veterans without bachelor’s degrees,” Mr. Cuthbert said in a phone interview. “A bachelor’s degree is a key tool for socioeconomic mobility in today’s economy. Enlisted veterans should not doubt that there are clear pathways to Ivy League and peer schools.”

According to school administrators, there was one undergraduate veteran attending Princeton during the 2013-14 academic year, out of 5,244 undergraduates. Harvard had four among its roughly 6,700 undergraduates. Brown had 11 out of 6,182. Dartmouth, whose former president, James Wright, is an enlisted Marine Corps veteran who encourages veterans to continue their education during his visits to military hospitals, had 18 of 4,276.

Data from the Department of Veterans Affairs also shows that less than one half of one percent of the Post-9/11 G.I. Bill money paid since 2009 has gone to individuals attending Ivy League schools. Of that relatively small amount, an even smaller portion went to enlisted veterans attending undergraduate programs at those colleges. The remainder went to dependents of service members, officers or enlisted veterans attending graduate programs.

In response to those numbers, organizations like the Posse Foundation have turned their attention to bringing more veterans to the nation’s colleges. The foundation was started in 1989 to help underrepresented students to enter top-tier schools. Two years ago, Catharine Bond Hill, the president of Vassar College, began working with the group to apply their model — which focuses on helping exceptional community college students gain admission to elite four-year colleges — to veterans.

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A Sister, and Brother, in Arms

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Voices

Just before Sept. 11, 2001, my teenage brother Mike, fresh from Air Force training, pressed something small into my palm: two pin-backings stubbed on a curled shape in dusky silver. Jump wings.

“If you keep them safe, I’ll always be safe,” he said.

My brothers and I had always tried to protect each other. Chris, the younger, was calm, but Mike was rambunctious. When I was 4 and they were toddlers, I would sneak into their room past midnight to ensure they still occupied their dual cribs. I would poke a finger through the crib slats, slide up their eyelids, and check their breathing as they slept. Safe in their company, I would curl up on the floor for a minute, then pad back to my pink-swathed bed. But by elementary school, our parents had divorced, and anger ran through our thin walls.

When I was 14, our stepfather and Mike, 12, got in a fight over pajamas. Too cowardly to burst in, I stayed in bed and turned up my Walkman. Mike sobbed himself to sleep with a nosebleed that soaked his mattress. He had misbehaved, but my crime felt worse — I had let him thrash alone. As the years passed, conflicts with our stepfather prompted police cruiser lights on our street. When I finished high school, Mike’s card to me read, “…Stay another year? Please?” I should have ensured my brothers grew up strong. Instead I fled.

At 18, I paid for college with a Marine Corps R.O.T.C. scholarship; the military’s rules seemed enlightened next to the ones back home. Mike later barreled into the same Boston unit as an Air Force cadet. He tagged along on field exercises with us upperclassmen, easily completing grueling hikes and rappelling down university buildings. My senior year, the Twin Towers fell, and I knew at some point I would deploy. The following June, Mike and Chris pinned gold lieutenant bars on my shoulders.

Teresa Fazio receiving her Marine Corps commission in 2002, with her two brothers, Chris on the left and Mike on the right.   Courtesy of Teresa Fazio

Two years later, on an Iraqi base, I nervously strapped myself into an androgynous Kevlar jacket. Tromping around our gravel-strewn compound, I doled out candy and phone cards while waiting for mortars to fall. We plodded through our days, trusting in grace that wherever we stepped was safe. Late at night, when the desert heat lifted, I taught my Marines martial arts. As we punched foam mats and dragged each other through the sand, I wondered how my fist would feel against my stepfather’s face, how much pressure my forearm required to choke his carotid artery. But I could not predict the techniques my sparring partners threw; I could only try to counter them. And my rage did not help me lead.

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Writing as a Soldier and a Civilian

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It is 12 a.m. in the land of the midnight sun. Seventy-two hours until deployment. I should be at home with my wife, Jen, and 6-month-old son or unpacking the house we bought recently. Instead, I’m on my bike riding home from the University of Alaska, Anchorage. A rowdy group rides down another trail that merges with mine, cycling in a pack in front of me. They laugh, pull beers from messenger bags, see me and offer me one. The exchange is tour-worthy. An anonymous rider pulls out a cold Olympia and reaches toward me. His eyes remain on the trail ahead, as do mine. I extend a blind left hand, close the gap, find the front of the can. For a moment we are connected by cheap beer. Then he lets go and it is all mine. I toast the rowdies and ride ahead.

Voices

***

On Jan. 13, my wife’s water broke, just as I put the final touches on my application to the M.F.A. program in creative writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. While I drove, frenzied, across town for a post office, she held out through rising contractions. Finnegan Shichiro Komatsu made his entry that night, and a month later a letter came in the mail. I was in, accepted into the creative nonfiction program.

Matt Komatsu and his son, Finn.  Megan Marlene Photography

The university program is low residency: a correspondence course for all but two weeks every summer. During the residency, students from all over the globe — and from three genres (fiction, creative nonfiction and poetry) — converged on the Anchorage campus. For two weeks, it was 12 hours a day of writing: poetry, fiction, readings, lectures, manuscript workshops. Immersed in an unfamiliar world, windows to new material opened hourly.

Because the program required so little time on campus, I did not have to quit my job to pursue the degree. The course work for my first semester was online. When it was time for the residency, I took leave, shed my uniform, pulled on some civvies and rode my bike to class.

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Death, Recovery and Hope at a Hospital During Drawdown

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Maj. Jason Pasley, left, and Lt. Col. Jason Williams operated on a wounded man’s arm at Craig Joint Theater Hospital. Maj. Brandon Lingle
Voices

These days most NATO forces in Afghanistan rarely, if ever, leave the secured perimeters of their bases. While safer, life on base produces a complicated proximity to the realities of war — we’re both close and far away. At Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, the line between life and death is often clearest in the largest American hospital in the country, Craig Joint Theater Hospital.

The Air Force-led hospital’s primary mission is to treat injured or ill NATO personnel, and despite decreased volume of battle injuries due to the drawdown of troops, the facility remains busy. But now, it’s mostly a steady flow of Afghan trauma and humanitarian patients punctuated by sporadic coalition casualties, such as the wounded from the attack that killed Army Maj. Gen. Harold Greene in August.

Sometimes the contrast between hope and despair, between smooth recoveries and catastrophic battle injuries, comes into focus within minutes.

July 22 was supposed to be the last day in Afghanistan for Air Force Lt. Col. Jason Williams, and he wanted an easy morning to pack, tell friends goodbye and perform a final check-up on a special patient. But a suicide bomber in Kabul changed those plans. Instead, the 38-year-old cardiothoracic surgeon was in an operating room scrambling to save six gravely injured Nepalese security contractors.

More than a dozen doctors, nurses and technicians attended to one man who spent five hours in surgery. Maj. Jon Forbes, a neurosurgeon, worked on a severe brain injury while Colonel Williams and a trauma surgeon, Maj. Jason Pasley, tried to save the man’s arm.

“We’re on our last unit of B. I’m going to activate the walking blood bank,” the anesthesiologist, Maj. Scott Jensen, said as he set a cooler with the last of the hospital’s B-positive next to a pile of empty blood bags.

“Jon, do you think this guy’s survivable?” asked Major Pasley while suturing a hole in the man’s radial artery.

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Williams Opposed War, but Supported the Troops

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Robin Williams greeted troops at a December 2004 U.S.O. stop in Baghdad. Sgt. Dan Purcell/U.S. Army, via Associated Press

Robin Williams opposed the war in Iraq. His many comedic riffs that punctured the rationale for the 2003 invasion, and the president who ordered it, are evidence enough.

Yet his affection for the warriors sent to carry out the nation’s grim and bloody business in Southwest Asia was on display each time he left home and family at Christmas to go overseas and join the U.S.O. holiday tours for the troops.

His successes on TV and on stage, in film and in stand-up clubs, have been amply noted following his death on Monday. But his audiences, especially among the troops, never knew how hard, really hard, Mr. Williams worked at his craft.

I observed his comedic diligence, genius and humanity up close during two of his intense, raucous U.S.O. tours of Iraq and Afghanistan; in 2004 and again in 2010. (In all, he made four holiday barnstorming visits to the wars.)
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From Hero to Hateful: Recalling an Afghan Soldier’s Descent

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Voices

The recent green on blue attack that claimed the life of Gen. Harold J. Greene, the deputy commander for the Combined Security Transition Command–Afghanistan, has, for good reason, caused a fury of questions in the media about these attacks and what they meant. Who are the Afghans that carry them out? Why do they seem to suddenly turn on the Americans that have been fighting with them for years and years, struggling to help Afghanistan build something from the ruins of three decades of war. The answers, it seems, are complex, but also nuanced. And the questions reminded me of the worst case of post-traumatic stress syndrome that I’ve ever seen.

He called himself Castro. He was a slight Afghan man with fine features, wide eyes half-hidden behind a chronic furrow, and black hair always swept back for how often he would sit with his head in his hands.

One of his first firefights, in 2003, was an ambush that cost two American lives. It happened in a distant valley in eastern Afghanistan, a chance encounter at dark in a place without the slightest significance to American interests before, and now significant only for the families of men killed there. All of it is a metaphor for how CIA officers often die.

The sole remaining American – we’ll call him John – charged up the mountain, trying to break the ambush at the flank. The Afghans with him tried to keep pace, but much popular mythology to the contrary, not all Afghans have evolved with genes uniquely selected for fighting and climbing steep hills. Between the valley floor and the ridge, they all dropped, from exhaustion or fire. All but one: Castro. He and John reached the top, taking fire from both sides. Shooting at the row of Taliban militants to his front, John could not turn to return fire coming at his back. Castro, close behind, saved his life.

Years later, John did not remember the story quite the same way. But distinguishing the details of one firefight out of one thousand can be hard. What was interesting was that this was the story Castro chose to tell over and over: that he was there when two Americans died, he was there when the third charged up the mountain.

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A Letter to the President, and a Well-Timed Response

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In June, a Marine Corps veteran named David Nelson wrote a letter to President Obama expressing concern that the rapid advances of Islamist militants in northern Iraq might prompt the United States to send troops back to bolster the shaky government in Baghdad. In his letter, Mr. Nelson, who was a judge advocate during the Vietnam War, wondered whether the Obama administration might use the successes of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, much the way President Lyndon B. Johnson used confrontations between North Vietnamese torpedo boats and an American destroyer in August 1964 to justify expanded military action in Vietnam.

The 50th anniversary of the 1964 episode, the Gulf of Tonkin incident, came and went. Then, on Thursday, Mr. Nelson, now a lawyer in Houston, received an email from the president. In it, Mr. Obama said, “I want to be clear: American forces will not be returning to combat in Iraq.” But he added that the United States was “gathering more information about potential targets associated with ISIS, and, in consultation with Congress and leaders in Iraq and the region, we will be prepared to take targeted and precise military action if the situation requires it.”

The White House declined to comment on the exchange but did not dispute the authenticity of the president’s email.

Hours after Mr. Nelson received that message, Mr. Obama announced that he had authorized limited airstrikes against Islamist militants in Iraq. Several hours after that, Navy F-18 fighters dropped bombs on an ISIS target near Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Kurdistan region.

Below are Mr. Nelson’s letter to the president and the president’s response.

Mr. President,

The old saying is that “history repeats itself.” But in the current Iraq situation I implore you NOT to let the history of our nation 50 years ago repeat itself.

In early August, 1964, an incident occurred in the Gulf of Tonkin that led to Congress passing the infamous Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Within a few months thousands of U.S. troops were sent into Vietnam even though President Johnson, Senator Richard Russell, and others never did see light at the end of the tunnel.

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Dean Baquet, Times Executive Editor, on the Word ‘Torture’

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Over the past few months, reporters and editors of The Times have debated a subject that has come up regularly ever since the world learned of the C.I.A.’s brutal questioning of terrorism suspects: whether to call the practices torture.

When the first revelations emerged a decade ago, the situation was murky. The details about what the Central Intelligence Agency did in its interrogation rooms were vague. The word “torture” had a specialized legal meaning as well as a plain-English one. While the methods set off a national debate, the Justice Department insisted that the techniques did not rise to the legal definition of “torture.” The Times described what we knew of the program but avoided a label that was still in dispute, instead using terms like harsh or brutal interrogation methods. Read more…

The ‘Battle Rhythm’ of Helping to Build a Democracy

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KABUL, Afghanistan – Here come the helicopters again. Blackhawks, flying out of the Kabul night, the gunner hanging out the side, scanning the city from behind the sights of an M-240B automatic rifle. The blades thunder their rhythm throughout the compound, too loud to talk over. They land quickly, spill out their passengers and a few bags, and leave. This isn’t the place to linger.

The last Blackhawk landed so close it blew open the windows and scattered papers across our office floor. I’m on the ground, at the headquarters of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), a relatively safe NATO compound in central Kabul, along with more than 2,000 people from 48 coalition countries.

Tonight, the Macedonians are playing a serious game of soccer at a small court surrounded by a chain-link fence. On my walk around the small compound, I see Afghans, Britons, Dutch, Germans, Greeks, Italians, Norwegians, Swedes, Poles, Romanians, Turks, and a few whose country I can’t recognize; troops from the United States Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force; and civilians. Almost all are armed. My friend said that this place was like the Epcot Center, with guns.

I pass a white-haired lady wearing a conservative blue dress who could be described only as grandmotherly, if it weren’t for the 9-millimeter Beretta strapped to her hip. Every Sunday, I sing and play acoustic guitar at the base chapel. I’m learning from my musical betters. My tendency is to rush a song. If I don’t position the strap just right, my 9-millimeter handgun bangs against my guitar as I play. The rest of the congregation, except for the chaplain and a few civilians, is also armed.

Lt. Col. James Bishop in Kabul. TSgt. David Zheng.

Our “Battle Rhythm,” meaning the meeting schedule and work shift, is long. We work seven days a week, and 12 hours a day, or more, with two glorious exceptions: On Friday and Saturday mornings, we get to come in at noon. I average about 84 hours a week; others average more. Days blur, so it hardly matters whether today is Tuesday or Saturday. People said you would get used to working seven days a week. I haven’t. The pace does violence to the ancient rhythm of work and rest: Six days shalt thou labor, the Lord told Moses.

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In Ukraine, Spent Cartridges Offer Clues to Violence Fueled by Soviet Surplus

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An expended rifle cartridge removed from bloody puddle, before, left, and after cleaning, which showed that it had been manufactured in Ulyanovsk, the city of Lenin’s birth, in 1982. C. J. Chivers/The New York Times

With its independence in 1991, Ukraine inherited a huge and unneeded stockpile of arms and ordnance from its former Soviet masters. In the years since, the country’s businessmen, security services and cargo carriers, operating in an environment plagued by corruption, have repeatedly been accused of trafficking the surplus in black-market arms deals to Africa and the Middle East. So it was little surprise that this year, after fighting broke out, that Ukraine felt the sting of what had been its own shadowy trade. Exactly the sort of weapons it has long exported found bloody use on Ukrainian soil.

One result so far has been violence in eastern Ukraine that has claimed hundreds of lives and destroyed homes and infrastructure in areas that had not seen combat since World War II. The prevalence of Soviet-era military equipment used in the rebellion and crackdown was obvious from the semiautomatic pistols and assault rifles seen at rebel checkpoints to the glimpses of shoulder-fired, heat-seeking antiaircraft missiles, or Manpads, that were occasionally carried by rebels and apparently used to down several Ukrainian military aircraft, including one strike that killed more Ukrainian soldiers than any other incident in the war. A legacy of weapons from the Soviet period, the SA-11, or Buk surface-to-air missile, was also suspected in the downing of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17, though the precise origins of that particular missile and the launch vehicle used in that attack are as yet unclear.

Today, At War will look at an element of the conflict that standard images or field reporting does not readily capture, because the details are too small to be seen at a glance, or cannot be viewed at all without magnification: the origins of small-arms ammunition.

Understanding the origins of small-arms ammunition, which usually attracts less attention than big-ticket or high-tech weapons, is important, because in most conflicts it is a primary fuel for organized violence, and accounts for a large share of the casualties and the disruption caused by armed parties. This was certainly the case in eastern Ukraine, where the war began as rebels seized territory with common and relatively simple rifles and other light weapons. This war, like many, gained velocity with small arms, and as the violence from small arms escalated, it grew into a conflict that claimed a civilian passenger jet and the lives of 298 people passing through overhead.

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