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other candy the soldiers had received from home.
    Army commanders refer to this as “Hershey Bar Diplomacy,” because spoiling the village children is an incredibly effective icebreaker. Villagers who were overtly hostile or suspicious when an American patrol entered their village relaxed and became friendlier in a matter of minutes when they saw the smiles on the faces of their children. Almost always, a village elder came out to exchange greetings with the troops, and if everything went right, the patrol commander was invited to sit down for tea to discuss local issues. If all went well after that, the intelligence began to flow.
    As gratifying as the Wardak experience may have been, there were parts of Afghanistan that were far more hostile environments than Wardak Province.
    Fifty years ago, French historian Bernard Fall described the doomed French military stronghold of Dien Bien Phu in North Vietnam as “Hell in a very small place.” This moniker aptly describes the Korengal Valley in southeastern Afghanistan, which a number of American field commanders have said was by far the worst place they ever served in.
    Located in the heart of Kunar Province, the desolate Korengal Valley, dubbed the “Valley of Death” or alternatively the “Valley of Fire” by the American troops, does not even appear on most maps of Afghanistan. It is only a flyspeck, only a half mile wide and six miles long, the equivalent of the length of the boardwalk in Atlantic City, New Jersey.
    The valley’s 4,500 inhabitants, known colloquially as Korengalis, are not Pashtuns. Like the Hazaras to the north, the Korengalis are a separate ethnic group who speak their own language and have a distinct culture, reinforced by centuries of self-imposed isolation from the outside world.
    According to Afghan government officials, Korengalis are the Afghan equivalent of hillbillies. They live in a dozen or so impoverished villages set high up on the walls of the valley’s steep and bare mountainsides, eking out a living through subsistence farming and by smuggling timber out of the valley to Pakistan. Intensely clannish, they make no secret of the fact that they dislike outsiders, so much so that even their kinsmen from neighboring valleys know better than to visit.
    The outright hostility of the Korengalis to whichever government happens to be in power in Kabul is legendary. The Soviets never dared enter the valley during their nine-year occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Even the Taliban had the good sense to leave them alone when they ruled Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Since the American invasion, the Korengalis have resisted all attempts by the U.S. Army to bring them into line and refused to accept the legitimacy of Hamid Karzai’s government in Kabul. In short, the Korengalis wanted nothing to do with the outside world. When the U.S. Army established a permanent presence in the Korengal Valley in 2004, many Korengalis joined the Taliban overnight.
    The fierceness of the Korengali resistance to the U.S. military was intense. Many of the American officers and enlisted men who served in the Korengal Valley honestly believed at the beginning of their tours that these illiterate peasants, armed with nothing more sophisticated than their family’s vintage AK-47 assault rifle, would turn tail and run when they came face-to-face with American superiority in numbers and firepower.
    But between 2004 and 2010, six different U.S. Army and Marine Corps battalions tried and failed to quash the Korengali Taliban, despite the fact that they never numbered more than a couple of hundred fighters at any one time. During this six-year period, forty-two American soldiers were killed in the Korengal. To give an idea of the fierceness of the fighting: One U.S. Army unit, the thousand-man 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment, lost eighteen men killed and over one hundred men wounded in the Korengal between June 2008 and