Photos: The Soldiers Who Still Patrol

First Platoon of Company C, 2nd Battalion, 502nd Infantry Regiment is a rarity in Afghanistan, one of the last conventional U.S. units still hunting for insurgents. Michael M. Phillips/The Wall Street Journal

World War II ended in victory parades. Korea ended in stalemate. The Vietnam War ended in controversy, neatly captured in 1971 by veteran John Kerry (now secretary of state) when he posed the rhetorical question: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

The coming end of conventional combat operations in Afghanistan, after 13 years of fighting, doesn't resemble any of these models. Fought by an all-volunteer military, the war still draws young men who want to test themselves in combat, led by men who have already seen more than they sometimes care to remember.


Of the 30 men in 1st Platoon, eight are hardened veterans with previous experience here or in Iraq. The remaining 22 are rookies who have never been to war and consider themselves lucky to have made it in time.

Sgt. 1st Class William Duffy, one of the old hands, tries to damp the rookies' enthusiasm for combat by reminding them that war only seems like a lark when nobody gets hurt. "There are a lot of my friends who aren't here anymore," said the 38-year-old Pittsburgh native.

The U.S. and its allies have closed, bulldozed or handed off to the Afghans all but about 70 of the 852 bases and outposts they held at the war's peak. American troops now number roughly 30,000, down from a high of 100,000. President Barack Obama has announced that he intends to leave 9,800 in the country after the end of the year, if the incoming Afghan president agrees.

U.S. casualties have fallen dramatically as Afghan government forces have taken over the bulk of the fighting. In 2010, 499 Americans were killed in Afghanistan, the largest single-year toll of the war. So far this year fewer than 40 have died here. (Total U.S. deaths in Afghanistan since 2001 number more than 2,300.)

Still, Afghanistan remains an unpredictable and dangerous place for international forces—a fact reinforced this week when an Afghan soldier opened fire at a military school in Kabul, killing U.S. Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene, 55, of Schenectady, N.Y. He is now the highest-ranking American fatality of the war. The attacker wounded more than a dozen other Afghan and allied officers.

Today, most U.S. conventional troops stay on relatively secure bases and do little fighting. On an average day, allied forces conduct just two dozen patrols, compared with hundreds of daily missions during the troop surge ordered up by Mr. Obama between 2010 and 2012.

But U.S. commandos are still in the field, seeking out the enemy, and they are among those who would remain behind after 2014.

Patrolling from Bagram Airfield, the largest U.S. base in eastern Afghanistan, heightens the bizarreness of 1st Platoon's war. Bagram provides a disconcerting combination of wartime military readiness and the rigidity of the peacetime military.

The men live in new cream-colored, two-story barracks with open bays and bunk beds. Outdoors, they are required to wear yellow reflective safety belts even during the day. They attend personal-growth counseling sessions. They line up for height-and-weight measurements to determine whether they meet Army guidelines for body-mass index. Saluting is mandatory; the sidewalks are a parade of hands snapping to foreheads.

"Here on Bagram you have to go out on mission and then come back to garrison and a completely different mind-set," Sgt. Duffy said during lunch at a mess hall, where onion rings come with the schoolmarmish warning that they are a "low-performance food."

The rookies are eager to be seen on base wearing a Combat Infantryman Badge, the award—with a framed musket overlaid on a wreath—that is given to grunts after their first encounter with enemy fire. "If I get it, that's awesome," said Spc. Michael Townshend, a 24-year-old former high-school baseball star from Turtle Town, Tenn. ("We've got some big-ass turtles there," he explained.)

First Lt. Joe Payne, the commander of 1st Platoon, tells his men how he showed up at Fort Campbell, Ky., new to command and, like them, itching for a taste of combat. One staff sergeant—junior to the lieutenant in rank but with a Combat Infantryman Badge on his chest—sat the young officer down and gently scolded him.

"If I could trade this in to get some of my guys back, I wouldn't hesitate for a second," Lt. Payne remembers the sergeant saying.

Now Lt. Payne, 24, from Rapid City, Mich., passes on that wisdom to his men. "I'd rather bring you all home," he tells them.

Young soldiers, though, believe that death is something that happens to someone else.

Sgt. Joe Hayes spent three years as a member of the Old Guard, the Army unit that conducts military funerals at Arlington National Cemetery. He estimates that he participated in 600 burials, lining up in his dress uniform to fire ceremonial volleys saluting the dead.

At funeral after funeral, he couldn't dodge the thought that he should have been one of those shooting live ammunition in Afghanistan, not blanks in Virginia. "I joined the Army because I wanted to fight," he said.

Sgt. Hayes, 24, from Rochester, Minn., re-enlisted so that he could transfer to the 101st Airborne, gambling that the storied division would deploy to Afghanistan before the war ended. His bet paid off with a tour patrolling outside of Bagram.

"Three years ago, I was one of the guys sticking the flags in the ground," he said. "Now I'm here."

During the first four months of his combat tour, Spc. Uriel Palma manned a desk at Bagram, a base so safe that it has a Pizza Hut, delivering mail and processing awards for the soldiers who actually went out beyond the perimeter wire. Spc. Palma had been in a hurry to join the military; he enlisted two weeks after graduating from high school in Ocala, Fla. Now he was in Afghanistan, watching the chances dwindle that his war would ever feel like a real war.

"They won't let me go out," groused the 21-year-old.

Spc. Palma's boss finally gave in to months of pleading, after the clerk trained another soldier to deliver the mail should he be wounded or killed.

Early one morning in May, Spc. Palma joined the other soldiers in the parking lot outside their barracks to listen to Lt. Payne lay out the mission: Hunting for the insurgents who lob rockets into Bagram.

Two or three times a month, Taliban fighters place yard-long rockets into firing positions in the villages and fields outside the walls of the base. They lean them against grape vines or prop them up on rocks. They often trigger the rockets using lighted cigarettes or incense sticks that burn down like roadrunner-and-coyote fuses.

If the insurgents time it right, as they did during the kickoff to the official fighting season in May, a dozen rockets might pelt the base in rapid sequence long after the insurgents have fled the scene. (A similar attack at Kabul International Airport's military wing on July 3 destroyed President Hamid Karzai's helicopter on the tarmac; Mr. Karzai wasn't aboard at the time.)

First Platoon's job, the lieutenant explained, was to chase the Taliban away from their favorite villages and force them to use less reliable launch sites. "We know they have rockets," Lt. Payne told the men. "We know they're going to fire them."

Lt. Payne, who attended Villanova University, plans to get an M.B.A. when he leaves the military. But he's in no hurry. Not many of his friends, he said, can say they led men on patrols through Afghan villages. When he attends the captains' career course at Fort Benning in 2016, he expects he'll be one of the few young officers wearing a 101st Airborne patch on his right sleeve, signaling that he was in combat with the Screaming Eagles.

At 8 a.m., the platoon walked out of the Bagram gate and into irrigated fields and small clusters of houses surrounded by mud-brick walls. "This is their first rendezvous with destiny," said Sgt. Duffy.

The sergeant met his wife when he was in eighth grade and she was in 10th. She won his heart by standing up to the older football players who were picking on him. They have five children and two grandchildren.

This is his second stint with the Army. He joined in 1993 and then spent seven years as a civilian. He went back in to go to war and is on his third combat tour. He could have attended the elite Ranger school instead. But he turned it down to return to Afghanistan and take care of the new guys.

Moving methodically through villages, the soldiers chatted up local grandees and offered to help build a real school to replace the shredded tent classrooms donated long ago by the Japanese government and the Seventh-day Adventists. They needled farmers for information about Taliban rocketeers. The platoon medic bandaged an Afghan soldier's injured foot, which was weeping pus into his sandal.

One farmer, carrying a shovel, approached the patrol in an aggrieved huff. "A helicopter landed in my fields and crushed my wheat when your president came to visit," he complained.

Sgt. Duffy remembered the landing. The platoon had been airlifted into the villages to discourage rocket attacks while Mr. Obama visited the troops at Bagram in May. The sergeant promised to help the man file for compensation.

While the rest of the platoon took a break, Staff Sgt. Pablo Caraballo sent Spc. Palma and a handful of others on a 90-minute side patrol. "It's your first time out—I'm not going to work you too hard," Sgt. Caraballo told Spc. Palma.

The men took up firing positions behind a crumbling mud wall. A few rookies earned a stern word from their sergeant by placing themselves on the wrong side of the barrier, more akin to lining up for a firing squad than taking cover from a barrage of gunfire.

The weather shuffled rapidly from searing sun to blinding dust storms to gushing rain and back again.

Slumped against a wall during a moment of intense heat, Sgt. Chris Philippi, a 31-year-old forward artillery observer from Lacey, Wash., joked with Spc. Palma, implicitly welcoming him to the club of real infantrymen.

"You know what would be awesome?" said Sgt. Philippi, who already had two Iraq tours under his belt. "If they took everyone at Bagram sitting behind a desk and took them on a foot patrol."

During a downpour, Spc. Palma stood guard in the ruins of a sprawling mud compound.

The patrol ended on a sour note when local farmers grew alarmed by the news that the big olive-drab transport helicopters that were to carry the soldiers back to Bagram were going to land in the middle of planted wheat fields.

The Afghans refused to vacate the landing zone, unpersuaded by promises of future compensation.

Finally the soldiers asked attack helicopters to buzz the fields and release star-bright flares in the hope that a show of force would convince the farmers to disperse.

It worked, and, 12 hours after leaving Bagram, the soldiers ran through the darkened field to the helicopters, whose spinning blades bent wheat sideways to the ground.

Nobody earned a Combat Infantryman Badge. Nobody got hurt.

Said Spc. Palma: "I wish I could have gotten here a couple of years earlier."

A few weeks later, a suicide bomber on a motorbike blew himself up outside a clinic in a village outside of Bagram. The blast killed at least 10 Afghan civilians, two policemen and five Czech soldiers who had been patrolling that side of the base.