Lions of Kandahar (12 page)

When Dave was finished with the trucks, the plates and excess parts were piled in a heap in the motor pool. He’d managed to remove hundreds of pounds of armor that would have bogged us down in the sand as well as burned excessive fuel. Now we could meet our scheduled resupplies. It made me a little nervous to see even the smallest piece of protection lying in the dust, but we had no choice. We needed the trucks and the guns they carried into the fight more than the little bit of armor we were leaving behind.

That night, we lay in the hut drenched in sweat, wide awake. After a while, Bill started quizzing us about the mission.

“Greg, what’s the distance from the entry point to the exit point of the desert?”

“Two hundred seventy-five, two hundred eighty-five kilometers.”

“Steve, how far to the first turn off of Highway 4?”

Silence for several seconds, then Steve said, “Did you forget already, Bill?”

The hut erupted with laughter. I tried to hold back, but couldn’t. The tension broken, Bill continued to question the team until a few drifted off to sleep.

Bill and I remained awake.

“What do you think?” I asked.

Bill sighed. “I don’t like it, any of it. There are too many things that can go wrong. ISAF will get mauled in their armored vehicles because they can’t maneuver. There’s too much cover and concealment for the enemy in an urban fight.”

Bill had fought in Iraq and knew urban combat very well.

“Okay, sir, check this out,” he went on. “The intelligence said that there were probably four hundred Taliban fighters in that valley, right? Intelligence is close, but never spot on. What if there are more? Four hundred fighters, that’s a lot, and I mean a lot, of people trying to kill you. We will have to be on our A game for this. Besides, what if we run into a fight way out there in the middle of that godforsaken desert? No cover. We could keep the Taliban at bay for a while with our heavy machine guns and grenade launchers. But we can’t move at night. The Afghans don’t have night vision. If we move during the day, we’ll slow-roast in those vehicles and be exhausted by nightfall, losing our edge.”

He wasn’t even convinced that we’d stay in our blocking positions.

“I’ll bet you a case of beer the Canadians get into trouble and we have to go in there to help. The boys will be exhausted by the time the fight starts and when it starts, it will go on for a while. I mean
weeks,” he said. “ISAF is not planning on taking enough dismounted infantry to clear that huge valley. Somebody is gonna have to do it. Who do you think is gonna get volunteered?”

I dredged up the old adage, “There is a Thai proverb that goes like this: How do you eat an elephant?” I asked Bill.

“How the hell would I know?” Bill said. “I wouldn’t eat that nasty thing.”

“One bite at a time,” I said, smiling. We both laughed and got about an hour’s worth of sleep.

The whole hut rattled when the guard pounded on the door. Bill shot straight up. “Get up,” he bellowed. “The sooner we get this started, the sooner it will be over.”

Then he cut on the overhead lights, blinding everyone in the room. I felt for my boots and we all shook off the grogginess. Most of us headed to the chow hall to grab some Red Bull energy drinks or coffee. I found Bolduc and Jared pacing around the assembly area, talking.

With caffeine under their belts, the team started to check their equipment again. I went over to the ANA huts to wake them up so they would have time to make some chai and get ready to leave. But by the time I got there, the Afghans were up and moving and the chai kettles were on the blue, red, and gold propane tanks.

Shinsha was expecting me. I wished now that I hadn’t had that Red Bull, because I knew I was going to end up drinking a whole pot of tea with him.

He shooed his men away and we sat down on the cheap woven mats and each filled our right hand with doughy bread. You always eat and shake hands with your right hand, because in a culture mostly devoid of toilet paper, you can guess what they have to do with their left.

“I want you to make some words for the soldiers before we leave,”
he said. “Some are scared and I cannot convince them of our success. I am afraid they will leave when the fighting starts and go back to their villages.”

“No problemo, amigo,” I said.

He looked perplexed.

I grinned. “I would be honored. But we need to get going.” I needed to get back to the team, but I’d make sure to talk to the Afghans before we left.

As I rounded the corner building, I could hear the Special Forces gun trucks warming up. ANA trucks were arriving and taking their places in the convoy line. The ANA were almost never on time or prepared, but this time was different. This was their mission and their fight.

Hodge’s team would be leading the operation to the Red Desert, and I felt very comfortable with that. I said good morning to some of his men, who seemed a lot like mine. When I reached my team, I got the word that Bolduc wanted to say a few parting words. There was the usual groaning, but if it made him happy, so be it. We gathered around.

“Gentlemen, tonight you embark on one of the most important missions ever in the War on Terror and in support of the government of Afghanistan,” Bolduc said. “Let me be clear. If we fail, Kandahar could fall in several months, so there is no pressure.”

That brought smiles from the group.

“You are well prepared for this. Remember who you are, where you are from, and why we are here. God be with you.”

I remember trying to let it sink in. I remember thinking these men were some of our country’s greatest heroes and I got to serve with them. I looked around trying to memorize faces, because in a few days some of these men might not be with us.

When Bolduc finished, I needed a minute alone. I told Bill to gather the team and the ANA at my vehicle and walked to the hut. There was no one inside. I got down on my knees, folded my hands,
and prayed. I prayed for the safety of my men, and for the guidance to make the right decisions, and for strength. I prayed for my family and the families of my men. I prayed for the United States and for victory. It was what I always did, but this time I prayed harder. I had a bad feeling. Something told me nothing would go as planned.

When I got to my truck, the Afghans seemed apprehensive. I gathered everybody close.

“My brothers,” I said, “tonight we depart on a mission to destroy the Taliban. It will be difficult. The mission will be dangerous. You have fought with me in the past. You know we will not leave your side until death. Think about how you feel right now. I would rather die on the battlefield today, as a free man, knowing when I went before God that I did all that I could for my people, than die many years from now, old in my bed and living under the foot of a tyrant. We are the Lions of Kandahar!”

By the end of my speech, the Afghans were excited, and I hoped no one would fire his weapon in the air. They stood straight, proud. Ali Hussein pumped his fist. He got it. We broke the huddle, and the Afghans returned to their trucks, ready to go. Even Shinsha looked taller.

Dozens of soldiers came out of the darkness to wish us luck. Each handshake and slap on the back had an air of finality. We wouldn’t admit it, but it was a last good-bye between brothers and friends. Finally, Jared called the TOC and requested permission to leave. Bolduc’s steady voice crackled over the radio.

“Talon 30, this is Eagle 6 actual, permission granted, Godspeed.”

RAT LINES

W
e had traveled no more than a mile off the main road when a series of infrared flashes up ahead brought the convoy to a halt. Something was up. Scanning with my night-vision goggles, I saw several Special Forces soldiers jump out of their trucks. The rest of us waited and watched. The snowy images wearing helmets and body armor moved forward, hunched over with weapons at the ready. They communicated only with hand signals. It was cool to watch, even for me. Finally, after several minutes, the all clear was given. They had rounded a blind turn and discovered a bunkered fighting position with a heavy machine-gun mount inside. Fortunately, it was unmanned.

The ride so far had been uneventful. The convoy had slowly pulled out of Kandahar Airfield and headed toward Pakistan, hoping to keep the Taliban, with its prying eyes, guessing. Only every third truck had its lights on. As soon as we got to Highway 4, which runs east toward the border, we split into three separate, smaller groups, keeping enough distance between us so that anyone observing
wouldn’t suspect a large force. The lights on our gun trucks were disguised with tape or disabled to make the vehicles look like civilian vehicles from a distance.

The paved highway proved to be the last luxury of the mission. After a while, we dipped into a dried riverbed that took us deep into “Indian country.” The lights from a far-off jingle truck peeked from behind a bend. We watched it appear and disappear regularly as it picked its way through the deep, craggy wadis. After the truck was gone, there was nothing. No compounds, no buildings, no signs of life, only endless dirt roads and fields.

As we climbed up the hills, our lead element reported that the jingle truck we’d observed earlier had disappeared into the ten-foot-tall crop fields. Marijuana. We had stumbled upon hundreds of acres of marijuana. This was as dangerous as being in Taliban-held territory. The drug smugglers had no loyalty to either side and hated both for disrupting their business. The reason for the odd placement of the machine-gun nest was now obvious. Normally, we would have destroyed the bunker. Shinsha wanted the machine-gun mount, but he understood when I explained to him that to preserve the secrecy of the operation we would leave everything in place. We didn’t need any eyebrows raised. We called the TOC and reported the location of the bunker. If any coalition force was attacked in this area, the U.S. Air Force would ensure the lethal nest was given proper attention.

On a ridgeline, we took a break and allowed all three groups to link up. We watched and waited to make sure the enemy wasn’t onto us before pushing up a steep, winding road. It was treacherous and narrow and definitely never meant for broad, heavy vehicles. I remember thinking that Dave’s jettisoning of the armor had probably worked out for the best. Now we just had to pray we didn’t hit a mine. The Russians emplaced more than ten million mines during their decade-long duel with the mujahideen. They left another three million during their hasty departure. I didn’t think of them as a likely threat now because we were in the middle of the Taliban’s infiltration
routes—which we called rat lines—from Pakistan, and they would have been cleared. But mines would definitely be a concern in Panjwayi.

We traveled through the remainder of the night and into the morning. At dawn, Afghanistan offered up its real beauty—the sunrise. Even in this forsaken place, seeing the flaming red sun break over the dark blue mountains was beautiful. The fingers of sunlight spilled over the horizon, reminding me of the power of light. Some bacteria, when exposed, die. Too bad we couldn’t just shed light on the Taliban and be done with them.

As the sun crept higher in the sky, it illuminated the lushness of the bushes and crops. Caramel-colored ribbons of water cut through the middle of the terrain. Most of it came from natural springs farther north in the mountains. For the five years before the U.S. invasion in 2001, Afghanistan had been in a severe drought. But soon after we arrived, it rained, a lot. Record amounts. Call it divine intervention or climate change. The fact was, when we got to Afghanistan, so did the rain, and it became a bargaining chip we used to meet with local leaders and village elders—they believed we brought the rain with us. It gave us a chance to build the relationships that we then used to root out the Taliban. It also partially revived agriculture near Kandahar, Afghanistan’s breadbasket. Based on the size of the marijuana fields, things had continued to improve.

We drove on through the morning. That afternoon, we finally stopped on a hilltop to let the overheating ANA Ford Ranger pickups cool down. They weren’t designed to take the beating that rocky landscape dished out. Barely existent roads—sometimes just a set of tire tracks in the dirt—wove like drunks through wadis and around hills. It also didn’t help that the Afghans drove the trucks like rental cars with no care for their condition. These occasional stops allowed Hodge, Jared, and me to reconfirm the route and adjust our timeline, but they also made it impossible for us to hold our schedule. We were still miles from the desert, which would be even more unforgiving.
To make up the time, we flirted with changing our movement intervals to the early morning hours and late evening, when the heat wasn’t as bad. The team members had been rotating who took turret position in each vehicle, which was nothing more than a miserable slow roasting. Our only fear was that driving these roads in the dark would lead to a broken truck.

In the end, we got the same result in full daylight. A couple hours after our last stop, the call came over the radio that an ANA truck had died. It went down next to a riverbank, as its overheated motor seized up. Walking over to Jared’s truck, all I could do was shake my head. Jared looked frustrated.