Lions of Kandahar (16 page)

Jared sent David’s team to the south side of the mountain and I took my team north. The plan was to recon the area and meet on the opposite side. Along the way, we’d watch for fighters and make note of any possible cache locations, fighting positions, or areas the Taliban used as observation points. But we weren’t planning to get close enough to wind up in a fight.

A path in the sand led to the mountain, passing about a dozen compounds along the way. Shinsha agreed to send an ANA squad into one of the compounds. We covered them from the trucks as they quickly moved in. We could see fresh signs of life—water jugs, trucks, clothing, and even dogs. But the compounds were missing
one thing: people. No children came running out for candy. It was lifeless and eerie.

After several minutes, the first Afghan soldier came back out. He shrugged his shoulders and looked confused. The squad leader came to my truck and described the inside. The place looked lived in, he said, with sleeping mats on the ground and dirty pots and dishes, but no people. Shinsha ordered his men into another compound. Same story.

I didn’t want to waste any more time, so we loaded up the troops and headed north. As we passed the compounds, the Taliban began transmitting again. Taliban checkpoint 17 was losing sight of us and checkpoint 18 had picked us up. We followed the path into a lazy right turn that ended in a twenty-foot sand berm. It looked as if the desert ran straight into the mountain, the dust collecting up against its base. The trucks groaned as we forced them up between the berm and the rock ledge of the mountain. Slowly we climbed like a ship up a huge ocean wave until we finally crested the berm and half drove, half surfed down the other side.

As soon as the last truck got over the berm, the Taliban chatter reached a fever pitch.
“Allah akbar! Allah akbar!”
crackled out of the radio’s speaker. Victor, my terp, said the Taliban were setting up an ambush down the craggy rock trail. I stopped the convoy. It was time to recalculate the risk. We had not come to get caught up in a firefight. The cliffs around us were so steep we couldn’t raise our machine guns high enough to return fire and so narrow that we’d be traveling in one line like ducks in a row, easy prey for a well-coordinated ambush. We turned around and skirted the berm again. Now heading south, I focused on several large, flat rock faces with dozens of impact marks.

“Hold up, Brian. Bill, do you see that?” I asked over the radio.

“Sure do, about one hundred meters up from the desert floor,” he said.

“Correct. Now, look around.”

The ground was scattered with brass casings from weapons and plastic booster containers for RPGs. I called Jared.

“Sir, I don’t know what you have up there but we have just discovered a Taliban training camp. We could not continue because there was significant chatter and the terrain was too restrictive. The compounds we saw on the way in were housing and we just now found the weapons range.”

Brian hit the accelerator and I took down a ten-digit GPS grid coordinate. Jared’s response came back seconds later and didn’t need repeating.

“Get out of there now.”

We hit the accelerators and raced back to the convoy. My truck came to a rolling stop next to Jared’s and I jumped out with my map. Spreading it out on his truck’s hood, I showed him the camp. He took the dog bone—our nickname for the similarly shaped radio handset—and reported our findings to Kandahar.

In four days, we’d run across a remote training camp, been ambushed at a river crossing, found an infiltration site used by soldiers coming across the border, and gotten a line on supply routes between Iran and Pakistan. I caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Ali raising his eyebrows when I told Jared about the camp. That summed it up for me. We were smack dab in the middle of the Taliban’s superhighway into Panjwayi.

Jared finished on the radio and gave us the sign to move out. I watched as the team climbed into the trucks. The heat waves rolled freely across the horizon, causing even the most physically fit to slump. Everyone had heat rash on their shoulders and backs—our skin, soaked in sweat, rubbed against our body armor and became inflamed. Our pores were clogged with salt, oil, and dirt. Dragging my body armor on and off felt like having glass ground into my skin. I gritted my teeth and threw my armor over one shoulder and then the other.

Slumping into my seat, I looked back and watched Victor hop out,
spread his prayer rug by the rear tire, and, using a bottle of water, quickly rinse off his hands.

“Come on, it’s time to go,” Dave said from the turret.

“It is my duty to pray. You can wait,” Victor said, pulling off his vest.

“We are getting ready to move and move means move. We’ll give you time to pray when we make the next stop,” Dave said sharply, growing weary of the lackadaisical attitude from the team’s new employee.

Victor said nothing. In his early twenties, he was stocky for an Afghan from the predominant Pashtun tribe, with only scruff for a beard, which he nevertheless cultivated because it made him feel manly. He walked away from the truck and began to unlace his boots.

Our former interpreters had been killed during Shef’s rotation. Victor and the other interpreters were vetted by a contracting company. Once approved, they were randomly assigned to teams. The good ones, like my old interpreters, became part of the team. The bad ones bounced from one unit to another. Victor got bounced to us when we arrived.

Victor had shown little interest in praying five times a day up to this point, so it was obviously a ploy. He wanted a break. I was also afraid the other terps would see him and want to take a break too. But Victor knew he had us over a barrel. How would it look to the Afghan soldiers if we threw him into the back of the truck instead of letting him pray? I told Dave to relax and traded the unscheduled break for future rapport.

For the next few minutes, I watched as Victor faced the Ka’ba shrine in Mecca and alternated between standing ramrod straight behind his rug and prostrating himself, knees, forehead, nose, and palms to ground, praying to Allah.

After about ten minutes, he finished. He took his time putting his gear back on and rolling up his rug. I followed as he walked back to the bed of the truck, where he was now starting to pull out an MRE.
Rapport was one thing, but his actions were now on the verge of jeopardizing the mission. We had a deadline to make. It was time for a lesson in unconventional warfare.

“What’s up, man?” I asked, shooting him my best smile.

“I will now eat,” he said.

“Okay, no problem,” I said, managing to maintain my equanimity. “Would you like some water?”

“Yes,” he said, warming to my newfound interest in his welfare.

I started digging in the back of the truck for a bottle of water. I could feel Dave’s eyes on me from the turret.

“Hey, Captain, we got to go,” he said through clenched teeth.

Victor opened the MRE and began to sift through the package, complaining about the selection. “This isn’t a halal ration. Captain, I’d like another,” he said, taking the water from my hand.

I pulled out my pocketknife and, with a metallic click, opened it and thrust it into the bottom of the bottle. The warm clear water ran out onto his hand and the desert floor. Victor looked at me, confused.

“Captain, why did you do that?” he asked.

“It’s at least a week’s walk out of here from this point,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “Unless you want to start now without food or water you should get on the truck.”

To reinforce my point, I slapped the MRE out of his hand. I wasn’t going to be tested or questioned by anyone on the team, ever. My tolerance for bullshit was zero. “Get on the fucking truck now before I lose my temper,” I barked.

I had dealt with enough drama for one day. Victor wiped his hands on his shirt, put on his ammo vest, and got in the back without saying a word. He had learned a valuable lesson the hard way. From then on, we’d ask nicely once. The second time brought consequences.

“Let’s go,” I said into the radio.

Ole Girl’s engine roared as she crested a thirty-foot sand dune and
started down the back side. From the top of the dune, I could see hundreds more, looking like sets of waves coming ashore. The GMVs easily crested the dunes, but the ANA Hilux trucks had problems. A few miles into the desert, the first call came over the radio that a Hilux was stuck. Jared and the others helped dig the truck out. Grabbing the Afghan drivers, we told them to lower the tire pressure for more traction. We also had them put the trucks in four-wheel drive or low. They all nodded in agreement, but as we pushed on it was obvious that they still weren’t understanding the basic dynamics of this kind of driving.

One of the most austere environments in the world, the Registan is, for the most part, a sandy desert shot through with ridges and small, isolated hills of red sand as far as the eye can see. The sand ridges and dunes, reaching heights of between fifty and one hundred feet, alternate with windblown, sand-covered plains, devoid of vegetation and changing in some parts into barren gravel and clay. It looked like Mars.

Our progress ground to a near halt. It was like driving in rush-hour traffic in hell. The waves of heat shimmered off the dunes. We sat in pools of sweat. The heat rash on our backs and shoulders burned. I felt like a cookie slowly baking in the oven.

When the radio crackled again about another stuck truck, Dave screamed in frustration and grabbed the machine gun in a rage, shaking it violently. After a few seconds, he stopped, then leaned down from the turret, smiling calmly. “I am much better,” he said in a pretty good British accent for a guy from Ohio.

At sunset, my truck got stuck climbing up a massive dune. The wheels started to sink. Brian dropped the truck into four-wheel low and gently pressed the brakes, trying to get the non-power-side tires to catch. No luck. I got out of the truck, shrugged my shoulders, and took a bow. The ANA roared with laughter. Finally, the big, bad Americans had gotten one of their trucks stuck, and they could take
a break as they watched us dig it out. I looked at it as an opportunity. We had pushed them so hard and for so long that I figured this negative could be a positive. It was a way to humanize us.

That evening I boiled a pot of tea for the ANA. I’d picked up the strong black tea in the bazaar for just such an occasion. Grabbing the pot and a few glasses, I headed for Shinsha’s truck. I poured tea for him and some of his men. They graciously accepted it, but I could tell it shocked them. Afghan commanders never make tea for their soldiers. But I figured that this pot would ensure that when an Afghan truck got stuck it wouldn’t stay that way for long. We sat on the matted rugs in the desert and watched as the sun retired while passing handfuls of stiff unleavened bread among ourselves. I had two cups of chai and retired for the night.

I unrolled the drab green sleeping pad and removed my shirt and boots. I always slept in Teva sandals because I could fight in them and my boots and feet could dry. Ranger school preaches taking care of your feet, so I poured a bottle of water over mine to clean them. I took another bottle of water and tried to clean the grime, salt, and sweat out of my shirt, finally hanging it on my truck, where in this heat it would dry in just a few minutes. I finally laid my head down on my inflatable pillow. My wife had bought it for me, and I thanked God for the day she married me. I said my prayers and drifted off to sleep.

In what seemed like seconds, I felt a tug on my foot. Time to move. I packed up my mat, threw on my now dry shirt, and was almost ready to go when Bill and Smitty cornered me, looking grave.

“We have plenty of food but water is going quickly,” Bill said, looking at a list of supplies in his log book. “We’re going through a gallon or more of water a day per man.”

“Captain, we need to get resupply in forty-eight hours. If not, we’ll be in the hurt locker,” Smitty said.

We marched over to Jared and filled him in on the problem. Studying
the map and tracing our route into Panjwayi, we finally agreed to head for a bit of flat desert where a cargo plane could drop us pallets of water. Jude rigged up the satellite antenna so Jared could send up the supply request.

Hodge’s team took the lead, and my team fell back to the end of the convoy. By the time the morning sun broke the horizon, we had hit a relatively flat plain and I estimated that by the end of the day we would cover more than fifty miles. Then I saw the hulking sand dunes in the distance. The highest dune looked like a man hunched over with his arms stretched over the horizon.

“You get a feeling the dunes are trying to keep us out?” Brian asked me.

“Seems like it,” I said as Hodge came over the radio.

“Talon 30, this is Talon 26. We have to find a way around these dunes. Some of them are six stories high.”

Jared ordered us to stop and do some navigation.

Throwing my kit in the front seat, I jumped out of the truck and stretched my legs. Suddenly, I heard the crack from an AK-47, which sent me diving into the scalding-hot sand.

“Get back in the truck, Captain,” Dave yelled, as he sank immediately into the turret, grabbing his .50-cal machine gun and spinning quickly toward the direction the sound came from.

I did my best football scramble, pumping my legs as fast as they would go. Seconds later, the call came over the radio. We had a wounded Afghan soldier. I grabbed the first aid bag from behind the driver’s seat and dashed to the ANA trucks behind us, where an Afghan soldier stoically cradled his hand. I saw pencil-thin streaks of blood splattered on the truck and all over the soldier’s uniform and face, and I knew immediately what had happened. We had warned the ANA time and time again about putting their hands over the end of their AK-47 rifles. The weapon has a uniquely unsafe safety catch, and if left on fire, the rifle will discharge with very little pressure on the trigger.

I grabbed the Afghan’s wrist as crimson blood ran down his arm and covered my hand. Despite having just turned his right hand into hamburger, he didn’t yell or flail around. The bullet had splayed his hand open between the index and third fingers, with the wound stretching from his wrist to the top of his palm and the two fingers hanging loosely on silky white threads of tendon. I gripped his wrist tightly and placed my thumb and fingers against the radial and ulnar arteries to reduce the blood flow.