Lions of Kandahar (17 page)

Steve arrived and dove into his kit bag for a compression bandage. Trying to salvage something positive out of the ugly accident, I had the Afghans gather around as Steve, with Victor’s help, gave an impromptu class on how to dress and treat a wound. Steve pushed the open wound together and applied an entire roll of Kerlix and a pressure dressing to the impact site, Victor translating every step. The administration of intravenous fluids followed. When the class was finished, I chastised the ANA openly for being so undisciplined and causing us to lose a valuable soldier with such a stupid mistake.

I walked to the truck, washed my hands, and called Jared. The Afghan had to be evacuated. Jared called it in while my team set up the landing zone. Already short soldiers, losing one to something this unnecessary aggravated me. If the operation was going to work, we needed everyone.

Steve and Riley had the patient ready to move when the call came in over the FM radio.

“Talon 31, this is Mustang 11. Confirm grid and status of LZ,” the pilot said.

“Mustang 11, this is Talon 31. No change to grid. Status is cold. Beware of blackout sand,” I responded.

“Talon 31, roger. Inbound,” the pilot said.

I could see the drab green Black Hawk helicopter on the horizon. It was just a speck, but it was growing bigger by the minute. Someone popped purple smoke. On descent, the helicopter’s blades kicked
up a massive cloud of sand and grit. I ducked my head and covered my eyes. I had no idea how they could see in that mess.

The medevac helicopter stayed just long enough for Dave and Riley to load the Afghan soldier, and then it shot from the desert floor into the sky again, leaving another huge dust cloud. Shinsha walked over and slapped me on the shoulder. He had such a broad smile it made his eyes squint. He didn’t speak, but I got the message. We took care of his soldier. He expected this of me, and I would do nothing to lower his expectation.

Before he left, I told him about the emergency air drop. “We’re low on food and water, so we have to make it last,” I said. “No wasting water. No throwing away food. When it’s gone, we’ll have to go without.”

Shinsha understood and promised to speak to his men.

On my way back to Ole Girl, I ran into Chris, the stocky mechanic from the support company that flew in with the replacement ANA truck. For the last several days, he’d kept our trucks running on duct tape and sheer grit. He repaired leaking hydraulic lines by cutting off the secondary lines and overlaying them on the broken ones. The radiators on a pair of ANA Hilux trucks ran out of water, so he filled them with water, urine, and whatever other liquid was available. To fix one of the trucks with a broken leaf spring and another with a broken steering stabilizer, he used five-thousand-pound nylon ratchet straps, intended for securing cargo, and cinched the parts together tight so that the trucks could keep moving. Whether we could fight with them was another issue.

“Captain, when these trucks get hot again, those straps will melt,” he said. “Then it’s back to the motor pool.”

Jared decided to wait until morning to resume moving. I thought it was a good decision because we were tired and everybody was frustrated with the vehicles and the Afghans. The break allowed tempers to cool.

*  *  *

At first light, we took advantage of the cooler temperatures to make our final push through the desert. The pain from my heat rash was excruciating, and I began to seriously debate riding this last leg with my kit off. My rash was turning into sores. If the sores got infected, I’d need antibiotics and be forced to raid our meager supply, medicine that I knew we might need for more serious injuries. I packed a fresh dip of snuff, closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and swung my body armor on. Pain shot like an electric current down my back and across my shoulders. I tried to control my heart rate and blinked away the tears in my eyes. As soon as the pain passed, I swallowed a half-dozen Tylenol, got on the radio, and called for the convoy to move.

For days, I’d suffered through Dave’s ear-splitting techno music. He’d hooked his iPod up to two Sony speakers on the turret. The enemy threat was low, and the music was great for breaking the monotony. Since he was in the baking sun all day, I’d allowed him to play DJ. But I couldn’t stand his high-octane techno anymore.

“For fuck sake, Dave, do you not have anything else on your iPod?”

“I’ve already been through all five thousand songs. What do you want to listen to?”

I reached back and fished a small Pelican case out of my assault pack. I passed up my old first-generation twenty-gig white iPod, which I’d taken on three rotations and which had survived a roadside bomb blast and several firefights. It was a gift from a family friend. On the back, he’d inscribed, “One does not make friends. One recognizes them.” The iPod had become a sort of good luck charm.

Dave plugged it into the speakers.

“What do you want to listen to?”

I told him to pull down the country road music playlist. The first song couldn’t have been more perfect: the first few bars of “East Bound and Down” by Jerry Reed blared out of the speakers.

THE NOTEBOOK

T
he Kuchi tribesman, with about twenty camels in tow, came over the horizon. As he got close, I could see his weathered face and long black beard. His thin frame was covered in layers of robes, and he had a sizable knife, curled at the end, wedged into his belt.

“This guy looks like an extra from
Raiders of the Lost Ark,
” I cracked.

Smitty called over the radio that through his binoculars he could see several large packs on one of the camels that appeared to be ammunition or mortar rounds. I didn’t see a weapon in the tribesman’s hands, but I knew the desert can play tricks on you. Hell, I had just seen a herd of camels that I took for enemy soldiers.

When the Kuchi saw the long line of trucks, he stopped, dropped his pack, and threw his hands in the air.

“I like this guy already,” Bill said over the radio.

Steve, Smitty, and their terp, Jerry, went to talk with the man. He
told them that his herd was part of a dowry from his bride. Steve and Smitty searched him and then asked to see his cargo. Without hesitation, he pulled out his knife and cut the heavy packs off the camel. The woven cloth bags tumbled to the sand.

Smitty rifled through the packs while Steve watched with his rifle at the ready. The bags were full of scrap metal, mortar fins and munitions casings, which the tribesman said he had collected at the training camp we had found near the mountain about a week’s walk south. His story made sense. There was plenty at that camp to pick up. He smiled when Smitty offered him three bottles of water, glad to drink from our supply rather than his own. While he drank, Smitty took out a notebook and started asking questions. I stood off to the side by my truck.

“Seen anyone around here?” he asked, as Jerry translated.

“Several Hilux trucks.”

“In which direction?”

“From the south, toward Panjwayi,” the Kuchi responded, polishing off the last bottle.

No one innocent would cross this desert on a joy ride. I checked our position on my computer and GPS. We were almost out of the desert. I watched the Kuchi repack his load as we started again toward Panjwayi. Ahead of us, the contour lines on the GPS display converged, indicating more high ground to surmount.

After a few hours, we crested a hill and spotted a small cluster of multicolored tents pitched on a plateau. The Kuchi’s future father-in-law. As we passed, the man greeted us and asked if we had seen his camels. He didn’t seem too interested in the welfare of his future son-in-law.

“Typical father-in-law,” I told Brian.

The plateau fell off into another series of rolling hills. When we at last surmounted the final one, stretching out before us was the lush green Panjwayi Valley. I called Jared to let him know we’d made it out of the desert and were near the drop site. Jared radioed back that
another truck was stuck, so Brian, Dave, and I shut off Ole Girl, shed our gear, and handed out bottles of water like celebratory champagne.

Beyond us flowed a vast ocean of green vegetation. I could see the Dori and Arghandab rivers framing the valley on either side, an intricate network of hundreds of villages crammed with mud huts, grape fields, pathways, trails, and irrigation ditches. For a moment, I imagined how ancient travelers must have felt when they saw the valley after weeks of walking across the desert, but the feeling didn’t last. The battlefield calculus was all too obvious. The Canadians were going to need more troops—a hell of a lot more. This wasn’t a few remote villages. This was an undeveloped city.

“Good thing we don’t have to clear it,” Brian said, reading my mind.

Jared’s truck pulled up next to mine, its radiator hissing, the cooling fan churning at full blast.

“Man, that sure is a sight for sore eyes,” he said.

“Let’s just hope we don’t have to fight in it,” I responded.

Victor hopped off my truck and pulled out several bottles of water and his prayer rug.

“What’s the water for, Victor?” I asked.

“It is time for me to pray,” he said.

We were close to the drop zone, but still short on supplies, which we’d been rationing for a day. I wasn’t taking any chances until the pallets of food and water arrived.

“You can either drink that water or wash your feet with it,” I said. “I don’t care, but that’s all the water we have left to share with you. Your choice.”

He thought for a second and put two of the bottles back in the truck. Dave looked down from the turret and smiled. “Maybe he’s a fast learner, Captain.”

“We’ll see.”

Jared met with the commanders and we all agreed to wait until
dark to approach the resupply site, so that we wouldn’t compromise it. I spent part of the afternoon going over my gear. I had two pairs of socks and two T-shirts. My skin was raw because of the heat rash. I soaked an expensive Under Armour T-shirt in water and washed my chest and feet. My civilian boots were holding up, and it helped that they were a size too big. In this heat, my feet swelled badly. Army desert boots have a piece of leather that cuts across the top of your feet—and, when they swell, digs into them and cuts off circulation to your toes. You can’t cram a soldier into boots and equipment made by the lowest bidder and mass produced for every soldier. It doesn’t work that way and never has. That’s why most special operations soldiers wear civilian hiking boots. It isn’t because they look cool. It’s because they work.

I grew up in the infantry and still remember the Ranger instructor’s words of wisdom: “Listen up, girls, there are two things you will take care of as a grunt or you will not last long on the battlefield: your rifle and your feet. In that order.” I put on fresh socks and slid my boots back on. They were tight, really tight.

Team 26 had volunteered to lead the way toward the valley and we got under way as the sun was setting. As Hodge turned the convoy off the ridgeline and into the riverbed, the temperature dropped at least twenty degrees, and we were soon soaked by the light spray thrown up by the tires and the water sloshing over the floorboards of the truck.

The convoy churned along in the shallow river for about a mile, until we converged on the drop point programmed into our computer maps. For once the map of the area basically reflected the actual ground. Our homework had paid off; the site was perfect. A large sandy drop zone was surrounded by a ridgeline that we could set up on, and that provided some concealment for the vehicles and a commanding view for miles. Bill set up sectors of fire that I plotted on a laminated tablet, later adding the Afghan positions that Shinsha showed me. The sector sketch was basically a diagram of the position
and showed the machine guns’ interlocking sectors of fire in the event a fight broke out.

With the area secured, we set up signals for the pilots. A night air drop could be more dangerous than a firefight. Once those pallets slid out of the aircraft, the only thing controlling them was weight, wind, forward throw, and gravity. One mistake and thousands of pounds of water and ammunition might land on our heads.

With the sun now gone and still several hours until the aircraft arrived, we decided that the ANA could go down to the river in groups of ten men at a time. The first five would bathe while the others secured the area. When the first group finished, they would switch. We needed to wash, too, and the medics—Steve, Riley, and Greg—talked about it, consulting cards they carried in their uniform pockets and checking the amount and types of medicines on hand. The river was full of microorganisms and bacteria.

Finally, Greg gave us the thumbs-up.

“Do it, but you have to dry your clothes in the sun to kill any remaining bacteria,” Greg said. Riley added that we could soak the clothing in alcohol to kill most of the creepy crawlies if we had to move before it was light. I agreed to their recommendation and Bill sent the guys down to the river a couple at a time.