Lions of Kandahar (19 page)

An old man with thick glasses, a gray turban, and a cane came out and looked me square in the eye. I greeted him and asked him as a
mesher
, or senior, to please sit. He smiled. I knew he was not a combatant or an enemy. There was no sustained eye contact, scowling, head hanging, cursing. Instead, he looked at me and my long gray-and-white beard, which he slowly reached out and touched, his hand shaky.

“You. I have seen you before,” he said.

I helped him slowly sit down on a bench near the market’s door. His smile grew to chuckling, his chuckles to laughter. I was not in the mood for humor and told the interpreter to ask him what the joke was.

The old man, who turned out to be the shop owner, pointed an arthritic finger at me and continued to laugh as he said, “I know who you are, gray one. You are of the long beards.
Amerkaianu Mushakas Kawatuna.
” American Special Forces.

He then pointed his crooked finger at the men lined up in front of the store.

“These Talib boys will not run like wild animals while you are here.” He laughed in a low, vindictive tone. “You have much work to do here, gray one. Many Talibs have returned with their Arab friends.”

In my full kit with weapons and assault pack, I weighed nearly three hundred pounds, but right then, you could have knocked me over with a feather. I nodded respectfully and took out my notepad. Bill stuck his head around the corner of the doorway of the store and said that he, Riley, Smitty, and the others were going to start their search. I nodded and returned to my notebook. I wanted to capture every word. What the old man told me about the current situation, the enemy, and the attitude of the local population surpassed two weeks’ worth of intelligence work.

The heat of the day was sucking the life out of everyone, and it was obvious that the Talibs were getting thirsty. I went to my truck and pulled a bottle of water out and handed it to the old man. An ANA soldier squatted by him and wiped his brow. Afghans have a great admiration for their elders. They appreciated the fact that I showed him respect.

The PUCs had been separated from one another so they could not communicate, and the ANA were more than happy to begin questioning. The teenage boys were the first to get the ANA’s full attention. They were the youngest, least trained, and would usually be the first to provide useful information. When the ANA found someone they were sure was a Taliban member, he was pulled off to the side and given a GSR, or gunshot residue and explosives test. Whenever a gun is fired, the shooter gets sprayed with an invisible blast of chemical residues that are by-products of the incomplete combustion of gunpowder, primer, and lubricants. The kit can identify very small amounts of these chemical markers on a person’s hands, arms, or clothing. Out of the six Talibs, the one who scowled the most had residue all over his hands.

“Hey, Captain, we need you in here,” Bill called from the store.

Jackpot
, I thought to myself. My guys would only call for me if there was something of interest. Riley and Smitty had been first inside. The interior was cluttered with pills, injectable antibiotics, and bandages. The other side was stocked with clothes, candy, and trinkets. Riley had been poking around the back wall near the antenna base. He casually swept the ground with his foot. Unlike the usual earthen floors in the country, baked hard from decades of heat and blistering sun, this one was soft. Someone had disturbed it. Digging down about six inches, Riley had uncovered a notebook wrapped in a plastic bag, which Smitty handed to me as I stepped inside. It was a small green tablet, about three inches long, text reading from right to left. The only markings were names and numbers. Jackpot.

There was no sign of the phone that belonged to the satellite array. I was absolutely sure that the others had taken it with them when they made their hasty exit. The antenna on the roof ran to a hidden cable and charger. Riley took great pleasure in snapping the antenna from its base and tossing it off the roof.

Intravenous needles, IV bags, clotting agents, pressure dressings, morphine, tourniquets, needles, and sewing thread were packed in boxes and stacked neatly in the back of the shop. When I came out and asked the old man who the medical supplies belonged to, he told me Hafiz Majid’s men. Hafiz Majid was one of the top-five Taliban commanders in all of Afghanistan. If those supplies belonged to his men, he couldn’t be far away. I wondered if he had been one of those who fled, but I doubted it. Senior Taliban commanders did not travel without Al Qaeda bodyguards, and their visits were no secret, heralded by much fanfare. They generally wanted the entire area to know they were there in the face of the infidels’ invasion.

We spent the next several hours questioning the Talibs. The ANA squad leader stood smiling at me.

“We take them, Captain?” the Afghan soldier asked.

I knew what he meant. If I had said yes, the whole bunch would have been taken on a one-way trip into the desert and never returned. It sickened me to have to deny the ANA request because I knew we would be fighting these Talibs later, but something had to separate us from them.

“No,” I said flatly.

The Afghans understood, but they always asked anyway, hoping I might say yes.

I walked over to the Talib who scowled the most and drew my knife to cut his plastic flex cuffs. I commanded him not to move. Then I took his right arm and with a Sharpie marker drew an American flag on his wrist.

Grinning, I said clearly for the others to hear,
“Nanawateh tismedel.”
I had just given him safe passage according to one of the most primary Pashtunwali benefits. Like it or not, he now owed me a favor.

He was obligated to obey.

“I have a message for your boss. Show him this,” I told him through a terp, indicating the flag. “Tell him we are looking for him.”

He jerked his hand away and glared. I gave him a little wink and stepped up into my truck. We made the turn out of the compound fully prepared for an ambush. I saw the ANA squad leader wave to the Talib who had just walked away with his life.

As we headed back to Jared’s position, I got a call on the radio that there were some serious arguments among the Taliban as to why we were not ambushed on the way out of the compound. Apparently there was a very, very irate Taliban soldier who wanted to engage us but was told by his commander he was obligated not to.

At the top of the ridge, Jared waited anxiously with his interpreter for the captured notebook. I handed it off to him as we drove by. Now the administrative pain would begin. I was hoping someone on the ridge had kept our timeline for the after-action report. I began a brain dump of everything I could remember, while Bill and the team began cleaning gear and weapons.

A shadow fell over the door of my truck. It was Jared, grinning from ear to ear. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding up the notebook Riley and Smitty had found.

“Yep,” I replied. “It’s a list of Taliban commanders and phone numbers. This wasn’t left there by accident. It was hidden.”

I studied the list carefully and recognized at least four of the names immediately as men I had been hunting during my last rotation. This time we might not have to chase them all over Afghanistan.

THE VOICE OF AN
ANGEL AND DEATH

A
t daybreak, our fully loaded trucks rolled down from our perch over the Dori River and headed into the valley. Our teams’ mission from this point was to continue to move west and gather as much detailed intelligence as possible, while keeping the enemy watching. The idea was to draw their attention to us and away from the northern areas where the ISAF main force would be launching an attack. Before we departed that morning, we rehearsed within our team and with the others what to do if one of the trucks got stuck in the slimy, silky mud of the riverbed. We would be skirting the riverbed, but if we had to drop down into it in a pinch, we needed to be sure what to do. This close to the Panjwayi, we might not be able to recover a vehicle, especially in a firefight.

It was a nice morning ride until we approached what looked like a giant earth-covered finger pointing straight into the riverbed. The ridge made a perfect ambush site. It was very narrow at the base and
at its bottom there was room for only one vehicle at a time to squeak past. It provided good cover, had numerous draws running through it, and provided an easy escape route to the open desert. Dave nudged me with his right foot. Glancing over my left shoulder, I could see him sunk down into the turret. Suddenly, three muffled rifle cracks snapped over the rumble of our truck engines. Hodge called over the radio to report that a man on a motorcycle was fleeing around the ridge toward the network of villages.

“Told you,” Dave said behind me.

Hodge’s truck scratched and clawed up the bank, throwing dust and dirt into the air. The other trucks followed in quick procession like fat armored dune buggies. Clearing the ridgeline, they sped across the open desert in pursuit of the Taliban spotter. My team crested the hill and set up on the ridge finger to cover them with our machine guns and grenade launchers.

I smiled, imagining what was taking place. Inside the security of a mud-walled compound in the village across from us, a shocked Taliban commander was being abruptly roused from his peaceful sleep by an excited guard. He and his entourage would have luxuriated for months in the area, preying on the local population for food and living quarters while terrorizing the villages with their ideology of fanaticism. Now, as his scout came screaming into the village with his tail between his legs, he would look over his compound walls and see five American gun trucks and dozens of Afghan soldiers all on line, headed straight for him. Taliban radio calls confirmed my intuition.

The labyrinth of the valley swallowed up the motorcyclist before the team could catch up to him, so Hodge and Jared called to say that they were returning. But the false sense of security the Taliban had enjoyed for months was over. The rumors that the long beards were back in the area had just become reality.

As I scanned the village and surrounding area, it seemed familiar. I just couldn’t put my finger on why. Staring at the snaking river, I
realized that I’d been in this valley in 2002 as a first lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division. We had protected an explosive ordnance detachment (EOD) sent to destroy tons of leftover Soviet munitions.

The Soviets left massive amounts of ordnance, explosives, and bombs at Kandahar Airfield during their hasty departure from Afghanistan. The Taliban loaded the bombs onto trucks and dumped them in a series of large wadis near the Dori River. When I say bombs, I mean some of the worst kinds, in all sizes, types, and shapes. Fuel bombs, like napalm, anti-personnel cluster bombs, and massive thousand- and two-thousand-pounders.

So the EOD came out and blew it all up. The fireball lasted twenty-five seconds and slowly morphed into a mushroom cloud that hung in the sky as the shock wave rolled through the valley, sending Afghans running for cover. At that time, it was the largest controlled explosion in Army history—so big that NORAD, the missile defense command in Colorado, detected it.

Now, the Taliban radios all over the valley came online. The commanders didn’t know what to make of us. We had just achieved part of our mission. We had their attention. They hadn’t seen an American patrol in years, one commander said. ISAF weren’t aggressive; they kept to the main roads and rarely took the fight to the Taliban. American patrols meant trouble.

Jared decided to keep them guessing. We headed west, deeper into the district toward the villages at first, and then cut south back toward the river in a zigzag maneuver. By now the hazy waves of heat poured over the desert floor like water, blurring the images in the distance.

“Who wants to live here?” Brian asked when we stopped.

“It is all they have,” I said, taking my helmet off.

Days of crashing through the open desert and bouncing off the bottom of sand dunes had taken their toll. Our backs were tight and sore, our legs and stomachs cramped. I gently rubbed my swollen,
sand-crusted eyes under my sunglasses. I could barely see through the binoculars and my head throbbed. Once, in a restaurant while on leave, I was quizzed by a college student who wanted to know what it was like in Afghanistan. “The only way to describe the average hundred-and-twenty-degree heat would be to stick a salon-sized hair dryer in your face at full blast and leave it there for days,” I told her. “While doing this, try to stay hydrated by drinking warm bathwater while stepping into and out of the bathtub holding a radio, trying not to get killed.”

My headache was quickly becoming a raging migraine. I didn’t want to show weakness. A lot of times when we work with conventional units, they stay in full kit, even when it’s not required, until they keel over with heatstroke. I learned quickly that there is a time and place for everything. If you don’t need to be in full kit, take it off. Afghanistan is one place where uniformity will not just make you combat ineffective, it will kill you.