Lions of Kandahar (6 page)

In 2004, he had been left for dead after his militia unit was ambushed and an improvised explosive device (IED) sheared off parts of his face and mangled his legs. An American Special Forces medic found him next to the flaming remains of his Hilux and kept him alive. After numerous surgeries to repair his face and months of physical therapy he returned to the firebase. I thought of him personally and professionally as a miniature soldier with a Goliath-sized heart.

The family reunion gradually wound down, and we all turned in. After a few hours of sleep and breakfast, the teams shuffled into the firebase’s version of the TOC for the handoff brief.

Each firebase had its own tactical operations center, which functioned just as the TOC in Kandahar did, but the similarities ended there. If Kandahar was a starship, then the firebase TOC was like a wooden glider.

Rather than dozens of people buzzing about the latest and greatest in automation, projectors, screens, lights, and computers, the firebase had two computers sitting on mismatched desks along one wall. The radios were neatly organized and positioned along the opposite wall for quick removal or destruction in the unlikely event we got overrun. A projector—one of only a few on the base—sat on a table in the middle of the room, pointed toward a painted wall that served as the screen. A hodgepodge of chairs and tables of various shapes and sizes served as a conference area. Locally made mats and threadbare
rugs in ornate reds and greens kept the dust and dirt down. It wasn’t uncommon to see an occasional mouse or rat run across the rough-hewn log rafters.

Members of both teams—the outgoing and the incoming—filed in and quickly claimed all the chairs. It paid to show up early because these briefings could take a long time and late arrivals had to stand. Critical for maintaining continuity, the handoff brief was basically show and tell. The outgoing team went over everything they knew about the area, the enemy, and the Afghan Army units assigned to the firebase.

A good handoff can make or break the first few weeks of a deployment. This one started with a thud. Just as Shef took the floor, the power went out and the room went dark.

“Well, some things haven’t changed,” someone cracked.

The base was on the Kandahar city power grid, so we, like the locals, were at the mercy of the ancient Soviet generators and years of neglect and incompetent upkeep. While we waited for the generators to kick back on, I wondered if the people were grateful for the limited power they did get. It was more than they got under the Taliban.

Compared to the other five bases, ours was sprawling and spacious. Once the Taliban’s presidential palace, construction on it had begun around 1996, the year the Taliban took control in Afghanistan, and took about three years to complete. Osama bin Laden had built the compound for Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and Kandahar residents still call it Omar’s compound. Special operations forces took it over in 2001 and called it Firebase Gecko, after the lizards that patrolled the walls.

It had a double-wide fireplace in the cafeteria, three catfish that lived in a two-tier fountain, and a swimming pool for when it got too hot. We had room to build a looping five-mile dirt track around the perimeter and even a shooting range for us and the Afghan soldiers.

Our backup generators finally kicked on and the power returned.
Shef started the brief by introducing Ron, the Air Force joint tactical air controller (JTAC), who nodded at us. He was a big stick in the room, with the power to save our asses by calling in air strikes. In his early twenties, he seemed quiet and reserved behind his thick, dark beard. I made a mental note to sit down with him after the meeting.

The brief rolled on as Shef went over key leaders, targets, and areas in and around Kandahar. Then he started to talk about Operation Kaika. Three months earlier, Shef had led his team and a company of ANA soldiers into the Panjwayi district south of the city. The team had received reports that the Taliban were forcing Afghans out of the villages in the district. Besides being the Taliban’s hometown, the district was Kandahar Province’s breadbasket because it encompassed the wide Arghandab River valley, which holds the primary water reserve and provides the most fertile and sustainable crops in southeastern Afghanistan. Pomegranate groves, corn, wheat, and marijuana fields, and grape vineyards mingled with the country’s biggest cash crop, poppy. At harvesttime, the valley is filled with endless fields of flowers. The poppy sap, mixed and processed into heroin, fuels the Taliban insurgency, and the district supplies insurgents and Afghan government officials alike with cash. Afghanistan’s main highway and numerous secondary roads flow through the province, creating a network of routes between Afghanistan and Pakistan. During my last rotation, my team could move through Pashmul, a Panjwayi subdistrict, without incident. There hadn’t been much enemy activity there. But when Shef pushed into the district hoping to capture Taliban leaders, his team was quickly surrounded and had to fight its way out.

Shef lost two Americans and three Afghan interpreters during the mission. My guys stared at the floor as he described it. No one looked up. No one wanted to ask questions for fear of sharpshooting the operation or playing armchair general. It was a clearly understood, unwritten rule.

The brief broke a few hours later. Each of the teams’ specialists
met separately to review their piece of the base. The weapons specialists checked on the ammunition. I followed Shef out. I wanted to know more about Panjwayi and Operation Kaika. How had a rotation, which on paper went well, gone to shit over one operation?

Shef seemed worn down as we walked across the hall to his room. His bushy beard and tanned skin hid it, but you could tell that the rotation had aged him. As we walked, he said most of their missions had gone extraordinarily well. His voice sounded confident, but his tired, bloodshot eyes told the real story. I had to know what happened in Panjwayi.

“How did they move into the area under our noses with such force?” I asked him, spreading several large maps out on the table in his room. “I need to know more about Kaika. It looks like they might be planning something in there, and I need ground truth.”

He paused for a second and looked me in the eye. The upbeat Shef I had known for almost ten years was gone. “Stay out of there unless you go in with an army, because you’re going to get hurt. I’ve been reporting the buildup of large numbers of Taliban in there and no one’s listening,” he said flatly.

Operation Kaika had started off well. Shef and his men moved on foot to the compound of a suspected Taliban commander and took it. But when night fell, a large Taliban force attacked from three sides with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Shef said he had Taliban fighters close to breaking through, but a steady stream of machine-gun fire and mortars beat them back. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt, but the ferocity of the assault surprised Shef and he called ISAF for a quick reaction force (QRF). The QRF launched but was not given the authority to cross a critical bridge leading into the contested area. The help never came.

“The ISAF units got to the Arghandab River but would not cross,” he told me. Even saying the words seemed to put a bad taste in his mouth.

Time, I thought. Time is the most valuable asset you have on
the battlefield, and it can never be replaced. He lost critical time waiting for that unit. Surrounded in the valley, with no help on the way, they tried to counterattack. Shef’s team located a compound the Taliban used to stage the attack. Master Sergeant Thomas Maholic volunteered to clear out the compound with twenty Afghan soldiers.

As they moved to attack the compound, Maholic split his men into two groups and dispatched Staff Sergeant Matthew Binney, a medical sergeant, to set up a machine gun to cover the attack. Binney took an ETT and nine Afghan soldiers with him and set up the machine gun. Maholic quickly cleared the compound, but a large Taliban group counterattacked and surrounded both his and Binney’s groups. Based on intercepted radio transmissions, Shef learned the Taliban’s intent was to capture the Americans alive.

Every time Binney and his team came over the radio, Shef could hear intense fire. Finally, Binney’s team moved through a hole in a mud wall and stumbled into a group of Taliban fighters. Binney and his men reacted first with furious fire and hand grenades at close range. Shef said the Taliban got close enough to Maholic and Binney’s men to yell insults and threats.

Exposing himself to throw a grenade, Binney was hit in the back of the head. Confused and temporarily blinded and deaf, he groped for his weapon and bearings. When he regained his wits, he organized an attack on a Taliban position, but Staff Sergeant Joseph Fuerst, the ETT, was hit in his left leg by a rocket-propelled grenade. Binney tried to drag the trainer to safety and was also hit. The bullets shattered his left shoulder and upper arm.

Shef had his own problems, as the Taliban began a wave of attacks on his compound. Between assaults, Shef said he moved from position to position, rallying his men and monitoring Maholic and Binney’s situation at the same time. His truck was covered in spent machine-gun shells. I tried to put myself in his shoes.

When he heard about the wounded, medic Brenden O’Connor
volunteered to lead a group to reinforce Maholic and treat Binney and Fuerst. O’Connor fought his way out of the patrol base with eight Afghan soldiers, an interpreter, and another Special Forces soldier. He led the small relief force along a wall that provided cover from Taliban machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. When he got to the end of the wall, O’Connor realized that the wounded soldiers were two hundred feet away across an open field covered by three Taliban machine guns.

Apache gunships had come in and were flying overhead. Shef said he tried to get them to cover O’Connor, but the Taliban fighters were dug into thick-walled mud huts. Bullets were tearing into the dirt and shredding the grass.

O’Connor realized that he couldn’t get low enough to avoid enemy fire because of his body armor. He quickly took it off and tossed it aside. Inch by inch, he made his way across the fire zone, somehow managing to stay a fraction lower than the hundreds of Taliban machine-gun rounds. He told Shef afterward that he couldn’t help thinking all the way across how the instructors at the Special Forces medics course would have roasted him if they were watching. They always hammered into their students not to go after the wounded because their skills were too valuable to risk them getting injured. Let the wounded come to you.

Fuerst had already lost a lot of blood from the gaping wound to his left leg by the time O’Connor reached him and Binney. O’Connor got a tourniquet on the leg immediately, but there wasn’t time to do much else. The Taliban were closing in. The medic picked Fuerst up and hauled him to a pump house on the edge of the orchard. He stashed the ETT in a shaded area and scouted out the pump house, hoping enemy fighters weren’t waiting. He climbed over the six-foot wall into a small dirt lane, where he found some Afghan soldiers and their advisor. O’Connor went back over the wall and brought Binney, and then Fuerst and two Afghan soldiers, back to the other side.

Once everyone was in the lane, O’Connor started to tend to the wounded seriously. Breaking out his medical gear, he discovered that the 120-degree heat had melted the glue that kept his IVs together. His gear was a mess, but he did his best to help Fuerst and Binney.

Throughout, Maholic had rallied the defenders in his nearby compound, ignoring the withering fire as he raced from position to position, and inspiring them to fight harder against the relentless waves of Taliban fighters barraging them with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.

Virtually surrounded, Maholic spotted a Taliban fighter moving down an alley near the compound. As he exposed himself to shoot the fighter, Maholic was mortally wounded. Galvanized by the master sergeant’s example, the Afghan Army soldiers rallied and beat back the Taliban fighters.

After nightfall, O’Connor led the relief force back to Maholic’s compound. When he got there, he found out that Maholic was dead, and he immediately took over the defense of the position.

“They needed that leadership. Up until that point, they were in disarray, just trying to hide and survive,” Shef said. “When he showed back up with the wounded, he provided that. O’Connor provided that leadership that was needed.”

They evacuated the wounded by helicopter as Shef called in air strikes. Fuerst ultimately died from his injuries.

Shef’s team had changed the base’s name a month before we got there. It was now called Firebase Maholic.

After telling me the story, Shef needed a break. I could see that he was still fighting the battle in his mind. There was a lot I needed to digest. We agreed to meet later, and I went to check on the team and supply situation.

I couldn’t shake Shef’s story. For starters, the battle told me two things: the Taliban had good advisors, and I probably couldn’t plan on using the ISAF, the NATO units that now owned southern Afghanistan, in a pinch.

*  *  *

The handoff took several days. On the third day, we focused on the ANA company at the base. Reconnecting with them was an important part of the process because we would soon be fighting side by side. Standing in formation in the middle of our dusty firebase, wearing old green camouflage U.S. Army uniforms, the Afghan soldiers looked like a ragged bunch. But the excitement of our arrival hadn’t worn off. “Positive motivation can go a long way on the battlefield,” I told Bill. He just laughed. Always the pessimist, he spat, “Wait and see how they do under the noon sun when they’re tired and thirsty.”

It was hot, really hot, even for August, but the Afghans performed remarkably well in the first drill. It started with an ambush of a disabled ANA truck. The Afghans had to recover the truck and then attack a compound where enemy fighters were hiding. As they raced to the compound and quickly cleared the rooms of imaginary fighters, my team followed close behind, taking notes. The Afghan soldiers knew what to do and moved with confidence. It impressed me and meant they were one small step closer to working us out of a job, an advisor’s ultimate goal.