by Ben Anderson
‘SHOOT ’EM’ screamed Black, still looking after Morrison.
‘START SHOOTING, MOTHERFUCKER’, yelled someone else. ‘We’re still taking fire from left and right.’
‘It’s from every direction, Staff Sergeant, every direction’, pleaded one marine.
Doc Morrison sat up and looked more annoyed than in pain. ‘Hey, call in some fucking air, man’, he shouted. Another burst cracked over the ditch.
Suddenly, a steady stream of bullets came right at us in the ditch. At least fifteen, each closer than the last. Next to me, Black and Morrison ducked. I pressed myself to the ground. ‘WHERE THE FUCK IS THAT COMING FROM?’ screamed Black.
‘CALL IN SOME FUCKING AIR’, screamed Morrison.
Everything went quiet. I heard someone shout: ‘I got his ass, he was right there on the fucking corner.’
Staff Sergeant Young, a short and stocky marine, walked towards us. He stopped to shout to some other marines that they still needed positive ID before they could shoot. He didn’t walk in the stagnant water at the bottom of the ditch. He didn’t walk along the inside of the bank. He walked right along the top, in full view of whoever was shooting at us.
‘Have we stopped the bleeding yet?’ he asked, as he climbed down the ditch towards us, out of breath.
‘You need to get down bro, we’re taking fire from fucking three goddamn positions’, said Sergeant Black, smiling.
‘We’ll be alright’, said Staff Sergeant Young, still standing. He jumped over the stream and got down on one knee. He said that most of the fire was coming from the direction he’d come from. Then a burst of fire from exactly the opposite direction almost hit us. Staff Sergeant Young stood up again.
‘Hey listen’, Black yelled, ‘get down there. The next time those fuckers open up, I want you to unload some rounds on them.’
Young, still standing, ordered some of his men to follow. He waved his right hand in the air so they could see where he was. The Taliban must have thought it was a trick; I can’t think of any other reason why they didn’t shoot him.
Bullets came into the ditch, right next to where the four of us sat. The bursts of fire from the marines had no impact.
‘Come on guys, get a better view somehow’, shouted Young, assuming the other marines cared as little about the incoming bullets as he did.
Jets roared overhead but did nothing. Usually, by this stage, the horizon would be exploding, as millions of dollars’ worth of bombs and missiles were dropped on to every building from where the Taliban had attacked. In the past, the mere presence of aircraft – the show of force – was enough to discourage the Taliban. Now, they didn’t seem to be the slightest bit concerned about the incredible technology high above.
Another burst of gunfire slammed into the ditch. ‘GET TO THE TOP OF THE FUCKING BERM’, screamed Young, ‘I WANT A 203 [air grenade] LOBBED OUT ON THE NEXT ONE YOU FUCKING SEE. YOU HEAR ME? GET A FUCKING SHOT OFF.’ He turned back to Morrison: ‘you’ll be alright.’ Young stood and looked through his rifle sights, then lifted Morrison and carried him along the bottom of the ditch to an easier crossing point. Young jumped into the water and put his rifle on the bank, ready to lift Morrison across. Morrison, still apologising for being hit, wanted to make his own way across the water, with his weapon. His bandaged right leg was soaked in blood and his trousers, rolled above the knee, were dark red. ‘I’m worried about you getting an infection. Come on, this could be very serious here’, said Young. He and Black lifted Morrison over the water. MEDEVAC helicopters were on their way.
I looked around. Blood, leafless trees, a bumpy dirt road, dark brown mud and stagnant water at the bottom of a ditch. It could have been 1916.
Sergeant Black sat down to get his breath back. ‘Fucking bastards, man.’ I asked if the buildings nearest to us, not a hundred and fifty metres away from where the helicopters would land, were clear. He laughed. ‘No.’
Hillis ran back. ‘Fuck me’, he said. He and Black exchanged glances. ‘Fuck me is right’, said Black. ‘You can’t fucking see dick, dude.’
Another marine said he saw someone’s head appearing over a wall. ‘Then shoot his ass’, shouted Hillis.
‘If he pops his head up, you rip one off’, said Black.
‘There’s one down over there’, said Hillis.
‘Dead?’ asked Black. He giggled when Hillis nodded yes.
‘I got him and the other guy that was running to the left. They started firing from that compound over there.’ He pointed across the field. ‘There was eight of them and they were effective. There was no pangs or claps, it was all TSINNNGGGGG! TSINNNGGGGG!’ he said, imitating the sound of bullets fizzing past your ear.
Black and Hillis planned the defence of the MEDEVAC helicopters that would soon be landing to pick up Morrison. ‘That compound’s live as fuck right there Black, we need air on that motherfucker right there’, said Hillis, pointing the building where he’d seen eight men. ‘Every time that moped stopped at the other end, he was dropping guys off and they ran in there, that’s where they were flooded. There’s at least ten to twelve now. Altogether I’ve seen about forty.’
He pointed at buildings all around as he spoke. ‘It’s not just one guy spraying, like we’re used to. These guys actually know what they’re doing. They’re probably foreign fighters.’
Hillis was frustrated that air strikes hadn’t been called. ‘They’re worried about collateral damage affecting the people. You don’t want to take out innocent people but it’s a ghost town. You got just a few guys in one compound where you’ve been taking fire. Even if they’re not holding weapons that should be enough. Alleviate the problem. What’s more important: your marines or the guys shooting at you and then laying a weapon down?’
Purple smoke spewed out of a grenade thrown in the field behind us as the two MEDEVAC helicopters approached. One flew just above the ground in erratic arcs, like a wasp in a greenhouse, while the other landed so Morrison could be carried on board. As the second helicopter briefly touched down, the Taliban fired, but they both took off without being hit. That had been Doc Morrison’s first-ever day of combat. Shrapnel had torn out eight centimetres of nerve and he would later have a tendon transplant, be unable to walk without a splint and be deemed ‘combat ineffective’.
In the ditch, another marine casually described the day’s events, pointing in every possible direction as he talked about bullets that hit the ground next to him and two fighters he’d seen killed. As he spoke, I heard a gun being fired, then the bullet zipping above us. Apart from being amazed about how much ammunition the man had, the marine was totally unconcerned. He laughed, ‘that’s coming awfully close to us.’ I wanted to inject a little more urgency, so I asked if the whistling sound really was the noise of the bullets.
‘Yup’, he said, still smiling, then went on talking about his day. ‘They use really good tactics. They hide an AK47 in one spot, then move to another that’s a good hiding place and where they have another AK47 and they shoot off all those rounds. Then they move, doing the same thing over again. Then they blend with the population.’
The marines were ordered to get out of the ditch, run across the road and back to a building we’d passed on our way in; moving in the opposite direction to Bravo’s objective. As we approached, someone shouted, ‘Women and children in the building.’ An Afghan family, a couple and their six children, including three toddlers, were being pushed out by one of the terps. A tiny girl tried to jump over the muddy ditch outside the house but fell short. She landed on all fours but got straight up and moved away. A slightly bigger girl, the mother and the father all carried babies. The father stopped and held his hands out towards his house.
‘Don’t worry about your house’, shouted the terp. ‘Go quickly, go to that house.’ He pointed to a building about two hundred metres away.
‘I understand’, the father shouted over his shoulder, terrified.
Inside the house, the marines poured water from a well over thei
r heads and climbed on to the roof. Others took it in turns to use an old shovel and an axe to smash firing holes through the thick mud walls.
Hillis slumped on the ground, lost in thought, when one of the ANA soldiers suddenly appeared in a hole that led to a small storage room. ‘RPG!’ he said, beckoning someone to climb through the hole with him. He gave me the thumbs up. Hillis was startled from his thoughts.
‘You can’t shoot an RPG from in there. Are you fucking stupid?’
The Afghan soldier nodded his head. ‘Nice.’
Hillis was flabbergasted. ‘Not in here, you’ll kill everybody!’
‘No good?’ said the Afghan, as someone handed him his RPG.
‘You can give it to him, just don’t shoot’, said Hillis, stunned. ‘NO SHOOT!’
‘No shoot’, agreed the Afghan soldier and disappeared back into the hole.
‘I’m just waiting on the mortars to start’, said Hillis. ‘I don’t like being here. It’s too fucking small, close to a fucking attack position, perfect range for rockets and mortars, an easy distance to judge.’ He paused, staring intently at nothing in particular in front of him. ‘I’m pooped.’
Hillis was one of those men who looked serious and ready to fight all the time, no matter what they were doing. You couldn’t even attack him in his sleep, because he’d still be ready. He was twenty-six years old, from Corinth, Mississippi. He’d been an all-star baseball player, scouted by many professional teams, until he picked up an elbow injury that took too long to heal. He had a few odd jobs, got bored and joined the Marine Corps. ‘I joined to fight’, he told me, ‘that’s all I thought the Marines did. When the recruiter told me I could be in an office or shop, I said fuck that, I want to kick in doors and shoot bad guys.’ So he went to boot camp, then the school of infantry and became a machine-gunner. This was his second tour in Afghanistan.
I asked how the events of the morning had made him feel about taking Marjah. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine, we just got started. Everybody will be on their toes now, if they weren’t already. It’s a kind of a wake up.’ He laughed. ‘But it’s a long time before we go home.’
The gunfight continued. We were being shot at from several different positions by people no one could see. Second Lieutenant Rich Janofsky, who was just twenty-four years old, with a pleasantly surprised look on his face as if he’d just found a fifty-dollar bill, spoke to Captain Sparks over the radio and announced a new plan. Everyone would run four to five hundred metres back towards the objective. At the same time, rockets would be fired into the building next to the petrol station, where Taliban fighters were believed to be. Six minutes’ worth of smoke would be provided as cover from the fighters across the fields.
Marines use ‘fucking’ more often than most people say ‘very’ but Janofsky was going for a record. ‘First is going to fire a fucking Jav into Building 20. Be prepared for fucking volley fire and LAWs [Light Anti-tank Weapons] into the fucking side of 20. And also be fucking prepared to fire fucking LAWs and 203s into Building 19. That door.’ He pointed to a doorway on his map. ‘I ain’t about going through it because they could probably fucking run back and forth. Not kosher. Fucking throw some shit up, punch through, hold security. Then fire another fucking damn bitch into fucking Building 19. If they fucking drop smoke, it’s going to be stupid danger close to fucking those guys.’ What he had just said was a mystery to me but everyone understood and nodded. ‘Alright, what formation you guys want to roll out in?’
Before Bravo could move forwards to their objective, they had to take care of the other fighters, still shooting from the building behind us. Three marines crouched down behind a huge pile of harvested opium poppies and fired air grenades. Then a Harrier flew low and did a few gun runs but everything landed outside the walls surrounding the building. The fighters inside went quiet and were soon forgotten. There had only ever been a handful of them and they were no longer shooting. I don’t remember a decision actually being made but the marines walked out and started bounding towards their objective.
Suddenly, we were sprayed with bullets again. And no one had a clue where the fire was coming from. I followed a few marines into a ditch no deeper than a kitchen sink. The others ran into a field whose short grass offered no cover at all.
‘We’re getting shot at from behind’, one shouted. The men in the building hadn’t been killed or scared away. They’d just stopped firing and waited for another chance. The explosives one of the marines carried on his back stuck out high above the grass; he wrestled them off as quickly as he could.
I was next to Hillis. He let go of his weapon for a second and lurched towards me as a bullet cracked past. ‘Whoooooah, it’s coming from that exact same building’, he said. A machine-gunner from another squad fired, but not at the building we were looking at. ‘What the fuck did he just shoot?’ asked Hillis. No one knew. The firefight was going in three different directions; the bullets that were almost hitting us came from more than one position. I lay flat on my back but Hillis and another marine, also called Black, sat up, trying to see who was shooting at us. ‘You recognise that zinging by now?’ he asked.
‘That means it’s within a few feet, right?’ I asked.
‘I believe so, yes’, said Black calmly. Marines had a habit of suddenly becoming exquisitely polite and eloquent in the worst of situations, as if it made them feel more at home in a situation that would make most people cry for their mothers.
We were told to get up and sprint towards the objective. ‘Go, go, go’, shouted Hillis. ‘Haul ass, haul fucking ass.’ The thick mud and the kit we carried on our backs meant we could sprint only about fifty metres before our legs burned. Slowing to a quick walk, we made it to a collection of strange, U-shaped buildings, like stables without doors, that the marines called ‘the Chicken Shack’. I collapsed into the first building. Alongside me, eight marines were trying to work out how much ammunition they had left. ‘Conserve’, said Hillis, ‘short fucking bursts, accurate fire.’ Most of the marines were puffing so hard they couldn’t talk. One asked the others how many kills they’d had. One held up a single finger, another held up two. ‘We got three between us’, said a third, smiling.
‘Dude, you gotta drop bombs, bombs don’t miss’, said Hillis. He undid his boots so he could remove the thermal underwear most of us still wore from the night before. ‘We ain’t had no problems out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’
‘They wouldn’t even fight us for this long last year’, said a marine called Carver, as he re-arranged his bandana. ‘They wouldn’t get closer than six hundred metres. These guys are a hundred and fifty metres away, if not closer. And they’ve got effective fire. Last year it was just sporadic, never hitting anything really.’
Lance Corporal Godwin took off his helmet. Inside was a picture of his baby boy, five months old that day. ‘I miss him’, said Godwin, who’d been deployed when his son was just two months old. ‘I’ll be home to him soon. He’s gonna be big. I can’t wait.’
Within a few minutes everyone was asleep. They flopped to the ground or slumped against the walls as if they’d been gassed, in what looked to be hugely uncomfortable positions. The fighting had lasted six hours and we’d been awake for at least thirty.
I woke to find that Captain Sparks had arrived. He sat alone, without moving, outside the buildings, where anyone could see him. He looked at a group of marines, 2nd Platoon, who lay on the other side of the field. I didn’t know it then but one was dead. A white smoke grenade had been set off; 2nd Platoon was waiting for the MEDEVAC helicopters.
‘We lost an engineer who was trying to bring up some breaching equipment’, Captain Sparks told me later. ‘And I’m the one that called back and told them, get the A-POBs [route-clearing explosives] up here and somebody, I can’t remember who it was, was arguing with me about how heavy the fire was. I told them “I don’t care, get the A-POBs up here, we gotta get into the objective”. And about a half hour after the incident I found out that doing that, one of the ma
rines had been killed. He’d been shot in the back as he was moving out to get that piece of gear. We always go into these fights and I know that in a fight like this I’m going to lose marines but this guy was doing exactly a task that I told him we needed to do and … you know… he got killed doing it.’ Captain Sparks swallowed and looked at the ground. ‘That was definitely the lowest point I’ve had so far. That took me a while to reconcile in my head.’
As the MEDEVAC helicopters landed and the stretcher was loaded on board, a loud bang sounded right behind me. I jolted forwards, as if someone had slapped me on the back of the head. The Taliban had fired a rocket at the helicopters as they took off but missed, hitting the outside wall of the buildings where we’d slept. Sergeant Black had been urinating against the wall that the rocket hit. He’d been knocked to the ground; the other marines quickly dusted him off to check for bleeding.
‘That scared the fuck out of me’, he said.
‘No cuts, baby, no cuts’, said Staff Sergeant Young as Black got up and started laughing again.
‘Motherfuckers. Man, I’m telling you. I’d just put my dick back in my pants. I was pissing. That fucker hit right above my head.’ What was left of the rocket, the central pin, splintered at one end, lay on the floor next to him. The sturdy walls, baked hard by so many merciless summers and cursed by so many marines and soldiers, were suddenly a blessing.
The A-POB explosives that Captain Sparks had ordered arrived. Marines prepared to fire them from the other side of the Chicken Shack. A-POBs are designed to clear a path through minefields. Imagine a small rocket dragging a huge football sock behind it, stuffed with grenades every foot or so; when the rocket lands, the sock lands behind it, in a perfectly straight line. The grenades explode, detonating any close-by IEDs and creating a safe path. The A-POBs were aimed to blast a path right up to the building that was Bravo’s objective for day one; an old police station that had been used by the Taliban. As the first sock flew out of its case everyone put their fingers in their ears. ‘These things are fucking great’, said Black. Fifteen seconds later, the A-POB exploded, followed by another. Black roared with laughter. ‘Fuck you, cocksuckers.’