by Ben Anderson
The mood suddenly changed. Corporal Sanders and his squad heard over the radio that their friend had been shot in the head and was not responding. Everyone assumed he was dead or at least badly injured. The men who had shot him were in a building just over a hundred metres away, across open fields.
Lance Corporal Rios, a young marine with a tattoo across his chest that read, ‘I’d rather be judged by twelve than carried by six’, found a hole in a wall. He saw one of the gunmen moving. ‘I got good eyes on this cocksucker right here’, he said, firing four shots. Two feet away from me a man was shooting at someone with every expectation of killing him. Yet there was no sense of drama or tension. Anywhere else, a gun would provoke terror, anger, increased heartbeats, policemen and news crews. Here it was humdrum, barely noticed. Rios cursed when his shots went over the man’s head.
The building was hit by a Hellfire missile. They usually only took out a single room, so the plan was to run the hundred metres across open ground and storm it. ‘You wanna do a Medal of Honor?’ asked one of the marines, grinning. ‘The fighters are probably still in that building and you’re just going to storm it on foot?’ I asked. Sanders looked at me with a pursed and slightly demonic smile and nodded. ‘Alright, tell ’em we’re pushing’, said Rios. ‘Alright fuck it, let’s go. PUSHING’, shouted Sanders. Everyone filed along a wall until they could see the field they needed to get across.
We sprinted to the building’s outer wall and knelt, to get our breaths. The lead marine peered around the corner, then ran towards the door. I followed the marine behind him. We both fell into a deep ditch. As we struggled to climb out, the marine behind us saw a yellow jug hanging from a tree, above our heads. He yelled ‘probable IED’ but someone behind screamed at us to keep running towards the door. Others darted past, almost stamping on our hands as we climbed out of the ditch. There was another awful clatter of gunfire. ‘GO, GO. WE GOTTA GET IN THAT FUCKING COMPOUND’, screamed someone. I turned into the door and saw that half the compound had been reduced to rubble by the Hellfire missile. A marine came out of a small room, shouting ‘CLEAR’. Another marine threw a grenade over a wall, screaming ‘Frag out’. Everyone went down on one knee as the grenade exploded. Slowly, we realised that none of the fighters had survived the air strike. Their bodies lay somewhere beneath the rubble.
As the sun set, we waited to hear if we’d be sleeping there that night or would be moving on. Two marines argued about their Welcome Home parties. One’s girlfriend was organising his and she had lots of friends, so the other, who was single, was desperate to be invited. But the marine with the girlfriend refused; he thought his friend would embarrass him. The argument went on until dark.
* * * * *
The next day, I decided I should try to see something different, to justify me still being there. So I tagged along with the EOD team, slowly making their way along the main road east, between the buildings that Bravo Company were clearing. Tom and Ski were working with Staff Sergeant Travis Gregrow and Sergeant Timothy Harrison, also EOD specialists. I joined them at 9.30 a.m., by which time they’d found and detonated four IEDs on just two hundred metres of road. I could see the craters spaced as regularly as lampposts, three or four feet deep and about twelve feet wide, big enough to use as trenches.
Occasionally, the EOD team were shot at, which only caused them to jump behind their trucks for a few minutes. After they had detonated their fifth IED, they attracted so much fire that we had to hide in an abandoned compound beside the road, where Nascar and Picc joined us. On their frequency, we heard the Taliban saying we were being shot at to keep us in the building until RPGs could be brought forward. No one wanted to wait for that, so they decided to take cover behind the truck as it drove up the road to the next building, where there were more marines. But the line of seven people – the four in the EOD team, Nascar, Picc and me – was longer than the truck. As everyone walked, pushed, pulled, slowed down and sped up, the people at the front or the back of the pantomime line-up kept appearing at either end of the truck. Not for the first time, only either our pure luck or the Taliban’s poor marksmanship was all that meant none of us were shot.
The regular pattern of IEDs continued until we reached a crossroads two kilometres from the base. There, a huge bunker had been dug at the corner of the intersecting roads, big enough for six men, with a concealed entrance and several firing holes. It was built from breeze blocks placed end up and plastered with mud, which exactly matched the colour of the road. Its roof, just a foot or so above the ground, had reeds planted in it. It was impossible to see until you tripped over it. The Taliban had spent a lot of time preparing this bunker but clearly, had expected the marines to slowly approach from outside. The plan to drop one company into the middle of Marjah had caused the bunker to be abandoned. Next to the bunker, the EOD team dug up a pressure plate, a simple device designed so that anything passing over it completed a circuit that detonated a nearby bomb.
‘Oh really, this is a little different’, said Ski, as he cut through the tape wrapped around the pressure plate to make it waterproof. He showed me a plank of wood, no bigger than a cricket bat, with three rectangular pieces of metal nailed to one side, connected with three pieces of wire. On top of each piece of metal was a small section of tyre, each lined with another rectangular piece of metal. ‘When you drive over it’, he said, pushing one of the pieces of tyre down and touching the two pieces of metal together, ‘it closes the circuit, which sets off the IED.’
‘You’d think they would have blown themselves up with that’, said Staff Sergeant Gregrow, as he walked into the road to start digging for the bomb. He hacked at the ground with a small axe, pulling away the loose dirt with his hand and digging out stones with his knife. But the bomb was deeply buried, which meant it was big. This didn’t inspire any fear in Gregrow. He was soon digging into the road with a shovel, pushing it into the ground with his foot as if he were digging for treasure, not for a bomb.
‘Please don’t film this part!’ he shouted, as he swung the shovel once more into the ground.
‘One question’, I said, standing next to him and looking nervously down into the hole. ‘Why don’t you wear a suit, like in The Hurt Locker?’
He laughed. ‘This close, a bomb suit isn’t gonna do anything and er ... mobility I guess. You can’t get around.’
‘But you’re digging, by hand, for a bomb that’s big enough to blow up a truck’, I said.
‘Yah!’ he replied, laughing again, not for a second stopping his furious digging.
‘These fucks had a looooong time’, said Tom.
Like every other EOD team I’d met, these men loved their jobs but not for the reasons you might expect. They didn’t get a visible thrill from the huge danger they put themselves in and they didn’t look like men with death wishes. They loved the technical challenge of discovering and dismantling bombs, of competing with the bomb-maker in a battle of wits. If it weren’t for their obvious bravery, they could be described as nerdy. There was no doubt they were gun-carrying, Fox News-watching Republicans who could look after themselves in a dark alley. (At least, certainly Tom and Ski could; Gregrow and Harrison were more traditionally nerdy.) But I could also imagine them at home in their garages, spending hours on electronic or mechanical projects.
After a lot of digging, Gregrow eventually found a big yellow jug about a foot and a half underground. I asked how powerful it was.
‘It would definitely kill us. We’d be little tiny pieces’, he replied, smiling gleefully.
‘What would it do to a truck?’
‘It would probably rip a truck apart and everybody inside would not be happy.’
I asked him why he chose to do this for a living. He said he used to be a canine handler but ‘I wasn’t getting good results with it and I wanted to get out and help guys as much as I can, so this was the best option for me.’
They planted their charges next to the jug. We ran to a nearby compound and waited for the blast.
It was much bigger than we expected. A plume of smoke, dust and debris went high into the clear blue sky. ‘Wow, you think that was two jugs?’ said Gregrow.
They also found a command wire, hidden in the reeds alongside a ditch. It ran for hundreds of metres up to, and under, the crossroads. ‘See how it’s all chewed up at the top? It’s like they threw a DFC in there’, said Tom, pointing to where the canal disappeared under the road. I couldn’t see anything that looked at all out of place. I walked around the reeds, where Gregrow soon found the DFC Tom had guessed was there.
‘It’s pretty much a cylinder’, he said. ‘A bunch of explosives and a whole bunch of nasty frag. And it’s pretty much pointing right at you right now.’ I took a few steps back.
We hid behind another building as they blew up the DFC. ‘Pretty hot ... man, I love that!’ said Gregrow, as rocks and dust rained down all around us. The reeds were gone and the ‘nasty frag’ had been blasted over and beyond the crossroads. It looked like the plan had been to defend the crossroads from the bunker for as long as possible, then flee after connecting the big IED to the power source. Then, when the IED blew up a truck, they’d detonate the DFC to hit anybody that came to help.
At the next set of compounds, the marines had to scream at the ANA until they handed over a small cache of Taliban weapons they’d found. One soldier offered a compromise: ‘After we’ve fired the rounds we’ll give you the magazines.’ ‘No, no, no’, shouted Ski, as one of them reluctantly handed over an AK47, ‘you cannot fire that, no. All the Taliban weapons have to be confiscated.’ Someone offered a handful of bullets. ‘We need one more one grenade’, said Ski. A soldier moodily pulled a grenade out of his pocket.
‘Tell them that the Taliban booby-trap this stuff’, said Tom. ‘Even bullets can be booby-trapped.’
Another gunfight began right outside the door. The ANA, still feeling mischievous after their weapons find, were in no mood to fight. While bullets cracked over the compound walls, one of them handed his rifle to his friend, showed me his knife and then pulled out a knuckle-duster with four spikes. ‘Good’, he said, ‘for a Taliban boxer.’ He grabbed his friend’s head, raised his right arm and punched him on the helmet with the knuckle-duster.
When the ANA had gone, Tom, Ski and I were distracted into finding grain for some starving chicks we’d come across. Suddenly, we realised that we had been abandoned. There had been some marines and a sniper team on the roof of the building we were in but they’d left without us. Bursts of fire came from several different directions. Nervously, we looked through the door, trying to see where everyone had gone. ‘You know what you said about never carrying a weapon?’, said Tom, ‘well, today might have to be the day that changes.’ He tapped the pistol attached to his body armour. We eventually spotted some marines, who covered us as we ran to a large compound at a T-junction that marked the end of the road east.
We were five kilometres away from the base, as far as the marines wanted to go.
Ski was handed a pressure plate that someone had found. It looked similar to the one with the rubber tyres but didn’t have the rectangular metal plates for completing the circuit. ‘This is a low mag pressure plate’, said Ski. ‘See those carbon rods in there? They basically give off zero to minimum metal signature. These are bad little guys to have in the road.’ Ski asked where it had been found.
‘It was sitting on a shelf in their house, not connected to anything, right beside their teapot.’
‘Fuck’, said Ski, sighing.
He was also handed a WFP (World Food Programme) sack. He looked inside and pulled out five RPGs.
Someone else pointed out more bunkers, on either side of the main road east. They were fortified with sandbags and had breeze-blocks for firing holes. From the far side of the T-junction, the direction they’d assumed the marines would approach from, the bunkers looked like slight humps in the canal banks. If the marines had approached them on foot from the east, they would have been mown down in seconds.
* * * * *
A few days later, back at the base, everyone struggled with the sudden quiet. They had achieved their objectives and considered themselves lucky not to have suffered many more casualties than they had. But there was also a sense of anti-climax. Tim Coderre and Mark Greenlief started a workout routine that involved going through an entire pack of cards twice and doing whatever number of press-ups each card said. Gunny D and Picc held as many as five shuras a day, employing local people to pick up litter and rebuild the mosque but they were frustrated by how many people simply demanded cash handouts. They’d also been told that at several shuras, some men who hadn’t spoken were Taliban representatives.
I wondered if there had ever been another conflict where one side had been handed so many advantages by the other. The Taliban had only to drop their weapons and they became invisible. Even the weapons, and the ability to use them, may have been handed to them, either when they fought the Russians or, more recently, British and American troops. There was such desperation to increase the Afghan National Army’s numbers (‘There’s a certain quality to quantity’, General Nicholson had said at the ROC drill) that just about anyone could get in, especially since the desertion rate was so high. Recruits received three months’ introductory training, which for anyone with questionable loyalties meant three months of being taught how their opponents operated. Often, they used the weapons and uniforms they’d been given to attack real security force members or their foreign mentors. This happened more and more, suggesting both the police and the army had been heavily, albeit easily, infiltrated. But the problem was not properly addressed, because that meant admitting that the absurdly ambitious goal of having a national army able to secure every province of Afghanistan, on its own, by 2014, was a fantasy. But that goal was the exit strategy, so publicly, everyone had to say it was plausible. Shortly after Operation Mushtaraq, President Obama said something he could only have believed if he’d been badly misled: ‘Not only have we succeeded in driving the Taliban out of Marjah but it also is a model of the partnership between US forces and Afghan forces.’
Marines wandered around the base or sat on the verandah, looking despondent and lost. ‘Did we win?’ asked Nascar, finally able to leave his laptop because the air surveillance now flew somewhere else. ‘Is there a white flag flying somewhere? I don’t actually know what I’m supposed to be doing right now.’ He wasn’t the only member of Bravo Company who found doing nothing very hard. ‘The captain said we need to aggressively find something to do, otherwise it’s going to become Lord of the Flies around here’, said another. Even the captain himself seemed uneasy. He told me that one of the major potential pitfalls was if ‘the government doesn’t come in and establish control and fill a vacuum that we can’t really fill’.
Three weeks into the operation, the chances of that happening looked low. There was still no sign of a ‘government in a box’.
US MARINE CORPS
JUNE 2010
1ST BATTALION
6TH MARINES
In May 2010, a week after President Obama claimed that Operation Mushtaraq had been a model of partnership between US and Afghan forces, General McChrystal was in Marjah. ‘This is a bleeding ulcer right now’, he said. ‘You don’t feel it here but I’ll tell you, it’s a bleeding ulcer outside. We have given the insurgency a chance to be a little bit credible because we’ve put more forces than ever in an area with a unique situation. We’ve said, “We’re taking it back”. We came in to take it back and we haven’t been completely convincing.’
General McChrystal’s claim that Mushtaraq was Afghan-led, a claim repeated by President Obama, a claim widely-spread and never seriously challenged, a claim backed by a massive media campaign, was the biggest fallacy of the entire operation. The Afghans were nowhere near ready to lead any military operation, leave alone in the Pashtun south. Certainly not one as big as Mushtaraq. Sadly, facing a public that had lost both interest and hope, it was too easy to say the Afghans had led an
d would soon be leading completely. That meant that the troops could come home.
I returned to Marjah just after McChrystal’s visit, roughly four months since the marines had first landed there. Bravo Company was in the last month of its tour. The new district governor, Abdul Zahir, was revealed to have spent time in a German prison; he’d allegedly stabbed his son as he tried to prevent his mother being beaten. There were regular battles and IED strikes, and there were many reports of local people who co-operated with the marines being intimidated, beaten, or even murdered.
Captain Sparks couldn’t wait to show me what Bravo Company had achieved in the bazaar. Without helmets, we walked out of the base, past a refurbished mosque, complete with fancy minarets, a long ablutions block, a well and a little fenced area the marines wanted to call ‘Freedom Park’.
The local people had re-opened many of their stores. Fresh fruit, meat, vegetables, cold drinks and even ice cream were available. The residents, I was told, were coming forward with reliable information about the Taliban. Children greeted us with high-fives and requests for more radios. The radios were still on their way, so they were given footballs instead. People were happy to be photographed laughing and joking with members of Bravo Company, with no apparent fear of reprisals. These things would have been unthinkable a few months earlier. I felt like I was on the set of an advert for counter-insurgency.