by Ben Anderson
Payne came back to continue sweeping the path until we could get on to another roof. He was annoyed that he hadn’t found the metal brake drum that one of the IEDs was made from.
An old man, leading a donkey pulling a cart full of firewood, appeared. ‘Why don’t we just follow him?’ said one of the marines. But nobody dared. The old man guided his donkey and cart around us, beyond the edge of the narrow path Payne had cleared and on down the uncleared path ahead, without saying a word.
A marine pointed down one of the alleys. He was sure that’s where the triggerman was hiding. ‘It’s alright’, he said, ‘he’ll be dead soon.’
Eventually, we climbed on to another roof. We sat down and stared into space. Payne pieced together what had happened. I asked if it was simple human error that had saved us. Payne thought the triggerman probably hadn’t had a perfect view and had misjudged where the marines were when he connected the wire to the battery. ‘They usually try to time us but they don’t always get it right on. It’s harder to find command wires [IEDs] but there’s less injuries from them. But Big T is lucky.’ He looked down for a few seconds: ‘We’re all pretty lucky we walked over it.’
Sergeant Giles, who’d been behind the blast, said that five IEDs had gone off and one ‘was a fucking pressure cooker and it had a bunch of big ass gears and shit in it. Only half the jug actually blew.’
‘So they were either poorly made or really old’, said Hancock. ‘How did we walk by all that?’ he asked despondently, holding his hands out, almost begging for mercy.
‘It wasn’t where we swept, it was off to the side of the road’, said Giles, reassuringly.
‘Except that one we walked right over’, said Hancock, who wouldn’t easily be convinced.
They talked about belts of IEDs, which I hadn’t heard of before. ‘There’ll be a line’, said Sergeant Giles, ‘like this whole fucking line of IEDs.’ He drew circles in the air with his hand, ‘so that no matter where you go, you’re gonna run into one.’ Everyone let that sink in for a few seconds, then Giles tried to lighten everyone’s mood: ‘Thomas can’t hear shit, he’s like Twombly in Black Hawk Down.’ ‘I’d say I’m happy for him’, said Hancock. ‘He’s lucky and he’s gonna get out of this shit, probably for a while.’ He looked overwhelmed, as he had done since I’d seen him on that first patrol. He let his head drop back until his helmet hit the wall behind him. ‘Dude, I just don’t know how we’re gonna find these things’, he said, talking more to himself than anyone else. ‘This place is the fucking wild wild west.’
Later, I asked him how he kept going. ‘It sucks, mentally’, he told me, ‘but I signed up to do this job, I’m gonna do it and get through, one way or another. There’s not really much I can do about it now. We all volunteered. We weren’t drafted or anything, so you can’t say much, whether it’s good or bad. Whether people are dying or not, it was our choice.’
As the light began to fade, we were told to lie down. The marines on Pharmacy Road were about to fire a MIC-LIC (Mine Clearing Line Charge). MIC-LICs worked on the same principle as A-POBs but on a bigger scale. Instead of giant football socks stuffed with grenades, MIC-LICs were more like one-hundred-metre-long sleeping bags, stuffed with shoeboxes full of explosives. ‘It’s a great end to the day’, said Giles, as everyone put their fingers in their ears. ‘I’m scared’, said a marine. We were much closer than was thought safe. And there were families in at least two of the compounds between us and Pharmacy Road.
‘I forget. Is it eyes closed and mouth open?’ asked a marine as he curled up into the foetal position. ‘Definitely keep your mouth open, ’cos of the pressure’, said another.
I heard what sounded like a jet blast and saw a rocket spiralling up, then down, leaving an arc of dirty brown smoke behind. Everyone waited for the explosion. Ten seconds passed. Twenty seconds. Thirty. A minute. A blast came from the corner where the daisy chain was. ‘Oh hell, no’, said one of the marines, echoing what everyone was thinking – that one of the remaining two IEDs in the chain had gone off. It had, but in a controlled detonation. The EOD team had arrived and blown them up.
Another minute passed, then a long stretch of Pharmacy Road was filled with a line of fireballs the size of hot air balloons, which soon turned into a long, dark mushroom cloud. The compounds around us filled up with so much dust they looked like they’d been lined with explosives.
‘It was like Jesus came down and punched the earth’, said a Japanese-American marine called Futrell. We climbed off the roof and went back down the path, to sleep in one of the cleared compounds.
The marines found twelve IEDs on that first day, some with highly complex counter-tampering devices; decoy command wires or fake pressure plates. These drew people close to the mines, believing they’d disconnected them, then the real trigger was pulled. But no one had been killed or lost limbs and although three marines were concussed, one very badly, the marines would have gladly accepted those statistics at the start of the operation. Nor had any civilians been killed or wounded, although that seemed to have as much to do with luck as planning.
Before everyone had bedded down, a man came out from behind the house with the white flags. ‘What does he want?’ asked one of the marines.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rock asked the man.
‘The matter is that the children are screaming when they hear the explosions, they fear the planes will come and bomb. I say to them, “It’s night, we are fifty people in this house, where can I take you? It’s winter, it’s cold”.’ He pointed out his house and begged to be left alone: ‘Please take care of us, please do not shoot us.’ ‘Hey man, it’s the Taliban placing all these IEDs up and down these alleys. That’s what’s been blowing up all day’, said the marine in charge of intelligence.
Two men said they wanted to get to their home, a compound alongside the one the marines planned to sleep in. Lieutenant Mike Owen, who didn’t disguise his automatic contempt for the men, didn’t bother to listen to their request. He assumed they wanted to walk right through Wishtan. ‘Check this out. Let them know this’, he said to his terp. ‘We have a weapon pointed down this direction. If anything’s moving, we’re going to shoot it, so if they want to get shot ...’
One of the men interrupted, ‘I am not going there. My house is here. You see the gate in that corner?’ He motioned towards a building less than thirty feet away.
‘Tell him we’re done talking’, snapped Owen. ‘If they walk up there, they’re gonna get shot. We have an operation to kill all the Taliban and make this place safer. If they come in here we’re gonna think they’re Taliban and we’re gonna shoot them.’
Sergeant Giles appeared behind Owen and politely asked what was happening.
‘These guys are trying to sneak in here’, Owen said, ‘they say they fucking own this place.’
Sergeant Giles explained that he’d met the men already and that they were telling the truth.
‘So we’re just letting people occupy right behind us?’ asked Owen.
‘Yes, we already talked to them today’, said Giles.
‘Like no shit! Right behind us?’ asked Owen again. He made it clear he thought this was a stupid idea.
‘Yes’, said Giles. He spoke to the men in Pashtu: ‘Delta rasha [come here].’ But they were now too petrified to move. ‘You can go to your house if you want’, said Giles, in English. But Owen had walked away, taking his terp with him, so the men stayed where they were, too afraid to walk back to their house. Eventually, Rock arrived and told the men they could go home.
* * * * *
The next morning, the marines woke at dawn and walked back to the roof where they had finished the day before. They waited there until enough walls had been blown for them to move to the next compound.
A young boy walked along the path below. ‘Ask him if he’s seen any Taliban’, said one of the marines. There was a lengthy back and forth exchange, which the marines took to mean he was avoiding the question. Eventually, Rock said tha
t the boy had come to get some stuff from his family’s house, which was on the corner where the daisy chain had been. The boy said that he usually spent all day in the bazaar and only came here at night.
‘Hey, if he goes to the bazaar during the day and comes back here at night, why is he here right now?’ asked a marine. This was a typical pattern of meetings with local people – catching them out or spotting the tiniest of contradictions, even if they only arose from translation, was preferred to actually finding anything out, leave alone offering help or reassurance.
The boy was only about twelve but even children weren’t above suspicion. A marine photographer, who told me he didn’t think there was any such thing as civilian casualties, claimed to have personally seen little girls burying IEDs. He also said that little boys were usually Taliban spotters. Another marine told me about ‘the Syrian Solution’ that they’d been taught at military college. In the eighties, facing protest in the city of Hama, Hafez Al Assad had sent the military in, who’d killed at least ten thousand people, demolished the town and then – and this was news to me – spread salt everywhere, so that nothing would ever grow there again. I didn’t need to ask if the marine thought that the Syrian solution would work in Sangin.
The boy had a reasonable answer as to why he’d come back during the day: he was moving as much as he could from the old family house to the house they had just moved to. ‘Will you come back?’ asked Rock.
‘I am going and coming back frequently.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there are foreigners here.’
The boy was told to crouch down. Another wall charge was about to explode, not far from where he was walking.
‘Don’t trust anyone in this fucking area’, said Rock. He was capable of one minute saying he thought that everyone was Taliban, then being reduced to tears at their plight the next. A marine said he’d been told about a fifteen-year-old Taliban kid. He thought the kid, now curled up in a ball below us, looked about fifteen and was probably the one he’d heard about. The boy put his elbows on his knees and his fingers in his ears, waiting for the explosion. When it came, he picked his nose, got up and walked away. He sprinted back again a minute later; his goats had escaped through the hole that had just been blown in the walls of his compound.
‘I wonder where their Alamo’s gonna be?’ one of the marines asked Sergeant Giles.
‘I don’t think they’re going to be stupid enough to have one’, Giles replied. ‘It would make sense for them to just continue a war of attrition. Basically, they have a defence in depth set up throughout the whole city where they can continuously fall back, then swarm back around and attack from different directions.’
A member of the marines’ Psychological Operations (Psy-Ops) team arrived. He set up a speaker on the roof where we had moved. He had two Pashtu messages, he said, ‘a friendly one and a call out one.’ One message of reassurance and one challenge to the Taliban. He waited for an A-POB blast, then played them. First came reassurance:
‘People of Sangin, peace and the blessings of God be with you, The national forces and their international allies are conducting an operation in the Wishtan area to establish sovereignty in this area, remove dangerous mines and destroy the houses which these criminals use for hiding weapons, bombs and mines. If these criminals have hidden weapons and bombs in the Wishtan area, the Afghan national forces and their allies will find these places and will destroy them in order to establish government control. Help your Afghan brothers and show them the places where the criminals have hidden weapons and bombs so that we can destroy these destructive weapons. If you don’t do this these forces will have no choice but to clear the way with bombs. It’s your choice, it’s up to you. Show the places of the bombs to the Afghan forces and their allies or if you know where the mines are, cut the wires and bring them to our post. Thank you for your help.’
‘And if you don’t have bombs in your house or can’t disarm them yourself and bring them to us’, they could have added, ‘we will blast our way through anyway.’ As for the Afghan national forces, supposedly accompanying the ‘international allies’, I hadn’t seen any yet.
The challenge to the Taliban was played next:
‘Listen, oh, enemies. The national forces and their allies are conducting an operation in this area. Cowards, you are taking money from these poor people, you attack these innocent people and lay mines beside their houses. Oh cowards! The Afghan National Army and Police are taking pride in fighting you. To fight you and finish you! Leave your cowardice and do not use these innocent women and children. Stay and fight like men.’
I’d started to get some feeling back into my toes, and in a few muscles, but my bones had yet to thaw, making my legs feel like badly-microwaved spare ribs.
As the marines cleared another building, a group of old men appeared through a gate and walked towards us, waving cautiously. The marines didn’t want to leave the building and meet them halfway, because the ground between hadn’t been swept. But when the men stopped and gestured for us to approach, the marines reluctantly walked forwards.
The oldest man had a thin white beard and eyes as bright blue as Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia. But the skin underneath sagged heavily, making them weep constantly and giving him a look of painful sadness. The marine’s intelligence officer also noticed how blue the man’s eyes were but couldn’t put whatever he was thinking into words. He just pointed to them and said, ‘Wow.’ Then, remembering his job, he struggled to think of a question. In the end, he managed to say: ‘Tell us about this area.’
The men said they didn’t understand what he wanted to know. He then asked where they lived. The men pointed over their left shoulders.
‘Will you walk us through the compound to show us a safe route?’ asked the intelligence officer.
‘Yes, yes’, said one of the men, ‘but you cannot stay there.’ ‘The women and children are scared’, said another. ‘We came here to ask what shall we do? When you come to our house will there be damage?’ A third man asked, ‘We want to know whether we will be harmed or not. When we leave the house, the women and children start screaming and they can’t keep calm anywhere. When there are explosions, it rocks our rooms and we are so scared we don’t know which way to go.
‘If there are women and children in a house, will you still go on the rooftop and sit there? Will you still blow your way into that house? We have come to find out. If you leave us alone we will not move out, because it’s cold. If it makes no difference to you whether there is a family in there or not, then we will have to leave.’
‘Are there mines?’ asked Rock.
‘We will not tell you if there are or not. If we say there aren’t, it’s possible that there are. If we say there are, then you will ask us to show you and we don’t know where they are. The Taliban places them and hides them, how are we supposed to know where they are?’
The marines asked about one house, higher than the rest, with a flat roof that looked like a good place to keep watch and spend the night. The old men led us to that compound, waved the women inside and walked up an outdoor staircase and onto the roof. The marines immediately set up gun positions on the corners while Lieutenant Grell radioed back to base to ask how much rent he should pay the owner.
As we climbed, a small boy, with a disability that made him look like he’d had a stroke, pushed himself backwards into the corner at the top of the staircase. His mouth fell wide open and his right hand gripped the wall as the giants filed past. His eyes could only just move fast enough to take in all the strange things he was seeing. Another boy crouched next to Doc St Louis, the dark-skinned Haitian medic, examining his face as if he were trying to work out a puzzle. I half-expected him to rub the doc’s hand to see if the colour came off. The boy pulled a green shawl over his head; other than that, he barely moved, staring in wonder. ‘It’s fucking Yoda sitting right there’, said Hancock.
Everyone was told to walk to the back of the building,
as two more MIC-LICs were fired, shattering the compound’s windows. The marines had two more walls to blast. It was getting dark quickly, so they used three times the normal amount of explosives to make sure they wouldn’t have to do it twice. I knew they weren’t checking compounds for civilians and could be disturbingly casual about where they placed explosives but I assumed they knew what was on the other side of the wall. The final blast was supposed to reveal a clear view across a field to the old British patrol base, Lima Company’s final objective.
But when I walked over the first pile of rubble and towards the second hole, I saw a small garden and behind it a house, cracked across its entire face, with two shattered windows. ‘Hey, we got a building right here’, said one of the marines. ‘There’s definitely a fucking hole though, a nice fucking hole. I’m proud of myself.’ He stopped smiling and sighed. ‘Now we got a building, fuck it.’
I was overtaken by a small boy, wearing a skullcap and a brown shawl draped over his shoulder. He was followed by a much younger boy. Both walked straight across the garden, eagerly calling for their friend. ‘Saifullah? Saifullah?’ they shouted, in voices that hadn’t yet broken. Two boys appeared from a small stairway that led to a basement, one no more than six years old, the other about twelve. Behind them two more children appeared, a girl and a boy, just six or seven years old, with impossibly innocent-looking faces. They all looked shocked; unable to express either fear or anger.
‘Hey, this is the guy that lives here’, said Payne, as the older boy walked towards us, smiling nervously. He nodded ‘salaam’, so quietly he was barely audible. The boy in the brown shawl stood next to his friend and turned to look at the marines.
‘Does anyone know how to say “I’m sorry”?’ asked Payne. Nobody did.