“Wrap it up, Bill,” I called to him as I hopped out of my truck. I pulled the Velcro strap that held an AT4 rocket launcher inside my truck and cradled the weapon in my hands.
The spring-loaded front and rear sights flipped into place and I set them for a range of 150 meters. As the lights got close, I noticed that the group was in a staggered military formation with equal distance between them. Taliban fighters didn’t operate this way. Who the hell was coming at us? Lost Pakistanis? Al Qaeda? Mullah Omar and his bodyguards? Whoever it was, they were in for a shock.
“You ready?” I called over the radio to Hodge.
“Always,” he said.
The convoy made a slight right turn around a sand dune and started straight toward us. I clutched the AT4 in my hands, waiting to shoulder it.
“Holy shit! Captain. Look right ten o’clock. Now!” Brian said.
Snapping my head in that direction, I felt a dead cold chill run straight down my back. In the green glow of the nods, thirty or forty men, several hundred meters away, were walking right toward us, backpacks on their shoulders.
What was going on here? What had we stumbled upon?
“Dave, you keep looking straight ahead. Bill, you take over the ambush! We may have dismounts to our left,” I called over the radio.
I set the AT4 gently down on the floorboards of my truck, grabbed my M240 machine gun, and swung the swivel mount over the hood. Pressing my shoulder into the buttstock, I leaned into the gun and centered the front sight post on the far right group of dismounts.
“You take far right and I’ll start from the left, working our way to the center,” Brian said.
The rumble of the engines rolled over us like waves as the vehicles got closer and closer. My finger gently touched the trigger, ready to cut loose with my first burst. I slowly flipped the safety off and settled my cheek on my left hand, gripping the stock in anticipation of the recoil.
“WAIT, wait, wait,” Brian said.
As the dismounts got closer, I could finally see that they were camels and their handlers, just passing nearby. Snapping the M240’s safety back on, I snatched the AT4 just as the headlights arrived.
“Captain, we have four very heavy movers, not armor, how copy?” Bill said.
The ANA moved up the road, switched on their searchlights, and stopped the massive vehicles. Several motorcycles that had been traveling with the convoy took off in all directions. Scouts. If the truck drivers tried so much as to argue with the ANA, we’d light up all four vehicles with gunfire. Several Afghan soldiers maneuvered carefully around all sides of the trucks, preventing anyone from exiting. The ANA squad leader cautiously approached the lead truck’s driver’s-side door. I heard him tell the driver to cut off the vehicle. Apparently the driver said something the squad leader didn’t like. The ANA leader reached into the cab and suddenly the driver came flying out, headfirst. One of the rear vehicles started to back up. An Afghan soldier jumped up on the running board and rammed his AK barrel into the driver’s chest.
The vehicles were giant military fuel trucks. They’d been covered with decorations to make them look like traditional Afghan transport trucks, but I knew exactly where they came from. I radioed Jared.
“Sir, we have four heavy movers. Tankers camouflaged to look like jingle trucks. They are Iranian-type military vehicles headed for Pakistan,” I said, noticing the Farsi writing on the trucks.
The message was short and to the point. The TOC monitored our frequencies, and I was sure that the last message had started secure phones buzzing at the command headquarters for all military operations in Afghanistan.
The ANA pulled the drivers and passengers out of the cabs. No one wore a uniform, but the trucks were definitely military vehicles and these guys were most likely soldiers. The ANA separated the drivers and started questioning them as they squatted in the dust. All of them stuck to the same story: they were supposedly stealing fuel in Iran and selling it in Pakistan. By crossing on the outskirts of the Registan Desert, they avoided paying Afghan taxes. The problem was that there are no Afghan taxes.
“Captain, we got diddly shit here,” Bill said over the radio. “Whatever cargo these guys had they dropped off and were headed back.”
Fuel trucks without a drop of fuel, clearly military, with drivers who seemed to be soldiers. It just didn’t add up, but I needed more than gut instinct to go any further.
One of the ANA squad leaders came up and asked if they could burn the vehicles and leave the drivers in the desert. They wouldn’t last long this far from the nearest village. The issue of whether to kill prisoners was one of the scenarios we’d worked through rigorously during Robin Sage, the Special Forces culmination training exercise in the forests of central North Carolina, as were many of the dilemmas we faced in Afghanistan. It was one of the best training exercises in the army. Thanks to Robin Sage, I had no question as to my response.
“We can’t go around killing enemy without weapons,” I told him. “If we do, we’re no different than the people we’re trying to defeat.”
That wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but he concurred because I was the commander. In his mind, war was a vicious cycle and all about survival. If your enemy lived, he could fight you another day. Before I could go on, Jared called me on the radio.
“Thirty-one, this is 30.”
I ignored his first call, but he called again. Jared wouldn’t have bothered me if it wasn’t important.
“Thirty, this is 31. What’s up?”
“Be very cool,” Jared said over the radio, and in three words I got the message.
We were being watched by a Predator unmanned drone from high above. Jared had been tipped off by someone back in Kandahar. But why would anyone bring an asset onto the site and not tell us? We were being spied on by someone, and whoever it was, they didn’t want us to know they were there.
I called Bill. “Wrap it up.”
“Stand by,” he said. A minute later he walked up and thrust a Pakistani military identification card into my hand. One of the drivers had hidden it under the dashboard of his truck. I turned it over, checking it under my red light. It was valid. Since before the war, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate had had strong ties to the Taliban. The ISI regularly gave them sanctuary and helped them cross the border. This was a smoking gun.
I called Jared and asked him what he wanted us to do with the guy. Did we risk falling a day behind schedule to detain these guys in an attempt to slow aid pouring over the borders?
We decided to just keep the ID card and took pictures of the drivers, passengers, and trucks. The Afghan soldiers tore into the trucks but could not find the access to the empty fuel tanks. We had to let them ride off, hopefully with their tails tucked firmly between their legs.
It later became apparent that they were not smuggling fuel, but munitions. With this regular supply line exposed, the Taliban would end up cut off.
Chapter 9
THE RED SANDS
We will either find a way or make one.
—HANNIBAL
The mountain looked like a rotten, jagged brown tooth sticking out of the sand. The closer we got, the more we picked up Taliban chatter on the radio. A commander, watching our dust plume grow closer, started to describe our convoy in detail and finally ordered his fighters to hide.
Jared sent David’s team to the south side of the mountain and I took my team north. The plan was to recon the area and meet on the opposite side. Along the way, we’d watch for fighters and make note of any possible cache locations, fighting positions, or areas the Taliban used as observation points. But we weren’t planning to get close enough to wind up in a fight.
A path in the sand led to the mountain, passing about a dozen compounds along the way. Shinsha agreed to send an ANA squad into one of the compounds. We covered them from the trucks as they quickly moved in. We could see fresh signs of life—water jugs, trucks, clothing, and even dogs. But the compounds were missing one
thing: people. No children came running out for candy. It was lifeless and eerie.
After several minutes, the first Afghan soldier came back out. He shrugged his shoulders and looked confused. The squad leader came to my truck and described the inside. The place looked lived in, he said, with sleeping mats on the ground and dirty pots and dishes, but no people. Shinsha ordered his men into another compound. Same story.
I didn’t want to waste any more time, so we loaded up the troops and headed north. As we passed the compounds, the Taliban began transmitting again. Taliban checkpoint 17 was losing sight of us and checkpoint 18 had picked us up. We followed the path into a lazy right turn that ended in a twenty-foot sand berm. It looked as if the desert ran straight into the mountain, the dust collecting up against its base. The trucks groaned as we forced them up between the berm and the rock ledge of the mountain. Slowly we climbed like a ship up a huge ocean wave until we finally crested the berm and half drove, half surfed down the other side.
As soon as the last truck got over the berm, the Taliban chatter reached a fever pitch. “Allah akbar! Allah akbar!” crackled out of the radio’s speaker. Victor, my terp, said the Taliban were setting up an ambush down the craggy rock trail. I stopped the convoy. It was time to recalculate the risk. We had not come to get caught up in a firefight. The cliffs around us were so steep we couldn’t raise our machine guns high enough to return fire and so narrow that we’d be traveling in one line like ducks in a row, easy prey for a well-coordinated ambush. We turned around and skirted the berm again. Now heading south, I focused on several large, flat rock faces with dozens of impact marks.
“Hold up, Brian. Bill, do you see that?” I asked over the radio.
“Sure do, about one hundred meters up from the desert floor,” he said.
“Correct. Now, look around.”
The ground was scattered with brass casings from weapons and plastic booster containers for RPGs. I called Jared.
“Sir, I don’t know what you have up there but we have just discovered a Taliban training camp. We could not continue because there was significant chatter and the terrain was too restrictive. The compounds we saw on the way in were housing and we just now found the weapons range.”
Brian hit the accelerator and I took down a ten-digit GPS grid coordinate. Jared’s response came back seconds later and didn’t need repeating.
“Get out of there now.”
We hit the accelerators and raced back to the convoy. My truck came to a rolling stop next to Jared’s and I jumped out with my map. Spreading it out on his truck’s hood, I showed him the camp. He took the dog bone—our nickname for the similarly shaped radio handset—and reported our findings to Kandahar.
In four days, we’d run across a remote training camp, been ambushed at a river crossing, found an infiltration site used by soldiers coming across the border, and gotten a line on supply routes between Iran and Pakistan. I caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Ali raising his eyebrows when I told Jared about the camp. That summed it up for me. We were smack dab in the middle of the Taliban’s superhighway into Panjwayi.
Jared finished on the radio and gave us the sign to move out. I watched as the team climbed into the trucks. The heat waves rolled freely across the horizon, causing even the most physically fit to slump. Everyone had heat rash on their shoulders and backs—our skin, soaked in sweat, rubbed against our body armor and became inflamed. Our pores were clogged with salt, oil, and dirt. Dragging my body armor on and off felt like having glass ground into my skin. I gritted my teeth and threw my armor over one shoulder and then the other.
Slumping into my seat, I looked back and watched Victor hop out, spread his prayer rug by the rear tire, and, using a bottle of water, quickly rinse off his hands.
“Come on, it’s time to go,” Dave said from the turret.
“It is my duty to pray. You can wait,” Victor said, pulling off his vest.
“We are getting ready to move and move means move. We’ll give you time to pray when we make the next stop,” Dave said sharply, growing weary of the lackadaisical attitude from the team’s new employee.
Victor said nothing. In his early twenties, he was stocky for an Afghan from the predominant Pashtun tribe, with only scruff for a beard, which he nevertheless cultivated because it made him feel manly. He walked away from the truck and began to unlace his boots.
Our former interpreters had been killed during Shef’s rotation. Victor and the other interpreters were vetted by a contracting company. Once approved, they were randomly assigned to teams. The good ones, like my old interpreters, became part of the team. The bad ones bounced from one unit to another. Victor got bounced to us when we arrived.
Victor had shown little interest in praying five times a day up to this point, so it was obviously a ploy. He wanted a break. I was also afraid the other terps would see him and want to take a break too. But Victor knew he had us over a barrel. How would it look to the Afghan soldiers if we threw him into the back of the truck instead of letting him pray? I told Dave to relax and traded the unscheduled break for future rapport.
For the next few minutes, I watched as Victor faced the Ka’ba shrine in Mecca and alternated between standing ramrod straight behind his rug and prostrating himself, knees, forehead, nose, and palms to ground, praying to Allah.
After about ten minutes, he finished. He took his time putting his gear back on and rolling up his rug. I followed as he walked back to the bed of the truck, where he was now starting to pull out an MRE. Rapport was one thing, but his actions were now on the verge of jeopardizing the mission. We had a deadline to make. It was time for a lesson in unconventional warfare.
“What’s up, man?” I asked, shooting him my best smile.
“I will now eat,” he said.
“Okay, no problem,” I said, managing to maintain my equanimity. “Would you like some water?”
“Yes,” he said, warming to my newfound interest in his welfare.
I started digging in the back of the truck for a bottle of water. I could feel Dave’s eyes on me from the turret.
“Hey, Captain, we got to go,” he said through clenched teeth.
Victor opened the MRE and began to sift through the package, complaining about the selection. “This isn’t a halal ration. Captain, I’d like another,” he said, taking the water from my hand.
I pulled out my pocketknife and, with a metallic click, opened it and thrust it into the bottom of the bottle. The warm clear water ran out onto his hand and the desert floor. Victor looked at me, confused.
“Captain, why did you do that?” he asked.
“It’s at least a week’s walk out of here from this point,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “Unless you want to start now without food or water you should get on the truck.”
To reinforce my point, I slapped the MRE out of his hand. I wasn’t going to be tested or questioned by anyone on the team, ever. My tolerance for bullshit was zero. “Get on the fucking truck now before I lose my temper,” I barked.
I had dealt with enough drama for one day. Victor wiped his hands on his shirt, put on his ammo vest, and got in the back without saying a word. He had learned a valuable lesson the hard way. From then on, we’d ask nicely once. The second time brought consequences.
“Let’s go,” I said into the radio.
Ole Girl’s engine roared as she crested a thirty-foot sand dune and started down the back side. From the top of the dune, I could see hundreds more, looking like sets of waves coming ashore. The GMVs easily crested the dunes, but the ANA Hilux trucks had problems. A few miles into the desert, the first call came over the radio that a Hilux was stuck. Jared and the others helped dig the truck out. Grabbing the Afghan drivers, we told them to lower the tire pressure for more traction. We also had them put the trucks in four-wheel drive or low. They all nodded in agreement, but as we pushed on it was obvious that they still weren’t understanding the basic dynamics of this kind of driving.
One of the most auste
re environments in the world, the Registan is, for the most part, a sandy desert shot through with ridges and small, isolated hills of red sand as far as the eye can see. The sand ridges and dunes, reaching heights of between fifty and one hundred feet, alternate with windblown, sand-covered plains, devoid of vegetation and changing in some parts into barren gravel and clay. It looked like Mars.
Our progress ground to a near halt. It was like driving in rush-hour traffic in hell. The waves of heat shimmered off the dunes. We sat in pools of sweat. The heat rash on our backs and shoulders burned. I felt like a cookie slowly baking in the oven.
When the radio crackled again about another stuck truck, Dave screamed in frustration and grabbed the machine gun in a rage, shaking it violently. After a few seconds, he stopped, then leaned down from the turret, smiling calmly. “I am much better,” he said in a pretty good British accent for a guy from Ohio.
At sunset, my truck got stuck climbing up a massive dune. The wheels started to sink. Brian dropped the truck into four-wheel low and gently pressed the brakes, trying to get the non-power-side tires to catch. No luck. I got out of the truck, shrugged my shoulders, and took a bow. The ANA roared with laughter. Finally, the big, bad Americans had gotten one of their trucks stuck, and they could take a break as they watched us dig it out. I looked at it as an opportunity. We had pushed them so hard and for so long that I figured this negative could be a positive. It was a way to humanize us.
That evening I boiled a pot of tea for the ANA. I’d picked up the strong black tea in the bazaar for just such an occasion. Grabbing the pot and a few glasses, I headed for Shinsha’s truck. I poured tea for him and some of his men. They graciously accepted it, but I could tell it shocked them. Afghan commanders never make tea for their soldiers. But I figured that this pot would ensure that when an Afghan truck got stuck it wouldn’t stay that way for long. We sat on the matted rugs in the desert and watched as the sun retired while passing handfuls of stiff unleavened bread among ourselves. I had two cups of chai and retired for the night.
Jerry Bradley & Kevin Maurer Page 11