Tough as They Come

by Travis Mills

  Going so long without taking a shower came with its share of complications. Guys got trench foot from their feet being wet and sweaty and not taking care of them properly. I got strange rashes in intimate areas, and it wasn’t uncommon for a guy to mutter about his balls sticking to his leg when he hiked. Every dude got chafed up pretty badly in his bodily crevices, and a common complaint was that a guy had “swass,” slang for “sweaty ass.” My armpits hurt. I sweated so much that the salt got trapped in my skin and my back broke out in a raised bubbly rash. This happened to other guys too. The only solution is to get your ID card and have another dude scrape your back hard until the salt crystals pop out. It’s a brutal procedure and feels like getting cut with a razor blade, but it’s all part of the fun.

  When you go for that long without a shower, you get a sticky and gross feeling at first. But then your body adapts with its oils and whatnot and after a while you don’t feel so sticky anymore, although you still feel gross. You just feel like you’ve got a film all over you. If you want, you could still put on deodorant every day, but after a while everything sort of blends together, so you learn to accept that you smell like crap.

  We did our best to wipe down with baby wipes, but only so much could be done. We took water bottles and cut holes in them with our knives and tried to spray them over us, but that made for a pretty poor substitute. We learned that it took about five days to get comfortable with our grossness. A week tops. Definitely not more than ten days. So, once we were comfortable, why bother with any sort of shower? We’d just need to get comfortable with being dirty and gross and sticky all over again.

  One day toward the end of our time on the mountain, I was looking forward to a particular afternoon snack I’d gotten in the habit of concocting. One of the MREs came with vegetable crackers with jalapeño cheddar cheese spread that came from a tube. It sounds gross, but if you spread the cheese on just right, then let it sit in the sun for a few minutes, everything gets warm and gooey like it’s straight out of the oven.

  Time came for my snack. I fixed up a cracker and let it sit to get warm. Just then the wind picked up and blew my cracker up and onto the ground. Fortunately, it landed cheese side up. Unfortunately, it landed on a pile of goat turd. I’d totally been looking forward to this snack all day. I examined the goat turd more closely. The turd looked dried enough, not juicy. I picked up the cracker, brushed off the bottom a little bit, and popped it in my mouth.

  “Not today, Afghanistan,” I said. “You’re not going to beat me today.”

  We lived on top of the mountain for fifty days straight, then our mission in that location was done. We were sent to the region of Robat Sangi-ye Bala, back over near the city of Herat, although this time we were about two hours north of FOB Stone. Winter set in. The weather turned freezing, with a forecast of snow.

  —

  When we arrived back in Robat, we set up our tents in a snowstorm. About six inches fell the first day, just enough to cover a man’s boots and make his feet wet. The area we were in was similarly featureless—mountains in the distance, similar paved road, similar tan-colored dirt, dust, rocks, and mud hut villages down the road. Our base was in a walled compound, although the building inside the compound wasn’t yet completed. Again, there were no showers anywhere. This time we built a makeshift bathroom out of a long board with three buckets underneath. At least we had that.

  We were closer to a village compared to the first time we were here, and we’d long since learned that it could be tough in Afghanistan to know where the line fell between civilian and the enemy. The Taliban didn’t work “with” the population so much as they forced people into complying with their way of doing business. For instance, whenever IEDs were planted, the local population typically knew where they were. Sometimes they shared this information with us, sometimes not. Once, a farmer told us that he would make sure none of his goats ever stepped on an IED, because if they did, the Taliban would come around and demand that he pay for the lost explosives. That’s the kind of survivalist mentality that had set in.

  About as soon as we got set up in Robat, the local chief from the ANP came over to meet with our LT and our platoon sergeant. The police chief had once been a member of the Taliban himself, but as far as we could discern, he’d switched over and was now fighting for the good guys. He was a tall, muscular dude with a full beard and a big stomach. He was pleasant for the most part, almost jolly, not angry or spiteful, and seemed eager to cooperate. I never did catch his name, but he looked sort of like an Afghan version of the late actor James Gandolfini, the guy known for his role as Tony Soprano.

  The police chief told us he knew all the bad guys in the area. He’d received some intel telling him that later that night a cadre of the region’s most wanted Taliban members would be traveling down a wadi (dry riverbed) on motorcycles. They’d be coming from a meeting of their leaders and operatives and would drive right where we could get them, he explained.

  Our leaders decided to check it out. These particular Taliban members were marked for “capture or kill” and they were known for previously placing roadside bombs that had killed American and British troops.

  We locked and loaded, jumped into our trucks, and drove to a spot near the location that the police chief had indicated. I was a truck commander of a Humvee with a big .50-caliber gun on top. Pender drove. Schwartz stood ready as gunner. Hubbard manned the SAW. We shut the trucks off, set up a security perimeter about 150 yards from the wadi, settled in, and watched. After that it became a waiting game. Night fell, and we put on our night-vision goggles to get a better view. With the goggles on, everything looked a different tint of green. About twenty-six of our men were on this mission. The ANP brought a bunch of their men too.

  About two in the morning I first heard the roar and sputter of approaching motorcycle engines. Dust lay in the night air, and instantly through my goggles I saw a group of bearded men round a curve and head down the wadi toward us. They weren’t traveling very fast, and the motorcycles they rode weren’t very big, probably Hondas or Suzukis, maybe 250cc at the most, typical of what the Taliban use. The police chief and his men ran into the wadi, waving their weapons and shouting, attempting to stop the motorcycles and arrest the Taliban. I didn’t know if that was part of the plan our commanders had agreed to or not. Right away, the Taliban screeched to a stop and started shooting at the ANP. Bullets crackled all around us. We got the word from higher command to engage, and I yelled to my men, “Fire.” We shot our rifles, and Schwartz let loose with several staccato bursts of the machine gun. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-a-tat-tat.

  This was my first large-scale firefight of any kind. It hit me with a wham that this wasn’t merely a training exercise anymore. This was the real deal. My adrenaline rose and with it a surge of energy. But I also felt calm, as if all my training had kicked in at once, and I just did what I was trained to do. I honestly wasn’t afraid. I took aim and fired at the bad guys, and they fired at me, and it didn’t faze me to think I might kill somebody when he wanted to kill me first.

  I saw several Taliban members get hit and fall. More fell. And more. The last few who were left turned around and took off up the wadi. We got word not to give chase, because wadis are great choke points for potential enemy ambushes.

  When the shooting died down completely, we approached close enough to see the bodies of the enemy soldiers I’d just helped kill. It was a surreal feeling, but I reminded myself that this is what soldiers are built to do. We received reports later that three of the men killed were top Taliban leaders in the region.

  We also received another report, although this one came about a week later. The same police chief who’d given us the intel got word to go check out a house. He went out with his driver and six of his men. When they arrived at the house, the driver and the police chief got out and began to walk forward. Without warning, their vehicle blew up, killing the rest of the chief’s men inside. The driver had parked on top of a remotely detonat
ed IED.

  Immediately, the police chief was surrounded by armed gunmen. They came from inside the house. It turned out the Taliban were exacting their revenge on the chief for tipping us off. Yet another indication of how the Taliban did business in Afghanistan. The driver, they let escape. He’d been in on the plan and had been paid the equivalent of $3,000 USD for betraying his chief.

  The police chief, they made walk forward until he was clear of the wreckage of his vehicle. The Taliban made him take off his shoes, part of the Islamic cleansing ritual. Before they enter a place of worship, they want to leave the dust and dirt of the world at the door. They told him to kneel and pray. He did. After he prayed, they shot him in the back of his head at close range. The full-bearded police chief slumped over dead.

  We were about a kilometer away on the other side of a hill and heard the bomb go off. We were sent to investigate. Blood was all over by the time we got there. We picked up body parts and loaded them into body bags. Other members of the ANP came out and policed the scene pretty well. The dead were all other members of the ANP, not civilians or American soldiers.

  I picked up an arm and a leg. A couple of our guys picked up a torso or two. A foot here and there. A hand with some fingers still on the end. When a bomb goes off like that, there are a lot of body parts you never find.

  I’d picked up dead bodies by then, and I felt desensitized to the experience. You just pick up what you need to, and you’re done with it. No one throws up like the movies often show. Not by that point in the war anyway.

  We handed over the bags to the ANP and left to go fill out the paperwork. It was a grisly day, and I was sorry that the Afghan police chief and his men had paid the ultimate price for helping their country become free.

  —

  Altogether, we lived at Robat for three months. Once the snow melted, living conditions were okay, but not great. We weren’t being shot at. I could heat up water, get a semblance of a hot meal, get some sleep. I missed the relative luxury of my first deployment, but I felt more like I was doing my actual job as a combat soldier this time. For the record, I took four showers total during the year of my second deployment. Yep, four.

  One day about six weeks into our time at Robat, we drove some two hours into the country on a regular patrol, like we often did, and went to a village to talk to the elders. We made it a point to talk to everyone we could. Our meeting with the elders lasted about three hours that day. We had tea with them, learned what we could, and communicated what we could to them. Everything seemed to go okay, but we noticed there was nobody of military age anywhere in the village. One of our guys cracked a raw joke that it was a good day to get ambushed.

  On the way back, I was in the lead truck in the convoy. Altogether, we had four American vehicles and four ANP vehicles, small Toyota Hilux trucks. We got about two miles away from the village when we started taking fire from the nearby mountainsides. AK rounds hit all around us with a sharp plink, plink, plink. A dry riverbed lay to one side of the road, and a hill was in front of us, so it was hard for our gunner to see up to where he needed to. The vehicles in the middle, the ANP trucks, were targeted the most by the enemy gunners, because they were nowhere as secure as ours. A steady hail of bullets continued to pound around us.

  We scrambled out of our Humvees, set up our weapons in an instant, and fired back into the hillsides. A squad maneuvered around to one side to outflank the enemies. I got my Mark 19 grenade launcher into the fight, fired, then yelled at my guys to stay there and man the guns. I ran back to the Humvee behind and drove it forward enough to where the gunner could see up the hill and engage the enemy. Then I ran back to my truck and continued to fire.

  One of the ANP guys with us wore a brightly colored vest—fluorescent green with two silver stripes. Earlier in the day I’d heard someone joke that if we were in a firefight, he’d make an easy target. He was just so easy to see. Once we actually got into the firefight, the joke was no longer funny, because sure enough the guy got hit. We called in a helicopter evac for him. The firefight was so heavy that they couldn’t land the helicopters at first. So we fired back enough to quell the enemy firing long enough to evac the guy.

  Up on the hillside, we could see a Taliban dude firing at us. A couple of our guys hiked up and flanked him. By the time they reached him, he was lying on his stomach and he’d stopped firing. They told him to surrender and get up, but he pulled out his AK-47 and shot at them. His shots went wild. They peppered him hard and he was done. When the rest of the fight was all over, our men brought him back to where we were. It’s a bit of a tricky situation, dealing with a body like that. You don’t just want to leave a body out in the open—even an enemy. We’re not pulling trailers with our vehicles, so you can’t use what you don’t have to transport a body. You don’t want a bloody body in the back of your closed truck. So I did the only thing I could think of. I strapped him to the hood of a Humvee like a deer.

  I realize that might go over bad in the public eye, but these are the improvisations you’re forced to make in combat situations. We needed to take the body back to the authorities so they could notify the family, and we had more on our minds at the moment than how to handle a dead enemy body. We got word from intel that the Taliban were setting up another ambush, this one even bigger, up the road, ready for us. We were prepared to fight again, but word came to get out of there instead. So we figured out a different route back to the base at Robat.

  It took about two hours to drive back. The ANP stayed with us. It was dark when we arrived, and we pulled the dead body off the hood, took him to the police station, and headed back to our compound. The next morning in the light I saw that the hood was covered in blood where the body had been. We washed off the hood, refit our ammo, and got prepared to go out on another patrol. For an infantryman, just another day at work.

  I remember that day thinking about how we’d been in the country for less than six months, and my second deployment had quickly proved to be very different from my first. We were in the thick of the battle here, and I felt a long, long way from my two-bedroom apartment back at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and my beautiful wife, Kelsey.

  On top of that, we were only halfway done, and although my men and I didn’t know it just then, more heavy combat would be right around the corner.

  Aside from punching out a truck and losing my wedding ring, I felt like I steadily matured as a leader on this deployment. Others noticed this too. About three months into deployment, while we were still up on the mountain, one of our sergeants got frostbite and needed to be evacuated. I took over for him then as acting squad leader. When he recovered and came back, he was sent to a different platoon. They gave me his job permanently as a squad leader when we were back in Robat, which meant I now led two teams.

  On the second team, my guys were Sergeant John Barton, a solid blond-haired fighter from West Virginia who’d crossed over from the army’s maintenance department; PFC Wyatt Sorenson, a great fighter and an all-around great guy; Specialist Jon Sy, a solid rifleman and a real workhorse; PFC Raycroft, a good fighter—we always called him by his last name only; I’m not sure if anyone ever knew his first—and PFC Anthony Russell, a tall guy from the South. He was a young kid, mischievous, who needed to be kept out of trouble.

  They were all good guys. Solid warriors ready to go to battle at a moment’s notice. With a team like this, I was going to adjust to my new job just fine.

  —

  Early morning on Valentine’s Day, 2010, we got a call that the ANP had cornered a bunch of Taliban fighters in a building about two hours down the road. They wanted us to come and help flush them out.

  We loaded fourteen of our men into four Humvees and headed up to the area under fire. The weather was calm that morning, sunny, still wintry cold although the snow had melted. My biggest goal that day, besides doing my job well, was to get home in time to call Kelsey for Valentine’s Day and tell her I loved her. No problem, I thought. It was supposed to be a five-hour m
ission total. Two hours up, one hour to clear the building, two hours back. If everything went according to plan, I’d have lots of time.

  Of course, this was Afghanistan. Time was relative.

  We arrived at the site, parked our vehicles about 150 yards away from the compound, and assessed the situation. The building the Taliban fighters were holed up in was a large mud-and-brick structure with two rooflines and two chimneys. A little wall about five feet tall surrounded part of the building. A fence to keep animals at bay sat to the left. No lights were shining out from openings of the house, I guessed, because there was no electricity inside. Sporadically, the bad guys inside fired their weapons through the house’s window holes.

  Afghan soldiers and police crouched behind their vehicles with their rifles and pistols drawn. There were about 150 other soldiers total besides us. They hunkered down behind their trucks, far enough away so they couldn’t get picked off by the bullets coming toward them.

  Since it already appeared that the Afghan officials couldn’t get the Taliban fighters to surrender and come out peacefully, the simplest solution to end the standoff was to do a bomb drop on the premises. Just fly a jet over the top and drop a GPS-guided bomb on the fighters (called a Joint Direct Attack Munition, or JDAM). We got on the radio and asked for a jet, but for whatever reason, we couldn’t clear the ordnance. We tried this twice, but it wouldn’t happen. I never found out why, but it’s not a squad leader’s job to ask. We just needed to figure out another way.