by Sean Parnell
“Blackhawk three-six, this is Mountain six.”
A lump clogged my throat. This was like a cubicle dweller at Microsoft getting a call from Bill Gates.
“This is Blackhawk three-six. Go ahead, Mountain six.”
“We’ve got an air strike coming in. After the bird hits your target, I want you to get up there. Clear the area. If you find anyone alive, take them prisoner. Be careful. Mountain six out.”
Apparently we had stumbled across something important. I acknowledged the order and then radioed my trucks that we had an air strike inbound.
A pair of A-10 Warthogs sped off the runway at Bagram, where they’d been sitting at alert status for just such a call. Throttles open, engines thundering, they raced east. The lead pilot’s voice came over the radio as they closed in on the target area, and I was mildly surprised to hear a woman’s voice. I didn’t know there were any female A-10 pilots. My forward observer coached her in the final distance until she called weapons free.
Three five-hundred-pound bombs fell out of the sky at five-minute intervals. Each one scored a direct hit. The men, the truck, and the cave vanished in a storm of smoke, spewing dirt and rock down the mountainside.
“Baldwin, let’s go!” I ordered. My column surged forward. According to our map, the road that led to the top of the mountain met ours at an intersection on the east-side slope. We had a couple of kilometers to cover before we could reach that intersection. It was important for us to get to the blast site as soon as possible to ensure that any survivors had no time to escape.
“Three-six, this is Blackhawk six. Enemy is now fleeing east for the border carrying their wounded.”
“Roger that, six.”
“Three clicks [kilometers] out.”
I told Baldwin to pick up the pace.
“They’ve loaded their wounded into a truck,” Captain Dye reported.
They must have had another prepositioned down the mountain; no way had the one we saw survived the bombing.
In front of us, the mountaintop boiled smoke into the crystal blue sky. It looked like a volcano ready to erupt and gave the scene a prehistoric quality.
“Come on, Baldwin. Faster,” I urged.
“Going as fast as we can, three-six.”
I looked at our dash. We were barely doing twenty-five, but even that seemed extraordinarily dangerous given the road.
“Blackhawk three-six, this is Blackhawk six, enemy is now two clicks from you.”
We were closing the distance. We might win the race after all and run them down before they reached their Pakistani sanctuary.
The road steepened, and we negotiated a series of switchback turns that forced us to bleed off some speed.
“Three-six, this is six. One and a half now.”
“Roger.”
We rounded another bend. The road seemed suspended alongside a rock cliff hundreds of feet above a valley floor. I looked down and saw the edge of the road only a few feet from my door. If Pinholt sneezed, we’d be toast.
Baldwin disappeared around the bend.
“Sir, we have a problem,” he radioed.
“What’s the matter?”
We motored around the turn. Before Baldwin could answer, I saw a civilian flatbed truck obstructing the way forward. It had been parked at an angle so as to serve as a roadblock.
“What now, sir?” Baldwin asked.
I thought it over. We could try to hot-wire it and move it. That was terribly risky, though. The enemy could have booby-trapped it, and I would not lose a man that way.
“Hit it with your fifty,” I ordered.
McLeod racked his machine gun and poured a long burst into the vehicle. Windows shattered, one fender spun away, shredded by the heavy bullets. No explosion.
The clock was ticking. We needed to get on with it. Still, I wanted to be sure we’d detonated any potential booby traps before approaching the truck.
“Hit it with the 203.”
Roberts dismounted and sent a grenade directly into the truck. The explosion blew the tires out and set the rig on fire. But it did not trigger a secondary blast. Convinced it was safe, we moved forward and pushed the vehicle out of our way.
“Let’s go!”
But it was too late. The roadblock had given them just enough time to scamper back across the border. Losing the race didn’t sit well with any of us.
A few minutes later, we reached the intersection and drove to the top of the mountain. As I dismounted, I was astonished by the view. Our entire area of operations, including FOB Bermel on the other side of Rakhah Ridge, could be seen from this vantage point. Short of having eyes in the sky, this was the best observation point I’d seen in country.
The enemy had turned it into a forward base. Though the bombs had collapsed the cave’s entrance, we discovered the remains of an enemy camp a short distance away. Torn tents and teepeelike lean-to structures dotted a stretch of flat ground that had been concealed by a grove of conifer trees. The pine trees were now broken like matchsticks, their trunks burnt, needles blown from shattered branches. They looked like skeletons set against the azure backdrop of the midday sky.
Here and there we found scraps of bloody clothing, all that was left of an insurgent after the air strike had caught him in the open.
We searched the camp and found a few personal stashes with Afghan and Pakistani passports. Baldwin brought me a photo he’d discovered. “Check this out, sir.”
The picture showed a grinning fighter holding an AK-47. Two smiling children flanked him. They didn’t look like Afghans.
“What do you think, Baldwin? Arabs?”
“Yeah. This was a foreign fighter camp.”
Next to a couple of charred tree trunks, the men found a cache of 107mm rockets. Crates of ammunition, a few scattered AKs, and provisions completed the scene.
At the cave entrance, we found the remains of the flatbed truck we’d seen. When the bombs struck, a landslide of rocks and dirt had swept over the area. Now the remains of the rig lay half buried; its load of rockets in the bed looked to have detonated in a secondary explosion.
Then stench hit us. Offal. Blood. The reek of humans defiled by firepower.
The men began to try to dig out the cave entrance. As they dug, they unearthed pieces of the men killed in the attack. I told them to stop. The gruesome work would not do any good, anyway. The entrance was under tons of dirt and rock and would take hours to uncover again.
I noticed a boulder that had plummeted down from the mountain’s peak, propelled by the triple bomb blasts. I went to investigate. It had landed on an enemy fighter. His left side lay crushed beneath it. His right side was still exposed, and I noticed that he was naked. That was not an uncommon discovery; a bomb’s concussion wave can blow clothing right off a person in its blast radius.
The sight prompted an idea. We Americans pride ourselves in never leaving a comrade behind. Soldiers will risk their lives to recover the body of a fallen brother. After some of the Rangers killed in the Bloody Sunday firefight in Somali back in 1993 were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by the enemy, a determination to ensure that none of our men suffered such defilement again became ingrained in the army’s culture. Since 9/11, it had been tested time after time. The enemy would not get our fallen.
In this one respect, our enemy shared our values, if for different motivations. Muslims believe that the dead have to be buried within twenty-four hours, lest they lose their opportunity to enter Paradise. That was why they carried their dead out with them as they escaped from us the day before. This was why, after years of fighting in Afghanistan, it was rare to see dead lying exposed at any time other than the immediate aftermath of a fight.
I looked at the corpse.
If that was Baldwin, would I be willing to risk my life to come back and get him?
Yes.
Maybe we could exploit that. Maybe the bodies here could be bait.
We cleared the site and set up a platoon perimeter on a neighboring hilltop that afforded a prime view of the enemy base. Captain Dye came out to join us with the Delta Platoon, and we settled down to wait.
At dusk, the enemy telegraphed their intentions. Radio chatter increased, and the Prophet spooks reported that they had crossed the border into Afghanistan again. Dye ordered our 105s to open up. Scores of rounds pummeled the mountaintop’s approach. The enemy frequency went silent.
A few hours later, they tried again. The 105s split the darkness, their huge explosions igniting the night sky with red-orange flashes like hellish lightning. The ground shook. It began to rain. A Predator drone buzzed overhead, sending back real time imagery of the target area for the men at the base. I sat in a shallow foxhole with Captain Dye and watched the fireworks.
“This is what it’s all about,” he whispered.
“What, sir?”
“Being in the infantry. This is what it’s all about.”
“It is,” I managed, thinking back to hockey games and history classes, moments with my grandfather, dinners with my family. Here on the other side of the planet, the rain chilled us to the bone. We shivered under our ponchos and didn’t say another word.
I thought of the photograph Baldwin had found. Those kids, were they the soldier’s sons? I hadn’t even thought of that when I’d first looked at it. I’d just eyed the image with a professional eye, trying to glean some useful intelligence from it. Now I wondered if their father was out there in the rain, trying his honorable best to recover his comrade’s corpse.
Or maybe he was our bait.
The shelling continued, and the night seemed without end.
Nine
The Moral High Ground
In the days following our destruction of the enemy’s cave network, a series of Taliban-led offensives conspired to change the focus of our operations. In southern Afghanistan, coalition forces virtually lost control of Kandahar and Helmand Provinces, forcing the army and marines to counterattack to regain the lost territories. With the U.S. military heavily committed in Iraq, the only way to reinforce our units around Kandahar was to strip troops from other sections of Afghanistan. Our battalion bore the burden of that sudden redeployment. By mid-May, Lieutenant Colonel Toner possessed little more than a company’s worth of combat troops to patrol a section of the border region the size of Rhode Island. My own platoon gave up a four-man fire team to augment our troops who were sent south. Right when I needed them most, I lost some of my most stalwart men, including Aleksandr Nosov, Erwin Echavez, and Khanh Nguyen. Short and built like a bulldog, Khanh was a quiet, dedicated soldier whose father had served in the South Vietnamese Army.
To compensate for the lack of combat power left to us, Lieutenant Colonel Toner ratcheted up our operational tempo until it pushed our remaining men to the breaking point. We patrolled nonstop, returning to the base only to refuel, rearm, and grab more supplies. Days off became distant memories as we tried to mask our numerical weakness with a constant presence out in the neighborhood.
Even with this effort, there was no way we could continue to support all the operations we’d undertaken earlier in the spring. The Bandar checkpoint and Major Ghul’s police battalion dropped to the bottom of our priority list. They would have to fend for themselves while we took care of business closer to FOB Bermel.
The frantic pace wore us out and degraded morale, but it did serve to get us intimately familiar with our battlefield. My platoon walked every hill, mesa, and ridge for fifty miles in all directions around Bermel. We drove the wadis, discovered goat tracks that could handle our Humvees, and used them as shortcuts to get around potential roadside bombs. We documented every trail, hamlet, qalat, and compound until we had rewritten our army-issued maps to reflect the changes years of warfare had wrought on the landscape.
Signs of the enemy abounded. Hidden in swales or within groves of pines, we found more teepeelike shelters, which we searched before destroying. In other places, the enemy had prepared fighting positions that overlooked roads our company frequented. Usually they consisted of shallow pits rimmed with rocks stacked like sandbags. We filled them in with our boots or entrenching tools, though we knew the enemy could just dig new ones. But I would be damned before I’d give the insurgents a free pass at anything.
In several places, we discovered more sophisticated fieldworks, including covered dugouts so masterfully camouflaged that they were undetectable at anything but point-blank range. To thwart our thermal imaging systems, each dugout was roofed with logs buried under three feet of dirt and pine needles. Even a passing AH-64 helicopter, with all its sensors, would have been unable to see the men hiding in those positions.
In some of the dugouts, we found prescription bottles for antibiotics and painkillers issued by hospitals in Pakistan. After passing that up the chain of command, we later learned that the treatment facilities served as havens for wounded insurgents. Bitterly, we wondered how much of the humanitarian aid money we were giving Pakistan went to creating and maintaining those places. What an odd situation—our wounded enemy recovering in our erstwhile “ally’s” medical system. What would folks have thought if the German wounded had recovered in London hospitals in 1944, only to return to the battlefield to fight later?
The world had changed a lot since my grandfather’s day.
As we documented the area around Bermel, we developed information on every cave network we could find. The caves served as primary staging points for the enemy, but the known complexes were not even noted on our maps. Fixing this deficiency proved to be a Herculean task, as the wadis, mountains, and ridges around Bermel were honeycombed with thousands of them. I made Sabatke our designated cave-clearance expert, a job he embraced. Time after time, I watched him plunge through a cave entrance, M4 at the ready, and wondered how he could descend into those dark and confined spaces with such fearlessness. Thank God he never encountered the enemy down there. Instead of sparking hellish firefights, his subterranean investigations revealed supply caches and gleaned bits of valuable intel.
In the flatlands below the cave systems, we became intimately familiar with how the war had ravaged the borderland villages. Only a few communities still existed around Bermel. Most of the others had been abandoned by the Waziri tribal inhabitants, who had fled to Pakistan to escape the conflict. Their qalats and businesses had fallen first into ruin, then into enemy hands. On our patrols, we would dismount in these ghost towns to find telltale signs that the insurgents were using them as staging points: torn wrappers, empty ammo boxes, abandoned gear. In some cases, we found weapons caches stashed among the ruins.
We could not leave the dwellings for the enemy, but how do you destroy buildings made of mud? We settled on burning their wood and thatch roofs. The walls would remain unharmed, but at least the buildings would not afford the enemy shelter from the elements or, more important, our air assets.
Wheat, our whittling sniper, turned out to be a talented firebug. He seemed to always know when I was about to order a dwelling to be torched. Before the words even left my mouth, he would appear at my shoulder, his best friend, Corporal Colten Wallace, in tow, and ask, “Y’all need somethin’ burned down, sir?”
All grins, he and Wallace would set to work. I’d watch and vow that someday, I’d visit them on the Fourth of July. Their fireworks displays would be epic.
Wallace and Wheat were two sides of the same coin. Both were southern cowboys who loved horses, the outdoors, and anything rugged. Wheat was the polished, tip-your-hat-and-say-“ma’am” sort of gentleman, religious and devoted to his wife and family. Wallace was the rough one, a cow-punching brawler type prone to smashing chairs over dudes’ heads in a good old-fashioned barroom dustup. Tall and lean, naturally muscular, he could drink a twelve-pack a night and never gain weight. He smoked
two packs of cigarettes a day but could run a six-minute mile without even warming up. Women and mayhem made him happy. If they’d both been alive in the 1880s, Wheat would have been a homesteader; Wallace would have been the guy playing poker with Wyatt Earp.
When Wallace and Wheat weren’t exercising their inner arsonists, we were out doing our best to help the few civilians still clinging to their lives in this tortured border region. Most were noncommittal when we approached. They’d seen U.S. units come and go, but the enemy always lurked around. The insurgents had terrorized these impoverished but hardy people, whose loyalty centered on their families and tribal affiliations. Their understanding of a broader Afghan nation simply did not exist, and we were just another passing group of interlopers as far as they were concerned. Like the British and Soviets before us, we would leave at some point too. And then what? The enemy would still be out there, sharpening their knives for the reckoning sure to be delivered to anyone who had assisted us.
Through these long and often boring days, our patrols yielded tidbits of information about the enemy we faced. To my surprise, we were not fighting the Taliban alone. The papers back home made our enemy in Afghanistan out to be a monolithic force. We had made the same mistake during the Cold War, assuming that all Communist countries formed a monolithic, anti-Western bloc. That simply was not the case.
Same thing in Afghanistan. The Taliban was the main group aligned against us, but its influence on the border was much less substantial than that of another shadowy organization, one that the CIA knew well. Known as the Haqqani Network, it had first taken shape during the Afghan-Soviet War in the 1980s, thanks to the acumen of its leader, Mawlawi Jalaluddin Haqqani. Charismatic, moderate in his religious views, and a capable diplomat and organizer, Haqqani led a band of warriors in southeast Afghanistan that destroyed hundreds of Russian tanks and shot down dozens of aircraft while playing a key role in the defeat of the Red Army. Jalaluddin’s moderate views and proximity to the Pakistani border made him a natural fit with the CIA and Representative Charlie Wilson’s campaign to support the Afghan insurgency. Before the end of the war, the Haqqani Network owed its funding, its weapons, and some of its training to the United States.