The Taliban Don't Wave

by Robert Semrau

  I asked about our newborn daughter, Caméa, and Amélie said she was doing great, she was really growing. Cam was only three months old when I deployed, and I missed her and my wife terribly. I was so happy to hear Amélie's voice and to be able to laugh and tell her . . .

  SNAP SNAP! . . . CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! Incoming enemy rounds passed feet and then mere inches over my head as the Taliban opened up on Sperwhan Ghar. Crap, did Amélie hear that?

  “What was that?” she asked, a familiar tone of suspicion in her voice. It was the same tone I got when she wanted to know what I'd been looking up on the Internet.

  “Absolutely nothing! Hey, I'm really sorry, chou, but something's come up and I gotta go, right now. I'll call you back as soon as I can.” I started to run toward my building, trying to crouch, sprint, and lie to my wife all at the same time as rounds cracked over my head. “Love you, gotta go, bye!” I hung up the phone and ran into our shack. “Stand to boys, the base is being attacked. First man dressed get over to the other shack, use the field phone and call the CP, let 'em know we've got incoming SA [small-arms] fire and we're being attacked. Go go go!”

  I think I set my personal best for getting kitted up, and ran over to the other building. The boys were playing vids and working on the computers, not hearing the sounds of incoming fire overtop of their video game—or more accurately, they probably just didn't care. This was crazy exciting for us newbs, but nothing new for them. “Base is under attack,” I said and quickly grabbed the field phone. The sergeant on the other end told me that I had to hurry; my ANA were already scrambling out the front gate to go and get some. Crap, that was quick!

  I asked Stephens and his boys if they wanted to come out and play guns but they were short-timers and knew it, and they weren't about to get pasted on their last day in Sper over some pissant drive-by shooting. I honestly couldn't blame them, not one bit. They'd done their time and now it was our turn.

  “Wish us luck,” I said, jogging out the door. I met the boys and told them what the command post had just told me. “We've gotta hurry.” I made my rifle and the gat of justice ready to sing, and started jogging toward the main gate, listening to the radio traffic over the net.

  Fourneau looked sick. “We'll be fine,” I said. “Just stay right behind me.” As we began to run down the slope we were now exposed to Timothy in the village to the west, where the incoming fire was originating. I remembered a trick from Northern Ireland, one we used when leaving the main gate. It was called “Hard Target,” and it meant running zigzag out the gate so that snipers couldn't get a bead on you. I started zigzagging down the slope, trying to make myself a “Van Damme” (Hard Target) and shouted at the others to do the same. I ran as fast as I could down the small hill, eager to get behind the cover of the ten-foot-high blast walls as incoming rounds smacked into the rocks around our feet. Thankfully we all made it into cover and then quickly ran up to the front gate.

  I shouted at the Canadian in the watchtower, “What've you got?” I heard a whoosh sound and looked up in the sky as the pretty, grey contour trail of an incoming RPG warhead passed over our heads. The rocket detonated harmlessly into the side of Sperwhan's hill. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. . . .

  “Fuck all! I can't see shit!” he shouted back. I could tell The Fear had gotten a hold of him, and was giving his sphincter a good squeeze.

  I shouted back, “Get as low as you can, you'll be fine!” The warrant looked at me and laughed at my flippancy. I thought for a moment about taking my three trained killers with me and running out after the Afghans, but then dismissed it as an exceedingly bad idea. Either the Taliban will outnumber us and kill us, the ANA will shoot us out of pure confusion, or the Canadians will assume anyone running outside the wire with guns is fair game!

  I thought again for a moment and asked, “Hey, buddy? Did you see any Afghan soldiers go running out the gate?”

  “No, no I don't think so. I'm tellin' ya man, I haven't seen fuck all!”

  “Wait a minute, didn't you just call the CP to tell them the ANA were running out the gate to go and stick it to Timothy?”

  “No. I told them the ANA had brought some civilians down to the gate, but that was it. I don't know what the hell you're talking about!” Nice.

  “Okay, so where are they?” I asked, looking around for any ANA and civilian persons of interest, but not seeing anyone matching the description.

  “Can't you see them?” he shouted. “Look around, they were there a minute ago! I'm not coming down to find them for you! Shit!” Evidently his pucker factor was going full bore. Poor bastard, all freaked out!

  “Okay,” I shouted back sarcastically, “sorry for bothering you!” I looked over at the warrant and . . .

  CRACK! CRACK! CRACK! CRACK!

  Time slowed down as I looked at the sandbar just over top of the warrant's and Hetsa's heads. Bullets kicked a long line of dust up in the soft sand, about ten inches over their heads, and although they couldn't see what was happening, surely they could hear it. Amazingly, neither of them so much as flinched. But the noise of supersonic bullets breaking the sound barrier right over their heads should have made them duck just a little bit! I was on the other side of the road, and I flinched! I was terribly jealous of their sang-froid.

  “Congratulations!” I shouted and smartly walked over to the Wizard and the dirty Hungo, outstretching my hand in fellowship. “First time being shot at?” I asked Hetsa.

  “Why, yes! Yes, it is!” he said, shaking my hand in the spirit of camaraderie. His incoming-rounds cherry had finally been popped.

  “How about you, Warrant? First time?” I asked, smiling a toothy grin and stretching out my hand.

  “Go fuck yourself!” he snarled.

  “Okay, no need to be rude about it.” I walked back over to Fourneau and put my hand on his shoulder. “First time, young man?”

  “Yes, sir.” He didn't seem to be enjoying the moment like the rest of us.

  “Well congratulations, you're a new man after this! It's a soldier's rite of passage. Like the gunny in Full Metal Jacket once said, ‘You'll be born again, hard!’ Well done!” We shook hands, but it had the same feeling you'd get from squeezing a dead fish.

  “Hey guys,” I said excitedly, “I just thought of something—we have now officially qualified for our Bronze Combat Badge!” Everyone snickered at my sarcastic comment. The rumour going around the army sewing circle was that Americans were giving Canadians attached to them a hard time, asking the Canadians, “Where's yer combat infantryman's badge?” Because every American who had been in combat (and every army in the world defined combat quite differently) wore a special badge to show he'd been in the shit. But Canadians didn't have that.

  So someone in the Canadian HQ felt left out, and started floating around the idea of having bronze, silver, and gold combat badges. The three separate badges would be awarded based on the nature of the combat you had survived. Bronze was supposed to be for getting shot at by small-arms fire, rockets, artillery, etc., but not actually shooting back, so technically, we all qualified! Yippee! Although, we'd all seen pictures of the proposed badges and agreed they were truly hideous, so we weren't exactly sure who would want to wear them anyway.

  Just then Lieutenant Aziz decided to make a guest appearance from around the far side of the watchtower, where undoubtedly he and his persons of interest had taken cover as the rounds started coming in. I was about to ask Ali to translate something for me, but damn it, I forgot Ali! In my haste to join the ANA outside the wire, I forgot to bring the only guy who could actually talk with them! I heard the voice of an old teacher of mine called Cort say in his gruff voice, “One mistake is all it takes to get a man killed, most of the time.” You idiot, Rob, you can't make mistakes like that and expect to live very long in this place!

  Rounds continued to crack over our heads and into the hill as Lieutenant Aziz hauled the two teenagers over to us and began asking some pointed questions, and even though my Dari w
as failing me, my psychology degree from the University of Saskatchewan (no honours, barely graduated) didn't let me down.

  But for some reason (that I could never quite figure out), whenever I saw the Afghans arguing amongst themselves, it always sounded in my head like the authentic, realistic dialogue from the movie Lawrence of Arabia, where white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant males (who had never even travelled to the Middle East) made up fight dialogue that was about as authentic as deep-fried chicken balls were to real Chinese cuisine.

  Aziz opened with, “You say you are not Taliban, but the moment I tell the village elders ‘No, you cannot have them back in time for supper,’ our base gets attacked! Explain that, you leprous worms!”

  “We are not Taliban, habibi, we are simple farmers!”

  “You lie like a donkey with a moustache! If you are not Taliban, then who is shooting at us?”

  “We do not know, habibi. We are simple farmers!”

  “Go then, back to your village, and tell your cowardly neighbours to stop shooting at us!”

  “We will go now, thank you, but we cannot guarantee the shooting will stop, for we do not know who is doing it, so how can we . . .”

  “Go, you sons of pregnant jackals, before I lose my patience and change my mind!” Or words to that effect. . . .

  So with a flourish, Lieutenant Aziz pushed them out the front gate to go and mediate at the Sperwhan Village Peace Accords of 2008. And they must've been very skilled diplomats, because miracle of miracles, within five minutes the firing stopped completely. Huh! As my Grandma Lockhart would've said, “Will wonders never cease?”

  As the sun began to set, we had a good laugh over the madness of it all and walked back up to our building. I thanked Aziz again, and radioed the CP to let them know that we were back in our shack, call sign 72A complete, and told them they had been the victims of the whispers game, where you whisper a simple message to a child and see how many variations of the message you get by the time it reaches the kid at the end of the line. The CP sergeant told us to stand by for further ops. None of us liked the ominous sound of that.

  I told the boys that from now on, I was instituting a new 72A SOP. After every patrol, the first thing we'd all do when we got back to our building was top up our water and dust off our weapons, because we never knew when we'd get the call to go back out again. I also reminded them of the cautionary movie Blackhawk Down, where the American Rangers didn't bother taking their night-vision goggles (NVGs) out on a day op, believing they'd be back long before nightfall. Unfortunately for them, they could've really used their NVGs before the fighting ended days later. For every patrol from now on, we'd always carry our small NVG monocle that could quickly be attached to our helmet, just in case we got caught outside the wire after nightfall. “These team SOPs are non-negotiable, starting now. And another thing—don't let me forget Ali again! Unless any of us just became fluent in Dari through the powers of reverse osmosis, I'm guessing we might need him one day.”

  The lads went and grabbed bottles of water and began refilling their CamelBaks, an amazing piece of kit. It had a long hose attached to a three-litre water bladder in our day sacks. We slowly began stripping off our armour and tac vests, but I kept my radio earpiece on, waiting for the word from on high. The rest of the boys took off their gear, still drenched with sweat from the morning, and were about to lie down on their beds when the command post transmitted our orders: “Seven Two Alpha, you will collect as many ANA as you deem necessary, and make your way outside the wire, approximately twenty-five metres northwest to a position designated by the snipers as the location of a dead Taliban insurgent carrying an RPG launcher on his back. He was shot off the back of a motorcycle trying to flee during this last engagement. You will recover the RPG launcher, over.”

  I was about to say, “You can't order us to do jack shit! We're the OMLT, we don't work for you!” but I realized we had to maintain good relations with the outgoing guys, and we were meant to be fighting the same enemy. It wasn't their fault they had a complete spastic for a boss! Besides, I was getting into the war rhythm and figured, what's one more op?

  I replied over the net, “Seven Two Alpha, I ack your last. Sure, why not? Over, ksscchh!” I made the static radio noise from the old seventies cop shows.

  “All right ladies,” I said to my team, “you heard the man, and you know the drill! Assholes and elbows!” I pointed at Hetsa and snarled, “Hudson, come here. COME HERE!”

  “Good one, sir,” he said. Every true infantryman loved the movie Aliens and its obvious star, Private Hudson.

  “Rebomb your water, grab some chocky bars and get 'em downrange, quick,” I said to the team. “We're going back outside the wire, and we want to get it done before Timothy knows we're rooting around in his backyard.” I wondered if in the short time I'd been in the Stan, for this round anyway, I wasn't becoming a bit of a war junkie, a guy who enjoyed the highs of adrenalin you got when you were getting kitted up, you had a mission, or rounds were cracking over your head. If it wasn't so terrifying, it would've been exhilarating.

  “Sorry, sir, what are we doing?” Fourneau asked, visibly perplexed.

  “Right, sorry, I forgot you don't have the implanted comms chip in your brain, so you can't hear the transmissions from the mother ship, like me. Okay, here's what's going on,” and I quickly briefed up the boys on what we'd just been ordered to do by the CP.

  “Shouldn't the QRF be taking this one, sir?” Fourneau asked, and then immediately regretted it as the angry father (the warrant) shot him a look that would kill a yak at fifty yards.

  “Technically, yes, but they—” I started to say, but the warrant quickly cut me off.

  “Fourneau, get your kit on, and get ready, we're going out again. Top up your water and eat something, quick.” The warrant shook his head and I imagined they'd have a private chat when I left the room to go and ask Lieutenant Aziz if he wanted to come and join us for some more excitement outside the wire. No rest for the wicked, and the righteous don't need any!

  I knocked on Ali's door. He was a good sport, and together we went and found Lieutenant Aziz. He was surprised to see me at his door for the third time today, and quickly said it wouldn't be possible, as the sun was about to set and the Afghans would finally be allowed to drink water and eat something. I said I understood completely, but the corpse was a mere twenty metres away from the gate, and it would be one less RPG launcher on the mean streets of Sperwhan Ghar. We'd need twenty guys, max. We'd go find the body, strip the RPG off of it, and be back no later than 1830 hours.

  “Fifteen men, and I don't come with you,” he said, raising the bet with his men like they were poker chips.

  “Okay, but who will be in charge of your men?” I asked, re-raising him.

  “Sergeant Major Khan,” he said, “and you must be back by 1830 hours.” He's all in!

  “We will, thank you very much. How soon can they be ready to go?”

  “Five minutes,” he said and brushed past me to go and prep his men.

  I told Ali to say thanks to the back of Aziz's departing head, and we walked over to my shack. I asked Ali how he was doing and he said fine, “but a little tired.” In the few short days I'd been working with him, I'd realized he had a great attitude. He was observing Ramadan as well, so he hadn't had anything to eat or drink all day, but you would never have known it. The Afghans' resolve and ability to maintain their fast, while still conducting operations in plus-fifty-degree Celsius heat, was truly astonishing. I know I would've dehydrated at the start of the morning and died of heatstroke if I hadn't been able to keep topped up on water.

  Aziz quickly scrambled his men, who never once complained or shot us dirty looks. They were needed and so they went, and that was enough for them. I apologized through Ali as my team of Canadians joined us, and promised them we'd be back as soon as possible. I radioed in our composition to the CP as we began marching down the slope toward the main gate, for the third time today. Hopefully this'll be
a milk run, I thought to myself. Fourneau called my name so I turned around.

  “Sir, you're not going to believe this, but I think we all just walked over an unexploded RPG warhead, and that Afghan there is kicking it like it's a rock down the street!”

  GEEEWWWW!!

  “Stop stop stop!” I shouted. “NOBODY MOVE!” I trusted Fourneau completely. He was smart so I gave him the benefit of the doubt. The warrant doubled back to join me and the Afghan sergeant major as I walked past Fourneau and looked back up the hill to where an ANA soldier was about to boot an unexploded RPG warhead, just like Fourneau had said.

  “Ali, get that man to STOP what he's doing, and back the hell away from it!” Ali shouted at the man who, looking like he just aged twenty years, slowly crept back from the rocket warhead.

  “Everyone, very slowly and carefully, do your fives and twenties! Make sure you're not standing next to any more rockets or mortars that haven't exploded!” As Ali translated, I looked around my personal space and performed my five- and twenty-metre check, like I'd been taught by the Brits and then relearned in the CF. Look five metres around you, and when that's clear and you're happy, look twenty metres around you. But they never said anything in the training about Afghans kicking pieces of UXO.

  I radioed the CP and advised them we had a UXO that the Canadian engineers would have to come and deal with, rapido. CP said the 'geers would be notified.

  “Hungo,” I spoke into the PRR. “On me,” I said, meaning come and see me.

  He quickly jogged over. I breathed in deeply and paused, then quietly said, “I've got a sinking suspicion the CP has once again run afoul of das kinderspiel ‘whispers.’ To that end, being very careful where you step, be a good chap and make your way down to the front gate and find the Canadian who sent up the report of the alleged dead Taliban with the RPG on his back. I'm guessing he actually sent up a report to the command post about there being a UXO on the western slope. I'd go, but I'm afraid the Afghans are going to start an impromptu game of soccer. There's a good lad, cheers.” With that, Hetsa carefully began making his way to the front gate.