The governor estimated our combined kill tally of insurgents to be close to one hundred dead, two hundred wounded. Then the governor said that at least two hundred Afghan families had returned to the area we'd cleared in as many days, to return to their homes that were once occupied by Taliban and their supporters.
When the major said that, we all felt pretty good. Finally, something decent, something important, that we can point to and say, “We did make a difference: we helped the people get their homes back.” To be able to say we had accomplished something tangible on the op was very important to everyone in the OMLT. It was a good thing, something we could be proud of, because we'd had precious few moments like that.
We mounted up the next day and were leaving the front gate when our vehicle column of Afghans and RGs came to a screeching halt. Wandering into the base, covered in dust and looking like death warmed over, was a small, frail-looking ANA soldier. It seems he'd fallen asleep at our leaguer on the hilltop in the middle of the desert, his friends forgot to wake him up, and he'd been left behind. He'd just walked over forty kilometres in two days through enemy-held territory and strolled up to the front gate. I don't want to be the kind of guy who says, “I told you so,” but . . .
The ANA threw him into the back of one of their trucks, gave him some water, and had a good laugh over it. We continued on and drove down the highway until we rolled into a Brit base called FOB Bastion, just north of the Lash. Hobbles and I walked into the command post to let them know we were there. We met a small Dutch major who explained they knew exactly where the enemy was, pointed their position out to us on a large map, and then politely asked if we would be so kind as to go and take care of them.
Hobbles and I looked at each other, and then stared at the Dutch major.
“And what's wrong with your soldiers?” Hobbles asked.
“Well,” he started to murmur, “if we go, we might get hurt, and so—”
“Holy crap,” I snapped. “What about us? It doesn't matter if we get hurt?” Hobbles muckled onto me and we quickly left the CP. Wow—did that really happen?
We spent the night and then made it back safely to Kandahar Province the next day. On our way, Ross had wisely taken a ten-figure map grid on his GPS for where he lost his rucksack on the way into Helmand, so we pulled up to the Afghan National Police station and Ross got out to confront an ANP officer wearing a CF army-issued winter jacket on the front gate. Ross's name tag was still on the jacket, so hilarity ensued when Ross asked if he could speak to himself about getting his jacket back. Then he ripped it off of the officer and hopped into his RG, and we fled down the road as the ANP threatened to kill us for stealing their jacket.
We made it back to Masum just in time for a late lunch. We began offloading our kit when Major Hobbles declared we were all going to KAF for two days of R&R. It was the best news we'd had in a long time. Visions of finally calling home, drinking coffee and eating ice cream on the boardwalk, sleeping in for once, and eating until we were actually full, filled our exhausted minds. You'd think we'd just won the lottery!
We had a quick after-action review for the road move and any points we wanted to pass on, and then remounted our RGs for our two days of roller coaster fun in KAF! Yippee!
The Wizard and I would be travelling with Ross and the sec-for boys in the lead vehicle. Rich offered us a place with him in his RG, along with the rest of call sign “Dead Men Walking,” but I wisely said, “Mon cher Richard, you—good sir—can stuff your offer. In fact, you can shove it, poke it, cram it, wedge it, stick it, push it, elbow it, and finally, nudge it right up your—”
“Yeah, I get it, dickhead,” he snapped. “All you had to do was say no thanks.”
I was about to mount up when I saw that the vehicle Hetsa was travelling in had all of its plastic firing ports open. If an IED went off (and didn't immediately kill them) and they had so much as even one port open, they'd all be concussed and deaf. I got their attention and shouted at them to close their ports like good stormtroopers. They groaned and assuredly said something derogatory about officers, but sealed all the ports closed.
The Wizard and I mounted up with Captain Ross and shrugged off the dust from the one-horse town that was Masum Ghar. We were heading to the bright lights of the big city! Yip-yip-yippee! Bright light city gonna set my soul / gonna set my soul on fire!
We screamed, “So long, suckers!” as we flew out the gate of Masum and quickly zipped along the ring road south to Kandahar city and then KAF. I reminded myself to stay switched on, but allowed myself to get caught up in the conversation about what we were going to do in KAF once we got there. Everyone was joking and laughing away, and for once, my fear of driving in Afghanistan seemed to have been left behind.
I looked back at the Wizard and said, “Do you think we'll find the suppressors you've been aft—”
KAAA-BOOM!
I looked out the back window. Oh no, oh no, oh no! I wanted to throw up. My heart had dropped into my stomach as I saw a huge mushroom cloud begin to billow and form in the sky, right in the middle of the road between our vehicles. Was it an RPG or a Spig 9 or an IED? Had to be an IED—the explosion was too big to be anything else. We just got IEDed! Everyone began to talk over top of each other. I couldn't hear any orders coming over my radio. I . . . what . . .
“Shut up!” I ordered. “Everyone be quiet and watch your arcs for Timothy! Listen for orders over the net!” I was expecting a stop and secure order if our friends had been obliterated or too badly damaged to move (we weren't going to leave our wounded or KIA behind), or a “Go go go! Get off the X!” order if the IEDed vehicle could still move. If it could move, we were supposed to get off the incident site, to get off the “X.” Secondary IEDs, direct fire, mortars, rockets: they could all be waiting for us if we didn't move, right now!
But no orders were forthcoming. Maybe Hobbles got hit! Then it was up to the nearest officer to call the next move. But no one was saying anything. The radio had gone maddeningly silent. What the hell? Longview started to open up the back door.
“Close that door!” I shouted, “We haven't been told to dismount! We're waiting for orders; we might be moving off the X.” He quickly slammed the door shut and sat back down. I was still staring back toward the explosion. The dust had begun to settle and I could see all of our RGs had come to a complete stop. Oh no, that's not good. They're too badly hurt to move. We've got to protect them. “Gunner,” I said, talking to the automated turret operator, “what do you see?” He had swiveled his gun around to check out the damage. He was using his optics to cut through the dust.
“Two vehicles back, one RG, missing its .50, with its hood gone, and smoke billowing out of the engine,” he stated. Two vehicles back? That was Hetsa's RG. . . .
“Is anyone moving inside?” I demanded. Please, God.
“Yes! Guys are moving inside!” He shouted. Everyone in our RG breathed out again.
“Sir,” the warrant said. We'd been in enough trouble together that I knew what he was thinking.
“You called it, warrant. Move out, dismount dismount dismount!” I ordered.
“Gunner, swivel your weapon around and look for any Taliban in cover; check out the hills to our north and the houses to the south. Ross, I'll be outside, diverting traffic. Get your gunner to cover us after his sweep.”
“Roger that,” Ross said, listening intently over the radio for some news, for someone to says something, anything.
I hopped out and looked down the road as soldiers ran up to the RG and climbed inside. They were doing their job; I had to do mine, which was to make sure we weren't about to come under fire from someone else or encounter a suicide bomber trying to rush through our cordon.
“Do your fives and twenties, boys!” I shouted to my vehicle's dismounts, reminding them to check for IEDs in their immediate area. The Taliban enjoyed planting secondary devices in the same location as the first IED, trying to kill us as we went to help the wounded.
The ro
ad we were on was the only major highway to Kandahar from Masum, so civilians were travelling back and forth on it as well. When they saw the explosion, they immediately stopped and wisely began to back up, knowing soldiers were more than likely to shoot first, ask questions never! I looked at the oncoming vehicles; they were beginning to pile up behind the lead one.
To our great relief, Rich's voice came over the net and said everyone in the vehicle was okay. They'd gotten their bells rung and some nosebleeds, but they were going to be okay. I wondered why our major wasn't telling us this. Was he hurt? He wasn't in Hetsa's vehicle. . . .
I spread out the guys from our lead vehicle and we started conducting traffic in a big loop, away from the incident site.
Once I was happy with everyone's position, I started to walk back to the IED blast site. I ran into Rich, who was running around, trying to get everything organized.
He ran over to me and said “Big effing IED—ripped the hood off of Hetsa's RG. The sheer force ripped off the .50-cal and launched it twenty metres into the desert. Everyone's okay though, nothing serious, lots of headaches and ringing ears.” His relief was written all over his face.
“What happened, though?” I demanded. “No one said anything, no orders, no nothing! I snapped at the guys because they wanted to dismount right away, but what happened to ‘Get off the X’?”
“I know,” Rich said, “that was messed up.”
“What about the major—is he okay, is he wounded?”
“No, he's fine, he was—”
“Then what the hell is going on? There's a whole freaking list of things we're supposed to do right after that happens, and we didn't do any of them!” I was really upset. The major enjoyed calling me a junior captain, but I knew we didn't just hang around immediately after an IED, not if we didn't have to!
“Rob!” he said, snapping me out of it. “It's not the time for that! Right now, we're off-loading the guys and waiting for the QRF.”
“The QRF will take hours to get here, but can the vehicle still be driven? Is it too damaged to move?”
“Besides the hood and the fifty, I think it's fine.”
“Well then what the fuck are we still doing here, just hanging out? Rich, I'm not having a go at you brother, but you and I both know we should've left ten minutes ago! It's a total miracle that wasn't an IED-initiated contact, because if it was, the way this gong show has been handled, we'd all be in a right shit state!”
“I hear ya.”
I breathed in deeply and stared back at the RG missing its hood. How weren't they all killed?
“Orders are: we sit and wait. QRF out of Masum will come and collect us to go back there,” Rich said quietly, not wanting to provoke me.
“Well, thank fuck you were there! You were the only guy saying anything!”
“Some guys step up, some guys go and stare into IED holes . . .” Rich said absent-mindedly.
What? What did he mean by that? Before I could ask him, he turned around and jogged back to the damaged RG where the guys were being carefully removed.
I walked over to the warrant and briefed him on the plan. He felt the same way I did. Collect our wounded, swap out drivers, grab the fifty, and vamoose!
Some ANP officers came up, and after begging me for some 9mm ammo, they wandered over to the IED blast site and found the detonating wire. They dug it up and followed it about six hundred metres away to the south toward a large compound, where they found a ladder leaning against the wall.
Thankfully Timothy's sense of timing was off, because he initiated the IED too soon, and all he managed to do was rip off the hood and the .50-cal. Had he fired his device at the right time, everyone in the RG probably would've been killed or severely wounded.
The cops did a search of the compound, but once Timothy had seen the ANP following his det cord, he would've lit out, rapido.
I walked back over to the IED hole to find Major Hobbles. I saw him standing next to the hole, with a vacant look on his face, staring into it. So that's what Rich had meant.
I walked up to him and quietly asked, “You okay, sir?” I could still smell the explosives from the hole.
“Yeah,” he snapped, “I'm fine. I'm not the one who got IEDed!” Well, you're sure not acting like it! We both looked into the hole. It was huge, easily five feet across. It must have been a large IED.
“Close one, eh?” I asked in a comradely tone of voice.
“No shit! I can't believe how close they came to getting us—half a second later and they'd all have been killed.” He continued to stare into the hole.
“Well, thankfully that didn't happen, so now I guess we just wait for the QRF.”
He didn't respond but just looked around, in a sort of daze. I let him be and walked back over to my lead vehicle and cordon duty.
After what seemed like an unbearably long time to wait, the QRF from Masum Ghar turned up with a Bison sporting a plow in the lead, bulldozing down walls to create a new route to get to us. It was followed by some tanks, a few LAVs, and a flatbed truck.
They pulled up to the site and loaded up the RG onto the back of the flatbed. Okay, that's why they called it the QRF. The RG couldn't move. We mounted up and slotted ourselves into their column for a slow ride back to Masum Ghar.
We pulled into the base and then escorted our guys to the medics. I asked all of them how they were feeling, and besides headaches and ringing ears, they seemed to be doing all right. One of the guys from Ross's sec-for group, whom I had only ever said a few words to, stopped me and said thanks for telling them to seal up their firing-port hatches. I said I was just glad they were all okay (relatively speaking).
We did a quick hot wash and it was obvious the CSM was livid over the lack of orders or any direction immediately following the IED. Everyone stared at the major—the CSM's comment was aimed directly at him. He didn't have an immediate response, but asked, “Any other points?” What did the CSM expect him to say?
I had been in enough scary situations in my thirty-five years to know that a person could be a hero one day, and a total goat the next. No one could be perfectly brave and courageous every single time, in every situation. It was a continuum, and all a leader could do was hope that on any given day he would do the right thing, make the right call, and not get anyone under his command killed. If you were particularly brave, then all the better.
Rich and I talked long into the night over powdered coffee. We had been told to stop using the instant mocha coffee sachets because one of the guys said a medic had told him they were poisonous, but after a day like that, pfft, who cares?
Fourneau was on leave and had been choppered out of FOB Tombstone back in Helmand, so it was just Hetsa (with cotton in his ears), the Wizard, and me left from call sign 72A. We slept outside on tables around the BBQ pit, outside the Batcave in Masum. I looked up at a parachute drifting lazily over us; someone had strung it up between the buildings to provide some shade from the cruel sun. I wondered if I would ever jump again. Then I caught myself and wondered if I was even going to make it home again, to do anything.
Around two a.m. I was ripped from a deep sleep by the sound of a small OMLT kitten getting torn apart by a wild mongoose, only a few feet away from me. I listened as it screamed when the mongoose began to eat it while it was still alive. I rolled over and fell back asleep.
Chapter 15
The next morning I found Sean hiding in the Batcave, obviously as far away from the wire as he could possibly get. After our usual pleasantries and piss-taking, he told me I would be taking over the mentoring position Rich held with the Third Company, 72 Kandak. The officer I would be mentoring was Captain Ghias, the guy who got tired on the second long foot patrol in Helmand and decided to hop onto the back of a Ranger truck and take off. Great. Sounds like my kinda guy.
The Third Company and all of its troops would be part of a huge Canadian resupply and teardown convoy making its way to Combat Outpost (COP) Zangabad, and then on to FOB Mushan, to the west
of Masum and Sperwhan. Sean told me I would be taking over for Captain John at FOB Mushan, the westernmost base Canada had in the Panjway Valley.
I would be signing for the RG that was already at Mushan, so I wouldn't be taking an RG out there. Sean had checked my file and realized I was LAV crew-commander qualified, so I was dicked to be in the turret of a spare LAV for the ride out. I hadn't been a “Panzer commander” since phase four officer training, so I was rusty as hell.
Then Sean dropped an A-bomb on my head when he told me I would be taking over as the commander of Rich's Canadian OMLT team, 72C, or as I liked to call them, call sign “Do Not Go Gentle!” Gaahaaaa!
“Are you mental?” I shouted. “I don't want to die!”
“You'll be fine, relax—” Sean said, trying to soothe my frazzled nerves.
“Relax? You don't know! You weren't there! But I saw it, with my own eyes: Death follows them on horseback and then just hangs out, eager to see what they'll get up to next! They have the mark of Cain on their foreheads! Like it was prophesied in the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, ‘Woe betide any man that doth willingly stand next to Seven Two Charles in a war zone. . . . ’”
“Oh, stop being so biblical,” Sean chided.
“I suppose you're right,” I sighed, slowly accepting my fate. “I guess Moe Szyslak's dad in The Simpsons was right—sooner or later, everybody gets shot.”
“You're such a nancy,” Sean sneered. “Grow a pair, you'll be fine.”
“As always Sean, your strength gives me strength.”
Sean told me to grow up and then said Warrant Smith would be my 2 I/C, but he was already out at Mushan, so I would meet him there. Stamps, Rich's ultra-dependable driver and all around good joe, would also be coming along, as would Rich's gunner, a young guy called Iropolous.
I told Sean thanks for nothing, and got up to go and find the Wizard and the dirty Hungo to tell them the bad news. I found them and said Ragnarök was upon us.
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