“How do we know whether they’re speaking Arabic or Pashto?”
The briefer didn’t have a response, and my confidence level shrank. Since every Afghan household had at least one gun, we couldn’t assume that being armed meant someone was hostile. Nor could we expect locals to notify us of any danger. Passing along information of an ambush up the road would be a death sentence for the informant and his or her family.
Our enemies worked like the Mafia. They earned cash by running illegal roadblocks and extorting shop owners. They used that revenue to bribe police commanders, buy cheap weapons, and recruit young thugs. They taught them a few easy techniques, the most important being the hit-and-run ambush. They kept their organizations small and outsourced the riskiest missions. They’d pay farmers two hundred dollars for every rocket they pointed at the Americans from one of their fields. Stuck in a ten-year drought in a stagnant economy, it was hard to blame the farmers, though it would become easier after enduring rocket barrages.
Children had a record of giving good intelligence tips, but they had also been used by the Taliban to fire pen guns at passing soldiers on patrol. We suspected some kids were responsible for planting roadside bombs under bridges and on tree branches. These bombs, known euphemistically as Improvised Explosive Devices, or IEDs, were growing in complexity and destructiveness as insurgents in Iraq collaborated with their colleagues in Afghanistan. Earlier that summer, I had received a letter from a classmate in Iraq. His report of children shooting at him and having to shoot back had made me shake my head when I read it. What would it be like to look at every kid as a possible threat? How would a child look through a gunsight?
TWO HOURS AFTER LANDING in Gardez and less than twenty-four hours after arriving in Afghanistan, I went on my first combat patrol. I sat in the backseat of the Humvee as we sped out past the guard post and gunned the engine to forty miles an hour. My brain was like cotton candy from the combination of sleeplessness, obscure Afghan names, and altitude.
That first patrol introduced me to dust. Layers of dust, settling in thick layers on every surface, horizontal and vertical. Inhaling dust, making it even harder to breathe whatever oxygen existed in the thin atmosphere. Dust stinging my eyes, as it swirled around our Humvee. Over the course of the deployment, I swallowed my own body weight in Afghan dust.
The sheer scale of the area we were attempting to secure was daunting. We drove for four hours and covered only half of our area of operations, a neat circle on the map twenty miles across. No census had been done in nearly thirty years, but Gardez’s population was estimated at more than one hundred thousand. If the estimate was correct, then I had roughly one soldier for every three thousand Afghans.
Paktia’s population was unusually dispersed. Families lived in multigenerational households spread among compounds dotting the entire zone we had to patrol. Humvees are tough trucks, but even NASA would have difficulty building a rover to maneuver in the Afghan countryside. A route that looked straight on the map turned out to be a roller coaster that whip-lashed my head between a soldier’s right knee in the gunner turret, the door handle, and the antitank bazooka suspended from the roof behind my head. I could almost hear the lug nuts and door hinges shaking loose with the bumps, rolls, and braking halts. There were more potholes than flat spaces. And that was a road. The other routes so neatly designated on the maps were more like recommendations: If someone were to build a road, we might recommend it go in this general direction. Thus it was possible to be both on the route and off the road. Nothing was marked, especially when we descended into the warren of dried riverbeds known as wadis. Piles of rocks marked either land mines or property boundaries. In either case, the rule was to steer away, even if that meant tipping the Humvee 45 degrees on a side to skirt along the edge of a wadi.
Downtown Gardez was India without the sacred cows. Fortunately for us, the driver from the 82nd was skilled. He knew where to drive without consulting the map and anticipated bumps from memory. He also sped up while crossing culverts to minimize the roadside bomb threats. Weaving through the city, the absence of stoplights caused no concern. He drove with the confidence of a New York cabbie and zigzagged through traffic effortlessly.
In the heart of Gardez, beneath the old city fortress, a solitary policeman stood in the center of the city’s main rotary junction. He had a waxed handlebar mustache and wore a well-creased uniform damp with sweat at the armpits. His white gloves had already begun to split at the seams. As dust and trash swirled around his pedestal, he stood like a man trapped in the eye of a hurricane. His cheeks bellowed as he blew his silver whistle, and his arms gesticulated wildly like an epileptic mime. None of the drivers appeared to take notice.
I TURNED TWENTY-FIVE THE day before my men finally arrived three days later from Kandahar. My platoon’s late arrival in Gardez meant we would have only forty-eight hours to do a relief-in-place with the 82nd Airborne. The object was for the veterans to pass on as much useful knowledge as possible so we wouldn’t make the same mistakes. By the time the platoon arrived in Gardez, I had followed the 82nd’s platoon leader everywhere except the bathroom, asking questions, hopping on patrols, and picking his brain for any scrap of information that might help our platoon.
Despite the plentiful food, my squad leaders were overjoyed to have left Kandahar. They had tried to make use of the delay to get their soldiers some shooting time on the rifle range at Kandahar. In an ironic twist of history, the range was at Tarnak Farms, the compound where President Clinton had hesitated to launch a strike at Osama Bin Laden when he was living there with his family. Every time a plane took off or landed at the airfield, the range had to stop shooting. Huber, the squad leader with a linebacker’s proportions, was livid.
“Sir, seriously, the only way one of those planes was gonna get shot was if a soldier shot his rifle straight up into the air.”
“Glad to be here then?” I asked.
“Is a frog’s ass watertight?” Huber answered.
The relief-in-place went by far too fast. At the motor pool I read a long receipt listing four Humvees, several .50-caliber heavy machine guns (“.50 cals”) and automatic grenade launchers (“Mark-19s”), and an arsenal of ammunition large enough to stock a midwestern militia. Before signing the receipt and becoming financially responsible for over a million dollars’ worth of equipment, I had the 82nd Airborne lieutenant show me each item. I had seen three of the Humvees but couldn’t find the fourth one. “Have you seen this fourth Humvee listed on the receipt?”
“Oh, that’s the good news.” He smiled slyly at me. “It’s not missing. Let me show you the garage.”
We walked over to two large shipping containers. A faded green tarp was slung between them and secured with heavy logs. In the shaded area underneath sagged the missing Humvee. Its condition was only slightly better than the ghetto sled. The mechanic rattled off a laundry list of repairs and parts needed to return the truck to duty.
“If that’s the good news, what’s the bad news?” I asked.
“The backlog for parts is a mile long, and we’re in line behind every broken Humvee in Iraq. We’ve been cannibalizing this Humvee to fix the other three when they break down. Better still, you have only one mechanic.”
My mouth gaped. Three Humvees meant I could move only fifteen guys at a time. I couldn’t very well take the ghetto sled into a gunfight.
The lieutenant must have anticipated my concern. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You can ask the reconstruction team to take one of the Hi-Luxes.” He pointed across the motor pool at the fleet of unarmored Toyota pickup trucks splattered with mud. Compared to the Humvees, the Hi-Luxes looked as if they were made of cheap plastic.
“You could take one out with a BB gun,” I said.
“Drive faster,” he responded.
I PUT SERGEANT HOWARD “Chuck” Adams in charge of getting the men trained to fight from vehicles. Before joining the Army, Chuck had been in the Marine Corps. He met almost every stereotype I had
of a Marine: monosyllabic, tough as boot leather, and exceptionally competent. He had taken the Marine Corps up on every school it offered, from sniper school to mountain warfare. Chuck looked like a bulldog—heavy jowls, thick skin, and compact muscles. He had two quirks. One, he could shoot eighteen holes on the golf course at par. Two, he refused to shower in a combat zone. It would take six weeks and another Marine’s intervention to get him bathed.
Chuck was the only guy in our light infantry platoon who knew much about heavy weapons. The 10th Mountain was a “light” division, designed for rapid deployment from the United States to any given hot spot. The “heavy” divisions, such as the 3rd Infantry Division or the 1st Cavalry Division, would arrive later with the big guns. Consequently, our division had no tanks and very few Humvees. At Drum our training had focused almost exclusively on foot patrols and house-to-house urban combat. We never trained with Humvees; there simply weren’t enough at Drum to spare. Only a few of my men had ever fired the .50 cal or Mark-19, the two heavy weapons we kept mounted on the rooftop Humvee turrets. They comprised most of our firepower in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, they weren’t easy weapons. The manuals were several inches thick, and it took practice to handle the recoil. The smallest guys, trying to keep hold of the big guns in the Humvee turrets, looked as if they were wrestling rodeo bulls.
The Humvees themselves were strange beasts for men accustomed to walking at four miles an hour. Our newly designated drivers were awful at first; it was like watching my brother, Gary, learn how to drive. Everyone else in the truck had to suffer while they figured out how to maneuver through ten-foot-deep wadis. We choked on dust driving in circles, trying to get un-lost. Chuck had us run through “Rat Drills,” like a combat version of a Chinese fire drill. Designate anyone in the truck as dead and then clamber through the Humvee to change seats while the Humvee keeps moving. I’m not sure we were more confident at the end of those drills. I still felt as though I were riding in a death trap.
We had doctrine for fighting on foot but little guidance for fighting in Humvees (much less pickup trucks). These were supposed to be utility trucks, ferrying rear supplies far behind enemy lines. But in Afghanistan there weren’t any enemy lines, so we did what every infantryman in history has had to do in combat: We improvised. “Semper Gumby,” as Chuck joked. Always Flexible. Problem: How do you put a machine gun on a Toyota? Solution: Strap it to the top of the cab with cargo ties. Problem: No armor. Solution: Drive faster.
22
Movement to Contact
A movement to contact is an offensive action that seeks to
gain or regain contact with the enemy. Usually, a unit moving
to contact lacks detailed information about the enemy.
Upon making contact, a unit identifies the enemy strengths
and weaknesses as it develops the situation.
ARMY FIELD MANUAL (FM 7-8)
THE PRINCIPLE BEHIND NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH ORGANIZATIONS is that the best policeman is the one who is able to spot what is out of the ordinary. In a country that is part arms bazaar, part drug depot, and part third-world kleptocracy, everything was out of the ordinary. Gardez was as different from Watertown, New York, as Bangkok was from Rhode Island. Even the best weapons won’t help you kill your enemy if you can’t find him. Mao famously compared guerrillas to fish swimming in a sea of people, able to sustain themselves by local cooperation or indifference. After a couple of weeks in Afghanistan, I couldn’t agree less. If Mao were right, finding the fish would have been easy. Any net could separate fish from water. As another theorist pointed out, our adversaries were more like fish swimming among other fish.
Captain Worthan instructed me to make our movements unpredictable, never to take the same route at the same time or on the same day of the week. We went on dozens of patrols every week—on foot, on wheels, in the day, and at night. Despite saturating the city with patrols, the attempt to impose our will on an uncooperative population we didn’t understand and an uncontrollable enemy we couldn’t find was both frustrating and futile. Reality was never more than an approximation, and our intelligence was seldom better than a probability. Fish among fish indeed.
THE FIRST TIME WE drove through downtown Gardez, men in their mid-twenties glared at us. They couldn’t see our suspicious gazes because we shielded our eyes with wraparound sunglasses. One group held up their index fingers in a number one gesture. I held out my index finger. Yes, America is number one! After the patrol, my interpreter told me it was the Afghan way of giving us the bird.
On another patrol we stopped at a police station nicknamed the Tank Farm. A half-complete two-story building stood inside a low-perimeter wall. At each of the four corners was a rusting Soviet tank. Investigating the Afghan police, our partners, had become part of the weekly routine. Specialist Lucas “Red” White pointed out that the turrets were facing toward our base—again. A Native American from Washington State, he seemed to have an innate ability to sense when something wasn’t right. He had joined the Army five days after September 11. Red was the platoon wiseass. On the predeployment form asking whether he had kids, Red had replied, “Not sure.” I sent him and a couple of volunteers from the platoon to scurry through the tank hatches and check for tank rounds before heaving the turret around 180 degrees. One of the tanks had twenty-five rounds in it.
The next police outpost was even more disheartening. There was nothing around it for miles except the patch of gravel in front of it that we called a road. A four-foot-by-ten-foot hut bathed in full sun had a bunk bed sitting on the roof. It looked like a cell in a 1940s prison—metal springs and a two-inch mattress. Two rocket-propelled grenade rounds and a mortar shell were arranged in a symmetrical display beneath a makeshift flagpole. The Afghan flag hung limp on two wooden staves lashed together with old shoelaces.
The guard woke up with a nudge from my gloved hand. As he snapped to attention, his belt cinched around his waist. He was nearly as skinny as the improvised flagpole. He smiled under his blue baseball cap, handed me a “badge” with a flourish of pride, and reported that he was part of the new police force. Apart from the display of munitions, he had neither a rifle nor a launcher for the grenades.
Later in July we attempted a night patrol downtown. The plan was to approach the city by an indirect route through the fields. We drove around for several hours in the pitch-black, lost in the wadi system. I strained to see anything at all through the triple filter of night vision goggles, dirty windshield, and a vortex of dust. Lights began flashing from the fields above our wadi. The wadi got deeper and deeper, with the walls now fifteen feet high on both sides. Suddenly, my Humvee screeched to an abrupt halt, and my head whipped forward and then back again.
“What the hell?” I barked at my driver.
“Sir, every truck in front of us is braking.”
The radio squelched, and Staff Sergeant Christopher McGurk asked me to move up to his lead truck. McGurk had arrived in the platoon in May to take one of my squads. He had ice-blue eyes, an American flag pillowcase, and an obsession with heavy metal music and Irish culture. A native of New Windsor, New York, McGurk had three brothers in the Army.
As I walked up to McGurk’s murky green silhouette, he pointed out two tiny pyramids of stone on the floor of the wadi thirty yards ahead. My heart raced in time with my analysis. Flashing lights. Marker stones. High-walled cul-de-sac. One plus one plus one equals ambush.
“Let’s go. Now. Turn around.” I galloped back to my truck as each Humvee did a nearly simultaneous three-point turn. I was certain we were about to be ripped apart by an ambush from the high ground. As soon as the wadi got shallow enough, my driver gunned the truck up the bank and onto the high ground. Branches scraped along our doors, and Markam cried bloody murder from his saddle in the turret. Miraculously, our unplanned escape route took us right into the city. Huber’s squad dismounted from the Hi-Lux, and I joined their foot patrol. There were no lights in town; the city generators had stopped working at 11 p.m. The
only scent in the air was the heavy odor of hashish smoke. A few stray dogs picked through trash along the gutters. I sensed that we were being watched from the shadows, but we walked all the way to the traffic circle and back. We saw nothing.
Several nights passed before I sent McGurk’s squad on a similar night patrol. We heard gunshots at the base, and the next thing I knew we were rushing in the dark to load every available man into Humvees and pickup trucks. The reports were patchy, and McGurk was out of breath on the radio. Several men had fired shots in his direction and then run through a wadi away from him. We flew through the gate and up onto the road toward town.
When we arrived, I questioned several policemen standing idle along the bridge crossing the wadi. They told me they had seen nothing unusual. “No gunshots?” I asked through the interpreter.
“Nothing,” they responded.
I tried several different questions and got the same “see no evil, hear no evil” response each time. As my frustration grew, a pickup truck sped out of the wadi up toward the bridge where my men stopped it. I walked across to question the driver. He was dressed in a kurta pajama and vest, and the smell of cologne and sweat filled the cab. We questioned him for ten minutes, but he stuck to the story that he had just left a wedding. I let him go, unsatisfied. Fortunately, none of McGurk’s men had been wounded in the hit-and-run exchange. When I returned to the base, I wrote my patrol report. Somewhere in Kandahar a staff captain would add another entry to his statistics, lending our patrols an air of precision to an inherently blind process. In Afghanistan our enemy was everywhere and nowhere.
The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 25