The Only Thing Worth Dying For

by Eric Blehm

“He says the people are angry here,” said Seylaab.

  “At us?” Amerine asked. “Or the Taliban?”

  Unable to explain in English, Seylaab shrugged. “He says the people came and buried all the bodies yesterday. There are still angry people here; we must be careful.”

  “They are angry at us?” Amerine motioned to himself and his men.

  “Yes,” said Seylaab. “All of us.”

  Seylaab could not put into words the difference in sentiment between Tarin Kowt, where the Americans and Karzai’s supporters were welcome, and the area just outside the town, but Amerine determined that the locals must have been sympathetic to the Taliban. From the ridge, he could see two dwellings in the distance, one with a truck parked beside it, but no people.

  “Did the people of Tarin Kowt search the homes in the area for Taliban yesterday?” asked Amerine.

  “Yes, maybe,” Seylaab translated for Bari Gul.

  “Yes? Or maybe?” said Amerine.

  “Yes.” Seylaab grinned. “Maybe.”

  Amerine laughed. They would remain vigilant.

  Back on the main road, they continued south, but their route was soon blocked by the burned-out hull of a truck, with two others smashed up against it as though they had rear-ended the lead vehicle as it was hit by a bomb. The team dismounted to take a look—everyone but Ken, who sat stone-faced in the back of JD’s truck.

  In a single day, scavengers had picked these trucks clean of salvageable parts, leaving behind only their molten, twisted skeletons. Beneath each blackened pile of metal was the brown stain of burned gasoline. RPGs were incinerated in the remains and scattered on the ground. Mag took out his camera and started photographing the wreckage.

  “The graves are there,” said Seylaab, pointing to piles of rocks beside the road. Sticks, burned-up ammo clips, and wreckage were planted among the piles as headstones, and pieces of ammo vests were draped over them in lieu of the iconic upside-down rifle stuck into the ground—functioning weapons were too valuable a commodity to leave with the dead.

  The rock piles varied in size, the larger ones marking whole bodies and the smaller piles, Bari Gul pantomimed, holding only pieces.

  “How many pictures do we need?” asked Mag.

  “I don’t know,” said Amerine. “I’ve never done this before.”

  After taking two or three shots of each destroyed vehicle they encountered, as well as a panoramic of the graves, the men got back in their trucks and rode silently past the wreckage. We did this was the collective realization. The shallow burials and the efficiency with which the locals had cleared the battlefield unnerved many of the Americans.

  Amerine experienced a sort of warrior’s remorse. Even though he had been responsible for the deaths of those buried here, he had not fought them in direct combat. In retrospect the battle seemed unfair, the antithesis of the more noble face-to-face combat he both dreaded and desired.

  They rose out of the labyrinth and parked on the same ridge from which they had spotted the convoy the day before.

  As they stared out across the enormous valley toward Tarin Kowt Pass, most of the wreckage was not discernible. With binoculars, though, the black specks on the desert floor became the remains of Taliban trucks.

  “I think I see something,” said Brent, looking east through binoculars. “There’s a large truck pointing some kind of gun this way.”

  About a mile away, the vehicle appeared intact and definitely carried some sort of artillery piece. The men continued to drive along the backside of the ridge, remaining out of sight in order to get to a closer vantage point, and then patrolled ahead on foot to peer over the edge. This overview provided a side profile of the vehicle, a quarter of a mile distant, and the team could now tell that it was a flatbed truck—destroyed by a bomb—with a massive, cannonlike anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back that had remained intact.

  “One last picture for the BDA,” said Dan. “Team photo?”

  They drove down to the valley floor and walked through the charred debris littering the sand toward the flatbed, crowding in close to the gun. Bari Gul and his guerrillas looked on until JD waved them over to get in the second photo. The only one not joining them was Ken, who refused to leave the truck.

  Returning to their vehicles, the men headed back up the ridgeline to their observation post, where JD set up a defensive perimeter with the weapons sergeants and Bari Gul’s men. To the west, the setting sun turned the horizon red, while the eastern sky was an encroaching pool of inky blackness.

  While Mike, Brent, and Ronnie fortified the team’s perimeter with claymore mines, Alex caught Amerine’s attention and said, “Pilots spotted six trucks heading north from Kandahar.” He indicated the position on the map. “Open road, no bottlenecks anywhere. Looks clean.”

  Alex waited as Amerine studied the map.

  “Clear them hot,” Amerine said in a low voice.

  A minute passed, then Alex said, “Convoy destroyed. BDA is six burning vehicles.”

  Amerine’s stomach tightened. He wouldn’t know if they had hit an enemy convoy until word filtered through Karzai’s network, which would take at least half a day. Six trucks, eight to twelve men in each: They may have just killed fifty to seventy men. What if he was wrong? What if they were civilians? On his own map, Amerine illuminated the approximate location of the destroyed vehicles with a small flashlight, and used a pencil to mark the spot with an X.

  Like the rest of ODA 574, he had been too busy to notice the meteors streaking across the sky. November 18 marked the beginning of the greatest show the Leonid meteor shower had put on in thirty-five years, and now there were dozens blazing across the sky simultaneously. As the night wore on, the men on guard duty were mesmerized by the spectacle, forgetting for a time that they were deep in Afghanistan, defending a town against a force of thousands and attempting to defend an entire province with a handful of guerrillas and a few reconnaissance aircraft.

  Overnight, Hamid Karzai’s credibility in the Pashtun tribal belt was established. Reports came in of villages throughout the south taking down the white flag of the Taliban and replacing it with the black, red, and green vertically striped Afghan flag, now recognized as Karzai’s battle flag. The stories were spreading, too: tall tales that put Karzai in the middle of the action, defending Tarin Kowt from annihilation.

  A local tribal leader claimed that Karzai had beaten back the Taliban with a thousands-strong Pashtun militia. In Pakistan, Ahmed Karzai told reporters that his brother’s eight hundred loyal soldiers were engaged in heavy fighting with the Taliban along a main road to Kandahar.1 Most villages in the south were without modern communications equipment, and Afghans often relied disproportionately on such rumors. The Taliban estimated Karzai’s troop strength by his support in the tribal belt and his ability to rebuff their own fighters; according to deserters, after the battle at Tarin Kowt, the Taliban believed that Karzai was as mighty as any of the Northern Alliance generals.2

  The morning after the meteor shower, the team returned to Tarin Kowt and moved into their new compound, where they immediately noticed that some of the guards had shaved their beards off in defiance of the Taliban. Amerine joined Karzai in his meeting room, had tea, and then pulled out his survival map.

  “Last night we hit a convoy of six trucks in this area here,” Amerine said.

  Karzai stared silently at the X on the map.

  “Have you heard anything from your people about it?” asked Amerine.

  “Nothing yet,” said Karzai.

  “Would you hear if there was a problem?”

  “I believe yes.”

  “Good,” said Amerine, feeling slightly relieved. “Please let me know whatever you learn. In the meantime, we need men as quickly as you can get them to man all the checkpoints around Tarin Kowt in these locations,” he said, pointing them out on the hand-drawn map that Karzai kept. “I have recon planes flying operations twenty-four hours a day to spot for enemy convoys, but a single miss could
be disastrous.”

  “How many convoys have you hit?”

  “Only that one so far. Now that I’m back in town, I’ll be talking to you before we engage anything. I will run the air operations from our compound across the street.”

  Just as Karzai began to update Amerine on new pledges of support, the Afghan’s satellite phone rang. It was the Northern Alliance’s defense minister, with whom he spoke for two minutes before ending the call.

  “That was Mohammed Fahim,” Karzai said to Amerine. “He called on behalf of the Northern Alliance to congratulate me on our victory.”

  Two days after the Battle of Tarin Kowt, James Dobbins 3 was en route to Kabul from Uzbekistan. He was flying in a private jet with representatives from the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a small contingent of Afghans, including Dr. Abdullah,* a protégé of the Northern Alliance’s recently assassinated leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

  This flight to Kabul—six days after the capital city was liberated by the Northern Alliance—represented the first U.S. diplomatic mission to Afghanistan in more than twelve years, as well as Dobbins’s first face-to-face meeting with representatives of the Northern Alliance. He was hoping to make strides toward the three goals he’d identified two weeks earlier as being paramount to the success of a post-Taliban government: the cooperation of the six neighboring countries; the identification of Pashtun leaders not tainted by ongoing Taliban affiliation; and the Northern Alliance’s willingness to cooperate with those individuals in the successor Afghan government.

  In the past week, Dobbins had made contact with envoys from all of Afghanistan’s neighboring countries, as well as Turkey. The Turkish emissary was the first to suggest, on November 14, that Hamid Karzai might be a good candidate to head the new Afghan government; the day after, a representative from Pakistan also suggested that Karzai would be an acceptable choice. Before Dobbins had been named envoy, he’d never heard of Hamid Karzai, but now he was heartened that the name had come up twice—and without prompting.**

  The pilot of the jet invited Dr. Abdullah and Dobbins to join him on the flight deck for a view of Afghanistan’s majestic Hindu Kush mountain range. Away from the other passengers, the two spoke privately for nearly two hours, the doctor giving Dobbins a crash course in Northern Alliance politics, personalities, and the challenges he would face. Abdullah also surprised Dobbins when he suggested that Afghanistan’s next leader should be a Pashtun from outside the Northern Alliance but not the aging King Zahir Shah.

  “We need more than a figurehead,” said Abdullah. “We need someone who will be able to deal with the terrible challenges Afghanistan now faces.”

  “Do you have anyone in mind?” asked Dobbins.

  Without hesitation, Abdullah replied, “Hamid Karzai.”

  It was more than forty-eight hours since the battle, and the Taliban still had not retaliated against Tarin Kowt. Amerine had authorized the bombing of one more convoy of six trucks, but these small, probing efforts appeared to be the extent of Taliban intrusions into Uruzgan Province.

  ODA 574 used this time to receive another weapons drop, to set up an early warning system of security checkpoints on all routes coming into the town, and to “nest,” a process ingrained from basic training. Assign a soldier a tent, a bunk, or a three-by-seven-foot section of dirt in a mud-walled compound in Afghanistan, and he or she will make it a home. The men had turned their central courtyard into an open-air living/dining room, using boxes of MREs, ammo, and other supplies as furniture. Each evening, a young Afghan man prepared a stew of potatoes, onions, goat or mutton, and a cube of the animal’s fat, boiled in a cauldron over an open fire, and served it to the Americans with rice and flat bread. The team had seen locals foraging through the garbage for their half-eaten MRE packages, and they understood the significance of these simple but hearty meals.

  Frequently, the men converged in the courtyard, sipping away Ken’s stores of coffee. On occasion, Karzai would join them, as he did on the morning of the 19th when he asked Amerine: “What is next? What of Kandahar?”

  “What of vehicles and men?” Amerine said. “And translators?”

  Before they could discuss the topic, Karzai’s phone rang, and he stepped away from the team to answer. “I’m sorry,” he said to Amerine when he returned. “May we discuss this later?”

  “What of Kandahar?” said Dan after Karzai had left. “Hamid doesn’t look tough, but he’s got the spirit. You watch, he’s gonna be running this joint before he’s finished.”

  After an hour, Amerine decided to follow up with Karzai, who was, as usual, in a large circle of Afghans, sipping tea.

  “Jason,” he said, as Amerine entered the room. “Come, sit. I was just going to send for you. I would like you to meet this gentleman.” Karzai gestured to a darkly tanned and deeply wrinkled man of perhaps fifty sitting beside him. “He walked here from his village in Kandahar Province—a two-day walk—after learning of our victory. He came to meet you.”

  “Me?” said Amerine.

  “Well, word has traveled, and he came to meet the U.S. military commander here in the south.”

  “I’m honored.”

  Karzai said a few words to the man, who nodded fervently with a wide smile, which contradicted eyes that looked as though they were about to brim with tears.

  “This man would like you to know that seven of his children were killed in their home by an American bomb three weeks ago.”* Karzai translated while the man stared into Amerine’s eyes. “There was a Taliban command post nearby, but it had been abandoned.”

  “I’m sorry,” Amerine said. “I’m very, very sorry.”

  “He does not want you to be sorry,” said Karzai. “He says that he would not mind losing the rest of his children, provided you liberate Afghanistan.”

  Amerine found it difficult to maintain eye contact with the man. He wasn’t one to hand out promises, but he was positive that the Taliban government would be defeated. “Please tell him that his children did not die in vain. We will remove the Taliban from power.”

  The man stood, and with him, Amerine and Karzai. After saying a few words in Pashto, he bowed his head and left the room.

  “What will he do now?” asked Amerine.

  “He is returning home.”

  “Can you offer him a ride? Somebody driving that direction?”

  “I did,” said Karzai. “He said he preferred to walk. I believe he is fearful that a vehicle might be attacked. Or bombed.”

  Seating himself again, Amerine broached the topic he had come to discuss. “You asked about Kandahar earlier.”

  “Getting fighters is not going to be a problem,” said Karzai. “The difficulty will be feeding them. We cannot maintain a large garrison here. I have to keep the fighters dispersed until the right time, so they can be fed by their own villages.”

  “Having large numbers of tribal fighters from outside Tarin Kowt would probably wear out our welcome pretty fast.”

  “Would you rather move on Kandahar with a force of a thousand undisciplined men or several hundred of our best fighters?” asked Karzai.

  “We need discipline to avoid alienating your supporters,” Amerine said. “But a few hundred men will not be able to take Kandahar.”

  “I believe Kandahar will be surrendered to us,” said Karzai. “We just need to get our army to the outskirts of the city so we can talk to the Taliban leadership face-to-face.”

  Amerine’s gut told him the quickest move was the best move. This was the time to make a run for Kandahar—before the Taliban realized how disorganized Karzai’s forces really were and could retaliate.

  “How quickly can you get your men assembled?” he asked.

  “I will try to get them here so we can leave by November 28, or sooner.”

  In the meantime, U.S. planes would continue to monitor and protect friendly villages and bomb enemy convoys. Karzai and Amerine agreed that the Taliban would wise up and begin to travel in smalle
r groups. They would be better able to blend in with the populace, but these smaller forces would also be easier to defeat on the way to Kandahar.

  Over the next nine days, Karzai would collaborate with local chiefs and cherry-pick the best fighters (such as Bari Gul and his nineteen men) until he had three hundred good men. Karzai also needed to purchase vehicles, something that wouldn’t be difficult with CIA cash. Once these guerrillas were organized, ODA 574 would mold them into some semblance of a military battalion that would then move toward Kandahar in a convoy.

  The team had realistic expectations. This would not be organized, mechanized-maneuver warfare—they would have no armored vehicles, not even Humvees; just station wagons, minivans, and Toyota trucks. The mob of guerrillas they would be attempting to harness would most likely behave more like a herd of wild horses, with the Green Berets just trying to hang on. But with air cover and a little luck, they would be able to ride hard, shrouded in the dust storm of Karzai’s perceived power.

  What seemed a reckless move was perhaps the safest way to victory. Who would think anyone was crazy enough to march on the thousands of Taliban waiting in Kandahar with just three hundred men?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Madness

  * * *

  There’s a great deal of talk about loyalty from the bottom to the top. Loyalty from the top down is even more necessary and is much less prevalent. One of the most frequently noted characteristics of great men who have remained great is loyalty to their subordinates.

  —General George S. Patton Jr.

  * * *

  The truck carrying Mike, Brent, Bari Gul, and a couple of his men was parked in a cloud of hashish smoke wafting from a security checkpoint seven miles outside Tarin Kowt. It was late morning on November 20.

  While some of their teammates were content to hole up in the compound, Mike and Brent couldn’t sit still. The two weapons sergeants were obsessed with ODA 574’s security—nobody placed much confidence in the local forces that the team had positioned in concentric layers of security, from their compound to miles outside town. With Alex, Dan, and Wes monitoring the reconnaissance aircrafts’ nonstop “pinging” of the countryside, a large force wasn’t likely to sneak up on them. Still, Mike and Brent were eager to do something other than sit on their rears and drink coffee.