by Eric Blehm
“Do you still feel the time is right to move?” Amerine asked.
“Yes. From what I know today, tomorrow is a good day.”
“Then tomorrow it is,” said Amerine, folding up the map.
“Oh, something funny,” said Karzai. “One of your men, the one who calls me Mr. K…”
“Sergeant Magallanes? Mag?”
“Yes, Mag. He asked me earlier if I would sign Afghan money for him, as gifts for his children. He said, ‘You’re going down in history, Mr. K, and I’d like some proof that I was there for the ride.’ Something like that.”
The two men laughed. “So, does this mean you’re an official candidate?” asked Amerine.
“There is still nothing official in Afghanistan,” Karzai said, “but the invitation to speak today…hmmm.” He changed the subject. “How many children does Mag have, Jason?”
“How many afghanis did he have you sign?”
“Forty!” said Karzai.
“Not that many.” Amerine chuckled. “If you become the leader of Afghanistan, Hamid, what will we call you?”
“Let’s not talk of such titles,” Karzai said. He shivered and pulled his blanket up around his shoulders. “Today we are just friends.”
“Stay warm, then, my friend,” said Amerine, getting up to leave.
On his tour of Tarin Kowt, Lieutenant Colonel Fox had been introduced to Karzai’s “fighters,” some of whom were armed with ancient flintlock rifles and, in one case, a pitchfork. What he’d seen didn’t even qualify as a militia. He envisioned the thousands of faithful Taliban prepared to defend Kandahar and thought, Okay, I’ve got one ODA and this small force of Karzai’s well-meaning friends up against hardcore Taliban—I’m not sure how I’m going to do this.
Toward the end of his first day in Afghanistan, Fox returned from Karzai’s compound and joined Amerine and JD, who were discussing the convoy they were set to lead toward Kandahar the following morning.
“I’m delaying things a day or two,” Fox said. “Just talked it over with Hamid, and what I’m going to do is have him send an advance recon, three-man element to drive our route to Petawek twenty-four hours ahead of our main party to make sure it’s clear—obstacles, mines, that kind of thing.”
Amerine noticed JD raise his eyebrows. They were both thinking the same thing: Fox has been on the ground for less than twenty-four hours and he’s already making decisions without bothering to consult with us?
“Sir, we need to get the guerrillas moving south,” said Amerine. “Hamid has to mass them just in time to move, since the town can’t support a large force. Delays like this can cause the whole machine to seize up and—”
“We aren’t going south without more recon and a more solid plan,” Fox said definitively.
Once Fox had left, JD said, “Guess he didn’t like our plan.”
“I guess not. He wants things tight in an environment that is all about controlled chaos. On the other hand, I might be too comfortable playing it loose with our guys.”
JD smiled. “We made it this far by playing it loose.”
That night an F-18 recon flight picked up seven vehicles heading north from Kandahar. It fit their definition of an enemy convoy, but when Alex plotted the location on the map, he saw that they were moving along a mountainous segment of the road. Amerine told Alex to hold off bombing and to continue monitoring the convoy, saying, “This one feels like it might be another bottleneck.”
JD and Bolduc were in the room when Amerine made his decision. “Civilians are always at risk in war,” Bolduc said, coming over to peer at the map. “You can’t let that dictate your operations. You still have to be aggressive.”
Not including the Battle of Tarin Kowt, Amerine had authorized the bombing of at least forty-seven vehicles over the previous nine days. He had refrained from bombing twelve vehicles (and one encampment of refugees) during the same period. Using conservative estimates—eight men per vehicle—they’d killed at least 376 enemy combatants.
“We’ve been bombing convoys every day since we got here and haven’t killed any civilians yet,” said Amerine. “I’m not going to start being a cowboy now.”
After a moment of uncomfortable silence, Bolduc walked out of the room.
“Water off your back, sir,” said JD. “If something doesn’t feel right, that’s the beauty of this command structure. Bolduc said it himself this morning—they are here to advise Hamid and provide top cover for us. Mulholland is leaving the fighting to us.”
The convoy ultimately passed through the bottleneck but remained in tight formation, continuing across the desert as a unit. As it approached Uruzgan Province, Amerine cleared the pilot to engage. All seven vehicles were destroyed.
Shortly after noon three days later, a light rain was falling while the Americans loaded weapons and gear into four trucks parked in a row across the street from their compound, preparing to move to Petawek. The low cloud cover currently made aerial reconnaissance of their route almost impossible.
“Are we going to have any problem getting air?” Amerine asked Alex, who was setting up his radio in the back of their truck.
“Too early to tell,” said Alex.
The fact that the advance recon Fox had insisted upon had driven through Uruzgan Province without incident two days before meant little for today. In order for the movement to be as simple as possible, Amerine had wanted to condense their forces into a single convoy that would have a small footprint and allow him tighter control of the guerrillas. Fox saw things differently, adjusting Amerine’s plan so that the convoy would move in two separate units.
The first, smaller section, acting as forward security, would be led by an Afghan named Bashir—whom Bari Gul had vouched for—and three trucks full of his men, followed closely by Amerine’s vehicle, carrying Mike, Alex, and Seylaab. Mag’s truck, with Wes, Ken, and Victor, would trail five minutes behind Amerine with three more trucks of guerrillas.
Forty-five minutes behind Amerine, the main part of the convoy would be headed by Bari Gul and his three trucks of guerrillas, then JD’s vehicle carrying Dan, Brent, and Ronnie, followed by the shuttle bus with Karzai—and Fox, Casper, and the rest of the spooks. Another twenty vehicles loaded with Afghans would bring up the rear.
ODA 574 had listened to Fox’s revised plan the day before in concealed bemusement. The team had already experienced the undisciplined nature of the guerrillas and doubted they would adhere to the complicated parameters of the movement, but Fox was adamant. “Let’s just roll with it,” JD whispered to Amerine during the brief. “The guerrillas will dictate how it ends up.”
Now, shortly after 2 P.M., Amerine’s and Mag’s vehicles were sloshing through muddy streets toward the southern edge of Tarin Kowt. In spite of the gloomy weather the roads were festooned with the national flag of Afghanistan; children carried them as they ran through puddles, keeping pace alongside the vehicles. Karzai’s movement to Kandahar was no secret.
Just before the town gate, the old man who had refused to accept Karzai’s name as credit for gas the week before stood in front of his pumps, lifting his fist in the air and cheering the convoy on. At the gate itself was the massive artillery piece that ODA 574 had found in the valley below Tarin Kowt Pass. Someone had hauled it back to town and aimed it south toward Kandahar. Outside the gate, at least thirty idling vehicles were on both sides of the road. Some drove about in the mud as if impatient to get moving, but the majority were parked facing the road and crammed with guerrillas, RPG launchers, and AK-47s.
Bashir, in the first of three trucks, waved to Amerine and pulled into place in front of the captain’s truck; three more trucks fell in place behind Amerine and just ahead of Mag. As a group—seven Green Berets in two extra cab trucks and sixty guerrillas packed into six king cab trucks—they headed toward the labyrinth.
That was unbelievably organized, thought Mike, watching Tarin Kowt shrink away in the rearview mirror.
While Amerine’s lead element began t
o ascend the road toward Tarin Kowt Pass, the main element met up with the twenty remaining guerrilla vehicles waiting on the edge of town. The rain had stopped and the roads were nearly dry when Bari Gul’s truck took its place ahead of JD, followed by the shuttle bus. As Karzai’s bus passed, the cobbled-together militia honked their horns and cheered for him.
The first few miles went well.
Hey, thought Fox as they drove around the cemetery and into the labyrinth, this is not too bad. We’re moving, the skies are clearing, air cover will be back up shortly. We’re heading south.
They traveled past ODA 574’s original position overlooking Tarin Kowt Valley, down the long traverse, and onto the valley floor. Then, as if someone had waved a green flag, cars and trucks veered out into the desert and swooped back, falling into place alongside Karzai’s shuttle bus to wave at him. More trucks came in from the sides of the valley, as if they’d been lying in wait. The unsettled Americans couldn’t tell who was going and who was coming. An approaching truck full of men waving AK-47s could have charged ahead, spun around, and returned—or it could be a bunch of suicidal Taliban.
This, thought Major Bolduc, is a freakin’ disaster.
For Fox’s communications sergeant, twenty-five-year-old Nelson Smith—who had just graduated from language school and was about as fresh to Special Forces as they come—the confusion was more a distraction than a worry. This was his first look at the countryside beyond Tarin Kowt, where Bedouins and goatherders roamed the land. He saw steel-armored wreckage of modern warfare rusting near the ruins of ancient earthen fortresses. At roadside stands, Frisbee-sized disks of flat bread cooked in traditional clay ovens hung from Coca-Cola signs riddled with bullet holes. On long sections of road, if it weren’t for the smell of exhaust, the sounds of laboring engines, and occasional gunfire from the exuberant Afghans, he imagined the country looked as it did when Alexander the Great fought his way through these very mountains and deserts. Beyond Tarin Kowt Pass, villages appeared out of nowhere, like rest stops along an interstate highway. “Here comes another Cracker Barrel,” Bolduc proclaimed to Smith as these choke points forced the guerrillas’ vehicles to briefly converge.
At dusk, the main group approached the lead group, now parked haphazardly on the shrubby, rolling terrain. At this unplanned stop, the dust settled while guerrillas from both elements of the convoy got out of their trucks, unfurled carpets, and knelt down to pray—their only synchronized movement of the entire day.
“So much for our forty-five-minute lead,” said Alex.
From the bed of the same truck, Mike coined what would become a regular saying for the men of ODA 574: “Fucked up as an Afghan convoy.”
The Americans waited as the Afghans prayed, rolled up their carpets, and returned to their vehicles.
“Okay, let’s roll,” Amerine said to Bashir, who was walking toward him. Seylaab translated Bashir’s response as the guerrilla handed a stack of flat bread to Amerine. “No, we will leave soon. Now we eat.”
An hour and a half later, the lead section of the convoy edged slowly into the night, crossing the open desert of southern Uruzgan Province. Then the road narrowed and climbed into the mountains, where a sheer drop on one side and a rock wall on the other forced the convoy into order. In the open air of the truck bed, Amerine craned his neck to look up at the rock face above them. He imagined the anxiety the Soviet patrols must have felt in these craggy canyons, tailor-made by Allah to conceal the faithful as they terrorized the infidels passing through them. He understood now why the Soviets had for the most part avoided Uruzgan, and was thankful that Karzai had persuaded the clans in this region to allow them safe passage.
Some eight hours after they left Tarin Kowt, the road widened and the mountains parted like curtains on a massive stage to reveal a vast desert. At 10 P.M., the convoy, having come together as one in the mountains, reached Petawek. Situated on the fringe of the foothills at the southern edge of Uruzgan Province, the village was bisected by the Kandahar Road, which continued south into the desert.
More than half of the guerrillas parked their vehicles north of the village, up against the mountains they’d just passed through, guarding their rear. Karzai’s shuttle bus followed Bari Gul’s and JD’s trucks to a compound in the more densely populated section of the village on the right side of the road, and Amerine’s trucks pulled up and parked alongside JD’s. As Karzai was greeted by a village elder and escorted into the compound’s courtyard, the Americans formed their usual defensive perimeter.
“This will be Karzai’s headquarters,” Fox said, approaching Amerine and JD. “He’s going to meet with the locals and bed down. We’ll discuss the movement tomorrow. I want your team on the hill over there, to guard the town.” He gestured toward some high ground a few hundred yards to the east that overlooked Kandahar Road and the desert to the south.
Amerine watched Casper and his men unload their gear from the shuttle bus and move into Karzai’s compound. “You don’t want us in there with Hamid?” he asked Fox.
“No, I don’t. Get your men moving. I’ll be sleeping out there with your team.”
ODA 574 drove away from Petawek and parked on a flat-topped ridge, facing their vehicles back toward the road and the village. Two hundred yards from the nearest buildings and three hundred yards from Karzai’s compound, nothing stood between them and Kandahar Province except sand, until Bari Gul and his men arrived and set up a perimeter around the Americans as they had done in Tarin Kowt.
Amerine scanned the surroundings with his NODs. The village sat on an arid, rocky plateau of rolling hills covered with patches of scrub brush. Their observation post was located where the plateau descended abruptly to the edge of a desert that extended to the horizon. As with Tarin Kowt, aerial reconnaissance would be their only early warning if Karzai’s spies failed to warn them of an attack.
“Sir,” JD said quietly to Amerine, “let me get this straight. We’re three hundred yards from Hamid, the C-team is out here with us doing nothing—shouldn’t somebody be with the G-chief?”
“I brought that up with Fox,” said Amerine, “but he appears to have a reason for being out here with us.”
“Maybe you should consider keeping a split team in the compound, so we know what’s going on—kind of slide back into your old liaison job if they aren’t going to do it.”
“They haven’t even been here a week. Let’s give them a chance to do their job before we start working around them.”
“Fair enough,” said JD.
“Come up with a plan for us to drive back and grab Hamid if we get attacked,” Amerine said. “I’m going to check on the recon flights and see if anything is going on.”
“I’ll put the team at fifty percent tonight,” JD said. “See that glow out to the south?”
“Yeah,” said Amerine, watching as a surface-to-air rocket, tiny in the distance, rose from the darkened void well beyond the horizon. The streak hung there, then evaporated into the blackness.
“That’s Kandahar.”
“Say hi to the Christmas present,” Mag called out as Amerine and Mike, on their way to meet with Karzai in his new command post, trotted down from the top of the hill where ODA 574 had spent the night.
“Christmas present?” Amerine turned, looking back up the slope at Mag.
“It’s December first, sir. Right now we’re Santa Claus. Mr. K’s the Christmas present. We gotta deliver him to Kandahar before Christmas.”
“Where do you come up with this stuff?” said Amerine, shaking his head.
“Sir, it’s just how my mind works,” said Mag. “You always have to have a goal.” Mag’s singing followed them down the hill: “Feliz Navidad…Feliz Navidad…I want to wish you a Merry Christmas…”
An hour later, Amerine and Mike returned to the team’s perimeter with Fox and Bolduc, who had met with Karzai earlier, in tow.
“We’ll be here another night,” Amerine told JD. “Hamid refuses to move forward until we get another l
ethal-aid drop and some humanitarian aid for this village and his men.”
“I’ll get Dan on it,” said JD.
Amerine gestured toward Fox. “The colonel is putting together the list for Santa Claus right now.” He winked at Mag. “He’ll run it past you.”
They were out of earshot of Fox and Bolduc when JD said, “Have you figured out why the lieutenant colonel has us all the way out here?”
“I don’t know,” said Amerine. “But Casper has gotta be happier than a pig in shit since Fox is apparently staying with us.”
“So, what’s the plan for today?” asked JD.
“You want to take a recon element out?”
“I’m afraid I got some of what Miles had. I’ll be fine, but if you don’t mind, I’ll stay here to make sure this hill doesn’t go anywhere.”
“Okay,” said Amerine. “I’ll grab Seylaab, have him get Bari Gul’s men moving. Then I’ll take Alex and Mike south and recon to that ridgeline out on the horizon.” Amerine indicated a dark streak in the distance where hills could be seen rising above the cream-colored desert. “You get the guys organized for the supply drop tonight. Once we get all that sorted out, we’ll plan the next push forward.”
Four trucks headed south on the main road out of Petawek, the first three carrying Bari Gul and his men while Mike drove Amerine, Alex, and Seylaab in the fourth. The recon route descended from an arcing line of leafless trees that marked the outskirts of Petawek and into a broad expanse of desert. Here the road was barely discernible beneath a layer of powdery sand that had been swept smooth by the wind. About ten miles away, the hills that were their destination crouched in front of distant mountains.
Halfway across the valley, the Americans looked back toward Petawek: Set against the mountains, with only north and south avenues of approach, the village would be easy to defend. Even if an enemy convoy managed to slip through Karzai’s network of loyal Pashtun villages or conceal itself from aerial recon, it would still have to cross eleven miles of open desert.