The Lion of Sabray

by Patrick Robinson

  Brought up, as I was, in the heart of a vicious armed conflict against a well-armed but less cunning enemy, I have never known true tranquility at night, and it’s possible I never will.

  The family had gone to bed early, soon after the sun had slipped behind the western peaks, and the long shadows of the mountain had enveloped the village. A bright three-quarter moon soon rose above the peaks, and I awakened, stood up, and found myself staring out the window into the darkness.

  And then I heard something, which up there is very rare. I thought I could sense the faraway thumping of a helicopter engine, rising and falling on the summer wind, sometimes near and sometimes far. I think it was real, but perhaps not. I remember deciding it must be American, but it was very late, even for them.

  There were no bombs, no explosions, no gunfire, and no scream of a Taliban missile howling out of its launcher. Nothing, really, except the half-real, distant whop-whop-whop of the rotors on a big helicopter several miles away. And then, quite suddenly, it grew fainter, and then vanished, and there was only silence.

  I was tired, but suddenly I had no wish to sleep, and I stood there staring at the North Star, bright in the black northern heavens. This was the same bright star beloved of all battle commanders seeking the right direction while on the move in the night.

  Around that time, it began to rain quite heavily. And if anyone was out there, on the mountain, I felt for them. The Hindu Kush uplands were no place to be in rough weather. They lacked shelter or any kind of cover, and they were swept for hours on end by winds made stronger by the sharp and steep escarpments.

  The weather was one thing, but, as an Afghan officer would, I still kept wondering if I had been listening to a helicopter. And if so, what was it doing up here, probably forty-five minutes from the big US air base at Bagram? It had not come to bomb or strafe. So what had it come for? Perhaps an insertion of troops? US Special Forces?

  But if so, where were the Al Qaeda or Taliban missile men? Why had I heard no shots, when I knew perfectly well there was a sizable Taliban army over in that direction? Perhaps I’d been mistaken. Maybe the American war had not, after all, come up here to our peaceful pastures just as summer had arrived.

  I went back to bed but barely slept before the sun once more came up over the high peaks. We prayed soon after dawn, and I remember walking up to the village mosque in the quiet of the first light. I remember listening, I suppose, for another US helicopter, but there was no sound from the empty skies, and soon I was on my prayer mat in a crowded but holy room, alone with my own thoughts and with Allah.

  I had much work to do in the timber business that day, and it would take me to the hills high above the village. All through that morning, Tuesday, June 28, I cut and stacked the hardwoods which had already been felled.

  Perhaps this is with the benefit of hindsight, knowing what I now understand so much better, but I occasionally paused and strained my hearing for the sound of another helicopter. But there never was.

  If the US military had been up there on a bombing run, or even one of its other missions of destruction, the population of Sabray would have known by now. The Americans were still liable to bomb a whole community just to take out a few Taliban or Al Qaeda warriors, and that was apt to be an impossibly noisy procedure.

  If the Americans had landed a marauding Special Forces patrol, the Pashtuns would have known that before the mullah called the faithful to prayer that morning. But they’d heard nothing. So the question hung in the fresh mountain air: What was a US military helicopter doing up there in the middle of the night, if not delivering military personnel? And where were those personnel?

  It was approximately one hour after noon in the mountains where Gulab was toiling, and the sun was still at its height. The air was hot and thin. No clouds. And loading timber was hard work. That was when he heard the first sounds of battle echoing back across the high pastures.

  Everyone in or near Sabray heard the start of it: one solitary loud shot from a high-powered machine gun, bigger than any Kalashnikov. Then a pause. Then a barrage of gunfire. Gulab gathered his thoughts. The noise came from the northwest, from the direction of Ahmad Shah’s Taliban army. Someone had engaged them in combat. That much was obvious.

  And in Gulab’s mind, it was equally obvious who that enemy was: it had to be the Americans. There was only one way they could have arrived up here, and that was by helicopter. By the sound of the raging battle, it must have been a very big helo, or maybe there had been two of them. But Gulab had heard only one.

  He knew the United States had big Chinooks that could carry dozens of US military, and he believed that Shah had around four hundred armed warriors. Thus, in those moments, he estimated the Americans had a sizable force up there, and there would be a great deal of dying. The only thing that baffled him was the Americans’ apparent willingness to fight without air cover. That was so unlikely.

  So far as Gulab could tell, all the advantages were with the Taliban’s mountain men—territorial experts. But with or without air cover, the sheer volume of the gunfire was astounding. He wondered many times about the fate of the young Pashtun men, doubtless being mowed down by heavy US firepower. Everyone had relatives in that Taliban army.

  Anger toward the Americans was bad, but against the Taliban, it was equally vindictive. Basically, most Pashtuns disliked both combatants, but up here in the mountains, with a major military action in place, those old blood ties kicked in. No one would have cared if the Taliban disbanded, but in a firefight, they were the blood brothers, not the Americans. In the fight currently blasting away on the mountains, the men from the United States of America were the real enemy, from far away, no ifs, ands, or buts.

  Gulab stood there in those high woodlands, listening to the staccato rattle of the guns; the rise and fall of the battle. By his assessment, maybe forty US inserted troops had come up here in the night and now faced the hordes commanded by Ahmad Shah.

  The Taliban commander would probably take heavy casualties, but in the end, his cunning, stealthy fighters should overwhelm the US attack. Gulab tried to guess precisely where all this was happening, but that was difficult. So far as he could tell, it was about one and a half mountains away—probably seven miles—but in this light summer air, it sounded much closer.

  He had no watch, no way to tell time, except for the sun. He estimated the battle lasted for around ninety minutes, with continuing sporadic fire.

  At that point, it was almost entirely Kalashnikov gunfire he was hearing, with the occasional whoosh and scream of an RPG. There were already reports, rumors, and whispers of a sensational battle that had taken place all the way down the mountain.

  There had been many Taliban casualties, possibly a hundred, against a small, highly trained group of US Special Forces, and the Taliban army was apparently still out there.

  Sabray was getting some information, though certainly not all. And there was little news of exactly why the gunfire died down, with only a few RPGs still exploding. It seemed that whatever had been happening was over. Ahmad Shah had subdued whatever threat there was, but no one had an accurate picture of the action—only that many Afghanis had died.

  As a Pashtun, Gulab is not a boastful man, but he has his skills and some knowledge, mostly of mountain warfare. Lacking formal education, he rarely claims expertise, except in two areas of the battlefield: gunfire and explosions. Inside the mujahideen, on those subjects, he is an acknowledged master.

  But shortly before two o’clock on that hot June afternoon, Mohammed Gulab heard the thunderous roar of twenty-first-century conflict as he had never experienced before. It was a barrage of such intensity that he wondered how any enemy could possibly withstand it.

  Out there in the timber country, the blasts came echoing through the mountains—one after another, sometimes in clusters where the explosions fused together. Up close, he thought, it must have sounded like an atom bomb, sufficient to destroy your hearing.

  But they were not
bombs. Gulab knew the sound of them. These were very noisy Russian-built RPG-7s—rocket-propelled grenades—designed to blow battle tanks in half. And he knew the Americans had no tanks up there, not in that steepest part of the mountains, and no vehicles, either.

  But the Taliban did have the RPG-7. So they were using them against armed US personnel only. That much he could work out for himself. He also knew there could not be many Americans to fire at, since he’d heard only one helicopter, and this little battle was already nearly two hours old.

  Gulab could discern the type of rockets being used: probably high-explosive fragmentation as well as thermobaric antipersonnel warheads, both capable of causing absolute havoc. Judging by the noise, they must have unleashed a hundred of them. Heaven help their enemy.

  He could not imagine anyone living through that. They’d obviously taken an area where the Americans were making a stand and thrown everything they had at them. He could not know what the US troops had done, but there were a lot of very angry Taliban commanders over there. Gulab was pretty sure that survival would have been impossible.

  The RPG-7 is deadly at two hundred meters, but the mujahideen rocket men were accustomed to getting in close, firing at eighty meters or less. And they understood accuracy. Against the Russians, they would fire and blow up Soviet tank tracks, and then go for the main armor.

  The two US Army Black Hawk helos downed in Mogadishu, Somalia, in 1993 were hit by RPG-7 rockets. And the Taliban missile operators were a lot better than the Somalian terrorists.

  Gulab waited up there on the mountain for the noise to subside and signify the end of this battle. Which it did, but only partly. There was still intermittent gunfire, so however much damage the grenade barrage had done, it had not destroyed the Taliban’s enemy. Because they were still attacking someone. And again he wondered how many Americans had been on that mountain—and how many were left.

  By now, the rumors were flying faster than the bullets. Up in the pastures, word was that half the Taliban force had been wiped out, but only one American body had been found. No one believed that, since that last heavy attack sounded great enough to have knocked down Kabul.

  But the enormous, sustained barrage had died down—not out, just down. And the villagers were hearing that Taliban casualties were really bad, dozens and dozens lying dead or badly wounded on the mountain. And the sporadic gunfire continued, not like before, but enough to get Sabray’s attention. Gulab remembers thinking he was hearing one of the most violent confrontations of the American war in the mountains. He was also listening to one of the most puzzling. After that massive barrage of rocket grenades, the air became still for a few minutes. Gulab thought it was over—the Taliban’s enemies had plainly been wiped out.

  But no, here it came again. More gunfire. Then rockets. Whoever had confronted Shah’s forces was still fighting. Someone was still firing at something. And whatever that was, someone was firing right back. Gulab was brought up with the sound of the AK-47 ringing in his ears from the age of eight. He knew the difference. And the intermittent return fire he was hearing from over those mountains was unmistakably heavier US rifle fire.

  By now, it was impossible even to try guessing the numbers involved. US intelligence had the number of Shah’s Taliban fighters at a hundred or fewer, but Gulab insists that there were closer to four hundred men. No one knew how many of them had stepped up to the front line to face the Americans.

  By around two o’clock, it was much quieter. He could still hear sporadic bursts, but nothing sustained until just before two thirty, with the sun very high. At that moment, there was a barrage of gunfire—AK-47s—as if they were letting fly at anything that moved; or, perhaps, searching for a target, somehow hoping to flush it out.

  Whatever it was, there were a couple more rocket blasts, and then it all went very quiet, as if the battle had finally ended. The last scattering of shots were all from Kalashnikovs, no return fire. The Taliban, in Gulab’s opinion, had eliminated their enemy.

  But there remained, as ever, the twisting, turning, tribal contradictions, which had riven the dark hills of Afghanistan for two thousand years. And those ingrained fractures between ancient clashing empires, having evolved into modern disputes, made national government virtually impossible.

  Tribal ethnic and language differences caused endemic tensions and led to blood feuds among Afghan warlords. These rumbled down the years, magnifying differences and eradicating the factors that ought to bind them together. In Sabray alone, there was still this schism separating families whose sons had gone to join the army of Ahmad Shah and those who regarded the Taliban commander with long-held suspicion.

  Thus there were rival factions standing on opposite sidelines as that late June battle erupted on the nearby mountains. Some villagers prayed for their own families and rooted for the Taliban. But there were others hating the prospect of another Taliban rule and praying for the Americans to take them out. All in one village—could anything be more blindingly confusing than that?

  And then, of course, there were people like Gulab: mujahideen loyalists who wanted nothing to do with any foreign invaders and nothing to do with the Taliban, either—brutal, unenlightened, religious imposters that they were.

  For him, it was even more baffling. Raised as a battlefield commander, he could not quite decide whether American troops were still at large in these hills or not. And neither could he make up his mind why they had come in the first place. He simply believed the Taliban had probably finished them, by pure weight of numbers.

  And then he heard a sound so familiar, it was like the soft tread of his youngest son. The noise came from far off to the east, clearly audible. It was one of those massive US Chinook MH-47s—an aircraft capable of transporting up to fifty military personnel, not including the pilot, copilot, and flight engineer—clattering up over the peaks.

  When Gulab first heard it, that helicopter was flying straight and true—no stopping and starting like the US aircraft he’d heard late last night. This one was sure of its landing zone. Those big twin-rotor helos are essentially heavy lifters used for troop transportation. You want to move a fighting force, and fast, get a Chinook-47.

  I strained to hear its direction better, turning my head sideways to the warm, early-summer wind, and then, suddenly, I heard yet another sound so familiar to me: the whoosh and whine of a Stinger missile followed by the instantaneous kaboom! of its sixty-one-pound hit-to-kill warhead. And then, seconds later, an almighty thumping crash on the mountainside, as several tons of heavy, burning steel and gasoline smashed into the ground.

  I was astounded at the clarity, how I could hear it so plainly, but at this height in the high peaks, sounds are sometimes amplified by the echoing effect of the escarpments.

  Obviously I was blind to all of this. But acute hearing and heightened sound in clear, silent air magnified it all. And I knew beyond doubt, that the Taliban rocket men had hit that Chinook, and there were many more dead on the mountain.

  As sounds of the burning and explosives died away, there was again silence. Those Boeing rotors were stopped forever. And Allah alone knew of the forthcoming consequences of this. The United States did not take military setbacks lightly, as Osama bin Laden would likely attest.

  I stopped working for a few minutes, listening for further developments. But there was nothing, not even a few scattered gunshots from the Taliban AK-47s, which a veteran like myself could always distinguish.

  Of course, among the Sabray timber men that afternoon, there were other experienced mujahideen troops, and, inevitably, we gathered to speculate. But it was so quiet up here, and there was little to be learned until the herders began to return through our lands, and then the rumors would begin in earnest.

  I think we went home early, walking down to the village long before dark, and the only thing we noticed in the final couple of hours was heavily increased US air traffic: helicopters and fighter jets, clattering and screaming across the skies above the Hindu Kush.<
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  To tell the truth, it was nerve-racking for us. Because we all understood how violently the Americans would react if the Taliban rocket men really had the temerity to knock a big US Chinook out of the sky. Hopefully, Sabray was just far enough away to be judged innocent of the “crime.”

  Aside from the many extra military flights over this part of the country, there was nothing to give the locals a clue about what had sparked the firefight. But they’d know a lot more as the evening wore on.

  Gulab had no news update for several hours after daybreak. No one who arrived in Sabray knew anything more than anyone else. The Taliban army still had only two American bodies, but they were celebrating the massacre of the US reinforcements in the downed helicopter.

  He went up to the hills above the village to check three things: the timberlands, the pastures, and what Americans call the grapevine—that’s the rumor system that works as well up there in the Hindu Kush as it does anywhere else.

  He remembers the quiet of the morning, and his thoughts were of the many dead Pashtun tribesmen, his own people. Gulab had no time for the Taliban or for any of their wishes and ideals. But his own people had died yesterday up here on their own mountain, fighting against Americans.

  And now there was only silence. And it went on for hours and hours. There seemed to be no one walking by with any information. And, so far as anyone knew, there were possibly two heavily armed American killers wandering around—men who had helped to wipe out half of Ahmad Shah’s army.

  “I was not afraid,” says Gulab. “But I was careful, and I never took one step in any direction without my AK-47. There were three of us still patrolling the upper fields, walking slowly, when I heard, around the middle of the day, the unmistakable crack of a gunshot echoing across the escarpment, much closer than the rest of the battle sounds we had heard the previous afternoon. Like all ex-field commanders, I stopped breathing just for a second, awaiting the burst of return fire. But it never came. And from that, I was drawing a thousand conclusions.