Full Battle Rattle

by Changiz Lahidji

  It was dirty, dangerous, tedious work, but the Laotians picked up the concepts quickly. The ninety-day course was designed to turn these Laotians into trainers to instruct subsequent teams.

  In October 1999 when the US technical assistance program ended, over 1,000 Laotians had graduated with a variety of UXO action skills, over 104,000 UXOs had been identified and cleared, and more than 700 villages had been visited with comprehensive UXO risk messages—especially the three Rs: recognize, retreat, report.

  * * *

  After a week break, we flew to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to provide protection a US-led construction crew repairing a road called Route 4. This important highway ran from the capital city of Phnom Penh south to the port of Sihanoukville—named after King Norodom Sihanouk, who had returned to power in 1993 after the deadly eighteen-year reign of the Khmer Rouge. It spanned 500 kilometers through flatlands, jungle, several mountain passes, and remaining Khmer Rouge strongholds.

  The $23 million US-funded project had been delayed because of local bureaucratic delays and security problems. A year earlier a Thai road worker had been shot and killed while traveling in a truck convoy. The shooting was blamed on rogue Royal Cambodian Armed Forces (RCAF) soldiers manning a toll checkpoint.

  Some people reported that local RCAF commanders had a problem with Thai workers dominating a Cambodian construction project. Others blamed corruption in the RCAF and the new Cambodian government.

  A month before we were called, another construction crew was attacked by Khmer Rouge rebels near Sihanoukville. Apparently, the dark shadow the Khmer Rouge regime had cast over the country hadn’t completely lifted. Led by “Brother Number One,” General Pol Pot, the Marxist-nationalist movement had seized power in 1975 with the help of the North Vietnamese army and Vietcong.

  Once in control of the country, it launched a radical program of closing all schools, hospitals, and factories; abolishing banking, finance, and money; outlawing all religions; and confiscating all personal property. Teachers, merchants, bankers, professionals, ethnic Thais, Vietnamese, and Chinese, and all intellectual elites were executed to make way for an agrarian form of communism. What came to be known as the Cambodian genocide resulted in between 1.2 million and 2.2 million deaths out of a population of roughly 7 million.

  There was real reason to fear remnants of the Khmer Rouge, who were still active in the south. USAID, which was running the road project, didn’t feel they could count on the RCAF to provide security. So we were tapped to oversee local security guards and guard construction crews.

  From our hotel in Phnom Penh, we left early each morning fully armed in jeeps. Cambodian and Thai workers along Route 4 were happy to see us, as were the USAID supervisors who watched the oft-delayed project progress. The biggest problems we encountered were the heat and the bugs.

  Three weeks in, I came down with a high fever and started experiencing severe headaches and muscle pain and yellowing of the skin. Our medic concluded I had yellow fever—a viral infection transmitted by a bite from an infected mosquito. It had the potential to cause liver damage and in some cases could be fatal.

  Since there were no good medical facilities in Phnom Penh at the time, I was given money and put on a boat that took me to Pattaya, Thailand. At the International Hospital there, the Thai doctors and nurses treated me, and three days later I felt well enough to return to Cambodia to finish the project, which lasted another two weeks.

  * * *

  At the end of 1997, I was promoted to E8 (Master Sergeant) and sent to 1st Group in Okinawa, where I was assigned as operations sergeant to Alpha Company. My responsibilities included running five teams, scheduling activities for all the teams, and communicating assignments from battalion command.

  Our team sergeant was Sergeant Major Butch Young. While Butch returned to the States for a month and a half of R&R, I took his place.

  Apparently I didn’t screw up too bad because when he returned, he awarded me with my team to command, ODA 113. In certain ways, it was a dream come true—a final confirmation that I was valued and accepted. In another sense, it felt long overdue as I’d watched scores of others who’d done a hell of a lot less than I had get promoted ahead of me.

  One of our first assignments in ODA 113 was to deploy to South Korea to do intel gathering along the DMZ—a 2.5 mile buffer zone that had been created as a result of the Armistice Agreement of July 1953 that had ended the Korean War. It runs 160 miles along the 38th Parallel and is considered the most heavily fortified border in the world, because of continued animosity and ideological differences between North and South Korea.

  Sporadic fighting and North Korean incursions since the armistice had resulted in over 500 South Korean casualties, at least 250 from the northern Democratic People’s Republic, and the deaths of fifty US soldiers.

  The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) to the north was ruled by a hereditary dictatorship led at that time by maniacal Kim Jong-il, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars on maintaining the largest military in the world (over 9 million active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel out of a population of 23 million). He was also hell-bent on developing nuclear weapons, while hundreds of thousands of his people starved and 200,000 were locked away in political prisons. According to Human Rights Watch, the DPRK had (and still has) one of the worst human rights records in the world.

  For this mission, we split up into three four-man teams and hiked into the heavily forested mountains on the southern side. At 10,000 feet we built primitive hootches out of wood and tarps, and recorded the comings and goings at the North Korean military base to the east, which we could make out clearly through high-powered binoculars.

  Rain poured down on us ten out of the fifteen days we stayed there, and it was cold as hell. As I lay in my sleeping bag at night, freezing my ass off and with the wind howling outside, I reminded myself how lucky I was to be living in a country like the United States where I didn’t have to live according to the whims of a maniacal dictator.

  Toward the end of our mission, Battalion Sergeant Major Mike Moore trekked into the mountains with a four-man inspection team to visit us. But we were so well hidden they couldn’t find our location.

  From my hideout up in a tree, I spotted them and made a noise.

  They looked up but still couldn’t see me.

  So I said. “Hey, Sergeant Major. It’s Changiz. What are you doing here?”

  “Why the fuck are you up in that tree?” Sergeant Moore asked back.

  “It’s a hide sight, isn’t it? I’m hiding.”

  I climbed down as he and his men cracked up. Then I signaled the rest of the guys on my team to come out of their hides.

  A few days later, we broke camp and passed through a village on our way down to Camp Casey—a US military base forty miles north of Seoul—and one of several US bases near the DMZ. Tom, Chris, Jason, and I were standing at a local bus stop, soaking wet, waiting to get picked up, when a man came out of his house and invited us inside. We removed our wet clothes and dried them before a fire, and the old man served us a dinner of soup, fish stew, kimchi, and rice.

  The rain continued to come down in sheets for two days, and our host insisted on sheltering and feeding us. When the clouds finally parted, we wanted to find a way to thank him. I knew that South Korean men loved US uniforms, so I asked the guys on my team to pitch in anything they could spare. We left him uniforms, knives, flashlights, and MREs, then called for a truck from Camp Casey to pick us up.

  * * *

  More training assignments took ODA 113 to Thailand. By January 2001, I’d served in Special Forces for twenty-three years. I felt like it was time to step aside and welcome in the Pepsi generation. So I put in for retirement and was honored with the highest award in Special Forces—the Legion of Merit.

  Three of my longtime SF buddies, Ken, John, and Dave, were retiring at the same time, so the three of us pooled our money and hosted a three-day, two-night bash on Torii Beach in Okinawa. Wives,
girlfriends, and friends danced and partied. We went out in style!

  12

  AFGHANISTAN

  I’m not the kind of guy to kick back and play golf. Yes, I had retired from Special Forces, but I immediately started looking for something else to do besides ride my Harley up and down the Pacific Coast Highway.

  Since I’d moved back in with my family in Santa Clara, I started looking for work in Northern California.

  In February 2001, Lockheed Martin hired me as a security coordinator responsible for checking credentials and supervising other security personnel. Early in the morning of September 11, 2001, I had just completed my rounds as security duty captain at a plant in Sunnyvale, California, when one of the four off-duty guards inside the day room pointed to a TV screen and said, “Changiz, you’ve got to see this.”

  “What?” I asked, feeling a sense of déjà vu from 1979.

  “Some planes have crashed into some buildings in New York!”

  Instead of rioting Islamic students on the screen, I saw black smoke and flames pouring from the two huge buildings. “That’s the World Trade Center! How the hell did that happen?”

  We watched in horror as the towers burned and collapsed to the ground. I felt a sick feeling rise from the pit of my stomach. Obviously, this wasn’t an accident. Then a news commentator announced that a third plane had crashed into the Pentagon.

  “We’re under attack!”

  My instinct was to grab my gear and prepare to deploy. But I was no longer in the service. The four guards and I linked hands and prayed for the victims of the attack and for the future of our country.

  Throughout the day, more news trickled in about the number of brave firefighters who were missing and the fact that some of the hijackers had been identified and linked to the terrorist group Al Qaeda.

  I was bursting at the seams to go after Osama bin Laden and his followers and kick their asses. I was also pissed that our government had dropped the ball. Not only was our border security seriously flawed, but we had also failed to destroy Al Qaeda after they had bombed our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in August 1998 and attacked the USS Cole on October 12, 2000, in Yemen.

  While our government was focused on impeaching a president who had lied about a sexual indiscretion, we had allowed a small group of Sunni radicals to plan and deliver a shockingly devious and damaging blow on American soil. And it could have been worse. I learned later that in mid-August 2001 bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri sat down with two Pakistani nuclear scientists in a mud-walled compound in southern Afghanistan and discussed the possibility of Al Qaeda obtaining a nuclear weapon. Bin Laden left that meeting abruptly, telling the Pakistanis that something momentous was going to happen soon.

  Throughout the rest of that grim day in September 2001, I kept reminding myself that we should have seen it coming. I’d come very close to brushing shoulders with bin Laden and his Al Qaeda followers in Pakistan and the Panjshir Valley of Afghanistan in 1981 when I was training mujahedeen and first heard his name. I’d also heard bin Laden discussed during my undercover visits of mosques in Brooklyn and Queens while on assignment to the FBI in ’92. More recently, some members of Al Qaeda had aided Somalia militiamen during the Battle of Mogadishu.

  Shaken and angry, I called a friend at FBI headquarters in New York and asked, “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  He said, “We’re completely overwhelmed now, Changiz, but thanks for calling. I’ll keep you in mind.”

  “I’ll do anything,” I said. “You know my language skills and familiarity with the region. I’m in California now, but I can be in New York or DC tomorrow. Send me to Afghanistan to go after the bastards. I’ll do whatever you need.”

  “Okay. Thanks. As soon as I see what our needs are, I’ll let you know.”

  I was too upset to sleep. The next morning, I called a former commander from 5th Group Special Forces named Colonel Jack Hook, who was now working as a military contractor for a firm called Military Professional Resources Inc. (MPRI) based in Alexandria, Virginia. MPRI hired me immediately. A week later I was on a plane to Germany to do “red cell” testing—or security penetration testing—of US bases.

  Investigators looking into the 9/11 attacks learned that a number of the Al Qaeda terrorists, including leader Mohamed el-Amir Awad el-Sayed Atta, had previously been part of a secret cell living in Hamburg, Germany. Knowing that Al Qaeda had a strong presence in Germany, the Pentagon was concerned about the security of the more than a dozen military bases and the 100,000 Army, Navy, and Air Force personnel we had there.

  Working with a small team of former SF and SEAL operators, I broke into bases in Heidelberg, Berlin, Frankfurt, and Stuttgart, gained access to top secret areas, and even stole equipment. Then we wrote detailed reports on these breaches so they could be corrected.

  On a rainy night in October 2002, I was in my hotel room in Stuttgart getting ready for bed when the phone rang. It was Mike Smith, a friend and former colleague from 5th Group.

  He asked, “Changiz, what the hell are you doing?”

  “I’m on a contract with MPRI doing red cell work overseas.”

  “How do you like it?”

  “It’s fine. Why?”

  “You still have your top secret clearance?”

  “Yeah. Of course.”

  “What is MPRI paying you?” he asked.

  I gave him a figure, which was twice what I had earned in Special Forces.

  “How would you like to make even more?” Mike asked.

  “I wouldn’t complain.”

  “You’d have to go to Afghanistan.”

  “No problem,” I answered. I’d been longing to go to Afghanistan, which was where the action was.

  After it had been established that Al Qaeda leadership had planned and directed the 9/11 attacks from training camps in that country, President George W. Bush had given the Taliban regime an ultimatum: Hand over the Al Qaeda terrorists and stop giving them sanctuary in Afghanistan or suffer the consequences.

  When the Taliban refused to comply, the US responded with air strikes against terrorist and military targets. President Bush also authorized sending in small teams of CIA officers and Special Forces operators to work with Northern Alliance opposition militiamen (commanded by my old friend Ahmad Shah Massoud, before his death at the hands of Al Qaeda assassins on September 9, 2001) to topple the regime.

  The combination of air strikes and CIA/SF teams coordinating with Northern Alliance units worked better than anyone had expected. By the end of December 2001, the Taliban had been pushed out of Kabul and most major cities, and bin Laden and his remaining followers were fleeing the country.

  A week after Mike called, I met him at United States Information Service (USIS) headquarters in Tysons Corner, Virginia—just outside DC.

  A government official explained that they were putting together a team to train a personal security detail for the newly installed president of Afghanistan.

  Back in December 2001, twenty-five Afghan political leaders met in Bonn, Germany, in a conference organized by the UN to form a transition government in Afghanistan. As a result of what became known as the Bonn Agreement, signed on December 5, Hamid Karzai, a longtime critic of the Taliban regime who fought with the Northern Alliance and US Special Forces teams, was named chairman of the Interim Administration. Six months later, he was appointed interim president of Afghanistan until presidential elections could be organized in 2004.

  With Taliban units still roaming the country and no real Afghan army to count on, US Navy SEALs and other special operators had been charged with protecting President Karzai. In July 2002, Afghan vice president Abdul Qadir and his driver had been shot to death by two gunmen with automatic weapons as their vehicle left a ministry compound in downtown Kabul. A month later President Karzai barely escaped an assassination attempt.

  Soon after that attack, the State Department announced that members of their Diplomatic Security Service would replace US tr
oops and begin training a local security force to protect the Afghan leader. According to a senior Afghan government official, “the important thing to remember is that the ultimate aim is to have Afghans providing security for our head of state, not Americans.”

  Because of my extensive Special Forces experience I was considered a perfect candidate. Officials at USIS supplied me with a black passport—which carried the protection of diplomatic immunity—and an airplane ticket to Tashkent, Uzbekistan. I arrived there two days later, and spent several very cold days in a hotel waiting for a CIA flight to Afghanistan.

  The view of the Hindu Kush Mountains as we descended through the clouds was breathtaking. Twenty years after my last visit, I was back in Kabul. Greeting me at Bagram Air Base were two officials from the US Embassy, who drove me to Camp Watan, a small secret State Department facility close to the US Army’s Camp Phoenix and four miles from the US Embassy. Across the street sat a huge NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) compound that housed soldiers from Holland, New Zealand, Turkey, Spain, Australia, the UK, and other Coalition partners.

  Inside a barbed-wire perimeter heavily fortified with machine gun nests, bunkers, and guard towers was the football-field-sized camp with mobile homes for sixteen instructors, two big barracks for the Afghan recruits, a generator to provide electricity, a lunchroom, gym, and lounge. Adjoining the camp was a huge junkyard filled with rusting tanks, helicopters, trucks, and cars discarded by the Soviets when they fled Afghanistan.

  The next day we met 120 handpicked Afghans—a motley crew that spoke no English, had no birth certificates, and were largely illiterate. Out of that group only seventy-six managed to pass a basic test and join our first class. I communicated with them in their local Dari. The other trainers depended on seven translators, known as terps, fluent in both Dari and Pashto.

  My primary responsibility was firearms instructor, and I also taught the recruits how to line up for inspection, march, drive a dune buggy, make a bed, take a shit in a latrine, and wipe their asses. I’m not kidding.