Full Battle Rattle

by Changiz Lahidji

  “Sure. But why?” I asked.

  “Because with your long beard and hair you look like such a badass.”

  “You read me all wrong,” I replied. “I’m a lover at heart.”

  They smiled.

  15

  10TH GROUP SPECIAL FORCES

  In August 2008 I was back in Afghanistan, assigned to 10th Group Special Forces Alpha Company as a Counter-IED advisor. We worked out of a special compound within Camp Phoenix, Kabul.

  One advantage of being a private contractor was that I could wear anything I wanted. Sewn in the middle of my combat vest was a special patch that I had made by local tailors. It read, “Hey, Fuck face.” It was my greeting to the Taliban fighters, who were known to wear mean, determined expressions on their faces.

  One day I was standing outside ISAF headquarters waiting for some colleagues to drive me back to Camp Phoenix, when a two-star general walked over to me. He pointed at the patch and asked, “Are you kidding me? What the hell is this?”

  “It’s part of my uniform, sir,” I answered.

  “Your uniform? Are you regular military?”

  “No, sir, I’m a contractor.”

  “A contractor, huh. Then watch yourself three-sixty.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Guys from other SF A-teams often visited our compound at Camp Phoenix between assignments to more remote parts of the country.

  One afternoon, I was outside talking to a couple of colleagues when a guy from one of the visiting A-teams shouted at me, “Hey, terp, come here and translate something for me.”

  I walked over to where he was standing with four of his colleagues and said, “Hey motherfucker, I’m no terp. I’m a retired sergeant major in SF. I have more time in A-teams than you have years.”

  I smiled and they laughed and apologized. Then we became friends.

  In October, I was assigned to go to Tora Bora as part of Alpha Company’s twelve-man B-team. The French had built an outpost high in the Uzbin Valley near the village of Garda Khazaray, which was staffed with members of their Foreign Legion and one SF A-team. The Legion’s motto, painted on the roof of the base headquarters, read: LEGIO PATRIA NOSTRA (The Legion Is Our Homeland.)

  The legendary group, which had been in existence for 178 years, had fought wars in Bosnia, Cambodia, Chad, Kuwait, Algeria, Vietnam, and Somalia. Its 7,500 members, drawn from eighty nationalities, were known to be ferocious fighters. Over 900 of them had died during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Around 2,000 had been killed or deserted when France invaded Mexico in 1861. More recently, they lost 1,976 men in the eight-year struggle over Algerian independence.

  They were extreme warriors from all over the world, including Ecuador, the Czech Republic, and New Zealand. I fit right in.

  Some had shady, even criminal pasts, which were kept secret once they joined the French Foreign Legion and were given a new name and a new lease on life. They were foreign mercenaries, distrusted by French leftists, and embraced a nihilistic attitude expressed by one veteran Legionnaire, who said, “We are dust from the stars. We are nothing at all. So fuck off with your worries about war.”

  Many of them didn’t even speak French.

  What they didn’t like was sitting around with nothing to do but shoot the shit, watch videos, and listen to European techno music, which is what we did from our mountain outpost two-thirds up the Uzbin Valley. The top of the mountains were controlled by the Taliban and some remnants of bin Laden’s men.

  I ended up doing 135 missions with 10th Group SF over the course of ten months, saw a ton of action, and killed and captured lots of bad guys.

  One night we went out on a mission in five Black Hawks to grab some HVTs (high value targets) in a small cluster of huts on top of a hill. The high-tech NVGs I wore that cost $15,000 a pop helped me see in the pitch dark. Cold wind through the open Black Hawk door stung my face. The helo I rode in came up fast over a valley and hovered over a clearing seventy meters from the cluster of shacks. It jerked up and I thought we had touched down. So I jumped.

  Turns out it was still five feet off the ground. I hit it hard with my knees bent, and rolled forward past a group of shrubs and down an embankment. Blood in my mouth, my head spinning, I got up slowly and realized I’d lost my NVGs.

  Other guys on the team were already on their way to the huts. I heard them communicating with one another through my comms.

  “Cover left. Entering hut, center-right.”

  “Roger.”

  “Cover! Cover!”

  I found the lost NVGs in the approximate place I’d come down. My knees and feet barked like hell. Thinking that at over fifty I was too old to do this shit, I hurried and caught up with my unit, assumed my position, and helped raid two of the huts. We found none of the HVTs and no weapons or bomb-making material. The intel we had taken action on wasn’t right. Either that or the HVTs had been alerted somehow and escaped.

  While waiting for the Black Hawks to circle back to pick us up, I saw something moving in some trees at ten o’clock.

  “Possible enemy, at ten!” I exclaimed into the radio.

  Our TL Larry shouted back. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

  We flanked the trees, found a hiding place with weapons, and detained six suspects—four men and two women, all unarmed but who appeared suspicious as hell. The TL instructed us to load them in one of the helos and take them in for questioning. I never heard whether they turned out to be Taliban or not.

  On another nighttime raid north of Kabul, we landed in a valley and had to climb up a steep 1,000-foot incline to a cluster of huts. We set a charge against the door of the hut we were targeting and blew it in. Inside we confronted two terrified men, a woman, and two young children. All of them had shit their pants. As usual, I did the talking and tried to calm them down while my colleagues searched the hut. They found a laptop and a couple of pistols.

  The engagements passed in a blur—night raids, firefights, patrols. I loved the action but sensed we weren’t winning the war. Back in Washington, generals were petitioning Congress for more money and more troops.

  Everywhere we went, when I got a chance to talk to the locals, they expressed their displeasure with the Taliban. But they didn’t trust us, either. We were foreigners, gharibe kgahgi, and as far as they were concerned we didn’t belong in their country, especially if we were wearing uniforms and carrying weapons.

  * * *

  Three months later, during our return from Tora Bora, we ran into traffic on the Jalalabad Road. Seeing black smoke ahead, we hurried in our two RGs and two Humvees to see what had happened. Turned out it wasn’t a run-of-the-mill fender bender but a Taliban ambush of an ISAF convoy.

  Vehicles were ablaze and bodies lay scattered across the road.

  Before we could attend to the wounded we had to stop the firing coming from a cluster of mud huts to the right. We took cover and readied our weapons. Drivers and passengers scurried out of the trucks and cars behind us and hid behind the opposite embankment.

  Surrounded by chaos, death, and fear, our master sergeant shouted, “One o’clock!”

  We unleashed on targets along the perimeter wall 150 meters away with automatic weapons fire, machine guns, and rockets. My buddy Brian tore the wall apart with the .50 cal. I saw whole clunks of it flying and enemy shooters being propelled back and hitting the ground. The whole hamlet became enveloped in a cloud of thick red dust.

  A few shots kept ricocheting around us.

  “Two o’clock,” our MS shouted.

  The enemy was moving south. I lined one up in my sights and took him down in two short bursts. The firing subsided.

  While some guys in my unit ran to help the wounded, four us of us stayed back to surveil the huts to our right. Out of my left periphery, I glimpsed the barrel of an AK on the floor of a battered Nissan waiting in traffic.

  I hurried over to the car with my weapons ready. The three men inside looked like typical Afghan men from the south—young wi
th thick beards, wearing loose pants, shirts, and caps. Could have been simple farmers, opium traffickers, members of the Taliban, or all three.

  “Gentlemen,” I said. “I’m with the police. I’m going to ask you to exit your vehicle.”

  They complied without protest. As an SF colleague kept them under guard, I reached into the Nissan and recovered the AK. It was loaded. I removed the mag and stuffed it in my back pocket. Then I checked the car for more ammo and weapons.

  Finding nothing, I waved the three dudes back into the car. They remained silent and sat stoically. God knows what was going on in their heads.

  It took thirty minutes before the road was cleared and traffic resumed moving. Any travel in Afghanistan, day or night, was dangerous. Even in Kabul. As members of the ISAF, we were constant targets.

  * * *

  Back at Camp Phoenix, I stood in line at the mess hall when I recognized a familiar figure in front of me. It was my former team leader from ODA 171, Ron Johnston. He wore silver birds on his uniform indicating he was now a full colonel.

  I came up behind him and put him in a headlock. He spun me around to face him. Seeing a wild man with a beard down to his chest, he smiled.

  “Changiz, goddammit. I heard you had retired.”

  “It’s not so easy to get rid of me, sir.”

  “Cut the sir shit,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’m working with 10th Group Special Forces.”

  We arranged to meet a couple nights later at a Lebanese restaurant in town, where we chowed on lamb kebabs, smoked a hookah, and reminisced about old times.

  Later that night when I returned to Camp Phoenix, I learned that General Michael Repass, commander of US Army Special Forces, was visiting Kabul and had requested to see me. General Repass had been my team leader when I was with SF ODA 561 thirty years earlier. I had become friendly with his wife, Linda, who was an E4 at the time working in the mailroom.

  Since his days as a second lieutenant, Repass had rocketed up the military chain of command with tours at NATO headquarters in Europe, Grenada, and Iraq.

  I drove over to ISF headquarters with Ron Johnston. I had just climbed out of our Humvee and was standing near the gate fully loaded with my M4 pointed at the ground when a three-vehicle convoy entered and stopped abruptly.

  General Repass climbed out of an armored SUV, threw his helmet on the seat, and hugged me.

  “You son of a bitch, Changiz. It’s so good to see you. I love you.”

  “I love you too, General.” He stood a head taller than me at six-four and looked the epitome of the modern warrior, conveying strength and determination in everything he did. My appearance was more unusual—desert cammos, long salt-and-pepper beard to my chest, Ray-Ban wraparound sunglasses.

  He said, “I can’t wait to tell Linda. She’ll be thrilled.”

  “Please send her my love, sir.”

  “I absolutely will.”

  A couple of the general’s aides had gotten out of the vehicles to see what was going on. One of them turned to the other and, nodding in my direction, asked, “Who is this guy?”

  General Repass overheard him, draped his long arm over my shoulder, and replied, “This is Changiz. He’s a hero of Desert One and a legend in Special Forces.”

  It was one of the proudest moments in my career.

  * * *

  November 2009, I was back in California, riding my Harley up and down the coast and looking for other ways to kill the boredom, when I got a call from a friend who was working at CACI International—described as a professional services and information technology company headquartered in Alexandria, Virginia. Their website boasted 20,000 employees worldwide. My friend asked if I was interested in being a BETSS-C operator.

  “What the hell is a BETSS-C operator?”

  “You’ll be working with what are called Persistent Threat Detection System (PTDS) blimps.”

  I’d never heard of them, but they sounded interesting.

  “They’ve become our most trusted reconnaissance resource in the field,” he explained. “You worked on Counter-IED teams before, correct? So you know how pernicious the problem is.”

  “Pernicious” wasn’t in my vocabulary. I said, “I think so. Yes.”

  “Well, one of the things the PTDS blimps do is spot insurgents planting or tending to the power supplies of bombs.”

  “My AOR?” (area of responsibility)

  “Operate all sensor systems, perform preventive maintenance, document incidents, et cetera.”

  Intrigued, I flew to Fort Bragg for a month of training. It was like returning home.

  Soon after I arrived, I walked over to SOCOM headquarters to pay my respects to General Repass. He wasn’t there, so I left a message, and a week later he called to invite me over for dinner. After dining on steaks grilled to perfection by Linda, we sat on the back patio drinking beer. The general stretched his long legs on a lounger and asked why I was at Bragg. I told him about the PTDS assignment I had signed up for.

  He turned to me, nodded, and said, “Changiz, you’ve had a great career. Why do you need that shit?”

  It was a good question, and one that I’d contemplated many times myself. “I want to help my country,” I answered. I didn’t tell him about my mother’s hefty medical bills, and the fact that my entire military pension was going toward her support. But I did add, “Hopefully, this will be my last go-around.”

  A week later I deployed to Camp Holland, a combined Dutch, US, Czech, and Australian base on the outskirts of Tarin Kowt, the capital of Uruzgan Province in southern Afghanistan. The place was known to the soldiers of all nationalities as TK—a godforsaken dust bowl smack in the middle of Taliban territory and surrounded by magnificent snow-capped mountains.

  Why anyone in their right mind was willing to fight over this place beat the hell out of me. All I saw inside town and out was misery, poverty, and dust. Subsistence farmers toiled on narrow strips of fertile land along the Teri Rud River. The winters were bitter cold, and the summers sizzling.

  No industry; no natural resources; no schools, police, health clinics, or businesses.

  Most locals lived in mud huts without electricity. The only local color was found at the central bazaar where vendors who looked like extras from the movie Exodus sold produce, hookahs, and handwoven rugs.

  The city of 70,000 boasted a whole list of Pashtun tribes, some of which originated in the twelfth century. To the naked eye not a whole lot had changed since then—except for the airport and our base, which was surrounded by layers of reinforced cement walls topped by razor wire. Everything, including our living quarters, was heavily armored to withstand the constant Taliban rocket attacks.

  TK stood sixteen kilometers from the provincial capital, but, as many put it, was 300 years away. It boasted many of the comforts of home—a Green Beans coffee shop run by two amicable Indian dudes, PXs, game rooms, gyms, a memorial to those who had lost their lives, and even a recreation center where young Filipino women gave pedicures and massages.

  Even with the amenities it was often described as a shithole, and that’s where I ended up, working twelve-hour shifts in a bunkerlike PTDS command module. Part of a four-man team led by a captain in the Australian army.

  The PTDS was an aerostat balloon, approximately thirty-five meters in length, made from a durable multilayered fabric suitable for all environments. It was filled with lighter-than-air helium and equipped with sophisticated surveillance and communications equipment.

  According to its manufacturer, Lockheed Martin, the PTDS “leverages a wide-area, secure communications backbone for the integration of threat reporting from multiple available sensors.” It was moored to a 100-meter tower by a retractable tether that allowed it to ascend another 1,500 meters. From that altitude its 360-degree high-speed cameras could record images thirty miles away.

  The all-weather, all-temperature, day-and-night-capable platform was armed with infrared and color video cameras and a s
ophisticated GPS tool that offered four modes of operation:

  • Synthetic Aperture Radar: generates an earth map that’s transmitted to ground stations for analysis; creates overviews and specific object images, such as buildings, fences, and stationary cars; facilitates mission planning for possible direct assault; and helps assess potential collateral damage.

  • Coherent Change Detection: reveals tiny differences in maps of the same area over time, revealing disturbed earth and moved vehicles.

  • Moving Target Detection: sees objects of interest up to 360 degrees around the PTDS. Data is laid over ground station maps, letting operators cue the optical sensors for positive ID, tracking, and target designation.

  • Ground Moving Target Indicator: pinpoints suspect vehicles from wide terrain and tracks them from start to endpoint.

  Flying like a kite with no propulsion, the aerodynamically shaped aerostat always pointed toward the wind with fins and a tail system that remained buoyant. Filled with 74,000 cubic feet of helium, it was effective even in windy conditions. We usually kept ours at max altitude to keep it out of range of small arms fire.

  Because the aerostat operated on a low-pressure system even when hit, which happened once a week, it didn’t pop like a party balloon. Instead the helium oozed out, giving us time to reel it in and patch it up.

  Every month, we had to climb up the tower and take the camera down to clean it. Otherwise, it was monotonous work. Especially at night when the only visible part of the aerostat was a single blinking light. We directed the camera to roads, bridges, checkpoints, and other sites where insurgents were known to plant bombs.

  When our base was attacked, which happened on average three or four times a week, I’d turn on the camera to see where the fire was coming from. Then I’d pick up a phone and alert the QRF, which would hurry out to try to neutralize the insurgents.

  Wanting a break in the routine, I convinced the leader of the Australian-led QRF to let me go out with them one night on patrol. Accompanying the Brisbane-based Two Platoon Alpha Company, I searched several compounds of interest four kilometers west of the city. We uncovered weapons and explosives and chased some suspected insurgents into an adjacent canal.