The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  The company was a mix of contradictory moods. Some were excited. This is happening, thought Corporal Ray “Chief” Charfauros, who led one of First Platoon’s squads. This is crazy. Others felt dread. We’re flying into antiaircraft fire, and we might land in a minefield, thought Edwin Harger, one of First Platoon’s corpsmen. He spent his days gathering bandages and mentally preparing for the trauma aid he expected to be giving to his friends. For Lance Corporal Mark Hummel, a team leader in First Squad, everything he had heard told him that Kilo Company might be outgunned—an unusual worry for a large unit at this late date in the war. There’s a thousand Taliban waiting for us, he thought. Marines were given instructions to make arrangements for their own deaths. “Write your letters,” they were told. “Write your letters home.”

  By early February, Kilo Company’s plans assumed final shape. The bridge, the bazaar, the hilltop with the radio tower—these were judged essential to controlling Marja’s main road. The helicopters carrying Kilo Company would not land directly on them. Their landing zones would be offset in farmers’ fields, to avoid bombs or air defenses.

  First Platoon, led by Neff, would land closest to the highway in a landing zone called Eagle. One rifle squad and a machine-gun squad would seize the small farming and residential compound, labeled Building 187. Another rifle squad would head southeast, to a compound along the road, labeled Building 316, where they would block an intersection to prevent Taliban fighters from hitting the company’s flank. Neff and the remaining squad would spend the first hours ensuring the others were in place and then clear a route to the bridge for the rest of Kilo Company, which was landing to the west. He would have about seventy Marines or sailors under his command—his three squads plus machine gunners, a Javelin rocket detachment, corpsmen, snipers, and others from intelligence and radio intercept units. An Afghan squad would fly with the platoon, too.

  The Marines were told to be ready to attack by February 12. On February 6, while they were rehearsing at Camp Dwyer, two tilt-rotor Ospreys landed beside them. Out stepped General James T. Conway, the commandant of the Marine Corps. The company gathered for a pep talk. The commandant’s appearance surprised Neff. This is a bigger deal than I knew, he thought. At the platoon level, where practicalities mattered more than platitudes, not everyone was impressed. Some Marines groused that they were being flown into Marja with so much equipment they would hardly be able to move. “Didn’t leave a warm and fuzzy in me whatsoever,” Swider wrote in his journal that night. “They have turned us into human pack mules for the push.” Swider estimated that his load topped 145 pounds.

  On February 10, Kilo Company flew back to Camp Leatherneck, moved into large rectangular tents with rows of cots, and was locked down—sequestered before the assault. The Marines and Afghan soldiers were allowed to visit only the chow hall and portable toilets. Lights were switched off at 10:00 P.M. Marines were ordered to sleep while they could. Speaking was forbidden until morning—a rule that forced an anxious unit to rest. Kilo had reached the end of its pre-combat preparations. Each night, with the young men wondering if these nights were their last, Marines on duty paced the aisles between the cots with flashlights, ensuring that the company slept and deterring Afghan soldiers from stealing gear. The hours stretched long. The stillness was broken only by the footsteps of the guards and the wet coughs of the company’s sick troops.

  * * *

  For three days the company waited. The moon phase and weather were right. NATO was dropping leaflets from planes and broadcasting radio messages urging civilians to remain in their homes and to avoid helping the Taliban. The Marine Corps had been giving repeated notice during the run-up that it planned to assault Marja, hoping that the area’s elders might broker a deal to allow the Afghan government to enter the poppy production zone without force. The outreach failed. The message was now different: We’re coming, so stay inside. Neff and his platoon reviewed plans, talked over the maps, played cards, and read books. Sick men rested, hoping any delay would grant time for fevers to recede and lungs to clear.

  On the evening of February 12, Captain Biggers told the Marines their wait was over. After one last warm meal in the chow hall, the platoons dressed for battle and boarded old buses for the drive to the cold landing strip. Hours passed. After a shivering wait in darkness, and a short meeting with the pilots, Marines and Afghan troops crowded onto aircraft. Each man carried a pack that felt like an anvil. The first Marines found seats. But as more filed in, they added more equipment: spare ammunition, explosive charges for breaching lanes in minefields, five-gallon jerry cans of water. The aircraft was overstuffed. No seats remained. More people were still pushing in from outside. The aisle between the benches that ran the aircraft’s length had already filled with equipment and with ladders for crossing canals and scaling walls. The last Marines climbed onto the pile. They would ride like cargo. Neff was in the front, farthest from the tail ramp—a position from where he could wear a headset and talk with the aircrew. Standing upright, encased in a shifting pile of backpacks, weapons, and men, he was immobilized. He felt almost crushed.

  The helicopters rose, banked slowly, gained speed, and moved in formation through the night. One aircraft was so crowded that Corporal Charfauros dangled his feet over the tail ramp, arms interlocked with Swider’s, whose grip saved him from falling to the earth.

  Neff pushed his night-vision monocular over his shooting eye and looked across the aircraft’s interior. The faces of his Marines and Afghan soldiers were focused and set. After a half-hour flight he’d be leading them for the first time in the field. His first patrol would be in one of the largest operations of the war. Captain Biggers had joked that he was like a football player whose first game was the Super Bowl.

  The helicopters passed over the arid flatland. Kilo was aware that its foes were waiting and may have been tipped off by Afghan soldiers. Would the Taliban know the landing zones? Would they have machine guns at the edges of the farmland? Neff liked this possibility the least of all—to lose Marines in a fiery crash before reaching the fight. But he figured the chances were small. The Taliban possessed many machine guns. And there had been a complex ambush with heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles in 2007 in Helmand Province that had claimed a NATO helicopter and killed seven Western troops. But now, in the cold hours between midnight and dawn, only a disciplined force would be organized enough to defend a large area in the dark. And the Taliban often avoided night combat. Its fighters lacked night-vision equipment and were vulnerable to Western forces’ thermal sights. Neff expected something else: Their local cells would have put belts of IEDs at the places they expected the Marines to try to claim, and would have cut firing ports—murder holes—in walls and buildings from which to fire on the Marines after they landed. The Taliban would fight the way they knew how. Neff watched the flat terrain roll by below, waiting for the dash out into the poppy field.

  The helicopters passed above the first canal of Marja’s outer ring. Neff’s view changed from pale sand to dark tilled fields. The canal was a twinkling black line between worlds. Neff saw mud-walled compounds, and dirt trails, and warrens of short walls. It was all perhaps one hundred feet below. It seemed utterly still. No one fired up.

  The aircraft turned to descend. Dark earth rushed up. Wheels settled down.

  Shouts rose over engine noise. “Go! Go! Go!”

  The space around Neff loosened as everyone ran out the back ramp. He charged behind them, leaping onto damp soil and running for about twenty yards until clear of the helicopter’s rotors. He looked back. Only the door gunners remained behind. In Marine jargon, the landing zone was cold. Kilo had met no resistance. The door gunners had not fired a shot. The aircraft rose on a cold blast of rotor wash and bitter exhaust, and vanished from view. Operation Moshtarak had begun.

  First Platoon was arrayed in a rough circle. The air was hushed. The ground was damp and furrowed. Through Neff’s night-vision monocular it looked like green frozen waves. His radio crackl
ed with information: The rest of the company had landed to the west. Kilo Company was on the ground. He needed to pass up a report.

  Neff asked for a head count and discovered an ordinary level of infantry confusion. One of the interpreters was missing; he had run from the helicopter to the wrong squad. Afghan soldiers, who did not have night-vision equipment, were huddled in hesitant knots, unsure what to do. The platoon was solving its problems without its lieutenant. Marines were already rounding up the Afghan soldiers and arranging them in columns. Others tracked down the interpreter and put him with the right squad. Neff called the company and told them First Platoon was in place with all of its people.

  Neff knew that the aircraft had woken everyone up, probably for miles. All through Marja civilians would be waiting for the Americans’ next move. And the Taliban would know where First Platoon was. If the platoon stayed put, Neff expected it would come under fire. The field had been freshly pumped with water; its mud was soft and clingy. The Marines were burdened by heavy equipment, and on ground upon which it would be hard to run. Neff gave word for the squads to leave the landing zone.

  With First and Third Squads, he set off to the south to claim Building 316. Marines led Afghan soldiers by hand through the night.

  Colistra, the executive officer, and Second Squad headed north to Building 187 and entered it, finding a nervous family. Through the interpreter, he told them that the Americans would be operating in the area and urged them to stay inside for a few days.

  Charfauros’s squad entered Building 316. A family was huddled inside, too. Several Marines took posts along the walls, looking out and over. To the south was a larger hamlet with a dense cluster of houses. Through night-vision devices it looked empty. Nothing moved there.

  The head of household was a sullen young man, and as Marines scoured the compound for weapons, they found photographs of him posing with armed men. They looked like a motorcycle gang with Kalashnikovs and RPGs. This guy’s shady, Charfauros thought. He’s Taliban.

  The man answered few questions.

  Through an interpreter, Charfauros told him that his family could leave but he could not. The man’s wife and children gathered a few belongings and headed for the hamlet to the south. Charfauros ordered the man to be zip-tied and held in a room.

  A Marine who worked in civil affairs interrupted.

  “You can’t do that,” he said.

  Charfauros looked at the Marine coldly. He was not part of Kilo Company. He was temporarily assigned for the operation. Charfauros barely knew him and did not like being undercut.

  “This is my mission,” he said. “You’re just an attachment.”

  Charfauros was not going to have a Talib loose among his squad and would not release the man to tell his friends where the Marines were and how many men and weapons they had.

  The squad lashed the man’s wrists tight, led him to a room, and placed him under guard, out of sight.

  A short while later, while searching the perimeter of the compound, Charfauros found a loose string in the field near the gate. He had been raised on a farm in Alabama and thought the string had been left behind by a farmer after using it to line up rows of crops at seeding time. He had reached down to roll it up.

  An explosion erupted on the road, knocking him to the ground, peppering him with dirt. He rolled over and checked the Marines with him. No one had been injured. They had been just far enough away.

  Laughter and curses gave way to recognition. The Taliban had prepared defenses and the road was booby-trapped.

  Later that morning, Charfauros looked outside and saw a line of Afghan men staring at the compound. They were unarmed. The Marines stared back. It was an odd standoff, an encounter made possible by American rules of engagement: As long as these men were not carrying arms, the Marines did not have authority to shoot. The two sides looked at each other coldly, sizing each other up.

  * * *

  Kilo had landed in Marja unchallenged, and the Taliban had not started to fight. While Charfauros’s squad faced the line of Afghan men, Colistra was in Building 187, trying to convince the family to stay put, and Neff was with First Squad, going from home to home.

  To their west, beyond a slight rise, the rest of Kilo Company was doing the same things. Marines were searching compounds and choosing temporary bases, caching their equipment and readying for the push to the bridge. Afghan men on motorcycles moved in the distance. Others watched the Marines over walls. It went on throughout the morning, as if their enemies were tallying the Americans’ numbers and mapping their whereabouts.

  By late afternoon the watchers were less numerous. Enemy gunfire began, directed at Charfauros and his squad in Building 316 and at Marines in the company’s positions to the west. Mostly it was scattered shooting from a few hundred yards away. By evening, First Platoon’s radios carried news that Third Platoon had been skirmishing to the west and that part of Second Platoon had been ambushed. The Taliban knew the Marines’ locations. But so far its marksmanship was poor. No one had been hurt.

  Captain Biggers called Neff on the encrypted radio with orders: Kilo would link up with Neff at a compound southwest of the bridge in the morning, and Second Platoon would assault the bazaar while Neff’s Marines stood ready with covering fire.

  The company settled in for the night, ringed in by foes, its Marines on watch with night-vision devices.

  * * *

  Neff woke ahead of the sun and gathered First Squad for the walk to meet Biggers and Second Platoon. The morning was cold and windy. The squad stepped out into breeze. First it checked compounds around the landing zone to make sure no Taliban had moved close overnight. At Building 284 it was greeted by an old man and the displaced family that had opted to leave its home when Colistra and Second Squad moved in. Neff had slept beside the head of their goat. The man wore a gray coat over a white robe, and had dark brows over a pale beard. Through an interpreter, Neff told him the Marines hoped not to occupy the home across the field for long, and that the family would be able to move back soon. A few women milled about, keeping distance from the Americans. Children watched. All seemed calm.

  Across the landing zone to the west, the ground climbed slightly uphill. A small hamlet rested on the knoll. First Squad spread out and crossed the open expanse. It stopped at a compound, Building 214, near where Neff planned to meet Kilo’s assault force.

  The hamlet looked like a suitable place from which Lieutenant Gordon Emmanuel, who led Second Platoon, could push for the bridge. The compound Neff chose had been planted with poppies, which rose to the Marines’ shins. It resembled bright green lettuce. Another old man stood near the entrance. Children gathered around him. They greeted the Marines with smiles, amused by the big foreigners. Some of them chased each other in a game of tag. The easy vibe was a good sign. Neff felt safe. This would be a good spot for a linkup. The second day in Marja was proceeding according to plan.

  Marines from Second Platoon began to appear in the hamlet and filed into the compound. The lead Marines had a metal detector and had swept their path for IEDs. It was about 8:30 in the morning. Northern Marja, so far, was the battle that wasn’t.

  Squads took positions along low outer walls, which offered commanding vistas across to Building 187, where the support-by-fire position was ready to cover Second Platoon’s next move, and to the southeast, about a kilometer away, where Corporal Charfauros and his squad held the company’s flank. The wind blew strong and cold, pushing dust. Marines scanned for threats. Several other buildings stood on the steppe. The canal running east–west to the south marked a line of demarcation. Beyond the canal, anyone could move unchallenged. Vegetation along its bank shielded the area from view.

  Standing in the poppy field inside the compound’s walls, Biggers called his lieutenants into a circle. Neff’s Marines handed an explosive charge to Second Platoon, and Neff described the path he and Sergeant Laney had reconnoitered through the last hamlet before the bazaar. The Taliban had been casing Kilo Compa
ny, staying out of range. There had been no sign that it had massed to defend the bridge. A Reaper drone reported to the company that it could see fighting positions at the bazaar but no one who looked like a threat.

  Marines on the outer walls reported seeing a column of civilians leaving a home. They were heading north, carrying sacks on their back. “Maybe they know something we don’t know,” Biggers said.

  A few gunshots sounded from the south.

  Harassing fire, Neff figured. Doesn’t sound like many weapons. They are feeling us out.

  Kilo had many Marines behind the walls. He expected they would push the gunmen off.

  The incoming fire grew. Bullets snapped by, passing over the officers’ heads.

  Dozens of Marines opened fire. The rate of incoming fire seemed to build. Through their scopes, Marines saw Taliban gunmen to the south, moving into place.

  “There’s a shit ton of them!” shouted Private First Class Eric D. Currier.

  A SAW gunner, Private First Class Joshua D. Horne, said he saw thirty or forty Taliban. He fired bursts until he had emptied a 200-round drum. “Reloading!” he shouted.