“Roger, inbound,” Neff answered.
He gave the squad a heads-up. A missile was about to hit the building, he said. When it did, the Marines would rush forward in an assault.
Bacchus’s voice came over the net again.
“Release,” he said.
Neff and First Squad heard a screaming whoosh. The ordnance slammed into the compound, near its north side, and exploded. It was smaller than the HIMARS strikes they had seen, but still sent chunks of wall and dirt spinning in the air. Its roar shook the field. Black smoke rose.
The compound fell quiet.
Laney looked at the rising smoke and wondered if the missile had struck outside the compound, at the base of the wall. The exterior walls all seemed intact, except for a small section that collapsed. He was concerned it had been a near miss. He wanted a second strike before asking his Marines to run across 200 yards of empty field. They had tried that the day before. Three of them had been shot.
He ordered several of his Marines to form a base of fire, to suppress the compound, and told two Marines—Hummel and Lance Corporal Spencer Crowe—to be ready to run across the open with him and clear the compound. Laney had a yellow smoke grenade, and told the Marines who were staying back that when he threw it they should cease fire.
Minutes passed.
The Reaper pilot thought he had hit the place. Neff said there would not be another airstrike. He told Laney to clear the compound. “Take your squad and go, go, go,” he said.
Laney, Hummel, and Crowe scrambled from the canal and began running south. The field contained nothing more than the tan stubble of the previous year’s crop. It had not yet been tilled and did not offer furrows they might dive behind for protection if the Taliban tried to cut them down.
The rest of the squad fired as the men ran.
At about 100 meters out, Laney threw the smoke grenade. Its bright yellow plume rose and billowed on the still morning air.
First Squad ceased fire.
The three running Marines closed the last distance in seconds, hearing only their own breathing and thumping footfalls of their boots.
The man Hummel had shot was sprawled on the ground near the door. He had been hit just above the left eye. His radio was beside him.
Hummel rushed past.
They reached the wall, stopped briefly, then burst through the door firing.
Laney saw that Neff had been right. The missile had hit its target, exploding with a wave of heat and pressure and splattering the walls with shrapnel. Its blast had blown over an earthen interior wall and partly buried a Taliban fighter. The dead man’s legs protruded from the rubble. An RPK machine gun was in the mess, unattended.
Hummel heard motorcycles outside, but not close, as if more fighters were fleeing.
The Marines tossed fragmentation hand grenades and cleared the remaining rooms. They found no one else within the building, and expanded the search.
Just outside another wall they found a third dead Taliban fighter. He sat upright in a shallow canal, head back, eyes closed, mouth open, in dark green pants and top. His left leg was twisted at a strange angle, as if broken multiple times. His right shoe was gone, exposing a sockless foot. His torso looked singed. Blood from his wounds seeped into the canal, tinting the water red.
Laney figured other Taliban fighters had been dragging their friend’s body away and abandoned him as the Marines rushed.
The Marines returned inside and dug out the dead man. His head had been crushed. They made photographs of the two bodies killed by the Hellfire, for an intelligence report, and collected the RPK.
Hummel stood over the man he had shot.
He thought the Taliban fighters in these compounds were the same men who had killed Currier the day before. Currier had been a member of Hummel’s team. Looking down at the corpse, Hummel felt as if he were settling a score. He had never killed a man before, at least not that he could confirm, and had wondered what it would feel like—if he would be sad, or scared, or angry. And now here he was, getting to find out. The sentiment registered: It was joy.
Hummel searched the dead man, taking his radio, rifle, and a chest rig holding several Kalashnikov magazines. He removed a wad of Pakistani currency from his pocket, and took a scarf. There was nothing left to do.
Laney radioed Neff and the rest of his squad to tell them they were coming back.
The three Marines ran across the field and rejoined the others.
First Squad was intact again, in the little canal, minus those who had been shot the previous day. Neff could sense his Marines’ energy. They were sleep-deprived, parched, running on adrenaline, fueled by revenge. They were low on ammunition, and the barrels of their weapons were freshly cooled. They examined the weapons they had captured, and listened to the Taliban radio crackle with the sounds of their enemies’ voices. It was a tongue they did not know. The meaning of the weapons seemed clear. The Taliban had fired that RPK, they thought, at First Platoon the day before.
“Hell yeah,” someone said. “Fuck yeah. We probably got that piece of shit who shot Currier.”
Marines surged with satisfaction and swore.
A Taliban fighter tried to cross the dirt trail on a motorcycle to their west.
One of the Marine snipers had been watching the spot through his scope. He shot the man. Another man stepped out to help the downed fighter. The sniper shot him, too.
Kilo company had moved far south, to the edge of the area where First Battalion, Sixth Marines were operating. Neff’s mind worked like a checklist, processing the day, assessing his platoon’s situation. He had a count of his Marines. No one was hurt. No casualties. To the east he saw armored trucks on the road. They were a familiar profile, the armored vehicles of one of the Marine companies that had entered Marja overland. They had caught up to Kilo. Their appearance meant that the rest of the battalion was arriving and First Platoon’s flank was covered. Kilo would not be alone any longer, and the Taliban would know it.
Captain Biggers told the company to pull back.
Neff gave the word.
The snipers and the Marines of First Squad covered for Second Squad, to the west, as it began bounding north. Then it was their turn. They filed out of the canal and began walking briskly, weapons ready. This day had been for payback. Neff was proud of his Marines. They had been given a chance to fight on their terms, and they had fought well. This is what I thought the Marine Corps was going to be like, he thought. He felt good.
* * *
I. For most of those who were there, the origins of the errant HIMARS strikes remain uncertain to this day. The former company, battalion, and regimental commanders all agree that the rockets targeted the wrong building and killed unarmed civilians. They also agree the strikes were a result of human error, not a technical flaw. Public statements by a British major general in Kandahar that the compound was being used by the Taliban in the attacks were false. The Marine Corps investigated the mishap but did not publicly release the results. After repeated inquires by the author, spanning years, the Corps said it could not find a copy of its investigator’s report.
PART IV
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* * *
Reckoning
Throughout 2011, the American military presence in Afghanistan remained large, at just under 100,000 troops. Officially the military said it was meeting its goals. Ground commanders and troops knew that the Afghan surge had not achieved what its organizers promised. Osama bin Laden was dead, killed by Navy SEALs in a raid in Pakistan in May 2011. And Mullah Omar remained in hiding, his relevance uncertain. But a new generation of Taliban commanders and local fighters, seasoned by a decade of war with the United States, held sway over much of the countryside, even as the surge crested and the Afghan government churned out new units. U.S. forces had spread out across the country, building bases and challenging the Taliban in remote areas, and now they were preparing to draw down and try passing responsibility to Afghan combat forces, which were unready. I
n Iraq, the Pentagon was completing a full withdrawal. The last American troops were due to leave the country by the end of the year.
ELEVEN
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* * *
G-MONSTER
The Satisfaction of Restraint
“I prayed to be able to see action and be in combat. Now I pray I don’t have to see combat and can avoid having to drop.”
DECEMBER 31, 2011
Inside an F/A-18 Super Hornet over the Arghandab River, Kandahar Province, Afghanistan
Commander Layne McDowell looked from the cockpit at the American military’s battlefield presence below. He had returned to the Afghan war after an absence of a decade to find scenes and circumstances that bore almost no resemblance to the war he had left. When he departed the theater in late 2001, he hoped that his services as an attack pilot would not be needed over Afghanistan again. But in the intervening years there had been more war than he had foreseen, and a few hours before he had been catapulted off the USS John C. Stennis, a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the North Arabian Sea, to patrol an assigned sector of sky—a “kill box,” in his community’s jargon—to provide air cover to ground forces whose numbers had swelled and were roaming the Afghan ground. He expected a long day, at least seven hours in the seat, a flight requiring pacing between calls for help from ground troops and scheduled times to refuel.
For the moment it was quiet. McDowell scanned the ground through the infrared sensor of his targeting pod, listening to radio traffic.
He marveled at the changes, at how the urgent simplicity of the early Afghan campaign had been replaced by a ponderous, intricate, and entrenched military and air traffic control scheme. In 2001, McDowell had flown into Afghanistan stealthily. There had been almost no one to talk with on the ground. Usually he had an assigned target list, flew through nearly empty airspace, dropped ordnance, and rushed back to the ship, often without using his two-way radio. Now McDowell’s F/A-18 worked in a sophisticated air-support system that rotated strike fighter and attack aircraft from multiple countries into Afghanistan’s airspace; integrated them with drones, helicopters, and other attack aircraft operating from Afghan bases; assigned them to ground units and aerial fuel tankers; guided them to strikes or units in need; and then, after a mission, rotated them out. Afghanistan was a cluttered airspace. Pilots were at risk of violating air-control rules as surely as if they were flying over Atlanta.
Changes marked the ground below as well. Even when viewed from above 15,000 feet, Afghanistan looked different. It was as if a foreign force had colonized an arid planet. Rural provinces had been overlaid with American military bases and outposts. Even small positions were visible from the air, with linear blast walls and telltale gravel landing zones. Some bases were effectively small cities, with endless plywood shacks, motor pools, airstrips, and rows of palletized supplies. A few were watched over by blimps that swung far overhead, rooted by tethers and connected to video screens that gave soldiers live infrared feeds of their outposts’ environs. The blimps angled up and away, pulled by dry Afghan winds. Convoys moved between them. The airwaves were busy with encrypted radio chatter.
McDowell was the executive officer of VFA-41, a strike fighter squadron from Lemoore, California. The Black Aces, the unit called itself. He was on his command tour, expected to deploy once with the squadron as its second-in-command and then return briefly to the States, become the commanding officer, and head back out to sea for a final tour in 2012 or early 2013. President Obama’s Afghan surge was well into motion when he arrived. The American withdrawal from Iraq was under way. McDowell thought maybe the Afghan surge would be over before his next tour, though he sensed not. Even if the Pentagon was drawing down forces by then, airpower would be needed to cover whatever troops remained and to protect bases from being overpowered. Moreover, carrier-based aircraft offered the Pentagon an end run on its Afghan troop-strength cap. Naval aircraft were not stationed in Afghanistan. They did not count in the troop tally. For the Pentagon they amounted to an accounting trick—an expensive off-the-book asset that was present nonetheless. This almost ensured that as McDowell and the Black Aces would be back.
In the fall of 2011, before setting up off Pakistan’s coast, the Stennis entered the Persian Gulf for what the Pentagon touted as the final air-support missions of the Iraq war. The campaign had shed its original name, Operation Iraqi Freedom, and replaced it in 2010 with an optimistic new label, Operation New Dawn. American combat brigades left the country that year, and during 2011, the remaining troops, many of them combat forces by training but assigned to “advise and assist” roles under the messaging of the day, were to leave Iraq, too. The war was not over. The country was ruled by a government class beset with corruption and sectarian tension. Al Qaeda in Iraq’s descendant, the Islamic State of Iraq, lurked in Sunni neighborhoods and provinces, and the rest of the country remained crowded with militias of uncertain intentions. Its military and security forces were weak and often organized along sectarian lines. But the United States, determined to extricate itself from an unpopular war, was leaving.
Aboard the Stennis, F/A-18 crews were assigned to cover the departing ground troops on missions they called armed overwatch. The flights were long and the missions unliked. Communications with units on the ground were spotty. The Super Hornets left the carrier with little ordnance, and often, upon reaching the areas they patrolled above the desert, the crews would announce themselves over encrypted radios to ground forces that did not reply. Some of the younger aviators were miserable. They fit the same profile McDowell had fit as a younger pilot: aggressive, eager, hungry for action. They had trained to fly and to kill. Years of releasing precision-guided munitions had imbued their community with a peculiar form of confidence. The old bromides of general destruction through carpet bombing (“we’ll bomb them back to the Stone Age”) had been supplanted by the possibilities of their time (“we put warheads on foreheads”), but the mission over Iraq offered the Black Aces no chance to wield such power. The flights were boring. McDowell, as a senior pilot, was one of the most experienced aviators on the ship. He remained soft-spoken, thoughtful, self-contained. His job involved mentoring new aviators. One lieutenant junior grade, Sasha Young, flew the first combat flight of her career as his backseater. Between flights, she had heard him telling younger aviators that they were fortunate to see a war nearing its end, to look down from the cockpit at convoys of American troops headed home. “The campaign is over,” he said. “We’re here just in case.” Young had been as bored as her peers. But she respected his view. For all of the strikes behind him, he was no braggart. She came to see him as a modern fighter, cerebral and mature, a leader who was not looking for action for action’s sake. Our job in Iraq, she thought, is to close the door on a war.
Afghanistan would be different. In December, as the Stennis prepared to depart the Persian Gulf to take up its station in the North Arabian Sea, the aviators studied their squadron’s next role. McDowell reviewed the change. In 2001 the Taliban held territory openly and had familiar infrastructure to strike, right down to airfields and bases. In 2011 military infrastructure in Afghanistan was held by NATO or Afghan government forces. The Taliban and other militants were almost invisible from the air. News reports and the briefings on ship described them all around the outposts, keeping government forces in a state of low-grade siege. But they rarely massed. They moved in small numbers and were almost impossible to distinguish from civilians. Outposts were kept alive by convoys on primitive roads and by helicopter support. The details cohered into a bleak picture. NATO officials rarely stated it, but Western airpower kept a far-flung American enterprise alive. Without aircraft to deliver precise and powerful munitions in less than an hour, the Taliban would be more assertive and bold. Outposts would be overrun. The officially sturdy but actually flimsy position that Afghan soldiers and small groups of Americans could hold remote territory would then unravel, along with the public relations messages and morale, which
was already low.
Across the country the joint Afghan-Western hold was tenuous and sparse, challenged by patient enemies who had studied the Americans and their tactics for a decade. Obama’s surge had pushed fresh forces out into much of the country only to meet populations that often did not want them there. Airpower helped reduce Western casualties. It bought time. But it could not win the war, much less foster real peace, and the statistics about its use could be reassuringly deceptive. The data showed that air strikes were relatively rare. This was not because violence was down. It was because the rules for releasing weapons were more restrictive than they had been, and the Taliban, so familiar with American response times, often attacked and withdrew before aircraft showed up.
In the cockpit of one of the most lethal tactical weapons the world had ever seen, McDowell faced the limits of American conventional military power. He framed his squadron’s place in the Afghan war of 2011 in frustrated terms. A mission from ship to shore, he thought, was like flying in airspace around LAX, one of America’s busiest airports, and then trying to find and attack a gang member with high-explosive weaponry and cause no civilian casualties—in greater Los Angeles. This was not how to defeat a gang.
His sentiments about being an attack pilot had evolved. In his first two tours, as a younger man, when he was dropping bombs he felt like he belonged. But after his first son was born the nightmare started—of entering a building he had struck and finding his own child in the rubble. The nightmare was occasional. It never intruded upon his sleep when he was in a busy flying schedule; McDowell assumed that this was because his mental and emotional bandwidth was fully occupied with the schedule’s demands. It also never went entirely away. Its effects on him worked into his thinking. During his tour to Iwakuni he was grateful to be deployed away from the wars; the assignment meant he would not be asked to drop weapons where civilians and combatants were mixed.
The Fighters Page 33