We did a last count of our roughly two dozen personnel and took the short ride to the airfield. It may sound strange that in a well-honed fighting unit we felt the need to count noses like we’re third graders going on a field trip. But these were hard-learned lessons, and missions had been compromised because a guy was getting just one more thing for his kit or one more weapon and got left behind.
As we arrived at the airfield, we saw our 160th SOAR brothers waiting for us. The pilots had their birds turning as usual, and listening to the high-pitched whine of the helo’s turbines and the flapping of the Chinook’s blades beating the air into submission helped me snap into the reality of what we were about to do.
What makes it real for me is not being in-country or the mission briefing or mustering on the concrete for FMC. It’s getting on the aircraft. This is the hardest step you take because once you’re on that bird you’re committed to the mission, and the only way you’re coming back is either successful or under a flag.
Our 2nd Platoon’s motto was “With it or ON IT.” We had taken this from the Spartans. “ON IT” was a reference to the shield the Spartan warrior carried, the fighting device that protected not only him but the man next to him. The shield was heavy and cumbersome, and it was the first thing discarded by retreating soldiers. Spartan women would inscribe these words in Greek on the inside of their Spartan warrior’s shield before a campaign to remind him that he either came back victorious carrying his shield or dead, carried ON his shield by his compatriots.
We walked to the ramps of our two birds, bracing against the hot prop wash that hits you all at once. I always thought how unnatural this was, what we do. It was like walking into the mouth of some great and terrible beast, happily offering yourself up to be devoured. It was the hardest part, but it was my favorite part.
I flashed back to Marc’s choice to extend his enlistment, forestall college, and come hunting with me one more time—a foregone decision, I knew, even as I tried to talk him out of it. This is what you had to do to be the guy who goes out into the night to find the evil men who cut off heads and drag bodies through the streets, the ones who steal others’ sons and force them to make their so-called jihad and convince others to blow themselves up to indiscriminately kill their own countrymen.
I stepped up on the ramp and made my way to a cargo-net seat hard against the skin of the aircraft. My life—as well as the lives of my fellow Rangers—was in the capable hands of 160th SOAR’s Night Stalkers. The rest of the chalk (the number of men would fit into one helo) loaded, I stuffed my earplugs in my ears, smiled, and thought, I’m on a helicopter full of Army Rangers, my face is covered in camo, and I have a sniper rifle. LIFE IS GOOD. The cabin lights clicked off, and our blacked-out Chinook lifted up from the Kandahar airfield and banked left.
It was a short flight to the objective area—just enough time to rehash what I’d heard in the mission brief and bounce that against what I learned during my Ranger training, as well as the hard lessons I’d learned during earlier rotations to Afghanistan. It’s easy to go into information overload if you don’t check yourself, but for better or worse, I figured I was as prepared for this mission as I could be.
The birds zoomed into the landing area, and the pilots made a combat flare, yanking the nose of the Chinook up to 30 or 40 degrees above the horizon to abruptly stop their forward transit. No matter how many times I’ve experienced this, I couldn’t help tugging on my tether, thinking that if the ramp came open we’d all tumble out the back of the helo. Once all forward motion stopped, the pilots planted the birds on the ground, the ramp opened, and our platoon sergeant signaled for us to stream out of the bird.
Once on the ground, I stopped squinting behind my ballistic glasses and began to orient myself. The prop wash from two Chinooks is like being in your own personal hurricane, so we moved away from the birds as quickly as we could.
I took in the dark landscape and checked my wrist compass. The target was seven klicks from our landing zone. I scanned the horizon for tracer rounds, a sort of early-warning system to see if we were walking into an ambush. It was all quiet, and the lead squad got up from their crouched positions and moved out.
During our mission brief back at KAF just a few hours ago, our movement to the objective areas was a red line drawn on a map, cutting through hedgerows and tilled fields. Now, as we looked through our NVGs (PVS-15 night vision goggles), it was an expanse of green-tinted blackness with pitch and defilade spread before us as far as the eye could see. When we did our mission brief and reviewed the imagery of the objective area, three-story houses were just gray squares. But that meant there could be dozens of windows—and each one could hold menace.
Staff Sergeant Reggie was out front setting a pace that I knew from experience could kill a man, but we matched him with relative ease. Without a word, the platoon silently fell into their order of movement, fanning out to take advantage of the open terrain. We set off at a brisk pace for a reason: we were completely exposed on this open ground, and the faster we moved, the less vulnerable we would be.
Staff Sergeant Reggie’s torrid pace paid off, and we arrived at the target compound about 2330, ahead of our schedule. We all moved out to take up our pre-briefed positions around the compound. A shadow governor who used to be a Taliban fighter was now the dictator of this village. While there were many others like him dominating other villages, we had the intel and the opportunity to snatch this guy now. There would be many others we’d grab on future missions.
I moved quickly past the target building to where I could see a vantage point that allowed me to cover two intersecting roads, the fastest routes to and from this target area. We were close to the village—maybe 30 meters—and seeing those buildings in three dimensions was jarring. Marc and I set up shop behind a small wall that gave us just enough cover. I started finding ranges with my rangefinder, memorizing distances and landmarks so I wouldn’t have to do the math in my head during a firefight. Meanwhile, Marc tuned up his optics.
I continued to finely tune my setup, cradling Miss America and scanning the area around the compound. I knew the assault team was moving on the house, and all hell could break loose at any moment. It struck me how different this village was from the ones I’d encountered in my previous rotations to Afghanistan. It was the quietest, most orderly village I’d ever seen. All the doors and windows were shut, and all the lights were off. All the roads were clean, the hedgerows were straight, animals were inside and secure, and there weren’t even any dogs barking.
That told me something important. The Taliban bastard who controlled this village had imposed, and was enforcing, a strict curfew. Everyone who lived there had battened down the hatches because they knew retribution would be coming if they didn’t strictly comply with this Taliban-imposed curfew, and nobody was testing it. That meant that anyone who we saw moving about in the village at this time of night was most likely a Taliban fighter. In a lot of ways, this bad actor was making our job easier.
I continued to scan the area I had under sniper observation as the assault team made its move on the compound. A gun team set up about 10 meters to my left. I walked over to see who was leading it. It was Sergeant Lips, a good guy to be teaming with. We discussed having Marc use his optics to help Lips and his gun team direct their fire if we needed to light up the enemy.
I looked through my sniper scope and saw that the assault team had done their work quickly. They had marched everyone in the compound out into the courtyard and were checking them for weapons. I had no idea whether the Taliban leader we’d come to snatch was among that group or not, but I put that curiosity out of my mind for the moment and kept scanning the roads and the buildings for any signs of danger.
Staff Sergeant Bill eased his way into our position and checked on Marc and me, as well as on Lips and his team. I was confident I could handle a lot with just my sniper rifle, but having Lips and his machine-gun team near me gave us an extra edge if it came down to taking out a vehicle trying to make its
escape from the compound or wasting a group of Taliban trying to rush our position.
It sometimes feels odd being a Ranger Sniper. You are sitting away—sometimes far away—from the action, and you know your buddies who are kicking down doors are going up against a ruthless enemy. We’ve lost countless Rangers—as well as other special operators—to booby-trapped houses and enemies lying in wait to ambush them. Still, you have to force your training to kick in and just do your job. As one of my platoon leaders once told me, “You’re not their mom.”
Things were calm, and we were talking with Staff Sergeant Bill about how peaceful the scene in front of us was. The Afghans that the assault team had gathered up and walked out into the courtyard seemed quiet, even docile. And still, no lights had come on in the village, even after what we assumed was quite a commotion as the assault team took down the Taliban leader’s house.
“Taliban doesn’t mess around when it comes to their curfew,” Bill said. His voice was hushed, just above a whisper.
“They run a tight ship. Not even a dog out in this neighborhood,” I whispered back. I forced myself to remember that what seemed serene could still blow up in our faces.
Staff Sergeant Bill started to say something about how clean the village smelled. That was unusual, as most Afghan villages had raw sewage running everywhere. If we couldn’t smell the village from 30 meters away, it meant that this was a prosperous little place: they had clean water and were able to at least move their sewage away a bit.
Suddenly, the radios came alive. It was the assault team leader giving us an update on progress inside the compound. We had our man, and now we were going to go next door to his neighbor’s house. Our assault team had evidently extracted intel that his next-door neighbor was a bad actor, too.
“Better go,” Bill said. “Got to adjust One Gun,” he said, referring to the machine-gun team to the north.
“Roger,” I replied.
“You guys have this intersection?” Bill asked Marc and me.
Marc gave me a nod, and I replied, “Yes.”
“Okay, good,” he said. “I’m moving Two Gun down one,” he said, meaning he was relocating Lips’s machine-gun team to a small intersection east of us, about 100 meters away.
“Roger, Staff Sergeant,” I said. “We got this.”
As he left, and I could see him adjusting our outer security positions to encompass our now-larger area of operation.
Lips and I agreed that if we were ambushed by an enemy lying in wait in the area surrounding the village, one of us would move to whoever made contact first, and we’d fight our way out of the village together. We were only about 50 meters from the compound and had a good overwatch position.
The radios came alive again. It was the assault team leader. “We’ve got this joker and his buddy. We’re moving out. Prep for exfil in five mikes.” That was a welcome call. The mission had gone smoothly. We had our target plus one, and we hadn’t taken any casualties.
Marc and I watched the assault team march our two flex-cuffed and hooded captives toward the exfil point. We continued to maintain overwatch while the rest of the Afghans the assault team had assembled in the courtyard ambled back into the compound. We learned later that the assault team had “cleared” all these people, meaning there were no MAMs (military-age males) or anyone else who posed a threat to us.
We walked about five klicks to our exfil point and met up with our 160th SOAR brothers. The flight back to KAF was routine, meaning our pilots didn’t have any RPGs shot at them. Once back at KAF, we dropped our kit and mustered for our AAR. Major Dan confirmed that the two guys we had snatched were definitely bad actors. We handed them off to some no-name three-letter-agency guys, most likely CIA. We learned later that they had turned them over to the Afghan police, who would bring them to trial on formal criminal charges.
If this mission sounds antiseptic and “quiet,” that’s because it was. But it was more typical of Ranger missions than the Chechen sniper mission described in the previous chapter. This is important, because most of what people have been exposed to about special operations has been the kinetics. It’s special ops guys rolling in on a target with massive firepower and blowing the enemy to shreds. It’s like what a high school buddy asked me when he heard I was going to be a Ranger: “Oh, so you’re going to be Rambo.”
But the majority of Ranger missions are not about kinetics; they are missions just like this one. We are the ninjas who quietly sneak into your house in the dead of night and snatch you out of your bed, often without waking your family. On this mission, as we learned during the debrief, a Taliban governor who’d been terrorizing an entire village for years surrendered meekly once he saw about 1,500 pounds of Rangers with glowing green eyes hovering above his bed.
This is what direct action is all about and why Rangers are typically the first choice for this kind of mission: we operate in total stealth mode for as long as we can, but if things go to hell in a handbasket we can light up the enemy with overwhelming firepower.
3
SUGAR SHACK
There had been a lull in the action, and we hadn’t been called out for a mission in almost a week. That meant training, training, and more training, something that was vitally important but wasn’t what we were here in Afghanistan to do. We worked in shifts, sifting through ISR (Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance) feeds, and our officers scoured the intel cells for targets. To put it in civilian terms, we were looking for work.
It was still a month before the beginning of fighting season, and our past experience told us this was the time when the Taliban would move their people, foreign fighters, weapons, and drugs into position so they could be prepared to wreak mayhem once the spring thaw came. While we didn’t expect there to be any major Taliban offensives this early in the fighting season, we wanted to be outside the wire prosecuting actionable targets.
It was late afternoon, almost dusk, on a cold Afghan day when we got word that we had good intel and a possible mission that night. Runners were dispatched, and we were told that all personnel needed to assemble in their tactical operations center that evening. That was all we were told, and for reasons of operational security there was little speculation. We knew we would learn more in the TOC.
The importance of operational security is drilled into us from day one as a Ranger. When your entire reason for being is to conduct high-risk/high-reward missions, one small security breach can completely compromise the mission and get you and your buddies killed.
Inside the wire at KAF we had not just U.S. military personnel but professionals from other U.S. agencies; soldiers and civilians from every member nation of our coalition forces; U.S. and Afghan contractors providing services from meals to construction; Afghan interpreters who accompanied us on our missions; and others too numerous to name. That’s all by way of saying we discussed nothing of an operational nature unless we were in the TOC.
As I walked into the TOC and saw the elements of two platoons—2nd Platoon and a Reconnaissance Platoon, along with headquarters components like K-9s—settling in and getting ready for our intel briefing, I immediately understood that this was going to be an important mission. As I’ve said, most of our missions were platoon-size ops. Now we were loaded for bear with over two platoons’ worth of Rangers.
During our intel briefing we learned that a high-value target—smugglers in a vehicle coming back from Pakistan—would be moving along a major supply route between Pakistan and Afghanistan that night. This MSR was southeast of Kandahar and was familiar to us. Both Pakistan and Afghanistan are somewhat primitive countries—Afghanistan much more so than Pakistan—and they don’t have networks of highways like the ones we’re accustomed to in the United States. In most cases, there’s one way in and one way out, and you could count all the major highways in Afghanistan on the fingers of one hand. Operationally and tactically, that made our job easier.
Afghanistan basically has an agricultural economy, with a big part of that
the growing of opium poppies, which are the raw material for heroin. In addition to opium poppies, Afghanistan is also the largest producer of cannabis (mostly as hashish) in the world. There are few facilities in Afghanistan for turning large amounts of that raw material into the finished product, so the opium poppies and cannabis get trucked to Pakistan to be turned into finished drugs.
In return for this raw material for drugs—which is a major source of income for the Taliban and allows them to buy weapons—the Taliban ships money, manufactured goods, and fighters back into Afghanistan. And often, the trucks and cars coming back into Afghanistan also carried the piece parts—shaped charges, blast caps, detonators, and the like—that the Taliban used to make the IEDs (improvised explosive devices) that were so feared by our troops.
Anyone who has followed the news about the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past decade and a half knows about IEDs. These weapons have been more deadly to our troops than anything else that the enemy has thrown at us. They’re easy for terrorists to build and incredibly difficult for our troops to find and disable. And as we devise ways to defeat one generation of IEDs, the enemy ups its game and builds better ones. Pakistan was shipping sophisticated IED parts that were made there or in places like India and China, and we knew we needed to interdict them. For any soldier fighting in Afghanistan, nothing feels better than stopping the enemy from building IEDs.
Our intel told us that the vehicle we were going to intercept soon after it crossed the border from Pakistan into Afghanistan was carrying weapons, materiel, and money. Most important, these smugglers were going to deliver their cargo to some Taliban leaders who had shipped the raw material for drugs to Pakistan and were now waiting for their payment. That meant our U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, the DEA, was also involved in this mission.
The crux of this mission was capturing these smugglers so we could interrogate them and have them lead us to the Taliban bosses who were the big fish. We had intel from the DEA, mostly concerning drug smuggling, drug production, and money laundering. The DEA was able to put the pieces together, but they didn’t have the manpower to take action against these kinds of targets, and that’s where we came in.
When the Killer Man Comes Page 7