When the Killer Man Comes
Page 9
The 2nd Platoon leader called for exfil, Marc and I broke down our position, and we began to walk west, straight out into the flat plane, which reflected moonlight like a dusty mirror.
Second platoon broke down their position, collected their smugglers, and also moved west, into their own desert, separated from ours by the dark, looming rocks that used to be great mountains.
When we were 5 or 6 kilometers from the MSR, we took a knee and listened. Soon we heard the unmistakable sounds of the incoming Chinooks. The reassuring sound of 160th’s Night Stalkers grew louder and louder, and soon there was a noise of dust, roaring turbine engines, and the glowing static rings of the rotors. This glowing effect is caused by dust and static, and has been named the Kopp-Etchells effect for Ranger Benjamin Kopp, who was killed in action near Marjeh in southern Afghanistan in 2009, and Corporal Joseph Etchells, a British solider also killed in 2009 in Afghanistan.
We loaded up our four smugglers and took them back to KAF for further interrogation so we could learn the location of the Taliban leaders they were supposed to link up with. Time was of the essence because we knew that when they didn’t show up for the scheduled rendezvous, the Taliban kingpins would be suspicious.
Back at KAF, we handed these guys off to an Afghan team and a western advisor for what we figured would be a long interrogation. Like many missions we conducted in Afghanistan, we did our part and then we were done. It was frustrating not having the big picture, and something you never got used to.
For a Ranger Platoon, if there’s one thing that we constantly remind ourselves of, it’s that there’s no “I” in team. I’d just made the most technically difficult shot in my Ranger sniper career, but all I could think of was how we all had accomplished our mission and were returning to KAF without any Rangers killed or wounded.
When we got back to the TOC for our debrief, and our seniors began to piece together what had happened during our mission, I got kudos from Major Dan, our recce platoon sergeant, and some other platoon leadership. They knew they could count on me in a pinch, even if it meant putting my ass on the line.
This mission had a positive result; it just took a bit longer than we had expected. Even under intense interrogation, the four smugglers we captured didn’t know—or wouldn’t divulge—where the Taliban leaders they were delivering this materiel to were located. But our intel analysts had watched the feed from one of our UAVs (on-station unmanned aerial vehicle) and noticed that these smugglers had stopped in the disputed tribal areas near the Pakistan-Afghanistan border and conducted a linkup with another vehicle.
Our overhead assets followed this vehicle as it moved into Afghanistan, and the next night, 1st Platoon followed that vehicle all the way to the Taliban leaders’ compound and captured him. He turned out to be a high-value target. He was brought back to KAF, interrogated, and then handed over to Afghan authorities.
Without putting too fine a point on it, this was like many Ranger missions, where persistence pays and it’s a total team effort to complete what we came to do. I was happy—but I still wanted that trophy of the totaled engine compartment.
4
WORKING WITH THE DEA
Our entire platoon was buzzing. The previous evening, another Ranger platoon had gone on a night raid into Kandahar. During the mission, someone tried to bushwhack one of our snipers. Equipped with night-vision gear, he had seen the Afghan man become alerted to the Ranger’s presence and fetch his AK-47. The Afghan noticed our sniper on the roof and took aim. As soon as he did, the Ranger sniper, well ahead of him, broke a perfect headshot, followed by four or five more shots to the head for good measure.
I don’t think our sniper missed any of those shots, and it was a gruesome job putting this guy’s face back together to try to identify who our enemy was. It turned out that the man who was taking a potshot at our Ranger sniper was the bodyguard of a Haqqani family member, and he also happened to be a cousin of then-Afghan president Hamid Karzai. This was unsurprising and points to one of the many gray areas in Afghanistan: it was often difficult to sort out your friends from your enemies. Without getting into a political argument, let’s just say our partnership with the Afghanistan government was an uneasy one.
It’s worth pointing out that our Ranger sniper providing overwatch on a pretty routine mission getting shot at by some random guy is completely normal. We expected that kind of thing to happen on every mission. Kandahar is like every other city and village in Afghanistan—everyone is armed. It was a challenge to “win the hearts and minds” of the Afghans when the only way to survive was to treat every civilian as a potential enemy. And that didn’t just mean military-age males. It could be an 80-year-old man with a cane who was wearing a suicide vest, or a woman with a weapon hidden under her burka, or even a child with a weapon. We learned the hard way that most of these people didn’t want us here, and they were willing to take extreme measures to kill us in any way they could.
What was clear from the encounter I just described was that the Afghan fighting season was underway. Spring was coming, and like the weather, things were only going to get hotter. You might think that would make us worried or afraid or wish that our rotation would soon be over. In fact, we knew we would be in Afghanistan well into the fighting season, and it was exactly what we wanted.
Those of us who had done a few turns in Afghanistan knew that “operations tempo” and felt time went hand in hand. Winter deployments were a grind, and you eked out your time hitting any and every possible target. During the fighting season, the sheer volume of Taliban and foreign fighters meant we would conduct missions nightly, sometimes two or three a night.
We showed up at the TOC for our briefing when we usually did, around 1700. Since we own the night, and we wanted the odds stacked in our favor, that meant nighttime ops were our bread and butter. We’d often come back from a mission in the wee hours of the morning, debrief, shower, get some chow, and then sleep until early or mid-afternoon the next day. Luckily, the time difference between Afghanistan and home base at Fort Benning was almost 9 hours, so it was more like a 3- or 4-hour difference in your schedule, like moving from Los Angeles to New York. You got used to it eventually, but it took a while.
During our intelligence briefing, we learned that we had targets on the outskirts of Kandahar city. “Outskirts” was good news, because it meant we’d be forcing action against the enemy but didn’t have to navigate the treacherous tangle of the city itself, where every window, door, or alley was a potential ambush. Kandahar is a huge city—maybe half a million people live there—and it’s been around since the days of Alexander the Great. That means the buildings are jammed together every which way. It’s not an orderly city, like we’re used to in the United States.
All this is by way of saying that if you were on a night mission in Kandahar proper, you had to guess at everything. Was a pile of rubble the remains of a decayed adobe building or a hiding place for a jug containing a homemade bomb? Were those goods left out overnight in a bazaar because they had little chance of being stolen, or were they too dangerous to move because they were filled with explosives?
In the suburbs or the countryside, dangers were a little easier to discern, but there was always something confounding going on. I never understood why every home had an old hubcap full of nuts somewhere in its living space, or why a basket placed over some chickens was often placed on the ground next to a swaddled infant. It always struck me that stepping on a wicker basket with chickens underneath in the middle of the night would be alarming, to say the least. You never got used to it, which means you were on high alert 24/7. Just when you grew accustomed to swaddled-looking things being infants, they turn out to be homemade explosives. Most of the time that wicker basket was over some chickens, but it could also be hiding a land mine.
When our Ranger platoon or company showed up at the TOC for a briefing, we often met people from other organizations who had some role in the overall U.S. effort there. You’ve probably heard the
terms “joint” and “interagency,” but it’s worth explaining them here, because you’ll hear them many times during the rest of my story.
“Joint” simply means one or more of the U.S. military services working together. We’ve learned though many conflicts that we’re more successful taking on an enemy in a conventional war when all the services—Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force—work in unison. For a long time we couldn’t figure out how to work together, so the Army worked in one area, the Marine Corps in another, and so on. The events of 9/11 were the catalyst to change that, and now all the services train together in exercises and then work and fight together in major conflicts like Operation Enduring Freedom.
We’ve also learned the hard way that leaving things solely to the military leaves our domestic agencies in the dark, which undermines the entire point of the Global War on Terrorism, which is to prevent terror attacks on U.S. soil. That’s where “interagency” comes in.
For example, there are seventeen U.S. intelligence agencies alone. Some, like the CIA and NSA, are familiar to most Americans because they’re in the news. And then there are a whole host of other groups, like the DEA, CBP (Customs and Border Protection), and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).
Many of these agencies were working in Afghanistan because this is not a conventional war. In a conventional war, an enemy takes territory that isn’t theirs and we go in force-on-force and throw them out. An example of this is Desert Storm, where Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and our coalition drove him out. Most of today’s wars are far more complicated. And if there is a poster child for this different kind of war, it’s Afghanistan.
Our and our coalition partners’ mission in Afghanistan wasn’t just to kill Taliban. It was also helping the government establish itself in areas the Taliban controlled. Another mission was stopping the flow of drugs from Afghanistan to the West. Yet another was to help the Afghan people do things we in the West take for granted, from having schools for both boys and girls to having at least semi-reliable cell phone service, to bringing more modern farming and construction methods to remote towns and villages.
All this is by way of saying that when you showed up in the TOC for a briefing, you never knew who you would meet or, more important, whose needs would be driving your mission that night. If some other agency was there, it might be their needs.
So it was often left to us Rangers to analyze the intelligence (typically from multiple sources) and determine what the “go/no-go” criteria were before conducting the mission. That was ideal, but sometimes it wasn’t that way, and other agencies worked with us to meet our combined needs.
I can’t tell you how many times we showed up at the TOC, saw some guy in civilian clothes—typically a nondescript guy in a polo shirt sporting a beard—who only told us his first name and almost never told us what organization he was with. Major Dan and the rest of the command team would know those details, but that information was Top Secret and Compartmentalized, meaning that only a few of us were read into the full details of the mission.
All that most of us Rangers knew was that we were to go to this place and do this or that or the other thing. And sometimes we’d just be told, “This is Bill (or John or whoever), and he’s coming with us.” Sometimes this interagency guy would “pitch” us as to why what we were being asked to do was important. We’d plan and brief the mission like we always did, except our “new guy” was now hanging out with us.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this was a bit unsettling, and it was something I never got used to. We were trained as Rangers, which is all about “one team, one fight.” But when the people you’re supposed to be working with to accomplish a dangerous mission go out of their way to make the point that they’ll tell you only what they think you need to know—well, let’s just say that it made me feel a bit like a hired gun.
For this mission, our new friend was a DEA agent. He was part of the briefing that evening, and he made his pitch. When I say pitch, I mean just that. In Afghanistan, all of these three-letter agencies were there to assist us, not to direct us to do anything. So, just as on many previous such missions, our DEA agent painted the picture as convincingly as possible and in such a way that our leadership—and all of us, for that matter—could see that the risk-reward equation worked out in such a way that we’d go on the mission.
As I’ve said, Afghanistan is a major producer of the raw material—opium poppies and cannabis—for what eventually become street drugs. We were told that our target was a guy who lived in a compound where there were tons of opium poppies ready to be smuggled into Pakistan to be turned into heroin. We were told that this target was a major producer, and just like back in the States, that meant he must have important connections.
Just as they do in the United States, our DEA agent assured us that the street value of the drugs could be in the millions, maybe tens of millions. That seemed to be the norm for all of the missions like this that we were asked to take on. It was as if the agent felt he could work us into a frenzy by convincing us that the cache of drugs was so vast that we were on the most important anti-drug strike ever.
I was still digesting this briefing as we sat in our 160th SOAR Chinooks and curved up and away from KAF. Personally, I was dubious about the overlap of the war on drugs and the war on terror in general. I wondered how much of what we’d been told was fact and how much was fiction. We had excellent reconnaissance of the area, with good imagery from a variety of overhead assets, and I could see from the images just how our target was living. His little house had dirt walls, and he had dung cooking fires. He looked for all the world like a simple Afghan farmer, but our DEA agent had told us he was a major drug dealer. But what did I expect, that this Afghan farmer would have a mansion and a zoo like Pablo Escabar?
We were briefed that the guy we were going after had two compounds. He lived in one compound with his large family—maybe a dozen people overall. The second compound was separated from the first one by a road and was unoccupied. This was likely a workshop used to process drugs. My platoon, 2nd, was assigned to take down the compound where the dealer and his family lived, while Mac and 1st Platoon were assigned to secure the other compound.
We landed well away from the objective area and moved toward the compound at our usual breakneck pace. But as we got to the outskirts of the village we had to change our tactics to honor the threat of IEDs. On this mission we needed to be extremely wary of them.
The IED threat was extreme in Helmand province, and the Taliban encouraged poppy farmers to put IEDs pretty much everywhere around their growing operation. The war in Iraq was over, or damn near, and the bomb makers and fighters who had been operating there found their way to Afghanistan. Our enemy was skillful at using this influx of talent, and now the country was saturated with IEDs.
The poppy farmers were businessmen who wanted to stay in business. For them, sowing the area around their property with IEDs was no more extreme than a storekeeper in a rough neighborhood in America using a pull-down grating to protect his store. The farmers started by putting IEDs in obvious places, like roadways, doorways, and footpaths. As a rule of thumb, if it was easy, it was booby-trapped. And based on what we’d heard in our intel brief, if this guy was as big a grower as we were told he was, we figured he’d damn sure want to protect his operation.
The easy route to his compound had danger written all over it, so we went the hard way. Instead of taking a direct path toward it and going through gates, we walked through crop fields and scaled walls. Poppy fields were especially treacherous, since the Taliban had discovered that our strategy was to target the source of their revenue. All this meant that we had to treat poppy fields as all-but-certain locations for IEDs and other bombs.
As we approached our target, I walked near the front of our platoon, just behind the point man, Sergeant Ryan, the team leader for 3rd Squad. On our left was Jim, our dog handler. His Belgian Malinois was a small brindle similar to a German Shepherd, an
d it was trained to do two things: smell bombs and attack (and sometimes eat) terrorists. Behind us was our EOD (Explosive Ordinance Disposal) staff sergeant.
Back in KAF I had been picking his brain about how he searched for bombs during a foot movement. His description sounded like something I had learned in sniper school called target detection. It was a tactic useful for finding hidden enemy snipers, and it worked just as well for finding IEDs, trip wires, and other booby traps.
We agreed that I could use my sniper skills to help him look for these dangerous devices. I could probably do this just as well as he could, but he was the only guy on the ground who could render an IED safe or destroy it. He and I ran our plan by our platoon sergeant, and he liked it. From then on, if I wasn’t needed somewhere else in our order of march, I made sure I was out in front with the lead element.
Just as important, our EOD staff sergeant was the guy who could accurately identify HME (homemade explosives). Simply walking into an HME lab unawares could ignite a massive explosion. All it took was the impact of a single footfall, or the gust of air from opening a door, to blow the explosive crystals against each other and create enough friction to trigger a massive explosion.
We arrived at the compound without incident, but pretty beat up from climbing and crawling to avoid IEDs. Since Marc and I were the only snipers on this mission, I put him on one end of the outer cordon around the target compound and set up shop on the opposite end. I had my favorite sniper rifle, Miss America, and Marc had his preferred weapon, his SR-25.
In much the same way as the rest of a Ranger task force, Ranger snipers are trained to be flexible. We work together or alone, or augment another weapons system. With our training and optical equipment, snipers have the best “eyes” on the battlefield, and a good portion of our job is to confirm or deny anything suspicious that any other Ranger sees. We can see farther than anyone else, which means that snipers can positively identify a weapon at a greater distance. This is important because seeing an enemy with a weapon defined our “shoot/no-shoot” criteria. I knew our entire platoon was counting on us to identify an enemy before he could take a shot at any of us.