When the Killer Man Comes

by Paul Martinez

  Marc and I were acutely aware of what had happened to our sister Ranger platoon when a terrorist with an AK-47 almost nailed one of their snipers. I could feel my heart pounding as I looked through my night scope at the fuzzy green glow and searched for anything that looked threatening. If someone on the outer cordon around the target area was suspicious of a distant figure or vehicle, he would call for one of us to look at it through our sniper scope and make an assessment. Using snipers in that way afforded us more time and space to deal with a threat—something called “standoff,” which meant the safe space between you and a threat.

  There are many factors that go into making a successful shot at an extended range—the target, the distance, the wind, the weather, and the elevation, among other things. As part of my Ranger Sniper training, I studied with an aeronautical engineer for several weeks. If you think about it, hitting a target with a bullet is a bit like hitting a point in space with a rocket, so there were strong parallels to my craft. The math we did was part trigonometry, part geometry, and part rapid calculation.

  One of the things that attracted me to become a Ranger sniper was that our craft is part science and part art. For example, one part of the job is ranging the distance to a target. We had top-of-the-line laser rangefinders—at least as good as any other military service—but we also practiced range estimation by eye because that’s the fastest way to get bullets on a target. It took practice, but we were well calibrated from drilling this and other sniper skills daily.

  It always amazed me that the human body could be so well calibrated, often gauging great distances to within 5 or 10 meters, good enough for a first-round hit with a sniper rifle. Knowing range accurately was also important for machine gunners, who could send a swarm of bullets in a concentric pattern 1,500 meters away instead of just one at a time like me with my sniper rifle. That’s why, whether it’s us or the enemy, snipers and machine gunners working together make for a deadly combination.

  Machine gunners and snipers share a number of skills. For example, we both make range cards. You can give this card to the next Ranger who relieves you on overwatch, and he can use it as a reference for windage and elevation corrections. So while many people think of a sniper as a lone wolf working alone, the synergy we bring to the table by working with a machine gun team can be deadly to an enemy.

  We knew our assault team was about to move on the compound, and our job as snipers was to have their backs. And I mean that literally, as we’d learned the hard way on missions where we’d lost Rangers. The enemy had a knack for luring us into a trap where we’d move on a house and focus all our attention on what was inside while the enemy snuck up behind us.

  I felt we had a good plan to cover our Ranger buddies’ backs on this mission. I left Marc to “hunt the gap” with the rest of our outer-cordon security. They were blocking all the main avenues of approach to the compound, and Marc would roam between them to make sure we weren’t missing anything. If he found a gap in our security, he would fill it in or call it up. In that case, Staff Sergeant Bill, our WSL (Weapon Squad Leader, pronounced “weasel”), would decide if he needed to move personnel to better cover the assault team.

  The assault team conducted a surreptitious entry of the compound: one Ranger slipped over the wall on a ladder and opened the gate from the inside, while the second Ranger up the ladder stayed on the wall and provided cover and overwatch on the entire compound. Once we all were inside the compound walls, things got noisy. Our interpreter, Zeke, used a bullhorn to call the man out of his house. Within minutes, a clearly confused and dazed man staggered into the courtyard.

  The rest of the assault force secured the perimeter, and we continued to have their backs. Within minutes, First Sergeant Hutch and Zeke were talking with the suspected drug dealer. The questioning went okay at first, but then they hit a snag. Hutch had a knack for discerning if someone was lying, and he could follow a narrative with precision. If you tried to make something up or there was an inconsistency in your story, he would catch it. But Hutch couldn’t find any inconsistency in this guy’s story. He seemed to be telling the truth when he said he didn’t know anything about the Taliban, or even heroin, for that matter. What he did know about was cannabis, to the extent that he had grown enough of it to have 5 tons of the stuff sitting under tarps, ready to be made into hashish. We didn’t know what that pulpy green stuff was other than some form of cannabis, so we just called it hashish or hash or sheesh, for “sheesha,” the local word for it.

  While our intel was good, it wasn’t perfect, and we noticed another compound close by. We sent a team over to the neighbor’s house, but he was as clueless as Smokey (our nickname for the hashish farmer) about the Taliban and heroin. Two houses and just one guy’s stash of sheesh. We had expected heroin and a Taliban connection. Could our DEA agent have been this far off?

  Major Dan called KAF for clarification. The orders we got back were simple and straightforward: burn the drugs. It seemed uncomplicated enough; the stuff was made to be smoked, so it should be easy to burn it. Rangers were good at destroying anything and everything, and we were especially keen to try out our incendiary grenades on something different. In the end, we tried just about everything short of high explosives (not that we had low explosives) to destroy the stuff, and none of it seemed to work. I think it would take a dozen tires and a hundred gallons of diesel fuel to burn up that much wet plant matter.

  By morning, when most of us were manning the walls of the compound, the stuff was still there in smoldering piles of what had to be the world’s most expensive compost. I felt bad for the farmer. We had zip-cuffed him, and he had to watch as we burned his stuff.

  The morning dawned, which meant we no longer had the advantage of owning the night and were closer to being on an equal footing with the enemy—not a good thing. We packed up our NODs, made sleep rosters, and powered down some MREs (“meals ready to eat,” though we called them “meals rejected by everyone”). We were talking with higher headquarters about reconnaissance and other air support, as well as about exfil plans if things got really hot, as they had when we had to deal with the Chechen sniper and his pals in the Musa Qala District.

  We had sent Smokey and his family packing, telling them to send the Taliban to his house if they wanted to kill Americans. I felt for the guy. One minute you have 5 tons of sheesha, spring is around the corner, and you’re going to finally make some money on last year’s crops. The next minute someone has burned up all your stuff and kicked you out of your own house so they could have a war in it. They say war is hell, and it is—it can kill, maim, or wound you, and keep you in constant terror. But it can also snatch away your dreams when a day ago you thought you had a goldmine no one could ever touch.

  The sun melted the frost a few hours after dawn, and the people in the villages around us started to wake up and move about. The compounds closest to us stayed quiet, and aside from the Afghans inside them doing necessary things like feeding and watering animals in the interior of their courtyards, the village seemed to stay buttoned up. They knew we were there, and we figured they saw no value in attracting our attention.

  So why were we still there? After all, we’d destroyed the drugs we found, and our DEA agent was certainly pleased. But that brings us back to why we were in Afghanistan in the first place. Think of it this way. The DEA’s mission was to burn drugs. Our mission was to fight—and capture or kill—Taliban.

  When we carried out the DEA’s mission, we were essentially burning the Taliban’s money. We knew this would tick them off and make them crazy for revenge. That’s why we didn’t exfil that night but instead did a ROD, so the Taliban could come and try to kill the Americans who were burning the goods they used to fund terror. None of us Rangers really cared about the drug war, which was secondary to our goal of fighting Taliban.

  We continued to scan the villages around us, but no one was coming or going. A few hours before dawn we had sent a team out to place barricades on the main supply
route that ran through our area. We knew that if Taliban from the surrounding area were going to mass to attack us, the MSR was the dagger that pointed directly to our position.

  Suddenly, two men who looked to be in their early twenties appeared riding one of the small motorcycles that were popular in the region. I could see that they had no weapons, and they just sped down the road and stopped at our barricade. Wary of their hand gestures, Mac and I fired two suppressed warning shots in their direction. They were in a perfect position to call in a mortar or rocket strike against us. Our quiet shots didn’t exactly have the desired effect.

  Our captain’s voice came over the radio: “Sierra-One, this is Six. What are you firing at, over?”

  “Six, Sierra, warning shots. We have two MAMs on a moto stopped at our northern barricade,” I keyed back.

  He pressed his transmit button twice—what we call “breaking squelch”—sending two slow, deliberate “squelching” sounds scratching softly into my ear. I could hear Platoon Sergeant Pack in the background but couldn’t make out his words. Then our Caption came back on the net.

  “Hey, Sierra, we don’t think they realize they’re being shot at because of your suppressor, over.”

  Our 3rd Squad leader, Staff Sergeant Bob, had heard our transmission and decided to take matters into his own hands, firing two rounds from his unsuppressed M4 that tore through the still air and impacted near the front tire of the moto. The driver ripped the throttle, and the passenger on the back barely held on as he whipped away.

  “Warning shot, over,” Staff Sergeant Bob’s voice boomed over the net. I could picture him with a big smile on his face.

  “Ho! That dude almost fell off! We almost got a new terp, Sarn’t!” Bob’s SAW gunner said excitedly. (“Terp” is short for “interpreter.”)

  “That’s why you don’t ride two-up on your moto with another dude!” Bob said sagely before cracking another big smile and laughing with his SAW gunner.

  Mac and I chuckled along with them from our position a little farther down the wall.

  They got the picture, and I thought that our captain was probably right and that suppressed warning shots aren’t so good.

  The two men had turned left as they sped off. Then we saw them meet up with two more motos. Mac and I immediately scrutinized them with our rifle scopes, trying to guess their intentions. Soon a gang of twelve motos had formed. Now things were getting interesting, and not in a good way.

  “Sierra-One, Seven, you have any SA on those motos?” It was Platoon Sergeant Pack. He wanted to know if we saw the moto riders carrying any weapons.

  “Seven, negative. They’re four hundred meters out. No weapons, over,” I keyed back.

  “Roger, keep an eye on them,” Pack ordered.

  After their little meeting, the motos dispersed in every direction but ours. A short while later they returned, now each of them two-up, which meant they were getting closer to matching our manpower.

  Now we were getting twitchy. But then the motos disappeared as suddenly as they had appeared.

  The day wore on, and a little after noon Marc came to relieve me. I stayed up on the wall and overwatched our area of operations with him for a while before finally giving in and finding a place to sack out. I was so tired I don’t remember if I even bothered to eat.

  I’m not sure what woke me, but I put on my kit and helmet and went back to work, probably around 1500. I found Marc, who was shooting the shit with a machine gunner on the west side of the compound. They were pulling security, but all that took was your eyes unless something happened.

  We could see the shapes of men on motos riding back and forth in a wood line about 300 meters away. (A wood line is a row of trees at the edge of a field.) Every once in a while they would gesture at us. They seemed interested, but their hurried movements and the terrain obscured their numbers, as well as what they were doing. We didn’t see anyone digging; that was good. Digging would mean IEDs on whatever route they anticipated us taking out of there. I left Marc and the machine gunner and went to find Mac to see what he thought about the action.

  I found Mac on a ladder on the west side of the compound, peering through his small binoculars. “Got anything, Mac?” I asked, looking up at him.

  Before he answered, he climbed down a rung or two so he wasn’t silhouetted over the wall, not taking his eyes off the horizon until he was covered.

  “A bunch of guys on motos fucking around in the wood line, all around us, actually,” Mac said from his perch. He was frustrated, and we were both a little puzzled. Those were not good guys out there, and they sure weren’t the neighborhood watch.

  More and more of these motos formed around the periphery of the compound. We were surrounded, but to get to us the enemy would either have to drive through tilled and furrowed fields or come down the MSR single-file.

  The Taliban are fierce—and sometimes fanatical—fighters, but they’re not stupid. We had our machine guns trained on both of these avenues of approach, and we could have cut them to pieces if they had tried to attack us.

  There was an empty fighting hole in the wall near Mac, and I joined him in searching for a shot, looking for anything that would give these guys away. They were our enemy, but, like us, they had been blooded in combat, and they knew what rules we were bound by. They had their own intel that they’d gleaned from somewhere—from KAF or a corrupt councilman or who knows where. The point is, they knew exactly what our engagement criteria were. It was pretty binary: ten years of fighting makes you dead or savvy … I don’t care who you pray to.

  It was a small consolation, but the enemy seemed as frustrated as we were. They couldn’t figure out a way to get to us. It was a standoff, but it was an away game for us, and soon we would have to walk out of this compound and into whatever they might have waiting for us.

  Then, before the sun met the horizon, as we were breaking down our positions and getting ready to exfil, the shadowy motorcycle gang that had surrounded us started to evaporate, and we could see them turning away from us and hear the high-pitched whine of their speeding bikes.

  Finally the sun set, and we prepped to move out. We waited until it was fully dark and then headed south to our new exfil point. We made that change when we noticed that they couldn’t completely encircle us in that direction, since the terrain to our south was impassable for a moto, which also meant it was unlikely there were IEDs planted along that route. It was tough going, but hard walking is always better than getting your legs blown off and never walking again.

  We waited at our exfil point for only a short time before we heard the reassuring sound of the Night Stalkers’ Chinooks beating their way toward us. There wasn’t any chatter as we each sat alone with our thoughts. Mine were focused on wondering how our intel for this mission had gotten it so wrong.

  Back at KAF we dragged into the ready room where we staged our fighting kit and weapons. Twenty-four hours of continuous operations doesn’t count the planning process. We dropped our kit and made our way to our briefing room and our AAR. It was a pretty standard debrief. We talked about the ways to make holes in the tough Afghan adobe, what extra supplies we needed for the next mission, and other ways we could up our game.

  The thing we talked about the most was the farmer and his sheesh. We had spent a whole day and most of a night trying to destroy his stuff. We messed it up really good, in the sense that now the farmer couldn’t sell it. But I guessed we only actually destroyed at most one of the five tons. A thermite grenade had barely made a dent in this stash. I could see a few other Rangers shift uncomfortably in their seats, just as did I when we started discussing the best way to destroy hashish.

  Maybe this operation was a bust, and the DEA’s tip about smugglers didn’t pan out. We had spent 24 hours outside the wire and had zero follow-on intel from the night’s operation. Our agent seemed pleased during the debriefing, but I noticed First Sergeant Hutch give him a sideways look when he said we had done good work.

  * *
*

  The next afternoon, Mac and I got up early and went to the “European” chow hall. KAF had four chow halls, one for each coalition partner, and we were both adventurous eaters.

  We were as close as any brothers and still are to this day. But our backgrounds were vastly different. Mac’s father was in the military, and he had grown up mostly on the East Coast. His upbringing and his values as an adult were conservative, to say the least. I had grown up out West, in Colorado. My upbringing had been much more liberal, and my values reflected that.

  “Hey, Mac,” I began as I watched him shovel in what could almost pass as gourmet food. “You ever do a mission like this before, where you go after a guy for growing drugs?” I asked the question to broach the subject, because I remembered that back in the summer of 2009, Mac and I had patrolled through cultivated fields of 8-foot-tall cannabis plants as far as the eye could see.

  “Shit, no!” he exclaimed around a mouthful of food. He swallowed quickly and added, “Remember ’09? That’s practically the national crop around here. We would have to march abreast with the whole battalion armed with flamethrowers from here to the Hindu Kush to destroy all that stuff!”

  I chuckled a bit in response; he had hit that nail on the head. In the summer of 2009 we did almost an entire 7-klick movement through fields of cannabis.

  “I mean, they don’t even have booze; they aren’t allowed to drink,” Mac continued. “What are we really going to do about it?”

  “Right!” I agreed enthusiastically. There were millions, probably tens of millions, of hectares of cannabis being cultivated here, and its use was ubiquitous among the Afghans.