It wasn’t hard to reach the conclusion—hell, it was a near certainty—that by burning his crops we probably killed that man, and maybe his family, too. With their entire cash crop gone, they would need some other means of income. For a farmer with no crops to sell or money to put in a new crop, the options were few and grim.
We knew from experience that Taliban stooges would likely hire him to house, hide, and feed their fighters. If he was unlucky, his children would be treated like property by these men on their way to wage jihad. His sons might be pressed into the fight rather than learning to work the land and provide for their families.
If he was lucky—and in this case that’s a relative term—his home would become a way point on a smuggler’s route as they moved bits of IEDs, weapons, medical supplies, and other things they needed to take the fight to us. If he was really lucky, he would just be expected to be a source of intel for the Taliban, monitoring the MSR for any sign of our coalition forces.
But as much as we wanted to believe those “lucky” scenarios, our collective experience of over a decade of dealing with the Afghanistan Taliban told us it was wishful thinking to hold out any hope for this farmer. The more likely scenario was that he would be found by a Marine Corps or Army sniper’s bullet while he tried to dig a hole for an IED the Taliban ordered him to plant.
Another scenario, equally bad, was that in exchange for his family’s safety, he would be forced to wear a suicide vest and make his way into the nearest coalition base and wreak havoc on our forces.
Then it would go downhill from there. His sons, bound by honor and religion to avenge their father, would have nowhere else to turn but the Taliban or Haqqani. It’s difficult for Americans to understand, but the Afghani and Muslim customs of honor are incredibly strong. They are bound by religious teachings, as well as tribal ones, to avenge a family member’s death. But they aren’t focused on the Taliban when they do this. They’re focused on us. We were the ones who came out of the night and destroyed their livelihood, which forced their patriarch to turn to the Taliban just to make enough money to survive.
As I mulled this over, it didn’t take me long to come to the conclusion that all we were accomplishing on these missions were creating terrorists. That’s what made what we were doing so recklessly shortsighted. Worse, we were risking our lives to create these terrorists and perpetuating the cycle of violence we had come to Afghanistan to end. While I got going after poppies to cut off the Taliban’s money supply, rolling in on simple sheesh farmers and destroying their livelihood and effectively sentencing them and their families to death made no sense at all.
What we were pretty certain of was that doing this to a simple farmer who was making his living in the same way farmers in Afghanistan had made their living for centuries wasn’t helping us accomplish a mission that made any sense for our country or for our coalition partners. Turning hard-up farmers into Taliban or Haqqani stooges wasn’t going to result in fewer Taliban or Haqqani: it was going to make more of them. And from a risk-reward standpoint, trying to get to a well-protected compound where this farmer was doing the sensible thing and protecting his only livelihood certainly wasn’t worth our legs getting blown off when our strike force found the inevitable IED.
As soon as we got back to KAF we dropped our kit in our ready room and headed to the TOC for our AAR. Normally an AAR was informal, our time to air grievances and speak frankly about what had happened on that mission. Rank was rank, but if you had a criticism, this is where you had a chance to say it. It was part of our constant effort to fine-tune our strategy, improve our tactics, and adapt to our enemy.
Tonight was different, and the bitterness of some of our team members bordered on contempt. We all were still in a state of disbelief that we had been ordered to do what we just did. We may not have had degrees in criminal justice, and none of us were well versed in the sea of American foreign policy directives that were suddenly intersecting in our Tactical Operations Center, but something wasn’t right. Saying “If it walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck” comes to mind as I reflect on this mission even today.
We were in the TOC the next evening and it was too quiet—I’d never seen it that quiet. A room full of high-testosterone alpha males always has a sort of buzz about it, but there was none of that tonight. We got our intelligence dump, and all the day’s developments were relayed to us. We were shifting our focus to direct action against some Taliban and Haqqani targets. After a quick brief about who these guys were, and our trigger criteria (events significant enough to cause us to launch) were for this mission, First Sergeant Hutch let us all know why things were so quiet. Hutch began by saying what I had been thinking.
“Men, we won’t be working with the DEA anymore. I don’t personally give a shit if every Afghan wants to smoke sheesh until their eyes glow red. If the DEA wants to go after these guys, they can go out and get them on their own. I didn’t come here to burn marijuana, and nobody in my company is getting their legs blown off for that.”
Hearing a leader we trusted—one who had been carrying out orders far longer than we had—say this was one of the high points of my six rotations to Afghanistan. He said what needed to be said, and he said it with conviction.
First Sergeant Hutch then said that Major Dan and the rest of our leadership agreed with his assessment, and that they had taken those concerns to the top of the 75th Ranger Regiment. Hutch reiterated what some of us already knew, which was that all of Afghanistan smokes sheesha. It’s as ubiquitous as alcohol in the United States. If you really wanted to wreck the Afghanistan economy and turn every last person against the United States, then you just had to burn all their cannabis crops.
But we also knew that, unlike sheesha, the Taliban and Haqqani had their hands in almost all poppy production. That much more lucrative market was indeed funding terror, and until we got our arms around that, the Taliban would be well funded and well armed, and we wouldn’t succeed in our mission.
5
SAVING THE CAVALRY
We had operated out of Kandahar for several months now and were pretty settled—meaning we knew the area, knew the enemy, and had learned enough through trial and error that we felt, to use a sports analogy, that we were in midseason form. We knew that the enemy we were facing in southeastern Afghanistan was dangerous and ruthless, but we were beginning to get the upper hand. And now that it was spring and fighting season was in full swing, we knew the enemy would come at us, and we’d be able to take out more of them.
That didn’t mean we were taking a victory lap—far from it—but we felt we would be able to go on missions to kill more Taliban while losing fewer Rangers. That was based on the experience we’d gained, and especially what we’d learned about the tactics, techniques, and procedures the enemy used in this area. I’d felt this way before on previous rotations to Afghanistan, and it usually meant just one thing—we were going to get tasked to move to a completely new area and start all over again.
It was a normal day at KAF. We were training, doing PT (physical training), and cleaning our weapons when our platoon sergeant came to us with a WARNO (warning order). This was the usual way we got the word about what might happen next. It was an informal kind of communication that was used all the time, and all we were told was that we would be moving—and soon. Some of the usual hotspots were mentioned: JBAD, Khost Province, Ghazni Province, and a few others. Obviously we wanted to know more, but our platoon sergeant just left it at “somewhere up north.”
That wasn’t very satisfying, to say the least, but we knew the drill. We all began to pack up, taking our full fighting kit and weapons and trying to decide what to leave behind. Some of that was our personal stuff, but some was gear that could be air-dropped to us in a contingency. And then we waited.
We didn’t have to wait long. The next night, we got the official word: We were moving from KAF to Mazar-i-Sharif, in Northern Afghanistan. That meant only one thing: there would be a fight
there, and getting into a fight is exactly what Miss America and I, as well as my fellow Rangers, came to Afghanistan to do. I could feel the adrenaline rush already. I’d heard stories about how hot the fighting got around MES (Mazar-i-Sharif), and I was ready.
Now things rocked on fast-forward. As night fell at KAF, we did our final MWE (accounting of men, weapons and equipment) and prepped for our flight to MES. It wouldn’t be helos for this trip; MES was almost 900 klicks from KAF. The only way to get us there was in the venerable C-130 Hercules, the four-engine military transport that has been around since the 1950s.
As we loaded aboard our two C-130s, we were all anticipation. We hadn’t gotten any additional intel on what we’d be doing once we got to MES, or why we had to get there in such a hurry. Back when we were all civilians, we would have had a thousand questions and would have demanded answers. But that wasn’t the military way, it wasn’t the Army way, and it sure as hell wasn’t the Ranger way.
The Hercules flight was uneventful—meaning no one shot at us—and we landed at Mazar-i-Sharif International Airport just before dawn. We taxied to the military side of the airport and caught a ride to Camp Marmal, the German-built base that housed the troops of many nations that were part of ISAF. There were about 5,000 ISAF troops from over a dozen nations in Camp Marmal, so we figured we wouldn’t have any trouble blending in.
We dropped our gear in a small tent camp that the base commander had cordoned off for us. It was secluded from the rest of the base—something that was always important to us. That was the good part. The not-so-good part was that Camp Marmal was really basic. While KAF wasn’t Club Med, it was upscale compared with this. Here we had four tents: one for our leadership, two for our assault force, and one for our TOC. We were living on top of each other, at least twenty people to a tent. And since we didn’t have a ready room like we had at KAF, that meant that we lived with all our gear strewn all over the place.
Still, we settled in as best we could, accounted for all our men, weapons, and equipment, started absorbing some of the intelligence from the area, and tried to get back on a normal sleep cycle. And just like you’d do if you moved to a new town, we scouted the base out to find out the best options for everything from food to places for PT to where you could barter for some swag from the troops of one of the other ISAF nations at Camp Marmal. There was even a local bazaar, which was just a tractor-trailer full of cheap junk. Think of it as an Afghan Stop & Shop, with things like cheap cigarettes, knock-off toiletries, and gas station snacks like chips and other junk food.
At first, we didn’t have any big missions, and I began to wonder what the rush had been to get us here. Some missions took us northeast to Kunduz Province, while others took us to Maymana, the capital of Faryab Province, near the Turkmenistan border.
A typical mission would put us on Chinooks flying to Kunduz. Once there, we’d refuel and then launch to the surrounding area to do a mission—typically going out in platoon-size units to snatch a Taliban leader and bring him back to Camp Marmal for interrogation. Another mission would put us on C-130s to Maymana, where we’d remain in that Dutch-controlled forward operating base, sleeping through the day and launching missions at night. We basically did three types of missions there: night raids against high-value targets, clearance in a zone of large areas where intel couldn’t pinpoint a specific target, or investigating NAIs.
The pace was grueling, and we didn’t have our full complement of 160th SOAR Chinooks to carry us every night. That meant that the Night Stalkers were augmented with some National Guard Chinooks. The National Guard birds were older airframes with older weapons, mostly M240 machine guns, instead of the miniguns on the SOAR birds.
The National Guard pilots were as ballsy as anybody I had ever flown with, and their dated guns were meticulously maintained by their aircrews. What they lacked in sexy, cutting-edge technology they more than made up for with their professionalism. The Army worked its Chinooks and their crews hard. While it might say “National Guard” on the side of their birds, they were as good and as busy as their regular Army counterparts.
I had been farmed out before, meaning we were so far from the primary targeting lines that the 160th SOAR couldn’t justify the risk of carrying us. They had logistical considerations as well and would often fly for more than one Ranger strike force. Everyone was maxed out, and the Night Stalkers were no exception.
We call them targeting lines because they’re straight lines connecting one bad actor to the next. We’d get intel on one Taliban leader and capture and interrogate him, and that would often lead us to another one, who’d lead us to yet another. That was a best-case scenario, and if we could have our pick of missions, these were the ones that were most effective in terms of effort spent and results achieved.
We quickly realized that many ops out of MES would have weak, or nonexistent, targeting lines. Up here in Northern Afghanistan, we didn’t always have actionable intel. It was like the ghosts we hunted in Musa Qala all over again. These Taliban fighters—and, more important, their leadership—were well connected, well resourced, and as easy to spook as an old buck deer during hunting season. They traveled light, left little trace of themselves, and could vanish into the Hindu Kush, whose 20,000-foot peaks have been the Afghan people’s fortress for thousands of years.
Once obscured in this western portion of the Himalayas, Taliban could travel anywhere they wanted, from Iran to Pakistan to Turkmenistan to Tajikistan and even to India if they were determined and had the right connections. You only need to glance at a map to see how enormous this area is and how easy it is for an enemy to melt away and elude us.
Worse, the alternating expanses of desert and mountains these areas contained accounted for some of the most severe and impassable terrain on the planet, and our enemy used this desolation to their advantage. Worse still, border checkpoints were perfunctory at best, if there was any “border” at all.
Given all this, there was very little ISAF presence in these far-flung areas. I never understood why we were conducting missions in these remote areas in northern Afghanistan when the Taliban were killing hundreds of their countrymen in cities in southern Afghanistan every month. To me, it seemed a bit like filling sandbags in your living room to try to keep your house from flooding. But as I said before, these missions were thought up by people way above my pay grade. Like Rangers before us, our role was to execute policy, not create it.
The battle rhythm I describe above was a constant grind and was wearing us down. We went on lots of missions without a whole lot to show for it. Sure, we went on those missions to Kunduz, Maymana, and elsewhere and scooped up lots of Taliban, but after a while it began to feel like we were playing Whac-A-Mole. There was no end-game in sight, and we sometimes felt like Sisyphus trying to roll his enormous boulder up the hill, only to be doomed to watch it roll down again.
Mac and I were in the TOC looking over the day’s intel when we got a hint that an entirely different kind of mission was coming together. Our officers, who were always hunting for a mission where we could take the fight to the Taliban, caught wind of an emerging crisis. And as opposed to the missions we’d been conducting night after night, this one involved saving our own guys.
We learned that somewhere out in the vast expanse of desert to the east of us, a Forward Operating Base full of Army Cavalry Scouts was cut off and surrounded by fighters from the IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan). The Cavalry Scouts at this FOB were there to conduct VSO (Village Stability Operations) for that area. This was something the Army and Marine Corps had been tasked with in many of our wars—keep the enemy out of the villages and let the people who live there have as normal a life as possible and gain confidence that the government could protect them. The idea was to eliminate the leverage that the Taliban—or in this case the IMU—had on the locals. This would create a favorable environment for our Special Operations Rangers to take out the Taliban who sought to keep the local civilians under their thumb.
&nb
sp; The intel we got told us the Cavalry Scouts had been doing this for a while: providing a security presence for the local villagers, helping them with building projects, holding juras (a sort of Afghan town hall) with village elders, and basically establishing trust with them. It was the “hearts and minds” aspect of what our military, and especially the Army, had done for the longest time in many of the conflicts we’ve been involved in over the years.
The Cavalry Scouts at this FOB were in a tough place to begin with and out on a limb with respect to support. Let me put it this way. The Chinook is the fastest helicopter in the U.S. Army inventory, and this FOB was over an hour away by Chinook from the closest coalition support. They’d been doing okay during the winter, but as the spring thaw came and the enemy became more mobile, the IMU fighters began to mass in the area around the Cavalry Scouts’ FOB. To say that our Army brothers were a juicy target doesn’t begin to describe how vulnerable they were.
The intel kept coming, and it kept getting worse. The IMU fighters in the area had surface-to-air missiles and plenty of RPGs that could easily take down any of our helicopters, so the 150 or so Cavalry Scouts at this FOB were running low on everything: food, water, ammunition, you name it. These men were heavy hitters, one of the Army’s premier units, but now the powers that be had put them in such a tenuous position that an enemy using Cold War–vintage weapons had cut them off and virtually surrounded them. They were in deep trouble, and it was getting deeper by the hour.
The Cavalry Scouts had a dirigible floating above their FOB that was put there to provide reconnaissance for the area surrounding them. We had a satellite feed from their dirigible, and we used that to augment our intel and try to determine how many enemy we would be up against. Even with the best intelligence, we had no way of telling exactly how many IMU fighters were in the vicinity, but our educated guess put the number in the thousands.
When the Killer Man Comes Page 12