8 Seconds of Courage

by Flo Groberg

  The monsoon conditions made it extremely difficult to scan for threats, especially when one of my soldiers spotted a small group of potential enemy fighters on a nearby ridgeline. My biggest fear was that the group was actually made up of American soldiers from the Alpha Company platoon we were there to support. Before ordering my gunner to fire at them, I needed to confirm our fellow company’s location.

  After a lengthy process to verify that the men were carrying weapons and not wearing US Army uniforms, my gunner fired, which sent the suspected Taliban insurgents scurrying all over the rain-soaked hills.

  We were wet, tired, and exhausted by the time Alpha Company made it to the bridge, but instead of being thanked for our efforts, which included firing at the enemy, I was unexpectedly berated by the battalion commander (BC) for allowing our trucks to park along the mountain face. While I thought I was following normal procedures by staying to the right, the commander was angry that I had forced his vehicle to pass on the edge of one of the area’s many steep cliffs.

  After some thought, I understood why my four-vehicle convoy blocking most of the narrow mountain road, which made Alpha Company’s maneuver home even more hazardous, would piss off the BC.

  When we finally got back to the COP, I was scolded yet again, this time for allowing the cagelike wiring designed to shield our vehicles from RPGs to get caught up at Honaker-Miracle’s gate, which resulted in damage to one of our trucks. The success of our mission was irrelevant to my commanding officer (CO), who told me that I would have to find and hire Afghan contractors to repair the truck.

  The next morning, I had to wake up at 0600 to secure plans for a truck repair, which is not quite as easy as going to your local body shop when you are in the heart of Afghanistan’s mountainous Kunar Province.

  I would undoubtedly make more mistakes during the many long days of fighting that lay ahead, but even after getting chewed out for the second time, I felt that I might have earned some measure of respect from the platoon for staying calm and completing a tough mission. I still had doubts about whether I could perform all of my duties in Afghanistan, but when I went to sleep that night, I decided to trust in the training I had received.

  The following week, I shared our experience with SFC Staley when he got back from Jalalabad.

  Staley nodded in acknowledgment, but didn’t say much as we stood outside the TOC overlooking the bloody Pech River Valley. He was smoking a cigarette and I was chewing tobacco.

  “Fourth Platoon is yours now,” Staley said. “Good luck . . . and know that I’ve got your back.”

  From that day forward, I knew that twenty-four American lives were in my hands. I was ready, motivated, and understood my role and the importance of my position. I also felt everyone’s eyes on me.

  For seven days, I had shut up and I listened. For the next seven months, it was time to go hard or go home.

  3 PISS AND SHIT

  Some of eastern Afghanistan’s landscape is the most beautiful in the world. Picture clear blue reservoirs like Thailand, mountain peaks like Sweden, pastures like Ireland, and endless fields of flowers like the Netherlands. With the pervasive threat of death surrounding you, it’s often hard to see that beauty, especially amid frigid winter temperatures.

  Contrary to the picturesque landscape was our remote combat outpost, where conditions were as bad as it gets. Therefore, my initial impression of Afghanistan was jaded: I thought it was a dirty place.

  Inside COP Honaker-Miracle’s compounds, the floors were made of concrete but covered by dirt. Clean drinking water was nonexistent, which required us to use bottled water when brushing our teeth, and our “reliable” Internet was mostly just the opposite. I was fortunate enough to have my own room, but that’s about the only luck I had at the time.

  To prevent my lungs from filling with filth, I would roll out a carpet on the floor of my room each night. Still, I would wake up with the taste of dirt on my tongue. I soon learned that it was necessary to cover my bunk with my bivy cover—a woodland camouflage waterproof sleeping bag—during the day.

  To top off this lovely experience, I felt like almost everyone in the Pech River Valley hated me. Everything I knew and cherished in my safe Bethesda home was now a distant memory as I lay in a dusty cot.

  My small space, which I never took for granted since most soldiers on the COP didn’t have the luxury of their own rooms, quickly became my overseas sanctuary. After I returned from my missions each night, my room became the office where I would plan the following day’s missions. I even came by a few posters of supermodels, which soon became my classy wall decor.

  I remember the third morning in my new room beginning like any other. I woke up at 0600 to my lungs contracting and forcibly coughing. I also needed to piss.

  My teeth chattered as I trudged through the hallways, making my way to the makeshift outhouse. The outdoor pissing buckets were covered in thin camouflage canopy netting. While we had Porta Potties at one end of our base, it was convenient to have a makeshift outdoor bathroom right next to our sleeping quarters for wintry conditions, even though it reeked.

  “What’s up, McPhee?” I said to the Army specialist taking a piss next to me. He was a fuel expert whom I had met a few days earlier.

  “Hey, how’s it going, L-T?” he said through a yawn.

  McPhee was—for lack of a better word—gifted. It wouldn’t be long before McPhee was known around COP Honaker-Miracle for his enormous package.

  “How in hell did you end up as a fueler in The Stan?” I asked. “Did your porn star application get rejected?”

  Just as McPhee and I started to laugh, we were interrupted by a sudden, unmistakable sound of a firecracker in the distance, which was followed by a whizzing sound right past my ear. McPhee, in a natural move to take cover, swung himself around and in doing so, pissed on my leg.

  “Oh, shit,” he yelled. “They’re shooting at us, sir!”

  With my private parts in hand, I stood there staring at the wall where the bullet had just struck. A sniper had literally caught two American soldiers with their pants down.

  As another round made its way toward me, I ducked and joined McPhee on the ground. We then crawled back to the barracks for cover, where we finally heard the sounds of mortars pounding the mountain where the sniper had set up. A fellow US soldier manning one of the COP’s several guard towers had thankfully heard the sniper rifle’s popping off and alerted our gunners, who rained hell on the bathroom assailant.

  After a minute or two, McPhee and I slowly stood up and dusted ourselves off. We laughed harder in that moment than I would at any point during the rest of my deployment.

  “Jesus Christ,” I said. “I can’t even take a leak in this place, huh?”

  “Welcome to The Stan . . . we call this Tuesday morning,” McPhee said. “I guess I should have been a porn star after all, huh?”

  • • •

  While laughing about the story at breakfast later that morning, my college friend Saul shared a rumor about the sniper being a militant from Chechnya. That was the first time I heard that the dark caves above the Pech River Valley weren’t just filled with Taliban insurgents. There were plenty of al Qaeda terrorists and America-hating foreign fighters up there, too.

  “Should be a fun seven months,” I said.

  “Tell me about it, sir,” said a soldier at our table, Private First Class Louis Martinez, who had been fighting alongside the men now under my command for almost five months.

  Shortly after my near-death experience in the outhouse, I endured another event that would turn out to be the shittiest night of my young life.

  Following an evening visit to Shege, one of the seven Pech River Valley villages my platoon was responsible for protecting, my soldiers and I were sitting down to eat dinner when my translator, a young Afghan National Army soldier we called Shams, came to tell us that he had received a phone call from the elder (similar to a mayor) of Shege.

  “Taliban,” said Shams, who loo
ked almost exactly like Antonio Banderas. Immediately, I stood up from the table and headed toward the TOC to let our commanding officer know.

  Earlier in the week, an Army Psychological Operations (PSYOPS) noncommissioned officer had the brilliant idea of ordering us to go to all seven villages and pass out business cards—yes, business cards—with a phone number to reach us if the bad guys entered their village.

  The only issue—aside from the already huge problems of bribes and intimidation of villagers by the Taliban—was that every single Afghan I had met in the Pech seemed to care about one thing and one thing only: getting free stuff from the foreigners occupying their land. During the weekly meetings I led at each village, the impoverished Afghans would practically beg me for edible or tradable goods, which were usually more valuable to them than money.

  What some in the US Army didn’t understand is that almost anyone living in the valley, including a respected elder, wouldn’t hesitate to lie through their rarely brushed teeth if they thought it would result in more free stuff. If an Afghan told us he had seen Taliban, perhaps we would regard his village as cooperative, and therefore green-light a construction project they wanted Uncle Sam to pay for.

  On a much smaller scale, Afghans overwhelmingly wanted cases of Rip It Energy drinks. For whatever reason, that valley was addicted to sugary sodas. My platoon got more valuable intelligence from locals by handing out Rip Its and Mountain Dews than we ever did by killing a Taliban commander. Ironically, the Rip It Energy drink slogan is “Patriotism . . . if only we could bottle it!”

  After I finished talking to the CO, we jumped into our four military vehicles and drove east into the darkness.

  “Watch each other’s backs,” I told my guys over the radio while checking my weapon in my vehicle’s passenger’s seat.

  “Just wait until L-T sees what’s really out there,” Martinez whispered just loud enough for me to hear over the radio.

  It seems my soldiers, already six months into their combat deployment, knew we were walking into a setup. What Martinez was implying by saying “what’s really out there” is that there would be nothing at all.

  Sure enough, when we arrived after a fifteen-minute ride over the always unpredictable Afghan roads, the village of Shege was dark and quiet, with no Taliban to be found. As I pounded on the elder’s door, my platoon was already getting frustrated.

  “Just bust the damn door down, L-T,” one soldier pleaded.

  I didn’t disagree with the sentiment, but our rules of engagement (ROE) dictated that we could not enter a home unless accompanied by Afghan soldiers or police. Since we were trying to reach the village before the alleged Taliban fighters left, we didn’t have time to round up one of the ANA platoons on the other side of our COP.

  “Negative,” I told the impatient soldier.

  Finally, a woman answered the door, followed by her husband, who was the village elder.

  “Taliban,” I said to the elder. “You said there were Taliban here.”

  “No” is the only English word we consistently heard from most of these folks.

  “No Taliban, they already left,” he told Shams, who then translated for me. Shams was very serious about his job since he could potentially be rewarded with papers to get him out of Afghanistan and possibly to America. I trusted him and his translations.

  “Check everything out from here to the ridgeline,” I told a soldier who had stayed inside one of our vehicles. “See if any of these guys are running up the mountain.”

  If our thermal imaging equipment detected a small group trying to disappear into the night, the gunners atop our platoon’s vehicles would light them up with missiles and machine gun fire.

  After a few minutes of waiting, my radio buzzed.

  “Negative, sir,” my soldier said. “Nobody’s up there.”

  My platoon had been right all along. The Afghans had indeed lied to us, and one stupid American—me—had taken the bait. I proceeded to berate Shege’s elder, even though my translator almost certainly censored the worst of my profanity.

  We were on high alert while walking across a small, rickety bridge that led us out of the village. While the most likely scenario was that the elder wanted to trick us into thinking he was cooperative, I also had to consider the worst, which was that the Taliban had paid or forced him into setting up the Americans for an ambush.

  I was the last soldier in the platoon crossing the bridge, and even though I couldn’t see much, I was walking backward while scanning Shege’s outer perimeter for threats. That’s when one wooden strip of the flimsy bridge snapped beneath my feet. I plummeted down a few feet into the river below me.

  Suddenly, I was surrounded by darkness and a pungent, overwhelming stench. After a few miserable seconds, I realized that I had just plunged into a river of raw sewage.

  “Dude, L-T just fell in their shit!” a young sergeant, Troxell, said amongst robust laughter.

  “Help me up,” I requested between gags. When no one obliged, I realized that my guys weren’t exactly eager to jump into a river of shit for some rookie lieutenant.

  Pissed off, I pulled myself out of the raw sewage. I ordered my men back into their vehicles.

  “Um, sir, you really shouldn’t be riding with us,” SGT Mauldin said. “You’ll stink up the truck for a month.”

  “With all due respect, Sergeant, you can go f—k yourself,” I said while dripping with sarcasm and sewage. “Let’s get out of here.”

  When we got back to the COP, I ran straight toward Honaker-Miracle’s fire pit, stripped naked, and proceeded to burn my shit-covered uniform. I then walked into the base’s TOC to confront the PSYOPS genius who thought passing out business cards in primitive Afghan villages was a good idea.

  In hindsight, it wasn’t the best judgment to walk into the TOC completely naked, but as we all know, hindsight is 20/20.

  Stunned silence filled the room as I shared the results of our mission with the PSYOPS guy and our first sergeant.

  “Just so you know, there were no Taliban out there,” I said. “Have a good night.”

  I then turned my bare ass around and walked out.

  Nobody even asked why I was nude, and to my surprise I didn’t get into any trouble for my indecent exposure. After the leadership realized that I had fallen into a Great Nile of Shit, they probably decided to let it go.

  So that’s how my first deployment to Afghanistan began: piss and shit. War is just like the movies, right?

  4 THE WILD WEST

  My Dagger Company predecessor, Captain Antonio Salinas, described the enormous challenge of leading an infantry platoon through the Pech River Valley in his 2012 book, Siren’s Song.

  We wear and move in heavy armor. Our weapons and munitions cost thousands of dollars. We can see in the dark, seeing humans in the form of heat signatures many kilometers away under the cover of darkness. We can call for an array of air support, ranging from unmanned aerial vehicles, F-16s, A-10s, to Apaches, and Kiowas. We can drop 2,000-pound laser guided bombs. Our 155’s can hit targets, accurately, from miles away using GPS. We can MEDEVAC the wounded and save life. We can air assault supplies and ammo within minutes of a request. We have satellite imagery and can communicate instantly with our comrades utilizing state of the art communication equipment. We are loud, menacing, and, most of all we are ungodly powerful.

  Our opponents wear no armor. They wear linen and carry just a few magazines or a few RPG rounds. They have no laser sights on their weapons, any air support, or satellite imagery. They do not have platoons of men waiting to be a Quick Reaction Force. They can’t call for fire on the move, nor see in the dark. They cannot MEDEVAC their wounded. However, they have the heart to persevere. They fight against overwhelming odds and do amazingly well.

  While some of my Ranger School buddies had shared stories of spending many long and boring weeks in Afghanistan, Salinas, Staley, and the soldiers under my command had repeatedly warned me that the Pech River Valley was different.
My own early experiences—from the bathroom sniper attack to other encounters—also taught me that every minute of every day could be my last.

  Upon waking up one winter morning, while dragging my feet to the outhouse and taking an uneventful piss to start my day, I noticed something strange on a calendar that was thumbtacked to one of the COP’s big plywood walls.

  “Why is there an ‘X’ on that date in August?” I asked Martinez.

  “That was the only day since we’ve been here that nobody fired a round in our AO sir,” he said.

  The calendar made me think. How could we gain more days that were risk-free? I had an idea. It was probably a bad idea, I thought, but it also might save lives.

  That night, I lay in bed reading transcripts of intercepted radio traffic from the previous twenty-four hours. The Taliban wasn’t exactly MI6, so we generally knew the frequencies on which they would communicate most often. Unsurprisingly, their conversations were full of chest-thumping rants about allegedly killing ten “kifers” (infidels) during a recent ambush. In fact, zero of my men were injured or killed, but that didn’t stop the enemy from spreading the tale to motivate new fighters coming over the border from Pakistan.

  “Inshallah, we will kill each and every one of those American sons of shits,” a Taliban fighter under Dairon’s command said during the last recording. “Allahu Akbar!”

  During the next day’s patrol, I had the platoon stop at Observation Post (OP) Taliban, which was built on a steep mountaintop about a mile south of COP Honaker-Miracle and used to be a staging spot for the Afghan mujahideen fighters getting ready to ambush Soviet troops back in the 1980s. The stunning scenery was crystal clear, and for the most part so was the radio reception. You couldn’t find a better spot in all of Afghanistan to rest, take in the spectacular view, and make a quick radio call.

  After summoning Shams, I handed my walkie-talkie to him and asked our platoon’s RTO (radio man), Jernigan, to tune to the Taliban frequency with the heaviest traffic. Next, I asked Shams to start calling out some of the Taliban names we constantly intercepted. I received a skeptical look from my translator, as we both knew what I was doing was unsavory. That should have prompted me to rethink my idea.