8 Seconds of Courage

by Flo Groberg

  “Shams, I got this,” I said, stupidly. “Please do what I say.”

  Within a few seconds, we heard a voice. I recognized the voice as a Taliban member who frequented what we jokingly called the Taliban Radio Network.

  “Muhammad,” I said through my very wide-eyed translator. “Muhammad, are you there?” (Names of some Taliban fighters and US troops have been changed.)

  While there was silence on the other end of the radio for at least thirty seconds, Jernigan started laughing while Shams looked completely shocked by what I was doing.

  “Who is this?” Muhammad said in Pashto. “Why are you calling me?”

  “This is Lieutenant Groberg with the United States Army,” I said while trying not to laugh. “I have an important message for you.

  “The war is over,” I continued. “You can now turn in all your weapons at Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle, and we promise not to shoot at you. Once all the weapons are collected, we will leave your country.”

  By this point, Shams had joined Jernigan in laughing, which Muhammad could almost certainly hear in the background.

  More silence, until . . .

  “You son of shit,” Muhammad yelled. “I will crush you and your pig American soldiers.”

  “Well, thanks for that, Muhammad,” I said through Shams. “But that’s not very nice.”

  The laughter blew my cover, and predictably, the enemy fighter was not amused.

  “Inshallah, we will kill you and then come to America and kill your wives, too,” he screamed. “Then we will kill your daughters!”

  “Okay, okay, Muhammad, here’s Plan B,” I said through Shams. “Instead of coming up to Honaker-Miracle, go ahead and give your wives and daughters your weapons, because they are better warriors than you will ever be—”

  BOOM.

  It was the sound of Taliban RPGs blasting into the side of a snowy mountain that was about two miles to our north in the nearby Watapur Valley, where COP Michigan was located. We could see the smoke and fire from our vantage point, which prompted me to let Muhammad know that his aim was way off.

  Suddenly, I got a tap on my shoulder from Martinez.

  “Sir, isn’t Lieutenant Thompson’s platoon on patrol near COP Michigan today?” he said.

  Oh shit.

  • • •

  At our nightly post-mission briefing, Saul, who had thankfully made it back to base safely, was drumming through his accounts of the day when he mentioned one in particular.

  “One of the Taliban teams—I think it was some idiot low-level fighter—completely exposed his position to us and started shooting RPGs that hit this mountain right above us,” he said.

  To reiterate, Saul and I were best friends from the University of Maryland. He was a towering six-foot-five dude with brown hair, a wide smile, and mesmerizing eyes (as women would often say). Ladies flocked to him and he was used to it. In college, we never went to parties at the Greek houses, but instead frequented congested bars so we could catch up and talk about our various fantasy sports leagues while drinking cheap beer. We became brothers long before we were coincidentally deployed together, which only strengthened our bond.

  I owed Saul an honest explanation, especially before I got grilled by the boss about what happened outside the wire.

  “Um, yeah, about that . . .” I said, my face filling with heat. “So I might have been talking to one of Dairon’s guys before that happened, and I might have pissed him off a little bit.”

  On cue, our CO exploded.

  “What did you just say, Groberg?” he yelled. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I’m sorry, sir,” I said as my posture straightened.

  “I appreciate that, Groberg,” he shot back. “But ‘sorry’ wouldn’t really cut it at the funerals of Thompson and his entire God damn platoon,” he said, pointing out the obvious.

  “No, sir,” I said, truly ashamed.

  “Thompson, good work out there today,” the CO said to Saul before dismissing us with an annoyed look on his face. “Glad your buddy didn’t get you shot up.”

  As I walked out of the TOC behind Saul, I let him know how genuinely sorry I was. Even though I knew him well, Saul’s response was nevertheless surprising.

  “I thought what you did was awesome,” he said with a grin. “Screw these Talis [slang for Taliban] . . . they can kiss my ass.”

  • • •

  Through trial and error (after error), I somehow managed to develop a decent daily routine. After waking up at around 0600, I would visit the TOC to get an updated enemy situation and weather report, adjust the day’s patrol, and alert platoons stationed on other FOBs and COPs if we planned to cross into any of the zones they were responsible for. Then I would lead a five-minute operations order and mission brief for my platoon before everyone checked their weapons and ultimately loaded up the trucks to go outside the wire. Six days a week, we would leave the COP to confront the enemy and hold meetings with those village elders.

  The soldiers under my command had it a lot tougher than I did. While I could retreat to my room at any time to fill out after-action reports or watch movies, those guys were bunking together and, for the most part, were always on duty. Due to the constant threat of enemy attacks, each of the COP’s guard towers had to be manned at all times. My men and Thompson’s soldiers would rotate in four-hour increments—day or night and whether the temperature was 19 degrees (as it was at this point in the deployment) or 91 degrees. As their leader, I had enormous respect for the sacrifices these young soldiers were making on a daily basis.

  While Shams and I were busy negotiating village construction project costs with usually corrupt Afghan contractors, my guys were repairing or cleaning the trucks. While I was working on the next day’s mission plan, my married soldiers were calling their wives and children back home. While I was “sleeping in” until 0600, the cooks were waking up at 0430 to make us breakfast. These dedicated, hardworking soldiers were not only every bit as tough as anyone in the Army; they were the unsung heroes of America’s wars. Every time I had an extra moment in Afghanistan, I would always remind myself of how lucky I was.

  On one particularly chilly morning approximately three weeks into my stint at COP Honaker-Miracle, gunfire erupted from a guard tower. One of the soldiers had allegedly spotted a Chechnyan sniper aiming his Soviet-era Dragunov rifle at us from atop a nearby mountain. We were used to gunfire at our COP, but since it was early in the morning and our snow-covered courtyard was mostly empty, the piercing sounds from our guard’s machine gun echoed loudly.

  The same sniper had been terrorizing Honaker-Miracle for weeks. Intelligence reports led us to believe that his cave was on the side of a mountain where we were continually dropping bombs, but our actions were ineffective. To my chagrin, these massive explosions—the biggest and loudest I had ever heard—seemed only to be flattening trees and pounding sand and snow in the cliffs. Even though I grudgingly acknowledged that this particular sniper was pretty good at his “job,” if you could call it that, I was tired of having to say a Hail Mary every time I walked on open ground around my base.

  The sniper’s rounds, which were probably provided by al Qaeda, hadn’t hit anything on our COP during this particular firefight. After a few minutes of return fire from the guard towers, his rifle went silent.

  It was time to act. After I spoke with Saul, we had our best guys jump into our Oshkosh MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) M-ATVs (all-terrain vehicles), which were still being prepped for the day’s mission. These large vehicles are more effective at protecting soldiers from IED blasts than Humvees. Using the same heat signature equipment we relied on during nighttime patrols, our platoon’s experts were able to find the sniper cowering in the hills. Within moments, our gunners were raining 120mm mortars down on that location in a cacophony of an assault. No survivors were possible in an attack of this magnitude.

  As one thirty-five-pound mortar after another exploded into the valley, we saw no furt
her movement from the hiding spot pinpointed by our heat signature technology. It remained that way until the next day.

  Less than twenty-four hours later, a soldier on guard tower duty spotted a large group of unidentified locals gathering near the same ridgeline. Since Islam requires a proper burial as soon as possible from the time of death, I thought to myself that the soldier had probably witnessed the sniper’s funeral.

  Four days after that attack, my team and I packed up the M-ATVs and headed out to the village closest to the sniper’s suspected lair. As a group of us met with the village elder, one of the soldiers on guard duty radioed the TOC to notify them of a very interesting development. A kid had just told him that he and his group of friends had found a sniper rifle.

  “Time out,” I told my fellow soldiers. “Did anyone just hear that?”

  Sure enough, the rifle was a Dragunov, and after we went outside and gave the boy a few pieces of candy, the child confirmed that the funeral we had seen indeed belonged to the sniper. Although we suspected this was the outcome all along, it was a huge relief to have it confirmed.

  Instead of giving the boy more candy, which probably would have upset his stomach from eating so many sweets, I pulled a crank radio out of my bag.

  “Shams, go give him this,” I told my translator. “Also please tell him thank you and As Salam alaikum.” Peace be upon you.

  • • •

  Because of the sniper’s death and continually plummeting temperatures, things got relatively quiet from late December until the end of February. I use the word “relatively” because we still went outside the wire every day for Shuras (meetings held in accordance with the ancient Pashtunwali code) with village elders. We also continued going on daily combat patrols, which became even more tiresome when the already brutal, shaky terrain was covered with several feet of snow. Shockingly, US Army platoons don’t get the luxury of snow days.

  Even in the winter months, our COP continued taking mortar and RPG fire from what we called the Taliban’s “D team,” which generally stepped forward while Dairon and his gang vacationed in Pakistan or hibernated in their caves. Their replacements were usually teenagers sent over the eastern border to learn how to fight the barbaric infidels (us). For the most part, these amateurs could barely aim their weapons, let alone strike significant targets. It was nevertheless my job to keep the entire platoon focused and ready in case the D team got lucky and actually hit something.

  That dreaded moment arrived on December 25, 2009, when the Taliban blew up the platoon’s mail truck, while I was still at FOB Blessing.

  If you haven’t served in the military, you may not fully understand how important and sacred a mail truck is to a soldier’s morale (and sanity). Those trucks bring letters from our loved ones, photos of our newborns, and poems from our children. In truth, they bring us a light at the end of a very dark tunnel. That’s why blowing up a mail truck represented a lot more than losing a vehicle. Most devastatingly, it happened on Christmas Day.

  After the vehicle fire was put out, soldiers found the remnants of dozens of Christmas care packages that had been assembled with so much love by family members and military charities. The toughest part of that day for my men was sorting through charred photos of their children at Christmastime. Sure, nobody had been killed in the attack, for which we were grateful, but the Taliban still managed to ruin the holiday.

  As a single guy who loved watching football, the D team’s next successful attack left me just as disheartened. On the morning of the Super Bowl, a Soviet-era mortar managed to hit the chow hall and damage the satellite dish. That night, the cooks had planned a surprise meal for the big game, but instead of watching the New Orleans Saints battle the Indianapolis Colts on February 7, 2010, the soldiers of COP Honaker-Miracle were relegated to playing videogames.

  It was a terrible evening until one of our mechanics realized he could repair and reposition the satellite. The mechanics had already saved the day many times by fixing our trucks or Internet connections, but this particular mechanic scored a touchdown for all of us on that memorable night. It felt so good to watch football, eat wings, and forget that we were in Afghanistan.

  • • •

  For all the bullshit we had to deal with in Afghanistan, some days made everything worth it. After being awoken by the Muslim prayer call that resonated through the gradually warming valley every morning (and five times a day), my platoon journeyed along the Pech River to a place called Andersille. That particular village had a kind, honest elder who I learned had been leading the charge against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan while I was being potty trained by my mother in France.

  While corruption and mistrust definitely existed in many Afghan villages, individuals like this gentle old man, Ahmed, reminded me that while there were many bad actors in Kunar Province, the ordinary Afghans were good, caring people. Through no fault of their own, citizens of the historic land where I was deployed lived in a much more primitive culture than the civilized world I was used to.

  After exchanging pleasantries about a visit my platoon had made to one of the village’s schools the previous week, Ahmed formally began the Shura with the traditional As Salam alaikum. We called these visits key leader engagements (KLEs). They were among our platoon’s most important duties in Afghanistan.

  As usual, Ahmed began by pouring me a cup of chai or tea. The cup was dirty and the tea tasted like a mixture of Pepto-Bismol and soil, but not to drink the entire cup would have been viewed as extremely disrespectful under the Pashtunwali code. Therefore, I sipped the chai while displaying my best poker face.

  I had a hard and fast rule about KLEs being no longer than thirty minutes. Not only did that prevent the villagers from asking me for everything under the sun, but it also protected my soldiers, who were pulling security outside the village gates—a position in which they were often shot at.

  Ahmed genuinely appreciated all that the Americans had done and were doing for his village, and seemed to sincerely care about me and my soldiers. He even asked whether any of us had children, which I appreciated. Three-plus months after arriving in eastern Afghanistan, Ahmed was the only elder who seemed to fully understand what my men were sacrificing each day to help the men, women, and children of his village and others.

  “Thank you for visiting the All-Boys School last week, Lieutenant,” Ahmed said through Shams. “If you don’t mind, I have one more request.”

  Oh, here it comes. Just as I was starting to like Ahmed, he was probably about to ask the Army for a month’s worth of fuel and/or a new retaining wall.

  “This is a historic invitation, Lieutenant,” he continued to my surprise. “I would like you to visit our village’s All-Girls School.”

  Wow. Not only had I completely misjudged Ahmed’s motives, for which I felt deeply embarrassed, but he didn’t need to explain the significance of this forthcoming event for me to understand its symbolism. Other than an elder or teacher, it was strictly forbidden for any male—let alone an armed US Army soldier—to enter an All-Girls School.

  “I am deeply honored by your request,” I had Shams tell Ahmed. “It is with great humility and appreciation that I accept.”

  The next day, I was greeted by the smiling faces of little girls ranging in age from six to twelve years old. Their prominent, mostly hazel eyes seemed wider than American children’s eyes, perhaps because they had witnessed so much war and suffering at such a young age.

  “My name is Flo Groberg,” I told about forty young students after Ahmed gave me permission to speak to them. “I used to live in France, but now I am a soldier from the United States of America.”

  Before Shams could finish translating, one little girl—probably about eight years old—stood up. To my complete shock, she spoke to me in English.

  “Are you here to hurt us?” she inquired pointedly.

  “No,” I whispered while kneeling down to speak with her. “My soldiers and I are here to protect you and to help your moms and
dads.”

  It was hard not to dwell on that question, or feel heartbroken while looking at the faces of these innocent children. They had grown up in the most dangerous valley of a country that had already been at war for a decade when they were born. While I didn’t have kids of my own, the concept of a little girl growing up in a rugged, primordial place like Afghanistan—where women were sometimes murdered, raped, and oppressed—bordered on the unimaginable.

  At the same time, the fact that these girls were being taught English was deeply inspiring. To me, nothing underscored the importance of what the men in my platoon were risking on a daily basis more than that school visit.

  Speaking to those little girls was the single best moment of my first deployment to Afghanistan. I will never forget the mixture of curiosity and fear in their eyes, or what the same English-speaking girl asked me after I was given permission to hug her.

  “Please keep us safe from the bad men,” she said while tugging on my green and brown combat fatigues.

  “I promise that I will,” I said while looking squarely into her eyes.

  • • •

  A few days after the school visit, I took my platoon out to visit a different school in Shege, where I had fallen into the river of shit earlier in the deployment. We went back because I was determined to visit the village elder—the one I had previously berated—to make amends.

  For three hours, we handed out candy and school supplies to the same kids we would often see collecting brass from spent ammunition during our many violent firefights. We also decided to play soccer with a bunch of young boys, who were silly with excitement. It was a great way to start the day.

  We returned at about 1400, and by 1500 I was working out in our base’s small gym when I heard a jarring series of explosions. It only took me a second or two to realize that I was hearing the loud echoes of exploding enemy RPGs and mortars.