by alex seymour
He was right about the risks of being an interpreter employed by the ISAF. Terps faced exactly the same dangers as the troops they accompanied, and many of them were killed while on duty. Verbal threats followed them wherever they went. There was a very real risk they would be assassinated while home visiting their families. Their job also put their families at risk. For these reasons and others, the identities of our terps were closely guarded secrets. They, and we, never used their real names. There were plenty of occasions where Dashim was subjected to abuse from local teenagers and young men. They’d call him a traitor and the Afghan equivalent of a fucking wanker. Naturally, these insults upset his normally cheerful character. I did my best to reassure him that he was doing a good job in difficult circumstances.
As much as I liked him, he was a mystery. I had difficulty reconciling that this cheerful, hardworking, and educated young man could also be brutal to his enemies. Prior to working with British marines, he had worked as an interpreter for the US marines. He told me what he had once done to a prisoner. The Americans had captured a Taliban fighter who had been shot. He was badly wounded and writhing in agony. Dashim looked so proud of himself when he told me that he’d bent down and castrated him as a reprisal for his attempt on their lives. He said everyone around him had laughed their heads off as he’d done it.
7
Best Man’s Grief
I t was June, and there was no variation from the cloudless blue sky and unrelenting sun. Comedian Bill Hicks’s rant about the weather in Los Angeles played again and again in my mind.
“I hate it,” he said. “It’s hot and sunny every day. Hot and fucking sunny. Every day.”
We were landlocked; the sea was at least another country away in any direction. Even the “river” wasn’t real—it was a channel scraped out of the desert, a superlarge irrigation ditch serving the runoff from mountains so far away they weren’t even visible. People grow up and die here for generations without ever even seeing a mountain, a river, or the sea. Every feature is man-made, every piece of vegetation planted.
That said, most local men did have plenty to eat, plenty of children, several wives, and access to unlimited free opium and cannabis, which grew wild by the bushel.
On patrol, to lighten the mood, Matt, one of the lads from the Reconnaissance Troop (Recce Troop) told the boys following us begging for sweets that his name was Cock and Balls. We all soon adopted this moniker, and smiles spread across our weary faces when we heard the kids shout “Cock and Balls! Cock and Balls! Cock and Balls!” as they tried to pry sweets from us. For the rest of our tour, it wasn’t too difficult to pinpoint where 43 Bravo was on patrol during the daytime—all you had to do was stop, listen carefully, and before long you would hear the children singing out, “Cock and Balls!”
I asked Matt a question, as we shared a cigarette after a postpatrol debrief with a group of other guys. “Where do you get your confidence from?”
“Dunno. S’pose it’s just innate. I was bullied by an older kid when I was little. He used to steal my shoes on the way to school, and I had to walk to school with no shoes on. We were pretty poor. My dad had an MBA in finance, but instead of going into business, he lectured at a university. My mum didn’t work, so it was always a struggle. I bumped into the bully once after the pubs shut, walking along the canal with my girlfriend. I’d been in the marines for a couple of years, but this guy didn’t know—we hadn’t seen each other since school. Anyway, so this cocksucker’s walking past me and says something out the corner of his mouth, sneering, drunk, stuffing kebab in his face. So I just banged the fucker out, battered him with one punch— smack—straight under his jaw. He flew straight in the canal with bits of kebab floating around his head.”
Everyone laughed. Ah, revenge. I mused . . . so base, so primitive, so sweet. It was great to have him there.
The next day on patrol I heard the massive crump of an explosion erupt. Matt and I looked at each other, wincing, and waited for the orders to jump into our gear and get going. Smack in the face news came that JJ had been badly injured by an IED. He had been searching a compound suspected of being a Taliban bomb-making factory. The same IED had killed two marines and badly injured two other men, one of whom was an Afghan interpreter, who later died of his injuries. That left only four marines alive in JJ’s patrol to deal with the casualties, the dead men, and any remaining threats in the compound.
Oliver Augustin, a young lieutenant, was one of the men killed. Another was Sam Alexander—the best friend of Jason, my friend in 43 Bravo. Jason had been best man at Sam’s wedding. They’d been in basic training together and had been sent to the same fighting company in 42 Commando. They spent most weekends together and DJ’d on a local Internet radio station. Jason had badgered me to listen to their radio show before we got out here, and they were good. Sam had already been awarded a medal for bravery during a previous tour. He was a hero and left behind a wife and young son.
My heart wrenched for Jason. Over the course of the tour, I had watched him take so much unnecessary bullshit, and he didn’t deserve any of it. He was given only an hour off duty to grieve. When he returned from R&R, he had Sam’s name etched in an elegant design in a tattoo on his forearm.
Information trickled through. JJ had severe fragmentation injuries to his legs, one of his arms had been smashed to bits and part of the elbow was missing, several fingers had been severed from his other hand, and one of his eye sockets had been fractured and crushed.
That night on sangar duty, I couldn’t get my mind off JJ’s injuries, brooding over how the children he taught at school might treat him. I hoped they wouldn’t be too cruel about his disfigurement. I wondered how he’d deal with it all in the long term. He was always so upbeat, but now I worried that this personal disaster might change that. Not being able to see JJ was a test of my patience.
Not having contact with my own family was hard, although it was by choice. We had access to free secure mobile satellite phones, but what was I going to say to my wife, kids, parents? Life here is shitty. The food is crap. The heat is brutal. Friends are being killed and maimed—and for what? So I decided to write home every couple of weeks instead of call.
Yet still, I had no doubt that some of us were out here to try to set the record straight. Before being mobilized I considered all the human suffering caused by dictators, despots, and tyrants—history’s worst, the atrocious, loathsome shame of men. Time to fight back. Restore justice. And who really knew all the causes of 9/11? Collectively we reap what we sow. But we had to get real and face the fact that the men who we had voted into power had brought us here—and now we were all dealing with the consequences.
One thing we could have confidence in was that we owned the night. The Taliban were using older technology, forced to use ordinary white-light torches to navigate in the dark, making them easier to spot, and so they generally avoided operating at night. In contrast, we had night-vision goggles (NVGs)—which made all the difference. Men looked like part mutant cyborgs while wearing them. It was eerie patrolling in the pitch black using NVGs, with everything bathed in a grainy green light. Dashim said the locals called us ghosts because we had a habit of materializing at night, seemingly from nowhere. We also had laser light modules (LLMs) mounted on our personal weapons, an infrared torch that assisted us with navigation in the dark.
Although our technology kept the Taliban threat to a minimum at night, it raised the risks in other ways. While wearing NVGs we couldn’t easily detect the ground signs that alerted us to freshly laid IEDs. It became just a matter of time before the senior command decision to patrol more at night led to our unit’s first nighttime casualties. Marines started getting blown up by bombs they could have avoided during the day. We began to seriously question the value of these nighttime patrols. The Taliban weren’t around, but their handiwork was. The official position was that at night we had ground domination and could deny the enemy freedom of movement, but that reasoning ignored the trade-off: d
eaths and catastrophic injuries. That decision was a bitter pill to swallow, especially if you were the man on the ground.
Patrolling one night we saw a small Taliban unit about three hundred meters to our south in an irrigated potato field. The younger guys were desperate to open up and engage, but Yoda was against us blazing away because of the risk of civilian casualties. Unless the Taliban engaged us first, it was thought to be too rash to shoot to kill without proper qualification. So, instead, we put up some schermuly night flares to illuminate the ground and patrolled toward them. By the time we got there, they’d disappeared. Bollocks.
8
Don’t Think
T hree months in and I was not the only one thinking that some sort of psychosis would manifest unless we got some decent sleep. Our body clocks had surrendered in confusion weeks earlier. Another typical day: up at 2 a.m. for two hours of sangar duty, then 4 a.m. go on patrol, returning at 10 a.m., my back hurting so bad I had to swallow 800 milligrams of ibuprofen. Then admin duties and more sangar, until it was time for patrol again from 5 p.m. until 10 p.m. Take care of my kit and fall onto my bunk for some shut-eye until 4 a.m., when it was time to go back on the sangar.
I fantasized nearly every day about what luxury it would be to spend the rest of the tour in an English prison: temperate climate, full night’s sleep, TV, bed with a mattress, three cooked meals a day, no backbreaking physical labor, no chance of being shot by a sniper. English prisoners were lucky bastards.
A friend sent an article from the Daily Telegraph. A senior British army officer complained about the operational effectiveness of ground troops being compromised by the sheer weight of our gear, the ammunition and weapons we had to carry on every patrol. The 120 pounds seemed ridiculous. My children didn’t even weigh that much. Even in the Falklands War over twenty-five years ago, men had marched with 80 pounds of gear. Seemed like we were going backward.
After a few months I got into a routine of finishing a patrol, attending the postpatrol briefing, and then enjoying the highlight of the day: a lie down on a six-foot-long, two-foot-wide ripped-up cardboard box that I had carefully positioned in one of the few shady spots next to the ops room. I’d retire there for an hour with my Kindle. Other men did the same, often claiming one of the few covetable medical stretchers, each man competing for the slithers of shade dotted around the fort. I developed an affection for that dusty, shitty piece of cardboard, like a dog retreating to the sanctuary of his basket.
Irrigation ditches ran around the villages, and as we waded through them, turds drifted by our thighs. Human crap was everywhere because there was no sewage infrastructure. Often I’d drop to one knee next to a compound wall taking up a fire position and then get hit by an overpowering stench. A cursory glance could reveal six or seven turds within a few feet. Tactics techniqes and procedures (TTPs) dictated that we never advance in set patterns and that we alternate our routes wherever possible on every patrol in order to minimize any predictability that could be exploited by enemy snipers. The net consequence was that we had to wade through filthy water every day.
Our uniforms stank. We had to hand-scrub them every other day at a minimum. We’d hang them to out to dry in the sun, and within a couple of hours they were baked rigid, impregnated with so much sand and dirt they could be folded like cardboard. Each man had only two or three liters of water a day to wash clothes, and our do-it-yourself detergent was a splash of shower gel, never enough to properly clean a uniform. It just seemed to wet the material and muddy the water. Even after my uniforms were washed and dried, I could still feel the grainy dirt embedded in the fabric, and they retained their cardboard texture. To say that marines take pride in their personal cleanliness is an understatement, so being forced to live like this was another little chiseled dent in morale.
We never had cold water to drink in Zamrod—I was in the field for two months before getting hold of a bottle of chilled water, and I had to walk for three hours to get it. We had patrolled up to Khammar, the company HQ, and discovered they actually had a couple of refrigerators that really worked. It was unquestionably the best drink I ever tasted! Heaven delivered in a little plastic bottle. At Zamrod we had a solar-powered fridge, but it didn’t work because it was missing a crucial part—the solar panel. The fridge sat there month after month in the galley, a hunk of dumb metal, mocking us. So we’d had no cold, or even cool, drinks at all for at least five months. It cannot be underestimated how much we take cool water for granted. At home you turn on a tap and it’s just there. Here we had no running water, and with no refrigeration, all of our bottled water was ambient temperature. Since this was Afghan summertime, that meant the water was always warm, and by the end of the day, it was often far too hot to even sip. No exaggeration—it was scorching. Each evening men scavenged around the fort for a bottle that had been in the shade long enough that the water didn’t burn their tongues when they took a sip. When you come in from a patrol, covered in filth, exhausted, completely soaked in sweat, the thing you want most badly in the world is a long, cool drink of water, but even this simple pleasure evaded us. So, the chilled water I got at Khammar was liquid bliss. I drank half of it and poured the other half over my sweaty and dusty head, shivering with pleasure.
When we got visits from other teams in M Company’s AO, inevitably it became a ritual to swap stories about the rudimentary living conditions in the respective forts. We engaged in competitive oneupmanship, comparing complaints. At Khammar that day, one of the visiting corporals told me that his fort actually had a clean freshwater stream running right through it. The water came up to their waists, and after the patrols, they would strip off and wash in it. My bullshit radar was on high alert. He must be lying through his teeth. I had to verify his story. It was true, and I was mute with envy, imagining that if we could just have this one simple luxury at Zamrod, then everything in my world would be OK.
Midsummer’s day—my birthday. I received a few packages from my family. The main presents were a bottle of 400-milligram tablets of ibuprofen painkillers from Julia and three liters of orange squash. Perfect. Relief from both body aches and the monotony of drinking warm water. The sergeant major sauntered past me as I opened a bottle, commenting blithely that I looked skeletal. I wouldn’t have known. The mirrors here were no bigger than the palm of your hand.
Normal took on a new meaning, both in the fort and out of it. We were patrolling through a small village, and we could sense something was amiss. Although we were unfamiliar with this area, the village was a ghost town. “Absence of the normal, presence of the abnormal”: if it feels weird, be on guard. We were on high alert as we closed in. It felt so eerie that it almost seemed like a staged setup, an atmospheric cliché. Something’s happening, the shit’s gonna hit the fan, I can feel it . . .
Taff spoke the words everyone was thinking, “This fucking place is creeping me out, man.”
As we snaked around one of the outer compounds toward the surrounding deserted fields, we took incoming fire from the south. Sniper! Everyone dove for cover. A quick visual check revealed that none of the lads had been hit. Most of us took cover behind the same wall. Yoda launched a smoke grenade and ordered the sharpshooters, whose weapons had more powerful telescopic sights, to move through an irrigation ditch out to the flank to see if they could get eyes on the enemy. A young boy working in the field realized he was caught between us and the sniper. Terrified, he started wailing and crying, running as fast as he could, calling out for his parents. He was the same size as my son. As he ran toward safety, we turned away, scoping the terrain for the likely enemy firing position. A sharpshooter was next to me, and we both edged around the wall, covering the south. He dropped to the ground on his guts in a ditch in the time-honored gravel belly position. A man was out there somewhere trying to kill us, and because of that he deserved to die—right now. Our eyes lingered on every potential firing position, but none of us spotted anyone we could positively ID. The lone gunman survived.
N
ews filtered in that American SEAL commandos raided and killed Osama bin Laden. Naturally, we stayed put. Excellent news, but it was not going to end the war. The biggest manhunt in all of history was over, and now we needed to mop up. To compound things we heard that five hundred Taliban prisoners had escaped from prison in a mass breakout and were now at large— again. Well that’s just fucking great, just what we need. How many men gave their lives trying to catch those men in the first place? Imagine that happening back home. Heads would roll.
I went to bed and listened to the crump of explosions. Mortars, IEDs, grenades—it was hard to tell which was which, but each time the image was the same in my mind, a marine losing his legs in the worst carnage imaginable. With an increasingly childlike attitude, night after night I’d lie in my bunk and ruminate on our predicament. Why can’t I get a day off in months? How’s it fair that I get to carry the heaviest piece of iron on practically every patrol? Who decides that I get the shortest amount of downtime between a daytime patrol and a nighttime patrol? What is going to mentally corrode first if I continue to get less than four hours of sleep a night? When will we ever get a cold drink or fresh food? Sweet baby Jesus, just shut the fuck up, you jabbering Muppet.