by Graeme Smith
from: Graeme Smith
to: Caitlin Smith
date: Tue, Sep 5, 2006 at 11:35 PM
I woke up shivering this morning after about ninety minutes of sleep in the freezing desert. Me and my CP [Canadian Press] friend had to hustle to catch our convoy last night and forgot our warm sleeping stuff. Ugh. I made a small fire with food wrappers and cardboard boxes, and kept stoking it until the sun started to warm things up. I smelled really bad, like burnt plastic, but at least I stopped shivering. Today I dumped some water over my head to rinse away some of the carcinogens. But of course I still smell awful, after four days with no shower.
Ah, the glamorous life.
It did feel kind of glamorous, though. I enjoyed the freedom of camping outdoors: sleeping in the dirt wasn’t so bad, and though I forgot to bring a toothbrush and a change of clothes, nobody minded. This was a place where a guy could piss where he wanted, belch when he wanted, and in some ways behave more naturally than is usually allowed. My mouth tasted awful, and my combat pants grew crusted with rings of salt from days of accumulated sweat, but it felt like an adventure.
Every night I rigged up my satellite, checked my newspaper’s website and discovered that my bulletins were appearing on the front page. Soldiers peered over my shoulder to read the stories about themselves. The media in Europe and North America were generally supportive of the war at the time, and my dispatches often ran alongside editorials or columns praising the troops and their actions. The headline across the top of my newspaper’s front page on September 4, 2006, announcing the death of four Canadian soldiers, was “Bloodied, but unbowed.” I made friends with the soldiers, too, adopted into a platoon that called itself the Nomads. I felt proud when they gave me a “Nomads” patch for my flak jacket. The soldiers were brave, generous and devoted to their friends. I was basically an excited kid, recording what felt in some ways like a climactic battle between the forces of barbarism and civilization—but my notes include scraps of information that I should have investigated more carefully. My translators called me with reports of civilian casualties, and I documented some of them, but forgot about many others. I wrote down the name of a man rumoured to have lost his entire family in an air strike (“perhaps five sons, two daughters, one wife killed”) but I never found him. Such professional failures would haunt me later when I ranted about the lack of media resources to track events in southern Afghanistan. Some of that anger would be secretly aimed at myself for allowing stories to slip away.
One of those missed stories that still bothers me was passed along from a reconnaissance unit prowling ahead of the front lines at night. The soldiers usually found no trace of their enemies except blood trails disappearing into the undergrowth, because the insurgents were efficient at removing their dead and observing the Muslim custom of a quick burial. But in the chaos of Operation Medusa, some of the bodies were left behind. One night a Canadian reconnaissance platoon decided to use Taliban corpses as bait, dragging them out from the leafy cover of the farmland and marking them with infrared glow sticks. The soldiers hid themselves and waited for the insurgents to collect their dead. Hours ticked by, with the troops poised to fire—but nobody fell for the trap. The stench of death attracted wild dogs, which spent the night ripping chunks off the bodies while the Canadians watched through their gun scopes.
The soldiers casually joked about it afterward; in one of my audio recordings, an officer sounds casual about it. “We hit a couple of guys over here,” he said. “Left them out as bait. And the dogs are eating them now.”
Those nights and days of tense waiting ended on September 7, when the Canadian and US troops were ordered to resume their offensive. On the north side of the battlefield, Bravo Company scurried out of the scrub into the dense farmland where their comrades from Charles Company had been ambushed a few days earlier. The soldiers used armoured bulldozers to carve new roads across the dry canals and smashed gaps in mud walls, allowing their vehicles to avoid the existing pathways, which were riddled with landmines. As night fell, the soldiers began doing something that international forces had rarely attempted in that rebellious region: digging into new positions, hacking at walls with pickaxes to open firing holes and cutting down trees with chainsaws to clear gunners’ sightlines. Foreign soldiers had visited the area many times in the previous months and years, but they had never stayed for long. Operation Medusa was meant to change that pattern, proving that the foreign troops could follow the counter-insurgency mantra of “clear, hold and build.” For one glorious evening it almost seemed possible, too, as the troops’ initial advance found no resistance. The soldiers relaxed a little and allowed themselves to admire their freshly conquered land.
“See these vegetables and stuff here? You could live for awhile,” said Captain Piers Pappin, a Canadian platoon commander. “These are mulberry trees right here. The fruit’s already done, but I recognize the leaves from mulberry trees at home. And pomegranates you can see everywhere.”
“If I remember my history right, this is the same bit of farmland that supported Alexander the Great’s armies when he busted through here.” I had been reading and wanted to show off. There was something about the handcrafted walls and gardens in the valley that make them look like illustrations in a book.
“Yep, Kandahar, he did this,” Captain Pappin said, referring to Alexander’s marches. “All the way through the Hindu Kush to the Oxus.”
The valley was so quiet that we could hear the insects buzzing in the grass. The captain took me inside a compound where we would spend the night, and we met a group of soldiers already making themselves comfortable.
“Alright, I guess we’ll chill out for awhile,” Captain Pappin said.
“What do you want for supper, sir? We got grapes, grapes and grapes,” said a soldier.
“And for dessert, raisins,” said a young soldier.
“We got some chicken too, sir,” said another, eyeing the live fowl in the yard.
An older soldier cut in: “We found a lot of artillery shells and casings in a lot of the buildings.”
“They use them as lawn ornaments,” said a young corporal, with a broad smile. “We use garden gnomes, they use 155-millimetre shells.”
The battle paused through the night but continued the next morning, September 8, when the Taliban made several counterattacks on the advancing troops. A mortar exploded not far from the spot where I was sitting, and later in the day I found myself hunkered down with the Nomads on the roof of a two-storey mud building that had recently been used by a farmer for drying grapes into raisins. This became a bunker as the Canadians exchanged sporadic fire with enemies hidden in a line of trees. We heard the rattle of an old machine gun in the foliage, and the soldiers pounded the spot with a hail of gunfire, brass casings piling up around their boots. As evening fell, the blasts from turret guns looked like red streaks as hot metal slugs flew through the dusk. Over and over, the international forces slammed ordnance into the Taliban positions and the valley fell silent, only to erupt again when a brave or foolhardy insurgent poked out from between the trees.
The soldiers chatted casually during the long breaks between volleys. A Canadian corporal told me he didn’t think anybody back home would believe the intensity of the fight: “Our nation is pretty much pacifist, that’s what it is,” he said. “But we’re actually at war, and that doesn’t sit well with a lot of people. It’s like, ‘Yeah? We’ve got an army?’ I actually run into some people who didn’t know we had an army.”
Later on, a more experienced soldier was in the middle of explaining the sound created by a rocket-propelled grenade, saying it resembles the noise of a toy bottle rocket, when we got a live demonstration. Something whizzed by our heads and exploded.
“Okay, that was close,” the soldier said, adding: “See, it does sound like a bottle rocket.” He grinned like a maniac as gunfire erupted again.
Some of the soldiers clearly enjoyed the full-throated battle. “This is what the boys trained f
or,” said a grizzled warrant officer, watching the troops firing grenades, mortars, cannons and machine guns. “This is the epitome of my career, this moment here.”
It felt like a decisive moment, but it wasn’t. Few insurgents remained to block the international forces after days of air strikes, but the troops still moved cautiously. During a pause in the fighting, I followed Captain Pappin over to a hill where a US platoon commander was surveying the fields. Lieutenant Ryan Edwards had already spent seven months in Afghanistan, longer than the average six-month deployment for soldiers with the Canadian battle group. After chatting for awhile about their next moves, and staring out at the rustling fields where they suspected the insurgents were hiding, the American turned to the Canadian officer and offered some frank observations.
“The last place we were at,” the lieutenant said, “pretty much every day, it was all about survival. My platoon was twenty-seven, twenty-eight [men]. Pretty much every firefight we had they [the insurgents] would have about one hundred at least. We’d just take human wave assaults at our position, just one after the other after the other. And then ambushes every time we left. That was just a dogfight. There was no real ground to keep. It was just who had the most ammo.”
The Canadian officer looked concerned. “But if you have a good defensive position?”
“Fortunately we had a good piece of high ground,” the American said, nodding and scuffing the dirt with his boot. “Day after day, we’d go out in between attacks and fight them in their territory. They’d come back to ours, we’d go back to theirs. We’d inflict thirty, forty casualties at a time. It was just that. But the problem was, that was where they lived. They didn’t have to come in. That’s what we found with the strongest points. Taliban weren’t coming into it. That’s where they lived. So a lot of them we’d kill, their house was ten metres away from it. So you’d have their wife and kids out there going, ‘Oh, you killed my husband! He was innocent!’ And I’m like, ‘So the machine gun in his hands right now? He was innocent?’ ”
He added, sarcastically, “That place was a jewel.”
The officers talked about other topics, but the US lieutenant circled back to his original idea: that the international troops were fighting the Taliban near the insurgents’ own homes. This contradicted the public statement from the United States and other NATO governments at the time, which described the insurgents as the nomadic remnants of the Taliban army, wintering in Pakistan and spending the summers fighting in Afghanistan. The international troops wanted to portray themselves as protecting villagers from the marauding invaders—but like so many other soldiers, the American lieutenant had realized he was fighting the villagers themselves.
It was a rebellion, not an invasion.
“There was definitely a lot of casualties on both sides,” the lieutenant continued. “That was one of the biggest strongholds they had. And it was not so much a terrain issue, it was like, that’s where they lived. So it was just a huge absolute monster fight.”
“They were fighting for hearth and home,” Captain Pappin said.
“Yeah, so now they’re fighting for home,” the American continued. “So we basically found a dirt hill right above them, and just moved in. That’s where I lived. At that point, nobody supports you, nobody likes you, nobody even wants to get near you. And it was night after night, just constant. And finally we just broke them.”
“Killed enough of them, and they fucking …” the Canadian said.
“They just finally, yeah, they finally just—we just finally broke their spirits,” said the American. “ ’Cause really it was like we moved in and pretty much 100 per cent of everybody else—we didn’t say anything—they just moved out. Entire villages deserted overnight. And we were like, ‘Yeah, that’s probably not a good sign.’ And pretty much from there it was like, ‘Let’s do it.’ ”
“Fuck,” I interrupted. “Well, it worked.” The Canadian and American officers turned to look at me like I was an idiot. The battles described by the US lieutenant had taken place in Zabul, a province I had recently profiled as an example of successful counter-insurgency efforts. I figured those battles had won a measure of calm, but I was wrong. Nobody’s spirit was broken. The violence would get worse in Zabul the next year, and the year after, and the year after, and the year after. The exhausted look on the American officer’s face should have tipped me off.
Operation Medusa’s final assault happened on September 11, 2006, on the fifth anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. On the north side of the battlefield, the commander of Bravo Company gave a rousing speech as troops warmed themselves around garbage fires at dawn. “It’s September 11,” he said. “Is that symbolic? Damn right, it’s symbolic. It’s the reason why we’re here.” More than a week of relentless bombing had left the former Taliban stronghold a shattered landscape of ruined buildings, littered with shrapnel and unexploded bombs. Fires gutted insurgent hideouts and continued to burn. Estimates of the Taliban numbers in those fields had climbed into the hundreds during the operation, but when NATO made its final attack the soldiers expected to find only a handful of insurgents. Still, the intelligence had proven disastrously wrong in the past, so the troops blasted into their objectives with bone-rattling intensity. Engineers ran up to the walls of farmhouses and set up charges using so much plastic explosive that the detonation kicked up rolling clouds that swept over the troops like the end of the world, blotting out the sun and immersing them in an otherworldly universe of filtered light and falling debris. Sometimes the sheer oomph of those explosions made the soldiers shake their heads and swear.
“Jesus,” said a soldier, after a particularly big blast.
“Hoooly,” said another.
“What the fuck was that?” said Captain Pappin.
“Fucking rain of fucking building,” I replied.
Building materials were falling from the sky: wood, stone, mud. A chunk hit a soldier on the wrist and smashed his plastic watch. We hunkered down, listening to the rubble clattering on our helmets. Then we got up and charged through the blast holes. At first, the soldiers went around each corner with their rifles high and ready, lobbing grenades to clear a path. They blew open doors with shotguns and even punched their gloved fists through obstacles. But their pace slowed as the day continued and they found little except abandoned rooms. The group of soldiers I was following paused for a break from the midday sun, sheltering in a leafy courtyard and eating tomatoes from the garden.
“My wife, she doesn’t watch the news,” a soldier said. “She stopped six or seven years ago. She’s like, there’s nothing good on the news. Especially for a military wife, right? She’d prefer not to know. She works at a call centre, and there’s a shitload of girls who have military husbands. And they’re all like, ‘Oh my God, you know who died today?’ She’s like, ‘I don’t want to know.’ ”
Another man chimed in: “Yeah, it’s always, ‘Ahhh, my baby’s coming home in a box!’ I’m like, no, no, no.”
This got some rueful laughter. It’s easy to forget how much soldiers laugh. Years later, listening to my audio recordings of firefights, I’d be amazed at how the sound of gunfire was interspersed with gruff merriment. “Blood trail leads into the marijuana,” I observed at one point, noticing a bleeding insurgent had staggered into a field of cannabis. “Well, if you were dying, wouldn’t you want to go happy?” said a laughing soldier. Maybe we were all giddy from sleep deprivation, or dehydrated by the sun.
Some of the humour also had a darker edge.
“Let’s commence with the killing,” said a beefy corporal.
“What do you know about killing, fatboy? We ain’t killing no burgers here,” said another.
Shortly afterward, a soldier sat down heavily and wiped sweat from the lenses of his protective goggles. “Fuck me, I want to shoot somebody. I’m serious. This pisses me off,” he said.
“You’ll get your chance,” I said.
“I already had a chance the other day, and I want more,” he
said. “I’m in the infantry. I didn’t join this to make fucking changes in the world, other than population depreciation.”
I laughed at this, too, but I also felt a measure of sadness. These young soldiers might as well have been exploring a distant planet. The Panjwai valley was an alien landscape to these troops, and I started to feel that the sheer magnitude of this dislocation was somehow a part of the conflict. That night as the troops slept, I opened my laptop and tried to understand these feelings by tapping out a few paragraphs. I probably looked like a strange intruder myself as I sat with my computer in a pile of straw, under the arched roof of an Afghan farmer’s empty house. Swarms of moths fluttered against my screen, the brightest light in the valley.
This war is tribal, I wrote. That’s the heartbeat of the battle. Down beneath the layers of ideas and politics, across the world from the leaders who sent the soldiers into battle, in this ancient land of wars, the ceremony of conflict followed old ways. The soldiers who knew the history, the ones who read books when not carrying guns, said they could feel the presence of the Greeks, the British, the Russians, and all the great powers that trampled the same fields. The other soldiers only felt something shiver through them, something that made them fall silent, put away their dirty magazines and stare across the Stone Age landscape, rubbing the plastic stocks of their assault rifles in the same reassuring way that Alexander’s men would have handled their spears. Out there, somewhere in the foliage, in soil worked by hands with the same methods for a hundred generations, was a hostile tribe. These enemies behaved differently from us, in a manner so outlandish that it was easy to believe anything about them. They attacked and disappeared. They died and disappeared, too, dragged away by their comrades. Every soldier had heard stories about Russian troops in the 1980s who were captured by insurgents, about the rape of prisoners. Some of the older soldiers laughed scornfully at these tales, but younger ones repeated them with wide eyes. Most of them said they would save their last bullet for suicide. The rest of the bullets were for killing, and the soldiers did want to kill. Of course they also wanted to build Afghanistan into a country, they wanted peace and security and all the nice things they were told to fight for, but the real motivation was more primal. Many of them had friends who died in Taliban ambushes or bombings. The rest of them talked about September 2001, about the challenge to the Western way of life by religious fanatics. Their commanders avoided using words like “revenge” and “payback,” but in the ranks they were not so cautious. A dangerous tribe inhabited these fields, and the troops wanted to fight.