by Graeme Smith
The trouble started with a single bullet in the night. In the second week of May, a group of US special forces known as Task Force Scorpion was driving along the river north of Sangin when they hit an insurgent ambush. The Taliban fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, and one of them got a lucky shot over the chest plate in an American’s body armour. The bullet ricocheted off the man’s collarbone and down into his torso, killing him. His comrades pulled back and called for air support, including attack helicopters, fighter jets and a gunship. They guessed a few dozen insurgents were killed that evening. I heard about the incident the next morning from an American major. He had promised to take me on a patrol north of Sangin, but he cut it short and circled back to base as it became clear that this was going to be a bad day. The dirt roads were jammed with vehicles carrying the human wreckage from the previous night. Many of the victims arrived at the gates of the military base, as villagers tried to get medical treatment for the survivors and compensation for the deceased. Rusty vehicles jolted up the steep laneway to the main gates, so full of human bodies that it was hard to tell the dead from the injured. Soldiers scrambled into disaster response mode, snapping on rubber gloves and grabbing stretchers. They heaved the injured out of trucks and set up field clinics, giving the victims oxygen and intravenous drips. One man was pulled from a hatchback sedan on a folded blanket and set down on a stretcher in the shade of a metal shipping container. He was covered with blood—hands, feet, shirt—the red stains turning dark and crusty. Bewildered by the medical exams, he moaned and struggled.
“Relax, just relax. It’s fine,” a medic barked, as an interpreter murmured in Pashto.
“Hey, hey, listen to me,” the medic continued. “Can you feel your fingers? I need to know. Can you feel your fingers? Nah, he can’t feel his fingers. Probably has nerve damage. I need to know about his arm. Does this hurt? Does this hurt? Does this hurt? Is he having any problems breathing?”
The patient lolled his head and whimpered.
“Don’t move your arm, okay? Keep your arm right there,” the medic said.
“We’ve got more inbound right now,” somebody said, and all eyes turned to the stream of vehicles bringing more casualties. The governor would later estimate twenty-one civilians were killed, but nobody could know for sure. As the injured washed up at the gates of the military base I counted at least fifteen children among them. They were strangely quiet, gazing at the alien features of the base: helicopters, razor wire, medical apparatus. The boys stared hard at the female medics, who must have seemed like erotic angels in tight shirts and running shorts, a different species from the local women in burkas. A thirteen-year-old boy stood mesmerized under the shade of a hospital tent as a medical team worked on his injured uncle. Maybe he was still mildly in shock, cradling a bandaged hand with a shrapnel wound, or perhaps he was stunned by the sight of his uncle, who was missing a chunk of his back the size of a large dinner plate. A soldier peeled a dressing off the wound and the uncle winced, the skinless muscle of his shoulder glistening. The boy turned away, and I asked him what happened. A bomb collapsed his house, he said. Four of his relatives were killed, and he could hear two of his younger brothers crying under the rubble. He told them to shut up because he wasn’t sure what other dangers waited in the darkness. Scrabbling through the ruined building, he found them in a corner and dragged them out by their shoulders. At daybreak he saw a dozen of his fellow villagers lying dead. Some survivors remained on the ground, too, because people were afraid to emerge from their hiding spots and collect them. He remembered a girl flailing in the dirt with her foot blown off. “She was crying, and there was nobody to help her,” he said.
Most of the victims were members of tribes that did not usually support the Taliban in that valley. When I asked him how he felt about the insurgents after the bombing, the boy looked at me seriously. His school had been closed for a year because the Taliban had beheaded four students. Nobody in the village liked the Taliban. But even as he watched the foreign troops trying to save his uncle’s life, he couldn’t find anything nice to say about the international forces.
My notes end with this scribble: “1:53 p.m. Order to stay in CA [Canadian] area.” That’s the exact time in the afternoon when the US special forces commander tried to stop me from reporting the story about civilian casualties. He instructed that I should be confined to a remote corner of the base—and that if I wandered out of that zone, he would evict me from the base. This was a death threat, in effect. I didn’t really think the soldiers would push me outside the gates; although the special forces never had a sophisticated grasp of public relations, they probably understood how bad it would look if villagers lynched a journalist. Still, I couldn’t ignore the order. American counter-terrorism worked outside the usual rules. The special forces were pissed off and exhausted after losing one of their comrades the night before. One of them had already tried to confiscate my camera. The hapless officer assigned to drag me away was apologetic, but ultimately he was carrying a pistol and I was not. I retreated to a shady bunker.
The base was returning to normal, anyway. The flow of civilian casualties had finally dried up, and a couple of American soldiers resumed their usual banter. They saw that I was visibly shaken by the incident, so they tried some military-grade humour to smooth things over. The small guy pointed to his well-muscled friend and tried to persuade me that he served as a body double in Lord of the Rings. Then, more seriously, he asked if I had seen the porn version of the film.
“The Porn of the Rings?” I said.
“Porn of the Rings,” the big guy said, nodding and smiling. We contemplated silently, watching the afternoon heat waves. Somewhere on the other side of the camp, medics were sewing up children blasted by air strikes. Soldiers learn to avoid dwelling on such things. It was more pleasant to think about naked elves.
The next morning I was woken with a shake on the shoulder by a British officer. News had spread to his section of the camp that I had angered the US special forces on the previous day, and it turned out that I wasn’t the only person who didn’t get along with them. There was no love between the British soldiers and Task Force Scorpion, especially after the Americans mistakenly killed civilians during the ambush and sent the whole valley into an uproar. This kind of tension was remarkably common between the US forces and their NATO allies in Afghanistan. All too often, the Europeans viewed the Americans as trigger-happy cowboys, while the US soldiers saw their counterparts as weak and useless. The American counter-terrorism forces had a different mission and separate chain of command from the NATO troops; while the elite commandos hunted for threats to global security, the rest of the international forces were struggling to put down a local insurgency. Translated into action, this meant that bearded Americans ran around at night kicking down doors, while clean-shaven regular troops went on day patrols and held meetings to foster goodwill and set up the basics of government. These differences made for an uneasy dynamic among the international allies, but it helped me on that particular morning in 2007. I’d been trying for days to get permission to join a British patrol, with no success until the American commander threatened to kick me off the base. Being hated by the Americans somehow made me loved by the British. The world’s greatest military alliance was clearly dysfunctional, but its problems got me a ride into the valley.
The Taliban had enjoyed remarkable control in parts of the Sangin valley in recent months. British troops established an outpost in the middle of town in spring 2006, as part of NATO’s surge into southern Afghanistan, but what followed was a humiliating siege. The insurgents cut off the roads, forcing the troops to get supplies by helicopter. Taliban patrolled the area; I had obtained video footage of them conducting leisurely searches of cars on the highway, apparently unafraid of the British troops penned up in their base nearby. A major offensive in the spring of 2007 finally broke the siege, but insurgents still roamed the hills north of town. With the onset of fighting season, it seeme
d the Taliban were moving back toward the half-ruined settlement.
The insurgents’ new offensive brought them to the doorstep of Captain James Shaw of the 1st Battalion Grenadier Guards. He commanded one of several British teams working with Afghan forces in Sangin, sleeping alongside the local troops in a crumbling mud building near the town market. Like other outposts, this one lacked a toilet. Showers consisted of a plastic bag of water dribbled over your head. Somehow the captain had scrounged a few cans of gin-and-tonic, a rare pleasure in a country where alcohol is usually restricted, but otherwise the soldiers were living rough. Such outposts were part of a counter-insurgency strategy that called for making the troops part of the community. The thinking was that locals would start to trust the foreign soldiers if they cemented themselves in the neighbourhood, which would lead to better intelligence. In practice, many Afghans seemed to have abandoned the town. This was a pattern that repeated itself across the country, as villagers correctly saw the soldiers as magnets for trouble. Still, an old woman who visited the outpost for afternoon tea raised the captain’s hopes. She described a cache of Taliban weapons just north of the town, and gave details about how to find it. This was exactly the sort of information the foreign troops craved. Some of the soldiers were skeptical, but Captain Shaw radiated enthusiasm. His boyish face, under a brush of blonde hair, went pink with excitement as he rounded up his men. The rumoured cache was only five kilometres away, which he guessed wasn’t so far north that he risked encountering Taliban. Captain Shaw’s small unit had only three jeeps and a few pickup trucks, so he hoped to find the weapons and return without a fight.
As we bumped up the road, I leaned out of a jeep and enjoyed the breeze on my face. You can’t get that kind of experience in most of the NATO vehicles; the Dutch, Canadians and Americans had armoured carriers with layers of steel or ceramic protection between passengers and the world outside. But the British, in a fit of hubris, deployed their troops in modified Land Rovers, with improvised armour that seemed jerry-built. Somebody had lashed bullet-resistant blankets along the sides with plastic straps, a baleful attempt to make them safer, but the soldiers couldn’t do anything about the open-topped roof. Their best defence was to stay observant, swivelling their guns at every passing car as we rolled through the blasted outskirts of town. We passed empty buildings, shuttered stores and a mosque with a missing wall. Breaking into the countryside, our convoy churned past farmland that sloped away to the left. Children hauled bundles of dry poppy stalks through the fallow fields.
A few minutes outside of town, a craggy hill on our right side exploded in a shower of grey smoke streaked with dirt. Rocket-propelled grenades whistled toward us from a stand of trees on our left. I threw myself to the floor of the jeep while the soldier above me yelled and started firing. The clatter of weapons came from all around, the sound of Taliban rifles mingling with the fire from Afghan and British soldiers. The loudest bangs came from the weapon of a British soldier standing beside me, his rifle spewing brass that bounced off my helmet as I ducked and cowered. The young soldier squinted through his scope and jolted out more rounds, then swore heartily as another vehicle slammed into ours, throwing him off balance. In the first moments of the ambush, the British were jamming their vehicles into reverse and pulling back. For them, it was standard procedure: get out of the Taliban’s sights and return fire. The Afghans did the opposite, bailing out of their pickup trucks and charging forward. Two of the Afghan soldiers had been wounded, and many others had miraculously avoided injury when an anti-tank mortar slammed into their tailgate—the mortar was a dud, fortunately, and the impact only shattered a rear window. This narrow escape seemed to embolden the local troops, who advanced to a ditch and looked back at the retreating British with scorn.
Despite the Afghans’ bravery, it was the British who answered with the most firepower. After pulling a short distance away, they started hammering the tree line and a compound with machine guns. The soldier beside me jumped out of our jeep, leaving the back hatch open. For a few minutes I crouched in the open hatchway, taking photos of the firefight, until I realized the dark square doorway was framing me as an easy target. I didn’t want to give up my clear view, but fear prompted me to shut the hatch and continue watching from a small window, narrating my observations into an audio recorder. My voice sounds weirdly calm in the digital recording, as if I was stupefied by adrenaline. “I’m watching through what I hope is a bulletproof plate of glass, a tiny grilled window at the back of the troop carrier,” I said. Moments later, the microphone captured a series of high-pitched singing notes as Taliban bullets rang off the metal door and the window in front of my face. Closing the hatch had been a good decision, it turned out. The volley also confirmed that the yellow glass was, in fact, resistant to gunfire. I pressed my face against the pane to watch.
A sergeant scurried out from the cover of his vehicle to set up a mortar tube. He tried to steady the weapon while finding the range, tilting the tube until a bubble in greenish liquid indicated that he had the correct angle. Taliban bullets punched the air around him, hitting the vehicles with more of those awful high-pitched notes. The sergeant’s legs wouldn’t stop shaking. He dropped a mortar into the tube and sent it thudding into the tree line, smoke and dust rising a storey above the foliage. After a few more successful shots, as they felt themselves gaining the upper hand, a sense of euphoria seemed to overtake the sergeant and a few of his comrades. He pulled out a silver pocket camera, pressed record, and laughed wildly into the lens, setting the device on the front bumper of his jeep to capture footage of himself in action. “This is great!” a soldier shouted, above the concussive din.
Captain Shaw looked grim, however, crouching behind a vehicle with a spindly communications device. The radio told him no aircraft or artillery were ready to hit the Taliban positions; the airspace was blocked by incoming medical helicopters, ferrying wounded from another battle. Nor did the British captain have any way of talking to the Afghan troops, who seemed intent on facing the enemy despite having suffered casualties. He needed to pull them back, but they could not hear his shouts. Finally, the captain charged forward with another soldier, ducking low through the Taliban’s arcs of fire. A red flash with a loud bang kicked up smoke as something exploded in the middle of the road, perhaps a dozen metres from the British vehicles. Soldiers manning the machine guns ran out of bullets, fumbling with fresh boxes of ammunition. One screamed in pain as he inadvertently touched the hot barrel of his gun. Another gunner shouted and waved at a small girl wearing a purple dress, trying to get her to move away as she led a donkey through the crossfire between the British and the Taliban. She was too distant to hear him, just a waifish figure ambling through a dry field. At one point she appeared to stop, as if unsure which direction led to safety, and a moment later she disappeared amid the brown stalks.
Finally the young captain succeeded in hauling the Afghan troops back to their vehicles for a retreat. Another group of British soldiers arrived to cover our withdrawal, and our convoy started to return south along the gravel road. As we got moving, however, a soldier beside me noticed two men in black turbans and waistcoats cresting the hill about one hundred metres away, on the opposite side from the original ambush. They looked like civilians at first glance; then they pulled out Kalashnikov rifles and sprayed the convoy. There was a moment of surprise that we’d been outflanked, and a split second of even greater surprise that nobody was hurt by the wild shooting at nearly point-blank range. Then the attackers went down in a cloud of dust as the troops retaliated with much better aim. We sped away at full speed. “Go, go, go, go, go!” a soldier shouted. “Get us out of here.”
But it was difficult to escape the Taliban. That evening, after a medical helicopter took away the injured Afghans, shots cracked over barricades of our outpost. The night filled with sounds of men shouting and running. Somebody sent up flares, casting a ghostly light over a confused scene. The phosphorescence revealed British and Afghan soldiers wa
tching nervously over the walls, toward an empty graveyard where Taliban fighters were sneaking toward us. It was only a probing attack, intended to gauge the strength of our defences. But the truth was that our defences weren’t very strong. The British troops didn’t trust the Afghan guards to stay awake, or hold their positions in the face of an attack, so Captain Shaw ordered two-man rotations of British troops to keep watch through the night, which meant little sleep for his six men. As the flares winked out and darkness returned, Captain Shaw turned to me and offered a handgun. I refused, explaining that journalists don’t carry weapons. The young captain was insistent. “You might need it,” he said, holding out the firearm, its black polish gleaming under his headlamp. “We don’t know what will happen tonight.” His face had lost its boyishness. We had a short conversation about the fact that I was utterly incompetent with guns, but agreed that he should leave the pistol and several ammunition clips on the floor beside my sleeping mat. We spent a restless night, with the thudding noises of fighting in the distance, but the insurgents never made a serious attempt to take the outpost. Thankfully, I never had to touch the gun.
Morning brought a sleepy review of the previous day. Soldiers counted the ammunition spent, including a thousand machine-gun bullets and fifty mortar rounds. Captain Shaw held a meeting with his counterpart in the Afghan army, a platoon commander with a thick beard. The local commander was anxious to reassure his foreign friends that he had correctly judged the old woman’s intelligence about a weapons cache.
“Well, I think we did find the weapons,” Captain Shaw said. “They were fired at us.”
The Afghan estimated that the ambush included more than thirty insurgents, judging by their boldness. The British captain was skeptical of the number, guessing the Taliban group was smaller, but in any case he concluded that many more troops would be required next time he ventured north of town. The onset of the fighting season had ignited a wave of violence to Sangin; a roadside bomb exploded near our outpost that morning, the second in as many days. At another small British checkpoint nearby, tribal elders had brought the bodies of three children killed in recent battles, but they had no information about the girl in the purple dress.