Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Including the Taliban medic but not the wounded, nineteen enemy fighters or suspected collaborators were captured that day—an unusually large haul, most of them netted during house-to-house raids that the Afghan National Army conducted after dark with a fire team from the Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command. Problem was, no one wanted them the next day. So while the ANA bickered with the ANP about what to do with them—the provincial jail in Gardez was full, complicating matters—a squad from an engineer company started constructing a temporary holding pen south of the ANP’s command center on Route Falcon. Lockwood’s nine-man squad was attached for security, a relief to them: Shaken and exhausted from the previous day’s fight at Tor Kalay, the men welcomed a day of recuperative overwatch. Their Strykers were even more battered; the squad left the base in an MRAP, a heavier and more lumbering armored vehicle with an exposed gun turret, while mechanics rehabbed the Strykers.

  The site of the holding pen was a long-abandoned walled courtyard, with a small building and crumbling guard tower attached, sitting about a hundred yards back from Route Falcon and backing up against an abrupt slope of blue pines and boulders. When the Taliban attacked—in something akin to a cavalry charge, rolling down from the steep slope like a human avalanche—the driver and the gunner leapt into the MRAP to back it into a better position for firing. Then an RPG struck it, shrapnel blinding the driver and breaking the gunner’s forearm. Cameron was helping Lockwood clear the two men from the MRAP when a bullet struck the gunner in the kneecap and dropped him to the dirt—a ricochet, possibly, or a missed shot at Cameron or Lockwood, or, to Cameron’s thinking, a gratuitous cruelty, a late hit in football speak, a violation needing payback.

  That’s when Cameron muttered “Goddammit”—“just put out, you know,” as Lockwood told Euclide Abbascia, “like he’s playing poker and got his tenth crap hand in a row”—and climbed into the MRAP. Lockwood, escorting the hopping gunner to where a medic was waiting behind the wall outside the courtyard, figured Cameron was double-checking to be sure the vehicle was clear. He was expecting Cameron to show up behind him in a matter of seconds.

  And then he heard the MRAP’s .50-caliber heavy-barrel machine gun firing in fat, hot, suicidal bursts.

  “Shit,” he groaned, in fair summary. The squad had guns firing from both the sides of the open gateway and another at the outside of the courtyard’s southwest corner, but the Taliban attackers had more guns, maybe three times more, and also, as they began popping onto the attached building’s roof and as one went shinnying his way up to the guard tower, increasingly better positions. Lockwood screamed at Cameron to get out and get back; but Cameron says he never heard him, not until the sergeant was below him in the MRAP.

  Just how many enemy fighters Cameron killed that morning—firing more than three hundred rounds while exposed in that gun turret, with his furious squad leader rushing into the vehicle to load for him and curse at him and load some more—is unclear. He let the fighters crest the walls and then mowed them down once their feet touched the ground—a sign of at least semi-lucid thinking, since shooting them at the top of the wall would’ve discouraged the fighters behind them, who, blind to their comrades’ fates inside the courtyard, kept climbing over. Cameron raked the mountainside behind them as well, trapping the fighters between the rear wall and the slope and making it possible for the squad’s grenadier to launch several catastrophic booms back there. As in any combat situation, teamwork was vital and credit for the outcome diffused: Sergeant Diego Cordon shot the fighter who’d managed to climb the guard tower from where, just a few second later, he would’ve had an easy bead on Cameron, and the engineer company was able to keep the Talibs from flanking the north side of the courtyard. And luck, that infantryman’s oldest friend, also played a cameo: A recon team later solved the mystery of why the first RPG was also the last by finding its launcher’s mangled body on the mountainside, a stopped or cracked tube having caused the grenade to detonate into his shoulder. Yet the merit of Cameron’s half-crazed valor, even to the members of his squad who’d later distance themselves from Cameron, is undisputed. “We were this close to being overrun,” says one, leaving a hair’s width of air between his pinched fingertips. “Without that firepower, without him sticking himself up there like he did, I don’t think I’d be sitting here talking today. I don’t know that most of us would.”

  Still, Lockwood was incensed. “You, Harris, right there, you,” he came charging at Cameron a short while afterward, after First Platoon arrived and a Warthog bombed the slope into a funnelform of gravel. Cameron was trying to smoke, his hands shaking so badly from either nerves or recoil that he was struggling to meet the cigarette with his mouth. His helmet, Lockwood saw, was gouged from where a bullet had glanced it. “You’re a stupid motherfucker, you know that?” He was drill-sergeanting him, spit-spraying him, close enough to Cameron to bite his nose off. “Did your mama raise you stupid or did you just figure it out all by yourself?”

  The outcome didn’t matter, not to Lockwood: Cameron had disobeyed his order to get down and out of the MRAP. Had Lockwood, as squad leader, chosen to break contact with the enemy, and retreat to a hypothetically safer position, Cameron’s “Rambo bullshit”—Lockwood’s semi-fond phrase—would’ve forced upon the sergeant the impossible choice between abandoning his soldier or surrendering his own combat authority. (Cameron, for his part, would later say it wasn’t insubordination so much as miscommunication: He thought Lockwood was ordering him to “get down” into a more protected, crabbed posture, more of an insistent coaching tip than a command.) Yet Lockwood’s anger was of a giddy, diluted kind—“where you want to high-five someone with one hand,” as he puts it, “and smack him upside the head with the other.” And Cameron’s meek, almost mewling defense—“Sorry, Sarge, I just lost my temper”—somehow drained it entirely. Lockwood found himself clenching his teeth to kill the smile his face wanted to form, one clear fact glowing and buzzing in his mind as the adrenaline leeched from his veins: every member of the squad, himself included, was alive. And if all of it wasn’t due to this beautiful motherfucker in front of him, most of it sure was.

  Lockwood left Cameron and walked about twenty paces before wheeling slowly back around. The rest of the squad, sitting in a line against the outside wall, was in a victorious lather, rehashing the play-by-play, bumping fists, suckling their canteens and groaning happily how much better cold beer would taste at the moment, yet despite the frequent cheers they were whooping his direction and their entreaties to join them, Cameron was keeping to himself, chainsmoking inside the courtyard—closer in spirit, if not in yardage, to the corpses heaped against the bullet-pitted walls.

  Lockwood stood there frowning. He was feeling a keen spear of fascination, lodged deeper than ever, about this quiet, blue-eyed, scar-faced, lank-framed, tender-voiced, violent-hearted soldier of his, both the one he’d found vomiting outside the Taliban medic hut eighteen hours earlier and the one who’d just pulled that kamikaze stunt in the MRAP’s gun turret, who still didn’t know or didn’t care that a chunk of his helmet was missing, the one whose hands Lockwood could still see trembling as a cigarette went wobbling toward his lips. He was reminded of something his mother’d once told him, when as a boy Damarkus was pestering her with questions about his missing father and after a long sigh through her nose she’d made to shut him down: “The best kind of people in this world, D, but also the worst kind—they’re riddles. You know what a riddle is? It’s something that don’t want to be solved. They do things that don’t make sense, and no matter how hard you try you can’t never figure them out. But you can’t help yourself trying. You’ll stop eating before you stop trying.”

  Operation Safe Passage ended with the August 20 elections. The Afghan government’s official turnout, for Paktika Province, came in at 626 percent of the eligible voting population—a patently absurd figure, a numerical punchline. From Bravo Company’s perspective, t
he turnout looked closer to nil. Not a single female was seen entering a polling station. By late afternoon, at the Tor Kalay schoolhouse, only five people had been seen going in to vote. When the local ANA commander sought Lieutenant Cantwell’s permission to close the polling early, Cantwell spluttered a fierce objection. Yet with an inscrutably straight face the commander explained to him: Tor Kalay’s election officials had run out of ballots. The box was full. Cantwell shook his head as a long groan fell out of him, trailing into a sigh. This was what they’d fought for, he tried not thinking: five voters and a white box crammed with bullshit.

  Their own mission correspondingly finished, the Taliban fighters slid back into Pakistan to regroup or else ghosted back into the local populace. Several days of relative quiet followed. On one of these, during a dismounted recon patrol, Lockwood’s squad stopped to rest in a spinney of pines on a cliff brow overlooking a tributary of the Weca Sega. This was remote country, far from any village, where even the trees seemed calmer and less troubled, their trunks unscarred and their branches unbroken, and where Cameron, for the first time since landing in Afghanistan, noted birds other than vultures. Their songs startled and disoriented him, and for a moment even homesickened him, as if he were hearing the impossible chimes of an ice cream truck. Across the deep gorge, in the distance, were the saw teeth of the border mountains, a craggy range servicemen called the Big Uglies; but they didn’t look so ugly now, tinged violet by the canted afternoon sunlight and requiring little imagination to be seen as the spine of a dragon bedded down astride the horizon—half malevolent but half mystical too. Plunging their gaze downward the squad’s members could see a silver stream needling its way through the gorge bottom and curving around an outwash of stones directly below. This was where one of the men, squinting through his rifle scope, saw something more. “Y’all ain’t gonna believe this,” he announced, “but I’m looking at one…two…three sets of titties right now. I am straight-up not shitting you. Afghan titties at six o’clock.”

  The speed at which the rest of the squad shouldered and sighted their weapons could not have been quicker had an impending ambush been declared. Three women were bathing in the stream—two of them young, roughly the age of most of the peeping squad members, and the other, perhaps their mother, in her middle years. For a while the soldiers were not just silent but breathless. The only glimpses of live woman-skin they’d seen since landing in Paktika Province were occasional faces in windows, quick bronze flashes of cheeks and foreheads that retreated at the soldiers’ first glance; otherwise, as one soldier liked to joke, the burqa-shrouded women were indistinguishable from Pac-Man ghosts. One of the younger women was standing in knee-deep water wringing out her long black hair; the other one splashed her, and a playful, bouncy chase ensued. “Oh…my…god,” one of the soldiers moaned.

  “I’m gonna say naked chicks are a sure sign this ain’t Talib territory,” another one theorized, pretending to be considering the mission.

  “Lookit the bush on that one,” said another, pretending nothing. “It’s huuuuge. Looks like she’s giving birth to a Yeti baby.”

  “Unnnhh. If I bust a load right now it’s gonna land in Pakistan.”

  “Someone give that man grid coordinates.”

  So intently were the men peering into their scopes and binoculars that no one in the squad noticed that two of its members weren’t likewise engaged. Staff Sergeant Lockwood glanced over at Cameron, who, eyes bouncing, smiled nervously back.

  * * *

  In late September, the soldiers of Bravo Company learned they were moving. The reasons they heard for this were myriad and opaque. One was that the brigade’s eight-wheeled Stryker vehicles, which’d proven so invaluable in Iraq, were flopping in the gnarlier terrain of Afghanistan—no surprise to the enlisted men, who’d taken to calling them “Kevlar coffins.” The Strykers were too wide to navigate many of Afghanistan’s scrawny mountain roads, prompting some units to risk removing the vehicles’ slat side armor, and their flat bottoms weren’t bearing up against blasts from the Taliban’s more powerful brand of IEDs. Another reason the soldiers heard whispered was that losses were too high; the Two-Forty-Four alone had seen eight men killed (including Cameron’s original squad leader, Staff Sergeant Leroy Hooper) and thirty-one wounded (including, again, three men from Cameron’s tattered squad). The Army would later concede that the brigade, swept into that summer’s surge of troops, had been dropped into intense combat without sufficient training and preparation. But ISAF’s Regional Command South didn’t traffic in reactive measures, not publicly anyway: They were breaking up the brigade and dispersing its units, they said, for strategic gains.

  What those strategic gains might be wasn’t immediately visible from Combat Outpost Hila, one hundred and twenty miles west of FOB Barmal in Zabul Province. At eight thousand feet above sea level, the outpost occupied the top of a mounded buttress—a dwarf cousin to the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks to its north and west—in a thin and lifeless-looking alpine valley known as Darah Khujz. The outpost’s appearance befitted its remote location: a cramped, two-acre assemblage of mustard-colored Quonset huts and plywood bunkers and homemade latrines and a heart-shaped mortar pit, all girdled by five-foot hedgerows of dirt-filled Hesco bags.

  The outpost was laid out in the shape of a cleaver. In the handle section was a scatter of mud-and-stone huts housing the outpost’s Afghan National Army contingent. These dated back to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, when Hila came into its original existence as an outpost for Soviet forces battling the mujahideen. The mud huts weren’t the only Soviet remnant, however: There was a junkyard, too, a snarled pile of bent steel and rusted artillery and fragged wreckage. At its center was a corroded and sun-bleached but mostly intact Soviet BTR-60, or Bronya, an eight-wheeled, tank-like armored personnel carrier that’d long ago been stripped of its tires and sat now like some grim colossus from antiquity, Ozymandias in the ’Stan. The symbolism was obvious but everyone took pains to ignore it, even as they added American junk to the Soviet heap.

  One additional Soviet remnant Bravo Company learned about during its orientation: land mines. The area of operations had never fully been cleared. The Soviets usually marked the mines they laid with painted rocks, white paint on one side and red on the other. The mine, they were told, was somewhere on the red side.

  Nearly every facet of life was drastically different at Hila. On the low end of those differences: no running water, no hot food, no electricity save for what a diesel generator supplied the command post, no internet, no phones, and no way to or from the outpost except via helicopter or on foot. On the high side, however: Nobody was pelting them with mortars or RPGs. You could linger outside without a neck-prickle forcing you to constantly hawk-eye the mountainsides for movement. You could smoke a cigarette without the low-grade apprehension that it might be your last.

  During their first week Bravo Company fielded a few welcoming potshots from the surrounding slopes. No one got hit, though a bullet did whiz in and out of a latrine that a sergeant was occupying, granting him the rare literal claim to having had the shit scared out of him. The company’s commanding officer, a pink-cheeked Minnesotan named Gary Lindholm, opted to answer these potshots with sanguine force, calmly targeting the shooters with mortars. A gray puff would appear on the mountainside, followed by silence and then, from inside the wire, rowdy cheering. This felt like great and virtuous sport to the soldiers, their minds still jangling from their losses in Paktika, until they learned that the Taliban paid young goat-herder boys five dollars a day to take those shots.

  Three times a week each squad walked what Cameron calls “meet-and-greet” patrols and what the brass was now calling KLE patrols, for Key Leader Engagement: the officers huddling over tea with village elders while the enlisted men outside would scan village men’s fingerprints and retinas with handheld devices, or distribute sacks of rice and corn, all the while trying, post-Paktika,
to feel or at least act unfazed in the presence of Afghan civilians. Medical teams sometimes choppered in to set up one-day surgical or dental clinics in the villages, a squad assigned to hump along. Any grittier stuff was mostly reserved for night patrols, to confer upon the locals the impression of a benign U.S. presence, but around the Darah Khujz valley that autumn, unlike elsewhere in Afghanistan, there wasn’t much grit to be had. During the five months he was posted at Hila, Cameron fired his weapon on just two occasions; Lockwood never fired his at all.

  The result of this sudden shift, for the troops, was a kind of mental whiplash. In their three months at FOB Barmal they’d pinballed from one firefight to the next, freebasing adrenaline, their muscles coiled and fists clenched even during sleep. But now, instead of infantrymen, they were feeling like old-timey cops strolling a beat, sarcastic whistling sometimes breaking out in the patrol lines. Hearts and minds were no longer something to line up in crosshairs; they were to be cajoled, flattered, bribed, won.