by Brandon Webb
I got back to Cassidy on the radio and told him what happened. I could see him now, going back and forth with the farmers, who were hotly denying everything. I’d seen enough to know they were lying.
Thinking back over the whole sequence, I didn’t see what I would have done differently. With the information I had, giving this farmer the benefit of the doubt still seemed to me the right decision. Yes, these Afghan village people would sometimes harbor other Afghans who were Taliban or Arabs we would call al Qaeda. For the most part, though, they were not bad people; they were just trying to get along and survive, to go on living there in the mountains the way they had been for generations without getting caught in the crosshairs of battle.
When we first arrived, in Kuwait and Oman and finally Afghanistan, we were hyped up and angry and ready to deliver payback. We were coming right off the shock of 9/11, and we had all sorts of people e-mailing us from the States, voicing their support and cheering us on. Underneath that caricature of the white devil and “3 ECHO” on our platoon patch, I’d had a legend stitched that said, EMBRACE THE HATE. That’s the mode we were operating in, and our rules of engagement certainly supported that. When in doubt, take them out. However, as we got more immersed in the culture and started seeing things from the point of view of the people who lived there, things began to shift a little. I’d been in Afghanistan long enough now to understand that not everyone had to die. I didn’t want to shoot anybody who didn’t need shooting.
Still, the shot I didn’t take sometimes haunts me as much as some of the shots I did.
SATURDAY, JANUARY 12
By day 7 we were starting to wrap up the operation and prepare to return to base. We had now been holed up in this mountain range for a week and had cleared out a ton of enemy resources, taken a handful of prisoners, and racked up dozens of enemy KIA (killed in action), but there were still a lot of bad actors in the area that we hadn’t been able to track down. Even our surveillance tactics of a few days ago had had limited success. Sitting in that one spot for the whole day, we weren’t able to observe nearly as much as we’d have liked.
Osman and I had an idea. We wanted to get out there on our own, just the two of us, and patrol the area without having to be tied to a whole squad. A two-man mobile surveillance unit.
We pitched the idea to Cassidy. We proposed that the two of us go out, insert at two in the morning, and spend the entire day scouting the area. See what was really going on out there and what we could turn up.
There was a checkpoint we had observed, maybe 5 miles south of our position, a controlled vehicle access point usually manned by two to four guys at any one time. Because of the Army Special Forces incident that had mistakenly taken out a bunch of Karzai’s people, we were especially cautious about making sure who these guys were before we took any action. Osman and I had been watching these guys for days, and by now we were clear that they were Taliban. They were facilitators, ground warriors whose primary mission was to run combat supplies back and forth across the Afghanistan-Pakistan border—money, passports, intel, and other tools of the trade. We also knew they’d been surveilling our own platoon. Hell, they’d nearly ambushed us more than once. Now we wanted to go out countersurveilling the guys who were surveilling us.
Cassidy and Chief Dye gave us the thumbs-up. That night we mapped out our route, got our plan together, and packed up our kit.
We headed out early the next morning, about 3:00 A.M. Before leaving we had checked in with Mark, who was our comms guy, and told him what we’d be doing throughout the day and to make sure to check us in with TOC and let that C-130 know they’d have two friendlies out there. We had our IR glint tape on, a special reflective tape like joggers wear at night, except that instead of reflecting visible-range light it reflects infrared. We hoped they’d see that, but it sure wasn’t something we’d want to count on. We did not want to be little green heat trails in the C-130’s video game.
By this point Osman and I were totally garbed out in traditional Afghan gear. We were wearing wool shawls and Afghan roll-up hats; we had water, bullets, a little food, and guns. At a casual glance, we could have passed for Taliban. We’d gotten the lay of the land and were now running around those goat trails, too. As much as it was possible to do, we had become mirror images of the guys we were about to hunt.
We got to the bottom of the hill, humped over to our first observation post, settled in, and waited for the light to come up. Osman looked over at me and said, “Sure hope Mark called that damn C-130.” I nodded. I sure hoped so, too. We were pretty vulnerable out there and had put our lives in Mark’s hands.
The cold morning air hung thick in the valley. Each warm exhale of breath briefly fogged the outside corner of my scope as I waited and watched.
There.
I could just make him out: a middle-aged man, wrapped in traditional Afghan dress, darting furtively back and forth and breaking down his makeshift campsite with seasoned efficiency. I noticed a slight crook in his step—an old wound, perhaps a story from the days of the Soviet occupation. The man had been at his clandestine trade for years. He would be at it for less than twenty-four hours more. I saw a faint wisp of smoke from the campfire he had just extinguished, and my brain automatically registered the direction and intensity of the gust of breeze that flirted with the smoke, calculating windage, distance, and elevation. We could take him out right then and there; Cassidy had given us the go-ahead. If we did, though, it would likely be our only kill of the day, because the moment you fire your weapon you’ve risked compromising your position, and you never know who else is lurking around the corner or somewhere behind you, especially in an environment like this. Besides, we had a bigger strategic goal. We could kill one … or we could find them all, mark their positions, and they would all die.
I’ve since been deer hunting quite a few times; that’s what this was like—except that we didn’t expect to shoot anyone. Today it was not our marksmanship we’d be practicing but our stalking craft. As much time, energy, training, and focus as we put into our marksmanship skills, the core skill of the expert sniper is not to shoot. It is to hunt. If intellectual capacity is a sniper’s foremost qualification, the number two trait is patience. We will take out any enemy we have to when the situation calls for it, whether that means using a rifle, a handgun, a knife, or our bare hands. Yet the sniper’s fundamental craft is not killing a person, but being able to get close enough to do so. Osman and I were on a classic sniper stalking mission: track, sneak up, observe, and disappear again, leaving no trace behind.
The man was moving out now, ready to start his day. So were we.
A short while later we found the spot. The man and a few of his cohorts had been using this site to lay up at night: bedroll stash, food and water, some ammo, evidence of a small fire for cooking. Chances were very good they’d be back that night. We marked the GPS coordinates and backed out again, leaving everything exactly as we found it, and moved on.
We spent the day out there, covered a good 10 to 12 kilometers and located about half a dozen sites.
We got back to camp about midnight. After reporting in, we sat down and put our notes together, lining up all the coordinates so we had a tight sequence. By this time we were already familiar with the process of calling these coordinates in ourselves. Brad and Eric had spent so much time over the week calling in air strikes that they’d gotten some of us to spell them at times, just so they could take a break to eat and get some rest. By this point we had already called in a lot of ordnance in this valley.
Now, in the middle of the night, they set Osman and me up on the radio, and we called in our sequence ourselves. We had laid a gigantic trap, and now we would be the ones to spring it.
The site we had occupied with Chief Dye that first night at Zhawar Kili gave us an amazingly clear view of the valley below, such that we were able to gaze out with our binos and get an easy visual on all the locations we’d marked during the day. One by one, we saw the barest flicker
here, a glint there, telltale flashes as they fired up their cookstoves and campfires signaling us that, yes, this site was occupied again tonight. We called in our coordinates, one by one.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
One after the other, we called in the numbers to our F-18s overhead and sent them all to hell.
SUNDAY, JANUARY 13
After a week of forensic spelunking, and even with all the air strikes we had called in, we knew we still had not come close to destroying all the equipment, weaponry, living supplies, and other matériel that was stashed away in that mountainside. This place was a Fort Knox of war-making wealth. There was no way we could carry all this stuff out with us, and we didn’t want these guys coming in here after we left and digging out their stashes of ammo and whatever else they might be able to find. So we choreographed one last hurrah. All the intel we’d gathered over the week was orchestrated into one final bombing session, the largest since the bombing of nearby Tora Bora exactly one month earlier. We pounded that place, and caved in the side of the mountain.
Our twelve-hour mission had turned into a military and political bonanza. In a network of more than seventy caves and tunnels, we’d uncovered nearly a million pounds of ammunition and equipment, along with a ton of intelligence, including extensive papers documenting cross-border traffic and other aspects of enemy tactical plans. More than 400,000 pounds of ordnance was dropped on the targets we flagged. We had destroyed one of the largest terrorist/military training facilities in the country and had taken out a significant number of enemy personnel.
The following day, Monday, January 14, on the ninth day of our twelve-hour mission, we boarded a pair of helos and lifted out of Zhawar Kili, bound for Bagram and Kandahar.
TEN
COALITION
When we arrived back at Kandahar we found a buzz going through the entire camp. Our planned twelve-hour outing had turned into one of the most high-profile missions of the war effort to date, and everyone was fired up about it.
We debriefed with Harward and could tell he was proud of us. It was good for us and our reputation. Some of the other snipers, especially the Danes and Germans, started requesting that Osman and I come over and debrief with them so they could learn more about the terrain and the forces we were up against. The notoriety of our success at Zhawar Kili soon led to a request from the Kommando Spezialkräfte (KSK), the German Special Operations team assigned to Task Force K-Bar. They had been slated to go with the Army Rangers on a direct action mission, but after that disastrous ODA mission went bad they changed their minds and said they would rather join forces with Navy SEALs.
After the attacks on 9/11 the world in general felt a tremendous amount of solidarity with America, and nobody more so than Germany. The German people were horrified at what had happened in New York City, Arlington, and Shanksville, and our KSK buddies were pretty much in the same frame of mind we were: They wanted to get into the action.
The historical significance of the fact that we were going out on a joint raid with German Special Operations was lost on none of us. The last time the Germans were on a battlefield was in World War II, and then we were on opposite sides of the trenches. Ditto in World War I. Hell, there were Hessian mercenaries arrayed against us in the Revolutionary War. This would be the first military mission with German and American forces working together since … well, since ever.
The Germans were amazingly well trained and extremely solid guys. Most of them also spoke decent conversational English, so communication was not an issue. It was about time we got to work together, and our association was one of the highlights of my experience in Afghanistan.
Our mission briefing started off with the Germans’ OIC, Major Mike. (I never learned his last name, and who knew if “Michael” was even his real first name, since most of us were going by nicknames anyway, and they all had fake identities.) Major Mike had developed the mission plan jointly with Cassidy, who would get input from all of us on particulars of helo landing site, insertion points, and other elements of the plan.
This was an HVT mission, meaning high-value target. We were going to descend on an Afghan village called Prata Ghar, a handful of miles northwest of Zhawar Kili, in search of an important al Qaeda higher-up. Prata Ghar was also the site of another cave complex with known al Qaeda ties. The site consisted of one large central building, four stories tall, surrounded by about a dozen smaller buildings. As this was a joint raid, we would divide up the village and field of fire: The Germans would take down the large central building, and we would comb and clear all the others.
We flew up to Bagram in a C-130 (by now my preferred mode of air travel) the day before and prepared for the op. As usual we would be leaving in the middle of the night so we could get on target hours before first light, when anyone in their right mind would be asleep. We needed to hit these guys hard and fast.
THURSDAY, JANUARY 24
We made the brief flight down to Prata Ghar in two Chinook 47s and set down on the far side of a hill, 3 or 4 klicks from the village itself and well out of sight. With its dual rotors and long slender rotor blades, the CH-47 is an extremely agile and maneuverable chopper, the bird of choice for dicey inserts. The moment we stepped out into the snow one of our guys, Forrest Walker, rolled an ankle. Dumb luck. We had to put Forrest back on the chopper and send him home, so we were now down one guy.
We took a head count, rallied up, and moved out. It was still pitch black when we reached the village about forty-five minutes later. We communicated with the German group, moved to our set points, and got ready for the signal. I knew all the other guys were experiencing the same heightened state I was, senses so acutely tuned it felt like the buzz of a high-tension wire. In our briefings we had seen a single photograph of the place, shot from a distance. The interior layout of the individual buildings was a complete unknown, which meant we would be improvising based on what we encountered, and doing so at lightning speed.
“Fifteen minutes,” came the word over our comms. We waited, still as statues. “Ten minutes.” “Five minutes.” “One minute out.” Then it was time.
We started taking the place down.
It’s an intense experience to bust into a compound like this, knowing that first, you have no idea how the place is laid out inside, second, you’ll have only seconds to act in each location if you want to retain the advantage that comes with the element of surprise, and third, the place is packed with highly motivated and determined people who are probably armed to the teeth and will not hesitate to blow your brains out if given half a chance.
Prata Ghar village was pretty big, roughly 2 square kilometers. We had about a dozen buildings to clear, and we would have to play most of it by ear.
We burst into the first room and immediately heard a woman screaming. There on a thin mattress on the floor lay a husband and wife, an infant between them. The baby couldn’t have been more than a few weeks old. The woman continued screaming her head off. It wasn’t hard to see why. Here she was, safely in bed for the night with her family, and suddenly her door was kicked in and two guys were standing there in balaclavas, pointing weapons at her and shining a SureFire flashlight beam in her eyes. No doubt she was terrified. Of course, that was the idea.
These people were clearly aiding and abetting the enemy. Villages like this one were serving as host-and-resupply stations for Taliban and al Qaeda forces. That’s why these guys didn’t have to carry around much in the way of supplies. They relied on the hospitality of these villagers to feed them and house them as they roamed around.
Of course, it wasn’t like these folks had a whole lot of options. What were they going to do, say no to those guys? Besides, to some extent they were obviously sympathetic to the cause, not only because they shared their Muslim faith but also because these were the people who had helped them fend off the Soviets when they invaded their country. What’s more, most were afraid of the mullahs and pressured through fear into helping the Taliban anyway. So we could empathize wi
th them. At the same time, though, they were harboring guys who were plotting to kill as many of us as they could.
We broke into the next room to find one of the most horrifying scenes I’ve ever witnessed. There in their bedrolls on the floor were a woman and two girls I surmised were her two teenaged daughters. They were just as surprised as the couple in the next room, but they didn’t react the same way. Having jumped up at the sound of us busting open their door, now that they saw us enter the room they immediately got back down and lay still. On their backs. The two girls looked terrified; the woman just looked at us stony-faced, betraying no emotion, with an expression that said, Just do what you came here to do. For a moment there was no sound in the room but our own ragged breathing and a quiet whimper from the youngest of the three. Osman and I stared at each other for a few seconds as the meaning of the scene sank in. These women assumed we were there to rape them. They thought if they gave no resistance, maybe we wouldn’t kill them.
“Jesus,” one of us muttered under our breath.
“It’s okay,” I mumbled to the women in bad Pashtun.
Was it their experiences with the Taliban? No, more likely the Soviets. Lord knows these people had seen enough invaders over the centuries. We moved on to the next room.
We took that place down hard and fast, plowing through room after room, villagers screaming, doors smashing and bursting, us calling out our signals so we could move fast without surprising each other—“Clear left!” “Clear right!” “All clear!” Within less than a half hour we had gone through all the buildings. We wrapped up our search, brought out a few persons of interest, then did a reclear. Now we went through the place like the soldiers in a Vietnam movie poking through rice bags and finding weapons—and there were plenty of weapons for the finding: RPGs, AK-47s, all sorts of bad stuff.