One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel Fick

  Captain Eric Dill, commander of the recon platoon, held his face six inches from the map, tracing a line with his finger. Dill shaved his head bald and had a reputation for frankness and good analysis. I joined him.

  He greeted me with “One vehicle per minute at night.”

  “What?”

  “Surveillance assets report an average of one vehicle each minute on this stretch of road between sunset and sunrise.” He pointed to a black line snaking west from Kandahar toward the town of Lashkar Gah.

  “Who are they?”

  Dill arched an eyebrow. “How many Afghan farmers have you seen tooling around in Toyota pickup trucks?”

  I hadn’t seen any Afghan farmers. I hadn’t seen any Afghans at all. But I knew that the Saudis had sold the Taliban several hundred Toyota pickup trucks. They weren’t quite as identifiable as a tank with a Taliban flag painted on the side, but they were close.

  The square-headed MEU operations officer called the room to order. We minimized note taking in secret briefs, so I rolled my watch cap above my ears to hear better.

  Australians worked in the Helmand River valley to our west. Joint Special Operations Task Force South, made up of SEALs and Special Forces, operated along the Pakistani border to our east. Opposition leader Hamid Karzai continued to pressure Kandahar from the north, and another opposition commander, Gul Agha Shirzai, was moving aggressively toward the city from the eastern town of Spin Boldak. His fighters had captured a bridge only seven kilometers from Kandahar International Airport the previous afternoon. The Taliban and al Qaeda were reported to have nineteen thousand supporters in Kandahar.

  An intelligence analyst wearing jeans and a flannel jacket pushed his glasses back on his nose and stepped to the center of the room. But for the pistol on his hip, he could have been in front of a college class. He predicted that Kandahar would collapse within a week, certainly by mid-December. The Taliban were expected to defect and run for home, some to Pakistan, some to Iran, and many to the hills around Kandahar. Al Qaeda, by contrast, would be more ruthless. Many fighters would prefer death to surrender.

  “We’ll give it to ’em,” the operations officer said, then continued briefing the plan. Within an hour, a force of recon Marines would depart Rhino to drive north nearly one hundred miles. By the following morning, they were expected to identify a landing zone and a site for a patrol base near the highway between Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. LAR and CAAT, the light-armored reconnaissance company and combined anti-armor teams, would join them that afternoon. Their LAVs and Humvees would provide the bulk of the force’s punch. My platoon and a rifle platoon would follow via helicopter late that night or early the next morning. Together, we would be known as Task Force Sledgehammer. Our mission was to interdict traffic on the highway to prevent the Taliban and al Qaeda from escaping the Northern Alliance onslaught against Kandahar. Despite the task force’s name, we would be the anvil to Hamid Karzai’s hammer.

  Locking eyes with me and the other young commanders in the room, the operations officer finished with a recap of the “Five Bullets” that every Marine in our platoons had to know: mission statement, challenge and password, rules of engagement, lost Marine plan, and escape and recovery plan. It amounted to knowing what we were doing, how not to get killed by our own people, how to ensure that we were killing only bad guys, and what to do in case we got lost.

  The brief ended, and the men in the room disappeared into the dark to make their final preparations for the day to come. Eric and I stood by the compound gate. As I pulled gloves from my pocket, I asked him, “What do you think — good aggressiveness or a bridge too far?”

  Eric reflexively tugged on the magazine of the M4 rifle slung across his chest. “We’re way outnumbered, that’s for sure. But with all our airpower, it shouldn’t be a problem. I think we have to kick somebody’s ass once, and then word gets out.”

  Later that night, I walked my platoon lines to check on the Marines. After midnight, there was no ambient light within a hundred miles and probably fewer than three dozen internal combustion engines. The air was so clear that the Marines on patrol would report headlights or campfires on the horizon, only to realize that they were watching stars rise.

  My first stop was the mortar pit, where I found Staff Sergeant Marine on watch while his Marines slept.

  “Evenin’, sir,” he said.

  “Good news. Day after tomorrow, we’re flying north. Just third platoon and us, and some other parts of the BLT. I’ll have more details tomorrow.”

  Marine took the news with a quick nod, leaning to spit a stream of tobacco juice into the sand. “Good. The sooner we kill ’em, sooner we go home.”

  “What happened to all that talk about ‘golden memories and no ghosts’?”

  “That time is past. We’re committed now. No more pray for peace. Now it’s shoot to kill. Fight to win.”

  I shivered and hoped that Marine would attribute it to the wind. I changed the subject. “You reading anything good right now?” Marine was an avid reader, and we often traded books.

  “Funny you should ask, sir, funny you should ask.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a paperback. In the moonlight, I read “Rudyard Kipling” on the cover. “I’m not much for poetry, but this is almost enough to convert me:

  “When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains

  And the women come out to cut up what remains

  Jest roll to your rifle an’ blow out your brains

  An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.”

  “If I’m wounded, Staff Sergeant, and you fuckers leave me on Afghanistan’s plains, I’ll put my last bullet between your shoulder blades before I put it in my own head,” I replied.

  Marine laughed and shot another stream of brown saliva into the sand. “I expect you will, sir.” He paused and added, “Even Hadsall might’ve done that.”

  I continued down the line to see the rest of the platoon. A white halo surrounded the moon, looking like an iris around a pupil. The moonlight cast my shadow across glowing sand, again reminding me of new snow. Normally, I chafed under the twenty-pound weight of my flak jacket, but now it was the only thing keeping the icy wind off my skin. I imagined the chill air pouring off glaciers high in the Hindu Kush and racing across miles of desert without a tree to slow it down.

  One of my machine gun teams was dug in with Patrick’s platoon, anchoring the far flank of the company’s lines. They were in the middle of Sergeant Espera’s squad, the former repo man with whom I’d flown into Pakistan on the Sword mission. For a few hours each night, Espera turned one of his holes into the company’s social center, brewing coffee and debating the issues of the day with all comers. I slid into the hole, and Espera caught me up on the night’s discussion.

  “Sir, we’re talking about Lindh. These guys” — he nodded at the other Marines in the hole — “think he’s a freedom fighter.”

  John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, had been captured the week before at Qala-i-Jangi prison in northern Afghanistan. Now he was imprisoned in a metal container a few hundred yards from Espera’s hole.

  “And what do you think?” I asked Espera.

  “Traitor. And the most vicious kind. He turned his back on the society that raised him, that gave him the freedom and idealism to follow his beliefs.”

  “But what was his crime?” I goaded Espera, happy to play devil’s advocate. “Other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

  “Joining the Taliban. Claiming to be a member of al Qaeda. Shit, sir, if that ain’t enough for you, his buddies killed a Marine!” Mike Spann, a CIA officer and former Marine captain, had been killed shortly after interrogating Lindh. “If my grandma killed a Marine, she’d be on my shitlist.”

  Espera turned serious again. “We’re young Americans out here doing what our nation’s democratically elected leaders told us to do. And he’s fighting against us. Why’s that so hard to figure out? And already the press is bitching about ho
w he’s being treated. He’s warm. He’s protected. He eats three meals each day and sleeps all night. Do I have that? Do my men have that?”

  “Their freedom to voice stupid opinions is part of what we’re fighting for,” I said. It was well after midnight, and I still had more positions to check on, so I climbed out of the hole as Espera and the other guys resumed their debate.

  Farther down the line, in the middle of a gravelly flat near the runway’s end, I approached another fighting hole, careful to come from the rear and listen for the verbal challenge. It was an assault rocket team, and there should have been two Marines awake. In the moonlight, I saw three heads silhouetted against the sky. I slid down into the hole with a rustle of cascading dirt. General Mattis leaned against a wall of sandbags, talking with a sergeant and a lance corporal.

  This was real leadership. No one would have questioned Mattis if he’d slept eight hours each night in a private room, to be woken each morning by an aide who ironed his uniforms and heated his MREs. But there he was, in the middle of a freezing night, out on the lines with his Marines.

  General Mattis asked the assault men if they had any complaints.

  “Just one, sir. We haven’t been north to kill anything yet.”

  Mattis patted him on the shoulder. I had heard that he was old school, that he valued raw aggression more than any other quality in his troops.

  “You will, young man. You will. The first time these bastards run into United States Marines, I want it to be the most traumatic experience of their miserable lives.”

  14

  TURBINES WHINED in the predawn darkness. Pure potential energy, building, storing, promising to go kinetic on the thundering gallop north. Blue static electricity spun off the rotor blades as the platoon ducked aboard. I climbed forward to the space between the pilots’ seats and plugged into the intercom. We had met the night before to rehearse the mission, so there wasn’t much to say. A platoon commander’s only job on a flight like this is to track the pilots’ navigation and make sure they drop us in the right spot. It also pays to have some situational awareness outside the helicopter in case the bird is forced down and the Marines have to shoot from the hip.

  As always, we lifted off hesitantly. The big Super Stallion rocked back and forth while inching upward. A cloud of dust, the frenzied rotor wash, enveloped us. Suddenly finding its purpose, the helicopter’s nose dropped, and we blew through the murk, seeing the horizon again and picking up speed. Two more birds followed close behind.

  We flew low, rising and falling with the contour of the hills. Our destination was one hundred miles due north, just outside Kandahar, one hundred miles from the nearest Americans. I had read enough about Afghanistan to know that helicopters had an uninspiring history there. The Soviets had been wearing down the mujahideen until the CIA introduced Stinger missiles and turned the tide of the war. A Stinger is small enough to pack on the back of a donkey and homes in on an aircraft’s hot exhaust. In 1986, an Afghan commander named Engineer Ghaffar fired the first Stingers of the war and blew three Soviet Hind helicopters out of the sky near Jalalabad.

  Marines call the CH-53 “the Shitter.” I’d heard two different explanations for the nickname. One was that mortar fire destroyed a CH-53 on the ground at an airfield in Vietnam; the wreck became a makeshift latrine, and the name stuck. The other story was simply that the big bird poured out so much hot, smoky exhaust. I imagined flocks of Stingers chasing that heat signature and hoped the former explanation was the right one.

  My paranoid sightings of Stinger teams behind every hill resolved themselves into trees, shepherds, and at least one camel. We saw remnants of the Soviet occupation — the circular berms of artillery positions and rusting trucks staining the soil red. Roads cut across the desert, many showing tread marks from tracked vehicles, tanks perhaps. The United States had no tracked vehicles in Afghanistan.

  Behind me, thirty members of the platoon sat facing one another on two rows of fold-down canvas seats. Their packs were piled between them. Gunners stood in the open doors, crouched behind .50-caliber machine guns, their visored heads stuck out in the slipstream. One clamped an unlit cigar in his jaw. I wondered idly what would happen if they started firing. Bursts of spent shell casings would fly through the cargo bay, whipped along by the wind to burn any skin they touched.

  The pilots talked back and forth, monitoring gauges and pointing out potential threats of rising terrain and figures on the ground. I was irrationally reassured by the fact that they were on edge, too. I looked out the side of the Plexiglas windscreen at the other helicopters. They flew impossibly low, throwing plumes of dust into the sky behind them. This made us more visible from a distance, but flying low and fast meant that we would be past a gunner before he had time to see us, aim, and fire. At least I hoped so.

  The GPS made it easy to track our progress. Even without it, dark mountains on the horizon announced our emergence from the flat deserts of the south. Their jagged regularity conjured up dragon’s teeth and welcomed us to the Afghanistan of myth and legend: Alexander the Great, the Great Game, the Hindu Kush. Looking at the snow, I thought that nature could be as deadly as any terror network. I’d felt this way in New Hampshire’s White Mountains, usually in the late fall, racing darkness to the trailhead, aware that being caught on the mountain overnight meant losing fingers, or even worse. Our canvas desert boots weren’t designed for tromping through snowdrifts. We had only light jackets and thin gloves. Nights at Rhino had been uncomfortably cold; in the mountains, they would be dangerously so.

  “Five minutes!” I extended an open hand to the seated Marines. Goggles down, weapons loaded, packs grabbed by a strap for a quick drag down the ramp. Pocket the map, turn on the radio, last savor of sitting here, last comforting illusion of a short hop to safety.

  “Thirty seconds!” Standing now, thanking the aircrew, removing my headset. The blades’ pitch changed as we flared to land, the smooth whir becoming a choppy clatter. Nose up, tail down, and the thump of landing gear settling onto the ground. The ramp dropped, and the platoon ran out, fanning to secure a perimeter around the landing zone. The other two birds followed their leader, and two more streams of Marines arced into the circle. I bent my head and closed my eyes as the climbing helicopters blasted us with sand. They turned south and left us in a growing silence.

  LAR and the recon teams already manned positions on a rocky rise two kilometers away. Our two infantry platoons completed the package. We shouldered our packs and moved to join them. It was colder here, less than a hundred miles north but much higher in elevation. A sharp wind rustled the carcasses of plants still upright in the ground. Others rolled along like tumbleweeds in an old Western. Afghanistan’s rugged, spare beauty reminded me of the deserts of Nevada and Arizona. That beauty can overwhelm a person when its immensity isn’t tempered by a lodge or a campfire. Infantrymen feel the immensity. They are part of the landscape, not observers of it. No windshield or cockpit separates them from the mountains and the wind. The sense of space and time is like gazing at the stars.

  Staff Sergeant Marine organized the platoon’s digging while I joined the other officers for a brief in the tiny tent that served as the battalion’s traveling command post.

  “Welcome, Bravo Company, to Patrol Base Pentagon.” The battalion commander, who went by “Shaka” in honor of the famed Zulu warrior, had been awaiting our arrival. His brief was triaged — most vital information first. Aerial surveillance reported a radar dish to our south and a multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) to our north. An MLRS is a set of rocket tubes on the back of a truck. It can obliterate a square kilometer. First priority for the battalion was to learn more about those threats. The colonel sent Jim along with an LAR patrol to check on the radar and recon to investigate the MLRS.

  The next priority was a rough outline of our short-term plan. A few klicks to our north was a river, its banks dotted with villages and farms. The highway from Kandahar to Lashkar Gah paralleled the river on its n
orth side. That night, according to the colonel, our little band of Marines was slated to be General Tommy Franks’s main effort. Franks commanded all American forces from the Horn of Africa across the Middle East to central Asia. All eyes would be on us. We would patrol the highway to interdict traffic and send a message to the Taliban.

  “Go after them, gentlemen,” the colonel said, pointing at the young commanders along the sides of the tent, “until they fear us more than they hate us.”

  We expected to continue this tactic for the next several nights, probably moving the patrol base each day to make it more difficult for anyone to attack us. When Kandahar fell to the Northern Alliance, a portion of our force would move to secure the airport there in order to replace the runway at Rhino with something larger and more permanent. The colonel couldn’t speculate on possible missions more than a few days out. Our enemy would adapt as we adapted, so we couldn’t expect to set the agenda. We would initiate as much as we could, but we’d also have to respond to the other guy’s moves.

  I was still in the tent when the LAR patrol, with Jim in command, reached the reported radar site.

  “Shaka, this is Cossack. We’ve reached the location of that reported radar dish. It’s a tree.”

  “Negative, Cossack. We had good reporting that it was a radar, maybe disguised. Take another look.”

  I imagined Jim cursing and running his hands over the bark.

  “Shaka, Cossack. Roger, we checked again. It’s definitely a tree.”

  Recon found that the MLRS was actually an MLRS, but it was unusable, probably rusting in place since the Soviet withdrawal twelve years before. For the moment, Patrol Base Pentagon was safe.