Many times, he said, the kuffar walk now, without their laareys. But you must think, where will he walk? And how long do I have to work? Not long, before they see you from the sky. Dig one hole, set one bomb, then go back to hiding and wait. Do not be greedy. Be slow. Patience. Persistence.
The young man had more trouble translating these last two words, but al-Muhandis ignored it. He was distracted, having just noticed a stack of yellow plastic jugs, grimy with the crusted spillage of indelicate preparation and piled up in a corner.
And you have mixed those as we discussed last time? he may have asked.
The youths looked at each other. No one was eager to claim ownership.
This is important, he repeated. It is not to simply combine the ingredients. It must be done thoroughly, carefully mixed, so the albuyah nasiffah detonates correctly. You have done this?
Inshallah it is so, malem, the young man said.
The young boy hiding at the door could take it no longer, and when the group was focused on the jugs and the Arab’s back was turned, he crept up to the table and began inspecting the various fantastic implements he found there. The Engineer caught him but did not scold.
When you are older, you will fight jihad like your lala, al-Muhandis said to the boy, holding his shoulder.
Will not the kuffar be gone by then? the young man said.
I read the Western papers, al-Muhandis said, and here the group gave a disapproving murmur that should have been stifled. He rubbed the head of the boy affectionately.
They say that this incursion cannot last, the Engineer went on, but if it not here, then there will be kuffar to fight somewhere else. The Great Satan is always searching for a new land of the ummah to invade.
THE CANADIANS CONTROLLED the sector, and even though they insisted on speaking only French on the radio (“it was some strict military rule, they said”) and wouldn’t use his normal EOD call sign (using déminage for “demining” or a variant thereof), Fye enjoyed working for them. Their vehicles were tough, they went on patrol every day, and they fought like dogs in one of the worst IED hotspots in Afghanistan.
But soon after Fye arrived, the Canadians announced they were pulling out, ceding to political pressures to bring their troops back to North American soil. They would be home within months. The US Army was taking over, and as part of the president’s Surge strategy, fresh soldiers would push out even farther into areas that hadn’t seen a regular NATO presence. Ever.
Though he had not been in Mushan long, Fye knew well the threat details. He’d spent hours doing his own research, reading the reports and studying photos. Most of the IEDs were pressure plates, balls of tape and wood scraps and rusting saw blades buried in the ground that completed the simplest of electrical circuits when stepped on. The average main charge was a forty-pound slurry of homemade explosives. Manufacturing the explosives involved multiple steps of drying and sifting and mixing, and then they’d pour the concoction in a plastic container that began life as a jug of motor oil. Forty pounds is enough to kill the guy who steps on it and his buddy next to him. Some main charges were as large as ninety pounds; those killed more, or knocked out unarmored Afghan Army pickup trucks. The month before Fye arrived at Mushan, a Special Forces guy from the local Operational Detachment-Alpha (ODA) team had stepped on one at the Taliban Bazaar, killing him and his interpreter. The ODA team called in airstrikes after that and leveled it.
How does such a place earn a name like the Taliban Bazaar? Be a dense nest in the cradle of the twenty-year-old Taliban movement. Host regular meetings of the group for a decade under the nose of an orbiting Predator.
Before leaving, the Canadians provided intel on one particularly ugly stretch of donkey track that led to the Taliban Bazaar. “They”—Canadians or Americans or NATO, it was hard to tell sometimes—had allowed the IEDs to be placed along that dusty walking path, watching them all the time from above. “They”—Taliban or Hakami or pissed-off local tribesmen, it was hard to tell sometimes—had dug in six or eight IEDs before an attack helicopter or fast mover had taken them out. Judging from the size of the crater on the imagery, Fye guessed it was probably the second, a five-hundred-pound JDAM smart bomb from an F-16 or F-18. Either way, a Predator or helo or UAV of some type (it was hard to tell sometimes) had taken photos a week ago, and there they were, plain as day, intact IEDs untouched by the bomb that killed their emplacers.
Killed the emplacers, not the Engineer. Again. Some Surge lessons took longer than others to stick.
“So what do you think?” asked the American intel guy who handed Fye the overheads. The Army wanted to start patrolling Doab, and the bazaar lay right along the key route.
“I think we don’t go searching for IEDs,” Fye said, “but if you want to work out there now, and since we know that the IEDs are in these spots, then we could go clear them. Tell the company commander we should go out there. I think it’s good if we go clear the knowns.”
Which was how Fye found himself at nearby Combat Outpost Robinson on May 26, prepping his team for several days of continuous operations. Mushan was physically large, a few acres of farmer’s field that the Army had encircled with dirt-filled HESCO-barriers, but it had little infrastructure and few troops, only one platoon of US Army infantry, plus some Canadians and Afghan Army stragglers and an ODA team. COP Robinson, on the other hand, while just a tiny old Afghan police station in the hamlet of Taloqan, had showers and laundry and hot meals and, in a fit of necessity-as-mother-of-invention ingenuity, a pool made out of a water tank cut in half. Even more importantly, though, Robinson had lots of US soldiers. So Fye stopped for one quick overnight to pick up new security and extra firepower for his excursion to the Taliban Bazaar and beyond.
Fye’s two team members were Dove and Harry. Dove was Fye’s reliable right-hand man. He was older than Fye and outranked him, but had cross-trained into EOD halfway into his Air Force career. While he had plenty of leadership experience, he was still learning the technical aspect of the job. Harry was the youngest member of the team, smiley, everyone’s kid brother. Dove and Harry worked well together: Dove handled all of the logistics and comm and equipment issues; Harry drove the JERRV and served as a safety backup. Fye trusted both of them completely.
When they got to COP Robinson, they had hoped to finally bathe, but the line was so long they instead spent the evening cleaning and inventorying the armored truck, killing time before the next day’s mission. Fye studied ISR-provided imagery of the days to come. First they needed to clear out the remaining IEDs and collect any available evidence scattered about the Taliban Bazaar. Then the next day their patrol could push farther into Taliban-controlled lands, farther from the safety of the FOB than Fye had ever yet traveled, into wastes that had a reputation for being more dangerous than anything he had yet seen.
But on that day, before their first missions, as they sat beneath the camo netting and waited and could do nothing but wait at Robinson, they got news.
That morning, several hundred kilometers away, three members of Fye’s EOD unit—Solesbee, Hamski, and Mirabal—had hopped out of a 101st Airborne Division helo in the remote mountain village of Shorabak. The target of their raid was a secluded trailer at the top of a low rise, an enclosed mysterious container discovered by Army Pathfinders and believed to be full of homemade explosives. No robot, no bomb suit can be brought along when riding to battle in a helicopter, so, armored in vest and helmet alone, Solesbee approached the trailer. To give him a better view, Hamski and a small fire team moved up and took cover along a berm just down the hill from the trailer. Hamski put his magnified rifle scope to his right eye, brought Solesbee’s cautious form close, and watched his team leader take the long walk alone.
When the trailer detonated, Solesbee all but disappeared. The force of the blast flattened the security along the dirt berm, drove the optical sight of Hamski’s rifle backward. It broke his face like ballpeen hammer on an overripe melon, lodged the optics in his brain. As Mirabal scrambl
ed to get up and render first aid and clear a safe path to the victims, a second IED detonated, then a third, then more. Chaos reigned on the remote hill.
Solesbee and Hamski and six Pathfinders from Fox Company, 4th Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 159th Combat Aviation Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, died that day. Eight Americans dead total. There were few days in the Afghan War worse for the United States than that one.
Fye got the call at Robinson. Two of your bros are dead. But you’re still going to the Taliban Bazaar tomorrow.
This would not necessarily be the case. Traditional EOD command policy stated that any unit that suffers a casualty, either killed or seriously wounded, will stand down and not conduct operations. Another EOD unit, often of another branch of the service, will backfill their area of responsibility and conduct missions in their stead until all safety investigations are complete and the unit grieves. When you put your brother in a box and load him on a States-bound C-130, your head isn’t in the game. And on a tactical level, if an enemy method evolved, if a serious mistake was made, if al-Muhandis had built a new device, if there was a new way to die, that information needed to be broadcast to other EOD units as quickly as possible. Otherwise, casualties mount. EOD forces had been taking safety stand-downs since 2005, when we began dying in bunches. They were near mandatory in Iraq and were done in Afghanistan as often as possible, though the limits of transportation, manning, and the vast size of the country made it challenging.
“Why didn’t you guys stand down?” I asked Fye.
“I don’t know.”
“Should you have been on that mission at all?” I pressed, gently to him, more firmly to myself. The small part of me that was still a military officer needed to adjudicate.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference,” Fye said. “The IED that got me was so well hidden, the amount of metal in it so little, I don’t know if the detector beeped. I don’t know if I would have found it. And if wasn’t me, it just would have gotten someone else. I’d feel worse if someone else got hurt.”
On the morning of May 27, Fye loaded up in the JERRV with Dove and Harry, drove to Afghan Army Checkpoint Number 22, and began work on an IED for the last time.
“THIS ISN’T WORKING!” Fye called out to the platoon sergeant.
Fye looked across the line of soldiers stretching from one side of the road to the other. They were packed not quite shoulder-to-shoulder, each with their backs to him, each sweeping a small section of the path with their own handheld metal detector. For weeks Fye had tried to train his security on how to use the Valon mine detectors, but they had continually rebuffed his efforts, citing the lack of time and need to be on patrol and simple exhaustion when finally back at the COP. Now that they were out on the road, the paucity of skill was painfully apparent and thoroughly bogging down operations.
“My objective is not this road,” Fye said to the platoon sergeant. “My objective is the IEDs we know about at the Taliban Bazaar.”
So far Fye’s first multiday operation had not gone as he imagined. They woke early at COP Robinson, but as they loaded up into the JERRV and got ready to leave, the routine began to deviate almost immediately.
“Hey, guys, let’s be safe out there and watch each other’s backs and everyone comes home,” Fye said. He said these words, in this order, without fail, every time they went on a mission, without fail. But then something new happened. Harry piped up.
“Dove’s going to be fine. Ask him about his dream,” Harry said.
“What does that mean, Dove? What’s he talking about?” Fye asked.
“I had a dream I came back alive and unhurt,” Dove said.
“Well, what about me and Harry?”
“I said I came back okay,” Dove answered sheepishly, and Harry giggled a bit as he drove the armored truck out of the gate.
Fye and his security convoyed to the last Afghan checkpoint and dismounted according to the plan. With so many hidden pressure-actuated IEDs it was unsafe to drive on unswept roads. No, not roads, Fye thought. Dirt trails less substantial than the average four-wheeler route back in California, a herd path of pedestrian and donkey and motorcycle traffic. So they decided to patrol on foot, clearing a path first to the Taliban Bazaar, then to the impact crater of the bomb that had killed the emplacers, then to the nearby IEDs identified on the ISR imagery, until finally pushing the next day into Indian Country.
Instead, after thirty minutes of sweeping, thirty minutes of checking (by hand, with a knife-tip in the ground) every tiny fragment of metal, every screw and nail and scrap of discarded pig iron and piece of mortar left from decades of war, thirty minutes of chasing beeps from the mine detectors in the hands of the untrained soldiers, they had made it a total of one hundred feet from the Afghan checkpoint. Fye could turn around and wave at the Afghan soldiers and police.
They probably think we look ridiculous, Fye thought, inching forward from their checkpoint as if a mine was hidden under every speck of dust.
“Get on the radio with your TOC. We need to skip the road and just cut across the poppy field. We’ll maneuver around the road and just hit the Taliban Bazaar from the side,” said Fye.
The platoon sergeant agreed—let the engineers sweep the road, his job was shooting and moving, not standing in an execution line—and was grabbing his radio to inform his command when a shout came from the perimeter. Fye turned to see his outer security pointing down the baked-mud road. A vehicle was approaching from behind them, slowly but deliberately, kicking up a cloud of dust.
The platoon sergeant called for his men to take cover and rifles came up and Fye looked for Dove and Harry to tell them to get down in case it was a car bomb. But the vehicle stopped. And a boy got out. And the vehicle sped away, back down the dirt track from where it had come.
The boy was typical of Afghanistan in every way: dirty, sandaled, dark-haired and light-eyed, American T-shirt, scrawny in an unfed sort of way. Shorter than my son, Fye thought, though I bet they’re the same age.
“Mista mista, boom boom!” the boy yelled as he fearlessly ran up to the line of American soldiers.
“Hey, go get the terp,” the platoon sergeant called to his men, using the common slang for interpreter.
“Boom boom!” the boy repeated, pointing in the direction of the Taliban Bazaar. The terp was slow to arrive, and in the meantime the boy’s singular English was more effective than any of the soldiers’ Pashto.
“They’re trying to draw us in,” Fye said to the platoon sergeant. “Who would just drive up and drop off their kid? This isn’t right.”
“Maybe not,” he replied, “but he’s pointing to where we think the IEDs are anyway. Let’s go. He can come with us a little way, at least.”
The rainy season was long since past, and so the field through which Fye and his security tromped more closely resembled a weedy brick obstacle course than any farmer’s plot in the San Joaquin Valley near Fye’s childhood home. They patrolled through shin-high cut poppy, harvested only weeks before but already as parched and woody and shrunken as the boy who led them, always pointing, always repeating his assertion that booms lay ahead. Fye and Dove and Harry and their security hopped over a low wall that separated the poor farmer’s swath from another donkey trail, moved in a staggered line down this new path briefly, and then, still led by the boy, approached two elderly gentleman squatting in the midday heat.
Only here in Afghanistan, Fye thought, would this make sense. We’re in the middle of nowhere, fields and the occasional mud hut, two men sitting outside to pass the day smoking, a boy leading us.
Fye pulled out a printout of the latest ISR imagery and figured they were about halfway to the bazaar. He looked down, the Predator pointed at the bombs. He looked up, the boy pointed at the bombs.
The terp was more helpful now, and an animated discussion began with the older bearded men. Yes, they could confirm that there were bombs down the road at the Taliban Bazaar. Yes, there was a detonation that killed the men placi
ng them. But the Americans must leave now, stop speaking to them and leave them be, because the Taliban wanted to ambush the Americans. The longer they spoke to the soldiers, the greater chance someone would see them doing it, and then they would die a much more painful death than that delivered by a missile from the sky.
But before the patrol could push on, the platoon sergeant’s radio lit up again. Cross-intel from another unit that the elderly men’s fears were well-founded. The spooks were listening to the Taliban ICOM radio chatter in real time, and they were rallying right then to ambush a patrol.
There was no way to know if the Taliban were waiting for them at the bazaar or along another patrol route, but either way, there was only one American unit in the area. The day before, Fye’s security had gotten popped in a firefight—or a TIC, Troops in Contact, as everyone called it now—and they weren’t eager to get caught again. He and his team needed to get to the IEDs and clear them quickly, or he’d be doing it while ducking bullets.
“What were you thinking then,” I asked Fye, “knowing an ambush was coming right when you were about to start working on these IEDs?”
“Man, I was stoked!” said Fye. “I thought, after ten years, I finally get a chance to do something.”
FIRST, THERE IS usually a simple flash of light. Fireballs are mostly for movies. Then, after the detonation, there is always a cloud, sometimes deceptively light and gray and sometimes oily and black. An explosion is nothing more than an instantaneous chemical reaction, and the cloud contains the toxic gases violently released. The cloud contains the vaporized bits of packaging that had surrounded the explosives. It contains the vaporized bits of whatever person or thing was unfortunate enough to be kissed up against the main charge.
After the cloud comes the debris. Counterintuitively, the largest chunks are thrown the farthest, up and out, and so as the cloud hangs still a moment the steel and clods of dirt and concrete and heads and hands and feet start falling on top of you. “Frontal and overhead cover,” the Army field manual warns, is needed to bunker against a blast.
All the Ways We Kill and Die Page 9