The Silence of War

by Terry McGowan

  In the interim, the real work was being done by engineers and 3rd Platoon. The group I was with had guard duty—at the “back door.” Since the guard was rotated, those who were not on duty spent most of each airless, blazing-hot, oppressive day trying to find shade. I soon discovered the “bat cave.” It really was a bat cave; there were bats in residence. But I liked the tongue-in-cheek allusion to Batman and played it up.

  Down the “hall” of that inside man-made cavern was a windowless, dark “room.” It was a secret place, its existence revealed only by searching for it with a flashlight. It had obviously been occupied in the not-too-distant past because it contained mounds of blood-soaked bandages and empty boxes of antiseptics. I wondered if the previous occupants had departed in a hurry when they saw our dust cloud approaching. I could tell that the rust brown blood wasn’t terribly old. I wondered if the room had been a hidden Taliban “hospital” of sorts. I didn’t hang around any longer than necessary to take it all in. Dried blood gets into the air, and disease can be contracted simply by breathing it in.

  During the hottest part of the day, I would lie on a shelf—away from the hidden “room”—which was carved out of the inside adobe wall. There I would take a nap. It was probably ten degrees cooler inside the bat cave than outside. Although it was still awfully hot, it felt terrific to lower the thermostat of hell by ten degrees. I justified that daily nap as an old man’s prerogative. It was a glorious way to break up the stifling boredom. It didn’t take the rest of the Marines I was with very long to congregate there. Officer status notwithstanding, D-Ring would join us as often as he could. The guys enjoyed the opportunity to talk to an approachable officer.

  Lance Corporal Perkins was our version of TV in the bat cave. A natural-born comedian and philosopher, he kept us entertained with jokes and stories. Corporal Bryan Stuart would frequently quip that he came to Afghanistan to “PAR-TAY!” and Perkins would keep Stuart going on about it. It was incongruent enough to be humorous. This was no place to party.

  Perkins also liked to challenge me on intellectual abstractions. He wasn’t being confrontational—he relished the opportunity to present some of his ideas and elicit a response. From my perspective, I’m a teacher by nature. I enjoyed the pensive side of his personality. That this repartee should have taken place in an environment so hostile to life itself speaks well of mankind’s innate awareness of something greater than ourselves—although I doubt that Perkins would agree. Whether he realized it or not, I believe Perkins was a Platonic ideal in vivo. And he was—ironically enough—then in Hades.

  Once the sun came up, sleep was impossible due to the roasting heat. After a few days, however, we would leave security to the guards in their armored turrets and sleep inside the ruin up against the eastern wall. The rising sun took longer to reach us there, so we got a bit more shut-eye. D-Ring joined us every night, sleeping right on the ground fully dressed and ready for instant action—just like everybody else. He was a true Marine officer. Finally the time came to leave. The Hesco FOB was already taking shape. Before we shoved off, however, a small Army contingent departed, led by a major. I shook hands with him and wished him luck immediately prior to his parting. They weren’t gone long. The major’s Humvee hit an IED. Fortunately it only killed the vehicle. The major sustained no more than slight wounds.

  The area around Baqua was literally salted with IEDs. They seemed to be everywhere. Engineers with metal detectors constantly swept the dirt roads and the areas adjacent to the roads. All that we ever found were the victim-detonated IEDs mentioned earlier. Those IEDs were constructed of wood with two copper metal contacts. The contacts were separated by springs—apparently bedsprings—until sufficient weight was applied. At that point the contacts would join. Power was supplied by a motorcycle battery. The contacts were connected by wire to the explosive charge, and it would detonate.

  With victim-detonated IEDs and vehicles, it was all a matter of luck. The charge was separated from the contacts; therefore the enemy had to guess which direction the vehicle would be coming from. If the vehicle came from that direction, as the weight of its front wheel caused the metal plates to close, the explosives would be directly under the crew cab of the vehicle. Seldom were there survivors, and those who did endure were horribly burned.

  If, on the other hand, the vehicle came from the opposite direction, the front wheel set the charge off sooner, and it blew up the front half of the vehicle, where the engine was. That’s what happened to the major’s Hummer. And that’s why he and the others in that vehicle lived to tell the tale. If a man stepped on the detonator, it would be a miracle if he survived regardless of direction of travel.

  Since we were also about to leave Baqua, the reappearance of the bleeding major and the ruin of his Hummer were sobering sights. When our time came, we left by a different route from the one we took to get there. There was no road—we traveled cross-country—and we encountered no IEDs. Each driver did his absolute best to stay in the tire tracks of the vehicle in front of him. If the first one hadn’t set off an IED, most likely the follow-on driver wouldn’t either. It wasn’t always possible to stay in the exact tracks of the previous vehicle, however. Therefore, driving in IED country—even when none is encountered—is stressful. One never knows from instant to instant if an IED is about to go off.

  Sergeant Joe France led the column from the first vehicle. Often we would stop, and Sergeant France would inspect a suspicious spot of ground personally. His was the most dangerous position. The first vehicle was the most likely to hit an IED. Unfortunately, at a later date, when I wasn’t with him, his vehicle struck one of those homemade mines. Thank God only the vehicle was killed. But for Sergeant France and Lance Corporal Mike Michalak, it was their third combat-related concussion. Anyone inside a vehicle that hit an IED could expect a concussion at the very least. Fearing permanent brain damage if either Marine struck another one, medical personnel pulled both of them off the line. They were sent to the rear for the remainder of the deployment. Neither was happy about that.

  D-Ring was still traveling with us, and our convoy was down to only a few vehicles. Therefore we made good time. Once we reached the Ring Road we pushed on. Our next stop was 2nd Platoon at FOB Bala Baluk. The FOB was on a paved tributary off the Ring Road. That made traveling to the position relatively safe. Second Platoon Marines were colocated with an Afghan Army FOB. They shared the same Hesco outer perimeter, although the Marine portion was separated from the Afghan Army on the inside. Putting aside trust issues involving the Afghan Army, the FOB struck me as unassailable. Since the Marines moving into Bala Baluk had dealt the Taliban a severe blow, I still thought the fight there was over. Maybe if I had stayed more than one night I’d have felt differently.

  I was looking for a place where I might be utilized to the greatest advantage. I didn’t think Bala Baluk was the right place for me. D-Ring was ordered to remain. It was difficult to leave him, Whit, Nick Harris, Howell, and Wolfe. They were my buddies by now, but I enjoyed a freedom I had never had when on active duty. I had the trust of Lieutenant Colonel Hall to find my own way to be value added. So the day after I arrived at Bala Baluk, I left. I got on board a convoy en route to another FOB on the Ring Road—in Delaram.

  9

  Delaram

  Afghanistan is administratively divided into districts overseen by governors. Each district is organized into subdistricts. Delaram was the capital of one of the subdistricts, and it was administered by a subgovernor. It was the subdistricts along the Ring Road that the Allied planners were trying to pacify. They felt that if they could surround the interior of the country with secure, prosperous communities, all connected by the Ring Road, that the happy people living there would prevent the Taliban from returning.

  Delaram was astride the Ring Road where commerce ought to have flourished. It didn’t. Delaram was impoverished. It was beyond poor; it was squalid. Lining the Ring Road on both sides were small shac
ks assembled with anything the people could find to use as construction material, including discarded cardboard. Men sat by the side of the road selling sticks of firewood. There was an air of desperation about the place.

  There were old cars, and there was a run-down gas station or two, but it was a shockingly beggared town. No happy, prosperous people were living there. I don’t know where the billions of dollars of aid we and other countries have been pouring into Afghanistan has been going, but it hasn’t been filtering down to the ordinary Afghans I saw. Those people were living on the precipice of life. The worst American slum would have seemed like paradise to the community I saw living in Delaram.

  Immediately outside the west side of the town were poppy fields. Forget the highly touted poppy eradication stuff the media get from the government; nobody was lifting a finger to eradicate anything that I could see. From my perspective it was just as well. The dirt-poor farmers who worked those fields lived as sharecroppers. Poppy was their only source of income, and their families would have starved without it. The land was owned by a few rich Afghans. Besides, the overwhelming majority of opium that’s grown in Afghanistan finds its way to Iran and China. The heroin that makes its way into the United States comes from Mexico. As far as I was concerned, Chinese and Iranian addicts are none of our business.

  A river with very steep banks spanned by a solid bridge formed the boundary of the east side of the town. ANP buildings were inside the town on both sides of the road overlooking the river well below them. The structure on the north side of the road was made of adobe. It looked indefensible from the north and west sides.

  As had been my custom in law enforcement days, I wandered around and took in small details. In this case, I examined the trash pit and saw a plethora of hypodermic needles and other impedimenta indicative of heroin addicts. Clearly, the cops had a large number of junkies in their ranks.

  The defensibility of the ANP building on the south side of the road was another story. It was made solidly of rock and concrete and was surrounded by razor wire. Machine guns were posted on the roof. The building was pockmarked by bullets, but none had penetrated the stone construction. The open space of the road provided clear fields of fire to the north, and the south overlooked a steep, dry tributary, which ran down to the main river. The west was protected by stone walls with lots of razor wire. As mentioned earlier, the east overlooked the river, a steep climb after crossing the wide waterway. No attacker could approach from that direction. The subgovernor maintained his office and residence inside these ANP defenses. But there were needles in that trash pit as well.

  Across the river from the town on the east side of the river was another steep bluff. Gazing menacingly down to the river valley below was a large Hesco FOB, which was occupied by the Afghan Army. Immediately next to that was another FOB, occupied by a Spanish army unit. Connected to the Spanish defenses, but not to the Afghan Army, Americans were busy building an enormous Hesco FOB. It was ridiculously huge considering how few Americans were stationed there. Obviously somebody above my pay grade was looking to the future.

  We had no running water and no toilet facilities. We shaved and washed up using bottled water in outdoor sinks with a couple of cracked mirrors gazing back at us. Solid human waste was disposed of in small bags called “WAG bags”—I have no idea what that acronym really stands for—and burned. Long PVC pipes about five inches in diameter were driven deep into the ground. That was for urine. The smell by those pipes could’ve driven away a vulture. Periodically the ground around them was sprinkled with lye—nobody’s aim is perfect.

  The only source of water aside from bottles came from a single hand pump inside the Spanish army perimeter. The Spanish I was forced to learn in high school came in handy. “¿Donde esta la agua?” got me to the well. To wash clothes, we carried a bucket into the Spanish army’s area, pumped water. then sloshed the clothes with a stick. The process was repeated until the brown water turned tan. Nothing got cleaner than that. We, ourselves, were always sweaty and dirty. Our “washed” uniforms dried stiff from the dirt still embedded in them. Gritty socks and underwear were a real treat to put on.

  Much later a Navy engineer strove valiantly to provide us with functioning showers. They worked for a short while until some technical problem shut them down. But while they were serviceable, I would walk into the shower with my uniform on and stand under the flow, staring in wonder at the dark brown water running down the drain. As with the bucket method of washing clothes, once the water turned tan the laundry was done. The clothes simply weren’t going to get any cleaner than that without a professional-strength washing machine—which we didn’t have. Then I would peel the uniform off layer by layer and repeat the process of watching the dark water exit the shower. In the end, I washed me. It was glorious while it lasted.

  There were enough olive drab canvas tents to house the Marines stationed there, with camouflage netting for shade behind them. I tossed my pack on an empty cot inside one and called it home. There’s something about the smell of a hot canvas tent that never changes. The scent reminded me of my days in the field when I was an active-duty battalion staff officer.

  The eating area was terribly small but sheltered from the ruthless sun by more camouflage netting. It was in a narrow space between two large metal storage boxes such as one would see on freight trains. A Hesco wall completed the claustrophobic dining ambience. We had to wait for a place to sit or just eat standing up. There wasn’t enough room for everybody at the same time. The food was bland and predictable. Sometimes I could barely choke it down. I would have much preferred MREs. The chow made me wish for the return of “C rats”—which is really saying something. I’m an avid milk drinker, but what passed for milk, some kind of “can’t spoil” white-colored liquid in cardboard containers, didn’t taste like anything that came from a cow. I drank it anyway.

  The dirt constantly blowing inside the FOB was called “moon dust” by the Marines. It had the consistency of talcum powder and got into everything. Since the sides of the tent were mosquito netting only, when I awoke in the morning, I was covered in it. So was my gear. We lived in dirt, breathed dirt, and ate dirt. Living conditions were about as austere as they could get. It goes without saying that there was no PX, no Internet, and, of course, no air-conditioning. Summer was fast approaching, and the temperature kept rising. Second only to Baqua, Delaram was the hottest place I have ever been—on the planet.

  What I liked about Delaram was the sense of intrigue that enveloped it. It’s the reason I chose to locate myself there. The leaders of the police didn’t trust the subgovernor. They told us he had been captured by the Taliban and released a short time later. Since normally the Taliban will assassinate such government functionaries, I didn’t trust him either. As for me, I wasn’t getting good vibes from the ANP second in command. Many of his answers to our questions felt contrived and designed to mislead. I had been lied to by experts in my law enforcement days, and he fit the bill. Since it was nearly impossible to get a straight answer out of this guy, his evasion was troubling.

  I found evidence of an Afghan Army heroin overdose victim while on foot patrol across the Ring Road directly opposite the Afghan Army FOB. A primitive needle was lying very near a complete Afghan Army uniform—right down to underwear and socks. I’m convinced it was a fatal overdose because Muslims remove the clothes a dead person was wearing; they are regarded as unclean. Had the soldier not been dead, there would have been no need to undress him. So, in short order, I had garnered evidence of hard-drug usage among both the ANP and Afghan soldiers. I was sure there were other secrets waiting to be discovered as well.

  We had a lone Marine counterintelligence operator with us—covertly, of course. We were kindred spirits, so he revealed himself to me. The “two heads are better than one” cliché kicked in. We were both anxious to map Delaram’s human terrain. He’s still in the Corps, so I’ll just call him “Staff Sergeant Striker.
”

  One of our interpreters, called “terps” for short, immediately aroused my suspicions. One evening I was sitting with Staff Sergeant Striker when that particular terp came to talk. Among other things he complained that his fiancée lived in Iran and he needed to call her every day. She was young and beautiful, he said, and he was nearing middle age. He expressed concern that she would leave him for another if he didn’t continuously call. Woefully, he would lose his last chance for love and happiness. Striker wasn’t buying it, so the guy kept going on and on. I just sat and listened—wordlessly.

  At one point, Striker asked the man how many languages he spoke. The terp rattled off a long list. Arabic was not one of the languages he listed. I remembered all those grade-B World War II movies where escaping English-speaking soldiers or airmen would be nailed by the Gestapo. The Gestapo would speak to the man in English and receive an automatic reply in English.

  So I said to our terp, in Arabic, “Ente taki Arabi?” Instinctively he replied, “Arabiya, nam.”

  He had corrected my mispronounced word for “Arabic” and answered “yes” in Arabic.

  I asked him why he hadn’t listed Arabic as one of the languages he spoke. He became flustered. Not actually knowing, but acting on my street investigator instincts, I asked him how long he had lived in Iran. He answered twelve years. Since Iran is Shiite Muslim while Afghanistan is Sunni Muslim, I let it slip that I knew he was of the Hazara tribe (a Shiite tribe in Sunni Afghanistan). Since he was a Hazara, he became completely rattled and began to open up. More and more it became obvious that this terp was a spy for Iran. The phone calls to Iran to his “fiancée” were more likely to his “handler” than to a paramour.