Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (6 page)

“We’re not going there to fight, Meyer,” he said. “Our job is to train the Afghans. They do the fighting, not us.”

Back then, and even today, I didn’t understand how we could train Afghans in a combat zone while avoiding the fight. There was a huge problem with that theory. In our field exercises, the enemy were American role players with fake bullets; in Afghanistan, the enemy were genuine Taliban fighters. Things came to a head on the last patrol. Everyone was tired as we came down the hill, heading toward warm showers and decent food. The patrol leader left four stragglers on the hillside to wander in by themselves. As we were putting away our weapons, I complained about the haphazard ending. For three years in the infantry, it had been pounded into me to be precise and disciplined. No slack, no shortcuts.

First Sgt. Christopher Garza, the team’s senior enlisted man, was a strict but fair man. In retrospect, things might have turned out differently if I had used diplomacy, appealed to his human side, recited my Tinker Bell speech, and got him to smile. Instead, I charged straight ahead and blurted out what I believed.

“We need a debrief to correct our errors, First Sergeant,” I said.

“Damn it, Meyer,” Garza yelled back. “I’m tired of your negative attitude.”

Uh-oh. It was too late for Tinker Bell.

“I’ve had it with you!” he screamed in front of the team. “Load up your gear and get down to the flight line. You’ll sleep on the runway tonight and stay away from us. You’re off the team.”

A few hours later, Garza calmed down and let me stay on the team. We didn’t resolve our fundamental difference. I was still confused. Were we to act as garrison instructors or combat advisors? Either way, we were on our way to Afghanistan.

When we arrived in Afghanistan in the summer of 2009, it was 1st Sgt. Garza who assigned me to Lt. Mike Johnson’s four-man team at Monti, ten miles north of Joyce. That way, headquarters didn’t have to put up with me on a daily basis, and I’d get all the action I wanted.

Lt. Johnson assigned each of us a specific job. He took on the tasks of improving the leadership procedures of the Afghan officers and coordinating our activities with those of Dog Company. He was the perfect guy for that job—sunny and smiling, with an easy laugh, but completely professional, with the highest standards. I had climbed mountains with him in California, of course, and I knew he was as strong physically as he was mentally. On that first trip up to Monti, when he was saying the mountains looked good for hiking, I knew he could probably give those mountain goat dushmen a run for their money to the top of the ridge if he wanted to.

Staff Sgt. Aaron Kenefick was a personnel specialist with eight years’ expertise in administration, so his job was to bring some order to the Afghan personnel procedures and pay records. That sounded
like herding cats to me, but he was the man for it, as he cared about doing things right and made you care about it, too.

He would have quite a challenge, as the Afghan Army is not what you would call a tight ship. For example, they have no visible penalty for desertion: soldiers collect their pay, declare themselves on leave, and come back when they run out of money, if they come back at all. Starbucks runs a tighter ship than the Afghan Army. Faced with a turnover of 8 percent per month, molding a fighting unit was almost out of the question. But if anybody could get their records straight, Aaron could.

Doc Layton, our corpsman, would provide some basic medical care to the Afghans in the villages, but his primary job was to be ready in case any advisors or Afghan soldiers were wounded.

I had a job, too: Lt. Johnson put me in charge of tactics, operations, and weapons training. Before each patrol, I approved the Afghan scheme of maneuver, inspected the radios and guns, coordinated fire support, and planned an emergency escape route. This was far easier than planning the sniper missions I had been trained for. I also trained the Askars (Afgahan soldiers) on their M-16 rifles. Some tried to shoot well, and some didn’t care. I concentrated on getting across the three basics: take aimed shots and conserve your ammunition—don’t fire all over the place in a panic; watch your flanks; listen to your officers. In the middle of a hot shootout, those rules will usually save your life.

On some Marine advisor teams, and all Special Forces teams, everyone is on a first-name basis, regardless of rank. Having the maturity not to overstep your limits is assumed. I didn’t call Lt. Johnson by his first name, but we got along well and I rarely called him “sir.” He was the boss, and we both knew it.

Aaron, on the other hand, kept a military distance from me. He
was a by-the-book staff NCO. Because Lt. Johnson and I had trained together, he may have thought I was a teacher’s pet to Lt. Johnson, and it griped him a little.

“We live in the same hooch, Corporal Meyer,” he said when I slipped and got too casual, “but don’t forget to address me as Staff Sergeant.”

“Roger that, Staff Sergeant.” I didn’t mind that.

“Soon to be Gunnery Sergeant, by the way,” he added, smiling. He was excited to make that promotion.

Down at Joyce, Maj. Kevin Williams concentrated on staff matters. He was quiet and pleasant, different from the brusque, hands-on type of commanding officer I knew from the infantry. He let Lt. Johnson manage our team.

Monti, like every U.S. outpost on the frontier, was following the Pentagon’s official counterinsurgency strategy. The general idea was to make friends with the villagers, provide them security, give out project money, and build relationships with the local officials. The theory was that when the tribes realized their government was guarding them and giving them things like American-funded generators, they would tell their young men not to join the Taliban. All of us advisors wanted to believe that, but both the American and Afghan soldiers warned us never to assume the villagers were on our side. The Afghans have a saying: you can rent an Afghan but you can never buy one. Meaning they are going to support whoever gives them the most “rent,” or money. That was apparent to us within the first week.

There were about forty villages in our area, and the Americans and Afghans at Monti sent out about ten patrols a week, each one planned as carefully as a beer run and executed like one, too. We
didn’t go out to search and destroy the enemy, although the Afghan soldiers knew which valleys were hostile. We didn’t make arrests or bring local police with us because the Askars and the villagers disliked them. The villagers didn’t like the Taliban either, but the math didn’t add up: ten patrols a week couldn’t protect forty villages.

The four of us settled into a routine of patrolling five days a week. The Afghan company commander would pick out a village and we’d rehearse how to make the approach and what to do when we got there. Before leaving we’d check weapons, double-check the operations orders, and test our radio frequencies with the Dog Company op center.

Doc Layton prepared medical supplies to give to the villagers, and Johnson and Staff Sgt. Kenefick rotated as the senior advisor to the Afghans. I manned the turret, alternating between Humvees with .50-caliber machine guns and the Mark 19s with their 40-millimeter guns. The 40-millimeter is a small automatic cannon; its explosive shell, weighing almost one pound, can take apart a cement building.

The Askars climbed into the backs of their Ford Ranger pickups, and we’d leave through the Monti’s front gate with about four vehicles. As we drove along, sometimes we’d take potshots from a side valley, and the Askars would pay no attention. Other times, their Rangers skidded to a stop, and we’d pile out and scope the hills for targets we usually couldn’t find. On most patrols, we eventually reached a hamlet of ten to forty mud-and-timber houses perched on a hillside, looking one mudslide away from oblivion.

We’d park the trucks and walk up steep, rocky paths where the vehicles couldn’t go. The Askars would amble along, not expecting trouble, their weapons dangling casually. We four Americans, of course, were looking everywhere, our fingers beside our triggers and our guns pointing forward—I would have a heavy-duty machine gun
at my side. About half of our Afghans were Tajiks from the north who didn’t speak the language of the Pashtuns in Kunar. The others were from other tribes, including some from Kunar, though no Afghan soldier in our unit was from the local district. That would put his family at risk, as the Taliban considered Afghan soldiers to be traitors.

Once inside the village, we’d set out sentries and sit down with the elders for a “key leader engagement” over a few cups of hot green tea.

The ritual was predictable:

Lt. Rhula (the Afghan company commander): “Your government wishes to protect you from the dushmen.”

The Askars called their enemy dushmen, meaning thugs and bandits. The villagers called them Taliban, but never dushmen. No one called them mujahideen, or holy warriors.

Gray-bearded Elder: “You say this every time you come, but you give us nothing. The last group of Americans promised us a generator. Where is it?”

Lt. Johnson: “We are simple soldiers, like Lt. Rhula. You must speak with the PRT [provincial reconstruction team] about the generator.”

Elder: “Americans do nothing but promise.”

Lt. Rhula: “Have you seen any strangers?”

Elder: “Taliban sometimes come by. They don’t tell us anything. The next village is bad, not us.”

It was always the other village. We visited a village for a few hours; the Taliban came and went as they pleased.

Some villages were genuinely friendly, some standoffish. You’d rarely see young men, and any woman would dash inside immediately. The
villagers and Askars were polite to one another, but rarely did I see them laugh together or talk in a friendly manner. The Askars looked bored and the villagers looked resigned to casual searches of their compounds while the Afghan officer and the elders sipped tea and we advisors checked off another “key leader engagement.”

When we walked into some hamlets, however, you could feel something was wrong. When kids threw rocks at you, you knew what the parents were telling them. Sometimes the Askars grabbed the kids’ soccer balls and sliced them apart. This didn’t win hearts and minds, but it did stop the rocks. Whenever the elders hurried through the ceremonial tea, though, I’d watch the Askars. When any soldier senses danger, he crouches down a few inches to make himself less of a target. When the Askars did that, I went on full alert.

Hafez was our lead interpreter and, we quickly learned, our best warning system. A thirty-seven-year-old sergeant major retired from the Afghan Army, Hafez had served in Kunar for three years with advisor teams. The Afghan soldiers distrusted him because he refused to support their never-ending schemes to skim from the Americans.

Hafez was a man without a country. His request for a visa to the States went unanswered because he lacked a high-level American sponsor. Yet his loyalty to Americans was unbounded. He taught us how to act with the elders, provided tips before meetings, and pointed out when the Askars were taking advantage of us or when the villagers were lying. Hafez became the unofficial fifth member of our team. Inside a hamlet, if he shook his head at us, we knew it was time to forget the tea and get out.

Lt. Rhula was smart. To him and to the Askars, the war was a job. If they were rounded up or killed, their families would lose a steady paycheck. Most wouldn’t stay to fight on ground that favored the enemy.

The dushmen weren’t idiots either. Think of it. You’re three or four Taliban living in a compound, and you see pickups bouncing over the rocks toward your village. It’s another “key leader engagement” by the infidels and the Afghan traitor soldiers.

Unseen, you run up the hill and dig up your two AK rifles and a PKM machine gun with fifty rounds in the belt. From behind some rocks, you squint down at the helmet of an American advisor in an armored turret, slowly cranking his enormous .50-caliber gun back and forth, not knowing where you are, but knowing you are watching him.

Usually the dushmen waited until we drove away before firing in sheer bravado. Thank you and don’t come again. I’d respond by turning the offending hillside into dust clouds. Only two or three times did I hit somebody. Usually it was just a cloud of dust downrange and the wind-chimey cascade of empty brass shells falling into the Humvee from my thumping gun. Then we’d head back to Monti.

The Askars with us didn’t care one way or another about our counterinsurgency theory. They were soldiers, with no attachment to the people living around Monti. For them, it was another day, another walk through a hamlet, then back to base for dinner, chats over their cell phones, some fine hash to smoke, then a few hours’ sleep in the barracks. They joked with one another and posted security, bored bit players in a drama that changed only when a friend went home or took a bullet. I learned to trust and rely on them every day. They became like family.

Over the course of these patrols, I went through thousands of rounds, but it’s hard to hit an unseen enemy. Not that I didn’t try. Lt. Johnson gave me a long leash to determine team tactics, and sometimes I let my hunting instincts get the better of me. I kept hearing about this place called Dab Valley, where every patrol took fire. So I
came up with a brilliant plan and presented it in low-key fashion to Lt. Johnson. We’d drive up toward Dab, I explained, and then stop any passing vehicles to search for weapons or ammo. I didn’t tell him that we were going to park at the exact spot where previous patrols came under fire. I was quite proud of my scheme. When we came under fire, I’d train my Askars, just as headquarters wanted, and shoot Taliban, just as I wanted.

So we drove into this narrow gulch and stopped. When we looked up, we could see a dozen caves where the enemy could be hiding. We sat for a few minutes knowing we were sitting ducks. I happily waited to unload with my .50-caliber. Lt. Johnson, though, was taking in the bigger picture, including what would happen if an RPG blew off one of our tires and we were stuck in the shooting gallery. The more he looked around, the more he growled at me. Finally, he threw up his hands and shouted that we were leaving. In a cloud of dust, we drove out of that death trap.