Lions of Kandahar (7 page)

Overall, I liked what I saw. Bill, on the other hand, had a list of corrections.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I told him.

He let out a skeptical laugh and shook his head. “This sure isn’t how they started either,” he noted, rounding up the Afghans and sending them through again.

During the exercise, I noticed that Ron, the JTAC, had come out to watch. I took the chance to introduce myself again. We talked about the last couple of months and operations with Shef’s team, and he wasn’t afraid to point out shortcomings such as problems with ISAF support structure. That was the type of candor every commander needs to hear from his men. I liked him immediately.

As the sun set, Bill and I sat outside with cups of strong coffee. The
cloudless sky was bright with sparkling stars. With no industrial pollution or competing light sources, looking at the stars in Afghanistan is awesome, but the spectacle was lost on us. Our minds were still foggy from the long trip over and the struggle to get acclimated to the hot weather and altitude. I was exhausted and knew I would stay that way until I boarded the plane to come home.

“You know, Bill, Afghanistan looks like Texas,” I said, poking fun at his home state.

Before Bill could respond, we heard the heavy whistling of the first rocket and threw ourselves to the dirt. Willing myself as flat as possible, I heard the rocket hit in a flash that looked like hundreds of sparklers. Red-hot shrapnel shot out across the tarmac. The second rocket landed just outside the compound’s walls.

Soviet-made 107-mm rockets. The Soviets brought in countless numbers of these lightweight, three-foot mini-missiles during the decade-long war in the 1980s. Now they were buried or hidden in caves all over the country; the insurgents fired them using timers and wooden launchers from the backs of trucks or straight off the ground. The wooden launchers are crude, just wedges of wood cut to different angles to provide optimum trajectories. But they work.

After a few minutes, someone hollered, “All clear.” Dust and the heavy smell of explosives hung in the air.

Bill and I went to the TOC to see if anyone had been injured. Bill got a head count. We were short one person—Steve, our junior medic. His room sat near the tarmac where the rocket hit. My heart began to pound. Had he been on the tarmac? If so, why was he out there? Had shrapnel pierced the sandbags around his hut or penetrated his room?

We sprinted through the narrow, mud-walled hallways toward Steve’s quarters. His door was shut, and there was no answer when we pounded on it. We shoved it open to find him lying on his bed, peacefully asleep. He was wearing earplugs and didn’t even flinch when the door burst in.

Steve was our newest team member. He had arrived a few months before the deployment and breezed into our team room at Fort Bragg with bleached white hair and the dark tan of a surfer. He chain-smoked cigarettes and looked like a scrawny version of the Marlboro man compared to the other team members. Normally, they would have considered his laid-back demeanor and easygoing attitude a sign of weakness. But the unspoken rule on a team is never make the medics angry, ever. Unlike the ranks in most other sectors of the military, those working in the medical field can personally make your life miserable, by way of “losing” your medical records, threatening proctology exams, and finding myriad other opportunities to hit you where you live.

Despite his warm, youthful smile and comforting demeanor, some on the team thought Steve had a habit of becoming nervous when conducting medical training, giving an IV, or negotiating other stressful situations, and they dubbed him “Shaky Steve.” Most, including myself, thought he was just young, maybe intimidated by his status as the youngest among a group of seasoned, driven veterans. We would soon learn that we were all wrong, dead wrong. When treating the wounded, even under the worst conditions, Steve had nerves of steel and the hands of a surgeon. He would display a flowing fountain of emotional calm and that easygoing smile during horrific situations where others would have folded. He was invaluable in dealing with the local Afghans. He could treat the most frightened child, deliver a baby, and gain people’s trust with a warm, youthful smile and comforting manner.

At the moment, Bill’s manner was far from comforting.

“What are you guys doing in here?” Steve asked, half asleep and expecting a practical joke as we rousted him out of bed.

“What are you doing?” Bill screamed, mostly out of frustration. “You know after an attack you’ve got to come up to the TOC.”

“What attack?” Steve responded as we left to continue on our rounds.

My heart rate slowed as we got to the ANA area of the base. No one was hurt and we headed with the Afghans out to inspect the crater. Squatting next to the new hole, Dave, our senior engineer, was digging in the dirt, well into his impact analysis. Shrapnel had gouged the earth around the crater, and he pulled out dozens of razor-sharp metal shards.

“It came in from the north,” he said, studying the pattern of the impact. “They probably meant for it to hit near the TOC, in the middle of the living quarters, but missed.”

It was our first stroke of luck.

BINGO RED ONE

A
fter a full day’s meetings, we dressed in our best uniforms and joined the Afghans for the traditional feast we threw after a team exchange. It showed our appreciation and helped build the much-needed rapport that’s essential in combat. Warm light spilled out of the biscuit-colored hut and Afghan soldiers loitered outside. As we walked through the door, we were assaulted by smells of roasted and grilled goat, stewed squash, carrots, hot peppers, and tons of rice. Plates of flatbread, fresh onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes crowded the rest of the table.

More than two hundred Afghan soldiers crammed the room. Dirty, smiling, with bad teeth and ad hoc uniforms, they all stood erect when we walked in. Lieutenant Colonel Shinsha came forward, gave me a perfect salute, and then turned to face his men. He opened the festivities with a short growl of a speech, introducing my team as the guests of honor and lauding us for helping to free their country from the Taliban. The gratitude of a freed people is humbling, and
I thought of what it must have been like for those soldiers during World War II who liberated Europe.

After the speech, the Afghans lost no time in mingling with us. Old and new faces passed in front of me shaking my hand, hugging me, firing off greetings in short Pashto bursts, and urging us to sit and eat. Across the room, I saw the familiar, scarred face of Ali Hussein, a lieutenant in the Afghan Army. The last time I saw him he was being loaded onto a medevac helicopter. I hurried over. He reached out to shake my hand and I saw his eyes were misty.

He seemed upset and dismissed the other soldiers standing around us, almost angrily. Suddenly I wondered if I was actually in for a tongue-lashing. I’d been pretty hard on him the previous year.

When we first met during my last rotation, his men had openly mocked him. He was short and frail, and it was known that his tribal ties with the Hazara and a hearty “donation” had secured his commission in the army. On patrol, he looked scared and unsure. Wild things like soldiers and dogs can smell fear, and his Afghan soldiers had little confidence in him.

After a handful of missions, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Leading men into battle was not for the meek, and I wanted him to understand the gravity of his position. At night, he’d come to my room and we’d go over chapters from the Ranger handbook. We’d review how to patrol, ambush, and clear rooms of enemy fighters. I berated him for every mistake and miscalculation. Within a few months, he confidently set off to lead his men on a long patrol into the Ghorak Valley with my SF team.

It was late 2005.

We were departing an area where we had just conducted an operation. My truck was in the lead as we carefully navigated down a wadi, a dry creek bed, near the border of the Helmand River valley. The anti-tank mine was well concealed among the smooth gray creek stones, and we missed it by a few inches. One single second later, Ali’s truck hit it. I was leaning out of the truck looking for
mines when the explosion blew off my headset and sheared off the front half of his Ranger truck. The shrapnel killed several of his men and sliced Ali’s face open to his skull. We evacuated him and I figured that he’d retire after his wounds healed.

But he hadn’t. When Shef’s team was surrounded in Panjwayi, Ali refused to leave Fuerst, the wounded ETT. He beat back several attacks by the Taliban. When they tried to bribe him to give up the American, he traded insults with them. If Ali was the warrior Shef claimed he had become, then I wanted him as an ally. Standing there at that feast, I waited to see if he intended to give me a taste of my own medicine first. After he dismissed the nearest soldiers, he turned to me and said in accented English, “You my captain, you my commander. I want die with you. You make Ali man. My family have honor now because Ali is man.”

“I hear you are a lion now, brother,” I said, shaking his hand.

I threw my arm around his shoulder, and we started toward the table. Ali called over Shamsulla. This was turning out to be a real family reunion. Shamsulla, who went by his nickname Taz, was an American Ranger trapped in an Afghan body. I stood staring at the two of them. Taz had definitely been hitting the weights. He too had put on muscle while we were gone. I brought him over to Bill, who broke into a huge grin as I reminded him of some of Taz’s exploits.

Taz became infamous in 2005 for two incidents, the first at a checkpoint near Kandahar city that we’d set up to look for roadside bomb makers. After several hours in the hot sun, I had decided to pack it up. Any Taliban fighters in the area had probably heard about the checkpoint and avoided it. I watched as a beat-up gray Toyota sedan bounced along the road toward the checkpoint, trailing a dirty dust cloud behind it. Suddenly the driver stopped, threw the car into reverse, and roared backward. Taz was operating a hidden rear security position in an abandoned hut. The road was too rough for the Toyota to get up any real speed, and after seeing the car turn around, Taz and two other soldiers took off running in pursuit. Partway to the
car, Taz stopped and fired a burst from his AK-47 into its engine, bringing it to a halt. With his weapon at the ready, Taz approached the driver, who cursed him, calling him a dog. Suddenly, Taz, mad with rage, dove into the car. The other Afghan soldiers started screaming at us to come. My team sergeant, Willie, and I raced to the car, weapons at the ready. I heard two muffled cracks and then Taz squirmed out of the window covered in blood and bits of brain matter. He was smiling.

The driver had tried to pull a pistol, and during the struggle it went off, most unfortunately, two times under the driver’s chin. Oops. In the trunk of the vehicle, we found AK rifles, ball bearings, wiring, mines, and blasting caps. All were common components for IEDs—roadside bombs. Needless to say, the car’s passenger was more than willing to cooperate.

The second event occurred two weeks later. Around midnight, Taz banged on my door. Snatching my pistol, I followed him to one of the ANA barracks rooms. One of the team’s interpreters, Hik, was lying on the mat, bloody. He had gone to the bazaar with his father to buy supplies for the soldiers and was stopped at a checkpoint by the Afghan National Police. The ANP were known throughout Afghanistan for being corrupt, untrained thugs. They wanted a bribe, and when Hik refused, they threatened him and his father. For his loyalty to his father, the police thugs beat him and punctured his lung.

We took Hik to the team’s medics’ shed, where they started patching him up while I went with Taz to the ANA compound. There I found all of the ANA armed and clustered outside a small storage building. Inside, the two ANP thugs had been dumped on the dirt floor of the shack, bound into human balls lying in the fetal position.

After the terp had staggered back to the camp, Taz had gone to the checkpoint, beaten the corrupt police officers, tossed them into the back of his truck, and taken them to the shack, but hadn’t killed them. Our classes on civil society and human rights were partially
working. It took several days of negotiations between the ANP and the ANA, but we finally convinced Taz to release the two miscreants. The bigger lesson was that Taz had taken the ragged group of ANA, formed them into a unit, and taught them absolute loyalty, albeit Afghan style, by going after the corrupt guys who’d hurt the terp.

All too often people get wrapped up in the popular Hollywood action version of what we do and forget that the Special Forces were created not just to destroy things, but to work within foreign cultures to turn their soldiers into a functioning army.

I’d studied sociology in college and have been fascinated by foreign societies, cultures, and languages since I was a boy. I also grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, where hunting, fishing, and the outdoors are a way of life. Special Forces scratched all of my itches. My career started when I enlisted in 1993. I served with the 25th Infantry in Hawaii before earning my commission. I served with the 82nd Airborne Division during my first rotation in Afghanistan. I’d learned a lot from the 82nd Airborne, especially leadership and how to build unit cohesion. I got a glimpse of Special Forces in Kandahar on that rotation. Their missions—learning the language, respecting the culture, and fighting as guerrillas on the enemy’s ground—appealed to me. I realized then that I wanted a bigger challenge.