News From the Red Desert (4 page)

In Iraq there was more threat, and much more injury, and the soldiers were less easily angered. The Brits and the Americans both blew off so much ammunition no one even pretended to keep track. Here, every round was accounted for. After spotting Taliban, the first thing they did was review whether the rules of engagement were satisfied. If everyone in charge agreed after deliberation that they were, they engaged. Most of the time the incident didn't meet the criteria and so they crept away silently. These episodes had given rise to Wilson's—and nearly every other senior NCO's and junior officer's—frustration. But it wasn't as if, when they did open up, they had had the satisfaction of joined battle. The slipperiness of the Taliban was such that all they usually accomplished was make noise and pulverize dirt. Which had its appeal but was not why they had become soldiers.

Deirdre listened to these comments and had to stop herself from laughing. In Iraq everyone had talked like that, too, in the first months of the occupation—especially the guys who hadn't been in on the invasion. Itching for trouble, itching to kill. She knew the desire wasn't quite as monstrous as it sounded. Peacetime soldiers train for years, imagining what it would be like to be in combat. Unbloodied, they all feel like imposters. Then the shit came, and the idea that they had ever longed
for anything like it seemed impossible. Listening to these men made her realize just how awful Baghdad had been. Twenty percent PTSD rates. Hollowed faces and empty eyes. Abu Ghraib. Too many non-combatant shootings to even begin to keep track.

Fortin took a swig from his water bottle. “ROEs are about discipline,” he said, apparently to the platoon, but really to Wilson. “And without discipline, you can't do anything in a place like this. Chaos is always ready to come roaring in. You let your discipline waver, everything falls apart in a second. We're gonna follow the fucking ROEs.” He spat into the dirt and did not look at Wilson at all.

And then he judged that they were done resting and he stood and then so did the section commanders. Water bottles were put away and the platoon rose quickly and without discussion. The men lifted their rifles and tightened their webbing. The platoon commander rose and stood beside the warrant. Those two men nodded to one another and then they started off. Wilson took his section at a trot into the lead until they could just be glimpsed at the next bend. He didn't ask, nor had he been told. It was their turn. And it was a relief to get off by themselves.

Two hours later, the platoon was walking along a dirt road lined by forty-foot eucalyptus trees as thin as a man's thigh. It was a bright and cool afternoon. The scent from the trees was strong. In the distance, a thin farmer steered a wooden plow behind a thinner ox. A rifle shot cracked overhead, so loud it seemed close. The soldiers were all on the ground before their hearts had a chance to beat again. The lower-pitched boom of the rifle discharge rumbled over them. They waited for the next shot.

Which did not come immediately. They listened hard to the abrupt silence. From the sound of it, it had probably been a 12.7-mm PKM Soviet sniper rifle, Deirdre thought. The big rounds alarm even experienced soldiers in a way the AK's seven-six-two doesn't. Against a background hum of ballistic yips and barks, a roar catches everyone's attention.
In Baghdad, the 12.7-mm was the snipers' favourite rifle. Body armour wouldn't stop a twelve-seven bullet if it was shot from anywhere within sight. Fired from a few hundred metres, a twelve-seven armour-piercing round could go through three men and their armour. That happened to the Brits once, in Basra. Men had crowded together behind a wall, scanning for a sniper—but another shooter was on the other side. Lancashire Fusiliers falling as one. Kicking. Shuddering. It was one of the worst things Deirdre ever saw. She knew those men. Had posed for pictures with them an hour earlier. She nearly quit that day—and learned one more reason not to have special friendships.

The second shot is how the shooter tells you where he is. Deirdre and everyone else in the platoon listened hard, waiting for it. The range from which a round was fired can be guessed at by listening to the gap between the crack of the bullet overhead and the subsequent booming discharge from the rifle's muzzle—the longer that gap, the farther away the shooter. It is easier to judge if you're prepared for it. At the sound of the bullet, they had all hit the ground, and somewhere in that excited moment of huffing and swearing, they'd hadn't noticed the gap between it and the rifle report. As they listened for the unforthcoming second shot, the absence of a known direction or distance to the shooter compounded the anxiety the men felt. They looked and listened as intently as they could. The lieutenant radioed his company commander. “Contact. Wait, out.”

And then they were all still for as long as they could stand it. Those who had sightlines peered around trees and over the grass alongside the road. Most of them couldn't see anything except the ground in front of them and the knee-high grass growing from it. No one could see anything that looked like a sniper blind.

Deirdre tried as hard to listen for and locate the direction of the second shot as any of the soldiers on the ground. Lying with her face pressed into the dirt, her breath came to her quickly. She tasted fear and she tasted cow-shit-laden soil. She felt a kind of focus and intensity that had been more usual in Baghdad and she realized she was relieved to
know it again here. She had thought coming to Afghanistan would be the end of a certain way of feeling the world.

The soldiers glanced at her and they knew what she felt. This amused them and when they grinned at her she felt self-conscious. She made herself stop listening for the second shot. She paid attention instead to the soldiers around her. She took out her pad and made a show of taking notes. She took a sideways photograph of the young man nearest her. She had seen it all before, a hundred times, she was telling them. Telling herself.

At last, Fortin leopard-crawled along the perimeter of their defence and studied the landscape, searching for likely firing positions. There was lots of dead ground—hollows obscured from their view—and there was a stone wall that ran for a hundred metres five hundred metres away. If he were the shooter, that would be where he would fire from. After the shot he could run behind it in whichever direction he wanted.

“Can you see anything, Warrant?” a corporal, Perry Wilton, from Manitoba, with tattoos of freshwater sports fish on every bit of unweathered skin on his body, whispered.

“Shut the fuck up.”

They listened. Long minutes passed.

They continued to pass.

Still no more fire.

They kept passing.

The platoon commander decided to request a helicopter surveillance of the area.

“Request Hawkeye reconnaissance of our loc.”

“Roger that.”

And then a moment later: “Hawkeye en route.”

It was the same as it had been in Iraq, Deirdre supposed. In the space between shots being fired, every advantage was with the insurgents.
The Taliban looked like the locals because they were the locals, for the most part. Just like the Anbar Sunni militiamen, they knew every bend in every road and they knew which farmers would hide them and who could feed them. The older men had fought in these same valleys against the Soviets and in the civil war among the warlords after the Soviets left. Experienced guerillas understand the importance of surprise and of terrain and of high ground and they understood the long game.

Ferenghee soldiers could almost not be killed by anything except a head shot. They had armour over their bodies and their vehicles and everything one might want to destroy. They had drones in the air, all day every day, and helicopters and fast air available within a few minutes of the first loud noise. Even when there was fog and rain, missiles found the heat signature breath makes leaving frightened lungs. Artillery boomed out 155-mm shells from the forward operating bases most days, and there was no escaping it: Once you let the Americans—to the Afghans, the ferenghee were all Americans—see you with a rifle in your hands, it was over.

The US Army Apache appeared then, its gas turbine engine roaring and its rotor thumping away as it began to methodically sweep the grid they were in. It paused over a couple of treelines and then continued. It ran the length of the stone wall. Then the pilot drawled to the platoon commander, “We're not seeing evidence of enemy activity here. Can you be more specific about the direction the fire came from?”

“Negative.”

“Is it certain that the sound was gunfire?”

“Affirmative.” Spitting.

“Have you scouted out your position on foot?”

“Hawkeye: Roger.”

The Apache came lower now and the ground pulsed with the wash of the heavy rotor. Deirdre could feel it with her knees and her cheek. She shut her eyes, to keep the dust out. It criss-crossed the fields on both sides of the road and studied the rows of trees with infrared.

Somewhere, a man with a rifle was lying completely motionless underneath something large. Probably far from here, by now, watching the helicopter on the horizon and praying.

“We're not seeing anything that looks like enemy activity,” the pilot said.

“Thanks for your help.”

“We're returning to base. Best of luck.”

The platoon commander radioed Wilson, up ahead. “Send a team around to the north and south sides of this road.”

“Roger that.”

Half an hour later, Fortin crawled up to where the platoon lay on the sides of the road.

“I think we're clear, sir.”

“Nothing, huh?”

“Not that I can find. Probably hightailed it the moment the shot was off.”

The platoon commander nodded and the two men stood slowly. The rest of the platoon warily rose as well, Deirdre with them. The warrant nodded and they resumed the patrol. For the next three miles, they moved slowly and carefully and paused to study every copse of trees they came upon. It took two hours. They walked a little more quickly than that for the next hour. And then they were back to normal. Wilson's section stayed way out on point that whole afternoon and he hardly had to speak to Fortin at all.