No Worse Enemy (18 page)

The Afghans were nervous. Qadeer first froze, then kicked the door in and ran back a few steps. The others moved towards the door, fidgeted nervously in front of it but wouldn’t go in. It
was pitiful to watch. ‘Go, Go’, screamed the marines, ‘GET THE FUCK IN THERE.’ One looked through the door and edged in, the others stood still. ‘Go, go’,
screamed another marine. Several marines charged up to the Afghans and shoved them through the door: ‘Get the fuck in.’ Five Afghans and five marines burst into the building almost as
one. If the door had been booby-trapped, they would have all been hit. The marines charged round inside the compound, looking though their rifle sights as they went from room to room, shouting that
they saw movement. But the building had been abandoned. The compound was linked to a second. Qadeer and Romo, now being called Qadaad, were ordered to clear those rooms too. They tried and failed
to kick in a door, then looked through the windows. ‘Good. Talib no. Yes sir.’

‘No Taliban, good, let’s go to the next one’, said a Marine.

Bravo Company now held two large compounds, surrounded by high thick walls. The larger of the two, the old police station, would become their Combat Operation Centre (COC), their base and home
for the next four months. Most of the building’s six rooms were empty but one was piled high with sacks, yellow jugs and wooden boxes. Qadeer showed me one box holding a Qur’an, which
he saluted, then carefully closed.

Tim Coderre, former army sniper, now Law Enforcement Advisor, searched the bags. He showed me some brown, sticky opium. Then opened a bigger bag, saying, ‘which is then processed into
that’, lifting a sealed plastic bag full of heroin. There were eight identical bags, each worth about $60,000. He laid them on the ground. ‘That’s pretty much half a million
dollars’ worth of heroin’, he said, sucking a lollipop.

‘And this’, he said, taking the lollipop out of his mouth and pointing to some yellow sacks in the corner, ‘is ammonium nitrate. And there’s some aluminum powder over
there and a sifter. They mix the two ingredients to make ammonium nitrate and aluminum – ANAL. This is IED-making material.’ In total, he found I ED precursor chemicals weighing almost
ten thousand pounds. He also showed me a ledger, compiled by a Taliban mullah, listing taxes paid.

Veterans of Fallujah (scene of some of the most vicious fighting in Iraq) said this had been the most intense day of combat they’d ever experienced. But Bravo controlled only two
buildings. The marines were completely cut off from the other invading forces, had no electricity, no vehicles and no chance of being re-supplied soon. And the surrounding Taliban still had freedom
of movement. Their wider objective, of taking the bazaar and the village of Karu Charai, which included the densely populated ‘Pork Chop’ (so called because on the map, it looked just
like a pork chop), remained to be met. It felt like they’d barely started.

As the light began to fade, the marines did whatever they could to keep warm; sharing thin camouflage sheets, wrapping scarves around their heads and smoking the last of their cigarettes. Our
beds were cold cement, damp mud and broken glass, which I was too tired to sweep away.

At 3 a.m. on the first night in Marjah, a series of explosions woke the few marines who had managed to fall asleep. Someone shouted that mortars were being
‘walked’ on to the base. It felt as if a giant animal were approaching, its huge feet crushing everything in its path as it stomped slowly towards us. Whoever was firing the rockets
probably had a spotter watching from a distance, radioing in changes to the range, aiming for a direct hit. ‘Holy fuck, that’s right there’, screamed a marine, as explosions
rocked the building, each closer than the one before.

‘It’s in the bazaar; it’s blowing up the bazaar.’

‘It’s that mortar position we were talking about.’

‘So they’re hitting short. Means they’re gonna be adjusting on us.’

‘KEEP DOWN.’

‘Holy fuck, there’s a bunch of propane tanks on fire.’

‘The gas station’s about to fucking blow up.’

Barely thirty metres away, flames climbed high in the air. The propane tanks could have exploded, flying in all directions like missiles.

Three men were reported to have stormed one of the small look-out posts at the edge of the compound. They’d been repelled by a hand grenade and pistol shots. The marines who fought them
off swore they were suicide bombers but no bodies were ever recovered.

The fire in the gas station eventually died down. The propane tanks, remarkably, had safety valves that prevented them becoming rockets. No one ever knew if the explosions had been mortars or if
the men that had approached the base had been suicide bombers. Both felt perfectly plausible.

When daylight came, the Afghans attached to Bravo Company appeared in the courtyard in front of the base. They intended to ceremonially raise the flag that the Afghan soldier the marines called
‘Rambo’ had worn over his shoulders. Captain Sparks’s Afghan Army counterpart, Captain Saed, a short, proud-looking man with a wiry black beard and a mischievous grin ordered his
men into two lines of about fifteen soldiers each. Three soldiers attempted to thread a stick through one end of the flag, so that it could be attached to a pole on the wall and flown over Marjah,
in defiance to the Taliban, who still controlled most of the district.

Captain Saed changed his mind and ordered his men into a single line. I recognised Qadeer, whose white teeth appeared in the middle of his thick black beard as he grinned at me. ‘Morning
how are you good?’, he asked. He had a wonderfully expressive face that ran through three states: deep concentration, unbridled joy and heavy sadness. Behind Captain Saed, Rambo finally got
the flag up, to applause and cheers. From the middle of the courtyard, Captain Saed turned and shouted at him to take it down again; he had a speech to make before the flag was raised. The Afghans
were in full combat gear, wearing flak jackets and helmets, with rifles held in front of their chests, pointing to the ground. I’d never seen them look so good.

One Afghan soldier put his RPG on his shoulder. ‘Whoa, whoa, put that down’, shouted one of the marines. The marines watched from the verandah at the front of the base, with
patronising but benevolent pride, like parents watching their children’s first school play. This was a shambles but at least it wouldn’t get any marines killed. As soon as anything
important happened, the marines’ feelings toward the Afghans would go straight back to frustration and contempt.

‘AT THE READY!’ shouted Captain Saed. The Afghan soldiers hit their heels together and stamped their feet in unison. ‘Nobody move until the flag is raised! Even if a snake
bites you or a bee stings you. This is our national flag, we must respect it. It is for this that we have fought and sacrificed ourselves. We did it for the people of Afghanistan and to be able to
fly our flag here in Marjah.’ ‘Allah Akbar [God is great]!’ the soldiers chanted.

The flag was raised. Everyone applauded. As they dispersed, a few Afghans hugged the watching marines. ‘Good day, good day’, one said to me. A bullet zipped overhead, presumably
aimed at the Afghan flag, but only a couple of people noticed.

On the other side of the compound was a small outbuilding, being used as a toilet. Or rather, it was a room full of rubble where the marines went to shit into plastic bags, which were then
burned. The toilet had a small flat roof, of no more than ten square feet, which three marines were turning into another look-out post. Sandbags were handed up to them, which they assembled around
themselves for protection. They had piled only eight bags together when a few bullets fizzed over their heads and bounced off the wall beside them. ‘Keep those sandbags coming faster,
we’re pretty exposed up here’, said one, nervously. Another fired a few shots back. Behind them Captain Saed stood, oblivious, trying to get the flagpole to stay upright.

‘It’s coming from that compound six hundred metres out, to my direct front’, shouted the marine who’d fired. His direct front was one of the sides that didn’t yet
have any sandbags. Captain Saed finished tying the flagpole and climbed down.

A few hours later, one of the marines, still taking fire on the roof, approached Captain Sparks. ‘If we may, can we take the flag down? It’s an excellent wind indicator for their
snipers, Sir.’

‘The fucking flag stays up’, said Sparks. ‘It’s like a lot of things right now, I don’t care. I like the flag, it’s like saying fuck you
constantly.’

Bravo needed to extend their area of control. Two squads of marines, a handful of ANA and the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team set out to clear five buildings to the north
of their base.

Every step had to be taken carefully; every bag, bump or pile of dirt treated with suspicion. This created an awful amount of work and required an exhausting level of concentration. IEDs are
often made from the yellow plastic jugs that Afghans use to carry water; they’re scattered all over the place in every home. Here, every jug had to be approached carefully and checked before
anyone could walk past it. It was like walking across New York knowing that every takeaway coffee cup could be booby-trapped.

The first compound we entered contained a small two-roomed house. On one side, two cows were tied to a wall, on the other was a tiny garden. The door at the far side of the compound was closed
but a marine was sure it had been open when we first walked in. Everyone went down on one knee and pointed their guns at the door. The explosives-sniffing dog ran around, followed by a marine with
a metal detector. ‘Hey – let the ANA go first’, said a marine behind me. ‘Get the fuck out, back the fuck up.’ Four Afghan soldiers shuffled nervously through the
door, followed by the marines shouting ‘going in the next building’.

Beyond the door was a huge well, twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep. In a crescent shape, covering half the surface of the water, floated what must have been a month’s worth of human
shit. The marines gagged at the smell. In shock, one pointed to a bucket and pulley. You could see them thinking:
these people actually use this water?
Every new building and new contact
brought more evidence that the people they’d come to liberate were, to put it politely, not at all like them. Sometimes, I saw the moments of revelatory shock on their faces:
‘They’re not like Americans; what kind of a person does that; how can they allow themselves to be beaten down like that; how can they lie like that?’ were questions I heard
often.

Next to the well was a mosque, which the ANA had already entered. Beyond the mosque, they found a ‘line’, trailing over the far wall: a suspicious-looking white wire. The EOD team
– Tom Williams and Rich Stachurski (‘Ski’) – were called forward. ‘They say they got one, they can see the line’, said Staff Sergeant Young, as Tom turned on his
Vallon metal detector. Crouching, he walked across the mosque’s courtyard and looked over the far wall.

‘Hey. Listen up, how far to the right have we got guys?’ shouted Tom.

‘We’ve got guys in the far corner here’, said Young, referring to the marines who had stayed by the shitty well.

‘There’s a fucking IED over there’, said Williams.

‘PUSH BACK AWAY FROM THAT WALL, PUSH BACK INTO THIS AREA’, screamed Young. The wall was all that separated his men from the IED.

I followed Young across the courtyard.

‘It’s fucking huge’, said Tom as we approached him. ‘I don’t know what it is; it looks like maybe a fifty-pound bag or something. It’s big as fuck and
it’s electric, it’s running into the other compound.’

‘And there’s a kid over the wall’, said another marine.

The IED was a white parcel, held together with black tape, which sat on the ground, just around the corner of the wall surrounding the well. It looked like a large bag of laundry, or a giant
rolled-up sleeping bag. No effort had been made to hide it, so it had probably been placed there just before we appeared. The white wire ran from the IED along a ditch beside the mosque, over the
wall and into a neighbouring compound. Someone would be at the other end, wire in one hand and a power source, probably a battery, in the other, waiting to make the connection as soon as the
marines walked around the corner. Fifty pounds of explosives is easily enough to blow several marines to pieces. If they’d continued straight from the well, rather than clearing the mosque
first, they would have walked right on to it.

Tom climbed over the far wall and walked slowly towards the wire. He cut it and pulled it away from the IED, then came back over the wall and said he was going to place a charge next to the IED
to set it off. Ski asked where they could run after the charge had been set. The marines’ rules didn’t allow them to enter the mosque, so they would have to run around to the other side
before the IED blew. Tom asked for cover while he approached the IED. He was worried that whoever had been on the other side of the far wall, ready to detonate the bomb, might pop up and shoot him
from close range. He walked towards the IED, sweeping every inch of ground in front of him.