No Worse Enemy (22 page)

‘To your right. You know Building seven? The next little compound to your right, see it?’

‘The left side or the right side?’

‘The middle, he came up right in the middle, you can almost see a little dust trail.’

A burst of machine-gun fire was aimed at the little compound.

‘Higher’, said Young. Two more bursts, from two marines. About twenty came back, right above us.

After an hour, there was no movement in the pork chop other than the white smoke drifting. The white-bearded old man reappeared, with two young boys; all of them wore green
shalwar
kameez.
They walked towards us, then stopped directly beneath the marines, staring up, their arms behind their backs. The old man pointed to the burning buildings, which had been pummeled for
the last hour, and held out his hands in despair. One of the boys looked up at us on the roof, the other looked at the ground. One of the Afghan soldiers on the ground shouted at the old man:
‘Lift up your shirt.’ He looked even more despairing, as if to say, ‘after all that ...
this
?’ The two little boys nervously copied him, first showing their bare
stomachs, then turning to show their backs. It was the saddest thing I’d seen in Marjah.

The old man said everyone had now left the buildings. He and the boys slowly walked away. We got down from the roof as a Harrier jet approached to hit the smoking buildings with a gun run.

Back at the base, about thirty trucks from Charlie Company had arrived. It had taken them almost three days to clear five miles along the road to Marjah. On the way,
they’d found more than twenty IEDs. As the marines jumped from the first vehicle, the driver almost landed on a large metal drum, just visible above the ground. He pulled out his knife and
dug up the earth around it. Three other marines gathered around. ‘Don’t be a hero’, they laughed. In the end, they decided it was the lid of an old anti-tank mine and left it
alone.

Bravo now had a supply line, power and the reassuring presence of armoured trucks with huge machine-guns on their roofs. Captain Sparks hadn’t requested the backup, nor had it been part of
the original plan. But the relentless violence of the first few days and the content of the reports he’d sent back had made his commanders decide to send Charlie Company.

Some trucks were parked in a long line along the road into Marjah and some were at each end of the bazaar, pointing out, their guns manned. The bazaar, the commercial hub of Marjah, straddled
the main road through Kuruh Charai, the same road where we’d been ambushed as the sun came up on the first morning. Now, its battered metal shutters were closed, a small blue lorry lay on its
side in a ditch and abandoned boxes of fruit and vegetables had dried up in the sun. Other than a few distant figures who hovered outside, pretending not to look, the bazaar was deserted.

Charlie Company’s arrival in Karu Charai hadn’t been without incident. As they covered the area south-west of the pork chop, to help Bravo Company start moving north, they’d
been caught in a gunfight and fired a rocket into a house where three families were sheltering. As they’d been told in the days before the invasion, the families hadn’t fled, but stayed
indoors until the fighting died down. The rocket had killed four people and injured seven, two critically.

‘These dark figures kept running towards us. They would show up with a bundle in their hands and it would be a baby wrapped up, either alive or dead’, said First Lieutenant Aaron
MacLean, a lean and kindly-looking Platoon Commander. ‘They just kept coming and coming. By the end we’d evacuated seven casualties and there were four KIA [killed in action].They kept
bringing them over the field. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.’ He struggled to breathe as he spoke. His lips were dried up and cracked and his startled, wide-open eyes
darted around the room, not focusing for long on anything.

The seven injured people had been flown to a British hospital in Lashkar Gar. The rest of the family, and the bodies of the dead, sheltered in an abandoned store in the opium bazaar, now
occupied by Charlie Company.

‘You’re looking at the definition of innocent people, there’s no question about it, you know. Little girls’, said MacLean. ‘There’s just no way to rationalise
that this was in any way a good thing or justified. It’s just a terrible failing and a terrible sight.’

Of all the soldiers I’d ever met, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, MacLean was one of the most idealistic, in the best sense of the word. Commanding officers and generals always say
honourable-sounding things about noble intentions; they have to. Grunts often don’t care or even know about higher political aims. I’d asked Hillis about COIN and General
McChrystal’s promise of a ‘government in a box’. ‘I wasn’t even aware that was the long-term plan’, he’d replied. ‘I didn’t know there was a
future part to it, just that there were bad people here.’

But MacLean had clearly read and thought a great deal about Afghanistan and the war on terror. ‘The United States and United Kingdom have a responsibility not to let these people slide
back under the thumb of these theocratic fascists’, he said, softly but passionately. ‘We’ve promised these people a lot over the years and we owe it them to see those promises
through.’ He’d just seen seventeen lives torn apart; he was in shock, struggling to hold on to the beliefs that had brought him to Afghanistan. ‘War is a curse. I knew that
intellectually before I came. But it’s not the worst thing out there. That’s the calculation you have to make to justify it; otherwise everyone would be a pacifist. And there’s a
good case to make for that, I could certainly make it more strongly having seen what I’ve seen.’ What he’d seen had reinforced the arguments against his belief in military
intervention. But he remained resolute: ‘I have strong black and white moral views about people like the Taliban; they are just evil.’

I followed MacLean, several marines and a terp as they went to meet Abdel Baki and his father. They had both been in the house when it was hit; Abdel Baki’s sister and her daughter had
been killed. The family had fled Uruzgun Province following a dispute with the government about land; they’d come to Marjah because there was no government there. Now, they had to sleep next
to their family’s dead bodies, in two storerooms on one side of the opium bazaar. We sat down on the floor and MacLean asked the marines to introduce themselves. Abdel Baki interrupted them.
‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with the dead bodies’, he said. ‘I need to take them to Lashkar Gar, to the cemetery.’ His hair, eyebrows and long beard,
which curled out from the sides of his face, were thick and dark, extensions of his unusually solid frame. His eyes were almost black and he had a graze across his forehead. Although Abdel Baki
struggled not to break down, he spoke without anger or hyperbole.

‘I’ve had a very difficult life. I kept moving from place to place. I took refuge somewhere and had to leave and then came here. I’m a farmer working on somebody else’s
land. I get a sixth of everything I make. I have nothing except the clothes that I’m wearing. If I go to Lashkar Gar I have no place to stay’, he said. ‘We heard on the radio that
coalition forces were coming. And then we would be allowed to leave. So we spent four days indoors waiting, as you asked, waiting for you to say it was OK to leave, to take us to a safe place. But
then a shell hit our house, destroying my family. Two of my family are killed: one from another family, and another family had a member killed.’

‘We’re really sorry for what happened yesterday’, said a marine, addressing Abdel Baki directly for the first time.

‘Right now, I don’t have anything. No money, no clothes, no food. When I’m done with the dead bodies I have to go to the hospital, where the rest of my family are. You guys
have to take me there.’

The marines said they were checking with the military hospitals in the area, trying to find out which one the injured had been taken to. Incredibly, no one knew. But they couldn’t promise
to take Abdel Baki to see them, or to bury his dead, because ISAF rules forbade Afghan civilians from travelling on helicopters unless they were escorting injured children or were themselves
casualties.

‘Why don’t you do your piece?’ said MacLean to Sergeant Berwa, who knelt next to Abdel Baki.

‘It pains us all here to know what you must be going through right now’, said Sergeant Berwa, a reservist working for the Civil Affairs team. He coughed, struggling to get out what
he’d been sent to say. He looked at the floor and continued. ‘You know, the US Marines, the citizens of Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan, together can achieve great things
to make Afghanistan a safer and more prosperous place for all.’ How he managed to say that last line I don’t know, nor did I have any idea what good it was supposed to do.
‘There’s nothing we can do to bring back your loss. But what we can do is try to help you out by giving you the very least that we can, which is to help you in your travels to Lashkar
Gar for your fallen ones.’

‘In future, if you guys have operations, announce them to civilians, tell them to go to you, then this won’t happen again’, Abdel Baki said.

‘We’re here to help out with everything that we can, with security and stability in the area’, said Lieutenant Greenlief, Bravo Company’s executive officer, who’d
been entrusted with clearing up Charlie Company’s mess. ‘And because we’re here for you, we never target ... or if there are any indications that civilians are there, we do not
shoot. I’ve seen the cowardice of the Taliban, forcing women and children to walk with them, using them as shields so they can shoot at us and walk away. One of the most important things in
our lives is family and taking care of our family.’

MacLean sat next to Greenlief, his arms around his legs, gently rocking back and forth. His jaw muscles twitched under his skin. He seemed to be struggling not to break down. (He was suffering
from pneumonia, which he’d refused to be evacuated for, and had lost nearly ten pounds in weight in five days.)

Abdel Baki said his family could easily have been saved. ‘I was waiting inside my house for four or five days, I was waiting for you to call me to come out and for you to take me to a safe
place. There are lots of people like that, if you ask, they will come out.’

MacLean thanked him for the information, saying he didn’t know families were waiting inside their homes like that. (ISAF messages had specifically told people to stay in their homes and
had even claimed they wouldn’t fire anything powerful enough to penetrate their compounds’ mud walls.) ‘The majority of the people in the Taliban are poor, helpless
Muslims’, continued Abdel Baki, ‘who have been forced to be there. You have to give them a chance to switch sides. Only the core fighters will stay, the others will come
over.’

‘Sergeant B?’ said Greenlief, prompting Berwa to finish.

‘It’s not the most that we can do for you right now but we want to try and help you out with a payment for your losses ... to help you out ... with your travels to Lashkar Gar, the
burial process and any other type of alleviations. We all feel deeply saddened by this incident and we hope to try and avoid these in the future using the information that you have been telling
us.’

Abdel Baki explained exactly who in each family had been killed or injured. One family had just a single child left. His wife and four children had all been injured.

‘There were four deceased, bottom line’, said a marine.

‘Check’, said another.

Sergeant Berwa continued. ‘I’ll present him with the ... with the condolence payment.’ He coughed again and turned to the terp. ‘Like I said, it’s the absolute
least that we can do because there’s ... obviously you can’t bring back someone you love.’

He pulled bricks of Afghan notes out of his backpack and piled them in a stack. Abdel Baki’s whole body turned away. He didn’t touch the money. He just stared at it, at the final
confirmation that this was really happening.

Sergeant Berwa placed the stack of notes, roughly $10,000 altogether, $2,500 for each life lost, on the ground in front of Abdel Baki.

Abdel Baki picked up the money, his face twisted away from it, as if he were carrying one of his dead relatives.

‘My heart still bleeds from what happened yesterday. I’m suffering a lot’, he said. Next to him, his father, Abdel Kareem, wiped tears from his eyes.

As I walked out, I looked into the next room. I saw four bodies on the floor, covered with a single, pale blue, sheet of cloth. Over two bodies, blood had seeped through the cloth. A man invited
me in, motioning that he would lift up the sheet so that I could film the bodies. But I already felt I’d intruded too much. I bowed my head, put my hand over my heart, and walked away,
failing to do my job properly.

Later, sitting on the concrete floor of the small room where he slept, half-way down the opium bazaar, MacLean was admirably frank when describing what had happened.

‘We’d been engaged all afternoon by an enemy team and they’d taken a few RPG shots at us. At one point, someone actually stepped out directly on the road and fired an RPG at
one of our vehicles. Through the course of the afternoon we fired multiple rockets and the enemy fired multiple rockets at us. Either our rocket or their rocket hit this family’s
house.’ He could have shed more doubt on whose rocket it had been but he didn’t. ‘We’re here to provide security and last night we failed at that. It doesn’t really
matter whose rocket it was, the Taliban won last night because people got hurt and marines were in the area.

‘I’ve been told this by Afghans before. “I don’t mind Taliban and I don’t mind marines, I just want everyone to leave me alone and I want to lead my life.”
There’s something to be said for that point of view and certainly if you’ve lost family members I couldn’t stand in front of you and tell you otherwise and that’s not really
my place. I don’t know. If I was in his shoes ... It’s almost like there’s two entirely different levels. There’s the political level and there’s the level on the
ground and I’m not sure I’ve entirely reconciled them myself right now.’ The marines under MacLean didn’t have his sensitivity. And they had no doubt whose rocket had hit
the family’s house. They even knew who’d fired it and already nicknamed him ‘Whopper’. I asked what this meant. ‘Whopper – Burger King – BK – baby
killer.’