No Worse Enemy (28 page)

The Marines officers had a phrase they used when questioned about giving power to such men: it might not be perfect but it was ‘Afghan good enough’.

I joined Bravo Company on a patrol to the east, along the road I’d watched them clear a few months earlier. The number of attacks had increased immediately after the poppy
harvest, the traditional start of the new fighting season. Everyone stopped when we heard heavy gunfire three hundred metres south of our position. The ANA, which had advanced much further than it
was supposed to, fired at us, somehow mistaking the marines for the Taliban. No one was perturbed; if anything, they seemed slightly bored.

The EOD team found a freshly-laid IED at the crossroads two kilometres from the base, where they’d found a bunker and two IEDs before. As they dug into the road, they were shot at first by
a ‘highly-effective’ sniper, then from another direction by a machine-gunner hiding in a row of trees. At first, when the team heard the ‘tsssszzzzup’ of a bullet, they
darted behind their trucks. Eventually, they gave that up, just lay flat out on the road, and continued digging.

When they’d uncovered the IED, I left my camera on the road to film it being detonated. We took cover behind the wall, exactly where we’d hidden before. After the explosion, I ran
back to pick up my camera, thinking the dust cloud, at least fifty metres high, would conceal me. As I bent down, a bullet fired by the sniper zipped past me, louder and faster than any bullet
I’d heard before. I grabbed my camera and ran back towards the truck.

‘Oh my God’, said one of the EOD team when I reached safety. ‘He fired right into the fucking smoke man, holy shit. You’d say that just barely missed you, huh?’ I
felt shaken, even offended that the sniper had lined me up in his sights, followed me until I slowed down, taken aim and fired a shot. He wasn’t supposed to single me out, I was just a
witness, not a participant.

A group of men in black
shalwar kameez
ran across the road eight hundred metres away from us. Marines bounded across a neighbouring field in pursuit. ‘This reminds me of day
one’, said a marine crouched next to me. Everyone scanned the trees for movement. A burst of fire came from the trees, no more than sixty metres away, but no one was hit. I asked how the
gunman had managed to miss. ‘I don’t know’, replied the marine, ‘because they suck?’ He sprinted to the next truck and banged furiously on the door. It opened, he
climbed in, and slammed it shut. Marines were approaching across the fields north and south of the main road. The gunmen vanished; they’d decided it was time to retreat.

I’d had many similar experiences, both on this and previous trips to Afghanistan, when great numbers of the soldiers and marines I’d been with really ought to have been shot. I now
regarded the idea that the Taliban were the best fighters in the world to be a myth. They were often terrible shots, used old and badly-functioning equipment and regularly wasted perfect chances.
Their main strength was their ability to become invisible. The Russians had found things just the same; they called their enemy
dukhi
– ghosts.

As we approached the T-junction that marked the end of the road east, a drone above us filmed a man being dropped off a motorbike and eight others entering a mosque two hundred metres beyond the
north–south road. ‘Those are the guys that are going to shoot at us in a bit, so I’d like to padlock their movements. They’ve massed in the last short period of time,
because it was a ghost town just a moment ago’, Nascar said to the drone pilot. Soon, eight men became twelve, then ‘upwards of twelve’, then twenty.

The marines congregated at the petrol station at the T-junction. Although everyone expected to be attacked at any moment, many fell asleep in the shade.

The north–south road, and the canal that flanked it, formed the border between Bravo Company’s area of control and the desert, where the Taliban had free rein. But the Taliban often
crossed the canal, driving their motorbikes across shoddily-built footbridges. Captain Sparks wanted to strengthen the border and make it meaningful; he decided to blow up the bridges.

As we walked towards the first bridge, several local people came out of their houses. They wanted to know why the marines had abandoned a nearby base that they had established three weeks after
they landed. ‘When you had a post there security was very good. Now, every day, the place is insecure and the Taliban is coming’, said a man who had recently moved to Marjah from
Lashkar Gar. Captain Sparks said there would be a base there again ‘very soon ... We’ll take down the bridges and that will provide security for you in the short term so they
can’t travel though here. That will allow us to build posts, then when security is better we’ll build new bridges.’ He told the man and his sons to go inside, to be safe from the
explosions. ‘And tell him to say “hi” to us next time we’re on patrol’, said a marine.

Listening to this conversation, I noticed that the terp had developed a curious habit, probably from spending five months listening to the marines, of inserting ‘fucking’ into every
sentence he translated. This didn’t make sense to the marines: ‘did that old man really say fucking that much?’; ‘is there even a word for “fucking” in
Pashtu?’ But the terp didn’t stop, not until Captain Sparks told him that he didn’t need to put the word into every sentence.

When I asked Captain Sparks why the post had been abandoned, he explained that having lost almost a platoon of marines, he had no choice other than to focus on a smaller area. One marine had
died; the others had survived but their wounds were serious and they wouldn’t come back. ‘If you lose that many guys, it affects how much you can do each day. We have to accomplish the
mission so it means that everyone gets a little more tired and a little more worn-out every day.’ The squads Bravo sent on patrol had shrunk from thirteen men to eight.

Captain Sparks looked across the canal. He was as exhausted as I’d ever seen him. ‘They’re all over the place out here’, he said, waving his hand across the desolate,
flat landscape before us. ‘This is the area where we stop trying to control. Our area of control fades a little bit about a klick [kilometre] away from here, it gets worse, but this is the
edge of where we’re really actively trying to secure the area. Literally right there, that road.’ He pointed to the north–south road at our feet, then looked back over the canal.
‘It might as well be a different country. This is probably one of the most hostile places in Afghanistan. There’s two to three hundred Taliban out there.’

Sparks, who would later receive the Silver Star, spoke slowly and quietly. His eyes were dead. He looked like he could seize up and keel over on the spot, as did most of the marines. There is an
argument that six- or even twelve-month tours are too short. That nothing can be achieved or understood in such a short space of time. But the look on Captain Sparks’s face, like the looks on
the faces of everyone in Bravo Company, suggested that for the infantry, six months was too much. They looked utterly hollow and ready to snap.

‘It’s probably just as dangerous as when we first landed’, said Staff Sergeant Dawson, the marine from Staten Island, with whom I’d enjoyed the first quiet day in Marjah.
He’d recently been shot. His radio antenna had become tangled in a tree; as he tried to pull it free, a bullet went through his hand, through the name badge on his chest plate and finally,
pierced his throat, knocking him unconscious. But two weeks later, he was back in Marjah and on patrol again. ‘I feel like I got hit in the face with a baseball bat. It knocked the wind out
of me. If you let your guard down for a second, you get hit. I think that there are fresh fighters out there, with foreign advisory fighters. They’re picking up their game.’

Staff Sergeant Dawson’s experience was common. Three marines had been shot in the head, saved from death by their helmets. Lance Corporal Willis had been airlifted out after being hit by a
DFC. He returned a month later, only to need an airlift out again when he was shot through both legs. The only real shock was that no one from Bravo had been killed since the first day of combat,
when Corporal Jacob Turbott had been shot in the back by a sniper. As we got back to the trucks at the petrol station, the news came that two marines from Alpha Company, operating a few hundred
metres south of Bravo, had been killed by a DFC as they entered a building.

The bridges were blown up. The next day, one of them had been rebuilt; men on motorbikes could be seen driving across it. Plans were made to blow it up again the following night.

I wanted to catch up with Corporal Wesley Hillis, who’d been such a steady guide in those first few terrifying days. He was part of the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) –
a small team, formed from the nine members of Bravo that you’d least like to get into a fight with. They were the crazies. Their job was to be ready to charge into a battle whenever anyone
bad appeared. They spent their days driving around Marjah, praying to be ambushed.

I joined the QRF as they drove west from the bazaar, past a still-smouldering house from which they’d been attacked the day before. Hillis calmly scanned the buildings and trees around us.
‘Come on motherfuckers, come out to play’, he whispered from the seat in front of me. The truck knocked over a parked motorbike: ‘What? What? What the fuck are you looking
at?’ the top gunner screamed at the stunned faces below him. The task today was to pick up a man who had tried to grab a policeman’s gun – he wanted to shoot his own son, for
theft – but Hillis almost got into a fight with the police commander. Hillis wanted to take the man in cuffed and blindfolded, but the police commander thought he’d done nothing wrong
and Hillis should respect the commander’s superior rank. As they argued, in front of a small crowd, Hillis held his helmet in his right hand. I thought he would swing it into the
commander’s face (later, he told me he’d wanted to do just that), but he turned and walked away. ‘These people’, he told me later, ‘they’re not like Americans.
There’s no way you can trust them. They let the Taliban beat them but if it comes to one of us saying the wrong phrase or anything, they lose their lid because we’re Americans but
“that Taliban was from the same tribe as me”. It’s ridiculous, it’s a mind-fuck, it’s frustrating and ... that’s a losing ball game.’

He was further sickened when he was told to take off the tiny American flag he’d attached to his truck; it ‘sent the wrong message’. He told me that just before I’d come
back, a local imam, who had been given more than $65,000 for repairs to his mosque, had helped a Taliban commander avoid arrest. The marines had reliable intelligence that the commander was in the
imam’s village; they searched every building except the imam’s house. The imam agreed his house could be searched but asked if he could first usher the women into a separate room. The
commander, the marines later found, was amongst them, wearing a burqua.

‘This is nothing against the people of Afghanistan’, Hillis told me, ‘but I fucking hate the people of Marjah.’

The people of Marjah, four months after they had been liberated, also had plenty to say. Away from the marines, in front of large crowds who neither disagreed nor showed signs
of disapproval, a succession of men, including some I’d filmed re-opening their stores, selling cigarettes to the marines and the ANA, smiling and shaking their hands, took turns to complain
about life since the intervention.

‘We are Afghans, we won’t accept anybody else’s rule’, said one, summing up the entire problem in nine words. They kept coming, each more eager to speak than the one
before.

‘The situation is getting worse day by day. We are afraid. Our women and children are being martyred. Americans are entering houses. When they see someone with a beard they accuse him of
being Taliban. America should pull out its military and leave us with our elders and with our Muslim way of life. We don’t want them to be slapping this man or that man. Afghanistan is not
going to be built this way. Where does the Taliban come from? The Taliban are the sons of this land, they don’t come from outside. The situation in the bazaar is better but as soon as I leave
there is no security. The Americans were driving their tanks, someone’s stall was knocked over and dragged along the road. His money and his phone cards went everywhere. The marines drove on
and didn’t care.’

‘When the Taliban were here it was fully secure. No one was allowed to steal or commit robbery. If anyone was caught stealing they would pour used engine oil on his head and parade him in
the bazaar, so no one would dare commit robbery. I had a shop in this market, selling melon. I would leave them out at night and nobody would dare steal them.’

‘If someone comes out of the house to use the toilet [a field] they are shot. Two people are not able to sit together at night.’

‘I don’t think it will be of any use if they build a bridge or a school. I think it will be very good if they pack up and leave.’

No one had anything good to say, no one suggested any of the speakers had gone too far or shown ingratitude. No one seemed surprised by what was being said. One man said there would be peace if
Marjah were left to the Afghans.

‘The solution is that the Americans leave us with the Afghan forces and the government enforces Islamic
sharia
. We would totally support it, co-operate and work together.’ His
reasoning was simple: ‘I will say
jihad
is an obligation against the infidels but
jihad
is not permissible against Muslims. The Taliban would realise this and not fight against
them [the ANA].’ My translator laughed when he heard this; he said the man well knew that if the marines left, the ANA would be defeated, or flee, within hours and Marjah would once again be
under the control of the Taliban.

It is an old cliché, often used by those who know very little about Afghanistan and one that I have often argued against, that the Afghans will first fight foreigners, then each other,
and nothing will persuade them otherwise. Although every Afghan friend has proved to me, again and again, that a foreign guest is offered levels of hospitality and generosity that can be
embarrassing, it is also true that as soon as a foreign soldier lands, especially in the south, the local men will reach for their guns. Perhaps it was a mistake to think that after all that has
happened since we first arrived, even after we had re-defined our good intentions, we stood any chance of changing that.