One Hundred Victories (13 page)

Aziz then invited the district governor into a side room and showed him a document. It had been Aziz’s idea to prepare a written agreement for the Rabat elders to sign with their thumbprints. By signing, they would be committing their five subtribes to forming a local defense group to defend the pass. In return, the government would support them. The governor agreed to the idea, and he and Aziz returned to request the elders’ signatures. The elders asked for a fortified observation post to be built on the pass to help protect their men, and the team agreed. Chamtu came to Rabat two days later to berate the elders and demand that they renege, but they told him they had had no alternative.

The team was on the hunt for Chamtu, hoping to take him down. A few weeks later, on June 8, they were in Surobi at the district center when they came under mortar fire from the mountain range to the west. Three passes leading out of that range served as ratlines for the Taliban, who enjoyed sanctuary in the sparsely populated district beyond, which connected in the south to Pakistan. The team members jumped into their Humvees and headed due west to the closest ratline. At its mouth sat the little village of Nawi Kalay. Their plan was to gather the elders and try to persuade them to give them some information as to the insurgents’ whereabouts. It would be difficult. Many of those villages along the mountain range found it easier to submit to Taliban domination than to fight it. In addition, they had less economic incentive to deal with the Americans than the poorer tribes on the east side of the valley did. Quite a few of their sons worked in Dubai and sent home money. Their silk
shalwar kameezes
testified to their comfortable, if rural, circumstances. Hutch also had the SOT-A intelligence team attached to them monitoring the radio traffic as they sped along.

As they entered Nawi Kalay, the group came to an open area. Fifty meters off the road, near the tree line, they saw Afghans taking down mortar tubes, probably the very ones that had shot at them. The team reacted instinctively. They wheeled to the left and attacked. The sergeant in the lead Humvee led the charge into the midst of about two dozen Taliban fighters, who began running in every direction. Hutch did not need to issue orders; the team just went on automatic pilot. Every infantryman had practiced the maneuver thousands, probably tens of thousands, of times. As they closed in, the soldiers jumped off their trucks to chase down fleeing insurgents.

A few of the Taliban stood and fought. Caught at close quarters, one soldier drew his Yarborough knife, an item that every Green Beret receives upon graduating from the qualification course. The knife was named to honor William P. Yarborough, the Special Warfare Center commander who persuaded John F. Kennedy, an ardent special forces supporter, to authorize the beret as their official headgear, over army opposition. The headgear was to symbolize their special skills as well as the higher ethical standards Yarborough believed they should uphold to carry out their credo, “To free the oppressed.” The knife is usually a ceremonial item, used to cut open rations or fix gear, but in this case the soldier put it to its intended use: hand-to-hand combat. Training in close quarters battle tactics is standard in the special operations forces, as is “combatives” training, when a fight goes to ground. It is a mix of martial arts, grappling, and all-out ultimate fighting.

Very rarely had the men been in such close-range fighting, but they reacted with a practiced fury that overwhelmed their enemy. Hutch’s gun truck ran over one of the insurgents, literally mowing him down. In the middle of the firefight, a car drove down the road and was hit by a round. A ten-year-old boy riding in the car was killed.

After the fighting stopped, Greg took photos to aid identification of the fighters. They confirmed that one was the insurgent leader Chamtu. Many of his premier fighters were dead as well. They also found RPGs, cell phones, code books, and a motorcycle rigged with a bomb for a suicide driver. Greg, the intelligence sergeant, was ecstatic at the treasure trove, which would help him and the team’s intelligence analysts track down the group’s affiliates in three districts, its support network, and its contacts in Pakistan. In all, eleven enemy had been killed.

They loaded the corpses into their trucks. There was nowhere to put them but inside, under their feet. When they got back to the Surobi district center, however, the Afghan police there were too afraid to take control of the bodies. They refused, certain that there would be reprisals. Finally the operators persuaded the district governor to take custody of the dead Taliban and arrange for their burial. Hutch also explained what had had happened to the boy who was killed in the car. No outcry from the villagers or the district governor ensued, and Hutch surmised that the Afghans understood that the father had been in error to drive into the middle of a firefight with his son. In their subsequent shura with the Surobi elders, Hutch gave detailed instructions for what civilians could do to avoid harm if a battle was occurring in their vicinity. He promised his team would always seek to engage insurgents outside of the populated areas.

The next day, in the Orgun bazaar, Aziz issued a public challenge to Abdul Aziz Abbasin, the Taliban shadow governor for Orgun District and the number-two Taliban leader in the province. “Come fight me,” he said on a handheld speaker. “I will fight you anywhere.” The following day, a gas station attendant arrived with the reply: Abdul Aziz Abbasin will fight you in Pirkowti tomorrow morning. Pirkowti was the Taliban stronghold.

Challenge issued, challenge accepted. As in an old-fashioned duel, further terms were offered. Hutch relayed the message that if the insurgents didn’t use IEDs, they would not call in air support. He was confident they could win with only infantry. The team reached Pirkowti thirty minutes before dawn. In addition to their ODA, they had Aziz and his platoon, psyops, which was now called Military Information Support Operations, or MISO—a terrible acronym that spawned bad jokes about Japanese food—and the signals intelligence guys, about fifty men in all. They passed through Pirkowti itself without incident and proceeded eastward toward the next village, Shaykhan, where Abbasin reportedly lived, or at least bedded down. They took a hard right into an uninhabited area between the two villages, and as they came around a bend they encountered a flaming “jingle truck”—one of the fancifully painted and decorated trucks that hauled goods throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, named for the bells that adorned the railing above the cab. As soon as he saw the fire leaping upward, Hutch braced himself. This is really going to happen, he thought. A split second later the barrage began, with rounds from two 82 millimeter recoilless rifles coming from the ridgeline across the road. These were the standard big guns of the Taliban, their heaviest stand-off weapons. The site was well chosen: the team was caught in a kill zone with minimal cover. The men could not drive through, guns blazing, as they normally would, because the burning truck was blocking the road. RPG fire began to come from the wadi below them on one side of the road and the mountains that rose up directly from the road on the other side. They fired back against the unseen enemy. It was about 8:30 a.m. Greg, the intelligence sergeant, clambered up the sheer mountainside, seeking an angle from which he could throw a grenade into the crevice where the Taliban were hiding. The greenery growing out of the wadi was waving with the Taliban movements.

A MISO soldier named Buck was shot. Hutch sent the medic to check on him. Buck, who had been manning the .50-caliber machine gun on the exposed back of one of the Humvees, was hurt pretty badly. He had been hit in the neck, and the bullet had traveled down his shoulder to lodge in his ribs. Hutch yelled: “What’s going on?” He wanted to push ahead, if possible. They had not yet run out of ammo, but they were getting low. Matt was on the .50-cal on the back of Master Sergeant Cameron Ua’s truck. Ua was their new team sergeant, a veteran of 1st Special Forces Group and a very calm, steady presence. He formed the perfect balance to the hyperactive and highly verbal duo of Hutch and Greg. Ua asked Matt for an ammo check, and Matt reported that he had started the day with 12,000 rounds, of which he had expended 8,000.

Then one of the attached intelligence sergeants was lightly wounded. A bullet ricocheted off an ammo can into his chest, hitting a side plate. With two down, Hutch knew they would need to call for medevac and more ammo. He hated to leave the fight, but they pulled back through Pirkowti to a big green space with a small mud hut nearby. The team checked their ammo. They were down to 10 to 40 percent of their total per truck, so they cross-loaded what was left while the call for medevac went out. At 9:15 the medevac bird came in, about forty-five minutes after the battle began. The team had preplanned an ammo resupply back at Orgun base. Ua and Jeff had packed the cans, and the packet was sitting there ready to be sling-loaded under a helicopter. But there were no gunships available. Hutch swore. The maintenance platoon at Orgun offered to drive ammo to Pirkowti in an RG-31. But there was no way that vehicle could climb into and out of the steep walls of the wadi and then navigate the narrow canyon into Pirkowti.

Hutch did not have much time to make a decision. They heard the insurgents talking on the radio; they were already flooding into the wadis to block the exit from the valley. As it was, the team would have to blow through there hard to make it out without further casualties. Dustin was Hutch’s driver; he had been a motocross racer in Oklahoma and he knew how to drive as well as fix vehicles. He’d applied directly to the special forces through the “X-Ray” direct accession program, formally known as Initial Accession, or IA. He had been assigned to the “Schoolhouse”—that is, the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School at Fort Bragg, and found himself on a bus out to Camp Mackall. Dustin had the air of a laid-back California hippie, and he was a true sun worshipper. No sooner did the team arrive at one of their camps than he would strip down to his Ranger panties, as their black nylon workout shorts were called, and stretch out on a rooftop or a folding camp chair to soak up some rays. But Dustin’s appearance and manner belied his mechanical and technical skill and an inquisitive, contrarian nature. There were no yes men among the sergeants. Hutch gave the order to go, and Dustin floored it. A recoilless rifle round narrowly missed them, landing five meters away. The next one shot out their satellite antenna. Greg was driving his truck, crazily, with two Afghan trucks bringing up the rear. An RPG hit his right rear, blowing out his back tire. He kept driving on the rim. The poor working dog cowered in the back, under the feet of her handler. Working dogs often suffered post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and this small black lab was no exception. She had been through a lot already.

The insurgents’ tactics were practiced. Another trap was sprung as the team left the wadi and rejoined the road. The insurgents were used to shooting at the trucks from the wadis on either side of the road. The larger mine-resistant armored vehicles were sitting ducks and had a hard time returning fire effectively. The insurgents were so close that the tall trucks could not depress the barrels of their automated guns low enough to reach such a close-in target. The latest innovation, called CROWS (for “Common Remotely Operated Weapon System”), allowed a gunner to locate and fire on targets using a joystick, video and thermal cameras, while staying safely cocooned inside his armored vehicle. The experience was something like playing a video game on a roller coaster. But the Humvees had an advantage in this situation because they were closer to the ground. Their .50-cal guns were just about level with the heads of the insurgents when they popped up from the wadi edge to fire at the team through the foliage. The team later heard intercepts of the Taliban talking about how many they had lost in that wadi and concluding that they had crept up too close.

The team pushed the Humvees as hard as they would go. They hit forty miles an hour, driving through the ambush, then jostled violently down into the wadi and over the rocky bed until they exited the valley. The team and their Afghan comrades rolled into Orgun as bystanders turned around to gawk. Their trucks were limping, full of bullet holes, windows shot out. The RPG was still sticking out of Greg’s wheel rim. Aziz took the opportunity to taunt Abbasin. “We went to meet you and you did not show yourself,” he said, issuing another challenge with his megaphone. When the returning fighters entered their base camp at Orgun, the “Rakkasans” of the 187th Infantry Regiment, part of the 101st Airborne Division, came over, offering to help fix their vehicles and refit their ammo. “It was like having a pit crew,” Hutch said of the warm welcome their infantry brethren gave them.

The team and Aziz went back to Pirkowti the next day to show the flag and see if Abbasin would give battle, but he did not. They did not want their departure the day before to be interpreted as unwillingness to fight. Hutch and his team were learning the finer points of the “Kabuki” theater of Afghan warfare. There is a show of force, and then someone loses face. Rarely are the battles fought to the last man. It is combat for position and psychological dominance. The special operations team and their Afghan allies had shown themselves to be the undaunted ones, and this narrative stuck. They picked up chatter to the effect of “if you see the Humvees, run away.”

The effects of Chamtu’s death and word of the Pirkowti showdown were dramatic. When the team and Aziz’s fighters returned to Rabat, they were greeted like heroes. Men lined up to join the local defense group and began helping to construct the fort. In addition, the young men of Rabat built a smaller observation post on the biggest mountain in the pass. When they were done, they raised the Afghan flag above both. The symbol of Taliban on motorcycles had now been replaced by a locally manned outpost flying the national flag.

As word of the recent battles and observation post construction spread, sentiments changed. Hutch and his team along with Aziz and his men brokered similar agreements with the elders in Orgun. Then they went to Surobi for a shura with the district governor and the elders there. That day, seventeen elders signed an agreement to raise a self-defense force, and dozens more signed in the coming days. The team had perfected its formula. It had shown itself willing to fight, hand to hand and face to face, and had prevailed. The psychological impact encouraged others to stand with them. The Rabat agreement was reached via a series of side deals; the power brokers of each subtribe had to be engaged away from the rest, not at the shura. Once they had agreed to come forward publicly, their assent would pull the other, more reluctant tribes along. This was how Afghan decision-making occurred. The real decisions did not occur in the shura; the shura or jirga was the place where decisions already reached behind closed doors were ratified, positions aired, and terms of the deal recited. It was politics in action.