One Hundred Victories (26 page)

The massacre had the potential to derail special operators’ efforts throughout Kandahar Province, but Hansell was shocked that he encountered little fallout from a terrible act of violence committed by an American just fifteen kilometers away. The most potent effect may have been not on Afghans in Maiwand but on Americans at home in the United States, adding yet another reason for them to recoil from the war. On the first patrol with Hansell and his soldiers after the lockdown order was lifted, Jan Mohammed, his ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips, asked a simple, succinct question about Bales: “If he was crazy, why was he in the army?”
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“WE’RE NOT GOING SOUTH, ARE WE?”

The massacre did not derail the ODA 7233’s plan, but the decisions of the conventional force command in Kandahar did. Hansell and the team were poised to move Jan Mohammed south and begin their intensive recruitment in the critical Taliban stronghold along the river. But Regional Command–South had other ideas. The deputy commander for operations, Brigadier General Marty Schweitzer, wanted the team to move instead into the eastern edge of Maiwand to stop the flow of Taliban into Zhari. Four successive brigades had tried to beat back the Taliban in that area, and Schweitzer’s 82nd Airborne was now trying to rack up this district in the win column before it was time to go home.

Hansell’s chain of command supported what he wanted to do. The southern part of Maiwand along the river was a major ratline from Helmand into Kandahar City; securing it could represent a critical breakthrough for the entire province. He had moved his pieces into place and was now ready for his decisive move south. The team had seven weeks remaining in its tour. If successful, this undertaking would be the culmination of three years of hard work by the special operations teams there. Hansell had seen how southern Maiwand fit into the bigger picture, then crafted a plan and lined up the allies to get there. Like his counterparts in Paktika and Kunar, he had found a way to pacify a larger area than a single village by combining a series of tactical moves. The key was not conducting repeated combat operations or building forts, but bringing successively more Afghans together around a plan they supported. Hansell grasped that his role was to be a facilitator: to put the Afghans in positions in which
they
would be able to protect things they valued, with enough support and numbers to enable them to survive. A security bubble created in that fashion would take root, expand, become more solid, and perhaps endure. The district police chief had fully embraced Hansell’s proposed move south, but the chief had no interest in going to the unpopulated eastern edge of Maiwand.

Brigadier General Schweitzer was focused on Zhari, however: he saw a situation there that needed resolving, and he saw the team in Maiwand as an asset he could use. Zhari, a recently created and tribally fragmented district, remained a violent place despite years of effort. A quickie attempt by US conventional forces to build local police there had gone awry, and Schweitzer wanted the special operators’ help in fixing it. A special operations team had originally been placed in Zhari, but it departed after experiencing conflicts with the brigade commander, who did not want the team to meet with the district officials without him being in attendance. The signs that the Afghan Local Police in Zhari had gone off the rails began to mount. Hansell began receiving reports that the Zhari local police were driving around Maiwand in their trucks and extorting bribes. One ALP member was caught planting a bomb. The conventional brigade had adopted an ill-advised policy of paying the police a reward, on top of their pay, for turning in IEDs, which was contrary to the rules prescribed for local police. Then one of the conventional unit’s soldiers had been killed by an Afghan dressed in a police uniform, part of the rising number of so-called “insider attacks.” The last straw came when two Zhari local police dragged a detainee behind their vehicle, killing him.
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Schweitzer wanted Hansell’s team to move east immediately to train and mentor the Zhari local police, as well as to recruit new local police in eastern Maiwand to shore up the effort in Zhari. There were many problems with this proposal. First, the team had not done any of the usual patrolling, village assessment, and local meetings that were essential first steps before entering a new area. It would not be a quick matter to fix the Zhari police force, which had ballooned overnight with none of the careful procedures that the special operators followed. Only eleven of the four hundred police even had official government IDs. They would need to re-vet the force to weed out the bad apples. The command’s desire to see quick production of additional police only compounded the risk. Finally, taking on this task would divert Hansell and his team from completing the culminating step of their own plan for Maiwand.

Schweitzer had no authority to issue orders to Hansell or any other special operations team. This fact always galled the conventional commanders. The special operators had tried over the years to placate them while maintaining autonomy. But this was an acute example of the type of conflicts that arose: there was one team and two different ideas of what it should do with the last seven weeks of its tour. Brigadier General Haas proposed a compromise to Brigadier General Schweitzer. The team could do both missions by splitting in half and dividing the remaining available positions allotted for Afghan Local Police in Maiwand between the two locations. That would allow the team to conduct its planned push south while also working in the eastern edge of the province.

Schweitzer rejected the proposal. He wanted all of the remaining slots for Maiwand devoted to the eastern edge and the special operations team’s entire focus on his priority. “Are we agreed?” he replied to Haas. “If not, I can raise this with Huggins.”
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It was a thinly veiled power play, one that occurred all too frequently despite senior officials’ rhetoric about the good working relationships that special operations and conventional forces had forged in the past decade. Schweitzer was threatening to take the issue to his two-star boss, Major General Jim Huggins, the commander of Regional Command–South—who also did not have any authority over special operations forces. But Huggins did outrank Haas, and Haas would be expected to accede to his request.

Schweitzer’s frontal challenge had its intended effect: Haas decided not to create a national command-wide argument over the location and mission of one twelve-man team that he would, in all likelihood, lose. The three-star commander tended to support the two-star commanders, and Haas would have to ask Allen to overrule them both. Hansell was crushed. He had a vision, he had taken the initiative, and he truly believed he and his team could fundamentally alter the situation in Maiwand with this carefully staged expansion of ALP. But he received an email from his battalion commander, Navarro, that left no further room for debate. Hansell gave the order for half of the team to move to the eastern part of Maiwand. Their new home would be tents at Deqobad, a tiny combat outpost that had been nearly vacated by the conventional forces.

Chris, the team sergeant, was angry. Conducting split-team operations in insurgent territory was not to be undertaken in a casual manner. Half of the team and half its infantry squad moved into Combat Outpost Deqobad. Hansell inspected their new home, a truly desolate scene reminiscent of the last days of Vietnam. A few forlorn conventional soldiers manned machine guns in three sandbagged, camouflage-covered lookout towers at three corners of the nearly vacant base. Two Stryker armored vehicles and a tank were parked under netting. They did not patrol outside the gate, because no one would be left to guard the base. So the young men just hunkered down, pulled their shift, and watched through binoculars.
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About fifty meters outside the base to the south, the brown Arghandab River marked the border with Panjwayi. A rat-a-tat of gunfire broke out one afternoon across the river in early August. This was not unusual; gunfire was often heard when the special operations team left the compound, which was barely visible through the trees. About ten attacks a day occurred in this area, called the Horn of Panjwayi. Hansell had ordered a PGSS (Persistent Ground Surveillance System), whose cameras, mounted on aerostatic balloons, allowed the team to watch the insurgents digging holes, planting bombs, and preparing ambushes.

Hansell quickly sized up how bad things were. Not only had the remaining conventional soldiers at Deqobad failed to do any patrolling to create a security bubble, they drew their weapons on any Afghans who did come to their gate—a tactic that would certainly not win them any friends in the area. The young men were totally bunkered in. Even the landowner, who had not been paid by those who built the base, was turned away at gunpoint.

Hansell, his split team, and their trusty Afghan special forces team partners immediately began patrolling the area to establish their presence and understand who was who. On their second patrol into the village just outside the outpost’s gate, Hansell’s men and Najibullah’s team returned to see an elder they had visited the day before. They entered his qalat and found that the doorway was booby-trapped. “Why didn’t you tell us?” Hansell asked, incredulous. “You and your children could’ve been killed at any moment.”

The hapless man replied, “They threatened to kill us if we told you.” He had chosen to risk killing himself or his family rather than trust an American to help him. As Hansell and the others continued their tour north of the village, Hansell shook his head at the effort the conventional forces had expended to build a row of tiny outposts that were little more than watchtowers—a Potemkin creation to give the appearance of American control when nothing could be further from the truth. The troops were almost gone, and the only regular activity was a mine-sweeping patrol that ran up and down the road once every day or so.

In the mosque of one of the villages, Najibullah spoke to the villagers who had gathered there at his request. “We’ve come to help,” he said. “What are your problems here?” They told him that the Taliban had also rounded them up, but had never asked what they needed. Najibullah appealed to the villagers as good Muslims to help bring peace to their land. He left feeling that he might be able to gain some recruits; the villagers seemed amazed at being treated so respectfully. Najibullah heard that the Afghan army commander at the nearby base had not been seen since arriving two months before. Najibullah went to the base, introduced himself to the commander, and asked that he send ten of his troops out on patrol with them. The commander agreed, but did not offer to come along.

Hansell and Najibullah’s men set out to patrol the next day, August 6, heading west from the Deqobad outpost toward a nearby police outpost. Hansell had asked the reluctant district police chief to send some of his men down there to man the post. As they approached, Hansell’s men split into two groups, leaving their medic, Dan, at the “V” so he could respond, if needed, in either direction. They walked along a streambed, a standard way of avoiding IEDs. Hansell wished he had prevailed on the district chief to send his crack mine detector; the Afghan could spot a command wire or signs of a buried jug like a tenderfoot.

As the first group of Afghan and American soldiers reached the police post, they began to scale the sides of the riverbank. Suddenly, one of the Afghans spotted a mound of dirt that looked like a buried IED. The Americans radioed for the explosive ordnance disposal technician attached to the team to come to their location. As they waited, one of the Afghan special forces soldiers took a step back from the mound. His body was blown upward and landed a few feet away, bleeding profusely. Then Louis, one of Hansell’s attached conventional infantrymen, stepped on another mine. He was leaning forward, and the blast caught his entire body. The force of the bomb broke one leg, mangled the other, and ripped off his arm. Louis’s best friend in the squad, who was manning the radio, froze in shock for what seemed like an eternity. Then he snapped out of it and grabbed the radio, shouting for Dan, who had heard the first blast and was already on the run. There was no telling how many mines had been planted in that field by the streambed.

Dan arrived at the ghastly scene, threw down his bag, and began tearing bandages and gauze out of it. He soon ran out. He wrapped Louis’s exposed leg bone and stuffed gauze around the wound to stop the bleeding and try to save the rest of the leg. The soldier’s head wound had been cauterized by the blast. There was not much that Dan could do for his genitals. Before Dan arrived on the scene, one of the soldiers had already applied a tourniquet, as every soldier was trained to do, to the other leg, where the foot had been blown off. Over the past decade, the operators’ tourniquets had been refined repeatedly so that they were light, quickly applied, and effective. The apparatus they used was a simple adjustable loop of webbing material with Velcro on one side that was fastened around the damaged limb. A six-inch-long black plastic stick attached to one side could cut off the circulation and stem the blood loss with a few quick turns.

As Dan worked feverishly, the communications sergeant called for a medevac helicopter, which arrived about thirty minutes later. The two wounded soldiers were loaded aboard and flown to the military hospital at Kandahar Airfield. Louis was outbound a few hours later for Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, via Germany. The young Afghan soldier was still alive, but he had been gravely wounded. Both men were triple amputees struggling for life, and if they did survive their lives would be irrevocably altered. That night, Najibullah requested leave from his company commander to go to see his soldier at the earliest possible date. It was Ramadan, and Najibullah stayed up late every night to talk with his men after their sundown meal. They sat outside their tent in the Deqobad’s gravel yard by a fire pit they had made. Normally, they would listen to music or sing, but no one felt like singing.