by Ben Anderson
‘They were probably like “Ah, look at our RPGs!” They friggin’ rattled the wall! Well, imagine how that felt’, said Young.
The marines blew a hole in the wall at the end of the path they’d just made. From there, it was just over a hundred metres to the old police station. Some marines dived to the ground, into firing positions, while the rest ran towards the building.
‘Qadeer, Qadeer, you gotta be the first one going in’, Young shouted to one of the Afghan soldiers. For the first time – and for this one miserable task only – the Afghans were in the lead. It was their job to be the first to enter the old Taliban building, which was highly likely to be booby-trapped. They were also there to talk to any civilians who might be inside. General McChrystal’s claim that Operation Mushtaraq would be ‘Afghan-led’ looked like a sick joke. Qadeer, who had a thick black beard and was a good foot shorter than most of the marines, jogged awkwardly to the front of the line making its way towards the old police station, carrying his rifle in one arm and holding the other outstretched to keep him upright in the wet mud. Following him was an even shorter Afghan soldier, Romo, whom the marines described as ‘actually, slightly retarded’. They approached the door to the building. A marine with a metal detector swept the ground leading to it.
‘Hey! Kick the door and go in, OK?’ one of the marines shouted to Qadeer. He called to the other Afghan soldier, ‘Romo, up here, get up here’, gesturing for Romo to go behind Qadeeer. ‘Little pussy ass! Romo, kick the door in, then move out the way, then you’re gonna go in, ok? Kick the door and then you’re gonna move.’
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 Af
ghan 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.
Staff Sergeant Young spoke to the terp. ‘There’s a kid on the other side of the wall but that’s exactly where the wire was leading, so we don’t know if he’s the one that was going to set off the bomb. In any case, when the EOD runs back, you’re gonna yell across and tell them that the explosion’s about to happen.’ The terp nodded. ‘They got two minutes and they need to run away, OK?’ The terp nodded again. ‘Yell as loud as you can so they can hear you.’
Slowly, Tom walked along the ditch. Young shouted that over the wall, smoke was burning; probably some kind of signal. Tom nodded and continued. When he was close enough, he put his metal detector on the ground, took out a block of C4 explosive, ignited it, placed it right under the bomb, picked up his metal detector and ran back towards us.
‘Everybody back, behind here’, shouted Young.
‘Yell across the courtyard. Yell, tell the kid to run’, he said to the terp, who didn’t yell anything. ‘YELL ACROSS, QUICKLY, YOU AIN’T GOT A MINUTE, YELL, JOHN!’ The terp stared at him. ‘OK, just stand there, then. Get out. Get over here, get down, behind this wall.’ Tom, Ski and two ANA soldiers made their way around the mosque. ‘You were supposed to yell at the kid in the courtyard, John. That was the whole thing you came over for.’ The terp said nothing.
‘After it goes off, listen for frag, so everybody be quiet’, said Tom, visibly frayed and struggling for breath.
I asked him if he’d volunteered for this job. ‘Yes, I did’, he said, laughing slightly.
We braced ourselves. The explosion smashed the mosque’s windows and made us all wobble, even though most of us were crouched on one knee.
/> Tom looked at the crater the explosion had made. ‘It was probably about a hundred pounds.’
An old man with a thick white beard suddenly appeared on top of the wall, right where the wire lay. He threw it towards us. ‘No, no, no, tell him to stop, tell him to leave it’, shouted the marines. The old man was terrified; his eyebrows arched up into the thick curved lines that ran across his forehead. He held the palms of his trembling hands towards us. ‘There is no Taliban’, he said, ‘come in, come in. Don’t worry, just come.’
‘I got two men’, shouted a marine.
‘Two men?’ shouted Young.
‘They just went down behind a berm or something. You see ’em? You see their heads?’
‘Keep an eye on ’em, see if you can spot a weapon.’
We heard a few bursts of gunfire. ‘Is that shooting at us?’ asked Young.
‘No’, someone replied.
The old man went back behind the wall. The next burst of gunfire definitely was aimed at us. Some of the marines collapsed on the ground, others ran back behind the cover of the mosque.
‘Hey, let’s go, where’s the fucking target at?’ screamed Young. More shots came into the compound. ‘Get a fucking shot off.’ While everyone else ducked behind a wall or ran behind the mosque, Young stayed standing. ‘Give me a goddamn 203 shot, for Christ’s sake.’ More bullets came right into the courtyard where he stood. The marines fired back. ‘You see a guy out there, you fucking hit him!’ screamed Young.
‘There’s two guys on the roof’, shouted a marine, as he pumped shots at them. ‘See the brown top? He’s firing from there. I fucking saw it. They’re right there, twelve o’clock.’ He fired single shots at the men on the roof. Other marines hit the building with air grenades and bursts from their machine-guns. Someone screamed for a LAW rocket to be brought forward.
