Command Guidance: You will Pressure, Pursue and Punish.
We were expected to conduct the preparation and training for war as skillfully as we would execute operations themselves during war. During deployments we would often find ourselves passing this concept on to our ISAF and coalition counterparts. It is not hyperbole to say that we were expected to go anywhere, anytime, anyplace, and be prepared to do damn near anything.
Next to Shinsha, Bolduc looked like a kid. Shinsha is an absolute bear of a man, with a round face, huge hands, and strong and broad dark Tajik features. Unlike most Afghans, he wears a thin, well-groomed beard that he says is just long enough to keep the Pashtun tribes off his back.
I had barely gotten the words “Good morning, sir,” out of my mouth when Shinsha recognized me. He came straight over and threw his arms around me. I am not a small man by any stretch, six foot one, but he easily picked me up in a bone-crushing hug and feigned two kisses on both cheeks. Holy crap, I thought, he may have cracked a rib or two. Bolduc, understanding the importance of our relationship, winked and walked off.
“It is good to have your long beards back in Afghanistan,” Shinsha said. “Long beards” is a nickname given to Special Forces by the Afghans, a mark of respect in its comparison to the beards of their elders.
I was truly glad to see him. He and I had a long history. We’d fought together in 2005 and 2006 and had broken the back of the Taliban in Kandahar Province. Shinsha would proudly boast that “the Taliban could not stop to piss in Kandahar Province without us showing up that year.” Unbeknownst to him, this statement was essentially true. Captured Taliban had said much the same. He jokingly referred to the Taliban as “shuzzuna”—women—in Pashto.
We’d spent many hours talking strategy and learning each other’s languages over strong green and black tea. He still spoke only a smattering of English, and my Pashto was equally as bad. Since we were just out of earshot of the commanders, I asked him how things were going in Kandahar.
“What is the situation, my friend?” I asked in broken Pashto.
“No, no, no things good here in Kandahar,” he said in heavily accented English.
Shinsha never minced words and painted a bleak picture. Taliban fighters were operating inside and outside the city and more fighters arrived daily. The Special Forces units that replaced us after our last rotation focused most of their efforts doing night raids and did not have sufficient time to build rapport with the population. This was not their fault; the directive to move only at night came from higher headquarters. Shinsha said the Taliban now dominated the daylight hours. I knew and respected members of the other Special Forces group as both friends and professional colleagues, but Shinsha’s news worried me.
Last year we had rarely encountered resistance inside the city except for suicide bombers. We had run across the Taliban on patrol near mountain passes, but rarely in the city. When Shinsha’s battalion had completed its training, we immediately started raiding Taliban safe houses. Eventually, the raids grew into full-scale attacks. My team hit targets up until the week before we rotated out. The constant pressure had driven the enemy deep underground or out of the province altogether, and we had passed our strategy to the incoming replacements. Eight months later the Taliban resurgence was obvious to everyone. Their progress was steady and methodical. Fighters based in the villages around and inside the city now attacked the ISAF coalition and measured its response. I wanted to know how all of our work had been reversed.
Winning a guerrilla war means getting out in the hinterland and not just showing, but convincing the population that your side is the winning team. Working by, with, and through the local population and indigenous forces is not optional. It is the essential key to success. Moving away from that holistic approach represents a fundamental breach in counterinsurgency operations, leading to major setbacks. For whatever reason, the pressure had not been kept on the Taliban rurally; the focus had switched mostly to raids and operating exclusively at night. We couldn’t afford to take this approach anymore.
Shinsha and I agreed to meet later, and I hustled into the headquarters. The first thing I noticed when I walked in was the memorial wall. The list of our fallen soldiers now almost reached the floor. I stopped and ran my fingers across the names and closed my eyes so I could see their faces and hear their laughter. I fought back tears for my friends. It happened every time I came back.
Farther down the hallway, an eclectic assortment of dozens of modern rifles and rocket launchers hung side by side along the wall. Most were taken from weapons caches or dead enemy fighters. As on the memorial wall, I noticed a few new additions. But I put aside my nostalgia when I got to the door to the tactical operations center and keyed in the new pass code.
The TOC looked like the bridge of a starship. Several large screens displaying Predator feeds filled the main wall, with an even bigger screen that tracked every unit in southern Afghanistan. Everything was monitored by TOC drones, soldiers who buzzed around the room or huddled over laptops. Most of the time, they sat facing their monitors on a raised semicircular platform that resembles an altar. Each soldier, dressed in brown T-shirt and desert uniform pants, had a specific job. One might work supply requests while another coordinated aircraft and another coordinated artillery fire. The whole room revolved around the battle captain, who acted as the conductor of the orchestra of war.
The planning and intelligence office sat off the right side of the main room. I walked over and knocked on the door. Trent, my unit’s intelligence sergeant, met me with a somber look on his face and led me to a seat.
Maps and pictures of possible targets covered every inch of the wall. A large table cluttered with laptops and intelligence reports ran through the middle of the room. Intelligence analysts sifted through radio intercepts, satellite pictures, and tips from Afghan locals, trying to build a clear picture of what was going on in southern Afghanistan.
Trent’s assessment of the situation didn’t differ much from Shinsha’s. “This place is about three months from going under,” he said.
He outlined a series of setbacks. When we left Kandahar after our last rotation, the Taliban were afraid to come into the city, and we seemed to be one step ahead of them. Now we were outnumbered and losing ground fast. By the end of the brief, I felt sick to my stomach. The sickness quickly turned to anger. My team now had to fight for ground we had already taken. Kandahar was the prize—strategically vital to both us and the Taliban.
The third-largest city in Afghanistan, Kandahar has been fought over for centuries. Since the time of Alexander the Great it has stood at the crossroads of trade routes to five major cities: Herat and Gereshk to the west, Kabul and Ghazni to the northeast, and Quetta in Pakistan to the south. With its airport and extensive network of roads, the city served as a center for the mujahideen resistance during the Soviet invasion and was the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar’s hometown. When the Taliban captured it in 1994, it became their capital.
“Trent, please tell me exactly what the hell happened in the six months we were gone,” I said.
“Seems the enemy moved in too fast and we lost a lot of the rapport we had built with the civilians and leadership,” he said sharply.
It was our job now to rebuild it and keep the Taliban from reclaiming its power base.
* Shortly after taking over as the commander of all ISAF and coalition forces in the country in 2009, General Stanley McChrystal addressed the lack of a unified national strategy in Afghanistan. It took him less than a year to establish, synchronize, and direct its implementation, completing the macro (big) picture.
Chapter 3
PICKING A FIGHT
Wars may be fought with weapons, but they are won by men.
—GENERAL GEORGE S. PATTON, JR.
Heading back to the hut to brief the team, I saw “Ole Girl”—the same truck that I had been using in Afghanistan since 2005. Brian, my communications sergeant, had given her the name.
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p; This truck and I had a rough history. She had taken more than her share of bullets and shrapnel and I quickly matched some of her battle scars to mine. Slowly and smoothly, I ran my hand along her hood. I glared at a bullet hole just below the front windshield. The year before, my team had gotten caught in an ambush near the Pakistan border. I didn’t notice the hole until after the fight. I pulled out my Sharpie and retraced the faded words “MISSED ME BITCH” I had written then to commemorate another close call.
For me, Ole Girl symbolized American strength. She was big, powerful, and dependable. In her belly, she carried some of America’s finest warriors to battle. Her antennae flew a three-by-five-foot American flag so that the enemy could see who was coming for them. She was a force to be reckoned with and my comfort blanket.
On my way back to the hut, one of the battle captains from the TOC stopped me. The team we were replacing had arrived from Kandahar to pick us up and escort us back to the firebase. Shef, the other SF team’s leader, stepped out into the blinding sunlight. He looked rough, tired. We’d gone through OCS together almost ten years ago and traded places at the same firebase earlier in the year. The past rotation had been hard on him and his team. They’d lost two good men in a valley outside the city. I could see that the loss of his teammates had taken its toll.
“Shef, I am so sorry to hear about your guys,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, looking down. The tears welled up in his eyes.
He needed some breathing room. I knew in my gut that Shef had been handed a shit sandwich on that mission. We agreed to meet later to plan for the convoy back to the firebase.
While I had been getting the update brief, Bill had taken charge. He sent part of the team to draw medical equipment and ammunition and inspect our trucks. The rest broke down the pallets from the aircraft while Bill went to meet with the embedded tactical trainers (ETTs) who would be attached to the team. I met him over at their headquarters.
Mostly National Guard soldiers, ETTs spent their whole tour mentoring Afghan Army units. The trainers helped plan missions, made sure the Afghans had the right supplies, and served as a bridge between the Afghans and their Western partners.
The ETTs had a huge poster of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders tacked to the wall of their bland, plywood-walled headquarters: white vests, tight shorts, big, um, smiles. I paused to admire the Texas handiwork, and then rapped heavily on the wooden door. “Come on in,” yelled someone from a back room.
Bill sat on one of three threadbare couches arranged in a horseshoe around the television in the center of the room.
“Sir,” he said, “this is Chris and Sean. They will be attached to us for this rotation with our ANA unit.”
Both men were from the Oregon National Guard and couldn’t have been more different. Sean’s massive six-foot-three-inch frame made him look more like a lumberjack than a soldier. I could imagine him in a red-and-black flannel shirt and wool hat, swinging an axe. His partner, Chris, was slighter and looked small next to him, but Chris had the look of complete focus. I got the sense immediately that he knew exactly what he was doing.
I asked both soldiers, point-blank, their opinion of the situation in Kandahar. They exchanged looks before responding. I knew instantly what would be said, but I listened anyway: Taliban fighters were in Kandahar in greater numbers; they operated practically in the open and our coalition partners didn’t stop them. By now it was beginning to sound like a broken record.
That night, we finally got moving. My team would be operating from the same firebase as on our last rotation, so we knew the route, or so we thought. Just after dark, we checked our gear, lined up the trucks, and headed toward the main gate, which was guarded by coalition soldiers. Some of our Afghan National Army soldiers were waiting for us at the gate’s massive entrance. Remembering us from the previous rotations, they jumped out of their trucks, arms open, their faces bright and their smiles huge. Several rounds of hugs and back-slapping later, we were finally ready to drive out of the gate. I was glad to know that the rapport we had built with these men had stood the test of time. I was feeling good for the first time since our arrival. We locked and loaded all weapons and the convoy began to move.
Shef’s team took the lead. It felt really good to be out again. The leash was off. But I was concerned that the route would take us south of the city through an area we had previously tried to avoid.
Go with it, I thought, be flexible. It was Shef’s show.
The main road was quiet and there was very little traffic. Unlike in America, Afghanistan is dark, pitch-black. There are very few streets, let alone working street lamps. Few of the houses or buildings in the city have lighting other than hearth-style campfires inside. Even with our night-vision goggles on, I could barely see beyond the main road.
Three miles later, we came across the first ANA checkpoint, set up at a bridge that crossed a broad, dry riverbed. The ANA had built two machine-gun nests out of sandbags on either side of the crossing. We came to a slow stop and an ANA soldier came out from behind the sandbag wall, hands in the air. He had no weapon and looked rattled. “Don’t continue down the road,” he warned us.
“Whew, this guy may have pissed his pants or worse,” one of the soldiers on Shef’s team said over the radio.
At least he didn’t leave his post, I thought. Some discipline is better than none. The Afghan soldier told Shef that about an hour earlier a dark Toyota Hilux truck had approached with its lights on, blinding him. When it got close, six men with AK-47s jumped out. Shoving the muzzles in his face, they told him the road was closed and they’d attack anyone who didn’t obey. Then they stripped him of his rifle, took the little bit of money in his pocket, and loaded the truck with ammunition.
We cut our primary lights and relied fully on our night-vision equipment. Touted as a new alternative to traveling through the center of Kandahar, the road took us south of the city through the slums, a place for the dregs and homeless and now a haven for Taliban fighters. It was also a primary drug-smuggling route, and caution was the watchword. We had gone into this area a year earlier to hand out medical supplies, and even then we’d been warned to be very careful.
The convoy wove its way through the maze of compounds. The rutted dirt roads reeked of sewage. Piles of garbage, some several feet deep, ran along the compound walls. The dark, hidden alleyways and streets made me nervous considering the prevalence of suicide bombers in Kandahar city. We knew too well how suicide bombers operated. They hide in the black corners, behind walls, and in traffic-congested streets and attack like cowards, killing indiscriminately. To them, killing dozens of innocent people just to wound one of us was acceptable.
The bombers usually wore white and shaved their heads. Captured Al Qaeda training manuals say that followers are allowed to break all their religious laws and betray their beliefs to put themselves in a position to attack us. For our enemy, the rule book is something they make up as they go along. No wonder my hair is turning gray.
“What the hell are we doing, Captain?” Bill called over the radio. “This is a perfect ambush area, and known enemy activity to boot.”
“Sit tight, boys, and let’s see how it plays out,” I responded. The team hated situations like this, when they knew I was just trying to be positive on the radio. We all knew Bill was right to be concerned.
We turned a blind corner. The L-shaped road was lined with mud walls for more than 150 feet on both sides, with a heavily wooded area just beyond the walls providing an escape route for attackers. It was just the spot I would have picked for an ambush. In the glow of our night-vision headlights and spotlights, the group of twenty or so men waiting around the corner looked like a Taliban recruiting poster, dressed in the traditional all-black turbans and dark olive clothes. We had been going so slowly, and without our primary headlights on, that they never saw or heard us coming. They initially looked puzzled, but quickly realized we were a military convoy.
Some immediately threw their hands in
the air and some hid their faces. Most just stood there, stunned. The hasty call came over the radio to be ready for a fight. I didn’t see any weapons, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there. Several Taliban ran for the cover of a nearby irrigation ditch. Someone requested permission to open fire. I almost said yes, but before I could respond an ANA soldier jumped off his Ford Ranger truck and swung his AK violently, flashlight in hand. The rifle struck a Taliban square in the face and he fell onto the dusty road. The ANA soldier screamed at the Talibs to go get their weapons and fight like men. The Taliban sat or huddled, hissing and sneering like hyenas, gnashing their teeth, making hand gestures toward the Afghan soldiers. After all my time in the country, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing—it was medieval. The hatred on their faces could not be disguised. This was the enemy we all sought, up close and personal—and without weapons. We could not do a damn thing about it.
The Talibs didn’t move. The Afghan soldier quickly searched several of the better-groomed men, then swore at them one more time and hopped back in the truck. Those who were well groomed were likely the subcommanders, or were tribally affiliated with those who had favor among other Taliban commanders. The rougher-looking members of the group had probably just been brought across the desert or smuggled across the border in a vehicle trunk. As long as they were unarmed, we couldn’t touch them. It was the ultimate frustration of legitimate counterinsurgency.
Shef gave the order and the convoy slowly moved on, toward the city and away from the group of Taliban. I really, really wanted to move faster, to get the area behind us as soon as possible.
Jerry Bradley & Kevin Maurer Page 3
