Jerry Bradley & Kevin Maurer

by Lions of Kandahar: The Story of a Fight Against All Odds

  Juma Khan came up to my window, clinging to an AK-47 and a vest of ammunition. “I want to go,” he said. I’m not sure whose smile was bigger, his or mine.

  “Wali na,” I said—why not?—signaling him to hop into the back.

  Then, over the radio, the Canadian voice said, “Bingo Red 1, this is Bingo Red 7. We are clear of the ambush. We have numerous casualties and are twenty kilometers from Kandahar Airfield.”

  Our vehicles ground to a halt. Bill sauntered over to my truck.

  “I don’t think they’ve moved far, Captain. The Taliban must have run out of ammo.”

  “We can go to KAF and get the real story,” I said.

  The trucks were running, the plan was set, the radios were up. I just needed the launch order from Bolduc. He finally gave an order, but it wasn’t the one we wanted: “Stand down.”

  I didn’t like it but I did it. I trusted Bolduc, and if the mission was a no go then it was a no go. Disappointed, we rolled back to the motor pool and unpacked our kit to return to the celebration.

  The next morning we started our intensive training cycle with the ANA. Under the freshly risen sun, we did calisthenics and ran around the five-mile track we’d built just inside the base’s walls. Besides keeping us in shape, the routine forged a bond with the Afghans and allowed us to identify our problem children. Those who couldn’t keep up got the most attention.

  I took the officers, including Ali, under my wing. The rest of the team worked with the sergeants and soldiers. Bill and I focused the training on three areas: moving, shooting, and communicating—the basics of combat. We’d worked with some of these soldiers in the past, but before I took them into harm’s way I wanted to know what I had.

  Like everything in the Army, we trained in three phases. Crawl. Walk. Run. After the morning’s workout, we had breakfast and met back at the range for the “crawl” phase. Basic marksmanship started with the weapon’s zero. If the sights didn’t align then it was impossible to hit the target. It should have been a simple exercise. Instead, it took us all morning because many of the Afghans had lost respect for their weapons. Instead of maintaining them, they got lazy and banged the rifles around or tinkered with the sights. Every aspect of discipline has to be maintained.

  During the break, our team, under Bill’s direction, worked on our own marksmanship skills with a “stress shoot,” which is a race against the clock. Bill set up a series of targets that forced us to move in full kit and hit targets while changing magazines or switching between our rifles and pistols among numerous firing positions. The winner got bragging rights, a source of great pride on a team of wiseasses. Before the competition started, we all got to run through the course once to get a feel for it and to eliminate excuses.

  The course was about half a football field wide and an equal distance long. The range extended far beyond the barrier walls and made a slow rocky climb to the base of the adjacent mountain. The ground was flat, gumball-sized gravel offering some stability, but not much. During the day the stones acted as a mirror, reflecting the heat of the midday sun onto our baking bodies.

  There were several types of targets. We had plywood barriers to shoot around, over, under, and through. Bill added a pile of chairs, a GMV, an ATV, and a junk car. The first targets were a mix of steel pistol and rifle silhouettes, flat plates in the shape of a human head and shoulders that fell when struck. The other targets were commercial cardboard targets depicting menacing faces or hostage situations, increasing the difficulty level.

  I watched my team practice the course meticulously and methodically. They made it look easy despite their cumbersome body armor.

  Bill started the competition. As the team sergeant, he set a high standard. He raced from behind the Humvee to the pile of chairs. Ping. Ping. His direct hits reverberated across the range. He reached the final target, transitioned his now spent M4 to the side, and smoothly drew his pistol. Within seconds, he was standing at near point-blank range of the final target with a tight cluster of shots on the target’s chest, an empty pistol in his hand.

  When he was finished, he walked the course with each of the team members, calmly coaching them through it.

  “Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Relax, feel the trigger. Squeeze, don’t jerk. Keep your eyes on the target,” he coached as we moved from mark to mark. “Change magazines without taking your eyes off the target. Transition to your secondary weapon, don’t look, know where it is. Know where your magazines are. Everything must be muscle memory.”

  Bill knew that in a close firefight the steady, consistent shooter would come out the winner every time. Bill was consistent with everyone when it came to training, even me. There was a standard you were required to achieve. You fail, you go home. It was that simple. I loved these courses. They were some of the best combat training you could get. I had done well in the past and I was anxious to see how I would do now.

  Shouldering my rifle, I looked down the sights and dropped the first target. Trotting to the next mark behind some plywood, I again zeroed in on the target and heard a familiar ping. Two for two. My internal clock counted the seconds. My body went into autopilot while I controlled my heart rate. Sweat ran into my eyes, and all too soon, my lungs heaved and gasped for breath in the high altitude. Ending a few minutes later, I holstered my pistol and waited for Bill to grade me.

  “Middle of the pack,” Bill said. Even if I did well, Bill didn’t hand out compliments.

  Steve was the last shooter and got most of Bill’s attention. He seemed rattled at the finish line and after Bill counted up the hits, he had the lowest number. Dejected, Steve told Bill he needed to rezero. In one motion, Bill took Steve’s weapon and fired two rounds into the steel target two hundred meters away, knocking it down. He walked over to the weapons table and grabbed a shotgun. “At least with this, Steve, you won’t have to aim,” he said, with that familiar smirk. Steve took it in stride, but I knew I’d see him later practicing on the range when no one else was around.

  Our company commander, Jared, had arrived at KAF and had spent the last day or so getting briefed up on a massive operation. He was in charge of several Special Forces teams, including mine, and wanted to read me in on the details. I arranged to get him a helicopter over to the firebase for a short visit to get us up to speed on the mission.

  Before we left KAF, I’d heard rumors of a big operation. But I hadn’t wanted a piece of it. I envisioned a room full of commanders from half a dozen coalition countries sitting around a table trying to create a plan, all of them convinced they were smartest. But based on our running into the large, defiant group of fighters on the convoy to the base, plus the rocket attacks, plus everything else I’d been hearing, they sure needed to do something—and soon.

  Ever since Operation Anaconda, Special Forces teams had rarely taken part in large-scale operations, especially those involving conventional units. During Anaconda, in March 2002, troops from the 101st Airborne Division and 10th Mountain Division planned to block enemy escape routes, but the whole mission crumbled when some Special Forces and the fledgling Afghan militia made contact with hardened Al Qaeda fighters in Gardez in the bitterly cold Shahi Khot Valley. The end result was that there were critical mistakes made by all parties and some Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders escaped. The 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne didn’t communicate with the Special Forces teams much after that. For our part, we had received so much blame for that operation that it was not worth the effort to participate in others.

  The fallout crippled Afghan relations with conventional commanders, who now defined the Afghan militias as unreliable. So Special Forces continued operating on their own, “by, with, and through” the indigenous Afghan forces. As a result, we had built critical relationships and a structure to develop the Afghan Army. Over time, the conventional commanders began placing more and more emphasis on partnering conventional forces with the fledgling Afghan Army. We were with them to make sure they succeeded. Now I learned from Jared that Bolduc
saw this new operation as a chance to really show ISAF and the world that the Afghan Army could do its part. It was our job to make sure his intent became reality.

  I put out the warning order to prepare to support an ISAF operation, much to the chagrin of my team. We had been at the firebase only a week. They wanted more time with the Afghans. Our ANA soldiers needed more training to make sure everybody knew the basic battle drills. We needed more sergeants and officers to lead the soldiers. But most of all, despite knowing some of them from past rotations, we needed to renew and continue to build our relationship. We needed a level of trust that could sustain the pressures of combat.

  I let everyone know we would be leaving for KAF in twenty-four hours. The damn mission had not even been formally announced, but I had to get the Afghans on board. We held a team meeting in the small mud TOC, and almost all the comments started with, “But Captain …” We had no choice but to make the mission work, so we called a chai session with the Afghan leadership in their compound.

  Shinsha, the Afghan commander, and Ali Hussein, my scarred protégé, came and joined me and Bill on the floor of their main mud hut, which was used as the ANA headquarters. Over boiling-hot tea, I started by channeling my best football-coach-before-the-big-game speech. I played heavily on the centuries-old unwritten tribal code of Pashtunwali, an ancient ideology that governs the actions of Pashtun tribe members. They believe that when they die, they will be judged by their god, Allah, by however closely they have followed the Pashtunwali code. I hammered home the blood feud with the Taliban (badal), the duty to honor the family (nang), the love of the Pashtun culture (dod-pasbani), and their sworn oath to protect it (tokhm-pasbani).

  “Will your people remember your names? Do you want to live under the heel of Taliban rule again?” Then I bellowed, “You are the Lions of Kandahar! You are the protectors of southern Afghanistan! We have fought and bled with you many years. Will you not fight with me now?” My Afghan comrades, dressed in fatigues and sitting cross-legged on the floor, seemed fixated on what I was saying.

  “No country has ever helped Afghanistan like America. Did we not help you defeat the Russians?” I asked.

  Then I told them this was their chance to get badal, or revenge, for what had happened to Shef’s team and heal an open wound. That’s what they desperately wanted. Narrowing their eyes, they grunted and nodded.

  Ali turned to Shinsha.

  “Wali na?” he said.

  Now came the hard part. We had to figure out how to tell them about the mission without giving up too much detail. I figured we could give them just enough information to shape their ideas into plans we had already made, making them think that it was their plan. If it was their plan they would keep it quiet, knowing that a slip of the tongue would tip off the Taliban. Loyalty in Afghanistan can be bought, and we knew the Taliban had spies in the Afghan Army. Hell, we knew there were Taliban at the firebase. We just didn’t know who they were. I explained that none of the soldiers could leave the base, all the weapons needed to be locked away, and all cell phones and the barracks office phone had to be confiscated.

  Shinsha asked us to leave. He wanted to talk with his commanders dispersed around the room. He knew I spoke some Pashto; this was his subtle way of being polite. We ducked out of the hut. When we returned, they agreed to join the mission and to all of my requests. We ended up with a volunteer force of almost sixty soldiers and nearly ten solid leaders out of more than one hundred ANA. The rest of the unit was getting ready to go on leave.

  In the meantime, Jared had talked again to Bolduc and knew a little more about the operation. The planners back at KAF wanted us to block Taliban escape routes out of the district, which I preferred to tagging along with a Canadian unit for the whole operation. We would need to sneak into the district to retain the element of surprise and initiative.

  Briefed on the basics, and with the Afghans ready, I approached Jared about the trip back to KAF, where we would be brought into the complete plan for the operation. Jared had commanded my team several years earlier when he was a captain and remained in good standing with the unit—he got the “wink, wink, nod, nod” from the operators when they heard about his return. He stood six feet tall and was in good shape. Although he was an avid runner, he also lifted weights and his build was far from the average buck-o-five runner stereotype. Personable, confident, with strawberry blond hair and a fierce red beard, he was a welcome returning addition to the deployment. The million-dollar words that astute men picked up in their work with high-ranking officers sounded strange in his thick West Virginia accent. He, like many field-grade officers at that time, had only one rotation in Afghanistan (some had none), but he made up for it by being smart, easy to work with, and open to suggestions from his team leaders.

  Not long after Jared’s return, in true Charlie Company fashion, all of the detachments had demonstrated their support for him by attaching their team stickers to the bumper, window, and tailgate of his red Chevy 4×4 pickup truck, along with other vehicle adornments thoughtfully selected in honor of his well-known fondness for hunting. Intertwined among the parachutes, swords, skulls, and arrows were stickers attesting to an affiliation with PETA, anti-gun slogans, a colorful rainbow, and a “Vote for John Kerry” swatch.

  Jared was housed in the base commander’s room I had occupied the year before when there was no company commander on that side of the compound. He made a point of telling me how very much he appreciated my fixing up the room for him. I refrained from noting that the joke was on him. The room was directly across from the operations center. His room would be the first stop for every issue and every question anyone had. Seldom in years past had I had a complete night’s sleep.

  In any event, it was only fair. I and another team leader, Matt from ODA 333, also known as 3X, had played several good jokes on Jared in the past, most recently a dinner we and our wives had shared at a nice Japanese steak house. That night we told the owners that it was Jared’s birthday and we wanted to make a really big deal about it. When the time was right, the owner broke out the party hat and had the entire staff sing him “Happy Birthday,” along with the rest of the restaurant for good measure. Jared wore the hat and went along with all of it to keep from insulting the owner and everyone else, despite the fact that it was nowhere near his birthday.

  Jared was a good commander and had a real concern for the soldiers and their well-being. I liked that you could get into very heated debates over issues with him and things never got personal. That was what made Jared an exceptional officer. He understood everyone had a voice and a perspective or opinion. He also understood that at the end of the day everyone wanted to do the right thing.

  An in-depth planning session began over routes and execution for the convoy movement back to KAF. We agreed to leave that night and go through the city, instead of around it. Traffic would be light and no American units had been down the road for months, which we hoped would throw off the Taliban. Speed was also good security against car bombs, and we knew we could hustle on the paved road.

  By nightfall the GMVs, masquerade jingle trucks, and ANA pickups were lined up at the gate. The jingle trucks derived their name from the hundreds of dangling bells, chimes, and decorations that ring out for good luck from local trucks as they lumber along rutted dirt roads.

  Brian started our truck and looked at me to give the order to move. Brian and I had served in the same units before Special Forces and went through the Special Forces Qualification Course together. Needless to say, when Brian became available for selection to a team, I fought hard to get him, and he joined the team not long after I did in 2005. Brian knew me. It was not a secret that I would never follow my men into combat, I would go first everywhere, unless my team sergeant said otherwise. I couldn’t stomach the idea of one of my men being hurt or killed when I should have been out front for him. Brian believed in that philosophy as wholeheartedly and as deeply, if not more so, than I did. I think that’s why he soon made sure he wa
s the driver of the lead truck, my truck. He analyzed every trail, road intersection, and ditch as carefully as any of his beloved NASCAR drivers would study the day’s track and took infinite precautions all along the way. On many occasions I have personally attributed my survival to him and his finely honed instincts for keeping us alive in that truck.

  During his off-duty hours Brian lived for NASCAR. He knew the drivers, their statistics, the tracks, all of it. I think he was drawn to the challenge of individual competitiveness and the technical expertise it required. He lived simply, but he was very complex and technically adept. I admired and appreciated him for everything that he was. He had his own workshop at the firebase, which looked like a super-villain’s lair with antennas, handsets, and cables covering the little table. If we weren’t on a mission, he was in there tinkering, building “stuff the Army should have.” He treated everything as a no-fail event. When it was time to communicate with others, you did it, period.

  Brian was the team’s senior communications sergeant; if he set up your radio, you knew it would work. But as key as that role was, Brian was much more than just my senior communications guy; he was a close advisor and friend. Between Brian, with his lean build, reddish hair, and freckles; Smitty, our intelligence sergeant; and me, you would have thought we had an Irish team. Brian could not grow a beard to save his life, but with his mustache and soul patch, he reminded me of Doc Holliday in the movie Tombstone. He was, in a word, meticulous. He was also was my version of MacGyver. He could take gum wrappers, a Coke can, a AA battery, aluminum foil, and electrical tape and make a radio that would work from the two ends of the earth.

  We liked to joke about Brian’s likely formative years in an old woman’s home because he was so anal. Everything had a place on Brian’s planet and it better be put back there, properly, if he even let you borrow it in the first place. Lord help you if it wasn’t. Despite that, Brian was one of the most easygoing members of the team. Yet he had a ruthless streak when it came down to the art of “business.”