Jerry Bradley & Kevin Maurer

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

  I watched 26 skirt the low ground and move up and over the small crest where I had seen the Talibs. Not far past it, they ran across a group of Kuchi tribesmen, nomads with strong ties to the Taliban. The Kuchis have survived several invasions—the British twice, the Russians, and now us—and consider it all a minor inconvenience. Over the radio, Hodge reported that the nomads were claiming there were no Talibs on the hill and the team wasn’t finding any blood trails. I had gotten excited and jerked the trigger. Bill would be all over me about it.

  While 26 searched around the hill, the interpreters finally got the Kuchis to talk. Hodge radioed to tell me they admitted the men were Taliban, but they had run off when the firing started. There must have been a recent crossing and the fighters had linked up with guns, but not trucks.

  We were already running well behind schedule because of the truck breakdown, so we collected as much information as we could from the Kuchis and started moving again, now with a real sense of urgency. The infiltration route was awfully well populated for late August. The summer heat should have been keeping Taliban fighters at home, yet they were moving north. This was extremely unusual, and all the commanders agreed that we needed to change the route and get to the safety of the high desert.

  Maintaining radio silence as we drove, we kept watch for Taliban fighters, who were now undoubtedly watching for us. After several hours of driving, we reached the last remaining obstacle to the high desert and safety—a fast-running stream. It was a classic ambush point and good hiding spot for IEDs. But the biggest problem was a mud pit forty yards wide that the ANA’s Rangers couldn’t cross. We stopped the convoy and had the ANA drivers put the trucks in four-wheel-drive low.

  “Don’t gun it,” Bill told the lead driver through an interpreter. “Just let it glide through the mud.”

  The Afghan nodded and, grinning from ear to ear, floored the gas pedal. The truck sloshed into the mud in four-wheel-drive high. It made it across but dug a massive trench right through the middle of the pit. Bill screamed at the driver, who was jubilantly pumping his arms up and down in victory. In his mind, all he had to do was get across. The next driver took off without warning, before we could explain things in more detail. The ANA truck raced into the mud and just barely made it through.

  We decided to stop the next ANA vehicle and send a GMV across. We knew the hefty GMV would make it with little effort and could tow vehicles across if necessary. But as the first GMV started moving, another ANA truck darted in behind it, and it immediately got stuck and sank in the mud. This crossing was going to take much longer than expected.

  Of the sixteen vehicles in our patrol, we still had four more ANA vehicles to get across and all nine of the GMVs. My team was pulling security on the bank and staying low in the vehicles. Several more GMVs crossed and joined the teams pulling security on the far side. One of the last GMVs tried to winch the small Ranger free from the clutches of the mud but only managed to get itself stuck, too.

  Riley, our medic, sat in the back of his truck scanning the rocks. That’s where he spotted a black turban and dirty face with a scruffy beard peeking out, right where he was pointing his M240 machine gun. The M240 fires a bullet the size of your pinkie finger and can punch through nearly three-quarters of an inch of steel.

  The sound of the machine-gun burst sliced through the noise of the straining engines, immediately accompanied by sporadic AK fire from both sides of the river. The rounds slammed into the young Taliban fighter’s head, and his body rolled out from behind the rock. The endless ranting of mullahs from the mosques in Pakistan and the foreign fighters in the training camps had driven the guy to try and steal a glimpse of the infidels. Curiosity killed him.

  Another fighter popped up out of a small ditch nearby, weapon in hand. Riley cut him down before he could get away.

  I called Riley for a report.

  “I just killed two assholes hiding behind a rock. Light fire from our side,” he radioed back.

  As the team medic, Riley provided the team and our Afghan soldiers with all our care. You didn’t go to Riley for a stomachache unless you wanted to be called a sissy or worse. But if you were lying in a pool of blood, Riley was the first person you wanted kneeling at your side.

  Riley’s personality was, let’s say, multidimensional. Like Bill, he was from Texas, the small town of Tolar, where the cattle vastly outnumber the people and his high school graduating class numbered thirty-two. He had enjoyed the vast freedom of the open plains since he was a teenager, with a near frontier upbringing that kept him busy raising livestock and roping cattle. Just short of five foot ten inches tall, he was as wide as two men and had the strongest, heaviest hands on the team, obviously from his youth of handling horses and other men. He was most comfortable in cowboy boots, a T-shirt, and jeans and would have happily gone on patrol in that clothing if I had allowed it. I could imagine him in a long duster, dismounting a sixteen-hand quarter horse and sauntering into a bar, spurs singing, shotgun in hand. Riley was a free spirit and as wild as the horses he kept and the state he came from. I was willing to endure his turn-of-the-previous-century antics on and off duty for one simple reason: loyalty. Having Riley on the team was like having a brother around full time. He was never without a smart-ass answer to a question and was always ready to back up his statements with a brawl. That being said, we could be in the thick of a team feud, but outsiders best not make the mistake of messing with any one of us when Riley was around.

  A life of backbreaking farmwork had honed Riley’s tendencies when it came to force. This I used to great advantage as my team pursued our country’s goals. I could and would ask Afghans nicely one time and one time only for anything. If my politeness was taken for weakness, I would send in Riley. Whatever technique he applied, he did so without hesitation, usually resulting in a smiling Afghan returning to me hat in hand, ready to do what I asked. Soon word got around and I only had to ask the one time. This job and Special Forces in general were a perfect fit for Riley. While methodical in the clinic, he was a fierce gunfighter fueled by natural rage. He wore his emotions on his sleeve and preferred to be on the front of stack ready to kick in the door and lay waste to the enemy. If you wanted to take ground, put Riley in the front. The problem was, he was too valuable to sacrifice. His job was to keep everyone else alive.

  As the senior medic, Riley never forgot his absolutely critical responsibilities. He was charged not only with providing medical assistance to the Afghans, and training the medics for the ANA, but most important, with keeping team members alive until they could be medically evacuated from the field. These things made for a heavy rucksack of burden, but Riley had big shoulders. His ability to practice medicine in the worst of circumstances was inspiring. Once, he got word that one of our ANA soldiers had been wounded in a firefight. The nineteen-year-old arrived in the small triage room with a huge gunshot wound to the chest. The ISAF medic and nurse had already given up on him because they couldn’t get a chest tube inserted to inflate his lungs so he could breathe. Riley arrived, dropped his trauma bag, and went to work. He had the chest tube inserted and the patient stable and breathing on his own in minutes. It would be one of many instances where Riley would back up his brash demeanor to the hilt.

  Riley continued to fire all around the rocks and up into the wadi to suppress enemy fire. Taliban fighters on the opposite side of the river began firing back, thinking that their ambush had been sprung; in response, all the machine guns and grenade launchers on the GMVs opened up. For the second time that day, I heard Jared call, “Troops in contact!” over the radio.

  The remaining GMVs raced forward across the mud. Jared’s truck stopped just long enough for him to jump in, and then all the Americans were across except for my team and the GMV stuck in the bog. The Taliban fire began to die down.

  Across the river, two trucks dashed back to the edge of the mud, tossed towing straps to the sunken GMV, and easily freed it. Jared ran to Shinsha and told him to get all of his equipmen
t off the stuck Ranger. Under sporadic fire, the ANA formed a line and heaved backpacks and ammo to another truck. Finally, with everyone else on the far side, Jared ordered my team across, too. Brian grinned as the massive Goodyear tires slung mud in all directions. We roared past the waiting trucks and once again took up the lead.

  A significant ambush never materialized. Once we moved through the kill zone, the Taliban fighters stopped taking shots and our machine guns went quiet. There were no more targets. Overhead, Air Force jets covered our escape. Jared called in an air strike on the Ranger we’d left behind to prevent the enemy from digging it out and using it. We couldn’t afford to have Taliban fighters in possession of an official Afghan Army vehicle, parading around in it as propaganda. As the bluish gray sky gave way to darkness, we saw the flash of a precision bomb striking the vehicle. If anyone had been trying to pillage it, they were dead.

  We were down a truck, but we made good progress after the mud. We set up a small base on the ridgeline on the cusp of the Red Desert, content with the day’s accomplishments.

  Chapter 8

  A CAT-AND-MOUSE GAME

  In war, only the simple succeeds.

  —FIELD MARSHAL PAUL VON HINDENBURG

  The warm water felt good as I poured a small amount of it over my eyes. It ran down my neck, soaking my already wet T-shirt. The blazing sun had baked us during the day, but as it dipped below the mountains the heat was giving way to a cool breeze at the edge of the desert. I swigged warm water that would have felt better in a shower instead of in a water bottle, swishing it and spitting it out to get the dust and grime from my mouth.

  We had covered about ninety kilometers, had a truck successfully airlifted to us, and been in two small firefights with no one injured. A busy three days. On top of that, the Taliban had to be wondering just what the hell we were up to down here.

  “Not bad,” I said to Dave.

  “Yeah, no problem, sir,” he said dryly. “Now we just have to cross two hundred kilometers of some of the most unforgiving terrain on the planet, sneak into the enemy’s sanctuary, establish blocking positions, and wait for the ISAF to push the Mongolian horde into our tiny element.”

  “How did you become so cynical?”

  Dave cocked an eyebrow and looked down at me as he finished cleaning the heavy machine gun.

  “I’ve worked for you for two years, Captain.”

  In that moment, I wished I could stay in this job for the rest of my career.

  Jared came by and said we should get some quick rest. We needed to be off the ridge before the sun came up. I went to pass the word to Hodge and Team 26.

  Hodge asked, “So, Rusty, how did you miss that Talib today?”

  “Guess I didn’t take my Geritol,” I said.

  He laughed.

  “What about yourself?” I shot back. “I’m surprised at your age that you can see that far, much less think you can hit a moving target at over three hundred meters.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t miss today. You did.”

  Hodge was right. I had reflex fired instead of taking the time to line up the stadia lines in my optic sight and lead the target. I would not let that happen again, ever.

  Bill set up the guard shifts while I went over to check on the Afghans. The fight had left me keyed up. There was no way I could rest. Plus, I knew the ANA broke out the chai every time we stopped. When I got to Shinsha’s truck, the blue propane flame was licking the black bottom of the brass pot and I could hear the water rolling to a boil.

  Shinsha was in good spirits. His men, who seemed as fired up as I was, scurried around their trucks making the tea, smoking, or making a mess. As soon as I sat down, the Afghans started making fun of my Pashto, which I speak with a western North Carolina accent. I could say a few words and phrases and knew enough to get my point across in a pinch, but I needed an interpreter for the heavy lifting. Still, the tea was hot and sweet and an hour passed before I headed back to my truck to take my guard shift and relieve Smitty.

  I settled into the turret of the truck, picked up the thermal imagery scope, and took a look around. Nothing. Not even a stray donkey or camel herd. Under the dying light, the smooth, rolling surface of the desert flowed away out of sight. After such a long day, I enjoyed the few hours of quiet. It gave me time to collect my thoughts, which soon drifted back to my family. I did the math and figured out it was still afternoon in the States. I could see them in the kitchen. I wondered what they were having for lunch.

  Crossing the Red Desert (August 24–31, 2006)

  Kandahar Airfield, home of the ISAF and coalition contingent. Starting point for Operation Medusa.

  First contact with Taliban made in riverbed during infiltration. Units turn west into the Red Desert.

  Interdicted military fuel trucks smuggling ammunition and weapons into Panjwayi.

  Discovery of the Taliban training camp and weapons firing range.

  Unit heading northwest to the aerial resupply point.

  Just after midnight, I began to wake the troops. The Taliban would eventually come looking for us. Leaving at night allowed us to get a good head start, and the morning breeze would blow sand over our tracks. Since the Afghans didn’t have night-vision goggles, Special Forces soldiers jumped into the driver’s seat of the Afghan trucks. We headed out into the open desert. The rugged trails and riverbeds that caused your back to ache for days were behind us. I checked my map and compass. We were cruising at a good clip, despite our worn and dated equipment.

  As reassuring as it was to be back in Ole Girl, she was ancient by military standards. Afghanistan is murder on trucks. Busted axles, blown tires, and punctured hoses are common on the rock-strewn landscape. Ole Girl was a first-generation GMV. She hit the ground in 2003 and for the last three years had never stopped bouncing along the wadis and dirt tracks of Afghanistan. She lacked any of the advanced armor and electronics that were so prevalent in the new trucks, but those were all headed to Iraq.

  Most conventional combat units had the newest Humvee models with an onboard tracking system called the Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below, or FBCB2. The system let commanders navigate and see all the other units on the battlefield through a satellite uplink. Dubbed a “force tracker,” it showed the positions of friendly units and trucks on a digital map. The operator could click on the icons and not only tell their location but the type of unit as well.

  Brian, Ron, and I had to MacGyver one out of my laptop, a GPS, and some scrap metal. Brian and Ron figured out a way to hook the GPS to the computer mapping system and put an antenna in the back so we could track our position. I built a mount out of a piece of old aircraft aluminum and several yards of sticky Velcro. It looked like it sounds, but it worked. That was the difference between Special Forces and other units: We could improvise. But after six years at the tip of the spear, we shouldn’t have had to.

  In the distance, I saw lights. They flickered on the horizon across the vast wasteland. I took a closer look through my monocular. From the number of lights, it looked like several trucks or cars, but I couldn’t tell how many. I called Jared and recommended that we set up a checkpoint and see who was driving out here.

  Jared agreed. Hodge, listening on the radio, pulled out to our right flank and set up to cover us. I radioed all the vehicles and ordered the teams to attach an IR chemlight, a small glow stick that can only be seen through our nods, to the rear of the trucks. The lights would let us identify friend and foe should any shooting start.

  When we stopped, Bill jumped out and scouted out a low, sandy trough in front of the oncoming vehicles to put two of the ANA trucks into. Then he moved his truck to the right side, creating a barrier and funneling the headlights into the ANA trucks. Taking his cues from Bill, Brian positioned our truck off to the left. To Bill’s credit, the checkpoint was well established in a very short period of time. I called Jared and told him that my team was set. Hodge called in and everybody was in position. Then we all flashed our IR lights—like
the glow sticks, they could only be seen with nods—to make sure everybody knew where everybody was.

  The plan was simple. Hodge was covering us. Jared, Shinsha, and the others were set up nearby, ready to be the cavalry if things went south. I felt like one of those spiders waiting for my prey to fumble past in the darkness and fall into the trap. The headlights slowly drew closer. At one point, they stopped. Light and sound carries over extremely long distances in the open desert, and I feared we’d been spotted. But soon enough the lights started toward us again.

  We could hear the rumble of their engines. Too loud to be trucks, I thought. It wasn’t jingle trucks or busted up pickups. I called over to Bill. He was thinking the same thing. Hodge couldn’t see the vehicles, only four sets of lights. But he agreed with Bill that the vehicles sounded like tanks or armored personnel carriers.

  I radioed Jared and asked him to call the TOC and see if ISAF had any units in the area. “I don’t know what those are,” I said, “but we may have our hands full out here.”

  I could hear Jared radio back to the TOC as I called Bill again. “Bill, get your anti-tank weapons out and ready!”

  He was already ahead of me. He’d ordered the gunners to switch to API, armor-piercing incendiary rounds. The interpreters went to the Afghan trucks and gave the same order. Bill also told the Afghans with RPGs to shoot the last two vehicles in the convoy if the American gunners opened fire. Finally, he told the GMVs’ rear gunners to “scratch their backs,” or spray the turrets and chassis when the crews exposed themselves.

  The lights were a half mile away and the ground started rumbling. It felt like a small earthquake.