Jerry Bradley & Kevin Maurer

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

  Grinning, I said clearly for the others to hear, “Nanawateh tismedel.” I had just given him safe passage according to one of the most primary Pashtunwali benefits. Like it or not, he now owed me a favor.

  He was obligated to obey.

  “I have a message for your boss. Show him this,” I told him through a terp, indicating the flag. “Tell him we are looking for him.”

  He jerked his hand away and glared. I gave him a little wink and stepped up into my truck. We made the turn out of the compound fully prepared for an ambush. I saw the ANA squad leader wave to the Talib who had just walked away with his life.

  As we headed back to Jared’s position, I got a call on the radio that there were some serious arguments among the Taliban as to why we were not ambushed on the way out of the compound. Apparently there was a very, very irate Taliban soldier who wanted to engage us but was told by his commander he was obligated not to.

  At the top of the ridge, Jared waited anxiously with his interpreter for the captured notebook. I handed it off to him as we drove by. Now the administrative pain would begin. I was hoping someone on the ridge had kept our timeline for the after-action report. I began a brain dump of everything I could remember, while Bill and the team began cleaning gear and weapons.

  A shadow fell over the door of my truck. It was Jared, grinning from ear to ear. “Do you know what this is?” he asked, holding up the notebook Riley and Smitty had found.

  “Yep,” I replied. “It’s a list of Taliban commanders and phone numbers. This wasn’t left there by accident. It was hidden.”

  I studied the list carefully and recognized at least four of the names immediately as men I had been hunting during my last rotation. This time we might not have to chase them all over Afghanistan.

  Chapter 11

  THE VOICE OF AN

  ANGEL AND DEATH

  The difficult we do immediately; the impossible takes a little longer.

  —AIR FORCE MOTTO

  At daybreak, our fully loaded trucks rolled down from our perch over the Dori River and headed into the valley. Our teams’ mission from this point was to continue to move west and gather as much detailed intelligence as possible, while keeping the enemy watching. The idea was to draw their attention to us and away from the northern areas where the ISAF main force would be launching an attack. Before we departed that morning, we rehearsed within our team and with the others what to do if one of the trucks got stuck in the slimy, silky mud of the riverbed. We would be skirting the riverbed, but if we had to drop down into it in a pinch, we needed to be sure what to do. This close to the Panjwayi, we might not be able to recover a vehicle, especially in a firefight.

  It was a nice morning ride until we approached what looked like a giant earth-covered finger pointing straight into the riverbed. The ridge made a perfect ambush site. It was very narrow at the base and at its bottom there was room for only one vehicle at a time to squeak past. It provided good cover, had numerous draws running through it, and provided an easy escape route to the open desert. Dave nudged me with his right foot. Glancing over my left shoulder, I could see him sunk down into the turret. Suddenly, three muffled rifle cracks snapped over the rumble of our truck engines. Hodge called over the radio to report that a man on a motorcycle was fleeing around the ridge toward the network of villages.

  “Told you,” Dave said behind me.

  Hodge’s truck scratched and clawed up the bank, throwing dust and dirt into the air. The other trucks followed in quick procession like fat armored dune buggies. Clearing the ridgeline, they sped across the open desert in pursuit of the Taliban spotter. My team crested the hill and set up on the ridge finger to cover them with our machine guns and grenade launchers.

  I smiled, imagining what was taking place. Inside the security of a mud-walled compound in the village across from us, a shocked Taliban commander was being abruptly roused from his peaceful sleep by an excited guard. He and his entourage would have luxuriated for months in the area, preying on the local population for food and living quarters while terrorizing the villages with their ideology of fanaticism. Now, as his scout came screaming into the village with his tail between his legs, he would look over his compound walls and see five American gun trucks and dozens of Afghan soldiers all on line, headed straight for him. Taliban radio calls confirmed my intuition.

  The labyrinth of the valley swallowed up the motorcyclist before the team could catch up to him, so Hodge and Jared called to say that they were returning. But the false sense of security the Taliban had enjoyed for months was over. The rumors that the long beards were back in the area had just become reality.

  As I scanned the village and surrounding area, it seemed familiar. I just couldn’t put my finger on why. Staring at the snaking river, I realized that I’d been in this valley in 2002 as a first lieutenant in the 82nd Airborne Division. We had protected an explosive ordnance detachment (EOD) sent to destroy tons of leftover Soviet munitions.

  The Soviets left massive amounts of ordnance, explosives, and bombs at Kandahar Airfield during their hasty departure from Afghanistan. The Taliban loaded the bombs onto trucks and dumped them in a series of large wadis near the Dori River. When I say bombs, I mean some of the worst kinds, in all sizes, types, and shapes. Fuel bombs, like napalm, anti-personnel cluster bombs, and massive thousand- and two-thousand-pounders.

  So the EOD came out and blew it all up. The fireball lasted twenty-five seconds and slowly morphed into a mushroom cloud that hung in the sky as the shock wave rolled through the valley, sending Afghans running for cover. At that time, it was the largest controlled explosion in Army history—so big that NORAD, the missile defense command in Colorado, detected it.

  Now, the Taliban radios all over the valley came online. The commanders didn’t know what to make of us. We had just achieved part of our mission. We had their attention. They hadn’t seen an American patrol in years, one commander said. ISAF weren’t aggressive; they kept to the main roads and rarely took the fight to the Taliban. American patrols meant trouble.

  Jared decided to keep them guessing. We headed west, deeper into the district toward the villages at first, and then cut south back toward the river in a zigzag maneuver. By now the hazy waves of heat poured over the desert floor like water, blurring the images in the distance.

  “Who wants to live here?” Brian asked when we stopped.

  “It is all they have,” I said, taking my helmet off.

  Days of crashing through the open desert and bouncing off the bottom of sand dunes had taken their toll. Our backs were tight and sore, our legs and stomachs cramped. I gently rubbed my swollen, sand-crusted eyes under my sunglasses. I could barely see through the binoculars and my head throbbed. Once, in a restaurant while on leave, I was quizzed by a college student who wanted to know what it was like in Afghanistan. “The only way to describe the average hundred-and-twenty-degree heat would be to stick a salon-sized hair dryer in your face at full blast and leave it there for days,” I told her. “While doing this, try to stay hydrated by drinking warm bathwater while stepping into and out of the bathtub holding a radio, trying not to get killed.”

  My headache was quickly becoming a raging migraine. I didn’t want to show weakness. A lot of times when we work with conventional units, they stay in full kit, even when it’s not required, until they keel over with heatstroke. I learned quickly that there is a time and place for everything. If you don’t need to be in full kit, take it off. Afghanistan is one place where uniformity will not just make you combat ineffective, it will kill you.

  Operate smarter, not harder. That’s why you were selected, remember? I said to myself.

  Bill called me over the radio. He didn’t like this area.

  “Sir, there is no way to establish a security perimeter at this location. We are going to recon a spot on the high ground and maybe set up there,” he said.

  With the desert at our back and the entire river valley laid out in front of us, the ledge Bill foun
d turned out to be perfect. I scanned the riverbank and the honeycomb of mud compounds and villages sprawled before me. I didn’t see any trucks. No farmers tending to the fields, which were thick, green, and ready for harvest. Something didn’t add up. This valley should be alive with activity.

  Suddenly, Victor, my normally cocky terp, ran up to me, frantic.

  “Turan Rusty, you must hear this,” Victor said, nearly out of breath. “The Talibs are watching us, many, many of them.”

  I tried to get him to calm down and explain what he had heard. Usually the term “many” in Afghan math meant twenty to thirty, more or less. Afghan math was simple: Take the number they give you and cut it in half twice, and then it is only about 10 percent of that. Afghan numbers are always exaggerated.

  I listened as one commander after another checked in. I counted fourteen total, and all sounded confident and calm. Some even laughed or had music playing in the background. Chills ran down my spine. How could so many fighters get this close to Kandahar city undetected? I tried to write down their code names but couldn’t keep up. We would find out later that the village directly in front of us was the Taliban’s headquarters in the southern part of the district.

  “The Talibs say they beat Americans in Pashmul. Taliban commanders now say they do it again,” Victor said.

  The Taliban commanders were talking about Shef’s team, and his warning to not come here without a battalion of troops echoed in my mind. When we left Kandahar Airfield, our intelligence shop estimated that three to four hundred fighters were in the valley. There were sixteen Taliban commanders in the notebook we found. If each enemy commander had fifty or more fighters, the intelligence was wrong. Way wrong. Good ole American math told me there were more than eight hundred enemy fighters before me, and that did not include those on the north side of the river. The north side of the river was twice as big and most likely held twice as many fighters. That put the total at more than two thousand.

  The number rattled me. I immediately thought of the fights at Anaconda and Tora Bora. The difference between those and ours was that those battles were fought in the mountains. This was smack dab in the middle of a city. I focused on our advantages. Returning over and over to the same regions in Afghanistan gave Special Forces a very distinct advantage. We knew the people, the local leadership, the terrain, the enemy. I knew I had hunted at least four of the men I was hearing on the radio, who had been named in the captured notebook. And, maybe more importantly, they knew us. Their rapid retreat from the compound earlier proved that. Hopefully we’d live up to our reputation.

  Jared was shocked when I told him what I’d heard.

  “Are you sure?” he said.

  “As sure as three combat rotations in the same place can make me.”

  “Okay, I got it. ISAF will never believe this, but I’m going to send this up now,” Jared said.

  “Make sure our TOC gets the information out to the ISAF ground commanders.”

  Now we were accomplishing one of the most important pieces of our mission—intelligence gathering. And what we were collecting was not secondhand or hearsay from an informant. It was real-world, real-time information on the enemy. Intelligence rarely gets more accurate.

  After sending up the report, Jared passed word along the ridge that we likely faced an attack. The Taliban knew they couldn’t fight in the heat of the day. Instead they would wait until evening when it got cool.

  We broke out our sniper rifles, made sure all of the machine guns and grenade launchers had full ammo loads, and dug in. As the last rays of sunshine faded, painting the whole sky orange, I split open a thick green pouch of spaghetti and started to eat. A few spoonfuls in, Victor was back, even more agitated than before.

  “Captain Rusty, the Talibs are going to attack! They were speaking with each other, talking in strange languages, then stopped talking. Everyone stopped talking.”

  “What do you mean they are talking in strange languages and stopped talking?”

  “They were saying prayers, like, Be glad to be martyr for Allah, Allah akbar, allah Akbar! This is very bad.”

  “Yes, partner, it sure is,” I said, heading toward Bill.

  Typically, the prayers come out when it’s time to fight or celebrate. In the videos of suicide bombers, that is what you are hearing them say or scream: Allah akbar. God is great.

  As twilight turned to a thick blanket of darkness, the radios stayed silent. There was nothing we could do but wait. Scanning the valley with my binoculars, I just wanted them to come. Combat was hard, but nothing fried my nerves like waiting. It was far easier to just fight the enemy instead of the battles in my head. You couldn’t prepare for everything, but you try, and it grates on your mind.

  Casey, Jared’s turret gunner, first saw vehicles moving. It started with a group of four pickup trucks speeding north along the main road. Several seconds later, another convoy started moving, then another and another. We stopped counting at fifty-seven vehicles, all rolling at the same time. Some may have been decoys because they would stop, shut off their lights, and then proceed again. They were moving important people around the battlefield and positioning their forces.

  Jared called for an AC-130 gunship for support but was told one wouldn’t be available for at least an hour. The only thing they could send immediately was a 1980s-era B-1 bomber built to fight the Soviet war machine. Its dart-like shape and long wings now patrolled over Afghanistan and Iraq delivering precision-guided bombs. From the ground, it looked like a fighter. I missed the massive hulking frame of the B-52. Bombers are great for hitting bigger targets like buildings, but at twenty thousand feet it was hard to hit moving pickup trucks.

  The B-1 bomber arrived shortly and circled high overhead for several minutes as the Air Force controllers tried to talk it onto a target. By the time the B-1 identified a column of trucks, it was short of fuel, as it peeled off to top off from fuel tankers flying a racetrack pattern nearby. We had thirty minutes remaining before the AC-130 gunship would arrive.

  Reports started coming in that Taliban fighters had moved into the riverbed on our left and right flanks. Bill and Jeff started setting up ANA soldiers in a defensive position, using lasers to identify sectors of fire under night-vision goggles. As the Taliban moved, we countered. Like the early rounds of a boxing match, neither fighter got within reach of the other.

  I stayed focused by keeping up with the Taliban movements on the map and trying to anticipate the next one. But with no air cover and an enemy setting up for what looked like a complex attack, much like the one that had hit Shef, I started to get nervous. As soon as I heard the buzz of the AC-130’s turboprops, I exhaled.

  The stout Spectre gunship flew over us, bristling with guns. We couldn’t see its 105-mm artillery piece, the world’s largest airborne gun, and the 40-mm cannons poking out of its belly, but they were there. Radar pods and infrared cameras situated around the guns allowed the crew to shoot with pinpoint accuracy night or day. Jared and Mike stood nearby, and I heard Mike get on the radio and start painting the picture. He described our position and tried to focus the gun crew onto several of the convoys and Taliban positions.

  “Roger, Talon 30, Reaper 21,” a silky female voice answered back.

  Jared nudged me in the ribs. Reaper 21 had one of the sexiest voices I’ve ever heard. She sounded like Shania Twain to me, and for the rest of the night my mind saw the attractive country star behind the controls, although the way we smelled and looked, I doubted she’d be remotely interested. I turned toward Mike and saw Dave, Brian, Smitty, Bill, and Riley all gathered around the truck.

  “Ooh, yeah,” someone said.

  I wished we could let the Taliban know that their ass whipping was coming from an attractive American woman pilot.

  When the Taliban heard the engines, the airwaves exploded with commands.

  “The death plane,” one Taliban commander said in a raspy voice. They started ordering their fighters to get to their attack positions and
hide. The commanders seemed eager to attack and continued to bark orders to their troops for several minutes.

  “Put down the watermelons,” the raspy commander said, using their code word for mines.

  Reaper 21 saw a group of several trucks move toward the river and banked the AC-130 toward them. When she got there, only a compound was visible—no movement. The raspy Taliban commander had also stopped transmitting.

  Nothing.

  Mike had Reaper 21 fly away for a few minutes, hoping to trick the Talibs into an attack. The buzz of the props faded, leaving nothing but silence and tension. We waited patiently.

  Still nothing.

  When Reaper 21 returned, Mike worked her up and down the irrigation ditches looking for groups of fighters.

  Nothing.

  “It must be hard to get good help these days,” I said to Jared. We both had a good laugh.

  Finally, Reaper 21 radioed back and said the gunners saw a group of eight men moving through the thick brush on the south side of our position. Mike ordered the bird to watch them closely. If they saw a weapon, shoot.

  I could visualize the gunners in the cramped plane huddled over their black-and-white screens, searching for a weapon. No luck, but just because they couldn’t see the weapons, it didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

  Not far away, we spotted two trucks just off the road. The Spectre picked up two heat signatures, but those men scrambled onto the trucks and took off. Still no visible weapons and the truck didn’t pose a threat. Radio calls weren’t enough to sanction an attack.

  I wanted to fire. I’ve seen the Taliban hide behind women and children, and it made it easy to despise them. Their ideology does not value their own people, except as sacrifices for their cause. It is sickening and inhumane. Every day I saw my soldiers and others accept enormous risk to prevent civilian causalities, even to the point of letting our enemies escape.