The Silence of War

by Terry McGowan

  Colonel Hall approached me and—eyeing me with what I took to be a friend’s concern—said, “Don’t get yourself killed up there.” Miquelon had just been busting chops, calling me an “old man” immediately prior to the colonel’s appearance. I replied, “Don’t worry, sir. I’m not too young to die, but I haven’t heard my last ‘old man’ joke yet.” Then the colonel pulled out, en route to another FOB.

  Payne, Harless, and Peterson were slated for Golestan. That same day a resupply convoy was heading there, and they were driving up with it, in a Humvee. Since there were only the three of them going in a vehicle that sits four, with Peterson in the machine-gun turret, I hitched a ride with them. Payne just assumed I would be the vehicle commander—he definitely didn’t regard me as a civilian—and since the other two didn’t object, I assumed the role. “Technicalities be damned,” I thought.

  Supply convoys were sent to FOB Golestan about every ten days to two weeks. I figured that was plenty of time to nose around and see what I could come up with. I still felt that Delaram was the right place for me to operate for all the reasons I stated earlier. Therefore I took only my assault pack with me, leaving other gear behind. I brought shaving gear, three pairs of skivvies, three olive drab T-shirts, and three pairs of tan boot socks. Those were the only luxuries. Kevlar helmet and body armor, magazines for my rifle, first-aid equipment, spare batteries, my uniquely Marine, personally owned Ka-Bar knife, and my check-signer-issued laptop completed the inventory.

  The convoy pulled out of Delaram at about dusk. It was led by a “minesweeping” truck—a vehicle that had a metal arm in front of it attached to a large heavy “roller.” If an IED was encountered, that should have set it off with no casualties. Much of the trip was in country that those in charge of the convoy would later come to know intimately, but they hadn’t yet been afforded the opportunity. Therefore, once darkness closed in, we got lost several times.

  When the countryside we were traversing changed from flat open plain—with excellent fields of vision and clear fields of fire—to narrowing mountains, I began to perk up. I always looked at us as I would have if I were the enemy. It didn’t make for a relaxing journey.

  We were hours into the trip, with many hours yet to go when we took the wrong fork in a road. We ended up dead-ended in a remote mud-walled village. Several times we tried to get straightened out and exit the village, only to discover we had gone down another village byway. At one point the entire convoy did a U-turn in some poor farmer’s field. I’m sure that didn’t endear us to the locals.

  Finally the convoy just stopped, strung out in a long line of vehicles, right in the middle of the village. There is no electricity in rural Afghanistan, so people go to bed early. They live pretty much from sun to sun. In fact, the first call to prayer is at sunrise. So when I observed two men walking parallel to us about a hundred yards away, in the middle of the night, my awareness heightened. It was way too late at night for men to be out for a stroll. That sort of thing just wasn’t done in rural Afghanistan.

  We remained stationary way too long for my comfort. My demeanor was intense. I had been laughing, joking, and playing around with these three Marines for some time prior at Delaram, but not now. Payne was behind the wheel, watching intently. Harless was edgy, muttering his displeasure under his breath. Peterson was in the turret, saying nothing—his absolute silence reminded me of the lull before the storm. I exited the vehicle and took a tactical walk around, getting the lay of the land. The “Lone Ranger” stuff was getting to be a habit.

  We were close enough to structures that an enemy could have materialized at almost any point and cut into the column. I discovered a square walled-off area a very short distance from where we were stopped. It had just enough of an entranceway for our vehicle to enter—but barely. Otherwise it was a completely enclosed empty space. From the middle to the walls was approximately twenty yards. The walls were about five feet high, made of bullet-stopping, rock-hard adobe, and if we were in the center no one could approach us without getting shot. Peterson’s armor-protected turret was higher than the stockade; he could still engage an enemy and help protect the convoy. That enclosure would have afforded us much better protection than where we presently were.

  I briefed my companions on what, in my day, would have been called an “immediate action drill”—that is, something that would be done without any hesitation. I pointed out the walled area to Payne and told him that if we were attacked and I gave him the word (in the absence of orders from the convoy commander, of course) he was to drive our vehicle into that protected area. Peterson was to engage any approaching enemy with his belt-fed machine gun, and Harless was to keep him well supplied with belts of ammo. The rest we would play by ear.

  Like being on patrol when no suicide bomber approaches, or no IEDs are encountered, even when something doesn’t happen, it’s nerve-racking.

  On that night, to my immense relief, nothing happened.

  We got moving again. However, with the passing of hour after hour, Payne was finally getting too tired to drive. I drove the damn Humvee. I sure as hell wasn’t supposed to. I had no military driver’s license, had not been trained on the vehicle, and was technically a civilian. But I drove anyway. As we climbed higher into the mountains, we encountered ever-narrowing trails with many switchbacks. A steep climb on one side was offset by a steep drop-off on the other. I enjoyed myself enormously. I’m a rebel like that. Finally, as the night dragged endlessly on, even I became too tired to drive. Harless took the wheel. Peterson stalwartly manned the gun in the turret for the entire trip.

  Thirteen and a half hours after leaving Delaram, we arrived at FOB Golestan. The sun was already up. It was on or about June 18.

  A cursory look around was all I needed to realize why Colonel Hall had been troubled. The place reminded me of the Alamo. It was not a Hesco walled fortress, like most FOBs. It was a partially enclosed adobe position with openings in the enclosure and obvious terrain features favorable to an attacker. I took it all in quickly. I recall thinking that I could take the place with twenty-five Marines and I wouldn’t need all of them. I would have kept five in reserve.

  I was exhausted, the trip had been harrowing, and my patience was not what it otherwise might have been. I mutely wondered if the platoon commander, Lieutenant Brewster, had been made aware of the intelligence reports battalion was picking up. The Taliban meant to attack in strength and annihilate him. I was there because the battalion commander was worried; now I was worried as well. There was no time for gradual diplomacy. The captain in me, like the Wolf Man during a full moon, came out with fangs showing.

  I stood with a deliberate posture of authority and eyes to match. I motioned to Brewster and said, “We’ve got to talk.”

  Much later, when Lieutenant Brewster and I had developed both mutual respect and friendship, each of us chuckled as he spoke of his first impression of me at Golestan. He said he thought, “Who does this old guy think he is to summon me to talk ten minutes after arriving at my command?!”

  Ever the gentleman, although thoroughly peeved, the lieutenant began to dialogue with me. I won’t bore the reader with the details. Suffice it to say that it took some time before he and I were at ease with one another. Considering our contentious beginning, it’s a near miracle how splendidly we began to work together over time. As it dawned on me that many of the shortcomings at Golestan were not of Brewster’s making, I began to appreciate the steps he took to alleviate them. Before the deployment was over, I would describe him as audacious. Audacity is a virtue in an outnumbered military commander. Robert E. Lee was the soul of audacity. Brewster, I came to realize, was made of the same stuff.

  That would come later, however.

  Once the initial confrontation with Lieutenant Brewster was over, I spied Sergeant Holter of Bravo Squad. We were both glad to see each other, and we met like old friends. He quietly expressed his reservations about th
e precariousness of the platoon’s position. He articulated the hope that my arrival might cause change for the better. I knew I needed to know more about what was going on in the area around the FOB, so I asked him to take me out on patrol and he agreed—we would be leaving the FOB at midnight that night.

  Next I spotted Gunny Mendoza. The gunny’s frustration was visible. I could read it on his face and see it in his body English. I could hear it in his voice. He told me that his advice to the lieutenant had been falling on deaf ears. Knowing that the gunny was sent to Golestan specifically because he had the experience to guide a new second lieutenant, my concern for the safety of the platoon ratcheted even higher. I silently cursed the fact that I had no secure way to communicate directly with the battalion commander. I was certain that things were worse at Golestan than he knew.

  Gunny Mendoza understood. We had fifty-six Marines in a porous defensive position, with excellent covered and concealed approaches accessible to an enemy should that enemy avail himself of them, and we were more than thirteen hours from reinforcements. Unlike the typical Marine Corps battalion, which had indigenous air assets, we might have to rely on aircraft from another country—if we could get air support at all. In other words, we were really way out on a limb, on our own, and according to the battalion intelligence section, the dogs of war had gotten our scent and were swiftly closing in.

  Together, I promised the gunny, we would talk to the lieutenant. There were some things that could be done to improve our position, even though it would still be vulnerable. First, though, I was anxious to get out on patrol with Sergeant Holter. I needed to see more of what lay around us. I needed to know just how close the enemy was. I believed the people of Golestan would provide me with that information without saying a word. That’s why I was there—“street investigator radar.”

  Finally I flopped on an empty cot—whose I don’t know—and got what sleep I could in the stifling desert under an olive drab canvas covering. It offered a little shade but really soaked up the heat. At an altitude of approximately four and a half to five thousand feet above sea level, the FOB was noticeably cooler than Delaram. Still, a few sweat-soaked hours of nap time were all I could manage. Whereas it had been about 140 degrees or so at Delaram, it was still a good 130 at Golestan. Ten degrees cooler was nice, but it was still bloody hot.

  When I got up, stiffly, I took a good look around. To the west was a high, mountainous ridgeline that ran from north to south. Colored only in varying shades of brown, it was burned to a crisp by the unrelenting sun. Between the mountain and our position was a bone-dry riverbed. Comprised of smooth gray stones and grayish sand, it was used as a road by one and all. Quite wide, I supposed at some point in time it must have hosted a rushing torrent of unstoppable water.

  Before the riverbed, immediately to the west of our western adobe wall—fifty-five steps, in fact—was a thick, solid four-foot-high rock wall that surrounded several concrete and stone buildings. It was known as “the clinic,” since it was meant to house an Afghan doctor who, theoretically, would provide medical services to the local people. In point of fact, the “doctor” barely had step one first-aid training. His buildings and walls caused me the greatest concern.

  If I were attacking the FOB I would have commenced in the dead of night when all the Marines, except for posted guards, were asleep. I would have had my men crawl low, unobserved, to that bulletproof wall. Then to start the attack I would have dedicated two rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) launchers and two belt-fed (RPK) machine guns to each of the Marine bunkers opposing it. The operant definition of “fire supremacy”—as I was taught lo those many years prior, at TBS—is a state whereby any defender foolish enough to lift his head to shoot at the attacking force stops a bullet. At that close range, coupled with the element of surprise, the RPGs and RPKs would have guaranteed fire supremacy.

  My first troops over the wall would have carried ladders or boards and thrown them on what paltry razor wire there was, allowing subsequent waves of attackers to pour in. On the west side of the FOB, at the lowest point, our wall was only about five feet high. At fifty-eight years of age, I was able to get from the rock wall, through the razor wire, and vault that wall in seventeen seconds. It took me thirty seconds to get from the nearest cot, don gear, pick up my rifle and Kevlar helmet, and reach the same point. Do the math. Theoretically, the enemy could have poured into the FOB in force. The fighting would have been hand to hand.

  I was deeply concerned.

  The west wall was not the FOB’s only weak point. The south wall was no more than about four feet high and was adjacent to a solid, bulletproof, concrete boys’ school. Although sandbagged Marines were posted on the roof of the school, and the school area was surrounded by razor wire, a gulley ran in an east-to-west direction from the dry riverbed to a point on a dirt road over which our wire crossed. That point was low ground—below our line of sight. Therefore, both the gulley—an avenue of approach—and the spot where the dirt road and wire met were unobservable. An enemy could have cut the wire unseen and launched an attack from the south at very close quarters.

  Both the clinic and the school had been constructed by some prior Allied force for the good of the community. Razing them did not seem to be an option. Although from a military standpoint that would have afforded the FOB clear fields of fire and denied cover and concealment to the enemy, counterinsurgency strategy requires winning the hearts and minds of the people. Destroying a school and clinic was not likely to further that cause. Yet the FOB was vulnerable precisely because the school and the clinic remained standing. They posed a real dilemma.

  If the enemy had sufficient manpower—and subsequent events proved he did—and if the enemy attacked both from the west and the south, taking advantage of the terrain as described above—which he did not—we would most likely have made history—just as the defenders of the Alamo had made it. Lieutenant Brewster’s name would likely be toasted at formal military functions along with that of Lieutenant Travis—the commander of the Alamo. Two lieutenants overwhelmed by superior enemy forces after a desperate battle to the last man. Marines don’t surrender; the Taliban doesn’t take prisoners. Not exactly the kind of history I wanted to make. Obscurity is much to be preferred—at least in my pragmatic old mind.

  Golestan should have been a priority for the company commander. He was Lieutenant Brewster’s immediate commander. He should have gone to the battalion commander and articulated serious concern while proffering potential solutions—not the least of which could have been to pull the platoon back. Knowing the colonel as I came to know him, I have no doubt that very idea was percolating in his mind.

  It was also the company commander’s job to allocate company resources—he could have reinforced Brewster, for example, from another part of the company. He might have sent Brewster his missing rifle squad, even if he needed battalion approval to do it. But just as the CO had demonstrated a lack of tactical acumen at Baqua, he seemed apathetic about Golestan. Brewster was on his own minus one rifle squad with no equipment to construct a typical Marine FOB, and only fifty-six men—some of whom had just arrived on the same supply convoy that brought me.

  So I found myself in a poor defensive position with a pissed-off lieutenant, a frustrated gunny, an out-of-touch company commander who was somewhere far away—and no means of communicating with the man whose concern had brought me to Golestan in the first place.

  I was not a happy camper.

  When I awoke, after another all-too-brief nap, I looked around some more. To the north we looked pretty secure. A waterless offshoot that emptied into the main north-to-south river ran east to west at the base of a steep drop-off. That dry riverbed provided us with excellent unobstructed fields of fire. Across the dried-out waterway were high ground and a wooded area. I wondered how a patch of woods came to be when it was bordered on two sides by bone-dry rivers—especially since everywhere else was parched desert. Later I real
ized that all the runoff from wells, irrigation, and so forth in the village of Golestan ended up at the low ground, where the trees were. Still, they were separated from the FOB by a wide stretch of open ground—the dry watercourse.

  Also atop high ground, on the north side of the dry tributary and situated right outside the village, sat an adobe-walled “FOB” that had been constructed and occupied by the Soviets. It was being used by ANCOP, which stands for Afghanistan National Civil Order Police. While the ANP were off receiving formal training, ANCOP took their place. When the Soviets had garrisoned Golestan, they stationed fifteen hundred men there. As previously noted, we had fifty-six. I would guess there were about fifty ANCOP.

  To the immediate east was a lot of open land that gradually became foothills and mountains. Therefore, there were great fields of fire facing east, and that direction didn’t concern me. I was a little apprehensive about what I called “Russian Hill.” It was to our south and east. When the Russians occupied the country they had fortified a position on top of that prominence. The rock-lined entrenchments they had built were still there.

  The hill was about eight hundred meters high and very steep. There was no cover at all on its sides from which to assault should the enemy man the peak. Moreover, the fortifications could only be taken out by a direct hit from a mortar or by an air strike. All the same, it was pretty much too far away to threaten us directly, and our armored vehicles should have been more than a match for any Taliban foolish enough to wish to engage us from that site. However, it afforded the enemy an excellent observation post from which to look right down into our FOB.

  There would be no secrets from the Taliban.