A few minutes after the episode with Shirzai’s agitated commander, the recon element began to return to the bivouac. A nervous Afghan on the perimeter lit up the first pickup with AK fire. It was carrying the SF members, but fortunately no one was hit. A bullet did cut the hydraulic brake line for the right front wheel, however, and from that moment through the next couple of weeks every time the brakes were applied, the pickup would careen to the left. It provided some comic relief during our convoy movements.
The wounded arrived in the other pickups and were driven to our command post. The fighters lifted them out of the trucks and laid them at my feet like human offerings, which in a sense I suppose they were. The SF medic and another ODA member came over and started assessing the wounds. Strangely, not one of the men was bleeding. After questioning them through interpreters we learned they had been very close to where the bombs fell, and the concussive force of the explosions had blown them down a hill. The medic assessed that they were in psychological shock, but they did not appear to have any physical wounds. He told the Afghans to keep the casualties warm and lying down for the next few hours. They picked them up and carried them away.
Hank continued to work through the night with the SOFLAM, keeping approaching vehicles at bay. The temperature became very cold, and the wind continued to blow. It was the coldest night I would spend in Afghanistan, and one of the longest.
My communications window for submitting Foxtrot’s daily verbal situation reports to Headquarters was at 2:00 a.m. Gary set up the radio for me, and I made contact with a Headquarters officer who I let myself imagine was probably sitting comfortably in her chair in the middle of the afternoon back at Langley sipping on a soy latte from Starbucks. I didn’t recognize her voice and she told me she was new. We exchanged pleasantries and I started dictating my already prepared report. Normally this would be sent in written form, but I still didn’t have the gear I needed for that. She had just enough of an Asian accent that I was having difficulty understanding what she said to me over the less than optimal communications link. It was a frustrating situation. Then, right in the middle of my dictation—KABOOM!!! Hank had just called in the closest strike of the night, from the powerful sound of it, right on the other side of the hill where I was huddled with the radio.
“What was that? Did you drop your coffee cup or something?” she innocently asked.
After the call, I walked back to the command post to try to get some sleep. Several Americans were in the back of the pickups curled up in their sleeping bags. Others were inside the truck cabs. There was no room for me in either place. I rolled out my bag and a foam pad on the cold ground, crawled inside, and finally fell asleep to the sound of the howls of the wind.
27
The Longest Day
Early THE NEXT MORNING, and still tired from the previous night, we pulled out of our perimeter and drove toward Takhteh-Pol. After only a short distance we stopped at the edge of an elevated plateau overlooking a broad expanse of ground that led to the hills that stood between Takhteh-Pol and us. These were the same hills where our recon element had gotten into the firefight with the Taliban the night before. Looking it over with binoculars, I could see several vehicles still moving around the Taliban positions, and we decided to call in air strikes before crossing the open ground in daylight.
Within a few minutes, high-flying fast-movers arced overhead dropping ordnance, taking their cues from a young redheaded sergeant who directed them by radio to the targets. The sergeant was confident in his commands, to the point of seeming a bit cocky, given the rap-like staccato cadence he used when talking with the pilots. Whatever the case, he was getting the job done and he seemed to like what he was doing.
By this time the white sun had driven us out of our fleeces, and we basked in its warmth. From our ringside seats, we watched the awesome display of aerial firepower like we might watch fireworks on the 4th of July.
After several strikes, the jets were called off and Shirzai ordered two pickup loads of fighters to reconnoiter the Taliban line of defense. From our vantage point at the lip of the plateau, we watched as the trucks slowly made their way down to the open plain below and then barrel across it, side by side with contrails of dust streaming from their tires. As they raced away, the pickups slowly started to angle away from each other forming a “V” pattern as one headed for the right side of where the Taliban had been and the other for the left. With serrated-peaked mountains in the far distance providing a panoramic backdrop, it was a striking and dramatic scene.
Soon the reconnaissance parties reported the Taliban fighters were gone. We climbed into our trucks and began our own descent down the side of the plateau and then sped across the flat expanse toward Takhteh-Pol.
On the far side of the plain we passed through a tiny collection of little mud homes near where the bombing had taken place. A middle-aged Afghan man stood by the road near one of the homes. One hand was over his heart, the other motioning to us as we rolled by.
“Maybe he is inviting us in for tea,” someone joked.
But we had no time for the man, and we laughed and rolled on by.
A couple of kilometers more and the convoy stopped.
“What’s up?” I asked Gary who was driving.
“Must be Highway 4.”
Having traveled on dirt roads for two days I was imagining what the grand highway would look like. Curious to see it, I asked Gary to pull our truck around the stopped vehicles to get a look. From what we could see, it did not look much different than the roads we had traveled, with the exception that it was wider and there were stretches of deteriorated pavement here and there. It was also cratered with potholes; some so large a pickup could drive into them and almost disappear from sight.
We were now no more than a kilometer or two from Takhteh-Pol. We suspected that after all the bombing the Taliban would have fled the village, and we sent some fighters in to check it out. Meanwhile, Shirzai instructed his forces to set up a roadblock on the highway and to stop and search any vehicles approaching from the direction of Spin Boldak.
All members of Foxtrot were together at this point and we pulled our pickup over to a low dirt embankment off the road to provide a flanking base of fire should there be problems at the roadblock. As we watched, I decided to ask Gary about something I had noticed over the last couple of days.
“No offense, Gary, I’m not complaining about your company, but it seems like you or Mike are always hovering around me. What’s up with that?”
“You don’t know?” he asked incredulously. “We’re acting as your bodyguards. It was part of the justification used to get authorization for us to deploy with Foxtrot.”
I thought that was really funny.
“Well, forget that. Thanks for your services, but you guys have enough to worry about without worrying about me.”
After a few minutes I walked over to talk to Shirzai who was parked nearby. I looked back to make sure neither Gary nor Mike were following me. They weren’t. My message had been received.
Up until this point, I had generally taken a back seat during tactical discussions with Shirzai concerning engagements with the Taliban, letting Hank and his ODA be the military advisors since that is what an ODA is trained to do. I believed that role, along with calling in close air support, was their primary task. But now that we were at Highway 4 and almost on the doorstep of Kandahar, I knew our chance of engaging al-Qa’ida members in the next few hours was probably very good. When all was said and done, that was what Foxtrot was there to do as a field element of CIA’s Counterterrorist Center. With this in mind, through Khalil I told Shirzai that as soon as we secured the village, he needed to set up and maintain roadblocks on both sides of town. I reminded him our primary targets were members of al-Qa’ida and that his men should detain any foreigner they came across.
Word came back that the village was clear of the Taliban and we moved in. My first order of business was to check out the roadblock that Shirzai had se
t up on the western end of the village. As I walked along Highway 4, which at that stretch was just a dirt street that passed through the center of the tiny village, I saw some of Shirzai’s men getting ready to hoist the green Afghan flag on a pole that previously held a Taliban flag. I pulled out my disposable Kodak and snapped a picture. It wasn’t the flag raising at Iwo Jima, but it was still a pretty cool moment.
At the roadblock, Shirzai’s fighters already had stopped a couple of vehicles. One was an old stake-bodied truck, the other was a beat up sedan. No al-Qa’ida, just some farmers and a local passing by.
Satisfied that the roadblocks were functioning, I walked back towards the small, walled compound that had previously belonged to the Taliban. It would now serve as our command post. Near the compound I ran into Hank.
“Hey, you shouldn’t be walking around out here. It’s dangerous and we need to keep a low profile,” he said.
He was right, of course, but I needed to see for myself that the roadblocks were up and operating. Now that I had done that I could get out of sight.
“OK, I’m heading over to the compound right now.”
The former Taliban compound was relatively small, with one larger building and a few other smaller ones. A wall about 7 feet high surrounded the entire complex. We moved into the buildings and set up our communications gear, as we believed we would probably be there for a few days.
In the small building Foxtrot occupied, we found dishes with pieces of partially eaten bread and teacups half-filled, all evidence of a hasty departure. I imagined the “breakfast-interrupted” scene that must have transpired earlier that morning. Black turbaned Taliban enjoying their naan and chai when—KABOOM—they hear the first bomb explode only a couple of kilometers away. They pick up and get out of Dodge, or Takhteh-Pol as it were.
We all pitched in and searched the compound, anticipating booby-traps. Found in the basement of the main building were all kinds of ordnance, but mostly mortar and RPG rounds. We didn’t like having an arsenal right in the middle of our compound so Shirzai ordered his men to take it away to a safer place, and we watched them as they carefully carried it out the front gate.
An hour or two later, I spotted Khalil quickly striding toward me.
“An Arab has been captured at the roadblock. Come quick!”
I went out the compound gate with him and walked across the open area toward Highway 4 only a short distance away. As we approached the road, a small mob of fighters suddenly came around the corner of a building about 50 feet away, gesturing and yelling as they hurriedly moved toward us. For the first couple of seconds, I could not figure out just what I was looking at. I knew they were friendlies, but something about the scene instinctively put me on edge, and I tightened my grip on my AK-47. Then I saw the prisoner. One of the Afghans had him by the collar of his shirt and was pulling him along. He was unsecured otherwise. By the time I had spotted him, he already had seen me. Directly in front of him and in the open, I was an obvious Westerner.
As soon as our eyes met, he reached down and violently tried to yank an AK-47 from the hands of an Afghan walking beside him. At that point, my mind went into hyper-focus and things slowed down. I watched as what seemed like a slow-motion struggle ensued as the Arab continued to try to wrest control of the rifle from the Afghan. At one point, the owner’s grip slipped and the Arab grabbed the rifle again, this time by the barrel as he continued to struggle mightily to take control of it. The Afghan stepped out in front of the Arab and tried to sling him off the rifle, but the man still tugged violently at the gun. I could plainly see the determination in his face—he wanted that rifle. After two or three seconds more the Afghan squeezed off a burst of about five rounds point blank into the Arab’s body. At almost the same instant another Afghan standing behind him opened up on him as well.
Still in a hyper-focused state I could see the bullets pass out of his body front and back, popping and snapping his loose fitting clothing as they tore through him. He went down instantly and hard—like a ton of bricks, a cliché that described his fall perfectly—and I knew he was dead before he hit the ground. The group of Afghans swirled in excitement around his limp body like an ocean tide around a stranded fish on the beach. My perception clicked back into normal speed.
I had zero emotion about the shooting. This surprised me. Had I discovered some heretofore hidden sociopathic trait about myself? I really thought I should have felt something. But I didn’t. I was not excited, scared, happy, angry—nothing. I didn’t feel any hatred toward the now dead man, even though I was certain he would have killed me if he could have. On the other hand, I didn’t feel any sympathy for him either. We had both come to Afghanistan knowing it was dangerous and that we might die. Today he died, tomorrow I might. And that was it.
I turned to Khalil, “Looks like we won’t be talking to him.”
Khalil nodded and I told him to have the men search the body for any documents and bring them to me.
Khalil relayed my instructions to the fighters and we walked back toward the compound.
“Did you see him try to grab that grenade?” Khalil asked.
“What grenade?”
“You didn’t see? He was fighting trying to take a grenade from our guy.”
“I saw him trying to take away the rifle, but there wasn’t any grenade,” I said.
“No. He was after a grenade.”
I was shocked that Khalil was saying he had not seen the struggle for the rifle, and instead was saying the fight was over a grenade, which I knew was not the case. How could both of us witness the same event from the same location and have seen things so differently? It was a mystery, and neither of us would give ground on what we believed we had seen.
I had scarcely returned to the compound following the shooting when a wounded fighter was brought in. He was gut shot with two AK-47 rounds through his abdomen and was groaning in pain. He had been shot at one of the roadblocks when two al-Qa’ida members decided to fight it out. They both were dead. We were told the wounded Afghan was Shirzai’s first cousin and the two were very close. He was carried into the building Shirzai was using for his headquarters, and the medics went to work on him. They were not hopeful for his survival.
A little while later, I was standing in the compound near the front gate when an Afghan civilian appeared. He was the same man that was waving to us earlier as we drove toward Takhteh-Pol. He had a little girl in his arms, his daughter. She was about seven or eight years old. She was wounded from one of the bombs that had been dropped on the Taliban defensive line. The wound was a deep facial cut, so deep you could see the light color of her cheekbone peeking through the gash in her caramel skin. She was not crying but was curled tightly into her father’s arms, terrified.
We carried her into the building where the medics were still working on Shirzai’s cousin. One of them started to tend to her wound and she began to scream.
I went outside and sat down on the front steps to make some notes about what I would need to include in the next situation report. As I wrote, the little girl’s screams and the groans of the wounded Afghan fighter mixed together into a discordant duet of pain, the effect of which was to obliterate any concern of mine that I was an unfeeling sociopath.
The little girl’s wound was stitched up but the medic was not happy with his handiwork. Concerned that the wound would leave a nasty scar, we gave the father some money and arranged for a hired car to take them to Spin Boldak. There was a hospital there with doctors who could maybe improve on the medic’s stitching technique.
The father did not appear to be angry with us, which amazed me. I would have been angry if it were my daughter that had been injured by our bombs and probably scarred for life. But no, he seemed okay about it, not one glimmer of hatred in his eyes, at least none that I could detect. He seemed appreciative of the medical help and money we gave him, and he picked up the little girl and carried her away.
Shortly after dark, Shirzai’s fighters brought in tw
o Arabs captured at the roadblock on the east side of Takhteh-Pol. The fighters had learned their lessons, and the prisoners were blindfolded and bound in chains. Inside the car that one of the Arabs, a Yemeni, was driving, a trunk full of SA-7 anti-aircraft missiles was discovered.
I watched as the prisoners were silently searched by Gary, Mike, and a couple members of the ODA, and then were placed in special plastic handcuffs and put under Afghan guard in separate mud buildings. None of Shirzai’s fighters spoke Arabic and of the Americans, only Mike knew the language but not at a level needed to conduct an interrogation.
When he was captured, the Yemeni had in his possession a small walkie-talkie radio, and we listened to it as someone speaking in Arabic pleadingly called for him like a lost puppy. It was clear the caller was worried about him and continued to call for him over the next couple of days. The radio signal was very clear and strong as if the caller was close by, which seemed unlikely, and we suspected al-Qa’ida had set up radio repeaters along Highway 4 to keep in touch with its members traveling between Kandahar and Pakistan.
If we were to have any hope of obtaining any useful information from the two prisoners, they needed to undergo a professional interrogation in Arabic as soon as possible. Hank and I conferred and he put in a request to 5th Special Forces Group to have an Arabic-speaking interrogator flown down to Takhteh-Pol. It took a couple of days but they sent us one. Although Mark and I looked on, the Army guys were in charge of the interrogation.
The Yemeni was of most interest to us given his carload of surface-to-air missiles. During the interrogation, he claimed to have no association with al-Qa’ida, and said he worked in Afghanistan for a particular NGO, which we knew al-Qa’ida used as a cover in Afghanistan. The prisoner had no explanation for driving toward Kandahar in a car loaded with surface-to-air missiles.
Foxtrot in Kandahar Page 12
