7

Odysseus Redux

Sing now of the wooden horse, fashioned by Epeius with Athena’s aid and brought by artful Odysseus to the city’s gate, its belly filled with warriors who would lay Troy low.

—Homer, Odyssey

All warfare is based on deception.

—Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In mid-November, with Mountain Resolve in full swing, B-Team called us to Asmar, a small town an hour north of Abad, for a Direct Action planning session with Major Hewitt. The code name for the commo and logistics headquarters there, Castle, gave things a medieval feel despite the presence of twenty-first-century technology. When we arrived, we learned that a former Taliban commander, now a local thug, was thought to be hiding weapons in his compound at Sangar, a nearby village. Command wanted to secure the cache and its owner through a Sensitive Site Exploitation, or SSE—military jargon for a weapons raid. Leaving our Mohawks and AMF on bridge detail, we set about planning the operation.

We first sent a four-man recon team—Scott with an interpreter, an Afghan soldier, and the informant, all in Afghan garb—to drive by the village and identify the compound in question. Scott, with his thick, dark beard, could pass for an Afghan from a distance. He was perfect for this type of recon. When they reported back, it became evident that securing the weapons was going to be a delicate affair.

In this part of Kunar, there were tons of small valleys, rivers, and trails that ran from the mountains bordering Pakistan to the Kunar River. These were the escape routes that our manning of the bridges was designed to cut off. Sangar was nestled between the Kunar River to the west, an east-west tributary that bordered it to the north, and a dirt road that bordered it to the south. It was only twelve miles from Pakistan, with a clean river bed and dirt road that ran all the way to the border. A likely transit point for insurgent arms.

The village contained about thirty compounds. The largest one, our target’s sanctuary, was set far back from the entry road, close to the natural perimeter of the Kunar River tributary. The river wasn’t the site’s only protection. The compound was encircled by high mud walls that gave it a fortresslike appearance. Our target, it seemed, had a castle, too.

Guarding the compound were two sentries cradling AK-47s, one at the compound itself and another on a wall next to the road. They could indicate a larger force in the compound or around the area. The sentry on the wall next to the road had me concerned. “He’s got a clear sight line down the road,” Scott said. “Two-fifty, maybe three hundred yards, until it bends on the way back to Asmar. That’s the closest we’re going to get before being spotted.”

The layout put us at a disadvantage. Any military vehicle traversing that three hundred yards of open ground would alert the sentries and give them plenty of time to move or hide the weapons—or, worse, prepare us an automatic fire welcoming party. As was common in this region, the terrain was too steep to permit a flanking operation: that too would be detected before we could reach the target. We considered a night raid, but even then we might be spotted approaching the target. In addition, there was no moon that night, and our Afghans, who would support us, had no night-vision equipment. The thought of blind, adrenalin-filled trainees running around a dark village didn’t make me optimistic about our chances of success. So it looked like the element of surprise was off the table.

That deficiency was not to be taken lightly. Ever since British colonel J. F. C. Fuller had laid out his “principles of war” just after World War I, students of military science had accepted surprise as a tactical plus.1 In the U.S. Army Field Manual, it’s one of the nine basic principles of effective operations. Here in Kunar, we were constantly reminded of its importance, because our fugitive enemy relied on it so extensively. That had been clear in the November 1 ambush of the QRF, and it was clear every time a patrol hit an IED. Surprise was the very lifeblood of the insurgents’ toolkit. For this SSE, I wanted to turn the tables on them, but given Scott’s recon report, that seemed unlikely.

But maybe not impossible. Sitting with the team around a planning table just outside of Asmar, I suddenly remembered Homer, and I had an idea.

“What about the Trojan horse routine?” I asked.

I was referring to the most celebrated example of surprise in the Western military tradition: the “wooden horse” stratagem used to vanquish Troy. Unable to take the city after a ten-year siege, the Greek army pretends to sail away during the night, leaving behind a huge wooden horse. The Trojans, delighted at the “gift,” drag it into the city. That night, out of its side climb Greek warriors led by wily Odysseus, the inventor of the ruse. They overcome the Trojans and burn the city to the ground.

Every student of warfare knows the wooden horse story, so I knew it wouldn’t take much explaining to the team.

“Go on,” Scott said.

“They’ll be on the alert for a Humvee or anything else looking like it’s coalition. But what if we used a jingle truck, put our guys inside, and drove it up to the compound? Like any other delivery truck. They might figure out something was up, but by then ten or twelve of us, jumping out, could easily take down the guards, and we’d be in.”

Jingle trucks were civilian vehicles that were heavily decorated with paintings, fabric, chains, and other metal adornments. The cost of the decoration gave their owners prestige, and the jingling of the hanging metal gave them a name.2 There were jingle trucks in every village in Afghanistan, and we were on good enough terms with some of the local tradesmen that locating a suitable one wouldn’t be a problem. In fact, during that planning session, one was parked in the street right in front of us, unloading supplies from Asadabad.

Working out the details was less complicated than fashioning a hollow horse.

First, we commandeered the truck. Acquiring local resources in this way has been a military prerogative for centuries, and it can be accomplished with greater or lesser finesse. The nadir of finesse would be, for example, General Sherman’s devastation of the Southland during his March to the Sea. Such a snatch-and-grab policy would have backfired for us in Kunar. Any Afghan whose goods we appropriated needed to feel that we had engaged in a fair market transaction, not armed robbery with an M4. In borrowing the jingle truck, therefore, we paid its owner triple what he would have made driving it back and forth from Asadabad. He was more than happy. (We didn’t dwell on the possibility that it might get shot to hell during the SSE.)

The truck was an old Russian supply truck, open-top design, so we had to rig a canvas tarp over it to conceal our “Greeks.” On Scott’s suggestion, I decided the concealed attack force would be composed of Afghans rather than the ODA. Scott had been increasingly pleased with their willingness to take responsibility, so I figured this was as good a time as any to have them demonstrate their skills. After adding in the Afghan militia from ODA 934, we had twelve Afghan soldiers ready to go. In keeping with the mantra of “letting the Afghans do it,” we would stay in reserve; the Afghans would be the face of the operation.

For it to succeed, they would have to rehearse, so we spent that afternoon going over the assault details. Beneath the tarp they would be unable to see where they were, so we agreed on a two-tap signal from the driver to let them know the truck had gotten as close to the compound as the narrow village streets would allow. They would then jump out, breach the gate, and secure the area. Scott, Randy, and Dave had been drilling them on the fine points of search and secure for weeks, so they knew the proper procedures for threat assessment and room clearance, and the difference between securing a suspect, beating the crap out of him, and just shooting everyone in the compound because they might be the enemy.

To many Afghans in 2003, the idea of Rules of Engagement was an abstraction. In perpetual conflict for generations, they had evolved their own, pragmatic version of ROE: when you have the upper hand, take it. That wouldn’t do when we were storming a compound that might contain many more innocents than insurgents. To avoid civilian casualties, we had to teach them new rules, such as “Don’t shoot immediately when you go in a door” and “Before questioning, be sure all rooms are cleared.”

Using a compound next to the AMF headquarters in Asmar as a practice site, we ran the Afghans through multiple trials of this “secure the objective” phase, until we were satisfied they could follow the ROE with minimum risk to themselves and to bystanders. The B-Team approved immediately and they sent the plan to Bagram for approval by the Combined Joint Special Operations Task Force (CJSOTF). As expected, CJSOTF approved the CONOP as we laid it out.

Having received the CJSOTF green light, we settled in for the night, the gurgling of the Kunar River easing us to sleep. For a few drifting moments I almost forgot we were at war.

Early on November 13 we put the SSE into gear, rolling a three-vehicle convoy north out of Asmar. In a lead Toyota were Jimi dressed as an Afghan and one AMF soldier. About a hundred yards behind came the motorized “horse,” driven by our interpreter Mashal, with Scott riding shotgun. Taking up the rear at an additional three-hundred-yard distance was an armored Humvee, with Roger at the wheel, me next to him, Dave on the .50-cal, and two more of our guys riding inside. We would provide command and control, and the .50-cal would provide rear security and overwatch the SSE. From the turret, Dave would be the first to see the compound as we approached.

The gaps between the vehicles weren’t arbitrary. The idea was that the Toyota would stop on higher ground about fifty yards past the target. It would provide security on the east-west road past the compound to prevent leakers from leaving the target area and to prevent anyone coming from the east to assist the target. I stayed way behind in the Humvee because we didn’t want to be seen until our “Greeks” were overpowering the guards. If all went well, by the time the sentries spotted us, the guys in the jingle truck would already be in control.

That was pretty much how it went down.

As the Humvee rounded the bend, I could see, three football fields ahead, that most of the Afghans were already on a fast clip toward the compound; the last two were just then jumping out of the truck that had stopped on the main road. Roger floored it: no need for holding back now that the game was on. In seconds we squealed to a stop behind the jingle truck, jumped out, and raced after our Afghan buddies.

It was quite a race. The Afghans may not have been through Special Forces training, but they were a fit crew, and they had the advantage over us of having grown up at this altitude. It was no piece of cake catching up to them. When we did so a couple of minutes later, we instantly appreciated the value of a rigorous rehearsal: they had secured the compound with impressive speed. All rooms had been cleared, and they had under close watch the compound owner as well as a sentry who, as the jingle truck approached, had been so startled that he fell off the wall. A second sentry, the owner’s son, had been asleep in the compound.

Our trainees greeted our arrival with broad smiles. So far so good: guards disabled, rooms cleared, and the suspect ready for questioning. He was an old man who didn’t look very much like a Taliban commander; but it would be reckless to take such appearances at face value. He was standing in the inner courtyard of the compound, his wife and two teenage sons behind him, with an expression that I couldn’t decipher. Confusion? Outrage? Apprehension?

SSEs are a tricky dance at this point, because you’ve entered another man’s house without an invitation, and you’re about to subject him to questioning in front of his family. In a culture as patriarchal and shame averse as this one, that’s risky business. If he turns out to be innocent of any wrongdoing, you’ve insulted him for no reason and opened the door to retaliation from his kinsmen. Even if he’s guilty of something you don’t like, such as abetting HIG or the Taliban, you might earn his neighbors’ enmity by taking him away. In the battle for the human terrain, the cost could be high.

Another complication was that, as we had learned in the October “Gestapo” incident, informants lied. For all we knew, the sentry might have been securing his family compound from a Taliban threat in the next village and we could be acting on a tip that was meant to hurt our allies. We had it on decent intel that this compound and this village elder were in some fashion in league with our enemies. But we had acted on “good” intel before and discovered too late that it was a trick to get revenge on a hated neighbor. I was still smarting over that early mistake as, talking through our interpreter Mashal, I asked the old man where he was hiding his weapons.

Predictably, he denied knowing anything about weapons. That, of course, was ridiculous, as there wasn’t a house anywhere in Afghanistan that didn’t have a rifle or pistol or old Soviet grenade stashed somewhere. I pursued the matter for a moment, the old man responding in wide-eyed protest. I was getting nowhere when a kid about ten, who had been watching from the sidelines, walked up to Mashal and murmured something to him. Mashal turned to me.

“In the creek,” he said. “On the far side of the house.”

Why the kid volunteered that information I don’t know. Maybe his father had a beef with the old man. Maybe his brother had been tortured by the Taliban. Maybe he looked at our triumphant Afghans and thought, That’s for me. Of course he also might have been lying, trying to throw us off the scent. Whatever the reason, it was worth following up on his tip. We gave him a Power Bar—candy diplomacy—and he ran off down the street grinning.

The creek he had mentioned was a stone’s throw away. With a metal detector we swept the near bank, then the far one, with no hits. I was beginning to favor the “lying child” explanation when I noticed a large boulder in the middle of the stream. On a hunch I walked over to it. I pointed the flashlight attached to my weapon into a recess that the water had carved in it long ago. There, stacked snugly in a hole protected from the stream, was a neat pile of 107mm rockets, 82mm mortars, and recoilless rifle rounds.

Finding the cache was a fluke, but our Afghan soldiers looked at me as if I had superhuman powers of detection. I did nothing to disabuse them of the delusion.

We removed the weapons from their lair, prepped and padded them for transport, and loaded them into the Toyota for shipment back to Asmar—the first stop on their eventual destination, Asadabad. Then I returned to the old man’s compound to resume questioning. If the cache had contained just small arms, I might have let the whole thing go, but storing ordnance of this heft went beyond the traditional frontier norm of keeping a musket over your door against bandits and wolves. As we sat down to tea together, I had Mashal ask him why he had hidden the weapons and if he was my enemy.

Certainly not, I was assured. He had a thousand reasons for holding on to those old Russian arms. I listened politely but halfheartedly, knowing that for all his talk the real reasons were the ancient ones: arms were a protection against enemies—foreign and domestic—and they were also collateral in a resource-poor country. Indians stored silver bracelets, crash-averse Americans stored gold bars, Afghans stored guns. There was no particular reason to suppose that this man, just because he had concealed twenty-year-old ordnance, harbored ill will toward the coalition. And he said as much.

“No, no Taliban. I am a friend to the Americans.”

OK, I thought. Prove it.

“You know,” I had Mashal tell him, “that I could take you to Bagram.” He stiffened at the word. “But when you say you are not my enemy, I want to believe you. I am not your enemy, either. I want to help your village and I would like your help. I would like to know about the men who are our enemies. Your enemies and mine. There are Taliban in this area. Where are they?”

He didn’t know exactly. But he did share some information about insurgent activity in the Shigal Valley highlands west of Asmar. This wasn’t breaking news, since the whole thrust of Mountain Resolve was to target that area. But the fact that he was willing to share it spoke well of his intentions. It let me know he was no friend to that area’s warlord, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. He might not have been as committed to destroying the insurgency as our Afghan soldiers were, but it didn’t seem likely that he was a threat. I decided to leave him alone.

When he learned that he would not be taken away from his family, he thanked me profusely and gratefully accepted the Power Bars that we gave to his kids. Then, almost ceremoniously, I handed him an AK-47 and three magazines that we had taken in the search of his compound and let him know that, as he was our ally, we didn’t want to leave his family unarmed. In the rough neighborhood of Kunar, we respected his right to protect them against our common enemy. As he took the weapon, I could see in his eyes that this simple demonstration of trust had gone some way to offsetting the disappointment he must have felt at having the larger arms confiscated.

In returning the AK-47, I was applying a lesson I had learned from my experience in Kosovo. In a country of perennial conflict, when you completely disarm a villager, you are inviting his enemies to take advantage of his vulnerability. Faced with that threat, he may feel forced to partner up with unsavory characters—like a Taliban insurgency—to protect himself and his family. When everyone has at least the equivalent of that musket over the door, it creates a certain sense of balance that tends to keep local troublemakers at bay.

As we drove away, the arms cache in tow, my guys were as thankful as I was at how this particular raid had panned out.

“This feels a lot better than the last time,” Roger said.

I couldn’t have agreed more. Drawing on the element of surprise to mount a simple but effective raid, we had ended the SSE with proud trainees, a solid arms cache, and a village that saw the Americans as judicious and merciful. I was glad we had followed Odysseus’s lead. And that, unlike the Greeks, we had managed to take our objective without burning it down.

The completion of the SSE almost closed our involvement with Mountain Resolve. We returned the old man’s arms cache to Asadabad, where it would be either destroyed, requisitioned back into coalition magazines, or distributed to friendly Afghan forces. Then we returned to the Kunar River crossings, where we divided our time between bridge detail, supervising AMF on bridge detail, and relaxing in the Border Brigade building. HBO’s The Sopranos was a monster hit at that time, which meant that when we weren’t keeping an eye out for our HVTs, we were watching Tony Soprano wreak havoc on his.

In the two plus weeks we had been away from Asadabad, combat was starting to look a little boring. The 10th Mountain guys were trudging up and down forty-five-degree inclines, but so far the bad guys they were supposed to be driving in our direction hadn’t made an appearance. I kept my opinion to myself, but I couldn’t say I was surprised. I was getting used to seeing the enemy as perpetual no-shows.

But that didn’t last. On the morning of November 22, while patrolling the road along the river, the Humvee Randy was driving narrowly missed an IED, in an explosion that hurled rocks into the turret and nearly deafened Ben, who was manning the gun. If the bomb had gone off any closer, it might have disabled two-thirds of our MEDCAP team. Randy treated Ben on the spot and he returned to Asadabad, where he was diagnosed with a ruptured eardrum—an injury that got him a Purple Heart.

The following day, a Toyota driven by Green Berets from ODA 934, en route to link up with us, was rocked by another IED, severely injuring two soldiers and their interpreter. We heard the explosion, drove to their aid, and joined a firefight in progress, as the other ODA peppered the hills to the west, where they had seen some of the attackers disappear. They followed in pursuit and were understandably pissed when the search came up dry.

The two attacks occurred two and a half weeks into Mountain Resolve—just about the time that a 10th Mountain company commander was claiming on a DOD website, “We’re showing the ACMs that there is no place that they can hide because we’ll find them.”3 I don’t know what map he was looking at, but apparently it didn’t include Naray.