WELCOME BACK
If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.
—SUN TZU
It was three a.m., but Juma Khan and the other ANA soldiers, about thirty of them, were too pent up to sleep. They boiled chai and wandered around the firebase, waiting. The word of our arrival had spread rapidly among the Afghans after I had called the base to tell them we were on our way. The “long beards” of 1st Battalion, 3rd Special Forces Group—their rora, their brothers—were coming again to fight by their side.
Ours wasn’t the typical relationship. As had been made clear to us on numerous occasions, Afghan soldiers historically distrusted ISAF and other coalition forces because of their perceived lack of commitment and capricious attitude toward the country and its people. We were inherently different. We ate, slept, lived, and breathed with the Afghan people as if we had done so all our lives, immersing ourselves in their language and culture. It was not a perfect fit, but we tried in earnest to show respect and still project the power of the United States. Respect goes a long, long way in Afghanistan; you have to give it to get it. The ANA regularly expressed their respect for us because we did our best to abide by their customs and culture. This was reassuring, considering what was regularly being projected in the media. We were, after all, at war. My team and our ANA-partnered units worked cohesively on how to operate jointly among the Afghan people against the Taliban. Fighting the foreigners such as Al Qaeda was a different story. The Afghans understood that it was better to help the Americans fight than to get between them and their enemies.
It was comforting to see the glow of the firebase as we turned onto the paved road that led to its gates. It sat on a plateau and had a commanding view of the northern half of the city. As we got closer, I could see shadowy figures in the high concrete guard towers set at intervals along the stone walls, providing welcome additional protection from the rockets and mortars that occasionally fell. It took a few minutes for our eyes to adjust to the camp’s low-level lighting as we traveled through the front gate. The Afghan guards, trained by civilian contractors, looked professional and were well equipped. I felt safer here than at Kandahar Airfield. This was like coming home.
The ANA surrounded our trucks as we rolled into the motor pool, patting the hoods, clapping, and dancing, their dark faces lit by brilliant smiles. This is what it will look like when we kill bin Laden, I thought. The Afghans reached into the truck and pulled me out, into their giddy midst. Crap, I’m gonna have to dance, I thought. I hated doing stuff like that—I would hear about it for days afterward from my teammates. And someone always had a camera. My e-mail would be clogged with images of my face pasted on the bodies of belly dancers, break-dancers, and other imaginative surrogates.
The dancing led to chai, and soon everyone on the team had a scalding cup in his fist. From the center of the crowd, I saw Juma Khan.
Juma Khan had enlisted as a private in the ANA and worked his way quickly up through the ranks. Unfortunately, he was illiterate like most Afghans and couldn’t be promoted higher than sergeant, no matter how brave he was in battle. He smelled like a campfire and wore a white T-shirt and loose-fitting pants. Barely five feet tall and one hundred pounds soaking wet, he always led his countrymen from the front. I looked down and noticed his pair of worn, white Nike sneakers, a gift from when I’d first met him. He refused to replace them.
In 2004, he had been left for dead after his militia unit was ambushed and an improvised explosive device (IED) sheared off parts of his face and mangled his legs. An American Special Forces medic found him next to the flaming remains of his Hilux and kept him alive. After numerous surgeries to repair his face and months of physical therapy he returned to the firebase. I thought of him personally and professionally as a miniature soldier with a Goliath-sized heart.
The family reunion gradually wound down, and we all turned in. After a few hours of sleep and breakfast, the teams shuffled into the firebase’s version of the TOC for the handoff brief.
Each firebase had its own tactical operations center, which functioned just as the TOC in Kandahar did, but the similarities ended there. If Kandahar was a starship, then the firebase TOC was like a wooden glider.
Rather than dozens of people buzzing about the latest and greatest in automation, projectors, screens, lights, and computers, the firebase had two computers sitting on mismatched desks along one wall. The radios were neatly organized and positioned along the opposite wall for quick removal or destruction in the unlikely event we got overrun. A projector—one of only a few on the base—sat on a table in the middle of the room, pointed toward a painted wall that served as the screen. A hodgepodge of chairs and tables of various shapes and sizes served as a conference area. Locally made mats and threadbare rugs in ornate reds and greens kept the dust and dirt down. It wasn’t uncommon to see an occasional mouse or rat run across the rough-hewn log rafters.
Members of both teams—the outgoing and the incoming—filed in and quickly claimed all the chairs. It paid to show up early because these briefings could take a long time and late arrivals had to stand. Critical for maintaining continuity, the handoff brief was basically show and tell. The outgoing team went over everything they knew about the area, the enemy, and the Afghan Army units assigned to the firebase.
A good handoff can make or break the first few weeks of a deployment. This one started with a thud. Just as Shef took the floor, the power went out and the room went dark.
“Well, some things haven’t changed,” someone cracked.
The base was on the Kandahar city power grid, so we, like the locals, were at the mercy of the ancient Soviet generators and years of neglect and incompetent upkeep. While we waited for the generators to kick back on, I wondered if the people were grateful for the limited power they did get. It was more than they got under the Taliban.
Compared to the other five bases, ours was sprawling and spacious. Once the Taliban’s presidential palace, construction on it had begun around 1996, the year the Taliban took control in Afghanistan, and took about three years to complete. Osama bin Laden had built the compound for Taliban leader Mullah Omar, and Kandahar residents still call it Omar’s compound. Special operations forces took it over in 2001 and called it Firebase Gecko, after the lizards that patrolled the walls.
It had a double-wide fireplace in the cafeteria, three catfish that lived in a two-tier fountain, and a swimming pool for when it got too hot. We had room to build a looping five-mile dirt track around the perimeter and even a shooting range for us and the Afghan soldiers.
Our backup generators finally kicked on and the power returned. Shef started the brief by introducing Ron, the Air Force joint tactical air controller (JTAC), who nodded at us. He was a big stick in the room, with the power to save our asses by calling in air strikes. In his early twenties, he seemed quiet and reserved behind his thick, dark beard. I made a mental note to sit down with him after the meeting.
The brief rolled on as Shef went over key leaders, targets, and areas in and around Kandahar. Then he started to talk about Operation Kaika. Three months earlier, Shef had led his team and a company of ANA soldiers into the Panjwayi district south of the city. The team had received reports that the Taliban were forcing Afghans out of the villages in the district. Besides being the Taliban’s hometown, the district was Kandahar Province’s breadbasket because it encompassed the wide Arghandab River valley, which holds the primary water reserve and provides the most fertile and sustainable crops in southeastern Afghanistan. Pomegranate groves, corn, wheat, and marijuana fields, and grape vineyards mingled with the country’s biggest cash crop, poppy. At harvesttime, the valley is filled with endless fields of flowers. The poppy sap, mixed and processed into heroin, fuels the Taliban insurgency, and the district supplies insurgents and Afghan government officials alike with cash. Afghanistan’s main highway and numerous secondary roads flow through the province, creating a network of routes between Afghanistan and Pakistan. During my last rotation, my team could move through Pashmul, a Panjwayi subdistrict, without incident. There hadn’t been much enemy activity there. But when Shef pushed into the district hoping to capture Taliban leaders, his team was quickly surrounded and had to fight its way out.
Shef lost two Americans and three Afghan interpreters during the mission. My guys stared at the floor as he described it. No one looked up. No one wanted to ask questions for fear of sharpshooting the operation or playing armchair general. It was a clearly understood, unwritten rule.
The brief broke a few hours later. Each of the teams’ specialists met separately to review their piece of the base. The weapons specialists checked on the ammunition. I followed Shef out. I wanted to know more about Panjwayi and Operation Kaika. How had a rotation, which on paper went well, gone to shit over one operation?
Shef seemed worn down as we walked across the hall to his room. His bushy beard and tanned skin hid it, but you could tell that the rotation had aged him. As we walked, he said most of their missions had gone extraordinarily well. His voice sounded confident, but his tired, bloodshot eyes told the real story. I had to know what happened in Panjwayi.
“How did they move into the area under our noses with such force?” I asked him, spreading several large maps out on the table in his room. “I need to know more about Kaika. It looks like they might be planning something in there, and I need ground truth.”
He paused for a second and looked me in the eye. The upbeat Shef I had known for almost ten years was gone. “Stay out of there unless you go in with an army, because you’re going to get hurt. I’ve been reporting the buildup of large numbers of Taliban in there and no one’s listening,” he said flatly.
Operation Kaika had started off well. Shef and his men moved on foot to the compound of a suspected Taliban commander and took it. But when night fell, a large Taliban force attacked from three sides with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades. Shef said he had Taliban fighters close to breaking through, but a steady stream of machine-gun fire and mortars beat them back. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt, but the ferocity of the assault surprised Shef and he called ISAF for a quick reaction force (QRF). The QRF launched but was not given the authority to cross a critical bridge leading into the contested area. The help never came.
“The ISAF units got to the Arghandab River but would not cross,” he told me. Even saying the words seemed to put a bad taste in his mouth.
Time, I thought. Time is the most valuable asset you have on the battlefield, and it can never be replaced. He lost critical time waiting for that unit. Surrounded in the valley, with no help on the way, they tried to counterattack. Shef’s team located a compound the Taliban used to stage the attack. Master Sergeant Thomas Maholic volunteered to clear out the compound with twenty Afghan soldiers.
As they moved to attack the compound, Maholic split his men into two groups and dispatched Staff Sergeant Matthew Binney, a medical sergeant, to set up a machine gun to cover the attack. Binney took an ETT and nine Afghan soldiers with him and set up the machine gun. Maholic quickly cleared the compound, but a large Taliban group counterattacked and surrounded both his and Binney’s groups. Based on intercepted radio transmissions, Shef learned the Taliban’s intent was to capture the Americans alive.
Every time Binney and his team came over the radio, Shef could hear intense fire. Finally, Binney’s team moved through a hole in a mud wall and stumbled into a group of Taliban fighters. Binney and his men reacted first with furious fire and hand grenades at close range. Shef said the Taliban got close enough to Maholic and Binney’s men to yell insults and threats.
Exposing himself to throw a grenade, Binney was hit in the back of the head. Confused and temporarily blinded and deaf, he groped for his weapon and bearings. When he regained his wits, he organized an attack on a Taliban position, but Staff Sergeant Joseph Fuerst, the ETT, was hit in his left leg by a rocket-propelled grenade. Binney tried to drag the trainer to safety and was also hit. The bullets shattered his left shoulder and upper arm.
Shef had his own problems, as the Taliban began a wave of attacks on his compound. Between assaults, Shef said he moved from position to position, rallying his men and monitoring Maholic and Binney’s situation at the same time. His truck was covered in spent machine-gun shells. I tried to put myself in his shoes.
When he heard about the wounded, medic Brenden O’Connor volunteered to lead a group to reinforce Maholic and treat Binney and Fuerst. O’Connor fought his way out of the patrol base with eight Afghan soldiers, an interpreter, and another Special Forces soldier. He led the small relief force along a wall that provided cover from Taliban machine-gun fire and rocket-propelled grenades. When he got to the end of the wall, O’Connor realized that the wounded soldiers were two hundred feet away across an open field covered by three Taliban machine guns.
Apache gunships had come in and were flying overhead. Shef said he tried to get them to cover O’Connor, but the Taliban fighters were dug into thick-walled mud huts. Bullets were tearing into the dirt and shredding the grass.
O’Connor realized that he couldn’t get low enough to avoid enemy fire because of his body armor. He quickly took it off and tossed it aside. Inch by inch, he made his way across the fire zone, somehow managing to stay a fraction lower than the hundreds of Taliban machine-gun rounds. He told Shef afterward that he couldn’t help thinking all the way across how the instructors at the Special Forces medics course would have roasted him if they were watching. They always hammered into their students not to go after the wounded because their skills were too valuable to risk them getting injured. Let the wounded come to you.
Fuerst had already lost a lot of blood from the gaping wound to his left leg by the time O’Connor reached him and Binney. O’Connor got a tourniquet on the leg immediately, but there wasn’t time to do much else. The Taliban were closing in. The medic picked Fuerst up and hauled him to a pump house on the edge of the orchard. He stashed the ETT in a shaded area and scouted out the pump house, hoping enemy fighters weren’t waiting. He climbed over the six-foot wall into a small dirt lane, where he found some Afghan soldiers and their advisor. O’Connor went back over the wall and brought Binney, and then Fuerst and two Afghan soldiers, back to the other side.
Once everyone was in the lane, O’Connor started to tend to the wounded seriously. Breaking out his medical gear, he discovered that the 120-degree heat had melted the glue that kept his IVs together. His gear was a mess, but he did his best to help Fuerst and Binney.
Throughout, Maholic had rallied the defenders in his nearby compound, ignoring the withering fire as he raced from position to position, and inspiring them to fight harder against the relentless waves of Taliban fighters barraging them with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades.
Virtually surrounded, Maholic spotted a Taliban fighter moving down an alley near the compound. As he exposed himself to shoot the fighter, Maholic was mortally wounded. Galvanized by the master sergeant’s example, the Afghan Army soldiers rallied and beat back the Taliban fighters.
After nightfall, O’Connor led the relief force back to Maholic’s compound. When he got there, he found out that Maholic was dead, and he immediately took over the defense of the position.
“They needed that leadership. Up until that point, they were in disarray, just trying to hide and survive,” Shef said. “When he showed back up with the wounded, he provided that. O’Connor provided that leadership that was needed.”
They evacuated the wounded by helicopter as Shef called in air strikes. Fuerst ultimately died from his injuries.
Shef’s team had changed the base’s name a month before we got there. It was now called Firebase Maholic.
After telling me the story, Shef needed a break. I could see that he was still fighting the battle in his mind. There was a lot I needed to digest. We agreed to meet later, and I went to check on the team and supply situation.
I couldn’t shake Shef’s story. For starters, the battle told me two things: the Taliban had good advisors, and I probably couldn’t plan on using the ISAF, the NATO units that now owned southern Afghanistan, in a pinch.
The handoff took several days. On the third day, we focused on the ANA company at the base. Reconnecting with them was an important part of the process because we would soon be fighting side by side. Standing in formation in the middle of our dusty firebase, wearing old green camouflage U.S. Army uniforms, the Afghan soldiers looked like a ragged bunch. But the excitement of our arrival hadn’t worn off. “Positive motivation can go a long way on the battlefield,” I told Bill. He just laughed. Always the pessimist, he spat, “Wait and see how they do under the noon sun when they’re tired and thirsty.”
It was hot, really hot, even for August, but the Afghans performed remarkably well in the first drill. It started with an ambush of a disabled ANA truck. The Afghans had to recover the truck and then attack a compound where enemy fighters were hiding. As they raced to the compound and quickly cleared the rooms of imaginary fighters, my team followed close behind, taking notes. The Afghan soldiers knew what to do and moved with confidence. It impressed me and meant they were one small step closer to working us out of a job, an advisor’s ultimate goal.
Overall, I liked what I saw. Bill, on the other hand, had a list of corrections.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day,” I told him.
He let out a skeptical laugh and shook his head. “This sure isn’t how they started either,” he noted, rounding up the Afghans and sending them through again.
During the exercise, I noticed that Ron, the JTAC, had come out to watch. I took the chance to introduce myself again. We talked about the last couple of months and operations with Shef’s team, and he wasn’t afraid to point out shortcomings such as problems with ISAF support structure. That was the type of candor every commander needs to hear from his men. I liked him immediately.
As the sun set, Bill and I sat outside with cups of strong coffee. The cloudless sky was bright with sparkling stars. With no industrial pollution or competing light sources, looking at the stars in Afghanistan is awesome, but the spectacle was lost on us. Our minds were still foggy from the long trip over and the struggle to get acclimated to the hot weather and altitude. I was exhausted and knew I would stay that way until I boarded the plane to come home.
“You know, Bill, Afghanistan looks like Texas,” I said, poking fun at his home state.
Before Bill could respond, we heard the heavy whistling of the first rocket and threw ourselves to the dirt. Willing myself as flat as possible, I heard the rocket hit in a flash that looked like hundreds of sparklers. Red-hot shrapnel shot out across the tarmac. The second rocket landed just outside the compound’s walls.
Soviet-made 107-mm rockets. The Soviets brought in countless numbers of these lightweight, three-foot mini-missiles during the decade-long war in the 1980s. Now they were buried or hidden in caves all over the country; the insurgents fired them using timers and wooden launchers from the backs of trucks or straight off the ground. The wooden launchers are crude, just wedges of wood cut to different angles to provide optimum trajectories. But they work.
After a few minutes, someone hollered, “All clear.” Dust and the heavy smell of explosives hung in the air.
Bill and I went to the TOC to see if anyone had been injured. Bill got a head count. We were short one person—Steve, our junior medic. His room sat near the tarmac where the rocket hit. My heart began to pound. Had he been on the tarmac? If so, why was he out there? Had shrapnel pierced the sandbags around his hut or penetrated his room?
We sprinted through the narrow, mud-walled hallways toward Steve’s quarters. His door was shut, and there was no answer when we pounded on it. We shoved it open to find him lying on his bed, peacefully asleep. He was wearing earplugs and didn’t even flinch when the door burst in.
Steve was our newest team member. He had arrived a few months before the deployment and breezed into our team room at Fort Bragg with bleached white hair and the dark tan of a surfer. He chain-smoked cigarettes and looked like a scrawny version of the Marlboro man compared to the other team members. Normally, they would have considered his laid-back demeanor and easygoing attitude a sign of weakness. But the unspoken rule on a team is never make the medics angry, ever. Unlike the ranks in most other sectors of the military, those working in the medical field can personally make your life miserable, by way of “losing” your medical records, threatening proctology exams, and finding myriad other opportunities to hit you where you live.
Despite his warm, youthful smile and comforting demeanor, some on the team thought Steve had a habit of becoming nervous when conducting medical training, giving an IV, or negotiating other stressful situations, and they dubbed him “Shaky Steve.” Most, including myself, thought he was just young, maybe intimidated by his status as the youngest among a group of seasoned, driven veterans. We would soon learn that we were all wrong, dead wrong. When treating the wounded, even under the worst conditions, Steve had nerves of steel and the hands of a surgeon. He would display a flowing fountain of emotional calm and that easygoing smile during horrific situations where others would have folded. He was invaluable in dealing with the local Afghans. He could treat the most frightened child, deliver a baby, and gain people’s trust with a warm, youthful smile and comforting manner.
At the moment, Bill’s manner was far from comforting.
“What are you guys doing in here?” Steve asked, half asleep and expecting a practical joke as we rousted him out of bed.
“What are you doing?” Bill screamed, mostly out of frustration. “You know after an attack you’ve got to come up to the TOC.”
“What attack?” Steve responded as we left to continue on our rounds.
My heart rate slowed as we got to the ANA area of the base. No one was hurt and we headed with the Afghans out to inspect the crater. Squatting next to the new hole, Dave, our senior engineer, was digging in the dirt, well into his impact analysis. Shrapnel had gouged the earth around the crater, and he pulled out dozens of razor-sharp metal shards.
“It came in from the north,” he said, studying the pattern of the impact. “They probably meant for it to hit near the TOC, in the middle of the living quarters, but missed.”
It was our first stroke of luck.