AT SAYED ABAD Base, Hill climbed to the compound rooftop with 2LT Miles Hidalgo, PL for A Co’s Alpha Dawgs.10 In response to increased Taliban attacks along Highway 1, Hill planned to relocate some of the Alpha Dawgs’ mortar tubes so that Hidalgo and his men could provide indirect fire coverage to suspected hot spots along the route.
Because Hill considered Hidalgo a near peerless platoon leader, he had given him charge of Sayed Abad, one of the toughest AOs in Wardak. If anyone could lock down the area, it would be Miles, Hill thought.
Atop the roof, the two men looked south toward the proposed new site, and saw black smoke billowing in the distance. Hill pulled binos from his vest and glassed the horizon. “Can’t tell what it is, but something is going down,” he said. “See if the ANP can find out.”
Five minutes later, the Afghan National Police chief partnered with Hidalgo came back with news: The Taliban had set up a roadblock and attacked an Afghan-contractor-secured U.S. logistics convoy with a force of more than a hundred men.
It was the largest attacking force since Dog Company had arrived, Hill realized. And they were getting bolder.
Minutes later, Hill, with HQ and 3rd Platoon, was rolling toward the scene. Ahead, he could see dozens of oily plumes corkscrewing into the sky. As the highway uncoiled, flames came into view, along with a chain of burning destruction at least a half a mile long.
Hill’s driver slowed. A blackened boneyard of trucks was scattered across the road at panicked angles. They were “jingle trucks,” vehicles decorated in the Afghan style with colorful flags, tassels, beads, and pennants. For a bizarre instant, Hill thought it looked as if a band of crazed clowns had torched a circus. Some trucks smoldered while others actively burned, the bright tassels forming giant candlewicks. Shell-shocked Afghan security contractors wandered through the smoking wreckage, crying “Taliban! Taliban!” Cargo spilled from the truck beds—U.S. mail, water, chow-hall-sized cartons of food, and cases of water. Letters from home fluttered in the wind.
Hill’s mind had to stretch to embrace the scope of destruction, which resembled a scene from some postapocalyptic film.
From 3-3’s turret, SPC Joel Ochoa could see the bodies of Afghan contractors slumped through truck cab windows, stitched with bullet holes. One corpse had a wide, through-and-through hole in his torso, ragged but cauterized.
RPG, Ochoa thought. He smelled cooking flesh.
Passing another dead man flung faceup on the asphalt, Ochoa saw that a large chunk of the face was missing. It was gruesome, but not the worst Ochoa had seen. That had been in Iraq, when his element found the decapitated corpses of a family of four, but only two heads. The children’s heads were later found sewn up inside their parents’ bodies.
This scene, too, had beheadings. As D Co rolled through, Hill counted six headless men beside the road, each head separated from its owner by the swing of some heavy blade.
That’s some Mexican drug cartel shit, he thought. Then he applied a mental tourniquet, cut off the nightmare images, and put them away. It was the only way to deal with it, the only way not to come undone.
A few meters farther on, Hill saw an empty cargo pallet labeled XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX—and thought about how much more effective Taliban snipers would now be with American sights on their weapons.
In all, the Taliban had destroyed forty-four jingle trucks and driven another two into the mountains, kidnapping their drivers. Every intelligence report Hill received that day confirmed that the ambushing party was at least one hundred strong; most reports pegged it at closer to 150. Hill remembered the intel he’d received on the second Taliban jirga, the one he’d planned to disrupt before canceled CAS required him to scrub the mission. It now appeared the jirga had had a specific—and significant—target in mind.
Hill considered the escalating insurgency in Wardak. Attacks were increasing in frequency and the size of attacking forces growing geometrically. The first ambushing party they’d faced at Esh-ma-keyl had been fifty to seventy-five men. At Badam Kalay, the Dirty First fought seventy or more men. Now this.
Dog Company’s number two pencils mission was officially over.
Though already spread thin, some D Co soldiers would have to be detailed to clear the jingle truck wreckage from Highway 1. At Hill’s suggestion, Battalion set up a temporary COP in an elementary school compound two clicks east of the highway, overlooking the annihilated convoy. Battalion sent units to help with the recovery op, including its mortars platoon, as well as a couple of platoons from Charlie Company and Echo, Battalion’s Forward Support Company. Major Rob Smith, the new Battalion XO, was in charge of the operation.
The company spent the next week and a half helping Afghan heavy-equipment operators load the remains of each jingle truck onto lowboys, which then hauled them up to Kabul. The recovery was slow, grueling work. Some trucks burned for days, melting large swaths of gravel and asphalt right off the highway berm, leaving gaping gashes across the already patchwork pavement. Dog Company soldiers worked with the ANA and ANP, wrapping their faces in bandanas to filter the choking fumes.
On an Omigod-why-are-we-doing-this? scale of one to ten, the operation was for Donnie Carwile and Shon Haskins about a twelve. Of all Hill’s platoon leaders, Carwile was the quietly rebellious one. An effective platoon leader walks a fine line between pleasing his company commander and taking care of his men. Commanders motivate their platoon leaders by pushing them until they push back. But Carwile didn’t give a rat’s ass how hard Hill pushed, because he already knew where all the buttons were. His men adored him for it.
The enemy had, at will, seized vital American supplies. Now, to avoid a Taliban PR victory in the form of news images of the smoldering skeleton of a large, U.S.-funded logistics convoy, Carwile’s men were risking their lives—forced to distinguish between Taliban fighters planting booby traps and garden-variety looters, then shoot the former and not the latter, though they all looked about the same.
Carwile was pissed—and relieved when Hill tasked 3rd with several days of patrols in nearby Haft Asiab. He wasn’t thrilled to be saddled with Paul Avallone, a reporter who was along for the trip. As embedded journalists went, though, Avallone, fifty-six, of Clarksville, Tennessee, was a good one to draw. A former Green Beret, he knew his way around a gun truck.
After accompanying 3rd in Haft Asiab for a couple of days, Hill joined 1st Platoon in running patrols surrounding the jingle truck recovery. A few days in, Hulburt, Dudley, and some French Coalition soldiers apprehended two men leaving a madrassa, an Afghan schoolhouse that had been converted to a Taliban meeting house. The men had been following the patrol from a distance for several hours before dipping into the Talib safe house.
Inside, the Dirty First found notebooks detailing ambush plans, music with lyrics chanting “Death to America,” and several belts of ammo. A quick biometrics scan revealed that one of the men was a known Taliban weapons smuggler. It was a valuable find.
LT Sean Allred, 1st’s PL, relayed the news to Hill, then the Dirty First split out a detail to transport both prisoners back to the temporary COP near the jingle truck massacre. There, both a Battalion intel officer and CPT Wade Barker questioned the men, then worked through the night putting together an evidence packet strong enough to force the suspected smuggler to the next-higher level of detention.
The following day, a Black Hawk touched down at the COP, scooped up the suspect, and flew him to Brigade. As the prisoner was being loaded aboard, he boasted about being a Taliban fighter, and spit on and struck at the military policeman guarding him. The helo buttoned up and flew the prisoner to the brigade detention facility.
When 1st Platoon returned to the COP, Allred went to find Barker to congratulate him on transferring the captured smuggler to Brigade.
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For Hill, the release of this prisoner was a kind of last straw. After more than a week of demoralizing recovery work, the capture had been for Dog Company a morale boost and also, they had hoped, a small measure of justice for their Afghan allies so brutally killed on Highway 1. After this, though, what else could Dog Company do? They had captured numerous EPWs in different environments, caught them actively engaged in espionage and firefights. This man was a known weapons smuggler, confessed to being Taliban, and physically assaulted his guards. XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX How much lower could Dog Company’s expectations fall? How much more demoralized could they be?
For those reasons, Hill never shared news of the smuggler’s release with the rest of the men. They had worked too hard to hear how badly their command had let them down.