The first convoy I joined was hit by an IED. I heard the boom and looked through one of the tiny bullet-proof windows to see the lead vehicle crumpled forwards, as if beaten to its knees. The front left tyre had been blown about eighty metres into a nearby field but the main body of the truck, like the seven marines inside, survived intact. Even Blue, the explosives-sniffing dog, jumped out wagging his tail.

If British soldiers, in roofless old Land Rovers, had driven over the same bomb, everyone would have been killed. The US soldiers already had about twelve thousand bomb-proof trucks but would soon order over four thousand more, because the design had been improved. The Americans, and certainly the Marines, seemed to take war much more seriously than the British.

The crippled MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) was dragged to a nearby base. I followed the marines on their foot patrol to recover parts of the IED and truck from the site. We passed one crater (‘No, this is the one from three days ago’) and came to two craters, one right in the middle of the road, the second a little beyond it, at exactly the spot a vehicle would pass to avoid the first. Barely thirty minutes had passed since the explosion but every scrap of metal had been cleared.

‘There are fresh motorcycle tracks here’, said a marine on the other side of the crater.

‘Motherfuckers’, said another.

A canal ran parallel to the road. On the far side, two men on a motorcycle rode past, staring at us coldly. Another motorbike, carrying a man and his wife, came towards us on our side. The marines studied the couple through their rifle sights before ordering them to stop and get off the bike. The man looked only mildly inconvenienced as he lifted up his shirt and walked toward the marines. They kept their sights trained on him. He said didn’t have any information about the Taliban.

‘If you’ve finished with him, let him go’, shouted someone behind us. ‘Just because we have to get blown up doesn’t mean he has to as well.’

‘You think he’d be standing there if there were more explosives, you fucking idiot?’ shouted Lance Corporal Gomez, crouched next to me. ‘He knows where everything is. They all know.’

We walked back to the base. The convoy was ordered back to FOB Delhi, the marines’ main base, close to the Helmand Green Zone but far south of anywhere I’d been with the British. We’d been trying to get to Echo Company, who had pushed further south than anybody so far, into the small village of Mian Poshteh.

Soon, so many convoys had been hit that the two roads from FOB Delhi to Mian Poshteh were closed. The second convoy I joined had to drive through the desert. Two of the massive MRAP trucks, which weigh over thirty tonnes, sank into the thin, powdery sand. We had to wait for lorries to come and tow them out; a journey of sixteen kilometres took us thirteen hours.

I was ordered to switch vehicles. When I climbed into the back of the second truck I was surprised to see two Special Forces soldiers. There was an awkward moment as they eyed my camera and I looked at their elaborate weapons and long beards. They eventually spoke but batted away my questions about what they were on their way to do.

The driver, excited to have such exalted company in his truck, told them a house in front of us had been used by a sniper a few days earlier. ‘I hope he shoots at us again, then we can set you guys on him.’ He turned around and smiled hopefully. The Special Forces soldiers looked away.

I was later told that the sniper was a sixteen-year-old Chechen girl. I remembered I’d been told exactly the same thing by the British, two years earlier. They had described her as if she were an evil super-hero from a comic. I had no idea she was so good she didn’t age.

It was dusk on July 4^th when I finally made it to Mian Poshteh. Echo Company had already been involved in a seven-hour gunfight. One marine had been killed, the first American to die on an operation approved by President Obama.

Described by Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss, the commanding officer of 2/8 Marines, the mission sounded simple. As the sun rose, the Taliban would ‘wake up to find marines everywhere’. They would call for reinforcements, only to be told that they too, saw marines everywhere. The Taliban would have ‘no stomach to stand and fight, and would disappear’, enabling the marines to ‘target the population, not the enemy’. Sadly, it’s necessary to point out that in this case ‘targeting’ means ‘winning over’. The thinking, based on the counter-insurgency books that are the bibles of ambitious American officers, was that if you won over the local population they would reject the enemy, who would then become ‘irrelevant’. It sounded remarkably similar to the comprehensive approach the Brits had been trying for the last two years. I lost count of how many times I was told that the Taliban were about to become irrelevant. In that time, the Taliban, rather than becoming irrelevant, had become increasingly successful and audacious in their attacks against foreign and Afghan forces.

Main Poshteh is a small market town straddling a canal. Its two rows of shops, merely tiny storage rooms with mud walls and small, shaded, outside trading areas, had been abandoned hastily. Goods were on the shelves, scales and weights were neatly piled on the floor and vegetables were on display outside, rotting in the sun. The marines helped themselves to cigarettes and sweets, leaving behind generous amounts of dollar bills.

The marines slept on the concrete floor of a long, thin building that was once a school. I was told to sleep with the medics, who had one room to treat casualties, one room for the doctor and a mud courtyard that I shared with about fifteen others. My bed was a stretcher, unless the medics needed it.

‘Have you seen what’s next door?’ said a marine. ‘A gynaecologist’s bench with a dustbin at the end. How apt for this country.’

There was one casualty at the medical centre. He was a local boy, a paraplegic who, despite being ‘somewhere between sixteen and thirty’, couldn’t have weighed more than six stone. He’d been discovered in a nearby house, on fire after being hit by a Hellfire missile. His family had fled, together with everyone else, when the marines landed. Unable to move and barely able to talk, the boy had almost starved to death. He told the interpreter that he’d been injured in a farming accident, which none of the marines believed. They assumed anyone with such injuries had sustained them fighting or making IEDs.

I couldn’t sleep that night. When I heard the medics asking for a fourth man to help carry the boy out to a chopper that would take him to the hospital in Kandahar City, I got up and grabbed one corner of the stretcher. After my delay in getting there, I was anxious to see as much as possible.

We jogged to the end of the government building, treading on marines trying to sleep on the dusty ground. ‘Is that the cripple?’ ‘Is he even alive?’ ‘Is it true his family just fucking left him there?’ ‘He probably crippled himself making bombs.’ Dust and dirt blown by the chopper’s blades whipped our faces as we carried the boy into the helicopter’s huge belly. The staff at Kandahar hospital would have to try and locate his family.

That afternoon, four Special Forces soldiers who everyone knew had been on operation the night before, appeared, covered in mud and dripping with sweat. Marines shouted out compliments as they went by. The two men I’d met in the truck walked past me without making eye contact. The rumour went round that they had twelve confirmed kills and many more unconfirmed. But the awe they inspired wasn’t shared by all the marines: ‘They’re nothing but Rangers with a few skill sets and some extra assets, they ain’t special’, said one.

Some of that resentment could have been because the Special Forces went out and killed people within hours of arriving, whereas Echo now rarely saw the enemy. Local people were returning to their homes; the marines were sure Taliban were among them, studying Echo’s movements.

The men in this tricky position were often no more than nineteen or twenty years old. Mostly from Florida, North Carolina or South Carolina, (their base is Camp Lejeune, NC), many had never before left their home state. They’d been trained to kill; some openly fantasised about ‘dropping’ people. But now, they were under orders to hold back and concentrate on building relationships with the local community.

I joined Lance Corporal Brady Bunch, a chubby-faced, frustrated young marine, and Second Platoon, as they went on patrol to a compound from where they’d been attacked several times. As we prepared to leave, Bunch stroked his favourite weapon. ‘Big Tom – the best weapon in the Marine Corps. I’m gonna drop a raghead at eight hundred feet with this’, he said. Then he looked away, laughing: ‘Probably not.’

As we approached the compound, a man dressed in black, carrying a bag on his back, ran away. Bunch got down on his belly and got the man in his sights. After a few tense moments, the platoon leader decided they would approach the house slowly and try to talk to whoever was inside. So Bunch wasn’t allowed to take a shot. The man crossed a footbridge and disappeared into another compound.

‘Fuck. Every fucking open shot I get. Fuck’, said Bunch as he stomped towards the house. He turned, grinning: ‘I could have waxed his ass.’

A small boy, about twelve years old, came out of the house. ‘No, I don’t want a kid. Where is his father?’ asked Bunch. The boy said he was alone. He and the interpreter carried on talking, without translating. Bunch became more and more frustrated. A young girl appeared. ‘OK, this is a bullshit story, there’s another kid here. We’re going in this house.’ Three men gathered on the other side of the canal. The boy kept changing his story. ‘This kid’s about to cry and all these people are trying to talk to him. Something’s definitely going on’, said Bunch.

I followed him up to the entrance to the house. As he walked in, a sudden violent movement sent everyone darting backwards. Another small girl had appeared, startling Bunch into a firing position. ‘That little girl almost got blasted’, he said. More girls appeared, then a woman who seemed to be their mother.

‘Now there’s a woman in the house. What the fuck is going on? There wasn’t supposed to be anybody here, now there’s a whole family. Tell the kid to stop lying and tell us the truth’, said Bunch. ‘Ask him why he’s so nervous.’

Eventually, the boy said there were three women in the house, that his brother had ‘escaped the Taliban’ and that his father was ill in hospital.

Before they searched the building, the marines told the boy to get all the women into one room. We were ordered to turn our backs as they were ushered past. Any Taliban fighters could easily have escaped or sprayed the whole platoon with bullets. It was odd to see one of the world’s most lethal fighting forces offering such a gift to the enemy. They had to be ready to blow people’s heads off or walk into booby-trapped buildings, but they also had to be culturally sensitive. When all the women were in one room, the marines searched the rest, telling the boy to go in first because ‘they won’t shoot if he goes in’.

The last place left to search was a side passage where animals were kept. The boy tried to block the entrance. ‘What’s he so worried about?’ demanded Bunch. Marines pushed past. One shone a light into the chicken coop. He found a rifle, wrapped up.

‘You’re fucked, kid’, said Bunch. Everyone gathered at the doorway but no one was allowed in; the gun might have been booby-trapped.

‘What is this? What is this? Why is there a rifle in here? There’s probably a shitload buried in there.’

The boy was ordered to go in and pick up the rifle, which he was reluctant to do. ‘Right there! I know you see the rifle, kid.’ Eventually he picked it up. ‘Don’t fucking touch it, put it down, put it down. Get away from the rifle.’

The interpreter picked it up, carried it outside and unwrapped it. Bunch opened it to check for ammunition. His shoulders dropped. ‘Are you kidding me? It’s a fucking BB gun.’

‘Why was it covered up?’ he asked the boy.

‘I use it to kill some birds. I can’t kill somebody with it’, said the boy.

They told the boy not to cover things up, because it causes suspicion. ‘Tell him thank you for his time, we’re going to leave now, sorry.’

Outside, the three men still watched. Bunch asked the interpreter why they were so concerned with this house but he didn’t get an answer. Then, the man dressed in black, who we’d seen running away earlier, joined them. One of the marines spat on the ground. They asked who the local elder was and were given a name they hadn’t heard before. Bunch went down on one knee: ‘They give a completely different answer every time you ask them.’ The boy had followed and was standing behind Bunch. Bunch turned towards him, discreetly pointing at the men across the canal. ‘Talib? Talib? Taliban?’ he asked in a whisper. But the boy just stared.

‘He ain’t telling me shit’, said Bunch, after a few more attempts. He turned back to the men, who were being asked for help by the platoon commander. ‘If we help you the Taliban will kill us’, they said.

Bunch was sure the man in black was Taliban, ‘eye-fucking’ the others into not talking. He sighed. ‘I wish the bad guys had uniforms.’

It was almost dark, so the men were told that if they did have any information, they should come and see the Marines at their patrol base. Then we started the long walk back.

Later, I approached the adjutant. ‘Is Brady Bunch his real name? Did his mother actually call him that?’

‘Yep. He gets a lot of shit for it.’

The next day, I joined First Platoon on another patrol. As one of the marines attempted to talk to an old man using a Pashtu phrase book, a few rounds from an AK47 popped over our heads. We moved in the direction the bullets seemed to be coming from. Leaning against a low wall, we peeked over but no one could see anything. Staff Sergeant Funke, a recent divorcé, permanently disgusted but with a sense of humour that made him instantly likeable, studied his map, simultaneously listening to his radio. The person at the other end identified two men with RPGs and AK47s. Funke worked out where they were and laughed. ‘They’re right fucking there, gentleman. Right there’, he pointed. ‘They’re about ... ... Ha! Less than a hundred metres from us.’

We heard the harmless-sounding whoosh of an RPG over our heads and everyone dropped to the ground. Everyone except the old man, who stayed upright, looking down at the marines. Then he turned and slowly walked inside. The rocket didn’t explode but everyone stayed down, giving Funke something else to get annoyed about: ‘Can we fucking move on these people, goddamnit?’

‘Does anyone see anything?’ shouted another marine. A heavy and constant burst of gunfire came from very close by. Everyone seemed to have someone ranked below them to shout at. Funke yelled at one marine, who yelled at the marine next to me: ‘Get your fucking goddamn fucking muzzle up, pay fucking attention. See that window? Watch it.’

The marines ran into the next compound, kicking open doors and searching rooms as they went. AK47 rounds popped over our heads but never seemed to hit anything. We all ran, crouched, at the same time; all except Funke, who stood straight, looking down at us impatiently. ‘The rounds are going over your heads. Let’s go.’

Everyone jogged towards the next compound. Funke strolled casually behind, until we started going in the wrong direction. ‘Gentlemen, the enemy is to the south. We are to the north. We need to get through this’, pointing to a compound to the south. ‘They are there, we need to kill them. Let’s go.’

Someone shouted, ‘Incoming’. We all fell on one knee and put our chins on our chests. But whatever it was didn’t explode. We ran to the last compound, which had much higher walls than the others. A rickety-looking ladder stood against one wall and a door led in to a field, beyond which were the trees from where we were being attacked. Everyone looked confused. No one wanted to be the first through the door, because they would be an easy target for the as-yet-unseen enemy.

Funke marched to the middle of the courtyard. ‘Gents, listen up. They are waiting for us to expose ourselves in front of this tree-line. I need a three-man position on the outside of this corner. I need a three-man position on the outside of that corner. I need two marines at the door and one person doing over-watch on this fucking ladder. It does you no good being inside. This is what you wanted. You fucking got it. Now go get it.’

Lance Corporal Gomez, a dark-skinned Ecuadorian, was ordered up the ladder first, because he was carrying a SAW (Squad Automatic Weapon), a bigger machine gun than everyone else’s. He climbed the ladder very slowly, fully expecting it to collapse under his weight. Carefully, he eased his head above the wall. I asked him if he could see anything.

‘I see weed, man.’ There was a huge field of marijuana on the other side of the wall. ‘I want to jump in. But I see nothing else.’

Suddenly, he did see something. He started firing, showering me with dozens of hot bullet cases. Three or four other marines started firing, although asked for an exact location, all they could say was ‘on the tree-line’, which we had known from the beginning.

Gomez fired a grenade. ‘Come on baby, hit, hit.’ He stared at the trees, so desperate to be on target that it looked like he’d be in physical pain him if he weren’t. I heard the grenade explode on the far side of the field. He fired another but the grenade launcher came away from his gun: ‘Motherfucker’. The marines around us kept firing. Funke ordered some through the door and into a ditch in the field. I ran after them, not realising until I jumped to the ground that it was just ploughed earth, not a ditch. A small bird could have pushed the furrows aside to get a worm. It certainly wouldn’t stop bullets. The mud was so hot it burnt my elbows. Either side of me, marines looked through their sights at the trees hiding our attackers. They couldn’t see any movement. Neither could I.

‘They’re in that tree line next to the building just in front of us?’ I asked the marine to my left.

‘Are you asking me or telling me?’

‘Asking’, I said, startled that he might actually listen to what I had to say. I ran back inside.

Gomez, drinking water, wiped sweat from his face. ‘I love this shit, this is what I re-enlisted for. Four deployments now, you can’t keep me down.’

A few marines sheltered in the narrow slice of shade offered by the wall of the compound’s one room. ‘If I move I’m gonna pass out’, said Staff Sergeant Paz, wobbling. Some marines went inside and sat down. One, with a startled look on his face, started vomiting. It looked like his stomach was being pumped but nothing but pasty water came out. He vomited three times, took a deep breath, and jumped to his feet, strapping on his helmet. ‘Let’s go, y’all. Let’s go, Bravo, GET ON YOUR FEET, LET’S GO.’

‘You sure?’ his platoon commander asked.

‘I got it.’ The two men bumped fists and marched outside. ‘Let’s go, gentlemen. ON YOUR FEET. FUCK THESE BITCHES.’

But the battle was over. Our attackers had either been killed – at least three marines claimed to have hit them – or fired everything they had and vanished. The marines searched the trees but found neither blood nor bodies.

*  *  *  *  *

The marines continued to patrol daily but the Taliban remained invisible. ‘This is some Vietnam shit’, said Bunch. ‘Most of the time it’s like we’re getting shot at by bushes.’

In the middle of another patrol, everyone settled down for a quick nap in a house they had just cleared. On the walls, children’s drawings showed fighters firing AK47s.

‘A fucking little kid drew a picture of his dad shooting down a fucking helicopter. These people are amazing. This country never ceases to amaze me. I drew pictures of my dad driving his truck to work, not shooting a fucking helicopter’, said one marine.

‘This one got shot down’, said another, laughing. He’d found a drawing of a grounded helicopter lying on its side. ‘Sick bastards, man. Dude, have you even seen anyone that lives here? They’re like hippies, because of all the pot. Except they’re not liberalish, they’re like, extremist. But they smoke a lot of weed. They should relax and be like the hippies. No war! Just peace!’ He let his head drop, leaving his fingers in a V-sign in the air.

On another patrol, I was with PFC Janos Lutz when we found a huge field of weed. ‘Wow! That is by far the biggest pot field I’ve seen.’ Lutz was just twenty-one but already, he’d done a tour of Iraq and time in prison for assault. Lutz was downbeat when I spoke to him. He’d been allowed to use the company sat-phone to call home. During the pep talk before the operation, Echo Company had been told that ‘the world is watching’ but the people on the other end of the phone didn’t know there had been any fighting.

‘Our families know what’s going on. People in the military know, but the general population doesn’t. America’s not at war, America’s at the mall’, Lutz said, visibly angry. ‘No one fucking cares. It’s “what’s up with Paris Hilton now? Britney Spears fucking this ...” The average American doesn’t fucking know when people die over here.’

Bunch agreed. ‘There’s no way people back home could understand what this country is like. It’s like every day, we get shot at. I finally got to make a phone call today, expecting it to be like “Oh, I miss you so much” and all kinds of stuff. No. I call home and it’s “everything’s fine, I’m partying, having a good life down here”. Doesn’t even ask me how I’m doing. That’s when I realised that people don’t give a shit about what we’re doing here. No one even really mentions 9/11 any more. To me, that’s the whole reason I’m over here, that’s why I went to Iraq, why I joined the Marine Corps. Now we’re here and I really don’t know why.’

A marine stroked a small bush with his gloved hand. ‘Look at this fucking thing, it’s nothing but thorns. It’s just angry. It literally has no function except to cause pain. Everything in this country is just so fucking angry.’

I asked if this still felt like the ‘War on Terror’, even though the phrase was no longer used. Some of the marines were just eleven or twelve years old on 9/11. Some said it did. ‘There are three thousand reasons why, three thousand names who aren’t with us any more. And the fucks who did that are here.’ But the younger they were, the less clear they became. One private, who had signed up exactly a year before, five days after his eighteenth birthday, said, ‘I guess ... I don’t know. Where I was, the economy wasn’t good, you couldn’t get a job, my stepdad was suffering, had a hard time finding a job. I knew this was a good organisation, regular pay check, they take care of you. Sitting here now, I’m helping my parents out a lot.’ His pay was just over twenty thousand dollars a year.

One of Echo Company’s captains, Eric Meador, believed he was still fighting Al-Qaeda but more important, ‘we abandoned these people after the Russians pulled out, just like we abandoned the Iraqis after we kicked Saddam out of Kuwait. So we owe it to them to help now.’ He told me about an Iraqi woman who had approached him a few tours ago, holding a child who had Down’s Syndrome. She screamed at him, saying he had let Saddam gas the Shiites after the uprising of 1991 and now her baby was like this. He said he’d never forget her; he’d never seen anyone so angry and he understood why.

There were marines who genuinely wanted to help the Afghans but even the strongest sense of moral obligation couldn’t make someone do more than they are capable of. I didn’t understand how the policy could succeed. Of the twenty-one thousand extra men Obama had sent into Afghanistan, only four thousand were actually fighting to provide security. The rest were in secluded and isolated bases, in supporting roles. Even in Mian Poshteh, the latest focus for massive resources and manpower, control and reach was extremely limited. As one senior marine confided, ‘we only control as far as we see’.

Before I left Echo Company, I sat with the Commanding Officer, Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss, and asked what he thought his marines could achieve.

Killing the Taliban, he said, was ‘almost irrelevant’. What I’d seen in Mian Poshteh may have been the ‘end of the beginning but it wasn’t actually that decisive’. What would be decisive was good counter-insurgency, which Cabaniss was evangelical about. While I was waiting for the convoy to Mian Poshteh, he’d gone out of his way to discuss it with me, before one of his men politely told him he had more important business to attend to. Counter-insurgency – COIN – as it was known in Helmand, had become a verb. ‘I’m gonna coin the shit out of these people’, said one engineer, heading out to work on an irrigation project.

Cabaniss thought that only now were there enough troops on the ground to apply it properly. ‘Some places here, they had seen brief periods where the British had come into their villages and left. Where we went, we were going to stay. And that’s where we start to gain some trust from the local population. They’ll start talking to us and telling us about things that are going on in their community. I think in the past they have not wanted to say anything to anybody, out of fear.

‘I don’t like the term “hearts and minds”, because most people don’t understand it but their heart is ... they have to believe it’s in their best interests to be on the side of the government of Afghanistan. Their mind is ... they know we’re going to win. They can’t sit on the fence any more. We’re not going to build Jacksonville, North Carolina in the next six months but I think we can expect to have sustainable progress. The people connected to the government, the government connected to the people, they work together in common cause to bring tangible progress. Not shove the Taliban out completely but marginalise them. Where most of the locals look at them as common criminals, people that are just disturbing the peace.’ During an earlier conversation, he had described this as ‘armed social work’.

I said that over two years ago British officials had said exactly the same things, and yet the Brits had just suffered their worst month so far and the Taliban were stronger than they had been since being overthrown.

‘The Brits had a good understanding of what was going on down here but they never had enough combat power to do what they would like to do and sustain it over time. My battalion taking over, we’re obviously just a little bit larger, we’ve been able to position forces all over the central Helmand river valley and really get out among the people. They just didn’t have the capability to do it right.’

I said that while it was obvious the Taliban couldn’t win a military victory, why couldn’t they keep laying ever-more-sophisticated IEDs and taking pot-shots for years to come, costing lives, billions of dollars and eventually bleeding all the foreign forces dry?

‘If we can take a deep hold, in the areas that we’re in, by wintertime the Taliban are going to be on their heels, sitting in Pakistan, wondering what to do next. And we’ll have the people.’ He smiled as if this had already been achieved. ‘Once the people decide they won’t tolerate the Taliban’s presence, there’s no way they can stay.’

I asked if this was the new way America fought wars.

‘Not tooting the Marine Corps horn but before General Petreaus went to Iraq, the Marine battalions in Al Anbar [a province in Iraq, where many marines believe COIN was first successfully applied] had already come to the conclusion that working closely with the local population, building relationships with them, had a greater impact on security than going street to street and shooting did. We learnt that the hard way in Iraq and we’re starting the right way in Afghanistan.’

These levels of faith in COIN were new in Afghanistan. Many Americans had become converts in Iraq, where they thought it had worked. One of the COIN bibles was David Kilcullen’s The Accidental Guerrilla, which I read at FOB Delhi, frequently interrupted by officers telling me what an amazing book it was. The rise to prominence of the ‘COINistas’ – now shaping Afghan policy – was no less momentous than the rise of the neo-cons ten years earlier.

I waited two days for a helicopter ride to Camp Bastion, which had expanded to include Bastion 2 and Camp Leatherneck, the Marine Corps base. One soldier had been told the camp would eventually include Bastions 15 and 16. I had another three-day wait before I could fly to Kabul and I bumped into some Afghan interpreters I’d met on the way out. Many had become American citizens when their families had fled either the Russian invasion or the Taliban. When I told one Hazara man, paid just $700 a month, what I’d seen, he said: ‘Man, the Americans are being too soft down there. They need to go into the villages and say “if we see one Taliban here or if you help them once, we’ll flatten every building”. The problems would end that day.’