At 3 a.m. on the first night in Marjah, a series of explosions woke the few marines who had managed to fall asleep. Someone shouted that mortars were being ‘walked’ on to the base. It felt as if a giant animal were approaching, its huge feet crushing everything in its path as it stomped slowly towards us. Whoever was firing the rockets probably had a spotter watching from a distance, radioing in changes to the range, aiming for a direct hit. ‘Holy fuck, that’s right there’, screamed a marine, as explosions rocked the building, each closer than the one before.

‘It’s in the bazaar; it’s blowing up the bazaar.’

‘It’s that mortar position we were talking about.’

‘So they’re hitting short. Means they’re gonna be adjusting on us.’

‘KEEP DOWN.’

‘Holy fuck, there’s a bunch of propane tanks on fire.’

‘The gas station’s about to fucking blow up.’

Barely thirty metres away, flames climbed high in the air. The propane tanks could have exploded, flying in all directions like missiles.

Three men were reported to have stormed one of the small look-out posts at the edge of the compound. They’d been repelled by a hand grenade and pistol shots. The marines who fought them off swore they were suicide bombers but no bodies were ever recovered.

The fire in the gas station eventually died down. The propane tanks, remarkably, had safety valves that prevented them becoming rockets. No one ever knew if the explosions had been mortars or if the men that had approached the base had been suicide bombers. Both felt perfectly plausible.

When daylight came, the Afghans attached to Bravo Company appeared in the courtyard in front of the base. They intended to ceremonially raise the flag that the Afghan soldier the marines called ‘Rambo’ had worn over his shoulders. Captain Sparks’s Afghan Army counterpart, Captain Saed, a short, proud-looking man with a wiry black beard and a mischievous grin ordered his men into two lines of about fifteen soldiers each. Three soldiers attempted to thread a stick through one end of the flag, so that it could be attached to a pole on the wall and flown over Marjah, in defiance to the Taliban, who still controlled most of the district.

Captain Saed changed his mind and ordered his men into a single line. I recognised Qadeer, whose white teeth appeared in the middle of his thick black beard as he grinned at me. ‘Morning how are you good?’, he asked. He had a wonderfully expressive face that ran through three states: deep concentration, unbridled joy and heavy sadness. Behind Captain Saed, Rambo finally got the flag up, to applause and cheers. From the middle of the courtyard, Captain Saed turned and shouted at him to take it down again; he had a speech to make before the flag was raised. The Afghans were in full combat gear, wearing flak jackets and helmets, with rifles held in front of their chests, pointing to the ground. I’d never seen them look so good.

One Afghan soldier put his RPG on his shoulder. ‘Whoa, whoa, put that down’, shouted one of the marines. The marines watched from the verandah at the front of the base, with patronising but benevolent pride, like parents watching their children’s first school play. This was a shambles but at least it wouldn’t get any marines killed. As soon as anything important happened, the marines’ feelings toward the Afghans would go straight back to frustration and contempt.

‘AT THE READY!’ shouted Captain Saed. The Afghan soldiers hit their heels together and stamped their feet in unison. ‘Nobody move until the flag is raised! Even if a snake bites you or a bee stings you. This is our national flag, we must respect it. It is for this that we have fought and sacrificed ourselves. We did it for the people of Afghanistan and to be able to fly our flag here in Marjah.’ ‘Allah Akbar [God is great]!’ the soldiers chanted.

The flag was raised. Everyone applauded. As they dispersed, a few Afghans hugged the watching marines. ‘Good day, good day’, one said to me. A bullet zipped overhead, presumably aimed at the Afghan flag, but only a couple of people noticed.

On the other side of the compound was a small outbuilding, being used as a toilet. Or rather, it was a room full of rubble where the marines went to shit into plastic bags, which were then burned. The toilet had a small flat roof, of no more than ten square feet, which three marines were turning into another look-out post. Sandbags were handed up to them, which they assembled around themselves for protection. They had piled only eight bags together when a few bullets fizzed over their heads and bounced off the wall beside them. ‘Keep those sandbags coming faster, we’re pretty exposed up here’, said one, nervously. Another fired a few shots back. Behind them Captain Saed stood, oblivious, trying to get the flagpole to stay upright.

‘It’s coming from that compound six hundred metres out, to my direct front’, shouted the marine who’d fired. His direct front was one of the sides that didn’t yet have any sandbags. Captain Saed finished tying the flagpole and climbed down.

A few hours later, one of the marines, still taking fire on the roof, approached Captain Sparks. ‘If we may, can we take the flag down? It’s an excellent wind indicator for their snipers, Sir.’

‘The fucking flag stays up’, said Sparks. ‘It’s like a lot of things right now, I don’t care. I like the flag, it’s like saying fuck you constantly.’

*  *  *  *  *

Bravo needed to extend their area of control. Two squads of marines, a handful of ANA and the EOD (Explosive Ordnance Disposal) team set out to clear five buildings to the north of their base.

Every step had to be taken carefully; every bag, bump or pile of dirt treated with suspicion. This created an awful amount of work and required an exhausting level of concentration. IEDs are often made from the yellow plastic jugs that Afghans use to carry water; they’re scattered all over the place in every home. Here, every jug had to be approached carefully and checked before anyone could walk past it. It was like walking across New York knowing that every takeaway coffee cup could be booby-trapped.

The first compound we entered contained a small two-roomed house. On one side, two cows were tied to a wall, on the other was a tiny garden. The door at the far side of the compound was closed but a marine was sure it had been open when we first walked in. Everyone went down on one knee and pointed their guns at the door. The explosives-sniffing dog ran around, followed by a marine with a metal detector. ‘Hey – let the ANA go first’, said a marine behind me. ‘Get the fuck out, back the fuck up.’ Four Afghan soldiers shuffled nervously through the door, followed by the marines shouting ‘going in the next building’.

Beyond the door was a huge well, twenty feet wide and twelve feet deep. In a crescent shape, covering half the surface of the water, floated what must have been a month’s worth of human shit. The marines gagged at the smell. In shock, one pointed to a bucket and pulley. You could see them thinking: these people actually use this water? Every new building and new contact brought more evidence that the people they’d come to liberate were, to put it politely, not at all like them. Sometimes, I saw the moments of revelatory shock on their faces: ‘They’re not like Americans; what kind of a person does that; how can they allow themselves to be beaten down like that; how can they lie like that?’ were questions I heard often.

Next to the well was a mosque, which the ANA had already entered. Beyond the mosque, they found a ‘line’, trailing over the far wall: a suspicious-looking white wire. The EOD team – Tom Williams and Rich Stachurski (‘Ski’) – were called forward. ‘They say they got one, they can see the line’, said Staff Sergeant Young, as Tom turned on his Vallon metal detector. Crouching, he walked across the mosque’s courtyard and looked over the far wall.

‘Hey. Listen up, how far to the right have we got guys?’ shouted Tom.

‘We’ve got guys in the far corner here’, said Young, referring to the marines who had stayed by the shitty well.

‘There’s a fucking IED over there’, said Williams.

‘PUSH BACK AWAY FROM THAT WALL, PUSH BACK INTO THIS AREA’, screamed Young. The wall was all that separated his men from the IED.

I followed Young across the courtyard.

‘It’s fucking huge’, said Tom as we approached him. ‘I don’t know what it is; it looks like maybe a fifty-pound bag or something. It’s big as fuck and it’s electric, it’s running into the other compound.’

‘And there’s a kid over the wall’, said another marine.

The IED was a white parcel, held together with black tape, which sat on the ground, just around the corner of the wall surrounding the well. It looked like a large bag of laundry, or a giant rolled-up sleeping bag. No effort had been made to hide it, so it had probably been placed there just before we appeared. The white wire ran from the IED along a ditch beside the mosque, over the wall and into a neighbouring compound. Someone would be at the other end, wire in one hand and a power source, probably a battery, in the other, waiting to make the connection as soon as the marines walked around the corner. Fifty pounds of explosives is easily enough to blow several marines to pieces. If they’d continued straight from the well, rather than clearing the mosque first, they would have walked right on to it.

Tom climbed over the far wall and walked slowly towards the wire. He cut it and pulled it away from the IED, then came back over the wall and said he was going to place a charge next to the IED to set it off. Ski asked where they could run after the charge had been set. The marines’ rules didn’t allow them to enter the mosque, so they would have to run around to the other side before the IED blew. Tom asked for cover while he approached the IED. He was worried that whoever had been on the other side of the far wall, ready to detonate the bomb, might pop up and shoot him from close range. He walked towards the IED, sweeping every inch of ground in front of him.

Staff Sergeant Young spoke to the terp. ‘There’s a kid on the other side of the wall but that’s exactly where the wire was leading, so we don’t know if he’s the one that was going to set off the bomb. In any case, when the EOD runs back, you’re gonna yell across and tell them that the explosion’s about to happen.’ The terp nodded. ‘They got two minutes and they need to run away, OK?’ The terp nodded again. ‘Yell as loud as you can so they can hear you.’

Slowly, Tom walked along the ditch. Young shouted that over the wall, smoke was burning; probably some kind of signal. Tom nodded and continued. When he was close enough, he put his metal detector on the ground, took out a block of C4 explosive, ignited it, placed it right under the bomb, picked up his metal detector and ran back towards us.

‘Everybody back, behind here’, shouted Young.

‘Yell across the courtyard. Yell, tell the kid to run’, he said to the terp, who didn’t yell anything. ‘YELL ACROSS, QUICKLY, YOU AIN’T GOT A MINUTE, YELL, JOHN!’ The terp stared at him. ‘OK, just stand there, then. Get out. Get over here, get down, behind this wall.’ Tom, Ski and two ANA soldiers made their way around the mosque. ‘You were supposed to yell at the kid in the courtyard, John. That was the whole thing you came over for.’ The terp said nothing.

‘After it goes off, listen for frag, so everybody be quiet’, said Tom, visibly frayed and struggling for breath.

I asked him if he’d volunteered for this job. ‘Yes, I did’, he said, laughing slightly.

We braced ourselves. The explosion smashed the mosque’s windows and made us all wobble, even though most of us were crouched on one knee.

Tom looked at the crater the explosion had made. ‘It was probably about a hundred pounds.’

An old man with a thick white beard suddenly appeared on top of the wall, right where the wire lay. He threw it towards us. ‘No, no, no, tell him to stop, tell him to leave it’, shouted the marines. The old man was terrified; his eyebrows arched up into the thick curved lines that ran across his forehead. He held the palms of his trembling hands towards us. ‘There is no Taliban’, he said, ‘come in, come in. Don’t worry, just come.’

‘I got two men’, shouted a marine.

‘Two men?’ shouted Young.

‘They just went down behind a berm or something. You see ’em? You see their heads?’

‘Keep an eye on ’em, see if you can spot a weapon.’

We heard a few bursts of gunfire. ‘Is that shooting at us?’ asked Young.

‘No’, someone replied.

The old man went back behind the wall. The next burst of gunfire definitely was aimed at us. Some of the marines collapsed on the ground, others ran back behind the cover of the mosque.

‘Hey, let’s go, where’s the fucking target at?’ screamed Young. More shots came into the compound. ‘Get a fucking shot off.’ While everyone else ducked behind a wall or ran behind the mosque, Young stayed standing. ‘Give me a goddamn 203 shot, for Christ’s sake.’ More bullets came right into the courtyard where he stood. The marines fired back. ‘You see a guy out there, you fucking hit him!’ screamed Young.

‘There’s two guys on the roof’, shouted a marine, as he pumped shots at them. ‘See the brown top? He’s firing from there. I fucking saw it. They’re right there, twelve o’clock.’ He fired single shots at the men on the roof. Other marines hit the building with air grenades and bursts from their machine-guns. Someone screamed for a LAW rocket to be brought forward.

‘Taking effective fire from Building 89 and Kilo 22’, said Young into his radio. ‘One shooter on top of the roof, we spotted him, we’re gonna take a LAW shot and knock him out.’

I ran behind the short wall surrounding the mosque. Three marines fired at the brown rooftop; one was ready to fire the LAW rockets. Occasionally they stopped, and ducked behind the wall as bullets cracked through the air around them. As one of the marines got ready to fire the rocket, another screamed: ‘DO NOT FIRE THE LAW! NAZIR, COME HERE!’ Nazir, one of the Afghan soldiers, was sitting cross-legged alongside the wall, right behind the rocket. He’d have been badly burned, at the very least, if he stayed there. Nazir got up and ran towards me. The marine got ready to fire the rocket again and the others ducked down and put their fingers in their ears. Suddenly, we were covered in dust and the air was sucked from around us. Everyone looked over the wall. ‘We got a hit, that’s a confirmation hit.’ Then another bullet cracked over our heads and we ducked again. One of the marines who’d been next to the firing rocket ran back towards the mosque. ‘I can’t hear anything’, he said, holding his ears and keeling over.

‘Keep eyes out in that direction’, screamed Young, ‘a group is moving and we’re taking sporadic shots from that direction. Get out of the mosque. If you can’t get cover, back out.’ In the middle of a battle, they remembered their cultural sensitivity training. I thought having gunfights in people’s gardens was probably more offensive than entering mosques but didn’t think it was a good time to raise the point.

The battle died down inconclusively. The Taliban had probably run out of ammunition, dropped their weapons and retreated. They could have walked right past the marines a few minutes later and not been touched.

We lined up to climb over the wall into the compound from where the old man had appeared. An Afghan soldier stood right next to a marine who was lifting people up and over the wall but didn’t want any help. The marine looked at him: ‘Get out of my way or I’m gonna punch you in the face.’

I looked over and saw ANA soldiers were searching the old man, yanking him roughly by his waistcoat. I also saw the kid they’d spotted earlier, complaining, shouting and gesticulating wildly. He was about three feet tall and looked about six years old but his hand gestures were those of a fully-grown man with attitude; a New Yorker arguing or an Italian football player protesting against a referee’s decision. As the marines stabbed sacks with their knives, looking for ammonium nitrate, the terp asked the old man and the kid if the Taliban had forced themselves into their home.

‘Yes, they did’, said the old man.

‘It’s like with you’, said the kid. ‘If you slit our throats, what can we do about it?’ He raised his right hand, twisted it clockwise and opened it, as if to say, ‘Are you stupid?’

‘What were they wearing?’ asked the terp.

‘I don’t know. Something like this’, said the kid, grabbing the old man’s tattered green shirt. He looked disgusted at the level of questioning.

‘Did they have Kalashnikovs?’

‘Yes’, said the old man, who still instinctively held his hands in the air.

‘Come on, pops’, said the kid, leading the old man away.

A few minutes later, a marine turned, in shock. ‘He just called me a motherfucker’, he said, laughing. ‘The little son of a bitch.’

A large black dog approached, barking. The kid spun round and ran towards it, picking up a rock on the way. ‘Go away, dog’, he shouted, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ The dog cowered and the kid threw the rock, hitting the dog hard in the ribs. ‘Take that.’

‘He is twenty years old’, said one of the terps.

‘Is he a midget or something?’ said one of the marines.

‘Is he really twenty years old?’ said another.

The kid, Mohammad, was actually a man and really was twenty years old. He was a dwarf and a heroin addict. He’d been a refugee in Iran for five years but had recently returned to Marjah; one of the approximately two million Afghans who’d fled from the Taliban but returned after their overthrow, expecting peace and prosperity.

‘That’s freaky’, said one of the marines.

‘The Taliban ran out of ammunition’, said the old man. ‘They threw down their guns and left.’

‘We’ll stay here’, said Mohammad. ‘I’m a tough guy. Fuck the Taliban! And fuck their mothers!’

‘Why don’t you seal off both sides and search in the middle?’ asked the old man, demonstrating with his hands.

‘Tell him we’re going to find the Taliban’, a marine said, ‘and we’re going to kill whoever needs to be killed.’

Mohammad walked up to Qadaat and another ANA soldier, who were keeping watch through a gate. They were on their knees, so as Mohammad berated them, they were face to face. ‘I am a Baluch [the region of Baluchistan straddles the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan]. It’s five years since I’ve been back here. We came back for work’, he said. ‘I ask you for money but you do nothing to help, what can I do?’

Qadaat smiled. ‘We’re here to get rid of the Taliban, we’re here to help you. Build schools and lots of other things.’

‘Right’, said Mohammad, disdainfully. ‘Thanks a lot.’

He looked down the alley and stared up at the marines around him, one at a time, as if they were just the latest bunch of men who were going to make his life miserable.

Captain Sparks appeared. Mohammad’s appearance threw him for the briefest of seconds, then he stepped around him. He joined Young, the terp and the old man at the end of the alley, next to a door that marked the edge of the cleared ground. The terp and the old man began an intense conversation both speaking at the same time.

‘What’s he saying?’ asked Captain Sparks. The terp continued the conversation. ‘Tell us what he is saying.’ The terp went on speaking in Pashtu. ‘NO, no, no. It’s not for you to talk, you need to tell us what he’s saying’, demanded Sparks.

‘We don’t want to move, he says’, said the terp.

‘He doesn’t have to move’, said the captain.

‘His family is over there and he wants to stay with them’, said the terp, pointing through the door and along the path.

‘He doesn’t have to move’, said the captain again.

‘We want to know if it’s safe to move out there. Are there any more Taliban bombs?’ said Young.

Figure 2 Operation Mushtaraq (© Google 2011; Image © Digital Globe 2011)

The old man had started explaining there were no bombs, when Mohammad, who had followed Captain Sparks up the alleyway, sprinted through the door. ‘No, no, no, don’t go, don’t go’, yelled the terp, trying to grab him. But Mohammad was too quick. He made it to the other side, turned and ran back. ‘There’s nothing, no mines’, he said, talking as if everyone were stupid. The old man wanted to walk across too, to be with his family. ‘He’s free to go wherever he wants’, said Captain Sparks. The old man and Mohammad walked through the door and across a small bridge before turning into the next compound, the last one that Bravo planned to clear that day. The ANA followed and then the marines ran out, darting in different directions, going down on one knee and looking through their rifle sights.

Inside the compound was a family of three men and over a dozen kids. One man, crouching in front of a huge pile of harvested opium poppies, held an enormous dog in a neck lock to stop it barking. Another carried a baby wearing an all-in-one suit; with the hood covering its head and a cone shape over its feet, the baby looked like a mermaid. The men were patted down as the marines walked around their home, checking for IEDs or weapons.

‘Who’s the elder? Who’s the guy I want to talk to?’ asked a marine. The terp pointed to an older man, who held the baby in the mermaid suit. Two boys and a young girl walked from the back of the building. The boys smiled as they were searched. The women were hidden somewhere.

‘Have the Taliban been here?’ asked the marine.

‘Yesterday, they were in the yard around our house but they haven’t been here today’, said one of the elder’s sons. The elder walked past me, still holding the baby, gesticulating towards a small room next to the gate. ‘Look! This is where we make our bread.’ He disappeared inside and came out with a piece of thick, round bread. He pretended to take a bite out of it, before offering it to me. He had one of the kindest smiles I’ve ever seen, so kind I was instantly convinced he’d offer the piece of bread if it were the last thing he had. He wore a beaten-up old purple jumper with holes over a tatty green jumper, followed by a dusty green waistcoat. His turban had once been white but was now the same colour as the mud walls.

He put both the baby and the bread on the ground and excitedly reached into his pocket. ‘Card, card’, he said. The baby started crying. A gorgeous little girl, with dark red hair and a bright green headscarf, walked over and picked it up. She was probably no more than eight years old but knew how to look after the baby on her own.

The old man pulled out a small bundle, unwrapped several layers of cloth and handed over a card bearing his photograph in the bottom right corner and the Afghan flag in the top left. ‘This is an ID card’, said the terp, ‘a vote card.’

Outside the main building, one of the man’s sons and Mohammad were talking to a terp and the marines’ intelligence officer. ‘Tell your jets no to bomb this place’, Mohammad told them. The terp spoke over him. ‘Hey, are you listening to me?’ demanded Mohammad. The son smiled at him, bent down and gently pressed his hand against Mohammad’s, urging him to be quiet.

‘We’ve been stuck in the house’, said the son. ‘We listened to the radio and they said to stay indoors. We haven’t been able to go and wash at the mosque. We’ve had to wash like women.’ When they’d finished, I asked him what life in Marjah had been like under the Taliban. ‘When the Taliban governed, there were no robberies. And they ran quick and fair tribunals to settle disputes. If you left them alone, they left you alone.’ An Afghan soldier who understood Pashtu listened and didn’t look the least bit surprised.

I’d heard so much about life in Marjah under the Taliban that I asked everyone I could what it had been like. They all said similar things. ‘It was fine’; ‘it was not like under the government’; ‘there was no crime, no thieves and no robberies’. The only bad things I heard about the Taliban were that they smoked too much marijuana and didn’t spend enough time with their families.

The sound of gunfire filled the air above us. The family ran inside.

Some marines ran outside to see where the firing was coming from. Others smashed firing holes through the compound walls. Everyone else went into the house, with the family. The son who’d told me about life under the Taliban sat on a sack of seeds. He asked Mohammad to join him: ‘Come, come, have a cigarette’, he said, patting the sack next to him.

‘We’ve been living in constant anxiety’, the elder told me. ‘We thought the Taliban would beat us or the government would come and bomb us. We’re stuck in the middle, so we hide indoors, worried about the bombings.’

Mohammad took a cigarette and asked the marines if he could smoke. They told him of course he could, appearing to think this was his first time. He lit up and started smoking like a trooper, making a show of it and enjoying being the centre of attention. Faces eased every time they looked at him. I could still hear marines whispering to each other that he was twenty years old. ‘He’s got a cigarette in his right hand, imagine a prison shank in his left’, said one. Others joked that they wanted to put him in their backpacks and give him a pistol, so he could protect them. But their jokes were made discreetly and Mohammad didn’t know about them. The ANA had no fears about political correctness. They picked him up and showed him around. At one point they put him in a kind of swinging basket that hung in the middle of the corridor, which infuriated him.

Four children stood in a corner, transfixed by everything the marines did and said. After months of rumours and fear, here they were, laughing, joking and handing out sweets in the children’s very own home. Everyone had expected much worse. One man said he’d been told the marines would eat his children.

Janofsky took the elder to one side. He wanted to rent a room for himself and his squad for the night. The elder kept saying he was afraid of the helicopters.

‘The helicopters are on our side and when you’re in here, you’re on our side too, so the helicopters are here for you too’, said Janofsky.

The man bent down and touched his sacks of seeds, begging the marines not to take them. Janofsky assured him that no marines would take any of his food. ‘We’re here to provide security to you and the people of Marjah’, he said.

‘All we have here is tea and bread’, the man replied. He couldn’t grasp the idea that armed men had entered his home but wouldn’t hurt him or steal his food.

Janofsky looked confused too. All he wanted was ‘just to rent his place for the night’.

The interpreter wasn’t helping: ‘You should leave this house and go away’, he told the old man, totally mistranslating what Janofsky had said.

The man’s kind and pleading smile dropped into a look of absolute terror. He couldn’t speak. He thought he and his whole family had been handed a death sentence.

‘There is fighting so you shouldn’t be here’, added the terp nonchalantly.

‘Where can I go? What if you bomb us?’ asked the man, panicking.

Janofsky sensed the terror in the man’s voice and asked what he was saying.

‘Where should we move?’ said the terp.

‘Who should move? No, they’ll be OK to stay here with us, for tonight’, said Janofsky, confused.

‘OK, you can stay here’, said the terp, casually, as if he’d been abusing his power just for the fun of it. The old man had almost been reduced to tears.

More bullets cracked over the compound. One smashed through a window and sank into the high walls of the corridor above our heads.

We sat down and started talking. The sons made everyone glasses of tea. You could hear the deep piston thuds of guns being fired outside but everyone had stopped noticing. The family weren’t going to be turfed out of their homes to face the bombs, their babies weren’t going to be eaten and nothing would be taken. There was a delightful sense of relief throughout the room. For an hour or so, everyone enjoyed being in each other’s company. Marjah seemed not such a difficult place to be.

On the marines’ maps, the compound where we were was called La Mirage. It was one of several strange names I’d heard. Other houses were called Toby’s, the Cave, Cherry’s and Heroes. It wasn’t until I was in North Carolina, some months later, on my way to Camp Lejuene, 1/6 Marines US base, that I realised where the names came from. I drove past a warehouse surrounded by cars; it looked like Tony Soprano’s strip club. It actually was a strip club and I looked at the sign to see if it was named the Bada-Bing. But it was La Mirage. When I’d passed the Cave, and later Cherry’s, I realised the Marines had named the landmark buildings of Kuru Charai after North Carolina’s titty bars.

Janofsky and First Squad stayed in the house overnight. Everyone else had to make a mad dash back through the four buildings they’d fought their way through earlier on. The first two were easy; it was possible to go through them without ever leaving the protection of their high mud walls. But as soon as we entered the mosque compound, the crackle of machine-gun fire filled the courtyard and everyone darted under the covered porch. The fire was so great it felt like a giant was throwing huge fistfuls of stones against the mosque. Marines on either side of me fired into different parts of the pork chop, the densely-populated area the marines had still to clear, suggesting we were being attacked from two different positions.

Whenever anyone stepped into the courtyard, there came another ear-piercing crackle of shots. The four marines next to me lined up and took hand grenades out of their pockets. Hand grenades? I thought to myself. They don’t still throw hand grenades, do they? And anyway, the enemy can’t be that close. I thought they were over a hundred metres away. I’d been telling myself, as I always did when I heard that awful cracking sound, that the Taliban were terrible shots, that they didn’t know how to use their sights and if they did, their guns were so old the sights would be no good anyway. But they were a hand grenade’s throw away? A child could be on target at that distance. The four marines ran across the courtyard and threw their grenades over the wall in front, not behind, where most of the firing had been coming from. They’re over there as well? We’re surrounded? Again?

‘Frag out!’

‘FRAG OUT!’

‘FRAG OUT!’ The marines tossed their grenades, cackling with delight as they exploded.

The gunfire continued and soon, the courtyard was covered in broken glass and hot bullet cases. Every time the marines fired, someone replied with greater fire. Then it stopped. The Taliban seemed to have worked out that if they launched attacks from several positions at the same time, they had a good few minutes before they were in serious danger. One by one, we sprinted across the courtyard, over a wall, across a ditch, over another high wall and into the last compound before the base.

*  *  *  *  *

Back at the base, Captain Sparks wrestled with the biggest surprise of Marjah, the highly-skilled snipers. The tiny roof I’d seen being turned into a watchtower was now walled with sandbags but even so, a marine had been shot there. Two marines had been shot on the roof of the main building. The snipers were in well-concealed positions, roughly three hundred metres from the base. One sniper had fired just four bullets during those first two days and hit three marines. Locating someone so patient was hard enough but there were also marksmen nearby, who followed each sniper’s shot with a few single shots from their AK47s, confusing anyone who thought they knew roughly where the first shot had come from.

Captain Sparks stood outside the base, trying to work out the sniper’s positions. There was another crack. ‘Did he just shoot the sandbag? It sure looked to me like he shot the sandbag’, he said. ‘He did’, said a marine in front of him. Sparks had walked out of the big double doors that led into the courtyard and stood on the verandah, studying the watchtower. In front of him were a line of marines in full combat gear. It looked ceremonial; as if a king had come out of his palace to survey his land and the sentries had assembled to protect him.

Another crack filled the courtyard. Captain Sparks looked up. There was another crack. ‘Is that Koenig firing?’ he asked.

‘It is, Sir.’ Lance Corporal Koenig was one of the marines lying down behind the sandbags.

‘There’s no holes in the Afghan flag yet. Semper Fi’, said Sparks as he walked inside. ‘The sniper is the most psychologically effective weapon on the battlefield, because there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Stay low, keep your heads down’, shouted one of the marines on the verandah. Their eyes were fixed grimly on the sandbags at the top of the watchtower. There were different theories about where the snipers were; Captain Sparks was sure they were two to three hundred metres north-west of the base, hiding somewhere in the pork chop. ‘So there’s nothing we can do about it until we clear it’, he said.

Captain Sparks walked into his room and began putting on his helmet and his body armour, his chest rig, stuffed with sixteen magazines of ammunition. As he walked through the door, he passed a marine standing in the corridor looking lost. ‘Bozman, stay motivated!’ he said, like a gym instructor rallying a sagging spin class.

Above us, the cracks of the competition between marksmen continued. Its structure was polite, like a conversation between strangers; back and forth, back and forth, sometimes in single words, sometimes in sentences. Often, the participants waited minutes to take their turn. In between, there was an awful silence. It was careful, considered and cerebral. There seemed to be rules, tricks, feints and a mutual respect that suggested an etiquette. Occasionally, of course, someone at either end collapsed into a lifeless heap.

‘It’s not Enemy at the Gate’, one of the marine snipers explained later, ‘but you do try to get in the other guy’s head.’

The first sergeant ran outside and told the men in the watchtower to get their heads down. One of the terps had heard the Taliban on their radios, saying they were trying to hit the tip of something, ‘And it better not be a fucking Kevlar’, he said. The panicked look I’d seen on the first morning appeared again on a few faces.

‘Someone sticks their head up and you get a round which just misses, or hits, it will paralyse a unit’, said Tim Coderre, the law enforcement advisor. He thought there were at least five snipers. ‘There’s probably nothing more lethal other than unmanned aerial stuff.’

The forward air controller, whose job it was to call in air strikes, asked Captain Sparks where he thought the snipers were. Sparks thought there were two positions he could be sure of. The forward air controller said he’d drop a Hellfire missile on them next time the marines took fire. ‘It’s friggin’ counter-insurgency in a ghost town. There’s nobody out there’, he said, thinking all the civilians had fled.

‘That’s what I thought earlier’, said Sparks, ‘until I went into that compound and there were thirty women and children hunkered down inside, where third platoon’s at.’ Such brief exchanges were the difference between those thirty women and children living and dying.

The following day, one of the snipers fired again, hitting Lance Corporal Koenig in the head as he bobbed up over the top of the sandbags.

‘I came up and turned around to get my rifle passed to me and as I turned around, I guess my head was just a little above the sandbags and he shot and ended up hitting me directly in the head’, said Koenig. He had an incredible glow about him for someone who’d just been shot in the head. Or maybe he glowed because he’d been shot in the head and was able to tell me about it. He glowed like a born-again Christian or a Hare Krishna. His whole face was smiling. ‘It cracked me back and I was dazed and didn’t really know what was going on. I was like, “I’m hit!”’ He picked his helmet off the ground and showed me a huge dent in the front. ‘This is where I was hit, about an inch above my eyes. And this is the mount where it hit. This is what they say stopped the round from going through the Kevlar.’ He showed me a broken metal brace, for attaching night vision goggles, that had been on the front of his helmet. Contrary to popular belief, even of the soldiers and marines who wear them, their helmets aren’t actually bullet-proof, especially if they’re hit square on. ‘It hurt really, really bad. I thought I was dying. I thought I’d actually been hit, it scared me pretty bad.’

Four marines had been shot on the roof above us in the space of just two days. They had probably all been shot by one sniper, whose position was still unknown. This would be terrifying to most people but Captain Sparks was encouraged by it.

‘He’s not a real sniper’, he said. ‘If he was we’d have a lot more casualties. He’s just very good with whatever he’s got.’ That was perhaps what separated Captain Sparks from everyone else and made him either a genuine warrior or a complete lunatic. He always worked out a way to be encouraged by everything and anything, no matter how discouraging things first appeared. Sometimes you could see it happening. He’d say something that sounded like an admission of failure or an acknowledgement of limitations. But then he’d say something to temper it and by the time the third sentence had left his mouth he’d created an argument to destroy the hopelessness of the first and was completely gung-ho again. I’ve met people who could pick themselves up and come back from things but never anyone who could do it in the space of three sentences.

To me – and I’m sure to many of the marines – it looked like there was still an awfully long way to go and a lot that could go badly wrong. Bravo Company had been in Marjah for two days; they’d lost one man, suffered four casualties, were surrounded and cut off from the other companies, who were still miles away. And they only controlled five buildings in Karu Charai village, a slither of Marjah.