A few months before they handed over Sangin, the British had cleared exactly that area the Marines now aimed at. It had cost them dear. In one incident alone, five British soldiers had been killed by a daisy chain of IEDs on Pharmacy Road, the main road through Wishtan. That was the biggest single loss of British life since the war began. Olaf Schmid, a bomb disposal expert and posthumous recipient of the George Cross, cleared thirty-one IEDs in twenty-four hours there, only to be killed soon afterwards.
The British had established three patrol bases along Pharmacy Road but these were abandoned by the Marines. This had given the Taliban several small valleys and a maze of alleys and compounds to disappear into if they attacked the remaining bases in the north and west.
The night before the operation, Lima Company travelled to the nearest remaining patrol base. It was the one I’d been in three and a half years earlier, when the Grenadier Guards were attacked with rockets and machine-gun fire. The plan was to slowly clear Wishtan before re-establishing the old British patrol bases. Pharmacy Road was to be cleared by ABVs (Assault Breacher Vehicles): ‘super-tanks’ carrying huge claw-like ploughs instead of gun barrels. These would be followed by armoured bulldozers, to flatten everything a hundred metres either side of the road. ‘If it casts a shadow, it gets flattened’, said Captain Peterson. ‘I’d rather have a headache that costs money at a shura than one that costs blood.’ If a house were occupied, he said, he would risk letting it stand, although the surrounding walls would have to go. He expected most buildings to be abandoned.
Before the bulldozers could start, the marines had to clear every building either side of Pharmacy Road on foot. It would be a painstaking and hazardous process; although the road was only a kilometre long, clearing it was expected to take three to four days.
The night before the operation began was miserable, so cold that some marines chose to stand, like skid row bums, around a burning oil drum, rather than sleep. Afghan winters are as punishing as the summers; a few hours in one made you nostalgic for the other. Only for a few weeks in between seasons is the weather bearable. The rest of the time, you have to make a massive effort just to survive. Wearing scarves around their necks, woolly hats under their helmets and sometimes, balaclavas beneath their woolly hats, the marines jumped up and down on the spot or chain-smoked to keep warm.
Just before first light, everyone put on their gear and congregated near the main gate. Captain Peterson and his officers formed a human tunnel, like basketball players before a game. As the marines streamed past, out of the gate, the officers patted them on their backs.
Every path, road, window and doorway was expected to be laced with IEDs, so the plan was to travel through people’s houses or over their roofs, as much as possible. After a short walk up Pharmacy Road, the marines tried to blast their way into the first compound they came across, before they remembered the super-tank ABVs. Soon, one came roaring forwards towards the wall. When it was lined up, the driver changed gear; the engine snorted and spewed out thick grey smoke. It looked like the tank was psyching itself up. Then it moved forward, blades raised high, and pushed the wall over like a wave toppling a sandcastle.
The marines walked through the hole and saw a well-built white house, with a green, pink and blue border along its plastered walls. The floor was cement but piles of dust and twigs lay everywhere. The marines circled, then, crouched down, brushing the piles with their hands, looking for any wires. Lance Corporal Payne, the platoon’s minesweeper, walked up the stairs and almost right on to an IED. ‘It’s a pressure plate’, said Payne, ‘right where we would have stepped.’ It was also on the roof, where the marines thought they’d be safest.
Whether it was the large amount of equipment he carried or his absolute lack of swagger, Payne walked with a slight waddle and always had an apologetic look on his face. He spoke in short sentences, if he spoke at all. His slight speech impediment had earned him the nickname of ‘Elmer Fudd’. These things – and the fact that he was doing one of the most dangerous jobs, in one of the most dangerous districts of the most dangerous province in Afghanistan and didn’t seek the tiniest nod of appreciation or respect – made him one of the most admirable marines I’d ever met. But I’m sure if I’d told him that he would have shuffled away, looking for something to carry or a suspicious pile of dirt to start digging in.
There were black fingermarks on the walls, small piles of neatly-arranged rocks, like little totem poles and random mounds of dust all over the floor. The marines knew these were ‘indicators’ – warning signs for local people – but no one understood what they meant. Several times, moving to avoid one mound of dirt, I almost stepped on another. Soon, we were surrounded by voices: ‘Hey, Payne, this is definitely something’; ‘Hey, Payne, this is shady as fuck right here.’ Around me, marines delicately brushed away layers of dirt with their fingers, trying to reveal what was underneath. It was odd to see them suddenly being so gentle, as if they were stroking a child’s hair. Their muscle, firepower and aggression had suddenly been rendered utterly useless.
‘Fuck my life’, said a marine, nervously tiptoeing past.
The first compound cleared, the marines blasted their way through the next wall. They were about to walk through when a man and his two sons appeared in a doorway further up Pharmacy Road. The marines froze where they were. The man was so tall and thin that his body seemed to be caving in on itself. He walked towards us with a limp. As he came closer, I could see that one of his eyes was almost closed by scar tissue; it looked like his skin had melted and slid down the right side of his face.
‘There are mines there’, the man said, pointing at our feet. Rock was right behind us. He confirmed what the man appeared to be saying; we were standing on IEDs. After some hurried dialogue, Rock said the mines were up against the wall, two feet behind us. The man’s sons approached, then disappeared down an alley the marines had thought too dangerous.
The man said there were mines in the alley next to his house. ‘We don’t know where the mines are but they have piled rocks, implying no one should cross that point’, he said. Pointing to another area, beyond the hole the marines had just blown, he said there were mines there too. The man was asked how he knew where the IEDs were. He offered to lead everyone to his house, show them the piles of rocks and tell them what he thought they meant. But the marines decided to keep going in the direction they’d already started, away from Pharmacy Road.
The marines asked if the Taliban ever fired from his house, in an accusatory tone that I thought was unfair. The man said they hadn’t, but they had been close by. ‘Thank you, bye’, said the man, walking back to his house. ‘Thank you, bye’, said Rock.
The people with a little money had fled Wishtan; those who remained were the desperately poor and the powerless. They were exactly the people the marines should have been helping and who they could have built relationships with. Not helping the man who had helped us felt like a moral failure. It also seemed a waste. If the marines had someone like him they could trust, they could have walked through Wishtan in twenty minutes.
I asked Lieutenant Grell, the most senior officer present, if the man’s house would be bulldozed. His cheeks tightened, exposing his front teeth slightly, as if he’d just dipped a toe in cold water. ‘That’s what ... that’s what’s on ... I mean if we knock it down we’re gonna offer him a ton of money, offer him some other place to live but ...’ He was distracted by the man, who had walked to the end of the alley outside his front door and was pointing out exactly where the IEDs were. ‘Thank you’ said Grell, waving at him. The man waved back, walked inside his house and closed the gate.
As we moved from roof to roof, I heard children’s squeaks and giggles and almost every chimney had smoke coming out of it. But none of the families were evacuated or told about what was happening.
Soon, every few minutes, there were explosions that sucked the air out of my lungs. Most came from the marines blasting their way through Wishtan, creating new routes with wall charges and A-POBs. Even the buildings that weren’t to be demolished cracked and crumbled. Occasionally blasts came unexpectedly, producing different sounds and dark smoke. These were IEDs set off by the blasts or by the ABVs as they ploughed their way up Pharmacy Road. When that happened, everyone stiffened and waited in silence, until a voice on the radio told them someone hadn’t just stepped on an IED.
A man carrying a weapon wrapped in cloth was spotted in an alley on the other side of the building we stood on. An air strike was called in.
We didn’t hear a plane, just the whoosh of a missile almost on top of us. We braced ourselves. We heard a heavy thud, as if a boulder had just been dropped. A thin plume of black smoke rose into the air. ‘Dude, that was weak’, said a marine next to me, who had curled up into a ball and put his fingers in his ears.
‘That was a dud?’
‘It had to have been.’
‘Do you think the dud killed him?’
‘If it hit him right on the head!’ said Sergeant Giles, sarcastically.
It was soon impossible to proceed without walking along a path that ran parallel to Pharmacy Road and across the front of the house from where the Grenadier Guards had been attacked. Its few remaining walls were pockmarked by bullet-holes and shrapnel spray. In the rubble, two white Taliban flags stood; either a sign of defiance or another indicator that nobody understood.
Outside the house, several large rocks looked incongruous on the path. Payne, on his knees, scraped at the ground with his knife. Hancock slowly followed, stretching each leg straight out and feeling the ground with his toes before he took a step. He looked like a madman who wouldn’t step on the cracks, or someone wearing their best pair of shoes, avoiding puddles. Hancock thought the rocks were a guide for someone at the other end of a command wire. ‘They see someone walk by it, they know that’s when to pull the trigger ... Boom!’ He fanned his hands out to demonstrate the explosion.
‘See that hole filled with rock?’ said Hancock, ‘I’m not going there. That’s like the one that hit McGuinness.’ McGuinness had stepped on IED a few weeks earlier, on Thanksgiving Day. He had survived.
We approached an S-shaped bend in the path, a junction of four alleys. The marines were desperate not to walk there. There were four big dips in the path, filled with gravel. Payne climbed a wall and looked for an alternative route.
Figure 4 Pharmacy Road (© Google 2011; Image © Digital Globe 2011)
‘Is there a better way to go besides this fucking choke point?’ asked Hancock, hopefully.
Payne peered over the wall for a long time: ‘No.’
‘There have to be IEDs on this fucking corner’, said Hancock.
No one knew it at the time but Hancock was absolutely right. A jug and a brake drum were buried just under the path, packed with home-made explosives. They were part of a seven-IED daisy chain, designed to kill or maim an entire platoon. Two command wires led down two alleys; at the end of one, someone watched, waiting to detonate the bombs. That person held the power source, probably a battery, in one hand and the command wire in the other, ready to connect them and set off the daisy chain. This detonation mechanism left no metal for Payne to detect. Slowly, he swept the ground. Hancock nervously followed behind. I followed him; delicately, we inched our way forwards, stepping right over the IEDs.
I didn’t breathe until I got past the corner. Four marines came behind me, looking down each alley through the sights of their rifles. Payne put the ladder up against another wall, trying to find a way off the path – the ‘fucking path’ – as everyone now called it. As he reached the top of the ladder, a huge explosion roared behind us. I turned: two plumes of brown dust filled the alley and stones and rocks rained on us.
‘IS ANYBODY HIT? IS ANYBODY HIT?’ screamed the marines. I couldn’t see around the corner but could hear some awful groans.
‘That had to be a command wire.’
‘Motherfuckers, man.’
I walked back to see what had happened. Everyone had frozen where they stood, their feet locked to the ground. The groans became horrendous begging sounds. As the dust cleared I saw a crater with the fragments of a yellow plastic jug in it. The jug was big enough to have held about forty pounds of explosives, enough to blow several people to pieces.
‘Jesus fucking Christ, it was right there’, said a marine. He pointed at the crater, about eight feet away.
Another marine was on his knees, his right hand reaching for something to grab hold of. But he couldn’t even find the ground. The medic was screaming from far away; could he hear, could he see, could he crawl away from the corner? At least three IEDs had gone off together but everyone was sure there were more.
Payne appeared next to me. The marine who’d been closest to the blast said, ‘You think we should step out this way, man?’ Payne surveyed the corner for a second, then quietly walked forward. He stepped over the first crater and bent down to the casualty. It was Thomas, known as Big T; the other marines used to playfully mock him, because he flinched at any explosion, even small and controlled ones.
‘Can you stand up, can you see?’ asked Payne.
‘He’s blind! Big T’s a priority!’ someone screamed into a radio. Less than three feet away from Big T’s head was another crater, full of a fizzing dark powder that sounded like a fistful of matches being scratched alight at once. It felt as if something else could explode at any moment.
Payne tried to get Big T on to his feet but he just patted the ground around him and groaned. ‘Can you see? Can you stand up?’
‘Huh?’
‘Can you see?’
‘Huh?’
‘He can’t hear you, man’, the medic shouted. Big T was blind and deaf. Payne helped him to his feet but he collapsed, groaning. ‘Arrrggggh fuck.’
‘Big T, follow me, grab my shoulder’, said Payne. Putting Big T’s arm around his neck, he staggered back down the path.
I was suddenly alone, standing between two smoking craters. ‘Stay where you’re at, don’t move’, yelled a marine in front of me.
‘The blast was right here’, someone shouted from around the corner. But the marine who’d told me not to move was also temporarily deaf.
Big T was lowered to the ground. He groaned and his arms hung lifelessly from his body, like a stuffed dummy. The black powder in the crater was now on fire, crackling ominously.
‘Do you remember what happened?’ the medic asked Big T.
‘Huh? What?’
‘Did you lose consciousness?’
‘Huh?’ Big T put his hands to his ears. His mouth was wide open and his glasses were covered in thick dust, hiding his eyes. It was a disturbing image that reminded me of Francis Bacon’s painting of a screaming pope.
‘We have to get him out of here’, said the medic.
I shouted to the nearest marine that the powder was still burning. ‘Could it explode?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know, I’m not going over there’, he said.
The daisy chain had been made of seven IEDs but only three of them had gone off. Miraculously, none of the marines had been on top of them when they did. No one had been seriously injured. The people at the front of the patrol – Payne, Hancock, me, and four marines – had been standing on top of the IEDs for about ten minutes before we walked round the corner.
Payne came back to continue sweeping the path until we could get on to another roof. He was annoyed that he hadn’t found the metal brake drum that one of the IEDs was made from.
An old man, leading a donkey pulling a cart full of firewood, appeared. ‘Why don’t we just follow him?’ said one of the marines. But nobody dared. The old man guided his donkey and cart around us, beyond the edge of the narrow path Payne had cleared and on down the uncleared path ahead, without saying a word.
A marine pointed down one of the alleys. He was sure that’s where the triggerman was hiding. ‘It’s alright’, he said, ‘he’ll be dead soon.’
Eventually, we climbed on to another roof. We sat down and stared into space. Payne pieced together what had happened. I asked if it was simple human error that had saved us. Payne thought the triggerman probably hadn’t had a perfect view and had misjudged where the marines were when he connected the wire to the battery. ‘They usually try to time us but they don’t always get it right on. It’s harder to find command wires [IEDs] but there’s less injuries from them. But Big T is lucky.’ He looked down for a few seconds: ‘We’re all pretty lucky we walked over it.’
Sergeant Giles, who’d been behind the blast, said that five IEDs had gone off and one ‘was a fucking pressure cooker and it had a bunch of big ass gears and shit in it. Only half the jug actually blew.’
‘So they were either poorly made or really old’, said Hancock. ‘How did we walk by all that?’ he asked despondently, holding his hands out, almost begging for mercy.
‘It wasn’t where we swept, it was off to the side of the road’, said Giles, reassuringly.
‘Except that one we walked right over’, said Hancock, who wouldn’t easily be convinced.
They talked about belts of IEDs, which I hadn’t heard of before. ‘There’ll be a line’, said Sergeant Giles, ‘like this whole fucking line of IEDs.’ He drew circles in the air with his hand, ‘so that no matter where you go, you’re gonna run into one.’ Everyone let that sink in for a few seconds, then Giles tried to lighten everyone’s mood: ‘Thomas can’t hear shit, he’s like Twombly in Black Hawk Down.’ ‘I’d say I’m happy for him’, said Hancock. ‘He’s lucky and he’s gonna get out of this shit, probably for a while.’ He looked overwhelmed, as he had done since I’d seen him on that first patrol. He let his head drop back until his helmet hit the wall behind him. ‘Dude, I just don’t know how we’re gonna find these things’, he said, talking more to himself than anyone else. ‘This place is the fucking wild wild west.’
Later, I asked him how he kept going. ‘It sucks, mentally’, he told me, ‘but I signed up to do this job, I’m gonna do it and get through, one way or another. There’s not really much I can do about it now. We all volunteered. We weren’t drafted or anything, so you can’t say much, whether it’s good or bad. Whether people are dying or not, it was our choice.’
As the light began to fade, we were told to lie down. The marines on Pharmacy Road were about to fire a MIC-LIC (Mine Clearing Line Charge). MIC-LICs worked on the same principle as A-POBs but on a bigger scale. Instead of giant football socks stuffed with grenades, MIC-LICs were more like one-hundred-metre-long sleeping bags, stuffed with shoeboxes full of explosives. ‘It’s a great end to the day’, said Giles, as everyone put their fingers in their ears. ‘I’m scared’, said a marine. We were much closer than was thought safe. And there were families in at least two of the compounds between us and Pharmacy Road.
‘I forget. Is it eyes closed and mouth open?’ asked a marine as he curled up into the foetal position. ‘Definitely keep your mouth open, ’cos of the pressure’, said another.
I heard what sounded like a jet blast and saw a rocket spiralling up, then down, leaving an arc of dirty brown smoke behind. Everyone waited for the explosion. Ten seconds passed. Twenty seconds. Thirty. A minute. A blast came from the corner where the daisy chain was. ‘Oh hell, no’, said one of the marines, echoing what everyone was thinking – that one of the remaining two IEDs in the chain had gone off. It had, but in a controlled detonation. The EOD team had arrived and blown them up.
Another minute passed, then a long stretch of Pharmacy Road was filled with a line of fireballs the size of hot air balloons, which soon turned into a long, dark mushroom cloud. The compounds around us filled up with so much dust they looked like they’d been lined with explosives.
‘It was like Jesus came down and punched the earth’, said a Japanese-American marine called Futrell. We climbed off the roof and went back down the path, to sleep in one of the cleared compounds.
The marines found twelve IEDs on that first day, some with highly complex counter-tampering devices; decoy command wires or fake pressure plates. These drew people close to the mines, believing they’d disconnected them, then the real trigger was pulled. But no one had been killed or lost limbs and although three marines were concussed, one very badly, the marines would have gladly accepted those statistics at the start of the operation. Nor had any civilians been killed or wounded, although that seemed to have as much to do with luck as planning.
Before everyone had bedded down, a man came out from behind the house with the white flags. ‘What does he want?’ asked one of the marines.
‘What’s the matter?’ Rock asked the man.
‘The matter is that the children are screaming when they hear the explosions, they fear the planes will come and bomb. I say to them, “It’s night, we are fifty people in this house, where can I take you? It’s winter, it’s cold”.’ He pointed out his house and begged to be left alone: ‘Please take care of us, please do not shoot us.’ ‘Hey man, it’s the Taliban placing all these IEDs up and down these alleys. That’s what’s been blowing up all day’, said the marine in charge of intelligence.
Two men said they wanted to get to their home, a compound alongside the one the marines planned to sleep in. Lieutenant Mike Owen, who didn’t disguise his automatic contempt for the men, didn’t bother to listen to their request. He assumed they wanted to walk right through Wishtan. ‘Check this out. Let them know this’, he said to his terp. ‘We have a weapon pointed down this direction. If anything’s moving, we’re going to shoot it, so if they want to get shot ...’
One of the men interrupted, ‘I am not going there. My house is here. You see the gate in that corner?’ He motioned towards a building less than thirty feet away.
‘Tell him we’re done talking’, snapped Owen. ‘If they walk up there, they’re gonna get shot. We have an operation to kill all the Taliban and make this place safer. If they come in here we’re gonna think they’re Taliban and we’re gonna shoot them.’
Sergeant Giles appeared behind Owen and politely asked what was happening.
‘These guys are trying to sneak in here’, Owen said, ‘they say they fucking own this place.’
Sergeant Giles explained that he’d met the men already and that they were telling the truth.
‘So we’re just letting people occupy right behind us?’ asked Owen.
‘Yes, we already talked to them today’, said Giles.
‘Like no shit! Right behind us?’ asked Owen again. He made it clear he thought this was a stupid idea.
‘Yes’, said Giles. He spoke to the men in Pashtu: ‘Delta rasha [come here].’ But they were now too petrified to move. ‘You can go to your house if you want’, said Giles, in English. But Owen had walked away, taking his terp with him, so the men stayed where they were, too afraid to walk back to their house. Eventually, Rock arrived and told the men they could go home.
* * * * *
The next morning, the marines woke at dawn and walked back to the roof where they had finished the day before. They waited there until enough walls had been blown for them to move to the next compound.
A young boy walked along the path below. ‘Ask him if he’s seen any Taliban’, said one of the marines. There was a lengthy back and forth exchange, which the marines took to mean he was avoiding the question. Eventually, Rock said that the boy had come to get some stuff from his family’s house, which was on the corner where the daisy chain had been. The boy said that he usually spent all day in the bazaar and only came here at night.
‘Hey, if he goes to the bazaar during the day and comes back here at night, why is he here right now?’ asked a marine. This was a typical pattern of meetings with local people – catching them out or spotting the tiniest of contradictions, even if they only arose from translation, was preferred to actually finding anything out, leave alone offering help or reassurance.
The boy was only about twelve but even children weren’t above suspicion. A marine photographer, who told me he didn’t think there was any such thing as civilian casualties, claimed to have personally seen little girls burying IEDs. He also said that little boys were usually Taliban spotters. Another marine told me about ‘the Syrian Solution’ that they’d been taught at military college. In the eighties, facing protest in the city of Hama, Hafez Al Assad had sent the military in, who’d killed at least ten thousand people, demolished the town and then – and this was news to me – spread salt everywhere, so that nothing would ever grow there again. I didn’t need to ask if the marine thought that the Syrian solution would work in Sangin.
The boy had a reasonable answer as to why he’d come back during the day: he was moving as much as he could from the old family house to the house they had just moved to. ‘Will you come back?’ asked Rock.
‘I am going and coming back frequently.’
‘Why?’
‘Because there are foreigners here.’
The boy was told to crouch down. Another wall charge was about to explode, not far from where he was walking.
‘Don’t trust anyone in this fucking area’, said Rock. He was capable of one minute saying he thought that everyone was Taliban, then being reduced to tears at their plight the next. A marine said he’d been told about a fifteen-year-old Taliban kid. He thought the kid, now curled up in a ball below us, looked about fifteen and was probably the one he’d heard about. The boy put his elbows on his knees and his fingers in his ears, waiting for the explosion. When it came, he picked his nose, got up and walked away. He sprinted back again a minute later; his goats had escaped through the hole that had just been blown in the walls of his compound.
‘I wonder where their Alamo’s gonna be?’ one of the marines asked Sergeant Giles.
‘I don’t think they’re going to be stupid enough to have one’, Giles replied. ‘It would make sense for them to just continue a war of attrition. Basically, they have a defence in depth set up throughout the whole city where they can continuously fall back, then swarm back around and attack from different directions.’
A member of the marines’ Psychological Operations (Psy-Ops) team arrived. He set up a speaker on the roof where we had moved. He had two Pashtu messages, he said, ‘a friendly one and a call out one.’ One message of reassurance and one challenge to the Taliban. He waited for an A-POB blast, then played them. First came reassurance:
‘People of Sangin, peace and the blessings of God be with you, The national forces and their international allies are conducting an operation in the Wishtan area to establish sovereignty in this area, remove dangerous mines and destroy the houses which these criminals use for hiding weapons, bombs and mines. If these criminals have hidden weapons and bombs in the Wishtan area, the Afghan national forces and their allies will find these places and will destroy them in order to establish government control. Help your Afghan brothers and show them the places where the criminals have hidden weapons and bombs so that we can destroy these destructive weapons. If you don’t do this these forces will have no choice but to clear the way with bombs. It’s your choice, it’s up to you. Show the places of the bombs to the Afghan forces and their allies or if you know where the mines are, cut the wires and bring them to our post. Thank you for your help.’
‘And if you don’t have bombs in your house or can’t disarm them yourself and bring them to us’, they could have added, ‘we will blast our way through anyway.’ As for the Afghan national forces, supposedly accompanying the ‘international allies’, I hadn’t seen any yet.
The challenge to the Taliban was played next:
‘Listen, oh, enemies. The national forces and their allies are conducting an operation in this area. Cowards, you are taking money from these poor people, you attack these innocent people and lay mines beside their houses. Oh cowards! The Afghan National Army and Police are taking pride in fighting you. To fight you and finish you! Leave your cowardice and do not use these innocent women and children. Stay and fight like men.’
I’d started to get some feeling back into my toes, and in a few muscles, but my bones had yet to thaw, making my legs feel like badly-microwaved spare ribs.
As the marines cleared another building, a group of old men appeared through a gate and walked towards us, waving cautiously. The marines didn’t want to leave the building and meet them halfway, because the ground between hadn’t been swept. But when the men stopped and gestured for us to approach, the marines reluctantly walked forwards.
The oldest man had a thin white beard and eyes as bright blue as Peter O’Toole’s in Lawrence of Arabia. But the skin underneath sagged heavily, making them weep constantly and giving him a look of painful sadness. The marine’s intelligence officer also noticed how blue the man’s eyes were but couldn’t put whatever he was thinking into words. He just pointed to them and said, ‘Wow.’ Then, remembering his job, he struggled to think of a question. In the end, he managed to say: ‘Tell us about this area.’
The men said they didn’t understand what he wanted to know. He then asked where they lived. The men pointed over their left shoulders.
‘Will you walk us through the compound to show us a safe route?’ asked the intelligence officer.
‘Yes, yes’, said one of the men, ‘but you cannot stay there.’ ‘The women and children are scared’, said another. ‘We came here to ask what shall we do? When you come to our house will there be damage?’ A third man asked, ‘We want to know whether we will be harmed or not. When we leave the house, the women and children start screaming and they can’t keep calm anywhere. When there are explosions, it rocks our rooms and we are so scared we don’t know which way to go.
‘If there are women and children in a house, will you still go on the rooftop and sit there? Will you still blow your way into that house? We have come to find out. If you leave us alone we will not move out, because it’s cold. If it makes no difference to you whether there is a family in there or not, then we will have to leave.’
‘Are there mines?’ asked Rock.
‘We will not tell you if there are or not. If we say there aren’t, it’s possible that there are. If we say there are, then you will ask us to show you and we don’t know where they are. The Taliban places them and hides them, how are we supposed to know where they are?’
The marines asked about one house, higher than the rest, with a flat roof that looked like a good place to keep watch and spend the night. The old men led us to that compound, waved the women inside and walked up an outdoor staircase and onto the roof. The marines immediately set up gun positions on the corners while Lieutenant Grell radioed back to base to ask how much rent he should pay the owner.
As we climbed, a small boy, with a disability that made him look like he’d had a stroke, pushed himself backwards into the corner at the top of the staircase. His mouth fell wide open and his right hand gripped the wall as the giants filed past. His eyes could only just move fast enough to take in all the strange things he was seeing. Another boy crouched next to Doc St Louis, the dark-skinned Haitian medic, examining his face as if he were trying to work out a puzzle. I half-expected him to rub the doc’s hand to see if the colour came off. The boy pulled a green shawl over his head; other than that, he barely moved, staring in wonder. ‘It’s fucking Yoda sitting right there’, said Hancock.
Everyone was told to walk to the back of the building, as two more MIC-LICs were fired, shattering the compound’s windows. The marines had two more walls to blast. It was getting dark quickly, so they used three times the normal amount of explosives to make sure they wouldn’t have to do it twice. I knew they weren’t checking compounds for civilians and could be disturbingly casual about where they placed explosives but I assumed they knew what was on the other side of the wall. The final blast was supposed to reveal a clear view across a field to the old British patrol base, Lima Company’s final objective.
But when I walked over the first pile of rubble and towards the second hole, I saw a small garden and behind it a house, cracked across its entire face, with two shattered windows. ‘Hey, we got a building right here’, said one of the marines. ‘There’s definitely a fucking hole though, a nice fucking hole. I’m proud of myself.’ He stopped smiling and sighed. ‘Now we got a building, fuck it.’
I was overtaken by a small boy, wearing a skullcap and a brown shawl draped over his shoulder. He was followed by a much younger boy. Both walked straight across the garden, eagerly calling for their friend. ‘Saifullah? Saifullah?’ they shouted, in voices that hadn’t yet broken. Two boys appeared from a small stairway that led to a basement, one no more than six years old, the other about twelve. Behind them two more children appeared, a girl and a boy, just six or seven years old, with impossibly innocent-looking faces. They all looked shocked; unable to express either fear or anger.
‘Hey, this is the guy that lives here’, said Payne, as the older boy walked towards us, smiling nervously. He nodded ‘salaam’, so quietly he was barely audible. The boy in the brown shawl stood next to his friend and turned to look at the marines.
‘Does anyone know how to say “I’m sorry”?’ asked Payne. Nobody did.
The boys talked among themselves. ‘Did they destroy your other house?’ said the one in the brown shawl.
‘Yes, they destroyed everything’, replied Saifullah.
‘They will destroy this room as well.’
‘Why?’ asked the younger boy, who looked about seven years old.
‘Because they want to be able to see from there. They can see the road from that position.’ The boy pointed to the compound from where we had come and then to the roof where the rest of the platoon had set up machine-gun positions.
The boys walked through a gate in the wall and into the field the marines had thought they were blasting their way to. ‘Did they make two holes in your house?’ asked the younger boy.
The boy in the brown shawl nodded. ‘They are going to make a bigger hole over there as well’, he said, pointing to the gate they had just walked through. ‘They think our doors are no good for them.’
The younger boy had a pained expression on his face. It looked like all this was new to him. It was the face of a child walking past a man asleep on the streets and asking why no one was willing to help. I walked up to the two young boys and flipped over the little viewing screen on my camera so they could see themselves. It was a pathetic attempt to make them feel better. They giggled and pointed at themselves, then became suddenly shy again. Behind them, the little girl was clearly eager to see herself too but she froze at the top of the stairs. I wanted to take the camera to her but I froze, too.
Beyond the compound walls, the bulldozers and ABVs strained for a few seconds as they came to walls and buildings, then exhaled as they flattened them.
As it got dark, we all put on every piece of clothing we had before we got into our sleeping bags. I tried to get to sleep before it got too cold but it was impossible, even wearing two pairs of thick socks, boots, trousers, gloves, a jacket and a woolly hat. By 2 a.m. I thought I’d got frostbite; my toes were so cold they felt as if they’d drop off if I flicked them. At 4 a.m., half-mad with tiredness and cold, I got up, hopped across the roof in my sleeping bag, emptied the contents of my backpack and put my feet in, pulling the zips on either side up as far as they’d go. But it didn’t make any difference. At dawn, everyone woke and immediately lit cigarettes. It was impossible to tell whether they were exhaling smoke or cold breath. Two marines held a serious conversation about how handy the cold would be if they stepped on an IED. Frozen stumps, they thought, would bleed less.
‘We’re moving in one minute, so if you want to follow a cleared path, get your shit on’, said Lieutenant Grell, who was already packed up and ready to go.
‘Let’s go destroy some more people’s walls, man’, said the marine who’d blown the last two walls the night before.
We walked down the stairs and out of the compound. Before the sun had crept over the horizon to offer a tiny promise of warmth, we walked a hundred metres up Pharmacy Road, turned right, climbed through what had been a window and entered a building that looked close to collapse.
Not until I’d walked around inside and read the graffiti did I realise we were in the old British base, FOB Wishtan. Lima Company had reached their objective.
* * * * *
Sergeant Giles and his squad started conducting patrols to the neighbouring buildings. They all had to be cleared and if they were uninhabited, demolished. At the first gate, a tiny old man greeted us. He looked surprised when the marines asked permission to enter, as if he weren’t used to having a choice. The man had a feeble, buckled frame, with huge ears, pushed outwards by his black turban. His thick, white beard curled back in a long S-shape under his chin but his moustache, and the hair on his cheeks, starting just below his eyes, was black. His eyes were pleading, and the expression on his face was at once sad, kind, wise, and pertified. He led us into his home – four rooms off a cross-shaped corridor – and started to walk up the stairs to the roof. The marines asked if it was safe. The man stopped. He didn’t know, he said; he hadn’t been up there for months.
‘We have no other choice, there are so many mines in this area. We have no choice but to sit in here for hours.’
‘How long have you lived here?’ asked Rock. ‘Six to seven months’, said the old man.
Another old man appeared, even more frail and bent-over than the first. The green turban on his head, and the once-white shawl that hung over his back, were so big on his emaciated body that it was almost impossible to see where his shoulders might be. ‘We are so scared because of all the explosions’, he said, slowly walking towards us. ‘I am a poor person. I have nowhere to go, what can we do?’ He squatted on the floor in the corridor, next to his friend. They pointed to their shattered windows. Rock promised they would be compensated, then told them that there was about to be a big explosion and they shouldn’t be afraid.
‘You are better than the others, we can talk to you’, the second old man said to Rock. I assumed that ‘others’ meant the Taliban. In places like Wishtan, people saw both sides almost every day. The idea that they would be anything other than as pliant as possible was ludicrous, especially considering how helpless most of the people were. ‘I have some military experience in Kabul, I know how government works’, the old man went on. ‘These others, we don’t know where they come from; we cannot go out at night. If someone is screaming outside no one will come out because they are afraid.’
‘Yes, I know, it’s very difficult’, said Rock, sadly. ‘Life in Afghanistan, especially in Sangin, is very difficult. I don’t know how you live in this area.’
‘What can we do? We have no choice’, said the old man.
‘We pray to God for peace in Afghanistan’, said Rock.
‘We are so poor we can’t even afford to pay the fare of a vehicle. I have no children, it’s only me and my old wife’, said the first man. ‘He has one son and three or four girls’, he gestured towards his friend. ‘They are all ill. All the doors and windows have been blown up by mines.’ I’d guessed the men were in their seventies or eighties but the mention of children made me think. I was shockingly bad at working out Afghan people’s ages, often overestimating by several decades.
A third old man joined us. His right eye was badly infected; it looked like it was cast from creamy-coloured, misty glass, like a prized marble. The three men chatted with Rock, who tried to interpret highlights of what they said to the marines, so that they might show some sympathy. He said, almost begging, that they were ‘Persian people, very good guys. Their knowledge is family but they are so poor. If they had money they would go back to their homeland, in Ghor province [in central Afghanistan].’ He said that because they spoke Farsi (Persian), no one spoke to them, so they trusted no one in the neighbourhood. ‘Tell them I don’t either’, said Sergeant Giles, as he walked past. Another marine pointed into a small room, with long brown finger marks on the wall. ‘So you shit in here, wipe your ass with your hand and then wash your hand here’, he said, laughing, pointing to the wall.
The explosion Rock had warned the men of shook the house. The man with the diseased eye flinched, gasping slightly, as if he had been slapped hard on the back. I didn’t know how he survived a single night in that house.
I followed four marines as they put ladders between roofs to a neighbouring mosque, where they set up a couple of machine-gun positions and kept watch for a few hours. They could see the building on top of the hill where they had taken one of their first casualties, who’d needed a double amputation after an old IED exploded. ‘That’s Building 47’, said Giles. ‘Whenever you came up on that hill and exposed yourself to this side of the hill for longer than five minutes you’d start getting shot at from over here.’ We now sat on the buildings the Taliban had disappeared into after such attacks but Giles was under no illusions about how much effect that would have. ‘They’ll still operate in this area, just not as freely’, he said. ‘They’ll just move east, towards the desert and into the wadis they had used to transport weapons.’
Even if the marines could completely halt the Taliban’s ability to operate in Sangin, it was one of only a handful of towns and districts that had anything like the manpower and resources needed. On maps of Afghanistan – even just of Helmand province – these towns were mere dots. It was easy for the Taliban to move on, as they had since the initial invasion.
‘Holy shit, that’s big as fuck, dude’, said a marine, digging out a huge bullet from the wall with his knife. I asked if it had been fired by Americans: ‘I hope so’, he replied. Some kids in the courtyard below asked for chocolate and offered to sell us what looked like chillies. ‘I ain’t eating your pepper, it’ll give me the shits’, said the marine.
I asked Giles what he’d been told about Sangin before he came. ‘We went on YouTube and there were hundreds of videos from the British. It was mostly air strikes and huge firefights. All the news articles we read, it was all “one of the worst places in Afghanistan” so we knew it was going to be a tough deployment. Marines like to fight, so we were excited to go somewhere that we knew there’d be plenty of fighting.’ I asked if there had been fear too. ‘You’re definitely scared too, scared and excited. I’d say before you get here, mostly excited and once you get here, a little more scared. It’s a mix of both.’
He said the Taliban were very good at guerrilla warfare. ‘We have way more guys than them, much better weapons, supplies, all that stuff, and they still manage to make it a good fight. So they’re good at sneaking around, they’re good at ambushes, they’re good at IEDs.’ I asked the question I’d often asked: have you actually seen the Taliban? ‘Actually seen them, no. Most of the time you’ll just see muzzle flashes or the dust signature from where they fired but I haven’t actually personally seen any. There’s only a couple of guys in my squad that have actually seen them.’
I asked how he kept on going out, when so many of his friends and colleagues had been maimed or killed. ‘It’s just ingrained in the marines or in any military: you just keep going, you have to get the job done. It’s scary. But it makes you want to go out and get the guys that have hurt your friends or tried to hurt you, so it’s a mix of things.’ I told him that things had got worse every year when the Brits were here and that by the end of their time someone was blown up every few days. Giles said he hoped the marines could win in Sangin. ‘If we give them [the people] a better option than the Taliban, then hopefully they’ll choose us.’
* * * * *
Back at the old British patrol base, I climbed on to the roof. The bulldozers went back and forth on either side of Pharmacy Road, flattening every wall and building in sight. Sergeant Giles was on the roof next to me. I asked if what we were watching made him feel bad. ‘Er ... not really’, he replied, without elaborating. The marines had several arguments for anyone who did feel bad. The people here probably didn’t own the shitty houses they were living in, they’d be given far more money than they were worth and some of them would be rebuilt by the marines much better than they were before.
The rest of the marines were inside, eating, resting, enjoying having reached their objective in one piece.
‘This is our shitty new patrol base’, said one with a smile.
‘We’ve still got ninety days though. Ninety days to keep our legs’, said another, smiling. ‘Three days of hard fighting and now we can masturbate in privacy.’
‘This is where we jerk off and shit’, said Zeimus, as he disappeared into a tiny room with a camouflage sheet for a door, the closest thing they had to a private space.
‘This is our new place. It’s great, a lot of concrete’, said another, stamping his foot on the floor. ‘We like concrete, so it’s mission accomplished.’ ‘Yeah!’ screamed another marine and the two embraced. It was indeed a massive relief to step on concrete; the only surface in Sangin which couldn’t conceal an IED. The physical sensation of hard and flat ground under my boots was so soothing. It was difficult to understand how we’d walked on soft earth for so long without breaking down.
Back on the roof, I could see the house the marines had mistakenly blown their way into the day before. The three boys and the little girl who had emerged from the basement in shock were there. The wall that separated their field from Pharmacy Road had been demolished; their house, and their family, was exposed, probably for the first time in their lives. Seeing Afghan houses without their high and impenetrable walls is like seeing western houses without windows, doors, curtains or blinds. But much worse, because a lot of Afghan family life happens within the compound walls but outside the main rooms. Without the essential privacy the outer walls had given them, the children looked naked and pathetic, afraid even to move while so many people could see them.
One of the older boys was walking slowly and nervously towards the building where we were. I jogged down the stairs and grabbed Rock, telling him that the boy was outside and needed to talk to someone. The bulldozers were getting closer, destroying everything on either side of Pharmacy Road. It looked like the boy’s house was next and I wasn’t sure the marines had told their CO – or the men in the bulldozers – that there were at least four children inside. That was one of the few times when I felt sure the tiny role I played in the world was important; that I was in a unique position to report something essential. Suddenly, I had the courage and conviction that I assumed other journalists always had and that many others thought I had. We met the boy at the edge of the field, about twenty metres from the old patrol base. Curiously, the boy had a broad smile on his face, something I’d often seen local people often do in Helmand – look as unthreatening as possible to anyone strong and potentially violent. For most people, it was all they could do.
‘They will destroy the whole house?’ he said, still smiling. ‘There are children in these houses and they are scared, it’s cold outside.’
‘No, no they will cause no destruction’, said Rock, ‘they will just destroy that wall.’
‘My father is coming. He is very upset.’
‘I know this must make you angry. If Americans came to my house and did this, I would be angry and I know you are.’
A stocky, bearded man walked towards us. He looked scared as he watched the bulldozer flatten a wall on the opposite side of Pharmacy Road. He was sweating; his movements were jittery and panicked but as he approached, he also smiled broadly, and shook our hands. He wore a long, light blue shalwar kameez, with a small label stitched to the chest pocket that read ‘Lucky’.
‘What is happening here?’ he asked, so terrified that the words came out somewhere between a chuckle and a whimper.
‘Sorry, but this is how it is. They will compensate you’, said Rock. He made it sound as if the bulldozers would indeed flatten everything we could see, as they feared.
‘All our belongings are there in that house, are you destroying it?’ the man asked. Rock didn’t know what to say. Buildings with people in them were supposed to be safe but no one was checking. And the man’s house was right next to the old patrol base. ‘Tell them that our stuff is there, we are poor people, what should we do? Tell him that our children are there!’
The Marines’ Civil Affairs Officer arrived. Rock began explaining to him that the man owned the house we were looking at.
‘All our stuff and our children are in there’, the man said again, his panic increasing. He struggled to remain calm. His smile had gone and his expression was desperate. ‘Do you want to destroy my compound?’ he pleaded.
‘No, we’re not going to destroy your compound’, said the Civil Affairs Officer. ‘Tell him it’s just the walls. It’s for the security for everybody because this whole road has been laced with explosives and we’re getting rid of it so we can keep security down this whole road, so his family can feel safer.’
‘At the back of my compound there’s another with a family ...’, the man said.
‘As long as there’s people in it it’s not going to get destroyed.’
Behind him, as he spoke, bulldozers flattened walls. When they reversed they bleeped loudly and repeatedly, an absurd warning, far too little and far too late.
The man was asked his father’s name and his tribe. No one made an effort to address his obvious fears, no one apologised for the destruction or for the terror his children felt. As the Civil Affairs Officer made notes, Rock tried to reassure the man.
‘You are a poor man, you mind your own business. It is good for you to have a base here.’
‘But we are worried that if there is a base and someone takes a shot at it that we will be held responsible.’
‘Our presence is good for you, you live in this area, so no one can shoot at you.’
Rock told the Civil Affairs Officer what had been said. ‘Tell him I’m sorry for the inconvenience but it’s going to be safer for everyone and he’s going to get reimbursed at the end of this’, was the reply. Two more men approached from the other side of Pharmacy Road. Both wore dark green shalwar kameez and turbans. One wore a brown waistcoat, the other a brown blazer. They were ordered to stop and show that they weren’t carrying weapons or wearing explosives belts.
‘Nothing! There is nothing!’ they said, lifting up their tops to reveal bare chests and stomachs, then pulling up their loose-fitting trousers to reveal bare legs. They gestured towards an electricity pole that had almost been pushed over as a wall was flattened. ‘It didn’t knock down the line, just the pole’, said the Civil Affairs Officer, smiling.
‘This is our house, this is our area’, the men said, pointing to several buildings just off Pharmacy Road. It looked like they were next for the bulldozers; the walls surrounding the first house had already gone and large white crosses had been sprayed on the other buildings.
‘The engineers will come and rebuild it’, said Rock. ‘You will be compensated for all of this. Come here tomorrow, we will talk and we will assess the damage and they will pay you accordingly. Come tomorrow, every problem will be solved.’
‘Give us the compensation and we will rebuild it’, said one of the men.
‘That house was full of stuff’, said the other, pointing to another building that had been flattened.
‘No problem’, said Rock, ‘when the owner comes he can speak with this man. OK?’
‘OK’, said the man. He knew there was nothing they could do.
An ANA soldier with a long dark beard, green woolly hat, and thick lines on his face stretching from the corners of his eyes all the way down the sides of his cheeks, approached. ‘Were there mines in these houses?’ he asked.
‘No’, said both of the men.
They looked at the bulldozers and held spare cloth from their turbans over their mouths and noses to keep away the dust that filled the air.
‘Was this was a mosque?’ asked the soldier, pointing to a single storey building across the road. Its speakers were still there but the windows and doors were badly damaged, as if someone had attacked every straight edge with a hammer.
‘Yes, it was our mosque.’
The Civil Affairs Officer asked who the mullah was. The men said there was no mullah, just them and an old man. Between themselves, they looked after the place and prayed inside. As the men talked to Rock and the Civil Affairs Officer prepared compensation forms on his little notepad, Rock sighed with frustration and said, ‘Bullshit.’
‘What’s he saying?’ asked the Civil Affairs Officer.
‘He’s saying “when they give me money?” I said, “tomorrow, tomorrow”.’
‘Tell them tomorrow they can come up here but until then they have to go back to their compounds for their safety’, said the Civil Affairs Officer.
The ANA soldier spoke to the mosque owners again. ‘It is because of the divisions between us, Pashtun, Tajik, Uzbek and so on, that we are seeing this and it could even get worse.’ The soldier said he was a Pashtun but had moved to Herat many years ago and only spoke Dari: ‘If today a mosque here is being demolished, maybe tomorrow a mosque in Herat will be demolished.’
One of the men approached the mosque. The pole holding the speakers that sent the call to prayer was bent and only just upright. The man looked nervously at the rubble in the doorway, then cautiously stepped forward. Without going in, he pulled out a Calor Gas heater and a prayer mat; he snapped the mat in the air and slapped it to get some of the dust off. He told Rock there were Qur’ans inside but he didn’t dare go in and retrieve them.
The other mosque owner watched, his arm around the home owner we had spoken to, gently rubbing his back. The men had been told to go back to their compounds but they stayed, squatting outside the old British patrol base, watching everything around them being effortlessly turned into dust.
Fifteen minutes later, the mosque was dust too. As the bulldozer turned to flatten the piles of bricks and cement, two explosions went off beyond the next wall due for demolition but no one seemed to notice.
I asked Captain Peterson how demolishing homes, and even a mosque, was supposed to win over the local people. It didn’t seem like good COIN. ‘I know that most people in the world probably wouldn’t understand. You’re trying to build a country up by destroying it and it seems like a paradox but those are people who have not been to Afghanistan. They don’t understand that the nature of conflict inevitably includes destruction before you can start to build it the way it should be, in a way that’s secure and provides a better economy for the people in the future.’
He thought the Afghan people would be more pragmatic: ‘I think they understand, after nearly four decades of war, that damage is unavoidable. For a long time, we’ve been going about piecemeal destruction of things to open up new avenues of approach or provide freedom of movement. It’s the same thing we’re doing here, we’re just doing it on a much higher scale and we’re doing it all up front. Short term, there is a sacrifice of convenience to an extreme degree and that’s not something that’s lost on us. But I think what people understand is that to increase security on that route and to prevent the enemy from putting any IEDs there, these types of drastic steps are necessary.’
But the people of Wishtan hadn’t been given a choice. The destruction had happened without notice, suggesting that the security of the marines was more important than the welfare of the local people. It felt like the era of ‘courageous restraint’, where foreign forces were supposed to be prepared to take more risks and more casualties, to protect the homes and lives of the people (‘the people are the prize’), was over.
Everyone flinched and looked over their shoulders as another MIC-LIC exploded nearby. In the old patrol base, a marine screamed, ‘Yee-ha.’
‘So Monday, OK?’ said the Civil Affairs Officer. Everyone whose compounds had been demolished was asked to go to the District Centre on Monday to claim compensation. There was a loud explosion in the middle of Rock’s translation. Everyone flinched again. ‘Tell ’em to get there early in the morning because a lot of people are gonna be coming to get payments’, added the Civil Affairs Officer. ‘Tell them also that tomorrow we’ve got a medical initiative going on, where they’re going to be giving classes on how to use certain medications that they’re gonna be giving y’all.’
Further away, some houses had been bulldozed along with their surrounding walls. I could just about see the house belonging to the man who’d helped us on the first day. To my relief, it was still standing.
We walked past the mangled shell of a British truck, so badly burned that it looked as if it were ready to blow away, like the ashes of burnt paper. A group of twelve kids, seven boys and five girls, approached and almost at once, said ‘choc-a-let, choc-a-let.’ ‘Their fucking lives revolve around chocolate’, said Hancock, not stopping.
‘Me one dollar!’ shouted one of the boys, as we walked back to the patrol base where we had started. Almost everything on either side of Pharmacy Road had been flattened.
* * * * *
The next morning, New Year’s Day, 2011 (New Year’s Eve had passed without a mention), I joined Captain Peterson on a walk through Wishtan. He wanted to see his platoon commanders, chart progress and give them a morale boost. But before we reached the first group of marines on the hill, the vicious crack of a sniper’s bullet sent everyone to the floor. That snapping sound meant he had only just missed his target: probably Captain Peterson. People with long radio antennas were often ‘bullet magnets’, as they were assumed to be important. I was sure I heard the bullet hit the wall next to us. But within a few minutes, three other people, at three different points along the patrol, said they thought it hit close to them.
There was a brief discussion about where the sniper might be and what might be the best way to kill him. But soon, everyone was up on their feet and walking again, paying him no more attention. Someone had attacked a large group of highly-trained, heavily-armed foreign troops, while drones, jets, surveillance blimps and helicopters flew in the skies above. It should have been suicidal. But he had escaped with ease, without being spotted, shot at or chased.
Once he’d spoken to his men, Captain Peterson paused on the high ground and looked across Wishtan. ‘We’re denying the enemy any freedom of movement whatsoever. Now we’re in the south and the north and they’ve got nowhere to run. It’s a tactical victory but also an emotional one, because of the casualties we’ve taken. It feels good, personally, and it’s going to make a big difference.’ He explained why it had been so important to take Wishtan from the Taliban. ‘As the noose tightened, this became his last refuge. We had to come here, as part of clear, hold, build. You have to clear effectively and completely otherwise you’re holding areas and not holding other areas and it just becomes unmanageable.’
I mentioned that Wishtan had been cleared by the British. Was giving up the patrol bases they’d established a mistake? ‘I don’t know what the criteria behind the thought process was that went into that, I’m not sure what the reason for abandoning them was. You could spend a lot of time talking about what could have been done better and everything is clearer in retrospect. But I can tell you it’s definitely the right decision to hold them now so I’m glad that we are.’
We walked to the old British patrol base. The marines were working in a long line, like a chain gang, filling sand bags. The Afghan soldiers sat in an outbuilding, three feet away from the marines, smoking and watching, not caring what anyone thought about them not helping. Someone had managed to light a small fire in a dustbin and cook a tray of powdered eggs. Squares cut from a cardboard box became the plates. Captain Peterson quietly served the marines this special breakfast treat, wishing them ‘Happy New Year’.
Sergeant Zeimus appeared again, the inevitable Rip-it® in his hand. ‘Hey, get all the snipers from the roof and downstairs. Hey, did you eat yet? Come on, let’s go.’ He sounded angry even when he was making sure that everyone got their breakfast. ‘Hey, Reyes, let’s go, dog.’ Someone asked if the ANA got eggs too. ‘They don’t need to eat this shit, they got their own stuff.’ He screamed at everyone not to throw the plates away but to pass them on. As early in the morning as it was, he was already high on caffeine and anger. ‘Let’s go, come on, hey, Lance Corporals, let’s go, get the fuck over here, Jesus Christ.’ He spoke so fast that seven words became two: getthefuckoverhere, JesusChrist.
Captain Peterson laughed quietly. But he punched Zeimus on the shoulder when he started impersonating a Vietnamese marine, Nguyen. ‘The camera’s on’, Peterson whispered. ‘Oh shit, sorry’, said Zeimus. Then, not wanting to let even the captain have the last word, added, ‘You just hit me and the camera’s on.’
‘That’s not rated R material’, said Peterson.
‘That’s not rated R material’, Zeimus repeated. He walked away; he’d had the last word.
Captain Peterson went on ladling steaming powdered eggs on to dusty squares of cardboard. ‘The beginning of a new year, you got hot chow, company objective three is secured, Operation Dark Horse II is almost over, there’s only one or no casualties. Whatever you eat for the next New Year’s breakfast is not going to be as good as this, I guarantee you.’
Zeimus ate last, putting his drink on to his piece of cardboard, so it looked like a breakfast tray. He simply lifted it right up to his mouth, shovelling every piece of powdered egg straight in. It was gone in seconds.
After breakfast, Captain Peterson and Lieutenant Grell made plans to erect a few tents, for families whose homes had been destroyed and who had nowhere to sleep in the freezing cold. Others finished fortifying the old patrol base or went on patrols to set up checkpoints or observation posts.
* * * * *
Captain Peterson was happy with the way the operation had gone, that the Taliban had nowhere left to hide and that the lower levels of insurgents had picked up on the marines’ ‘tenacity and determination’. ‘People who were once thought of as irreconcilables are, as we speak right now, waiting to talk with American commanders to negotiate some deal where they’re willing to bring in IEDs and identify higher leaders.’
The company’s losses had been staggering. Peterson almost broke down when he told me about a marine who’d been killed the day before his son was born. But despite so many killed and injured men, he remained determined. ‘We’re never going to quit, we’re never going to stop patrolling. There’s not enough IEDs to keep us from patrolling. Not enough bullets to keep us from accomplishing our mission. We’re not leaving, we’re going to stay. When the enemy saw that, at the lowest level, it demoralised him and he said, “We can’t continue to fight them, because they’re better than us. We can’t outlast him because he’s not leaving. So we’d better figure out a way to carve our way into the future of Afghanistan or we’re going to get left out in the cold”. And if that’s his analysis he’s exactly right.’
I asked what he would say to people who were angered, scared or confused by the fact that Afghanistan had become America’s longest war. ‘If we put a timeline on it, well, then we’ve started to say that the time we spend is more important than the cause itself. And if that’s the case we never should have gotten in in the first place. I don’t think that is the case, I think the cause is justified and I would say to them: so what? This is America’s longest war, so what? So it’s taken us ten years to get where we are. If it takes another five, if it takes another ten, if that’s the price of success, then who cares how long it lasts?’
