On DECEMBER 6TH, GUESTS from Great Britain arrived at our compound. It was a Royal Navy detachment that brought with them two Land Rovers equipped with heavy machine guns. I was partial to Land Rovers, having owned one in the past. I liked the look of the sturdy vehicles, bristling with their mounted machine guns, parked in our little compound. As I looked out past the Land Rovers at the miles and miles of dehydrated terrain I found some irony in the fact that our entourage included both U.S. Navy SEALs and Royal Navy personnel. I was happy to have them “on board,” all the same.
Over the next couple of days it became apparent that our bombing and probes at the airport were paying off, as we could observe less and less activity there. Karzai was at the same time trying to negotiate a surrender of the Taliban. While we were hopeful that the end was near, we were receiving reports that the Taliban and al-Qa’ida were taking advantage of the negotiations and using the time to secretly flee Kandahar or otherwise melt into the local populace. The only thing we knew for sure about the enemy was that he wasn’t stacking arms and turning himself in, so we proceeded accordingly.
In an effort to find out what exactly was the situation in the city of Kandahar, Shirzai sent in a recon party to check it out. Pat, dressed in Afghan garb, accompanied them. In downtown Kandahar, they made it into the Governor’s Palace, which the Taliban and al-Qa’ida had been using as a headquarters, and discovered it was abandoned. Learning this, Shirzai told me that he wanted to move into Kandahar the next day.
Neither Hank nor I could see any tactical reason to delay going in, although in my reading between the lines of Headquarters cables, my sense was that their preference was for Karzai to enter the city first, probably for political reasons. The problem was that Karzai’s forces had just taken a major hit with the errant bombing, and it was not clear just how quickly they would be able to move down to Kandahar. It reminded me a bit of the question of who would enter Paris first during War World II, General Patton or Field Marshal Montgomery. I did not see it as a competition between Karzai and Shirzai—and by extension Echo and Foxtrot teams—but I did believe that both forces and their respective teams should try to enter the city as soon as possible. The sooner we were in Kandahar, the sooner we could begin our hunt for al-Qa’ida and related time-sensitive intelligence. To my mind, this trumped any other consideration.
Late that evening as we prepared our gear for the next morning’s move, we received intelligence reporting that indicated Taliban leader Mullah Omar planned to escape from Kandahar sometime that night. Headquarters requested that we be on the lookout for a convoy trying to get through our lines. Shirzai sent word out to his fighters to be on the alert, but the night passed without incident.
The next morning, as we loaded our gear into the pickups for our movement into Kandahar, a follow-on request related to Mullah Omar came in. A convoy had been spotted from the air during the night about 20 kilometers from Takhteh-Pol. It was bombed and destroyed, and Foxtrot was tasked to go check it out and see if any of the bodies were that of Mullah Omar. The cable specified that no U.S. military personnel could be involved in the operation. I was not clear why there was a restriction, but I suspected it was due to legal restraints related to the Title 50 and Title 10 authorities. As we did not want to delay our arrival at Kandahar any longer, I asked John to take a security force of Shirzai’s fighters and go locate the destroyed convoy to see if Mullah Omar was among the dead, and then join us in Kandahar at the Governor’s Palace. We also decided to leave a presence of fighters in Takhteh-Pol in case the situation in Kandahar proved to be untenable and we needed to withdraw.
When the convoy preparations were complete, the pickups and larger trucks pulled into position to begin the road march. This was an important moment for me, one that I had been moving toward in fits and starts ever since I first saw the awful images of the attacks at the World Trade Center. Had it only been 12 weeks? It seemed so much longer.
The dual cab of my pickup was full of passengers and equipment so I climbed into the pickup bed. As I did, I noticed that the two burlap sacks of horse feed were in the back of the pickup in front of me. Two heavily armed SEALs who had recently joined us were adjusting them for use as seats during the ride into Kandahar. Well, at last they are being put to some use, I thought.
I wore a black stocking cap on my head and sand goggles to protect my eyes from the dust that was sure to come. I sat in the rear corner of the pickup bed with the butt of my AK-47 braced against my lap and the barrel pointed upward. I imagined I looked like a character from a “Mad Max” movie.
The convoy was finally formed and the signal to move out given. This was the moment we had all been waiting for and it was exhilarating; at least that was how I felt. One of Shirzai’s fighters was sitting on top of the closed tailgate of a nearby pickup. I didn’t think that was such a good idea. When the truck’s turn to move came, it lurched forward and the Afghan fell off backward and landed with a dull thud and a puff of dust. The convoy stopped three feet after starting. It was not the dramatic departure I had envisioned. The fighter got back in the truck laughing, no worse for the wear, and we started forward again.
About halfway to the bridge, I saw the two SEALs stand up in the truck bed and toss the bags of horse feed out of the pickup onto the side of the road. The seat idea wasn’t working out. The bags looked sad and forlorn laying there on the barren plain as we rolled past, and I contemplated the unlikely journey those two products of Iowa had made.
We reached the bridge and drove across, passing the turn-off to the airport that had already been largely secured by Shirzai’s fighters. Continuing on toward Kandahar we began to see the effects of our bombing campaign. Along sections of the highway there were destroyed and burned out vehicles. Bodies twisted and dismembered were littered here and there; their contorted positions suggested the idea of a giant hand having violently flung them onto the ground like rag dolls.
An unnatural stillness lay over the entire scene, a seeming after-effect of the deadly violence that had suddenly visited. Whatever the cause, the stillness was palpable and it commanded my attention as we passed through the area.
Ahead of us I spotted a body that appeared to be sitting upright on a paved portion of the road. A few feet behind it, was the burned out hulk of a large truck, its tires completely melted off. As we drove by, I saw the body had no bottom half, and its upper torso somehow balanced upright. A large stain of what I could only imagine was blood darkened the pavement around it.
Had he been driving the truck when the bombs began to rain down? Did he try to make a run for it? The grotesque image begged these questions and more.
Passing out of the zone of destruction, we began to encounter some buildings along the road. Soon there were more of them, and we knew we had reached the outskirts of Kandahar. We were alert, thinking anything could happen. As we penetrated further into the city, the road narrowed. There were Afghans walking about, but we had yet to see a single vehicle. The pedestrians shot us occasional glances, but nothing more. Their expressionless faces gave nothing away about how they felt about our entrance into their city.
A bit further we started to encounter an occasional car or pickup, and soon a convoy of five or six pickups came down the road toward us from the opposite direction. As the two convoys passed each other, each slowed down due to the narrowness of the street. Like ours, the trucks in the other convoy were full of heavily armed men. We were so close we could have reached out and touched each other. If there was ever a modern opportunity to play Sioux warrior and “count coup,” this was it. They looked at us. We looked at them. Who are these guys? Taliban? I thought to myself. If anyone had started shooting it would have been a bloody mess. No one did. The episode reminded of a scene from the film “The Longest Day” in which a German and an American patrol pass right by each other neither firing a shot. I remember having thought it was a ridiculous scene that never could have happened.
Passing through a market area, the pedestrian and vehicular traffic became much more congested. A shopkeeper looked up at us and scowled, gesturing at us with a knife. This native was not friendly.
Finally we reached the Governor’s Palace where Shirzai had once held power before being deposed by the Taliban. High, thick walls surrounded the palace compound that included two main buildings separated by a courtyard with a small decorative water fountain. Shirzai moved into his old building, and Foxtrot team and the ODA moved into the other one.
Shirzai’s fighters established a security perimeter around the palace’s exterior as we set up our communications gear inside its protective walls. I could now transmit the message I had been waiting to send.
“FOXTROT IN KANDAHAR. ALL PERSONNEL ACCOUNTED FOR.”
We were the first team to make it into the city, and I thought it ironic that the date was December 7th, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor 60 years earlier. For me, December 7th would no longer be a day of infamy, but a day of triumph.
But I also thought about that day in September that had started it all and had set the path that I and the other men around me had taken since. And, as extraordinary as it was that I was now standing in Kandahar some three months later, it seemed right that I was there, and I would not have wanted to be anywhere else.