Lions of Kandahar (3 page)

Very soon after joining my unit I realized that Special Forces soldiers and our organization in general have a particular mystique. It’s something you can’t put your finger on and definitely does not derive from a Hollywood movie. We lived, trained, and operated within a unique paradigm. On one hand, every day was like September 12, 2001. We were truly the tip of the spear, out there in the enemies’ backyard with little or no support, living wholly within the indigenous culture. Our country wanted blood, brains, and balls on the wall in Afghanistan, and we would deliver. On the other hand, we were simultaneously trying to build a country and free its people from the tyrannical ideology of the Taliban—the more difficult challenge. In order to fulfill this key aspect of our mission, it was necessary to separate ourselves from Western thinking and adopt the mind-set of an Afghan, immersing ourselves in their society, tribes, languages, culture, religion, and fundamental philosophy. It was imperative to establish and meet the needs of the Afghan people as they undertook the huge transition from a warring society to a peaceful one. They needed security, education, organization, honest political representation, and civil infrastructure. We understood that this transition would take several generations and a whole lot of money. We understood, strategically, that Afghanistan as a nation had to prevail.
If it followed its historical track record, and we could not secure a country for these people, all our sacrifices would be for naught. The Afghans do not see their country as a graveyard for another empire. We were not there to conquer but to rebuild and help, and they knew it.

As the C-17 glided through the night sky, I concentrated on my last rotation as a Special Forces team commander, reviewing our premission training and preparation for the upcoming deployment. There is not another unit in the U.S. military as versatile as a Special Forces team. Born after World War II, Special Forces fields some of the most highly trained units in the U.S. military. The standard SF team, called an Operational Detachment Alpha, or ODA, is designed to operate independently and consists of twelve men led by a captain and a warrant officer. The rest of the team is made up of NCOs—sergeants. Two senior sergeants serve as the team sergeant and intelligence sergeant. Each team specialty also has two sergeants, one senior and one junior. The weapons sergeants are experts on tactics and maintain the team’s weaponry, such as rifles, machine guns, and rocket launchers. The engineer sergeants build and blow things up, and they also act as the team’s supply sergeants. The medical sergeants are the Army’s best trauma medics, but they can also treat common diseases, do dental work, and even provide veterinary care for farm animals. The communications sergeants maintain the team’s radios and computers and keep the team connected to the outside world.

My team had studied the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan for the past couple of months. The remote, wild tribal area in Pakistan, stretching five hundred miles along the Afghan border, has been lawless and violent for centuries. Today it is a breeding ground for jihad. Taliban and Al Qaeda militants hunkered down there to use the area as a launching pad for attacks against Afghanistan, and as a training ground for terrorist attacks worldwide. It is an
area of Pakistan the government doesn’t control and it is off-limits to the U.S. military.

We knew the major players and could occasionally tell the good guys and those just riding the fence from the bad. We plotted the Taliban’s routes in and out, identified probable hideouts and ambush sites. Our Special Forces company, in conjunction with a brigade from the 173rd Airborne, had nearly shut the Taliban down in Kandahar Province during our last rotation eight months ago, and I prayed for the same successes this time.

After a few minutes, the plane finally stopped taxiing and the Air Force crew chiefs who’d loaded the plane opened the rear cargo door. They were dressed in tan flight suits and heavy body armor.

“Okay, Captain,” Zack, my weapons sergeant, said sarcastically, chuckling as the crew chiefs waddled about trying to get the cargo ready to unload. “So we’re on a ten-ton plane carrying five tons of fuel flying four to six hundred miles per hour. The absolute last thing you need to worry about is a bullet.”

“I know Zack, I know,” I said.

Zack was new to the team, having arrived during the early summer, but you would never have known it. He was burly, with a stocky build and a barrel chest that would have suited a UFC fighter. He fell in with Bill, the team’s senior sergeant, and the two of them made a damn good pair. You can always tell who the pipe hitters are, and Zack fit the bill to a T. He was rough, young, brash, and annoyingly honest. He could most likely kick your ass, and he knew it. His thick black hair made for a great full beard, and I had already pondered the scope of his capabilities when in civilian clothes among the Afghans. My guess was that he could easily disguise himself physically and would work well with the team in dicey circumstances. Zack handled guns like professional drivers handle race cars. They were to be guarded and protected until it was time to use them. Then, when the time is right, you bang the living shit out of them for all they are
worth. Zack knew he could repair or replace them later, but when they were needed, he knew how to apply them for their intended purpose and get every mile per hour out of them. He was Bill’s protégé and they trained hard together. Bill turned Zack into a top-notch weapons sergeant, while Zack kept Bill on his best game. Between the two of them, anyone we ran into on this trip stupid enough to engage the team would pay a dear, dear price for his recklessness.

Zack was single, and several of the married team members lived vicariously through him. Women loved him and he never went without a lady on his arm. Zack was not cocky—okay, maybe a little—but it is not considered cocky in this culture if you can back it up. Zack always tested himself, rigorously, physically and mentally. Whether it was physical team events, marksmanship, drinking beer, or a Sudoku puzzle, Zack would come in first or die trying. His career was just beginning, but his mental toughness would continue to be sought after through the years. Watching him, I often wished I was fifteen years younger and twenty pounds lighter. Zack was the training partner to push you where you didn’t think you could go. I kept that little secret tucked away in my bag of tricks. If I ever needed a square peg smashed into a round hole, I knew Zack was the guy to do it, and that it would please him greatly. I would have loved to have traveled the world with this extraordinary young man, kicking people’s asses who desperately needed it. He didn’t take any shit from the other team members, even though he was a new guy. If Zack didn’t know how to do something, you only needed to give him a month and he’d be doing it better than you.

With the cargo ready, the broad gray hydraulic doors opened and the cool temperatures we had enjoyed at altitude quickly gave way to the stifling heat waiting outside the aircraft. Afghanistan smells like an open sewer running past a pine wood fire. Every head on the team literally sank, almost in unison.

We were back.

As the engines shut down, trucks began to pull up to the rear of
the aircraft. The vehicles were dirty, banged-up Toyota Hilux trucks, the Afghan equivalent of a Toyota Tacoma compact pickup. The crew chiefs quickly snapped off the huge chain supports and rolled the pallets out of the back of the plane to the waiting forklifts, which lumbered forward and began to hoist the pallets of supplies out of the bowels of the plane. The pallets contained everything from weapons and ammunition to office supplies. Piled high on one pallet were boots and uniforms for our Afghan National Army soldiers. We had seen how poorly the Afghan soldiers had been equipped on the last rotation. This time each of us brought all his spare gear from home: boots, uniforms, belts, socks, hats, load-carrying equipment. I, and many others in the unit, had personally purchased additional gear for them. We knew what they needed and wanted to be sure they had it. All of it was critical for the fledgling Afghan Army.

I climbed out of the back of the plane and hit the concrete of the runway. My knees ached from being trapped inside. It had been six months since I’d left Kandahar Airfield and I took a quick survey. It was built in the 1960s about ten miles southeast of Kandahar city by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) as a base in case of war with the Soviets. The Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 and used the airfield themselves. Army Rangers seized it in 2001 and it became the United States’ main hub in southern Afghanistan.

A senior sergeant from the tactical operations center greeted us on the tarmac and tracked each pallet as it was unloaded, checking it off on his clipboard. With the last pallet finally secured on a flatbed truck, we were ready to head out.

Bill pointed out the team’s trucks. He had come to the team halfway through our 2005 rotation. A former platoon sergeant in the Rangers, he had taken only a few days to get up to speed. Now the team sergeant, the senior supervisor, he kept the team on track with training and tactical planning. Bill answered to me alone and was as good a noncommissioned officer as anyone could ever hope for—the
guy who could be a friend to the soldiers, yet maintained their respect as the senior NCO. Raised in a poor rural community in White Settlement, Texas, he joked that his family was a living
Jerry Springer
show. He was a vivid, wiry Dallas Cowboys fan with a taste for top-shelf bourbon, and when not on duty he kept the team in stitches for hours. For men like Bill, combat was an extension of their personality. He could go from easygoing team member to head disciplinarian (or asshole) in less than a second if the situation called for it. But when it came to work, no one knew tactics and weapons better. He kept the team leaning forward, ready to take on the next challenge at all times. To say Bill was competitive would be an understatement. When he first joined the team he had been a physical stud—he could easily outrun any of us, do more push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups, typical Ranger stuff. He quickly learned that no one in SF gave a flying shit about running fast. A team member must be able to do three vital things in combat, all of them in full equipment and body armor: fight, carry a fully equipped wounded soldier, and carry a rucksack uphill. Most of us were Rangers. We
never
left a fallen comrade on the battlefield, ever. After several team lessons in the combatives pit, Bill figured it out. Soon after that he was attending daily workout sessions in the weight room. I think he liked the brawn and it stuck. He had put on nearly twenty pounds of muscle since the last rotation.

Climbing into the truck, I asked the NCO from the TOC for an update.

“Sir, it is pretty complex,” he told me. “You’d better get the briefing from the boss.”

Bill leaned over. “It can’t be good if you have to go get the briefing,” he whispered.

The special operations compound is a short ride from the airfield. We drove through the gate, past the guard shack, and were dropped off in front of our barracks, a hastily built plywood building. We threw our gear onto our bunks, which consisted of cheap, thin mattresses
on ramshackle metal frames taken from the old Russian barracks.

The supply pallets were being delivered to a gravel field nearby, and we headed over to inspect them. Bill decided to stay with the team and make sure all the gear was accounted for while I went to the TOC for the brief. “Captain, I’m going to get a feel for the place. I’ll catch up to you later,” Bill said. Exploring the camp didn’t interest me. I was eager to get the intelligence briefing and check in with my commander, Lieutenant Colonel Don Bolduc.

Rounding a corner, I ran into Bolduc and an old friend, Lieutenant Colonel Shinsha, the commander of the Afghan Army’s 2nd Battalion, 3rd Kandak. Short, lean, and fit, Bolduc lived off some kind of inexhaustible energy source. Even this early in the morning, he was firing on all cylinders. He liked being around the soldiers in his command and used his time with them to get up to speed on what was happening in the field. It wasn’t lip service, like some commanders. He really wanted to know what they thought, and he commented often that the input and information helped him make decisions. Bolduc himself had enlisted and became a sergeant before attending OCS. The mission always came first, but he valued his soldiers and took care of all of us. He treated everyone in the battalion, from his operations officer to a mechanic in the motor pool, as a professional.

In my fifteen years in the Army, I’d never had a better commander. Bolduc understood the importance of details and, like a chess master, his command of the big picture made him lethal. He seemed to know what the Taliban, ISAF, coalition, and even his own team leaders were going to do before they did it.

In the years between 2002 and 2009, there was no centralized national military strategy for Afghanistan—none. A strategy refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal. An overarching strategy for any conflict unifies and directs all of its elements to work toward the execution of that strategy, facilitating the accomplishment
of the intended goal. In the absence of a strategy, military organizations, especially ones composed of diverse multidimensional and multinational forces such as those in Afghanistan, operate in an unsynchronized fashion, never accomplishing or achieving their intended goals.

If a unified strategy was out there during those years, it was invisible to us, and we populated the battlefield more frequently than any other unit. We received ever-changing directives from commanders that were based on their professional and personal leadership style, not necessarily around a cohesive, nested strategy that forced everyone in the battle space to work toward accomplishing the same set of goals.

The first and fundamental requisite for establishing a strategy is to know exactly what the end state needs to be. This is no small task. In Special Forces, we understood it was paramount that a stable and secure national government be established in Afghanistan and that that government had to provide for the security of the people and meet their basic needs. If the national government would not or could not meet the needs of the people, the insurgency would interfere or even try to meet these needs, thus creating a massive division among the people and their society. Once the end state is determined, the means to achieve it must be identified. To reach our desired end state, we needed to establish and accomplish a certain set of achievable goals. Defining what those goals were for ourselves allowed us to establish a series of objectives and accomplish them one by one.