Lions of Kandahar (8 page)

Now that challenge meant forging the ANA into a fighting force that could handle the resurgent Taliban. Since arriving, I’d heard nothing but bad news. The account of Taliban fighters almost overrunning Shef’s team, and Shinsha telling me that the Taliban moved openly along streets where they once feared taking even one step, obsessed me. We were five years into the fight. This shouldn’t be happening.

I was trying to focus again on the celebration when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It was one of the soldiers from our firebase’s TOC.

“Sir, come with me now,” he said. Shit, another good meal wasted.

I excused myself and headed for the TOC. I remember thinking
about the scene in the movie
The Green Berets
when John Wayne is interrupted during his dinner with the code word “Tabasco.” The code word was for an emergency situation. Whatever the TOC wanted now, it was not good and not scripted. The only thing missing was the code word.

The TOC was alive with frantic radio calls for assistance. I could tell from the accent it was not a Special Forces team. An ISAF unit had been ambushed—in a big way, from the sound of it.

“Have you heard from KAF or the TOC yet?” I asked the radioman.

“Sir, they’re waiting for you to call on the satellite phone,” he said.

I picked up the bulky black phone and headed for the rooftop to get a clear signal.

“This is 31. Put me through to the boss,” I said. Bolduc got on the line moments later.

“An ISAF unit has gotten themselves in a pickle and I want you to be prepared to assist them,” he told me. I asked him if we should wait for an execution order or just go immediately.

“Stand by till I can get you a clear picture,” he said. “I’m not going to send you into a bad situation if I don’t have to. Get your kit ready as a QRF.”

By the time I got off the phone, Bill was at the TOC. I told him we were the QRF for a Canadian unit that had been ambushed. “Tell the boys to get their kits, weapons, helmets, body armor in the trucks quietly.” Bill disappeared into the darkness. Back in the TOC, I got on one of the computers and requested an update. I needed to come up with a plan and had lots of questions.

Where was the ambush?
22 kilometers from Kandahar
.

How many Canadian soldiers were wounded?
Unknown
.

How many enemy fighters were in the area?
Best guess, between 25 and 40
.

By the time the team filtered into the TOC, Bill and I had developed two courses of action. We could go to the exact site of the
ambush and assist the ISAF unit from there. Or we could estimate the direction of enemy movement and ambush the ambushers. We were fully prepared to maneuver behind the enemy and kill those savages where they stood.

With no permission yet to go out, my guys sat around the table and listened to the radio as casualty reports came in.

“They’re just sitting there, Captain,” Bill said.

“Their call,” I said. “They’re a professional army and they know the rules. If they’re in contact and can’t move to a safer location or assault the enemy positions, then they’ll have to eat it till we get the word to launch.”

The voice on the other end of the radio was shaky. No one was assisting them, and they weren’t doing well at assisting themselves.

“They sound like they’re in the hurt locker,” Dave said, meaning they were in a bad way.

“Probably so,” I said, praying that we could go help them.

Maybe twenty minutes ticked by, feeling like hours. I was running through the multiple options. I thought about the ISAF units who had listened in when Shef’s team was in heavy contact. “Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s go. I’ll deal with the repercussions later.
We
won’t leave them out there without help.”

Clearly relieved, my teammates moved toward the door. We headed for the motor pool and loaded the trucks. It felt good, really, really good to be back in my seat. I could hear rounds slamming into the chambers of the heavy guns. The radio crackled with more situation reports. Things were getting worse—more wounded, more incapacitated vehicles. I loaded an ammo belt into the machine gun mounted to my side of the truck. The GMV’s engine rumbled to life. This was one hell of a start to our 2006 rotation.

“Let’s go boys,” I said into the FM radio as the trucks crawled to the garage exit.

Juma Khan came up to my window, clinging to an AK-47 and a
vest of ammunition. “I want to go,” he said. I’m not sure whose smile was bigger, his or mine.

“Wali na,”
I said—why not?—signaling him to hop into the back.

Then, over the radio, the Canadian voice said, “Bingo Red 1, this is Bingo Red 7. We are clear of the ambush. We have numerous casualties and are twenty kilometers from Kandahar Airfield.”

Our vehicles ground to a halt. Bill sauntered over to my truck.

“I don’t think they’ve moved far, Captain. The Taliban must have run out of ammo.”

“We can go to KAF and get the real story,” I said.

The trucks were running, the plan was set, the radios were up. I just needed the launch order from Bolduc. He finally gave an order, but it wasn’t the one we wanted: “Stand down.”

I didn’t like it but I did it. I trusted Bolduc, and if the mission was a no go then it was a no go. Disappointed, we rolled back to the motor pool and unpacked our kit to return to the celebration.

The next morning we started our intensive training cycle with the ANA. Under the freshly risen sun, we did calisthenics and ran around the five-mile track we’d built just inside the base’s walls. Besides keeping us in shape, the routine forged a bond with the Afghans and allowed us to identify our problem children. Those who couldn’t keep up got the most attention.

I took the officers, including Ali, under my wing. The rest of the team worked with the sergeants and soldiers. Bill and I focused the training on three areas: moving, shooting, and communicating—the basics of combat. We’d worked with some of these soldiers in the past, but before I took them into harm’s way I wanted to know what I had.

Like everything in the Army, we trained in three phases. Crawl. Walk. Run. After the morning’s workout, we had breakfast and met
back at the range for the “crawl” phase. Basic marksmanship started with the weapon’s zero. If the sights didn’t align then it was impossible to hit the target. It should have been a simple exercise. Instead, it took us all morning because many of the Afghans had lost respect for their weapons. Instead of maintaining them, they got lazy and banged the rifles around or tinkered with the sights. Every aspect of discipline has to be maintained.

During the break, our team, under Bill’s direction, worked on our own marksmanship skills with a “stress shoot,” which is a race against the clock. Bill set up a series of targets that forced us to move in full kit and hit targets while changing magazines or switching between our rifles and pistols among numerous firing positions. The winner got bragging rights, a source of great pride on a team of wiseasses. Before the competition started, we all got to run through the course once to get a feel for it and to eliminate excuses.

The course was about half a football field wide and an equal distance long. The range extended far beyond the barrier walls and made a slow rocky climb to the base of the adjacent mountain. The ground was flat, gumball-sized gravel offering some stability, but not much. During the day the stones acted as a mirror, reflecting the heat of the midday sun onto our baking bodies.

There were several types of targets. We had plywood barriers to shoot around, over, under, and through. Bill added a pile of chairs, a GMV, an ATV, and a junk car. The first targets were a mix of steel pistol and rifle silhouettes, flat plates in the shape of a human head and shoulders that fell when struck. The other targets were commercial cardboard targets depicting menacing faces or hostage situations, increasing the difficulty level.

I watched my team practice the course meticulously and methodically. They made it look easy despite their cumbersome body armor.

Bill started the competition. As the team sergeant, he set a high standard. He raced from behind the Humvee to the pile of chairs.
Ping. Ping
. His direct hits reverberated across the range. He reached
the final target, transitioned his now spent M4 to the side, and smoothly drew his pistol. Within seconds, he was standing at near point-blank range of the final target with a tight cluster of shots on the target’s chest, an empty pistol in his hand.

When he was finished, he walked the course with each of the team members, calmly coaching them through it.

“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Relax, feel the trigger. Squeeze, don’t jerk. Keep your eyes on the target,” he coached as we moved from mark to mark. “Change magazines without taking your eyes off the target. Transition to your secondary weapon, don’t look, know where it is. Know where your magazines are. Everything must be muscle memory.”

Bill knew that in a close firefight the steady, consistent shooter would come out the winner every time. Bill was consistent with everyone when it came to training, even me. There was a standard you were required to achieve. You fail, you go home. It was that simple. I loved these courses. They were some of the best combat training you could get. I had done well in the past and I was anxious to see how I would do now.

Shouldering my rifle, I looked down the sights and dropped the first target. Trotting to the next mark behind some plywood, I again zeroed in on the target and heard a familiar ping. Two for two. My internal clock counted the seconds. My body went into autopilot while I controlled my heart rate. Sweat ran into my eyes, and all too soon, my lungs heaved and gasped for breath in the high altitude. Ending a few minutes later, I holstered my pistol and waited for Bill to grade me.

“Middle of the pack,” Bill said. Even if I did well, Bill didn’t hand out compliments.

Steve was the last shooter and got most of Bill’s attention. He seemed rattled at the finish line and after Bill counted up the hits, he had the lowest number. Dejected, Steve told Bill he needed to rezero. In one motion, Bill took Steve’s weapon and fired two rounds
into the steel target two hundred meters away, knocking it down. He walked over to the weapons table and grabbed a shotgun. “At least with this, Steve, you won’t have to aim,” he said, with that familiar smirk. Steve took it in stride, but I knew I’d see him later practicing on the range when no one else was around.

Our company commander, Jared, had arrived at KAF and had spent the last day or so getting briefed up on a massive operation. He was in charge of several Special Forces teams, including mine, and wanted to read me in on the details. I arranged to get him a helicopter over to the firebase for a short visit to get us up to speed on the mission.

Before we left KAF, I’d heard rumors of a big operation. But I hadn’t wanted a piece of it. I envisioned a room full of commanders from half a dozen coalition countries sitting around a table trying to create a plan, all of them convinced they were smartest. But based on our running into the large, defiant group of fighters on the convoy to the base, plus the rocket attacks, plus everything else I’d been hearing, they sure needed to do something—and soon.

Ever since Operation Anaconda, Special Forces teams had rarely taken part in large-scale operations, especially those involving conventional units. During Anaconda, in March 2002, troops from the 101st Airborne Division and 10th Mountain Division planned to block enemy escape routes, but the whole mission crumbled when some Special Forces and the fledgling Afghan militia made contact with hardened Al Qaeda fighters in Gardez in the bitterly cold Shahi Khot Valley. The end result was that there were critical mistakes made by all parties and some Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders escaped. The 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne didn’t communicate with the Special Forces teams much after that. For our part, we had received so much blame for that operation that it was not worth the effort to participate in others.

The fallout crippled Afghan relations with conventional commanders,
who now defined the Afghan militias as unreliable. So Special Forces continued operating on their own, “by, with, and through” the indigenous Afghan forces. As a result, we had built critical relationships and a structure to develop the Afghan Army. Over time, the conventional commanders began placing more and more emphasis on partnering conventional forces with the fledgling Afghan Army. We were with them to make sure they succeeded. Now I learned from Jared that Bolduc saw this new operation as a chance to really show ISAF and the world that the Afghan Army could do its part. It was our job to make sure his intent became reality.

I put out the warning order to prepare to support an ISAF operation, much to the chagrin of my team. We had been at the firebase only a week. They wanted more time with the Afghans. Our ANA soldiers needed more training to make sure everybody knew the basic battle drills. We needed more sergeants and officers to lead the soldiers. But most of all, despite knowing some of them from past rotations, we needed to renew and continue to build our relationship. We needed a level of trust that could sustain the pressures of combat.

I let everyone know we would be leaving for KAF in twenty-four hours. The damn mission had not even been formally announced, but I had to get the Afghans on board. We held a team meeting in the small mud TOC, and almost all the comments started with, “But Captain …” We had no choice but to make the mission work, so we called a chai session with the Afghan leadership in their compound.

Shinsha, the Afghan commander, and Ali Hussein, my scarred protégé, came and joined me and Bill on the floor of their main mud hut, which was used as the ANA headquarters. Over boiling-hot tea, I started by channeling my best football-coach-before-the-big-game speech. I played heavily on the centuries-old unwritten tribal code of Pashtunwali, an ancient ideology that governs the actions of Pashtun tribe members. They believe that when they die, they will be judged by their god, Allah, by however closely they have followed the Pashtunwali
code. I hammered home the blood feud with the Taliban (
badal
), the duty to honor the family (
nang
), the love of the Pashtun culture (
dod-pasbani
), and their sworn oath to protect it (
tokhm-pasbani
).