News From the Red Desert

ALSO BY KEVIN PATTERSON

Fiction

Consumption

Country of Cold

Non-fiction

Outside the Wire: The War in Afghanistan

in the Words of its Participants
(co-editor)

The Water in Between

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-one

Chapter Twenty-two

Chapter Twenty-three

Chapter Twenty-four

Chapter Twenty-five

Taliban's Last Stand, December 2001

T
he automatic and heavy weapons fire gave way eventually to the sound of sporadic pistol shots and isolated hollering. A twenty-eight-year-old sergeant from Boise—Special Forces, thus unnameable—stood and watched as his comrades probed the enemy dead. His bright red beard jutted into the world with the assertiveness of a thorn fence. Beside him stood a twenty-year-old private from Bar Harbor with silky wisps of blond cheek and lip hair but shoulders like articulated melons. As combat frenzy faded from the scene, they could breathe easily again.

They looked around at the holed remains of the building the enemy had defended. Other Government Agency personnel—CIA—stood together tightly in one khaki adventure wear–clad clump; SEALs bunched together in their own tight little sunglassed pod. There was no one left to chase. The enemy who wasn't dead now would be soon.

“This was the last position held in strength,” the private said.

The sergeant nodded. “According to the intelligence brief.”

“Where'd they all go?” said the private.

“If you'd been paying attention you'd have noticed that we killed a lot of them.”

“We didn't kill a whole army.”

“Dead, run away—they're gone.”

“Gone somewhere.”

The sergeant shrugged. “If they're still in formed groups, we'll grease them.”

In that moment, the popping of gunfire fell away entirely.

“Kinda blows, huh?” the private said.

“What does?”

“I don't know.”

“Yeah.”

The CIA men moved to search the bodies of the dead Taliban. The soldiers stood back from this. After other operations, the senior NCOs had immediately rounded up the fighting men and directed them toward the helicopters waiting to take them to the next target. They were given their briefings and more ammunition in the helicopter. High-tempo ops were all about not giving the enemy a chance to regroup, to hide, to think things over. Now there was no one to chase.

The private choked up silently and had to swallow. He got it down, then asked the sergeant, “How many did we lose, all told?”

“Not sure. Not many Americans. More NA.”

“How many Talibs did we waste, do you think?”

“Lots. Those things bother you?”

“Not really.”

“Okay.”

“Think we'll go home now?”

“Not right away. Soon.”

“Shortest fucking war I ever heard of.”

“There's been plenty of short wars,” the sergeant said. “Mostly those are the only ones worth fighting.” Tendrils of flame now licked the building and they tracked the smoke as it climbed into the sky. It was long minutes before either spoke. Then the sergeant said, “I spent ten years training for these last three months and now I'll be another fifty, telling stories about them.”

“Like one of those brontosauruses at the VFW going on about 'Nam, how they coulda won it if they hadn't had one hand tied behind their backs. Fat and drunk.”

“Already got the beard. Just missing the Harleywear vest and the ex-wife.”

“Difference being, here, we won.”

They both stroked their beards. They were still not used to them. What they used to know about being a soldier, before they ever shot anyone, was: soldiers do not wear beards. Something to do with gas masks not fitting, but mostly because soldiers do not wear beards. Maybe Brits and Frenchmen. If you could call them soldiers. And sailors. Which just proves the point. Then they got to Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan men wore beards. So they were told to throw away their razors. War turns the world upside down.

Overhead they could see fast air—F-18s and A-10s—circling, waiting, silently begging to be called in. In the private's silvered Oakleys the older man, still thinking about his itchy beard, caught a glimpse of himself. “I look like someone's half-Appalachian, half-pedophile uncle, come up from the hollow for prostate surgery. Jesus fuck.” He was only twenty-eight years old.

The private continued to look skyward. “You're trying a little hard.”

“The prostate surgery?”

“I liked the half-Appalachian, half-pedophile part.”

They were quiet for a time while they tried to think up new lines.

The CIA people set to going through the burnt buildings working in two-man teams. One photographed and the other collected. They wore microphones into which they muttered continuously, describing everything they saw. The pair closest to where the sergeant from Boise and the private from Bar Harbor were standing had been in on every operation they had been a part of, though they had exchanged almost no words. CIA disdained soldiers as unsophisticated and rule-bound muscle. That was the sergeant's read of them, anyway. As if all of them weren't making it up as they went along, from the moment they
had landed two months earlier. How to ride horses, how to speak to angry and terrified village elders, how to know when the interpreter is massaging the story. The soldiers, for their part, considered the CIA to have a scent about them. They'd watched some of the interrogation sessions with Taliban considered important enough to take live. Not pretty. Not anything a soldier would ever do, the sergeant from Boise had told his men. And his platoon commander. And his company commander. Who had nodded and looked hard at him. The sergeant did not look away.

The men in khaki pants emptied the pockets of the dead into plastic bags and they photographed the face of every corpse and then they took cheek swabs. They lined up the bodies and numbered them. As the sergeant and the private watched, they rolled one over and an arm seemed to move. The CIA pair stopped for a moment to look at it. One of them put his hand on his pistol. The soldiers held their breath. Then the CIA resumed their photographing and searching. The soldiers exhaled slowly.

The F-18s and A-10s continued to circle overhead, though they looked more resigned now. Other elements of their force had secured the perimeter and still others were searching the surrounding airfield and roads for traps and unexploded ordnance. In a moment the company commander would be calling the captain for an after-action report. There aren't that many ways of saying what the captain from Salt Lake City would have to say. One: the bad guys are all dead. Two: none of our guys are hurt. Three: it doesn't matter how much ammunition we have remaining because: see One.

It had taken twelve weeks. The whole country had seemed to lift up and tilt their way. The fighters near the Tajikistan border gave way in one long loud night when B-52 bombers out of Diego Garcia, far away in the Indian Ocean, appeared overhead, as faint as satellites. The Northern Alliance fighters were used to night fighting but they had not been prepared for this. Unshaven and muscular
ferenghee
pointed lasers on
clumps of men and then watched expressionlessly through starlight scopes as they became unclumped. There wasn't anyone on that battlefield who was as old as the half-century-old bombers flying overhead, turning men into red mist, but that did not matter much. Not to the bombed, and not to the bomb aimers. Two-ton high-explosive Guided Bomb Units dropped into rock cracks four feet wide and the plume of body parts that erupted then was an unholy sight in any religion. Age matters when it brings weakness, but strong old things, like infantry master sergeants and B-52s, are made even more formidable by their age.

Chasing the evaporating enemy, the ferenghee had ridden their shaggy Afghan horses until the beasts fell down beneath them and then they ran on their own feet, mechanically and seemingly without tiring. They called in B-52 and Tomahawk missile strikes on every bit of organized resistance they found. One night a Taliban boy named Atta Door was hiding under a rock that rang with steel splinters. He thought to himself,
The ferenghee cannot be defeated.
With the next concussion, that idea spread from him to the men closest to him, who were frantically trying to operate their radio despite the jamming of the invisible airplanes high in the night sky. From them, that idea rippled out to the riflemen and the leaders and imams of the force. They all sagged, and then the point was no longer debatable. It radiated farther outward, and a few minutes later, it filled the thoughts of villagers in their bedclothes listening to the clear-night thunder filling the valley. Then it swept over the mountains, and headed for Mazar-i-Sharif. And from there it headed for Kabul and Herat.

At the Kandahar Airfield, the thought had just found its full expression. That morning, the smoke from the broken dun-yellow plaster of the shattered airport spiralled upwards alongside smoke from one hundred other fires burning on the field. Twenty years ago, before the wars, this building had been an administrative office. It had once been a version of beautiful. Its graceful dome had a Persian sensuality that looked nothing at all like what the private and the sergeant thought of as airport architecture. If you looked closely, you could still see damage from the fighting that had attended the civil war six years earlier.
But this new assault had been vastly worse. Now the domes were punctured, and rebar straggled free of concrete in half a dozen blasted places.

The sergeant from Boise look at the disarray he and his comrades had created. Maybe it would be repaired this time. But it was a pretty broken country. On their way here in their Chinooks, they had seen the hydro dams to the north, unmaintained since the Soviets left, spilling water purposelessly. And no electricity anywhere, except from chieftains' generators, running on smuggled fuel. A broken place in for more breaking, it turned out.

Three months later the sergeant and the private were lined up on the newly operational Kandahar Airfield, their M-4s slung over their shoulders, and their packs hanging loosely on their backs. Regular army guys ran off the C-130s, turboprops still winding down, scanning 360 degrees for threats, at all times displaying full zeal and outstanding situational awareness. The Special Forces guys, three and a half months in-country now, would have laughed, but that would have made it look like they had noticed the newbies.