No Worse Enemy (17 page)

Purple smoke spewed out of a grenade thrown in the field behind us as the two MEDEVAC helicopters approached. One flew just above the ground in erratic arcs, like a wasp in a greenhouse, while
the other landed so Morrison could be carried on board. As the second helicopter briefly touched down, the Taliban fired, but they both took off without being hit. That had been Doc
Morrison’s first-ever day of combat. Shrapnel had torn out eight centimetres of nerve and he would later have a tendon transplant, be unable to walk without a splint and be deemed
‘combat ineffective’.

In the ditch, another marine casually described the day’s events, pointing in every possible direction as he talked about bullets that hit the ground next to him and two fighters
he’d seen killed. As he spoke, I heard a gun being fired, then the bullet zipping above us. Apart from being amazed about how much ammunition the man had, the marine was totally unconcerned.
He laughed, ‘that’s coming awfully close to us.’ I wanted to inject a little more urgency, so I asked if the whistling sound really was the noise of the bullets.

‘Yup’, he said, still smiling, then went on talking about his day. ‘They use really good tactics. They hide an AK47 in one spot, then move to another that’s a good hiding
place and where they have another AK47 and they shoot off all those rounds. Then they move, doing the same thing over again. Then they blend with the population.’

The marines were ordered to get out of the ditch, run across the road and back to a building we’d passed on our way in; moving in the opposite direction to Bravo’s objective. As we
approached, someone shouted, ‘Women and children in the building.’ An Afghan family, a couple and their six children, including three toddlers, were being pushed out by one of the
terps. A tiny girl tried to jump over the muddy ditch outside the house but fell short. She landed on all fours but got straight up and moved away. A slightly bigger girl, the mother and the father
all carried babies. The father stopped and held his hands out towards his house.

‘Don’t worry about your house’, shouted the terp. ‘Go quickly, go to that house.’ He pointed to a building about two hundred metres away.

‘I understand’, the father shouted over his shoulder, terrified.

Inside the house, the marines poured water from a well over their heads and climbed on to the roof. Others took it in turns to use an old shovel and an axe to smash firing holes through the
thick mud walls.

Hillis slumped on the ground, lost in thought, when one of the ANA soldiers suddenly appeared in a hole that led to a small storage room. ‘RPG!’ he said, beckoning someone to climb
through the hole with him. He gave me the thumbs up. Hillis was startled from his thoughts.

‘You can’t shoot an RPG from in there. Are you fucking stupid?’

The Afghan soldier nodded his head. ‘Nice.’

Hillis was flabbergasted. ‘Not in here, you’ll kill everybody!’

‘No good?’ said the Afghan, as someone handed him his RPG.

‘You can give it to him, just don’t shoot’, said Hillis, stunned. ‘NO SHOOT!’

‘No shoot’, agreed the Afghan soldier and disappeared back into the hole.

‘I’m just waiting on the mortars to start’, said Hillis. ‘I don’t like being here. It’s too fucking small, close to a fucking attack position, perfect range
for rockets and mortars, an easy distance to judge.’ He paused, staring intently at nothing in particular in front of him. ‘I’m pooped.’

Hillis was one of those men who looked serious and ready to fight all the time, no matter what they were doing. You couldn’t even attack him in his sleep, because he’d still be
ready. He was twenty-six years old, from Corinth, Mississippi. He’d been an all-star baseball player, scouted by many professional teams, until he picked up an elbow injury that took too long
to heal. He had a few odd jobs, got bored and joined the Marine Corps. ‘I joined to fight’, he told me, ‘that’s all I thought the Marines did. When the recruiter told me I
could be in an office or shop, I said fuck that, I want to kick in doors and shoot bad guys.’ So he went to boot camp, then the school of infantry and became a machine-gunner. This was his
second tour in Afghanistan.

I asked how the events of the morning had made him feel about taking Marjah. ‘Oh, we’ll be fine, we just got started. Everybody will be on their toes now, if they weren’t
already. It’s a kind of a wake up.’ He laughed. ‘But it’s a long time before we go home.’

The gunfight continued. We were being shot at from several different positions by people no one could see. Second Lieutenant Rich Janofsky, who was just twenty-four years old, with a pleasantly
surprised look on his face as if he’d just found a fifty-dollar bill, spoke to Captain Sparks over the radio and announced a new plan. Everyone would run four to five hundred metres back
towards the objective. At the same time, rockets would be fired into the building next to the petrol station, where Taliban fighters were believed to be. Six minutes’ worth of smoke would be
provided as cover from the fighters across the fields.

Marines use ‘fucking’ more often than most people say ‘very’ but Janofsky was going for a record. ‘First is going to fire a fucking Jav into Building 20. Be
prepared for fucking volley fire and LAWs [Light Anti-tank Weapons] into the fucking side of 20. And also be fucking prepared to fire fucking LAWs and 203s into Building 19. That door.’ He
pointed to a doorway on his map. ‘I ain’t about going through it because they could probably fucking run back and forth. Not kosher. Fucking throw some shit up, punch through, hold
security. Then fire another fucking damn bitch into fucking Building 19. If they fucking drop smoke, it’s going to be stupid danger close to fucking those guys.’ What he had just said
was a mystery to me but everyone understood and nodded. ‘Alright, what formation you guys want to roll out in?’

Before Bravo could move forwards to their objective, they had to take care of the other fighters, still shooting from the building behind us. Three marines crouched down behind a huge pile of
harvested opium poppies and fired air grenades. Then a Harrier flew low and did a few gun runs but everything landed outside the walls surrounding the building. The fighters inside went quiet and
were soon forgotten. There had only ever been a handful of them and they were no longer shooting. I don’t remember a decision actually being made but the marines walked out and started
bounding towards their objective.

Suddenly, we were sprayed with bullets again. And no one had a clue where the fire was coming from. I followed a few marines into a ditch no deeper than a kitchen sink. The others ran into a
field whose short grass offered no cover at all.

‘We’re getting shot at from behind’, one shouted. The men in the building hadn’t been killed or scared away. They’d just stopped firing and waited for another
chance. The explosives one of the marines carried on his back stuck out high above the grass; he wrestled them off as quickly as he could.

I was next to Hillis. He let go of his weapon for a second and lurched towards me as a bullet cracked past. ‘Whoooooah, it’s coming from that exact same building’, he said. A
machine-gunner from another squad fired, but not at the building we were looking at. ‘What the fuck did he just shoot?’ asked Hillis. No one knew. The firefight was going in three
different directions; the bullets that were almost hitting us came from more than one position. I lay flat on my back but Hillis and another marine, also called Black, sat up, trying to see who was
shooting at us. ‘You recognise that zinging by now?’ he asked.

‘That means it’s within a few feet, right?’ I asked.

‘I believe so, yes’, said Black calmly. Marines had a habit of suddenly becoming exquisitely polite and eloquent in the worst of situations, as if it made them feel more at home in a
situation that would make most people cry for their mothers.

We were told to get up and sprint towards the objective. ‘Go, go, go’, shouted Hillis. ‘Haul ass, haul fucking ass.’ The thick mud and the kit we carried on our backs
meant we could sprint only about fifty metres before our legs burned. Slowing to a quick walk, we made it to a collection of strange, U-shaped buildings, like stables without doors, that the
marines called ‘the Chicken Shack’. I collapsed into the first building. Alongside me, eight marines were trying to work out how much ammunition they had left. ‘Conserve’,
said Hillis, ‘short fucking bursts, accurate fire.’ Most of the marines were puffing so hard they couldn’t talk. One asked the others how many kills they’d had. One held up
a single finger, another held up two. ‘We got three between us’, said a third, smiling.

‘Dude, you gotta drop bombs, bombs don’t miss’, said Hillis. He undid his boots so he could remove the thermal underwear most of us still wore from the night before. ‘We
ain’t had no problems out of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.’

‘They wouldn’t even fight us for this long last year’, said a marine called Carver, as he re-arranged his bandana. ‘They wouldn’t get closer than six hundred
metres. These guys are a hundred and fifty metres away, if not closer. And they’ve got effective fire. Last year it was just sporadic, never hitting anything really.’

Lance Corporal Godwin took off his helmet. Inside was a picture of his baby boy, five months old that day. ‘I miss him’, said Godwin, who’d been deployed when his son was just
two months old. ‘I’ll be home to him soon. He’s gonna be big. I can’t wait.’

Within a few minutes everyone was asleep. They flopped to the ground or slumped against the walls as if they’d been gassed, in what looked to be hugely uncomfortable positions. The
fighting had lasted six hours and we’d been awake for at least thirty.

I woke to find that Captain Sparks had arrived. He sat alone, without moving, outside the buildings, where anyone could see him. He looked at a group of marines, 2nd Platoon, who lay on the
other side of the field. I didn’t know it then but one was dead. A white smoke grenade had been set off; 2nd Platoon was waiting for the MEDEVAC helicopters.

‘We lost an engineer who was trying to bring up some breaching equipment’, Captain Sparks told me later. ‘And I’m the one that called back and told them, get the A-POBs
[route-clearing explosives] up here and somebody, I can’t remember who it was, was arguing with me about how heavy the fire was. I told them “I don’t care, get the A-POBs up here,
we gotta get into the objective”. And about a half hour after the incident I found out that doing that, one of the marines had been killed. He’d been shot in the back as he was moving
out to get that piece of gear. We always go into these fights and I know that in a fight like this I’m going to lose marines but this guy was doing exactly a task that I told him we needed to
do and … you know… he got killed doing it.’ Captain Sparks swallowed and looked at the ground. ‘That was definitely the lowest point I’ve had so far. That took me a
while to reconcile in my head.’

As the MEDEVAC helicopters landed and the stretcher was loaded on board, a loud bang sounded right behind me. I jolted forwards, as if someone had slapped me on the back of the head. The Taliban
had fired a rocket at the helicopters as they took off but missed, hitting the outside wall of the buildings where we’d slept. Sergeant Black had been urinating against the wall that the
rocket hit. He’d been knocked to the ground; the other marines quickly dusted him off to check for bleeding.

‘That scared the fuck out of me’, he said.

‘No cuts, baby, no cuts’, said Staff Sergeant Young as Black got up and started laughing again.

‘Motherfuckers. Man, I’m telling you. I’d just put my dick back in my pants. I was pissing. That fucker hit right above my head.’ What was left of the rocket, the central
pin, splintered at one end, lay on the floor next to him. The sturdy walls, baked hard by so many merciless summers and cursed by so many marines and soldiers, were suddenly a blessing.

The A-POB explosives that Captain Sparks had ordered arrived. Marines prepared to fire them from the other side of the Chicken Shack. A-POBs are designed to clear a path through minefields.
Imagine a small rocket dragging a huge football sock behind it, stuffed with grenades every foot or so; when the rocket lands, the sock lands behind it, in a perfectly straight line. The grenades
explode, detonating any close-by IEDs and creating a safe path. The A-POBs were aimed to blast a path right up to the building that was Bravo’s objective for day one; an old police station
that had been used by the Taliban. As the first sock flew out of its case everyone put their fingers in their ears. ‘These things are fucking great’, said Black. Fifteen seconds later,
the A-POB exploded, followed by another. Black roared with laughter. ‘Fuck you, cocksuckers.’

‘They were probably like “Ah, look at our RPGs!” They friggin’ rattled the wall! Well, imagine how
that
felt’, said Young.

The marines blew a hole in the wall at the end of the path they’d just made. From there, it was just over a hundred metres to the old police station. Some marines dived to the ground, into
firing positions, while the rest ran towards the building.

‘Qadeer, Qadeer, you gotta be the first one going in’, Young shouted to one of the Afghan soldiers. For the first time – and for this one miserable task only – the
Afghans were in the lead. It was their job to be the first to enter the old Taliban building, which was highly likely to be booby-trapped. They were also there to talk to any civilians who might be
inside. General McChrystal’s claim that Operation Mushtaraq would be ‘Afghan-led’ looked like a sick joke. Qadeer, who had a thick black beard and was a good foot shorter than
most of the marines, jogged awkwardly to the front of the line making its way towards the old police station, carrying his rifle in one arm and holding the other outstretched to keep him upright in
the wet mud. Following him was an even shorter Afghan soldier, Romo, whom the marines described as ‘actually, slightly retarded’. They approached the door to the building. A marine with
a metal detector swept the ground leading to it.

‘Hey! Kick the door and go in, OK?’ one of the marines shouted to Qadeer. He called to the other Afghan soldier, ‘Romo, up here, get up here’, gesturing for Romo to go
behind Qadeeer. ‘Little pussy ass! Romo, kick the door in, then move out the way, then you’re gonna go in, ok? Kick the door and then you’re gonna move.’