No Worse Enemy (19 page)

Staff Sergeant Young spoke to the terp. ‘There’s a kid on the other side of the wall but that’s exactly where the wire was leading, so we don’t know if he’s the one
that was going to set off the bomb. In any case, when the EOD runs back, you’re gonna yell across and tell them that the explosion’s about to happen.’ The terp nodded. ‘They
got two minutes and they need to run away, OK?’ The terp nodded again. ‘Yell as loud as you can so they can hear you.’

Slowly, Tom walked along the ditch. Young shouted that over the wall, smoke was burning; probably some kind of signal. Tom nodded and continued. When he was close enough, he put his metal
detector on the ground, took out a block of C4 explosive, ignited it, placed it right under the bomb, picked up his metal detector and ran back towards us.

‘Everybody back, behind here’, shouted Young.

‘Yell across the courtyard. Yell, tell the kid to run’, he said to the terp, who didn’t yell anything. ‘YELL ACROSS, QUICKLY, YOU AIN’T GOT A MINUTE, YELL,
JOHN!’ The terp stared at him. ‘OK, just stand there, then. Get out. Get over here, get down, behind this wall.’ Tom, Ski and two ANA soldiers made their way around the mosque.
‘You were supposed to yell at the kid in the courtyard, John. That was the whole thing you came over for.’ The terp said nothing.

‘After it goes off, listen for frag, so everybody be quiet’, said Tom, visibly frayed and struggling for breath.

I asked him if he’d volunteered for this job. ‘Yes, I did’, he said, laughing slightly.

We braced ourselves. The explosion smashed the mosque’s windows and made us all wobble, even though most of us were crouched on one knee.

Tom looked at the crater the explosion had made. ‘It was probably about a hundred pounds.’

An old man with a thick white beard suddenly appeared on top of the wall, right where the wire lay. He threw it towards us. ‘No, no, no, tell him to stop, tell him to leave it’,
shouted the marines. The old man was terrified; his eyebrows arched up into the thick curved lines that ran across his forehead. He held the palms of his trembling hands towards us. ‘There is
no Taliban’, he said, ‘come in, come in. Don’t worry, just come.’

‘I got two men’, shouted a marine.

‘Two men?’ shouted Young.

‘They just went down behind a berm or something. You see ’em? You see their heads?’

‘Keep an eye on ’em, see if you can spot a weapon.’

We heard a few bursts of gunfire. ‘Is that shooting at us?’ asked Young.

‘No’, someone replied.

The old man went back behind the wall. The next burst of gunfire definitely was aimed at us. Some of the marines collapsed on the ground, others ran back behind the cover of the mosque.

‘Hey, let’s go, where’s the fucking target at?’ screamed Young. More shots came into the compound. ‘Get a fucking shot off.’ While everyone else ducked behind
a wall or ran behind the mosque, Young stayed standing. ‘Give me a goddamn 203 shot, for Christ’s sake.’ More bullets came right into the courtyard where he stood. The marines
fired back. ‘You see a guy out there, you fucking hit him!’ screamed Young.

‘There’s two guys on the roof’, shouted a marine, as he pumped shots at them. ‘See the brown top? He’s firing from there. I fucking saw it. They’re right
there, twelve o’clock.’ He fired single shots at the men on the roof. Other marines hit the building with air grenades and bursts from their machine-guns. Someone screamed for a LAW
rocket to be brought forward.

‘Taking effective fire from Building 89 and Kilo 22’, said Young into his radio. ‘One shooter on top of the roof, we spotted him, we’re gonna take a LAW shot and knock
him out.’

I ran behind the short wall surrounding the mosque. Three marines fired at the brown rooftop; one was ready to fire the LAW rockets. Occasionally they stopped, and ducked behind the wall as
bullets cracked through the air around them. As one of the marines got ready to fire the rocket, another screamed: ‘DO NOT FIRE THE LAW! NAZIR, COME HERE!’ Nazir, one of the Afghan
soldiers, was sitting cross-legged alongside the wall, right behind the rocket. He’d have been badly burned, at the very least, if he stayed there. Nazir got up and ran towards me. The marine
got ready to fire the rocket again and the others ducked down and put their fingers in their ears. Suddenly, we were covered in dust and the air was sucked from around us. Everyone looked over the
wall. ‘We got a hit, that’s a confirmation hit.’ Then another bullet cracked over our heads and we ducked again. One of the marines who’d been next to the firing rocket ran
back towards the mosque. ‘I can’t hear anything’, he said, holding his ears and keeling over.

‘Keep eyes out in that direction’, screamed Young, ‘a group is moving and we’re taking sporadic shots from that direction. Get out of the mosque. If you can’t get
cover, back out.’ In the middle of a battle, they remembered their cultural sensitivity training. I thought having gunfights in people’s gardens was probably more offensive than
entering mosques but didn’t think it was a good time to raise the point.

The battle died down inconclusively. The Taliban had probably run out of ammunition, dropped their weapons and retreated. They could have walked right past the marines a few minutes later and
not been touched.

We lined up to climb over the wall into the compound from where the old man had appeared. An Afghan soldier stood right next to a marine who was lifting people up and over the wall but
didn’t want any help. The marine looked at him: ‘Get out of my way or I’m gonna punch you in the face.’

I looked over and saw ANA soldiers were searching the old man, yanking him roughly by his waistcoat. I also saw the kid they’d spotted earlier, complaining, shouting and gesticulating
wildly. He was about three feet tall and looked about six years old but his hand gestures were those of a fully-grown man with attitude; a New Yorker arguing or an Italian football player
protesting against a referee’s decision. As the marines stabbed sacks with their knives, looking for ammonium nitrate, the terp asked the old man and the kid if the Taliban had forced
themselves into their home.

‘Yes, they did’, said the old man.

‘It’s like with you’, said the kid. ‘If you slit our throats, what can we do about it?’ He raised his right hand, twisted it clockwise and opened it, as if to say,
‘Are you stupid?’

‘What were they wearing?’ asked the terp.

‘I don’t know. Something like this’, said the kid, grabbing the old man’s tattered green shirt. He looked disgusted at the level of questioning.

‘Did they have Kalashnikovs?’

‘Yes’, said the old man, who still instinctively held his hands in the air.

‘Come on, pops’, said the kid, leading the old man away.

A few minutes later, a marine turned, in shock. ‘He just called me a motherfucker’, he said, laughing. ‘The little son of a bitch.’

A large black dog approached, barking. The kid spun round and ran towards it, picking up a rock on the way. ‘Go away, dog’, he shouted, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ The
dog cowered and the kid threw the rock, hitting the dog hard in the ribs. ‘Take that.’

‘He is twenty years old’, said one of the terps.

‘Is he a midget or something?’ said one of the marines.

‘Is he really twenty years old?’ said another.

The kid, Mohammad, was actually a man and really was twenty years old. He was a dwarf and a heroin addict. He’d been a refugee in Iran for five years but had recently returned to Marjah;
one of the approximately two million Afghans who’d fled from the Taliban but returned after their overthrow, expecting peace and prosperity.

‘That’s freaky’, said one of the marines.

‘The Taliban ran out of ammunition’, said the old man. ‘They threw down their guns and left.’

‘We’ll stay here’, said Mohammad. ‘I’m a tough guy. Fuck the Taliban! And fuck their mothers!’

‘Why don’t you seal off both sides and search in the middle?’ asked the old man, demonstrating with his hands.

‘Tell him we’re going to find the Taliban’, a marine said, ‘and we’re going to kill whoever needs to be killed.’

Mohammad walked up to Qadaat and another ANA soldier, who were keeping watch through a gate. They were on their knees, so as Mohammad berated them, they were face to face. ‘I am a Baluch
[the region of Baluchistan straddles the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan]. It’s five years since I’ve been back here. We came back for work’, he said. ‘I ask you
for money but you do nothing to help, what can I do?’

Qadaat smiled. ‘We’re here to get rid of the Taliban, we’re here to help you. Build schools and lots of other things.’

‘Right’, said Mohammad, disdainfully. ‘Thanks a lot.’

He looked down the alley and stared up at the marines around him, one at a time, as if they were just the latest bunch of men who were going to make his life miserable.

Captain Sparks appeared. Mohammad’s appearance threw him for the briefest of seconds, then he stepped around him. He joined Young, the terp and the old man at the end of the alley, next to
a door that marked the edge of the cleared ground. The terp and the old man began an intense conversation both speaking at the same time.

‘What’s he saying?’ asked Captain Sparks. The terp continued the conversation. ‘Tell us what he is saying.’ The terp went on speaking in Pashtu. ‘NO, no, no.
It’s not for you to talk, you need to tell us what he’s saying’, demanded Sparks.

‘We don’t want to move, he says’, said the terp.

‘He doesn’t have to move’, said the captain.

‘His family is over there and he wants to stay with them’, said the terp, pointing through the door and along the path.

‘He doesn’t have to move’, said the captain again.

‘We want to know if it’s safe to move out there. Are there any more Taliban bombs?’ said Young.

Figure 2
Operation Mushtaraq (© Google 2011; Image © Digital Globe 2011)

Inside the compound was a family of three men and over a dozen kids. One man, crouching in front of a huge pile of harvested opium poppies, held an enormous dog in a neck lock to stop it
barking. Another carried a baby wearing an all-in-one suit; with the hood covering its head and a cone shape over its feet, the baby looked like a mermaid. The men were patted down as the marines
walked around their home, checking for IEDs or weapons.

‘Who’s the elder? Who’s the guy I want to talk to?’ asked a marine. The terp pointed to an older man, who held the baby in the mermaid suit. Two boys and a young girl
walked from the back of the building. The boys smiled as they were searched. The women were hidden somewhere.

‘Have the Taliban been here?’ asked the marine.

‘Yesterday, they were in the yard around our house but they haven’t been here today’, said one of the elder’s sons. The elder walked past me, still holding the baby,
gesticulating towards a small room next to the gate. ‘Look! This is where we make our bread.’ He disappeared inside and came out with a piece of thick, round bread. He pretended to take
a bite out of it, before offering it to me. He had one of the kindest smiles I’ve ever seen, so kind I was instantly convinced he’d offer the piece of bread if it were the last thing he
had. He wore a beaten-up old purple jumper with holes over a tatty green jumper, followed by a dusty green waistcoat. His turban had once been white but was now the same colour as the mud
walls.

He put both the baby and the bread on the ground and excitedly reached into his pocket. ‘Card, card’, he said. The baby started crying. A gorgeous little girl, with dark red hair and
a bright green headscarf, walked over and picked it up. She was probably no more than eight years old but knew how to look after the baby on her own.

The old man pulled out a small bundle, unwrapped several layers of cloth and handed over a card bearing his photograph in the bottom right corner and the Afghan flag in the top left. ‘This
is an ID card’, said the terp, ‘a vote card.’

Outside the main building, one of the man’s sons and Mohammad were talking to a terp and the marines’ intelligence officer. ‘Tell your jets no to bomb this place’,
Mohammad told them. The terp spoke over him. ‘Hey, are you listening to me?’ demanded Mohammad. The son smiled at him, bent down and gently pressed his hand against Mohammad’s,
urging him to be quiet.

‘We’ve been stuck in the house’, said the son. ‘We listened to the radio and they said to stay indoors. We haven’t been able to go and wash at the mosque.
We’ve had to wash like women.’ When they’d finished, I asked him what life in Marjah had been like under the Taliban. ‘When the Taliban governed, there were no robberies.
And they ran quick and fair tribunals to settle disputes. If you left them alone, they left you alone.’ An Afghan soldier who understood Pashtu listened and didn’t look the least bit
surprised.