No Worse Enemy (20 page)

I’d heard so much about life in Marjah under the Taliban that I asked everyone I could what it had been like. They all said similar things. ‘It was fine’; ‘it was not
like under the government’; ‘there was no crime, no thieves and no robberies’. The only bad things I heard about the Taliban were that they smoked too much marijuana and
didn’t spend enough time with their families.

The sound of gunfire filled the air above us. The family ran inside.

Some marines ran outside to see where the firing was coming from. Others smashed firing holes through the compound walls. Everyone else went into the house, with the family. The son who’d
told me about life under the Taliban sat on a sack of seeds. He asked Mohammad to join him: ‘Come, come, have a cigarette’, he said, patting the sack next to him.

‘We’ve been living in constant anxiety’, the elder told me. ‘We thought the Taliban would beat us or the government would come and bomb us. We’re stuck in the
middle, so we hide indoors, worried about the bombings.’

Mohammad took a cigarette and asked the marines if he could smoke. They told him of course he could, appearing to think this was his first time. He lit up and started smoking like a trooper,
making a show of it and enjoying being the centre of attention. Faces eased every time they looked at him. I could still hear marines whispering to each other that he was twenty years old.
‘He’s got a cigarette in his right hand, imagine a prison shank in his left’, said one. Others joked that they wanted to put him in their backpacks and give him a pistol, so he
could protect them. But their jokes were made discreetly and Mohammad didn’t know about them. The ANA had no fears about political correctness. They picked him up and showed him around. At
one point they put him in a kind of swinging basket that hung in the middle of the corridor, which infuriated him.

Four children stood in a corner, transfixed by everything the marines did and said. After months of rumours and fear, here they were, laughing, joking and handing out sweets in the
children’s very own home. Everyone had expected much worse. One man said he’d been told the marines would eat his children.

Janofsky took the elder to one side. He wanted to rent a room for himself and his squad for the night. The elder kept saying he was afraid of the helicopters.

‘The helicopters are on our side and when you’re in here, you’re on our side too, so the helicopters are here for you too’, said Janofsky.

The man bent down and touched his sacks of seeds, begging the marines not to take them. Janofsky assured him that no marines would take any of his food. ‘We’re here to provide
security to you and the people of Marjah’, he said.

‘All we have here is tea and bread’, the man replied. He couldn’t grasp the idea that armed men had entered his home but wouldn’t hurt him or steal his food.

Janofsky looked confused too. All he wanted was ‘just to rent his place for the night’.

The interpreter wasn’t helping: ‘You should leave this house and go away’, he told the old man, totally mistranslating what Janofsky had said.

The man’s kind and pleading smile dropped into a look of absolute terror. He couldn’t speak. He thought he and his whole family had been handed a death sentence.

‘There is fighting so you shouldn’t be here’, added the terp nonchalantly.

‘Where can I go? What if you bomb us?’ asked the man, panicking.

Janofsky sensed the terror in the man’s voice and asked what he was saying.

‘Where should we move?’ said the terp.

‘Who should move? No, they’ll be OK to stay here with us, for tonight’, said Janofsky, confused.

‘OK, you can stay here’, said the terp, casually, as if he’d been abusing his power just for the fun of it. The old man had almost been reduced to tears.

More bullets cracked over the compound. One smashed through a window and sank into the high walls of the corridor above our heads.

We sat down and started talking. The sons made everyone glasses of tea. You could hear the deep piston thuds of guns being fired outside but everyone had stopped noticing. The family
weren’t going to be turfed out of their homes to face the bombs, their babies weren’t going to be eaten and nothing would be taken. There was a delightful sense of relief throughout the
room. For an hour or so, everyone enjoyed being in each other’s company. Marjah seemed not such a difficult place to be.

On the marines’ maps, the compound where we were was called La Mirage. It was one of several strange names I’d heard. Other houses were called Toby’s, the Cave, Cherry’s
and Heroes. It wasn’t until I was in North Carolina, some months later, on my way to Camp Lejuene, 1/6 Marines US base, that I realised where the names came from. I drove past a warehouse
surrounded by cars; it looked like Tony Soprano’s strip club. It actually was a strip club and I looked at the sign to see if it was named the Bada-Bing. But it was La Mirage. When I’d
passed the Cave, and later Cherry’s, I realised the Marines had named the landmark buildings of Kuru Charai after North Carolina’s titty bars.

Janofsky and First Squad stayed in the house overnight. Everyone else had to make a mad dash back through the four buildings they’d fought their way through earlier on. The first two were
easy; it was possible to go through them without ever leaving the protection of their high mud walls. But as soon as we entered the mosque compound, the crackle of machine-gun fire filled the
courtyard and everyone darted under the covered porch. The fire was so great it felt like a giant was throwing huge fistfuls of stones against the mosque. Marines on either side of me fired into
different parts of the pork chop, the densely-populated area the marines had still to clear, suggesting we were being attacked from two different positions.

Whenever anyone stepped into the courtyard, there came another ear-piercing crackle of shots. The four marines next to me lined up and took hand grenades out of their pockets.
Hand
grenades?
I thought to myself.
They don’t still throw hand grenades, do they? And anyway, the enemy can’t be that close.
I thought they were over a hundred metres away.
I’d been telling myself, as I always did when I heard that awful cracking sound, that the Taliban were terrible shots, that they didn’t know how to use their sights and if they did,
their guns were so old the sights would be no good anyway. But they were a hand grenade’s throw away? A child could be on target at that distance. The four marines ran across the courtyard
and threw their grenades over the wall in front, not behind, where most of the firing had been coming from.
They’re over there as well? We’re surrounded? Again?

‘Frag out!’

‘FRAG OUT!’

‘FRAG OUT!’ The marines tossed their grenades, cackling with delight as they exploded.

The gunfire continued and soon, the courtyard was covered in broken glass and hot bullet cases. Every time the marines fired, someone replied with greater fire. Then it stopped. The Taliban
seemed to have worked out that if they launched attacks from several positions at the same time, they had a good few minutes before they were in serious danger. One by one, we sprinted across the
courtyard, over a wall, across a ditch, over another high wall and into the last compound before the base.

Back at the base, Captain Sparks wrestled with the biggest surprise of Marjah, the highly-skilled snipers. The tiny roof I’d seen being turned into a watchtower was now
walled with sandbags but even so, a marine had been shot there. Two marines had been shot on the roof of the main building. The snipers were in well-concealed positions, roughly three hundred
metres from the base. One sniper had fired just four bullets during those first two days and hit three marines. Locating someone so patient was hard enough but there were also marksmen nearby, who
followed each sniper’s shot with a few single shots from their AK47s, confusing anyone who thought they knew roughly where the first shot had come from.

Captain Sparks stood outside the base, trying to work out the sniper’s positions. There was another crack. ‘Did he just shoot the sandbag? It sure looked to me like he shot the
sandbag’, he said. ‘He did’, said a marine in front of him. Sparks had walked out of the big double doors that led into the courtyard and stood on the verandah, studying the
watchtower. In front of him were a line of marines in full combat gear. It looked ceremonial; as if a king had come out of his palace to survey his land and the sentries had assembled to protect
him.

Another crack filled the courtyard. Captain Sparks looked up. There was another crack. ‘Is that Koenig firing?’ he asked.

‘It is, Sir.’ Lance Corporal Koenig was one of the marines lying down behind the sandbags.

‘There’s no holes in the Afghan flag yet.
Semper Fi
’, said Sparks as he walked inside. ‘The sniper is the most psychologically effective weapon on the battlefield,
because there’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘Stay low, keep your heads down’, shouted one of the marines on the verandah. Their eyes were fixed grimly on the sandbags at the top of the watchtower. There were different theories
about where the snipers were; Captain Sparks was sure they were two to three hundred metres north-west of the base, hiding somewhere in the pork chop. ‘So there’s nothing we can do
about it until we clear it’, he said.

Captain Sparks walked into his room and began putting on his helmet and his body armour, his chest rig, stuffed with sixteen magazines of ammunition. As he walked through the door, he passed a
marine standing in the corridor looking lost. ‘Bozman, stay motivated!’ he said, like a gym instructor rallying a sagging spin class.

Above us, the cracks of the competition between marksmen continued. Its structure was polite, like a conversation between strangers; back and forth, back and forth, sometimes in single words,
sometimes in sentences. Often, the participants waited minutes to take their turn. In between, there was an awful silence. It was careful, considered and cerebral. There seemed to be rules, tricks,
feints and a mutual respect that suggested an etiquette. Occasionally, of course, someone at either end collapsed into a lifeless heap.

‘It’s not
Enemy at the Gate
’, one of the marine snipers explained later, ‘but you do try to get in the other guy’s head.’

The first sergeant ran outside and told the men in the watchtower to get their heads down. One of the terps had heard the Taliban on their radios, saying they were trying to hit the tip of
something, ‘And it better not be a fucking Kevlar’, he said. The panicked look I’d seen on the first morning appeared again on a few faces.

‘Someone sticks their head up and you get a round which just misses, or hits, it will paralyse a unit’, said Tim Coderre, the law enforcement advisor. He thought there were at least
five snipers. ‘There’s probably nothing more lethal other than unmanned aerial stuff.’

The forward air controller, whose job it was to call in air strikes, asked Captain Sparks where he thought the snipers were. Sparks thought there were two positions he could be sure of. The
forward air controller said he’d drop a Hellfire missile on them next time the marines took fire. ‘It’s friggin’ counter-insurgency in a ghost town. There’s nobody out
there’, he said, thinking all the civilians had fled.

‘That’s what I thought earlier’, said Sparks, ‘until I went into that compound and there were thirty women and children hunkered down inside, where third platoon’s
at.’ Such brief exchanges were the difference between those thirty women and children living and dying.

The following day, one of the snipers fired again, hitting Lance Corporal Koenig in the head as he bobbed up over the top of the sandbags.

‘I came up and turned around to get my rifle passed to me and as I turned around, I guess my head was just a little above the sandbags and he shot and ended up hitting me directly in the
head’, said Koenig. He had an incredible glow about him for someone who’d just been shot in the head. Or maybe he glowed because he’d been shot in the head and was able to tell me
about it. He glowed like a born-again Christian or a Hare Krishna. His whole face was smiling. ‘It cracked me back and I was dazed and didn’t really know what was going on. I was like,
“I’m hit!”’ He picked his helmet off the ground and showed me a huge dent in the front. ‘This is where I was hit, about an inch above my eyes. And this is the mount
where it hit. This is what they say stopped the round from going through the Kevlar.’ He showed me a broken metal brace, for attaching night vision goggles, that had been on the front of his
helmet. Contrary to popular belief, even of the soldiers and marines who wear them, their helmets aren’t actually bullet-proof, especially if they’re hit square on. ‘It hurt
really, really bad. I thought I was dying. I thought I’d actually been hit, it scared me pretty bad.’

Four marines had been shot on the roof above us in the space of just two days. They had probably all been shot by one sniper, whose position was still unknown. This would be terrifying to most
people but Captain Sparks was encouraged by it.

‘He’s not a real sniper’, he said. ‘If he was we’d have a lot more casualties. He’s just very good with whatever he’s got.’ That was perhaps what
separated Captain Sparks from everyone else and made him either a genuine warrior or a complete lunatic. He always worked out a way to be encouraged by everything and anything, no matter how
discouraging things first appeared. Sometimes you could see it happening. He’d say something that sounded like an admission of failure or an acknowledgement of limitations. But then
he’d say something to temper it and by the time the third sentence had left his mouth he’d created an argument to destroy the hopelessness of the first and was completely gung-ho again.
I’ve met people who could pick themselves up and come back from things but never anyone who could do it in the space of three sentences.

To me – and I’m sure to many of the marines – it looked like there was still an awfully long way to go and a lot that could go badly wrong. Bravo Company had been in Marjah for
two days; they’d lost one man, suffered four casualties, were surrounded and cut off from the other companies, who were still miles away. And they only controlled five buildings in Karu
Charai village, a slither of Marjah.