No Worse Enemy (35 page)

The oldest man had a thin white beard and eyes as bright blue as Peter O’Toole’s in
Lawrence of Arabia
. But the skin underneath sagged heavily, making them weep constantly and
giving him a look of painful sadness. The marine’s intelligence officer also noticed how blue the man’s eyes were but couldn’t put whatever he was thinking into words. He just
pointed to them and said, ‘Wow.’ Then, remembering his job, he struggled to think of a question. In the end, he managed to say: ‘Tell us about this area.’

The men said they didn’t understand what he wanted to know. He then asked where they lived. The men pointed over their left shoulders.

‘Will you walk us through the compound to show us a safe route?’ asked the intelligence officer.

‘Yes, yes’, said one of the men, ‘but you cannot stay there.’ ‘The women and children are scared’, said another. ‘We came here to ask what shall we do?
When you come to our house will there be damage?’ A third man asked, ‘We want to know whether we will be harmed or not. When we leave the house, the women and children start screaming
and they can’t keep calm anywhere. When there are explosions, it rocks our rooms and we are so scared we don’t know which way to go.

‘If there are women and children in a house, will you still go on the rooftop and sit there? Will you still blow your way into that house? We have come to find out. If you leave us alone
we will not move out, because it’s cold. If it makes no difference to you whether there is a family in there or not, then we will have to leave.’

‘Are there mines?’ asked Rock.

‘We will not tell you if there are or not. If we say there aren’t, it’s possible that there are. If we say there are, then you will ask us to show you and we don’t know
where they are. The Taliban places them and hides them, how are we supposed to know where they are?’

The marines asked about one house, higher than the rest, with a flat roof that looked like a good place to keep watch and spend the night. The old men led us to that compound, waved the women
inside and walked up an outdoor staircase and onto the roof. The marines immediately set up gun positions on the corners while Lieutenant Grell radioed back to base to ask how much rent he should
pay the owner.

As we climbed, a small boy, with a disability that made him look like he’d had a stroke, pushed himself backwards into the corner at the top of the staircase. His mouth fell wide open and
his right hand gripped the wall as the giants filed past. His eyes could only just move fast enough to take in all the strange things he was seeing. Another boy crouched next to Doc St Louis, the
dark-skinned Haitian medic, examining his face as if he were trying to work out a puzzle. I half-expected him to rub the doc’s hand to see if the colour came off. The boy pulled a green shawl
over his head; other than that, he barely moved, staring in wonder. ‘It’s fucking Yoda sitting right there’, said Hancock.

Everyone was told to walk to the back of the building, as two more MIC-LICs were fired, shattering the compound’s windows. The marines had two more walls to blast. It was getting dark
quickly, so they used three times the normal amount of explosives to make sure they wouldn’t have to do it twice. I knew they weren’t checking compounds for civilians and could be
disturbingly casual about where they placed explosives but I assumed they knew what was on the other side of the wall. The final blast was supposed to reveal a clear view across a field to the old
British patrol base, Lima Company’s final objective.

But when I walked over the first pile of rubble and towards the second hole, I saw a small garden and behind it a house, cracked across its entire face, with two shattered windows. ‘Hey,
we got a building right here’, said one of the marines. ‘There’s definitely a fucking hole though, a nice fucking hole. I’m proud of myself.’ He stopped smiling and
sighed. ‘Now we got a building, fuck it.’

I was overtaken by a small boy, wearing a skullcap and a brown shawl draped over his shoulder. He was followed by a much younger boy. Both walked straight across the garden, eagerly calling for
their friend. ‘Saifullah? Saifullah?’ they shouted, in voices that hadn’t yet broken. Two boys appeared from a small stairway that led to a basement, one no more than six years
old, the other about twelve. Behind them two more children appeared, a girl and a boy, just six or seven years old, with impossibly innocent-looking faces. They all looked shocked; unable to
express either fear or anger.

‘Hey, this is the guy that lives here’, said Payne, as the older boy walked towards us, smiling nervously. He nodded ‘salaam’, so quietly he was barely audible. The boy
in the brown shawl stood next to his friend and turned to look at the marines.

‘Does anyone know how to say “I’m sorry”?’ asked Payne. Nobody did.

The boys talked among themselves. ‘Did they destroy your other house?’ said the one in the brown shawl.

‘Yes, they destroyed everything’, replied Saifullah.

‘They will destroy this room as well.’

‘Why?’ asked the younger boy, who looked about seven years old.

‘Because they want to be able to see from there. They can see the road from that position.’ The boy pointed to the compound from where we had come and then to the roof where the rest
of the platoon had set up machine-gun positions.

The boys walked through a gate in the wall and into the field the marines had thought they were blasting their way to. ‘Did they make two holes in your house?’ asked the younger
boy.

The boy in the brown shawl nodded. ‘They are going to make a bigger hole over there as well’, he said, pointing to the gate they had just walked through. ‘They think our doors
are no good for them.’

The younger boy had a pained expression on his face. It looked like all this was new to him. It was the face of a child walking past a man asleep on the streets and asking why no one was willing
to help. I walked up to the two young boys and flipped over the little viewing screen on my camera so they could see themselves. It was a pathetic attempt to make them feel better. They giggled and
pointed at themselves, then became suddenly shy again. Behind them, the little girl was clearly eager to see herself too but she froze at the top of the stairs. I wanted to take the camera to her
but I froze, too.

Beyond the compound walls, the bulldozers and ABVs strained for a few seconds as they came to walls and buildings, then exhaled as they flattened them.

As it got dark, we all put on every piece of clothing we had before we got into our sleeping bags. I tried to get to sleep before it got too cold but it was impossible, even wearing two pairs of
thick socks, boots, trousers, gloves, a jacket and a woolly hat. By 2 a.m. I thought I’d got frostbite; my toes were so cold they felt as if they’d drop off if I flicked them. At 4
a.m., half-mad with tiredness and cold, I got up, hopped across the roof in my sleeping bag, emptied the contents of my backpack and put my feet in, pulling the zips on either side up as far as
they’d go. But it didn’t make any difference. At dawn, everyone woke and immediately lit cigarettes. It was impossible to tell whether they were exhaling smoke or cold breath. Two
marines held a serious conversation about how handy the cold would be if they stepped on an IED. Frozen stumps, they thought, would bleed less.

‘We’re moving in one minute, so if you want to follow a cleared path, get your shit on’, said Lieutenant Grell, who was already packed up and ready to go.

‘Let’s go destroy some more people’s walls, man’, said the marine who’d blown the last two walls the night before.

We walked down the stairs and out of the compound. Before the sun had crept over the horizon to offer a tiny promise of warmth, we walked a hundred metres up Pharmacy Road, turned right, climbed
through what had been a window and entered a building that looked close to collapse.

Not until I’d walked around inside and read the graffiti did I realise we were in the old British base, FOB Wishtan. Lima Company had reached their objective.

Sergeant Giles and his squad started conducting patrols to the neighbouring buildings. They all had to be cleared and if they were uninhabited, demolished. At the first gate, a
tiny old man greeted us. He looked surprised when the marines asked permission to enter, as if he weren’t used to having a choice. The man had a feeble, buckled frame, with huge ears, pushed
outwards by his black turban. His thick, white beard curled back in a long S-shape under his chin but his moustache, and the hair on his cheeks, starting just below his eyes, was black. His eyes
were pleading, and the expression on his face was at once sad, kind, wise, and pertified. He led us into his home – four rooms off a cross-shaped corridor – and started to walk up the
stairs to the roof. The marines asked if it was safe. The man stopped. He didn’t know, he said; he hadn’t been up there for months.

‘We have no other choice, there are so many mines in this area. We have no choice but to sit in here for hours.’

‘How long have you lived here?’ asked Rock. ‘Six to seven months’, said the old man.

Another old man appeared, even more frail and bent-over than the first. The green turban on his head, and the once-white shawl that hung over his back, were so big on his emaciated body that it
was almost impossible to see where his shoulders might be. ‘We are so scared because of all the explosions’, he said, slowly walking towards us. ‘I am a poor person. I have
nowhere to go, what can we do?’ He squatted on the floor in the corridor, next to his friend. They pointed to their shattered windows. Rock promised they would be compensated, then told them
that there was about to be a big explosion and they shouldn’t be afraid.

‘You are better than the others, we can talk to you’, the second old man said to Rock. I assumed that ‘others’ meant the Taliban. In places like Wishtan, people saw both
sides almost every day. The idea that they would be anything other than as pliant as possible was ludicrous, especially considering how helpless most of the people were. ‘I have some military
experience in Kabul, I know how government works’, the old man went on. ‘These others, we don’t know where they come from; we cannot go out at night. If someone is screaming
outside no one will come out because they are afraid.’

‘Yes, I know, it’s very difficult’, said Rock, sadly. ‘Life in Afghanistan, especially in Sangin, is very difficult. I don’t know how you live in this
area.’

‘What can we do? We have no choice’, said the old man.

‘We pray to God for peace in Afghanistan’, said Rock.

‘We are so poor we can’t even afford to pay the fare of a vehicle. I have no children, it’s only me and my old wife’, said the first man. ‘He has one son and three
or four girls’, he gestured towards his friend. ‘They are all ill. All the doors and windows have been blown up by mines.’ I’d guessed the men were in their seventies or
eighties but the mention of children made me think. I was shockingly bad at working out Afghan people’s ages, often overestimating by several decades.

A third old man joined us. His right eye was badly infected; it looked like it was cast from creamy-coloured, misty glass, like a prized marble. The three men chatted with Rock, who tried to
interpret highlights of what they said to the marines, so that they might show some sympathy. He said, almost begging, that they were ‘Persian people, very good guys. Their knowledge is
family but they are so poor. If they had money they would go back to their homeland, in Ghor province [in central Afghanistan].’ He said that because they spoke Farsi (Persian), no one spoke
to them, so they trusted no one in the neighbourhood. ‘Tell them I don’t either’, said Sergeant Giles, as he walked past. Another marine pointed into a small room, with long brown
finger marks on the wall. ‘So you shit in here, wipe your ass with your hand and then wash your hand here’, he said, laughing, pointing to the wall.

The explosion Rock had warned the men of shook the house. The man with the diseased eye flinched, gasping slightly, as if he had been slapped hard on the back. I didn’t know how he
survived a single night in that house.

I followed four marines as they put ladders between roofs to a neighbouring mosque, where they set up a couple of machine-gun positions and kept watch for a few hours. They could see the
building on top of the hill where they had taken one of their first casualties, who’d needed a double amputation after an old IED exploded. ‘That’s Building 47’, said Giles.
‘Whenever you came up on that hill and exposed yourself to this side of the hill for longer than five minutes you’d start getting shot at from over here.’ We now sat on the
buildings the Taliban had disappeared into after such attacks but Giles was under no illusions about how much effect that would have. ‘They’ll still operate in this area, just not as
freely’, he said. ‘They’ll just move east, towards the desert and into the wadis they had used to transport weapons.’

Even if the marines could completely halt the Taliban’s ability to operate in Sangin, it was one of only a handful of towns and districts that had anything like the manpower and resources
needed. On maps of Afghanistan – even just of Helmand province – these towns were mere dots. It was easy for the Taliban to move on, as they had since the initial invasion.

‘Holy shit, that’s big as fuck, dude’, said a marine, digging out a huge bullet from the wall with his knife. I asked if it had been fired by Americans: ‘I hope
so’, he replied. Some kids in the courtyard below asked for chocolate and offered to sell us what looked like chillies. ‘I ain’t eating your pepper, it’ll give me the
shits’, said the marine.

I asked Giles what he’d been told about Sangin before he came. ‘We went on YouTube and there were hundreds of videos from the British. It was mostly air strikes and huge firefights.
All the news articles we read, it was all “one of the worst places in Afghanistan” so we knew it was going to be a tough deployment. Marines like to fight, so we were excited to go
somewhere that we knew there’d be plenty of fighting.’ I asked if there had been fear too. ‘You’re definitely scared too, scared and excited. I’d say before you get
here, mostly excited and once you get here, a little more scared. It’s a mix of both.’