One Hundred Victories (9 page)

Scott Miller’s staff had discovered a possible source of help. A local defense group called the Gomai militia had operated in the Soviet era, and its leader in Maiwand, Hero Jabbar, was not only still alive but a member of parliament. He agreed to come to Maiwand to try to rally the population and ask old leaders of the militia to come forward. He sketched a map for the Americans showing the villages around Hutal that had contributed to the Gomai militia, which the team called the Hutal hub. Jabbar also introduced them to his friend Fazil Ahmad Barak, an engineer who had helped to build irrigation canals and other infrastructure in Kandahar and Helmand. His old blueprints and expertise were invaluable in planning restorative and new development projects.

Hayes finally settled on Ezabad, a flyblown village just north of the district center. The elder of the town had a foot in each camp of the war, one son a doctor and the other a Talib. The elder agreed to support the arrival of the team and arranged for the special operators to live in a nearby
qalat
, as the mud-walled compounds where Afghans live are called. The high walls built of mud and straw were surprisingly sturdy. The walls enclosed one or more homes, a garden, a yard for animals, and a shed for crops or animals. Qalats sometimes shared adjoining walls when family members or neighbors built their homes next door. Outside the walls were defecation areas, as the soldiers quickly realized.

Ezabad was only a few kilometers off Highway One, but it was a world away. Over several days, the team ferried their impressive collection of armored vehicles from Hutal to the qalat—their new home. Each team was supplied with vehicles with varying levels of protection and mobility. The heaviest were the massive RG-33s, which were the safest but, weighing in at 50,000 pounds, the least able to traverse steep hills, narrow passes, or the deep moondust of Maiwand. Next in their inventory was the Military All-Terrain Vehicle, which, like the RGs, had a V-shaped hull to deflect the blasts of buried bombs. The manufacturer had designed a special operations variant with improved suspension, a gunner’s turret, and a larger windshield for better visibility, but even this lighter vehicle clocked in at 27,500 pounds because of its hefty armor. The teams tended to rely on their Humvees for navigating the dirt roads and wadis (dry riverbeds) of rural Afghanistan, even though they were flat-bottomed and made of lighter steel. The operators’ new favorite in the Afghan war was their lightest vehicle of all, Kawasaki dune buggies mounted with the special operations variants of either the M249 or M240 machine gun. The teams favored mobility over armor, but they always wanted as much firepower as they could carry.

On the road to Ezabad, the team’s convoy of vehicles careened and spun their wheels as they climbed and rolled through the hilly terrain, sinking up to their axles in fine powdery dirt. Up they climbed to circle a lone hilltop lookout, and then went down to Ezabad, bordered on the east by a wadi. That small canyon was the superhighway of the insurgents, who often came into the village and slipped away again without being detected.

The truth was that the team had no idea how many Taliban lived right in Ezabad. Their most valuable asset would be the four signals intelligence teams, which were coveted by the special operators and parceled out to those living in the toughest territory. These units, called Special Operations Teams–Alpha, or SOT-As, were part of the special operations support staff, uniformed military intelligence officers and noncoms rather than special operators per se. Trained in technical intelligence collection, analysis, and languages, they took shifts listening around the clock to the communications intercepts or “ICOM chatter” on the airwaves. They relayed breaking threat information in real time from a team’s operations center or on patrol and were essential in helping the teams build a picture of who the insurgents were and where they were. It was a safe bet that quite a few of the young men riding through Ezabad in twos on motorcycles were insurgents. They would have to get to know them all.

Across the wadi, the village of Eshqabad was even less welcoming, and farther north, another, called Moshak, was totally dominated by the Taliban. The village lived in the shadow of Gormabak Pass just to the north, where the Taliban convened a shadow court that dispensed rulings that were subsequently enforced at the point of a gun.

As soon as they “embedded,” Hayes and his team visited every qalat in Ezabad and the adjacent village of Nasu Kalay, asking each head of household to attend meetings where they could discuss the local problems and needs. At the same time, they worked to convert their mud-walled compound into a home. They rented two adjoining qalats and created a common yard, filled with gravel, to serve as a mechanics bay for their extensive collection of vehicles. At first the team members had lived out of a kicker box, a cardboard and plastic box kicked from planes, and burned their feces in an oil barrel. A row of sleeping containers and a shower trailer were then brought in, and three plywood “B” huts were built for their “op cen,” or operations center, which included a dining hall, a TV room, and additional lodging for the interpreters, intelligence and other support personnel. When their squad of 1-16 infantry arrived, the troops moved into Quonset tents erected across from the mechanics yard. Two additional tents served as the all-important gym—one weight room and one cardio room, the latter including treadmills, elliptical trainers, and stationary bikes. Containers of canned food and dry goods were hauled in through the moondust canyon, and netting strung in between the metal boxes created shade for outdoor shuras. Meetings requiring more privacy were held in the mud-walled shura room that was part of the original qalat building.

From the outside, the qalat looked like any other qalat, except for the antennas sprouting up over the high walls. Camo netting on the rooftop obscured a lookout post and machine-gun nest. The qalat next door would serve as a classroom for the local police volunteers. A mud-walled watchtower outside was manned by hired Afghan security guards. The Ezabad outpost was finished, with just enough creature comforts to make the long tour bearable.

The qalat attracted insurgent attacks right away. The Taliban launched mortars from tubes from north of the village, and AK-47 potshots regularly peppered the qalat. The team knew that the best defense is offense and began aggressively patrolling day and night. The biggest danger was hitting buried bombs, most often fashioned from mines left over from the Soviet era or homemade from ammonium nitrate. Often the explosives were strung together—one to stop a vehicle, then clusters of smaller bombs to hit the troops as they dismounted the vehicle.

The team’s hopes for a quick rapport with Ezabad ran aground when the elder who had invited Hayes in was kidnapped and taken north to the Taliban court in Gormabak, where he was threatened with death if he continued to cooperate with the special operators. Somewhat surprisingly, he returned, but he hunkered down at home and declined further invitations to meet. Hayes was crestfallen, but after several meetings the team decided to stay put in Ezabad and seek new allies. Hayes and his team held shuras to assess village needs and determine what projects might benefit the town, and they kept up an aggressive meeting schedule with the Maiwand police chief. They also met with the district subgovernor whenever he ventured out to Maiwand from his home in Kandahar. Hayes worked hard to convince the governor, Obaidullah Barwari, who was staying in Kandahar City, to spend more time in Maiwand despite the security risk. He believed that if they were to make headway with the population, something had to happen—something that would show people that they stood to gain if they took a risk. The special forces captain had the right personality for the incessant and patient lobbying. A slender and winning young man with a slight Asian tilt to his eyes, he could pass for an Afghan when dressed in a
shalwar kameez
.

Hayes and his team rotated back to Fort Bragg and were replaced by another team, but they returned a few months later. Reeder, who was now the special forces commander at Bragg, had decided that the 3rd Special Forces Group would come back for an extra-long tour in order to accommodate the 7th Special Forces Group’s move from Fort Bragg to the Florida panhandle. This was not a popular decision with the families. The team was hopeful that they would partner with an Afghan commando company—but it was not to be. They were heartbroken. Not long after their return, Hayes’s team sergeant quit due to personal, family-related problems. The team sergeant was typically the lynchpin of a special forces team, and it was an unsettling event, since few operators ever quit and certainly not on deployment. Losing a team sergeant—the father figure—can upend the ten more junior sergeants on the team. An experienced, no-nonsense master sergeant arrived soon, however, and immediately restored order. He used the F-word like all-purpose seasoning to flavor every sentence, but he was no drama and all business.

Hayes could also rely on his newly minted but superb chief warrant officer, Eli. The chief warrant officer’s duties had evolved over recent years to focus more on intelligence gathering and assessments than in the past, but he was also supposed to serve as the team’s deputy commanding officer and future planner. Eli was a short, muscular soldier with a quick wit and outgoing personality—and a fluent linguist. He led by doing and could outrun, outpress, and outthink any member of the team except his intelligence sergeant, a quiet giant named Brant. Brant was the longest-serving team member to date. He had come straight into special forces in 2003 after graduating college in Indiana and had gone through the medic training. He had previously deployed to Paktia and Kapisa and had helped to train Afghan commandos before the team moved to Maiwand.

Brant helped buck up the team. He had immersed himself in the details of the district as well as in the fundamental logic of the place; his thorough and thoughtful SITREPs (situation reports) were read and shared widely among the various units in Kandahar. They would have to learn to play chess, because there would be no easy wins here. “They are all fence-sitters here,” he said, noting that the Taliban provided useful services, such as transporting opium tar balls once the farmers harvested the crop. “There is a lot of passive support for the Taliban—and massive distrust of a government they never see,” he said. Brant, thirty-two, was more philosophical than some of his younger and more impatient teammates. “This is a very slow process,” he said. “It may be the next team that will reap the benefit and see results of what we do.” To help his teammates and the attached infantry master learn the arcane but important tribal and local history, the five pillars of Islam, and the local officials’ names, he concocted a game he called the Trivia Bowl. He tried to involve the infantry in every aspect of the mission and encouraged them to engage with the people of Ezabad. Having the additional manpower of the infantry squad made a huge difference. The previous tour, they had had a very hard time managing with a team of only nine. They had no Afghan special forces either. They had picked up a squad of Afghan uniformed police to patrol with, but they were terrible. They were from the north, not Pashtuns, and would routinely steal fruit from the bazaar and sneak off to smoke hash.
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Hayes’s team was a diverse mix of personalities, but they were all Type A individuals who thrived on competition and rough humor. Parker, the communications sergeant, had talked over his reenlistment carefully with his wife during his short stay at home. This would be his seventh combat deployment, but he loved the life. He had been in the Ranger Regiment before going to special forces selection. The medic, Jimmy, was an irascible but highly capable redhead who pored over his thick medical textbooks to ensure that he correctly diagnosed the flood of sick and injured Afghans who began coming to the compound for medical attention. His treatment did more to build a bridge to the wary and intimidated people of Ezabad than anything else the team did. The first serious injury he treated was that of a small girl who had developed a deep abscess in her upper leg. After that, the word of his careful and respectful treatment traveled far and wide. Jimmy took on a young Afghan boy as his medical assistant, teaching him hygiene, first aid, and English.

Hayes returned determined to find some way to make a breakthrough. The fact that the same team returned to the village helped immeasurably, since they could pick up where they left off. It sent a signal to the people of Ezabad. “The looks on their faces when we came back—it was huge,” Brant said. “It’s a trust thing. I saw a guy I had treated last time; he gave me a big smile.” Most of the world operates as a relationship culture, rather than the transactional system common to the United States. Afghans responded on the basis of friendship and kin ties.

The team had to find some way to lessen the climate of intimidation. The men resumed their grueling pace of day and night patrols to create a security bubble for themselves and the village. After four men and a bomb dog were wounded when their RG-33 hit a 120-pound bomb made of homemade explosives, the team decided to abandon the vehicles for foot patrols. A “route clearance package”—units that would drive through with special mine-detecting equipment—had not worked, because after they went through, within hours new mines would be planted. The team hiked long distances around the village and also patrolled the wadi and badlands to the north.

The team members did many foot patrols, loaded with their kits, through rolling dirt terrain. They logged nineteen “TICs,” or troops-in-contact incidents, as combat encounters were officially called. They knew it was important to fight through every encounter, secure the village, and complete their search. They could not always get attack helicopters to provide close air support; in one case, Parker was pinned down by rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fire, but he held on, knowing that Jimmy, the medic, would blast through to his location.

Hayes started an ongoing fitness contest that he named the 1,000 Pound Club as a diversion, knowing that it would keep the team in good shape for their treks and boost morale. Each team member who managed to bench press, squat, and dead lift a total of 1,000 pounds became a member of the club. Visitors to their Ezabad outpost and other units in Kandahar were invited to participate. Each week, a new spreadsheet with the latest results was posted in the TV room, which doubled as a dining room. Word of the contest spread, and resupply convoys began to time their visits to the qalat to compete in the monthly event. Soldiers would gather around when Brant made his appearance; the intelligence sergeant kept ahead of the pack, one month lifting a total of 1,393 pounds in the three events.