Chapter 13
Nothing is as exhilarating in life as to be shot at with no result.
—WINSTON CHURCHILL
From a distance, the westward end of the Panjwayi Valley looked like Eden. The endless sea of sand slowly gave way to the lush vegetation that embraced the mud huts and compounds strewn throughout the fields and irrigation ditches. The jagged mountains surrounding the valley seemed to protect it from the outside world.
But as my eyes scanned east toward the river I saw the mirage melt away. Scars and wreckage from the battle stretched for miles. I could see gunfire tracers and flashes from rockets exploding. Buildings and vehicles smoldered in all directions. The Canadian task force clogged the radio with messages about how they continued to “consolidate and reorganize” under enemy fire. Victory was slipping away.
We had no choice but to occupy Sperwan Ghar. Without control of that ground, the Canadians could not advance and would be stopped. Losing this decisive battle would be catastrophic for the people of Kandahar, the coalition, and all of southern Afghanistan.
The wind felt hotter than usual as everyone loaded up. I checked the radios inside the gun truck and scanned the laminated notepads and quick reference sheets stuck to every available empty space below the windshield. Tucked neatly around my seat were ammunition bandoleers, smoke grenades, medical equipment, water, and signal flares. Ready, I grabbed my hand mike and called Kandahar.
“Eagle 10, this is Talon 31. We’re moving.”
The convoy of gun trucks tucked into a perfect V-shaped formation. The route took us down from our perch on the ridgeline and past some green pine trees that masked our approach to Regay, a small village in the valley between us and Sperwan Ghar. We’d been watching the villagers from up and down the valley flee for days, but the scene when we entered the village was still shocking.
The villagers hurried past us, packed on broken carts, tractors, donkeys, camels—anything that could move. Regay was the final stopping point for the caravans of refugees seeking water before their journey to safety in Kandahar city. Hundreds crowded around the well. Each villager gripped a bright yellow or lime green water jug. No one made eye contact with us. They knew who we were and who was waiting for us.
Some of our ANA soldiers in a Ford Ranger were flagged down by a man leaving Regay in a faded white Toyota Corolla sedan. He never stopped but pointed to the hill, said, “Mines,” and drove off. The warning was radioed up to us. “This just gets better and better,” Brian said.
The open desert faded into Ole Girl’s side mirror and the tactical nightmare of villages and compounds opened up like the mouth of an immense beast. I glanced down at the map. After Regay, we were headed straight for Sperwan Ghar.
As Hodge’s team passed Regay, we switched the formation from a broad V to a straight line or “Ranger file” of trucks to maneuver through the never-ending labyrinth of broken buildings, irrigation ditches, marijuana, cornfields, and grape vineyards. Centuries-old ashpsh khana, or grape-drying huts, which stood three or four stories tall, dotted the fields, perfect redoubts for snipers. I kept one eye on the huts and the other on the dust-covered display of the digital map. We were close to the point of no return, an imaginary decision point on that map.
My nerves spiked as we raced down the dirt track toward the first compound. There was too much vegetation and too much cover. It was harvesttime, a bad time to start any operation. The enemy could hide anywhere. Shooters could be ten feet inside any one of the fields and we’d never know it, until they started firing. Brian, as driver and senior communications sergeant, always rode “dirty,” meaning he had his shotgun out the open window, ready in case an enemy fighter popped up. In this case, it would likely come from behind the compound walls or out of the fields.
The radio finally squawked to life. Jared, our ground force commander, wanted a countdown to the marker. “Talon 30, this is Talon 31, two hundred meters, wait one,” I responded.
Just as I said it, I caught a glimpse of movement—a figure, half crouching, half standing, on top of the thick walls of a large grape-drying hut. Snatching my binoculars, I focused in on him. I knew in my gut that he shouldn’t be there. The jet black turban and dark brown clothing stood out in stark contrast to the biscuit-colored dry mud walls. The hair on the back of my neck rose. RPG! I prayed that I wouldn’t see the flash of a rocket-propelled grenade headed toward my truck.
“Contact front. Enemy at eleven o’clock, two hundred meters on top of the grape hut. Kill that motherfucker,” I called to Dave, my gunner on the .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the top of the truck. The World War II model machine gun—known as an M2, or “Ma Duce”—with modern optics is as lethal today as it was sixty years ago.
The words had barely gotten out when Dave confirmed the target. “Got it,” he said coolly, sighting in on the Taliban position. He cut loose with a long burst, riddling the grape hut. A four-foot flame belched out of the M2 barrel, marking its tremendous firepower. Dave continued to shoot as we got closer.
My heart was pounding and sweat dripped into my eyes—I knew we were driving into an ambush. I pulled my headset down from the visor and called the report in to Jared. “Talon 30, this is Talon 31. Enemy contact eleven o’clock. They are in the grape huts.”
It didn’t matter if the enemy scout on the grape hut reported our position now. The machine-gun blast definitively announced our presence. I wished I had a dip or even a piece of gum to calm my nerves. But that thought disappeared with the vapor trail from the first RPG.
I saw the first rounds of the battle smack off my windshield as a hail of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun bullets sliced into our trucks. After that, there was no shortage of fire or targets to shoot at. From the top of the hill and surrounding compounds, they could see us coming. The Taliban knew what we knew: that Sperwan Ghar was prime real estate and they owned it.
“All 31 elements, watch your sectors and stay tight,” I radioed to the convoy. “Gunners, stay low in the cupola.”
Enemy snipers target the machine gunners; if our big guns went down, the vehicles would be defenseless. My mind focused again on the scout. How many were with him? What weapons did they have? We definitely needed more firepower. We had M4 rifles, M240 machine guns, .50-caliber heavy machine guns, a sniper rifle, and the Goose, a Carl Gustav 84-mm recoilless rifle, but this was the kind of situation where a mini machine gun is priceless, and I wished I had at least three.
“Eagle 10, this is Talon 30. We are troops in contact. We have twenty to forty enemy one hundred meters northeast of our position and are receiving intense RPG, PKM, and small-arms fire from numerous compounds,” I heard Jared radio to our headquarters at Kandahar Airfield. “Request immediate close air support.”
Within seconds the radio responded clear and loud. “Talon 30, this is Eagle 10, roger, we copy troops in contact. Stand by.” The wait lasted only a few moments, but it seemed like forever. Back at the tactical operations center dozens of men on radios and telephones would be scrambling to find us the help we needed. They would have to coordinate with the Canadians, who controlled all the aircraft for this operation.
“Talon 30, this is Eagle 10. We have emergency aircraft inbound to your target area. ETA twenty mikes [minutes].”
Twenty minutes from now this fight might be over, I thought. Neither Taliban fighters nor their ammunition were in short supply. Shouldering the smaller M240 machine gun mounted to the door on my side of the truck, I started firing at the muzzle flashes and fighters moving near the compounds surrounding the base of the hill.
The firing was heavy from the right side, and the Taliban fighters seemed to continue to maneuver from right to left. But now our heavy weapons began “talking” the way their operators had been trained. This meant that one machine gun would fire a short burst into an enemy position and would rotate with another machine gun doing the same thing, all rotating firing at the target until it was destroyed. This technique allowed us to destroy the enemy using maximum firepower and minimal ammo.
In response, the Taliban fighters unloaded airburst RPG rounds all over us—rigging the rockets to explode so that shrapnel rained down on us. The volleys were meant to take out the gunners and wound troops in the back of the trucks.
“We have fire coming from our six o’clock. I say again, we have fire coming from our six o’clock,” my team sergeant, Bill, said over the radio as I shook off the effects of the RPG blasts.
“Move truck 3 and 4 to my left and into an L shape,” I barked back to him.
The whole fight was a giant chess match. By putting our trucks in an L shape, we had managed to keep the Taliban at bay on the left and rear and make room for the rest of the convoy to move forward.
Brian called “Set”—the command that the truck was going to move—and quickly turned the vehicle to face the compound. Now we had the engine block between us and the enemy. I had no sooner reloaded my next can of ammunition than Dave called for a reload for his .50-cal. He laid a fresh belt of ammunition in the gun just as an RPG exploded on the truck’s front bumper, throwing up a massive wave of dust and debris. My teeth hurt and I had the strong metallic taste of explosives in my mouth.
Damn, we need more firepower. “Where is the CAS?” I screamed to Ron, my Air Force JTAC, one of the most important members of the team. It was his job to call in air strikes and get us the close air support we needed. I could hear the rounds cracking around me as I took a quick look into the back of the truck. Ron was firing at fighters behind us. That was good and bad. He wasn’t injured, but he also wasn’t calling in air strikes on the Taliban fighters surrounding us.
This time Dave, Brian, and I all saw the source and unleashed our fire into the tree line beside a compound directly in front of us. Almost as quickly as we started firing, it was returned from the compound—a mosque. We were being attacked from a mosque. According to the Geneva Convention, if the enemy engages you from a holy site, using it as a military position, it can be engaged.
Dave went to work on the enemy machine-gun positions firing from inside the mosque. I called for him to give me covering fire and I got out of the truck with an AT4 and a LAWS. The AT4 is a disposable light anti-tank round. The LAWS is the Light Anti-Armor Weapons System for destroying small trucks and fighting positions. Both were made to destroy armor, but they’d also work on buildings.
I fired the LAWS first at the building directly in front of us to get my bearing and range. I might as well have thrown a tennis ball for all the good it did. I heard the loud thwack of rounds pass around me and I ducked back into the truck before I could fire the AT4. When the firing broke, I hopped back out, sticking closer to my truck, and took aim at the compound in front of us. The firing procedure was second nature: Front and rear sights up. Three hundred meters distance, set. Pull safety pin. Check back blast. Safety off and fire. BOOM. Solid impact. Dust and debris flew from the main entranceway and every window. Just as I slid back into the truck, Bill appeared in my doorway.
“How you doing up here, fellas?” Bill asked in his slow Texas drawl, despite the maelstrom of fire around him. I’ve had the pleasure of serving with several Texans, and they were all born fighters. It must be something in the water down there.
“I need a round count, things are too crazy on the radio,” he said. As team sergeant, Bill kept the guns running with plenty of ammunition. He went to take stock of our stores, and returned shortly. “Got bad news, Captain. We are amber on .50-cal,” he said. Amber meant we’d already shot half of our ammunition.
I told him to get some bigger guns going, but he was already a step ahead. Sean, an ETT, was breaking out the Goose. The 84-mm recoilless rifle, dubbed the Goose in honor of its original manufacturer, Carl Gustav Stads Gevärsfaktori, could shoot a high-velocity, high-explosive round the size of a football into the buildings. “We’re going to try the AT4 first,” he said.
It sounded good, but I told Bill to use the radio next time he wanted to talk with me. He was too valuable to be running around without cover. “I need you alive and not leaking,” I told him.
He disappeared just as I heard the sweet whomp, whomp of helicopter blades. The AH-64 Apaches had arrived.
“Okay, motherfuckers, now it’s really on!” screamed Dave at the top of his lungs.
I turned to Ron and he showed two fingers. Two aircraft. Jet fighters were also arriving on station, and Ron began to coordinate and identify targets.
Since the main effort for Operation Medusa was the Canadian task force across the river, we had to get permission from them to use the Apaches. At the time, the Canadians were not under attack, and they eventually released the helicopters to our control. The Canadian task force had also wanted to keep the jets we had requested, American A-10 ground attack fighters, in reserve, but they relented and released them as well. While Ron sorted through the A-10 mess, Jared identified targets for the Apaches droning above us, which were part of the ISAF Dutch contingent. At his direction, the gunships made runs on the heavily defended buildings in our path to drive out the occupants. But the Dutch pilots were nervous about shooting too close to us. They didn’t want to be blamed for friendly fire.
“If you do not engage the targets we tell you, then we cannot use you,” Jared finally snapped, exasperated. “The enemy is within two hundred meters of our location and we need the fire now.”
The first two 2.75-inch rockets from the Apaches slammed high into the grape house in front of us, collapsing its entire front. The sharp cracks of the explosions marked a good hit. As the dust cleared from the rocket blasts, Afghan Army soldiers to my right cut down the four or five Taliban fighters who came stumbling out of the building dazed and confused.
As I reached down to grab another box of ammunition, a red glow flashed across the hood of my truck. The RPG exploded just outside Brian’s window, showering the truck with shrapnel. Stunned momentarily, we were snapped back into focus by Jared’s voice on the radio. He was still trying to muster fire superiority to push up toward the hill. Then the TOC in Kandahar came back: “Talon 30, this is Eagle 10. Here is your situation: the enemy count is not dozens, but hundreds, maybe even a thousand. Do you copy, over?”
I shot a glance at Brian. “You have got to be shitting me.”
The slapping sound of rounds hitting vehicles got my attention and I again focused on engaging targets with my machine gun. Nearby, the Apache gunships strafed Taliban fighters hiding around the hill. I could hear the giant zipper of the 30-mm cannons tearing up the compounds and irrigation ditches beyond us. Usually Taliban fighters hid when the Apaches showed up, but this time they held their ground and dug in. After a final pass, the Apaches banked, and the low thump of rotor blades faded in the distance as they headed back to Kandahar to refuel and rearm.
If these fighters weren’t afraid of the helicopters, then they’d only get bolder now that the birds were gone. I could hear Ron over the radio trying to get more helos. Ammunition in my truck was going fast, and based on the level of fire, I suspected the situation was the same in the other trucks.
As I turned back to my machine gun, Riley, my senior medic, arrived at my door. He had two AT4s, the light anti-tank rockets.
“Where do you want them?” he asked.
I directed him to one of the most active compounds. On his signal, Brian, Dave, and I fired every weapon we had to give him cover as he crept along the backside of my truck. Taliban machine gunners saw him, and their short bursts came within feet of him as he stepped out of cover to fire. He fired off the first rocket while trying to dodge the incoming fire marked by dusty flicks of dirt. It missed the doorway and exploded into the thick mud wall. Riley dove back to the truck for the second AT4. Racing back to the same spot, in the open, he shouldered the rocket and fired. Another cloud of dust flew in all directions around him. The 84-mm round impacted exactly where the Taliban machine gunners had been seconds before. Nearly a dozen more explosions followed, all around our trucks. I turned to ask Brian where we got all the AT4 rockets, thinking others were firing at the enemy too. Then I saw the fright in Brian’s eyes.
“That’s RPGs!” Brian screamed. Incoming enemy rockets.
It was like standing in a Fourth of July fireworks display complete with razor-sharp shrapnel. In the turret of his vehicle, Zack winced as an airburst RPG exploded beside him, sending shrapnel slicing into his arm. He ducked into the protection of the armored shield mounted around the MK19 grenade launcher and made a quick self-assessment. Seeing his arm still attached and being able to move his hand, he resumed firing at Taliban positions. The MK19 grenade launcher fires tennis-ball-sized grenades for hundreds of meters.
The call came over the radio. “Zack’s hit!” Riley darted to his own vehicle, grabbed his aid bag, and sprinted over to Zack, climbing up to the mount, completely exposed to the Taliban, to treat the gash in Zack’s arm while he continued firing. It wasn’t life-threatening. Riley bandaged the wound, calmly climbed down, and ran to the other three trucks in turn, checking everyone’s status.
Moments after Riley left, a grenade jammed in the smoking-hot barrel of Zack’s MK19. The grenades had kept the Taliban fighters at bay, but Zack could see them moving through an irrigation ditch and tree line on our flank. Not an ideal time to reduce firepower. Zack climbed out of the protective turret and around to its front, where he hunched over the gun, rear end to the enemy, jammed a steel clearing rod into its barrel, wrenched out the grenade, and repaired the damage. Miraculously intact, he was soon back to hammering the flanking fighters.
Ron hollered to me from the bed of my truck. More bad news: we had lost the A-10 aircraft, which had to go refuel. “Shit, we can’t get a break,” I answered, then gave the heads-up over my handset: “As soon as we lose the aircraft, the savages are going to hit us hard. We need to be ready.”
Hodge and his team were spread out in a broad line, watching our rear in the narrow opening leading to the hill. When the ambush was sprung, my team had moved forward, and now the thick smoke from explosions and fires masked us from Hodge.
“Pop a smoke grenade to mark your position,” Hodge said over the radio.
“Negative,” I responded. The smoke would also give the RPG gunners a target to shoot at.
Hodge figured he could at least try to neutralize the enemy moving to reinforce their positions and increase the pressure on us. As he maneuvered, trying to glimpse us, an RPG barely missed his truck. The back blast caught the team’s attention. About twenty Taliban fighters were hiding in a deep irrigation ditch. They’d pop up, shoot, and then crawl back down and reload. Hodge’s truck jerked to a halt and opened fire.
Hodge’s second truck belonged to Jeff, the team sergeant; it was also armed with an automatic grenade launcher and quickly pulled up alongside Hodge’s truck. The gunner sank behind the boxy green launcher, flipped the safety off, and started pumping out dozens of grenades directly on top of the fighters in the irrigation ditch, strafing from left to right.
The rest of Hodge’s team pulled abreast and poured fire down the length of the trench, trapping the Taliban fighters. Bodies burst into pieces as the rounds tore into the group; an RPG shot straight up into the air.
Two fighters made a dash for it. Wearing baggy shirts and pants, AK-47 magazine pouches strapped across their chests, they darted into the open and were promptly cut down by two Afghan soldiers with a PKM machine gun.
The grenade launcher worked up and down the ditch repeatedly. No one was coming out of that trench ever again.
I called Jared and asked him to send Bruce’s team up to me. We literally needed to circle the wagons inside the bowl in order to maximize our firepower. Jared said they were dismounted from their trucks in the compound’s entrance, rooting out Taliban fighters, and couldn’t move. Some dire necessity had to have prompted that—you never send troops out on foot unless they can be covered by machine guns. I prayed that no one got isolated and pinned down.
I found out later what had happened: when the ambush was sprung on us, fighters in the compounds to the left and right side of Bruce’s team also opened up, smashing them in a hellish crossfire. The thick walls of the compound offered great protection—so good, in fact, that the team’s .50-caliber machine guns and 40-mm grenade launchers couldn’t penetrate them.
Bruce had decided to send in a small fire team to clear out the fighters. Ben, an engineer sergeant, and J.D., a medic, led a squad of six Afghan soldiers from the cover of the trucks to the lead compound, where they pressed themselves against the compound’s thick tan walls and heaved grenades over to a spot near an entranceway. Their red and green tracers tumbled and spun, crisscrossing the interior as they flooded inside.
Ben and his men found four Taliban fighters in the back of the compound trying to flee through a small door. Three made it out. The fourth fighter broke for the door at a sprint, firing his AK from the hip. He hit the door and bounced back, surprised when it didn’t open, and collapsed in a heap when the Afghan soldiers with Ben fired.
The ANA squad leader shot Ben a toothy grin and a thumbs-up. Ben, known for his dry sense of humor, grinned back. The soldiers pushed on to other compounds and the scene repeated itself two more times. Each time, the bond between the Afghans and Americans solidified.
The third compound was really a large, three-story grape house running right beside a deep, dry irrigation ditch covered with vegetation. The Afghan soldiers threw another grenade into the ditch, then dashed across to secure the outside of the building. Peeking inside, they spotted several dozen large ammunition boxes and RPG rockets. Just as the combined team of soldiers was about to enter, an Afghan soldier outside started screaming. Hanging above the door was a Russian 107-mm rocket. A wire at head level would have set the booby trap off.
Between bursts, I listened to Ben’s radio report back to Bruce. I’d had enough of getting shot at while we waited on Bruce’s team to finish clearing the compounds. I sprinted across the open field to Jared’s truck. “Where the fuck is 36?” Our conversation and the explanation played out in shouts over the hammering of .50-cal machine guns and explosions all around us.
“The ambush cut off our element. Bruce’s team couldn’t get to our location—his guys went to push the enemy back so we can get all the vehicles together,” Jared told me. “Predator says we have hundreds of fighters here.”
“Well, we need those guys back here now!” I shouted. “If they get stuck in there, we’ll have hell to pay getting them out. Can you get them back here so we can get out of this mess?”
The meeting was cut short when Casey, the gunner in Jared’s truck, shouted, “Ammo!” Jared and I scrambled over the back of the truck together to move ammunition boxes to him so he could keep the gun firing. The machine guns and grenade launchers were keeping us alive.
Bill came running to the truck. “Captain, I have bad news,” he shouted. “We have two boxes per gun and four rockets left. We are about to go black on ammo.”
Black on ammunition meant we were about to run out. I reached down and hit the talk button on my radio.
“Bruce, have your guys break contact and get your men out of there NOW! We are about out of ammunition. If they stay in there any longer, we cannot support you.”
Bruce called Ben and told him to get back to the vehicles. The teams were short on ammo, but Ben had to get out, and he couldn’t leave the enemy a cache as lethal as the one they had found. Taking a knee, he fished out a green bag with two blocks of C-4 explosives from his assault pack. The tiny packages were primed and ready to go.
Ben called Bruce on the radio. “Sir, we have cleared to the third compound due west of your location. We have a large booby-trapped cache at this grid. Cache includes a large amount of ammunition and RPGs. Demo countdown begins in two minutes on my mark. MARK.”
Ben ordered the Afghan squad leader to start moving his men back to the first compound. As each one passed, Ben tapped him on the shoulder to ensure everyone was accounted for. Two minutes was not a lot of time. Ben and the Afghans had to move fast.
Ben set his stopwatch and the timer. He glanced at the detonation cord, time fuse, and blasting caps to ensure they were properly set, then he carefully slid his fingers into the green blasting caps and gave a jerk. The small plastic containers popped and spewed streams of thick gray smoke. Ben calmly slid the C-4 into an opening next to a large stack of rockets and backed away.
The calm part was over. “Burning, burning, burning!” Ben said through the radio static as he sprinted from the grape hut. The demo was armed.
“Talon 36, this is 36 Bravo, thirty seconds to detonation.”
As soon as Bill and I heard Ben on the radio, we sprinted back to our trucks. Bill warned the last two trucks and I warned the first two.
“Button up, demo in thirty seconds!”
Brian slammed his door shut. Dave quickly dropped down into the turret. Ron crawled under Dave’s feet. I got in the passenger’s side and hunkered down as far as I could. We were only about a football field away. Two blocks of explosives setting off a cache would be … Whoom! The flash hit first, then the sound, and a heat wave swept over us, rocking the trucks. Everything not tied down went airborne. Huge chunks of mud wall, clay bricks, rockets, and mortars rained down from the sky.
“All trucks give me a status,” I barked into the radio.
“Truck two up.” “Truck three up.” “Truck four up.”
The blast covered everything in a thin layer of dust. I looked up at Dave squatting in the turret. He burst out laughing. Soon, Brian and Ron joined in.
“What the hell are you laughing at?” I demanded.
“You look like a two-hundred-and-twenty-pound sugar cookie, Captain,” Dave got out between laughs.
It wasn’t a leap to realize that I looked ridiculous, half stuffed into the space between the floorboards and my seat, covered in dust, and barking into a radio. I had to laugh. “What else can happen today?” I said sarcastically.
“The day ain’t over yet,” Ron said.
“Coming out,” Ben said into the radio. He had no more than spoken when the first of the Afghans appeared, exiting the hole in the outer compound’s wall. Our rear gunners covered them as they and Ben sprinted toward the trucks.
Hodge’s team still couldn’t see us. J.D., the medic on Bruce’s team, knew we were stuck in the kill zone and took off with an Afghan soldier to flag them down. Running back along the road and skirting a marijuana field, he finally found Hodge’s group.
They were under fire too. The safety glass on two of Hodge’s trucks had been popped from bullet impacts and was laced with a webbing of cracks. There was no cover other than the trucks, and Hodge knew his team couldn’t stay in that position for long. But they were stuck. If they abandoned their rear covering position, the rest of the teams might never make it back out. Our entire situation was deteriorating rapidly.
It was time to make a no-bullshit assessment. We were receiving accurate fire from all directions. We were also low on ammunition. We couldn’t push forward to seize the hill. If we stayed, we’d eventually be outnumbered, facing hundreds of Taliban fighters—with no machine guns. I got on the radio and called Jared.
“Thirty this is 31. Recommend we break contact so we can consolidate, reorganize, and call in an emergency resupply.”
Jared called 36, Bruce’s team, to make sure they were ready. Their fight had turned when the Taliban started firing armor-piercing rounds, which easily cut through our thinly armored trucks.
“Do it,” Jared shot back.
“All 31 elements BREAK CONTACT, I SAY AGAIN, BREAK CONTACT! Peel out in movement order. Provide covering fire,” I ordered.
Brian called, “Set,” and everyone held on. Our truck jolted backward, accompanied by an avalanche of brass shell casings cascading from the roof and hood. The other trucks on my team followed suit, and we stayed in one another’s tire tracks to avoid land mines and IEDs. As we blew back out through the entranceway, the suffocating sensation of being in the kill zone evaporated. I watched the collage of colors on the digital map fade flat as we moved several kilometers into the desert.
Round one went to the Taliban.