Chapter 5
Regard your soldiers as your children, and they will follow you into the deepest valleys. Look on them as your own beloved sons, and they will stand by you even unto death!
—SUN TZU
After a full day’s meetings, we dressed in our best uniforms and joined the Afghans for the traditional feast we threw after a team exchange. It showed our appreciation and helped build the much-needed rapport that’s essential in combat. Warm light spilled out of the biscuit-colored hut and Afghan soldiers loitered outside. As we walked through the door, we were assaulted by smells of roasted and grilled goat, stewed squash, carrots, hot peppers, and tons of rice. Plates of flatbread, fresh onions, cucumbers, and tomatoes crowded the rest of the table.
More than two hundred Afghan soldiers crammed the room. Dirty, smiling, with bad teeth and ad hoc uniforms, they all stood erect when we walked in. Lieutenant Colonel Shinsha came forward, gave me a perfect salute, and then turned to face his men. He opened the festivities with a short growl of a speech, introducing my team as the guests of honor and lauding us for helping to free their country from the Taliban. The gratitude of a freed people is humbling, and I thought of what it must have been like for those soldiers during World War II who liberated Europe.
After the speech, the Afghans lost no time in mingling with us. Old and new faces passed in front of me shaking my hand, hugging me, firing off greetings in short Pashto bursts, and urging us to sit and eat. Across the room, I saw the familiar, scarred face of Ali Hussein, a lieutenant in the Afghan Army. The last time I saw him he was being loaded onto a medevac helicopter. I hurried over. He reached out to shake my hand and I saw his eyes were misty.
He seemed upset and dismissed the other soldiers standing around us, almost angrily. Suddenly I wondered if I was actually in for a tongue-lashing. I’d been pretty hard on him the previous year.
When we first met during my last rotation, his men had openly mocked him. He was short and frail, and it was known that his tribal ties with the Hazara and a hearty “donation” had secured his commission in the army. On patrol, he looked scared and unsure. Wild things like soldiers and dogs can smell fear, and his Afghan soldiers had little confidence in him.
After a handful of missions, I couldn’t stand it any longer. Leading men into battle was not for the meek, and I wanted him to understand the gravity of his position. At night, he’d come to my room and we’d go over chapters from the Ranger handbook. We’d review how to patrol, ambush, and clear rooms of enemy fighters. I berated him for every mistake and miscalculation. Within a few months, he confidently set off to lead his men on a long patrol into the Ghorak Valley with my SF team.
It was late 2005.
We were departing an area where we had just conducted an operation. My truck was in the lead as we carefully navigated down a wadi, a dry creek bed, near the border of the Helmand River valley. The anti-tank mine was well concealed among the smooth gray creek stones, and we missed it by a few inches. One single second later, Ali’s truck hit it. I was leaning out of the truck looking for mines when the explosion blew off my headset and sheared off the front half of his Ranger truck. The shrapnel killed several of his men and sliced Ali’s face open to his skull. We evacuated him and I figured that he’d retire after his wounds healed.
But he hadn’t. When Shef’s team was surrounded in Panjwayi, Ali refused to leave Fuerst, the wounded ETT. He beat back several attacks by the Taliban. When they tried to bribe him to give up the American, he traded insults with them. If Ali was the warrior Shef claimed he had become, then I wanted him as an ally. Standing there at that feast, I waited to see if he intended to give me a taste of my own medicine first. After he dismissed the nearest soldiers, he turned to me and said in accented English, “You my captain, you my commander. I want die with you. You make Ali man. My family have honor now because Ali is man.”
“I hear you are a lion now, brother,” I said, shaking his hand.
I threw my arm around his shoulder, and we started toward the table. Ali called over Shamsulla. This was turning out to be a real family reunion. Shamsulla, who went by his nickname Taz, was an American Ranger trapped in an Afghan body. I stood staring at the two of them. Taz had definitely been hitting the weights. He too had put on muscle while we were gone. I brought him over to Bill, who broke into a huge grin as I reminded him of some of Taz’s exploits.
Taz became infamous in 2005 for two incidents, the first at a checkpoint near Kandahar city that we’d set up to look for roadside bomb makers. After several hours in the hot sun, I had decided to pack it up. Any Taliban fighters in the area had probably heard about the checkpoint and avoided it. I watched as a beat-up gray Toyota sedan bounced along the road toward the checkpoint, trailing a dirty dust cloud behind it. Suddenly the driver stopped, threw the car into reverse, and roared backward. Taz was operating a hidden rear security position in an abandoned hut. The road was too rough for the Toyota to get up any real speed, and after seeing the car turn around, Taz and two other soldiers took off running in pursuit. Partway to the car, Taz stopped and fired a burst from his AK-47 into its engine, bringing it to a halt. With his weapon at the ready, Taz approached the driver, who cursed him, calling him a dog. Suddenly, Taz, mad with rage, dove into the car. The other Afghan soldiers started screaming at us to come. My team sergeant, Willie, and I raced to the car, weapons at the ready. I heard two muffled cracks and then Taz squirmed out of the window covered in blood and bits of brain matter. He was smiling.
The driver had tried to pull a pistol, and during the struggle it went off, most unfortunately, two times under the driver’s chin. Oops. In the trunk of the vehicle, we found AK rifles, ball bearings, wiring, mines, and blasting caps. All were common components for IEDs—roadside bombs. Needless to say, the car’s passenger was more than willing to cooperate.
The second event occurred two weeks later. Around midnight, Taz banged on my door. Snatching my pistol, I followed him to one of the ANA barracks rooms. One of the team’s interpreters, Hik, was lying on the mat, bloody. He had gone to the bazaar with his father to buy supplies for the soldiers and was stopped at a checkpoint by the Afghan National Police. The ANP were known throughout Afghanistan for being corrupt, untrained thugs. They wanted a bribe, and when Hik refused, they threatened him and his father. For his loyalty to his father, the police thugs beat him and punctured his lung.
We took Hik to the team’s medics’ shed, where they started patching him up while I went with Taz to the ANA compound. There I found all of the ANA armed and clustered outside a small storage building. Inside, the two ANP thugs had been dumped on the dirt floor of the shack, bound into human balls lying in the fetal position.
After the terp had staggered back to the camp, Taz had gone to the checkpoint, beaten the corrupt police officers, tossed them into the back of his truck, and taken them to the shack, but hadn’t killed them. Our classes on civil society and human rights were partially working. It took several days of negotiations between the ANP and the ANA, but we finally convinced Taz to release the two miscreants. The bigger lesson was that Taz had taken the ragged group of ANA, formed them into a unit, and taught them absolute loyalty, albeit Afghan style, by going after the corrupt guys who’d hurt the terp.
All too often people get wrapped up in the popular Hollywood action version of what we do and forget that the Special Forces were created not just to destroy things, but to work within foreign cultures to turn their soldiers into a functioning army.
I’d studied sociology in college and have been fascinated by foreign societies, cultures, and languages since I was a boy. I also grew up in the mountains of North Carolina, where hunting, fishing, and the outdoors are a way of life. Special Forces scratched all of my itches. My career started when I enlisted in 1993. I served with the 25th Infantry in Hawaii before earning my commission. I served with the 82nd Airborne Division during my first rotation in Afghanistan. I’d learned a lot from the 82nd Airborne, especially leadership and how to build unit cohesion. I got a glimpse of Special Forces in Kandahar on that rotation. Their missions—learning the language, respecting the culture, and fighting as guerrillas on the enemy’s ground—appealed to me. I realized then that I wanted a bigger challenge.
Now that challenge meant forging the ANA into a fighting force that could handle the resurgent Taliban. Since arriving, I’d heard nothing but bad news. The account of Taliban fighters almost overrunning Shef’s team, and Shinsha telling me that the Taliban moved openly along streets where they once feared taking even one step, obsessed me. We were five years into the fight. This shouldn’t be happening.
I was trying to focus again on the celebration when a heavy hand fell on my shoulder. It was one of the soldiers from our firebase’s TOC.
“Sir, come with me now,” he said. Shit, another good meal wasted.
I excused myself and headed for the TOC. I remember thinking about the scene in the movie The Green Berets when John Wayne is interrupted during his dinner with the code word “Tabasco.” The code word was for an emergency situation. Whatever the TOC wanted now, it was not good and not scripted. The only thing missing was the code word.
The TOC was alive with frantic radio calls for assistance. I could tell from the accent it was not a Special Forces team. An ISAF unit had been ambushed—in a big way, from the sound of it.
“Have you heard from KAF or the TOC yet?” I asked the radioman.
“Sir, they’re waiting for you to call on the satellite phone,” he said.
I picked up the bulky black phone and headed for the rooftop to get a clear signal.
“This is 31. Put me through to the boss,” I said. Bolduc got on the line moments later.
“An ISAF unit has gotten themselves in a pickle and I want you to be prepared to assist them,” he told me. I asked him if we should wait for an execution order or just go immediately.
“Stand by till I can get you a clear picture,” he said. “I’m not going to send you into a bad situation if I don’t have to. Get your kit ready as a QRF.”
By the time I got off the phone, Bill was at the TOC. I told him we were the QRF for a Canadian unit that had been ambushed. “Tell the boys to get their kits, weapons, helmets, body armor in the trucks quietly.” Bill disappeared into the darkness. Back in the TOC, I got on one of the computers and requested an update. I needed to come up with a plan and had lots of questions.
Where was the ambush? 22 kilometers from Kandahar.
How many Canadian soldiers were wounded? Unknown.
How many enemy fighters were in the area? Best guess, between 25 and 40.
By the time the team filtered into the TOC, Bill and I had developed two courses of action. We could go to the exact site of the ambush and assist the ISAF unit from there. Or we could estimate the direction of enemy movement and ambush the ambushers. We were fully prepared to maneuver behind the enemy and kill those savages where they stood.
With no permission yet to go out, my guys sat around the table and listened to the radio as casualty reports came in.
“They’re just sitting there, Captain,” Bill said.
“Their call,” I said. “They’re a professional army and they know the rules. If they’re in contact and can’t move to a safer location or assault the enemy positions, then they’ll have to eat it till we get the word to launch.”
The voice on the other end of the radio was shaky. No one was assisting them, and they weren’t doing well at assisting themselves.
“They sound like they’re in the hurt locker,” Dave said, meaning they were in a bad way.
“Probably so,” I said, praying that we could go help them.
Maybe twenty minutes ticked by, feeling like hours. I was running through the multiple options. I thought about the ISAF units who had listened in when Shef’s team was in heavy contact. “Fuck it,” I said. “Let’s go. I’ll deal with the repercussions later. Wewon’t leave them out there without help.”
Clearly relieved, my teammates moved toward the door. We headed for the motor pool and loaded the trucks. It felt good, really, really good to be back in my seat. I could hear rounds slamming into the chambers of the heavy guns. The radio crackled with more situation reports. Things were getting worse—more wounded, more incapacitated vehicles. I loaded an ammo belt into the machine gun mounted to my side of the truck. The GMV’s engine rumbled to life. This was one hell of a start to our 2006 rotation.
“Let’s go boys,” I said into the FM radio as the trucks crawled to the garage exit.
Juma Khan came up to my window, clinging to an AK-47 and a vest of ammunition. “I want to go,” he said. I’m not sure whose smile was bigger, his or mine.
“Wali na,” I said—why not?—signaling him to hop into the back.
Then, over the radio, the Canadian voice said, “Bingo Red 1, this is Bingo Red 7. We are clear of the ambush. We have numerous casualties and are twenty kilometers from Kandahar Airfield.”
Our vehicles ground to a halt. Bill sauntered over to my truck.
“I don’t think they’ve moved far, Captain. The Taliban must have run out of ammo.”
“We can go to KAF and get the real story,” I said.
The trucks were running, the plan was set, the radios were up. I just needed the launch order from Bolduc. He finally gave an order, but it wasn’t the one we wanted: “Stand down.”
I didn’t like it but I did it. I trusted Bolduc, and if the mission was a no go then it was a no go. Disappointed, we rolled back to the motor pool and unpacked our kit to return to the celebration.
The next morning we started our intensive training cycle with the ANA. Under the freshly risen sun, we did calisthenics and ran around the five-mile track we’d built just inside the base’s walls. Besides keeping us in shape, the routine forged a bond with the Afghans and allowed us to identify our problem children. Those who couldn’t keep up got the most attention.
I took the officers, including Ali, under my wing. The rest of the team worked with the sergeants and soldiers. Bill and I focused the training on three areas: moving, shooting, and communicating—the basics of combat. We’d worked with some of these soldiers in the past, but before I took them into harm’s way I wanted to know what I had.
Like everything in the Army, we trained in three phases. Crawl. Walk. Run. After the morning’s workout, we had breakfast and met back at the range for the “crawl” phase. Basic marksmanship started with the weapon’s zero. If the sights didn’t align then it was impossible to hit the target. It should have been a simple exercise. Instead, it took us all morning because many of the Afghans had lost respect for their weapons. Instead of maintaining them, they got lazy and banged the rifles around or tinkered with the sights. Every aspect of discipline has to be maintained.
During the break, our team, under Bill’s direction, worked on our own marksmanship skills with a “stress shoot,” which is a race against the clock. Bill set up a series of targets that forced us to move in full kit and hit targets while changing magazines or switching between our rifles and pistols among numerous firing positions. The winner got bragging rights, a source of great pride on a team of wiseasses. Before the competition started, we all got to run through the course once to get a feel for it and to eliminate excuses.
The course was about half a football field wide and an equal distance long. The range extended far beyond the barrier walls and made a slow rocky climb to the base of the adjacent mountain. The ground was flat, gumball-sized gravel offering some stability, but not much. During the day the stones acted as a mirror, reflecting the heat of the midday sun onto our baking bodies.
There were several types of targets. We had plywood barriers to shoot around, over, under, and through. Bill added a pile of chairs, a GMV, an ATV, and a junk car. The first targets were a mix of steel pistol and rifle silhouettes, flat plates in the shape of a human head and shoulders that fell when struck. The other targets were commercial cardboard targets depicting menacing faces or hostage situations, increasing the difficulty level.
I watched my team practice the course meticulously and methodically. They made it look easy despite their cumbersome body armor.
Bill started the competition. As the team sergeant, he set a high standard. He raced from behind the Humvee to the pile of chairs. Ping. Ping. His direct hits reverberated across the range. He reached the final target, transitioned his now spent M4 to the side, and smoothly drew his pistol. Within seconds, he was standing at near point-blank range of the final target with a tight cluster of shots on the target’s chest, an empty pistol in his hand.
When he was finished, he walked the course with each of the team members, calmly coaching them through it.
“Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. Relax, feel the trigger. Squeeze, don’t jerk. Keep your eyes on the target,” he coached as we moved from mark to mark. “Change magazines without taking your eyes off the target. Transition to your secondary weapon, don’t look, know where it is. Know where your magazines are. Everything must be muscle memory.”
Bill knew that in a close firefight the steady, consistent shooter would come out the winner every time. Bill was consistent with everyone when it came to training, even me. There was a standard you were required to achieve. You fail, you go home. It was that simple. I loved these courses. They were some of the best combat training you could get. I had done well in the past and I was anxious to see how I would do now.
Shouldering my rifle, I looked down the sights and dropped the first target. Trotting to the next mark behind some plywood, I again zeroed in on the target and heard a familiar ping. Two for two. My internal clock counted the seconds. My body went into autopilot while I controlled my heart rate. Sweat ran into my eyes, and all too soon, my lungs heaved and gasped for breath in the high altitude. Ending a few minutes later, I holstered my pistol and waited for Bill to grade me.
“Middle of the pack,” Bill said. Even if I did well, Bill didn’t hand out compliments.
Steve was the last shooter and got most of Bill’s attention. He seemed rattled at the finish line and after Bill counted up the hits, he had the lowest number. Dejected, Steve told Bill he needed to rezero. In one motion, Bill took Steve’s weapon and fired two rounds into the steel target two hundred meters away, knocking it down. He walked over to the weapons table and grabbed a shotgun. “At least with this, Steve, you won’t have to aim,” he said, with that familiar smirk. Steve took it in stride, but I knew I’d see him later practicing on the range when no one else was around.
Our company commander, Jared, had arrived at KAF and had spent the last day or so getting briefed up on a massive operation. He was in charge of several Special Forces teams, including mine, and wanted to read me in on the details. I arranged to get him a helicopter over to the firebase for a short visit to get us up to speed on the mission.
Before we left KAF, I’d heard rumors of a big operation. But I hadn’t wanted a piece of it. I envisioned a room full of commanders from half a dozen coalition countries sitting around a table trying to create a plan, all of them convinced they were smartest. But based on our running into the large, defiant group of fighters on the convoy to the base, plus the rocket attacks, plus everything else I’d been hearing, they sure needed to do something—and soon.
Ever since Operation Anaconda, Special Forces teams had rarely taken part in large-scale operations, especially those involving conventional units. During Anaconda, in March 2002, troops from the 101st Airborne Division and 10th Mountain Division planned to block enemy escape routes, but the whole mission crumbled when some Special Forces and the fledgling Afghan militia made contact with hardened Al Qaeda fighters in Gardez in the bitterly cold Shahi Khot Valley. The end result was that there were critical mistakes made by all parties and some Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders escaped. The 10th Mountain and 101st Airborne didn’t communicate with the Special Forces teams much after that. For our part, we had received so much blame for that operation that it was not worth the effort to participate in others.
The fallout crippled Afghan relations with conventional commanders, who now defined the Afghan militias as unreliable. So Special Forces continued operating on their own, “by, with, and through” the indigenous Afghan forces. As a result, we had built critical relationships and a structure to develop the Afghan Army. Over time, the conventional commanders began placing more and more emphasis on partnering conventional forces with the fledgling Afghan Army. We were with them to make sure they succeeded. Now I learned from Jared that Bolduc saw this new operation as a chance to really show ISAF and the world that the Afghan Army could do its part. It was our job to make sure his intent became reality.
I put out the warning order to prepare to support an ISAF operation, much to the chagrin of my team. We had been at the firebase only a week. They wanted more time with the Afghans. Our ANA soldiers needed more training to make sure everybody knew the basic battle drills. We needed more sergeants and officers to lead the soldiers. But most of all, despite knowing some of them from past rotations, we needed to renew and continue to build our relationship. We needed a level of trust that could sustain the pressures of combat.
I let everyone know we would be leaving for KAF in twenty-four hours. The damn mission had not even been formally announced, but I had to get the Afghans on board. We held a team meeting in the small mud TOC, and almost all the comments started with, “But Captain …” We had no choice but to make the mission work, so we called a chai session with the Afghan leadership in their compound.
Shinsha, the Afghan commander, and Ali Hussein, my scarred protégé, came and joined me and Bill on the floor of their main mud hut, which was used as the ANA headquarters. Over boiling-hot tea, I started by channeling my best football-coach-before-the-big-game speech. I played heavily on the centuries-old unwritten tribal code of Pashtunwali, an ancient ideology that governs the actions of Pashtun tribe members. They believe that when they die, they will be judged by their god, Allah, by however closely they have followed the Pashtunwali code. I hammered home the blood feud with the Taliban (badal), the duty to honor the family (nang), the love of the Pashtun culture (dod-pasbani), and their sworn oath to protect it (tokhm-pasbani).
“Will your people remember your names? Do you want to live under the heel of Taliban rule again?” Then I bellowed, “You are the Lions of Kandahar! You are the protectors of southern Afghanistan! We have fought and bled with you many years. Will you not fight with me now?” My Afghan comrades, dressed in fatigues and sitting cross-legged on the floor, seemed fixated on what I was saying.
“No country has ever helped Afghanistan like America. Did we not help you defeat the Russians?” I asked.
Then I told them this was their chance to get badal, or revenge, for what had happened to Shef’s team and heal an open wound. That’s what they desperately wanted. Narrowing their eyes, they grunted and nodded.
Ali turned to Shinsha.
“Wali na?” he said.
Now came the hard part. We had to figure out how to tell them about the mission without giving up too much detail. I figured we could give them just enough information to shape their ideas into plans we had already made, making them think that it was their plan. If it was their plan they would keep it quiet, knowing that a slip of the tongue would tip off the Taliban. Loyalty in Afghanistan can be bought, and we knew the Taliban had spies in the Afghan Army. Hell, we knew there were Taliban at the firebase. We just didn’t know who they were. I explained that none of the soldiers could leave the base, all the weapons needed to be locked away, and all cell phones and the barracks office phone had to be confiscated.
Shinsha asked us to leave. He wanted to talk with his commanders dispersed around the room. He knew I spoke some Pashto; this was his subtle way of being polite. We ducked out of the hut. When we returned, they agreed to join the mission and to all of my requests. We ended up with a volunteer force of almost sixty soldiers and nearly ten solid leaders out of more than one hundred ANA. The rest of the unit was getting ready to go on leave.
In the meantime, Jared had talked again to Bolduc and knew a little more about the operation. The planners back at KAF wanted us to block Taliban escape routes out of the district, which I preferred to tagging along with a Canadian unit for the whole operation. We would need to sneak into the district to retain the element of surprise and initiative.
Briefed on the basics, and with the Afghans ready, I approached Jared about the trip back to KAF, where we would be brought into the complete plan for the operation. Jared had commanded my team several years earlier when he was a captain and remained in good standing with the unit—he got the “wink, wink, nod, nod” from the operators when they heard about his return. He stood six feet tall and was in good shape. Although he was an avid runner, he also lifted weights and his build was far from the average buck-o-five runner stereotype. Personable, confident, with strawberry blond hair and a fierce red beard, he was a welcome returning addition to the deployment. The million-dollar words that astute men picked up in their work with high-ranking officers sounded strange in his thick West Virginia accent. He, like many field-grade officers at that time, had only one rotation in Afghanistan (some had none), but he made up for it by being smart, easy to work with, and open to suggestions from his team leaders.
Not long after Jared’s return, in true Charlie Company fashion, all of the detachments had demonstrated their support for him by attaching their team stickers to the bumper, window, and tailgate of his red Chevy 4×4 pickup truck, along with other vehicle adornments thoughtfully selected in honor of his well-known fondness for hunting. Intertwined among the parachutes, swords, skulls, and arrows were stickers attesting to an affiliation with PETA, anti-gun slogans, a colorful rainbow, and a “Vote for John Kerry” swatch.
Jared was housed in the base commander’s room I had occupied the year before when there was no company commander on that side of the compound. He made a point of telling me how very much he appreciated my fixing up the room for him. I refrained from noting that the joke was on him. The room was directly across from the operations center. His room would be the first stop for every issue and every question anyone had. Seldom in years past had I had a complete night’s sleep.
In any event, it was only fair. I and another team leader, Matt from ODA 333, also known as 3X, had played several good jokes on Jared in the past, most recently a dinner we and our wives had shared at a nice Japanese steak house. That night we told the owners that it was Jared’s birthday and we wanted to make a really big deal about it. When the time was right, the owner broke out the party hat and had the entire staff sing him “Happy Birthday,” along with the rest of the restaurant for good measure. Jared wore the hat and went along with all of it to keep from insulting the owner and everyone else, despite the fact that it was nowhere near his birthday.
Jared was a good commander and had a real concern for the soldiers and their well-being. I liked that you could get into very heated debates over issues with him and things never got personal. That was what made Jared an exceptional officer. He understood everyone had a voice and a perspective or opinion. He also understood that at the end of the day everyone wanted to do the right thing.
An in-depth planning session began over routes and execution for the convoy movement back to KAF. We agreed to leave that night and go through the city, instead of around it. Traffic would be light and no American units had been down the road for months, which we hoped would throw off the Taliban. Speed was also good security against car bombs, and we knew we could hustle on the paved road.
By nightfall the GMVs, masquerade jingle trucks, and ANA pickups were lined up at the gate. The jingle trucks derived their name from the hundreds of dangling bells, chimes, and decorations that ring out for good luck from local trucks as they lumber along rutted dirt roads.
Brian started our truck and looked at me to give the order to move. Brian and I had served in the same units before Special Forces and went through the Special Forces Qualification Course together. Needless to say, when Brian became available for selection to a team, I fought hard to get him, and he joined the team not long after I did in 2005. Brian knew me. It was not a secret that I would never follow my men into combat, I would go first everywhere, unless my team sergeant said otherwise. I couldn’t stomach the idea of one of my men being hurt or killed when I should have been out front for him. Brian believed in that philosophy as wholeheartedly and as deeply, if not more so, than I did. I think that’s why he soon made sure he was the driver of the lead truck, my truck. He analyzed every trail, road intersection, and ditch as carefully as any of his beloved NASCAR drivers would study the day’s track and took infinite precautions all along the way. On many occasions I have personally attributed my survival to him and his finely honed instincts for keeping us alive in that truck.
During his off-duty hours Brian lived for NASCAR. He knew the drivers, their statistics, the tracks, all of it. I think he was drawn to the challenge of individual competitiveness and the technical expertise it required. He lived simply, but he was very complex and technically adept. I admired and appreciated him for everything that he was. He had his own workshop at the firebase, which looked like a super-villain’s lair with antennas, handsets, and cables covering the little table. If we weren’t on a mission, he was in there tinkering, building “stuff the Army should have.” He treated everything as a no-fail event. When it was time to communicate with others, you did it, period.
Brian was the team’s senior communications sergeant; if he set up your radio, you knew it would work. But as key as that role was, Brian was much more than just my senior communications guy; he was a close advisor and friend. Between Brian, with his lean build, reddish hair, and freckles; Smitty, our intelligence sergeant; and me, you would have thought we had an Irish team. Brian could not grow a beard to save his life, but with his mustache and soul patch, he reminded me of Doc Holliday in the movie Tombstone. He was, in a word, meticulous. He was also was my version of MacGyver. He could take gum wrappers, a Coke can, a AA battery, aluminum foil, and electrical tape and make a radio that would work from the two ends of the earth.
We liked to joke about Brian’s likely formative years in an old woman’s home because he was so anal. Everything had a place on Brian’s planet and it better be put back there, properly, if he even let you borrow it in the first place. Lord help you if it wasn’t. Despite that, Brian was one of the most easygoing members of the team. Yet he had a ruthless streak when it came down to the art of “business.”
As I said, I had a Super Bowl–caliber team. Brian is the best communications specialist I have ever seen in my fifteen years in the military. He took his job and responsibility to move, shoot, and communicate to another level. He and Smitty were a deadly combination in any room takedown.
A simple man, Brian was never distracted by the normal worldly allures of fancy cars, motorcycles, money, or women. Like most of the guys, he was a deeply devoted family man. He took his family as seriously as he did his job. It was a trait that I held in the highest regard and encouraged other team members to emulate.
Our gypsy caravan entered the sleeping city through a section of the bazaar. During the day, all the shops were crowded with people and overflowing with everything from hanging meat and carpets to household goods. At this hour, the market was deserted, and the numerous shuttered shops were good cover for anyone watching our movements. The cars, trucks, donkey carts, and burned hulks of old Soviet military vehicles parked along the road provided easy places to hide roadside bombs.
My night-vision goggles allowed me to peek into doorways and backstreets as I scanned for danger. Small white dots from our rifles’ laser sights traveled from alleyway to alleyway and darted along the buildings. We could see the Afghan National Police checkpoint ahead and flashed the infrared (IR) signal to them. I had no trouble making out the Afghan policeman’s broad grin under the green glow of night vision as we passed. He gave us the Hawaiian shaka, the familiar thumb and pinkie hand signal.
We rolled into the first straightaway and as soon as the last vehicle passed the police checkpoint, Brian floored it. The support company mechanics, huge fans of NASCAR, had manipulated the governors so our trucks could accelerate and maintain incredible speed with their supercharged diesel engines. I felt safer traveling fast, especially as we approached a particularly nasty section of the city known as IED Alley.
About 70 percent of all suicide bombers and IEDs hit along this stretch of road inside Kandahar. Just seeing it made my butt pucker. Scars from the attacks pocked the pavement. Big, deep holes that could easily shatter an axle or bust the trucks’ suspensions forced us to slow down. If we could just make it through this stretch and reach the city outskirts, we should be okay.
As we slowed to avoid a pothole big enough to swallow our truck, the radio crackled a warning: “Motorcycle at three o’clock!”
I spotted the bike running parallel to the convoy on a side street. Suicide bomber? Or a tail to help his buddies set up an ambush? It was two a.m., so it was unlikely he was out getting milk.
Bill came over the radio and said the motorcycle had shot down an alleyway toward the convoy. I tightened my grip on my rifle, ready for the motorcycle to cut out into our path. A warning burst from an Afghan soldier’s AK-47 broke through the rumbling of the engines. I just caught the back of the bike as it darted down the alley away from the convoy. Maybe the rider was just a civilian who wasn’t paying attention and now had to change pants. If he had been a suicide bomber, he would have kept coming.
We crossed under the concrete arches that reminded me of the McDonald’s logo, which marked the official entrance to the heart of the city. I finally exhaled as we reached the dark highway leading through the city and picked up speed. There are no bright streetlights lining the avenues of Afghan cities. Power lines hung in a thick crisscross above the dusty road. The squat tan buildings passed by in a blur as we raced toward the airfield. We soon saw its bright lights glowing in the distance.
We neared the bridge where the Taliban patrol had disarmed the guards two days earlier. The convoy came to a rolling halt and I asked the ANA soldier if there had been any trouble. He shook his head no. He had his weapon and there were now two other guards joining him.
We drove through the first Afghan security gate on the north side of the base, where the Afghan Army had a compound. The guards greeted us with smiles. The jingle trucks peeled off as we continued deeper into the airfield. The coalition gate was protected by menacing sandbagged machine-gun nests and two concrete towers bristling with machine guns. My truck slowed and I waved to the guard. No response. The gate stayed closed, which was strange. We were in clearly marked American gun trucks.
“American. Open the gate,” I yelled to the ISAF guard.
A voice on a muted bullhorn ordered our Afghan soldiers to surrender their weapons and move into the razor-wire containment area where Afghan workers and drivers are searched before starting work on the base. What?
“Hey, partner, what’s the problem here? We’re Americans and they’re with us!” I was completely confused. We were American soldiers, in American uniforms, riding in American gun trucks, and we were being denied entry to the very base that the United States had seized and established. These Afghans weren’t civilians—they were Afghan government soldiers accompanying a Special Forces team. I wasn’t going to put these Afghan soldiers in a containment area like common criminals or pets to wait until we returned. I got out of my truck and walked toward the guard.
“Hey, partner, what’s the problem here?” I repeated.
The guard took a step back behind a small concrete barrier and moved his weapon to the low ready position.
“What the fuck are you doing?” I growled.
I demanded that the sergeant of the guard come out and talk with me. No one responded. Now I was really getting pissed. I could see them on the phone following their long list of protocols, trying to get their superiors on the line. Finally, the sergeant of the guard came to the window of the bunker and demanded—not asked—that I surrender my ID card.
Fishing it out of my shirt pocket, I held it up. “Come out here and get it!”
Not surprisingly, he didn’t budge. Fed up, I went back to my truck and called the TOC on a radio channel that every coalition unit in southern Afghanistan monitored and announced that ISAF soldiers had detained my team, including my Afghan soldiers, at the gate. Dave’s voice from the turret whispered, “Easy, Griz.” Griz was a nickname Matt from 3X had given me for moments such as this.
The battle captain in the TOC came back a moment later. “Stand fast. We will deconflict.”
I held my tongue. Leaning against my truck, I suddenly felt like laughing. In the last few hours, we had raced through downtown Kandahar and avoided roadside and suicide bombers, only to run up against an immovable object—this damn gate. We were about to kick off a massive combat operation with this same force. Some teammates, I thought. I hoped this wasn’t an omen of things to come.
After five minutes, a truck arrived at the gate and broke up the staring contest. A member of our unit went into the guard shack, and when he came out, the sergeant of the guard nodded. The guard opened the gate without a word.
As we drove past, the sergeant of the guard gave us the finger.