Chapter 7
The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step, and a lot of bitching.
—UNKNOWN
We had traveled no more than a mile off the main road when a series of infrared flashes up ahead brought the convoy to a halt. Something was up. Scanning with my night-vision goggles, I saw several Special Forces soldiers jump out of their trucks. The rest of us waited and watched. The snowy images wearing helmets and body armor moved forward, hunched over with weapons at the ready. They communicated only with hand signals. It was cool to watch, even for me. Finally, after several minutes, the all clear was given. They had rounded a blind turn and discovered a bunkered fighting position with a heavy machine-gun mount inside. Fortunately, it was unmanned.
The ride so far had been uneventful. The convoy had slowly pulled out of Kandahar Airfield and headed toward Pakistan, hoping to keep the Taliban, with its prying eyes, guessing. Only every third truck had its lights on. As soon as we got to Highway 4, which runs east toward the border, we split into three separate, smaller groups, keeping enough distance between us so that anyone observing wouldn’t suspect a large force. The lights on our gun trucks were disguised with tape or disabled to make the vehicles look like civilian vehicles from a distance.
The paved highway proved to be the last luxury of the mission. After a while, we dipped into a dried riverbed that took us deep into “Indian country.” The lights from a far-off jingle truck peeked from behind a bend. We watched it appear and disappear regularly as it picked its way through the deep, craggy wadis. After the truck was gone, there was nothing. No compounds, no buildings, no signs of life, only endless dirt roads and fields.
As we climbed up the hills, our lead element reported that the jingle truck we’d observed earlier had disappeared into the ten-foot-tall crop fields. Marijuana. We had stumbled upon hundreds of acres of marijuana. This was as dangerous as being in Taliban-held territory. The drug smugglers had no loyalty to either side and hated both for disrupting their business. The reason for the odd placement of the machine-gun nest was now obvious. Normally, we would have destroyed the bunker. Shinsha wanted the machine-gun mount, but he understood when I explained to him that to preserve the secrecy of the operation we would leave everything in place. We didn’t need any eyebrows raised. We called the TOC and reported the location of the bunker. If any coalition force was attacked in this area, the U.S. Air Force would ensure the lethal nest was given proper attention.
On a ridgeline, we took a break and allowed all three groups to link up. We watched and waited to make sure the enemy wasn’t onto us before pushing up a steep, winding road. It was treacherous and narrow and definitely never meant for broad, heavy vehicles. I remember thinking that Dave’s jettisoning of the armor had probably worked out for the best. Now we just had to pray we didn’t hit a mine. The Russians emplaced more than ten million mines during their decade-long duel with the mujahideen. They left another three million during their hasty departure. I didn’t think of them as a likely threat now because we were in the middle of the Taliban’s infiltration routes—which we called rat lines—from Pakistan, and they would have been cleared. But mines would definitely be a concern in Panjwayi.
We traveled through the remainder of the night and into the morning. At dawn, Afghanistan offered up its real beauty—the sunrise. Even in this forsaken place, seeing the flaming red sun break over the dark blue mountains was beautiful. The fingers of sunlight spilled over the horizon, reminding me of the power of light. Some bacteria, when exposed, die. Too bad we couldn’t just shed light on the Taliban and be done with them.
As the sun crept higher in the sky, it illuminated the lushness of the bushes and crops. Caramel-colored ribbons of water cut through the middle of the terrain. Most of it came from natural springs farther north in the mountains. For the five years before the U.S. invasion in 2001, Afghanistan had been in a severe drought. But soon after we arrived, it rained, a lot. Record amounts. Call it divine intervention or climate change. The fact was, when we got to Afghanistan, so did the rain, and it became a bargaining chip we used to meet with local leaders and village elders—they believed we brought the rain with us. It gave us a chance to build the relationships that we then used to root out the Taliban. It also partially revived agriculture near Kandahar, Afghanistan’s breadbasket. Based on the size of the marijuana fields, things had continued to improve.
We drove on through the morning. That afternoon, we finally stopped on a hilltop to let the overheating ANA Ford Ranger pickups cool down. They weren’t designed to take the beating that rocky landscape dished out. Barely existent roads—sometimes just a set of tire tracks in the dirt—wove like drunks through wadis and around hills. It also didn’t help that the Afghans drove the trucks like rental cars with no care for their condition. These occasional stops allowed Hodge, Jared, and me to reconfirm the route and adjust our timeline, but they also made it impossible for us to hold our schedule. We were still miles from the desert, which would be even more unforgiving. To make up the time, we flirted with changing our movement intervals to the early morning hours and late evening, when the heat wasn’t as bad. The team members had been rotating who took turret position in each vehicle, which was nothing more than a miserable slow roasting. Our only fear was that driving these roads in the dark would lead to a broken truck.
In the end, we got the same result in full daylight. A couple hours after our last stop, the call came over the radio that an ANA truck had died. It went down next to a riverbank, as its overheated motor seized up. Walking over to Jared’s truck, all I could do was shake my head. Jared looked frustrated.
“It’s a marathon, not a sprint,” I said.
Bill was standing nearby and asked Jared if he knew how to eat an elephant.
“I wish all you philosophers on 31 would shut the hell up,” Jared jokingly barked.
Then he called in to the TOC in Kandahar and requested a replacement truck with water and fuel. We had too much gear to crossload the dead vehicle’s cargo onto the other trucks. The TOC got us a replacement truck, but also needed to arrange for a helicopter to fly it to us. The Special Forces do not have any helicopters of their own, strange as that may sound, so we have to borrow them from other units and are dependent on the owners’ schedules and priorities. Most units were really, really good at supporting us when they could. The major problem with helicopter lift assets arose when we received time-sensitive information on targets. Special Forces has a solid intelligence network, but bad guys don’t stay in the same place too long. When we need helicopters fast to go after someone, more often than not they aren’t available.
We finally got word that the helicopter would arrive in two hours, and we started to tow the disabled truck to a makeshift landing pad in a flat area between two irrigation ditches, having stripped it of ammunition, weapons, and equipment. We had it halfway to the landing zone when the familiar chugging of rotors echoed across the valley. The birds were early. Shit. Jared sent out the landing team to mark the landing zone (LZ) with purple smoke, as Afghans and Americans alike converged on the broken vehicle, manhandling it across the remaining irrigation ditch. I went to the LZ with the offloading party to prepare to remove the new vehicle.
The whirling CH-47 Chinook—a huge dual-rotor cargo helicopter—touched down, sending up a massive cloud of loose gravel and dirt that penetrated every crevice and pore. As the ramp on the bird dropped, its crew chief gave me a thumbs-up. An Afghan soldier raced up the ramp and dove into the window of the truck sitting in the helicopter’s belly. I climbed into the truck bed, over the cab, and onto the hood so that I could guide him out.
The engine roared to life as the Afghan turned the key and floored it. I screamed “AROM SHA!”—Slow down!—at the top of my lungs and held on for dear life as the truck shot from the belly of the helo. The driver hit the brakes just as the rear bumper cleared the ramp. I hopped off and gave the driver an earful, but it couldn’t have gone better if we had rehearsed it. The helicopter crew chief just stood there, the cable still in his hand, a stunned look on his face. I gave him a thumbs-up and rode off with the ANA.
We needed to move fast. The pilots don’t like to stay on the ground for long. I told the driver to load up all the equipment and went back to help the crew pushing the dead truck toward the helicopter. After several false starts, we got it lined up. Drenched with sweat and caked with dirt, we set our feet for the final push up the ramp. That’s when I noticed that the machine-gun mount was about to slam into the roof of the helicopter. I gestured to the GMV crew on the hill, and someone raced down with the tool kit from his truck. I tried several wrenches on the large bolt before I found the correct size. I cranked on one nut, no movement. God, I wished I had some WD-40. I scrambled on the top of the cab to gain some leverage and pushed the wrench until the bolt loosened. Jared hopped in the back with me, and like a NASCAR pit crew we cranked off the rest of the bolts. I threw the mount clear and everyone pushed the small truck into the belly of the Chinook.
I helped the crew chief tie the truck down with cargo straps, and then he gave me a thumbs-backward gesture to beat it off his helicopter. I scrambled off just as the bird’s engines let out a high-pitched whine and the massive Chinook leaped into the air. Within fifteen seconds, it was disappearing into the crystal blue sky.
Our sideshow with the trucks had used up the rest of the day. Jared decided to stay put until morning and see if the Taliban had any surprises for us. It was a good move; we needed some rest. He also started rotating which team took point. It would be my team’s turn tomorrow.
There’s a saying that you’ve never lived until you’ve almost died. You can only get that from being out front, facing the unknown. You’re the eyes and ears for every man behind you. Losing focus is a matter of life and death. You have to identify every danger, from an IED to an ambush. If I could choose, I would rather be hurt or killed than have it be one of my men. I felt very comfortable with Brian, Dave, and me in the lead, and we made good progress the next day. During breaks we worked on the vehicles and prepared for the next movement.
I usually took the last guard shift at night because I was always up late anyway trying to send our status reports. This normally took a while because we had to share satellite bandwidth with other units talking to the base. Finding a gap in the traffic always took some time. That night, it was after midnight when I finally shut my eyes for a few hours of sleep. I woke at about four in the morning to the usual tug on my foot. I cut on the propane for my handheld coffeemaker, and I began to conduct the normal checks on the ANA guards. I returned to a piping-hot pot of coffee and started to wake the rest of the team for “stand to.” It was a rule we dared never break.
During the French and Indian Wars, Major Robert Rogers wrote twenty-eight rules for his company of six hundred handpicked Rangers. “Stand to” was developed from rule 15: “At the first dawn of day, awake your whole detachment; that being the time when the savages choose to fall upon their enemies, you should by all means be in readiness to receive them.” Rogers’s rules have since been adopted and rewritten by the 75th Ranger Regiment. When in the field, without fail, every day before sunrise we packed up our kit and pulled security for thirty minutes before and thirty minutes after the sun came up.
When no attack came, we loaded up and continued to move along the narrow dirt trail that came and went on the map. We dropped into a series of deep ravines that were full of high grass and water. Far off to the side at the bottom of a ravine through a gap in the grass, I noticed something distinctly out of place: a stick about four feet tall with a piece of red cloth tied to it. It looked like a linkup marker for Taliban coming across the border on foot. The Talibs would often infiltrate on foot, undetected, and then meet with a “mule,” or vehicle, that would take them to a safe house.
I stopped the convoy and radioed Jared. We moved the vehicles off the trail and Brian and I got out. As we made our way toward the marker, Dave watched the high ground above us from the truck with the heavy machine gun and Ron scanned the ravine floor with his rifle. We skirted the trail and approached from the east, cutting through the thick grass. I could feel my heart pounding away in my chest. Slick hands. Dry mouth. I could hardly swallow. As we got close to the narrow opening in the grass, I gave Brian the hand signal to stop. I could see the small piece of red cloth that marked the entrance to the meeting area.
I held up my fingers to my eyes, silently telling Brian to keep an eye on the tall grass just in case someone walked out. Then I studied the ground and saw fresh footprints—both boots and sandals—spaced about a man’s stride apart. It looked like maybe six or seven sets. I signaled to Brian that I could see something inside. Creeping to the opening, I slowly inserted the barrel of my rifle between the blades of grass and gently swept them to the side. Ahead lay a small, circular opening in the reeds of the sandy riverbed. Several yellow water jugs, some still partially full, littered the area. The clearing was wet from the morning dew, but I saw several dry spots about the size of a mat or blanket where it looked like someone had slept. Nearby, a spot as big around as a truck tire was bone-dry.
Brian came closer and softly tapped me to let me know he was there. I placed my hand on the tire-sized spot. Warm. The fighters had covered their fire without putting it out. Digging down a few inches with my knife, I found the smoldering ash. Dave whispered in the headset that he couldn’t see us anymore, let alone cover us. I took a knee and put my hand behind me, signaling that I was coming out. Brian nodded and turned toward the truck. As he did my eyes caught a glimpse of movement over his left shoulder. I carefully raised my rifle. Looking through my scope, I saw four men—one of them carrying a weapon—on a ridge three hundred meters away.
I fired.
The round smashed into the rocks at their feet, too low to hit the lead Talib. I focused on the second Talib, who was now running at full sprint. I fired twice, trying to lead him a little. Brian saw him too and fired. We raced back to the truck and called Jared. They’d heard the shots and Hodge’s team—Team 26—came up fast. I set up firing positions while 26 moved up to pursue. The Afghan soldiers were right there.
I watched 26 skirt the low ground and move up and over the small crest where I had seen the Talibs. Not far past it, they ran across a group of Kuchi tribesmen, nomads with strong ties to the Taliban. The Kuchis have survived several invasions—the British twice, the Russians, and now us—and consider it all a minor inconvenience. Over the radio, Hodge reported that the nomads were claiming there were no Talibs on the hill and the team wasn’t finding any blood trails. I had gotten excited and jerked the trigger. Bill would be all over me about it.
While 26 searched around the hill, the interpreters finally got the Kuchis to talk. Hodge radioed to tell me they admitted the men were Taliban, but they had run off when the firing started. There must have been a recent crossing and the fighters had linked up with guns, but not trucks.
We were already running well behind schedule because of the truck breakdown, so we collected as much information as we could from the Kuchis and started moving again, now with a real sense of urgency. The infiltration route was awfully well populated for late August. The summer heat should have been keeping Taliban fighters at home, yet they were moving north. This was extremely unusual, and all the commanders agreed that we needed to change the route and get to the safety of the high desert.
Maintaining radio silence as we drove, we kept watch for Taliban fighters, who were now undoubtedly watching for us. After several hours of driving, we reached the last remaining obstacle to the high desert and safety—a fast-running stream. It was a classic ambush point and good hiding spot for IEDs. But the biggest problem was a mud pit forty yards wide that the ANA’s Rangers couldn’t cross. We stopped the convoy and had the ANA drivers put the trucks in four-wheel-drive low.
“Don’t gun it,” Bill told the lead driver through an interpreter. “Just let it glide through the mud.”
The Afghan nodded and, grinning from ear to ear, floored the gas pedal. The truck sloshed into the mud in four-wheel-drive high. It made it across but dug a massive trench right through the middle of the pit. Bill screamed at the driver, who was jubilantly pumping his arms up and down in victory. In his mind, all he had to do was get across. The next driver took off without warning, before we could explain things in more detail. The ANA truck raced into the mud and just barely made it through.
We decided to stop the next ANA vehicle and send a GMV across. We knew the hefty GMV would make it with little effort and could tow vehicles across if necessary. But as the first GMV started moving, another ANA truck darted in behind it, and it immediately got stuck and sank in the mud. This crossing was going to take much longer than expected.
Of the sixteen vehicles in our patrol, we still had four more ANA vehicles to get across and all nine of the GMVs. My team was pulling security on the bank and staying low in the vehicles. Several more GMVs crossed and joined the teams pulling security on the far side. One of the last GMVs tried to winch the small Ranger free from the clutches of the mud but only managed to get itself stuck, too.
Riley, our medic, sat in the back of his truck scanning the rocks. That’s where he spotted a black turban and dirty face with a scruffy beard peeking out, right where he was pointing his M240 machine gun. The M240 fires a bullet the size of your pinkie finger and can punch through nearly three-quarters of an inch of steel.
The sound of the machine-gun burst sliced through the noise of the straining engines, immediately accompanied by sporadic AK fire from both sides of the river. The rounds slammed into the young Taliban fighter’s head, and his body rolled out from behind the rock. The endless ranting of mullahs from the mosques in Pakistan and the foreign fighters in the training camps had driven the guy to try and steal a glimpse of the infidels. Curiosity killed him.
Another fighter popped up out of a small ditch nearby, weapon in hand. Riley cut him down before he could get away.
I called Riley for a report.
“I just killed two assholes hiding behind a rock. Light fire from our side,” he radioed back.
As the team medic, Riley provided the team and our Afghan soldiers with all our care. You didn’t go to Riley for a stomachache unless you wanted to be called a sissy or worse. But if you were lying in a pool of blood, Riley was the first person you wanted kneeling at your side.
Riley’s personality was, let’s say, multidimensional. Like Bill, he was from Texas, the small town of Tolar, where the cattle vastly outnumber the people and his high school graduating class numbered thirty-two. He had enjoyed the vast freedom of the open plains since he was a teenager, with a near frontier upbringing that kept him busy raising livestock and roping cattle. Just short of five foot ten inches tall, he was as wide as two men and had the strongest, heaviest hands on the team, obviously from his youth of handling horses and other men. He was most comfortable in cowboy boots, a T-shirt, and jeans and would have happily gone on patrol in that clothing if I had allowed it. I could imagine him in a long duster, dismounting a sixteen-hand quarter horse and sauntering into a bar, spurs singing, shotgun in hand. Riley was a free spirit and as wild as the horses he kept and the state he came from. I was willing to endure his turn-of-the-previous-century antics on and off duty for one simple reason: loyalty. Having Riley on the team was like having a brother around full time. He was never without a smart-ass answer to a question and was always ready to back up his statements with a brawl. That being said, we could be in the thick of a team feud, but outsiders best not make the mistake of messing with any one of us when Riley was around.
A life of backbreaking farmwork had honed Riley’s tendencies when it came to force. This I used to great advantage as my team pursued our country’s goals. I could and would ask Afghans nicely one time and one time only for anything. If my politeness was taken for weakness, I would send in Riley. Whatever technique he applied, he did so without hesitation, usually resulting in a smiling Afghan returning to me hat in hand, ready to do what I asked. Soon word got around and I only had to ask the one time. This job and Special Forces in general were a perfect fit for Riley. While methodical in the clinic, he was a fierce gunfighter fueled by natural rage. He wore his emotions on his sleeve and preferred to be on the front of stack ready to kick in the door and lay waste to the enemy. If you wanted to take ground, put Riley in the front. The problem was, he was too valuable to sacrifice. His job was to keep everyone else alive.
As the senior medic, Riley never forgot his absolutely critical responsibilities. He was charged not only with providing medical assistance to the Afghans, and training the medics for the ANA, but most important, with keeping team members alive until they could be medically evacuated from the field. These things made for a heavy rucksack of burden, but Riley had big shoulders. His ability to practice medicine in the worst of circumstances was inspiring. Once, he got word that one of our ANA soldiers had been wounded in a firefight. The nineteen-year-old arrived in the small triage room with a huge gunshot wound to the chest. The ISAF medic and nurse had already given up on him because they couldn’t get a chest tube inserted to inflate his lungs so he could breathe. Riley arrived, dropped his trauma bag, and went to work. He had the chest tube inserted and the patient stable and breathing on his own in minutes. It would be one of many instances where Riley would back up his brash demeanor to the hilt.
Riley continued to fire all around the rocks and up into the wadi to suppress enemy fire. Taliban fighters on the opposite side of the river began firing back, thinking that their ambush had been sprung; in response, all the machine guns and grenade launchers on the GMVs opened up. For the second time that day, I heard Jared call, “Troops in contact!” over the radio.
The remaining GMVs raced forward across the mud. Jared’s truck stopped just long enough for him to jump in, and then all the Americans were across except for my team and the GMV stuck in the bog. The Taliban fire began to die down.
Across the river, two trucks dashed back to the edge of the mud, tossed towing straps to the sunken GMV, and easily freed it. Jared ran to Shinsha and told him to get all of his equipment off the stuck Ranger. Under sporadic fire, the ANA formed a line and heaved backpacks and ammo to another truck. Finally, with everyone else on the far side, Jared ordered my team across, too. Brian grinned as the massive Goodyear tires slung mud in all directions. We roared past the waiting trucks and once again took up the lead.
A significant ambush never materialized. Once we moved through the kill zone, the Taliban fighters stopped taking shots and our machine guns went quiet. There were no more targets. Overhead, Air Force jets covered our escape. Jared called in an air strike on the Ranger we’d left behind to prevent the enemy from digging it out and using it. We couldn’t afford to have Taliban fighters in possession of an official Afghan Army vehicle, parading around in it as propaganda. As the bluish gray sky gave way to darkness, we saw the flash of a precision bomb striking the vehicle. If anyone had been trying to pillage it, they were dead.
We were down a truck, but we made good progress after the mud. We set up a small base on the ridgeline on the cusp of the Red Desert, content with the day’s accomplishments.