pleased.
Some villages were genuinely friendly, some standoffish. You’d rarely see young men, and any woman would dash inside immediately. The villagers and Askars were polite to one another, but rarely did I see them laugh together or talk in a friendly manner. The Askars looked bored and the villagers looked resigned to casual searches of their compounds while the Afghan officer and the elders sipped tea and we advisors checked off another “key leader engagement.”
When we walked into some hamlets, however, you could feel something was wrong. When kids threw rocks at you, you knew what the parents were telling them. Sometimes the Askars grabbed the kids’ soccer balls and sliced them apart. This didn’t win hearts and minds, but it did stop the rocks. Whenever the elders hurried through the ceremonial tea, though, I’d watch the Askars. When any soldier senses danger, he crouches down a few inches to make himself less of a target. When the Askars did that, I went on full alert.
Hafez was our lead interpreter and, we quickly learned, our best warning system. A thirty-seven-year-old sergeant major retired from the Afghan Army, Hafez had served in Kunar for three years with advisor teams. The Afghan soldiers distrusted him because he refused to support their never-ending schemes to skim from the Americans.
Hafez was a man without a country. His request for a visa to the States went unanswered because he lacked a high-level American sponsor. Yet his loyalty to Americans was unbounded. He taught us how to act with the elders, provided tips before meetings, and pointed out when the Askars were taking advantage of us or when the villagers were lying. Hafez became the unofficial fifth member of our team. Inside a hamlet, if he shook his head at us, we knew it was time to forget the tea and get out.
Lt. Rhula was smart. To him and to the Askars, the war was a job. If they were rounded up or killed, their families would lose a steady paycheck. Most wouldn’t stay to fight on ground that favored the enemy.
The dushmen weren’t idiots either. Think of it. You’re three or four Taliban living in a compound, and you see pickups bouncing over the rocks toward your village. It’s another “key leader engagement” by the infidels and the Afghan traitor soldiers.
Unseen, you run up the hill and dig up your two AK rifles and a PKM machine gun with fifty rounds in the belt. From behind some rocks, you squint down at the helmet of an American advisor in an armored turret, slowly cranking his enormous .50-caliber gun back and forth, not knowing where you are, but knowing you are watching him.
Usually the dushmen waited until we drove away before firing in sheer bravado. Thank you and don’t come again. I’d respond by turning the offending hillside into dust clouds. Only two or three times did I hit somebody. Usually it was just a cloud of dust downrange and the wind-chimey cascade of empty brass shells falling into the Humvee from my thumping gun. Then we’d head back to Monti.
The Askars with us didn’t care one way or another about our counterinsurgency theory. They were soldiers, with no attachment to the people living around Monti. For them, it was another day, another walk through a hamlet, then back to base for dinner, chats over their cell phones, some fine hash to smoke, then a few hours’ sleep in the barracks. They joked with one another and posted security, bored bit players in a drama that changed only when a friend went home or took a bullet. I learned to trust and rely on them every day. They became like family.
Over the course of these patrols, I went through thousands of rounds, but it’s hard to hit an unseen enemy. Not that I didn’t try. Lt. Johnson gave me a long leash to determine team tactics, and sometimes I let my hunting instincts get the better of me. I kept hearing about this place called Dab Valley, where every patrol took fire. So I came up with a brilliant plan and presented it in low-key fashion to Lt. Johnson. We’d drive up toward Dab, I explained, and then stop any passing vehicles to search for weapons or ammo. I didn’t tell him that we were going to park at the exact spot where previous patrols came under fire. I was quite proud of my scheme. When we came under fire, I’d train my Askars, just as headquarters wanted, and shoot Taliban, just as I wanted.
So we drove into this narrow gulch and stopped. When we looked up, we could see a dozen caves where the enemy could be hiding. We sat for a few minutes knowing we were sitting ducks. I happily waited to unload with my .50-caliber. Lt. Johnson, though, was taking in the bigger picture, including what would happen if an RPG blew off one of our tires and we were stuck in the shooting gallery. The more he looked around, the more he growled at me. Finally, he threw up his hands and shouted that we were leaving. In a cloud of dust, we drove out of that death trap.
“Meyer,” he said, “why do I let you talk me into insane things?”
Chapter 4
ADVISING
A few days later—early August—I had another chance to impress Lt. Johnson with my initiative. We were on our way to conduct a key leader engagement. When we stopped at this small hamlet, we were greeted with a mortar shell exploding next to us. I scanned the ridgeline and saw the dust raised by the recoil of the launching tube, about a thousand meters away.
We took cover. There were maybe two or three guys up there. We started calling in artillery and we could have driven away, of course, but what fun would that be?
Instead, I came up with another brilliant idea.
“Let me climb up and flank them from the left,” I said to Johnson. He stared up at the mountain, thinking about it. To show him how confident I was, I grabbed a few Askars and started climbing before he could say no.
It took twenty minutes for us to scramble up, with only a couple of hostile rounds cracking off the rocks near us. When we reached the top, we looked around for the mortar team.
Suddenly, heavy slugs cracked overhead. It was friendly fire, coming from the Afghan police station position in the town on the other side of the mountain. They had spotted our silhouettes and figured we were the mortar guys. They were dialing us into the crosshairs of a Russian anti-aircraft gun, which would soon turn the ridge, and us, to dust.
“Get it off us!” I radioed frantically.
Lt. Johnson pulled out his cell phone and called Lt. Rhula, who immediately called the Afghan police chief.
“If your guys fire one more burst,” Rhula yelled, “I’ll drop mortars on your head.”
The firing stopped. We stood up, dusted off, and trudged back down the hill.
“If you’d gotten clipped, Meyer,” Lt. Johnson said, “I’d have to spend a month with investigators.”
“I had it under control, sir.”
“Uh-huh.”
A few days later, Rhula filled two Ranger trucks with Askars and sped out the gate without telling us where he was going. He said he was responding to an ambush of several jingle trucks. Most Afghan trucks are brightly painted and decorated with jingling bells, as if every vehicle had to pass through a third-grade art class. But if all your life you’ve been saving for that vehicle, you want to show it off. Trucks were routinely stopped by Taliban or other bandits and shaken down. Sometimes the Taliban torched the trucks for no obvious reason. The truck drivers continuously played Russian roulette.
About an hour after Rhula left the gate, we got a call from a helicopter pilot.
“Hey, Fox 6, your Afghans are shooting it out with some Afghan security guards,” the pilot said. “What do you want me to do?”
“We have no SA,” Lt. Johnson replied. “Don’t do anything.”
“No SA” means no situational awareness—a military phrase meaning no fucking idea what is happening. An hour later, our Askars returned with bullet holes in their trucks. Eventually we found out they had driven off the ambushers and, as payment for their services, had siphoned five gallons of gas from a jingle truck. The pissed-off drivers had shot at Rhula’s Humvees as they drove away. No one was seriously hurt, though—only a couple scratches and bruises. All good.
