“The Taliban approved the radio broadcast,” Kaplan said, “maybe to get goodies in return for an empty gesture. Those who spoke on the radio could be goat herders for all we know, with zero status inside the village.”
In early September, a U.S. patrol entered a hamlet near Ganjigal to test the reaction of the locals. The villagers seemed friendly. When the patrol left, only a few PKM machine-gun rounds were fired at them. So the effort was deemed a success. Inside 1-32, the view was that Ganjigal was “pro-U.S. and supportive of the Afghan government.”
The elders then asked that Afghan—not American—soldiers visit Ganjigal and provide money for their mosque. So our key leader engagement was scheduled for September 7—and was then pushed back a day. Most Afghan males—whether merchants, villagers, police, or soldiers—had cell phones, and they jabbered constantly. The delay was equivalent to announcing our movement over the public radio.
The four of us on Team Monti, together with about ten other advisors in the command orbit of Joyce, attended the mission brief. Few Afghans or soldiers from 1-32 were present; they had been briefed separately. Second Lt. Fabayo briefed Operation Buri Booza, or Dancing Goat II. He used only one slide, showing a photomap of the valley. Coming on top of Hafez’s warning, the map clearly showed a trap. (See map.) We were walking into a box canyon surrounded by high ridgelines. The horseshoe-shaped valley provided the ideal shooting gallery for snipers and machine-gun crews. I would have planned to go in there with heavy guns, armor, and air cover.
The village of Ganjigal consisted of two small hamlets separated by a gravel wash. The plan was to advance from the west up the wash and turn left into North Ganjigal, about fifty compounds stacked one on top of another on a steep hillside right beneath a massive ridgeline that ran back into Pakistan. The largest compound consisted of a concrete foundation with half-completed walls.
On the other side of the wash, on a steep finger of land, South Ganjigal held about fifteen compounds enclosed behind stout mud walls. Farther south was another wash, then another wall of rock ridgeline. A school funded by the United States was perched on its slope. Constructed of thick stones anchored in heavy cement, the school could withstand avalanches, blizzards, floods, or machine-gun fire. Despite American offers to pay for teachers, the school had been empty for three years. The villagers claimed their children had to work, leaving no time for school.
Two miles south of all that was Camp Joyce, with its 120-millimeter mortars at ready; 120s were fearsome shells that dropped straight down and smashed anything in their path.
“There are reports of ten to twenty Taliban, maybe more,” Fabayo said. “The likely course of action is that they shoot at us as we pull out. That’s what happened to 1-32 on their patrol up there a few days ago.”
Historically the Taliban had not sprung ambushes from inside villages, so that wasn’t discussed at the briefing. Plus, we were going in with ninety Afghans and fifteen advisors, with a platoon from 1-32 deployed behind us as a quick reaction force.
“This show belongs to our Afghan counterparts,” Fabayo said. “We advisors will stand off to the side and let them talk with the elders. We’re not in the lead. We’re assisting.”
That made no sense, I thought. Considering who was doing the briefing and who was hearing it, we were in the tactical lead, even if we claimed otherwise. No Afghan had a clue how to call in the 120 mortars. I had been over this ground before with Maj. Williams and Fabayo. I’m not good at hiding my feelings, and I may have shaken my head in disagreement during the brief.
It was nuts to rely upon indirect 120 mortar fire alone. One look at the valley dictated bringing the direct firepower mounted on our armored Humvees. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight; bring a cannon. The land sloped up so steeply that houses were supported by those below them. The compounds were made of stone, concrete, and adobe bricks baked by centuries of summers. They looked like a set of interlocking gun pillboxes.
Outside each main house was a small dirt courtyard with an outhouse, a clothesline, a clay cooking oven, and a few stalls for the cows and donkeys. Scrawny barnyard fowl and mean watchdogs ran loose. High mud walls enclosed every compound, separated by twisting footpaths littered with human and animal feces. Inside this rat’s nest of alleyways, a man could walk from one end of the village to the other without being seen and fully protected against small-arms fire. Big, boomerang-shaped farming terraces stepped down the hill to the wash below. More than twenty of these giant steps guarded each side of the wash—as did two square stone watchtowers, useful, no doubt, over many centuries of warfare. Each terrace was held in place by a stone retaining wall four to six feet high on the downhill side.
Lt. Fabayo laid it out: Team Monti and the lead platoon of Askars would walk up the wash and enter North Ganjigal. Team Monti would continue east to a water tank at the end of the village to make sure no bad guys came down the trail from Pakistan. When the meeting with the elders was finished, we would walk back down to our vehicles and drive twenty minutes back to Joyce.
“We’re walking in?” I asked. “We’re not taking our gun trucks?”
The way to get into those two hamlets, it seemed to me, was to drive armor right up the wash between them. A half-dozen Humvees with .50-cal guns could provide protection for the meeting. There didn’t seem to be any other way to do it. The mountains made it too hard to flank around and get above the villages.
“No. We’re going in at dawn,” Fabayo said. “The noise of trucks would alert them. I don’t want to lose the element of surprise.”
Element of surprise, my ass. I didn’t know how ninety noisy Askars, arriving after a day of cell phone chatter, could have an
Lt. Johnson looked at me, shaking his head to warn me to be quiet. He pointed at the map and pantomimed making notes. I got it. He wanted me to stop critiquing what I couldn’t change and come up with the tactics for our lead element.
Thinking the danger lay on the far ridgelines and not closer in, my idea was simple. Because Team Monti was in the lead, we’d be the first to engage. So I’d take point with a 240 machine gun with five hundred rounds. I’d put Dodd Ali and his spit-polished SAW on my flank. I assumed we’d be hit by a few snipers, covered by a PKM. If the 240 couldn’t suppress them, Dodd Ali would cover me while I called for artillery.
I saw Capt. William Swenson sitting among us. He was the quiet, long-haired Border Police advisor I knew only by reputation. For ten months, he and his SNCO (senior noncommissioned officer), Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Westbrook, had been living with the police, driving around in an unarmed Ford Ranger pickup. Swenson joked that they were “an Army of Two.”
Swenson was on his third combat tour and had held over a hundred key leader engagements with mountain clans. He popped up in the strangest places. Once, when Lt. Kerr was conducting a patrol into very remote valleys outside Dangam, his soldiers stopped by the compound of Gal Rahman, a border police chief. They were greeted by a lanky, beardless man in a gray man-dress and a flat
I was glad to see Swenson at the briefing. He was known for calling in artillery fire on the dot. Adjusting artillery in the mountains wasn’t easy. So I planned to introduce myself to Swenson and compare coordinates.
Fabayo said helicopters weren’t in support of us, but would be diverted if needed. He did say artillery was in support and pointed to the Kilo Echoes, or artillery registration points, marked by six red crosses on the photomap. I watched Swenson check them against his own map.
“Three-070 is the Undo KE, correct?” he said.
“Undo” meant we were pulling out. Swenson was concentrating on how we would get out of that box canyon if things went wrong. He wanted a fire mission to conceal our retreat. Maj. Williams believed 1-32 had assured him that “we could put smoke on the deck for screening.” KE 3070 was the registration point for that smoke screen.
“KE 3070 is the Undo,” Fabayo agreed.
The briefing hadn’t addressed command and control. I assumed Maj. Williams, as the senior American, was in charge. Battalion 1-32 believed Williams was in charge. But Williams believed Maj. Talib, the operations officer of the Afghan battalion, was in command. Which is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Talib, who
