staff at the Kandahar headquarters didn’t keep most of the supplies for themselves. Contreras and Torjan discussed how the ANCOP would refuel in Nawa, with Torjan suggesting they find gas stations. Nobody knew if there were any gas stations in the area.
That evening Ironhorse sat waiting to be briefed by Contreras. They were all scouts, and some were snipers, chosen by their lieutenant because they were “rough” and “shooters.” The major’s original plan called for them to go to Nawa before the Marines got there. “We would have gotten eaten alive,” one of them joked. The Marines in Nawa were attempting to provide a safe and secure environment for the Afghan government in order to facilitate the handover of the security mission to the ANSF, he explained. Ironhorse’s mission was to conduct a movement to Nawa—traveling through the eastern desert to avoid the much faster main road, which had not been cleared of IEDs—in order to link up with Marines and support their operations.
Contreras said guys in police uniforms were harassing civilians in Nawa. The men seemed very skeptical about the whole thing. “Duration of mission and number of legitimate police in Nawa, and how will ANP get along with ANCOP, and who is mentoring the ANPs there?” Staff Sergeant McGuire tersely asked without moving or looking at the major. Staff Sergeant Verdorn complained that they would be doing the Marines’ job of clearing. As the major concluded his brief, McGuire loudly muttered, “It’s a cocksuck.” Contreras left. “That was very well thought out,” McGuire said. I asked him to elaborate. “Fuel will be the biggest issue,” he said. “We don’t know where we’re gonna live, we’re not taking tents.” It was the worst operations order he had ever seen, he said, just telling them to go down there and the Marines would tell them what to do. “It’s a ‘fly by the seat of your pants’ operation.” There was no plan for what would happen after they got to the school where the Marines were based. McGuire wondered what the mission was. If it was to give an Afghan face, well then there were already hundreds of Afghan soldiers there. Staff Sergeant Thacker was also worried. There were “a lot of I don’t knows” in the brief, he said, like the radio frequencies for the Marines. “A normal op order, even the lowliest private knows what everybody’s going to do,” McGuire told me.
The British warned against occupying a school, but Contreras dismissed the concern. “The point is to provide a safe and secure environment,” he said. He told the men to plan for seven days before they returned to base. “The reason why we’re going down is to put an Afghan face on the mission,” he said. “There isn’t enough ANSF there.” Contreras explained to me later that the goal was to set the conditions to deploy the ANCOP to work with the Marines in that area. It was a clear-and-hold operation, a basic element of counterinsurgency. “The Afghans have to feel like we’re there with them,” he said. The Marines would clear the area of Taliban, and the police would hold it. “My Afghan counterparts say that loads of Taliban want to stop fighting and reform,” Contreras told me. He believed the Taliban had seen the error of their ways. All evidence pointed to the contrary, though. The Taliban were more confident than ever.
“The Marines are trained to go off a ship, hit the ground and fucking charge,” Contreras told me, worrying that they might not be suitable for COIN. “I’ve never been to the place where I’m going. I have no idea what it looks like,” he admitted. Contreras drove to the ANCOP facility, and we walked to Saki’s office. There was a marijuana plant in the garden. Saki was watching Bollywood movies. He had a picture of President Karzai on his wall, some plastic flowers next to it, a bare desk, and a coffee table in his office, along with a map of Helmand. Saki wore an ornate
IEDs were the biggest threat, the perfect asymmetric weapon. In 2009 there were thousands of IED attacks on ANSF. Most of the American and British soldiers killed every month were victims of IEDs, not small-arms fire, but IEDs were not just effective when they exploded. The threat of them crippled foreign and Afghan security forces. It meant that their vehicles were not free to go to all areas, and that they had to proceed at a snail’s pace with bomb detectors walking in front of convoys or their vehicles crawling ahead. IEDs were built from homemade explosives like fertilizer and fuel as well as old mortars from past wars. Some were detonated by remote control, by cable or a pressure plate. In Iraq paved roads made it harder to conceal them; in Afghanistan the prevalence of dirt roads made it easier.
The men of Ironhorse had lost their lieutenant and a sergeant, as well as an interpreter and a cop, in a February 2009 IED blast. Lieutenant Southworth and Staff Sergeant Burkholder had gone to examine an IED the ANCOP discovered. They asked for an explosive ordnance disposal team to destroy it because they needed the road open and they worried civilians would get blown up. The British told them to mark the location and move on. As the ANCOP tried to dismantle the IED, it blew up. Ironhorse and the police spent an hour picking up pieces of their friends from the road and even a tree. Ironhorse later got a good tip on the IED maker who had killed their two friends. They raided his house, arresting him and his son, but when the two prisoners were in police detention they paid $1,500 to two guards and escaped. Ironhorse had returned to the house three times looking for them.
Although the men were chosen by their lieutenant for being “meat eaters,” the months of daily operations and shitting in bags had taken a toll on them. They hated being in Afghanistan and being sent on missions that weren’t their own; they resented the neglect they felt and the lack of progress. One sergeant’s parents owned a hardware store and sent the team four tow straps for their Humvees because their request through the military was going nowhere. One Humvee drove around with bad transmission for a month and a half because they couldn’t get a mechanic. “That’s the kind of shit that just wears on you,” Sergeant McGuire told me. “We were doing repairs above our mechanical level because there wasn’t anybody to look at it, and then we got an e-mail asking why we were doing it, a kick in the nuts.” While stationed in southern Helmand, they had to find their own water supply because the Army wasn’t providing them with any.
Southworth had been very passionate, his men told me; he believed he had come to give Afghan kids a better future, and he loved what he was doing. He paid Afghans $150 for pointing out IEDs. A rich aunt sent him the money. It was unusual but it worked, his men said. The men had been told they would be on a large base in a safe job. Southworth knew different. They were going into the shit. He spent over a year putting the team together, sending them to schools for sniper, scout, combat lifesaver, and mountain skills. He gave a speech to the men before their final leave back home, warning them that a couple of them wouldn’t make it back. His death was a huge loss for the team.
Contreras agreed to go through the desert to avoid the main road. The Marines or police working with them would meet them on the other side of the Argandab River to guide them to the schoolhouse base. The Marines were in the desert between Marja and Nawa to prevent an exodus of Taliban to Marja and prevent reinforcements from Marja coming into Nawa. Saki thought the Marines couldn’t distinguish between Taliban and civilians. He asked for gunpowder residue kits so that people’s hands could be tested to see if they were handling weapons. None were available. Saki strongly believed most Taliban were local farmworkers who fired when they had a chance and then threw down their weapons and took up shovels. Contreras told Saki he wanted him to set up two checkpoints with thirty men each so there would be about thirty left for patrolling and other missions. “If there are Marines with us, we can man checkpoints,” Saki said. “Otherwise we can’t.” It was too dangerous for his men to do it alone.
But Saki had still has not received his written orders from the Interior Ministry to go on the mission on Sunday, and it was already Friday. He joked that by the time he got the orders the Nawa operation would be over. He worried that his chain of command would make problems for him, especially if he lost somebody there. Saki asked Contreras to tell the American training headquarters in Kandahar to e-mail the deputy minister of interior and explain that they needed an order to move to Nawa. He still could not even confirm that he would go there. He needed orders or he would get in trouble, but he didn’t have the authority to speak to the ANCOP commander in Kabul or the deputy minister of interior. He asked the Americans to do it for him and pressure his leadership to give him the mission orders. A key element in the year’s largest operation was being held up by bureaucracy.
Saki was concerned about his informant in Nawa, who was traveling on foot. He asked Contreras for money to get him a motorcycle. It would cost $500 at the most, he said. He lost informants because of lack of resources, he said, and asked for more to help them. But Contreras was noncommittal. Saki had not heard from one of his informants for the past two days. He worried that the man had been captured by the Taliban. Saki had no food, fuel, or water for the mission. The Marines would help provide food, Contreras assured him, while Ironhorse would take care of the water. This left only the need for diesel fuel. The Marines had fifty heat casualties yesterday, Contreras told Saki: “They haven’t learned to stop working in the middle of the day.” Saki and his assistant laughed.
