to do it. He suggested a different route through the desert along the river, which would take an entire day.
Westby was baffled but maintained his aplomb. “I think we are strong and we can attack them back,” he said. “We have enough firepower with our trucks, and I can radio for helicopters.”
Abdulahad explained that they were not scared of the Taliban but of IEDs. His men did not have armored vehicles like the Americans, and he worried that the sandy and rocky roads would be perfect cover for IEDs. Westby finally persuaded them to go, but then they raised more objections. There were many Taliban checkpoints, Abdulahad objected, and his men didn’t have enough ammunition. There were only thirty-three Provincial Reserve men on the base that night, Westby said, so when the remaining twenty returned the following day they could solve the supply problems and join the rest of the team. The Afghans reluctantly agreed, having run out of objections. Westby painstakingly made sure each one of them knew his task and would do it.
BUT THE POLICE were not ready at 7 a.m. “New leadership and lack of motivation are making the PR slow this morning,” Westby texted to his headquarters on the BFT. “I’m sure some of these dudes are scared shitless,” one soldier from Team Prowler said as the PR slowly lined up. “Before Farid got killed, the men were usually on time,” Enriquez told me. “I’m sick and fucking tired of waiting,” Westby told his men, hiding his frustration from the Afghans. “Not getting paid, the high-op tempo, the casualties, are taking a huge toll on their morale,” Westby texted to Jasper. Thirty-six Afghans from the PR finally got into seven Ford Rangers, and the fifteen men from Prowler along with their two interpreters joined the convoy in four Humvees.
We left, eventually, at 8:13 a.m. Highway 601 was a new road and the driving was smooth, with the PR hopping out every few minutes to look inside culverts for IEDs. At 8:40 Sergeant Gus radioed from the front of the convoy to announce that the Taliban had blown up a new part of the road. “There’s pretty significant damage,” he said of the culvert that had been blown up. “It’s pretty fucked up here. It looks like we’re gonna have to take a bypass.” It took fifteen minutes to figure out how to bypass the road. Sergeant Dyer wanted to clear the compounds in the area to see if there was any sign of the Taliban and to look for command wires that could detonate an IED.
“I like Sergeant Dyer’s enthusiasm, but we don’t have time to clear every compound that’s two hundred meters from the road,” Westby said.
“Look for freshly dug ant trails” on the dirt road, Westby ordered. They would be signs of command wires leading to an IED. “That culvert was 1,100 meters from an ANP checkpoint, and they couldn’t keep it protected,” Westby said in wonder of the blown road, and there was another ANP checkpoint 1,500 meters after it. The diversion exposed traffic to the nearby compounds, he wrote in his BFT. “Textbook setup for pressure plate IED and command wire IED from those compounds.”
Kilaki asked Westby if they should stop at a nearby ANP checkpoint. “I’ve got a feeling he’ll say what he always says,” said Westby. “There’s Taliban all around us! They’re all over!” We stopped at a schoolhouse that had been converted to a checkpoint. It was surrounded by concertina wire and sandbagged positions. The night before, it had been attacked by the Taliban. We reached another blown-up part of the road, and the vehicles rolled down into the desert, driving through a moonscape, passing sheep and their herdsmen and the mud compounds they shared.
We stopped at a checkpoint with mud walls. Outside were the charred carcasses of destroyed vehicles, including a police Ranger. It too had been attacked the previous night and early that morning by Taliban who shot machine-gun fire and RPGs from motorcycles and Toyota Corollas. “North of us the Taliban have a checkpoint,” one of the highway patrolmen told me. Originally from the north, he had been in the police for a year and a half and had lost nearly a hundred comrades. “We have a graveyard for the police not far away,” he said. Many police were not wearing uniforms or boots. They warned that if any of the checkpoints were abandoned, then the next day the road would be full of IEDs. The men left two Rangers and their occupants behind with only half a can of water and no food. “These motherfucking idiots, like Goddamn children,” Westby complained, exasperated that their commanders gave them no supplies. Ahmadullah and many of his men were not wearing their body armor.
We passed another blown-up culvert only a few hundred meters away from the police checkpoint. Westby wondered how the police hadn’t seen it happen. “They were sleeping,” said Kilaki. Westby conceded that they didn’t have night vision. The bypass took us over a canal. We leaned to the right and nearly tipped over. Locals struggling with their vehicles warned that the alternative bypass went through a Taliban-controlled area where they had their own checkpoint. “The village you go through just 800 meters away is Taliban territory,” Westby wrote on the BFT. We passed another destroyed piece of road and then another IED crater. Westby decided to keep all the checkpoints open. Colonels Shirzad and Jasper had ordered one police commander to stay at a different checkpoint with the British army. He didn’t trust the British, so he refused. He finally agreed but then went to town instead. “It wears on you, these guys,” Westby sighed.
“The PR have no radios to communicate from checkpoint to checkpoint,” Westby texted to Jasper. “Vehicle radios don’t have enough range, food water fuel ammo resupply still an issue. PR not equipped to be self-sustaining here, no cooking equipment, only one CP has a well.” Westby was still hoping the remaining PR would come that day, but he doubted it. “They’ll come up with some excuse,” he said. Westby gave the PR additional jugs of water so at least they wouldn’t die in the heat. Most of the PR had not been paid for months, he told me. They didn’t have radios, so they would have no way of notifying the Americans if they were attacked. He hoped their vehicle radios worked and tried to explain to the PR squad leader that communication was essential. Westby didn’t expect his own position to be attacked because the Taliban probably saw that there were Americans there.
Lieut. Col. Jasper De Quincy Adams showed up. He was young, handsome, and full of energy. He complained about the highway police commander. “When locals interact with him, they think the Taliban are better,” he said, worrying that the commander delegitimized the government. “We’ll turn this around by aggressive patrolling,” he told Westby. “Your mission is all about deterring and disrupting.” He wanted Westby to lay ambushes and take the fight to the enemy. “I think that Popalzai needs to be patrolled very aggressively,” he said. “Have large numbers of patrol and ambush.” Jasper’s men followed us and fixed the holes in the road, filling them with dirt. Jasper complained that about twenty of the twenty-five recruits had tested positive for opiates. “That’s why the road is full of IEDs,” Westby told me. “They’re high all the time.”
The men of Team Prowler broke the mud walls with sledgehammers so that they could fit their Humvees inside. Then they parked on all sides so that they could have 360 degrees of coverage. They broke the tops of walls so they could fire better. Garbage littered the compound, including sheeps’ hooves and bones, the remnants of previous meals. The Americans tried to clean it all up and set it on fire. Westby told me he didn’t think everybody in the villages around Highway 601 was Taliban; some were just normal civilians.
The commander of one of the checkpoints got on the radio to announce that his men had seen a Corolla full of Taliban with weapons. The commander met with local villagers by his checkpoint and explained that they were a different police unit replacing the old one to establish security. “It’s good initiative,” said Westby. That night the men drove up and down the road and found a suspected IED. It was too dark to do anything about it. They did a recon by fire, meaning they shot at the house where they suspected the trigger man might be hiding, but nothing happened. If anything detonated, they would have annihilated the suspected firing point.
The next morning the team drove to a compound they suspected had been used by the men who placed the IED. They dismounted with the PR, walking past green fields into the first mud compound. On one corner by the road was a spy hole and another hole at the bottom with two ant trails coming out of it. Inside was a cornfield, a marijuana field, and harvested poppy plants. Several of the police on patrol didn’t wear their body armor and stood casually in fields of fire. Team Prowler kept pushing ahead. We passed by large poppy fields. The plants were dry and harvested. The police came across three small brothers who pointed to a narrow path between two mud walls and said five armed Taliban had just moved north of the compound. But Dyer didn’t pursue the Taliban because he didn’t want to be channeled through the narrow path.
The men found a mosque with mattresses and a room with corn kernels, bags of nitrogen, and a car battery. The nitrogen could have easily been used for fertilizer or explosives. While the Americans were poking around inside the mosque, the police sat in the shade beneath nearby trees. Some of them filmed the patrol with their camera phones. “I need those men from Lashkar Gah to get in some Rangers and drive their sorry asses out here,” Westby complained, and asked Mansur, the translator, to radio them. Back at the mud checkpoint Westby briefed his men. Their mission was to “deter and disrupt enemy forces burying IEDs,” and the “center of gravity is Popalzai.”
That night Dyer led an ambush by the mosque, where the team suspected the Taliban were sleeping. They
