The next afternoon, we climbed the stairs to the task force COC and pushed through the plastic sheet doorway into the warmth and light of the crowded room. The effect was all cheer and goodwill after the cold emptiness of the desert outside. The doctors were right: we were heading north the next day. The plan was mostly set, and platoon commanders were brought in only for the final confirmation brief.
Computer stations filled the back corner, and track lighting overhead bathed laminated maps taped together across the longest wall. Rifles were stacked by the door like umbrellas. Forty infantry officers, helicopter pilots, SEALs, Australian Special Air Service operators, and CIA liaisons crowded around in a whatever-keeps-you-warm assortment of fleece jackets and skullcaps. Most sat on piles of carpets, which outnumbered chairs by two or three to one.
Captain Eric Dill, commander of the recon platoon, held his face six inches from the map, tracing a line with his finger. Dill shaved his head bald and had a reputation for frankness and good analysis. I joined him.
He greeted me with “One vehicle per minute at night.”
“What?”
“Surveillance assets report an average of one vehicle each minute on this stretch of road between sunset and sunrise.” He pointed to a black line snaking west from Kandahar toward the town of Lashkar Gah.
“Who are they?”
Dill arched an eyebrow. “How many Afghan farmers have you seen tooling around in Toyota pickup trucks?”
I hadn’t seen any Afghan farmers. I hadn’t seen any Afghans at all. But I knew that the Saudis had sold the Taliban several hundred Toyota pickup trucks. They weren’t quite as identifiable as a tank with a Taliban flag painted on the side, but they were close.
The square-headed MEU operations officer called the room to order. We minimized note taking in secret briefs, so I rolled my watch cap above my ears to hear better.
Australians worked in the Helmand River valley to our west. Joint Special Operations Task Force South, made up of SEALs and Special Forces, operated along the Pakistani border to our east. Opposition leader Hamid Karzai continued to pressure Kandahar from the north, and another opposition commander, Gul Agha Shirzai, was moving aggressively toward the city from the eastern town of Spin Boldak. His fighters had captured a bridge only seven kilometers from Kandahar International Airport the previous afternoon. The Taliban and al Qaeda were reported to have nineteen thousand supporters in Kandahar.
An intelligence analyst wearing jeans and a flannel jacket pushed his glasses back on his nose and stepped to the center of the room. But for the pistol on his hip, he could have been in front of a college class. He predicted that Kandahar would collapse within a week, certainly by mid-December. The Taliban were expected to defect and run for home, some to Pakistan, some to Iran, and many to the hills around Kandahar. Al Qaeda, by contrast, would be more ruthless. Many fighters would prefer death to surrender.
“We’ll give it to ’em,” the operations officer said, then continued briefing the plan. Within an hour, a force of recon Marines would depart Rhino to drive north nearly one hundred miles. By the following morning, they were expected to identify a landing zone and a site for a patrol base near the highway between Kandahar and Lashkar Gah. LAR and CAAT, the light-armored reconnaissance company and combined anti-armor teams, would join them that afternoon. Their LAVs and Humvees would provide the bulk of the force’s punch. My platoon and a rifle platoon would follow via helicopter late that night or early the next morning. Together, we would be known as Task Force Sledgehammer. Our mission was to interdict traffic on the highway to prevent the Taliban and al Qaeda from escaping the Northern Alliance onslaught against Kandahar. Despite the task force’s name, we would be the anvil to Hamid Karzai’s hammer.
Locking eyes with me and the other young commanders in the room, the operations officer finished with a recap of the “Five Bullets” that every Marine in our platoons had to know: mission statement, challenge and password, rules of engagement, lost Marine plan, and escape and recovery plan. It amounted to knowing what we were doing, how not to get killed by our own people, how to ensure that we were killing only bad guys, and what to do in case we got lost.
The brief ended, and the men in the room disappeared into the dark to make their final preparations for the day to come. Eric and I stood by the compound gate. As I pulled gloves from my pocket, I asked him, “What do you think — good aggressiveness or a bridge too far?”
Eric reflexively tugged on the magazine of the M4 rifle slung across his chest. “We’re way outnumbered, that’s for sure. But with all our airpower, it shouldn’t be a problem. I think we have to kick somebody’s ass once, and then word gets out.”
Later that night, I walked my platoon lines to check on the Marines. After midnight, there was no ambient light within a hundred miles and probably fewer than three dozen internal combustion engines. The air was so clear that the Marines on patrol would report headlights or campfires on the horizon, only to realize that they were watching stars rise.
My first stop was the mortar pit, where I found Staff Sergeant Marine on watch while his Marines slept.
“Evenin’, sir,” he said.
“Good news. Day after tomorrow, we’re flying north. Just third platoon and us, and some other parts of the BLT. I’ll have more details tomorrow.”
Marine took the news with a quick nod, leaning to spit a stream of tobacco juice into the sand. “Good. The sooner we kill ’em, sooner we go home.”
“What happened to all that talk about ‘golden memories and no ghosts’?”
“That time is past. We’re committed now. No more pray for peace. Now it’s shoot to kill. Fight to win.”
I shivered and hoped that Marine would attribute it to the wind. I changed the subject. “You reading anything good right now?” Marine was an avid reader, and we often traded books.
“Funny you should ask, sir, funny you should ask.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a paperback. In the moonlight, I read “Rudyard Kipling” on the cover. “I’m not much for poetry, but this is almost enough to convert me:
“If I’m wounded, Staff Sergeant, and you fuckers leave me on Afghanistan’s plains, I’ll put my last bullet between your shoulder blades before I put it in my own head,” I replied.
Marine laughed and shot another stream of brown saliva into the sand. “I expect you will, sir.” He paused and added, “Even Hadsall might’ve done that.”
I continued down the line to see the rest of the platoon. A white halo surrounded the moon, looking like an iris around a pupil. The moonlight cast my shadow across glowing sand, again reminding me of new snow. Normally, I chafed under the twenty-pound weight of my flak jacket, but now it was the only thing keeping the icy wind off my skin. I imagined the chill air pouring off glaciers high in the Hindu Kush and racing across miles of desert without a tree to slow it down.
One of my machine gun teams was dug in with Patrick’s platoon, anchoring the far flank of the company’s lines. They were in the middle of Sergeant Espera’s squad, the former repo man with whom I’d flown into Pakistan on the Sword mission. For a few hours each night, Espera turned one of his holes into the company’s social center, brewing coffee and debating the issues of the day with all comers. I slid into the hole, and Espera caught me up on the night’s discussion.
“Sir, we’re talking about Lindh. These guys” — he nodded at the other Marines in the hole — “think he’s a freedom fighter.”
John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, had been captured the week before at Qala-i-Jangi prison in northern Afghanistan. Now he was imprisoned in a metal container a few hundred yards from Espera’s hole.
