We watched from the heights, trying to see the LAVs down on the dark plain. Headlights approached from the east and became a Toyota pickup truck. Seeing the wire, the driver slowed, then gunned the engine. He succeeded only in wrapping his axle with wire, and the truck slid to a halt near the Marines. A recon team approached the truck. Their translator told the men to put up their hands.
Instead, two figures in the truck’s bed sat up from under blankets and raised AK-47s. The Marines opened fire, killing all the men in the truck. Fuel and ammunition ignited. Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), lying in the bed, cooked off, streaking wildly past the LAVs. I watched the tracer fire in the dark, tendrils of red drawn across a black canvas.
With dead bodies sprawled on the pavement and the truck now engulfed in flames, the Marines on the scene hurried to put some distance between themselves and the ambush site. As they scrambled to free an LAV, spinning helplessly in soft sand, the battalion radioed a warning from the P-3: two more vehicles approaching from the east. Down on the highway, the forward air controller set up his laser marking system. A minibus and a dump truck, carrying dozens of armed men, stopped a few hundred meters short of the burning wreckage.
The Marines hunkered down in the shadows, eager to avoid a fair fight. The forward air controller whispered into his radio, talking a Navy jet onto the target. I heard its engine pitch change to a high whine as the pilot dropped the jet’s nose, accelerating, putting the trucks in his sights. Two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped off the wings and whistled through the dark sky. I watched the jet’s glowing afterburners fade into the overcast. Ducking in anticipation, I instinctively closed my eyes.
I had seen dozens of air strikes in training, dropped thousands of pounds of ordnance in the Nevada and California deserts. But this was real. Three, two, one… I counted down to the bombs’ impact. The concussion cracked past. Two trucks full of Taliban soldiers disappeared in the flash, leaving only twisted metal and charred lumps of flesh on the highway.
15
THE RAID FORCE MADE a triumphal return to Pentagon in the predawn darkness. Weeks later, General Franks would send the MEU a note declaring that its prowess as a “power projection strike force was superbly demonstrated” that night. I laughed when I read the accolade. I hadn’t thought of a few buddies with rifles as anything so grand as a “power projection strike force.”
Just before sunrise, in the coldest hour of the day, Jim relieved me at the radios, saying, “Don’t touch your rifle without gloves on.” He opened his fingers to show me a palm missing a quarter-size piece of skin. “Cold stuck me right to it.”
Without even taking my boots off, I lay on the gravel and pulled my sleeping bag over me. I had slept only one hour in the past twenty-four. Thirty seconds later, Jim stood above me.
“Don’t shoot the messenger, but Shaka wants the platoon commanders at the tent for a brief.”
“When?”
“Three minutes ago. Sorry, bro. I must have missed the first call.”
The wind cut through my skin and I was nearly blind with exhaustion as I stumbled down the ridge. I remembered a night march at Quantico when I’d fallen asleep in midstride and woken up on the pavement with bloody hands. This was why our training had emphasized fatigue. War pares existence to its core — little food, little sleep, little shelter. The only thing I had in excess was stress.
A dozen people packed the tent. Body heat warmed it, and the generator-powered bulb overhead made the place almost homey, a long way from the dark holes up on the ridge.
“We’re closing the ring, gentlemen,” Shaka said. He looked tired, too. “Karzai is close to Kandahar. Shirzai is in part of the city. Intel thinks Mullah Omar fled to Pakistan, but Kandahar is still important to us. As you all know, it’s the spiritual capital of the Taliban. And we need that airport.”
He paused for a moment and turned a page in his green commander’s notebook. “I don’t normally call everyone in here for operations orders, but I wanted to look at each of you. I’ve had officers tell me they can’t accomplish missions because their troops are too tired. Bullshit. You are tired, and those Marines are capable of more than they know. We had a two-hundred-meter gap in the lines last night. It’s sloppy, and it’s dangerous.” He made eye contact with each of us. “Keep your heads in the game.”
The battalion operations officer took over at a nod from the colonel and began to brief the day’s mission. “At 0130Z 10 December 2001, BLT 1/1 conducts a movement to contact near Kandahar to seize key terrain astride Highway 1 in order to interdict al Qaeda and Taliban forces fleeing from the city.”
I scribbled notes as the formal order was translated into plain English. “Gents, we’re going to get up on that highway in broad daylight, and you will fuck up anybody who tries to escape until the CIA can sort out who’s who. Everyone with a vehicle will drive up there. Bravo Company,” he pointed at Captain Whitmer standing next to me, “will set up landing points in the desert here and fly up in two CH-53s.”
Catching the major’s eye, I asked, “Fire support, sir?” Dill’s assessment had been right: outnumbered was fine as long as jets were overhead.
“Cobra escort during your flight, but they have only thirty-five minutes on station. Otherwise, Navy fixed- wing. Two F-14s, call sign Cosby 41. Four F-18s, call sign Noah 55. Six F-18s, call sign Gumby 21. They’re on station for two hours.”
The operations officer took a last look at his notebook and slammed it shut. “Two more things. Expect tactics of desperation — car bombs, suicide bombers, booby traps, attempted kidnappings. Also, there are known minefields three kilometers east and four kilometers west of where we’re going, so don’t walk all over the fucking place to take a leak.”
After the rest of the force snaked down to the river in a winding convoy, I stood on a flat piece of desert with the platoon, cocking my head to hear distant rotor blades. We saw the Cobras first. They raced to our north, flying low and fast. I knew the Super Stallions would be close behind and turned on my strobe light. It was after sunrise, but a thick overcast blended the morning light and the desert into an indistinguishable gray.
I turned my head as the helicopters roared onto the landing zone we had marked, throwing dust and rocks everywhere. Staff Sergeant Marine and I stood at the tail ramp and counted the Marines aboard. Space was tight because a pallet of fuel cans and ammo was strapped in the center of the cargo bay. I would have to stand on the ramp.
The crew chief, grinning behind his opaque facemask, handed me a nylon strap and scrambled forward, over the laps of the seated Marines, to get behind his door-mounted machine gun. I looped the strap around my waist and clipped into the airframe overhead. With my boots at the ramp’s edge, I looked down and watched the desert disappear in a cloud of dust.
We tilted slowly out of the cloud and accelerated, dropping back down to rooftop level. It was a five-minute flight. We passed over the houses I had watched from afar for so many days. The river was a muddy ribbon — sitting, not flowing. Cultivated fields of green, probably poppies, contrasted with the bland rock and sand all around. The sand stretched in an unbroken plain up to the edge of Highway 1. The highway looked like a driveway, no more than a lane and a half wide, the last paved road for two hundred miles to the west and south. A single line of crooked telephone poles stretched next to it as far as I could see in both directions. North of the highway, the ground changed abruptly to a rocky scree field extending a couple of kilometers to the base of the mountains.
We landed in the center of these rocks. Narrow arroyos reached like veins from the foothills down to the road. Beyond it, I saw the trees near the river, and beyond them, the dunes and the ridge where our patrol bases had been. This spot was much more exposed than our previous sites, in plain view of the highway and dominated by the mountains towering above us to the north. I had the unbidden thought of mortars crashing into the rocks, adding jagged flying chips to their explosions of shrapnel.
With the LAVs all around us, the platoon didn’t have much of a security mission. I settled them into the deep crevasses, safe from indirect fire, to clean their weapons, eat, and rest while I searched for information about our next move. Commanders are always with the radio antennas, so I looked for the biggest bunch of antennas and walked toward them.
Halfway there, I noticed two Afghan boys walking toward our position, smiling and waving. Remembering
