All In (14 page)

The fighting only grew more intense for his soldiers. On July 30, they began a carefully choreographed operation to clear a group of buildings long controlled by the Taliban outside the town of Jelawur. The buildings, which the Americans called Objective Bakersfield, occupied an important intersection of two major roads that connected four U.S. combat outposts. An eerie calm fell over Bakersfield as the first of Flynn's soldiers arrived at first light. Flynn, accompanied by members of his battalion staff and his personal security detail, set out on foot toward Bakersfield shortly before 8:00
A.M.
, following a convoy of engineers who were clearing the route of IEDs. But as Flynn approached, an IED detonated and the Taliban opened up with a barrage of small-arms fire. Then another IED went off and Flynn saw Specialist Michael L. Stansbery, 21, of Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, down on the road, injured by the blast. It had ripped his torso in half. A huge cloud of smoke hung in the air. Captain Andrew Shaffer, one of Flynn's commanders, remembered how, at that moment, time seemed to slow to an agonizing crawl.
“Medic!” he heard someone shout. Radios crackled with reports of small-arms firing coming from the south.

Minutes later, yet another IED exploded, leaving two of Flynn's sergeants bloodied and dazed. Then he saw Sergeant Kyle B. Stout, 25, of Texarkana, Texas, in the choking black smoke, gravely wounded on the road. His face was frozen, mouth open. There was a blank look on his face. Three limbs were gone. Shaffer knelt beside him and forced a tourniquet over exposed bone and pulled it tight on flaps of skin and muscle. He remembered thinking how strange it was that Stout wasn't bleeding—his body was “shunting,” instinctively cutting off blood flow to its extremities in a last-ditch effort to protect its vital organs. Flynn knelt by his side and tried to talk him back to consciousness. A call went out for medevac. A Black Hawk helicopter soon landed in a field fifty meters to the northeast and evacuated Stansbery and Stout from the battlefield.

Flynn huddled with commanders near one of the simple buildings at Bakersfield to consolidate and reorganize to continue the assault. When he walked the north side of his unit's perimeter, he felt another IED shake the battlefield, detonating thirty-five meters away, on ground he'd just walked across. At least two more soldiers had been wounded. Flynn regrouped again with commanders, calling for reinforcements from battalion headquarters in what had by now become a battalion-level engagement. With small-arms fire coming from three sides of the battlefield, Flynn set up a command post in the hay-filled building. Then a report came over the radio of another casualty, sixty meters to the west.
By the time Flynn got to Robert Pittman, a retired master sergeant working as an adviser for the Asymmetric Warfare Group, Pittman was conscious but unresponsive. Blood trickled from his ear. His eyes were open but unresponsive. He had been a tower of strength for the soldiers. “Mr. Pittman, can you hear me?” a soldier asked. Pittman could not speak, but he blinked his eyes. He'd been hit by gunfire.

After what seemed like an eternity, a medevac helicopter approached—and Flynn's men opened up with all the fire they had to provide cover. The shooting was insanely loud. A team of soldiers dashed toward the Black Hawk with Pittman and loaded him on board in hopes that he could be saved. Rotor wash cleared the landing zone of debris as the helicopter lifted off. Minutes later, Flynn grabbed Shaffer. “Drew,” he said. “We can't shoot like that. We've got friendlies eighteen hundred meters in that direction.” He was concerned about the volume of fire at Command Outpost Nolen.

“Yes, sir,” Shaffer said, feeling almost lost.

He and Flynn learned later, as the fighting raged and they maneuvered soldiers across the battlefield, that Stansbery, Stout and Pittman had died of the wounds they suffered in the opening moments of the battle. It soon became clear to them how important this simple crossing was to the enemy. The fighting continued for five days before Flynn's soldiers finally cleared the objective.

Flynn called Pittman's wife, Melissa, on the battle's first day, after her husband's death had been confirmed. He remembered it as an exceedingly difficult conversation. Except for a short article in the 2nd Brigade Combat Team's monthly publication,
Heart Beat
, the Battle for Bakersfield made not a single headline and received not a word of press coverage. It was typical of the grinding combat in Kandahar that almost never rose to conventional force-on-force battle. Regardless, the Arghandab was, as Flynn observed, a “hellacious” place to fight.

A few days later, at ISAF headquarters in Kabul, Petraeus described the ongoing effort in Kandahar during his morning stand-up. “The important part about Kandahar is that it is a very comprehensive approach,” he said. “Months ago we began targeting Taliban in Kandahar through Special Forces operations. We continue with this, and the tempo of these highly effective strikes builds. Now we have thickening of conventional forces, and that will also continue and will become more visible in the weeks and months ahead . . . as will the eventual addition of Afghan Local Police elements. All of this is following an established timeline. In sum: This is how a COIN operation is conducted; it is not a conventional operation with a D-Day—we need to push this message.”

Whatever weaknesses Flynn's forces had coming into the fight in the Arghandab River Valley in July, they had overcome them by late August, having pushed farther into Taliban country than the 82nd before them ever had. “The fight here has been intense and almost exclusively dismounted in the densely vegetated river valley,” Flynn said. “The enemy in our area was estimated to number 150 strong. . . . We have conducted two major offensive operations that have by and large routed the enemy from this area. We now own the villages that have long been Taliban sanctuary.”

Soon after, in Babur, a village long controlled by the Taliban, Flynn met with village elders and told them they needed to choose whether they wanted to live under the Taliban or under the government. His sense was that the villagers hated the Taliban but were deathly afraid of them, having watched them assassinate those who cooperated with the government and the Americans. His subordinate commanders started holding weekly
shuras
[councils, generally of elders] with elders in the area, using a “cash for work” program that paid five hundred afghani (about ten dollars) a day to clean canals, refurbish mosques and fix roads.

In early October, Flynn and other U.S. commanders devised a final plan for clearing the remaining Taliban out of the Arghandab River Valley with the help of Haji Shah Mohammed, the district governor; General Mohammad Naim, Kandahar's chief of the National Directorate of Security, the country's equivalent of the FBI; and Colonel Abdul Raziq, a charismatic leader of the Afghan Border Police. Flynn's Top Guns had seized significant terrain and villages south of the Manarah Canal, on the west side of the Arghandab River, but had yet to clear eight villages north of the canal, including Tarok Kolache, Charqolba Sofla and Khosrow Sofla. General Naim had grown up in Khosrow Sofla, and Flynn had become close with Karim Dad, the village's chief, or malik. Flynn nodded in agreement as General Naim explained that Khosrow Sofla and Charqolba Sofla had become hubs of Taliban activity and major bomb-making centers and they had to be cleared.

Colonel Raziq struck Flynn as a brash young Afghan, dressed in upper-class Pashtun garb—off-white dress, Kandahari hat and loafers.
A profile in
Harper's
in 2009 had described Raziq as a corrupt warlord protecting the opium trade along the border and working closely with U.S. and NATO commanders, who tolerated his corruption because he was brutally effective, with his three-thousand-man command, at helping keep the peace in Kandahar Province. “I have been fighting in the area we are discussing for the past hundred days,” Flynn said, describing a plan to clear and hold Tarok Kolache following a raid by U.S. Special Operations Forces so that Raziq's Afghan forces and U.S. Special Forces could clear Khosrow Sofla, Charqolba Sofla and Lower Babur. Raziq looked at Flynn and asked, “You've been fighting in Arghandab for a hundred days?” With a flamboyant wave of his index finger, he added, “I will clear all of Arghandab in one day.” It was all Flynn could do to restrain himself. But Raziq would prove to be an effective tactical leader in the days ahead.

Flynn began the work of clearing the Arghandab with directed strikes by lethal rockets from a Multiple-Launch Rocket System (MLRS) on a ten-ton truck. In Afghanistan, those weapons had supported the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) exclusively until 2010, when they were also allocated for support to conventional force-clearing operations. The JSOC controls the military's most skilled and highly classified units: the Army's Delta Force, the Navy's SEAL Team 6, and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron, in addition to the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. These were the units conducting night raids across the country, directed by a Special Operations command center at Bagram Air Base.

Flynn's strikes targeted two compounds in Khosrow Sofla that the insurgents were using to manufacture homemade explosives.
A short time later, a London tabloid, the
Daily Mail,
published a story in which Flynn was quoted as telling villagers that if they did not tell him where IEDs had been buried in Khosrow Sofla, he would wipe the village off the face of the earth. But the reporters weren't at Flynn's meeting with villagers, who in fact were told that the Americans would have no choice but to destroy compounds from the air if they were unable to determine where they had been laced with explosives. The villagers no longer lived in Khosrow Sofla and knew they would never be able to return unless the village was somehow cleared of bombs.

After the rocket strikes, Flynn maintained “persistent” surveillance of the village using video from a Predator drone to assess battle damage and capture “patterns of life” in Khosrow Sofla, if any remained. From his command center, he watched six men walking through the rubble of the damaged homes. Flynn thought they looked angry as they walked quickly around the village. Stopping at various places, they might have been planting new IEDs. Although the six were not carrying weapons, Flynn could have killed them with Hellfire missiles from the Predator under the rules of engagement. But he gave them the benefit of the doubt, knowing U.S. forces would take the village within seventy-two hours and could kill or capture them then if they were still around.

Planning continued the following day as Flynn coordinated with U.S. Special Operations Forces in the clearance operation, which had been given the code name Eagle Claw 1. Special Operations Forces, with Afghan commandos, were planning additional air assaults on two villages north of Khosrow Sofla, Tarok Kolache and Khosrow Olya. Captain Shaffer, the Top Gun company commander who had been fighting in Tarok Kolache since July, knew which compounds to hit. He was a proponent of destroying as much as possible from the air, with good reason: His unit had suffered three traumatic casualties there over the past two weeks. Flynn told the Special Operations Forces that he had five or six compounds he wanted destroyed but that they should try to preserve as much of the village as possible so residents could eventually move back in. The Special Operations Forces coordinated with Flynn because it was his area of operations, but they were the ones who would implement. As Flynn went to sleep for a couple of hours before the next morning's attack into Tarok Kolache, he told his executive officer, Major Tom Burrell, that he was not in favor of destroying more compounds in the village if they didn't need to. But at 2:00
A.M.
, Burrell woke him up and told him that the Special Operations Forces wanted to destroy the entire village because it had been thoroughly laced with all kinds of bombs and explosives. Like Captain Shaffer's men, the Special Operations Forces had suffered numerous IED casualties over the summer in the villages of the Arghandab. Flynn was convinced, and unleashed a thunderous display of firepower on Tarok Kolache, rattling the countryside for miles around.

When B-1 bombers began dropping two-ton bombs on the village, the earth shook and the windows and walls rattled in Flynn's command center, less than two kilometers west of the village. Flynn's staff listened to the radios as American Special Operations Forces landed by helicopter and began their assault. Almost immediately, one of the assault force soldiers stepped on an IED. It malfunctioned—and prepared the Special Operations Forces for what was to come. As they cleared the village, they discovered IEDs, jugs of homemade explosives and fifty-gallon drums of explosives in the homes—house-borne IEDs. Raziq's Afghan Border Police forces did not arrive until the next day. They fought alongside the teams that went to Charqolba Sofla and Khosrow Sofla.

Some months later, the blogosphere erupted with complaints that Flynn, with Petraeus's full support, had reverted to Vietnam tactics—destroying villages in order to save them. But Flynn believed that Tarok Kolache had been destroyed when the Taliban drove out all of its residents and seeded its fields and compounds with explosives. When Captain Shaffer's soldiers fanned out across the village at first light on October 7, the compounds—and the bombs—were gone.

By the end of October, Flynn's battalion had lost seven soldiers and had awarded eighty-three Purple Hearts. Three-quarters of those wounded had been hit by IEDs. Fourteen soldiers had lost a limb or been so gravely wounded that their lives would forever be changed. Four had lost both their legs. Flynn was firm in his belief that they had achieved important results. “There's no space for the Taliban to return to this district during the spring,” Flynn said. “This war either ends at the negotiation table or when the people unite and collectively reject the Taliban.”