Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (7 page)

“Meyer,” he said, “why do I let you talk me into insane things?”

A few days later—early August—I had another chance to impress Lt. Johnson with my initiative. We were on our way to conduct a key leader engagement. When we stopped at this small hamlet, we were greeted with a mortar shell exploding next to us. I scanned the ridgeline and saw the dust raised by the recoil of the launching tube, about a thousand meters away.

We took cover. There were maybe two or three guys up there. We started calling in artillery and we could have driven away, of course, but what fun would that be?

Instead, I came up with another brilliant idea.

“Let me climb up and flank them from the left,” I said to Johnson. He stared up at the mountain, thinking about it. To show him how confident I was, I grabbed a few Askars and started climbing before he could say no.

It took twenty minutes for us to scramble up, with only a couple of hostile rounds cracking off the rocks near us. When we reached the top, we looked around for the mortar team.

Suddenly, heavy slugs cracked overhead. It was friendly fire, coming from the Afghan police station position in the town on the other side of the mountain. They had spotted our silhouettes and figured we were the mortar guys. They were dialing us into the crosshairs of a Russian anti-aircraft gun, which would soon turn the ridge, and us, to dust.

“Get it off us!” I radioed frantically.

Lt. Johnson pulled out his cell phone and called Lt. Rhula, who immediately called the Afghan police chief.

“If your guys fire one more burst,” Rhula yelled, “I’ll drop mortars on your head.”

The firing stopped. We stood up, dusted off, and trudged back down the hill.

“If you’d gotten clipped, Meyer,” Lt. Johnson said, “I’d have to spend a month with investigators.”

“I had it under control, sir.”

“Uh-huh.”

A few days later, Rhula filled two Ranger trucks with Askars and sped out the gate without telling us where he was going. He said he was responding to an ambush of several jingle trucks. Most Afghan trucks are brightly painted and decorated with jingling bells, as if every vehicle had to pass through a third-grade art class. But if all your life you’ve been saving for that vehicle, you want to show it off. Trucks were routinely stopped by Taliban or other bandits and shaken down. Sometimes the Taliban torched the trucks for no obvious reason. The truck drivers continuously played Russian roulette.

About an hour after Rhula left the gate, we got a call from a helicopter pilot.

“Hey, Fox 6, your Afghans are shooting it out with some Afghan security guards,” the pilot said. “What do you want me to do?”

“We have no SA,” Lt. Johnson replied. “Don’t do anything.”

“No SA” means no situational awareness—a military phrase meaning no fucking idea what is happening. An hour later, our Askars returned with bullet holes in their trucks. Eventually we found out they had driven off the ambushers and, as payment for their services, had siphoned five gallons of gas from a jingle truck. The pissed-off drivers had shot at Rhula’s Humvees as they drove away. No one was seriously hurt, though—only a couple scratches and bruises. All good.

“We won’t help you steal,” Lt. Johnson said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” Rhula said.

Hafez shook his head, and so did the others. We had busted them and they saw the humor in it. If one of them had been killed, though, it would have been different.

The four of us adopted a stray mutt named Annie. She was always happy to see us barge in, peel off our armor, and open the ammo box we kept full of dog biscuits. For some of the U.S. Army guys, our small hooch was a hangout because the atmosphere was relaxed. Lt. Johnson treated everyone as an equal and kept things upbeat. I don’t mean to say it was summer camp, but it was good to get to know each other, despite the differences of rank and age and upbringing.

Lt. Johnson was a Virginian by birth but was now Mr. Oregon. That’s where he saw his future. He was in tremendous shape and at sunset, would muster us out for a hundred push-ups, two hundred sit-ups, and ten laps around the perimeter.

Soon-to-be Gunnery Sgt. Kenefick, a New Yorker, looked like a
damn movie star—maybe Ben Affleck. He worked day and night to get the Askars shaped up organizationally. He had been a high school quarterback and had wanted to be a Marine way before 9/11.

Hospitalman 3rd Class James “Doc” Layton, the Californian, with a younger, happier face than the rest of us, and heavy-metal music in his earbuds, was watching out for our health (according to him) and bringing health services to the villages we visited. Doc had grown up in a small town near Modesto, and as a teen he would walk the several miles into town each night to work in a pizza joint. He had planned out his life on those long walks. He was going to pursue a career in radiology while operating a little recording studio on the side.

As for me, I didn’t think about civilian life after the war, and I wasn’t ready to settle down. I was training the Askars to use the M16 rifle and riding shotgun on our daily patrols to hold “key leader engagements.” Lt. Rhula appeared to want to do the right things, and his first sergeant was tough and demanding. But they couldn’t impose their wills on the entire company. The Askars had a high sense of individual self-worth and tolerated each other like an unruly class of tough eighth-graders. When an Afghan soldier went home without permission—what I would call deserting the unit—the others weren’t upset. We were advising an army with no established standards of group behavior.

Sometimes we advisors felt more like parole officers. Some Askars tried, and others clung to old habits, like—what can we steal today? A standard scam was to siphon fuel from their own generator and their own trucks to sell in the local markets. So we parked the Afghan Humvees on the U.S. side of the motor pool and let their generators run out of fuel. After two days of no lights, no air conditioning, no hot water, and no rides to the market, they got the message and behaved themselves—for a while.

They grew hash wherever they could. When a stoned Askar stumbled or staggered on patrol, the others would smile tolerantly. “Hash cigarettes are like dushman RPGs,” Johnson warned. “If you’re high, you can’t shoot back and the RPGs will kill you.” When Lt. Johnson burned the plants growing on base, the Askars retaliated by making a hash run into the market and, stoned silly, crashed two Humvees on their way back.

What bugged me most was the negligent discharge of guns. They would play with their new guns at night until one went off. I’d hear the crack of it, then nervous laughter. I’d storm through the camp until I smelled the cordite hanging in the air. Then I’d grab the offender and bang on the door of Lt. Rhula’s hooch. He would take it from there.

In the hills along the Pakistani border, no Afghan, military or civilian, had much of anything. I think practically every American soldier or Marine tried to help in some way. We purchased candy and trinkets in the markets to give to the kids. I soon had two little buddies, boys about ten or eleven. They’d hang around the main gate, yelling “Meyeda! Meyeda!” (Meyer!) when they saw me. At first, I’d buy them Cokes, and then I started sharing my care packages from home—soap, candy, peanuts, gum. Maybe a decade from now, some kids would remember that some Americans were kind to them, even when their older brothers were shooting at them. Maybe not. You don’t help out because you expect something in return.

If people like you, generally you like them. I enjoyed hanging out with the Askars. They laughed a lot at little, and once you were firm about not being Santa Claus, most stopped asking you for stuff. I ate dinner every night with them—rice, cachaloo potatoes, and gravy. Of about a hundred Askars, I memorized the names of the twenty or
so who tried the hardest. I was especially close with five who were as dedicated to their job as I was. We’d sit outside in the evenings with our food and, with Hafez’s help, talk for hours. They refused to believe that my dad worked three hundred acres in his spare time, after he got home from work. How many days a week, they asked, did I rent a tractor? They were convinced I was a millionaire when I told them we had two tractors.

They thought it was a great joke when I told them my government paid farmers not to raise tobacco. Making money by not working was beyond their comprehension. When we sketched out in the dirt the comparative size of our farms, they decided that, yes, I was the richest man they had ever met. They were absolutely dumbfounded why a man so wealthy would come to Afghanistan to fight bandits.

I asked if it was true that they shared their houses with their cows. Certainly not, they said; cows were kept in a separate section of the house, not in the living quarters.

Sex with women intrigued them. I won’t get into what they asked about, but their sexual imaginations knew no bounds. Whatsoever.

I discussed religion with them all the time, trying to understand their beliefs while they were doing the same about mine. I was surprised at how educated they were about Christianity.

The Askars scoffed at the suggestion that the Taliban were the true Muslims. They were just bandits and murderers, they said. I don’t think they said that just for my benefit. When I asked if they knew where the dushmen were living, they assured me they did. But when I urged that we attack them there, they laughed as if I were simple-minded. I was always talking to them about how badly I wanted to fight and how much I looked forward to it. They would just sit and laugh, nodding along, with about as much confidence in me as they had in the idea that there would ever be peace in Afghanistan.

* * *

After dinner was a good time to call home, as people would be just starting their day in the States. We bought minutes on inexpensive Afghan cell phones. I wasn’t much for emails or video chats—I just never felt comfortable or natural communicating that way. A phone call was about my limit.

“Hi, Dad, this is Dakota. How’d your week go?”

“Good. The rain’s held off and we got up a hundred bales behind Pepa’s house. Tractor’s acting up. What’re you doing?”

“Nothing much. Just got back from another patrol. Pretty boring.”

It was like that. I would also call my friends Toby and Ann. Ann had been my high school advisor and she and her husband and I were like family. Toby wouldn’t hang up until he got something out of me that was either funny or dangerous. They would talk about me and what they saw in the news about that strange country in far-off central Asia.

In our hooch, we didn’t talk much about our lives back home. It was another planet, and nobody was interested in the soap operas going on back in somebody else’s family. We weren’t bored or annoyed by each other. We were different ranks and ages, so the verbal hazing you’d hear among lance corporals in a platoon—ridiculing comments about families, wives, or girlfriends—didn’t happen. When we visited another base, we stayed together.

After a while, it all becomes you, your buddies, and your Afghan friends. Other worlds fade away, even the other advisors ten miles down the road at Joyce. You stay alive because of what you do each day, sometimes each hour. It’s just you and your small band, operating beyond the bounds of civilization. You even think you control your own destiny.

Some U.S. soldiers at Monti confided to us that they weren’t seeing enough action. After several outposts had been overrun, the U.S. high command had tightened the rules about leaving the wire. A patrol had to write a briefing detailed enough for a space launch. However, since we advisors fell under the Afghan command we could still plan our normal patrols—the beer runs with badass vehicles.

Sgt. 1st Class Dennis Jeffords complained to me that he wasn’t getting enough action. One night he and PFC Lage pulled me aside. Lage liked to fight so much that he carried a 240G machine gun instead of a rifle. Jeffords had received permission to set up a vehicle control point the next day. Nothing was more boring than a VCP—stopping jingle trucks and searching through chickens and fertilizer poop for weapons that were never found.

Jeffords and Lage had decided to place their checkpoint at Hill 1911, a notorious ambush point where a steep valley intersected with the only paved road north from Monti. Their plan was to sit there
until they took fire. Then, instead of pulling back as standing orders required, they would stand and fight against the enemy on the high ground.

“We may need backup,” he said. “But if I ask over there”—he pointed toward his op center—“I’ll be ordered not to go. So be ready to roll early if you want in on the action.”

Sgt. Jeffords was known for being the crazy one on base when it came to fighting the enemy. Guys always talked about the time he walked up Dab Valley with a big bright orange air panel—made to mark your position for aircraft—on his back as a cape trying to get the Taliban to shoot at him. I wanted to do the exact same thing except
while
getting shot at. I briefed Lt. Johnson on my latest scheme.

“Meyer,” he said. “That is a bullshit idea. You’ll get me in trouble again. Forget about it.”

At six in the morning, Jeffords came up on the radio, and I could hear shooting in the background.

“We’re engaged,” he said. “You coming?”

I shook Lt. Johnson awake. He muttered that Jeffords’ platoon would break contact, as was standard procedure. He rolled over to go back to sleep. I shook him again.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “We gotta get out there, sir—something must be wrong, and you know how long it takes the Army to react.”

I added a little drama to get his wheels spinning. Mumbling, he got dressed. I was like a dog with his owner’s leash in his mouth, demanding his morning walk. I even held open the Humvee door for my groggy lieutenant. Together with two truckloads of excited Askars, we rolled to Hill 1911, where Jeffords had deployed his dismounted platoon. As usual, the dushmen were high up on the ridge, shooting and scooting among huge boulders.

“I can climb up,” I said, “and flank them from the right.”