The Taliban Don't Wave (21 page)

The next morning it was decided by the Brits to leave Salavat alone, even though we hadn't cleared a single compound inside of it.
But that was neither here nor there.

We drove our vehicles over to the east of Salavat and formed a leaguer next to some Afghan Bedouin. We muckled onto our Afghans and patrolled into the nearby village of Fathollah, and you would be hard pressed to find a “more wretched hive of scum and villainy.”

It was one of the birthplaces of the Taliban, so obviously, it was a
bit
dangerous, and not really the sort of place you just wandered into. Once we were inside its twisting alleys and high walls, the ANA (to a man) all sauntered off, and then Fourneau decided to join in the fun and promptly left me. I turned around at one point; I couldn't find my fire-team partner, and Ali asked me, “What?” I tried desperately to suppress my panic and started looking all over, but I couldn't see Fourneau. It was just me and Ali, as the warrant and Hetsa were with the recce element to the east. I had climbed a small wall, and Fourneau had decided he would find another way around it, and just took off without letting me know.

When I realized he was gone, I was absolutely terrified. Images of him with an empty sandbag over his head, a single dangling light bulb barely illuminating a propaganda banner behind his beaten-up body, and a guy holding a rusty saw standing at the ready behind him, limbering up his sawin' arm to begin slowly cutting off Fourneau's head for the Al Jazeera six o'clock news flooded my mind, threatening to choke me out with panic.
Must not fear, fear is the mind-killer!
I told myself as I suppressed the panic threatening to drown me.

I ran to a nearby rooftop and started scanning and asking the rest of the team over the PRR if they had seen Fourneau, when suddenly he rounded a corner, unperturbed by the heart attack he almost gave me. I, on the other hand, was
quite
perturbed, so I explained a few things to him through the use of expletives and frothing at the mouth, and together, as a fire team, we moved out.

On our way out of the village, we came under small-arms fire, and as the ANA returned it, I had to run up onto a roof to find out why the Brits weren't joining us. They were supposed to be to our south, ready to act as a QRF if we needed them. If they had run up to join us, they could've acted as a fire-support base while the ANA flanked the small group of Taliban, but the Brits hadn't so much as budged.

I was a bit angry, so after the ANA had scared off the Taliban, I walked over and asked the Royal Marines captain, “What the hell just happened?” He told me his major had denied him permission to come up to join us. That night at the major's O-group (orders briefing), I asked him why he had denied his men permission to join me in the TIC, and he arrogantly replied, “The days of soldiers charging to the sounds of the guns went out with the Napoleonic Wars.”

I replied, “For some, maybe.” His men couldn't make eye contact with me; they knew they'd left us high and dry.

That night, as I slept peacefully under the stars on my hobo blanket, I heard a strange noise to my left. I sprang up and grabbed my rifle and reached for my night-vision monocle. I scanned around, but couldn't find the source of the weird noise. I then looked to my immediate left and realized it was Hetsa, shivering in the cold night. I had told my young Jedi apprentices to pack some warm gear for the op, but Hetsa, being the salty vet, knew better, so now he was freezing in his sleep. I got up, took off my American-issue Ranger blanket, and draped it over him and whispered, “Good night, son.”

Early the next morning, the Brits decided we would move our leaguer back to where it was at the start of the op, just above Salavat. As we patrolled through the western edge of Fathollah to clear it for the vehicle convoy, the ANA with Warrant Longview caught out the Taliban and fired on them before they could detonate their IED. I heard their gunfire so I hopped over a wall and ran to join them, where the warrant had to give me an impromptu satellite map-reading lesson under enemy fire, which was probably a first for both of us.

I sent up my contact report to the LO to give to the Brits, then I traced the detonating wire (which Lieutenant Aziz, God bless him, had already cut) back to the wall. I stood by the wall, saw where I thought the IED was buried in a nearby culvert under a small bridge, and then I sent up my IED contact report. I found out two days later that the wall we had all been hopping over had about four hundred pounds worth of IED explosives buried in it. The wall
was
the IED.
GEEEWWWW!

An American Apache helicopter gunship turned up, but for some odd reason, wasn't allowed to disintegrate the Taliban currently shooting at us. I found out later it was because he was in a British AO and our Royal Marines major on the ground denied him permission to engage the enemy. What would've taken the Apache five seconds took us close to twenty minutes of shooting—and getting shot at—until Timothy had enough and fled into a wadi. The Americans, bless their socks, decided to act as a mobile spotting platform and chased the enemy all the way to a large compound, about two hundred metres away to the southwest, where they quickly went to ground.

I ran and told the Brits the ANA had a cunning plan to give chase, if the Brits would be so kind as to set up on the southern flank and act as a mobile cut-off, ready to kill any Taliban we chased out of the compound. They were game and wanted to discuss the plan at great length, but I said, “I've gotta go; the ANA are hard chargers and I don't want them to leave without me!” I took off shouting, “2 Para leads the way!” as I sprinted over to the HMCS
Tippy Canoe
(our RG) to retrieve my driver and gunner. At the start of the day, Fourneau and Hetsa were manning our vehicle in the British column move through Fathollah, but now the plan had changed considerably, so I told them they were more than welcome to come and join the flying circus. Hetsa was game, but Fourneau said he'd rather stay with the RG.
Hmm.

I was about to order him to abandon ship when I realized he hadn't made eye contact with me once during my entire speech about the newly developing situation. I didn't press him—Phobos the Greek god of fear had obviously gotten a good hold of him, so Hetsa and I ran over and rejoined the warrant and Aziz while Fourneau opted to stay with the British vehicle column.

When the warrant found out that the Fornicator was missing out on a once-in-a-lifetime combat opportunity (we'd never known before with one hundred per cent certainty where the enemy was actually hiding), he was beyond livid and threatened to drag Fourneau out of his metal security blanket by his short, dark curlies. I asked the warrant to let it go for now, as we had more pressing matters, like leading the ANA on a flanking assault on an enemy-occupied compound.

I told the Wizard and the dirty Hungo to go schtum as I lied through my buckteeth to Lieutenant Aziz, telling him the Brits wanted us to take it back to the old school and do a hard-knock entry on the compound while they covered us from the south. Once Aziz (who put the “Q” back in “Quisling”) heard that the plan came from a major, he was all for it. I thought to myself,
Hey, he's probably thinking, as long as a higher rank can take the fall if it goes sour. . . .

Aziz quickly briefed his CSM and sergeants on the plan while I told Ali to stay close to me and to do what I said. I reminded him I had promised his mother I would take care of him. Then I turned to my Canadians and told them what my peewee hockey coach always said at times like this: “Keep your sticks on the ice and your heads up in the corners!” I clasped them both on the shoulders. “This is who we are . . .”

“So say we all,” Hetsa and Longview said back in perfect unison.

I told them that if they had any questions, to make it quick. They said they were good to go, so I said, “Okay then, it's the old army classic, ‘hey diddle-diddle, right up the middle.'”

We started marching with some ANA in front of us when suddenly we heard laughing and shouting behind us.

We turned around to see an Afghan soldier with something in his hands running between his friends, all of them reaching at his arms, desperately trying to steal something from his grip. He got closer and ran by us with a large bunch of grapes (recently liberated from a farmer's field) in his mouth, another bunch in each hand and, for the
coup de grâce,
a pretty white flower hanging from the front of his beret. We shook our heads and kept marching toward the compound with the angry Apache Dragonfly buzzing over top of it.

We were only twenty metres out from the compound when we found ourselves with open ground between us and its nearest wall, so I shouted, “Run for it!” as every Canadian and Afghan sprinted across the dry field, fully expecting the sickening snap and crack of incoming fire to ruin our family fun run.

We made it to the wall without taking any fire and began to round it, heading toward the compound's front gate. Somehow I ended up as lead man on the assault, but there was no time to shoosh some ANA out in front of me, so I had to act quickly. I turned the corner, my weapon on my shoulder, and quickly made out an old man standing next to the compound's open front gate. He beckoned us in, but we didn't budge until Ali got him to lift his shirt so we could see he wasn't packing a fifty-pound IED suicide vest.

We had heard of this happening before. The Taliban would go into a village and grab a senior citizen or a mentally challenged child and strap a suicide bomb to him. To the child, they would make it seem like a fun game—“Run up to the soldiers and say hi.” To the elderly man they would say, “You're almost dead from old age anyway; this way, you can serve Allah. Do this, or we'll kill your whole family.” Then they'd hold his family hostage until he detonated himself. He raised his shirt and showed us he was clean, so we gently pushed him out of the way and snaked into his compound.

He had a massive bruise forming under his right eye and tears began to flow down his cheeks as he began pleading with Ali, begging us to leave his village. It was as I'd feared. The Taliban had run from the chopper into the nearest village, found out who the elder was, punched him in the face, and told him, “We now belong to your village. In fact, we're your nephews from Fathollah. If you tell the coalition soldiers who we are, we'll come back and kill all of you, tonight.” It wasn't an empty threat, and the old man knew it. Completely innocent civilians found themselves in these hopeless situations every day in the warring provinces of Afghanistan, and as in every other war since the beginning of time, it was always the civilians who suffered the most.

I began to feel very angry.
Those fucking savages! They don't have the guts to stand and fight, but they're pretty fucking brave when beating the shit out of an old man and threatening his life and the lives of his family!

All of the ANA soldiers had stopped in the middle of the compound and began chatting amongst themselves, asking villagers the odd question, but not overly concerned by current events. Even though there were several fighting age males, covered in dust and sweat and shooting us terrible stinkeyes, the ANA just couldn't seem to get the concept that the chopper had followed the Taliban right to this
very
compound.
Damn it all to hell!

I advised Aziz to politely ask his men to start policing up all of the FAMs, searching them properly and putting them under armed guard, and then to start searching the compound for their weapons. He thought about it for a good minute and then slowly turned and told his men to get busy. The ANA slowly started herding the FAMs over to a wall beside me, but didn't bother to search any of them, just casually told them to go over and stand next to me.
Yeah, thanks.

Suddenly an Afghan shouted something and opened up with his PKM belt-fed machine gun right next to me, shooting over a wall toward a small farmer's hut in the middle of a grape field about a hundred metres away. I followed the trail of his rounds and thought I saw movement and a long-barrelled weapon, so I shouted, “Fire!” and suddenly the world erupted into a hellish cacophony of gunfire and outgoing rockets. I switched to fully automatic on my assault rifle and said, “Git some, git some!” over and over as I shot at Timothy, who so brazenly had called down the fires of hell. Outgoing rockets, RPGs, PKM machine gun fire, AK-47s, M-16s; everyone opened up on full auto with everything he had, trying to kill this guy, who in hindsight, I wasn't a hundred per cent sure anyone had even seen.

I saw one ANA soldier throwing grenades; he'd never make the distance, but by God, it was on his war to-do list! The ANA gunner immediately to my left was screaming “Ahhh, ahhhhh!” as he sprayed his whole belt of ammo downrange. Hetsa was to my right, his Minimi belt-fed machine gun pumping out hundreds of bullets, the burning hot brass of his expended cartridges falling all over the suspected Taliban youths who had ducked down behind the wall next to us when the firing started.