The Taliban Don't Wave (27 page)

Major Hobbles arrived but never came over to see us. He found a place to sleep in the back of an Afghan ambulance and quickly racked out.
Nice. As long as you're okay,
I thought to myself.

“Right, that does it,” I said to Rich. “I'm off to find something, 'cause we won't make it through the night.” I got up and began walking around the ANA vehicles, until I finally found a Hessian sack covering a DshK heavy-machine gun in the back of a Ranger.
That'll do.
I quickly untied the knots and took the tarp back to the fire where Rich, Longview, and Smith were the only OMLT guys left; apparently it was now every man for himself as we all tried to stay warm.

We went over to a truck to shelter from the wind, laid down part of the tarp to cover us from the sand, and then hopped in, covering ourselves with the rest of the tarp. “Let us agree to never speak of this night again,” I said.

“Agreed!” they all replied, in perfect unison.

The next morning we set off around four a.m., but before we left, I asked Captain Shafiq Ullah if he'd like to do a head count of his men. We'd been scattered to the four winds after our run up and down the mountain, and it wouldn't surprise me if he had accidentally left someone behind. Max translated for me and replied, “Nah, he says, ‘We are good.'”
Fair enough sunshine; if you don't care, I don't care!

The rest of the day became a nauseating blur of getting whiplashed back and forth in a big truck, constantly getting stuck, and dealing with snapping, fraying tempers. At one point, after an open-backed Humvee driver flew through a deep river and sent a tidal wave cascading over his passengers, one of them dismounted and actually pulled leather on the driver. He pointed his PKM belt-fed machine gun at the driver and we all thought he was really going to do it, but cooler heads prevailed and managed to stop him in time.

After hours of bone-rattling slow motion, we finally dismounted on the outskirts of Lash and RVed with our RG vehicles, feeling terribly seasick. I was never so happy to see my fellow Canadians in my whole life. We drove through the city and pulled into the ANP station without further ado.

We did a quick debrief and then cleaned our weapons and kit.
First my kit, then myself.
I grabbed the towel the Brits had given me at FOB Tombstone and strolled off to find the showers, happy at the thought of finally getting clean again. I saw some ANA milling around a low building, so I wandered over there. I walked through the open door to see an Afghan soldier, naked from the waist down, with both of his feet planted on the edges of a sink as he squatted over it and soaped his cucumber and beets.
Geeewwww! I really,
really
didn't need to see that!

He turned from his ablutions and said, “
Salaam.
”

I never made eye contact as I kept on walking to the showers. “Yeah,
salaam.
”

I walked into an open stall and saw rusty, used razor blades on the floor. I skipped that one and walked over to another. Mud, and what was probably human feces, choked the drain, causing brown, mucky water to fill the floor basin.
Nasty!
Okay
, I thought to myself,
maybe I'll just skip the shower and have a wet-wipe classic later.

I walked over to the other side of the building to use the toilet, careful not to look at, or make eye contact with, Mr. “I think it's perfectly socially acceptable to wash my junk in the communal sink.” I walked over to the stalls, knocked on the first one with a door, and hearing no response, gently swung it open. My eyes were physically assaulted as I took in the human stool smeared all over the floor, the back of the door,
and
all three of the walls.
Gaagaagaaa!
The stink was overpowering, and I was glad I hadn't had breakfast yet, because I would've lost it. Not that it would've changed the overall ambience of the toilet.

I decided to tempt fate once more and walked to another stall with a door on it, and repeated my polite knock. I opened the door and was instantly showered in the face with spraying water—a hose ripped out of the wall was shooting all over the inside of the toilet. I choked and spit out coppery-tasting muck as I slammed the door shut.

I thought to myself,
Luck be a lady tonight,
and slowly, carefully, opened another stall, expecting God knows what to jump out at me.

No hideous smell or brain-scarring sight met my tired eyes, no terrible-tasting water splashed onto my face.
Huh.
I slowly walked inside and then remembered my toilet SOP: look for toilet paper before you start. I closed and latched the door behind me, and then bent over to check the toilet roll holder. I reached under and felt for a paper roll, but instead stuck my hand into something soft and mushy.
GAAHAAAA!

Suddenly—horrifically—hundreds of flies began swarming out of the mush under the toilet roll holder, buzzing angrily around my face and arms. “No, no, get back!
Aaaahhh
!” I squealed as I swatted the air around me, with hundreds of flies clinging to my face and hair. I tried to find the latch to let myself out of the toilet, but couldn't grasp it as panic threatened to choke out my reason and dexterity. I boot-stomped the door, ripping it off its hinges, and fled the building, back outside into the hot sun. I shook my head violently to get the last of the flies off of my face and hair.
Seriously, what the hell was that all about?!
I stormed back to the resident OMLT building and warned the boys not to use the toilets. “They're like a haunted house! The ANP toilets need an exorcism!”

But I still really had to go. Thankfully, I suddenly remembered we'd brought along our portable toilet bucket, which was a Gucci piece of kit. Some genius had created a triple-sealed bag full of cat litter, which you would open up and spread over a bucket by its edges. Then you would put a makeshift toilet seat over the bucket, do what nature called, and then zip the bag, wet wipe your hands, and chuck the lot in the garbage. I'd totally forgotten that we'd packed the portable buckets, because if I'd remembered, I never would've risked losing my soul in the ANP toilets.

Later that morning Major Hobbles, as the OMLT rep, got called to the governor of Helmand's palace on the outskirts of Lashka Ghar. He was presented with a strange white-rock trophy, and was told that he and his officers were now entitled to become landowners in Helmand Province.

The governor estimated our combined kill tally of insurgents to be close to one hundred dead, two hundred wounded. Then the governor said that at least two hundred Afghan families had returned to the area we'd cleared in as many days, to return to their homes that were once occupied by Taliban and their supporters.

When the major said that, we all felt pretty good.
Finally, something decent, something important, that we can point to and say, “We did make a difference: we helped the people get their homes back.”
To be able to say we had accomplished something tangible on the op was very important to everyone in the OMLT. It was a good thing, something we could be proud of, because we'd had precious few moments like that.

We mounted up the next day and were leaving the front gate when our vehicle column of Afghans and RGs came to a screeching halt. Wandering into the base, covered in dust and looking like death warmed over, was a small, frail-looking ANA soldier. It seems he'd fallen asleep at our leaguer on the hilltop in the middle of the desert, his friends forgot to wake him up, and he'd been left behind. He'd just walked over forty kilometres in two days through enemy-held territory and strolled up to the front gate.
I don't want to be the kind of guy who says, “I told you so,” but . . .

The ANA threw him into the back of one of their trucks, gave him some water, and had a good laugh over it. We continued on and drove down the highway until we rolled into a Brit base called FOB Bastion, just north of the Lash. Hobbles and I walked into the command post to let them know we were there. We met a small Dutch major who explained they knew exactly where the enemy was, pointed their position out to us on a large map, and then politely asked if we would be so kind as to go and take care of them.

Hobbles and I looked at each other, and then stared at the Dutch major.

“And what's wrong with your soldiers?” Hobbles asked.

“Well,” he started to murmur, “if we go, we might get hurt, and so—”

“Holy crap,” I snapped. “What about us? It doesn't matter if
we
get hurt?” Hobbles muckled onto me and we quickly left the CP.
Wow—did that really happen?

We spent the night and then made it back safely to Kandahar Province the next day. On our way, Ross had wisely taken a ten-figure map grid on his GPS for where he lost his rucksack on the way into Helmand, so we pulled up to the Afghan National Police station and Ross got out to confront an ANP officer wearing a CF army-issued winter jacket on the front gate. Ross's name tag was still on the jacket, so hilarity ensued when Ross asked if he could speak to himself about getting his jacket back. Then he ripped it off of the officer and hopped into his RG, and we fled down the road as the ANP threatened to kill us for stealing
their
jacket.

We made it back to Masum just in time for a late lunch. We began offloading our kit when Major Hobbles declared we were all going to KAF for two days of R&R. It was the best news we'd had in a long time. Visions of finally calling home, drinking coffee and eating ice cream on the boardwalk, sleeping in for once, and eating until we were actually full, filled our exhausted minds. You'd think we'd just won the lottery!

We had a quick after-action review for the road move and any points we wanted to pass on, and then remounted our RGs for our two days of roller coaster fun in KAF!
Yippee!

The Wizard and I would be travelling with Ross and the sec-for boys in the lead vehicle. Rich offered us a place with him in his RG, along with the rest of call sign “Dead Men Walking,” but I wisely said, “
Mon cher
Richard, you—good sir—can stuff your offer. In fact, you can shove it, poke it, cram it, wedge it, stick it, push it, elbow it, and finally, nudge it right up your—”

“Yeah, I get it, dickhead,” he snapped. “All you had to do was say no thanks.”

I was about to mount up when I saw that the vehicle Hetsa was travelling in had all of its plastic firing ports open. If an IED went off (and didn't immediately kill them) and they had so much as even one port open, they'd all be concussed and deaf. I got their attention and shouted at them to close their ports like good stormtroopers. They groaned and assuredly said something derogatory about officers, but sealed all the ports closed.

The Wizard and I mounted up with Captain Ross and shrugged off the dust from the one-horse town that was Masum Ghar. We were heading to the bright lights of the big city!
Yip-yip-yippee! Bright light city gonna set my soul / gonna set my soul on fire!

We screamed, “So long, suckers!” as we flew out the gate of Masum and quickly zipped along the ring road south to Kandahar city and then KAF. I reminded myself to stay switched on, but allowed myself to get caught up in the conversation about what we were going to do in KAF once we got there. Everyone was joking and laughing away, and for once, my fear of driving in Afghanistan seemed to have been left behind.

I looked back at the Wizard and said, “Do you think we'll find the suppressors you've been aft—”

KAAA-BOOM!

I looked out the back window.
Oh no, oh no, oh no!
I wanted to throw up. My heart had dropped into my stomach as I saw a huge mushroom cloud begin to billow and form in the sky, right in the middle of the road between our vehicles.
Was it an RPG or a Spig 9 or an
IED? Had to be an IED—the explosion was too big to be anything else. We just got IEDed!
Everyone began to talk over top of each other. I couldn't hear any orders coming over my radio. I . . . what . . .