The Taliban Don't Wave (28 page)

“Shut up!” I ordered. “Everyone be quiet and watch your arcs for Timothy! Listen for orders over the net!” I was expecting a stop and secure order if our friends had been obliterated or too badly damaged to move (we weren't going to leave our wounded or KIA behind), or a “Go go go! Get off the X!” order if the IEDed vehicle could still move. If it could move, we were supposed to get off the incident site, to get off the “X.” Secondary IEDs, direct fire, mortars, rockets: they could all be waiting for us if we didn't move, right now!

But no orders were forthcoming.
Maybe Hobbles got hit!
Then it was up to the nearest officer to call the next move. But no one was saying anything. The radio had gone maddeningly silent.
What the hell?
Longview started to open up the back door.

“Close that door!” I shouted, “We haven't been told to dismount! We're waiting for orders; we might be moving off the X.” He quickly slammed the door shut and sat back down. I was still staring back toward the explosion. The dust had begun to settle and I could see all of our RGs had come to a complete stop.
Oh no, that's not good. They're too badly hurt to move. We've got to protect them.
“Gunner,” I said, talking to the automated turret operator, “what do you see?” He had swiveled his gun around to check out the damage. He was using his optics to cut through the dust.

“Two vehicles back, one RG, missing its .50, with its hood gone, and smoke billowing out of the engine,” he stated.
Two vehicles back? That was Hetsa's RG. . . .

“Is anyone moving inside?” I demanded.
Please, God.

“Yes! Guys are moving inside!” He shouted. Everyone in our RG breathed out again.

“Sir,” the warrant said. We'd been in enough trouble together that I knew what he was thinking.

“You called it, warrant. Move out, dismount dismount dismount!” I ordered.

“Gunner, swivel your weapon around and look for any Taliban in cover; check out the hills to our north and the houses to the south. Ross, I'll be outside, diverting traffic. Get your gunner to cover us after his sweep.”

“Roger that,” Ross said, listening intently over the radio for some news, for someone to says something,
anything.

I hopped out and looked down the road as soldiers ran up to the RG and climbed inside. They were doing their job; I had to do mine, which was to make sure we weren't about to come under fire from someone else or encounter a suicide bomber trying to rush through our cordon.

“Do your fives and twenties, boys!” I shouted to my vehicle's dismounts, reminding them to check for IEDs in their immediate area. The Taliban enjoyed planting secondary devices in the same location as the first IED, trying to kill us as we went to help the wounded.

The road we were on was the only major highway to Kandahar from Masum, so civilians were travelling back and forth on it as well. When they saw the explosion, they immediately stopped and wisely began to back up, knowing soldiers were more than likely to shoot first, ask questions
never
! I looked at the oncoming vehicles; they were beginning to pile up behind the lead one.

To our great relief, Rich's voice came over the net and said everyone in the vehicle was okay. They'd gotten their bells rung and some nosebleeds, but they were going to be okay. I wondered why our major wasn't telling us this.
Was he hurt? He wasn't in Hetsa's vehicle. . . .

I spread out the guys from our lead vehicle and we started conducting traffic in a big loop, away from the incident site.

Once I was happy with everyone's position, I started to walk back to the IED blast site. I ran into Rich, who was running around, trying to get everything organized.

He ran over to me and said “Big effing IED—ripped the hood off of Hetsa's RG. The sheer force ripped off the .50-cal and launched it twenty metres into the desert. Everyone's okay though, nothing serious, lots of headaches and ringing ears.” His relief was written all over his face.

“What happened, though?” I demanded. “No one said anything, no orders, no nothing! I snapped at the guys because they wanted to dismount right away, but what happened to ‘Get off the X'?”

“I know,” Rich said, “that was messed up.”

“What about the major—is he okay, is he wounded?”

“No, he's fine, he was—”

“Then what the hell is going on? There's a whole freaking list of things we're supposed to do right after that happens, and we didn't do any of them!” I was really upset. The major enjoyed calling me a
junior
captain, but I knew we didn't just hang around immediately after an IED, not if we didn't have to!

“Rob!” he said, snapping me out of it. “It's not the time for that! Right now, we're off-loading the guys and waiting for the QRF.”

“The QRF will take hours to get here, but can the vehicle still be driven? Is it too damaged to move?”

“Besides the hood and the fifty, I think it's fine.”

“Well then what the fuck are we still doing here, just hanging out? Rich, I'm not having a go at you brother, but you and I both know we should've left ten minutes ago! It's a total miracle that wasn't an IED-initiated contact, because if it was, the way this gong show has been handled, we'd all be in a right shit state!”

“I hear ya.”

I breathed in deeply and stared back at the RG missing its hood.
How weren't they all killed?

“Orders are: we sit and wait. QRF out of Masum will come and collect us to go back there,” Rich said quietly, not wanting to provoke me.

“Well, thank fuck you were there! You were the only guy saying
anything
!”

“Some guys step up, some guys go and stare into IED holes . . .” Rich said absent-mindedly.

What? What did he mean by that?
Before I could ask him, he turned around and jogged back to the damaged RG where the guys were being carefully removed.

I walked over to the warrant and briefed him on the plan. He felt the same way I did. Collect our wounded, swap out drivers, grab the fifty, and vamoose!

Some ANP officers came up, and after begging me for some 9mm ammo, they wandered over to the IED blast site and found the detonating wire. They dug it up and followed it about six hundred metres away to the south toward a large compound, where they found a ladder leaning against the wall.

Thankfully Timothy's sense of timing was off, because he initiated the IED too soon, and all he managed to do was rip off the hood and the .50-cal. Had he fired his device at the right time, everyone in the RG probably would've been killed or severely wounded.

The cops did a search of the compound, but once Timothy had seen the ANP following his det cord, he would've lit out,
rapido.

I walked back over to the IED hole to find Major Hobbles. I saw him standing next to the hole, with a vacant look on his face, staring into it.
So that's what Rich had meant.

I walked up to him and quietly asked, “You okay, sir?” I could still smell the explosives from the hole.

“Yeah,” he snapped, “I'm fine. I'm not the one who got IEDed!”
Well, you're sure not acting like it!
We both looked into the hole. It was huge, easily five feet across. It must have been a large IED.

“Close one, eh?” I asked in a comradely tone of voice.

“No shit! I can't believe how close they came to getting us—half a second later and they'd all have been killed.” He continued to stare into the hole.

“Well, thankfully that didn't happen, so now I guess we just wait for the QRF.”

He didn't respond but just looked around, in a sort of daze. I let him be and walked back over to my lead vehicle and cordon duty.

After what seemed like an unbearably long time to wait, the QRF from Masum Ghar turned up with a Bison sporting a plow in the lead, bulldozing down walls to create a new route to get to us. It was followed by some tanks, a few LAVs, and a flatbed truck.

They pulled up to the site and loaded up the RG onto the back of the flatbed.
Okay, that's why they called it the QRF
. The RG couldn't move. We mounted up and slotted ourselves into their column for a slow ride back to Masum Ghar.

We pulled into the base and then escorted our guys to the medics. I asked all of them how they were feeling, and besides headaches and ringing ears, they seemed to be doing all right. One of the guys from Ross's sec-for group, whom I had only ever said a few words to, stopped me and said thanks for telling them to seal up their firing-port hatches. I said I was just glad they were all okay (relatively speaking).

We did a quick hot wash and it was obvious the CSM was livid over the lack of orders or any direction immediately following the IED. Everyone stared at the major—the CSM's comment was aimed directly at him. He didn't have an immediate response, but asked, “Any other points?” What did the CSM expect him to say?

I had been in enough scary situations in my thirty-five years to know that a person could be a hero one day, and a total goat the next. No one could be perfectly brave and courageous every single time, in every situation. It was a continuum, and all a leader could do was hope that on any given day he would do the right thing, make the right call, and not get anyone under his command killed. If you were particularly brave, then all the better.

Rich and I talked long into the night over powdered coffee. We had been told to stop using the instant mocha coffee sachets because one of the guys said a medic had told him they were poisonous, but after a day like that,
pfft, who cares?

Fourneau was on leave and had been choppered out of FOB Tombstone back in Helmand, so it was just Hetsa (with cotton in his ears), the Wizard, and me left from call sign 72A. We slept outside on tables around the BBQ pit, outside the Batcave in Masum. I looked up at a parachute drifting lazily over us; someone had strung it up between the buildings to provide some shade from the cruel sun. I wondered if I would ever jump again. Then I caught myself and wondered if I was even going to make it home again, to do
anything.

Around two a.m. I was ripped from a deep sleep by the sound of a small OMLT kitten getting torn apart by a wild mongoose, only a few feet away from me. I listened as it screamed when the mongoose began to eat it while it was still alive. I rolled over and fell back asleep.

Chapter 15

The next morning I found Sean hiding in the Batcave, obviously as far away from the wire as he could possibly get. After our usual pleasantries and piss-taking, he told me I would be taking over the mentoring position Rich held with the Third Company, 72 Kandak. The officer I would be mentoring was Captain Ghias, the guy who got tired on the second long foot patrol in Helmand and decided to hop onto the back of a Ranger truck and take off.
Great. Sounds like my kinda guy.

The Third Company and all of its troops would be part of a huge Canadian resupply and teardown convoy making its way to Combat Outpost (COP) Zangabad, and then on to FOB Mushan, to the west of Masum and Sperwhan. Sean told me I would be taking over for Captain John at FOB Mushan, the westernmost base Canada had in the Panjway Valley.

I would be signing for the RG that was already at Mushan, so I wouldn't be taking an RG out there. Sean had checked my file and realized I was LAV crew-commander qualified, so I was dicked to be in the turret of a spare LAV for the ride out. I hadn't been a “Panzer commander” since phase four officer training, so I was rusty as hell.

Then Sean dropped an A-bomb on my head when he told me I would be taking over as the commander of Rich's Canadian OMLT team, 72C, or as I liked to call them, call sign “Do Not Go Gentle!”
Gaahaaaa!

“Are you
mental
?” I shouted. “I don't want to die!”

“You'll be fine, relax—” Sean said, trying to soothe my frazzled nerves.

“
Relax
? You don't know! You weren't there! But I saw it, with my own eyes: Death follows them on horseback and then just hangs out, eager to see what they'll get up to next! They have the mark of Cain on their foreheads! Like it was prophesied in the
Necronomicon Ex-Mortis
, ‘Woe betide any man that doth willingly stand next to Seven Two Charles in a war zone. . . . '”

“Oh, stop being so biblical,” Sean chided.

“I suppose you're right,” I sighed, slowly accepting my fate. “I guess Moe Szyslak's dad in
The Simpsons
was right—sooner or later, everybody gets shot.”

“You're such a nancy,” Sean sneered. “Grow a pair, you'll be fine.”

“As always Sean,
your
strength gives
me
strength.”

Sean told me to grow up and then said Warrant Smith would be my 2 I/C, but he was already out at Mushan, so I would meet him there. Stamps, Rich's ultra-dependable driver and all around good joe, would also be coming along, as would Rich's gunner, a young guy called Iropolous.

I told Sean thanks for nothing, and got up to go and find the Wizard and the dirty Hungo to tell them the bad news. I found them and said Ragnarök was upon us.

“The Big Green Machine has decided to finally break up our little award-winning team of like-minded individuals. They know that together, as a team, our combined strength was just too powerful, and that we ‘threatened the natural order of things!'” I said, trying to keep the mood light.

I thanked Hetsa for his hard work and for keeping morale up with his full beard and great sense of humour, and then I spoke with the warrant alone. I thanked him for his excellent attitude and for watching out for me and not letting me step on my dick, as the expression went. I told him how much I appreciated his looking out for me and the team, over and over again, and for keeping us safe with his magical enchantments.

It bothered me a lot that 72A was getting split up, but with the leave blocks the way they were, we all knew it was inevitable. Everyone, no matter his rank or job, got a couple of weeks of vacation during his tour. And the way our staggered leave blocks were set up, it was unlikely the members of 72A would ever work together as a team again. The warrant said some kind words back, and helped me get ready.

I grabbed a terp (a young guy who, not surprisingly, was named Max) and told Captain Shafiq Ullah the news. I thanked the ANA for . . . for uh . . . for coming on patrols every morning and for the great working relationship they had fostered with me and my Canadians. They thanked me back for . . . for uh . . . for always going out on patrol with them and for being ready to radio for help. I heard the Bellamy Brothers start to sing in my head,
“Just let your love flow like a mountain spring.”
Truly, we would all be heartbroken to be working with someone else: me with another group of ANA in Mushan, the ANA with other Canadians in Sperwhan.

Then Max and I went to meet my new ANA. I knocked on their office door and they let me in and introduced themselves, but they were somewhat cold. I shook hands with Captain Ghias and his CSM, a very young man probably no older than nineteen or twenty called Shamsallah. Then we sat down together, but they weren't overly chatty. I guess they were scared I was the new guy who would get them all killed. The ANA could really take their time warming up to you.

I was just about to leave when the door opened and in walked the artillery captain that Brannon was mentoring back in Sperwhan, the guy I gave the parachute flares to. When he saw me in the corner he literally ran over to shake my hand and gave me a man hug, and when Ghias and Shamsallah asked how he knew me, he told them the whole story, and finished with, “He's a friend of
ours.
” Suddenly their defences came down and I was just one of the boys, chatting away and having a few laughs before I had to go back to OMLT HQ.
Now that's some good karma!

That afternoon, Sean and I sat in on the convoy movement and Zangabad teardown orders given by the tank major in charge of the convoy. Early the next morning we would mount up, take our armoured vehicles and RGs into the dried-out Arghandab River, and then travel west until we were north of COP Zangabad. That afternoon our engineers would tear down the COP, and the next morning we'd hat up again, go back to the riverbed, and go farther west until we were above FOB Mushan. Then our vehicles would form a huge leaguer just west of the FOB, and our engineers would do some maintenance and construction on the FOB while the Canadians and ANA patrolled through the bandit country west of Mushan. It was a good plan, and nobody had any questions.

I spent the rest of the afternoon studying a LAV manual, because I would be in the turret commanding one of those beasts for the move with some sec-for guys as my driver and number two on the turret. Sean would be following along with an RG and then heading back with the convoy, at which point 72C and the Third Company ANA would be left in Mushan, to our own dubious devices.

Naturally, I mercilessly took the piss out of Sean, telling him it was okay to be scared, and to stick close to me because I was a heavily augmented super-soldier: “Spartan-118, UNSC designation: ROB.” I assured him if anything happened, I'd take care of him. He countered with some choice words, rife with expletives, and told me to get out of his office.

I fired off an e-mail to Amélie and told her I'd get in touch with her again just as soon as I could. Because of OPSEC I had to be careful not to tell her where I was going or what I was doing, but she was a veteran and knew the drill. Then I wrote back to a class of schoolchildren from Saskatoon who had written some letters to me. My mom's friend was their teacher, so they all wrote fun notes to me, saying things like, “I hope you're having a good war,” and “Can you bring your tank when you come to visit us?” My personal favourites were, “I give you strength, I give you power!” and “I hope you don't die.”
Yeah, me too!
I took a picture of the OMLT kittens (the ones the mongoose hadn't eaten yet) and attached it to the letter I sent the kids, thanking all of them for their great letters.

I had a great sleep, and the next morning we were up early and quickly on our way. The column we joined was absolutely huge, with at least fifty to sixty different vehicles. We rumbled through Masum and quickly got into the dried riverbed, and even before the convoy's last vehicles joined us, they came under enemy contact. They really did a number on Timothy with their 25mm cannons and 7.62-calibre machine guns. In the hands of a well-trained soldier, the LAV was an incredibly deadly instrument, and our soldiers had been very well trained.

We rambled along, and the whole while our tail-end vehicles were constantly shooting into the walls Timothy was hiding behind. It was incredibly surreal. It was a beautiful day: the sun was up, there wasn't a cloud in the sky, and every now and then an incoming round would snap over my head. Twenty-five millimetre cannons shot death at the enemy as a firefight raged behind me.
All very normal.

I was riding in my turret, with just the top of my head barely showing out of the hatch, when suddenly the armoured vehicle two in front of me got IEDed. The blast echoed over the riverbed. The major in charge quickly ascertained that the vehicle and its crew were all okay, so we just kept rolling along, like nothing had even happened.

After a couple of hours we turned south and rolled into an open field to the west of COP Zangabad. We dismounted and I went to say hi to Andrew, my friend from 3 RCR who had joined the battalion at the same time as I had. He quickly gave me the lay of the land and assured me that Timothy was most definitely out there, watching us and waiting. In fact, we had pretty much just hopped over his fence and were now hanging out in his backyard.

We didn't have to wait long as the engineers got to work tearing down the small base, and after half an hour, mortars started to fall in the field south of the COP. They were slowly being “walked” (falling increasingly closer) into the COP, but the engineers, in an incredible display of guts, just kept right on working. Only when the mortars started to land fifty metres out could they be bothered to stop their work. Everyone mounted up, battened the hatches on their armoured vehicles, and watched their arcs of fire.

After a while, Timothy must've run out of ammo, because the mortars let up and the engineers got right back to work. I tried to get my new ANA to go with me on a patrol to find the mortar team, but something had them spooked, and nothing I said or did could get them to change their minds. Sean and I discussed some ideas but we decided I would push them for a patrol the next morning. Sean then made a few radio calls, and by the time I went over to see Shamsallah (the CSM) again, he was game for a patrol the next morning. His boss, Captain Ghias, was joining us in Mushan in a few days' time, so Shamsallah was in command of all of the ANA soldiers. That night, we slept next to our vehicles and quickly fell asleep. I got woken up to take my turn on turret duty, but thankfully, nothing happened during the night.

I wondered how Amélie and our baby girl, Caméa, were doing. Cam was only five months old; she was born and then I left three months later. I missed them both so much. I had tried to call on the sat phone back in Sperwhan whenever I could, but it never seemed like enough. But just being able to call them every now and then was an amazing morale booster; I'd never had anything like that on any of my previous tours. I said a silent prayer for them and then went to wake up the next guy on turret duty.

The next morning I went and found Major Obermann and said I wanted to take my ANA and patrol south. I was hoping to catch the Taliban mortar team completely unaware, before they could start lobbing shells into our perimeter again. He told me good luck and to let them know if we needed help.

I muckled onto Ginge (one of the 1 RCR infantrymen roped into helping Captain Brannon mentor the ANA artillery back in Sper), who joined me as my fire team partner for the COP teardown, and I then broke open my map to show Sean what I had in mind. As much as I took the piss out of Sean, he was incredibly switched on, and although I would never say it to his face, I valued his advice. He said he would take Stamps and go up on a nearby rooftop to act as an RRB (radio re-broadcast) station in case my comms went wonky with Obermann. I thanked him for the good idea, said some nasty things about his fugly face, and then walked over to the ANA who were, to my great astonishment, up and ready to go.

I had a new terp, who would be working for me in Mushan, by the name of Omer. He was a nice guy and seemed really keen to do his job. Together we walked over to Shamsallah and I discussed some ideas with him over the map. He would bring along about twenty Afghans for the patrol. I would've liked to have more, but hey, at least we were going. Memories of a patrol back in Sperwhan when Lieutenant Mujahedeen refused to patrol one hundred metres to a big tree to kill/capture the Taliban recruiting team flooded back into my mind.
Maybe these guys really will be different. Inshallah.

We set off right on time and began to make our way south of the Zangabad teardown operation, which had started up again as soon as the sun had come up. The sun promised to be hot today. It was only 0800 hours, but already I was starting to sweat profusely.
Situation: no change.

We followed a wide footpath through a couple of villages, but where there should've been normal village activity, there was only eerie silence. Now that wasn't completely abnormal or anything, especially if we were new to the area and hadn't met the locals yet, but there was something in the air, a familiar bad vibe.
I sense something; a presence I've not felt since . . . the last time I got shot at! Which was . . . yesterday?