The Taliban Don't Wave (4 page)

By the time they were done handing out kit, our total equipment weight—once our mags were bombed up with ammo and we had on our helmet and body armour and some water in our day sack—was close to one hundred pounds. Later in the tour I weighed all of my kit. It totalled ninety-two pounds. Every time I left the wire, I carried ninety-two pounds of kit on my body. I liked to tell the boys that I put the “light” back in “light infantry.” They would immediately snarl back, “Actually, you put the ‘ugly' back in ‘fuck ugly,'” which I promptly amended to
fugly.

And my kit wasn't even the heaviest, not by a long shot. Our light machine gunners, who carried twenty pounds of ammunition all linked together for their guns, could walk around carrying close to 120 pounds. Try and imagine carrying 120 pounds of equipment in fifty-degree-Celsius heat. Then imagine trying to fight in that, for hours on end. That's what we had to look forward to. But, as crazy as it sounds, we had all joined up as volunteers; we weren't conscripted, so we could only blame ourselves and those great recruiting commercials.

Hetsa had told me his recruiter had actually asked him if he liked going camping. When Hetsa responded “yes,” he was told, “Well, son, the infantry's the branch for you!”
Sure, I could see how fighting in Afghanistan was eerily similar to going camping—“extreme sports” camping!

Something I discovered back home in Canada was that a lot of civilians didn't understand that soldiers
want
to go overseas and do their jobs. It would be like a firefighter who goes through months of rigorous training and countless exercises, only to stay behind in the fire station when the alarm sounds. You wanted a chance to actually do the job you were trained for.

The next morning, call signs 72 Alpha (72A) and 72 Bravo were slated to hop into some Bison armoured vehicles and drive through Kandahar city on our way to Masum Ghar, our first stop. From Masum, we'd be going to our individual outposts. Another OMLT captain, named John, and his call sign, 72 Bravo, would be travelling on to Forward Operating Base (FOB) Mushan, in the extreme west of Panjway Province. I had found out just a day before we deployed from Canada that my call sign, 72 Alpha, would be going to Sperwhan Ghar.

I wasn't feeling too good about riding in the back of a blacked-out, hermetically sealed Bison armoured vehicle for my ride to Masum Ghar.
The Fear
had crept up on me, probably in my sleep. I found myself thinking about that long, slow drive down the IED highway, the only road leading to the west, where I had to go. I kept seeing that PowerPoint presentation, the one with all of the explosion symbols on it.

Rich, always an intuitive guy, must've picked up on my “for those about to die” vibe. That or the fact that I was most often the guy running around trying to keep morale up, and now I'd gone deathly quiet. He walked over to me and looked me in the eyes. “Hey, fucknuts. You okay?”

“Listen Tricky Dick, I'm a
dismounted
warrior, damn it! If I want to coward out and run and hide under a pile of coats, I have that option! I get claustrophobic in a hermetically sealed armoured vehicle that doesn't have quite enough underarmour to protect me from a thousand-pound bomb buried in the middle of the road. And like I've always told ya, I'm allergic to getting blown up!”

Rich cut me off. “Hey, hey, hey. Easy, little camper! Your Uncle Richie's here to tell you somethin'—you're gonna be fine. If you get scared and need a little pick-me-up, you just call your big Uncle Richie, okay?”

Rich leaned back and smiled, then roughly thumped me on the back. “Get a grip of your shit, trooper! You're supposed to be leading your men into combat, not scaring the hell out of them with your doom-and-gloom vibe! You'll be fine. Like you keep telling me, you can't possibly die here, because you've got to pull your thumb out and invent that flux capacitor thingamajig!”

“Thanks, brother,” I said, and pretended to punch him in the groin.

He blocked my punch and smirked. “Now get outta here, and don't forget your rifle and pistolé; you
may
need them where you're going. Although the way you shoot, you might as well just carry around a twenty-pound paperweight!”

We said, “Strength and honour,” and then clasped forearms like Roman legionnaires. I know we would've made General Maximus Decimus Meridius proud.

Sergeant Donahue, an OMLT hard case, walked over and said, “Remember the unit you came from,” meaning I had been in 2 Para in the Brits. “You weren't in the RAF regiment, you're a Sky God! Don't ever forget that!” Then he slapped me roughly on the back.
What the hell was it with people and back slapping today?

I guess everyone knew, deep down, that this might be it . . . our last piss take together before we met up again at the ramp ceremony, to stand at attention and salute as a friend's coffin passed by. I pushed that morbid thought from my mind. We'd all be okay. My second-in-command's first name was actually Merlin, ergo we nicknamed him “The Wizard.” He'd protect us with his level thirty magic!

“Cheers, mucker,” I said to Donahue, and returned his back slap. He was an ex-3 Para soldier from the Brit army, so he knew the drill. We'd been to the same places in Northern Ireland, so he knew what I was going through; no airborne warrior liked being cooped up in an armoured vehicle—it was anathema to our nature.

And with that, I walked over to the warrant, Hetsa, and Fourneau. I told them I'd see them in Masum Ghar, as we were being split up for the ride. I then found my Bison vehicle, hopped into the back, and said a silent prayer and reminded myself that
the Lord hates a coward
as the heavy metal door was closed shut, blocking out all the light and air from the outside. I reached into the top pouch of my tactical vest and pulled out my good-luck earplugs, knowing how loud the armoured vehicles could be. Those earplugs had gotten me through some hairy moments before, and I was hoping they could do the trick again, as we rumbled out of KAF and into our little part of the war.

Chapter 2

Our vehicle convoy rambled down the road and through the city of Kandahar, the provincial and political capital of Kandahar Province. At one point a soldier in the top turret shouted down to us in the back, “If you look out your left viewport, you can see the prison where the Taliban recently blew up the front gate and fifty guys escaped.” I'd seen the prison on the news, but there was nothing quite like seeing it with your own eyes. One of John's 72 Bravo soldiers held up a phone to the viewport and snapped a picture.
War tourism
, I thought to myself.
Ya gotta love it.

Thankfully, the ride to Masum Ghar was surprisingly uneventful. That was the problem with so many of our training scenarios back in Canada. In every training scenario back home, the
pretend
enemy who was waiting to get you always threw the kitchen sink at you, in addition to a four-litre jug of two per cent milk
and
your kid's plastic Dora the Explorer plates. It got you so paranoid that you started thinking, every time you left the wire
for real
, that you weren't coming back. How could you? When you got rocketed, mortared, snipered, IEDed, and shouted at by an angry mob every time you left the wire?

We arrived and passed through the front gate's cement barriers and watchtower. I thought about what my major had told me back in Canada. I was to get my team to Masum and, once there, find the outgoing OMLT major and get a briefing from him on the OMLT's SOPs (standard operating procedures) and on my AO. As a bonus I was also hoping to meet my counterpart, a captain from the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry (PPCLI) out of Edmonton, who would start his left-seat, right-seat handover briefings with me. We called it “left-seat, right-seat” because the guy was right there next to you, giving you the heads-up on everything you were meant to be coming up against. Many times we'd actually be fighting side by side; the outgoing guy and the incoming would be covering each other and shooting back at the enemy during handover patrols. Hopefully by the end of play that day I'd have a much better idea of what we'd be getting into and who we'd be up against, and I could pass the info on to my boys.

I used to give them what I called the
Rob Semrau Guarantee
, which meant that when I knew something,
they
knew it. I'd had officers in the past who were control freaks; they liked to keep the information (that they were expected to pass on to the troops) to themselves, thinking it put them in an elevated position of power, or some bollocks like that. My current OMLT major was a keen practitioner of retaining any and all information—and then at the last minute finally sharing the next day's plan with us.

I was a private once, and I knew what it was like to be treated like a mushroom—kept in the dark and fed on shit. I wasn't going to be that type of officer. My bottom line was to treat people the way I wanted to be treated. I read a book once called
Ethics 101
and that was its entire premise: follow the Golden Rule.

I walked over to the other vehicles and collected the warrant, Fourneau, and Hetsa. “How was the trip, boys?”

Longview looked up and said, “Uneventful, thankfully.”

“My thoughts exactly. Warrant, take the guys with you and do some old-school recce [reconnaissance]. Try and find your warrant counterpart; they're supposed to be on the ground here somewhere, waiting for us. For when we get to Sperwhan Ghar, find out the answers to the three most important questions to an infantryman: Where do we eat, how's the food, and where do we sleep? I'll meet you guys for lunch and we can swap notes. Any questions for me? Besides the obvious . . .”

The warrant looked at me with a quizzical look on his face. “And what's the obvious?” he asked. Fourneau and Hetsa stopped what they were doing and looked at me.

“How
do
you stay so damn handsome in a war zone?
Obviously!
” I slapped him on the shoulder and walked off in the direction of some buildings that had a headquarters air about them. A corporal said I could find the OMLT major in the main briefing tent and pointed it out to me. I rounded the twelve-foot-high blast walls and went inside. I stood off to the side while my eyes slowly adjusted to the gloom.

An older officer and a young sergeant seated at a large table in the middle of the tent looked up from the map they were studying and assessed me, hard. I wasn't wearing a beret or helmet so, in military-protocol terms, I wasn't supposed to salute. Instead I snapped my heels together and brought my arms down to my sides, the position of attention
sans
beret, and loudly stated, “Sir, my name is Captain Semrau. I'm the new incoming OMLT captain slated to go to Sperwhan Ghar. My four-man team just got into Masum a few minutes ago. I was told by my major back in Canada to find you here so that you could give me an OMLT SOP briefing as well as an AO briefing for Sperwhan.” The officer stood up and walked over to me, extending his hand.

“At ease, Captain. My name's Speers; this is Sergeant Little,” he said, turning and pointing to the sergeant at the table.

“Sir,” he said, nodding his head.

“Sergeant,” I responded, nodding back. I shook the major's hand. “Rob Semrau, sir, just came in on the Bison train.”

The major laughed. “No nasty surprises on the trip in?”

“No, sir.” I said. “The Taliban don't know I'm here yet, but they'll know soon enough!”

“Nice.” He pointed to the chair next to him. “Have a seat and we'll get started.”

“Thanks,” I said, and sat down on the hard chair. I looked at the map; it was huge, with lots of different areas and symbols marked out on it.

The major started talking, using his best “briefing room” voice. “After we're done here, I'll send you off to find Captain Stephens, the OMLT captain in Sperwhan you're replacing. I've told him to take you up the hill here and point out some features of Masum and its surrounding area, then you guys'll hop into some RGs [mine-protected armoured personnel carriers] and head over to Sperwhan this afternoon. Over the next few days you'll do some patrols with him, all the while conducting your left-seat, right-seat, and he'll be there to answer any questions you may have. For now, I'll do this AO briefing, then you and your guys can enjoy our fine cuisine in the dining hall.” He looked me over to make sure I'd caught all that.

“Sounds good, sir. I don't think I've ever been on the ground before with the outgoing guy, so this'll be a first for me,” I said, happily surprised. It was supposed to be that way, but for any number of reasons, it never seemed to happen.
This'll be a first.

“Yeah, I know what you mean, we've been trying to get this right for a while now but it finally seems to be working with our incoming and outgoing flights. He's a good captain and he's had some great experiences there, so use the time wisely and get as much out of this as you can before he's gone.”

“Will do, sir. Do you mind if I take notes so I can pass this on to my men?” I reached into my hip pocket and pulled out my trusty field message pad (FMP). You can't be a good officer without one or, better yet, several.

“Go right ahead. For now,” he said, pointing at the map with his pen, “we're obviously here, at Masum Ghar,
Ghar
being Pashto for
mountain.
Don't know if you knew that or not . . .”

“No, I didn't. I've been working more on my Dari . . .”

“Keep practising. Learn a few greetings in Pashto, what the villagers speak, but certainly focus more on Dari, the ANA's language. If you can't talk to the locals, your interpreter [terp] always can. But if your terp gets hit and you can't speak to the ANA, you'll be in a right shit state.”

“How are the terps, sir?”

“The usual—some aren't that good, and most are terrible. Okay, Masum Ghar is a sort of political hub for this AO. Whoever your battle group major is going to be in Sperwhan, he'll have to come here to the local
shura
[a meeting of local nationals] once every couple of weeks to discuss their never-ending issues. Obviously we've got our base here with some of the tankers, some artillery boys, lots of engineers, and some Afghan police. Also the QRF [quick reaction force], if you ever need them, will launch out of Masum to come and help you. The OMLT and POMLT [Police Operational Mentor and Liaison Team] here patrol the local area once a day, focusing on the bazaar, or market. We've had a few SIGACTS in the bazaar with some IEDs, a couple of shootings, and Masum itself gets rocketed and mortared almost daily from the surrounding villages and hills. We've done clearance patrols but haven't had much luck in stopping them.”

The major then gave me some very elaborate instructions for when I would be operating out of Sperwhan; conditions that had to be met before I could patrol, and some possible circumstances that could stop me from patrolling. He described several of the key local national (LN) players in my neck of the woods, who could end up either helping me or actively working against me, depending on what kind of mood they were in that day.

He elaborated on the contacts the Canadians had in the past with the Taliban: ambushes, small-arms shootings, rockets, mortars, IEDs. He gave me a very good heads-up on the type of action we could expect in the Sperwhan area. Apparently we weren't going to be bored there. The enemy had been quite busy trying to kill us over the last six months, and I was told my OMLT team could expect the same less-than-cordial reception.

“And here I thought one of the tenets of their religion was being hospitable to strangers in their land?” I asked the major with a smartass smile on my face.

“Yes, indeed—how terribly rude of them. You'll quickly find out the Taliban are what we call
hypocrites
,” he said with a big grin. The major sighed. “They'll murder their own people for smoking or drinking alcohol, but they'll produce ten thousand tonnes of heroin a year and then sell it all over the world to poison everyone else!”

The major then pointed to the map and showed me that Sperwhan was actually fairly close to Masum, only about five klicks southwest as the crow flies.

“As you can see,” he said, pointing at the map, “one of our problems here is the fact that we've got only one road connecting Sperwhan to Masum—Route Kelowna. If you look at the map, you'll see as you carry on farther west on Route Kelowna, past Sperwhan, that it's also the only road connecting us to our much smaller combat outpost bases, namely Hajikan, Talikan, Zangabad, and Mushan. Only one road in and one road out is going to lend itself nicely to getting IEDed all to hell, which is exactly what's been happening.”

“Sir, I thought the ANA were sending engineers to sweep Route Kelowna daily for IEDs?”

“They are. And they're getting ambushed almost daily as well. The Afghan National Army can only send a small team of ‘engineers'—and believe me, I use the term very loosely—kitted out with old American equipment that couldn't find an atomic bomb buried under the road. When they're close to finding something, the Taliban usually detonate it and use it as a signal to initiate their ambush.”

I'd heard of that before. That technique, not surprisingly, is called an IED-initiated ambush. The Taliban would set up an IED in the middle of the road and then lie in ambush and wait until someone stepped on or drove over it (or they might just detonate it themselves with a command wire or radio-controlled device), and then pop up and shoot the hell out of anyone who was still alive. They would use the shock and fear that often paralyzed soldiers after an IED went off (and the fact that everyone in their kill zone was most likely deaf and concussed from the blast) to mop up any survivors.

“Mark my words,” the major continued, “at some point in your tour you'll probably end up going to rescue the ANA engineers after they've been hit.”

“Nice,” I responded.
Poor bastards.

“Well, at any rate, you can see why the ANA has become so damn fatalistic. But back to the briefing. . . . In order to get to your base at Sperwhan from Route Kelowna, you've got to travel south on the only road you can take to get there. It's called Route Brown.” He pointed to it on the map. “It passes over three water culverts buried under the road, and guess what?”

“They get IED
surprises
planted in them daily?”

“You're a smart man, Semrau. You've been here before?”

“I fought in the Clone Wars before, sir, but only in Kabul where, thankfully, we didn't have to deal with any of this.”

“Well, you're in the
real
war now, son. But you'll get used to the daily rhythm of shootings, rockets, mortars, and IEDs. You'll get used to it, or go batshit crazy! Hopefully the former, but the ANA you'll be working with are supposed to be a good crew. You'll be with the First Company of 72 Kandak, 502 Corps. They've just come off two months' rest and refit, so I'm sure they'll be rarin' to go.” The major looked at me and smiled.

I wasn't sure if he was being sarcastic or not.
Would
they be good to go or not?

I suppose Yoda's words rang true when he wisely said, “Frivolous, speculation is, when patience will reveal all.” I always told Rich any time you could quote Yoda in a war zone, it was a good day.

The major wrapped up his in-depth briefing and told me to call him twenty-four/seven if I ever had any problems. I really liked Major Speers. That was exactly the type of briefing you hope to get when you're new in country, and I thanked him for taking the time.

His final words of advice to me were, “Give 'em hell and make them pay. Watch out for your men and stay safe. And let the ANA die for their country. Don't
you
die for it. Let them go first, let them take the risks. Learn when to mentor, and when to
act.
”
Good advice.
He wished me luck, shook my hand, and told me to go and get some chow.