No Worse Enemy by Ben Anderson
‘They’re using us’, said the captain, nodding again. He moved his hands between himself and the old man, symbolising an exchange. ‘That’s why this relationship is very important.’ ‘I’ll give you an example: if somebody belongs to a specific tribe, they will come to you and say that all the Isakzai tribe are the Taliban; and someone from the Isakzai tribe will tell you that all the Alokozais are the Taliban. They will be following their personal agenda – they might be better off in a chaotic situation. You should be very careful.’
The old man took a compensation form. Captain Peterson agreed a figure the terp thought was far too high considering the damage. Peterson said he was happy to pay it, because with it, he was paying for a relationship with someone he wanted to talk to often, and learn about the tribal politics of Sangin.
* * * * *
The frosty treatment I’d received at Sangin DC continued at Patrol Base Jamil. The first sergeant I met threatened me with ‘major, major problems’, if I made marines look like ‘baby killers’. I told him there was a simple way to prevent that happening; not kill babies. He still thought I was determined to paint marines in a bad light and needed to be scared.
The only way to get anyone to engage with me was to go out on every patrol, every day. Reporters, especially television reporters, often came to places like Sangin for only a few days and rarely ventured far from the bigger bases. It was easy to look good in comparison; the marines started to accept me and involve me in their conversations.
Out on those patrols, I came to understand how bad the IED threat was. Every patrol was led by a minesweeper; everyone had to walk in his footsteps. They left trails of bottle tops or sweets in case the footprints were too hard to follow. I was told that when we were ambushed, I shouldn’t dive off the cleared path, instead, I should drop on one knee, because I was less likely to be shot than to step on an IED.
It took the first patrol I joined over an hour to cross the main road that ran past the base. It took other patrols hours to cross a field; one patrol needed five hours to travel one kilometre. The marines often froze, scanning the ground in front of them for clues, shouting ahead, asking exactly where their next step should be. They trod so carefully they looked like ballet dancers. They almost never went along the paths but walked through the fields, up to their ankles in freezing-cold mud. There was constant talk, from the terp monitoring the Taliban’s radio frequency and the marines back at the COC. At the COC, they constantly monitored video from the drones and surveillance blimps above us. The blimps – like weather balloons with the latest long lenses and night vision cameras – reportedly cost $25 million and were described to me as ‘game changers’; they could track someone on the ground for days on end.
To avoid obvious routes, patrols used heavy explosives to blast their way through walls and copses of trees. Every blast shook everything around it and half the patrol disappeared in the dust cloud. Each blast took up to half an hour to be approved; they had to take photographs of whatever they were blowing up, before and after the blast, so they couldn’t be conned in compensation claims. Sometimes they blew holes in walls just metres away from a hole blown the previous day. On most patrols, the marines didn’t make it to their destinations because they ran out of explosives and couldn’t go on. The Marines had rejected the British forces’ tactics of putting small groups of men in a large number of positions, abandoning over half of the twenty-two bases the British had fought to establish. They wanted to ‘aggressively patrol’, to keep the enemy guessing and limit their freedom of movement. But this wasn’t aggressive patrolling at all: nothing is too disconcerting or disruptive if it’s travelling towards you at two hundred metres an hour. If anything, it seemed to be a gift to anyone wanting to lay IEDs (now being laid in three minutes, I was told), set ambushes, or evade large groups of heavily-armed marines.
According the the surveillance reports, small groups of Taliban were always watching us, waiting to attack. Snipers with supporting machine-gunners were never far away and men with rifles crawled across roofs. We walked past murder holes and abandoned compounds and skirted orchards so dense you couldn’t see through them. Marines had been attacked from these places before. In the distance, people moved, circling us, watching our movements, then disappearing.
On one patrol, the marines crouched in a field of cold, wet mud, dark as peat and crunchy with ice. The marines thought it was too dangerous to walk any further and decided to fire A-POBs across the field and up to a building with three walls still standing. A young boy, carrying a shovel across his shoulder, appeared within the walls.
‘Delta rashah [come here]’, shouted a marine, in Pashtu. But the boy turned and walked away.
‘Shoot him, I don’t give a fuck’, shouted Sergeant Zeimus, the squad leader. He was a small, permanently angry Chicagoan, who had covered up a nasty neck injury so he could come to Helmand. A marine lifted his rifle and lined up the shot. Then, possibly remembering that I was there, Zeimus added: ‘Don’t just shoot him, shoot at him’, barely a second before the marine fired two shots into the building.
‘Don’t hit him, alright?’ said Zeimus, after the shots.
‘I didn’t’, said the marine who’d fired. The boy had walked out of the back of the building. He re-appeared, waved nervously and slowly came towards us.
‘Hey. Tell him to lift his fucking shirt up’, shouted one of the marines. Another boy appeared behind the first. They both lifted their shirts, exposed their stomachs and chests, then turned and pulled them over their heads to show their backs. The first boy looked about fourteen, the second about nine; both carried shovels. They walked up to us and sat down in the field, suggesting there were no IEDs there. But the A-POBs were fired anyway, almost exactly along the route the boys had just walked. They said they only wanted to manage their fields and get water, then go home.
‘Tell them to go home now’, said Zeimus, ‘today is a bad time.’
‘NOW’, he shouted, when they protested.
The boys, got up, walked, and then ran, away. They were the sons of a man who had been extremely helpful to the marines.
Marines went out on two or three patrols every day. They usually walked out of the base, across the main road and around the neatly-divided fields of the Green Zone, sometimes for as long as eight hours. They took a different path every time, to keep the Taliban guessing where they should place their IEDs. One patrol decided to blast their way through a wall on the other side of the road, rather than pass through the small garden they had crossed several times. Dozens of Afghans in cars and on motorbikes were forced to wait as the marines placed a charge and then sought approval to detonate it. There was soon a traffic jam in both directions, because HQ couldn’t locate the wall on their map. ‘Jesus Christ’, snapped Zeimus, who was permanently high on Rip It® (a cheap American version of Red Bull, which marines drink by the crate), ‘it’s right across from the fucking base.’
Eventually the wall was blown and the entire platoon disappeared in a cloud of dust. The closest marines approached the wall and looked through the smouldering hole. ‘Holy fuck man, son of a bitch’, I heard Zeimus shout angrily. Beyond the hole was a thirty-foot drop into the field below. Nobody had looked around the edge of the wall, just twenty metres away. The drop was even visible from the gates to the base, where the marines had just spent twenty minutes waiting for the ANA. The Afghans waiting on the road were told to move on. I’d seen them looking utterly perplexed as marines inched slowly past, leaving their trails of sweets or bottle-tops. Now they looked at them as if they had finally lost their minds.
Embarrassed, the marines decided to go down an alley further up the road. They had avoided taking such an obvious route because it was so likely to be booby-trapped. Two marines nervously cleared a thin line down the middle of the alley, slowly combing the ground with metal detectors. Every time they got a reading, they dropped to their knees and delicately stabbed the earth with their knives.
An old man appear
A little boy appeared, then a family of six. As we stood, rooted to our positions, they walked around us in perfect single file, with quizzical expressions on their faces, then quickly disappeared from sight. Everyone seemed to know where it was safe to walk but no one was willing to explain it to the marines. Instead, they had to concentrate on every step they took, which I found exhausting. The marines maintained a focus that only people who had recently seen several of their friends maimed or killed by slight mistakes could maintain. One marine, a young, skinny, boyish-looking lance corporal called Hancock, had had more close shaves than most. He had seen three marines from his squad hit.
‘When we first got here I was in one IED blast’, he told me. ‘One of our guys stepped on one, Lance Corporal Billmyer. We were in a compound that we thought was safe, so we had our gear off. I was a couple of feet away from that one. And I’ve been close to four, or I think five, now. I was close to Lance Corporal Tinks and Lance Corporal Corzine.’ Billmyer and Corzine were now double amputees; Tinks, whose real name was Litynski, was a triple amputee.
Incredibly, Hancock used these close shaves to give himself courage. ‘Unless you’re stepping right on top of it, it’s just going to give you a concussion. Maybe if you’re a foot or two away it’ll rip off one limb or something, but if you’re five feet away it’s just going to rock your head a little. The first one dazed me a lot. It took a week or so to recover. But all the others have just been headaches, for like a week. Your ears will be ringing. You’ll lose hearing.’ I asked if seeing people killed or losing two or three limbs didn’t make every patrol terrifying. ‘It scares the crap out of you. I step just in footprints. Someone can say a route’s been cleared and I’m still only stepping in footprints. I hate going in alleyways, choke points, intersections. Every intersection we’ve been in we’ve either found IEDs or been hit by IEDs. There’s always going to be an IED, every day.’
One marine had asked his wife to send him some carbon-fibre underpants he’d read about on the Internet. All the marines took doxycycline so that if they did lose their legs, they wouldn’t get an infection. Some seriously talked about duct-taping their testicles and penises to their bodies, to reduce the chances of losing them to an IED. Zeimus saw the look on my face when I heard that one: ‘This is the way we have to think out here, man, this is the way we talk’, he said.
A few months later, the Marines ordered twenty-five thousand pairs of carbon-fibre underpants, in response to the fact that many of those who were hit lost entire legs or suffered horrendous injuries to their lower bodies, including their internal and reproductive organs. One marine, they said, had ‘his entire ass blown off’, as well as his legs. Double amputees, I was told, nearly always ask the same two questions as soon as they can talk: Will I walk again? Will I fuck again?
* * * * *
On another patrol, the marines used explosives to destroy some trees that obscured their sniper’s view. They also removed the long, grenade-filled sock from an A-POB and spread it across a bush. Only after they detonated it, sending a huge black and grey cloud hundreds of feet into the air, did the absurdity strike me; the special absurdity of blowing up a bush that would grow back as soon as spring came.
After a dozen or so blasts, the terp and an ANA soldier banged on the gate of the building we’d been crouching beside. It hadn’t occurred to me that someone might be living there but I heard dozens of children’s voices coming from inside. The gate screeched open and a woman’s voice said, ‘There is no adult male in here, you cannot come in’, then pulled the gate shut. Sergeant Zeimus ordered them to knock again. He’d realised that the only roof where he could put marines to keep watch lay within her walls. Eventually, the woman opened the gate again and was persuaded to let some marines climb up on to the roofs of some outbuildings in the far corners of her compound.
‘They’re a cool family’, said the terp. ‘Many kids. We get permission to come in and use their compound.’ The marines called the terp Rock, because he liked rock music. In among the marines, Rock looked like the happiest man in Helmand province. He sometimes tried too hard to please. Once, he ran up to me: he’d been ordered to tell the reporter what the marines were going to do. ‘We gonna fuck right in asshole of Taliban right now. Got it?’ he said eagerly, then turned back to the marines ‘OK?’ Rock was skinny, with bright, yellowy-green eyes and long eyelashes. Away from the marines, he revealed a sadness, at being away from his family and at seeing the suffering of the Afghans in Helmand province, that was heart-breaking. He was also sad that the marines and large parts of the rest of the world saw Helmand and thought ‘Afghanistan’. He was from Mazar-e-Sharif, which, he kept telling everyone, was a beautiful place with no war.
I counted at least fifteen kids, who trailed behind the woman wherever she went and gathered behind her legs when she stopped. The kids were dressed in bright colours; none looked like they’d yet reached their teens. The woman wore a black veil that almost, but not quite, covered her black and grey hair. The small amount of hair revealed was shocking in a place as conservative as Sangin. It gave the impression that she was a lone renegade, looking after all those kids and speaking to Rock and the marines.
‘Just tell the kids what we’re about to do, because I don’t want the kids to be scared’, said Zeimus, who had more trees left to blow up. A dozen huge explosions had already shattered the compound’s few windows and terrified the kids.
‘Everything we do is controlled and they’re not gonna get hurt’, said Zeimus. ‘And tell them that whenever they hear gunfire to go inside. Because sometimes the Taliban come here and shoot at us, so we shoot back. I’m gonna let the marines know there’s a family in here so we won’t fire in here.’ He thought for a second, then corrected himself: ‘We’ll try not to fire over here. Tell her I’m sorry and I don’t mean no harm to her.’
‘It doesn’t matter’, said the woman, ‘we have no options, God has made us helpless. We have many children here, we are scared.’
‘Let her know that we’re trying to help the country out’, Zeimus replied.
‘God sees all that we do’, said the woman, ‘God is kind.’
‘We need it’, said Zeimus. ‘God is, you know ... the answer, so ... tell her thank you and I’m gonna go back to doing what I’ve been doing. Let her know we’re just gonna clear some trees, then we’re gonna leave.’
Rock, who looked desperate to offer her something, said that if there were any damage to her home, she would be compensated. ‘I don’t want anything. My son has become martyred and I want nothing, all we want is for you to leave’, she replied.
The slow, grinding pattern of the blasts, and the headaches they produced, were depressing enough. Now I saw even younger children, who hadn’t dared to come into the courtyard, hiding in an archway, wincing at each blast. Rock spoke to the woman for some time, then walked towards me and took off his sunglasses. He struggled not to cry. ‘They’re sad because of everyday blowing up, fighting, shooting ... It’s so hard ... so ... this is life in Afghanistan, see?’ He swallowed and loudly exhaled a breath: ‘I hope one day ... become better.’
Zeimus walked back
Rock waved at the woman and kids as they walked out of the gate.
‘I can’t hear shit’, said one marine.
‘Neither can I’, said another.
* * * * *
On Christmas Eve, as the calls to prayer echoed across Sangin and everything was painted blue by the last few minutes of daylight, the marines were told that the Taliban number two commander in the district was about to drive right past their base. Everyone grabbed their rifles and jogged to the gate, putting on body armour and helmets as they went.
Several marines got into firing positions on the road. Others leaned against the wide, gravel-filled Hesco barriers that protected the base and looked through their sights. Zeimus screamed at a boy walking across the road: ‘Keep going, fucking idiot.’
‘That’s him, that’s him!’ said a marine. ‘That’s his blue sedan right there!’
‘We see it.’
The car slowed, turned right and vanished.
‘He went down the alleyway, man’, said Zeimus.
‘He saw us. That’s why I told you I didn’t want to stand here’, said one of the marines in the road.
The light was about to fade completely but the marines wanted to go after the commander. Rock was told to call the ANA and get them to come out, in case the marines needed to search the compounds the car had driven into. They refused, on the grounds that they hadn’t had a report on this mission. ‘Jesus Christ, this just happened five minutes ago we don’t have time to do reports’, said Zeimus. A motorbike sped towards us. ‘Slow down pal, before you bump into a 203 round’, said Zeimus. The bike, carrying two little boys as well as the driver, stopped. Next a white estate car pulled up, then another motorbike. ‘Tell them to fucking go’, said Zeimus, ‘they’re not bad guys.’