What the Taliban Told Me, page 11
And after the spotter reported the helo’s movement, I didn’t hear anything. Well, almost anything. Everyone I know who flew has tinnitus. Most of us don’t have it too bad, just a faint ringing in the ears such that the world is never truly quiet. It’s better this way, though. When it’s quiet, there’s nothing happening. When nothing’s happening, either everyone is dead or they’re about to be.
It was still quiet when the ground team started sprinting for the nearest wadi, ducking and diving into the ditches. We could see the dirt flying up from their boots and the bullets that were hitting the earth around them. What we couldn’t see was where the fuck the bullets were coming from. And then I heard them. The men shooting those bullets.
Talib 1: “Move up, they’ve gone to the western ditch. They’re running, move up!”
Me: “CSO, I think they’re to the east, back in the village.”
JTAC: “Recoil, what the fuck is going on, where are they?”
Recoil (callsign for a Whiskey): “Crimson 12, east of you, shooting from the village. We’re searching now.”
JTAC: “Copy, we’re gonna keep moving.”
It might be because of action movies and video games, or it might be because thinking about what was happening as something virtual was easier to comprehend, but in that minute of watching these men leapfrog from ditch to ditch, moving just like all the characters I’d seen in media with their crouched bodies, swiveling heads, and constant hand signaling, I felt like I was watching an imagining of what would happen when a group of highly trained men suddenly started getting shot at. It didn’t seem possible that this was what actually happened in battle, that I was watching this actually happen.
Talib 1: “Where’s the big gun? Is it ready?”
Talib 2: “It’s coming, we have it, it’s coming!”
Talib 1: “Get it ready! They’re moving again.”
Recoil: “Crimson 12, enemy is setting up a big gun.”
JTAC: “Copy. If they get it, our bird can’t come in.”
The team kept moving and got as close to their LZ as they could. But they had to stay more or less in the wadi or they would have been in the open, completely vulnerable. They talked to the helo pilot, who was willing to come in, big gun or no. But the JTAC had to decide if they were better off having the helo come in and risk it (the helo) possibly getting shot or stay and ensure they (the humans) definitely got shot.
In the next two minutes, nine events take place.
1. Helo lands and team begins loading.
2. We find the guys shooting.
3. JTAC says almost everyone is on and that he’ll get on last.
4. JTAC gets shot.
5. JTAC screams.
6. Talibs celebrate because they hit the JTAC.
7. We launch our Griffin.
8. CSO gets the missile just over the edge of a wall into the Talib-filled alley.
9. No more Talibs.
JTAC: “Recoil, where are they, what are they doin—Fuck, I’m hit.”
Talib 1: “Brother, you got one. Keep going! Keep shooting! We will kill them all!”
Talib 2: “Yes, we will, the gun is work—”
There are, obviously, many other things that both happened and were said, and while I recognize those as having occurred, in my brilliant flashbulb memories, those nine things are What Happened. I know they Happened in that order because no other sequence of events makes sense. The Taliban can’t celebrate shooting the JTAC unless he gets shot, and we can’t exactly have killed them without launching our missile. But in my mind, in those two minutes that I have relived hundreds of times—that I’m actively reliving as I write this—all of those events happened at once, having been compressed into one infinitely expansive instance of time. Partly, this is because some of them were in fact simultaneous; in all but one joined breath I heard the JTAC’s pained scream and the Talibs’ elated celebration.
There is one other event that could have been the tenth in that list or shared the spot of number nine. It happened the same moment the Talibs died/were killed/ceased to exist. We were all watching the CSO’s screen, waiting for the Griffin’s impact, worried it might miss. I can’t know what my new friend Blackbear (his last name is Black, and he’s big and snuggly, ergo Blackbear) was thinking in that moment; I don’t know what his face looked like before the Griffin hit. I was just as transfixed by the screen as he was. I do know, and will always know, exactly what he looked like when the Griffin reached its targets. Because when the Griffin impacted, one of the kindest, nicest, most soft-spoken people I’ve had the pleasure of working with leapt into the air, one hand in a fist pump, the other hand ripping off his headset, utterly unable to control his happiness at our kill. That moment is frozen in my head like the end frame of a 1990s sitcom.
This was (1) Blackbear’s first kill, and (2) a very good kill—you’d never know that two men had just been in that alley. There was nothing left of them. No pink dust. No legs melted to walls. No pools of blood glittering under IR, like so many modern-age spoils of war. Further contributing to his elation was the fact that this is what he, and we, had been trained to do: protect the ground team. And if that meant killing some Talibs, not just so be it, but hell fucking yeah let’s do it.
Except Blackbear was a loadmaster. He’d been trained to load cargo onto planes and make sure all the weights were balanced. The CSOs were glorified navigators, men who’d been trained to calculate bearing and speed, with a little bit of ad hoc camera operation on the side. And I was a linguist, a boy who’d been trained to listen to people talk. We were no killers. And yet…
The rest of the crew was, if not quite as exuberant as Blackbear, then pretty happy. I felt bad for the pilots, as they didn’t get to revel in the exact moment of death, having been preoccupied with flying the plane, but the video was recorded, so I’m sure they watched it later. We flew back to base, the hour of transit giving everyone time to ride oh so very high on our accomplishment. It had been a long mission, with more excitement than the prior week combined, but when we got off the plane and made our way back to camp there were no complaints about the flight time or worries about tomorrow’s mission. There was just this great sense of pride and exhilaration, the bond of bloodshed (well, hypothetical bloodshed; the Griffin had turned even that back into its constituent atoms) having further strengthened the crew’s relationship.
I had flown with this crew for dozens of hours by this point. They were far and away my favorite. But I wasn’t one of them. I’d flown with a different crew the day before, and when this crew went on to fly the next day, I wouldn’t be with them. I may have been “their DSO,” but a possession is not the same as a teammate.
Furthering the distance between us was the fact that they didn’t fully know what I did. I’m not saying that I fully understood their jobs; I have no idea how to balance a one hundred thousand–pound plane or determine the best route between two bumfuck points in Afghanistan based on weather and air conditions and all sorts of other shit I can’t even think of. But I could see what they did, and the results thereof. Most of what I did was a black box to them. And seeing as how nearly all of that “doing” happened in my head, well, that didn’t exactly foster camaraderie. This meant that no one else had heard, and no one else ever would hear, the simultaneous screams of the JTAC and the Talibs. Or the sudden quiet when the Talibs died.
I flew the next day. And the day after. The routine helps. It’s sort of like being programmed or being on autopilot (using this expression to describe being in the back of a plane has an irony to it that I find difficult to articulate). You have a choice, technically. You can choose not to fly. But that’s a little like saying Sisyphus could choose not to roll his boulder up the hill. Technically, he could, but then he’d have to admit that he couldn’t make it to the top.
Besides, if you don’t fly, then suddenly you have a lot of time to sit around and think. You can hide the thoughts, numb them, avoid them, but there’s only so much Call of Duty, so much gym time, so much porn out there. At some point the thoughts creep in around the edges. It wasn’t that I was upset that we’d killed them; they’d ambushed the team, purely as targets of opportunity. They were trying to kill us (even though the men actually being shot at were ten thousand feet below the Whiskey, it’s still a feeling of us; you sort of become part of a giant singular organism with enough time). We genuinely had been trying to do something that would have helped the village. So when we killed them, it was primarily an act of self-defense, albeit self-defense that we reveled in.
I was upset that they’d had to be killed. I was upset that as a nation we had decided that this was how we wanted to spend our resources. We’d convinced ourselves that if we gave enough Afghans enough stuff, they’d see the error of the ways of the Taliban, and if not join us, then at least not support them.
But how do you give people enough stuff to make up for all the lives you take in the process? We paid people, sometimes, for wrongful deaths, when their kids got shot during a no-knock night raid or we dropped a missile on the wrong part of town or any of the other myriad ways we “accidentally” killed Afghans. But it isn’t clear to me that we actually believed in innocence, at least not in Afghanistan. It seems that we estimated every Afghan as either with us or with the Taliban. And even if they were with us, there was a nagging suspicion that they were just one bad day away from going back to the enemy. We told ourselves that we had this suspicion because of the nature of Afghans, that they’re a shifty little brown people with no loyalty, who don’t know how to function in the modern world. But they aren’t the problem. We are.
For so many Afghans, a bad day consists of their house getting blown up along with the fifteenth family member they’ve had killed because of this war. It’s not hard to understand why they might want to get back at us for that shit. Or maybe their bad day is when, after having been promised a well, a few foolhardy fuckwits decide to shoot at the Americans in broad daylight, and the Americans decide that everyone in that village can get fucked, the well is off. That’s if we don’t decide to just bomb them, citing “increased Taliban presence.”
And then I realized that no, this was the wrong thing to be mad at. Not only was it useless, as my anger could do nothing to stop the U.S. military from carrying out its God-given mission, but it was also just the wrong way of looking at things.
The Taliban had forced our hand. They were responsible for harboring the people who had planned and carried out 9/11. They routinely infringed on human rights, and while maybe we did too, at least we accomplished something when we did it. What were they building? What were they giving the world? Fucking nothing. Killing them, ridding them and their ilk from the face of the Earth was the only way to ensure that no more JTACs got shot, no more girls got acid thrown on their faces, and this war could finally end. The only logical conclusion was that I should, in fact, be mad at the Taliban. Maybe they weren’t completely and utterly evil, but that sure as shit didn’t mean they didn’t need to die.
If I’d been on U-boats, it would have been easier for me to make this a reality, to kill as many Talibs as possible. Hunting humans during the day is very different from hunting humans at night. There’s far more chatter all over the electromagnetic spectrum when everyone is awake, and while it’s easy enough to differentiate Talib from non-Talib, I still had to sort through all that noise. Visually, a guy slowly making his way from tree to tree with a long stick was probably checking on his orchard. And a group of guys standing around could just be shooting the shit or deciding what non-IED planting work needed to be done.
At two o’clock in the morning, anyone who’s talking on a radio is all but guaranteed to be Taliban, or at least Taliban-adjacent. It’s also usually a safe bet that the guy trying to slowly make his way from tree to tree, three-foot object in hand, in the pitch-black countryside (not much light pollution in the rural bits of Afghanistan; lack of electricity and all) is up to something less than savory. And if there’s a group of guys congregating? Bad, bad dudes, who need to get got before they try and get us.
And so if I’d been flying on U-boats, it would have been so much simpler to make sure more of them died. On the Whiskeys, there was all the daylight activity mucking up our ability to say that guys on the ground were being nefarious, and there was the added complication of the way the seats were set up, such that I couldn’t readily look at the camera feeds without everyone knowing that I was looking. On a U-boat, I could sneak a peek over my shoulder and see what the sensor operators were looking at with no one the wiser. Then I could wait a few seconds, act like I was concentrating real hard, take down some notes, and then tell the crew that I had heard something.
“Nav, DSO, I have multiple Taliban coordinating movement south toward a village.”
“Nav, IR, I have three MAMs moving south toward the village.”
“JTAC, Spooky, we have ICOM and visual on a group of MAMs moving toward your position.”
“Spooky, copy… Cleared hot.”
Or, in English:
“Hey, Navigator, Fritz, the DSO, here. I’m hearing some guys who sound like Taliban coordinating movement south toward our village.”
“Hey, Navigator, infrared camera operator here, I’m seeing three shifty-looking dudes moving south toward the village.”
“Hey, Special Operator guy on the ground, we’re hearing some bad dudes talking on the radio [ICOM] about moving toward you, and we’re watching a group of three men move toward you on our disconcertingly old and yet still highly effective cameras.”
“Hey, gunship, thanks for letting me know… Kill those fuckers.”
And my invented intelligence, combined with what the sensors were seeing, would be enough for the JTAC to call in the strike. And then we’d shoot them, and it would be a good, clean kill, and I’d have helped remove some evil from the world, probably saved some future lives, and most importantly, killed some more fucking Talibs. The ethics would be redundant, and uninteresting. We all knew those were bad dudes, there was just dumbass formality shit getting in the way of killing them. Who’s to say I wouldn’t have heard them coordinating their movements later? Why wait? I was doing them a favor, making sure they didn’t die tired.
If I already feel that what I did weakened the tethers of whatever it is, spirit or otherwise, that anchors me to this world and you people in it, shouldn’t I regret not sucking it up and taking this to its logical conclusion? Wouldn’t I have been worth the erasure of even a little more of their evil? Wouldn’t I be a fine price to pay to bring about a sooner end to their regime, to the war, to all this god-forsaken fucking fighting? Wasn’t I enough?
I didn’t fly on U-boats that deployment. There was a chance I could have, but the way the hours and mission requirements were working out, I didn’t switch over. I’m still not sure if that’s a good thing. On some abstract level I know that not murdering men—for this is what it would have meant for me to invent whole-cloth things that I was hearing, such that we could, without impunity, shoot those little black-and-white silhouettes moving back and forth across the screen—is better for my humanity, or spirit, or whatever it is that’s supposed to keep me attached to this side of the ether. But I also know that in the moment, killing them would have felt good in a way that nothing else ever has or likely will. I know that doing this once would have been a slippery slope into doing it on the next mission, and the one after that, and that I would have been praised for the incredible skill I displayed in finding the enemy and bringing about their demise. I know that some people might have questioned this, but that the machinery of war, the celebration of killing, the fact that the greater the number of enemies killed in action the happier the officers above me would be, as this was one of the ways they could ensure their promotion—that all of this would have protected me from any serious investigation, and that I could have gotten away with night after night of slaughter.
What I don’t know, what I still haven’t figured out, is whether doing this would have been better for the world. What if after the ecstasy of execution comes the fallout of fratricide? What if I realized that murdering a man, be he Talib or not, is still to murder another human, another person that I’m related to, that I’m supposed to be connected to? So what if by choosing to kill him I forever ensured my removal from the brotherhood of good humans? Knowing what I know, or knew—or I guess I’m not sure I still know but most definitely at the time knew—that there are some people who are akin to things, who can’t be reasoned with, or made to see the light, and that sometimes, or maybe even most of the time, the only thing to do with those people-things is to kill them—not remove them, or separate them, or some other humanistic and liberal attempt at saving their useless lives, but kill them—if, when I knew this, I did this, it would have been a Good thing to have done. Now, if I no longer know this, and had done it, what would it have been? And what would it be?
* * *
To this day, I don’t know how this attack got planned. The village elder must have had notice that the team was coming in, and presumably he told most of the village so that they wouldn’t freak out when yet another American helicopter was seen heading toward them. I have to think, or at least hope, that the attack was planned before we showed up. Because if they were planning it that day, coordinating over radios (like they usually do), and I didn’t hear it, then I’m at least partially responsible for that JTAC getting shot.
Except, I’m not. I’m really not. I did my job that day exceptionally well. My Pashto was at its peak; I had finished language school recently enough that I still had a large vocabulary fresh in my mind, but I had also had enough missions that I’d heard real conversation in and out of combat and could follow what was being said through all the surrounding chaos. I translated everything the guys attacking said in as near to real time as it was possible for me to get. I relayed the important information and kept the bullshit to myself. It’s not unlikely that this mission was the first time I had done my job perfectly right. If there is blame to be had, I don’t deserve any of it.
