What the Taliban Told Me, page 16
All of this is a slow, methodical process. For the CSOs, even with the incredibly powerful cameras the Whiskeys had, it takes time to scan a given area, decide whether something is worth looking at in greater detail, zoom in, and look again. If, during the time it takes to make that decision, the plane’s orbit puts a wall or building or some other thing in the way of their view, then they have to wait to come back around, and keep scanning. For me, thanks to all the bullshitting that fills the airwaves of Afghanistan, I had to listen to multiple conversations for extended periods of time, waiting in case in the middle of all the nonsense someone said something potentially incriminating, or at least interesting. Throughout all of this, we updated the JTAC with what we were seeing and hearing. This JTAC was, fortunately, nothing like the one outside of Kandahar, but he was still trying to build up a mental image of what we could see from on high, so we told him everything that seemed remotely interesting.
A little while into this process, one of the CSOs came across three guys working a plot of land. It wasn’t a very big piece of land, and since none of us were farmers, it wasn’t all that clear what these guys were doing, other than moving the soil around with hoes and other tools. When we relayed this to the JTAC, he immediately perked up.
“Say again, how many?”
“Three.”
“Do they have any weapons on them?”
“Uh, no, just what look like farming tools.”
“Fuck that, they’re up to something.”
This did not appear to be the case, to us. It wasn’t like this was a road that anyone would drive over, or a path that someone might walk along, so we couldn’t imagine the three guys were burying an IED. Plus, doing that in broad daylight would be ballsy, even for the Taliban. If they weren’t bomb planting, the field could have been an excuse for these guys to be together in one place so that they could plan something, without needing to discuss it on the radio, where it could be overheard. But seeing as how they didn’t have radios, didn’t have guns, and we couldn’t read their lips from fifteen thousand feet, as far as we were concerned they were three dudes working in a field.
“Recoil, what does the soil look like?”
“Uh, say again?”
“The soil, does it look freshly turned over, or older?”
We were used to thinking about freshly turned dirt when looking for IEDs, as recently agitated soil has a different heat signature to it than the area surrounding it. On a road, or by a culvert, there isn’t much of a reason for some random patch of land to have been recently dug up other than for the placement of an IED, so this was an effective technique when doing route recon for convoys. But this was a field that three guys were actively turning over in the middle of the day. There was no difference in the heat signature of any given part, and the dirt looked like all the other dirt.
“Hard to say, Oxblood. Seems like they’re working the whole thing.”
“Stand by, Recoil.”
The CSOs kept watching, and I kept searching for interesting comms. Maybe I had missed something or had deemed something unimportant that was related to this new development.
“Recoil, that field was untouched yesterday.”
At this point, we were all a little lost. But you can’t just ignore someone over the radio, and the CSO didn’t want to sound dumb by asking the JTAC to repeat himself again. So he just said, “Roger.”
“They’ve done this before, they’re smart. They know we’ll search the houses, so they go and bury the weapons they used. Then no one gets caught.”
This was a new tactic to us. It sort of made sense, though. Assuming the team had been there long enough, they would know the houses fairly well, and likely would have found any hidey-holes where a gun would normally be stored. Or maybe the locals really didn’t support this nonsense and wouldn’t let the bad guys hide their weapons with them. Just because we hadn’t seen it before didn’t make it impossible, and this guy had been shot at way more than us (which is to say, more than not at all), so who were we to second-guess him?
“Recoil, how many Griffins on board?”
“Oxblood, enough.” [Not what we said, but the actual number is probably classified.]
“Roger, stand by.”
Nothing had changed. The guys were still working in the field, I wasn’t hearing anything of use, but the JTAC was clearly riled up. The crew was starting to get energized, excited by the prospect of shooting. The loadmasters checked everything related to the missiles, and they appeared to be in working order. We were ready.
It was a little strange, maybe, that I hadn’t heard anybody on the ground mention us. There wasn’t much they could do to us by then, as we’d long ago destroyed all the anti-aircraft guns in the country, and MANPADs were few and far between (Man Portable Air Defense Systems—think classic shoulder-mounted rocket launcher). And even if they had something capable of damaging a plane, those things are limited in their range, and Whiskeys flew much higher than real gunships. I had long wondered if it was this, or the fact that we were flying during the day, or some combo, that explained why I so rarely heard anyone mention our presence. It was almost insulting, compared to the gunships, where anytime you showed up you were paid your due respect by the very, very afraid enemy.
When the JTAC came back on, he told us he’d gotten clearance from the ground commander for us to fire on the men in the field, based on a history of similar, nefarious activity in the area. The crew couldn’t believe their luck. This was an ideal Griffin mission. No needing to get the missile over a wall in the middle of some compound. No worry that the guys were gonna run away while it was in transit. Just three easy targets in the middle of an open field.
Firing a Griffin requires fewer moving parts than firing a 105. No one has to load a bullet, close a chamber, or really do much of anything physical. There are some systems that have to be checked, some buttons pressed in the correct order, but it’s very digital, this future of warfare. So when the CSO finally “hit fire,” it always felt a little anticlimactic to me, with my 105-filled blood. Were you really shooting if the plane didn’t buck underneath you, if you couldn’t taste the cadmium and lead newly released into the air, if there wasn’t a ka-thunk? And what’s with all this guidance or steering or whatever the fuck it is they’re doing with the missile while it’s in flight? When you shoot a bullet, once it’s out, that’s it, you either hit or you miss. No take-backs. That’s like, the whole point of aiming. It was far more stressful to watch the CSO oh so carefully direct the Griffin, with everyone worried that it would freak out and fly off in some random direction, miss the target, and, horror of horrors, embarrass us. But the Griffin behaved, and in the split second before it hit, I could see the relief on the CSO’s face, his excitement at a job well done.
That relief immediately turned back into anxiety the moment after the Griffin impacted. Instead of exploding, and incinerating the three guys into so much ash, it just sort of smashed into the ground. Bad Guy A, who had been closest to the impact, looked dead, or at least unmoving. Bad Guy B had had his legs blown off. Bad Guy C had been blasted a few meters away, and we figured he was dead too, the shock wave having turned his internal organs into gruel. Okay, so a little messy, but the amputee would bleed out, and the other two were KIA. The Griffin had worked.
“Oh, shit.”
The third guy was, in fact, not dead. As evidenced by his sprinting away from the field.
If we’d been a real gunship, we could have killed him in the next ten seconds. He would have been a squirter—a guilty person running away from our weapons, not because it’s human instinct to run away from the sudden explosions raining down on you, but so that he could then go get his own weapons and retaliate—not a guy sprinting. And he would have died a Talib, guilty by virtue of his execution. I wouldn’t have questioned the tautological nature of all of this, because I never would have heard anything that could insert itself into this perfect loop of logic.
Instead, we watched him keep running back toward the village. While we were telling the now more high-strung JTAC what the fuck exactly had just happened, Bad Guy C had apparently got what he went to find and was racing back to the field with a wheelbarrow. Even in Afghanistan, a wheelbarrow is definitively not a weapon. Which was upsetting, because if he’d done what we’d expected him to, and had something that looked like a weapon, it would have been that much easier to clean up our mess and kill him. Another guy was close behind him, and together, they loaded the newly amputated Bad Guy B into the wheelbarrow.
By this point the JTAC was seriously worried about retaliation. If all three of them had died, there’d be a chance that some locals would be mad, but what would they be able to do about it? And who’d be able to say that the dead men weren’t Talib, or at least the guys who had shot at the JTAC and his team the day before? Now the alive guys could call up their friends and swarm the village. So when they loaded up into a station wagon and started hightailing it down the road, the JTAC had us follow them.
It was only once they were in the car that I started hearing anything.
“Go, drive! We’re coming.”
“Oxblood, targets are coordinating with unknown third party.”
“Abdul was hit! We have him in the car! We’re coming!”
“Recoil, prepare to re-engage.”
“Keep going! Don’t let them shoot us!”
“Oxblood, targets are attempting to evade.”
“Roger.”
“CSO, DSO. I don’t think they’re going to get weapons.”
“What?”
“I think… Stand by.”
“Yes, yes, we’re coming! We will save him!”
“CSO, I think they’re just trying to get the legless guy to a doctor.”
“You sure?”
“I… Yes. They aren’t talking about weapons. They’re just trying to get this guy to help.”
“Oxblood, targets are not discussing weaponry.”
“Recoil, you sure?”
The JTAC wasn’t wrong to question me, as the Taliban has a sort of code for when they talk over the radio. It’s not an entirely different language, but they use what are otherwise innocuous words when they want to (they think) slyly talk about an impending attack, or a certain type of weapon, or what have you. The JTAC was worried that I was taking them at face value, not understanding that, for instance, they might say they’re going to get food, but food would mean bullets (hypothetically). Unfortunately for the Taliban, we know most of these words, so it doesn’t really work.
What the JTAC wasn’t considering, and what I hadn’t either, until that point, was that all of those words are in Pashto, aka the language of the Taliban. The guys I was listening to weren’t speaking Pashto. They were speaking Dari, aka not the language of the fucking Taliban. And while it’s possible that there were code words in Dari that I was unfamiliar with, I simply knew that these guys weren’t interested in retribution. They were interested in trying to get their friend to a doctor, or at least someone who could try to save his life.
It’s this knowledge that made being a DSO difficult. Memorizing all the definitions of words is tedious and time-consuming, but it’s something other people understand. Knowing that a given word in Pashto, once put into its oblique form, sounds like a completely different word, is maybe less readily understood, but explainable. The fact that words don’t exist in a vacuum—that how someone is saying something can be just as important as what they’re saying—is difficult to explain in English, let alone in translation. I didn’t have to know any code words, or doublespeak, or spy shit to understand that these men knew that their friend was dying, and that in that moment, trying to prevent his death was far more important to them than any payback.
During this, the CSOs were preparing to fire another Griffin, a far trickier prospect given that the target was now highly mobile.
“Oxblood, Griffins are ready.”
“Recoil, stand by for orders.”
Internally, just on our plane comms, we were debating whether it was legally okay to shoot these guys. Were they retreating? Or were they running away? Those are very different things. If they were running away, then okay, fine, they’re not a problem. But if they were retreating, didn’t we kill those guys all the time? Retreat isn’t surrender, and like the JTAC was worried about, they could come back, with friends (mechanical or meat-based). I felt that not only were they running away, they were trying to treat their wounded, and they were no longer a threat.
We were still trying to figure this out when I heard Guy B die.
Which, of course, I didn’t actually hear. What I heard was Guy C say, instead of yell, like he had been for the last however many minutes, “No, brother. He’s dead.”
And then the car slowed down.
So we didn’t shoot.
Contrary to popular belief, it isn’t illegal to shoot a retreating enemy. The U.S. Naval Handbook states that “the mere fact that a combatant or enemy force is retreating or fleeing the battlefield, without some other positive indication of intent, does not constitute an attempt to surrender, even if such combatant or force has abandoned his or its arms or equipment.” It also, however, states that “offenses against the sick and wounded, including killing, wounding, or mistreating enemy forces disabled by sickness or wounds” can be considered a violation of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Obviously, none of us had this information readily at hand, making the debate we were having that much more difficult, and that much more human. If these guys were bad—which was the assumption we had to make, given that we had just fired a missile at them, and any equivocation of their guilt would mean that we had bombed three potentially innocent people, which was, of course, out of the question—then by not shooting them we were putting the JTAC and his entire team at risk. If retreating can’t be assumed to be an indication of surrender, but the enemy either has no way of signaling their surrender, or just hasn’t bothered, given that they’re pretty busy with the whole dying friend thing, then the safest assumption is that they’re still active combatants.
If we had killed them, none of this would have mattered. We wouldn’t have faced any consequences, as it would have been our words, our intelligence, versus nothing and no one. Maybe some other villagers would have defended the dead and proclaimed that they were no Talibs, but we would have ignored them and stuck to our story, our truth.
The mood on our way back to base was about as far removed from the normal sense of celebration as it was possible to get. The air was heavy with denouement, but sans any of the traditional endorphins that normally prevented it from feeling like a comedown after a night of Molly and fucking, all serotonin and dopamine stores depleted, the ability to feel happiness gone with them.
What had we accomplished? I’m not sure the JTAC felt any safer, as now Guy C would be able to tell everyone in the village the horror story that was watching Guy B bleed out in the back of a station wagon, which was not likely to engender further feelings of hospitality, regardless of whether the villagers knew the JTAC had called in the strike. And that was just the immediate response. If those guys were Taliban, then Bad Guy C would be a hero, the badass who had survived a fucking direct-hit air strike, and the other two would be martyrs for the cause. If they weren’t Talibs, then they were just more innocent people in the long line of civilian casualties brought on by our fear and faith. Either way, we had basically just made a recruiting video for the Taliban. “Hey, look, they aren’t so scary, I survived, we can take them!” or “Hey, look, they’re fucking animals, killing our people while we just try to earn our living, grow our food. We have to fight them!” Better yet, “Look how scared they are, not even willing to fight us face-to-face.”
For my part, I had saved lives that day. But whose? Yes, they were speaking Dari, which in my hundreds of hours of experience was not something any legit Talib ever did, and yes, it really looked like they had been farming. But then, they were talking on something I could listen in on, which generally wasn’t associated with good guys. And who were they taking their injured friend to? Your average Afghan doesn’t have a doctor, or medic, or whoever the fuck on call. Should I have saved them? If I’d said nothing—not necessarily lied, just told no one what I was hearing—we would have blasted that car into oblivion. Maybe that would have meant some non-Talibs got killed, but wouldn’t the hypothetical end, the killing of Talibs, have justified the real means, the killing of Afghans?
The crew did not feel like they had saved lives, not any lives worth saving anyway. They weren’t mad at me, or if they were, they never said anything. I think they were frustrated that the strike had gone wrong, and whatever reputation they had been tenuously holding on to was now that much weaker. If they’d just been able to hit the car, then maybe they could have proved that they weren’t fuckups, that the Whiskey was a good idea, that they were deserving heirs to the gunship throne. So, when I put my foot down, and repeatedly said that these guys were harmless, that we shouldn’t shoot again, I think they felt that I was actively getting in the way of their mission. Or, at least, I worried that they felt this.
We spent most of the flight back trying to figure out what in the fucking fuck had happened with that goddamn Griffin. Yes, a Griffin is no 105, but it should be more than capable of killing a few humans. No, a Griffin is capable of killing a few humans, I’d done it. The CSO hadn’t missed, that much was clear. And the missile had in fact detonated, or there wouldn’t have been any damage. Did it have a light payload? Can only part of a bomb explode? Was this going to happen again? At some point, someone, one of the CSOs I think, came up with what we all came to see as the most plausible explanation: the soil. Regardless of why they were doing it, the guys in the field really had been working the earth. Most of the soil had been turned over, and the spot where the Griffin landed definitely had been. What if, when it hit, instead of hitting hard ground like normal, the Griffin had managed to bury itself a foot or two into the soft earth before it detonated? That would explain the lack of a normal explosion, the lack of fire and fury, and the lack of more dead dudes. It would also mean that we hadn’t fucked up. The bad guys, or guys, had just gotten lucky. Well, the one anyway.
