What the Taliban Told Me, page 2
I knew before I left that I would be flying on Whiskeys for at least some of my deployment, and maybe even the whole thing. Despite the Whiskey’s less virile image, commanders across Afghanistan were excited to have a gunship, any gunship, overhead during the day. The fact that I had never seen an MC-130W, much less flown or even trained on one, wasn’t important. DSOs are unique in that they can get qualified on another aircraft with just one or two flights, either stateside or in a combat zone. This may sound irresponsible, and it might be, but our job doesn’t really require all that much knowledge about a given plane beyond basic safety rules, escape routes, and the location of the pisser. That said, I still had to be trained on the Whiskey, which meant I had to fly with an instructor. Fortunately, there was an instructor already deployed to Kandahar: Ed.
Ed was a little high-strung, kind of twitchy. He was on his second marriage—which didn’t appear to be going much better than the first—on deployment number whatever-the-fuck doing a job that he had been poorly trained for, a combination that helped further his progression into an ebulliently stressed-out bundle of nerves. He talked too fast, expected too much, and, as near as I could tell, hated most everything, including, but very much not limited to, his marriage, Afghanistan, Afghans, deployments, and existence. Ed was a nice enough guy, and he usually meant well. He wasn’t necessarily disliked, but he wasn’t popular, partly due to his anxiety and self-seriousness, partly by virtue of being an instructor, as it’s sort of hard to like the person grading you.
Once you get to Afghanistan, you get one day or so to adjust to the new time zone. And so my first combat mission wound up being at the tail end of March 2011. Ed felt that it was going to be a good first mission, easy, just circling overhead a forward operating base (FOB). This would give me time to adjust to the new plane and let Ed teach me the few differences that mattered. I couldn’t ask for a better way to ease into finally doing the job for real.
We went to our mission brief, and stepped to the plane a little earlier than the rest of the crew. Along the way, Ed told me some of the differences between the gunships and the Whiskeys. How I wouldn’t have to worry about naked gunner hugs, as there were no gunners, just two loadmasters. How I wouldn’t be talking to the EWO and Nav, but instead to the CSOs (sizzos), or combat systems officers, the Whiskey’s hybrid FCO/Nav/sensor operators. How I wouldn’t have to turn around to see what the CSOs were looking at, as my seat was right in front of the monitors they used. He said that the cameras were incredible, basically HD, but given my experience with the gunships’ ancient and grainy black-and-white CRTs, I figured he just meant they were HD in comparison.
The base radio station was playing “Asshole” by Denis Leary, a favorite of Ed’s I had never heard, so he had me listen to the whole thing. He showed me around; taught me how to set up my equipment on a Whiskey; showed me where to piss, where to shit (the Whiskeys had this on the U-boats, an actual can). All the important stuff. The flight over to Kunar took a while, so we bullshitted about this and that and lamented the Kunari accent (in most Pashto, the word “yes” is either balay or balay ho or just ho. In Kunar, ho becomes something like “hhhhnyeah.” Dialects are weird.) Mostly, we just hoped that there wouldn’t be anything all that important waiting for us.
This was wishful thinking, as Kunar is an infamous part of an infamous country. Kunar is one of the N2KL provinces—Nuristan, Nangarhar, Kunar, and Laghman in the northeastern corner of Afghanistan—the area that has been host to most of the worst battles in modern Afghanistan’s history, at least on the U.S. side; twelve of the fourteen Medals of Honor awarded to American military in Afghanistan were for actions carried out in these four provinces. Kunar might or might not be the most dangerous of the four. It’s the most recognized, though, as it’s home to the Korengal Valley, known widely as “The Valley of Death.”
This name makes sense from the American point of view, given how many of our soldiers have died there. But the area is full of life. Eastern Afghanistan is mountainous in a way that’s hard to explain if you haven’t seen it. It’s not dissimilar to the Rockies, in that there are seemingly countless peaks, rugged and rough. But the valleys between the mountaintops are unlike any other place I’ve seen. They’re so deep that it’s hard not to envision an ancient god astride the planet, driving his world-sized pickaxe thousands of feet into the earth, jaggedly scraping out the land in one fell swoop, replacing what was once lifeless rock with seemingly endless life. The valleys, ten thousand feet and more above the sea, are lush and vibrant, often verdant beyond belief; the idea that so much life can flourish at such heights almost requires these divine descriptions, as it’s hard to believe that nature and time alone could result in such extravagant beauty.
The beauty of this landscape was brought to incredible life by the new cameras on the Whiskeys. As the precursors to the next-generation gunships, they’d had their sensors upgraded. These cameras are connected to high-definition, full-color monitors, making watching the world through the eyes of the Whiskey like something out of the future compared to what I was used to on U-boats. So I was not a little distracted while we were in transit, trying to process everything I was seeing, along with what I was hearing over the radios, as we started getting updates en route. A TIC—troops in contact—had been called.
“Hey Ed, uh, that means there’s like, actual fighting, right?”
“Eh, it means there’s shooting, but by the time we get there it could be over.”
This was meant to reassure me. Ed was calm and collected (I quickly learned that flying Ed was a much more controlled person than on-the-ground Ed), but I was pretty wet with flop sweat. And my dampness wasn’t being helped by the increasingly intense radio calls we were hearing directing more assets in the same direction as us. Soon, we knew we were close, and the CSOs started scanning the ground with the Whiskey’s cameras. But in those mountains, even if you’re flying at twenty-five thousand feet above sea level, you aren’t all that high above the ground, so you can’t really see down into a given valley until you’re directly overhead. When we finally cleared the last crest and got directly overhead Barawala Kalay Valley, there was plenty of life. And a lot of it was moving.
I looked at Ed, hoping to gain some reassurance that the madness below was just a product of my greenness, that because this was my first real flight I was just overwhelmed. But even Ed wasn’t calm anymore. Wide-eyed, almost a little slack-jawed, his forehead now glistening with the same sweat I felt streaming over my entire body, he made it clear that the madness was real.
“Yeah. It’s not over.”
Our wishful thinking had been in vain. The valley was swarming with men. With Talibs. Hundreds of them. At our altitude, we could see almost everything. Usually, this meant that we had a better understanding of the battlefield than the guys on the ground. But with this many enemies running around, it was more like sensory overload.
No one will ever be able to say with any certainty, but it’s estimated that there were three hundred or more Talibs fighting that day in Barawala Kalay. If we assume that only 10 percent of them were actively communicating over radios—think walkie-talkies, also called push-to-talk radios, the Taliban’s preferred method of communication—that’s thirty voices all trying to talk over each other while we listened. Under the best of circumstances, the Taliban doesn’t generally have the same level of radio discipline that we do. This was not the best of circumstances, not for them, not for us. When we started listening, it was just an onslaught of noise; Ed and I were inundated. It was eventually possible to focus in on a single voice or conversation, and hear things like:
“God is great, brother! We are killing them! We are killing them! Move forward, move forward!”
“Keep shooting keep shooting, we will go around!”
But we faced the same problem that the guys scanning visually did: There was just too much going on in the battle below. Even if we told someone that a group of Talibs were going to move up, it would be meaningless, as there were so many of them moving up all the time.
As the battle progressed, more aircraft were called in. The ground team undoubtedly would have preferred a “real” gunship, but because there was daylight, they only had us. But some fighter jets and their bombs came. Helos too, both Pave Hawks for medevacs and Apaches for attacks. When two of the Apaches arrived, we heard the Taliban yelling:
“East, brother! They’re coming from the east! The dub-dubs are coming! At least two dub-dubs!”
The word for a helicopter in Pashto, or at least the Taliban’s Pashto, being دب دب دبوکی or thing that makes the dub dub sound.
And as the Apaches carried out their attacks:
“The demons are firing, brother! Stay safe, brother, we are moving!”
Who knows how many drones were on station (this isn’t a rhetorical statement; it’s probably not known, what with how often they lose their connections and wind up just circling around at inconvenient altitudes). The battle soon felt like something out of a training simulation. While the men on the ground used their mortars, rockets, and rifles, the Apaches did their gun runs and fired their missiles, and the fighters dropped their bombs. One of the medevacs had to turn back after it took heavy fire.
The fighting continued for hours. Throughout, Ed and I tried our hardest to discern what we could from the voices, struggling to interpret the thick Kunari accent between the sounds of guns firing and bombs exploding, the screaming and yelling that are part and parcel of battle. We passed along any information we could, but truth be told, I don’t see how we were of much use. And even if we were, it certainly didn’t feel like it.
I watched a five-hundred-pound bomb land, turning what I’d thought looked like twenty men into dust. As I took in the new landscape, full of craters instead of people, there was a lull in the noise, and I thought, Surely now we’ve killed enough of them.
We hadn’t.
“Keep shooting! Keep shooting! We will kill them all! God is great! Keep shooting! They will retreat!”
“We are killing them! Move the others! They are still coming!”
Throughout the battle they constantly repeated variations on the theme of their success.
“Brothers, we are winning. This is a glorious day!”
“God willing, the monsters will all die today!”
“God is great, brother. God is great! Kill all the demons!”
Even if we couldn’t count the bodies just yet, it was obvious that we were killing so many more of them than they were of us. And yet, they kept fighting. More of them appeared on every hillside, our game of schwack-an-Afghan not going very well.
And still:
“Brothers, we are killing them! Go go go go go! Keep shooting! We will kill all the devils!”
“Keep fighting, brothers! We are killing all the monsters! God is great!”
Eventually, the battle slowed, likely due to a combination of us killing enough Talibs that even they felt it prudent to back off and the waning sunlight. We had to return to base as we were running low on fuel.
This mission, my very first, is the only one I know of that was captured on film, courtesy of a reporter embedded with the army at the time. What a video. It’s got it all. Soldiers, heavy and bulbous with their armor and ammo, crouching behind walls as the countless reports of the Taliban’s bullets echo all around them, firing back when they can. Medevacs flying in and out. An Apache firing its missiles. And the money shot, a bomb hitting one of the hillsides, the smoke and dust rising in memoriam, accompanied by all the cheering that comes from men being on the right side of such power.
What you don’t see is any of the Taliban; the footage is too low-resolution, the camera too far from the men who appear as ants on such massive mountainsides. They also aren’t the point of the video, despite their presence being the entire reason the video even exists. You don’t see them in their loose-fitting clothes, flitting about, running on rocks, occasionally using trees and brush as cover, but frequently out in the open, firing as often as possible. (If this contrast seems to you like a thinly veiled, sophomoric attempt at an allegory painting the American war machine as a galumphing giant and the Taliban as some lithe leopard, don’t worry, I’m not nearly clever enough for all that.)
I’d been “danger close” to 105 rounds. This is pretty far in training situations, a few hundred feet, but the rush of wind from the impact still knocked dirt off the truck I was standing next to. I’d felt the soil vibrate as an A-10 used its GAU-8 Avenger to rip up the earth, and I’d been shot at by SEALs as they drove into a compound (real guns with simulation rounds, think paintball but with automatic rifles). But these were controlled environments, and unless some terrible accident occurred, I had no chance of getting hurt, let alone dying. Despite having witnessed such fatal danger both from the ground and from the safety of my plane on high, and having had the added experience of hearing, via radio, the experience of the Taliban in real time, I still don’t understand fully what it was like to be a Talib on the ground that day. I know I don’t know, because even through static and fear and thick Kunari accents, they told me, even if indirectly, how they felt. And it was so absurdly removed from anything I could imagine.
How could they not feel like ants under the magnifying glass of our cruel godhood? How could they have even had the nerve to engage in this battle in the first place? What hope did they and their ancient AKs have against our LMGs and Apaches and fucking gunships? Yes, we were the invaders, and no, we had never successfully secured a position in this area, but like, wasn’t that only because we hadn’t really tried? What chance did they have of beating us if we gave it our all?
I knew, of course, that they would fight in the presence of a gunship, despite their name for the gunship being “bogeyman.” I knew that they would use their decades-old Russian rifles against our $30-million attack helicopters. I knew because I’d listened to training audio of conversations like these back in Florida, and so I thought I knew what it would be like to hear it in real time.
But while that training audio kept me from being completely overwhelmed during this mission, it was entirely different from the simultaneous hearing and seeing of the real battle. Sure, they were ants, but only insofar as they were swarming. Yes, their guns were old and busted, but they’d still managed to use them to make a helo turn back. And yes, we secured our position in Barawala Kalay, but for how long?
* * *
The next day, Ed sent me an email. All it said was “So you know this is real,” followed by a line break with a link to a news article and some names below it. They were the names of the Americans who died on our mission.
In the final tally, six Americans died, seven more were wounded, and anywhere from fifty to over one hundred Talibs were killed in action, depending on the source. (One of my enlisted performance reports, the Air Force’s annual evaluation form, chose to go with the bigger number. The more enemy combatants I had killed, helped kill, or at least been in the vicinity of when they were killed, the better.) Besides the medevac that was shot—it turned out the pilot was hit—at least six more had followed it in. The commander of the 101st Airborne went on to say it was their biggest battle since Vietnam.
Ed, it would seem, felt I did not appreciate the reality of the situation. At the time, I was insulted. Who was this fucker who spoke Pashto half as well as I did trying to tell me what’s real and what’s not? I get it, “You’re an asshole,” but you really think I don’t understand that death is real? You think I spent three years training for this job and didn’t figure out along the way that there are very real consequences to war?
I’m still insulted, and Ed is still an asshole, but now I can at least understand why he thought this was something he should do. To him, I must have looked completely unaffected by this utterly insane battle. I didn’t ask to talk about it or to take a day off from flying, and I came in the next day perfectly well rested. It wasn’t that I’d decided to not think about the mission, I just sort of didn’t. This was what I’d been trained to do. The Taliban were supposed to die en masse; some of us would die, hopefully less en masse; and we would facilitate both of these outcomes to the best of our ability.
So it would make sense if Ed felt like my puny virginal brain couldn’t fully comprehend the scale of the battle and all that had happened. Maybe he felt that because I didn’t have the same reaction he did, I hadn’t taken the mission seriously. Maybe he really meant well, and was genuinely worried that because I’d spent so much time in training, I hadn’t yet connected all the dots.
My therapist has told me that I shouldn’t automatically assume that people’s actions are negatively motivated; indeed, I should operate under the assumption that everyone is doing their best (thank you, Brené Brown, for spreading this delightful message). These conjectures are my attempt at this generosity. I must not be doing it right though, as I don’t feel any better and I’m still pretty sure Ed was being a dick.
That said, I didn’t yet know how troubled Ed was and how powerless he felt to do anything about his problems. Sure, there was always that solution, the one available to all of us, so he might put his 9mm in his mouth on occasion, but it usually wasn’t loaded, almost always had the safety on, and he had his kids back home to think about. He wouldn’t actually do it; he just wanted to know how it felt to have all that steel in his mouth. Instead, he would dutifully wake up, exercise, fly his missions, and when he felt that too many occupiers and not enough occupants were dying, when the cold steel was starting to taste too good, he’d go through the battle damage assessment (BDA) photos on JWICS, our Top Secret version of the internet, and get his emotional rocks off looking at bloody, holey, half-blown-up Afghans. These pictures are taken after missions and, according to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction (CJCSI) Methodology for Combat Assessment, help to “develop observable, achievable, and reasonable measures and indicators, including targeting measures of effectiveness (MOEs) and targeting measures of performance (MOPs) to assess the outcome of operations.” I guess pictures that detail exactly how much of a dead guy’s face is missing let you know how effective you were. Fifty percent of head left? Not good enough, aim better next time.
