Westside
“I don’t want all of you to roll down you window, stick your weapon out, shout “Westside”, and start fuckin’ blastin’. That’s not what I want.”
This was one of the many deadpan lines delivered during the briefing given by the Sergeant leading our convoy from Gardez to Firebase Wilderness the morning after I arrived at the Gardez FOB. I can’t write about most of it because it was about tactics and techniques used in TICs, (Troops in Contact, the new phrase that describes a firefight), and about the Rules of Engagement. I’m not allowed to reveal any information about these, but I’ll give you a few more lines from the Sergeant.
“Communicating is important. This signal, …., means I gotta stop and make a call. I might wanna stop and call my wife or some shit, and say “Hey, did you turn the lights off.” Alright.”
(if we are hit by an IED….) “I want you to start helping out. I don’t need everyone gathering around if we’ve got somebody injured, saying “damn, he’s fucked up.”
(Discussing what will happen to a casualty) We have got medics, Painkiller, and Dr. Feelgood. If you have problems breathing they’re going to call me, and I specialise in that shit. I WILL get your fucking airways open. You’re gonna breath whether you like it or not.
“Prioritisation. Most dangerous to least dangerous. That means if we take fire from this side, on the mountainside, and we have RPGs, automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons, then prioritise. Take out the RPG first, the you go to the automatic weapons, semi-automatic weapons, then the frickin’ guy with the ninja stars, the guy with the baseball bat, the guy with the javelin, The woman with the high heel shoes, and then the badass who is running towards you. Prioritise.”
This guy was funny, and worked the crowd like a pro. Like a lot of guys out here, his humour was pretty dark. At the same time he delivered the Rules of Engagement 3 times to the soldiers, and emphasised the importance of following those rules. It did not sound like the trigger-happy Americans that I’ve heard about.
The place we were heading for is called Firebase Wilderness. It is somewhere on the road between Gardez and Khost, which means it’s on an arterial road from Pakistan into Afghanistan. This is an area where US troops have encountered 23 IEDs since June.
The convoy set off across another mountain pass, around 9,000ft, but unlike the road from Gardez which was newly paved and allowed fast driving, this road was a bloody dirt track. Initially we encountered brown-outs, where there is so much dust risen by the proceeding vehicle that you can’t see a thing, but as we climbed into the mountains the road was a real quagmire in places. There were jingle trucks, minivans, and all sorts of vehicles using this road that I would have considered impassable, but they all moved aside for the US troops. Snow started to appear along the side of the road, and the mountains overlooking us were white. We stopped near the top briefly, and the view was magnificent. I will say this again, it is such a pity this beautiful country is so ravaged with conflict, because I can’t think of a more beautiful place to explore if it was safe.
This was they first time I travelled in an American Humvee, and I have to say they are comfortable. They are wide, which means as well as giving good stability on these rough roads, there is room for all that super-secret technology that they pack inside. I still had room to just about wriggle my feet, and they best thing was that I was facing forward and could see out through the bullet proof windows. Much better than travelling in the back of an armoured car or Land Rover. The noise is surprising though, as everything rattles on these roads, and then you have a number of different radios squawking. I was travelling with a Lieutenant Colonel, and he took the time to give me a really good understanding of the area under his command, over all the noise.
At one stage we reached a total blockade on the road, where a Jingle truck had become stuck, and traffic had piled up in both directions as a result. The problem here is that Afghans will become stuck like this often, and then everyone refuses to give way to someone else, thereby creating a standoff. The US soldiers managed to take control and got traffic backed up enough so that our convoy could get through, and hopefully that broke the stalemate that had developed on this high mountain road.
We arrived at Firebase Wilderness, and it is a construction site. It was in its 5th day at that stage, but the 3rd Brigade Special Troops Battalion, 10th Mountain Division, that I am embedded with contains a large Engineers element, so the place was coming together fast. The base is a joint US / Afghan project, so there are ANA located here as well, and ANP man the checkpoints.
The Lieutenant Colonel I travelled down with wanted to climb to one of the Ops, so I decided to head up there as well. As usual, it didn’t look that far, but hiking up 150ft in full body armour and helmet at this altitude (7,000ft) is bloody exhausting. Once up there the ANA immediately jumped up from their Chai, which they seem to drink constantly, and assured the US soldiers that they were just taking a short break from their work. We then took some time to survey the view, which again is fantastic.
Later in the day the Lieutenant Colonel was due to attend a Shura (meeting) with local elders in a nearby village. I tagged along, and ended up shaking hands with about 20 elders in the District Governor’s official office. It was a crumbling hut, with a half-hearted sandbag wall at the front, and a tatty flag flying outside. The room had a patterned material pinned halfway up the wall, and the same material covered his table. Very stylish. The meeting was tense as the US soldiers had arrested 3 Taliban suspects in the village recently, and the elders were demanding that their young men were returned to them. Then the elders went on to say that the area was secure and didn’t require a military presence. The Lieutenant Colonel disagreed, and pointed out that 4 ANA were killed only recently by an IED. I didn’t get the feeling that there was love in the room. In fact I would go so far as to say there was barely concealed hatred bubbling just under the surface.
As we returned to the Firebase, the Lieutenant Colonel was saying that he does believe that they are making a difference in Afghanistan, although it is slow. But he points to the fact that the rough road we are travelling on will soon be paved, just as the pass I travelled on from Gardez has been. A new road allows more commerce in the area, and also provides security due to the improved response time of the military to any incidents. But he believes that the biggest difference will be made by the schools that are being built and funded. He says that if they can win over the youth then they can start to take away the support that an insurgency needs to function.
It started to rain as we returned to base, and I was assigned a sleeping area in one of the nicer tents. It’s very cold up here, so I broke out my new sleeping bag, and slipped it inside my other one. Finally, I got a decent night’s sleep.
Yesterday I arose early (5:30am) to find the poor bugger assigned to cooking trying to light a fire. Unfortunately his high tech electric cooking station had malfunctioned, and so he was going to have to heat water for coffee, and soup, over an old fashioned fire. The problem was that all the wood was soaked from the nights rain, so trying to get it to light took over an hour. By the time he had a fire going people were looking for hot water, but he had only just put on the pot, so the unfortunate guy only got harangued for the lack of coffee, and no appreciation for getting the wet wood to burn.
Having not learned my lesson, I climbed up to another OP to talk to the guys up there. There are ANA manning the OP, but US soldiers were also staying up there. These guys had slept out in their bivvy bags overnight, and woke up to find that the rain that fell on them for the first half of the night had frozen solid during the second half.
Later in the day I got talking to an Air Force guy (hereafter known as AFG). He had been in the military for 22 years, and we talked about the various places he had been deployed, and the difficulties it puts on spouses and families. (This reminds me, I have seen posters at Bagram and Gardez warning troops that the most common reason for suicide on deployment is a Dear John letter, and soldiers are asked to seek counselling for themselves or their buddies should they receive such a letter) The talk turned to this war, and he told me about the difficulty he had with feeling guilty when on his leave, sitting on a beach with his wife drinking a beer while worrying about his men and women back in the field. When he returned he discovered that two of his guys were in hospital following an IED attack. He was wearing dark glasses, but I saw him wipe away tears when he though I wasn’t looking. He felt so responsible for ”these kids” he told me, and he worried about how hard it is on them. But he also told me about a sit down talk that another group had after an IED attack, in which initially all the soldiers were angry about being attacked and the wounding of colleagues. Soldiers said that they were not interested in being friendly anymore, and they wouldn’t even give gifts to the kids. But after a while they calmed down and the next day they were out again, giving pens and candy to the children that flock to them everywhere they go. AFG said he was proud of the way that they handled these traumatic situations.
Then we got onto the subject of what benefits could be derived from these experiences, and the main one was an appreciation for life and a clarity on the importance of family and loved ones. He talked about how he looked forward to getting home and spending time with his wife. He also talked about writing the dreaded “death letter,” which he had only just written the previous Sunday night. This is an experience I am only to familiar with, as I did the same thing Saturday night before my drive to Gardez on Sunday morning. He said that a friend had advised him to do it, but that nothing had prepared him for the emotions it would bring out. He said it took him hours, and he was drained when he finally finished. But he said putting it all down helped him to clarify why he volunteered for this tour, and still believed he was doing good by working in Afghanistan, and that it was worth the sacrifice. However we both agreed that we hoped those fucking letters would never be opened!
John D