Chapter 45
At the end of the day, the Afghans who had been issued knives were lined up, and the knives were collected. The count showed one of them missing. The Afghan who did not turn in a knife was held from behind and strip-searched. He didn’t have the knife, so was beaten severely. Blows to the nose, chest, arms, and mid-section rained down on him. He bled profusely from a broken nose, the blood running in a stream over his lips, down his chin and neck, and over his torso. Still conscious in spite of the beating, his knees sagged. He remained standing only because he was held up from behind. He probably would still be able to work tomorrow, but would be in pain for days. The guards had doled out punishment sufficient to make their point, but not so much as to make the man unable to perform his work in the fields.
The guards then systematically held and roughly strip-searched each Afghan, working their way down the line of those who had been issued knives in the morning. When they finished with that group, they started on the rest of us, working down the line from the left until they came to me. I was grabbed by the shirtfront and pulled forward roughly, by Jeremy Mason.
Using his one-handed grip on my shirt, he shook me violently. He slapped me across the face several times with his other hand. He stopped slapping me to remove his rifle that he had strapped over his shoulder. I presumed he did that to provide more leverage to strike me harder with a closed fist. “I’m gonna enjoy this,” he seethed nastily.
But he never got the chance. The Afghan man to my right lunged at him and plunged the knife into Mason’s left upper chest. Mason staggered backward a step, screaming, grasping his wound as blood spilled between his fingers. The Afghan followed up with a swing toward Mason’s neck. But his charge was abruptly stopped by the butt of a rifle smashing him across the bridge of the nose. He crumpled to the ground, bleeding but conscious.
Mason was wounded, yet it did not look life threatening. He would live, but was going to be out of action for a few days. PFC Jeremy Mason had messed up. He was so eager to get at me that he let his guard down. He wasn’t paying attention to the other prisoners nearby.
The Afghan was hoisted off the ground, held up, and beaten in the face and stomach until he collapsed back to the ground unconscious. The Afghan had to know this would be the outcome. With the shackles on his legs, there was no way he could get very far.
But then I realized that immediate escape was probably not the intent. It was resistance. It was retaliation. This was a battle of attrition. I knew a common ratio of prisoners to guards in a penal system is about four to one. Here there were maybe 50 Afghans and perhaps two dozen guards. That’s a ratio of about two to one. That seemed like a favorable ratio for the guards.
Yet, if each of the prisoners took out a guard, when all the soldiers were dead, or at least wounded too seriously to function, most of the prisoners would still be standing. Even if not all the guards were out of action, just taking out a third or a quarter of them would leave too few of them to do the job of watching over the prisoners 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And this was a more dangerous situation than a prison where all are contained within a small area. This valley was huge for such a small band of guards to control the situation. After a battle of attrition, the Afghans would have lost a lot of their numbers, but they would win. One for one, maybe even two for one, is acceptable when you outnumber the enemy. So many battles and so many wars have been decided that way. Attrition works for those willing to make the sacrifice of so many of their own.
While the beating of the Afghan was intended as punishment and deterrence, it would not deter desperate men who knew their remaining time alive on this planet was short. Besides, the Afghans grew up in a country torn apart by war, internal conflict, and invasion for decades. Intimidation was everywhere everyday. It probably didn’t work on them any more. They were accustomed to bullying and had learned to tolerate it, perhaps even to thrive in the face of it. So I suspected this would not be the last incident of a missing knife or an attack, regardless of the bad odds.
The guards were tense and looked ready to open fire, to wipe out the whole lot of us. But they held their ground, waiting for orders. That military discipline driven home by Lieutenant Gates was keeping them in check. Even in their rage, they also probably realized they still needed the skills of the Afghans to fulfill their dreams of riches. So we stared at each other unmoving. Lieutenant Gates made his appearance and surveyed the scene.
“Attend to Mason,” he said with concern. “Then get these rag heads fed and in the hut,” he growled in our direction. He glared at us for a long time, hatred blazing in our direction. Yet there was also a hint of concern in those eyes. This clearly was not the first time this had happened. He certainly had to be aware of the attrition strategy. He surely had seen it over there, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and now he was experiencing it again on US soil. He knew he would lose if it continued, but there was nothing he could do about it. Maybe there was a crack forming in this seemingly impregnable fortress.