‘Taking effective fire from Building 89 and Kilo 22’, said Young into his radio. ‘One shooter on top of the roof, we spotted him, we’re gonna take a LAW shot and knock him out.’
I ran behind the short wall surrounding the mosque. Three marines fired at the brown rooftop; one was ready to fire the LAW rockets. Occasionally they stopped, and ducked behind the wall as bullets cracked through the air around them. As one of the marines got ready to fire the rocket, another screamed: ‘DO NOT FIRE THE LAW! NAZIR, COME HERE!’ Nazir, one of the Afghan soldiers, was sitting cross-legged alongside the wall, right behind the rocket. He’d have been badly burned, at the very least, if he stayed there. Nazir got up and ran towards me. The marine got ready to fire the rocket again and the others ducked down and put their fingers in their ears. Suddenly, we were covered in dust and the air was sucked from around us. Everyone looked over the wall. ‘We got a hit, that’s a confirmation hit.’ Then another bullet cracked over our heads and we ducked again. One of the marines who’d been next to the firing rocket ran back towards the mosque. ‘I can’t hear anything’, he said, holding his ears and keeling over.
‘Keep eyes out in that direction’, screamed Young, ‘a group is moving and we’re taking sporadic shots from that direction. Get out of the mosque. If you can’t get cover, back out.’ In the middle of a battle, they remembered their cultural sensitivity training. I thought having gunfights in people’s gardens was probably more offensive than entering mosques but didn’t think it was a good time to raise the point.
The battle died down inconclusively. The Taliban had probably run out of ammunition, dropped their weapons and retreated. They could have walked right past the marines a few minutes later and not been touched.
We lined up to climb over the wall into the compound from where the old man had appeared. An Afghan soldier stood right next to a marine who was lifting people up and over the wall but didn’t want any help. The marine looked at him: ‘Get out of my way or I’m gonna punch you in the face.’
I looked over and saw ANA soldiers were searching the old man, yanking him roughly by his waistcoat. I also saw the kid they’d spotted earlier, complaining, shouting and gesticulating wildly. He was about three feet tall and looked about six years old but his hand gestures were those of a fully-grown man with attitude; a New Yorker arguing or an Italian football player protesting against a referee’s decision. As the marines stabbed sacks with their knives, looking for ammonium nitrate, the terp asked the old man and the kid if the Taliban had forced themselves into their home.
‘Yes, they did’, said the old man.
‘It’s like with you’, said the kid. ‘If you slit our throats, what can we do about it?’ He raised his right hand, twisted it clockwise and opened it, as if to say, ‘Are you stupid?’
‘What were they wearing?’ asked the terp.
‘I don’t know. Something like this’, said the kid, grabbing the old man’s tattered green shirt. He looked disgusted at the level of questioning.
‘Did they have Kalashnikovs?’
‘Yes’, said the old man, who still instinctively held his hands in the air.
‘Come on, pops’, said the kid, leading the old man away.
A few minutes later, a marine turned, in shock. ‘He just called me a motherfucker’, he said, laughing. ‘The little son of a bitch.’
A large black dog approached, barking. The kid spun round and ran towards it, picking up a rock on the way. ‘Go away, dog’, he shouted, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ The dog cowered and the kid threw the rock, hitting the dog hard in the ribs. ‘Take that.’
‘He is twenty years old’, said one of the terps.
‘Is he a midget or something?’ said one of the marines.
‘Is he really twenty years old?’ said another.
The kid, Mohammad, was actually a man and really was twenty years old. He was a dwarf and a heroin addict. He’d been a refugee in Iran for five years but had recently returned to Marjah; one of the approximately two million Afghans who’d fled from the Taliban but returned after their overthrow, expecting peace and prosperity.
‘That’s freaky’, said one of the marines.
‘The Taliban ran out of ammunition’, said the old man. ‘They threw down their guns and left.’
‘We’ll stay here’, said Mohammad. ‘I’m a tough guy. Fuck the Taliban! And fuck their mothers!’
‘Why don’t you seal off both sides and search in the middle?’ asked the old man, demonstrating with his hands.
‘Tell him we’re going to find the Taliban’, a marine said, ‘and we’re going to kill whoever needs to be killed.’
Mohammad walked up to Qadaat and another ANA soldier, who were keeping watch through a gate. They were on their knees, so as Mohammad berated them, they were face to face. ‘I am a Baluch [the region of Baluchistan straddles the borders of Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan]. It’s five years since I’ve been back here. We came back for work’, he said. ‘I ask you for money but you do nothing to help, what can I do?’
Qadaat smiled. ‘We’re here to get rid of the Taliban, we’re here to help you. Build schools and lots of other things.’
‘Right’, said Mohammad, disdainfully. ‘Thanks a lot.’
He looked down the alley and stared up at the marines around him, one at a time, as if they were just the latest bunch of men who were going to make his life miserable.
Captain Sparks appeared. Mohammad’s appearance threw him for the briefest of seconds, then he stepped around him. He joined Young, the terp and the old man at the end of the alley, next to a door that marked the edge of the cleared ground. The terp and the old man began an intense conversation both speaking at the same time.
‘What’s he saying?’ asked Captain Sparks. The terp continued the conversation. ‘Tell us what he is saying.’ The terp went on speaking in Pashtu. ‘NO, no, no. It’s not for you to talk, you need to tell us what he’s saying’, demanded Sparks.
‘We don’t want to move, he says’, said the terp.
‘He doesn’t have to move’, said the captain.
‘His family is over there and he wants to stay with them’, said the terp, pointing through the door and along the path.
‘He doesn’t have to move’, said the captain again.
‘We want to know if it’s safe to move out there. Are there any more Taliban bombs?’ said Young.
Figure 2 Operation Mushtaraq (© Google 2011; Image © Digital Globe 2011)
The old man had started explaining there were no bombs, when Mohammad, who had followed Captain Sparks up the alleyway, sprinted through the door. ‘No, no, no, don’t go, don’t go’, yelled the terp, trying to grab him. But Mohammad was too quick. He made it to the other side, turned and ran back. ‘There’s nothing, no mines’, he said, talking as if everyone were stupid. The old man wanted to walk across too, to be with his family. ‘He’s free to go wherever he wants’, said Captain Sparks. The old man and Mohammad walked through the door and across a small bridge before turning into the next compound, the last one that Bravo planned to clear that day. The ANA followed and then the marines ran out, darting in different directions, going down on one knee and looking through their rifle sights.
Inside the compound was a family of three men and over a dozen kids. One man, crouching in front of a huge pile of harvested opium poppies, held an enormous dog in a neck lock to stop it barking. Another carried a baby wearing an all-in-one suit; with the hood covering its head and a cone shape over its feet, the baby looked like a mermaid. The men were patted down as the marines walked around their home, checking for IEDs or weapons.
‘Who’s the elder? Who’s the guy I want to talk to?’ asked a marine. The terp pointed to an older man, who held the baby in the mermaid suit. Two boys and a young girl walked from the back of the building. The boys smiled as they were searched. The women were hidden somewhere.
‘Have the Taliban been here?’ asked the marine.
‘Yesterday, they we
re in the yard around our house but they haven’t been here today’, said one of the elder’s sons. The elder walked past me, still holding the baby, gesticulating towards a small room next to the gate. ‘Look! This is where we make our bread.’ He disappeared inside and came out with a piece of thick, round bread. He pretended to take a bite out of it, before offering it to me. He had one of the kindest smiles I’ve ever seen, so kind I was instantly convinced he’d offer the piece of bread if it were the last thing he had. He wore a beaten-up old purple jumper with holes over a tatty green jumper, followed by a dusty green waistcoat. His turban had once been white but was now the same colour as the mud walls.
He put both the baby and the bread on the ground and excitedly reached into his pocket. ‘Card, card’, he said. The baby started crying. A gorgeous little girl, with dark red hair and a bright green headscarf, walked over and picked it up. She was probably no more than eight years old but knew how to look after the baby on her own.
The old man pulled out a small bundle, unwrapped several layers of cloth and handed over a card bearing his photograph in the bottom right corner and the Afghan flag in the top left. ‘This is an ID card’, said the terp, ‘a vote card.’
Outside the main building, one of the man’s sons and Mohammad were talking to a terp and the marines’ intelligence officer. ‘Tell your jets no to bomb this place’, Mohammad told them. The terp spoke over him. ‘Hey, are you listening to me?’ demanded Mohammad. The son smiled at him, bent down and gently pressed his hand against Mohammad’s, urging him to be quiet.
‘We’ve been stuck in the house’, said the son. ‘We listened to the radio and they said to stay indoors. We haven’t been able to go and wash at the mosque. We’ve had to wash like women.’ When they’d finished, I asked him what life in Marjah had been like under the Taliban. ‘When the Taliban governed, there were no robberies. And they ran quick and fair tribunals to settle disputes. If you left them alone, they left you alone.’ An Afghan soldier who understood Pashtu listened and didn’t look the least bit surprised.
I’d heard so much about life in Marjah under the Taliban that I asked everyone I could what it had been like. They all said similar things. ‘It was fine’; ‘it was not like under the government’; ‘there was no crime, no thieves and no robberies’. The only bad things I heard about the Taliban were that they smoked too much marijuana and didn’t spend enough time with their families.
The sound of gunfire filled the air above us. The family ran inside.
Some marines ran outside to see where the firing was coming from. Others smashed firing holes through the compound walls. Everyone else went into the house, with the family. The son who’d told me about life under the Taliban sat on a sack of seeds. He asked Mohammad to join him: ‘Come, come, have a cigarette’, he said, patting the sack next to him.
‘We’ve been living in constant anxiety’, the elder told me. ‘We thought the Taliban would beat us or the government would come and bomb us. We’re stuck in the middle, so we hide indoors, worried about the bombings.’
Mohammad took a cigarette and asked the marines if he could smoke. They told him of course he could, appearing to think this was his first time. He lit up and started smoking like a trooper, making a show of it and enjoying being the centre of attention. Faces eased every time they looked at him. I could still hear marines whispering to each other that he was twenty years old. ‘He’s got a cigarette in his right hand, imagine a prison shank in his left’, said one. Others joked that they wanted to put him in their backpacks and give him a pistol, so he could protect them. But their jokes were made discreetly and Mohammad didn’t know about them. The ANA had no fears about political correctness. They picked him up and showed him around. At one point they put him in a kind of swinging basket that hung in the middle of the corridor, which infuriated him.
Four children stood in a corner, transfixed by everything the marines did and said. After months of rumours and fear, here they were, laughing, joking and handing out sweets in the children’s very own home. Everyone had expected much worse. One man said he’d been told the marines would eat his children.
Janofsky took the elder to one side. He wanted to rent a room for himself and his squad for the night. The elder kept saying he was afraid of the helicopters.
‘The helicopters are on our side and when you’re in here, you’re on our side too, so the helicopters are here for you too’, said Janofsky.
The man bent down and touched his sacks of seeds, begging the marines not to take them. Janofsky assured him that no marines would take any of his food. ‘We’re here to provide security to you and the people of Marjah’, he said.
‘All we have here is tea and bread’, the man replied. He couldn’t grasp the idea that armed men had entered his home but wouldn’t hurt him or steal his food.
Janofsky looked confused too. All he wanted was ‘just to rent his place for the night’.
The interpreter wasn’t helping: ‘You should leave this house and go away’, he told the old man, totally mistranslating what Janofsky had said.
The man’s kind and pleading smile dropped into a look of absolute terror. He couldn’t speak. He thought he and his whole family had been handed a death sentence.
‘There is fighting so you shouldn’t be here’, added the terp nonchalantly.
‘Where can I go? What if you bomb us?’ asked the man, panicking.
Janofsky sensed the terror in the man’s voice and asked what he was saying.
‘Where should we move?’ said the terp.
‘Who should move? No, they’ll be OK to stay here with us, for tonight’, said Janofsky, confused.
‘OK, you can stay here’, said the terp, casually, as if he’d been abusing his power just for the fun of it. The old man had almost been reduced to tears.
More bullets cracked over the compound. One smashed through a window and sank into the high walls of the corridor above our heads.
We sat down and started talking. The sons made everyone glasses of tea. You could hear the deep piston thuds of guns being fired outside but everyone had stopped noticing. The family weren’t going to be turfed out of their homes to face the bombs, their babies weren’t going to be eaten and nothing would be taken. There was a delightful sense of relief throughout the room. For an hour or so, everyone enjoyed being in each other’s company. Marjah seemed not such a difficult place to be.
On the marines’ maps, the compound where we were was called La Mirage. It was one of several strange names I’d heard. Other houses were called Toby’s, the Cave, Cherry’s and Heroes. It wasn’t until I was in North Carolina, some months later, on my way to Camp Lejuene, 1/6 Marines US base, that I realised where the names came from. I drove past a warehouse surrounded by cars; it looked like Tony Soprano’s strip club. It actually was a strip club and I looked at the sign to see if it was named the Bada-Bing. But it was La Mirage. When I’d passed the Cave, and later Cherry’s, I realised the Marines had named the landmark buildings of Kuru Charai after North Carolina’s titty bars.
Janofsky and First Squad stayed in the house overnight. Everyone else had to make a mad dash back through the four buildings they’d fought their way through earlier on. The first two were easy; it was possible to go through them without ever leaving the protection of their high mud walls. But as soon as we entered the mosque compound, the crackle of machine-gun fire filled the courtyard and everyone darted under the covered porch. The fire was so great it felt like a giant was throwing huge fistfuls of stones against the mosque. Marines on either side of me fired into different parts of the pork chop, the densely-populated area the marines had still to clear, suggesting we were being attacked from two different positions.
Whenever anyone stepped into the courtyard, there came another ear-piercing crackle of shots. The four marines next to me lined up and took hand grenades out of their pockets. Hand grenades? I thought to myself. They don’t still throw hand grenades, do they? And anyway, the enemy can’t be th
at close. I thought they were over a hundred metres away. I’d been telling myself, as I always did when I heard that awful cracking sound, that the Taliban were terrible shots, that they didn’t know how to use their sights and if they did, their guns were so old the sights would be no good anyway. But they were a hand grenade’s throw away? A child could be on target at that distance. The four marines ran across the courtyard and threw their grenades over the wall in front, not behind, where most of the firing had been coming from. They’re over there as well? We’re surrounded? Again?
‘Frag out!’
‘FRAG OUT!’
‘FRAG OUT!’ The marines tossed their grenades, cackling with delight as they exploded.
The gunfire continued and soon, the courtyard was covered in broken glass and hot bullet cases. Every time the marines fired, someone replied with greater fire. Then it stopped. The Taliban seemed to have worked out that if they launched attacks from several positions at the same time, they had a good few minutes before they were in serious danger. One by one, we sprinted across the courtyard, over a wall, across a ditch, over another high wall and into the last compound before the base.
* * * * *
Back at the base, Captain Sparks wrestled with the biggest surprise of Marjah, the highly-skilled snipers. The tiny roof I’d seen being turned into a watchtower was now walled with sandbags but even so, a marine had been shot there. Two marines had been shot on the roof of the main building. The snipers were in well-concealed positions, roughly three hundred metres from the base. One sniper had fired just four bullets during those first two days and hit three marines. Locating someone so patient was hard enough but there were also marksmen nearby, who followed each sniper’s shot with a few single shots from their AK47s, confusing anyone who thought they knew roughly where the first shot had come from.
Captain Sparks stood outside the base, trying to work out the sniper’s positions. There was another crack. ‘Did he just shoot the sandbag? It sure looked to me like he shot the sandbag’, he said. ‘He did’, said a marine in front of him. Sparks had walked out of the big double doors that led into the courtyard and stood on the verandah, studying the watchtower. In front of him were a line of marines in full combat gear. It looked ceremonial; as if a king had come out of his palace to survey his land and the sentries had assembled to protect him.