No Worse Enemy

  Another crack filled the courtyard. Captain Sparks looked up. There was another crack. ‘Is that Koenig firing?’ he asked.

  ‘It is, Sir.’ Lance Corporal Koenig was one of the marines lying down behind the sandbags.

  ‘There’s no holes in the Afghan flag yet. Semper Fi’, said Sparks as he walked inside. ‘The sniper is the most psychologically effective weapon on the battlefield, because there’s nothing you can do about it.’

  ‘Stay low, keep your heads down’, shouted one of the marines on the verandah. Their eyes were fixed grimly on the sandbags at the top of the watchtower. There were different theories about where the snipers were; Captain Sparks was sure they were two to three hundred metres north-west of the base, hiding somewhere in the pork chop. ‘So there’s nothing we can do about it until we clear it’, he said.

  Captain Sparks walked into his room and began putting on his helmet and his body armour, his chest rig, stuffed with sixteen magazines of ammunition. As he walked through the door, he passed a marine standing in the corridor looking lost. ‘Bozman, stay motivated!’ he said, like a gym instructor rallying a sagging spin class.

  Above us, the cracks of the competition between marksmen continued. Its structure was polite, like a conversation between strangers; back and forth, back and forth, sometimes in single words, sometimes in sentences. Often, the participants waited minutes to take their turn. In between, there was an awful silence. It was careful, considered and cerebral. There seemed to be rules, tricks, feints and a mutual respect that suggested an etiquette. Occasionally, of course, someone at either end collapsed into a lifeless heap.

  ‘It’s not Enemy at the Gate’, one of the marine snipers explained later, ‘but you do try to get in the other guy’s head.’

  The first sergeant ran outside and told the men in the watchtower to get their heads down. One of the terps had heard the Taliban on their radios, saying they were trying to hit the tip of something, ‘And it better not be a fucking Kevlar’, he said. The panicked look I’d seen on the first morning appeared again on a few faces.

  ‘Someone sticks their head up and you get a round which just misses, or hits, it will paralyse a unit’, said Tim Coderre, the law enforcement advisor. He thought there were at least five snipers. ‘There’s probably nothing more lethal other than unmanned aerial stuff.’

  The forward air controller, whose job it was to call in air strikes, asked Captain Sparks where he thought the snipers were. Sparks thought there were two positions he could be sure of. The forward air controller said he’d drop a Hellfire missile on them next time the marines took fire. ‘It’s friggin’ counter-insurgency in a ghost town. There’s nobody out there’, he said, thinking all the civilians had fled.

  ‘That’s what I thought earlier’, said Sparks, ‘until I went into that compound and there were thirty women and children hunkered down inside, where third platoon’s at.’ Such brief exchanges were the difference between those thirty women and children living and dying.

  The following day, one of the snipers fired again, hitting Lance Corporal Koenig in the head as he bobbed up over the top of the sandbags.

  ‘I came up and turned around to get my rifle passed to me and as I turned around, I guess my head was just a little above the sandbags and he shot and ended up hitting me directly in the head’, said Koenig. He had an incredible glow about him for someone who’d just been shot in the head. Or maybe he glowed because he’d been shot in the head and was able to tell me about it. He glowed like a born-again Christian or a Hare Krishna. His whole face was smiling. ‘It cracked me back and I was dazed and didn’t really know what was going on. I was like, “I’m hit!”’ He picked his helmet off the ground and showed me a huge dent in the front. ‘This is where I was hit, about an inch above my eyes. And this is the mount where it hit. This is what they say stopped the round from going through the Kevlar.’ He showed me a broken metal brace, for attaching night vision goggles, that had been on the front of his helmet. Contrary to popular belief, even of the soldiers and marines who wear them, their helmets aren’t actually bullet-proof, especially if they’re hit square on. ‘It hurt really, really bad. I thought I was dying. I thought I’d actually been hit, it scared me pretty bad.’

  Four marines had been shot on the roof above us in the space of just two days. They had probably all been shot by one sniper, whose position was still unknown. This would be terrifying to most people but Captain Sparks was encouraged by it.

  ‘He’s not a real sniper’, he said. ‘If he was we’d have a lot more casualties. He’s just very good with whatever he’s got.’ That was perhaps what separated Captain Sparks from everyone else and made him either a genuine warrior or a complete lunatic. He always worked out a way to be encouraged by everything and anything, no matter how discouraging things first appeared. Sometimes you could see it happening. He’d say something that sounded like an admission of failure or an acknowledgement of limitations. But then he’d say something to temper it and by the time the third sentence had left his mouth he’d created an argument to destroy the hopelessness of the first and was completely gung-ho again. I’ve met people who could pick themselves up and come back from things but never anyone who could do it in the space of three sentences.

  To me – and I’m sure to many of the marines – it looked like there was still an awfully long way to go and a lot that could go badly wrong. Bravo Company had been in Marjah for two days; they’d lost one man, suffered four casualties, were surrounded and cut off from the other companies, who were still miles away. And they only controlled five buildings in Karu Charai village, a slither of Marjah.

  Day three in Marjah. The Forward Air Controller, Ben Willson, was almost having a nervous breakdown. I hadn’t seen him sleep since we’d landed. I hadn’t seen him anywhere other than the cold central corridor of the old police station, hunched over, fixated on the chunky laptop that showed him what the drones above us were filming. He was even there when I got up to go to the outside ‘toilet’ (just a plastic piss tube hammered into the ground) in the middle of the night. And although on day three he looked particularly obsessed with the tiny white figures on the little screen, it looked like he’d been building up to a nervous breakdown for some time.

  Everyone called Ben ‘Nascar’ because in his normal job as a helicopter pilot he had a reputation for only ever turning left. (NASCAR is a massively popular American motor racing sport in which the drivers race anti-clockwise around an oval track, thus only ever turning left.) Tall and slim, with a closely-shaved head and good-looking enough to be in a Marines recruitment video doing push-ups, running and looking determined, Ben also defied the stereotype; he was a philosophy graduate who read Kierkegaard and William James.

  What drove Ben to the verge of that nervous breakdown was that he requested up to forty air strikes a day but almost all were denied. The few approvals that came through took so long – one took two hours, by which time the planes had run out of fuel and flown away – that the little figures he saw on the laptop screen laying IEDs simply escaped. Nascar, like all the other forward air controllers in Afghanistan, had to go through five levels of approval for an air strike, including a lawyer and ending with the general and his staff.

  That morning, Ben had received approval to bomb twenty-five to thirty Taliban fighters he’d seen getting out of a van and making their way into the pork chop. But the plane had malfunctioned and the bomb got stuck in its undercarriage. The fighters, who may have included the snipers, were free to spread out and enjoy another day of firing at marines from the maze of alleys, firing holes and roofs offered by the pork chop.

  Captain Sparks couldn’t sit back and watch them do that again. He ordered all available marines to put on their body armour and follow him. They would run eight hundred metres, mostly over uncleared ground, sneak on to a roof to the north of the pork chop and ambush the Taliban fighters as they became visible. I followed about thirty marines as they ran through the five buildings they’
d cleared the day before, pausing briefly in La Mirage to work out their final route on a map.

  ‘You good? You know what your job is ... ? You good?’ Staff Sergeant Young asked the marines as they waited at the gate. ‘Four minutes until step time. Any questions?’ There were no questions. Some marines furiously chewed gum or tobacco, others bounced up and down on their toes. ‘Whoop, whoop, WHOOP, WHOOP’, one shouted, each whoop louder than the last.

  One of the Afghan soldiers couldn’t get a magazine into his rifle. A marine grabbed it and did it for him. ‘It’s the same shit you were doing last night’, he said, clicking the magazine into place. The Afghan soldier held his rifle horizontally. The marine grabbed it again, violently pushing it down. ‘You’re POINTING it at people. Leave it, you’re good.’ He walked away, shaking his head: ‘Fucking guy, man.’

  The route to the rooftop hadn’t been cleared for IEDs. Where possible, sniffer dogs were let loose or the EOD team quickly checked a doorway or bridge with their metal detectors, but mostly we just watched our steps and hoped we weren’t unlucky enough to step on anything. The firing holes in the walls we passed had been created so recently they still had piles of fresh dirt beneath. Every time the marines walked around a corner, they left one behind, lying on the ground with a SAW machine-gun. ‘Keep your eyes on that building’, said Young, quietly, ‘anything moves, let ’em have it.’

  Everyone was silent. A message came in over Young’s radio: ‘Be advised, there is mass movement around buildings two nine and one five, how copy.’

  ‘That’s on the other side of the pork chop’, said Young, ‘it shouldn’t affect us any, unless they start moving towards us.’

  ‘Are you happy?’ one of the ANA soldiers asked me. ‘These are the enemies of this country, we should finish them.’

  They reached a compound with a high-roofed building, kicked the gate down and walked through. Three ANA soldiers went in first, ordered to clear an outhouse that looked like a stable. They timidly looked through the glassless windows and stepped through the doors, pointing their guns as they went, just like the marines. One saw what looked like the top of an anti-tank mine. He pointed it out to me with his left foot, then kicked. Luckily, it was just a pot lid, with hard ground underneath it. He smiled, let out a theatrical sigh of relief, and moved on.

  I followed a marine to the staircase. He stopped halfway up and stabbed a huge spider against a wall, then crawled out on to the roof. ‘Look, over there’, whispered one of the Afghans, pointing to a man casually walking away from the northern tip of the pork chop. I fully expected the marines to start shooting but they let him go. Another young man stood about two hundred metres away, staring at us, carrying a shovel on his shoulder, in a very obvious way. (Months later, I showed this footage to some Afghan friends in London. They laughed out loud: ‘That guy’s so Taliban’, they said, incredulously, ‘he’s laughing at you.’) Another man walked away across a field, slowly and nervously, glancing up at us every few steps.

  Young crawled to the edge of the roof and looked through his rifle sights. I crawled to the edge too; the lip surrounding the roof was only a few inches high, offering no protection. More marines came up the stairs, dropped to their stomachs and dragged themselves to the edge of the roof, like snakes moving across sand.

  Somewhere close by, a battle started. Nothing came towards us. The fighters in the pork chop were attacking someone, somewhere, but they hadn’t seen the marines gathered on the roof, further away from their base than they’d so far been, waiting. Occasionally, the fighting died down. I heard a dog, tied to a tractor, barking constantly. Its throat sounded as dry as the desert around us. It must have been tied there for at least three days, with no food or water. But still it wouldn’t stop barking.

  The marine on my left, Lance Corporal Blancett, adjusted his rifle sights with one hand and the two legs on which his rifle rested with the other. Every movement was delicate and precise and he appeared to have the touch of an old watchmaker. With his blond hair, bright white teeth and cocky smile, Blancett looked like Val Kilmer playing Iceman in Top Gun.

  ‘See that building straight out in front of you? Look to the very end, the right edge of the pork chop’, said Young quietly. ‘See them?’

  ‘Negative’, said Blancett.

  Whoever the Taliban had attacked was now firing air grenades into the pork chop. I heard the distant chopping sounds of grenades exploding and saw white clouds of smoke rising above the compound, one row of buildings in from the outer walls. I assumed the fighters were in those buildings. They must have known it was time to escape but they had no idea what awaited them on the route they had used to come in. I imagined the terror and panic they were about to experience. Blancett moved the legs under his rifle by millimetres. Other marines slowly screwed suppressors on to their rifles.

  ‘THERE THEY ARE, THERE THEY ARE’, screamed Blancett. He started firing. The marines next to him fired as well.

  ‘ON THE CORNER’, shouted Blancett, still firing. ‘Hey, 240 gunner. You need to scoot up to the edge of the wall. You’re on target but scoot the fuck up.’ He looked up for a second. ‘I HIT THAT FIRST GUY, HE’S FUCKING DEAD.’

  ‘That’s what I like to hear, baby’, shouted Young.

  ‘I hit that guy right in the fucking head’, said Blancett. As everything went quiet, he took a breath. ‘That was intense. They’re behind that building somewhere. Hey – keep eyes in case they start egressing to the west; you’ll be able to see them moving through that gap in the wall.’

  Another marine saw movement in a building north of the pork chop. Blancett swung his gun around. ‘Where they at? Building seven? Left or right?’

  ‘Left but he’s moving right.’

  ‘I got him’, whispered Blancett. He asked how far away the building was, adjusted his sights, put his finger on the trigger and let out two deep breaths.

  ‘He’s walking, behind the building.’

  ‘I got him’, said another marine.

  ‘NO, NO, NO’, said Blancett, ‘that’s the guy that I saw walking earlier, you asked me if he had anything in his hands. I said he’s got a brown floppy jacket on. That’s the same guy.’ He took his finger off the trigger and pointed his rifle back towards the pork chop.

  They spotted more movement along the north wall. ‘It looks like a kid’, said a marine. ‘Yeah, I see him’, said Blancett, ‘he’s got a little green man dress on.’ They also saw an old man, standing next to the buildings, still full of white smoke from the air grenades.

  The marines chatted continuously, sharing every snippet of information. Someone constantly relayed reports from the base and from marines nearby. And the terp had a radio permanently tuned to the frequency the Taliban used, reporting everything they said, which was often wildly exaggerated.

  The result of all this information was, as the marines called it, ‘a mindfuck’. It also left the constant impression that catastrophe was just a few minutes away: there were twelve suicide bombers in town (reported that morning); a sniper had them in his sights (reported the day before); and an army was marching towards them, intent on fighting to the death (reported every few hours). A machine-gunner opened up again, reporting muzzle flashes ‘to the right’.

  ‘To the right of what? You gotta be more specific’, screamed Blancett.

  ‘The right of the whole compound.’

  ‘Same spot as before?’

  ‘Same spot, that’s the building they’re consolidating in.’

  A cluster of bullets crackled over our heads. Someone had finally spotted us. The machine-gunner opened up again. Young told everyone the Taliban had moved into the next building. ‘Keep eyes on seven and eight’, he said, ‘give me a 203 gunner, let’s go.’ He wanted air grenades to be dropped inside the building’s walls.

  Marine Niemasz dragged himself next to me, on the other side from Blancett. ‘See that building with the three trees behind it? That’s what I want you to hit. I want you to pepper them’, shouted
Young. Niemasz popped a gold-coloured 203 (air grenade) into the tube beneath his rifle and cocked it. Air grenades look strange when they’re fired; the popping sound as they fly out of their tubes makes them seem like children’s toys. They are designed to be dropped on to their targets, not fired at them, so they’re only propelled by the force pushing them out of the tube, travelling like golf balls rather than bullets. Not until you see them explode do you take them seriously; their blast is big enough to kill anyone within five metres. Niemasz quickly pumped seven air grenades into the walls of Building eight, which disappeared beneath waves of white smoke. So much smoke that Blancett complained he couldn’t see to shoot. Then the building caught fire, filling him with hope that the fighters would flee right into his sights.

  A big group of people suddenly emerged from the furthest tip of the pork chop. A shout came for everyone to hold their fire; there were women and children among them. ‘Man, they’re not a family. Those fucking assholes are using those kids and women as cover to get out of there’, said Blancett. ‘Horse-shit man. That is ... ...’ He couldn’t find the words to express his frustration. ‘ARGGGHHH GOD’, he shouted, growling.

  I saw at least two children, one woman and five or six men who could easily have been, in military language, ‘fighting-age males’. But we would never know. Too often in the past, people on roofs, in jets or staring at computer screens had seen what we were seeing and made the wrong choice.

  A burst of gunfire crackled over us. The marines on the far side of the building shouted, ‘EGRESS, EGRESS.’ The Taliban fighters weren’t all in Buildings seven and eight and they hadn’t all escaped using women and children for cover. Another group, far to the left of where the marines had been firing and much closer to the building where we lay, were shooting at us. As marines on the far side of the building ran from the edge of the roof and back down the stairs, an RPG hit the building, followed by bullets that seemed to almost skim the tops of our helmets. Perched on the flat roof of a single-storey building, I suddenly felt very easy to see.