‘Where the fuck is that LAW?’ shouted Young.
‘We got two prepped sir.’
‘The next shot that comes from Building seven you rip it right through that fucking window, you understand?’
‘You want me to put one in there?’
‘No, wait. I’ll tell you when.’ Young had moved to the back of the roof, standing up, to get a better view. More bullets popped above our heads.
‘To your right. You know Building seven? The next little compound to your right, see it?’
‘The left side or the right side?’
‘The middle, he came up right in the middle, you can almost see a little dust trail.’
A burst of machine-gun fire was aimed at the little compound.
‘Higher’, said Young. Two more bursts, from two marines. About twenty came back, right above us.
After an hour, there was no movement in the pork chop other than the white smoke drifting. The white-bearded old man reappeared, with two young boys; all of them wore green shalwar kameez. They walked towards us, then stopped directly beneath the marines, staring up, their arms behind their backs. The old man pointed to the burning buildings, which had been pummeled for the last hour, and held out his hands in despair. One of the boys looked up at us on the roof, the other looked at the ground. One of the Afghan soldiers on the ground shouted at the old man: ‘Lift up your shirt.’ He looked even more despairing, as if to say, ‘after all that ... this?’ The two little boys nervously copied him, first showing their bare stomachs, then turning to show their backs. It was the saddest thing I’d seen in Marjah.
The old man said everyone had now left the buildings. He and the boys slowly walked away. We got down from the roof as a Harrier jet approached to hit the smoking buildings with a gun run.
* * * * *
Back at the base, about thirty trucks from Charlie Company had arrived. It had taken them almost three days to clear five miles along the road to Marjah. On the way, they’d found more than twenty IEDs. As the marines jumped from the first vehicle, the driver almost landed on a large metal drum, just visible above the ground. He pulled out his knife and dug up the earth around it. Three other marines gathered around. ‘Don’t be a hero’, they laughed. In the end, they decided it was the lid of an old anti-tank mine and left it alone.
Bravo now had a supply line, power and the reassuring presence of armoured trucks with huge machine-guns on their roofs. Captain Sparks hadn’t requested the backup, nor had it been part of the original plan. But the relentless violence of the first few days and the content of the reports he’d sent back had made his commanders decide to send Charlie Company.
Some trucks were parked in a long line along the road into Marjah and some were at each end of the bazaar, pointing out, their guns manned. The bazaar, the commercial hub of Marjah, straddled the main road through Kuruh Charai, the same road where we’d been ambushed as the sun came up on the first morning. Now, its battered metal shutters were closed, a small blue lorry lay on its side in a ditch and abandoned boxes of fruit and vegetables had dried up in the sun. Other than a few distant figures who hovered outside, pretending not to look, the bazaar was deserted.
Charlie Company’s arrival in Karu Charai hadn’t been without incident. As they covered the area south-west of the pork chop, to help Bravo Company start moving north, they’d been caught in a gunfight and fired a rocket into a house where three families were sheltering. As they’d been told in the days before the invasion, the families hadn’t fled, but stayed indoors until the fighting died down. The rocket had killed four people and injured seven, two critically.
‘These dark figures kept running towards us. They would show up with a bundle in their hands and it would be a baby wrapped up, either alive or dead’, said First Lieutenant Aaron MacLean, a lean and kindly-looking Platoon Commander. ‘They just kept coming and coming. By the end we’d evacuated seven casualties and there were four KIA [killed in action].They kept bringing them over the field. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever seen.’ He struggled to breathe as he spoke. His lips were dried up and cracked and his startled, wide-open eyes darted around the room, not focusing for long on anything.
The seven injured people had been flown to a British hospital in Lashkar Gar. The rest of the family, and the bodies of the dead, sheltered in an abandoned store in the opium bazaar, now occupied by Charlie Company.
‘You’re looking at the definition of innocent people, there’s no question about it, you know. Little girls’, said MacLean. ‘There’s just no way to rationalise that this was in any way a good thing or justified. It’s just a terrible failing and a terrible sight.’
Of all the soldiers I’d ever met, both in Afghanistan and Iraq, MacLean was one of the most idealistic, in the best sense of the word. Commanding officers and generals always say honourable-sounding things about noble intentions; they have to. Grunts often don’t care or even know about higher political aims. I’d asked Hillis about COIN and General McChrystal’s promise of a ‘government in a box’. ‘I wasn’t even aware that was the long-term plan’, he’d replied. ‘I didn’t know there was a future part to it, just that there were bad people here.’
But MacLean had clearly read and thought a great deal about Afghanistan and the war on terror. ‘The United States and United Kingdom have a responsibility not to let these people slide back under the thumb of these theocratic fascists’, he said, softly but passionately. ‘We’ve promised these people a lot over the years and we owe it them to see those promises through.’ He’d just seen seventeen lives torn apart; he was in shock, struggling to hold on to the beliefs that had brought him to Afghanistan. ‘War is a curse. I knew that intellectually before I came. But it’s not the worst thing out there. That’s the calculation you have to make to justify it; otherwise everyone would be a pacifist. And there’s a good case to make for that, I could certainly make it more strongly having seen what I’ve seen.’ What he’d seen had reinforced the arguments against his belief in military intervention. But he remained resolute: ‘I have strong black and white moral views about people like the Taliban; they are just evil.’
I followed MacLean, several marines and a terp as they went to meet Abdel Baki and his father. They had both been in the house when it was hit; Abdel Baki’s sister and her daughter had been killed. The family had fled Uruzgun Province following a dispute with the government about land; they’d come to Marjah because there was no government there. Now, they had to sleep next to their family’s dead bodies, in two storerooms on one side of the opium bazaar. We sat down on the floor and MacLean asked the marines to introduce themselves. Abdel Baki interrupted them. ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do with the dead bodies’, he said. ‘I need to take them to Lashkar Gar, to the cemetery.’ His hair, eyebrows and long beard, which curled out from the sides of his face, were thick and dark, extensions of his unusually solid frame. His eyes were almost black and he had a graze across his forehead. Although Abdel Baki struggled not to break down, he spoke without anger or hyperbole.
‘I’ve had a very difficult life. I kept moving from place to place. I took refuge somewhere and had to leave and then came here. I’m a farmer working on somebody else’s land. I get a sixth of everything I make. I have nothing except the clothes that I’m wearing. If I go to Lashkar Gar I have no place to stay’, he said. ‘We heard on the radio that coalition forces were coming. And then we would be allowed to leave. So we spent four days indoors waiting, as you asked, waiting for you to say it was OK to leave, to take us to a safe place. But then a shell hit our house, destroying my family. Two of my family are killed: one from another family, and another family had a member killed.’
‘We’re really sorry for what happened yesterday’, said a marine, addressing Abdel Baki directly for the first time.
‘Right now, I don’t have anything. No money, no clothes, no food. When I’m done with the dead bodies I have to go to the hospital, where the rest of my family are. You guys hav
e to take me there.’
The marines said they were checking with the military hospitals in the area, trying to find out which one the injured had been taken to. Incredibly, no one knew. But they couldn’t promise to take Abdel Baki to see them, or to bury his dead, because ISAF rules forbade Afghan civilians from travelling on helicopters unless they were escorting injured children or were themselves casualties.
‘Why don’t you do your piece?’ said MacLean to Sergeant Berwa, who knelt next to Abdel Baki.
‘It pains us all here to know what you must be going through right now’, said Sergeant Berwa, a reservist working for the Civil Affairs team. He coughed, struggling to get out what he’d been sent to say. He looked at the floor and continued. ‘You know, the US Marines, the citizens of Afghanistan and the government of Afghanistan, together can achieve great things to make Afghanistan a safer and more prosperous place for all.’ How he managed to say that last line I don’t know, nor did I have any idea what good it was supposed to do. ‘There’s nothing we can do to bring back your loss. But what we can do is try to help you out by giving you the very least that we can, which is to help you in your travels to Lashkar Gar for your fallen ones.’
‘In future, if you guys have operations, announce them to civilians, tell them to go to you, then this won’t happen again’, Abdel Baki said.
‘We’re here to help out with everything that we can, with security and stability in the area’, said Lieutenant Greenlief, Bravo Company’s executive officer, who’d been entrusted with clearing up Charlie Company’s mess. ‘And because we’re here for you, we never target ... or if there are any indications that civilians are there, we do not shoot. I’ve seen the cowardice of the Taliban, forcing women and children to walk with them, using them as shields so they can shoot at us and walk away. One of the most important things in our lives is family and taking care of our family.’
MacLean sat next to Greenlief, his arms around his legs, gently rocking back and forth. His jaw muscles twitched under his skin. He seemed to be struggling not to break down. (He was suffering from pneumonia, which he’d refused to be evacuated for, and had lost nearly ten pounds in weight in five days.)
Abdel Baki said his family could easily have been saved. ‘I was waiting inside my house for four or five days, I was waiting for you to call me to come out and for you to take me to a safe place. There are lots of people like that, if you ask, they will come out.’
MacLean thanked him for the information, saying he didn’t know families were waiting inside their homes like that. (ISAF messages had specifically told people to stay in their homes and had even claimed they wouldn’t fire anything powerful enough to penetrate their compounds’ mud walls.) ‘The majority of the people in the Taliban are poor, helpless Muslims’, continued Abdel Baki, ‘who have been forced to be there. You have to give them a chance to switch sides. Only the core fighters will stay, the others will come over.’
‘Sergeant B?’ said Greenlief, prompting Berwa to finish.
‘It’s not the most that we can do for you right now but we want to try and help you out with a payment for your losses ... to help you out ... with your travels to Lashkar Gar, the burial process and any other type of alleviations. We all feel deeply saddened by this incident and we hope to try and avoid these in the future using the information that you have been telling us.’
Abdel Baki explained exactly who in each family had been killed or injured. One family had just a single child left. His wife and four children had all been injured.
‘There were four deceased, bottom line’, said a marine.
‘Check’, said another.
Sergeant Berwa continued. ‘I’ll present him with the ... with the condolence payment.’ He coughed again and turned to the terp. ‘Like I said, it’s the absolute least that we can do because there’s ... obviously you can’t bring back someone you love.’
He pulled bricks of Afghan notes out of his backpack and piled them in a stack. Abdel Baki’s whole body turned away. He didn’t touch the money. He just stared at it, at the final confirmation that this was really happening.
Sergeant Berwa placed the stack of notes, roughly $10,000 altogether, $2,500 for each life lost, on the ground in front of Abdel Baki.
Abdel Baki picked up the money, his face twisted away from it, as if he were carrying one of his dead relatives.
‘My heart still bleeds from what happened yesterday. I’m suffering a lot’, he said. Next to him, his father, Abdel Kareem, wiped tears from his eyes.
As I walked out, I looked into the next room. I saw four bodies on the floor, covered with a single, pale blue, sheet of cloth. Over two bodies, blood had seeped through the cloth. A man invited me in, motioning that he would lift up the sheet so that I could film the bodies. But I already felt I’d intruded too much. I bowed my head, put my hand over my heart, and walked away, failing to do my job properly.
Later, sitting on the concrete floor of the small room where he slept, half-way down the opium bazaar, MacLean was admirably frank when describing what had happened.
‘We’d been engaged all afternoon by an enemy team and they’d taken a few RPG shots at us. At one point, someone actually stepped out directly on the road and fired an RPG at one of our vehicles. Through the course of the afternoon we fired multiple rockets and the enemy fired multiple rockets at us. Either our rocket or their rocket hit this family’s house.’ He could have shed more doubt on whose rocket it had been but he didn’t. ‘We’re here to provide security and last night we failed at that. It doesn’t really matter whose rocket it was, the Taliban won last night because people got hurt and marines were in the area.
‘I’ve been told this by Afghans before. “I don’t mind Taliban and I don’t mind marines, I just want everyone to leave me alone and I want to lead my life.” There’s something to be said for that point of view and certainly if you’ve lost family members I couldn’t stand in front of you and tell you otherwise and that’s not really my place. I don’t know. If I was in his shoes ... It’s almost like there’s two entirely different levels. There’s the political level and there’s the level on the ground and I’m not sure I’ve entirely reconciled them myself right now.’ The marines under MacLean didn’t have his sensitivity. And they had no doubt whose rocket had hit the family’s house. They even knew who’d fired it and already nicknamed him ‘Whopper’. I asked what this meant. ‘Whopper – Burger King – BK – baby killer.’
That night, the bodies were buried, in coffins of wood and plastic sheets, in a vacant lot next to the opium bazaar. The marines watched as Afghan soldiers recited from the Qur’an and spoke a eulogy.
The massive restrictions on air strikes had been introduced because President Karzai, the Afghan population and the international public were appalled by civilian casualties. To a large extent, the restrictions had worked. In 2010, civilian casualties had been reduced and, according to the UN, over two thirds had been caused by the Taliban, not the American forces or ISAF. But the restrictions on air strikes were also a response to bad headlines. Rockets could be fired from the ground that were almost as powerful as those fired from the air. And because they were fired horizontally, these rockets could travel hundreds of metres before they exploded, increasing the chances of killing civilians if they missed their target. If the accidental slaughter of the people we were supposed to be helping was to stop, the restrictions had to go further.
Weeks later, Abdel Baki was still in Marjah. The marines hadn’t been able to do the one thing he’d asked for – get him to his wounded family members in the military hospital at Lashkar Gar. When they couldn’t get him on a helicopter, they’d stolen a car, hot-wired it and presented it to him. But he couldn’t drive.
There was surprisingly little damage to the building the marines had showered with air grenades the day before. The main rooms hadn’t been hit and all four walls still stood. Only a storeroom in the centre of the compound had been directly hit; that was what we’d seen bu
rning. Even so, a terp emerged holding two eggs, perfectly intact. When Captain Sparks came in, the marines had already cleared the compound, although one had shot two dogs in the process. Sparks called him over. ‘We’ve got to clear the entire rest of the town without killing any dogs. You’ve killed two in the first two hours. Very simple, very clear; do not kill another fucking dog.’
He climbed a mound with Marine Anthony Piccioni – Picc – a stocky and jocular Italian-American with a cynical sense of humour. Sparks pointed to the roof we’d been on the day before. ‘Those bitches didn’t have a chance and they had no idea we were up there.’
‘They didn’t?’ said Picc, who had called in the gun run that finished the rooftop ambush.
‘It’s a perfect position. We had them trapped and I think we got ten of them.’ For a minute or two, Sparks was buoyant behind his sunglasses, albeit in a very controlled way.
The pork chop had still to be completely cleared of IEDs but it now belonged to Bravo Company. The operation had been chaotic and had taken longer than expected but they had achieved their objective. The fight for the control of Karu Charai village, Marjah’s most densely populated area, appeared to be over.
Now came the hard part. Marines who had been trained to kill and, in the Captain’s own words, be ‘masters of controlled chaos and violence’, now had to become social workers, policemen, community project managers, anthropologists and judges.
The aim was to show the people why they should side with the Afghan government and reject the Taliban’s rule. But the only representatives of that government were the army and the police, who wouldn’t even be there if it weren’t for the Marines. The people were being shown what they already knew: your government is incapable of looking after you, so don’t burn any bridges with the Taliban.