‘FUCK’, said Picc again.
‘So if they say they have possible PID on an IED emplacer, that’s right where we’ve had IEDs emplaced for the last three days’, Nascar continued, hitting the map with his finger. ‘We’ve watched it happen.’ Two of Charlie Company’s vehicles had been hit by IEDs at exactly the same spot the day before.
Picc put the radio to his mouth. He looked as close to a nervous breakdown as Nascar. ‘Scarface 6-4 from Siege 1-4. We’ve watched them place IEDs in this vicinity for the last three days.’
‘Scarface 6-4 has PID on the IED emplacer down in the hole, where the IED is’, said the voice on the radio. Nascar nodded vigorously. ‘Alright, let’s go, we got it.’
‘Let’s do it’, said Picc, smiling into his radio. It was a small triumph; Nascar reminded him they still had to get approval. The voice on the radio said he recommended a gun run, hitting the IED emplacers and the IED. Nascar agreed. Picc handed him the radio. ‘I’ve been trying to give you this for half an hour, that’s why I came and woke you up.’
The four figures on the laptop screen walked north, to a building they’d used for the last three days. They’d now been tracked for forty-five minutes. Picc and Nascar received initial approval, then set up a live feed to the general and his staff, back at Camp Leatherneck, so they could give the final approval. It took Nascar twenty minutes to make contact. Several marines had gathered around Nascar, Picc and the laptop. I asked why he couldn’t get approval when they’d seen four men laying an IED. ‘That’s an outstanding question’, said Nascar, not amused. The figures were digging the road again.
Greenlief said this was exactly what they’d been seeing, four or five times a day, for the last three days. He said that two guys buried the IED, while two stood sentry at either side of the road. As soon as something appeared in the air above them, they’d move women and children alongside, making it impossible to get air strikes approved. But this time, there were no women or children.
A pilot came on the radio. He’d seen two ‘squirters’ – figures running away from the IED. The pilot was flying an A10, a Warthog – ‘basically a huge cannon with wings and a man sitting on top’, said a marine – and had been given approval for a gun run against the target. Captain Sparks came to watch. ‘Picc did all the work and now he’s taking a shit. He’s missing the gun show’, someone said. Nascar pointed to the screen with the antenna of his radio and everyone watched in silence. We heard what sounded like a gigantic electric drill.
‘We do have three individuals KIA in the field’, said the pilot.
‘Nice’, said a marine, ‘they got three.’
‘How long did that take you?’ someone asked Nascar.
‘Two hours.’
There was movement on the screen. Three more figures walked away from the building that they’d used as a hiding place for the last three days.
‘We’re gonna slay some bodies today’, said Nascar.
‘Fuck yeah’, said a marine.
‘There’s another one. There’s two more, at the intersection.’
‘These guys aren’t real smart’, said Nascar. He passed the grid references to the pilot and said again that the targets were confirmed IED emplacers. His eyes were locked on the map and the screen. Anything could have been happening behind him and he would have been oblivious. He asked the pilot for his altitude. No answer.
‘Hog 5-1, siege 1-2, how copy.’
No answer. He said it again. Again, there was no answer.
‘We should have just fired fucking Hellfires’, said Picc, who’d come back.
The problem was that the sky above Marjah was crowded, especially at twenty thousand feet. At that level, the Apaches and jets made it difficult for the drones (Reaper pilotless aircraft, remote-controlled from a trailer in Vegas) to get the airspace below cleared so that they could fire the Hellfire missiles. The A10 warthogs flew at ten thousand feet, where the airspace was clearer.
‘I don’t know what they’ve got against Hellfires today. Those guys were out in the open’, said Nascar.
He leant on his left elbow, the radio in his hand, an inch in front of his nose. His head dropped, his eyes closed and he pushed his forehead into the speaker, almost in prayer.
He called to the pilot one more time. ‘Hog 5-1, siege 1-2.’
‘Hog 5-1 go ahead’, the pilot replied. The lives of the three men on the road hung on tiny details like how well the radios worked. There was no relief on Nascar’s face, just an instant return to the furious concentration on killing the remaining men. Through no fault of his own and not because of any cunning on their part, the men had evaded him for the last three days. He was desperate to kill them.
The pilot and the marines on the ground confirmed that the men were still in the road and that one of them had put something into the ground, ‘potentially the IED itself’.
Nascar turned to Picc. ‘Alright, we got everything we need.’ He didn’t nod his head slightly as he said this, looking for consensus; he nodded his head five or six times, rapidly, as if he were daring anyone to stop him.
The pilot said he could still see the men. He prepared to turn towards them one last time.
‘Roger. That is your target, we are awaiting approval’, Nascar said.
‘Mission approved’, said Picc, who was talking to the Battalion HQ on another radio. Nascar nodded and spoke to the pilot. ‘Final attack headings 3 6 0 to 0 1 5. Your mission is approved. Your airspace below is clear. Stand by for push.’ Every muscle under the thin skin of his face strained towards his eyes, locked on to the laptop screen. A long furrow ran from his hair, across his forehead and between his eyebrows. A large vein was visible on one side of his head. ‘He’s inbound’, he said and leaned closer to the screen. A minute passed. Nothing.
‘What happened? What are we waiting on?’ said Picc.
‘We’re waiting for him to call inbound’, said Nascar. His head plunged closer to the screen. ‘Come on buddy, push. Goddamn.’
‘Hog. The emplacer has moved east, he is now moving south down the road. Your approval remains in effect.’
‘Hog 5-1 copy. Still have eyes on.’
Nascar suddenly saw something on the screen. ‘Who is that? Who is that?’ It looked like a civilian had wandered close to the IED emplacer. For a second, Nascar looked ready to cry.
‘Voodoo 1-4 what do you see in there?’ Voodoo 1-4 was the drone controller in Vegas.
‘It looks like the two IED emplacers. This is where we saw them bring back the objects and set them down on the east side of the road.’ The other person on the screen had been deemed a target.
‘Roger. Hog, confirm you are pushing at this time.’
‘Moving in south to north, in about one minute.’
‘What is this’, said Nascar. Someone else had appeared on the screen. His thumb circled the press-to-talk button on his radio and he pushed his forehead into the speaker again.
His lifted his head. ‘There’s one PAX, coming from the south to the north, we don’t know where he came from.’ ‘Pax’, the abbreviation for passengers, had become a general word to describe a person. A civilian had appeared on the laptop screen, too close to the targets.
‘Affirm Hog, hold for now, abort for now.’ He released the speak button. ‘FUCK.’
They had to wait for the civilian to leave. If he didn’t leave, the IED emplacers would escape. ‘Hog 5-1. I need you to stand by, ready for an immediate push.’
A few minutes later, the civilian walked off the screen. The pilot said he was ‘hot’ and ready to attack. Everyone moved closer to the screen, willing the plane to be able to attack. Even the chaplain was watching. He took off his sunglasses and whispered ‘come on’.
‘There he is.’ The A10 Warthog appeared on the screen.
‘5-2’s in hot’, said the pilot. We heard the effects of the first gun run, which sounded like the earth was being ripped open. Then came the sound of the cannon, a hideous roar that seemed too loud a
nd deep to come from anything man-made. It sounded like the sky had split.
‘East ten metres, east one five metres, in the canal, cleared hot.’ Nascar corrected the second A10, even as we felt the roar from the first. We heard another burst of thunder, followed by the vicious belch of the second cannon.
‘There he goes’, said a marine.
‘Wow’, said the chaplain, as hundreds of 33 mm bullets turned the road into a huge cloud of smoke and dust. Some of the marines ran to the side of the building and looked over the wall to watch.
‘Hog 5-2 good effects, good effects’, Nascar said into his radio.
‘Sympathetic detonation too’, said Picc. The IED had been shot by the bullets and exploded. It was hard to imagine anything within a hundred metres had escaped being hit. Ants would have been directly hit by that many bullets.
‘Finally’, said Nascar. ‘Hog, good shots, I need you to look for squirters to the south. Voodoo 1-4, I want you to look for squirters to the north.’ After all that, he still wanted to make sure no one got away.
‘There were two squirters to the east, I think we got them on the second pass’, said one of the pilots. They reported that during the two gun runs, when the cannons had been used no more than a second and a half each, 460 bullets had been fired.
‘They missed on the first one, we corrected them east and they schwacked the canal’, said Nascar, turning to the marines who had gathered around him. One of them gave him a high-five, another sang the theme from Team America, ‘America, fuck yeah!’ without irony.
It was immediately reported that two squirters were still alive, probably tending to a wounded man lying by the side of the road. The Warthogs were told to climb back up to sixteen thousand feet and the marines on the ground were ordered to go and find out who had survived.
* * * * *
A deep canal ran through Karu Charai, cutting directly across the main road and cleaving to the eastern side of the pork chop. It would have been the long piece of fat on the chop, except it was perfectly straight. Someone at HQ had decided that ‘pork chop’ wasn’t a good name for a place inhabited by devout Muslims whose hearts and minds they were supposed to be winning, so officially, it was renamed the ‘lamb’ chop. Everyone on the ground carried on calling it pork.
I followed Captain Sparks, Tim Coderre, Mark Greenlief, Ski and Tom Williams from EOD, and a few ANA soldiers as they walked about two hundred and fifty metres along the canal, then turned into the jumble of buildings, alleys and high mud walls, which had looked so mysterious and threatening until that moment.
The first building we came across looked like a small storeroom. Two makeshift gutters came off its flat roof. Water had run out of the gutters and down the walls, carving two channels, like tiny valleys, all the way down to the ground. The entrance to the room was on the other side of a long wall, so no one paid any attention to it.
On our way out of the pork chop, on the other side of the same wall, someone waited beside the small building. ‘You gotta check this out’, he said. Even when I went in, I still didn’t know what I was looking at. Only when I saw Captain Sparks staring out though a slit in the wall did it click. A vertical line of sunlight striped him as he raised his rifle and looked through the sights. Someone had chipped away at one of the channels worn away by the water, until they’d gone right through the wall. The slit was impossible to see unless you stood right next to it, as Captain Sparks was. What he saw was a perfect view of the sandbags on top of the marines’ base. They had found the sniper hole that had been used to inflict most of their casualties.
Captain Sparks stood in that shard of light for a long time, staring out. Eventually, he turned to a marine behind him and said, ‘Throw your ACOG [Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight] up there and look at our post.’ The marine pointed his rifle through the slit and looked through.
Figure 3 The Sniper Hole (© Google 2011; Image © Digital Globe 2011)
‘That’s where Lamont was hit’, said Tim Coderre.
‘This is it. Perfect angle’, said Sparks. He spoke into his radio: ‘Roger COC, I believe we’ve identified the sniper position, break.’ He gave the GPS position. ‘There’s a vertical loophole in the wall here, break. It has perfect sight alignment for the post, where Lamont and the snipers were hit.’ He stared through the hole again.
He clenched a fist and gently punched the wall next to the hole. He looked angry to be standing where the sniper who had outwitted them for a few days had stood. The sniper had escaped and could shoot again. Tim Coderre picked eighteen bullet cases off the floor and put them in a plastic bag. There were 556 rounds, the same NATO rounds that had been found on the other sniper. ‘He was probably using a weapon that we’d supplied him with in some way or another’, said Sparks.
I asked a question but Sparks wasn’t really listening; he was working out exactly how the sniper had stayed hidden for so long. He stepped back and looked at the wall opposite the slit. ‘He was probably sitting back in the shadows where we couldn’t see any indication of his weapon at all, shooting through this slit in the wall. Perfect sniper position.’ I looked through the slit and saw three marines’ helmets behind the green sandbags on the roof of the base.
I asked Captain Sparks how it felt to be standing there. He took a few seconds to answer. ‘Um ... I’m just a little upset that it took us three days to find it.’ He spoke to someone on his radio for a second. ‘But it’s ours now, so victory is achieved.’
‘He was extremely well-trained’, said Tim Coderre, ‘to know that he has to be this far back so that his muzzle flash isn’t seen. And to engage targets ... you know, he was hitting them in the chest and the head from back here, so he was probably well-trained military.’
I asked which military would have trained him.
‘Possibly ours, at some point. But Al-Qaeda also could. There are lots of countries that could provide this level of training. The only thing he didn’t do was pick up his casings.’
Captain Sparks was visibly aggravated that the man who’d shot four of his marines was getting some credit. ‘So he’s not a sniper, he’s just a good marksman’, he interjected. Tim followed suit. ‘Exactly. He left target indicators [the bullet cases]. Eighteen of them to be exact.’ ‘A real sniper would have destroyed this wall or patched it up and picked up his casings and we’d never have known’, added Sparks.
He’d done it again; found encouragement from nowhere. ‘He’s just a guy that’s a good shot and knows a little bit about concealment. He’s an idiot though.’ In five minutes the man had gone from being a skilful, cunning and possibly American-trained sniper, to an idiot marksman with only a little knowledge.
‘Alright’ said Captain Sparks. ‘Let’s continue the game.’
A week after landing in Marjah, just two days after the first stores in the bazaar had re-opened, two platoons from Bravo woke early to push east and clear another five kilometres of ground. This was an area they had regularly been attacked from and where they had identified an IED cell. I was surprised they weren’t having a day off; they’d been clearing compounds and sleeping in them since the first day.
‘We don’t do days off’, said Janofsky, without a hint of complaint, simply as a statement of fact. ‘No days off’, said Captain Sparks, with just a bit of braggadocio, ‘there’s no such thing.’ Sometimes the marines acted so much like Marines it would have been easy to accuse them of thinking they were Clint Eastwood or Lee Marvin. But over time, I began to think it was actually the other way round and the Hollywood actors were copying the Marines. This was how they really were.
I told myself that I’d follow the marines as they headed out, then film them walking into another battle, which I thought would make a good ending for my film. But I stayed with them as they cleared one more building, then as they found an unexploded rocket sticking out of the ground, then another, then as they heard that a group of Taliban were watching them. I’d promised myself more than once that I’d had enough but I made no eff
ort to keep that promise. I kept following until I’d come too far to turn round. I wasn’t addicted to danger or excitement; each trip felt more like an endurance test that I had no choice than to pass. It was more that I was unable to say ‘no’ to seeing something new. It was impossible to feel I’d had enough. I was just watching and recording. I didn’t need to kill anyone or save anyone’s life. I didn’t need to follow orders. And most of all, I didn’t live there. I had a plane ticket home that I could use whenever I wanted. Of everyone in Marjah at that time, I had the easiest time.
The next three days were almost as bad as the first three. The Taliban only ever went as far as the marines pushed them. They were masters at staying just out of range. And no one pushed them from the other side, not from five miles away and not from any neighbouring town, province or country. The marines were attacked with mortars, found IEDs everywhere and were pinned down in fields and deserted compounds as they slowly made their way east. But there was a different atmosphere; I didn’t see panicked and lost faces. Even in the worst moments, lying under fire in a field or sprinting between buildings with bullets zinging across their path, I could hear laughing and joking. Sitting in an abandoned building during a firefight, everyone told the marine next to me, who claimed to be a rapper, to perform for my camera. He was reluctant, but I told him not even 50 Cent had rapped under fire. What came out had neither rhyme nor any kind of rhythm. ‘It was white people rhyme’, he said. But it fitted the mood.
The ANA still did little except enter buildings first. Often they couldn’t even do that. The marines watched in disgust as one soldier charged several times through a door too small for his backpack and rolled-up sleeping mattress. Each time, he dangled half-way into the compound, throttling himself, then re-appeared with a confused look on his face and tried again. ‘GET IN THERE’, screamed a marine. But he couldn’t, so a corpsman went in first instead. ‘Great, you just killed a corpsman’, said Corporal Sanders, the squad leader. ‘Stay here, stay here.’ The ANA soldier wanted to try again. ‘Sit. Sit the fuck down. Sit’, said Sanders, usually placid to the point of aloofness. He pointed to the ground, as if he were house-training a dog. ‘Sit, sit, sit’, said Sanders and another marine, in concert. The ANA soldier took off his backpack and attempted to go through the door. ‘No sit down. You ...’, they pointed to him and then to the floor. ‘SIT DOWN. SIT DOWN.’ He sat on his bag, smiling, but hurt and embarrassed. ‘Sid dow’, he said, trying to repeat his orders. Luckily, there were no IEDs or fighters in the building.