Gunny D created a ‘Princess Diana’ effect wherever he went. Kids followed him, chanting his name (‘Ganna D’, ‘Gunna D’, and even ‘Kenna D’). Men embraced him, pressing letters into his hand and exchanging phrases in Pashtu.
‘Gunny D is the Mayor, he knows everyone in town’, said Captain Sparks.
Gunny D’s popularity, which embarrassed him, was due to the fact he had spent roughly $675,000 on salaries for three thousand local people, for cleaning, repairing and rebuilding the bazaar.
‘From the beginning we were always out there, always interacting with the locals’, said Gunny D. ‘We spend twelve to fourteen hours a day with them. We take off our sunglasses, the helmets, all the gear and it shocks them. But they feel very relaxed; they know who they are talking to. The Captain told them he wanted them to know who was in charge, who was taking care of them and who was here to kill the Taliban. Four months on, we’ve got genuine friends here. We regularly have breakfast, lunch and dinner with them.’ A group of tailors, who had only re-opened their store five days earlier, complained that they didn’t have enough work for their staff to do. ‘Well, we’re hiring’, Gunny D told them.
‘Yeah, they can make some new suits for the sanitation department’, said Captain Sparks. A group of shopkeepers was told that anybody with a skill could use the marines, and their money, to set up apprenticeship schemes. Hard-working rubbish collectors could become apprentices, then receive micro-grants to start their own business. A man asked if he could be paid to train an apprentice moneychanger. ‘I don’t know if that’s a skill’, said Sparks, ‘it should be for somebody that builds something or fixes something.’
Bravo had established two security ‘bubbles’: the bazaar, where Captain Sparks said there hadn’t been a serious attack for three months; and a wider bubble around it, about eight kilometres across, where IEDs were still being laid and snipers and gun teams roamed. But although Marjah was one of hundreds of districts and sub-districts that needed to be secured, and it had taken roughly a tenth of the available resources to do it, Captain Sparks thought it showed that the policy could work. ‘If you’re just going through some checklist, you’re never going to get anywhere’, he said. ‘You see Gunny D right there, he knows these guys, they’re his friends. We establish relationships and figure out what they really need and want. That’s really the key to this.’
Their goal was to create a self-sufficient economy, so that the people would choose to turn away from the Taliban. ‘When we came in, the Taliban had a grip on the people; checkpoints, taxes, sharia law, forcing them to grow opium’, said Captain Sparks. If the marines did the exact opposite, he added, the Taliban would lose influence. ‘The people are the objective. Eventually the Taliban will become irrelevant, because the people don’t want them here and they’ll push them out on their own.’
The only thing that hadn’t re-opened was the opium bazaar, although massive amounts of opium, heroin and methamphetamine had recently been found. I asked how so much could be hidden in such an obvious place; the police had been paid to keep quiet, I was told. The marines talked about turning this area into a park or a school but the local people were too afraid of the owners – drug smugglers, who had not yet come back – to go anywhere near the buildings. This was a reminder not only of how easily nefarious interests could intimidate the local people but also how the invasion of Marjah had severely damaged the opium trade, the people’s main livelihood. This alone could have decided the outcome of Operation Mushtaraq before the first shot was fired.
Gunny D spotted Mohammad, the dwarf, picked him up and carried him over to us. Mohammed smiled but he looked awful. A poor opium harvest, caused by a mystery virus (nothing to do with the counter-narcotics policy) had forced him to go cold turkey.
I drifted away from the marines, to get a better view. Just a step or two away from the handshakes and the high-fives, I noticed that many of the men, especially the ones not directly engaging with the marines, eyed them with suspicion and sometimes malice. As we headed back to the base, news of another casualty came in over the radio. A helicopter swooped low towards a field just beyond the bazaar, sending the groups of kids sprinting away.
The situation was still precarious: ‘fragile and reversible’ in military euphemism. In just a few weeks’ time, Bravo Company were to be replaced, the close relationships they’d established would come to an abrupt end and the residents would meet an entirely new set of faces.
The remarkable progress made in Kuru Charai was entirely due to the marines; the ‘government in a box’ still hadn’t appeared. But the changes had not yet spread to neighbouring areas. I was shown video of a riot that had occurred in April. Three hundred men on motorbikes and in the back of trucks, waving the white flag of the Taliban, stormed towards the bazaar from a nearby village, Sistani. The protest had been organised after rumour had spread that the marines had burned a Qur’an. Only after considerable diplomatic effort, including the donation of ten new Qur’ans, and the presentation of a marine who had recently converted to Islam to hundreds of ecstatic Marjah residents, did the crowds disperse. (The marine reverted a few weeks after returning home.) The marines said it could easily have gone the other way. Boulders were thrown and one demonstrator carried a hand grenade.
I saw footage of one of the ANCOP approaching a driver at a checkpoint and casually punching him in the face. I heard two ANA soldiers had collapsed from a heroin overdose, one in the corridor of the building where the senior marines slept. They were saved by the marine medics. And Captain Sparks had been involved in a stand-off with the ANA, when Captain Saed refused to make his men pick up their rubbish before they left. Saed said he wouldn’t want to see his men firing on marines. Captain Sparks snapped, ‘I’ll back one of my men against any five of your clowns any day’, and marched the ANA out without their weapons. Sparks said it had just been a clash of personalities.
The campaign to recruit residents of Marjah to the Afghan National Police was being re-designed; it hadn’t pulled in a single volunteer. A local elder had been put on the payroll after he and twelve of his men had prevented the Taliban from entering their village, which was fewer than two kilometres from Bravo’s base. They had captured some of the fighters and handed them over to the police. The elder, Commander Bosgul, a veteran fighter, was described to me as having been a ‘Mujahadeen commander during the jihad and had serious co-operation with every government since then’. The emphasis on ‘every’ begged an obvious question, which was answered before I’d finished asking it: ‘... including the Taliban’.
‘I’m sure that six months ago some of these guys were Taliban’, said Captain Sparks. ‘Now they’re not. Now they want to protect their village and protect their family. The key to this whole thing has been proving to them that we’re the winning side. Ninety-nine per cent of the population here, they’re not really hard-core Taliban extremists. They don’t like the foreign preachers that are coming in and influencing things any more than we do. Like anybody would, they side with the most powerful people to protect their family. The goal is to show them that they are the most powerful people.’
Bosgul had so impressed the Marines that they suggested he set up his own force, the ISCI (Interim Security of Critical Infrastructure). They announced a recruitment day when men recommended by Bosgul could sign up. They had to pass a health check: a marine corpsman asked, ‘Are you in good health?’ and they all replied, ‘Yes’. Over sixty men turned up; the marines ran out of registration forms. Some recruits were elderly, others looked barely teenagers. But they all seemed willing. The $90 a month salary might have had a lot to do with it. ‘It will be huge’, said Captain Sparks. ‘This turns into the police. Then we go to the next village, turn them into the police. And then we go home.’
The policy of creating local militias – arbaki, Afghan Local Police (ALP) – as they were known, soon became national policy. It was hoped that 30,000 local fighters would be recruited. There was a training programme, to
teach basic policing and ethics and to discourage corruption, but it only lasted eighteen days. However, the plans had to be cut back after reports surfaced of robbery, warlordism, and even rape. Some of the militiamen attacked each other, the ANA and the Marines. Just outside Marjah, an alleged motorbike thief was beaten by militia members. In the subsequent brawl, a fifteen-year-old boy was shot in the head. Two militiamen argued over a woman; one was stabbed with a bayonet and another shot dead.
The Marines officers had a phrase they used when questioned about giving power to such men: it might not be perfect but it was ‘Afghan good enough’.
* * * * *
I joined Bravo Company on a patrol to the east, along the road I’d watched them clear a few months earlier. The number of attacks had increased immediately after the poppy harvest, the traditional start of the new fighting season. Everyone stopped when we heard heavy gunfire three hundred metres south of our position. The ANA, which had advanced much further than it was supposed to, fired at us, somehow mistaking the marines for the Taliban. No one was perturbed; if anything, they seemed slightly bored.
The EOD team found a freshly-laid IED at the crossroads two kilometres from the base, where they’d found a bunker and two IEDs before. As they dug into the road, they were shot at first by a ‘highly-effective’ sniper, then from another direction by a machine-gunner hiding in a row of trees. At first, when the team heard the ‘tsssszzzzup’ of a bullet, they darted behind their trucks. Eventually, they gave that up, just lay flat out on the road, and continued digging.
When they’d uncovered the IED, I left my camera on the road to film it being detonated. We took cover behind the wall, exactly where we’d hidden before. After the explosion, I ran back to pick up my camera, thinking the dust cloud, at least fifty metres high, would conceal me. As I bent down, a bullet fired by the sniper zipped past me, louder and faster than any bullet I’d heard before. I grabbed my camera and ran back towards the truck.
‘Oh my God’, said one of the EOD team when I reached safety. ‘He fired right into the fucking smoke man, holy shit. You’d say that just barely missed you, huh?’ I felt shaken, even offended that the sniper had lined me up in his sights, followed me until I slowed down, taken aim and fired a shot. He wasn’t supposed to single me out, I was just a witness, not a participant.
A group of men in black shalwar kameez ran across the road eight hundred metres away from us. Marines bounded across a neighbouring field in pursuit. ‘This reminds me of day one’, said a marine crouched next to me. Everyone scanned the trees for movement. A burst of fire came from the trees, no more than sixty metres away, but no one was hit. I asked how the gunman had managed to miss. ‘I don’t know’, replied the marine, ‘because they suck?’ He sprinted to the next truck and banged furiously on the door. It opened, he climbed in, and slammed it shut. Marines were approaching across the fields north and south of the main road. The gunmen vanished; they’d decided it was time to retreat.
I’d had many similar experiences, both on this and previous trips to Afghanistan, when great numbers of the soldiers and marines I’d been with really ought to have been shot. I now regarded the idea that the Taliban were the best fighters in the world to be a myth. They were often terrible shots, used old and badly-functioning equipment and regularly wasted perfect chances. Their main strength was their ability to become invisible. The Russians had found things just the same; they called their enemy dukhi – ghosts.
As we approached the T-junction that marked the end of the road east, a drone above us filmed a man being dropped off a motorbike and eight others entering a mosque two hundred metres beyond the north–south road. ‘Those are the guys that are going to shoot at us in a bit, so I’d like to padlock their movements. They’ve massed in the last short period of time, because it was a ghost town just a moment ago’, Nascar said to the drone pilot. Soon, eight men became twelve, then ‘upwards of twelve’, then twenty.
The marines congregated at the petrol station at the T-junction. Although everyone expected to be attacked at any moment, many fell asleep in the shade.
The north–south road, and the canal that flanked it, formed the border between Bravo Company’s area of control and the desert, where the Taliban had free rein. But the Taliban often crossed the canal, driving their motorbikes across shoddily-built footbridges. Captain Sparks wanted to strengthen the border and make it meaningful; he decided to blow up the bridges.
As we walked towards the first bridge, several local people came out of their houses. They wanted to know why the marines had abandoned a nearby base that they had established three weeks after they landed. ‘When you had a post there security was very good. Now, every day, the place is insecure and the Taliban is coming’, said a man who had recently moved to Marjah from Lashkar Gar. Captain Sparks said there would be a base there again ‘very soon ... We’ll take down the bridges and that will provide security for you in the short term so they can’t travel though here. That will allow us to build posts, then when security is better we’ll build new bridges.’ He told the man and his sons to go inside, to be safe from the explosions. ‘And tell him to say “hi” to us next time we’re on patrol’, said a marine.
Listening to this conversation, I noticed that the terp had developed a curious habit, probably from spending five months listening to the marines, of inserting ‘fucking’ into every sentence he translated. This didn’t make sense to the marines: ‘did that old man really say fucking that much?’; ‘is there even a word for “fucking” in Pashtu?’ But the terp didn’t stop, not until Captain Sparks told him that he didn’t need to put the word into every sentence.
When I asked Captain Sparks why the post had been abandoned, he explained that having lost almost a platoon of marines, he had no choice other than to focus on a smaller area. One marine had died; the others had survived but their wounds were serious and they wouldn’t come back. ‘If you lose that many guys, it affects how much you can do each day. We have to accomplish the mission so it means that everyone gets a little more tired and a little more worn-out every day.’ The squads Bravo sent on patrol had shrunk from thirteen men to eight.
Captain Sparks looked across the canal. He was as exhausted as I’d ever seen him. ‘They’re all over the place out here’, he said, waving his hand across the desolate, flat landscape before us. ‘This is the area where we stop trying to control. Our area of control fades a little bit about a klick [kilometre] away from here, it gets worse, but this is the edge of where we’re really actively trying to secure the area. Literally right there, that road.’ He pointed to the north–south road at our feet, then looked back over the canal. ‘It might as well be a different country. This is probably one of the most hostile places in Afghanistan. There’s two to three hundred Taliban out there.’
Sparks, who would later receive the Silver Star, spoke slowly and quietly. His eyes were dead. He looked like he could seize up and keel over on the spot, as did most of the marines. There is an argument that six- or even twelve-month tours are too short. That nothing can be achieved or understood in such a short space of time. But the look on Captain Sparks’s face, like the looks on the faces of everyone in Bravo Company, suggested that for the infantry, six months was too much. They looked utterly hollow and ready to snap.
‘It’s probably just as dangerous as when we first landed’, said Staff Sergeant Dawson, the marine from Staten Island, with whom I’d enjoyed the first quiet day in Marjah. He’d recently been shot. His radio antenna had become tangled in a tree; as he tried to pull it free, a bullet went through his hand, through the name badge on his chest plate and finally, pierced his throat, knocking him unconscious. But two weeks later, he was back in Marjah and on patrol again. ‘I feel like I got hit in the face with a baseball bat. It knocked the wind out of me. If you let your guard down for a second, you get hit. I think that there are fresh fighters out there, with foreign advisory fighters. They’re picking up their game.’
Staff Sergeant Daw
son’s experience was common. Three marines had been shot in the head, saved from death by their helmets. Lance Corporal Willis had been airlifted out after being hit by a DFC. He returned a month later, only to need an airlift out again when he was shot through both legs. The only real shock was that no one from Bravo had been killed since the first day of combat, when Corporal Jacob Turbott had been shot in the back by a sniper. As we got back to the trucks at the petrol station, the news came that two marines from Alpha Company, operating a few hundred metres south of Bravo, had been killed by a DFC as they entered a building.
The bridges were blown up. The next day, one of them had been rebuilt; men on motorbikes could be seen driving across it. Plans were made to blow it up again the following night.
* * * * *
I wanted to catch up with Corporal Wesley Hillis, who’d been such a steady guide in those first few terrifying days. He was part of the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) – a small team, formed from the nine members of Bravo that you’d least like to get into a fight with. They were the crazies. Their job was to be ready to charge into a battle whenever anyone bad appeared. They spent their days driving around Marjah, praying to be ambushed.
I joined the QRF as they drove west from the bazaar, past a still-smouldering house from which they’d been attacked the day before. Hillis calmly scanned the buildings and trees around us. ‘Come on motherfuckers, come out to play’, he whispered from the seat in front of me. The truck knocked over a parked motorbike: ‘What? What? What the fuck are you looking at?’ the top gunner screamed at the stunned faces below him. The task today was to pick up a man who had tried to grab a policeman’s gun – he wanted to shoot his own son, for theft – but Hillis almost got into a fight with the police commander. Hillis wanted to take the man in cuffed and blindfolded, but the police commander thought he’d done nothing wrong and Hillis should respect the commander’s superior rank. As they argued, in front of a small crowd, Hillis held his helmet in his right hand. I thought he would swing it into the commander’s face (later, he told me he’d wanted to do just that), but he turned and walked away. ‘These people’, he told me later, ‘they’re not like Americans. There’s no way you can trust them. They let the Taliban beat them but if it comes to one of us saying the wrong phrase or anything, they lose their lid because we’re Americans but “that Taliban was from the same tribe as me”. It’s ridiculous, it’s a mind-fuck, it’s frustrating and ... that’s a losing ball game.’