No Worse Enemy

  * * * * *

  On Christmas Day, hundreds of welfare packages arrived at Patrol Base Jamil. They were stacked in shed-sized piles by marines, some wearing Santa hats. The company walked through the boxes, labelled ‘to our American heroes’ and ‘America Supports You’, searching for their names. Most of the boxes contained the same sweets or toiletries as they did every week. These were emptied into huge crates outside the main door and left for people to help themselves. Only when someone found smuggled porn or a few drops of alcohol was there a little burst of excitement.

  Sangin was a hard place to celebrate Christmas anyway but Lima Company had also woken to the news that Lance Corporal Corzine, who’d had both legs amputated after stepping on an IED three weeks earlier, had died. He was the battalion’s twenty-sixth fatality. Some of the marines speculated that he’d pulled the wires out of his life support machine. They said they’d do it, if they were in his position.

  Next to the welfare packages, six dog tags hung from a cross, with the insignias of dead or wounded marines on its central column. Someone had placed a laminated card bearing Corzine’s name and blood group at the base of the cross. Outside the front door, under a Christmas tree, a fluffy reindeer had been positioned to look like it was having sex with a toy puppy.

  Zeimus, high on Rip It®, tried to cheer everyone by demonstrating exactly how he was going to teabag his wife when he got home. Although those nearest to him laughed a little, they soon went back to what looked like lonely, dark thoughts. Piles of ammunition boxes, rockets and explosives were dropped off at the gate, preparation for an operation that would start in a few days. That finally got everyone out of their morbid haze. For many, thoughts of revenge were the only remaining motivation.

  Three days after Christmas, Lima Company left their patrol base to begin Dark Horse II, an operation to take Wishtan, an area of central Sangin. If I thought most of Sangin was bad, the marines kept telling me, Wishtan was much worse. It was the last piece of ground in Sangin where the Taliban had free rein. Where they’d had months to prepare defences and booby-traps.

  Before they moved, marines from 2/9 arrived from Marjah to take over Lima Company’s patrol bases. Within their first few days there, I was told, they shot at least three civilians dead. Two of the dead were well known to the men of 3/5: one had given them valuable information about IEDs, another often brought them chickens and cigarettes. Because of this relationship, the men were relaxed about digging in their fields, within clear sight of the base. The newly-arrived marines hadn’t been told about them, thought they were planting IEDs, and shot them.

  A few months before they handed over Sangin, the British had cleared exactly that area the Marines now aimed at. It had cost them dear. In one incident alone, five British soldiers had been killed by a daisy chain of IEDs on Pharmacy Road, the main road through Wishtan. That was the biggest single loss of British life since the war began. Olaf Schmid, a bomb disposal expert and posthumous recipient of the George Cross, cleared thirty-one IEDs in twenty-four hours there, only to be killed soon afterwards.

  The British had established three patrol bases along Pharmacy Road but these were abandoned by the Marines. This had given the Taliban several small valleys and a maze of alleys and compounds to disappear into if they attacked the remaining bases in the north and west.

  The night before the operation, Lima Company travelled to the nearest remaining patrol base. It was the one I’d been in three and a half years earlier, when the Grenadier Guards were attacked with rockets and machine-gun fire. The plan was to slowly clear Wishtan before re-establishing the old British patrol bases. Pharmacy Road was to be cleared by ABVs (Assault Breacher Vehicles): ‘super-tanks’ carrying huge claw-like ploughs instead of gun barrels. These would be followed by armoured bulldozers, to flatten everything a hundred metres either side of the road. ‘If it casts a shadow, it gets flattened’, said Captain Peterson. ‘I’d rather have a headache that costs money at a shura than one that costs blood.’ If a house were occupied, he said, he would risk letting it stand, although the surrounding walls would have to go. He expected most buildings to be abandoned.

  Before the bulldozers could start, the marines had to clear every building either side of Pharmacy Road on foot. It would be a painstaking and hazardous process; although the road was only a kilometre long, clearing it was expected to take three to four days.

  The night before the operation began was miserable, so cold that some marines chose to stand, like skid row bums, around a burning oil drum, rather than sleep. Afghan winters are as punishing as the summers; a few hours in one made you nostalgic for the other. Only for a few weeks in between seasons is the weather bearable. The rest of the time, you have to make a massive effort just to survive. Wearing scarves around their necks, woolly hats under their helmets and sometimes, balaclavas beneath their woolly hats, the marines jumped up and down on the spot or chain-smoked to keep warm.

  Just before first light, everyone put on their gear and congregated near the main gate. Captain Peterson and his officers formed a human tunnel, like basketball players before a game. As the marines streamed past, out of the gate, the officers patted them on their backs.

  Every path, road, window and doorway was expected to be laced with IEDs, so the plan was to travel through people’s houses or over their roofs, as much as possible. After a short walk up Pharmacy Road, the marines tried to blast their way into the first compound they came across, before they remembered the super-tank ABVs. Soon, one came roaring forwards towards the wall. When it was lined up, the driver changed gear; the engine snorted and spewed out thick grey smoke. It looked like the tank was psyching itself up. Then it moved forward, blades raised high, and pushed the wall over like a wave toppling a sandcastle.

  The marines walked through the hole and saw a well-built white house, with a green, pink and blue border along its plastered walls. The floor was cement but piles of dust and twigs lay everywhere. The marines circled, then, crouched down, brushing the piles with their hands, looking for any wires. Lance Corporal Payne, the platoon’s minesweeper, walked up the stairs and almost right on to an IED. ‘It’s a pressure plate’, said Payne, ‘right where we would have stepped.’ It was also on the roof, where the marines thought they’d be safest.

  Whether it was the large amount of equipment he carried or his absolute lack of swagger, Payne walked with a slight waddle and always had an apologetic look on his face. He spoke in short sentences, if he spoke at all. His slight speech impediment had earned him the nickname of ‘Elmer Fudd’. These things – and the fact that he was doing one of the most dangerous jobs, in one of the most dangerous districts of the most dangerous province in Afghanistan and didn’t seek the tiniest nod of appreciation or respect – made him one of the most admirable marines I’d ever met. But I’m sure if I’d told him that he would have shuffled away, looking for something to carry or a suspicious pile of dirt to start digging in.

  There were black fingermarks on the walls, small piles of neatly-arranged rocks, like little totem poles and random mounds of dust all over the floor. The marines knew these were ‘indicators’ – warning signs for local people – but no one understood what they meant. Several times, moving to avoid one mound of dirt, I almost stepped on another. Soon, we were surrounded by voices: ‘Hey, Payne, this is definitely something’; ‘Hey, Payne, this is shady as fuck right here.’ Around me, marines delicately brushed away layers of dirt with their fingers, trying to reveal what was underneath. It was odd to see them suddenly being so gentle, as if they were stroking a child’s hair. Their muscle, firepower and aggression had suddenly been rendered utterly useless.

  ‘Fuck my life’, said a marine, nervously tiptoeing past.

  The first compound cleared, the marines blasted their way through the next wall. They were about to walk through when a man and his two sons appeared in a doorway further up Pharmacy Road. The marines froze where they were. The man was so tall and thin that his body seemed to be cavi
ng in on itself. He walked towards us with a limp. As he came closer, I could see that one of his eyes was almost closed by scar tissue; it looked like his skin had melted and slid down the right side of his face.

  ‘There are mines there’, the man said, pointing at our feet. Rock was right behind us. He confirmed what the man appeared to be saying; we were standing on IEDs. After some hurried dialogue, Rock said the mines were up against the wall, two feet behind us. The man’s sons approached, then disappeared down an alley the marines had thought too dangerous.

  The man said there were mines in the alley next to his house. ‘We don’t know where the mines are but they have piled rocks, implying no one should cross that point’, he said. Pointing to another area, beyond the hole the marines had just blown, he said there were mines there too. The man was asked how he knew where the IEDs were. He offered to lead everyone to his house, show them the piles of rocks and tell them what he thought they meant. But the marines decided to keep going in the direction they’d already started, away from Pharmacy Road.

  The marines asked if the Taliban ever fired from his house, in an accusatory tone that I thought was unfair. The man said they hadn’t, but they had been close by. ‘Thank you, bye’, said the man, walking back to his house. ‘Thank you, bye’, said Rock.

  The people with a little money had fled Wishtan; those who remained were the desperately poor and the powerless. They were exactly the people the marines should have been helping and who they could have built relationships with. Not helping the man who had helped us felt like a moral failure. It also seemed a waste. If the marines had someone like him they could trust, they could have walked through Wishtan in twenty minutes.

  I asked Lieutenant Grell, the most senior officer present, if the man’s house would be bulldozed. His cheeks tightened, exposing his front teeth slightly, as if he’d just dipped a toe in cold water. ‘That’s what ... that’s what’s on ... I mean if we knock it down we’re gonna offer him a ton of money, offer him some other place to live but ...’ He was distracted by the man, who had walked to the end of the alley outside his front door and was pointing out exactly where the IEDs were. ‘Thank you’ said Grell, waving at him. The man waved back, walked inside his house and closed the gate.

  As we moved from roof to roof, I heard children’s squeaks and giggles and almost every chimney had smoke coming out of it. But none of the families were evacuated or told about what was happening.

  Soon, every few minutes, there were explosions that sucked the air out of my lungs. Most came from the marines blasting their way through Wishtan, creating new routes with wall charges and A-POBs. Even the buildings that weren’t to be demolished cracked and crumbled. Occasionally blasts came unexpectedly, producing different sounds and dark smoke. These were IEDs set off by the blasts or by the ABVs as they ploughed their way up Pharmacy Road. When that happened, everyone stiffened and waited in silence, until a voice on the radio told them someone hadn’t just stepped on an IED.

  A man carrying a weapon wrapped in cloth was spotted in an alley on the other side of the building we stood on. An air strike was called in.

  We didn’t hear a plane, just the whoosh of a missile almost on top of us. We braced ourselves. We heard a heavy thud, as if a boulder had just been dropped. A thin plume of black smoke rose into the air. ‘Dude, that was weak’, said a marine next to me, who had curled up into a ball and put his fingers in his ears.

  ‘That was a dud?’

  ‘It had to have been.’

  ‘Do you think the dud killed him?’

  ‘If it hit him right on the head!’ said Sergeant Giles, sarcastically.

  It was soon impossible to proceed without walking along a path that ran parallel to Pharmacy Road and across the front of the house from where the Grenadier Guards had been attacked. Its few remaining walls were pockmarked by bullet-holes and shrapnel spray. In the rubble, two white Taliban flags stood; either a sign of defiance or another indicator that nobody understood.

  Outside the house, several large rocks looked incongruous on the path. Payne, on his knees, scraped at the ground with his knife. Hancock slowly followed, stretching each leg straight out and feeling the ground with his toes before he took a step. He looked like a madman who wouldn’t step on the cracks, or someone wearing their best pair of shoes, avoiding puddles. Hancock thought the rocks were a guide for someone at the other end of a command wire. ‘They see someone walk by it, they know that’s when to pull the trigger ... Boom!’ He fanned his hands out to demonstrate the explosion.

  ‘See that hole filled with rock?’ said Hancock, ‘I’m not going there. That’s like the one that hit McGuinness.’ McGuinness had stepped on IED a few weeks earlier, on Thanksgiving Day. He had survived.

  We approached an S-shaped bend in the path, a junction of four alleys. The marines were desperate not to walk there. There were four big dips in the path, filled with gravel. Payne climbed a wall and looked for an alternative route.

  Figure 4 Pharmacy Road (© Google 2011; Image © Digital Globe 2011)

  ‘Is there a better way to go besides this fucking choke point?’ asked Hancock, hopefully.

  Payne peered over the wall for a long time: ‘No.’

  ‘There have to be IEDs on this fucking corner’, said Hancock.

  No one knew it at the time but Hancock was absolutely right. A jug and a brake drum were buried just under the path, packed with home-made explosives. They were part of a seven-IED daisy chain, designed to kill or maim an entire platoon. Two command wires led down two alleys; at the end of one, someone watched, waiting to detonate the bombs. That person held the power source, probably a battery, in one hand and the command wire in the other, ready to connect them and set off the daisy chain. This detonation mechanism left no metal for Payne to detect. Slowly, he swept the ground. Hancock nervously followed behind. I followed him; delicately, we inched our way forwards, stepping right over the IEDs.

  I didn’t breathe until I got past the corner. Four marines came behind me, looking down each alley through the sights of their rifles. Payne put the ladder up against another wall, trying to find a way off the path – the ‘fucking path’ – as everyone now called it. As he reached the top of the ladder, a huge explosion roared behind us. I turned: two plumes of brown dust filled the alley and stones and rocks rained on us.

  ‘IS ANYBODY HIT? IS ANYBODY HIT?’ screamed the marines. I couldn’t see around the corner but could hear some awful groans.

  ‘That had to be a command wire.’

  ‘Motherfuckers, man.’

  I walked back to see what had happened. Everyone had frozen where they stood, their feet locked to the ground. The groans became horrendous begging sounds. As the dust cleared I saw a crater with the fragments of a yellow plastic jug in it. The jug was big enough to have held about forty pounds of explosives, enough to blow several people to pieces.

  ‘Jesus fucking Christ, it was right there’, said a marine. He pointed at the crater, about eight feet away.

  Another marine was on his knees, his right hand reaching for something to grab hold of. But he couldn’t even find the ground. The medic was screaming from far away; could he hear, could he see, could he crawl away from the corner? At least three IEDs had gone off together but everyone was sure there were more.

  Payne appeared next to me. The marine who’d been closest to the blast said, ‘You think we should step out this way, man?’ Payne surveyed the corner for a second, then quietly walked forward. He stepped over the first crater and bent down to the casualty. It was Thomas, known as Big T; the other marines used to playfully mock him, because he flinched at any explosion, even small and controlled ones.

  ‘Can you stand up, can you see?’ asked Payne.

  ‘He’s blind! Big T’s a priority!’ someone screamed into a radio. Less than three feet away from Big T’s head was another crater, full of a fizzing dark powder that sounded like a fistful of matches being scratched alight at once. It felt as if something else
could explode at any moment.

  Payne tried to get Big T on to his feet but he just patted the ground around him and groaned. ‘Can you see? Can you stand up?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Can you see?’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘He can’t hear you, man’, the medic shouted. Big T was blind and deaf. Payne helped him to his feet but he collapsed, groaning. ‘Arrrggggh fuck.’

  ‘Big T, follow me, grab my shoulder’, said Payne. Putting Big T’s arm around his neck, he staggered back down the path.

  I was suddenly alone, standing between two smoking craters. ‘Stay where you’re at, don’t move’, yelled a marine in front of me.

  ‘The blast was right here’, someone shouted from around the corner. But the marine who’d told me not to move was also temporarily deaf.

  Big T was lowered to the ground. He groaned and his arms hung lifelessly from his body, like a stuffed dummy. The black powder in the crater was now on fire, crackling ominously.

  ‘Do you remember what happened?’ the medic asked Big T.

  ‘Huh? What?’

  ‘Did you lose consciousness?’

  ‘Huh?’ Big T put his hands to his ears. His mouth was wide open and his glasses were covered in thick dust, hiding his eyes. It was a disturbing image that reminded me of Francis Bacon’s painting of a screaming pope.

  ‘We have to get him out of here’, said the medic.

  I shouted to the nearest marine that the powder was still burning. ‘Could it explode?’ I asked.

  ‘I don’t know, I’m not going over there’, he said.

  The daisy chain had been made of seven IEDs but only three of them had gone off. Miraculously, none of the marines had been on top of them when they did. No one had been seriously injured. The people at the front of the patrol – Payne, Hancock, me, and four marines – had been standing on top of the IEDs for about ten minutes before we walked round the corner.