No Worse Enemy

  Barack Obama had been the only presidential candidate to say that Afghanistan was in danger of being lost because essential resources had been diverted to the wrong war, in Iraq. Now, he’d been elected President and seemed determined to turn things around. He’d authorised seventeen thousand additional troops, most of which would go to Helmand. He also began a major policy review.

  Most of those troops were to be US Marines. I’d once spent time with the Marines: three weeks with the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, in the Persian Gulf. Despite being stuck on an aircraft carrier, they ran six miles a day wearing heavy backpacks, regularly practised hand-to-hand combat in large groups and spent hours playing Iraq War games on X-boxes, actively encouraged by their commanding officers. In a refreshing contrast to the uptight sailors I’d filmed, the Marines were instantly and completely honest and didn’t seem to care what I, or anyone else, thought of them.

  They talked about Fallujah, where they had been involved in the most brutal fighting of the Iraq War, in the same way that I talk about Rio; that is, they loved and missed it. They appeared to be a guerrilla army within the American military, whose lack of restraint no one dared criticise. When I asked what part of the navy they were – and they are part of the navy, although they operate autonomously – I received a disdainful snigger: ‘We’re the men’s department.’ I instantly warmed to them and knew that if I got the chance to film them in action, I’d jump at it.

  In the early hours of July 2nd, 2009, approximately four thousand US Marines, the first of the seventeen thousand additional troops, landed in southern Helmand province. They were there for Operation Khanjar, ‘Sword strike’, a dress rehearsal for the policy that Obama would later decide on. Finally, it was thought, there was enough manpower, equipment and will to defeat the Taliban, offer good governance and win over the war-weary Afghans. Finally, somewhere would be cleared, held and developed. This would be replicated elsewhere and the war could be won.

  The British Army had shown incredible bravery and suffered horrendous losses, yet it was impossible not to see the US Marines, with their billions of dollars’ worth of new equipment, unlimited support, aggressive ambition and unapologetic bluster, as the big boys coming to take charge. Roger Moore was charming but the fighting had spiralled out of control and John Wayne, Ted Nugent and Ice-T had been sent in to finish things off.

  ‘It’s time to change the game in Afghanistan’, said the Marines’ commanding officer before they took off. ‘To force the Taliban to react to us, instead of us reacting to them. We are attacking to seize control of the population from the Taliban, because once we’ve secured the population, they no longer have a sea to swim in. The insurgents are going to die on the vine. We are experts in the application of violence. The world will remember what we do here and believe me, Echo Company is going to change history.’

  The first convoy I joined was hit by an IED. I heard the boom and looked through one of the tiny bullet-proof windows to see the lead vehicle crumpled forwards, as if beaten to its knees. The front left tyre had been blown about eighty metres into a nearby field but the main body of the truck, like the seven marines inside, survived intact. Even Blue, the explosives-sniffing dog, jumped out wagging his tail.

  If British soldiers, in roofless old Land Rovers, had driven over the same bomb, everyone would have been killed. The US soldiers already had about twelve thousand bomb-proof trucks but would soon order over four thousand more, because the design had been improved. The Americans, and certainly the Marines, seemed to take war much more seriously than the British.

  The crippled MRAP (Mine Resistant Ambush Protected) was dragged to a nearby base. I followed the marines on their foot patrol to recover parts of the IED and truck from the site. We passed one crater (‘No, this is the one from three days ago’) and came to two craters, one right in the middle of the road, the second a little beyond it, at exactly the spot a vehicle would pass to avoid the first. Barely thirty minutes had passed since the explosion but every scrap of metal had been cleared.

  ‘There are fresh motorcycle tracks here’, said a marine on the other side of the crater.

  ‘Motherfuckers’, said another.

  A canal ran parallel to the road. On the far side, two men on a motorcycle rode past, staring at us coldly. Another motorbike, carrying a man and his wife, came towards us on our side. The marines studied the couple through their rifle sights before ordering them to stop and get off the bike. The man looked only mildly inconvenienced as he lifted up his shirt and walked toward the marines. They kept their sights trained on him. He said didn’t have any information about the Taliban.

  ‘If you’ve finished with him, let him go’, shouted someone behind us. ‘Just because we have to get blown up doesn’t mean he has to as well.’

  ‘You think he’d be standing there if there were more explosives, you fucking idiot?’ shouted Lance Corporal Gomez, crouched next to me. ‘He knows where everything is. They all know.’

  We walked back to the base. The convoy was ordered back to FOB Delhi, the marines’ main base, close to the Helmand Green Zone but far south of anywhere I’d been with the British. We’d been trying to get to Echo Company, who had pushed further south than anybody so far, into the small village of Mian Poshteh.

  Soon, so many convoys had been hit that the two roads from FOB Delhi to Mian Poshteh were closed. The second convoy I joined had to drive through the desert. Two of the massive MRAP trucks, which weigh over thirty tonnes, sank into the thin, powdery sand. We had to wait for lorries to come and tow them out; a journey of sixteen kilometres took us thirteen hours.

  I was ordered to switch vehicles. When I climbed into the back of the second truck I was surprised to see two Special Forces soldiers. There was an awkward moment as they eyed my camera and I looked at their elaborate weapons and long beards. They eventually spoke but batted away my questions about what they were on their way to do.

  The driver, excited to have such exalted company in his truck, told them a house in front of us had been used by a sniper a few days earlier. ‘I hope he shoots at us again, then we can set you guys on him.’ He turned around and smiled hopefully. The Special Forces soldiers looked away.

  I was later told that the sniper was a sixteen-year-old Chechen girl. I remembered I’d been told exactly the same thing by the British, two years earlier. They had described her as if she were an evil super-hero from a comic. I had no idea she was so good she didn’t age.

  It was dusk on July 4th when I finally made it to Mian Poshteh. Echo Company had already been involved in a seven-hour gunfight. One marine had been killed, the first American to die on an operation approved by President Obama.

  Described by Lieutenant Colonel Christian Cabaniss, the commanding officer of 2/8 Marines, the mission sounded simple. As the sun rose, the Taliban would ‘wake up to find marines everywhere’. They would call for reinforcements, only to be told that they too, saw marines everywhere. The Taliban would have ‘no stomach to stand and fight, and would disappear’, enabling the marines to ‘target the population, not the enemy’. Sadly, it’s necessary to point out that in this case ‘targeting’ means ‘winning over’. The thinking, based on the counter-insurgency books that are the bibles of ambitious American officers, was that if you won over the local population they would reject the enemy, who would then become ‘irrelevant’. It sounded remarkably similar to the comprehensive approach the Brits had been trying for the last two years. I lost count of how many times I was told that the Taliban were about to become irrelevant. In that time, the Taliban, rather than becoming irrelevant, had become increasingly successful and audacious in their attacks against foreign and Afghan forces.

  Main Poshteh is a small market town straddling a canal. Its two rows of shops, merely tiny storage rooms with mud walls and small, shaded, outside trading areas, had been abandoned hastily. Goods were on the shelves, scales and weights were neatly piled on the floor and vegetables were on display outside, rotting in the sun. The ma
rines helped themselves to cigarettes and sweets, leaving behind generous amounts of dollar bills.

  The marines slept on the concrete floor of a long, thin building that was once a school. I was told to sleep with the medics, who had one room to treat casualties, one room for the doctor and a mud courtyard that I shared with about fifteen others. My bed was a stretcher, unless the medics needed it.

  ‘Have you seen what’s next door?’ said a marine. ‘A gynaecologist’s bench with a dustbin at the end. How apt for this country.’

  There was one casualty at the medical centre. He was a local boy, a paraplegic who, despite being ‘somewhere between sixteen and thirty’, couldn’t have weighed more than six stone. He’d been discovered in a nearby house, on fire after being hit by a Hellfire missile. His family had fled, together with everyone else, when the marines landed. Unable to move and barely able to talk, the boy had almost starved to death. He told the interpreter that he’d been injured in a farming accident, which none of the marines believed. They assumed anyone with such injuries had sustained them fighting or making IEDs.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. When I heard the medics asking for a fourth man to help carry the boy out to a chopper that would take him to the hospital in Kandahar City, I got up and grabbed one corner of the stretcher. After my delay in getting there, I was anxious to see as much as possible.

  We jogged to the end of the government building, treading on marines trying to sleep on the dusty ground. ‘Is that the cripple?’ ‘Is he even alive?’ ‘Is it true his family just fucking left him there?’ ‘He probably crippled himself making bombs.’ Dust and dirt blown by the chopper’s blades whipped our faces as we carried the boy into the helicopter’s huge belly. The staff at Kandahar hospital would have to try and locate his family.

  That afternoon, four Special Forces soldiers who everyone knew had been on operation the night before, appeared, covered in mud and dripping with sweat. Marines shouted out compliments as they went by. The two men I’d met in the truck walked past me without making eye contact. The rumour went round that they had twelve confirmed kills and many more unconfirmed. But the awe they inspired wasn’t shared by all the marines: ‘They’re nothing but Rangers with a few skill sets and some extra assets, they ain’t special’, said one.

  Some of that resentment could have been because the Special Forces went out and killed people within hours of arriving, whereas Echo now rarely saw the enemy. Local people were returning to their homes; the marines were sure Taliban were among them, studying Echo’s movements.

  The men in this tricky position were often no more than nineteen or twenty years old. Mostly from Florida, North Carolina or South Carolina, (their base is Camp Lejeune, NC), many had never before left their home state. They’d been trained to kill; some openly fantasised about ‘dropping’ people. But now, they were under orders to hold back and concentrate on building relationships with the local community.

  I joined Lance Corporal Brady Bunch, a chubby-faced, frustrated young marine, and Second Platoon, as they went on patrol to a compound from where they’d been attacked several times. As we prepared to leave, Bunch stroked his favourite weapon. ‘Big Tom – the best weapon in the Marine Corps. I’m gonna drop a raghead at eight hundred feet with this’, he said. Then he looked away, laughing: ‘Probably not.’

  As we approached the compound, a man dressed in black, carrying a bag on his back, ran away. Bunch got down on his belly and got the man in his sights. After a few tense moments, the platoon leader decided they would approach the house slowly and try to talk to whoever was inside. So Bunch wasn’t allowed to take a shot. The man crossed a footbridge and disappeared into another compound.

  ‘Fuck. Every fucking open shot I get. Fuck’, said Bunch as he stomped towards the house. He turned, grinning: ‘I could have waxed his ass.’

  A small boy, about twelve years old, came out of the house. ‘No, I don’t want a kid. Where is his father?’ asked Bunch. The boy said he was alone. He and the interpreter carried on talking, without translating. Bunch became more and more frustrated. A young girl appeared. ‘OK, this is a bullshit story, there’s another kid here. We’re going in this house.’ Three men gathered on the other side of the canal. The boy kept changing his story. ‘This kid’s about to cry and all these people are trying to talk to him. Something’s definitely going on’, said Bunch.

  I followed him up to the entrance to the house. As he walked in, a sudden violent movement sent everyone darting backwards. Another small girl had appeared, startling Bunch into a firing position. ‘That little girl almost got blasted’, he said. More girls appeared, then a woman who seemed to be their mother.

  ‘Now there’s a woman in the house. What the fuck is going on? There wasn’t supposed to be anybody here, now there’s a whole family. Tell the kid to stop lying and tell us the truth’, said Bunch. ‘Ask him why he’s so nervous.’

  Eventually, the boy said there were three women in the house, that his brother had ‘escaped the Taliban’ and that his father was ill in hospital.

  Before they searched the building, the marines told the boy to get all the women into one room. We were ordered to turn our backs as they were ushered past. Any Taliban fighters could easily have escaped or sprayed the whole platoon with bullets. It was odd to see one of the world’s most lethal fighting forces offering such a gift to the enemy. They had to be ready to blow people’s heads off or walk into booby-trapped buildings, but they also had to be culturally sensitive. When all the women were in one room, the marines searched the rest, telling the boy to go in first because ‘they won’t shoot if he goes in’.

  The last place left to search was a side passage where animals were kept. The boy tried to block the entrance. ‘What’s he so worried about?’ demanded Bunch. Marines pushed past. One shone a light into the chicken coop. He found a rifle, wrapped up.

  ‘You’re fucked, kid’, said Bunch. Everyone gathered at the doorway but no one was allowed in; the gun might have been booby-trapped.

  ‘What is this? What is this? Why is there a rifle in here? There’s probably a shitload buried in there.’

  The boy was ordered to go in and pick up the rifle, which he was reluctant to do. ‘Right there! I know you see the rifle, kid.’ Eventually he picked it up. ‘Don’t fucking touch it, put it down, put it down. Get away from the rifle.’

  The interpreter picked it up, carried it outside and unwrapped it. Bunch opened it to check for ammunition. His shoulders dropped. ‘Are you kidding me? It’s a fucking BB gun.’

  ‘Why was it covered up?’ he asked the boy.

  ‘I use it to kill some birds. I can’t kill somebody with it’, said the boy.

  They told the boy not to cover things up, because it causes suspicion. ‘Tell him thank you for his time, we’re going to leave now, sorry.’

  Outside, the three men still watched. Bunch asked the interpreter why they were so concerned with this house but he didn’t get an answer. Then, the man dressed in black, who we’d seen running away earlier, joined them. One of the marines spat on the ground. They asked who the local elder was and were given a name they hadn’t heard before. Bunch went down on one knee: ‘They give a completely different answer every time you ask them.’ The boy had followed and was standing behind Bunch. Bunch turned towards him, discreetly pointing at the men across the canal. ‘Talib? Talib? Taliban?’ he asked in a whisper. But the boy just stared.

  ‘He ain’t telling me shit’, said Bunch, after a few more attempts. He turned back to the men, who were being asked for help by the platoon commander. ‘If we help you the Taliban will kill us’, they said.

  Bunch was sure the man in black was Taliban, ‘eye-fucking’ the others into not talking. He sighed. ‘I wish the bad guys had uniforms.’

  It was almost dark, so the men were told that if they did have any information, they should come and see the Marines at their patrol base. Then we started the long walk back.

  Later, I approached the adjutant.
‘Is Brady Bunch his real name? Did his mother actually call him that?’

  ‘Yep. He gets a lot of shit for it.’

  The next day, I joined First Platoon on another patrol. As one of the marines attempted to talk to an old man using a Pashtu phrase book, a few rounds from an AK47 popped over our heads. We moved in the direction the bullets seemed to be coming from. Leaning against a low wall, we peeked over but no one could see anything. Staff Sergeant Funke, a recent divorcé, permanently disgusted but with a sense of humour that made him instantly likeable, studied his map, simultaneously listening to his radio. The person at the other end identified two men with RPGs and AK47s. Funke worked out where they were and laughed. ‘They’re right fucking there, gentleman. Right there’, he pointed. ‘They’re about ... ... Ha! Less than a hundred metres from us.’

  We heard the harmless-sounding whoosh of an RPG over our heads and everyone dropped to the ground. Everyone except the old man, who stayed upright, looking down at the marines. Then he turned and slowly walked inside. The rocket didn’t explode but everyone stayed down, giving Funke something else to get annoyed about: ‘Can we fucking move on these people, goddamnit?’

  ‘Does anyone see anything?’ shouted another marine. A heavy and constant burst of gunfire came from very close by. Everyone seemed to have someone ranked below them to shout at. Funke yelled at one marine, who yelled at the marine next to me: ‘Get your fucking goddamn fucking muzzle up, pay fucking attention. See that window? Watch it.’

  The marines ran into the next compound, kicking open doors and searching rooms as they went. AK47 rounds popped over our heads but never seemed to hit anything. We all ran, crouched, at the same time; all except Funke, who stood straight, looking down at us impatiently. ‘The rounds are going over your heads. Let’s go.’

  Everyone jogged towards the next compound. Funke strolled casually behind, until we started going in the wrong direction. ‘Gentlemen, the enemy is to the south. We are to the north. We need to get through this’, pointing to a compound to the south. ‘They are there, we need to kill them. Let’s go.’