Sneak Peek

I've been pondering a way to record my experiences in Afghanistan.  I'm terrible at keeping a journal.  I've tried at least a dozen times and never made it for more than a few days or maybe weeks before stopping.  But I feel that I have to write this down before I forget.  While it's a chapter of my life that is personal and dear to my heart, for some reason I don't feel I should keep to myself.

I think it's the writing style that makes it hard for me to keep a journal.  I don't like to record events, and I hate writing letters so the dear diary crap won't work for me.  I do, however, like to write stories or articles.  So I decided to write down my experience as if it were a book.  Each significant event will have its own chapter.  I'll try to keep them chronological, but it has been over 2 years, so I might not do that well.  Maybe I'll publish it when I'm done.  And then again, maybe not.  Maybe I'll show it to a publisher and be told that nobody is dumb enough to publish that crap.  We'll see.

All the same, I just finished writing down my first entry.  I thought I'd share it.  Think of it as a teaser or a movie preview.

I changed people's names, as some might not want to be written about.

Introduction

The way things are

The sun beat down on the dirt streets as Walid stood behind his old rusty gate, staring straight ahead blankly.  He wasn’t looking at anything in particular, really just trying to settle his nerves.  He took a few deep breaths to collect himself, straightened his grey vest and pakol, then pushed the gate open.  As he walked out into the street his gate slammed shut behind him.  Walid couldn’t help but jump at the noise.  He put on some cheap sunglasses and pressed on until he reached the taxi that was waiting for him.

Walid gave the driver a few Afghani and softly told him where he wanted to go.  The driver looked back at him questioningly at first, but after Walid firmly nodded and pointed south, he put the corolla into gear and turned into the busy market street.  In the back seat, Walid tried to relax, but couldn’t help but fidget and look around suspiciously, as if he was being watched.

Walid really was being watched.  Five miles away a few soldiers and I sat in a control room looking at a monitor.  We were watching live video feed taken by a surveillance balloon that was floating hundreds of feet in the air over the Afghan desert.  Walid’s departure signaled the beginning of a complex operation that was the result of several weeks of planning and preparation.

Walid, as nice as he tried to seem, was really the scum of the earth.  He was a low-life pawn in an insurgent cell that had made a habit of blowing up cars and setting roadside bombs in the southern part of the province.  Walid was the second cousin of Abdul Hamsa, the leader of this cell, but seemed to resent his cousin.  Walid had been giving my team information on the cell’s activities for some time now, but hadn’t really managed to give us anything of real value.  It was unclear whether Walid felt guilty about selling his family out for a sum that wasn’t more than a few dollars or if he thought that stringing out the Americans for a bit longer might fetch him some more money.  It was probably both.  Either way, we had told Walid that he had better give us something of consequence or we were cutting the ties.

This was something of consequence.

Walid had informed us that Abdul Hamsa was planning an elaborate attack on the route-clearing patrol that came through his area once or twice a week.  The group had tried some explosives out, but the route-clearing equipment the soldiers had was built to withstand what Abul Hamsa’s group had thrown at them.  So Abdul Hamsa had decided to go big.  He had called a meeting for today to discuss the plan.  And we made sure that Walid invited himself.  He was to identify Abdul Hamsa and then stay at the meeting and report the plans to us.

We had told Walid that we would be watching from a nearby mountainside, but we all knew that Walid knew we were going to use the balloon to watch the meeting.  Afghans may be poor and uneducated, but not dumb.

My little team sat in our control room and watched Walid work his way south on what in America would be considered a lousy farm road.  In Afghanistan, though, this was a highway.  The driver dodged goats, jingle trucks, and crowds of people as it worked is way south to a little complex on the north side of the next village.  Walid stopped the car and spoke to the driver, sending him on his way.  The driver, as if he know what was going on (and he may have), took off to the north hastily.

A small group of men welcomed Walid as he entered the compound.  They all bowed slightly and muttered greetings to each other for a few moments.  As Walid approached one man he removed his pakol then shook his hand.  

“That’s the signal.  That’s him!” exclaimed Jake, a member of my team.

“It looks like it,” I said.

Captain Hoffer, the lead in this operation, told his radioman to call the Kiowa team and let them know that the operation was a go.  There was some excited radio chatter as the coordinates and description of the meeting site were relayed and confirmed then confirmed again.

“Do you think they have any idea of what is about to happen?” asked Sam.

“No way,” Jake replied defiantly. “Riley told him he had to stay at the meeting so he could report back to us on how it went.  The douchebag doesn’t have a clue.  Hey, out of curiosity, how much did you say you’d pay him for this anyway, Riley?”

“I gave him twenty bucks and told him that if all went well and if he had some good info for us, I’d give him fifty when we met next,” I replied.

“Douchebag doesn’t have a clue.”

We sat in anticipation and stared at our little screen as the meeting began.  Abdul Hamsa sat directly across from Walid.  They and a couple of other guys who were sitting in the circle were staring at another man who seemed to be explaining something to the group.  The man was wearing a long, black turban that nearly touched the ground.  He seemed upset and was shouting at the rest of the group.

“Riley, I think that’s Abdul Hamsa, not the other guy,” commented Sam.

“I think you’re right.  Captain Hoffer, do you see this?”

“I do, but it really doesn’t matter does it?  He’s there all the same.”

“Scumbag didn’t even give us his cousin!” Jake shouted.  “He thinks he can string us along some more while we chase the wrong guy.  I told you he was a douchebag!”

“I know,” I replied.  “Like Hoffer said, it really doesn’t matter anyway.”

Jake shook his head as if he was surprised.  We both knew better, though.  This kind of crap happened all the time.

The next minute felt like an eternity.  The men on the screen continued talking to each other and the new Abdul Hamsa continued to occasionally shout at the other men.  Suddenly, one of the men stood up.  He pointed to the east and shouted something.  The rest of the group bolted up and ran to different sides of the compound.

“It’s on!” whispered Captain Hoffer.

Kiowas are amazing machines.  They are unbelievably fast helicopters capable of flying very low at high speeds.  Funny thing is, when they fly low in a canyon, they’re really hard to hear unless you’re in the canyon as well.  And the guns they’re equipped with can reach out and touch a guy from over a mile away as if they were right in front of you.  If you’re not in their canyon but do manage to hear them, you’re too close.

I sat back and let the radioman and Hoffer take it from here.  There was a continual stream of surprisingly calm commands given as the Kiowa team made short work of the group in the compound.  Captain Hoffer and his guys were good at their job.  One guy got off an RPG round, but at that range, the grenade air-bursted far short of the helicopters.  I don’t know if he saw the grenade go off, though.  It looked like one of the kiowas got him first.  Both Abdul Hamsas were taken out on the east side of the compound.  Another of the insurgents managed to run almost a hundred feet away to the north before he was shot.  Walid dove for cover into a side building.

Captain Hoffer looked at me for a moment.  It was if he meant to ask if he should pursue Walid.  “He’s no good to me now,” I said to him.  One of the kiowa pilots responded as if I had spoken directly to him instead of Hoffer.  He used his hellfires on the building in which Walid was cowering.  Then he showered it with .50 caliber bullets for good measure.  All in all, the business end of the operation lasted less than a minute.

A strange silence came over the control room as we looked at the rubble.  I imagined Walid in there, covered in blood and debris.  He might have been the biggest scumbag on the earth, but I still knew him.  I was glad that I didn’t actually see him die.  It felt less personal that way.

Jake clapped me on the back.  “Well done, bro!” he shouted.  “We cleaned shop this time.  That many less IEDs for us to hit when we’re out on patrol.”

“Absolutely,” I replied, mustering a smile.  Inside I wanted to puke.

“All right,” said Hoffer.  “Be back here in ten so we can go over everything that just happened.”

After the guys went outside for a minute Captain Hoffer leaned over to me.  “I hate it too.  But it’s our job.  You can’t get emotionally involved in this stuff.  He might have been selling out his cousin this morning, but he would have killed you in a heartbeat if it paid better.  It’s the way things are.”

I nodded in agreement.

When I first heard that I was going to Afghanistan, I thought that my deployment would have several days like this.  My team and I would spend weeks developing sources, gathering intel and planning operations; setting things up so that when the time came, we could do our part to take out some bad guys.  I don’t know if Hollywood had implanted that into my head, or if I had heard too many over-embellished stories from the guys who had just gotten back from the sandbox.

Regardless of how I came to that fantasy, it really didn’t happen the way I had imagined.  Days like that never happened at all.  In fact, what really happened was nothing like the events I just described.

What you are about to read is what really happened.