Target Practice (Part 2)
“I don’t want you going to school looking like a slut,” said a woman’s voice. I sat up on my cot slightly disoriented, not quite sure where I was. “What are you wearing?” Pause. “No. Put your grandma on the phone.” Pause “Mom, I need you to handle this. Don’t let her go to school dressed like a slut.”
As the haranguing continued, I thought of my own parenting responsibilities, how they had been reduced by one order of magnitude four months prior. My son, who shaved his eyebrows in college to facilitate applying part of a costume for a drama class, was dead. His attire was something I would no longer consider. The fog lifted. I was in a large tent, sheathed in predawn dark, in one of the most remote US outposts in Afghanistan. It was an Army Special Forces camp in the upper Sangin River valley in Helmand province. My role was that of supervisor of the cultural advisors assigned to the Navy SEALs, Marine Special Operators (not yet called Raiders), and Army Special Forces. There were ten advisors, all government civilians — not contractors, a distinction I will explain — who were scattered across the region.
The goal of the program was to give all the soldiers fighting the Taliban a little Jiminy Cricket that would whisper at just the right moment, “I wouldn’t do that if I were you, Pinocchio. You might make the people really mad, and we need the people. Okay?” I was visiting the two advisors assigned to the camp known as Zombalay.
Back at Bagram, after the third rocket attack in two weeks — all three occurring on a Monday between 5:30 and 6:00 a.m., originating from the same space of scorched earth two kilometers from the impact area (was I the only one detecting a pattern here?) — I’d rediscovered my courage. I no longer scampered like a scared kid to the nearest slab of concrete. I’d stilled my shaking hand and assumed the role of willing target. It was the only way of finding peace in the chaos. Soon I was walking around with the same air of indifference as the soldiers half my age.
Cultivating that cool took some work: the third attack killed four of us on the base and damaged a general’s plane. The occasional death kept things real.
While we could trace the flight of every rocket coming in from launch to impact, we never fired back, and for a couple of reasons. First, we would likely have killed non-combatants as well as the Taliban. The Taliban launched their rockets from fields near neighborhoods hoping we would respond in kind. Second, we would have had to put people outside the wire on constant security patrols to ensure no one got close enough to hit us with rockets or mortars. Those patrols, when they did occur, more often than not were hit with roadside bombs. American casualties and their concomitant “Dover” effect (as in Dover Air Force Base) of our dead going home in boxes was not politically viable. A fear of killing civilians without the cover of a pitched battle, and fear of American deaths, drove us to embrace a strategy based on fear. The unintended consequence of this fear-based strategy was the erection of fortresses alongside airfields surrounded by wire inside which we waited for the next attack, hoping there would be no casualties.
On my cot, I listened to a mother’s efforts at long distance parenting. “Just please don’t let her dress like a slut,” the voice repeated. I discovered later that the woman making the call was a single mom based on the west coast. Her own mother was guardian to the marine’s teenage daughter while the marine served her country as a moving target.
The outpost at Zombalay was a fort about a mile square surrounded by walls twenty feet high defining a bullet-proof perimeter made of dirt-filled boxes caged in heavy gage wire. The boxes and wire cages shipped flat. Unfolded, assembled, and filled with dirt upon arrival, they joined like Lego blocks. Three feet of dirt will stop pretty much any bullet. The walls around Zombalay were double and triple stacked, and wide enough to form a catwalk along the top. Thus, we were secure from small arms fire. That security, however, left us isolated from the local population. Instead of making us safer, our inability to interact made it difficult for the natives to warn us in case of imminent danger.
A maze of paths connected the various tents and buildings inside our compound. There was a latrine, a couple of washers and dryers under a lean-to, a tent with workout equipment like treadmills, another one with free weights and benches, and another one with dumbbells. A temporary building long past its life served as a dining and cooking area. There was also a helicopter landing zone and a parking area that could hold half a dozen vehicles.
A hundred people called Zombalay home. Sharing space with the twelve Green Berets were a platoon of infantry from the United Arab Emirates (about thirty men), a US infantry platoon (another thirty men), four teams of mortars (about ten men manning those tubes that shoot bombs into the air), a bomb dog and his handler, an explosives expert, and the two cultural advisors I was visiting. Among all these men were three women. The women had the same role as the cultural advisors (with whom they shared a tent). As the SF guys (or any men for that matter) were not permitted to speak to Afghan women (ever), the US female advisors served as our window onto one half of the Afghan population.
Despite our fortifications and firing power, we were attacked daily.
My first experience of this routine came a few hours after I arrived. I was lunching with the Green Berets, discussing an upcoming visit to the Afghan local police station about one kilometer away. As I was chewing on something from a can, gunfire erupted outside the walls. Judging by the sound, I guessed the firing came from about 500 meters away. Close enough to make me eye my rifle leaning against my chair.
Not one of my hosts bothered looking up or acknowledging the attack.
I thought maybe I was being tested: how will the old man respond under fire? I looked around the table. No big whoop. Pass the salt.
The gunfire intensified. Definitely machine guns. Now they sounded like they were right outside the wall. Finally, one of the Green Berets, a warrant officer, looked at one of his guys and said, “Hey, man, call them and see if they need any help.” The man rose taking his plate with him and disappeared into the warren. Looking at me, the warrant officer explained there were two sub-stations to this outpost, one manned by the Afghan local police, and one manned by a section of the UAE troops who rotated from the fort to the outpost. The one with the UAE troops was the one taking fire, he explained, and here I understood from his explanation that this was a daily ritual for the local Taliban.
I tried looking like I was listening to the latest sports news even while a horizontal blizzard of bullets was blowing within a few football fields of our luncheon. Soon the thump of a mortar firing drew my attention from the meal. The blast from the detonation reached us about a minute later. As the thumps grew closer together in time, I pictured the mortar crew, stripped to the waist, poring sweat, dropping mortar bombs down the tubes angled up and out. We kept chewing but the conversation died while the bombs and bullets flew outside the wire.
“Chief,” I asked the warrant. “Who is calling for those mortars? How do you know you’re hitting the target?”
“There’s only two places the booger-eaters can attack from over there,” he replied. “We drop a round and ask the OP if that’s the right spot. If they say yes, we pound it. If they say no, we shift to the other spot and pound it.” He returned to his meal. We finished as the firing subsided and our mortars became quiet.
I considered what the local Afghans must think. Zombalay was in the middle of a farming community. We shelled — daily — an area that otherwise would have not seen any war. The reason the Taliban was there was because we were there. If we left, the Taliban would never come to that location. Ironically, we bombed an area because we did know who lived nearby. And we knew the local Afghan people knew not to go near those Taliban hiding places, ever, because everybody (including the Taliban) knew that’s where we bombed when we got attacked.
About two hours later, the daily patrol assembled, and I was invited. Most of the SF guys, the bomb dog and his handler, the explosives expert wearing a portable jammer to block cell phone signals that could detonate a bomb, the three female advisors, one of the cultural advisors, and I stood fully kitted — body armor, helmets, combat gloves, knee and elbow pads, weapons locked and loaded — and received a final mission brief. We would stop to chat with an elder along the way to visit the Afghan local police. We should be gone about four hours.
“How far is the OP?” I asked, not sure I understood from the brief.
“About nine-hundred meters,” replied the Green Beret captain who was coming with us.
We’re getting fully kitted, discussing this patrol like we’re doing combat reconnaissance in advance of a major attack, and we’re going just over half a mile to visit the Afghan local police.
On cue, we lined up to exit the wire. One of the SF guys stood at the exit and counted us off. There were twenty-three of us. I was walking towards the middle behind the young woman who had extolled her daughter not to dress like a slut. She was living that advice. She looked like the Terminator, right down to the tricked-out rifle, the pistol on her hip, and the black wrap-around sunglasses.
With the bomb dog and handler in the lead, followed closely behind by the guy with the jammer in a backpack, we walked single file on the road leading from the gate of the little fort to a few houses set amongst fields of corn. The corn was taller than me: the perfect height for hiding Taliban.
Be still, coward. There’s a woman the same age as your daughter walking in front of you like she owns the place, and you’re waiting for the boogeyman to jump out of the corn.
We came up to a house larger than the rest, and stopped. Most of the members of the patrol took up positions along the road while a couple of the Green Berets, the cultural advisor, and I went into a courtyard. The female members of the team went inside and disappeared. Children came out and swarmed us.
A little girl, no older than five, walked among the soldiers and the Afghan elder who emerged to greet us. The SF captain and his interpreter — a contractor — exchanged pleasantries with the elder who then invited us inside.
We walked into a room that easily held all six of the Americans, plus two other local Afghan men, and removed our kit. I understand now what it must have been like for the knights of old to don and remove all that armor.
The conversation between the elder and the SF captain centered around projects the elder was hoping the Americans would fund, including perhaps repairing a barn. As we drank tea and ate cookies, the conversation arrived at our real reason for stopping. The night before my arrival (or about eighteen hours before our tea time), the Taliban had conducted a night attack against Zombalay. In response, we had called in an A-10, basically a flying cannon that shoots larger-than-one-inch-wide bullets.
The rapidity of the cannon fire sounds like a chainsaw. A machine gun actually sounds like the Hollywood version, pop-pop-pop. Fast and loud pops; distinctive blasts. The 30-millimeter Vulcan on an A-10 runs the pops together so that they make a growl.
Not surprisingly, when the A-10 rolled in, the Taliban spread out among the houses in the community. To the credit of the A-10 pilot, he or she did not chase the Taliban with the Vulcan.
Still, imagine you are asleep in your house, in your bed, and someone you did not invite comes into your house, stands right outside your bedroom door, and cranks a chainsaw. That’s what it sounded like to the local Afghans. The local inhabitants were terrified. The kids, the kids who had just swarmed us, had suddenly become targets.
The elder implored us not to do that, again.
I stared at my tea while the SF captain explained he would ensure future responses did not include such an aircraft. Even as he said that, all of us sitting there knew we would flatten any place or person that posed an immediate threat to us and feel bad about the collateral damage (dead kids) later. The translator spoke in Pashto, and the elder nodded.
The circle grew quiet. The attack against us came because we were there. How our being in Zombalay was helping anybody eluded all of us in that room. More specifically, how the people we came to help (the Afghan people) could benefit proved utterly elusive. Eleven years in at that point, no one could really say what we hoped to achieve. Something good measured in decades was not jumping out at anybody. The silence clung to us for a moment too long to be anything but an indictment.
We stood, donned our kit, gathered our weapons and went back into the courtyard. Like relatives who say goodbye to family for fifteen minutes after the decision to leave is made, we stood and chatted through the interpreter. We tried to pretend that earlier in the predawn hours nothing untoward had happened, that a real, flying, fire-breathing dragon with a man inside had not flown over and churned the earth.
As we chatted in the courtyard, I became the victim of a pickpocket. I was wearing a combat uniform with sleeves that had pen holders sewn into the forearms. My weapon was slung muzzle down across my chest, right hand resting on the grip stock. Suddenly, I felt something sliding out of a pen holder and glanced down just in time to see the little girl stealing a pen from me.
“Hey,” I feigned anger, jerking my arm away from her delicate dirty hands, but not before she secured the pen. She squealed and ran into the house. The elder laughed, and some oxygen returned to the group. Something normal had transpired, unrehearsed, almost pleasant. The little had girl behaved like a child, which allowed the adults to be normal grown-ups. For a minute.
We left the courtyard and reassembled the patrol. The SF captain came up to me and pointed to a piece of ground just past the entrance to the house we had left.
“Two days ago, our patrol found a cell phone laying on the ground right there,” he said.
“Just laying there?” I replied. He was pointing to a spot maybe twenty feet from where we had just said goodbye in the courtyard.
“Yep.”
A little girl is brave enough to lift a pen off an armed man, but nobody touched the cell phone on the ground. Right.
“The dog alerted,” he continued. “EOD (explosive ordnance disposal, aka the explosives expert) disassembled it. It was set to go off when you turned it on. Had about enough plastic explosive to blow your hand off.”
I nodded. Just then, the female members of the team rejoined us, and we started moving. I learned later that US women sat with the Afghan women as we had with the Afghan men. The US women would share something time-sensitive (like there’s Taliban waiting to attack us on the way back) on the spot, but otherwise would brief the Green Berets once we got back to our base.
We resumed our single-file march, walking in silence. A wall of mud and bricks, just short enough for me to see over, ran along one side of the road from the elder’s house. A field of corn wide as a football field ran parallel to the road. While I was not sure why the wall was there, I was absolutely certain that the wall provided cover from small arms fire should someone be hiding in the corn. The people ahead of me sped up, then slowed as they passed a break in the wall. Any opening posed a danger, something to be avoided, a vulnerability. If the wall hadn’t been there, no one would have felt any more vulnerable. But the wall with its gap was there and part of everyone’s battlefield calculus, mine included.
An idea entered unbidden. As I approached the opening, circumstances crystallized my thought.
The patrol paused just as I entered the aperture. Everyone stopped and dropped to one knee, weapons at the ready, everyone but me. I still don’t know why we stopped and never cared to know.
I could see across the cornfield to a stand of trees about one hundred and fifty meters away. If ever there was a perfect shot for someone with an AK-47 or a grenade launcher, I was the ideal target, neatly framed.
US soldiers are taught that the enemy needs three to five seconds to acquire, aim, and fire accurately at anyone stupid enough to stand unprotected in a combat situation. I stood, my weapon on my hip, ready to fire, and counted.…ten…eleven…twelve…here I am you booger-eaters…thirteen…kill me…give it your best shot…I will melt this barrel if you don’t kill me first…
A growl came from behind me. “Hey,” it was one of the SF guys about twenty feet away.
I ignored him.
“Goddammit, get outta there,” he said through clenched teeth.
I moved out of the opening and took a knee just past it.
From that point on and for the rest of my time in Afghanistan, I knew I could be what I needed to be. My demon was back like he had never left. I was no longer scared. I was also not much use to anyone outside of hell. I could deal with that later. My dead son was in an urn, I was walking down a road where bombs were common, and booger-eaters were waiting somewhere to hit me. I didn’t care. I was in hell, and I was fine with it.
Please, don’t let my daughter dress like slut. Please, keep the flying cannon away. Please, tell us where the bombs are. Okay?
Let’s have some tea.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.
