Nir Rosen - Aftermath

The men prepared for a departure the following morning. The Marines gave them enough fuel for another day or so. McGuire worried about what they would do after that. “The homework wasn’t done in advance,” he said. At 5 a.m. Sergeant First Class Sadler showed the men the route. The military command for Helmand contradicted the Marines and Nafaz Khan, informing Contreras that the Aynak police were legitimate and that they belonged to the Nawa headquarters and Khan. We rumbled slowly along a green canal. Marine minesweepers walked ahead of us. At 9 a.m., nearly four hours after leaving, we had gone only four or five kilometers. It was a numbing pace and one that allowed the fleet-footed Taliban to flee well in advance. The Americans’ enemy was elusive, normally engaging them from a few hundred meters away unburdened by the heavy body armor and gear the Americans had.

As we progressed, I watched children tending cows and sheep in dark green fields. It was almost idyllic. The men I was traveling with linked up with the Marines at 10:30 a.m. Dozens of their vehicles were parked off the dirt road on plowed fields, crushing corn plants. “This farmer is not gonna be happy,” Corporal Chapman said. The Marines had paid damages to farmers in the past few days. They accidentally set one field on fire and ran around trying to put it out.

The shura meeting was canceled because we were so late. Instead, Marines lay about in the shade. Specialist Baker sat atop a Humvee. “We came, we parked, we relocated, then we parked,” he said triumphantly.

Marine Captain Schoenmaker told Contreras that when they first arrived in Aynak and asked locals about the Taliban, they heard complaints about the police instead. He estimated that there were about 150 of them. They were stoned, he said, wearing beads and looking shady. “It was uncomfortable when we met them, they were all high,” he explained. Aynak was mostly deserted, he said. The Marines didn’t know what to expect up there, and Colonel Saki was frustrated with the lack of a plan.

We languished in the heat for hours, eating watermelons purchased from a local farmer. McCollough complained that he had been given only one hundred Afghan soldiers. The night before he had watched satellite footage of twenty-five guys dressed in black meeting the cops at the Aynak checkpoint, he told Contreras. I thought they might have just been other cops. Saki called his boss, Colonel Shirzad, who said he would send somebody down to Aynak. Shirzad said one station in Aynak belonged to Nawa district and the other one belonged to Lashkar Gah, and both would be instructed to hand over control of their stations to the ANCOP. Saki said all the Taliban had left the area. I asked him if the ANP improved after coming back from their additional training. “Only for the first five days,” he joked, then they went back to their old ways. “The academy has good showers, free food—the result is these first five days. They need more training.” He told me of an incident where police returned and then deserted to join the Taliban.

“Why are we driving into this town to remove the ANP?” Thacker asked. “Because the Marines want us to,” Contreras told him. “These ANP up here sound like the ANP everywhere in this fucking country,” Thacker said. “The ANP are crooked. This problem is everywhere in this country.”

We wouldn’t be leaving until 4:30 in the afternoon. Verdorn was concerned. “It seems like the Marines want to get in a firefight,” he said. “5:30 PM is the beginning of fighting time.” “I’m beginning to think these Marines are a bunch of cheese dicks,” Thacker muttered. I asked the major why the operation was being delayed. “Because it’s fucking hot,” he said, and the Marines had to walk. Since the operation started they had lost dozens of casualties just to the heat.

A couple of Marines told Thacker that it seemed like there was going be a fight in Aynak. He dismissed them. “What, are there signs up?” he asked. “No briefing about what we’re doing, how far it is, how the convoy will be spread out,” McGuire complained. As the vehicles slowly lined up on the road, the Marines and soldiers had trouble communicating, which made McGuire even more impatient. “Unbelievable, there’s no command and control. I’m awestruck. What a clusterfuck. A good leader puts together a plan, formulates an op order, and then briefs our men.”

We finally began to plod along on the rocky road, the Marines walking in front of us. Kids stood motionless in front of homes and glared at the Americans, unlike the children in Lashkar Gah, who often waved (though sometimes they threw stones too). Men with black beards and black turbans stared at the Americans, expressionless, standing ramrod-straight. “That’s a fucking Talib if I’ve ever seen one,” McGuire said.

There were no paved roads in the villages we passed, only rocky paths. We drove around a large crater. “That’s a pretty fucking good bomb there, hell yeah!” McGuire said. The wall next to it was destroyed, and a new one was being built of fresh mud. A boy emerged from behind a metal gate and mud walls to talk to the ANCOP, but none of them spoke Pashtu and he didn’t know Farsi. The Americans’ interpreter translated. There was an IED on the road up ahead, the boy said. His father came out wearing a green salwar kameez . He fingered red worry beads nervously. The IED was planted on the road on the side of their house. Several days before the Taliban were hiding in the house several hundred meters away, he said, pointing toward it. He worried locals would inform the Taliban that they had warned the Americans about the IED. McGuire walked five feet up to the IED and saw it partially buried and concealed by shrubs. “Plain as day,” he announced. The minesweepers arrived but were dismissive. They didn’t think a guy from the Army could find an IED or that they could miss one. They sent a robot to place plastic explosives on it. On the first attempt, the explosives blew up but not the IED. The second attempt worked, sending up a huge cloud of smoke and debris. Rocks rained down on us a few hundred meters away. The men speculated if it would have been a catastrophic kill. McGuire thought it would have just tossed us up a bit in our armored vehicle but would have obliterated the police.

We made it to Aynak after nightfall. It had taken an entire day to go twenty kilometers. Clouds hid the moon. It was pitch black, impossible to distinguish faces at the checkpoint. Dozens of local cops surrounded the five Americans, Saki, and some of his men. Many of the cops wore turbans and the salwar kameez . They looked like the Taliban. They were cooperative and friendly, unlike what the Marines described. They shook hands and moved out. Thacker and McGuire were impressed with them; they seemed just like any other ANP, but their facility was cleaner than most. The Marines had never seen the ANP before and had nothing to compare them to.

We slept under the stars that night, the men taking turns on guard shift. Overnight we heard explosions and gunfire in the distance. The next morning we were able to explore the dusty abandoned schoolhouse. The police used an adjacent mud compound as a bathroom, and so did we. Shell casings from ANP battles with the Taliban littered the sand. There was nothing to do except wait. The men discussed the odds of getting into a firefight. The consensus was that there were too many Americans and the Taliban would not risk it. That morning an Afghan man approached the Marine captain. He poked him in the chest and said they were occupying his property. Then he slapped the Marines’ interpreter.

Colonel Shirzad, the ANP commander for Helmand, showed up. I hitched a ride back to Lashkar Gah with him, sitting in one of the four Ford Rangers in his convoy. It took us thirty minutes to drive to Lashkar Gah. The trip from there to Aynak with the military had taken three days. Shirzad’s men did not stop to check the road for IEDs, which could shred their vulnerable Rangers. I scanned the road desperately.