13 December 2009
Kandahar, Afghanistan

People are confused about the war.  The situation is difficult to resolve even for those who are here.  For most of us, the conflict remains out of focus, lacking reference of almost any sort.  Vertigo leaves us seeking orientation from places like Vietnam—where most of us never have been.  So sad are our motley pundits-cum-navigators that those who have never have been to Afghanistan or Vietnam shamelessly use one to reference the other.  We saw this in Iraq.

The most we can do is pay attention, study hard, and try to bring something into focus that is always rolling, yawing, and seemingly changing course randomly, in more dimensions than even astronauts must consider.  All while gauging dozens of factors, such as Afghan Opinion, Coalition Will, Enemy Will and Capacity, Resources, Regional Actors (and, of course, the Thoroughly Unexpected).  Nobody will ever understand all these dynamic factors and track them at once and through time.  That’s the bad news.

The good news is that a tiger doesn’t need to completely understand the jungle to survive, navigate, and then dominate.  It is not necessary to know every anthropological and historical nuance of the people here.  If that were the case, our Coalition of over forty nations would not exist.   More important is to realize that they are humans like us.  They get hungry, happy, sad, and angry; they make friends and enemies (to the Nth degree); they are neither supermen nor vermin.  They’re just people.

But it always helps to know as much as you can.  This will take much time, many dispatches, and hard, dangerous work.  Let’s get started.

The Taliban’s main effort at the moment is Kandahar City.  See it down there?  Let’s move closer.

Click on the above image for larger view.

First, let’s talk about understanding “the borders.”  They are fictitious.  The “borders” that describe the “country” of Afghanistan have trivial effect on the enemy, but the borders (without quotes) greatly affect Pakistan and the Coalition.  The AfPak frontier will be sealed the day frogs stop croaking.  We complain that Pakistan should help, but they can’t do much.  We haven’t secured the Tex-Mex border.  Many Afghans are migratory in the way that we see Mexican laborers in the United States.  Only instead of just picking corn, some will pick corn and supplement their income by planting a bomb.  For some, it’s just business, like being a hired gun in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Lots of normal people will do those jobs.  We must consider this when thinking about the rent-a-Taliban.

Click on the above image for larger view.

President Obama and NATO will plan to send tens of thousands more troops.  The big fight shaping up will likely unfold in the south, in places like Helmand, Kandahar, and to a much lesser extent, Zabul, and also in other eastern provinces.  We could use far more troops, and so other places will be left to fester, but the surge and change of course might be enough to turn the war around.  We will find out.

Russians say we repeat their mistakes but they are wrong.  The Soviets employed true scorched-earth tactics—the same tactics that many armchair commanders at home would like to employ.  Every time the Soviets whacked the Afghan hive, more hornets raged out.  Soviets bullied their way around places like Hungary and Czechoslovakia, and were fantastically brutal in Afghanistan, using all the fire they could breathe.  Their “Rules of Engagement,” if any, were probably more concerned with conserving ammunition.  They tortured.

Click on the above image for larger view.

Soviet abuses enflamed the population and combat ranged from north to south—with much occurring in Kandahar Province, the capital of which is Kandahar City.  The Soviets fought in places like Bamian, where today Americans can literally go on vacation.  The Lithuanian Ambassador to Afghanistan told me he took some holidays in Bamian and loved it.  Last year, I drove about a thousand miles from Jalalabad to Kabul to Mazar-i-Sharif and back, and other places, with no problems and no soldiers.  Most of the country is not at war.  Much of this is a result of our strict “Rules of Engagement” (ROE) which seems to be driving people crazy at home (and many soldiers, too).  Many soldiers hate these new ROE, and there is little doubt that we will lose troops due to restrictive ROE.  My own thoughts are of little relevance.

Click on the above image for larger view.

Left Green Zone

The Green Zone on the left is a result of the Helmand River Valley, and also widespread American construction projects last century.  These projects left goodwill toward Americans and fantastic agricultural opportunities for the drug lords, whose products are said to kill more people every year than the war itself.  The drugs are a crucial part of this war and must be correctively addressed.

The British are running the fight in Helmand Province—they are fighting well and courageously but are under-resourced.   There are US Marines, Danish, and other folks out there.  In Helmand, the fight is serious, and friendly troops are spread far too thinly.  Some experts believe that focusing on Helmand before securing Kandahar was a strategic error.  Most districts in Kandahar are said to be under Taliban control or heavy influence.  Some areas of the south are under complete, uncontested Taliban control.  The brown area comprising the lower third of the image above is a massive desert.

Right Green Zone

The Green Zone to the right is caused by the Arghandab River, just next to Kandahar.  The Taliban want Kandahar and are in a good position to get it.  The year 2010 likely will mark a true Battle for Kandahar, though it probably will not be punctuated by the sort of pitched battles we saw in places like Mosul and Baghdad.  This remains unknown.

Click on the above image for larger view.

Armies from at least three countries have ventured into the Arghandab River Valley: British, followed by Soviets, and more recently Canadians; all were unsuccessful.

In the book Three Campaigns in Afghanistan (on the subject of Britain’s three wars), difficult engagements are described: “Further west, however, there is a great gap in the hills, where the plain narrows and runs in the Arghandab Valley.  To force a passage in this direction, through thickly sown villages and gardens and vineyards, was ‘no child’s play.’  Without masses of well-trained infantry, the attempt could not have been made at all.”

The Soviets came.  The Bear Went Over the Mountain contains a description by Soviet Army LTC S.V. Zelenskiy: “In October 1982, our reconnaissance learned that 10 guerrilla forces with a total strength of approximately 350 men were operating north of Kandahar City in the ‘green zone’ bordering the Arghandab River.  This fertile ‘green zone’ stretches for 15-20 kilometers along the northern bank of the river and is up to seven kilometers wide.  It is an agricultural region of gardens and vineyards bisected by a network of irrigation ditches.  It is practically impassible for vehicles.”

LTC Zelenskiy continues:

“The brigade received an order to destroy these mujahideen.  The commander’s concept was to seal off the north with the broneguppa of three battalions.  Helicopter gunship patrols would fly patrol patterns to seal off the south and east.”

The Soviets were defeated.  That was 1982.  But the Soviets kept trying.  In 1987, the Soviets came with all they could muster.

The Battle for Chaharqulba Village

Click on the above image for larger view.

The history is acutely relevant because the 5/2 Stryker Brigade Combat Team from Fort Lewis, Washington, is at this very moment fighting in the ARV, in the same villages described.

The book The Other Side of the Mountain: Mujahideen Tactics in the Soviet Afghan War recounts some experiences of Mujahideen Commander Akhtarjhan, who joined the Jihad at age 12.  At war’s end he was a twenty-five-year-old commander.

Akhtarjhan describes the 1987 battle:

“The Soviets were there in strength, but they stayed on the plain with their tanks and artillery and seldom committed their own infantry.” The Soviets pushed Afghan troops ahead.

The guerrillas had fortifications and thousands of mines. The Soviets employed the tactics that many people at home beg for today; massive artillery, bombings, helicopter attacks.

According to The Bear Trap: The Defeat of a Superpower, Soviet commanders did not search and destroy; they destroyed then searched in villages throughout Afghanistan.

The battle raged for days, then weeks.  The guerillas began to crack.  According to Commander Akhtarjhan, they had plenty of ammunition but were starving and would take food and supplies from soldiers they fought.

”…my base (was) in Babur village in the orchards on the west bank…”

(Today, leaders in 5/2 Stryker Brigade say that Taliban wounded are evacuated to Babur.)

During the big battle, Soviets crept with their vehicles from the Zhare Dashta plain, just west out of the Green Zone, toward the guerrilla base in the village of Chaharqulba.  Sandbags on the Soviet vehicles made them difficult to kill with RPGs, but “It took them a week of fighting to cover six kilometers to our base.”

According to Akhtarjhan, the District Government post was on the east side of the river (as today), and the guerrillas used the east side as R&R because the Soviets would not bomb that area.  Interestingly, today, there are relatively few actions in the northeast Arghandab Valley, but the west side of the river is a madhouse during fighting season.  Unlike the Iraqis who would fight in their own neighborhoods, Afghans take it somewhere else.

Commander Akhtarjhan recounted: “During the siege, however, we could not send our wounded to Pakistan.  We could not remove the shrapnel and so many of our seriously wounded died of their wounds.  We had a few Arabs in our base at this time.  They were there for Jihad credit and to see the fighting.  ‘If you are Muslims, help us collect the wounded,’ we would tell them.  They would refuse.”

On June 05, 1987, the Manila Standard reported that Afghan forces “lost as many as 1,500 men through desertion and casualties,” and that “a 6,000 strong Soviet-Afghan force launched a massive operation on May 26 against their positions around Kandahar and nearby Arghandab. The sources said the anti-government units fought back and captured 300 Afghan troops and seven Soviet soldiers.  They added that guerrillas killed four of the Soviet soldiers while the other three joined guerrilla ranks.”

Akhtarjhan recounted, “We let the enemy get closer than ten meters to us before opening fire.  We let them get this close for two reasons.  First we wanted to be sure to get them with the first shot.  Second, we wanted to prevent their escape.  We laid thousands of PMN mines [anti-personnel] in the area – particularly on the infantry approaches from Jelawor.”

The guerrillas were having a hard time killing Soviet vehicles.  The mujahideen became dispirited and were ready to retreat.  But then Akhtarjhan’s Senior Commander, Mullah Naqib, said, “This is their last battle and will decide the battle between them and us.  They’ve tried to conquer the base for years and this is their last throw.”

Mullah Naqib strode out to fight alone, and his courage rallied the commanders behind him.  After 34 days the Soviets were defeated and retreated.

Of global significance, in what is perhaps ultimate Cosmic Justice, Soviet barbarity was a great factor leading to the downfall of the empire.

Mullah Naqib would become a leader of much influence and would later become helpful to us against the Taliban, who tried unsuccessfully to kill Mullah Naqib.  Unfortunately, he died of a heart attack in October 2007.  Demonstrating the fragility of the situation, Naqib’s death was a major setback for Kandahar city security and left an opening for the Taliban.  President Karzai appointed Mullah Naqib’s son to take over, but he is deemed both inexperienced and unable to handle the task.

Since the 2001 invasion, U.S. soldiers have come and gone from the Arghandab, but we’ve never had enough soldiers to sit still.  More recently, the Canadians made jabs at Arghandab but did not get far.  Some people believe the Canadians have been militarily defeated in their battlespace. No US officer has told me that the Canadians have been defeated, and none have denied it.  There is no doubt that Canadian troops earned much respect, and that more that more than 130 paid the ultimate price.

On current course, Canada will have fully retreated by 2011.  This is crucial: the enemy realizes that our greatest weakness is Coalition cohesion and they have defeated what was an important partner.

Now it’s mostly down to the U.S. and Afghan forces to saddle Arghandab, or lose Kandahar.

DUSTWUN
Duty Status: Whereabouts Unknown

Click on the above image for larger view.

Afghan elections were scheduled for 20 August 2009.  With the Canadians effectively neutralized by enemy resistance, the 5/2 Stryker Brigade combat team was tasked to operate in Arghandab to help facilitate voting.  The Brigade Commander, Colonel Harry Tunnell, had little intel on the region.  (Though I have found 5/2 soldiers reading and discussing everything they can find on the Soviet experience.)  The enemy started by making small bombs but those were not effective against Strykers, and so they kept upping the charges to a thousand pounds or more.  Enough to destroy any vehicle on the planet.

Early in the tour, two soldiers were killed about twenty minutes apart by IEDs.  Their buddies “knew” that the soldiers had been killed, but the bodies could not be found.  The U.S. military will practically stop the war to look for a missing soldier.   Every available asset was sent to Arghandab and they gained huge intelligence and flooded the place for the first time.  Remains were found and the men joined America’s honor roll.  The Taliban suffered humiliation.

The enemy is not defeated, but our people were now operating among them.  U.S. casualties continued during the next three months but there are indications that the enemy is today in disarray.  The enemy became afraid to sleep indoors where they might be killed by an airstrike—or by U.S. soldiers, who have a tendency to burst in during periods of maximum REM sleep.  The Taliban were terrorized and began sleeping in the orchards at night, rigging homes with explosives, which they arm at night.  (I’ve heard similar reports from Pakistan.  Pakistanis have said that drone strikes are demoralizing and terrorizing the Taliban, and though drone strikes are controversial, some Pakistanis want to see the strikes increased.)

Tactically, it is important to recognize that Arghandab is agriculturally rich in products such as grapes and pomegranates.  The valley is not like the big opium farm we see to the west in the Helmand green zone.  Famous for its pomegranates, Arghandab is considered a “breadbasket” for Afghanistan.

Pomegranate trees represent major long-term investments for farmers.  The trees take 5-7 years to mature and are productive for about 50 years.  The harvest occurs between about the first week of October to mid-November.  This is important because the trees are thick and provide good tactical cover for the Taliban, making them difficult to spot from the air, explaining why they sleep in the orchards at night.  This angers farmers; the Taliban plant bombs in the orchards, using their livelihoods for cover and concealment, and fighting during harvest season.  Bombs kill trees.

Mostly the enemy is gone for now.  Each year, many Taliban migrate to Pakistan.  The “snowbirds” return and fight during spring.  Our signals intelligence people intercepted communications from a senior Taliban leader in Pakistan, to the senior surviving leader in Arghandab, who was then heading to Pakistan.  The commander was ordered to return to Arghandab or risk losing to the Americans.  U.S. officers at 5/2 said the Taliban commander was very upset by the order.

Colonel Tunnell would say, “It is our assessment that the enemy has been defeated in the near term in the southern Arghandab River Valley, which has given us a few months’ breathing space.”  The Strykers will soon deploy to other missions in southern Afghanistan and will be replaced by the 82nd Airborne Division.

The Taliban in Arghandab got a serious whipping but they are not dead.   The winter season is providing our side a brief opportunity to earn local support with various projects in a relatively unmolested environment, while the snowbirds are in Pakistan, no doubt plotting their return.

The Battle for Kandahar is on.  Fresh troops in the United States have been given orders to get over here.  The chapter called “Arghandab” will be crucial.

The War in Afghanistan has truly begun. This will be a long, difficult fight that is set to eclipse anything we’ve seen in Iraq. As 2010 unfolds, my 6th year of war coverage will unfold with it. There is relatively little interest in Afghanistan by comparison to previous interest in Iraq, and so reader interest is low. Afghanistan is serious, very deadly business. Like Iraq, however, it gets pushed around as a political brawling pit while the people fighting the war are mostly forgotten. The arguments at home seem more likely to revolve around a few words from the President than the ground realities of combat here. I can bring the ground realities, but can sustain the coverage only by the graciousness of readers. Please keep that in mind. Please click…

Please consider joining my free Facebook and/or Twitter pages.

Helo Halo

Luminous halos twirled above a Boeing CH-47 Chinook on a recent night around 11:30 p.m. local time at Forward Operating Base Jackson in Sangin, Helmand Province, Afghanistan, as helicopters ferried casualties and supplies in and out of the base. The photographer was independent journalist Michael Yon, a former U.S. Army Special Forces soldier who has covered Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Philippines with a camera. Helicopter pilots don’t have a name for the effect, but one explained to Yon, “Basically it is a result of static electricity created by friction as…dissimilar material strike against each other. In this case, titanium/nickel blades moving through the air and dust.” Yon says, however, that a researcher studying helicopter brownout emailed him to say that scientists are not 100 percent sure what causes the effect. Depending on the viewing angle, it creates dazzling little galaxies. An even longer exposure reveals stars and another aircraft marked by a string of lights at upper left of center; Yon suspects this aircraft was a Predator or Reaper UAV, which, unlike manned military aircraft, fly with their lights on in the Afghan night to avoid collisions. Yon, who made these shots with a Canon 5D Mark II with a 50 mm lens at an ISO of 800, claims that the night was far darker than his sensitive camera conveys, as evidenced by the green chemlights on the ground to guide the pilots. He was moved to create a name, the Kopp-Etchells Effect, for the rotor phenomenon to honor a pair of fallen soldiers, U.S. Army Corporal Benjamin Kopp and British Army Corporal Joseph Etchells, who died one day apart in July after fierce fighting in Helmand (Kopp had been evacuated to the U.S. before he died). “The tent in the foreground is a medical tent,” says Yon, “so that casualties can be kept in a tent until the last minute. A substantial number of British casualties in Helmand have been lifted off of this exact spot…because this is probably either the most dangerous place in Afghanistan, or nearly the most dangerous.”

Please give the gift of independent reporting. Your gift goes far and is used for transport, lodging, living expenses, satellite communications and for repairing and replacing gear that fails due to the rigors of the battlefields.  Millions of people, in more than a hundred countries, see these photos and words.  Your generosity goes very far, and is greatly appreciated.

Anybody seen a better future around here?

21 October 2009

In 2008, I was trekking in the Himalayas in Nepal preparing for a return to Afghanistan. A message came from a British officer suggesting to end the trip and get to Afghanistan. Something was up, and I didn’t bother to ask what. Days of walking were needed to reach the nearest road. After several flights, I landed in Kandahar and eventually Helmand Province at Camp Bastion, Afghanistan. The top-secret mission was Oqab Tsuka, involving thousands of ISAF troops who were to deliver turbines to the Kajaki Dam to spearhead a major electrification project. The difficult mission was a great success. That was 2008.  During my 2009 embed with British forces, just downstream from Kajaki Dam, it became clear that the initial success had eroded into abject failure. And then the British kicked me out of the embed, for reasons still unclear, giving me time to look further into the Kajaki electrification failure.

After communications with many American and British officers, a sad picture emerged.

The following message was provided by a well-placed officer. The message has been slightly edited by me for clarification.

Michael,

ISAF’s initiative [at Kajaki] to light up southern Afghanistan following the successful delivery of a third turbine to the Kajaki hydro-electric dam has run into major problems which could set the project 24 months behind schedule.

Last September, US and British special forces spearheaded a 100 vehicle convoy from Kandahar 180 miles across open desert, much of it owned by the Taliban, to Kajaki.  The Operation, codenamed Oqab Tsuka, included 4,000 British, US and Canadian troops in what was hailed as the biggest demonstration since 2006 that ISAF is delivering progress in the south.

The heavily guarded convoy contained what was called T2 (Turbine 2) and was successfully delivered to the US AID built dam after a six-day operation which saw significant fighting by British paratroopers and advance clearance operations by special forces. As it crawled north up the Sangin valley the Brits mounted the biggest deception operation seen since World War Two.

With just one road available which was an obvious target for insurgents’ IEDs, special forces located a second, more difficult and remote route. After confirmation that it could be used, a battle group was flown into the area of the main route, giving the enemy the clear perception that the convoy was heading that way. Then a dummy convoy headed up the road, while the Brits used the alternative route out of sight.

But despite last year’s success it is now becoming clear that little progress has been made. At the time of the operation a US contractor, known as Kajaki Joe, stated that the turbine would be installed by April 2009 with all three turbines in action by September 2009. However, problems with engineers and missing elements of the turbine have caused significant delays.

When the turbine was delivered only one turbine was in action, another was being overhauled on site with the aim being to install the new one and commission all three into service. Now exactly a year on a report submitted to US AID in Lashkar Gah has suggested that the turbine which was being overhauled needs replacing. Sources in Lashkar Gah say this is a gross overestimate of the situation and that there will be no mission to deliver another turbine.

In 2006 US AID representatives in Lashkar Gah asked the British to play down the project and not to raise people’s expectations about when power would be delivered. The British Foreign Office was quick to try and hijack the public relations spin of last year’s success, even though the UK gave no funding to the project.

The overall aim of the turbine mission was to support the power grid in southern Afghanistan. In fact Canada pledged millions of Canadian dollars to the Kandahar economy once the power was plugged into the grid and supplying business in the city.  But the Canadians seem doubtful that power will be switched on before 2014—by which time they will have pulled their troops out of Afghanistan.

The war is intensifying month by month while support for this mission plummets. Your help is crucial to my staying in the war. 2010 will almost certainly prove to be the bloodiest even as coverage dries up. More troops are coming in. The fighting for those who are here is already as tough as any seen in Iraq. Do you trust the Government to tell the truth? Please donate today.

14 September 2009
Helmand Province, Afghanistan

With the war increasing, Air Force Pararescue has been crisscrossing the skies picking up casualties.

That’s the Green Zone of Helmand Province, the opium capital of the world. Those fields are the great ATM of our enemies here. The fertilizer used to make those fields green is the same fertilizer used to make countless bombs.

We are flying in a special U.S. Air Force Blackhawk helicopter to fetch a seriously ill British soldier.

In Iraq, many of the casevacs were done by ground forces. In other words, if we hit a bomb or got shot, soldiers would load up the dead and wounded and rush them to the CSH (Combat Support Hospital or “cash”). But in Afghanistan most of the fighting occurs outside the cities and far away from the base hospitals. Rescue helicopters stationed at places like Bagram, Kandahar Airfield and Camp Bastion have been flying thousands of missions.

Air Force Rescue Helicopters launching on a mission from Camp Bastion.

There are numerous helicopter rescue “services” in Afghanistan. For instance, the British have MERTs (Medical Emergency Response Teams) that fly in a CH-47, and the U.S. Army uses Blackhawks as does the U.S. Air Force. Special operations teams normally cover their own evacuations.

This U.S. Army rescue helicopter parked at Camp Bastion (Helmand) flies with the red cross symbol allowing the enemy to get a better aim at the helicopter. Unfortunately, by displaying the red cross symbol, the helicopters are not allowed to carry miniguns or other large weapons. This seems a rather questionable decision given that the Taliban and other enemies could not give a hoot about law. It is unclear why the Army decided that a red cross provides more protection than miniguns.

These Air Force “Pedro” rescue helicopters have two miniguns each (total of four miniguns), and the PJs all carry M-4 rifles. They do fire those weapons in combat. In July, a helicopter swooped down during a rescue and picked up some wounded soldiers and then was shot down. The second Air Force helicopter had to get the U.S. Army patients off the bird that had been shot down. But there was not enough room in the second bird for the Pedro crew. (No injuries.) So the tiny Army OH-58 Kiowa helicopters flew out—Kiowas only seat two people and both seats were full—and some of the Pedro folks had to clip onto the skids and fly out like James Bond.

The damaged helicopter was left behind. Bullets had hit a fuel line and caused the fuel to leak out, and so the pilot had no trouble landing, but the helicopter was now stuck in the middle of nowhere. So after the Pedros rescued U.S. soldiers who then rescued Pedros, other soldiers flew out to rescue the Pedro helicopter. The plan was to cut off the rotors and have a bigger helicopter use a cable to lift out the Blackhawk and fly it back to base. But when the soldiers started using a saw on the rotors, sparks hit the fuel that had leaked and the Blackhawk burned to the ground. The Army killed the Air Force’s helicopter.

The helicopters take hits. On another mission in Helmand, an RPG shot through the tail but luckily it missed the transmission; if the RPG had hit the transmission, the entire crew likely would have been killed. And so . . . those miniguns come in handy. The gunners are great shots and can return accurate fire within seconds.

Some readers have gotten upset that I call them “Pedro,” thinking the name is secret. The concern is welcome but not warranted in this case. The Pedros don’t care and they even have a Pedro patch.

The Pararescue medics are often called “PJs.” The SEALs, Delta, Rangers and Green Berets all hold the PJs in high regard. Firstly, the PJs are among the best medics in the U.S. military (we have incredible medics—so that’s a significant statement). Secondly, PJs go through just about any combat training available, ranging from HALO to mountaineering to scuba. They’ve got scuba gear here at Camp Bastion and have had to use it to recover soldiers who were killed after the enemy blew their vehicle into some water. In a different war, the Pedros would be tasked to rescue pilots who might be shot down hundreds of miles into enemy territory.

As we fly out to pick up a sick soldier, the door gunners and PJs test-fire the miniguns and M-4s.

When we get low, the PJs sit with their feet hanging out the doors so they can return fire, but up high they relax and take in the scenery. That’s the Helmand River and part of the “Green Zone.”

The Pedro commander, Major Mathew Wenthe, said that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates had issued a directive that all casualties be evacuated and arrive at the hospital within one hour of the call. Pedros intend to fulfill that directive.

The Pedro crews at Bastion have three helicopters but they only take two on missions. Major Wenthe gave high credit to the mechanics who are constantly changing out parts, up to and including seven engines in the last few months. The birds are ready, and that’s the first step.

There are two Pedro shifts who work 12 hours on, 12 hours off, with no days off during the tour. The first shift starts at 0200 and runs to 1400 and the second shift takes 1400 to 0200.

Inside the TOC (Tactical Operations Center; the HQ), Pedro has a big board where reports from around Helmand Province scroll down. If a British unit gets into a firefight, for instance, Pedro knows about the firefight within probably a minute because the messages are relayed to TOCs that need to know. At least one person is always watching that screen, and so you might hear a pilot say, “The Marines are in contact near such and such.” Or, “The Brits just hit an IED near Sangin.”

The casualties are classified as Category A, Cat B, or Cat C. Cat A basically means the soldier is probably going to die, lose a limb, or lose his eyesight if not quickly treated. Cat B is more like someone who’s gotten shot in the foot. It’s a big deal, but not immediately life-threatening. Cat C might be some kind of non-life-threatening illness or a broken finger.

When the Pedro crews see injuries scroll down, they rush out to the helicopters like Batman and Robin heading to the Batmobile. Really, you’ve got to get out of the way or they will knock you down. Within a few minutes the rotors are spinning but the Pedros actually have not yet been tasked to go. The British-run JHTF (Joint Helicopter Task Force) is watching the same information but they also have other assets that can be sent, such as the U.S. Army of the British MERT (Medical Emergency Response Team) in the CH-47. The Pedros are always the first who are ready to go, but it might make sense for JHTF to send MERT because MERT is a bigger helicopter and so it flies faster than Blackhawks. Plus, the doctor on the MERT can actually pump blood into patients, because when the patient gets shot or blown up, medics on the scene radio the blood types, and the MERT crew can actually fly out with the right blood. Pedros don’t push blood but do start IVs. However . . . the CH-47 is a big helicopter and is easier to shoot down, and so if the landing zone is going to be tight or under fire, it might be better to send Pedro. Yet much of Afghanistan is high and hot and the CH-47 can fly in thinner air than can Blackhawks.

While the JHTF makes a decision, Pedro is waiting with rotors spinning and all they need to hear is “Go Pedro.” Thirty seconds later they are gone. (The British MERT CH-47 flies faster, but it’s slower to start.)

Every day is a “National Geographic” day. Afghanistan is incredible.

As we approach the LZ, the PJs pull on rubber gloves; the helicopter is subject to getting bloody.

This rotation of Pedros had done just under 400 missions in three months. Similar crews in Iraq might do half a dozen missions in the same period.

These PJs have treated hundreds of patients and gone into dangerous areas every day.

Typical compound.

Afghan interstate system.

The Afghans call this the Dasht-i-Margo (Desert of Death).

The roads of nowhere.

Lone vehicle in the Desert of Death.

Some compounds are miles from the nearest neighbor, yet they still have walls. Afghanistan is the land of a million Alamos.

When Afghans build a home, they start by building a wall. When the wall is finished, they start on the home.

The pilots swoop in for the patient. There is only one thing that British soldiers love more than mail and that’s Pedro. When I told British soldiers from 2 Rifles that Pedro was going to take me, many British soldiers asked me to say “thank yous” to the Pedros. The Pedros are a great morale booster because we know when we take casualties, Pedro is coming with miniguns and incredible medics. When other helicopters are grounded by bad weather, Pedro goes. When bullets are flying, Pedro comes in with miniguns blazing. They also rescue Danish, Americans, and others, including contractors and Afghan civilians sometimes.

We picked up a British patient from 2 Rifles, one of my favorite infantry units. The British are more sensitive about casualties than Americans (many Americans don’t care about photos if they are wounded, though some do). Although I was not embedded with the Brits and so do not have to follow British rules, I respect the soldiers.

And so, without the patient’s consent (which was hard to get because he was in pain and the helicopter was loud and the PJs were working), these photos will not show his face.

The problem was apparently appendicitis. The PJs went to work and at one point a PJ smacked the bottom of the patient’s right boot. The PJs said that if his appendix is bad, smacking the bottom of his right foot should cause sharp pain in his abdomen. And true enough, when the medic smacked his boot, the soldier winced in pain.

As we are flying back, vitals and other information are being transmitted back to Camp Bastion so that when we land, the right doctors and nurses will be ready.

The medical evacuation system is excellent. Our folks work hand in glove with British and Danish back at the hospital.

During the flight, the PJs also put earplugs in the patient so that his head isn’t rattling from this very loud helicopter. When patients are brought aboard, the PJs slide the doors shut.

This was an easy mission, but at other times there will be multiple amputations and KIAs and so the helicopters can get full.

British fire crews rush to grab patients.

The hospital is about 30 seconds away from the LZ and the PJs usually go inside so that they can do a handoff to the doctors. Then we fly back to the runway about half a mile away, refuel, and get ready for the next call.

The motto of Pararescue: “That Others May Live.” And they mean it.

Don’t mess with the miniguns . . .

The next mission took us to a Special Forces base where an ANA soldier had somehow managed to get shot in both feet. It was lucky for him that he was with Special Forces; the Green Beret medics also are tops. I’ve seen the Green Beret medics at work on countless occasions. It’s bad to get shot, but if you must, it’s best to happen in the presence of Green Berets and to get picked up by Pedros.

Some Green Berets helped load the patient and then went back to whatever it is that Green Berets do out here.

The medic(s) on the scene already have prepped the patient, so the PJs don’t have to bandage him up other than plugging his ears, taking vitals and other tasks.

The pilots fly low and very hard and at times.

On the way back with the ANA soldier who managed to get shot in both feet, another call came so we diverted to get two more patients.

Americans lived down here before the Soviet invasion and built much of the irrigation networks. The poppy has already been harvested this year and other crops are in the fields.

The other Pedro bird flies in to get the two patients.

We fly low and make hard turns. The PJ has to crane his neck back just to see the horizon.

In combat, the Pedro can land and get a patient loaded in about thirty seconds.

The patients are loaded and off we go. One guy had a tooth problem, and the other got bitten by a bat.

The last mission. Just under 400 on this tour, and I had the honor of going along. We’ll never know how many lives the Pedro crews saved this year in Afghanistan, but it was a lot. A book could be written about their tour, but alas, this is likely about all the recognition they will ever get. The two crews that I did missions with were:

Pedro 35
Maj Mathew Wenthe
1Lt Josh Roberts
CMSgt Rick Nowaski
TSgt Christopher Gabor
Capt Dave Depiazza
TSgt Tom Pearce
SrA Eric Mathieson

Pedro 36
Maj Mitzi Egger
Capt Adam Tucci
MSgt James Patterson
SrA Adrian Jarrin
SSgt Joe Signor
SrA Anthony Daroste
SrA Alejandro Serrano

The crews assembled and asked me to make their photo, but . . .

Just as they were starting to line up for the photo, a call came in and the helicopters flew away.

The war is intensifying month by month while support for this mission plummets. Your help is crucial to my staying in the war. 2010 will almost certainly prove to be the bloodiest even as coverage dries up. More troops are coming in. The fighting for those who are here is already as tough as any seen in Iraq. Do you trust the Government to tell the truth? Please donate today.

Memorial for Fallen at FOB Inkerman

08 September 2009
Helmand Province, Afghanistan

Just before the mission, soldiers form up near the memorial for our fallen.

The mission was simple. Taliban had been watching FOB Inkerman and British patrols from various compounds and we were going to occupy those compounds and pick a fight with all comers.

The mission is set to begin just at sunrise, so soldiers use white lights because night vision will not be needed. (We are still well within the base.)

The sounds: Muffled discussions, metallic clicks and snaps, and the sound of gear being stuffed into rucksacks. A soldier can be heard taking a long inhale from a cigarette. The tip grows brighter and he pauses; the tip dims and he exhales while quietly talking at half volume.

The task was very dangerous and we expected a fight. Ross Kemp, the famous British journalist who shot a documentary here, did a fine job in catching the truth of the Green Zone. Little has changed since Mr. Kemp came here; his work is as true now as it was then. Every British soldier knows and respects Ross Kemp—not because he made them heroes, but because he told the truth.

As a mood-probe, I posed a silly question from the darkness: “Is this dangerous?” Two soldiers burst into laughter, and a third said, “It’s stupid as shit, that’s what it is.” The mood was good. It’s when you don’t get an answer that you need to watch out.

Leaving base, we pass the mortar pits where the crews are ready to support us with lethal fire. A hundred meters away, the 105mm howitzers also are prepared, as are the Javelins and machine guns and grenade launchers on the perimeter. Today, when the fighting begins, they will fire many shots.

It’s time to head to the gate by the 611 “highway” that separates the desert from the Green Zone. FOB Inkerman is on the desert side, but just fifteen seconds’ walk from here begins the Green Zone.

The enemy owns the Green Zone and so platoons don’t push far from base. The risk of being outnumbered and outmaneuvered is evident. Some commanders might take issue with that statement, but the commanders here will not. To any commanders who are distant and would like to challenge my claim that the enemy owns the Green Zone here, they might consider accepting my challenge: When an officer of the rank of Colonel or General is ready to walk from FOB Jackson to PB Wishtan to FOB Inkerman and walk back to FOB Jackson, please call and I’ll walk with you.

Yes, if they accept this challenge and spend the day to walk this route, their words will stick. Yet today, even with so much immediate support from the mortars, guns and Apaches and jets, little imagination is required to envision losing most or all of a platoon within a couple miles of a base.

Despite all that, the morale of British troops is unmistakably good, which cannot be attributed to the terrible rations they eat. After more than a month with British combat troops in the Green Zone, I hadn’t seen a piece of fresh fruit on a base, despite that we are surrounded by farms.

Riflemen Ben Taylor and Aaron Jones always seem ready to roll. Moments before we head into the mission, I say, “Don’t worry men. If there are any dramas, just fall behind me and obey my commands.” Their eyes go wide, then Ben laughs loudly and Aaron goes “Kookoo, Kookoo,” while twirling a finger close to his ear.

We snap on helmets and enter the Thunder Zone. Lance Corporal Johnston takes file behind Ben Taylor. Two soldiers wearing at least three types of camouflage because the British Army has not properly outfitted its soldiers. Missions here range from Brown Zone to Green Zone back to desert brown within minutes. The soldiers need camouflage similar to what special operations folks wear. British and American special operations folks use camouflage suitable for both environments. It’s cheap and every combat soldier should have it.

Please click on the Image for Higher Resolution.

We have so few troops that we cannot even control the veins of Green Zone.

Please click on the Image for Higher Resolution.

As we step off base from FOB Inkerman, we are immediately subject to coming under small-arms attacks.

We walked off base, briefly along the 611 “highway” that runs just by that power line. On the hill, just this side of the mosque, are approximately 35 men and boys. They are watching us. The speakers mounted on the mast above the mosque are used for the call to prayers.

Please click on the Image for Higher Resolution.

Is it a security violation to print Google maps? Those men up on the hill and the farmers in the fields see every move we make. If this were the opening stage of the war, it would be a mistake to print such a map. But not now. The people here know exactly what we do and where we do it. The people at home are in the dark, but not the Afghans.

We move through the corn and other crops under the eyes of the Afghan men on the hill. Soldiers on point mark a possible bomb.

As the sun rises, the variation in from Brown Zone to Green Zone becomes evident.

Rifleman Jack Otter is in the file just behind me. It seems that the most dangerous place in the file is at the point, but after that everywhere is probably about equal. The battle spaces around Afghanistan are very different. Here at Inkerman, for instance, the fight is remarkably different than the fight four miles away at Sangin. At Inkerman there are bombs, but it’s still mostly a gunfight, whereas in Sangin most of our KIAs come from bombs.

The opium has been harvested and these fields have been sowed with corn and other crops. Farmers are not happy with this year’s opium prices.

The corn provides great cover for the enemy and for us. Operating in the corn is like being aboard a British submarine while we cruise around for Taliban subs. We can’t see more than a few meters, and so it’s particularly important to be quiet and try not to ruffle the corn stocks which jiggles the tassles. Even in this kelp-like maize, we are subject to being hit by bombs. There are so many IED attacks that it’s hard to keep track. A special operations unit was attacked in late August resulting in one KIA, some amputations, and a soldier who lost his genitals, which happens more often than one might think.

Land mine? Nail?

The PKM is a common enemy weapon that packs a wallop. It can penetrate our helmets. Untrained fighters typically will fire high during night time, or in places of limited visibility such as in the corn. Good fighters often use “grazing fire,” so that even when the enemy is lying flat the gun can get hits. During our ambush on 20 August, four days earlier, the enemy had used good fire discipline and it was only due to pure luck that none of us were killed. Our guys are better shots and more tactically sound, so whereas the terrain definitely belongs to the enemy, when firefights actually start, the smart money is on the Brits or Americans, not the Taliban. They might kill a few of us, but if they stick around and fight we will wipe them out.

Lately the Green Zone has been flooded by the farmers and the fields have been muddy, yet today the irrigation had shunted and the irrigation ditches were mostly dry for this mission. Sometimes the enemy plants bombs in trees, or stretches tripwires high so that antennas will catch, which is part of the reason why being on point is not always most dangerous. Often, the point elements miss the bombs which then hit the main body. IED strikes are not like the war movies where somebody gets shot, falls down dying in his buddy’s arms saying, “Tell Lara…cough cough… Tell Lara…I love her.” And his buddy says, “No Jimmy, hang in there! Tell her yourself! Tell her yourself! Don’t die Jimmy! Don’t die you bastard!”

No, that’s not how it is at all. After an IED strike you are using sticks to knock body parts and gear out of trees, and you are collecting arms, legs, and helmets splattered with brains. Bodies get blown from one compound into another compound, and parts land on roofs. Weapons are completely lost or shattered into pieces. There is nothing romantic about the bombs. It’s straight up combat. Body parts we cannot find get eaten by dogs and nobody wants that, so we try to find every little piece—if time permits, and if there is enough light. Lately, the enemy have often been killing more of us with the second bomb than the first. After we get blown up and start collecting casualties, BOOM, other bombs start exploding.

'Bale' from Fiji.

There are loads of Fijian soldiers in the British Army. The Fijians make good soldiers and they also are very friendly and easy to get along with.

When firefights start, maneuvering can be tricky; the “cleared” lane is only a few feet wide.

Nearing the objective. We had split into several elements for mutual fire support.

As we approached the compound that was our objective, the point elements kept sweeping for bombs. Often there will be a metallic ping on a corner. I went around a corner a month or so ago, and found a sheer hole that might have been forty feet deep. Just how many soldiers have fallen into holes in this country is unknown, but it’s got to be a lot. Afghans are liable to dig holes just about anywhere, and you can bet that the holes will be unmarked. The deep holes around here are wells. Perfect tiger traps in the making.

We enter the compound and find this man. He looked familiar. As it happens, he had come to FOB Inkerman on 21 August along with nine other men, when an elder asked to be compensated for a generator that got shot on the 20th by a Javelin missile. (I had photographed the Javelin shot and can confirm that the big fireball seemed to have come from a hit on fuel.) Captain Ed Addington asked for his ID, and other details. The man claimed not to know any Taliban, though of course he probably is part of the gang. He seemed friendly and self-assured, and despite that he probably is the enemy, I would end up sitting with him for about an hour. When he learned I am American, he smiled and said “Barack Obama President.” The man said he had never heard of Michael Jackson. Just behind the man is a hole that’s about 10m deep, and about 8m x 5m on the surface. (About 30×25x15 feet.) At the bottom was water. The massive hole was dug by hand—about 4,000 cubic meters—and the whole hole was inside his compound walls. I asked how long it took to dig that hole, and he said six men would need two months.

Information flow from locals is tantamount to zero. There are some local sources, but on a scale of 1–10, information flow is probably about a 2. The other 8 must go to the Taliban, though the more time I spend in the Green Zone the more I begin to think we are fighting the people in general, and not some small group of Taliban. The British government insists that British must guard Kajaki Dam (just upriver from here) or the Taliban will destroy it because the Taliban does not want people to have electricity. This is untrue. The Taliban had years of control over Kajaki and never destroyed the dam. British officials also tell me that it would do no good to build an electrical grid because the Taliban would destroy the grid. This is patently false. The power lines in this area – under Taliban control – are in fine condition. The Taliban controls the electricity and shuts it off at night, along with cell phone towers in many places. We generate the electricity and the Taliban collects money for wattage.

Water well in the compound.

The soldiers occupied the walls and watched for attacks, while I sat with the two men in the compound.

He was all smiles and then asked for his photo. When the camera was brought to bear, he got the serious look. The moment the photo snapped he was all smiles again and wanted to see the photos on the screen.

I counted five kids. They never avoided us but never approached us and never smiled. If the kids were a barometer of the house, this house did not like soldiers.

The children’s dollhouse also had walls.

The handmade dolls might have reflected a census of the household.

Even the dolls had sleeping mats.

The younger man watched the soldiers while holding a wrench that I figured was for hitting us if he got in the mood. The soldiers found an ammunition carrier in the house but no ammo.

We had reliable information that the enemy was moving in on us.

Shots were fired by us on several occasions but the firefight had not yet started.

We kept getting information that the enemy was moving in on us. The machine gunner in the background fired at men who were maneuvering in. The soldiers were very confident that we would be attacked on the way out. As we moved into the corn, a shot rang out and I fell flat and a soldier behind me said, “That was impressive,” and I said, “I told you I am always the fastest to the ground.” Turns out it was just a warning shot . . . but nobody warned me! A couple minutes later a proper firefight broke out and we were all on the ground but we were not actually in contact. Another element was shooting at the enemy with machine guns, rifles and grenade launchers. The mortars began firing and we moved to contact, and along the way encountered what appeared to be an IED laid out for us. We went around and ended up with the element that was doing all the shooting. The 81mm mortars and the 105mm howitzers were firing dozens and dozens of shots into a compound where the enemy had disappeared.

Lance Corporal Lee Casey stays on the gun. After each firefight, the soldiers redistribute ammo so that the loads are more even.

Lance Corporal Gareth Prior

Lance Corporal Michael Pidgeon

Behind the dust is the compound we were hammering. We got intelligence that some enemy might have been killed or wounded, so the British commander said, yeah, right, hold on. Cease fire. Let’s give them a chance to send a recovery party and when they’ve had time to get there, unleash again with the mortars and guns. And so that’s what happened. The next barrage was intense and on target. Again, dozens of howitzer and mortar rounds landed inside the compound and a B-1B was said to be in the area, and there were hopes that we could drop a bomb in there, too. No bomb was dropped.

After the fighting, we moved back to Inkerman, and along the way we kept getting reports that the enemy was trying to hit us with bombs they had hidden. We got lucky this time.

More than two years ago, Ross Kemp, an outstanding British journalist, filmed a documentary series here. I have recognized many of the scenes in his footage. Little has changed other than it’s more dangerous here now. If you want to see what it’s like here through a video camera – Ross Kemp and his crew have done an incredible job. His facts and the tone were just right.

And that was it. We came back to base and I received a message. The British Ministry of Defence had canceled my embed. Here we are, eight years after the attacks on 9/11, watching censorship creep in to “the forgotten war.”

Reader support is greatly valued and crucial to the continuation of this mission. Today I am unembedded in Helmand Province. Please cover my back while I cover the war.

31 August 2009
Helmand Province, Afghanistan

The historical Afghan elections scheduled for 20 August were days away. While the west mostly continued to vote for Afghanistan, the big question was, “Will Afghanistan vote for itself?”

The latest media wave splashed into the main voting centers in places like Kabul, Kandahar, Jalalabad, Herat and Lashkar Gah. The larger cities only account for perhaps 20% of the Afghan population. Whereas the easy and obvious stories are in the cities, a crucial and larger dimension—the other 80%—would unfold in the boonies. Most Afghans would have no chance to vote.

The election was to be run by Afghans. In theory and in practice this would be a recipe for disaster. The strategic thinkers cannot be faulted for this; after nearly eight years of war, if the west were still running the elections, the elections and government would be a failure to begin with. By comparison, the Iraqi elections on 30 January 2005 (less than two years after invasion) were run mostly by Iraqis. In the voting of October and December of that same year, Iraqis had two more runs at the ballots, which were increasingly successful. Afghanistan, however, is different. This would be only the second election in history.

There are no good choices here. Either we run the elections and the central government and in doing so undermine the same central government we are investing in, or we allow that central government to run the elections and probably watch it undermine itself. But who knows?

We need more troops. The leadership tells us that the Taliban and associated groups control only small parts of the country. Yet enemy influence is growing, and so far, despite that we have made progress on some fronts, our own influence is diminishing. For example, an excellent British infantry unit that I embedded with in Iraq and now Afghanistan, the “2 Rifles,” is staked out in the “Green Zone” around the Helmand River. HQ for 2 Rifles is at FOB Jackson near the center of the map above. There are several satellite FOBs and Patrol Bases, each of which is essentially cut off from the outside world other than by helicopter or major ground resupply efforts (which only take place about once a month). The latest ground resupply effort from Camp Bastion resulted in much fighting. The troops up at Kajaki Dam are surrounded by the enemy, which has dug itself into actual “FLETs.” FLET is military-speak for “Forward Line of Enemy Troops.” In other words, the enemy is not hiding, but they are in trenches, bunkers and fighting positions that extend into depth. The enemy owns the terrain.

The British are protecting Kajaki Dam but otherwise it’s just a big fight and no progress is being made. The turbine delivery to the dam, which I wrote about last year, was a tremendous success. Efforts to get the turbine online have been an equally tremendous failure. Bottom line: the project to restore the electrical capacity from Kajaki Dam is failing and likely will require multi-national intervention to bring it online and to push back the enemy.

We need more helicopters. Enemy control of the terrain is so complete in the area between Sangin and Kajaki that when my embed was to switch from FOB Jackson to FOB Inkerman—only seven kilometers (about four miles) away—we could not walk or drive from Jackson to Inkerman. Routes are deemed too dangerous. Helicopter lift was required. The helicopter shortage is causing crippling delays in troop movements. It’s common to see a soldier waiting ten days for a simple flight. When my embed was to move the four miles from Jackson to Inkerman, a scheduled helicopter picked me up at Jackson and flew probably eighty miles to places like Lashkar Gah, and finally set down at Camp Bastion. The helicopter journey from Jackson began on 12 August and ended at Inkerman on the 17th. About five days was spent—along with many thousands of dollars in helicopter time—to travel four miles. Even Generals can have difficulty scheduling flights. Interestingly, when I talk with the folks who reserve helicopter space, they say the Generals are generally easy-going about the lack of a seat, but that Colonels often become irate.

A helicopter finally was heading from Camp Bastion to FOB Inkerman, which is cut off from its own headquarters at FOB Jackson only four miles away. The war and fighting can vary dramatically around Afghanistan. In Sangin, the enemy uses mostly fertilizer bombs, which, along with normal leave schedules, has rapidly attrited the battalion to the point that replacements have been sent. Conversely, four miles away at Inkerman, it’s still mostly a gunfight, though the use of bombs is increasing. Inkerman sits on the desert side of “highway” 611 that goes from Highway 1 (the “Ring Road”) to Kajaki. The 611 marks the border between the deadly Green Zone and the desert. The road is almost completely controlled by the enemy. Only tiny patches of the 611 are under serious NATO/ISAF influence. Some will take issue with this statement; if they claim to be in control, they should readily accept the challenge to drive in an unarmored car in those areas they claim to control.

To help avoid being shot down, the helicopter approaches Inkerman from the desert side. (In fact, two days later on the 19th, a similar helicopter was shot down near here.) The Afghan road system is the human equivalent of ant trails. After thousands of years of living here, the Afghans have not cracked the code on road building. Many people will say that geography has been cruel to the Afghans, and that the mountainous, landlocked terrain is the problem. Yet this does not explain away the success of landlocked, mountainous countries such as Austria and Switzerland, nor does access to the sea guarantee anything more than saltwater. The meek have inherited this plot of earth because the strong don’t want it enough to take it.

Where liquid water can be found, so too can Afghans.

Some people point back to the “good-old days” in Afghanistan, when hippies could smoke hash and swim naked in the streams. The good old days in Afghanistan did not leave much evidence of progress in the form of roads, architecture or written history.

The stories of foreign invaders do not explain away the great walls built around nearly every home and every mind. The problem is not the terrain. The problem is not that Americans and others supported the Mujahadin when they fought the Soviets. The problem is not the artificial boundaries penciled in by the British all over Asia and the Middle East. The people are backwards and many want it that way. You can fly over a compound in the desert, miles from the next compound, and still it will have walls. Afghanistan is the land of a million Alamos.

As the pilot brought the helicopter to the yellow pin called FOB Inkerman, an Afghan man had parked his car just near the front of the base on the 611. He took out a shovel and began digging, hidden by his car, he thought, at a spot where a bomb had recently detonated. A British soldier fired a warning shot and the man drove away. An Apache helicopter eventually attacked the car out in the desert. There he was, just within direct view of Inkerman, digging in a bomb. This is typical of the larger situation.

Helicopter landing site at FOB Inkerman.

Two platoons are stationed at Inkerman; meaning only one platoon at a time can leave the base. Using one platoon to cover this area is like trying to water a football pitch with a drop of water. The enemy fights just outside the base, even planting IEDs in view of the guard towers. On my first morning at Inkerman, one of the platoons was outside the wire in the corn. They came across tripwires and other booby traps. The enemy was so close that soldiers could hear the enemies’ own radios crackling nearby in the corn. A firefight ensued. Machine guns and mortars were fired. The white smoke is a screen launched by the mortars to help the infantry platoon break contact. There are too few troops to fix the enemy and prosecute attacks.

Cleaning the mortar tubes after the fire mission.

Restacking unfired mortar bombs.

The platoon comes back to base. Amazingly, despite the dire situation, British morale is high. My respect for the men and women here only grows by the day.

The soldiers keep streaming in from the mission. The Pentagon and British MoD spin lies (though I have found Secretary Gates talks straight), but veins of pure truth can be found right here with these soldiers. The Pentagon and MoD as a whole cannot be trusted because they are the average of their parts. There are individual officers and NCOs among the U.S. and U.K. who have always been blunt and honest with me. Among the higher ranking, Petraeus and Mellinger come to mind, but for day-to-day realities this is where it’s at. Out here. Nothing coming from Kabul, London, or Washington should be trusted.

A recent controversy was stirred in the U.K. by my photos of British soldiers in the GZ (Green Zone) wearing brown uniforms. There is some truth to the controversy, but in fairness to the British MoD, only part of the battles take place in the GZ. Much of the fighting takes place in the deserts. Even individual missions often alternate between the Green Zone and the Brown Zone, and so neither green nor brown is perfect. The British SAS and American special operations forces are using camouflage that is more suitable for both environments. It would cost very little to outfit these soldiers in better camouflage.

These men and women will never get the credit they deserve.

The women are medics, and they brave the combat just like the infantry soldiers. But again, they will never get the credit they deserve, and so we joked that they should just let people think they spent the entire tour at Camp Bastion. Who would believe that they were out there in the thick of it? On this day, an Afghan man showed one of these medics a rash on his arms, but the medic carried no such medicines out into the fighting. When medic Evans said she had no medicine, a young man picked up a big stone and was preparing to hit her. Rhian instantly pointed the rifle at the man who put down the rock.

Still streaming in.

Another day in the war.

Finally they are all in the gate and nobody is shot or blown up this time, and I say a quiet thank you for bringing them back in one piece.

After each mission soldiers drop gear and go immediately into a debriefing to discuss what has occurred. They discuss things that were done well, things that were done not so well, and there is discussion about how to improve before the next fight. They talk about the performance of the enemy and any good moves or bad tactics used by the enemy. They talk about any gear that may have failed or performed well.

The soldiers knew they were doing well and I knew it because they invited me on more missions than I could possibly go on while still being able to write.

Some things could have been done better—always the case even among the most experienced soldiers—so the soldiers talked it through, and after it was over they headed back to re-issue new ammo, clean weapons, recharge batteries for various gear, and prep for combat on a moment’s notice.

About three hours after the firefight, an Afghan man was brought to FOB Inkerman with the note above. The note was signed with the name Dr. Haji A. Baqi, who the British said is a doctor for the Taliban. (Not necessarily a “Taliban doctor,” but someone who definitely treats Taliban.) The Brits said that Dr. Baqi gets medical supplies from the ICRC. The referral says the patient was “SHOUTED BY GUN,” and judging by the small bullet hole it might well have been a British gun.

Normally, a correspondent would not be permitted to publish photos of a captured enemy (while embedded with British or U.S. forces), but this guy was not captured and he was not being detained. He was not officially deemed the “enemy,” despite that his hands were soft and he likely was hit during that firefight.

The medical team: Nikole Cunningham, Rhian Evans, Jonathan Richards, Daniel Yeoman, all led by Dr. Gabriel Shaya, going to work on the suspected Taliban. His only real problem seems to be the bullet hole (entry and exit) in the abdomen. Luckily for him, he seems to have been hit by the same bullets used in American and British assault rifles (5.56mm), which lack the power to make the definitive hits caused by more powerful weapons. The man was alert throughout.

Dr. Shaya tries to find a vein, but ends up drilling into the guy’s right tibia to deliver fluids. This is Dr. Shaya’s first combat deployment. On August 2nd the monthly convoy was moving up from Camp Bastion to resupply bases that no longer see fresh apples, fresh milk, or fresh anything. The convoy had been harassed along the way and the enemy already knows the expected convoy routine, so they were busy with ambushes. When the convoy passed by FOB Inkerman, Captain Shaya was on QRF (Quick Reaction Force) duty. A nearby IED strike caused a casualty just near the base. Captain Shaya loaded up with only two other soldiers into the Pinzgauer vehicle. Darkness was falling when the total of three soldiers launched out of Inkerman and Dr. Shaya thought it was exciting to be on his first mission, but he also knew the dangers, having worked for three weeks at the Camp Bastion trauma center. Shaya was sitting in the back and realized that if the Pinzgauer got hit with an IED, he might break his neck on the partial ceiling, so he shifted to sit under the open space. He began to ready his gear to accept the casualty, when about five minutes into his first mission, BOOM!, the front of the vehicle apparently hit a pressure plate.

The explosion did not seem loud to Dr. Shaya. Dust and smoke filled the darkening air as the vehicle came to a stop, and part of the truck fell onto Shaya. His arms and legs were still attached but due to a partition he could not see either man in the front. He shouted to them and they both responded and both were wounded. The easiest, quickest way to the front was to crawl out the back and open the driver and passenger doors, but there might be IEDs because the enemy often plants bombs in clusters. Dr. Shaya did not want to walk on the road until it had been cleared. They were alone in the dark. He didn’t even want to turn on his red flashlight. He could climb over the top but did not want to be an obvious target, so he shouted to the front for them to use the radio to call for help. The truck had no radio.

Dr. Shaya climbed over top to the front, but didn’t want to turn on his light. Soon he saw a dim light approaching from down the road and he felt anxious. As the light grew closer and closer the anxiety increased, and it came closer still until he saw it was the company Sergeant Major and some soldiers. The anxiety evaporated into profound relief. The soldiers opened the doors and Dr. Shaya saw that the driver’s lower right leg was gone, while the dashboard had crushed in on the passenger who was in great pain. The driver was trapped by the steering wheel, and while soldiers tried to pull him out, Dr. Shaya, now between the driver and the passenger, tried to lift up the steering wheel and finally they got him out to a stretcher where Dr. Shaya had to screw into his tibia to administer fluids. Dr. Shaya thought the driver was losing his will, and so he gave a pep talk and tried to keep him in the fight. The other patient was screaming as he was pulled from the vehicle. He was a large man and difficult to move, and continued to scream with pain as he was put onto a stretcher and the IV was inserted. Three morphine doses later he was still in great pain due to a severely fractured femur, and as they drove in another vehicle back to base he screamed on the bumpy road. Dr. Shaya was painfully honest with his recounting, saying that during the stress of his first combat, he had forgotten his weapon and medical bag on the damaged vehicle. He was upset with himself that he could not administer more because of that oversight. “The journey back seemed to take an eternity,” he said. The British MERT helicopter was circling in the darkness overhead and when it landed at Inkerman, he ran off, helping with the stretcher, when he should have been preserving his strength for other casualties.

Dr. Shaya told me that when he returned to the medical tent, “When I got back, I was shattered (exhausted) and shaken.” He began to pack another medical kit in case he had to crash out the gate on his second mission, yet now soldiers were arriving for treatment after the initial blast that wounded the first soldier, and only when all of that was done could Dr. Shaya relax, and begin to feel the pain from his own throbbing, bleeding elbow.

Combat is the cruelest teacher. Dr. Shaya, who makes no pretense of being a combat soldier, had been five minutes into his first mission when suddenly he was alone in the dark with two seriously wounded men.

Dr. Shaya treating the suspected Taliban. Maybe this was the guy who blew up the vehicle.

Soldiers examine the referral note, signed with the name Dr. Haji A. Baqi, wherein the suspected doctor of the Taliban describes symptoms.

Backside of the referral note.

Call sign 'Pedro': One of the great untold stories of this war.

The 129th ERQS (Emergency Rescue Squadron), flying a pair of HH-60G Pavehawks, launched from Camp Bastion to retrieve the suspected Taliban who was deemed a “Cat A” casualty. Category A means the patient requires immediate evacuation. Total flight distance (given the route) from Bastion to Inkerman back to Bastion would be about 100 miles.

Among the British combat soldiers in Afghanistan, Pedro is the only thing more popular than mail. When friendly forces are in need, Pedro will come anywhere, anytime, during any weather, and their helicopters have gotten the bulletholes to prove it. The United States Air Force runs the only rescue service that will always be there, no matter what, no matter that there is no moon for flying, or the dust is too heavy for everyone else, or you are in a firefight. American Army helicopters in Afghanistan fly with the red cross on the side. Flying with that symbol makes it illegal for our people to carry weapons. The decision seems ridiculous; the enemy will only use the red cross for an aim point. While the Army flies armed with a red cross, Pedro flies with miniguns. And they bring some of the most highly qualified medics in the entire U.S. military–which is saying a lot. They bring miniguns, and powersaws to cut soldiers out of MRAPs or other twisted hulks, and scuba gear when troops and gear are lost to the water. If our people can manage to get there, Pedro can manage to get them out. Pedro rescues people every single day.

The lead aircraft, Pedro 35, brings two pilots, a gunner, a rescue officer, a flight engineer, and two PJs (elite “rescue specialists”; these men are a story unto themselves).

When Pedro 35 landed at FOB Inkerman, the two PJs along with the rescue officer, Captain Dave Depiazza received the patient while British soldiers brought the suspected Taliban toward Pedro. The PJs like to meet the ground troops outside to make sure the patient is properly categorized, assessed, and loaded. One challenge with some ground troops is that they will rush the helicopter during a “brownout” and start to load the patient feet first (or headfirst), when the PJs might need the patient the other way; the PJs want the head near the lifesaving airway equipment, and since helicopters vary in configuration, the PJs need to take control early to save seconds. They want to spend no more than 30 seconds on a hot landing zone; the aircraft do take hits but they have been lucky so far. (A Pedro from Kandahar Airfield was shot down in July. Luckily all survived and kept doing missions, but the helicopter was ultimately destroyed during a recovery mission that went awry.)

Sometimes Pedro 36 comes in first, but this time Pedro 36 flies top cover while Pedro 35 loads the patient.

Pedro 36 racetracks low watching for ground threats. The door gunners can—and often do—return lethal fire in a couple seconds.

Pedro 36 roars low and then both disappear and head back to Camp Bastion. When the Pedro 35 landed near the Bastion trauma hospital, Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman happened to be visiting the hospital as the PJs helped unload the suspected Taliban. (Just the day before, when I had spent some hours with the Pedros before heading back out with British infantry, one of these same PJs said he would clean the operations center for a week if he could meet McCain. I said to him, “Fat chance you’ll get to meet with McCain,” and so imagine the PJ’s surprise when he carried the suspected Taliban into the hospital and accidentally ran into Senators McCain and Lieberman, and shook their hands.)

The war is a busy place and far too much happens out there than can possibly be explained. Llater that night, a platoon launched on a mission to raid several compounds. I was invited on the mission on 18 August but did not go due to the usual writing-crunch and impending elections, and so during breaks I sat in the ops center and listened to the radio calls. The raids unfolded, and after half a night the soldiers brought back six suspects, one of whom had run from the soldiers and urinated on his hands to remove explosives residue. The terrain had been rough and the night was dark and so two soldiers busted their ankles.

Major Ian Moodie, commander of B Coy 2 Rifles, guaranteed me that in the morning there would be a gaggle of locals, including elders, who would arrive to demand release of the prisoners. Major Moodie said this problem is exacerbated by the helicopter shortage; if he could get the prisoners extracted as soon as they were captured, he would be able to say that the prisoners had already been moved and there was nothing he could do, but already in the past he had decided to release prisoners to cool tensions.

Later in the day of 19 August, locals arrived to demand release of the six. All were released except for one, who was finally picked up by a helicopter on the evening of the 19th, the day before the latest historical Afghan elections wherein Abdullah Abdullah and Hamid Karzai had reached the showdown to decide who would become the President of one of the most primitive countries on Earth, but one that probably gets more international press and attention than Japan and Germany combined.

As the helicopter lifted off with the prisoner, the JTAC who talked the helicopter in said to me that “Axle” Foley, another JTAC four miles away in Sangin, was about to call in a bomb from a B1. The fighting had begun and it was not even election day. Taliban in the area were threatening people to stay in their compounds and not vote.

On the afternoon of the 19th, before our election-day mission on the 20th, “Snowy” meticulously cleaned every speck of dust off his weapon. He disassembled the magazines, cleaned the springs, and individually cleaned each bullet.

Snowy then counted every last bullet—twice—and I joked that if his weapon failed the next day, cleaning would not be the issue. The weapon was ready, it seemed…. Meanwhile, my BGAN satellite communications gear was malfunctioning on the evening before the election. Hours would be wasted before it was ascertained the satellite gear was officially broken. Murphy’s Law was in effect for all guns and gadgets. I’ve come to a remote base and can report what others are not seeing, and the crucial link was broken at the crucial moment.

At about 2245 a rocket banged and zoomed overhead but missed the base and exploded seconds later somewhere out in the darkness. Orange illumination rounds drifted down nearby and in the far distance, some casting long, flickering shadows. Radio chatter at the ops room said that an SAS (British special forces) helicopter had been shot down north of us and one troop was wounded, and that the enemy was moving toward the crash site which was still occupied by British soldiers. I headed to bed because the mission on election day was likely to include serious fighting. The alarm was set for 0330, but by midnight there had not been time to get a wink. Just after midnight, having seen no less than 10 meteors streak through the darkness above, sleep came. The alarm sounded and I pulled out of the cot, already dressed for the mission, and pulled on the boots in the dark. Sometime around 0400, there was a distant thud as the helicopter that had been shot down was destroyed. (An officer later said that two bombs were used, but I heard only one.)

By 0436, the soldiers were ready to launch on the mission and there was time for a few images on this historic day in the middle of nowhere.

The soldiers had erected a memorial for lost comrades.

Metal detectors and other gear were tested.

It was time.

The mission began.

Suspected bombs were marked along the way. Dozens of them. The metal could be anything from an old bullet to a nail. For years, the enemy has seen us with the metal detectors and so are making bombs with LMC (low metal content).

The soldiers on point with the metal detectors have an incredibly dangerous job. They must watch for all sorts of ambushes, high and low. The enemy uses command wires, pressure pads, trip wires and radio-controlled devices. Some people say the enemy bombs are cowardly, as if we are in a gentlemen’s duel. Others might say IEDs are no more cowardly than our using B-1Bs and A-10s.

Election day begins.

Our mission was to move to an over-watch position to prevent Taliban from harassing voters on their way to Sangin. Most people in Afghanistan would not have a chance to vote even if there were no Taliban. British officers told me that between here and Kajaki, for instance, there were no polling stations.

Fatal funnel: the enemy often plants bombs in walls, or simply throws grenades over top.

Often after ground has been “cleared,” soldiers far down the line get blown to pieces.

Open areas make us less predictable for IED strikes, but now we are extremely vulnerable to machine-gun, RPG fire and other weapons such as B10 rockets. Luckily they are terrible shots with mortars.

If we get ambushed, the only cover is accurate return fire, but the enemy of course tries to hide their firing positions.

Nobody from either side was dead yet. Not here, anyway.

We reached our objective; an occupied compound that British forces had used three times before and this boy was waiting. Afghans often stand with an arm behind their back, or they walk up and down steep mountains in the same fashion.

Nearby compound with a possible IED at the corner.

Several sections occupy different compounds giving us better arcs for mutual fire support.

The opium had already been harvested and the poppy bulbs were hard and dry. How many bulbs does it take to buy one bullet? The drug dealers are getting rich, and so a strong central government is a natural enemy.

As we occupy his home, this Afghan boy plays like he is killing us with a rifle and then wants to see his photo.

The man of the house says he is worried that on our fourth stay, the Taliban will think he is collaborating and will kill him. Asked if he will vote, he says no, and that nobody in this area will vote because the Taliban will kill them.

Climbing around these compounds takes its toll. One can only imagine how many bones are broken. Often, the entrances of the compounds are laced with explosives, so the soldiers blow a “mouse hole” through a wall, or use ladders to scale, and so the enemy now places booby traps atop walls. Again, some people will say it is a “security violation” to say that the enemy places bombs atop walls, as if the enemy doesn’t know that the enemy has placed bombs atop the walls. People will say it’s a security violation to say that we use ladders to climb walls, when every day countless thousands of Afghans see us with ladders. We’ve been fighting this war for nearly eight years. The enemy knows we listen to radios, cell phones, and just about anything else we do. It’s the people at home who do not know. The enemy has learned our tactics and psychology.

Joseph Etchells had been killed nearby almost exactly a month ago, on 19 July. “The Kopp-Etchells Effect” dispatch was written partially in Joe’s memory. Several times, the events of Joseph’s loss were recounted to me, in clear hopes that important details would be told. I said not to worry, it will be told. The missing details were that soldiers had complained about not having enough ladders to scale walls to avoid dangerous compound entrances. During a mission the soldiers needed to get over a wall but were without a ladder, and so Joseph Etchells volunteered to go through the entrance, where he stepped on a pressure plate.

The compound we occupied on election day was littered, partially with batteries. Soldiers do not throw away old batteries, but collect them in boxes because the enemy digs through trash to collect batteries to make bombs, but just as often something like this is benign.

Afghans in this area typically live with their animals.

Many believe that the Pashtun people are one of the lost tribes of Israel. If true, some Taliban might actually be descended from Jews, which would be one of the most severe ironies of humanity. Some branches go off and earn Nobel Prizes and unravel the secrets of the universe while advancing humanity by leaps and bounds, while another turns malignant and doesn’t know how to build a road.

The FST (Fire Support Team) goes into position over-watching a road leading to Sangin. The mission is to prevent any roving bands of Taliban from interrupting voters traveling to Sangin.

The family keeps two myna birds whose wings have been clipped, and the Hazra interpreter tells me the birds can talk. I tell him that birds of similar appearance, also called myna, are sold in America. “What if the bird says, ‘I love Mullah Omar.’” I asked the interpreter. “Then we must shoot it!” he answered.

The heat increases and the soldiers wait.

The first customers arrive. Maybe they are a probe.

The men are searched. If others were planning to come down the road on this day, none do.

A radio call said there was an IED strike nearby, in the area of Patrol Base Wishtan, which would be on or in the area of Pharmacy Road (the subject of the latest dispatch “Bad Medicine.”)

Later we learned that two soldiers were killed at Wishtan: Sergeant Paul McAleese, 29, and Private Jonathan Young, who was 18.

According to the BBC:

They were killed while on a routine foot patrol near the town of Sangin, in Helmand province, on Thursday. Their families have been informed.

Their deaths bring the total number in Afghanistan since 2001 to 206.

Lt Col Nick Richardson, spokesman for Task Force Helmand, said: “It is with deep regret that we report the deaths of two soldiers in Helmand Province.

“Our deepest heartfelt thoughts and sympathies go out to the bereaved family, friends and comrades of these brave soldiers.”

The MoD said the deaths were not connected to Thursday’s presidential elections in Afghanistan.

Every mission here on the 20th was connected to the elections. The idea that the losses were not connected to the elections seems off, not that it would make a difference to the fallen. Yet the slights and spins, often for no apparent reason (even if not the case here), undermines the messengers.

There would be much fighting around Afghanistan this day.

Men were watching us and roving around at a distance of about 900 meters. Sniper Keiran Jones is told to fire a warning shot.

Fighting was kicking up in the distance, and FOB Inkerman was starting to get attacked. Out in Sangin the fighting would last all day.

Rifleman Keiran Jones keeps his eye on the target while rolling the foam earplugs. The man watching us is wearing a white dishdasha and a white turban.

BAM! Keiran Jones launches a bullet from the .338 rifle, which cracks just a few feet away from the “dicker.” (Watcher.)

Another FST member has already recorded coordinates for targets and is ready to start a fire mission using mortars or the 105mm howitzers.

Rifleman Keiran on the scope. The snipers would fire about half a dozen times this day, and not all were warning shots.

Steady…

BAM. Dust fills the air and reflects off the morning sun.

Re-chamber.

Steady…

BAM. More dust.

The snipers are cleared to kill a man, the same one who has been watching us, as he peeks his turbaned head around a corner about 900m away. The shot is difficult because Keiran is in a tough and painful position to shoot from. I joke that they need to do “sniper yoga” and Jones replies with a chuckle, “No shit. It’s a stress position.” Both snipers stayed in positions that were agonizing for their legs and backs. There were no good places to get a relaxed shot.

Keiran Jones aimed for the man’s head and BAM! The supersonic bullet that could kill an elephant raced toward the target.

Keiran was very upset, thinking he may have missed, though others thought he might have hit the man. The shot would have been an easy shot if Kerian were prone, but the muscle stress in the growing heat was adding up.

The snipers stayed for hours up in that sun, sometimes taking alternating breaks, but they were in competition to get the enemy.

Like dueling banjos.

I sat in between them for about 20-30 minutes and all three of us were aching from the positions, though my position was far easier and shaded by one of the snipers.

They stayed at it.

Jones, drenched in sweat, takes a micro-break.

Fighting continued in the distance over in Sangin. We saw bombs drop and the mortars and howitzers were firing dozens and dozens of rounds, while the Apaches were hammering away with their cannons, and launching about 30 rockets through the day.

The compound and our soon-to-be ambush spot.

CPT Ed Addington keeps an eye out. We could hear firefights but other than the snipers peeling off some shots, we were not in contact.

We were not trying to hide. The Brits wanted everyone to know we were there.

A jet drops a bomb in the Green Zone.

Down inside the compound, soldiers began to try to compress themselves into any sliver of shade but the shade kept shrinking. Though we had occupied the compound, soldiers respected the house by staying outside.

The dog looked thirsty but when I tried to give him water, he launched out like the Killer Rabbit on Monthy Python. If not for the rope around his neck, there might have been a death match. The dog seemed completely insane, as if he had been attending al Qaeda seminars. The soldiers couldn’t believe that five minutes later, little Cujo was still viciously growling. I slid the water close enough but by several hours later he still never took a sip.

Medic Nikole Cunningham goes into firefights in the middle of bomb-laced country. Nikole said her family thinks she never goes on missions.

The family was long gone, but two boys came back and fed their grandfather (apparently) who was very old and stayed with us.

The plan was to stay all day, but we were told that by late afternoon, only 245 ballots were cast. And so it was decided that we should head back before dark, which would make it easier for us to avoid IEDs, but more difficult to avoid ambushes from machine guns and RPGs. No matter what you do. . . .

Everybody expected an ambush. The enemy had had most of the day to cook up something.

Off we went, down the middle, taking chances with the machine guns, RPGs and other rockets, but avoiding the more likely IEDs for the first leg.

The Taliban is in complete and uncontested control of the nearby power station. We don’t even have enough soldiers to take and hold the power station, and so the enemy controls the on/off switch, and they charge locals for power. While we generate electricity up at Kajaki, the Taliban makes money off it. It’s no wonder why the Taliban laugh at the idea of negotiating.

The thought went through my head, “If I were the enemy, I would ambush us right. . . . ” ZIP, SNAP, CRACK, CRACK, CRACK!

Their machine-gun fire was accurate and we all dove to the ground.

ZIPT! SNAP SNAP! Some bullets hit between this soldier and me.

There’s Snowy, who had cleaned his weapon with surgical care. He had wiped down every bullet and every millimeter of the magazines. His weapon was working just fine. For now.

Sapper Cameron Baldry starts to get up, and I think, “Why is he getting up?” Bullets were snapping by.

The soldiers often complain that when they hit the dirt, some of the bulky radio frequency gear they carry gets in the way of their helmets. When soldiers are down in the dirt they cannot aim their weapons because their faces are stuck in the ground. So Baldry rolled into a sitting position to return fire.

Meanwhile behind me, Snowy’s weapon began to malfunction.

I was making video when a soldier fired a Javelin missile which impacted close to the nearest compound.

This is where untrained fighters usually crack and run away in a jumble. British soldiers, however, are well-trained. While some provided covering fire, others peeled off in an organized fashion.

At this point another Javelin was launched and can barely be seen in this photo.

Impact: I’d never seen a Javelin explode like that. Usually they are like gigantic hand grenades, but this one looked like a bomb from a jet.

What in the world did he hit?

A fireball gathered and left a mushroom cloud.

None of us knew what had been hit, but of course there was speculation that the Javelin had found ammunition or bomb-making material. Maybe a tractor, I thought.

We went to a nearby compound that was empty and I stayed low near the front thinking this was the real ambush and that a cluster of bombs was about to kill half of us.

A soldier dropped his pants to see where he had been hit. Apparently a bullet had sent a rock into his thigh. The fire truly was accurate. We truly were lucky that several of us did not get hit. Meanwhile, other soldiers were checking ammo levels and doing redistribution as needed. After every firefight, the Brits (and Americans) check for wounds, redistribute ammo, and check critical gear. Two or three British soldiers asked if I was okay. Meanwhile, leaders would consult maps, develop SA and figure out what they wanted to do next. It cannot be stressed enough to check your buddies for wounds. Soldiers have often died because in the adrenaline rush and cascade of survival juices, or sometimes simply because they are still fighting, troops don’t realize they are badly wounded, and so they bleed out and die.

Being just a writer, it’s not my domain to intrude, but after every drama I closely watch their uniforms and hands for blood. All the soldiers are well trained, but some are still just teenagers and so you start to feel responsible for the younger ones, especially.

Sapper Cameron Baldry, a twenty-three-year-old soldier from 2 Troop, 11 Field SQN of the 38 Engineer Regiment, pointed at me exclaiming something like, “Did you see those bullets hitting between us! They were striking right between us!” I chuckled, saying yes, it was close, and those guys are good shots but we got lucky. Baldry’s antenna had been shot off but he didn’t get shot.

We headed back to FOB Inkerman, avoiding many markers for potential IEDs.

Aircraft could still be heard, and there was fighting in the distance.

Marker.

Marker.

Fighting continues to our left, but it’s in the far distance. To our right about a thousand meters away someone is using a signal mirror, probably tracking our movements.

The heat and the weight cause some soldiers to pause, and finally we are back on base and somehow got away with no fatalities or even injuries.

There is no telling how much ammo was fired by 2 Rifles elements in Sangin, Wishtan and elsewhere, but the soldiers from Inkerman fired at least 1,100 rounds of 5.56 (rifle and link), 800x 7.62mm, 3x Javelin, 133x 81mm mortar, 172x 105mm howitzer. The Apaches fired about 500x 30mm, 28x flechette rockets and a Hellfire. Someone dropped 2x 500lb bombs and a British Tornado strafed, while American A-10s and Belgian F-16s also joined up.

Too much was going on to keep up, and in fact the base had been hit while we’d been gone, destroying someone’s sleeping space. Soldiers on base had identified at least one firing point and kept eyes on, and we got back just about the time I saw John Loughday and Simon Wagstaff trying to kill someone with a Javelin as the enemy occupied a firing position with what soldiers identified as a B10 rocket laucher. The first Javelin failed, and so they grabbed another and launched. With six seconds of flight time to that target, the single enemy saw the messenger coming his way. Instead of praying he made a run and I heard the explosion. The men radioed down from the tower, “Hello Two Zero this is crow’s nest. Good strike one enemy dead.”

The day kept going but a man can only record so much. My sat-gear was broken and so there was no way to file a detailed account of the election day, which in this area was a failure.

The next morning, on the 21st, ten men showed up to the FOB to talk about the generator that he said had been hit by the Javelin missle during the ambush yesterday. The soldiers had previously been to his compound and confirmed that he had a nice generator, which now apparently was the victim of a Javelin missile and had gone out as a fiery mushroom cloud. As a heat source, it would have stood out as a nice target to lock the Javelin onto. As a side note, the man said they had gone to Sangin to vote and had voted for Karzai. Yet we had watched his compound all day and nobody had left it to travel to Sangin. Furthermore, three days later, I was present when the same platoon occupied a compound of the man wearing blue (above). On the 24th, he said he had not voted. We occupied his compound on the 24th because British soldiers thought it was being used by the enemy. Yet here he is on base on the 21st, part of the party asking for money for the blown-up generator. On the 24th he said he didn’t know any Taliban and had only been here for a month. He spontaneously said he knows that Barack Obama is the President of the United States, but when asked, did not know who Michael Jackson was. On the 21st he was on base, while on the 24th I sat with him for about an hour while we waited for the enemy to square off for a fight. (And there came another firefight.)

On the 21st, the elder said the generator cost about 70,000 Afghanis, or about $1,400, but the most that could be paid from this base was $300. The inanity of it all is difficult to fathom in one sitting. We were taking machine-gun fire, apparently from his compound or that area, but he had no information about the Taliban. Probably because he is Taliban. We blew up his generator and now he wanted to get paid.

Later the evening of the 21st, soldiers held a ceremony for recently lost comrades and the next day they were right back out there in combat.

On the 22nd there was business as usual. A patrol was out on the road and a man was driving toward them on a motorcycle. The daylight was fading and a warning shot was fired but the man kept coming so a soldier went lethal and shot to kill, grazing the man’s arm. The man didn’t realize at first that he had been shot, or where it had come from.

As with young American soldiers, nobody seems to believe that a man cannot hear a warning shot while he’s riding his motorcyle, or that he can’t see soldiers wearing camouflage during the last rays of daylight. Despite being in countless firefights wherein we often have great difficulty identifying firing positions (such as two days earlier when machine guns were nearly hitting us), many young soldiers think that firing a warning shot is enough. We all know that snipers who are in hiding fire only one shot to avoid conveying their firing position. Warning shots mean nothing to an old man who needs glasses, who is riding a motorcyle at twilight in an area where gunshots are more common than frogs. So a small piece of flesh was stripped from his arm and the man got off light.

The world kept turning and on the 24th “Bad Medicine” was published just after midnight Eastern Standard Time, and that morning before sunrise the soldiers were going on a dangerous mission and I went along. The result was a firefight and much mortar and cannon fire using prox fuses, delay and airbursts into the enemy position. Though we had information that the enemy was trying to get us with IEDs, we escaped getting blown to pieces. When I got back to base, there was a message from British MoD that my embed had been canceled (about one month before we had agreed it would end) without warning. The message and timing were clear enough. “Bad Medicine” was published, and I was out. The soldiers at 2 Rifles were astonished. The MoD gave the reason that it was unfair to the journalists who were clamoring for spots, but my sense was that MoD had created a convenient excuse that was kept in the chamber, and now they had pulled the trigger.

I responded to the MoD:

Thank you for the message.

The precipitous decision by the MoD to cancel my embed after today’s dispatch is unfortunate.

The sudden reversal after today’s dispatch — apparently a publication that did not sit well with the MoD — will cause me significant headaches. As you know, there are many balls in the air, and the MoD has effectively shoved me out of the way.

Please forward to Ltc Richardson that the message was received.

Michael
—-

And so that was it. My last day with the British 2 Rifles had ended the same as it had ended in Iraq. In combat. I’ll miss the British soldiers. They constitute a truly professional force–if dangerously underresourced. It has been my honor to accompany them in combat. In theory I would do so again anytime, but in practice this will be the last time MoD will have a chance to cut me off in mid-flight, wasting much time and resources that should have been devoted to telling the story. Barring a guarantee from a British General Officer that something like this will never happen again, my days of covering British operations are over.

On Sunday morning, 31 August, the United States Air Force “Pedros” took me on three missions. Please stand by. This is very interesting.

I cannot operate in the war without your support. If support does not substantially increase, I will be forced to abandon war reporting in September. There has seldom been much interest in the Afghanistan war. True interest has been starkly reflected in the support for this mission. Each journey into Afghanistan, since 2006, has bled out resources from my operations. Reporting from Afghanistan is not sustainable at this rate.

Nevertheless, I continue to crack on: Please consider signing up for free Twitter updates at Michael_Yon (not Michael Yon without the underscore), for the most timely snippets possible.

You can help support this mission through paypal, all major credit cards, or e-check.

Captain Henry Coltart on Pharmacy Road

24 August 2009
Helmand Province, Afghanistan

The British soldiers of 2 Rifles had a mission: clear and hold Pharmacy Road.

FOB Jackson is currently home to Battlegroup headquarters for 2 Rifles. The area around the river is called the “Green Zone,” but just as appropriately could be called the Opium Zone. During season, the area is covered with colorful poppies, whose 2009 products are probably showing up by now on the streets in Europe. European money flows back here and buys fertilizer in the Sangin Market, which can be used to make bombs, produce more opium, get more money and make more bombs and grow more opium and make more money and bombs and grow more opium. Sangin is at once an ATM and weapons bazaar for the enemy. Nearly all fatalities in this unit have been caused by fertilizer bombs. The decision to mostly ignore the drug dealers has been a strategic blunder.

This mission was about tactical exigencies created by the strategic realities. Though FOB Jackson is small enough to walk from one end to another in a few minutes, it is the main base in Sangin, with smaller patrol bases spread around the Sangin area of operations. Two of those bases are Patrol Base (PB) Tangiers and PB Wishtan. Tangiers is an Afghan National Army (ANA) PB often used by 2 Rifles, while PB Wishtan is manned by C Coy of 2 Rifles. (“Coy” is British for “Company.”)

From Jackson, one can often see or hear fighting related to Tangiers or Wishtan while tracers arc into the night, and illumination rounds cast long, flickering shadows as they float to Earth under parachutes.

Though PB Tangiers seems randomly named, PB Wishtan is named after the local area which the locals call Wishtan. The main resupply route from Jackson to PB Wishtan goes through the Sangin Market, past Tangiers, and west along the approximate 1 kilometer of Pharmacy Road through Wishtan to PB Wishtan.

British soldiers from 2 Rifles said they had sustained approximately twenty fatalities and injuries in the area. (More were killed and wounded in Sangin since this mission.) The situation is reminiscent of so many roads in Iraq, such as Route Irish, previously dubbed the most dangerous road in the world. The short stretch of Route Irish is situated between main bases in Baghdad. Since we never had enough troops in Iraq, the route was difficult to secure despite that it was a short stretch with bustling military traffic nestled between huge bases. A lot of people were killed and maimed on that short stretch—I have little idea of the numbers of casualties on Irish—but the total must have reached at least the hundreds. Irish was eventually made far more secure by allocating substantial Iraqi and Coalition troops along with what must have been many millions of dollars’ worth of physical defenses, all augmented with frequent coverage from the air. Despite that, car bombs, IEDs and small-arms attacks continued to occur on a less frequent basis. I’ve probably driven Irish a hundred times with no dramas, but it was never safe. Despite international infamy and the sharp political desire to secure at least one small stretch of road between main bases in Baghdad, Irish was never completely secured. Pharmacy Road in Wishtan is a small-town redux of Route Irish in Baghdad.

Pharmacy Road was effectively closed by enemy harrasment, including a blockage caused by two blown-up vehicles (a “jingo truck” and a British tractor). Resupply and troop movements were performed by helicopter, despite that a patrol could walk from Jackson to Wishtan in an hour, and straight driving would only take fifteen minutes. A bypass route was made with similar results. Captain Alexander Spry told me that Wishtan is like something from a Freddy Kreuger movie where bombs are planted in broad daylight and the enemy chisels small firing holes through the fifteen-foot walls and launches bullets down the tight spaces and alleyways. The Afghan mud walls are so robust that the 30mm cannons from the air will not penetrate. Dropping a 500lb bomb into the middle of a compound will leave the walls standing. In Wishtan, our snipers are of little use because they can’t see or shoot through the walls, and there is no commanding terrain other than the air. As with Route Irish and probably hundreds (thousands?) of other routes in Iraq and Afghanistan, routes cannot be secured without pinning substantial numbers of troops. Life is far easier for the guerrilla than for the counterguerrilla, just as arson is easier for arsonists than for firefighters.

With the shortage of helicopters in mind (and the fact that an RPG was recently fired at a helicopter as it lifted out of PB Wishtan), closure of Pharmacy Road increased enemy freedom of movement while decreasing our own. Though British forces continued to push into combat around Wishtan, battlegroup commander LtCol Rob Thomson wanted Pharmacy Road open.

Most of us tried to sleep the night before the mission, but there was much to do. At one point, perhaps half a dozen 81mm mortar illumination rounds from another base were shot straight over FOB Jackson. The empty casings, weighing perhaps 2lbs each, swooshed through the darkness, possibly at several hundred miles per hour, and thumped onto Jackson. (Terminal velocity varies from object to object.) One casing was heading toward a sergeant named Marty who runs Flight Ops. Marty hit the dirt and the casing landed just next to him.

The mission began under cover of darkness. Conditions were far too dark to focus and the soldiers were not using lights, so focus was done by trial and error. A sniper team quietly sat beside a dog and its handler. The dog seemed to take interest in the sounds of the camera.

The few who speak only whisper. A soldier checks his night-vision monocular.

Flipping up the night-vision monocular puts it on standby.

The mission will be very dangerous and the soldiers, who mostly could not see me taking photos unless they were using night-vision gear, seemed lost in thought.

The friendly attack dog. A dog handler recently told me he was urinating when an Afghan soldier tried to grab his willy. The handler said the dog bit the Afghan soldier who needed a few stitches.

We set off down the market road. Some folks believe such reports are “security violations,” as if the thousands of people living here do not know exactly where the bases are, or do not know exactly where we came from and went to. Operations take place here every day. Civilians are everywhere.

We made it to FOB Tangiers with no dramas. Some Afghan soldiers were on guard while others seemed comatose.

The commander of 2 Rifles is Lieutenant Colonel Rob Thomson (right), who this morning was constantly studying maps or soaking up information by talking with soldiers whose ears were glued to radios. Most soldiers did the smart thing and immediately began to fall asleep; experienced combat soldiers never miss a chance to fill canteens or sleep. Meanwhile, the Commander’s work has just begun (despite my having seen him work late the night before). LtCol Thomson has chided other officers and NCOs about sleep, saying it’s an advantage of growing older. You just don’t need as much sleep. Plus having children is good training for combat.

Corporal Mark “Axle” Foley (left) is the JTAC who controls air strikes. Axle is a good-spirited soldier and funny to talk with, always cracking jokes though sometimes I have difficulty understanding his accent. When Axle picks up that radio, a magical toggle-switch clicks in his head from “fun” mode to “all business.” While Axle talks business with the pilots, one can only wonder how well the American pilots understand Axle. Yet the pilots work with Axle all the time, and seem to understand him perfectly on the first go, and he understands them. One night, I heard a Southern accent come down from an aircraft, which set the Brits to laughing and trying to immitate the accent. Brits and Europeans often get a big kick out of thick Southern accents but all attempts to imitate the twang seem to fall flat. (Except by country bands in Germany who can perfectly imitate the patois as if they grew up next door to Willie Nelson.)

Axle, who often works with American pilots, says these A-10 and B-1B pilots are probably the best to work with because they come to Sangin so often that they know the terrain, the roads and bases, so they are easy to talk onto targets.

Sitting there in the darkness, Axle works the radio while watching the downlink screen. As the A-10s approach at about 0314, the aircraft are still about 40 miles out, and a pilot starts listing off all the various sorts of weapons they are carrying. They had more spells than Harry Potter. As the A-10s close in on our postion, Axle picks up a downlink and suddenly he can see through the A-10 crosshairs. Whatever the pilot is looking at comes on Axle’s screen. Axle gives the pilot some reference points and each time the crosshairs instantly go to that point, and within maybe thirty seconds, the crosshairs slewed precisely to the spot where we were sitting. Axle told him that’s us, which probably sounded to the A-10 pilot something like, “Ah roga, dat’s us,” and then Axle starts walking the pilot through to all the friendly locations so he can know where our guys are.

An A-10 was transmitting downlink but we were getting interference, maybe from the building or other radios. Axle moved outside where Corporal Henry Sanday from Fiji came in. Henry is a good man whom I got to know in Iraq, and sometimes we have lunch or dinner at FOB Jackson, where he constantly invites me on missions. Henry is battle-proven and very good under fire. When your life is at stake, Henry is a man you want to be with, as you will soon see. This morning, his men were falling asleep, but as a section leader Henry kept working. Major Karl Hickman (right) is the A Coy Commander, and while his men plopped down to sleep, Karl kept working. I’ve never been in combat with Major Hickman, but his men say he’s good and steady under fire. Axle as JTAC is a crucial link to this mission, which explains why when Henry and Major Hickman might be sleeping, they are checking in with Axle to keep their SA (Situation Awareness) updated.

We had the A-10s for only a few minutes when a radio call from a different net came to Axle to release the A-10s for a TIC (troops in contact) somewhere in South Helmand. Axle radioed the pilots to switch freqs, and I recall a pilot apologizing and saying he looked forward to getting back up here. Axle put down the radio and looked straight at me, saying, “That’s such a bummer,” as if his fishing buddy had to go home early, then Axle finished with, “However, the guys that get them will be well happy,” and started shutting down his gear as the sounds of the A-10s faded into the darkness. While Axle worked, I asked about times when he “smashed” the Taliban. British soldiers like to use the word “smashed” when talking about the Taliban. When Axle would finish talking about one fight, I would ask about another. Finally, Axle said, “You Yanks are great. You like to hear stories about us smashin’ the Taliban but people at home want to know how much we miss our families.” We both chuckled, and I asked, “Really? They don’t ask you about smashing the Taliban?” “That’s right,” then Axle said something like, “They only want to hear how sad we are.” Axle and I got along great because I didn’t care if he missed his family and he didn’t care if I missed mine. This part is about smashing people who would help those who smashed the World Trade Centers and blew up people in London and Bali and Jakarta and Israel and Spain and the Philippines and anywhere else they can reach. There is a crucial development and governance aspect to this war, and still a crucial smashing side. Sometimes you’ve got to swap hats for helmets. Mullah Omar is still alive, apparently in Pakistan, and he needs to be killed. Just on 20 August I heard a Taliban singing over a walkie talkie that Mullah Omar “Is our leader,” and they were celebrating shooting down a British helicopter only twelve hours before just some miles from here. There will be time to hug families later. Now is a time for fighting.

We talked some more about smashin’ the Taliban. When the A-10s turned toward some distant battle, nobody here complained. Yes, we need more helicopters, but since I have been in Sangin, we never have been short on attack aircraft. The JTACs are happy. Air cover, since I have been in Sangin, is better than we could honestly hope for. Axle talked about strike aircraft; “The F-15E Strike Eagles are brilliant,” he said. The JTACs, if given a choice of the other fourteen types of piloted aircraft that come on station, seem to vote for F-15E Strike Eagles.

The F-15E package (weapons, electronics, and strike pilots) is particularly lethal for this fight. When strike aircraft come onto station, the pilots declare their weapons load. A typical F-15E declartion sounds like this: An American voice crackles over the radio, “Good morning. I’ve got 4 GBU-12s, 6 GBU-38s, 2 GBU-31s, and 1,000 x 20mm cannon.” [GBU-12: 500lb Laser Guided Bomb is the JTAC favorite here; GBU-38 is a 500lb JDAM and also very good; GBU-31 is a 2,000lb JDAM and too big for use in Sangin but there are many other fights in Afghanistan; 20mm cannon can destroy armored vehicles but bounce off the compound walls here.]

In total, the two F-15Es arrive with a dozen accurate bombs, a thousand rounds of 20mm, incredibly good optics, and a great downlink package so the JTACs can peer through F-15E crosshairs and coordinate with the pilot. Most importantly, the Strike Eagle pilots are specifically trained for this mission. Nobody on the ground complains about this package.

Whereas Strike Eagles are favored in Sangin, there are close runner-ups. B-1Bs are called “Bones” because B-One spells bone. Bones were made for nuclear war with the Soviets and for carrying hydrogen bombs, and so they don’t carry a lot of different tricks for small battles. B-1Bs do come with 12 GBU-38s and 8 GBU-31s, very good optics and Axle says the pilots are easy to talk onto targets. When a B-1B runs low on gas, refuelers can fly to us. One day, Axle could see Bones refueling directly overhead while continuing to track a target.

In all, about fourteen types of aircraft fly topcover, including American, Belgian, British, Dutch and French. JTACs here say the least desirable aircraft of those fourteen are the French M2000D. A package of two jets carries no cannon, no downlink and a total of only 4 GBU 12s. The optics aboard the aircraft are not good, and the trail aircraft spots targets with binoculars like the Red Baron. Also, the French and British have problems understanding each other’s accents. The British who work with French forces refuse to say a bad word. They say the French are good and ready—which can be surprising because the Brits and the French like to slag each other—but the French aircraft simply are primitive in comparison to the American jets. An American unit in Zabul Province last year said that some French pilots probably saved them, or at least made a big difference, and so any words about primitive aircraft should be taken in light of respect for the pilots.

No mention is made of the Apache helicopters because Axle was talking about jets. The Apaches seem to do most of the heavy lifting—for every jet strike I must have seen 5-10 Apache strikes. Apaches are very effective. We are too far out for coverage from Kiowa Warriors. Predators are excellent but Reapers are especially welcome.

The A-10s were gone and so Axle headed to sleep but Corporal Henry Sanday keeps working while all his men are zonked out.

The following account does not pertain to Pharmacy Road, but pertains to Corporal Sanday, his men, Axle and others in these photos. These photos were made on 09 August. On 13 August, a bomb detonated at 0523, wounding Matthew Hatton and two others. Sanday arranged to evacuate the wounded by helicopter but there were IEDs along the routes to the HLS (Helicopter Landing Site).

As Daniel Wild and Mark Hale helped the wounded Matthew Hatton, they were hit by a second bomb, killing all three men. In total there were five casualties, and call-sign “Pedro,” helicopters from the United States Air Force had come in to evacuate the killed and wounded. Henry Sanday was acting Platoon Sergeant and wanted to land Pedro on a roof but the roof was too small. He finally got the casualties loaded out. After suffering three killed and two wounded, the men continued the mission though some of the men were very rattled. Later that evening, when the mission had been completed and the soldiers were moving back to FOB Jacskon, they were hit by a third bomb leaving two casualties. Sanday was setting up another helicopter extraction when a fourth bomb detonated and an interpreter turned into a “white mist” leaving only a leg. The interpreter went MIA. Sanday asked the Apaches to search for the body but they found nothing. I’d seen this happen in Iraq and it took us a long time to find two of the bodies. One missing body was maybe a hundred meters away. The other body was farther. It’s been a long time, but I think it might have taken an hour to find the last body, and we had dozens of people looking. Sanday was down to four unwounded soldiers in his section and in Sangin the IEDs often seem to come in big clusters. No matter which way you go, there is a high probability of more. Two interpreters were killed in the strike and three were wounded.

Some of the men were in shock and did not react to Sanday’s commands. They were seriously battle-affected and refusing orders, though others rose to the occasion and were the glue. I’ve seen this breakdown happen. Soldiers typically bounce back. Two officers described to me their thoughts on Corporal Sanday. “He is an absolute hero,” said one, and the other agreed. Sanday’s name was mentioned with respect all the way back in Iraq. Now in Afghanistan he continues to rise to the occasion, but now with more experience. The next day, Sanday went on a combat mission in Sangin. About 100 meters in front of him an IED detonated on another section. Three soldiers from the Royal Regiment Fussilliers were killed. During extraction to the HLS, a pressure-pad IED caused more casualties. Again, I am told Sanday and others rose to the occasion.

The interpreter who disappeared was found in the Helmand River, about 20 miles south at FOB Price.

But those attacks were still a few days away. Today, Sanday had more dangers to lead his men into, and through, and as they slept, he worked.

Body armor for a pillow. Many soldiers buy those bracelets because they say the profits go to support wounded warriors. Next time I’m in Camp Bastion, I’ll buy a couple.

“Axle” Foley, who was on that horrible mission with Sanday, went to sleep until more aircraft were scheduled to show up. This photo was made at about 0517 and I put down the camera then my head down at 0521, just in time for the first explosion seven minutes later at 0528. The explosion was close and powerful and literally raised some dust. AFTER it exploded, someone said it was EOD for the first controlled detonation. The Bang Boys were out there in the danger zone, cracking away. I said a little prayer for them and put my head back down and that’s when the rooster started crowing—from inside the building! Look at the halls in the photo. A rooster is very loud inside here, as if he were crowing straight into our ears. The ANA keep the rooster for fighting. He was incredibly loud. BOOM at 0540. EOD was back at it, and at 0548, then 0558, then 0610 and 0612 and 0621. The EOD soldiers were into a rhythm. Between the rooster crowing inside the building and EOD blasting away nearby, sleep was hard to come by, so I got up and walked to one of the guard towers. LtCol Rob Thomson seemed to be the last one working, and warned me not to get shot. (During the bad morning on the 13th, LtCol Thomson saw some gloom on a few faces and he jerked those faces back into the fight.)

The British call guard towers “sangers” (a word the Brits picked up during a previous Afghan war). At the bottom of the ladder, I announced my presence to the ANA soldier and he waved me up.

The EOD were blasting just a few hundred meters away, and after every explosion, the ANA soldier would imitate and laugh, “BOOM, BOOM, hahahahah BOOM, BOOM, hahahaha.” He was like a big kid. He begged to have his photo taken and then wanted to stare at his photo and begged for another photo and another. Finally, he got behind the machine gun and acted like he was shooting. He was saying “gugugugugugugugugugugugugugug” like he was firing the machine gun. I walked over to make sure the gun was not aimed at any British EOD soldiers, who were in a different direction off to the left. The ANA soldier kept making the gun rattle, “gugugugugugugugugugugugug,” while laughing like a six-year-old boy, “gugugugugugugugugug.” Where were the 3- to 5-round bursts? He was wasting imaginary ammo. I said “No! It should be gugug…..gugugugug…gugugug. Not gugugugugugugugugugugug.” He wrapped his finger on the trigger and started to pull, but before doing so, a red LED seemed to flash inside his brain. He stopped. And there was a long pause, like on one of those old-timey calculators where you press “2” “+” “2” “=” … and then wait five seconds for the answer “4.” He checked the safety which, predictably, was on FIRE despite that a long belt of ammo was draped from the loaded gun. He clicked the safety on and pulled the trigger and kept going, “gugugugugugugugugugug.” Some men should not touch guns. He made me nervous that he might accidentally shoot someone, especially a British soldier, and so I distracted him with the camera, and started taking notes. Every time the pen hit the paper, he would lean over and stare at the writing, as if he were going to accidentally poke out his eye with the pen.

“Gugugugugugugugugugugugug.”

That’s when his buddy showed up with the dog. In Afghanistan mostly only villagers keep dogs, but the ANA are copying the British and adopted their own guard dog. Sometimes I wish all the readers could just come out here for a single day. Readers would never forget it. Look at that dog. What’s he going to do against Taliban with RPGs? He’s hardly got energy to bark. The gugugugugugugug man insisted that I photograph his friend and the dog, and then Dog Boy sprinted to the base of the sanger, tied the breathless guard dog to the ladder, climbed up breathlessly and stared at his photo and laughed and smiled and started jabbering on and giving the thumbs up, crawled back down, untied the dog and ran away laughing while the dog tried to keep up and they both disappeared around that corner.

The British and American soldiers often like the Afghans they work with; most of the Iraq veterans (British and American) did not make friends in Iraq, but most soldiers who work closely with Afghans seem to like them. The Afghans do some crazy, goofy things, but something about Afghans can be very likeable. Practically none of us want to be here, but nobody seems to have malice for Afghans. It’s difficult to explain.

Mud walls meet cinderblocks. Locals fill the cinderblocks with mud. If the people spent as much time building roads as they do building walls, this place would have more roads than California.

Sangin from the Sanger. The town of Sangin is not exactly Jurassic Park like most of Afghanistan. Despite that the British have been here since 2006, some people just a few miles from town still think the British are Russians, and the more enlightened ones seem to think the British are Americans. Most people seem to know who Michael Jackson is, but few have heard of Canada.

A couple days before this photo, British soldiers on FOB Jackson were firing large .50-caliber machine guns over my head, intermittantly, for about an hour. I thought they must be shooting someone, but this dispatch was a work in progress and so eventually the .50 caliber noise started affecting my concentration while I sweated over the keyboard. Finally, I pulled out the earplugs, walked outside and asked why the heck they keep shooting right over base?! There was no return fire. Turns out they were test-firing the machine guns, but every time the Fire Support Group launched bullets, villagers would see tracers and run toward the beaten zone where dust poofed up and rocks splintered through the air. Each time the soldiers fired the machine guns, the British soldiers would have to wait for the villagers to clear out, then fire again and the villagers would run back to the impact zone. The soldiers and I laughed at the absurdity. Iraq was almost never funny. Afghanistan can be like a war version of Comedy Central.

That man is walking on Pharmacy Road. Most of the the walls are roughly fifteen feet tall, though the walls behind him are shorter. There is no commanding ground—this is about as good as it gets—and the snipers cannot get long shots or observe far. The enemy are aware and use the labyrinth of walls nearly as effectively as if they were tunnels.

Orientation Image #1 (Please Click on the Image for a Larger View)

FOB Jackson sits beside the Helmand River, south of the Kajaki Dam which bottles the lake at the top. Kajaki Dam is currently protected by British soldiers from 2 Rifles. They are completely surrounded by Taliban and fight every day. (Please Click on the Image for a Larger View)

’The Green Zone’ is not made by rain, but by the Helmand River. The Kajaki Dam was built by Americans decades ago. We actually built much of the infrastructure now used to grow poppy. (Please Click on the Image for a Larger View)

FOB Jackson, established in 2006, is the main base in Sangin. (Please Click on the Image for a Larger View)

Scrap in front of PB Tangiers.

The mercury rose with the sun. LtCol Rob Thomson gathered up some men and wanted to go see the EOD soldiers as they were clearing some of the most dangerous ground. Though they had just cleared this stretch, there have been many instances where soldiers got blown to pieces by ground that was just cleared. Cleared is more like “cleared.”

The EOD soldiers said this dog missed a big pressure-activated bomb and led his handler right over it. Luckily the team didn’t step on the device. The dog is better at finding shade than bombs, apparently. Probably should be a drug dog. I’m no expert on search dogs, but it is true that glaring sun can bake away scent. I had the feeling that the soldier felt like he let people down, but nobody said any such thing. Everybody knows it’s tough out here and sometimes you simply miss the bomb.

Viewed from north. (Please Click on the Image for a Larger View)

The “Wishtan 5” were killed on the Wishtan market road on the top left. Those five soldiers were killed in a similar attack wherein soldiers who survived the first attack were killed while rescuing their buddies.

We came into a compound that had been “cleared.” Without EOD, our losses would be far higher in Afghanistan. The EOD soldiers get special respect and earn every ounce of it.

LtCol Thomson checks progress.

(Please Click on the Image for a Larger View)

The imagery from November 2004 does not show the power lines in the photo below. I made the photo below from nearly the same angle as the image above. So, the EOD soldiers on top of the truck are in the corner of the compound overlooking Pharmacy Road. The soldiers are a few meters from where the yellow thumbtack denotes “Blown Vehicles.”

The EOD team is rigging this wall to blow part of it down. On the other side of the wall are the two blown-up vehicles; one of the vehicles is British and the other is the trailer from a “jingo truck.” The area surrounding the trucks is booby-trapped with explosives, and the vehicles also are booby-trapped. So the goal is to blow down the wall and drag the vehicles off the road and into this compound.

These EOD soldiers wear a Rainbow patch and call themselves Team Rainbow, which of course seemed quite curious.

The wall is so thick and strong that Team Rainbow put about 200 pounds of plastic explosive in all the right places, then rolled out the wire. The reader might be surprised to see what 200 pounds of high explosives does to the wall.

Team Rainbow and LtCol Thomson stayed up close, but I got behind the farthest vehicle because I have no pride in my courage. Some people think this is crazy work, but I’m actually a safety fanatic.

When the enemy hears a detonation—which typically occurs many times per day—they wait for helicopters, knowing that if helicopters swoop in and land, they have achieved success. Many of the enemy bombs in Sangin are detonated by command wire, while many others are pressure-activated and are simply improvised land mines. The enemy often uses pressure cookers to make bombs, just as was done by the Maoists in Nepal. In Nepal, the government began confiscating pressure cookers (which angered many people), and the government often shut down cell service (angering many people) because the Maoists used cell phones. The Maoists won the war. We are operating far smarter in Afghanistan. Here it’s the enemy who actually shuts down cell towers—and this angers the people. Also, the enemy bombs around here are killing a lot of innocent people, and this also angers the people. Despite progress made by the Taliban, they alienate many people.

And so that’s all that 200lbs of high explosives, in perfect contact with the target, placed by experts, could do to this wall. When soldiers come back from Afghanistan and say that the compounds are like fortresses, this is what they mean. The electrical wires, which cannot be seen in the Google Earth imagery of 2004, got blown down. The EOD soldiers wanted to avoid the live electrical wires. EOD called the Royal Engineers to come up with a non-destructive solution to the wires. Within minutes they thought of a solution. The vehicle above cut a notch in the top of the far wall with his scooper.

He drove the scooper machine to the front and opened the wall to let a bigger truck inside. The Engineers hooked webbing around the electrical wires, and using the winch on the big truck, pulled the wires up and draped them over the notch the scooper had cut. EOD was back in business clearing Pharmacy Road. In fact, the soldier who is driving the scooper is the same driver who got blown up on Pharmacy Road, and his blown up vehicle is one that they were about to drag into the compound.

It can be very rattling out here. But they keep getting blown up and going, and the enemy is getting it worse.

Preparing plastic explosives in slivers of shade. Iraqis thought our body armor was air conditioners, and thought we have “cold pills” to chill us out. The soldiers carry far more weight than I do, and they work three times harder. This heat is bad even for me, but much worse for them. Often U.S. and British soldiers end up back at the hospital after they collapse, but in nearly all cases they come straight back to the fight. There was a U.S. battalion in the 1st Infantry Division in Baquba, Iraq, who were constantly pumping IVs so they could outlast the enemy.

SSgt Schmid of the Joint Force Explosive Ordnance Disposal (JFOD). Dealing with hidden bombs made by pernicious enemies requires special people. I asked Ssgt Schmid which wire he cuts when dealing with booby-traps—red wire, or the green?—SSgt Schmid just laughed and kept working.

The blown-up vehicles were dragged through the blown-up wall under the blown-down wires.

As the midday sun pounded down, the EOD soldiers continued to work in the heat. LtCol Rob Thomson stayed out in the boiling sun with the men. I retreated with some others to a cooler place that was halfway underground. Most of us soon fell asleep as the EOD soldiers kept blasting, blasting, blasting. They must have made dozens of explosions during the day and they never seemed to take a break. None of them, nor LtCol Thomson, ever took even a minute of shade break with us.

After an afternoon of blasting, LtCol Rob Thomson headed to PB Wishtan, but my gear was back at Tangiers, where some ANA were preparing for a mission.

During the clearance, this soldier fell off a ladder. He was all the way at the top, about fifteen feet high. Luckily he was wearing his helmet because he said he also cracked his head. His spirits were good but he seemed a little embarrassed for falling off, but accidents like this happen a lot. Even when nobody is shooting, there are plentiful ways to get hurt out here. In the background are two improvised cots where I slept the second night. Just on the other side of the barrier, the Hescoes got hit some months ago by an RPG, as seen below.

RPGs are simple but enormously effective.

As the shadows grew longer, the British and ANA began playing volleyball while EOD kept blowing up charges along Pharmacy Road.

When people complain about the British rations, I think of Laxle Kedian Harris, more commonly known as “H.” I offered some weightlifting tips but H laughed and changed the subject. But make no mistake—the rations are . . . to put it kindly, bland.

It’s dangerous to leave a camera unguarded around soldiers. It could have been much worse.

That night, we stayed in the field because the mission was not merely to clear Pharmacy Road, but to build a sanger (guard position) about halfway down—one which would be constantly manned. While we slept, soldiers from 2 Rifles and the engineers worked all night erecting the sanger.

After a long, hot day taking back Pharmacy Road.

Some work while others sleep.

And that was it. Pharmacy Road was cleared and the sanger was built and most of us headed back to FOB Jackson just as the sun was rising on the second day.

Later that afternoon, back on FOB Jackson during the Battle Update Briefing (as Americans would call it), a BOOM shook the room. Word came that a local person was pulling parts from one of the vehicles that were dragged off Pharmacy Road. He encountered a Taliban booby-trap and he was killed. EOD had not cleared the vehicles of booby-traps; the two vehicles had merely been pulled off the road. Next day another local was killed on a parallel road that he thought the British had cleared. It had not been cleared. The Taliban blows up a lot of local people in Sangin.

The mission was an obvious success. It was surprising that we endured no fatalities or serious injuries. The mission was well-executed and since many of the soldiers have substantial combat experience from Iraq and Afghanistan, major dramas were averted. Murphy had smiled upon us. The only injury to my knowledge was the soldier who fell off the ladder. Soldiers who had previously fought on Pharmacy Road said we had sustained about twenty fatalities and injuries in that general area. And though at least one IED has been placed on the road since last week, C Coy and the ANA are now regularly patrolling and the freedom of movement has resumed.

This is a brutal fight. Since that mission, eight more British soldiers and two interpreters have been killed in this area. That’s ten KIA plus the wounded. The soldiers keep going.

Coming up next: the fighting we saw on election day wherein the soldier beside me got his antenna shot off.

I cannot operate in the war without your support. If support does not substantially increase, I will be forced to abandon war reporting in September. There has seldom been much interest in the Afghanistan war. True interest has been starkly reflected in the support for this mission. Each journey into Afghanistan, since 2006, has bled out resources from my operations. Reporting from Afghanistan is not sustainable at this rate.

Nevertheless, I continue to crack on: Please consider signing up for free Twitter updates at Michael_Yon (not Michael Yon without the underscore), for the most timely snippets possible.

You can help support this mission through paypal, all major credit cards, or e-check.

A gunshot ripped through the darkness and a young British soldier fell dying on FOB Jackson. I was just nearby talking on the satellite phone and saw the commotion. The soldier was taken to the medical tent and a helicopter lifted him to the excellent trauma center at Camp Bastion. That he made it to Camp Bastion alive dramatically improved his chances. But his life teetered and was in danger of slipping away. Making matters worse, the British medical system back in the United Kingdom did not possess the specialized gear needed to save his life. Americans had the right gear in Germany, and so the British soldier was put into the American system.

British officers in his unit, 2 Rifles, wanted to track their man every step of the way, and to ensure that his family was informed and supported in this time of high stress. Yet having their soldier suddenly in the American system caused a temporary glitch in communications with folks in Germany. The British leadership in Sangin could have worked through the glitch within some hours, but that would have been hours wasted, and they wanted to know the status of their soldier now. So a British officer in Sangin – thinking creatively –asked if I knew any shortcuts to open communications. The right people were only an email away: Soldiers Angels. And so within about two minutes, these fingers typed an email with this subject heading: CALLING ALL ANGELS.

Soldiers’ Angels Shelle Michaels and MaryAnn Phillips moved into action. Day by day British officers mentioned how Soldiers Angels were proving to be incredibly helpful. The soldiers expressed deep and sincere appreciation. Yet again, the Angels arrived during a time of need.

The severely wounded soldier, whose name I will not print without explicit permission, is recovering in the United Kingdom.

Two or three weeks after the injury, I was having dinner with a British Major and several Captains. The Major talked reverently about Soldiers Angels, and then about a herculean effort that the United States military extended to save a single British soldier. I had no idea about that effort. I just heard the gunshot, saw the soldier carried away into the night, and heard the helicopter roar into the darkness. I knew Soldiers’ Angels had intervened back in Germany, but the details that followed came as incredible surprise. The U.S. military had quietly moved Heaven and Earth to save a single British “Squaddie.”

Please read the following description, authored in part by Soldiers’ Angel MaryAnn Phillips:

In late July, a British Soldier deployed in Afghanistan sustained life-threatening wounds to the abdomen and chest. I alluded to him in this post, but his identity has not yet been made public.

The article quoted below describes the extraordinary (and to my knowledge unprecedented) efforts made to save his life. It is a testimony to the advancements made in the technological, logistical, and medical fields. But most of all, it is a testimony to the commitment of the many to care for the needs of the one.

Here is a summary of the medical, logistic, and air assets involved in this incredibly complex mission. It is almost certainly incomplete.

Aircraft:
- One C-17 aircraft to get the medical team and equipment from Germany in place at the hospital in Afghanistan.
- One C-130 aircraft to fly a pulmonologist from a different hospital in Afghanistan to the Soldiers’ location.
- A second C-17 aircraft to fly the patient from Afghanistan to Ramstein Air Base in Germany.
- LifeBird German civilian medevac helicopter to fly the patient from Ramstein Air Base to Regensburg University hospital.

Aircrews:
- Three C-17 aircrews; four sorties
- LifeBird helicopter aircrew

Medical Teams:
- British, Danish, US surgical team at the hospital in Afghanistan.
- A pulmonologist from a different hospital in Afghanistan flown to the facility where this Soldier was located.
- The Landstuhl Acute Lung Rescue Team (Specialized Critical Care Air Transport)
- The LifeBird medevac team in Germany
- The thoracic surgical and ICU teams at Regensburg University hospital in Germany, for the highly specialized treatment developed and available there.

Logistics Teams:
- Combined Air and Space Operations Center (SW Asia)
- Joint Patient Movement Requirements Center (within the CAOC above, SW Asia)
- Global Patient Movements Requirement Center (Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, USA)
- 618th Tanker Airlift Control Center (Scott Air Force Base, Illinois, USA)
- Landstuhl DWMMC (Deployed Warrior Medical Management Center)

A surgeon at work in an Afghanistan field hospital. At this hospital there is a general team of five surgeons, working with another three orthopaedic surgeons. With anaesthetists, emergency doctors and junior doctors, there could be 20 staff working on a single patient. Photo: Marco Di Lauro/Getty Images

Air Force aeromedical evacuation teams give British soldier fighting chance
by Capt. Justin Brockhoff

618th Tanker Airlift Control Center Public Affairs

8/4/2009 – SCOTT AIR FORCE BASE, Ill. (AFNS) — Three Air Force aircraft along with multiple aircrew, aeromedical evacuation teams, and agencies from around the world gave a British soldier a fighting chance at life in late July after the soldier sustained multiple gunshot wounds and had his blood supply replaced more than 10 times at a military hospital in Afghanistan.

According to officials, the soldier sustained multiple wounds to the abdomen and chest, and was transfused with 75 units of blood and another 75 units of platelets.

Emergency surgery was conducted to repair the Soldiers’ liver and lung. After being stabilized by the medical teams on the ground, the patient’s respiratory condition worsened and doctors determined that the patient had to be moved to upgraded care in Germany.

The Combined Air and Space Operations Center, staffed by U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, U.S. Marine Corps and Coalition partners. Built at a cost of $60 million, the project created the most advanced operations center in history. It includes thousands of computers, dozens of servers, racks of video equipment and display screens, over 67 miles of high-capacity and fiber optic cable, and hundreds of people, working in satellite communications, imagery analysis, network design, computer programming, radio systems, systems administration and many other fields.

Officials at the Combined Air and Space Operations Center and Joint Patient Movement Requirements Center at an air base in Southwest Asia, and the Global Patient Movements Requirement Center and 618th Tanker Airlift Control Center at Scott Air Force Base, Ill., immediately started working to find the aircraft, aircrews and medical crews to airlift the soldier to further care.

“We received the call on our operations floor to airlift the British soldier from Afghanistan to Germany and immediately did what we could to make it happen,” said Col. John Martins, the 618th TACC director of operations who led coordination efforts for the mission. “It was a complex move. Not only did we have to find a plane and crew to fly the patient out of theater, but also we had to find another plane and aircrew to get the right medical personnel and equipment into Afghanistan because we needed specialized medical teams to care for the patient in-flight.”

In less than six hours, a C-17 Globemaster III previously scheduled to fly a cargo mission was airborne with the required medical personnel and equipment from Ramstein Air Base, Germany, to Afghanistan.

“We were able to quickly identify a mission that was planned to fly into Afghanistan, and after coordinating with other agencies in the 618th TACC we were able to re-task the mission as an aeromedical evacuation flight,” said Maj. Kris Rowe, an aeromedical flight manager. “At the same time, we needed a pulmonologist to be part of the AE team due to the trauma to the Soldiers’ lungs. Working with our counterparts at the CAOC, we were able to get the pulmonologist from a different location in Afghanistan to the Soldiers’ location on a pre-scheduled C-130 (Hercules) mission.”

The pulmonologist arrived to the Soldiers’ location and continued to care for him on the ground, while the C-17 carrying the medical teams and specialized lung equipment were still en-route on the eight-hour flight from Germany.

Because of crew duty day restrictions, safety regulations that dictate how long an aircrew can be on-duty before they’re required to rest, the original C-17 aircrew couldn’t stay the six hours it would take the lung team to prepare the soldier on the ground, and still fly the mission back to Germany. Instead, once they arrived, the C-17 and its crew were able to wait on the ground for just over an hour while nine other patients, in addition to two amputees previously picked up during a fuel stop, were on-loaded for a flight to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Ramstein AB.

Once they had dropped off the medical crews and equipment to stabilize the British soldier, and its 11 new patients were prepped for flight, the first C-17 took off back for Germany. Its mission was complete.

A C-17 Globemaster III, like the one pictured here, aeromedically evacuated a British soldier in late July from Afghanistan to Ramstein Air Base, Germany. Before the soldier could be evacuated, an additional C-17 and a C-130 Hercules were needed to airlift specialized medical teams and equipment into place. U.S. Air Force photo/Senior Airman Clay Lancaster.

Enter the second C-17 and aircrew, assigned to the 385th Air Expeditionary Group, who were also previously scheduled to fly a cargo mission in Afghanistan. Officials at the 618th TACC delivered a similar notification that they’d been re-tasked to be involved in the lifesaving effort.

“The patient was loaded on the second C-17 and airborne within 22 hours of receiving the call for support at the 618th TACC,” said Master Sgt. Keyser Voigt, an aeromedical evacuation mission controller at the 618th TACC. “When you look at the requirements we had, its awe inspiring to see how many people will come together to save one life. It took two airplanes to get the medical team and equipment in place, another to fly the patient to Germany, three aircrews, four sorties, AE personnel and many more coordinating on the ground to get this done. Including the fact that we had to fly in specialized teams and equipment from eight-plus hours away and it took a minimum of six hours on the ground to prepare the patient using that specialized equipment, everyone involved did absolutely everything we could to give this soldier the care he deserves.”

At approximately 1 p.m. local time Aug. 2, the British soldier landed safely at Ramstein AB and was flown to further medical care at a university hospital by helicopter.

“It’s a true testament to the aircrews, the medical crews, and the ground personnel around the world and at the airfield that we could get this soldier out of Afghanistan so fast,” said Lt. Col. Duncan Smith, the 618th TACC’s Aeromedical Evacuation Division chief. “It is truly amazing to see this coordination take place in such a short amount of time, because we’re literally coordinating these moves from a world away. We are in the business of saving lives, and we will do everything we can to reach that goal.”

As of press time, the soldier was still at the university hospital in Germany, where he was listed in critical condition.

This movement marked the 8,563 patient movement by U.S. Air Force aeromedical evacuation teams in 2009, and the 135,233 since April 1, 2003.

(emphasis added)

As of today, almost 10 days after this story was written, the Soldier remains in Germany where his condition is stable. He may be able to fly home to the UK soon.

The doctors say it’s a miracle.

I’d say it’s probably close to a thousand miracles: A miracle for each of the many who came together to meet the needs of the one…

–
MaryAnn Phillips
Vice President, Warrior Medical Support Europe
Soldiers’ Angels main web site: www.soldiersangels.org
Soldiers’ Angels Germany blog: www.soldiersangelsgermany.org

*** New shipping address ***
MTD
Attn: Soldiers’ Angels
CMR 402
APO AE 09180
*** New shipping address ***

Post Script from Michael Yon:

Soldiers’ Angel MaryAnn Phillips emailed to me:

“I thought you might be interested in this. Incredibly, [British Soldier] is actually beginning to do quite well. He has regained consciousness and may be able to be transported to the UK within the next week.

While at Regensburg hospital with his mom […] right after she arrived here, I told her about some of this. She broke down and couldn’t believe “all of those people would do all that for my son”. It was a very, very moving moment.

Take care of yourself, Michael.

mp

I cannot operate in the war without your support. If support does not substantially increase, I will be forced to abandon war reporting in September. There has seldom been much interest in the Afghanistan war. True interest has been starkly reflected in the support for this mission. Each journey into Afghanistan, since 2006, has bled out resources from my operations. Reporting from Afghanistan is not sustainable at this rate.

Nevertheless, I continue to crack on: Please consider signing up for free Twitter updates at Michael_Yon (not Michael Yon without the underscore), for the most timely snippets possible.

You can help support this mission through paypal, all major credit cards, or e-check.

Thursday night, 06 August 2009
Afghanistan

I made this photo last night in Helmand Province, Afghanistan. This Landing Zone is very dangerous. A few weeks ago, another helicopter was coming into this LZ and was shot down at the last minute, killing all passengers and crew. Two children on the ground also were killed. The sparks coming off the rotors occur when the helicopters land in hot, dusty conditions. The landing itself occurs in a dangerous “brownout.” Brownout danger is compounded by the sparks which light up the dust and can confuse pilots who are wearing extremely sensitive nightvision goggles.

Michael

I cannot operate in the war without your support. If support does not substantially increase, I will be forced to abandon war reporting in September. There has seldom been much interest in the Afghanistan war. True interest has been starkly reflected in the support for this mission. Each journey into Afghanistan, since 2006, has bled out resources from my operations. Reporting from Afghanistan is not sustainable at this rate.

Nevertheless, I continue to crack on: Please consider signing up for free Twitter updates at Michael_Yon (not Michael Yon), for the most timely snippets possible.

You can help support this mission through paypal, all major credit cards, or e-check.

29 July 2009

Orders are given before every operation. The orders filter down through various unit levels involved, until each platoon finally receives its specific mission. The concept for this mission came down from the 2 Rifles Battlegroup (battalion) to the companies, including elements of the Afghan National Army and their British counterparts from the Welsh Guard, and down to each 2 Rifles platoon involved. So for any mission there might be literally dozens (or more) orders and rehearsals until each man and woman knows the perceived enemy situation, their specific tasks, and much more. While soldiers here at FOB Jackson received orders, undoubtedly pilots and others, stationed far away, perhaps on an aircraft carrier or even farther afield, were finalizing related plans.

Finding the Enemy

On 23 July, the afternoon before the mission, a call came into headquarters that two British soldiers had been wounded by two IEDs, and that the American helicopter medevacs known as “Pedro” had been called to extract the casualties. Pedro is a potent morale booster; British soldiers know that their American brethren in the medevac helicopters will come for them anytime anywhere, guns blazing if needed. Medevac is dangerous work; earlier this month, a bomb detonated, killing and wounding soldiers from 2 Rifles, and when they moved to prepare for medevac, another bomb exploded. In all, five soldiers were killed and many wounded. Yet the soldiers know that if they can get their buddies while still alive onto Pedro, chances for survival are dramatically increased. In addition to carrying outstanding medical crew, Pedro would roar back to Camp Bastion’s first-rate trauma center in about fifteen minutes. Night or day, gunfight or not, Pedro will be there.

23 July 2009, at 1600 hours: Corporal Kris Griffith, from British 2 Rifles FSG Snipers, receives his mission. The gear is already prepared. The weapons are spotless. All that’s left is one last round of checks, and then to try to sleep until about 2345 hours.

At midnight, soldiers arrived in the mess tent for breakfast.

After breakfast, the soldiers pulled on their body armor and what seemed like dozens of sorts of weapons: rockets of various sorts, different types of machine guns and rifles, grenade launchers with odd sorts of grenades, hand grenades, pistols, knives, radios (probably most deadly of all) and lots of attitude. A few soldiers smoked last cigarettes and then we trod on foot into some of the most bomb-laden stretches of Afghanistan. Everyone wore night vision gear, but it was so dark that I left the PVS-14 flipped up, on standby mode, and used what little ambient light was there.

Even at 3200 ISO, f1.2, 1/8s, precious little light was registering on the camera sensor.

The camera was nearly useless (as the shot above will attest), but in fact the enhancement below shows the eerie apparition of the soldier as we headed into the battlefield. With water crossings ahead and the darkness, the camera was better stowed in the waterproof bag inside the rucksack, so was soon tucked away.

Each soldier had been told to carry at least six liters of water, and so I carried 8.5 liters. Everyone carried medical kits, including bandages and tourniquets on the right side, and an un-cracked infrared chemlight on their helmet, and a blue chemlight for casualties. Twenty British soldiers have been killed in Afghanistan this month so far (the number since this mission has increased), and probably another hundred to hundred and fifty have been wounded. Ingress was dangerous, with land mines and other bombs planted in every route the soldiers were likely to take, and so we set off through the most unlikely routes that the commanders could manage. All roads and paths are mined or laced with IEDs, at choke points such as bridges and easy ground. And so we slogged through muck and soft ground, and crossed irrigation canals by ladder or wading through in the dark. The soldiers were quiet and used no lights, though some used the night vision monocular that would leave a faint green glow around one eye.

This is an active battlefield—even as I write these words on 27 July an Apache is firing down with its 30mm (killing four Taliban) nearby and combat occurs many times per day—and so this mission can only be described in general terms. In broad strokes, the mission on 24 July was to bait the enemy to take certain actions, and there were multiple moving parts to our side, making it difficult for the enemy to keep track of our combat elements. Though we would leave obvious boot tracks through fields and neighborhoods, our units split and went here and there, and so despite that the enemy had home field advantage, we could still achieve relative surprise for at least short periods. As the soldiers quietly sweated and moved through the darkness, dogs barked in the night; the canines sometimes go nuts at quiet but high-pitched emanations from the metal detectors.

Other sections pushed forward and entered a compound where more than a half dozen Afghan women and girls were sleeping in the open on a raised platform, under the Milky Way, where it was cool. The lights inside bathed the compound with an amber glow.

The interpreter explained our situation to the women and girls, who hardly seemed startled and not the least bit afraid. Everyone knows that women and children will be treated well, and I kept the camera mostly out of sight and away from the women. The British soldiers stayed away from the open area where the women and girls just watched us from the platform, though a couple of them seemed to fall back asleep.

Rifleman Grieves had been on point—an extremely dangerous place to be—and was unhappy to suddenly be carried by his buddies and to slow down the mission. But that’s the way it goes; the ground was favorable to a broken bone or two, and Rifleman Grieves had drawn that straw and busted the ankle. (Later we learned it was not broken.)

Medic Lance Corporal Beth Sparks is on her job, while Rifleman Karl Dresser talks to Ryan Grieves who is on his back. A soldier took Grieves’s weapon and cleaned it spic and span; the barrel got stuffed with mud, which can be a problem out here, and you’ve got to pay close attention, especially at night. Firing the weapon with mud in the barrel will cause it to explode, which takes the rifle out of action and possibly the rifleman, too.

Corporal Lee Edwards with Molly the bomb dog. Everyone loves Molly. First off, she’s a cool dog that likes to swim in the river with the soldiers, and secondly she trots into combat and has found a lot of bombs that could/would have blown people up. Molly can cross ladders spanning deep ditches, or when needed she piggybacks on Corporal Edward’s shoulders. It seems that every working dog in Afghanistan is treated better than the soldiers. Molly is no exception. Corporal Edwards treats Molly like the Queen of Sangin.

Up to this point, there had been no gunfire, but first light was coming at 0440, and we needed to get into position before light. So my section of eight left the compound while others stayed behind with Rifleman Grieves.

Corporal Kenny Copeland 2 Plt A Coy 2 Rifles.

We moved another two hundred meters through low corn to another compound, which was occupied by a family. The man of the “house” asked if he could leave, and if he could take his wives and children. The British soldiers treated the family respectfully saying they were free to stay or to go. I kept the camera low. After all, the man was not known to be Taliban, just a farmer, and it’s bad enough that we would commandeer his compound for half a day, much less that someone would start to take photos. The soldiers were respectful of the little property, though there was practically no property other than a few filthy blankets, nasty pillows, one light bulb, and just enough cooking utensils to fill up a brown grocery bag. The family tantamount lives in a barn with three cows, two donkeys, some sheep, chickens, and what appeared to be a fat dove-like bird in a cage hanging above their filthy blankets. Corn, okra and other vegetables were growing within the compound.

The compound, rooms and all, covered an area about the size of a tennis court. Tomato slices were laid out drying on a chest-high wall while human and animal feces dried just near the bottom of the same wall. Fred Flintstone would call the place primitive.

The compound had been selected because the commanders thought Taliban might stumble into us while the Taliban were, let’s say, reacting to some other initiatives. If the Taliban ran into us, the soldiers were to kill them, and by now various elements were scattered smartly about to make the Taliban feel like a pinball, only instead of getting hit with flippers, it might be machine guns, rockets, mortars, howitzers, and fire from aircraft. The Taliban are trying to snare us with mines, bombs, and SAFIRE (small-arms fire), and basically we try to do the same, only we don’t use mines, and our bombs often come from the sky. The Taliban are very brave, but they are ignorant brutal men who murder locals who do not support them, and brave doesn’t stop bullets.

After we occupied the compound and the family walked out, the soldiers heard some activity and were keen to check it out. Compound walls are incredibly resilient and can stop 30mm rounds, so AK-47 bullets make little more impression than do mosquitoes on windshields, but that doesn’t stop people from tossing grenades over the walls or popping up from tunnels.

The rustling next door was just a family going about their business.

And so we waited, and waited. While other British and Afghan elements did their work. Our job was to wait for about ten hours to shoot any Taliban who stumbled by, or maybe call in an air strike or cannon fire.

Lance Corporal Kevin Bowen, from Jamaica, mans the radio after carefully checking/cleaning his machine gun and laying the brush down. Kevin’s accent is easier to understand than some of the British accents.

Riflemen Jamie Massey and Jordan Farrer checked their weapons and zonked out. Everyone was wet from the canal crossings and sweat, and so the morning was chilly.

The ladders are used to get on the roofs. This family was so poor that they did not even sleep on a raised platform, and didn’t seem to have a radio, but they did have the fat dove-like bird in the cage, which apparently was their only song.

Corporal Chelsea Williams and Color Sergeant Kevyn Diggle ('Diggs') clean their weapons.

'Diggs': ready for action.

As earth warmed under the rising sun, flies began buzzing about. Kevin Bowen was ready for the onslaught.

Kitchenware: This represents nearly the entire extent of the family’s utensils and tools. There was little more besides a shovel and a pump sprayer for herbicide/pesticide, and they had the few blankets and pillows. A small stack of poppy was drying by the front door. How can anyone be blamed for joining the Taliban when they live like this? (We have no idea if this guy was Taliban.) Sangin is a fester-pot of the Taliban: Isolation, poverty and distilled ignorance create ideal conditions for the cult.

U.S. B-1 bomber roars miles overhead. During the mission of 24 July, hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of aircraft covered us at one time or another. The B-1 above is departing at 0631 local, when this photo was made, while sporadic SAFIRE and machine-gun fire competed with the birds chirping.

Impersonal view of Sangin from approximate bombing altitude of the B-1.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates and General Stanley McChrystal put sharp restrictions on the ROE (Rules of Engagement), which caused many armchair generals to throw tantrums that we are endangering our troops. (Years of loose ROE clearly did not work; during the cowboy years since 2001, Afghanistan got worse.)

Secretary Gates, General McChrystal and troops all over Afghanistan are making difficult decisions. Only time will reveal if McChrystal and crew can turn the war around. If our folks – the Coalition in general – can reverse the slide, they will deserve the same respect that was earned for the turn-around in Iraq.

PBR Street Gang, this is Almighty Standing by.

It’s great to know that Almighty is up there, yet it’s also clear that Almighty needs to keep those bomb bay doors closed most of the time. Down here, this could not be more clear. We can pulverize the Taliban from now until we are ready to go home, but if Afghanistan is to be brought into the first millennium, we need the resources to build, the patience and stamina to see it through, and greater wisdom than has so far been brought to task. And sometimes Almighty. These Afghans on the ground need education and development. Without education, we will develop only richer more confident enemies.

At about 0700 hours, a couple of mortars or rockets explode close enough to cause me to step inside a mud room. At 0708 hours, a B-1 again roars over and disappears. A report comes on the radio that Afghans passing through an ANA (Afghan National Army) checkpoint say that Taliban are warning families to leave the area around us. Meanwhile, a man neatly dressed with a robe drives by at various times (during the day) on a motorcycle.

A soldier on the roof sees families leaving nearby compounds. At 0711 two fighting-aged males move into a compound nearby. I ask Chelsea Williams, who is military police, if her family and friends know she comes out into combat. Chelsea laughs, saying her family thinks she is on Camp Bastion, which is about the safest place in Afghanistan. I say to Chelsea that she should never tell her family what she really does because they won’t believe her anyway. Chelsea laughs and there is sporadic small-arms fire from different directions, but nobody is shooting at us. What’s the use in Chelsea trying to explain all this? At 0717 there is a controlled three-round burst from a machine gun, and a couple of sparrows land on a wire in the compound. Less than a minute later, another controlled machine-gun burst and the sparrows glance around and chirp but hardly seem to notice. It seems certain that the sparrows live better than does this family. The machine-gun bursts must have been either British or ANA trained by British; Taliban would have let rip the machine guns in longer bursts. I ask the radio operator if he knew who was firing and he answers that it was ANA. Two minutes later intel comes in that Taliban are in a compound just near us and are “ready to go.”

Between 0719 and 0825 is sporadic SAFIRE and machine-gun fire (probably a few hundred rounds) and occasional booms from RPG shots.

Sangin: everything that is not under our direct view is under heavy Taliban influence. The Taliban still control Sangin more than we do. The entire surrounding area is under Taliban control. The British are confident they are making progress, and my initial impression is to say they are in fact making progress, though the journey will be long.

As the sun rose higher, the soldiers stuck it out on the sweltering roof. Many of these soldiers have been to Iraq, and it was much hotter in Basra, but still the temperature would climb to about 110 degrees in the sun. They were chugging the water but without complaints.

With the family gone, the animals became thirsty and hungry and broke out of the pin and started ravaging the family garden. It seemed fruitless to try to stop the animals, but Diggs was the defender of the family plot and kept herding the animals until finally he rounded them all back up. The Afghan man came back with a couple of his burkha-clad wives, apparently for the animals that needed to be watered and fed, but the soldiers made what I thought was a smart decision and didn’t let them back in. The man already knew our strength, and allowing him in would show our posture.

The brown splotches on the wall (upper-center) are manure that is dried and used for cooking.

The pin is made from mud and sticks and reminded me of Red Riding Hood. In Afghanistan, a home made of mud is practically bombproof against violence that would shatter a home made of bricks, but unfortunately, the Big Bad Wolf that once nearly swallowed the whole of Afghanistan is the Taliban, and Sangin truly is part of the Taliban belly. (Yet in one telling indicator of Taliban weakness, we are in their belly and there is little they can do about it. They are trying to expurgate us, but they are growing weaker, slowly weaker, in Sangin.)

Soldiers not on guard were trying to sleep because good infantry soldiers never miss a chance to fill canteens or sleep, and they already had filled canteens. At 0835 there was a brisk salvo of something bigger than RPGs, sounded like 105mm howitzer. Whoever had fired went straight to FFE (Fire For Effect) and skipped any adjustment, indicating the fire came from a fixed base onto a pre-registered target. At 0837 another salvo popped off and though I was half-asleep, it sounded like about 35 rounds, but I lost count and it might have been mortars. A radio call said our guys were trying to cut off some Taliban and trying to push them into a different area that favored our side, so that they could be hit by ambush or air strike.

Off and on we could hear “Green Eyes,” a UAV, buzzing like a lawnmower overhead. I got up and at 0842 the guard on the roof again spotted “two geezers” moving about 50 meters from us. The fields were completely dead. No farmers, nobody. By 0900 it was starting to get warm and bright so I switched the clear Oakley lens to the amber. It’s important to wear ballistic eyewear because eyes are more expensive than Oakleys. Plus it will be harder to write if my eyes get blown out. The British NCOs are strict that the young soldiers wear the glasses and gloves. There continued sporadic fights from various directions, but we were uninvolved, though a bullet zinnnged overhead (sounded like it came from many hundreds of meters away). At 0921 a proper firefight broke out and the radioman relayed saying ANA was in a big fight, which was doggone evident. Other than that, I didn’t realize it was ANA; some shooters seemed to be controlling fire and some weren’t. There were some explosions and the firefight seemed to subside after a mere three minutes.

By 0925 all of us are sweating in the shade. My water inventory: 2.5 liters gone, 6 liters to go. The soldiers who are awake are in good spirits, as if this is just a picnic that they do every day. I try to go back to sleep as the firefight resumes at 0930. I look around the sad compound and realize that even birds make better homes. There is a large explosion and I have no idea what it is, and at 0935 more explosions, and between 0936 and 0937 more explosions—maybe mortars—while I try to sleep, and by 1015 it’s quiet but the cloudless day is growing hot. At 1104 an Apache comes overhead then flies away. The soldiers on the roof must be cooking, but not nary a word of complaint from anyone about anything.

The only cupboards were simple recesses in the mud walls.

The Sketch

The animals needed to be fed and watered, but what were we to do? The Afghan man of the compound sent his three children to another compound, where another British section waited in ambush and where Grieves waited to be extracted with his messed-up ankle. The kids, a boy and two girls, were trying to say something to Captain Nick White, who pulled out his notepad and a child drew the picture above. Captains Nick White and Aaron West realized that the kids wanted to feed the cows, and told the kids it was okay to come back to our compound. The kids gave the sketch to Diggs who let the kids in.

The two girls and the boy fed and watered all the animals, smiling at the British soldiers the whole time, and finally they left with the fat dove-like bird and the sheep, donkeys and cows.

As hours dragged by, the fields were empty, and sporadic firefights continued around us while I slept in the feed storage room and the soldiers slept here and there. Each time a soldier walked on the roof, sand and dried mud rained on my sweating face. Another firefight broke out, apparently again with ANA, and this time some bullets whizzed overhead but we were out of the action. The motorcycle driver had gone by probably ten times by that point.

At 1343 came a BOOM shoooooosszzch BAM! Diggs said that some kind of rocket had just been fired and he told the radio operator to call it up, and as it happens, my watch was off sync by about 2 minutes, and it was in fact a Hellfire launch at 1340 from an American Reaper who was helping us out. I didn’t know what had happened other than that someone fired a rocket. Turned out that a Reaper—flying too high to be seen or heard—had been tracking Taliban who had been responsible for some of the shooting we had been hearing. The Taliban had been shooting at the Welsh Guard British OMLT (Operational Mentor Liaison Team) and their ANA counterparts. The Reaper had watched as the Taliban took their weapons into a mosque and came out unarmed, but the Taliban mistake had occurred when they went to another compound and picked up some weapons and got back into the fight. The Reaper used its own laser to designate the target and was cleared to fire by LTC Rob Thomson, Commander of 2 Rifles, and launched a Hellfire missile whose seeker head locked onto the laser reflection. At about the last half-second, the Taliban heard the missile and bolted like deer trying to jump the bow, but it was too late for two men who were killed. The third might have escaped with injuries, but if he did he’ll need new eardrums because the strike was very close. Interestingly, the enemy had avoided the bait that had been laid for them, and had gone for a hook (the team the dead guys had been firing on was there to ambush Taliban), but it did little good because the Company Commander in the Sky—this time Reaper—took the shot. (Thanks “Team Reaper,” wherever you are. Probably Nevada. The soldiers love to know that Predator/Reaper has arrived.)

The order was given to collapse back, and so we left early at about 1400. We and the enemy know this is the best time to hit us, and we fully expected to get hit. We walk away from the paths because that’s where the mines and pressure plates are most likely. Diggs and crew had been hit heavily almost exactly here just less than a week before. Apparently the soldiers killed the IED triggerman that blasted a few soldiers down, but they were all okay. The IED was big but the enemy buried it a little too deep, and so it left a smoking crater and some soldiers who couldn’t hear so well but they came straight back into combat.

Staying off the paths means crossing open fields and avoiding bridges.

Soon, even logs will be off limits, but it’s clear that the Taliban are losing 'ground' here.

The corn is not high yet, but as it grows it will provide excellent cover for friend and foe. There are so many bombs around here that last week a Taliban accidentally stepped on one of their own pressure plates and got blown to pieces.

Cujo: Always being watched. He wanted off that rope.

Cat and mouse: We move in unlikely places, though the enemy is watching every step and would try to plant bombs in front of us. The day had grown hot and I was down to 2.5 liters of water.

Cat and mouse: we try to bomb them, they try to bomb us. The enemy is now putting bombs in these ditches, too. It would be greatly beneficial if every infantry soldier had a few weeks of tracking training. We could spot even more IEDs.

Smelly ditch

Bombs often are planted in the walls, or the enemy shoots through small holes.

Probably safe because there are kids around.

There’s the Kite Runner kid. Up in Mazar-i-Sharif, the kids fly kites by the hundreds. Sometimes the enemy uses kites for signals.

Growing up in the belly of the Taliban.

He smiled and pedaled by.

The soldiers don’t like running low on ammo during firefights, and so were carrying about three times more weight than I had.

Nearly back to FOB Jackson. We never got hit, but crossing through warm stench-water from the village was little consolation.

Sangin sewerage.

Other patrols had been in for more than an hour, but everyone waits until the last patrol arrives, just in case.

Sweating and dusty, the soldiers wade into a chilly river running through camp, uniforms and all.

The current flows at roughly 1.5fps, so the rope is there to help stay in the swimming hole.

Afghan soldiers set up their toilet just down from the swimming hole.

The Fob Jackson Launderette.

Corporal Richard Tyrrell; Rifleman Stephan Glover.

In summary, the 24 July mission netted two Taliban killed by the Hellfire missile from the Reaper but that was just another day. On the 25th, soldiers at Kajaki killed two Taliban. On 26 July, here, just near FOB Jackson, Sniper Team Kris Griffith and Justin De Lange dropped another Taliban from 1,100 meters with the .338 rifle, and were themselves barely missed by a Taliban “sniper” who fired two shots, but remained concealed. I was not involved in the firefight but was close enough to hear the firing and explosions. During the same engagement, the mortars and 105mm howitzers fired 15 rounds each and killed three more, for a total of four Taliban killed. The sniper kill on the morning of 26th was the fifth confirmed for the two sniper teams during this tour. This morning, 27 July, while finishing off this report, the enemy fired an RPG at a British helicopter but missed. Later at Kajaki, a British soldier was killed by an IED. A U.S. Reaper came back on station in Sangin and was tracking armed targets that I saw on the monitor. The kills would have been easy, but the British commander here, LTC Rob Thomson, and the Reaper crew, were looking for a good shot that would cause no civilian casualties, and eventually an Apache who fired 60 rounds from the 30mm. Later in the day we received nine casualties in Sangin, and the A-10s came in and were firing their cannons, and as the dispatch is finished late afternoon on the 28th, a vibrant firefight is unfolding outside the perimeter. An RPG just fired.

I cannot operate in the war without your support. If support does not substantially increase, I will be forced to abandon war reporting in September. There has seldom been much interest in the Afghanistan war. True interest has been starkly reflected in the support for this mission. Each journey into Afghanistan, since 2006, has bled out resources from my operations. Reporting from Afghanistan is not sustainable at this rate.

Nevertheless, I continue to crack on: Please consider signing up for free Twitter updates at Michael_Yon (not Michael Yon), for the most timely snippets possible.

You can help support this mission through paypal, all major credit cards, or e-check.