Authors: Rusty Bradley
Just after midnight, I began to wake the troops. The Taliban would eventually come looking for us. Leaving at night allowed us to get a good head start, and the morning breeze would blow sand over our tracks. Since the Afghans didn’t have night-vision goggles, Special Forces soldiers jumped into the driver’s seat of the Afghan trucks. We headed out into the open desert. The rugged trails and riverbeds that caused your back to ache for days were behind us. I checked my map and compass. We were cruising at a good clip, despite our worn and dated equipment.
As reassuring as it was to be back in Ole Girl, she was ancient by military standards. Afghanistan is murder on trucks. Busted axles, blown tires, and punctured hoses are common on the rock-strewn landscape. Ole Girl was a first-generation GMV. She hit the ground in 2003 and for the last three years had never stopped bouncing along the wadis and dirt tracks of Afghanistan. She lacked any of the advanced armor and electronics that were so prevalent in the new trucks, but those were all headed to Iraq.
Most conventional combat units had the newest Humvee models with an onboard tracking system called the Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below, or FBCB2. The system let commanders navigate and see all the other units on the battlefield through a satellite uplink. Dubbed a “force tracker,” it showed the positions of friendly units and trucks on a digital map. The operator could click on the icons and not only tell their location but the type of unit as well.
Brian, Ron, and I had to MacGyver one out of my laptop, a GPS,
and some scrap metal. Brian and Ron figured out a way to hook the GPS to the computer mapping system and put an antenna in the back so we could track our position. I built a mount out of a piece of old aircraft aluminum and several yards of sticky Velcro. It looked like it sounds, but it worked. That was the difference between Special Forces and other units: We could improvise. But after six years at the tip of the spear, we shouldn’t have had to.
In the distance, I saw lights. They flickered on the horizon across the vast wasteland. I took a closer look through my monocular. From the number of lights, it looked like several trucks or cars, but I couldn’t tell how many. I called Jared and recommended that we set up a checkpoint and see who was driving out here.
Jared agreed. Hodge, listening on the radio, pulled out to our right flank and set up to cover us. I radioed all the vehicles and ordered the teams to attach an IR chemlight, a small glow stick that can only be seen through our nods, to the rear of the trucks. The lights would let us identify friend and foe should any shooting start.
When we stopped, Bill jumped out and scouted out a low, sandy trough in front of the oncoming vehicles to put two of the ANA trucks into. Then he moved his truck to the right side, creating a barrier and funneling the headlights into the ANA trucks. Taking his cues from Bill, Brian positioned our truck off to the left. To Bill’s credit, the checkpoint was well established in a very short period of time. I called Jared and told him that my team was set. Hodge called in and everybody was in position. Then we all flashed our IR lights—like the glow sticks, they could only be seen with nods—to make sure everybody knew where everybody was.
The plan was simple. Hodge was covering us. Jared, Shinsha, and the others were set up nearby, ready to be the cavalry if things went south. I felt like one of those spiders waiting for my prey to fumble past in the darkness and fall into the trap. The headlights slowly drew closer. At one point, they stopped. Light and sound carries over extremely
long distances in the open desert, and I feared we’d been spotted. But soon enough the lights started toward us again.
We could hear the rumble of their engines. Too loud to be trucks, I thought. It wasn’t jingle trucks or busted up pickups. I called over to Bill. He was thinking the same thing. Hodge couldn’t see the vehicles, only four sets of lights. But he agreed with Bill that the vehicles sounded like tanks or armored personnel carriers.
I radioed Jared and asked him to call the TOC and see if ISAF had any units in the area. “I don’t know what those are,” I said, “but we may have our hands full out here.”
I could hear Jared radio back to the TOC as I called Bill again. “Bill, get your anti-tank weapons out and ready!”
He was already ahead of me. He’d ordered the gunners to switch to API, armor-piercing incendiary rounds. The interpreters went to the Afghan trucks and gave the same order. Bill also told the Afghans with RPGs to shoot the last two vehicles in the convoy if the American gunners opened fire. Finally, he told the GMVs’ rear gunners to “scratch their backs,” or spray the turrets and chassis when the crews exposed themselves.
The lights were a half mile away and the ground started rumbling. It felt like a small earthquake.
“Wrap it up, Bill,” I called to him as I hopped out of my truck. I pulled the Velcro strap that held an AT4 rocket launcher inside my truck and cradled the weapon in my hands.
The spring-loaded front and rear sights flipped into place and I set them for a range of 150 meters. As the lights got close, I noticed that the group was in a staggered military formation with equal distance between them. Taliban fighters didn’t operate this way. Who the hell was coming at us? Lost Pakistanis? Al Qaeda? Mullah Omar and his bodyguards? Whoever it was, they were in for a shock.
“You ready?” I called over the radio to Hodge.
“Always,” he said.
The convoy made a slight right turn around a sand dune and started straight toward us. I clutched the AT4 in my hands, waiting to shoulder it.
“Holy shit! Captain. Look right ten o’clock. Now!” Brian said.
Snapping my head in that direction, I felt a dead cold chill run straight down my back. In the green glow of the nods, thirty or forty men, several hundred meters away, were walking right toward us, backpacks on their shoulders.
What was going on here? What had we stumbled upon?
“Dave, you keep looking straight ahead. Bill, you take over the ambush! We may have dismounts to our left,” I called over the radio.
I set the AT4 gently down on the floorboards of my truck, grabbed my M240 machine gun, and swung the swivel mount over the hood. Pressing my shoulder into the buttstock, I leaned into the gun and centered the front sight post on the far right group of dismounts.
“You take far right and I’ll start from the left, working our way to the center,” Brian said.
The rumble of the engines rolled over us like waves as the vehicles got closer and closer. My finger gently touched the trigger, ready to cut loose with my first burst. I slowly flipped the safety off and settled my cheek on my left hand, gripping the stock in anticipation of the recoil.
“WAIT, wait, wait,” Brian said.
As the dismounts got closer, I could finally see that they were camels and their handlers, just passing nearby. Snapping the M240’s safety back on, I snatched the AT4 just as the headlights arrived.
“Captain, we have four very heavy movers, not armor, how copy?” Bill said.
The ANA moved up the road, switched on their searchlights, and stopped the massive vehicles. Several motorcycles that had been traveling with the convoy took off in all directions. Scouts. If the truck drivers tried so much as to argue with the ANA, we’d light up all four vehicles with gunfire. Several Afghan soldiers maneuvered carefully
around all sides of the trucks, preventing anyone from exiting. The ANA squad leader cautiously approached the lead truck’s driver’s-side door. I heard him tell the driver to cut off the vehicle. Apparently the driver said something the squad leader didn’t like. The ANA leader reached into the cab and suddenly the driver came flying out, headfirst. One of the rear vehicles started to back up. An Afghan soldier jumped up on the running board and rammed his AK barrel into the driver’s chest.
The vehicles were giant military fuel trucks. They’d been covered with decorations to make them look like traditional Afghan transport trucks, but I knew exactly where they came from. I radioed Jared.
“Sir, we have four heavy movers. Tankers camouflaged to look like jingle trucks. They are Iranian-type military vehicles headed for Pakistan,” I said, noticing the Farsi writing on the trucks.
The message was short and to the point. The TOC monitored our frequencies, and I was sure that the last message had started secure phones buzzing at the command headquarters for all military operations in Afghanistan.
The ANA pulled the drivers and passengers out of the cabs. No one wore a uniform, but the trucks were definitely military vehicles and these guys were most likely soldiers. The ANA separated the drivers and started questioning them as they squatted in the dust. All of them stuck to the same story: they were supposedly stealing fuel in Iran and selling it in Pakistan. By crossing on the outskirts of the Registan Desert, they avoided paying Afghan taxes. The problem was that there are no Afghan taxes.
“Captain, we got diddly shit here,” Bill said over the radio. “Whatever cargo these guys had they dropped off and were headed back.”
Fuel trucks without a drop of fuel, clearly military, with drivers who seemed to be soldiers. It just didn’t add up, but I needed more than gut instinct to go any further.
One of the ANA squad leaders came up and asked if they could
burn the vehicles and leave the drivers in the desert. They wouldn’t last long this far from the nearest village. The issue of whether to kill prisoners was one of the scenarios we’d worked through rigorously during Robin Sage, the Special Forces culmination training exercise in the forests of central North Carolina, as were many of the dilemmas we faced in Afghanistan. It was one of the best training exercises in the army. Thanks to Robin Sage, I had no question as to my response.
“We can’t go around killing enemy without weapons,” I told him. “If we do, we’re no different than the people we’re trying to defeat.”
That wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but he concurred because I was the commander. In his mind, war was a vicious cycle and all about survival. If your enemy lived, he could fight you another day. Before I could go on, Jared called me on the radio.
“Thirty-one, this is 30.”
I ignored his first call, but he called again. Jared wouldn’t have bothered me if it wasn’t important.
“Thirty, this is 31. What’s up?”
“Be very cool,” Jared said over the radio, and in three words I got the message.
We were being watched by a Predator unmanned drone from high above. Jared had been tipped off by someone back in Kandahar. But why would anyone bring an asset onto the site and not tell us? We were being spied on by someone, and whoever it was, they didn’t want us to know they were there.
I called Bill. “Wrap it up.”
“Stand by,” he said. A minute later he walked up and thrust a Pakistani military identification card into my hand. One of the drivers had hidden it under the dashboard of his truck. I turned it over, checking it under my red light. It was valid. Since before the war, the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence directorate had had strong ties to the Taliban. The ISI regularly gave them sanctuary and helped them cross the border. This was a smoking gun.
I called Jared and asked him what he wanted us to do with the guy. Did we risk falling a day behind schedule to detain these guys in an attempt to slow aid pouring over the borders?
We decided to just keep the ID card and took pictures of the drivers, passengers, and trucks. The Afghan soldiers tore into the trucks but could not find the access to the empty fuel tanks. We had to let them ride off, hopefully with their tails tucked firmly between their legs.
It later became apparent that they were not smuggling fuel, but munitions. With this regular supply line exposed, the Taliban would end up cut off.
We will either find a way or make one
.
—HANNIBAL
T
he mountain looked like a rotten, jagged brown tooth sticking out of the sand. The closer we got, the more we picked up Taliban chatter on the radio. A commander, watching our dust plume grow closer, started to describe our convoy in detail and finally ordered his fighters to hide.