No Worse Enemy (24 page)

‘Has a dog been in here?’ asked Tim.

‘There was a dog right out here’, said one of the marines. Then, I saw a man’s body, its left side blown open. Several yellow and red organs, swollen with fluid, hung out of
the hole. The man had been killed by the grenade; the dog was eating his exposed muscle and fatty tissue. Tim put on his gloves and walked in. The man lay on his right side, his face buried in a
blanket. Rigor mortis had set in, so as Tim pushed the left arm, the whole body went with it and the man was flipped on to his back. The right side of his face and head had been blown off. Tim
searched him, pulling prayer beads from his shirt: ‘Those didn’t work, did they, motherfucker?’ A rifle that looked about seventy years old was propped against the wall.
‘It’s very powerful, well-maintained and very accurate’, said Tim. ‘It’s a 7.62 mm, .303 Enfield.’

He searched the man’s pockets. ‘Oh wow. Here’s your prick’, he said, pulling a string of shiny new bullets from the dead man’s clothing. ‘Get the fuck out of
here’, said a marine standing in the door. ‘556?’ he asked.

‘Oh yeah’, said Tim. The bullets were NATO rounds; the bullets that Americans and Brits used and the ones that were issued to the ANA. They were also the bullets that had been fired
at the marines, so the dead man was either one of the snipers or one of the marksmen covering the snipers.

‘What are you gonna do with him?’ asked one of the marines. ‘Him?’ said Tim. ‘I don’t believe we’re gonna do anything with him, we’ll just leave
him there.’

Three people approached; two old men and a woman. They said the building was their house and they wanted to move the body. Lieutenant Greenlief asked if they were related to the dead man. One of
the men said he was his nephew and his sister – the dead man’s mother, who was blind – wanted her son to be buried near the family home, on the other side of the pork chop.

‘Ask him if any more of his relatives are Taliban’, said Greenlief.

‘No one’, they said.

‘So the guy that’s dead is the only Taliban in their family?’ asked Greenlief.

‘He was not Taliban’, said the family, all together. ‘But they forced him to carry a gun’, said his aunt. ‘If they give you an order, you don’t say no’,
said his uncle.

Charlie Company had also started work in Karu Charai. Their area included the opium bazaar, where one of them noticed a wire coming out of a wall and disappearing into the
ground. The wire linked eighteen military-grade rockets and a fragmentation device (‘like a home-made Claymore [a type of mine]’) in a daisy chain, that zigzagged for a hundred and
fifty metres. It was the most complex IED they’d found in Afghanistan.

‘If a marine patrol had walked through [the opium bazaar] it was designed to kill the whole patrol, all at once’, said Lieutenant Aaron McLean, the marine I’d met at the
condolence payment meeting. ‘Walking round here’, he said, ‘is a bit like swimming in the ocean. You’d never do it if you knew how many sharks there really were. The number
of IEDs we find, the number of IEDs that malfunction or that we miss entirely, in this country, is tremendous.’ They’d detonated every IED they’d come across so far.
‘We’re twelve for twelve right now’, said Ski.

Elsewhere in the pork chop and bazaar, the marines found so many bags of heroin and opium that they hadn’t enough space to store them. One house alone had somewhere between forty and fifty
kilograms of heroin in a few old sacks. The EOD team found toolboxes full of IED-detonating devices, mortars and recoil-less rifle rounds. ‘These are the best-looking pieces of ordnance
I’ve found in this country. Some of them are brand new’, said Tom Williams, examining some shiny Chinese rockets. They also found a hideous device, a DFC (Directional Fragment Charge).
This was a metal barrel, three-quarters full of explosive powder, the rest packed with nuts, bolts, broken china and ball-bearings. It worked like a cannon, firing the junk into whoever was in
front of it when it went off.

Their ingenuity amazed me. Most houses I’d seen in Marjah didn’t have toilets, beds, chairs, tables, cookers or a source of clean water. But if you wanted to make IEDs or turn opium
into heroin, it was like being in Toys‘R’Us.

However, after a few days, Tom and Ski, the most experienced of the EOD team, began to mock the bomb-makers. ‘I thought this would be a hub for seasoned Taliban fighters but the IEDs
we’ve found are simple’, said Tom. ‘Words can’t express how Bush League these devices are. The daisy chain we found was command-detonated [detonated by wire] and the guy who
set it off would have been ...’, he pointed to the roof of a single-storey building across the street, ‘less than twenty metres away. It was shady. You think we’d not see a guy on
the roof with a wire in his hand?’

It was surreal sitting in the sun, laughing at Tom and Ski insulting the Marjah bomb-makers. They chuckled slightly when I reminded them that barely a week ago, the streets where we sat had been
described as among the most dangerous on earth. Staff Sergeantt Robert Dawson, from 1st Platoon arrived. In his thick, Long Island accent, he complained that getting here had been ‘serious
and hectic’ (together with ‘stoopid’, these were the most dramatic phrases he ever used) but the Taliban had now ‘punked out. We drove them right out. And now it’s
quiet and boring.’ He was as dismissive as Tom of the enemy’s actions. ‘One dude with an RPG didn’t have enough space. It bounced back and blew him up.’

The unsophisticated IEDs found in Marjah suggested that the Taliban here weren’t part of an international network of criminal masterminds or even a pan-Afghan network that shared
bomb-making expertise and equipment. The seasoned fighters and snipers may well have come just for the battle. There certainly was a criminal network in Marjah but its chief concern seemed to be
the manufacture and export of heroin, not
jihad.

Back at the base, Nascar and Picc were glued to the surveillance laptop, talking to some marines two kilometres away from the base, who thought they might have spotted four men placing an
IED.

‘You have PID?’ asked Picc over the radio. PID – positive identification – is required before anyone can be targeted. There was silence.

‘It’s as close as we could be to an IED being placed. We’ve been watching them for a while’, said the voice on the radio. Picc was annoyed at their vagueness. Nascar
smiled knowingly. ‘It looks like it would be an IED to me’, said the voice.

‘So ... based on pattern of life and their actions right now ...’, said Greenlief, watching at one side. Picc repeated his words to the marines on the radio, encouraging them to say
they had PID.

‘PID is theirs’, said Nascar, ‘
they
have to say they have PID.’

But the marines wouldn’t say they were sure. Everyone was afraid of making the wrong call but not because of a horror of killing civilians. Most of the marines and soldiers I’d met,
who spent their days at the sharp end, accepted the fact that civilians died in wars. They were scared of making the wrong call because everyone thought that the lawyers now decided how wars were
fought. They were afraid they’d end up as the subjects of lengthy investigations, and could even face prison.

Greenlief and Picc shared a cigarette. They offered it to Nascar, who looked at it guiltily, then said ‘one drag’. He was the only marine I’d ever seen who looked wrong
smoking. He looked like a schoolboy trying to pretend he smoked.

‘Scarface 6-4. It looks like we do have something going on here. Lots of individuals are coming up to it, walking away, looking at it like “oh wow what’s this, check it
out” so it is definitely not normal. I would say we do have PID on a possible IED’, said the voice on the radio.

‘He needs to have PID on an IED
emplacer
’, said Nascar.

Picc spoke into the radio. ‘Do you have PID on the IED
emplacer.
Do you have PID on the guys that are emplacing?’ He put the radio down. ‘FUCK.’

‘Wait, wait, wait’, said Nascar. ‘You know, we don’t want to put too much on them, I mean, they’re telling us what they see. PID is ours. They’ve just got to
build the picture.’

‘FUCK’, said Picc again.

‘So if they say they have possible PID on an IED emplacer, that’s right where we’ve had IEDs emplaced for the last three days’, Nascar continued, hitting the map with his
finger. ‘We’ve watched it happen.’ Two of Charlie Company’s vehicles had been hit by IEDs at exactly the same spot the day before.

Picc put the radio to his mouth. He looked as close to a nervous breakdown as Nascar. ‘Scarface 6-4 from Siege 1-4. We’ve watched them place IEDs in this vicinity for the last three
days.’

‘Scarface 6-4 has PID on the IED emplacer down in the hole, where the IED is’, said the voice on the radio. Nascar nodded vigorously. ‘Alright, let’s go, we got
it.’

‘Let’s do it’, said Picc, smiling into his radio. It was a small triumph; Nascar reminded him they still had to get approval. The voice on the radio said he recommended a gun
run, hitting the IED emplacers and the IED. Nascar agreed. Picc handed him the radio. ‘I’ve been trying to give you this for half an hour, that’s why I came and woke you
up.’

The four figures on the laptop screen walked north, to a building they’d used for the last three days. They’d now been tracked for forty-five minutes. Picc and Nascar received
initial approval, then set up a live feed to the general and his staff, back at Camp Leatherneck, so they could give the final approval. It took Nascar twenty minutes to make contact. Several
marines had gathered around Nascar, Picc and the laptop. I asked why he couldn’t get approval when they’d seen four men laying an IED. ‘That’s an outstanding
question’, said Nascar, not amused. The figures were digging the road again.

Greenlief said this was exactly what they’d been seeing, four or five times a day, for the last three days. He said that two guys buried the IED, while two stood sentry at either side of
the road. As soon as something appeared in the air above them, they’d move women and children alongside, making it impossible to get air strikes approved. But this time, there were no women
or children.

A pilot came on the radio. He’d seen two ‘squirters’ – figures running away from the IED. The pilot was flying an A10, a Warthog – ‘basically a huge cannon
with wings and a man sitting on top’, said a marine – and had been given approval for a gun run against the target. Captain Sparks came to watch. ‘Picc did all the work and now
he’s taking a shit. He’s missing the gun show’, someone said. Nascar pointed to the screen with the antenna of his radio and everyone watched in silence. We heard what sounded
like a gigantic electric drill.

‘We do have three individuals KIA in the field’, said the pilot.

‘Nice’, said a marine, ‘they got three.’

‘How long did that take you?’ someone asked Nascar.

‘Two hours.’

There was movement on the screen. Three more figures walked away from the building that they’d used as a hiding place for the last three days.

‘We’re gonna slay some bodies today’, said Nascar.

‘Fuck yeah’, said a marine.

‘There’s another one. There’s two more, at the intersection.’

‘These guys aren’t real smart’, said Nascar. He passed the grid references to the pilot and said again that the targets were confirmed IED emplacers. His eyes were locked on
the map and the screen. Anything could have been happening behind him and he would have been oblivious. He asked the pilot for his altitude. No answer.

‘Hog 5-1, siege 1-2, how copy.’

No answer. He said it again. Again, there was no answer.

‘We should have just fired fucking Hellfires’, said Picc, who’d come back.

The problem was that the sky above Marjah was crowded, especially at twenty thousand feet. At that level, the Apaches and jets made it difficult for the drones (Reaper pilotless aircraft,
remote-controlled from a trailer in Vegas) to get the airspace below cleared so that they could fire the Hellfire missiles. The A10 warthogs flew at ten thousand feet, where the airspace was
clearer.

‘I don’t know what they’ve got against Hellfires today. Those guys were out in the open’, said Nascar.

He leant on his left elbow, the radio in his hand, an inch in front of his nose. His head dropped, his eyes closed and he pushed his forehead into the speaker, almost in prayer.

He called to the pilot one more time. ‘Hog 5-1, siege 1-2.’

‘Hog 5-1 go ahead’, the pilot replied. The lives of the three men on the road hung on tiny details like how well the radios worked. There was no relief on Nascar’s face, just
an instant return to the furious concentration on killing the remaining men. Through no fault of his own and not because of any cunning on their part, the men had evaded him for the last three
days. He was desperate to kill them.

The pilot and the marines on the ground confirmed that the men were still in the road and that one of them had put something into the ground, ‘potentially the IED itself’.

Nascar turned to Picc. ‘Alright, we got everything we need.’ He didn’t nod his head slightly as he said this, looking for consensus; he nodded his head five or six times,
rapidly, as if he were daring anyone to stop him.

The pilot said he could still see the men. He prepared to turn towards them one last time.

‘Roger. That is your target, we are awaiting approval’, Nascar said.

‘Mission approved’, said Picc, who was talking to the Battalion HQ on another radio. Nascar nodded and spoke to the pilot. ‘Final attack headings 3 6 0 to 0 1 5. Your mission
is approved. Your airspace below is clear. Stand by for push.’ Every muscle under the thin skin of his face strained towards his eyes, locked on to the laptop screen. A long furrow ran from
his hair, across his forehead and between his eyebrows. A large vein was visible on one side of his head. ‘He’s inbound’, he said and leaned closer to the screen. A minute passed.
Nothing.

‘What happened? What are we waiting on?’ said Picc.

‘We’re waiting for him to call inbound’, said Nascar. His head plunged closer to the screen. ‘Come on buddy, push. Goddamn.’