Later that night, I walked my platoon lines to check on the Marines. After midnight, there was no ambient light within a hundred miles and probably fewer than three dozen internal combustion engines. The air was so clear that the Marines on patrol would report headlights or campfires on the horizon, only to realize that they were watching stars rise.
My first stop was the mortar pit, where I found Staff Sergeant Marine on watch while his Marines slept.
“Evenin’, sir,” he said.
“Good news. Day after tomorrow, we’re flying north. Just third platoon and us, and some other parts of the BLT. I’ll have more details tomorrow.”
Marine took the news with a quick nod, leaning to spit a stream of tobacco juice into the sand. “Good. The sooner we kill ’em, sooner we go home.”
“What happened to all that talk about ‘golden memories and no ghosts’?”
“That time is past. We’re committed now. No more pray for peace. Now it’s shoot to kill. Fight to win.”
I shivered and hoped that Marine would attribute it to the wind. I changed the subject. “You reading anything good right now?” Marine was an avid reader, and we often traded books.
“Funny you should ask, sir, funny you should ask.” He reached into his pack and pulled out a paperback. In the moonlight, I read “Rudyard Kipling” on the cover. “I’m not much for poetry, but this is almost enough to convert me:
“If I’m wounded, Staff Sergeant, and you fuckers leave me on Afghanistan’s plains, I’ll put my last bullet between your shoulder blades before I put it in my own head,” I replied.
Marine laughed and shot another stream of brown saliva into the sand. “I expect you will, sir.” He paused and added, “Even Hadsall might’ve done that.”
I continued down the line to see the rest of the platoon. A white halo surrounded the moon, looking like an iris around a pupil. The moonlight cast my shadow across glowing sand, again reminding me of new snow. Normally, I chafed under the twenty-pound weight of my flak jacket, but now it was the only thing keeping the icy wind off my skin. I imagined the chill air pouring off glaciers high in the Hindu Kush and racing across miles of desert without a tree to slow it down.
One of my machine gun teams was dug in with Patrick’s platoon, anchoring the far flank of the company’s lines. They were in the middle of Sergeant Espera’s squad, the former repo man with whom I’d flown into Pakistan on the Sword mission. For a few hours each night, Espera turned one of his holes into the company’s social center, brewing coffee and debating the issues of the day with all comers. I slid into the hole, and Espera caught me up on the night’s discussion.
“Sir, we’re talking about Lindh. These guys” — he nodded at the other Marines in the hole — “think he’s a freedom fighter.”
John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, had been captured the week before at Qala-i-Jangi prison in northern Afghanistan. Now he was imprisoned in a metal container a few hundred yards from Espera’s hole.
“And what do you think?” I asked Espera.
“Traitor. And the most vicious kind. He turned his back on the society that raised him, that gave him the freedom and idealism to follow his beliefs.”
“But what was his crime?” I goaded Espera, happy to play devil’s advocate. “Other than being in the wrong place at the wrong time?”
“Joining the Taliban. Claiming to be a member of al Qaeda. Shit, sir, if that ain’t enough for you, his buddies killed a Marine!” Mike Spann, a CIA officer and former Marine captain, had been killed shortly after interrogating Lindh. “If my grandma killed a Marine, she’d be on my shitlist.”
Espera turned serious again. “We’re young Americans out here doing what our nation’s democratically elected leaders told us to do. And he’s fighting against us. Why’s that so hard to figure out? And already the press is bitching about how he’s being treated. He’s warm. He’s protected. He eats three meals each day and sleeps all night. Do I have that? Do my men have that?”
“Their freedom to voice stupid opinions is part of what we’re fighting for,” I said. It was well after midnight, and I still had more positions to check on, so I climbed out of the hole as Espera and the other guys resumed their debate.
Farther down the line, in the middle of a gravelly flat near the runway’s end, I approached another fighting hole, careful to come from the rear and listen for the verbal challenge. It was an assault rocket team, and there should have been two Marines awake. In the moonlight, I saw three heads silhouetted against the sky. I slid down into the hole with a rustle of cascading dirt. General Mattis leaned against a wall of sandbags, talking with a sergeant and a lance corporal.
This was real leadership. No one would have questioned Mattis if he’d slept eight hours each night in a private room, to be woken each morning by an aide who ironed his uniforms and heated his MREs. But there he was, in the middle of a freezing night, out on the lines with his Marines.
General Mattis asked the assault men if they had any complaints.
“Just one, sir. We haven’t been north to kill anything yet.”
Mattis patted him on the shoulder. I had heard that he was old school, that he valued raw aggression more than any other quality in his troops.
“You will, young man. You will. The first time these bastards run into United States Marines, I want it to be the most traumatic experience of their miserable lives.”
14
TURBINES WHINED in the predawn darkness. Pure potential energy, building, storing, promising to go kinetic on the thundering gallop north. Blue static electricity spun off the rotor blades as the platoon ducked aboard. I climbed forward to the space between the pilots’ seats and plugged into the intercom. We had met the night before to rehearse the mission, so there wasn’t much to say. A platoon commander’s only job on a flight like this is to track the pilots’ navigation and make sure they drop us in the right spot. It also pays to have some situational awareness outside the helicopter in case the bird is forced down and the Marines have to shoot from the hip.
As always, we lifted off hesitantly. The big Super Stallion rocked back and forth while inching upward. A cloud of dust, the frenzied rotor wash, enveloped us. Suddenly finding its purpose, the helicopter’s nose dropped, and we blew through the murk, seeing the horizon again and picking up speed. Two more birds followed close behind.
We flew low, rising and falling with the contour of the hills. Our destination was one hundred miles due north, just outside Kandahar, one hundred miles from the nearest Americans. I had read enough about Afghanistan to know that helicopters had an uninspiring history there. The Soviets had been wearing down the mujahideen until the CIA introduced Stinger missiles and turned the tide of the war. A Stinger is small enough to pack on the back of a donkey and homes in on an aircraft’s hot exhaust. In 1986, an Afghan commander named Engineer Ghaffar fired the first Stingers of the war and blew three Soviet Hind helicopters out of the sky near Jalalabad.
Marines call the CH-53 “the Shitter.” I’d heard two different explanations for the nickname. One was that mortar fire destroyed a CH-53 on the ground at an airfield in Vietnam; the wreck became a makeshift latrine, and the name stuck. The other story was simply that the big bird poured out so much hot, smoky exhaust. I imagined flocks of Stingers chasing that heat signature and hoped the former explanation was the right one.