No Worse Enemy (21 page)

Day three in Marjah. The Forward Air Controller, Ben Willson, was almost having a nervous breakdown. I hadn’t seen him sleep since we’d landed. I hadn’t seen
him anywhere other than the cold central corridor of the old police station, hunched over, fixated on the chunky laptop that showed him what the drones above us were filming. He was even there when
I got up to go to the outside ‘toilet’ (just a plastic piss tube hammered into the ground) in the middle of the night. And although on day three he looked particularly obsessed with the
tiny white figures on the little screen, it looked like he’d been building up to a nervous breakdown for some time.

Everyone called Ben ‘Nascar’ because in his normal job as a helicopter pilot he had a reputation for only ever turning left. (NASCAR is a massively popular American motor racing
sport in which the drivers race anti-clockwise around an oval track, thus only ever turning left.) Tall and slim, with a closely-shaved head and good-looking enough to be in a Marines recruitment
video doing push-ups, running and looking determined, Ben also defied the stereotype; he was a philosophy graduate who read Kierkegaard and William James.

What drove Ben to the verge of that nervous breakdown was that he requested up to forty air strikes a day but almost all were denied. The few approvals that came through took so long – one
took two hours, by which time the planes had run out of fuel and flown away – that the little figures he saw on the laptop screen laying IEDs simply escaped. Nascar, like all the other
forward air controllers in Afghanistan, had to go through five levels of approval for an air strike, including a lawyer and ending with the general and his staff.

That morning, Ben had received approval to bomb twenty-five to thirty Taliban fighters he’d seen getting out of a van and making their way into the pork chop. But the plane had
malfunctioned and the bomb got stuck in its undercarriage. The fighters, who may have included the snipers, were free to spread out and enjoy another day of firing at marines from the maze of
alleys, firing holes and roofs offered by the pork chop.

Captain Sparks couldn’t sit back and watch them do that again. He ordered all available marines to put on their body armour and follow him. They would run eight hundred metres, mostly over
uncleared ground, sneak on to a roof to the north of the pork chop and ambush the Taliban fighters as they became visible. I followed about thirty marines as they ran through the five buildings
they’d cleared the day before, pausing briefly in La Mirage to work out their final route on a map.

‘You good? You know what your job is ... ? You good?’ Staff Sergeant Young asked the marines as they waited at the gate. ‘Four minutes until step time. Any questions?’
There were no questions. Some marines furiously chewed gum or tobacco, others bounced up and down on their toes. ‘Whoop, whoop, WHOOP, WHOOP’, one shouted, each whoop louder than the
last.

One of the Afghan soldiers couldn’t get a magazine into his rifle. A marine grabbed it and did it for him. ‘It’s the same shit you were doing last night’, he said,
clicking the magazine into place. The Afghan soldier held his rifle horizontally. The marine grabbed it again, violently pushing it down. ‘You’re POINTING it at people. Leave it,
you’re good.’ He walked away, shaking his head: ‘Fucking guy, man.’

The route to the rooftop hadn’t been cleared for IEDs. Where possible, sniffer dogs were let loose or the EOD team quickly checked a doorway or bridge with their metal detectors, but
mostly we just watched our steps and hoped we weren’t unlucky enough to step on anything. The firing holes in the walls we passed had been created so recently they still had piles of fresh
dirt beneath. Every time the marines walked around a corner, they left one behind, lying on the ground with a SAW machine-gun. ‘Keep your eyes on that building’, said Young, quietly,
‘anything moves, let ’em have it.’

Everyone was silent. A message came in over Young’s radio: ‘Be advised, there is mass movement around buildings two nine and one five, how copy.’

‘That’s on the other side of the pork chop’, said Young, ‘it shouldn’t affect us any, unless they start moving towards us.’

‘Are you happy?’ one of the ANA soldiers asked me. ‘These are the enemies of this country, we should finish them.’

They reached a compound with a high-roofed building, kicked the gate down and walked through. Three ANA soldiers went in first, ordered to clear an outhouse that looked like a stable. They
timidly looked through the glassless windows and stepped through the doors, pointing their guns as they went, just like the marines. One saw what looked like the top of an anti-tank mine. He
pointed it out to me with his left foot, then kicked. Luckily, it was just a pot lid, with hard ground underneath it. He smiled, let out a theatrical sigh of relief, and moved on.

I followed a marine to the staircase. He stopped halfway up and stabbed a huge spider against a wall, then crawled out on to the roof. ‘Look, over there’, whispered one of the
Afghans, pointing to a man casually walking away from the northern tip of the pork chop. I fully expected the marines to start shooting but they let him go. Another young man stood about two
hundred metres away, staring at us, carrying a shovel on his shoulder, in a very obvious way. (Months later, I showed this footage to some Afghan friends in London. They laughed out loud:
‘That guy’s so Taliban’, they said, incredulously, ‘he’s laughing at you.’) Another man walked away across a field, slowly and nervously, glancing up at us every
few steps.

Young crawled to the edge of the roof and looked through his rifle sights. I crawled to the edge too; the lip surrounding the roof was only a few inches high, offering no protection. More
marines came up the stairs, dropped to their stomachs and dragged themselves to the edge of the roof, like snakes moving across sand.

Somewhere close by, a battle started. Nothing came towards us. The fighters in the pork chop were attacking someone, somewhere, but they hadn’t seen the marines gathered on the roof,
further away from their base than they’d so far been, waiting. Occasionally, the fighting died down. I heard a dog, tied to a tractor, barking constantly. Its throat sounded as dry as the
desert around us. It must have been tied there for at least three days, with no food or water. But still it wouldn’t stop barking.

The marine on my left, Lance Corporal Blancett, adjusted his rifle sights with one hand and the two legs on which his rifle rested with the other. Every movement was delicate and precise and he
appeared to have the touch of an old watchmaker. With his blond hair, bright white teeth and cocky smile, Blancett looked like Val Kilmer playing Iceman in
Top Gun.

‘See that building straight out in front of you? Look to the very end, the right edge of the pork chop’, said Young quietly. ‘See them?’

‘Negative’, said Blancett.

Whoever the Taliban had attacked was now firing air grenades into the pork chop. I heard the distant chopping sounds of grenades exploding and saw white clouds of smoke rising above the
compound, one row of buildings in from the outer walls. I assumed the fighters were in those buildings. They must have known it was time to escape but they had no idea what awaited them on the
route they had used to come in. I imagined the terror and panic they were about to experience. Blancett moved the legs under his rifle by millimetres. Other marines slowly screwed suppressors on to
their rifles.

‘THERE THEY ARE, THERE THEY ARE’, screamed Blancett. He started firing. The marines next to him fired as well.

‘ON THE CORNER’, shouted Blancett, still firing. ‘Hey, 240 gunner. You need to scoot up to the edge of the wall. You’re on target but scoot the fuck up.’ He looked
up for a second. ‘I HIT THAT FIRST GUY, HE’S FUCKING DEAD.’

‘That’s what I like to hear, baby’, shouted Young.

‘I hit that guy right in the fucking head’, said Blancett. As everything went quiet, he took a breath. ‘That was intense. They’re behind that building somewhere. Hey
– keep eyes in case they start egressing to the west; you’ll be able to see them moving through that gap in the wall.’

Another marine saw movement in a building north of the pork chop. Blancett swung his gun around. ‘Where they at? Building seven? Left or right?’

‘Left but he’s moving right.’

‘I got him’, whispered Blancett. He asked how far away the building was, adjusted his sights, put his finger on the trigger and let out two deep breaths.

‘He’s walking, behind the building.’

‘I got him’, said another marine.

‘NO, NO, NO’, said Blancett, ‘that’s the guy that I saw walking earlier, you asked me if he had anything in his hands. I said he’s got a brown floppy jacket on.
That’s the same guy.’ He took his finger off the trigger and pointed his rifle back towards the pork chop.

They spotted more movement along the north wall. ‘It looks like a kid’, said a marine. ‘Yeah, I see him’, said Blancett, ‘he’s got a little green man dress
on.’ They also saw an old man, standing next to the buildings, still full of white smoke from the air grenades.

The marines chatted continuously, sharing every snippet of information. Someone constantly relayed reports from the base and from marines nearby. And the terp had a radio permanently tuned to
the frequency the Taliban used, reporting everything they said, which was often wildly exaggerated.

The result of all this information was, as the marines called it, ‘a mindfuck’. It also left the constant impression that catastrophe was just a few minutes away: there were twelve
suicide bombers in town (reported that morning); a sniper had them in his sights (reported the day before); and an army was marching towards them, intent on fighting to the death (reported every
few hours). A machine-gunner opened up again, reporting muzzle flashes ‘to the right’.

‘To the right of what? You gotta be more specific’, screamed Blancett.

‘The right of the whole compound.’

‘Same spot as before?’

‘Same spot, that’s the building they’re consolidating in.’

A cluster of bullets crackled over our heads. Someone had finally spotted us. The machine-gunner opened up again. Young told everyone the Taliban had moved into the next building. ‘Keep
eyes on seven and eight’, he said, ‘give me a 203 gunner, let’s go.’ He wanted air grenades to be dropped inside the building’s walls.

Marine Niemasz dragged himself next to me, on the other side from Blancett. ‘See that building with the three trees behind it? That’s what I want you to hit. I want you to pepper
them’, shouted Young. Niemasz popped a gold-coloured 203 (air grenade) into the tube beneath his rifle and cocked it. Air grenades look strange when they’re fired; the popping sound as
they fly out of their tubes makes them seem like children’s toys. They are designed to be dropped on to their targets, not fired at them, so they’re only propelled by the force pushing
them out of the tube, travelling like golf balls rather than bullets. Not until you see them explode do you take them seriously; their blast is big enough to kill anyone within five metres. Niemasz
quickly pumped seven air grenades into the walls of Building eight, which disappeared beneath waves of white smoke. So much smoke that Blancett complained he couldn’t see to shoot. Then the
building caught fire, filling him with hope that the fighters would flee right into his sights.

A big group of people suddenly emerged from the furthest tip of the pork chop. A shout came for everyone to hold their fire; there were women and children among them. ‘Man, they’re
not a family. Those fucking assholes are using those kids and women as cover to get out of there’, said Blancett. ‘Horse-shit man. That is ... ...’ He couldn’t find the
words to express his frustration. ‘ARGGGHHH GOD’, he shouted, growling.

I saw at least two children, one woman and five or six men who could easily have been, in military language, ‘fighting-age males’. But we would never know. Too often in the past,
people on roofs, in jets or staring at computer screens had seen what we were seeing and made the wrong choice.

A burst of gunfire crackled over us. The marines on the far side of the building shouted, ‘EGRESS, EGRESS.’ The Taliban fighters weren’t all in Buildings seven and eight and
they hadn’t all escaped using women and children for cover. Another group, far to the left of where the marines had been firing and much closer to the building where we lay, were shooting at
us. As marines on the far side of the building ran from the edge of the roof and back down the stairs, an RPG hit the building, followed by bullets that seemed to almost skim the tops of our
helmets. Perched on the flat roof of a single-storey building, I suddenly felt very easy to see.

‘Where the fuck is that LAW?’ shouted Young.

‘We got two prepped sir.’

‘The next shot that comes from Building seven you rip it right through that fucking window, you understand?’

‘You want me to put one in there?’

‘No, wait. I’ll tell you when.’ Young had moved to the back of the roof, standing up, to get a better view. More bullets popped above our heads.