The Only Thing Worth Dying For (24 page)

“So this battle really stirred things up,” said Amerine.

“It was as I’ve told your government for years. Most Pashtun have not been happy with the Taliban, but could not defeat them. Now they see an opportunity. The question they have now is whether or not your military will stay to finish the job.”

“I can’t make any promises,” said Amerine. “I know we intend to stay until the Taliban fall and al-Qaeda flees the country. I don’t know the plans for reconstruction. Afghanistan is going to take decades to rebuild.”

Satisfied with Amerine’s candor, Karzai nodded. Three Afghans approached, each handing him a few sheets of paper, and he glanced at the writing, then signed the documents with a flourish. The men thanked Karzai and left the room.

“These letters they asked me to sign,” said Karzai, “they grant safe passage as they travel to Helmand Province.”

“Who are they?”

“Young men who have snuck away from their Taliban units in Kandahar and are going home.”

Amerine had read about these chits in Ahmed Rashid’s book
Taliban
: Mullah Omar had provided letters of safe passage as his movement swept across the land, his signature serving as a stamp of protection. Now Karzai was receiving the same respect.

“That is a big deal,” Amerine said.

“It is how things are done here,” Karzai responded.

When Amerine, Mike, and Wes returned to the observation post, Brent and Victor had arrived and were settling back in with their team. Ronnie was telling Brent about the nickel-plated AKS, and Mike immediately began going through a new rucksack that Victor had brought him, full of replacements for his stolen gear.

“Thank God,” Mike said when Victor tossed him a sleeping bag. “I have been freezing my ass off.”

“Any news?” JD asked Amerine.

“The tribal belt is in complete upheaval. We don’t have everyone on our side, but most of the villages between here and Kandahar are rethinking their allegiance.”

“Not bad.”

“Yeah,” said Amerine, “but I think we should give it one more night out here. Hamid agreed.”

Dan walked over. “Task Force Dagger wants us to provide battle damage assessment [BDA] with digital photos of the enemy vehicles we destroyed,” he said.

“Are they worried about the effectiveness of five-hundred-pound bombs on Toyotas?” said JD.

“I think they’re worried that we’re still in Pakistan and just making all this up,” replied Dan.

“Okay, so we’ll take a drive around the battlefield, then camp on the ridge for the night,” said Amerine.

Through Rahim, Amerine briefed Bari Gul, who nodded. Rahim, on the other hand, shook his head as he spoke. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but I cannot go with you.”

“Why is that?” asked JD.

“I am here to translate, not to fight,” he said, expressing his concern that there might still be Taliban in the area. “I will return to the headquarters now.”

“We need a translator,” said JD. “Karzai said you’re our man.”

“I will send Seylaab. He is young,” said Rahim, appearing pleased that he had solved the problem. He climbed into the passenger seat of one of Bari Gul’s trucks, closed the door, and stared through the windshield. A guerrilla climbed behind the wheel, and the truck headed back toward Tarin Kowt.

Amerine looked at Bari Gul. Despite the language barrier, as long as this warrior was around, Amerine felt that ODA 574 was in good hands.

It was an hour before the truck returned, and the six-foot-four Seylaab, still wearing his aqua robe, stepped out; he was carrying an
AK-47 upside down, one hand gripping it awkwardly by the barrel.

“He’s all yours, sir,” said JD.

The team laughed as Seylaab hurried to Amerine’s side. “Mister Jason, I was told that I am to assist you.”

Amerine nodded to Bari Gul, who walked to his truck, which was packed with his men. Seylaab lingered, awaiting his next order. “Hop in, Seylaab,” said Amerine. “We have to go.”

Dashing ahead, Seylaab held open the door to Amerine’s truck. “You don’t have to do that,” said Amerine. “Just get in.”

“Yes,” said Seylaab. “Yes, Mister Jason.”

The five trucks moved slowly in single file along the same dirt road that had been gridlocked the day before. They had traveled no more than fifty yards south into the labyrinth when Bari Gul’s lead vehicle turned off-road and ascended a ridgeline a short distance to the west. At the top, Bari Gul, Amerine, and Seylaab got out of their trucks. Staring across the labyrinth, Amerine realized that this piece of high ground, just across the road from the one they currently occupied, was a far better observation post.
He knows what he’s doing
, thought Amerine.

Bari Gul spoke, looking at Amerine, not Seylaab.

“He says the people are angry here,” said Seylaab.

“At us?” Amerine asked. “Or the Taliban?”

Unable to explain in English, Seylaab shrugged. “He says the people came and buried all the bodies yesterday. There are still angry people here; we must be careful.”

“They are angry at us?” Amerine motioned to himself and his men.

“Yes,” said Seylaab. “All of us.”

Seylaab could not put into words the difference in sentiment between Tarin Kowt, where the Americans and Karzai’s supporters were welcome, and the area just outside the town, but Amerine determined that the locals must have been sympathetic to the Taliban. From the
ridge, he could see two dwellings in the distance, one with a truck parked beside it, but no people.

“Did the people of Tarin Kowt search the homes in the area for Taliban yesterday?” asked Amerine.

“Yes, maybe,” Seylaab translated for Bari Gul.

“Yes? Or maybe?” said Amerine.

“Yes.” Seylaab grinned. “Maybe.”

Amerine laughed. They would remain vigilant.

Back on the main road, they continued south, but their route was soon blocked by the burned-out hull of a truck, with two others smashed up against it as though they had rear-ended the lead vehicle as it was hit by a bomb. The team dismounted to take a look—everyone but Ken, who sat stone-faced in the back of JD’s truck.

In a single day, scavengers had picked these trucks clean of salvageable parts, leaving behind only their molten, twisted skeletons. Beneath each blackened pile of metal was the brown stain of burned gasoline. RPGs were incinerated in the remains and scattered on the ground. Mag took out his camera and started photographing the wreckage.

“The graves are there,” said Seylaab, pointing to piles of rocks beside the road. Sticks, burned-up ammo clips, and wreckage were planted among the piles as headstones, and pieces of ammo vests were draped over them in lieu of the iconic upside-down rifle stuck into the ground—functioning weapons were too valuable a commodity to leave with the dead.

The rock piles varied in size, the larger ones marking whole bodies and the smaller piles, Bari Gul pantomimed, holding only pieces.

“How many pictures do we need?” asked Mag.

“I don’t know,” said Amerine. “I’ve never done this before.”

After taking two or three shots of each destroyed vehicle they encountered, as well as a panoramic of the graves, the men got back in their trucks and rode silently past the wreckage.
We did this
was the collective realization. The shallow burials and the efficiency with which the locals had cleared the battlefield unnerved many of the Americans.

Amerine experienced a sort of warrior’s remorse. Even though he
had been responsible for the deaths of those buried here, he had not fought them in direct combat. In retrospect the battle seemed unfair, the antithesis of the more noble face-to-face combat he both dreaded and desired.

They rose out of the labyrinth and parked on the same ridge from which they had spotted the convoy the day before.

As they stared out across the enormous valley toward Tarin Kowt Pass, most of the wreckage was not discernible. With binoculars, though, the black specks on the desert floor became the remains of Taliban trucks.

“I think I see something,” said Brent, looking east through binoculars. “There’s a large truck pointing some kind of gun this way.”

About a mile away, the vehicle appeared intact and definitely carried some sort of artillery piece. The men continued to drive along the backside of the ridge, remaining out of sight in order to get to a closer vantage point, and then patrolled ahead on foot to peer over the edge. This overview provided a side profile of the vehicle, a quarter of a mile distant, and the team could now tell that it was a flatbed truck—destroyed by a bomb—with a massive, cannonlike anti-aircraft gun mounted on the back that had remained intact.

“One last picture for the BDA,” said Dan. “Team photo?”

They drove down to the valley floor and walked through the charred debris littering the sand toward the flatbed, crowding in close to the gun. Bari Gul and his guerrillas looked on until JD waved them over to get in the second photo. The only one not joining them was Ken, who refused to leave the truck.

Returning to their vehicles, the men headed back up the ridgeline to their observation post, where JD set up a defensive perimeter with the weapons sergeants and Bari Gul’s men. To the west, the setting sun turned the horizon red, while the eastern sky was an encroaching pool of inky blackness.

While Mike, Brent, and Ronnie fortified the team’s perimeter with claymore mines, Alex caught Amerine’s attention and said,
“Pilots spotted six trucks heading north from Kandahar.” He indicated the position on the map. “Open road, no bottlenecks anywhere. Looks clean.”

Alex waited as Amerine studied the map.

“Clear them hot,” Amerine said in a low voice.

A minute passed, then Alex said, “Convoy destroyed. BDA is six burning vehicles.”

Amerine’s stomach tightened. He wouldn’t know if they had hit an enemy convoy until word filtered through Karzai’s network, which would take at least half a day. Six trucks, eight to twelve men in each: They may have just killed fifty to seventy men. What if he was wrong? What if they were civilians? On his own map, Amerine illuminated the approximate location of the destroyed vehicles with a small flashlight, and used a pencil to mark the spot with an X.

Like the rest of ODA 574, he had been too busy to notice the meteors streaking across the sky. November 18 marked the beginning of the greatest show the Leonid meteor shower had put on in thirty-five years, and now there were dozens blazing across the sky simultaneously. As the night wore on, the men on guard duty were mesmerized by the spectacle, forgetting for a time that they were deep in Afghanistan, defending a town against a force of thousands and attempting to defend an entire province with a handful of guerrillas and a few reconnaissance aircraft.

Overnight, Hamid Karzai’s credibility in the Pashtun tribal belt was established. Reports came in of villages throughout the south taking down the white flag of the Taliban and replacing it with the black, red, and green vertically striped Afghan flag, now recognized as Karzai’s battle flag. The stories were spreading, too: tall tales that put Karzai in the middle of the action, defending Tarin Kowt from annihilation.

A local tribal leader claimed that Karzai had beaten back the Taliban with a thousands-strong Pashtun militia. In Pakistan, Ahmed Karzai told reporters that his brother’s eight hundred loyal soldiers were engaged in heavy fighting with the Taliban along a main road
to Kandahar.
¹
Most villages in the south were without modern communications equipment, and Afghans often relied disproportionately on such rumors. The Taliban estimated Karzai’s troop strength by his support in the tribal belt and his ability to rebuff their own fighters; according to deserters, after the battle at Tarin Kowt, the Taliban believed that Karzai was as mighty as any of the Northern Alliance generals.
²

The morning after the meteor shower, the team returned to Tarin Kowt and moved into their new compound, where they immediately noticed that some of the guards had shaved their beards off in defiance of the Taliban. Amerine joined Karzai in his meeting room, had tea, and then pulled out his survival map.

“Last night we hit a convoy of six trucks in this area here,” Amerine said.

Karzai stared silently at the X on the map.

“Have you heard anything from your people about it?” asked Amerine.

“Nothing yet,” said Karzai.

“Would you hear if there was a problem?”

“I believe yes.”

“Good,” said Amerine, feeling slightly relieved. “Please let me know whatever you learn. In the meantime, we need men as quickly as you can get them to man all the checkpoints around Tarin Kowt in these locations,” he said, pointing them out on the hand-drawn map that Karzai kept. “I have recon planes flying operations twenty-four hours a day to spot for enemy convoys, but a single miss could be disastrous.”

“How many convoys have you hit?”

“Only that one so far. Now that I’m back in town, I’ll be talking to you before we engage anything. I will run the air operations from our compound across the street.”

Just as Karzai began to update Amerine on new pledges of support, the Afghan’s satellite phone rang. It was the Northern Alliance’s defense minister, with whom he spoke for two minutes before ending the call.

“That was Mohammed Fahim,” Karzai said to Amerine. “He
called on behalf of the Northern Alliance to congratulate me on our victory.”

Two days after the Battle of Tarin Kowt, James Dobbins 3 was en route to Kabul from Uzbekistan. He was flying in a private jet with representatives from the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and a small contingent of Afghans, including Dr. Abdullah,
*
a protégé of the Northern Alliance’s recently assassinated leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud.

This flight to Kabul—six days after the capital city was liberated by the Northern Alliance—represented the first U.S. diplomatic mission to Afghanistan in more than twelve years, as well as Dobbins’s first face-to-face meeting with representatives of the Northern Alliance. He was hoping to make strides toward the three goals he’d identified two weeks earlier as being paramount to the success of a post-Taliban government: the cooperation of the six neighboring countries; the identification of Pashtun leaders not tainted by ongoing Taliban affiliation; and the Northern Alliance’s willingness to cooperate with those individuals in the successor Afghan government.