The Dogs Are Eating Them Now: Our War in Afghanistan (20 page)

Canadian artillery unit in Helmand province

The fighting season arrived in spring. Violence climbed slowly as the weather got warmer, then stagnated for a few weeks as everything paused for the opium harvest. Taliban fighters put down their guns and picked up farm tools. Then, at some point in April or May, the harvest finished and the young labourers turned into an insurgent army. You could almost pinpoint that moment—the end of harvest, the start of the fighting—to a particular week, depending on the maturity of the poppies. I couldn’t read anything in the rolling expanses of pink, purple and red flowers, but my local friends said the blooming fields in the spring of 2007 indicated that the violence would spike in the middle of May.

Military officials disagreed. The relative calm of the winter season had renewed their optimism, leading them to think that the Taliban were still reeling from their losses during Operation Medusa the previous year. The smart money inside the diplomatic compounds in Kabul and the military bases in Kandahar was betting that the insurgents had lost their momentum. Senior officials predicted the 2007 fighting season would bring less violence than the previous year, or at least nothing worse. I decided to spend a couple of weeks on the battlefield, testing that theory. My motivation wasn’t purely rational; researching local jails and the moral ambiguities of the
NATO mission had left me yearning for the simplicity of battle. I had once joked with my colleagues that firefights don’t impress writers because there’s a limit to the narrative possibilities of “bang, bang, bang,” but at that point I wanted to immerse myself in the military’s narrow world. I wanted to forget about torture, wanted to leave behind those hard questions. I craved front lines, good guys and bad guys. I hopped a convoy and headed west.

At first, everything was peaceful. I spent a few days with an artillery unit on a hill known as Sperwan Ghar, southwest of Kandahar city. A road spiralled up the summit, which rose out of the surrounding farmland like a fairy-tale fortress, topped with US and Afghan flags. Everything you could see from the pinnacle of the hill had been a hot zone in the previous fighting season, when bodies littered a nearby road. Now the artillery was silent. Some of the platoons had not fired a single shot in months. The soldiers squatted on their mud parapets, peering down at villagers who wandered the fields with herds of goats, or collected the last of the poppy crop. The troops knew that the harvest would finish in the next week, and there wasn’t much they could do except watch the slow progress of days. The outpost baked in the sun.

The only enemies that showed up at first were the small creatures living in the crevices of the sandbag fortifications. One soldier forgot to shake out his sleeping bag before settling down at night and was bitten by a yellow scorpion. The sting numbed the right side of his body, and he was evacuated for medical treatment. A commander reassured the troops that he would return to duty soon, but the incident did nothing to ease the fear of pests. One night I was sitting with a few men on a makeshift porch, camouflage netting stretched across pine boards and plywood, leaning back against a wall of sandbags, when I heard a scurrying sound over my shoulder. A camel spider scuttled out of its burrow and paused a few centimetres from the trimmed line between a sergeant’s brush cut and his sunburned neck. I nudged him, and he jumped to his feet. Furry
and brownish, the camel spider was legendary among foreign troops in Afghanistan. Many soldiers believed the arachnid was deadly, but this was just another of the false rumours about Afghanistan and its inhabitants. The sergeant jabbed at it with a pair of pliers, unsuccessfully, and the nimble thing slipped back into the sandbag wall. Another soldier brought a spray can of lubricant, flipped open a lighter, and scorched the whole area with his improvised flame-thrower. For a moment, a cluster of men watched smoke rise from the blackened fabric of the sandbags, inspecting for signs of life. I was sure the thing was dead, but the camel spider soon tumbled out of the sandbags and wriggled on the plywood, burnt and steaming. A soldier attacked it with a combat knife, cutting it into a dozen pieces. The corpse was tiny, barely enough charred legs and body to fill a matchbox. That night, the troops sprayed double the usual dose of repellants in their sleeping quarters. A chemical mist pervaded the bunker, curdling with the smells of sweat and foot fungus. I lay on my bunk, breathing the odours, reviewing the evening’s excitement in my mind and thinking about how the military sometimes fails to identify its real enemies. The camel spider had not posed any danger; while capable of painful bites, it wasn’t venomous. In fact, the arachnid was useful against genuine threats because it hunted poisonous insects and scorpions. But the troops were afraid and irritated, their skin covered with red bites from things that chewed on them while they slept. The camel spider was a convenient target. Its obliteration seemed in keeping with all of NATO’s misplaced fury.

Then again, Afghanistan breeds toughness. The following afternoon I joined a group of soldiers as they cheered two ants in a tug-of-war over a corn chip. The men were absorbed in this contest of insect strength; when somebody commented that the bugs seemed stronger in Afghanistan, everybody agreed. There was something urgent about the way the flies climbed on your face, worming their way into your eyes and nostrils, hunting for moisture. The flies were
less skittish than the houseflies back home. You swatted at them and they circled back to buzz in your hair or sip the spittle from the corner of your mouth. If you wanted to get rid of them, killing was the only way.

The cigarette smoke also helped with the swarming flies. Soldiers played poker for cigarettes, the crumpled paper tubes trading hands so many times that they had to twist the tips to keep the tobacco from falling out. Sometimes they continued these games into the night, playing with headlamps under the stars, using red filters on their lights to make them less visible to Taliban in the fields beyond the perimeter. After months of deployment, they had exhausted most options for entertainment. Their stashes of men’s magazines were rumpled and used. I brought them fresh copies of
Maxim
from a store at the airfield, but this was disappointingly tame for soldiers who had developed a taste for serious pornography. The troops had watched all the DVDs in their collections. They shared a laptop with intermittent access to a satellite modem, but there’s a limit to the number of times you can send your girlfriend e-mails about the weather during an unyielding series of sunny days. So the soldiers dealt another hand of cards, swatted flies, exhaled streams of tobacco smoke and waited for battle.

Just before it began, I caught a helicopter ride further west to an outpost in Sangin district of Helmand province. The base stood on a plateau overlooking a fertile valley, near a town that served as a hub for opium trafficking. There had recently been so few attacks that British troops boasted of their brigade commander feeling safe enough to casually shop in the bazaar. That spring they installed a new Afghan district leader and set up a few smaller patrol bases around the town. They hoped to start reconstruction work in the district and extend their security zone all the way up the valley to the Kajaki Dam so they could increase the supply of hydroelectricity to the south. As the harvest drew to a close, however, the troops saw signs that the fleeting peace was ending. Hundreds of young men
appeared on the roads, crowded into trucks and cars. They were unarmed and got through NATO checkpoints by calling themselves farm labourers. Many of them obviously
had
been working the fields, because they had scarred hands and stained shirts, but the soldiers wondered where they were going next.

The trouble started with a single bullet in the night. In the second week of May, a group of US special forces known as Task Force Scorpion was driving along the river north of Sangin when they hit an insurgent ambush. The Taliban fired rocket-propelled grenades and automatic rifles, and one of them got a lucky shot over the chest plate in an American’s body armour. The bullet ricocheted off the man’s collarbone and down into his torso, killing him. His comrades pulled back and called for air support, including attack helicopters, fighter jets and a gunship. They guessed a few dozen insurgents were killed that evening. I heard about the incident the next morning from an American major. He had promised to take me on a patrol north of Sangin, but he cut it short and circled back to base as it became clear that this was going to be a bad day. The dirt roads were jammed with vehicles carrying the human wreckage from the previous night. Many of the victims arrived at the gates of the military base, as villagers tried to get medical treatment for the survivors and compensation for the deceased. Rusty vehicles jolted up the steep laneway to the main gates, so full of human bodies that it was hard to tell the dead from the injured. Soldiers scrambled into disaster response mode, snapping on rubber gloves and grabbing stretchers. They heaved the injured out of trucks and set up field clinics, giving the victims oxygen and intravenous drips. One man was pulled from a hatchback sedan on a folded blanket and set down on a stretcher in the shade of a metal shipping container. He was covered with blood—hands, feet, shirt—the red stains turning dark and crusty. Bewildered by the medical exams, he moaned and struggled.

“Relax, just relax. It’s fine,” a medic barked, as an interpreter murmured in Pashto.

“Hey, hey, listen to me,” the medic continued. “Can you feel your fingers? I need to know. Can you feel your fingers? Nah, he can’t feel his fingers. Probably has nerve damage. I need to know about his arm. Does this hurt? Does this hurt? Does this hurt? Is he having any problems breathing?”

The patient lolled his head and whimpered.

“Don’t move your arm, okay? Keep your arm right there,” the medic said.

“We’ve got more inbound right now,” somebody said, and all eyes turned to the stream of vehicles bringing more casualties. The governor would later estimate twenty-one civilians were killed, but nobody could know for sure. As the injured washed up at the gates of the military base I counted at least fifteen children among them. They were strangely quiet, gazing at the alien features of the base: helicopters, razor wire, medical apparatus. The boys stared hard at the female medics, who must have seemed like erotic angels in tight shirts and running shorts, a different species from the local women in burkas. A thirteen-year-old boy stood mesmerized under the shade of a hospital tent as a medical team worked on his injured uncle. Maybe he was still mildly in shock, cradling a bandaged hand with a shrapnel wound, or perhaps he was stunned by the sight of his uncle, who was missing a chunk of his back the size of a large dinner plate. A soldier peeled a dressing off the wound and the uncle winced, the skinless muscle of his shoulder glistening. The boy turned away, and I asked him what happened. A bomb collapsed his house, he said. Four of his relatives were killed, and he could hear two of his younger brothers crying under the rubble. He told them to shut up because he wasn’t sure what other dangers waited in the darkness. Scrabbling through the ruined building, he found them in a corner and dragged them out by their shoulders. At daybreak he saw a dozen of his fellow villagers lying dead. Some survivors remained on the ground, too, because people were afraid to emerge from their hiding spots and collect them. He remembered a girl
flailing in the dirt with her foot blown off. “She was crying, and there was nobody to help her,” he said.

Most of the victims were members of tribes that did not usually support the Taliban in that valley. When I asked him how he felt about the insurgents after the bombing, the boy looked at me seriously. His school had been closed for a year because the Taliban had beheaded four students. Nobody in the village liked the Taliban. But even as he watched the foreign troops trying to save his uncle’s life, he couldn’t find anything nice to say about the international forces.

My notes end with this scribble: “1:53 p.m. Order to stay in CA [Canadian] area.” That’s the exact time in the afternoon when the US special forces commander tried to stop me from reporting the story about civilian casualties. He instructed that I should be confined to a remote corner of the base—and that if I wandered out of that zone, he would evict me from the base. This was a death threat, in effect. I didn’t really think the soldiers would push me outside the gates; although the special forces never had a sophisticated grasp of public relations, they probably understood how bad it would look if villagers lynched a journalist. Still, I couldn’t ignore the order. American counter-terrorism worked outside the usual rules. The special forces were pissed off and exhausted after losing one of their comrades the night before. One of them had already tried to confiscate my camera. The hapless officer assigned to drag me away was apologetic, but ultimately he was carrying a pistol and I was not. I retreated to a shady bunker.