One Bullet Away

“Thirty seconds!” Standing now, thanking the aircrew, removing my headset. The blades’ pitch changed as we flared to land, the smooth whir becoming a choppy clatter. Nose up, tail down, and the thump of landing gear settling onto the ground. The ramp dropped, and the platoon ran out, fanning to secure a perimeter around the landing zone. The other two birds followed their leader, and two more streams of Marines arced into the circle. I bent my head and closed my eyes as the climbing helicopters blasted us with sand. They turned south and left us in a growing silence.

LAR and the recon teams already manned positions on a rocky rise two kilometers away. Our two infantry platoons completed the package. We shouldered our packs and moved to join them. It was colder here, less than a hundred miles north but much higher in elevation. A sharp wind rustled the carcasses of plants still upright in the ground. Others rolled along like tumbleweeds in an old Western. Afghanistan’s rugged, spare beauty reminded me of the deserts of Nevada and Arizona. That beauty can overwhelm a person when its immensity isn’t tempered by a lodge or a campfire. Infantrymen feel the immensity. They are part of the landscape, not observers of it. No windshield or cockpit separates them from the mountains and the wind. The sense of space and time is like gazing at the stars.

Staff Sergeant Marine organized the platoon’s digging while I joined the other officers for a brief in the tiny tent that served as the battalion’s traveling command post.

“Welcome, Bravo Company, to Patrol Base Pentagon.” The battalion commander, who went by “Shaka” in honor of the famed Zulu warrior, had been awaiting our arrival. His brief was triaged — most vital information first. Aerial surveillance reported a radar dish to our south and a multiple launch rocket system (MLRS) to our north. An MLRS is a set of rocket tubes on the back of a truck. It can obliterate a square kilometer. First priority for the battalion was to learn more about those threats. The colonel sent Jim along with an LAR patrol to check on the radar and recon to investigate the MLRS.

The next priority was a rough outline of our short-term plan. A few klicks to our north was a river, its banks dotted with villages and farms. The highway from Kandahar to Lashkar Gah paralleled the river on its north side. That night, according to the colonel, our little band of Marines was slated to be General Tommy Franks’s main effort. Franks commanded all American forces from the Horn of Africa across the Middle East to central Asia. All eyes would be on us. We would patrol the highway to interdict traffic and send a message to the Taliban.

“Go after them, gentlemen,” the colonel said, pointing at the young commanders along the sides of the tent, “until they fear us more than they hate us.”

We expected to continue this tactic for the next several nights, probably moving the patrol base each day to make it more difficult for anyone to attack us. When Kandahar fell to the Northern Alliance, a portion of our force would move to secure the airport there in order to replace the runway at Rhino with something larger and more permanent. The colonel couldn’t speculate on possible missions more than a few days out. Our enemy would adapt as we adapted, so we couldn’t expect to set the agenda. We would initiate as much as we could, but we’d also have to respond to the other guy’s moves.

I was still in the tent when the LAR patrol, with Jim in command, reached the reported radar site.

“Shaka, this is Cossack. We’ve reached the location of that reported radar dish. It’s a tree.”

“Negative, Cossack. We had good reporting that it was a radar, maybe disguised. Take another look.”

I imagined Jim cursing and running his hands over the bark.

“Shaka, Cossack. Roger, we checked again. It’s definitely a tree.”

Recon found that the MLRS was actually an MLRS, but it was unusable, probably rusting in place since the Soviet withdrawal twelve years before. For the moment, Patrol Base Pentagon was safe.

Jim and I occupied the highest crag on the rock pile the battalion surrounded. We lined up our laser range finders, rifles, binoculars, and scopes for easy use. Then we began to dig. We rotated digging and watching over the valley beneath us. I dug while Jim stood watch, and then we switched. The sand was dry and loose between the rocks, but digging was slow. We didn’t have full-size shovels, only collapsible entrenching tools that attached to the outside of our packs. By prying rocks from the ground, we built a parapet in front of our deepening hole and soon had a protected vantage point overlooking the valley.

“People down there are checking us out.” Jim pointed out along a rocky ridge that extended below us into the valley. Two figures peeked from behind a boulder. I focused my binoculars on them. Young guys, maybe our age, dressed in traditional shalwar kameez. I didn’t see any weapons.