One Bullet Away

The next morning, I was called to the COC for a brief. Our mission to Tora Bora was canceled. No American forces would take part in the operation. Instead, our Afghan allies would do the job. There were already rumblings about most of the assembled fighters slipping away across the border into the wilds of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. Colonel Waldhauser said that fear of casualties had prompted the cancellation at the highest levels of the U.S. government.

Back in the tower, Jim kicked the wall when I told him the news. “Goddamn chickenshit decision. Casualties? What the fuck do they think happened on 9/11? This is our chance to get those bastards.”

I agreed with him, and so did Staff Sergeant Marine. He heard us yelling in the tower and came up to see what was happening. “Afghan allies? We don’t have any Afghan allies. We got Afghans who’ll do what we say if it helps them and if we pay them to do it. Bin Laden will trade ’em a goat and escape.”

With that mission went our dream of laying hands on America’s most wanted man. But we felt relief, too. A winter fight in the high mountains against hardened mujahideen would have been ugly. They’d fought the Soviets on that ground for ten years. It was a measure of the mission’s significance that the Marines knew all the dangers and still wished we’d gone.

The cold-weather clothing was collected, leaving us again to shiver through the nights on watch. But those nights were few. The Northern Alliance had routed the Taliban. They would probably live to fight another day, but their control of Afghanistan was over. Hamid Karzai was already positioning himself for a role in the replacement government. The Twenty-sixth MEU, the other half of Task Force 58, held Kandahar International Airport. Rhino had outlived its usefulness. The dirt runway required hours of maintenance each day just to withstand another night of landings and takeoffs. And the remote location, once a welcome boon to security, was now merely an inconvenience. We were told to prepare for our return to the ships.

Charlie Company was first out, then Alpha, LAR, and recon. By January 3, 2002, Rhino was almost empty. The entire MEU had either moved up to Kandahar or back to the ships. Bravo Company was alone. The afternoon our plane was scheduled to arrive, most of the company packed its gear and moved out to the runway. Captain Whitmer instructed Jim and me to stay in the tower and to leave the mortars set up until the plane was on the ground. We scanned the horizon in every direction but saw nothing moving. The air was cold and clear beneath a wintry overcast. A few snowflakes drifted down.

“This place is straight-up hell,” Jim said as he threw a tiny Tabasco bottle into the sand beyond the tower.

“It’d be great to come back someday and explore, though,” I replied. “Like old guys going to Normandy or Monte Cassino.”

“Shit, bro, I’ll be back when there’s a golf course, a Hilton, and direct flights from Nashville. Until then, this place can fucking rot.”

When a dark speck in the distance resolved itself into a C-130, Jim and I shouldered our packs, took one last look out across Rhino, and squeezed down the spiral staircase. The courtyard, once full of radio towers, cooking fires, and Humvees, was silent. We walked through the gate and pulled it shut behind us. I dropped the latch into place. Taking a last look inside, I thought I knew what astronauts had felt like leaving the moon. I would never be back.

Jim asked, “How long before the bad guys are back in this compound?”

“They’ll be digging up our MRE trash before sunset tomorrow.”

The Hercules blasted us with a prop wash of sand, pebbles, and kerosene exhaust. Captain Whitmer waited at the tail ramp, grabbing our shoulders as we climbed aboard. The C-130 rose off the runway at a steep angle, the pilots piping AC/DC’s Hell’s Bells through the plane.

Arriving on the Dubuque, we were corralled from the helicopters down into the well deck to be stripped and deloused. I stood with the platoon as a sailor blasted us with a hose, like a herd of cattle. After forty days without bathing, no one complained. I climbed, barefoot, up to my room to take a real shower. While we were ashore, someone in the ship’s crew had taped a political cartoon to my stateroom door. It showed the backs of three armed Marines walking across a desert toward distant mountains. Above them was a scroll with the words “Peace on Earth,” and below them a caption: “We’re working on it.”