GHAZNI, Afghanistan — As minutes moved into hours, anticipation permeated the air as soldiers waited for the CH-47 Chinooks to arrive to whisk them away on their first company-sized air assault in months.
Some smoked cigarettes or chewed tobacco. Others settled onto their assault packs, which were loaded down with everything they would need to sustain them for the next 24 hours. And still others moved between the columns of soldiers as they ran through last-minute radio and equipment checks.
Finally, after more than three hours, word came down that the Chinooks were on their way and two Apache attack helicopters were circling over their objective, a small village of mud homes and dry, dusty fields southeast of Ghazni named Shaturi.
When the Chinooks arrived, the soldiers of B Company, 1st Battalion, 506th Infantry Regiment, 4th Brigade, 101st Airborne Division, took to the sky for the 10-minute flight.
An air assault, the bread and butter of the Currahee, was underway.
It would be the first of many planned air attacks throughout the month of October as the soldiers conducted operations to disrupt the enemy and pave the way for local villagers to register to vote in next year’s Afghan national elections.
Shaturi is a known Taliban safe haven, a place where the enemy goes to have meetings and get food, shelter and water, said Capt. Spencer Wallace, commander of Bravo Company. The village also is little more than a mile from a voter registration site, he said.
“We wanted to go where they are comfortable and what we hope is to throw them off their plans, keep them busy,” he said. “When we go to an area, they either fight or move out. To keep them busy and guessing, that has a great effect.”
On the morning of Oct. 6, the first day of voter registration, Wallace’s soldiers landed in Shaturi heavily armed and ready to fight.
But the enemy was nowhere to be seen. The soldiers later learned from some of the villagers that the circling Apaches and overwhelming show of force by the Americans, who were joined by 20 Afghan soldiers and about a dozen Afghan police, had chased the enemy away. The enemy had reportedly fled to another village for refuge, another place to plan their attacks.
All that were left were a few men, who throughout the day fired pot shots at the soldiers, leading to frustrating foot patrols across the village as the soldiers tried to chase them down.
But despite the early reports that the enemy had fled and the threat had been significantly reduced, the soldiers were just getting started.
Small groups of soldiers set up protective positions, some armed with machine guns and others with mortars, ready for any attack the enemy may have tried to throw their way. Elements of 1st Platoon and the company’s leadership struck out into the village, going door to door, talking to the men and drinking tea with the elders.
“We spend a lot of time talking to [the people],” Wallace said. “I think we figured out in a counterinsurgency [that] we can target the enemy, but there’s always going to be more enemy. Instead, we target the people. They want the same things that we want.”
This is how the war on the ground in Afghanistan looks — soldiers who are willing to engage and kill the enemy, but soldiers who also are trained to engage, in a different way, the people of this country, the people commanders refer to as “key terrain,” the prize in a tug-of-war between the Afghan government and the enemy.
“I guess the secret to our success is … understanding that the Afghan people are what matter and getting that down to the soldier level,” said Lt. Col. Anthony DeMartino, the battalion commander. “Measures of success are a challenge in counterinsurgency because I don’t have enemy artillery tubes that I’m destroying and [that] I’m ticking off on a map. But when we go out and we put a new outpost in an area, at first, particularly if it’s an enemy sanctuary or a safe haven, the people avoid us. But then as the enemy attacks us and we get out and we try to help the people … what we’ll start to see is the people start to come to these outposts [with information]. The people have said, ‘OK, there’s the Taliban, here’s the government. I’m going this way.’”
As the soldiers moved through Shaturi, a place they had never visited before, they found a small village made up of clusters of mud and tan-colored houses separated by plain, brown walls. The neatly squared plots of land were mostly barren, with an occasional patch of green grass. If the villagers were home, they stayed inside their walled compounds, unwilling to make the first move to approach the soldiers.
But the soldiers would approach the people, as they worked to gather information and gain an understanding of the people who live in the village. They also looked for homes that would be suitable places to set up command posts, suitable places for the soldiers to sleep that night.
1st Lt. Phil Moffatt, who leads 1st Platoon, spoke with a homeowner, a thin, graying, elderly man whose property included a spacious compound shared by a donkey, a cow and some chickens. Moffatt, who has picked up some conversational Pashto since deploying here in March, asked the old man for permission for his soldiers to stay in the compound.
“We’re not the first people to be here, trying to do this,” he said. “It’s more delicate than barging in. You have to be invited in. If you’re honest with people, you don’t steal from them, they’ll trust you.”
The old man agreed to let the soldiers stay even though he expressed concerns that the Taliban would pay him a visit after the soldiers left, demanding to know why he allowed the Americans to use his compound.
“The locals, they are looking for a side to take,” said Staff Sgt. Michael Boganowski, a squad leader in 1st Platoon. “You have to constantly show your face and let the locals know you’re here and you’re here to help. [The problem is] we’re just spread so short.”
Boganowski and his fellow soldiers each said they didn’t know if they would be able to return to Shaturi, an indication of the shortage of ground troops deployed to Afghanistan’s vast and unforgiving terrain.
“There’s just so much ground to cover,” Moffatt said.
Most of the time, the enemy has already been to a village by the time the soldiers arrive, he said, and the challenge is to go to a village enough times to gain the locals’ trust.
“I don’t really expect good intel until we’ve spent about two months with them,” Moffatt said. “Right now, I’m just another guy in ACUs. The fruit of all the work, of having tea with a guy for two months, is you start to get information. You can make a little go a long way. We’re trying to make it a little bit better [here] and not just hunt and kill bad guys.”
As the first half of the 24-hour mission in Shaturi wound down, the soldiers gathered at various locations throughout the village, in compounds or homes they had secured earlier in the day.
At the old man’s compound, about a dozen soldiers unrolled their sleeping bags and settled in to eat and relax while the noncommissioned officers set up a plan for the soldiers to take turns pulling guard duty.
The village was still and quiet as the soldiers drifted off to sleep under a blanket of stars.
At the crack of dawn, the soldiers were awake, aware that the first rays of light brought with them one of the best chances of an enemy attack. But the attack never came, and the soldiers prepared to leave Shaturi for the comforts of Forward Operating Base Ghazni.
The man watched as the soldiers cleaned up and started a fire to burn their trash. The soldiers paid him the equivalent of $40 for the use of his compound. The old man took the money, but refused to accept the cases of bottled water leftover from the previous day’s mission.
If you leave the water here, the Taliban will know you were here, he told the soldiers. But without vehicles, the soldiers could not remove the water or take it with them.
“We know success is a legitimate government in Afghanistan, it’s a good perception of security and stability,” Wallace said. “In essence, it’s a tug-of-war for the people. The people really feel caught in the middle sometimes between the government and the Taliban.”
After almost 30 hours in the field, the Chinooks appeared from the sky once again, kicking up clouds of dust and sand that enveloped the soldiers. Minutes after climbing onboard, the soldiers are back at the FOB, every soldier unhurt and accounted for.
After this month’s voter registration period, the soldiers of Bravo Company will assume a new area of operations, moving from its four districts in northern Ghazni — Dehyak, Andar, Giro and Zanakhan — to west Paktika province, closer to the Pakistani border.
When the entire battalion moves to Paktika, Polish troops will take over in Ghazni.
But success won’t come easily, Wallace said. Sometimes, it may even be difficult to measure, he said.
“We try to put a lot of metrics on things, but you can’t put metrics on people,” he said. “You have to measure their actions. We stress [to our soldiers] that success is not measured in a body count. Success is measured by the confidence of the people.”
"...Instead we target the people...."
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Originally Posted by Roger the Shrubber
