Grey Wars: A Contemporary History of U. S. Special Operations by N. W. Collins

Author:N. W. Collins [Collins, N. W.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300198416
Google: UaYxEAAAQBAJ
Published: 2021-06-29T02:42:04+00:00

7

FALLEN ANGEL

You want Pashtun boys to shoot their cousins—this is a strategy?

—Dr. Roshanak Wardak

In the Tangi Valley, Afghanistan, farmers plow with water buffalo and live in multigenerational clusters behind stout pine-plank doors and high clay walls. Hectares of wheat fields grow waist-high on land fed by thawing snowcaps. Canals souse the apple orchards, apricot trees, and pomegranate groves. Bare red mountains surround the green bowl, but in the windy season, the funnels move downward through the jagged cliffs, kicking up clouds of yellow silt.

In the summer of 2011, despite the U.S. news headlines announcing the end of the 9/11 wars, deployments of U.S. special operators are unchanged—and soon to increase. Raids continue apace. In the four months of operations after the Abbottabad raid, the Department of Defense reports 2,832 raids across the entire region. Locals describe ground operations in Tangi on a nightly basis.

One, in particular, goes disastrously wrong.

The failed raid is reported in U.S. media outlets but attracts little notice among the general public. Late in the night of Friday, August 6, a 40,000-pound loaded U.S. helicopter—call sign Extortion 17—is shot down in the Tangi Valley by a rocket-propelled grenade. That downing results in the greatest loss of life for U.S. Special Operations in its history, surpassing Operation Eagle Claw and Operation Gothic Serpent.

It is the deadliest day for the United States in its then decade-long war in Afghanistan.1

_____

“Welcome to Tangi . . . it’s like getting kissed by the devil.” The lieutenant offers an apt simile of the valley’s destructive allure, to no one in particular.

“To be honest, they didn’t want us here,” another young man explains, referring to the 1,500 U.S. personnel who arrived in Wardak province to take over outpost responsibilities.2

Each morning from Combat Outpost (COP) Tangi, they set out on foot patrol, up and down and up. The work is tedious—to find tiny wires beneath them—and ever on the verge of deadly, requiring their complete attention to conduct the bomb sweeps. Stray cords, fresh dirt mounds, awkward rock piles—any of these is a sufficient reason to stop. Fail in the hunt and any heavy vehicle that drives over buried pressure plates—but most likely a U.S. Humvee or an MRAP (Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle) in this area—is enough to connect the underground lines and set off its detonation. Miss an oddly placed object—a can of soda or a packet of cigarettes makes adequate casing—and the device’s crude charge is left for a truck to trigger in passing.

The area of patrol for COP Tangi has been just south of a physical checkpoint recognized as the Bab al-Jihad, or the Gates of Jihad. To pass through that marker is to leave the grit of Kabul and enter a pastoral landscape of birches and wildflowers growing on a terrain with well-trained militias, fierce antiforeign defenses, and a heritage of liberation struggles.

Where a newcomer gazes up at the sandstone peaks and sees barren spaces, a local points to a crisscross of sunken dirt tracks leading to the Kabul-Kandahar corridor, the road linking the country’s two largest cities, a part of the ring road forming Highway 1.

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