The Other Face of Battle by Wayne E. Lee

Author:Wayne E. Lee
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2021-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Map 6.1 Kandahar Province and RC-South. (Map by Matilde Grimaldi)

Map 6.2 The Attack into Makuan. (Map by Matilde Grimaldi)

6

Makuan/Operation Dragon Strike, September 15–17, 2010

The Muslim call to prayer and the muffled sound of digging interrupted the night’s stillness, alerting the American soldiers of Captain Brandon Prisock’s Bravo Company that Taliban insurgents were awake and busy planting mines around them. After the day-long fight on September 15, 2010, for control of the Afghan village of Makuan, strategically located in the district of Zhari in Kandahar province, supported by tracked breaching vehicles, trucks, armored vehicles, bulldozers, helicopters, and A-10 Thunderbolt II ground-attack aircraft, the Americans were now being matched by the enemy’s two most effective weapons: improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and darkness. To Staff Sergeant Joshua Reese, the sound of digging triggered “a really sickening feeling.”1

Prisock, a 2004 West Point graduate from Louisiana, knew the sounds meant that the Taliban were reoccupying Makuan. He also knew that their dilapidated Soviet-era weapons and homemade bombs could neutralize his company’s firepower. Carrying seventy pounds of body armor, combat gear, ammunition magazines, and water bottles, and wearing long-sleeved uniforms in temperatures that regularly topped 105 degrees, the Americans also wore “screaming eagle” patches on their left shoulders, identifying them as members of the 101st Airborne Division. Meanwhile, the Taliban fought in simple robes and sandals—and sometimes barefoot—affording them a greater degree of mobility and the ability to blend in with civilians. First Lieutenant Nicholas Williams, one of Prisock’s three rifle platoon leaders, summed up his feelings upon entering the alien world of Makuan: “We were strangers in a strange land fighting someone on their home turf. . . . The call to prayer was a constant reminder that this wasn’t our world.”2

The battle for Makuan, which lasted for three days in mid-September 2010, was the opening thrust of Operation Dragon Strike, at the time the largest single U.S. Army operation of the war. After trading blows with the Taliban for nearly nine years, U.S. commanders intended for Dragon Strike to deliver a knockout punch. The operation involved more than 8,000 American and Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers fighting for control of Zhari district.3

The idea was to crush the will of the Taliban. Zhari, where Mullah Omar had founded the Taliban in 1994, occupied a strategic position on the western doorstep of Kandahar City, Afghanistan’s second-largest population center, with just under a million people. Yet since the start of the war in 2001, the American-led coalition had not made securing Zhari a priority. The 2008 election of President Barack Obama, however, altered the strategic calculus. Describing Afghanistan as a “war of necessity,” the new president deployed 21,000 additional troops into theater in March 2009 and announced plans to send another 30,000 nine months later. The Pentagon envisioned that this new “surge”—as it was called—would retake swaths of southern Afghanistan long dominated by the Taliban, providing an opportunity to prepare the ANA, which was scheduled to take the lead on the battlefield in the fall of 2011.

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