My Share of the Task(164)
He looked me in the eye for a few beats, nodded, and turned to face the road again. We drove back to base. My reaction was unfair. I hadn’t raised the dog that died. I hadn’t enjoyed his companionship during lonely nights at some dusty outpost. I hadn’t had my life saved by the dog.
But, nearing the end of my command, four and a half years in, I had an acute awareness of the incredibly lethal machine we had built in order to defeat the enemy, and the amount of killing that machine had required men like Chris—young, moral, fearless—to bear. I reacted to Chris like this not because I saw in him any bloodlust or brutishness or imbalance but because I feared these qualities might gnarl the upright men I led.
We found ourselves in a situation wherein an enemy ideology had spread and corrupted thousands of young men. By the time they came into contact with our machine, by the time they had a vest strapped to their chest and were planning to cut down a score of Americans on their way out, the only way to deal with them was to fight them and, often, kill them. Operations reports put the toll into tidy acronyms—EKIA, enemy killed in action—while the aerial feeds of operations showed men fleeing our helicopters as antlike specks, too small to show their blanched faces. But they obviously believed in what they were fighting for. And while some men showed an innate, unalloyed cruelty, many who ended up fanatical and dangerous had begun as misguided, gullible kids. That they had to die was something to lament.
* * *
On May 1, 2008, I waited in the SAR at Balad for a missile impact some two thousand miles away in a rural compound in Somalia. We’d done the same thing eight weeks earlier, however, and had failed. In that case, our intelligence was accurate, but to be conservative, we’d fired only two missiles when four would have covered the entire compound. Al Qaeda leader Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan was in a separate part of the compound, escaped the edge of the blasts, and survived. The miss was a bitter lesson for me.
Another opportunity arose quickly. In late April 2008, we located Al Shabab leader Aden Hashi Ayrow near Dusa Mareb, Somalia. Like Dadullah in Pakistan, Ayrow seemed an eerie mirror of Zarqawi. A stubborn but charismatic extremist known to be personally volatile and ruthless, he was responsible for the deaths of foreign aid workers, Somalis, international peacekeepers, and BBC journalist Kate Peyton, who was shot in the back near her Mogadishu hotel in February 2005. Since the Ethiopian invasion sixteen months earlier, Al Shabab had split from the Islamic Courts union . No longer a “youth wing,” Al Shabab was growing into an autonomous terroristic organization with aims to disrupt political reconciliation inside Somalia. It also had aspirations, albeit boastful ones, of striking beyond its borders. Aden Ayrow’s continued personal ascendance had helped spur Al Shabab’s dangerous rise. Now we felt we had him in the crosshairs.
Waiting for the operation brought me back to the tense moments surrounding Big Ben, the arms cache on the southern edge of Fallujah we had struck in the summer of 2004, when insurgents controlled the city and TF 714’s credibility was far more fragile. And yet, in spite of everything we’d done in the past four years, I again worried about the potential impact of a second failed strike on TF 714’s standing and its hard-won freedom of action.
As the missiles impacted, we waited anxiously for indications that Ayrow was dead. Sometimes the target’s voice came up on a phone call after the strike. Ayrow’s never did. The operation represented an important step in TF 714’s ability to contribute in even difficult, denied areas. A September 2009 U.S. raid that killed Nabhan reflected the continued maturation of this capability.
* * *
A month later, in June of 2008, immediately before I left Iraq for the last time, I walked the three hundred meters from a new headquarters and billet area we had occupied since March of that year for a last look at the original area we had built and occupied since the summer of 2004.
In the fading light of early evening, with the frequent roar of departing jets or helicopters in the background, Jody Nacy and I walked into the bunker, through the SAR, TF 16’s operations center, and then across the gravel patch I’d crossed thousands of times to our small wooden hooch when retiring at dawn. All the areas were deserted but still largely furnished, as they had been when we had lived there. The plywood tables, worn chairs, and shelves, often built quickly, all remained. It was as though everyone had suddenly disappeared. It was as though we were exploring a sunken ship.