Parade Magazine Articles
Hunting Down Al-Qaeda -
A Message for Corporal Ramirez
September 12, 2004
Also available on the Parade Magazine Website
THE FOUR-ENGINE C-130 Hercules descends toward total
darkness above Tarin Kowt in the plains of central Afghanistan, 70
miles north of the ancient capital of Kandahar. Its wheels finally
bite into an unmarked dirt airstrip. The aircraft brakes hard, then
taxis along the strip. Billows of dust engulf us. The rear door
yawns open, and we trundle down the tailgate onto an eerie, empty
landscape lit only by the brightness of the moon. As I step onto the
runway, my boots sink into six inches of powder, so fine and dry
that it might be talc.
In the moonscape I can see the silhouettes of Marines
moving through a small city of tents, concertina wire and military
vehicles. I have arrived at Camp Ripley, the desolate forward
operating base of the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit (MEU). From
here Alabaman Col. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., the 22nd MEU's commander,
has been directing 2000 Marines, and recently Army infantry troops
as well, in combat operations against Taliban and other forces
across an area half the size of North Carolina.
I have come to Afghanistan to observe the 22nd MEU and
other Marine Corps units fighting in this often-neglected theater.
My son Jim, with me as my photographer, is also carrying a message
for Marine Cpl. Jose Ramirez, whom we are determined to locate
during our visit.
At Bagram: A lesson in history
Two days earlier, we had left Ramstein Air Base in Germany,
a busy hub linking medevacs and cargo to Iraq and Afghanistan.
During a seven-hour flight, we sat on canvas jump seats and napped
on the metal floor of an Air Force C-17 loaded with fresh cargo and
finally landed at the main American base at Bagram.
Built up by the Soviets during their ill-fated occupation
of the country, Bagram is a lesson in history and of the contrasts
in living styles that attend all wars. Its perimeter is littered
with old Soviet weaponry and crisscrossed with still-active
minefields.
We slept in an odorous, dusty room that was once part of a
Soviet-built hospital. All around us, the American military-plus
soldiers from at least a dozen other nations and hundreds of
civilian workers -live in a world almost surreal in its
contradictions.
Britney Spears, pizza and weapons
Bagram, home to more than 6000 soldiers, offers up the heat
and isolation of a war zone and at the same time emits an unreality
that might be found in an episode of M*A*S*H. The base has never
been attacked other than by occasional rocket fire from distant
mountains, but every person in military uniform carries a loaded
weapon, even when walking to the base exchange or the day spa or
pizza parlor. At the transient quarters, a visiting Army general
even straps a shoulder-holstered pistol over his undershirt as he
travels from his bedroom to the latrine one floor below.
And yet, throughout the day, hundreds of soldiers in
official Army gym clothes jog on Bagram's roads and sidewalks,
weaponless and worry-free. Just outside the Internet cafe, I watch
an aerobics class where dozens of solemn-faced soldiers kick up
their knees in unison, step-dancing to the rhythm of Britney Spears.
Unarmed, full-bellied civilians with thick Southern accents
dish out food in the chow halls, run the laundry and operate supply
trucks, compliments of Vice President Cheney's ever-present
Halliburton Co., which even announces when you sign onto the
Internet that it has provided the connection.
A place of wind and dust
Camp Ripley offers neither the distractions nor the
contradictions of Bagram. It is a place of wind and dust, sitting on
an arid, empty plateau. The seriousness of the Marines' mission
permeates the air. At night the camp is eerily quiet and the
darkness is nearly complete, interrupted only by green chem sticks
marking pathways through the concertina wire and an occasional blue-lensed
flashlight.
Struggling in the thick dust, we carry our gear from the
airstrip to the small group of tents that mark Colonel McKenzie's
command post. Iron gray Sgt. Maj. George Mason sits at a small
table in the darkness, smoking a cigar as he converses in a
near-whisper with another Marine. Rising to greet us, the New
Jersey-born Mason hands us thin mats and gestures toward two nearby
one-man pup tents, where we will stow our gear and sleep on the
ground. There is not one cot in the hundreds of tents that dot Camp
Ripley's moonscape. Colonel McKenzie and Sergeant Major Mason are
testimony that the Marine Corps leads by example, sleeping on the
dust-filled deck inside their own pup tents, no differently from the
rest of their Marines.
The command operations center is a low-lit tent jammed with sophisticated computers. I learn that a recently arrived Army unit is in contact with guerrillas in the mountains to the east, not far from where the 22nd MEU's Marines recently killed more than 100 enemy, including at least one Chechen. This largely unreported operation, the most extensive in Afghanistan in more than two years, has been overshadowed by events in Iraq and represents the farthest inland penetration by ship-borne amphibious forces in the history of the Marine Corps.
To an outpost in the the hills
The next morning, we board a helicopter and fly north over
vast reaches of desert, banking through sharp mountain passes.
Gunships ride our flanks. A second helicopter follows in our trace.
Bare scrapes of road mark the desert floor and the edges of many
mountains.
Every now and then, we see a lone vehicle, a herd of goats,
even wild camels. Occasionally there are squares of mud walls,
denoting an Afghan housing compound. Finally we fly past a
halfdozen Marines manning a hilltop outpost, and on the other side
we descend toward a streambed at the edge of a village. Green smoke
from a grenade curls into the air, marking the landing zone. And in
minutes, we are at the command post of "One-Six" -the 1st
Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment.
One-Six is now in its 74th consecutive day of offensive
combat operations. Led by Pakistani born Lt. Col. Asad Khan, whose
call sign, appropriately, is "Genghis," and a particularly daring
sergeant major, Kentuckian Thomas Hall, the three 200-man rifle
companies have covered enormous distances along the rough roads and
narrow mountain passes. Early on, the Taliban attempted a series of
three-point, V-shaped ambushes and learned a costly lesson. Rather
than going on the defensive once ambushed, the Marines attacked in
classic fashion, stunning the ambushers and chasing them down one by
one.
A five-vehicle convoy picks us up, along with several bags
of precious mail brought in by the helicopters. It is brutal hot in
the Humvees as we drive along craggy mountain roads. Dust pours into
the open windows, mixing with the odor of the fuel cans behind us.
On the roofs of the Humvees, gunners stand watch, dark goggles on
their eyes, their boots fixed into canvas straps that descend into
the center of the cab.
The square mud housing compounds seem to blend into the
desert as we pass. Young children stare curiously, a few daring to
wave. A vehicle breaks down, and we leave it behind with another one
for security. It is a risky but daily occurrence, with the Marines
stretched out so far and wide.
The tip of the spear
Charlie Company, along with several dozen Afghan soldiers,
is set up at the edge of a swiftly flowing river, its vehicles
marking the edges of the patrol base. On the far side of the
river, a group of villagers has gathered to watch, and a smaller
group of nomads has set up its own tents. We have reached the very
tip of the spear whose hilt began in Bagram, and these Marines have
an edge to them. They are well-disciplined but cocky, the series of
recent firefights having cost them few casualties. At the same time,
they are weary, knowing they are toward the end of their deployment
and soon will be heading home.
That afternoon we wade the chest-deep river, moving quickly
through a large portion of the village on the other side as the
Marines cordon and search different compounds, looking for Taliban
and stashed weapons. It is intricate, exhausting work that will
carry over into the next day and the next in other remote villages.
Dogs are barking and snarling. Bearded men are protesting. Women
with long memories of abuse during the Soviet occupation are hiding
with their female children. A few gritty female Marines are attached
to the company in order to search the women without insulting local
traditions. Afghan interpreters conduct in-depth interrogations
under the direction of Marine counterintelligence. Four-man fire
teams work with quick precision, tempers occasionally flaring from
the tension and the heat, searching room after room, compound after
compound, then marking large X's on the mud doorways with their
bayonets. Opium and marijuana are omnipresent, drawing frequent
jeers from Marines who must deal with stoned-out Afghans but who are
not allowed even to drink a beer inside this country for fear of
offending Muslim sensibilities.
Then it is over, and we wade back across the river. At
night I lay amid the smooth round stones of the riverbank. My
clothes are still wet from the patrol. A soft, cooling wind rises
off the river, and I pull my flak jacket up to my chin as if it were
a blanket. The sky is brittle clear and the stars shine with amazing
clarity. As I lay on my back, I see a satellite slowly crossing the
sky. And I wonder if it I is watching us.
A last distant outpost
Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment is
far to the north of Camp Ripley, strung out along a series of remote
platoon outposts that look directly at the Pakistani border. We find
Kilo's third platoon at a Special Forces camp high above a gorgeous
river, looking down at a valley so green that it could be in
Vietnam. In this odd war that combines so many aspects of national
security, it is no small irony that vast fields of opium sprawl in
plain view just on the other side of the river.
The Marines' work up here is different-defensive rather
than offensive, with Kilo's platoons under the operational control
of the Army's Special Forces. For eight days at a time, combined
squads of Marines and Afghans man dangerous outposts on top of
nearby mountains that are reachable only by helicopter. Daily
squad-sized security patrols trace the hills overlooking the main
compound. In the cave-pocked valleys along the border, small Special
Operations teams are frequently inserted by helicopter, conducting
long range patrols in search of al-Qaeda and other terrorists' base
camps.
To reach this distant outpost, we hitch a ride in an Army
CH-47 Chinook helicopter whose missions for the day include
delivering resupply loads. As we fly, Apache helicopters constantly
cover our flanks. The many-houred journey from Bagram is routine for
these highly skilled pilots, who on the trip must negotiate a
foglike sandstorm through hazardous mountain passes and drop off
large loads by hovering at the edge of sharp terrain that leaves no
room for error.
Journey's end
And here, in the shadow of the Pakistani border at the far edge of
Afghanistan, we finally link up with Corporal Ramirez. Dripping
sweat, he breaks from a working party when our helicopter arrives,
greeting Jim and me with a handshake and a quick embrace before
getting back to work. My son later joins his squad on a combat
patrol up into the steep mountains. Then, as night falls, we talk
for more than an hour of home and of Afghanistan. The seductive
quiet of the mountains, where al-Qaeda's forces watch, listen and
hide, can be deceptive. Shortly before our arrival, a three-man
patrol repeated an earlier route and was quickly wiped out as it
stepped down a ridgeline into a ravine. The platoon is still haunted
by the bravery of the patrol's radio operator, a 19-year-old
Tennessean who fought the attackers to his death, giving up his
radio only when they cracked his forearm on a rock to pry it out of
his hand.
The message for Corporal Ramirez, carried so many thousands
of miles by my son, is a letter from my daughter, Sarah. I have no
need to read it to know the gist of what she said. This is the
second time that Corporal Ramirez has deployed to Afghanistan in
little more than a year. I have seen her struggle with the pain of
these separations-forgoing normal college rituals, forcing herself
to learn more about this proud oddity called the Marine Corps and
this remote country that has the potential to so drastically alter
her life. I have listened on the phone as her calmness descended
into sudden tears when asking about news of casualties. Two days
before my trip, I watched her celebrate her 21st birthday, an
evening of forced gaiety with one glaring, remembered absence.
And yet, saying good-bye to Jose the next morning as a
Black Hawk helicopter swoops in to take us back to Bagram, I know
something else-that he and I, and so many others, cannot allow
ourselves to feel unique in these emotions. Indeed, they are being
repeated a hundred thousand rimes over, every day, among those who
have been sent into harm's way. My only wish is that the rest of
America might somehow comprehend their depth and their
intensity.
UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS