Marine Special Operations Fox Co cont.
The Next Part: The Attack, The Slaughter, and the Beginning of a Cover Up
I’m watching out the front of the truck and I see this blue van swerve into the Humvee in front of me and detonate into a gigantic fireball. A massive fireball without much punch to it like I came to expect with high explosive IED’s and detonations. Those have a concussive wave that just hits you like a wallop to the chest; this one not so much.
The convoy came to an immediate stop and everyone in our truck was on alert and looking for anything and everything that could come at us next. When the smoke cleared ahead I could see the Marines in the turret and the back of the Humvee ahead of us stirring about, and then they just started unloading and awesome stream of automatic and semiautomatic fire into something to the left of the convoy, adjacent to them. My view was blocked.
There was a string of buildings and huts along the road that comprised the Bati Kot market to the left of where I was sitting. To the right of our truck was a down slope into a housing area, and then a hill rose gradually behind it. Up in front of us where the 2nd Humvee was sitting, the row of buildings had ended and a dirt road went off to the left, out of my view. Just beyond that in front of them, if I recall correctly, was a dry riverbed. Things began happening rapidly. The Platoon Commander sitting in front of me was calling over the radio trying to talk to the Marines ahead of us on one radio, trying to reach headquarters over Satcom on another, and ultimately just trying to figure out what the heck just happened and what was going on currently. The turret gunner in our truck started traversing around, looking for a target but not finding any. I saw a local woman running across the road, away from the market, and took off down the embankment towards the housing area.
Eventually the Platoon Commander figured out he wasn’t reaching headquarters over Satcom because of our IED jammer that was located in the trunk area of the Humvee, directly behind my seat. It fell on me to climb back into the trunk to turn it off. With the flip of the switch, we were back in contact with the outside world. I got back into my seat and regained my head-swivel composure in search of anything that could be a threat or a target. I never found one. Neither did our turret gunner who never once fired a shot. Neither did any gunner in any truck behind us. There was nothing to shoot at, there were no attackers, there was no ambush.
The shooting ahead had ceased and the order was given to RTB (return to base). We slowly inched forward and headed west and we passed the once-blue van that was still a blaze in the middle of the road. Once we cleared the van we came to the end of the row of buildings that had been blocking my view to the south and I could finally see what the Marines in the 2nd Humvee had been shooting at. There sat a grey SUV on the dirt road that had been approaching the highway. It was riddled in bullet holes from top to bottom. Four men were either sitting or hanging out of it lifelessly. I saw four men – all military aged, I saw a Swiss-cheesed SUV, I saw no weapons.
Now, before you get all uptight with me and start in with the bleeding heart accusations – I certainly have a place inside me that can justify what just happened to them. That’s not really the part of the story I have a beef with. Sure, it tweaks me that I didn’t see any small arms weapons but anyone who had been in that business of hunting the “bad guys” over there knows that small arms aren’t their most effective weapon. Propaganda is. A man who blows himself up while attacking his enemies isn’t worth much at all if there isn’t a propaganda video of it to show proof, accompanied by some emotionally charged background music. Minimally, such an attack would at least require eye witness testimony to their following. They would have a hard time recruiting more suicide attackers if they couldn’t prove how great for the cause it was.
Why does any of that matter? I firmly believe those four dead men were connected to the attack in some way. It was a common tactic both in Iraq and in Afghanistan. You have witnesses who record the attack and provide witness to the efforts against the Great Satan. We caught them often enough but there was never any evidence to press them with. We knew it in our gut, we had plenty of source reporting on the tactic, and under highly-scrutinized interrogation the answers you usually got were “we’re students coming to/from university.”
Unfortunately, we were more of a police force than a warfighting effort so we knew without hard evidence or an admission of guilt they would be set free within 3-14 days. Under the highly-scrutinized interrogations we performed, our hands were practically tied behind our backs. That’s the insanity we dealt with over there. We’re saying “Here’s a guy who is going to kill Americans at the first opportunity. He doesn’t wear a uniform. He doesn’t operate under any recognized flag or fighting force. He denies his actions. He hides among civilian populations, and we can’t eliminate him because of some misapplied, skewed interpretation of the Geneva Conventions and Law of Land Warfare.
I’m not losing any sleep over those four dead men in that SUV. There’s not a shred of doubt in my mind that they were connected to what just happened, I would have just preferred them to openly carry weapons so they could die like men. No, not that; it was all the people who died afterward and the cover-up of those deaths that destroyed my faith in humanity, the Marine Corps, and the purpose of the United States in the world.
The sheer audacity the gears of justice within the United States displayed to cling to the wobbliest justifications and outright fabrication of the facts to excuse away what amounted to mass murder is truly eye opening. President Obama’s preacher Jeremiah Wright so famously offered during a sermon that “America's Chickens are coming home to roost.” I can see it today. I can see our path of death and destruction that brings us to what we’re experiencing today.
We cleared what we call the “X,” or the point of attack, and continued heading west to our base in Jalalabad. We were all still pretty tuned up and looking for continuance of an attack, but we found none. No one was shooting at us, there were no RPG’s coming at us, no mortars or indirect weapons. No waves of Taliban fighters coming down the hills or up over the berms and out of the riverbed. Nothing. No one. Just us and the cars on the road. There never had been. Consistent with our information reporting, it was a lone suicide IED attack of a rudimental explosive made with little effort. Possibly some dead religious fanatics who wanted to bear witness to the event. The whole thing could have been prevented had the political cowards in NATO approved our target package. Matter of fact, it was probably us submitting the target package which led to the attacker stepping up his time scale due to some insider information from Kabul.
Just as soon as we got up to highway speed heading west, the Marines in the Humvee in front of us started shooting at oncoming traffic. I didn’t really know what to think of it at first, I guess I figured they were shooting warning shots at oncoming traffic to get them to pull over and give us right-of-way. Then I started seeing them actually shoot cars that weren’t pulling over. I saw them shooting into windshields and the telltale glass ‘mist’ that sprays up when you shoot windshields. Holes through hoods, holes through roofs of cars.
They were shooting any and every car that wouldn’t pull over to the side of the road. Both the turret gunner and the Marine in the back of the Humvee were letting loose. Then, cars started rolling past our truck and I could see more clearly. I could see people shot in the seats. Kids in the backseat, dead. Men slumped over the steering wheel and the car still rolling along. Then I saw a car careening off the road and down the embankment, out of control. I was in shock at what I was witnessing. I leaned up to the Platoon Commander in front of me and I said, “Sir, you should probably tell them to cease fire.” A few seconds later he keyed up the radio headset and repeated that across the net.
We didn’t stop and render aid. We didn’t assess the situation. Two Marines slaughtered those men, women, and kids and we kept going. We just shot them up and hauled ass like some gutless, soulless gangbangers leaving the scene of a crime. Nothing we did in these moments said “within the highest traditions of the Marine Corps and United States Naval Service.” The rest of the ride back was extremely silent. No radio chatter, no conversations in the truck, just silence and the sound of the engine.
When we got back to Jalalabad the cover-up began immediately. I think I sucked down a half pack of cigarettes in the staging area while the Platoon Sergeant for 1stPlatoon gathered his Marines up and eventually quarantined them in their platoon area, privately. I didn’t know what to do. I gave my Team Leader, Mr.Gung-ho Recon Wannabe, the cliff notes version of what happened, and I just tried to find some quiet space to sort things out. For the next couple days the Platoon guys really kept to themselves and no one was talking about what happened, almost as if it had been decreed as off-limits.
We got word someone important was coming to the FOB to do an initial inquiry into what happened. At some point before he arrived I had a phone conversation with my girlfriend and I told her some really bad stuff had happened and I was pretty upset about it. Immediately she asked me, almost accusatory, possibly accusatory, if I “had anything to do with killing those women and kids.” My heart sank. I knew then what I had to do and it wasn’t going to be easy or popular; it might even cost me my life.
Now if you think the story is bad, unbelievable, disheartening, or even evil, just wait till you start reading about the coverup and the official narrative. Well, if you’ve ever read up on this story then you know what the official narrative is: “A complex attack with explosives and small arms fire with an ambush element….” Lie. Lie. Lie. How did we get to that narrative though? Talk about living a nightmare
To be continued…