In my last column, I told you about Marine Lance Cpl. Nick Mitchel and how, in 2010, he shipped with his infantry unit to Afghanistan with dreams of earning the coveted Combat Action Ribbon. He wanted to be an all-American badass Marine. He earned the ribbon on his first day in the war, but quickly learned, with the brutal deaths of some of his fellow Marines, that war is hell. Many more hard lessons would follow. Some things cannot be unseen.
“It was pretty brutal. I was already checked out,” Mitchel said.
They had firefights on four patrols a week. The patrol base often took fire. It was a daily occurrence to see Marines in the physical training uniforms in which they slept, scrambling to the wall to answer enemy fire with M203 40mm grenade rounds.
“I didn’t care anymore. Everything I thought about war being romantic, all the pomp and circumstance … I came back down to earth,” he added.
It seemed impossible that Mitchel could make it through another 6 months.
On one mission, his squad was dismounted, pushing through a town. Nothing could be more dangerous. Afghans love walls. Every property is a compound surrounded by high, thick walls. The enemy has thousands of excellent firing positions in any Afghan village. Mitchel’s squad was sent to clear a conspicuously empty open-air market. The Taliban had done a poor job of concealing a trigger wire on an enormous IED. The beast consisted of 19 pieces of heavy unexploded ordnance wired together. While Explosive Ordnance Disposal worked to disarm the IED, Mitchel’s squad pulled security on the flank.
There was a nasty sniper in the area. For two days, he had been taking accurate random shots. On the third day, as the sun was going down, the Marines thought they had the sniper’s location zeroed. After the next shot, they unloaded: M4 rifle 5.56mm rounds, M240 7.62mm machine gun rounds, M203 40mm grenades, Mk 153 Shoulder-Launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon (SMAW) 83mm rockets. Hell hath no fury like a squad of pissed-off Marines.
There were no more sniper shots. The Marines were pleased. Then they heard the horrific screams. But not the death screams of a fighting-age man. It was the horror shriek of women and children in agony. An old man emerged from the compound, splattered in blood. A grandmother with shrapnel in her face carried a baby wounded the same way. With a wheelbarrow, the old man began hauling out the bodies of the members of his family the Marines had killed. A girl had been shot through the head, her brains sliding out. A dead boy, maybe 4 years old, with one of his legs blown off at the knee, was dropped in front of Mitchel.
For days ahead of the operation, civilians were warned to leave the area. Why had this family remained? Maybe they had nowhere else to go. That Taliban bastard had forced the family to let him fire from their house, and they paid with their lives. The Marines stared at this terrible thing they had been forced to do.
The old Afghan man wiped blood from his face and yelled at the Marines through an interpreter, “You just killed my family!”
A civil affairs Marine paid the man $20,000 for the loss of his loved ones.
“We’re sorry,” the Marine said helplessly.
AMERICA HAS BETRAYED AFGHAN ALLIES WHO FOUGHT BESIDE ME
What words are possibly sufficient in such a circumstance? What payment could ever be enough?
Mitchel had a hard time telling me this part of his story, and with some sad Afghanistan War experience of my own, I suspect it’s because the sight of those dead civilians is burned into his memory forever. War is especially replete with nightmare images that cannot be unseen. It was only the second month of Mitchel’s time in Afghanistan. He had five long months to go.
Trent Reedy, author of several books including Enduring Freedom, served as a combat engineer in the Iowa National Guard from 1999 to 2005, including a tour of duty in Afghanistan.
*Some names and call signs in this story may have been changed due to operational security or privacy concerns.