Walk in My Combat Boots Read online

  We hit the airfield really hot. The back gate drops before the plane even stops, and we haul ass outside.

  The heat is stifling—it’s as if someone covered my face with Saran Wrap—and there’s dust everywhere, the plane kicking it up from the old and barely used airfield. I have no idea where the enemy is, what they have planned for us.

  They’re not in the airfield tower. We clear it within minutes. We set up a perimeter and then begin to clear the rest of the airfield.

  I don’t know much about the history of Somalia, so I’m surprised to discover, inside the old barracks, that the Russians had been here at one point. They left recruiting posters hanging on the walls, filing cabinets.

  Only their stuff is still here. No people.

  The airfield secured, we set up our leadership command post. Captain Flowers puts out the order to get American flags on the buildings.

  “Sergeant,” he tells me, “I want you and your scout teams doing roving patrols outside this air base.”

  I’ve endured four years of some of the hardest, most grueling training, and it’s all been preparation for this moment: going out and looking for the bad guy.

  Wally World is ten klicks away. We slowly make our way through the high desert scrub. We don’t have any solid intel. We don’t know if the enemy is setting up on us or if they’re waiting for us. I’ve got guys that are locked and loaded with live ammo for the first time in their lives, and we’re expecting contact at any moment.

  We don’t encounter a single soul along the way.

  We reach Wally World, undetected, and start our recon.

  Almost immediately I notice that all the women are working—and I mean doing everything.

  The men are armed. Not just a handful but, like, every single one of them. It doesn’t seem right, seeing them all walking around smoking Sportsman cigarettes and carrying AK-47s, and there’s no way to tell the bad guys from the good guys. The village is small, but it has stores, and I don’t see a single person who is starving. One Somali woman, large and overweight, is carrying a basket on her head. It’s full of bread. The whole thing is surreal to me, just surreal.

  The Marine Corps arrives two days later. They secure the airfield and relieve us. We’re getting pushed over to this coastal town called Merca. It’s a port city, like Mogadishu, and the aid shipments being sent by Oxfam and other independent charitable organizations—things like flour, grain, cooking oil, and little boxes of Kilimanjaro water—are being raided by powerful clans. They’re controlling the country by holding the food hostage. Our mission now is to secure the city and the food shipments and get rid of the bandits and drive them out of Merca.

  On our way to the city, we take on fire—errant shots, but still, guys are shooting at us. I’m jacked with adrenaline, super focused and alert. This isn’t a training exercise; this is the real deal.

  Game on.

  I’ve been told there’s a sweet spot where you’re able to perform your job while also being able to think clearly and make good, solid decisions. That’s the place I find myself in right now as I engage the enemy.

  By the time we reach the city, which is covered in clan graffiti, we’re all geeked up. We take on fire again—this time from Somalis in concealed positions—as we seize the port.

  That’s our job for the next two months: defend the ports and defend the convoys so they can get the aid into the smaller cities where there are people who are really starving. These warring clans are starving these people to death.

  Near the end of February, Flowers comes to me with new orders. “We’re heading down to a place south of here called Kismayo. Colonel Jess is head of one clan, Colonel Morgan the other. They were both trained by the US, back when the country had an actual government and was a strategic location. We trained a lot of them then.”

  Big archways greet us on our way into Kismayo. I can tell they were probably beautiful at one time, but now they’re in near ruin, pockmarked with bullet holes.

  No contact on arrival, though Flowers told me that Bravo Company had been ambushed here the week before. We get to work and declare martial law, send everyone home by 10:00 p.m. to keep these clans from battling it out on the streets. It’s a fairly big city, so we have to use a lot of patrols to enforce the curfew.

  The terrain is going to make our job tricky. The city isn’t a perfect grid. You have a couple of major roads, but mostly a maze of alleyways that run between huts, some of which have compounds around them. You can get lost very easily, and there’s not a lot of room to maneuver in the event we get attacked. We break the city down into sectors.

  Captain Flowers wakes me up my third night in Kismayo. He’s all smiles.

  “Got an intel brief on Morgan and Jess,” he says. “The two clans have agreed on a temporary truce to come together and fight us. They’re going to hit our compound tonight. We’re going to find them and hit them first.”

  I’m up and on my feet.

  “All right, Sarge,” he says, “we’re gonna see what your boys are made of. We’ll break down into teams. I’m gonna take half your sections, you’re gonna take the other half, and we’re gonna go out and find some bad guys.”

  Flowers is a warrior, a born fighter and leader. I just love the guy, and like so many others, I find the man inspirational. I want to please him.

  Flowers leads us to the sector he wants to clear. He takes one of my sections. I take the other half, about six men each. We’re making our way through the night-black alleys, trying to parallel each other in case something goes down, when I hear his section light up.

  In that environment, gunshots are loud as hell. The gunfire stops by the time I rendezvous with Flowers.

  “What’s going on, sir?”

  “Made contact,” he says. “Engaged two guys, ran right into them—I mean face-to-face. One guy got away. We’re going after this one.” He points to a trail of blood.

  We follow it to a residence.

  “Our bad guy’s in here,” Flowers says. “Everyone: set up.”

  We get the home surrounded very tactfully, very stealthily. Flowers radios in our coordinates and location while I’m kneeling down, a gun pointed at the front door. He comes over to me and says, “Hey, Sarge, you ain’t got that building cleared yet?”

  “I didn’t know what we were doing, sir. You want me to clear it?”

  “Yeah. Let’s clear it.”

  I take Kevin Smith, one of the guys from my old scout platoon, with me. We’re crammed into this little area that can’t be more than five meters in diameter. The door is to my twelve; Smith and a couple of other guys are at my two and four; and Flowers, my seven, is at my due left.

  This door isn’t like the ones back home. It’s about the same size but it’s cut down the middle so you can open one half or the other. I kick it as hard as I can and hear it splinter.

  The guy in there lights it up. I see a muzzle flash.

  Start to fall backward.

  Start shooting as Captain Flowers, to my left, charges his weapon.

  I’ve got thirty rounds in the magazine, a full combat load. By the time I hit the ground I’ve put the butt of my weapon right into the center of my chest and I’m firing off as many rounds as I can into the doorway. Everyone is around me lighting it up, too, except Kevin Smith. He grabs me by the flak vest and pulls me out and through our guys who are firing and firing.

  I’m lying on my back, thinking about the muzzle flash, how close it was, when Flowers orders a cease-fire. I barely hear him say it. My ears are ringing from all the gunshots. I hear someone nearby yelling for a medevac.

  I’m hit. Oh, my God, I’m hit.

  Only I don’t feel like I’ve been shot.

  Holy shit, am I already dead?

  Kevin is kneeling next to me, working on removing my vest.

  “I feel good,” I tell him. “Nothing hurts.”

  “That’s the adrenaline.”

  I’ve taken a round in the chest. The shooter was right there;
I could’ve touched that muzzle blast. There’s no way he missed—and I’m wearing a really old vest. Those vests don’t stop anything.

  Kevin rips open my shirt.

  Freezes.

  “Shit,” he says.

  “How bad is it? Tell me.”

  Kevin looks at me. His face is pale. It must be bad.

  “You’re fine,” he says. “You’re fine,” he says again, like he can’t believe it.

  I can’t believe it. I touch my chest and feel skin—solid skin. No gunshot wound. It has to be there, I tell myself, and keep checking my body. The guy was less than five feet away and I saw the muzzle flash. There’s no way he could have missed.

  But he did. He did miss.

  Flowers and his section have finished clearing the house. They come out with the shooter. Our interpreter talks to him first, then to us.

  “He says he’s not a bandit—he’s not a bad guy. He didn’t know who you guys were.”

  But I’m not really listening or caring because I’m staring at the shooter. The guy doesn’t have a scratch on him.

  How I missed him—how we missed him—I don’t know. It’s unbelievable. We were the same distance apart.

  Flowers thinks the guy dumped into a corner. Probably wasn’t his first battle, probably not his first firefight, probably not the first time he shot at somebody. He probably dumped into a corner and waited for us to finish lighting it up.

  “The compound is big, with these little rooms,” Flowers tells me. He seems unfazed by everything that just went down.

  Inside we find weapons—and women and children.

  Nobody got shot.

  Later that night, we go back to our command post—an old schoolhouse. I sit on my cot, still geeked up, trying to figure out how that guy missed me. I keep turning it over in my head, and I can’t come up with an answer.

  Flowers comes into the room. He still seems unfazed. This was his first combat deployment, and nothing seems to bother the guy.

  That’s why he’s a warrior.

  “Boys,” he says, pointing at me. “That’s the luckiest man in Somalia right there.”

  He’s right—I am lucky to be alive—but hearing him say it—hearing someone say the words out loud, maybe—wakes up something in me. Wakes me up to life. I’m the luckiest man in Somalia. I’m not gonna die in this country. I just got a second chance at life—and I’ve got a lot more to do in my life than this. It’s really profound, this feeling, and it stays with me for a long, long time.

  JASON BURKE

  Jason Burke grew up in Philadelphia and served as an officer in the Navy. He retired, in 2013, as a Navy captain. During his last tour, he was stationed at the Naval War College as an associate professor of national security affairs. His grandfather served in the Army and fought in World War I.

  The governor of Ghazni Province lives in a compound secured by wire fencing and armed guards that constantly patrol the area, day and night, on the lookout for attacks from the Taliban—who live right here in the city. When I step inside the man’s home and see chairs, lights, and walls, an actual floor, I feel as though I’ve stepped through a portal, back into the modern world.

  I’ve spent my day traveling the rural areas, along with my savvy interpreter, speaking to Afghan tribal leaders and elders about the US-backed construction projects—everything from a thirty-million-dollar paved road to smaller but equally critical projects like women’s literacy programs and building more chicken coops. As part of the counterinsurgency mission, I need to secure the leaders’ support so their people will assist in helping rebuild their country.

  Our western culture is based on municipalities and local and national government. Here, in the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan, government is very low on their list, if it’s on their list at all. Living their lives as Muslims is their top priority. After religion, they have family, their tribe, and then regional tribes.

  When the elders and leaders invite me into their homes, it’s imperative that I show respect. I take off my helmet, body armor, and shoes. In more rural areas, the meetings usually include a small meal. We eat sitting on the floor, sometimes nothing more than hardened dirt covered by a few decorative rugs. The rugs get lined with plastic to protect them from food stains as we pass around bowls of rice and mutton, everyone sticking their ragged hands into the meal. I do that, too, without hesitation.

  This is all profoundly different from my previous career as a naval aviator.

  However, meetings with the governor are “off the floor.” After I wash up, I head to the dining room to eat with him, his staff, and my comrades with the US Army’s maneuver battalion. The governor is a good guy. Solid. He’s also vastly different from the first governor, who lasted only three months. The tribal leaders didn’t like him because he was too secular and wore western-style suits and spoke a little too much English in the rural areas. I liked him because he was easy to work with and he tried to reduce corruption within his constituency. This point made him unpopular with the other Afghan leaders who thought it “okay” to earn “extra” money. Ultimately, he was going to be ineffective with peers and subordinates, and therefore ineffective for our mission in Ghazni Province.

  That’s the other part of my job: trying to reduce corruption. It’s a difficult and, at times, impossible task. Afghanistan in 2008 is like the Wild West—maybe even more primitive. The level of poverty here—people can’t imagine it. In some of these areas, you see groups of kids running around without shoes in forty-degree weather, dirty from head to toe, hair in dreadlocks, snot in their noses. But as a whole, they smiled and played like children anywhere else on the planet. They had hope.

  The maneuver commander, the governor, and I are discussing the strategy for Afghanistan’s upcoming voter registration when the door opens. An Afghan police officer enters, flanked by the governor’s security guards. The officer speaks a few words in either Dari or Pashto, the two local dialects, and then the governor stands.

  “Please excuse me for a moment,” he says to me, and leaves the room.

  Has to be the Taliban, I think. The Taliban are actively disrupting and sabotaging all our projects. Earlier today, they kidnapped a dump truck and the driver of one of our funded health clinic projects. Now they’re holding them for ransom.

  The Taliban has also started booby-trapping the province’s culverts with IEDs. In late winter of 2007, heavy snow on the mountains surrounding Ghazni Province had a very rapid snowmelt, causing the city to flood, killing dozens and washing out many of the dirt and paved roads. Since then, we’ve installed new culverts to prevent the roads from being washed out. The Taliban are intent on destroying them—and anyone who drives over them.

  The governor returns an hour later. He looks troubled.

  “The police have arrested a woman,” he explains. “They found her and a young boy—her adopted son, she told the police—outside the governor’s compound. She says she’s from here, but she speaks neither Dari nor Pashto.”

  “Why was she arrested?”

  “A shopkeeper noticed a woman in a burqa drawing a map and decided to alert the police.”

  I understand the shopkeeper’s suspicions. Pashtun women in Afghanistan rarely travel without a male relative and are largely illiterate.

  “When the police approached her,” the governor says, “they saw her crouching against the ground while holding two shopping bags. They thought she might be hiding a bomb underneath her burqa. Upon further inspection, the local police officer found she was carrying a large quantity of plastic explosives, some powdered poison, and a written manifesto of her hatred for America.”

  His eyes cloud in thought. “The police found a considerable number of handwritten notes listing various US landmarks. They may be potential targets. I need to inform President Karzai.”

  We agree. As we watch the governor call President Karzai on his cell, the battalion commander and I recall a recent report about a woman and a young boy traveling together through Afg
hanistan, trying to recruit women for suicide bombings.

  Could this be the same woman?

  The governor doesn’t need to explain the situation to the president. Karzai has already been informed.

  “Has any harm come to her?” Karzai asks the governor.

  “No.”

  “That is probably a good thing. This woman—Aafia Siddiqui is her name. She’s a terrorist. The American FBI has her on their most-wanted list.”

  And that’s when I make the connection. Aafia Siddiqui, a woman born in Pakistan to a Muslim family, is rumored to be a carrier for Al-Qaeda. She is the only female to have made the FBI’s list of most-wanted terrorists. The CIA, FBI, and Interpol have been actively looking for her—put her on their “kill or capture” list back in 2003. They call her Lady Al-Qaeda.

  Then, as if this were a movie, the office door opens and in comes a group of American guys—bearded, dusty, and stinky. They look like Special Forces, either Delta Force or SEALs. Their lead officer introduces himself, says he’s with the FBI’s counterterrorism team. He has a few documents.

  In the file he shows us there’s a photograph of a young dark-skinned woman with doe eyes, black hair, and an incredibly open, innocent-looking face.

  “Why did she come here, to the compound?” I ask. “Was she going to try to assassinate the governor?”

  The FBI agent shakes his head. “He wasn’t the only target.”

  “Who else was?”

  “The battalion CO and you,” he says.

  I’m still registering his words when he informs us that he’s here to take Siddiqui into custody and fly her back to the US, to stand trial for attempting to kill Americans in Afghanistan. That snaps me back to the present. The battalion CO and I talk for a brief moment.

  “You’ll have her,” the battalion CO says to the FBI agent. “But not right now.”

  The fed shakes his head. “All due respect, this isn’t up for debate. The FBI—”