GIs Battle 'Ghosts' in Afghanistan

The U.S. soldiers would search for weapons caches, set up an ambush and wait. "If we find the caches," Harkins said, "we've found the enemy. Then they come to us."

'A Little Hunting'

"Hey, fellas, everything okay?"

It was 6 a.m. on Saturday and Fetterman was checking on the mood of his troops gathering on the tarmac at Bagram. Each was wearing body armor, 60 to 80 pounds of gear and a heavy helmet covered with burlap and green ribbon for camouflage they call "iron hair." Armed with M-4 assault rifles and 9mm handguns, they also carried night-vision goggles, knives, binoculars, canteens and some smoke grenades.

"We're going to have some fun," Fetterman told them. "Maybe do a little hunting. Just listen to your NCOs [noncommissioned officers] and we'll all be back here slapping high fives in two, three days."

Piling onto three CH-47 Chinook helicopters, the soldiers appeared impossibly young. Some had been reading "Harry Potter" novels in their tents just the day before. Yet they betrayed no hint of fear. As the choppers lifted off at 7:08 a.m. and headed south, many drifted off to sleep. Most knew better than to look out the windows to see how the choppers appeared to be flying straight into cliffs. Still, the ground-hugging, roller-coaster flight would take its toll: Two vomited.

After a 55-minute flight, the three choppers settled down one by one in a flat, rocky area at the base of a mountain and unloaded. Fetterman had been irked that he was not provided an escort by AH-64 Apache attack helicopters, and now he was doubly annoyed to discover that the Special Forces and Afghan soldiers who were supposed to meet him had gone to a wrong landing zone.

"This is typical," he groused.

Eventually, the Special Forces escorts showed up and provided trucks to take the soldiers to the areas where they would operate. They started in a southern area designated Texas and began marching toward a small compound of mud buildings flying the Afghan flag. It was not yet noon, but the sun was already scorching. By the end of the day, Harkins's thermometer read 126 degrees, some of the battalion's equipment had melted and three days' supply of water was gone.

"Get that gun up and trained on that vehicle up there!" a soldier shouted as they approached the mud building. Several men were jumping into a white pickup truck near the building and getting ready to leave. The Special Forces troops ran to intercept it; the men turned out to be aid workers from UNICEF.

They had no more luck inside the compound. The Afghan men herded the women and children outside and made them wait under a tree while the soldiers searched. No weapons, no indications of enemy presence. Not far away, another squad found four caves but they too were empty of everything but trash and animal dung.

"Damn it! Nothing here," Fetterman exclaimed. "We'll come back one more time in the morning just in case he thinks it's safe."

'Good Work'

A family walked by, oblivious to the U.S. force, a man in a white shalwar kameez, a woman balancing a red sack on her head and a small boy in yellow. The American soldiers stared as if they had never seen Afghans before, and, in fact, they had not. Locked in their bases in Bagram or Kandahar, most U.S. infantrymen fighting the war have had no real interaction with the local population. And so all appeared potentially hostile.

"I feel like I'm on a safari," one soldier said as their truck rumbled down the desert road.

Sitting under a tree a little later, eating a Meal Ready to Eat (MRE), the unit's chief NCO, Sgt. Maj. Jim Smith, spotted a group of shepherds in the distance. "There was a bunch of Habibs over there a few minutes ago," he said, using the soldiers' name for Afghans. "I bet I could take down four with my M-4 and two more with my 9 millimeter before they could chamber a round. What do you think?"