Battle in "the Evilest Place"

By Tim McGirk/Shkin

The American soldiers at the Shkin firebase in Afghanistan live precariously on the front line, a target for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters who launch frequent strikes from camps in nearby Pakistan. This border area is an unforgiving landscape of rocky hills and scrub pines where the enemy can nestle into position at close range while remaining invisible. When the soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division venture out in humvee patrols along dusty tracks they have dubbed Chevy, Pontiac and Camaro, they know how easily a hunter can become prey. As U.S. Army Colonel Rodney Davis puts it, "Shkin is the evilest place in Afghanistan."

The fighting in Afghanistan may have slipped below the radar of most Americans back home, but for the soldiers on the ground things appear to be getting worse. Attacks on the Americans and their Afghan allies are increasing. The enemy is becoming better organized and better armed. Despite the presence of 8,500 U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the influence of al-Qaeda and the Taliban is spreading. A new U.N. security report reckons that one-third of the country is too dangerous for aid distribution.

Just ask the boys at the Shkin firebase. On Sept. 29, two platoons from the 1st Battalion, 87th Regiment, 10th Mountain Division found themselves locked in a 12-hour battle against a few dozen al-Qaeda and Taliban guerrillas. It was the fiercest combat U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan have seen in more than 18 months and an extreme test of valor under fire. An American was killed by a sniper; quick thinking by U.S. soldiers averted many more deaths. "Most of us feel this strange mixture of sorrow and exhilaration," says Major Paul Wille. "It was the perfect fight."

In this battle, victory went to the U.S. forces. But it seems evident that the enemy is growing bigger and bolder. "During the jihad against the Soviets, the fighters were crossing over in threes and fours," says a European diplomat in Kabul, referring to the long guerrilla struggle that finally drove the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in 1989. Now, says the diplomat, who has access to intelligence reports, "they are coming across in hundreds." The U.N. Security Council met in closed consultations late last week to discuss the situation in Afghanistan. "It is really very bad, much worse than Iraq," says a senior ambassador who took part. He fears the country could devolve into a lawless free-for-all, with international troops caught in the middle.

Just two miles from Pakistan's border, the Shkin firebase acts as a choke point on fighters coming out of the mountains. The 300 men at the fort have a single mission: to hunt down the enemy. They are equipped with artillery, fleets of armored humvees and a communications network that lets them call in air strikes within minutes. These days they focus too on how not to offend local sensibilities, no longer searching veiled women, for example. ("But if I find an Afghan woman who is 6 ft. 5 in."--Osama bin Laden's height--"I'm sure as hell going to have her searched," says Sergeant Vernon Story.) Soldiers are also learning to be more wary regarding tips about al-Qaeda suspects; the U.S. has often been duped into taking sides in tribal feuds.

Lately, however, the problem has been an absence of intelligence and precious few leads about the whereabouts of bin Laden or his comrades. That may be because the Taliban, which controlled Afghanistan and gave comfort to al-Qaeda before the U.S. invaded, is regrouping. "The tribal chiefs are hedging their bets," says an adviser to Afghan President Hamid Karzai. "They know that when the American soldiers leave their village, the Taliban will steal back to take revenge." A few miles north of Shkin, in a dusty bazaar known as Bormol, gunmen dragged a pro-American police chief and seven of his officers out into the marketplace this summer and slit their throats. In these U.S. outposts, the Army can do little but wait until the enemy strikes first.

The U.S. firebase looks like a Wild West cavalry fort, ringed with coils of razor wire. A U.S. flag ripples above the 3-ft.-thick mud walls, and in the watchtower a guard scans the expanse of forested ridges, rising to 9,000 ft., that mark the border. When there's trouble, it usually comes from that direction, which is exactly what happened early in the morning of Sept. 29.

It was supposed to be a day off for the 1st Platoon. Some of the 300 men at Shkin are watching TV in the fort mess hall, chowing down on grits and eggs. A few are lifting weights. Specialist Richard Solloway is grumbling to anyone who will listen that Hugh Hefner turned down Solloway's request for the platoon to tour the Playboy Mansion on the next home leave.

The 2nd Platoon is out on patrol, moving through the draws and brush-covered hills along the border. Armored humvees with gunners inside are parked on the ridges, while the infantrymen below stalk through the wadis, or dry streambeds. One soldier thinks his buddy is playing a joke, hitting him in the back with a rock. But it's shrapnel. Suddenly mortar rounds are screaming in, landing all around the Americans. Sergeant David Gilstrap is bleeding; he has been hit in the face. A jagged dart of shrapnel protrudes from Specialist Robert Heiber's arm. It hurts like fire, but Heiber mostly feels anger. He uses his Leatherman pliers to yank out the shrapnel and keeps on firing. When a medic tries to take Heiber back with Gilstrap to the firebase for treatment, Heiber refuses. He is a sniper and has spotted a curl of smoke from al-Qaeda mortar tubes above a rock gallery, some 600 yds. away.

Solloway's daydreams about Playboy bunnies are shattered when a humvee roars up to the firebase, and Gilstrap is pulled out. "I wanted to get those sons of bitches," says Solloway. His chance would come. The enemy usually retreats after firing off a few rounds. But this time the barrage holds steady, coming from several directions. That morning, radio surveillance picked up voices in Arabic--a sign that al-Qaeda was taking charge of the assault, according to Major Wille.

The reinforcements scramble into place. Solloway and other 1st Platoon men toss on their combat gear and are quickly bucking along the Chevy track in their humvees. The platoon heads to a hilltop overlooking the ridges that's wide enough for the humvees and, if needed, for a medevac helicopter to land. The hilltop also has a clean firing line. The vehicles pull up, and company commander Captain Ryan Worthan fans his men out into the scrub pines and along the wadis, to stalk the enemy. In one wadi, Sergeant Christopher McGurk sees footprints and the remains of a fire. He makes a decision that, in the end, probably saves 20 lives: sensing an ambush, he orders his men to advance parallel to the footprints along a nearby hill. Had they remained in the wadi, they would have blundered straight into the enemy's gunsights.

In the dirt his men find a long, half-buried wire. It leads in one direction to where the humvees are parked, and in the other, up a rough slope. Sergeant Allen Grenz begins following the wire. As he crests the hill, Grenz spots a rustle in underbrush. Crouched under a pine are three enemy fighters. It clicks in Grenz's brain that the wire, a blast cable, is leading straight up to the enemy. (Later the soldiers find that the wire was set to detonate five antitank mines buried under the humvees.) Grenz quickly absorbs the danger: one of the fighters is holding a detonator. Another is poised to hurl a grenade, and a third is leveling his weapon at Grenz. In the space of one, maybe two, seconds, Grenz squeezes off three shots with his M-16 rifle. He nails the first man in the forehead, the second in the right eye, the third in the stomach.

Suddenly, a northern ridge on the Pakistani side erupts in gunfire. Then from the south, inexplicably, a Pakistani militia unit occupying a border outpost on the hillside unleashes five rocket-propelled grenades at Grenz and his men. The Pakistanis are supposed to be helping the Americans. It's something the Americans will puzzle over later, when the fighting stops. "There were about 20 muzzle fires on the northern ridge," Captain Craig Mullaney later recalls. One was a sniper, who, from a distance of 600 yds., hits Private First Class Evan O'Neill, 19, twice precisely below his flak jacket, shearing a main artery. A third shot hits O'Neill as his buddies are dragging him behind a tree. Braving machine-gun and rocket fire, medic Christopher Couchot administers first aid and then helps carry O'Neill up the hillside to the humvees. A Black Hawk medevac helicopter circles but is driven away by gunfire. O'Neill, a self-mocking kid from Haverhill, Mass., who could make everybody in his platoon laugh, slips into a coma and dies.

By now, Captain Worthan can locate the enemy on the north, east and south sides of the ridge, just inside the border. U.S. spotters target at least 30 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Worthan, while dodging sniper fire behind a boulder, orders up the full wrath of several Apache attack helicopters and an A-10 Warthog gunship. "The whole ridge was ripped up," Worthan later recalls. "It was like time stopped." The Americans estimate that more than 20 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were killed.

After the fighting, back inside the Shkin fort, the men collapse from fatigue inside their windowless hooches. Wille, the brawny, red-haired, soft-spoken major, visits his wounded men. Then he and Worthan review the battle. "The enemy did a good job anticipating what we'd do," Wille says. "They wanted us to take casualties and bring in a helicopter so they could shoot it down."

The big mystery is why the Pakistani militiamen fired on the Americans. And why the Pakistanis didn't do anything about the al-Qaeda gunners in plain view just a few hundred yards below the border post. After all, President Pervez Musharraf is an avowed ally in the Bush Administration's war on terrorism, and Pakistan has helped fill Guantanamo's jails with hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects. On the ground, however, the loyalty of Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officers is questionable. Afghan officials in Kabul claim that some military officers from Pakistan, which backed the Taliban prior to 9/11, are providing funds, arms and sanctuary to help the Taliban regroup. The goal: to keep Afghanistan neatly tethered to Pakistan.

Washington later complained to Islamabad about the firing at Shkin. Days later, an elite troop of Pakistani forces attacked several al-Qaeda safe houses across the border from the U.S. firebase. Eight al-Qaeda fighters were killed--including some Chechens and Arabs--and 18 were captured, according to Pakistani officials.

Despite Pakistan's counterattack, the U.S. soldiers brace themselves for further assaults. They complain that Afghanistan has become a forgotten war. "Back home, nobody knows what's going on over here, how bad it is," says one. On a patrol through a hilly danger zone known as Saturn, where two soldiers were killed in an ambush early this year, the Americans are vigilant. A humvee driver scans the track for hidden explosive devices, while his top gunner trains his eye on a forested slope. One hand rests on a machine gun, the other on a pistol. "You know," says Sergeant Story, "my boy asked me on the phone, 'How many bad guys are over there, Daddy? You've been gone a long, long time.'" The fact is, this war isn't ending anytime soon.