Combat In Afghanistan

Team Infidel

Forum Spin Doctor
CBS
October 19, 2008

60 Minutes (CBS), 7:45 PM
LARA LOGAN: This past year in Afghanistan was the deadliest yet for American troops. Seven years into this war, US commanders from Kabul to Washington are pleading for more soldiers, exposing an uncomfortable truth: There aren't enough troops on the ground to get the job done. Tonight we're going to tell you about a small group of American soldiers who deal every day with that reality under the worst of circumstances. We lived with them for a month on a small forward operating base in eastern Afghanistan, not far from the Pakistani border. This is where the real fight against America's avowed enemy, al-Qaeda, is happening, in canyon valleys and jagged mountain hideouts which, as we witnessed, are crawling with enemy fighters.
There is a reason the base we traveled to is called "Wilderness," because it's in the middle of nowhere, nothing but desolate mountains stretching endlessly into the distance--until you drop onto this tiny patch of ground not much bigger than a football field in the heart of enemy territory.
Staff Sergeant JAKE SCHLERETH: I thought it was going to be a little bit quieter here, but we landed in a hornet's nest when we got here.
LOGAN: When 27-year-old Staff Sergeant Jake Schlereth and 33-year-old Sergeant 1st Class Anthony Barnes were sent to Afghanistan, they thought the fight was mostly over.
Did either of you think when you landed here that you would be landing in a hornet's nest?
SCHLERETH: No. Not at all. I guess I really didn't know what to expect when I got here. I'd never been here before; I'd only been to Iraq. And you didn't--you didn't hear too much about Afghanistan on the news. It was all about Iraq.
Sergeant 1st Class ANTHONY BARNES: Iraq, yeah.
SCHLERETH: And boy, the...
BARNES: Roles have reversed.
SCHLERETH: Yeah, reversed. And now it's all about here.
LOGAN: It's all about here because the fight in Afghanistan is worse than ever. This tiny base has been hit by rockets and mortars at least 30 times since these soldiers arrived in March, and that's only part of it. Sergeant Barnes, Sergeant Schlereth and their fellow soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division have survived 20 ambushes on their patrols. American casualties are highest here in the east, where they're fighting an Afghan warlord, Jalauddin Haqqani and his son, who are closely allied to al-Qaeda and share al-Qaeda's goal of driving America out of Afghanistan. They've also publicly stated that targeting the base is one of their top priorities.
The base commander, 29-year-old Captain Thomas Kilbride, has seen more combat than any of his soldiers, constantly deployed since 9/11.
Has it changed much, Afghanistan? This is your third time here.
Captain THOMAS KILBRIDE: In regards to enemy activity, I think it's increased.
LOGAN: Their mission here, for one year, is to protect this road, the only direct link between the east and the capital Kabul.
KILBRIDE: The road is the livelihood for everybody. It's a--it's a line that connects the rest of Afghanistan. It's a bloodline, an opportunity for all of Afghanistan to kind of develop.
LOGAN: Part of that development is a planned $122 million project to rebuild the road, paid for by US taxpayers. The enemy doesn't want to see that happen, so Captain Kilbride is unrelenting about going after them. And doing that here means getting up every day to face these mountains, every inch of them enemy territory.
KILBRIDE: Oh...(word censored by station). You good?
LOGAN: Yeah.How bad is this area?
KILBRIDE: It's one of our worst areas. They have the advantage. They know this terrain more than we do.
LOGAN: It often takes eight hours or more of climbing to 10,000 feet--even if they don't find the enemy, just to let them know they're not out of reach.
BARNES: Another day in paradise. No matter how many of these things you climb, this still sucks just as bad.
The first time I did it I thought I was going to die, because I'm from the East Coast, I'm from the South. The highest mountain we got's 5,000 feet.
KILBRIDE: The terrain here will kick your ass. I mean, it's not a joke.I mean, you can feel it in your lungs, feel it--you get that feeling in your chest when you're like, `whew!'
LOGAN: Every day.
KILBRIDE: Every day, yeah.
LOGAN: On this mission, after a steep, at times vertical climb to the top of the mountain to search for a weapons cache, they found nothing.
KILBRIDE: Dry hole. Going to move back down the hill and we continue the mission.
LOGAN: The terrain and the enemy here are relentless.
You never let your guard down?
SCHLERETH: Can't. Security's a must around here. Don't take anything for granted.
BARNES: They catch you slipping, they will definitely make your day hard.
LOGAN: We found that out one night during our visit when an Apache helicopter pilot spotted a suspicious group of armed men.
OFFSCREEN VOICE: Got the RPG launcher in sight.
LOGAN: Captain Kilbride ordered the pilot to engage. That started an intense battle, with Kilbride and his men right in the middle of a more deadly type of warfare here, facing a new breed of al-Qaeda fighter, strengthened by their ability to carry out sophisticated, conventional tactics. As daylight came, the advancing soldiers had no idea they were heading straight into a close fight to the death, the type of close engagement hardly ever seen in this war.
Gunfire suddenly rang out, bullets coming at the soldiers out of nowhere, whizzing just over their heads and hitting the wall behind them.
KILBRIDE: Right now we've got some enemy to the right side of the wadi. We're not exactly sure where.
LOGAN: Machine gunners fired from the humvees to clear the way forward. Captain Kilbride's men tossed hand grenades and moved in after their enemy, pursuing them through thick corn fields.
It wasn't easy moving through those corn fields.
KILBRIDE: No, it wasn't. You start losing, you know, your sense of where everything is.
SCHLERETH: You couldn't see. Just like walking through a forest, you know, thick foliage. You got corn stalks, and they were laying in the prone. And every once in a while, you had to get down on the ground and look and see if they were down there or...
Because you knew they were in there, just--you just couldn't see them.
LOGAN: Somehow, in the midst of all that...
SOLDIER: Hey, I found a bag!
LOGAN: ...a soldier found a camera that would provide valuable intelligence later.
SOLDIER: Looks like a camera.
LOGAN: As 1st Sergeant Eddie Heater led his group of men out of a corn field, they suddenly encountered a hidden fighter.
1st Sergeant EDDIE HEATER: Went over the berm, the insurgent was hiding in a ditch.
LOGAN: That was right there.
HEATER: That he was right beside me.
LOGAN: As we came over that berm, the soldier to my left was shot. Soldiers called out for a medic.
OFFSCREEN VOICE: Medic!
SOLDIER: I need a medic at my location.
SOLDIER: Medic!
LOGAN: What did you do?
HEATER: I immediately, you know, turned and killed the enemy.
HEATER: I got him! Got him!
LOGAN: The gunman was dead, his body slumped in the nook where he'd been laying in wait.
OFFSCREEN VOICE: Enemy has been neutralized.
LOGAN: A young sergeant, Marcus Vasquez, had been shot in the shoulder.
SOLDIER: You're doing good, man. You're going to be out of here before you know it.
SOLDIER: Did you get him?
HEATER: Yeah. Smoked that mother...(word censored by station).
LOGAN: Sergeant Vasquez was lucky. The bullet passed straight through, and he was quickly stabilized. The medevac chopper arrived within minutes, and Vasquez was taken away to one of the main US bases for surgery.
BARNES: That's the day we'll remember. It's the closest fight we've had.
LOGAN: They were pretty well armed.
BARNES: They were pretty well armed. Most of the time when these guys hit, they hit from a position of advantage to them. They don't want to fight you even--on even terms, because they'll lose.
LOGAN: At least 12 enemy fighters were killed that day.
KILBRIDE: We'll pick up all the bodies, take everything that we need off of them, bag and tag them.
LOGAN: And what have you learned about the enemy that you're fighting from, you know, this attack and previous attacks?
KILBRIDE: We're not fighting an inexperienced army.
LOGAN: When Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, the deputy US commander in Afghanistan, arrived at the base shortly after the battle, we pressed him on US claims that the mission is succeeding.
In 2005 I was told the same thing as 2006 and in 2007, `Oh, it's not that the enemy's stronger, it's that we're more successful.'
Major General JEFFREY SCHLOESSER: Well, you know, I'm not telling you that. I'm telling you the enemy did increase from 20 to 30 percent this last year. And you haven't asked yet, but I'll tell you that they are doing more complex activities, which concerns me greatly. So I'm not here to blow smoke up anybody's dress. I'm not.
LOGAN: This video Captain Kilbride's men found in the corn fields shows an unscripted view of the enemy you never see, and it was surprising, from their discipline and organization to their many new weapons. When Captain Kilbride reviewed the tapes right after the battle, he counted over 50 heavily armed fighters in these pictures. The gunmen had also filmed their own attacks and training.
SOLDIER: Anything good?
LOGAN: Then this eerie discovery.
KILBRIDE: This is them showing a unit driving. I don't know if it's us or not.
SOLDIER: Are you serious?
KILBRIDE: Yeah.
LOGAN: The captain found evidence the militants carried out video surveillance of US troops on patrol, possibly even his own men.
You know you're being watched every time you're out there, but here when you see it.
KILBRIDE: Well, seeing, it's interesting, to see where they set up, their vantage point.
LOGAN: Do you think they're watching every time you go out the gate?
KILBRIDE: Oh, yeah.
LOGAN: More and more, the fighters they face are foreigners, General Schloesser told us, coming over the border from Pakistan's tribal areas, where they have sanctuary.
How can you defeat the enemy inside Afghanistan if you have--if you continue to have no access to its base across the border in Pakistan?
SCHLOESSER: Yeah.
LOGAN: That seems like an impossible task.
SCHLOESSER: I think it makes it extraordinarily difficult, there's no doubt in my mind. Americans should know that we defend ourselves and we fire right back inside to Pakistan because it is a threat.
LOGAN: You're right, they do need to know that because it's seven years on.
SCHLOESSER: And they've--we didn't say this fire very much.
LOGAN: Yes.
SCHLOESSER: I'm telling you the truth. We do.
LOGAN: Still, US soldiers are not authorized to operate at will on Pakistani soil.
Would you like to be able to conduct raids across the border?
SCHLOESSER: There's a lot of things I'd like to be able to do in life, Lara, but I'm a professional soldier. After 32 years, I do what is legally permissible under the laws, and so here I am.
LOGAN: But it's got to be frustrating, though. I mean, I know it's frustrating for the soldiers year after year.
SCHLOESSER: It is. There's no doubt. There is no doubt.
LOGAN: The general says he can do something about the fights he sees the enemy planning for the winter, which he predicts will be the most violent yet.
Given that, what you're expecting, how underresourced are you?
SCHLOESSER: I've been very clear that I need more resources, more soldiers and more assets.
LOGAN: Those assets can't come soon enough for Captain Kilbride and his men, as we found out on this mission in search of a reported roadside bomb.
KILBRIDE: We don't really know exactly where it is. It's somewhere in this area. So we're just checking bridges.
LOGAN: They soldiers didn't find it that day. But the morning after we left, a US humvee hit a roadside bomb in that same area. Photographs from the scene show the vehicle was obliterated, killing everyone inside, an Afghan interpreter and four of Kilbride's soldiers. For the captain, seen here putting out the flames moments after the blast, it was the bloodiest day so far.
KILBRIDE: Nothing's easy. It's going to be a long fight. I'm not telling you that it's going to be--it's going to happen tomorrow. I'm not going to tell you it's going to happen next year. But, you know, it might be 12, 15 years from now and we're still in Afghanistan.
LOGAN: How do you see the purpose of your mission here, your presence here?
BARNES: I tell you like I told my daughter when I left. She asked my why was I leaving again. And I told her, I said, `I got to go over there and I'm going to help the good people, I'm going to help their army, and I'm going to try to get, you know, put their bad people away.' And she was, like, `OK.' And that's my goal, to help as many good people as I can help, to get rid of as many bad people as I can get rid of, and to take as many of mine back home with me as I can take.
 
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