bobdina
04-30-2010, 11:30 AM
Volatile Afghan district has soldiers on edge
By Dianna Cahn, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Thursday, April 29, 2010
SABARI DISTRICT, Afghanistan — One minute, soldiers were walking back from a patrol in the nearby village of Nakam. Their outpost was in sight.
"My thought was, ‘Look, we are almost home,’ " said Pfc. Jordan Topai, 19, of Grand Junction, Colo. "The next minute there’s lots of noise. I could feel heat on my neck."
"All I know," said Pfc. Derek Taylor, "I was walking down the street and I turned around to tell my staff sergeant to move to the other side of the road because someone had been digging there. And then they blew it up."
"Boom! He [Taylor] stood there for a second and then he fell in a cloud of dust," said Pfc. Nicholas LaBounty. "We all thought he was dead because we couldn’t see him.
"We were all sure our buddies were annihilated," he added.
Ever since they arrived at Combat Outpost Sabari in eastern Afghanistan’s Khost province on Feb. 10, the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, have been getting blown up.
The soldiers have been through five major attacks and countless minor ones. They earned 12 Purple Hearts and dozens of combat infantry badges in six weeks.
"When we were on our way in [to Afghanistan], we ran into some of the (4th Battalion, 25th Infantry Regiment) that we were replacing and they asked where we were going," recalled LaBounty, 23, of Middlebury, Conn. "We were like, ‘Sabari,’ and they all started laughing. That tells you about this place."
A third battalion
The U.S. has two battalions in the province, and military officials here say the surge in forces that President Barack Obama hopes can stem growing insurgent control will bring a third battalion in late summer.
That will make Khost a likely center of gravity come September as surge offensives in Helmand and Kandahar provinces give way to a new NATO focus on the eastern front.
"I know Helmand and the south is the main effort and my sense is we are right behind that somewhere," said Lt. Col. Rick Ullian, with 3rd Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, to which the 3-187th is attached.
Sabari is "easily the most challenging district in the brigade’s area of operations and arguably in [Regional Command] East," he told the soldiers with the 3-187th.
They are, he added, "the right team at the right place and at the right time."
"A lot of different factors" are at work here, according to 1st Lt. David Tressler, a member of the Khost Provincial Reconstruction Team.
He ticked off a breakdown in the tribal leadership that can help resolve disputes, lengthy feuds between tribes and subtribes, poverty, insurgents’ use of fear and intimidation, and the lack of an active role by the district or central government.
"The government has a lot of convincing to do to show the villages and districts that they can be a positive influence on their lives," he said.
‘Cup of poison’
Combat Outpost Sabari took mortars just a few hours after the men arrived, said Pfc. Matthew Miller, 21, from Skygusty, W.Va.
Though most land outside the base, it’s frequent enough to have become "pretty much a casual thing — as casual as getting shot at by mortars can be," he said. "When you hear the whistling over your head and you feel the ground shake, it’s something you never forget."
The men are jumpy, particularly the ones who’ve been wounded by blasts. They have trouble sleeping. They joke about explosions, but their stories accompany them on their daily patrols into the lush, ominous landscape of this eastern border province.
"You can think of stress as a cup of poison that’s full," Miller said. "You drink all of it, you are through. You drink half of it, you might have some bad times, but you’ll come through. We all share in it together and we come through in the end."
Three days after Topai, Taylor, 26, of Mobile, Ala., and Spc. Jonnathan P. Baumes, 22, of Pensacola, Fla., were wounded by the improvised explosive device, another platoon got word that men were seen planting a bomb in the Khalbesat bazaar, Sabari’s central market not far from the outpost.
Soldiers went to investigate and got into a heavy firefight with four insurgents. Two soldiers were wounded, said platoon leader 1st Lt. Nick Gregory.
‘Zambar no good’
On March 7, the soldiers went on their first visit to Zambar, a village in northern Sabari that is so hostile the favored refrain among the men is "Zambar bad. Zambar no good."
The soldiers air-assaulted in and set up in positions at the Makhtab bazaar, near Zambar. Gunships flew overhead, but every time the aircraft went to refuel, insurgents opened up on them, said Spc. Cameron Reed, 21, of Sacramento, Calif.
The first time, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and recoilless rifle rounds came hurling at their positions, the soldiers said. Two hours later, they took mortar fire. But the jets returned and the fire quickly stopped.
The third attack was more complex.
"We took contact first to the north," Reed said. "Then we started taking mortars and small-arms fire from the east and south."
Thirty minutes into the firefight, a mortar landed three feet from the building Reed was guarding. Reed and another soldier, who were on the roof, were knocked off their feet while a soldier on the ground took shrapnel to his thigh and buttocks.
Reed was a month into his first deployment, and already an old hand at combat. He’d been on duty in one of the guard towers around the outpost three weeks earlier when insurgents lobbed mortars and RPGs, one of which lodged itself in his tower, Reed said.
"That was a crazy night," he said. "The firefight last 10 minutes. We unloaded 250 .50-caliber rounds and 300 (machine-gun) rounds."
On March 21, soldiers went on patrol to Bak district, just east of Sabari. A military police unit positioned itself at the Afghan National Police compound at the district center, while the infantrymen went to the bazaar.
When the insurgents made their move, they fired mortars — first at the bazaar, then at the district center, where two military policemen guarding the tower suffered concussions.
The soldiers were shaken when they returned a short time later to a building they’d been in most of the day to find it had taken a direct mortar hit.
"That’s when we realized how close they came to us," LaBounty said.
The soldiers at Sabari count themselves lucky. They’ve suffered mostly concussions and a handful of minor shrapnel wounds. All have returned safely to base.
But Topai and his fellow soldiers know they’re playing the odds. Topai said he just put his Purple Heart away in a box.
"I don’t want to look at it," said the soldier, now two months into a yearlong deployment. "I don’t want a reminder of how near I was to something killing us."
Pictures here: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69660
By Dianna Cahn, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Thursday, April 29, 2010
SABARI DISTRICT, Afghanistan — One minute, soldiers were walking back from a patrol in the nearby village of Nakam. Their outpost was in sight.
"My thought was, ‘Look, we are almost home,’ " said Pfc. Jordan Topai, 19, of Grand Junction, Colo. "The next minute there’s lots of noise. I could feel heat on my neck."
"All I know," said Pfc. Derek Taylor, "I was walking down the street and I turned around to tell my staff sergeant to move to the other side of the road because someone had been digging there. And then they blew it up."
"Boom! He [Taylor] stood there for a second and then he fell in a cloud of dust," said Pfc. Nicholas LaBounty. "We all thought he was dead because we couldn’t see him.
"We were all sure our buddies were annihilated," he added.
Ever since they arrived at Combat Outpost Sabari in eastern Afghanistan’s Khost province on Feb. 10, the soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, 187th Infantry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 101st Airborne Division, have been getting blown up.
The soldiers have been through five major attacks and countless minor ones. They earned 12 Purple Hearts and dozens of combat infantry badges in six weeks.
"When we were on our way in [to Afghanistan], we ran into some of the (4th Battalion, 25th Infantry Regiment) that we were replacing and they asked where we were going," recalled LaBounty, 23, of Middlebury, Conn. "We were like, ‘Sabari,’ and they all started laughing. That tells you about this place."
A third battalion
The U.S. has two battalions in the province, and military officials here say the surge in forces that President Barack Obama hopes can stem growing insurgent control will bring a third battalion in late summer.
That will make Khost a likely center of gravity come September as surge offensives in Helmand and Kandahar provinces give way to a new NATO focus on the eastern front.
"I know Helmand and the south is the main effort and my sense is we are right behind that somewhere," said Lt. Col. Rick Ullian, with 3rd Battalion, 320th Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, to which the 3-187th is attached.
Sabari is "easily the most challenging district in the brigade’s area of operations and arguably in [Regional Command] East," he told the soldiers with the 3-187th.
They are, he added, "the right team at the right place and at the right time."
"A lot of different factors" are at work here, according to 1st Lt. David Tressler, a member of the Khost Provincial Reconstruction Team.
He ticked off a breakdown in the tribal leadership that can help resolve disputes, lengthy feuds between tribes and subtribes, poverty, insurgents’ use of fear and intimidation, and the lack of an active role by the district or central government.
"The government has a lot of convincing to do to show the villages and districts that they can be a positive influence on their lives," he said.
‘Cup of poison’
Combat Outpost Sabari took mortars just a few hours after the men arrived, said Pfc. Matthew Miller, 21, from Skygusty, W.Va.
Though most land outside the base, it’s frequent enough to have become "pretty much a casual thing — as casual as getting shot at by mortars can be," he said. "When you hear the whistling over your head and you feel the ground shake, it’s something you never forget."
The men are jumpy, particularly the ones who’ve been wounded by blasts. They have trouble sleeping. They joke about explosions, but their stories accompany them on their daily patrols into the lush, ominous landscape of this eastern border province.
"You can think of stress as a cup of poison that’s full," Miller said. "You drink all of it, you are through. You drink half of it, you might have some bad times, but you’ll come through. We all share in it together and we come through in the end."
Three days after Topai, Taylor, 26, of Mobile, Ala., and Spc. Jonnathan P. Baumes, 22, of Pensacola, Fla., were wounded by the improvised explosive device, another platoon got word that men were seen planting a bomb in the Khalbesat bazaar, Sabari’s central market not far from the outpost.
Soldiers went to investigate and got into a heavy firefight with four insurgents. Two soldiers were wounded, said platoon leader 1st Lt. Nick Gregory.
‘Zambar no good’
On March 7, the soldiers went on their first visit to Zambar, a village in northern Sabari that is so hostile the favored refrain among the men is "Zambar bad. Zambar no good."
The soldiers air-assaulted in and set up in positions at the Makhtab bazaar, near Zambar. Gunships flew overhead, but every time the aircraft went to refuel, insurgents opened up on them, said Spc. Cameron Reed, 21, of Sacramento, Calif.
The first time, mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and recoilless rifle rounds came hurling at their positions, the soldiers said. Two hours later, they took mortar fire. But the jets returned and the fire quickly stopped.
The third attack was more complex.
"We took contact first to the north," Reed said. "Then we started taking mortars and small-arms fire from the east and south."
Thirty minutes into the firefight, a mortar landed three feet from the building Reed was guarding. Reed and another soldier, who were on the roof, were knocked off their feet while a soldier on the ground took shrapnel to his thigh and buttocks.
Reed was a month into his first deployment, and already an old hand at combat. He’d been on duty in one of the guard towers around the outpost three weeks earlier when insurgents lobbed mortars and RPGs, one of which lodged itself in his tower, Reed said.
"That was a crazy night," he said. "The firefight last 10 minutes. We unloaded 250 .50-caliber rounds and 300 (machine-gun) rounds."
On March 21, soldiers went on patrol to Bak district, just east of Sabari. A military police unit positioned itself at the Afghan National Police compound at the district center, while the infantrymen went to the bazaar.
When the insurgents made their move, they fired mortars — first at the bazaar, then at the district center, where two military policemen guarding the tower suffered concussions.
The soldiers were shaken when they returned a short time later to a building they’d been in most of the day to find it had taken a direct mortar hit.
"That’s when we realized how close they came to us," LaBounty said.
The soldiers at Sabari count themselves lucky. They’ve suffered mostly concussions and a handful of minor shrapnel wounds. All have returned safely to base.
But Topai and his fellow soldiers know they’re playing the odds. Topai said he just put his Purple Heart away in a box.
"I don’t want to look at it," said the soldier, now two months into a yearlong deployment. "I don’t want a reminder of how near I was to something killing us."
Pictures here: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=69660