Read Online One Hundred Victories by Linda Robinson - Free Book Online Page B

outskirts of Ezabad, a woman dubbed “the egg lady” (because she sold eggs from her house) reluctantly chatted with the uniformed women as she sat on the dirt floor turning a metal churn, which was wrapped in a frayed green sweater to keep it cool. She had a smile on her face, but her eyes, lined with heavy kohl, were wondering and wary. One of the American women inquired after her health and her children and offered some first aid advice based on their last chat, but the woman’s reserve did not thaw. The gap was an enormous one to bridge: the Afghan mother could not comprehend why these foreign women had no children of their own and had ventured so far from their own homes. As the American women collected their rifles and got up to leave, the woman, still polite, asked them not to return. The Afghan American interpreter, also a female, explained as they left that the Afghan woman was terrified that the Taliban would think she was collaborating with the Americans and would come to kill her and her family.
    About six months into its second tour, the team’s dogged persistence finally paid off. After many hundreds of meetings, Hayes had gathered five older Afghans who would become his Afghan Local Police commanders. They looked like characters out of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, with craggy faces and long, wispy beards. Soda Khan was a dour, white-haired elder who decided to return from Kandahar to help rally the villagers. Out of Hero Jabbar’s former Gomai militia came Jan Mohammed (no relation to Karzai’s mentor, Jan Mohammad Khan of Uruzgan), a one-eyed former commander with a twinkly smile and teeth stained from constant smoking. He immediately enlisted his sons and volunteered to man the first outpost on the north side of Ezabad. Soda Khan was not such a hands-on leader, but he appeared at every meeting, gliding into the seat next to the district governor or appearing at his side when he made his rounds. He was no doubt seeking some type of windfall, but in the meantime, Hayes was happy to use his tribal stature as a legitimizing force to galvanize the timid villagers.
    Ezabad residents endorsed the idea of local police in a shura, but they would not volunteer their own sons, so the five commanders’ recruits came mostly from the Hutal hub villages around Highway One and the district center. Some came from farther afield, including neighboring Helmand, where Jan Mohammed had a house. Some recruits were elderly and some very young. Rob, the weapons sergeant, oversaw the recruits, their training, and their pay. He snapped their photos and ran them through the biometric database to try to ascertain where they had come from and to ensure they had no record as a criminal or insurgent. One of the first recruits to go through the course held up a car to shake down the occupants. A few days later he was shot dead on orders from the Taliban shadow court. The incident had a salutary effect on the next class of recruits.
    Some of the Afghan recruits knew how to handle an AK-47; others were totally raw. The special forces weapons sergeants and other team members patiently corrected the neophytes’ hunched-over posture as they tried to brace their thin bodies against the weapons’ recoil. The only way to get better, as with most skills, was to practice. One technique the sergeants used to teach the green recruits how to shoot was to seat them cross-legged at a slight angle to the target, so the body formed a natural cradle to brace the gun against the shoulder. The recruits sat in rows, watching as those in front took turns firing at paper targets stapled to boards. When they finished, the instructors beckoned them to the paper targets to examine their shot groups. The three-week program of instruction was a modified version of the standard bread-and-butter infantry training that special forces gave all over the world. They taught basic squad movements (overwatch, bounding overwatch, breaking contact, and