Lions of Kandahar by Rusty Bradley Page B

Later on, I heard him screaming the same commands at nearby drivers as we made our way down the street in Kandahar.
    As an engineer, he was an artist and would spend endless hours working feverishly on a structural project. He loved details. What kind of materials to use, the length, width, the temperature, density, humidity, barometric pressure, weight, etc. It didn’t matter if it was a dog house or a bridge, Dave could build it. It didn’t take long to figure out why he loved building so much. His real passion was demolition.
    “You can’t enjoy destroying things if you don’t know how to make them,” he would say.
    Dave absolutely, positively, with all his heart loved to blow things up. A massive explosion or complete destruction was not his forte. No, not Dave; that would be too easy. Too crude. A good partial destruction was usually his goal. It denied use of the object to the enemy, then, later, Dave could rebuild it again and put it to some other use.
    When Dave was finished with the trucks, the plates and excess parts were piled in a heap in the motor pool. He’d managed to remove hundreds of pounds of armor that would have bogged us down in the sand as well as burned excessive fuel. Now we could meet our scheduled resupplies. It made me a little nervous to see even the smallest piece of protection lying in the dust, but we had no choice. We needed the trucks and the guns they carried into the fight more than the little bit of armor we were leaving behind.
    That night, we lay in the hut drenched in sweat, wide awake. After a while, Bill started quizzing us about the mission.
    “Greg, what’s the distance from the entry point to the exit point of the desert?”
    “Two hundred seventy-five, two hundred eighty-five kilometers.”
    “Steve, how far to the first turn off of Highway 4?”
    Silence for several seconds, then Steve said, “Did you forget already, Bill?”
    The hut erupted with laughter. I tried to hold back, but couldn’t. The tension broken, Bill continued to question the team until a few drifted off to sleep.
    Bill and I remained awake.
    “What do you think?” I asked.
    Bill sighed. “I don’t like it, any of it. There are too many things that can go wrong. ISAF will get mauled in their armored vehicles because they can’t maneuver. There’s too much cover and concealment for the enemy in an urban fight.”
    Bill had fought in Iraq and knew urban combat very well.
    “Okay, sir, check this out,” he went on. “The intelligence said that there were probably four hundred Taliban fighters in that valley, right? Intelligence is close, but never spot on. What if there are more? Four hundred fighters, that’s a lot, and I mean a lot, of people trying to kill you. We will have to be on our A game for this. Besides, what if we run into a fight way out there in the middle of that godforsaken desert? No cover. We could keep the Taliban at bay for a while with our heavy machine guns and grenade launchers. But we can’t move at night. The Afghans don’t have night vision. If we move during the day, we’ll slow-roast in those vehicles and be exhausted by nightfall, losing our edge.”
    He wasn’t even convinced that we’d stay in our blocking positions.
    “I’ll bet you a case of beer the Canadians get into trouble and we have to go in there to help. The boys will be exhausted by the time the fight starts and when it starts, it will go on for a while. I meanweeks,” he said. “ISAF is not planning on taking enough dismounted infantry to clear that huge valley. Somebody is gonna have to do it. Who do you think is gonna get volunteered?”
    I dredged up the old adage, “There is a Thai proverb that goes like this: How do you eat an elephant?” I asked Bill.
    “How the hell would I know?” Bill said. “I wouldn’t eat that nasty thing.”
    “One bite at a time,” I said, smiling. We both laughed and got about an hour’s worth of sleep.
    The whole hut rattled when the guard pounded on