ARGHANDAB VALLEY Afghanistan — The US forces’ enemy is almost invisible in parts of this
lush valley in southern Afghanistan. It comes not as gunmen but as bombs
planted on footpaths wedged into walls nestled in trees and hidden under bridges.
The Bravo Company soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry
have gotten caught up in only one significant firefight in the
six months they've been stationed in a 1.2-square mile area just north of Kandahar
city.
But nearly every day they find — or step on — homemade bombs. As a result they've had some intense on-the-job training in bomb-spotting so they can continue to keep patrolling and keep die Taliban from threatening local villagers.
The military operation is completely different just a two-hour hike to die north or west. In northern Arghandab schools are being set up and agriculture subsidies are making friends of farmers.
To the west paratroopers are in nearly daily firefights with
insurgents who ambush patrols and assault combat outposts.
Bravo Company’s dogged fight for control of the southern end of the Arghandab river valley illustrates a key difficulty
facing US forces as they work this summer and fall to squeeze
the Taliban out of their spiritual heartland. The battle for
Kandahar city and its environs is not one fight but many.
"You’ve got three different problem sets," said the top US general in the south, Brig Gen Ben Hodges — referring to the
city lawless southern districts with vast expanses of desert and areas like Arghandab that at least have some government presence.
Localized skills
So each company has to
develop very localized skills for their specific fight.
For Bravo company it’s the fight against homemade bombs — known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs — which accounted for about 40 percent of US fatalities in 2009 according to an Associated Press tally of NATO reports.
Three soldiers in the company have been killed by buried explosives and almost every soldier has encountered one.
Typically, troops depend on ordnance disposal teams for bomb experts. Those teams are in Arghandab too, but in Bravo Company tire average soldier has spent a lot of time learning to spot or even just feel out bombs. They describe a sort of sixth sense that develops after encountering so many.
"We’re looking for booby traps, trip wires or just the absence of the normal" said Lt Ross Weinshenker, 24, who commands one of the two platoons that patrol out of the company’s main combat outpost.
And the hidden killers don’t discriminate. They also accounted for 60 percent of the 600 Afghan civilian casualties from January through June this year NATO says.
To counter the threat posed by IEDs the US Defense Department is delivering $3 billion worth of additional equipment. Ashton Carter, U..S. Defense Department undersecretary for acquisition technology and logistics, told reporters Thursday at NATO headquarters in Kabul.
The Pentagon has doubled the number of tethered surveillance blimps
being sent to Afghanistan this year to 64 providing troops a
bird’s eye view of certain areas, Carter said. So for, 6700 Mine
Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles have been delivered to
Afghanistan and the Defense Department is
continuing to send unmanned aerial vehicles so every
route-clearance patrol will have the benefit of full-motion
video overhead.
Such technical solutions can help, but Bravo Company has developed
its own on-the-ground detection methods to save life and limb.
Capt. Adam Armstrong, the company commander, said that 20 of its
approximately 150 soldiers stationed in Arghandab have been
wounded. Many have been hit multiple times — wounded enough for
a quick trip to nearby Kandahar Air Field to check on a
concussion or a shrapnel injury but nothing serious enough to
keep them away more than a few weeks. Sometimes the constant
vigilance wears on die soldiers.
“Hope I get deployed to Iraq after this, I could use a vacation,"
joked Pvt Micah Kahn, 23, of Nashville Tenn. "You know what you
do in Iraq? Work out, Drink water, None of this losing a leg and
watching it blow away”.
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