‘A lot of Marines join up because they want to know what it’s like to kill somebody’

We were on the first wave to go in. Each of us was silent in the dark interior of the chopper at 3am, carrying our own thoughts, fears, memories and regrets. The rear door was open, and a machine gunner sat ready staring into the darkness of Afghanistan below.

A wounded soldier is evacuated from battle. (Photo: Supplied)

I tried not to think of other Osprey helicopters that had been shot down with a rocket grenade coming through the open hatch and exploding. A few months earlier a recon Marine unit had narrowly avoided being shot down in the very same area we were heading to, and the Taliban in the area had a significant record of shooting at Ospreys with RPGs.

We landed in a cloud of dust. The lieutenant was first on the ground and counting us out as we laboriously clambered off the bird and into the surprisingly hot night.

The first thing that struck me was the rank, sickeningly sweet smell of the harvested opium poppies. I was confused and very fearful. There was movement all around me but no excessive noise. Commands were uttered quietly, and I couldn’t really understand what was being said or what I should be doing next.

We arrived at a compound and the translator shouted at the people to open up. Which of course they didn’t, so the US Marines put a charge of explosive on the door and blew it open. And we marched in.

They set up guards on the walls and the rest of us hunkered down behind the thick protective mud walls. Everything went quiet. I remember sitting on the hard ground, still sweating and staring up at the bright stars in the clear dark sky. I remember writing in my notebook. “I know I am meant to be here, and I am resigned to my fate.”

But of course, that wasn’t really true. I felt no sense of spiritual comfort in what the universe had brought me to live through. The world around me was hostile and deeply uncertain. I just shut down that part of me which feared what that fate might be.

Strangely comforting was the sound of aircraft circling overhead. I couldn’t see any of them, but I knew that in concentric layers above were Cobra helicopters, C-130 gunships, Predator drones and even Harrier fighter jets.

Somewhere in the distance, a faraway mortar round exploded. The war was waiting for us out there in the darkness.

Then, we heard the sound of the next wave of helicopters arriving. Suddenly, as they drew near, the sky erupted in red and white tracer fire.

It was bewildering. Then the flash of an RPG arced through the sky towards the almost invisible Ospreys coming through the darkness.

Seconds later, a gunship circling invisibly overhead rained down a hail of fire at some 2,000 rounds per minute.

Then silence.

Those were the first deaths I witnessed on the mission. Thank god not directly, but the dark silence where the rocket grenade had been fired from said enough.

Depression and emptiness filled my mind.

There was no escape. The NCOs corralled us out of the compound and we moved back into the rank-smelling poppy fields.

I didn’t dare even think of IEDs in the ground beneath my feet. I just walked.

The sun finally rose palely over the landscape. We were walking through an empty field when bullets started cracking out all around us. Russian DShK machine guns opened up on us as we lay on the dry, baking-hot soil. The Marines yelled for the 240 SAW machine gunner, Lance Corporal Schmidt, to come up. He fired back, but our assailants were hidden in a deeply dug-in bunker, apparently left over from the war against the Soviets.

There was shouting and more firing all around me. I had no idea what was going on. It was obvious that the Marines were not in control. We were pinned down and in terrible danger. And they were scrambling to respond. The lieutenant later described it as “probably the scariest moment of my life”.

I was terrified, but something beyond fear filled my awareness. It wasn’t a conscious decision to disregard fear. It was something inchoate, inexpressible that held back my imagination about what might happen – I lived only in the moment, in the very actual lived seconds as they unfolded around me, one by each terrifying one.

At some point, the captain ordered a tank up. It rolled across the poppy stalks in front of my eye line and fired. There was a plume of white smoke from its barrel; a distant thump – and silence

Another killing. The BDA or Battle Damage Assessment found the inside of the bunker thickly smeared with human blood. The bodies had been removed.

But by some miracle, none of our company had even been injured.

We moved on, from mud-walled compound to compound in the heat of the day, surrounded constantly by flies landing on our eyes and lips and noses, sucking the moisture out of us wherever they could.

Late that afternoon, we were hunkered down inside a compound.  Someone began shooting at the Marines on watch on the roof, for at least an hour a gun battle raged.

US soldiers moving from compound to compound. (Photo: Supplied)

And so the operation went. Day after day of terror, rage and exhaustion. Somewhere in the confusion there was a quiet moment inside an Afghan compound. One of the young Marines came to me in the coolness of a mud-walled room. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” he told me. His words half-swallowed with the empty breathiness of chronic anxiety.  “Someone is going to get hurt and that someone is going to be me.”

I knew he had to find someone to confess his fears to. He couldn’t tell any of his officers or his fellows. I nodded uncomfortably, looking into his frightened eyes, barely knowing what to say. I thought I didn’t have that feeling; but I also had that feeling somewhere in the subconscious recesses of my mind. I was very aware of him throughout the mission, and, of course, nothing bad did happen to him. He kept his discipline and never wavered in doing his duty, but every day, inside him, I knew he was suffering the agonies of the damned. I admired the silent courage he sustained throughout the operation.

Finally, on about day five, I got a break from active operations and was able to fall behind the lines to spend a day downloading footage. I sat in the heavily armoured MRAP vehicle behind my computer, working at the video we had recorded, but, in truth I was just glad to get out of the direct line of fire for a while.

I was already suffering from battle fatigue, and was horrified by the reality of experiencing war so close up. This was a world outside of my civilian, and even my previous journalistic experience and conscience.

This was war – on the front lines – and I understood deeply that I had no business or right trying to judge what was taking place.

I was just there, thrown into a world beyond my emotional understanding, writing, filming and taking one step after another.

Shortly after that young Marine spoke to me; another had to be casevaced after nearly dying from heat stroke. The Taliban fired rockets at the helicopter carrying him away to safety and a hospital. There was, as the saying goes, no easy day.

I never carried a weapon – which, of course, goes without saying. But I was constantly aware that not doing so created a moral distance between me and the Marines. Without a rifle, I was exempt from the hideous duty that the young men around me faced.

I never faced the brutal dilemma wherein lay the deepest truth of the experience of war – the psychological price of necessary violence. As a non-combatant, I knew I had no right to judge those who were combatants, and under orders to kill if it was required of them. I faced no orders.

There was no escape from my fear of wounding or death, but there was – crucially – no necessity for me to act against my conscience. I would never face the potentially life-long wounding that doing so might leave me with. The men around me were not the cliched clean-cut warriors of cheap war adventure yarns, nor were they the spaced-out PTSD junkies of the popular legends of Vietnam.

They were a highly trained, disciplined and effective unit. It was their human fears and motivations I wanted to understand, beyond both the military realities and cliches.

In the MRAP were two Marines who had been assigned to the supply unit and, in between downloading footage, I got chatting to them, partly to pass the time, and partly as a kind of “talking cure” for my own battle anxieties that I was feeling so deep inside, but, somehow, successfully hiding from anyone else.

I was trying to comprehend this strange world of constant battle on the front lines, and to understand the men who lived in the midst of it.

The first Marine I spoke to was Private Holmes. He was a tall, darkly handsome man with a quiet, intelligent demeanour. I found his unruffled, strangely magnetic personality very calming in the midst of my own emotional distress. We got chatting, and he told me something of his life, of how he loved to hike in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, of how he had fallen and cracked his skull and a wandering hermit had found him and nursed him back to health. In the process, he had some deep spiritual awakening. Holmes looked at me as he finished telling his story. “Every man sees God in his own way,” he said.

The other Marine, Corporal Mills, was a powerful, big man with the outer braggadocio that sometimes goes with such size. He carried no outward doubts or ambiguities. Few people would care to argue with him, and he knew it.

“I joined the Marines,” he told me, “because I had nothing else to do. I gotta get out of trouble or I woulda gone to prison, and – I wanted to kill people.”

I felt a jolt in my head. I had already witnessed a great deal of killing on this operation, but I had assumed that it was, for the Marines, a terrible reality that went with carrying out their duty in war. To be told in such brutal terms that it was something someone like Mills would actively wish to do, shocked me.

What self-doubt makes you feel you need to kill somebody, what perverted curiosity? I wondered silently.

Holmes looked up from where he was packing stores away. He saw my consternation and emotional turbulence at this ugly revelation. “It’s what no one talks about,” he said softly

 “A lot of Marines join up because they want to know what it’s like to kill somebody.”

Something held me back. I was in out of my depth in this environment and I didn’t want to offend anyone, so I didn’t ask Holmes if he, too, had that desire, but he wanted to speak, and as that day in the MRAP wore on, he told me his story quietly, without bombast – an extraordinary tale of courage and self-sacrifice.

A few years before he had been in Sangin, a town that had been held strongly by the Taliban, and had seen some heavy fighting with the British and later the Marines had gone in to help out. The combat there was regarded as the bloodiest by both the US and UK forces.

Holmes had been on guard post when as he told me “a Chechen sniper” shot him in the neck. The force of the bullet knocked him all the way to the ground and badly wounded him. Pouring blood, Holmes picked himself up and took up his machine gun again and fired back at the enemy, defending his comrades even though he was so severely wounded.

Sunset guard duty in hostile territory. (Photo: Supplied)

Finally, he was relieved and made his way back to his fellows, where he collapsed from lack of blood and had to be evacuated by helicopter. A subsequent analysis of the action showed that he had killed at least six Taliban fighters while refusing to abandon his post.

Holmes had received a Silver Star medal for his bravery. He was a bona fide battle hero who was no longer in the front line.

After he had told me his story I was silent. His bravery and his compassion for his fellow Marines had been his overwhelming motivation – but he had killed six people. I didn’t ask him how he felt about it. I didn’t dare.

The story stood on its own, filled with what I was learning, and what I was starting to call, the paradox of war: the exhilaration of overcoming fear, of sharing and surviving danger within yourself and with your equally fragile comrades; of finding that in the midst of your worst fear, you often find the best part of yourself. That feeling of joy and pride was contrasted with the murderous rage you felt at your enemy and then, the long shadow of the guilt and shame of killing other human beings.

I have no answer to this paradox. Nor does anyone else. Not in any telling of war from the ancient fall of Troy to Ukraine today can an answer be found.

It is at the core of who we are. We have found no way to transcend this alternating light and dark within us.

Despite his supreme bravery and his medal, he was wounded in his body and his soul, but he was in the Marine Corps still, and doing his duty. He was reluctant to explain exactly why, so I left it at that.

The next day I found myself back on the front lines with the platoon. The fighting continued. We were ambushed or fired at by the Taliban at least three times a day. One morning, we were heavily mortared, which was a terrifying experience. And yet, our captain’s leadership was superb. We fought and so far, not one of our men had been killed or even wounded,

Some came close, and in another company fighting alongside us, we heard that a man was killed by a sniper – we later found out it was almost certainly a suicide from battle stress. I never knew the man but when I heard of his death in the middle of the mission, my sense of self, my confidence, my very hope almost all drained away, and it was all I could do to carry on. But there was nowhere else to go, so I went on, holding my fear silently inside.

The full truth of his fate will perhaps never be known.

I was constantly bewildered and frightened, conscious of my own fragility and naivety in this environment, and yet, I too, felt the paradox of war in my own small way – the acceptance of my stamina and willingness to walk alongside and hump my baggage alongside the much younger men; the pride and self confidence that came with my holding on and doing my own job to record and film the action, just as the young Marines felt pride in doing the jobs of marching, defending and killing that they had to do.

The ancient wisdom of military discipline and good leadership is what keeps soldiers risking their lives and fighting, and our captain was a superb leader who openly wanted two things: to complete the mission successfully, and have none of his men killed. He barely slept all through the time we were out in the field, working to achieve these two almost incompatible goals.

Under his leadership, all the Marines fought within the “ROEs”, the rules of engagement which were aimed at minimising civilian casualties

The Marines were there for a variety of personal reasons from back home. Here, they had a difficult, even hideous job, and they did it as they had been trained.

The strongest feeling among them was one of camaraderie, and, very interestingly, respect for the Taliban, for their courage, and their fighting abilities.

The old notion of how combatants from either side share the experience of battle was certainly true among these men. They didn’t make too much of this – after all, both sides were still out in the field trying to kill one another, but it is part of the shared human experience of the terror of battle and the joy of surviving it, that should be mentioned.

We were at war, and surrounded by killing. At one point, I wrote exhaustedly in my notebook about what was being reported back to headquarters from that day’s fighting. “Captain to major: confirmed kills 4, but more like 8 or 10.”

It was a job, but it was one that tested the outer limits of humanity. One where we wandered outwardly in the literal Afghanistan desert, and, inwardly, deep into the shadowlands of spiritual wreckage.

One day, though, I found myself on the other side of war. Somehow, I found myself sitting in the middle of a field of young green wheat. I don’t remember why there was this pause in the fighting. I was barely able to hold myself together from exhaustion and constant fear, so often I simply put one foot in front of the other and walked.

But I found myself sitting alongside one of the young medics, or corpsman, Petty Officer 3rd Class Miller. Strictly speaking, Miller was from the US Navy Hospital Corps, and he had joined the navy to improve his skills as an emergency medic. He never expected, or wanted, to be sent into war as an infantryman. He never asked to face the dilemma that carrying a gun creates for soldiers at war.

The two of us sat together in that cool green field with a tank standing ready nearby. Miller carried something of a secret, perplexing shame. I was more than twice his age, and perhaps that gave him the confidence to share it with me.

“I’m not so good at this,” he told me, “I’ve only ever fired my gun once, shot one bullet.”

I felt the world around me open up, allowing me to let go of so many negative feelings that I carried with me. But I knew this was a delicate moment. He felt an uncertainty I could understand, perhaps of not having supported his comrades in battle as fully as he could have.

“One bullet?” I asked quietly, hoping I was not asking too much or seeming judgemental.

He nodded.

Shortly after that, our moment of peaceful sharing came to an end. The tank engine revved and we were all on the march again.

Later, that evening, I scribbled a few lines in my notebook to remind me of this extraordinary moment of human vulnerability. I knew I would want to revisit it.

Finally, the mission ended. No Marines in our company were killed or wounded. I don’t remember exactly how many of the Taliban were killed, but it was certainly over 20.

Back at base, after a few days’ rest, we interviewed a number of the Marines formally, with our television cameras rolling.

Finally, it was Miller’s turn to be interviewed. I really wanted, even needed, to hear what he had to say about his experience of battle. But I was also hesitant to ask him outright about only shooting one bullet. I didn’t want to embarrass him in front of his fellow Marines.

But Miller was happy to talk openly. He was proud of his service, and there were moments of battle he relished, and where – like me, like all of us – he was proud of having lived through them with as much courage as he could muster.

“Being shot at is probably the biggest adrenaline I’ve ever gotten. It’s almost addictive how hard the adrenaline hits when you start hearing bullets.

“I didn’t expect me to enjoy something like that in combat so much. I mean there’s plenty of bad to go with it, but those bad parts you don’t really talk about, unless someone really wants to know… it’s kind of unspoken, you know?”

But he told me he’d only ever fired one shot. I asked the question.

It wasn’t easy for him to answer. There was a lot at stake between his personal morality and that of being in a company of fighting men.

“They always tell you when you’re taking fire you need to gain fire superiority, you need to shoot, shoot till you get them to stop,” he replied. “It happened when we were taking contact. We were laying down and we saw the rounds impacting in the dirt in front of us and they kept getting closer and closer, and you can hear the little sounds of them flying by you. I never got a positive ID on the guy who was shooting at me, but the other Marines were saying that there was an area in the field – like a dark space – where they said there was a guy. So, I shot a bullet, and it wasn’t at a person – but just a small shape or something.

“Honestly, we’ve been shot at many times, and the guys around me have seen individuals who were shooting at us, but personally I’ve never seen it, and never felt the need besides that one time to pull the trigger.

“It was, I don’t know, I didn’t… I wasn’t proud of myself that I… that was my reaction, that I actually shot off a round, but I still did it… I mean it could have been a farmer who is caught in a crossfire and just trying to hide. It could have been anything, so that’s something I worry about sometimes…”.

He never took his eyes away from me, though.

“I actually prefer that I don’t have to shoot anyone. I feel like seeing someone and then pulling the trigger and seeing them fall – I’d feel like that would be one of the instances of war that would stick with me for life and be the most problematic for me personally.”

It was his job as a medic, and the lives he saved, that he valued most.

“Luckily no one in my platoon has gotten hit, but I’ve worked on a few of the Afghan National Army guys when three of their guys got hit by an IED. There was one guy with a large part of his thigh blown out, so there was a lot of blood from that.

“The one I treated the most was a guy who lost his right leg from the shin down and the bones in his left leg were completely shattered and he lifted it up and it was just like a jelly leg. It was kind of mind-boggling, but when you’re working on a patient you completely detach like you’ve never met the guy before and just do what needs to be done.”

That was a positive, utterly life-changing experience.

“Knowing I could make the right decision at the right time gave me confidence to take care of that; and know that he would have died if I wasn’t there. That’s always been what helps me accept what’s going on, and what I’m doing here, because I know that deep, deep down my ultimate job is to help, and to cause more good in an environment that causes a lot of harm. So regardless of what my ideals or beliefs are, it helps to know that I’ve done good.”

He ended with one final thought.

“I don’t know if I still believe in pacifism as a way of life, but I’m trying to hold on to it as much as I can.”

War ultimately wounds everyone involved in it. Physically, often; and, spiritually, always. But Miller’s open conscience, and that shared moment in the wheat field between us taught me something that I will always hold on to – he showed me that despite the horror that surrounds you, compassion and often the very best of humanity are still to be found within the doubts and fears that we face. His experiences had taken him deep inside the brutal heart of the paradox of war, and he had emerged as entirely his own person, strengthened in his truest self.

The author, exhausted. (Photo: Supplied)

A few days before I left Afghanistan, Miller found me alone somewhere walking among the neat rows of military tents. I don’t remember where I was going, but he stopped me.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said quietly, and handed me a blue, loosely folded length of cloth. I had no idea what it was, but when I opened it up, I saw that it was a United States Navy flag.

“I wanted you to have this,” he told me. DM

Hamilton Wende is a South African writer and journalist who has worked on a number of television projects and films for National Geographic, CNN, BBC, ZDF & ARD, among others. He has published nine books based on his travels as a war correspondent in Africa and the Middle East, and two children’s books. His latest thriller, Red Air, reflects his experiences with the US Marines in Afghanistan.