Licensed to Kill by Robert Young Pelton

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    After the helicopters take off and the convoy has ferried the older gentlemen over to the base for their meeting, I am left talking to “the other folks.” Even the army oddly says it is not actively looking for Osama bin Laden, though here standing in front of me is the army looking for Osama bin Laden. The secrecy of this task force and their direct supervision and direction by the CIA requires the army to disavow their activities. So officially the people I am looking at don’t exist.
    I walk over, trying hard to act nonchalant as I begin talking to the technically nonexistent American soldiers guarding the landing area. The dark, bearded leader of the Special Forces team listens to my compressed bio, looks me up and down, and says, “Yeah, we’ll talk to you…. Just wait for these REMFs [Rear-Echelon Mother Fuckers] to go home and we’ll come and get you.” His message seems to be to make myself scarce until the heat is gone, so I go back and sit on the side of the hill with two other team members to wait out the older officers’ visit to the remote base.
    â€œWelcome to the war America forgot,” says a Special Forces sergeant in a cynical greeting. He is a big burly man wearing one large earphone and tan camo. Unlike the rest of the team, he doesn’t have a beard and seems eager to talk immediately. He was in Iraq for nine months and then was sent directly to Afghanistan for a six-month assignment. “Fuck this one weekend a month shit!” he snorts. He is reserves, part of the 20th Special Forces group from Alabama. He doesn’t feel too out of place: “The countryside around here reminds me of southern Utah.”
    What I quickly learn from him is that in the borderland, the enemy has returned in force. The Americans and Afghans have been attacked and ambushed on a regular basis. The United States had already abandoned one of its four outposts, a firebase in nearby Lawhra. The others have come under increasingly frequent attack and occasionally change hands between the Afghans, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the Pakistanis, and the Americans. The attacks come from the Pakistani side and almost always happen at night, beginning with rockets, then rocket-propelled grenades, and then three-wave assaults: one waiting to advance, one lying down to fire, and one advancing to repeat the process. Often, the mystery attackers take the base from the Afghan regulars for a few hours, only to be chased out by arriving American air support.
    The sergeant seems a little rattled by the recent attacks in the area. “We got hit pretty bad two weeks ago,” he tells me, adjusting his dirty Jack Daniel’s cap. “Six guys in our unit got Purple Hearts. They were waiting for us—knew exactly where we were…. The Pakistanis watched the whole thing and did nothing.”
    He points to a spot a little over a mile away. “They fire rockets right from that hill on the Pak side. We meet with the Pak officials every month right on the border…. They smile. We smile. They bullshit us and we bullshit them. Then they watch us get attacked without lifting a finger. This place is fucked.” I ask him if the men who attacked him were Taliban, Pakistanis, or Arabs. He looks up at me, squints in the sun, and spits again for effect, admitting, “I have no fucking idea who we are fighting.”
    After cooling my heels for a couple of hours at the landing area, waiting for the officers to depart, I once again bump into the American with the AK-47—the Contractor. He starts off not with a greeting, but with a warning: “They’re not gonna let you cross into Pakistan…. And don’t be surprised when the head Afghan kicks you out.”
    I ask him who “they” are.
    â€œTF,” is his curt reply—task force.
    Apparently, some videotaping I had done earlier had not gone over well. “You’ve filmed their base and vehicles.