La guerre, douleur et mort

L'hélico arrive tout près du blessé.

La guerre possède un visage que les romantiques n'aiment guère, celui de la douleur, de la mort. Le New York Times nous offre un superbe reportage dont voici quelques images avec un excellent article de C. J. CHIVERS


As Afghan Fighting Expands, U.S. Medics Plunge In


FRANTIC MOMENTS During a recent battle near Marja, an infantry patrol carried a wounded Marine to a medevac helicopter.


MARJA, Afghanistan — The Marine had been shot in the skull. He was up ahead, at the edge of a field, where the rest of his patrol was fighting. A Black Hawk medevac helicopter flew above treetops toward him, banked and hovered dangerously before landing nearby.

United Nations Could Hasten Removal of Taliban Leaders From Terror Blacklist (June 13, 2010)
U.S. Military Intelligence Puts Focus on Afghan Graft (June 13, 2010)
Several Marines carried the man aboard. His head was bandaged, his body limp. Sgt. Ian J. Bugh, the flight medic, began the rhythms of CPR as the helicopter lifted over gunfire and zigzagged away. Could this man be saved?

Nearly nine years into the Afghan war, with the number of troops here climbing toward 100,000, the pace for air crews that retrieve the wounded has become pitched.

In each month this year, more American troops in Afghanistan have been killed than in any of the same months of any previous year. Many of those fighting on the ground, facing ambushes and powerful hidden bombs, say that as the Obama administration’s military buildup pushes more troops into Taliban strongholds, the losses could soon rival those during the worst periods in Iraq.

Under NATO guidance, all seriously wounded troops are expected to arrive at a trauma center within 60 minutes of their unit’s calling for help. In Helmand Province, Afghanistan’s most dangerous ground, most of them do.

These results can make the job seem far simpler than it is. Last week, a Black Hawk on a medevac mission in the province was shot down by a rocket-propelled grenade, and four members of its crew were killed. And the experiences in May and early June of one Army air crew, from Company C, Sixth Battalion, 101st Combat Aviation Brigade, showed the challenges of distance, sandstorms and Taliban fighters waiting near landing zones.

It also showed crews confronting sorrows as old as combat. In a guerrilla war that is turning more violent, young men in nameless places suffer wounds that, no matter a crew’s speed or skill, can quickly sap away life.

For Company C’s detachment in Helmand Province, the recent duty had been harried.

Over several days the crews had retrieved a Marine who had lost both legs and an arm to a bomb explosion; the medic had kept that man alive. They had picked up two Marines bitten by their unit’s bomb-sniffing dog. They landed for a corporal whose back had been injured in a vehicle accident.

And day after day they had scrambled to evacuate Afghans or Marines struck by bullets or blasted by bombs, including a mission that nearly took them to a landing zone where the Taliban had planted a second bomb, with hopes that an aircraft might land on it. The Marines had found the trap and directed the pilots to a safer spot.

Les infirmiers se ruent vers le blessé.

A few days before the Marine was shot in the skull, after sandstorms had grounded aircraft, another call had come in. A bomb had exploded beside a patrol along the Helmand River. Two Marines were wounded. One was dying.

For hours the airspace had been closed; supervisors deemed the conditions too dangerous to fly. The crews wanted to evacuate the Marines. “I’ll go,” said Sgt. Jason T. Norris, a crew chief. “I’ll walk.”

A crew was given permission to try. Ordinarily, medevac flights take off with an older, experienced pilot in command and a younger aviator as co-pilot. The two take turns on the controls.

From Kandahar, the brigade commander, Col. William K. Gayler, ordered a change. This flight demanded experience. Chief Warrant Officer Joseph N. Callaway, who had nearly 3,000 flight hours, would replace a younger pilot and fly with Chief Warrant Officer Deric G. Sempsrott, who had nearly 2,000 hours.

Afghan sandstorms take many forms. Some drift by in vertical sheets of dust. Others spiral into spinning towers of grit. Many lash along the ground, obscuring vision. Powdered sand accumulates like snow.

Le blessé a perdu beaucoup de sang mais est toujours conscient.

This storm had another form: an airborne layer of dirt from 100 to 4,000 feet above the ground. It left a low-elevation slot through which the pilots might try to fly.

The Black Hawk lifted off in dimming evening light. It flew at 130 knots 30 to 40 feet above the ground, so low it created a bizarre sensation, as if the helicopter were not an aircraft, but a deafening high-speed train.

Ten minutes out, the radio updated the crew. One of the Marines had died. The crew chief, Sgt. Grayson Colby, sagged. He reached for a body bag. Then he slipped on rubber gloves and sat upright. There was still a man to save.

Just before a hill beside the river, Mr. Callaway banked the Black Hawk right, then abruptly turned left and circled. The helicopter leaned hard over. He looked down. A smoke grenade’s red plume rose, marking the patrol.

The Black Hawk landed beside dunes. Sergeant Bugh and Sergeant Colby leapt out.

A corporal, Brett Sayre, had been hit in the face by the bomb’s blast wave and debris. He staggered forward, guided by other Marines.

Sergeant Bugh examined him inside the Black Hawk. Corporal Sayre’s eyes were packed with dirt. He was large and lean, a fit young man sitting upright, trying not to choke on blood clotting and flowing from his mouth.

United Nations Could Hasten Removal of Taliban Leaders From Terror Blacklist (June 13, 2010)
U.S. Military Intelligence Puts Focus on Afghan Graft (June 13, 2010)
The sergeant asked him to lie down. The corporal waved his arm.

“You’re a Marine,” the sergeant said. “Be strong. We’ll get you out of here.”

Corporal Sayre rested stiffly on his right side.

Sergeant Colby climbed aboard. He had helped escort the dead Marine to the other aircraft. The Black Hawk took off, weaving through the air 25 feet off the ground, accelerating into haze.

The corporal was calm as Sergeant Colby cut away his uniform, looking for more wounds. Sergeant Bugh suctioned blood from his mouth. He knew this man would live. But he looked into his dirtied eyes. “Can you see?” he asked.

“No,” the corporal said.

At the trauma center later, the corporal’s eyes reacted to light.

A Race to Treatment

Now the crew was in the air again, this time with the Marine shot in the skull. Sergeant Colby performed CPR. The man had no pulse.

Kneeling beside the man, encased in the roaring whine of the Black Hawk’s dual engines, the sergeants took turns at CPR. Mr. Sempsrott flew at 150 knots — as fast as the aircraft would go.

The helicopter came to a rolling landing at Camp Dwyer. Litter bearers ran the Marine inside.

The flight’s young co-pilot, First Lt. Matthew E. Stewart, loitered in the sudden quiet. He was calmly self-critical. It had been a nerve-racking landing zone, a high-speed approach to evacuate a dying man and a descent into a firefight. He said he had made a new pilot’s mistake.

He had not rolled the aircraft into a steep enough bank as he turned. Then the helicopter’s nose had pitched up. The aircraft had risen, climbing to more than 200 feet from 70 feet and almost floating above a gunfight, exposed.

Mr. Sempsrott had taken the controls and completed the landing. “I was going way too fast for my experience level,” the lieutenant said, humbly.

No one blamed him; this, the crew said, was how young pilots learned. And everyone involved understood the need to move quickly. It was necessary to evade ground fire and to improve a dying patient’s odds.

Beside the helicopter, inside a tent, doctors kept working on the Marine.

Sergeant Colby sat, red-eyed. He had seen the man’s wound. Soon, he knew, the Marine would be moved to the morgue. Morning had not yet come to the United States. In a few hours, the news would reach home.

“A family’s life has been completely changed,” the lieutenant said. “And they don’t even know it yet.”

Barreling Into a Firefight

A few days later, the crew was barreling into Marja again. Another Marine had been shot.

The pilots passed the landing zone, banked and looked down. An Afghan in uniform crawled though dirt. Marines huddled along a ditch. A firefight raged around the green smoke grenade.

The Black Hawk completed its turn, this time low to the ground, and descended. Gunfire could be heard all around. The casualty was not in sight.

“Where is he?” Mr. Sempsrott asked over the radio.

The sergeants dashed for the trees, where a Marine, Cpl. Zachary K. Kruger, was being tended to by his squad. He had been shot in the thigh, near his groin. He could not walk. The patrol had no stretcher.

A hundred yards separated the group from the aircraft, a sprint to be made across the open, on soft soil, under Taliban fire. Sergeant Bugh ran back. Sergeant Colby began firing his M-4 carbine toward the Taliban.

Inside the shuddering aircraft, the pilots tried to radiate calm. They were motionless, vulnerable, sitting upright in plain view.

The Taliban, they knew, had offered a bounty for destroyed American aircraft. Bullets cracked past. The pilots saw their medic return, grab a stretcher, run again for the trees.

They looked this way, then that. Their escort aircraft buzzed low-elevation circles around the zone, gunners leaning out. Bullets kept coming. “Taking fire from the east,” Mr. Sempsrott said.

These are the moments when time slows.

At the airfield, the crews had talked about what propelled them. Some of them mentioned a luxury: They did not wonder, as some soldiers do, if their efforts mattered, if this patrol or that meeting with Afghans or this convoy affected anything in a lasting way.

United Nations Could Hasten Removal of Taliban Leaders From Terror Blacklist (June 13, 2010)
U.S. Military Intelligence Puts Focus on Afghan Graft (June 13, 2010)
Their work could be measured, life by life. They spoke of the infantry, living without comforts in outposts, patrolling in the sweltering heat over ground spiced with hidden bombs and watched over by Afghans preparing complex ambushes. When the Marines called, the air crews said, they needed help.

Now the bullets whipped by.

A Hot Landing Zone

Cobra attack helicopters were en route. Mr. Sempsrott and Lieutenant Stewart had the option of taking off and circling back after the gunships arrived. It would mean leaving their crew on the ground, and delaying the patient’s ride, if only for minutes.

At the tents, Mr. Sempsrott had discussed the choices in a hot landing zone. The discussion ended like this: “I don’t leave people behind.”

More rounds snapped past. “Taking fire from the southeast,” he said.

He looked out. Four minutes, headed to five.

“This is ridiculous,” he said. It was exclamation, not complaint.

His crew broke from the tree line. The Marines and Sergeant Bugh were carrying Corporal Kruger, who craned his neck as they bounced across the field. They fell, found their feet, ran again, fell and reached the Black Hawk and shoved the stretcher in.

A Marine leaned through the open cargo door. He gripped the corporal in a fierce handshake. “We love you, buddy!” he shouted, ducked, and ran back toward the firefight.

Six and a half minutes after landing, the Black Hawk lifted, tilted forward and cleared the vegetation, gaining speed.

Le blessé est évacué alors que l'ennemi est toujours présent.

Corporal Kruger had questions as his blood pooled beneath him.

Where are we going? Camp Dwyer. How long to get there? Ten minutes.

Can I have some water? Sergeant Colby produced a bottle.

After leaving behind Marja, the aircraft climbed to 200 feet and flew level over the open desert, where Taliban fighters cannot hide. The bullet had caromed up and inside the corporal. He needed surgery.

The crew had reached him in time. As the Black Hawk touched down, he sensed he would live.

“Thank you, guys,” he shouted.

“Thank you,” he shouted, and the litter bearers ran him to the medical tent.

The pilots shut the Black Hawk down. Another crew rinsed away the blood. Before inspecting the aircraft for bullet holes, Sergeant Bugh and Sergeant Colby removed their helmets, slipped out of their body armor and gripped each other in a brief, silent hug.

Cinq minutes de guerre et un tireur d'élite ennemi

Le journaliste du New York Times C. J. Chivers a accompagné des Marines en opérations. La routine et les drames de la « vraie guerre ». Un reportage vidéo de grande qualité.

Le reportage texte est ici.

Un fusil de tireur d'élite taliban, fabriqué en 1942 au Canada.

Firsthand Look at Firefights in Marja


During the initial American-led assault earlier this year into Marja, the last large Taliban-dominated population center in Helmand Province, Marines in several companies encountered something unusual in the American experience of the Afghan war – insurgent snipers.

For several days, and in several places, competent and deliberate marksmen fired on Marine patrols. A video today presents one such event, a firefight between the Marines of Kilo Company, Third Battalion, Sixth Marines, and Taliban fighters, including at least one Taliban gunman the Marines considered to be a sniper. The footage shows the effects of incoming gunfire that is much different from the normal experience of Afghan shooting.

The Ineffectiveness of Taliban Riflery

Now and then over the years, there have been reports of well-trained Taliban marksmen in different parts of the country. But credible reports have been few. Taliban rifle fire, in the main, has been largely ineffective.

How ineffective? Through April 3, the number of American troops killed by gunshot wounds in the entire war in Afghanistan, according to the casualty summaries compiled by the Defense Manpower Data Center, had reached 188. That includes wounds caused not just by rifle fire, but also by the more powerful PK machine guns and any other firearm present in the war.

This number — 188 — merits consideration, for what it tells us about the Afghan war and much of the public conversation about it. To put things in perspective, fewer American troops have died of gunshot wounds in more than eight-and-a-half years of war in Afghanistan than in almost any single month at the height of the war in Vietnam. Many factors contribute to this – better medical care in the minutes after injury (the so-called golden hour); improved body armor and helmets; the prevalence of bullet-proof plates and glass on most American military ground vehicles; the longer ranges of typical engagements in lightly vegetated Afghan environments, as opposed to the short ranges that were common in engagements in tropical jungles and deltas; the Taliban’s shift to a greater emphasis on explosives, including against foot patrols; and others.

Yes, the comparison is imprecise, for reasons both obvious and subtle. Troop-strength levels for both sides were higher in Vietnam (there is no Taliban equivalent of the massing of N.V.A. battalions south of the demilitarized zone, and nothing remotely like Tet), and the lethality of bullet wounds to American troops has declined sharply in recent years, compared with the experiences of past wars. Yet the raw data is still remarkable. It serves to keep this war in martial perspective. And it underscores that impressions created by much of the public chatter about the Taliban as a fighting force – they are natural fighters, the fighting is constant, come warm weather they will be back strong in the “spring offensive” etc. – often do not align with what the war actually looks like on the ground, and need fine-tuning.

Enter the Snipers

Taliban gunmen have been adept at exerting influence over the Afghan population. They are an enduring and effective political force. Their numbers seem large and their support substantial. They are skilled at intelligence collection, and have integrated bomb-making and emplacement into their operations. But their success as gunfighters against the American military has been episodic, as in Wanat, and local, as in the Korangal Valley, and often related to questionable tactical choices by American commanders as much as to Taliban skill. In all, the Taliban’s gunmen have proved to be a modest threat.

Enter the snipers, who are an exception.

In recent months, there have been cases of better Taliban marksmen harassing American patrols and wounding and killing American troops. The operations in and near Marja were a prominent example. The phenomenon deserves closer examination, to try to gain a richer perspective than is often possible while reporting in the midst of fighting.

Let’s look at what is known.

First, what exactly is meant by “sniper”? Like many terms used to discuss war fighting, this is a slippery word. In the context of Afghan fighting, American troops tend to talk about a sniper when they encounter an insurgent rifleman who is obviously more skilled and disciplined than the norm, someone who fires with reasonable accuracy at medium and longish ranges, usually using a rifle-and-ammunition combination that can be effective out to 400 or 500 meters or more. But while the Taliban’s “snipers” are not the usual class of Kalashnikov-carrying Afghan fighter, they typically are not what a conventional soldier might think of in relation to the term.

The available evidence suggests that many of them are not highly trained shooters, with advanced optics, premium ammunition and precision high-powered rifles, who can be reasonably expected to hit a man with a single shot at 700 or 800 or 1,000 meters or more. One way to understand them, based on the experience of Marja, is to say that these better gunmen could usually hit a sheet of plywood at 400 yards, but most of them could not hit a sheet of copy paper at that range. This is very good shooting for Afghanistan. It’s not especially impressive shooting by a higher standard. (Note: A few Taliban marksmen can hit a sheet of paper from 400 yards. One fighter with that level of skill is the Taliban gunman in the video.)

The Rifles

Second, how are they equipped? Kilo Company’s battlefield collections, along with reviews of recent photographs of armed Taliban fighters and information shared by an officer who gathered data from across Helmand Province, offer insights. Among the captured rifles were two variants of the Lee-Enfield rifle line. These are bolt-action rifles with design roots reaching to the late 19th century, when conventional armies favored heavier, long-barreled rifles that fired more powerful ammunition than what is predominant in military use today.

One of the rifles had been manufactured at the Long Branch arsenal in Toronto in 1942. The other was manufactured at the Government Rifle Factory in Ishapore, India; its date was not clear. Photographs of the Taliban have also shown a few of their gunmen carrying old Mosin-Nagant bolt-action rifles. These were a similar czarist (then Soviet) arm of the same era.

These rifles belong to class of weapon often referred to as “battle rifles” and differ markedly from the assault rifles in widespread circulation today. They have longer effective ranges, are less concealable and fire heavier bullets than assault rifles. The shooter loads them manually, by manipulating a bolt that ejects the spent cartridge and then slides the next cartridge into place; they have no automatic or semiautomatic features.

Battle rifles have had their champions for decades, in part because their slower rate of fire keeps ammunition consumption low and encourages disciplined aiming, but also because they were manufactured for much of the 20th century in large quantities in several countries. Their abundance meant that after the shift by most conventional forces to assault rifles — which began on a small scale in Hitler’s army and by the 1960s and 1970s was spreading through conventional armies most everywhere — the old battle rifles, which gradually fell from service, became available in huge surpluses and at inexpensive prices. They are also well suited to desert fighting or any other shooting involving open vistas, because of their longer effective ranges. Not surprisingly, Lee-Enfields were distributed to the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance by the C.I.A., via the Pakistani intelligence service, in the early 1980s. They also can still be found on arms markets. In the opening of the Marja assault, it was clear on many days as bullets passed by that these kinds of weapons, or similar ones, were in use by the Taliban. The round makes a distinctly different sound. The battlefield collections then confirmed the hunch.

The Ammunition and the Shooting

Third, the ammunition. Caches in Marja turned up ammunition – dated Mark 7 British .303 cartridges from several different factories — that matched Lee-Enfield rifles. In two caches captured by Kilo Company, some of the British .303 cartridges dated to 1941.

Many held bullets that were jacketed in steel – which marked them as original British World War II-production ammunition from Churchill’s time. (The British used steel for bullet jackets to save copper and zinc for other wartime uses.) A small portion of the ammunition in the sample appeared to have been older still — a few cartridges were round-nosed Mark 6 rounds, which British forces were phasing out before the First World War.

Last, several rounds were 7.62×54R cartridges, which match Russian Mosin-Nagant rifles or the SVD line, the Soviet-designed semiautomatic sniper rifles of the former Eastern bloc that were often used by insurgent snipers in Iraq. (Curiously, there are very few recent reports or images of SVD rifles in Afghanistan. They are not absent from the war. But they seem not to be widely used. This is in some ways surprising, considering the expansive distribution in Afghanistan of the standard arms of the former Eastern bloc – the AK, PK, DshK and Makarov lines, as well as 82-millimeter mortars, rocket-propelled grenades and F1 pineapple-style hand grenades.)

Fourth, the shooting itself. Often the Taliban’s snipers fired near misses, one after another, separated by 30 seconds or more. Mixed with the incoming automatic fire, the firefights in Marja would be punctuated by the occasional single round that would pass by just overheard, or thump into the soil or at a door frame or the surface of a wall beside a Marine. These rounds were attention-getting, to say the least. At times, and the video captures some of this, it appeared that more than one Taliban fighter with battle rifle was firing, which may have signaled not so much the presence of a single “true” sniper, but that some of these Taliban units had multiple fighters who preferred to carry Lee-Enfields. This might make them no different from the American grunts who prefer to carry M-14s, arguing that their larger cartridges have greater range and stopping power than the rounds fired by the M-4 and M-16 line, and thus have a real value in Afghan fighting.

But among whoever was firing on the Marines, there were several instances of skilled and accurate shooting. The officer who gathered data (and asked not to be named here) said there were times during the operation when a Taliban sniper killed a Marine, as well as instances in which Marines survived after being hit on their bullet-proof plates or, once, after a glancing shot that hit a helmet. In Kilo Company, the Marines present in several engagements also felt that at least one of the Taliban gunmen shooting at them in this particular area might have had a telescopic sight. Their feeling was that the distances were long enough that it would be hard to make shots like this with the naked eye. Moreover, the day after I recorded the video footage above, an Afghan National Army soldier was killed while walking in the open during a lull in fighting. He was felled by a single shot, at a range the Marines estimated at 500 to 700 meters, and the bullet struck his neck. Whoever made that shot was, absent extraordinary good luck, not the run-of-the-mill Taliban fighter.

What does it all mean? To gain some distance on this, broader casualty numbers are again helpful. But we’re out of space for today. Tomorrow we’ll publish data that put the snipers of Helmand Province in a fuller context. We’ll for now hint at what the statistics seem to show: Taliban fighters with traditional battle rifles have made Helmand Province more dangerous. They present an interesting phenomenon, and bear close watching. On the national level, they do not appear to mark a profound shift in the war.

That’s not to say that they do not create harrowing moments. As the video shows, Lance Cpl. Travis Vuocolo was a very lucky man.