Battle report--Marines at Now Zad, Afghansitan

Washington Post:

"Fix bayonets."

Not long after giving that order, 1st Lt. Arthur Karell was hunched in a dirt trench crowded with Marines. The hushed darkness bristled with eight-inch blades fitted beneath the barrels of dozens of M-16 assault rifles.

You fix bayonets when you expect to need the aggressive combat mind-set that's produced by the primal sight of massed blades. You fix them when you expect to search hidden places. You fix them when you expect the fight could push you within arm's reach of your enemy -- gutting distance. In modern warfare, that's extraordinarily rare.

The problem was, Karell didn't know what to expect. He was from Arlington. He'd traveled the world. This place, though, was like nowhere he'd ever been. The 2nd Battalion of the 7th Marine Regiment had deployed to Afghanistan last spring to train Afghan police. But when Karell's platoon arrived in Now Zad, the largest town in a remote northern district of Helmand province, they'd rolled into a ghost town.

The Afghans who used to live here, more than 10,000, had been gone for several years, their abandoned mud-brick homes slowly melting into the dusty valley. Insurgents were using the place for R&R. At night, all you heard were the jackals, ululating like veiled, grieving women. The fact that Now Zad had no civilian residents, much less any police, had somehow escaped the notice of the coalition planners who had given the Marines their mission.

"They saw what they wanted to achieve but didn't realize fully what it would take," Task Force 2/7's commander, Lt. Col. Richard Hall, said at the time. "There were no intel pictures where we are now because there were few or no coalition forces in the areas where we operate. They didn't know what was out there. It was an innocent mistake."

So, with no police to train or civilians to protect, the Marines in Now Zad were left with the job of evicting the insurgents who had taken over the town. The fight to root them out began a year ago in the predawn twilight of June 15, in a trench.

Karell was about to lead the first assault of his first deployment. Some Marines in his platoon had done tours in Iraq, but Afghanistan was new to all of them. The dried-up irrigation trench they were in led toward the edge of Now Zad, then ran parallel to a thick mud wall that was taller than a man and that separated the town from a small forest.

No coalition forces had ever been beyond that wall. With the trees blocking their view, all they knew about what lay beyond was that whenever they got close, they were shot at. Whether the small arms fire had been coming from bunkers in the wall or the trench alongside it, they didn't know. So Karell gave the order to fix bayonets.

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There is much more. The story gives you a good idea of our force to space ratio problem in Afghanistan. It is a long story covering five internet pages. A platoon was sent to do a job that needed a company of Marines. Ground has to constantly be retaken because they do not have enough troops to hold the gains they make. Buying the same real estate over and over and paying in blood is not a way to defeat the enemy.

The AP has more on the recent action around Now Zad.