Sleepless in Afghanistan
We’re sitting around a small bonfire at Tom Kelly’s place in Central PA admiring the last summer sunlight as it breaks through enormous cumulus clouds, sending shafts of light diagonally into a Blue Mountain ridge a few miles away. Between our ring of fire and the mountains are big rolls of hay and a lush pasture with two of Tom’s horses, My Lady’s Hot and Kahlúa. A brood of chickens furiously compete for our seasoned shrimp morsels, tossed as we eat ‘em.
The sense of harmony we feel here contrasts to the story I’m hearing from Tom and his good friend Grant. We’re all working on big, smooth cigars, alternating between sips of Newcastle beer and a taste of Jack Daniels now n’ then.
The topic is Tom’s second rotation to Afghanistan. He was there with Grant and a group of other Special Forces team members. MSG Tom Kelly was the team sergeant. Major Grant Marks was the CO, or team leader. They were the two senior ranking SF guys.
“By the time we were forward-deployed, we had a bunch of amazing, younger SF guys with us that were freakin’ brilliant and super-motivated,” said Kelly. “We had a job to do and the team wasn’t about to let anything stand between us and getting it done.”
Marks, a West Point grad, entered the Army 15 years earlier. He was thrilled with the power and mobility of armor and pleased at becoming an M1 Abrams tank commander until the events of 9-11. Osama bin Laden’s attack became a crucible moment for Marks. He soon asked for a transfer to SFQC, the Special Forces Qualification Course, determined to make the war effort “close and personal.” Small team tactics would be a big departure from the 80-ton warhorse he’d soon leave behind.
Kelly and Marks met stateside a year before they deployed together in Afghanistan, summer of ’09.
“At first, they didn’t know where to put us,” said Kelly. “For two months, we were assigned to FOB Black Horse, about nine miles out of Kabul. And then the day came to pack up for our new operating base located in Sirkoni, Konar Province – an ‘X’ on the map with no facility of any kind, only 500 meters from the Paki border.
“It was a rugged pile of sand with goat shit, deep in ‘Indian country’ that we were to 
turn into an FOB overnight,” added Kelly. Marks said that they were to move out with a battalion of Marines, there to set up security for us.
The team learned quickly from ICOM chatter monitored by their terps that they were being observed ‘round the clock. “So, right from the start, we gave the locals a taste of our ‘busy bee’ syndrome. We wanted to make a big psychological footprint,” said Kelly.
Marks leaned toward the fire to aim a shot of Copenhagen spew into the embers. “What Tom’s saying is that, knowing the Taliban could be found in any direction from where we were, we decided to give them the impression that we were a bunch a really truly crazy bastards, not to be fucked with – and that we never slept.”
“So it wasn’t long before we were doing live fire exercises at one, two or three in the morning, and sometimes two or three times a night,” said Kelly, laughing. He leaned close enough to touch bottle necks with a smiling Marks.
“We put every weapons system to use and, for extra impact and some of the best freakin’ fireworks you can imagine, we’d occasionally call in the 155 illum[ination arty rounds] 
from howitzers at the big fire base in ‘A-bad’ 20 clicks away,” said Marks. “For base defense, we knew exactly where their best hilltop and mountain ledge observation posts were, some too close for comfort. These target reference points (TRPs) were already GPS-programmed . . .” known to team members simply as TRP1, TRP2, etc.
“So we’d call A-bad saying, ‘This is Team Sirkoni. Fire mission for 155s’ and then we’d give ‘em the grid and TRP with instruction to go ‘live fire’,” added Kelly. “We’d fire our TRPs as a total psychological package as we beat the hell out of those little Taliban mountain observation posts. Of course it was fully applicable to our mission.”
“And there were times we’d do just the opposite,” said Marks. “We slip outa’ firebase at O-dark 30 with nigh vision gear and hike into many of the local villages in the valley.”
“This was always an adrenalin drip trip,” added Kelly. “When we get near the villages, the freakin’ dogs go crazy. Every compound had dogs – one helluva’ security system – and they knew we were on ‘em in a hurry.”
The dogs would bark and yammer fiercely, but this is exactly what the team wanted: for the locals to know that someone was out there, potentially a threat. If a village wasn’t their destination for the evening, they’d drift through it like wraiths in the dark, just long enough to agitate the dogs into full alarm.
“At two or three in the morning, no one ever came out to investigate,” said Kelly. “But they sure as hell knew someone was out there, and it made for a bad night’s sleep after that, for sure.”
It wasn’t uncommon for the team to set off a string of canine alarms along a jagged three, four, or six-mile path. A few hours before daybreak, they’d occasionally settle
into concealed positions within a village as every dog hit fevered pitch. Eventually, the animals would settle down, but buy this time the villagers were sleepless in 
Afghanistan.
“In those instances, we concealed ourselves while maintaining radio communications with other team members,” explained Marks. “Eventually, we’d come out of concealment to ‘be discovered’ by someone in town, or we’d just come out of hiding and walk away in full daylight. This was usually just short of a heart attack for them, but the impact was the same: shock n’ awe, you know? And then, no doubt, the rumor mill buzzed for days as villagers compared stories.”
“We don’t wanna’ mess with those crazy bastards!” shouted Kelly, the most fitting punctuation to the story.
During the heat and blinding light of day, just as unlikely a time for live fire exercises, they’d go out to do gun drills, soon drenched in perspiration. They were active on the range, always shooting, always working in tandem, sweating bullets.
The idea, said Marks and Kelly, was to be as unpredictable as possible, badass to the core. Sort of like the pooch that swaggers up to a skanky half-rotten corpse and rolls in it to say: “Sure my shit stinks. I’m a nasty m’fer.”
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