Security

Epic Border Battle a Bad Sign for Afghanistan

MARGAH, Afghanistan — Brett Capstick was in bed when it happened. The 22-year-old Army specialist from Ohio awoke to the sound of “screaming, explosions,” he says. It was around 1:20 in the morning on Oct. 30 at a tiny American outpost in Margah, a dusty border town in eastern Paktika province. David Axe spent six […]


MARGAH, Afghanistan -- Brett Capstick was in bed when it happened. The 22-year-old Army specialist from Ohio awoke to the sound of "screaming, explosions," he says. It was around 1:20 in the morning on Oct. 30 at a tiny American outpost in Margah, a dusty border town in eastern Paktika province.


David Axe spent six weeks in Afghanistan, on the war's dangerous and largely forgotten eastern front.
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Capstick's unit -- Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry -- had been in plenty of firefights and rocket attacks since arriving at Combat Outpost Margah in August. But as he reached the roof of the outpost's main building, Capstick realized that this ... well, this was different.

The rainy, overcast night was alive with tracers and explosions. The noise was apocalyptic. The battle raging on all sides of the soccer-field-size outpost and its adjacent hilltop observation post was "all-out," Capstick says six months later. He's sitting in one of the mouse-infested, concrete-and-plywood buildings where two platoons of infantry hunker between exhausting, hours-long foot patrols.

That night, Capstick and his teammates manned two separate mortars while other soldiers fired rifles, machine guns and anti-tank missiles to beat back hundreds of insurgents attacking from all sides. Artillery at a nearby U.S. base added its firepower to the melee, as did Air Force jet fighters and Army Apache helicopters. When the sun rose and the dust settled, 92 insurgents lay dead around the outpost, according to Army figures. Five Americans were wounded, but none was killed.

Capstick estimates he personally fired up to 16 mortar rounds. Spec. Matt Barnes, firing his M-4 rifle from one the outposts guard towers, says he burned through at least 300 rounds. To keep Fox Company fighting through the night and following day, Blackhawk helicopters swooped into the outpost's gravel landing zone hauling body bags filled with ammo and a fresh M-2 machine gun.

It was the one of the biggest localized fights of the 10-year-old Afghanistan war -- and one of the most lopsided battlefield victories for American forces. But the nearly 12-hour Battle of Margah barely registered in the news cycle back in America.

All the same, a half-year later Margah remains an important object lesson for the U.S. military and NATO, and for politicians betting on improving security to allow them to withdraw troops from Afghanistan starting this summer.

Safe Haven

It's an axiom of successful unconventional war that insurgent fighters require safe havens. As long as Afghan and foreign fighters can move unmolested between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the U.S.-led coalition will never be able to reverse Afghanistan's deteriorating security.

In their Pakistani shelters, insurgents re-arm, refine their intelligence and hone their training. That's the hidden lesson of the Margah battle, and of Fox Company's ongoing operations in eastern Paktika.

True, the insurgents failed to capture the American outpost in the October fight, and few of them survived the attempt. But it was close. "A lot of us didn't think we were going to make it," Barnes says, sitting amid the craters and ruins of the hilltop observation post that saw the bloodiest fighting back in October.

That the Margah attackers could muster the necessary manpower and weaponry and also plan and support such a large-scale attack is a sobering sign of the insurgency's enduring, or even increasing, strength -- and a foreboding signal of the potential intensity of this spring's fighting season.

Soon after they arrived in Margah in August, the young men of Fox Company received reports of as many as 700 insurgents crossing the nearby border all at the same time. They say they were skeptical of such huge figures ... until a sizable proportion of that insurgent army appeared in the Americans' night scopes in October, armed to the teeth and shouting "Allah akbar" as they stormed the outpost.

Surrounded


The soldiers of Fox Company had been in the area just a few days when they launched their first patrol through the downtown Margah, a few hundred yards from the outpost. It was a modest operation meant to "show our faces," in the words of Pvt. 1st Class Cody Wilmot (pictured, above).

But Margah's insurgents had other plans. The Americans didn't realize it at the time, but their reception in downtown Margah on Aug. 29 was a preview of the much deadlier assault that would follow in October.

The patrol had gone as planned -- so far. A big crowd of town residents gathered to greet Fox Company. Kids ran alongside the strolling soldiers. Satisfied that they'd announced their presence, the Americans were withdrawing from Margah back toward their outpost when the first shot rang out.

"It sounded like popcorn," recalls Wilmot, a grinning 21-year-old with a Wisconsin accent who had been in the Army just seven months at the time of the downtown ambush. The young soldier with the giant holes in his ears -- from guages he no longer wears -- remembers thinking, What's that noise?

Then the first Rocket-Propelled Grenades exploded, and no one was confused anymore. In an instant, the Americans began taking fire from four different positions on three sides. Wilmot and his squad leader leaped into a wadi, a dry streambed, to cover their comrades as the others retreated.

"Rounds are going not two feet over my head," Wilmot says. "An RPG flew five feet over my head."

The young soldier fired his M-4 then switched to a grenade launcher. Six months later, Wilmot's lieutenant, a 29-year-old Floridian named Jason Wright, describes Wilmot lobbing grenade after grenade at the attackers, never once showing fear or breaking his concentration. Wilmot's squad leader had to drag him out of the wadi so they could catch up with the withdrawing patrol.

As is often the case in Afghanistan, the fighting ended after the U.S. Apache gunships showed up.

It was another American victory -- at least as far as the apparent body count goes. Nobody stuck around to get an exact tally, but Fox Company's machine gunners certainly killed several Taliban when they blasted a couple enemy trucks. No Americans were killed or wounded, although one injured his ankle falling into a wadi.

Later, the Army would award Wilmot an Army Commendation Medal for his actions in Margah that day. It would be only the first in a cascade of medals for Fox Company's courageous soldiers. The truly intense fighting would start two months later, on the day before Halloween.

Rude Awakening

Barnes was asleep when the October battle kicked off. The first thing he remembers is a sergeant running through the outpost's concrete-walled rooms, shouting, "We're taking incoming!"

That was soon self-evident as rockets exploded and machine-gun rounds pocked the outpost's concrete buildings and sandbagged towers and bunkers.

Barnes and the other Fox Company soldiers threw on their gear, grabbed their weapons and moved to defend their tiny toehold in this remote and hostile town. Barnes climbed into a guard tower with his squad leader and opened fire on Taliban fighters streaming over a distant ridgeline.

He'd been shooting non-stop for around 20 minutes when he noticed a red glow coming from the hilltop observation post looming over the main outpost. At the observation post, a team of just six soldiers manned a gun-armed, blast-proof truck and some machine-gun bunkers.

Unbeknown to many of the soldiers down below, the six guys on the hilltop had been fighting for their lives against a human wave of Taliban assailants. The red glow Barnes saw was a flare -- the agreed-upon signal that "something bad had happened," Barnes says.

Pvt. 1st Class Timothy James was at the bleeding edge of the hilltop fight. Like so many of his fellow Fox Company troopers, James was asleep as the Taliban surrounded the American base. James (pictured, above) sprang out of bed when the shooting started and Pvt. 1st Class James Platt burst into the bunker saying that the Taliban were already on top of the hill.

James, from Arizona, is an unlikely combatant. Just 18 years old at the time of the attack, he has a round face and expressive eyes. When he describes the violence of that October night, he lists in detail what everyone else was doing, while downplaying his own incredible heroics.

To hear him describe it, James utterly failed to strike back at the Taliban attackers. "I was the only one who got to his pre-planned position," he says in early April, while perched atop the sandbags surrounding one of the outpost's mortar pits. "I look back and I see 30 Taliban coming up road, up the OP, shooting and crying, 'Allah akbar' -- their war cry and stuff.

"I tried to fire my weapon, but I probably got one round off the M-249 [machine gun] at that time. After that, I started breaking down. I felt helpless, so I tried to do anything I could: take the .50-cal [heavy machine gun] out of the bunker -- that wouldn't work. I tried shooting off the AT-4 [anti-tank missile] the first time -- that wouldn't work ... Near my position there was a truck with a 'Crows' system, an automated weapons system. I tried turning that on, but the kill-switch was off on the truck, so that wouldn't work either."

Despairing, James sat and watched the other hilltop soldiers firing on the Taliban. "They were doing a fantastic job," he says, his eyes growing red and wet as he recalls his hopelessness that night.

But James' fatalistic account belies what his fellow soldiers said about him after the battle. The young Arizonan "ran across open ground under fire to reach the southeast position, which ended up being essential to defending our ground," Sgt. Donald Starks, leader of the observation-post defenders, wrote in his official report to the Army. "While at that position, he was able to fire the AT-4 as well as throw two grenades in the direction of the enemy."

James' actions and those of his comrades on the hill delayed the Taliban long enough for Capstick and the other soldiers in the outpost to direct massive fire onto the observation post. Nearby Forward Operating Base Boris fired 155-millimeter shells to add to the devastation.

Starks decided it was time to get the hell off that hill. Dodging Taliban fire and a few errant rounds from jumpy Afghan National Army soldiers stationed down below, the six hilltop defenders raced down a steep, rocky incline and dove through the earth-and-wire walls of the outpost.

With the observation post abandoned by American troops, the outpost defenders called in the big guns. Air Force jet fighters dropped two satellite-guided bombs on the summit, after which Apache helicopter showed up and began pumping 30-millimeter cannon fire into the surviving Taliban.

Sporadic fighting would continue until the afternoon, but with bombers and Apaches overhead, the Taliban were outgunned -- and Combat Outpost Margah assured of its survival.

"I'm Just Thankful I'm Alive"


Within hours, the first brass arrived from brigade headquarters. And over the next 10 days, a steady stream of generals and sergeants major would drop by Margah to debrief, and praise, the defenders.

Around 10 days after the attack, Gen. David Petraeus, the top NATO commander in Afghanistan, came bearing medals.

The Army had agreed with Starks' account of James' heroism. Petraeus pinned a Bronze Star on the young private's chest and promoted him on the spot to specialist. In all, Fox Company soldiers would come away from the Battle of Margah with one Silver Star, three Bronze Stars, 12 Army Commendation Medals, two Purple Hearts and 10 Combat Infantrymen Badges.

For the combatants, the danger was subsiding, but the emotional risk was just beginning. "At that time [of the assault], the adrenaline was rushing," James said. "I didn't really feel too much. I was shaken up, but pretty calm at the time."

James says he didn't start feeling the emotional trauma until a few days later. Six months later, it's still evident on his smooth face. "I'm just thankful I'm alive," he says.

For James, Capstick, Barnes and the others, the August Battle of Margah is all over except for the coping. But today, with winter turning to spring, more bitter and bloody fighting is surely imminent -- in Margah and across Afghanistan.

The free flow of insurgents across the Af/Pak border, which six months ago allowed hundreds of insurgents to mass in Margah, remains one of the major reasons NATO is losing the Afghanistan war. Until that border is sealed, insurgents will enjoy safe haven in Pakistan, and the coalition will fight the same battles, every spring, against refreshed insurgent forces.

The coalition understands this danger. As part of the Afghanistan "surge" approved by the Obama administration two years ago, the U.S. Army added several battalions from the 101st Airborne Division to Paktika, in hope of interdicting border crossings. It's not clear yet whether that effort is working.

The Battle of Margah changed the lives of its participants -- and not always for the better. But the Americans were lucky. For as awful as that night's fighting was, no Americans died. The next time hundreds of Pakistan-based insurgents surround an isolated border outpost, the defenders might not be so fortunate.

Photos: David Axe, Sgt. Maj. Hector Santos of Task Force Currahee