The loud report of the guns echoed all around the sleepy farming village. Mudin buckled, went down face first onto the ground. As the grenade exploded, he and Holmes opened fire, shooting the boy repeatedly at close range with an M4 carbine and a machine gun. Then Morlock tossed a grenade toward Mudin, using the wall as cover. The soldiers knelt down behind a mud-brick wall. Morlock and Holmes called to him in Pashto as he walked toward them, ordering him to stop. “He was not a threat,” Morlock later confessed. The expression on his face was welcoming. He held nothing in his hand that could be interpreted as a weapon, not even a shovel. He was wearing a little cap and a Western-style green jacket. His name, they would later learn, was Gul Mudin, a common name in Afghanistan. Not much younger than they were: Morlock was 21, Holmes was 19. He was a smooth-faced kid, about 15 years old. And just like that, they picked him for execution. With no one around to witness, the timing was right. But the farmer was the only Afghan in sight. Off in the distance, a few other soldiers stood sentry. Andrew Holmes, saw a young farmer who was working by himself among the spiky shoots. The poppy plants were still low to the ground at that time of year. “The general consensus was, if we are going to do something that fucking crazy, no one wanted anybody around to witness it,” one of the men later told Army investigators. There, in a nearby poppy field, they began looking for someone to kill. While the officers of 3rd Platoon peeled off to talk to a village elder inside a compound, two soldiers walked away from the unit until they reached the far edge of the village. The insurgents, for their part, preferred to stay hidden from American troops, striking from a distance with IEDs. It was impossible to tell which, if any, of the villagers were sympathetic to the Taliban. Instead, they were greeted by a frustratingly familiar sight: destitute Afghan farmers living without electricity or running water bearded men with poor teeth in tattered traditional clothes young kids eager for candy and money. But as the soldiers of 3rd Platoon walked through the alleys of La Mohammad Kalay, they saw no armed fighters, no evidence of enemy positions. Local villagers were suspected of supporting the Taliban, providing a safe haven for strikes against U.S. To provide perimeter security, the soldiers parked the Strykers at the outskirts of the settlement, which was nothing more than a warren of mud-and-straw compounds. Singer Paulette McWilliams on Her Years With Marvin Gaye, Michael Jackson, and Steely Dan The massive, eight-wheeled trucks surged across wide, vacant stretches of desert, until they came to La Mohammad Kalay, an isolated farming village tucked away behind a few poppy fields. On the morning of January 15th, the company’s 3rd Platoon – part of the 5th Stryker Brigade, based out of Tacoma, Washington – left the mini-metropolis of tents and trailers at Forward Operating Base Ramrod in a convoy of armored Stryker troop carriers. But not long after the New Year, as winter descended on the arid plains of Kandahar Province, they agreed to stop talking and actually pull the trigger.īravo Company had been stationed in the area since summer, struggling, with little success, to root out the Taliban and establish an American presence in one of the most violent and lawless regions of the country. Some of them agonized over the idea others were gung-ho from the start. For weeks, they had weighed the ethics of bagging “savages” and debated the probability of getting caught. Early last year, after six hard months soldiering in Afghanistan, a group of American infantrymen reached a momentous decision: It was finally time to kill a haji.Īmong the men of Bravo Company, the notion of killing an Afghan civilian had been the subject of countless conversations, during lunchtime chats and late-night bull sessions.
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