Continuing Actions on Objective Part 6
Ghost walkers of the night hide within the shadows of life and death.
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My vision was green and black even without night vision goggles these days, once the nightfall came, my eyes would switch directly to shades of green changing to the brightness of the moon’s exposure of light, think of a black and white photo, and the white areas show parts of the photo due to the light being exposed, this was what my vision turned into permanently, expect with two colors green and black. The unknown number of patrols under night vision goggles became a surgical operation to my brain, rewiring my visual pathway becoming a superpower to survive out here. Majority of patrol infills happen no earlier than a couple of hours prior to midnight, allowing for the ecosystem to settle from the vibrations of the sun. Night patrols at first were slow and grueling, covering minimum terrain making the patrol very clunky. And now, comes a smoothness over terrain and obstacles not stopping us in our tracks anymore. Each one of us learned how to move through this country, becoming architects physically and cognitively to the battlefield. With the moon above casting light down helped remove graininess that came from too much light or too little. The spin is, the night vision goggles covered one eye, the dominant eye, leaving your other eye staring off into the darkness that lurks, but as time went on, it felt like both my eyes were in the middle of my head looking through a tube into another realm of life. They were attached to an mounting arm that connects to a black plate screwed on to our helmets that resemble the shape of a diamond. Which is what led the Taliban to name 1st Recon Battalion “The Black Diamonds of Afghanistan.” The mounting plate stood out from afar due to the tan color helmet it was placed on. Night vision goggles were a nonnegotiable item, it allowed each and every member of a patrol the ability to move and communicate in pure darkness with minimum light. Repetition after repetition learning to patrol during these sunless windows turned us into ghost walkers, another superpower that kept us alive, disappearing from our kryptonite. The will to survive and fear of death was the fuel needed to maintain the upper hand once we took over the area. Night patrols became the knight in our chess match against the Taliban. These missions under night vision goggles consisted of looking for IEDs, conducting key leader engagements - private meetings with big fish - and collecting more intel from the locals giving them a death wish, knowing they will be killed by the Taliban for treason. Plus any other enemy activity that might have come up throughout the day around our area of operation. We often found locals afraid and unsure of what was going on as we entered their homes, to conduct search, seize, and extract tactics rampaging throughout their house for weapons, drugs, and bomb-making material, questioning them for further information about the Taliban. Other nights, missions were to search and clear houses, by kicking these people out of their homes in the wee hours of the night or hiding them in a room for the time being. It felt much like kidnapping, but we paid them off afterward for their time, so it wasn’t. We needed to do this for a couple reasons: establishing a hide-site to observe known areas of activity that we had gathered during our key leader engagements or clearing compounds to set up future-forward observation posts that our company or team would conduct patrols and follow on missions from. These people didn’t trust us, or want our help. After all we did, they wanted us dead. I learned rather quickly that fighters of the Taliban knew these villages like the back of their hands. Most fighters recruited from these areas built cells to look over the shadiness of business in those villages turned into a connector to the map of the Taliban money lines. At least one family member or the whole family grew up fighting a war that becomes their only reality. It is a consistent stream of evil since time began. Immerse into their genes due to years of dismay. Fighters under the Taliban are not human. They don’t know empathy. To defeat these soulless beings you have to ignore mankind. By ignoring humanity, an action that fuels the fire to remain vigilant, became gunshot wounds to the heart, mind, soul, and spirit. Unseen wounds leaking blood leaving me to apply a tourniquet and packing the wounds with quit clot trying not to kill myself. In those environments, this was a means of survival, overtime adapting, and building my tolerance to war. The Taliban's mission was to kill those not part of their tribe, and even being a part of that tribe doesn't mean anything. They knew two things, survival and loyalty to those who are loyal to them. The men with a black diamond on their helmets who shook the night under black and green vision were not friends or a part of their tribe. The Black Diamonds of Afghanistan were the devil in their hearts and minds.
