51st US soldier this year is killed in forgotten war

Tim Albone,
Baylough, Afghanistan

IT WAS just after midnight when the radio crackled and a shout of “Man down, man down” came over the airwaves. The signal was weak and the voice barely audible, but the message to the men of Kelts platoon of the US Army’s 503rd Airborne was painfully clear.
Earlier that evening a patrol of 16 Americans and 25 Afghan soldiers and police had set off from their mud compound at Baylough, in Afghanistan’s restive southern province of Zabul, to stake out the house of Mullah Toor Manan, a local Taliban commander.

The Afghans covered the front of the house; Captain Mike Kloepper, the commanding officer, and Lieutenant Derek Hines, 25, his second-in-command, took the back.

The sound of gunfire alerted the men at base that something was wrong. Then came the message on the radio.

Manan, number 15 on America’s most wanted list, had apparently been alerted by sounds outside and he and his bodyguard burst out of the back of the house. Before they were both shot and killed they unloaded several rounds — one of which went through Hines’s left shoulder, passing through his chest. He and his Afghan interpreter died.

Hines was the 51st US soldier to die in hostile fire in Afghanistan this year, the highest annual number since the 2001 invasion. His killing has underlined the threat still posed by the Taliban in its southern stronghold in the run-up to parliamentary elections next Sunday.

Fighting the remnants of Afghanistan’s fundamentalist Islamic erstwhile rulers will be the main challenge for British troops who are to play the leading role in a multinational force to be deployed in nearby Helmand province next May.

“This is the front line in the war on terror,” said Lieutenant Mark Bush, a 25-year-old member of Kelts platoon. Bush said the Day Chopan district in the north of Zabul, for which he was responsible, had suffered more violent attacks than anywhere else in Afghanistan. It was also one of the most conservative areas, where a mere 90 of the 4,500 women eligible to vote had registered.

Bush, a calm, reflective man who plays guitar, said: “I remember watching the footage of 9/11 and seeing someone run into the smoke to help people. I wanted to be the type of person that helps people. I’m helping these people to be free from terrorists.”

The base used to be a police headquarters and is as austere as it is isolated. It has no running water and all waste has to be burnt. Rocket attacks are a regular event. Defence is a matter of damage limitation.

A western security source said he believed the local Taliban were being trained and assisted by militants from Chechnya, Uzbekistan and other central Asian countries. The Day Chopan area is so dangerous that almost all supplies are flown in by helicopter from Kandahar. The helicopters fly in twos — a Chinook to carry supplies and an Apache to protect it from ground attack.

When it comes to taking on the Taliban, however, the American soldiers have no alternative but to venture beyond their base, sometimes with fatal consequences.

Hines’s father Steven, a policeman with the anti-terrorist taskforce at Boston’s Logan airport, said last week that when told of his son’s death he was initially angry with the American government for having sent him on such a mission.

However, his anger was tempered by the knowledge that his son truly believed in the work he was undertaking. “I don’t want to minimise his memory by getting mad at the government,” Steven Hines said. “He didn’t have to go to Ranger school or Airborne school. He chose to. He was fearless.”

Among the dead man’s comrades, however, there is frustration at how little is understood in America about what they are going through.

“We thought we wouldn’t take our guns off safety, but this is a war,” said Private Justin Berg, at 24 one of the older members of the platoon. “In America they call it ‘Who-gives-a-stan’. They don’t think anything is going on here any more.”

Gunmen fired on a vehicle belonging to Abdul Rahim Wardak, the defence minister, yesterday, shortly after he had got out. Nobody was hurt in the incident, which happened after a helicopter carrying the army chief, General Bismillah Khan, was forced to crash land. He escaped without injury.

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