U.S. Troops Tense After Sniper Fire

Darren McDonough was wrapping up a routine check of the perimeter with a stop at the last foxhole under his command when he heard a series of rapid cracks from across the barbed wire about 55 yards away.

It was sniper fire at the U.S.-controlled Kandahar airport, a theoretically secure site where the tension, for good reason, is palpable.

McDonough, a first sergeant in the Army’s 101st Airborne Division, plunged into the dust and started firing toward the muzzle flashes. Two bunkers away, Cpl. Anthony Mata was tucked behind a pile of sandbags, taking fire that left his bunker pocked with bullet holes. He called for help.

“I see it, I see it,” McDonough said as he ran toward Mata in the pitch blackness.

Sparks flew as a spray of bullets struck corrugated steel on the runway. McDonough crouched behind a mound of sand, but the rounds kept coming, sending him tumbling to the ground on his back. Dazed, he ran a hand across the nape of his neck. It felt wet.

“I think I’m hit,” he said into his radio.

The Feb. 13 incident that sent the base into its highest state of alert highlights the lingering tension among American soldiers over security here.

Military strategists have gone far to tighten security for troops stationed overseas ever since the 1996 truck bombing of Khobar Towers, an Air Force housing complex in Saudi Arabia, said Col. Keith Bartsch, commander of the Air Force’s 19th Air Support Operations Squadron.

“The military’s learned a lot of lessons,” Bartsch said. “Khobar Towers, things like that--that won’t happen here.”

It is a commentary on Afghanistan that the soldiers here say the airport is the safest it has been since the war began Oct. 7. Several hundred yards away, Air Force mechanic Tech. Sgt. Kenneth Main slept through the Feb. 13 firefight. Despite the prospect of terrorists testing modes of entry into the base, he said he isn’t taking additional precautions.

“You’ve got to act like that would happen at any time,” said Main, 36.

Military strategists expect further attempts at the airport, which has been a dangerous place for a couple of decades. Along the runway lie the hulks of helicopters destroyed during the Soviet Union’s failed war in Afghanistan in the 1980s. One of them is little more than a single rotor blade jutting diagonally about 15 feet into the dusty Kandahar sky.

As McDonough and other military officials tell it, the Feb. 13 attack was carried out by three groups of two disciplined gunmen each taking turns firing and reloading, apparently using night-vision goggles to track their targets.

Apache helicopters were dispatched, their pilots equipped with night-vision technology to look for the attackers. But no enemy fighters were captured, and no bodies were found. The search was hampered because the fire came from across an area riddled with mines, beyond the concertina wire that surrounds the base.

McDonough and other Army officials here believe that the gunmen were disciplined soldiers sending carefully calculated exploratory fire into American positions, probing for weaknesses they could later exploit.

“It is clearly probing fire trying to find a hole, trying to find the weaknesses. Trying to find complacency. Trying to find anything they can to exploit and get in here and do something,” said Col. Frank Wiercinski, the top officer managing the base for the 101st Airborne.

Army Lt. Col. Charles Preysler, praising his troops for driving away an enemy who has not been identified, has recommended the 101st Airborne soldiers for combat medals.

Still taking fire, Mata bolted out of his bunker and around the first in a row of 10-foot-high berms. Turning the corner, he collided with McDonough.

“They weren’t just shooting blindly. They were shooting at us,” McDonough recalled. “Certainly if you look out 50 meters away you couldn’t see somebody running without night-vision equipment.”

Mata “put his body on top of mine,” said McDonough, 31. “One hand was firing, returning fire, and with the other hand he was pulling me back behind this berm. . . . He reached down and wiped the blood off. Then he told me, ‘Hey sir, you’re just scratched. You’re good.’ I was like, ‘Roger.’ Then he said, ‘We gotta get out of here.’ I was like, ‘Roger. Let’s get out of here.’ ”