Then gunfire rattled alongside the lead platoon's flanks as insurgents opened up from among the vines. It was a little after 8am. Within half an hour, a popular platoon commander had been wounded by an IED. By 9.30, every one of the company's units was in contact with the enemy. Dog Company were barely 600 metres south of their start point and still some way from reaching another of their battalion's companies, dropped further south by helicopter during the night. As the soldiers returned fire, the Kiowas swooped in impossibly low, strafing the Taliban with rockets and machine-guns to a ground chorus of exultant yells.

"Light 'em up!"

"Yeah, baby!" 

"Hell, yeah!"

By this time, the donkeys had been abandoned and, free of their loads, wandered unconcernedly through the vines as gunfire rattled about them. Some of the accompanying Afghan troops joined them in the foliage, nodding off in hash-induced trances beneath the bullwhip crack of bullets. Relatively newly-recruited troops, the Afghan National Army here looked miserably inept beside their US allies, and were a far cry from some of the pugnacious Afghan units I had encountered in Helmand a year earlier. Natural killers, some of those fighters had habitually placed the mutilated bodies of dead Taliban beside their nocturnal checkpoints as a message to the local populace. By contrast, these charsullahs (potheads) seemed overwhelmed by it all. 

Forever ingrained into my brain was the image of a US soldier fighting in the flat light of late morning, his combat trousers ripped open through wear along the seams of his crotch from knee to knee, his penis out and flapping ridiculously, firing up the vineyards with his M4 carbine while beside him lolled an ANA trooper so stoned he struggled to keep his eyes open, his helmet strap hooked under his nose, weapon cradled uselessly in his arms, an utterly moronic figure: not quite the official pin-up boys of the surge, but certainly memorable. 

The Taliban put up a doughty resistance. There were little more than perhaps ten insurgents — two or three machine-gun teams — slowing down Dog Company with harassing fire. Arrayed against them were drones, jets, A-10s, Apache helicopters, Kiowas, Stryker tanks and 155mm artillery. There was not much let-up at night either, when the Spooky gunships dealt out death from above, or the new Himar rockets — a type of mini-cruise missile — wiped out the Taliban bomb factories and command-and-control nodes in the rear areas.

Yet time and time again, the Taliban, huddled in their tight little earth-walled "murder hole" bunkers among the vines, appeared to absorb the most frightful punishment from the vengeful, roiling skies, only to emerge once again with the distinctive clacking of their Kalashnikovs and PKM machine-guns. But as time went by and the Kiowa gun runs mounted, the space between these insolent retorts lengthened. Eventually, by the third day, there was no sound from the insurgents at all. 

Was this the beginning of the war's end?