Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (10 page)

“No. We’re going in at dawn,” Fabayo said. “The noise of trucks would alert them. I don’t want to lose the element of surprise.”

Element of surprise, my ass. I didn’t know how ninety noisy
Askars, arriving after a day of cell phone chatter, could have an
element of surprise
walking into a mountain village. Even as a twenty-one-year-old E-4, I could assure you that a ninety-man patrol is incapable of having any sort of
element of surprise
.

Lt. Johnson looked at me, shaking his head to warn me to be quiet. He pointed at the map and pantomimed making notes. I got it. He wanted me to stop critiquing what I couldn’t change and come up with the tactics for our lead element.

Thinking the danger lay on the far ridgelines and not closer in, my idea was simple. Because Team Monti was in the lead, we’d be the first to engage. So I’d take point with a 240 machine gun with five hundred rounds. I’d put Dodd Ali and his spit-polished SAW on my flank. I assumed we’d be hit by a few snipers, covered by a PKM. If the 240 couldn’t suppress them, Dodd Ali would cover me while I called for artillery.

I saw Capt. William Swenson sitting among us. He was the quiet, long-haired Border Police advisor I knew only by reputation. For ten months, he and his SNCO (senior noncommissioned officer), Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Westbrook, had been living with the police, driving around in an unarmed Ford Ranger pickup. Swenson joked that they were “an Army of Two.”

Swenson was on his third combat tour and had held over a hundred key leader engagements with mountain clans. He popped up in the strangest places. Once, when Lt. Kerr was conducting a patrol into very remote valleys outside Dangam, his soldiers stopped by the compound of
Gal Rahman, a border police chief. They were greeted by a lanky, beardless man in a gray man-dress and a flat
pahkohl
hat. It was Swenson. He had been invited to a wedding and had stayed on in the mountains for a week as the chief’s guest, despite the news that a “
soft American target” had made its way back into Pakistan.

I was glad to see Swenson at the briefing. He was known for calling in artillery fire on the dot. Adjusting artillery in the mountains wasn’t easy. So I planned to introduce myself to Swenson and compare coordinates.

Fabayo said helicopters weren’t in support of us, but would be diverted if needed. He did say artillery was in support and pointed to the Kilo Echoes, or artillery registration points, marked by six red crosses on the photomap. I watched Swenson check them against his own map.

“
Three-070 is the Undo KE, correct?” he said.

“Undo” meant we were pulling out. Swenson was concentrating on how we would get out of that box canyon if things went wrong. He wanted a fire mission to conceal our retreat. Maj. Williams believed 1-32 had assured him that “we could put smoke on the deck for screening.”
KE 3070 was the registration point for that smoke screen.

“KE 3070 is the Undo,” Fabayo agreed.

The briefing hadn’t addressed command and control. I assumed Maj. Williams, as the senior American, was in charge.
Battalion 1-32 believed Williams was in charge. But Williams believed
Maj. Talib, the operations officer of the Afghan battalion, was in command. Which is the craziest thing I’ve ever heard in my entire life. Talib, who spoke broken English, could not call in fire support. But Talib and Williams would be together, so any confusion about command could be resolved on the spot. If everything went according to plan, the trip to Ganjigal would be a pleasant morning hike on a pleasant fall day.

At one point, Maj. Williams said, “I hope we can be back at Joyce in time for lunch.”

* * *

As we left the briefing room, I didn’t get that chance to corner Capt. Swenson; 1st Sgt. Garza pulled me and Team Monti aside.

“Gunny Johnson is replacing Meyer on this op,” he said.

Gunny Johnson handled logistics on base, doing endless paperwork. He was competent, even-tempered, and obliging. If Team Monti needed gear, he found it and shipped it to us. It was not unusual to rotate men on missions where low-level shooting was likely. Hearing a few rounds crack by once during a nine-month tour wasn’t too much to ask. Every Marine wanted to qualify for the Combat Action Ribbon. It would suck to be stuck on Joyce, and never qualify for the CAR.

Plus, I wasn’t popular at ETT headquarters on Joyce. Fabayo had told me several times that “our job as advisors was not to fight.” Headquarters considered me too headstrong. Maybe so, but on this patrol, we were going into a horseshoe-shaped valley with steep mountains on every side, with no trees or undergrowth for concealment, walking uphill for over a kilometer to reach two hamlets where every house was as hardened as a Normandy pillbox.

“I should be with my team, First Sergeant,” I said.

I was Team Monti’s tactician and gunner. In the dozen-odd scrapes we’d been in, I had burned through ten thousand rounds. I could clear misfires, coax malfunctioning breeches, and quickly swap out one barrel or one gun for another. I had walked fire onto targets at ranges from two hundred to seven hundred meters. On this patrol, I wanted to walk point in front of Lt. Johnson, not babysit the trucks in the rear. The four of us were a unit now.

Staff Sgt. Kenefick and Lt. Johnson agreed with me, objecting strenuously.

“We need Meyer,” Staff Sgt. Kenefick said.

“We’re a team, First Sergeant,” Lt. Johnson said. “It makes no sense to split us up.”

“The decision’s been made,” 1st Sgt. Garza said. “End of discussion.”

I tried to keep calm. I couldn’t be mad at Garza, as he wasn’t the one who had made the decision. I told myself it was my ego that was hurt. I was just steamed because I’d miss some shooting time. It was no big deal; the insurgents never fought from inside a village. Gunny Johnson deserved to go on a patrol. Still, why jerk me off the team? The ETT head shed at Joyce had pulled me out to shove my nose into it, to make me more of a team player, that sort of thing.

The more I stewed, the more upset I became. The mission brief hadn’t been thorough. The ridges around Ganjigal bothered the hell out of me. I couldn’t shake a bad, bad feeling.

I sought out Staff Sgt. Juan Rodriguez-Chavez, our motor transport chief. I had known him for five months. He didn’t stand on rank and we’d traded stories about growing up on farms. He had grown up on a ranch in Mexico. Having a similar approach to life, Rod and I had become friends.

He was in the eighth grade when his family moved to Texas, where he learned English, played football, earned good grades, and roped cows in rodeos. Our team called him “Hot Rod.” He laughed a lot, bragged about how smart his two daughters were, and kept all our vehicles in top condition.

“Rod, this mission is fucked up. If the shit hits the fan,” I said, “we’re going in. My team’s walking point, and they’ll get cut off. We have to go in and get them out.”

“Dakota,” Rod said, “don’t put this on Gunny Johnson. I heard him and Staff Sgt. Kenefick talking. They’re both upset you’re not with them.”

“I know, Gunny’s a good guy. I’m pissed about the whole setup. If
they step in shit, they’ll need heavy firepower, and we’re back here. We have to be ready to push up that wash.”

“Devil Dog,” Rod said, “say the word, and I’ll do the driving.”

Having some sort of contingency plan now, I walked back to the advisor headquarters and briefed Lt. Johnson.

“If things get hairy,” I said, “I’m coming in. Rod will drive. Radio your coordinates and get down to the wash. Fucking climb in and we’ll haul ass back to the main body.”

He stared at me for a second, smiled, and burst out laughing.

“Meyer, you’re always thinking how to get into it,” he said.

He definitely was relieved. I did the fire planning for our team and then I was suddenly gone. Now I was promising I’d figured out a way to be there. The lieutenant was too good a leader ever to speak badly about anyone. He’d joke around about personality tics, but not in a way that undercut anyone’s authority. Still, he didn’t try to talk me out of it, or tell me to coordinate with Maj. Williams or Lt. Fabayo. My deal with Rod stayed inside Team Monti, and I took that as a green light. If there was trouble, Rod and I were going in.

The lieutenant and I lay down on the two couches in the advisor’s office. I could tell he was feeling better about the patrol because he wasn’t brooding or going over his notes. Instead, we talked and laughed about silly stuff. Maybe we had made too much fuss about another KLE.

While we were chatting, Fabayo, dressed in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt, walked into 1-32’s tactical operations center to drop off our roster, called an
equipment density list. Before a convoy leaves a base, all Social Security numbers and blood types are handed in to the duty officer.

In the TOC, a report about Ganjigal had come in via the brigade Internet. A Special Forces team reported that
thirty-two fighters were
moving from Pakistan to reinforce Ganjigal. Half an hour later, the video feed from an unmanned aerial vehicle showed a man with a mortar tube on his back entering a known safe house,
two kilometers north of Ganjigal village. Ten minutes later, four more men entered the same house.

Fabayo knew nothing of these movements; the TOC at Joyce had not mentioned them. Such sightings at night were frequent, and few turned out to be serious. Even so, one of the observations came with this note: “Their movement is too organized to be locals; they have a point man, security element and overwatch. Locals do not move like this. They are utilizing terrain,
stopping under cover and hesitating at all open areas.”

In fact, Qari Zia Ur-Rahman, head of the Taliban in Kunar Province, had
perfect intelligence a day ahead of our movement. He had thrown away his normal tactics, gathered all the forces he could muster, crossed over from Pakistan, and headed toward Ganjigal. He intended to stand and fight from
inside
the village. Twenty Taliban were already in the village; a fighter named Khadim had fifteen more, and Rahman had another fifteen. A leader named Faqir brought in twenty more and set up in five positions: two on the north side,
two on the south side, and one in the middle. At 4:13 A.M., a group of fighters had stopped to pray on a hill
two kilometers northeast of Ganjigal. They were seen by an eye in the sky, as were the movements of other men coming our way. Before dawn, they were in place in and around Ganjigal, a village so tough to attack that it had
served as a major supply point in the war against the Russians.

Fabayo walked back to the advisor area. Neither Lt. Johnson nor I believed the small task force would roll on time. But we left the wire shortly after three in the morning, ten minutes late, which wasn’t bad.

On the way in, we talked about our plans for when we got back to the States. We came up with one super scheme: Lt. Johnson would volunteer to be the officer-in-charge of ROTC at a small college. Staff Sgt. Kenefick would be the senior NCO, handling personnel matters. He’d slip Doc Layton and me in as transfer students. The college might be a surf party school or a ski party school—we went back and forth on that.

Under a bright moon and gentle wind, we rolled the two miles north to the jumping-off point. I was in the turret. Staff Sgt. Kenefick drove; Lt. Johnson sat opposite him in the commander’s seat, monitoring the radio. Doc Layton sat behind him. Hafez, sitting behind Staff Sgt. Kenefick, changed our mood.

“Ganjigal is a bad valley,” Hafez said. “Very bad valley.”

“Stop saying that, Hafez,” Staff Sgt. Kenefick said.

Everyone was irritable because the team had been broken up. It felt unlucky.

“Meyer, it’s your bad,” Johnson said. “If you learned how to kiss ass, or at least not kick people in the ass, you’d be coming with us. But no, that’s not your style. So stay behind with the trucks and sip chai. See if we care.”

“Sir, don’t bust my balls. I’ll drive in to get you if your feet get sore.”

I reminded them of my plan with Rodriguez-Chavez.

“Hot Rod drives like he’s in a rodeo,” I said. “He can get up that wash. If shit happens, be ready to move.”

We were heading toward Little Big Horn.

With lights off, we drove slowly a mile and a half up the dirt track into the valley—half a league, in British military parlance. From there, it would be that distance again, but on foot.

The jumping-off point was called the ORP, or the objective release point. Our convoy consisted of three passenger trucks, six Ford Ranger pickups with open backs, and four armored Humvees. The soldiers hopped out, leaving the thirteen vehicles parked in a long row on the narrow road. It would be hard to get those vehicles out of the way in a hurry, I thought, and hard to get anyone out for medical help. Not a great place to stop, considering there were plenty of wide spots in the dry riverbed.

“Lieutenant,” I said to Lt. Johnson, “if we have an emergency medevac, this will be a cluster fuck.”

He took Fabayo aside, and a few minutes later we moved the trucks off the track. While the vehicles were repositioned, Staff Sgt. Kenefick took me aside.

“Make sure you monitor the net,” he said. “I want you listening up.”

“If the shit hits the fan,” I replied, “get down to the wash. We’ll pick you up.”

The patrol formed up single file. Capt. Kaplan, the intelligence officer, took off separately with a small group to set up an observation post on the southern ridge, to our right. Higher up on the same ridge an Army scout-sniper team had already settled in. A third observation team cut left across the rocky wash to establish a post on the northern ridge, a half-mile away.

Gunny Johnson walked up to join my team. It was still dark, but we could see each other under the stars and moon. He knew how I was feeling. He was carrying our 240. Well, the machine gun wasn’t complicated to use. Besides, he’d never have to fire it.

Team Monti and our Afghan platoon—the best of them—set off in the lead. Dodd Ali scrambled by me to take point ahead of Gunny. He grinned and gave me a little wave. When Lt. Johnson walked by, he gave me a fist pump. Hafez, busy adjusting his pair of radios, ignored me.