Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (11 page)

Terrific
, I thought,
everyone’s excited to be going in, and I’m stuck in the rear
.

Maj. Williams then joined the column with his Command Group, which included 2nd Lt. Fabayo, First Sgt. Garza, Maj. Talib, and an American reporter I hadn’t met. The tactical command party (TCP) was the mobile headquarters for the operation. In this instance, it was a few men on foot. Capt. Swenson and his SNCO, Sgt. Ken Westbrook, walked behind the Command Group. Lights in the village more than a mile uphill to the east were still twinkling from the power of the little hamlet’s diesel generator.

The Askars remaining with the trucks lit up cigarettes and drank some water. It was Ramadan, so there’d be no eating or drinking once the sun came up. Most were fairly religious, praying five times a day.
The night before, I had urged them to hydrate by drinking at least five bottles of water. By noon, some would be sucking pebbles to take their minds off their thirst.

Staff Sgt. Rodriguez-Chavez and I sat on the hood of my Humvee, listening as the last gravel crunch of the column’s march faded out. A few minutes later, all the lights in the village went out at the same time. Someone had pulled the switch.

Swenson’s border police turned to Hafez when the lights went out.

“Dushmen!” they said. “We must turn back!”

I listened as Johnson sent a warning over the advisor radio net, while the platoon stopped briefly for morning prayers.

All right
, I thought.
Now the Command Party knows there’s no surprise. They’ll call up the gun trucks
.

“Get ready to roll, Rod,” I said.

But no, the patrol proceeded toward the village, with some of the border police drifting back to the rear of the column. They weren’t trained or equipped for firefights.

A few minutes later, the advisors climbing to the northern overlook radioed that flashlights were winking on and off in the hills to their east, closer to Ganjigal.

Just before five in the morning, Rod and I heard gravel crunching on the trail: men, women, children, sheep, and goats suddenly hurried by our trucks, heading out of the valley. Pre-dawn always brought the first singsong call to prayer, followed by people scurrying about. This morning, I had heard no high-pitched mullah, and these people were not heading to market, they were running away.

I stood in the middle of the path and blocked the departure of a teenager and a tall, older man with a full beard, wearing the cleanest white man-dress I had ever seen.

“Salaam,”
I said, placing my right hand over my heart in the traditional sign of respect toward an elder.
“Singay?”
—what’s going on?

Refusing to look at me, the man clicked away at the string of worry beads in his hands. When I tried to shake hands, he ignored me. I was surprised by the open insult. Even when they don’t like you, Afghans shake hands, just as Americans do. The teenager smirked. I stepped aside and they strode past.

“What you think, Homey?” Rod asked.

“This sucks,” I replied.

Team Monti and the lead platoon had climbed up a series of terrace walls and were entering the outskirts of South Ganjigal as dawn broke. They spread widely apart in the open terrain. Behind them came Majors Talib and Williams, 1st Sgt. Garza, and 2nd Lt. Fabayo. A bit farther back, Swenson was walking with some police, keeping within shouting distance of the others.

As Lt. Johnson approached the first row of houses, he radioed back to Garza that he and Lt. Rhula were heading toward
the house of an imam, one of the village elders. Seconds later, an RPG streaked in from the east, followed by a burst from a PKM, the Russian-made machine gun that shoots a hefty 7.62-millimeter cartridge. It started tearing up the ground and the adobe walls. As the men took cover among the terrace walls, more PKM fire came from the northeast, joined by AKs at closer range.

Enemy fighters were crouched inside the houses and below the windows of the schoolhouse on the southern ridge. They were hiding in the alleyways and dug in behind the stone terrace walls to the east.
They had a dozen fixed positions and were shooting downhill with the sun behind them.

* * *

I heard the shooting echoing through the valley, ragged at first and subsiding momentarily while magazines were reloaded. Then the volume increased, with mortar and RPG explosions mixed in. The advisor net crackled with voices stepping over each other. Fifteen Marines sharing one frequency were trying to radio their positions and the locations of the enemy.

Bedlam isn’t unusual in the first seconds of an attack. When dushmen open fire, they usually rip through several magazines while our guys go flat and scramble for position. Within minutes, the troops normally settle down, the senior man controls radio traffic, the forward observer calls in artillery and helicopters, and the enemy rate of fire slackens. The dushmen then scamper over the ridges and, ten minutes later, quiet descends.

Not this time. I waited for the firing to die down, but it didn’t. The staccato chaos of RPG explosions, PKM machine guns, AKs, and M16s increased. I heard the report of a recoilless rifle—basically, a 100-pound, shoulder- or tripod-mounted cannon and a sure sign of a planned ambush, as the dushmen don’t lug that over the hills for exercise. Then I heard the crump-crump of their mortar shells.

There was a wild babble of voices on the command radio—advisors yelling at each other to clear the net. No one was taking charge. There was no central command. I was pacing around, frustrated at being out of the fight and not being able to help.

Gunny Chad Lee Miller, approaching his observation position high on the north ridge, saw an enemy strongpoint on a plateau only three hundred meters to his east. The enemy soldiers were launching rounds from a mortar tube while others, inside a bunker there, were
firing a DSHKA, a massive Russian antiaircraft gun that sounds like a jackhammer hitting a manhole cover.

Staff Sgt. Guillermo Valadez, another advisor, and six Askars were on a ledge about fifty meters below Miller. They also were facing east, looking directly at the same enemy. Soon both ridgelines were sparkling with fire, as the Askars and dushmen engaged each other with rocket-propelled grenades. Smoke and shrapnel filled the air.

Across the narrow valley on the south ridge, Capt. Ray Kaplan had trudged up to his observation position, winded by the steep climb and amazed by the stamina of Cpl. Steven Norman, a slight but tough Marine lugging a 240 machine gun and several belts of ammo.

Seconds after the ambush began, they were pinned down by PKM fire from the east. Cpl. Norman set up his gun and
returned fire, killing the enemy gunner.

The first instinct of the Askars with Kaplan was to run downhill into the valley. Kaplan shouted them back into position.

It was a good thing, because a swarm of dushmen were maneuvering up the hill to overrun them.

Kaplan watched as one dushmen got to his feet to make a rush. Cpl. Norman stitched him squarely and he tumbled downhill. That knocked some enthusiasm out of the others. Kaplan seized the moment, ordering his Askars to spread out and find cover, facing northeast, the direction of the main ground assault. For the next hour, the Askars,
Kaplan, and Cpl. Norman would duel with PKM and AK gunners.

Kaplan made his men shift their positions constantly so the dushmen couldn’t zero in. He carried Viper binoculars with a laser that
measured the distance and azimuth to a target. Before he could get the reading to call in, a bullet smashed through the binoculars. He was all right, but he couldn’t call in help from the artillery with any precision.

Enemy fire from the east was swelling like a thunderstorm. RPGs and mortars shells were dropping in, with machine guns delivering accurate fires from the north and south ridgelines. Swenson, marooned out on the terraces below the village, ducked behind a stone wall. He had marked nine artillery registration points on his map; each consisted of a number preceded by the letters KE. It wasn’t Swenson’s job to act as the forward observer and to call in fire, but he responded automatically.

“This is Highlander 6!” he yelled over the din. “Forward line of troops pinned down at X-Ray Delta 96873 51568. Heavy enemy fire. Request immediate suppression. Fire
Kilo Echo 3070. Will adjust.”

The southern ridgeline was so high that Swenson’s radio couldn’t reach the operations center at Joyce, only two miles away. Kaplan, recovering from a bullet into his binoculars, tried to relay the message from his higher perch, but portions of it were garbled. Higher up on the ridge, Staff Sgt. Thomas Summers of the Army scout-sniper team, Shadow 4, finally relayed the message to the TOC.

“Fire KE 3070,” Sgt. Summers said. “I will relay adjustments.”

I heard the radio command. KE 3070 was the “Undo” fire mission, signaling a withdrawal. Swenson hadn’t wasted any time. Once the smoke shells started landing, I assumed Team Monti would pull back. I knew what Rod and I had to do when that happened. That was obvious.

“What you think, man?” Rod said.

“If the dushmen cut around the rear,” I said, “and close the back door, they’ll catch our people in a fire sack. This is deep shit. They gotta get out of there.”

The way to break up an ambush is to hammer it with heavy fire. The Humvee gave us armor, mobility, and a heavy gun. We could roll in and bring Team Monti back to the location of the Command Group. I grabbed the radio and called Fox 3—Lt. Fabayo. No reply. I tried Fox 6—Williams—and then Fox 9—1st Sgt. Garza. No one replied. I was calling for permission to enter the valley, asking for it from anyone who would answer.

Finally, Fox 7—
Valadez, up on the northern ridge—answered on the net.

“Fox 3-3, your requests to enter the valley are denied.
Fox 9 says you are to stay at your present location.”

It made no sense. On my truck was mounted the Mark 19 belt-fed
40-millimeter grenade launcher. Fearsome. It spat out explosive shells as big as a man’s fist.

I put down the handset and sat there, listening as a dozen advisors tried to talk over a single radio channel. It was sheer bedlam.

“This is bullshit, Rod.”

I rechecked the ammo belt on the Mark 19. Rod sat in the driver’s seat.

“You ready, Rod?”

“Give it a few more minutes, Meyer. You’ll fry for this,” he said.

He was right. I’d get sent home for disobeying a direct order. There was no question in my mind about that. I was already on thin ice with Garza, Fabayo, and Williams. So I sat there, frustrated, listening to the shooting, flexing my hands on the grips of the Mark 19 and breathing hard. I tried to calm down. Maybe the battle sounded worse on the radio than it really was.
Son of a bitch!

Inside the tactical operations center at Joyce, Capt. Aaron Harting was the senior officer on duty from midnight to eight in the morning—the battle captain. He had been in Afghanistan for eight months but had rarely controlled fires, and certainly none like this one.

His desk was behind a low railing at the south end of the large, square white plywood room. A big electronic map and several video monitors—the eyes in the sky and other sources—were mounted on the north wall. A forest of electronic green boxes and flat-screen monitors were jammed in. Rough plywood shelves held three-ring binders; weapons leaned in plywood stands. Flip-chart easels and chalkboards and whiteboards, water bottles, an electronic coffee-maker, foam cups, bundles of cables going through holes in the walls, paper topo maps taped to walls, exposed air ducts, digital wall clocks
with local time and Zulu (Greenwich Mean) time, and soldiers with short haircuts and camo clothing filled all the visual space. Between the electronic map wall and Harting was a long desk with computer screens and radios manned by the half-dozen or more sergeants who daily tracked unit locations and fire missions.

As artillery stood by at Joyce and at Asadabad, a few miles away, Harting asked for more and more information from the men on the long table: Who was requesting the fire missions, was it Shadow 4, Highlander 5 (Swenson), or Fox 3 (Fabayo)? What had they heard from Fox 6—Maj. Williams? Who was presently in charge, the Marine advisors or the Afghan Army? Did the ground commander know where all his troops were? Had they double-checked the grids of the KEs?

He asked question after question.

In the valley, Swenson dodged his way forward one hundred meters to link up with Fabayo, who was calling artillery in on KE-3345, near an enemy machine-gun location,
four hundred meters to the east.

At Joyce, 120-millimeter mortars were fired fifteen minutes after Fabayo requested. The first shell, though, struck within fifty meters of the enemy position. The next flurry of shells was on target. That would be the only effective fire mission of the entire day.

The patrol was now in deep trouble. The ridgelines on the horseshoe around them were a tangle of rocky outcroppings and shallow caves. Enemy machine guns, three hundred to six hundred meters east of the patrol, were nestled into snug crevices, far enough back to conceal gun flashes, with angles of fire that crisscrossed the valley. The only cover was the retaining walls of the farm terraces on either side of the wash.