Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (16 page)

The Askars remained frozen in the wash. We were all going to die if they stayed where they were and didn’t fight back. We could maybe hold open the neck in the bottle for them to escape—if they would fight for it. Valadez kept shouting warnings to us, as I concentrated on shooting to my right and to the front. For every fifty rounds I was pumping out, we’d get two hundred back, including RPG rounds. One exploded about fifteen meters to our right front. Somehow the shrapnel didn’t shred our front tire. I scanned the hills and the houses
for the dust raised by the back blasts of the RPG tube—no luck. Some 107 rockets were mixed in, or maybe a recoilless rifle.

Rod was jerking the truck around to avoid their fire, but they couldn’t miss us forever. I knew it wouldn’t be a bullet; a red-hot chunk of jagged shrapnel would rip off my face, leaving it up to Rod to get out alone.

My sweaty right hand kept slipping off the gun’s handgrip and butterfly trigger. When I wiped the sweat away, I realized it was red. I ducked down in the turret, letting my right arm dangle, to grab a bandage.

Rod looked at me in a startled way.

“You okay, man? You hit?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Sweating like a pig is all. Go. Go.”

I had been shot above the elbow—a bleeder that did no damage. The bone was fine. In a fight, adrenaline deadens the pain. I did a little wrapping and got back to shooting.

I had no idea where to go. My team was up ahead somewhere and out of radio contact. Each
whoosh
of an incoming RPG still caused me to involuntarily flinch. The air was sizzling and I had to scream for Rod to hear me.

“Do you see the team?”

“Negative!”

It was after eight in the morning and I was out of ideas. Then two small OH-58 Kiowa helicopters skimmed around my turret. The two-person Kiowa is about the size of an Austin Mini. It carries about two hundred rounds of .50-cal and a few small rockets. Think of an airborne motorcycle or an angry wasp.

The frustrated Kiowa pilots had been listening on their radios for the last forty minutes while Joyce dithered. Now that they’d been
turned loose,
the pilots couldn’t do enough to help us. They’d provided the cover for Swenson’s Command Group to get out of the wash, and now they were hovering above me. With my handheld, I made contact.

“This is Fox 3-3. I can’t find my team. Four Marines are missing up in that village. I don’t have a grid or radio contact with them.”

“Three-3, this is Pale Horse,” the pilot said. “Roger. We’ll stay with you. Give us a vector.”

“Pale Horse, the heaviest fire is coming from that white schoolhouse, grid 972 678.”

“Three-3, we got it. Be right back.”

The two Kiowas peeled off to the southeast and poured their remaining rockets into the schoolhouse. They then darted forward and buzzed back and forth over South Ganjigal. Dark smudges of smoke burst around them—the dushmen were using their RPGs as antiaircraft weapons.

I was swiveling the gun around, firing short bursts. When I saw a turkey-necker, I’d keep shooting until he went down or I had pulverized the terrace wall where he was hiding. I didn’t have to aim down the gun sight; all I had to do was walk in the red tracers. The timing on the overheated gun was slipping, so I placed the bolt release in the up position and fired single shots.

The more fucked up things got, the more Rod and I started laughing. He was steering away from RPGs streaming at us and laughing, and I was shooting the big gun and laughing. Definitely crazy, but your emotions have to go somewhere.

The Kiowas, dipping low for their gun runs, looked too flimsy to last another minute. I’d hear a quick rattle of gunfire from them or toward them, and they’d peel off or zip straight up, bank sharply
around, and zoom in again. The black puffs around them continued, but the enemy fire slackened on us as the Kiowas darted around. They were like a steel umbrella over us.

A few minutes later, Pale Horse came back on my net.

“Three-3, we’re Winchester. We’ll be back in fifteen mikes.”

Winchester meant they had expended their munitions. They were too light to carry much, and they had been shooting at targets wherever they looked. The firing picked up. We were again the pinata. I climbed down from the turret to talk to Rod and Hafez. We had started in with six ammo cans. Now we were down to one. I had fired more than two thousand rounds.

“Guys, we need a new gun,” I said. It was three steps forward, two back. As we turned around, I saw an Askar crawling feebly toward the road. We stopped and I hopped out. A PKM machine gun was tilling the ground around me, so I dodged back and forth until I reached him. One Kiowa, out of ammo, hovered above me and distracted the enemy,
ignoring the RPG shells exploding in the air. I turned the Askar onto his back. Hit by three rounds in his upper chest and neck, he was gurgling and drowning in his own blood. I rolled him onto his side, and he died before I could pick him up.

I hopped back into the truck and we drove back down the wash to get ammo.

We had turned left out of the wash and onto the narrow track back to the casualty collection point.

The Afghans were turning back to their wounded. When I hopped out to help them, they asked if more helicopters were coming, or whether they should drive their casualties back to Joyce.

“I don’t know,” I said.

It wasn’t that I didn’t care, but I had my own problems. Where was my team? I looked around for Maj. Williams. He was sitting off to one side, wounded and in shock. There were four or five vehicles and at least twenty Askars milling around. These were our Afghans—we had come down from Monti together. I glanced hopefully from group to group. Hafez was asking if they had seen Lt. Johnson.

“They say the lieutenant is back in Ganjigal,” Hafez said. “The team didn’t make it out.”

Shit!

Some of the wounded Askars had made it to the ORP where the U.S. Army platoon had stayed. They reported to the TOC that
six Afghan soldiers were dead and nine wounded. That meant about thirty or forty were still pinned down in the valley or dead out there.

Hafez, Rod, and I drove back into the wash. Hafez could hand the ammo cans up to me—they’re like big lunch boxes that clip to the gun. We were in good shape as long as the .50-cal didn’t go out of whack again. We didn’t have a kit for quickly changing the barrel, and the gauge for setting the gun’s headspace wasn’t in the toolbox.

A Ford Ranger driven by an Afghan policeman followed behind our Humvee. The Ranger would make do as an ambulance to ferry out the wounded. As we entered the wash, we passed Swenson and Fabayo in another Ranger truck, heading to the casualty point with two or three wounded or dead Afghans piled in the back.
Swenson brought back two dead jihadists, too. That proves he’s a nicer guy than I am.

Good for them
, I thought;
those guys are doing something
.

Askars were walking out as we drove back in. Some were dazed, others limping, some leaning on each other. Many had tied a cloth around an arm or a leg. With their chests protected by body armor, they thought they weren’t badly hit. But they were inviting death within an hour or two. A bullet wound in the arm or leg often doesn’t bleed profusely. Instead your blood drips out steadily, your blood pressure drops, your body goes into shock, and you die. Doc Layton had given them classes for a month, but in the chaos of combat, they had forgotten everything.

I wanted to ignore the Askars, because somewhere, farther up the wash, my team was fighting to stay alive. I’d promised to get them, and Rod and I had the only gun truck willing and able to go in. I
wanted to pretend I didn’t see the bleeding. Besides, they were not far from the collection point, where they might get help or a ride out.

We’d gone only another hundred meters when I saw an Afghan soldier huddled behind a rock. No other Askar was around. We were the advisors, which comes with a responsibility, like being parents.

I had no choice.

“Hold up, Rod.”

I climbed down from the turret and ran over to the Askar. He’d taken a bullet in the thigh and was slowly bleeding out. I kept a stack of tourniquets in my medpack and knew how to apply them. I wrapped a tourniquet around his thigh. In my frustration, I twisted it extra tight and he screamed.

“Hafez, tell him to shut up,” I said. “Hurting is better than dying.”

Not the most soothing bedside manner. I knew I was being unfair. If someone cinched a thin strap around my leg and twisted as hard as he could, I’d scream, too.

If you’re a grunt, you will come face to face with horrendous gore. You have to steel yourself to seeing mangled bodies and smelling blood. Doctors and nurses cope with screaming and suffering every day. I had dressed out dozens of deer. You learn to dissociate from the task when you’re pulling out warm guts or cutting off slabs of dripping meat, with the blood sticking to your hands.

Doc Layton had kidded me for being a hospital pack rat. He was the corpsman, but my medpack, stuffed with everything I could scrounge, was bigger than his. I had taken the Combat Lifesaver course while stationed with my battalion. Plus, on a sniper team, you don’t have a corpsman, so I had to learn a variety of emergency skills. It was interesting, so I tried to learn as much as I could, especially about trauma.

Hafez and I moved the moaning Askar into the back of the Ranger behind us, and we both drove back to the casualty collection point. It
was now about nine in the morning and Swenson and Fabayo had come forward again in their Ford Ranger.

The Kiowas had rearmed and come back on station, directing us toward another wounded. Like it or not, we had been pressed into the ambulance business. The Kiowa commanded by Chief Warrant Officer Yossarian Silano—a good name for a guy in a crazy war—had been a Marine grunt before becoming an Army pilot. His bird was easy to talk to and directed me where to go, sometimes hovering so low I could just about reach up and touch his skids. He was covering my rear whenever I got out of the truck.

Twice, Hafez and I got out, climbed up the sides of terraces, found the Askars, and lugged them down the terrace walls to the wash. After we’d loaded two into a Ranger, my brain finally kicked in: I couldn’t be the gunner and the corpsman at the same time. I didn’t need Hafez out there in the fields with me. Rod, though, needed someone on the gun.

“Hafez, will you take over the .50-cal?” I said. “I can do more good on the ground.”

Hafez climbed into the turret. I dragged an Askar to the road, and Hafez waved to an Afghan truck to pick him up. But the .50-cal was acting up and Hafez had difficulty clearing the jams. He was jacking the bolt back and I was nervous that he’d pull off the back plate with the bolt locked to the rear. If he did, the pressure of his next and last burst would drive the plate into his chest. To coax the gun back into firing shape, every so often I’d slip and slide up into the turret—blood from my arm and the wounded Askars had spattered everywhere inside the truck—and try to reset the gun.

The incoming fire didn’t stop. The machine-gunners were aiming at movement. They were shooting short bursts, with good fire discipline. Some gunners seemed to have spotters hidden in the houses.
They weren’t using tracers, so no green rounds gave away their positions. Without tracers, though, they couldn’t adjust well. A machine-gunner shooting from five hundred meters away couldn’t tell if he was missing me to the right or the left. Plus, firing at a downward angle of 30 degrees, they were overcompensating.

I knew by the sounds of the bullets when a gunner was zeroing in on me. When puffs of dirt spurted close, I’d find a depression and lie flat. Not seeing me, the gunner would grow bored. I’d wait until the dirt kicked up farther off before moving again.

With Swenson driving one truck and Rod the other, we shuttled around for maybe ten or fifteen minutes, a few Afghan trucks following and at least two Kiowas buzzing overhead. About six had been sent to help us. While two covered us, another pair waited on the other side of the ridge and the third pair rearmed at a nearby base. The pilots were fearless. Knowing my team was lost, they were running search patterns twenty feet off the ground so that they could identify each body.

Many of my Askars were lying prone, doing nothing, not returning fire. I’d trained them on the M16s, but they weren’t comfortable with them. Some had ripped through all their magazines, while others didn’t want to attract attention by shooting. I left the able-bodied to fend for themselves, because I couldn’t organize them without getting Hafez out of the truck to interpret.

To the enemy gunners up in the hills above us, our trucks probably looked a little like beetles scurrying around, swerving from one terrace to the next. Maybe they thought it was like a video game as they tried to hit us. They were doing their best, and they were experienced shooters who had crossed over from Pakistan for this event.

* * *

Swenson and Fabayo stopped their Ford Ranger next to us to talk over our next move. Behind us, an Afghan truck was shuttling wounded back to the collection point.

“Lieutenant,” I said to Fabayo. “Can you replace Hafez on the .50-cal? That’ll free him up to talk to the Afghans, and I got a sighting on another wounded.”

Fabayo got into our turret and Hafez got on the radio. I hopped in with Swenson. He was driving with a handset jammed to his ear, yelling back and forth to the Kiowas. The Ranger had taken a beating. The shocks were absolutely gone. Rounds had gone through the suspension, door, door handle, rear window, and cab. I pointed to a terrace about a hundred meters off to our left front.

“Stop!” I said. “I think that’s where I saw the guy. I’ll go look.”

Swenson had torn the ligament in his right knee and his shins were peppered with shrapnel, so he stayed behind the wheel and I hopped out.

“Don’t go far,” Swenson said.

I climbed up a terrace wall and followed the contours of the field around a corner to a body lying facedown. On the man’s hands were green gloves with the fingers cut out. I knew even before I rolled him over that it was Dodd Ali, my closest Afghan friend. He was due to take leave in a few weeks. He had left on bad terms with his mother, who was sure he would be killed. Finally, after two years, she had relented and invited him back to the farm for a visit.