by Jeff Schanz
His real name was Benny Maccaro, but his buddies from basic called him Macaroni. Then later he became Bony Macaroni. That got shortened to just Bony. You get the pattern of our nicknames. And no, I didn’t have a nickname. Just Brandt, or Sarge. Anyway, Bony was a good kid. I say kid even though I was only five years older. He was twenty-two and was from a tough area of Philadelphia. Kinda like his movie hero Rocky Balboa, he made his way from nothing with a lot of hard work and pure grit. He saved up enough money to get a mortgage on a little two-room house in the suburbs and got engaged to his high school sweetheart. He wanted to marry her before he got deployed, but she insisted on waiting, telling him it was his incentive to come back alive. She waited this long, she could wait a few more years. Bony was loyal, trustworthy, funny, and a good cook. He could make a kick-ass Alfredo sauce. And there was nobody better watching my back. He was my friend. My Army brother.
We waited until it was barely dark. The targets had gone inside and hadn’t left. We didn’t know how long they’d stay in there, so we weren’t willing to risk any more time to let it get darker. The three of us would go down to the building and the rest would make a multi-checkpoint route back to our camp. Once we completed the mission, we’d backtrack the way we came, fold up our remaining gear, and trek back down the other side of the mountain. We didn’t want to be seen leaving via the main road. We had found a reasonable mountain pass on our way in and that would get us to our base in Afghanistan.
Captain led us down. We trusted the guys behind us to find their positions to guard our rear, so we didn’t hesitate or look back. We got to the building and luckily the lights were still on inside. It was a simple concrete building with frosted windows and no yard. Just a fence, rocks, and sand. Pretty much like everything else, except the hillside had brush, some trees, and some tall grass. The village was more like some old west town. One street with buildings alongside it, and some houses and sheds spreading out for a hundred yards in either direction. We slid down and got on our butts at the wall, and Cap checked the window. We didn’t think we were seen or heard. No commotion inside, no noise. It was actually too quiet if we thought about it, but we were just happy we hadn’t tripped anything or raised an alarm. Bony got to work on the charges around the exterior. Cap kept watch and I followed Bony around, and we took turns setting the charges and making sure we were clear. We encountered no one. We figured everyone was busy inside doing whatever drug dealers do: Counting their money, or laughing about the kids that they mess up with their opium. Who knows? But we were hoping our luck held. I didn’t want to fire at anyone and get the show started too quickly. Once we were done, we figured it was time for the big finale: We’d bust in, throw down a few more charges and flame the inside, maybe get all the drugs, and waste anyone who was inside as we did it. Once we started shooting, the whole village would wake up, so we’d have to hurry.
Bony and I flanked the door and Captain breached. Actually, he kicked the door and fell in, pretty much. The place wasn’t locked up. We ran in with rifles up ready to grease whoever we saw. There was nobody. The room we were in was empty except for some tables and a desk. We figured we had miscalculated which room everyone was in, so we ran to the far door and busted through that.
That was the processing room, no doubt. Long metal tables, empty packaging, various boxes, and remnants. We were confused because knew we had it figured right. Everyone had come in and no one had left. We were in the right place. But everything had been cleaned out, somehow.
A few things dawned on us. One, a lot of the Muj fighters liked making tunnels. Tunnels allowed them to slip out, attack, and slip back in without being noticed. So there might be a trap door under a rug or something. And two, if they had exited through a tunnel and took their shit with them, that meant they knew we were coming. It meant they probably knew we had been sitting in the mountains and were drawing us out, the assholes.
The whole thing was a trap.
Cap yelled at us to get out. He had just given us the order when we heard footsteps in the outer room. We shot out a glass window and Bony and I dove through it. Cap was going to lay down some cover fire and then jump through after us. He never made it. We heard him yell at us to run, but we hesitated, not willing to leave him behind. He cried out when he got hit by something large caliber, and then we heard the sound of them hacking his body apart with some kind of blade. Captain must’ve expected to die as soon as we heard the footsteps, which was why he told us to run immediately. He sacrificed himself so Bony and I could get some distance. But no one counts on being hacked and gutted by a sword.
By the way, Muj was our word for any jihadist who was armed with anything larger than a kitchen knife. It’s short for Mujahideen, their word for Islamic warrior, and yeah Muj is derogatory, but it’s better than most of the stuff we really called them. They were trying to kill us, so fuck them.
Bony and I ran back toward camp, keeping low, using the high grass as our cover until we could get to the first checkpoint. Teller was set up on the mountain somewhere. He needed to be high for good line of sight. The rest of the squad would be scattered like a bucket brigade chain as we ran.
We got behind a line of brush and saw our first contact, Jonesy, our lieutenant. He was the only black guy I ever knew that not only couldn't stand rap but hated all the music that black people stereotypically liked. Hip-Hop, Soul, Reggae, R&B. Hated all of it. He was also smart as hell and had an Ivy League education, I forget what school, and had read maybe as many books as you. I think he might have given himself the nickname, Jonesy. I can't remember. Anyway, Jonesy met us, we spat out that Captain was dead, and we took off for the next checkpoint. Jonesy was now in charge.
At our next checkpoint was Charlie Poole, no nickname. Nervous kid, but ferocious in a fight. He gave us a few seconds distance and fell in behind us, and we continued up the mountain. A few more checkpoint guys fell in as we went, and we made it up most of the way to our camp before we spotted the first sign of trouble.
We found Teller’s gun lying across the path. Placed to each side were Teller’s hands. Just his hands. A “t” design was painted in blood under all of it. It was arranged to look like a macabre Christian cross.
When we got to our last checkpoint, no one was there. No one alive. Buster Grimes was supposed to be our last checkpoint person. We found him gutted, his intestines strewn around like someone was using them to lasso things. The strong smell of urine was all around him. And another cross was drawn in the sand in Buster’s blood. Buster was a straight-up good guy. I don’t even know what his first name really was, he had been Buster since he signed on with us. He was the opposite of Jonesy, loved everything to do with Hip-Hop and Rap, and I think that’s where his nickname came from. Some Hip-Hop artist name Busta Rhymes, or something like that. He was the most loyal and straight-shooting guy I had ever met, and now he lay underneath his own intestines in some Muj’s piss.
Jonesy whispered at us to go find cover, he was going to check out camp. We didn’t like it, but he gave an order. With six of us, that many boots crunching soil, we weren’t exactly quiet even if we tried.
I had the highest rank of our six, so I told everyone to get to the latrine. We had dug out an old fissure in the ground, expanded it to accommodate our toilet needs, and it was wide enough to hold all of us if we pushed in tight. We had covered it with a bunch of branches we had tied together, so on a casual glance, it just looked like a pile of dead foliage. Our boots crunched too loudly on the dry leaves we treaded through on our way, but there was no other path. The good news is that we would hear anybody else coming toward us once we got there. We all ducked into the latrine and waited.
The hole stunk literally like shit. The ground was rocky and a lot of our waste had sunk down below, but it still stank, and there were big insects buzzing around us. None of us wanted to die, but we damn sure weren’t going to die in a hole full of shit. If it came down to it, we’d charge out of there like Butch and Sundance, a
nd go like men.
But we had time before we needed to decide. Time to think, too. We were starting to realize that the kid ratted us out. No coincidence that the day after we saw the kid we got baited by the sight of our target. And then The Russian just happened to visit? The kid probably hadn’t even finished eating his MRE before he sold us out to his boss. Hell, the kid was probably sent up to the mountain to see if there was anyone hiding up there. I don’t know. But our trust meter was down pretty close to zero.
It seemed like half an hour passed and no Jonesy. No screams, no footsteps, no calls of all’s well. I was going to go out and scout, but one of my guys held me back. I think it was Iowa, the farm boy, I can’t remember, it was dark in the shit hole. But once that option was discouraged, we all began to discuss in whispers what we should do. It came down to this: We were going to climb out together, head down the footpath toward Afghanistan, then double back and hopefully flank whoever it was that had ambushed us. There was a rocky area that was a tough climb, but once we were over it, we’d be back on our way to Afghani Land, if we wanted to keep on going straight.
We slowly crept out, two at a time. One to crawl and one to keep a rifle ready. We all made it out and headed for the rocky hill. None of us were free climbers, but when you’ve got someone hunting you, you find that sheer nerve and desperation will get you over those rocks pretty well. Again, two at a time we got back on the path and started down. It eventually bisected another path, which was the one we took originally to get to our camp. We looked at each other to be sure, but we were all sure. We were going back.
I took point and we trekked back up slowly, trying not to make noise. We weren’t checking our watches, but I’d estimate it took us two hours at that pace. When I finally peeked around a corner and saw one of their oblivious sentries, the two hours was worth it.
I did the old “toss a rock in the opposite direction” trick and the dumbass fell for it. He turned and took a few steps to find where the noise came from. Billy Tolbert was half Navaho and swore he had Indian skills with a knife. I had always thought he was bullshitting me until that night. Billy ran up and skewered the sentry in the back of the neck without the guy getting off a single word. The son of a bitch never even saw Billy's face. It was a small victory, but it was pretty obvious that one kill wasn't going to end this battle, and regardless of how many we killed, it wasn't going to bring back our dead brothers, or even accomplish our mission at this point, since we had been made, and it had been a setup. But we were bloodthirsty, and we were damn sure going to get revenge before we hiked back to our base in Afghanistan. None of us would've been ok with escaping with our skins and just telling our superiors that we lost good men and ran. We would've been haunted by it.
Turns out what haunted me, in the end, was far different.
Near our camp, we found Jonesy’s head. Then we found the rest of him. He had been cut into pieces and spread around so it was hard not to step on something. His severed penis was stuffed into his mouth. The look on his face looked more like regret than fear. I guess he couldn’t forgive himself for letting us down.
We crept around a corner and saw a bunch of Muj rummaging through our gear. They probably figured we hopped over to the other side of the mountain and headed back to Afghanistan, and were gone. And that’s what we were hoping they thought. We still had our rifles, but we didn’t need them. We surprised them all and slit their throats. It wasn’t even a struggle. We didn’t have the manpower to keep hostages and we didn’t want to raise the alarm. Maybe we’d still be able to turn around and head back to base without anyone else knowing. But we missed one of their sentries way on up ahead who ran back down to the village and warned everyone anyway.
We could run for it and hope they didn’t beat us to the place where the mountain pass is lowest, or we could hold our position and make the best of it. We had the high ground. The terrain was too hard to approach except from two directions. It was defensible. We decided to stay.
I got the bright idea to start making some traps for anyone approaching, while the rest of us stayed focused on the town below and fired at anyone who approached. I had seen some war movies about stuff the Vietnamese did to us with makeshift traps and tripwire devices, so we figured we’d set up some tripwires, grenades, pits, etc. if we could. Three of us got to work and the other three kept rifles on the village.
When the day came, they charged at us. They had a few grenade launchers and hit the area around us hard. One guy got torn up pretty bad, but if we could've gotten him to a hospital, he would've been all right. The rest of us took cover and returned fire between grenade blasts. They came running up the path in both directions, single file because that was the only way you could do it without falling off the mountain. We picked them off easily enough but wasted a lot of ammo. They got a couple of lucky shots in and two guys got nicked up, but were ok. The Muj tried a new tack and fired from windows in the village. While we were keeping our heads down, they sent more guys up the paths. We still picked off most of them, but one guy made it through our perimeter. Then he hit our grenade tripwire. He was literally on top of the thing when it blew. It was a nasty mess and sprayed some of us with his guts. We had engineered it so there was a boulder between us and the grenade, so the shrapnel didn't get any of us. That assault failed and they regrouped again. We were holding them off pretty well, but we would eventually run out of ammo and we knew it.
It lasted the rest of the day, them trying some new tactic and us adapting. They found one more grenade launcher from somewhere and hit the top of the mountain with it, which caused a small avalanche and killed the guy who had been injured by the first blast. Another guy got his legs crushed by a boulder: Iowa. The kid cried after it happened, probably for what it meant rather than the pain. He had been a football player in high school. Big guy, good athlete. He was going to take over his family’s farm when he got back to the states. But with crushed legs, he wouldn’t be able to do the work on the farm. It was me, Bony, Tolbert, and Poole left to defend the camp. Our ammo was dangerously low, so everyone had it on single shot and hoped we had good aim.
They came at us again. I chased down one group that was trying to flank us and forced them towards the back where we kept the latrine. I had layered the bottom of the latrine with sharpened sticks. Three of them fell into the pit after stepping on the false ground we had made. One guy was killed by one of the sticks through his gut. The other two were just scuffed up, but they were in an awkward position and were easy enough to shoot in their heads. One bullet each. Fish in a barrel.
When I got back to Charlie and Billy, they were going at it hand to hand with four guys in black scarves. Whoever the guys in scarves were, they weren’t the usual Muj fighters. These guys had serious training from somewhere. But Billy impressed me again and threw one guy clear and knifed the other guy. I shot the one he threw clear. Charlie managed to stab one of the guys he was fighting, but the other black-scarved guy split Charlie’s neck with a sword. Those black-scarved guys didn’t have guns, I have no idea why. Anyway, I shot the guy that got Charlie, but Charlie was essentially dead. Billy stood for a second to survey the scene and someone shot him from the village. Probably a lucky shot, doesn’t matter, though. Billy wasn’t dead immediately, but he staggered and fell off the mountainside. It was steep, with jagged rocks, and Billy was killed by the fall.
I had no idea where Bony was, but I couldn't see him and figured he was dead too. I was losing my mind. My whole squad was gone as far as I knew. Just then, another of the black-scarves ran around the corner ready to chop off my head. I was distracted and wasn't ready. Bony came out from nowhere and shot the guy in the face. He apologized for not being there sooner, but said he had to get a guy off him, and led him into one of our tripwire traps that had a bent tree limb held back by a rope. The tree limb got the guy and flung him off the mountain. Bony came back just in time to get the guy who was aiming for me.
They had killed Iowa. The k
id couldn’t move with broken legs. He had a gun, but it didn’t last long. They cut him into pieces, then pissed on him. Urine was dripping from Iowa’s chin.
Bony and I were the only ones left. Some black-scarved guys we thought we had killed were still moving around, so we kicked them off the mountain. We popped off the last of our rounds suppressing the peanut gallery from the village, and were hoping we could make it until dark to find our way out. We figured we’d load what we could from our camp and climb that cliff again, and get the hell back to base across the border. I acted like I thought we were going to make it, but I knew better: they’ll be waiting for us at the path intersection. Finding a new path over the mountain without pitons or climbing gear would be impossible. We were screwed and knew it. But we’d go through the motions and try.
We left that night. We actually got past the intersection before they hit us. The assholes probably had some tunnel somewhere in the mountains because they jumped us from nowhere. They hit me over the head with something. I thought I was dead. And later, when I woke up, I wished I had been.
CHAPTER 25
They had me and Bony tied up to some kind of stake, naked and spread out like we were Christ on the cross. Bony was bleeding pretty bad from his side and I had some blood coming from my head. There were some mongrels fighting each other to lick up the blood that was dripping. Bony looked half-dead, but he was definitely alive and crying softly to himself. They held us like that for – I have no idea how long. Felt like days, but it was probably only hours. They would hit us in the head and stomach with leather straps just to see us flinch. They didn’t even ask us any questions.
Finally, some guy with a clean-cut goatee and no headscarf came in. He wore the same plain outfit the villagers wore, but he wasn’t one of them. He had an Eastern European accent, if I had a guess, and was probably an associate of The Russian. Next to him was a tall guy in a black scarf. All I could see was the guy’s eyes: greyish brown, intense and crazy. He smiled at us, I could tell because his cheeks pinched up into his eye-slit, and he had a rabid predator’s look in his eyes. I had no doubt he was truly looking forward to torturing us. He wore a bunch of chains with silver plates on them. As he got closer, I could see they were the dog tags of my squad. I noticed mine were missing from my neck.
