Craig & Fred

by Craig Grossi

  When Josh reappeared, blowing out a mouthful of water and smiling widely, everybody around us erupted in cheers. I looked around, confused and impressed. There was even a woman who looked like she was in tears. I hadn’t realized till then just how closely the crowd was watching us. Fred clambered down the rocks to meet Josh at the bottom, making sure he was okay. I followed behind, Josh’s prosthetic in hand, smiling.

  CHAPTER 14

  The Mud Fields

  I was miserable on Leatherneck. I did my two weeks of physical therapy at the TBI clinic and was cleared to go back out into the field, but I needed to wait. The RECON guys I’d worked with from the beginning were still back at the compound I’d been medevaced from, but they were coming to the end of their deployment. In another couple of weeks, they’d all be back at Leatherneck and a new company of RECON marines would take their place. When the new company inserted, I’d go out with them.

  It felt good to hang out with Sergio and Mac, to eat real food and work out in the gym, but I wanted to be back in the dirt with my guys. Too much time in the air-conditioning drove me nuts. Physically, I was doing okay. I still got dizzy if I stood up too fast or if I worked out too hard. At night, I got headaches. But I wasn’t telling anyone about that. With Operation Fred accomplished, my focus was getting back out into the field. Even though the RECON marines were leaving, my EOD buddies, Justin and Ysa, were staying out there. I couldn’t wait to see them and let them know Fred had made it home.

  Right before I returned to Sangin, I received a package in the mail. When I opened it, I found a small photo album, assembled and sent by my sister. In it were pictures of Fred: sitting in the back of the car on the way home from the airport; sopping wet and confused during his first bath; hanging out on the couch with my dad; rolling in the grass and drinking from a fountain in the backyard of my childhood home. I turned the pages over and over again, staring at the pictures. I fell asleep looking at them. Seeing that Fred was really back home made it all feel real for the first time.

  Finally, after nearly a month on Leatherneck, I reinserted by helicopter, just as I had all the times before. When the new RECON guys and I reached the compound, it was as if I’d never left. I walked up to the little room Justin, Ysa, and I had initially claimed, and there they were, half-asleep, their mats in the same spots as before. The corner where I’d had my sleeping mat and stuff was clear, as if they’d saved it for me.

  I walked in and dropped my stuff, saying, “What did I miss?”

  “Look who’s back from the 107 party,” Ysa teased, referring to the 107mm rocket that’d nearly killed me.

  “You didn’t miss much,” Justin said. “Couple gunfights and a few episodes of Breaking Bad.”

  The guys got up and hugged me. Their beards were coming in strong and so was their body odor. I could tell Justin—who had found the rocket in the postblast evaluation—seemed a little surprised I was back out in the field. He asked how I was doing, but he didn’t push it.

  “How was the ice cream back on Leatherneck?” Ysa asked, making a reference to Forrest Gump’s relaxing recovery after he got shot in the butt.

  “Oh, it was delicious,” I said. “I got Fred out, too.”

  I told the guys the whole story. They couldn’t believe it.

  “Man, you got scammed,” Ysa said. “That dog’s actually a Taliban sleeper agent. Now he’s gonna go back and infiltrate our government. He’ll hold your dad hostage.”

  The teasing was endless. It was what we did. Next time I took a shit, Ysa said, “Here you are shitting in a bag while your dog is back home eating cheese and sleeping in your bed.” I laughed, and Justin just smiled and shook his head.

  Over the next few days, we stayed in the compound, and the new RECON team got familiar with the terrain. By the fourth night, we were headed out on a patrol. The plan was similar to the last one: we were going into the Green Zone to take a compound. We’d hold it for a few days, right in the heart of Taliban territory. And just as we’d done before, Justin, Ysa, and I chose to go.

  The night started out like all the others. We ducked through the doorway of our compound, out into the cool, dark desert, and headed toward the lush fields and canals of the Green Zone. It felt good to be back to work, and I fell right back into our routine. We slipped down the ridge, crossed the first canal, and headed into a dense field of corn.

  It was in the second field that we realized something was wrong. By the time the point man was about halfway through it, he’d sunk hip-deep in rich, dark soil. The field was flooded.

  We didn’t have any other choice; we waded into the slop. It was dense, almost like chocolate pudding. With each step I took, I moved just inches forward, and the mud pulled me down. What should have taken a few minutes was taking nearly an hour. Finally, a few of us made it to a berm on the opposite side. Justin passed his canteen around, along with a Clif Bar from one of his wife’s care packages.

  When I looked back into the field, I saw the machine gunner—a young guy who must’ve been carrying his weight in gear—thrashing in the mud, quietly sinking. I left my pack with Justin and Ysa on the berm and waded over to him, taking his gun to lighten his load.

  Eventually, the rest of the patrol made its way through. One of the marines lost his boot in the sucking mud. He frantically tried to recover it, but we didn’t have the time.

  When we got to the next field, it too was flooded, and so was the one after it. A patrol that should have only taken us a few hours took nearly all night. When we finally arrived at the compound, we were exhausted, and we only had an hour or two to go until sunup. We told the RECON guys to get rest while they could, and Justin, Ysa, a marine named Brian, and I got to work filling sandbags.

  The compound was pretty small, but its walls were high. We dug out murder holes and fortified a rooftop post on top of one of the rooms. One of the doorways didn’t have a door, so we also filled enough sandbags to block it.

  By sunup, the compound was in good enough shape. Justin, Ysa, and I found an empty room and collapsed. We took off our boots and tried our best to get warm and dry. We were caked in mud from the waist down, and it was smeared on our faces, chests, and hands. We laid our sleeping mats side by side and lay close together to try to share body heat. I could tell Justin, who was in the middle, couldn’t get comfortable. I even thought I heard his teeth chattering. From my ruck I pulled out an extra pair of wool socks and gave them to him. (Any time anyone back home asked me what I needed in a care package, I always asked for three things: beef jerky, instant coffee, and wool socks.)

  “Thanks, man,” Justin said, putting them on. For a short time, we slept.

  A few hours later, the attack came. When we woke up, the radio was buzzing, and marines were scrambling to get on a wall. Immediately, the fire was rapid, constant, and accurate. The rounds sounded closer than I’d ever heard. I worried that, once again, our standoff—the space between us and them—was too narrow. Sean, the gunner who had been on the rooftop post all morning, was at the end of his shift but wouldn’t come down. He was a skilled machine gunner and had already taken out a group of Taliban fighters, but he knew it was still going to get ugly. The RECON guys remembered Sean telling them: “You can come up, but I’m not coming down. You guys will want me up here in a few minutes anyway.” Missenheim, another marine, got up there and joined him.

  Justin, Ysa, and I got on the wall. In this kind of attack, we were marines first, EOD technicians and intelligence collectors second. Through the hole, I could see a narrow alley and the wall of the neighboring compound less than twenty feet away. Above us, on the roof, Sean was peeking his head above the sandbags, trying to get a visual on where the fire was coming from. How many fighters, which weapons, where they were. The more we knew, the more accurately we could engage them and take them out.

  But then, a loud shout came from the roof.

  “Corpsman!”

  My heart rattled against my chest and I turned my head to see. I heard it again,
an urgent cry: “Corpsman!”

  The shouting was coming from Missenheim, the teammate who had joined Sean on the roof when he didn’t come down. Their position was being overrun with gunfire. Sean was shot.

  I ran over. He’d been hit right under the brim of his helmet, in his forehead, and Missenheim was trying to stop the bleeding on the roof. But we needed to get him down. Bullets were buzzing directly overhead, some hitting the small sandbag barrier in front of them.

  The corpsman, Doc Jones, found a rope and threw it up to Missenheim. He lassoed it across Sean’s chest, under his arms, and started to lower him down. As his body came over the edge of the roof, we heard him suck in a deep gasp of air. He was still alive.

  I recognized Sean from when we’d gathered on the tarmac before our departure, just a few days earlier. Some of the new RECON guys had heard about Fred and were asking about him, Sean included. I remembered the way he’d smiled and laughed heartily. He had blond hair and a big, Viking-like frame. He looked young—maybe just twenty years old—but I got the feeling he was an old soul.

  Doc and I grabbed Sean and guided him down onto a litter—a small tarp stretcher—on the ground. The lieutenant had already begun to call for a medical evacuation over the radio.

  We quickly wrapped Sean’s head with gauze and inserted an IV. His blood pressure was dropping and his breath was shallow. I helped Doc Jones start a tracheotomy. We wiped Sean’s neck with alcohol and I put my hands on his throat, right above his collarbone, holding the skin taut while Doc made the incision. Into the hollow of Sean’s windpipe, he inserted the tube to release air, and I started to help him breathe while Doc Jones continued to monitor his vitals, radioing his status to the approaching medevac team. Beside us, Sean’s helmet lay faceup to the sky, a pool of blood, tissue, and skull inside.

  I watched Sean breathe; he was still doing it on his own. I’d give him two breaths, then he’d give one. He was unconscious, but in case he could still hear, I talked to him. “You’re gonna be okay, man. You’re a badass. Stay with us.”

  I felt like my hearing was heightened. The echoing, tinny sounds of the ongoing firefight enveloped me. I heard the strained, unfamiliar voices of marines saying, “Stay here, Sean. We need you. Don’t go. Don’t go.” The repeated pop-pop-pop-pop-pop of machine gun fire overhead as Missenheim continued to work from the roof. The numbers Doc Jones spat rapidly into his radio. And finally, the steady thump-thump-thump of the medevac in the distance.

  As the firefight continued around us, two RPGs flew overhead, landing inside our compound. They landed with a sharp, explosive crack, sending rocks and debris erupting into the air, but no one was hurt.

  The incoming medevac was an air force team called Pedro. They always came in twos: one bird was armed to the teeth and would come in first to provide security for the second bird. The second one was an airborne ambulance; it held the medical crew. They were the ones who would need to make the perilous landing in the middle of the firefight to get Sean.

  Overhead, we saw the armed helicopter come in fast and low, spraying machine gun fire into the Taliban-occupied compounds. Close behind, the second bird began to descend over us, trying to come down in the compound. I looked up and saw bullets ricochet off its belly.

  Over the radio, the pilot said, “There’s not enough space to land!” And we watched as he pulled the helicopter up. But in the next second, he rotated it almost 360 degrees and zipped to the other side of the compound, toward an open field. The maneuver was quick, almost like a barrel roll.

  “Fuck it,” I heard the pilot say over the radio. “We’re putting it down.”

  He’d decided to land the only place he could—in the adjacent field, where they’d be completely exposed.

  We needed to move fast. With a count of three, Justin, Ysa, Brian, the radio guy, and I picked up Sean on the litter and sprinted toward the doorway. But it was blocked, filled from top to bottom with sandbags that we’d filled the night before. Now they needed to come down, fast. We put Sean down and rushed to the door, scrambling to yank bag after bag away from the entrance. The longer the helicopter was on the ground, the more time the Taliban had to ready another RPG. From the roof, Missenheim continued to lay down fire, providing as much cover as possible so we could safely get Sean to the helicopter.

  We tore at the sandbags. From between them, I saw a blue hand reach through from the other side. It was the gloved hand of the pararescueman, a PJ, as they’re called. He’d jumped out of the helicopter to help us clear the doorway—something well above and beyond his duty, maybe even against orders.

  With enough room cleared, we picked up Sean on the litter and rushed into the field, making our way toward the open door on the side of the medevac. One of the two pilots had gotten out and was shooting toward the Taliban with his pistol. The PJ who’d helped clear the doorway fired his rifle, covering us as we ran.

  When we got to the helicopter, we lifted Sean inside, and Doc Jones shouted out a final round of vitals as the pilot and PJ jumped in. The bird sprung from the ground immediately, Sean’s huge boots still hanging out the side as it ascended into the sky. Despite the severity of the situation, we couldn’t help but smile at that, seeing our Viking buddy almost too big to fit in the helicopter.

  Missenheim screamed at us from the roof to get back in. It would’ve been easy to take us all out with one spray of machine gun fire. We ran for our lives. Right before I passed through the doorway back into the compound, I looked up at Missenheim just as a round struck him in his vest. Dust flew off his body armor, but he barely flinched. He was pissed. We all were.

  Back in the compound, it was as if the Taliban could smell blood. They knew they’d gotten one of us, and it emboldened them. I wasn’t just hearing bullets whiz by; I heard the actual AKs being fired and Taliban fighters shouting to each other. They were right there. I got on a murder hole and fired out. In my four months in Afghanistan, I never saw the enemy like this.

  Holy shit. We’re gonna get overrun, I thought. Videos I’d seen of Taliban fighters overtaking coalition forces flashed in my mind. I pictured them standing over stolen gear and stripped, mutilated bodies. No. That’s not how my family is gonna see me.

  A 107 rocket whizzed overhead and sputtered into the distance.

  “Hey—nobody take that; that’s Craig’s!” Ysa shouted. I looked over and saw him against the wall like me, smiling like a Cheshire cat. I couldn’t help but laugh.

  At last, HIMARS were on the way. It was impossible to say how long we’d been fighting, but it felt like hours. With the rockets incoming, we took cover. We lay on the ground, faces in the dirt, with our hands over our heads.

  After the blasts, it was quiet.

  No one had much to say. We didn’t know if Sean was going to make it, and no news had come in over the radio. We wanted to give the RECON guys some space. That was their friend they’d just watched get medevaced out. They took inventory on their ammo while Justin and Ysa went over to the lieutenant and radioed our base—the other compound—to give them an update.

  I stood in the courtyard with Sean’s blood on my boots and uniform, unsure what to do. I wanted to scream. I wanted to kill something. I spotted some baby chicks wandering around the compound. I picked one up, feeling the gentle prickle of its feet and soft down of its feathers against my palm. Justin and Ysa came over, and we sat down to eat something. I fired up my Jetboil to heat the MREs, and we joked we were going to make a meal out of the chick. But instead we gently passed the little thing between us, smiling and taking pictures.

  The command decided our patrol would return back to the other compound that night, rejoining the rest of the company. Our ammunition supply was low and our position was too vulnerable.

  We waited for nightfall, enduring the heat and the disquiet. A few hours after sunset, finally, it was time to step off. We put our game faces on, but after a day like that, you realize how fragile everything is. Even though we weren’t safe in the compound, it still f
elt more secure than the exposure and unknown of the Green Zone. None of us was looking forward to patrolling back through Taliban territory. Before we slipped between the tall, whispering cornstalks of the first field, I turned to Justin and Ysa and bumped my fist into theirs. “I love you guys,” I whispered, then pushed my way into the sea of corn.

  On the other side of the cornfield, we encountered another flooded field. It was worse now. The soil was so saturated, water pooled on top of the mud, reflecting glassy, glimmering streaks of moonlight. We trudged into the cold, sucking soil, sinking hip-deep. Midway through the first field, one of the marines sunk into it up to his chest, and Ysa and I pulled him out, leaving his boots behind.

  Slowly, we worked our way through the next flooded field, and then the next. It became clear this was part of the Taliban’s plan. They knew we cut through fields; they knew where we needed to go. If we were slow, stuck, and vulnerable, they could unload on us. And halfway through our retreat, they did. A pop-pop-pop sputtered through the mud near the patrol. Thankfully, though, it was just one guy taking inaccurate shots from far away. Our sniper went to the back of the patrol and lay in the mud, trying to get a shot at him.

  To say we were miserable would be an understatement. We were mentally and physically exhausted. The mud was relentless, and the erratic pop shots were almost enough to make you come unhinged. What should have taken us a couple of hours was taking all night.

  With less than an hour before sunrise, we came upon a final canal. It was the one nearest to our compound—the first one we always crossed when we left the desert and ventured into the Green Zone. We called it the “Mini Helmand” because of its size; it was wide and deep, one of the only ones that had a current to it instead of dead, still water. Once we got through it, our compound wasn’t far off. We were almost home.

  But something was wrong. As we approached the canal, I could hear it. When we’d crossed it the night before, the water had been up to our hips. Now, though, the current was raging, and it looked twice as deep.