by Sean Parnell
I yanked the door open and stepped into the storm.
Five
Gauntlet
May 7, 2006
Sunlight shone hot on my face, but the St. Christopher medal felt cool against my chest. I stood on the lip of the wadi as the firefight raged around me.
Something cracked, like Indiana Jones snapping his whip. It happened again. Then again. The noise seemed to be coming from everywhere. It had no focus, no direction or distance. It just engulfed me in sensory overload.
On the ridge, I could see the muzzle flashes of machine guns. Perhaps two hundred meters away, maybe less, the men manning them held the advantage. They had cover, concealment, and elevation. They were winning the fight.
A bullet struck the door as I started to close it. The heavy armor shuddered from the impact. I took a last look at Pinholt, who was still yelling something at me, then slammed the door.
A puff of white smoke wafted from a patch of brush halfway up the ridge. Over the gunfire, I heard a hollow bass drumbeat. A split second later, an RPG struck the wadi’s rim perhaps five meters up the road from me. In that instant, some primal instinct took over and I felt my body duck just as the heat wave surged over me. It burned the hackles on my neck and singed the exposed hair below my helmet. Before I could even process a thought, the heat vanished and the concussion wave struck as shrapnel splashed overhead.
Every training exercise we’d been through emphasized moving under fire. Stay in place, the enemy wins. You become easy meat, or you allow yourself to be pinned down, unable to fight back or escape.
Another bullet ricocheted off the Humvee. Fear gripped me. Nothing moved. Nothing worked.
I stood in the funeral home’s doorway, my grandfather’s coffin on the other side of the room. Between us sat our family and friends. They stared at me in my sweat-stained ACUs. I’d driven all night to be there for that moment. And on the threshold, the sight of his coffin and the eyes upon me bred fear my feet could not overcome.
The shroud of dirt elongated as it drifted across the road. Soon it would thin out and offer no concealment at all.
From somewhere to my right, I heard a distinctive boom, different from the other weapons already in the fight. It was like thunder, louder and more throaty than an AK. The sound of it echoed down our narrow valley.
Dragunov.
Sniper rifle.
Something pulled at my pant leg. For a crazy moment I thought of my cousin Freddie when he was a baby, tugging at my pants to get my attention. But when I looked down, I didn’t see the child who’d been named after my grandfather. I saw a bullet hole in my ACUs just above my right boot. There was an exit hole in the fabric at shin level. The sniper had his crosshairs on me.
I couldn’t move. I stood in the doorway, my family waiting for me to react. Then I saw my father’s eyes. They broke fear’s grip on me. My feet shuffled forward. I made it down the aisle and fell to my knees alongside the open coffin. Head down, as if in prayer, I waited for words to come. In that moment, I knew I needed to say something profound. How do you say thank you for a lifetime of support and love? The words would not come.
Through the riot of noise, I heard the Dragunov again. Bits of debris—rocks, clods of dirt—rained down around my Humvee as the last pieces of the RPG impact fell back to earth.
How much time had passed? Five minutes? Five seconds? In such moments, time has no traction. The chaos kaleidoscopes around you and scrambles your senses. In later fights, I learned to stay grounded. In this one, I didn’t know enough to do anything but to be a prisoner of the chaos.
The dust swirled. The Dragunov boomed. AKs rattled, the machine guns poured cold fury. Indy’s whip cracked repeatedly. My boots were made of iron.
Then I saw Baldwin’s rig again, forty meters and a continent away. The sight of it filled me with dread. What would I do if I closed on it to find Baldwin wounded? He was just the selfless type of NCO to ignore his own wounds for the sake of his men and the mission. He had sounded fine over the radio, but until I laid eyes on him, I couldn’t be sure.
What would I say to his wife, Regina, or his children if he were hurt or dying? Seeing that scene play out in my mind, I couldn’t think of Baldwin as my stalwart NCO; he was the bear-sized, loving family man and husband I’d seen back in New York.
The hospital bustled with activity. Nurses moved purposefully about; doctors in long white coats carried charts. A woman cried softly, alone in a waiting room chair. I made my way down a corridor until I saw Baldwin, standing near an open door. His face registered surprise when he saw me. He extended his hand, and I felt connected to this man by the warmth of his handshake.
“Thank you for coming, sir.”
He pushed open the door to the private room. Regina lay propped in bed, their newborn daughter in her arms. A weary smile. A father’s pride. A family moment of which I was a part.
Looking now at the smoking Humvee before me, I had one thought: Get to Baldwin.
The fear broke, and my legs flew into action. Hunched down, I sprinted forward.
Do not let your brothers down.
Bullets spouted in the dirt around me. I felt another tug on my pants. I crossed the open ground to the rocket-hammered Humvee with what felt like every insurgent in range targeting me. Somehow I made it.
Alongside Baldwin’s Humvee now, I could see that the rig’s armor had held and everyone was okay. The thoughts of home and family vanished. We had a job to do, and I needed my stalwart NCO.
I slammed my fist against the armored glass in Baldwin’s door. In the backseat, I saw Bruce Lee curled up and cowering on the floorboard behind Baldwin’s seat. I needed a ’terp right then, and seeing Bruce Lee incapacitated by terror reminded me again how dearly we missed Abdul.
I didn’t stop. I didn’t issue any orders. I had momentum. My feet were working.
Either Baldwin would follow me, or he wouldn’t. Either way, I had to get to the top of the hill and get the Afghan troops to clear the road for us.
My lungs ached. My head swam. I kept running, carrying my rifle by its ACOG scope as if it were a briefcase. A machine-gun burst ripped the dirt around me. I was flying now, running flat out like a kid fleeing a graveyard. The road steepened, and I forced more energy from my body, afraid that if I slowed, the bullets would catch me.
There was almost no cover or concealment until I reached the top of the knoll and the abandoned Afghan pickups.
The Dragunov spoke again.
How was I going to get the Afghans to get out of the way without Abdul or Bruce Lee? The only other way was to find the marine trainers embedded with the unit. I could see a few Afghan troops taking cover behind boulders alongside the road at the top of the knoll. A few lay prone behind the pickups. Others darted this way and that, streaming along the crest and disappearing over it. Finding the marines was going to take time we didn’t have.
Fucking Bruce Lee.
Right then, I needed Baldwin. His steady presence, his patient council—he’d be able to figure out what to do. He was a combat vet; he’d mastered this chaos. He’d show me the way.
The nearest Afghan pickup was about fifty meters away. I reached the steepest part of the road. In the high-noon sun, kitted in full battle rattle, my full-speed dash was sucking my energy reserves dry. My ACUs were drenched with sweat. Another ten meters left me gasping, lungs afire.
What if Baldwin doesn’t follow me?
The thought sent a thrill of fear through me. I’d never given him an order.
To my left, a couple of conifer trees screened me from the enemy gunners on Gangikheyl Hill. That didn’t stop them from sawing bursts through the pines. Branches snapped and tumbled into the road. Needles fell. Bullets slapped into the trunks.
If he didn’t follow me, I had two options: keep going, or run back and get him.
I broke out beyond the
row of pines, feeling slower now. Each stride grew heavier and required more effort.
I didn’t have it in me to go back. Either he’d follow me, or he wouldn’t. The time to establish the sort of bond that made men like Baldwin trust a man like me had long passed. If I had failed to forge that bond, I would know it now.
You cannot lead men who are unwilling to be led. You must inspire them to give you the power to do so. That power comes only from their minds, their hearts, not from discipline or devotion to army regulations. When death lurks, nothing else matters but that bond of trust, or lack thereof, between soldier and leader.
In college, I memorized a passage from Xeones as he described King Leonidas, the Spartan leader made famous by Steven Pressfield’s Gates of Fire: “A king does not require service of those he leads but provides it to them. He serves them, not they him.”
Did my men know that I served them?
Random AK rounds popped and skipped around me. Twenty meters to go. I was almost through the gauntlet.
As I staggered the final meters to cover, I burned with self-doubt. Had I just sifted myself from the inner circle? Would I end up like Captain Waverly for this decision?
I had to know. I broke stride to look over my shoulder, praying that I would see Baldwin’s fullback figure charging up the hill behind me.
Six
Welcome to the Family
Through the smoke and spinning cloudlets of moondust, I saw the Illinois father of three racing toward me. Bullets scored the road around him. A stitch of machine-gun fire split his stride and kicked up a half-dozen fountains of dirt right between his legs. He ran on, jaw set, helmet low over his forehead.
Phillip Baldwin had my back.
And so did the rest of Outlaw Platoon. Wheat and Campbell, our medic, Doc Pantoja, Travis Roberts with his grenade launcher—together they streamed up the hill after me, weapons high, bearding the enemy and the rivers of lead pouring onto the road. Over my shoulder, I counted ten, fifteen, twenty men dismounted. Only the gunners and drivers remained in their rigs.
The sight shattered all self-doubt and sent bolts of pure energy through my system. My exhaustion gone, my legs grew light. The burn in my lungs vanished. Euphoria drove me forward. In that moment, I knew there’d be no way we’d lose this fight. I almost pitied the enemy. The hurt was about to be laid on them like they’d never known. Outlaw Platoon was going to work.
I bounded the final meters to the nearest Afghan truck, which had been abandoned a short distance below the knoll’s crest. An ANA soldier lay in the dust behind one tire, head down, weapon at his side. I passed him without a word just as Baldwin caught up to me.
“Sir, you’re absolutely fucking crazy!”
I spun to face my brother, laughter growing into a rapturous victory cry.
“Let’s find the marines and get the ANA outta the way.”
“Roger that.”
A fusillade of bullets chopped through a nearby pine tree. Branches and needles rained down on us. We looked at each other and laughed like teenagers.
“This is fucking awesome, sir! Never had anything like this last time we were here.” Baldwin’s eyes shone with adrenaline. No doubt they matched mine.
Down the hill, some of the men paused to open up on the enemy with their rifles. A few used the trucks as cover. To my immense pride, nobody fired from the hip. They chose their targets carefully to ensure that no stray ANA would be hit.
Travis Roberts finished the gauntlet and sprinted over to us. He was a crack grenadier. Back at Fort Drum, he had outscored the entire battalion on the M203 grenade launcher range and was quietly proud of his status as 2-87’s top marksman with this weapon. I wondered if his gaming addiction had something to do with this feat. He’d honed his small-motor skills with countless hours of Halo on the Xbox 360 and SOCOM on his PlayStation 2. His room at Bermel looked like a Best Buy with all the consoles and monitors he had stuffed into it. He even had a handheld Game Boy, which he hauled around everywhere, like Pinholt carried books. Any free moment, he’d be nose down killing pixilated bad guys.
Baldwin approached Roberts and ordered, “Use your 203 to knock out those machine-gun positions over there.” He pointed to the ridge on the far side of the wadi. Roberts didn’t bother to reply. He just lunged to the east side of the road, settled down into a firing stance behind some cover, and searched for somebody to kill for real this time.
More men joined us. Baldwin organized them into a perimeter, making sure the east side, facing the ridge, was the strongest. The volume of fire was much heavier from that side of the road, and Baldwin recognized our need to neutralize the enemy there first.
Roberts found a target and squeezed his 203’s trigger. The grenade exploded next to some trees midway up the ridge. As he reloaded, I heard him shouting, “Eat that, motherfuckers!”
“Make sure of your targets,” I reminded the men. “The ANA are all over the place.”
The men had it handled. I grabbed Baldwin, and together we charged to the knoll’s crest in search of the marines. Beyond a couple of the Toyota pickups, we found one of their Humvees. Running to the right side, we discovered their commander, a major, slouched sideways in the passenger seat with his back resting against the center console. He silently held a radio’s handset against his ear.
“Sir! We gotta move to the high ground!”
He turned vacant eyes my way. I stopped cold at his open door. “Sir, I need you to move your rigs out of the way. My trucks are trapped at the bottom of the hill!”
No response. He was the senior officer on the field. He needed to be coordinating this fight. His behavior surprised me.
“Sir? Either we get up this hill or we die.”
He said nothing. His unfocused gaze almost unnerved me. Baldwin and I exchanged a glance. No words passed between us, but we both knew exactly what to do.
The major’s checked out. Find his first sergeant.
The sweet sound of M4 carbines firing swelled behind us. My men laid on their triggers. M4 magazines carried thirty 5.56mm bullets and could hit targets up to 600 meters away. It was our standard-issue rifle, and it was deadly effective. The hurting time had come.
I felt a hand grip my shoulder. I spun around to see the marines’ senior NCO, First Sergeant Grigsby, standing beside me.
“Sir, whaddya need?” he shouted.
“My trucks are trapped at the bottom of the hill. We need you to clear the road and get your men to the top of the hill. I’ll get my trucks up here, and we can consolidate at the crest.”
He nodded. “You got it, sir!”
He sped back to his Afghan soldiers, shouting and gesturing as he ran among them. A few rose and began to move toward the pickups.
Baldwin and I returned to the platoon perimeter. Whomp! Roberts sent another 203 round into the ridge.
On the ridge, I counted four different machine-gun positions. Two more chattered away from the backside of Gangikheyl Hill.
Those machine gunners were dug in. It would take more than Roberts and a squad’s worth of rifles to knock them out. We needed a bigger punch.
“Baldwin,” I called out, “where’s our mortar?”
He pointed back down the road at Tony Garrett. With the 60mm mortar tube slung over one shoulder, he was sprinting up the slope through a hail of machine-gun fire as his section leader, Sergeant “Bear” Ferguson, matched him stride for stride. Garrett hailed from Atlanta, wore his ball caps sideways, and spoke with a honky gangsta affectation—our version of Eminem but more heavily armed.
The Dragunov barked. AKs rattled. Roberts triggered off another 203 grenade. At last, Garrett and Ferguson reached our perimeter. Both men were winded and bathed in sweat. The three components of the mortar weigh forty-five pounds, and the rounds are another three and a half pounds each. Bear and Garrett were the two most heavily laden men in our platoon
.
“Garrett,” I said, “start droppin’ rounds on those machine-gun nests.”
“Yew gottit, sir.”
Still standing exposed in the middle of the road, he swung the mortar off his shoulder and planted it. No time for the bipod. No time for aiming stakes and optics. Instead, he licked his finger and held it up to gauge the breeze, then pointed the tube at the enemy on the ridge. Kentucky windage at its finest.
Bear dropped a round into the tube. Garrett eyeballed the nearest enemy machine-gun nest and touched off his weapon. With a hollow thunk the mortar round sailed high over the firefight to detonate on the ridge.
“Ya, beetches! Comin’ at ya now! How ya like that shee-eet!” Garrett screamed. His gangsta was tinged with a soft southern accent, which made his voice seem ridiculously out of place in the middle of an Afghan firefight.
He and Ferguson worked flawlessly together. Reloading the mortar, Garrett made an adjustment and walked the second round closer to the nest. Alarmed by this threat, the enemy gunners shifted their fire and sprayed my mortar team. Undeterred, Ferguson and Garrett reloaded again even as bullets skipped and snapped past them.
As I moved to the right side of the road to get a better view of the enemy on the far side of the wadi, Sergeant Wheat appeared beside me. As always, a piece of hay dangled out of his mouth. I wondered if he had his folks send him straw from back home in their care packages.
“Where ya need me, sir?” he drawled.
I pointed to the right side of our perimeter. Wheat gave me a thumbs-up and headed off to find a good sniping position.
Up the road, the Afghan troops started to consolidate at the top of the knoll. Some climbed into their Toyotas; others stayed in the fight, mowing through their ammunition with long, full auto bursts from the AKs. We were getting organized amid the chaos at last.
Next play, Sean?
I needed to get back on the horn and call the base. If we could just get the trucks out of the low ground, we could establish contact and call in artillery and maybe even air support.
