by Sean Parnell
Waites appeared out of nowhere, standing beside the back-left fender of his Humvee. His weapon was at his side, barrel down. He looked disengaged.
“Waites!” I shouted to him. He didn’t reply.
His head swiveled from side to side.
“What the fuck is he doing?” Pinholt asked Wheat.
“No idea.”
Head still on a swivel, eyes the picture of desolation, Waites walked right between us and started down the slope into the teeth of the enemy force. Fully exposed, rifle still at his side, his sudden move surprised the enemy. There was a pause in the firing. Quickly enough, they recovered, and a flurry of AKs unleashed in full auto at him. The air cracked and whipped with bullets. The ground around him churned. He kept walking toward the enemy.
Pinholt screamed, “Sergeant Waites, they’re trying to kill you!”
My black-sheep squad leader didn’t respond.
Wheat and Pinholt exchanged glances. In that instant, they knew what had to be done. Wheat covered Waites with quick, well-aimed shots. Pinholt rose into the firestorm and charged down the hill. He caught Waites by his IBA and stopped his momentum. Two men exposed sparked an AK feeding frenzy. Dugin’s fifty answered, but the fusillade continued.
Through it, Pinholt single-handedly dragged Waites back up the hill. He set him down next to Wheat’s fighting position. Waites offered no resistance.
I crawled over to him. “Waites?”
No response. His head had stopped moving. He looked catatonic.
The terror and strain of combat affect every man differently. It had made Dugin momentarily lose his senses and throw his Gerber into the dirt. For others, such as Sabo, it arouses rage and adrenaline. With Wheat it had the opposite effect; he went cold and calculating.
Here I was confronted by a new response. Waites was no coward, not by a long shot. His psyche just could not process in these conditions. He’d shut down completely. All his lackadaisical behavior these past months came into focus. He had refused to consider combat a possibility. It could not happen, this moment could not come. Deep down he knew his mind would not be able to function in battle. Denial had become his defense.
“Waites?” I said again.
Reality has a bad habit of making denial irrelevant.
“Wheat?”
“Yeah, sir?”
“Your squad now,” I said.
“I got it, sir.” Silently he stripped Waites of his magazines and handed a few to Pinholt. Waites didn’t resist or say a word. He just gazed out into space with a thousand-yard stare.
“They’re coming again!” Pinholt shouted. Wheat’s rifle cracked twice. Another insurgent died. Dugin’s fifty boomed. He was spot-on this time, handling the huge weapon like a steely-eyed veteran. He’d found his battle legs.
Three men against twenty, and they were holding their own.
To the north, though, a crisis brewed. I heard Chris Brown’s 240 rip through a belt. Had they gotten behind us after all? I got up and ran back to my rig. Brown had traversed north and was shooting at targets to the left of Greeson’s Humvee. Baldwin had refused to stay out the fight. Using my door as cover, he stood on one leg, blazing away at the enemy to the north.
Greeson appeared. He’d been bolting from one position to another, handing out ammunition to the men. He stuck a finger out at Baldwin and said, “You. Sit.”
“We need everyone in this fight,” he protested.
“Stay here and get treated,” I ordered. He looked pissed.
I checked with Reuter. “Any birds en route?”
“Negative, sir. All the air assets are tied up elsewhere.”
“Keep trying.”
I huddled up with Greeson. A good dynamic existed between the two of us. I was always the hot one. He ran cold and kept me grounded. We’d become so close that we could finish each other’s thoughts. Throughout the fight, we didn’t even have to communicate much, but all along we functioned smoothly as a team.
“Greeson?”
“Yeah, sir?” he growled through dirt-crusted lips.
“What’s our next play?”
Somebody screamed, “They’re comin’ again!” The sound of gunfire grew fast and desperate. The tempo of the fight was changing, building. I looked at Greeson and saw relentless determination etched on his face. But I also saw a touch of fear.
“Fuck, I dunno, sir. Shoot back.”
Has it come to that?
He grabbed a handful of M4 mags and dashed across the perimeter. I checked my own situation. Five mags. I’d given two to Wheat.
A platoon leader should never be directly in the fight. The radios are his best weapon. But there are moments imposed upon us by the enemy when there is no other option. Briefly, I thought of Major General William Dean, whose division had been overrun in the summer of 1950 during the Korean War. As his men had broken under the weight of a tank assault, he had grabbed a bazooka and fought street by street in the city of Taejon.
Greeson was right. This was one of those moments. So I did what he suggested and ran after him to the east edge of the perimeter. Campbell was still in the turret of Baldwin’s rig, his hands and arms burned and studded with pieces of shrapnel. But he was working the fifty like a gruesome artist. The enemy cleared the road and reached the base of our hill. They were only a couple hundred meters away now. One more rush, and they’d be on us.
They paused, and I could see them forming up into fire teams. In groups of three or four, they began bounding uphill toward us, each squad working to cover the other’s movements.
That’s exactly how we’d do it.
Sabatke started to run for me. A jagged chunk of shrapnel had cut open his forehead. Blood was trailing down both sides of his face and across the bridge of his nose. It made him look hellish.
“Sir! They’re coming up the hill! They’re coming up the hill!” A fusillade of enemy fire sent him diving for cover. The volume of incoming swelled again as we started taking AK fire from those below us. Bullets bounced and whirred off Campbell’s armored shield. He seemed oblivious to the danger.
From below arose a hundred war cries, intermingling into one terrifying undulating sound. “Li-li-li-li-li!”
My men began shouting back, “Motherfuckers! Come and get some!”
Campbell tracked a target and unleashed a burst. “Eat that, fuckers!” he screamed.
“Allahu akbar!”
“Li-li-li-li!”
“Suck my dick!”
Galang’s squad and fire team leaders barked out orders. The firing grew climactic as the fighting narrowed to point-blank range.
We don’t have the ammo for this.
Below me, I saw a fire team dash from one stand of trees to another. Less than a hundred meters away now, they moved with practiced speed, howling as they went. They wore man jams, olive drab pants, and old-style green field jackets. Some of them had chest racks bulging with extra AK-47 magazines. I saw a few wearing black ski masks.
All of them carried those eight-inch knives on their hips.
Another fire team broke cover and surged toward us. This time, Campbell caught them cold. He triggered his fifty, and its stream of bullets ripped them apart with appalling violence. Their gory remains decorated the slope and festooned the trees. The trailing enemy fire team froze at the horrific sight.
Right then, the first 105mm artillery rounds from the guns at FOB Bermel struck the base of the hill. The ground bucked and shook. Flames and smoke jetted skyward. I watched one shell vaporize three men. But more came on, sprinting even faster, driven by the realization that their only hope now rested on getting to the top of the hill, where we could not call in artillery without killing ourselves. It was the one way they could mitigate our firepower advantage.
About thirty meters away, I spotted an enemy fighter partially concealed behind a t
ree. He was yelling something to four other men advancing ahead of him. As I took aim, my eyes had trouble focusing and he ducked behind the trunk. Which side of the tree would he peer around next? I had a fifty-fifty chance, so I picked left.
Sure enough, he exposed his chest and head for just an instant. A slight adjustment, and my sight was on him, center mass. My rifle cracked. A jet of blood erupted from his neck, and he spun away from the tree to collapse in the dirt.
I felt nothing. No time to think about that now.
Campbell’s machine gun made a metallic click sound. He’d burned through the last rounds on that belt. A quick check of his Humvee revealed that it was the last of the fifty-cal ammo. He let out a long string of obscenities as he reached for his M4. Soon he was blazing away next to his empty machine gun, still in the fight.
One by one, our heavy weapons ran out of ammunition. Brown’s 240 went silent. So did Private Dugin’s fifty that was mounted on Waites’s rig. Nobody was in Sabo’s turret now that both Emerick and Lewis had gone down with head shots. Despite every effort, Bray’s Mark 19 refused to fire. Our best weapons were all but useless. Desperate, the gunners drew their 9mm pistols, racked the slides, and fired into the onrushing waves of enemy. It was a measure of last resort I’d never thought I’d see.
Another fire team sped forward. They attracted a rash of fire from my men, but none of them went down. Ten meters away, they went to ground behind rocks and trees to spray us with their AKs. Behind them, another squad swept uphill as soon as the lead squad began suppressing us.
What next, Sean? What next?
I thought of the 20th Maine Volunteer Infantry Regiment on day two of the Battle of Gettysburg. All afternoon those Union men had repelled wave after wave of Confederate attackers. Finally, with more than half the regiment down, their commander, Colonel Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, ordered a final, desperate bayonet charge into the teeth of the attacking force.
We were at that point. Only we didn’t have any bayonets.
Fourteen
Blood Brothers
Chris Brown’s pistol cracked. Campbell’s rifle bucked. Wheat double-tapped another insurgent. Pilon’s SAW chattered. Sabatke ducked into his Humvee and snatched a pair of M18 Claymore mines. Withering AK fire be damned, he planted one next to each front fender, facing down the hill.
Galang’s men squeezed closer. They had us, and they knew it.
A head appeared in Sabo’s turret. No helmet, just filthy hair caked with blood. Our artist lived. A rush of relief flooded through me.
He pulled himself up to the fifty and quickly checked it over. It still had a few rounds left. He swung the weapon down and soon found a target. He triggered a burst. Then another. A fifty-cal at point-blank range creates an indescribable mess out of human beings. For those nearby who somehow escape its wrath, the carnage it wreaks inflicts paralyzing terror.
Emerick was holding his own.
To the north, a sudden swell of gunfire rose above the din of our own battle. I could hear AKs and enemy machine guns hammering furiously at some new target. Fifty-cals, 240s, and a Mark 19 answered back.
Captain Dye and Delta Platoon had joined the fight. They were coming in across the enemy’s right flank and would have to shoot their way through the insurgents assaulting Sabo and Greeson’s section of the line. If we didn’t coordinate with them, we ran the risk of accidentally shooting at each other while aiming at the enemy in between. I’d have to make sure that did not happen.
I backed off the crest, rose to my feet, and ran for Greeson, who was picking his shots from behind a tree.
The enemy made a rush at Sabo. He killed them with a Claymore. Those mines are like shotguns on steroids or Civil War cannons loaded with grapeshot. They spray a kill zone with hundreds of tiny steel balls that shred anything unarmored in their path. Their optimum range is twenty to thirty meters. In a defensive fight, they form the last line of defense before hand-to-hand combat.
Screams and shrieks of pain filled the air. Sabo detonated the other Claymore. Emerick’s fifty went dry.
I reached Greeson and took a knee next to him. From his vantage point on the northern edge of the line, we could see Delta’s Humvees in the valley below us. They’d stumbled into Galang’s flank security element, which had sparked a vicious secondary firefight that had distracted the enemy and stalled their attack.
Mortar rounds rained down on the hilltop again. A fresh stream of RPGs joined in as Galang’s support-by-fire element risked hitting its own men in the hope of finishing us off before Delta could fight its way to us.
The linkup between our battered platoon and Delta had to go flawlessly. There was no margin for error here. After all we’d been through, I could not stomach the idea of one of my men getting hit by friendly fire. I broke cover and started running downhill. Greeson shouted something and came after me, but I ignored him.
Delta’s rigs reached the base of the hill, and I recognized Sergeant Chris Cowan standing tall in Captain Dye’s turret, going cyclic with his 240.
Captain Dye’s remaining rigs blew through Galang’s flank security and struck the northern assault element from the rear and flank. The enemy fighters recoiled away from the Humvees as they rumbled up the hill.
If Wheat’s element can hold out, we may pull this off.
I waved at the lead rig’s driver and directed him into place. Greeson helped guide the rigs as they got closer to our lines. One by one, the Delta trucks rolled to our perimeter and took station on the east side.
Captain Dye dismounted into machine-gun, mortar, and RPG fire. “What the hell is happening here?” he exclaimed as we met up just behind his rig. Around us my men fought on, bloodied and wounded, most down to their final rounds. Greeson started cross loading ammo from Delta’s trucks so our men could stay in the fight.
Captain Dye had arrived in the nick of time.
Sergeant James Newton, a big redhead known to be an excellent shot, stepped out of one of the Delta rigs, hefting a Vietnam-era M14 rifle. He joined us as I briefed Captain Dye.
“Half my men are down, sir. They’re attacking in two elements. Two platoons plus. We’re out of ammo and need to get our seriously wounded out of here.”
“Where do you want me?” Newton asked.
Just as he did, Emerick stumbled out of Sabo’s truck. He and Newton were friends, and the big redhead marveled at our artist’s head wound and the burns on his neck and face.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asked.
“Check this out,” Emerick said as he held up his helmet. There was a splintered hole in the front and a bigger hole in the back side. The chin strap had been severed.
“I got shot in the head, Sergeant Newton! Can you believe this? It knocked me out cold,” Emerick let out a peal of crazy laughter. The bullet had grazed his left side, exited the back of his helmet at a downward angle, and gone through part of his vest to ricochet around inside the truck.
“Unbefuckinleavable,” Newton exclaimed. Before Emerick could reply, bullets shredded a nearby tree.
“Emerick, get down!” Newton shouted.
Emerick didn’t bother to duck.
The enemy re-formed and came at us again. The range narrowed to mere meters. It astonished me that they would try again despite the addition of Delta’s heavy weapons on our perimeter. One by one, our fifties rejoined the fight as Greeson delivered fresh ammo to our gunners.
Newton ran over to support Campbell and protect Baldwin’s crippled truck. He’d mounted a beautiful Leupold scope on his M14, not that he needed it at such close quarters. As the fresh enemy assault closed in, he prepared to fire. Campbell, who had just finished loading a belt that Greeson had given him, triggered his Ma Deuce. His bullets walked through an advancing team and tore three men apart.
“You fucker, those were mine, I had them in my sights!” Newton shouted at Campbell
.
The enemy wouldn’t quit. The fight grew even more intense. Delta’s platoon anchored us, or we would have gone down for sure. Still, we couldn’t hold the enemy off indefinitely. We needed more firepower and more men.
Where was Second Platoon? Back at my rig, I checked in with the FOB. Our company executive officer was on the net now, and he told me he was still working to get us some air assets. Sergeant Burley had taken up a supporting position with Second Platoon several kilometers to our rear.
I paused to think this over. Why was Burley not coming to join us?
On a hill a few hundred meters to our northwest, a head appeared over the crest. Then another. Soon a dozen figures flowed over the hilltop and down the slope facing us.
They were carrying AKs.
More followed. A dozen. Two. The lead element opened fire on the run, shooting from the hip like something straight out of a movie.
I had one mag left. I’d given all my others away. Even with Delta’s trucks, we couldn’t stop this fresh threat. Unconsciously, I clutched my Gerber knife.
I can’t believe it has come to this.
More men poured over the crest. And then I saw a marine in their ranks.
“They’re ANA,” I said to myself.
Combat whipsaws your emotions in an extreme way that nothing else can. I’d gone from despair to euphoria in a matter of seconds.
The Afghan troops sprinted into our perimeter and counterassaulted the enemy through our firing line. Galang’s men reeled from the blow and fell back pell-mell to the base of the hill. Several more marine Humvees and ANA Toyotas joined us from the northwest. We’d gone from having five trucks, three of which had been rendered immobile by damage, to having fourteen.
Captain Dye’s call for help had brought us two hundred Afghan soldiers. FOB Bermel was virtually stripped of soldiers. Yet Second Platoon had not joined the fight.
The battle raged below us. The Afghans were on a tear today, hoping to exact revenge for May 7. They pushed Galang’s force back across the road on the valley floor. The enemy’s machine guns caught some of the ANA in the open. The Afghan troops fell back or went to ground. The counterattack stalled, but the enemy did not break contact. A stalemate ensued.
