Outlaw Platoon

by Sean Parnell

  Greeson caught up to First Sergeant Grigsby and asked, “Hey, can we use your trucks to get our wounded out of here?”

  “Roger that! Load ’em up in those two,” Grigsby replied, pointing at two Humvees on the northwest side of our hill. They were out of the main enemy fields of fire, which made them perfect for this mission of mercy.

  “Sir, let’s get Garvin and Baldwin out of here,” said Greeson. We returned to my Humvee to find Garvin semiconscious. He’d lost a lot of blood. Baldwin had somehow crawled back into the fight. We could see him shooting into the valley while lying prone just behind the crest of the hill. The bandage on his leg was soaked; Pantoja had not been able to stanch his blood loss.

  Sergeant Stalter grabbed Garvin and hoisted him off his feet. Greeson and I ran to go get Baldwin. But as we reached him, he shouted at us, “Get the fuck away from me! Take care of Garvin first!”

  Stalter called out, “We got him, don’t worry.”

  Baldwin had lost so much blood he couldn’t stand anymore. The fact that he was still in the action was a testament to his lion heart. Now he was starting to fade. Greeson and I tried to lift him, but he was almost deadweight.

  He mumbled something. His eyes had lost their luster. He’d given all he had to give. And then some.

  Seeing us struggle, Sabo and our Prophet spook, Sergeant Dixon, rushed over to help us. Each of us grabbed one of Baldwin’s limbs, and we carried him back toward the marine Humvees.

  That was a terrible mistake.

  Somewhere on the far ridge, an enemy machine gunner saw five Americans clustered together. The target we presented was too great to resist.

  Dixon went down first, a bullet in the arm. He dropped his hold on Baldwin, and the sudden shift of weight caused all of us to slip and fall atop one another. We lost our grip on Baldwin, who flopped motionless to the ground.

  Dixon turned, mouth agape at the sight of his own blood squirting over Baldwin. The bullet had severed an artery in his arm; with every heartbeat his life force fountained from his body.

  Pantoja appeared beside us. He pulled Dixon to a knee, secured a tourniquet on his arm, and dressed the wound in a matter of seconds. The blood flow slowed to a trickle.

  Baldwin stirred; he tried to raise his head, but the effort proved too much. He looked petrified.

  “We gotta get them to the trucks,” Greeson ordered. Dixon, now sheet white from blood loss, lifted Baldwin’s wounded leg with his unwounded arm. The rest of us picked him up as well. Staying low, we moved as fast as we could off the lip of the hill, down the northwest slope to the waiting Humvees.

  Before we could slide him inside the truck, Baldwin cried, “Sir, sir?”

  The terror in his voice made us freeze.

  “I’m fucked up.”

  Mouth open, shallow, rapid breathing. He was going into shock. I could see Afghan dirt ground into his teeth.

  “You’re gonna be okay, bro,” I said.

  “I’m shot in the back.”

  What?

  When we all went down, Baldwin took a round at the base of his spine. We’d had no idea until that moment.

  “I can’t feel my legs.”

  He seized my hand with his, and as he stared at me with saucer eyes, he squeezed it hard. As weak as he had been, the fear assailing him now evoked one last burst of strength.

  No words came. I held my brother’s hand until they pulled me from him. Door closed, driver gunning the engine, the Humvee lumbered off for FOB Bermel. The second one, carrying Garvin and Dixon, soon followed. I watched them go, Greeson and Sabo standing beside me, the blood of our brothers drying on our hands and arms.

  Fifteen

  The Place Beyond Devotion

  Two Apache gunships stormed over our battle-torn hilltop just as we reconvened at my Humvee. They arrowed into a steep climb until, hundreds of feet above us, they leveled off and plunged down into a gunnery pass. Their 30mm guns belched flame. Rockets spewed from pylon pods. A Hellfire missile went down range. Below us, the enemy side of the valley turned into a typhoon of steel and smoke.

  The sight of those gunships riding to our rescue energized our weary men. They rose as one, arms high, cheering as the choppers dealt death to our tormentors.

  As the Apaches strafed, I found Captain Dye. “We’ve got fixed wing coming in. Couple of A-10s.”

  Whatever aviation spigot had been shut off earlier was now open wide. I grinned and gave him a thumbs-up.

  Then he added, “And a B-1, too.”

  The B-1 Lancer had been built as the last of the Cold War strategic bombers. Designed to carry nukes into the heart of Soviet Russia, each one could now carry dozens of satellite-guided bombs. For us, having one in the air was like an infantry platoon on Iwo Jima having a B-29 squadron on call.

  “Wrath of God,” I said.

  “We need to get the ANA back here,” Captain Dye said. He started to run after them, but I grabbed his shoulder. “Sir, I got this. You’re working the radios. If you go down, we all go down.”

  He stopped and thought it over. “You’re right. Go ahead.”

  “I’m on it,” I replied.

  The Apaches made another gunnery run. The enemy fire slackened, but we were still receiving occasional bursts from the ridges. I found one of the marine NCOs and told him what we needed. It took about twenty minutes for him to round up the Afghan troops—it was like herding cats—but soon everyone was tucked behind our hilltop perimeter.

  Or so we thought.

  The Apaches pulled off in preparation for the A-10s’ arrival. They choppered east to pick off any of Galang’s men trying to escape into Pakistan.

  Over the radio, we heard the Warthog drivers roll into their attack runs. The peculiar sound of their engines rose in the distance.

  “Hold it! Hold it! We’ve got men on the ridge!” First Sergeant Grigsby warned.

  Somehow a squad of exceptionally aggressive Afghan troops had fought their way forward, across the valley, and halfway up one of the ridges. In the process, they’d lost contact with the rest of the ANA force.

  Through our binos, we could see them skirmishing with one of the support-by-fire positions. Captain Dye told Reuter to call off the A-10s, whose pilots pulled up and went into orbit a few miles away. It took another half hour to get those hard chargers to cease their assault and return to us.

  Once they did, hell visited Galang’s men.

  The Warthogs whistled in first, flaying the ridges with their tank-busting cannons before unleashing six satellite-guided bombs. We watched the concussion waves roll off the ridges toward us. A moment later, the ground shook as though a volcano had just blown its top.

  Somehow the enemy managed to stay in the game. The remaining machine-gun positions continued to lash at us. Our rigs took hits. The men stayed hunkered down. It was time for the wrath of God.

  “Pound those assholes,” Captain Dye said to Reuter. Our forward observer keyed his mike and talked to the Lancer crew. “I don’t care if they have high heels and miniskirts. Drop everything you have on that ridge!”

  We heard the air force pilot chuckle through his confirmation.

  Miles overhead, the B-1 Lancer reached its release point. The bomb bay doors flung open, and the crew disgorged its deadly load.

  Seconds passed. The weapons fell with precision, their fins making minute corrections to their flight path based on the data stream flowing to their electronic brains from a satellite in orbit above us.

  The ridges simply exploded. Eleven bombs struck in precise succession, each one overlapping the other until it looked as though a giant’s fist had punched upward through the earth’s crust, splintering rock and trees in all directions. In the holocaust of smoke and flames, men disintegrated. Weapons melted. Dugouts vanished.

  Peals of thunder rolled through the valley. Our hilltop trembled an
d quaked. In seconds, smoke engulfed the stricken ridges and all we could see was debris raining down for hundreds of meters in all directions.

  When it was over, the silence was almost unbearable. Galang’s force had been pulverized.

  The fighting had lasted for almost six hours. Exhausted, we hooked up our three disabled rigs and towed them off our hilltop for home. Our long column traveled west with barely a word shared among us. Empty shell casings littered our Humvee’s floorboards, and as we bounced along the rugged Afghan roads, they jingled like sleigh bells.

  When we reached Bermel, the homebodies turned out in force. The divide between combat troops and the men who work behind the wire grows wider in moments such as those. Band of brothers? No. Battle sifts those relationships like nothing else.

  We called them POGs (Personnel Other than Grunts) or FOBBITS. They smiled and laughed and took photos of our battered trucks as we parked out on the maintenance pad. They had spent the fight safe inside the base, uniforms clean, body armor stowed under their bunks. Now they behaved like the picnicking civilians who had turned out to watch the Battle of Bull Run during the Civil War. Combat tourists. What was worse, the POGs failed to notice how their ball game–like reception affected us. My men endured it, but just barely. Engines off now, the men dismounted to lean against tires, smoke in silence, or just stare into space.

  I wasn’t normally a smoker, but I was that evening.

  My head throbbed. That weird pinkish fluid still dribbled from my ears and nose. Each time I took a step, the world tilted. Staying on my feet was an effort, but I refused to sit down. I didn’t want the men to think I was weak.

  “Woah, lookit that,” a POG with a camera marveled as he studied the bullet holes all over Sabo’s Humvee. He started snapping pictures as his buddies laughed and smiled.

  I wanted to punch the son of a bitch.

  Rowley came up to me. He’d been stuck on the FOB with one of our fire teams, forced to pull security on the base perimeter.

  “Sir, I’m sorry I couldn’t get out to you,” he said, looking ready to burst.

  “Don’t worry about it, Rowley.” I took a drag on the smoke I’d been given and tried not to gag.

  “No, sir, you don’t understand. We all tried to go out with Second Platoon when they left to go get to you.”

  “You did?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, but Sergeant Burley told us ‘no fucking way’ he was taking us out with him. He ordered us back to the barracks.”

  That was not good.

  “Why not?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  The platoon will think it is because he never intended to reach us. If he’d taken Rowley and the rest of our team with him, they would have raised all manner of hell for not coming to our rescue.

  That was going to cause a rupture between the platoons.

  Yusef walked by, looking wide-eyed and weary. I asked, “How you doing?”

  “Long day, Commander Sean, eh?” He forced a smile. He looked like a loan shark when he did that.

  I hadn’t seen him once during the entire fight. I suspect he stayed in one of the Humvees. Just before we’d pulled off the hilltop, he’d appeared and stood around, watching the men hook up towlines to our crippled rigs.

  I missed Abdul.

  Meanwhile, we had twelve wounded men. Three had already been evacuated. The others needed medical attention. I walked to Greeson and saw that he already had the men moving to get treatment.

  Quietly, they lined up at the aid station’s door. We’d recently lost our doc, who had been a family practitioner back home. When the FOB’s gate had been hit by a suicide bomber a few months back, he had frozen in the middle of the crisis as horrifically maimed Afghan soldiers had been carried into the aid station. A few days later, he had been transferred to FOB Salerno and we’d never seen him again.

  He’d been replaced by a scowling Asian American female physician’s assistant who was one of the few women on our FOB.

  I stayed outside, smoking and staying within myself. I knew I needed to get checked too, but I didn’t want to do it until the men were all treated first. Sunset approached. The sky warmed to a yellow-orange glow and made the few clouds look gilded in gold. I finished the cigarette and cast the butt into the dirt.

  Over at the aid station, my men were walking away in groups of two or three. Something was up.

  I went inside just in time to hear the female PA patronizing Campbell. “Hey, you can handle this stuff, right? You’re an infantryman.”

  Campbell’s expression transformed from exhausted to indignant. He walked out without a word, despite the fact that slivers of shrapnel were still embedded in his arms.

  “Next,” she called.

  Reluctantly, another one of my men stepped forward. She glanced over him. “You’re gonna be fine. Next.”

  My rage boiled over. Storming over to her, I barked, “What are you doing? Do you have any idea the hell these guys just went through?”

  “Hey, LT, you don’t speak to a captain that way. I wonder what your commander will think about this.”

  “Treat my men with respect,” I said in a low, irritated voice.

  She ignored me and in a bored tone said, “Next.”

  She barely even examined the rest of my men. As soon as the last one left and I went out with them, she called Captain Dye and complained that I had treated her with disrespect. He asked me to meet him at the aide station.

  Walking back in, I saw her pleading her case. When Captain Dye asked me what had happened, I explained everything I saw. His face reddened.

  “Listen to me,” he said, his voice measured but freighted with anger, “when my soldiers come in here, I expect you to provide them the best possible care. Do you understand me? I know that you’re a captain too, but this is my FOB and these are my men. You treat them with respect.”

  Her bravado wilted.

  “Bring your wounded back in, Sean. Have them looked at again.”

  Wearily, the men lined back up. She offered cursory exams again, but this time she stowed the attitude. When she got to me, she looked at the pinkish fluid draining from my ears and said sarcastically, “You’re fine. You just need to clean your ears a bit better.”

  Back outside, Greeson sent the men to chow. Everyone was looking forward to a bite to eat and a long night’s sleep after the day we had.

  Walking back to my hooch, I found Captain Dye waiting for me.

  “Hey, sir. Thanks for having my back at the aid station earlier.”

  Without warning, he gave me a man hug.

  With reluctance, he said, “Sean, get your guys together. You’re going back out tonight.”

  My head swam. I thought my ears had played a trick on me.

  “Set up a checkpoint at the mouth of Route Trans Am.”

  Trans Am intersected with one of the north–south roads in our area. It was a major road into Pakistan and a very dangerous place. He wanted us to go park out there, set up a roadblock, and see what came at us.

  “Sir?” was all I could manage.

  “Take Second Platoon’s trucks. Cross load your ammo and gear.”

  “Sir, half my men are wounded, and they need to rest,” I finally said.

  “I know, Sean. Just do it,” he replied, putting one hand on my shoulder.

  When I explained all this to Greeson, his normally cool demeanor melted in the face of solar rage. I felt the same way, but we both knew we couldn’t refuse the order. After taking a moment to compose ourselves, we went off to tell the men. They were too tired to even complain.

  In the darkness, we gathered at our vehicles. Second Platoon pulled theirs up alongside ours. In their clean ACUs, they worked alongside my men to move our ammo, food, and water into their Humvees. Bandaged, burned, and bloodied, my men worked like automatons. But the
stark difference between how they looked and how Second Platoon did was not lost on anyone there that night. Sergeant Burley did his best to ignore it, preferring instead to hurl invectives at anyone who crossed his path. His behavior made our teeth grind.

  Second Platoon went to bed. In their undamaged trucks, we drove out into Indian country, cold fury keeping us awake. Whatever chance we’d had of keeping some semblance of a bond between the platoons evaporated that night. The chasm between us was complete.

  Sixteen

  Chickenshit Squared

  The fight on June 10 cost Outlaw Platoon dearly. Garvin, Baldwin, and Dixon had all been severely wounded and were evacuated from theater to undergo months of medical treatment back in the States. Nine other members of the platoon had suffered wounds as well. Almost half of the men on the hilltop had earned Purple Hearts in one day of combat.

  Galang did not survive unscathed. Our intel section learned that he’d been critically wounded during the final stages of the assault. Carried out of the fight by his surviving men, he’d made it back to the Pakistani hospital that was supplying his fighters with prescription drugs. Doctors there had amputated one of his legs. Though we hadn’t killed him, we had at least knocked him out of the fight for a while. I hoped that whoever took over for him would lack his tactical savvy. Brigade told us that they’d never seen such a sophisticated assault by the enemy, and I was tired of us being the test dummies for their new tactics.

  Galang’s attack cost his forces at least sixty-five men on the ridges and around our hilltop perimeter. Another thirty men died at the cave complex we hit with 105s at the start of the morning. Almost a hundred men killed in one engagement. Battalion told us that it was the largest battle on the frontier in years and the biggest victory since 2002.

  It didn’t feel like a victory, not with Baldwin, Garvin, and Dixon gone. Killing off Galang’s entire network would not have balanced out the loss of those three men. Besides, we all knew the score: had it not been for Captain Dye and Delta’s platoon, the Outlaws would have died to the last man.