Outlaw Platoon

by Sean Parnell

  The fight had cost us two squad leaders. Waites’s zombie walk toward the enemy on June 10 had destroyed his squad’s confidence in his leadership. We had to move him out of the platoon. Unlike Captain Waverly, who had vanished from the battalion after he was relieved, Waites stayed at Bermel to become an instrumental part of our civil affairs operations until he was later wounded during a surprise rocket attack. Even then he returned to Bermel as soon as he was well enough to execute his duties. His devotion drove him to serve in any capacity his mind would allow. There was honor in that effort.

  Our southern sniper, Sergeant Wheat, took over Waites’s squad. During our hilltop stand, the men had responded to his calm leadership. He exuded confidence, and the men told stories of his sniping with a measure of awe in their voices. First Squad would be just fine.

  On the other hand, Baldwin’s experience and insight could not be replaced. He’d been our point man, the NCO whose sixth sense had steered us out of trouble on many occasions. Along with Greeson and Sabo, Baldwin had played a key role in our mission planning. To the younger men in his squad, he had been a steadying presence, a voice of reason, and a guiding presence. He wasn’t a yeller; he didn’t berate the men to get them to do what he wanted. Instead, a few soft-spoken words was all it took to get them to respond. The life that Baldwin had sacrificed at home to be out with us made his motives beyond question. At times, soldiers will grumble about an NCO making a decision that is not in their best interests but made to advance that sergeant’s career. Nobody ever thought that about Baldwin. Few NCOs commanded more respect.

  Losing Garvin was a double tap to the squad’s morale. He was beloved as a team leader. Compassionate and understanding, he connected with his soldiers in ways other young NCOs could only hope to do. He treated them with great respect. In return, they drove through walls for him. He motivated and inspired. On the battlefield, he always led by example.

  Greeson and I decided to promote Colt Wallace into Garvin’s role. Though he didn’t have Bennett’s experience, he was self-assured and respected and possessed a natural charisma that Greeson felt would make him a fine young leader. Wheat was his best friend and could help mentor him along too.

  We reached outside the platoon to replace Baldwin. Sergeant Chris Cowan, who had been Captain Dye’s radio operator, took over Second Squad. Initially, the men weren’t sure what to think of him. He possessed a very dry and sarcastic sense of humor, which left some of the men confused as to when he was joking around and when he was being serious. Whereas Baldwin had held his squad to high standards but led with a tempered hand, Cowan was tough and exacting. Chris was a phenomenal NCO, but Greeson and I knew it would take time for the cohesion that had existed in the squad to develop again.

  Three days after the June 10 fight, Lieutenant Colonel Toner ordered us back to battalion headquarters at FOB Orgun-E. He’d heard about what happened at the aid station with the physician’s assistant and wanted all of us to be thoroughly checked over by the battalion’s medical staff. In the meantime, the physician’s assistant disappeared from Bermel, never to be seen again.

  The chance to get back to a larger base with better chow and more supplies appealed to the platoon. Despite the clear threat Galang’s force posed to us around Bermel, getting ammunition had become a serious headache. Fortunately, battalion kept on hand ample quantities of everything we needed. Of course, the paperwork maze to get it seemed insurmountable, so Greeson used all means available to “scrounge” every round he could find. While the men went through their medical checks, he crammed our Humvees full of machine-gun belts, drums of 40mm grenades, and crates of .556 rifle ammunition. Forget the unit basic load-out we’d been trained to carry; we planned to double it. Fourteen mags per rifle, two thousand rounds for the machine guns, and eighty grenades for the Mark 19. That’s what we would roll with in the future so that next time we wouldn’t run out of ways to kill the enemy.

  The medical staff did what they could for the men. Every one of our walking wounded needed better care than was available at Orgun-E. The docs told them they would be sent to Bagram for further treatment. To a man, they refused. They would not leave their brothers, even if it meant living with pain in the weeks to come.

  Campbell’s arms were full of shrapnel, but the wounds had started to heal over. The doc picked out what pieces he could reach, but the rest would need surgery. “Forget it, Doc,” he said. “I’m staying here.”

  Sabo said the same thing when his turn came, as did Greeson when the doc looked over his shoulder wound.

  I stood off to one side, listening to the medical staff try to reason with my men. Their devotion to the platoon put a lump in my throat.

  After the last man had been treated, Greeson came over to me. “Sir, you need to get looked at. Don’t give me any shit, just go do it. Now. That’s an order.”

  “What are you, my mother?”

  “Somebody’s gotta look out for you, ’cause you won’t do it.”

  Under his watchful gaze, I went to have my turn with the doc. Since June 10, I’d had a nearly constant migraine headache, bouts of vertigo, and blurred vision. I wasn’t about to tell the doc any of that.

  He looked me over, noted the fluid that had dried and turned to a spongy mass in my ears, and told me I had to go to Bagram and get an MRI.

  “I’m not leaving,” I said.

  He regarded me and said, “You’ve got postconcussive syndrome. Your brain could be bleeding or swelling. You need to be evaluated at a better facility.”

  The men set the example for their leader that day. My brains could have been leaching out my ears, and I would not have left them. When I refused evacuation again, the doctor threw up his hands and muttered, “You’re all crazy.”

  As we left, I caught Greeson smiling at me.

  Our moment at the battalion aid station at Orgun-E solidified the platoon as a family. Everyone hurt. Everyone would have traded a limb to get out of theater and see home again. But they would do it only as a platoon. They would not let their family carry on the fight without them.

  Back at Bermel, the long patrol cycles continued. We would spend three to six days out beyond the wire, then come back for a few days to rest up and carry out duties at the base. Cole was there waiting for us every time we rolled through the gate, eager to do anything he could to help the platoon. He’d lost more weight, and I’d run into him at the base’s makeshift gym many times. He’d pat his shrinking stomach and would say something like “Sir, it is only a matter of time before I’m out there with y’all.”

  In the meantime, he happily did as much of the mundane scut work as the rest of the platoon would let him do after we finished a patrol. He would unload gear, help service the trucks, and clean weapons, and he’d just light up as he worked. Being around the men had that effect on him. He missed us, and it was obvious to everyone in the platoon that he hated being left behind.

  Those mini-reunions with Cole became part of our end-of-patrol ritual. I found myself looking forward to seeing him, as his levity always picked me up in spite of the exhaustion and soreness I felt after those long sorties.

  After the rigs were taken care of and our gear was squared away, the men would hit the chow hall for a hot meal. Greeson and I usually met with the squad leaders to go over any lessons learned from the last mission. We’d take those lessons and push them out to the rest of the platoon after everyone had a chance to eat. As a platoon, we developed new tactics, rehears
ed them on base, and devised countermeasures for the enemy’s latest ambush techniques. It was a constant evolution. One slip and we’d fall behind, and that could be catastrophic. The enemy forced us to think and adapt constantly.

  We decided we would move around in the battle space more. That way, the enemy would be hard pressed to set up another June 10–style assault on one of our nocturnal perimeters. Stay fluid, keep the enemy guessing, and never let them get the drop on us again. In the future, all potential ambush sites would be shot up with our fifties or the Mark 19 before we drove through them, a tactic called “reconnaissance by fire.” If an enemy force did lurk in the area, firing at it would almost certainly trigger a response and get it to reveal its positions to us.

  When we analyzed the attack the enemy had initiated against us on May 7, plus the one that had rattled Second Platoon, we concluded that the best way to handle such an ambush would be to drive through it to a preplotted rally point and circle the wagons. From there, we’d dismount, call in air and artillery, then counterattack.

  Every day on the FOB, we took time to rehearse our new tactics and plan for every possible contingency. The enemy had learned lessons from May 7 and made changes to how it did business. Now we did the same. Whose new game plan would be better remained to be seen. One thing was for sure: we’d get the opportunity to find out. Contrary to its behavior in years past, the enemy did not melt away and lick their wounds in Pakistan. The Prophet spooks heard them chattering on their radios every day as they observed us from concealed positions. For the moment, though, they turned cagey and elusive. Try as we might, we could not bring them into battle again.

  While on patrol one day in mid-June, Prophet spooks called from Bermel and reported that an enemy force was nearby. An enemy scout had just radioed, “We’ve got five camels approaching. Get ready.”

  Camel was the enemy’s code name for our Humvees. They were watching us from a concealed ambush position somewhere ahead. We braced ourselves for the coming attack, went over how we would handle it, and pushed forward.

  Nothing happened. A few minutes later, the Prophet spooks checked in to tell us that the enemy had said, “Do not attack! Do not attack! It is the Green Skulls!”

  They’d seen Emerick’s Outlaw insignia on the side of our Humvees. Thanks to June 10, we had a reputation among our enemy now. On that day, they wanted an easier target.

  We came off our patrol cycle the next morning and transitioned into FOB duty. As stressful as our missions outside the wire were, we at least possessed a sense of freedom and independence. Nobody messed with us. Back at the FOB, a host of brewing conflicts existed that our status as veterans exacerbated. After June 10, the line between those of us doing the fighting and those doing the supporting on the bases had never been more clearly defined. Our tolerance level for the petty rules and politics we faced on base diminished, even as they seemed to grow more acute and offensive. Chickenshit squared. We internalized every slight, noticed every inequity between us and the Fobbits, and fumed with resentment over the lack of respect we thought they telegraphed. The platoon withdrew into itself, the men building a protective wall around those they trusted. Everyone else was viewed with quiet suspicion.

  It started with little things related to men living practically on top of one another. Sergeant R. Kelly, Delta’s platoon sergeant, continued to sing with headphones on at all hours of the night and morning, despite being told early and often to be quiet. After days of sleep deprivation out in the field, all we wanted was a decent night’s sleep. Next door was an NCO who was conspicuously absent every time Delta rolled outside the wire, who also lacked the grace to respect that need for sleep. Earlier in the spring, I’d just tried to ignore it. But after all we’d been through without seeing this sergeant shoulder his responsibilities and help lead his platoon in combat, I burned with indignation.

  R. Kelly did not belong to our company. He was part of our battalion’s Delta Company. The platoon from Delta that had served with us at Bermel was not part of our administrative chain of command. This meant that for R. Kelly’s platoon, all matters of pay, awards, promotions, discipline, and mail went through Delta Company, not through Captain Dye. Dye had only tactical control of R. Kelly and his platoon. He could not discipline or initiate investigations and did not have the ability to take care of issues within the Delta Platoon in a swift manner. Basically, R. Kelly fell through an administrative crack, a glitch that he exploited. Until Delta Company could send its first sergeant down to check on the platoon at Bermel, R. Kelly was safe from any punitive action.

  Meanwhile, his daily patterns fell under our company’s scrutiny. Instead of patrolling with his men, he seemed to be following a female mail carrier around the brigade’s area of operations. That particular mail carrier was detested by our platoon. She was rude and officious and handled our care packages like Ace Ventura. The men called her “the Mail Bitch.”

  One of the few joys the platoon found at Bermel was the small cadre of dogs we’d inherited from the 173rd Airborne guys we had relieved in February. Though it was against regulations to keep pets on base, Captain Dye recognized their morale value to the men and looked the other way. Doc Pantoja and the other medics had vaccinated them, so they posed no health threat. The platoon built kennels for them and taught them tricks.

  The Mail Bitch did not like the dogs. Whenever she came on post, she complained loudly about them, even though she never had any actual contact with them. She was just the kind to make trouble at higher headquarters about them for the sake of making trouble. Not that we didn’t have other, more important things to worry about—such as staying alive in the face of a cunning enemy. A Fobbit like her was so removed from the tip of the spear that she cared nothing for such things. Instead, the rules and regulations served as her refuge from the obvious disgust the combat troops held for her. We’d seen her wield them as weapons against those she didn’t like, which added to everyone’s stress and made the men protective of the dogs when we were back at base after a patrol cycle.

  Calling home while at Bermel turned into another festering issue. We knew that our time on base would be limited to a short forty-eight- or seventy-two-hour cycle before we had to get back out into the field. That gave us only a small window to call our loved ones back home. The Fobbits monopolized the phones available at the MWR (morale, welfare, and recreation) hooch. My men would show up there, eager to touch base with their wives, girlfriends, or parents and tell them they were safe, only to find they had to wait for hours to get a chance to make a ten-minute phone call.

  To compensate for that inequity, we let the men use a couple of the company satellite phones, which could be checked out for short periods at the operations center. That worked well at first, but there were times the men forgot to sign out the phones or return them. I ended up having to track them down.

  One night, I combed the barracks looking for a missing sat phone. None of the soldiers had it, and I grew testy with frustration. I had shit to do and did not need to be running around trying to find a phone.

  As I checked around for it, somebody mentioned that the ’terps occasionally used them. That surprised me, and I felt a fleeting sense of disquiet over the discovery. A sat phone can be used to call anywhere on the planet. A local national on our base using one could be seen as a breach in operational security.

  I hustled over to the ’terp hooch, where I found Yusef curled up on his cot, talking quietly into the missing sat ph
one. He was alone; Bruce Lee and Shaw were out on duty. When he saw me enter, he hung up and said sheepishly, “Just talking to my family, Commander Sean.”

  He handed me the phone. For a second, I had my doubts as Captain Canady’s and Abdul’s warnings came back to me.

  What the hell. He hasn’t seen his family in months, just like us.

  “Come to me or Captain Dye in the future, okay?”

  “Sure, sure, Commander Sean.”

  I took the phone and carried it to the operations center. I had to be there anyway to start a shift as the company’s night-battle captain. When I arrived, I found Pinholt manning the radios. We greeted each other warmly as I racked the sat phone and checked it back in.

  We were in for a long night. Battle captain duty involves mainly hanging out in the operations center to handle any incoming calls from units on patrol or from the perimeter. If something serious came up, we’d have to wake Captain Dye—or drag him away from another Halo 2 tournament on the Xboxes floating around the FOB. Since saving us on June 10, he’d retreated within himself a little. Of course, we all had, but the fact that we were not seeing him out and about as much had not gone unnoticed by the men.

  The first hours of the night shift passed slowly. With nothing going on, Pinholt and I ended up in another series of unusual conversations. We jumped from topic to topic—he was still reading Atlas Shrugged—until we ended up talking about day trading. He had been learning the ropes from Khanh before he’d gone down to Helmand Province. Khanh was so good at it that he’d already cleared several thousand dollars just working the Net whenever he had access here at the FOB.