by Sean Parnell
Love cements selflessness.
If Dugin was the exception, he also proved the rule. His bullshit lies and puppy-dog devotion didn’t play within the platoon. But what was he really doing? He was trying to be validated; he wanted to belong. But he always went about it the wrong way, and he couldn’t connect. He couldn’t fit. He couldn’t love or be loved. He just didn’t know how. Ultimately, that disconnect made the difference between returning to the turret to stay in the fight and heading to the casualty collection point. Dugin was no coward; June 10 had proved that. But without that bond, without that love the rest of us felt for one another, he was never going to give himself selflessly in battle. That limitation was good to know.
Outlaw Platoon had bonded in a way that made us fierce in battle. Our selflessness was our secret weapon. In the months to come, my job would be to keep our chemistry intact. It would be tested by internal tensions as well as external ones. I had no doubt of that. No matter what, it needed to be nourished and protected.
Sabo found me lost in thought. He moved alongside me and asked, “We going to head home, sir?”
I shook my head. Through clenched teeth, I replied, “No way are we giving the ground to the enemy. We stay here tonight.” They might have thwarted my counterattack—again—but we would secure the moral victory and dare them to take it from us.
Sabo offered a broad smile. “Fuck, yeah, sir.”
Word was passed. The men made preparations to stay the night. The perimeter was reinforced, battle positions improved, MREs passed around.
The self-doubts were gone. The second-guessing and the overanalyzing of my leadership style—those were weaknesses we could no longer afford. I silently shed those weights; I had experience leading men in battle now.
This fight had transformed us, furthered our becoming. Gone was the euphoria we had felt in May, replaced by steel and icy professionalism. The adrenaline rush combat produced didn’t last as long this time, either. Nor was it as intense. Our bodies were growing used to that chemical surge, and its effects were diminishing with every injection.
We were reaching a peak. Almost halfway through the deployment, we knew our jobs and ourselves. Combat had become a known quantity. There were no more surprises save the ones the enemy schemed to spring on us. Perhaps we’d have a few surprises for it in the weeks ahead. This battle had been our arrival moment.
At dusk, I stood beside a crumbled qalat wall and gazed across at the ridge on the far side of the valley. Here and there, smoke still coiled up from fires sparked by our 105s. Broken trees and blackened shell holes dotted the scene. The enemy had fled. We’d outgritted them yet again. I wanted to throw my head back and let out a victory cry. But such a thing does not become a leader. I kept it tight.
After dark, the Special Forces colonel came to me with a crucial piece of intel we’d been lacking since the start of the spring offensive. His team had the same signal intercept capabilities that our Prophet spooks possessed, with some extra (classified) features thrown in for good measure. He briefed me on what they’d learned. When he finished, I rounded up Sabo, Campbell, and Wheat to tell them the news.
“We know the enemy’s intentions now,” I said. That got everyone’s attention.
“They are seeking a decisive victory over an American platoon. They want to pin us in a kill zone by disabling our vehicles, then overrun us and kill us to the last man. They plan to behead anyone they capture. If they catch us in an observation point again, they will try a direct assault, just like June 10.”
Sabo growled, “Guess we’ll ratchet things up.”
The other men nodded. I saw grim determination on every face.
We discussed this news for several minutes, developing more plays for our book should the enemy return tonight. When we finished, I said, “Every time they come at us, we’ll be ready. We’ll slaughter them, just as we’ve been doing. Intel intercepted some enemy radio transmissions that confirmed we took out another twenty of the bastards—at least. Good job. Keep it up.”
Nods all around. For an impulsive second, I wanted to add something else. I swallowed the words before they reached my lips. Men do not do well when tender emotions exist between them. They can be there. They can even be tangentially recognized. But to acknowledge them directly would have violated the structure of our relationships and turned the moment awkward. I went quiet rather than run that risk. But I suspected everyone in the leaders’ huddle that night was thinking the same thing. Forget firepower and ammunition, forget grit, forget numbers and access to indirect. All those things had been available to other units overrun in other wars and battles.
As the meeting broke up and my NCOs returned to their squads, I stood in the ruins and let my mind dwell on the words I hadn’t had the heart to utter.
Love’s the only thing that will see us through this. If that love fails, or if we let circumstance and friction grind it down, we will surely die.
I was glad I hadn’t said that to my squad leaders. Just hearing it in my head sounded gay enough. I’d have never lived it down. No matter. Spoken or not, we all knew it to be our central truth.
Nineteen
Rocket’s Red Glare
The sun, a molten crescent peeping over Rakhah Ridge, streaked the sky with bands of gold and red. The haze lingering in our valley caught the light and tinted the air the color of dried blood. We could have been campaigning on Mars.
Dawn: our time.
Back home, this moment of spectacular beauty is missed by so many of our friends and family. Here, it was the start of every business day. Dawn served as a trough between restless sleep and the emotional suck of combat, a waiting period in which I could gauge the platoon’s mood.
We had lined the rigs up on the gravel next to the operations center in preparation for the morning’s mission. Today we would take the Special Forces team to an Afghan checkpoint east of FOB Shkin. We’d be in Abdul’s old neighborhood for the first time since he’d been killed.
Chris Brown, all of twenty-one, stood in the turret of my Humvee, arms peppered with shrapnel now buried within cauterized wounds. He wore a floppy booney hat and had thrown a black-and-white-checked Afghan scarf across one shoulder. Its tassels dangled on his chest. He flipped up the booney hat’s brim, revealing a tuft of brown hair on his forehead. He looked ready for a GQ photo shoot. Accessorize your ACUs on an Afghan budget.
Ayers was by the Humvee’s door, looking up at Brown as Brown regaled a small audience with some goofy tale. He had deepened his voice and put a Philly street accent into it, which made him sound like Rocky Balboa.
“So I says to the kid, I says, ‘Yo kid, yous ain’t got nothin’. Nothin’.’ ”
I walked past, shaking my head. Brown was from a middle-class Memphis family and was about as street as I was.
“Hey, Brown,” somebody interrupted.
“Yo, homey! What’s you wan’?” he replied, striking another ridiculous pose that prompted cheers from the platoon.
“ ‘Thriller’!”
He made a show of considering the request.
Sabo, who’d been by his own rig talking to Rowley, sauntered over, trying to look cool and uninterested. A few more of the men gathered while others smoked next to their trucks, attentive to the spectacle.
Brown popped out of the turret and stood on the Humvee’s back deck, his pistol snug in a holster strapped to his belt. That back deck had served as his makeshift dance platform many times in the past. He had the platoon’s full attention now.
“Check it!” he shouted. He strutted forward and onto the spare tire stowed like an old-style continental kit on the Humvee’s rear. Hands on his hips now, he thrust his pelvis, spun, and landed with catlike grace on the back deck. His
audience cheered.
Head twitch left. Claws right, claws left, two stutter steps, and then a moonwalk into a pivot turn. I wondered how many times Brown had watched that old Michael Jackson video to get the moves down so perfectly.
He slid left, head shaking, then crouched, hands on his thighs, and did a miniature version of the monster stomp laterally across the deck.
Sabo actually cracked a grin. He’d been ultraserious recently, so that was good to see. He had a Mossberg 500 shotgun strapped across his back and a pair of sunglasses on.
“Fucking whack job,” I heard him mutter.
The catcalls continued. Brown hammed it up, and I stood at the edge of the scene, content to take the platoon’s pulse. Despite everything we’d experienced these past months, the men were lighthearted and at ease. If an outsider were to stumble upon this scene without context or location, he’d never guess we were about to drive into battle.
The silliness continued until the Special Forces team showed up. The colonel greeted me, and we discussed the plan for the morning.
“Showtime,” I said.
The platoon transitioned quickly into steely combat mode. Brown strapped on his body armor and slid back into his turret. The rest of the men geared up. Within minutes, we were in full battle rattle, ready to roll, with our weapons loaded, safeties on.
The men were looking forward to the day’s mission. Though we might encounter the enemy, we’d be able to stop at FOB Shkin for a while to grab a bite to eat. Its chow hall had much better grub than ours. The thought of something other than corn flakes for breakfast appealed to me.
First, we had to drop the Special Forces guys off at the Alamo, our nickname for a remote Afghan checkpoint directly opposite the Pakistani border.
Our Humvees carried the scars of our firefights, just as our bodies did. Paint chipped, their armored skins pockmarked with bullet divots, they were the mounts of battle-hardened men.
We plunged south into the Afghan morning, once again that tiny bubble of Americans in a hostile landscape. An hour and a half later, we arrived at our destination. The Afghan troops manning the Alamo opened the front gate, and we motored past bullet-scarred walls, pitted Texas barriers, and sandbagged guard towers to park not far from the outer wall, which was composed of a single row of dilapidated Hesco bags. Just as our rigs telegraphed our status, so too did this remote and battered outpost. This place had taken a beating.
The Alamo had been the original site of FOB Shkin. It overlooked a gated border crossing directly in front of a Pakistani town called Angoor Ada. Sharp-peaked mountains dominated both sides of the town, and our Pakistani allies had deployed a company of regular army troops on their slopes, well supported with quad ZSU-4 antiaircraft machine guns positioned in concrete bunkers. They were the old Soviet-era versions of our fifty-cals and could penetrate thirty-two millimeters of hardened armor at five hundred meters.
We dismounted to stretch our legs and say good-bye to the Special Forces team. Sabo came over to me. “Check that out,” he said, looking pissed off as he pointed toward Pakistan.
Over the Hesco-bag wall, I could see Angoor Ada. It was a typical ramshackle little town with mud-walled qalats and tin-roofed structures forming a commercial district. Above downtown Angoor Ada, a Taliban flag fluttered in the midmorning breeze.
“Allies, eh?” he remarked sarcastically.
Something flared on the right-hand slope beside the town. A second later, a 107mm rocket hummed overhead. It slammed into one of the guard towers, blowing sandbags and bits of wood through the air.
“Take cover!” somebody screamed. The platoon dived behind the Hesco-bag wall just as another rocket hammered the outpost. The ground shook. The men hugged the Hesco-bag walls. A dazed Afghan soldier picked his way out of the guard tower’s wreckage. His head and shoulders were smoking. When he saw us staring at him, he gave a weak thumbs-up.
“Garrett!” I shouted to my honky gangsta mortar man.
“Sir?”
“Start hitting those launch sites.”
“Sir, them beeches might be too far.”
“Give it a go anyway. Maybe we can get them to stop firing!”
Garrett hefted his weapon and moved away from the protection of the Hesco-bag wall. He and Ferguson planted the mortar in the dirt, took careful aim, and popped a round into the tube.
Not even close. The range was too great. A third rocket streaked right over us to impact only a few dozen meters away.
“Holy shit, that was fucking close!” Garrett shouted. The shock of the near miss knocked the gangsta affectation out of his voice. I realized that it was the first time I’d heard the real Garrett.
“Fuck it, get back over here,” I called to him and Bear.
We heard another one cook off from its launch site. The red glare of its fiery engine stood stark against the morning’s blue sky. An instant later, it gouged a crater near our Humvees.
Sabo, we’ve got to move the trucks to better cover. Get ’em up against the Hesco wall.”
“Roger, sir.” Sabo turned and passed the order along. Another rocket landed, this one a little farther away than the last two. My drivers broke cover and ran to their Humvees. Yet another rocket exploded, this one less than twenty-five meters from us. As they started the trucks and moved them behind the wall, I stood up to take a look at the enemy.
They were firing at us from just below the concrete bunkers that housed the PakMil antiaircraft guns.
I moved to my truck and called Captain Dye to request indirect. “Negative, three-six,” came his answer. “That’s Pakistani territory.”
Another rocket skittered past, low and fast. Everyone molded himself against the Hesco-bag wall as it spewed shrapnel and flame across the outpost. The explosion sent peals of terror through us.
We can’t shoot back?
“Jesus Christ, these things are close,” Garrett groaned as he made himself as small as possible beside me.
We lay against the wall, chain-smoking in silence, each blast like a wrecking ball to the platoon’s spirits. Soon all that remained inside us was a sense of helplessness and cold fury. As the barrage continued, even the fury gave way to naked terror.
Rockets are mind-fuck weapons. Where they land is beyond our ability to judge, and their fall is so random as to seemingly require an act of God to kill anyone. “You buy it that way, it was your time, dude” was a common response to the attacks at Bermel.
This time was different. The bastards on the other side of the border had us cold in their sights. With their aim unhindered, they took their time and sent each rocket straight into the Alamo with deadly accuracy. Between salvos, our nerves sang like overstretched guitar strings as we waited for the sound of the next launch. When it came, the ensuing seconds reduced us to silence, begging God for it to land long. Then, even though we knew the detonation was coming, the sudden flat BOOM rolling at us always came as a shock. With rockets, even the expected blast is unexpected. You never know the exact moment it will hit, and that switch from tense expectation to reacting to it sends the nervous system into convulsions. We jumped and started so many times our bodies began to shake uncontrollably.
We huddled together as each one exploded dangerously close. A few landed less than thirty meters away. Dirt pelted us until we resembled albinos and our mouths were gritty and foul. With each blast, our sinuses burned from the stench of cordite. A metallic taste lingered on the tips of our ton
gues. We could smell our own fear—a sourness laced with panicky sweat and body odor.
Each launch made us second-guess where we had taken cover. Could this be where the next one hits? What if we took cover further down the wall? Would that be a safer spot? Our minds tormented us, unsure whether some decision we made would freakishly put us into a rocket’s path. It was a dreadful head game that left our confidence completely shattered.
During World War I, the soldiers of the western front had learned to crater jump to avoid such mind games. They’d believed that the chance of another shell impacting atop a previous hit was mathematically improbable, so once the shrapnel passed and the smoke cleared, they’d seek solace in the torn and shattered earth.
Of course, one look at the overlapping craters at places such as Verdun dispelled the reality of such suppositions. Besides, here we could not do that. The rockets didn’t leave deep enough craters, and it would have been far too dangerous to move around. All we could do was lie there, captives.
I saw the platoon change. The men’s eyes grew hollowed and wide. We’d been through dangerous encounters before, but we had always been able to fight back. That gave us something to do and occupied our minds. Our inability to act now exposed us to terror’s fullest effects.
Sabo was the only one to react differently. After a rocket exploded on the other side of our Humvees, showering the rigs with shrapnel that tinked off their armored hides, he sat up and shouted something. His eyes flared, and he flashed a maniacal grin at me, as if this was the place he had been born to be.
As I watched him, a couple of Apaches ventured out to our aid. Between rocket strikes, we could hear the bass roll of their rotors swelling as they approached. Meanwhile, the barrage did not let up.
