Outlaw Platoon

by Sean Parnell

  With the Black Hawk inbound, our Apache gunships made repeated gunnery runs. In the past, the presence of those deadly helicopters had usually caused the enemy to break contact and slip away. Not this time. From hilltop bunkers and rocky trenches, the insurgents poured accurate fire at the two birds, striking one in a fuel tank. Badly damaged, the Apache crew pulled up and out of the fight. With his wingman as his shepherd, he limped back to FOB Orgun-E.

  Ignoring the danger, the Black Hawk crew flew through a hail of enemy bullets and roared into a hover over the battlefield. Hall guided them to his position, then secured the penetrator and loaded Lieutenant Burthonette into it.

  The ANA fought in place, delivering volleys into the dug-in enemy with resolve and grit we’d never seen before. The marines had rubbed off on them at last.

  Their wounded, who were not as critically injured as the marine lieutenant, were later extracted via their Toyota pickups and taken back to Bermel.

  Meanwhile, my column reached the far side of the ridge, my gunners concentrating on the slopes to our east. The time was ripe for another countermove. My men and I quickly dismounted from our trucks and assaulted the eastern slope of the enemy ambush line. As the men bailed out of our trucks and formed up, the enemy picked that moment to break contact. Our blow struck empty trenches and abandoned machine-gun nests.

  Once again, Galang’s old command had proven themselves to be formidable warriors. Deftly, their survivors slipped away to fight again. Little did they know that we’d be coming after them like a steamroller in the days ahead.

  Thirty minutes after Lieutenant Burthonette had been flown to safety, stillness descended on the battlefield. The two platoons met back at the original jump-off point. We shared mutual hardships. Lieutenant Carnegie had been a tiger in the fight, and Second Platoon’s men had fought with tenacity and skill. Their counterassault had broken the insurgents’ grip on the ANA at a vital moment and probably saved our allies from being overrun. Though we would never be close—too much water had passed between us—a newfound respect bloomed.

  I climbed out of my truck and found Jeff Hall.

  “Goddamn, Sergeant Hall! What you did—that was fucking amazing!”

  Laconically, he replied, “Sir, don’t even think about putting me in for an award. Getting that marine out is the only award I need.”

  We later found out that Lieutenant Burthonette had survived, but just barely. Another few minutes on the battlefield, and he would have bled out and died. Jeff had not needed to join Second Platoon’s attack. He had waded into the fray even after losing two of his men earlier during our run-and-gun through the kill zone. I never put him in for an award, a lasting and profound regret. But in my book, Jeff Hall’s selfless devotion to a fellow American, a man he didn’t even know, exemplified the best of what had held Outlaw Platoon together against all the forces that threatened to tear us apart.

  Twenty-seven

  The Last Last Stand

  For five days, we pushed the enemy east toward the Pakistani border. They fought us ridge by ridge with the ferocity of a caged animal. We couldn’t understand why this was the case. After every other engagement, they had retreated to their safe havens to resupply and absorb new, fresh-eyed jihadists to fill in for all the ones we’d killed. This time, they didn’t quit. They stood toe-to-toe, displaying all the grit that we had demonstrated throughout the year.

  They were slaughtered by the firepower Lieutenant Colonel Toner brought to the fight. During the day, we pounded them with artillery, A-10s, Apaches, and our own heavy weapons. We dismounted and assaulted hilltops and ridgelines and cleared long-abandoned qalats. We found their dead. We found their weapons caches and casualty clearance stations. Once again, most of their medical supplies came straight from Pakistani hospitals.

  At night, we’d halt to establish a perimeter and await the arrival of our AC-130. Ten thousand feet overhead, it orbited for hours, zapping bad guys with miniguns, forty millimeters, and a 105mm cannon. It was a scourge in the sky, equipped with technology so significant the enemy simply could not hide. They moved, they died. Darkness gave them no respite.

  Lieutenant Colonel Toner decided to mess with our enemy’s minds. He brought forward a psychological operations truck, whose crew insulted the insurgents in multiple languages through a loudspeaker system.

  “Women! Come out and fight!”

  Such insults would inevitably trigger a response to us via radio: “American pigs! You will die like dogs!”

  That would be enough for us to smother the foolish insurgent with artillery fire after we triangulated his position.

  We kept up the pressure. As the enemy’s men fell wounded, they would send trucks to carry them across the border to Pakistani hospitals. We wanted to target them. The A-10s’ drivers would have loved to blow them to pieces with their 30mm Avengers. But we could not absolutely confirm that they were hostile, so by the rules of engagement we had to let them be.

  On the final day, we seized the high ground overlooking the frontier. The remaining enemy holdouts chose to make their last stand here, between us and a Pakistan Army border checkpoint. They marshaled their remaining weapons and had emplaced their machine guns with their usual tactical cunning.

  We’d been under fire for almost a week. Filthy, reeking of gunpowder and body odor, constipated by the MREs, we’d spent Operation Catamount Blitz sleeping in our rigs between skirmishes. Now came the climactic moment. We’d spent all year making last stands against their furious assaults. Here the roles were reversed, and they would die in place.

  They went out hard. Machine guns laced our battered Humvees. They had a few RPGs left and sent those our way as well. I dismounted onto the ridge and lay prone, watching their muzzle flashes dancing across the valley floor.

  Chris Cowan suddenly dismounted from his truck. Casually, he strolled toward me. Tracers zipped like lasers just over his head. The bullets snipped branches from the nearby conifer trees. He walked on as limbs and needles fell around him. Once he stopped and carefully brushed some needles off his ACUs.

  He reached my door and looked down at me. “Hey, sir.”

  “Chris, are you fucking crazy?” I shouted over the battle’s din. “At least take a knee!”

  He acted unconcerned. “Oh, yeah. We’re being shot at.”

  He dropped down as I sat up. We met halfway.

  “Sir, just wanna make sure you see those machine-gun nests over there.” He pointed at a couple of muzzle flashes.

  “You walked all the way over here to tell me that?”

  “Well, yeah,” he said, almost embarrassed.

  Together we lay down in the Afghan moondust and watched the battle unfold. The enemy was down to about fifty men dug in around an abandoned village that, according to our intel, had served as a training area for them.

  At length Chris grew angry. “You know, sir, I don’t get why those PakMil bastards don’t just unload into their backs. They’re supposed to be on our side, right?”

  “Not after their peace summit.”

  “Fuckers.”

  Our forward air controllers called in a final series of air strikes. The A-10 pilots were unleashed to do what they do best. With JDAMs and 30mm strafing runs, the Warthogs pulverized the enemy. When it was over, there was no need to assault their last stand. Not an insurgent remained upright.

  Captain Dye and Lieutenant Colonel Toner walked to our ridge. They’d been working the radios with the forward air controllers and now gazed down into the smoke-shrouded valley. The last A-10 swept past, its chain gun throwing lead in one final act of overkill.

  As it pulled up and raced skyward, Dye and Toner erupted in cheers. Soon, all along our line the men
joined in. Victory cures all pain.

  When Catamount Blitz ended, the battalion had killed a hundred and sixty men, including the leader who had replaced Galang. This branch of the Haqqani Network had been totally destroyed.

  Or so we thought. Not a week after Catamount Blitz, the enemy crept back across the border to rocket FOB Bermel again. We had to sweep the frontier a second time. Not able to use the Humvees for this, Outlaw Platoon climbed over countless ridges on foot, our bodies aching under the weight of our gear and armor.

  I was up front with a fire team from Third Squad and had Khanh Nguyen on one shoulder and Sergeant Keith Lewis (no relation to PFC Lewis, who had been wounded on June 10) on the other. Khanh was telling me about how his father had survived his years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam when I spotted something yellowish lying in the dirt halfway up a small rise. I bent down and examined my find. It was a footlong length of rubber-sheathed wiring. This was out of place, and I immediately held my fist up as a signal to halt the entire platoon.

  Khanh dropped to a knee beside me, his M4 and its M203 grenade launcher pointed toward the top of the rise.

  “Whatzit, sir?” he asked in a whisper. Khanh spoke broken English at best. He mixed up his tenses and never got plural forms right, but we’d long since come to understand him perfectly, though men from outside the unit usually could not.

  “Hold on. I’ll be right back,” I said.

  I moved quietly to each squad and explained what I’d found. We’d move forward, expecting contact now.

  Lewis and Khanh led the way when I gave the order to advance. The trail had just gone hot.

  We reached the top of the rise and ran straight into the enemy. A complete Soviet 107mm rocket-launching system sat tucked away in a firing pit at the bottom of the reverse slope, shielded by another ridgeline opposite us.

  We appeared just as three insurgents were trying to carry a dead comrade away from the pit. When they saw us, they dropped the body and reached for their weapons. Both sides opened fire simultaneously, but the shock at this sudden close encounter caused everyone to shoot wildly. Both sides sprayed bullets in one spasmodic moment. Despite the fact that we were less than twenty meters away from each other, nobody was hit.

  Khanh went wild, screaming Vietnamese epithets like a berserker as he pumped rounds at the enemy. They broke and ran, firing over their shoulders as they sought cover over the next ridge. Khanh triggered a 203 round after them, but it went wide.

  Suddenly Khanh rushed forward after the rocket team. It was as if all our hatred for these psychologically devastating weapons vested our Vietnamese warrior with maniacal fury and singular purpose: kill these men who had tormented us for months. Firing 203 rounds as he ran, reloading on the fly, he reached the rocket pit and banzai-charged up the far slope.

  Before I could stop him, Sergeant Lewis burst forward after Khanh. Soon the entire platoon was energized, and the men poured over the rise. But Khanh and Lewis sprinted far ahead, trying to gain ground on the fleeing enemy.

  They went over the far ridge and disappeared. When I got to the top, I saw them halfway down, blasting away at the enemy. Finally Khanh winged one of the insurgents with a well-placed 203 round. It exploded next to him and blew him off his feet. As he struggled to stand back up, still hefting his AK, Lewis drilled him. He flopped into the dirt. Before we could reach him, his comrade dragged him over the crest of his hill, where both disappeared.

  The other two got away, but that didn’t stop the platoon from celebrating. Khanh bellowed an outsized victory cry. Lewis yelled obscenities. The rest of the platoon high-fived each other. We needed this moment. After all the frustration, it felt glorious to watch the enemy flee or die.

  The chase and the kill had been cathartic, payback for months of helpless moments on our base as rockets exploded around us. After that mission, the attacks diminished. We had succeeded at last in securing our base from attack. It had taken ten months too long.

  After Thanksgiving, a lull descended on the border. With the snow piling up in the mountains, we began to think the enemy had packed it in for the winter. Fine with us. We had less than sixty days before we were supposed to head home, and as far as we were concerned, Cat Blitz had put us over the top. We were ready for a boring stretch, then a flight home to our families. They had never seemed closer or farther away from us than that Christmas season.

  Lieutenant Colonel Toner had other plans for us. Instead of coasting through the final weeks of the deployment, he kept the battalion operating at full speed. Our entire strategy in Afghanistan was in the process of a significant transformation, based on the counterinsurgency model developed in Iraq. We started constructing remote combat outposts all across the frontier that were designed to collocate U.S. troops with the local populace. Each outpost would be defended by a platoon or two.

  The new strategy spread us thin. Our ability to patrol diminished as each platoon had to take a turn manning our new outpost at Margah, about forty miles north of FOB Bermel. In early December, our engineers drove down there to start work on the place. Captain Dye ordered them to build it across from the Margah bazaar, in keeping with the intent of our new strategy. I protested to him that the location was too vulnerable. It sat between two gigantic mountains, one called Tur Gundy and the other Khowt Gundy. Two wadi systems wound their way along the north and south ends of the proposed perimeter, less than fifty meters from where the walls would be constructed. An enemy force could mask its approach on the outpost by closing on it from behind the mountains, then slip into the wadis to close undetected to point-blank range. They’d be at our walls before we could really even fight.

  Captain Dye understood where I was coming from but overruled me. The engineers went to work. In late December, while the outpost was only half completed, the enemy attacked the engineers and Second Platoon with a station wagon loaded with four hundred pounds of ammonium nitrate. Second Platoon smelled the attack coming and lit the vehicle up, and it exploded prematurely. Had Second Platoon not reacted so quickly, the suicide bomber might have inflicted catastrophic casualties. As it was, the effects were bad enough. Lieutenant Carnegie’s radioman was seriously wounded, as was his gunner. Carnegie himself was blown clear of his Humvee.

  As Second Platoon evacuated its wounded, Captain Dye sent us down to take over the outpost’s defense. We joined up with Lieutenant Carnegie, whose men had done a phenomenal job. They handed the Margah outpost over to us and returned to Bermel to refit. The next morning, without telling Lieutenant Colonel Toner, the engineers left unexpectedly. They had not even finished constructing the walls yet, and as they loaded up to bug out, we tried to stop them to no avail. They abandoned us in a poorly sited outpost without even the basics of force protection completed.

  Five Humvees, less than thirty men—that’s what we had to hold the Margah Combat Outpost. We had two weeks left before we were scheduled to go home. This was our last cycle out beyond the wire, and, given the tactical circumstances, all of us were jittery.

  Wheat and Wallace did their best to lighten the tension we felt. They built a wooden bull from pieces of scrap lumber they found lying around, then spent hours trying to lasso it from different angles. The men watched and cheered them on. But the levity was forced.

  Small wonder. Looking around at the half-filled Hesco bags that formed what walls we did have, I could not help but think of Rorke’s Drift, the tiny British outpost struck by thousands of Zulus in 1879. We were hung out on a limb, and I knew that if the enemy came at us from across the border, it would be our last last stand.

  That’s exactly what they planned to do. Since Cat Blitz, the Haqqani Network had rebuilt its local forces from the safety of its Pakistan bases. Bringing in Al Qaida–supported foreign fighters and others, they put together a force of more than two hundred and fifty men. Shortly after we reached Margah, they passed through the PakMil checkpoint at the border and infiltra
ted to staging bases east and northeast of our outpost.

  In doing so, they passed through the Village of the Damned. The elder held his blind and traumatized grandson until the Haqqani fighters left the area. Then he packed some meager provisions and limped on aged legs down his hilltop to the road where we had first discovered his grandson, lost and keening with fear.

  The elder walked for days, his feet blistering, his old man’s bones protesting every step. Finally, long after dark on January 10, 2007, he reached his destination: FOB Bermel’s front gate. Taken inside, he was brought to Captain Dye. The elder told him that he had at least two hundred insurgents pass his village, bound on attacking the new base at Margah.

  We had saved his grandson in July and given his people all of our medical supplies. Those gestures had formed a bond between us and this old man. It had compelled him to cross more than forty miles of mountainous countryside to try to save us.

  He was not a moment too soon.

  At 0230 that morning, I was sitting in my Humvee next to Rowley, bored to tears and strongly considering taking a nap. We had spread our five rigs around the outpost’s perimeter. Mine was on the west side.

  The radio crackled. “Three-six, this is six.”

  “Go ahead, six.”

  “There are two hundred plus men coming to attack you.”

  The news failed to register.

  “Uhh.” I looked at Rowley, who was driving, “Roger?”

  Greeson appeared at my door. “Did you hear this shit?”

  “Yeah.”

  Greeson shook his head. “Son of a bitch.”

  I thought of the open walls on the east and west sides. I thought of the wadis to the north and south. One rush, and they’d soon be climbing over the half-filled Hesco bags.

  Two hundred men or more? We had twenty-five.

  Our tactical position could not have been worse.

  Second Platoon was hours away. So was Delta. We’d get no reinforcements anytime soon.