Outlaw Platoon

by Sean Parnell

  In anticipation of my homecoming, my father had found me an apartment in Watertown, New York. My family had been driving up from Pittsburgh to get all my stuff moved in so that I would have a place of my own as soon as my boots touched American soil.

  I wondered if I’d ever see that beautiful gesture.

  Greeson said, “Sir, I’ll work on improving the perimeter. You work the radio.”

  I nodded dully.

  Two weeks left. Two weeks.

  Captain Dye checked in. “Three-six, we’re working to get you indirect, and I’m sending Delta platoon your way now.”

  “Roger, six.” Dye always had our back. Tonight we’d need everything he could dredge up for us. Delta Platoon and a battery of 105s would not be enough.

  I radioed the platoon and gave them the news. Nobody had any illusions of our chances.

  “Three-six, we’ve got a drone overhead. We’re uploading the enemy’s location to the Blue Force Tracker now.”

  “Roger.”

  Each platoon leader’s Humvee came equipped with a computer system connected via satellite to a military network. Every friendly vehicle in theater was displayed on a monitor. Click on an icon, and the unit’s identity would pop up. Scroll around the map, and even a junior lieutenant could see what every U.S. unit was doing at that moment.

  We could also track enemy movements with the system. Now, as the information was uploaded from our battalion operations center, two red blips popped up about four kilometers away from our outpost. One force, about a hundred and fifty strong, was closing in to the east behind Tur Gundy. Another hundred men lurked to the north, using Khowt Gundy to conceal their movement.

  Without the village elder’s warning, we would never have seen them coming until it was too late.

  “Three-six, this is six.”

  “Go ahead, six.”

  “We’ve got 105s ready. Cat six is working air.”

  “Roger.”

  Greeson and the men worked to do what little we could to improve our defensive perimeter. He used two of our Humvees to plug the gaps in the east and west walls. That would at least slow them down for a little while. Two of our other trucks were stationed atop dirt ramps behind the north and south walls constructed by the engineers so that our gunners could fire over the Hesco-bag wall. Since we had no guard towers yet, the Humvees served in their place.

  I checked the Blue Force Tracker. The two enemy forces were closing fast now and were less than three kilometers out.

  “Three-six, this is six.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We’re gonna bring in A-10s for you. Working on more.”

  “Roger.”

  Greeson positioned our mortar team. Garrett and Bear made sure they had plenty of ammunition at hand, including illumination rounds. When the enemy got to the wadi system, we would dump everything we had on them to slow their advance.

  The Blue Force Tracker updated itself automatically every few minutes. When the screen refreshed, the enemy force was only two kilometers out.

  “Three-six, this is six.”

  Please give me more good news.

  “Okay, we’ve got two Apaches on standby for you at Orgun-E. A Predator’s on its way.”

  “Roger.”

  “You’ll have an AC-130 overhead any minute.”

  “This is sounding good, six.”

  “And a B-1.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Toner has scored us a strategic bomber?

  I radioed my trucks. “Okay, they’re two clicks out, about a click from getting to the wadi systems. Battalion’s stacking up air for us. We won’t be alone. You know what to do. Lay the hurt on ’em, guys.”

  Around our makeshift perimeter, my gunners charged their guns and dropped their night-vision goggles down over their eyes. Our dismounts spread out along the walls, weapons leveled over the Hesco bags.

  At battalion headquarters, Lieutenant Colonel Toner and the staff worked feverishly to pull assets from all over Afghanistan for us. As the aerial armada raced the enemy to Margah, the staff rehearsed exactly how Lieutenant Colonel Toner wanted this to go down. Three times they talked through the plan. The aircraft reached our area as they finished the third run-through. Battalion put them in orbit overhead, where they waited for the call to strike.

  Our Prophet spooks reported the enemy’s radio chatter. Their northern force leader checked in: “We’re here.”

  They must have reached their objective rally point. This was their last stop before launching their attack on us.

  Their new enemy commander replied, “Hold there, and tell your men to take a knee.”

  I checked the Blue Force Tracker. The enemy pincers had stopped about a kilometer and a half away.

  Galang’s replacement gave his men final instructions: “When you overrun the Americans, cut their heads off and mount them on stakes. Good luck, and I’ll see you on the objective.”

  Lieutenant Colonel Toner ordered, “Hit them now.”

  The satellite-guided bombs, dropped from the strategic bomber, struck first. Before the smoke had even cleared, the A-10s rolled in and unleashed all their fearsome firepower. The Predator launched its Hellfires, and the Apache batted clean up.

  Around us, the night sky was rent asunder. We watched in awe as bombs burst, tracers flared, and rockets sizzled. When the AC-130 opened up, its battery of weapons only rearranged the bodies.

  The strafing runs continued. Nothing that moved survived. Not a single enemy fighter got within a mile of Combat Outpost Margah that night. We stood on our makeshift ramparts and cheered wildly with every blast. Perhaps some of the men were celebrating the destruction of our enemy. I screamed for joy at our survival.

  At dawn, we ventured out to conduct a “sensitive site exploitation.” This was army-speak for policing up weapons, documents, and any other intelligence we could glean from the night’s holocaust of fire, lead, and steel.

  To the east, we found the blackened ground carpeted with human remains. We dismounted and picked our way through hundreds of meters of arms and legs, ragged half torsos, severed heads with flat-brimmed hats still covering blood-encrusted hair. The stench of death hung in the air. In places, patches of snow that had somehow survived the night had been stained red. In others, small fires still burned and sent palls of grayish smoke wisping across the battlefield.

  Broken trees littered the landscape, their barren limbs decorated with ghastly pieces of human beings. From one, a web of intestines dangled from the branches, dripping gore onto the snow below.

  We’d seen death’s many faces before this morning. We’d grown hard carrying the dead enemy to our Humvees and dumping them at the local mosques. But even for the most cynical and steeled among us, this charnel house had an effect. Nobody who walks among such things is ever the same again.

  We focused on our job. The AKs and machine guns we gathered looked brand new. We stacked them in our rigs alongside RPG launchers that looked factory fresh. The boots scattered about were of better quality than ours. The enemy carried sophisticated radios and military-issue compasses. On dismembered legs we saw kneepads. Torn clothing—the remains of desert camouflage uniforms—fluttered in the morning breeze.

  Farther east, we began to encounter more intact corpses. To our astonishment, they wore body armor. Some even had World War I–style helmets still strapped to their heads.

  Suppressing our horror was no easy task that morning. But we had to do the job right. At each corpse, the men cleared it for booby traps or unexploded ordnance. They found hand grenades and hundreds of AK magazines. In the pockets of the dead were documents—visas, passports, and notebooks that we knew would be of value. And then we made a startling discovery. Some of these enemy fighters were not Haqqani or Al Qaida at all.

  They were Pakistan Army Frontier Corps soldiers, Pakistan’s ragtag borde
r militia. We found their identity cards.

  In the spring, we had discovered how Pakistan was allowing our enemy to use its sovereign territory as a rest and refit area. The Haqqani Network trained in Pakistan and received logistical and medical support from our ally’s hospitals.

  In the summer, at the Alamo, we had watched helplessly as our enemy used the Pakistan Army troops stationed along the border as willing human shields to prevent us from launching counterbattery fires.

  In September, the president of Pakistan had made peace with Taliban representatives, freeing our enemy to throw their full weight against us.

  In December, we had been sent out north of the Alamo to escort an Afghan infantry company as it conducted a site survey for a proposed border fence. The Pakistani troops on the slopes overlooking Angoor Ada opened fire on the ANA and pinned them down with those ZSU-4 quad machine guns. Afraid we would fire back and create an even more serious international incident, my platoon was ordered to fall back to FOB Shkin while a Special Forces unit sortied out to rescue the ANA. Greeson and I thought that for sure the episode would become headline news around the globe. We feared that it would spark an open war between the United States and Pakistan. But the incident was never reported.

  Now, in January, miles inside Afghanistan, we had discovered that Pakistani Frontier Corps troops had launched a joint offensive with Al Qaida and Haqqani Network fighters against a U.S. combat outpost.

  We bundled up the evidence and stowed it in our rigs. Later, it was rumored that the documents found their way out of theater to the secretary of defense, who dropped them on President Musharraf’s desk in Islamabad. We never found out if that was true or not, but I’d like to think it was. Somebody needed to call the Pakistanis on what they were doing to us.

  The weapons we collected were later examined by a civilian intelligence team, who matched their serial numbers to recent production runs from Iranian factories.

  The Sony DVD Handycam was one of the last things we found while rifling through the pockets of the enemy dead. We carried it back to FOB Bermel that day and watched its disc on a laptop computer in the company’s operations center.

  I stood behind Greeson, Cowan, Sabo, and the rest of our platoon, watching the footage we’d captured.

  It started with a rousing recruitment speech delivered in a Pakistani border town. Jihadist orators urged the crowd of hundreds of men to join the fight against America. By the time they finished, the enraptured crowd began to dance and sing.

  The next scene showed a training range, also in Pakistan. The Haqqani fighters were practicing short-range marksmanship, a necessary skill for urban fighting. In other scenes, teams of jihadists practiced evading simulated gunfire.

  When the training scenes ended, the screen went black for a moment. At first I thought that was the end of the DVD, and I almost turned away. I wish I had.

  The next scene showed an Afghan Border Police checkpoint in the aftermath of a night assault. The enemy had overrun the ABP. Bodies lay in heaps, illuminated by flashlights.

  Then the cameraman stepped in front of a screaming captive. Somebody shone a spear of light on him as he lay on his stomach, facedown, his arms and legs held by masked men. Somebody else straddled his back, reached around and lifted his head by his chin.

  The terrified face was that of a teenager. He wore a 1990 Chicago Bulls Championship cap.

  Pinholt exhaled sharply. “That’s the ABP who met us at the gate at Bandar last February,” he said softly.

  The man on the boy’s back drew a knife from a sheath on his belt. He showed the eight-inch blade to the camera, then slid it under the boy’s chin. The teenage boy screamed hysterically as the knife sank into his flesh.

  It wasn’t sharp. It wasn’t quick. I could not watch the end. I’d seen too much already.

  Without us there to protect them, the Afghan police of Bandar checkpoint had been overrun. I wondered how the enemy had done it. Had the garrison been betrayed from within? Or had the men been so demoralized and poorly equipped that even their remarkable hilltop redoubt could not save them from defeat?

  Was Major Ghul out in that darkness, dead among his men? I doubted it. A man like him who played both sides was a survivor. Our shortage of troops had forced us to put Bandar at the bottom of our priority list as we faced the enemy’s spring offensive. That teenage kid in his Bulls cap had paid the ultimate price for our weakness.

  The sounds of his dying moments lingered in my ears as I left the operations center. Without Lieutenant Colonel Toner and an honor-bound old man, that would have been our fate.

  Twenty-eight

  Homeward Bound

  FOB Bermel

  January 20, 2007

  Outlaw Platoon’s final moments together ticked down as we waited for the Chinooks to come and start our journey home. The men sat on the Hesco-bag wall skirting the helicopter landing zone, smoking and joking again at last. The pressure was off. We were going home. Finally it was okay to have hope. Excitedly, we spoke of beer and steaks, of sex and taverns and leaves planned with eager families. Photos of children and wives and girlfriends appeared and were passed around. The men took photos and hammed it up for rolling video cameras.

  Greeson and I watched the scene, light of heart yet sensing an underlying sadness. Despite all that we had endured—or perhaps because of it—we had become a family. Greeson was our father figure, Pantoja our selfless nurturer. Sabo was the crazy uncle who made every family event an adventure. Wheat and Wallace were our cowboy twins. Cowan was the hardass who kept things running, Hall the favored son whom everyone admired. Rowley was our smart-ass prankster; Brown was the platoon comedian. And of course there was Pinholt, the family’s rising star, whose future would be limited only by the goals he established for himself.

  Our strength lay in our diversity. In that regard, Outlaw Platoon was a mirror image of the society we had sworn to protect. Harnessing the power of our differences and talents kept us alive. It made me understand my country a little bit more. With men like these, no wonder we’d become the greatest nation of our age.

  The absent faces weighed on me in that moment. Cole had been inspirational to us. Instead of remaining content in his noncombat role, he pushed himself to the limit to make his way back into our ranks. When he hadn’t been able to roll with us, he did everything he could to lighten our load and contribute—on top of his duties at Bermel. That work ethic, that determination to stay part of the family evoked admiration and love from the rest of us. In death, his loss welded us even closer together through our shared grief.

  And Baldwin—where was he? We’d heard nothing from him since he’d been flown out of theater. He was the big brother everyone missed. His loss had left a void in our group that had never been filled.

  Then there was me. I was the ultimate authority within the platoon. I just tried not to use it. I’d learned that the strongest thing a leader can do once his men entrust power to him is put it back into their hands. I’d spent the year watching them run with that authority and do amazing things with the freedom it gave them. We were creative, flexible, and light on our feet out there. Serving the men of Outlaw Platoon was the greatest honor of my life.

  Greeson sensed the pride I was feeling. He leaned into my ear and whispered in his deepest Sling Blade voice, “You’re a good dude, sir. Helluva job.”

  I couldn’t turn to look at him just then. I knew if I had, I would have lost my composure.

  Who was I that day? I was a man who bore witness to greatness. A leader and servant of heroes. Being a part of the platoon validated my life.

  Looking around, I could see the physical scars of the deployment on our men. Pantoja’s face still bore the white-and-red weal from the bullet he’d taken on June 10 while saving Bennett Garvin’s life. Saint Jean had refused to be evacuated from Bagram after he’d been shot in the head. He’d come back to us two day
s later, his head bandaged like a mummy’s. He’d patrolled that way with us for weeks. Chris Brown, Bray, McCleod, Campbell, and Howard—and how many others carried shrapnel souvenirs within their bodies? In the years to come, how many times would their bodies set off airport metal detectors? My men had been cut and torn; six of them had been shot in the head. A handful of us had suffered traumatic brain injuries whose insidious symptoms had plagued us through the rest of the deployment. How many would feel the effects of this time in their lives through those wounds? Almost all of us.

  The thunder of incoming Chinooks swelled in the distance.

  The sound of our freedom.

  The men grew silent, realizing that soon our union would be broken apart. The bond would always exist, nested permanently within us, but the lives that awaited us on the other side of the globe would take us ever farther from this brotherhood.

  The hugging began. Promises to stay in touch were made. E-mail addresses were scrawled on slips of paper.

  The birds landed.

  One by one, the men filed past Greeson and me to say their good-byes. Perhaps more words would have been shared among men less acquainted with one another. Not so with us. We knew one another so intimately that words were superfluous. We hugged and shook hands and locked eyes one final time. Never before and never since have I shared so much in near-total silence.

  We had done it. Survival was our destiny, home our destination. After a year of stripping ourselves of hope, we could now relax into the anticipation of our loved ones’ arms.

  The men threw their arms around one another’s shoulders and walked to the waiting Chinook. Pinholt paused on the ramp and waved to Greeson and me one last time. We leaned on the Hesco bags and waved back, knowing that the defining period of our lives had come to a blessed end.

  When the Chinooks lifted off and bathed us in dirt, I felt more alone than at any other moment in my life.

  Greeson and I didn’t board the bird with the men that afternoon because we’d been ordered to stay behind for a bit to help acclimate our replacement unit, an element of the 82nd Airborne Division, to the Bermel area. We were to take them out on patrols and show them the ropes, teach them about the villagers and the enemy. Then, after a couple of weeks, we would be stateside too.