“It was kind of like really quick and to the point. On that last shot when I saw him go down, I double-checked to make sure he wasn’t moving. I was still thinking, ‘Why is that guy by himself?’ So I was worried about a larger pocket of guys in the rocks,” Crowder said.
As he would learn in the coming days, in Afghanistan there are lone fighters in remote positions as well as pockets of guys. The platoon was ready to move out, and there was no chance to answer Carracino’s hunch that Crowder had been up to something while Carracino was busy checking maps and other gear.
“About four or five hours later, Jason’s like, ‘Hey, man, did you shoot a guy down there?’ and I’m like ‘yeah’ and he’s like, ‘I saw you shooting and I thought I saw a guy down there and then I saw him fall,’” Crowder recounted. “I guess he only saw the third shot.”
The rifle platoon started its move toward higher ground, and the Crowder-Carracino sniper team hung back about one hundred meters from the rest of the platoon to make sure no one closed with them. Their plan to branch off was fragged by the intensity of the contact they were all taking, and they decided to stick with the rifle platoon so they could mutually support one another. The men trekked and walked and climbed through low ground and dead space, through wadis and rocks and boulders on the way up from the LZ to the blocking position known as “Diane.”
The snipers’ planned mission was to stop fighters fleeing the Marzak Camp toward the Pakistan border and to block reinforcements or anyone who was able to get past the rifle platoon from heading to the mountain pass behind the blocking position and higher ground directly above.
The platoon would be the snipers’ contingency security plan, the nearest friendly unit. They had expected to operate alone and stay for twenty-four to forty-eight hours. But they stayed with the rifle platoon for thirty-six hours, and ten days would go by before the battalion picked them up.
As the hours wore on, the platoon moved through Taliban country, the soldiers learning that they would have to adapt quickly and anticipate the enemy’s movements if they were to survive the assaults of well-entrenched fighters, whose positions had been stationary for decades and who were as much a part of the landscape as the centuries-old rock formations.
“Their positions are so well built, they’re not moving around as much or doing a lot of dumb things to let themselves get caught,” Crowder said.
He was amused by their crazy fashion choices, a hodgepodge of ancient biblical-style man jammies layered with modern-day cold-weather gear and high-performance designer labels like North Face.
And he was impressed with the unexpected accuracy of their fires. The enemy had only to wait for the Americans to make a move before striking from their well-hidden big machine guns, mortars, and howitzers recessed into the sides of rock face. Wherever the Americans moved, Crowder said, they’d invariably get potshotted by the invisible Taliban.
“We used to find stacks of rocks. One day I pace-counted it. It was roughly one hundred meters from one stack to the next, all the same height and stacked in similar fashion. They weren’t painted or anything. They probably had some guy with binos or optics watching, and that’s how they figured out their range,” he said.
Crowder said he and the platoon found a few positions where bedrock was chiseled in the shape of a base plate or mortar system so that when the enemy took a shot, they would be on target with the first round. “They don’t have to set it at all, because it’s in rock, not dirt,” Crowder said.
Thirsty Platoon Sergeant
The lessons of exposing themselves to the enemy were made startlingly clear early on, when a senior noncommissioned officer (NCO), apparently thirsty and not just a little bit complacent, took off his body armor and helmet during the platoon’s first full day in the mountain.
Perhaps thinking he was at his favorite fishing hole back home, he casually approached a stream of water and within seconds he was nearly shredded by a DShK machine gunner.
“I can’t for the life of me figure out why he did that. At this point we had been mortared and gazed quite a few times from the time we reached the blocking position, and the next morning when we came down and reached this position is where this happened,” Crowder said. “We would hear rounds for a few minutes, and then you get hit by a few more just on top of each other.”
Members of the platoon were on the inside wall of a wadi running east to west. The banks were about seven feet high, and the wadi was about one hundred meters wide. It was a giant riverbed, but only about a three-foot trickle of water ran down the center because the winter snow hadn’t melted.
Crowder saw the platoon sergeant approach the water and admonished him against taking such a chance. He knew there was a hilltop just to the west of their position known as “the well” that was home to a couple DShKs (pronounced dish-kah), large-caliber Russian machine guns that could cut a man in half. As the sergeant bent over to scoop up some water in a cupped hand, Crowder said, he could hear the sound of those guns in the distance.
“Boom!Boom!Boom!Boom!Boom! and then I counted one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, and these bullets are coming in all around his feet, hitting the sides of the wadi, he’s dancing around and comes running back,” Crowder said. “They’re all laughing, and then the sergeant told everyone to get their stuff on,” but no one else had taken their equipment off because they were about to head out to the LZ to move to a new position.
As if to punctuate the display of terrain dominance, the enemy let fly a new barrage of heavy metal onto the platoon. While the troops were moving out, a mortar sailed in and hit the exact position where they had been sitting. That was followed by the “pop” of a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG), and a young corporal who was standing about fifty feet from Crowder got lucky.
“It hit right at his feet and blew his chest plate out the top of his plate carrier, shredded his magazines. He took shrapnel in his armpit, on the back of his legs and his butt and knocked him a few feet in the air,” Crowder said. “The RPG was a dud.”
A Ridgeline Shooter and Reading the Wind
Another early lesson for Crowder and Carracino was the difficulty of reading Afghanistan’s wind at high altitude, a formidable foe that snaps and blows erratically. Short of channeling Aeolus, the mythological ruler of winds, they drew on their training and instincts to get the shot they wanted.
“The wind is insane between fifteen and twenty miles per hour, and it’s crazy, too,” Crowder said, describing the conditions on their first day at the blocking position. “The wind will come off the ridge, come down, come back up, hit you in the face. A lot of guys make the mistake of misreading that kind of wind because it’s hitting them in the face and they’re thinking it’s coming straight at them. It’s your basic stuff you learn.”
Instead of branching off immediately from the platoon as planned, Crowder and Carracino agreed to stay a little longer to help the rifle platoon retain the advantage a two-man sniper team represents—and the benefit of their enhanced optics and weapons.
Crowder and Carracino also knew that minimizing their movement and exposure to enemy eyes after the heavy contact they had seen at the LZ would be smarter than launching on plan—and they could rest and eat. They would help the platoon pull some long-range observation of the vast landscape before them.
They didn’t wait long for action. It started day one. A team of 240B machine gunners in a position above the platoon’s outpost was receiving shots, inaccurate shots, every few minutes from a gunman somewhere on an adjacent ridgeline. The blowing wind likely kept him from succeeding, but it didn’t stop him from trying.
“The way the terrain was, on the other side of the ridge was Khost and then on the other side was the Pakistan border. That ridge looked to be about six hundred meters away, and the top of the ridge looked about nine hundred meters,” Crowder recalled.
But he knew distances could be de
ceiving. Because it all looked so enormous and prominent, he said, “everything looked closer than it really is, plus there was snow and the light reflected on it makes it seem even closer.”
The machine gunners fired back across the ridge, but it did nothing to deter the shooter on the other side. At the request of the rifle platoon sergeant, Crowder and Carracino hiked up to a position near the machine gunners. Carracino set up his rifle, and Crowder positioned his scope. They told the gunners to stay back.
The snipers lay side by side, Crowder reading the wind, Carracino relaxing and getting his body position nestled comfortably into the earth. They scanned the ridge for about an hour, looking for all the possible nooks, ledges, cracks, and gaps where a shooter might hide and giving themselves a chance to get used to the wind.
“There was snow, places where snow had melted, there were spruce pines. I wondered where I’d be, what I’d be doing if the shoe were on the other foot. I wouldn’t be on the ridgeline because behind it is a big blue sky to show everybody where you’re at. I’d probably be a couple hundred meters below the ridgeline shooting down at us at a slight angle,” Crowder remembered.
After scanning for at least another hour, the team saw no movement and figured the gunman had retreated. Then “Zip!” a shot whizzed past about five feet overhead. The enemy had refocused his sights on the American sniper team and came damn close, but Crowder was faster. With that one shot, he saw a quick muzzle flash, even though the sun was out, and adjusted his scope to as close to the spot as he could.
“I still wasn’t exactly on top of the guy, I figured a little fifty-meter area, yeah he’s right here,” Crowder said, explaining how he adjusted the magnification on his scope to bring in everything from the area. After a short while he “saw the outline of the guy from the high chest to the top of the head and what looked like a stick out off to an angle. I kept Jason vectored in between a few boulders.”
He focused a little more, “just like we do in training,” and identified the stick as a rifle. He saw rocks piled up like sandbags. Carracino quietly said to Crowder that the shooter was at twelve o’clock, directly in front of them about fifty meters up, and said he had seen the flash and was on him.
In one of the only Hollywood moments of the mid-afternoon duel, the sun came across the ridgeline and exposed the shooter. Carracino waited for Crowder’s last call to shoot. And now it was between Crowder and the wind, which was constant but with wildly varying speeds. He knew it would be hard to nail it, and they didn’t want to miss.
“I asked the 240 guys to give me a three-round burst so I could see the behavior of the tracer. That wind took it for a ride. I told Jason to shoot when the wind was at its lowest so when I say ‘go,’ we need to go,” Crowder said.
He figured out the range and had the scope dialed right around 750 at elevation. He said he didn’t dial in for wind, but used scope hold off, a method of compensating for wind.
There are two methods of adjusting for windage and elevation. The first method is to estimate the range and the effect the wind will have on a bullet, then adjust the reticle by dialing the scope. This allows the shooter to aim directly at the target.
The second way to do it is to use the reticle’s features, such as mil dots, to adjust the point of aim. This method is known as scope hold off.
“You use your crosshair to judge and the wind was coming from left to right at a constant so we’re going to shoot to the left side, a heavy left.”
So they waited a bit, saw the guy move slightly every once in a while as if to adjust his own position.
“Jason has no optics, and once the wind slowed down a bit, I told him to shoot immediately. . . . Then I was going to say ‘fire’ but he shot, which was good, he was right on the guy. It was three inches off his left shoulder. I said, ‘Standby.’ He did exactly what he was supposed to, he shot, breathed out, re-cycled the bolt, never lifted his head off the gun. The elevation looked good, but the wind needed to be played with so I gave him a correction to move slightly left,” Crowder said.
The next shot hit the gunman just above the belly button, and he went down. Crowder considered the shot and wondered if the fight was over. “I thought in the back of my head, ‘OK, that’s a hydraulic wound, unless we hit him in the spine; he’s going to die but it could be a half hour or two hours.’ I looked at Jason and said, ‘All right man, 750 feet in insane winds with all the climbing and all the stuff all morning, that’s good stuff, man.’”
The wide-eyed machine gunners on the hill asked, “You got him?” And I said, ‘Yeah, we got him.’”
But the snipers kept an eye on the place they’d sent the shot, and a couple of minutes later, they saw the wounded shooter hunched over the rocks that had been shielding him. He was weak and trying to hold himself up with one arm. Jason shot again and hit the rocks right in front of him. Then he shot one more time.
“That last shot hit the guy right on the right side of his high chest, and he fell straight back and never got back up. We hit him on the second round, and we hit him on the fourth round. “The actual shot was 745 or 746 meters. It wasn’t quite 750. In Afghanistan with a 7.62, that’s a long shot, especially in that region, it’s really long,” Crowder said.
Chapter Nine
The Parisian
By Alden Brooks
The murderous trench warfare that took place in World War I, with fixed positions of troops attacking each other over open ground, amid machine-gun and artillery firing, has been chronicled by many writers. Few, however, capture the intensity and feeling of the troops like this Alden Brooks story from his book, The Fighting Men, first published by Scribners in 1917.
—Lamar Underwood
It was a terribly dark night, wet and piercing cold. The pavements were slippery with a muddy slush. They tramped along in silence; not a word; each man his own thoughts, yet each man’s thoughts the same. Slowly, however, their blood warmed a little, and their shoulder straps settled into place. The trenches were five kilometres away to the north. By the time they reached the field kitchens, the night was a little less dark; dawn was coming. There was a wee light burning. They halted beside it and wondered what was going to happen next. One or two went and knocked on the rough huts where the cooks slept. Perhaps there might be some chance of getting a little coffee.
“Coffee for us? You’re crazy. Do you think they’d waste coffee on us?”
But it so happened that they had halted for just that reason. From the wee light there came a man with great buckets of hot coffee. They gathered about him and held out their tin cups. The man told them not to crowd around so, he could not see what he was doing, and there was plenty for everybody. Standing up, they gulped it down. It was hot. It warmed. Shortly afterward they were filing along the channels through the earth—the third trenches, the second trenches, then slowly into the first trenches. The watchers there rose stiffly and made room for them. A blue rocket shot up from the Germans opposite. It lit up the landscape with a weird light. The earth seemed to grow colder. Then the artillery began intermittently. Then it got to work in earnest, and for half an hour or more it tore the sky above into shreds. They became impatient. They wanted to know what they were waiting for. It was the captain.
“What in the hell is he fussing about now?”
“Oh, he’s fussing about the machine-guns!”
“Oh, he’s always fussing about something or other!
“Hell, that’s his business!”
Presently the captain came creeping along. He spoke in a low whisper to the young lieutenant in charge of De Barsac’s section.
“Are your men ready?”
“Yes, all ready.”
“You’ve placed your machine-guns the way I told you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Then, you understand, you attack right after us. Give me a few minutes, then come out and dash right up.”
/>
There was silence again. The captain moved off. Presently George snickered.
“That’s all. Dash right up. Well, I’ll promise you one thing, old whiskers,” he murmured to a watcher by his side, “if I’ve got to rot and stink out here for the next month, I’ll try and carry my carcass as near as I can to their nostrils rather than to yours.”
“Shut up,” growled Jules.
George looked around.
“God! you’re not funking it, are you?”
“Oh, what do you lose? Nothing. Eh! What do you leave behind?”
“Old man, I leave behind more wives than you.”
“Yes, I guess you do—yes, I guess you do—yes, I guess that’s about it.”
“Stop that noise,” whispered the lieutenant.
The artillery fire ceased. A minute later they heard the shouts of the other company over to the left, and above the shouting, the rapid, deadly, pank-pank-pank of the German machine-guns. They stood up instinctively; they swung on their knapsacks; they drew out their bayonets and fixed them on their rifles, and while they did so, their breath steamed upon the cold, damp air. Then, standing there in a profound silence, they looked across at each other through that murky morning light and gave up now definitely everything life had brought them. It was a bitter task, much harder for some than for others; but when the lieutenant suddenly said, “At ’em, boys!” all were ready. A low, angry snarl shot from their lips. Like hunted beasts, ready to tear the first thing they met to pieces in a last death-struggle, they scrambled out of the trench. Creeping through the barbed wire, they advanced stealthily until a hail of bullets was turned upon them, then they leaped up with a mighty yell, ran some twenty paces, fell flat upon the ground, and leaped up once more.
Head bent down, De Barsac plunged forward. Bullets sang and hissed about him. Every instant he expected death to strike him. He stumbled on, trying to offer it the brain and nothing else. He fell headlong over shell holes, but each time picked himself up and staggered on and on. Hours seemed to pass. He remembered George’s words. Not rot here—nor here nor here—but carry one’s carcass higher and higher. Finally, he heard the young lieutenant yelling: “Come on, boys, come on, we’re almost there.” He looked up. Clouds of smoke, bullets ripping up the earth, comrades falling about him, a few hurrying on, all huddled up like men in a terrible rain-storm. Of a sudden he found himself among barbed wire and pit holes. The white bleached face of a man, dead weeks ago, leered at him. He stepped over the putrid body and flung himself through the wire. It tore his clothes, but failed to hold him. Bullets whizzed around his head, but they all seemed to be too high. Then, of a sudden, he realized that he was actually going to reach the trench. He started up. He gripped his rifle in both hands and let out a terrible yell. He became livid with rage. Up out of the ground rose a wave of Germans. He saw George drive his bayonet into the foremost; and as the bayonet snapped off, heard him shout: “Keep it and give it to your sweetheart for a hatpin!” A tall, haggard German charged full at him. He stood his ground, parried the thrust. The German’s rifle swung off to one side and exposed his body. With a savage snort he drove his bayonet into the muddy uniform. He felt it go in and in, and instinctively plunged it farther and twisted it around, then heard the wretch scream, and saw him drop his rifle and grasp at life with extended arms, and watched him fall off the bayonet and sink down, bloody hands clasped over his stomach, and a golden ring upon the fourth finger. He stood there weak and flabby. His head began to whirl. Only just in time did he ward off the vicious lunge of a sweating bearded monster. Both rifles rose up locked together into the air. Between their up-stretched arms the two men glared at each other.
War Stories Page 20
