The Only Thing Worth Dying For

by Eric Blehm

  “We’re taking that hill again, so make sure our internal comms are squared away. The radios aren’t faring too well, and I’m a little worried.”

  “You gotta be gentle with them,” Dan said, cradling one of the radios in his open palm. “Treat it like a baby.” He looked up from behind his bushy beard, cocked his head sideways, and squinted at Amerine. “So, we’re going to take the hill again, eh?”

  “Looking that way.”

  “Groundhog Day,”* said Dan. “Any chance I could have Wes’s spot?”

  “Certainly,” said Amerine. Dan was arguably the best marksman on the team. “But make sure JD doesn’t mind sending you out with me, and figure out who’s going to run commo on his split team.”

  “Would be good to be up front on the assault.”

  “It would be good to have you up front. See you in a bit.”

  Though Amerine doubted the Taliban would attack with a delegation en route to discuss surrender, he would not allow himself to underestimate the enemy. Looking around at the flurry of activity on the Alamo—the scene was almost festive, with the guerrillas chatting up Fathi and the headquarters personnel mingling with ODA 574—he thought, I gotta find Bovee, hammer out this bullshit operations order, and get us moving.

  Pickett was making the rounds, introducing himself as the battalion medic and performing checkups on the members of ODA 574. He approached a man who was grabbing some gear from the back of a truck.

  “What do you do?” he asked Ken.

  “I’m the battalion medic.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Pickett. “I’m the battalion medic.”

  “Well, not anymore,” Ken said.

  After confirming this swap of positions with Bolduc, whose idea it had been to give Ken a chance on the headquarters staff, Pickett headed over to his new team sergeant, JD, whom he knew from 5th Group. “Hey, Sergeant, looks like I’m your new medic,” he said.

  “That’s what I got,” said JD. “Why don’t you put your kit down in that truck. We’re gearing up for a mission in a bit; come on back and I’ll fill you in.”

  Feeling a surge of adrenaline, Pickett walked off the Alamo to transfer his gear to one of ODA 574’s vehicles. Boy, he thought, is Denise gonna be pissed when she finds out about this!

  Shortly after leaving Dan, Amerine found Captain Dennis Bovee, the headquarters’ assistant operations officer, in the command post.

  “We have to stop meeting like this,” said Amerine with a grin.

  Bovee had been with the 101st Airborne Division when it relieved Amerine’s battered battalion after the disastrous riots in Panama. Today was December 5, three days before the five-year anniversary of that fiasco.

  “Yes we do,” Bovee said, smiling. “So, how do you want to work this plan?”

  “Let’s take a walk. There’s a place just up the Alamo where we can see our objective, down by the bridge.”

  The two captains strolled north along the edge of the Alamo, past the ashes of the guerrillas’ fire from the night before, to a section of crumbling wall where they sat facing the bridge and the hill with the ruins a mile to the west.

  “Good view,” said Bovee.

  “Makes a leader’s recon pretty easy,” said Amerine.

  With a flash of fire, a 500-pound bomb exploded on the ridge across the river just south of the bridge, sending up a billow of brown dust and black smoke.

  Both men stood up. “What the fuck?!” said Amerine. The Afghans on the other side of the Alamo started to cheer.

  “Hold on a minute,” Amerine said to Bovee and walked quickly over to the command post. There he saw the headquarters TACP, Price, with his radio and map spread out on the ground before him, and Alex next to him, sitting with his legs in his sleeping bag and eating an MRE. Alex returned Amerine’s angry look with an apologetic shrug and glanced over at Fox and Bolduc, five yards away.

  Amerine understood immediately what was happening: Bolduc’s brief had become the headquarters’ air strikes. The fighting headquarters, he thought. Getting a piece of the action.

  Only there was no action and, as far as Amerine could tell, nothing to strike. Combat had ceased the day before, soon after Wes was shot. There hadn’t been so much as a bullet fired in the past fifteen hours.

  Noticing Amerine, Bolduc stepped over while Fox looked on.

  “What’s going on, sir?” asked Amerine, choosing words that weren’t confrontational but using a tone that clearly was. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m orienting my staff, Captain,” said Bolduc. “We’re engaging Taliban positions on the ridge. I’ll get one of the new TACPs linked up with your team sergeant later.”

  “Well,” Amerine said through clenched teeth, “whenever you’re done doing whatever it is you’re doing, send the new TACP over to JD.”

  Wes is the lucky one, Amerine thought as he headed to JD’s position at the southwestern edge of the Alamo, where forty or more guerrillas had massed to watch the bombing. He doesn’t have to witness this bullshit.

  Reaching JD, Amerine asked if the team was ready to move.

  “They’re all packed,” said JD. “Just holding in place, waiting for the word.”

  Nelson Smith joined Fathi after the bomb hit. It had taken Fathi only a few short conversations with the Afghans—locals and guerrillas—to determine the locations of numerous enemy positions on the other side of the river. The bomb had been directed at some men the Afghans pointed out—and that the headquarters staff had confirmed with binoculars were armed—coming down the ridge on a trail. No other enemy were spotted.

  “So where are the bad guys now?” asked Smith.

  “They go inside a cave on that ridge over there,” said Fathi, pointing downstream toward the bridge.

  “How do they know?”

  Indicating one of the Afghans, Fathi said, “He’s from that village over there, and he says he knows where they are, and that’s where they go. To escape the bombing.”

  “We should tell Colonel Fox about this,” said Smith.

  “Just heading that way,” said Fathi, accompanying Smith to where Fox was standing alone a few yards away—Bolduc had left the Alamo to pick up his own mail at the medical clinic.

  After giving the information to Fox, Smith pointed out the general direction of the cave to Price and Alex, who began to scan the ridgeline with their binoculars. Fox was doing the same. He’d been looking at this ridge all morning and hadn’t noticed any caves. Holy shit, he thought. There it is.

  Fox turned to Price and said, “Destroy that cave. Put a bomb on it.”

  This command was the first instance in Price’s six years working exclusively with Special Forces teams that anybody other than an ODA captain, warrant officer, or team sergeant had approved an air strike. It just wasn’t done that way in Special Forces, but who was he to question a lieutenant colonel? He’d already crossed Fox once back in Jordan—he had been ordered back to Fort Campbell by his Air Force superiors to refit and prepare to deploy for the war in Afghanistan, but Fox had forced him to stay with the headquarters, citing his need to retain a TACP. When Price reminded Fox that he was the property of the Air Force, he suddenly found himself serving chow in the mess hall at the base where they were staying in Jordan.

  Because he hadn’t been able to refit at Fort Campbell, Price had borrowed a new type of laser designator called a “Viper” from the battalion’s weather specialist, who used it to measure cloud ceilings for his weather reports. The Viper was essentially a pair of binoculars that, paired with GPS, could provide the coordinates for a location with its laser.

  Price set the Viper on its tripod and found the cave in its view-finder, but he didn’t see any enemy combatants. They must be inside, he concluded. Though Fox agreed that the cave looked like a good place for Taliban to hide, none had been spotted there. The only people the Americans could actually see across the river at that time were unidentified—and unarmed—Afghans walking southeast of the cave down the road on the other
side of the valley.

  But Price’s job was not to assess the viability of a target; his job was to put bombs on it when ordered. He radioed the position of the cave to an F-18 pilot, reading off the GPS latitude and longitude coordinates from the Viper: “North 31, 46, 29 decimal 48; east 65, 45, 46 decimal 92.” Next he used a topographic map to estimate its elevation at 4,000 feet, about 700 feet higher than their position on the Alamo. Then he talked the pilot onto the target with various features, including the dry riverbed and the bridge. With all the required information received, the F-18 pilot began his attack, releasing the second 500-pounder of the morning.

  Around 8:30 A.M., Lieutenant Colonel Crosby guided his B-52 into Afghan airspace. It had been seven hours since he’d taken off from Diego Garcia, on course for a preassigned orbit point in the north. Following protocol, Crosby checked in with a combat flight controller, who redirected him to a developing situation in the south, near Kandahar. The pilot tuned his radio to the channel on which Tech Sergeant Price was working an F-18 using Fox’s battalion headquarters call sign, Rambo 85.

  Once over Kandahar, the B-52 entered a clockwise orbit at 40,000 feet, above the “meat block” altitude: within range of surface-to-air missiles and anti-aircraft artillery. The weather was perfect for flying: mostly clear, a fifty-knot wind from the west, with only light scattered or broken cloud cover below them. Upstairs at the controls, Crosby and his copilot could see their arcing contrail as well as most of the city, but not the F-18 or the location from which Price was calling in air support.

  Amerine returned to the wall and sat beside Bovee, trying to control his anger.

  Another bomb exploded on the ridgeline west of where the first bomb had hit, closer to the bridge. Lifting his binoculars, Amerine scanned the area: smoke and dust. What in the hell are they bombing over there? he thought. There were no people, no fortifications, and there had been no more gunfire. In other words, there was no threat.

  “Anyway,” said Amerine. “Let’s talk about attacking the hill.”

  Over the next fifteen minutes, two F-18s dropped three more 500-pound bombs, none of which hit the cave. Out of weapons and low on fuel, their pilots told Price they were returning to their carriers to rearm.

  Price was puzzled. Why hadn’t the F-18s been able to hit the cave? One of the bombs had landed in the riverbed three hundred yards short of the ridge. The frustrated pilots did one more pass—lower this time—and were finally able to get a clear visual of the cave with their jets’ targeting system. One asked Price if he would like him to radio for additional planes; Price said that a B-52 was checking in and would put a JDAM* on the cave. The pilot then told Price that the original coordinates appeared to be a couple hundred meters off the target—if Price were to give the same coordinates to the B-52 crew, their JDAM would also miss. A minute later, the F-18s were gone.

  Concluding that the pilot had a better perspective than he did from his position on the Alamo, Price decided to try to generate a new set of target coordinates for the B-52. First, though, he would have to recalibrate the Viper, whose internal magnetic compass he suspected was slightly off.

  Emerging from his command post west of the medical clinic, Hamid Karzai pulled a tan woolen blanket tightly around his shoulders to ward off the chill. The walls of the cement building were so thick they had muffled the explosions from the half-dozen 500-pound bombs dropped in the previous twenty minutes.

  Assuming that the large group of men gathered atop the Alamo had been drawn there by the sun, Karzai decided to join them to warm himself before meeting with the Taliban liaison Mullah Naqib, whose arrival he anticipated later that morning. Unaware of the bombing across the river, he walked briskly toward the hill, flanked by his ever-present Afghan and CIA bodyguards.

  Still circling high above Kandahar, the crew of the B-52 had learned from listening to the radio traffic that the target was an enemy cave near the American position.

  Finally, Price checked in with Crosby. “This is Rambo Eight Five,” he said. “Say lineup.”

  “This is Aetna Seven Nine,” said Crosby, who proceeded to give Price a brief detailing his mission capabilities—how long he could stay in the area and in what format he would like to receive the coordinates—then read the B-52’s available weapons menu. Today’s special: a full load of 2,000-pound JDAM bombs.

  Price looked over at Fox and his staff a few feet away; ten yards beyond them the mob of Afghans, all eyes and a few pairs of binoculars fixed on the ridgeline, waiting for him to destroy the enemy cave. It was time to try a JDAM.

  While JDAM technology had been around since the Gulf War, it hadn’t been used for close air support before Operation Enduring Freedom; that is, ground forces had never called in a JDAM bomb to hit targets in proximity to their position. Still, Price considered it a fairly straightforward weapon: A target’s coordinates are entered into its guidance system, and the bomb goes where it’s told.

  But since the JDAM had not been used for close air support, Price and the other forward controllers in Afghanistan had yet to be trained in the procedure to deliver the coordinates to the bomber crews who would program the data into the weapon’s guidance system. Officially, there had been zero training available, period, on the employment, tactics, techniques, and procedures for utilizing the weapon in this manner. This was, for Price, on-the-job training.

  Crosby informed Price that he had two types of JDAM to choose from: one that burrows into the ground before detonating and another that detonates upon impact with the target or just above its surface. Since the target was a cave, Price selected the penetrating warhead. Then he told Crosby to stand by.

  Crosby and his B-52 crew went into orbit safely above Shawali Kowt, assuming that the reason Price could not immediately provide coordinates was that his Special Forces team was engaged with the enemy. As the B-52 crew awaited further instruction, Price followed the Viper’s directions for recalibrating off its current location, using the built-in compass to guide him as he held the laser at a 45-degree angle to the ground and fired the device to the north, then south, then east, then west. When he finished, he noticed that the GPS showed a low-battery warning, so he installed new batteries. With the Viper recalibrated, Price pointed the laser at the cave and “shot” the location in order to generate a new set of latitude-longitude coordinates—north 31, 46, 53.33; east 65, 47, 07.43—that he relayed to the B-52.

  The bomber crew also requested the coordinates of Price’s location, which he refused to provide. He had heard that providing friendly coordinates was the fatal mistake in the Mazar-e-Sharif incident nine days earlier when Lieutenant Colonel Queeg’s headquarters staff had called the bomb in on itself. Standard operating procedure dictated that you didn’t give your own coordinates while calling in close air support, in order to avoid your location being confused with that of the target. All Price would tell Crosby was that the friendly position was 2,000 yards east of the cave, a distance that put them out of the JDAM’s powerful blast radius.

  When everything was set, Price said to Fox, “Weapon ready, cleared hot?”

  “Clear,” said Fox. “Drop it.”

  Coming in on a south-southwest heading, the crew of the B-52 announced, “Weapon away,” then banked right to await a report from Price.

  On the Alamo, Amerine sat with Bovee twenty yards northeast of the command post, oblivious to the contrail—barely visible against a dark blue sky—of the B-52 that had been circling high above.

  He had just finished explaining to Bovee the plan to retake the ruins. “We just need to figure out how you want to present all this to your boss,” Amerine said.

  While Bovee considered this, Amerine looked over his shoulder and saw Brent and Victor standing near the command post with Staff Sergeant Cody Prosser, a twenty-eight-year-old Army intelligence analyst who’d come in with the headquarters, and whom Amerine knew well from recent deployments to Kuwait. Brent was brushing his teeth while Victor and Cody shared a laugh about somethin
g. Turning his head, Amerine stared at the hill to the west. He still couldn’t believe that he and his men weren’t there right now.

  That was Amerine’s last thought.

  There was a hot and blinding flash. The explosion sounded like a thunderclap and felt like a paralyzing kidney punch that sucked the air out of Amerine’s lungs and tossed him through the air. He hit the ground on the other side of Bovee. Stunned but conscious, he started to roll down the slope, stopping several yards away. He heard himself saying, “I’m okay…I’m okay…I’m okay…”

  Less than a minute before the explosion, Dan had walked up to JD, who was telling headquarters Chief Warrant Officer Terry Reed about Wes.

  “JD tells me your junior got shot yesterday,” said Reed. “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I’ve always been a senior and never had a junior working under me,” said Dan. “I get a junior, what happens? He gets shot. You watch, I’ll be next.”

  Leaving Dan and JD, Reed wove his way through the Afghan spectators along the southern edge of the Alamo. He noticed a pair of binoculars on the low wall of the command post near Fox, and was reaching down to pick them up when the blinding flash turned everything white.

  Mag had been standing at the trucks with Mike, who had just tied down a couple of gas cans in the bed of one, closed the tailgate, and grabbed a canned ham that his wife and kids had sent him. “I’m gonna eat this sucker for Ramadan tonight,” he told Mag. Digging into a can of Copenhagen, Mag put a huge dip in his mouth and shared some with Mike, who then began to walk up the hill toward Brent, Victor, and Cody Prosser. He had taken four or five steps when he was consumed by a wall of flames.

  Brent was brushing his teeth and listening to Prosser and Victor talk about home. Since arriving in-country, ODA 574 had been completely isolated, and Prosser was the first person they’d been able to grill for news. Brent spit out his toothpaste. The next thing he knew, he was facedown in the dirt a few yards away, a burning sensation covering his entire body. The ringing in his ears muffled all other sound. Smoke billowed around him. He pushed up onto his knees and felt overwhelmingly sick. Everything went brown as he fought to stay conscious.