by Ed Darack
“I got a real bad feeling about that guy,” Pigman said to Eggers and Roy as the figure disappeared into the trees above them. All three, having read Marcus Luttrell’s after-action report, felt the encounter was a bad omen. “First we see Shah’s hides, then this guy,” the corpsman continued.
“All right. Let’s keep moving, gotta maintain eyes on Echo-3,” Eggers stated. In addition to their training as scout/snipers, each of the three had grown up with a love of outdoor pursuits. Pigman couldn’t get enough of hiking, camping, and hunting in his home state of New Jersey; Roy, from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, lived for hunting season; and Eggers’s activities ran the gamut from kite surfing in his hometown of Santa Cruz, California, to multipitch alpine rock climbing in the high Sierra Nevada. The trio might have been far from their stomping grounds, but they felt right at home in the wild environment of the Hindu Kush. Quickly and silently, Ronin flowed down the north ridge.
Soon they reached an open area, surrounded on all sides by high ground—a perfect setting for an ambush. They had no choice, however, but to cross through it; they needed to keep visual contact with Echo-3. Roy scanned the area repeatedly with his spotting scope, but could find nothing. “Stay low,” Eggers reminded his teammates. “I got a bad feeling about this.” He moved out in front of the team, “on point,” with Pigman behind him and Roy acting as “tail-end Charlie,” in the rear. Sweating from the noontime heat, each of the snipers sensed every crunch of their feet on the dirt and every whisk past a shrub’s branch loudly echoing in their heads as they moved through low vegetation in the steep bowl.
They reached the bottom of the bowl quickly, crouching through the waist-high vegetation and maintaining solid dispersion from one another. Without breaking their gait, the three began to course up the rise in front of them—toward the safety of the forest above. Then, out of the breezy, thin air, they heard a brrrrrrrrrrrrrr! The first shots of the ambush rang out. The hillsides to their left and right exploded in machine-gun and RPG fire. Pigman, turning to his left, flung his M16 into firing position, threw the selector onto burst, and plugged three shots downrange—then saw nothing but sky and some distant clouds as his leg buckled under the weight of his pack and he fell backward. A PK light machine-gun round had driven into his left knee, shattering his lower femur before lodging under his kneecap. Rounds cracked over his head, but he continued to fire. He dropped his pack, then felt a round impact his left gut, and rolled over and continued to fire, his knee locked in an L-shape as he struggled to keep putting rounds accurately downrange. Moments later, three more rounds impacted his chest, directly on his SAPI plate holder, throwing him into the dirt. Instinctively following the scout/sniper standard operating procedure under such an attack, the corpsman began to “bound back,” moving toward Roy.
“Roy!” he yelled as the intense gunfire ramped up in fervor. “ROY!” Pigman had been hit at least seven times. RPGs burst around him as he clawed his way through the low bushes. The gunfire ceased for a moment, allowing the corpsman to grab a pressure dressing and wrap it tightly around his leg above the wound. Intense pain shot throughout his body—but he was still alive. Keep moving, keep firing! he thought.
“Motherfuckers!” Crack! Crack! Crack! Joe Roy loosed three-shot bursts at the well-covered positions of Shah’s men, revealed only by bright yellow muzzle flashes, about four hundred meters to either side of him. Thud! Thud! Two rounds knocked Roy face-first to the ground. “Shit! You motherfuckers!” The bullets struck his rucksack, but not Roy himself. He sprang to his knees, thrown off balance by his heavy pack—which he dumped onto the ground, freeing him to move faster. Crack! Crack! Crack! He continued to fire at multiple targets. Thud! Another round hit him, hurling him into the dirt. The bullet impacted him squarely on his rear SAPI plate, the shot feeling as if someone had landed a hard-swung sledgehammer between his shoulder blades. Steadily moving back up the hill, Roy repositioned himself to fire and calmly sent yet more volleys of well-placed rounds into the attackers’ positions, alternating targets on his left and right as he tried to maintain suppression of the enemy. But the rate of fire from the attackers, whom Roy figured to be between eight- and twelve-men strong, became overwhelming, saturating the air and ground around him. After low-crawling over thirty meters as he inhaled dirt kicked up by rounds impacting just inches from his head, Roy lurched to his knees again. Crack! Crack! Crack! He shot repeated volleys, each burst skillfully aligned on an enemy position, emptying magazine after magazine. Crack! Crack! Crack! Then, after another low-crawl, he rose up, shooting, and thud! Another of the rounds whizzing through the air struck his rear SAPI—again hurtling him face-first into the dirt. This is gettin’ old, he thought. Where’s Pigman and Eggers?
Below the snipers, near Chichal, the Marines of Echo-3 could hear every burst of the firefight. Guyton immediately grabbed a PRC-117 radio, and accompanied by his strongest Marines, began a sprint up the steep slope. Hearing the overwhelming volume of PK and AK fire, punctuated by the distinctively bloodcurdling sound of launched RPGs, the Echo-3 Marines assumed the three-man team had been killed. Then, out of the cacophony of enemy 7.62 mm weapons, came the crack! crack! crack! of the Snipers’ 5.56 mm bursts. The Marines, holding firm below, began to cheer.
“Roy!” Pigman yelled again.
“Pigman!” Roy called back, now in range of each other. “You all right?”
“Forget about me. I’m good enough to yell. Where’s Eggers?”
“Shit, I thought he was with you . . . EGGERS!” Roy roared into the cruel air during a brief lull in the firefight. “EGGERS!”
“Shit, man. I think he might be dead,” Pigman stated in a horrified tone. “He better not be dead. EGGERS!”
But Eggers wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even hit. After returning fire and dumping his pack—standard operating procedure for scout/snipers under intense attack—the ever-calm sniper leader jumped on one of his radios and contacted First Lieutenant Roe Lemons, an artillery forward observer traveling with Echo-3, and put in an urgent request for both 120 mm mortars and Doghouse’s 105s. The strike would be danger-close, but given the odds against Ronin already, Eggers had no other choice.
“EGGERS!” both Roy and Pigman continued to call out as they low-crawled and plugged rounds into the enemy’s positions. “EGGERS!”
As the two yelled, Shah’s men, likely suspecting that their overwhelming ambush had at least injured the three, broke from their cover and moved toward Eggers. Flat on the dirt, his legs splayed out, holding his M4 in his right hand with his straight index finger just barely touching the side of the trigger—his arms and face pressed against the ground as he controlled his breathing in anticipation of at least one carefully placed shot—the sniper rolled his eyes up to see the silhouettes of three of Shah’s men pass within fifteen feet of him. He could hear them speaking to one another, he could hear their footsteps, he could even hear their breathing. Timing his breaths—a steadying technique he’d mastered during precision shooting—he menacingly rose from his flat cover and lifted his M4’s ACOG sight to his right eye, the only sound he made being the click of the selector as he rotated it from safe to semi. Red arrow on the head—crack! Shift to the next. Crack! The next—more difficult, he’s now turning. Crack! Having loosed three closely aimed rounds—and revealed his location to the men in Shah’s team—Eggers flipped the selector to burst. As he quickly built his situational awareness, gauging the possible locations of Pigman and Roy by the sounds of their weapons and identifying locations of the enemy as well, he unloaded three magazines’ worth of 5.56 mm.
“EGGERS!” He heard Roy’s voice. As he continued to send suppressive fire onto enemy positions—and while they continued to shoot back, but in a now far less organized and coordinated manner—the team leader rejoined Pigman and Roy, and the three of them continued to keep the enemy confused and suppressed with an evenly timed cadence of bursts.
“Thought you were dead—you’re not even shot!” Pigman excitedly stated.
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“I was busy calling in arty and mortars. That show will start any second now. We’d better find some good cover. Gonna be loud. Are you hit anywhere else besides your knee?”
“Man, I got hit all over the place—but only my knee is fucked up. I thought I took one in my abdomen, but my NVGs stopped the round. Had ’em in a bag hanging off my gear harness. Roy got hit twice in the rear SAPI.”
“You want morphine?” Eggers asked. “You look like you’re in some serious pain.”
“Hell no,” Pigman responded. “They’re probably regrouping, gonna come back and attack us again. I wanna be absolutely coherent if and when they do move on us, so I can pop ’em. I don’t care how much pain I’m in.”
“Yeah, they sure are gonna come and get us,” Eggers agreed. Crack! Crack! Crack! He tore through another few bursts. Then his mind flashed to the Luttrell after-action report, and the Shah videos of the SEAL recon ambush, showing all the gear the enemy had pillaged. “They’re gonna go for our packs!” Eggers paused for a second, then gazed at Pigman. “You don’t have an IV, do you?” The wounded corpsman just stared blankly at him. The team leader, knowing that the corpsman could soon slip into shock, turned and sprinted back into the “kill box” below them.
“Where the fuck did he go?” asked Roy. Moments later, Eggers bounded through the scrub, Pigman’s ruck—stuffed with vital medical supplies, including IVs—slung on his back. Ronin’s leader, still fixated on the enemy pilfering their gear, and panting from the sprint, turned, and weighed his actionable options before him. In an instant, Eggers mentally scanned the list of equipment in his and Roy’s packs. At the top of that list sat his M40A3 bolt-action sniper rifle, custom-made in Quantico, Virginia, at Marine Corps Headquarters.
Roaring, “I’m not going to let those fuckers get my rifle!” Eggers sprang forth, knowing that the 120s and 105s would be raining down any second, and raced to his pack, dispatching bursts of fire along the way. He dove atop his ruck, digging his fingers into its roughly textured nylon face, and lurched it onto his back. Then he reached for Roy’s pack, which held the majority of the team’s precision optics. On the move with two big packs—a total of over 150 pounds—Eggers sprinted back toward Pigman and Roy as he unleashed burst after burst from his M4.
“You’re just in time. They’ve regrouped,” Roy said. Crack! Crack! Crack! The three of them got into a covered position and continued to fend off their attackers, who now advanced on the three from just over four hundred meters.
“Yeah, I did get here just in time. Get your head DOWN!” Eggers responded after a few more bursts as a wavering hiss announced the first of a volley of football-size 120 mm mortars sailing over their heads. Boom! Trees splintered and rocks shattered as a mushroom cloud of earth clumped into the sky, knocking the wind out of the three members of Ronin with a pummeling concussive blast. Eggers radioed Lemons, who was on the hook with both the mortar team and Doghouse, and adjusted fires. The scout/sniper team leader told the mortar team to “walk” a swath of destruction along the north ridge throughout Shah’s men’s positions and along what he felt to be their most likely egress routes. Within a minute, Lemons had Doghouse cleared to fire, but he also had a problem: the members of Ronin that day sat at the very, very outer edge of the 105 mm howitzers’ range; when rounds are fired onto such complex terrain, at a target over eight thousand feet above sea level, their trajectories, if off by just a few tens of meters horizontally, could result in a much-greater vertical offset, thereby sending the shells down onto Ronin’s position.
Hearing the distinctive sound of an incoming artillery round, Eggers, Roy, and Pigman prepared for the explosion . . . but heard instead a deafening roar echoing throughout the mountains.
“What the”—boom!—“hell!” Roy wondered out loud. “Did someone just fire a rocket at us?” Then another round descended, it, too, followed by a thunderous roar and a huge explosion.
“That must be the rocket assist portion of the round’s flight,” Eggers said.
“Man, that’s close,” Roy began as yet more 105 mm RAP rounds impacted the north ridge, just a few hundred meters from Ronin’s position, directly on target. Soon the barrage stopped . . . as did the enemy’s ambush.
“Hopefully we got some of them, and then the 120s and 105s finished ’em off,” Pigman observed.
“Well, we probably won’t ever know. They’re good about dragging off their dead, and we’re in no position to go and do a battle damage assessment,” Eggers replied. “Now we gotta get you out of here,” the team leader continued. “Will you take some morphine now?”
“Hell no.” The corpsman stubbornly held firm in his resolve. “It’s still just three of us—and if they somehow survived that barrage, I wanna shoot as many as possible if they come back!” Pigman said as he grimaced in pain. “They almost had us like the SEALs—same number of guys, same positioning, everything!”
Eggers agreed—Shah’s men had ambushed Ronin in virtually the same manner as they had attacked the NAVSOF recon team, using plunging, interlocking superior fires from extremely well-covered—virtually invisible—positions with eight to twelve men broken into a few positions.
Eggers radioed Captain Zach Rashman requesting a Dustoff extract. Then the sniper team waited. As Rashman worked furiously to coordinate the extract, which would require Echo-3’s Marines to secure an LZ, Pigman slowly began to drift into shock from blood loss. Within an hour after the first shots of the ambush, Guyton and his Echo-3 Marines had sprinted up to the snipers. As they desperately searched for an LZ amid terrain that was inaccessible even for a nimble helicopter like a UH-60, the pilots and crew of two Dustoff Blackhawks raced into their craft at Jalalabad Airfield and spun up the birds’ engines. Escorted by two Shock Apaches, the aviators could feel their helicopters struggling at altitude in the afternoon air; although they rocketed up the Pech River Valley at around seven thousand feet above sea level, the intense August afternoon heat pushed the density altitude much, much higher. And once they were close to the mountain itself, that heat would cause all types of convectional turbulence for the pilots.
The lead Dustoff, piloted by Army Chief Warrant Officer Rob Henninger, followed the Apaches up the Shuryek Valley, intending to arrive at the snipers’ location by passing over the north ridge, a route the Apache pilots felt to be less of a threat than the Korangal Valley. Their ears popping from the altitude, the Dustoff pilots slowed their craft’s forward progress as they quickly approached the high terrain of the upper Shuryek. Henninger, noticing that the four aircraft were literally boxed in by the valley, maneuvered his Blackhawk to allow the lead Apache a quick escape route should the Shock pilots run out of air on their climb over the ridge. With their Blackhawks at max climb and max power, and a wall of Hindu Kush dominating their forward view, the lead Apache radioed back, “We need to back off. We’re not gonna make it over.” The skilled pilots worked their craft to draw every ounce of lift power out of their engines and rotors. Henninger, looking to his left and right, however, quickly realized that they’d flown into such constricted terrain that to turn around they’d have to carve steep banks in the air, and as they approached the mountain, the amount of vertical airspace between the helicopters and Sawtalo Sar shrank. And since helicopters require increased power to maintain elevation during a bank—and the Blackhawks and Apaches already were running at maximum power—their only choice was to press on as the dark mountain drew ever larger and more menacing in their field of view. Turning with no more power to add literally meant falling from the sky, “knifing down” onto Sawtalo Sar.
Flying at only sixty-five knots of airspeed, and with about one thousand vertical feet to go to surmount the north ridge, Henninger heard the last sound he wanted to hear through his headset—a warning alarm, signaling him to check the bird’s diagnostics. The helicopter’s master caution light and his number-two engine “chip light” flickered on, meaning that sensors had detected metal chips in the turbofan’s oil, which could possibly
shut the engine down and send the Dustoff crashing onto the mountain below. Unable to turn, Henninger gazed at the lead Apache as it approached the crest of the north ridge—then disappeared. Buffeted by strong thermals spinning off the steep ground below, the aviators could make out details in individual branches of high cedar—virtually at their eyes’ level. At the very crest of the north ridge, with less than fifty feet to spare, the Dustoff pilots pitched the noses of their Blackhawks up and they passed under Sawtalo Sar’s summit, then torqued the craft down like a roller coaster, into the Korangal—regaining airspeed and visual on the Apaches.
Letting out a huge sigh of relief, Henninger could hear Rashman talking to the Apaches about the LZ. The Shocks had pushed ahead, in order to scout the area for any RPG-wielding bad guys. When Henninger approached the tiny, sloping landing zone, marked by a purple smoke grenade, he thought for sure that it would be a hoist mission, where they’d drop a litter on a winch. But closer still, he and the aircraft’s crew dogs realized that they had just enough space to nestle the craft onto the ground. Henninger circled the craft and hovered high above the slope, with the helicopter’s nose facing the Korangal Valley. Constantly monitoring the aircraft’s systems, particularly that chip light, Henninger began the slow descent. As a group of Echo-3 Marines hauled Pigman on a tarp toward the inbound bird, the Dustoff crew poked their heads out the side doors of the Blackhawk and called out distances while Henninger—who’d never undertaken a closed-confines landing before—placed the tail of the craft between two small trees, just eight feet apart. With the bird’s gear on the ground, the crew chief casually stepped onto Sawtalo Sar as the Marines, carrying Pigman, stormed toward the craft. But the helicopter barely sat on the ground—Henninger couldn’t completely let off the collective, which controls the pitch of the rotor blades, as he had to keep the rotor tips from drooping and striking surrounding trees. With their heads hung low to avoid running into the rotors, the grunts loaded Pigman, now doped up on morphine, into the Dustoff. Roy, although not seriously injured, was also ordered to get on the medevac so that a doctor could check his back for any injuries.
