18 Hours

by Sandra Lee

  ‘I have never heard so much firepower, I bet my bottom dollar that I’ve never heard so much firepower go into an area, as where Jock was.’

  He knew the GIs with Jock were well trained, even if many of the younger soldiers had no battle experience, and that some of the command were former Rangers and Navy SEALS who had undertaken similar training to the SAS troopers. But he would rather have been there himself.

  The men from the 10th Mountain had brought in a battery-powered, shoulder-fired AT4 anti-armour rocket that has a maximum effective range of 300 metres and can penetrate 35 centimetres of armour. Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera looked over at Frank Grippe.

  ‘Who’s our best shot, Sar Major?’ LaCamera said.

  Grippe called out to a private who ran over.

  Jock says, recalling the moment: ‘They’ve brought this poor bastard forward, and it’s, “Right, son, we’ve only got one round. You confident you can do it?” What’s he gonna say — “Ah, no sir”? This is LaCamera talking to the best-shot private soldier. “And don’t you miss, boy.” And of course, what happens?’

  Jock was furious, not at the poor bastard who’d just missed an al Qaeda nest with the last rocket they had, but at the entire situation the soldiers found themselves in and the way it had unfolded. A control freak who ranks safety and preparedness as his top priorities, Jock was frustrated at the poor intelligence that had clearly underestimated the enemy positions and numbers. And he was frustrated that they were still under attack with no apparent way out, and vexed by the long delays for CAS.

  ‘Why didn’t you train your men not to drop their fucking packs — especially when they’re not even getting shot at?’ Jock says now. ‘Why weren’t you doing em-plane and ex-plane drills getting on and off the helicopter the day before, instead of going for a two-hour famil [familiarisation] joyflight? Let’s do the real shit, then it would have worked out.’

  Jock didn’t blame the soldiers — ‘most of them were young’ — but he did blame the brass. The one thing he was thankful for was Grippe and Sergeant Robert Healy, who kept a firm hold on the show. ‘What prepped us for this was just watching the September 11 attacks,’ Healy told reporters during a press conference four days later. ‘We knew we were going to be called up and go into combat and rid the world of this evil here. And all the boys are ready to do that.’

  One member of Healy’s 1-87 wrote on all of his hand grenades the names of two friends who perished in the September 11 attacks. This was personal.

  Healy had a handful of guys including tactical air controllers and radio operators and forward observers in his position. Before flying out, he had ordered half a dozen of his troops to bring in empty sand bags in case they needed to make a secure fighting position around the control element. It would soon turn out to be a fortuitous move.

  ‘They were worth their weight ten times in cold piss, they were bloody brilliant,’ Jock says of Grippe and Healy.

  ‘These guys were, at the time, making the calls and coming up with the decisions that were effective — and required essentially — for our survival. They were the ones who had the initiative. They were the ones who stepped up to the mark. That’s the shit you can’t buy.’

  Sergeant Michael Peterson’s eight-man mortar platoon had turned into an infantry squad. With their massive 120mm mortar out of action, they had nothing better to do than help each other stay alive. LaCamera had asked Sergeant Pete to liaise with Captain Nelson Kraft to find a position up on the slope of Hell’s Halfpipe and pull security for the men in the bowl. Kraft directed him to a position and Peterson instantly knew why none of the other troops had occupied it until now. It was a bad spot on the northeastern corner, completely barren and with no covering protection. But the position was vital.

  An order is an order, he thought.

  Peterson started up the hill and turned to his young soldiers.

  ‘Who’s got the balls to follow me up this hill?’ he yelled over the racket.

  Sergeant Pete reckoned he sounded like an egotistical jackass but sometimes you’ve just got to say stupid things, he thought, and this was one of those sometimes.

  He looked back over his shoulder; his men were stunned. His comments were totally out of character.

  ‘Get the fuck up the hill,’ Sergeant Pete yelled, and as one, his platoon fell in and started moving up behind him.

  ‘They were brave, they were just awesome kids. They were looking at me like, “You’ve just gone mad”,’ Sergeant Pete says now.

  Peterson’s men got to position and instantly a young buck private named Ryan got pinned by a sniper. Each time the soldier tried to manoeuvre into a safer position a couple of centimetres in either direction, the sniper traced him, winging bullets right next to his head. Ryan was trapped.

  ‘Sergeant Pete, Sergeant Peeeeeeeete,’ Ryan yelled.

  ‘We just kind of reached over and grabbed him and pulled him away,’ Peterson says.

  Sergeant Pete’s men were shooting at the enemy as fast as the enemy ducked out of their hideouts. The firepower was terrifying and would have paralysed lesser men. Sergeant Pete looked over behind his position and saw four al Qaeda fighters with weapons raised running towards his men, ready to shoot.

  ‘There is a rule that you never fire over the heads of any of your guys — you never want to do that, it’s called flagging,’ Peterson says. ‘You just don’t do that. But at this point I just don’t have a choice so I just start firing. I engage these guys and, alright, one of them is down, and that’s when [Raul] Lopez came in with the two-oh-three and he just kept dropping rounds in there. I don’t know if we got all of them but I tend to think we got a few. And I start to wonder if those are the guys who inflicted all the gunshot wounds later on that night, because somebody was back there.’

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Down in the bowl, Jock had dragged some of the injured men into his shell scrape and was lying over them, taking shots and firing at the enemy, leaning on the injured for leverage. They were safe and out of the line of fire but Jock had made himself more visible and increasingly vulnerable.

  IT HAD JUST GONE 3pm in the Shahi Kot Valley and the sun was starting to sink in the western sky. Someone was quietly saying a couple of Hail Marys and a few Our Fathers. ‘There’s no atheist in a foxhole,’ Paul LaCamera would say later. Luckily for him, someone upstairs was listening to the prayers.

  Up on the hill, Grippe was engaging the enemy on the opposite ridge with small-arms fire. After a lull in fighting, the battle was back on. When it rains it pours.

  ‘Incoooommmmming,’ came the warning call.

  But it was too late. A mortar screamed in.

  Booooooom.

  Al Qaeda’s aim had improved significantly and the mortar exploded in the bowl, about three metres away from LaCamera’s battalion’s command post at the northern end of Hell’s Halfpipe, the battlefield TOC, blasting his most senior men off their feet. Six men were wounded. Healy and the colonel’s operations officer, Major Jay Hall, were tossed over like rag dolls. Shrapnel cut through their uniforms and tore shreds out of their muscled bodies. Healy, who had been based in Alaska and was one of the few soldiers used to the high altitude and cold conditions, and his men had dug small ditches in the ground and filled their sandbags to build a perimeter, but it did not protect them when the mortar exploded. Healy was hit and had shrapnel holes behind his right ear. Blood was pouring out of his leg and shoulder where the jagged metal had ripped into him. Hall, too, was brassed up but not seriously wounded.

  A piece of jagged shrapnel had torn through Sergeant Andrew Black’s knee, almost blowing it right off. Black, who was Healy’s radio operator, was losing blood fast.

  A piece of shrapnel deflected about five metres, up the slope, tearing into Grippe’s right hamstring and torso. He felt as if he’d been body-slammed by a wrestler. Blood poured out of his wounds, staining his torn fatigues.

  ‘I’m hit,’ Grippe yelled down to the command post as he kept
firing.

  Grippe didn’t have time to worry about his wounds. Healy had his head down, fully expecting another mortar — where one lands, another surely follows — when LaCamera charged past and banged on Healy’s helmet. The lieutenant colonel ordered the men to move position.

  ‘Let’s go, let’s go,’ LaCamera yelled.

  Healy lifted himself up and raced about ten metres up the slope, ignoring the pain in his leg and swatting his bleeding ear like it was a mosquito.

  He turned around and saw Sergeant Black in the hole where he’d been blasted. He had gone into shock. Healy charged back down and grabbed him, dragging him up the hill. It was just in time. A second round came in, exploding in the exact position where Black had been.

  Healy hauled Black to cover and looked down at the wreckage that had been Black’s knee. Most of the 10th Mountain soldiers had been trained as combat life-savers and all the drills told Healy that Black’s injury was bad.

  ‘Hey, bud, you’re probably going to lose your leg,’ he said to the fallen soldier.

  ‘I don’t care, just get me out of here alive,’ Black replied.

  Healy called the medics. One jabbed a syringe full of morphine into the sergeant’s thigh and another placed a tourniquet above where his knee had been to stop the femoral artery from haemorrhaging.

  ‘The medics did a good job to keep him alive,’ Healy says now.

  Peterson’s position on the slope of Hell’s Halfpipe turned out to be better than he’d first thought. The wounded were located at the casualty collection point down in the bowl, near where Jock was manning the southeast corner, and al Qaeda had begun shooting at them, zeroing in on their position.

  ‘It was crazy. At one point you just get mad,’ Peterson says. ‘I’m trying not to [but during] a particularly intense mortar barrage, we’re getting nailed and I was infuriated. I was mad. I wanted to just kill all those guys because they would not stop and I’m watching our guys get hit left and right and they’re hitting the CCP — the casualty collection point — and re-injuring people.’

  Sergeant Pete’s men were running from one side of the bowl to the other, firing with their weapons on automatic burst. The return enemy fire tossed them around, but the young soldiers got right back up and returned fire. The shooting would be intense for two or three minutes, then go quiet for a couple of minutes. What the hell’s going on, Sergeant Pete thought in the brief silence between each barrage. And then it was on again. Volley for deadly volley.

  ‘There may have been a couple of wuss boys out there, but you know what … the kids were awesome,’ Peterson says. ‘Those guys — they’re buck sergeants and privates — win all wars, you know. It’s not leaders like Sergeant First Class Peterson at the time.’

  Staff Sergeant Randal Perez had also risen to the occasion and was continuing to lead by example, doing the job of a lieutenant. As Mark Thompson would write in Time magazine six months after Anaconda: ‘Perez kept in touch with his men over the radio or by going helmet to helmet.’ Thompson recounted how Perez ran from one soldier’s firing position to another in and around the halfpipe. He was checking on his active troops as well as the wounded and would be recognised for his courage later.

  Healy couldn’t speak more highly of the soldiers’ bravery.

  ‘About five of the guys from Charlie Company stayed up on the ridgeline and they were receiving sniper fire and machine-gun fire, rounds were bouncing all around them, but they stayed there to cover our movement,’ Healy said four days after the ambush. ‘None of them faltered. They knew they could get hit at any time but they stayed there and held their ground and made sure we got out of there.’

  Down in the bowl, Jock had dragged some of the injured men into his shell scrape and was lying over them, taking shots and firing at the enemy, leaning on the injured for leverage. They were safe and out of the line of fire, deep in the Afghan dirt, but by manoeuvring the soldiers Jock had made himself more visible and increasingly more vulnerable.

  Jock was well aware of the dangers and knew that a ten centimetre shard of shrapnel with torn edges could cut a man in half, but the wounded needed to be protected. At all costs.

  Incooommmming, came the warning again.

  And a nasty fucking wait for the boom, Jock thought.

  The seconds between the warning and the explosion were sheer terror. Jock didn’t know if the mortar would make its destination and wipe them from the face of the earth in an explosion of blood and guts, or if it would be a dud.

  Booooom.

  ‘Mongrels,’ Jock thundered.

  Frank Grippe was astounded at the amount of fire, and later reflected on the injuries. ‘When a mortar came in … Sergeant Black just about got killed. We had a mortar land right in the middle of the TOC. Healy took some shrapnel, Jay Hall took some shrapnel. I was returning fire up on the hill and we had mortar rounds landing right in the bowl, I mean right in the bowl. It was pretty interesting,’ Grippe says with usual understatement.

  ‘It’s like someone hitting you with a sledgehammer. It’s just weird the way explosives deflect. And for whatever reason I got hit here in the upper hamstring and it put a hole in my side. That’s all. I yelled down to the TOC that I’m hit, and to the guy next to me. I kept returning fire and the guy next to me just put a gauze over the wound. It wasn’t till a couple of hours later that I got in the mode of looking at it.

  ‘If I take the attitude I’m out of the fight and go and sit on my arse and feel sorry for myself … you’re not setting an example for the troops. And you need every gun available, plus I’m just another pissed-off New Yorker. And when you meld the three together you just drive on.’

  Healy took the same attitude. As former Rangers, he and Grippe had survived the toughest of the tough training to graduate from Ranger School, and they understood the value of true leadership.

  ‘You can’t sit down and do a time-out or get on the disabled list,’ Healy says now. ‘That’s one more weapon that would be out of commission if you didn’t keep fighting … You are not going to lead troops if you basically give up and let them do the fighting. If you are able to still do stuff then you need to do it, and most people did that.’

  Two more mortars landed in the spot vacated by the US soldiers.

  Jock’s Australian colleague, SAS liaison officer Clint, was close to the command post when the mortars walked in but was luckier than Hall, Healy, Grippe and Black and had the relative luxury of more cover. It was all relative.

  ‘Clint nearly got nailed by a mortar big time,’ Jock recalls.

  Clint was about two metres at the absolute maximum from the centre of the blast. His personal radio took the brunt of the shrapnel which ripped through its speaker.

  The mortar rounds that nearly took out the entire command of the 10th Mountain got the adrenaline pumping. Jock was amped. He could see how Sergeant Pete and Sergeant Major Grippe charged their men to great heroics and he was going to do all he could to keep them in the fight.

  Mortars raged on. Doc Byrne threw himself over one of the injured when incoming was called — ‘probably one of the bravest things I saw,’ says Sergeant Pete.

  Jock saw it too. Fuck this, he thought. This is beyond ‘Do no harm’.

  Jock got on the lifeline and radioed in to the chook pen.

  He spoke firmly and clearly. ‘One Oscar, this is Niner Charlie. We are taking casualties from mortars. We need CAS.’

  Jock was calm but the intensity of his voice conveyed the message.

  He ended his transmission with a stab at irony. ‘Back to digging in. Out.’

  There was nothing he could do but wait.

  Sergeant Robert Healy was at the new command-and-control point in Hell’s Halfpipe when one of his privates yelled down to him. The kid was up high on the slope of the bowl, out in the open, lying flat on his guts, his rifle propped on a rock, as he looked through his binoculars.

  ‘Sergeant Healy, come here,’ he yelled.

  Healy raced up the sl
ope. If a young private calls for help, you don’t leave him wanting or waiting, especially not when bullets are bouncing all around him.

  ‘I think I see where the guy directing mortar rounds is,’ he said, pointing up at the eastern ridge and handing Healy his binoculars. The snow on the mountains had turned black from the bombs, changing the complexion of the Takur Ghar.

  Thunk. A bullet ricocheted off Healy’s helmet, nearly knocking him over.

  Healy collected himself and searched through the binos, spotting the dirty big mortar tube sticking out of a cave. The private was right. Hoo-ah! Healy slid down the slope to the radio and ordered the forward air controller to call in an air strike, while the kid held his position up on the slope.

  A fast mover screamed in and fired at the coordinates that the FAC had read out to the pilot.

  Booooom.

  The al Qaeda hide went up in a puff of smoke.

  ‘I was very impressed with the young privates. I am in awe because those kids were amazing,’ Healy says now.

  The youngest soldier in the battle, Daniel Menard from the 120mm mortar platoon, was shadowing Sergeant Pete’s every move, never letting him out of his sight.

  At one point during a particularly intense mortar barrage Menard crawled up to Sergeant Pete and lay there, staring him in the face.

  ‘What the hell are you lookin’ at?’ Sergeant Pete yelled.

  ‘I’m scared, Sergeant Pete.’

  ‘Man, we’re all scared, just keep fightin’.’

  ‘And he did and he performed. I can’t imagine a seventeen-year-old going through what he did. He was a boy. He should have been going to the high school prom, but now he’s a sergeant. He’s awesome.

  ‘Here is a seventeen-year-old kid — in my personal opinion he has got no business being out there,’ says Peterson, who has since retired from the US Army. ‘My son is seventeen now and I can’t imagine him going through the hell that Menard went through.’