No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  It was a brief moment of relief because seconds later, Behr collapsed. Clutching his hip, he was yelling in agony. He was hit, and while Behr was alive, he was still in the line of fire. Bullets were skipping off the dirt inches from his body. There was no way Carter could leave him out there. So, without hesitation, he ran toward the fire to rescue him.

  He grabbed Behr’s arm and began pulling him toward an overturned tree for protection. “Come on, dude, it’s going to be all right,” he said.

  Carter was struggling to move Behr’s body, until Morales arrived at the scene. Together, they dragged him to safety. It was clear Behr was seriously injured. Blood soaked the lower part of his uniform. He was moaning.

  It looked bad.

  20

  Walton

  Walton could feel the rush of adrenaline shoot through his body.

  That’s what happened when you were in the middle of an attack. At any moment, a bullet could end your life or a fellow soldier. You had to think clearly and straight because every decision involved life and death.

  Just before the firefight, he had received a detailed situation report, and it seemed that everything was going as planned.

  “Blocking positions set, moving into the assault.”

  Walton knew that Sanders and Walding were almost to the village. They had one more terrace to go. He was about halfway up with Behr, CK, Carter, and Rhymer. Bringing up the rear, Ford’s element hadn’t even started climbing yet.

  An F-15 flew low over the mountain, its engines sending a roar that echoed through the valley. Walton was getting a little concerned that the team was getting too spread out, but they hadn’t made contact with the enemy. Everything was going smoothly. Maybe they could get up to the village before Ghafour and his fighters could react.

  Then a high volume of fire exploded around him. They were in an open area. As bullets hit inches from his boots, Walton and CK bounded toward a small nook in the mountain. The crevice was the size of two TuffBoxes, too small to offer much cover. The rounds were coming straight in, and one ripped into CK’s skull. Walton watched as the Afghan collapsed.

  The captain felt like someone had punched him in the gut. CK was an important member of the unit. He liked CK, his upbeat personality. But he had to brush aside any personal feelings. Not when rounds continued to snap overhead and smash into the rock wall.

  Walton and his men were stuck in a kill zone, and he had to find protection. Scanning the ledge, he noticed an overhang about fifty feet away. It wasn’t much, but it looked like it could provide a little cover. But as he retreated to the area, a round hit Behr. As Carter and Morales moved Behr’s body, Walton reached to get the radio from Behr’s back so that he could call for help.

  Walton was wearing dual communication Peltor headphones, which allowed him to hear transmissions from the team’s net and from the satellite net. From the messages going back and forth between the different elements, he knew everybody was taking heavy, accurate fire.

  “Assault 2, move up. We have one casualty. We need Ron up here,” Walton said.

  Walton wanted to keep Shurer out of the fight. He was their only medic and he didn’t want him to get hurt. But he had no choice. Behr was seriously hurt and needed medical attention. And Carter and Morales didn’t know enough to save him.

  Plus, he needed as many guns in the fight as he could muster. Walton quickly got on the air to the commanders back in Jalalabad and Bagram.

  “Monster 33. Gremlin 36. Troops in contact.”

  That meant that Walton and his team were in combat and would need more help.

  “We’re taking effective machine-gun fire,” Walton continued.

  “How effective is the fire?” asked the battle captain from Bagram.

  “Pretty fucking effective.”

  Everybody in Afghanistan heard it, and they would continue to tune in and monitor the firefight for the next several hours as Walton and his team fought for their lives.

  21

  Ford

  Even though his team was under fire, Ford was confident that the battle would soon turn in their favor. But he was surprised at the intensity of the attack. How many men did the HIG have? It seemed like they were firing from every possible position.

  Just before the firefight, Ford had heard Morales’s warning over the radio, and he silently scolded his intelligence sergeant. Don’t tell me what you’re seeing, he had told the team over and over again. I just want to hear gunfire and I’ll figure out what you’re seeing.

  When Morales fired his shots, Ford was at the bottom of a trail that zigzagged up the mountain. He knew Sanders and Walding were well ahead and probably close to cresting the hill. Morales was halfway up the mountain with Walton and the rest of the command section.

  Soon the whole valley was alive with the snap of bullets and the roar of machine guns. It was the biggest barrage of fire he had ever seen on any trip to Afghanistan or Iraq. Rounds crashed around him, forcing him to scramble for cover.

  The nearby commandos pressed themselves against the cliff face. In the dirt, Ford tried to hide behind one of the many large boulders on the floor of the wadi.

  The shock of the fire quickly led to amazement as Ford realized these fighters were not your run-of-the-mill guerrillas. These insurgents had training that you didn’t typically see in Afghanistan. They returned fire from a knee. And the others waited until the team was spread out and working its way up the hill before opening up. This wasn’t the typical “spray and pray” style, hoping Allah wills a bullet to the target. This fire was deadly accurate, steady, and punishing.

  “Get that Carl G rocking,” Ford shouted at Howard, who also was hiding behind a nearby rock.

  The Carl Gustav was an 84mm shoulder-fired recoilless rifle. Like a bazooka, it fired high-explosive rounds that could punch through the thick mud walls of the houses where the HIG fighters were hiding. With Howard working to get the recoilless rifle up and firing, Ford stole a look skyward.

  We need to start thumping them. Where are the Apaches?

  All around him the commandos and Americans were shooting back. It was impossible to see any of the fighters, so they shot at windows in the buildings, holes in the walls, and clumps of trees or piles of rocks where fighters were likely to be hiding.

  Grabbing a single-shot 40mm grenade launcher he was carrying, Ford started to lob grenades into the windows of the houses. After each one, he would snap open the shotgunlike breech of the launcher and slide in another baseball-size shell that resembled an egg sitting in a cup. Thump. Reload. Thump. Over and over he shot the grenades into the windows.

  Soon the thud of the grenade was followed by the whoosh of an RPG. Looking around, Ford spotted a small commando the team had nicknamed “Joe Pesci” staring at him with a shit-eating grin, his RPG loaded and ready to fire. Soon the pair were smashing windows of houses, hoping to kill or at least suppress the machine gunners on the ridge.

  Ford could feel the battle turning. They had taken the first blow, but they were returning fire, and when the Apaches finally started firing, they would be in good shape. A few more minutes and maybe they would have the initiative. Then he heard Walton call him over the radio.

  “You need to get up here now.”

  22

  Behr

  With bullets zipping by their heads, Morales and Carter dragged Behr twenty feet to the base of a small, uprooted tree near the edge of the cliff. All that protected them was a big clod of dirt and the tree’s thick dark trunk. But it was better than being out in the open.

  They were stranded, trapped on a wide-open stretch of rock—right in the enemy’s line of fire. The entire ledge was about sixty feet long and ten feet wide. A thirty-foot-high rock wall ran the length of the ledge. And perched directly above that back wall were several mud-colored buildings filled with HIG fighters. They were so close the team could hear their voices. There were a few nooks and crevices along the wall, but those indentations offered little cover to the soldiers. />
  The only place that seemed to offer any protection—a sloping overhead rock—was on the south side of the ledge. And it was there that Walton and Rhyner were pinned. It was a space just eight feet long and ten feet wide—the size of a bedroom. But there was more danger: Part of the ledge was surrounded on three sides by cliffs with vertical drops of nearly sixty feet. One wrong move and a soldier could roll off and fall to his death.

  “Calm down, dude, I got you,” Morales said to Behr. “It doesn’t look that bad.”

  Behr knew he was lying. He had to be. He’d been shot twice and could barely move. He could feel the blood seeping from his wounds. Morales was no medic, but he knew how to apply a tourniquet. That’s something soldiers learn in basic training. Crouching, Behr watched his teammate pull a tourniquet from his medical pouch. Morales was about to work on Behr’s arm, but Behr quickly stopped him.

  “No, here,” he screamed, pointing to his hip.

  “Okay, dude, I got it,” Morales said.

  Morales stared at the wound, then turned to Behr. “It’s too high up.”

  Behr knew what that meant: The tourniquet was useless for his pelvic wound. Tourniquets are used to help control severe blood loss, and are only used as a last resort. You have to put a tourniquet directly above an injury and tie it tight to cut off the blood flow. But tourniquets are mostly used on limbs. Direct pressure is the best way to stop pelvic wounds. And that’s what Morales did. He began applying pressure on Behr’s pelvis to stop the bleeding. When that failed, he removed a pair of “penny scissors” (scissors so sharp they can cut a penny in half) from his kit and sliced Behr’s pants to get a better look at the injury. Morales took a deep breath and pulled out an envelope of QuikClot, a blood-clotting agent in powder form, and poured it on the wound. When the powder mixes with blood, it turns into a cauterizing liquid that helps form a clot—a mass of coagulated blood—to stop the bleeding. Morales continued to work on Behr, applying pressure and more QuikClot—anything to halt the blood flow. Anything to keep Behr alive until Shurer could reach them.

  Behr watched as his friend worked feverishly to save his life, and he felt like a burden. He should be on his feet returning fire. Protecting his buddies. Instead, they were taking care of him. Behr began surveying the scene. It was total chaos.

  They were trapped on this damn ledge with no way to escape—at least not with the heavy fire.

  Then Behr’s eyes spotted CK’s body. Blood was pouring from an open wound. The interpreter was foaming at the mouth, and pieces of his skull had been splattered on the rocks. No way he survived. Too much blood. In fact, so much blood had spilled that the light brown dirt had turned maroon.

  Behr saw that Walton was struggling to use his radio, which had fallen to the ground when he was hit. Behr wanted to show the captain how to get it going, but he couldn’t move. The captain was shouting something at Morales, who was a few feet away. The gunfire was nonstop, and his pain was growing more and more unbearable. He closed his eyes.

  We’re never going to get out of here, he thought.

  23

  Walding

  Just before the barrage of gunfire echoed in the valley, Walding had planned to get a quick head count. It was in preparation to storming the nearest compound and setting up a strongpoint while the others climbed the mountain.

  But everything had changed.

  Pressed against the brick wall on the bank of a ditch, Walding wasn’t sure what to do. It was a worst-case scenario: They had been lured into a trap. But the strange part was that none of the bullets were being aimed at Walding or Sanders or their commandos. The insurgents were shooting over them—and directly into the middle of the pack at the team.

  “Hey, dude, they’re not shooting at us, man,” Walding said to Sanders. “I don’t think they see us.”

  Sanders agreed.

  “Game on,” Walding said.

  Walding and Sanders sat there and, like duck hunters at dawn, began picking off insurgents one at a time. “We got them, man,” Walding shouted. “They don’t have a fucking clue.”

  The soldiers sat there patiently and waited. And when an insurgent appeared in their scopes, they would pull the trigger. It was like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Still, it was tough to just stay in one spot. They could hear the gunfire. They wanted to help their team. It was one big shitstorm.

  They didn’t know how long they had been perched in the spot. They just kept firing—until they heard over the radio that Behr was shot, and that they were calling in air strikes on the compound.

  To help with the aerial assault, Walding and Sanders tried to mark the buildings for bomb drops. They fired rounds from their rifles into the side of the buildings to let the pilots know which ones to hit. Sanders also marked the buildings with his M203 grenade launcher.

  Walding then began to spread his commandos strategically on the side of the mountain so that if one got shot, it would just be one. Not the entire group. But with all that, Walding still faced a dilemma. He recalled that Ford had told him that if the shit hit the fan, “go up and take a house. There’s not an enemy out there that can freaking withstand an ODA house stronghold.”

  Walding considered storming and securing the building in front of him. Maybe they could turn that into a casualty collection point to move people out of harm’s way. But he scrapped the idea because it was just too hard to get up the mountain. There was no way the wounded could physically do it. Not with the incessant fire.

  The whole team was strung out over the mountain. He was up there with Sanders and a few commandos. Ford was somewhere. Walton was pinned down and Behr was wounded.

  All they could do was hold their ground and wait.

  24

  Morales

  The sound of Morales’s voice momentarily cut through the firefight.

  “I just got fuckin’ shot,” he shouted “Damn.”

  He sounded more pissed off than scared. He needed to keep fighting to protect his fellow soldiers. He didn’t want anything to slow him down. Now this? He was injured? It was just bad luck. The whole mission was surrounded by bad karma.

  Moments before, Morales had been working feverishly to save Behr’s life. He had tried to apply a tourniquet. Even poured QuikClot in the wound and applied pressure.

  The whole time, there was no lull in the action. Bullets were kicking up around them, but Morales was in the zone. He focused on Behr like a laser beam.

  “Come on, dude, man. You’re going to make it. You’re going to make it, man.”

  In the middle of working on Behr, Walton turned to Morales and began shouting something. But with all the gunfire, it was hard to make out the words. It seemed that the captain was asking Morales to fix Behr’s radio. It wasn’t working and Walton needed to use it.

  Morales started shouting instructions to Walton. But the captain couldn’t hear him because he was wearing Peltors that were connected to his radio. Morales knew there was probably heavy traffic over Walton’s radio. That would have made it even more difficult for the captain to hear him.

  “Luis, fix this,” Walton yelled again.

  Morales spotted the problem. The wire that connected the radio to the antenna was ripped out. All he had to do was reconnect it. It was simple. Just like connecting a cable wire to the back of a television. Twist and turn. He stood up to help Walton when he felt a sharp pain in his thigh. It was like a bodybuilder had just smashed his thigh with a sledgehammer. It knocked him down. He realized what happened when he looked at his bloody thigh.

  “I just got shot!” Morales yelled.

  “What?” Walton said.

  “I just got fuckin’ shot,” Morales screamed. “Damn.”

  Morales grabbed his upper thigh around his crotch and began squeezing. He wanted to see if the round had penetrated his femoral artery. The round opened a six-inch long wound and he was losing lots of blood. If his femoral wasn’t severed, it was pretty close.

  Morales was on the ground near the edge of the cliff.
His only cover was that small tree. That was it. And he would have to share the cover with Behr. There wasn’t much room. Morales continued taking care of Behr—even with his own wounds—and firing his rifle. But now the pain was so great that he grimaced and shook his head. He was going to beat it. Deal with it. He was going to stay in control. A Morales never quits, he thought. From his grandfather to his father, they overcame obstacles to make a name for themselves in the military. That was his goal, too. He was going to carry on the family tradition.

  Scanning the enemy positions, he noticed that most of the fire was coming from a mountain on the side of the ridge opposite to where the team was trapped. It was about a football field away.

  “Kyle, the guys who are shooting at us are over there,” he said, pointing to the mountain.

  Before Walton had a chance to respond, Morales felt a knifelike pain in his ankle. No one had to tell him what had just happened. He knew right away.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?” Morales shouted. A round had ripped apart his ankle. Now he was really angry. He’d been shot twice, and the pain was excruciating. It was nothing like he had ever experienced in his life. Parts of his flesh were excoriated—he could see tendons, bone. Pools of blood soaked his uniform. But Morales didn’t panic. Keep cool, keep your bearings, he thought.