No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  But as the battle wore on, the physical suffering nearly crushed him. Sometimes he would just lie back, put his head down, and say, “This freaking hurts.” Worse, he hadn’t been examined by Shurer. He knew the medic had his hands full, but this was ridiculous. I’m just an old country boy from Texas and I don’t know shit about medical stuff. My tourniquet is tied real tight, but come on, man. I need help, he thought. As much as he hated to do it, he shouted to Shurer, “Ron, you want to check me out, man?”

  The medic just poked his head up from working on Behr and Morales and gave Walding a thumbs-up. “You’re good,” he told him, too busy with Behr’s injuries to minister to Walding.

  “Are you kidding me?” Walding replied angrily. “That’s bullshit. Don’t tell me I’m good. Fuck you, I’m good. I have no fucking leg!”

  44

  Behr

  Behr was losing hope.

  As much as Shurer worked on him, he was still bleeding and in severe pain. He knew that if he wasn’t treated by a doctor soon, he would die. He had no idea how long the team had been trapped. They started the mission at dawn. It was early morning when they landed and it had taken at least an hour to get into position before they were hit. Looking at the sky, he figured it had to be the afternoon. If they stayed there too long, night would fall. Medevac birds couldn’t fly in at night. It would be too dangerous. And the temperature would drop, too. It was in the forties when they landed, and hadn’t gotten much warmer.

  It was getting harder and harder to think that they were going to make it out of there. When people are still shooting at you and helicopters can’t land and you’re up on a mountain and there’s no way they can evacuate you, it’s hard to be positive.

  Behr knew there was usually a ratio of how many people you want alive to people you need to medevac. The proportions were starting to tip. They still had Afghan commandos, but Behr didn’t think of them as saving the team members’ lives. The SF soldiers would have to do it themselves.

  Walding screamed for Shurer to help, but the medic continued to focus on Behr. He didn’t leave Behr’s side. That was another sign that Behr’s wound was serious.

  And Behr could tell that Shurer was tense. It was overwhelming for the medic. Shurer pulled back from Behr’s face for a moment and put his helmet back on. Seconds later, a bullet pinged off the helmet. Shurer was only a foot away from Behr, and Behr knew he was lucky that the round didn’t ricochet off the helmet and hit him in the face. Stunned by the impact, Shurer lifted his hands and looked like he was going to remove his helmet. As he did so, a scene from the movie Saving Private Ryan flashed into Behr’s head. In the movie, a bullet bounced off a U.S. soldier’s helmet during a battle, and when the soldier took it off to see if he was wounded, another bullet ripped into his skull. Behr mustered all the energy he could, screamed at the top of his lungs, “Noooooo,” and stopped Shurer from making the same mistake.

  But the force of the bullet had disoriented the medic. He was woozy and discombobulated. A few minutes earlier, Walton had also been hit in the helmet by two rounds, smashing the captain’s face into the ground and causing him to gag on some dirt.

  “I just got shot,” Shurer screamed.

  Ford yelled at him: “Check yourself. But I don’t see anything.”

  But Behr could tell it would take some time for Shurer to regain his composure.

  45

  Morales

  It wasn’t getting any easier. The fire continued to rain from the high ground. They were pinned on the ledge against the rock wall. An Afghan commando on another part of the ledge had just been hit in the head with a round and wasn’t moving. With blood gushing from his skull, he was probably dead. And at this point, it was unclear how they would even attempt to get off the mountain.

  This was no time for reflection, but Morales couldn’t help but think about his wife and his family. He wanted to survive so he could hug her. Tell her and his family how much he cared about them. The battle was a disaster, but he wasn’t giving up hope—that wasn’t in his DNA. He would keep fighting. But the reality was, if things didn’t improve soon, there was a chance that the insurgents would overrun their position.

  In all the confusion, he didn’t have time to think about CK. When he saw the Afghan’s lifeless body, he was startled. Then angry. CK was his little brother. They had spent so much time together during the deployment. They watched endless episodes of Friends and spent countless hours talking about their lives. Morales knew everything about CK. How he wanted so badly to be an American. How he dreamed of joining Special Forces. And like a big brother, Morales was always giving CK advice. He told CK that Special Forces really needed interpreters and he should focus on that. He remembered the days when they went to bazaars and how CK had looked out for his friend. He would barter with the merchants every time Morales picked up a trinket for Katherine. He would make sure he didn’t get ripped off, and the two of them would laugh about it later.

  Morales truly cared about CK. Now he was dead.

  When Shurer arrived, Morales waved him off and told him to work on Behr first. No question Behr was in worse shape than he was, Morales told the medic. He’d been shot first and needed immediate help. Behr was only a few feet from Morales, who had been watching the events unfold. He tried to help, firing his weapon, pointing out enemy positions. But it reached a point where the pain was just too great to do anything.

  Morales didn’t know how many insurgents were above them, but he estimated that there had to be at least a hundred, probably more. They had been entrenched in that village for who knows how long. This was their turf. They knew every cave and every hiding spot for snipers. They had the weapons. He could tell. The only hope was to bomb the shit out of their positions. But his team was so close they might be injured in any bombing run. It was a conundrum for sure. Bomb the enemy and run the risk of taking friendly fire. Or do nothing and run the risk of an entire Special Forces team being massacred in a remote valley. Not much of a choice. And something must have happened to the other ODAs and those commandos. Were they pinned down, too? Why aren’t they here? Morales thought.

  When Walding was shot, it was like Morales was hit again. Being wounded was one thing. Morales could handle that. But watching his friends—especially Walding—in agony was another. Walding was his best friend in the unit. There was nothing physical that Walding couldn’t do, and they pushed each other in the gym, or when they ran on the airfield. And when it was time to unwind, they would download TV shows and movies on their iPhones and stream them on the big screen TV in the recreation room. Big Brother was their favorite. They loved the intrigue and backstabbing and strategy as contestants brokered deals in order to last to the end of the show and possibly win $250,000. It was like real life. So many hours in the last few months were spent laughing their asses off watching back-to-back-to-back episodes of Big Brother. They even joked about trying out for the show when they returned home.

  Morales smiled for a moment when he recalled how Walding had reenlisted just a few weeks earlier during a routine border patrol mission. The goal of that operation was to protect a remote outpost, which had been attacked a few times at night. The Army had information that it was going to be hit again, and they needed soldiers to help reinforce the outpost. So Morales’s team and the commandos, along with an Army National Guard unit, rolled out of Jalalabad and headed east to the outpost in the desert.

  It was a huge convoy. His team drove to a small wadi and parked. They waited there all night while the National Guard trekked two more miles to the outpost with supplies. Morales’s team had to stay in position and wait just in case of an attack. They couldn’t leave their vehicles. Morales didn’t mind. The night before the trip, he had been promoted to staff sergeant, which meant he had his own vehicle and driver. For the longest time, he had been chauffeuring Wurzbach.

  And on the trip, they rolled past amazing scenery—like they were in some kind of travelogue.

  In one spot, they saw a
tent with two hundred camels standing outside with one leg tied to another. That was the way to prevent the camels from walking off. Or as Morales put it, they had on their parking brakes. During the trip, they traveled on a mountain pass that doubled as a superhighway for donkeys and camels headed back and forth from Pakistan to Afghanistan. He knew the Pashtun people don’t recognize that Pakistan-Afghanistan border. To them, it didn’t make sense. They were all Pashtun people on both sides anyway.

  The next morning, the team had to go to a base near the Torkham Gate on the famed Khyber Pass. As they were driving down an asphalt road close to Pakistan, they reached a checkpoint near the base that looked like a tollbooth on the New Jersey Turnpike. When the U.S. troops peeked inside Walding and Ford’s vehicle, they asked, “Hey, what unit are you guys in?”

  Walding, who was Ford’s driver, looked over at him. Without blinking, Ford responded, “We’re in the 201st [Afghan] Commandos.” They all started laughing, and when they neared the Pakistan border, Morales heard Walton ask Walding if he wanted to reenlist. Right there. In the middle of traffic. “Fuck yeah. I want to do it,” Walding said.

  So Walding exited the vehicle and Walton left his Humvee. Someone held up an American flag as a backdrop and Walton read him the enlistment oath. It was cool as shit, Morales thought.

  But now Walding was in the dirt, and there was nothing Morales could do to help him. He would do anything to just summon the strength to run over to his friend and help him put on the tourniquet, or sprinkle QuikClot or something on his wound. Just tell him he would be okay. But at this point, all he could do was watch.

  And pray.

  46

  Ford

  Tucked behind the butt of his M4 rifle, Ford kept shooting.

  Then he heard a snap, and the rifle fell from his left hand and dangled in front of him, clipped to his body armor by a carabiner. His left arm, his dominant hand, started to sting. The pain wasn’t tremendous. Kind of like that numb feeling when you hit metal with a sledgehammer. Ford looked down and tried to lift his arm up and couldn’t. His triceps was hanging off his arm. He had been shot.

  That sucks, he thought. It was probably that damn sniper.

  Sliding down against the wall, he pressed his helmet against the rock face in pain. Blood was starting to squirt onto the wall. I am going to bleed out and die if I don’t find the artery.

  Grabbing at the wound, he tried to put pressure on it. The left side of his uniform was soaked in blood.

  “Break your artery,” Shurer yelled from the other side of the ledge.

  Sliding his thumb under his arm, he found the slippery, blood-soaked artery and pressed it against his body. The bleeding stopped immediately. Stunned by the wound, he stayed against the wall for a few minutes to collect himself.

  “Fuck,” he said.

  Sanders, shooting nearby, saw the wound.

  “Hey, man. You’re going to be okay,” he screamed.

  Ford looked down at his torn triceps. The muscle looked like a piece of rare steak.

  “Bullshit, I’m fucked,” he said.

  “We need to get the fuck off this mountain,” Walding shouted.

  Ford was demoralized. Tired. The bullet had knocked some of the fight out of him. Pressed against the side of the cliff, he thought about life. For the first time in a long while, he thought of his family. His daughter and his girlfriend. Thoughts that had never crossed his mind during a fight in the past. For a few minutes, he felt mortal. He didn’t think he would die. But he knew he was hurt badly.

  Stealing a glance back at the ledge, he saw that the team wasn’t doing well. There were four guys down. Ford knew they had to get off the ledge or die there. Forcing the emotions down, he took a few deep breaths before standing up.

  “Hey, we need to get the fuck down there. We need to start getting this shit set up,” he said.

  Ford knew they had been in the same spot a long time. Too long, and with every minute the insurgents were getting closer. Shurer was taking too long packaging the wounded to move, and Walton was consumed by working on air strikes. At this point, all Ford was concerned about was survivability.

  But first, he needed to stop the bleeding. His team’s standard operating procedure was to centerline their tourniquet by rubber-banding it to the front of their body armor instead of in a pack on the side of their kit. That way, they could use it with either arm. But Ford couldn’t get to his because if he let go of the artery, he would bleed out.

  “Ron, I need a tourniquet!”

  Shurer, working on Behr, looked up at Ford. The medic was covered in blood and seemed overwhelmed by the carnage around him. Ford had watched him try and patch up his teammates for the past several hours, but the constant crack of rounds nearby and now more and more wounded stacking up had finally taken a toll.

  “I need to regain my composure,” Shurer said.

  Ford immediately forgot about the burning pain in his arm. He forgot about his family. He forgot about everything. Regain his composure? All Ford was seeing was red.

  “I will throw you off this fucking mountain.”

  But Shurer had been hit by the same bullet that passed through Ford’s arm. It ricocheted, striking Shurer in the helmet. Shaking it off, he finally scrambled out and slid the black tourniquet over Ford’s shoulder, cinching it tight with the Velcro band. Spinning the windlass rod, Ford could feel the pressure as the tourniquet slowed and then stopped the blood flow.

  But the pressure quickly built up and Ford’s arm started to hurt. The tourniquet’s band was also crushing nerves in his shoulder. Getting shot was nothing compared to how his arm hurt with the tourniquet. It sent pain shooting throughout his body.

  Struggling to the edge of the rocks, Ford was going to lead the evacuation. First, he had to climb down and help secure the shed in the wadi to use as a casualty collection point. Then he would give the orders to bring the men down. He was taking Williams with him. Ford had told him to grab a couple squads of commandos and set up along the two ledges to help move the casualties down.

  Ford sat down at the edge and pushed off with his good arm, sliding down the rocks toward the wadi. The descent was grueling. It was hard enough for someone in top physical shape to scale down the steep rocks. But Ford only had one good arm—and he knew the insurgents would have him in their crosshairs.

  He had to take it slow. One step at a time. And when the space between the ledges was too wide, he would drop down and hope he didn’t tumble off the mountain. As Ford moved, several rounds hit nearby. Soon several enemy fighters above him started taking shots at him as he slid down the mountain. He had to stop on several of the ledges and hug the rock face to avoid being hit again.

  As he crawled down, Ford tried to keep his arm close to his body and out of the dirt, but after a few minutes he just let it hang. His torn triceps, exposed and hanging from his arm, dragged in the dirt and rocks. Each time he slid down the mountain, soil packed into the meat of his triceps. He didn’t care. He figured the arm was gone anyway. The only thing that mattered was making it to the bottom.

  47

  Howard

  Howard’s radio didn’t work. Unknown to him, he had hit the radio on a rock and broke the connection between it and the battery pack. So he wasn’t sure what was happening on top of the mountain. But from the gunfire he was hearing, it didn’t sound good.

  In the wadi, Howard had been looking up at the ledge where his team was pinned down. And that’s when he spotted Ford on the ledge signaling him to come up. Rounds were impacting in the dirt and rocks near him. Enemy fighters were shooting from the cliff above, so Howard figured they would be safe at the base of the cliff because of the angle.

  He signaled all of his commandos and they raced to the base of the cliff. On the way, he passed Wallen, who was trying to get a commando to move forward. Howard, safely at the cliff, looked back and saw Wallen still struggling with the man. He had the Afghan soldier by the shirt and was trying to lift him up to get him to
move forward. But the Afghan was just not moving.

  All around them, bullets were smacking the rocks. Howard was yelling to Wallen at the top of his lungs, “RYAN! RYAN! Get over here. Now!”

  It was one of those decisions that had to be made in a split second. Did Howard want to run out and grab Wallen, and risk getting shot? No. That wouldn’t help anybody, especially if they both went down.

  “RYAN! You are being shot at!”

  Wallen finally turned to look at Howard, then at the rounds impacting around him.

  “OH!” he said.

  Getting up, he sprinted to the cliff face. The commando, seeing him run, jumped up and headed toward Howard and the others.

  With everybody together, they started up the cliff toward Ford’s ledge.

  About halfway up the mountain, Howard could see Ford and Williams picking their way down the path. As they approached, Howard was shocked. Ford, the inspirational leader of the team, looked like shit. Howard could see the muscle and tissue from his arm hanging out of his shirt. He was caked with blood and dirt.

  “I’ve lost my arm. CK is dead. John lost his leg. Dillon has been hit,” Ford said as the groups met on the path.

  Stopping onto a ledge, Howard examined the arm and began inspecting the tourniquet.

  “Okay, calm down,” he said, pulling Ford’s injured arm closer so that he could bandage it.

  Ford jerked it away.

  “I need to get down,” he said, trying to move forward. Ford was convinced that he was going to bleed out and didn’t want Howard and the others to have to carry him down.

  But Howard refused to let him go.

  “Hey,” he screamed. “You need a field dressing on that!”

  Cutting open the shirt, Howard discovered a stream of blood oozing from the arm. Grabbing the tourniquet, he began to tighten it down. Digging in his kit, he fished out some Kerlix gauze and an ACE bandage. Covering the wound with the gauze, Howard tried to wrap the entire wound in the bandage to keep everything in place.