Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War

by Bing West

  Copyright (c) 2012 by DM Tactical and Francis J. West, Jr.

  Maps copyright (c) 2012 by David Lindroth, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Meyer, Dakota.

  Into the fire : a firsthand account of the most extraordinary battle in the Afghan War / Dakota Meyer and Bing West.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-679-64544-3

  1. Meyer, Dakota, 1988- 2. Ganjgal, Battle of, Ganjgal, Afghanistan, 2009.

  3. Afghan War, 2001- —Personal narratives, American. I. West, Francis J.

  II. Title.

  DS371.4123.G36M49 2012

  958.104‘742—dc23

  2012026889

  www.atrandom.com

  Title-spread photo: Capt. Jacob Kerr

  Jacket design: Carlos Beltran

  Jacket photograph: (c) Dakota Meyer

  v3.1

  The battle of Ganjigal resulted in the largest loss of American advisors, the highest number of distinguished awards for valor, and the most controversial investigations for dereliction of duty in the entire Afghanistan war. This is the story of a man who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his bravery in that battle.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  List of Maps

  Introduction:

  Along the Afghan-Pakistan Border

  1. Finish the Game

  2. The Marine Years

  3. Monti

  4. Advising

  5. Coming Together

  6. Out of the Smoke

  7. Ganjigal

  8. Into the Valley

  9. Paralysis

  10. Lost

  11. Into the Fire

  12. Into the Wash

  13. Primal

  14. Team Monti

  15. Dab Khar

  16. Cheerleaders

  17. Old Haunts

  18. All In

  Postscript: Swenson

  Epilogue by Bing West

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix 1: Ganjigal Timeline

  Appendix 2: Medal of Honor Citation for Cpl. Dakota L. Meyer, USMC

  Notes

  About the Authors

  Maps

  The Region

  Ganjiga

  Full Ganjigal Battlespace

  Ganjigal Ambush

  Meyer Swarmed During Medevac

  Dodd Ali Found

  Introduction

  ALONG THE AFGHAN-PAKISTAN BORDER

  SUMMER 2009

  Lt. Mike Johnson, our team leader, leaned his head way back next to my knees and shouted up the turret hole to me:

  “We’re gonna love it here! Look at those mountains, Meyer! Heavy stuff! Let’s go hiking!”

  He was yelling over the diesel grind of our Humvee’s engine, the deep drumming of our heavy iron suspension, and the clatter of the gun turret, as I cranked the .50-cal back and forth, chasing my suspicions around the landscape from one likely ambush spot to the next. To man the machine gun atop a Humvee, you stand up through a hole in the roof. Your legs are behind the guys in the front seat.

  We were roaring through the steep valleys of the Hindu Kush. The Khyber Pass was to the southeast of us—the famed route from the Western world into Pakistan and then India. We were heading north, away from the Khyber, along a river road you wouldn’t want to travel without us. Convoys like ours often get rained on by bullets and RPG shells—rocket-propelled grenades. The local drivers of the big civilian trucks will then panic—understandable—and swerve and crash into each other and tip over and catch on fire and block the narrow highway.

  The lieutenant and I had become friends during our weeks of training in California’s High Sierras. He’d try to beat me to the top of a ridge at the end of each day. Then we’d build a lean-to for the night, boil our ramen rice noodles, and sleep under a zillion stars. You couldn’t beat his enthusiasm.

  His specialty was communications. Riding now in the Humvee’s shotgun seat, he had control of two radios stacked one on top of the other: one for the convoy and one in contact with the command post, which was ten miles back. So he was paying attention to all that and to the risks around us, and, as usual, said something funny to lighten us up, which makes you more alert. Fear slows down your logic circuits, gives you tunnel vision, and triples your heart rate, which isn’t helpful in modern combat. A good leader keeps you from getting too scared.

  I scanned the bleak ridgelines, the big boulders and small caves, scrawny trees and thorny underbrush, all offering cover for snipers. You look for movement or a reflection. Gone were the stands of soaring green fir trees I’d seen in postcards at the airport. I would soon learn that a common English word that had made it into the Pashto language was chainsaw—for decades the mountain tribes had been cutting down their forests and selling the timbers to their rich Pakistani neighbors.

  “I’m telling you, Meyer,” Johnson said, “I’m going to be a forest ranger and live the good life.”

  More likely he’d wind up in Silicon Valley, not hidden away in some wilderness, I thought. He was the only married man on our team and had been living on Okinawa with his wife. Truthfully, I couldn’t figure out why he had volunteered to be an advisor in the first place. The Afghan Army used Radio Shack-type handheld radios, far below his technical skills. He had mentioned Marine traditions in his family. Being a leader was one of them.

  Staff Sgt. Aaron Kenefick was our staff NCO (noncommissioned officer). The way it works is your lieutenant, which in our case was Lt. Johnson, is your leader. Your staff NCO is more the administrator. Staff Sgt. Kenefick was the old man at age thirty, and considered himself the ramrod of our outfit. I had sized him up as your typical platoon sergeant, serious, squared-away, and by-the-book. A true New Yorker, he loved his Yankees and kidded me about my Kentucky accent, which isn’t an accent at all but just the way real Americans talk.

  Our Navy corpsman was “Doc” Layton, more formally Hospital Man 3rd Class James Layton. As a twenty-two-year-old “boot” (what you’re called on your first tour), he kept his medical supplies in meticulous order, according to him anyway, and his mouth shut when he was around Marine veterans. Inside our little team, though, he was laid-back and droll, a classic California surfer dude.

  As for me, I was the only grunt on the team, the infantryman and the weapons trainer. I wasn’t there to train the other three members of my team, but the Afghan soldiers we were on our way to meet. All four of us were coming in as advisors in our areas of specialty. My desire to see action was a running joke. For my twenty-first birthday, Staff Sgt. Kenefick and Lt. Johnson had presented me with a cake that consisted of a piece of bread with a smoking cigarette on top. The others were looking to do their jobs and return home; I was looking for a fight.

  We were rolling alongside the Kunar River now, nearing Combat Outpost Monti, the mountain ranges on each side looking like the black skeletons of two massive dinosaurs. We drove past valley after valley, steep cuts carved into the mountains by thousands of years of rain, earthquakes, and erosion, each one occupied by a small, illiterate tribe.

  My town in Kentucky is surrounded by gentle hills, rich in grass a
nd water. Our tractor blades cut easily through the topsoil. Still, we know the grind of farm work; the animals and crops don’t take care of themselves. Farming communities work hard, share a bond with the land, and stick together. One long look at those hollows and the stone homes clustered back in the hills told me all I needed to know about the people we were dealing with. It takes plain stubbornness to hack a living out of that flinty earth. If the villagers supported the insurgents, we were in for a long war.

  We drove past a few rugged-looking guys with beards and long sticks, beating their sheep off the road. When I waved, they refused to wave back. The tribes, we had learned, lived by the three rules of the Pashtunwali code: courage, hospitality to strangers, and revenge for personal slights. Tough guys. Since the 1930s, the tribes in Kunar had rebelled seven times against the central government. The Russians in the late 1980s never subdued Kunar. In 2001, Osama bin Laden escaped into Pakistan by way of Kunar. A wild place.

  “Why’s it called Monti?” I called down to Staff Sgt. Kenefick, who was seated just behind my legs.

  “Three or four years ago,” he called back, “there was a big firefight. Some Army guys were going up a mountain to set up an observation post. They got ambushed.”

  Aaron scooted up so I could hear him better:

  “Monti was the staff sergeant, and he pretty much did a suicide run to get to a wounded private who was stuck in the kill zone. Monti kept getting pushed back, but then he would make another go. On his third try he got hit and didn’t make it. But he called in the helicopters before he made his run. Four guys were killed. Monti got the Medal of Honor. That’s why they named the place after him.”

  For the record, Jared Monti, Brian Bradbury, Patrick Lybert, and Heathe Craig were the brave guys who didn’t come back from that one.

  A half-hour earlier that afternoon we had rolled out of Camp Joyce, a forward operating base about ten miles south of our destination, Combat Outpost Monti.

  In eastern Afghanistan in 2009, the U.S. Army provided the conventional battalions and the Marines supplied the advisors to the Afghan Army. Joyce was the headquarters for U.S. Army Battalion 1-32, tasked with preventing enemy infiltration from Pakistan. Joyce was also the headquarters for the Afghan battalion that we were advising.

  While our four-man team was to live up at Monti, Lt. Johnson reported to Maj. Kevin Williams down at Joyce. Altogether, there were twenty-one Marines on the embedded training team, ETT 2-8. We were spread out in different numbers among five outposts like Monti. Each outpost was supposed to block the exit from a key valley. Insurgents avoided the posts by taking back trails around them. And since the tribesmen walked twice as fast as any American, you couldn’t sneak up on them out on those trails. The outposts, though, did cut down on the heavy supplies the bad guys moved from one point to another.

  Before we left Joyce on the convoy to Monti, the local commander of the Afghan Army, Lt. Col. Eshok, greeted us warmly. He had fought against the Soviets and served as a bodyguard for Massoud, the famous warlord who was assassinated by Al Qaeda, two days before their attack on New York. Massoud was the man who was credited with defeating the Russians in Afghanistan. He opposed militant Islam as practiced by the Taliban and Al Qaeda, and organized the Northern Alliance against them. It was interesting to me that Massoud’s picture, and not President Hamid Karzai’s, hung on Eshok’s wall. Eshok had been on good terms with the advisor team we were replacing and had a standard speech.

  “Kunar people like Americans,” he told each new team of advisors. “You bring money and build roads. We Askars [the Pashto word for soldiers] are your partners. The border police at this base are okay, but not the local police. They set up checkpoints to steal from the farmers.”

  As we left Joyce, 1st Sgt. Christopher Garza, the top enlisted Marine on the ETT, said whatever supplies we four advisors needed would be on the next convoy north to Monti. However, the Afghan company we’d be working with would try to use us rather than their own supply line. Major Williams was all about pushing the Afghans to get their shit in order. So we shouldn’t do the Afghans’ work for them. Hold them accountable. That sounded like a good deal to me. Our headquarters down at Joyce would focus on straightening out the screwed-up Afghan logistics, leaving us four up at Monti a free hand to work on tactics and fighting.

  We made our trip to Monti without incident.

  Located on the remains of an old Afghan combat base, Combat Outpost Monti was typical of what you would see anywhere in Afghanistan: a flat rectangle of dust and gravel enclosed in Hescos and barbed wire. Hescos were square burlap bags as tall and wide as a man, held together by a wire frame and filled with a ton of dirt: inexpensive shields against bullets, RPG rounds, and truck bombers. At the gates and corners of Monti, two- and three-story concrete towers provided protection and some observation for the sentries.

  The base was the size of six or seven football fields, one-quarter set aside for the Afghan soldiers and the rest for the Americans of Dog Company from Battalion 1-32. A hundred-man Afghan company lived in several plywood barracks to the south, separated by a line of Hescos and a parking lot from the barracks of one hundred U.S. soldiers. You have trucks and Humvees parked in rows, fuel and water bladders, a mess hall, showers, and plywood bunkhouses. Enough gravel is brought in so you are not always knee-deep in mud during the rainy season. Everything is prefab: the whole place is a beige and dusty Legoland. Lumber comes in quickly on trucks and copters and the defenses are put together before the enemy can decide what to do about it. Bigger bases are called forward operating bases, or FOBs, and they have compact hospitals and larger gyms. The combat outposts, or COPs, like Monti, were little forts on the frontier where you could be a little bit safer than if you were out in the open. The designation COP or FOB was flexible; a base might get bigger or smaller and still keep its original designation.

  We four advisors moved into our own bunkhouse in the Afghan section, which you call a hooch—probably a word picked up by soldiers during the Vietnam war. Our little hooch had concrete walls inside. Ropes were nailed along the walls like towel racks to hang some of your stuff. There were little scraps of paper stapled to the wall—sports team posters, family photos, and calendars. There was flickering electric power from the generators, four beds made from wood, four folding canvas chairs, a plywood table, and four lumber T-stands to hold our body armor. There was an always-chattering tactical radio connected to Dog Company’s TOC (tactical operations center), located just across the other side of the Hesco barriers that divided the camp.

  A Dog Company sergeant and the Marines we were replacing gave us the camp tour. The TOC was an impressive war room, with good views of everything around. There was a screen for watching live video feeds and replays from aircraft and drones circling the Pakistani border a few miles to the east. There were radio and satellite connections to higher headquarters and to the artillery guns just outside. There was a bank of radios for keeping in touch with patrols in the field, and detailed maps were taped on the walls. In a nearby room, they had a radio intercept unit listening to enemy chatter. Those on watch could steer long-range cameras on blimps floating thousands of feet in the sky and tethered at a base several miles to the south.

  The problem with the area around Monti was that the terrain was too rough and steep for any kind of vehicle, once you got off the few roads that went along the rivers and not much more than a few hundred yards up the hollows. After that, it was all foot and hoof, which was why Monti was set up astride a main trail between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The mission was to cut down on enemy infiltration from Pakistan and to hold open a fifteen-mile section of road that ran alongside ridgelines so steep you could roll rocks down on passing vehicles.

  The soldiers from Dog Company explained that the enemy was a collection of insurgent groups with different names, grievances, and ambitions. They were Taliban with a small “t.” Some were allied with Al Qaeda terrorists; others were warlords and smugglers. Some were die-hard Islami
st mujahideen or holy warriors, dedicated to killing infidels; others were illiterate teenagers drawn by adventure and male bonding. In a kahol, or extended family, if one son joined the Taliban, the chances were that others would follow to fight in the same gang. If the leader was killed, someone from inside the gang, usually a relative, replaced him.

  They warned us never to let down our guard. We lived in the shadow of Pakistan, a vast, 1,500-mile-long sanctuary with disciplined guerrilla fighters. We listened to radio intercepts of insurgents taunting us from Pakistani towns ten miles away. We watched video from UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that showed Pakistani trucks driving up to the border and loading munitions onto donkey trains. In the towns, money-changers sat at glass tables, offering Pakistani rupees for the Afghan soldiers’ paychecks. Most of the finished goods in the area—clothes, shovels, pots, bicycles—were manufactured in Pakistan. Families, merchants, smugglers, traders, and insurgents walked daily across the border. To the Pashtuns, Pakistan wasn’t a country; it was the far side of the mountain where their cousins lived.

  “We’ll keep the four of you posted if anything big is going on in the sector,” said the sergeant who gave us the tour. “There’s a radio in your hooch. You let us know whenever you leave the wire on patrol.”

  He showed us the gym, the showers, the dining hall, and the Internet stations. Wherever you are these days, you can get satellite Internet and make live video calls back home, so there’s a lot of that. “So just make yourselves at home here, and use our maintenance guys if you have any vehicle issues. Don’t let things go too long, because these roads really eat up the vehicles.”

  Well, I’m from Kentucky, and even by my high standards this was looking like a very friendly little town. Dog Company made us feel right at home.

  Only in the smallest combat outposts do the Coalition and Afghan troops share the same bunk areas. Monti wasn’t that small, but the four of us who had just arrived were bunked on the Afghan side because we were there as advisors. That was fine with me. The sooner we settled in, the sooner we’d be outside the wire on combat patrols, which was where I wanted to be.