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

by Bing West

  Twice I had heard Shadow say that air would be on station in fifteen minutes. Nothing had happened. How long do you do nothing while your friends are fighting for their lives?

  “Fox 7, this is 3-3. Sitting here is stupid. We’re going in.”

  Rod and I were on the net with Valadez. There was no dispute among us. It was about 0600—time to move. I was the vehicle commander, so the fault lay with me for disobeying orders if I arrived in the valley and discovered that the Command Group had the situation under control. I knew there was a good chance I’d be sent back to the States in disgrace. When I shouted to the Askars to follow us, they looked confused. Up on the north outpost, Valadez grabbed a senior Afghan sergeant. The sergeant radioed to the Afghan drivers clustered around our truck, urging them in Pashto to follow me.

  Mortar shells were falling a football field away, to our west. The enemy knew our trucks were somewhere on the path but uncertain just where. The explosions made the Askars jumpy. Just the same, some of them jumped into the two Humvees and roared into position behind us.

  “Rod, let’s go,” I said. He put it in gear.

  We headed slowly east on the narrow path that twisted among the uneven farming terraces, looking for a trail down to the wash off to our left. We were driving blind toward the sound of the guns. We hadn’t gone two hundred meters when PKM rounds started striking around us. They were coming from a ridge to our east, near Capt. Kaplan’s observation post.

  For a minute, I was confused. There was a torrent of firing a kilometer to our northeast, where the command group was pinned down. But we hadn’t yet reached the wash, off to our left. So why were we under fire?

  Then the light clicked on. I was too accustomed to the dushmen being on the defense, shooting and falling back. These pricks were on the offense, with separate packs moving west along the ridges on both sides of us. One group had skirted around Kaplan’s strong point. Shooting from higher ground, our truck looked to them like easy prey.

  I pivoted the Mark 19 and looked for muzzle flashes. None. The dushmen weren’t firing from exposed positions along the lip of the ridges; they were hunkering back in fixed positions. I watched for dust curls. Water was so scarce that the dushmen usually didn’t wet down the ground in front of the guns to help conceal their positions. When I saw a few wisps about five hundred meters away, I pumped out three-round bursts of explosive 40-millimeter shells, using the quick flashes of their detonations to adjust my aim. The PKM, however, continued shooting.

  We drove east another hundred meters when the Mark 19 jammed. I hadn’t fired more than 30 bursts and I always kept a clean, well-oiled gun. I worked the breach but the shell refused to eject, as if it had been welded into place. I switched to the 240 machine gun I kept in the turret as a backup. It wasn’t attached, so every time we hit a rut or bounced over a rock, which was about constantly, I’d throw a burst of fire in some crazy direction.

  “Rod, I need a stable gun,” I called down the turret to him. “We gotta go back and get another truck.”

  Rod had to move back and forth five or six times to turn us around, while I waved at the Afghan Humvees to follow us—I didn’t want them going in alone, and I didn’t want them parked in the line of fire. Back at the operational release point, we ran to another truck, threw extra cans of ammo into the back, and I climbed up into the turret behind a fresh .50-cal.

  By that time, several Askars were stumbling out of the battlefield, some bleeding, a few without their rifles, all exhausted.

  “Where Americani?” I yelled. “Dost? Dost?”

  The Askars pointed up toward the village.

  Again we started forward, passing more exhausted Askars as I threw them a few bottles of water. From his northern outpost, Valadez could see our truck.

  “Fox 7, this is 3-3,” I radioed to Valadez, “we’re lost down here. I don’t know how to get up to the village.”

  “Fox 3-3, roll to the Monti net,” Valadez said. “I’ll guide you in.”

  I switched to the alternative frequency and looked up at the huge ridge to my left.

  “Fox 7, I have no idea where you are,” I radioed. “I can’t follow your directions.”

  Valadez, with the enemy shooting at him, draped a bright orange air panel over a big rock. When he said “go right” or “go left,” I used the panel to orient myself and shout the direction down to Rod. About 150 meters down the trace, Valadez told me to take a sharp turn to the left.

  We went down into a draw. When we popped out the other side, a volley of RPGs hit us, one exploding so close to our left side that Miller, who was on the ledge above Valadez, thought we had been hit dead center.

  “Fox 3-3,” he radioed to me, “you have enemy at your nine o’clock, driver’s side.”

  That dushmen pack off to our east had been waiting for us. We took some PKM bursts, followed by a few mortar shells to our left front. I blindly fired the .50-cal while Rod kept the truck moving forward. We passed a group of Askars hiding in a ditch who waved frantically at me.

  “Rod, hold up!”

  Five Askars made a mad dash for the truck. Three piled into the backseats, while two others ran around to the rear, popped open the trunk, and crawled in. Once the doors were shut, Rod turned the truck around and we bounced back up the track. He pulled in behind a small rise that gave shelter from direct fire.

  “Drop them off?” Rod shouted.

  “Good a place as any!”

  When we stopped, the Askars refused to get out. I screamed at them and they tumbled out. I hopped down, closed the trunk, and rearranged the ammo boxes on the rear seats so I could get at them easier in the fight ahead. Rod turned us around and again we headed east. Toward the wash and the heavy fight, fifty or sixty Askars were trapped in the valley, along with my friends. The Afghan Humvees didn’t seem to be behind us anymore. Somewhere behind us was a U.S. Army platoon. It seemed to me to be time for them to make a move. They were the quick-reaction force, our insurance policy.

  Valadez was on the radio, arguing with Dog 3-6, the quick-reaction Army platoon leader.

  “Dog 3-6, this is Fox 7,” Valadez radioed. “You need to get in there, man. Fox 3-3’s to your front in a Humvee. Drive east until you link up with him.”

  “Fox 7, this is Dog 3-6,” the lieutenant said. “Our vehicles are too big for the mission.”

  We were driving on a footpath that was barely wide enough for our Humvee. Valadez came up with an alternative.

  “Dog 3-6, this is Fox 7,” Valadez radioed. “I understand. Drive forward until you reach the Afghan vehicles. Use them to get into the fight. There are people out there dying!”

  The platoon leader said he had to wait for clearance from the TOC at Joyce. Right.

  * * *

  I heard Swenson again asking for air, as he had been doing for about forty-five minutes. Again, the TOC was promising it would arrive in “fifteen mikes.” I later learned that inside the TOC, Staff Sgt. Lantz had grabbed a radio and, ignoring the battle captain, called the ops center at Jalalabad Air Base, seventeen miles to the south.

  “We have a bad TIC (troops in contact) in Ganjigal,” Lantz said. “Those guys need your help right away.”

  The squadron had helicopters in the air supporting an operation north of Ganjigal. The squadron ops chief agreed to re-task the birds immediately. Over the radio net, the pilots heard the request and flew south. Lantz had gone out of channels, and no written request had been sent via the official computer net. Lantz didn’t care; help was at last on the way.

  Inside the TOC at Joyce, Tech Sgt. Matzke, the Air Force NCO in charge of air support, demanded that the battle captain authorize fixed-wing close air support in addition to helicopters. Harting, the battle captain, hesitated, not saying yes or no, letting the request dangle in the air.

  Five minutes later, the helicopter ops center called back, saying re-tasking of the birds had been canceled because Lantz had not called his own brigade headquarters to ask permission and because another
mission north of Ganjigal was of “higher priority.”

  The refusal was too much for Shadow 4 up on the southern ridge. Sgt. Summers came back on the net, shouting that Ganjigal was “a heavy TIC,” meaning that Swenson’s requests should take priority and that the helicopters should be re-tasked immediately. Capt. Harting ignored Shadow’s plea and did not immediately call his brigade headquarters to demand air support.

  Capt. Kaplan heard that exchange and passed the bad news to Swenson.

  “We are not getting any air,” Kaplan radioed. “They said it was unavailable.”

  Down in the dirt where bullets were dusting up the ground around him, Swenson burst out laughing at how ridiculous the situation was. Harting had already acknowledged an estimate from the Shadow observation post that “thirty to sixty AAF” (Anti-Afghan Forces) were attacking. Ten minutes later, the TOC again received requests from Shadow for smoke in order to break contact. The requests were “denied twice due to proximity of structures.” The TOC assessed the enemy to number up to sixty—and wouldn’t authorize fire support.

  Swenson and Fabayo sat stunned.

  Lt. Johnson again contacted Fabayo on the radio.

  “You need to bound back to us,” Fabayo said. “We have to fall back.”

  “We’re pinned,” Johnson said. “If we leave, we’ll get shot. Get us smoke to get out of here.”

  Swenson knew there was no smoke coming, so he called for white phosphorus rounds.

  “We need Willie Peter,” Swenson radioed to the TOC at Joyce.

  White phosphorus is a sticky, gummy substance that burns intensely. It throws off a cloud of thick white smoke and is routinely used to conceal the movement of troops. Swenson wanted the Willie Peter to explode along the edge of the village. That way, the enemy machine-gunners would be shooting into a fog bank, permitting Team Monti to fall back to Swenson’s position on the lower steps of the terrace.

  White phosphorus is permitted by the UN Convention governing the rules of war. But during the Fallujah battle in Iraq in 2004, charges that Willie Peter had burned civilians created an uproar in the press. The TOC at Joyce denied Swenson’s request, explaining that the village was too close.

  More than an hour into the fight, the situation was as follows: Team Monti was trapped in a house; the U.S. and Afghan commanders were pinned down by shooters closing in on them from three sides; the north and south observation posts were under fire; the Askars were caught in the open with nowhere to hide; Rod and I hadn’t reached the wash; the 1-32 quick-reaction platoon was not quick-reacting; the TOC at Joyce was paralyzed, preventing artillery support; and the helicopter gunships had not arrived.

  Maj. Peter Granger, the executive officer now in command of the battalion while the highly competent Lt. Col. Mark O’Donnell was on leave, kept a cot in his office outside the TOC. Whenever he walked into the TOC, he was in charge as the senior man. But his occasional appearances only reinforced Capt. Harting’s hesitancy.

  “They [the Marine advisors and Afghan officers] didn’t know where all their soldiers were,” Granger said later. “They didn’t know if they’d be calling fire on their own. They didn’t have SA [situational awareness].”

  I could hear Swenson’s angry voice on the radio. How the hell was he to know where everyone was? That wasn’t the point. He knew where the machine guns were—in the hills around the village. Some from the lead platoon had run by him, streaming blood and shouting, some without their helmets or rifles. As he grabbed at two of them, bullets chipped the stones at his feet. All three flopped down as rounds cracked overhead.

  Some Askars, pinned down, weren’t returning fire. Dushmen with AKs were sneaking forward on the far sides of the terrace walls, picking off Afghan soldiers lying helpless on the ground. The Askars were targets, waiting to be hit in the beaten zone.

  Swenson wanted a massive artillery barrage. Because the dushmen didn’t have overhead cover, artillery airbursts would send millions of lancets racing down toward them. Hundreds of shells had to shake the mountains and roll thunder down the valley. The dushmen were zealots, but they weren’t crazy. Once artillery began exploding overhead, gunmen with AKs wouldn’t get up and run forward in the open. Each salvo of four artillery shells exploded with enough blast and red-hot shrapnel to blanket an entire football field.

  Yet the TOC refused to fire at Ganjigal, only a few miles from Camp Joyce. Unleashing a barrage in your own backyard wouldn’t win any applause at higher headquarters. The directive from the high command was clear: do not employ “air-to-ground or indirect fires against residential compounds, defined as any structure or building known or likely to contain civilians, unless the ground force commander has verified that no civilians are present.”

  After the fight had raged for over an hour, the TOC at Joyce finally directed Dog Platoon to prepare to move forward to the valley as “a potential QRF [quick-reaction force].” The platoon leader, Lt. Bielski, replied that he had not been given a grid location for a link-up with the force in the valley, and he hadn’t been told how far he was to advance. Again, there was hesitation.

  With Dog Platoon unwilling to help, Maj. Williams handed his cell phone to his interpreter, asking him to call for an Afghan quick-reaction force. Soon Afghan Humvees were leaving Camp Joyce—without any Americans from 1-32 joining them.

  Fabayo began talking to Johnson about an egress route, when he saw friendly mortar rounds landing on KE 3365.

  First Sgt. Garza watched the eight 120-millimeter shells detonate with no effect on the enemy rate of fire. Worse, many of the Askars were no longer returning fire. Some had emptied their magazines; others, not accustomed to the new M16s, had experienced jams and thrown away their rifles.

  The Command Group was taking fire from three sides: from the village to their front, from the ridges to the south, and from the terraces to the north.

  Lt. Johnson came back on the net, again requesting smoke “to conceal their movement.” I heard him give a grid, exactly where he wanted the shells to land. He was calm on the radio. Shadow, the Army outpost on the southern ridge, replied that the TOC at Joyce said the fire mission was too close to the village.

  “Too close to the village?” Lt. Johnson said. “If you don’t give me these rounds right now, I’m gonna die.”

  “Try your best,” Shadow replied, knowing the TOC wouldn’t fire.

  Try your best? From the tone of Shadow’s voice, I knew he was on the verge of complete rage. He wanted to strangle the officers in the TOC at Joyce. I felt the same way. This couldn’t be happening. We were on the same side. We weren’t Marines or soldiers; we weren’t Americans or Askars. We were one lone group fighting desperately to stay alive. The villagers weren’t our friends. This was war, and my team was on the verge of dying. Whose side was the TOC on?

  Radio call after call, Swenson kept requesting smoke. Finally, around 0630 the TOC at Joyce permitted four white phosphorus rounds to be fired into the southeast backside of the village, too far away to conceal my team. Those were the last rounds fired during the battle.

  At about 0640, the TOC at Joyce forbade any more artillery support, citing garbled communications, incomplete calls for fire procedures, and a lack of situational awareness on the part of those trapped in the valley.

  The enemy fire was holding steady, with occasional mortar rounds and RPGs mixed in with the PKM machine guns and the heavy DSHKA. The angle of the fire had shifted southeast, indicating to Fabayo that the Command Group was being cut off.

  After an hour with no helicopter gunships or artillery response, the villagers joined the winning side. Fabayo sensed that more and more men were shooting at him from inside the town. Lying behind a dirt mound, he saw flashes coming from a house on a hill to his right. Fabayo blasted the window of the mud house and the fire from that spot ceased. A woman in a red and purple dress was carrying ammunition from one house to the next. Swenson saw another woman stacking rocks to make a fighting position; he didn’t shoot at her.

 
; With the villagers spontaneously contributing a base of fire from the shelter of their houses, the hard-core enemy fighters seized the opportunity to sneak behind the terrace walls to cut off the Command Group. Fabayo saw that the far ambush was becoming a near ambush.

  The Command Group had to pull back. Swenson and Fabayo provided covering fire as Maj. Williams and 1st Sgt. Garza fell back, with rounds hitting at their feet. The reporter who was with them chose not to risk the run. He remained on the ground, with his face in the dirt. Williams and Garza were running in the open with machine-gun rounds striking in front of them. Garza sprawled flat just in time to avoid a burst right over his head. Next, an RPG exploded near him, throwing him to the ground. Dazed, he struggled up. Williams grabbed Garza and pulled him behind a terrace wall.

  Lt. Johnson and Team Monti were still holed up in a house as the Command Group fell back to avoid being surrounded.

  As we moved forward for the third time, the TOC had finally ordered the Army platoon—Dog 3-2—to move forward. They pulled in behind us, with the platoon leader in a Humvee with an anti-tank TOW missile on the roof. The TOW made no sense to me, but the truck was equipped with a 240 machine gun. Behind him were twenty U.S. soldiers in four heavily armored vehicles.

  “You rolling with me, Lieutenant?”

  I was confirming what I took for granted.

  “I’ll scout the route first, before I bring my platoon in. The terrain may be too tough.”

  He refused to put his soldiers into the Afghan vehicles. I could understand that.

  “Okay. I go first,” I said. “You cover our six. The Afghans will be behind you.”

  I waved to the Afghans standing beside their trucks.

  “Burayam! Let’s go!” I said.

  We headed down the trace, with Valadez giving us directions. It was about 0645. As we bounced forward, I heard Team Monti again come up on the radio.

  “We’re under fire,” Lt. Johnson said. “We’re surrounded!”

  * * *

  The Command Group had now fallen back into the terraces below North Ganjigal. They were spread out, but close enough to shout back and forth. Lt. Fabayo saw our Humvee a few hundred meters to the west, well behind his forward position. He urged the Askars huddled around him not to get up and run toward us. He pointed to a dead Askar nearby.