by Bing West
“If you stand up,” he shouted, “that’s going to happen to you. You got to keep calm.”
Swenson’s interpreter, Shafi, was listening on his handheld when an insurgent leader came up on the border police radio net. The insurgent had either taken the handheld from a dead policeman or had bought it in the market. The police, the Askars, and the Taliban all used cheap, commercial handhelds and often hurled insults at one another.
“The Russians made the same mistake coming here,” the insurgent said in Pashto. “The elders invited you in; I decide if you leave. You must surrender.”
Shafi yelled the message across to Swenson, who dismissed the taunts as crazy talk. Fabayo was lying nearby behind a small mound of dirt to avoid the grazing fire of a machine gun. He heard some shouts in Pashto, something about giving up. He glanced up to see what he thought were four Askars in Kevlar helmets, their gear askew, coming around the side of a terrace. He yelled at them to get down.
But the soldier in the lead had a beard, a green chest rig, an armored vest, and cream-colored pants. He was no Askar. When the soldier raised an AK, Fabayo shot him in the chest. Low on ammunition, Fabayo then scrambled over to Williams to get more magazines. The three other dushmen hesitated long enough for Swenson to lock eyes with a man wearing a black helmet. Then the enemy slid back around the corner. Swenson reached into his pack, took out a grenade, lobbed it over the terrace wall, and ducked.
I hope I pulled the cap off the grenade, he thought. I don’t want some kid to find it intact and blow himself up.
The grenade detonated and the fighters did not reappear. Rahimula, Major Williams’ interpreter, was then shot and killed. More dushmen were moving in from the terraces to the south to cut them off. Fabayo took a head count before falling farther back.
“Where’s the reporter?” he yelled. “Where’s the reporter?”
Swenson thought the reporter was dead. But after about twenty-five minutes, he risked the fire and ran back to the Command Group. Fabayo’s M4 had jammed and Swenson, who carried five hundred rounds for his M4, was busy providing suppressive fire for the entire command party. Fabayo checked on the three wounded Askars lying a few feet away. One had been shot again in the back and had died. Fabayo was soaked in so much blood that the notepad in his pocket had crumbled. Off to his left, he saw a bleeding Askar jump down from a higher terrace, screaming for help. Fabayo started to crawl to him when he heard Williams yell, “I’m hit!”
“You okay, Major?” Fabayo shouted.
Williams had been hit in the inside of his left forearm.
“I’m fine,” Williams said. “Keep going!”
Fabayo reached the Askar, who had been shot in the lower stomach. As he applied an H bandage, two other Askars straggled over to him. Both Lt. Rhula and his first sergeant had been shot in their thighs. Fabayo cut away their trousers, wrapped the wounds in gauze, and handed them anti-infection pills.
Several meters away, Garza and Sgt. 1st Class Westbrook, Swenson’s NCO, were firing steadily.
Fabayo was pinned down by the machine-gun fire when he heard Garza yell, “Sergeant Westbrook’s been hit!”
Garza ran over to Westbrook, who, with blood oozing from his neck, was struggling to get to his feet. Rounds were zipping past as the dushmen aimed in to finish him.
“Stay down!” Garza said, looking at the wound. “Stop trying to get up. You’ll get shot.”
The three wounded Askars crawled to the stone wall holding up the edge of the terrace and dropped down to the next terrace, leaving Fabayo alone. Swenson looked back to see one Askar stand up and take a bullet in the neck.
Garza, out in the wash thirty meters away, yelled for help moving Westbrook out of the line of fire. The reporter rushed out and together they pulled Westbrook back. Fabayo dropped his first-aid bag and sprinted across to Garza, who was holding Westbrook’s hand and reassuring him. Westbrook was heavy, and it took the reporter, Garza, and Fabayo pulling together to carry him behind a terrace wall.
A bullet had entered Westbrook’s neck near the shoulder blade and ricocheted downward, a dangerous but not fatal wound. Swenson applied Quick Clot powder and a bandage to seal off the bleeding.
The fight had been raging for over ninety minutes and the chain of command throughout Kunar Province was on alert. Procedures for releasing helicopters had been unsnarled, and two OH-58 Kiowas were en route to the valley. At 0715, they contacted Swenson.
“Highlander, this is Pale Horse,” the PC (pilot in command) radioed. “What do you need?”
“Pale Horse,” Swenson replied, “am under heavy fire from the village and the hills to the east and on both sides. Request immediate suppression while we pull back.”
The Kiowa squadron had been in Kunar for ten months. The pilots knew the terrain and enemy habits. They intended to swoop in low in crisscrossing strafing runs, deliberately swerving and cutting back at odd angles. They didn’t care whether they hit the dushmen; they wanted to force them to crouch down and cease firing. The aerial tactics would allow the Command Group to pull back westward down the draw under reduced enemy pressure. The reporter and Garza propped up and carried Westbrook and some of his gear.
As Swenson moved, he called for a medevac. Shadow radioed back that the TOC wanted questions answered before calling for one.
“Is he Army or Marine?” Shadow said.
Swenson cursed; Maj. Williams was more diplomatic.
“This is Fox 6,” Williams radioed. “It doesn’t matter his service. He’s U.S.”
There was a pause, then Shadow reluctantly radioed, “Repeat, TOC needs to know if he’s Army or Marine. It’s in the regulations.”
Swenson ignored the request. Fabayo and Swenson unfolded their orange air panels in preparation for a medevac by helicopter. When that drew the attention of the enemy machine-gunners, Swenson ordered everyone to pull back west another two hundred meters. As they were falling back, Williams and Garza were carrying the gear of the wounded and returning fire, while Westbrook, barely conscious, was helped by Fabayo and the reporter. At least twice they had to duck for cover as machine-gun bullets and rocket-propelled grenades impacted behind them and to their right side.
Standing up in the turret, I saw the group of Americans staggering down the wash to our left. Our Humvee was almost clear of the terraces and about to enter the wash when Rod came to a sudden halt. There were big bags of a white powder in the path just ahead. It was the stuff the dushmen use to make roadside bombs. There was no way to go around the bags. We had a cliff wall on our left and a sharp drop-off on the right.
Rod shouted up the turret.
“Looks bad, Homey!”
Chapter 11
INTO THE FIRE
It was standard procedure for the dushmen to place sacks of ammonium nitrate in shallow holes, insert a blasting cap, and run a wire to a flashlight battery. They’d cut the wire and glue each strand to a piece of wood, with the ends almost touching. When a foot or a tire wheel applied pressure, boom.
“I don’t think they had time to wire them up,” I said. I had no way of knowing that for sure, but I wanted to believe it. They might have seen us coming and rigged it in a hurry to cut us off.
“You ready?” Rod said.
He dropped the truck into gear. I hung on to the turret, eyes squeezed shut. I waited to be flung into the sky and wondered if I could do a backflip in the air and land on my feet—not that it would make any difference. I’d be dead, but you have a few funny thoughts in the infinite split seconds of a battle.
We rolled over the bags. There was a slight bump, and we continued driving.
“All right!” Rod yelled.
Ahead of us the trail cut sharply to the left and led down into a gully. Rod hit the accelerator, and we gained speed downhill. I lost sight of Valadez’s orange air panel up on the ridge. Then we popped out on the far side of the gully.
I saw Hafez. He was staggering past us, holding up another Askar.
“Stop!” I ye
lled to Rod.
I climbed down and grabbed Hafez. He had been nicked in the right arm and another bullet had lodged in the armor plate on his back. He was dirty and tired. He drank some water while I bandaged his arm.
“Very bad in there,” he said. “All confused.”
“Where’s Lieutenant Johnson?”
Hafez shook his head.
“We were in a house, heavy shooting,” he said. “The lieutenant told me to go first. I knew the way. He’d follow.”
He described what happened next: They ran out of the house and across a terrace. They leapt into a trench to catch their breaths before making the next bound. The trench, visible on our photomaps, slashed diagonally, leading uphill toward the schoolhouse occupied by the enemy.
Lt. Johnson said he’d cover Hafez, who helped two wounded Askars hobble downhill. With bullets zinging about him, Hafez ran at a fast clip. He didn’t see or hear Lt. Johnson after that.
Hafez and the two wounded Askars joined the Command Group scattered in the terraces beside the wash. He had heard an insurgent leader, whose voice he did not recognize, tell his men to stay off their radios and use their cell phones.
Dushmen were pressing in on the Command Group from both sides, yelling in Pashto to the Askars to surrender. A wounded Askar next to Hafez threw down his M16.
“If you give up,” Hafez said, “I’ll shoot you. No one surrenders.”
At one point, Hafez said Maj. Williams was lying next to him, returning fire. Two dushmen in dirty man-dresses peeked over a terrace wall about thirty feet away and gestured to them to surrender. Hafez clawed at his gear and threw a smoke grenade. They ducked away and didn’t reappear.
Hafez left the Command Group to sort itself out and, helping a wounded Askar, was heading west back to the operational release point when I had stopped him.
“I need you to come back in with me. I can’t find them without you,” I said.
Hafez had recently married. He was wounded and exhausted. He could now go home and have a life.
“If today is my time to die, then I die.”
He climbed into the truck next to Rod. After placing my bulging medical bag and ten boxes of ammo on the rear seats, I strapped a handheld radio to the gun turret so I could listen for Lt. Johnson and we moved out again.
“Can you show us a way in?” I said.
Hafez shook his head.
Wounded Askars were straggling by us. One was holding a bloody cloth to his face, another was hobbling on a shredded leg. The exhausted Askars had stopped where the shallow gully and steep terraces gave them protection from direct fire. Some were stretched out on the ground. The spot would serve as our casualty collection point.
Shortly after we headed again down the valley, we bumped into another group of wounded Askars. Rod recognized their first sergeant, who was dripping blood down the right side of his trousers. He was waving his arms, begging us to stop. Four Askars hobbled over and threw themselves into the backseats, splashing blood all over the place. We drove them back to the collection point. The first sergeant was blubbering, begging us not to go back in. I was a little rough shoving him out of the truck. I was running out of time and patience. Once we dropped them off, we gunned it back down the track.
To our front, the narrow path opened up into a broad wash, layered with rocks the size of bowling balls. The dry riverbed ran straight to Ganjigal, still half a mile onward. On both sides of us lay the terraced hillsides running up to the two halves of the town, one on each side of the wash.
I heard Staff Sgt. Kenefick on the radio.
“Everyone stop talking on the net,” he said. “I gotta get a medevac. I need to give a grid. Nine seven …”
His transmission broke up. I hastily scribbled the two digits on the side of my turret.
Seconds later, Valadez came up on the net.
“Fox 3-3, this is Fox 7,” he said. “From what I see, you better stay in the center of the wash. There are a lot of bad guys on both sides.”
That didn’t give Rod much room to maneuver. Where we were, the wash wasn’t sixty meters wide. Two Kiowas were up in front of us, following Swenson’s radio instructions. We were getting to a place where we couldn’t turn around, and couldn’t dodge and weave as the RPG smoke trails came at us.
“We could get pretty stuck in here!” Rod yelled.
The truck had very little traction and absolutely no cover.
“Then I guess we’ll die with them!” I yelled back.
What else could I say? We weren’t going back.
Rod shifted into low gear and we bounced forward over the bowling ball-sized boulders. Up ahead, I saw a cloud of yellow smoke—then I saw our Command Group stagger out of it. I recognized Maj. Williams and 1st Sgt. Garza stumbling forward. Some others were supporting a wounded Army soldier. I saw Capt. Swenson yelling orders. I couldn’t reach him over the radio, but no words were needed. With a Kiowa overhead, the Command Group was trying to get out of the wash. They included about six Americans and six Afghans—no one from Team Monti. We couldn’t fit them all in the vehicle, so we would just have to give them cover while they moved.
“I don’t want to shoot blind through that smoke!” I yelled. There might be more of our guys coming through it. We did have to give them cover from their rear, somehow.
“I’ll pull around to the other side of the smoke!” Rod yelled back. “Get ready to fire.”
He rocked the truck over the rocks and through the foul-smelling smoke until we bobbled into the open on the far side. The volume of incoming fire didn’t seem that bad: bullets from two PKM machine guns a good way up the valley and AK rounds from the nearby terraces were cracking past us. I returned fire in the several directions to slow down their rates of fire. When I looked behind me, the smoke had cleared, and the Command Group had made it out of the wash and into the trace leading back to the casualty collection point.
“Let’s move up until they see us!” I yelled, meaning my team.
To our right, about four hundred meters away and thirty stories up the slope, was the schoolhouse that was now an enemy machine-gun bunker. Our truck was taking a few whacks from the PKM, but 7.62-millimeter bullets couldn’t punch through our three-inch steel.
My .50-caliber rounds couldn’t break through the concrete schoolhouse, but we were a moving target and they weren’t, and I could suppress their fire whenever I raked their open windows.
From the western edge of North Ganjigal, another PKM was chipping away at us. Its exact location was impossible to spot, because it wasn’t firing any tracers. I could see a crevice the gun might be nested in, so I sprayed in that general direction.
To our right on the ridge above the terraces, a third PKM sometimes shot at us. That gun was also engaging Kaplan at our northern outpost. I just didn’t have time for that one, so I ignored it.
In South Ganjigal, about four hundred meters ahead, a few women and children were running back and forth among the houses. Below the houses, a few guys without weapons stepped out from behind terrace walls, looked at our truck, and ducked out of sight. Maybe they were farmers with rocks in their heads. In other villages, sometimes civilians had stood gawking while I exchanged fire with dushmen. Insanity.
Once I had a rough idea where the fire was coming from, I shifted my gaze to take a general look around. The fields around us were littered with the bodies of Afghan soldiers, some tucked up against the terrace walls and others lying behind little rocks or in shallow depressions. It looked like the set of a Hollywood war movie. When the director yelled Action!, I expected the soldiers to stand up and take their assigned places.
For maybe two or three seconds, I didn’t get it. It was surreal, all those bodies just lying there. I couldn’t be looking at corpses. They couldn’t all be dead. Sure enough, as the truck bounced forward, I’d see an Askar wave his hand slightly or twitch his foot back and forth, signals of life from men too scared to move.
In a firefight, you’re shooting blind most of t
he time. When you hear the first bullets whiffing past your face or the crump of a mortar shell, your body seeks cover—you don’t consciously think about it. Your instincts know it’s time to be absolutely flat on Mother Earth. You shoot from the prone position. If you’re well trained, you aim at where you think the fire is coming from and squeeze off burst after burst. If you’re ill trained, you shoot wild, holding the rifle above your head. Even when you’re doing it right, you rarely have a man in your sights. You shoot at an area where your enemy is also lying down, trying to stay out of sight. Once you’re flat, your enemy can’t see you—unless, like here, he’s up above you. That’s why you always want the high ground in battle. That’s why Ganjigal was hell.
Rod was swerving the Humvee through the rocks, keeping us moving forward while zigzagging. There was a brush of wind past my cheek—a low hum like a bee, which was a round losing velocity and going subsonic. The air was full of static, like listening to a radio in a thunderstorm. A few bullets clinked off our truck, sounding like gravel thrown up by the wheels. We had driven into the middle of a perfect ambush. The contours of the ridges and terraces reminded me of the Roman Colosseum, with the Taliban spectators armed with AKs and our Hummer the only Christian thing moving on the arena floor.
I looked behind us. The Army Humvee with the TOW missile had closed the gap. Its 240 machine gun could cover our rear. Then, and to my astonishment, the TOW truck stopped and began a laborious but determined U-turn. The track was narrow, with ditches on both sides. It took over a dozen back-and-forths for the truck to turn tail and run.
One of the unit’s heavy trucks had slipped off the trace near the casualty collection point and rolled slowly over, landing back on its wheels. The four soldiers inside were strapped tightly in their seats and suffered only mild bruises. The lieutenant turned around and left to go see about it.
