He shot once and saw the bullet kick up a puff of dust at the man’s feet, adjusted, then fired a second time and dropped the runner like a sack of goat shit.
It was probably the finest shot Raz had ever made.
Meanwhile, Jones was taking a harder look at the police checkpoint where the two insurgents had been hiding before they broke cover. The checkpoint was a stone-and-concrete cube with a flat roof, and it sat on flat ground and was backed by a sheer cliff that rose all the way to the top of the Putting Green. Just behind the building, the Taliban had set up a machine-gun team.
That team had a clear line of fire along the entire front gate area, including the guard tower on top of the Shura Building—and thanks to the height of our Hescos, Jones couldn’t get a clear shot at any of them. He had them pinned down but no way of eliminating them. The best he could do was lay a barrage of raking fire over their heads.
“Hey, Sergeant Ro?” Jones called out.
“What’s going on?” I asked, kneeling down next to him.
“I got some dudes pinned down behind the checkpoint building, right underneath the tree next to that blue tarp.”
This was another example of how you really had to give the Taliban credit. Their gun emplacement reflected some careful planning, as well as a shrewd command of small-unit tactics. Until we figured out a way to get rid of them, they would be able to put fire directly on the front gate.
I turned to Raz, who was just behind me and Jones.
“Do you have any smokers for your 203?” I asked.
“Hell yeah I do.”
“Okay, find out if you can put one on that gun, and then we’ll see what the Apaches can do.”
After eliminating the thirty fighters with their chain guns, the Apache pilots had spent the past half hour orbiting the skis above Keating, staying high enough to avoid small-arms fire from the ridgelines, then making selective gun runs on whatever targets they could spot. But unlike the large group of fighters they had eliminated on the eastern side of camp, the roof of the police checkpoint and the machine gun concealed beneath the tree were extremely hard to spot from the air. To solve that problem, I had in mind something called “shifting from a known point.”
If Raz could put a smoke grenade within a few feet of the target, the bright-colored smoke spewing from the canister—green, purple, pink, or yellow—would offer everyone a hard point of reference. That, in turn, would allow us to walk the pilots directly onto the target via radio.
It’s an effective technique, in theory. But we quickly ran up against two problems. First, in order to reach the checkpoint, Raz would have to lean far out over the edge of the Hesco wall while firing through the branches of a tree that loomed directly above us. And second, it was taking too long to get the directions to the pilots because the information had to be relayed from me to the command post, where Bundermann passed the instructions to at least one other radio operator until the message reached one of the two Apache gunners.
“Tell the pilot that where that green smoke is off to the southwest at four hundred meters, there’s a group of guys under the tree behind the rocks,” I radioed Bundermann.
By the time this information got to the Apaches, the grenade had burned off and the smoke had already begun to dissipate. It also didn’t help that the Apaches couldn’t stay in one place: Ross Lewallen and Randy Huff, the pilots, had to switch direction continuously in order to avoid the ground fire that was being directed at them from the ridgelines. Bundermann, who was monitoring the traffic on the Fires net, could hear how challenging this was for the pilots:
We don’t see the smoke . . . Fire another grenade.
We cannot identify your target . . . Fire again.
Realizing that our system wasn’t working, Bundermann decided to cut himself out of the loop.
“Ro, I want you to switch to the Fires net frequency,” he ordered.
I turned the knob on the top of my radio to the number six position, which was preset to the Fires net. Next thing I knew, Bardwell’s voice was coming directly into my earpiece. I was now in control of a four-blade, twin-turboshaft AH64 attack helicopter armed with a 30-mm chain gun.
As that handoff took place, Raz was doing his best to get a smoker closer to the target. Knowing he was working at the extreme end of his 203’s range, he aimed his barrel high in the air.
“We’re about to fire again,” I informed Bardwell.
Raz squeezed off the shot, and we watched as the grenade sailed through the air and landed two hundred yards away from the tree that was concealing the gun crew.
“Yellow, two hundred yards south,” I said.
“All right, we see it.”
Bardwell’s bird was almost directly above us when he opened up with his cannon. Jones, who had his eyes locked on the target, was shocked as he watched the explosive-tipped 30-mm rounds obliterate not simply the fighters and their weapon but the entire tree under which they were sheltering. The destructive fury was heightened by the chain gun’s metallic whir, which made it sounded as if the air was being chewed apart by a high-speed circular saw. Equally impressive was the deluge of several hundred brass cartridges that rained down from the sky and landed, hot and shimmering, on the ground around us.
Damn, Jones thought to himself, that was completely insane.
Raz too was impressed.
“Hey, Ro?” he asked, turning to me. “Do you think this is anything like what it was like in World War II?”
“Nope,” I replied, shaking my head. “This is probably just a small taste of what it was like back then, brother.”
That was true. What was also true—and what I didn’t say to Raz—was that regardless of how impressive that demonstration of airpower might have been, the picture on the ground wasn’t looking nearly as good.
Despite the progress we’d made, our counterattack had completely stalled out.
• • •
AS THE APACHES continued to orbit above Keating and scan the ridgelines for targets, the enemy on the other side of the river was keeping a low profile. But the larger picture in terms of where me and my team were—and where we needed to be—was disturbing.
Hill’s failure to get his machine gun in place meant that we’d lost not only our momentum but also our “violence of action,” which is the physical and psychological drive that speed, surprise, and aggression can achieve. By this point, the enemy knew exactly where we were, and precisely what our next move would be. The longer we continued to delay that move—which would involve attempting to retake the Shura building and the front gate—the better their chances of stopping us.
By now, my anger and frustration were starting to boil over. Each request I radioed for our missing support by fire met with the same response: Hill’s team was still too busy battling the flames on the eastern side of camp to get his machine gun set up. I could even hear members of Hill’s team calling over the Force Pro net for fire extinguishers so that they could try to save Blue Platoon’s barracks before it was fully engulfed.
From my perspective, this made no sense. If my squad failed to move within the next few minutes, the enemy gunners on the ridgelines would pin us down and we would be immobilized. And if that happened, it wouldn’t matter whether our buildings burned down or not.
“Let the barracks burn—they’re just barracks,” I yelled into the radio. “What the fuck happened to my machine gun? We can’t move without it. If you don’t get that goddamn thing in place, you’re going to get me and everybody with me killed.”
“The fire is a threat that needs to be taken care of,” replied someone.
At this point, what I most wanted to do was scream into the radio that if that machine gun wasn’t in place within one minute I would grab my gun, head over to the center of camp, and personally shoot anyone who had an extinguisher in his hand. What was becoming clear, however, was that the
fire wasn’t really the problem. Instead, the delay was rooted in the fact that Hill had not irrevocably committed himself, regardless of what it might cost, to securing the chow hall and getting his machine gun to where it needed to be.
In 1958, a soldier named J. Glenn Gray wrote a book about soldiers in combat called The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle. Gray, who was drafted into the army as a private in May 1941, was discharged as a second lieutenant in October 1945 after having seen fighting in North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany. His book, which is both obscure and revered, touches on something that would later strike me as relevant to what was now unfolding at Keating as our counterassault came in danger of unraveling.
Gray wrote with elegance and precision about how the essence of combat basically boils down to an exchange of trust between two men—or two groups of men—each of whom are providing support by fire for the other. This simple agreement—you will move while I shoot at the guys who are trying to kill you, then I will move while you shoot at the guys who are trying to kill me—depends on a willingness to place one’s life into the hands of someone else while in turn taking responsibility for that person’s life in your own hands. When this pact is executed well, it is not only extraordinarily effective but also tends to create a bond between the men who enter into it that may stand as the most powerful connection they will ever experience to another human being.
There is, however, one thing that Gray doesn’t explore in his book, which is what can happen when one of the two parties who are supposed to be working in tandem fails—for whatever reason, legitimate or not—to keep his end of the deal. That was what appeared to be taking place right then with Hill’s machine-gun team.
The south side of camp, including the area around the chow hall, was being targeted by relentless fire from the North Face, the Putting Green, the Switchbacks, the Waterfall, and the Diving Board. Stepping into that zone and laying down cover fire would have required a depth of resolve that blurred the line between flirting with suicide and having a full-on death wish. On the other hand, however, the five guys on my team had already demonstrated exactly that resolve.
J. Glenn Gray didn’t have anything to say about this kind of situation. But based on my own experience, I can state that when a support-by-fire pact is not upheld on the battlefield, it can generate the opposite of an unbreakable bond between men. What it triggers instead is a sense of rage and betrayal while—oddly enough—instilling an implacable determination to do whatever it takes to get the job done.
Well, our machine gun just isn’t coming, I thought to myself as I listened to the continuing radio chatter about fire extinguishers. I guess we’re gonna have to make this happen on our own.
• • •
I DON’T RECALL being especially disheartened as I scurried over to Jones, who was now paired up with Ryan Schulz, a sergeant with HQ Platoon who Bundermann had sent out to replace Dannelley. My mind was already focused on what we needed to happen next.
“You doing okay?” I asked Jones.
“Just tell me what’s going on,” he replied.
“We’re done waiting,” I said. “You and Schulz are gonna hold your position and give us as much cover fire as you can while the rest of us push for the Shura Building. Got it?”
They both nodded.
“One other thing,” I added as Raz brought over the first of three boxes of grenades that we’d fished out of the ammo depot.
“There are guys right on the other side of this wall, so every coupla minutes, I want you to pull the pin on one of these and just throw it down the street. That’ll keep them from sneaking up on you.”
Then I turned to Raz, Dulaney, and Miller.
“We’re moving out, so grab as much ammo as you can carry,” I said. “It’s time for us to retake the Shura Building and the front gate.”
Lastly, I keyed my radio and took care of one final piece of business.
“One, this is Two,” I said, radioing Bundermann but skipping our official call signs in an effort to keep the transmission short. Then I invoked the expression we used when we needed to continue a mission: “We need to Charlie Mike. The enemy is pinpointing us, and soon we’ll be sitting ducks.”
I paused for a second to allow Bundermann to absorb this before continuing.
“I’m tired of sitting here waiting. We’re movin’.”
“Negative, Red Two,” spat Bundermann. “Stand down—do not move.”
It was pointless to argue, so I pulled one of the oldest (and cheapest) tricks in the book.
“Say again,” I replied. “You are coming in weak and unreadable . . .”
Bundermann repeated his order, and I deployed the same gambit. Then I reached down to my right hip, where my radio was attached to my vest, and rotated the volume knob to “off.”
It was a bogus play and, to be honest, not a cool thing for me to pull on someone I respected as much as Bundermann. But it had to be done. There was no point in waiting any longer for a support by fire that simply wasn’t going to come. The Shura Building had to be stormed, and the only way that was going to happen while we still had the ability to maneuver freely was for the four of us to launch out and get it done.
As we got ready to make our run, Schulz turned to Jones and asked, “What are we shooting at?”
“What are we shooting at?” replied Jones. “Any fucking thing I see, Schulz, that looks like it’s moving and that looks like it wants to kill Ro and his guys. That’s what we’re shooting at.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Not Gonna Make It
THE DISTANCE from where we stood to the Shura Building was no more than about twenty steps, but getting there would be tricky. First we’d have to stack up on the southeast corner of the ammo supply depot, and then we’d race down a narrow alleyway between the wall of Hescos on our right and a row of sandbags stacked three feet high on our left. At the far end of that alley was a door made of three-quarter-inch plywood that opened into the east side of the Shura Building. It was our only way in.
From the perspective of anyone who might be trying to defend the building from the inside, this alley served as a huge kill zone—the kind of choke point known as a “fatal funnel,” where a team of assaulters are forced through a narrow passage as they are silhouetted against their entry point. So one of the key questions we faced was whether there was anyone on the opposite side of that door.
As I peeked my head around the corner, I could see that it was cracked open about six inches—just enough to allow a team of defenders to see if someone was moving down the alley toward them while still keeping the interior hidden to anyone looking from the outside.
“This could get bad,” I said to the three men huddled in back of me on the near side of the corner. “You guys trust me, right?”
“We’re with you all the way,” said Raz.
Dulaney and Miller both nodded.
I knew that aside from a handful of eight-by-eight posts that supported the roof, the space inside the Shura Building was relatively open but also strewn with a few significant obstacles. There were a dozen or so benches that were used for meetings with local Afghan dignitaries. Off in one corner, there was a treadmill and an elliptical machine that had been salvaged from the gym and were awaiting transport to Bostick as part of our pullout. If the number of fighters inside that space were equal to or greater in number than us, the close quarters combat that would unfold inside that space would be savage and deadly. A four-on-four gunfight in a room the size of a one-car garage never ends well.
Worse, if they had a machine-gun pointed at that door, they would probably annihilate all four of us before we even set foot inside.
There was only one way to find out what we were up against.
“Okay, listen up,” I said. “Here’s how this is gonna work.”
The basic plan was to nail the door with the grenade la
uncher and follow up with the machine gun. But the key to the whole deal lay in how we choreographed our move, and the level of violence we achieved.
“Dulaney, you’ve got the SAW, so you’re number one,” I said, looking at my assault gunner. “When we go through that door, you’re gonna be the first guy in the room. I’m gonna be right behind you, and I’m gonna push you in the back to make sure you get all the way in. All I want you to concentrate on is clearing the inside and killing anybody that’s in there. Put your gun on full auto. Start left and sweep all the way to the right, and just machine-gun it all. Got it?”
He nodded.
“Miller,” I said, turning to our new guy. “You’re gonna be number three, which means you’ll stack up right behind me. We will sweep up after Dulaney—I’ll move right and you’ll move left.”
Finally, I looked up at Raz.
With his massive height, he towered a full foot above me. He was at least eight inches taller than Miller and Dulaney too. That was a key element for what I had in mind, because I needed Raz to be able, if necessary, to shoot directly over our heads.
“You’re the last guy in line on this one, Raz, but what’s gonna kick off this move is that you’re gonna peel around the corner first and put a grenade straight through that door with your 203.”
He nodded.
“While you do that, Dulaney’s gonna lead out with me and Miller right behind. The three of us will enter, and then you’ll pull rear security.”
“Roger that,” said Raz.
As this entire exchange was taking place, I knew Bundermann would be on the radio, still trying to get me to stop.
“Okay, can I hit ’em with the 203 now?” asked Raz.
“Do it.”
Red Platoon Page 24
