Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (15 page)

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 the 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.

We were alone again and very exposed. Puffs of dirt from bullets
pelted the ground like hailstones; the air was full of cracklings and rumblings, as if an invisible thunderstorm were rolling across the sky.

Only Rod’s skill at the wheel was preventing me from being hit again and again. Bullets make different sounds when they pass by you. The cracks of bullets breaking the sound barrier mean they’re high, maybe five or ten feet over your head. The bullets that snap close by your ears are the real killers. A few, losing power and slowing down, made a low buzzing sound.

Strange though it may seem, I wasn’t scared or angry. I was beyond that. I didn’t think I was going to die; I knew I was dead. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. I wasn’t a thinking human being. I had gone somewhere else. I wasn’t firing the machine gun;
I was the machine gun
. Rod wasn’t driving the truck;
Rod was the truck
.

I had melded with my weapon. I was no more human than the five-foot machine gun I was embracing. We were locked together, metal and flesh. Without that .50-cal, I would have quivered like the Askars, helpless in the storm. But with that weapon, I felt transported. I had something to do until the blackness came.

A .50-cal holds true out to half a mile. There was no wind and little need to fire high to arc the rounds onto targets. The gun shot rounds as big as cigars, and every fourth one was a glowing red tracer. Firing four- to eight-round bursts, I had walked rounds onto targets dozens of times up at Monti. The hills around Ganjigal were no different. I figured out roughly where a target was and let the .50-cal do the walking.

I wasn’t paying any attention to the Afghan soldiers. Rod and I planned to keep driving east until we were obliterated or we found my team. Suddenly, with no warning, five or six Askars who were lying in a terrace about a hundred meters away leapt up and raced toward our truck.
Wham
, one was shot in the back and pitched forward.
Wham
, a second man went down screaming.
Wham
, a third—then the fourth and the fifth.

I had never seen anything like it. Five men taken down in five seconds. There was so much screeching and shooting that I couldn’t pick out the location of the weapon that shot them. To deliver such lethal grazing fire, the machine-gunner must have been hidden only a few hundred meters away, with a clear line of sight and his bipod firmly anchored. Yet whoever shot those men didn’t raise his gun sights and stitch me. I knew he was looking at me, but I couldn’t see him. There was nothing I could do. He let me live. Not one of his rounds even struck our truck. I can’t explain it.

We couldn’t see around the corners of the boomerang terrace walls, but Valadez, way up there, could see for us.

“They’re coming at you!” he yelled over the radio. “I can see them closing from both sides. They’re swarming you!”

In front of our truck, I saw a few guys sprinting across the wash from left to right, heads low. I don’t think they saw us coming up behind them, or heard the truck engine over the din of the gunfire. They scurried too quickly for me to get off a burst. Glancing to my right, I looked smack into the eyes of five or six men in dirty man-dresses,
crouched alongside a drainage ditch, not ten meters away. When I gaped at them, they ducked down like they were playing hide-and-seek.

It took me a few seconds to realize they were spreading out to seal off the open end of the horseshoe valley, ziplocking the frozen Askars inside a fire sack. Rod and I had blundered into their rear.

We were bouncing over rocks no faster than a man can run when a bearded dushman clutching an AK leapt out of a ditch and sprinted after us, like a man trying to catch a bus. My gun almost wouldn’t swivel low enough to shoot him—the barrel was tilted down as far as
it could go. I fired into his chest and he went down like he had hit a glass wall. A bullet doesn’t blow a man back like in the movies. Either he stumbles on or he falls dead. This man fell dead.

Rod was yelling at me—maybe I was hypnotized for a second by the death. There was a guy trying to open the right door. I couldn’t depress the .50-cal that low.

“I can’t get him!” I yelled. “
The gun won’t go down enough!”

It takes the brain twelve thousandths of a second to react to danger. My mind was a complete blank. I had fired so many thousands of rounds that I didn’t think what I was doing. Once you’ve practiced a motion long enough, it becomes second nature. Some researchers call it “
expertise-induced amnesia.” Athletes call it “being in the zone.” I call it self-preservation. I grabbed my M4, leaned out, and shot the guy four or five times in the shoulder and the neck. It was like shooting a zombie. There was no shock power in the little 5.56-millimeter bullets. He fell to the ground.

I pivoted back to the .50-cal and grabbed the spade handle. The weapon, my hands, and my eyes were working as a trained unit, independent of my brain.
Man, sight picture, shoot
. You don’t really look at the target. The enemy remains out of focus; you concentrate on the sight picture.
Man, sight picture, shoot
. I hit one or two guys next to the truck and
the others ducked back into the ditch.

Valadez came back on the radio.

“Rod, watch your front!”

Rod was focused on keeping traction in the loose gravel. If the truck got stuck, even for a moment, we’d be toast. He looked ahead to see a bearded, hatless man in his mid-thirties, dressed in brick-red man-jams with a green chest rig full of ammo, running toward the truck and
firing an AK at us from his hip.

“Hold on, Homey!” Rod yelled.

He hit the accelerator. The truck hit the man squarely in his chest. There was a bump, and then another bump under the tires.

“Holy shit!” Rod yelled. “I just ran over a guy.”

“Back up and do it again!”

Ducking our firepower, the dushmen were pulling back into the terraces, jumping behind the walls, turkey-necking out to shoot at our blind spots. All had beards and none looked young. Most wore dirty clothes—some with Afghan Army trousers showing underneath. Many wore green chest rigs for ammunition and Afghan Army helmets. I would have shot more of them if I didn’t have to look twice to make sure they weren’t our guys.

A few hundred meters behind us, a monster-big Blackhawk was setting down in a terrace. I could see the blades turning and supposed it was a medevac. If the dushmen had the brains to ignore Rod and me and fire in the other direction, it would be a mess. The chopper was an easy mark for an RPG. I sprayed in a wide arc around the terraces to my right. I wasn’t aiming; I just wanted the assholes to keep their heads down and their jihad thoughts on us. That chopper took off almost as soon as it landed—a great evac job by ballsy pilots.