Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War (19 page)

“I appreciate it,” I said, “but they’re my brothers. I have to do it.”

When I walked into the hooch, all the gear was scattered about, exactly as we had left it. Lt. Johnson’s skimpy PT shorts that we all kidded him about were on his rack, Doc Layton’s CDs on the table, and Staff Sgt. Kenefick’s computer on his rack.

Maj. Williams had sent Bokis and Staff Sgt. Richards up to Monti with me. Together we sorted, marked, and stored the belongings of my brothers. After that, I walked outside, fidgeted around, and finally went into the ammo bunker to count up our munitions and keep myself busy. I heard a gunshot over at the burn pit and what sounded like my pup Annie yelp, then another gunshot.

There was an order to shoot all dogs on base, but the 1st sergeant in the ops center had assured me Annie would be fine. Still, after the shots, I walked outside and called for her.

A sergeant was rounding the corner with his shotgun slung.

“That wasn’t my dog you shot, was it?” I asked.

“No, it wasn’t yours,” he replied, trying to get around me.

“Let’s make sure,” I said.

We walked around the corner, and I looked at her lying on top of the burning trash.

“You motherfucker,” I said, “how about I lay your stupid ass down and shoot
you
? She was giving you kisses and wagging her tail while you carried her over here and shot her twice, wasn’t she—you piece of shit!”

“First sergeant ordered me to do it,” he said.

“He did what?” I said as I walked off.

I stormed down the hill, looking for the man. Gunny Kevin Devine, Kerr’s platoon sergeant, saw me and fell in step beside me. He knew what had happened.

“Be cool, Devil Dog,” he said. “Don’t fuck up your life.”

The 1st sergeant who had killed Annie was standing outside the ops center, smoking a cigar, with a stupid smirk on his dumbass face. As I headed for him, Gunny Devine, who had twenty pounds of muscle on me, grabbed my shoulder. He made it plain he was going to wrestle me to the ground. I settled for smacking the sandbag next to the 1st sergeant’s face, and Devine pulled me away before I committed a court-martial offense.

It probably wasn’t a good idea that I was bunking in the hooch. Bokis and Sgt. Richards were good company, but I didn’t want them to think they had to babysit me. The first few days back, I avoided even trying to sleep. As long as I was awake and doing something, I thought I was okay.

Each night, Kerr and Devine led their platoon—a platoon of strong men—through hours of pain in the weight room, and they dragged me along. My muscles were burning and Kerr was yelling for one more lift and then another. The pain was a relief. It stopped my thinking.

After the others showered and turned in, I’d wander around the quiet base, visiting with the Askars in the sentry tower, improving my Pashto. A few new advisors moved into the hooch. I never got close to them. My bad. I was standoffish—didn’t feel at ease with them. I didn’t want any new friends.

As to Ganjigal: Some Special Forces teams entered the village in the late afternoon, many hours after the ambush. By then, the Taliban had collected their dead and wounded and hiked back into Pakistan.

Ganjigal was one of the deadliest small-arms battles of the Afghanistan war. We lost five advisors. In addition to Team Monti, Army Sgt. 1st Class Westbrook had died of his wounds. Eight Askars were killed and thirteen seriously wounded by rifle, machine-gun, and RPG fire. Enemy losses to small arms were probably of a similar number. There were no IEDs, no bombs, and very few artillery shells. Bullets caused most of the casualties. Ganjigal was a mountain fight from an earlier century.

The Taliban leader, Rahman, crowed over the Taliban radio about his great victory. But the American and Afghan commanders decided not to launch a retaliatory raid; they didn’t want to draw attention to our defeat and to the lack of fire support. I thought their passive approach was wrong. If you were a villager anywhere in Kunar Province, what would you think after Ganjigal? We should have hit back at a Taliban camp.

The Askars decided they could not trust the Americans to support them. So they didn’t want to patrol unless they were accompanied by U.S. Army soldiers, not just advisors. As for the Americans, Capt. Paco Bryant, the commander of Dog Company, didn’t want to send his soldiers into a village like Ganjigal if they weren’t going to hold it.

“As soon as you leave, it will be back in enemy hands within two or three days,” he said, “and that’s not worth a soldier’s life.”

The U.S. high command decided that any patrol into a capillary valley like Ganjigal required helicopter support, and a PowerPoint brief sent to battalion and brigade headquarters. As a result, the pace of patrolling by Askars and by Americans dropped dramatically.

Finally, I had another chance. Col. Daniel Yoo, the senior Marine advisor, paid a visit to Monti. I knew he had come a long way to check up on me, and I appreciated his thoughtfulness. We were talking in my hooch when an alert came over the tactical radio: an Army convoy had been ambushed north of Monti. Lt. Kerr and Capt. Bryant, the company commander, were on their way to assist.

I looked at Col. Yoo, who nodded in agreement. Minutes later, Yoo, Bokis, Staff Sgt. Richards, some of the colonel’s guys that came with him, a dozen Askars, and I were headed out the gate. We drove a few miles north and stopped at the top of a rise. On our right was the Kunar River. On our left was a towering ridgeline. Two hundred meters to our front was a narrow valley called Dab Khar, a favorite ambush site—steep sides, narrow roadbed. I had fought there before, alongside Staff Sgt. Jeffords.

The valley cut a deep V slice out of the ridgeline. At the bottom of the V, jingle trucks were jammed against each other like a massive traffic accident. Three twelve-wheelers were lying on their sides, burning. Four others, banged up, were parked at crazy angles. Mixed among them were four U.S. Army MRAPs—big armored vehicles—and an armored Humvee.

PKMs and AKs were hammering down on this mess, with little
return fire. It would be crazy to drive into that tangle of vehicles. Bokis was on the MK19 on our truck. He couldn’t shoot because of the angles of fire.

Richards stayed in the driver’s seat while I advanced on foot by bounds into the wreckage. Our Askars ran forward with us, but their light M16s didn’t impress the Taliban machine-gun crew. I was quickly pinned behind a disabled truck. Looking up, I could see the PKM was shooting from a thick stone house two hundred meters upslope. Excited to have a target so close, I fired about five shells from my grenade launcher before my common sense kicked in.

What am I doing?
I thought.
I’m outmatched by a machine gun, but there’s an Army Humvee sitting next to me with no one in the .50-cal turret!

I signaled to Capt. Bryant, who had taken shelter behind another jingle truck.

“Why isn’t that truck returning fire?” I yelled.

Bryant shrugged, as baffled as I was. Kerr was hunkered down, radioing for air. He was famous for bombing the shit out of insurgents. Gunny Devine and Sgt. Hall were shooting with little effect at the PKM position. I ran over to the Army truck and banged on the hatch. There were
bloody handprints all over the door, where the poor Afghan drivers had been banging and begging to be let in.

“Man your .50-cal!” I yelled.

“We’re logistics,” came the muffled reply. “We don’t fight.”

Some supply guys can’t wait to get into the action, but not this gang. I wasn’t worried, though. Wild Man Kerr would soon have air on station.

Bodies were scattered all over the road, all civilians. Lying facedown next to me alongside the Army truck was a skinny teenager in a T-shirt, bleeding from shrapnel in his chest and left arm. With the
American soldiers and Askars putting hundreds of rounds downrange, my M4 wasn’t needed. I slung my rifle, wrapped a tourniquet around the kid’s arm, picked him up, and carried him back to my Humvee. He had a tracheal deviation and a sucking chest wound. I plunged a decompression dart into the pleural cavity below his third rib and foul-smelling air hissed out his lung. As I was doing this, Specialist Charles Tomeo, the medic in Kerr’s platoon, ran up and shoved a plastic tube up the kid’s nose to open the airway.

He was a pathetic sight, sprawled on his back in his filthy brown shorts, an orange-tipped needle protruding from above his heart and a plastic stopper shoved up his left nostril. He didn’t weigh as much as I ate in a day. His hands and feet were uglier than dirt from his efforts to crawl out of the line of fire. He wasn’t old enough to grow a beard, but he had a full shock of black hair. Not a bad-looking kid. Once he was cleaned up at the aid station and had some ice cream, he’d be OK.

I felt good. In fact, I was pumped. I had applied dozens of tourniquets, but this was the first time I had smelled death hiss out. I had saved a human being, a poor, scrawny kid eking out a living by driving a banged-up truck past known ambush sites. Would he eventually join the Taliban and betray an American convoy? I had no idea. Sure, some of the villagers at Ganjigal had been real pricks. But why should I hold that against this kid?

I ran back down the road, hoisted up another wounded truck driver, and carried him back. Then I stopped to check on the skinny kid. I wanted to pat him on the shoulder to make myself feel good for my supposedly wonderful deed. Only he was dead. He had bled to death from the wound to his left arm. The crew in the Army truck had let him bleed out, not five feet away, because he was an Afghan and they were afraid.
Damn it!

I went back to the wreckage and carried another truck driver back to our truck, where Tomeo bandaged him up. We placed the two wounded in our two trucks, and I put the kid’s body on the hood.

When I got back to the messed-up trucks, the enemy fire had slackened because Kerr was directing a Kiowa helicopter overhead. The Afghan drivers were huddled together in a ditch by the river. The ambush had been sprung about ninety minutes earlier. By now they had pissed themselves dry and had nowhere to go. I banged my rifle butt on the Army truck, yelling to the soldiers to open up.

“At least give me some water for those poor bastards!” I shouted.

A sheepish medic got out of the truck with several bottles of water and his medpack and ran over to the ditch. I knelt there, looking at the mud bloodstained from the kid, right beside the truck door.

I banged on the steel door again. It opened a crack.

“Fuck you!” I shouted at the captain inside.

I had placed a firecracker up my ass. I figured the shocked captain would light the fuse as soon as we got back to Monti. Don’t ask me why I did it.

By now, Kerr was directing rockets from the Kiowas to provide aiming points for an F-15 and was gleefully bombing the slopes. But we had to unsnarl the traffic mess to get the Army convoy—and my newest buddy, the captain—out of there. Capt. Bryant was yelling at the Afghan drivers to get back in whatever trucks would move. They were looking at him as if he were crazy. Bryant then came up with a brilliant idea.

“Hey, Meyer,” he yelled, “get behind the wheel of that big truck, drive it to the edge of the river, and hop out! When they see that, they’ll move the others.”

I liked Paco Bryant, but there was no way in hell that was happening.

“No, I’m not doing that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ll drown.”

“Okay, put a rock on the gas pedal and hop out.”

“No. How about
you
get in the truck and
I’ll
watch?”

He thought for a moment.

“You got a point,” he said. “Get one of those drivers to do it.”

I crawled over to a driver and threatened him with my rifle, pointing at the truck. We were still taking some light incoming. He just gestured for me to shoot him, as he preferred that to drowning. I laughed and he smiled back.

So we waited until a big wrecker arrived from Monti that quickly shoved aside the smoking wrecks. That still left a U.S. MRAP stuck in a ditch. Devine and I watched as a soldier hopped down from the wrecker and casually attached chains to the MRAP. We both liked this soldier, a hard worker who grumbled about how roughly grunts treated his beloved trucks.

“Better stay under cover, bro,” Devine said.

Instead, the mechanic, with no armor, stood on the road and slowly lit a cigarette.

“No biggie, Sergeant, I got this.”

Cigarette dangling from his lip, he signaled to the wrecker with both hands. Mr. Cool from a Camel ad. Very smooth, very much in charge—and very exposed.

Crack!

“I’m hit! I’m hit!”

Mr. Cool was down. We rushed him into the ditch and cut open his right trouser. He’d been drilled through the thigh. The bullet had passed through like a sizzling branding iron.

“Son of a bitch!” he screamed. “Son of a bitch!”

Understandable statement. The pain truly burned and Mr. Cool was definitely hurting. The bullet, though, had missed the femoral artery. A quick tourniquet, a fifteen-minute ride, and he’d be tucked inside clean white sheets, soon on his way to Germany and strawberry ice cream.

At the moment, though, he didn’t see the upside. Instead, he was screaming, convinced he was dying. Gunny Devine started to giggle, and I broke out in short snorts. Kerr ran over, took one look at the wound, and hooted.

We weren’t heartless. If he had been dying, we would have promised him he was going to live.

As the traffic jam was sorted out, Col. Yoo and I walked back to our Humvee. The dead kid lay on the hood and rather than ride to base with a corpse between us, we wedged the body in the trunk.

Sometimes you laugh, and sometimes you want to cry.

The captain in charge of the logistics convoy did not press charges, although she may have suggested I was too high-strung. The psychologists were keeping an eye on me, calling me in for chats that went round and round.

The weeks crept by. Every now and then, an enemy sniper climbed a few thousand feet above our camp and fired a few rounds. The odds were way low that anyone would be hit, and the camp commander didn’t want to place sentries on top of the hill, requiring a three-hour hump each way. A few bullets were like a few falling stars you couldn’t do anything about.