Not a Good Day to Die (43 page)

Once in the bowl—later dubbed “Hell’s Halfpipe” by Specialist Brian McGraw—Kraft felt better. As a defensive position, it wasn’t perfect, but it would certainly do. About 300 meters west of the lower slopes of Takur Ghar and a similar distance east of the Finger, Hell’s Halfpipe was shaped like an enormous dugout canoe. It was 100 meters long and six meters wide at its base, with fifteen-meter slopes at its northern end and its western and eastern sides. Its southern end was open. (Jay Hall said its shape resembled that of a football stadium enclosed on three sides.) The problem was that to fire at the enemy on the eastern ridge, the soldiers had to crawl up the Halfpipe’s eastern slope to its rock-strewn tip, exposing them to fire from the Finger. Soldiers engaging the Al Qaida fighters on the Finger faced the same situation in reverse. Nevertheless, Hell’s Halfpipe was eminently defensible and gave both the company and battalion command posts somewhere to set up their radios and allow the commanders to take stock. LaCamera established himself with his radio operator and Grippe at the northern end of the Halfpipe, about seventy-five meters north of Kraft’s command post. Kraft was relieved that somehow none of the thousands of bullets that had been fired at his men had found their mark. As his men clambered up the slopes and began returning fire with a vengeance, the captain focused on his three priorities: getting Blocking Position Heather established, making contact with 2
^nd
Platoon at the other LZ, and figuring out how to get the rucksacks back. He called Maroyka, the 1
^st
Platoon leader, who was still taking cover near the LZ with a squad’s worth of soldiers. The captain told him to press on and establish Heather. Then his 2
^nd
Platoon leader, 1
^st
Lieutenant Aaron O’Keefe, reported that his troops were also receiving fire.

O’Keefe’s men had only moved about thirty meters from the LZ when the first RPG flew in with a sound Ropel described as “a deep whistling combined with static.” “Incoming!” he yelled, diving to the frozen ground with the others. Again the 10
^th
Mountain troops’ guardian angel was watching over them as yet another RPG fizzled in the dirt without exploding. The soldiers got to their feet and shouldered their rucks, only for the unseen enemy nestled into crevices in the eastern ridgeline to open up on them with mortar and small arms fire. This time it was 2
^nd
Platoon’s turn to drop their rucks and sprint for cover. Immediately a pair of Apaches zoomed overhead. The pilots had spotted one of the enemy positions shooting at 2
^nd
Platoon, and they subjected it to withering rocket and cannon fire, providing the troops on the ground with welcome relief in the process. The infantrymen were already realizing the drawbacks of landing on the valley floor. “You can only see so much from the ground,” Ropel noted. And they could also only do so much with the light weapons they had brought to the fight—M4 assault rifles, SAWs, and M240B medium machine guns.

Task Force Rakkasan’s limited number of Chinooks had forced Kraft to make hard decisions about what to bring in on his first lift. He had chosen to leave his 60mm mortars behind to make room for more riflemen. It was a decision he’d regret, but at the time it seemed justified. He knew LaCamera was bringing one of the battalion’s 120mm mortars in on the same Chinook as 2
^nd
Platoon. Between that, the Apaches, and fixed-wing close air support, Kraft figured he was covered for any fires he needed.

The man in charge of the only ground weapon more powerful than a medium machine gun that Task Force Rakkasan brought to the battle on March 2 was Sergeant First Class Michael Peterson, 1-87 Infantry’s mortar platoon sergeant. “Sergeant Pete” had seven men under him: four to man the huge mortar tube and three to provide security. LaCamera had brought the 120 in on his first lift because it had a greater range and killing power than the battalion’s 81mm mortars. The mortar had a range of 7,200 meters, long enough to support the 2-187 troops farther north if need be. And if it had to be brought into action, its shells could slice apart a man standing within seventy-five meters of their impact. But all that firepower carried a high price in mobility. The weight of the tube plus the ammunition Peterson brought with him was 1,500 pounds. The weapon was ideal for sitting in a protected area firing missions for troops a couple of thousand meters forward, but it was not the perfect system for the running battle in which Task Force Rakkasan now found itself, a fact Peterson well understood, but could do little about.

Peterson and his men got their weapon up and running in no time. The enemy had fired the first round in the mortar duel, but the Americans were about to fire the biggest. First fielded in 1994, the 120 mortar had never been fired in combat until Sergeant Raul Lopez, who had never even fired it in training, sent the first round looping toward the enemy with a loud
whoomph.
Within moments the mortar crew was working in a smooth rhythm, with Peterson the main gunner. The Al Qaida fighters quickly realized the 120 was their greatest threat and therefore their highest priority target. Within a minute or two, bullets were zipping and cracking past the American mortarmen with steadily increasing intensity. Then the enemy mortars found their range and began walking rounds in toward Peterson and his men, who were running in circles trying to find cover in between returning fire. It was clear they had to move, so with difficulty they broke the mortar down under fire, loaded it and the ammunition on a series of sledlike devices called Skedcos, and hauled them 200 meters west to a wide ditch or wadi beside where Maroyka was setting up Heather with Higley’s squad.

The new position offered only slightly better protection than the last. As enemy fire dogged their every step, a combination of Peterson’s mortarmen and riflemen from Sergeant Thomas Finch’s fire team ran back and forth ferrying the rest of the ammo between the two positions. Just as Peterson and his team seemed to have found their rhythm again, the ears of Maroyka’s RTO, Private First Class Kyle McGovern, picked up an odd whistling sound. A split second later his world turned black as a mortar round exploded with a loud, cracking
thud
inside the ditch three meters from where Peterson stood with Maroyka. The explosion knocked a dozen soldiers to the ground. As they came to their senses, they checked themselves for wounds. Peterson and Higley were unscathed, but glancing down they realized the enemy had finally done some real damage. No soldiers were dead, but at least half a dozen were wounded. McGovern seemed to be bleeding from his head to his toes (two of which were now missing), and the platoon’s two senior figures, Maroyka and Abbott, were also hurt. Looking at the faces of the wounded men, Peterson saw fear in American eyes for the first and only time that day. He and Higley went to work, Peterson directing the men, Higley bandaging Abbott’s arm, where shrapnel had left a hole in his tricep big enough for Higley to stick his pinkie in. McGovern came to and started yelling, thinking from the pain that his legs had been blown off. Deciding this wasn’t the time for sympathy, Higley screamed right back at him. “Get the fuck up!” The RTO gritted his teeth and staggered to his feet. Everyone realized they had to move before another round caught them in the same place.

Kraft had heard the mortar round detonate near Heather. Concerned, he picked up the hand mike. “Cobra 1-6, Cobra 1-6, sitrep, over,” he said. In a calm voice Maroyka relayed the bad news. “Cobra 6, this is Cobra 1-6, still taking mortar fire, and I have been hit, over.” With the able-bodied supporting the wounded, the soldiers stumbled across 100 meters of open terrain between Heather and the Halfpipe. Glancing back, they saw a mortar round detonate at the spot they’d just left. By the time they got to the Halfpipe, Kraft had set up a casualty collection point—a place to put and treat casualties—on the outside western slope of the Halfpipe. (He put it there because there were too many people running around inside the Halfpipe.) The battle was now at its most chaotic. Most of the 10
^th
Mountain troops were in the Halfpipe, but small groups were scattered elsewhere on ridgelines and in wadis, taking and returning fire. For those in the Halfpipe, the noise of battle was almost deafening. “You’ve got major explosions from both RPGs and mortar rounds,” Kraft said. “You’ve got the enemy direct fire from both west and east, you can hear it zipping past our heads and cracking into the rocks. Then you’ve got my machine guns, my small arms fire returning fire in both directions. It was pretty much like any war movie you ever see, how loud it is, with smoke and dirt in the air.” Mortar rounds would land every thirty seconds. The prevalence of the enemy’s mortars came as a shock to every American. No one had focused on mortars as a threat at Bagram. LaCamera and his mortarmen were particularly impressed with the speed and accuracy with which the enemy mortars were able to target their locations. As if that wasn’t enough to focus the Americans’ minds, Peterson heard a new threat whistle through the air: the unmistakable sound of an artillery round. Somewhere in the draws and wadis of the Shahikot, Al Qaida had hidden the equivalent of a battery of towed howitzers. Now one or more of them were letting loose. Fortunately, the flat trajectory of artillery fire made it tough for the enemy gunners to drop the rounds into the Halfpipe.

Peterson’s 120 tube was still sitting no more than 100 meters away, but he had fired all thirty-five of his high-explosive rounds, so there wasn’t much point risking anyone’s life to retrieve the tube. Instead the mortarmen became riflemen manning the Halfpipe’s northeastern corner, which had none of the rocks that offered protection along the rest of the rim of the bowl. Peterson was the first to crawl up to the lip, to make sure his men wouldn’t become instant casualties. His leadership by example left an impression. “His leadership skills were just unbelievable,” said Private First Class Jason Ashline. “He was just so calm during the whole thing. He didn’t show any fear whatsoever.”

9.

AS the Al Qaida fighters in the mountains ran to their fighting positions and aimed the first RPGs at the American troops below them, two Black Hawks flew low and slow over the Finger. They carried Wiercinski’s tactical command post (known as the TAC), which sounds like a big headquarters but in reality consisted of only a handful of men and radios. The Rakkasan commander’s aim was to land on the Finger, stay for thirty to sixty minutes, long enough to get a sense for how the operation was unfolding, and then fly back to Bagram. The first challenge, however, was to find somewhere to land. The ridgeline looked like a knife edge from the air, a thin sliver of rocky terrain pointing into the heart of the valley. For several minutes the pilots circled, searching for a flat space wide enough to land in. Every second spent over the valley made them more vulnerable. Both helicopters were flying with external fuel tanks on their wings in order to allow Jim Marye, the air mission commander, to stay aloft long enough to oversee the first phase of the operation. These tanks were not bulletproof. A single bullet or shard of shrapnel would turn one into the equivalent of a torpedo-shaped firebomb strapped to the side of the helicopter. Mako 31 had taken care of one DShK that would have spelled certain death for the men on the two helicopters, but other threats remained in the shadows of the Shahikot.

Trying not to think of the dangers lurking below, the men on the birds concentrated on finding an LZ. Savusa, Wiercinski’s stalwart sergeant major, thought of his family and said a silent prayer.
If this is it, then let it be so.
Wiercinski spotted a bowl-shaped gap in the rocks that looked just big enough to accommodate a Black Hawk. “Put us down there,” Wiercinski told the pilots, pointing to the location about halfway up the ridge’s spine. But the pilots of his Black Hawk had a hard time trying to put the bird down in the narrow strip of land between large rock formations the colonel had identified. After not making it the first time, they opted to fly around the valley and try again.

The pilot of the other helicopter (which carried Savusa, Corkran, plus a captain and two lieutenants from Corkran’s battalion, who were there to provide security for the TAC and get the lay of the land, in case they were called forward as the reserve), then gave it a shot, and succeeded in deftly maneuvering his aircraft into the space. The soldiers in the back held their breath as the whirring blades flashed no more than two feet from sheer rock walls as the helicopter settled on to the Finger. They jumped out but, with no space to run, just kneeled as the helicopter took off in cloud of dust.

Meanwhile, Wiercinski’s aircraft, which also carried Michael Gibler, Dino Murray, Jim Marye, and Specialist Brandon Hall, circled around the valley. Unseen by those aboard the Black Hawk, who were distracted by the first radio calls from the valley floor reporting fierce enemy resistance, an Al Qaida fighter below them shouldered his RPG launcher and took aim. The rocketassisted projectile shot upward, exploding just beneath the chin bubble of Wiercinski’s Black Hawk and hurling a big piece of shrapnel into its under-belly. Another fighter pointed his Kalashnikov at the same aircraft and pulled the trigger. His aim was even better, but not quite good enough. The bullets peppered the helicopter’s tail rotor hub, one of the rounds nicking a push-pull rod in the tail rotor assembly. “If that thing had severed, we’d have lost tail rotor control, and we’d have been gone,” Marye said. “It was by the grace of God that that didn’t happen.” A lone AK-47-wielding guerrilla firing a bullet that cost pennies had come within millimeters of downing a multimillion-dollar Black Hawk helicopter and consigning the brigade commander, his air mission commander, operations officer, and air liaison officer, as well as an RTO and the air crew, to their doom. Such a disaster in the opening minutes of the battle would have left Operation Anaconda hanging by a thread.