“We have a probable KIA, and we’re getting chewed up pretty bad,” Jordan yelled on the radio. “We’re pinned down and completely unable to move.”
Dan relayed the situation to Andy and asked for emergency air support. He was pinned down farther ahead with one of the others, who was firing over the berm. Some of the Harris radios they used to communicate had gotten wet and weren’t working. A Delta, who was on loan from a Texas team, reached Mick and checked his vitals.
“He’s alive,” he said over the radio.
Dan corrected the message on the radio to Andy. There was nothing they could do while trapped in the ditch except keep Mick’s head above the water and his neck straight.
Jordan saw a mortar land in the berm in front of Kevin, who dived to the ground, screaming, “FUCK!” Another landed behind them. The Taliban mortar team was bracketing them in. Dan repeated the call over the radio.
“We’re pinned down. We need air support now,” he said again, trying to sound calm.
Dan couldn’t see why the Apaches wouldn’t fire. Andy had the second combat controller with him, who was on loan from another team. That was fortunate, because Ski and Mick, who was the only team member that was qualified as a combat controller, were both wounded. The combat controller relayed his request for emergency close air support, giving them Andy’s initials, which would make Andy responsible for anything that went wrong with the strike. When an F-16 bomber finally flew overhead, it only carried out a strafing run on an empty field as a show of force that did nothing to stop the volume of fire.
Another mortar landed behind them, sinking into the mud. Dan wondered how long they had been in the ditch. It felt like an eternity. He had been in firefights before, but this was the first time he felt fear. It wasn’t death that scared him, but the thought of leaving his wife alone and two young children without a father. He was starting to seriously question his decisions. Why had he come to Afghanistan? An image formed in his mind of his wife and their newborn son at home. He thought of his little daughter, who was still a toddler and probably wouldn’t remember him if he died. They had no idea that he was here in this ditch, fighting for survival, perhaps in the final moments of his life.
Dan felt angry with himself for putting everyone in this situation. He thought about Mick’s wife and their ten-week-old baby. Mick could have stayed with them in Seattle. He tried to pull himself together and concentrate on getting them out. He roused himself into action.
“I can’t stress this enough,” he said on the radio, trying to keep his voice measured. “We are unable to move, completely pinned down. We need air support to take out one of these buildings.”
“I know, man, we’re doing everything we can. Hang in there,” Andy responded.
They waited, returning fire during lapses in the shooting, only for the volume to pick up as soon as they poked their rifles over the berm. There was no sign of air support. They were trapped and freezing, and they couldn’t move Mick. Dan told Andy to get the Apaches off station so they could try using the mortars. The Fox lobbed some toward the building, but it was hard to direct them while under fire and without a clear view of the shooters. Bullets started to zip through the canal from the far end.
Jordan realized the Taliban had maneuvered into the canal and were shooting directly at them from inside the ditch. It was a situation known as enfilade fire, the worst possible circumstance they could be in. They had to get out pretty fucking fast. Andy came back on the radio and said that he understood the severity of the situation but was unable to get them air support. The Apaches wouldn’t fire. He felt terrible. Dan ordered everyone to retreat back to Alpha-64.
Jordan dropped to his hands and knees trying to figure out how to carry Mick, a two-hundred-pound guy carrying sixty pounds of water-soaked gear. He pushed while another teammate pulled, and the medic kept Mick’s head above the water. A fourth carried Mick’s weapon and kit. They eventually reached the edge of the compound and waited for covering fire. Most of their rifles were clogged with mud, and Dan’s radio was the only one still working. They bounded to the compound and dragged Mick inside. They kept him away from Ski. Death was contagious. They called for the flight medic to come outside instead.
The flight medic saw the gunshot wound to the head and knew that Mick was going to die. He was already showing signs of Cushing’s triad, the body’s response to a terminal head injury and elevated pressure in the brain, involving increased systolic blood pressure and falling heart rate and respiration. Mick’s breathing was erratic and his pulse faint, in the forties. He was also freezing cold in his wet clothing. They cut off Mick’s uniform and wrapped him in a blanket to prevent hypothermia. One of the Deltas asked to borrow the medic’s ventilator. The medic didn’t think it was a good idea, because a ventilator could increase the pressure on Mick’s brain, worsening his condition.
“You’re better off bagging him,” he said.
The medic gave Mick fluids and hooked up a cylinder of oxygen to a mask over his face. The system involved using a manual resuscitator to force-feed air into his lungs. Mick’s eyes were fixed, dilated, and unresponsive. The medic worried about using limited medical resources on a casualty who was going to die, but he didn’t know how to explain that to Mick’s teammates without sounding heartless, so he said nothing. He left the pilot, Flannery, and a crew member to handle the bagging and returned to Ski.
The rest of the guys worked to clear the mud out of their weapons. They were running dangerously low on ammunition, even after distributing the flight crew’s ammo among the team and commandos. Jordan’s weapon was clogged, so he was using Ski’s rifle, and he had only three magazines left. Those wouldn’t last long.
The battalion wanted to know Mick’s status. Dan approached the team’s Deltas.
“What is his condition?” Dan asked them.
“What do you think it is?” the junior medical sergeant said angrily. “He has a bullet through his head and no medevac!”
Dan tried to measure his response, knowing they were under stress. He turned to the senior medic. It was about the chain of command. It was their job to provide an assessment.
“The commander needs his condition to send to higher,” he said again, looking at the senior Delta.
“Critical to expectant,” the senior medic said flatly.
“Thank you,” Dan said.
He sent the report over the radio through the second combat controller the team had on loan. He hoped Mick wasn’t suffering. Mick was staring at the ceiling, and his breath came in fits and gasps. Dan went back and forth between the perimeter and Mick’s side for the next three hours. A terrible weight fell over the team. They felt helpless, with no hope of medevac and no way of securing a landing zone.
It took Mick hours to die. His body eventually went into spasms, clinging to the last moments of life. There was nothing they could do to save him. When he eventually gave up fighting for air and lay still on the ground, Dan asked the flight medic to check on him one last time. Then he went around to the team members who were guarding the walls to let them know Mick had died.
“Eagle down,” Andy said over the radio, and read out the last four digits of Mick’s social security number, followed by his name.
They covered Mick’s body with an American flag and took turns going into the room to say goodbye. The team’s mood plummeted. Mick was the first among them to die, but at a certain point everyone’s survivability would go to zero. Without air support, they were going to get overrun. Some of the team members were close to running out of ammunition, counting down every time they fired. Andy was in a rage.
He stormed into the room where the Afghan commandos were sitting with their backs turned to the battle outside. Several had been hit by shrapnel and patched up by the medics. They were done fighting. He wasn’t entirely confident that the commandos wouldn’t switch sides and turn on them.
“What the fuck are you doing, man!” he shouted at the captain.
He
grabbed a number of the commandos and dragged them outside to the walls. Then he turned to Flannery.
“Watch them!” he told the pilot. “Don’t let them leave their posts.”
Andy didn’t know what to do to get air support. The Apaches wouldn’t shoot. The F-16s wouldn’t drop. The quick reaction force made up of a couple of teams from their company had been ordered to turn around. Could anything else go wrong? He crouched against the wall with Dan, and they surveyed the situation. Another 81mm mortar landed nearby, sending mud and shrapnel raining down on them. A fragment hit Dan’s helmet.
“Fuck,” Dan said. He shook his head, and he and Andy gave a few hoarse chuckles.
Andy pulled out his map and started writing on the back. It was a step-by-step narrative of the day’s events that he planned to read to the battalion. He thought if he could use clear legal terms, the military’s leadership would at least be liable for the team members’ deaths if they turned them down for air support again. They were all going to die if things didn’t turn around fast.
“We’re pinned down by sniper fire, machine gun fire, and incoming mortar fire from all sides and unable to maneuver,” Andy wrote. “We’re running out of ammunition. The aircraft won’t fire on the buildings because they can’t see anyone shooting, because combatants are firing from inside roofed structures through murder holes in the walls. When they move between positions, they are leaving the weapons in place, knowing we will not fire on unarmed combatants. The commandos won’t fight. We have one KIA, one WIA [wounded in action], and no quick reaction force coming.”
He read his statement over the radio.
The high level of approval required to sign off on airstrikes meant that the message had to travel through the entire chain of command. It was passed from the battalion, where Col. Johnston was in an intensifying state of frustration, to the SOJTF deputy commander, Brig. Gen. Tony D. Bauernfeind, who was waiting for Resolute Support, the US military headquarters in Kabul, to approve the request for air support.
CHAPTER 18
Get Back Out There
ANDY
THE MESSAGE CONVEYING the team’s urgency and despair reached Resolute Support, where the deputy chief of staff for operations, Gen. Buchanan, and a team of legal advisers were tasked with signing off in accordance with the rules of engagement. The request for air support was cleared. Brig. Gen. Bauernfeind, the SOJTF deputy commander, came on SATCOM and authorized airstrikes on the surrounding buildings.
Andy was surprised that the ninety-second narrative he’d read aloud had worked. It seemed headquarters finally understood their desperation. An F-16 thundered across the battlefield and dropped a five-hundred-pound bomb. Nothing happened. It was a dud. The aircraft dropped a second bomb, but again nothing happened. The team couldn’t believe it. The jet left to refuel and returned, this time striking several buildings.
Things seemed to have gotten quieter. Andy tried to get a drop of supplies, including water and ammunition. That’s when he found out, to his consternation, that there were no GPS-guided parachutes. A C-130 transport aircraft offered to push a box of supplies out to them, even though it was still daylight. It wasn’t supposed to fly during the day to avoid the risk of getting shot down.
Andy was reluctant. If the drop landed off target, they would have to recover it somehow, but being resupplied on ammunition was vital. The battlefield erupted with gunfire as the plane swooped across. He watched the parachute sail down toward them and divert course at the last moment, settling into the middle of an open field. Now they would have to go fetch it in the dark. It was easier said than done: the loaded pallet was heavy as shit.
An AC-130 gunship finally arrived on station around five p.m., as the sky was darkening. The pilot asked Andy for the top three targets. Andy went outside and tried to direct them to the buildings that seemed to be emanating the heaviest fire. He stayed outside the compound to guide them, barely aware of the possibility of getting shot at the most critical moment of the battle. The AC-130 thundered overhead and began to fire at the first building.
The blasts from the gun were followed by the echo of the round exploding as it hit the target, causing a cloud of dust and debris to billow into the sky.
The airstrike continued for about two minutes. The pilot came back over the radio. “What was the second target again?” he asked. Andy was ecstatic. The AC-130 had finally made sure target number one wasn’t going to give them any more trouble.
The SOJTF wanted Andy to keep reading out his narrative. For every strike, over the course of about two hours, Andy had to pull out his map and reread his statement aloud. By now, he had lost all faith in leadership along with the capacity to be dismayed. What kind of bureaucratic bullshit was this?
After the gunship hit about eighteen compounds, the surrounding area grew quiet. There were still military-aged men leaving the vicinity, but the firing had stopped and the battalion ordered a pause. The teams hunkered down in the compound, with defensive positions on the wall, to wait for nightfall. Everyone was exhausted, hungry, and dehydrated. They had been fighting for nearly twenty-four hours.
The flight medic remembered that there were four emergency kits in the helicopter containing snack bars and water. He climbed in and found them. Everyone got a bit to drink. The medic was glad to have been able to contribute. He was worried about Ski’s leg. It had been in a tourniquet all day, and repeated efforts to convert the tourniquet to avoid an amputation had failed.
After dark, the team went out to recover the resupply pallet that had been pushed out of the C-130 into the field. They were nervous, but the area remained quiet. An officer from the battalion came on the radio again to ask if they could spend another night in Marjah. Andy was outraged.
“What? No! We cannot stay another night,” he said into the radio. Who was this guy? Andy spelled out all the reasons why it wouldn’t be a good idea.
“Well, what if we swap you out with another team,” the officer said, “and leave the Afghans behind?”
Andy couldn’t believe it. If they abandoned the Afghan commandos, it would destroy anything that remained of the relationship between them. In military terms, it was called a catastrophic loss of rapport. The commandos were deadweight at this point, but they were supposed to be partners, and ditching them in Marjah was not part of the plan.
“No way,” Andy told the officer. All they had to do was survive another couple of hours. The quick reaction force, made up of two US teams and a company of commandos, was on its way. It had been waiting at Camp Dwyer all day to be cleared to depart. The troops were dropped several miles away, and it would take them hours to reach Alpha-64 on foot, but the air force refused to drop them any closer over concerns about losing another helicopter.
Dan went into one of the rooms to rest and saw the pilot, Flannery, talking to his crew chief. Flannery looked crushed. “Sir, don’t beat yourself up; you’re a great pilot,” Dan heard the crew chief saying. Dan couldn’t resist trying to poke some fun at Flannery. In his experience, humor was the best cure in the darkest of times.
“Did you call ‘Black Hawk down’ when your aircraft crashed today?” Dan asked, referencing the movie. Flannery looked at him mournfully and shook his head.
“Well, you fucked up a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!” Dan said, trying to cheer him up. Flannery couldn’t help but laugh.
Ski was adamant that the flight medic should keep trying to save his leg, which risked being amputated after spending all day in a tourniquet. He howled every time the medic took the tourniquet off and was forced to put it back on to avoid further blood loss. Around midnight, the medic managed to remove the tourniquet without disturbing the blood clot that had formed at the site of the wound. He kept it loosened around Ski’s thigh and told him to minimize any movement to avoid ruining the blood clot.
Soon afterward, the sister teams and over a hundred Afghan commandos reached the compound. They were exhausted after hiking for hours through muddy farmland. The Ma
rjah team was delighted to see them.
“Great to see you, brother,” Dan said to one of the team sergeants he knew well. “I have a prime piece of Afghan real estate for you.”
The teams secured a perimeter around an adjacent field to create a landing zone large enough for the four Chinooks that would evacuate Andy’s team, the attached support soldiers, and the Afghan commandos. The two new ODAs were staying behind to wait for the recovery team to collect the downed Black Hawk. Andy divided everyone into groups, or chalks, and assigned a color to each Chinook to speed up the boarding process.
Dan was relieved when they took off and left Marjah behind. Ski lay on a stretcher on the floor, and Jordan held his hand.
“Okay, let’s get out of here,” Dan said.
IT WAS EARLY MORNING when they landed at Kandahar Airfield, exhausted, covered in blood, wet, and freezing cold. The pilots told them this was their final stop. Everyone was dismayed. They were expecting to get back to Camp Antonik, where they could shower, change clothes, and call home. They didn’t have cell phones or money with them.
Then they discovered that news of the battle had leaked, and reports about a stranded team of Green Berets and a downed helicopter had been playing on cable TV all day.
Dan asked to borrow his old team leader’s office so he could call home. He was worried that Brianne, who was still in West Virginia with her parents, might have seen the story, as her father seemed to have Fox News on in the background all day. But she had no idea what had happened. Andy’s parents, on the other hand, knowing their son’s team was involved, had been glued to their screens and were almost inconsolable.
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