Tough as They Come

by Travis Mills

  It took us more than four hours to walk to the village. We set up on the north side while half our guys came in slightly east of the village. The plan was that one element would establish a base of fire while we flanked from the north. One of my machine gun teams was with me, and my other team was with the other element.

  As soon as we set up, a bullet zipped in. Right behind it came another. A firefight broke out and for the first little while, it was just small arms fire from the Taliban’s AK-47s, nothing major. By the smoke plumes, the enemy fire looked to be coming from the wadi on the other side of the village. We shot back and started maneuvering to see if we could push the enemy back. An hour passed and then another. Then another. Gradually we moved forward and through the village. It was dirt poor. Everything was closed in the village. No one was running around. All I saw were mud huts and mud walls and narrow alleyways. No civilians anywhere. We saw some yellow jugs at one house that looked like they contained materials for making explosives, but that was it. Eventually the firing died down completely and for about thirty minutes on the other side of the village there was absolute silence.

  In front of us lay the dry riverbed. It was wide, about 800 meters, maybe half a mile. Our CO was with us on this mission and told us to cross the wadi to see what was on the other side. There was no cover whatsoever in the riverbed, which meant we were completely open to attack. The area was wide, low, rocky ground—and I could tell by the concerned looks on the faces of the other squad leaders that none of us thought this was a good idea.

  I set up my gun line on the edge of the riverbed with my Alpha team on the right and my Bravo team on the left. Sergeant Farr was team leader of Bravo and I knew he’d do a good job. The idea was that the rest of the troops would cross the riverbed in between my two gun teams. I gave both teams the sectors of fire, the limits where they could and couldn’t shoot, so they wouldn’t hit the guys walking between us. With our two gun teams in place, the guys from the first and second squads slowly started to walk across the riverbed. Everything was quiet. That eerie sort of quiet that you fear isn’t going to last long. Our men followed the mine hound, walking at a snail’s pace.

  When our men were halfway across the wadi—completely vulnerable—one enemy bullet zipped in. Our men all took a knee. When a bullet zips in it makes a whistling sound, almost like a really quick whip. Another bullet soon followed, and suddenly the area around the wadi completely erupted with heavy fire. Our men flattened out. This was like no fire I’d ever seen before. Bullets kicked up all around us. Artillery shells boomed. Mortars. Rockets. Everything was pouring toward us with fire and fury.

  Bullets zipped in and hit all around our fingers, our helmets, our arms, our legs, whip, whip, whip. You could feel the extreme velocity of the fire. This was our lieutenant’s first firefight ever, and he didn’t panic, but I knew he needed to make a decision soon—keep our men walking forward or bring them back. He kept the radio to his ear. He was shouting and someone was frantically yelling back at him from the radio. Everywhere I could hear the dire sound of constant lead. Boom! Boom! Boom! The Taliban knew exactly what they were doing, and they were walking the mortars closer to us, zeroing in their coordinates to land a direct hit. Shells landed twenty meters away from our men. Then fifteen meters. Our guys were pinned down. They’d stopped moving.

  From the far side of the wadi, my gun teams fired back with everything we had. Our guns were all set to cyclic, the maximum rate of fire. My men were shooting prone to make themselves smaller targets. But I noticed that two of my guys were shooting in the wrong spot. They were shooting too close to where our other guys were positioned and were liable to shoot them. Plus, we needed to keep our heads, particularly in a heavy firefight such as this, and conserve ammo. No one knew how long this would last. Someone needed to set them straight. It was time to move. I sprinted over to my other gun team and slapped their heads to make sure they were firing in the correct position, then yelled at them not to burn through their ammo all at once. They calmed down, their training took over, and our machine guns spewed out bullets in deadly measured increments.

  Our lieutenant’s decision still hung in the air when I noticed out in the middle of the wadi that one of our guys was down—Sergeant Butler. He yelled, “I’m hit! I’m hit!” One of his team leaders, Sergeant Marty Miller, ran over to him and swept his hands along Butler’s body to check for blood. Miller ran back to our lieutenant to report and yelled that he couldn’t find any. Out in the wadi, Butler tried to stand but fell.

  Lieutenant Lewis decided right then to bring everybody back. I hate to lose a scrap, but it was the right choice. Pushing forward with mine hounds was going to take too much time, particularly now that we had a casualty out in the middle of the wadi. Plus, it was going to be nearly impossible to land a helicopter to evac Butler anywhere in a hailstorm like this. Our guys started to fall back to where we had been.

  Bullets still raged all around us. Butler had his arms around two guys. They were trying to pick him up. But every time he took a step he fell to the ground in pain. Bullets smacked all around them. Mortars continued to fall. Boom! Boom! Boom! Everywhere was dust and confusion and smoke. The two guys could have dragged him to safety, but something was happening that impeded that process—I couldn’t tell exactly what.

  My mind flashed to a moment back in the States when I’d had a disagreement with Sergeant Butler. He was older than I was, maybe late thirties, an E6, same rank as me, and in charge of the first squad (I was in charge of the fourth). Butler wasn’t a bad guy, but he ran his mouth, and we had our differences. He’d said something, and I’d said something, and we’d disagreed. That was okay. It brought a fun level to work.

  Here in the middle of a firefight, I didn’t care about any disagreement. I tossed my M4 to First Sergeant Michael Parrish and sprinted out into the riverbed. I was still wearing my body armor, but essentially I was weaponless. If I’d kept my rifle, it would have only slowed me down. I ran down to where Sergeant Butler lay. He was probably fifty meters total away.

  “It’s my leg,” he shouted. “I can’t put any weight on it.”

  “Shut up!” I yelled. “Get on my back now. Let’s go!” Without waiting for him to answer, I grabbed his right hand with my left, squatted down, and threw him over my shoulders in a fireman’s carry. He was probably 185 pounds. I hefted him up, and ran him back to safety.

  We got behind a berm and I kept going another fifty meters, then I set Butler down so a medic could tend to him. I was sweating something fierce and just about to gulp a drink of water when my first sergeant yelled, “Mills, I need you over here right now!” So I ran over to him on the edge of the wadi, got my M4 back, and took charge over the two gun teams again. He needed to get everybody off the line, and there were still a few more men to go.

  We called in Kiowa helicopters to help provide covering fire. When they showed up, the enemy quit firing for a short time so as not to show their position. That gave us enough time to run Sergeant Butler back to the casualty control point, an area set up by the platoon sergeant to collect the wounded while out on patrol. But the Kiowas didn’t stick around long—and they didn’t dare land to evacuate Butler. In a hot point like this, it’s any Taliban’s dream to blast a coalition helicopter with an RPG.

  Eventually we all got out of there safely. We hiked out the same way we went back in, slowly and cautiously through shaving cream lines with a minesweeper leading the way. Butler was carried on a stretcher, and we took turns carrying him. When we neared the strongpoint, I ran ahead of my guys and high-fived them back into the strongpoint while singing the 82nd Airborne song. This was the first time a lot of our guys had ever seen combat, so they were shaky and a number of them were smoking. I said whatever I could to encourage them. They did the right thing. That’s how they were supposed to handle a crazy situation like that. You just want to keep their spirits up so they don’t freeze the next time they’re in battle.

  Two guys caught me outside my
tent. They’d deployed before but had been with a different unit then. Earlier, both of them had wondered out loud why I’d ever been promoted. They’d fought under other NCOs, and the other NCOs were always serious, never joking around about anything. But these two guys had changed their tune now. They said that after seeing me in today’s firefight they’d follow me to hell and back. It felt like a pivotal point in my leadership.

  No one was hurt except Butler. We had an aid station at the strongpoint, but it was limited to bandages and Neosporin—the stuff your mom would have at home. What we needed was an X-ray machine. It turned out that Butler wasn’t shot after all, but he’d torn up his ACL something bad and couldn’t set any weight on the leg. Since his condition wasn’t critical and resources were limited, they decided to evacuate him the next morning when an aircraft would normally depart from the strongpoint. Driving him to Kandahar wasn’t an option due to the high risk of the area around us.

  Later that night we relaxed a bit and were all joking around, just letting the stress of the day wash out of us. I said something to Butler about how he’d need to get a desk job now. It sounded condescending, I confess, and he didn’t like that and called me cocky and said a couple of other words my direction. We exchanged a few more jabs and things escalated. I ended up saying that if he didn’t have a bad leg I’d come over to where he was and punch him to pieces. Despite our attempts to unwind, the tension of the day was still running high. But this is how a brotherhood is: tempers can flare in the military, but guys get over stuff fast.

  An hour and a half later, Butler said, “Hey, Mills, I gotta use the bathroom.”

  And I was like, “Okay, I’m coming.” I picked him up and carried him to the john.

  Our disagreement was over. Just like that.

  Later that night, we could see heavy lights on in the villages around us. They were holding Taliban funerals. We listened in on our Icom (basically a walkie-talkie with a police scanner built in), and they were saying prayers and naming off the guys who’d been killed.

  I can’t say we felt remorseful. It could have been our guys’ funerals. It was only our third day here and already we were taking heavy fire. We knew we were in for a real battle on this deployment, and we were ready to go back out to the fight and do our jobs the following day.

  The next morning I carried Butler to the helicopter. His knee was all swollen up.

  “Take it easy,” I said, and set him down.

  “You too,” he answered.

  Those are the things you do for your fellow brother-in-arms.

  Later, a couple of my higher-ups said I should get the Bronze Star for my actions in running into the wadi under fire to save Butler. My commander wanted to put in for a higher medal for me, but I told him not to bother with the paperwork. It was what it was. I was just doing my job. Later on I received a Bronze Star for all my actions during the deployment.

  —

  From then on, we took fire almost every day. Day after day after day after day.

  It might have been a week in, we headed out to a village called Khik, about three or four kilometers away from the strongpoint. It would take at least a five-hour hike to get there. The 10th Mountain had come into heavy contact with the Taliban there, so we were pretty sure it would happen again. We knew that when it came to Khik, we weren’t just going to stroll in and talk to the leaders. So our orders were to take bigger rucksacks, talk to the elders, stay the night in or near Khik, then come back the next day.

  It was early morning, almost daylight, when we left the strongpoint. Conventional wisdom would reason that any platoon out on a mission would be safer to travel under the cloak of darkness. But because of the threat of IEDs, it was actually safer for us to travel during daylight. Again, we were moving through barren land with no cover. The same dry riverbed (wadi) generally runs east to west, but it changed course and paralleled where we were on this hike.

  About an hour in, the sun’s rays streaked across the land. In the distance near the wadi, three vehicles careened along the landscape, traveling fast in a dusty convoy, heading straight toward the village of Khik. Two of the vehicles were pickup trucks and one was a car. There was no road where these vehicles were driving, only the edge of the wadi, and all three vehicles were traveling at an unnaturally high rate of speed. Maybe fifty to sixty miles per hour. Normally, civilians will travel at about twenty when there are no roads around. I could see military-age men packed in the back of the pickup trucks and inside the car. I had a strong hunch who they were.

  Sure enough, about thirty minutes later, another cluster of vehicles traveled the same stretch of ground. Same high rate of speed. Same age of men packed into the vehicles. They were glaring our direction, obviously not happy to see us.

  It was the Taliban on their way to work. Their work was to set up around the village of Khik and blast us once we got there. They wanted to keep us from talking to the village elders inside, from making any allegiances with them, from helping them in any way. Seeing this deadly commute prompted an unnerving feeling. Frustration. Anger. Because of the rules of engagement, we couldn’t do anything about these vehicles. The men weren’t shooting at us. They were only driving by us on their way to shoot us. It felt like being in high school again on the football team. You’re the home team and you see the other team arrive and take the field. We knew we’d be battling these exact guys later in the day. But for the moment we couldn’t do anything except give them the stink eye. Equally unnerving was that it still would take us a while to arrive at Khik. By then, they’d have had more time to set up and build up their defenses.

  An hour passed. We continued our slow pace behind the minesweeper. Finally we arrived at the outskirts of the village.

  We set up behind a karez hole for cover. Used for irrigation, a karez hole is sort of like a giant molehill with water in the bottom. The opening of the hole is maybe 10 feet by 10 feet, and the drop down inside is maybe 50 to 60 feet. If you fall in, it’s going to be a bad day. We took off our rucksacks, and Lieutenant Lewis set up a sniper team overlooking the village, a weapons squad on another karez hole closer to the village, and two rifle elements. I set up my guns and called in our grids. All was completely dead silent. We knew it was the calm before the storm.

  The village was maybe the length of two football fields away. With security now set up, the lieutenant led our second squad, about eight men, toward the village to make contact. They moved at a snail’s pace, always sweeping the ground for mines. I had to hand it to the lieutenant—he was right in the middle of this action, doing his job fearlessly.

  Sure enough, when our men were not quite halfway from us to the village, the air erupted in bullets. Shooting at our men were the same Taliban members who’d been driving by us all morning. The fire wasn’t coming from the village itself. It was coming from the neighboring areas. Once again, our guys were pinned down in the open. It was pretty heavy fire—lots of smoke, dust, noise, and lead—and there was an additional problem this time: my guys couldn’t fire at the enemy!

  From where the squad had stopped moving—directly out in the middle—we couldn’t shoot our machine guns at the targets we needed to hit. Our own guys were right in our way. There was no means of getting a message to the squad by radio. That meant someone needed to run out into the middle of the fire and deliver the message in person. The squad was about thirty yards away. That would be my job.

  I sprinted forward to our men, got in the face of the team leader, Sergeant Williams, and told him to move the squad. It was hard to hear and he hesitated. I started literally picking his guys up and shoving them forward. He got the picture in a hurry. “Follow Sergeant Williams!” I yelled at them. “Move!”

  They started to move forward. Still under fire, I ran back to the karez hole and got my gun teams working. Our field of fire was now cleared, and we began ripping into the enemy. We fired and fired and lay down enough cover so the second squad was able to move into the village.

  On some d
ays, I attended these key meetings with the elders, but on days like this where the fire was flying, I needed to stay out by the guns. I’d be in on the debriefing later to hear what was said. Eventually the firing died down.

  Our second squad spent the rest of the day in the village. Lieutenant Lewis talked to village elders through an interpreter and worked to gain an understanding of where their allegiances lay. We were all suspect of whatever the elders in Khik told us. Your job is more like trying to piece together the truth when you walk in there, rather than expecting you’ll hear it being told openly.

  Picture it this way. The villages in our area were neither totally “bad” nor “good,” meaning neither aligned with the Taliban nor against them. Their allegiances were almost always fluid, and in a crazy sort of way this actually made sense for the civilians’ survival. The village elders had seen a lot of combat in their area over the years, and they were used to sitting on the fence, switching sides depending on who dominated at any given time. In places such as Khik, they hadn’t yet seen much influence of the new Afghan government, so it made sense for them to be allied with the Taliban sometimes. With no one to protect the village, the Taliban would inflict retribution on the villagers if the place wasn’t allied with them.

  I talked extensively with Lieutenant Lewis about this afterward, and the longer we were in Afghanistan, the less we believed the conflict had much to do with actual religion, although Islamic extremism acted as an umbrella to influence every action. More and more we could see that the war had a lot to do with money.