by Sean Parnell
Outlaw Platoon
Heroes, Renegades, Infidels, and the Brotherhood of War in Afghanistan
Sean Parnell
WITH JOHN R. BRUNING
Dedication
To the men of Third Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, “The Outlaws,” whose extraordinary courage in the face of great adversity inspired me to write this book
Epigraph
Many heroes lived . . . but all are unknown and unwept, extinguished in everlasting night, because they have no spirited chronicler.
—QUINTUS HORATIUS FLACCUS (HORACE)
Contents
Dedication
Epigraph
Author’s Note
Map
Prologue
Part I: Outlaw Country
One: Game Faces
Two: Prisoner of the Divide
Three: The Long, Dark Reach
Part II: The Spring Offensive
Four: Only Do, or Do Not
Five: Gauntlet
Six: Welcome to the Family
Seven: The Becoming
Eight: Bring Out Your Dead
Nine: The Moral High Ground
Photos
Part III: The Summer of Discontent
Ten: The Gates of Mordor
Eleven: Morning on the Mountain
Twelve: The Zombie Apocalypse
Thirteen: Desolation Walk
Fourteen: Blood Brothers
Fifteen: The Place Beyond Devotion
Sixteen: Chickenshit Squared
Seventeen: Skeleton Crew
Eighteen: Arrival Moment
Nineteen: Rocket’s Red Glare
Twenty: Last Fair Deal Gone Down
Twenty-one: Village of the Damned
Twenty-two: Shake and Bake
Twenty-three: The Far Side of the Sky
Twenty-four: We Stumble Through
Part IV: Indomitable Moments
Twenty-five: Crosses to Bear
Twenty-six: The Place Where Mettle Grows
Twenty-seven: The Last Last Stand
Twenty-eight: Homeward Bound
Epilogue
Platoon Members
Acknowledgments
Glossary
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Author’s Note
One important purpose of this book has been to chronicle my soldiers’ incredible journey in one of the most dangerous places on the face of the planet. These remarkable men spent sixteen months on a small Forward Operating Base in the Bermel Valley, roughly twelve kilometers from Pakistan. Throughout the course of their deployment, these soldiers endured continuous close, direct-fire contact with a combat-hardened, tactically proficient enemy on its home terrain. I was both blessed and cursed to have led one of the most valorously decorated conventional combat units in the history of Operation Enduring Freedom. When the haze of combat dissipated, the Outlaws were awarded seven Bronze Stars, including five for Valor, twelve Army Commendations for Valor, and thirty-two Purple Hearts. I am writing this book to tell the world of their amazing accomplishments and to secure their place in American military history.
It’s also worth noting that this book displays no political agenda nor is it a review of U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan. This story is not intended to hurt anyone’s feelings but rather to provide an honest assessment of what combat was like for these young warriors.
Regrettably, it was impossible to mention every member of the platoon in this book. The men portrayed herein are representative of the unit as a whole. My goal was to show the world their sacrifices and, in doing so, provide readers with a much-needed window into the heart of American infantry soldiers everywhere. Also, I have no desire to expose any soldiers who did not live up to this standard, so I have changed the names and identifying characteristics of some soldiers.
Finally, this book is a work of nonfiction. Every event in this book took place. Actions and experiences have been retold using both my own memory and interviews with my men. Dialogue is presented here from my own recollection and is not intended to be a word-for-word documentation; rather, it is intended to capture the essence of the moment. Any errors made in the story were not intentional and likely can be attributed to the intense pace and chaotic nature of combat.
Prologue
February 5, 2006
Eastern Afghanistan
The snowcapped ridges stretched from horizon to horizon, a vast dragon’s back of peaks and valleys. An hour before, as we had left Bagram Air Force Base, the landscape had been salted with villages and walled qalats interspersed with the ruins of ancient fortresses constructed during Alexander the Great’s time. As we choppered eastward, such signs of civilization began to vanish. The qalats and farms grew sparse. Finally, even the Kuchi nomads and their tent camps disappeared.
Towering mountains, their rocky cliffs wrinkled like an old man’s face, flanked the red-brown flatlands where not a road could be seen. Here the earth was untransformed by human endeavor. I found beauty in its pristine hostility. It was perhaps the last place on the planet that had defied the efforts of man.
I found it lonely too. I wished my men were with me in this helicopter. Our battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Toner, had ordered us platoon leaders to fly out a few days ahead of our men to our assigned base on the Pakistani border. We were to be briefed by the unit we were replacing, learn the area, and prepare the way for our platoon’s arrival. After the orientation, we would begin combat operations. In the meantime, a hollow sense of loneliness remained ever present.
I was sitting in the back of a Boeing CH-47 Chinook, the venerable “Flying Banana” that harkened back to the Vietnam War. The airframe of that bird was older than I was. Eighty feet long and powered by two jet engines mounted on the back pylon, the Chinook looked about as aerodynamic as a metropolitan transit bus with rotors. We entered and exited via an aluminum ramp in the back of the cargo bay.
The Chinook crews were a breed apart. They usually flew with the ramp down and the flight engineer sitting on the end of it like a kid fishing off an old dock. Except instead of a pole and Zebco reel, he wielded an M240 machine gun capable of spewing out up to 950 bullets a minute. In an age of Mach 2 jets and satellite-guided munitions, going to war at about ninety miles an hour with your feet dangling in space seemed old-school hard core.
Beyond the flight engineer, the ranks of ridges marched out behind us. Two months before, I had been home in Pittsburgh enjoying Christmas with my family. My six-year-old cousin, Freddie, was hovering close. He had been in a strange mood all morning, alternating between excitement over gifts and anxiety over my pending departure. Finally, in the midst of present opening, he asked, “Sean, are you gonna die over there?” Leave it to a kid to voice what everyone was thinking. The hubbub drained away, replaced by a shocked, uneasy silence. I had pulled Freddie close, “No, no. I’ll see you next Christmas. I’ll be fine.”
My Italian grandfather, Frederick Sciulli, whose fingerless right hand (the result of a childhood fireworks accident) had never ceased to fascinate me as a kid, observed the moment with somber eyes. He’d never missed a day of work in fifty years, but after reti
ring, his health had finally started to fail, and he had spent much of the fall in the local ICU. Only a few days before Christmas, he’d been released from the hospital, and we were all in the mood to celebrate that.
“Sean,” he said softly, “you just be careful.”
How does an infantry platoon leader respond to that? It is our job to set the example in combat, and that meant I would have to take risks, expose myself, and place myself in the center of any fight we found ourselves in. My grandfather was not a man to bullshit. Freddie had squirmed out of my arms and pounced on a gift. I remember watching him send strips of wrapping paper flying and smiling at his innocent enthusiasm.
“Sean,” my grandfather said again, “you be careful.”
I turned to look at him. He was the greatest man I’d ever known. Medically disqualified during World War II, he had spent his entire adult life working a printing press. On nights and weekends, he had earned extra money as an usher at Steelers and Pirates games. He’d hung out with a bunch of blue-collar throwback Italians with nicknames like Vinnie the Creep and Fast Eddie. The nicknames were deceptive. They were the men upon whose backs this country was built—hardworking, principled, and devoted to family and company. I never saw him lose his temper or even heard him raise his voice. He loved his wife with singular passion, and my grandmother returned it with an intensity I’d not seen in any other relationship.
Be careful? Going to war in Afghanistan, how do you do that? I met his eyes and saw the old spark, the flint and grit of a man who had forged a life of simple nobility with his hands and heart. “Grandpap, I love you.”
His face registered surprise. It dawned on me that I had never said that to him before.
“I love you too, Sean.”
The Chinook banked and slipped between two sawtooth ridges. We were getting close to Forward Operating Base Bermel, the patch of real estate my platoon would call home for the next year. The air inside the cargo bay grew ever colder, and I was grateful to have put my gloves on before we climbed aboard. Winter in Afghanistan is no joke, and with the icy slipstream pouring through the door gunners’ windows, the feeble heaters under our seats had no prayer of keeping us warm.
I’d come into the company late, a branch transfer from, of all things, the air defense artillery. I’d spent the first part of my career in the army learning how to shoot down planes when all I really wanted was to be a straight-legged infantry officer. The bond I’d seen shared by riflemen in such movies as Saving Private Ryan appealed to me. I wanted to experience that. In the first weeks with my platoon, I’d learned that Stephen Ambrose had perpetuated a myth. The Band of Brothers thing? That was based on fading and selective memories of the Greatest Generation. Like all myths, there was truth wrapped up within it, but the reality, I discovered, was far more nuanced and complex.
Our company’s weeks in training divided the men into cliques, and that created tension. Within each platoon of about forty men, personalities clashed, and some men didn’t give their full measure to the platoon. The weeks we spent practicing for war sifted my platoon. Those who appeared to measure up earned respect. Those who didn’t were regarded with distrust and became outsiders. An inner circle formed around the men who demonstrated they could handle anything thrown at them. They were men of character, and they became the core of the platoon. I was lucky; when a platoon coalesces around alpha males who lack character, bad things happen.
The Chinook’s nose dropped, and we dived low into a narrow valley; our pilots kept us close to one side of it so the enemy could not catch us in cross fire. It worked well tactically, but for a nonaviator like myself, seeing these desolate mountains flash past only a few dozen meters from the porthole window in the fuselage was not for the faint of heart. If the pilots sneezed, we’d be a flaming smear on one of these rocky cliffs.
Unconsciously, my right hand went to my throat. My fingers dug under my body armor until they found the St. Christopher medal I’d worn since my last leave. Its flat silver surface slipped across my gloved fingers as I rubbed it gently. The feel of it was a comfort.
Across the aisle from me, Second Platoon’s leader, Lieutenant Dave Taylor, sat lost in thought, his eyes tracking the countryside through one of the Chinook’s Plexiglas bubbles. Even though our platoons did not get along well, Dave was my closest friend among my officer peers. We had spent many nights playing Halo together on our Xbox. At work, Dave shared his training plans with me, and I learned much of how to serve as an infantry officer by following his lead.
Just before we left Bagram, we had stood on the flight line near the rotary wing terminal, rows of Black Hawks lined up behind us. The mountains around Bagram were dusted with snow; the sky was a flawless ice blue. It was hard not to be captivated by the raw beauty of Afghanistan.
While we had waited for our ride, I’d asked Dave for two favors: “If I die, just make sure to wipe all the porn off my computer.”
He’d gotten a laugh out of that one.
Turning serious, I added, “Make sure my St. Christopher medal gets back to my mother.”
Dave nodded, then asked me for a favor: “If I get killed, I want you to carve a postage-stamp square of skin off the back of my neck and send it to my brothers.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Send a piece of my skin back to my brothers.”
I couldn’t tell if he was kidding. The other officers laughed uneasily.
“Dude, you’re a fucking nut!” I exclaimed.
“Why?” Dave looked puzzled.
“I’m not cutting off a piece of your skin and mailing it back to your family.”
Dave seemed disappointed. “Whatever, man. Whatever.”
I didn’t know what to make of Dave’s peculiar request. He’d also given serious thought to the stagecraft of his potential final moments. “If I know the end is coming—like if I see an RPG fired at me or I know a sniper is about to shoot me—I want my last word to be ‘Rats.’ ”
Our Chinook pitched nose high. The flight engineer stood and raised the ramp to the halfway-closed position to deflect some of the dust that was sure to blow into the cargo bay when our rotor wash reached the ground. We swung over FOB Bermel’s landing zone. The Chinook’s six rotor blades generate Katrina-force winds. Dust and rocks are churned up by the whipping power of the wash, often creating a total brownout that obscures vision and fills the aircraft with flying debris. At such moments, the gunners lean out their windows, scan for signs of Mother Earth, and talk the pilots down. It takes trust and coordination, a leap of faith similar to trusting someone in the backseat of your car who is talking you into a parking spot while you’re blindfolded.
Though everyone hates browning out, the pilots sometimes use the rotor wash offensively. If an animal wandered into the landing zone and wouldn’t get out of the way, the poor beast would surely get blasted. More than one unfortunate goat had been blown clear of landing zones like the cows in the movie Twister. Little kids who threw rocks or made gestures at the Chinooks sometimes paid for their sins with the mother of all dirt baths.
With a final turn, the Chinook settled into a hover and touched down. The flight engineer dropped the ramp, and we hurried out of the aircraft. Chinooks are at their most vulnerable while on the ground like this. The insurgents know this and try to target them, so we are trained to transition as quickly as possible.
We all cleared the ramp in seconds and the Chinook’s pilots poured on the torque, lifted off, and raced away to their next assignment. As it departed, the rotor wash pelted us with debris and dirt. We shielded ourselves by putting our backs to the bird, yet within seconds every piece of exposed skin was coated in brownish dust, even the postage-stamp-sized bit of Taylor’s neck that he wanted me to send to his family in case of his demise.
“Welcome to Forward Operating Base Bermel,” came a voice somewhere ahead of us in the brownout. It was smooth and measured an
d deep. A voice of authority.
A captain from the 173rd Airborne Brigade materialized out of the dust. Taller than my six foot one, he wore an old-style desert combat uniform that had recently been replaced army-wide by our digital-gray-and-green ACUs (Army Combat Uniforms).
“I’m Ryan Canady,” the captain said. Our group of newbies took turns shaking hands. He walked us over to the FOB’s rear gate and told us to drop our gear off on the concrete pad next to the tactical operations center. Captain Canady gave us a tour of our new home. Bermel was a small FOB, fit only for a reinforced company on the U.S. side, plus a battalion of troops on the Afghan National Army (ANA) side. Near the operations center, three flags fluttered in the breeze—one American, one Afghan, and one that looked like the French tricolor but turned out to be the 173rd Airborne’s unit flag. The base stretched about two kilometers east–west and about a kilometer north–south. It was formed by a curving wall of sand-filled Hesco bags that enclosed some weatherized tents, about a dozen wooden structures, and four guard towers. The Hesco bags were double stacked and more than ten feet high, but behind them an enormous ridge dominated the eastern skyline. It looked like the back hump of a sleeping dinosaur. “That’s Rakhah Ridge,” Canady told us. “On the other side is the Pakistani border. When we take incoming fire, it usually originates from behind that ridge.”