by Sean Parnell
For this patrol, we planned to head out to the south, check out a village down there, then swing around Rakhah Ridge and set up outposts on a couple of hills overlooking key intersections in the road leading out of Pakistan. If we controlled those choke points, we’d disrupt the enemy’s ability to move into Afghanistan. A company of Afghan soldiers had sortied with us and led the way with a small cadre of marines to serve as their embedded trainers. They bounced along in Toyota pickups a half kilometer or so in front of us.
Our five Humvees rattled down the narrow dirt road through the village of Malakshay. Not a soul greeted us. Windows were shuttered, doors closed. The bazaar was empty. The place looked like a ghost town. We drifted through the main drag, gunners scanning the empty alleys with nervous anticipation. Not even a cat roamed the streets.
We reached the far end of town and broke out into open country to the east, where we picked up speed. Pinholt and I sat side by side in silence, our usual financial and political banter killed off by the creepy feeling we’d gotten in Malakshay. Ahead, the road headed straight into a series of ridges and hills. We were in for another long stretch of moving at school-zone speed.
Pinholt eased off the gas as Baldwin’s truck, which was on point, wound around a corner created by a massive butte that my map identified as Gangikheyl Hill. Rising nearly straight up for 2,500 feet, the feature dominated the landscape. Inching around the corner, we followed Baldwin’s truck to the back side of the butte. Behind us, our other three rigs and their alert drivers maintained the proper spacing as we slowed down. As we came around the bend, we could see that the road dropped into a narrow valley behind Gangikheyl Hill.
After only four hours on the road, we were already broiling in the sweatbox the armored Humvees became after any duration under the sun. After a day in such heat, it was not uncommon for our body temperatures to hover at 103 degrees. We called it “baking brain cells.” Within hours, our temples throbbed; our bodies leeched salt and fluids. No matter how much Gatorade or water you drank, there was no way to replace everything you lost. When we stopped to pee, our urine looked like apple juice, a sign of perpetual dehydration.
The dust our vehicles kicked up caked our faces and hands. We had to be careful when wiping the sweat off our faces, lest we contaminate our eyes with grit. My gunner, Brian Bray (Chris Brown was in Sabo’s truck that day), already sported so many layers of Afghan moondust that he looked like the albino character from The Da Vinci Code. We’d learned that to keep from passing out from dehydration or heat exhaustion, we had to eat or drink constantly. We carried beef jerky and potato chips to replace the sodium our bodies dumped out our pores. To keep our electrolytes in balance, we alternated two liters of water with every liter of Gatorade.
With one grimy sleeve, I wiped the sweat off my brow. I’d just finished a liter of Gatorade; time to switch back to water. I found a bottle in a case sitting on the flat space between the front seats.
Pinholt kept us crawling along at ten miles an hour. We reached the dip in the road and had a roller-coaster moment as the Humvee’s nose pitched down. A solid cliff ran straight up to our left—the back side of Gangikheyl Hill. To our right, another cliff plunged down into a wadi. A few hundred meters beyond the wadi rose a series of sharp ridges.
The road continued its steep descent for several hundred meters before flattening out. It then followed the lip of the wadi before climbing precipitously up to the top of a knoll that grew out of the back side of Gangikheyl Hill. It was going to be like driving to the bottom of a gravy boat, then up and out its spout.
Looking at the slope ahead, I wondered if it was too steep for us to navigate without each truck getting a running start first. In earlier patrols, we had found that the heavily laden Humvees simply didn’t have the power to get up some inclines without getting up a head of steam first.
The hackles on my neck suddenly stood straight up. My nerves jangled, spellbound by a sensation unfelt before.
What the hell?
Perhaps I was getting seriously dehydrated. I opened the water bottle in my hands. My lips curled around its plastic rim just as Baldwin’s Humvee exploded. For a split second, a bubble of orange flame sprouted from its right side. The rig lurched hard left as its shocks absorbed the violent blast. Another flame ball boiled underneath the Humvee. Gouts of dirt and smoke spewed horizontally from out between the tires.
An instant later, the fire vanished, replaced by curls of black smoke haloed by swirling dust. McCleod, Baldwin’s gunner, disappeared out of the turret, leaving the barrel of his M2 .50-caliber heavy machine gun pointing skyward.
“Baldwin!”
I dropped the water bottle. Before it hit my lap, a third bloom of fire spawned midway between our two Humvees. My truck trembled, and suddenly it sounded as if somebody was making popcorn.
Shrapnel on the armor plate.
The smoke and dirt shrouded Baldwin’s Humvee from view.
I heard a sharp explosion behind us, quickly followed by several more. The ground quaked again. The water bottle shifted, fell over my left thigh, and spilled down my pant leg.
Pinholt sat next to me with his gloved hands tight on the Humvee’s steering wheel. Sweat trickled down the side of his head; more beaded on his forehead just below the rim of his helmet. He looked at me, his face tense but his eyes determined. He was waiting for me to make a decision.
Ahead, more smoke swirled around Baldwin’s Humvee. Beyond it, I could see our Afghan National Army (ANA) cohorts bailing out of their Toyota Hilux pickup trucks toward the top of the knoll. The Afghan soldiers, never pictures of discipline, ran this way and that with their weapons held at low ready. A few flopped into the dirt on either side of the vehicles. Others vanished off the road, sprinting as they fired randomly from the hip.
Between the explosions, the drumbeat of machine guns rang out from both sides of us.
Gunfire has its own language. Suppressing fire, the purpose of which is to pin you down, sounds undisciplined; it wanders back and forth over you without much aim. It is searching and random and somehow doesn’t seem as deadly.
Accurate, aimed fire is a different story. It has purpose to it. You know as soon as you hear it that somebody has you in their sights. The shots come with a rapid-fire focus that underscores their murderous intent. Somebody is shooting at you. It becomes intimate and fear-inducing.
Gunfire can also telegraph the trigger puller’s emotional response to a firefight. When a squad is surprised, you can tell they’re jumpy and startled by their return fire. There’s no rhythm, just a crash of noise jumbled together that gradually settles down as they recover their composure.
There are the pros, men who have waited with cold calculation for other men to venture into their sights. They take their time. They space their shots like drummers setting a band’s beat.
And then there are the haters, men brimming with passion, controlled only by long-instilled discipline. But when time comes to pull the trigger, the very act becomes an unbridled emotional release, volcanic, furious—terrifying.
The enemy machine gunners hammered at us with accurate bursts. As their bullets struck home, they spoke to us infantrymen as clearly as if they had used our native language. Message received: these were not amateurs hiding in the hills on our flanks.
I reached for my radio handset, remembering that the radio is a lieutenant’s best weapon.
“FOB Bermel, this is Blackhawk three-six,” I said in a voice as calm as I could manage.
No response. Before I could try again, Sabatke came over the platoon net: “Three-six, this is three-four! We’re getting tore up back here! We have to get outta the kill zone!”
“FOB Bermel, this is Blackhawk three-six, troops in contact . . .”
A voice broke through the static. I recognized it as First Sergeant Christopher. The transmission was weak and garbled. I called the company one more tim
e but received only a broken response again.
“We’re getting fucked up back here!” Sabo reported.
Another explosion rocked my Humvee. The enemy machine gunners concentrated on killing the men in our turrets. They knew our Humvees served as mobile firepower platforms. The lone soldier in the turret manned a heavy weapon such as a machine gun or grenade launcher, which were our best casualty-producing assets. Take those out, and we would be virtually defenseless.
A spray of bullets tore across Baldwin’s empty turret. I heard a round spang into ours and ricochet around.
“Blackhawk three-six . . .” came First Sergeant Christopher, but the rest of his words were swallowed by static.
Fear assailed me. We were in a kill zone perhaps 350 meters long. To our left was the rocky cliff side of Gangikheyl Hill. It rose about six feet over our Humvees, then flattened out into a short plateau before running nearly vertical to the 2,500-foot summit. The hill was between us and our base, which was the reason for our terrible radio reception.
To the right, the road extended only a few feet beyond my door before dropping into the wadi. Looking out the bulletproof window in my door, I could see muzzle flashes on the conifer-stippled ridgeline.
The abandoned Afghan Toyota Hiluxes made forward movement impossible. We couldn’t drive right or left. We couldn’t even dismount and attack into the ambush; the terrain was just too rugged. Backing up while taking rocket and machine-gun fire was not going to work either. Our trucks probably didn’t even have the power to reverse up the slope we’d just negotiated.
The enemy had used the terrain brilliantly to trap us in their kill zone. The amount of tactical acumen it had taken to conceive and execute this ambush sent a surge of pure terror through me.
We needed artillery. We needed aircraft. But I couldn’t talk to the FOB, and we couldn’t drive out of the fight.
Another explosion blossomed near Baldwin’s Humvee.
Bullets stitched across my rig’s turret. A 7.62mm round center-punched our windshield. Two more struck home, and the ballistic glass spiderwebbed with cracks.
I switched to my platoon net and called out, “All elements, this is three-six. The ANA is blocking our path. We’re going to need to stand and fight it out.”
Silence greeted this.
Again, I peered through the armored-glass window in my door. I could see perhaps twenty muzzle flashes on the hill there. Some appeared to be coming from the trees, some from bushes. I looked left. High up Gangikheyl Hill, I made out another rash of muzzle flashes. The enemy was emplaced in force on both sides of us, plunging fire down on our vehicles.
The FM radio we used to talk to the FOB was useless. My rig also had a tactical satellite radio, but it didn’t work unless we turned off our electronic jamming systems, which were designed to prevent the enemy from detonating roadside bombs on us with a remote device such as a cell phone. If I ordered the jammers shut down, then lost a vehicle to a bomb, I would never be able to live with myself. Surely there had to be another solution.
Baldwin’s voice came over the radio, “Three-six, this is three-two, my gunner can’t engage. We don’t know where the ANA is.”
Baldwin’s alive! So is McCleod!
Relief cooled the terror I felt. My head cleared.
Think this through, Sean.
The enemy had anticipated our tactics. They’d picked this ground because they knew it was a dead spot for our radios. Without communication we could not call down artillery and an air strike on them. That one calculation had evened their odds against us considerably.
They knew that our field manuals taught us to assault into an ambush like this. But the rock wall to our left and the steep drop into the wadi to our right removed that option from our playbook. They might as well have been behind a moat or a medieval castle wall.
Within this deadly stretch of ground, they targeted our lead and trail vehicles first. Baldwin and Sabatke. Destroy those rigs, and our remaining ones would be trapped in a kill zone dominated by enemy machine gunners and rocketeers.
Okay. There would be no driving out of this fight, certainly not with the ANA blocking our way ahead.
That left something out of the box. Something not in the field manuals. But what? I clutched my rifle, reached for my portable radio, then closed my eyes for just a moment. In the darkness, the firefight drained away and I could see my parents’ faces. They were crying in their doorway as a contact team reported my death. Was it a vision? Or just a warning?
Sean, it’s time to prove yourself. You have to lead.
The cold, flat ring of lead on armor filled the air. The window in my door splintered.
Suddenly, I was thirteen again, sitting on the school bus home. That year, a fat brute had made it his personal mission to terrorize, humiliate, and pound on me at every turn. Those bus rides became a nightmare. Even my home wasn’t safe. After I built a fort in my backyard, the brute and his pals wrecked it one day when we were gone. It grew so bad that I moved through my neighborhood as if I were stealing through enemy territory, fearing that I’d be discovered, chased down, and beaten raw again.
On that particular afternoon, I sat next to a pretty girl and had momentarily dropped my guard. She spoke to me with a soft, inviting voice. I rode along, listening with joy I had not felt in months.
Something slammed into the back of my head and drove my chin into my chest. I saw stars. The brute had thrown his backpack at me. “You better pass that back to me, bitch,” he sneered.
Half his size, I knew I had no chance against him, especially since four of his cronies were staring at me. One act of defiance, and they would make an example of me.
My stomach lurching, I reached down, picked up his backpack, and handed it to the kid behind me. He passed it back to the brute.
He threw it at my head again. That time, he caught me even harder. My head jerked forward, and I bounced off the girl who’d been talking to me.
“Give it here, bitch,” he called through peals of cruel laughter.
I looked around. Wasn’t anyone going to stand up for me? My best friend sat across the aisle from me. I looked pleadingly into his eyes. He looked away. Everyone did. The girl moved.
I passed the backpack to the kid behind me. Moments later, it struck me in the back of the head again.
The bus driver saw it and told the brute to stop. He ignored him, and the driver did nothing. Not a soul rose to my defense. The bully had terrified everyone, and they just wanted to stay out of his way.
The bus remained silent as the torment continued, until my stop mercifully arrived. I fled, humiliated and more alone than at any other time in my life.
That night, as I thought of all those kids watching and doing nothing, I swore I would never stand idly by while somebody needed help.
That moment propelled me down a path that led me to the army.
I grasped the Humvee’s door handle. Pinholt noticed the movement. He turned his head in surprise. “Sir, what the fuck are you doing?”
Be their leader, set the example.
Since training, I’d seen the platoon’s dynamic change. Some men had risen to the challenge of Lieutenant Colonel Toner’s grueling pace; others had failed or set forth bare minimum effort. That dichotomy had rewritten the social fabric of the platoon. Friendships had faded; new ones had bloomed that were based on success. Those who measured up to Lieutenant Colonel Toner’s standards had grown into the heart of our platoon.
So far, I was a member of the platoon’s inner circle—not by what I’d done under fire but for those moments back in the States when I had stood up for my men in the face of garrison politics. I had earned their respect, but a moment like this one would break that forever if I didn’t take the right path.
I remembered Captain Waverly’s decisive moment. Rockets were exploding all around our base, and he had faile
d to make a decision. Sweating in the ops center, he had been a deer in the headlights. He’d lost the men that day. Not long after, Lieutenant Colonel Toner had replaced him after finding him inside the wire when he’d reported to battalion that he was going out on a patrol.
In combat, men measure up. Or don’t. There are no second chances.
I held on to the handle. Another spate of bullets carved their way along the side of the Humvee. Baldwin’s rig took another near miss from a rocket-propelled grenade. I could hear my gunner, Bray, shouting something, but his words were unintelligible over the din of battle.
My hand hesitated on the door handle.
Do it. For them.
Just before we’d left Fort Drum, the platoon had gathered for one last night out on the town. Long after midnight, the liquor had made me relaxed and loud. I was happier than I had ever been, surrounded by men I’d come to care so much about.
Then I’d made a snarky comment to a woman who had insulted one of my men. She’d reported it to her boyfriend, a townie with a chip on his shoulder. He and four of his buddies had ambushed me in the bar’s bathroom. As they’d grabbed me and carried me outside, I’d laughed and said, “You picked the wrong night to do this.”
They’d dragged me into the parking lot, ready to go to work on me. Before they could throw a punch, my entire platoon had poured through the front doors, pounced on the townies, and turned them into bleeding, bellowing wrecks.
“OUTLAW PLATOON!” we’d celebrated with high fives, back slaps, and hugs. It was our first engagement. We’d won a decisive victory, and my men had proven they had my back.
In that drunken parking lot beat down, my bond to those men had become complete. For the first time in my life, I had experienced what loyalty returned felt like. And I knew that I would rather die than lose that.