by Sean Parnell
Baldwin’s wound looked bad. I wanted to shout for Doc Pantoja, but my body still refused to obey. Instead of words, I managed only an incoherent gurgle.
Phil.
So much blood.
A swarm of hornets ripped through the nearby trees: incoming machine-gun fire. It had to be originating from those ridges on the other side of the valley.
Get to Baldwin and Garvin, now!
The professional in me knew I had to get artillery onto those ridges.
Your family needs you, Sean. Get up.
My arms were rubber. My head swam. I tried to sit up, only to find myself falling back into Stalter’s embrace.
Another explosion overhead severed more treetops and pelted us with cartwheeling branches. Airburst mortars. That was a level of sophistication we’d not seen before.
On the far left of the line, Sabatke stood tall in the middle of the whirlwind, screaming at his men to get behind cover. A mortar round exploded only a few meters from him. He shielded his face with one arm but refused to get down; instead, he stayed exposed and kept shouting at his men, who were hugging the earth around his Humvee. Bullets ricocheted off the rig and kicked up swirls of dirt around his feet. He seemed oblivious to the danger.
In the turret of Sabakte’s Humvee, Sergeant Emerick rocked his .50-cal. I could see him snapping off eight to ten rounds at a time, just as we had trained, hammering at the ridgelines on the other side of the valley. Hold the trigger and say, “Die, motherfucker, die.” Ease up, repeat as necessary. That’s how you stay on target, don’t waste ammo, and minimize a jam.
Another mortar exploded overhead. Mangled bits of the trees showered Sabatke again. Emerick’s head whipsawed backward, a spray of blood filling the air. He dropped out of the turret and vanished.
I was sitting on my ass, my legs out in front of me like a child during reading time, and one of my men just got killed in front of me. I couldn’t even react at first; I just stared like a drunk at his empty turret.
Galang just killed my brother.
All at once I was seized by a rage so profound it banished my physical pain.
Emerick. Our platoon artist. Father of a newborn. His wife, Jessica, is a sweet and comforting woman. I visited them at the hospital too, shared their joy for a few brief minutes after their child was born. And I just watched him die.
I rose shakily to my feet. Bullets tore the ground beside Stalter and me as one of Galang’s machine gunners traversed our position. I started to fall, but Statler caught me.
“I got ya, sir. I got ya,” he said.
Propped against Statler, I pushed my way upright.
Get to Baldwin and Garvin. Now.
Campbell howled with rage and burned through the last of a hundred-round belt. Before reloading, he peered down at Baldwin and Garvin.
“Hang in there, man, hang in there!” His voice rose an octave. “Doc! Doc! We need you!”
Help them, Sean! Get your ass over there now.
No. My heart keened. My head cleared. Focus. Be the leader the entire platoon needs.
Right then I felt another part of me die.
The mission or the men you love?
Mission first.
Little by little, the reality of combat stole portions of my humanity.
Clinging to Statler, I made the professional decision I needed to make. In his ear, I shouted, “My truck, let’s go!”
Leaning on Statler, we half ran, half staggered to my vehicle. When I got there, I grabbed the radio handset from Reuter.
“FOB Bermel, this is Blackhawk three-six.” Was that really my voice?
Something exploded on the east side of the hilltop. Mortar? RPG? The blasts were coming one atop another now. Another airburst mortar detonated to the north, shredding the already splintered trees.
“Blackhawk three-six, this is Blackhawk five, what the hell is going on up there? We can hear it!” That was our company executive officer.
“We’re getting hammered. We’re outnumbered, and we need help. Send the QRF to my location right now.”
A pause as the XO digested this. A bullet bounced off the side of my Humvee. Lead impacting armor makes a distinctive, flat tunk; there’s nothing in the world that sounds remotely like it.
“Roger! Roger!” his excited voice came back across the static. “We’ll get someone to you ASAP.”
ASAP? What did that even mean? My men were dying here. The QRF—quick reaction force—was Second Platoon. Ever since it had been ambushed last month, Burley, their platoon sergeant, had displayed a notable reluctance to get into another fight. At times, he’d take his platoon out and sit in a safe position, then radio false location reports back to the FOB so it appeared as if he were moving around as ordered. Having him lead our rescue force? That did not bode well for us.
Reuter, in a voice so detached it could have come from the grave, said to me, “Sir, we’ve got to get out of here.”
So here’s what we’re going to do. We will always stay and finish the fight. Got it? We’re never going to break contact. We will never leave the ground to the enemy, and we’re never going to give them a moral victory.
I looked across our perimeter. Baldwin’s vehicle looked as if it had been used for target practice at a redneck convention. The hood was spackled with bullet holes, the windows were spiderwebbed with cracks. Campbell was still in his turret, but steam boiled over the nose of his Humvee from a ruptured radiator. Sabatke’s rig was in even worse shape—tires flat, engine belching smoke, windows wrecked. And when I studied my own, I could see gouges across the fenders, hood, and doors.
The only thing we have over those guys is grit. But where’s the line between fighting for a moral victory and reliving the Alamo?
Then I realized that the point was academic. Escape was not an option.
“Reuter, we can’t go anywhere, we’ve got three trucks down.”
“Yeah, but, sir . . . we need to get the fuck out of here.”
I put my hand on his shoulder. “Reuter, listen to me. We can’t leave. But we can start calling fire on those ridges. And the cave. You got that?”
He nodded in slow motion.
“Way to go, bro. Get those 105s rocking for us.” I handed him a radio. He regarded it curiously for a moment, as if his brain wasn’t processing. Then it all clicked into place. His eyes focused again. “I got this, sir.”
“I know you do, Reuter. You always have our back.”
He keyed the mike and went to work.
In my truck’s rear left seat sat Specialist Bobby Pilon. He was tall, lanky, and athletic, with a voice that sounded incongruously like Towelie’s from South Park. He stared at me with uneasy eyes, his face even more pale than usual. The other guys in the platoon called him Powder for his Casper the Friendly Ghost–like complexion.
He’d propped his M249 SAW between his legs, barrel up, box magazine facing the front seat.
“Pilon. Hey, how you doing?”
No response. He stared at me with fearful blue eyes. I had no doubt our expressions were identical.
“Pilon,” I said again, “we’ve got to lay down fire, and I need every man and gun we can get on the line.”
His eyes steadied and speared mine.
“I need your SAW over on the eastern flank by Baldwin’s truck. Can you reinforce that section of the line?”
He gazed out behind me at the maelstrom
of fire sweeping the hilltop. Mortars still rained down. Machine-gun fire stitched the trees, rocks, and vehicles. Baldwin and Garvin lay in a bloodied heap. He would have to run through all of that across open ground to execute my order.
Roger, sir,” he said without inflection. He unbuckled his seat belt and slipped out of the Humvee. He looked my way one last time, and I could see that calm resolve had frosted over the fear in his eyes. I had a sickening feeling that I had just ordered this gentle kid from Michigan to his death.
Without a word, Pilon brought his SAW to the low ready and rushed into the inferno engulfing the hilltop. I saw him stumble once, twice, but both times he recovered and kept running. An RPG sizzled overhead. Machine guns raked the ground. He didn’t slow down; he never hesitated.
How does a man find such courage?
I needed to be there with him. The eastern flank was the center of the fight, and that’s where a platoon leader had to be. I should have gone with Pilon.
“Blackhawk three-six, this is Blackhawk six.” Captain Dye’s call broke my concentration. I grabbed the radio handset and replied, “Blackhawk three-six, we’re taking a shellacking here, sir.”
“We can see the airbursts. You guys are in some serious shit.” He said.
“We’re not going to last,” I said flatly.
“Hang on, brother, we’re coming to you.”
I breathed a sigh of relief. He was only a few kilometers to the north with Delta’s heavily armed Humvees. We wouldn’t have to depend on Burley’s Second Platoon for our salvation after all.
Captain Dye would not let us down.
I cradled the handset and turned back toward the fight. Pilon had made it to the eastern hillcrest. With a single fluid motion, he dropped in the prone and popped his bipod open, just as Sabo had taught him back at Fort Drum. A moment later, his weapon was spewing lead.
Time to get on the line with the rest of the men. I steeled myself. The volume of fire sweeping the hilltop made May 7 look like a warm-up exercise.
I moved to the Humvee’s fender, ready to make a run for it.
There’s only one way to handle a moment like this one. Courage is a fleeting commodity and can be crushed effortlessly by a single fond memory of home. A backyard barbecue, a fragmented flashback to a moonlit dance with a beautiful girl—those are psychological bullets in combat. One glimpse of what has been makes a soldier yearn for what can be again. That yearning can be as caustic as acid. It burns away the resolve you need to get the job done.
One stray thought can paralyze just as effectively as a bullet in the spine.
Give yourself to the moment, Sean.
My legs began to move. Still dizzy from the mortar blast, I ran like a drunk across the open space, hearing the whip crack of bullets all around me. Something knocked me off balance, and I almost went down. At the last second, I stutter-stepped, righted myself, and kept running. Later, I found a bullet hole in my assault pack.
More RPGs arced and whizzed into the perimeter. One exploded off to my right on the crest of our hill. Another sailed overhead and detonated behind me. The machine guns chattered. My men screamed obscenities. I ran on.
Finally I threw myself down behind a tree not far from Pilon.
From there I had a bird’s-eye view of the battlefield. The enemy had emplaced three machine guns on each ridge on the other side of the valley. They’d positioned them in such a way that their fields of fire interlocked directly across our hilltop. It had taken someone with a keen tactical eye to set that up, and I wondered if Galang himself was out there directing this fight.
They had hit us with mortars to pin us down while they moved their machine guns onto the ridges. Once emplaced, they had unleashed hell upon us. We were facing a very capable force. How many times had a U.S. platoon faced such overwhelming firepower? Six heavy machine guns plus mortars—there was no way we could withstand this much longer.
To my left, Baldwin secured the tourniquet to Garvin’s arm. Baldwin’s leg looked bad, and the dirt around him was soaked with his blood.
Go to him.
The man I used to be bucked against the leader I had to be in combat.
“Pantoja! We need you over here!” I might as well have been whispering in a hurricane.
Focus.
What was their next move? In training, we learned to conduct assaults by using one squad to lay down a “base of fire” on the enemy before maneuvering on him. By blanketing his positions with lead, we could pin him into place so our other squads could strike the enemy’s flank. We called the element doing all the shooting the “support-by-fire” position.
That’s exactly what the enemy had done on the far ridge—they’d set up two support-by-fire positions.
They’re going to maneuver on you, Sean.
This was no May 7 hit-and-run. Galang was coming after us for sure. And it wouldn’t be long.
Two support-by-fire positions. What does that mean?
A pair of RPGs exploded among my men. I could hear them screaming, their voices full of rage.
Two support positions. Two pronged attack. That’s what I would do if I had a full company to maneuver.
I sat up sharply, feeling a bolt of terror. The enemy had seized the initiative; it held fire superiority and the high ground. The tactical situation had tilted drastically in its favor. We were in trouble.
“Prepare for an assault! They’re gonna be coming over those hills!”
Sabatke hollered back, “Sir! We’re red going on black on ammo! We’ve got almost nothing left!”
All across my line, I saw nothing but wounded men. Garvin, Baldwin, Greeson, Sabatke—all bleeding and battered. Emerick’s turret remained empty. I squashed the image of him getting hit.
I realized we needed a man on that gun.
Campbell checked his ammo situation. “Same here, sir. Going black.”
Behind me, I heard Greeson’s growl. “Conserve your goddamned ammo! Don’t shoot unless you can see ’em. Got that? Shoot at only what you can see!”
I looked over my shoulder and saw him standing bowlegged, his shoulder wounded, unflappable even in the midst of this crisis. I felt a surge of love for the man.
“Sir, we gotta get the casualties out of here.” He was right. Garvin and Baldwin would be smack in the path of any enemy assault, helpless to react. We needed to clear them away from the eastern flank and get them to Doc Pantoja, our medic, back by my Humvee.
“Roger that.”
The volume of incoming suddenly spiked. Rocket-propelled grenades, mortars, and machine-gun fire hammered our hilltop. All we could do was stay low, but with the cross fire they had us in, we had no safe place.
I peered around the tree trunk and watched the muzzle flashes flaring from the two ridges. I wondered how Reuter was doing with the artillery support.
Come on, Reuter, we need those big guns to speak.
The enemy didn’t give us the time. Howling like banshees, they poured over the tops of the eastern ridges and down the tree-covered slopes toward the valley floor. Two groups, scores of men, raced for us in a dead sprint that reminded me of the zombie apocalypse movies filmed back in my hometown in Pennsylvania. Dawn of the Dead meets Afghanistan. They were already less than a kilometer away, and I realized that they would be on us in a matter of minutes. Clearly, that was the point. If they could cross the valley before we could get indirect onto them, we didn’t
stand a chance.
Down they went into the valley. They flowed around rocks and trees, never slowing or wavering. They angled for our northeast and southeast flanks, sweeping wide as they ran and forming two prongs of a giant pincer with us in the middle.
Most of the enemy carried AK-47s at the low ready, but others shouldered RPGs or light machine guns. Wicked knives, perhaps eight inches or longer, sat in leather sheaths attached to their belts.
I thought of a captured Taliban video we’d seen. In it, the enemy had decapitated a helpless Afghan soldier with one of those wicked long knives. They had done it slowly, just to maximize the pain and horror. The dying man had gurgled and cried as he bled out, finally going limp in his tormentor’s arms as his neck was completely severed.
They’re coming for our heads.
I reached for my portable radio, only to discover it had been blown off of my chest rig at the start of the engagement. I had no choice now; I had to get back to my Humvee, get on the radio, and then organize a rescue for Baldwin and Garvin.
I stood up and ran back through the sheets of fire, staying low as I went. When I reached my Humvee, I found Doc Pantoja working on my dismounted M240 machine gunner, Specialist Howard. Howard sat on his knees with his arms outstretched and shaking. His hands were burned and blackened. His face was covered with blood, chunks of skin, and tendons. I could see flecks of red flesh and white pieces of bone in his hair.
“RPG exploded in front of me, sir.” He explained that the stuff all over his face and hair had come from Garvin. Howie had been standing behind Bennett when he’d been shot.
His voice was calm. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll still be able to kill these assholes.”
Greeson broke cover to streak for Garvin and Baldwin. His movement drew a firestorm from the two enemy positions. He flung himself prone as bullets laced the ground around him.
I turned to Pantoja and Howie. “Guys, we’ve gotta get Garvin and Baldwin.”