The Only Thing Worth Dying For

by Eric Blehm

  ODA 574 gathered for a final huddle, and Amerine recapped the plan they’d been preparing for the day’s movement to Damana, twenty-five miles away.

  “I don’t expect the hill west of Damana to yield anything,” Amerine said, “so get your heads focused on Shawali Kowt. We’ll make contact with the enemy today. If we have to take Shawali Kowt, it isn’t going to be easy. But that town and that bridge are the key to defending the entire area.”

  “Enough fun and games,” said JD after a long pause. “Let’s saddle up.”

  While the rest of the men moved out to their vehicles, Amerine took JD aside and said, “We’re going to run into something out there today. If things go to shit and I give you the word, get Hamid’s ass out of there. Get him airlifted to Pakistan or back to Tarin Kowt, whatever it takes. We’ll find our way back to you; don’t try to come for us. Your job is to keep Hamid alive.”

  “I hear you, but we’re not going to leave you behind,” JD said, tugging the bill of his Harley-Davidson cap downward.

  “You’re going to have to trust that I will call for you to come help if there is anything you can do. Remember, Hamid Karzai is about to become the leader of this country’s government. You are protecting the future of Afghanistan.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Death on the Horizon

  * * *

  Unlike the northern capital, Kandahar does not lie in the shadow of lofty hills; but about three miles off, from the north, westward, to the south, there runs a bare serrated range, with many a fantastic peak and clearly-cut block showing against the sky-line. To force a passage in this direction, through thickly sown villages and gardens and vineyards, was no child’s play. Without masses of well-trained infantry the attempt could not have been made at all.

  —Lieutenant Charles Gray Robertson, 18811

  * * *

  The convoy pushed out from Petawek at the crack of noon, the men waving good-bye to the children for whom, over the last few days, they had provided a distraction from the tedium of village life. Nelson Smith, a new father, had been particularly taken with these beautiful children and was astounded at how weathered they were by the desert wind and sun, even at just two or three years of age. In some cases they already had wrinkled hands and crow’s-feet forming at the corners of their eyes.

  “I wish I could put one of these kids in my rucksack and take him home,” Smith told Mag. “Could probably give him a cracker every once in a while and he’d be happy as a clam.”

  Before they departed, Fox had emphasized to Karzai the importance of an orderly convoy; they couldn’t afford another off-road rally this close to Kandahar. Karzai’s followers were to stay behind the shuttle bus. If they wanted to swarm around the desert in the rear, that was fine. Showing great restraint, the guerrillas maintained order as the line of vehicles crossed over into Kandahar Province without so much as a speed bump marking the sandy border and climbed into the mountains where Amerine and his split team had mistaken the bulldozer tracks for a tank’s.

  Caves, overlooks, and fighting positions—foxholes and trench lines—abounded on both sides while the convoy moved cautiously down the rough road, but the positions were unoccupied. Word of Karzai’s victory had reached the province, where local tribal leaders had opened channels through which they were now traveling unopposed. They were less than twenty-five miles from Kandahar with no sign of the enemy, only an occasional farmer walking along the road, carrying firewood or a sack of dried goat dung. Every so often, the outline of a camel in the distance alerted them to a Bedouin camp.

  Around 3 P.M., the lead element crested the far side of the range, and the terrain smoothed out before them: an arid landscape striped by belts of vegetation—some green, but mostly the burnt hues of autumn; the few villages in the valley below looked like handfuls of pebbles strewn among the brown and tan fields. There was nothing to suggest that a thriving metropolis lay only fifteen miles beyond the sharp peaks jutting like the serrations of a saw blade on the far side of the valley.

  The road swept down through the foothills of the range until Damana appeared abruptly on the plain below: a dozen scattered mud huts and a few compounds surrounded by hundreds of acres of farmland. From here, Amerine could see the hillock Fox was interested in occupying as a new command post. It was too rugged and steep, seemingly impassable and thus unsuitable as a vantage point.

  Just as the guerrillas’ vehicles rolled into town, two trucks pulled out from behind buildings on either side of the road ahead of them and turned away from the convoy. Mike slowed his truck. Through binoculars, Amerine could see men in the cabs, but the beds were empty; he suspected it was a Taliban patrol. The trucks sped south over a rise, and Alex, who had jets waiting overhead, glanced at Amerine, awaiting his orders. Amerine shook his head. The men had not opened fire and might only be frightened locals.

  Mag and his guerrillas were right behind Amerine. Amerine instructed twenty guerrillas to secure Damana for Karzai’s segment of the convoy, then radioed Mag to follow him toward Shawali Kowt. The two trucks full of Americans, along with thirty guerrillas in three trucks led by Bashir, emerged on the south side of Damana. From here they could see Shawali Kowt, three miles farther south and, on its western edge, the bridge over the Arghandab River; to get there, however, they had to pass through Shawali Kowt. As Amerine’s truck followed Bashir’s men, a soldier’s intuition warned him that bullets were about to fly.

  In the back of the vehicle, Alex learned from aerial recon that the two trucks fleeing Damana had turned off the main road and continued south along another track toward the more densely populated eastern side of Shawali Kowt, about a mile upriver from the bridge. The guerrillas took this same road, followed by the Americans, while the pilots reported that the vehicles had now pulled into Shawali Kowt and parked among its densest cluster of buildings. (See map on p. 354)

  The north side of the town, facing the desert, was protected by a berm ranging in height from ten to twenty feet, a natural barrier that had been created by episodic flooding of the river. This was the only thing standing between the lead of the convoy and Shawali Kowt. A hundred yards ahead of Amerine’s truck, the guerrillas pulled over to the west side of the road seventy-five yards short of a wide gap in the berm, and parked their vehicles facing back toward Damana as if preparing to retreat.

  “That can’t be good,” said Mike.

  Jumping out of the trucks, the guerrillas ran toward the embankment.

  “At least they didn’t just drive into town without taking a look,” said Amerine.

  Mike slowed the truck but continued to creep forward, catching glimpses of the town through the notch where the road split the berm. There was no gate, no guard tower, no machine-gun emplacements—and no people. Unlike the guerrillas, he parked the truck facing forward, which allowed Amerine, Mike, Alex, and Seylaab to watch the Afghans scrambling up the berm. Seylaab pointed out a barely visible white flag waving from the top of a distant roof. “Taliban,” he said, just as the guerrillas peered over the berm. Automatic weapons fire erupted from the town, and some of the Afghans flattened themselves to the ground.

  “This town is not clear,” Alex calmly said into his radio on the local channel. Switching channels, he went to work, calling out “troops in contact” to the F-18 Hornet pilots flying overhead.

  A quarter of a mile behind them, Mag was riding in the back of the second American truck, with his M4 rifle, a half-dozen RPGs, and a PKM machine gun that Brent had salvaged. Nothing gave Mag more confidence than a perfectly operating weapon with unlimited ammo, and this PKM had purred when he’d tested it out in the desert just after leaving Petawek.

  A rocket suddenly streaked into the sky at one o’clock from their position, and Mag gripped the machine gun tightly, swinging it to his nine o’clock and three o’clock, anticipating an ambush. They cleared a gradual rise. Before them, a wide, sloping plateau descended six hundred yards to Shawali Kowt. Beyond the town, the yellow and orange of what appeared to b
e orchards stretched along the banks of the Arghandab, which at this time of year was a muddy ribbon of earth. On the other side of the riverbed, mountains shot up from the valley floor.

  Ken turned the truck sharply to the right and parked behind a low rise, and the Americans grabbed their weapons and hurried into a roadside ditch.

  “What’s going on up there?” Ken said into the radio. “What’s the status up there? You in contact?”

  Far ahead they could see Amerine’s truck—facing away from them—and, in front of it, the guerrillas’ vehicles facing toward them. The Afghans were on a twenty-foot-high section of the berm that ran east–west for a mile. Machine-gun tracers arced from the town toward the berm like a line of sparks. Amerine’s voice came through the radio: “Our guerrillas are in contact north of the town with an unknown number of enemy using small arms and RPGs.”

  The main body of the convoy was closer to the lead element than it was supposed to be. The trucks had just reached Damana when gunfire crackled over the Americans’ radios. “The town is not clear,” both JD’s and Fox’s men heard Alex say, and Smith, who was driving JD’s truck, came to an abrupt stop, halting the convoy.

  JD, Fox, Bolduc, Ronnie, and Dan jumped out and spread a map across the vehicle’s hood while Smith set the parking brake, grabbed his rifle, got down on one knee, and covered the left flank. After studying the map for a few moments, Dan radioed a SITREP to Task Force Dagger.

  “I need to get forward and see what they’re up against,” JD said to Fox. “You coming or staying with Karzai, sir?”

  Bolduc was itching to get forward, too. Like Fox, he was supposed to stay with Karzai, but both men considered the CIA to be Karzai’s bodyguards. “Sir,” Bolduc said to the lieutenant colonel, “we gotta get up there and help out.”

  With a last look at the map, Fox gave the order: “Let’s move!” Smith got back behind the wheel, the sound of explosions in the distance accompanied by nonstop machine-gun fire over the radio.

  Not far behind, Karzai’s bus was idling with the rest of the convoy, Afghans and CIA guarding its rear, front, and flanks.

  “Should we send more men forward with them?” Karzai asked Casper.

  “I don’t know,” said Casper. “We’ll monitor the situation. For now, let’s get you off the road.”

  “Enemy strength unknown.” Alex completed his brief of the situation to the pilots standing by while Mike looked to Amerine for an order.

  “Stay here with Alex,” said Amerine. “I’m running ahead to see what we’re up against. Get ready to pull back to Damana.”

  Pushing the door open, Amerine pulled Seylaab out with him and sprinted toward the berm.

  “Hey!” shouted Mike. Seylaab and Amerine turned in unison, and Mike tossed the interpreter his rifle. “You might want this.”

  As he ran forward, Amerine saw the reddish-orange flame of an RPG arcing high overhead and heard the whoosh of more in flight. Looking up, he saw one RPG fly steeply into the sky, then hit its apex and angle back toward earth. The trajectory was off to the west and the explosion was far beyond their vehicles. The Taliban were pointing the rockets up in the air like artillery rounds, using the road to Shawali Kowt as their target.

  “We are being engaged by mortars,” radioed Ken.

  “Negative,” Amerine radioed back. “Those are RPGs.”

  Bashir’s guerrillas had begun to head back down the berm toward their parked trucks, and Amerine ran toward them, waving his arms and shouting, “Stop! Stop!” Beside him, Seylaab belted out something in rapid-fire Pashto and mimicked Amerine’s movements. The guerrillas continued their retreat.

  “Stop!” Amerine continued to yell, gesturing frantically. “Stop!”

  At last they did, though appearing ready to bolt again at any second. Panicked American voices came over Amerine’s radio. “All elements hold tight,” he radioed back. “And keep the net* clear. I’m reconning the town.”

  Stay where you are! Amerine waved at the guerrillas again. Stay right there! Crouching low, he climbed the berm while sticking foam plugs in his ears. When he reached the top, he dropped on his stomach and edged forward to survey Shawali Kowt.

  “What’s going on up there?” Ken said over the radio. “Are you in contact?”

  Lying prone beside Ken, Mag said, “No fucking shit, Ken, they’re in fucking contact. Ask them which side they want support on.”

  It seemed to Mag and Wes that Ken was more concerned with the RPGs falling just ahead of their position than the fact that their lead vehicle was in contact with the enemy. The gunfire increased, and more RPGs ripped across the clear sky.

  “Ken!” Mag yelled when the medic repeated his question into the radio. “Shut the fuck up. We’re out of range of the RPGs. Ask them which side do they want support on? Right or left?”

  “They’re exploding right in front of us!” Ken said. “We need to know what’s going on up there before we move forward.”

  The explosions stopped a couple of minutes later, and Mag got Ken back into the truck. Wes slid behind the wheel and peeled out, the truck lurching forward, then accelerating down the road toward Shawali Kowt.

  As soon as Amerine crested the berm, he could see where the RPGs were being fired from. Three Taliban stood among what looked like the decomposing ruins of an earthen wall on top of a wide twenty-foot hill about two hundred yards south of his position and just east of Shawali Kowt. They launched another RPG. More armed fighters with AK-47s were running in streets that angled between the buildings below him.

  Amerine glanced back. The only way to get the guerrillas into the fight was to lead by example. Taking aim at one of the Taliban on the hilltop with his M4 carbine, Amerine squeezed off a round, then another, adjusting for the distance.

  Withering gunfire raked his position, and an RPG exploded in front of him, showering him with dirt and rocks. Chuckling at his mistake, Amerine rolled halfway down the berm and stopped at the feet of the guerrillas.

  “Tracers—bad fucking idea,” he said to the uncomprehending Afghans. Blood streamed down the bridge of his nose where his weapon had apparently hit him in the tumble down the slope. Bewildered, the guerrillas watched as the laughing, bleeding American changed out his ammo clip for one without tracers. On the way from Tarin Kowt, Amerine had kept loaded a full magazine of tracers, an old infantry technique leaders use to mark targets for their soldiers—which would have proved helpful if the convoy had been ambushed. In this situation, tracers were suicidal.

  “Tell them to follow me!” Amerine shouted to Seylaab before charging back up the embankment to a new position twenty-five yards to the right of where he had fired the tracers.

  A few Taliban walked cautiously out from the town toward the berm. Behind them, a dozen or more armed men followed, the closest spraying gunfire across the top of the embankment, where Amerine remained invisible to them. He slid his M4 into position and opened fire.

  The Taliban returned fire with wild bursts of ammunition and scattered. A few fell to the ground and were still; the rest fled in confusion, running and diving for cover behind buildings. Scanning the town, Amerine swung his carbine east to the hill, where there were now only two Taliban, both firing at him with AK-47s. Did I hit the guy with the RPG, or did he run out of rounds? Amerine wondered, taking aim at one of the two. He shot three rounds, and the man dropped out of sight behind the wall. Keeping his weapon in the direction of the hill, Amerine glanced toward Shawali Kowt. The street was completely empty.

  Several shots kicked up dirt along the berm and Amerine noticed movement to his right. He turned and shot twice at a lone figure sprinting toward him and the berm, clutching an AK-47. In the silence that followed, Amerine could just hear the sound of the body hitting the dirt less than fifty yards away, and he stared at it for a moment, realizing that the guerrillas, who were now hunched down beside him, had been watching but not shooting their rifles. A few armed men hid around the corners of buildings and sprinted at intervals across t
he streets.

  “Tell them to shoot!” Amerine yelled at Seylaab.

  Mike didn’t want his captain to be alone up there on the berm, but he knew his position, two hundred yards back with Alex, was crucial. Alex was their link to airpower, and if they were overrun, airpower would cover their retreat. That was why Amerine had ordered him to stay put, but Mike could see that the guerrillas weren’t being much help and would most likely abandon Amerine if the enemy came rushing over the berm. This was the heat-of-battle reasoning behind Mike’s split-second decision: I gotta get up there with the captain.

  “I’m going,” he told Alex, who had every pilot in Afghanistan headed their way. “If you see us getting overrun, put air on us and get the hell out of here.”

  Mike sprinted forward twenty yards, hearing bullets whizzing overhead. Holy shit, this is for real! he thought. Oh, fuck. I’m scared as shit. Oh man, they’re really shooting—I can’t believe this. This is funny. No, this is not funny. I need to kill these motherfuckers; I need to go that way, toward them.

  He paused twenty yards out. Directly ahead of him was a “fatal funnel,” where he would be exposed for at least a hundred yards without cover. “Fuck this,” he said out loud. He ran back to the truck.

  “These fuckers are trying to kill us!” he shouted at Alex, and they both laughed. “This is a bad fucking place to park. We’ll have more cover ahead, closer to that berm.”

  The guerrillas did not react as Amerine shouted at them to attack; they just stared at the retreating Taliban. Amerine kept shouting, “Shoot! Attack!”

  Misinterpreting Amerine’s order, Seylaab stood up on the crest of the berm, yelled something in Pashto, and charged down toward Shawali Kowt with a guttural roar, spraying bullets wildly from his AK-47, his bright aqua robe flowing behind him. As surprised as Amerine, the other guerrillas immediately sprinted after him, and Amerine followed, laughing.