by Eric Blehm
Seconds later, black smoke and brown dust consumed the men, followed by a loud explosion.
“Damn!” somebody yelled, but otherwise the Alamo was quiet.
The cloud dissipated. Two of the Taliban, bloody and obviously injured, were dragging a body out of sight behind a rise. There was no sign of the fourth man.
Bolduc walked over to Mike to request a SOFLAM tutorial.
Hearing this, Mag muttered under his breath, “OJT” (on-the-job training). The presence of the brass continued to irritate him, and it only got worse a half hour later when JD informed ODA 574 that the rest of Fox’s staff would arrive that night.
Since their first day in Petawek, Fox had been coordinating to get his battalion staff in-country. They had solved the transportation problem by purchasing two new Toyota Tundra king cab trucks in Pakistan to be flown in with the men.
“How many more guys are coming?” Mag asked Amerine, taking advantage of a moment when Fox and Bolduc had moved out of earshot.
“Twelve. It’s not the entire battalion staff, just a command-and-control group.”
“Any ODAs coming with them?”
“Not that I’ve heard about,” Amerine said.
“Twelve battalion staff on this tiny hill is twelve too many,” said Mag. He suddenly realized that Smith was only two feet away, trying to ignore the conversation. “Shit,” said Mag. “No offense.”
Smith shrugged. “None taken,” he said.
Shortly before one o’clock that afternoon, the guerrillas who had fled to Damana returned to Shawali Kowt, honking their trucks’ horns and holding their weapons overhead as though they had won the night’s battle. The men of ODA 574 watched in numb amusement, too tired to be angry at them for running away the night before. The fact that the guerrillas were able to return supported the evidence from aerial recon that their attackers had either been killed by the AC-130 in the desert between the two towns or escaped back to the southern side of the river.
Soon after, Karzai drove in with the CIA team, and Fox trotted down the hill to greet him.
“Looks like we won’t have to send Mag and Dan to Damana,” said JD to Amerine. “On the flip side, it sure isn’t a good idea for Hamid to be down here right now.”
“I know, but I would really rather keep him close to us after that mess last night,” said Amerine as he watched Karzai and his entourage take over a cinder-block building adjacent to the medical clinic.
When he walked down the hill, Amerine was greeted by the usual group of guerrillas guarding Karzai’s headquarters. Inside, Karzai was sitting with his circle of tribal leaders, Fox by his side.
“Hello, Jason,” Karzai said.
Amerine sat down. “I need your help, Hamid,” he said. “I have to organize a group to take control of the hill overlooking the bridge west of here. This will require a more elaborate explanation than Seylaab can manage, so could you translate? I’d like to get things moving right away.”
“Of course. Tell me what men you require.”
“I need Bashir. His men did very well yesterday. I will also take my friend Bari Gul.”
Seated across from Karzai, Bashir nodded when Karzai spoke to him.
“They will be ready in an hour,” Karzai said to Amerine.
Bashir, Bari Gul, and their men were assembled beside the Alamo, listening to Karzai translate the details of the plan.
JD’s split team and Bari Gul’s men would establish a “support by fire” position on the berm a mile west of Shawali Kowt, overlooking ODA 574’s new objective—the hill with the ruins—six hundred yards to their south. Three PKM machine guns with a range of more than one thousand yards would provide support fire for an assault team led by Amerine. Once JD’s team was in place, Amerine’s team would drive to some compounds they had identified at the base of the hill. There they would lead Bashir’s men in a classic infantry assault to seize the ruins at its top.
“Four years at West Point and that’s all you come up with?” JD said to Amerine.
Admittedly, it wasn’t much; but the simpler the plan, the harder it would be for the guerrillas to mess up.
As the guerrillas dispersed after the briefing, Amerine took Bashir by the arm and led him over to Karzai.
“Can you ask Bashir if he’s clear on everything?” Amerine asked. Karzai uttered something in Pashto, and Bashir gave a nod. “He says his men are ready to take the hill.”
“See you on top,” JD said to Amerine just before he got in his truck shortly after 3 P.M. to follow Bari Gul’s three vehicles to the western end of the berm.
Less than a mile down the road from Shawali Kowt, Bari Gul turned right, passed through a break in the berm, and headed into the desert. He made a U-turn and drove back to park on the north side of the berm, concealed from anyone who might have been watching from across the river. The hope was that their small convoy would appear as if it were heading back toward Damana.
JD parked alongside the others and hiked up the berm to recon the position before emplacing his men. He lay prone across the compacted ground at its top, the open desert behind him to the north. In front of him, to the south, the battlefield stretched across six hundred yards of farmland to the ruins of a fortress that looked like a sand castle eroding back into the hill it was built upon. Two hundred yards beyond that was the bridge across the Arghandab River.
When he sighted down his carbine barrel toward the ruins, JD saw an open, unplanted field, divided at the four-hundred-yard mark by an irrigation canal with a large compound on either side. The nearer one, on the north side of the canal, they’d named “compound one” and was to be the “objective rally point.” A wooden bridge barely large enough for a vehicle spanned the canal to “compound two.” Past the canal the terrain sloped gradually upward to the ruins, then downward to the orchards along the riverbank. The road that JD’s element had taken out of Shawali Kowt turned to the left where the fields ended, skirted the right (western) side of the hill, and continued on over the bridge and to Kandahar. On the west side of the road, about two hundred yards from the bridge, was another set of ruins dubbed “compound three,” atop a small rise that the men thought might conceal enemy movement to the west.
Amerine’s assault team would leave the road a quarter of a mile before it went left and drive across the field to compound one, then move on foot across the canal to the second compound, where they would stage their assault up the hill. The machine guns manned by JD’s team would engage any enemy positions on the hill or in the trenches that existed around it; they would also spot for Taliban hiding in the orchards on their side of the river. If needed, the machine guns could be super-elevated to reach the orchards and ridgeline on the other side of the Arghandab as well.
JD could see no Taliban, anywhere.
The guerrillas lugged the PKM machine guns up the slope, staying quiet and low so as not to silhouette themselves. Soon the guns were in place, tripods dug in and ammunition stacked, with Ronnie, Brent, and Victor standing by as JD arranged Bari Gul’s men in a security perimeter.
Dan, who had set up next to the guerrillas amid the boxes of ammunition, called Amerine, speaking in a hushed voice into his radio: “Support by fire is good to go, but we don’t see any enemy anywhere.”
In an infantry attack, the job of the support-by-fire element is to “soften up the target,” that is, kill the enemy defenders on and around the objective by surprising them with overwhelming firepower just prior to the assault team’s attack. In this case, the enemy had not shown themselves, which made the assault all the more dangerous.
“This just became a movement to contact,”* replied Amerine, thinking, Shit, we just lost the initiative.
“We’ve got you covered,” said Dan.
“Roger,” said Amerine. “We’re moving out.”
CHAPTER TEN
The Ruins
* * *
In preparing for battle, I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.
* * *
Mike started his truck, shifted into first gear, and eased between the Alamo and the medical clinic onto the dirt road that led west out of Shawali Kowt. He looked over at Amerine in the passenger seat and Alex in the back of his pickup, then focused on Bashir’s guerrillas—each armed with an AK-47—in the truck twenty yards ahead. He wondered if their smiles and laughter were born from nervousness, bravado, or the prospect of meeting Allah in the next few minutes.
There were three trucks ahead of Mike’s, each with eight guerrillas, and two more close behind. Mag’s truck brought up the rear. Standing on top of the Alamo, Fox, Bolduc, Smith, and a handful of Bari Gul’s men watched the convoy disappear behind the buildings in town. Karzai’s security was now the responsibility of his two hundred remaining guerrillas, who had scattered onto rooftops and along the berm. Inside his command post with Casper’s spooks, Karzai was on the phone with reporters, diplomats, the Northern Alliance, his family, and intermediaries of the Taliban, all of whom were probing the statesman for news of his intentions now that he was, as he put it, “just outside Kandahar.”
Once the trucks cleared the town center, Mike could see fields on their left, desert and the berm on their right, and the deserted main road that headed over the bridge and on to Kandahar dead ahead.
Passing JD’s position on the berm, Bashir’s trucks followed the road west, then turned sharply south across unplanted fields toward compound one, the uneven terrain causing the vehicles to spread apart, with wide gaps between them.
When the first truck parked at the compound, the Afghans immediately dismounted and charged toward the hill, not waiting for the rest of the convoy. A second truck stopped, its guerrillas jumping out and running after the first group, followed by the third truck. These ragged clusters of men moved over the rough-hewn timber bridge that spanned the irrigation canal separating compound one from compound two, with Bashir running alongside and making no attempt to stop or organize them.
Bouncing across the field in their truck, Amerine and Mike watched the Afghans sprint over the bridge in a textbook guerrilla attack: lots of gusto and zero organization.
Mike threw up his hand in frustration. “There they go.”
“So much for the simple plan,” Amerine said.
“You have quite a mess there,” radioed JD as Mike parked next to the empty trucks. He, Amerine, and Alex got out and began to run forward.
“Roger that,” said Amerine. “We’ll go round them up—but it looks like our objective might be deserted after all.”
Just as Bashir’s lead group was halfway up the hill, unseen Taliban fighters opened fire on the guerrillas. The sharp crack of AK-47s was joined by machine guns; the guerrillas halted, then scattered and ran for cover wherever they could find it—in a ditch, up to the ruins, back behind compound two. At the canal, the Americans paused.
“At least we’ll have no problem catching up with them now,” said Amerine. “But where the hell is Mag’s truck?”
Mag, Wes, and Ken had been bringing up the rear when the truckloads of guerrillas at the head of the convoy had reached the fields and suddenly sped up, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake. Unable to see where they’d turned off the road, Ken slowed the truck.
The hill with the ruins was four hundred yards behind them to their left; the berm with the support-by-fire team was one hundred yards behind them on their right. They had overshot the spot in the fields where the lead element had turned off, and Ken was now steering around a bend in the road that brought them within plain sight of the enemy. Seated in the truck’s bed, Mag and Wes heard bullets whiz overhead.
“Out of the truck!” Mag yelled to Wes. Grabbing their rifles, they jumped out as Ken continued to drive, hunched low behind the dashboard, searching for a way to get to compound one that was visible two hundred yards to their left. Behind the slow-moving truck, Mag and Wes used the tailgate for cover as they jogged along in a hunched position.
“We need to turn around and get some solid cover!” yelled Wes. “This truck is a fucking bullet magnet.”
“Do you see where the fire is coming from?” Mag shouted back.
“No! Somewhere ahead of us.”
Mag yelled to Ken, “Where they at? Where they at?” But Ken didn’t respond. The truck almost stopped, and Mag briefly thought Ken was going to get out and use the truck for cover as well, but instead he turned onto a road that looped to their left across the fields toward the rally point and their comrades. Sucking in exhaust and keeping their heads down, Mag and Wes continued to jog with a weapon in one hand and the other gripping the tailgate.
The truck picked up speed until the two men were running to keep pace. They sprinted thirty yards before they had to let go of the tailgate. “Fuck!” yelled Wes as the truck sped away. Mag fell forward, rolled a couple of times in the middle of the road, came to a stop, and shouted “Motherfucker!”1
At the support-by-fire location, JD watched the guerrillas who had been charging toward the ruins react to the gunfire. The lead group, including Bashir, broke left and continued their ascent, traversing to the northeast corner of the ruins and disappearing into a crumbling section of the wall. The others scattered to the right, diving into the trench that ran vertically up the side of the slope, parallel to the road that continued onto the bridge: It appeared that this trench line had originally been dug as outer defenses for the hilltop fortress. After approximately ten seconds under fire, the entire guerrilla force had broken its attack and was now hunkered down, out of sight.
JD’s split team had identified the positions of the Taliban as soon as they had opened fire, and JD immediately radioed a SALUTE (Size, Activity, Location, Uniform, Time, and Equipment) report to Amerine: “We see two enemy positions by the orchards along the river to the west of the bridge and one enemy position on the ridge across the river to the south of the bridge. They are engaging you guys with small arms and light machine guns. No idea how many there are.”
“Roger,” said Amerine. “Can you see what my guerrillas are doing on the hill?”
“I have visual on three groups of guerrillas; you own the hill. They aren’t really taking much fire, but they sure are keeping their heads down.”
To reach the Taliban in the orchards on the near side of the river, and on the ridge more than a thousand yards away on the other side of the river, JD’s team pointed their guns into the sky and used plunging fire—shooting the bullets in a rainbow-like arc—at more than 650 rounds per minute. As the bullets landed they kicked up dirt that JD tracked with his binoculars, directing the men to “walk” the fire onto the heads of the enemy.
The Taliban on the other side of the river, who had been firing their light machine guns at the guerrillas, were now staying low or had retreated from their gun emplacements—or were dead—but the Americans continued to rake their positions with bursts of gunfire. There was still enemy AK-47 fire, however, coming from the orchards.
“We’re encountering some light resistance,” Amerine radioed to Fox back at the Alamo, his calm voice contrasting sharply with the echo of machine-gun fire. “Some of our guerrillas have holed up in the northeast corner of the fort and we’re trying to get the rest to move up.”
Spitting out the dirt he’d eaten during his somersault along the road, Mag darted behind some low rocks with Wes—the only cover they could find. Bullets were crackling in the air, but all Mag could think about was taking a piss. Lying on his side, he got his pack’s waist strap undone and dug below his pistol belt in search of the zipper, his hands fumbling with fear and adrenaline. By the time he unzipped his fly, it was too late; urine was streaming down his legs.
Wes didn’t notice—he was too busy trying to scope out the best route to rejoin their teammates without getting shot. He decided on the straight-line approach.
Looking back at Mag, he said “Let’s do it!” and started running across the open field toward the compound some two hund
red yards away. Mag zipped back up and charged after him. “I am gonna kick Ken’s ass,” he growled.
A minute later they were at the vehicles, bent over and sucking wind. Mag glanced up to see Amerine beckoning to him; with a grunt, he jogged over, forcing himself not to look at Ken, who was standing beside their truck. Wes joined Mike at the corner of the compound wall, where he was peering around it to the west. There the road met the bridge—the likely avenue for an attack. The last two truckloads of guerrillas were by their vehicles, awaiting orders.
Still breathing hard, Mag knelt beside Amerine next to the canal.
“What happened?” asked Amerine.
“I’ll fill you in later. Now’s not the time.”
“All right,” said Amerine, puzzled. “JD’s boys are keeping the enemy pinned down. There seem to be positions in the orchards along the river and on the ridge to the south. Our guerrillas are in the ruins and all over this hill. I am going to run forward to compound two and assess the situation, then we’ll get the rest of these guys moving.”
He radioed JD. “See anything new?”
“Negative.”
“Nothing at the ruins?”
“Nothing but our guerrillas keeping their heads down. Looks like they aren’t going anywhere.”
“Keep that fire coming,” Amerine said.
“I’m putting the CCP [casualty collection point] at this wall,” Ken called out to Amerine, “with the trucks.”
“All right. I’ll come back for you in a bit.” Amerine turned to Mag. “You’re coming with me.”*
“If we aren’t back in five minutes,” Amerine informed the rest of the assault team, “Mike is in charge; try to reach me by radio and give JD a SITREP. Watch that western flank. If you come under direct attack, let me know and we’ll come back with some of the guerrillas.”
Heads bobbed in unison as the men checked their watches. Crossing the bridge over the irrigation canal, Amerine and Mag arrived at the southeast corner of compound two. Mike and Wes ran to the western side of compound one in time to see a truck speeding across the open ground a half mile to the west. It was well out of range, but Mike went ahead and fired off two grenades from his carbine’s launcher that landed far short as the vehicle disappeared into an orchard. Realizing that there could be more trucks out there, and that a full charge from that direction was a possibility, he yelled to Ken, “Radio JD and have him send some of our G’s out to that third compound across the road. Have them watch our western flank.”