by Sandra Lee
It seemed like things were moving in slow motion, but that was the trick of war. Oldham came running out of the smoke, straight at Peterson.
‘And his small Japanese eyes had turned this big and I’m like “Tommmmmmmmmmy”,’ says Peterson. ‘And he came running at me and I grabbed him and we both were like, man, holy cow!’
Sergeant Abbott had been struck by a piece of shrapnel in the right shoulder. Just before he flew out, his wife had told him: ‘Don’t be a hero, come back to us.’ A father of four, he had every intention of doing just that. He looked around and saw injured men clutching at their wounds, blood seeping through their camouflage gear which had been shredded by razor-sharp pieces of red-hot shrapnel. They were lying on the ground, half stunned, half shocked and trying to work out whether they were dead or alive.
‘If you don’t get up you are going to die,’ Abbott roared at his fellow soldiers, at the same time thinking that the enemy fighters he was up against were the more skilled trainers, not the callow locals forced to join the jihad.
Lieutenant Brad Maroyka, the commander of Charlie Company’s 1st Platoon, looked like a piece of Swiss cheese, having copped a burst of shrapnel. He had holes all over his body, but he knew what he had to do.
‘We just needed to get the hell away from where we were,’ Maroyka later told Time magazine. ‘Even those of us with leg injuries had a simple choice: get up and run, or die.’
Maroyka could barely walk. Shrapnel had ripped his calf to pieces.
Private First Class Kyle McGovern was lying on his stomach covered in blood. The tall 21-year-old from New Hampshire had enlisted straight after high school, where he had starred at basketball and soccer. McGovern’s sturdy boot was blown half off his foot, exposing his wounds. He lost the two middle toes on his right foot and shrapnel smashed his ankle and tore a hole through his hand. McGovern’s eardrums had been blasted, and his vision was blurry.
Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe was in Hell’s Halfpipe with Lieutenant Colonel Paul LaCamera and Sergeant Robert Healy, watching Peterson’s mortar platoon when the mortar struck.
‘I figured I had four or five guys dead,’ Grippe says now. ‘That was quite interesting, just watching this explosion and all the dust flying around and smoke. And before you know it I’m thinking, “Okay, I’ve got four or five guys dead” — and they all get up. It’s amazing. You know, I’ll put it this way: it seems like we Westerners quantify a fight by how many were killed in action — and we didn’t have anyone killed in that fight.
‘Lieutenant Maroyka, he got tuned up by some shrapnel. Sergeant Abbott, he had his arm ripped open by shrapnel. Those people were out of the fight, literally, they were just too weak to go on. No fault of their own.’
Sergeant Pete had a decision to make. The terrorists had scored a direct hit and knew their fire line was accurate. Any second yet another mortar would be hurtling through the sky and exploding exactly where the first had tossed the men off their feet like toy soldiers. He had a bunch of wounded soldiers who needed medical attention fast, including a kid who was barely conscious. A piece of shrapnel had pierced through the side of another soldier’s Kevlar vest and lodged near his heart.
Sergeant Pete was also out of mortar ammo — having fired all 56 rounds for the 120mm. All he had left were six illumination rounds.
‘Why I brought those I have no idea, maybe I was going to throw them at ’em, I don’t know,’ he says now, somewhat sardonically.
Major Jay Hall, LaCamera’s operations officer who had flown in with Peterson on the Chinook, was, at age 41, a Desert Storm veteran who knew how to issue orders in the heat of battle. Hall wanted his sergeant to consolidate his troops in the bowl near where Jock and Clint were making calls back to the Australian headquarters.
‘Roger that, Major,’ Sergeant Pete said to Hall over the personal two-way radio each soldier had clipped to his webbing.
Peterson told his men to move and those that could do so under their own steam did. McGovern, who went by the nickname of Crazy K in school, didn’t want to get hit again. Ignoring the searing pain in his leg, he got up and ran like hell on his injured foot, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
‘So people started hauling arse,’ Peterson says. ‘We are trying to get everybody out of our location and get them to the bowl. Everybody’s gone and all I’ve got is some of my guys and a couple of guys from Charlie Company and some wounded folks.’
Peterson had to get his men across the open terrain to the relative safety of the bowl, but he was on the reverse slope of Hell’s Halfpipe. He set up a perimeter around his troops and got them moving, but al Qaeda was not going soft on the wounded men. They had a mission to kill the American soldiers who dared enter the bear trap.
Direct and indirect fire rained down on Sergeant Pete’s men from another position on the hillside.
Holy cow, we’re fuckin’ surrounded, Peterson thought.
‘And these guys had us dead-to-rights because we were right out in the open now,’ he says.
A 30-year-old staff sergeant named Randal Perez took over from the injured Maroyka and showed incredible courage — standing up and exposing himself to al Qaeda fighters, and firing at the enemy as the injured soldiers ran for their lives.
Artillery screamed by and once the smoke had cleared another mortar exploded where they had been.
Boom.
The mortar blew up two medical kits that had been left out in the open with the sea of packs, ditched in the first run for cover.
That’s not real helpful, Jock thought.
Jock could see the huddle. Injured soldiers were limping towards the bowl, not really sure where they were going. They were dazed and confused and the anaesthetic of shock was starting to take hold.
‘Mate, over here. This way,’ Jock bellowed through the cacophony of war, gesturing to the halfpipe.
Peterson, a rangy, athletic man who stands about 193 centimetres in bare feet, was struggling with some huge fella wrapped around his shoulder. The soldier wasn’t seriously wounded but he had gone into shock. A dead weight.
Charlie Company’s field doctor, Major Thomas Byrne, was patching the kid with a shrapnel wound and raced out to help Peterson. The 32-year-old doctor is a small, stout bloke with Coke-bottle glasses who had never seen combat before, but his actions were those of a seasoned war veteran. Jock Wallace was inspired.
Jock recognised the sounds of artillery and saw mortars and RPGs dogging the fleeing soldiers, exploding right behind them. Bugger this, he thought.
Jock dropped his radio and without a second’s thought for his own safety, bolted into the line of fire. He didn’t monkey run, just straight up sprinted to the wounded, not thinking about the hail of bullets cracking across the valley from al Qaeda hot spots. His lungs screamed from a lack of oxygen and he could see AQ popping out of their hiding spots, taking aim and shooting.
Like ferrets on a fuckin’ fence, Jock thought.
A wave of pure hate collided with bloody-minded determination as he ran. Like most soldiers in a war, Jock didn’t fear injury or death, he just feared letting down his fellow troops.
Whatever it takes!
Jock grabbed one of the soldiers, heaved him over his shoulders and hauled him across open ground and into Hell’s Halfpipe, looking up at the ridgeline to check on the enemy, hoping in that split second when everything becomes crystal clear that his compatriots’ suppressive fire would save all their lives.
Bullets snapped past his ears but miraculously missed their targets, making a dull phffft when they hit the hard clay of the bowl. Some ricocheted off the rocks. But Jock was on a mission to get his soldier brother out of the line of fire to the casualty collection point where the injured were being treated. He was out of breath, his chest heaving, but he managed to lay his wounded patient down gently and safely.
‘Thanks, buddy,’ said a medic.
‘No worries, mate,’ Jock replied.
The company’s medics, who had work
ed with the paramedics in New York City after the World Trade Center attacks, had set up an emergency triage section and soldiers were being assessed for treatment. It was a bloody, moaning mess, but nothing the medics couldn’t handle.
Jock wiped the blood from his hands onto his camos, grabbed his M4, stood up and raced back into the line of fire to help the last of the wounded to safety. There was no thinking, no worrying — just doing.
‘He saw there was a need there to go out and pull some of those guys to safety and dress their wounds. And he put himself in harm’s way; under fire he moved out, collected some of these wounded and dragged them back to safety in the ditch they were in,’ Lieutenant Colonel Tink would say later.
Someone helped Jock into the last few metres of Hell’s Halfpipe, but he didn’t stop to exchange names and phone numbers as if it were a civilised car crash. He got down low, monkeyed back to his position and hooked right into his radio to put in a call to the SAS Regimental HQ.
It was near to 10am local time. Staff in the HQ could hear the fire fight coming over Jock’s radio, but the commanders in the TOC at Bagram could not see how chaotic it was in the valley because the Predator was still locked on the compound at Sherkhankhel further north. ‘We were advised that 25 personnel in black were moving west from a compound, essentially up into high ground where they had earlier shot at the Americans,’ Tink says now, referring to the Predator vision.
Jock Wallace couldn’t believe that no one had been killed in the torrent of gunfire and kept his eyes on the ridgelines, calmly informing his liaison officer, Clint, when he spied an enemy target, updating the sitrep for the brass at headquarters. It was crucial information, and with other reports coming in from around the valley, it let the commanders know just how far off the mark the intelligence had been about al Qaeda and Taliban numbers in the Shahi Kot.
According to Major General Hagenbeck, Jock’s radio work was vital.
‘The Aussie SAS soldier there was instrumental because he had direct communications right back to us [via the Regimental HQ] and he, in essence, could talk us through what was actually happening on the ground and give us an even better sense of how the fight was going,’ Hagenbeck said.
Sergeant Pete and Sergeant Tommy Oldham were taking fire outside Hell’s Halfpipe and bringing their weapons to bear on al Qaeda. Most of the mortar platoon had got to safety, but Sergeant Pete found himself on the back slope of the bowl, receiving indirect fire.
‘This is probably where I’ve said the dumbest thing I’ve ever said in my life,’ Peterson says now, laughing at the memory. ‘I crawled to the lip of the bowl, and we’re receiving a lot of indirect fire, and I get up on the lip and I can see all my Charlie Company and I can see my commander in their sanctuary. But I still have to run through a hill of fire to get to these guys and here’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever said.
‘I yelled out “mortars inbound”, meaning we [he and Sergeant Oldham] were inbound. I only wanted them to lay suppressive fire, but everyone in that bowl thought [mortar shells were inbound] and everyone gets down and we come flying over the hill.
‘All hell breaks loose and I get to the bottom of the hill and I look at Lieutenant Colonel LaCamera and go, “And here I am.” And he goes, “And here you are.”
‘And I’m like, holy cow: we got there, everyone’s alive and all the wounded are in a good location.’
Grippe’s right-hand man, Healy, was surprised that the soldiers had managed to get through the morning for so long before any casualties occurred. A seventeen-year veteran, he knew the realities of war.
‘I can’t explain how or why no one was injured up to that point, because the fire was so intense. But after you’ve been there for a while you get used to it, so you’d get up and move around and you’d have bullets zinging right by you,’ Healy says now. ‘But you had to get up and do your job.
‘We had some guys that had some pretty good bleeding wounds: arms, legs, facial wounds … The Doc obviously wanted to get them out of there, but the first casualty report made a decision not to send a medevac [helicopter].’
The commanders at Bagram received the first casualty report indicating that several soldiers from Charlie Company were injured, some seriously. None of the injuries, however, was considered life threatening and the highly skilled Army medics had the situation under control. A decision was made to delay sending a medical evacuation chopper until more was known about the enemy numbers, weapons and locations.
The decision was frustrating, but Healy had been in the Army long enough to know that decisions like that had to be made.
‘It does really hurt that your guys could die, but you don’t want to see them get on the helicopter and it get shot down and kill four more people,’ Healy says now. ‘It’s hard for us but I am sure it’s harder for the guys making the decision.’
The decision that they weren’t getting out any time soon added to the fear in the halfpipe. But the fear sat well with the thumping adrenaline that kept the young soldiers going. Healy saw that the GIs who had been tossed in at the deep end had a determination and resilience that could only be born of war. Of ‘kill or be killed’. The will to survive.
‘It was real scary. When you get in a situation like that, when you know you are outnumbered real badly and they’ve got the high ground, you feel kind of desperate,’ Healy says.
‘And once you get over that, you’re fine. And I think another thing that motivated the [young soldiers] was, like me, whenever I’d see one of our guys get wounded, I’d get so pissed off that I’d want to — not really get even — but make sure the enemy are not going to do that again. Our guys fought like they were veterans. Ninety per cent of them were just amazing.’
CHAPTER ELEVEN
‘Lying on your back, looking ten kilometres up in the air, you can see the B-52s overhead and see the bombs drop, and you hope you’ve got more than a few seconds to live.’
JOCK WALLACE
JOCK GRABBED THE SLEEPING bag from his pack and did a monkey-run over to the casualty collection point, placing it over one of the more serious casualties from Sergeant Pete’s mortar platoon while medics attended to other wounded soldiers. They could use the bag more than Jock could. It could ultimately mean the difference between life and death for those with limbs torn open, and would stave off hypothermia for the soldiers in danger of going into shock.
‘One guy had shrapnel up the side of his body, cut straight across the eye, shrapnel chopped his eye in half. He was about nineteen, a young American kid,’ Jock recalls. ‘They were just kids. They were lacking skills and lacking tools but they were not lacking courage, they certainly were not — they did their best, the poor little bastards.’
He thought back to last night — a time that seemed so long ago now — when Colonel Frank Wiercinski had revved up his troops. Standing next to Wiercinski on the Humvee had been a chaplain with the US Army, who had led the troops in prayers. The Ballad of the Green Beret played over the speakers, as did the anthems for the Rakkasans and the 10th Mountain Division. Once the final amens were said, the young men and women of Anaconda who chose to, dispersed to their multi-denominational padres for blessings and last rites.
Those without religion in their lives headed straight to the chow line at the back of the hangar for a feast of crayfish and other delicacies rarely found in an army mess. Battles came with a different menu, Jock had noted wryly. It was a repast fit for the Last Supper but the soldiers heading out in the morning didn’t think of that then. They were thinking of their stomachs, which had become accustomed to the challenging and mysterious flavours of MREs, otherwise known as Meals Ready to Eat, single-ration combat food. And they were thinking of victory ahead. Jock didn’t treat himself because he had had to recode his radio equipment. Plenty of time for a feed later.
By ten o’clock the next morning, after five hours under ambush in the Shahi Kot Valley, Jock wished he’d hoed right in. He rummaged through his all-purpose lightweight individual carr
ying equipment pack — his ALICE pack. Cold-weather gear, H2O, equipment to protect his comms gear, and nothing to eat but three lousy cut-down MREs. This was going to be a long day.
Jock was joined by two US Air Force troops whose job was to call in close air support for Charlie Company.
Senior Airman Stephen Achey had been separated from his unit within minutes of alighting from the Chinook and had come under direct fire from al Qaeda. He crouched behind his rucksack, but the rounds found their target. Three bullets tore into his PRC-117F multi-band tactical radio, knocking it out of action. But Achey was determined to live and somehow managed to get out of the open valley floor and into Hell’s Halfpipe with another airman, Technical Sergeant Vick McCabe. Armed with his AR-15 rifle, he also braved running into the line of fire to retrieve another radio that had been left in the open. They hooked up with Jock, whose radio was alive. Major bonus.
The men introduced themselves as if they were at a back-yard barbecue at Swannie, not under fire in Afghanistan.
Achey and Vick were members of the Tactical Air Control Party, and were tasked with calling in every asset flying in the sky above, regardless of whether the aircraft were on reconnaissance missions or flying in a holding pattern waiting for a bombing raid. They worked by directly calling the Bossman in the Air Force’s E-3 airborne warning-and-control system (AWACS) aircraft who coordinated the joint air power and deployed fighter planes on their individual missions. And on some occasions they were able to call the pilots without the assistance of the Bossman.
Even though they had joined the US Air Force, they spent all their time on the ground with the Army, working side by side with the grunts in the most dangerous of conditions. Achey, who was a bit younger than Jock, and Vick were right at home with their new Aussie mates.
They began radioing in to the Bossman but came up against a hurdle. The frequency bandwidth for the satellite-based communications system used by the Americans had been largely dedicated to the Special Forces who had arrived in-country within days of the September 11 attacks, leaving only a single frequency — or channel — for the forward air controllers to coordinate target bombings close to friendly forces.