It was less than 25 minutes into the fight.
As they slipped into the original fighting position they could see a soldier in the last fighting position, the one furthest away, firing on the enemy. They were close to overrunning him. Madd grabbed a couple of magazines and took half the grenades with him. Real slammed a magazine into his M-4 and started firing. It was useless to try and support that last man from here. From his position Hey saw Madd and Real stand up, start firing and move toward the man about to be overrun. It looked suicidal.
Madd headed to help the solider in the last position with Real to his right. He was almost there when the last soldier saw them and gave them a grin. Madd slipped into the position and told him to duck, pulled the pin, let the spoon fly and counted 2 seconds before rolling the grenade less than 30 feet from their position. Real was using the sandbags around the position to give him some cover. Spacing them out a minute between each one, Madd used 2 more grenades. Real took up the pace with 2 of his own. After 3 grenades they all could hear bells going off in their ears.
This was the last position they were going to be able to get to, so they either held this one or tried to scoot away. Neither option looked that good. Without someone to provide covering fire it didn’t look too good for leaving. At least they had some ammo they brought with them in this new position.
Soon the enemy decided to make a rush for it. Madd, Real and the other man were going hand to hand with them, using fists, knives and their 9mms. It was a desperate fight and ended just as quickly as it had started. All three men were again wounded, but not seriously. At least they were alive, something that amazed them all. The fire coming from the enemy had slacked off when they went hand to hand so that they wouldn’t hit their own men, but with their men down all bets were off. The three barely made it into the position and ducked down before a virtual wall of rounds swarmed towards them.
Finally, a platoon sergeant and 8 me, arrived at the observation post to reinforce the soldiers. By that time, the insurgents had breached the perimeter of the observation post to the east and were using the fighting positions on that side for cover. They were approaching Madd’s position once again with more men.
The platoon sergeant sent men to man three of the other positions. With one man the sergeant crawled to Madd’s position, just as the insurgents made a run for Madd’s position again. Gunfire rang out, and Madd and Real were standing up firing over the sandbags. At the same time, they were shouting at him, “They are right on the other side of the sandbags,” and pointing.
With the sergeant’s help they managed to kill all the closest enemy. The sergeant and his man slipped into the positions.
The sergeant took a look at Madd’s back, which was soaked with blood. The two other men in the position had assorted wounds that had dressings on them that were seeping blood as well. He started calling for a medic.
“No point, sergeant,” Madd told him. “The medic went down in the first couple of minutes. He’s dead.”
The heat was back on; gunfire and RPG’s were picking up again. Back in the fighting position, the sergeant fired a few quick rounds, then looked to where Madd and the other men were fighting and asked them, “How many dead?”
“No way to know for sure sergeant, at least five,” Madd told him. Looking back to where Hey was firing alone, he corrected himself.
“Looks like at least 6 KIA that I know of. We have had no contact with the positions to the East since 4 minutes into the firefight.”
He could tell the sergeant didn’t believe him. He just shrugged; the man would find out soon enough.
The sergeant left his man there and headed over to where Hey was still continuing to pour out rounds.
The sergeant was asking Hey how many dead and could they hold on with the men they had. Hey just looked at him and shook his head.
“What?” asked the sergeant.
“Sergeant, we are it, everyone else is dead. Of the eight that came with you, one is dead in another position, two are wounded and no longer able to hold a weapon. One is wounded but still able to fight. Both Real, the specialist in his position and I are wounded. You probably saw Madd is bleeding all along his back and legs. I don’t know how he is on his feet; he should have been down from blood loss by now.”
“What about the RTO?”
“He was two positions counterclockwise from here. He took an RPG straight on in the first three minutes. Of the original force, there are only four of us left. You have maybe five effectives of your force along with us. Not much of a command, sergeant.”
The sergeant made it to the other two positions that the men he brought with him were manning, and found out that Hey was right: dead and wounded were all around him.
The sergeant was putting out rounds but from this new position he could see the man he left with Madd was down to using his 9mm for some reason. Just as he came to the realization that their position was impossible, another of his men was wounded. He shouted to the other fighting position and told them they would all withdraw to the FOB.
Madd and the others wouldn’t leave. They kept up a steady fire at the enemy. The sergeant had to order them three times and threaten them to get them to break off the fight.
“Those guys are way too hardcore for their own good,” he told the corporal next to him.
Divided into two groups they were leapfrogging back, each group covering the other group as they pulled back, taking their wounded with them. They were almost back to the FOB when Real went down. They grabbed him under the arms and helped him walk back. Inside the FOB they found he had taken a round to his boot heel. It tore the heel all the way off and made his foot black and blue; one toe looked like he might lose it.
Coming into the FOB, the Lt asked what was going on at the observation post. The sergeant told him all the soldiers left there were dead. Another of his men was wounded on the way back; he lay against a Humvee, and a medic was putting a tourniquet on him.
They didn’t know it at the time, but one other soldier did manage to get off an adjacent hill and make it back to the FOB. Unfortunately about the time everything went to crap, he had been in a hide close to the OP, making observations. He had decided to lay low as he didn’t feel he could help from where he was without committing suicide. He radioed in and asked for assistance. Four soldiers went to help extract him just as the Lt was taking the sergeant’s report. They suffered wounds after encountering RPG and small-arms fire and were unable to get close enough to support him. When everything was over he made his way to the FOB on his own.
The FOB
Insurgents could be seen taking over the OP. The FOB was starting to take fire from that position. The hills and gullies surrounding the FOB came alive with the enemy. RPGs and mortar fire were falling on the FOB like a Kansas thunderstorm. When the attack began on the FOB, Ivan grabbed an M-240 and started shooting toward the OP that everyone had just left. Soon as he could see some muzzle flashes, he switched targets to those surrounding the FOB. Even though it was still dark he could see the enemy surrounding them. Ivan put down as much fire as he could.
He got down behind the wall he was shooting from to load more ammo and found he was taking fire from behind. He threw the bipod legs of his machine gun onto the top of a HESCO bastion, preparing to fire. A 7.62-millimeter caliber bullet hit the HESCO at an angle and burrowed through a foot of dirt before striking him in the upper left quadrant. It hit just above his plate carrier, impacting his Interceptor body armor and knocking him to the ground. A soldier applied a dressing and called for the medic.
The wounded soldiers were distributing ammo and grenades to those getting back from the OP, since everyone was very low on ammo.
As soon as he had a dressing on his wound Ivan was back up and filling the night with 7.62 from his M-240.
Finally air support arrived in the form of Apache helicopters, A-10s and B-1B Lancer bombers, performing bombing and strafing runs.
The air around the FOB was filled with smoke and dust from
the bombs being dropped close to them. Everything was on fire. The trucks. The grass. Seeing the bomb flashes through that haze made it seem like something out of Dante’s inferno.
After two and a half hours, medevac helicopters were arriving to collect the most seriously wounded. By eight AM the insurgents broke off and melted into the countryside.
In the after action report Captain Williams asked the platoon sergeant who had gone up to the OP what he found when he got there.
"I am on my third tour and I have never seen the enemy attack like that. It’s usually a few RPGs, some sporadic fire and then they’re gone… I don’t know where they got all those RPGs. It was just insane. When I got there the four soldiers left were still firing. Three of them kept getting up and firing back, even when everything around them was popping and whizzing and trees and branches were coming down, sandbags were exploding and RPGs were coming in over their heads. Some of the enemy were so close they were down to using their 9mms to hold them back. It was a back alley fistfight, with those guys holding the enemy off. Normal guys don’t do that, you’re not supposed to stand up and fire back at point blank range.”
The Captain wanted to know how these four could do what they had done.
The platoon sergeant just shrugged and said, “Hardcore assholes I guess, Sir.”
US Military Medical Facility
“Howdy cousin, you getting enough rack time?” asked Ivan.
“Oh ya. All of us used to gripe about not getting enough rack time, but I have to tell you, that getting it while laying on your stomach sucks. At least now I’m able to get up and walk around. I see they gave you the deluxe wheelchair, Ivan.”
“They did Madd, but I won’t have to stay in it much longer. Actually, from what I heard this morning I should be up and walking around already.”
“How’s the shoulder?” asked Madd.
“That round did tear me up some. A foot of dirt and cloth on that HESCO bastion slowed it down considerably. If it had hit straight on I wouldn’t even have been hit. Coming in at an angle let it get through the edge of the bastion. Even so, it took a chunk out of my shoulder after sliding off my body armor. At first they told me I might lose some range of motion, because of the size of the missing tissue. That was almost four weeks ago. At first when they took the dressing off, I could see that a chunk was gone, but today the hole was almost completely gone and new skin was covering almost all the wounded area.”
“I’m doing a little too good, I’m afraid. They claim they are watching me for infection. Maybe they are but for the last week, every time my dressing needed to be changed there was a whole group of doctors and technicians watching. This morning after they left the room and closed the door, I got out of bed and listened to them talk in the hall. They don’t understand how the wound is healing up and my body seems to be replacing tissue they thought was permanently gone. According to what I heard this morning, I should have been released already. They are keeping me around so they can show my shoulder to as many medical people as they can find.”
“That’s very interesting. Ivan, I’ve been getting some of the same treatment. I wondered what was going on. I’ve been getting up and moving around. They found eighteen pieces of shrapnel in my butt and legs. Most of it wasn’t too deep except for three pieces on my upper thigh and calf muscle. It was close to some arteries and buried pretty deep. Took them hours to get it out. One of the bigger pieces left a divot in my leg just like your shoulder. They claim they are still watching it. Just like you when they change the dressings, there is a smallish hole with some scabbing, but it would be hard to tell it was a big hole to begin with. If it wasn’t for the new skin showing where the wound had been it wouldn’t look like much. They were saying a week ago I would be out of here in less than a week. Today when I said I was ready to get out of here they hemmed and hawed.”
“I think we need to start rocking the boat and make them release us.”
“Sounds like a plan, Madd. What’s the word on Hey and Real?”
“Real took a couple of hits, one to his foot that almost took a toe off and some shrapnel cut up his scalp some. He might be going to have an interesting scar, but he will eventually be 100%. Hey ended up with a concussion and some first degree burns on his lower back from an incoming RPG. A round got through his helmet and gave him some scalp wounds similar to Real’s. No deep penetrating wounds, it just threw him around some. Both of them had a lot of scratches and cuts. They are on the other side of the hospital for tests and treatment.”
“Tinker came through without a scratch,” said Madd.
“Good, guess we were really lucky, a lot of guys died there. It could just as easily been us.”
“That’s a fact, Ivan. We need to get out of here. Our enlistments are up in a matter of days, we need to get processed and head home as soon as we can.”
“Madd, something has been on my mind. Will we, any of us, ever be the people we were before we enlisted and did what we have done?”
“I don’t know Ivan, I surely don’t. Late at night lying here in the dark with men in pain and those struggling for breath, I wonder about that. Something I once read worries me. Something Ernest Hemingway said: ‘There is no hunting like the hunting of man, and those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter’.”
Back at Madd’s, a pot of coffee later
“Sounds like you guys really caught hell once again,” Al said after hearing the story. “Seems like fate or Mr. Murphy saved up two years of crap to dump on you guys in the last couple of months before getting out.”
“As I recall Al, you didn’t exactly have the easiest or safest time there yourself,” Madd pointed out.
“True, but I was mostly in small quick engagements then back to air-conditioning and good food. You guys had to stay in place and take it.”
“At least we managed to come home alive; that is a big improvement over the other way,” Madd pointed out.
It was hard on all of them. They might be home from war but the war and lost comrades would stay fresh in their minds for a very long time.
Al had his own demons to wrestle as well.
A meeting with the Riders
Dek was tired of having to always harp on money, but all the guys took it well. No one seriously blamed him for all the details and ins and outs of finance he had to dump on them. As meetings went this one was short and to the point, then they shut it down so everyone could get back to work.
The others had filed out but before the cousins could leave, he needed to talk to them.
Via hand signals Dek indicated that the cousins wait for a second. Dek stepped over to both the outside door and the connecting doors between the meeting room, and the room where the girls were working, making sure they were tightly shut.
“Sorry about the melodrama guys, but I wanted to talk about something that definitely should never be recorded. And not everyone needs to hear.”
He got curious looks from the cousins.
“I wanted to talk about the shipping containers that Zeb put us onto. I didn’t want to mention this while you guys were trying to adjust to civilian life, but we got those containers just like Zeb planned. It went perfectly. We hid the containers after we snatched them in metal buildings and used every electronic device we had heard of and a few that I never heard of that were supplied by Zeb to sweep for tracking devices. Before we left the shipping companies lot, we put magnetized scramblers on each container to render any electronic tracking devices inoperable. When we got them in those metal buildings we went over them inch by inch and opened the containers to make sure they were sterile.
“We left them there for four months with localized jammers going, and no one ever came near them. At that point we unpacked each container, making sure we searched them thoroughly for any devices. We went so far as to transfer the contents to our own containers and checked them again before moving them. We even checked them for any radioactive trace elem
ents. After everything was removed and taken away, we hired a crew to load the now empty containers and ship them to the Port of Houston. We sold them to a third party and they are now spread around the world. While we were at it we took a sample of several types of armament and ammunition in those containers, before hiding the containers themselves.”
“Wow Dek, you guys went the whole nine yards, that’s for sure,” said Madd.
“Guys, we grabbed 50 containers chock full of arms and armaments. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammo in various calibers. Some could be numbered in the millions. You can’t imagine what we now have stockpiled. When I got a look in the first few containers I knew we were involved in something very, dangerous. The people who we grabbed them from wouldn’t think twice about killing us. If a government agency caught us, we would never make it to jail. We would either be dead or in some black ops interrogation dungeon watching our fingers and toes being smashed with hammers.”
“It must have been some haul,” said Ivan.
Pulling out a list from his briefcase, Dek handed the sheets to Madd.
“I only made one copy, and I want to keep it with me after you read it so that I can lock it away in a very deep, dark hole. The list is only partial, just enough to give you an idea of what we actually got.”
What Do You Mean Its Still Tuesday Page 12