Everything was set before dark.
The air was chilly and the mountain ridge raked by cold gusts. Smith told the platoon to go to 50 percent watch—with every other man behind a weapon. Soto was soaked with sweat from the climb, and shivering. With Molano watching, he put down his rifle and pulled a dry undershirt and socks from his backpack. He changed clothes, ate a protein bar, and washed it down with a bottle of water. He lifted his rifle so Molano could have a turn doing the same.
The sun was dropping behind the western ridge. Soto could see the Korengal Outpost below him, across the open air. He realized this must be what it looked like to militants when they attacked.
Farther downhill, he saw tiny outlines of Afghans moving about their villages. Smoke rose from wood fires in houses and in yards outside. A distant call to prayer floated on the mountain air.
The light dimmed to a soft yellow, then to gray. A deepening blue gave way to black. Soto lowered his monocular night-vision device so it rested in front of his shooting eye. He turned on his AN/PEQ-15 aiming laser, attached to his rifle. A fine green line extended through the night. It moved with his rifle’s muzzle—invisible to anyone without night-vision equipment, brilliantly bright to Soto and the rest of Second Platoon. His weapon was ready now; he could use it effectively at night.
Stars appeared. The platoon had spent the day playing the new lieutenant’s Ranger games, Soto thought, but at least no one had been killed. He expected tomorrow morning would be dodgy. Second Platoon could almost count on being hit during the walk home.
These motherfuckers know exactly where we are, he thought.
He peered through his sight at the stillness to his front. His sector was a quiet green world, glowing dully in the small circular screen before his right eye.
We’re wasting time. Fuck this place.
* * *
Lieutenant Smith followed the playbook. He let his soldiers change into dry clothes with the last of the light. Then came stand-to, a period of 100 percent alertness during which the soldiers were forbidden to move. All were motionless at their fighting positions, weapons pointed into sectors. The silence was total. The drill—as if bracing for an attack—was part of infantry life, a means to focus the platoon. The lasers formed a web of green lines. It was a purposefully assembled geometry of Second Platoon’s close-range killing potential, a prediction of what its bullets might do should anyone wander into its kill zone. It did not include the claymore mines and high-explosive grenades, or the scouts who soon would be leaving the patrol base to hide by the trail. It also omitted the vast apparatus of firepower that Smith and the platoon’s radios could summon on short notice. This was the firepower that routinely killed the Taliban in small quantities and kept the outposts from being overrun. Smith was ready to call it down, onto this ridge.
After a few minutes, stand-to ended.
Smith dispatched three scouts up the slope to find their vantage point. They stepped off into the night in single file. Soto figured they would find a spot about one hundred yards away, behind terrain that could block the platoon’s gunfire and claymores, and settle in until morning.
Second Platoon was in position. A night of boredom was ahead.
* * *
Near the center of the patrol base, Specialist Halase sat on cold ground beside the radio. The scouts had just left. He had spread out his poncho liner and opened an MRE. He was thinking he’d pass an easy run of hours, now that the difficult walk was over.
Smith rushed toward him. He had his own radio for talking with the scouts and squad leaders. He was earnest and animated, whispering fast. He had just heard from the scouts. “Dudes are coming down the trail,” he said.
Halase wondered what Smith meant. Dudes coming down the trail? He asked the lieutenant if the scouts were coming back.
“No,” Smith said. “The Taliban.”
The lieutenant dashed away to take his place on the line.
* * *
Soto heard movement behind him. Smith was crouched between him and Molano. He practically hissed. Scouts had just reported gunmen walking this way, he said, ten or fifteen people in all.
“Molano, you got the gun up?” he asked. Molano said he did. Smith was gone.
Adrenaline rushed through Soto. His heart rate spiked. His muscles seemed coiled to pounce. What the fuck. He entered the peculiar mind-set that can settle over a combatant in the seconds before battle, a feeling of absolute, intoxicating clarity. Viper had shuffled the deck, and the roles in the valley had been reversed. This time it was the Americans with the advantage. Someone else was walking into a trap.
His breathing quickened. He pressed his chest to the earth and adjusted himself so the barrel of his M4 was parallel to the dirt and aligned with the trail. He flipped its selector lever off safe. He went still. His world shrunk to what the rehearsals had drilled him for: peering into his sector, weapon ready to kill.
Seconds passed. Soto knew the scouts were not far. If they’d seen men, those men would be getting very close.
Soto’s job, for now, was to wait. Smith alone was to decide whether anyone approaching was a combatant. If he decided they were, then he had to decide the moment to begin shooting. By the rules of the ambush, which he had said over and over in the operations order and the rehearsal, only the patrol leader could initiate fire.
The other soldiers were to remain motionless until released.
Soto’s heart thumped in his ears.
His kept his eye close to his night-vision monocular. It showed what he had seen during stand-to: a lethal green matrix, set. All was as it had been.
His right eye picked up a change.
Something was moving. It moved again.
Into the dim green glow of his eyepiece stepped the shape of a man. He was carrying a rifle and wore ammunition pouches across his chest. He was about thirty-five yards away, walking gingerly.
Another man emerged behind him. He carried a rifle, too.
Two more men stepped into view.
The first man paused.
This one looked older than the others, with a thick beard. He pointed a small flashlight at the ground, switched it on, and quickly switched it off.
The Taliban fighters were ghosts no more. They were people like any others, dealing with what every soldier dealt with. This man was trying to be sure of the trail. For a moment Soto was detached, in a meta-state, both there and away from there. He felt vindicated. He had been right all along when he saw flashlights in the hills and suspected that the Taliban was so cocky, so familiar with the limits of the American rules, that its fighters moved openly at night.
Fuck These are the dudes we’ve been trying to catch.
The man had found the trail. He started walking again, into the intersecting green lines of the platoon’s night sights.
Calm settled over Soto. Surprise tonight rested with Viper Two.
These four approaching men were about to die.
A fifth man stepped into view.
Soto’s shooting eye surveyed the group. A rocket-propelled grenade protruded from one man’s back. Another draped a PK-style machine gun across his shoulders. After the first two men, the others did not have their weapons ready to fire. Some had their rifles slung. Their body language was relaxed. They walked side by side. They weren’t ghosts. They were a mess. They had grown too confident. They had no idea of the danger they faced.
Emotions raced through Soto. First surprise, next anger, then disgust. He’d never seen the Taliban so closely, at least not with their weapons. Were these the guys who had killed his friends? They did not look like the mujahideen of legend. You got me on the other side of the world, on this mountain, fighting these guys, and they don’t even know what they’re doing?
The lead man was perhaps twenty yards away.
Soto had to choose whom to shoot. Lasers had already settled on the first two men. A green line stopped on the forehead of the man with the flashlight in the lead; another traced a figure-eight p
attern on the same man’s chest. The second man was similarly marked. Other soldiers had chosen them.
They’re gonna get wasted, Soto thought.
He moved his weapon toward the third man. This one had the machine gun across his shoulders. He balanced the weapon by gripping its barrel with one hand. He had no beard and no headdress. Soto moved his aiming laser to his upper chest, squarely between the straps of the man’s tactical harness but above any equipment that might turn a bullet.
The man did not seem alert but his machine gun was a significant weapon. Soto would make sure he could not put it to use.
The gunmen drew nearer, inside of fifteen yards, then inside of ten. More Taliban fighters filled in behind them.
Soto kept his laser trained on the third man. It was time.
Where was Smith? he wondered.
Hurry up.
Hurry the fuck up.
The man with the machine gun was maybe twenty feet away. The soldiers were silent.
Where’s Smith? C’mon, dude.
Smith had not given the sign.
Do it, Soto thought. Do it.
Fucking do it.
The man with the machine gun was less than fifteen feet away.
Do it already.
Soto’s heart felt like it might rupture his chest.
Fucking do it.
To his right, another soldier switched his rifle from safe to fire, making a slight metal-on-metal click.
The lead Taliban fighter stopped.
Shit.
Other fighters behind him paused. For a second the scene was frozen. Had they heard it? The gunmen in the kill zone were motionless. Trembling green lasers rested on their faces and chests, invisible to the Taliban, bright and hot to the soldiers hiding in front of them.
Soto wanted to scream.
C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, fucking Smith, c’mon—
An explosion shook the forest.
Steel balls slammed into the Taliban patrol. Smith’s voice sounded in the darkness.
“Fire! Fire! Fire!” he said.
Viper Two came off its leash.
Soto pulled the trigger, sending his first bullet into the chest of the man carrying the machine gun. He fired several times more, eyes on his victim, hearing the rest of the platoon firing all around him.
The man fell to his knees. Soto kept shooting. The man crumpled the rest of the way to the ground. He did not move.
Halase radioed the company’s operation center, checking in as Viper Two. “We’re in contact!” he said.
Viper Company’s commander, Captain Jimmy Howell, radioed back.
“You need HE?” he asked. “You need Willie Pete?”
The mortar pit was ready with high-explosive and white phosphorous rounds.
Gunfire tore through the kill zone and across the trail. Halase could tell, from the angles of the aiming lasers, that this was no situation for mortars. The two sides were yards apart.
“No, they’re too close,” he said. “We need Apaches. Now!”
Along the line where soldiers were firing, someone shouted to Sergeant Craig Tanner, who was ready with a claymore that one of his soldiers had hidden beside the trail. It was a command in the dark: “Hey, Tanner, they are running down your side! Blow the claymore!”
Tanner detonated it, shaking the hillside again.
Looking for another man to shoot, Soto scanned a green pandemonium—the grisly confusion made visible through a night-vision device. A few of the Taliban fighters had dropped in place on the trail. Others were staggering and scattering. Bright tracers slapped and skipped off rocks, spinning out over the ridge in hot arcs. The Taliban fighter on point had somehow dashed sideways, sprinting to Soto’s right. Soto had heard Specialist Robert Oxman’s machine gun roaring as the man headed toward it. Others ran between the thick trees, back to where they had come from.
Soto fired at them. He thought he hit them, but wasn’t sure.
The man Soto had shot first rose. He was upright, directly in front.
Soto spun left and fired into him again. The man dove away, into the brush to Soto’s left.
Someone threw a grenade. It shook the forest anew.
Soldiers heard familiar voices.
“Where you at?”
“Check that way!”
“How much ammo you got?”
“You good?”
“What do you see?”
Soto yelled he was fine. He checked Molano, changed his rifle’s magazine, and kept his eyes facing out front.
Smoke hung low over the underbrush.
The shooting slowed.
The shooting stopped.
Not a single shot had been fired back.
An American voice called out a warning.
“Get ready for a counterattack!”
Soto’s ears rang. The platoon was jumpy. Barrels were hot. He remained pressed to the ground, not wanting to rise and be mistaken for an Afghan.
A voice called out from uphill, in a language the soldiers did not know. They heard four syllables, broken into what sounded like two words: Delta rasha!VIII
The voice sounded again: “Delta rasha!”
It sounded plaintive and scared.
Soto kept his rifle aimed uphill. He had no idea how many militants were on the ridge. His mind cycled through possibilities. Maybe the platoon had killed only the first men of a larger force. If someone ambushed Viper like this, Viper would send out a quick-reaction force.
He braced for a counterattack.
The sergeants moved through the patrol base, checking each man.
Soto asked what was up. Someone said none of the Americans had been hurt. Word passed between the troops. Specialist Oxman said that the Taliban’s point man had managed to survive for several paces. “This guy kept running toward me and I kept lighting him up,” he said. He had finally fallen directly in front of Oxman’s muzzle, so close that Oxman reached over to check his pulse.
An explosion boomed over the valley. From afar, soldiers in Viper Company had seen fighters fleeing. Captain Howell had cleared an F-15 to hit them with a 2,000-pound laser-guided bomb.
Second Platoon followed the next steps as rehearsed.
A sergeant led Soto and two other soldiers into the kill zone to search the dead. Just off the trail, Soto found the body of the machine gunner he had shot. He was sprawled in the underbrush. He looked sixteen years old. They found more bodies—one shot through the brow, another missing limbs. One man’s face was a death mask, eyes opened in astonishment. A sergeant put on latex gloves and turned the dead fighters’ heads to photograph each face.
The sound of helicopters thumped overhead. A pair of Apaches had come.
Throughout the valley the Taliban was suffering a breakdown in discipline. Its fighters frantically used two-way radios to find out what had happened, and were having trouble getting answers. Viper Company eavesdropped, receiving translations of the intercepts. One of their commanders, a man American intelligence knew as Hamkar, had been with the ambushed fighters. His peers were not sure whether he was dead.
Captain Howell relayed another translation to Halase, from a fighter hiding on the ridge. “Tell my family that I love them and this is probably going to be the end for me,” the man had said.
An Apache fired a 30-millimeter chain gun. The pilots had found a militant, they said, and killed him.
* * *
Second Platoon reorganized. The search team had stacked the weapons they captured into a pile. There were too many to carry. They permanently damaged most with thermite grenades, rendering them useless, and selected a few to bring to their outpost.IX Smith and the sergeants counted every man and told the first soldiers to begin the walk home. They had killed more than ten Taliban fighters in what might have been the most successful conventional infantry ambush of the Afghan war. Now they had to get back behind their blast walls before sunrise to avoid suffering casualties of their own.
The scouts went first. The rest of the soldi
ers worked their way down the slope behind them.
Gunfire broke out again. It sounded like American weapons, but from his position back in the formation Soto was worried. They regrouped and scouts got fucked up, he thought.
He and the soldiers near him slid downhill, grabbing branches in the brush to break their falls. The shooting ended, over in less than a minute.
Soto’s squad caught up to the scouts. They stood over three more Taliban bodies.
The soldiers searched the freshly killed men, then kept moving.
The adrenaline high had worn off. Soto’s mind wandered. The lopsided violence seemed unreal. He felt proud as a soldier. Vengeance was satisfying. This night, he knew, was payback. It might even be more than payback. The Taliban’s losses, he thought, could hurt the Taliban’s ability to fight. This might calm shit down. As for Smith, the ambush on the ridge forced Soto to rethink his view. He had to square his feeling of the past days with what had happened in the past hours. Lieutenant Smith, he now knew, was legit. He had organized the platoon in a way that had torn a Taliban unit apart.
The soldiers arrived at the riverbed in the hours before dawn, waded across the frigid stream, and weaved their way uphill and into the outpost’s gate. It seemed like everyone was awake and waiting for Viper Two—the Marines who mentored the Afghan soldiers, the mechanics, the company’s officers, soldiers on guard and from the mortar pit. People were shouting to them, cheering. Soto heard people saying that what Second Platoon had just done was monumental. That was some crazy shit.
The platoon walked to the operations center and laid the captured equipment on the ground outside its door.
The cooks had prepared a hot meal, and the soldiers from the patrol clustered around one another, trading details, eating, chugging water, talking fast. After a while Soto drifted away. He was dehydrated. His legs quivered with cramps. His brain hurt. He had been working in gore. He washed himself by standing naked and dumping water bottles over his head, and headed to the B-hut where he lived. He cleaned his rifle and lay down on his plywood rack. Smith’s bunk was directly above. He had not come in to rest.
The Fighters Page 25