Captain Biggers watched his Marines firing back, distributing targets. This was bigger than the typical Afghan skirmish. Away from the gunfight, other Marines from Kilo were reporting to Biggers that they were watching men on motorcycles moving along their flanks, out of range. The Taliban was massing.
Biggers surveyed the two platoons around him. Marines were firing in multiple directions and the Taliban was spread out. But this still seemed manageable. Most of the Taliban were to the south. They would not be able to cross the open fields under fire and prevent Kilo from reaching its objectives to the north—the bazaar and the bridge.
Biggers consulted his GRG, the annotated satellite image, to determine the building numbers of compounds from where he thought Kilo was taking fire, and ordered Neff to move northward with Laney’s squad, nearer the objective. He planned to arrange fire support and Second Platoon would fight off the Taliban to the south, then be ready to sweep through an area cleared by Neff’s platoon and take the bridge.
Bullets were flying by and striking walls. Among them were machine-gun bursts, which flew by in a rush or tore up ground in front of Marines. Here and there the Marines heard the heavier crack of a well-aimed shot. Someone out there had a good rifle, and the skills to use it. Second Platoon spread out, sending Marines south and west to cover Kilo’s flank. They met more precise gunfire as they moved.
The fight settled into a stalemate. After an hour it still raged.
Much of Kilo Company was arrayed in a C-shaped arc. Taliban fighters had pushed into the open center. Biggers had few good options. If it had been night, or if the fields had had walls and thicker crops, this would likely have played to the Marines’ advantage. But the fields were bare, the walls were few, and the Taliban had chosen positions cannily. Many shot through firing ports, the murder holes the Marines had been warned about. Marines who crept forward were met by fire that fixed them in place. Along one wall, Lance Corporal Travis Vuocolo, a SAW gunner in Second Platoon, was nearly hit repeatedly. His squad leader, Sergeant Ryan Rogers, ordered him back. The man who owned the compound stood near his doorway, gesturing, imploring Marines not to trample his poppy plants.
The company had been told that the assault in Marja was necessary to stem the opium trade.
“Don’t step on the poppy, don’t step on the illegal shit!” shouted Corporal Jamie Wieczorek, a fire team leader, then muttered to Marines clustered with him against a wall. “This is what we’re here to fight and they say don’t step on it.”
“He’s giving us information,” a Marine replied.
“So what?” Wieczorek said. To the west, Second Platoon had been attacked the previous day. “The last guy who gave us information put us into an ambush. Fuck him.”
Marine training emphasized rushing attackers at the shorter ranges. But at longer ranges, by daylight, when an enemy was well positioned and behind its guns, rushing across the open spaces would be more than foolish. It would mean throwing away Marines’ lives. Kilo Company settled into a fight.
Some of the Afghan soldiers were fighting, but others lay low, doing nothing. Sergeant Rogers urged an Afghan with a machine gun, Mohammad Sadir, to get up.
“Taliban! Taliban!” the Afghan soldier said to Rogers, nodding toward the far side of the field.
“You see Taliban,” Rogers said. “You shoot him.”
The two men bumped fists.
The machine gunner stayed low, and did not fire.
Another Afghan offered another English word. “Sniper,” he said. But after each round flew overhead, he did not fight. Rogers returned to his squad.
A cry rose along the walls—“Corpsman up!”
Vuocolo had been hit.
He had fallen beside a line of Marines, who pounced and rolled him over to check his wound. A corpsman cut away part of Vuocolo’s uniform, exposing a pair of holes on his left shoulder. The bullet had passed through his deltoid, missing bone. After the corpsman applied a pressure bandage, Vuocolo was back on the wall.
Another Afghan soldier shouted triumphantly, his voice tinged with glee. “Taliban!” he taunted. “Pussy!”
The company was stalled. Staff Sergeant Joseph Wright, Second Platoon’s sergeant, was concerned. Kilo was using up ammunition. It needed to conserve what it had for a second fight, at the bridge. Wright paced as bullets passed over his head.
“Shoot only what you can see and what you can hit,” he said.
* * *
Neff and his First Squad, led by Sergeant Laney, were on the northern edge of the fighting, waiting for it to subside, ready to shift focus to the bazaar and the bridge. But Kilo was halted. Its officers wanted more firepower to kill the gunmen across the fields, or at least convince them to leave.
Near Captain Biggers, Lieutenant Durbin, who led the company’s fire-support team, huddled with a small group of officers, trying to organize mortar or artillery fire. He knew the pattern from his briefings: Once Americans concentrated firepower, the militants would disappear. If Kilo could get an aircraft overhead, or some artillery fire to splash down, this gunfight might end. The company could return its attention to the bridge. Captain Akil Bacchus, a pilot assigned as a forward air controller, was trying to arrange for an aircraft. Second Lieutenant Marvin Mathelier, an artillery forward observer, was working with him, relaying radio traffic through another forward observer, Corporal Christopher Herr, who was in Building 316 with Corporal Charfauros. Radio communications were spotty. The officers were frustrated. Kilo Company, in a large operation, was fighting alone.
One of the Marines, seeing the Afghan soldier with a machine gun was still sitting out the fight, put down his weapon and picked up the Afghan’s weapon to use. He fired over the wall.
Durbin had regained radio communications and was discussing artillery support, when he was told to be ready to report on the damage for an impending HIMARS rocket strike. HIMARS rockets were large—more than twenty feet long, with warheads containing about 200 pounds of high explosives.
Durbin was startled. He had not called for a HIMARS strike.
“What HIMARS?” he asked into the radio.
“The HIMARS that you called for,” the voice replied.
Durbin’s surprise became alarm. Kilo Company was partially wrapped around the Taliban. If big ordnance was about to crash down, its Marines needed to know.
“Where are they coming?” Durbin demanded. “Where!”
Captain Bacchus grabbed Lieutenant Mathelier by the arm and spun him, pulling him face-to-face. Bacchus seemed shocked, too. “You just called for HIMARS without telling me?” he said.
If rockets were in the air, Bacchus needed to warn aircraft and pilots out of the way.
This was the first Mathelier had heard of a HIMARS mission. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
All three officers were flummoxed. The battalion had still not answered Durbin’s question. He wondered what he had missed.
“Hey, confirm you got a rocket in the air,” he said into his handset.
No answer came back. He asked again.
“Confirm you’ve got a rocket in the air.”
Battalion did not reply.
Durbin changed handsets and broadcast a general warning on the company’s tactical net. “All stations,” he said. “We’ve got rockets coming in and I don’t know where. Everybody get down!”
Shouts passed from Marine to Marine.
“Get the fuck down!”
“Rockets inbound!”
“Get the fuck down!”
The voices rang with elation and anticipation. This had been a rifle fight for too long. The fire support the Marines had hoped for was happening at last. Those fucking Taliban are about to get smoked.
* * *
On the roof of Building 187, Lance Corporal Adam Wallace was facing the center of the battle with his back to the bazaar. There had been a break in the shooting. He fished out a cigarette. He heard a loud whistle, which almost immediately became a rushing whoo
sh. Wallace looked up and saw a large rocket falling from the sky. He’d never seen anything quite like it. It resembled a section of utility pole with tailfins extended like small wings.
It landed on Building 284 and disappeared in a brilliant flash. A shock wave rushed past, followed by a noise like thunder. A second rocket landed behind the first, detonating in an identical blast. Marines like firepower, and being on the winning side. Several screamed with joy.
“Fuck yeah!”
“Get some!”
Wallace heard another shout.
“There was a family in there!”
The cheering stopped.
* * *
Across the fields to the west, where Vuocolo had been shot, Second Platoon had been facing the spot from which the sniper had been harassing them, expecting the spot to be hit. The rockets came down to the left, a few hundred yards away, at the next compound. They turned their heads and watched black smoke and hot dust climb. The platoon had not taken fire from that place but assumed someone must have. Marines cheered.
“You ain’t got no fucking house!” one of them shouted.
There was a long pause. Something did not seem right.
* * *
Back in Building 187, Larry Lau, First Platoon’s radio operator, was scrambling to figure out what had happened. He had heard a radio call just before the explosions—a warning to stand by for HIMARS on Building 284—and then felt the twin blasts shake the steppe. He knew immediately someone had made a mistake.
There was no enemy in that compound, he thought. It was all women and children.
Beside him, the executive officer, Colistra, was equally confused. What the fuck was that? he asked himself.
Colistra looked outside. He had not heard Durbin’s warning, and was not sure what weapon had been used, or even who was behind it. His heart pounded fast. The family who lived in this building, whom he had asked to remain with the Marines, had gone there the morning before. The women, he thought, all those little kids.
Oh shit.
Oh no.
* * *
Around Captain Biggers, dozens of Marines faced the smoldering rubble, watching. Someone stepped out from the compound’s door. A few Marines fired. The range was long. The bullets missed. The survivor froze, in clear view.
She was a child.
She stood motionless, coated in dust.
“Cease fire!” someone shouted. “It’s a kid. Cease fire!”
Marines fell silent. For a moment the girl looked stunned. Then she ran, bolting straight toward her home, Building 187, which was about 400 yards away, and full of Marines.
She covered the distance quickly, determined, dashing across her own yard.
Marines met her at the compound door. Her face was smeared with blood. Her clothing was soaked in more. The corpsman put her on a table and looked for wounds. Her only visible mark was a small scratch on her face. The blood on her clothes had come from someone else.
Her father was brought to the room. He was First Platoon’s detainee. He picked her up. She clung to him. The interpreter asked questions. “Who was in there? Are they hurt? Are they alive? Are there bad people in there?”
The girl looked terrified. She barely spoke. Colistra had seen enough. He knew who was in that compound. He had seen them go in the day before. He and Lau had work to do. He called Captain Biggers on the radio.
“Was that us?” he asked.
Biggers told him it was.
Shit, Colistra thought.
“We’ve got civcas,” he said, using jargon for civilian casualties. “We need to get a squad in there fast.”
* * *
Neff was with his First Squad, Kilo Company’s northernmost unit, when the rockets hit. He had heard Durbin’s warning that HIMARS were inbound and lifted his head over the wall and saw the rockets hit Building 284, right between his support-by-fire position, where he had left Second Squad, and Building 316, where Corporal Charfauros and Third Squad were fighting on the company’s eastern flank. He was momentarily in disbelief.
“What was that?” he said. “We weren’t taking rounds from that compound.”
Neff remembered its occupants: an old man and a group of women and children. They had followed instructions and stayed inside. He heard confusion around him. Other Marines were as surprised as he was. He looked across the field at the drifting smoke and the shattered wall. Then he saw the girl. Through his rifle’s four-power scope he saw her dirty hair. It was black and wild. He thought she might be three or four years old.
“We searched that building,” said Lance Corporal Hummel, a fire team leader. “That’s where they put their women and children.”
“Who called that in?”
No one knew.I
The firefight had paused. Neither the Taliban nor the Marines seemed to know what to do next. Firing slowed.
Captain Biggers came to Neff on the radio. “I need you to get over there with your squad immediately and search that compound and give me a BDA,” he said, using the acronym for battle damage assessment. “I need to know what’s going on.”
Neff scanned the field. It was an empty expanse, exposed to the same gunfire that had been holding Kilo Company in place all day. The ruined building was about seven hundred yards away. Any crossing on foot would be a charge across the open, potentially a death run. He gathered his squad and told them the mission: to get into that compound and render aid to anyone wounded inside. He stopped. He wasn’t going to bullshit anyone about what would await them if they made it.
“Be prepared to see some shit,” he said. “There’s going to be some bodies.”
The squad stepped from behind the wall into plain view, spread out, and hustled across the field, each man expecting to be shot. Neff figured the Taliban would wait until his Marines were far away from the walls, with no chance of returning to cover, then open fire. Their only ally was speed. They needed to cross fast. Heavy with equipment and wet with sweat, he jogged farther into the field, expecting bursts of machine-gun fire, accepting that at any second they could be cut down. Nothing happened. First Squad was unchallenged. Amped by the adrenaline that accompanies imminent death, they drew nearer to the broken building. Laney called out to his Marines. “You remember that messed-up training I made you do?” he said. “You’re about to see some shit that’s worse than that.”
To his left Neff saw the support-by-fire position, where other Marines watched in astonishment.
The rockets had hit a corner room and blown out an exterior wall. Neff and Laney’s Marines reached the gap the blasts had made.
First Squad’s point man stopped, glanced inside, looked back at Neff.
“Sir,” he said. “We’ve got a whole bunch of bodies.”
Neff inhaled a bitter, burning smell, a mixture of explosives, burned soil, and something else. He looked in. One corner of the compound had been blown asunder. The courtyard was a tableau of rubble, dead livestock, scraps of cloth, and human body parts. Shrapnel had gouged divots in walls. Twisted pieces of the rocket littered the ground.
His Marines swept into the place, weapons level.
Their training kicked in. They fanned out and dashed through the structure’s mini-geography, covering one another and calling out as they opened doors, searched animal pens, assured themselves that the place was safe. They were looking for weapons or Taliban. The grounds were as still as a tomb. Haji Mohammad Karim, the old man whose family had been displaced the day before, arrived from Building 187 and stood dumbfounded, as if looking for something.
Several Marines rushed to a room where the HIMARS hit. A voice came out. “We’ve got bodies in here. Women and kids.”
Neff entered a scene of abject destruction. The dead were spread about the room. Many were small, the same children he had seen alive at the gate earlier. Others were adults ripped partially apart. The roof and walls had collapsed upon them, covering broken frames or shattered skulls with earthen brick. All were coated in a tan dust that settled
upon faces and pools of blood.
Someone said the compound was clear. First Squad had found no weapons and no one alive. It all confirmed what Neff already knew. The HIMARS had destroyed a civilian home.
His stomach tightened. He steadied himself.
His platoon had not done this. His Marines would have to clean it up.
The corpsman with First Squad knelt beside the body of a young woman. She had no legs and was missing an arm. A moan floated in the air. Neff found his voice.
“Doc,” he asked. “Is she still alive?”
The corpsman nodded. “Yeah,” he said.
Neff looked closely. The woman wore a blood-soaked maroon dress. Her chest rose and fell fitfully. Her remaining arm was held by a tissue of flesh.
From where she had fallen, she could not see the devastation in the courtyard or all of the bodies thrown around. She tried to sit up but could not. She turned her head, calling out names.
“She’s looking for the children,” the interpreter said.
The corpsman slipped tourniquets over her stumps and cinched them tight. Lance Corporal Dave Santana removed part of her dress, looking for more wounds. He saw the extent of the damage; she was mostly a head and torso. Santana had lost his sense of time but thought the rockets had hit about forty-five minutes ago. How is she even alive? he wondered. He felt a wave of empathy. A thought formed that he never expected to have: He wished that she would die. He wanted her suffering to end.
Outside, one of the Afghan soldiers had found a goat that remained alive. He drew a knife and slit its throat.
Haji Mohammad Karim stepped into the room. He was despondent and enraged, scolding the Marines. He yanked Santana back and pointed. Santana was standing on a piece of human skull. He had not seen it. He lifted his foot and apologized.
Colistra had crossed from Building 187. He pulled Neff aside. “We’ve got to do a BDA,” he said. “We have to start counting bodies.”
The Fighters Page 30