The patrol left for a glum walk back to the company’s temporary command post. Both sides were reorganizing; neither was looking for a fight. The Taliban and villagers were holding a funeral for one of the men whom Kilo had killed, and many young men—presumably the same fighters who had been firing on Kilo for days—were gathered at the gravesite. This left few militants to interfere with the colonel’s business, and his patrol crossed the fields unmolested. On the return walk it faced a few harassing shots from a distant gunman. The large battles of Marja had ebbed.
Christmas was true to his word. Late that afternoon a Marine tilt-rotored Osprey landed. Neff’s Marines loaded the bodies for a flight to the provincial capital for burial. The Taliban tried to destroy the Osprey as it sat on the ground, but again their shots were wide. A last RPG, fired after the Osprey lifted off, exploded beneath it, just far enough away that the aircraft and its crew were safe. The aircraft departed with its cargo, the bodies of the very civilians Marine commanders said the troops had come to protect.
First Platoon’s job at Building 284 ended. Captain Biggers ordered its Marines and Afghan soldiers—less Corporal Charfauros and his squad on the flank—to move the next morning to the company’s position to the west.
Neff and two squads left at dawn, bidding farewell to Haji Mohammad Karim. The walk was more difficult than those of the previous days. The Marines had to carry all of their equipment—the heavy loads they had brought with them by helicopter to Marja but had kept in their occupied compounds for days; the same immobilizing loads that Swider had wished to complain about to the commandant. They moved clumsily under the rising sun, weighted down like mules.
The platoon crossed the first fields without incident, and halted behind the cover of buildings, waiting for Sergeant Ryan Rogers from Second Platoon to bring two Marines who were going to walk with them. The sun climbed higher. Neff was feeling on edge. He did not like moving all of his Marines by daylight, slowed by full loads, giving the Taliban’s spotters time to watch. And he was down to his last spare battery for his two-way radio and worried about losing communication.
First Platoon had about a kilometer and a half left to cover. Up to this point its movement had either been near compounds under Marine control or behind walls of buildings. Neff could route the patrol behind buildings for a few hundred more yards, but then they would come to the danger area. The final leg would be across a flat field, an expanse seven hundred or eight hundred yards wide. The company command cell waited beyond that. The southern side field was bordered by a canal. Other platoons had been fired on from there as they crossed this field.
Neff did not like the route. When they reached the last open area, the platoon halted. The field looked risky under any circumstances, but especially risky by day and with heavy backpacks. First Platoon had its orders. There were missions to perform.
The platoon began to walk.
Sergeant Laney’s squad took point.
The Marines headed out tensely, with everyone watching the silent walls and vegetation to their south.
The point man, Private First Class Currier, was about three hundred yards out, almost in the middle of the field, when the ambush began.
First came a short burst from the south. The Marines dropped, ready to fire back. Laney thought it might be harassing fire. He ordered the Marines back up, to hustle for the buildings ahead. Let’s move forward and get out of this danger area, he thought.
Multiple weapons opened fire in single shots and bursts. Neff heard the thumping of at least one machine gun. Marines fell. Neff was still at the compound wall, in a safe position. He dropped his pack and dashed out to the open, trying to reach the downed men.
Sergeant Laney had run toward one of them, to help drag him to safety as he ordered his teams back. The Marines were silhouetted on a barren field covered with white powder. Bullets skipped around them and rushed by in the air.
The Taliban had had days to prepare this position on Kilo’s flank, and was firing from trenches and murder holes. Its fighters were unseen.
Marines spun out of their packs, dropped, and fired from behind them, using the packs as shields.
Private First Class Joshua Horne moved by Laney and said he was shot. Another Marine, Corporal Timothy Smith, had been struck, too. The two Marines had arm wounds. Neff reached Laney, who was beside the first downed Marine.
“Who’s hit?” Neff asked. “Who is it?”
“Currier,” the sergeant answered. He was holding Horne’s squad automatic weapon and Currier’s rifle, as well as his own.
Like Neff, Currier was a “Christmas present,” one of the last Marines to join the platoon. He had been with Kilo only since December. He was from New England, also like Neff. He looked lifeless.
Horne was there, his face in pain. “Sir, I’ve been hit,” he said. Laney told him to rush straight back to the compound. He could not fight or help move Currier. Neff picked up Currier’s pack.
First Squad withdrew as Second Squad returned fire with 40-millimeter grenades and machine guns. Laney and Hummel dragged Currier across the white dust. Currier was not a big Marine, but with all of his equipment he was heavy, and they were carrying extra weapons. Laney’s legs gave out two times.
When they reached the compound wall some of the backpacks had bullet holes. The corpsman rushed through a triage. Smith’s and Horne’s wounds did not appear life-threatening. He focused on Currier, pulling away his equipment to check his wounds. A bullet had struck him high in the chest, passing just above the top of his ceramic plate. He was dead.
A rocket-propelled grenade slammed into the wall, sending up a cloud of hot dust.
To their north, Staff Sergeant Wright, the platoon sergeant for Second Platoon, heard the gunfire. His instinct was to help, but he was shorthanded and could not leave Kilo’s supplies unguarded. Neff’s voice came up on the radio.
“I have one KIA and two WIA,” he said. Rogers radioed back and got no reply.
Neff sounded frazzled. Wright was not one to stand still near Marines under fire. He and Sergeant Rogers ordered four Marines to stay behind to guard the supplies, then sprinted toward the fight. They found First Platoon in the compound at the edge of the field, jumped over the low wall on its northern side, and joined them. Wright knew this place. Two days earlier Second Platoon had been ambushed in the same spot.
He projected composure.
“Hey, man,” he said.
Neff was near the body of a Marine and two others who had been shot, trying to get his radio to function. He needed a helicopter. Wright’s radio had a working battery. He told Neff they could divide the work.
“I’ll do the casevac,” he said. He urged Neff to focus on fighting the Taliban off and reaching the company command post.
From the west, Kilo Company began firing 60-millimeter mortars. Biggers dispatched a squad of Marines to flank the Taliban from the other side.
Wright called Colistra, who had lost contact with Neff when Neff’s radio battery died. The two men began organizing a medevac. A short while later a helicopter landed near the compound’s northern wall, shielded from the Taliban to the south. The platoon rushed out the wounded Marines and Currier’s body. Attack helicopters followed and strafed the fields.
With gunships circling, the Taliban’s firing abruptly stopped.
Wright urged First Platoon to move. “It’s quiet now,” he said. “Get across. We got you. Go.”
First Platoon stood, shouldered packs, and prepared to try again. Covered in sweat and their friends’ blood, they stepped out into the danger area. One of the Cobras passed low overhead. It was a menacing machine. Neff figured it would keep Taliban heads down.
Thank God, he thought.
He was carrying his pack and Currier’s, a load of two hundred pounds.
The Taliban did not fire again.
Several minutes later the Marines trudged into the compound where Kilo was set up. They filed past their peers angrily, gathered rations and wa
ter, and sat in knots. Neff left them to see Biggers. He returned with news.
“Say your prayers and do what you can for each other,” he said. “But keep your head in the fight, because tomorrow we’re going to push down to the south where you just got ambushed, and we’re going to get some payback for Currier. We’re going to be in a firefight again tomorrow.”
Captain Biggers had issued Kilo their next order. Two platoons would cross the canal early the next morning and run down the Taliban harassing the company from the south. Most of the company would be involved. They would have mortars ready and air support. Neff laid out his plan. It was uncomplicated—a movement to contact. “Nothing fancy,” he said. “We’re getting on line and we’re going.” When they found the Taliban, they’d fight.
After issuing his order, Neff cleaned his rifle, replaced his radio battery, and sat alone, rehashing the ambush in his head. He needed rest but could not sleep. To anyone watching, he looked calm. Inside he was grilling himself, rethinking his decisions. Would I have done anything differently? He could have crossed the danger area farther north and stretched the distance between the Taliban machine gun and his platoon. But the northern side of the crossing was wider. The Marines would have been unprotected a longer time. There was no good answer.
Around him, First Platoon was in a foul mood, seething and grieving at once. Neff sat for three or four hours, his mind replaying the ambush again and again. At last he drifted to sleep. Don’t overthink it, he told himself. Go get some revenge.
* * *
The Marines emerged into the cold air the next morning. They were about to change their pattern. The gunmen fighting them had developed an understanding of where Kilo did not go. These men had stacked up in compounds and canals and built fighting positions and holes through which they could harass the Americans on the northern side. Kilo intended to use the Taliban’s confidence against it by rushing headlong into the enemy’s zone before sunrise to catch them unready and rout them in place. The company had no plan to claim ground. This day was a hunt.
Biggers arranged two platoons side by side, with his command group in the center, and brought machine-gun squads, an explosive ordnance disposal team, snipers, and Afghans. Neff’s platoon took the eastern edge. The 60-millimeter mortars stayed behind, on call to lob rounds into any resistance. The air officer, Captain Bacchus, had a lineup of aircraft and drones on call. Neff had all three squads arranged on line, like an exercise from infantry school.
On the eastern edge, Corporal Charfauros’s squad exited Building 316 for the first time in days. They had been all but under siege, repeatedly attacked from three sides. A hamlet of villages was in front of them, across the canal, and Charfauros felt almost naked as his squad stepped into the gray dawn. The Taliban had kept up blistering fire against his squad. His Marines would have been mowed down from that hamlet if they had tried this in the days before. But it was early. Their foes did not seem to be awake. The word from Neff to get moving came over the radio. Third Squad crossed the field at a near jog. Within minutes they were south of the canal and entering their enemy’s positions. They had not faced a shot.
It was as if they had captured an opposing army’s trenches. Along the walls facing Building 316, Charfauros’s Marines found murder holes littered with spent brass from the gunfights of the preceding days. Inside the buildings and compounds, they discovered that the Taliban fighters had hacked man-sized mouseholes through interior and rear walls, or had placed ladders and planks that allowed them to change positions quickly.
“Motherfuckers,” one of the Marines said.
Unprompted, the Marines of Third Squad started ransacking rooms. They smashed furniture, shattered teacups, heaved bedding, broke doors. Nothing was spared. An Afghan fighter picked up a Koran from the floor and complained in halting English. “No good,” he said. “No good.”
Charfauros realized that was a step too far. He apologized. His Marines could read neither Arabic nor any of Afghanistan’s principal languages. They had not recognized the holy text. He had an idea. The Afghan soldiers seemed disgusted at the Taliban, too. He asked the interpreter to tell the Afghan soldiers they could help. “From now on, you guys grab the Korans,” Charfauros said, “and then we’ll trash the place.”
The Afghan soldiers agreed.
The squad continued to tear through the deserted hamlet, kicking in doors. Charfauros’s Marines were fit armed men rushing through someone else’s maze, marking their path with a trail of broken goods. After days of being stuck under fire in a single building, they felt released. Half hunting, half raging, they were gripped by a hunger and a power that the architects of the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency doctrine rarely acknowledged. One of their friends had been killed. Now they moved with a contempt that was timeless, exhilarating, satisfying, and channeled by youth—a living exhibit of why American soft-touch notions of counterinsurgency, pursued by conventional troops who had enlisted to fight, would almost never work. Circumstances for Third Squad had aligned. Officer catechisms had faded. They were not here to make friends. They were here to find the men who had been fighting them, and kill them.
If any of the Taliban’s gunmen remained in the village, they withdrew in the face of Third Squad’s advance.
As the squad reached the end of the hamlet, its excitement waning, the dynamic changed. The Taliban was filling in behind them, cutting off the route back.
Other fighters opened fire on the Americans from the fields, behind a new set of trenches or murder holes. They were off in the distance again. Third Squad stopped.
Marines took cover. Charfauros called Neff, who was more than a kilometer to the west.
Neff had information from the air officer. A Reaper pilot had seen gunmen leaving buildings on motorcycles not far from Charfauros. The Taliban might be flanking his squad, trying to surround them, but they had made a mistake. They had been seen.
Neff described the route they were taking on the map. “You need to eliminate the targets,” he said.
Charfauros knew the road they would be coming on, to his east. He arranged his squad and the machine guns and lay among them, looking through his four-power scope.
Motorcyclists appeared on five or six bikes, some doubled up with a second gunman on the back. They were far off but heading his way.
The Marines laid their sights on them, waiting for the sign from their squad leader. It was a moment they had waited for: the Taliban, out from behind walls, moving into range.
Charfauros fired. The rest of his squad opened up, along with an Afghan soldier behind a machine gun, who released a long burst.
Motorcycles veered and crashed as bullets struck. Some of the gunmen fell, stood, ran, and fell again. Others leaped into the nearby canal, alive.
Marines whooped and swore.
* * *
To the west, Sergeant Laney’s squad had crossed the same canal and overrun the vacant firing positions used by the gunmen who killed Currier the day before. They found holes cut in walls. Looking back through the portholes to where the platoon had been attacked, they saw the kill zone from their ambushers’ perspective. It was incredible, they thought, that more of them had not been hit. The scale of preparation was impressive, and so was the discipline. The Taliban had picked up their spent cartridge cases, and left the ambush positions clean.
The Taliban’s fighters had not returned from wherever they slept.
First Squad searched the nearby houses. They were empty, too, except for the occasional snarling dog. Fire pits were cold. Vehicles were gone, leaving nothing but tread marks where they usually parked. The residents had moved out, surrendering their homes to war. The squad kept bounding forward. As the lead Marines approached a fresh set of compounds, gunmen from inside shot at them through more murder holes about two hundred yards away. The Marines took cover in a chest-high irrigation canal with ankle-deep water, in which they spread out and fired back with rifles and squad automatic weapons. More gunmen moved on the squad�
�s right flank.
Lance Corporal Hummel pressed his chest to the dirt of the canal’s southern side, assumed a braced firing position, and looked down the scope atop his M16. The compound to their south had high walls of dried mud and a small door. He settled his scope on the door and waited, ready in case the gunmen inside looked out. It was a good firing position. He felt steady.
To his right, a gunman jogged across from right to left, toward the door. Hummel shifted the 4-power scope slightly until its circle contained the trotting man. The scope’s magnification brought him into view. He was bearded and wearing a dark blue-gray coat over gray clothes. In one hand he held a radio to his head, beneath his Afghan wool cap. In the other he gripped a Kalashnikov rifle.
He had almost reached the door.
The scope’s reticle contained a small red chevron that indicated the expected point of a bullet’s impact. Hummel tried laying the top of the chevron on the man’s head. He eased back on the trigger.
The M16 fired.
The round struck the wall. Hummel saw dust splatter where it hit.
He fired again.
The second round missed. Hummel could not tell where.
He fired a third time.
The man dropped instantly and tumbled to a stop.
“I got one,” Hummel said to Sergeant Laney, who was beside him.
“You get one?” Laney said.
“Fuck yeah,” Hummel said.
Through the scope, he could see the man, in a heap, as motionless as a sack.
Neff was nearby on his own radio, talking with the company. This day was different. Neff did not have to defend compounds, watch a bridge, or guard bodies. First Platoon was maneuvering with all three squads and a sniper team, and the company command group was not far to the west, ready with fire support. Laney had relayed the compound’s building number to Neff, who passed the coordinates over the radio to the air officer, Captain Bacchus. The Reaper was still above them. Bacchus told Neff it was armed with a Hellfire missile, could see the target, and would strike the building in front of First Platoon.
The Fighters Page 32