When the Killer Man Comes

by Paul Martinez

  During the AAR everyone was tense, and while we all kept the discussion professional, it was intense and often heated. We had a lot to say to our leadership about ROE, and all of it was negative. After the AAR, I asked to speak with my captain one-on-one. He agreed, and we stepped out into the hallway outside the TOC.

  “What’s up, Sergeant Martinez?” he began. He could tell I was angry, but he took it in stride. He knew you can’t spell “Ranger” without “Anger,” and he knew my anger wasn’t directed at him.

  We didn’t have complete privacy. There were a lot of other Rangers coming and going around us, and we would stop talking when someone approached. My captain’s tone was completely neutral, even accommodating, but in spite of my best efforts my tone was stern, even heated.

  I started out carefully. “Sir, I think I need to explain to you what it is Mac and I and our boys have been trained to do.” I began to list all the reasons why he needed to trust us to do exactly what our training enabled us to do.

  “Captain, we told the assault squad leaders what buildings, by the numbers, the Chechen sniper was firing from. (We assign temporary consecutive numbers to each building on a mission to identify them.) Sure enough, they found 7.62 × 54R shell casings with light extractor marks scattered all around. I’m sure you know that meant he was firing a Mosin-Nagant, like we said he was. We knew that because of the group size of the rounds impacting the wall of our cupola and because of his rate of fire. The bulk of the casings they found were at Building 33, his primary hide site.”

  “That was the building we called up for a fire mission. The same shell casings were also found at Building 15, which we called up as his secondary position. We knew he was inside those buildings, not outside, and we also knew that he wasn’t hiding in the cliffs because of the sound of his report (the sound his rifle makes). Buildings 15 and 33 were the only ones where he would have had the right size loophole facing the right direction with cover for his egress. Mac and I both agreed that those would be our first choices for a sniper hide.”

  My captain continued to listen, and this didn’t surprise me. He was a good leader, and that’s what good leaders do. I continued to pour out my story.

  “We knew roughly how far away he was by his second or third round. We knew he wasn’t an amateur because he coordinated his fire with his machine guns, and he chose his targets in the exact order of priority that we were trained to do. He fired at random intervals so that he could reduce his already minimal signature and keep us from timing his rounds for our own counter-sniper rounds. He picked out our hide site immediately; it was the first thing he shot at, even though we had spent hours before dawn concealing our presence there.”

  The captain was surprised we had so much SA (situational awareness) and said so. He had come up through the ranks—he had been an NCO before he was an officer—and he knew that my loud talking and anger venting weren’t directed at him personally.

  “Sir, there are only so many people who can do what that guy did today, and most of them work for us. We got really lucky—one more RPG and we would have had to bury half our snipers as well as our machine-gun team. If he had gotten a hundred or two hundred meters closer to us, his group size would have been the size of our fighting holes, not greater, and we would have taken a lot of casualties.”

  He paused a bit before replying. I could tell he was struggling with how to say what he was about to tell me. “I hear what you’re saying, Sergeant Martinez, and I appreciate you coming to me with this. But we all know the ROE is what it is, and I can’t change that. I get it, though. If you know what you say you do, just do what you know is right, and we’ll back you up.”

  To be completely honest, I hadn’t expected him to be so understanding. I finally began to realize that he was just as frustrated with the ROE as my buddies and I were. The Captain recognized my arguments had merit, and acknowledged the gray area we were operating in. I trusted my gut that I’d make the right decision, and now I realized that he trusted me as well. That didn’t mean I had carte blanche to shoot whoever I pleased, but I felt like we had built some trust in the last 36 hours of intense combat. What I took away was that he trusted me enough to know that I wasn’t going to shoot whoever I pleased. He promised to take my concerns up to Major Dan and said they’d discuss it with the other platoon leaders and platoon first sergeants.

  I walked back to my CHU (containerized housing unit), which was nothing more than a small shipping container with two beds in it. On the one hand, I was relieved that my concerns would be brought up the chain of command and get a fair hearing; on the other, I was still frustrated that somewhere near the top of that chain, someone was still making us fight with one hand tied behind our back.

  After that battle with the Chechen sniper, I still couldn’t believe I was alive. I also couldn’t believe that my first sergeant didn’t chew my ass for yelling at Major Dan. But above all else, I couldn’t believe we were going to fight like this for the rest of our rotation in Afghanistan.

  2

  NIGHT OPS

  Not all of our missions with Team Merrill in Afghanistan were like our encounter with the Chechen sniper. That one was short-fused and based on emergent intelligence. While we “planned” the mission, it wasn’t the deliberate planning we liked to do in order to enhance the chances of mission success.

  The night mission described in this chapter fits the mold of a classic Ranger mission with deliberate—even methodical—planning. We knew it was a mission where owning the night was going to be crucial. The objective area was a small farming community in South Helmand Province, not far from Kandahar.

  Our intelligence told us this town was under complete Taliban control. This meant that a shadow government was acting with the full support of the community, and that the Taliban controlling the town were taking orders from Taliban higher-ups operating from safe havens in Pakistan. This seemed a likely place for smuggling, caching of supplies, and safe-housing of foreign fighters.

  Team Merrill was a fully manned unit, and many of us had been in the 75th Ranger Regiment for years. We had tight bonds—the kind that are formed in fire and tempered by what was shaping up to be a never-ending conflict. I had met and worked with most of the guys from Alpha Company. I had worked for 1st and 3rd Platoons, but I didn’t have much more than first impressions of 2nd Platoon.

  We spent a good bit of time in the early stages of the deployment sizing each other up. As I sat and listened to the extended mission briefing for this night operation, my thoughts drifted to the men sitting in the TOC with me. I would have to watch their backs and they would have to watch mine. My life and limbs were on the line, and to say that meant I had more than a passing interest in knowing each of them even better than I knew my own brother is an understatement.

  “Knowing your brother” means something different to a Ranger. You’d think that people who spent months on end together would know each other the way college roommates do. In other words, you’d know things like their preferences in women, cars, sports, clothes, movies, and TV shows.

  While we did talk about those kinds of things, we also knew each other on a completely different level. We did this because we needed to. We found common ground on levels that soldiers have for millennia. I wanted to know about each of my fellow Rangers at an intimate soldiering level, and I’m certain they wanted to know the same things about me. How do you get ready for a mission? How do you prepare your kit? What are your physical, mental, and emotional limits? What rattled you on previous missions? How do you work out to ensure you’re at the top of your game?

  We needed to find out things about each other that would enable us to have each other’s backs in combat. Too many outside of our community think that all special forces operators are supermen. We’re not. But we’re all in it together, and without putting too fine a point on it, once we rotate in-country together, we’re more or less stuck with each other. So each of us needs to know certain things. Who is decisive, and who les
s so? How fast can you run or walk if we’re moving into, or out of, an objective area? Who is comfortable with a rigid plan, and who needs more flexibility? Who would freeze under fire, and who would fire back? Did I need to rein in a machine gunner or urge him on? Would someone carry his buddy on his back and never quit?

  The thing was, even though you all had gone through the same selection and training process, you never knew how each of your brothers would perform under the pressure of combat—and you were frequently surprised. I served with Rangers who were former blue-chip college athletes who would fall out when trying to carry a casualty, while a guy who had never worked out before his Army service made the same casualty-carry look easy. You just didn’t know, but you needed to know. And the most important question was this: Would you give your life for your buddy?

  As I sat there in TOC with the men I was about to go into combat with, everything about the way this mission was shaping up made me flash back to a fight I’d been in the year before. On that mission I had sized up a totally different group of men—Navy SEALs who we would be fighting alongside—and their senior sniper, Senior Chief Petty Officer Thomas A. Ratzlaff, who insisted everyone just call him “Rat.” The SEALs had our backs, and we had theirs. But I hoped to hell tonight’s mission wasn’t going to be as hairy as that one had been. My mind went back to that night mission in Nangarhar Province.

  * * *

  That fateful night in 2010, we (1st Platoon, Alpha Company, and a troop of SEALS climbed aboard our 160th SOAR Chinooks, launched out of JBAD (Jalalabad) at 2000, and flew to our FARP (Forward Air Refueling Point) site at FOB (Forward Operating Base) Laghman. We loaded up some more SEALs and finally arrived at our HLZ (Helicopter Landing Zone) around 2230. We set down in some fallow fields in a draw at the base of some giant mountains.

  We slogged through the rough fields and onto what passed for a highway, heading for our objective area, about 10 klicks to the northeast. It was a small village, and our intelligence told us there were senior Taliban leaders who had taken control and were using it as a staging point for attacks throughout Nangarhar Province. This had danger written all over it, as we had flooded walled-in fields to our east and impenetrable mountains to our west. We had excellent night-vision devices, but they needed a bare minimum of light to be effective, and we had none. We were literally groping our way along what was little more than a goat path.

  Mac was near the front of our combined Ranger/SEAL formation as we continued toward our objective area, beginning our climb to higher ground. I was pulling rear security as I watched the fuzzy silhouettes of Rangers and SEALs pick their way up the mountain. Once or twice during the ascent I heard the scrape of a man or equipment when one of us misjudged our path, but overall we were as silent as ghosts.

  When we finally reached the ridgeline, we could see the target village lying in a small valley. The village was small—maybe a few hundred people—with only two or three electric lights glowing.

  We picked our way along the ridgeline until our point man found the trail. It was barely wider than my feet side by side, but it was the best—and only—way down. Everything else was cliff or a scree. It was also the last place where the Taliban would expect us to attack.

  As we made our way down the mountain, Mac and I split up so we could provide overwatch for the SEALs. We had good fields of fire that overlapped the entire village. Mac had a bit of high ground to the west of me. I hunted among the boulders and rubble that had sheared off the cliff face, looking for clear firing lanes and good cover.

  It never failed: all the best shooting lanes had the worst cover. What that meant was I had to rely on the cover of darkness. The night would provide a thin layer of security, but one that would be compromised as soon as we started firing and the enemy saw our muzzle flashes.

  As we continued to provide overwatch, the SEAL team moved into the village. They were able to conduct a surreptitious breach of a large compound in the middle of the village, quietly rounded up everyone in the multi-family dwelling, and did their tactical questioning. Then did the same thing in two more compounds.

  The SEAL troop didn’t find any persons of interest in the compounds, which happened frequently when we went on missions with imperfect intelligence. They began to make their way back to our lines at the bottom of the cliffs as our Ranger machine-gun teams broke down and followed, covering the SEAL troop’s movement. It was a methodical withdrawal, since we knew that if there were Taliban in the village we would be outnumbered with our backs to the cliffs.

  The last fire team of SEALs was making its short movement out of the village when suddenly we heard AK-47s popping off. The sound was coming from the northeastern edge of the village. The rounds weren’t coming over our heads immediately, and I could hear that Mac was holding his fire. I moved to a small outbuilding and quickly climbed to the roof.

  Then all hell broke loose. We started taking small-arms fire from various spots in the village. I went prone, willing my body to meld with the hard ground. One of the SEAL snipers was just to my left, and we both scanned the village looking for muzzle flashes. We couldn’t see any, which told us the Taliban had ideal positions. It also told us we weren’t in immediate danger—a very relative term when you’re the target of a Taliban ambush. The mission had just gotten a lot harder.

  I started to raise my head and try to get my gun into the fight when rounds snapped over my head and I knew the Taliban were ranging us. I quickly dropped my head to the ground and stayed prone as I tried to scan the village through my sniper scope.

  The SEAL sniper to my left saw movement in the village about the same time I did.

  “Hey, Ranger,” he said. “Do you see that guy at Phase Line Broncos in the intersection?”

  I knew where to look immediately. Our labeling scheme was to put a “phase line” over a road or some other landmark, and we tended to use the names of professional sports teams to label them. In this case, Phase Line Broncos was the main east-west road through the village, and my SEAL counterpart—and now teammate—was tracking the same motion I had just noticed.

  I adjusted my aim just a bit to the left and zeroed in on a man in an intersection.

  “I’ve got him at two hundred fifty meters, white dishdash and brown pants,” I replied, referring to the robe-like garment worn by Arab men sometimes called a dishdasha. I could see he had an AK-47 at his side.

  “That’s him,” my SEAL partner replied excitedly. “He’s got an AK.”

  No more words needed to be exchanged. I centered the man in my crosshairs, favoring his left side because of the wind I felt on my cheek. I took up all the slack in my trigger and broke a shot, and so did my SEAL partner.

  We saw the man twitch, as one or both of our rounds passed through him, but he was still standing. We fired again, and this time our guns made a tick-tock rhythmic sound. Then I saw that the man was half-falling, half-clawing his way backward. I couldn’t tell if he was dying, but in an instant he was out of view, obscured by the heavy foliage and winding adobe walls of the village.

  “I think we got him!” my SEAL partner shouted.

  I was amped up and answered loudly, “I think so, too. Scanning right!”

  Celebrating isn’t fighting, and his silence meant he was scanning left. We both knew our sectors would overlap in the middle. The sun was now fully up, and I felt the giddy delirium that comes from the combination of physical exhaustion, sleep deprivation, hunger, and adrenaline. Rangers are solar powered, and the dawn light always invigorated me.

  We were still scanning the village, looking for additional targets, when an enemy hand grenade burst to our left, about 50 meters west of us. My SEAL partner and I were well out of its lethal range, but that wasn’t the case for the SEALs and Rangers making their way out of the village.

  That also meant that unless Tom Brady had chucked that grenade, the Taliban were close enough to smell. The dense, forest-like canopy of orchard foliage completely concealed them from our elevated vantage
point. And that was what worried me. There could be a dozen Taliban fighters, or there could be hundreds.

  We couldn’t see anyone in the dense foliage beneath us, so our priorities quickly shifted. We needed to make sure that the Taliban we couldn’t see weren’t reinforced by fighters in the village we could see. My SEAL partner and I turned our attention back to the right and scanned long.

  I had line of sight to another intersection on Phase Line Broncos, and I could see men with what could only be guns flash through the narrow opening.

  “I’ve got movement!” I shouted to my SEAL partner.

  “Roger, I’ve got it,” he replied.

  I snapped off two or three rounds each time I saw the flash of a man, and my SEAL teammate did the same. Our shooting lane was so narrow that if we hit someone it was likely that their momentum would carry him out of our view, even if he was mortally wounded.

  Suddenly an enemy hand grenade detonated just 15 to 20 meters in front of the building where I was perched. I could hear the sizzling shrapnel zip over my head like jagged red-hot buzz saws. I instinctively flattened myself on the roof, my cheek pressed into the dirt roof of the building. I was looking directly at the SEAL sniper, who was also doing his best flat-as-a-pancake impression.

  “See anything?” I asked.

  “Nope. You?” he replied. If we weren’t both puckered up tighter than a knot on a balloon, we would have laughed.

  I tipped my head up just a bit, and somewhere to the west I could hear Mac’s M110 sniper rifle snapping out fast bursts of three or four rounds at a time. I could tell that he was going to work on the intersections and gaps, just as we were.

  I looked forward and down at the mini-forest of fruit trees in front of me, and an unseen enemy sprayed his machine gun at us. His bursts arced just inches over our heads. I flattened myself again, frustrated that this guy had us ranged and that he was keeping me and Miss America from getting into the fight.