The puzzle started to become clear. Not only were the Cavalry Scouts under effective siege, but the local population was under duress. It was a similar dynamic to British soldiers who were garrisoned in homes in the American Colonies before the Revolution—the locals weren’t exactly happy about feeding and housing foreign fighters. They didn’t share their zeal for jihad.
The Cavalry Scouts had lost men and vehicles on several patrols and were on the ragged edge of still being an effective fighting force. Now the fighting season was coming on strong, and this FOB was in danger of being overrun—a bad way to start the summer campaign.
Mac and I knew our Rangers were the only ones who could help these guys and keep them from being overwhelmed by the IMU. The United States was transitioning power to the Afghan government, and we were already reducing troop numbers from their surge levels in anticipation of our 2014 exit deadline. There were no other options—we were it.
A couple of privates were dispatched to track down the rest of the Rangers, who were eating and doing their daily physical training before our scheduled intel brief. Those of us in the TOC, mostly the senior leaders, started making maps and analyzing significant enemy activity in the area. We weren’t in our own backyard but in the IMU’s, and it had been that way for most of the war in this part of Afghanistan. We couldn’t augment the Cavalry Scouts, and they were too banged-up from fighting to do it themselves. We were going to have to do this old school, on foot and at night.
The immediate area around the FOB likely had only a few hundred IMU fighters. They couldn’t garrison large numbers of fighters in the area because we could take them out with drones. As odd as it sounds, the dirigible over the Cavalry Scouts’ FOB was a deterrent; the enemy knew we could see them, so they generally moved in small units to try to blend in as locals.
We might ultimately have to face a thousand fanatical Uzbeks whose sole purpose in life was to kill us on their way to Paradise, but it would be in squad, platoon, or, at best, company-size elements. If we were cut off, got bogged down, lost momentum, or took too many casualties, we would be overrun. It was simple math—we couldn’t let the trickle of fighters become a tsunami.
This was doubly important because we had no backup. The closest Marines, Rangers, or Army infantry were at best an hour away, and they would be flying into what was already a no-fly zone. We knew the Cavalry Scouts would do all they could to get their guns into the fight, but they’d been attrited and whittled down to just a shadow of what they’d been when they set up the FOB. Any force they launched to help us out would be likely to take massive casualties, so we didn’t even brief that as a contingency. I had read Gates of Fire, the story of the 300 Spartans who fought and died at Thermopylae, when I was in the midst of the Ranger Selection process, and that certainly came to mind as we were planning for this mission.
Simply put, our plan was to use our Ranger unit as bait to lure the IMU fighters out of the villages surrounding the FOB. Only by presenting an inviting target would they come out in large enough numbers. Any Army private knows that this is a tactic usually eschewed in favor of following a more straightforward infantry doctrine, particularly in contemporary wars waged by superpowers with high-tech weapons. But there was no other way if we wanted to kill enough Uzbeks to provide relief for the Cavalry Scouts.
As our briefing evolved, Mac and I agreed that this mission was shaping up as one of the most challenging we’d ever faced. Once we’d landed inside the FOB and linked up with the Cavalry Scouts, the plan was for us to head for a medium-size village about 15 klicks south of the FOB. We’d pass through some smaller villages on the way and would have to clear parts of them, but the farthest village was where our intel told us the IMU units might be massing.
The terrain was the worst you could imagine. It was low ground, and there was a ravine we would have to cross to get to the main village. It was about 30 feet deep and ran north-south and just to the west of the village. If the enemy caught us while we were trying to cross the ravine, it would mean certain death. To the east were cliffs, all of them several hundred feet tall. They weren’t sheer, but trying to make an ascent up those cliffs during a firefight would mean certain death as well.
The only option left to 2nd Platoon was to walk out of the FOB west-southwest a few klicks to the nearest village and clear it. We’d have to do that slowly, as we’d be following a vehicle route that had likely been mined with IEDs. Then we’d need to head almost due south, through marshes and agricultural fields, to the main village, about 10 klicks due south.
If we encountered stiff resistance we could fight our way out to the south, but that took us away from the FOB and we could easily be enveloped by a large force. The Cavalry Scouts were in no shape to rescue us. That meant we’d have little option but to work our way back to the FOB the way we came. That was dangerous for a number of reasons, one of which was that the enemy would have most of the night to mine the route with IEDs, and the other of which was that the route cut through a dense village we knew held enemy fighters.
We also knew those fighters would be ready, as we planned to stir up a hornet’s nest as we moved through it on our way south. As we planned our movement back to the FOB, it looked like we’d have to cut straight through the crop fields on our way north. But that still meant we had a village to the left and cliffs to the right, and just-tilled soil or the odd irrigation trench for cover. There were just no good answers.
We were going to make this a two-platoon assault. Both platoons would bring backup machine guns as well as every extra 60-mm mortar cannon we had, and 1st Platoon would bring our heavy machine guns. Mac and Hank both brought their Mk-13s.
As for 1st Platoon, their orders were to infil to the east after we left from the FOB at night, but only after 2nd Platoon started waking people up as we moved through the small village nearest to us. That would mask their movement as they moved south to the cliffs over barren ground. Then they would turn south away from our area of operation and would scale the cliffs I mentioned earlier. They would remain concealed in these cliffs until 2nd Platoon was decisively engaged—which meant pinned down and cut off by the enemy we’d enticed out of the main village. Then, if the plan worked the way it had been sketched out, 1st Platoon would provide a counterpunch of machine-gun fire effective enough for us to fight our way out. It was basically the opposite of any sound military doctrine I had ever heard of. On its surface, it was more like something a first-year West Point cadet would dream up after reading Sun Tzu for Dummies.
While I’ve painted this in stark, I-can’t-believe-we’re-doing-this terms, Team Merrill’s mission was to engage our enemy in Afghanistan, and this plan was going to do it—in spades. Major Dan laid out the plan, and while dangerous, it made more and more sense. It also reminded me that getting into the fight was just what Miss America and I came to Afghanistan to do.
As soon as the briefing was finished, we got our kit and weapons together and prepared to move out. The 1st Platoon added pouches and spare barrels for our machine guns. There was a good reason for doing this.
During a sustained rate of fire, machine gun barrels literally melt through the rifling, eventually getting so hot that they glow red and begin to droop. Before this happens, we swap them out for a “cold,” or spare, barrel. We were going to need them. It seems counterintuitive, but even though we were fatigued from fighting our way through long, grueling operations, the danger of this mission, and the chance to keep those Cavalry Scouts from being overrun, buoyed our spirits.
We moved to the airfield at dusk. We waited in an empty helicopter maintenance bay while the helos, which were on the other side of the airfield, finished their flight checks and taxied to us. It was going to be a long flight, so we made sure all our gear was powered down. We also knew we needed to get some sleep during the flight. The plan was for us to fight all night and sleep in the besieged FOB the following day.
As soon as the birds were in front of us, we lined up by chalk and marched
into the belly of the beast. In the same way it hit me on other missions, now I knew the die was cast. I sank into my cargo-net seat, popped some foamies into my ears, and tried to get some sleep. If we made it into the FOB without getting shot down I would need it.
“FIVE MINUTES!” I awoke to the collectively echoed shout. The bird’s engines were screaming full out, and the pilots were flying low, banking with the terrain. There were reports that the enemy had SAFIRE capabilities—surface-to-air-capable rockets, typically Stinger missiles left over from the days when we armed the Afghan Mujahedeen to fight the Russians—and the thought made my skin crawl.
“TWO MINUTES!” Everyone echoed Platoon Sergeant Pack’s time hack, including me. I was gulping air and forcing myself to breathe out through my nose, trying to rein in the rush I felt. I had no clear thoughts yet, since, like most of the others, I had just awakened from a dead sleep, and the surge of adrenaline was just setting in.
“THIRTY SECONDS!” came the call, and it was echoed by all of us over the screaming noise and vibrations of the Chinook’s engines. The National Guard pilots never let off the throttle, and the aircrew members swiveled in their gunports searching for the attack we felt was all but guaranteed. I had only one thought: Don’t let me die on the bird. Too many good men—and women—had died in Iraq and Afghanistan when a cheap, Cold War-era weapon like an RPG had taken down a multimillion-dollar helicopter and killed all aboard.
If I’m painting a scary picture of almost every one of the scores of helo flights I took during my six rotations to Afghanistan, it’s because I intend to. Every one of them was that hazardous. I wasn’t especially religious, but just in case, I hoped the Vikings were right and that if I died fighting I would go straight to Valhalla.
The “THIRTY SECONDS!” call was still resonating when suddenly the Chinooks banked into a power slide and we lurched inside the cargo hold of the bird, straining at the limits of our safety tethers. I traced my tether down to the D-Ring that was snapped onto the steel deck, wanting to ensure I was made fast to something so I wouldn’t get thrown around the inside of the Chinook like a rag doll.
The power slide—skidding sideways—was bad enough, but then we seemed to drop out of the sky like a safe. I felt my stomach in my throat and sensed my eyes bug out from the g-force. One thought took over my brain: This is it, we’re all gonna die.
I was bracing myself for what I knew was going to be a fiery crash when the Chinook alighted softly on the small helipad. We unsnapped our safety tethers and rushed to the helo’s ramp in a chaotic press of Rangers. The Chinook was gone as soon as the last man’s boots hit the ground. I finally took a breath. We cleared the small helipad and pressed against the HESCO barriers. We watched the second Chinook unload the rest of 2nd Platoon in the same way.
I looked for my sniper teammate, Marc, and saw him adjusting his night-vision goggles before he spotted me.
“Holy shit, these National Guard guys are cowboys!” he said excitedly as he trotted over to me to clap me on the shoulder. He had a big grin, and that didn’t surprise me. Of course Marc would like that wild ride—he was an adrenaline junkie if there ever was one. I didn’t know if he was brave or foolhardy or both, but he wasn’t scared. I thought, If we’re going to die, at least my partner isn’t upset about it.
“I didn’t know you could power slide in a Chinook,” was all I managed to say before I heard a crackle of static on the radio. It was Platoon Sergeant Pack in my ear telling the platoon to follow him. A liaison from the Cavalry Scouts—one of only a handful of people who knew we were coming—had met us at the helo pad. The FOB was completely blacked out to discourage night mortar and rocket attacks. We picked our way through the tents and bombed-out vehicles toward the front gate of the FOB.
“Two-One lead, out,” Platoon Sergeant Pack said in a hushed tone as he gestured in the direction of the gate with an IR laser. The rest of us waited until the element we were supposed to follow moved past us and fell in behind them. The IED threat was high, and our EOD man insisted on leading the way. I fell in with the squad right behind him.
Sergeant Reggie and Staff Sergeant Josh walked up to the gate of the FOB and were met by two Cavalry Scouts soldiers guarding the entrance.
“Hey, who are you guys?” one of the Cavalry Scouts guards, a private, asked.
“Never mind, Private,” the trooper who must be the Sergeant of the Guard responded as he stared down Reggie and Josh. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“We’re going out there,” Reggie replied curtly, pointing through the metal gate with his gloved finger. This happened a lot when we walked out of FOBs at night. The gate guards had to keep people out, but sometimes people wandered to the front gate by mistake. They just usually didn’t wander out at night with night-vision goggles and an entire platoon behind them.
“It’s okay. We need you to open the gate. We’re conducting a patrol,” Staff Sergeant Josh began calmly. “Go ahead and call back to your HQ. Your sergeant major knows about it.” He looked at the guard, waiting for him to act. Staff Sergeant Josh was always cool under pressure, whereas Sergeant Reggie was practically humming with energy. Reggie was walking point, and out of all of us, he was the most pumped up for a fight.
“Okay, okay. He told me someone might be going out,” the Sergeant of the Guard said to Reggie, who looked ready to pounce on him.
They opened the gate, and as we passed by I could hear them calling their HQ to make sure they hadn’t just messed up and let someone out they shouldn’t have.
Outside of the walls of the FOB, the light from the stars was more diffuse, and we could see well into the night. In fact, we were higher than the distant village we planned to bait the enemy into. I shouldered Miss America to look at the village in my scope. I could just make out a couple of electric lights. It was 10 klicks as the crow flies, but we were going to follow the arc of the MSR and make several stops along the way. That would turn our movement into closer to 12 klicks.
The Cavalry Scouts had been ambushed from a building in the village closest to them, just to the west. That was our first stop. We headed there as quickly as we dared and trusted our EOD man and our K-9 team to clear the way by detecting the IEDs we were certain we were walking toward.
We got to the village without incident, and as we walked through it, we didn’t hear a peep. It reminded me of the Taliban-controlled neighborhood we encountered outside of Kandahar. My first thought was, The locals must really be under the IMU’s thumb. We got to the biggest adobe building in the village and found it abandoned. Our EOD man poked around a bit with Sergeant Reggie’s team, but all they found was some expended brass rifle cartridges. So far, so good.
I half expected the trip out of the village to be like walking through the bad end of a shooting gallery. I had moved out in front, closer to the distant village that was our next destination. I scanned and scanned until Sergeant Reggie and Staff Sergeant Josh walked past me, resuming our movement south. We made good progress over the open ground, and soon I could see the ravine next to the tangle of adobe buildings that made up the village. We knew from the images we had gotten from the dirigible floating above their FOB that some of the compounds likely held enemy fighters.
We paused about 50 meters west of this village so we could set up our outer cordon. That done, we quickly started clearing one compound after another as surreptitiously as we could. We entered a compound, woke up the residents, and questioned them in hushed voices, trying to get information as to where the IMU fighters might be hiding. We needed to work our way from the north side of the village, closest to the FOB, to the south side before dawn, or else our plan wasn’t going to work. So there was a huge tactical reason for our hurrying.
If the IMU attacked us at night, there was zero chance they would attack en masse, and we would make quick work of them. But come dawn, if we were still in the tangle of buildings in this village, we would be fighting team by team, building to building, working our way through narro
w footpaths and adobe walls that formed a maze we hadn’t been able to see on our overhead maps. Add the massed fire of a determined enemy, and those mazes would turn into death traps. It was our worst-case scenario.
I covered the west side of the village, near the ravine. Marc was on the east side, backed up against the cliffs. We climbed up and down ladders and outside stairways, moving from rooftop to rooftop, looking for the best vantage points to provide overwatch and following the assault force as it moved through the village.
Inside each small courtyard, Major Dan and First Sergeant Hutch were having Zeke ask the usual questions, “Where is the Taliban?” “Can you tell them to come and fight us?” When the questioning was over, the villagers were given strict warnings to stay in their homes until we left the following day. I didn’t like the fact that we were telling them our timeline, but as I said earlier, we were here for a fight, and this was certain to cause one.
It took us most of the night to clear almost all of the living quarters in the village, and now the sun was coming up. We were scattered throughout the village, except for a skeleton crew manning the outer cordon. From the enemy’s perspective, it looked like a small scouting party was poking around the outskirts of the village. The rest of us were concealed inside whatever buildings we found that were built well enough to stop bullets and also had windows to shoot from.
Things were status quo in the village for the moment. We were the bait, and we were waiting for the Uzbek fighters to make their move.
Since we were in the northern part of Afghanistan and we’d begun our mission at night, we had on extra layers of clothing to stay warm. I was co-located in an adobe building with our AT (Anti-Tank) crew, the guys tasked with carrying our RAWS. My roomies were Sergeant B and his private, Skinny Pete. The sun was about to rise, and I knew it was going to get warm in a hurry.
I turned to Sergeant B and said, “I’ve got to get out of these layers or I’ll cook today.” That sounded simple enough, but it meant I would have to take off all my body armor and most of my uniform, so I wouldn’t be able to monitor my radio, which was like being blind.
When the Killer Man Comes Page 13