When the Killer Man Comes

by Paul Martinez

  More unnerving, especially since we were deep in IMU territory, I wouldn’t be able to put Miss America into action quickly. I was completely vulnerable. Sergeant B and I had been together at RIP (Ranger Indoctrination Program), which meant we had an extra bond of trust.

  “Me and Pete will hold it down, brother, I’ll let you know if we get any calls,” Sergeant B replied, smiling. He was a big, cheerful guy with a barrel chest and was from Texas, so he had that larger-than-life presence.

  Skinny Pete was just the opposite. He looked like Sergeant B could use him for a toothpick. They were an odd couple, but they were fearless, and we had found ourselves charging into ambushes together more than once.

  “I’m going to camo up and stow my night gear. Don’t kill anyone without me,” I said as I ducked into a small outbuilding. I hurriedly got undressed and got ready for the heat of the day. I reapplied my camo face paint and packed my night-vision scope and goggles in a pouch. I tied them down to a small steel D-ring looped into my body armor. I took a few long pulls of water from my Camelbak. I wasn’t that thirsty, but I knew I might not have time to take another drink if the enemy hit us hard at dawn.

  I was kitted back up, ready to fight, but I could feel the fatigue setting in. Climbing up and down buildings wearing over 100 pounds of gear all night takes it out of you, especially after the long, fast march we made to get to the village. I finally got back with Sergeant B and Skinny Pete.

  “We killed them all without you. Sorry, Sierra,” Sergeant B joked. Skinny Pete laughed hard without making a sound.

  I came out of the small, walled-in yard and called my sniper teammate, Marc, on the radio. Our plan was pretty fluid, so I wanted to make sure we were on the same page.

  “Sierra-Three,” I said, “if you haven’t kitted up for daylight, you need to.”

  “Sierra-One, I’m all set,” he piped back. Now that we were on the ground and had cleared the entirety of this village, we’d need to adjust our plans.

  “Roger, I have a limited field of view here. How are you looking?” he asked. Marc was on the east side of the village and would be able to see less than I would.

  “I can’t see much unless I climb maybe a hundred meters,” I replied. We were on low ground with another village, about 800 meters to the south. Marc was at even more of a disadvantage in seeing the larger village to our south.

  “Got it,” Marc replied.

  “Roger, don’t climb until they attack. They can’t see us yet,” I told him. I didn’t want our big rifles to give us away as prime targets. Enemy snipers love to kill a guy with a specialty weapon, and supposedly there was still a bounty on American snipers. I really wanted Marc to go home and live his life. We may have been bait here, but I wanted him to get out more than I wanted to get out myself.

  I switched to 1st Platoon’s net to connect with Mac, who was hiding out of sight on the cliffs to our east.

  “See anything up there?” I asked.

  “Negative. We have movers and motos … too far for PID,” Mac replied, calm as could be. He was referring to “positive identification,” something we always had to do before opening fire on anyone. If our plan worked, he would have free rein over 1,500 meters. Mac was in the perfect spot. From his elevated position, he had nothing but air between him and any target that presented itself.

  People were meandering toward us in a way that seemed random but was actually a tactic we were familiar with.

  Since we were bait, all we could do was wait. We were well hidden in the tangle of buildings—we weren’t about to let enemy snipers pick us off—and we wanted to make them mass and come at us. I tried to remember what building number each Ranger element was in but found it impossible. We were spread out and broken down in buddy teams and fire teams.

  The sun had been fully up for almost an hour, but nothing had happened yet. Our flight of Kiowa birds had exhausted their mission time and had to go off-station. That meant we were going to be on our own for a while. I got a sinking feeling in my stomach as the Kiowas made a final pass and headed out over the mountains.

  Suddenly, the radios came alive. “All elements of 2nd Platoon, grab your kit and prep for exfil.” It was Platoon Sergeant Pack. We had mapped out preplanned positions where we would consolidate and move out. Our platoon started climbing out of rooftop hides and windows where they had maintained firing positions. Those of us already at the perimeter continued to pull security, and soon we were joined by the rest of the platoon.

  I knew that I needed to cover the exfil, and I called Marc. “You have the east side of the village, so when we exfil, you pick up rear. I’ll head out with the lead squad on the west side so I can cover the village we passed on the way in.”

  “Roger that,” Marc keyed back. He spoke in a monotone, and I assumed he must be as tired as I was.

  “And Marc, don’t let anyone come up on our six,” I instructed. (“On your six” means directly behind you, at the “six o’clock” position.) “You pull rear and zap anyone trying to chase us down.”

  “You got it,” Marc replied. Marc always seemed casual, but he was as serious a fighter as I’ve ever worked with. I had Marc pulling rear, which leveraged his ability to see and fire at an enemy as far as a klick away.

  I looked north, back in the direction of the FOB. It was 13 klicks away. To get there, we’d have to work our way through tilled fields, and it was getting hotter by the minute.

  As the platoon began its exfil, I got up from my kneeling position. Sergeant Ryan, the Alpha Team Leader, who was right next to me, got up too. Suddenly, machine-gun bullets zipped over our heads.

  Ryan and I hit the dirt, along with the rest of the team. We could hear PKM machine guns cranking away at us from four or five positions. In between PKM bursts, AK-47s opened up from a number of different directions. We could tell from the sound of the shots that the enemy was firing from the extreme range of their weapons, so the bullets were hitting in wide, unpredictable swaths.

  We could hear them getting closer as the sound of their guns grew louder. At the same time, their volume of fire intensified. We were returning fire and slowing them, but they were gaining ground. We watched with growing concern as the Uzbeks began flanking us. If they succeeded, we’d be pinned against the cliffs and picked off.

  Ryan pointed to a goat path that looked like a passage to the other side of the ravine I had wanted to avoid. I nodded, and he signaled his fire team. We dashed down the narrow path, half sliding at times, then churned our legs like pistons climbing up the other side. We found a bit of micro-terrain, a little wrinkle of a low spot, that would provide a bit of cover for about 100 meters as we worked our way closer to the enemy.

  Ryan and I hit the dirt and low-crawled until a machine gun opened up on us. The rounds were several feet over our head. We both took aim at the muzzle flashes. Ryan jammed out five or six rounds, and I sent three rounds at the flashing machine gun. Our shots were on target and that gun went silent.

  The rest of Ryan’s team was lined up a few meters to our left, firing at the enemy machine guns. Ryan added his fire, and another machine gun went quiet. I looked left, about 350 meters away, and spotted a small walled-in compound. I could see a man talking into a radio. I zoomed from 6 to 10 power on my scope. This guy didn’t have a weapon. He put his radio in his vest and looked in the direction of our attackers. Suddenly another machine gun burst zipped over our heads.

  Ryan’s fire team returned fire, and the enemy machine gun went silent.

  The man pulled out the radio again and looked back toward us. I knew what he was doing and figured that mortars would be next. If I let him call them in, we were going to be carrying casualties back under fire.

  I could hear the rest of the platoon taking a beating from machine-gun fire coming from the enemy south of the village. I rechecked the range to our enemy spotter. He was right at 350 meters. Miss America was “zeroed,” meaning “set dead on” for three hundred meters, so I needed to aim slightly higher
to match my point of impact to my point of aim. I squeezed off a single round. I looked through my scope and watched the man crumple. It was like he was a puppet and I had cut his strings.

  I scanned behind him, looking for other Uzbeks who might be backing him up. I saw a woman on her hands and knees at the door of the mud hut that must have been his home. I scanned the rest of the compound, but there was nothing there.

  Meanwhile, the Uzbek fighters had moved in for the kill, coming to within a few hundred meters of us—just where we wanted them. Then I heard the sound of a dozen M240 machine guns go cyclic. 1st Platoon was opening up on the enemy with all they had. The noise of the M240s echoed off the cliffs where 1st Platoon was laid up and drowned out the disjointed noise of the enemy weapons.

  They began alternating their fire—“talking the guns,” as we call it. This means that one machine gunner fires a long burst and the machine gunner next to him starts up before, or immediately when, the first gun stops. In this way there is continuous machine-gun fire, although the two guns are alternating their fire. This prolongs our ability to maintain a cyclic rate of fire. This nonstop stream of machine-gun fire silenced the enemy. (Fire coming from such an elevated position is called “plunging fire,” since it falls in an arc toward the enemy.)

  The radios came alive with a commanding voice. It was Platoon Sergeant Pack, and his call was insistent: “All right, 2nd Platoon, let’s move out while they have us covered.”

  “Two-One lead out, all elements send me your ups,” Pack continued, telling us to report in with casualties and the status of our gear. It’s what we do each time to ensure we’re good to go for movement out of an objective area. Our squad and team leaders ran from man to man, checking each one, making sure no casualty was missed in the adrenaline rush of what we just lived through.

  “Two-One, blue sky, moving out,” Staff Sergeant Josh replied as he moved into the open field and waved his men into a wedge at a brisk walk. (“Blue sky” was our term that meant we were good to go.)

  “Copy,” Platoon Sergeant Pack replied.

  Then came the calls of the other team leads: “Two-Two, blue sky,” “Two-Three, blue sky.” We were now out in the open field. We had about 500 meters to go before 1st Platoon would no longer be able to cover us from their position in the cliffs.

  “Sierra, blue sky,” I finally called and headed out. I was about midway through our formation, which was now moving at a fast trot. We had maximum dispersal of about 15 to 20 meters between each man. We were paralleling the MSR we had walked along the night before. There were clusters of motos with double and triple riders. They were following us, and they were trying to find a path to get to us.

  My earpiece came alive. “BREAK, BREAK, BREAK, 1st Platoon is breaking down, we are on our own,” came the call over the net. We now had steep hills on our right and a village full of IMU on our left. 1st Platoon’s fires were masked by the steep little mountains between us, and they broke down their position and exfiled. Mac told me later that they ran a more direct route back to the FOB.

  About 100 away, at the head of the formation, I watched Sergeant Bob motion and heard his voice in my earpiece.

  “Sierra,” he breathed heavily into his mic. “We’ve got a moto gang. Can you get eyes?”

  “Roger,” was all the breath I had to answer him as I put my long, heavy gun over my shoulder and started sprinting. I got to Sergeant Bob, who hadn’t slowed a bit, and dropped to a knee. A quick count of the motos told me we had fifteen of them. Worse, they were in a good ambush spot. Worse still, they were smart: they had no visible weapons. I sent a round toward them and it splashed in front of the moto driver who seemed to be in the lead. They kicked their bikes in a circle.

  “Warning shot, no weapons,” I called breathlessly across the net. I heard a static, breathless “Copy” from somewhere in the formation.

  “BREAK. Sierra, we’ve got some motos coming up behind us, seven o’clock.”

  I keyed back “Copy.”

  I turned around and started running back the way I came. I needed to move toward the rear of the formation to scope out the threat and engage if possible. A Ranger Sniper’s job is also to be a skirmisher and to keep the enemy occupied. We did that at a distance with our sniper fire while the rest of the platoon moved out.

  I saw another group of motos trying to follow a rough path toward us. I looked back along our column and saw Mark taking aim at them. He sent a couple of warning shots their way, and they wheeled back the way they came.

  I got up and started running again, this time forward, toward the front of the formation. It was my job to skirmish again. Using my sniper scope, I could clear the way ahead while the rest of the platoon kept on moving. My area of responsibility was the front and west side, Marc’s was the back and west side, and we met in the middle.

  “Sierra-One, Two-One.” Sergeant Reggie’s voice came across the net, calm as could be. “We have another moto gang. It looks like they’re blocking us from the FOB.”

  Leave it to Reggie to not be out of breath. I picked up my pace and ran past the trotting Rangers. I could see a shine in front of me, which turned out to be water. Soon I was splashing through a flooded wheat field, like a shallow rice paddy. The mud sucked at my boots, and I pumped hard, trying to catch up with the lead squad.

  “Sierra, we have guys at our nine o’clock,” I heard over the radio from a team leader in the trail squad.

  “That’s you, Marc,” I panted into my mic.

  “On it,” Marc called back. At this point, none of us had enough breath for formality.

  I caught up with the first squad. We were about 350 meters from the moto gang that was blocking our way back to the FOB. There were maybe two dozen bikes, but with each of them having two or three riders, they were close to matching us man for man. I dropped to a knee and shouldered my rifle. I looked through my scope and tried to spot weapons. But for some reason they just revved up and took off in every direction away from us.

  “Any weapons, Sierra?” Sergeant Reggie asked.

  “No, nothing,” I replied. I was disappointed but also relieved. We popped up, and Reggie sprinted back to his team. They had never slowed down. I fell into pace with the squad next to me.

  We ran as a platoon the whole time, slogging through the flooded fields and furrowed fields toward the FOB. Marc and I were running up and down the length of the platoon, but this was a running firefight, so we had to sprint to a crisis point, forward or behind. But as soon as a crisis was averted, we had to run back to our position in formation. In my case this was somewhere about parallel or behind the lead element; in Marc’s case, somewhere in the trailing third of the formation. This entire movement took well over an hour before the FOB came into sight.

  We trotted the last quarter mile before pumping hard up the hill into the open gates of the FOB. We all straightened up under our heavy kit and began breathing as evenly and calmly as we could. We did this mainly because right outside the FOB was a dangerous place to linger, but partly because there were other soldiers inside those gates who were watching us. I don’t think we could control the look on our faces.

  We were tired, haggard, and pumped full of adrenaline.

  There were Cavalry Scout soldiers on both sides of the small road just inside the gates of the FOB, about a dozen on each side. It seems word had gotten around the small camp about just what we were doing. Those Cavalry Scouts were out of Army food, but they had care packages their loved ones had sent them with their favorite snacks and comfort food. They had gathered up several boxes of this and gave them to us as we came in, along with bottles of water. It was grab-and-go, and we exchanged a few quick handshakes and thank you’s as we kept pushing farther inside the walls to make room for the Rangers behind us. We all had to get through those gates to safety before our mission could be called a success.

  Once we were all inside the FOB, we headed to a bombed-out vehicle bay. It offered overhead cover and a little bit of shade. It
had been patched up with plywood, chain-link fencing, and sandbags, so at least we would have a proper burial if we got blown up by rockets and mortars. We stretched out, using our body armor and Camelbaks as pillows. If the guys we fought earlier regrouped and attacked the FOB, the Cavalry Scouts were going to get their chance to show them some American foreign policy. Task Force Merrill was out like a light in a matter of minutes.

  We woke up about an hour before dusk and got our intelligence dump. We had a satellite feed, so there was no reason not to hear what the day’s intel had generated. For this intel dump, we had the benefit of hearing intercepted enemy communications. What we heard cheered us beyond words.

  We had killed almost fifty IMU fighters and had wounded even more. Out here in the remote northern wastes of Afghanistan, most of those wounded were doomed as well. There was more good news—no civilian casualties were reported.

  We waited through dusk and into the early darkness of night. We were silent and tired, but also pumped about our victory over the IMU. Finally, when it was fully dark, our 160th SOAR brothers, along with several National Guard Chinooks, came thundering our way to take us back to Mazar-i-Sharif.

  When we got back to MES it was creeping up on dawn. We had to drag ourselves from the airfield to our tents, but no one was watching us now, and we didn’t try to hide how completely exhausted we were.

  With practiced motions we sat on our bunks and rehabbed our kits. We cleaned the dust from our guns and night-vision gear. We reloaded our magazines, checking each one for damage. Some had bullet holes, some were crushed, and some were cracked. We put new batteries in our electronics and stuffed snacks into the few pockets that didn’t have mission-critical items. Our movements were automatic, free of thought. We might as well have been automatons.

  Once we got our gear squared away we knew we needed to get some shut-eye. We had just 8 hours before the next intel dump and planning session. We’d already been told we’d be going on another mission as soon as darkness fell.