This wasn’t a classic mission where we planned things out and executed the plan. It was more like getting attacked by muggers in an alley and fighting your way out. But it had accomplished two things: it gave the Cavalry Scouts some badly needed breathing room to resume juras with the local elders and it pushed the enemy back long enough that the Cavalry Scouts’ FOB could be resupplied.
6
CASTLE MISSION
Our mission to rescue the Cavalry Scouts had been challenging, and it was amazing we completed that effort without any of our Rangers getting killed or wounded. Just as we had done when we were operating out of Kandahar, we were constantly working to “build the picture” of the battle space. That meant that during every mission we conducted we learned more about the area’s geography, more about how little control the Afghan government had in the area, more about the enemy, and, most important, more about the capabilities of our Ranger unit.
You might think that all Rangers who complete the tough selection and training process are pretty much carbon copies of each other. But it isn’t until you get into combat that you really find out how long a man can march with a hundred-pound pack, how well he performs under pressure, or even how long a shot a sniper can take with a good probability of taking down a target. We’d already answered a lot of those questions in the several months of this rotation to Afghanistan, and we were about to answer more of them on this mission.
Word spread around our little tent city that we had an emergent mission and we’d be called into TOC that evening for an intel brief. That meant we all had to focus on getting our kit together, gathering our weapons and ammo, and doing whatever else was needed to prepare to launch that evening. I got together my sniper gear, and even before our intel brief, Marc and I started sorting out our roles and responsibilities for this mission.
The intel brief in TOC was pretty straightforward. Afghans in several villages in the same province as our last mission were under the thumb of the IMU. The villagers were tolerating it because they really didn’t have much choice.
Because our intelligence told us there was such a heavy IMU presence in these villages, our higher headquarters thought this presented another opportunity for us to do what we do best—serve as bait to draw the Uzbek terrorists to us and then kill as many of them as we possibly could. We had done this sort of mission so many times that we’d even moved beyond the gallows humor of “here we go again, we’re like cheese for a hungry mouse,” and shrugged it off as just another mission.
We launched out of our base at Mazar-i-Sharif and headed northeast to Kunduz Province. It was a short flight, and I was already into my mental and physical “zone” as our Chinooks pounded through the night sky, Miss America resting in my lap. Marc and I had already tightened up our plans, and we knew we’d be providing overwatch for our Ranger assault force as they swept through the villages.
We landed about 10 klicks from the first target village and headed for it at a brisk pace. We stuck to the low ground between rolling hills until we hit a hard-packed dirt road. This area was no-man’s-land—there were no Afghan army or coalition bases nearby, no government patrols, no government activity at all. The good news was that there was also virtually no IED threat, so we made good time over the ground.
We reached the target village, and Marc and I paused at a short stone wall while the rest of the platoon set up an outer cordon to the north and south to effectively surround the village. Marc and I were setting up to do our normal overwatch when suddenly we heard a disorganized smattering of full-auto AK-47 fire to the south of our position.
“Let’s go, Marc!” I half-shouted, eager to get into the fight.
Before I could get off a knee and begin to move south to get our guns in the fight, we heard more AK-47 fire to the north. The volume of fire made it clear that there were more than a few fighters taking on our platoon.
“Wait!” I shouted at Marc as I grabbed him by the shoulder strap of his kit. I was trying to get us both to be still so we could listen for where the enemy fire was most intense, since that’s where we’d be needed the most.
Suddenly we heard more AK fire on full auto, but this time from the west. Now we were all but surrounded.
I flashed back to our intel briefing and our strategy to use our platoon as bait. I guess that part was working, but maybe too well.
I didn’t have to sort out the radio chatter to understand how we were responding. Our weapons squad leader was a bit south of where Marc and I had set up our overwatch position, and we could hear the sound of our Ranger weapons—SAW-249s and M240 machine guns—going full cyclic, pouring out a withering amount of fire. The enemy had a machine gun in the fight, but our weapons were drowning it out.
My radio came alive, and I could hear the platoon sergeants directing the fight. Our massed fire was driving the enemy west, around the village and into the mountains.
I heard Platoon Sergeant Pack’s voice on the radio. He was to the north with Third Squad, and the fighting there sounded just as intense.
I could see the agitation in Marc’s face. Our Ranger buddies were engaged on three fronts by a determined enemy. He wanted to get our guns into the fight.
“What are we doing, man?” he asked.
I quickly assessed the tactical situation. I had a dense, uncleared village to move through to get to the Two-Four Squad to the southwest, and I’d probably be in their line of fire—a small probability, but too great a risk. I would have to circle back around and come from behind to link up with our forces to the north, but that would take too long and would put us on low ground behind them.
“It’s no good,” I replied.
Marc just stared at me in disbelief. My head was swiveling, trying to gauge where the enemy was and figure out the best way to get to them.
“We’ll go right up the middle,” I said. “There’s a bit of high ground clear of buildings near the center of the village. We can skirt to the north and avoid the densest part of the village. We should be able to see both ends of the fight from there.”
“What the fuck!” Marc exclaimed. “We’re surrounded and you want to walk through this village alone?” I could tell by the look on his face that he thought my plan could get us killed and not do a damn thing to protect our assault team.
He wasn’t wrong, but playing it safe didn’t fit my playbook. Marc was thinking of us as two snipers, while I was thinking of us as two guys with giant M4s. It wasn’t the first time we had disagreed about how to roll the dice.
“Fuck it, then,” I said angrily. I turned my back on Marc and headed into the village.
Just then, from behind me, Sergeant B, our RAWS gunner from Texas, piped up.
“Me and Skinny Pete will come with you, Balls!” he shouted. With Sergeant B it was never a request; it was more of a statement of what he was going to do.
With Sergeant B and his private, that made us a fire team. I gave Sergeant B and Marc a nod and kept walking. I was ahead of them, and I was the ranking member, so I just kept moving. It was on them to catch up with me; I was setting the pace.
I made it about five steps down my path when a small figure darted out of the shadows onto the hard-packed footpath I was taking. The figure was wearing a burka, and I immediately saw that it was holding something close to its chest. I stopped cold.
Was this a suicide bomber with a mortar or a rocket rigged to blow? Or was this a mother and her infant fleeing from the chaos that had erupted around them? I was in the perfect place for a suicide bomber’s attack at the center of our lines while our forces were decisively engaged on two fronts. It was a classic divide-and-conquer move, and it was coming at me full speed.
My mind computed variables at hyper-speed. If I took a shot to stop this person from detonating a bomb, I couldn’t risk a head shot. Heads bob and move more than any other part of the body. I only had time for one shot, and it had to shut down the central nervous system instantly or the bomber would still be able to detonate an IED. My be
st bet was to shoot high in the chest, splitting the difference between the heart and the spine. At this distance, the sheer velocity should disrupt both and drop the person like a stone. It also meant I had to shoot through whatever the bomber was carrying.
A little more than 20 meters behind me, still partially covered by low stone walls, were Marc and our AT team. Any repurposed ordnance this Afghan figure was carrying would only kill me. The boys would get some overpressure, but they would live.
My decision became immediately clear: I was here to watch over my buddies, not for self-preservation.
My visible red laser danced on the figure’s chest for an instant. Clenching the teeth I expected to be flying through the back of my head, I took up all the slack in my trigger as I lowered my rifle barrel to fire at the dirt between me and the sprinting Afghan. The bullet kicked up dust, causing an immediate reaction. The figure turned 90 degrees and darted into a skinny gap in the adobe wall to my left. I saw the profile and knew I had made the right call: it was a woman, and the bundle in her arms was indeed a child.
I breathed the biggest breath of my life and continued to trot toward the center of the village.
We made it to the clearing on the high ground, and the sound of Soviet-era guns was getting quieter, which was a good sign. It meant that our Rangers to the southeast were chasing the enemy they hadn’t killed into the foothills of the Hindu Kush.
Marc and I could see the lasers from our Rangers on the assault team chasing man-shaped shadows before they stumbled and fell. Some of those figures faltered but continued to scrabble into the hills.
“I’m on these guys,” Marc said hurriedly as he stroked his green IR laser around the shadows.
“Roger, watch your FLOT. I’ve got eyes right,” I replied. FLOT is “front line trace,” in this case the muzzle flashes of our friendly forces.
We were both tach’d out, meaning redline on a tachometer. We were maxed out, winded, oxygen-starved, and in danger of making bad decisions or having important things slip. It seems simple, but watching the FLOT means making damn sure you didn’t shoot at the muzzle flashes coming from your fellow Rangers’ guns.
I glanced at the area Marc was lazing and then shifted focus and turned my attention to the north, where the rest of our Rangers were hammering away at the enemy, who by this time was returning fire weakly. Our guys had beaten them back into the low ground and one walled-in compound.
Suddenly, Marc piped up. “Balls, give me a spot. I have a mover at 900 meters.”
I turned to the west and saw a faint light, as well as Marc’s laser.
I turned on my flood laser to illuminate the area for Marc, but before I could shoulder my rifle, Marc had clicked his laser off and cracked off a shot.
The light—probably a phone or a small flashlight or lantern carried by Marc’s target—went out.
The enemy fire had now almost ceased. They’d tried to encircle us, and, damn it, they’d almost succeeded. Now most of them were probably melting back into the mountains to the west of the village. That didn’t mean the village was completely free of enemy fighters, so we proceeded cautiously.
A short time later, we had the south side of the village encircled and under Ranger control. We were still fighting through waning resistance on the north side. One of the Two-One team leaders signaled to us, and I sent Marc to link up with him. The assault squad was already piling up enemy weapons and destroying them, and was surrounding the compounds where the enemy fighters had been.
The plan was to have Marc climb to where he had a good view of the entire village and make sure we weren’t reengaged by a pocket of resistance or an enemy element that had regrouped on the high ground and was going to stream down the hills and counterattack.
The firefight had died down, and the assault net was finally cleared now that we weren’t maneuvering under fire. I called up the platoon sergeant, gave him our position, and let him know that I was with his AT team—Sergeant B and Skinny Pete and their antitank weapon.
“Roger, move north so they can support us, and keep an eye on those hills,” he replied.
Sergeant B was already heading north. I saw him moving along a wall when suddenly a giant Kuchi dog leaped to the top of an 8-foot wall and loomed over him, just a meter away.
A Kuchi, or Afghan shepherd dog, is an Afghan herding dog that takes its name from the Kuchi people of Afghanistan. It looks like a 150-pound hyena with the mane of a lion. For centuries, Afghan nomads used these Kuchis as guard and working dogs, following their caravans and flocks of sheep, goats, camels, and other livestock and protecting them from wolves, big cats, and thieves.
But the terrorists we’d come to Afghanistan to kill had perverted the Kuchis, training them to be killers, just like their new masters. A Kuchi is easily capable of killing a man.
This nightmare of a dog had a thin lead trailing from its neck. I signaled Sergeant B with my laser.
He looked at the dog and looked back at me. “He’s on a lead,” he said with a smile, and then turned his back on the Kuchi and continued walking. Sergeant B was assuming the dog’s lead was tied down somewhere inside the compound and was long enough to let the dog get to the top of the wall but no farther. Sadly, he was wrong.
As soon as Sergeant B turned away, the Kuchi dog leapt down from the wall without a sound. His lead trailed behind him—it was attached to nothing. Now just a few feet from Sergeant B, it crouched to leap at him.
I centered my laser on the beast and fired from the hip, sending a round through the animal’s front shoulders. The huge Kuchi faltered and rolled on his back, just inches from Sergeant B. He and I nodded our lasers to each other, and the big Texan grinned.
“DOGS, DOGS, DOGS!” I called over the net so that our leadership understood that we weren’t engaged by the enemy.
“Seven,” our platoon sergeant keyed back, signaling his understanding.
We moved north and found a bit of rocky high ground. We watched the platoon below us working its way through several compounds, stacking up weapons they’d taken from the enemy we’d killed.
We assessed the tactical situation and realized that some of the enemy had escaped to the north. Our platoon leader called in a fire mission.
We could see four of the enemy begin climbing the hills to the north of the village, trying to escape. They were about 100 meters ahead of us. We heard Stryker, our JTAC, calling the Hercules AC-130 gunship and soon heard the roar of its four turboprop engines.
A minute later we heard the resounding boom of the Herk’s 40-mm cannon. It boomed four times, and seconds later four explosions cracked the ground near the fleeing IMU. Stryker called the gunship with a firing adjustment, and we heard another dozen 40-mm rounds metered out in four-round bursts.
We never bothered to look for the bodies. That many rounds from an AC-130 literally buries people. There would be no bodies to recover and no weapons to destroy.
A minute or two after that, I was watching the hills and saw a young man creeping along the slope toward Two-Three (Sergeant John’s squad). He was a MAM and was ducking and looking, slinking closer to the assault force.
“Two-Three, we’ve got a MAM maneuvering toward Third Squad in the high ground.”
“Sierra-One, do you have PID?” the platoon leader asked me.
I watched the man crouch and work on something on the ground.
“Negative,” I replied. “He’s burying something right now. Clear to engage?” I asked, putting conviction in my voice. I needed to take this guy out now.
“Negative, Sierra, you know we need PID,” John replied. He knew how badly I wanted to kill this guy—hell, he wanted me to—but he had to keep me out of jail as well as alive. “Do not engage!” he commanded.
A few seconds passed as we both stewed. We knew what we needed to do to take out a guy who was clearly intent on killing us, but the damn ROE were banging up against logic.
“Sierra-One, what’s he doing now?” John asked. “Give me a laze,�
�� he ordered.
I lazed the creeping man with my invisible green laser.
“He’s crouching when he walks, and he just got done burying something next to this goat path,” I said, urgency in my voice.
“Roger, we’ve got eyes on him.” It was Mac. He put a laze on the guy. I saw three more, and finally five lasers sweep over the man. He couldn’t see the lasers, and he could barely see us, but he kept creeping toward the assault force.
No one digs holes on the side of a mountain, and nobody sneaks up on armed soldiers if they don’t have ill intentions. As a sniper, it’s your job to roll the dice with your own life, not the lives of the people you overwatch.
I had Miss America’s suppressor on; otherwise, a warning shot would likely send the man running, either toward us because he’s enemy or away from us because he’s innocent. I took aim across his hips, hoping to shatter his pelvis. That would ensure he couldn’t run. If I was a little off, he would bleed out internally or die of septic shock in a day or two.
I eased back on the trigger and Miss America spit out a shell. Mac opened up on him as soon as he heard my rifle report. His squad followed suit, including their SAW gunner, and the man was dead in a hail of bullets before he hit the ground.
“Sierra-One, did you PID that EKIA?” (EKIA means “enemy killed in action.) It was our platoon sergeant. I couldn’t tell if he was pissed or worried that we killed a civilian, but I could tell he wanted an answer.
“Negative,” I called back, putting confidence in my voice. “He dug in a bomb and continued maneuvering on Third Squad.”
“Two-Three, go search the body and find out what he was doing,” Platoon Sergeant Pack called over the net, ignoring me.
“Roger, Seven,” Two-Three called back. His team spread out and moved methodically toward the body. I could hear their report over the net. They didn’t find any weapons. I started to get nervous. I would be investigated over this either way, and if we couldn’t justify the shot I took, I could face a murder charge.
When the Killer Man Comes Page 15