When the Killer Man Comes

by Paul Martinez

  “Roger, Sierra. BREAK. Two-One, get over there and take the AT, don’t let them get out of our AO.” It was Platoon Sergeant Pack directing a squad to essentially block the seven guys from leaving our Area of Operation and ambushing 1st Platoon.

  “AT, good, copy,” Sergeant B called back.

  “Two-One, good copy,” Staff Sergeant Reggie echoed, and they headed out on an intercept path. They would move west of Marc, who would engage the enemy with sniper fire and the machine gun team if they tried to run back the way they came.

  They were soon in position, but the six IMU fighters had spotted us and hidden themselves in another outbuilding.

  Sergeant B moved into position and got to a knee, putting his RAWS over his soldier like a bazooka. Skinny Pete loaded it with an HEDP (High-Explosive, Dual-Purpose) cartridge. He took aim at the small building and fired. I could hear the 84-mm high-explosive round detonate. Yet it had little effect on the super-strong adobe wall. Sergeant B would later tell me it just blackened the wall. You wouldn’t want to be inside, but we all expected the massively powerful antitank round to defeat the small structure.

  “Hit it again, AT,” Staff Sergeant John called.

  Skinny Pete loaded another round, and Sergeant B fired again, hitting the building dead center. The people inside were rattled, for sure, but unharmed.

  Two-One moved up to try to enter the building, but the enemy fighters came out of a door and started spraying them with their AK-47s. The Ranger squad answered with precise three-round bursts.

  I could hear the firefight from the other side of the village as its pitch increased to a noise. The battle lasted for only a minute—maybe two at the outside—but it was an eternity for all of us.

  The three men I was watching were shifting slightly and passing something back and forth between them at waist level. Whatever it was they were passing was obscured by the wall in front of them. They seemed completely unfazed by the violent battle being waged just a few hundred meters away.

  “BREAK, BREAK, BREAK. All elements north of Phase Line Broncos consolidate at Building Twenty,” Platoon Sergeant Pack called over the net with deliberate calmness and clarity.

  I needed to pick up and go, but before I could move out I saw one of the men I was watching reach into the doorway he had come out of earlier. I lifted Miss America to my shoulder and trained my IR laser on his face. I took the slack out of my two-stage trigger.

  The first man’s hand came back out with a long bundle, and I eased back the remaining one-and-a-quarter pounds of trigger pressure. Before I could register the hit I shifted my aim, illuminating the second man’s face, and pulled all the way through the trigger without pausing. Miss America bucked gently into my shoulder a second time, and I swung my laser beam to the right, onto the third man, who had turned to his compatriots.

  I could see the shock on his face as he registered what was happening. Heads bob and move, bodies don’t. The words of Ed Holmeyer, one of my instructors from the Special Forces Sniper Course, echoed in my head. I lowered my aim across the top of his shoulders, which were now at an oblique angle to me, and squeezed off another round.

  He disappeared straight down behind the low wall like a puppet cut from his strings. I paused after my final shot and let Miss America’s barrel drop slightly, looking with the wider field of view for any movement from any of the three men.

  Suddenly a Kuchi dog came charging toward me, barking and snarling, doing its best impression of a wolf. I trained my laser on the dog and without looking through the scope sent a round lengthwise through the beast. That dropped him, and he rolled onto his back and groaned.

  The firefight behind me was dwindling down to pop shots of mostly M4s. I picked up my gear and ran back toward Building 20, getting there in time to fall in with the last of the platoon that was moving south toward the firefight.

  I linked up with Marc at his blocking position and asked him if he had shot anyone. He shook his head no. I knew he was disappointed.

  A couple of our guys went into the building we had hit with the RAWS. They found one EKIA as well as an RPG. Other Rangers checked the EKIA who were right outside the building.

  The rest of the enemy the platoon engaged were far away and not visible to us, so we didn’t check them to determine how many EKIA there were.

  We called for exfil and skirted the northwest edge of the village, then headed due north. We walked across the softly rolling hills that were like rippling water frozen in time. The short green grass reminded me of the tundra grasses on the Montana and Colorado steppes, but the pleasantly cool desert air made me think of an arid green springtime around Bakersfield, California.

  7

  SIMO SHOT

  The fighting season was in full swing, and we continued our missions out of Mazar-i-Sharif. Most were single- or dual-platoon missions, and most of our HVTs were IMU fighters who were thought to be leaders of that movement.

  In a perfect world, Team Merrill would have rotated to Afghanistan as one unit, and we’d all be there until we redeployed back to the States as a group. But nothing in this world is perfect, and in war even less so.

  Marc and Hank were coming up on the end of their Army contracts, and like the rest of 3rd Ranger Battalion they were close to rotating home, while the rest of us would stay with Alpha Company in Afghanistan for several more months.

  Although it’s never said, there’s something in your DNA as a soldier that while it’s tragic to lose a comrade, it’s doubly tragic to lose a fellow Ranger who is just a few days or weeks away from going home. This is especially true on a rotation where every mission is a direct action against a determined enemy, and where that direct action is preceded and followed by a death-defying helicopter ride.

  Marc, my sniper teammate, was especially on my mind as we settled into our briefing in the TOC. Mac and I had already decided that we’d pull double duty as snipers to keep Marc out of the heat of battle as much as possible. Mac would do most of the dynamic work—climbing compound walls and rooftops—while I’d pull outer security. Our platoon sergeant decided to have Hank either work with the ROD platoon or stay at the FOB. No one thought anything less of these men for being assigned to these less risky positions. It was just the way we operated.

  Mac and I had been taking Marc or Hank’s place when our missions only called for a single platoon and its two-man sniper team. Despite their “short-time,” Marc and Hank weren’t happy about it. Mac and I, on the other hand, were firm that we were doing the right thing. You can’t control what happens once the gears of war start turning, but you could sometimes buy a little bit of space. It also meant that Mac and I skipped most of our nights off and that we were hunting twice as much. Unlike Marc and Hank, we didn’t have an eye to the future; we were already living out our dreams.

  We were getting into a regular rhythm here at MES, and in the waning afternoon light we found ourselves in yet another intel briefing. There was a massing of IMU and foreign fighters in the area, and there was at least one HVT with them. Up here in northern Afghanistan, the locals sometimes fed us intelligence when they thought we could get them out from under the IMU’s thumb. We had a name and a place, and that made it a point raid. We’d follow that up with the traditional Team Merrill work of clearing through the surrounding village and occupying a ROD site. Mac and I agreed we would do the legwork of clearing the village, and Marc and Hank could pull overwatch for 2nd Platoon, which was tasked with occupying and fortifying our ROD site.

  After the briefing in the TOC, our platoon sergeant introduced us to our new camera guy, Jose. If you’ve ever wondered how those scenes of Americans in combat wind up on the news, more often than not it’s because a member of the Combat Camera troop takes them, especially if it’s the kind of action Rangers get into, where it’s vastly too dangerous to have a civilian media person tag along.

  Jose’s call sign was “Com Cam”—short for Combat Cameraman—and we were told that he’d be accompanying us on this missio
n. We learned that he had no combat experience, and that meant we’d have to look out for him. That typically complicated things, because the Com Cam guys always wanted to be in position for the best shot and videos, which was almost always in the action. That left it to the rest of us to keep the Com Cam guys from getting their heads blown off while they did their work.

  Sometimes it was really tense trying to find the right balance for Com Cam guys, but Jose seemed levelheaded enough to keep from being a liability. He didn’t exactly fit the mold of a Ranger, and he wasn’t one, but he was a fellow soldier who had volunteered for this dangerous mission, so we wanted to treat him with the dignity and respect he deserved, while at the same time not putting him in harm’s way and not putting a Ranger in jeopardy trying to cover his butt. I can say this now because Jose stuck with us for the remainder of our rotation in Afghanistan. While none of us would lay odds during that first meeting that he’d be anything but a liability, he quickly rose to the occasion and turned out to be one hell of a soldier.

  For this mission, 2nd Platoon was the first out the door, as their mission was to secure our ROD site. We learned later that their infil was complicated by the fact that their Chinooks landed in a walled-in field. There was no gate and no way out except over the walls. This actually wasn’t that uncommon. Afghanistan is a rocky country, and farmers used those rocks with their ubiquitous adobe to cordon off their fields. My Ranger buddies who are from New England tell me it’s a lot like where they’re from.

  Second Platoon’s infil route was complicated even more because some fields in that area had been intentionally flooded, and many seemed like they were built in such a way as to hold the rainwater. Since spring is the rainy season, it seemed like every farmer had his own lake. While Rangers are pretty adept at humping our own gear, even our heavy machine guns, over long distances, the heaviest stuff that we take on some infils are our Speedballs. Believe me, once we got to the ROD site, we heard from 2nd Platoon about how they had to commandeer donkeys from the compound and, using the heavy ropes we carry on all our missions, haul those Speedballs over walls and drag them to the ROD site.

  Once 2nd Platoon was out the door, 1st Platoon mustered on at the MES airfield and we waited for our Chinooks. There was something about being with 1st Platoon again that put me at ease. Mac and I had deployed with them the year before, and we’d done some successful joint Ranger-SEAL operations near Jalalabad, in Nangarhar Province in eastern Afghanistan.

  I mentioned before that after flying only with the 160th SOAR on our missions out of Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, we were initially skeptical when National Guard helos showed up to lift us to an op. But it didn’t take us long to learn that these National Guard aircrew were as professional as any of us in the “regular” Army—and boy, could they handle those birds.

  During the short flight to our objective area, Mac and I went over our procedures and made sure we had planned for the unexpected—and there was always the unexpected. We landed about 6 klicks from our target compound and made a fast march to get into position before anyone was alerted to our presence.

  We managed to get there without stirring up any hostiles along the route. So far, so good. We set up a cordon around the compound, and the assault team surreptitiously entered. Then, as he had done many times before, Zeke got on the bullhorn and began calling the residents out of the building. Soon the assault Rangers were separating the residents and questioning them. Most military-age males got zip cuffs and continued to be questioned.

  That done, the platoon searched the living quarters and outbuildings. These structures were inside the walls of the compound and were the same kind of outbuildings you’d find on a big farm: several stalls for livestock, an overhang for agricultural equipment, and the motos that are everywhere in Afghanistan.

  I mention all this only because we’d learned the hard way that just because a structure was, say, a chicken coop, it could still provide effective cover for an enemy bent on ambushing us from behind. But the worst case would be that it was being used as a homemade explosive lab because, like a meth lab, those things had a tendency to blow up unexpectedly. We’d paid the price in blood for not clearing every building that could hide a human, and we didn’t want to pay that price again.

  Meanwhile, Mac slipped inside the compound and climbed up on a number of rooftops until he found the one with the best vantage point—one with a clear view of the main road through the village we’d need to walk through to get to our next target village. While Mac was doing that, I walked around the compound looking for anywhere where we might have a gap in security.

  From my vantage point, it seemed pretty quiet. My sense of ease made me think of the phrase “calm before the storm.” This area was loaded with IMU, we had been hitting them hard for the last few weeks, and it was all but inevitable they would come out and fight us toe-to-toe.

  I knew Mac had a good view and field of fire to the north, east, and south, so I found a bit of high ground about 25 meters from the compound that gave me a good vantage point looking north, northwest, and west. This may sound like a simple thing, but at night, after you’ve fast-marched a half-dozen klicks, with intel telling you the enemy was massing in this area, and with the assault team already zip-tying bad guys, we had to tamp down the adrenaline and ensure we were covering our other Rangers as best as we possibly could. That’s what overwatch is all about.

  I listened to the 1st Platoon squad leaders making calls to Major Kearney as they searched and cleared all the buildings and structures in the compound. Based on the radio chatter, it appeared that all the MAMs who were questioned were just villagers and not IMU. I was disappointed to say the least: we were supposed to be tracking down a “massed” IMU enemy.

  We had an AC-130 Spectre gunship overhead, and the radios came alive as the aircrew reported seeing two men leave a nearby village and begin picking their way toward us. The Spectre crew couldn’t tell for certain if the men were armed, but they were worried nonetheless, and so were we. It had been too damned quiet for too long, and this smelled like an ambush.

  The radio crackled again. “Sierra, One-Seven, see if you can get eyes on.” It was Platoon Sergeant Will calling Mac. The call from the Spectre gunship had him worried. “Spectre says they came from somewhere around building four,” Wes continued. As we planned our missions, we always gave buildings numbers just so we could talk tactically with some accuracy. We’d learned the hard way that being imprecise with terms like “That building by the fork in the road” or “That two-story building over by the outbuildings” was a surefire way to get our own guys killed or to shoot an innocent civilian. So while creating a numbering scheme like this originally struck me as a little anal, it helped to keep us alive, so we went with it.

  “Roger, Seven,” Mac replied. Then I heard his transmission cut out with a click. “Sierra-One,” Mac began again. “Start cheating north and see if you can catch them when they get to the open ground.”

  “Roger,” I called back.

  I got up, crossed the small road north of the compound, and began scanning. Soon I saw movement.

  “Sierra-One has eyes on. No PID, but they’re maneuvering,” I said. “Maneuvering” meant they were moving in the way a fighter would, keeping low, sticking to the shadows, and just generally being sneaky and suspicious. I could just make out their shapes as they crept away from the village and made their way west.

  “Roger, Sierra,” Seven called back to Mac and me. “Spectre says they have eyes on possible weapons. These guys are heading to the wadi.”

  That wasn’t good news. It meant these guys were using the terrain as good cover. Invisible to us in the low ground was a dried-up riverbed, or “wadi.” These wadis were always littered with boulders, old river rocks, and sand, yet the Afghans moved down them with surprising ease and speed. It was a high-speed getaway route for them, but for us, with our heavy kit, these wadis were an impediment. Trying to dash through one with a hundred pounds of gear in
the dark of night was a good way to break an ankle—or worse. We’d learned that the hard way on many previous ops.

  There was silence over the net for a few seconds, while Platoon Sergeant Wes and the 1st Platoon’s leader discussed what to do next. After talking it over with Major Dan, they decided to send 3rd Squad—One-Three—along with a machine-gun team and Major Dan’s element (our JTAC, call sign Stryker, and our Com Cam guy, Jose) and Mac and me to do “squirter chase.” That means any MAMs—armed or not—who try to flee an objective area.

  We knew we needed to get these squirters for a number of reasons—not least because they could alert other IMU fighters in the area and we could be quickly outnumbered and overwhelmed. We got a quick count of the men in each element of our group. Mac climbed down from his rooftop vantage point, linked up with me, and we moved north about 100 meters, where we had a good view of the wadi.

  Suddenly, the two men in the wadi started sprinting. Something must have alerted them to our presence, and they were trying to get out any way they could. We were trying to close the distance, but we were slogging through muddy furrowed fields, half running and half falling. Meanwhile, these guys were using their familiarity with the wadi to put distance between them and us. We were quickly reminded that this was an away game.

  “Up in the back,” one of 3rd Squad’s team leaders called over the net, meaning we had all personnel accounted for and could turn on the speed.

  Mac and I were running all out. I could hear Mac breathing heavily as we paused to shoulder our rifles. We could see much farther than the line guys and were hoping for a shot at the two men that would save our boys some running.

  All we caught was a glimpse of motion twisting through the wadi, obscured by sparse trees.

  “Up here, Balls. There’s a bit of a goat path,” Mac said, indicating the higher solid ground between the wadi and the village.

  He nodded in the direction. I saw the path and simply replied, “Roger.”