It wasn’t much of a path, but it gave us a good angle from which to shoot at the fleeing men and not hit our chase team, which was off to our left. We picked our way through the wadi, running as fast as we could while we paralleled our chase team in the riverbed. We would pause and quickly scan the west bank of the wadi to try for a clear shot at the squirters. The twisting wadi and rolling terrain didn’t give us many options.
As we kept pace with the fleeing men and our own chase team, we had to jump a few walls and dip down into the wadi when our route was impassable. We were just behind, or even with, our chase team as they doggedly fought their way through the rocky riverbed.
I watched the chase team try to keep up with the squirters as first one, then another Ranger would falter and go down, cracking hard on a knee, only to spring back up without a second’s hesitation. In sports they say sacrifice the body. The 1st Platoon’s chase team was exemplifying that, and the rocky wadi terrain was taking its toll. I knew how painful those falls were, and even the ample adrenaline we had coursing through our veins didn’t lessen that shock. Yet there was no hesitation on their part. They simply wouldn’t be stopped or even slowed.
Finally, the terrain opened up and we could see the running men clearly zigzagging toward some wooded hilly terrain. Mac didn’t quite have a shot, but I thought I might. I stopped and blew out hard to clear my lungs, doing everything I could to force my body to calm down.
I saw a team leader, Sergeant Abeyta, directly in front of me, almost in line with the fleeing squirter. I shouldered Miss America and saw that they both were in my scope. No good. Just then, Sergeant Abeyta slid to a stop to shoulder his rifle.
I could see the fleeing man over his right shoulder and took aim, remembering that I had subsonic rounds and needed to hold high to reach the man, who was only about 100 meters from me. I counted two-and-one-half tic marks in my reticle, centered that point between the fleeing man’s shoulders, and fired.
Sergeant Abeyta’s round was an echo of mine, but something was wrong. My gun failed to cycle because of the much quieter, weaker subsonic round. Damnit, damnit, damnit, I cursed to myself.
“Malfunction!” I hissed to Mac, who was just shouldering his rifle, instinctively picking up my slack.
At the same moment I heard five steady pops from Sergeant Abeyta’s weapon, followed by a louder noise of pops as the rest of his squad zeroed in on the squirters and cut them to ribbons.
I locked back my bolt, ripped out my mag, and replaced it with a new one. I smacked the side of my rifle hard, tripping the bolt release that forcefully chambered a fresh sonic round with a satisfying “chunk” sound.
“Gun up,” I half shouted to Mac, letting him know I was back in the fight.
I took a knee to steady myself, but by then the rifle squad had made it to the first bit of high ground and was kicking the enemy’s weapons away and searching the bodies.
“Look left,” Mac ordered. He’d already shifted back into overwatch mode while the line Rangers converged on the bodies of the two squirters to confirm that they were dead. They also needed to grab their AK-47s to support the inevitable after-action report and prove we had shot armed MAMs.
“Roger, light on, nine o’clock, two-story compound,” I replied. We were both looking at a large compound about 300 meters away that had suddenly come to life.
“I see movement, silhouettes on the balcony, no guns,” Mac called back. “Keep scanning.”
“I’ve got left,” I replied. Even without Mac telling me where he was looking, I knew he would scan right.
“Balls, ten o’clock, look here!” Mac began urgently, indicating the spot with his IR laser. “Two guys, looks like they’re carrying rifles.”
I shifted to the direction he was shining his laser on and looked through my scope. One man disappeared into a seam between two mounds of earth, but the other, who was clearly carrying an AK-47, remained in view and was heading straight for 3rd Squad.
“Roger, Mac, PID weapon,” I replied as I found the enemy with my scope. The man was covering ground fast and heading up a small hill.
“Two hundred meters,” Mac said. It was half-statement, half-question.
“One seventy-five,” I replied evenly, as I kept the target in my sights.
“Roger,” Mac said calmly. We both were controlling our breathing cycle instinctively, one breath, then two.
We fired simultaneously, and our guns coughed through their suppressors and made a single sound.
The fleeing man’s right arm flailed up as his bottom half crumpled. Mac had caught him high, likely blasting a clavicle into his lung. My round had struck low, hitting his spine or shattering his pelvis. His momentum and the shock of bullets hitting bone rolled him over the crown of the hill.
“Hit!” Mac called.
“Hit,” I replied.
I heard Mac’s SR-25 cough again and I ticked off another round. We could see a bit of humped clothing and a flailing limb barely peaking over the hill. The hump disappeared, but we could still see something flailing, so Mac and I continued to take careful aim and continued to loop rounds at the man, skimming the top of the berm hoping to hit him with the falling trajectory of our bullets.
“Sierra, what are you shooting at?” It was Major Dan’s distinct voice on the net.
“We PIDed two personnel with AK’s. We engaged one, he’s fixed, but he’s moving,” Mac said.
“Roger, Sierra, stand by,” Major Dan ordered. He then continued, “We’re rolling in the gunship.”
“Sierra, Stryker, fire mission inbound, confirm location of enemy personnel.”
“You’ve got him, Stryker,” Mac said.
Damn, those Spectres are the best! I thought. It was like the light of some terrible god shining down before he let loose his lightning bolts.
A minute later we heard the hollow thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk of 40-mm rounds as they spit out of the gunship. The rounds crashed into the earth with four corresponding explosions, blowing dirt and white-hot shrapnel into the air.
Our JTAC reengaged with the AC-130, and we heard four more thunks and watched again for the corresponding explosions on the ground.
“Sierra, Stryker, confirm effects on target,” our JTAC ordered.
“Good shot, target destroyed,” Mac replied. With that confirmation, 3rd Squad moved deliberately toward the area that was now churned-up earth.
I pulled out a handheld thermal scope from a pouch and scanned the area around them, searching for the other man, the one we lost between the berms. Meanwhile, Mac was talking with 3rd Squad’s leader, describing the exact area where we had last seen the second man.
They found him—well, most of him—half buried in the fresh dirt tilled up by the explosives. His gun was nowhere to be found.
“Sierra, you sure he had a weapon?” Major Dan called over the net. “Our boys can’t find a weapon.”
Mac put his hand on the transmit button of his mic and looked at me before pressing it.
“You saw his gun, right?” Mac asked.
“He had an AK in his right hand, and he was carrying it at his waist,” I replied.
“You’re sure?” Mac asked again. He didn’t doubt that he had seen it, but if they didn’t find a weapon we would be investigated. And since he was team leader, the bulk of the blame for shooting an unarmed man would fall on his shoulders.
Two of our sniper buddies, working for another task force, had just been through a rigorous investigation for killing the HVT who was the subject of a kill mission. That’s something that was unique to our situation. We could do real jail time if we make a mistake and take a life without justification.
“I’m positive, Mac,” I replied. “Those rounds buried half of a man. That AK could be buried three feet deep for all we know,” I continued, remembering my last sight of the man, AK in one hand, the other flailing over his head as our rounds cut through him.
“Damn, that’s right!” Mac replied. I could hear the relief in his
voice. The 40-mm rounds from Spectre packed a big punch, and they could simultaneously blow you up and bury you under a meter of earth.
Mac keyed his mic. “Roger, sir. Sierra-One and I confirm PID. The 40-mm rounds likely buried his AK.”
There was a long silence before Major Dan replied, “Roger.”
Mac dialed his radio to the command frequency Major Dan used to communicate with our JTAC, listened in, and then told me they were discussing that likelihood.
After another long silence, Stryker confirmed that, based on the volume of fire the AC-130 had poured out, the AK could be completely buried, or blown to bits and then buried.
We completed our BDA (battle damage assessment) and called up the number of EKIA and weapons we found. After that, we all regrouped, and 1st and 2nd Platoon met back at Building 4. No one we questioned could provide any additional information about the men we killed.
As we always did, we told the villagers to tell the Taliban and the IMU to come kill us, and we passed out some of the same leaflets we’d distributed in other villages. Then we headed for the ROD site to hunker down for our next mission the following night.
When we dragged ourselves into the compound, we saw an amazing sight. There was Sergeant Reggie, our muscle-bound mascot, dressed in his full kit on a white donkey. “Welcome to your castle,” he said with a toothy grin. It was jarring and bizarre.
Our little sniper group—Mac, Marc, Hank, and me—quartered together at the ROD site. When you know you’re going to fight together, you try to do everything together.
Exhausted or not, the first thing a Ranger does after a firefight is get his kit and weapons ready for the next fight. Once I was inside the compound the first thing I did was look for the Speedball so I could replace my empty mags with full ones. My replacements were made of polymer, and dragging them to the compound had ground them down to where they were useless. I simply emptied them and refilled my depleted steel magazines. It did mean I only had my standard load out, just enough to get through a night of fighting. I couldn’t load down with several hundred rounds for the day’s fighting, as I usually did in our ROD sites.
Once we got our kit and ammo squared away, our platoon sergeant gathered us around and said simply, “Time for breakfast, men.”
Platoon Sergeant Pack made a small wood fire and we scavenged potatoes, rice, and eggs from the living quarters of the compound. Doc, our medic, killed a chicken, and we boiled that with the rice. Then we cracked a few fresh eggs and stirred them into our soup. We added a butter packet and a seasoning packet from an MRE. The eggs were so fresh, they tasted amazing. We must have killed a laying hen, though, because that chicken was as tough as beef jerky. All in all, when you’re in the fight living on MREs, having a breakfast like this made us all feel we were human beings again, and it was a much appreciated luxury.
I was super-exhausted, but I knew what I needed to do next was find a good sniper hide. I climbed up to the second story of the main house, where I had a good vantage point of the surrounding area. There was a room with a small balcony, just right for a good sniper hide.
Corporal Tog, a team leader, was up there already, and he’d set up a machine gun nest. I’ve already said what a deadly combination a sniper and a machine-gun team make. After setting up my gear and Miss America, I bedded down and got some rack in that cold adobe room. There is a certain comfort you get from sleeping next to a heavy machine gun manned by battle-hardened Rangers, and sleep found me quickly.
I woke up around 1500 feeling more well-rested than I had in a long time. Corporal Tog, his ammo bearer, and I discussed our tactics. I wasn’t very hungry, but I choked down as much of an MRE as I could. I knew I might not get another chance to eat before we got back to MES, and that was a long way off, even if things went according to plan. One of the most stressful things about these missions is that we never knew exactly when we’d exfil. It might be that afternoon, or that night, or dawn the next day. The point is, you had to be ready whenever.
My meal over, I made my way out onto the balcony and took out my small laminated map of the area. I had committed much of the area to memory before sacking out earlier in the day, and I went back over what I could remember, remeasuring distances and directions and going over the numbers we had assigned to the buildings in the village.
I looked at each building through my scope and checked out each window and door. I could see curtains blowing in some of the windows, and I could see people moving past them. They could be families going about their lives or IMU fighters making preparations and waiting for their moment to strike—there was just no way to tell. I noted which buildings were occupied and then catalogued them from closest to farthest. I tried to match the roads and footpaths I could see on the overhead map with what I saw on the ground. Our enemies would inevitably have to use those passages, and I ranged the parts of them that I could see, as well as the buildings. It was a total team effort, because armed with this information, especially what buildings and roads had the most traffic, Corporal Tog and I were on precisely the same page. Now we had to do the hardest thing in combat—wait.
While we waited, a couple of the guys were taking “cool guy pictures.” I’d be lying if I said I didn’t share their sense of ease. We had lived in dozens of ROD sites, and the near-impenetrable adobe walls were a comforting contrast to the skin-prickling feeling you had when you walked into a Taliban- or IMU-controlled village in the dead of night. The soft afternoon light, the crisp spring air coming from the massive snowcapped mountains, and the pink of blooming fruit trees all added to our feeling of ease.
It was exciting to be living out of a pouch on my back, my only possessions my gun and my kit, with my Ranger buddies and the vague sense of something “back home” that mattered less and less with each mission.
I posed for a picture and couldn’t contain a smile. I felt like whatever was back home was worth never seeing again to be right here, right now. With those snowcapped peaks on the horizon, Miss America in my hand, and my Ranger brothers next to me, everything made sense. My existence was distilled down to the barest of things, and I felt the clarity of being completely in the moment.
Corporal Tog’s ammo bearer, a private on his first deployment, snapped a couple of quick pictures of me doing my “tough guy” pose. We looked at the digital display together and he said with a laugh, “That one there will get you laid, Sergeant.”
I smiled, but before I could join his chuckle, a sharp whoosh-crack shattered the moment. That was immediately followed by another, deeper cracking sound.
We hit the dirt, and my ears pricked with the whistle of another incoming mortar round. I placed the mortar location to the south. It had impacted Building 1, a shack made mostly of rubble and sticks that Two-Two had occupied. The shack was a short distance from the big, solid walls of the compound and was our weakest point. My first thought was, I hope Marc wasn’t on that roof made of sticks.
Another whoosh-crack shattered my thoughts. Then there were more whistling mortar rounds followed by two booming explosions to our west. 1st Platoon was getting hammered, too. The net erupted with calls conveying distance and direction of the enemy fire. Platoon Sergeant Pack called asking for casualty reports. Thus far, thankfully, there were none.
Automatic fire from the north battered my position. Corporal Tog laid on the trigger of his M240 machine gun, burning through two or three hundred rounds in an instant, hammering away at the muzzle flashes. I heard the other 240s and SAWs doing the same, firing in every direction, pouring Ranger machine-gun fire at the enemy’s positions. The sound was a roar, and as we poured out more and more fire, it reached a deafening roar.
We were like a lion on a train track bellowing at a freight train that was barreling toward us. It was as if our collective rage, expressed as violence, could stop death itself from plowing through us and scattering us to the wind. I could feel the blood behind my eyes and the throbbing in my neck and temples. There was no controlled breathing. I just ja
mmed myself against a wall and leveled Miss America at the nearest compound. Flashes and silhouettes were all the details I could make out in the windows and doors.
I ignored the mortars raining down on us. If one of them had my number on it, there was nothing I could do. I fired in a triangular pattern at each silhouette, just as my old sniper partner, Stuart, had taught me when we were going through the Special Forces Sniper Course. In moments like this your training comes back to you, even the exact words and actual voices of your instructors from years ago. Left to right, bottom to top, search in a pattern. Their lessons were a tonic that quenched the rising feeling of panic I felt.
I fired at a silhouette and saw a flash of a dishdash fall at an odd angle. I moved to the next window and fired at a flashing muzzle, and the movement stopped. Shoot what you can see, Mac had often told me when we drilled together. I moved my sniper scope to the next window, but there was nothing to see. I sent several rounds through the window, making sure to hit the left and right edges of the window frame. If anyone was hiding there, some high-speed dirt in their face would make them think twice about engaging us. Another instructor’s admonition came into my brain: One shot, one kill is for police snipers and the movies. Put lead in the bad guys; your platoon can do the rest.
I moved on to the next window where I’d seen muzzle flashes. The straight line of the window frame had a bulge, and I fired at that until it fell, taking a fabric curtain down with it. Meanwhile, Tog’s gun was hammering out nine-round bursts. I dropped my empty magazine and replaced it with a fresh twenty-rounder. The enemy’s fire waned slightly from a constant barrage to a steady but scattered stream of small-arms fire.
Our Ranger Death Blossom had broken the ranks of IMU fighters, separating them from each other and pinning them in their fighting positions. Overhead, Kiowas worked with our mortar teams to silence the IMU’s heavy weapons. Automatic fire was still pouring in on us, but it was lessening. I moved my sniper scope to the next building and went to work. Tog’s bursts followed the impact of my rounds, hammering everything he noticed me shooting at with six- to nine-round bursts. We worked together without a word. Nothing could hide from my scope, and nothing could withstand his heavy machine-gun’s barrage.
When the Killer Man Comes Page 18