I saw a foot peek out from a wall 300 meters away. I fired three rounds, and then Tog battered the area with a nine-round burst. If I saw a shadow on a visible bit of road I fired three rounds, and Tog would follow it up with a blast from his M240. I changed magazines again, shifted my aim west as far as I could see, and took aim at a more distant group of buildings. I scanned, saw muzzle flashes, and sent rounds after them while bullets snapped over my head. Tog’s machine gun was pummeling an irrigation trench in the dead center of our sector of fire, and the Rangers next to me peppered the area with their M4’s and 40-mm grenades.
Two-One and Two-Four made their way to the rooftop and we volleyed back and forth with our enemy, bursts of fire coming at us every other second. Our machine guns swiveled across their sectors, pausing to send suppressing fire where they saw or suspected movement.
Suddenly I felt something burst to the right of me, and a shock of pain jarred my head. I ducked to a knee behind the wall and raised my right hand to my ear. Two-One looked at me with alarm. I realized his muzzle brake was right next to my ear. I couldn’t help giving him a dirty look. He could have ruptured my eardrum or burned my face.
“Shit! Are you okay, man?” he asked. He looked like he’d just run over his dog.
“I’m good, man!” I replied with a genuine smile. I was elated that I wasn’t actually injured.
After a brief chuckle, we turned our attention back to the enemy. The fighting nearest to us was dying down, but we were still getting sporadic fire from all sides every few minutes. We were trying to pinpoint the last of the IMU fighters and answer their irregular fire. I still found shadows to shoot at, but the muzzle flashes I saw were 700 meters or more away and were obscured by brush. These weren’t exactly good shots, and I was burning through ammo too damn fast.
“Watch and shoot! Watch and shoot!” Two-One and Two-Four echoed each other, and the rest of us shouted the command back, both to them and to each other.
There was a lull in the fighting for a few minutes, with just some scattered fire from the enemy’s Soviet-era weapons. Everything on the ground was different from what we had seen on the overhead images, and we were trying to pin down which buildings were which and direct our fire at the buildings where we still saw muzzle flashes.
Suddenly there was another wave of enemy automatic fire from all directions. It was nothing like their initial barrage but was still intense. The enemy had regrouped, and tactically this was almost as impressive as their coordinated initial barrage. They gave us everything they had with a textbook infantry-style attack. It was exactly how we would have attacked if our roles had been reversed. I had to give grudging respect to the IMU. We had bitten a huge chunk out of their forces, but they still wanted more.
Our machine guns answered the enemy fire, and the rest of us searched the places we had found them before.
“It’s poppin’ off! That’s us, baby!” Sergeant Reggie shouted, as if the enemy could hear him and his verbal barrage were as deadly as the 40-mm grenades he was lobbing at them.
“Sierra, you see where that’s coming from?” Reggie asked.
“Twelve o’clock, four fifty, maybe five hundred,” I replied, measuring the distance in meters as accurately as I could.
Sergeant Reggie started launching 40-mm grenades, aiming at where I indicated. It was the maximum range for our grenade launchers, but it had the right effect and got the enemy moving. That brought them under our guns again, and we began to pick them off.
Those of us with a few deployments under our belt had spent plenty of time chasing ghostlike fighters, often with nothing concrete to show for it. Now, even though we were getting hammered with intense enemy fire, we were grateful that the enemy had decided to stand and fight. The sun was setting quickly, and every minute brought us closer to coming out of our walls and running these guys down like dogs.
One of Two-One’s privates disappeared down a ladder and soon reappeared with bandoliers of 40-mm grenades and belts of machine-gun ammo.
“Sierra, where is that machine-gun fire coming from?” Two-Four shouted.
“Behind that wood line, at eleven o’clock, there is a satellite dish at nine hundred meters,” I replied.
“What satellite dish?” Two-Four asked dubiously. There aren’t many satellite dishes in northern Afghanistan, but if it looked like one to me, I figured it would look like one to him when he saw it.
“The wood line is five or six hundred meters away. Behind that satellite dish and beneath that, you can see the flash,” I replied emphatically.
I knew I couldn’t snake a bullet through all that scrubby brush, especially at that range. But that’s why I love a machine gun. Miss America is a scalpel. Tog’s M240 machine gun was a buzz saw that could tear through the trees and brush with ease.
“Roger, walk me on to them,” Two-Four ordered.
“Roger, eyes on,” I replied as I focused my scope on the faintly blinking light. Two-Four gave Corporal Tog a rough area to fire at, and I watched his tracer fly harmlessly away into the distance.
“Right, Five-Zero!” I shouted over the sound of M4s and incoming fire. Corporal Tog had to rely on his experience at that range to know what 50 meters looked like.
“Right, Five-Zero,” Two-Four echoed into the machine-gun nest. Corporal Tog’s M240 gun ripped off another long burst, and it looked like it went right into the satellite dish. He’d made a perfect correction on the fly.
“Drop, Two-Five,” I said deliberately, and Two-Four echoed the command to the machine-gun nest. The tracers arced out and sliced through the thin forest between us and the enemy machine gun, dead on target.
“He’s on!” I shouted, and Two-Four relayed the command to Tog. Three long, satisfying bursts arced over the ground and punched through the trees, and that’s the last we saw of that IMU machine gunner.
“We have birds inbound for a fire mission, stand by to lift fire.” It was our captain’s voice over the net, letting us know we had a fire mission working.
A pair of Kiowas appeared on the horizon. The waning enemy fire dried up completely, and the enemy went to ground. They were brave enough to attack and re-attack our ROD site, but they weren’t stupid. They knew from experience that attacking us beneath our Kiowas was certain death.
The Kiowas made endless circles over the enemy positions but didn’t pour out any of their deadly fire. The enemy had melted away. We remained ready for another wave of attacks, but they never came. We had literally beaten over one hundred IMU into submission.
As night fell, we rebundled our Speedballs, packed up all our gear, and got ready to exfil. When it was fully dark we walked out to our HLZ and waited for our Chinooks. It was the right time to exfil. We were black on 40-mm grenades and really low on M240 ammo, and Mac and I were almost black on sniper ammo. (“Black” is military slang for saying a resource is gone.) I recall leaving there with only fifty rounds or so. Besides fighting for essentially 24 hours straight, I had slimmed down my kit over the last few missions so that now I was only carrying Miss America, a tomahawk, and one hand grenade.
The flight back to MES was uneventful and we went through our usual routine—debrief, chow, get our weapons and kit back into fighting order, and then blessed rack time.
I probably slept for 12 hours. As soon as my eyes opened I could hear and see the buzz in our tent. We’d gotten a WARNO. We were picking up and moving to Jalalabad, in Nangarhar Province, in eastern Afghanistan. I had been there during my first deployment and again in 2010, during the bloodiest year of the Afghan war. It was Taliban Hillfighter country, and I’d learned the hard way that they were always up for a fight.
8
TANGI VALLEY
Once we got the warning order that we’d be moving on from Mazar-i-Sharif, our morale surged. MES is a well-appointed base, with a café, spacious chow halls, and good gyms. Hell, they even had cobblestone drainage and paved roads. We didn’t get to appreciate that much, since our unexpected arrival meant they
had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for our billeting. We were tired of living on top of each other, packed into tents like sardines, living out of our rucks, and packing up and moving every few weeks.
On the other hand, we knew we wouldn’t be in JBAD for very long—a couple weeks at most. But there was a sunk cost in understanding the local geography, topography, weather, demographics, and especially the enemy. In the last case, I can’t say I ever figured out our enemy in Afghanistan. Trying to get your brain around the amorphous groups of men who murder their fellow citizens and terrorize the ones they don’t kill, all while claiming a religious moral prerogative. is something our entire Ranger Regiment struggled with, and something I struggle with to this day.
Once our platoon sergeants told us we were picking up and deploying to Jalalabad we became intel hounds. We spent a lot of time in the TOC, scrounging up whatever intel we could on what the enemy was doing in and around Jalalabad. Several of our fellow Rangers had operated out of JBAD during previous rotations, so we pumped them for information.
For most of us, it wasn’t a surprise we were rotating to JBAD. It is the second-largest city in eastern Afghanistan, right behind the capital of Kabul, which is about 150 klicks to the west. Jalalabad is an ancient city located at the junction of the Kabul River and the Kunar River, near the Laghman valley. It is the capital of Nangarhar Province, as well as the center of social and business activity in the region, because it is close to the Pakistani border. And since Pakistan is the main source of products for all of Afghanistan, Jalalabad is one of the leading trading centers with Pakistan, which meant that there was a constant flow of traffic from Pakistan to Afghanistan, and lots of it went straight through JBAD.
What all that meant to us was that JBAD was only 50 klicks from the Pakistani border, and the worst part of that border, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. If there is one place in the world where there is no rule of law, it was these areas. I know I’m not being politically correct saying this, but Pakistan had basically given up trying to govern these areas, and it seemed they let the Pakistan Taliban run a country within a country.
No one knows for certain how many Taliban are in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but the numbers are surely in the tens of thousands. So we knew going in that if things got hot in JBAD, we’d be facing a potentially unlimited flow of Taliban coming across the border. Our pucker factor was pretty high as we anticipated our move.
Just before leaving MES we had some more personnel rotations. To be completely honest, it was probably the worst possible time to have seasoned and blooded veterans leave us. No matter how well qualified their replacements, the new guys would have to be blended into the team. That was always a challenge, but especially now that we knew we’d be going to JBAD and face the Taliban again.
Marc and Hank were two of the guys who were leaving. Both of them had done their duty—and more—and the good-byes and good-lucks brought a lump to our throats.
Marc’s replacement was Chris, a sniper team leader himself. He had volunteered to be my subordinate for the latter half of Team Merrill for one reason: he wanted to hunt down and kill Taliban. Chris and I were buddies from Ranger School and had remained friends since then. We had often ridden Harleys together or met up for a Friday-night grill and bull session back at Fort Benning. Most people could walk right past Chris and never guess he was a Ranger. He was slightly built and skinny—so skinny that one of our Ranger School instructors tried to stick him with the nickname P.O.W. He had a shock of black hair and a perpetual five-o’clock shadow.
Chris had a reputation in the sniper community of being a crack shot. Beyond that, he was uber-professional, quiet, funny, and, despite his slight frame, strong as an ox. He wasn’t the kind of guy you wanted to race during a run, and he would embarrass most Rangers if you tried to beat him up a mountain.
Hank’s replacement was another one of my Ranger School buddies, Wade. He was the polar opposite of Chris. Wade was a big, heavy guy—over 6 feet tall and around 220 pounds. He was also brash, outgoing, and hot-tempered. He sometimes rubbed people the wrong way, but there was something about his quick wit and easy laugh—especially when he was laughing at himself—that took the edge off his abrasive personality. He was a lot like a big, loyal dog who kept annoying you but who you loved anyway.
Wade came in to be Mac’s sniper partner. They’d known each other for a long time, served together in the same platoon before they were snipers, and had one of those brotherly love-hate relationships. If you walked by the two of them when they were jawing at each other, you’d swear they were about to get into a fistfight, but they never did. Mac easily tabled any differences he had with Wade for good reason: he was a great sniper and absolutely fearless in a firefight.
We were rousted out in the pre-dawn hours and packed our kit and our weapons aboard C-130 Herks for the 400-klick flight to JBAD. We hadn’t gotten any intel on what our missions might be, but as always, we hoped for the best and planned for the worst.
What we saw when we arrived at the U.S. military base outside JBAD revealed a great deal. JBAD was the main base facing the Taliban and other militants who enjoyed safe haven in Pakistan, and it looked the part. To say it was austere would be a huge understatement. The base looked like it was ready to withstand a Taliban attack at any moment, and security was incredibly high.
While it was pretty basic, JBAD was humming. There were a wide variety of military and OGA (other government agencies) based there. We were pretty sure—or at least we hoped—that someone well up the chain of command was coordinating all their efforts, but it certainly seemed as if each of these outfits was just doing its own thing.
MARSOC (Marine Corps Special Operations) guys flew drones out of JBAD to gather intelligence about the local area. We never read into exactly what they were doing, but we figured it was basic reconnaissance. Army Special Forces also flew small drones that were designed to develop intelligence on possible HVTs in the area. We would go on direct action raids to take down some of the HVTs their drones located.
There was also a SEAL team working out of JBAD. We had a long tradition of working with the Navy’s special operators. The SEALs are a pretty small organization to begin with, they had a global mission to man, and they were deployed everywhere in the Afghan theater. All that meant they often didn’t have the numbers to go on direct action missions by themselves.
Since Rangers are all about direct action, we teamed up with SEALs frequently. We didn’t mind taking a supporting role if it meant we were getting to do work. Once we got to JBAD, they were the first guys we linked up with immediately after linking up with the Rangers who were already there. Having access to the highest levels of Navy intel apparatus was a windfall, and the odds that we’d be working together were high.
We were barely settled in to JBAD when we got an intel dump revealing the location of a one-legged IED maker we were calling “Old Joe.” Evidently this guy was pretty infamous around JBAD. He’d been doing this a long time—back when he had two legs.
We did a classic night raid, rolling in on a location where he was thought to be, but it turned out to be a dry hole. We regrouped, pored over the intel, and launched again, this time with high confidence that we would catch him. We missed him again, though we did find another man with one leg. Old Joe was a throwback from the Mujahedeen days for a reason; he was as cunning as they came. Back at JBAD, we got some updated intel that was of higher confidence than what we’d had before. A drone tracked him as he rode his motorcycle along an MSR and ultimately to the outskirts of a midsize village.
Working off the drone feed, we launched a Ranger kill squad that tracked him down. As the Rangers closed in on him, an AH-64 Apache Longbow took him down. The Rangers on the ground converged on him a minute later and confirmed he was dead. They also “liberated” his prosthetic leg and brought it to our Company building back at Fort Benning. This may sound a little gruesome, but all three times I’d been to JBAD since 2006 we’d
been hunting for this one-legged IED maker, so a trophy seemed appropriate.
These missions were necessary, but we felt like we were nibbling around the edges of really taking a bite out of the Taliban. This sure didn’t seem like the reason we packed out of MES in a hurry to come here. That’s why it was welcome news when Major Dan and our other leaders told us we’d be mounting up and deploying to Forward Operating Base Shank, about 60 klicks west-southwest of JBAD. The FOB was about a dozen klicks southeast of the city of Baraki Barak, in high desert steppe. It reminded me of the western slope of Colorado—high, dry, and with big mountains on the horizon.
As Forward Operating Bases go, FOB Shank was huge. It had a large ISAF presence whose mission was to train Afghan National Police. FOB Shank was strategically located within easy Chinook range of the Tangi Valley, which was where the Taliban massed for attacks on Kabul. Even before we received any specific intel briefings, we knew why we were here and had a good idea of what we’d be up against.
In much the same way as Pakistan had basically given up trying to govern their Federally Administered Tribal Areas, Tangi Valley (also known as Wardak Valley) had survived as its own entity for millennia, resisting any invasion or imposition of government control. The mountains there provided an all-but-impenetrable stronghold for the Taliban. The Afghan government was simply too weak to control it, so it was left to us to try to put a dent in the Taliban forces there.
While some questioned the value, given the risks, of going up against these well-entrenched Taliban in their mountain stronghold, the risks of not taking them on were greater. Along with the foreign fighters who flocked to them, the Taliban had enough forces in the area to pose a continuous threat to coalition forces. This ran the gamut from ambushing military convoys to rocket and mortar attacks on coalition bases to seeding roads with IEDs and even intimidating Afghan Army forces to get them to turn against American or coalition forces in “green on blue,” attacks.
When the Killer Man Comes Page 19