8 Seconds of Courage

by Flo Groberg

  “What do you want, man?” I said. “It’s 0530.”

  “Sir, Lieutenant Thompson has been hit,” he said.

  What?

  I’m not sure if this soldier realized that I had known Saul since our University of Maryland days and that he was one of my best friends. Hazily, I ordered the young man to go back outside my door, count to five, knock again, and repeat the news.

  “If you are playing an April Fool’s joke on me, I swear I’m gonna kick your ass,” I said.

  Sure enough, five seconds later, the rookie soldier knocked a second time.

  “Sir . . . Lieutenant Thompson has been hit,” he slowly repeated.

  For the first time in Afghanistan, I panicked.

  “What’s his status?” I yelled.

  “I don’t know, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  Seeing the fear in my fellow soldier’s face made me realize how serious the situation was.

  “Shit,” I said while scrambling to put on my uniform. Less than two minutes later, I ran out the door toward the TOC.

  Saul was the Taliban’s most wanted American in the Pech River Valley. That’s because Dairon and his gang had seen him in action and surmised that Saul was the most skilled, most talented infantry officer in the region. Knowing how big a target was already on Saul’s back made the news I had just received all the more terrifying.

  As I stepped into the TOC, everyone was standing around the radio listening to what was happening on top of the mountain where Saul had been hit. It still wasn’t clear if he was all right.

  All I wanted to hear was Saul’s voice. After what felt like an eternity, the radio crackled.

  “Hey, Phil, hit that OP right now!” Saul screamed on the radio.

  Saul was alive! Incredibly, as I would learn, he had survived an RPG landing between his legs. It was just one of those crazy things that happened in combat. I knew that my friend was tough, but this was pure luck.

  Saul however, was seriously wounded in the attack. His arms and legs were soaked in blood from shrapnel that had pierced sections of his body armor. Fortunately, the explosion’s deadly upward pattern had stopped just before reaching his heart and neck. Amazingly, especially considering where the RPG landed, Saul’s manhood was also intact.

  Knowing Saul, a six-foot-five American warrior whose platoon probably killed more Taliban than any other soldiers in the valley that year, I was sure he would be back on the battlefield in a few days.

  As radio traffic confirmed that a helicopter was carrying my injured friend to safety, any remaining feelings of invincibility that I had were gone. Even though nobody in my platoon or Saul’s had been killed since my arrival in Afghanistan, there had now been many—too many—close calls for comfort. In that moment, I realized that surviving combat is probably more about luck than anything else.

  • • •

  Six days later, as Afghanistan’s notorious summer fighting season approached, Saul was back on top of the very mountain where he had nearly been killed. This time, the enemy was determined to finish the job.

  The Taliban had surrounded his platoon with multiple fighters and was raining hell down on Saul and his soldiers. Cool, calm, and collected, Saul ordered his men to take a defensive posture. Still, with continuous AK-47 rounds hitting the trees and rocks all around them, Saul knew that he needed support.

  As soon as word reached COP Honaker-Miracle that Saul was pinned down, we sprang to action.

  “Groberg, get your ass in the TOC,” screamed our executive officer, First Lieutenant Fio Rito, who was second in command to the CO. He then told me that we were going to be Saul’s Quick Reaction Force and that we had to be out the door as soon as possible.

  “What the hell is going on, sir?” I asked. “Where’s Saul at?”

  “Same spot as last time,” Rito said. “Except today, the enemy came ready to fight.”

  After the jarring news, I ran as fast as I could to inform Staley of the situation.

  “Saul is in it again . . . we need to be out the gate in twenty minutes as QRF,” I told Staley. “Get the boys ready.”

  “Roger,” Staley answered in his typically stoic manner.

  In twenty minutes, we had four trucks out the gate to set out on one of our riskiest journeys of the deployment. To get to Saul, we would have to travel through unstable terrain that included a creek and a dirt road that was never meant to support the weight of our trucks. This was our only route into this section of the valley, so we had no choice but to proceed toward the danger.

  Because of the vicious terrain, it took us over forty minutes just to enter the valley where Saul had started his ascent up the mountain.

  As we entered the valley, I noticed our TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided) missile truck shaking more than ever before.

  “I think the ground is going to give out,” I screamed at my driver. “Go left!”

  Just as I started yelling, everything below us seemed to evaporate. Before I could blink, my men and I were cursing in fear as our truck rolled into the river.

  There was silence for a split second as we waited for the sounds of water rushing into our vehicle.

  “Sir, we need to get out of this truck through the gunner’s hatch . . . right now,” my driver screamed.

  “Roger that. Cortez, you go first,” I said. “Shams, you are next, then you (the driver). I’ll go last.”

  I don’t think I ever saw four men move that quickly as the nightmarish scenario began to unfold. Like many other soldiers, drowning was one of my worst fears. That is not the way I wanted to go out, and I’m sure my soldiers felt the same way.

  Despite panic, all those years of Army training quickly set in. After my three fellow passengers exited safely, I dismounted our multimillion-dollar TOW missile vehicle stuck in the chilly creek.

  Just when I thought the situation couldn’t get any worse, I began hearing radio chatter about the Taliban redirecting their positions. Instead of continuing to fight Saul’s platoon, they were headed straight toward us after hearing that an American vehicle was stuck. We were all alone and an easy target, they must have thought.

  By the time the bad guys arrived, I had already managed to call Honaker-Miracle to ask for a “wrecker”—a massive tow truck—and a team of expert soldiers that could get us out of this mess.

  As they had done several times before, these brilliant Army mechanics saved my ass and somehow pulled our vehicle out of the creek just before the Taliban arrived. This turn of events made the Taliban so angry that they decided to attack Honaker-Miracle instead.

  To that attack, we responded by firing five TOW missiles, which cost $250,000 each. Add in fifty mortars, and the Taliban beat a rapid (and humiliating) retreat. Instead of killing a bunch of Americans, they accomplished nothing.

  After we returned to Honaker-Miracle I played cards with Saul and some of his men later that night. Then I stopped by the TOC to see if there was any intercepted radio traffic from the immediate aftermath of the day’s harrowing events. Sure enough, there was.

  “Allahu Akbar, the American devils are dead,” a Taliban fighter chanted while clearly referencing the day’s fight. “Inshallah, we will kill twenty more like them tomorrow.”

  I couldn’t help but smirk as I read the transcripts. At the same time, it was clear that without the heroism of my fellow soldiers, the enemy fighter’s lies could have just as easily come true. As was often the case, things could have turned out much differently if the mechanics hadn’t responded so quickly.

  • • •

  By May, I think that most of the village elders began to genuinely respect my platoon, even when we refused to hire more contractors for construction projects or to risk our lives to protect a clip of fuel funded by American taxpayers. If there was one takeaway for the local leaders during my deployment, it was that Afghans need to ask the Afghan government for help, not Uncle Sam.

  Even as the number of firefights increased as the summer
season approached, I still felt like we were winning our protracted battle with Dairon and the Taliban. In addition to killing one hundred (or more) Taliban fighters, we successfully closed COP Michigan and completed the Pentagon-ordered withdrawal from the violent Korengal Valley, which had become familiar to some Americans because of Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington’s visceral 2010 documentary Restrepo.

  For the last few weeks, our most frequent assignment had been to protect the clips carrying fuel, munitions, and other equipment from those shuttered American bases. Once the millions of dollars’ worth of items arrived in Jalalabad, the materials would usually be shipped back to military bases in Europe or the United States.

  While escorting one such clip along the riverbank between COPs Honaker-Miracle and Able Main, I noticed a tough-looking Afghan staring down at us from the ridgeline near the village of Shamir Kowtz. I squinted, trying to determine whether he was carrying a weapon.

  “Yo, Cortez, look at this dude,” I said. “I can’t see much, but he looks bad.”

  Cortez, who was manning the TOW missile system, agreed. Still, there was nothing we could do due to our rules of engagement. Even though we operated under a steady threat of enemy ambushes, I couldn’t order an Afghan to his death simply because he looked suspicious, even if we were patrolling an active combat zone.

  All of us were zeroed in on the possible bad guy when suddenly we heard the rear hatch of our M-ATV swing open. Simultaneously, the heads of every American soldier in the stopped vehicle whipped around as all four of us tried to figure out what the hell was going on.

  It wasn’t the Taliban trying to breach our truck, but a bunch of Afghan boys stealing everything they could get their hands on, from ammunition to medical equipment.

  “What the hell, Cortez?” I screamed. “You didn’t see a group of kids running toward our vehicle?”

  “You told me to check out the guy on the ridgeline, L-T!” said Cortez, who was absolutely right. We were focused on the threat, not the back of our mammoth military truck.

  By this time in my deployment, I should have known that this sequence of events was probably happening by design. The Taliban had most likely paid those kids to distract us just long enough to move their men into position for an assault.

  Without fully pondering the possibility of an ambush, I ordered my men to dismount and enter Shamir Kowtz, where we found the village elder sitting in a rocking chair.

  “We’re going to a play a game,” I said to the elder. “It’s called ‘you tell those kids to give us our stuff back—’ ”

  Before I could finish, the thundering sounds of machine gun fire erupted.

  “Shit!” Martinez yelled as our four-man team quickly spread out, as we had been trained to do.

  Seconds later, a dozen or so machine gun rounds pounded the dirt directly in front of me, getting closer and closer to my legs as the gunfire continued to roar. Without thinking, I sprinted toward the first structure to my right as the rounds kept getting closer to our feet.

  Fortunately, none of us were hit, but by this point our nine lives were disappearing at a drastic rate.

  “Dement, you good?” I asked

  “Good to go, sir!” he responded.

  “Richardson and Moffett . . . y’all good?” I asked next.

  “Yup! We are fine,” Richardson said back. “Anyone see where it’s coming from?”

  Of course not, I thought. These Taliban guys were like ghosts; they blended in with the terrain, and today they had a plan.

  Once the enemy fire died down, I moved behind a big rock to get a better vantage point. Using the rock as cover, I shot more rounds out of my rifle that day than all previous firefights in Afghanistan combined.

  Upon realizing that where I had been shooting probably wasn’t the location of the enemy, I repositioned our trucks to better identify their location. As Staley led the show from our vehicles, he finally pinpointed a possible position and called in a fire mission. Ten minutes and twelve mortar rounds later, the enemy resumed their attack; this time with a bit more anger behind it.

  My platoon exchanged fire with the enemy for the next four hours until the Taliban eventually stopped returning fire. Unlike a movie, there was no dramatic climax to the battle—just silence, which usually meant that we had won.

  When we caught our breath and returned to our still open M-ATV, the crystal clear weather of that particular day enabled us to see the bodies of three Taliban fighters on the cliff. We were probably fighting five guys in total judging by the gunfire I heard, which meant that we killed most of their team before the others ran away. Due to the firefight’s chaos, my platoon didn’t know exactly who had killed the bad guys, but considering that we had been caught off guard by the enemy attack, I would say things turned out pretty damn well.

  “Now that was fun, L-T,” said Sergeant Dement.

  He was right, even though that line of machine gun fire had come far too close to hitting me. Escaping that huge firefight unscathed reinforced how fortunate each of us felt by that point in our combat tour.

  Even the Taliban fighter who falsely claimed to have killed “American devils” in the past couldn’t spin this one. I read about him lamenting our latest Houdini act in a subsequent radio transcript.

  “These American shits have an invisible shield,” he said.

  • • •

  If you looked down on the Pech River Valley during almost any day of that deployment, you would have seen a crescendo of explosions resembling the opening sequence of Apocalypse Now. Indeed, the US Army expended more ordnance in our area of operations in 2009 and 2010 than all other bases in Afghanistan combined.

  From the dead of winter to the dawn of summer fighting season, we had spent the last seven months—and more than a year in the case of the soldiers serving under me—in what was truly the most dangerous place on earth. My tour was 217 days long, and in that time frame, we engaged with the enemy more than two hundred times.

  Just before Memorial Day, we made one of our last fuel clip escorts to FOB Blessing. That’s when I got a radio call from a female Kiowa helicopter pilot who was watching our patrol from the skies above the dreaded valley.

  “Dagger-Four-Six this is Unfair-Three-Six, I see two enemy fighters approaching your clip holding what appear to be AK-47s, over,” she said. “Request permission to engage, over.”

  “Unfair-Three-Six this is Dagger-Four-Six . . . permission granted,” I radioed back.

  BOOM. BOOM. The pilot fired two rockets that sent plumes of fire and smoke shooting into the bright blue sky from a nearby cornfield.

  “This is Unfair-Three-Six . . . target expired,” she calmly reported over the radio. “Over and out.”

  The soldier who had saved us from yet another Taliban ambush was landing her Kiowa helicopter to refuel just as our clip arrived to FOB Blessing. As she disembarked and removed her helmet, her long blond hair was blowing in the wind.

  “Wow!” the entire platoon—no exaggeration—collectively gasped.

  Even though we had been betting each other on what she looked like for the entire ride to Blessing, none of us were bold enough to ask the pilot for her name. Still, as 4th Platoon, Dagger Company’s violent chapter in Afghanistan’s Pech River Valley finally came to a close, I was convinced that she was an angel. As I would later tell Saul over margaritas on a wild post-deployment vacation to Mexico, divine intervention is the only explanation for how the boys of Combat Outpost Honaker-Miracle were able to survive those seven months of hell.

  Shortly after my platoon left Afghanistan, the Pentagon decided to pull all US military forces out of the Pech River Valley. That might lead some to say that my men and I fought for nothing, which would prompt me to argue that they are wrong. My soldiers and I spent every single day serving and sacrificing in the hopes of making life better for ordinary Afghans like the children I met at the Andersille All-Girls School.

  This tour, I learned a lot about the fragility of human life. For th
e first time, I also witnessed the atrocities of war and how they can impact the local populace, and most important, our soldiers. I also learned how to save lives by hunting down the enemy and providing the locals with humanitarian aid. My only regret was not being able to take out Dairon, who was still roaming those deadly hills when I left despite our best efforts to kill him.

  My most important mission in Afghanistan was accomplished, which left me feeling elated. After years of training and a lifetime’s worth of good luck, I had successfully led a combat platoon through one of the most kinetic environments in the world. Even if I died the next day, I would do so knowing that I helped twenty-four American soldiers come home safely to their families. My men had done the same for me, and for the rest of our lives we would all be brothers-in-arms.

  A few months after returning from that raucous south-of-the-border vacation, I got the surprise of a lifetime. Less than two years after leaving the most dangerous place on earth, Uncle Sam would be sending me back.

  6 FINISH STRONG

  When I landed at Bagram Airfield in February 2012, the US military’s image had reached a low point in Afghanistan. That month, NATO International Security Assistance Force troops stationed at Bagram had inadvertently burned forty-eight copies of the Quran that had been removed from a prisoner holding facility.

  “I assure you—I promise you—this was not intentional in any way,” our commander in Afghanistan, Marine Corps General John Allen, told the Afghan people in a video statement. “I offer my sincere apologies for any offense this may have caused.”

  Despite General Allen’s heartfelt apology and subsequent written statement, much of Afghanistan went nuts. As a February 21, 2012, New York Times story put it, “about two thousand Afghans descended on the largest American air base in their country in the bitter cold to protest what is generally regarded as one of the most offensive acts in the Muslim world.”

  “Protest” was a mild way to characterize what was happening at Bagram as gasoline bomb explosions and “Death to America” chants rattled through the walls of our base. After more than a week of rioting across Afghanistan, according to Associated Press figures, six US troops and at least thirty Afghans were killed. Hundreds more were injured.