by Mitch Weiss
“We’ve got to have you because you’re our link to the commandos,” he yelled into the distraught Afghan’s face. “You have to focus or more people are going to end up like CK. You’re my lead terp now. You’ve got to get it done.”
Over the radio, Staff Sergeant Robert Gutierrez Jr., a combat controller from ODA 3312, warned them that a two-thousand-pound bomb was on the way. The target was the large, multistory building on a ridgeline across the wadi. Inside, HIG fighters could zero in on the ledge. It was impossible to move without one of the HIG fighters in the building getting a bead on them. But while the building was across the wadi, the straight line distance to the ledge was only three hundred meters.
“One minute out!” Ford said, keying the radio to warn Howard at the bottom of the wadi.
But the radio failed. Unable to call Howard, Ford crept to the edge and started to yell down, signaling with his arm.
“Incoming. Get down. Everybody get down.”
He doubted that anyone downhill could hear his warning, but from the corner of his eye he saw Shurer throw his body over Behr to shield him from the blast. From his previous deployments, Ford knew the kind of damage a two-thousand-pound bomb could inflict on enemy positions. If it landed right, it could smash a structure to pieces. Hunkered down against the base of the rock wall, he watched the bomb sail down toward the house.
At the last second, he buried his head in the crook of his arm. The blast pushed Ford against the wall followed by a shock wave that hit him deep in the chest. The impact of the explosion spewed a cloud of debris and dust that swirled in the valley. It blocked out the sun, and made it impossible for Ford and the others to even see a few inches in front of their faces. Baseball-size rocks and pebbles flew in their direction, and a small one hit Behr in the gut with the force of a fastball.
As the dust slowly dissipated, an eerie silence again fell over the valley. But then the shooting erupted again. Shit, these guys are fucking relentless, Ford thought. “We’re going to move a casualty every time a bomb is dropped,” he told Walton. Then he turned to Shurer: “Ron, get those guys packaged up and ready to move.”
Ford had taken over. He was in control and decisive. Through sheer force of will, he was going to make damn sure they moved to safety. He quickly huddled with Sanders and Williams. They had to get off the ledge or the wounded were going to die, and likely so would the rest of the team.
“You need to grab five or six commandos apiece and set up on those ledges,” he told them.
The idea was to establish security on the ledges leading down the mountain to the wadi. Then Sanders and Williams could help carry Behr and Morales while the commandos provided cover fire. Moving them was imperative. After the massive bomb, the fighters had started to really zero in on the ledge.
Suddenly an insurgent came rushing toward them from the same path Sanders and Walding had taken to join the team. Dressed in a gray top and a military-style hat, the fighter apparently hadn’t seen the Americans, and seemed to be focused on ODA 3312 in the wadi.
Williams and Walton saw him first and shouted a warning. Ford heard them and, in a smooth motion, wheeled around and snapped off a shot.
The burst knifed into the fighter’s chest and he crumbled to the ground, his AK-47 rifle crashing into the dust before him. Ford figured he likely hit the fighter in the spine because 5.56 rounds don’t have that kind of stopping power.
Everybody was stunned. With the fighter lying in a heap, Ford scanned the hill waiting for another fighter. Anyone coming down now was going to get shot.
Ford knew they had to move or get overrun. The fighters were starting to probe for an attack. Even for Ford, a veteran of many battles, the level of fighting was overwhelming. It was time to get off the ledge. Gathering up the team, he refined the escape with Walton.
Ford decided he and Walding would stay on the ledge with the team while Williams and Sanders set up on the ledges below. Down in the wadi, he wanted Howard to pull back to the small building that looked like a goat shed that they had passed earlier in the day. There, they could collect the wounded and regroup.
When the hastily convened meeting broke up, Ford and Walding returned to shooting at muzzle flashes. Ford was fixed on a window in a house overlooking the ledge, a perfect vantage point to shoot down on the team as they tried to get off the mountain. He kept firing burst after burst, hoping to suppress the fighters in the house, even pointing to Walding to shoot at it.
“What?” Walding said over the gunfire.
“Windows. Shoot windows,” Ford yelled. “We’re going to suppress windows.”
There were so many houses around them and Walton and Rhyner were dropping bombs right above the team’s ledge, showering them with dust, pebbles, and baseball-size stones. Ford could feel the grit and dust on his neck. The fighter planes overhead seemed to be coming and coming at a steady clip. One fighter after another released its payload of bombs before roaring up and out of the valley. Each time the bombs were hitting closer to their ledge.
Glancing back over his shoulder, Ford could see his guys rounding up the commandos.
He and Walding continued to fire into the nearby windows. In order to get off a clear shot, they both had to quickly step out from the base of the cliff and shoot, exposing them to fire for a split second. It was a risk, but without the cover fire, Ford knew there was no way they would be able to get the wounded down to the house in the wadi.
40
Walding
Always looking to protect fellow soldiers, Walding noticed an area near the wounded that needed to be covered. He took one step toward the location then felt something slice through his leg. The force knocked him off his feet; he flew a few feet in the air and landed near that overturned tree. The pain was excruciating. It felt like someone had smashed his lower leg with a sledgehammer.
“What the fuck?” Walding screamed.
When he glanced down, he saw blood, ligaments, tissue, and bone. A round had filleted the lower part of his right leg. It was barely attached to his knee. Trying to keep his wits, Walding knew he had to find cover before he could take care of his wound. He crawled to the shrub. It wasn’t much protection, but without it, he would be completely in the open and an easy target for a sniper.
He turned over and sat on his ass and stared at his leg. At that moment he knew his leg was gone. There was no way to save it.
Shit, there goes my SF career, he thought.
Sanders bolted over to him. “Damn,” he said.
Walding pulled a tourniquet out of his pocket and turned to Sanders.
“Man, I need you to help me with this.”
“Sure,” Sanders said breathlessly. Walding knew his teammate was jacked up. He has every right to be. He just saw my leg hanging off, Walding thought.
Sanders slipped the tourniquet above the wound and tightened it. But Walding saw spurts of blood continuing to flow from the injury.
“You may want to tighten this tourniquet a little more,” Walding told Sanders. Sanders complied and the blood stopped—for the moment.
Walding was seriously injured but he promised himself he was going to keep fighting. The lyrics of one of his favorite songs popped into his head: I’ll have you know, I’ve become indestructible. So he lifted his rifle and resumed firing. But every time he moved, his leg hurt so much he would growl. Damn leg.
He needed the pain to stop. He needed to function—to be combat effective. So Walding did the unthinkable. He turned the lower part of his injured leg—the area below the knee—toward his groin and removed his bootlace. Then he tied the lower leg to his thigh so it wouldn’t flap around. It was a drastic measure, but one he had to take to stay in the fight.
41
Ford
Out of the corner of his eye, Ford saw Walding almost jump into the air.
Focusing on the enemy, he continued to fire rounds from his M4, before turning his attention to Walding, who had almost rolled off the side of the mountain. The tree nea
r Rhyner was the only thing that kept him from rolling off the ledge.
Ford could see that Walding was hurt badly. His leg was mangled. A bullet nearly severed his lower leg—and blood was spurting like water from a garden hose. It didn’t look good. Ford fired a few more bursts, but it was hard to turn away. He wanted to help Walding, but he was the only one left who could shoot and provide cover.
All the while Ford kept shooting.
Standing up and leaning out away from the wall, he took a bead on a new window when a round struck him in the chest. The blow knocked the wind out of him, forcing him to one knee. Since he had left his heavier body armor at Jalalabad, his plate carrier lacked any of the padding that absorbed the shot of the bullet.
Sliding his hand behind the shattered plate that stopped the bullet from tearing into his chest, he looked for blood. His hand came out clean. No blood. He had to shake off the jolt. Taking a few deep breaths, he slid his almost spent magazine out of his rifle and replaced it with a fresh one. He had been hit. So had his teammates and CK. At first, Ford figured that the insurgents were getting lucky by filling the air with bullets.
Then it dawned on him.
All of the wounded were wearing tan desert uniforms. The commandos wore older green camouflage uniforms. The HIG sniper was zeroing in on the Americans. He had mistaken CK, who also was wearing the tan uniform, for a Special Forces soldier.
“Stay down. Stay back,” he barked at his men.
He was mad. Sliding out to shoot another burst, he was focused on buying enough time for his men to escape.
42
Shurer
Shurer had turned the mountain into a makeshift emergency room. The conditions were less than ideal, and he braced himself for the possibility that insurgents above would toss grenades down to their position, or fire an RPG in their direction. It’s just a matter of time, he thought. It was tough even to think straight with all the chaos. Shurer had trained for this. He knew this day might come when he enlisted and pushed to be a medic. But reality was different from training, and this was his first real battlefield test. He had to stay in control.
Like Behr, Morales was in poor shape. Not as bad as Behr, but close. Morales had highly visible wounds in his right thigh and ankle. Shurer administered a morphine shot and began closely examining his teammate’s injuries. It wasn’t pretty. His right leg was badly damaged. Shurer could put his hand straight through Morales’s thigh. It was just flayed open. But Morales had been lucky; there was no femoral damage, or injury to the femur.
Shurer knew the key would be to apply enough pressure on the thigh to keep it from swelling. With that much tissue damage, the thigh would normally swell up and, left untreated, would keep swelling. If that happened, the bleeding would continue. But the blood loss wouldn’t necessarily be visible. It would be hidden under the swelling. A real danger.
So Shurer packed the wound with Celox—a hemorrhage-control medication that quickly stops bleeding. (Pouring Celox into a wound prevents blood loss by forming a gel-like clot as the medicine binds to the surface of red blood cells.) Shurer then wrapped the area as tightly as he could to keep pressure on the thigh.
He then turned his attention to Morales’s ankle. He cut off Morales’s boot—and tossed it so far it tumbled off the mountain. But after examining the wound, he realized the only thing he could do was to try to stop the bleeding. He didn’t have time to do anything else. He used a bandage and, after the bleeding was under control, gave Morales a “fentanyl lollipop.” (Fentanyl is more powerful than morphine.) The lollipop helped ease the pain.
After that, Shurer bounded to CK, whose body had been moved by the soldiers near the rock wall. Shurer, who didn’t know that Walton had already examined CK, wanted to perform a more thorough examination of his friend. Maybe there was a chance—albeit a slim one—that he was still alive. People can be nearly dead and you might not see it with a quick glance. So this time, Shurer checked the terp’s pulse. Checked his breathing closely. Nothing. CK was dead, and Shurer had to regroup and focus his attention on the living.
When he returned to Behr, he heard Ford’s voice.
“Where’s the Skedco?” Ford asked. Made from a special plastic formula, a Skedco is a portable stretcher that unfolds like a Fruit Roll-Up. (Skedco is the name of the company that manufactures the stretcher and other military equipment.)
“I didn’t bring it,” Shurer said. Shit, it figures, he thought. It would have been stupid to bring the Skedco, which weighs about twenty-five pounds. Ford had encouraged his team to pack light for the mission. Keep the rucksacks lean, he said, because they would be climbing a steep hill. If every pound was going to be important, it was better to leave the Skedco behind, Shurer figured. He did pack a poleless litter—an ultralight polypropylene stretcher. It rolled up to the size of a towel and weighed only a few pounds. But it wasn’t as sturdy as a Skedco.
Shurer knew Ford was coordinating the evacuation plan and was trying to assess what equipment they had to move the injured soldiers. Sanders and Walding’s element had a pole-less litter—and they needed it now. But both men were on a ledge above them, firing at enemy positions. It could take some time.
While Shurer worked on Behr he could hear Walton and Rhyner on the radios, frantically calling in air strikes and trying to get medevacs in the area to rescue them. They also were talking to the other ODAs that had been cut off from their position. Neither could reach them because of the heavy fire.
Shurer glanced at Behr’s pelvic wound and it wasn’t getting better. So he turned to Celox—the same medicine he had just used on Morales. With Behr, it was a more complicated process. The bleeding was intense. He poured the Celox on top of the wound and then, with his fingers, shoved what he could inside. Then he poured a little bit more and repeated the process until he thought he had used enough. But with each step he had to apply pressure for at least five minutes or the Celox wouldn’t hold.
It was when he was applying Celox to Behr that the medic heard Walding scream and saw that he had been shot. Shurer wanted to run and help him, but at the moment he couldn’t. He had to keep his hands inside Behr’s wound so the Celox would hold.
Walding was just twenty-five feet from Shurer. But it might as well have been a mile. Walding couldn’t move, and Shurer couldn’t leave his position. For Shurer, it was a tough decision. If he left Behr in order to help Walding, who knew if the Celox would hold? If it didn’t, this would create another set of problems. If you release the pressure even just a little, you could break the newly forming clot. If that happened, the bleeding would be buried underneath all the junk you just put on top of the wound and you would never gain access to it.
Again, Shurer had to quickly evaluate the situation. Walding had suffered a traumatic amputation. The wound was below the knee and the bottom part of his leg was nearly severed. Get a tourniquet on it and it will be fine, Shurer thought.
Of the three injuries, Walding’s was visually the most shocking and most upsetting. But in the medic’s view, it was the easiest one to deal with: Put a quick tourniquet on the thigh. Squeeze the tourniquet around the femur. Squeeze it around the femoral artery. And that should stop the bleeding.
But nothing on this mountain was easy.
43
Walding
Walding was in severe pain.
After his leg was hit, his adrenaline kicked in and kept him going. He believed if he kept shooting or told the others where to aim, he would forget about the pain. And it had worked for a while. Not anymore. The pain was overwhelming. He needed morphine.
He pulled a morphine injector needle from his rucksack but was unsure how to use it correctly. He couldn’t remember which side of the injector to place against his thigh. With the pain and chaos, it was confusing, and Walding wanted to make sure he did it right. Shurer was busy taking care of Behr and Morales. He hadn’t made it to Walding, who was about twenty-five feet away.
Walding placed the purple side of the injector on
his thigh and exerted pressure on the device. But to his surprise, it was upside down and the needle jabbed into his thumb.
“Aw shit,” he shouted, loud enough for everyone to hear.
The soldiers all looked at Walding, and when they realized what had happened—that Walding had injected the morphine into his thumb—they broke out laughing. It was a funny, almost surreal moment in the middle of disaster. While Walding didn’t laugh, he understood why the others were cracking up. It was a dumb mistake. Shurer screamed something about turning the needle around and trying again. But Walding knew it was too late. And he was upset. He needed something to relieve the agony.
Even after the morphine mix-up, Walding kept returning fire. Keep it up, he told himself over and over. I can’t give up. But he was at the breaking point and becoming light-headed. Was he going into shock? He didn’t know. But things were getting bleak.
Walding began thinking about his wife and children. He wasn’t giving up. That would be out of character. Growing up on his grandfather’s Texas farm, Walding had experienced pain. Once, he fell out of a second-floor window in his house and broke his arm. He didn’t cry or even say anything. He just walked around with a broken arm for days. As a linebacker on his high school team, he loved to hit people. Running backs catching screens out of the backfield. Or fullbacks trying to run up the middle. He never gave up. But now his mind was playing tricks on him. He hated thinking that his children might not have a daddy. He was a family man, and they were his life. And what about his wife? What would she do without him? Who would tell her? Damn, stop it, he thought. If he continued to fight hard, at least he’d be able to hold his head high and know that he’d never given up. At least if he kept shooting and directed his team where to shoot, he would stop thinking about his family and the physical pain.