No Way Out

by Mitch Weiss

  Carter and Sanders tried over and over to navigate their way down the mountain. Several times, they slipped on loose rocks and had to hang on to shrubs. The two had taken an Afghan commando with them to help. But he was useless. He was too afraid to move from his position, so finally Carter and Sanders had to push him out of the way.

  As Carter climbed, his hands hurt. They were bleeding. Drenched in sweat, he dug his fingers deep into the dirt and the rocks cut like a knife. His muscles felt ready to explode. There were too many drop-offs, and this was freestyle rock climbing. No ropes. They just used their strength to pull up or to hold on when they were headed down. It was frustrating. You had to be Spider-Man to scale these cliffs. This is a bad place, a fucking bad place, Carter thought.

  “Shit, I don’t know,” Carter said to Sanders. “This is going to be tough.”

  Sanders agreed.

  The soldiers were exhausted. They had been fighting for hours and there was no end in sight. Covered as they were in blood and dirt, it would have been easy to give up. But they had to keep moving forward. Find a way off. Everyone was depending on them. So with the firefight raging in the background, they resumed their mission. They climbed up and down the sides of the mountain, desperately trying to find the right path. They even retraced their steps. Maybe there was something they’d missed. Finally, Sanders found a route that might work. There were still some extreme drop-offs in the beginning. But about halfway down, the drop-offs weren’t as bad and the path wasn’t as steep.

  Sitting on the rocks about halfway down the mountain, Sanders turned to Carter. “If we go this way, we might make it.”

  Carter knew what he meant. This route seemed to provide enough traction. Not as many loose rocks. And there were some shrubs to hold on to just in case. Not perfect. But it was the only way. This was an emergency. They had run out of time. Even in a best-case scenario—if the firing had stopped and they could move quickly down the mountain—the wounded soldiers could die. But with the incessant fire, the battle was far from over.

  Carter took a deep breath and looked at Sanders. He liked the way this Special Forces soldier handled himself. He was diligent. He didn’t give up in the face of a difficult challenge. The irony of this assignment wasn’t lost on Carter. They were both pressed into an unbelievable situation. They were an unlikely pair. And yet they were the ones who found the path that could save the team.

  “Let’s do it,” Carter said to Sanders.

  So Carter and Sanders bounded back to Walton.

  When they reached the captain, he was still on the radio. But he quickly turned his attention to the men.

  “Can we get them down? Are they going to make it?” Walton asked.

  Carter paused for a moment to collect his thoughts. “Yeah, they’ll live, but it’s going to be a bitch getting them down.”

  Sanders agreed. “Well, are broken bones going to be all right?”

  Walton didn’t hesitate. “Fuck it. Let’s go,” he shouted.

  It was time to pack up and leave.

  54

  Howard

  Pressing his body against the rocks, Howard took a deep breath.

  For a half hour, he had been frantically climbing up the mountain, followed closely by Williams and several Afghan commandos. It was a mad dash over unforgiving terrain to try to reach Walton. What Ford had told him was disturbing. The team was badly shot up. Just looking at Ford, he could tell that.

  Howard began thinking about his friends. How they were stuck on the ledge, bleeding and desperately fighting for their lives. Walton needed help getting the wounded off the mountain. He could hear Ford’s words in his head as he climbed. That was his motivation. Nothing was going to stop him. But just as he was about to scale the last switchback to reach the captain, Williams grabbed him.

  “What are you doing?” Howard said.

  “You can’t go up that way,” Williams said.

  Howard pulled away. “I have no choice.”

  Williams hesitated. He didn’t want to say the words he had been thinking. But finally he did. Howard needed to know the truth. “Everybody who has gone up that way has been shot.”

  It stopped Howard in his tracks. “Okay. Good point.”

  Now they had to find another way—and quickly. Howard had his Carl Gustav team and AJ in tow. But now rounds started cracking near them. They ricocheted off the wall and impacted the dirt near their feet.

  Howard still didn’t have a radio, and Williams was unable to reach Walton on his despite being less than fifty feet away. They had no idea if anyone was alive on the ledge, which was just above them. It was difficult to hear anything over the belching gunfire and the bombs exploding in the villages. It was frustrating. All they had to do was reach up, grab the ledge, pull themselves up, and they would be there. They were that close. But with the firefight, they might as well have been back in Jalalabad. It’s hard to maneuver when you’re inches away from death.

  “We’re going to wait two minutes, and if we can’t get in touch with Kyle, we’re going to go over there,” Williams said.

  Williams was always putting time lines on things.

  “Okay. Good plan,” Howard said.

  But they never followed the time line. Less than two minutes later, Howard and Williams came up with another plan. Grabbing AJ by the shoulders, Howard explained to him what they wanted to do.

  “Have all of the commandos step out and those two guys are going to shoot that way,” he said, pointing toward the closed portion of the valley. “Those two are going to shoot that way. And they are going to cover us and we’re going to climb around the rock face over to where Kyle is at.”

  Slinging their weapons, Howard and Williams prepared to move.

  “One. Two. Three. Go!”

  The commandos were supposed to start shooting, but all of them hugged the rocks. Finally, one of the commandos leaned out and fired off a short burst. His comrades soon followed, but Howard and Williams were long gone. They were already moving up the mountain in a different direction. They were trying to find a back way to Walton’s position—a path that didn’t expose them to deadly gunfire—when Williams signaled to Howard that he’d discovered one. They found a few good hand- and foot-holds and made it to an outcropping large enough to stand on and peek over the ledge directly behind Walton’s position.

  Williams poked his head over the ledge. Both Walton and Rhyner were huddled below a sloping rock ledge. Rhyner was lying there motionless.

  “What’s up? Are you guys okay?” Williams said.

  Walton finally heard them and turned. His satellite radio had lost its secure link to Bagram and Jalalabad.

  As Howard crawled past to start providing cover fire, Walton tossed the radio to Williams.

  “Matt, the radio is fucked.”

  Breaking open the backpack, Williams quickly reloaded the COMSEC, the codes that allowed the radio to make a secure link to the Army’s satellite communications network.

  Bullets skipped off the rocks, making it nearly impossible for them to stand up or move forward. Howard was shocked at the conditions up here. The space on the ledge where the team was pinned down was small—no bigger than a typical living room. Yet they were all squeezed in there. It was claustrophobic.

  “How many guys do you got?” Walton said, relieved to finally have some fresh bodies.

  “We have like five or six commandos,” Williams said, scrambling to where Walton was concealed.

  “Um, no, we don’t,” Howard said.

  “What?” Williams said, looking back at the ledge. Only AJ was standing there.

  55

  Morales

  They were finally getting ready to move, and Morales would be the first to leave.

  Everything was set. Carter and Sanders had found a path. Howard and Williams had rejoined the team. Walton, Rhyner, and Shurer were ready, and so, hopefully, were the handful of commandos and interpreters trapped on the ledge.

  Still, it would be a difficu
lt evacuation. HIG fighters were still firing at will—nothing seemed to slow them down. Morales could hardly move. Only one leg was functional and his entire body recoiled every time he took a step or made a move. His body was broken.

  Walton devised a plan. He would help Rhyner and Williams lay down suppressive fire while Howard moved to the front of the position with his sniper rifle. The rounds should provide enough cover for Sanders, Carter, and Shurer, who would transport Morales, Walding, and Behr.

  “Let’s do it,” Walton said.

  The men let out a barrage of fire. Meanwhile, Sanders and Carter moved quickly to Morales. They tried to be gentle as they lifted him. Morales leaned on them as he hobbled to the edge of the cliff. He climbed over and slid a few feet. Then he stared at the drop. It was unreal. One wrong move and he was dead. Everyone had to be careful. But how can you be 100 percent careful when you’re literally lowering a seriously injured solider from one ledge to another—with steep drop-offs. It just couldn’t be done.

  Morales didn’t want to be a burden. So he pushed himself to act like he wasn’t seriously wounded. Even though his thigh was punctured and his ankle was shattered, he still tried to walk by himself. He tried sliding down some of the way. He even tried lowering himself. But at one point in the journey, he just couldn’t hang on. Crawling down, he reached a ledge and shouted to Carter, “Mike, you have to catch me, man. I have to let go.”

  And let go he did, falling several feet, but Carter somehow managed to catch him. It was like that almost the entire way down. With every move, Morales could feel the strength being sapped from his body. And that had never happened before.

  He always had a reserve that he could tap into—whether it was training, running, or on missions. But now the well was dry. He was a proud, tough man. A team player. He didn’t want anyone to help him. He was the one who should be helping others. But at the moment he had no choice. With his injuries, this was strenuous. It would have been even without the wounds. But with the injuries? Nearly impossible. He kept repeating a Morales never quits over and over in his head. It was his mantra. His way of dealing with a massive amount of pain that consumed his body.

  But finally, he reached a slope at the bottom of the mountain that led to a clearing, and he felt relieved. It was a big step. Now there was a chance of getting out alive. At the bottom, he was surrounded by Special Forces soldiers from ODA 3312 who were anxious to help, including his buddy Nick McGarry, who, along with an Afghan commando, wrapped his arms around Morales and escorted him to the casualty collection point.

  On the way, they passed Morales’s boot—the one Shurer had tossed off the mountain when he began working on his ankle.

  “Hey, you want it?” McGarry asked.

  “Nah, fuck it. I’ll buy a new one when I get home.”

  56

  Walding

  It was Walding’s turn to leave—and it was just in time.

  The situation was grave. Walding knew it. All you had to do was count the wounded: Behr, Morales, and Ford. Rhyner was grazed. Rounds had bounced off Shurer and Walton’s helmets. CK was dead. Walding wondered who else was injured. The reality was that no one was safe. No one. And now he himself was fading fast. He could feel it. His body was shutting down.

  In retrospect, Walding should have seen it coming. From jumping out of a hovering helicopter and landing hard in a rock-filled wadi to falling into an ice-cold river to scaling a steep mountain that was reminiscent of the Rangers’ famed climb to take Pointe du Hoc during the D-Day invasion.

  Nothing had been easy. Walding’s hands were cut and bleeding from the climb. But he looked back with pride. He had reached the objective with his team. He and Sanders were so close to the village that they could almost reach out and touch the first building in the compound. But then the shooting started and everything changed.

  Sanders was the one who told Walding they were leaving. He explained that he’d found a way to get everyone off the mountain. It was risky—there were steep drops along the way. But it was much riskier staying on the mountain. Sooner or later, they could get overrun. Despite heavy bombing, the insurgents hadn’t gone away.

  “Are we going to make it?” Walding asked.

  No one had the answer.

  But now, on this small patch of rock, he was optimistic. Morales had made it to the bottom, right? How dangerous could it be?

  In preparation, Shurer ran to Walding and began checking his tourniquet. Although Walding was only fifteen feet away, it was the first time the medic had examined him. The tourniquet was a mess. It seemed that the wound was bleeding more now than at any point since he was shot. Shurer adjusted the tourniquet to try to stop the bleeding.

  “We have to move, John,” the medic said.

  Walding’s eyes were closing. He was fighting so hard to stay alert. He was blacking out.

  “John, we have to move.”

  Walding nodded weakly.

  It was Shurer’s job to take care of Walding. One of the terps, Blade, and a commando, ran over to Shurer to help.

  “We have to get you down the hill,” Shurer told Walding.

  “I can’t. I can’t do it.”

  “No, you have to do this. You have to get up.”

  The battle was raging. While planes had been bombing the compounds, insurgents were still firing a steady barrage of rounds and RPGs at the soldiers. It seemed that it was getting worse, not better, and if they stayed where they were any longer, no one would get out alive.

  “I need you to listen to me,” Shurer said sternly to Walding. “I need you to hold your leg and get up.”

  But Walding refused to move. Shurer believed that the image of his nearly severed leg was just getting into his head.

  “I can’t do it,” Walding said.

  “Focus,” Shurer shouted at him. “Focus. You can do it.”

  Walding finally nodded his head yes. He would do it. The soldiers lifted him and began moving him toward the edge of the cliff. He was extremely weak but he tried his best.

  Moving Walding was a little different from moving Morales. Morales had tried his hardest to help. He would slide and crawl. Walding, however, couldn’t move at all. He was probably in shock and incredibly weak from losing so much blood. So when the soldiers reached the edge of a berm, one man would lower Walding down to another. It went on like that until they came to a drop-off that was too wide to lower him by hand. They were stuck.

  But then Shurer had an idea. He removed a green nylon cord from the cargo pocket on his pants—the one Ford had forced the entire team to carry—and wrapped it underneath Walding’s arms. Then the soldiers lowered Walding to the next rock. Shurer had questioned why they had to carry the chord. He didn’t think they would ever need it. But if he hadn’t had it now, there’d have been no way they could safely lower Walding.

  It took a half hour or so, but Walding was finally at the bottom of the cliff. The soldiers waiting there moved him to the casualty collection point, where he was placed on stretcher near Morales. He heard Morales say something to him, but he couldn’t answer. He was too feeble.

  It was easier for him just to close his eyes.

  57

  Behr

  They were finally ready for Behr.

  “You’re next, man,” Carter said.

  Behr tried to smile, but was too weak.

  He was glad they were attempting to move him from this hellhole. And for the first time since the firefight began, he had a sense that he could get out of there alive. But he also had some concerns. How were they going to move him when he was immobile? Would the move exacerbate his wounds? His right leg was dead—he couldn’t move it at all. The bullet must have dislocated bones, he thought.

  Sanders and Carter lifted Behr slowly. The soldiers also helped him into his body armor. They wanted to make sure he was protected on the way down. Once on his feet, Behr felt light-headed. He had lost a lot of blood, and if he wasn’t already in shock, he was close to it. The morphine had played a
role, too. The narcotic makes you sleepy and slows your breathing. He knew he had to be alert, because any way off the mountain—short of a helicopter—would involve climbing, and he was in no condition to walk, let alone climb.

  But they had to get off the ledge quickly. He knew his fellow soldiers were risking their lives by standing and firing at the enemy. They were doing it to draw their attention away from him. Sanders and Carter wrapped their arms under Behr’s torso and began walking toward the edge of a cliff away from the gunfire.

  When they reached the edge, Behr peered down—and it didn’t seem like that was a good way to leave. It was steep, but it was the only way they could move off the mountain without being exposed to gunfire.

  Behr took a deep breath. He was always searching for meaning in his life. From his teenage days in the Pentecostal church to Bible college to acting to the Green Berets. His search had led him here, to the edge of a cliff. If he survived this, he could face anything. No more running. But first he had to survive. Moving down the mountain was dangerous. And even that didn’t go as planned.

  It began with one person on a ledge lowering him to another soldier stationed on the rocks below. It was a slow, tedious process. They had to be careful. One wrong move—a slip or a fall—and it could exacerbate Behr’s wounds. At first, it went smoothly. And then it happened, like everything on this mission, another glitch. As they were lowering him, his body armor snagged on a jagged rock that jutted from the cliff face.

  “I can’t move,” he shouted. “Don’t drop me, man.”

  Carter and Sanders tried pulling him back up. Then they tried tugging him down. But nothing seemed to work. Meanwhile, Behr was dangling and in excruciating pain. He was afraid about aggravating his injuries. At that point, the soldiers had no other option but to cut off his body armor with scissors. When they did this, he dropped more than ten feet, but landed on top of a soldier. This cushioned the impact of the fall, but Behr was in agony. I don’t know how much more I can take, he thought. His body had been jolted with two rounds from an AK-47. A rock had smashed into his stomach after a two-thousand-pound bomb blasted a building. Now this?