Into the Fire: A Firsthand Account of the Most Extraordinary Battle in the Afghan War

by Bing West

  They were in the air, screeching our way with their very rocket-like sound. You don’t have time to react. The hair on the back of your neck tingles for a split second before the bang. I jumped on the .50-cal and pumped out rounds, while Lt. Johnson tried to lay an azimuth for our mortars. Then my gun jammed.

  The lieutenant and I ran into the concrete watchtower at the main gate to get another gun. No sooner had I hopped on a 240 machine gun than a rocket shook the tower. An Askar picked up an RPG to shoot out the other window. I grabbed it out of his hands and placed it under my feet. The back-blast in that enclosed space would have fried us. I shouted down at Doc Layton to start shooting back. You need to get your firepower going if you want to keep the enemy from popping up and firing. It’s all about volume, aggression, overpowering them with a flood of bullets and explosions.

  “I’m a doc!” he yelled back. In our previous skirmishes, he had been there to patch us up, not to kill anybody.

  “C’mon, Doc. Corpsmen can shoot back when they need to!” I yelled.

  He started firing his peashooter M4 rifle toward the dushmen moving on the hill at least seven hundred meters away, probably setting up more rockets. A ridiculous range for the M4. We heard a sudden screech before another rocket slammed into the side of the tower. An Askar tapped me on the shoulder. He had a shocked look on his face and was pointing down. The bone was sticking out of his right shin where his foot had been, and blood was gushing out.

  “Doc Layton, put a tourniquet on this!” I screamed. Doc had something better to do now, the thing he had come for.

  I gestured at two Askars to carry the wounded man down the metal outside stairs. Twice they dropped him as more rockets slammed in. Lt. Johnson saw that they were just killing the guy and he jumped up to take care of the situation. Doc Layton grabbed the 240 and started ripping off bursts as I put the wounded man over my shoulder and headed down the stairs. Halfway down, a rocket hit a truck next to the tower. I leapt the last flight of stairs and landed hard on the ground. Lt. Johnson ran out and stopped a Ford Ranger that was headed out of the area.

  Lt. Johnson was screaming at our Askars to return fire. The rockets had them spooked. I lowered the wounded man into the truck bed. Lt. Johnson calmed down the driver and the Ranger drove toward the med station.

  I climbed back up the tower to help Doc Layton, who was still blasting away with the 240. I turned around on the steps to see Johnson sprinting across the base to the mortar pit. A shriek and boom followed—a rocket hit the tree next to Johnson. I was okay, but I was sure it must have got the lieutenant. You can’t process what you just saw, or think you saw. But a few seconds later he emerged black-faced from the smoke, brushing off his clothes. We laughed about it as we kept shooting. I took over the 240 from Doc Layton. An enemy PKM machine gun had joined the fight, and some rounds were pinging off the tower. The enemy’s Russian PKMs and our 240s are a match, both shooting .308-caliber bullets at a rate of about 750 per minute.

  “Where’s Staff Sgt. Kenefick?” I yelled.

  Doc Layton pointed toward the northeast tower.

  “Get over there and stay with him!” I yelled.

  Suicide bombers sometimes rushed the wire, trying to take an infidel with them as they evaporated in a red flash. Without hesitating, Doc Layton ran down the stairs, across the open space, and into the tower with Staff Sgt. Kenefick. Two or three seconds later, a rocket slammed into their bunker, exploding to pieces an Afghan worker huddled there beside the sandbags. Smoke rolled out of the tower.

  “They’re gone!” I yelled to Johnson, not believing what I had just seen.

  I resumed firing. It’s all you can do. The best first aid at that point was to return fire. Johnson worked the radio.

  “Fox 3-1, Fox 3-1, this is Fox 3, Staff Sgt. Kenefick, Doc Layton … Come on, man! Answer up!”

  We kept firing, but it seemed unworldly now. We were on automatic. Lt. Johnson got on the radio again.

  “Three-1, Fox 3-1, this is Fox 3, Staff Sgt. Kenefick, Doc Layton … Come on, man! Answer up!”

  Then finally …

  “Yeah, yeah, this is 3-1. We’re good.”

  Ten minutes later, our attack helicopters began their strafing runs—low, rumbling brrrs, like a giant burping. Incredible firepower, those lovely birds. Enemy fire ceased. Attack over.

  Johnson and I ran over to the smoking bunker, as Staff Sgt. Kenefick and Doc Layton stumbled out. The four of us sat on the bloody sandbags in the growing dusk, talking about it. Their eyes were slightly glazed and wide, wide open.

  As a grunt, I was resigned about death. I don’t go to church. To me, organized religions seem like bureaucracies. But I believed in God. Grunts see His acts on the battlefield. Guys beside you get shot or blown up. You don’t. God has a plan that we won’t understand until we cross to the other side. There’s no sense obsessing about getting tagged. Either a bullet has your name on it or it doesn’t. No need for philosophizing.

  Lt. Johnson, Staff Sgt. Kenefick, and Doc Layton, though, weren’t infantry. They had considered that by coming to Afghanistan they might die, but it hadn’t kicked in until now. Now they had heard the screams and seen the blood. Everybody, soot-covered, understood that now—that if we went home together, it might not be alive.

  The Askars were cleaning up the bloody mess not six feet from us, taking away the ripped-up body of their friend.

  We mumbled some stuff. All of us were too embarrassed to talk about our feelings, but we knew what we were all thinking: this shit was for real, and there were only the four of us.

  “We’ll be there for each other,” Doc Layton said.

  The surfer dude surprised me. He had said the one thing that made any sense.

  Chapter 7

  GANJIGAL

  We were always solid, but now it was as if we were stitched together, even while each of us thought the other three were hilarious nut cases. Lt. Johnson prowled the Afghan barracks, determined to stamp out the “RPG cigarettes.” Doc Layton, who’d never had a short haircut in his life, had decided that while his real calling was saving lives, you can’t do that if you’re dead. From now on, he was shooting back without waiting to be told. Staff Sgt. Kenefick was insufferable. His beloved Yankees had gone on a two-month tear and seemed destined for the World Series. Every time they won, he acted like he had been in the game. The staff sergeant also fancied himself quite the basketball player. I couldn’t wait to get him on a court and dunk the ball over his head. Then I’d hustle off before he discovered that was my one and only basketball move.

  It wasn’t long after the rocket attack that we received a call saying we were needed at FOB Joyce to run a mission in the morning. We started prepping to go when we were told to stand by; the mission had been pushed back another day. Lt. Johnson told me to prepare to move our Afghan company down to Joyce. He wasn’t told what the mission was due to operational security.

  I checked the ammo and water loads for our sixty-odd Askars. Whatever was ahead, it wasn’t a big deal. I figured it would be one more useless “key leader engagement” in one more mountain village, like dozens of others.

  In the afternoon of September 7, 2009, our convoy of about eight vehicles drove south. When we got to Joyce we found out that our mission was to provide security for a key leader engagement in a mountain village named Ganjigal. Ganjigal lay two miles north of Joyce and we drove right by the mouth of the valley. Ganjigal sounded like the name of an Irish town, full of smiling faces and friendly pubs. I could see a few of the larger compounds far back on a hillside, nestled against steep ridgelines.

  “Bad place,” Hafez muttered. “Bad people.”

  That got my attention. Hafez, who knew every village in Kunar, rarely pointed one out as more hostile than the others. It didn’t make me fearful, but my antennae were raised. I was suddenly more aware of my gunnery mission as it related to the team.

  Located two miles north of Joyce, Ganjigal Valley was an infiltration corridor from next-door Pakistan
. Video from night cameras on unmanned aerial vehicles showed donkey trains wending their way up to the border, smuggling out cedar planks and bringing in arms. You couldn’t call a fire mission on donkeys and shepherds, though, and U.S. patrols rarely ventured up the valley, because Battalion 1-32 was overextended protecting the main convoy routes.

  Occasional shots from the valley were fired at passing U.S. convoys. Yet unarmed Askars casually walked to a market just outside the valley, with no fear of being targeted. The local understanding seemed to be: don’t bother us, and we won’t bother you.

  * * *

  A few weeks earlier the local truce had broken down. Rockets fired from the ridge above Ganjigal had ignited a huge fuel fire inside Joyce. Fearing retaliation, Ganjigal elders trooped down to Joyce for a shura, or a palaver. They proposed that the Americans hire workers from Ganjigal and pay for a tribal militia that would stop the rockets. The Afghan border police commander, Lt. Col. Ayoub, believed the villagers were mostly Taliban, and he reacted angrily to what he understood as a demand bribe to stop the rockets.

  “These Americans aren’t Russians,” he told them. “They didn’t bomb you after you burned their base. They owe you nothing for your bad behavior.”

  Battalion 1-32, not amused at being shaken down, threatened to build an outpost in the valley, thus stopping all smuggling across the border, which would have devastated the local economy. After thinking that over, the elders returned a few days later and issued verbal support for the government over the provincial public radio. Capt. Ray Kaplan, the 1-32 assistant intelligence officer, was skeptical of their motives.

  “The Taliban approved the radio broadcast,” Kaplan said, “maybe to get goodies in return for an empty gesture. Those who spoke on the radio could be goat herders for all we know, with zero status inside the village.”

  In early September, a U.S. patrol entered a hamlet near Ganjigal to test the reaction of the locals. The villagers seemed friendly. When the patrol left, only a few PKM machine-gun rounds were fired at them. So the effort was deemed a success. Inside 1-32, the view was that Ganjigal was “pro-U.S. and supportive of the Afghan government.”

  The elders then asked that Afghan—not American—soldiers visit Ganjigal and provide money for their mosque. So our key leader engagement was scheduled for September 7—and was then pushed back a day. Most Afghan males—whether merchants, villagers, police, or soldiers—had cell phones, and they jabbered constantly. The delay was equivalent to announcing our movement over the public radio.

  The four of us on Team Monti, together with about ten other advisors in the command orbit of Joyce, attended the mission brief. Few Afghans or soldiers from 1-32 were present; they had been briefed separately. Second Lt. Fabayo briefed Operation Buri Booza, or Dancing Goat II. He used only one slide, showing a photomap of the valley. Coming on top of Hafez’s warning, the map clearly showed a trap. (See map.) We were walking into a box canyon surrounded by high ridgelines. The horseshoe-shaped valley provided the ideal shooting gallery for snipers and machine-gun crews. I would have planned to go in there with heavy guns, armor, and air cover.

  The village of Ganjigal consisted of two small hamlets separated by a gravel wash. The plan was to advance from the west up the wash and turn left into North Ganjigal, about fifty compounds stacked one on top of another on a steep hillside right beneath a massive ridgeline that ran back into Pakistan. The largest compound consisted of a concrete foundation with half-completed walls.

  On the other side of the wash, on a steep finger of land, South Ganjigal held about fifteen compounds enclosed behind stout mud walls. Farther south was another wash, then another wall of rock ridgeline. A school funded by the United States was perched on its slope. Constructed of thick stones anchored in heavy cement, the school could withstand avalanches, blizzards, floods, or machine-gun fire. Despite American offers to pay for teachers, the school had been empty for three years. The villagers claimed their children had to work, leaving no time for school.

  Two miles south of all that was Camp Joyce, with its 120-millimeter mortars at ready; 120s were fearsome shells that dropped straight down and smashed anything in their path.

  “There are reports of ten to twenty Taliban, maybe more,” Fabayo said. “The likely course of action is that they shoot at us as we pull out. That’s what happened to 1-32 on their patrol up there a few days ago.”

  Historically the Taliban had not sprung ambushes from inside villages, so that wasn’t discussed at the briefing. Plus, we were going in with ninety Afghans and fifteen advisors, with a platoon from 1-32 deployed behind us as a quick reaction force.

  “This show belongs to our Afghan counterparts,” Fabayo said. “We advisors will stand off to the side and let them talk with the elders. We’re not in the lead. We’re assisting.”

  That made no sense, I thought. Considering who was doing the briefing and who was hearing it, we were in the tactical lead, even if we claimed otherwise. No Afghan had a clue how to call in the 120 mortars. I had been over this ground before with Maj. Williams and Fabayo. I’m not good at hiding my feelings, and I may have shaken my head in disagreement during the brief.

  It was nuts to rely upon indirect 120 mortar fire alone. One look at the valley dictated bringing the direct firepower mounted on our armored Humvees. Don’t bring a knife to a gunfight; bring a cannon. The land sloped up so steeply that houses were supported by those below them. The compounds were made of stone, concrete, and adobe bricks baked by centuries of summers. They looked like a set of interlocking gun pillboxes.

  Outside each main house was a small dirt courtyard with an outhouse, a clothesline, a clay cooking oven, and a few stalls for the cows and donkeys. Scrawny barnyard fowl and mean watchdogs ran loose. High mud walls enclosed every compound, separated by twisting footpaths littered with human and animal feces. Inside this rat’s nest of alleyways, a man could walk from one end of the village to the other without being seen and fully protected against small-arms fire. Big, boomerang-shaped farming terraces stepped down the hill to the wash below. More than twenty of these giant steps guarded each side of the wash—as did two square stone watchtowers, useful, no doubt, over many centuries of warfare. Each terrace was held in place by a stone retaining wall four to six feet high on the downhill side.

  Lt. Fabayo laid it out: Team Monti and the lead platoon of Askars would walk up the wash and enter North Ganjigal. Team Monti would continue east to a water tank at the end of the village to make sure no bad guys came down the trail from Pakistan. When the meeting with the elders was finished, we would walk back down to our vehicles and drive twenty minutes back to Joyce.

  “We’re walking in?” I asked. “We’re not taking our gun trucks?”

  The way to get into those two hamlets, it seemed to me, was to drive armor right up the wash between them. A half-dozen Humvees with .50-cal guns could provide protection for the meeting. There didn’t seem to be any other way to do it. The mountains made it too hard to flank around and get above the villages.

  “No. We’re going in at dawn,” Fabayo said. “The noise of trucks would alert them. I don’t want to lose the element of surprise.”

  Element of surprise, my ass. I didn’t know how ninety noisy Askars, arriving after a day of cell phone chatter, could have an element of surprise walking into a mountain village. Even as a twenty-one-year-old E-4, I could assure you that a ninety-man patrol is incapable of having any sort of element of surprise.

  Lt. Johnson looked at me, shaking his head to warn me to be quiet. He pointed at the map and pantomimed making notes. I got it. He wanted me to stop critiquing what I couldn’t change and come up with the tactics for our lead element.

  Thinking the danger lay on the far ridgelines and not closer in, my idea was simple. Because Team Monti was in the lead, we’d be the first to engage. So I’d take point with a 240 machine gun with five hundred rounds. I’d put Dodd Ali and his spit-polished SAW on my flank. I assumed we’d be hit by a few snipers, covered
by a PKM. If the 240 couldn’t suppress them, Dodd Ali would cover me while I called for artillery.

  I saw Capt. William Swenson sitting among us. He was the quiet, long-haired Border Police advisor I knew only by reputation. For ten months, he and his SNCO (senior noncommissioned officer), Sgt. 1st Class Kenneth Westbrook, had been living with the police, driving around in an unarmed Ford Ranger pickup. Swenson joked that they were “an Army of Two.”

  Swenson was on his third combat tour and had held over a hundred key leader engagements with mountain clans. He popped up in the strangest places. Once, when Lt. Kerr was conducting a patrol into very remote valleys outside Dangam, his soldiers stopped by the compound of Gal Rahman, a border police chief. They were greeted by a lanky, beardless man in a gray man-dress and a flat pahkohl hat. It was Swenson. He had been invited to a wedding and had stayed on in the mountains for a week as the chief’s guest, despite the news that a “soft American target” had made its way back into Pakistan.

  I was glad to see Swenson at the briefing. He was known for calling in artillery fire on the dot. Adjusting artillery in the mountains wasn’t easy. So I planned to introduce myself to Swenson and compare coordinates.

  Fabayo said helicopters weren’t in support of us, but would be diverted if needed. He did say artillery was in support and pointed to the Kilo Echoes, or artillery registration points, marked by six red crosses on the photomap. I watched Swenson check them against his own map.

  “Three-070 is the Undo KE, correct?” he said.

  “Undo” meant we were pulling out. Swenson was concentrating on how we would get out of that box canyon if things went wrong. He wanted a fire mission to conceal our retreat. Maj. Williams believed 1-32 had assured him that “we could put smoke on the deck for screening.” KE 3070 was the registration point for that smoke screen.

  “KE 3070 is the Undo,” Fabayo agreed.