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

by Bing West

  We were alone again and very exposed. Puffs of dirt from bullets pelted the ground like hailstones; the air was full of cracklings and rumblings, as if an invisible thunderstorm were rolling across the sky.

  Only Rod’s skill at the wheel was preventing me from being hit again and again. Bullets make different sounds when they pass by you. The cracks of bullets breaking the sound barrier mean they’re high, maybe five or ten feet over your head. The bullets that snap close by your ears are the real killers. A few, losing power and slowing down, made a low buzzing sound.

  Strange though it may seem, I wasn’t scared or angry. I was beyond that. I didn’t think I was going to die; I knew I was dead. There wasn’t anything I could do about it. I wasn’t a thinking human being. I had gone somewhere else. I wasn’t firing the machine gun; I was the machine gun. Rod wasn’t driving the truck; Rod was the truck.

  I had melded with my weapon. I was no more human than the five-foot machine gun I was embracing. We were locked together, metal and flesh. Without that .50-cal, I would have quivered like the Askars, helpless in the storm. But with that weapon, I felt transported. I had something to do until the blackness came.

  A .50-cal holds true out to half a mile. There was no wind and little need to fire high to arc the rounds onto targets. The gun shot rounds as big as cigars, and every fourth one was a glowing red tracer. Firing four- to eight-round bursts, I had walked rounds onto targets dozens of times up at Monti. The hills around Ganjigal were no different. I figured out roughly where a target was and let the .50-cal do the walking.

  I wasn’t paying any attention to the Afghan soldiers. Rod and I planned to keep driving east until we were obliterated or we found my team. Suddenly, with no warning, five or six Askars who were lying in a terrace about a hundred meters away leapt up and raced toward our truck. Wham, one was shot in the back and pitched forward. Wham, a second man went down screaming. Wham, a third—then the fourth and the fifth.

  I had never seen anything like it. Five men taken down in five seconds. There was so much screeching and shooting that I couldn’t pick out the location of the weapon that shot them. To deliver such lethal grazing fire, the machine-gunner must have been hidden only a few hundred meters away, with a clear line of sight and his bipod firmly anchored. Yet whoever shot those men didn’t raise his gun sights and stitch me. I knew he was looking at me, but I couldn’t see him. There was nothing I could do. He let me live. Not one of his rounds even struck our truck. I can’t explain it.

  We couldn’t see around the corners of the boomerang terrace walls, but Valadez, way up there, could see for us.

  “They’re coming at you!” he yelled over the radio. “I can see them closing from both sides. They’re swarming you!”

  In front of our truck, I saw a few guys sprinting across the wash from left to right, heads low. I don’t think they saw us coming up behind them, or heard the truck engine over the din of the gunfire. They scurried too quickly for me to get off a burst. Glancing to my right, I looked smack into the eyes of five or six men in dirty man-dresses, crouched alongside a drainage ditch, not ten meters away. When I gaped at them, they ducked down like they were playing hide-and-seek.

  It took me a few seconds to realize they were spreading out to seal off the open end of the horseshoe valley, ziplocking the frozen Askars inside a fire sack. Rod and I had blundered into their rear.

  We were bouncing over rocks no faster than a man can run when a bearded dushman clutching an AK leapt out of a ditch and sprinted after us, like a man trying to catch a bus. My gun almost wouldn’t swivel low enough to shoot him—the barrel was tilted down as far as it could go. I fired into his chest and he went down like he had hit a glass wall. A bullet doesn’t blow a man back like in the movies. Either he stumbles on or he falls dead. This man fell dead.

  Rod was yelling at me—maybe I was hypnotized for a second by the death. There was a guy trying to open the right door. I couldn’t depress the .50-cal that low.

  “I can’t get him!” I yelled. “The gun won’t go down enough!”

  It takes the brain twelve thousandths of a second to react to danger. My mind was a complete blank. I had fired so many thousands of rounds that I didn’t think what I was doing. Once you’ve practiced a motion long enough, it becomes second nature. Some researchers call it “expertise-induced amnesia.” Athletes call it “being in the zone.” I call it self-preservation. I grabbed my M4, leaned out, and shot the guy four or five times in the shoulder and the neck. It was like shooting a zombie. There was no shock power in the little 5.56-millimeter bullets. He fell to the ground.

  I pivoted back to the .50-cal and grabbed the spade handle. The weapon, my hands, and my eyes were working as a trained unit, independent of my brain. Man, sight picture, shoot. You don’t really look at the target. The enemy remains out of focus; you concentrate on the sight picture. Man, sight picture, shoot. I hit one or two guys next to the truck and the others ducked back into the ditch.

  Valadez came back on the radio.

  “Rod, watch your front!”

  Rod was focused on keeping traction in the loose gravel. If the truck got stuck, even for a moment, we’d be toast. He looked ahead to see a bearded, hatless man in his mid-thirties, dressed in brick-red man-jams with a green chest rig full of ammo, running toward the truck and firing an AK at us from his hip.

  “Hold on, Homey!” Rod yelled.

  He hit the accelerator. The truck hit the man squarely in his chest. There was a bump, and then another bump under the tires.

  “Holy shit!” Rod yelled. “I just ran over a guy.”

  “Back up and do it again!”

  Ducking our firepower, the dushmen were pulling back into the terraces, jumping behind the walls, turkey-necking out to shoot at our blind spots. All had beards and none looked young. Most wore dirty clothes—some with Afghan Army trousers showing underneath. Many wore green chest rigs for ammunition and Afghan Army helmets. I would have shot more of them if I didn’t have to look twice to make sure they weren’t our guys.

  A few hundred meters behind us, a monster-big Blackhawk was setting down in a terrace. I could see the blades turning and supposed it was a medevac. If the dushmen had the brains to ignore Rod and me and fire in the other direction, it would be a mess. The chopper was an easy mark for an RPG. I sprayed in a wide arc around the terraces to my right. I wasn’t aiming; I just wanted the assholes to keep their heads down and their jihad thoughts on us. That chopper took off almost as soon as it landed—a great evac job by ballsy pilots.

  The Askars remained frozen in the wash. We were all going to die if they stayed where they were and didn’t fight back. We could maybe hold open the neck in the bottle for them to escape—if they would fight for it. Valadez kept shouting warnings to us, as I concentrated on shooting to my right and to the front. For every fifty rounds I was pumping out, we’d get two hundred back, including RPG rounds. One exploded about fifteen meters to our right front. Somehow the shrapnel didn’t shred our front tire. I scanned the hills and the houses for the dust raised by the back blasts of the RPG tube—no luck. Some 107 rockets were mixed in, or maybe a recoilless rifle.

  Rod was jerking the truck around to avoid their fire, but they couldn’t miss us forever. I knew it wouldn’t be a bullet; a red-hot chunk of jagged shrapnel would rip off my face, leaving it up to Rod to get out alone.

  My sweaty right hand kept slipping off the gun’s handgrip and butterfly trigger. When I wiped the sweat away, I realized it was red. I ducked down in the turret, letting my right arm dangle, to grab a bandage.

  Rod looked at me in a startled way.

  “You okay, man? You hit?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine. Sweating like a pig is all. Go. Go.”

  I had been shot above the elbow—a bleeder that did no damage. The bone was fine. In a fight, adrenaline deadens the pain. I did a little wrapping and got back to shooting.

  I had no idea where to go. My team was up ahead somewhere and out o
f radio contact. Each whoosh of an incoming RPG still caused me to involuntarily flinch. The air was sizzling and I had to scream for Rod to hear me.

  “Do you see the team?”

  “Negative!”

  It was after eight in the morning and I was out of ideas. Then two small OH-58 Kiowa helicopters skimmed around my turret. The two-person Kiowa is about the size of an Austin Mini. It carries about two hundred rounds of .50-cal and a few small rockets. Think of an airborne motorcycle or an angry wasp.

  The frustrated Kiowa pilots had been listening on their radios for the last forty minutes while Joyce dithered. Now that they’d been turned loose, the pilots couldn’t do enough to help us. They’d provided the cover for Swenson’s Command Group to get out of the wash, and now they were hovering above me. With my handheld, I made contact.

  “This is Fox 3-3. I can’t find my team. Four Marines are missing up in that village. I don’t have a grid or radio contact with them.”

  “Three-3, this is Pale Horse,” the pilot said. “Roger. We’ll stay with you. Give us a vector.”

  “Pale Horse, the heaviest fire is coming from that white schoolhouse, grid 972 678.”

  “Three-3, we got it. Be right back.”

  The two Kiowas peeled off to the southeast and poured their remaining rockets into the schoolhouse. They then darted forward and buzzed back and forth over South Ganjigal. Dark smudges of smoke burst around them—the dushmen were using their RPGs as antiaircraft weapons.

  I was swiveling the gun around, firing short bursts. When I saw a turkey-necker, I’d keep shooting until he went down or I had pulverized the terrace wall where he was hiding. I didn’t have to aim down the gun sight; all I had to do was walk in the red tracers. The timing on the overheated gun was slipping, so I placed the bolt release in the up position and fired single shots.

  The more fucked up things got, the more Rod and I started laughing. He was steering away from RPGs streaming at us and laughing, and I was shooting the big gun and laughing. Definitely crazy, but your emotions have to go somewhere.

  The Kiowas, dipping low for their gun runs, looked too flimsy to last another minute. I’d hear a quick rattle of gunfire from them or toward them, and they’d peel off or zip straight up, bank sharply around, and zoom in again. The black puffs around them continued, but the enemy fire slackened on us as the Kiowas darted around. They were like a steel umbrella over us.

  A few minutes later, Pale Horse came back on my net.

  “Three-3, we’re Winchester. We’ll be back in fifteen mikes.”

  Winchester meant they had expended their munitions. They were too light to carry much, and they had been shooting at targets wherever they looked. The firing picked up. We were again the pinata. I climbed down from the turret to talk to Rod and Hafez. We had started in with six ammo cans. Now we were down to one. I had fired more than two thousand rounds.

  “Guys, we need a new gun,” I said. It was three steps forward, two back. As we turned around, I saw an Askar crawling feebly toward the road. We stopped and I hopped out. A PKM machine gun was tilling the ground around me, so I dodged back and forth until I reached him. One Kiowa, out of ammo, hovered above me and distracted the enemy, ignoring the RPG shells exploding in the air. I turned the Askar onto his back. Hit by three rounds in his upper chest and neck, he was gurgling and drowning in his own blood. I rolled him onto his side, and he died before I could pick him up.

  Chapter 12

  INTO THE WASH

  I hopped back into the truck and we drove back down the wash to get ammo.

  We had turned left out of the wash and onto the narrow track back to the casualty collection point.

  The Afghans were turning back to their wounded. When I hopped out to help them, they asked if more helicopters were coming, or whether they should drive their casualties back to Joyce.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  It wasn’t that I didn’t care, but I had my own problems. Where was my team? I looked around for Maj. Williams. He was sitting off to one side, wounded and in shock. There were four or five vehicles and at least twenty Askars milling around. These were our Afghans—we had come down from Monti together. I glanced hopefully from group to group. Hafez was asking if they had seen Lt. Johnson.

  “They say the lieutenant is back in Ganjigal,” Hafez said. “The team didn’t make it out.”

  Shit!

  Some of the wounded Askars had made it to the ORP where the U.S. Army platoon had stayed. They reported to the TOC that six Afghan soldiers were dead and nine wounded. That meant about thirty or forty were still pinned down in the valley or dead out there.

  Hafez, Rod, and I drove back into the wash. Hafez could hand the ammo cans up to me—they’re like big lunch boxes that clip to the gun. We were in good shape as long as the .50-cal didn’t go out of whack again. We didn’t have a kit for quickly changing the barrel, and the gauge for setting the gun’s headspace wasn’t in the toolbox.

  A Ford Ranger driven by an Afghan policeman followed behind our Humvee. The Ranger would make do as an ambulance to ferry out the wounded. As we entered the wash, we passed Swenson and Fabayo in another Ranger truck, heading to the casualty point with two or three wounded or dead Afghans piled in the back. Swenson brought back two dead jihadists, too. That proves he’s a nicer guy than I am.

  Good for them, I thought; those guys are doing something.

  Askars were walking out as we drove back in. Some were dazed, others limping, some leaning on each other. Many had tied a cloth around an arm or a leg. With their chests protected by body armor, they thought they weren’t badly hit. But they were inviting death within an hour or two. A bullet wound in the arm or leg often doesn’t bleed profusely. Instead your blood drips out steadily, your blood pressure drops, your body goes into shock, and you die. Doc Layton had given them classes for a month, but in the chaos of combat, they had forgotten everything.

  I wanted to ignore the Askars, because somewhere, farther up the wash, my team was fighting to stay alive. I’d promised to get them, and Rod and I had the only gun truck willing and able to go in. I wanted to pretend I didn’t see the bleeding. Besides, they were not far from the collection point, where they might get help or a ride out.

  We’d gone only another hundred meters when I saw an Afghan soldier huddled behind a rock. No other Askar was around. We were the advisors, which comes with a responsibility, like being parents.

  I had no choice.

  “Hold up, Rod.”

  I climbed down from the turret and ran over to the Askar. He’d taken a bullet in the thigh and was slowly bleeding out. I kept a stack of tourniquets in my medpack and knew how to apply them. I wrapped a tourniquet around his thigh. In my frustration, I twisted it extra tight and he screamed.

  “Hafez, tell him to shut up,” I said. “Hurting is better than dying.”

  Not the most soothing bedside manner. I knew I was being unfair. If someone cinched a thin strap around my leg and twisted as hard as he could, I’d scream, too.

  If you’re a grunt, you will come face to face with horrendous gore. You have to steel yourself to seeing mangled bodies and smelling blood. Doctors and nurses cope with screaming and suffering every day. I had dressed out dozens of deer. You learn to dissociate from the task when you’re pulling out warm guts or cutting off slabs of dripping meat, with the blood sticking to your hands.

  Doc Layton had kidded me for being a hospital pack rat. He was the corpsman, but my medpack, stuffed with everything I could scrounge, was bigger than his. I had taken the Combat Lifesaver course while stationed with my battalion. Plus, on a sniper team, you don’t have a corpsman, so I had to learn a variety of emergency skills. It was interesting, so I tried to learn as much as I could, especially about trauma.

  Hafez and I moved the moaning Askar into the back of the Ranger behind us, and we both drove back to the casualty collection point. It was now about nine in the morning and Swenson and Fabayo had come forward again in their Ford Ra
nger.

  The Kiowas had rearmed and come back on station, directing us toward another wounded. Like it or not, we had been pressed into the ambulance business. The Kiowa commanded by Chief Warrant Officer Yossarian Silano—a good name for a guy in a crazy war—had been a Marine grunt before becoming an Army pilot. His bird was easy to talk to and directed me where to go, sometimes hovering so low I could just about reach up and touch his skids. He was covering my rear whenever I got out of the truck.

  Twice, Hafez and I got out, climbed up the sides of terraces, found the Askars, and lugged them down the terrace walls to the wash. After we’d loaded two into a Ranger, my brain finally kicked in: I couldn’t be the gunner and the corpsman at the same time. I didn’t need Hafez out there in the fields with me. Rod, though, needed someone on the gun.

  “Hafez, will you take over the .50-cal?” I said. “I can do more good on the ground.”

  Hafez climbed into the turret. I dragged an Askar to the road, and Hafez waved to an Afghan truck to pick him up. But the .50-cal was acting up and Hafez had difficulty clearing the jams. He was jacking the bolt back and I was nervous that he’d pull off the back plate with the bolt locked to the rear. If he did, the pressure of his next and last burst would drive the plate into his chest. To coax the gun back into firing shape, every so often I’d slip and slide up into the turret—blood from my arm and the wounded Askars had spattered everywhere inside the truck—and try to reset the gun.

  The incoming fire didn’t stop. The machine-gunners were aiming at movement. They were shooting short bursts, with good fire discipline. Some gunners seemed to have spotters hidden in the houses. They weren’t using tracers, so no green rounds gave away their positions. Without tracers, though, they couldn’t adjust well. A machine-gunner shooting from five hundred meters away couldn’t tell if he was missing me to the right or the left. Plus, firing at a downward angle of 30 degrees, they were overcompensating.