One Bullet Away

by Nathaniel Fick

  Jim and I occupied the highest crag on the rock pile the battalion surrounded. We lined up our laser range finders, rifles, binoculars, and scopes for easy use. Then we began to dig. We rotated digging and watching over the valley beneath us. I dug while Jim stood watch, and then we switched. The sand was dry and loose between the rocks, but digging was slow. We didn’t have full-size shovels, only collapsible entrenching tools that attached to the outside of our packs. By prying rocks from the ground, we built a parapet in front of our deepening hole and soon had a protected vantage point overlooking the valley.

  “People down there are checking us out.” Jim pointed out along a rocky ridge that extended below us into the valley. Two figures peeked from behind a boulder. I focused my binoculars on them. Young guys, maybe our age, dressed in traditional shalwar kameez. I didn’t see any weapons.

  “Probably shepherds or villagers from down by the river. Maybe they saw our helicopters.”

  We watched shadows in the valley lengthen in the dusk. The wind picked up, and the temperature plummeted. My thin gloves had holes in all the fingertips, and I resolved to fix them as soon as I had time. We fantasized about building a fire, but nothing attracts bullets in the dark like a flame. So we sat and shivered and watched. After sunset, the eastern horizon flashed as if with distant lightning.

  “Air Force is pounding the piss out of Kandahar,” Jim mumbled around a piece of dried grass stuck in his mouth. He reclined on his elbows, perfectly at ease.

  I tried to feel some remorse, some sense of the gravity of watching people die by the score. But I couldn’t. The explosions’ flickering yellow light reflected off the high overcast. Low rumbling followed the biggest flashes.

  “Poor fuckers,” Jim said. “Most of them have probably never even seen an airplane up close, and now they have JDAMs coming down their chimneys.”

  Jim was referring to the Joint Direct Attack Munition, a GPS-guided “smart bomb” that could hit targets with pinpoint accuracy. Our conversation was interrupted every few minutes by radio calls from the LAR patrol that had departed at sunset. The patrol was supposed to move down into the valley, where recon was looking for a site to ford the river, and then stop traffic along the highway. So far, the night had been a bust.

  We listened in as the recon platoon got a Humvee stuck in the river’s silt and spent three hours trying to free it. Meanwhile, Cossack was teaching us all a lesson about the unforeseen complications of real-world operations. In training, LAVs burn diesel fuel. But pulling up to the pump is not so easy in Afghanistan. We relied on aerial resupplies of fuel from the helos based at Rhino. They carried five-hundred-gallon bladders that the LAVs could pump from when they landed. To streamline our logistical tail, all the vehicles burned JP-8, the same aviation kerosene burned by the helicopters. But JP-8, being cleaner than diesel, burns hotter and faster.

  “Shaka, this is Cossack. We’re burning fuel at an unbelievable rate. I’m almost at half a tank, and we haven’t even crossed the river yet.”

  Shaka aborted the mission, and the LAVs whined back into Pentagon long before dawn. Our night as the main effort had been a frustrating waste.

  Two nights later, I shook Jim awake shortly before midnight.

  “Your watch, man.”

  Our new hole was perched on a sandy ridge, hundreds of feet above the river and the highway. We had moved from Pentagon to reduce the roundtrip time and distance for the patrols. I had gone on the last one, the night before. We had sat near the highway for two hours, unable to find any targets. Another fruitless mission. But this night looked more promising. I had watched throughout the evening as lights winked out in the windows of the houses clustered in trees along the riverbanks. Around dusk, traffic began to move on the highway — trucks mostly, traveling west from Kandahar.

  This patrol base, perfectly situated for defense and observation, had one crucial flaw: the high ridge obstructed line-of-sight radio communication between the colonel and the patrol. Jim and I, with our radios and antennas, sat right on the edge of the ridge. We had a clear shot to the patrol on the highway and to the headquarters tent a few hundred meters down the slope behind us. We became the radio link between the two.

  After climbing out of his sleeping bag, Jim hopped into the hole, rubbing his hands together, and I briefed him. “Cossack is moving toward the highway for interdiction. A recon team, Quizmaster, is looking for a ford site on the river. Patrol doesn’t want to come back the same way it went out. A Huey-Cobra mixed section should launch from Rhino soon to be on station for a couple of hours while they’re stopping traffic. And it’s freezing.”

  Jim took the radio handsets, and I clapped him on the back. I shook out my sleeping bag and shimmied in, zipping it up to my neck. The only sound as I closed my eyes was a subdued chirp each time Jim keyed the handset to relay a message.

  Less than an hour later, he woke me with a shake. By the time I sat up, Jim was twenty feet away, dropping back into the hole. “Get dressed, bro. Shit’s about to go down.”

  Climbing out of my bag, I caught my breath, as if I’d jumped into a cold river. I rushed into my jacket and hat, Kevlar vest, and gloves. The temperature was probably only in the twenties, but the cold had a way of seeping inside you and draining your warmth. We’d been living outside day and night for weeks, without fires or showers or roofs and walls to protect us from the weather.

  A high overcast had blown in, and a cold wind whipped across the ridge, flapping my jacket as I struggled to zip it. Airpower was our lifeline, and we scrutinized the clouds like aspiring meteorologists. They looked high enough to have little effect on us. From left to right, I scanned the sweep of dark horizon. No lights visible. No sounds. No immediate threats. Jim juggled the radios, briefing me between message relays. The raid force was in place down on the highway. The LAVs sat back off the road, with recon closer to the pavement. They had strung a piece of concertina wire across the highway to stop traffic. A Navy P-3 surveillance plane reported a vehicle approaching the roadblock from the direction of Kandahar.

  “Where’s that mixed section?” I wanted the comfort of a pair of attack helicopters nearby.

  “They crashed, bro.”

  “What?”

  “Heard on the radio that at least one of them crashed on takeoff at Rhino. So, yeah, they’re not coming.”

  We watched from the heights, trying to see the LAVs down on the dark plain. Headlights approached from the east and became a Toyota pickup truck. Seeing the wire, the driver slowed, then gunned the engine. He succeeded only in wrapping his axle with wire, and the truck slid to a halt near the Marines. A recon team approached the truck. Their translator told the men to put up their hands.

  Instead, two figures in the truck’s bed sat up from under blankets and raised AK-47s. The Marines opened fire, killing all the men in the truck. Fuel and ammunition ignited. Rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), lying in the bed, cooked off, streaking wildly past the LAVs. I watched the tracer fire in the dark, tendrils of red drawn across a black canvas.

  With dead bodies sprawled on the pavement and the truck now engulfed in flames, the Marines on the scene hurried to put some distance between themselves and the ambush site. As they scrambled to free an LAV, spinning helplessly in soft sand, the battalion radioed a warning from the P-3: two more vehicles approaching from the east. Down on the highway, the forward air controller set up his laser marking system. A minibus and a dump truck, carrying dozens of armed men, stopped a few hundred meters short of the burning wreckage.

  The Marines hunkered down in the shadows, eager to avoid a fair fight. The forward air controller whispered into his radio, talking a Navy jet onto the target. I heard its engine pitch change to a high whine as the pilot dropped the jet’s nose, accelerating, putting the trucks in his sights. Two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped off the wings and whistled through the dark sky. I watched the jet’s glowing afterburners fade into the overcast. Ducking in anticipation, I instinctively closed my eyes.

>   I had seen dozens of air strikes in training, dropped thousands of pounds of ordnance in the Nevada and California deserts. But this was real. Three, two, one… I counted down to the bombs’ impact. The concussion cracked past. Two trucks full of Taliban soldiers disappeared in the flash, leaving only twisted metal and charred lumps of flesh on the highway.

  15

  THE RAID FORCE MADE a triumphal return to Pentagon in the predawn darkness. Weeks later, General Franks would send the MEU a note declaring that its prowess as a “power projection strike force was superbly demonstrated” that night. I laughed when I read the accolade. I hadn’t thought of a few buddies with rifles as anything so grand as a “power projection strike force.”

  Just before sunrise, in the coldest hour of the day, Jim relieved me at the radios, saying, “Don’t touch your rifle without gloves on.” He opened his fingers to show me a palm missing a quarter-size piece of skin. “Cold stuck me right to it.”

  Without even taking my boots off, I lay on the gravel and pulled my sleeping bag over me. I had slept only one hour in the past twenty-four. Thirty seconds later, Jim stood above me.

  “Don’t shoot the messenger, but Shaka wants the platoon commanders at the tent for a brief.”

  “When?”

  “Three minutes ago. Sorry, bro. I must have missed the first call.”

  The wind cut through my skin and I was nearly blind with exhaustion as I stumbled down the ridge. I remembered a night march at Quantico when I’d fallen asleep in midstride and woken up on the pavement with bloody hands. This was why our training had emphasized fatigue. War pares existence to its core — little food, little sleep, little shelter. The only thing I had in excess was stress.

  A dozen people packed the tent. Body heat warmed it, and the generator-powered bulb overhead made the place almost homey, a long way from the dark holes up on the ridge.

  “We’re closing the ring, gentlemen,” Shaka said. He looked tired, too. “Karzai is close to Kandahar. Shirzai is in part of the city. Intel thinks Mullah Omar fled to Pakistan, but Kandahar is still important to us. As you all know, it’s the spiritual capital of the Taliban. And we need that airport.”

  He paused for a moment and turned a page in his green commander’s notebook. “I don’t normally call everyone in here for operations orders, but I wanted to look at each of you. I’ve had officers tell me they can’t accomplish missions because their troops are too tired. Bullshit. You are tired, and those Marines are capable of more than they know. We had a two-hundred-meter gap in the lines last night. It’s sloppy, and it’s dangerous.” He made eye contact with each of us. “Keep your heads in the game.”

  The battalion operations officer took over at a nod from the colonel and began to brief the day’s mission. “At 0130Z 10 December 2001, BLT 1/1 conducts a movement to contact near Kandahar to seize key terrain astride Highway 1 in order to interdict al Qaeda and Taliban forces fleeing from the city.”

  I scribbled notes as the formal order was translated into plain English. “Gents, we’re going to get up on that highway in broad daylight, and you will fuck up anybody who tries to escape until the CIA can sort out who’s who. Everyone with a vehicle will drive up there. Bravo Company,” he pointed at Captain Whitmer standing next to me, “will set up landing points in the desert here and fly up in two CH-53s.”

  Catching the major’s eye, I asked, “Fire support, sir?” Dill’s assessment had been right: outnumbered was fine as long as jets were overhead.

  “Cobra escort during your flight, but they have only thirty-five minutes on station. Otherwise, Navy fixed-wing. Two F-14s, call sign Cosby 41. Four F-18s, call sign Noah 55. Six F-18s, call sign Gumby 21. They’re on station for two hours.”

  The operations officer took a last look at his notebook and slammed it shut. “Two more things. Expect tactics of desperation — car bombs, suicide bombers, booby traps, attempted kidnappings. Also, there are known minefields three kilometers east and four kilometers west of where we’re going, so don’t walk all over the fucking place to take a leak.”

  After the rest of the force snaked down to the river in a winding convoy, I stood on a flat piece of desert with the platoon, cocking my head to hear distant rotor blades. We saw the Cobras first. They raced to our north, flying low and fast. I knew the Super Stallions would be close behind and turned on my strobe light. It was after sunrise, but a thick overcast blended the morning light and the desert into an indistinguishable gray.

  I turned my head as the helicopters roared onto the landing zone we had marked, throwing dust and rocks everywhere. Staff Sergeant Marine and I stood at the tail ramp and counted the Marines aboard. Space was tight because a pallet of fuel cans and ammo was strapped in the center of the cargo bay. I would have to stand on the ramp.

  The crew chief, grinning behind his opaque facemask, handed me a nylon strap and scrambled forward, over the laps of the seated Marines, to get behind his door-mounted machine gun. I looped the strap around my waist and clipped into the airframe overhead. With my boots at the ramp’s edge, I looked down and watched the desert disappear in a cloud of dust.

  We tilted slowly out of the cloud and accelerated, dropping back down to rooftop level. It was a five-minute flight. We passed over the houses I had watched from afar for so many days. The river was a muddy ribbon — sitting, not flowing. Cultivated fields of green, probably poppies, contrasted with the bland rock and sand all around. The sand stretched in an unbroken plain up to the edge of Highway 1. The highway looked like a driveway, no more than a lane and a half wide, the last paved road for two hundred miles to the west and south. A single line of crooked telephone poles stretched next to it as far as I could see in both directions. North of the highway, the ground changed abruptly to a rocky scree field extending a couple of kilometers to the base of the mountains.

  We landed in the center of these rocks. Narrow arroyos reached like veins from the foothills down to the road. Beyond it, I saw the trees near the river, and beyond them, the dunes and the ridge where our patrol bases had been. This spot was much more exposed than our previous sites, in plain view of the highway and dominated by the mountains towering above us to the north. I had the unbidden thought of mortars crashing into the rocks, adding jagged flying chips to their explosions of shrapnel.

  With the LAVs all around us, the platoon didn’t have much of a security mission. I settled them into the deep crevasses, safe from indirect fire, to clean their weapons, eat, and rest while I searched for information about our next move. Commanders are always with the radio antennas, so I looked for the biggest bunch of antennas and walked toward them.

  Halfway there, I noticed two Afghan boys walking toward our position, smiling and waving. Remembering the major’s warning about suicide bombers, I called for the translator and joined him to intercept them. Lance Corporal Ajmal Achekzai had been working as a cook on the Peleliu before 9/11. After the attacks, he let on that he had been born in Kabul and spoke Pashto. Achekzai became the primary translator for the task force.

  The boys wore flowing jackets over their baggy trousers. One had leather sandals, and the other walked barefoot on the rocky ground. They had bright, intelligent eyes. The barefoot boy smiled and reached out shyly to touch my hand. In Pashto, he told Achekzai we had been lucky to escape with our lives from the villages along the river.

  “They are all Taliban.”

  I shook my head and laughed. “Those villagers told us they were happy to see Americans and that everyone else in the area was Taliban,” I said. Achekzai shrugged. “Don’t tell him that,” I added. It wasn’t a lieutenant’s decision to play local politics. “Just thank them for their friendship and tell them we’re impressed by the beauty of their country.”

  The boys smiled at the compliment and waved as they walked back across the gravel toward the highway. I turned to continue my walk toward the headquarters and thought of one more thing. “Achekzai, tell them to keep people away from our positions, especially at night. The
y could get hurt.”

  The battalion commander and his staff clustered in the center of three Humvees, sitting on campstools. A map of southern Afghanistan was spread at their feet, and puffs of cigar smoke dissipated in the cold wind. I waited a few feet away until the meeting ended and Captain Whitmer joined me.

  “What’s the word, sir?”

  “We’re staying here. Reports of Taliban in a village to the southeast and al Qaeda to the northeast. You know the drill by now. Set up a good integrated defense. Rest half your Marines at a time, and be ready to support any patrols or other missions the battalion decides to run.”

  “Right. So do nothing, but be prepared to do anything.”

  Captain Whitmer laughed. “Seems like a pretty good general rule.”

  * * *

  Two hours after sunset, we had just settled into our defense for the night. I was nestled in a narrow wadi, monitoring the radio and trying to clean my rifle by feel in the dark. A terse order crackled through the handset to pack up and prepare to move immediately. I slipped my rifle back together and ran to the colonel’s Humvee. Several other Marines were already there. The operations officer updated us.

  “Electronic intercepts are picking up Pashto radio chatter nearby. At least two groups of fighters know where we are and are moving into position to ambush us with RPGs.”

  One of the LAR officers spoke from the darkness. “So what? We’re in a good defense. Even if they lob ’em, RPGs won’t reach out much more than a klick. We’ll just use the thermal sights on the LAVs and hose anyone who closes within a kilometer of us.”

  All suggestions that we should stay in place were brushed off. “The battalion commander wants to move. We’re stepping off in fifteen minutes and going south of the highway, less than ten kilometers from here. Everyone with a vehicle is in it. Bravo Company is on foot.”