Not a Good Day to Die

by Sean Naylor

  The breakthrough came when a Pentagon bureaucrat visited Fort Campbell to find out why the post’s reenlistment numbers were down. Perez’s superiors put the two together and Perez again pleaded his case. He noted that people are always trying to get out of the infantry, and that hardly anyone ever tries to get into the infantry, a point with which the suit concurred. Then Perez made his pitch: He was willing to forgo any resigning bonus, to reenlist for six years (the longest reenlistment allowed) and, to top it all off, he was willing to relocate to Fort Drum, one of the coldest, snowiest, and, in most soldiers’ eyes, least desirable posts in the Army. “Are you serious?” the bemused bureaucrat asked. “Are you really willing to do all this?” Assured that Perez was indeed serious, the bureaucrat went to work. Not long afterward, Perez was headed to Fort Benning, where all new infantry recruits are trained. But his trials had only just begun. Due to a paperwork screwup, he was forced to go through basic training again, this time as a sergeant among a horde of teenage privates. It was a couple of weeks before the drill sergeants realized the mistake and pushed him straight into advanced individual training—the infantry-specific course that follows basic training.

  After completing AIT, Perez headed straight to Drum, assigned to 1-87 Infantry. By now he was a staff sergeant, the rank of a squad leader. But he encountered a marked reluctance on the part of the battalion’s senior NCOs to entrust the lives of nine men to a squad leader who’d never spent a day in an infantry platoon before. Initially told there was a squad leader position for him in A Company, he headed to the company headquarters, where he met with the company first sergeant and one of his platoon sergeants. They asked Perez to wait outside the door, but it stayed open a crack, and he had to endure the indignity of overhearing the two NCOs talk with each other about how they didn’t want a “supply guy” running one of their squads. They emerged from the meeting and told him there was no job for him in the company. The battalion sergeant major of the time sent him to C Company instead. Again he was made to wait in a hallway while others discussed what to do with him. But his luck changed when Sergeant First Class Thomas Abbott, the platoon sergeant for 1st Platoon, ran into him sitting there. “You’re the new staff sergeant?” Abbott said. “We’ll take you.” Conditioned to disappointment, Perez explained his background to Abbott, expecting the platoon sergeant to change his mind. “Who gives a fuck?” Abbott said. “Come on in here, we’ll take you.” And just like that the supply guy became a light infantry squad leader.

  Recognizing that Perez’s enthusiasm and determination more than compensated for his lack of infantry experience, Abbott took the new squad leader under his wing, helping him climb the steep learning curve he needed to ascend in order to earn the respect of his men and his fellow NCOs. Perez applied himself fiercely to the task, burning with ambition to make all those who had doubted him eat their words. “I didn’t want to fail, because I didn’t want nobody to come back and say, ‘Well, of course he’s fucked up; that’s the former supply guy,’” he said. His efforts earned him a gradual acceptance into the infantry fraternity, but inevitably some questions remained. Frank Grippe took over as the 1-87 command sergeant major a few weeks after Perez arrived, and was surprised to find out that one of his squad leaders used to be a supply clerk. What a ballsy individual, the former Ranger thought after his first meeting with Perez, but I hope he knows what he’s getting himself into.

  What Perez was getting into at dawn on March 2, 2002, was exactly the situation his father had hoped he would avoid. As the Chinook made the final turn into the valley, Staff Sergeant Randel Perez, infantry squad leader, was about to jump into the middle of the fiercest battle U.S. troops had fought in a generation.

  Perez was flying on the first of the three helicopters carrying 10th Mountain troops. The troops on his helicopter—collectively known as Chalk 1—included 1-87 commander Paul LaCamera, his command sergeant major, Frank Grippe, the Charlie Company commander, Captain Nelson Kraft, plus the men of 1st Platoon, led by 1st Lieutenant Brad Maroyka. Riding into battle on the second helicopter were LaCamera’s operations officer, Major Jay Hall, an eight-man squad from the battlion’s mortar section, plus 2nd Platoon. Together these men were known as Chalk 2. The third chalk was led by Crombie and was headed for a landing zone 2,000 meters northeast of the other two. The LZs for Chalks 1 and 2 were only 500 meters apart between Takur Ghar and the Finger, about a kilometer south of Marzak. From there 1st Platoon was to move a few hundred meters southwest to set up Blocking Position Heather, cutting off the valley’s southern exit, while 2nd Platoon hiked a similar distance southeast to establish Blocking Position Ginger overlooking the deep gorge that ran to the south of Takur Ghar.

  Like almost everyone else onboard the helicopters, Kraft, thirty, from Toledo, Ohio, was glad to finally have the opportunity to get into the fight. His company was the battalion’s main effort. Setting up the blocking positions struck the ROTC graduate of Ohio’s Bowling Green State University, as “a simple ‘defend’ task.” But he had also paid attention when LaCamera reiterated one of his favorite phrases—” The enemy gets a vote”—an Army saying that means that no matter how good the plan is, the enemy will seek to make his decisions count on the battlefield. “The enemy has a vote and he will make sure that he places it, so be ready,” LaCamera had told his subordinates.

  A stocky figure with a long history in the Rangers, LaCamera was hard to get to know, with a reserve easily mistaken for hostility. But those who had fought with him swore by him. LaCamera heard over the radio on the flight down that TF Hammer was meeting heavy resistance. Okay, these guys are fighting. The battalion commander was prepared for that. He’d made sure his first lift of Chinooks was “heavy on the trigger-pullers,” while holding the psychological operations troops assigned to him and the few journalists embedded in his battalion back until the second lift.

  He was confident in his men. Since taking command in May, he had focused 1-87 on the “four basics”: battle drills, physical training, marksmanship, and medical skills. LaCamera took the last item very seriously. Light infantrymen often fought far from the nearest field hospital and had to rely on whatever and whomever they brought to the fight to provide lifesaving medical care. He had almost succeeded in his goal of getting each of his soldiers qualified as a combat lifesaver, a step between the Army’s “buddy aid” and the platoon medic, and he had sent his medics to train with emergency medical technicians in New York City, treating gunshot wounds. As for marksmanship, to LaCamera, it was a case of simple logic. He told his soldiers there were only two sorts of people on a battlefield—marksmen and targets. Left unsaid was that sometimes it was impossible to avoid being both.

  8.

  CHALKS 1 and 2 touched down almost simultaneously at their LZs 13A and 13 respectively. The soldiers rushed down the ramps and set up their perimeters around the helicopters, ducking instinctively as they ran under the giant rotor blades. So far so good. Wiercinski had achieved his overriding goal of getting all six Chinooks on the ground safely. Now it was up to the infantry to do their job. The first Chalk 1 soldiers off the bird looked up from behind their rucksacks and took the measure of the battlefield. They were in the southeastern corner of the Shahikot. Takur Ghar rose ominously to the east, its saddled peak 750 meters above the valley floor. A few hundred meters to the west the Finger pointed straight at the Shahikot’s heart, its northernmost slopes almost reaching the village of Serkhankhel. From where the soldiers lay or kneeled, the valley rose gently toward the south. Less than a kilometer to the north sat Marzak, a collection of single-story adobe buildings. The light brown soil between the troops and the village had been divided into terraced onion fields. Patches of snow covered about thirty percent of the valley floor, and all of the upper ridgelines and mountainsides. Like the AFO operators before them, the Mountain troops quickly realized that their maps bore only a vague resemblance to reality. The contour lines only reflected differences of fifty meters or more. The rolling hillocks and s
mall ridgelines that crisscrossed the valley did not appear on them.

  The first thing Sergeant Jerry Higley noticed was the dead silence that reigned after the Chinooks flew away. It lasted only a few moments, barely enough time for the twenty-six-year-old heavyset squad leader in Kraft’s 1st Platoon to get to his feet and start moving. Then the first bullets zipped over the troops’ heads. Welcome to the Shahikot. For all but a few of the men who’d just flown in, getting shot at was a new experience. It took some getting used to. Despite LaCamera’s admonition in the run-up to Anaconda that the enemy had a vote, Kraft still had to mentally adjust to the fact that someone was trying to kill him. Brad Maroyka, the 1st Platoon leader, had already begun moving to Blocking Position Heather. He called Kraft with a statement of the obvious: “We’re taking direct fire.” “Roger, so are we,” Kraft replied. “Continue with your mission.”

  The rest of the troops at the LZ moved out. As the first sporadic bursts of gunfire echoed round the mountains, Grippe looked up, trying to identify the source. Unable to spot the enemy locations among the rocks and crevices on the eastern ridge, he instead had the soldiers shoot at trees and boulders he considered the enemy’s most likely hiding spots.

  Higley and his platoon sergeant, Thomas Abbott, moved southwest with half a dozen men to a snow-covered ridgeline no more than ten feet high. Sergeant Bill Sakisit, walking point, crested the ridge and was pointing to what looked like a trail on the western side when a mortar round exploded several meters in front of him, causing him to duck. As the others got to the top, they saw black-clad figures moving about on the Finger, several hundred meters ahead of them. Abbott and Higley quickly arranged their men in pairs of marksmen and spotters. Higley began squeezing off rounds. The private first class acting as his spotter saw an enemy fighter crumple and get pulled away by one of his buddies. He let out an ecstatic yell. “You tagged his ass!” he whooped. Higley didn’t share the private’s enthusiasm. Before that moment the sergeant hadn’t viewed America’s enemies as human beings. That changed when he shot his first man. “Then you realize these are people, too,” he said. “You don’t really feel sorry for them, but you realize this is this guy’s friend that just got whacked. You start thinking about it the way that someone outside the military might.” Okay, I’m kinda done here, I’d like to take off now, he thought. But he kept firing.

  Kraft’s plan was to stay with 1st Platoon at least until 2nd Platoon had established Blocking Position Ginger. But 1st Platoon hadn’t moved more than about 100 meters when there was a dramatic increase in the small arms fire cascading down from the eastern ridge. As the guerrillas woke up and became aware of the enemies in their midst, the caliber of weaponry aimed at the Americans increased. The whoosh of RPGs was added to the din, to be followed by the deep thump of a mortar tube firing. No Americans were hit in these initial volleys, but Kraft could sense the plan slowly sliding away. “At that point, just because of the amount of fire they were throwing at us, it was obvious to me that we had to execute Battle Drill Two—React to Contact,” he said.

  Kraft and all the men around him dropped to the dirt. At that moment an RPG flew over their heads and hit the ground but failed to explode. Kraft’s radio operator, Specialist John Ogilvie, looked at the warhead stuck in the ground making a buzzing noise, then turned to the captain with eyes as big as bowling balls. “Holy shit, sir! That one was close.”

  “Roger, we need to drop rucks and get the hell out of the kill zone,” Kraft replied. That was no small decision the captain was announcing. Other than their weapons, water, and basic loads of ammunition, which they carried on their person, the soldiers’ rucks contained almost everything they needed to fight and survive for a few days in the mountains. Inside the rucks were sleeping bags and other “snivel gear” to help them stay warm, as well as ammunition for the M240 machine guns (this was far too heavy for the two-man machine-gun teams to carry alone, so it was divided up so each soldier packed 100 rounds). Some soldiers had even stashed their night-vision goggles in their rucks, although others had worn them around their necks. But this was way more resistance than Kraft and his superiors had expected, and the rucks weighed about eighty-five pounds, not an inconsiderable load when you’re trying to outrun bullets. Those 1st Platoon soldiers close enough to take cover behind rocks or dips in the ground began returning fire, allowing everyone else—the battalion and company command post personnel and the rest of 1st Platoon—to sprint to a bowl-shaped piece of terrain that seemed to offer some protection, leaving a trail of rucksacks all the way from the landing zone.

  Once in the bowl—later dubbed “Hell’s Halfpipe” by Specialist Brian McGraw—Kraft felt better. As a defensive position, it wasn’t perfect, but it would certainly do. About 300 meters west of the lower slopes of Takur Ghar and a similar distance east of the Finger, Hell’s Halfpipe was shaped like an enormous dugout canoe. It was 100 meters long and six meters wide at its base, with fifteen-meter slopes at its northern end and its western and eastern sides. Its southern end was open. (Jay Hall said its shape resembled that of a football stadium enclosed on three sides.) The problem was that to fire at the enemy on the eastern ridge, the soldiers had to crawl up the Halfpipe’s eastern slope to its rock-strewn tip, exposing them to fire from the Finger. Soldiers engaging the Al Qaida fighters on the Finger faced the same situation in reverse. Nevertheless, Hell’s Halfpipe was eminently defensible and gave both the company and battalion command posts somewhere to set up their radios and allow the commanders to take stock. LaCamera established himself with his radio operator and Grippe at the northern end of the Halfpipe, about seventy-five meters north of Kraft’s command post. Kraft was relieved that somehow none of the thousands of bullets that had been fired at his men had found their mark. As his men clambered up the slopes and began returning fire with a vengeance, the captain focused on his three priorities: getting Blocking Position Heather established, making contact with 2nd Platoon at the other LZ, and figuring out how to get the rucksacks back. He called Maroyka, the 1st Platoon leader, who was still taking cover near the LZ with a squad’s worth of soldiers. The captain told him to press on and establish Heather. Then his 2nd Platoon leader, 1st Lieutenant Aaron O’Keefe, reported that his troops were also receiving fire.

  O’Keefe’s men had only moved about thirty meters from the LZ when the first RPG flew in with a sound Ropel described as “a deep whistling combined with static.” “Incoming!” he yelled, diving to the frozen ground with the others. Again the 10th Mountain troops’ guardian angel was watching over them as yet another RPG fizzled in the dirt without exploding. The soldiers got to their feet and shouldered their rucks, only for the unseen enemy nestled into crevices in the eastern ridgeline to open up on them with mortar and small arms fire. This time it was 2nd Platoon’s turn to drop their rucks and sprint for cover. Immediately a pair of Apaches zoomed overhead. The pilots had spotted one of the enemy positions shooting at 2nd Platoon, and they subjected it to withering rocket and cannon fire, providing the troops on the ground with welcome relief in the process. The infantrymen were already realizing the drawbacks of landing on the valley floor. “You can only see so much from the ground,” Ropel noted. And they could also only do so much with the light weapons they had brought to the fight—M4 assault rifles, SAWs, and M240B medium machine guns.

  Task Force Rakkasan’s limited number of Chinooks had forced Kraft to make hard decisions about what to bring in on his first lift. He had chosen to leave his 60mm mortars behind to make room for more riflemen. It was a decision he’d regret, but at the time it seemed justified. He knew LaCamera was bringing one of the battalion’s 120mm mortars in on the same Chinook as 2nd Platoon. Between that, the Apaches, and fixed-wing close air support, Kraft figured he was covered for any fires he needed.

  The man in charge of the only ground weapon more powerful than a medium machine gun that Task Force Rakkasan brought to the battle on March 2 was Sergeant First Class Michael Peterson, 1-87 Infantry’s mortar plat
oon sergeant. “Sergeant Pete” had seven men under him: four to man the huge mortar tube and three to provide security. LaCamera had brought the 120 in on his first lift because it had a greater range and killing power than the battalion’s 81mm mortars. The mortar had a range of 7,200 meters, long enough to support the 2-187 troops farther north if need be. And if it had to be brought into action, its shells could slice apart a man standing within seventy-five meters of their impact. But all that firepower carried a high price in mobility. The weight of the tube plus the ammunition Peterson brought with him was 1,500 pounds. The weapon was ideal for sitting in a protected area firing missions for troops a couple of thousand meters forward, but it was not the perfect system for the running battle in which Task Force Rakkasan now found itself, a fact Peterson well understood, but could do little about.

  Peterson and his men got their weapon up and running in no time. The enemy had fired the first round in the mortar duel, but the Americans were about to fire the biggest. First fielded in 1994, the 120 mortar had never been fired in combat until Sergeant Raul Lopez, who had never even fired it in training, sent the first round looping toward the enemy with a loud whoomph. Within moments the mortar crew was working in a smooth rhythm, with Peterson the main gunner. The Al Qaida fighters quickly realized the 120 was their greatest threat and therefore their highest priority target. Within a minute or two, bullets were zipping and cracking past the American mortarmen with steadily increasing intensity. Then the enemy mortars found their range and began walking rounds in toward Peterson and his men, who were running in circles trying to find cover in between returning fire. It was clear they had to move, so with difficulty they broke the mortar down under fire, loaded it and the ammunition on a series of sledlike devices called Skedcos, and hauled them 200 meters west to a wide ditch or wadi beside where Maroyka was setting up Heather with Higley’s squad.