The Last Platoon

by A Novel of the Afghanistan War (retail) (epub)

  Cruz switched to his encrypted handheld and called the sniper team.

  “Winmag, this is Wolf Six, we have an IED at our pos,” Cruz said. “One hundred meters east of Compound 172.”

  Ashford was in command of the four-man sniper team, although he checked with Eagan before making any critical decisions.

  “Wolf Six, we have eyes on,” Ashford replied. “We’ve copied the GPS mark.”

  Wolfe cut around the IED, following the squishy hoofprints of sheep while monitoring the route on his iPad. He turned onto a dirt trail packed hard as concrete that led uphill next to a feeble stream. The slight elevation provided shelter from floodwaters for a dozen homes tucked behind stout walls. As the Marines warily climbed the incline, Cruz didn’t see a single hole hacked out of a wall, not one murder hole to conceal a rifle barrel. This told him that in the seven years since the Marines had left, no Afghan soldiers had ventured this far into the Green Zone.

  Chickens and roosters set up their usual clatter, and mangy watchdogs strained at their chains, growling and barking. As the Marines ducked under drooping electric lines leading to satellite dishes, they heard a few tinny voices before the TVs were turned off. No waifs begged for candy or pens, and no women in chadors and veils peeked from doorways. The Americans were the enemy, the godless unbelievers who delivered death from the sky swift as a falcon, unheard and unseen.

  On the crest of the hill, a donkey hitched to a paddle wheel plodded in an eternal circle. Shallow ditches from outhouses emptied into the stream. The soiled water nourished both the poppies and watermelons whose porous skins absorbed the bacteria from the feces. This caused local bouts of mountain cholera that ran their course as unremarkable—and unreported—as snakebites.

  Back at the ops center, Ahmed and his intel crew were listening to the ICOM traffic from dickers perched on roofs and walls, exchanging ridiculous code words like “two turnips,” “seven cows,” and “Hugulu.” When the Marines raised their rifles to observe through their telescopic sights, some watchers ducked down. Others stood their ground and one gave the Italian salute to the Marines, who laughed.

  Shortly before ten, Tic slid into line behind Cruz and spoke in a low voice.

  “Captain, dickers have made the sniper team.”

  “You think the team’s too exposed?” Cruz said. “Call them in?”

  Tic laughed.

  “Hell no, Skipper, not after the other day,” he said. “The locals are calling them kapesksa—goblins. They’re scared the goblins will pop them.”

  A moderate breeze had sprung up, and drab-colored kites were flying over several compounds. Tic gestured toward them.

  “They’re signaling where we are.”

  Cruz looked at his tablet. A blue dot showed the sniper team in over-watch in a thicket to his right front. He radioed to Ashford.

  “Dickers have spotted you. We’re pushing to our next checkpoint.”

  “Wolf Six, roger. We have a kid with an ICOM ducking up and down a few hundred meters to our south. OK to throw a few rounds near him?”

  With the ops center listening on the net, Cruz wished Ashford hadn’t been so direct.

  “Negative,” he said.

  QUAT, WHO WAS WATCHING THE PATROL, didn’t like his situation. He had concluded that his guide had lost part of his brain as well as three fingers on his right hand. A few times he had grinned at Quat and pointed at the Marines, mimicking with his hands as though a mine would soon explode. He held up his AK, indicating that after the IED went off, he would shoot at the infidels.

  Quat thought this was stupid. The Americans didn’t seem anxious or afraid. They didn’t head in any straight direction. Twice they had doubled back, and each time their point team had disappeared into the undergrowth. Occasionally a bird-size drone that sounded like an angry bee had hovered close to where he and Habullah were hiding. Quat knew the camera couldn’t see through the leaves, but he didn’t like how this was unfolding. The Americans were acting like they were the hunters.

  Now, Habullah was talking on his ICOM. Even if his low voice didn’t reach to the Americans, his tactics were sloppy. The old man turned to Quat, his forefinger and thumb forming a circle around his right eye. He pointed to his ICOM and squeezed his finger a few times. Warning: snipers somewhere out there.

  That broke it for Quat. His father, having endured eight years in a North Vietnamese “reeducation camp”, had taught him never to trust his life to any cause or man. To prosper, one must first survive. This Taliban idiot and his foolish game would get him killed.

  They were almost at the end of the tree line that concealed them. Beyond that, there was an open patch of scrub growth, and then dense thickets. If they ran fast, Quat thought they could make it across at an angle out of sight of the patrol. But the drone might pick them up. He needed a distraction. Some other Talibs had to shoot at the patrol. Gripping Habullah’s arm, he gestured at their escape route, then pantomimed shooting at the patrol. His mute fury frightened the old mujahideen, who nodded and hissed instructions over the ICOM. They knelt down and waited.

  BACK AT THE OPS CENTER, Sergeant Ahmed heard the feverish tones in the ICOM exchange and alerted the patrol.

  “They could be jerking us around,” Ahmed said. “But you may have a few stray rounds coming your way.”

  Coffman was monitoring both the intra-patrol and the ops center radio nets. He heard the warning and paid it no special attention. He wasn’t daydreaming, but he had lost interest in patrol techniques. After two hours, the reel was repeating itself, wending inside the Silly String through field after field, avoiding paths and bridges, veering into dense brush to wade across muddy streams, sloshing along until plunging into the next irrigation ditch. Being twelfth in line was boring. The young Marines in front and behind him had scarcely spoken, fearing to look unprofessional. Not once had anyone requested his judgment about anything. He’d learned enough. He hadn’t planned to stay out all day anyway. When their next loop brought them near the firebase, he’d hop off.

  He had his head down, studying his notepad, when the first bullet cracked overhead. Startled, he dropped the pad and as he bent over, three more rounds snapped by, one so close it made a zinging sound. Along with the other Marines, he went flat. For a few seconds, he felt sheer excitement, convinced he was the target. An enemy had sighted in and shot, intending to kill him. And the bullet had missed!

  It never occurred to Coffman that the shots were random, a few wild bursts intended to distract the Marines. No, those bullets were meant for him. He’d heard them snapping over his head. The Taliban knew he was the leader, the commander of the task force, a full colonel with the black metal eagle pinned on the center of his armored vest. At last, after twenty-five years, he was in combat!

  Now what? He hadn’t seen a single shooter, and he had only a vague sense of where the shots had come from. On every side, the field was lined with trees, green vines, and shrubs. The Marines lying down near him seemed as bewildered as he was. Each had a sector to cover and despite much shouting back and forth, he hadn’t heard anyone point where to shoot. A Marine blindly let loose a burst of three or four rounds. As the red arc of a tracer flashed toward a tree line, four more M27s cut loose. Cruz’s voice came over the intra-squad radio.

  “Cease fire, goddamn it! We got friendlies on bearing zero niner five.”

  Coffman poked up his head. No more incoming, and no return fire. Anxious to know what was happening, he worked his way forward, careful not to step outside the cleared path. Cruz and Doyle, on their knees studying the photomap, paid him no attention. Irritated, Coffman stood erect and looked around, as though he did this sort of thing every day.

  And there they were, in the opposite direction from where the shots had come. He had never seen an enemy before, and now he was looking at two! One was wearing black, like in those ninja movies. Hunched over, they were running across a soggy field, rifles clearly visible, water spurting up around their feet as they sprinted at incredib
le speed. Live targets, not three hundred meters away! How the hell could they move so fast? The open patch was small, and they were almost at the thickets on the far side. The Marines, lying prone, hadn’t seen them and now they were getting away! Coffman pointed, banging Cruz on the top of his helmet.

  “Get those bastards!” he yelled. “Get them!”

  Cruz leaped up and looked around. Get what? Shoot at what? The muj were gone, out of sight, safe in the greenery. In five seconds, it was over. The grunts were looking at each other, uncertain what had happened or what they were supposed to be doing. Cruz was not moving. Binns and Doyle looked equally confused. Coffman was having none of it. He took charge.

  “Two! Right over there!” Coffman shouted. “Work up a fire mission!”

  Cruz thought lobbing a few shells into the bush was a preposterously long shot. The odds of hitting any muj inside that tree line were one in a thousand. Coffman had butted in, but he was the task force commander. Cruz didn’t believe any civilians were hiding in the bushes. So why not? He nodded to Doyle, who spoke into his throat mic.

  “Badger Six, this is Badger Two, fire mission,” he said. “Two enemy running northeast. Request an open sheaf of six rounds at 436 898. Danger close. Friendly troops at 434 890 and 435 880.”

  The fire direction center had been tracking the GPS positions of the patrol and the sniper team. The computer immediately calculated the firing data, and 81mm mortar crews leveled the bubbles on the tubes and placed the propellant bags between the fins of the shells. Within a minute, four shells were in the air.

  THE FIVE-MAN SNIPER TEAM was two hundred meters south of the target. Ashford and Eagan were standing together, their rifle scopes resting on branches as they searched the bush on the far side of the opening. They had eyes on the patrol and were monitoring the radio traffic. But they hadn’t seen the two muj. They heard the shells leaving the tubes with dull metallic clunks at the same time they received the warning from the ops center.

  “Shot out,” Ashford said. “Heads down!”

  All four lay down. Twelve seconds later, Ashford, listening on his 153, shouted, “Splash!” He heard a sound like a newspaper being ripped in half, followed by a slight shudder in the ground; three quick, dull crumps; and one sharp crack. In a blink, the packed explosives shattered their forged steel casings, hurling thousands of molten slivers in all directions.

  PFC Tommy Beal was to the front, slightly behind Corporal Tim Byrne, the engineer with the metal detector. Byrne was lying flat, the left side of his face on the ground. He thought he saw Beal lift his head up just as the earth shuddered with the explosions. A tiny lapse in judgment.

  “Umph!” A cry of pain and shock, an expulsion of breath, as if struck hard in the stomach. Beal jerked to his knees, holding the left side of his neck. He fell backward, writhing from side to side, the heels of his boots kicking at the dirt.

  Byrne immediately crawled to him. Ashford ran forward, followed by Eagan, who was on the radio shouting, “Check fire! Check fire!” Ashford had to use all his strength to pull Beal’s hand back to inspect the wound. When he did, blood spurted into his face.

  “Hold him down!”

  He clamped two hands on the spouting wound as Byrne grabbed Beal’s shoulders to stop him from bucking. Eagan was ripping open compression and hemostatic field dressings. He shoved Ashford aside and stuffed in the gauze. Ashford had ripped his bandage open and Eagan plugged that on top of the others. In a second, the compresses were sopping red. Eagan pushed down harder with both hands. Beal, eyes bulging with terror, jerked and fought to get loose.

  “Fucking hurts,” he gurgled.

  Ashford pinned his arms, while Eagan pressed down harder. Wolfe was sweeping a path for the patrol to reach them, and Cruz was calling for a critic medevac. Corpsman Bushnell worked his way to the front of the file and took charge. He packed on more gauze and pressed firmly down. Beal was no longer struggling, and his head had lolled to one side. His armor was sopped through, and a puddle the color of rust had collected around his left shoulder. Doc Bushnell felt the blood seep through the fresh bandages and trickle down his fingers. He knelt there for another minute, losing his first Marine.

  They unfolded the field stretcher and strapped in Beal’s body. There was little talk. Coffman stayed off to one side. Binns took a knee in silent prayer, then stood back passively, as though he were an onlooker. Cruz told Byrne, the engineer, to sweep a path to a nearby irrigation ditch. The corpsman and the sniper team followed behind him. They rubbed their hands in the mud and splashed the brown water on their faces. They returned dripping with mud and blood, looking more like ogres than Marines.

  Cruz told the op center they were returning with one angel and read off Beal’s initials and the last four digits of his Social Security number. Sergeant Doyle sat numbly in the dirt, staring at his digital tablet. Had he sent the wrong position? Hell no! Besides, the ops center checked the GPS position and knew exactly where the sniper team was, well off the gun-target line. So did a mortar crew bungle when leveling the bubbles or attaching the powder bags? No, every step was checked twice. Then he remembered a whanging sound he’d never heard before. Had one shell hit a boulder and ricocheted crazily before exploding? Bewildered, he looked up at Cruz.

  “I don’t know how it happened, sir,” he said. “I’ve called hundreds of missions.”

  Four Marines picked up the collapsible litter. A fresh team would rotate every ten minutes. Wolfe figured they’d reach the wire within half an hour. The trip back was less a patrol than a funeral procession, carrying a body without a shroud and with mourners lost in their own thoughts.

  Head down, Doyle tagged along in the column, going over the details again and again. Farther back in the column, Coffman forced himself to think calmly and logically. When the patrol came under fire, he had to take charge because Cruz hadn’t taken action. He had to order the fire mission to protect the patrol. That was logical, wasn’t it? The tragedy wasn’t due to error on his part. Still, he dreaded the phone call from General Killian. PFC Beal was the third to fall. Shit.

  Binns was walking with his back erect, glancing to neither side, almost stomping, signaling that he hadn’t caused this disaster. He was smoldering, stoking his grudge, thinking that Cruz had pushed his way in, then screwed up royally.

  Once inside the wire, a casualty detail placed a poncho over the body. Coffman was standing with his hand on Beal’s blood-soaked shoulder, as if to reassure the dead nineteen year-old that things would be all right. Binns paused next to Coffman.

  “Beal should still be alive, sir,” Binns said softly. “Captain Cruz told him not to wear his helmet.”

  It took Coffman a few seconds to grasp the accusation. Then he felt a surge of relief. Of course! I had nothing to do with Beal’s death. It was Cruz who lacked judgment! Thank God for the common sense of snuffies like Binns.

  “You lost a good man, Sergeant,” he said. “Damn shame. I’ll have Major Barnes take your statement.”

  40

  Counterpunch

  As Binns headed to the platoon tent for the debrief, Barnes and Ahmed nervously approached the colonel.

  “We’re picking up buzz, sir,” Barnes said. “The muj saw the stretcher. They’re psyched, whipping everybody up. Sergeant Ahmed thinks we’ll take incoming if we don’t push back out.”

  Coffman was caught off guard.

  “What about the ANA? Can’t they do it?”

  “They’re still patrolling where we sent them, sir,” Ahmed said.

  Coffman got it. Only the Marine patrol had returned to base, leaving a sector unprotected. He couldn’t hole up like a scared hedgehog. How would he explain that? He had no choice. This was Cruz’s fault, so he’d have to deal with it.

  “Tell Cruz to get after it,” he said.

  CRUZ CALLED OUT MCGOWAN’S SQUAD that was standing by as the Quick Reaction Force. While the Marines loaded the waypoints into their GPS watches and tablets, Ahmed gave a brief intel update.
/>
  “Everyone’s squawking on ICOMs and cell phones,” he said. “They’re happy out there, all jacked. Bottom line: you’ll make contact.”

  The Marines nodded, pumped and hard. It was their fourth day, and every one of them had been outside the wire at least once. Half of them under twenty, seasoned enough to be lethal and impulsive enough to do wrong.

  “Devil dogs, I want fire discipline out there,” Cruz said, “not The Wild Bunch. We lost a brother. We’ll get some, the right way.”

  The agency team was also going back out, and Wolfe was staying at point. Cruz took Doyle aside.

  “That fire mission was on me, not you,” Cruz said. “When I get back in, I’ll see to it.”

  “No, sir,” Doyle said. “I called it in. I can’t stay here. I gotta go too.”

  If Doyle was left behind, his gloom would affect all who saw him.

  “All right,” Cruz said. “Fall in behind me.”

  The sniper team was standing off to one side, talking in low voices among themselves.

  “Two fucking days,” Ashford said, “and three brothers dead.”

  Eagan reacted angrily.

  “There’s no such animal as a one-way war,” he said. “They lose people, and so do we. You die here when you’re twenty or fifty when a heart attack kills you in the States. The difference is that you chose to be here. So suck it up.”

  “I was just talking,” Ashford said. “I’m ready.”

  QUAT ESTIMATED THEY WERE HALFWAY BACK to the mosque when he saw four unarmed Afghans on Hondas slowly wending their way along a serpentine path. Habullah, who had been jabbering on his ICOM, put down his AK and rushed out of the bush to welcome them. Recognizing Tulus, Quat too left the tree line.