Lions of Kandahar (34 page)

T
he long stream of dust could be seen for miles. Civilians continued to flee.

Numerous requests for Rangers, Marines—or any assistance—had fallen on deaf ears for several critical days, but after the second counterattack in less than twenty-four hours, the ISAF headquarters in Bagram finally sent Comanche Company from the 10th Mountain Division and another Special Forces team. Major General Freakley, God bless him, was true to his word. They also sent two 105-mm howitzers, slung under Chinook helicopters. Less than twenty minutes after the helicopters dropped off the guns at Keybari Ghar, the crews were ready and on the radio asking Jared for a fire mission.

The infantry company from the 10th Mountain Division arrived next. It had driven straight down Highway One from Kabul, stopping only to refuel the trucks. We didn’t care where they came from, we were just glad they were here. The convoy formed a huge defensive
perimeter around the artillery. Special Forces Team 376 from the 3rd Battalion also arrived with the infantry, along with an additional ANA unit. I knew their team leader, Mike, from the qualification course. He hopped out of his truck and pointed to the menacing-looking six-barreled minigun atop one of his vehicles. “I brought the scunion,” he said. A world of hurt.

Help had truly arrived.

The appearance of the 10th Mountain’s Comanche Company marked the first time conventional forces were under operational control of a Special Forces unit in Afghanistan for a large-scale operation. Jared had planned a broad sweeping action to clear Objective Billiards, the entire area north of Sperwan Ghar. Comanche Company would infiltrate from the desert, punch straight into the villages, and sweep southwest, clearing everything in front of Sperwan Ghar. Jared wanted volunteers to go with the new ANA unit and lead the reinforcements into the labyrinth of villages and compounds with Comanche Company. Riley, Casey, and Smitty agreed to go.

As the soldiers moved through the village below, I got into my truck and drove to the top of the hill. Bill pulled up next to me just as Smitty’s voice exploded over the radio.

“Talon 30, this is 31 Sierra. Troops in contact. Heavy contact. Over one hundred AAF [Anti-Afghanistan Forces]. Small arms fire, RPG and machine-gun fire. One hundred meters northeast of our position. Trying to get ANA to maneuver. Need immediate air support,” he said breathlessly. I could hear the rattle of gunfire in the background and see the fight erupting before us.

The Taliban had ambushed them. From a distance, it looked like fire ants pouring out of a great mound as about fifty fighters emerged from the irrigation ditches as the Afghan soldiers and American infantry pursued decoys. Smitty finally got some helicopters on station and began making gun runs on enemy targets. A Taliban commander could be heard trying to rally his men, while others simply fell back to other buildings. His fighters were getting pushed into a constricted
area. Signs of the enemy were everywhere, bodies of dead and wounded fighters scattered throughout the compounds and grape huts. Other rooms were packed with weapons, food, spare parts, and cheap Chinese motorcycles.

I had stepped away for a moment when I heard Dave curse. Someone was hit. As I got back to the radio, a second soldier was reported as wounded. Then: “We have four casualities, one American.”

An ETT working with the Afghans had been killed trying to get over the thigh-high hedges lining the vineyard. One ANA soldier had also been killed and two wounded. The four were carried out and loaded into the back of a Ranger, which sped off in a cloud of dust to Comanche’s main position. I watched as eight Rangers loaded with ANA soldiers took off for the highway, clearly not intending to stop until they got to Kabul. At least we now knew that the new ANA weren’t going to turn on us. They were just going to run.

The 10th Mountain commander, Comanche 6, called for support. His men were getting fired on from an area between the hill and their location in a field near the river. We needed to get a better vantage point, so Brian threw Ole Girl in reverse and peeled out. Zack and Chris followed in their truck. Working our way down the hill, we finally saw movement near a group of grape huts not far from Sperwan Ghar. Setting up below the school, a group of nearly one hundred fighters attacked the hill as we arrived—the third counterattack on Sperwan Ghar. They were in a pressure cooker, compressed between Comanche Company and us. Their machine guns opened up on us.

Brian and Dave switched, since Dave had spent most of the morning baking in the turret. Brian worked the gun while Ron and I started working on the grids for an air strike and made sure the aircraft wouldn’t drop on our own people. Ron jumped off the back of the truck as the firing picked up and set up at the corner of the schoolhouse. It was safer and he could still talk to me over the radio. Just then I caught the flash of an RPG smash concrete off the schoolhouse,
where it broke into pieces instead of exploding. The warhead landed two feet from Ron. The enemy was so close that the rocket did not have time to arm itself.

Looking through my scope, I quickly swept the fields from left to right, looking for a head with an RPG tube. There. “There, there!” Brian yelled at the same time, raking the small animal barn with fire. Surrounded by trees, it was about the size of a toolshed and had a three-foot-tall wall running along it.

The fire from Brian’s machine gun blew cinder-block-sized holes into the wall in a connect-the-dot pattern. An explosion flung part of a human torso into the air, followed by another explosion and a whitish-pink mist. The fighter wore a backpack full of RPG rockets; one must have caught a bullet. Brian continued to pummel the wall with fire until it collapsed and nothing else moved. Hodge’s team, on the other side of the hill, caught six guys running for the building to the north.

“The enemy is coming up from the south. We can close this gap. You should probably get back to the other side of the schoolhouse,” he radioed. Hodge had the commanding view and I took his advice.

We raced back to our previous positions. I heard Jared talking to Hodge and Bruce over the radio. Tomorrow, we would absolutely have to recon the hills of Zangabar Ghar, also known as the Dragon’s Back.

Down in the grape fields, Riley and Casey moved swiftly as the remaining Afghan soldiers kept the Taliban fighters’ heads down with accurate fire and stuck close by them. As they worked their way down one of the narrow irrigation ditches, Riley could hear the screams of a Taliban fighter over the radio. Lining up on the outside door of the compound where the Taliban fighters had gone, Riley and the Afghans burst through the door.

A Taliban fighter with an ammunition vest strapped across his chest, radio in hand, started to crawl toward his AK-47 several feet
away. Binoculars lay beside the rifle. He had bullet wounds in both legs, and a trail of blood followed him as he clawed his way toward the rifle.

After securing his hands and feet, Riley searched his pockets. The satellite telephone, two cell phones, and a fist-sized wad of cash made it clear this guy was a commander.

“I bet that hurts like shit,” Riley said, looking at the ANA. “He’s all yours.”

Six sets of hands reached for the Taliban leader who had just ambushed them. He was responsible for the death of their friends and atrocities against some of the local civilians.

Up on the hill, Bill came over to the truck. He’d been listening to the battle. “If this thing turns south and they get in trouble, I say we go straight down the hill and attack the enemy in the blind side,” he said in his slow Texas drawl. “They’ll never see it coming, we can kill a bunch of ’em and fall back to the hill. I ain’t letting our boys get stuck down there.” I nodded in agreement.

We prepared for our assault and staged at the schoolhouse. Bill coordinated with Riley, Smitty, and Casey for our attack in case the battle turned, but things got quiet over the next hour. Fighters took a few shots at us, but nothing like the previous days. We stayed either in the trucks or in the school to be safe. Evening was falling fast. Facing southwest, I stared at Zangabar Ghar. We knew Taliban fighters were coming from that area; Jared had tapped Bruce’s team to go over there the next day and patrol the area.

Sitting in Ole Girl, I reached into the ammo can next to my leg and hit the play button. “I’m just a middle-aged, Middle Eastern camel-herdin’ man, I got a little two-bedroom cave here in North Afghanistan …”

Brian, who was typically very reserved, and Dave jumped right in, and we sang like drunken sailors. Beside that hill, we could relate to Toby Keith’s hit. Brian and Dave were better fighters than singers. As
they butchered the song, I watched a small finch hop from limb to limb on the grapevines below. My attention was finally diverted when Victor jumped off the truck, his prayer rug under his arm.

“Stay on the truck, Victor,” I said. “We have to be ready to move in case the dismounted guys down in the village need us.”

“I am going right over here,” he said in broken English. Taking only a few steps from the truck, he rolled his rug and laid it out neatly.

“Victor, I am telling you … you are gonna get shot, stay on the damn truck!”

“
Inshallah
. If it is Allah’s will, but I will pray now!”

He had no more than hit his knees when an RPG raced by my door and exploded in the powdery dirt hill directly behind him. He fell to the ground, and I was sure he was wounded. I pushed my gun out of the door and started toward him. I had barely touched the ground when Victor leapt to his feet.

“Sheet-sheet-sheet. I will pray later!” he said, as he scrambled back into the truck.

Right then I really missed my two interpreters who had been killed in Panjwari with Shef’s team.

“You dumb sum bitch. We are trying to keep you alive,” I growled.

“I know, I know. I listen every time now,
Turan
, every time,” Victor panted.

The single RPG was followed only by sporadic shots. We held our fire.

Bill called over the radio. “Did anyone see the launch? If there is no more fire then this is a feint. Hold your fire. Hold and see what happens.”

I could see Brian in my peripheral vision nodding in agreement. It was a game of cat and mouse.
Where are you?
I thought. It didn’t matter. We held the high ground. If they wanted it bad enough, they’d have to come and get it. We could hear the Taliban fighters chattering on the radio, a midlevel commander ordering his fighters to attack Sperwan Ghar. I glanced at Victor, who had his notepad out.

“Don’t fuck this up. Write every word,” Dave said.

The Taliban commander was berating the RPG gunner for not coordinating with another gunner, yelling that he’d missed our truck and wasted another round. They were only two hundred meters away and had wasted an opportunity. Turning his attention back to us, he gave a new order.
“Hamla, hamla, za, za,”
he barked into the radio. Attack, attack, go, go.

Victor shouted something that got lost in the chaos. Sparking rounds and puffs of dust stuck the vehicles as I called Jared on the radio. He was managing two fights and trying to communicate as more machine guns fired. “Set,” screamed Brian as we bolted backward. I peered over the small three-foot-tall berm into the tangled mess of compounds, ditches, and fields and stared at the map. They could be any damn place. I crawled through the truck to talk to Ron.

“Here and here,” I said, pointing at targets. “If it was me, I would only be operating from two places.” Both were irrigation ditches running east to west, about 150 meters apart.

Ron nodded and called in the grid to the waiting aircraft above. A jet made a low pass, looking for the Taliban fighters.

“No joy, Captain,” Ron said. “We need to mark the target somehow so he can tell the difference.”

I got with Bill. “Can we fire into one of the buildings or set something on fire to use as a marker for the aircraft?”

Bill ordered the mortars to fire smoke rounds into a dry field. The rest of us strafed the field, hoping that the red-hot tracers would start a fire. It wasn’t much of a fire, not like the bonfire I envisioned. I turned to Ron.

“How is that?”

“Nothing. The pilot can’t see it,” Ron said, shaking his head.

On to plan B. Maybe we could kick up enough dust for the pilot. The enemy rounds kept coming, and Zack fired the grenade launcher at a series of grape huts near the closest irrigation ditch.

“Zack, when I hit that grape hut with an AT4, you fire about twenty rounds into it to create as much smoke as possible.”

He laughed.

“You can’t hit that from here,” he said.

“Case of beer?”

“Bottles or cans?”

I took the AT4 rocket from behind the seat in my truck and headed for a small washout between the vehicles. I signaled Bill when I was ready.

“Covering fire,” he called into the radio.

I looked down the small black plastic sights and realized how far away it was. The massive grape hut looked small, and I began to doubt myself. I pulled as tightly as possible on the front strap, lifted the safety, and pressed the small red firing button. The rocket streaked out of the launcher as the concussion took my breath away.

The rocket hit the roof, starting a fire that grew quickly as it burned through the dry thatch. I dropped the tube and sprinted back to the truck. Brian and Dave were laughing. I had not only hit the building but started a fire that a blind pilot could see.

“Target marked.”

Brian called Zack on the radio, who had nothing to say, but when I looked at him he was grinning like a thief. Hell, even Bill was shaking his head. In ten seconds, I had redeemed myself for missing the Taliban in the river during our infiltration to the desert.

“Zack, I like Guinness. Cans. Tallboys, if you please.”

Ron reported that the pilot saw the fire, and he talked him onto an irrigation ditch just behind a long wall.

“Bombs away, cover,” he said.

The F-18 swooped down and dropped. The blast rocked our trucks, and debris and dirt fell everywhere. As the dust cleared, I keyed the radio.