The Only Thing Worth Dying For (18 page)

Every member of ODA 574 had marked the compound’s location on his personal GPS, but Wes doubted he would be able to find his way back: All the compounds looked the same. After two sleepless nights he felt as if he were traveling through a dream. Sixty hours earlier they had landed in Afghanistan, expecting to remain con
cealed among the populace for months. Now they were rushing into battle.

On the edge of town they stopped at a gas station, where Amerine watched with concern as his driver, a frail-looking man named Qasim, began to fill the tank with the engine running. He laughed. Blowing up at a gas pump was the least of his worries, though pausing to top off the tanks did slow them down. Then the drivers got into an argument with the old man running the pumps over who was to pay. They invoked the name “Hamid Karzai” multiple times, but the man would not relent and Amerine surmised that Karzai’s name didn’t hold enough clout to act as credit. Begrudgingly, the drivers paid with cash from their own pockets.

Just past the gas station a twisted metal pole blocked the road, two armed Afghans asleep beside it. Qasim honked his horn. One man groggily raised the barrier, and the trucks left Tarin Kowt through the rows of connected buildings that formed the outer wall of the town—
like exiting a protective reef into the open ocean
, thought Amerine.

Their route descended from Tarin Kowt’s sloping plateau into a cluster of ridges and hills, as if the skin of the desert had wrinkled, creating a maze of passages that became dead ends or goat trails or looped back on themselves. The road through this hilly labyrinth was dotted with simple compounds and led to Tarin Kowt Pass, a gash in the mountains twelve miles to the south. That’s where ODA 574 would park, conceal their vehicles, and lie in wait, ready to call in air strikes on the enemy convoy they expected to arrive on the road below. On the map, the location seemed perfect, but Amerine knew that terrain analysis is much more art than science: It depends upon intuition and eyes-on consideration. Until they got out there and looked around, nothing they’d seen on the map was certain.

Five hundred yards outside town, the trucks’ headlights shone on Tarin Kowt’s graveyard: a hillside dotted with hundreds of slender wooden stakes, their colorful cloth streamers fluttering in the breeze, like a pincushion covered with threaded needles. Then they entered the labyrinth, heading toward the high ground they’d identified on the map.

As they sped through the twisting turns of the labyrinth, Amerine began to feel anxious.
Maybe there isn’t a good observation point
, he thought.
Maybe these hills roll all the way to the gap in the mountains.
If that was the case, they would have a very difficult time striking the enemy before it reached the town. And if ODA 574 let the Taliban reach Tarin Kowt, the battle would be lost—airpower would be useless. Dawn glowed pink on the eastern horizon, the start of another blue-skied, temperate winter day. Time was up: the Taliban could be arriving at any moment. The team had to find cover and establish their observation post immediately.

The road began to climb, a subtle ascent not apparent on the map, then steepened and suddenly rose up onto a ridge running east to west, where the trucks pulled to a stop before an enormous valley—at least four miles south to the mountain pass and seven miles wide. Amerine’s dread turned to excitement. They would not have to drive all the way to the mountain pass. They would make their stand right here, eight miles from Tarin Kowt.

He jumped out of the truck and ran ahead to where the road rolled over the ridge, turned sharply to the left, and traversed the slope down to the valley floor a couple hundred feet below. There it veered right and ran straight across the valley to Tarin Kowt Pass; it appeared to be the only route up this steep ridge, which formed a natural two-hundred-foot barrier from which they could easily spot enemy vehicles below.

We can set up the guerrillas along this ridge
, thought Amerine,
and hit the Taliban with heavy machine guns and RPGs after they cross the valley, as they try to ascend this ground.

The road narrowed as it climbed off the valley floor, too narrow for even a small car to turn around on and too steep to drive off.
Whatever vehicles survive our air strikes out in the valley will try to make it up this ridge. We’ll attack the lead vehicles, clog the route, and keep the rest corralled in the valley. They’ll have to retreat to the pass, and our pilots will pound them all the way back to Kandahar.

“This is it,” he called back to JD. “Get us a perimeter, and I’ll tell you what we’re gonna do.”

Mike jogged forward from the lead truck to see the most perfect kill zone he could imagine: wide-open terrain below them for miles. Two of the guerrillas had leaned their AK-47s against the side of their truck and were smoking hashish from a small pipe; others were taking in the view and awaiting instruction. Anticipating Amerine’s orders, Mag and Ronnie began to place the Afghans into fighting positions along the ridge. Alex announced that three F-18s had just checked in; they were overhead at 30,000 feet and standing by.

Mike was still shaking the stiffness from his legs when a glint in the notch of Tarin Kowt Pass caught his eye. “Looks like something parked in the pass,” he said, looking through his binoculars. Dan stepped up beside him. “Is that a…BTR?” Mike asked, referring to the Russian-made armored personnel carrier with mounted machine guns.

“Nah,” said Dan, “but something’s there.”

“That is, no shit, a fucking BTR,” said Mike. “Sir,” he said to Amerine, “does that look like a BTR in the pass?”

“Might be,” he said, after peering through his binoculars.

“I think it’s moving,” said Dan.

Amerine looked again and saw a trail of dust. Whatever it was, it was moving fast. “Shit. That’s them,” he said. “Alex, let’s get to work.”

The eight trucks the F-18s had engaged a few hours earlier must have been the
tail
of the convoy, not its head. The lead element had already arrived in the mountains and prepared for a morning attack.
We’re in deep shit,
Amerine thought.
If there are a hundred trucks on the other side of the pass, we don’t have enough bombs to stop them all. Once they reach our ridgeline, we’ll either stop them here or we’ll have to retreat back toward Tarin Kowt.

“Are they cleared hot?” Alex called to Amerine.

“Roger,” Amerine answered. “Clear them all.”

The convoy looked like a snake slithering out of the pass. There seemed to be no end; it just kept coming, its numbers obscured by the dust storm it created as it advanced across the flat desert floor. A
hundred yards into the valley, the column of dust became three when some of the vehicles veered out into the open desert from behind the lead trucks and pressed forward on opposite sides of the road in an arrowhead formation.

“Bombs away,” said Alex.

A large explosion kicked up dust and flame a few hundred yards ahead of the vehicle at the front, the sound reaching ODA 574 a couple of seconds later. Almost immediately, the same vehicle exploded as a second bomb found its mark. The team let out a cheer.

JD noticed that the guerrillas had gone silent. In fact, they were no longer on the ridge. After the first bomb had missed, they’d run.

“The G’s are getting in the trucks!” yelled JD.

Amerine turned to see the few guerrillas not already sitting in the trucks facing off with Mag and Ken, who had blocked their retreat but weren’t able to turn them around. The trucks were slowly rolling back toward Tarin Kowt, their drivers gesturing emphatically to the Americans to get in.

There was no interpreter to explain to the guerrillas what was going on. They had never witnessed American airpower, but they knew all about the atrocities the Taliban were capable of committing. For them, it was an easy decision. Yet the people of Tarin Kowt would be slaughtered if ODA 574 didn’t stop the convoy.

“What do you want to do?” JD shouted to Amerine.

We cannot stay without trucks
, Amerine thought, tightly gripping his M4 carbine.
The only way to stop them is to kill the drivers…I would kill them to prevent a massacre in Tarin Kowt…but that would be the end of Hamid’s movement; we would never be trusted again. This position is lost.

“Get everyone loaded,” Amerine ordered.

Alex had to be pulled up from kneeling beside his rucksack as he continued to direct aircraft. “What the fuck is going on?!” he yelled. “We’re just getting started!”

“They’re running,” said Amerine. “Get in the truck.”

Amerine’s pickup was the last to leave; the driver looked at him
with panic as he pinned the accelerator to the floorboard and hit a rut that almost threw Wes out of the back. “Slow the fuck down!” Wes shouted, pounding on the roof with his fist. He continued to pound, frustrated that they’d just been forced to give up front-row seats to the Super Bowl of aerial ambushes.

When the first bombs hit the lead trucks, the Taliban drivers might have considered the explosions to be lucky hits from old Soviet mortars the townspeople were firing from somewhere up ahead. They did not know they were being targeted by American soldiers. The first contingent of F-18s had dropped its small complement of bombs and left to rearm, creating the illusion that the artillery barrage had ceased. Unable to hear or see the aircraft high overhead, the convoy drove faster, racing along the road on the valley floor past the burning wreckage of four vehicles toward the ridge abandoned by ODA 574.

The Taliban trucks converged back together once they crossed the valley and began to slowly climb the road ascending the ridgeline and into the labyrinth. Impatient drivers again split off to the east and west to form two new columns, searching for another way up and into the labyrinth.

Through the dust, the F-18 pilots were able to provide the team a rough estimate of what they were up against. They reported at least fifty vehicles, with more coming through Tarin Kowt Pass. One large truck appeared to be towing a cannonlike artillery piece.

While the frantic driver of Alex’s truck negotiated the labyrinth, sliding around corners, bouncing up onto embankments, and accelerating through the ruts in the road, Alex somehow managed to continue directing the aircraft. He shouted out to Amerine, “I called in ‘troops in contact.’ Everything in theater is headed our way!”

Across the theater the word was out: A lone team of Green Berets was in contact with hundreds of Taliban fighters. Flights were diverted
from other missions in Afghanistan and aircraft were scrambled from their carriers in the Arabian Sea, all of them heading to Tarin Kowt.

“How long will it take for them to get here?” Amerine asked.

Alex shrugged.

Slamming his fist against the dashboard, Amerine yelled, “These G’s just pulled defeat from the fucking jaws of victory!”

In another truck, Mag was shouting at the guerrillas, who couldn’t understand a word: “What the
hell
?! They were
miles
away! We had
minutes
!
Long fucking minutes
!”

Mike and JD were holding on tight, trying not to get tossed from the back of the truck they were in and nervously eyeing the RPG rounds bouncing around like popcorn in the bed. One had lost its safety cone.
That thing’s gonna blow the fuck up
, Mike kept thinking.
We’re gonna die.

The trucks sped into Tarin Kowt, the town’s gatekeepers lifting the flimsy metal pole barely in time. Men, women, and children bolted to the sides of the road and pressed up against buildings as the trucks flew past, not slowing down till they screeched to a stop in front of the team’s compound.

Standing at the gate with a large group of armed Afghans around him, Karzai looked confused. “What is happening?” he asked Amerine.

“These guys ran,” said Amerine urgently. “My team is taking the trucks. We need to get back in the fight.”

“Okay, yes. Go! Go!”

Karzai uttered angry words in Pashtun to the panicked guerrillas as Amerine grabbed the keys from his driver and tossed them to Wes. “You want to drive?”

“Hell, yeah!” said Wes.

JD commandeered the second truck and yelled, “Drive ’em like you stole ’em!”

“I think we just did!” Wes shouted back.

The Americans raced back through Tarin Kowt, then parked their two trucks side by side on a knoll just outside the town’s gate. Am
erine considered turning the vehicles around to face their escape route through town, but he wanted to appear confident. Once the Taliban came within view of Tarin Kowt, the two trucks might give them a moment’s pause if they believed reinforcements were close behind.

Alex, perched on top of gear in the bed of one truck, continued to direct the U.S. aircraft arriving from all over the country: F-14 Tomcats, in their final months of military service, joined their replacements, F-18 Hornets, all staying above 30,000 feet. Below them, the pilots saw dust clouds from the Taliban convoy approaching Tarin Kowt along three roads through the labyrinth. They appeared to be converging on the pair of trucks sitting just outside town.

“Roger—I see two friendly victors [vehicles],” one pilot radioed to Alex.

“That’s us,” Alex replied.

“You mean that’s all you’ve
got
?!”

The pilots described to Alex what they were seeing: The smaller western and eastern columns of the Taliban attack were moving at a slower pace than the main force approaching in the middle.

“Put it all on the center column for now,” ordered Amerine. “That’s the immediate threat.”

Alex noted the number of planes as they checked in, via radio, when they arrived overhead. Amerine calculated how much firepower they had available: three aircraft, carrying a total of eighteen bombs, to take out at least fifty vehicles coming their way. Not enough.

Explosions echoed in the distance, and a few plumes of black smoke rose into the blue sky. Alex cleared another flight for the center column, marking the location of the air strikes on the map. The Taliban were halfway through the labyrinth, still coming on strong.