The Only Thing Worth Dying For (36 page)

Catching their breath for a minute, they did a three-count, darted across the twenty-five yards to the trench, and dove in. Looking uphill, Mag and Alex discovered that they weren’t alone: a group of Bashir’s guerrillas was sitting against the earthen walls of a deep, cir
cular fighting position, smiling down at them. One, a man in his early twenties, had wrapped himself in an orange blanket, the color the U.S. military had designated to identify friendly forces. Mag laughed. “You want to make damn sure you don’t get shot, eh, amigo?” Mag said, tugging on the blanket. The man grinned.

Peering over the top of the trench, Mag and Alex had a clear view of both sides of the bridge and the terrain on the near side of the river. Muzzle flashes were erupting from the edge of the orchard along their side of the Arghandab just west of the bridge; these orchards continued west and jutted north into the desert some five hundred yards downriver. In the desert between their position and the orchard, a Taliban fighter rose from a foxhole three hundred yards out and began to run toward the river. Mag shot a few rounds and the man dove into another hole some four hundred yards out, about the range of his M4. Elevating the carbine, Mag continued to fire while Alex shot M203 smoke grenades from his carbine in the same direction.

The rising smoke acted as markers that Alex used to direct the coming strikes from F-18s. Almost instantly, a jet shot by, heading northwest toward Shawali Kowt. It banked, dropping in elevation, and came back on a western heading, only a mile or two away and screaming directly at them.

“He sees us, right?” Mag said.

“He can’t actually
see
us,” said Alex, continuing to spot his targets.

“I got a signal mirror here.”

Concentrating on talking to the pilot, Alex didn’t respond. Mag glanced at the guerrilla with the orange blanket. “Fuck it!” he said, ripping the blanket from the man’s shoulders and scrambling over the edge of the trench. Hugging the ground, he spread out the blanket and weighted it down at the corners with rocks. Enemy fire churned the ground around him, and he dived back into the trench.

“Can he see
that
?” Mag shouted to Alex as the aircraft roared past.

A 500-pound bomb exploded a few hundred yards away, shaking the ground. For the first time since the assault began, there was silence. Mag looked toward the orchard. In place of the muzzle flashes, smoke was rising from a patch of blackened earth.

Mike, Wes, and ten guerrillas had crossed the canal to compound two, where Amerine began to orient them on the layout of the hill, including the dead space. He was pointing out where he’d last seen the guerrillas and where Alex and Mag were positioned, when a guerrilla peeked out of a trench only forty or fifty yards up the slope.

“They scattered like mice,” said Amerine. “I’m going to get those guys; then we can rally here and move up the hill.”

Running across the slope, he jumped into the trench as machine-gun fire raked its top.

Eight guerrillas were seated in the three-foot-wide, four-foot-deep space, smiling broadly, as though they had been expecting Amerine. The oldest, in his late forties, pulled out the small rug he was sitting on and slid it next to him, motioning for Amerine to take a load off. Even in trench warfare, Afghan hospitality persisted.

Amerine thanked him with a slight bow but remained squatting. He waved the guerrillas closer and, following his lead, they cautiously peered over the edge of the trench up the slope, which was being hit sporadically by bullets. Doubting he would be able to make himself understood, Amerine indicated the dead space beyond where the bullets were striking and drew a line with his finger to the ruins. He pointed at himself, ran in place, motioned up the hill, pointed at each of them, and said, “I go up there. You, come.”

They seemed to understand—because they shook their heads “no.” As if to punctuate their resolve, machine-gun fire raked across the top of the trench. Amerine flinched, then stood tall, which left him exposed from the shoulders up, turned toward the incoming fire, and, with both hands held high, flipped off the Taliban. “Fuck you!” he yelled, before ducking back down.

Another burst of fire showered them with dirt.

The guerrillas cheered and the older man offered Amerine a cigarette. When Amerine declined, the man shrugged and put it into his own mouth, which Amerine took to mean “I’m having a smoke. I’m not going anywhere.”

Just then, the bomb that Alex had called in exploded to the west.

In the ensuing silence, Amerine pulled the man with the cigarette to his feet, then crawled out of the trench, staying low for a few yards, and urged the Afghans to follow. One pulled himself out and began to run, and the rest followed, sprinting after Amerine back to the safety of compound two, where Mike and Wes were waiting with the other guerrillas.

“All right, let’s get them all to the ruins,” said Amerine.

Still working his radio, Alex turned to Mag and said, “I’m getting a low-battery warning; can you grab me some new batteries?”

“Sure,” said Mag, thinking they were in Alex’s go-to-hell pack, lying nearby on the ground.

“No,” said Alex when Mag reached for the pack. “They’re not here. They’re down in the truck.”

Fuck
, thought Mag. But his orders from Amerine were to get “warheads on foreheads,” so he put on his go-to-hell pack, picked up his M4, and climbed out of the trench. He bolted across the exposed ground to the corner of the ruins, sprinted down through the dead space, passing Amerine, Mike, and the guerrillas, and didn’t stop till he arrived at the bridge over the canal.

Walking over it to compound one Mag studiously avoided Ken, who was still standing by the trucks with a couple of guerrillas. He dug through Alex’s pack, grabbed the batteries, and retraced his route, all the way back to the top of the hill.

“Special delivery,” he said as he handed Alex the batteries, his chest heaving from the exertion. “Don’t let this happen again!” The two men began to laugh.

“You want to help push these guys up the hill?” Amerine asked Mike, nodding toward the guerrillas waiting alongside the eastern wall of compound two. “Not really,” said Mike with a grin as he began to line them up. Wes hung back to cover their flanks as fifteen Afghans
followed Mike out from behind the compound onto the open ground. “Let’s go! Let’s go!” he said, picking up speed. Running now, with Amerine on the right flank, the group moved into the dead space and steadily up the slope. They heard sporadic gunfire but remained unseen to the enemy.

Reaching the northeast corner of the ruins, Mike looked cautiously through a jagged crack in the thick fortress wall, relaxing at the sight of a few familiar guerrillas on carpets with their backs against what had once been the foundation of a room. They were smoking cigarettes, their AK-47s on the ground before them. Noticing Mike, they broke into smiles and waved him over.

Mike led his guerrillas into the center of the rectangular fortress, about twenty yards wide and forty yards long. At the south-facing corners, narrow windows in the remainder of the ramparts allowed them to see all angles of approach from the river. Two guerrillas at the western wall were taking turns emptying their magazines out the window before ducking back inside. A third was loading a PKM machine gun they’d hauled up.

“Mike,” Amerine said, bringing up the rear of guerrillas, “establish a security perimeter. I’m going to pull Mag and Alex in here, and then get Ken.”

As Amerine climbed back out through the crack in the wall, another bomb hit the orchard to the west. He ran along the wall of the ruins to the northwest corner, where he could see Mag and Alex’s position in the exposed trench line, and hopped in without drawing any fire. “We’re moving into the ruins. Get in there and set up a command post. Mike is establishing security.”

When the next explosion resonated from the orchard, Mag and Alex crawled out of the trench and headed toward the ruins, followed closely by the guerrillas. Inside, Mag laid the orange blanket on the ground near an old bomb crater in which Alex set up the command post. Checking his watch, Mag was jolted by the realization that it had only been a half hour since they’d left Shawali Kowt—probably only twenty minutes since the shooting began. He had experienced time warps in training, but nothing like this. He would have sworn they’d been getting shot at for hours.

The guerrillas joined the fighters Mike had already positioned at the windows, most of them facing the orchards to the west, where a few pockets of Taliban had survived the bombing sorties and were raking the fortress with bursts of light machine-gun and AK-47 fire. On the left side of the western wall, Mike was helping three of the Afghans adjust the sights on the PKM machine gun. Bashir, who was to their right, waved at Mag and, smiling broadly, stepped to a window, sprayed a clip of ammo, and jumped back. Another guerrilla stood at a window in the southwest corner, fully exposed for thirty or forty seconds as he took his time aiming his rifle. This unnerved Mag, who pulled the man away and set him down on the ground.

To avoid creating a pattern the enemy could anticipate, Mag began to move randomly from window to window, watching for muzzle flashes. In sniper training, his instructor had said, “You give me three seconds, I’m gonna put you down.” Now Mag repeated in his head,
I’m up, they see me, I’m down,
to keep himself from staying exposed for too long. If he saw flashes, he returned fire with his carbine, sometimes even pumping out a few M203 grenades from his carbine’s launcher before moving on to another window.

I’m up, they see me, I’m down. I’m up, they see me, I’m down…

Amerine ran down the hill, passing Wes, who was on his way up. He found Ken with some guerrillas between a truck and the wall of the first compound, on standby at the CCP.

“We’ve got the hill,” Amerine said to him. “Have the guerrillas grab the mortar tube and whatever ammo they can carry and come on up. Follow the dead space there.” The shadow made by the slope’s cleavage was more prominent now that the sun had dropped lower in the sky.

“Someone else should do it, sir,” said Ken. “It’s better for me to stay here at the CCP.”

“I’m telling you again, Sergeant: Get those men and the mortar up the hill. The CCP is now up there.”

Amerine grabbed his rucksack from his truck and bolted back to
the ruins, joining Alex, who informed him that they were continuing to take small-arms fire from the orchards. “But I think we got most of them,” he said, “or they ran, because it has definitely slowed down.”

“I’m going to have the guys start moving their gear up from the trucks,” Amerine said. He headed over to Mike’s position and told him to go down for his rucksack, then joined Mag by a window.

“Still seeing muzzle flashes at the tree line,” said Mag. “They’re focusing everything they got up here, and it ain’t much.” Amerine peeked out the window, scanned the trees, and pulled back just as machine-gun bullets pounded into the outer wall, sending a puff of dust floating into the space where his head had just been. Something hit the top of his boot, and he glanced down at an enemy tracer round glowing green in the dirt between his legs.

Mag was still moving from window to window when he turned to see Wes behind him. “Where’d
you
come from?” he said.

“I followed you guys up, pushing guerrillas. What have we got here?”

“Our guerrillas are shooting at something in the tree line at two o’clock, down the hill, across the road—a hundred fifty yards. I’m also seeing muzzle flashes at ten o’clock, over here.” The two men spread out along the fortress wall and began shooting out the windows. Within a couple of minutes, they were eight feet apart, converging on opposite sides of the same western-facing window. From the left, Mag peeked out, saw nothing, and pulled out of the opening. Coming from the right, Wes stuck his head into the window.

Mag heard what sounded like the snap of a bullwhip a foot from his head and saw Wes fly backward and land on the ground. At first, Mag thought Wes had realized his error and jumped away as the bullet passed between the two men. Then Wes dropped his gun, sat up, and swiped at the back of his neck, as if a bee had stung him. “What the hell?!” he yelled, looking over his shoulder.

The second he had popped in front of the window, Wes realized his mistake. When the muscle atop his shoulder had exploded in pain, he
thought the captain might have walked over and given him a ferocious slap for his stupidity. He turned to see who had hit him, but there was only a guerrilla, five feet away, holding his rifle at his hip and staring at Wes with wide eyes. Only then did Wes understand that he’d been shot.

“Mag! This motherfucker AD’d me!” shouted Wes, accusing the Afghan of accidentally discharging his gun.

“Put the gun down!” Mag ordered the guerrilla, who looked terrified as he sputtered something in Pashto.

“Shoot that motherfucker!” Wes shouted.

“Captain!” yelled Mag over the din of machine-gun fire. “Wes got shot!”

Looking up from the crater where he’d been about to radio JD, Amerine could see Wes sitting on the ground with his legs crossed in front of him. “What did he say?” Amerine asked Alex.

“Somebody got shot?” said Alex.

Amerine ran across the courtyard as Mag grabbed the gun from the guerrilla and shoved him down.

“Where’s my medic?” Amerine shouted, scanning the ruins and realizing that Ken had not driven up with the mortar.
He’s still back at the trucks
, he answered himself.

He radioed Ken. “Drive your ass up here! Wes got shot. Keep the truck on the north side of the hill in the dead space where I showed you and you’ll be fine.”

“Oh shit,” came the response. “I’ll be right there.”

Kneeling down beside Wes, Amerine watched Mag—who was an EMT before he entered Special Forces—assess the wounded man. He checked his pulse: It was strong. He unbuttoned the top of Wes’s shirt and pulled the collar down a little, revealing a perfectly round hole to the left of his throat—dangerously close to the artery. Trying to keep it lighthearted, Mag said, “You’re right, you just got shot!”