Lions of Kandahar (23 page)

The words had barely gotten out when Dave confirmed the target. “Got it,” he said coolly, sighting in on the Taliban position. He cut loose with a long burst, riddling the grape hut. A four-foot flame
belched out of the M2 barrel, marking its tremendous firepower. Dave continued to shoot as we got closer.

My heart was pounding and sweat dripped into my eyes—I knew we were driving into an ambush. I pulled my headset down from the visor and called the report in to Jared. “Talon 30, this is Talon 31. Enemy contact eleven o’clock. They are in the grape huts.”

It didn’t matter if the enemy scout on the grape hut reported our position now. The machine-gun blast definitively announced our presence. I wished I had a dip or even a piece of gum to calm my nerves. But that thought disappeared with the vapor trail from the first RPG.

I saw the first rounds of the battle smack off my windshield as a hail of rocket-propelled grenades and machine-gun bullets sliced into our trucks. After that, there was no shortage of fire or targets to shoot at. From the top of the hill and surrounding compounds, they could see us coming. The Taliban knew what we knew: that Sperwan Ghar was prime real estate and they owned it.

“All 31 elements, watch your sectors and stay tight,” I radioed to the convoy. “Gunners, stay low in the cupola.”

Enemy snipers target the machine gunners; if our big guns went down, the vehicles would be defenseless. My mind focused again on the scout. How many were with him? What weapons did they have? We definitely needed more firepower. We had M4 rifles, M240 machine guns, .50-caliber heavy machine guns, a sniper rifle, and the Goose, a Carl Gustav 84-mm recoilless rifle, but this was the kind of situation where a mini machine gun is priceless, and I wished I had at least three.

“Eagle 10, this is Talon 30. We are troops in contact. We have twenty to forty enemy one hundred meters northeast of our position and are receiving intense RPG, PKM, and small-arms fire from numerous compounds,” I heard Jared radio to our headquarters at Kandahar Airfield. “Request immediate close air support.”

Within seconds the radio responded clear and loud. “Talon 30, this
is Eagle 10, roger, we copy troops in contact. Stand by.” The wait lasted only a few moments, but it seemed like forever. Back at the tactical operations center dozens of men on radios and telephones would be scrambling to find us the help we needed. They would have to coordinate with the Canadians, who controlled all the aircraft for this operation.

“Talon 30, this is Eagle 10. We have emergency aircraft inbound to your target area. ETA twenty mikes [minutes].”

Twenty minutes from now this fight might be over
, I thought. Neither Taliban fighters nor their ammunition were in short supply. Shouldering the smaller M240 machine gun mounted to the door on my side of the truck, I started firing at the muzzle flashes and fighters moving near the compounds surrounding the base of the hill.

The firing was heavy from the right side, and the Taliban fighters seemed to continue to maneuver from right to left. But now our heavy weapons began “talking” the way their operators had been trained. This meant that one machine gun would fire a short burst into an enemy position and would rotate with another machine gun doing the same thing, all rotating firing at the target until it was destroyed. This technique allowed us to destroy the enemy using maximum firepower and minimal ammo.

In response, the Taliban fighters unloaded airburst RPG rounds all over us—rigging the rockets to explode so that shrapnel rained down on us. The volleys were meant to take out the gunners and wound troops in the back of the trucks.

“We have fire coming from our six o’clock. I say again, we have fire coming from our six o’clock,” my team sergeant, Bill, said over the radio as I shook off the effects of the RPG blasts.

“Move truck 3 and 4 to my left and into an L shape,” I barked back to him.

The whole fight was a giant chess match. By putting our trucks in an L shape, we had managed to keep the Taliban at bay on the left and rear and make room for the rest of the convoy to move forward.

Brian called “Set”—the command that the truck was going to move—and quickly turned the vehicle to face the compound. Now we had the engine block between us and the enemy. I had no sooner reloaded my next can of ammunition than Dave called for a reload for his .50-cal. He laid a fresh belt of ammunition in the gun just as an RPG exploded on the truck’s front bumper, throwing up a massive wave of dust and debris. My teeth hurt and I had the strong metallic taste of explosives in my mouth.

Damn, we need more firepower
. “Where is the CAS?” I screamed to Ron, my Air Force JTAC, one of the most important members of the team. It was his job to call in air strikes and get us the close air support we needed. I could hear the rounds cracking around me as I took a quick look into the back of the truck. Ron was firing at fighters behind us. That was good and bad. He wasn’t injured, but he also wasn’t calling in air strikes on the Taliban fighters surrounding us.

This time Dave, Brian, and I all saw the source and unleashed our fire into the tree line beside a compound directly in front of us. Almost as quickly as we started firing, it was returned from the compound—a mosque. We were being attacked from a mosque. According to the Geneva Convention, if the enemy engages you from a holy site, using it as a military position, it can be engaged.

Dave went to work on the enemy machine-gun positions firing from inside the mosque. I called for him to give me covering fire and I got out of the truck with an AT4 and a LAWS. The AT4 is a disposable light anti-tank round. The LAWS is the Light Anti-Armor Weapons System for destroying small trucks and fighting positions. Both were made to destroy armor, but they’d also work on buildings.

I fired the LAWS first at the building directly in front of us to get my bearing and range. I might as well have thrown a tennis ball for all the good it did. I heard the loud
thwack
of rounds pass around me and I ducked back into the truck before I could fire the AT4. When the firing broke, I hopped back out, sticking closer to my truck, and took aim at the compound in front of us. The firing procedure was second
nature: Front and rear sights up. Three hundred meters distance, set. Pull safety pin. Check back blast. Safety off and fire.
BOOM
. Solid impact. Dust and debris flew from the main entranceway and every window. Just as I slid back into the truck, Bill appeared in my doorway.

“How you doing up here, fellas?” Bill asked in his slow Texas drawl, despite the maelstrom of fire around him. I’ve had the pleasure of serving with several Texans, and they were all born fighters. It must be something in the water down there.

“I need a round count, things are too crazy on the radio,” he said. As team sergeant, Bill kept the guns running with plenty of ammunition. He went to take stock of our stores, and returned shortly. “Got bad news, Captain. We are amber on .50-cal,” he said. Amber meant we’d already shot half of our ammunition.

I told him to get some bigger guns going, but he was already a step ahead. Sean, an ETT, was breaking out the Goose. The 84-mm recoilless rifle, dubbed the Goose in honor of its original manufacturer, Carl Gustav Stads Gevärsfaktori, could shoot a high-velocity, high-explosive round the size of a football into the buildings. “We’re going to try the AT4 first,” he said.

It sounded good, but I told Bill to use the radio next time he wanted to talk with me. He was too valuable to be running around without cover. “I need you alive and not leaking,” I told him.

He disappeared just as I heard the sweet
whomp, whomp
of helicopter blades. The AH-64 Apaches had arrived.

“Okay, motherfuckers, now it’s really on!” screamed Dave at the top of his lungs.

I turned to Ron and he showed two fingers. Two aircraft. Jet fighters were also arriving on station, and Ron began to coordinate and identify targets.

Since the main effort for Operation Medusa was the Canadian task force across the river, we had to get permission from them to use the Apaches. At the time, the Canadians were not under attack, and they eventually released the helicopters to our control. The Canadian task
force had also wanted to keep the jets we had requested, American A-10 ground attack fighters, in reserve, but they relented and released them as well. While Ron sorted through the A-10 mess, Jared identified targets for the Apaches droning above us, which were part of the ISAF Dutch contingent. At his direction, the gunships made runs on the heavily defended buildings in our path to drive out the occupants. But the Dutch pilots were nervous about shooting too close to us. They didn’t want to be blamed for friendly fire.

“If you do not engage the targets we tell you, then we cannot use you,” Jared finally snapped, exasperated. “The enemy is within two hundred meters of our location and we need the fire now.”

The first two 2.75-inch rockets from the Apaches slammed high into the grape house in front of us, collapsing its entire front. The sharp cracks of the explosions marked a good hit. As the dust cleared from the rocket blasts, Afghan Army soldiers to my right cut down the four or five Taliban fighters who came stumbling out of the building dazed and confused.

As I reached down to grab another box of ammunition, a red glow flashed across the hood of my truck. The RPG exploded just outside Brian’s window, showering the truck with shrapnel. Stunned momentarily, we were snapped back into focus by Jared’s voice on the radio. He was still trying to muster fire superiority to push up toward the hill. Then the TOC in Kandahar came back: “Talon 30, this is Eagle 10. Here is your situation: the enemy count is not dozens, but hundreds, maybe even a thousand. Do you copy, over?”

I shot a glance at Brian. “You have got to be shitting me.”

The slapping sound of rounds hitting vehicles got my attention and I again focused on engaging targets with my machine gun. Nearby, the Apache gunships strafed Taliban fighters hiding around the hill. I could hear the giant zipper of the 30-mm cannons tearing up the compounds and irrigation ditches beyond us. Usually Taliban fighters hid when the Apaches showed up, but this time they held their ground and dug in. After a final pass, the Apaches banked, and
the low thump of rotor blades faded in the distance as they headed back to Kandahar to refuel and rearm.

If these fighters weren’t afraid of the helicopters, then they’d only get bolder now that the birds were gone. I could hear Ron over the radio trying to get more helos. Ammunition in my truck was going fast, and based on the level of fire, I suspected the situation was the same in the other trucks.

As I turned back to my machine gun, Riley, my senior medic, arrived at my door. He had two AT4s, the light anti-tank rockets.

“Where do you want them?” he asked.

I directed him to one of the most active compounds. On his signal, Brian, Dave, and I fired every weapon we had to give him cover as he crept along the backside of my truck. Taliban machine gunners saw him, and their short bursts came within feet of him as he stepped out of cover to fire. He fired off the first rocket while trying to dodge the incoming fire marked by dusty flicks of dirt. It missed the doorway and exploded into the thick mud wall. Riley dove back to the truck for the second AT4. Racing back to the same spot, in the open, he shouldered the rocket and fired. Another cloud of dust flew in all directions around him. The 84-mm round impacted exactly where the Taliban machine gunners had been seconds before. Nearly a dozen more explosions followed, all around our trucks. I turned to ask Brian where we got all the AT4 rockets, thinking others were firing at the enemy too. Then I saw the fright in Brian’s eyes.

“That’s RPGs!” Brian screamed. Incoming enemy rockets.

It was like standing in a Fourth of July fireworks display complete with razor-sharp shrapnel. In the turret of his vehicle, Zack winced as an airburst RPG exploded beside him, sending shrapnel slicing into his arm. He ducked into the protection of the armored shield mounted around the MK19 grenade launcher and made a quick self-assessment. Seeing his arm still attached and being able to move his hand, he resumed firing at Taliban positions. The MK19 grenade launcher fires tennis-ball-sized grenades for hundreds of meters.

The call came over the radio. “Zack’s hit!” Riley darted to his own vehicle, grabbed his aid bag, and sprinted over to Zack, climbing up to the mount, completely exposed to the Taliban, to treat the gash in Zack’s arm while he continued firing. It wasn’t life-threatening. Riley bandaged the wound, calmly climbed down, and ran to the other three trucks in turn, checking everyone’s status.

Moments after Riley left, a grenade jammed in the smoking-hot barrel of Zack’s MK19. The grenades had kept the Taliban fighters at bay, but Zack could see them moving through an irrigation ditch and tree line on our flank. Not an ideal time to reduce firepower. Zack climbed out of the protective turret and around to its front, where he hunched over the gun, rear end to the enemy, jammed a steel clearing rod into its barrel, wrenched out the grenade, and repaired the damage. Miraculously intact, he was soon back to hammering the flanking fighters.

Ron hollered to me from the bed of my truck. More bad news: we had lost the A-10 aircraft, which had to go refuel. “Shit, we can’t get a break,” I answered, then gave the heads-up over my handset: “As soon as we lose the aircraft, the savages are going to hit us hard. We need to be ready.”

Hodge and his team were spread out in a broad line, watching our rear in the narrow opening leading to the hill. When the ambush was sprung, my team had moved forward, and now the thick smoke from explosions and fires masked us from Hodge.

“Pop a smoke grenade to mark your position,” Hodge said over the radio.

“Negative,” I responded. The smoke would also give the RPG gunners a target to shoot at.

Hodge figured he could at least try to neutralize the enemy moving to reinforce their positions and increase the pressure on us. As he maneuvered, trying to glimpse us, an RPG barely missed his truck. The back blast caught the team’s attention. About twenty Taliban fighters were hiding in a deep irrigation ditch. They’d pop up, shoot,
and then crawl back down and reload. Hodge’s truck jerked to a halt and opened fire.