Lions of Kandahar (36 page)

The AH-64 helicopters arrived soon after and flew directly over Sperwan Ghar.

“Talon 31, this is Viper 04, lookin’ for a party. Request guns hot, inbound,” the lead pilot said.

“Viper 04, you are cleared hot. Come on heading of two zero two degrees. My position is on the volcano with a large orange visual recognition panel. Listen carefully; there are no friendlies north of the Arghandab River, except west of the thirty grid line. Taliban are attempting to overrun a Special Forces team on the south side of the river. You have no restrictions. My initials are Romeo Bravo. Bring the heat NOW, we need it.”

“Whoa, that’s all enemy,” the pilot said. “Let’s even the odds.” I looked up to the large H on the brown helicopter’s belly and wondered if it was the same pilot who had saved us last year in the mountain pass where my team sergeant had gotten shot.

Dropping its nose down toward the oncoming vehicles on the other side of the river, the lead Apache shot six pairs of rockets that arced toward the ground, destroying the fleeing vehicles.

Within minutes, the Apaches were making a final gun run before turning sharply back toward Kandahar. They had unloaded everything they had.

“Talon 31, this is Viper 04. Coming out. Winchester.” That meant he was out of ammunition, that he’d given us everything he had. I vowed right then and there to keep at least twenty dollars in my pocket in case I ever ran into a thirsty gunship pilot.

Like a conductor, Bill kept the whole orchestra of death going. He made sure the Afghans fired in their sector and got other guns to cover during ammunition and barrel changes. During the short lull, fighters fleeing the 10th Mountain soldiers stopped in a series of nearby huts. Seeing our position, they started firing. Rounds bounced around the rocks. Bill turned, snapped his rifle into his shoulder, and sent a short burst into one of the windows. I saw him and ran to his side.

“Right there. Right there, two o’clock, fifty meters!” he screamed without taking his eye from his scope.

Another round skipped between us as I stood alongside him and started firing too. There were now Taliban fighters near the base of Sperwan Ghar firing up at us.

“ALL GUNS, open fire!” Bill screamed, beating me to the punch.

The roar of the weaponry started again, and the rounds chewed into the walls of the nearby hut, killing the fighters. For the next hour, every soldier on the mountain, including myself, either fired, ferried ammunition, donned asbestos gloves and changed barrels, or carried guns up the six-story hill to replace worn out or broken weapons. There could be absolutely no relief in the intensity of fire we inflicted on the enemy.

The fighters were so close, J.D. could see their faces. He had no idea how many waited in that enormous irrigation ditch near the river or in the tree line. Ammunition was going fast, and soon Ben started telling his gunners to conserve what they had and be selective. No spraying and praying.

Hodge and the rest of the team’s trucks arrived at the field south of Bruce’s team and immediately got into a fight with Taliban soldiers heading for the compound. The situation could not have been more chaotic. SF teams held a compound, surrounded by Taliban. We now engaged the Taliban from the south, east, and north.

Suddenly, an F-18 thundered over the battlefield, prompting a brief lull in the fire. From the rooftop, Ben used the moment wisely and surveyed the terrain. To the south, he saw an escape route.

Hodge looked up just in time to see the first F-18 swoop down and roar over the compound. The jet was so low, Hodge swore he could see the pilot’s visor and patches. This guy meant business.

“Where did an F-18 come from?” he called over to Mike.

“An aircraft carrier!”

Ben and J.D. brought the F-18s on low passes over the compound as the Afghan soldiers climbed off the roof, wounded first. Ben stayed until everybody got down. J.D. was the last off. As he climbed down, an RPG hit nearby, throwing him off the ladder to the hard floor of the compound and showering the others with debris and shrapnel. Staggering to his feet, J.D. peeked through a sliver in a door. A pair of
Taliban fighters were approaching the compound. With the world still spinning, he tried to focus. Looking down the scope of his rifle, he fired, hitting one of the fighters. Turning to fire at the other fighter, he found himself looking down the barrel of the Talib’s AK-47. The moment froze in J.D.’s mind. The Talib had him, but hesitated. J.D. fired, hitting the enemy in the nose and sending him sprawling to the ground.

“Why didn’t he shoot me? Was he out of ammo?” J.D. would never know.

With everybody outside the compound, they still didn’t know the best route to Hodge and the trucks. Taliban fighters headed to the compound stumbled across the trucks and opened fire. J.D. volunteered to find a route. Running out of the door on the south end of the compound, he snaked his way two kilometers through the irrigation ditches despite a serious head wound. It was his second dash to get help, but one that he wouldn’t remember.

As the minutes passed, Bruce worried that J.D. had run into a group of Taliban fighters. Ten tense minutes later, Hodge called back that J.D. had made it.

Hodge popped a smoke grenade, and Ben led the others to the trucks. F-18 fighters flew so low they could distinguish between the SF and ANA soldiers. The pilots gashed the Taliban fighters with gun runs in front of the element, clearing the way for Bruce and his men.

It was more than a reunion when they all came back to Sperwan Ghar.

A medevac helicopter came in and took J.D., who had a fractured skull, and six Afghan soldiers with gunshot and shrapnel wounds back to Kandahar.

When the helicopter landed, Bolduc and the battalion’s command sergeant major, Hedges, stood on the tarmac waiting. Both had spent the balance of the day filing reports with their superiors explaining what had happened. But it was their policy to be the first
people their wounded soldiers saw when they got back to the base. Running next to J.D.’s stretcher, they followed him all the way into the hospital.

Back at his room, Bolduc finally relaxed and reflected on what had happened. Looking at CSM Hedges, he admitted what he couldn’t in the operations center.

“We were lucky. Very, very lucky.”

FIREBASE SPERWAN GHAR

T
he plum-colored phone buzzed rather than rang in the operations center. The nine a.m. call was for either Bolduc or Command Sergeant Major Hedges, and the sergeant in charge of the operations center in Kandahar knew it.

He didn’t want to answer it. The command staff in Bagram, Bolduc’s bosses, had been calling for hours. This was the third call. On the fifth ring, he finally picked up.

“Sir, I think they are in a meeting or something, but let me go find them and they will call you back.”

“Get Bolduc on the phone now,” the officer in Bagram said. The stalling tactic had played out.

A few days before, CSM Hedges had told Bolduc that “higher,” the commanders in Bagram, didn’t want him going out to Sperwan Ghar. It wasn’t an order, just a heavily emphasized suggestion. No one ever told Bolduc specifically not to go.

“We just want you to stay close to your FOB [forward operating base] a little more than in the past,” is all they said.

It was dangerous to circulate to the different firebases, and Bolduc had a reputation for finding trouble. On a previous rotation, his helicopter had gone down, and once he even had directed his helicopter to pick up ambushed paratroopers and ferry them off the battlefield.

The battle at Sperwan Ghar had become too fierce to endanger an entire command team. So, the night before Bolduc left for Sperwan Ghar, he instructed the sergeant to stall Bagram until he could get to the hill. Bolduc was smart enough not to ask permission, because he knew they’d say no. It is easier to ask for forgiveness. Plus, he knew that if the battle spread, we would need his rank out there to get assets and assistance.

“Sir, they are at Sperwan Ghar,” the sergeant finally told Bagram.

The amber sun was up before I woke on September 11, 2006. Startled, I realized that I had not been awakened for my guard shift. Had someone fallen asleep?

I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, snatched my weapon, and got up to see. It took me a second to will my swollen and stiff body off the ground. I still had a large tear in my pants, and my back, butt, knee, and shoulder throbbed relentlessly. I had had a horrible ringing in my ears since the blast. My men had not complained of their wounds, nor allowed themselves to be medevacked, and neither would I. I made a mental note to see Riley about some medication for the swelling.

Walking the short distance from my truck to the command center in the schoolhouse, I found Bolduc and CSM Hedges inside, monitoring the radio and pulling security. Jared walked into the hallway scratching his filthy red beard.

“How did you sleep?” Jared asked. “Commander and the CSM insisted that they pull guard duty the entire night.”

We had badly needed some rest. The past two weeks had been total sensory overload. A good six hours of sleep was just what the men needed, including me. It was rare indeed to have two leaders who cared so greatly for their men. Humbled, I headed back to my truck. As I left, my eyes fell on the words written in chalk on the ash-gray walls of the hallway: “From this day, until the end of the world, we in it shall be remembered. We few, we happy few, we band of brothers. For he who sheds his blood today with me shall be called my brother. —Shakespare.” I had misspelled Shakespeare.

I broke out the coffeepot and plugged it into the truck. The dusty socket sparked angrily but pushed enough power to the ten-dollar kettle. I dug deeply into my backpack for a bag of pure Kona coffee, Hawaiian gold that I saved for special occasions. If the commander and CSM were going to pull guard duty for my men all night, the least I could do was to make them a damn fine cup of coffee. I would not mind being a coffee gofer today.

Bill came up while the coffee brewed and wanted to know what had happened to the guard shift.

“Bolduc and Hedges are here and pulled them.”

“No shit?” he said. Seeing the coffee, he fished out his canteen cup. “First things first, I’m getting a cup of that right there!”

I poured the water slowly over the small yellow filter full of coffee and filled four canteen cups with the deep-almond-colored liquid. As I walked with Bill back toward the school, I held the cups close to my face, inhaling the aroma. Bill didn’t wait and took a big gulp.

When we got to the school, Jared, Bolduc, and Hedges were sitting on MRE cases and ammunition cans, talking about the last eleven days. Bill and I listened to the discussion, and its tally was impressive: we’d completed a clandestine desert crossing with an indigenous force, survived a massive ambush, assaulted a known enemy fortified position, seized the key and decisive terrain feature, repelled two counterattacks and two direct assaults on our defenses, killed or wounded nearly eight hundred enemy fighters, including eight Taliban
commanders, “assisted” NATO’s largest combat operation before becoming its main effort, and liberated a valley the Soviets never conquered.

“Whew,” I mumbled when Bolduc was done. “Not bad for thirty Green Berets and fifty Afghan soldiers.”

“It will be the greatest battle no one ever heard of,” Bill chuckled.

Then Bolduc delivered the news. Sperwan Ghar was now officially a firebase. We’d fought hard to get the hill, and now we’d use it to hold the valley. The Canadian task force had finally managed to seize and hold their hard-fought objective, Rugby, and established a firebase of their own at Masum Ghar. But we didn’t have time to dwell too much on our successes. We still had to cross the river and secure four more objectives. We knew the order was coming because the Canadians couldn’t do it with their mechanized vehicles.

With the coffee gone, Bill and I went back to our trucks. It was eerily silent, but I didn’t have that feeling of impending doom. Something had changed. Looking down into the fields and compounds, I didn’t see any activity. Nothing. I woke Victor and told him to scan the radio. He listened for several minutes to mostly static. Then there was a short message in Pashto. Victor’s eyes lit up. Grinning like an opossum, he held the radio in the air.

“They are leaving, they are leaving.”

The Taliban commanders were collecting the remaining fighters and leaving for Helmand Province and Pakistan. Listening to the radio calls, I could hear their humiliation. An Apache helicopter flew across the river, searching the fields and tree lines for a fight. Bill called him on the radio.

“Razor aircraft, this is Talon 31, requesting a situation report, over.”

“Talon, it looks like a ghost town. Everyone is gone. It looks like they’ve had enough.”

Bill looked at me and shrugged his shoulders. “Too bad, we were just getting a rhythm going,” he said.