The Only Thing Worth Dying For (38 page)

“You know who it was?”

“Haji Badhur,” said Charlie. “Him and his men—they came forward from Damana. We think he wanted to pillage those villages on the other side of the river. After he saw you guys spank the Taliban when you first got into town, he thought they’d all retreated. Easy pickings.”

“Ha! Sounds completely in character for that pirate,” said Amerine.

“Yep. But the bigger news is that Hamid was on the phone all day again, that big conference where the Afghan bigwigs are meeting in Germany, and they’re still pushing for him to lead this country after this is all over.”

“I can’t imagine a better man for the job.”

“There’s more,” said Charlie. “Hamid is expecting a big delegation from Kandahar tomorrow.”

“Here?”

“Sometime in the morning or afternoon Mullah Naqib, an intermediary for the Taliban, is coming over from Kandahar to do a face-to-face with Hamid. We’re thinking they might be ready to hand over the city.”

“Wow.” Amerine unbuttoned his cargo pocket, removed the map, and showed it to Charlie, using a red-lensed flashlight to highlight the overlapping circles he’d been plotting, like some bizarre Venn diagram, to document Karzai’s campaign. He’d drawn the first circle less than three weeks before, when they’d arrived in Haji Badhur’s Cove; after the Battle of Tarin Kowt, Karzai’s support had tidal-waved across the tribal belt. Based on Northern Alliance and American victories in the north and overwhelming support for Karzai in the south, Am
erine and Charlie deduced that Taliban leaders had realized they were all but finished.

“Wow,” Amerine said again. He thought of Wes riding away in the back of the pickup with a hole through his neck. “Wes might be the first SF guy shot by the enemy in this war.”

Charlie nodded. “He might be.”

“Seven years ago, almost to the day, I had to medevac half my platoon in Panama. That time it was rocks instead of bullets. I swear I’m some kind of widow-maker.”

“Ah, that’s bullshit,” said Charlie. “But I wouldn’t mention it to anybody else.”

“Oh, I won’t.”

Amerine sat down on his sleeping bag in a low spot east of the mortar pit, ripped open an MRE pouch, and took a few bites of cold beef stew, washing it down with big gulps of water from his canteen.

“In Somalia I lost a good friend,” Charlie said, sitting down next to him. “There was nothing anybody could have done to change that—except maybe to have skipped the war. Wars are always the same. Good people die, get hurt, get crippled. All you can do is what you think is right in the middle of the chaos.”

JD walked up. “Security is set,” he said, taking a seat on the ground.

“Let’s hope it’s a quiet night,” said Amerine.

“Heard you talking about Somalia,” JD said.

“You were there?” asked Charlie.

“Yeah,” said JD. “I went home early before my tour ended to attend a medical course, but in Somalia I was the TC
*
of my Hummer during patrols…You know, sat in the passenger seat beside the driver. Anyway, a week after I left, my old crew ran over a mine. It killed the guy that replaced me. Bob Deeks, I’ll never forget his name; died on March 3, 1993—three, three, ninety-three. Bothered me for a long time. Still does.”

“Somalia,” he said after a moment. “What a fiasco. At least now we’re in a war that makes some sense.”

The three sat in silence for a while, then Charlie stood up. “Well, if I don’t see you later tonight, I’ll see you somewhere down the road. I’m heading home.”

“Home?” said Amerine.

“Got some stuff going on with my family. It’s an emergency. I’m going to hop on one of the helicopters that’s bringing in Fox’s staff,” he said, shaking their hands. “I’ll catch you guys later.”

After Charlie was gone, Amerine told JD, “Indications are only getting stronger that Hamid will be the interim leader; they’re working out the final details tonight in Germany. It’s not official yet, but Hamid is almost guaranteed to be named the chairman of a transitional government. The Bonn Conference has created a timeline. Within six months, Afghanistan will have a Loya Jirga and then, in two years, a presidential election.”

“So Hamid is going to get his Loya Jirga.”

“That’s all he wanted.”

“God help him if he’s elected president,” JD said. “He’s too good a man for those political games. They’ll eat him alive.”

Once JD left, Amerine finally lay down in his sleeping bag and was a second shy of nodding off when Dan strode over to tell him commo was up. “You are going to love this: We got a message from Task Force Dagger asking for awards recommendations from all the Fifth Group elements in theater. They want them ASAP.”

Amerine sat upright. He had never been to war and he was fairly certain that neither had the people asking for such crap. He would have expected awards to be considered
after
teams redeployed, but here they were requesting a submission from the field, something he hadn’t given a thought to—and wasn’t going to until they completed the mission.

“Better get moving on that Silver Star recommendation for me, sir,” said Dan, grinning. “Oh, never mind: Medals like that are just for you officers.”

“When they put out the usual quota system for awards, I’ll make
sure to keep you at the top of the list,” retorted Amerine. “I’m going to rack out for a few hours. Unless something urgent comes through, just save it till morning.”

Lying back down, Amerine pushed the notion of awards into the back of his mind, the same place where he’d buried the absurdity of being pulled off two positions within an hour. As he began to doze, he thought of the thing that was most important to him: his men. In the finest tradition of the Green Berets, ODA 574 had pushed unwilling guerrillas up a hill under fire. They’d come together as a team, had taken their objective, and he was proud of them.

A couple of hours after Amerine fell asleep, Mag’s watch ended, and he found a flat spot just east of the Alamo’s command post—a rectangular patch of boot-beaten ground between a trench and a low wall—where he could catch four hours of sleep. The young guerrilla with the orange blanket had been shadowing him all day; now he approached Mag with Seylaab, who translated: “He would like to know how you stop the bombs from falling on you at night.” He pointed to the sky, and Mag tuned in to the ominous hum of Spectre’s props in orbit at a couple thousand feet. Mag cracked an IR chemlite, set it at the head of his sleeping bag, and let the Afghan look at it through his NODs.

Letting out an “oooh,” the man spoke a few words to Seylaab, then hurried down toward the medical clinic.

“He says you’re magic,” said Seylaab before taking off after the guerrilla.

Mag stretched out beneath his unzipped sleeping bag, which was buffered from the cold, hard ground by a thin piece of foam. His Beretta was on his stomach, his hand on top of that, and his M4 at his side. Boots on, go-to-hell pack ready at his head. Everything was exactly as it was when he went to sleep every night.

He was about to say his evening prayer when the guerrilla reappeared and spread his blanket next to him. Then another young Afghan crowded against his other side. They kept coming, fanning out around him. One put his head on Mag’s legs as if they were pillows.

“Wait a minute, I’m not your daddy,” Mag said, pushing the man off and attempting to spread them out a bit. With just a few inches of wiggle room between him and ten guerrillas, he began his silent prayer. This time he rambled more than usual, concerned that he’d sinned when he’d shot to kill for the first time in his life earlier in the day.
I’m sorry, Lord, if I was sinning today. Forgive me if I was having fun pulling the trigger, and for looking forward to doing it again.

Even though Mag was feeling no real threat, he was oddly compelled to end the prayer as he’d only done when his life had been in immediate mortal danger. He didn’t question the compulsion, figuring that God knew something was coming.

I know, Lord, I asked you once in the Himalayas stuck in that crevasse, and then when I was sick with giardia, to just get me through and get me off that glacier and get me home. I asked you to save me then, and I didn’t walk your path when I got home. This time, Lord, I ain’t making no promises. All I’m going to ask you this time, Lord, if anything happens to me, I just want you to watch after my kids, let my family and friends know I love them, and don’t let me feel a thing. Forgive me my sins. I accept you as my Lord and Savior.

Amen.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Thirteenth Sortie

There’s a grief that can’t be spoken.

There’s a pain goes on and on.

Empty chairs at empty tables

Now my friends are dead and gone.

—Claude Michel Schonberg, “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables”

Just after one in the morning on Wednesday, December 5, Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Timothy Crosby taxied his B-52 down the runway at the U.S. air base on Diego Garcia, an island in the Indian Ocean. He took off, banking north and ascending to a cruising altitude of 40,000 feet. The Stratofortress bomber was part of a squadron of ten B-52s and a half-dozen B-1s that flew out of Diego every day, providing round-the-clock, on-call air support for teams on the ground in Afghanistan. Its five-person crew—Crosby, his copilot, an aircraft navigator, a radar navigator, and an electronic warfare officer—had thousands of hours of flying time between them.

This mission was the crew’s thirteenth sortie in Operation Enduring Freedom.
¹

At 3
A.M.
in Shawali Kowt, Amerine was waking up after four hours of sleep. JD, hunkered down on watch a few feet away, heard Amerine’s sleeping bag rustle. “Top of the morning to you, sir,” he said, then gave a status report: Alex had been communicating with the Spectre pilot flying recon, who had detected no enemy movement in the area.

“It’s been really quiet,” said JD.

Amerine looked around to be sure nobody could overhear him, then said, “I’m going to fire Ken today. He’ll go to the C-team, and we’ll get their medic, who is coming in tonight with the rest of Fox’s staff.”

“It’s shitty, sir, but it has to be done.”

“I’ll take my shift after I write up the counseling statement on Ken,” said Amerine. “As long as you’re feeling all right.”

“I’m feeling pretty good, considering,” said JD. “Still wired.”

Walking along the Alamo’s perimeter, Amerine passed Fox, asleep on the ground, as was everyone else except for JD, Wes, and Ronnie. He chuckled when he saw the guerrillas around Mag like a litter of puppies.

Toward the northeastern end of the Alamo he came upon several Afghans huddling by a small fire they’d built in a shallow depression. The guerrillas were still inadequately outfitted for the nighttime temperatures that dipped into the 30s; despite numerous supply drops, few of them had even a sleeping bag. When he got close enough to hear their chattering teeth, he didn’t have the heart to make them extinguish the meager flames. In fact, he joined them, sitting off to the side as he wrote Ken up.

The fire broke a cardinal rule of field craft, yet Amerine wasn’t concerned. He found the moment oddly nostalgic, remembering bonfires on the beaches of Oahu. His guard was down, he realized, just as it was during Ranger School when he and his fellow students would build fires to mark the completion of a training mission.

He sensed that the battle with the Taliban was over: Sometime after sunrise, probably before noon, a high-level Taliban delegation would be arriving from Kandahar to discuss a peaceful cessation of hostilities. Less than three months had passed since 9/11, yet the United States, with its Afghan rebel allies, was about to topple the Taliban government. And he’d expected it to take six months just for ODA 574 to seize Tarin Kowt.

At 3:45
A.M.
, four Pave Lows that had originated from J-Bad, Pakistan, touched down in the desert at the landing zone designated
LZ Jamie, a mile and a half north of Shawali Kowt. Sergeant First Class Chris Pickett, a twenty-eight-year-old medic, and Air Force Technical Sergeant Jim Price, thirty-four, were riding in one of two brand-new white Toyota Tundra 4x4s loaded in the cargo bays of the helicopters delivering Fox’s battalion headquarters. Price gripped the steering wheel tightly as the Pave Low’s ramp lowered, then he flipped on his NODs, turned the key, and steered the truck down and out into a swirling billow of dust and darkness.

A figure suddenly appeared directly in front of him and Price slammed on the brakes. It was Major Bolduc, who used hand signals to direct them south, where three beat-up trucks belonging to guerrillas were parked along the road. Bolduc ran back to the lead truck, which led the king cabs carrying the remainder of Fox’s battalion headquarters staff—call sign Rambo 85—to Shawali Kowt.

If Denise Pickett had known her husband was part of a small convoy in the middle of the Afghan desert heading in the direction of Kandahar, she would have been proud but not pleased. Pickett had assured his wife before deploying that, as a medic on Fox’s battalion headquarters staff C-team, there was no chance he’d get near the battlefield. “Don’t worry about me, honey,” he’d said. “Worry about the other guys—the A-teams. I’m with battalion; we don’t get into the mix.”

Though Fox had also chosen an Air Force combat weatherman, an Army intelligence analyst, and two Air Force TACPs (tactical air control parties), most of the fourteen men of Rambo 85 were Green Berets, personnel from Fox’s C-team, many of whom had been shocked in the weeks before this mission when Fox was ordered by Mulholland to start running them through combat drills. They were not a combat unit: The extent of their recent training had been completing—or, as one NCO put it, “fumbling our way through”—a couple of react-to-contact drills, which even the most novice infantry units master before heading into battle.

Now Price, Pickett, and the rest of Rambo 85 were driving through the desert to join ODA 574—one of the teams Pickett had told his wife to worry about.