The Only Thing Worth Dying For (42 page)

When Price relayed the order, there were fifty or more Afghans on the Alamo, watching the bombing with most of the fifteen-member headquarters staff. ODA 574’s eleven men had been on or near the hill as well. More than seventy men were within forty yards of Price in the moments before he’d cleared the bomber to drop the 2,000-pound JDAM. A bomb that big, he knew, required a buffer space of at least five hundred yards to ensure the safety of friendly forces.

Now this hillside was a wasteland.
What the fuck happened?!
he thought.

He’d told the pilot they were 2,000 yards from the target. He’d been careful not to give their position, providing only what he thought were the coordinates of the cave according to the Viper. Weapons guided by coordinates did not go astray; they went where you told them to go, which meant that he must have given the bomber the wrong coordinates.

In the distance a voice shouted, “This is the CCP!” A dead Afghan a few feet away was sprawled in the dirt with a hole the size of a fist clean through his head. Men were groaning in the smoke around him. Whoever was panting like a dog nearby, Price knew from his medical training, was probably about to die.
I fucked up,
he realized.
I did this…Jesus, I fucking did this.

Once the shock began to wear off, Nelson Smith knew he had to get commo running again. Then he remembered that he had left sensitive items—his radio and cipher book—at the top of the Alamo when he’d gone for batteries.

Walking slowly back toward the hill, he nearly stepped on Mag, who was on his side near the lower slope of the Alamo. How had he missed him when he’d run by here just a few minutes before? Had Mag crawled over?

Mag looked up at Smith and spoke like a child: “Don’t. Feel. Good.” He reached out with a hand that was a dripping mop of shredded bone, flesh, and tendon. Dropping to his knees, Smith gripped Mag’s forearm as hard as he could to slow the bleeding and cried out, “Medic!”

As Pickett grabbed his aid bag from the bed of one of ODA 574’s trucks, he glanced up the rise to where he’d spoken with JD—that entire western slope was now void of anything but drifting smoke. The
crowd of Afghans standing there moments before had vanished. As he slung the bag over his shoulder, a hand grasped his bicep. He turned to see Major Bolduc and Sergeant Major Reid standing there.

“Bandage up the doc’s head so he can start treating people,” Bolduc said to Reid, who reached into Pickett’s bag, grabbed a roll of gauze, and wrapped it around Pickett’s head. Bolduc started to limp up the side of the Alamo.

“You wounded, sir?” Pickett yelled after him.

“No,” Bolduc shouted back. “Just got flattened by the blast, hurt my hip and my ears are ringing, but I’m not hit.”

His bandage in place, Pickett ran the twenty yards to where Smith had again called out for a medic. Smith was kneeling beside Mag, squeezing his forearm so tightly that his hand shook from fatigue.

“It’s bleeding pretty good, doc,” he said. “I gotta get commo up.”

“Thanks,” said Pickett, replacing Smith’s grip with his own.

Lying on his side in the fetal position with his eyes squeezed shut, Mag cried out in pain. Smith hesitated.

“I got it!” said Pickett.

After a few steps, Smith stopped. “His name is Mag,” he told Pickett. “Got it. Go!”

Mag began to kick his legs, as if running in place while holding his injured arm up in the air. Mag’s other hand was clamped around the back of his head, and the shoulders and collar of his uniform were soaked with blood and a clear liquid. Glancing at the head wound, Pickett could see a flap of scalp that was peeled off to one side and protruding from beneath Mag’s hand. Blood was oozing, but not flowing.

“Keep pressure up there on your head!” he told Mag.

Mag groaned.

Doing his best to hold the pieces in place, Pickett wrapped Mag’s destroyed hand and continued up his arm with Kerlix gauze. He fashioned a tourniquet from a cravat, a triangular bandage, and wooden tongue depressors taped together, and tightened it around Mag’s forearm, squeezing off the blood flow.

Setting the arm gently down, he eased Mag’s other hand away from his head and was shocked to see Mag’s brain framed within a jagged hole in his skull. Quickly, Pickett folded the torn scalp over the opening; as he was using a thick pressure bandage to cover it, Mag went limp and passed out. With help from two Delta operators, Pickett carried Mag to the CCP and set him down next to Brent, who was among a half-dozen wounded Americans lying scattered along the eastern wall of the clinic.

“You okay to watch him?” asked Pickett.

“Yeah, yeah,” said Brent. “I’m good.”

“Watch that arm for bleeding. And if he wakes up, don’t let him hurt himself.”

Cresting the Alamo, Smith came upon the dust-coated bodies piled in what had been the command post. Bovee was checking over Price at one end of the pile, while Fox was on his knees at the other end, searching for signs of life.

Smith’s rucksack was protruding from beneath the bodies along a low wall—exactly where he would have been had he not gone for batteries. He walked over and grabbed it, then glanced over the wall. A young Afghan covered in blood and dust was crying, holding the hand of an older, dead Afghan man.

Suddenly Fox yelled, “This guy’s alive!”

As Amerine finished yanking the RPGs from their burning bags, Karzai, Casper, a Delta operator, and an entourage of armed guerrillas hurried out of Karzai’s command post in the building to the left of the medical clinic, one hundred yards away.

Thank God
, Amerine thought as he watched Karzai, apparently unharmed, head toward some of the guerrillas’ trucks parked near the berm. Returning to the top of the Alamo, Amerine found Fox, Reid, Smith, and a Delta operator carefully separating bodies and lay
ing them side by side. One of them was Alex—alive, but struggling to breathe. His shoulder, which had been ripped open by shrapnel down to the socket, was heavily bandaged, and the midsection of his uniform shirt was torn away, revealing puncture wounds.

Amerine jogged over to Smith, who was helping carry a member of the headquarters staff off the hill. “You have commo up yet?” he asked.

“No,” said Smith. “I’m going to set up in the clinic right after we get this guy down to the CCP.”

Amerine headed in the same direction as Smith, toward the trucks, where Miles, the Delta operator assigned to Casper’s team, was changing an IV bag hooked up to Mike. Mike was on his back in the middle of a huge pool of blood. His face was covered with dust, his lips a pale blue, his closed eyelids drained of color. What hadn’t soaked into the earth had run downhill like a tiny creek, forming another puddle where the incline decreased.

“This all from Mike?” Amerine asked.

“Yeah,” said Miles. “I’m going to need something to move him, like a door if we don’t have any litters.”

“Okay.” Lowering his voice, Amerine said, “I have to send up a SITREP. What do you think?” He gestured at Mike.

“He’s got two compound-fractured arms, one barely still attached. His chest was laid open all the way across, from one armpit to the other down to the ribs. He’s got shrapnel everywhere, probably in all his major organs. I’ll keep doing what I can, but we better get him on a helicopter real quick.”

Smith’s legs began to shake and his vision blurred. He’d had virtually no sleep for two days, had eaten almost nothing that morning, and was soaked with sweat from the thermal underwear he’d worn the night before. The end of the litter he held started to slip from his grasp, and he wanted to let go, take off his thermals, and sit down.
You piece of shit!
he cursed at himself.
Suck it up! You gotta help this guy and get commo up!

He made it to the CCP and set the wounded man down. Along the southern wall of the medical clinic, Sergeant Troy Grubb, another commo sergeant from Battalion, was kneeling over Ronnie, who had been blasted with shrapnel and was slipping in and out of consciousness.

“How’s he doing?” asked Smith.

“Ah, he’s gonna be fine,” said Grubb cheerily. Seeing that Ronnie’s eyes were closed, Grubb mouthed the words, “Not good.”

Grubb’s face was covered with small lacerations. “Where were
you
?” Smith asked.

“Inside, setting up my radio, when the windows blew and—”

Commo!
Smith remembered and dashed into the clinic. Everything, including the radios, had been knocked to the ground but nothing appeared broken. First, though, he had to get out of his thermals. As he was stripping off the layers, he noticed a Delta operator caring for a wounded Afghan in the far corner of the room. Suddenly the operator ran out the door, and in the relative quiet, Smith heard a repetitive dripping and saw a puddle of blood forming beneath the table where the Afghan lay. The man reached out to him, asking for something in Pashto.

The operator hurried back in carrying some clothes and began tearing them up to make bandages.

“You a medic?” Smith asked.

“Yeah.”

“Can I give him water?”

“No!” the Delta operator said, and Smith turned and focused on his radio: “This is Rambo Eight Five. Over.”

“I have you, Rambo Eight Five,” said a dispatcher at Task Force Dagger. “SITREP?”

“Roger. Don’t know if you know what’s going on down here.”

“Negative, Rambo Eight Five.

“We have massive casualties. Unknown at this time what happened.”

The dispatcher told Smith to stand by and keep the line open. While he waited, the room became silent again, and he turned around. The medic was gone. The man on the table was dead.

A few minutes later, Smith was speaking to Colonel Mulholland, which for an enlisted-rank E-5 sergeant is like a White House guard being patched through to the president. Mulholland asked how many
were wounded and how many killed; he wanted details of the incident that Smith didn’t have. Smith ventured a guess that it might have been a mortar or artillery attack.

“Is your position taking fire now?” asked Mulholland.

“Negative,” said Smith. “I’ll go find Fox, sir. Lieutenant Colonel Fox. Stand by, sir.”

Rushing back outside, Smith narrowly avoided running into Bolduc, who was heading for the CCP; Smith told him the colonel was on the radio and that he needed some numbers and a solid SITREP.

“Start getting me a count, Sergeant,” said Bolduc, disappearing into the medical clinic. He swung his head back out. “Everybody. Americans
and
Afghans.”

Around the corner, Mr. Big was treating one of fifteen bloody Afghans along the northwest wall of the medical clinic. “I’m doing a count,” Smith said. “Do you know how many wounded Afghans?”

“I have no idea,” said Mr. Big. “All I know is I’m treating them as fast as I can and they’re dying by the second.”

It had been ten days since Chris Miller, Lloyd Allard, Tim “Cubby” Wojciehowski, and the rest of their B-team had reinvented themselves as a quick-reaction force at K2 in Uzbekistan. Every member of ODB 570 now kept three separate rucksacks—ranging in weight from fifty to 150 pounds—at the foot of his cot in order to be ready regardless of the nature or duration of the assignment.

After breakfast on December 5, the men were settling into their cots for a marathon viewing of
The Sopranos
. When the thirty-two-inch flat screen illuminated the back of the team tent, Miller strolled over to the “big tent”—the command center for Task Force Dagger—to see if anything had happened overnight. Miller was frustrated at his inability to find an angle that would get his team on the ground—and a little disgusted at himself for looking forward to
The Sopranos
.

This war,
he thought,
is passing me by
.

As he neared the tent, an operations officer came bolting out and ran past.

“What’s happening?” said Miller, catching the man by the arm.

The officer paused long enough to say, “Uh, sir, something bad happened near Kandahar,” then hurried down the road.

The command center was a large rectangular tent lit by fluorescent lights, its desks and aisles clogged with staff officers and personnel, none of whom noticed Miller’s presence when he entered. Considering the number of people inside, the tent was exceptionally quiet.

“What’s going on?” Miller asked a fellow major seated at a computer.

“Rambo Eight Five and Texas One Two: they’ve just taken a bunch of casualties. We’re—”

Miller didn’t wait for the rest.

He sprinted back to ODB 570’s tent and, while the team remained engrossed around the television in back, grabbed his gear from just inside the door. Outside, he put on his helmet and M4 rifle, strapped a Beretta sidearm to his leg, threw on a load-bearing vest complete with ammo, grenades, and radio, and rushed back to the command center.

Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Mike Kingsley, the J-Bad air base commander, and his deputy commander, Steve Hadley, had stayed up all night monitoring the infiltration of Fox’s battalion staff. The two men never slept when their helicopter crews were conducting missions in Afghanistan.

They’d finally gotten to their cots in a tiny room adjacent to the operations command center in the hangar and had been asleep less than an hour when they were awakened by the frantic voice of the on-call operations officer, Major Dale Reynolds. “Colonel Kingsley, Colonel Hadley, wake up! Sirs! You need to wake up immediately, sirs!”

“What’s going on, Major?” said Kingsley, his head still on the pillow.

“They’re taking mortar fire at the site we flew into last night. They’re requesting immediate medevac.”

Both Kingsley and Hadley sprang up. Swinging his legs off the edge of the cot, Hadley began lacing his boots. “Get the word out,” he told Reynolds. “We need everybody we’ve got here in the operations center. Now!”

Amerine finished his sweep of the Alamo, where he’d been unable to locate JD, the only one of his men not accounted for. As he moved toward the CCP, he heard another RPG whistling and watched it crash into the ground five feet from two Americans carrying Chief Reed on a litter. It was almost comical, like a scene from a silent movie, when the men looked over at the rocket, dropped the litter, and ran. Both Amerine and Fox—also on his way to the CCP—sprinted toward Reed, who had balled himself up into a fetal position. Fox grabbed the back of the litter and Amerine the front, the RPG continuing to smolder as they lifted the wounded soldier and rushed him down and around the corner of the medical clinic.