group of Askars hiding in a ditch who waved frantically at me.
“Rod, hold up!”
Five Askars made a mad dash for the truck. Three piled into the backseats, while two others ran around to the rear, popped open the trunk, and crawled in. Once the doors were shut, Rod turned the truck around and we bounced back up the track. He pulled in behind a small rise that gave shelter from direct fire.
“Drop them off?” Rod shouted.
“Good a place as any!”
When we stopped, the Askars refused to get out. I screamed at them and they tumbled out. I hopped down, closed the trunk, and rearranged the ammo boxes on the rear seats so I could get at them easier in the fight ahead. Rod turned us around and again we headed east. Toward the wash and the heavy fight, fifty or sixty Askars were trapped in the valley, along with my friends. The Afghan Humvees didn’t seem to be behind us anymore. Somewhere behind us was a U.S. Army platoon. It seemed to me to be time for them to make a move. They were the quick-reaction force, our insurance policy.
Valadez was on the radio, arguing with Dog 3-6, the quick-reaction Army platoon leader.
“Dog 3-6, this is Fox 7,” Valadez radioed. “You need to get in there, man. Fox 3-3’s to your front in a Humvee. Drive east until you link up with him.”
“Fox 7, this is Dog 3-6,” the lieutenant said. “Our vehicles are too big for the mission.”
We were driving on a footpath that was barely wide enough for our Humvee. Valadez came up with an alternative.
“Dog 3-6, this is Fox 7,” Valadez radioed. “I understand. Drive forward until you reach the Afghan vehicles. Use them to get into the fight. There are people out there dying!”
The platoon leader said he had to wait for clearance from the TOC at Joyce. Right.
I heard Swenson again asking for air, as he had been doing for about forty-five minutes. Again, the TOC was promising it would arrive in “fifteen mikes.” I later learned that inside the TOC, Staff Sgt. Lantz had grabbed a radio and, ignoring the battle captain, called the ops center at Jalalabad Air Base, seventeen miles to the south.
“We have a bad TIC (troops in contact) in Ganjigal,” Lantz said. “Those guys need your help right away.”
The squadron had helicopters in the air supporting an operation north of Ganjigal. The squadron ops chief agreed to re-task the birds immediately. Over the radio net, the pilots heard the request and flew south. Lantz had gone out of channels, and no written request had been sent via the official computer net. Lantz didn’t care; help was at last on the way.
Inside the TOC at Joyce, Tech Sgt. Matzke, the Air Force NCO in charge of air support, demanded that the battle captain authorize fixed-wing close air support in addition to helicopters. Harting, the battle captain, hesitated, not saying yes or no, letting the request dangle in the air.
Five minutes later, the helicopter ops center called back, saying re-tasking of the birds had been canceled because Lantz had not called his own brigade headquarters to ask permission and because another mission north of Ganjigal was of “higher priority.”
The refusal was too much for Shadow 4 up on the southern ridge. Sgt. Summers came back on the net, shouting that Ganjigal was “a heavy TIC,” meaning that Swenson’s requests should take priority and that the helicopters should be re-tasked immediately. Capt. Harting ignored Shadow’s plea and did not immediately call his brigade headquarters to demand air support.
Capt. Kaplan heard that exchange and passed the bad news to Swenson.
“We are not getting any air,” Kaplan radioed. “They said it was unavailable.”
Down in the dirt where bullets were dusting up the ground around him, Swenson burst out laughing at how ridiculous the situation was. Harting had already acknowledged an estimate from the Shadow observation post that “thirty to sixty AAF” (Anti-Afghan Forces) were attacking. Ten minutes later, the TOC again received requests from Shadow for smoke in order to break contact. The requests were “denied twice due to proximity of structures.” The TOC assessed the enemy to number up to sixty—and wouldn’t authorize fire support.
Swenson and Fabayo sat stunned.
Lt. Johnson again contacted Fabayo on the radio.
“You need to bound back to us,” Fabayo said. “We have to fall back.”
“We’re pinned,” Johnson said. “If we leave, we’ll get shot. Get us smoke to get out of here.”
Swenson knew there was no smoke coming, so he called for white phosphorus rounds.
“We need Willie Peter,” Swenson radioed to the TOC at Joyce.
White phosphorus is a sticky, gummy substance that burns intensely. It throws off a cloud of thick white smoke and is routinely used to conceal the movement of troops. Swenson wanted the Willie Peter to explode along the edge of the village. That way, the enemy machine-gunners would be shooting into a fog bank, permitting Team Monti to fall back to Swenson’s position on the lower steps of the terrace.
White phosphorus is permitted by the UN Convention governing the rules of war. But during the Fallujah battle in Iraq in 2004, charges that Willie Peter had burned civilians created an uproar in the press. The TOC at Joyce denied Swenson’s request, explaining that the village was too close.
More than an hour into the fight, the situation was as follows: Team Monti was trapped in a house; the U.S. and Afghan commanders were pinned down by shooters closing in on them from three sides; the north and south observation posts were under fire; the Askars were caught in the open with nowhere to hide; Rod and I hadn’t reached the wash; the 1-32 quick-reaction platoon was not quick-reacting; the TOC at Joyce was paralyzed, preventing artillery support; and the helicopter gunships had not arrived.
Maj. Peter Granger, the executive officer now in command of the battalion while the highly competent Lt. Col. Mark O’Donnell was on leave, kept a cot in his office outside the TOC. Whenever he walked into the TOC, he was in charge as the senior man. But his occasional appearances only reinforced Capt. Harting’s hesitancy.
“They [the Marine advisors and Afghan officers] didn’t know where all their soldiers were,” Granger said later. “They didn’t know if they’d be calling fire on their own. They didn’t have SA [situational awareness].”
I could hear Swenson’s angry voice on the radio. How the hell was he to know where everyone was? That wasn’t the point. He knew where the machine guns were—in the hills around the village. Some from the lead platoon had run by him, streaming blood and shouting, some without their helmets or rifles. As he grabbed at two of them, bullets chipped the stones at his feet. All three flopped down as rounds cracked overhead.
Some Askars, pinned down, weren’t returning fire. Dushmen with AKs were sneaking forward on the far sides of the terrace walls, picking off Afghan soldiers lying helpless on the ground. The Askars were targets, waiting to be hit in the beaten zone.
Swenson wanted a massive artillery barrage. Because the dushmen didn’t have overhead cover, artillery airbursts would send millions of lancets racing down toward them. Hundreds of shells had to shake the mountains and roll thunder down the valley. The dushmen were zealots, but they weren’t crazy. Once artillery began exploding overhead, gunmen with AKs wouldn’t get up and run forward in the open. Each salvo of four artillery shells exploded with enough blast and red-hot shrapnel to blanket an entire football field.
Yet the TOC refused to fire at Ganjigal, only a few miles from Camp Joyce. Unleashing a barrage in your own backyard wouldn’t win any applause at higher headquarters. The directive from the high command was clear: do not employ “air-to-ground or indirect fires against residential compounds, defined as any structure or building known or likely to contain civilians, unless the ground force commander has verified that no civilians are present.”
After the fight had raged for over an hour, the TOC at Joyce finally directed Dog Platoon to prepare to move forward to the valley as “a potential QRF [quick-reaction force].” The platoon leader, Lt. Bielski, replied that he had not been given a grid location for a link-up with the force in the valley, and he hadn’t been told how far he was to advance. Again, there was hesitation.
With Dog Platoon unwilling to help, Maj. Williams handed his cell phone to his interpreter, asking him to call for an Afghan quick-reaction force. Soon Afghan Humvees were leaving Camp Joyce—without any Americans from 1-32 joining them.
Fabayo began talking to Johnson about an egress route, when he saw friendly mortar rounds landing on KE 3365.
