had to do was walk in the red tracers. The timing on the overheated gun was slipping, so I placed the bolt release in the up position and fired single shots.
The more fucked up things got, the more Rod and I started laughing. He was steering away from RPGs streaming at us and laughing, and I was shooting the big gun and laughing. Definitely crazy, but your emotions have to go somewhere.
The Kiowas, dipping low for their gun runs, looked too flimsy to last another minute. I’d hear a quick rattle of gunfire from them or toward them, and they’d peel off or zip straight up, bank sharply around, and zoom in again. The black puffs around them continued, but the enemy fire slackened on us as the Kiowas darted around. They were like a steel umbrella over us.
A few minutes later, Pale Horse came back on my net.
“Three-3, we’re Winchester. We’ll be back in fifteen mikes.”
Winchester meant they had expended their munitions. They were too light to carry much, and they had been shooting at targets wherever they looked. The firing picked up. We were again the pinata. I climbed down from the turret to talk to Rod and Hafez. We had started in with six ammo cans. Now we were down to one. I had fired more than two thousand rounds.
“Guys, we need a new gun,” I said. It was three steps forward, two back. As we turned around, I saw an Askar crawling feebly toward the road. We stopped and I hopped out. A PKM machine gun was tilling the ground around me, so I dodged back and forth until I reached him. One Kiowa, out of ammo, hovered above me and distracted the enemy, ignoring the RPG shells exploding in the air. I turned the Askar onto his back. Hit by three rounds in his upper chest and neck, he was gurgling and drowning in his own blood. I rolled him onto his side, and he died before I could pick him up.
Chapter 12
INTO THE WASH
I hopped back into the truck and we drove back down the wash to get ammo.
We had turned left out of the wash and onto the narrow track back to the casualty collection point.
The Afghans were turning back to their wounded. When I hopped out to help them, they asked if more helicopters were coming, or whether they should drive their casualties back to Joyce.
“I don’t know,” I said.
It wasn’t that I didn’t care, but I had my own problems. Where was my team? I looked around for Maj. Williams. He was sitting off to one side, wounded and in shock. There were four or five vehicles and at least twenty Askars milling around. These were our Afghans—we had come down from Monti together. I glanced hopefully from group to group. Hafez was asking if they had seen Lt. Johnson.
“They say the lieutenant is back in Ganjigal,” Hafez said. “The team didn’t make it out.”
Some of the wounded Askars had made it to the ORP where the U.S. Army platoon had stayed. They reported to the TOC that six Afghan soldiers were dead and nine wounded. That meant about thirty or forty were still pinned down in the valley or dead out there.
Hafez, Rod, and I drove back into the wash. Hafez could hand the ammo cans up to me—they’re like big lunch boxes that clip to the gun. We were in good shape as long as the .50-cal didn’t go out of whack again. We didn’t have a kit for quickly changing the barrel, and the gauge for setting the gun’s headspace wasn’t in the toolbox.
A Ford Ranger driven by an Afghan policeman followed behind our Humvee. The Ranger would make do as an ambulance to ferry out the wounded. As we entered the wash, we passed Swenson and Fabayo in another Ranger truck, heading to the casualty point with two or three wounded or dead Afghans piled in the back. Swenson brought back two dead jihadists, too. That proves he’s a nicer guy than I am.
Askars were walking out as we drove back in. Some were dazed, others limping, some leaning on each other. Many had tied a cloth around an arm or a leg. With their chests protected by body armor, they thought they weren’t badly hit. But they were inviting death within an hour or two. A bullet wound in the arm or leg often doesn’t bleed profusely. Instead your blood drips out steadily, your blood pressure drops, your body goes into shock, and you die. Doc Layton had given them classes for a month, but in the chaos of combat, they had forgotten everything.
I wanted to ignore the Askars, because somewhere, farther up the wash, my team was fighting to stay alive. I’d promised to get them, and Rod and I had the only gun truck willing and able to go in. I wanted to pretend I didn’t see the bleeding. Besides, they were not far from the collection point, where they might get help or a ride out.
We’d gone only another hundred meters when I saw an Afghan soldier huddled behind a rock. No other Askar was around. We were the advisors, which comes with a responsibility, like being parents.
I had no choice.
“Hold up, Rod.”
I climbed down from the turret and ran over to the Askar. He’d taken a bullet in the thigh and was slowly bleeding out. I kept a stack of tourniquets in my medpack and knew how to apply them. I wrapped a tourniquet around his thigh. In my frustration, I twisted it extra tight and he screamed.
“Hafez, tell him to shut up,” I said. “Hurting is better than dying.”
Not the most soothing bedside manner. I knew I was being unfair. If someone cinched a thin strap around my leg and twisted as hard as he could, I’d scream, too.
If you’re a grunt, you will come face to face with horrendous gore. You have to steel yourself to seeing mangled bodies and smelling blood. Doctors and nurses cope with screaming and suffering every day. I had dressed out dozens of deer. You learn to dissociate from the task when you’re pulling out warm guts or cutting off slabs of dripping meat, with the blood sticking to your hands.
Doc Layton had kidded me for being a hospital pack rat. He was the corpsman, but my medpack, stuffed with everything I could scrounge, was bigger than his. I had taken the Combat Lifesaver course while stationed with my battalion. Plus, on a sniper team, you don’t have a corpsman, so I had to learn a variety of emergency skills. It was interesting, so I tried to learn as much as I could, especially about trauma.
Hafez and I moved the moaning Askar into the back of the Ranger behind us, and we both drove back to the casualty collection point. It was now about nine in the morning and Swenson and Fabayo had come forward again in their Ford Ranger.
The Kiowas had rearmed and come back on station, directing us toward another wounded. Like it or not, we had been pressed into the ambulance business. The Kiowa commanded by Chief Warrant Officer Yossarian Silano —a good name for a guy in a crazy war—had been a Marine grunt before becoming an Army pilot. His bird was easy to talk to and directed me where to go, sometimes hovering so low I could just about reach up and touch his skids. He was covering my rear whenever I got out of the truck.
Twice, Hafez and I got out, climbed up the sides of terraces, found the Askars, and lugged them down the terrace walls to the wash. After we’d loaded two into a Ranger, my brain finally kicked in: I couldn’t be the gunner and the corpsman at the same time. I didn’t need Hafez out there in the fields with me. Rod, though, needed someone on the gun.
“Hafez, will you take over the .50-cal?” I said. “I can do more good on the ground.”
Hafez climbed into the turret. I dragged an Askar to the road, and Hafez waved to an Afghan truck to pick him up. But the .50-cal was acting up and Hafez had difficulty clearing the jams. He was jacking the bolt back and I was nervous that he’d pull off the back plate with the bolt locked to the rear. If he did, the pressure of his next and last burst would drive the plate into his chest. To coax the gun back into firing shape, every so often I’d slip and slide up into the turret—blood from my arm and the wounded Askars had spattered everywhere inside the truck— and try to reset the gun.
The incoming fire didn’t stop. The machine-gunners were aiming at movement. They were shooting short bursts, with good fire discipline. Some gunners seemed to have spotters hidden in the houses. They weren’t using tracers, so no green rounds gave away their positions. Without tracers, though, they couldn’t adjust well. A
