Landigal so that they can block enemy movement into the inaccessible southern end of the valley. Meanwhile, Second Platoon will push down from the north. While Kearney is on the radio Hijar yells that he’s found an enemy blood trail coming off the hilltop. “After we get the KIA out of here I want Gunmetal to search directly to my west,” Kearney shouts to Stichter. “Hijar believes he has a blood trail, it’s likely that where we find this son of a bitch, we’ll find everybody else.”
The Apaches come in and start rocketing the next ridge over and then working it with gun runs. The rounds explode in the treetops with sharp flashes and they come so close together that the detonations sound like one long crackle. The men watch the Apaches do their work and then scrutinize the area through their rifle scopes, looking for enemy fighters trying to flee. Raeon has a suppressed M14 sniper rifle and he sits with his knees up and sweeps it across the ridgelines searching for the men who killed his commander. He is covered in Rougle’s blood from his trouser cuff to his collar as if he rolled in red paint. After a while he puts the rifle down and lights a cigarette.
“He was a good dude, man,” Raeon says. Stichter is kneeling next to him under a pine tree looking west into the draw. His hands are caked in Vandenberge’s blood.
“Sergeant Rougle?”
Raeon nods.
“You want a real cigarette?”
“Yeah.”
Stichter hands him a Marlboro.
“I worry about the rest of the guys,” Raeon says. “Some of them are takin’ it real bad, kind of blamin’ it on themselves because we couldn’t push over the top. But the thing they got to understand is he was dead instantly — there’s just nothin’ you could do right there.”
Raeon lights his cigarette and exhales.
“I go on leave in like two weeks,” he says. “It’s not how I wanted to go, though.”
3
THAT NIGHT THE MEN SLEEP WITH A HAND GRENADE in one hand and their 9 mil in the other. Instead of one man pulling guard while two men sleep, it’s the other way around, two-and-one. All night long enemy fighters have been observed walking from Yaka Chine to Landigal and then on up the mountain, and Kearney finally requests a bomb drop. The request is denied, and Kearney radios back, ‘The other night we let eight guys get away, and now we have one dead and two wounded. If we don’t drop now, I
The next morning everyone wakes up tense and exhausted. Prophet starts picking up radio chatter that the enemy is closing in again, and around midmorning several fighters are spotted moving along a nearby ridge. The entire American line opens up on them: mortars, 240s, LAWs, even First Sergeant Caldwell on his M4. Pemble alone shoots forty grenades out of his 203. The enemy fighters duck over the far side of the ridge and Apaches come in to do gun runs up and down the mountainside trying to catch them as they flee. Radio chatter indicates that fifteen are killed. All day long bombs and 155s crump into the mountainsides and the men sit behind cover on Rougle’s hill waiting for the enemy to come at them again. By midafternoon it’s clear they’re not going to and the men get a little rest and then move out around midnight. Second Platoon works their way down the mountainside toward Landigal on terrain so steep that they take much of it by simply sliding downhill on their asses. Their pants are shredded by the time they get to the bottom.
First Platoon had already returned to the KOP the previous night, and the next day at dusk they head back out with half of Third Platoon. There is intel that the enemy is planning to attack either Phoenix or Restrepo — the bases were left with only a dozen or so American soldiers during the operation — but the valley remains quiet except for the buzz of surveillance drones overhead and the occasional bump and thud of mortars. First Lieutenant Brad Winn leads First Platoon past Phoenix and Aliabad and then across the Korengal River and up a series of terraces to the top of the Gatigal spur. To their north is a pretty little valley with Landigal nestled into it and to their south is the rest of the Korengal — wild, unknown country so thick with fighters that it would take a whole battalion to get in and out of there safely. Winn sets his men up along the Gatigal and overwatches Second Platoon as they clear through the town looking for weapons. Kearney, Caldwell, and the rest of company headquarters are to the north and men at OP Restrepo watch from the west.
Winn and his men spend a long day on the ridgetop overwatching Landigal while Ostlund, a lieutenant colonel from the Afghan National Army, and the governor of Kunar fly in by Black Hawk to talk to the elders. It is the first time that a governor from
The soldiers walk single file along the crest of the spur spaced ten or fifteen yards apart. The terrain falls off steeply on both sides into holly forests and shale scree. The moon is so bright that they’re not even using night vision gear. Unknown to Winn and his men, three enemy fighters are arrayed across the crest of the ridge below them, waiting with AK-47s. Parallel to the trail are ten more fighters with belt-fed machine guns and RPGs. In the U.S. military, this is known as an “L-shaped ambush.” Correctly done, a handful of men can wipe out an entire platoon. Walking point is Sergeant Josh Brennan, an alpha team leader. He’s followed by a SAW gunner named Eckrode and then Staff Sergeant Erick Gallardo and then Specialist Sal Giunta, bravo team leader. Giunta is from Iowa and joined the Army after hearing a radio commercial while working at a Subway sandwich shop in his hometown.
“Out of nothing — out of taking your next step — just rows of tracers, RPGs, everything happening out of nowhere with no real idea of how it just fucking happened — but it happened,” Giunta told me. “Everything kind of slowed down and I did everything I thought I could do, nothing more and nothing less.”
The Apache pilots watch this unfold below them but are powerless to help because the combatants are too close together. At the bottom of the hill, Second Platoon hears an enormous firefight erupt, but they too just hold their fire and hope it turns out well. At first, the sheer volume of firepower directed at Brennan’s squad negates any conceivable tactical response. A dozen Taliban fighters with rockets and belt-fed machine guns are shooting from behind cover at a distance of fifteen or twenty feet; First Platoon is essentially inside a shooting gallery. Within seconds, every man in the lead squad takes a bullet. Brennan goes down immediately, wounded in eight places. Eckrode takes rounds through his thigh and calf and falls back to lay down suppressive fire with his SAW. Gallardo takes a round in his helmet and falls down but gets back up. Doc Mendoza, farther down the line, takes a round through the femur and immediately starts bleeding out.
After months of fighting an enemy that stayed hundreds of yards away, the shock of facing them at a distance of twenty feet cannot be overstated. Giunta gets hit in his front plate and in his assault pack and he barely notices except that the rounds came from a strange direction. Sheets of tracers are coming from his left, but the rounds that hit him seemed to come from dead ahead. He’s down in a small washout along the trail where the lip of packed earth should have protected him, but it didn’t. “That’s when I kind of noticed something was wrong,” Giunta said. “The rounds came right down the draw and there are three people — all friends — in the same vicinity. It happened so fast, you don’t think too hard about it, but it’s something to keep in mind.”
Much later, a military investigation will determine that the enemy was trying to throw up a “wall of lead” between the first few men and the rest of the unit so that they could be overrun and captured. Gallardo understands this instinctively and tries to push through the gunfire to link up with his alpha team, Brennan and Eckrode. Twenty or thirty RPGs come sailing into their position and explode among the trees. When Gallardo goes down with a bullet to the helmet, Giunta runs over to him to drag him behind cover, but Gallardo gets back on his feet immediately. They’re quickly joined by Giunta’s SAW gunner, PFC Casey, and the three men start pushing forward by throwing hand grenades and sprinting between the blasts. Even enemy who are not hit are so
