Through the Eyes of a JTAC
WES BRYANT
Fall 2005
The sun shined over southern Afghanistan as we pushed north through the center of Kandahar city in a small convoy of lightly armored Humvees that comprised our infantry company headquarters element.
Alex, my partner and JTAC-in-training (termed ROMAD), had gotten us some coffee from the Green Beans coffee shop on Kandahar Air Base just before we’d rolled out. A big fan of the dichotomies found in life, I enjoyed driving through the war-torn city on a combat operation while indulging in the wholly American luxury of a hot caffé mocha. It was a long drive, though, and the coffee was a short solace.
Kandahar was a bustling Afghan metropolis. It had large multi-lane roads, tall buildings, restaurants, coffee shops, and markets—it was the definition of “urban sprawl” with people seemingly on top of one another. It seemed to me like a Mad Max version of civilization—trying to copy the West, but not quite getting it right. If you added in war-ravaged infrastructure and incredibly weary and suspicious citizens, then you’d have the complete picture.
Alex drove us along as our convoy made its way to the other side of Kandahar to begin the long trek north on dry desert roads. A witty Japanese-Hawaiian with a thick islander accent and a penchant for jokes and banter, Alex entertained the two of us with a string of simultaneously insensible and deep conversations about nothing in particular, while blaring songs from Good Charlotte and Fall Out Boy from his iPod through one of our truck’s radio speakers.
We trudged on, and the hours eked by.
We headed through a small village called Pada. Pada was in a bit of a green belt—the main road lined equally with mudded huts and walls with lush vegetation. The village was backdropped on nearly all sides by mountains. I thought to myself how beautiful Afghanistan would be were it not for the state of the country.
A few old men glanced our way. Elementary school-aged kids, dirty-faced and disheveled, darted in and out of the huts and jumped on top of a short wall lining the road to get a look at our convoy as it passed. We made our way fairly slowly, since by that point the roads were hard-packed dirt and not paved as they had been through the city. To complicate the drive more, we were being funneled into a narrow gauntlet lined by sturdy mud walls, on a road system never made for the huge width and weight of American armored Humvees.
Northeast of Pada, estimated to be about an hour’s drive, was our objective area. There, in a valley characterized by two small villages of Gumbad to the north and Gumbaz to the south, we would establish our “blocking position.” Two other infantry companies were simultaneously advancing into the region via separate avenues of approach tens of kilometers separated from us. Once they got in place and cleared their objectives, our company would then take the “main effort” and push east. Because of that, I had no air assets tasked to me at the time, but things were quiet anyway.
We had a special team in our convoy whose job it was to intercept and monitor enemy communications. As we exited Pada to the north, our interpreter picked up enemy chatter between two men discussing our convoy movement.
“The Americans have reached Pada,” a scout relayed.
We knew, then, that at least one individual was watching our activity in Pada and reporting our movement to a Taliban team somewhere north of us. It was a regular tactic of the Taliban—to place scouts masked as villagers to forward-warn about movement of U.S. forces. I requested air support from higher headquarters in order to give us some cover. The communications intercepts continued, and we soon heard them coordinate for an unknown team to “set up the ambush” and “ready the bombs.”
Our company commander was relatively young, just a first lieutenant. He was the acting company commander while the captain was back home on leave. But he was aggressive. He passed his plan over the radio: Instead of becoming prey, we would be the predators. We would draw the enemy in as they continued to watch and report our movement, making them believe they could easily ambush our slow-moving convoy. Meanwhile, dismounted fire teams—squads of infantrymen—would traverse the rocky terrain above, parallel to the convoy, and intercept the embedded enemy positions. We’d then hit them with heavy weapons from the trucks while I obliterated their positions with airstrikes.
After an hour or so we had no enemy contact and no further communications intercepts had come in. We decided to call their bluff. Since it was nearing nightfall, the company commander finally gave the order to collapse the squads back to the convoy and continue our movement at normal speed. He wanted to get to our blocking position before sundown in order to establish a secure patrol base in the valley while we still had daylight. We pushed ahead with the convoy to pick up our infantry squads that had been shadowing us along the ridgelines. Alex and I were pretty damn disappointed we wouldn’t be getting into a fight, after all.
“Pussies,” Alex said, referencing the Taliban who must have decided that attacking us was too risky.
I agreed.
The convoy slowed as we linked with our infantry squads. Just then, the platoon sergeant for the platoon that was attached to our headquarters element came running down the road from the north. The truck in front of us stopped. A weathered and experienced fighting man with a dark and swarthy complexion, the platoon sergeant yelled something at the driver I couldn’t quite make out. The driver slammed on the gas and raced ahead.
Then the platoon sergeant turned and ran to us. Alex pushed down his armored window. “Get the fuck up there! We’ve made contact!” the sergeant yelled. Just then, two RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) impacted the ground to our front-left, about thirty meters away, just as enemy rifle and machine gun fire came inbound.
Here was our ambush.
“Let’s go, man!” I yelled to Alex.
Alex was already on the gas. I was head-down in my map sending an update on the ground situation to the set of A-10 Warthogs overhead that I’d called in after the intercepts.
“Hawg, this is Gunslinger Four-Two, we’re in contact from the north!” I told the pilots.
As I talked the lead pilot’s eyes onto where I thought the enemy positions might be, in the back of my mind I registered the strange fact that even though my adrenaline was up, I felt pretty damn controlled. My training took over—I was simply doing the job I was trained to do. The outside influences of a screaming platoon sergeant, rocket-propelled grenades, and gunfire became mere distractions.
I felt stone cold and focused, with no doubt in my mind that we would decimate the enemy before us. We pushed on a few hundred meters. Alex jerked the wheel back and forth to avoid more incoming RPG rounds as they impacted to our sides and front. Then, the convoy abruptly halted.
We were in a wide, open valley. Tall ridgelines to our sides bracketed us east and west. In front, to the general north a couple hundred meters, two mountain peaks towered where the east and west ridgelines terminated. The road cut between them, creating a saddle effect. I had no idea why we stopped. We seemed to be right in the heart of the kill zone.
RPG rounds and gunfire blasted around us. I saw the company commander and mortar team sergeant jump out of the truck in front of us. They started running toward the northeast ridgeline, but no one came over the radio to say what the hell the plan was.
“Grab your shit and get out!” I yelled to Alex.
I made sure my radio was seated in its pouch on my body armor and threw open the heavy armored Humvee door, fully intent on catching up with the company commander. Alex and I got out of the truck. We saw other soldiers up and down the convoy doing the same.
We were taking fire from at least three directions, but the enemy was so dug in on the high ground and concealed behind rocks we couldn’t make any of them out. We tried to return fire on an enemy we couldn’t see, on a ridgeline far above us. Worse, the company commander was nowhere to be seen. He’d run toward the rocky terrain at the foothills of the northeast ridge and was out of sight.
“Alex, get the L-T on the team net!”
I needed to get in touch with the ground commander. I continued to work to find any enemy locations as Alex tried to raise him on his FM radio, but the lieutenant never answered. I instructed the pilots to try to make out any enemy positions on the ridgeline. I passed distances and directions to locations I thought we were taking fire from, but the pilots had a hard time pinpointing the origin of any enemy fire or making out anyone at all on the ridgelines. (If you’ve ever tried to pick out a couple of robed men hiding among man-sized rocks on a desert mountain ridgeline from 15,000 feet in the air while flying 270 knots—you’d understand why.)
My ground commander—the lifeline to my awareness of friendly force locations and ability to pinpoint enemy positions with information from our most forward soldiers—was nowhere to be found. And he wouldn’t answer the net. I didn’t see any point in running blind into the foothills to figure out wherever he had scrambled off to. If we didn’t find him, then we’d risk being completely disconnected from the rest of the force.
Rounds continued pelting the ground around us. We ran for cover in a wadi—a small ditch—along with the mortar team that had stayed back when their sergeant ran off with the company commander. A couple of our Afghan Army soldiers got in the wadi along with us. They fired their AK-47s blindly into the ridgelines.
One of the Afghan soldiers looked at us then yelled, in broken English, “I am going to fire!”
Before we could register what he’d said, the ear-numbing boom of the backblast from his RPG launcher slammed into both of us. He’d fired at the northwest ridgeline while standing right next to us and hadn’t taken the time to clear his backblast area before pulling the trigger. Alex and I took the brunt of the auditory shock.
“Fuckin’ idiot!” Alex yelled.
The Afghan soldier realized his mistake and gestured an apology in the Afghan way—nodding his head toward his shoulder in an effort to feign “sorry.”
Alex and I weren’t wearing the nice, cushy closed-ear communications headsets with advanced hearing protection that would become standard issue years later—my unit couldn’t afford those back then. We were still using old “H-250” radio handsets, straight from the Vietnam era, that you had to hold up to your ear and use like a phone with a push-to-talk button.
The incoming fire had already been doing a number on my ears. With the shock of the RPG, I realized that if I got much more I wouldn’t be able to talk to my pilots on the radio because I’d be temporarily deaf. As ridiculous as it felt, I kneeled in the wadi for cover as I put my earplugs in. I needed to ensure my ability to continue doing what I was paid to do.
The three-pronged attack, the chaotic disarray of our soldiers’ locations, the loss of contact with my ground commander, and the blast to my ears created a mess of shit that I’m not sure I was quite ready for, but I kept on nonetheless.
“Get Legion Six on the net, Alex. We need to find out where his guys are!”
“He’s not answering on the company or platoon net!” Alex came back, just as frustrated.
Rounds still hammered all around, and I had yet to figure out where all our guys were let alone where the enemy was. Half the platoon was out of sight, and the other half was scattered up and down the road along our convoy right in the kill zone.
THWAP! A sixty-millimeter mortar round launched from its tube next to us. The mortar team had quickly “laid-on” one of their 60mm mortar tubes in order to get at least some effects up on the ridgelines.
SCHWACK! The high-explosive round hit near the top of the northwest peak.
I ran up to the mortar team leader. “Wha’ d’ya got up there?!”
“Taliban on top of that ridge, for sure,” he replied through scores of incoming and outgoing gunfire. “They’re the ones firing the RPGs. I saw the last one come from there!” He pointed at a spot up on the peak.
“Do you have comms with Legion Six? We haven’t been able to raise him!”
“Yeah…at least I got him a bit ago!” He tried again to raise the lieutenant on his radio but got no response.
At least we had an enemy location, I thought. I could work on getting the pilot’s eyes on the position and ready to strike while Alex kept trying to raise the lieutenant on the net to lock down all our friendly locations and get final approval to clear the strike.
THWAP! The mortar team sent another round up on the northwest ridge.
My lead pilot got his eyes on the general location, even though he couldn’t make out individual fighters. Still, I couldn’t approve a strike without go ahead from the lieutenant and up-to-date information on where all his guys were. For all I knew, some of them could have been making their way up the northwest ridge on the north side that was masked from our vantage point. In a worst-case scenario, I would risk a strike inadvertently going long of the target and hitting them, or at the least sending fragmentation their way.
“We can throw some Willie-Pete down for marking,” the lead Warthog pilot came back as an option.
Willie-Pete referred to air-to-ground rockets used primarily for marking rounds. They ignited an incendiary, toxic, white phosphorus smoke. They were great for marking targets, but could be very dangerous to any nearby friendly troops. They were also unguided and known to stray off course. I didn’t want to risk throwing marking rounds down.
“Stand by, I’m still not in comms with the ground commander,” I told him.
SHEEEEWWWWW…SMACK!
Another enemy RPG whistled over our heads. It struck the low-lying rocks just a few meters in front of us off the west side of the road. The only thing that saved us—it was a dud.
Thank the gods for expired Communist ammunition, I thought.
Gunfire rang continuously.
Then, the platoon medic came running toward us with a look of urgency and despair. With him—the company commander and mortar team sergeant.
“JTAC!” the medic yelled. He slowed as he approached, leaned with his hands on his knees and huffed for a few seconds.
“JTAC…I need you to pass up a MEDEVAC. The MEDEVAC net isn’t answering.”
I wasn’t surprised. We were out of range for the FM frequency that the MEDEVAC net worked on, and our location in the low-lying valley would preclude any chance of making communication anyway. I knew we needed to use my satellite communications to send up the MEDEVAC request to higher headquarters.
The company commander interjected long enough to tell us that one of his infantry fire teams had been pinned down on the northeast ridge by enemy fighters up on the peak. I told him that we were ready to strike that location on his call, but he told me he still didn’t know where his other squad was, and some of the guys were making their way to the top of the ridge in a counterassault—they’d be too close to risk a strike. He ordered me to just concentrate on the MEDEVAC.
The medic ran back to tend to our casualties. I asked the lead Warthog pilot if he could relay the MEDEVAC request to save the time it would take for me to set up my portable satellite antenna and make the call myself. After all, he was flying a multi-million-dollar communications and weapons platform. He was right on it.
In the time it took me to coordinate the MEDEVAC, the lieutenant had run off again.
A couple of our truck gunners were firing .50 caliber machine guns toward the east from the turrets of two Humvees.
“Aaaay!” I called through the gunfire. “Where did Legion Six go?!”
One of the soldiers pointed to a ridgeline to our southeast. “Headed to the top of that ridge!” he yelled.
Alex and I started running to the foothills of the southeast ridge to catch up with the ground commander. Then, the medic came running up again from behind us, this time with one of the young infantrymen.
“JAYYY-TAC!”
We stopped as he approached, heaving.
“JTAC…” the medic huffed, “change the MEDEVAC to two wounded, one KIA.”
The young infantry private stood next to him, a glazed look of shock on his face. Quietly, the private interjected. “Doles’ been hit,” he said, despair gripping his voice.
Alex and I looked at one another. I felt a choking in my throat. I gathered myself.
“Alright. I’ll pass the update, man.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the squad on the northeast ridge—along with two French commandos who’d attached to our unit for the operation—assaulted the enemy position on the northeast peak and killed two Taliban fighters. Gunfire eventually calmed down as the rest of the fierce Taliban ambushers withdrew into the mountains, easily evading us.
Alex and I made our way to an overwatch position on the southeast peak. I continued to control the A-10s while he controlled two Apache gunship helicopters, scanning the valley and ridgelines for any more enemy fighters as the MEDEVAC helicopters made their approach.
Two Blackhawks landed in the valley below, spinning rotor blades blasting desert sand in a gritty whirlwind. Medics and security elements kneeled, protecting the littered casualties. Alex and I exchanged solemn looks. We watched our casualties, in black covered litters, loaded onto the helicopters.
All in all, two U.S. and two Afghan soldiers had been hit during the fighting. One Afghan was wounded in the arm and the other shot in the neck, dying instantly. Of our Americans, one took a through-and-through gunshot to his lower back from a sniper we later discovered was likely hiding among an Afghan nomad caravan in the valley to the southeast. He miraculously survived—the medic thanking me for the rapid MEDEVAC, insisting the soldier had only made it because he’d gotten to surgery before he bled out. I didn’t take credit, I was just glad for it.
Our second American casualty was hit by the same sniper while charging the northeast peak, in a brave counterassault on the Taliban fighters holding the position at the top. He and died on the battlefield. Staff Sergeant John Doles was an esteemed infantry squad leader. He had been among the few soldiers to parachute into Iraq during the initial invasion in 2003. America lost a valiant soldier and family man that day.1
Over the course of the next few months I would rain down fire with airstrikes across the Taliban-infested mountains and valleys in the Kandahar region. But that wouldn’t bring back anyone we lost on that day or any other. I blamed myself for the casualties. A JTAC’s existence was to be the firepower that rained death on the enemy and protected the lives of his brothers (and sisters). I was on the ground not just to hunt the enemy, but to safeguard friendly forces, and I felt I’d failed at both.
On every mission throughout the years following, the scars from that day always burned brightly in the back of my mind. The memories never left me; but drove me to be better. I became determined that my most succinct goal as a JTAC was to kill as many of the enemy as I could while never allowing another friendly casualty to happen on my watch. That attitude would stay with me through more deployments over the years and become reinforced when I transitioned into special operations.
I scarcely could have known at the time, but almost a decade later I would carry those same lessons and that same determination into an entirely different fight using an evolved method of war fighting. In 2014, as we hunted the brutal enemy known as ISIS in Iraq, the echoes from years past in Afghanistan resounded loudly in my mind. I may then have been controlling airstrikes from a strike cell miles away from our partner Iraqi forces on the ground—but I was still there with them. In their moments of need, they were my brothers just the same.
In the scope of my job as a JTAC, I saw no difference. When our partner forces battled ISIS, I understood their perspective, emotion, and urgency for the close air support they counted on. Most importantly, I understood damn well the consequences of getting it wrong.
1 Joseph Giordono, “Italy-based soldier killed fighting Afghan insurgents,” Stars and Stripes, October 5, 2005, accessed September 11, 2018, https://www.stripes.com/news/italy-based-soldier-killed-fighting-afghan-insurgents-1.39160.