Gently, he shifted his torso and placed the grenade under his chest. The weight of his body kept the safety bail down, preventing the fuse in the grenade from being lit and detonating under him.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. The thunderous explosions announced the onslaught and broke the deceitful silence that had fallen on the Shahi Kot Valley while the al Qaeda and Taliban fighters covertly negotiated positions for their last-light attack. Jock didn’t look at his watch — no need to when you’re living each minute according to someone else’s battle plan — but a gentle darkness had started to shroud the valley and long shadows from the Whale blanketed Hell’s Halfpipe. He guessed it was around 5.30pm, maybe a little later — almost half a day since they landed at the foot of an al Qaeda stronghold.
Boom. The fifth rocket, like the ones before, smashed into the eastern bank of the bowl; all in quick succession, all fired from the eastern ridgeline. Once the dust had settled, a wicked torrent of machine-gun fire rained down from the western side high above a precipitous cliff that dropped straight to the valley floor.
The barrage was full-on, the most intense fire of the day and there was absolutely nowhere to hide.
‘How the fuck did the motherfuckers get over there?’ Jock said under his breath, using the soldier’s preferred profanity in almost every possible grammatical combination.
The enemy was less than 200 metres away on the west. Perfect sniping position. The rockets and mortars from the east, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, were the signal to terrorist elements on the west to open fire. Al Qaeda had the men from the 10th Mountain pinned down, surrounded on two sides, east and west, and closing in from Marzak one kilometre north, zeroing in on the ambushed soldiers with mortars and RPGs and giving it everything they’d got. Which was a shit-load.
Machine-gun rounds cracked like bullwhips overhead, smacking into the halfpipe, kicking up dirt and rocks on all sides of the bowl. If a trooper got up, he’d be caught in the crossfire.
You’re not going to get me, Ahmed, not tonight, not here.
Jock thought of Johnny on patrol further south in the valley, hoping that he didn’t decide to lead his men up to Jock’s position to save his mate. Soldiers are like that. In the Army, mateship is king. Your fellow soldier isn’t just a fellow soldier, he’s your brother. You’d bloody well die for him.
Jock was on the southeast corner with his radio, his backpack and a handful of wounded piled into his and Clint’s shell scrapes. Grippe’s men were combat-crawling in and out of the line of fire, trying to find protection on the eastern slope of the bowl where they had positioned themselves to shoot into the eastern ridgeline. But now they were getting their arses shot off from the western side. Sergeant Pete thought the whole world was shooting at him personally.
‘Where the hell are they comin’ from, the sky?’ he yelled at Grippe.
The soldiers spun around, returned fire at the western sniper positions and somehow avoided getting killed as they manoeuvred up and down the bowl, taking effective countermeasures by scrambling up the western slope. But that put them directly into the line of fire from the bad guys who had been there all day on the eastern ridge. It was a no-win situation in a confined kill zone, which is what the enemy wanted. There was bugger-all cover.
‘Get down, get down,’ Jock screamed.
Bang. One soldier copped a bullet in his buttocks and crashed to the bottom of the bowl on top of the wounded, screaming in agony: ‘I’m shot, I’m shot.’
Still, it was a miracle he was alive.
The soldiers couldn’t cover either side without getting shot at.
It was about to get worse.
Al Qaeda launched their ground assault from the north, out of Marzak.
‘At this stage we are completely surrounded. They weren’t friendlies shooting at us,’ Jock says. ‘They were trying to sneak up on us and at the same time they were dropping mortars on us and hitting us with rockets. The guys who were up on the ridge were pouring all their small-arms fire down on us in order for the guys on the western ridge to sneak right up on us. They came up to about 50 metres from us when they were coming out of Marzak. They came up pretty close — 50 to 100 metres.’
Jock, prone, looked to the southeast. Small-arms fire buzzed by his ears. He had a clear view.
Jesus fuckin’ Christ.
Two hundred metres away he spotted an al Qaeda terrorist crouched behind an RPK light machine gun. All of a sudden, the air opened up as an AQ fighter began punching rounds straight at Jock. There was no cover. The terrorist was higher than him and had the advantage. Bullets sprayed in front, beside and over Jock’s head.
‘They were on target; they were ripping into us,’ Jock says. How the hell they missed him God only knows and Jock wasn’t inclined to stop for a quiet chat to find out.
The 10th Mountain force was now surrounded on all four sides. The enemy had a clear shot right up the guts of the bowl, straight into the back of the soldiers fighting up the northernmost slope, where Grippe and LaCamera had reestablished their command post. Al Qaeda fired over the wounded who were at the casualty collection point, lined up shoulder to shoulder, trying to keep warm and stay alive as Doc Byrne attended to their wounds. Jock and Clint dragged more of the wounded into their shell scrapes to keep them out of the line of fire.
‘We were lying on top of them to fight. Treading on them, crawling on them, crawling over them; we threw them in our own holes,’ Jock says now. ‘With fire from the west as well as the east, it was even worse, so you are crawling on your hands and knees at best.’
Sergeant Pete bolted for the western slope with his riflemen to lay down suppressive fire on the new al Qaeda positions. It was kill or be killed. The soldiers didn’t dwell on it.
‘We got some folks up there and they started suppressing, but [the enemy] were really making a mess of where Jock and where some of Charlie Company was at — they were hitting those guys pretty good,’ Sergeant Pete says now.
The machine gunner was aiming at the men of Charlie Company who were countering the assault out of Marzak. Jock knew he had to silence it straight away. It was either that or they’d be doing a body count in Hell’s Halfpipe before the day was out.
Jock was with the only other able-bodied person in the southern end of the bowl at that moment — a young American soldier. Clint was in the guts.
Instinct. If he didn’t react, neither of them would be there much longer.
He dropped the radio handset, ripped his M4 to automatic and squeezed the trigger to engage the enemy, firing half a magazine’s worth of 5.56mm bullets. The Yank arced up, too.
That’s mighty neighbourly of you, friend.
The enemy machine gunner dropped like a sack of shit. Jock emptied the remaining half of his magazine — another fifteen rounds — into the crumpled heap just to make sure he didn’t get back up again. There’s no second chance in a war zone.
Jock and the young American GI were facing south, aiming and shooting. Mortars and bullets were landing to the left and right of them, coming from the eastern and western ridgelines and now the south.
‘Most of the available bodies were engaged in a gunfight trying to stop the assault from the north, so the machine-gun bullets from the south were ripping right past me and into their backs,’ Jock says. ‘The rest were pinned down in the middle of the pipe unable to return fire. There was literally only two of us holding the entire southern end of the pipe.’
Seconds later, four or five al Qaeda fighters began creeping around their fallen comrade, firing directly at Jock and the Yank.
‘Stupid fucks,’ Jock roared.
He slammed another magazine into his M4, released the working parts, and pulled the trigger, throwing lead down range. He picked off the enemy one by one, split second by split second, with brutal and lethal efficiency. It’s us or them. Two mags depleted. Eight to go.
‘They were really stupid, they popped up over this rise like they were invisible and creeping along, and we’re just bang, bang, bang, “Get out!” I gave them a couple of bursts of automatic. Engaged it, knocked it and got a few more of the bastards who were coming up on the left and the right of it. We never saw them again,’ Jock says. ‘And they weren’t a problem.’
Jock and his new buddy had dispatched the enemy machine gunner and his comrades with skilled efficiency that reflected the urgency of the situation. Mortars, rockets and machine-gun fire were coming in from the eastern and western ridges, and a ground assault was creeping down from the north.
‘We were now reduced right down to the bloody bottom of this creek bed in a sea of wounded, injured soldiers just littered everywhere,’ Jock says.
The insane amount of fire lasted about twenty minutes, then stopped for a minute. Jock knew the score. The enemy were regrouping. Typical mujahideen tactics. They’d been doing it for hundreds of years.
Pffat, pffat, pffat, pffat. Rat a tat tat.
Bullets landed at Jock’s prone body, blasting dirt and rocks into his face with the fury of a gale. He was lucky he had closed his shooting eye, otherwise he would have been blinded. He copped a mouthful of dirt, but not an eyeful.
‘They were really trying to wipe us off the face of the planet and they did a pretty bloody good job considering they didn’t have air power,’ says Jock now. ‘They exploited the situation quite well. The bloody Americans walked into the biggest ambush I’ve ever seen — or put us into it.
‘In retrospect, I think that the [first five] rockets at last light were the signal for the assault to commence from the west, and that was the first time we knew that these little mongrels were around on the western side. Up until that stage, we had fought off any assaults coming from the north to get around behind us on the west. Apart from the fact that we thought there were forward observers up there, there was never any indication of any kind of significant force attempting to dislodge us on the west. But once they had the west and the east, it was quite clear that they were going to try and pin us down from those ridges and try and sweep through with a ground assault, which is what they tried to do from Marzak.’
Jock had been glued to the radio all day and knew that Marzak was a hotbed of activity. Even though his view was south, he could hear the enemy getting ready in their calls and cries and the intensity of the shooting.
The situation was getting worse, if that was possible. Soldiers shot over each other’s heads, firing east and west, while those who could looked north toward Marzak, waiting for the ground assault to arrive. The noise was horrendous, and Jock thought if anything would make you succumb to fear the noise would be the trigger. That and a frightening lack of visibility. But the soldiers had a job to do, fear or no fear. No one was succumbing to anything, not the least these AQ fighters screaming Allahu Akbar while trying to kill him — Jock Wallace — and the men from the 10th Mountain Division.
But they were still taking casualties. The Yanks used tracer fire, which gave Jock the utter shits because it was a double-edged sword. Dusk had settled over the Shahi Kot Valley and the tracer gave away their precise position, enabling the enemy to zero in with their mortars, but it could also help pinpoint enemy targets for CAS and other soldiers.
Jock grabbed his handset.
‘One Oscar, this is Niner Charlie,’ he said. ‘We are surrounded. Enemy are now active on western ridge. We have a ground assault occurring on our position from the north and enemy have just established machine gun in the southeast. Wait, out.’
Minutes later, Jock was back on the radio.
‘This is Niner Charlie. We are being bracketed. We have just taken casualties. If we do not get CAS, we are not going to be here in a couple of minutes.’
Jock wanted to convey exactly how precarious their position was. The rounds ringing out in the background helped.
‘I was using every subtlety that I could to enhance the point to the chook on shift — he would have had a gaggle of Ruperts behind him listening in,’ Jock says now. ‘He is sitting on the radio and behind him on a little U-table are the Ruperts.
Jock told the chook: ‘This is Niner Charlie. I’m going back to the fight. I’ll get back to you when I can. If I can. Out.’
Jock then radioed the Bossman, the call sign for the US Air Force’s E-3 AWACS plane flying God-like overhead. He passed his handset to the forward air controller, Vick, who had returned to Jock’s position and then read out in a staccato delivery a series of grid coordinates as close air support targets.
‘Thanks, bud,’ he said to Jock.
Two single-seater F/A-18C Hornets swooped over the Shahi Kot, strafing enemy positions with their 20mm cannons at what is known as ‘danger-close’ range to the coalition forces on the ground. Despite the danger, the soldiers’ spirits lifted instantly.
‘Hoo-ah!’ came the roar of approval from the bowl.
The fast movers each made three passes over the valley, delivering a total of 400 rounds from their guns. As they sped off, Jock looked at what had been active mortar positions and saw bodies hanging over the rocks.
Thank you, fast movers, he thought.
The strafing run slowed things down for a moment.
The young wounded bloke that Jock had dragged to safety six hours earlier was ensconced in Jock’s pit. Jock had been looking after him throughout the day, giving him a cigarette when he asked for one and making sure he was kept warm and out of harm’s way. He had shrapnel wounds and a gash around his eye. One centimetre lower and it would have taken out the eye or, worse, killed him. Jock had positioned the kid beneath him for protection, but they were facing each other, looking over each other’s shoulders, watching out for encroaching enemy fighters, ready to snipe them if they rose into the line of fire. Waiting. Waiting.
As the last light faded, the blood-spattered kid looked at Jock. ‘Hey, bud, we gonna be alright?’ he said in a strong American accent that Jock couldn’t precisely locate.
Jock’s honest-to-God feeling was that they were both going to be shot in the back of the head by al Qaeda running over the top of one of the surrounding slopes of Hell’s Halfpipe. But he couldn’t bring himself to crush the young kid.
The kid was terrified, shitting himself, and Jock was too, but the young GI was looking for reassurance and Jock wasn’t going to let him down.
‘She’ll be right, digger,’ he said. ‘Hang in there, mate. We’ll take care of it.’
The soldier sat there for a couple of seconds and looked at Jock, the look on his face changing as he realised what he had to do.
‘Good luck,’ the young infantryman said, getting up on one knee, cocking his rifle, ready to move out.
Jock was stunned. The kid’s got balls.
‘I have gotta go do my job, hoo-ah,’ he said, running off to join his section further up the bowl as bullets pinged all around.
‘He knew he wasn’t wounded enough to lie there and do nothing,’ says Jock now, full of admiration for the young grunt’s courage. ‘He knew, despite the fact that he was wounded, he was still capable of fighting and this was his time. Despite the fact that he obviously was shitting himself to death, he rose on his own accord, without prompting, to get up and go and fight with his mates, the people he had come into battle with. And he wasn’t going to lie down there and take the arvo off because he had a headache.
‘Sorry, mate, the Panadols didn’t arrive. I had respect and pity all at once for him. Respect in that he had made the choice to make a better choice and not just cop what was coming, and then he had the balls to follow it through. He not only had the heart to come up with the right decision but the balls to carry it out.’
Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe is proud of his young GIs and the courage they displayed under fire.
‘Throughout history, infantry forces have always been younger soldiers,’ Grippe says. ‘You have got to have younger soldiers ready to carry the load. Their testosterone level makes them a little bit more focused to charge instead of duck.’
The casualties kept coming. Most of the soldiers’ initial injuries were frag and shrapnel wounds, but towards the afternoon and last-light attacks, troops were getting hit by sniper and rifle fire as the enemy crept closer. By 6pm, there were more than twenty wounded in the bowl.
‘This is fucked up. Mogadishu ain’t got nothing on this,’ yelled an older soldier who had been involved in the Black Hawk Down incident. Surviving that had been hard work and getting all their soldiers home — some of them dead — was a badge of honour he wore proudly.
Sergeant Robert Healy had been shot up by shrapnel earlier in the day. Like Grippe, who was carrying about eight pieces of shrapnel in his leg courtesy of al Qaeda, Healy had stayed in the fight and was leading the charge. After a long day in the halfpipe, Healy was looking forward to the coming night.
He had worked with the AC-130 aircraft, the Spectres, and had no doubt they would help carry the night. ‘Hey, don’t worry about it,’ he told the troops near him. ‘Papa Spectre’s coming. He’ll take care of it.
‘We own the night. We can see them. They can’t see us.’
Looking back, Healy says of the Spectre crew, ‘I have the utmost confidence and respect for those guys.’
Grippe echoed his sentiment. The creeping night was a blessing because the soldiers could pinpoint the exact location of enemy positions by the flashes from their gun muzzles.
‘It’s a lonely place being in a valley in the middle of Afghanistan,’ Grippe says now. ‘You know, 82 guys are surrounded — but I know with our air power, and especially at night, we are able to go out into the field and get our rucksacks off the field and get our night-observation devices back on.
‘And to tell you the truth, I was looking forward to the dark so that we could actually attack up in the hills and smoke these sons of bitches, kill them, engage them, tactically manoeuvre our angles.
‘At first dark we really took a heavy pounding of fire … we were, more or less, almost 360 degrees surrounded and taking fire from 360 degrees. I remember Wallace being off to the right and he had a group of wounded down there and he had his radio set up. And I remember being out in the open and taking and engaging this one guy about 400 metres away, and we are just putting fire back and forth on each other.
‘He [the enemy fighter] would spray automatic weapons fire and tracer would just whiz by me. But it doesn’t even dawn on me that there’s five bullets between each of those tracers. And it went by my face and you just keep a steady aim and I’m watching my tracer hit right where his muzzle flash was.’
Nevertheless, any hope that Jock might have had earlier that he was going to get out of the valley alive were gone — washed away by the rain of bullets. He truly thought he was going to die. But he couldn’t worry about that. He accepted it, the way all good soldiers do and he wasn’t going to go down without a fight. He would not dishonour himself or his uniform, no matter what he thought of the situation. Not that Jock had a death wish, but despite the continued close air support that had had a devastating effect on the enemy, al Qaeda just kept coming. Like the Energiser bunny, he thought. It was as simple as that.
Jock was shitting himself, no doubt about it. But his greatest fear was not a full frontal meeting with the enemy, head-to-head, nose-to-nose, or taking a bullet or dying on blood-soaked foreign soil. This was war; soldiers die.
His greatest fear was the unknown and there were plenty of unknowns. He could only look in one direction, southeast down the valley, and couldn’t see if al Qaeda or Taliban fighters were sneaking in behind him from the north, or on the west, or from their cave hideouts on the eastern ridge, ready to place a well-aimed bullet in his head.
Jock had packed three hand grenades in his webbing and rummaged around to drag one out. He pulled the pin that locked the safety bail on the small explosive and carefully tucked the pin in his ammo pouch. Gently, he shifted his torso and placed the grenade under his chest. The weight of his body kept the safety bail down, preventing the fuse in the grenade from being lit and detonating under him.
If he got shot now, Jock would have the last say. He had, effectively, booby-trapped his body. If the al Qaeda terrorists shot him and turned his body over to claim his weapons as a trophy — then, eight seconds later, boom. They’d be toast.
Goodnight Irene.
It was a dangerous tactic, but if worst came to worst, Jock thought, it had a certain ironic beauty about it.
‘I really thought they were coming over the top and I was anticipating they were coming over from the western side, or from the north, and that wasn’t comfortable for me because I had to watch to the southeast,’ Jock says. ‘I would have just got one in the back of the head. That’s why I lay on my grenade — because I thought, if they start coming in and nicking my equipment, then they’re going to get a surprise.
‘Stuff them!’