Behr had been in firefights before but nothing like this. The attack was something out of a Hollywood war movie. The barrage was sustained, coordinated, and professional. It was coming from mud-colored buildings on ledges forty feet directly above them. It was coming from ridgelines on a mountain directly across the wadi. It was coming from every direction. Bullets whizzed by their heads and impacted within inches of their feet. His team was clearly in the enemy’s crosshairs.
Shit, I have to find cover, he thought.
Behr kept firing his rifle as he looked for protection. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Walton and CK, who’d found shelter in a crevice along a thirty-foot-high rock face that ran the length of the ledge. But when Behr tried to fit in, he discovered there wasn’t enough room for all of them. His lower body was exposed, and bullets kicked up dirt near his feet.
At that point, Behr knew he would get hit in the foot or leg if he stayed there. This isn’t going to work.
So he made a quick decision: He stepped out from the wall, took a knee, and started shooting his M4 in the direction of the heaviest fire while he turned his head from side to side looking for cover. But there was no safe spot—at least as far as he could see.
“Damn it,” he muttered.
Here he was, in the open—a perfect target, he thought. And that’s when he felt a sharp pain in his pelvis—a sensation that sent shock waves through his entire body. It was excruciating and Behr had a high threshold for pain. In training, a sergeant had used a fifty-thousand-volt Taser on him and other recruits to show how effective it was in controlling unruly people. Behr held up better than most recruits; he didn’t drop to the floor like some of the others. But this pain was different. It was the equivalent of being Tased and smashed on the hip with a baseball bat at the same time. He was prostrate on the ground while bullets continued to fly over his head.
“Oh, shit. I just got shot,” he screamed.
He wasn’t sure anyone heard him over the noise. But at that moment he knew he was “combat ineffective.” He was useless. Unable even to lift his rifle, Behr was bleeding profusely. His whole body still reverberated from the shot, and he couldn’t move his right leg at all. An hour into the mission and only minutes into the firefight, his limb was dead—and he knew the round had hit a dangerous part of the body. The pelvis contains a number of arteries, including the femoral. If the femoral had been severed, he would die within minutes. Was he bleeding out? He couldn’t be sure. Shurer would know, but he was down in the wadi with Ford. And with the heavy fire, would Shurer even make it up the hill to treat him? Just then, he heard a voice.
“Hey, Dillon,” Carter said. “Hang in there, man. It’s going to be okay.”
Carter grabbed Behr under his left shoulder and tried to move him out of the line of fire. But within seconds, Behr felt another sharp pain—this one in his right biceps. He had been shot again. Unlike the pelvic wound, though, this round went straight through without hitting bone. Still, his biceps was bleeding and would need to be treated.
A moment later, Behr heard Morales’s voice. “We need to get Ron up here. Fast,” he said.