Just before the barrage of gunfire echoed in the valley, Walding had planned to get a quick head count. It was in preparation to storming the nearest compound and setting up a strongpoint while the others climbed the mountain.
But everything had changed.
Pressed against the brick wall on the bank of a ditch, Walding wasn’t sure what to do. It was a worst-case scenario: They had been lured into a trap. But the strange part was that none of the bullets were being aimed at Walding or Sanders or their commandos. The insurgents were shooting over them—and directly into the middle of the pack at the team.
“Hey, dude, they’re not shooting at us, man,” Walding said to Sanders. “I don’t think they see us.”
Sanders agreed.
“Game on,” Walding said.
Walding and Sanders sat there and, like duck hunters at dawn, began picking off insurgents one at a time. “We got them, man,” Walding shouted. “They don’t have a fucking clue.”
The soldiers sat there patiently and waited. And when an insurgent appeared in their scopes, they would pull the trigger. It was like a game of Whac-A-Mole. Still, it was tough to just stay in one spot. They could hear the gunfire. They wanted to help their team. It was one big shitstorm.
They didn’t know how long they had been perched in the spot. They just kept firing—until they heard over the radio that Behr was shot, and that they were calling in air strikes on the compound.
To help with the aerial assault, Walding and Sanders tried to mark the buildings for bomb drops. They fired rounds from their rifles into the side of the buildings to let the pilots know which ones to hit. Sanders also marked the buildings with his M203 grenade launcher.
Walding then began to spread his commandos strategically on the side of the mountain so that if one got shot, it would just be one. Not the entire group. But with all that, Walding still faced a dilemma. He recalled that Ford had told him that if the shit hit the fan, “go up and take a house. There’s not an enemy out there that can freaking withstand an ODA house stronghold.”
Walding considered storming and securing the building in front of him. Maybe they could turn that into a casualty collection point to move people out of harm’s way. But he scrapped the idea because it was just too hard to get up the mountain. There was no way the wounded could physically do it. Not with the incessant fire.
The whole team was strung out over the mountain. He was up there with Sanders and a few commandos. Ford was somewhere. Walton was pinned down and Behr was wounded.
All they could do was hold their ground and wait.