Walton knew he couldn’t keep coordinating the entire operation, so he asked the other team leader in the wadi to take over.
“Hey, get your TOC [tactical operations center] set up and start talking to Monster 33,” Walton told the other captain.
He didn’t know how much longer they would be alive. Rhyner was directing the bombs in closer and closer. Fire was coming from three sides and fighters were right above them in a house. He could hear them speaking Arabic, but couldn’t make out what they were saying. Walton was sure he and the others were about to get overrun.
One of the last intelligence reports he’d read before the mission was that the fighters protecting Ghafour had obtained a lot of grenades. He knew all they had to do was reach out of one of the windows and start tossing grenades.
Walton rolled over and felt for one of his own grenades. For a second he considered cooking it off and tossing it into the window above. But missing would just mean the grenade would land on them. Only the air strikes could save them now. Walton decided that if Rhyner was killed or they lost their radios, he was going to order the team to roll the wounded off the cliff and jump behind them.
It was a hard decision, but it was the battlefield calculus that he was trained to perform. He had already stopped the medevacs from coming in until they were off the mountain. He knew Ford and Wallen were down there bleeding. There were several commandos wounded and at least one dead. But he knew they might only have one chance to bring in the helicopters and he couldn’t risk it. It was a hard decision because Behr, Morales, and Walding were lying in the rocks in front of him bleeding to death.
Bullets and fragments bounced off Walton’s helmet again. He turned to the Afghan terps hiding behind them.
“For Christ sake, just shoot in that direction,” he begged them.
Walton could feel things spinning out of control. The longer they had been pinned down, the more desperate the situation had become. He had been on a quick reaction force for a unit in the 82nd Airborne. Some paratroopers got in trouble in Fallujah, but the force had been able to rescue them. He had always imagined that once all the planes showed up here in the mountains, they would bomb the shit out of the insurgents, and his team would be saved. That’s because the American government has the ability to save you.
But it was very clear now that the team was on its own. Nobody could save them. It seemed that every U.S. fighting unit in Afghanistan was stopping and moving toward them. Walton could hear the traffic on the satellite radio.
But it still wasn’t enough. They wouldn’t get here in time. Shurer was running out of medical supplies. Soon he wasn’t going to be able to treat any of them.
“We’ve got to get the fuck out of here,” Shurer yelled at Walton. “They’re bleeding out.”
Walton turned to Sanders and Carter.
“Listen, you guys have to find a way to get down that mountain.”
“Down that fucking cliff?” Sanders said.
“Find a way down that cliff. I don’t care how bad it is.”
On the radio again, Walton called back to Bagram.
“Listen, we’re combat ineffective,” he said. “We have an SF element about to be overrun. We need immediate CAS. We need a B-52 or B-1 because this CAS is not having its desired effect.”