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> > > ENEMY INSIDE THE WIRE

On that warm morning of August 22, the sky was just beginning to brighten as Staff Sergeant Conrad Begaye stepped outside the tactical operations center to catch the sunrise over the mountains after a night of radio duty. He stretched. A single gunshot broke the stillness. He figured it was an accidental discharge. But then the rising slopes to the east erupted in volleys of machine gun, rifle, and rocket-propelled grenade fire.

Wow. This is happening…

War had finally come to Ranch House, and at this critical juncture, uppermost in Conrad Begaye’s mind was that he was standing there in his flip-flops and PT shorts. His rifle, helmet, and body armor were back in the aid station where he bunked and left them.

He slipped back into the Tactical Operating Center (TOC), and five dozen or more enemy fighters began their assault on what was essentially the backside of the fort. Other gunmen were scattered along the fringes to the south and southwest, taking up positions between Ranch House and Aranas down the hill. It was still a half-hour before sunrise, and the sky was just bright enough to render night-vision goggles useless but too dark to see things clearly.

Jihadist gunmen had hiked far up onto the ridge so they could descend into Ranch House, following the arrows of approach drawn on the map Hazrat Omar displayed to his comrades. That gave them the advantage of what the military likes to call plunging fire—the ability to shoot down into defensive works or toss down grenades. To create even more havoc, a heavy, Soviet-made machine gun was set up across the valley about 650 yards to the west so a constant rain of suppressive fire could be directed into the American base to try to keep the paratroopers hunkered down behind their sandbags while the main body of insurgent fighters advanced.

A propaganda video posted later online shows the seconds before the insurgents launched the attack. A gaggle of bearded young men, rifles and grenade launchers in hand, their faces tense with anticipation, stand poised behind an abandoned stone cottage, or bondeh, high up above Ranch House and shrouded by trees.

Hazrat Omar leads a stitched-together band of fighters from Aranas and surrounding villages dressed in a mix of military fatigues and the familiar shalwar kameez shirt and pants that GIs liked to call “man dresses.” On their heads are flat, woolen Pashtun caps or Arab kufiyah headdresses. They’ve strapped on ammunition harnesses or vests stuffed with magazines full of 7.62mm rounds for their AK47 rifles or elongated missiles for the grenade launching tubes balanced on their shoulders.

There were several attack routes. Chosen Company leaders would later estimate that sixty to eighty gunmen made up the assault force. One band of insurgents moved west toward four US troops manning Post Four and north toward the center of Ranch House with the base command headquarters. To the right of that advance were two other groups of fighters converging on an Afghan security guard compound where there was a single defender on duty at Post Five; other guards were conducting morning prayers. A fortified compound immediately to the west housed Afghan soldiers.

Finally, a fourth group of insurgents attacked downhill toward Post Three. The guard station was a tower reached by a wooden ladder and built on top of a small plywood barracks, the entire structure tucked into the rising slope of the mountain. The barracks walls were painted with a large, looping camouflage pattern, and a huge parachute was draped on the downhill side of the building.

In the actual fighting position on the roof of the barracks, layers of sandbags were stacked around a wood-frame guard post. There was an M240 machine gun and an MK19 automatic grenade launcher. The grenade launcher looked like a machine gun on steroids and fired 40mm grenades fed into the gun on a belt at a rate of one per second. The grenade launcher and the machine gun were oriented uphill to the east over a kill zone of about thirty or forty yards of scrub brush that ended at a tree line. Post Three was the highest point on the base, and soldiers reached it by climbing a steep staircase of sandbags that had a rope line to grab onto.

Four paratroopers were assigned here, but one of them, Specialist Wallace Tinnin, had flown out with his team’s laundry for Camp Blessing. On this morning Private First Class Jeddah Deloria, who just turned twenty-one in June, was on guard in the rooftop post. Down below asleep in cramped quarters were Specialist Chuck Bell and Sergeant Carlos Gonzales-Rodriguez.

Deloria had been aching for his first taste of combat since the Chosen Few arrived nearly three months earlier. The stocky, round-faced Californian always seemed to be smiling, as if the muscles in his face, when relaxed, slipped naturally into a pleasant expression.

Jeddah Deloria was another of Chosen’s lost boys. His father was a mechanical engineer and his mother a dietitian, both Filipinos who were living and working in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, when he was conceived—thus his unusual first name. The paratroopers would later call him Delo because those were the letters they could read on his uniform name tag under the straps of his ammo harness.

He was born in Manila, and his parents immigrated to the desert east of Los Angeles six months later. His father, Joseph, was a strict disciplinarian who required his two sons to stand at attention for long periods. Jeddah, who was only five or six, didn’t really seem to mind it. In the undeveloped stretches of San Bernardino County there were rattlesnakes to catch and targets to shoot at with his dad. But at thirteen, when his parents divorced, he grew distant from his father; he got into fights, dropped out of school, and drifted.

Driving past a recruiting station with his brother one day, Jeddah decided on an impulse to join the Army. He was nineteen. Inside of a year he was assigned to Chosen Company, where he would find another family.

At five-feet-eight and 180 pounds, Delo was the slowest runner in Chosen Company, but he could hump almost anything up the side of a mountain. “A lot of torque, no horsepower,” he liked to say, and Delo’s oxen qualities were harnessed as part of a three-man machine crew carrying the M240. Jeddah loved that weapon—the power of six hundred rounds per minute; precise targeting at up to twelve hundred yards; the way the gas hydraulics drove through grit, resisting the weapon getting jammed; how you could punt-fire rounds over a ridge and hit fleeing enemy fighters on the other side. Now, after three months of not firing a shot in Afghanistan, he just wanted a chance to finally use it.

It was warm this early morning, even high up on the mountain, and like Begaye down at the TOC, Delo was standing post in a T-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops, though he also had on his armored vest. Delo had just put his night-vision goggles away with the growing daylight when he heard a couple of gunshots. He thought they might be from down in the village, but when he turned to face uphill, rounds were tearing into the sandbags in front of him and there were muzzle flashes from the underbrush and treeline far up the hill.

He grabbed the radio to the base tactical operations command: “Ranch House, Post Three taking contact.”

Begaye was on the receiving end. He had already rushed over and shaken Ferrara, who was bunked out nearby inside the headquarters. “I think we’re under attack!” The lieutenant was half awake after hearing the first explosions. Radio reports were tumbling in from all four guard posts, a chorus of agitated voices against a background of gunfire, and Begaye was trying to make sense of it all, to tease out the direction and size of the assault. He was busy acknowledging each call-in and briefed what he knew to Ferrara. All the time Begaye was desperately missing his gear.

I’ve got to get up to my crap. I need my helmet.

Up at Post Three Delo had two weapons at his disposal, an automatic grenade launcher on his left and his beloved machine gun on the right. There was really no question which he would choose, and in seconds he was blasting away with the M240, making small circles with the rounds, “painting” the hillside above with bullets. He was finally in combat, firing his favorite weapon. Delo was so happy he actually started laughing out loud.

Several dozen yards to the south and east the base defenses were quickly crumbling. In the predawn gloom a battle-scape of twisting mountain oak and tall grass was erupting in the white flash and boom of exploding, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs). Amid the billowing smoke and dust, the advancing enemy fighters looked like ghosts picking their way down heavily vegetated slopes and yelling “Allahu Akbar!” (God is greatest) as they moved toward the Afghan security guard positions. Only one security guard was on duty, and after the first volley of RPGs, the hired local Afghans abandoned their compound and ran west. Enemy fighters rushed in and started clearing abandoned buildings with grenades. The retreating guards reached a complex of sand-bag towers and plywood huts where a platoon of Afghan National Army soldiers was bivouacked. Most of the Afghan soldiers simply joined the security guards in a panicked retreat.

But a few Afghan military stood and fought—the platoon commander, a sergeant, and two of their soldiers. They held on for about fifteen minutes before being driven back. One Afghan soldier and one security guard were killed, and two Afghan soldiers were wounded.

On the far left flank of the main enemy assault, at the lowest elevation on the base, a handful of Chosen Few paratroopers manning Post Four found themselves nearly enveloped in gunfire. They were taking rounds from a heavy machine gun the enemy had set up across the valley. The Afghan National Army compound was to their north, and as the jihadist assault slashed down into the Ranch House base from the northeast to the southwest, fighters were advancing along that flank and pouring AK47 fire and RPGs into Post Four. Like Post Three, this fighting position was built on top of a small barracks. The man in charge was a quiet, unassuming Montana native, Sergeant Mike Johnson, who was on the eve of his twenty-sixth birthday.

Johnson, who was married and the father of two, grew up thirty-four miles outside Glacier National Park in the town of Whitefish. He graduated from high school in a class of twelve.

Johnson worked as a diesel mechanic before joining the Army at twenty-two. He first served with the 82nd Airborne and then went to Italy, where he joined Chosen Company during its first deployment to Afghanistan in 2005–2006.

At Ranch House on this day he was in charge of Post Four and was up in the guard tower with one of his paratroopers, Specialist Robert Remmel. With Remmel on an M240 machine gun and Johnson armed with an M4 rifle mounted with a grenade launcher, they focused their fire on enemy gunmen trying to reach the Afghan National Army position. Johnson had his two other soldiers, Specialist Jeffrey Shaw and Private First Class Gregg Rauwolf, direct their fire and throw grenades down a draw to the southeast where fighters had made their way to within fifty feet of the outpost.

Ranch House Post One was on the far west end of the base, the opposite side from the main enemy attack. The living quarters there were separate from the guard post, set back about fifty feet. Jason Baldwin was inside. He had just fallen asleep after finishing a guard shift. Army Specialist Hector Chavez had replaced him at Post One. There were test firings during early hours on other days, and Baldwin woke up, pissed at what he figured was another dry run of testing. He checked his watch—4:55 A.M.

What the hell are they doing?

Then he heard Chavez open up at Post One with a light machine gun. Chavez just kept firing. This was no drill.

Oh shit.

Baldwin cracked open the door and could hear a continuous exchange of gunfire. He leaned over toward a sleeping Sergeant Jose Canales Jr. “Hey, we’re being attacked.” The noncommissioned officer was suddenly up and kept saying, “Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh, shit. Oh shit.” He barked at Baldwin for turning on the light so they could get dressed. The room was plunged back into darkness, and Baldwin was left feeling around to find his clothes. He threw a shirt on over his shorts, pulled on his body armor and shoes, and was out the door. Private First Class Kyle White was right behind him.

Inside the living quarters at Post Three Chuck Bell was deep asleep when AK47 fire startled him awake. “Sergeant Gonzales, I think we’re taking fire.” They heard Delo firing the M240 on the roof. Within seconds an RPG slammed into the building. Gonzales was on his feet, throwing on his vest and helmet. He didn’t bother pulling pants over his long underwear or even putting on his boots. “Hope for the best,” he told Bell, and headed outside, climbing up a rear ladder to the firing post on the roof.

Bell’s heart felt like it was beating its way out of his chest.

This is real. This is it.

In the guard tower above, Delo’s war had barely begun when it was suddenly over. An RPG exploded into the right-front corner of his fighting position, the force of it collapsing the roof and sending a wave of hot shrapnel slicing into the right side of his body from his head down to his knee. The flesh on his right shoulder was shredded, and a thick layer of tissue on his forearm was literally peeled back. Delo was flat on his back under the fallen roof of the guard tower. He was conscious and fascinated with how the exposed muscles in his right arm would flex when he moved his hand. He couldn’t see out his right eye or hear out of his right ear. One piece of shrapnel about a quarter of an inch wide had burrowed through his skull. Delo didn’t realize it yet, but the metal had lodged in a part of his brain controlling movement on the left side of his body.

The enemy continued to shoot into the wrecked fighting position, and bullets skipped off Delo’s body armor, slamming into the collapsed wooden roof and pinning him to the floor. Wood splinters from the impacts hit him in the face. His stunned body for the moment felt no immediate pain.

I was so happy just a second ago.

Gonzales reached him as round after round of RPGs slammed into the outpost, tearing jagged holes in the plywood walls. One of them exploded just as Bell left the quarters below. The force of it sent him sprawling onto the ground, the air knocked out of his lungs. Bell’s first instinct was to get away from all of this. Escape. So he climbed to his feet, turned, and rushed back inside the hooch. But in seconds Bell realized this was no course of action for a soldier—his war had started.

Either I sit here and die… or I’m going to run out and do my job.

He steadied himself, counted to three, and barreled out the door, heading to the rear of the outpost, firing his 9mm over his shoulder in the direction of muzzle flashes up the hill. Gonzales was suddenly standing over him, up above in the ruins of the fighting position. Bell noticed how odd it was that the wooden canopy over the position was gone. Gonzales was yelling something down at him, but Bell couldn’t understand it over all the noise and called out for him to repeat it. “Go to Post Two! Run to Post Two! Tell them the radio’s down at Post Three and that the enemy’s at the wire!”

Bell holstered his pistol and started racing down the steep slope. Post Two was about seventy-five yards ahead, and he felt a mix of relief for getting out of that kill zone and shame for feeling that way. Behind him on the wrecked outpost Delo was asking Gonzales to dig him out from under the collapsed canopy. Almost at the same moment a bullet struck Delo in the right shoulder and passed right through it. “Fuck! I got shot!”

Gonzales saw it happen. “I have to go,” he said. “They’re coming through the wire. I have to go.”

And he was out of there, leaving Delo on the floor of the tower.

With Post Three down and the twin compounds for Afghan security guards and Afghan Army soldiers captured, the entire eastern sector of the base was wide open to the attackers. The Afghan soldiers had left a mounted machine gun behind that enemy fighters quickly spun around and put into action against the American defenses ahead. Enemy fighters broke open captured cartons of bottled water and started passing them around.

The initial flush of victory left Hazrat Omar’s assault momentarily unhinged. Fighters piled up around the captured fighting positions and barracks as their leaders urged them forward, one of them shouting into a hand mic that was wired into a bullhorn slung from a strap over his shoulder. A videographer panned the fighters and caught footage of Omar wearing an assault pack and desert-fatigue pants. He grinned into the camera before handing another fighter a grenade to throw down toward the paratroopers.

While a handful of more determined enemy fighters plunged forward toward the US positions, dozens of others crowded around the captured barracks. They searched rooms for spoils and found a cowering, befuddled security guard who got left behind during the defenders’ hasty retreat. The man was ushered away. A seized crate full of RPGs—the missiles still in their factory plastic wrapping—was broken open and the rounds distributed to fighters who started launching them down toward the Americans. The cache included eight AK47 rifles, six radios, and dozens of ammo cans and magazines full of 7.62mm rifle rounds.

Down at the center of Ranch House Baldwin and White emerged from the barracks of Post One and saw Afghan security guards streaming past them and down the hill. Baldwin was struck by how peculiar it was that some of those running away were smiling. He and White could hear rifle and machine-gun fire and see RPG explosions. An uphill landscape of oak trees and tall grass disrupted their field of vision, and there was a sense that the security of Ranch House base was slipping away. They wanted to find someone in charge and start fighting.

A short distance to the east in the aid station Erich Phillips had just rolled over and sat up on his cot after automatic weapons fire woke him. It was 4:45 A.M. He’d set his alarm for 4:50 to start a shift in the TOC at 5:00. But all of a sudden there was machine gun fire outside. Phillips stood and listened, trying to decipher what and who was shooting. There was an M240 machine gun and Kalashnikov rifles like those the Afghan guards and Afghan soldiers carry. Some kind of drill? Then an RPG round exploded outside the aid station.

No drill.

The door to the aid station swung open, and a wild-eyed Baldwin was standing there. Kyle White was right behind him. Baldwin announced that the base was under attack, but the news didn’t trigger the kind of reaction Jason expected. Phillips calmly geared up, pulled on his ammunition rack, and strapped on his helmet before finally reaching for his rifle. “Yeah, no fucking shit,” Phillips said and stepped out the door, only to see fleeing Afghan security guards going right past him in full gallop. Dzwik had stepped out of the TOC to find himself in the same stream of fleeing humans. He literally grabbed ahold of one Afghan soldier and placed him in a defensive position near the aid station.

The security guard commander, Abdul Gafar, was right on the heels of his own men. Phillips was red-faced with anger: “What the fuck are you doing? Get back to your post!” he yelled.

Gafar kept repeating: “Taliban! Taliban!”

“No shit! Get back to your post!”

But now bullets were starting to kick up dirt where they were standing. Phillips sprinted to the nearby mortar pit and dove in.

Far down the valley at Bella, Sergeant First Class Stockard roused Matt Myer with news that Ranch House was under attack. The captain was out from Blessing for a few days to visit Bella. He got on the radio with Begaye and could hear firing in the background.

Begaye was still trying to make sense of what was unfolding. Agitated young voices reporting by radio from different guard posts conveyed a sense of utter confusion. He had lost all communication with Post Three and could hear someone yelling over the radio, “Hey, they’re in the wire!” When Myer came up on the link from Bella, Begaye tried to make plain to his company commander how serious the situation was becoming at Ranch House.

“All right, roger that,” Myer said. “Keep calm.”

That didn’t sit well with Begaye.

Fucking keep calm! What the fuck? YOU’RE not up here!

Meanwhile Matt Ferrara had moved outside the headquarters to gather his own assessment, and as he neared the corner of the TOC, bullets started whizzing past.

They’re that close already?

At Post Two Private First Class Sean Langevin saw what looked like a wild man running down the rocks toward him dressed in combat boots, long underwear, and body armor. It was Chuck Bell, and he didn’t slow down until he reached the bunker. Bell swung around the MK19 grenade launcher on the roof and trained it on the area around Post Three up the hill, then started blasting away, hoping to keep the enemy from getting close enough to kill Gonzales and Delo. Firing the stream of grenades from the large, boxy automatic weapon gave the Missouri country boy at least a measure of relief from the guilt he was feeling for leaving his friends behind.

Post Two was a single-story bunker, with its grenade launcher and an M240 machine gun oriented toward the south and west in the direction of Aranas and down the valley. The living quarters for paratroopers manning the post was a separate, plywood hooch located about fifty-five yards southeast in the direction of the post headquarters. Langevin, who had a squad automatic weapon—or SAW, a light machine gun—had climbed up onto the roof of the Post Two bunker so he could start firing east in the direction of the enemy.

He and Bell suddenly saw Gonzales running toward them from Post Three. The sergeant had a gash on his foot after picking his way through boulders and prickly undergrowth without shoes. Worse than that, he had a shrapnel wound to his shoulder. Bell’s grenade launcher jammed up after an enemy bullet lodged in the trigger mechanism, and he took Gonzales inside the bunker to treat his wounds. Bell was frantic about Delo and demanded answers from Gonzalez. “Where’s Deloria? Where’s Delo?” Gonzales said Deloria was still up in the guard post buried under its collapsed roof.

“I told him we would be back. We’re coming back for him. Just stay quiet and no one will even know you are here,” Gonzales said.

Bell called up to Langevin to continue pouring cover fire in the direction of Post Three to keep the enemy away from Delo: “Hey, you make sure they don’t get up that ladder.”

Langevin was hunkered over his light machine gun, playing out bursts of ammunition. He didn’t need anybody telling him his job: “Don’t’ worry. I got this, Bell.”

Johnson and Remmel over at Post Four could see militants pouring into the Afghan National Army compound.

There’s nobody there fighting back at them.…

Enemy fire on Post Four was only getting more intense. Remmel had crouched behind a sandbag wall in the tower to reload his machine gun. At six-feet-five and more than 250 pounds, he was one of the biggest men in the platoon. He got back up on his feet to resume firing and was cut down by a burst of automatic weapons fire from his left. Johnson pulled off his body armor and found three bullet holes in Remmel’s side. Johnson strapped the protective vest back on the wounded soldier and called for Gregg Rauwolf to come help Remmel climb down and start dressing his wounds in the barracks.

Between the heavy machine gun fire from across the valley and rifle fire from the east and north, the post was literally under siege. Johnson picked up the radio mic and began reporting his first casualty to headquarters when a bullet shot the handset in half and communication was cut off.

At the center of the base Ferrara was back inside the TOC and had taken over briefing Myer on the radio. For an odd moment the company commander felt like he was getting mixed signals because his young platoon leader at Ranch House sounded unusually calm, the tone of his voice almost conversational.

But the circumstances had actually grown more dire by the minute and remained confusing. All four guard posts had reported being under attack. Post Three communication was lost entirely. Post Two was reporting incoming gunfire to the rear of its location, clearly from inside the combat outpost. And Johnson over at Post Four had just informed headquarters about Remmel’s gut wound.

When Ferrara took the radio from Begaye to get more detail, the line to Post Four went dead. It was still unclear whether there were friendly troops at the Afghan Army and security guard compounds up the mountain toward the east. Headquarters couldn’t raise any of the Afghan commanders by radio. Even the Marine advisors for the bulk of the Afghan soldiers, who were bivouacked down by the landing zone and base entrance, were out of radio contact. Clearly, though, there was automatic weapons fire and RPGs coming from the east, particularly plunging fire, and it was only getting worse around the aid station and TOC. But without knowing for certain whether those compounds were in enemy hands, Ferrara couldn’t order any mortar rounds fired in that direction.

We have to find out what happened to our allies.

Myer down at Bella was starting to absorb some of this from Ferrara when the radio connection with Ranch House suddenly dropped as the lieutenant was in midsentence. The captain radioed back, but there was nothing. By now there was little doubt that some enemy fighters had overrun a large portion of the base and were now within hand-grenade range of the base headquarters where Ferrara was on the radio. The more minutes that ticked by without reestablishing radio contact, the more alarming the prospects.

Was the command post just now overrun?

At Ranch House it took several minutes to restore order. An RPG had slammed into the headquarters’ roof, blasting a hole in the ceiling and cutting communication to the outside world. Overhead lights in the operations center had come crashing down, and shrapnel went flying across the room. Fortunately no one was hurt. But it took time before Ferrara got his hands on a working, handheld radio with a whip antenna that he could use outside to reconnect with Myer.

Meanwhile Phillips had started organizing a defense of the headquarters area. He moved Sergeant Kyle Dirkintis, the medic, up to the TOC and ordered Schilling to take a position on the northwest corner of the aid station where he could fire at insurgents higher up the mountain at the Afghan National Army compound.

Chavez, who was up in Post One just to the west, was trying to track on his radio how events were unfolding across the base, and he heard that Post Three had been overrun with all but one of the Americans evacuated.

“What do you mean one man’s unaccounted for?” Phillips yelled.

“Nobody knows where he is—it’s Deloria.”

At Post Three the enemy was still shooting into the tumbled-down guard tower. Delo, who was alone now, already had a bullet wound through his left shoulder. A portion of the collapsed roof was pinned against his body armor, keeping him from moving, so he shimmied out of the vest. But while he did, a second bullet ricocheted into his right thigh and then a third drilled though the meaty part of his right backside. “Come on, you got me!” Delo yelled out. “Time out! Stop!”

Now free to crawl around a bit, Delo found his M4 jammed under the wreckage, but he couldn’t pull it loose. Explosions had wrecked both the machine gun and grenade launcher. He saw detonators for the Claymore mines—clackers, they call them—hanging down off the front sandbags. He reached over and tried to set off the mines, but it didn’t work. Someone must have cut the wires.

It was just a matter of waiting for the enemy to come kill him. The radio was nearby, but Delo couldn’t get it to work. It had sensitive frequencies on it that should never be allowed to fall into enemy hands, so he twisted the knob to render the device useless.

Then he waited. He could hear insurgent voices down below, men shouting directions or orders at one another. It sounded very much like they were moving past him and continuing down the hill.

He was now behind the advancing enemy lines.

At the mortar pit Phillips called over for Baldwin, who was in a sand-bagged position near Post One, to come help him fire the 60mm mortar. From that location looking east there was virtually a wall of oak trees and waist-high grass and bushes. It was good concealment for the paratroopers in the mortar pit, a portion of which was an ammunition supply bunker. But it also made it tough for Americans to see the advancing enemy. Phillips had preplanned targeting coordinates for the mortar that would allow them to pummel the ground around Post Three. He had assembled the data as a contingency in the event of an attack like this.

But the gunfire raining down from higher elevations to the east made it impossible for him to reach and operate the mortar. Bullets were actually pinging off the launch tube.

Schilling, meanwhile, spotted an insurgent slipping up behind a plywood latrine just several yards east of the aid station. He started yelling, “He’s behind the shitter!” And everybody opened up on the shack, splintering the plywood with M4 rounds.

From where the troopers had taken positions in and around the mortar pit and the aid station, they could see muzzle flashes from the vegetation and trees on the rising slope to the east. Rocket-propelled grenade rounds whooshed out of the underbrush to explode nearby. But it was hard to see individual enemy fighters who were little more than shadows passing quickly from one tree to another. The soldier only had a split-second to react and Phillips felt certain he dropped a few of the enemy. He kept calling out, “Oh, I see one.” Then he would fire. “Got ’em!” And then he’d do it again. It was driving Baldwin bananas because the spectral figures with their AK47 rifles were just moving too quickly for him to get a bead on.

The volleys of RPGs escalated, and Phillips called out for his soldiers to ratchet up their return fire. Phillips wanted fire superiority—force the enemy behind cover.

Let ’em have it.

And it seemed to have some effect. Up at the Afghan National Army post, on images captured by the enemy cameraman, a row of attacking fighters were forced to take cover, crouching behind a sand-bag wall. The fighting there raged for several minutes. One enemy fighter unleashed an RPG round that struck the far end of the aid station, sending small pieces of shrapnel into Schilling’s face, and he had dust and blood in his eyes. The paratrooper instinctively started to pull back, but Phillips hollered at him to stay put.

“I need you to hold that center or we might not go home!”

Schilling, who was for the moment more intimidated by Phillips than the enemy, stayed put.

Dzwik came down from the headquarters, and Phillips shouted for him to relieve Schilling, who fell back to the mortar pit. Phillips surveyed his wounds and decided they were superficial, but he could tell Schilling was stunned from the blast, so he had him stay low behind the ammo bunker and fill magazines for the rifles. “Roger that, Sergeant.”

Half of the mortar pit doubled as an ammunition storage area, a bunker four feet high and covered with plywood overlaid with sandbags, and some of the RPG rounds coming in at an angle literally skipped off the sandbags like pebbles on a lake and flew off into the trees. Schilling was mesmerized watching two deflected RPGs spin end over end high up into the sky in a kind of aerial ballet. Each time an RPG roared in, Phillips and the others yelled “RPG!” and ducked down into the bunker as the missile caromed off to explode someplace else, then they would pop right back up with their M4s firing or throwing hand grenades. There was a strange rhythm to it all. Phillips was amazed how they were spared over and over again from being blown to pieces.

You want to talk about some lucky bastards.