5

> > > PHILLIPS FIGHTS BACK

Luck was scarce for several other Chosen Few defenders. At Post Two, where a wounded Carlos Gonzales was being treated, Sergeant John Relph and Private First Class Adam Spotanski tried to fight their way back up the steep, rocky terrain to reach Post Three and Deloria. But enemy fire was too intense, and they were forced to fall back.

The enemy advancing toward Post Two from the opposite direction had an easier time of it. They were scurrying downhill, a series of limestone outcroppings acting like stone walls that provided perfect fighting positions as the insurgents moved closer to the bunker.

An AK47 bullet literally drilled its way through the breach of Langevin’s SAW, but the firing mechanism somehow still worked. Spotanski climbed up on the roof to help Langevin lay down fire, but rounds were coming so fast and furious that eventually he headed back down inside the bunker. “Fuck this. I’m outta here.” Shrapnel from an RPG blast wounded Langevin in his thigh, but he didn’t cry out or even mention it to anyone and kept fighting. Chuck Bell, down below in the bunker, was on the radio when a round passed through his right triceps—a neat hole in and a neat hole out. Gonzales was sitting nearby getting bandaged and saw the whole thing. “Yep. You were shot.”

But Bell shook it off. He didn’t see much blood, and the pain wasn’t any worse than when he got vaccinated before deployment. He remained more troubled by the thought of his friend Delo, still possibly alive up at Post Three. Bell never had much patience for organized religion and had his doubts about a higher deity, but this one time he prayed to God.

I hope you keep Delo safe.

Far to the south at Post Four the fighting strength of the paratrooper team there had been cut in half. With Gregg Rauwolf treating Remmel in the barracks, only Johnson and Shaw were outside defending the bunker. Shaw was fighting from the secondary position, walls of sandbags stacked up on the ground near the outpost. He dropped down to reload his rifle, and when he reemerged to start firing, an enemy round passed cleanly through his right bicep and burrowed into his left bicep—one bullet, two limbs shot. Shaw was initially stunned by the wound, uncertain of what happened or why he was having trouble moving his arms or holding his rifle. By this time Johnson had been forced out of the tower by increasingly heavy gunfire and reached Shaw, saw that he was bleeding, and sent him back into the barracks. Now the sergeant was left outside to defend Post Four by himself.

Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund was down at Blessing in the Pech Valley, where the battalion had two 155mm artillery guns capable of wreaking some havoc on the enemy. He wanted to know why Myer wasn’t employing them in the battle at Ranch House. Myer explained that the enemy was inside the perimeter. “We can’t shoot artillery. They’re too close to us,” he told his boss.

The captain did call in fire from 120mm mortars located at Bella to hit ridgelines two to three hundred yards away from the base just in case there were enemy reinforcements positioned up there. Forty-five minutes into the battle enemy fighters had captured roughly half of Ranch House, with the area around Post Three and the Afghan Army and security guard compounds now under their control. The front line for the fight ran north to south through the center of the base.

There was further confusion because many of the attackers were wearing camouflaged military clothing, leaving some of the paratroopers uncertain whether they were seeing Afghan soldiers or security guards moving behind the dense vegetation. As the militants worked their way west, they began closing in on the base headquarters, the mortar pit, and aid station. They were within ten to twenty yards in some places. To the far right of the enemy advance was the Post Two guard station, where paratroopers were forced to turn their weapons toward the interior of the base to defend themselves. Between that fighting position and the aid station were the empty barracks for the paratroopers assigned to Post Two, and behind that building was a storage shed.

The enemy was pushing toward those structures. If they captured them, they would split what was left of the American defenses, isolating Post Two. The enemy would also have succeeded in outflanking the center of Ranch House—the headquarters.

At the mortar pit Kain Schilling could hear over a radio that Gonzales had lost blood from his wound and was slipping in and out of consciousness at Post Two. It was the first time the men at the mortar pit had heard of someone seriously wounded, and Erich Phillips decided he needed to get up there with Sergeant Kyle Dirkintis, the medic.

Nobody’s going to fucking die on my watch.

He grabbed Kyle White and low ran over to the TOC, where he found Ferrara standing in the doorway, one hand carrying the heavy portable radio, the other holding a mic to his ear. Phillips left White there to augment the headquarters defense, took Dirkintis, and returned over to the mortar pit. By this time enemy fire was so intense that rounds were tearing holes in the sandbags over the ammo bunker. Phillips was working on how he and Dirkintis were going to get across open ground uphill to Post Two—the first stop would be the Post Two barracks.

He wanted Baldwin to throw grenades into the oak trees where there were enemy gunmen and indicated where he wanted them to go and where he wanted Baldwin’s covering fire after that. Then they each pulled pins and lobbed grenades. Schilling watched in amazement as even before the bombs detonated Phillips and Dirkintis took off up the slope toward the barracks thirty yards away, crossing an area swept by enemy bullets. To the east of the barracks was a storage shed and a line of trees and trails that led east toward the captured Afghan Army compound. Figures were moving from the ANA post down through that foliage heading west toward the barracks. Phillips and Dirkintis picked their way through waist-high grass to reach the far west end of the barracks building. From there it was still another fifty yards across largely open and uphill terrain to Post Two. Enemy fighters were filtering in among the trees on the opposite, east end of the barracks building, which was about twenty feet long. They saw the two paratroopers move out in front of them, effectively blocking their infiltration. Phillips, in his bid to get a medic to Post Two, had disrupted an enemy maneuver to cut through the American line. The militants unleashed AK47 fire down along both sides of the barracks toward the west end of the structure where Phillips and Dirkintis had taken refuge. Other enemy fighters fired down from the direction of Post Three.

Phillips ordered Dirkintis to get inside the barracks out of the line of fire: “Lay flat on your belly. Don’t get up until you hear me call your name, dude. Like don’t fucking move. I can’t lose you.”

At the edge of the Afghan Army Compound Hazrat Omar was back in the lens of the video camera, this time with a cluster of his men and an AK47 in his hands. He started to lead them down a trail that sloped toward the center of Ranch House.

Jason Baldwin, at the mortar pit, could hear insurgents shouting “Allahu Akbar” as the gunfire grew even more intense, and it felt like they were on the verge of finally being overrun. He called over to Hector Chavez for help and then in the other direction toward Phillips. But both yelled back that they too were pinned down. Baldwin was left to struggle with the prospect of his own annihilation. He laid out three grenades near a support beam for the ammo bunker. Baldwin reasoned that if the worst happened, he would use one to destroy the mortar tube, another to roll into the ammo supply bunker, and a third on himself.

The twenty-one-year-old soldier could feel panic welling up inside. Then something in his head clicked. He realized there was nothing he could do to change fate.

Okay, I’m gonna die. So what.

After that, he could think straight. He remembered how Phillips once showed him how the elevation on the 60mm mortar could be raised up so that a shell would go straight up and come straight down and blow up the weapon. Baldwin figured if he just dropped that setting a smidgeon, 20 degrees, he might slam rounds just fifty yards away where the enemy fighters were clustered around the Afghan National Army compound. That could really mess things up for them.

Baldwin yelled over at Ferrara who was near the TOC with the radio. “Hey, can I blow up the ANA compound?” Matt Ferrara pondered for a moment the irony of bringing artillery down on a portion of his own combat outpost.

“Fuck it,” the lieutenant yelled back, giving the green light.

Baldwin adjusted the tube so that it was almost straight up and down. Then he dropped a round in. Schilling was nearby as Baldwin watched the shell fly upward and then appear to actually arc back over their heads in the wrong direction.

“Schilling, oh fuck, I think I’ve killed us.”

But the shell rose higher and finally pitched forward, dropping into the ANA compound.

Now Baldwin started launching more 60mm rounds. In his excitement he forgot to pull the arming pin on about four of them, so they landed harmlessly among the enemy. David Dzwik, over by the TOC, could hear Baldwin shouting obscenities at himself for the blunders. But the mortar man finally started to lay waste to the Afghan Army compound.

After several minutes the Afghan security guard compound was burning.

This was good news for Ferrara over near the headquarters, but it wasn’t good enough. He and Matt Myer knew the situation demanded air support. The closest available aircraft were two Air Force A10 ground attack jets that were prowling up and down the Pakistan border.

“We need to do something to get them off of us,” Myer told Ferrara about the insurgents closing in. “We need to figure out how we’re going to use the A10s to do that.”

The A10 is one of the ugliest aircraft in the American arsenal, even its most ardent supporters concede. Its nickname, after all, is Warthog. But the infantry love it—they know it can rain death in tight spaces. The aircraft doesn’t have the sleek, aerodynamic lines of an F16; it has big, boxy wings and vertical stabilizers—a muscle-bound, armored fuselage—that is actually wider than it is long. If airplanes were athletes, pilots like to think of A10s as weightlifters, powerful in small turns, if not fast—a homely child of the skies that only a pilot-parent could love.

The aircraft can carry a payload of bombs, rockets, and missiles, and from its inception in the 1970s it was designed to support troops on the ground by destroying tanks. So the entire airframe is built around one of the most distinctive weapons on the battlefield: a seven-barrel cannon called the Avenger that works like a supersized Gatling gun. It shoots 30mm cannon rounds—each the length of a forearm—at a rate of seventy shells per second and at a muzzle velocity three times the speed of sound.

The noise made by the cannon when it’s fired is a sustained, sky-rippling BRRRRT that can be heard for miles and that every soldier knows by heart. Whatever is targeted erupts in a riot of explosions and smoke. The cockpit actually vibrates when the gun is loosed, and even the Heads-Up Display on the cockpit window momentarily blurs out.

The two jets aloft this Wednesday morning were just waiting for a mission. The lead pilot was Dan Cruz, the son of an electrician and dental hygienist who grew up near Luke Air Force Base in Glendale, Arizona. He first fell in love with the F16 fighter aircraft, a machine he thought looked like a sports car in the sky. After graduating from the US Air Force Academy, Cruz got his second choice, the A10, and simply transferred his affections from one airplane to another.

His wingman flying the second A10 was Andrew Wood, another Academy graduate who grew up outside Memphis, Tennessee, and followed into the Air Force his father, Bill, who had flown F4 Phantom jets and was now a pilot for Federal Express.

Cruz and Wood had become minor sensations within their combat flying circle. On the occasions when they were assigned to fly together, ground attacks almost always seemed to materialize. Some pilots deploying to Afghanistan almost never use their weapons. But not Clyde and Freaq, the respective call signs for Cruz and Wood. Each of them had fired thousands of rounds since arriving in theater in April for no other reason than they just happened to be the pilots aloft when trouble or targets arose.

In the wee hours that morning Cruz and Wood had taken off from the sprawling US airbase at Bagram twenty-five miles north of Kabul. Before takeoff, with their night-vision goggles, they spotted huge camel spiders the width of a human hand skittering across the runway. The stars shimmered with an otherworldly glow through the eye devices that amplified ambient light, and the nearly full moon seemed to fill the entire night sky. As the twin-engine jet climbed to cruising altitude, electrostatic charges sent rippling spider webs of light playing across the front of the cockpit.

The two airmen were in plane-to-plane radio contact chatting about almost anything to pass the time as they cruised to the border to begin surveillance for any enemy fighters crossing into Afghanistan. The topic for tonight: the physical endowments of a certain female officer. The first few hours of the early morning passed without incident as they orbited up and down the Pakistan border. The pilots were ready to provide ground support if any coalition troops got into trouble. And that was precisely the emergency call that came in just as the sun rose.

It took them about twenty minutes to get over Ranch House.

Down below on the slopes of the mountain Phillips was virtually alone in his fight from the west end of the Post Two barracks. He’d been shifting from one corner of the building to the other, moving across a concrete pad in front of the door to the barracks, always firing east into the oak trees where insurgents had taken up positions. If he was lucky, they might think there were multiple defenders in their way. He peered around one of the corners, cracking off a couple of shots with his M4, and could see enemy fighters running down the trail from the east, right in his direction. He was certain that one of those times when he changed position and moved around a corner to open fire there would be an enemy gunman waiting for him.

Phillips was at the south corner of the building when an RPG came whooshing right toward him.

This one’s got my name on it.

It passed just over his shoulder and exploded a few yards behind, the concussion knocking him forward, flat on his stomach. Dirkintis heard the blast and decided he couldn’t sit inside the barracks out of the fight any longer. Phillips was already back up and shooting and when the medic emerged, he yelled at Dirkintis to take the north corner.

Just as Dirkintis started to return fire, a bullet struck him right in the collar bone, burrowed through his chest, and exited out his back, collapsing the soldier to the ground. Phillips reached him and started firing around the corner, dragging Dirkintis by his foot behind the building.

Langevin, still lying prone on the roof of Post Two with his SAW light machine gun, was pouring fire into the far end of the barracks and yelling, “You got two guys on the back of your building, Sergeant Phillips!”

Phillips started lobbing grenades over the roof to the other side, but he knew he was in trouble. Enemy fighters were just a few feet away, he had a wounded man in need of medical aid, and getting him anywhere from there was going to be dicey.

First thing was to see if Dirkintis could move on his own. Phillips, while continuing to fire at the enemy, started yelling at the medic, urging him however he could to get on his feet: “I need you to get the fuck off your ass.”

Dirkintis tried mightily to comply. Over and over he pushed up onto one hand, and then both feet, only to fall back down. Blood was oozing from under his body armor, and he was spitting it out of his mouth and moaning. Phillips figured the medic probably had a collapsed lung from a sucking chest wound. He started stripping ammo off Dirkintis to replenish his own and got ready to make a move. Phillips wanted a grenade blast for cover. But he was out of frags. He yelled over to Post Two for a little help. There was a parachute draped over the entryway into the bunker, and the fabric was suddenly pulled aside as John Relph emerged with a grenade in his hand, pulled the pin, and drew his arm back to lob it when he was struck in the right leg with a bullet and went down. Phillips could see the whole thing. The sergeant fell back into the bunker, and someone grabbed the live grenade and threw it outside, where it exploded.

Langevin, still on the roof with his SAW, could see it too and decided to act. As Phillips watched, the private first class popped open the feed tray on his weapon, laid in an ammo belt from a new drum, slapped the cover closed, pulled back the charging bolt, and opened up. He worked the barrel left to right, laying down a wall of fire across the far east end of the barracks. Phillips took the cue. He spun Dirkintis’s sprawled figure around, grabbed the medic by a handle on the back of his body armor, and, with his other hand firing his M4, started dragging him back down toward the aid station. Phillips found a deep-slotted depression in the ground about midway there and called for assistance from Chavez, who had moved down from Post One to join Baldwin at the mortar pit. Chavez came running.

Back up at Post Two, four of the six soldiers were wounded, and there was no sign of a medic coming any time soon. Langevin kept firing from the roof. The enemy had gotten closer, and Langevin trained his machine gun wherever he saw a head poke out from behind a rock. Paratroopers from down below started passing him grenades, and he lobbed them as far as he could, watching in frustration as some rolled back down the hill toward Post Two. But a few found their mark, and soldiers could hear insurgents screaming out in pain.

The fight had been raging for more than an hour, and the men in the bunker were exhausted. A battle-weary kind of giddiness settled in, and Relph blurted out, “Okay, guys, if I die, I want you guys to go ahead and delete all the porn off my computer so my wife doesn’t see it.” He actually looked serious about his request, but everybody else started laughing, a moment of comic respite in the middle of a disaster.

The same urge to step back a bit from the suffocating sensory overdrive of combat played out earlier when Phillips and Baldwin were side by side in the mortar pit, throwing grenades, and Baldwin, apropos of nothing, blurted out, “Hey, Sergeant Phillips, what day is it?”

It was actually a Wednesday, but that didn’t seem to be the point. Phillips turned and grinned at Baldwin and did his best bad-ass imitation, “I don’t know, motherfucker, but it’s a good day to die.” Baldwin picked up the cue and responded with a faux whine: “No, man, I just turned twenty-one. I haven’t even been able to drink legally in the States yet.”

A single fragmentation grenade was looped onto the ammo rack Baldwin was wearing, and he was thinking that now, in the midst of this terrible fight, he was like a kid excited about the chance to lob his first frag at an enemy, just like in every war movie he ever saw. Except Phillips turned and demanded the explosive so he could throw it, and Baldwin reluctantly gave it up. There would be time for dozens of grenades to be thrown. But just now, as Phillips called for another, Baldwin, without missing a beat, reached into his tactical vest and pulled out a plastic bag full of ready-to-fill, water-bomb grenades and stuck them in the NCO’s outstretched hand. “What the fuck is this, ass-clown?” Phillips said and threw the bag into Baldwin’s face. Baldwin grinned and handed him a real one.

The two men were alternating between firing their M4 rifles and throwing the grenades when Phillips all of a sudden asked for cover fire. He dropped down and opened a can of Copenhagen Long Cut smokeless tobacco, grabbed a pinch, and stuffed it between his cheek and gums.

“What the fuck are you doing?” said Baldwin, realizing he was providing cover for a tobacco break.

“Hey, I need a dip, man.”

At Post Four Sergeant Mike Johnson’s solitary defense finally got some relief. One of the Marine trainers made his way down to Johnson’s position with four Afghan Army soldiers and left them there to help the sergeant hold the beleaguered outpost. Still, the situation was dire. Remmel was suffering inside the barracks from the wounds to his stomach. He was bleeding internally, and his skin was turning pale. They needed to get him on a medevac helicopter.

As the A10 jets arrived over Ranch House there was a bank of purplish haze covering the mountains in the distance and tufts of cotton candy clouds rolling through the valleys down below, enough to make a pilot queasy about low-level strafing runs through the narrow caverns. Equally disconcerting was how the ground below was in shadow at this early hour, complicating the task of spotting targets. But the sky directly overhead was a clear blue, and as the aircraft passed low over the surrounding ridgelines, the feminine-sounding altitude warning alert—the pilots called her Bitching Betty—sounded out, “Altitude, altitude.”

The pilots bore in for a “show of force” display over the broad spur on which the battle was unfolding. They saw a column of white smoke billowing out of a burning structure to the east.

Down below at Ranch House headquarters the paratroopers could tell the show of force was doing nothing to deter the jihadist gunmen. In fact, Dzwik, from his position near the TOC, could hear the enemy forces from two different directions yelling at one another, as if they were coordinating a final assault.

“Hey, they’re massing,” Dzwik yelled over to Ferrara. “They’re getting ready to do something.”

Dzwik had been alternating positions between the TOC and the aid station. That kind of close-quarters combat was more difficult and desperate than anything the squad leader expected. Killing a man wasn’t as simple as pointing a weapon and firing. Everything just moved so fast, and there was so much confusion. Dzwik felt like all he could do was shoot where he thought the enemy was. By the time he actually spotted a shadowy figure shifting behind the trees and bushes, the insurgent was already halfway to his next defilade position, and Dzwik had been too slow to react. He got off a round that went nowhere.

It’s not like the movies.

Back at Bella, Chosen Company commander Matt Myer raised A10 pilot Dan Cruz on the radio and told him there were as many as forty enemy fighters closing in on the Ranch House base headquarters. Ferrara had been filling Myer in.

“We’re going to do a gun run here shortly that’s going to be danger-close,” Myer told the pilot.

Thirty-millimeter shells slamming into a hillside at high velocity could create a lethal splash pattern of debris and shrapnel flying up to seventy yards in any direction. If there were US troops within that zone, that was considered a “danger-close” attack and required explicit approval from ground commanders. There must be a clear understanding—and agreement—of the risks to nearby friendly forces.

Just then, though, both pilots tuned their radios to the frequency Matt Ferrara was using on the ground, and they could hear him calmly relaying a casualty report for medical helicopters that were on their way in. He already had seven wounded.

“Shit, dude, this is a fuckin’ medevac [report],” Cruz said to his wingman.

The enormity of what the pilots faced was becoming clear. During so many of their missions over these eastern provinces the attacks were often against enemy fighters hunkered down hundreds of yards away from US forces, and the goal was simply to kill the insurgents. This was different: there was a desperation in the facts being relayed, even if the men relaying them didn’t sound desperate.

Even more startling was something the facts they were hearing only hinted at: the attack mission would be carried on inside a US military base, something never done before in the war in Afghanistan.

For now, however, Cruz made radio contact with Ferrara and told him what he needed: coordinates for the gun run, where the nearest “friendlies” were in relation to the targets, and whether Ferrara had training in air combat support: Was he a joint terminal attack controller (JTAC)?

“No, I’m not a qualified JTAC,” Ferrara said. Cruz could hear gunfire in the background and was struck by how calm and unmoved the young lieutenant sounded. What he heard was quintessential Ferrara. When Kyle White, who was firing at the enemy from a position near the TOC, would call over for more ammunition, Ferrara, without missing a beat in his radio communications with Bella and incoming aircraft, would grab a magazine and toss it to his soldier.

Ferrara had ordered men at his outposts to lay signal panels near their fighting position to mark them for the incoming fighter planes, and he told Cruz this. The pilot didn’t react. The reality was that these VS17 panels, although they might be helpful to alert slower-moving aircraft like attack helicopters, were useless for jets streaming at tree-top levels at four hundred miles per hour, particularly over a densely vegetated hillside like this one.

Ferrara told Cruz he had a major worry. “I have one post, highest post on my installation… highest up on the spur all by itself. I have one person in that installation. Do not hit that installation. It’s the only special instruction I have.”

He was talking about Deloria trapped in the ruins of Post Three.

With the Afghan National Army compound now in enemy hands, Ferrara wanted it destroyed, and he passed along its latitude and longitude coordinates to Cruz. Myer came up on the radio to elaborate using the pilot’s call-sign, Hawg 1-7.

“Hey, roger, the friendly situation on the ground is they have their position, which is the TOC, marked by VS17 panels,” Myer said. “To the south of that location there’s a bondeh [cottage], which used to be friendly local national forces. Break. That location has been compromised, and they need a gun run.”

Myer provided his initials—M.M.—to certify as commander that a danger-close strafing run was authorized. He told Cruz the nearest US forces to the target were fifty-five yards away.

Cruz could see people down in the area where smoke was rising above a building. Was that the target?

“Roger,” Ferrara said. “That compound is on fire.”

To make absolutely certain what he would be bombing, Cruz told Ferrara he would fire a rocket filled with white phosphorous that would burn and mark the intended ground zero. With US troops so close, the pilot wanted there to be no question he would be killing only the enemy.

Cruz rolled his big plane to the left and then right and nosed it down, his right hand on the hand-grip of the weapons control stick between his legs and his left hand on the throttles for maneuvering his aircraft. The instrument panel before him was a panoply of levers, dials, knobs, and switches for radios, flares, speed breaks, weapon settings, and a host of other functions. Bitching Betty started sounding off about altitude.

“This is hard, dude,” Cruz said to Wood while he maneuvered for the best approach. “I don’t want to frag the friendlies with the rocket.”

“Yeah, you might want to get in close and spike that shit,” Wood said.

“I see some muzzle flash down there.”

Cruz fired the rocket and pulled up hard to get out of the valley. The rocket left an orange streak as it straight-lined into the mountain, hitting close to the burning compound. Ferrara quickly confirmed for Cruz over the radio that he had marked the right target.

Dzwik was nearby and growing anxious that the A10s were taking too long.

“They need to engage now,” the staff sergeant called out.

The lieutenant said the pilots were worried about hitting Americans.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dzwik said as he fired his rifle from the corner of the operations center. “We’re dead anyway. Might as well take some of them with us.”

Ferrara raised the radio and mic and gave the go-ahead as clearly as he could: “I want you to hit that [Afghan security guard] building and any personnel maneuvering south below that building or along the side of that building.”

As an afterthought Ferrara asked about what kind of munitions the planes would be firing.

“Thirty-millimeter high-explosive incendiary rounds,” Cruz radioed back, “and be advised this is going to be danger-close, so fifty meters. We’re going to be pushed in there pretty close to you guys.”

“Roger.”

Ferrara began calling those posts that he could still reach to warn paratroopers about taking cover, then he called out timeframes for the men hunkered down around him.

Thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten.

The jets came in low. Cruz flew his A10 only about one hundred feet off the ground, and Wood was thirty seconds behind him, the hulking silhouettes of their aircraft casting fast-moving shadows across the battlefield. Cruz flew straight toward the target with its white plume of smoke and fired for three full seconds, unleashing about three hundred cannon rounds in the time it takes to exhale. The Heads-Up Display momentarily vibrated into a blur in front of him, and just as Cruz lifted his finger off the trigger, another automated voice in the cockpit blared a warning about plowing into the ground: “Pull up! Pull up!”

But the Air Force captain had already throttled for altitude and was in a sharp ascent, banking right. In a few seconds he was looking at nothing but blue sky.

Wood was right behind, laying down more shells.

On the ground it felt like one continuous explosion rocking the entire planet. Baldwin had replaced Chavez in treating Dirkintis, who had been sucking on a fentanyl lollipop pain killer and had also gotten a morphine injection. Dirkintis was feeling good and, in his woozy state, kept asking Baldwin to go get his wallet so he’d have it when the medevac helicopter arrived. Baldwin had his head down, trying to listen to the medic’s labored breathing when suddenly everything ten yards off to their left seemed to explode.

Erich Phillips was back in the mortar pit and turned his head to the side like he was facing away from storm winds when the hillside erupted and rocks and debris pelted his helmet. He was thinking about the enemy.

They’re probably thinking, “What the fuck are we facing? These guys are willing to shoot their own base.”

Dzwik remembered peeking up a few seconds later and seeing a wall of exploding dirt in front of him and all along the area where the enemy had been advancing. He was ecstatic. “That’s it! Right there! Do it again. Do it again. Just like that. That’s perfect,” he yelled over to the platoon commander.

Dzwik called out, asking if everybody was okay, and got a scattered chorus in response, “Yeah, I’m good.… No injuries, nothing, we’re good.… Hell, yeah.”

Ferrara, for the first time with a hint of excitement in his voice, lifted the mic to his mouth, “Hawg, Hawg, that was a direct hit.”

They needed one more strafing run on the enemy, and Ferrara wanted them to shift the attack about fifty-five yards south of that last strafe. He also warned the pilots to be careful. “You can’t get any closer,” he said. “That hit was perfect. It was hitting where the fire from the enemy was coming from. But it was also very close to us.”

Both pilots bore in for a second run.

Ferrara started his countdown again. Thirty seconds. Fifteen. Ten.

Cruz changed his angle of approach ever so slightly, and some of the 30mm rounds went just too far. Begaye was down on one knee in the TOC bracing for the attack, and he felt the earth shaking from the explosions and the building rocking back and forth. He felt trapped in the headquarters during the fighting without his battle gear and even fashioned a shank out of antenna in case the enemy came barreling through the door. But just then something struck him in the back of the head, and he fell forward, unconscious for a few seconds. When he regained his senses he felt light-headed and reached back with his hand to discover he was bleeding.

Holy shit, how did this happen?

Dzwik was in the middle of telling everyone to get down again when suddenly the hillside seemed to explode, and he was on his back in a sea of brown. When he sat up it was eerily quiet until he heard Begaye from inside the TOC.

“Hey, I’m hit! I’m hit! I’m wounded!”

Dzwik headed inside to find Begaye on his feet, holding the back of his head.

Ferrara got on the radio to the pilots in just a few seconds. “Hey, that was too close, that was too close.… Cease fire, cease fire!”

It’s a pilot’s worst nightmare. What was too close? Did they kill someone? Fratricide? What happened? Cruz kept asking for details to understand whether there was a miscommunication. “Too close to what?”

Ferrara, his hands full trying to sort out the aftermath, put him off. “Stand by. Let me get a report from my post. Like I said, that was too close, and I need to make sure any kind of missions after it are safe.”

A few agonizing minutes later the pilots got the word that no Americans had been killed. They were not told about Begaye’s wound. But the shooting had died down across the eastern side of the base. The A10 attack put an end to the assault. The insurgents began peeling away, sweeping the battlefield clean of enemy casualties.

They left just one. Up the trail leading to the smoldering Afghan Army compound paratroopers found the body of Hazrat Omar. His remains were evidently too far forward for his fighters to recover and remove. It was unclear exactly what killed him. Phillips thought he might have shot the militia leader when he was firing at shadows in that direction. Baldwin thought it was one of the countless grenades he threw. Some speculated he died in the A10 attack. On his body they found attack plans, pictures of insurgents, and even payroll documents for his fighters. They also discovered a video camera with footage of the meeting where he discussed battle plans for Ranch House. The number of other enemy dead and wounded were difficult to assess. Some intercepted radio chatter suggested that four or five insurgents were killed and two wounded. Military valor citations later cited a killed-in-action total for the enemy of ten, and an intelligence analysis concluded there were a dozen attackers killed.

Helicopters arrived to evacuate the US and Afghan wounded and to deliver reinforcements. There was word that some of the wounded enemy fighters might have been carried down and treated in the school house the Americans built in Aranas. Ferrara discussed with Phillips the idea of forming an assault team to go down there, but the staff sergeant told him that they were all too shot up or exhausted and that the risks were too high.

After the strafing was over and the mountain finally fell quiet, Phillips turned to see Ferrara walk up to him, blackened from head to foot from dirt thrown up by the storm of 30mm shells. The lieutenant looked Phillips in the eyes. “Hey, I need you to go to Post Three.” Someone needed to get Deloria. Phillips said he’d go. “Trust me, I’ve got it. I’ll get him.”

Phillips gathered up Baldwin and a Marine advisor for the Afghan soldiers, Specialist John Paul Atchley, and headed first to Post Two. There Spotanski and Langevin joined the group before they started the careful climb up to the ruined guard post high up the mountain. Langevin, his leg wound now bandaged, carried his light machine gun along to provide cover fire.

From where he lay in the wreckage of Post Three, Delo could hear the familiar sky-ripping sound of the Gatling gun unleashing as the Warthogs made their runs.

Oh shit, that’s us.

He had been there for a long time now. An hour or more before, when the fighting was still heavy, Delo had tried to ease his way over to the edge of the building to get down. But there were so many rounds hitting nearby that he, struggling to move his left leg and blind out of his right eye, pulled back and stayed inside what was left of his guard post.

What he didn’t know was that Langevin at Post Two, while providing cover to Phillips pinned down at the barracks, now and again turned his SAW in the direction of Post Three and opened fire to discourage enemy fighters from trying to climb up on top of it. Langevin was still hoping Delo was alive up there.

But then the A10 Warthogs showed up like cavalry, and nearly all the shooting died away.

Delo just lay there, his mind racing. Were his buddies coming for him? He started dwelling darkly on how damaged his body was. He knew his right eye was in a really bad way. Would he someday get a bionic replacement? Could he emerge from all this even better than he started? His thoughts were foggy, and he was tired and losing track of time.

Then he saw figures down the mountain slowly making their way toward him. He recognized Phillips and Baldwin. Then Langevin. Then Spotanski. They were moving carefully. Phillips and Baldwin were pointing their rifles right at him until they approached close enough to recognize their wounded comrade.

“What’s wrong?” Baldwin called up to Delo, a teasing edge to his voice.

“What do you mean?”

“You’re not smiling.”

“I got hit by a fucking rocket,” Deloria said, his face finally relaxing into that familiar Delo grin.

“Oh, he’ll be fine.”

In the days immediately following the attack on Ranch House on August 22, 2007, intercepted enemy communications led Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund and intelligence officers to estimate that 120 to 150 insurgents mounted the assault. Once the Afghan security guards and many of the Afghan Army melted away in the opening phases of the assault, the remaining defenders were outnumbered by as much as six or seven to one.

The small US force suffered a 50 percent casualty rate, unusually high for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Four of those Americans wounded required evacuation from the war zone back to the United States: Private First Class Jeddah Deloria, Sergeant Kyle Dirkintis, Sergeant John Relph, and Specialist Robert Remmel. The others eventually returned to duty. One of the last to be injured was Spotanski, who fell off of the ruined Post Three after they recovered Delo, impaling himself on a stake. One Afghan National Army soldier and one Afghan security guard were killed, and a second Afghan soldier was wounded and was evacuated by helicopter.

No US combat outpost in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars came that close to being overrun. Historians say not since the Vietnam War was a bombing mission necessary inside the perimeter of an American base to stop an enemy assault. An intelligence analysis later concluded that the attacking force was filled with men from the Waigal Valley villages as well as members of Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan. Some fighters came from as far away as the Punjab Province of Pakistan. Every indication was that enemy commanders viewed the battle as a success against the Americans.

For many of the Chosen Few who fought in the battle it was their first true taste of combat. Even among those who had been in firefights before, the struggle on the mountain that morning was more ferocious than anything they had experienced. In the hours after the fighting, as soldiers explored the ruins of Post Three and repaired the damage to the headquarters, they marveled at how close disaster had come and took pride in fending it off.

“Didn’t take down the Chosen Few, now did they?” Dzwik said as he climbed up after the battle onto the shattered landing where Delo had held out on Post Three. “Try to kill my boy—what were they thinking?”

The paratroopers felt they had stubbornly stood their ground, absorbed everything the enemy could throw at them, and carried the day. Several gathered around the Post Two barracks for smokes and stories. Langevin was there. So was Baldwin.

Phillips saw them jawing with each other and made his way over. He had learned a few lessons about himself that day. It was the toughest fight Erich had ever been in, and at age twenty-three, he had learned to trust his instincts. He didn’t have to get bollixed up second-guessing every move but could rely on intuition. Something that flowed unfettered through his cerebral cortex when everything around him was in chaos took him where he needed to go when he needed to go there.

He also realized how proud he was of the men he fought with—of Matt Ferrara, calmly directing the battle on the open ground outside the TOC, or Baldwin taking the initiative to lob mortar shells into the enemy, or Langevin blasting away from the roof of Post Two.

Phillips wanted to say something about how he felt, but didn’t want to make a big deal out of it. He strolled up to the paratroopers gathered at the barracks.

“Hey men,” and their faces turned toward him. “I want you boys to know you fought your asses off. And I’m proud as hell of you.”

Then he just turned and walked away.

For his actions at Ranch House Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips received the Distinguished Service Cross, an award second only to the Medal of Honor. A Silver Star was awarded to Specialist Jason Baldwin and another to First Lieutenant Matthew Ferrara. A Bronze Star for valor went to each of seven soldiers: Sergeant Kyle Dirkintis, Private First Class Jeddah Deloria, Staff Sergeant David Dzwik, Private First Class Sean Langevin, Sergeant Mike Johnson, Sergeant John Relph, and Specialist Kain Schilling. A Distinguished Flying Cross for valor, equivalent to the Army’s Bronze Star, was awarded to Air Force Captain Dan Cruz.