7

> > > AMBUSH—MY FRIENDS ARE MY ENEMIES

The song was everywhere that day.

On the 8th of November the angels were crying

As they carried his brother away

With the fire raining down and the hell all around

There were few men left standing that day.

The summer before Chosen Company went to Afghanistan country western stars Big and Rich—Kenny Alphin, aka Big Kenny, and John Rich—released a documentary on the Great American Country Television network that told the story behind their recent hit single, “8th of November.”

The ballad was a bit of a departure for the singer-songwriters, enshrining in lyrics the sacrifices made in Vietnam by soldiers of the 173rd Airborne Infantry on November 8, 1965, in a battle waged north of Saigon. Big and Rich wrote “8th of November” after meeting a veteran who told them the story of the battle in which he and other members of two companies from the 1/503 Battalion—the sister of the Rock Battalion—were locked in sometimes hand-to-hand combat with a Vietcong regiment of twelve hundred for hours in the jungle, losing forty-eight soldiers and leaving more than four hundred of the enemy dead. One of the paratrooper medics, Lawrence Joel, would become the first black man since the Spanish-American War to receive the Medal of Honor. He moved throughout the battlefield caring for wounded even after being twice shot himself. The worst casualties were hoisted out of the jungle by helicopters.

As the eighth of November 2007 approached in Afghanistan, the song weighed heavily on the Chosen Few at Bella. The men who were heading out on a mission that very day played it over and over on their iPods or laptops and through speakers in their barracks. They let the mournful lyrics wash over them as they gave their weapons a last thorough cleaning, listening to the words of a young soldier saying “good-bye to his momma as he left South Dakota to fight for the red, white, and blue… just doing what he had to do.”

A lot of them called home. Sean Langevin reached his mother, Roxane, and his wife, Jessica, back in Walnut Creek, California, who was seven months pregnant with their daughter, Zoe, and asked for prayers. Jon Albert phoned his mother, Chele, though he didn’t elaborate or tell her he was nervous. He just wanted to hear her voice.

You don’t want to go on this operation and not say good-bye.

Their fears of surviving the next twenty-four hours stood in sharp contrast with life back at brigade headquarters on the sprawling US military base in Jalalabad, where troops were planning a twenty-four-hour relay run around the airfield to commemorate the November 8 battle. The disparity illustrated how this war’s hardest fighting was in the distant margins in places like the Waigal Valley.

The mission for Ferrara’s men was a hike back to Aranas. An Afghan messenger had arrived a few days earlier bearing an invitation for Matt Ferrara to come and visit with village elders at a shura, or meeting, in Aranas. Matt had participated in several shuras before when he was based out of Ranch House. But although the village was only about three miles away from Bella, it would be slow going over rugged terrain and would take hours each way. It would mean staying overnight. The route was either narrow goat trails cut into the sheer sides of a small canyon or a partially finished dirt road winding through uneven ground. Getting to Aranas meant following the Waigal Valley north before turning east and entering a narrower canyon that led to the village.

Ferrara really wanted to go. He wanted answers. He still felt the village leaders had somehow deceived him because of what happened at Ranch House six weeks earlier. He wanted to know how such a coordinated attack could have been carried out without any warning from the Aranas elders he had worked with for months. And Ferrara’s boss agreed. Matt Myer had told the Army historian, Major Dave Hanson, that they wanted explanations from the village elders at Aranas.

“They were definitely people who did a one-eighty on us, who were playing both sides. We felt betrayed by a village that we had a pretty good relationship with,” Myer said to Hanson.

But for his senior enlisted officers like Shane Stockard, David Dzwik, and soon-to-be-promoted James Takes, it was the elders’ deceit that led them to urge Ferrara to call off his November 8 plans to take a patrol up to Aranas. Moreover, no one had recognized the runner who delivered the invitation purportedly from Aranas elders, yet another unsettling twist. Couldn’t this just as easily be a trap? Have them come down here to Bella, they argued.

Going back to Aranas, that vertical village that cascaded down a mountainside just below where the fated Ranch House had been located, was like returning to the scene of the crime. In the TOC at Bella, Ferrara discussed the mission with Stockard and Begaye. Takes sat on the floor near the open doorway and added his two cents, even though he was only a sergeant-promotable. He had just returned from Blessing, where he sat before a promotion board, and it would be a few more months before he got his stripes as a staff sergeant. But he was already assuming leadership of a squad, and this would be his first mission as their leader.

“Sir, this is a fucking terrible idea. Why are we going up there?” Takes asked his lieutenant as the late-afternoon sun cast a column of light across the TOC’s wooden floor.

“They invited us up there,” Ferrara said.

“Why? So they can ambush us?”

Takes knew he was being a little too cocky for a new squad leader. But he could sense Stockard shared his concerns about the mission, and Takes knew he would be left with the unsavory task of convincing his soldiers that the Aranas trip was an order and they needed to buck up and carry it out. Ferrara outlined the precautions to be taken. They’d travel up there under cover of darkness—and it was really dark at night right then, with periods of moonless nights and zero illumination. They’d be shadowed by a scout team of six paratroopers led by Staff Sergeant Christopher Choay, a tough, highly respected squad leader who had received a Silver Star for heroism during Chosen’s previous deployment to Afghanistan. Choay would lead his small group high along a southern ridgeline to overwatch the patrol after it arrived in Aranas. There might be some air cover for at least part of the mission, although that sought-after resource was usually reserved for missions where enemy contact was anticipated. Ferrara would lead a reinforced squad of thirteen paratroopers and link up with fourteen Afghan soldiers and their Marine advisor, Sergeant Phil Bocks, once they arrived at Aranas. Ferrara and his men would travel at night on November 8, sleep at the empty schoolhouse the Americans had built for the village, finish up early with the shura, and be back on Friday before dark.

A few hours before the mission started, Dzwik pulled Ferrara aside and tried one last time to change his boss’s mind. “You really should not be doing this. There’s one way in and one way out, and they know you’re coming,” he told him. Ferrara argued that the elders would be violating their own cultural covenants if anything happened. If they extended an invitation, Ferrara argued, you’re assured safety going in and coming out.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dzwik said. “I’m telling you it doesn’t matter.”

Ferrara was losing patience. “I don’t understand why guys don’t want to do their job.”

The mission was on.

Langevin told his team leader, Sergeant Mike Johnson, that he really had a bad feeling about this patrol. He said he’d feel a lot better if Johnson went along. Langevin was one of the most likeable soldiers in 1st Platoon. He was like Jason Hovater in 2nd Platoon, someone who could just naturally put a buddy at ease and make him feel like he had a real friend. A lot of them respected and cared about the guy, not the least of which was Johnson. They both had fought at Ranch House and received Bronze Stars for valor. Johnson said he would be absolutely willing to volunteer for the mission if it made Langevin feel better. But he also assured him that the patrol would prove boring and uneventful.

The plan was for Bocks and his Afghans to head out during the day on November 8. The Afghan troops didn’t have night-vision equipment and needed to travel during daylight. Bocks would accompany them, and they all would link up with Ferrara and his men at Aranas.

Bocks was a twenty-eight-year-old native of the Detroit suburbs. He held the distinction of being a mountain warfare specialist for the world’s greatest amphibious fighting force, the US Marines. He joined up when he was twenty-one, was eventually promoted to sergeant, and became a trainer at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California. Deploying to the mountains of Afghanistan was a chance to practice what he had been teaching.

Bocks was assigned as a mentor for the Afghan Army soldiers as an Embedded Training Team (ETT) member. He, too, was from a broken home. His parents had divorced when he was eight. He grew up with his mother, Peggy, before moving to California to spend part of his high school years with his father, Kent, in Truckee. He had married the year he joined the Marines, but he divorced the year before he went to Afghanistan. Phil was a tall Marine, over six feet tall, well built, with a distinctive, dimpled chin resembling the actor Kirk Douglas.

After darkness fell, the patrol assembled at the front gate. The only one missing was Staff Sergeant Conrad Begaye, who was the mission’s senior enlisted officer. Stockard went looking for him. He found him back in his barracks in full battle gear, sitting on his bunk. Begaye was in prayer. He truly believed in the ways of the Navajo. He had his arrowhead and his medicine pouch out. Alone in his room with a few minutes to prepare himself for the mission to Aranas, Begaye had been chanting a Navajo prayer for warriors on the eve of battle.

After a time Stockard opened the door. “Hey, what are you doing?”

“Waiting.” Begaye didn’t want to explain himself

“Well, everyone’s waiting for you. They’re all in line out here.”

The troopers gathered at the gate were a mix of men who had fought at Ranch House or had been assigned to Bella since the deployment began. Ferrara, of course, was going. His radio man would be Kyle White. Kain Schilling would be along as forward observer for calling in artillery, and Lester Roque was their medic. Takes had his squad in tow—his team leader Jeff Mersman, Justin Kalenits, Scott Derry, Jon Albert, and Joe Lancour with his beloved SAW. Albert had been at Ranch House until he got transferred to Bella right before the August 22 attack. So he had missed the firefights that members of 1st Platoon at Bella had fought that summer, and then he missed the Ranch House battle. He was one of the few in 1st Platoon who had yet to fire his weapon in combat, and the others razzed him about it.

Last-minute safety checks were underway. CamelBak water containers were topped off. Takes walked up and down the line tugging at gear and rapping on helmets to make sure all heads were in the game. He was getting a lot of let’s-get-this-over-with feedback. And then Stockard, whose outsized leadership style had shaped and nurtured many of the young men heading out, did something wholly uncharacteristic. He began to go from man to man, shaking hands, wishing a safe trip or similar words of encouragement. Some, like White and Schilling, who had spent most of their time at Ranch House and had not worked as consistently with Stockard in Afghanistan, didn’t really think much of the farewell gestures.

But the send-off left others blinking in disbelief, a display of sentiment born of genuine concern seemed out of character for the tough-as-nails platoon sergeant. It was a side of Stockard they hadn’t seen.

Just how fucking dangerous is this mission?

Although the terrain largely dictated the general route to Aranas, Ferrara wanted to guard against predictability as much as possible. So he planned to cross the Waigal River at Bella and climb the opposite ridge before taking a partially finished dirt road north and then east, edging along the southern rim of the small canyon running to Aranas. They would be shadowed by Choay’s scouts, who would then take up a position across the valley from Aranas to keep a watchful eye through the duration of the shura before paralleling Ferrara’s troops on their return Friday. On that trip back to Bella the lieutenant planned to take his men along a goat trail on the opposite, northern slope of the canyon so they wouldn’t be repeating their steps from the previous night.

Traveling up there on the night of November 8 put a lot of the men at ease about a potential ambush because their movements were under cover of darkness. Vision through their night-observation devices, or NODs, always gave them a distinct advantage in this war, particularly under these kinds of moonless conditions. The enemy was all but blind on a night like this, but the paratroopers could see where they were going. Still, that didn’t make the hike easy. The green-tinted vision the NODs afforded was a two-dimensional world—there was no depth perception. This made stepping across uneven ground tricky. Although the soldiers were generally following a dirt road up there, there were times when they went off into the bushes and traversed gullies to avoid ambush choke points. They had to keep high-stepping to make sure they didn’t stumble over clumps of dirt or rocks that looked lower to the ground through their NODs. It was exhausting. Men were sweating, and they sounded like a herd of elephants despite efforts to maintain noise discipline.

At one point where the road had partially collapsed, Jeff Mersman fell hard and badly hurt his wrist. Begaye thought he might have shattered a bone. The pain was intense, but the sergeant didn’t complain. A couple of soldiers came down to help him back up on the trail. Roque later bandaged him up.

It was all so characteristic of this place. Mersman’s grimaced face could have been the poster image for what Afghanistan inflicted on people, beyond even the existential threat of an enemy out to kill them. The very earth they walked on, the gnarled trees and roots they grabbed for support, those mysterious critters slithering from under rocks and bushes all seemed to conspire to cause pain and injury. Some Chosen Few feared the terrain almost as much as they feared the enemy. The rocks and crevasses and caverns and valleys oozed hostility and threat, ready at any time to grab and twist ankles, shave off skin, or send some unfortunate paratrooper humping seventy pounds of gear tumbling down onto boulders. Everything animate and inanimate seemed in league. Even the Afghan soldiers, many who came from less daunting regions of the country than these Hindu Kush Mountains, complained about it. If they uttered any English at all, it was two words they knew would elicit an approving grunt from any American within earshot: “Fucking Nuristan.”

Ferrara and his men finally reached the schoolhouse just short of Aranas and started setting up security and working out watch rotations so soldiers could get some sleep. By morning they were up and ready to head into the village for the shura.

Except the village wasn’t ready for them. The soldiers waited all morning. Ferrara kept strolling up and inquiring, but there was always some delay, always someone who hadn’t shown up yet.

The soldiers bided their time pulling security. It was one of those slack periods that come with soldiering, endless hours waiting for no apparent reason, without any explanation. You were a cog in a military wheel that for the moment had ground to a halt. So you stood or you sat. You bitched or you munched whatever MRE snacks were in your assault bag. One pleasant surprise was the US jets orbiting overhead, which lowered tensions a bit.

By early afternoon the shura finally got underway. Ferrara took his translator, an Afghan named Alex Drany, and his radio operator, Kyle White, and met with about twenty people in what amounted to a kind of town square but was really little more than a courtyard.

White tried to follow the exchanges between Ferrara and the elders as Alex translated. But if he stared out over and beyond the village and the surrounding countryside, the mountain-scape looked very much like home.

White grew up in the spectacular setting of Bonney Lake, Washington, south of Seattle, in the shadow of 14,400-foot Mount Rainier. He was the only child of parents who worked for Boeing, the biggest employer in the area. He watched television images of the towers falling in New York while sitting in a middle school English class. His father, Kurt, had been in the Army, and Kyle listened to his stories. Being a paratrooper seemed a good fit. He was already an adrenalin junkie addicted to downhill mountain biking in the Cascades. Plus, there was something compelling about the idea of serving his country in uniform. When Kyle failed to get accepted into Central Washington University, he felt the Army was his next move. But his parents resisted, and he agreed to give community college a shot. That didn’t work out, and by January 2006 White had enlisted and was off to basic training.

On this crisp November day in the village of Aranas White wanted to hear something hopeful come out of this shura. So much had changed. The first three months of his deployment up at Ranch House had felt very nearly like the paratroopers were just camping out, as if the war in Afghanistan was someplace else. The people of the Waigal Valley didn’t seem to be looking for a fight.

But everything shifted violently on August 22 when they were fighting for their lives at Ranch House. It was clear there were enemy in the valley intent on killing the Chosen Few. Ranch House had been attacked at the weakest point in its defenses. The base had been nearly overrun. The video taken off Hazrat Omar’s body was a chilling indicator of how cunning the enemy could be.

These people are organized. They know what they’re doing.

White hoped the village elders might at least show some remorse for what the Islamist fighters had done at Ranch House. Maybe there was a relationship with the village that could be salvaged. But as White listened after the meeting finally got underway at 1 P.M., the discussion didn’t seem to be going in any purposeful direction.

Ferrara and White leaned on a courtyard wall and faced a collection of older village leaders, while several young men of fighting age watched and listened nearby. Begaye, who was the senior enlisted man on the patrol, cycled back and forth between the shura and his soldiers. Sergeant Mike Johnson and Marine Corps Sergeant Bocks, who was mentoring the Afghan troops, did the same.

Ferrara brought up the Ranch House attack, but it seemed to get glossed over. There were complaints that local children had been killed by explosives they found up near Ranch House after it was abandoned. Ferrara assured the elders that the kind of devices they were describing were not from the US Army. The villagers seemed hostile during much of a discussion that just dragged on.

Bocks approached Ferrara at one point looking worried. The Afghan soldiers had been monitoring radio bands and overheard a lot of chatter, some of it in languages they couldn’t understand. Something seemed to be going on out there, and it didn’t sound good. “We gotta go,” Bocks told Ferrara.

Ferrara agreed and wrapped up the largely disappointing shura. All he really had to show for it was a wish list of winter supplies the elders had asked for. He wrote it all down and stuffed it in his pocket.

When the US aircraft flying overhead finally departed, Begaye and Johnson approached him about staying in the village until nightfall, when the Americans would again have the advantage of night-vision goggles, and then heading back under the cover of darkness. It was highly unlikely anyone would attack them while they were in the village, the two men argued. Ferrara listened to his noncommissioned officers and seriously considered their idea. Just like at Ranch House, the more anxious a situation became, the cooler and more relaxed the lieutenant seemed to get. He decided they should go ahead and head home. As long as they made steady progress, they could probably stay ahead of any attack.

As the Chosen Few and their Afghan allies left Aranas, Begaye radioed Takes and said they needed to keep moving down cliff trails along the narrow valley connecting Aranas to the Waigal Valley. Just on the other side of the canyon was where a patrol of 10th Mountain soldiers had been attacked the year before, with three killed.

“It’s a bad area. Let’s move through here quickly,” Begaye warned.

For this route back to the Waigal Valley there were two parallel trails along the north side of the east-west canyon. One trail was high and one was low. The patrol would take the lower of the two. They could see and hear the mountain stream running down the center of the valley below. The weather was a perfect fall day—crisp, cool, and clear.

But there was a troubling flurry of activity as they left the village. Some young men came racing up from behind and squeezed past them on the trail. Kain Schilling saw a few of them take the higher trail. Some of them actually looked like they were laughing as they raced ahead of the column. Over their radios Begaye and Takes took note of the commotion as the young men finally went out of sight.

The goat trail that followed the canyon westward to the Waigal River Valley narrowed in places to little more than a catwalk cut into the steep slope of the canyon’s northern wall. Large spurs defined that side of the canyon, and the trail hugged them like a waistband so that troops walking the route single file could round a bend and be out of sight of those who were behind them.

The trail had been there forever and was surfaced with broken shale that made for unsteady footing, particularly on an incline. So the paratroopers tended to be focusing on their next step rather than looking out for threats. On this narrow trail the mountain slope rose steeply to the right, and a sheer cliff dropped perilously to the left. Worse yet, it was almost totally devoid of places to take cover. There was the occasional tree that somehow took root among the boulders. But otherwise the troopers might just as well have been walking a plank suspended over the valley.

They ended up coming to a frustrating halt at least a couple of times, primarily to let the Afghan soldiers who were lagging behind catch up. Each time someone would radio in their precise grid location to Bella. During one of the pauses Ferrara pulled out his camera and snapped a couple of pictures. One of them shows Kyle White right behind him, leaning up against the mountain on the narrow trail and staring across the valley almost as if he were enjoying the view. The other looks forward and captures Private First Class Scott Derry, Private First Class Joe Lancour, and Sergeant Jeff Mersman taking the opportunity to sit down and relax before pushing ahead. Mersman, with his helmet off momentarily, and Derry stare at the camera. Lancour looks like he’s deep in thought.

From across the canyon—where, in fact, enemy fighters with automatic rifles, machine guns, and RPG launchers lay in wait—the coalition column of Americans followed by Afghan soldiers looked like ducks in a shooting gallery moving from right to left.

Choay’s overwatch team, which had kept a lookout over Aranas during the shura, headed back to Bella when Ferrara’s troops left Aranas at about 2:30 P.M. Choay and his scouts largely retraced their outbound route, and this took them farther south to where a ridgeline blocked their view of Ferrara and his column of men moving west through the small canyon toward the Waigal. Choay wanted to get back to where he could overwatch that last leg down the Waigal Valley toward Bella.

With intelligence reports suggesting for weeks that enemy fighters were gathering around Bella, Ferrara’s last stretch leading to the base seemed the most obvious place for an ambush. But in fact the Islamist fighters were setting a trap in a different location. Local fighters and, potentially, elements of the Lashkar-e-Tayyiba terror group were taking positions at a point along the trail roughly five hundred yards from the valley crossroads located a little less than a mile north of Bella. At that point the paratroopers could be targeted from three different ridgelines: one directly south across the canyon, another due west across the Waigal River Valley, and the third, the ridge towering directly over their heads. Up above them someplace was a fortified position that was supposed to be manned by hired Afghan security guards. They called that outpost Lone Ranger.

Ferrara and his men had been delayed in Aranas long enough that by the time they reached the ambush site, the sun was in their eyes to the west, all but blinding them to targets shooting at them from that direction.

There were enemy preparations even beyond the ambush site, with militants taking up fighting positions above Bella and across the valley from the US observation post known as OP1. Others were shadowing Choay and his overwatch team. These forces would be ready to attack to prevent reinforcements from reaching Ferrara and his men.

Just like Ranch House, the Islamist fighters were intent on videotaping the battle for propaganda. Different cameramen from different angles were prepared to capture the ambush on film and recorded some images of the American column before the shooting started. One videographer across the canyon to the south panned along the goat trail where the Chosen Few could be seen walking single file in regimented fifteen-yard spacing, steadily trying to make their way home.

In the final video product the film editor did a freeze-frame at this point in the footage and inserted red arrows pointing at each paratrooper in view. There’s a subtitle in Persian. It reads, “The Americans and their slaves are doomed.”

At the very beginning most of them heard a single gunshot and suspected it was an accidental discharge by the Afghan soldiers.

Oh, these idiots.

And then the hillsides erupted. It was like being caught out in the open during a sudden cloudburst, only the rain was made of fire and steel. The surrounding amphitheater of rock walls not only amplified and reverberated the sounds of gunfire so that it grew into a sustained roar but also made it very difficult to discern exactly where shots were coming from. In fact, there were teams of gunmen firing from about five different locations in a semicircle around the column, positioned as if shooting into a giant fishbowl from the rim. It was 3:30 in the afternoon, and there was almost an hour and a half of daylight left.

The paratroopers reacted instinctively. The only way to check a fusillade of incoming enemy fire was to throw out a competing wall of lead all your own. After that it was a matter of maneuvering for advantage and calling in artillery or air support. The soldiers had this drilled into them endlessly in the training fields of Germany. In a place like the exposed goat trail along this narrow valley of northeastern Afghanistan, where there was no room to maneuver, their training would call upon them to stand and fight.

Each of them did just that.

Takes was leading the column, something he always insisted on doing because he liked the responsibility and felt he could handle it. As the shooting started and Takes brought his rifle to bear, his choices were to go forward, backward, or off a cliff. The trail ahead rounded a bend that would separate him from the rest of the paratroopers. So he retraced his steps back toward Jon Albert, who was armed with a SAW, or light machine gun, and in the first gunfight of his life.

Albert spotted Takes and sprinted toward his squad leader.

The pair found what they could tell right away was a pitiful place for cover: a rock along the trail maybe two feet high and about as long. Both paratroopers tried to make themselves small behind it, crouching shoulder to shoulder and bitching back and forth as bullets slammed into the rocks all around them.

“Slide over!” Takes yelled. “I’m getting shot over here!”

“Fuck you! I’m getting shot over here! You slide over!”

Just behind them in the column Private First Class Justin Kalenits ran back to take a knee next to Staff Sergeant Begaye, who was already returning fire. The pair was caught in a cloud of dust thrown up by the RPGs that were exploding everywhere. Kalenits was a grenadier, so Begaye, who was working to clear his jammed M4, started picking out enemy positions for his soldier to target with the brass-headed grenades that Kalenits fired from a launcher slung under the barrel of his carbine.

Beyond them around a bend in the trail were Private First Class Sean Langevin; Sergeant Mike Johnson; and the medic, Specialist Lester Roque, who all simultaneously started returning fire. Like everyone else, they were caught in the open. Langevin dropped to a knee to bring his light machine gun into action, aiming at muzzle flashes across the valley. Johnson went flat on the ground and opened up with his M4.

Roque yelled that he could hear someone behind them on the trail crying out for a medic. Mersman, Joe Lancour, and Scott Derry were next in line in the column and back beyond another bend in the trail. Johnson told Roque to stay put until they could maneuver in that direction as a group.

Meanwhile enemy gunmen were zeroing in. Johnson felt an impact to his right thigh. It actually shoved his leg backward. But there was no pain and very little blood, so the sergeant figured it was just a rock kicked up by an explosion.

As he looked to his right, Johnson could see Langevin rolled over on his side, as if he’d been shot. But then the SAW gunner reassuringly popped right back up again. The three started retracing their steps, but RPGs exploding in that direction forced them to stop.

Langevin called out that he was reloading, and Johnson took the cue to start firing at the ridgeline across the valley to provide cover. Now Johnson could hear someone calling for a medic back on the trail, and the next time he looked to his left, Roque was gone, obviously bent on reaching whomever was in need.

Even farther back on the trail was Matt Ferrara. As the ambush began, the lieutenant had reached the end of a spur where the trail cut back into the mountain. All of his paratroopers were ahead of him with the exception of his artillery forward observer, Kain Schilling, and his radioman, Kyle White. Behind those two soldiers was Marine Sergeant Bocks and then the Afghan troops he oversaw, arrayed out along the winding cliff trail for several dozen yards. Ferrara found himself caught in the open at the end of the spur and decided to lay flat on the ground and immediately put his rifle into action. Behind him Schilling, whose twenty-first birthday would be in three days, and White also opened fire with their M4 rifles, although none of them could tell precisely where the enemy fusillade was coming from. Bullets zipped and cracked through the air. The paratroopers simply aimed at the opposite ridgeline to the south and blasted away. White pivoted on the loose shale, slipped, and fell right down on his butt. Firing one round with each trigger squeeze, he emptied a thirty-round clip in seconds. He dropped that mag and started to slip in another one when an RPG exploded right behind him, knocking White to the ground unconscious, face flat on a rock. Schilling caught a piece of the shrapnel in his left hand before bounding over to climb behind a rock outcropping just above the trail.

White began to stir, and just as he lifted his head off the rock, an enemy round exploded against it, inches away from his face. Shattered bits of metal peppered his nose and around his mouth. He felt with his fingers and pulled his hand back—blood.

This is bad.

Climbing to his feet, White followed Schilling behind the outcropping. Both hoped this would cover them from the torrent of gunfire and RPGs coming from the opposite ridgeline. What they didn’t realize was that insurgents were dug in high up on the north ridge above their heads and could target them.

The Afghan Army soldiers scattered along the trail were by now in a near panic, scrambling back and forth, searching desperately for cover. Some dropped to the ground and lay still in hopes the enemy would believe they were already dead. In the midst of the confusion Phil Bocks, their Marine advisor, was a study in contrast. The Marine followed his training, picked a firing position near some low-lying rocks and bushes, and sent rounds across the valley with his M4. Bullets whizzed past him until Bocks realized he was caught in a crossfire. An enemy round hit him in the upper right thigh. Bocks didn’t flinch. Instead, he swung his rifle from where he was firing across the valley and took aim at a group of insurgents high up on the ridge above him.

One of the enemy cameramen was filming. In the footage that was later posted as propaganda on the Internet, it looks as though Bocks is pointing his weapon directly into the camera lens. Just as he starts to shoot, an enemy bullet hits him near the upper part of his right shoulder. His body goes slack and his head slumps forward. He rocks first to his left, absorbing the shock of the impact, then rolls to his right as his legs go limp. His feet slip on the loose gravel, and he tumbles down the trail, gripping his weapon all the while with his right arm and hand.

The man with the video camera chants the same phrase over and over in a Nuristani dialect as the lens follows the falling, wounded Marine.

“God is great! God is great!”

More than a mile south down the Waigal Valley in their fortified post high up on the ridge above Bella, six paratroopers manning OP1 could hear the sustained roar of gunfire in the far distance. It was clear that something had gone terribly wrong with Ferrara’s patrol. One of them manning the radio, Specialist Stephen Johnson, tried to contact the patrol. He could hear someone key the intercom, and the same cacophony of gunfire was in the background, only amplified over the radio.

One of the first people Johnson finally reached was Takes, and he asked the sergeant whether Bella could start firing at the high ground around the patrol with 120mm mortar rounds.

“Oh yeah, fucking let it rip!” Takes yelled into his mic.

The sergeant was still crouched with Albert behind a rock that seemed to grow smaller with each passing second as enemy gunmen zeroed in on them. Takes searched hard for targets on the opposite side of the canyon and saw muzzle flashes, so he started aiming and shooting at them. Each time he cut loose on one, another flashed nearby.

It’s like playing whack-a-mole.

Albert, for his part, couldn’t see any targets, so he just kept firing his light machine gun all along the opposite ridgeline. There were sudden explosions to their left and right. Takes figured they were mortar rounds closing in. “They’re bracketing!” he yelled at Albert. Then Takes realized the explosions were RPGs. Either way, they clearly couldn’t stay where they were.

Begaye was in exactly the same predicament just several yards back on the trail. He’d been directing Kalenits, who was down on a knee right next to him, where to launch his 40mm grenades, the hollow-sounding THOOMP going off as Kalenits fired away. But the incoming rifle fire was getting more accurate and intense. Enemy bullets were hitting the ground or zipping by them very close, and then an RPG slammed into the hillside just over their heads, raining down rocks and debris. Begaye’s sunglasses were blown off his face. A bullet passed through the meaty part of his upper right arm. Clearly it was coming from behind them, up on the mountain. They were caught in a crossfire. He tried to radio OP1, but the amphitheater of noise was so overwhelming that Begaye couldn’t make any sense of what was being said. He realized he had to make a decision and fast.

“Follow me!” Begaye yelled.

He took a few steps and threw himself off the edge of the cliff, choosing a spot where the drop appeared less sheer and there was a tree offering at least some concealment. But as he slid down between the rocks, Begaye got tangled up in the tree trunk, and suddenly there was a traffic jam of soldiers as Albert and Kalenits barreled down behind him.

Takes saw the exodus off the trail and started laying down cover fire at the far ridgeline across the canyon, boiling through magazines of ammo. He stood up and started to follow the paratroopers when he felt a dull pain—a bullet had sliced through his left shoulder. He was surprised it didn’t hurt more. Takes kept firing his rifle as he moved to the precipice and looked down to see the pileup of paratroopers.

It is an honest-to-God clusterfuck.

Then he followed, picking a slightly different course around the opposite side of one of the boulders, as enemy gunmen began to focus more attention on this scrum of Chosen Few.

Mike Johnson and Sean Langevin were headed right in the same direction. Johnson figured Roque had managed to backtrack around the bend in the trail behind them because he couldn’t hear anyone calling out for medical aid. Roque must have reached whomever was wounded. Johnson ordered Langevin to move forward down the trail, and he followed. As the pair progressed one behind the other, it looked like Langevin was in distress. He stopped at one point and took a knee, got back up, moved some more, then slumped to the ground. Johnson felt certain his friend was wounded and moved toward him to assist, only to watch Langevin climb back up on his feet, take a few more steps, then dive off the edge of the cliff, following the troops who had followed Begaye. Johnson was right on his heels. He couldn’t know that Langevin already had gunshot wounds in an arm and a thigh.

Somewhere farther back on the trail Scott Derry found himself in a kink that almost had him in a corner. He couldn’t see Ferrara, who was directly behind him, though he could hear the lieutenant firing his carbine. He couldn’t see Joe Lancour, who was right up ahead, but he could hear him blasting away with his prized squad automatic, the one he’d nicknamed Reese Witherspoon. Lancour had dropped off the trail into some kind of cover area where he could bring his weapon to bear.

Derry was a grenadier like Kalenits, so he was launching brass-covered grenades at muzzle flashes across the canyon and watching them explode on the opposite ridge. Dropping round after round across the canyon, Derry felt an enemy bullet graze his right shoulder. He knew he had to move.

And do it now.

Derry took several steps and almost immediately an RPG exploded right where he had been standing. Derry ran as fast as he could. His world, certainly his vision, was like a tunnel he wanted to pass through as quickly as his legs would allow. There was a second explosion close behind him. He rounded a short bend, caught his foot on something, and went flying onto the trail. It was a dead American—Roque. Derry had tripped over Roque’s boot. Derry got up and kept moving. Enemy fighters were trying to track and kill him as he headed down the trail. The air was full of flying lead. A bullet had sliced through the barrel of his grenade launcher, cutting it in half; another ricocheted off the helmet mount for his night-vision goggles.

The whole desperate flight through the gauntlet of fire had strangely played out as if in slow motion for Derry, his adrenalin pumping so hard that the world around him was in crystal-sharp focus. The endless drills the Army had put him through instilled muscle memory so that there was no second thought to running, finding cover, firing across the valley, and then doing it all over again as he made his way along the goat trail. Somehow he was staying alive.

He finally reached a part of the trail where the drop-off was less sheer and there were a few trees for cover. He dived off.

For Matt Ferrara, far back in the kill zone that Derry had fled, it was death by a single bullet. An enemy round struck the lieutenant near his left collarbone and passed through his body and out his back as he lay in a prone fighting position, killing him, the wish list for winter supplies from Aranas elders still tucked in his front pocket.

None of his men saw him die.

Several yards back on the trail a wounded Phil Bocks had rolled down the slope to a point where the ground began to flatten out, and he started half scooting, half crab-walking his way down the mountain path. Three Afghan soldiers who were laying on the ground nearby still pretending to be dead suddenly sprung to life and were on their feet, scrambling down the hillside, all but running over the stricken Marine as they frantically sought a place to take cover.

They left Bocks, their American mentor, behind, awkwardly sitting up in the dirt in the open, bleeding heavily from his wounds, with more blood oozing out of his mouth. He knew he had some real damage internally, and it was terrifying.

Not far away an enemy sniper found Kain Schilling. A bullet slammed into his collarbone and then shattered the bone in the upper part of his right arm. It sliced some nerves in the process, and for Schilling it felt like his right arm was gone. It was twisted awkwardly around behind him, so at first he didn’t even see it.

Oh shit, my arm just got blown off.

Gunfire was coming from above him. The rock outcropping Schilling had found wasn’t enough cover. He realized, thankfully, his arm was still with him. Climbing to his feet, the soldier headed farther down the trail to a place where a tree sprouted from below the edge of the cliff, and he took refuge under the canopy of leaves.

White heard Schilling cry out and saw him run down the trail, his right arm dangling at his side. He saw his friend reach the canopy of leaves and followed him. White began returning fire at muzzle flashes on the opposite ridge to the south, shooting through leaves above his head when he suddenly found himself struggling to breathe. There was a strange metallic taste in his mouth, and his lungs were burning. Schilling, nearby, felt some of the same symptoms.

Then Schilling noticed smoke coming from the large radio pack on White’s back.

“Your bag! It’s on fire!” he yelled.

Bullets had ripped through the lithium battery, spewing toxic smoke. White pulled off the backpack and hurled it aside. Out of the corner of his eye he spotted Bocks sitting out in the open, bleeding badly. The sergeant looked disoriented, and there was a good ten yards of open ground separating them, all of it swept by enemy gunfire.

The column of American and Afghan soldiers that had started out from Aranas and extended along the goat trail for a couple of hundred yards had disintegrated. Utter chaos unfolded. Where Begaye had led his soldiers off the trail, paratroopers remained bunched together around two large boulders where the only possible cover was a gnarled tree. It barely shielded more than a few of them and provided no protection at all from incoming rounds. And still more men fleeing killing zones along the goat trail were arriving. Sean Langevin had slid down nearby with Sergeant Mike Johnson right behind. Scott Derry would be there soon. Directly below, where the paratroopers were clustered, there was a thirty-foot drop-off to the canyon floor. The bottom of the canyon was wide and treeless except for foliage and rocks at the base of the cliff. Enemy gunmen were firing from several directions and, within a span of just a few minutes, the Chosen Few were trapped and getting shot to pieces.

Langevin called out: “Sergeant Begaye, I’m shot.” The staff sergeant was just about to answer back that Langevin wasn’t the only one wounded, but just then an enemy sniper round struck Langevin in the head. Johnson saw it happen—Sean’s head snapping backward from the impact. The father-to-be went limp and tipped over, spilling down the slope, his body brushing past Begaye. Albert caught a glimpse of a lifeless figure somersaulting all the way down before coming to rest in a sprawl near a stream at the bottom of the valley.

Just as Scott Derry reached the group, an RPG exploded against the mountain along the upper edge of where the soldiers were clustered. Pieces of shrapnel stitched across Derry’s left side, almost from head to toe.

James Takes, farther down, was facing uphill in the direction of the blasts, taking aim at muzzle flashes on the ridgeline above their heads. The RPG explosion threw a cloud of steel particles into his face and all the way down the front of his body to his genitals. The force of the blast literally spun him around so that the sergeant found himself sitting against the mountain, stunned and groggy, and staring down at the bottom of the canyon.

Johnson was closest to the explosion, and the force of it caused him to lose footing and slide diagonally down the mountain until he became wedged between two large rocks. The ground was steep, and he tried to brace himself on the rocks to keep from falling any farther. He was feeling faint. Hunks of shrapnel had passed through both legs, where he already had bullet wounds. But what caught his attention was how an enemy round had drilled cleanly through the center of his green Suunto tactical military watch.

What are the odds?

He knew he needed to stop his hemorrhaging soon. Derry suddenly showed up behind him, astonished by how much the twenty-six-year-old sergeant was bleeding. Derry could see the cargo pockets on Johnson’s trousers literally bulging with blood. The two men worked together for the next several minutes placing tourniquets on both of Johnson’s legs and his left arm.

Back where other soldiers were grouped near Staff Sergeant Begaye, Kalenits suddenly cried out. A bullet had smashed into the upper part of his left buttock—a Forrest Gump wound, Takes would call it. The round splintered bone as it passed through Kalenits’s pelvis and then exited out the inside of his left thigh. Meat from the inside of his upper leg hung from the exit hole, and blood gushed so thick that Kalenits thought both his legs had been shot.

Begaye felt a growing sense of helplessness and anger. He’d led his men off the cliff to try to protect them. Now they were dying right before his eyes. He was determined to save at least one in this mayhem. He and Kalenits were just below a kidney-shaped boulder where there was a crevasse in the crook of the rock. It was almost a small cave. Begaye grabbed Kalenits and shoved him into the hole as far as he could, then covered him with his own body. He pulled a HemCon bandage out of his aid kit—an Army field dressing actually made with a shellfish substance that works as a strong clotting agent—and started stuffing the dressing into the gaping wound in Kalenits’s backside.

Nearby Takes started to clear his head from the RPG explosion, and his eyes focused on the body of a US soldier lying near the creek below.

“Who is it?” he yelled over to Begaye.

“He’s dead,” the staff sergeant shouted back. “Don’t worry about it.”

Then they heard Specialist Jon Albert scream out in pain. The twenty-two-year-old SAW gunner had run through nearly one hundred rounds of ammunition firing his light machine gun. He was struggling to unload a bag of fresh ammo from his assault pack when it felt like his right knee exploded. He saw his pants ripped apart from where the enemy bullet grazed his kneecap. The pain was excruciating. Sitting against the mountain, Albert had his legs planted to keep himself from slipping down. But the right one, now damaged, gave out, and the soldier started to slide down the slope.

Takes snagged him at the last second, gripping Albert by the handle on the back of his body armor with one hand and clinging with the other to some vegetation sprouting from between the rocks. Albert could see the strain in his sergeant’s face as he struggled to hang on. Between the relentless enemy fire, Albert’s agonizing wound, this godforsaken mountainside, and the laws of gravity itself, it was as if everything was conspiring against them.

“Just let go,” Albert called out.

“Shut the fuck up,” Takes said.

The chorus of gunfire and explosions reverberating across the valley was by now unbroken thunder. Albert had been supporting his weight with his left leg, but the limb finally gave out. Takes couldn’t keep a grip. The Army specialist tumbled down the rocks, cracking his face on the edge of a stone before coming to rest on the creek bed about forty feet from Langevin’s body. Albert’s SAW gun had gone flying off in one direction and his helmet in another.

Takes watched and then started working his way over toward Begaye and Kalenits. He suddenly felt like he couldn’t breathe and his chest was constricting. A bullet had drilled through a spare radio battery in Takes’s assault pack, and just like White on the trail above him, the sergeant was choking on the toxic fumes. He peeled off the backpack.

The enemy rounds rocketing in at two thousand feet per second, had turned this corner of the battle into a horrifying game of Russian roulette. The rounds that hadn’t torn through flesh had stitched the dirt and rocks all around the crouching paratroopers, perforating folds of their uniforms. One bored a hole through the CamelBak water carrier on Begaye’s back so that warm liquid ran down his backside. Too busy to investigate it, Begaye figured it was probably blood and, as he was no worse off, ignored it. Bullets deflected off helmets and flattened up against body armor plates. Each time the impact was displaced across the entire ceramic shield it felt like a blow from a baseball bat. The bullet-proof shield smacked up against the body in a microsecond so any air caught between plating and skin blew out the sides like a tiny burst of wind.

Derry’s wallet, stuffed with $300 in cash he had just won playing poker with the guys up at OP1 the night before they left, stopped one bullet, but it penetrated some of the $10 bills. Another round hit a fragmentation grenade that Derry carried in a pouch on the front of his assault pack. The bullet broke loose the safety pin that held in place the spoon or lever that, when freed, would ignite a fuse and explode the grenade. Somehow, though, the bullet had damaged the spoon so it miraculously stayed in place. (After the battle Derry duct taped the spoon to the grenade to make sure it stayed put and carried the bomb on patrols for months afterward, like some kind of good-luck charm.)

After Takes abandoned the assault pack with the burning battery, he turned his attention to Albert, who was lying down in the creek bed, and yelled to him, “Hey man, quit fucking moving around! Just lay there for a bit. I know it hurts. But they’re going to think you’re dead.”

Albert lay in this shooting gallery, completely exposed. Taking a bullet to the head was what scared him the most. Rounds were hitting the stream bed all around him, and he figured it was only a matter of time before one of them drilled into his skull and it was all over. A flat rock stuck out of the ground a few feet away, and Albert, on his stomach, crawled over to it, lifted it up with his left arm, stuck his head under, and just let it rest on top of him. But the weight was too much, and in short order he pulled it off.

Takes could see the enemy had not stopped shooting at Langevin’s lifeless body.

Playing dead doesn’t work. I’m not going to leave Albert out there.

He spotted an overhang at the bottom of the cliff and told Begaye he might be able to drag Albert over there to get him out of the line of fire.

“Hey, if you want to make it down there, make it down there,” Begaye told him. “I have Kalenits right here.”

Takes, rifle in hand, slid the last thirty feet to the canyon floor and made his way over to Albert. The soldier was lying parallel to the creek with his head facing downstream. Enemy gunmen started to pay attention, and incoming fire picked up. Takes realized the only alternative for the moment was the Army doctrine of return fire: put those shooters back on their heels. He took a knee, straddled Albert where he lay flat on the ground, and started firing at targets high up on the ridge.

Back up on the slope of the mountain Begaye was transfixed by the scene playing out in the open down below—one American soldier covering his wounded comrade with his body and fighting back at the same time.

Wow, that is badass.