TALIBAN FORCES CONTINUED to rocket Airborne at least weekly. Despite living mainly in tents and plywood shacks, Dog Company had sustained only a handful of minor injuries. But the enemy was growing more accurate with every attack.
Hill and his men analyzed the Taliban’s firing patterns and began sending out patrols aimed at disruption. Wilson pitched the idea of setting up an OP on top of a building in downtown Maidan Shar. The building was really only a skeleton, unoccupied and still under construction. But it had a clear view of both “Razorbacks,” the ridgeline opposite Airborne, where most of the rocket fire originated.
On May 8, the Shockers slipped off the FOB and into Maidan Shar. SPC Graydon Kamp, twenty-four, of Allentown, Pennsylvania, broke off with a squad to establish an overwatch position. Because the operation was taking place directly on Afghan National Police turf, Hill and Wilson agreed it would be wise to include them, but without advance notice so as not to compromise the mission.
On the way to the OP, Wilson stopped in at the ANP station and explained the operation to the captain, who rallied a contingent of men to accompany 4th Platoon. Wilson left SSG Ray Davis and a squad at the police station while the rest of the element, including their terp, Habibi, moved out on Maidan Shar’s dirt main street.
The village lay mostly dark, an occasional window throwing a square of warm, yellow light onto the street. At first, the Shockers walked point. But Mo decided he didn’t want the ANP’s guns pointed at their backs, so the Americans slowed down to let the police walk ahead.
Late-night family sounds floated on the air, muffled by hut walls made of mud. The element reached the building, a concrete block structure that reached three stories into the night. A traditional Afghan courtyard stood behind an iron gate. The patrol stacked at the gate, then entered. The front door was not locked, but inside, the element found a different obstacle: The entire stairway was outlined in concrete construction forms. A kick board blocked each step.
SPC Carlos Colonruiz, Wilson’s Puerto Rican Schwarzenegger, muscled the nearly seventy-pound MK19 up the stairs. PFC Michael Peake followed with the tripod.
Wilson and Mo brought up the rear. The objective was stealth, but with the weight of the weapons, the hinky stairwell, and the ANP’s natural bluster, the ascent was a mash-up of whispered curses in English and Pashto, with Colon contributing curses in Spanglish.
There had been no end to the amount of shit Davis had given Colon in Ramadi over his crappy English. “What the fuck did you just say?” Davis would yell when Colon mangled a sentence. “Go back in the hooch and don’t come out until you can speak English!”
This was a ritual of infantry bonding that some soldiers found rough at first. If a soldier had some deficiency—no neck, a woman’s ass, whatever—it was his battle buddies’ solemn duty to give him as much grief as possible. On the heavy side himself, Davis had been called everything from Hot Tub to Lunch Box. Soldiers learned to roll with the verbal hazing or lose the trust of their platoon. The way Davis saw it, if a man whined when he got called names, he sure as hell didn’t want to stand next to him in a firefight.
Through the Ramadi deployment, Colon learned just enough infantry English to shotgun his own brand of insults. “Hey, Lunch Box, turn off that fucking cigarette! You know fat man not s’posed to smoke!”
The squad emerged onto the rooftop to find it covered in a layer of sheet metal. The ANP stomped aboard.
“Jesus!” Mo whispered. “Could they be any fucking louder?”
A wall about two feet high hemmed the roof. Wilson peered down into the small lot that surrounded the building. Below, on the west side, was a CONEX shipping container. Through the green haze of his NODs, he could make out some tools and construction equipment. Behind him, Colon and Peake assembled the MK19 in utter silence while Mo directed the rest of 4th and the ANP to take up positions at the roof’s four corners. Mo set up on the corner facing west, toward the ridgeline. He could see Baby Razorback to the left. Ambient starlight silhouetted both mountains against the sky.
“Sergeant Mo!” It was Colon in a hushed whisper. He was huddled behind the rooftop wall a few feet away.
Mo turned toward Colon, who jerked his head toward the ANP. “Sergeant Mo, this guys getting on their cell phones!”
Mo saw that an ANP officer was not only trying to dial out, he was also scooting down into a prone position, as though to take cover.
Probably calling in the damn Talidizzle, Mo thought.
Staying low, he moved to where the Afghan held his cell to his ear, and held out his hand. “Give it to me.”
The officer scooted backward, phone still to his ear. Mo followed, getting right in the man’s face. “I said, give me the fucking phone. I’ll give it back after the op.”
Mo reached to grab the cell, and the Afghan, wide-eyed, fought him to keep it, prompting Mo to whack the guy on the side of his head. The phone clattered to the rooftop, and Mo scooped it up. “Like I said, I’ll give it back after the op.”
Returning to his position, Mo whispered to Wilson, “I knew we couldn’t trust these sombitches.”
The commotion had stirred the neighbors. Muffled Pashto fluttered down from nearby qalats. Wilson’s soldiers scanned their sectors. The ANP fell silent. Maidan Shar nestled into a new quiet, and the Shockers settled in to watch the mountains for signs of a new attack.
Mo scanned the ridgeline using a CLU (Command Launch Unit, pronounced “clue”) optic, part of the Javelin system, a portable antitank missile. The CLU sight had saved his life in Ramadi. An insurgent with an RPG had crept through a stand of reeds to within fifty meters of Mo’s position before Mo picked him out of the darkness with the sight. Mo lit up the attacker with his night vision laser and fired on him with his rifle. His gunners followed his lead and finished the guy off.
Owing his life to the CLU, Mo rode Hill and Kay for weeks to get him one to use in Afghanistan. Then one day, CPT B’s guys called him down to their TOC, where they surprised him with a brand-new CLU, still in the case. Special Forces got all the good toys.
Now on the rooftop, long, still minutes strung themselves into an hour, like beads on a string. Starlight frosted the night.
Mo hated the expectant hush of waiting for a fight. If he was going into battle, he wanted to close with the enemy and get it on. The concussion of mortars, the snap of near-miss bullets; every earth-jarring, bone-pulsing round that didn’t hit him was both exultation and relief. There were times he felt he could make his home in a Wardak or a Ramadi. In combat, he felt at ease, relieved of the threat of violence he’d always lived with, instead meeting it head-on. Some ancient center in his brain powered up and became ascendant. He saw and heard and executed in high-def, with full assurance and zero hesitation. Something inside Mo, hardwired since childhood, made it easier to rejoice in life while tilting at death.
In a way, a counselor once told him, Mo had always been in combat. For a brief space while growing up, several months or a year maybe, he remembered being treated kindly by his mother’s temporary husbands. He was around four when she connected with a decent guy. Too decent, Mo decided in retrospect, because she ditched him for a man who made the rest of Mo’s childhood a nightmare, beating him from the time he was five until his early teens. Sometimes with a closed fist, sometimes a belt buckle. Once, he threw Mo through a wall.
Eventually, his mother met a man who showed him real love. But the flame of fear that burned inside young Tim Moriarty had already spread into a wildfire of rage. In school, he despised bullies and went out of his way to take them down. As he got older, Mo recognized this as a defect in his character. It was like looking into a mirror and seeing “them assholes,” as he came to refer to the men who had abused him.
The flip side of this defect was a fierce loyalty to those who earned it. But he did not completely trust another man until he met Greg Rogers.
The two connected at Fort Campbell, where SFC Rogers had taken over as Delta Company platoon sergeant, with Kris Wilson as his right-hand man. Rogers embodied two things Mo had never found in a role model: He was simultaneously approachable and unbullshitable.
Slowly, Rogers became the mentor Mo never had. Rogers and his wife, Sandy, were only a few years older than Mo, but they became his adopted mom and dad.
As their friendship grew, Rogers was able to rein Mo in and harness his leadership qualities, the way an experienced rider brings out the best in a horse no one else can break. Backcountry syntax mangled Mo’s speech; Rogers made him use proper grammar. Mo couldn’t stomach technology; Rogers made him use a computer.
Neither man was supposed to go to Iraq. Mo’s legs were laced with stress fractures from previous tours, and he was loping around on crutches. Then three months before the deployment, Sandy died. Complications from diabetes. Doctors had been able to revive her just long enough for Rogers to say good-bye.
Mo urged his friend to stay stateside and tend to his affairs, even though Mo himself wasn’t willing to let his brothers go fight those Al Qaeda bastards without him. When medics refused to clear him off his crutches, he reported for deployment, leaving his crutches in the car. When Rogers found out Mo was headed for Ramadi, he said, “If you’re going, I’m going.”
It was one of those brief conversations on which a man’s destiny turns.
One night, Rogers was slated to pull security for a route clearance mission in Ramadi’s turbulent streets. He told Mo that he didn’t think he was coming back.
“Man, don’t even say that,” Mo said. “That shit’s not funny.”
“It’s all right,” Rogers said. “I’d be cool with it. I could go be with Sandy.”
Hours later, Rogers was killed by an IED, just as he’d predicted. That night, April 9, 2006, was the first time Mo cried openly about losing anyone in combat.
Rogers’s premonition hadn’t come from instinct, Mo was certain. That came from somewhere else, somewhere higher. In a way it was a mercy, he thought, a divine whisper preparing you for the next life.
Mo believed in God and knew Rogers had, too. It wasn’t very politically correct, but Mo didn’t want any soldier fighting next to him who didn’t believe in Someone greater than himself. If a soldier didn’t believe in life after death, Mo reasoned, it wasn’t likely he’d give up his only life for another man.
Now on the Maidan Shar rooftop, grief stabbed Mo’s heart. Resolutely, he pushed it away.
Near midnight, Wilson’s earbud went hot. It was Kamp on the overwatch position. “Four-seven, we’ve got movement in the courtyard. Looks like two, maybe three pax. Armed, looks like AKs.”
“ANP?”
“Can’t tell.”
Wilson stood and walked to the rooftop edge overlooking the gate. He flipped on the tac light mounted under the barrel of his M4, shot the beam down to the courtyard. Through his NODs, he saw three men, each armed with a rifle.
“Stop!” Wilson called out.
Wilson saw one man raise his hand. Some instinct caused Wilson to draw back his head a split second before a three-round AK burst reached his face. Two bullets snapped past his left ear, and the third smashed his NODs off his face. He pasted himself prone so quickly that Mo thought he was dead. But Wilson popped up almost instantly, NODs dangling from his helmet. He aimed his tac light again and saw the shooters running toward the CONEX. Wilson fired controlled pairs, allowing his men to get into firing positions.
“They’re behind the CONEX!” Kamp called over the radio. “Stacked up on the other side!”
“Come out!” Mo yelled.
Wilson joined him. “Lay down your weapons and come out! We will not fire!”
Habibi translated for the ANP, who also began calling down surrender instructions in Pashto.
Silence.
“Four-two, what do you got?” Wilson said.
“They’re still stacked,” Kamp said.
“Do they still have their weapons?”
“Affirmative. Do you want us to take ’em out?”
“Negative, negative. I don’t want fire coming toward our position.”
During this radio traffic, Kamp’s truck had been relaying sitreps back to the Airborne TOC. The word came back from Hill: Engage and destroy.
“I’m in grenade range,” Mo said to Wilson, then gave the warning order—“Frag out!”—and tossed a grenade over the CONEX. The rooftop squad got low, prepped for the explosion…
… which did not come.
Crouching behind the wall, Mo looked at Wilson: What?
“Dude,” Wilson said. “Did you pull the safety?”
Mo rolled his eyes. “Yes, Sergeant First Class Wilson, I did.”
BOOM!
Mo and Wilson exchanged a look: You can’t make this shit up.
Within thirty seconds, Colon and an assault team had flown down the staircase, rounded the CONEX, and found three Afghans on the ground, weapons flung away. Wilson followed and the postassault SOP began: weapons confiscated, pat-down search, first aid. The assault team triaged the men, now enemy prisoners of war (EPWs). Two were wounded, one seriously, with what the men would later call a Forrest Gump shot. Wilson had shot one of his assailants directly in the buttocks.
With his squad surrounding the EPWs, rifles aimed, Wilson examined the prisoners. All wore civilian clothes. Two of the three were filthy.
“Talib,” Habibi murmured. The men looked straight out of the mountain bush. Also, they reeked.
Via the terp, Wilson began tactical questioning. “Why did you shoot at us?”
“We are the governor’s bodyguards,” said the youngest of the three.
“Look, friend, I shined my light on you and told you to stop,” Wilson said. “Why did you fire on us?”
“This is the governor’s new house and we thought you were stealing.”
“Okay, but the ANP commander knew we were here. Why did you shoot after hearing me? It’s pretty clear I’m an American.”
“We were coming here to take a generator…” The Afghan trailed off.
Wilson stopped. Okay, first we were stealing, now you were stealing?
He relayed a sitrep to the TOC via Kamp, who passed a message from the Airborne field grade, Major Christopher Faber: Do not return to base until you get sworn statements from the ANP about what they saw. Wilson got with Habibi and got it done.