Duff opened his eyes and found himself on his side, his body armor hiked up to his nose, his right temple and right shoulder hurting like hell.
His jaw felt like he’d just taken a left hook from a heavyweight.
It was so dark at first that he thought it was nighttime, but quickly the choking fumes in his throat and lungs told him something else was going on.
A sudden loud banging sound, somewhere close, helped to bring him back to the present.
He felt around and quickly figured out he was in the back of an armored car that had flipped onto its right side.
Another bang, just ahead of him, sounded like something had slammed into the roof of the vehicle at high velocity.
There were three men in here with him; he couldn’t see them but he remembered now.
Two rapid pounding sounds came next, bullet impacts on armor, and now the smoke began to clear.
Condor was in front of him, on his side and moving. Caruth was strapped in behind the wheel, arms and head hanging down, either unconscious or dead.
Duff heard a voice, just a foot or so away from him on his left. “Fuck me.” Mike Gordon coughed, and Duff felt a splatter of either spit or blood on the side of his face.
He slowly sat up to help Gordon out of his seat.
Condor spoke up now after a raspy cough. “Sound off.”
“Gordon’s good,” Mike said with a cough of his own.
“Duffy’s okay.”
Caruth was moving now. The South African shook his head and spoke weakly but with humor. “Andy C’s in the house.”
Suddenly, automatic gunfire raked the truck. Bullets pinged off the armor, snapped against the bulletproof glass of the windscreen.
Condor reached for his radio, but then a heavy machine gun somewhere out on the street laid down fire on the stricken vehicle.
Condor screamed to the men in back. “Back hatch! Back hatch! Bail, bail, bail!”
Duff climbed over the big crates of AK-47s, making his way to the rear of the truck. He flipped the lever to open the hatch, then fell out of the door and onto the street, pulling his rifle along with him.
All the gunfire seemed to be directed at the front of the fallen Askar, so Duff used the machine to shield his body as he posted security for the other men while they bailed.
Almost instantly he saw a technical roll into view from a side street; a man stood in the back of a white pickup behind a Russian-made machine gun. Duff went prone on the asphalt and opened fire. His first half dozen shots hit the vehicle itself or sailed high, but then he slammed a .223 round into the machine gunner’s stomach, causing the bearded man to fold up and fall out of the bed of the vehicle. Turning his attention to the two men in the cab now, Duff fired until he saw blood splatters on the glass, and then the technical rolled slowly forward until it hit an empty food stall and stopped.
He felt someone kick his boot and looked back to see Gordon on one knee just behind him, covering to the west. Caruth crawled out of the back of the vehicle next, blood dripping out of his beard, and took up a position facing east.
The last man out of the ruined armored car was Conrad Tremaine, call sign Condor.
He stayed low, walking on his kneepads, until he had his M249 light machine gun out the back, and then he rose and peered around the side of the vehicle, just under the still-spinning back left tire, six feet in the air.
He started to raise his weapon, but after a moment, he pulled his head back around.
He shouted to the three men around him. “PK shooter is reloading! We’re going to that wall! Move!”
Duff looked up and saw a long, low concrete wall around a parking lot in front of a two-story building under construction. It looked like it could have been a shopping center of some sort, and Duff assumed he and the others would try to use the structure for cover as they bounded on foot away from the kill zone. He rose and led the way to the wall, his rifle up, and as soon as he came around the side of the fallen APC he began firing short bursts in the direction of where they’d been taking fire.
He wasn’t even trying to hit anything, that would have been too much to hope for at the moment; rather, he was simply trying to keep heads down while he and his mates got to cover.
In seconds he’d crossed the fifteen yards to the low concrete wall; he rolled over it, then crawled a few feet along the wall so he wouldn’t pop up right where he’d gone over. He brought his weapon up and emptied the rest of his magazine at a group of armed men positioned on a rooftop across the street while the other three contractors tumbled over the wall next to him.
Tremaine rolled back to his kneepads, ducked down low, and then grabbed his radio. “J-Bad Op Center, J-Bad Op Center, this is Condor, we are in heavy contact from technicals and dismounts at this time, how copy?”
There was no response.
Duff looked behind him, already planning to begin bounding out of the area, and he realized Tremaine had put them in a bad spot. The building next to the parking lot had no doors on this side of it; it was just a flat concrete wall with a small lip about three meters high and a row of open windows above it.
With their weapons and body armor and packs, there was no way they were climbing that wall to access the windows, especially under fire.
Tremaine squeezed several bursts out of his M249, the most potent weapon the four contractors had in this fight. Enemy had positioned themselves for an ambush, and Duff could tell that the only reason he and the others were still alive was that whoever detonated the IED had done it about a second too early.
He turned to Tremaine now while Caruth and Gordon fired at targets across the street to the east and north. “Boss! We’ve got to move laterally off the X, go around the side of this structure on foot.”
Tremaine did not acknowledge him, he just shouted again into his radio. “J-Bad Op Center, this is Condor. We are in contact, time now. How copy, over?”
A response came, but it was garbled, and just as Condor was about to ask for the op center to repeat last, the PK machine gun opened up again. Bullets slammed into the wall just on the other side of them. Duff raised his weapon and fired without looking, still hoping he could get the attackers to bug out if he sent enough lead their way.
Duff saw that Tremaine was spending significantly more time on the radio than on his gun.
The South African shouted over the fire from the other three weapons. “Repeat last! You have us geo’d? We need QRF. Facing at least ten oppo.”
Duff reloaded his weapon a second time. “Condor, we gotta go!”
“Negative,” he shouted, and all of the others stopped firing and looked at him.
Tremaine said, “We hold this ground till the QRF comes.” He fired a long burst from his M249 at a rooftop across the street.
Duff knew this was exactly the opposite of the doctrine contractors used in times like this. They had to get away from the ambush, because in a city like J-Bad, more and more fighters would respond to the sound of gunfire.
The correct course of action was flight, and Duff couldn’t understand why Tremaine wasn’t ordering them to move.
“Boss, we—”
Heavy machine gun fire blew massive chunks out of the wall they hid behind, dumping rock and masonry and concrete onto the men as they hunkered down.
Tremaine finally made contact with the ops center and was told QRF was en route with an ETA of ten mikes, and he fired again over the wall. As he ducked back down, he said, “We’re not leaving those weapons! We have to take control of this intersection!”
“We have to do fuckin’ what?” Gordon screamed as he dropped the magazine from his HK and slammed a fresh one in the mag well.
The PK machine gun continued chewing up the wall; all four men crawled twenty feet or so and popped back up, then continued firing on men and a couple of gun trucks.
And behind the wall, the four contractors continued arguing. Duff said, “We’ve got to boogie!”
Tremaine shook his head. “My orders are to guard those guns with my life.”
“Go for it. But not my fucking life,” Caruth shouted now.
The Taliban machine gunner walked the rounds down so that they were now pulverizing the wall at the exact spot where the men had moved.
Tremaine moved again, then looked over the wall quickly. Once back out of the line of fire, he said, “There’s an unmanned MG on a technical to our right!”
Duff knew about the unmanned Russian-made PK machine gun because he’d just killed the man who’d been operating it, as well as the pair in the cab.
Duff said, “What about it?”
“Go get on that PK, kid.”
Gordon fired three rounds, then ducked back down. He shouted now, “No fucking way! Duff, you do not go out there.”
All four men moved again, and seconds later the wall where they’d been taking cover completely failed, and bullets whizzed through the parking lot where the men had just been kneeling.
Duff raised his weapon at another part of the wall, then laid down an obscene amount of fire. After expending an entire mag, he knelt back down. “Condor, we can go around the side of this building and be a block away from all this shit in thirty seconds.”
“I gave you a direct order, Duff! Get on that feckin’ MG!”
Duff poked his head over the wall again and saw that the truck was about twenty-five yards away. It would have been suicide to run for it if not for the Askar lying on its side in the middle of the road. Duff thought the armored truck would block the enemy’s view of him for about seventy-five percent of his run to the technical.
Gordon said, “Tremaine! We have to get out of here!”
Tremaine grabbed Duff by the shoulder strap of his body armor and shook him. “Kid, I’m not going to tell you again!”
Duff unslung his rifle and took off his pack. Leaving both there on the ground, he rose into a squat and then began moving along the low wall for another ten yards. Once there, he rolled over the top of it, landed on the street on the other side, and then began sprinting as fast as he could.
The machine gun on the other side of the armor kept booming at a cyclic rate, but Duff didn’t feel that the fire was being directed at him until he passed the tipped-over Askar with the crates of AK-47s lying behind it.
As soon as he did so, asphalt blasted into the air in front of him, an AK chattered, and Duff knew at least one Taliban rifleman had seen him.
He kept running, the armor weighing him down, both his arms pumping furiously and, after a spray of rounds snapped right overhead, he climbed into the open bed of the truck, rolling onto his side. He scrambled behind the PK, pulled the bolt back to charge it even though the dead Taliban had already done so, then looked through the iron sights for the enemy.
The road ahead of him was nothing if not a target-rich environment.
He opened fire on the street, took out the enemy technical just as it blasted through another section of wall where his three coworkers had positioned themselves, then began walking his fire along a line of men at a wall on the opposite side of the street.
When the men scattered, he began raking bullets across a rooftop full of men.
He took some return fire, and something slammed into his chest plate, but he kept dumping big machine gun rounds in short, measured bursts.
He heard Tremaine’s M249 working the area, as well, but he didn’t hear either Gordon’s or Caruth’s weapons in the fight.
Forty-five seconds after manning the PK, thirty seconds after knocking out the other machine gun up the street, the Taliban force bugged out. Duff emptied the last of a two-hundred-round box-fed magazine at a fleeing truck, missing it low, and then he knelt to the bed, grabbed another ammo can, and began switching it out as fast as he could.
As he did so he shifted his focus over to the wall for an instant, just long enough to see Condor standing there, his M249 up to his shoulder, covering Duff’s reload.
Once he racked a fresh round into the smoking-hot gun, Duff himself began looking for more targets, but only until he heard Mike Gordon yelling for him.
“Duff! Duff! On the double!”
Duff leapt off the gun truck and sprinted back across the road, passing the Askar and heading over to the ruined wall. Once there, he realized he didn’t have to roll over the top as before; he could simply jump over some low cinder blocks, because there was a gaping hole in the wall carved out by the enemy machine gun.
Once he was on the parking lot side, he stopped in his tracks.
There was blood everywhere.
Andy Caruth lay on his back; Gordon had gotten his armor off him, revealing a gunshot wound to the upper chest, almost in his underarm area. The man’s broken sunglasses were on the ground next to him, his eyes glassy and unfixed, and though he moved his mouth some, Duff couldn’t hear a word he was saying.
Duff had more trauma training than Gordon, so he immediately took over the man’s care. When Gordon didn’t move away from the injured man, Duff said, “Gordo! Cover!”
Gordon nodded, almost imperceptibly, then lifted his rifle and began scanning the market ahead of him.
Immediately Duff went into action, pulling his IFAK out and removing a chest seal.
Tremaine continued to pull security; Duff could hear the sounds of approaching APCs and he knew the quick reaction force was on the way, but Duff had had as much medical training as anyone who would be on the QRF, so he was just going to have to try to save Andy Caruth on his own.
For the next five minutes, now protected by an eighteen-man QRF in three armored gun trucks, Duff worked on Caruth, putting an airway in his nose, doing what he could to control the bleeding. He’d been shot through a lung, the bullet had exited his back, and even with two chest seals and a thick roll of bandaging, he continued to bleed.
And then the bleeding abruptly stopped.
Duff’s hands, his arms, and even his right cheek were smeared red by the time he sat back, wiped sweat off his brow with his forearm, and looked up to Gordon. “He’s gone.”
Duff looked around for Tremaine, then saw he wasn’t even there. He found him in the middle of the road, working with more men to retrieve the crates of Kalashnikovs from the IED site and load them into the QRF’s trucks.
Gordon called out to him. “He’s dead, Tremaine.”
The South African sighed in frustration, then walked back over to the two other men. Duff rose from where he’d been kneeling, then scooped up his rifle and his pack, putting them back on his body.
Tremaine turned back to one of the men by the QRF trucks. “Bobby, we need a bag.”
“Yeah, boss.”
A black body bag was pulled from the back of the vehicle and brought over, while Duff just looked on. The adrenaline was leaving his body now; he felt exhaustion, depression.
And then he felt rage. After several seconds standing there, covered in Caruth’s blood, he said, “Andy’s death is on you, Tremaine.”
“Fuck you, kid. We weren’t leaving all that equipment for the enemy.”
Duff stormed up to the South African, his rage getting the better of him, and balled his fist. The older man threw a punch, but Duff ducked it, came back up, and threw his own punch.
Condor took a glancing blow to the side of his head, but with his next swing he dropped the younger, smaller, and less experienced man to the ground with a hook to his kidneys.
The South African stood over him now; Duff heaved and spit into the grit on the road. He tried to roll onto his side to get back up, but he found he couldn’t move a muscle.
Right next to him on the ground, Andy Caruth’s body was unceremoniously rolled into the body bag facedown and zipped up.
Tremaine had another body bag—Duff didn’t know where it came from—and he opened it up, still standing over the prostrate American.
Duff lay frozen while Tremaine put him inside. He wanted to scream, but no sound came; his heart pounded in terror, but he could do nothing to stop it.
The zipper slowly shut over his face, over his eyes, and then all was dark.
The man in the bathroom sat on the toilet wearing track pants and a sweat-soaked threadbare T-shirt that read “Army.” His chest heaved up and down, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his forearm.
Though he breathed heavily, he did so quietly, biting the inside of his mouth to focus his thoughts and to push away the panic that threatened to overtake him.
It was just a nightmare, this he knew, but it was always just a nightmare, and that never seemed to make it any better.
And, if he was being honest with himself, it was not just a nightmare. The event had happened, though some of the details were different than what his conscious brain remembered; nobody put him in a body bag, for example, but the gist was the same.
Josh Duffy rose from the toilet, pulling himself up by the sink, then leaned against the sink’s edge and wiped sweat from his clean-shaven face with a towel hanging nearby. He washed his face with cold water and dried it again. Staring into the mirror, he saw the twitch in his upper lip that often came in moments of high stress, and then he told himself that it would go away.
Just like it always did, it would go away.
And just like it always did, it would come back.
Maybe not the same twitch, the same nightmare, the same country, the same weapons, or the same outcome.
But the combat he’d experienced in his life seemed like it was always there to relive, hanging out just under the surface of his consciousness.
He hadn’t dreamed of this particular event in Jalalabad in many months, maybe longer. The shootout had happened nearly ten years earlier, and in that time Duff had experienced quite a few other traumas that had taken J-Bad’s place in his nightmares.
And not all of the trauma he’d experienced was contained solely in his brain. He flipped off the bathroom light before opening the door, then hooked his left underarm over a crutch and began moving into his darkened bedroom.
Josh Duffy moved nimbly across the floor, silent as a cat, even though he was missing his left leg below his knee, and even though the panic attack he’d just dealt with had made him want to crawl out of his skin screaming bloody murder.
But he made it back to his side of the bed quietly, sat down slowly and gently, then leaned his crutch against the nightstand and looked at the clock.
Three twelve a.m.
He sighed.
Carefully, he lay back in bed, covered himself with the blankets, and stared out the window in front of him. Biting the inside of his mouth again, he took a few calming breaths, then closed his eyes.
Every. Fucking. Night, he said to himself, over and over.