9
DON TABRON, THE 160TH SOAR'S AIR MISSION commander who had been seated in the cockpit's jumpseat handling the radios, pitched in to help with the fight. He thought, When the special operations guys are in the air, we're in charge, and when we are on the ground, they're in charge.
After he ran off the ramp, he rolled over in the snow and covered the left side of the helo until shooting from that direction stopped. He understood the terrain. The al-Qaeda fighters to the west and southwest had excellent concealment, and nobody knew their numbers. Tabron had discovered an oddity of combat: when he was being fired at, his focus narrowed to a pinprick. It did not matter to him at that moment if a hundred enemy fighters were on the mountain. He only counted the one who was shooting at him.
He was lying on the ground, and the sun was rising over the mountains, reflecting off the brilliant carpet of snow. He was wet and cold. Lamereaux came over and said something to him, and Tabron noticed for the first time that his left index finger was shot off down to the first knuckle. He stared at his gloved hand. A bullet had ricocheted straight up his sleeve, piercing the fabric of his flight suit with five holes. Lamereaux threw him a blanket-sized piece of soundproofing to lie on. He heard someone shout, “Hey, we got the left seat pilot up on the ground there.”
Tabron and PJ Miller ran up and grabbed Gant by the strap on his flight vest and dragged him back over the snow to the casualty collection point that Lamereaux, Cunningham, and Miller had set up under the tail of the helo to protect the wounded from the small arms fire from the peak.
Self called for a resupply of ammunition. Tabron and the helo's right ramp crew chief, Brian Wilson, gathered up ammunition from the helicopter and, under cover from shattering bursts of rifle fire from Self and his Rangers, sprinted across the open snow, under fire from the peak. With the snow, the heaviness of the ammo, and the thin air, Tabron felt “like a rabbit in a shooting gallery. You get there and almost collapse, give it to them, catch your breath, and run back to get more.”
Wilson brought up the M-203 and the 40 mm grenades, and as he was being fired on, he ducked and threw them across the remaining distance. He and Tabron wore down from exhaustion after seven round trips with ammo and guns. During one run with the heavy grenades, Tabron knew he was going to get shot if he didn't protect himself. He decided to roll on the snow, just as Totten-Lancaster had done, over to Self at the rocks, and roll back to the helo. His rolling maneuvers almost certainly kept him alive, bullets snapping safely over his head.
Self was weighing the odds in favor of an assault on the peak. It was going to have to be tried eventually. He saw no other way to clear out the enemy from the high ground than to storm them. DePouli, behind the rocks to Self's right, was searching the sky for the sight of the Chinook with Chalk 2 that had followed them from Bagram. He was thinking, Fuck! We're up here, guys are wounded and guys are dead. There's only a few of us who can do anything. What's our plan? We started out half a platoon, and now we are a quarter of a platoon. We can accomplish our mission with a bare minimum of guys if we have to. But I'd feel a lot better if Chalk 2 was with us. So, what the hell do we do now?
Unless the Rangers took the peak, they would be fighting uphill all day long.
DePouli was ready to charge, telling David Gilliam, the machine gunner next to him, “Let's just kill these guys and get the hell out of here.”