2
STEBNER GLANCED AT THE BODY OF THE DEAD ENEMY fighter while he paused to rummage through the sleeping positions that DePouli had cleared earlier. Stebner shot a couple of rounds into the blankets for good measure. Then he noticed an American Army rucksack. He told Canon, “That's weird.” Packages of MREs were scattered in the hole. He thought, Where did they get it from? He also saw an American helmet with bullet holes front and back and a set of NVGs. “Fifi” was written on the helmet. A blue key chain was clipped to the ruck. He held it in the palm of his hand. It was a small blue unicorn. He put it in his pocket and stood up to walk around the rock.
“Where's the PL?” Canon asked DePouli, who pointed him to Self nearby.
“Boss, what do you want me to do?” Canon asked.
Self said, “We need to take the bunker. Now.”
“Where do you want the guns at?”
“Gilliam will show you. Just get some ammo.”
While his chalk went with Self up to the rocks beneath the bunkers, Canon made his way over to the casualty collection point at the rear of the helo for ammo. The sight of the dead shocked him. He was thinking, Whoa.
Totten-Lancaster, with a severed nerve from shrapnel, was sitting on the snow. It did not dawn on Canon that he might be wounded. Canon told him, “Get up! Get your shit! Get your gun!”
Totten-Lancaster said, “Sarge, I got a bit of a wound going on down here,” meaning his leg. “I don't have a SAW.”
“Where's your SAW at?” Canon demanded.
“Miceli's got it.”
“Where's Miceli's SAW at?”
“It's shot.”
“What are you guys doing up here, playing grab-ass?” He went over to Self, sheltering behind the rocks.
“All right, but why does Gilliam have the gun?” he asked Self. “I'm going to need an AG. Who?”
The 160th SOAR crew chief, Brian Wilson, was nearby. Canon asked him, “Do you know how to work a 240?”
“No,” he replied.
“You can use an M-60, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Close enough. Go start bringing ammo over here.” Canon then turned to Gilliam. “Where are we going?” Gilliam pointed to the peak and the low rock outcropping. It looked a long way to Canon.
As nature would have it, and while Canon and Self worked out the details of the assault, Walker, behind the rocks to the right of Self, where he had sheltered since the first attempted assault, felt the cramps of a painful imperative that until now he had successfully ignored. With an occasional bullet from the peak snapping over his head, he rolled over on his side, pulled his pants down, and relieved himself in the snow before rolling back over to await the assault.
Vela was still wheezing from the climb when he reached the rocks where the assault force was getting ready. He and Pazder, with one of the two M-240s, positioned themselves on Gilliam's right, and laid out a plan for their supporting part of the assault. Vela pushed the body of an al-Qaeda fighter out of the way, thinking, OK, he's dead. On the way up, he'd looked around for his friend Marc Anderson and did not see him or Matt Commons. He'd seen Totten-Lancaster over by the helo. But he was wondering, Where's Big A at? He did not even consider that he might be dead.
Stebner already knew Anderson's fate. When the chalk had reached the top, he'd asked DePouli, who had told him, “He's dead. You stay alive. Settle it up. Make it even. Kick ass.” Stebner thought indifferently about his own mortality, If you get hit, you get hit. So throw that shit out of your mind and just do it. But the loss of friends angered and confused him.
To reach the rocks from the southern outcrop, Polson had made a dash across the eastern edge of the saddle, over broken rocks in the snow, to reach Walker, in preparation for this, the second assault on the peak. As he ran, Polson's eyes were drawn over to the KIAs, their bodies scattered near the Chinook, 15 feet from the casualty collection point, where Cunningham was giving aid to Calvert, Dube, and Gant. Polson pulled up at the rocks, narrowly avoiding Walker's excrement. When Stebner ran over to join them, he headed straight for the pile.
Walker yelled, “Hey, watch out! I just took a crap right there.”
Stebner daintily lay down prone, with Polson on his left, leaving a respectful space between them for the offending ordure. Unexpectedly, Sergeant Patrick George came bounding up to join them, too, and dove headfirst behind the rocks. Stebner warned him too late. His elbows slid through it.
Laughing, Polson chided him, “Awww, you got shit on you.”
George was screaming, “Get it off me! Get it off!”
Polson said, “Naw, I don't want to touch it.”
“Get it off me!” George stood up, clearly more worried about the crap on his sleeve than about the bullets flying past him from the peak.
For that moment, uproarious laughter muffled the sounds of pain, as if an asylum had been emptied on a mountaintop.
For Self, who was again in command of both chalks for the first time since leaving Bagram, the imperative for a second assault to take the higher ground came from the casualties. He was getting radio reports of enemy movement. Clearly, he thought, the enemy's main positions were below and possibly to their right. If there were to be one, an attack would leave the wounded out in the open and exposed to everything the enemy had to throw at them. The safest way to anticipate and defend against an attack, he thought, was to secure the highest ground, take over their enemy's positions on the peak, and move the casualties up to the western side of the mountain out of the way. The plan made perfect sense. Its success depended now on timing and luck.
Polson, waiting to begin the assault, struggled to keep his eyes off the dead laid out on the snow. He did not know who they were. He wanted to and he didn't want to know. He looked at George, finally asking him, “Who is it?”
“You really want to know?” George asked.
“Yeah.”
“Brad's dead.”
A sudden anger overcame Polson. He looked for Crose's body among the dead. Instead, he saw a corpse with reddish purple hair shining in the bright sunlight. Matt Commons was the only person in the platoon with natural burgundy-colored hair. Nobody needed to tell him that his friend was dead. Polson could hardly wait for the assault to begin.
Canon was behind the rocks farthest to the east, near the dropoff into the valley. A dead enemy soldier with an RPG lying at his side was wearing a blue ski parka with the goose down blowing out bullet holes. Canon thought, Well, this guy can't stay here. We have to get in this position. He pushed him with his boot down an incline and over the side. Canon noticed that he was wearing plastic shower shoes in the freezing cold. He had to respect that kind of toughness. He reported to Self that he was ready.
Self said, “OK, we're ready for you to initiate.”
Canon asked, “Well, what's the signal?”
“Shoot,” Self replied. “Start shootin'.”
The first ten rounds in Canon's magazines were tracers. He stood up and yelled out, “On my mark!” Gilliam, with the machine gun, was looking up at him. “I don't know if I would be standing right there. I almost got shot there a while ago.”
Canon told him, “Whatever! I don't plan on getting shot today. All right, here we go.” He started shooting. The two machine guns fired alternately, first Gilliam's on the right with a one-second burst from the first squad's machine gun, then the second squad's machine gun for a one-second burst, back and forth across an interlocking field of fire.
On Canon's mark, Polson pushed off past the dead enemy with an RPG still in his frozen hands, his body riddled with holes. Half running and half walking with his SAW pointed at the peak, he sprayed the first bunker with bullets. Tracers from Vela and Pazder's machine guns ricocheted off the rocks to his left. Focusing on the front and left flank of the main assault, Polson and Stebner ran around the left side of the rock outcrop to flank whatever was behind the rock.
Stebner was moving up on Polson's right. Mere feet in front of bunker #1 by the rock, he saw a body lying facedown in the snow. A glance told him that the dead man was wearing American military boots with distinctive Vibram soles with yellow rubber logos. Oh, well, they have our boots, too, he was thinking. To him the redhaired dead man looked like a Chechen with a scraggly beard, but in fact Stebner was staring at the body of Neil Roberts. His attention was drawn away when, out of the corner of his eye, he saw an enemy fighter slip behind the rock outcrop. Stebner yelled to Polson, “Shit, somebody's behind that.” He and Polson moved to the east behind bunker #1. A redheaded Chechen was backing up in an effort to move down the steep incline on the northern crest. Stebner shot him twice. Polson emptied a twenty-round burst in him. The dead enemy did “his chicken dance on the ground,” his body twitching with the impact of the bullets. As he was firing, Polson's SAW went kerchunk. He told Stebner, “It's shit the bed on me.” The operating rod had warped. They moved to their right.
They were throwing hand grenades on the other side of the rise. Polson threw three. Stebner threw one. George threw one. Polson checked his toss of another grenade at the DShK and an 82 mm mortar tube, fearing an explosion of the enemy's ammunition. He was staring at a pile of rocks where he thought an enemy might be crouching. Specialist Oscar Escano, Chalk 2's M-203 gunner, came up behind him and fired a round at the DShK. A grenade exploded against the enemy's ammo, causing a secondary explosion that was the equivalent of at least a quarter pound of C-4 explosive. Five feet away from the blast, Polson was blown off his feet. He looked at Escano, thinking, Fucker, if you ever do anything like that again, let me know so I can get down.
At the start of the assault, Canon took off to the right. He came across a one-man fighting position behind a fir tree with a sweeping, panoramic view of the entire valley. Canon yelled, “Has anybody cleared this hole back here?”
The Army medic, Matt LaFrenz, beside Canon, pointed his weapon at the position.
Canon said, “Let's frag it.” He cooked off a grenade and counted, “One thousand, two thousand,” hoping the grenade had a five-second fuse. He chucked the grenade and heard its explosion. He stood up, flipped his gun to auto fire, and let off a burst into the bunker. A bundle of RPG rounds exploded and blew him back off his feet. LaFrenz grabbed his body armor's drag handles and pulled him away, with Canon thinking this was the luckiest moment in his life.
The group who had assaulted the peak felt more relief than amazement that, it seemed, only one enemy soldier was left to defend the peak, and Stebner had killed him. Every other enemy fighter was either gone or had been blown apart by bombs and bullets. Even before the assault, Self had assumed that most of the enemy soldiers were dead or had fled. Shots had continued from the peak onto their positions through the morning hours, and it was now near 1130 local. And whether one Chechen or fifty had defended the peak from the assault, it was all the same to Self. With his assault force slogging up the open ground in high-altitude air, one enemy on the peak with an AK-47 could have killed them if he had not been trying to flee. Brown was surprised only that anyone on the peak was alive after the multiple fighter gun runs and the Hellfire attacks.
If not their numbers, what the enemy had built for an outpost on the peak amazed Polson and Stebner. It was an ideal fighting position and a command and control point for the entire area on and around Takur Ghar, with a cleverly concealed C2 tent in a crevice; a bunker network that extended well down the northern peak; a large kitchen area with a stove, gas lamps, containers of diesel oil, and a dead goat hanging from a tree; individual shelters with warm clothes and blankets; and the DShK aimed out at the flat valley area between Takur Ghar and the Whale. The clever concealment of the position impressed Polson. The peak looked like untouched natural terrain from just a few yards away, much less from the base of the mountain or from the air overhead.
Checking out the top, around the enemy's kitchen area behind the bunkers, Canon smelled the dead animals.
Polson moved over to the nine o'clock of the helo. He sat down, watching Stebner and a couple of other Rangers go across the peak and down at the helo's eight o'clock position. Polson looked to the south and saw no sign of enemy soldiers. Polson was thinking that their work for the day was just about done.
On the peak, Canon called Self. He said, “Boss, you need to come up here and look at this.”
When he reached the top, Self saw what Canon was referring to. Self was still confused why Roberts would be there in the first place. He thought he might have killed an American in the assault. Canon pointed out Chapman's body buried under debris in bunker #1. On the north end of the bunker, Chapman's back was against the bunker wall. Self wondered if the al-Qaeda fighters had captured Chapman and Roberts, whom one of the Rangers recognized from a visit to their tent area a couple of times at Bagram. Canon searched their clothing for ID to confirm who they were.
Wasting no time, Self said, “Let's start moving the wounded up to the top of the mountain.”
Canon walked down the incline to the helo. Totten-Lancaster told him, “Anderson, Crose, and Commons are KIA.” Canon was visibly upset.
Self joined him a minute later. He told Canon, “Snap out of it. There's stuff we have to do here. Time to get back to the task at hand.”
But Canon needed a moment to compose himself. He was thinking about this confrontation with death. He told himself, You always know that people that work for you may die, and you do your best to make sure as many of them get home as possible. But it had never dawned on me that kids who worked for me, or I myself, might come home in a body bag. It's the invincibility of the team that's been shattered. Ten feet tall and bulletproof, and now you see two kids who work for you lying in the snow dead, and it's very surreal.
As senior NCO, Canon was responsible for “these kids,” as he called his Rangers. The three dead Rangers were closer to him, he said, “than his two blood brothers.” He had spent hours with them, counseling them, listening to them talk about girlfriends, careers, their job performance. He knew them. Crose, Anderson, and Commons, their bodies lying out in the open by the Chinook, had trained under him. He had been their squad leader from the day they walked into the battalion.
He remembered Brad “Danger” Crose, Matt Commons, and Marc “Gentle Giant” Anderson as friends who did a lot of joking together. The biggest joke since deployment had been the day they were leaving Savannah's Hunter Army Air Field. It tore them up. Girlfriends, wives, mothers and fathers, children, pets, and friends came out to wave good-bye. The parting was sad, but it was also electric with anticipation. This was war, and the Rangers were lining up for their share of it. They felt proud and anxious, aggressive and tough, and hardly a man was not champing to leave.
Posters and flags, hugs and kisses, promises and vows, tiny mementos, lockets with photos exchanged at the last minute . . . And then they were gone. Fifteen minutes later, they were back again, wearing sheepish grins. The airplane that was to fly them to Afghanistan had weight problems. They went back home for the night. The next day, it began again—flags, banners, the works, though with slightly diminished brio.
“Are you really leaving this time?” a Ranger's girlfriend asked.
“I hope so, because I don't want to do this again,” he told her.
But yet another mechanical problem kept them home.
Then on the third day, with a profound sense of relief, they waved good-bye, and they went. Once in the air, they laughed about how sick they were of saying good-bye.
Marc Anderson had not particularly minded the delays. His mom and dad had driven back to Florida after a first and last good-bye. Marc understood the complexities of troop deployments, and he knew how little things created frustrating delays. He was mature and even-natured, and as head of the weapons squad, he was arguably the most knowledgeable man in the platoon, the company, and perhaps the battalion. He seemed to know about everything, could comment on anything, was fatherly with good advice, and, like the teacher he had been before joining the Rangers, he loved to share with his buddies his knowledge of how things worked. He was a brute of a guy, 6 feet 3 inches and 240 pounds, named after Caesar's general Marc Antony. A few years back, he had scored 1,464 on his SATs and was recruited, for his talents as a track shot putter and a football player, by Brown, West Point, and Notre Dame. He'd gone to Case Western Reserve to study engineering and left after three years for Florida State, closer to home, where he graduated in 1995 with a 4.0 grade point average in mathematics education.
He taught at Ft. Myers Middle School for three years and loved his students. He even wrote one of them with the most potential into his last will and testament to receive $12,000 in case he died in battle. He had joined the military out of a sense of duty to his country that his father, Dave, a twenty-one-year Ranger veteran of Vietnam, had instilled in him. The Rangers assigned him to a weapons squad, responsible for a 25-pound M-240 medium machine gun. He had an uncanny ability to put a first round on target at night with the 50-caliber machine gun, and before long, he was good enough to instruct the battalion. When other gunners needed help, Anderson found time. The math required to calculate target ranges was daunting to many of the younger Rangers. “If you couldn't figure something out, you went to Anderson,” his platoon's first sergeant said of him. He took life as it came. Everyone in the platoon depended on him.
About a year before deployment to Afghanistan, Anderson's older brother, Stephen, was diagnosed with cancer. It weighed on Marc. At a last meeting, saying good-bye, Marc asked him, “Which one of us will be first?”
“Hey, guys—enough!” their mother, Judy, interrupted.
“I could get out of going,” Marc told her, “but I won't because I'm a part of a team.”
“No. Because it's your job,” said Stephen, who would succumb to his cancer within the year.
Sergeant Brad Crose, now lying in a heap on the snow beside Anderson, had been an odd mixture of personality and emotions. He was as tough as any other Ranger, but he also loved to go Christmas shopping with his mom and in any season to bake cookies from her special chocolate chip recipe. Growing up in Orange Park, Florida, near Jacksonville, he did the things that adventurous young men do—skied, rode horseback, went sky diving, and biked 150 miles a year. Unlike other young men, he badgered his mom, Sheila, for new recipes, which he filed on 3-by-5 cards in a box. He baked her special cookies, she said, better than she did, and that last Thanksgiving before leaving for Afghanistan, Crose had prepared a home-style dinner for twenty-five Rangers at his friend Sergeant Eric Stebner's apartment off base. He'd baked three apple crumb pies, three batches of the chocolate chip cookies, a casserole, and enough homemade rolls to feed everybody. Stebner roasted a turkey. Staff Sergeant Joshua Walker brought a honey-baked ham. If this did not sound like a family, nothing did.
The first day that they were scheduled to leave Savannah for Afghanistan, Crose's mother and grandparents drove up to see him off. His mother was a devout Christian and member of the Assembly of God, and Brad was a church-going Presbyterian. She worried, and she asked if something happened to him, would he go to heaven? One way to ensure that passage came through prayer. In the privacy of his room, she had prayed with him, kneeling on the floor. Then his grandfather had prayed with him, and finally his grandmother. He was patient and wore a smile. A shy, quiet man of twenty-seven, he wanted nothing so much as to please. He told his mother when they were alone again, “Mother, if I die, I died doing what I believe in. It has to be done. I don't want you to be upset. Don't worry, Rangers don't die.” He was certain of it. He told her, “Mom, I give you my word, I promise I'm coming back.” She asked if he had written an “in case” letter that some Rangers left behind for parents, wives, and girlfriends. Brad said, “I'll be back.”
Corporal Matt Commons, the last of the dead trio of Rangers, was a fascinating and complex young man, from Boulder City, Arizona. He'd brought along a deep fascination with metaphysics and had asked about the meaning of death even as a child. For his high school senior project, he had researched good and evil, God and the devil. The subject upset his mother, who had raised Matt and his brother as a single parent since Matt was five. Now at twenty-one, he was buff, 5 feet 10 inches and 160 pounds of muscle, with a six-pack he was proud of. In Afghanistan, he dreamed of home and Brittany, the love of his life. As a Ranger, everybody liked him for using good cheer as an antidote to bad conditions. His friends joked that he was the first to volunteer, always the first one to accept challenges, and the guy who was never afraid.
Only one thing had seemed to bother him about the deployment to Afghanistan. He explained to his mother, “Mom, I've never gone hunting before. I never even killed a rabbit. I wonder what it's like to kill a human being.” She said without an instant's hesitation, “Shoot first and think later. I want you to come home.”
The other dead man, Sergeant Philip Svitak, wasn't a Ranger. He was handsome, with blond hair and golden eyes, a trim 5 feet 11 inches. At the 160th SOAR compound at Ft. Campbell, Kentucky, he'd often arrived at the mess hall for lunch wearing neon bicycling shorts and a gaudy Italian racing shirt, much to the amusement of his friends.
Svitak had not intended to make the military a career, but when his parents in Joplin, Missouri, did not have the money to send him to college, he decided to sign up to save what was needed. After one tour, once he was discharged, he worked as a FedEx deliveryman for a year, but he missed his “brothers” in SOAR. His wife, Laura, the mother of their two young boys, Ethan and Nolan, understood when Phil reenlisted as a SOAR door gunner. He was a crack shot with his mini gun, and he sharpened his skill playing paintball, which had become his latest passion. In a black “Terminator” T-shirt decorated with the drawing of a human skull, he had a knack for popping up behind his opponents, his paintball gun pointed at them. He told them in a drawl like John Wayne's, “Pilgrims, you want it the easy way or the hard way?”
Now, Canon took a long look at Anderson lying on his back with his shirt off from when the PJ, Jason Cunningham, had attempted to resuscitate him. Canon was thinking about what “a huge teddy bear, a bear of a man,” Anderson was. There he is lying in the snow, his DCU bottoms on, with his cold weather boots black, and that's just it. He's looking up at you. I'm like, “Dipshit, hey! It's cold! Get dressed!” It took an instant to realize that was not going to happen.