One Bullet Away

“Probably shepherds or villagers from down by the river. Maybe they saw our helicopters.”

We watched shadows in the valley lengthen in the dusk. The wind picked up, and the temperature plummeted. My thin gloves had holes in all the fingertips, and I resolved to fix them as soon as I had time. We fantasized about building a fire, but nothing attracts bullets in the dark like a flame. So we sat and shivered and watched. After sunset, the eastern horizon flashed as if with distant lightning.

“Air Force is pounding the piss out of Kandahar,” Jim mumbled around a piece of dried grass stuck in his mouth. He reclined on his elbows, perfectly at ease.

I tried to feel some remorse, some sense of the gravity of watching people die by the score. But I couldn’t. The explosions’ flickering yellow light reflected off the high overcast. Low rumbling followed the biggest flashes.

“Poor fuckers,” Jim said. “Most of them have probably never even seen an airplane up close, and now they have JDAMs coming down their chimneys.”

Jim was referring to the Joint Direct Attack Munition, a GPS-guided “smart bomb” that could hit targets with pinpoint accuracy. Our conversation was interrupted every few minutes by radio calls from the LAR patrol that had departed at sunset. The patrol was supposed to move down into the valley, where recon was looking for a site to ford the river, and then stop traffic along the highway. So far, the night had been a bust.

We listened in as the recon platoon got a Humvee stuck in the river’s silt and spent three hours trying to free it. Meanwhile, Cossack was teaching us all a lesson about the unforeseen complications of real-world operations. In training, LAVs burn diesel fuel. But pulling up to the pump is not so easy in Afghanistan. We relied on aerial resupplies of fuel from the helos based at Rhino. They carried five-hundred-gallon bladders that the LAVs could pump from when they landed. To streamline our logistical tail, all the vehicles burned JP-8, the same aviation kerosene burned by the helicopters. But JP-8, being cleaner than diesel, burns hotter and faster.

“Shaka, this is Cossack. We’re burning fuel at an unbelievable rate. I’m almost at half a tank, and we haven’t even crossed the river yet.”

Shaka aborted the mission, and the LAVs whined back into Pentagon long before dawn. Our night as the main effort had been a frustrating waste.

Two nights later, I shook Jim awake shortly before midnight.

“Your watch, man.”

Our new hole was perched on a sandy ridge, hundreds of feet above the river and the highway. We had moved from Pentagon to reduce the roundtrip time and distance for the patrols. I had gone on the last one, the night before. We had sat near the highway for two hours, unable to find any targets. Another fruitless mission. But this night looked more promising. I had watched throughout the evening as lights winked out in the windows of the houses clustered in trees along the riverbanks. Around dusk, traffic began to move on the highway — trucks mostly, traveling west from Kandahar.

This patrol base, perfectly situated for defense and observation, had one crucial flaw: the high ridge obstructed line-of-sight radio communication between the colonel and the patrol. Jim and I, with our radios and antennas, sat right on the edge of the ridge. We had a clear shot to the patrol on the highway and to the headquarters tent a few hundred meters down the slope behind us. We became the radio link between the two.

After climbing out of his sleeping bag, Jim hopped into the hole, rubbing his hands together, and I briefed him. “Cossack is moving toward the highway for interdiction. A recon team, Quizmaster, is looking for a ford site on the river. Patrol doesn’t want to come back the same way it went out. A Huey-Cobra mixed section should launch from Rhino soon to be on station for a couple of hours while they’re stopping traffic. And it’s freezing.”

Jim took the radio handsets, and I clapped him on the back. I shook out my sleeping bag and shimmied in, zipping it up to my neck. The only sound as I closed my eyes was a subdued chirp each time Jim keyed the handset to relay a message.

Less than an hour later, he woke me with a shake. By the time I sat up, Jim was twenty feet away, dropping back into the hole. “Get dressed, bro. Shit’s about to go down.”

Climbing out of my bag, I caught my breath, as if I’d jumped into a cold river. I rushed into my jacket and hat, Kevlar vest, and gloves. The temperature was probably only in the twenties, but the cold had a way of seeping inside you and draining your warmth. We’d been living outside day and night for weeks, without fires or showers or roofs and walls to protect us from the weather.