Twenty yards down the slope from Brent, Amerine was sprawled on his stomach near Bovee. Black smoke was blowing overhead, darkening the sky that a moment before had been a deep, clear blue. Dust swirled everywhere, the acrid smell of explosives was thick in the air, and Amerine experienced an overwhelming sense of triumph in surviving the blast. He wanted to shout out “Fuck you! I’m still alive!”
But then it began to rain down around him—rocks, sand, and scraps of human flesh, followed by pieces of clothing and paper. The explosion, he realized, had been more powerful than an attack by mortar or artillery—the only weapons he believed that the Taliban in this area possessed. Whatever hit them, he knew, could only have come from an American aircraft.
As he struggled to his feet, it felt as if somebody took a baseball bat to his left leg. He looked down and saw a few small holes on his upper thigh, the largest the size of a penny, and realized he’d been hit by shrapnel. He could hear muffled noises in his right ear but nothing in his left. Lying on his back a few feet off, Bovee looked stunned.
“You okay?” Amerine asked.
“Yeah, yeah,” said Bovee, rolling to his side and pushing himself up to a sitting position.
Leaving Bovee, Amerine ran up the Alamo through the smoke and falling debris to find Brent and Victor on their hands and knees trying to get up off the ground. Blood dotted Victor’s face and trickled from his ears, but he appeared to have no major injuries.
“This is the rally point. Stay here. I’ll be back,” Amerine yelled to them before scrambling over the crest of the Alamo and stumbling upon a burned, decapitated body. He allowed himself a single thought: That’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen, then he ran forward another ten yards to the command post. Here, the metallic, sulfurlike smell of the bomb was overpowered by the stench of burned flesh and hair. Within the low walls, ten bodies were woven together into a mass of limbs, heads, and torsos covered by a thin coat of gray dust. Amerine couldn’t tell where one began and the other left off, and he focused on the one member of his team he could identify—Alex, drained of color and motionless. Dead, Amerine thought. All of them.
There was movement at the edge of the bodies, which had been pushed up against the wall like debris left by the tide. Fox suddenly sat up from the heap of bloody gore, pushing the torso of a dead Afghan off his chest. He sat there, staring forward.
“Sir!” Amerine yelled, but Fox was swaying, with a confused expression and showing no indication that he’d heard Amerine.
I need to get help, Amerine thought, sprinting off the Alamo and past the team’s trucks—where more Americans were strewn about on the ground—heading toward the berm where he’d last seen the Pinzgauers. As he rounded the northeast corner of the medical clinic, still in the smoky perimeter of the blast site, he nearly collided with a Delta operator coming his way. “What the fuck happened?!” the soldier said.
“We just got hit by friendly fire. Everybody is down. We are combat ineffective. I need everyone with medical training you can spare to help the wounded, and I need you to call for medevac—the Marines at Camp Rhino are closest. I also need you guys to set up a perimeter and secure the area.”
The Delta operator stared at him, then said, “Yes, yes, roger that.” He turned toward his unit, housed in an abandoned compound near the berm, while Amerine ran back up the Alamo, mentally going over a checklist: Okay, Delta is sending over their medics and calling for medevac. Now I need to account for my men, get a casualty collection point established, move the wounded, and triage the casualties. Marines should be here in less than an hour.
When Mike came to, he was sprawled facedown in the dirt. He couldn’t feel his body or hear anything over the ringing in his ears, and when he tried to look around, the world was blurry.
He moved his head slowly to the right, resting his left cheek on the ground. His right arm came into focus, limp at his side. It took him a moment to remember that his hand wasn’t supposed to be twisted back against the inside of his elbow. Oh, compound fracture, that’s bad, he thought. Turning his head, Mike regarded his left arm, which was broken in a 90-degree angle between the shoulder and elbow. Oh, that’s really bad, he thought. Unable to use his arms, he pushed his forehead against the dirt, raising his chest up a foot with his abdominal and back muscles. That was when what looked like a gallon of red paint dumped out of his body onto the ground, and he noticed the gaping wound on his chest. “Oh my God! Oh my God! Oh my God!” he said.
Feeling himself start to pass out, he struggled to keep his head to the side, thinking, If I put my face down in this puddle of blood, I’ll drown.
Smith had returned to his truck to get new batteries for his radio when the explosion slapped him to the ground between two vehicles like a flyswatter smashing a fly. Everything went black as night. He stood up and grabbed at his arms, legs, body, making sure he was alive. The darkness quickly became a rusty orange haze, and Victor emerged through the thinning smoke, moving slowly toward him. Blood streaked down his cheeks.
“What the hell happened?!” Smith shouted.
“No idea…incoming artillery? Let’s go this way!”
They headed for the northeast end of the Alamo, where the smoke was less dense, and threw themselves into an old bomb crater.
Brent didn’t remember Amerine telling him to stay where he was, because he was barely conscious at the time. When Amerine ran off, he tried to stand and fell back down. He remained on his hands and knees, fighting the urge to throw up. It passed and he sat down, patting his hands over his body, which seemed to be mostly intact. The uniform covering his lower body looked as if it had gone through a cheese grater, the shrapnel imbedded in his legs feeling hotter and more painful as the shock wore off. Assuming that they’d been attacked, Brent grabbed an AK-47 on the ground next to him and crawled behind a section of the eroding wall. He checked to see if the weapon was loaded, pushed up to his feet, and stumbled through the drifting smoke in search of a better fighting position.
Kneeling together in the crater, Smith and Victor called out when they saw Brent stumbling around, unaware that half of the AK-47 in his hands was gone. He dived into the crater between them, and the three men began scanning the smoke for signs of a Taliban attack.
After a couple of minutes, Brent said, “My legs are feeling kind of numb—and my back.” Smith pulled up Brent’s shirt to reveal a round, nickel-size hole in his lower back, deep and blackened; his torso and both of his legs were peppered with smaller burns and lacerations.
“Oh jeez, you’re hit, man,” Smith said.
“Who’s hit?” asked the battalion sergeant major, Ray Reid, who appeared out of the cloud and knelt down by the edge of the crater for a closer look at Brent’s wounds. “Let’s get him off the hill so we have a wall behind us,” he said, and Victor and Smith helped support Brent down to the side of the medical clinic.
“Set him down,” said Reid, then he yelled out in a deep voice that carried across the Alamo: “This is the CCP!”
As Amerine ran back up to the command post, he heard Reid’s shout. At the top of the Alamo a short distance from the mass of bodies, he found Fox kneeling beside the headquarters combat weatherman, Staff Sergeant Craig Musselman, who was lying on his back and moaning, his hands covered in blood and his heels kicking at the ground. Fox’s rucksack was open beside him, and he was pressing a bandage over Musselman’s right eye, trying to stop the blood that was flowing down his cheeks.
“You hit, sir?” Amerine shouted to Fox, whose face, hair, and the front of his uniform were coated in red. Fox looked at him through the smoke, pointing at his ears. Amerine yelled the question again.
“I’m all right,” said Fox. “This isn’t my blood!”
“Delta is calling for medevac and setting up security. We gotta get these guys down to the medical clinic.”
Mr. Big, Zepeda, and another CIA spook hurried up, carrying aid bags. “How can we help?” asked Mr. Big.
“Help our guys,” s
aid Amerine. “We’re just getting started. Help anyone you can find.”
Amerine heard the distinct whoosh of a rocket from somewhere inside the smoke enveloping the Alamo, then saw an RPG’s glow rising into the air. Somebody yelled, “Incoming! We’re under attack!” More ammunition started to cook off, sounding like firecrackers. Looking down at the trucks, he saw piles of RPGs engulfed in flames. He ran back down the slope to extinguish them. That was when he noticed legs poking out from underneath the truck parked closest to the blast. The right side of the vehicle was dented and punctured by shrapnel, its windows were blown in, and the passenger side of the cab was collapsed and bent inward as if a wrecking ball had clobbered it.
Kneeling down, Amerine saw that the legs belonged to Dan.
Amerine knew he was dead by the extent of his abdominal wound. As he stared in disbelief at Dan’s face, the periphery faded into a blur until a series of whooshes right beside the truck jolted him back to his surroundings. He looked up, then shielded his face with his arm as three RPGs ten feet away blasted off in different directions.
RPGs lay on the ground around the trucks, their cloth carrier bags on fire. The safety cones were still on these rockets, keeping them from detonating, but the burning bags were heating the propellant and causing the RPGs to fire off as lethal projectiles. The guerrillas were notorious for removing safety cones, so it was possible that some of these rounds were live and would explode on impact. Amerine stood up and spun around, taking in the scene: Smoke and dust still hung in the air; men were staggering aimlessly or sitting down, confused. Delta operators were arriving on the scene, running toward the Alamo, and a Pinzgauer had rolled out of Shawali Kowt and parked with its machine guns pointing south and west to cover those flanks. Twenty or thirty yards to the west of the truck, a leg in American camouflage lay in the dirt, as if it had been ripped off a toy soldier.
Another RPG took flight, and again a voice shouted, “Incoming!”
“We are not under attack!” Amerine bellowed. “Our RPGs are cooking off!” He grabbed the nearest RPG and yanked the rocket out of its burning bag, then another, his bare hands feeling nothing as they reached into the flames again and again.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Futility
* * *
My subject is war, and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity.
—Wilfred Owen
* * *
Swirling brown and black hid the Alamo in a cloud billowing skyward when Chris Pickett pushed himself up off the ground between the trucks and the medical clinic. He tried to stand, his body swaying on unstable legs. What happened?! he thought. Are we under attack? Did we get mortared?
Sounds came to him as if through a long tunnel. Over the ringing in his ears, he heard the muted but unmistakable whoosh of an RPG as somebody shouted, “Incoming!”
Pickett stared hard into the dusky fog, thinking, Run! Run! He took a step toward the clinic, then stopped. Okay, where’s my weapon? His M4 carbine was several yards off, its metal bent, the plastic cracked and shredded. Inhaling a long, deep breath, he tasted desert soil and smoke. He heard no gunfire and wondered again if they could be under attack.
A breeze blew over the Alamo and dissipated the cloud for a moment, revealing bodies and body parts everywhere. The smoke closed in again, shrouding the horrific sight. There was another whoosh. Then another. But no explosions.
“We are not under attack!” a voice yelled from somewhere behind the smoke. “Our RPGs are cooking off!”
When the smoke thinned out again after a few seconds, Pickett saw what looked like zombies rising up across the lower slopes of the Alamo, covered in dirt and ash and struggling to keep their balance.
His head throbbed. Crawling his fingers over his scalp to check for injury, he felt the warm, slippery wetness of blood, and probed carefully at the torn flesh and the rough edges of shrapnel imbedded in the back of his skull, which was otherwise intact. He pulled his hand back; it was an oily crimson. The realization that he’d been wounded had an oddly calming effect; it also reminded him of his job. Okay, you’re a medic, Pickett thought, wiping the blood on his pants. You’ve got to start treating these guys.
Forty thousand feet above, Crosby continued to fly his B-52 in circles. Following more than two minutes of radio silence, he and his crew began to feel anxious. Normally, the ground controller would immediately inform them whether they had struck the target.
Crosby told his copilot to call Rambo 85 and find out what was going on.
After a few unsuccessful attempts to make contact, a Delta operator in Shawali Kowt came on the same local frequency. He informed the crew that he was northwest of the American position, watching smoke billowing up. “Something really big just hit,” he said. “I believe they may be under mortar or artillery attack. Do you have more ordnance on board in case we need you?”
“We’ve got a full load,” said the copilot. “What are the coordinates of the American position?”
“Stand by,” was the response.
All five crewmen on the B-52 were listening in on the radio when the Delta operator rattled off the numbers. Four of them had heard Price deliver and confirm the coordinates of the cave. Each had recorded the data separately and confirmed that each other’s matched up; only then had the target been entered into the weapon. Now the crew rechecked their notes and the computer: The coordinates given to them by the Delta operator were only a few yards away from the ones they’d just programmed into the bomb’s guidance system.
“Hey!” the copilot told the Delta operator. “We don’t think they’re under fire—that appears to be where we dropped our weapon!”
Crosby looked over at his copilot, both men sick with the realization that they’d just hit an American position with one of the most powerful weapons in the world.
“Try to reach them again,” Crosby said.
“Any Rambo Eight Five element, this is Aetna Seven Nine. Do you copy?”
With his radio pack between his legs and his microphone in his right hand, Price had been focused on the cave and waiting for the explosion. He had glanced at Alex sitting beside him. The next instant, he was flipping through the air, then there was a flash, and then—nothing.
When Price came to, he was on his back and could not breathe or see a thing. His arm felt dead, as though he’d slept on it, and he had to drag it up to touch his face, which felt hot and tingling. Forcing his lungs to take a big gulp of air, he choked on the gritty earth that was everywhere, packed into his nostrils, his ears, his eye sockets. A coughing fit sent pain shooting through his chest.
A hot wind gusted, clearing the smoke slightly, and he saw that he was covered in dirt from the stomach down. Pushing himself to the side, he was able to sit up. The smell from incinerated bowels was sickening. He looked at the low wall of the command post, and it brought him back to the ridge, the bomb, and the last words he’d heard from the B-52 crewman: “Weapon away.”
When Price relayed the order, there were fifty or more Afghans on the Alamo, watching the bombing with most of the fifteen-member headquarters staff. ODA 574’s eleven men had been on or near the hill as well. More than seventy men were within forty yards of Price in the moments before he’d cleared the bomber to drop the 2,000-pound JDAM. A bomb that big, he knew, required a buffer space of at least five hundred yards to ensure the safety of friendly forces.
Now this hillside was a wasteland. What the fuck happened?! he thought.
He’d told the pilot they were 2,000 yards from the target. He’d been careful not to give their position, providing only what he thought were the coordinates of the cave according to the Viper. Weapons guided by coordinates did not go astray; they went where you told them to go, which meant that he must have given the bomber the wrong coordinates.
In the distance a voice shouted, “This is the CCP!” A dead Afghan a few feet away was sprawled in the dirt with a hole the size of a fist clean through his head. Men were groaning in the smoke around him. Who
ever was panting like a dog nearby, Price knew from his medical training, was probably about to die. I fucked up, he realized. I did this…Jesus, I fucking did this.
Once the shock began to wear off, Nelson Smith knew he had to get commo running again. Then he remembered that he had left sensitive items—his radio and cipher book—at the top of the Alamo when he’d gone for batteries.
Walking slowly back toward the hill, he nearly stepped on Mag, who was on his side near the lower slope of the Alamo. How had he missed him when he’d run by here just a few minutes before? Had Mag crawled over?
Mag looked up at Smith and spoke like a child: “Don’t. Feel. Good.” He reached out with a hand that was a dripping mop of shredded bone, flesh, and tendon. Dropping to his knees, Smith gripped Mag’s forearm as hard as he could to slow the bleeding and cried out, “Medic!”
As Pickett grabbed his aid bag from the bed of one of ODA 574’s trucks, he glanced up the rise to where he’d spoken with JD—that entire western slope was now void of anything but drifting smoke. The crowd of Afghans standing there moments before had vanished. As he slung the bag over his shoulder, a hand grasped his bicep. He turned to see Major Bolduc and Sergeant Major Reid standing there.
“Bandage up the doc’s head so he can start treating people,” Bolduc said to Reid, who reached into Pickett’s bag, grabbed a roll of gauze, and wrapped it around Pickett’s head. Bolduc started to limp up the side of the Alamo.
“You wounded, sir?” Pickett yelled after him.
“No,” Bolduc shouted back. “Just got flattened by the blast, hurt my hip and my ears are ringing, but I’m not hit.”