My Army Story part 4

MY ARMY STORY
Part IV

By Ken Scar

On my first mission in the war zone, outside FOB Tillman, on a ridge bordering Pakistan less than two hours after being ambushed in a river bed in a canyon in front of and to the left of me here. FOB Tillman can be seen as the light splotches in the distance in the upper right corner of this photo.

AFGHANISTAN

I knew I was guaranteed to go to one of the war zones when I joined the Army – I was counting on it, after all - but when it became real it became very real. The 7th MPAD received orders to deploy to Afghanistan about a year after I arrived at Fort Hood.

The Army spent the next nine months preparing us. We were sent to an endless series of briefings, psychological exams, and medical appointments; got issued weapons, body armor, and brand-new uniforms (the Army required a different-colored uniform for Afghanistan); practiced roll-overs in vehicles, had our teeth checked and our hearing tested, and got pep-talks from priests. The tension built until the day we left.

Finally, on August 13, 2011 the 7th MPAD loaded into a nondescript government contract airliner at Robert Gray Army Airfield to make the grueling journey across the world to support Operation Enduring Freedom.

We were sent to Regional Command – East (RC-East), an area of operation covering the northeast quarter of Afghanistan. We flew into war in the belly of a C-17 Globemaster – the massive and awe-inspiring workhorse of the Air Force – and landed at Bagram Airfield (BAF), which at 8,000 feet is dug into the heart of Afghanistan at the same elevation as my hometown in Colorado. BAF sits in a high-mountain valley called the Panjshir that is surrounded by jagged, snow-capped mountains, very similar to the alpine valleys in the Rockies. The climate was very similar too, but with more heat and dust in the summer and more mud and rain in the winter.

We were collected with all our gear and driven up the main road of BAF – Disney Drive – to our housing: A row of temporary wooden shacks that would maybe pass for decent backyard tree houses back home. There is only one thing to do at BAF, so we settled into our new plywood homes and got to work.

In the war zone, every mission is executed in “full kit” meaning we had to wear 50-plus pounds of armor plating, weapons, ammunition, a first aid kit, and our loaded M4 rifles, which were never out of arm’s reach for one minute of our time there. We 46Q’s also had to add several pounds of cameras and lenses to clack around on top of it all. It felt like walking around with a vending machine wrapped around your body.

After my first couple of missions, I got good at adjusting the straps around my neck so my camera would hang neatly over my armor-plated vest in the space between my ammo pouches and my individual first aid kit (IFAK), which helped keep it from swinging around and banging into me or my M4 with every other step.

When we traveled by road, it was like astronauts in a space ship; locked inside huge mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs) that were rolling fortresses complete with machine guns, cannons, life support systems, and surveillance technology.

When we traveled by air, it was usually in heavily armed UH-60 Black Hawk or Chinook helicopters, often with doors wide open, all engine noise and wind. With all the body armor on I felt like a turtle flying around in a tin coffee can.

When we traveled by foot, it was in our protective shells; heavy metal vending machines with legs.

My year deployed would be typical of most; long periods of malaise interrupted by short bursts of excitement. Not so typical was that as a 46Q I got to experience a wide variety of missions, embedding with companies and platoons in the thick of fighting all over RC-East. I did foot patrols with infantry units, cleared villages with scout units, rode in a convoy down the notorious Highway 1 with a transportation company, did air assaults, tagged along on battlefield circulations with (then) Brig. Gen. Gary Volesky, patrolled the perimeters of BAF with an Air Force infantry unit, and even spent a day following Senator John McCain around.

It turned out to be a damn cool job. The best part was having the power to raise morale. I would document the cool stuff Soldiers were doing, and then help get them well-deserved recognition in the papers and on internet sites back home. Every time a Soldier’s picture would appear in a hometown paper or on a website, it raised the spirits of the entire unit.

I also got to go places and see things even the most renowned civilian journalists could not. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I did my best to seize it.

Alcohol was forbidden in Afghanistan, and I didn’t miss it.

THE C.A.B.

My first real mission in the war zone was at Forward Operating Base Tillman – named after true American hero Pat Tillman, who gave up a career in the NFL to serve his country only to be killed tragically by friendly fire in that area of operation (AO) in 2004. I didn’t know much about the military before joining – but I knew Pat Tillman’s story. Being sent to the base named after him in the same area he died was sobering to say the least.

FOB Tillman sat at the foot of a small river valley spitting distance from the mountainous border of North Waziristan, Pakistan. Enemy fighters could easily get close enough to fire mortars at the base from the Pakistan side, which they knew made it politically forbidden for us to retaliate. As a result, FOB Tillman took indirect fire (firing a projectile without a direct line of sight) on an almost daily basis.

I was flown in by “jingle chopper,” which is what we called the noisy government-contracted helicopters that operated all over RC-East. They were mostly old Russian Sikorsky’s flown by grizzled old pilots from who knows where that had seen who knows what. Jingle choppers were essentially soup cans with rotors. The one I flew to FOB Tillman in had several bullet holes in the fuselage. I watched the sunlight blink through them as we banked back and forth through the mountains.

We touched down on a tiny patch of gravel laid across a hillside. I jumped out into a cloud of green smoke and scrambled to gather my equipment and hustle to the beefed-up ATV that was waiting to take me to the headquarters building, where I would meet the chain of command I’d be answering to during my time there. The thrum of the chopper faded back over the ridgeline and was replaced by another sound – the powpowpowpow of a .50 Caliber machine gun somewhere in the hills above us.

“Holy shit that’s intense,” I said, mostly to myself.

“What’s intense?” asked the sergeant who’d come to pick me up.

“Those guns going off!”

That got a chuckle out of him. “You know those are our guns, right?”

Sure I did – but they were shooting at someone, an enemy, which meant I was in the shit for real now.

The soldiers of FOB Tillman, most who were with the 172nd Infantry Brigade, were on the tail end of their one-year deployment. When the whistle of rocket-propelled grenades filled the air nobody but me blinked. This was life in the combat zone, and they were used to it. I found that both terrifying and comforting.

My first mission came a day or two after I arrived: I was to accompany a platoon from Company C, 66th Armor Regiment, Task Force Blackhawk on a two-day foot patrol through the tiny villages that surrounded the FOB and out into the barren mountain tributaries that led into the valley to inspect a point of origin (POO) i.e. a geographic location the enemy had been using to launch rockets at us.

The platoon leader, a second lieutenant that was half my age and 100 times more Hooah (Google it), gathered us in the dark just before the sun rose and explained how it was going to go: They’d taken fire from the enemy almost every time they’d patrolled the area we were headed to, “So keep your eyes wide open and your head on a swivel. Stay frosty. Situational awareness at all times. We get shot at every time we go to this place.”

That’s the moment I knew I’d made a terrible mistake. Somewhere between basic training and jumping out of that jingle chopper, I’d lost my desire for a hero’s death.

I executed a quiet, private hyperventilation into my breastplate that included puffing “What the fuck am I doing here?” multiple times under my breath.

It had been way, way too easy to get here. I was a 42-year-old painter for god’s sake - weighted down with body armor, cameras, and an M4 preparing to walk into a war. It made zero sense. I did not belong with these men. My stupid act of desperation had gotten way out of hand.

But once again, there was no turning back. I had to go. I lined up with the rest of the platoon and started walking.

Looking back, walking off FOB Tillman still feels like the craziest thing I’ve ever done. We knew we were walking into a fight, but we walked anyway - right out the gate and up the dirt road on the other side, in the cold of dawn, out into the jagged countryside - because we were Soldiers and we were ordered to do so.

I placed myself at the head of the column so I could turn back and get photos of the Soldiers’ faces. It was madness to willingly leave the safety of FOB Tillman, but in my photos they all look cool as cucumbers. This was just another day at work for them, and that was reassuring.

My legs stopped shaking and my breathing became normal an hour or so into it. As the sun rose, the frigid cold in the air gave way to a pleasant coolness that felt good on my face. We walked past a group of goat herders camped next to a small creek living out of horse-drawn caravans. It was my first encounter with real Afghans. They watched us file by with silent indifference.

The scenery was quite spectacular. We could have been hiking through the Alps. After a couple of hours I started to relax, but sure enough, after about seven hours of hiking through small villages and side canyons, our element – about 20 American and Afghan National Army (ANA) soldiers – stopped for a water break in a dry stream bed and got ambushed. I heard the “crack, crack” of AK-47’s, and saw dirt and rocks being thrown by the impact a few yards away.

“Is that . . . ?” I started to ask two Soldiers drinking from their canteens next to me.

And then all hell broke loose.

I remained strangely calm through the entire engagement. All around me, my fellow soldiers and our ANA partners planted themselves and unleashed a barrage of bullets and mortar rounds straight back up the canyon and down the throat of whoever had fired at us. I took cover behind a large boulder with another Soldier and an Air Force joint terminal attack controller (JTAC). Both of them were in front of me returning fire, making it impossible for me to shoot my weapon, so I took a couple (not great) photos that were later used to get each of them Combat Action Badges (CAB’s).

It was over in a couple of minutes. Our attackers either fled, or were dead.

The incident was called into headquarters at FOB Tillman, and relayed to higher headquarters at BAF. A few minutes later we received instructions to change direction and hike to the ridgeline directly to our right – a brutal trek straight up through rocks and shrub. After expelling a chorus of groans, we moved out and trucked up the hillside, reaching the ridgeline just as the sun was setting.

Not long after that, the platoon leader and his platoon sergeant determined that we were going to run out of water if we didn’t get resupplied. They called in a request to the tactical operation center (TOC) at FOB Tillman, which was the room full of higher-ranking Soldiers who had planned the mission and were tracking our movements.

An hour or two later, the unmistakable thrum of a Chinook filled the mountainsides. The gigantic, two-bladed bird roared right up over the ridge we were sitting on and descended into the canyon below us, where it dropped a pallet of water in the river bed – right where we’d been ambushed just a few hours before.

I looked across the ridge we were on, which was as long and wide as a football field.

“Why didn’t they just land here??”

I didn’t get an answer, but our platoon leader did not look happy. Some field-grade officer back in the confines of the FOB had decided it was a good idea to drop our water right smack back in the kill zone.

Our sergeant spat through his teeth into the dry grass on the plateau, “Fucking idiot. He’s not the one who has to hike back down this fucking mountain and get it.”

This, I would learn, was a classic example of how things can go very wrong very fast in a war. Miscommunication is a killer.

The platoon sergeant sent six men and a squad of ANA soldiers back down to the riverbed to retrieve the water. Sure enough, they started taking fire again as soon as they got there.

The JTAC called in a “show of force” which, I found out, is a demonstration to our enemies that we could easily annihilate them if they didn’t cut out their bullshit. Fifteen minutes later two F-16’s from BAF roared up through the canyon maybe 200 feet over the riverbed, all sound and lights, and ignited their afterburners next to our position, filling the night with such an ungodly noise that my eyes watered.

It left all of us on the mountaintop whooping and cheering like a bunch of crazed sports fans.

As the jets banked and roared back into the night, one of the Soldiers guarding our perimeter hooted, “If I was one of the bad guys I’d be switching sides right about now!”

We spent a frigid night on the ridge, curled up in little patches of grass between rocks with our weapons tucked against us, taking turns on guard duty and sleeping if we could. To quote another one of my comrades that day: It was Army as fuck. The enemy didn’t show their faces again.

Two days later I walked back through the gates of FOB Tillman a different person. I truly knew what it meant to be a Soldier. You’re one wolf in a pack: Alone you’re formidable, but together you’re invincible. I would witness that over and over again in the months to come.

For surviving the ambush, I received my own CAB “for performing assigned duties under hostile fire, while actively engaging or being engaged by the enemy.” It remains the military award I am proudest of, because it states in unequivocal terms that I had the balls to put my life on the line for my country. I will forever have a profound respect for anyone that’s done the same, whether they encountered the enemy out there or not.

I did many more missions outside the wire during my deployment and was very fortunate. I never saw one of my brothers or sisters injured badly or killed, and not for the lack of trying. Several times I’d go out with a platoon or a squad and nothing would happen, only to find out later that same group had taken casualties on their very next mission. I don’t know what else to attribute it to but luck. I came back without a scratch.

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In my B-hut on Bagram Air Field a few minutes after getting the highest APFT score of my Army career, age 42. 90 push-ups in two minutes, 82 sit-ups in two minutes, and ran two miles in 10:50.