For Love of Country by Howard Schultz

Author:Howard Schultz [Schultz, Howard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-101-87446-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-11-03T16:00:00+00:00

As the sun set behind the mountain on which most of the insurgents had perched, the firing ebbed. The Talibs, who lacked night-vision goggles, couldn’t spot their prey in the nearly moonless night. Although White and Takes never said so over the radio, they shared the same concern: Might the lull in shooting mean that the Taliban were trying to sneak up and besiege them from close range?

Had the 173rd Airborne soldiers been in Iraq instead of Afghanistan, help from the sky would have arrived less than fifteen minutes into the ambush, perhaps in the form of an AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, which carries a 30-millimeter chain gun and sixteen Hellfire missiles; or a supersonic F-16 fighter with five-hundred-pound satellite-guided bombs; or an AC-130 Spectre gunship, equipped with a cannon that spits out four-inch-wide rounds. But in 2007, the Afghanistan campaign was the Pentagon’s “economy of force” war. Most of the military’s aircraft were in Iraq to support the troop surge there. Overextended air support crews in Afghanistan did not always show up with the haste of a Domino’s Pizza delivery.

Two Apaches had hovered over the platoon as it left Aranas, but those birds had pulled away before the ambush, summoned to a different valley because another contingent of 173rd soldiers had gotten into a gunfight. By the time White got on the radio to request help, the only available aircraft was a B-1 bomber, which arrived ninety minutes into the attack. It dropped three separate one-thousand-pound bombs on the insurgents. Other aircraft arrived soon after, but their crews needed to assess the ongoing threat before medical helicopters could enter the valley.

On the trail and in the valley, White and Takes sought to keep themselves and their wounded comrades alive. As the sun vanished and the temperature dipped to just above freezing, White bundled Schilling in a poncho to keep him warm.

“Where are they?” Schilling asked about the medevac choppers.

“They’re on the way,” White replied, patting Schilling’s head, as he scanned the trail in both directions.

Schilling repeated the question every few minutes. White kept offering the same answer. The truth was that he didn’t know. The helicopters should have arrived by then. He had described Schilling as “urgent surgical.”

And then he heard the crunch-crunch of approaching footsteps on the trail.

Here comes the next attack, he thought.

White flipped the safety on his M4 to semiautomatic and raised it to fire. Then he heard the voice of Bocks’s interpreter.

“Here comes the ANA,” the interpreter said, using the acronym for the Afghan National Army. Several of the Afghan soldiers who had been at the end of the column came into view.

Using the interpreter, White directed them to guard both sides of the trail. His head was throbbing from the successive grenade explosions, and he began to worry that he would pass out, leaving Schilling alone with the Afghans.

When he finally heard the clatter of an approaching helicopter and a medic dropped down in a harness, White sent Schilling up first, then two wounded

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.