The Hardest Place by Wesley Morgan

Author:Wesley Morgan [Morgan, Wesley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-03-09T00:00:00+00:00

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ABU COMPANY WAS walking into not just one ambush, as it turned out, but several.24

The soldiers in Tsangar had been climbing through town for five hours on Friday morning, negotiating terraces as tall as they were and peering over accompanying ANA soldiers’ shoulders as they searched one empty house after another, when explosions and gunfire engulfed an overwatch position the company’s smallest platoon had set up on a knoll overlooking the village. Creeping through the boulders and foliage above the knoll to avoid being spotted by spy planes, drones, or attack helicopters, a group of guerrillas had spent the morning getting close enough to unleash a barrage of accurate machine-gun and RPG fire, taking advantage of an uncovered part of the platoon’s perimeter. The lieutenant, platoon sergeant, and radioman on the knoll fell wounded right away, and more soldiers were soon hit around them.25

Arriving over Tsangar a few minutes into the battle on the knoll, the pilots of two Apaches could see the muzzle flashes out their windows first, and then they could see the insurgents; dressed in a combination of robes and camouflage, they were moving confidently and competently in ones and twos, rushing short distances and covering one another as they spread out around the knoll and closed in to hand-grenade range. Over the radio, the pilot of one attack bird could hear a pinned-down soldier yelling for help and the screams of the wounded around him. The Apache’s cannon tore apart one fighter as he looked right up at the helicopter, but not before he’d added the rocket he was carrying to another punishing close-range salvo of RPGs. The next thing the Apache crews heard over the radio was that the RPGs had killed the platoon medic and a pair of Afghan soldiers.26

Down in Tsangar itself, the rest of Abu Company spent all day dodging machine-gun fire while negotiating one cliff-like terrace after another, struggling to reach their embattled brothers. By the time the company was reunited after dark and the enemy disappeared, half of the twenty-two Americans on the knoll had been hit, and risky hoist operations were under way to get the wounded and dead out. Guided in by a purple smoke grenade, one HH-60 Pave Hawk rescue bird had taken a DShK round through the right engine, and an Air Force pararescueman aboard had been shot.27

That night, Captain Bo Reynolds, the burly Army brat and former West Point wrestler who commanded Abu Company, sat on the cold mountainside, illuminating a laminated map of the valley with the dull red glow from his flashlight, while Ryan gave him new instructions over the radio from down at Honaker-Miracle.

The original plan of coming down from the mountain the next day was off the table now, Ryan said. He and Drew Poppas, the brigade commander back in Jalalabad, had talked it over and agreed that Abu Company needed to get a few hours’ sleep and then start heading north toward the next big village, Katar, a mile and a half farther along the mountainside.

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