Victory Point - Ed Darack [126]
Moving quickly yet remaining well concealed, and staying to the west of the Super Highway, Ronin did all they could to stay invisible and keep eyes on Echo-3. But as each man in the team knew all too well, avoiding soft compromise on Sawtalo Sar after traveling the mountain’s slopes for over five days—especially after linking up with an entire platoon at the mountain’s summit—was virtually impossible. And so, a little over an hour into their descent, a lone elderly Afghan man appeared “out of nowhere,” as typically occurred in the region. The trio approached him—he was unarmed, carried no ICOM, and looked unkempt and extremely unhealthy. Pigman immediately locked onto the man’s milky-white eyeballs. Trachoma, the corpsman thought. Eerie as hell. The team attempted to ask him some questions in basic Pashto, but the man, whose clothes were torn and soiled, didn’t cooperate. Following their rules of engagement, they photographed him, then sent him in the opposite direction of their travel.
“I got a real bad feeling about that guy,” Pigman said to Eggers and Roy as the figure disappeared into the trees above them. All three, having read Marcus Luttrell’s after-action report, felt the encounter was a bad omen. “First we see Shah’s hides, then this guy,” the corpsman continued.
“All right. Let’s keep moving, gotta maintain eyes on Echo-3,” Eggers stated. In addition to their training as scout/snipers, each of the three had grown up with a love of outdoor pursuits. Pigman couldn’t get enough of hiking, camping, and hunting in his home state of New Jersey; Roy, from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, lived for hunting season; and Eggers’s activities ran the gamut from kite surfing in his hometown of Santa Cruz, California, to multipitch alpine rock climbing in the high Sierra Nevada. The trio might have been far from their stomping grounds, but they felt right at home in the wild environment of the Hindu Kush. Quickly and silently, Ronin flowed down the north ridge.
Soon they reached an open area, surrounded on all sides by high ground—a perfect setting for an ambush. They had no choice, however, but to cross through it; they needed to keep visual contact with Echo-3. Roy scanned the area repeatedly with his spotting scope, but could find nothing. “Stay low,” Eggers reminded his teammates. “I got a bad feeling about this.” He moved out in front of the team, “on point,” with Pigman behind him and Roy acting as “tail-end Charlie,” in the rear. Sweating from the noontime heat, each of the snipers sensed every crunch of their feet on the dirt and every whisk past a shrub’s branch loudly echoing in their heads as they moved through low vegetation in the steep bowl.
They reached the bottom of the bowl quickly, crouching through the waist-high vegetation and maintaining solid dispersion from one another. Without breaking their gait, the three began to course up the rise in front of them—toward the safety of the forest above. Then, out of the breezy, thin air, they heard a brrrrrrrrrrrrrr! The first shots of the ambush rang out. The hillsides to their left and right exploded in machine-gun and RPG fire. Pigman, turning to his left, flung his M16 into firing position, threw the selector onto burst, and plugged three shots downrange—then saw nothing but sky and some distant clouds as his leg buckled under the weight of his pack and he fell backward. A PK light machine-gun round had driven into his left knee, shattering his lower femur before lodging under his kneecap. Rounds cracked over his head, but he continued to fire. He dropped his pack, then felt a round impact his left gut, and rolled over and continued to fire, his knee locked in an L-shape as he struggled to keep putting rounds accurately downrange. Moments later, three more rounds impacted his chest, directly