Victory Point - Ed Darack [127]
“Roy!” he yelled as the intense gunfire ramped up in fervor. “ROY!” Pigman had been hit at least seven times. RPGs burst around him as he clawed his way through the low bushes. The gunfire ceased for a moment, allowing the corpsman to grab a pressure dressing and wrap it tightly around his leg above the wound. Intense pain shot throughout his body—but he was still alive. Keep moving, keep firing! he thought.
“Motherfuckers!” Crack! Crack! Crack! Joe Roy loosed three-shot bursts at the well-covered positions of Shah’s men, revealed only by bright yellow muzzle flashes, about four hundred meters to either side of him. Thud! Thud! Two rounds knocked Roy face-first to the ground. “Shit! You motherfuckers!” The bullets struck his rucksack, but not Roy himself. He sprang to his knees, thrown off balance by his heavy pack—which he dumped onto the ground, freeing him to move faster. Crack! Crack! Crack! He continued to fire at multiple targets. Thud! Another round hit him, hurling him into the dirt. The bullet impacted him squarely on his rear SAPI plate, the shot feeling as if someone had landed a hard-swung sledgehammer between his shoulder blades. Steadily moving back up the hill, Roy repositioned himself to fire and calmly sent yet more volleys of well-placed rounds into the attackers’ positions, alternating targets on his left and right as he tried to maintain suppression of the enemy. But the rate of fire from the attackers, whom Roy figured to be between eight- and twelve-men strong, became overwhelming, saturating the air and ground around him. After low-crawling over thirty meters as he inhaled dirt kicked up by rounds impacting just inches from his head, Roy lurched to his knees again. Crack! Crack! Crack! He shot repeated volleys, each burst skillfully aligned on an enemy position, emptying magazine after magazine. Crack! Crack! Crack! Then, after another low-crawl, he rose up, shooting, and thud! Another of the rounds whizzing through the air struck his rear SAPI—again hurtling him face-first into the dirt. This is gettin’ old, he thought. Where’s Pigman and Eggers?
Below the snipers, near Chichal, the Marines of Echo-3 could hear every burst of the firefight. Guyton immediately grabbed a PRC-117 radio, and accompanied by his strongest Marines, began a sprint up the steep slope. Hearing the overwhelming volume of PK and AK fire, punctuated by the distinctively bloodcurdling sound of launched RPGs, the Echo-3 Marines assumed the three-man team had been killed. Then, out of the cacophony of enemy 7.62 mm weapons, came the crack! crack! crack! of the Snipers’ 5.56 mm bursts. The Marines, holding firm below, began to cheer.
“Roy!” Pigman yelled again.
“Pigman!” Roy called back, now in range of each other. “You all right?”
“Forget about me. I’m good enough to yell. Where’s Eggers?”
“Shit, I thought he was with you . . . EGGERS!” Roy roared into the cruel air during a brief lull in the firefight. “EGGERS!”
“Shit, man. I think he might be dead,” Pigman stated in a horrified tone. “He better not be dead. EGGERS!”
But Eggers wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even hit. After returning fire and dumping his pack—standard operating procedure for scout/snipers under intense attack—the ever-calm sniper leader jumped on one of his radios and contacted First Lieutenant Roe Lemons, an artillery forward observer traveling with Echo-3, and put in an urgent request for both 120 mm mortars and Doghouse’s 105s. The strike would be danger-close, but given the odds against Ronin already, Eggers had no other choice.
“EGGERS!” both Roy and Pigman continued to call out as they low-crawled and plugged rounds into the enemy’s positions. “EGGERS!”
As the two yelled, Shah’s men, likely suspecting that their overwhelming ambush had at least injured the three, broke from their cover and moved toward Eggers. Flat on the dirt, his legs splayed out, holding