MARINES CONFRONT AFGHAN ENEMY IN FIREFIGHT
Marines and sailors from Camp Pendleton engage insurgents in a two-day battle at a remote village
LWAR BAJIGAR, Afghanistan
—
The moon is nearly full when the helicopters descend on fields of
cucumber and cracked ground strewed with poppy chaff. Eight airborne
assault waves of Marines wearing heavy rucksacks and night-vision
goggles step into the darkness with rifles drawn, returning to a cluster
of villages where they battled insurgents a week before.
The assault force is part of Operation Branding Iron, a move by the
Marines to confront and eliminate enemy fighters in the remote Kajaki
district, one of their last strongholds in Helmand province.
As dawn breaks for the second day, Sgt. Erick Miranda and his squad move
into a mud-walled compound they intend to use for fire support as
another squad searches nearby buildings for weapons and enemy
commanders.
The first burst of machine-gun fire on their position forces a change in
plan. It is the insurgency’s opening salvo in a two-day firefight for
about 100 Marines and sailors from two platoons with Fox Company, 2nd
Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, an infantry battalion from Camp
Pendleton.
Families with toddlers in tow had fled the area dragging suitcases
shortly after Miranda and his squad of Marines arrived. Just after 6
a.m., the enemy opens fire on their compound flanked by vineyards
hanging with small green grapes.
On the domed roof of a manger, Lance Cpl. Trent Wolf, 23, of
Indianapolis, squeezes bursts from his 240B machine gun. Close by is
Sgt. Mares Vega, 25, of Salinas, a sniper firing booming rounds from his
massive SASR, a precision .50-caliber sniper rifle.
“Be advised … we’re taking contact,” Miranda, 22, of Los Angeles, says into the radio.
They are close enough to the enemy fighters they can hear their shouts
and see them with the naked eye popping in and out of a doorway across a
field.
Many of the Marines are dragging on cigarettes during a pause in the
fighting when the platoon commander arrives that morning with more
Marines. 1st Lt. Calum Belden, 26, of Averill Park, N.Y., peers into the
distance with binoculars. “Were they accurate?” he asks.
“They were hitting that wall, sir,” Miranda says.
“We’re just going to hold here and see if they’ll come play with us,” Belden radios higher command.
Within an hour, the enemy resumes firing, this time from a different
direction. Cpl. Greg Dominguez, a 2009 graduate of Bonita Vista High
School, shoots back with a long burst from his machine gun. The gun gets
so hot it melts his glove.
At about 9 a.m., the compound is shaken by a blast from a rocket-propelled grenade. “RPG, light ’em up!” a Marine yells.
“Ammo! Bring me ammo!” Dominguez hollers as his gun chews through a belt
of bullets, spitting brass casings and black metal brackets. “Murder
holes, murder holes!” he says, directing the Marines to enemy firing
ports gouged in mud walls.
The firefight intensifies until at one point the Marines use almost
every weapon they have. “Get some, Dom!” a Marine screams amid the
cacophony of shouted commands and whoops of support. Amid the chaos, one
falls through the roof into the manger.
“Hey, we’re taking fire from three directions now!” Belden barks into
his radio during one 17-minute fusillade. It was the most intense
sustained combat his platoon had seen in the entire deployment.
“Cover your ears!” a Marine yells as Lance Cpl. Jeff Duane, aka “Bazooka
Jeff,” fires the rocket. The blast sends a dust cloud quivering from
the walls inside the compound.
Belden helps the mortar team walk their rounds closer to the enemy position, calling out “Drop 30 … Fire!”
The mortar section chief, Cpl. Raymond Delawder, 22, of Purgitsville,
W.Va., yells, “Hang it … Fire!” as his team places a mortar in the tube.
It shoots out again with a boom and a metallic ping followed several
seconds later by the crump of impact. Afterward, an enemy body lies
slumped against a wall.
During a break in the fighting, Delawder stretches out to listen to a
country music singer croon “if I die young” from tinny speakers on his
iPod.
“At least they’ll actually fight you here,” in Kajaki district, he says.
“It sucks when they won’t stick around. … It’s also a good thing, too. I
guess they’re losing their willpower to fight. I guess we’re winning.”
The firefight continues intermittently over the next two days, making a
hen and her gangly chicks screech for cover and the dog tied to a tree
outside shake with fear. This is war at its essence — long periods of
boredom interspersed with the exhilaration of all-out combat.
By 7:30 a.m., the sweat is already rolling down the Marines’ faces, and
the heat is climbing toward 120 degrees. The water they carried in is so
hot you could cook Ramen noodles in it, a Marine notes. At midday,
another finds a broken egg on the ground, cooked by the sun.
Between shooting, the Marines talk of food, women and beer. They compare
intended first meals back home: a porterhouse from Lonestar Steakhouse,
Pedro’s Fish Tacos, Domino’s (“Really?” another scoffs), “anything my
wife cooks me.”
“My girl’s probably worried sick about me. I Skype with her every day,” says Lance Cpl. Jeff Duane, 20, from Castro Valley.
The enemy finally stops shooting at nightfall. The sky fills with stars
and the muezzin calls from the nearby mosque where insurgents were
spotted storing ammunition. Crickets chirp a lullaby as Marines sleep on
the ground, wrapped in nothing but a poncho liner in some cases,
swatting at mosquitoes.
Miranda, the squad leader, dozes with his grenade launcher on the
mounded roof, next to his men peering into the night through rifle
scopes and binoculars.
On the second day of the firefight, the enemy cracks off a few shots
just before 8 a.m. “It’s a single-shot weapon. Could be a sniper,”
Belden says on the radio. Sporadic gunfire frustrates the Marines. When
the enemy pops off another shot, one Marine puts his dukes up, jabbing
left and right. “C’mon, put ’em up, put ’em up!” he says.
Over the crackle of the radio traffic, the Afghan interpreter informs
them that the insurgents are frustrated, too. “We buried a lot of IEDs
(improvised explosive devices). I don’t know why they’re not walking,”
one says, according to Rocky’s translation.
"We are not (wimps) because we won’t go into their booby trap,” Belden replies. “We’re smarter than that.”
“That’s the most frustrating part about this war. We can’t move,”
Dominguez says. “As much as we would love to go kick in a door and shoot
someone in the face, we can’t do that because there’s too many IEDs in
there. … The juice isn’t worth the squeeze.”
“I don’t want to lose my legs,” agrees Sgt. Ari Malliaros, 26, of
Wildomar, grousing over their inability to maneuver as trained. “We
can’t run here. I have not run one time in Afghanistan.”
About lunchtime, an RPG explodes near the north side of the wall. At
dusk on the second day of fighting, the platoon commander is standing at
the roofline when he sees the flash of another rocket propelled grenade
shooting straight for his head. He ducks and a cloud of dirt erupts
about 60 feet away from him. When he looks up, he can see the smoke
trails, and his ears ring.
Miranda instantly squeezes off four grenade rounds. “Watch out! Watch
out!” he calls, shooting over the heads of his Marines on the roof.
One of the Afghan soldiers fighting with the Marines is also armed with
an RPG launcher. “Rocket man,” as the Marines call him, has an air
freshener dangling from it in the Afghan tradition of decorating
weapons. Sparkly stickers or Gatorade labels are also popular. He fires
it at the enemy, a little close for comfort to some other Marines in the
distance.
The combined Marine force ends up killing several insurgents and
wounding a few more, but suffers no casualties of its own. The
reinforced squad at the main compound under attack expended a couple
thousand rifle rounds, 36 mortars, 50 grenades and 25 rounds from the
.50-caliber gun, among other munitions.
At twilight on the fourth night, the Marines gear up to leave. Hours
later in the early morning darkness, they hunker quietly in a tree line
to wait for the helicopters.
A loud explosion suddenly pierces the dead calm. After checking with
each other, the Marines conclude it must have been an accidental
discharge of a roadside bomb. “Maybe we have one less IED planter,”
Dominguez whispers, adding a mental tick mark to the operation tally.
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