Part 7 (1/2)

Cunningham and Smitty were in a decent position to low-crawl to where they thought Bradbury was and drag him back.

”I'm going to get him,” Cunningham said.

”No, he's my guy,” said Monti. ”I'll get him.”

Monti tossed Grzecki his radio. ”You're Chaos Three-Five now,” he said, transferring his call sign, then shouted to Bradbury, ”You're going to be all right! We're coming to get you!” Monti stood and ran north, toward Bradbury and the enemy, away from the cover of the boulders, immediately prompting an eruption of machine-gun fire from the insurgents. Diving behind the small stone wall where Lybert's corpse lay, he paused, then stood and began pus.h.i.+ng toward Bradbury. The enemy fired upon him again. He dove back behind the wall.

”I need cover!” Monti called to his men.

Hawes grabbed an M203 launcher to fire grenades at the enemy. Others s.n.a.t.c.hed up their rifles.

”I'm going to go again!” Monti yelled, and once again he stood and ran toward Bradbury. Monti's quarry was lying on his back, about sixty feet away, in a small depression in the ground that hid him from both the U.S. troops and the insurgents. Bradbury was in agony; an RPG had ripped apart his arm and shoulder.

Now another RPG found its mark, slamming into Monti's legs, setting off its shock wave and filling the air with shrapnel.

The dust cleared. ”My leg's gone!” Monti screamed. ”f.u.c.k!” His leg was in fact still there, but it had been deeply cut by the shrapnel, and he was now in shock. When he tried to crawl back, he couldn't. ”Help me!” Monti cried. ”Cunny, come get me,” he pleaded with Cunningham, obviously in excruciating pain. ”Come get me.”

Cunningham stood and started to move, but the fire was too intense, both from the insurgents, who were frighteningly close, and from the U.S. troops returning their fire. He would have had to run through rounds. Hawes began low-crawling toward Monti, but even on the ground, there was only so far he could go.

For a short while, Monti's fellow troops listened to him scream as he bled out. From a distance, they tried to keep him calm, asking him questions between rounds of returning fire.

”What are you going to do when you get home on leave?” one asked him. ”Will you drink a beer with me?”

”Tell my mom and dad I love them,” Monti said, his voice fading.

”You'll tell them yourself!” yelled Hawes.

Cunningham could hear an enemy commander shouting out orders to his men.

”Tell them I made my peace with G.o.d,” Monti said.

He begged for the release of death, and finally it came.

From afar, the fire-support soldiers kept sending mortars that exploded on the ridgeline above the kill team, and as the sun set, Grzecki directed planes that began dropping five-hundred- and two-thousand-pound bombs about five hundred feet away. That was enough to abate the enemy fire.

Cunningham moved up and provided cover, firing his M203 grenade launcher. Hawes reached Lybert and-after confirming that he was dead-gathered up his ammo and threw it back behind the boulders. Insurgents fired at him; Hawes shot back with an M16 rifle that he found near Lybert, then threw a grenade. Next he scurried over to Monti. Also dead. He took and tossed his ammo, too.

Hawes then moved on to Bradbury, where Smitty met him. Bradbury was still alive, though the RPG blast had done serious damage to his arm. Together Hawes and Smitty carried him toward the boulders. Along the way, they pa.s.sed Monti's body.

”Who's that?” asked Smitty. The fire had been so loud, and the fight so all-consuming, that Smith hadn't been aware of everything that was happening, even just a few yards away.

”Monti,” grunted Hawes.

They pa.s.sed the stone wall.

”Who's that?” asked Smitty.

”Lybert,” Hawes answered.

n.o.ble, the medic, immediately started working on Bradbury. His arm was so badly mangled that n.o.ble had to wrap the tourniquet around his shoulder since there wasn't any place left to put it on the limb itself. The medic showed Garner where to hold the special quick-clotting combat gauze on Bradbury's wounds. The gauze burned a bit as its embedded chemical did its work, sealing the skin and flesh.

”You get to go home now,” Garner rea.s.sured him. ”You get to see your baby early.”

More rounds came toward them, and Hawes got Garner's attention and pointed to Bradbury's weapon.

”Get to it,” Hawes said.

Garner ran back to Bradbury's SAW and started firing. Smitty joined him. Grzecki radioed back to the base: they needed to get a medevac in there, he told them. By now, darkness had fallen upon the mountain.

The enemy retreated, and the kill team a.s.sumed a 360-degree posture, ready to fire outward in all directions.

Monti and Lybert lay side by side. Troops pulling guard duty could look through the thermal sights of their rifles and see the remaining heat leave the bodies of their fallen comrades. Viewed through infrared goggles, the two corpses slowly eased from a light shade of gray into the same inky black as everything else around them.

There was nowhere for the medevac helicopter to land, so one of the birds lowered a hoist carrying a combat medic, Staff Sergeant Heathe Craig, of the 159th Medical Company. Just hours before, Craig had been on his computer, using an Internet chat service to play peekaboo with his daughter, Leona, who was just thirteen days shy of her first birthday. His wife, Judy, and their four-year-old son, Jonas, had giggled because Craig's webcam wasn't functioning properly-to his family, in their off-post apartment close to Wiesbaden, Germany, their husband and father appeared upside down and green.

It was in the middle of that happy interlude that Craig had gotten the call, and now here he was, doing one of his least favorite things in the world: sitting on a Jungle Penetrator, the drill-shaped device lowered from a chopper to extract troops, balancing himself as he descended into hostile territory on the side of a mountain. He'd volunteered to be a flight medic after concluding that being a regular scout medic wasn't enough: treating cases of athlete's foot at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, didn't leave him feeling as if he were really contributing. But this this-well, this was terrifying.

Craig was lowered into an opening in the trees, just above a boulder on a steep decline to the west of the mountain ridge. Garner lit a strobe light, and Cunningham, standing on the boulder, grabbed the medic, losing his wedding ring in the process. Over the din of the choppers, Craig tried to rea.s.sure everyone that the ordeal was over.

”We're going to get you guys out of here!” Craig yelled. ”Everyone's going to be okay.”

The plan was for the two wounded men both to be choppered to an aid station on the same helicopter. Bradbury was supposed to get in the hoist first, but he had started bleeding again and was slipping in and out of consciousness, so Derek James was first to be strapped into the seat. Craig tied himself to the Jungle Penetrator, so that he was facing James around the upright metal stem, and twirled his finger as a signal for the chopper crewman to pull them up. Upon lifting off, the Jungle Penetrator swung from the boulder over the steep decline and started spinning around. Craig controlled the oscillations as he'd been trained to do, and the two men were quickly yanked into the bird.

Craig went right back down again for Bradbury. They got him onto the seat and strapped in, but he was going to be tougher to hoist up because of his wound. Craig twirled his finger again. The Jungle Penetrator swung out and started spinning again, and as they got closer to the helicopter, the oscillating increased in speed.

Unable to hold himself upright, Bradbury was leaning back, making it more difficult for Craig to manage the rotation. The chopper crewman tried to pull the two men up as fast as he could, but the Jungle Penetrator suddenly began spinning out of control. As the crewman frantically worked, the hoist's cable twisted and turned, rubbing against the sharp edge of the chopper's floor.

Because it was dark, Craig had fastened a small light to his gear. On Hill 2610, Matt Chambers stood and watched the light spin around until it was a blur.

Then the cable snapped. Chambers kept watching as the light stopped spinning into a blur and instead began falling, flying down. Craig and Bradbury plummeted some one hundred feet, onto the western side of the ridge, and landed on rocks.

Oh no, the men thought as they saw it happen. G.o.d, G.o.d, no. no.

Cunningham ran down to where they'd fallen, as did Chambers and n.o.ble. Craig and Bradbury were both unconscious and clearly in bad shape, drawing shallow breaths. Cunningham checked Bradbury for spinal injuries, and Chambers did the same for Craig, as the medevac flew away. Cunningham told Chambers to hand him the emergency flight radio attached to Craig's gear. ”They're still alive!” he yelled into it. ”Get that medevac back here!” There was no response, only static. Because it wasn't his own radio, Cunningham didn't know if it was even working, or if the chopper pilots had heard him.

Chambers could barely see anything, but he could feel that Craig was bleeding profusely. He cradled the medic's head between his legs, trying to hold it and his neck as straight as possible while also making sure that Craig didn't choke on the blood that seemed to be pouring from his nose. Chambers did the best he could, but ultimately he realized that he couldn't do much more than provide the dying man with some small measure of comfort. He cursed his own powerlessness as he heard the last breaths issue from Heathe Craig's mouth.

Hawes came down and tried to help Bradbury, but he was in the same condition as Craig-mortally wounded, being held by a fellow soldier who was unable to do anything to ward off death's inevitable touch.