This Man's Army A Soldier's Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism

Prologue March 2002 Bagram Airbase, Afghanistan The sun rose over the mountains to the east, flooding the valley with light. While it remained dark, we could still tease ourselves into thinking that the job we had to do today was some way off. But the sun, creeping up over the Hindu Kush, reminded us of the immediacy of our fate. We knew that the time had arrived for us to be brave, so that we might continue to believe that we were, even if we should face the worst.We quickly formed up in the new sunlight, walking in a line toward the waiting helicopters. We moved with great labor, each of us carrying nearly his body weight in weapons and equipment. It was an ungodly amount of gear. I personally carried ninety pounds of equipment in my rucksack as well as 210 rounds of ammunition, a radio, a set of maps, a compass, a handheld global positioning system, and two quarts of water. I had an array of other assorted supplies strapped to the nylon webbing on my body armor, including four grenades with phrases like ?Duck!? and ?You Should Have Dodged Left!? scribbled on them in black Magic Marker. I wondered how well I was going to move at ten thousand feet above sea level with all this crap on my body. We helped one another down off our feet in order to sit on the tarmac while waiting for our CH-47 helicopters to fuel. Then we sat silently, watching the planes and attack helicopters take off a few hundred meters away. Finally, it was our turn to load the helicopters, and each man struggled to his feet under the weight of his equipment. One of my friends from another platoon walked over and shook my hand before he went to board his own helicopter. He didn't say anything, just squeezed my gloved hand in his and forced a tight-lipped smile. Another friend in his group threw me a cocky wink, too far away already to walk over. It took a while to load the bird. We packed in tight, and because I would be one of the first on the ground, I was one of the last to board. Few of us had awakened early enough to eat anything in the hours before sunrise, and those of us who did had not been able to eat much. After we settled into the helicopter, a few men tugged at their pockets for energy bars or granola they had stowed away in their shirts and camouflage cargo pants. Most looked around nervously, their helmets swiveling from left to right. The curved night vision mounts strapped to their foreheads made them look like rhinos from the neck up. I almost fell over when the helicopter took off. There were more than thirty of us inside, and like me, many were on the floor, sitting on their rucksacks. The body armor wrapped around my torso made me feel awkward and off-balance, and when the helicopter lifted off, I latched onto Flash, my radio operator, to steady myself. Once the helicopter was in the air and on its way, we righted ourselves and settled down for the ride into combat. The helicopter had machine gunners on both sides, as well as one on the back ramp, which was down. The gunner in the back sat on the very edge of the ramp, confident he would not fall because he was tied down to the helicopter by a four-foot tether. We got our first good aerial view of the base as we left. Below us, rows of tan tents shuddered under the rotor wash of the helicopter blades. Behind them, we could see the bombed-out airplane hangar that had become the division's headquarters. I looked around me at the men to my right and left. They were my men, and I could feel them looking at me as well. Some of them looked scared, others simply looked anxious, and still others feigned sleep in an effort to show how cool they could be, how detached they were about what we were about to do. Many were still just kids, no more than eighteen years old, yet they carried a dizzying array of machine guns, shotguns, explosives, and other weapons. Only one man in the platoon, my platoon sergeant, wasExum, Andrew is the author of 'This Man's Army A Soldier's Story from the Front Lines of the War on Terrorism', published 2004 under ISBN 9781592400638 and ISBN 1592400639.