by William Yeske
The following is an excerpt from William Yeske’s book: Damn the Valley 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 2-508 PIR, 82nd Airborne in the Arghandab River Valley Afghanistan–which can be purchased here.
It was at this point that Kohler began screaming that something was wrong with the MK19: it was jammed and not firing. We just started yelling to use the 240 and forget the 19 as our element of dismounts was assaulting through at this point. I was scanning for weapon flashes and smoke trails as we continued to operate as a support-by-fire element in the trucks. Two RPGs (rocket-propelled grenades) were fired at the convoy, but missed and hit the buildings behind us. One of the rounds narrowly missed the rear vehicle as they lowered the rear ramp to dismount. One of the tactics the enemy will use is to shoot a round inside of a vehicle before the troops inside can get out. It’s the money shot and will end up killing everyone inside as the shrapnel bounces around in what just became a metal coffin.
The firefight was over just as quickly as it started and was a textbook L-shaped ambush with the vehicles as the support element. I was a little sad I had been stuck in a truck at the time, but it was the job required in the moment. I was surprised after everything when Hill asked me if I took some shots out the window of my vehicle. I just looked at him weird and told him no. I wasn’t sure what the value of having the driver unload a SAW through his window during a firefight would be.
Especially if that open window was toward the contact and would leave the possibility of the vehicle being compromised. I get it though. Some of those guys think in pure aggression during a time like that. Which is needed, but not to the point of being reckless. I never said anything about it, but I think keeping my head, assisting the gunner in reloading rounds, and scanning for enemy threats in the area, tactical possibilities, places to maneuver that were constantly changing, and monitoring/ using the radio during contact was the right answer at the time. I found out later that he asked because someone else in the convoy had done so.
As everyone was being looked over and the intense battle stories were being swapped, some of the guys turned their attention to the dead, ashen bodies on the roadway now. I think we just grabbed three or four bodies before Hill said that was enough for the after-action drop-off. He was ready to get back to the house after a long week. There were more bodies out there, but none was seen as anything worth recovering. The Taliban combatants also had a weird habit of bringing their dead with them when they fled the battle scene. It was pretty eerie when you would find blood trails with no bodies after a shootout. Not sure if it was because of their particular religious views of needing to be buried before the next sundown. It made me think of the books on Vietnam where they talked about the Viet Cong being the “ghosts” of the jungle. I can see how someone could disappear quickly in a jungle environment, but in the desert… it was more than strange. Were did they go? Were they just swallowed up by the sand to be spit out after we had departed the region?
Miraculously, no one was hurt on our end during the engagement. Sergeant Tyler Anderson had a bullet hole through an armpit on his uniform top and Specialist John Culp had a rip in his helmet cover where a round skipped off it as they had assaulted. There was an enemy combatant that had survived the onslaught and Doc Ponce was told to save him. It was a teenager that was clinging to life after Private Harris had let out a burst from his machine gun to cut him down in his path. The kid had suffered from his battlefield injuries with both of his hands mangled, a bramble thorn stuck in his eyeball, and a testicle hanging outside of his scrotum. Doc begrudgingly patched him up as Tyler proceeded with a brief battlefield interrogation.
There is nothing quite like the feeling of surviving a combat incident, although this was mild in the terms of incidents to come or what could have happened if they had gotten an RPG into us during the engagement. The adrenaline high, the fact you survived, the antagonist lying dead at your feet, the sheer heightening of senses that was experienced along with a healthy dump of dopamine and adrenaline make for a nice little cocktail only to be known by those who have been there. This is where you start to recognize the hard chargers, the pipe hitters, the barrel-chested fighters, and the ones they compare to “woodpecker lips.” After a moment like that, you get it. You understand what is at stake and why the discipline and urgency matter so much. You must give it your all or you won’t be the one advancing. There are a lot of factors involved, but you can tell the men from the boys after an extreme experience like this… as I saw later.
After a brief AAR (after-action review) and dumping the bodies at the bottom of the driveway at the next ANP station, we headed back to Lashkar Gah where our cheeky brethren warriors (the Brits) had a Halloween cookout waiting for us with burgers just coming off the grill along with some other BBQ food. We had just been out for days, so being able to enjoy that delicious, grill-fired hunk of meat without someone yelling at me was the real prize at the end of the day. Everyone decompressed for the night after that. We had gotten a taste of action and the new guys had proven to be not incompetent. Everyone was unscathed which led to an even higher boost of morale for us. It was a good night. Two of the guys (Culp and Kornegay) even broke out some homemade Halloween costumes that they had fashioned from a mop, and other miscellaneous gear you find laying around in a foreign country police station. They were some kind of pirate mates with one of them sporting a full-on beard made from a floor mop’s dangling threads and the other playing as a wench, complete with a coconut bra.
That night brutally exposed a few things for me. It made everything real. It’s like that moment in Airborne School where it all leads to your first jump from an aircraft. You’ll go through the motions for weeks before jump week happens. Even then, it wasn’t real when jumping into the dirt on Fort Benning a few hundred times. It wasn’t real when hopping out of the tower (although I think the 150ft tower is worse than the plane). Even after being released from that 300ft crane in the middle of the field of the airborne compound, I still can say that it wasn’t quite real for me.
However, when the doors open on the plane and the cool air slaps you in the face… that’s when it gets real. It can take anywhere from 15 minutes to six-plus hours to get ready for a jump depending on who you are jumping with, conditions, the aircraft size, crew, number of jumpers, and all of the other variables you have to deal with. So, after rigging up, being inspected, sitting in the pack shed, walking to the plane, sitting in the plane and taking off… all of this didn’t have the feel. It was the motions. You could now experience the moment.
This is combat for a soldier. Everything up until this point was the motions. You had enlisted and had gotten to where you were now. You may have had years of training experience and shooting up until this point, but the sheer severity of you vs them isn’t realized until after the fact. Yes, it’s your job, but the fact is that there is still a very small percentage of soldiers in the Army that see combat. Once you’ve gotten through it though, it doesn’t hit until later. You feel like Superman.
The rush is unlike anything you’ll ever get because you are operating at a level where most humans will never understand. It is you and them fighting to the death. One of you is leaving this world and one will move on to die another day. If you are in the thick of it, every fiber of your body is attuned to its surroundings (or at least it better damn be) and you have a hyper awareness.
I’ll get into it later, but if you are exposed to these conditions for a long period of time, your body settles into this heightened state continually. It is exhausting but something amazing to have experienced. The body and brain are an incredible piece of hardware that can be honed to a razor’s edge if you really have the fortitude to go down that road.
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William (Will) Yeske is a combat veteran who served 11 years in the U.S. Army. He is a serial entrepreneur who brings significant expertise in marketing, IT, and project management. He currently runs and operates a marketing company, No Limits Marketing Group (NLMG), founded to help small businesses survive the COVID-19 pandemic. It uses a combination of modern marketing techniques coupled with a non-lethal targeting framework learned in the military to provide clients with winning strategies. Will was also a founding board member of a Veteran non-profit, Rally for the Troops (now part of Racing for Heroes) and has worked on other veteran-based projects.
He is currently attending Columbia Business School while running current business projects, creating new possibilities for future endeavors, and parenting his two children with his wife, who is also a US military veteran.
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