Sudden Warrior

By MARK THOMPSON

With 40 other soldiers and their 80-lb. rucksacks crammed into the rear of a Chinook helicopter--a space designed for 33--Randel Perez barely had room to breathe. As they thundered through the darkness toward the Shah-i-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, the dim cabin lights cast pink and purple shadows on Perez and his fellow infantrymen from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. Some chattered about the fight to come, while others managed to catch a last-minute nap. Perez was far away, hugging a baby he had never met. It was early March, and the 30-year-old staff sergeant had seen only a grainy Internet picture of his only son, Ramiro, born just 10 weeks before. Perez wondered what Ramiro was doing. He wondered what would happen if he never got to see the boy, then stuffed that thought someplace way down deep.

The helicopter dropped into the southern end of the steep-sided valley, its rear ramp opening as it drew closer to the snow-patched ground. Perez knew that he had to let go of the baby. "I had to zone him out," he says. "The mission became the only thing on my mind." That's Perez--plainspoken and shaven-headed, a fireplug who wanted so badly to lead troops in combat that he had bailed out of the Army supply corps two years earlier and joined the frontline infantry. Before this day was over, he'd lead more troops through more combat than he'd ever dreamed possible.

As he and his fellow grunts clambered down the chopper's ramp, Perez realized that they had basically flown into a gigantic stadium and scrambled out, vulnerable and exposed, in the home team's end zone. From up in the grandstands--the half-mile-high mountains ringing them on three sides--an unknown number of al-Qaeda fighters began peppering the Americans with AK-47 fire. Operation Anaconda had just begun--and Perez and his comrades were already playing defense.

The U.S. Army, in its biggest assignment of the war, was sending in 1,411 men to seal off the valley while its Afghan allies tracked down the enemy and destroyed what was thought to be the last al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. But this time, unlike the fight nearly three months before in Tora Bora, Americans would not rely on Afghans to supply the combat troops. Perez and most of the other members of Task Force Rakkasan had flown in from the Soviet-era air base at Bagram, an hour away. Intelligence reports at the base, just outside Kabul, had hinted that Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar might even be holed up in the sullen, beautiful valley. Perez liked the sound of that.

But now there were other sounds to contend with. No sooner had Perez's Chinook wheeled out of sight than the skies filled with the thunks, thuds and whistles of rocket-propelled grenades, 82-mm mortar rounds and heavy machine-gun bursts. "All hell broke loose," remembers Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe, who was overseeing the action from a command post some 100 yards away. The U.S. troops returned fire with their short-barreled M-4 assault carbines and M-240 machine guns, but the enemy wasn't giving them much in the way of targets.

Lieut. Brad Maroyka, commander of Charlie Company's 1st Platoon, was watching his two squads fire at al-Qaeda targets from his position about 150 yards north of the command post. "We've got enemy moving up on the west side," Maroyka radioed company commander Captain Nelson Kraft, who was back near the command post. "We are destroying them, but they are returning fire."

Al-Qaeda's early mortar volleys missed by hundreds of yards and then began closing in. Soldiers call it "walking in rounds"--staring in pained fascination as the enemy drops "steel rain" closer and closer to where you're hugging the ground. A shell landed 50 yards from Maroyka and nearly a dozen of his men. Maroyka felt blood and realized that a piece of shrapnel from the blast had nicked his face.

"Sergeant!" he yelled at Platoon Sergeant Tom Abbott, his second-in-command. "They're getting close. We need to get out of here!"

"Everybody up!" Abbott bellowed. "Get the hell up! We're moving!" The soldiers were scrambling for safer ground when another 15-lb. mortar round exploded amid them. The air filled with dirt, smoke, blood and screams. "Damn," thought Grippe, as he watched from his post. "I've got four or five dead guys now." But in wonder, he saw the smoke clear and all of his soldiers seem to rise from the dead. Their new ceramic-plate vests had kept them alive, but shrapnel had shredded many arms and legs. Eight of the 10 soldiers closest to the blast were wounded. "I've been hit!" Maroyka radioed Kraft.

"Where's Sergeant Abbott?" Kraft demanded.

"He's hit too!" Maroyka responded. "And some other guys are hit too. We're pretty messed up."

The explosion had taken out the leaders of the 1st Platoon. With both the lieutenant and sergeant out of commission, command fell on the shoulders of Perez, the senior soldier left standing. "Sergeant Perez!" Kraft yelled over the roar of war to Perez, around 75 yards away. "You're now the platoon leader!"

"Roger that, sir," Perez responded. "I've got it."

Perez's army career wasn't supposed to turn out like this. A child of Texas' Rio Grande Valley and the grandson of four Mexican immigrants, Perez had seen a stint in the Army--safely in the rear--as his ticket to college. When he enlisted in 1991, his father Ramiro had a warning for the recruiter: "If he ends up in the infantry," he said, only half-joking, "I'll break your legs." So Perez became a supply soldier, responsible for making sure the men on the front lines got their beans, bullets and boots.

He left his parents and three sisters for Fort McClellan, Ala. There he fell in love with a college student named La Donia Miller, the woman who would become his wife. Despite his dad's warnings, he also fell in love with the idea of becoming a warrior. A three-year stint in Germany--tagging along on road marches, soaking up the camaraderie of Desert Storm veterans--led him to re-enlist. While in Europe, he spent six months in Bosnia. Suddenly the supply guy "was in full battle rattle, doing patrols," he says. "I loved being out there with them guys."

Perez began lobbying to switch from the supply corps to the infantry--the muddy, bloody face of war where, even in the age of smart bombs, winning ultimately means taking ground inch by inch. In Korea and Vietnam the infantry accounted for only 4% of troops in the theater but more than 80% of those killed in battle. It took Perez nearly three years--along with a threat to quit and a pledge to serve at frigid Fort Drum in upstate New York for up to six years--to prevail. On Valentine's Day of 2000 he reported for training at Fort Benning, Ga.

He and La Donia began Sept. 11, 2001, at Sears, outfitting the nursery for their first baby. Shoppers and clerks rushed toward the electronics department as row after row of television sets showed the same grim scene. That night Perez pondered his future. "Are you going to have to go somewhere now?" La Donia kept asking. "We're having a baby, so they're not going to send you, right?"

"The military's not like that," Perez told her. "My first priority is my job."

Nearly a month later, on Oct. 7, the day U.S. warplanes began bombing Afghanistan, Perez and 1,000 fellow soldiers left Fort Drum for a Soviet-era air base outside the town of Khanabad, Uzbekistan, 90 miles north of the Afghan frontier. Their mission was simple but dull: Secure the airfield. "God, this can't go on for six months," Perez said to himself during one of his 12-hour shifts patrolling the earthen berms that encircle the base. "Something's got to happen."

A month later, Perez's platoon was ordered into northern Afghanistan to help quell a prison riot. His unit guarded John Walker Lindh, the so-called American Taliban, and protected the body of Johnny (Mike) Spann, the cia operative who was killed in the uprising and was the first American to die in the conflict. The contrast between the two Americans struck Perez. "It was tough to look at Walker, knowing he is an American and fighting for the other side and that he was the reason Mike Spann--a great American--was a KIA."

On Dec. 23, La Donia called to announce the birth of their son. "He looks just like you," she said. "He's very beautiful." The hospital promised to post a picture of baby Ramiro, named after his grandfather, on its website. Luckily, Perez had been deployed along with the 5th Special Forces Group from Fort Campbell, Ky., a high-tech outfit with a laptop linked to the Internet by satellite--a laptop reserved last Christmas Eve solely for the use of one Randel Perez. He hunted and pecked until the screen filled with a digital image of Ramiro. Perez stared at the picture for two hours. "I'm sorry I couldn't be there," he said softly, over and over. "But I'll be home soon, and we'll throw the ball around."

Barely two months later, following the mortar blast in the Shah-i-Kot, Perez found himself in charge of his platoon. With nine of his 26 men wounded, his immediate concern was getting them to safety without making a bad situation worse. "I'm the quarterback now," Perez thought. "Whatever I decide, I'm going to have to live with it, right or wrong." His wounded comrades knew they had to move. "We just needed to get the hell away from where we were," Maroyka says. "Even those of us with leg injuries had a simple choice: Get up and run, or die."

Perez stifled the urge to rush to the aid of the downed men; he knew he would be mowed down if he tried. Instead he stood and began blazing away with his M-4 rifle. That forced the al-Qaeda fighters to take cover in the rocks several hun-dred yards away--and stop firing--as the wounded Americans limped to a safer spot. "He showed almost no concern for his body," says Sergeant Jeffrey Grothause, one of Perez's soldiers. "He's up there, and rounds are flying all around him, in between his legs, and he doesn't flinch. He keeps firing."

His men followed his example. "About five of the guys from Charlie Company, they stayed up on the ridge line, and they were receiving sniper fire and machine-gun fire--rounds were bouncing all around them--but they stayed there to cover our movement," says Sergeant First Class Robert Healy, who was wounded in the fighting. "None of them faltered."

Thirty minutes after the devastating mortar blast, with the sun rising overhead, 1st Platoon's wounded had taken cover in what some called Hell's Half Pipe, a natural trench, already protecting the command post, that shielded them from al-Qaeda's eyes. By chance, the enemy fire kept them where they wanted to be, guarding the escape paths from the southern end of the valley that al-Qaeda might want to use. But the Afghans, repelled by rocket and mortar attacks elsewhere in the valley, never showed. All the searching and destroying would have to be done by the Americans.

Landing in the middle of an al-Qaeda stronghold wasn't the way this mission was supposed to go. "If we had known they were there," says Grippe, the top enlisted man in the 1st Battalion of the 87th Infantry Regiment, "we would have landed someplace else." The U.S. troops didn't have the men or firepower to scale the rocks and wipe out the enemy fighters. But Perez and the others in command remembered the 1993 Somali fire fight--a panicky retreat in which 18 Americans were killed--and they decided to dig in. "We didn't run from the fight," says Grippe. "It wasn't a Mogadishu."

The soldiers held their ground and killed the enemy when they could. "We had them right where we wanted them," Battalion Commander Lieut. Colonel Paul LaCamera says. "All around us." When the U.S. troops spied the black smoke of mortars firing outside their reach, they called in air strikes.

Perez couldn't worry about the lousy intelligence that had got them into this mess. His job was to keep his men focused on their mission and to avoid using up all their ammunition. Mortar shells and machine-gun rounds were running short, but the roar of air strikes and the concussions of 2,000-lb. bombs in the mountains were good for morale. B-52 bombers, F-16 and F-18 fighter-bombers, and AC-130 and AH-64 gunships were pulverizing caves and crags. Perez's men set their M-4s to fire single shots instead of three-bullet bursts. "Perez was controlling his rates of fire, pointing out targets, just doing an awesome job," Grippe says. Kraft, the company commander, was impressed. "Here's a staff sergeant, stepping up and doing the job of a lieutenant who has gone through years of training," he says. "He was incredible."

Perez kept in touch with his men over the radio or by going helmet to helmet. He'd run 100 yards or so from firing positions to bolster the confidence of his shooters and then head back to the relative safety of Hell's Half Pipe to see how his wounded men were faring. "That means a lot to soldiers," Grothause says. "It lets you know somebody still cares, and it helps boost what little morale you have left."

One al-Qaeda sniper in particular was getting on Perez's nerves. Hiding 500 yards away, he'd come out shooting--and he seemed to be spotting for a mortar unit. He'd wave and flip his middle finger at the Americans before ducking back inside his stone nest. He continued to elude U.S. fire until Perez teamed up with Sergeant Jerry Higley, another squad leader. Their M-4s didn't have magnifying scopes, and the distance and rising trajectory of their bullets made hitting the sniper a challenge. So the two sergeants began working together. Higley squeezed off rounds as Perez used his binoculars to follow the tracers and watch the bullets hit the snow and rocks.

Crack!

"You're a little high," Perez told Higley.

Crack!

"You're a little low."

Crack!

"A little to the right."

After about 20 rounds, Higley and Perez found their target. Perez was grimly satisfied. "There wasn't any high-fiving; we just moved on to new targets."

The battle raged for an additional 15 hours in the chilly wind, with al-Qaeda and Americans trading bullets and bombs through the day and into the night. U.S. troops picked off the enemy one by one from the ground, while U.S. air power obliterated their havens from the sky. Amazingly, no American lives were lost in the southern end of the valley.

Shortly after nightfall, a pair of Black Hawk helicopters extricated Maroyka and the other seriously wounded men. As midnight approached, three CH-47s returned to the valley's southern tip. Perez wearily climbed up the ramp, where he ran into Grippe. "Are you sure we've got everybody?" Grippe yelled at him over the roar of the turbines. For the first time that day, Perez had his doubts. He scampered into the darkness and surveyed the area with his night-vision goggles one more time. Finding no Americans, he ran back to the chopper just before it lifted off. Maroyka had to hand it to the sergeant who had stepped into his role. "We all had a bit of fear, but everybody did his job, and the one who did his job more than anybody was Sergeant Perez," he says.

The U.S. Army agreed. On March 18 in Bagram, Army General Tommy Franks, who runs the war as head of the U.S. Central Command, awarded Perez the Bronze Star for valor. Franks declared Operation Anaconda "an unqualified and absolute success," despite claims by some Afghan allies that most of the enemy got away during the 11 days of fighting. Perez and his men dismiss the charge. After the initial fire fight, they returned to the Shah-i-Kot for another week of combat--hunting down al-Qaeda in their most secure redoubt and, they say, killing hundreds of the enemy while losing just eight Americans during the campaign. The al-Qaeda survivors--no one knows how many--fled across the porous border into the tribal zone of Pakistan.

As long as Perez was in combat, his wife La Donia knew to regard the telephone as a potential wrecking ball. Her voice quivers as she recalls a friend's warning: any call from the Army chaplain "means your husband is hurt, or worse." As long as the chaplain didn't call, Randy was safe. "Those days were the worst I ever felt," she says. "I couldn't believe what he was going through."

Perez's time in combat, he says, made him a better man. "It changed me. It made me more attentive to everything," he says. "It made me more serious about life and family, more patient. Combat makes you value your family more; you think about them a lot when you're there. They may not be in the trenches ducking the bullets with you, but they're always there."

Since he returned home in April, Perez has started having all those little talks with his son that he dreamed about in Afghanistan. "Little Ram" is nearly 9 months old now and accustomed to the sound of his dad's voice. "I've told him why I wasn't here for his birth and how it was something that I just had to do as a soldier," Perez says. Someday he'll tell what he did in the Shah-i-Kot Valley to earn the Bronze Star that sits on his dresser. "I'll tell him war isn't as glamorous as some people think it is," Perez says. "And I'll tell him I hope he doesn't join the infantry."