Word: helling
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...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...
...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...
...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...
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...
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...