Phillips nodded. “We’ll get right on it and have you guys airborne in no time,” he said. The other pilot joined the first, and the two headed off toward one of the tents that had been set up as a field kitchen.
While Sergeant Phillips moved closer to the helicopter with his tool case, he saw one of the POL guys moving a small tanker near the helicopter as another guy hooked the fuel hose up to the helicopter to refuel. While that was happening, a couple of the munition guys reloaded the rocket pods, and another guy worked on reloading the nose gun. It was a true team effort as the various support personnel crawled over the helicopter, getting it fueled, rearmed and mechanically checked over while the pilots took a few minutes to get some food and water and take a bio break before they flew back into harm’s way.
As the sun began to set, the air operations wound down, giving the mechanics the time they needed to fix a lot of the battle damage to the gunships: repairing bullet holes, fixing hydraulic hoses, and replacing electrical wiring and sensors. Come morning, those helicopters would be busy. In addition to the repairs the maintenance squad was responsible for, Sergeant Phillips also had to make sure his guys had dug a few fighting positions nearby. If the enemy managed to overrun the perimeter, then they might need to repel an attack on the airfield from these very same positions.
When the twilight of the new day peeled away the darkness of the evening, Phillips’ crew had just finished repairing the Cobra they were responsible for. The crew of mechanics was just picking up their tools when the sound of incoming rockets and artillery fire rang out in the distance. Rounds landed at various positions around the base, shaking the ground violently and shattering the morning's serenity. Looking in the direction of where the pilots had been sacked out, Sergeant Phillips saw them grab their helmets and run quickly to get into their helicopters and get airborne before a lucky round landed near their gunships, disabling or destroying them.
Phillips jumped into one of the fighting positions they had just prepared a few hours ago and made sure his squad was readying themselves to deal with whatever happened next. One of the helicopters got airborne and headed off in one direction, while the second helicopter continued to climb and gain altitude. As the second helicopter banked to the north, it was suddenly hit by one of the many rockets flying toward the Marine positions. The gunship exploded from the large-caliber rocket, crumpling the frame of the helicopter as it fell to the ground below in a fiery mess.
“Holy cow, that was close!” thought Phillips. He hoped this artillery barrage would end soon.
Looking toward the other end of the airfield, he saw the 105mm Howitzers clearly fire back at the enemy. It was now incumbent on them to provide the counterbattery fire that would hopefully silence the enemy’s guns. The dueling artillery fire went on for a handful of minutes before the enemy fire finally subsided. Then the Howitzers went back to firing in support of the ground forces, and so did the mortar platoon that was set up with them.
The next forty minutes was pure chaos. Light and heavy machine guns were firing all over the place. Wounded Marines were dragged back to the hospital tents near the artillery battery, while occasionally a medical helicopter would swoop in with its brightly painted red cross on the side to quickly load up the wounded and ferry them back to the higher-level trauma center on the amphibious assault ships offshore.
“Sergeant! Do you hear the sound of tanks?” asked one of the soldiers in the next foxhole.
“We don’t have any tanks with us yet, do we…?” he thought in horror.
“Yeah, I hear it. I don’t think it’s friendly though. If we have to fall back, guys, we’ll fall back to the artillery batteries’ position, OK?” Phillips shouted.
The other Marines in his squad just nodded as they continued to point their weapons into the forest and trees around them, waiting to see if a horde of enemy tanks or soldiers would suddenly appear out of nowhere. Suddenly, half of the air operation building, which was acting as their brigade headquarters, exploded. They saw an enemy tank charge right at the building, but then a missile streaked in from one of the attack helicopters they had been working on the night before, blowing the tank apart like a firecracker on the Fourth of July. The enemy tank had been destroyed, but not before it caused the damage it had sought to inflict on the Americans.
Then, to their front, an armored personnel carrier came barreling out of the woods and headed straight toward them. In the turret, Phillips spotted a soldier in the turret manning a machine gun, firing at his men. Sergeant Phillips raised his M4 to his shoulder and took aim at the soldier who was spitting out death and destruction. He gently squeezed the trigger, sending a three-round burst at the soldier, who clutched at his chest and fell inside the vehicle. The machine gun had been silenced.
The vehicle suddenly hit one of the tank mines Phillips had seen some of the engineers placing around the perimeter the night before. The vehicle stopped moving and started to billow smoke. Half a dozen enemy soldiers emerged from the back of the vehicle and fanned out, shooting back at the Americans. Then, maybe a platoon's worth of enemy soldiers emerged from the woods and added to the volume of fire toward the Marines defending the airfield.
“Sergeant, what do you want us to do? It looks like the enemy is going to overrun the airfield!” shouted one of the soldiers in Phillips’ squad.
Looking around, Sergeant Phillips saw his ten Marines were quickly being cut off from being able to fall back to the other side of the airfield near the gun battery. Their best bet now was to do their best to hold their current positions and hope the other Marines around them were going to do the same and the enemy would run out of steam.
“Everyone, listen up! We are dug in here,” said Phillips. “We’re going to stay put and make sure the enemy doesn’t take our little section of the airfield. Is that understood? I want everyone to stay put. Conserve your ammo and only shoot when you’re confident you’ll hit something. We can do this, Marines!”
Chief Petty Officer Brian Conway, call sign “Punisher,” sat on the roof of the air operations building at Fort Mag, wondering if this tour of duty was ever going to end. He had hit his six-month mark three months ago, with no end in sight. Then again, he hadn’t heard of a single Special Forces unit that had rotated home for any amount of dwell time.
“Well, I’m not getting shot to get some time off,” he thought.
Conway had been a part of SEAL Team Three since he’d joined the Navy and completed BUD/S training twelve years ago. After surviving the world’s most brutal training program, he specialized as a sniper. Having served multiple tours in both Iraq and, more recently, Afghanistan, he had built up quite a record among the teams as an exceptional sniper. When the war in Asia had broken out, his team had found themselves heavily involved in the opening of the Second Korean War, and then later in the Russian Far East. With the change in strategy and direction for the Marine ground war, his team had been pulled from Russia and sent to Guam to support the Marines in the Philippines.
He ran his hand across the flat black Stoner Rifle-25 semiautomatic sniper rifle he brought with him for this mission. Unless he was going to conducting long-range sniper operations, he preferred to use the SR-25 with its 20-round magazine. Conway had trained in the Philippines in the past — he’d even trained at Fort Mag before — so he knew he’d be faced with some dense foliage. That meant the majority of his shots would be under 500 meters. He was more concerned with being able to hit multiple targets in quick succession than he was about nailing an enemy soldier 2,000 meters away.