Several of the troopers tried to grab their wounded comrades, only to be gunned down or wounded themselves. Lieutenant Drake, who must’ve seen that his platoon was being torn apart, yelled to one of his squads, “Lay down covering fire!”
He and a couple of other soldiers attempted to drag the wounded back to cover. The lone Stryker vehicle also stayed in the line of fire, so the turret gunner could continue to fire back at the enemy and hopefully draw the enemy’s fire while their comrades worked to recover their wounded.
Pop, pop, crack! BOOM!
The lieutenant’s head snapped back. His body fell forward from the momentum of running toward one of his wounded brothers, but he was dead, killed by a sniper round to the head. An RPG shot out from another elevated window, hitting the front of the Stryker vehicle and catching part of it on fire. The driver of the vehicle immediately gunned the engine, pushing the vehicle back and around the corner of the road to get away from any further enemy fire. The remaining American soldiers begrudgingly fell back to the side of the Stryker vehicle.
“Help! Please don’t leave me here to die… someone… anyone… help,” cried one of his wounded soldiers roughly thirty meters in front of them. When one of the soldiers tried to retrieve him, a sniper shot him, leaving him wounded and trapped in the street, fully exposed. The sniper had added one more to his casualties.
Seeing that Lieutenant Drake had perished in the fight, Childers had no choice but to take control of the situation. “Men, fall back on me!” he ordered. We need to find a better position to attack or we’ll only add to the body count.”
Several minutes later, Command Sergeant Major Childers shifted uncomfortably on his side as he lifted his pocket binoculars to his eyes and scanned the buildings further down the block, past the oily black smoke from the burning Stryker vehicle and car.
“Where are you, you little snakes? Ah, there you are,” he whispered softly to himself. A smile spread across his face.
They had already tried a few other approaches, but every time they tried to get into a better position to attack the Russians, they were met with a barrage of enemy gunfire and RPGs. Clearly, the enemy had thought this ambush point through and knew they’d be able to inflict a lot of casualties on the Americans. Now the young soldiers in the platoon were all turning to Childers to save them.
“How do you want to do this, Sergeant Major?” asked one of the surviving senior sergeants as he spat a stream of tobacco juice on the ground.
“I’d like to put a tank round into the upper floor above that café at the end of the block,” said Childers with a wry smile. “However, seeing that we don’t have a tank, we’re going to have to figure out how to get closer to the building. Give me your map, will you?”
The sergeant obliged, and Childers eagerly took the map of the city and placed it on the ground. He pulled out his pad of waterproof paper and scribbled down a position on the map. He then used his index finger to give a rough measurement of a landmark they had preplotted on the map with the location of the café where the enemy sniper was located.
The sergeant asked, “You going to call in an artillery strike on them?”
Childers nodded, eliciting smiles and nods from the other sergeants and soldiers around them. With no other officers present, Childers was the highest-ranking person on scene, and while he wasn’t the platoon or even company sergeant, he was the battalion’s senior enlisted NCO. Normally, they wouldn’t be allowed to call in an artillery strike in a densely packed part of the city unless they knew there were no civilians nearby, but with more than a dozen of his soldiers dead and half that many lying in the street wounded and calling out for help, he wasn’t about to let an arbitrary rule written by a lawyer prevent him from keeping his soldiers alive.
“It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission sometimes,” he thought as he looked for the call sign for the German artillery unit they’d been assigned to use.
After signaling for the radioman to call up the Germans, he waited. A minute later, the young specialist handed him the radio handset.
“Arko Three, this is Saber Six-Seven. Fire mission. How copy?” Childers said, speaking calmly into the radio.
The tension in the air around him remained high as the soldiers continued to hear their wounded friends call out for help. It was tearing them up not being able to rush out to help them, but they knew they had to wait until the enemy positions had been dealt with.
“Saber Six-Seven, this is Arko Three. Send fire mission over,” responded a voice with a heavy German accent.
“One round HE. Grid SP 5765 7654. How copy?” Childers requested. He spoke clearly and slowly so their foreign partners would be able to understand him.
The German unit replied, reading him the grid coordinates again, making sure they had copied them right. A minute later the Germans let them know they had fired the shot. A couple of minutes went by before they heard the round sail over their heads and slam into the upper floor of a building roughly 100 meters to the right of where they wanted it to land.
“Arko Three, Saber Six-Seven. Adjust fire 100 meters to the left. Repeat last fire mission.”
A couple of minutes came and went, then they heard the next round sail over their heads and slam into the upper floor of the building where the enemy sniper had been operating. The upper floor of the building blew apart, throwing bricks and pieces of wood in all directions.
“Arko Three, Saber Six-Seven. Good hit. Repeat last fire mission. Stand by for additional fire missions,” Childers directed.
He turned to the remaining soldiers in the platoon around him. “When the next round hits, I want first squad to run out there and grab our wounded and bring them back. Third squad, you’re to lay down suppressive fire and cover them. I need one of you guys to get on the radio and call for a medevac so we can get our wounded out of here,” he said as he handed the radio receiver over to one of the sergeants.
When the next round hit the building, the entire structure blew apart, along with the two buildings next to it. In that instant, first squad darted forward to the wounded soldiers, grabbing them by the handle on the back of their body armor and dragging them back to safety. The soldiers of third squad unloaded on the façade of the buildings where the enemy had previously been. Even though the buildings had been heavily damaged from the artillery barrage, they were taking no chances of someone getting a shot off at their comrades.
With the last of their dead and wounded having been dragged back to safety, the medics in the group went to work on the injured. A low rumble started moving toward them down the road, and several of the soldiers looked up to see a couple of Stryker vehicles moving toward them. When the vehicles got closer, they stopped, and another platoon worth of American soldiers disembarked. A familiar face also appeared as he walked toward Sergeant Major Childers.
“I thought that was your voice and call sign I heard over the radio,” Captain Jack Taylor said. He approached Childers, extending his hand. They briefly shook hands before Childers led him toward the wounded guys.
“I was on my way over here to check on Second Platoon when they were ambushed,” Childers explained. “Lieutenant Drake was killed and so were three other soldiers. Unfortunately, five other soldiers were wounded and trapped out in the open, and the enemy was using them as sniper bait.”