“Incoming!” he shouted. The soldiers around him hit the dirt just as a series of rounds landed in the cluster of trees where they were hiding.
Crump, crump, crump, crump, crump.
Five explosions ripped through the forest, sending hot shrapnel in all directions. Then a guttural sound emanated from the gathering horde that was now roughly a kilometer away from their position.
Sergeant First Class Price poked his head up from his fighting position and looked for the militiamen rushing toward their positions. He turned to the Rangers to his left and right, and yelled, “Hold your fire, men! Wait until they get within two hundred meters and then cut loose on them.”
More mortar rounds landed among their positions as they watched the enemy soldiers get closer with each passing second. Once the enemy left the smoldering ruins of the village next to the forest preserve, they had a brief hundred yards of open ground they had to cross before they edged into the wooded tree cover where the Rangers were set up.
Zip, crack, zip, zap.
Bullets whizzed over their heads, hitting some of the nearby trees and underbrush they were using for cover. Just as the enemy crossed into a stretch of open terrain that marked them to be roughly two hundred meters away, the Rangers cut loose with their M240G machine guns. The red tracers from their machine guns looked like lasers as they crisscrossed back and forth across their interlocking fields of fire, shredding the attackers. The first several waves of enemy soldiers were simply cut apart by the five M240s the Rangers had placed on this line of their defense.
Price raised his own rifle to his shoulder and took aim at the wall of enemy soldiers charging relentlessly toward them. Bullets were cracking all around him, but he zeroed in on each target and blocked out his other senses.
Bang, bang, bang, bang.
Sergeant Price just kept pulling the trigger. Time and time again, he scored a direct hit with nearly every trigger pull. However, despite every man he saw taken out by one of his shots, enemy soldiers just kept coming at him.
Price dropped his now-empty magazine, quickly slapping a new one in its place as the relentless horde continued unabated toward them, threatening to envelop them in a tsunami of bullets and pure suicidal hatred. Flipping his selector switch from semiauto to full-auto, he knew he needed to cut through the enemy ranks at a much quicker pace or they’d be on his position in minutes.
The chattering ratatat of the machine guns was almost nonstop as the gun crews did their best to cut down their attackers and keep them at arm’s length.
Crump, crump, crump.
Friendly mortar and artillery fire hit the enemy ranks, throwing bodies and parts of bodies in every which direction, adding to the carnage unfolding before them.
“How can they keep charging like this?” Price thought, horrified. In that moment, he just wanted to be anywhere but there.
He reached to his right as a string of bullets flew right past were his head had just been, and grabbed the first clicker, depressing the button.
BOOM!
An enormous explosion occurred seventy-five meters in front of him as his Claymore mine detonated, flattening fifteen or twenty tightly packed enemy soldiers as the wall of ball bearings cut them down like a scythe.
When the enemy reached within 75 meters of their lines, more of the Rangers detonated their Claymore mines. As the fighting continued, many of the Indian militiamen were now using any cover they could find to seek shelter from the fuselage of bullets and ball bearings being thrown at them. The Indian militia began to take more accurately aimed shots at the defenders, finally scoring hits against the Rangers, who up to this point had been absolutely butchering them.
Price turned to the Ranger next to him to tell him to blow his Claymore when the man’s head snapped back and disintegrated in a midst of blood and gore and his body collapsed to the bottom of their fighting position. Shaking the sight from his mind, Sergeant Price reached over and grabbed the Claymore clicker, detonating the last mine they had in front of them.
BOOM!
Another swath of enemy soldiers was cut down. His only remaining battle buddy threw hand grenades at the enemy like it was going out of style.
Crump, crump, crump. Shrapnel being thrown everywhere.
Just as Price thought, “This is it — we’re going to be washed over by the enemy horde,” he suddenly heard dozens of whistles. The militiamen fell back — not to their original starting point, but several hundred meters away. Shooting between the two sides continued unabated, but the relentless charges stopped for the time being.
Lieutenant Martinez tapped Price on the shoulder. “We have to get the heck out of Dodge, or we’re done. I don’t know how we just survived that,” he said in awe.
Price nodded. “It’s starting to get dark, LT. The enemy probably pulled back to allow darkness to settle in, and then they’ll resume their attack when it’ll be harder to see them.”
Martinez shook his head and then grabbed his radio. “All Zombie elements, fall back to the vehicles immediately,” he ordered. “We need to get out of here ASAP. Leave the dead, but make sure we don’t leave any of our wounded behind.”
Sergeant Price was a bit impressed as he watched Lieutenant Martinez trot up and down the line to make sure everyone knew they were falling back. “Those Rangers don’t need to be told twice to leave,” he thought with a smirk.
The lieutenant and Price met up on their way back to the vehicles, but Martinez made a critical mistake and looked back at the front line, where the enemy had been pushing toward them moments ago. He immediately grabbed his stomach and fell to his knees, retching. Price stole a glance backward — the carnage was unimaginable. The ground was practically covered in dead and mangled bodies all the way up to the edge of their positions.
“What kind of commander could order his men into such a slaughter?” asked Martinez as he wiped away the vomit from his mouth with his hand.
When they arrived at their vehicles, Price and Martinez discovered that a couple of them had been destroyed by mortars, and one was simply too damaged to be used. Martinez looked around the motley crew nearby and sadly commented, “Looks like we lost several Rangers in this last battle though, so there’s no risk of leaving anyone behind from Third or Fourth Platoon.”
Just as they were about to leave, a massive artillery bombardment slammed into both the enemy lines and their own lines, where they had just been a few minutes earlier. This was their fire support to cover their retreat as they sped away in their vehicles back to the airfield.
As he sat in the passenger seat of the SOF JLTV, Sergeant Price was exhausted. His hands were shaking as they sped away quickly to the protective perimeter of the airfield. The drive was short, roughly twenty minutes, but it felt like an eternity.
Eventually, they found the entrance to the newly built perimeter, and some of the infantrymen guided them in. Price was glad to see the familiar outline of the Stryker vehicles in the dusk, as well as the Army soldiers manning the various machine-gun bunkers. He was also happy to see the trenches that the engineers had managed to dig and at least one row of concertina wire that had been placed.
The convoy of vehicles made its way to the center of the airfield where the bombed-out hangar was that the Rangers had taken over. Major Fowler was there waiting to greet them. He gestured with his hand in a way that indicated he was performing a head count of the men, and his face dropped. Only sixty-two of the original ninety men had returned.