Mark Owen - No Hero

Rung by rung, we passed the ladder up. It was tense because silence, not speed, was the most important thing. It was pitch-black outside. The wind was picking up, blowing the ladder around a bit. A few times I was afraid the point man was going to lose his balance and tumble into the compound.

All I could think about was the sleepwalkers. The report was of two movers, but ISR was tracking between five and seven fighters altogether. We all knew which door the two movers had come from and then later gone back into, but nobody knew exactly where the others might be sleeping. If they were to walk through the compound again, the snipers would drop them. But that would likely wake up the other fighters still sleeping inside. My hope was that we could get inside the house before the fighters had any idea we were there.

The point man finally got the ladder up and delicately lowered it into the compound. Then he and his swim buddy climbed down into the compound. I waited by the gate, ready to enter. A few seconds later, I could hear the bolt of the gate slide back, and the heavy wooden door slowly swung open.

The point man stood in the opening with a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Too easy,” he whispered.

We now had the front door open and it was time to go to work. We all crept through the gate and into the compound, which opened up into a small courtyard with buildings along the perimeter. Everybody moved as quietly as we possibly could. The “don’t run to your death” rule always applied. After all, this wasn’t a video game. You can’t just get shot and re-spawn in place.

Several of the newer guys were in front of me as we slipped inside the compound. I watched them veer off to search animal pens and the north and east side of the compound. I could tell the younger guys were all amped up. They were doing their best to suppress their energy.

But the key was being in the right place, and after more than a dozen deployments, I knew where the fighters were sleeping by listening to the ISR pilot on the patrol to the target. As I listened to each report, I thought back to the compound layout. The movers came out of a door on the west side of the compound. I headed straight for the west door. If the ISR was correct, the lone door on the west side of the compound was where the fighters were sleeping.

I didn’t run.

I wanted to be not just slow, but super slow. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I moved over to the west side of the compound and waited by the closed door. One of the new guys on his first deployment with the troop was on the other side of the door. I reached out and pressed the door handle down. The door was unlocked.

The door opened inward into a small anteroom. Two wooden doors were on either side of the room. A staircase leading to the second floor of the house was almost directly in front of us. Since I opened the door, the new guy was the point man and would be the first person to enter. He slowly stepped inside and I followed.

I saw from the doorway a whole bunch of men’s shoes in a pile next to the right door. The pile was a mix of big leather sandals and black Cheetahs. We joked that we’d never seen an innocent person wear a pair of Cheetahs. The black shoes equaled Taliban more times than not.

The opposite door had kids’ and women’s shoes stacked outside. I knew the instant we walked inside the anteroom where the fighters were sleeping. But the new guy, probably a little too amped to notice, went to the left door. I moved to the door on the right. As I reached for the knob, I was one hundred percent sure the fighters were inside the room. My hope was they were sound asleep.

The beat-up, rusty, old hinges let out a long squeak. In the silence, it sounded like a freight train barreling through the mud hut. The room was freezing and it was pitch-black inside. I had my night vision goggles down and could make out man-sized lumps lying under blankets.

As I scanned around the room, a fighter just to the left side of the door stirred and sat up. He was about three feet away from me. He must have heard the door and was trying to make me out in the darkness. Looking beside him, I spotted a large belt-fed PKM machine gun. His vision quickly cleared. He could tell whoever was at the door was not friendly. His hands instantly shot out and he grabbed the machine gun. The problem for him was the PKM’s barrel was pointed away from the doorway.

I watched for a split second as he wrestled with the gun, trying to get it turned and facing my direction. He never got the chance. I leaned in and shot him twice in the face.

My rifle had a suppressor, but even the muffled shots seemed loud in the mud room. The fighter flopped backward like he was going back to sleep and disappeared from view. I raised my rifle to cover the rest of the room and saw AK-47 rifles leaning against the wall. Chest racks stuffed with magazines hung on the wall. The “lumps” under the blankets immediately turned into a blur of movement as all the fighters woke up and scrambled to get their guns.

I didn’t hesitate.

I started to shoot. Tracking from one fighter to the next, I pumped two or three rounds into each blur’s chest, pausing only for a second to make sure the fighter went down. There was no yelling or screaming, just the muffled sound of my rounds cutting into the enemy fighters.

The fighters crumpled or fell back to where they had been sleeping. Each shot sent a charge through the dark wool blankets, which looked like a wave rippling over a lake. As quickly as it began, it ended. I stepped into the room with a swim buddy behind me and we moved from fighter to fighter, making sure they were no longer a threat.

There were six fighters total. I counted five AK-47s and one PKM machine gun. We also recovered two RPGs and several rockets. The fighters were well armed. Their guns were in decent shape and they had good gear compared to a typical Taliban fighter. We also found first aid kits and Afghan and Pakistani money.

No shots were fired in any rooms other than the room I cleared. All of the fighters had huddled into the one room. The family living there likely had no choice but to let the fighters hole up inside their home.

As I consolidated the weapons, I could hear the women and children crying across the hall. As I predicted, the new guy had walked into the women’s sleeping room. They were startled when he walked inside. When I started shooting, they started to scream. When I left the room I’d cleared, I poked my head into the opposite room and saw him pulling security on a room full of unhappy women. He didn’t look thrilled.

Just before we started to patrol back to the helicopter landing zone to catch our ride home, the new guy came up to me.

“Motherfucker,” he said. “I knew I should have gone to the right.”

During a slow deployment, missing a chance to send some rounds downrange was painful.

“Don’t be mad at me,” I said. “You had first dibs on which door to take.”

“I’m not mad at you. I’m just pissed at myself for not catching that sooner,” he said.

“Always—I repeat, always—check the shoes,” I said.

I’d learned the shoe lesson the hard way on a previous deployment to Iraq. When you’re new, all amped up, and in a hurry, you miss the little details, like the shoes, that can be meaningless at first glance but are really a big clue. When you’re more experienced and have been in the car crash a million times, and have made mistakes and learned from them, everything slows down and something as small as shoes can stand out.

This time, I read that situation perfectly. In our line of work, you can only hope to survive your first mistake and live long enough to never make it again. Thinking about it now, it was one of many lessons I learned that I still use today. On the practical side, it was about tracking the enemy, but the more universal lesson was about attention to detail in high-stress situations. In this instance, success meant life or death.