VIKING HAMMER (AND THE UGLY BABY)

01.Masters of Chaos Pages 8/17/04 12:00 PM Page 316
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M asters of C haos
with a long burst. The men back at Gurdy Drozna heard the cacophony
of fire over the radio and knew the team was in trouble.
Crouching behind the wall the captain noticed grimly that the field
they were in was a graveyard. They debated calling for air support. The
captain realized he had left his map at the wall behind them, where the
other two sergeants lay, so he jumped up again and ran back to get it.
The weapons sergeant was lying behind the wall, trying to spot targets
with his M21 sniper rifle. He stared, agog, at the captain, who was
blithely running back and forth amid the withering fire.
“Geez, captain, I would have brought you the map,” he said.
The captain returned to his wall and radioed the team sergeant.
They agreed that it was too risky to call in air strikes. Their Kurdish
fighters had spread out all over the bowl, and many of them were scaling
the back of the mountains to attack the dug-in Ansar positions. Any
bombs would surely hit their own men. Besides, the radio was only
working intermittently in the deep valley.
The captain knew that they had to mount some kind of counterattack
to change the dynamics. Ansar al-Islam had the high ground and
the initiative. The group might attempt to overrun them or just play it
safe and pick them off one by one.
The captain decided that they had no option but to fight their way
through. It would be an infantry battle from start to finish. The weapons
sergeant moved forward to the captain’s wall to hear the plan. He was to
run 200 meters back down the road to their weapons truck, get the M2
.50-caliber gun, and head into the hills.
The weapons sergeant, the communications sergeant, and one of the
medics carried the gun and ammunition cans up the mountain to where
they could aim into the Ansar al-Islam positions. It was up to them to
turn the tide of the battle. The weapons sergeant fired more than 700
rounds as his two teammates spotted targets for him. The Kurds’
artillery finally arrived from the rear, and began blasting the Ansar
redoubts. The team’s second weapons sergeant, who was on the green
prong, also came to their aid. From his position on a ridge a kilometer
away, he killed several Ansar machine gunners with his sniper rifle.