The Ambush in the East
T his was a routine Saturday convoy, set to deliver supplies to
another base.
Five humvees and six Afghan National Army (ANA) light pick-up trucks moved out of Forward Operating Base Bostick early
Saturday afternoon, Oct. 18, 2008. Bostick is a joint Army-Ma-rine base that commands and services four smaller combat outposts; it’s stuck well up in the mountains north and east of Asadabad, and
less than a mile from the Afghanistan-
Pakistan border. There is only one main
road, sometimes two lanes wide, that
snakes through the heavily wooded
area. The Marines are led by Lieutenant Colonel Benjamin T. “Ty” Edwards, the senior Embedded Training
Team leader, mentoring the Afghan
Army’s 2/2 Kandak.
“You know how heavy armored humvee doors are—with a
wounded arm I was having trouble trying to muscle the door open
to get out when suddenly, Blam! We got hit by an RPG. I was
knocked sideways. The humvee was rocked and filled with awful-tasting smoke. I could see blood on my other arm, and it felt like
I had blood all over my back. Doc was grabbing his aid bag, and
he and I began to bail out. I looked
over and saw that Hakimi was already
out. He’d taken my rifle and bolted; his
door was hanging open.
The convoy set off with four Army
humvees in the lead, followed by the
ANA pick-ups, with LtCol Edwards’
humvee placed toward the rear. Marine First Lieutenant Morgan “Sean”
McQuiston was manning the M240G
medium machine gun in the humvee
turret; Navy Hospital Corpsman First
Class Stephen Albright was driving;
local interpreter Hakimi was sitting in
the back; and LtCol Edwards was the
“We ran behind our humvee and
hugged the berm on our right. I got on
the radio, and got hold of [Army 2Lt]
Lorenz, and told him we had been
wounded. I could see the Army gun
trucks were about 500 yards up the
road. They were putting out a lot of
machine-gun fire. I could hear Lorenz
talking to his higher [command] and
heard that their QRF [quick reaction
force] was on the way. The colonel
was still lying in the road, not moving,
and I thought he was dead.
ANDRE W LUBIN
vehicle commander. The convoy had been LtCol Ty Edwards (above) resets the defenses at
on the road for less than an hour when it Combat Outpost Kamu in the Gowardesh Valley. Ed-
entered a sweeping S-curve on the narrow wards was severely wounded in an Oct. 18 ambush
highway.
and evacuated. He continues to improve during what
The following narrative is from 1stLt
will be a long recovery. First Lt Sean McQuiston
McQuiston, as related to Leatherneck three
(below), manning a turret machine gun in a humvee
days after the fight:
during the ambush, also was severely wounded.
“I heard RPG fire ahead of me, but I
couldn’t see any bad guys. But I saw the
“The incoming fire decreased, and
suddenly Hakimi ran up to me. Colonel Edwards [was] still alive, he told
me, and said that when he bailed out
of the humvee with my rifle, he ran to
the colonel to protect him, and he’d been
trying to raise the ANA on his radio to get
some help.
“I rallied the ANA with some ‘when I
shoot, you shoot’ hand gestures, and it
seemed to work. We got rounds going out,
and Doc ran out to work on the boss. Colonel Edwards was unconscious but still
breathing, Doc told me. He’d been shot in
Army humvees ahead of me firing on a hill
about 300 yards off to my 2 o’clock, so I
swung my turret over and shot maybe 50
rounds in support.
the head, and I called for a CASEVAC [ca-sualty evacuation].
“The Army humvees then drove off,
which is their TTP [tactics, techniques and
procedures], while the ANA dismounted
from their trucks and hugged a berm to the
right of us. The ANA vehicles are unarmored; you can’t fight from them. Lieutenant Colonel Edwards jumped out and
went forward to work with the ANA. I’m
still up in the turret, putting out rounds.
There’s machine-gun fire coming in on us,
but it’s not heavy. But suddenly it increased,
and I got hit in the left arm.
“Lorenz’s forward observer had been
calling in grid coordinates for fire missions, so now the Army’s 120 mm mortars
from Bostick were landing. The mortarmen
did good ... and the Army’s QRF was on
the way. Their Blue Platoon [reaction unit]
called and told me they’d be arriving in five
mikes [minutes]. When they came around
the corner, their .50-cals and Mark 19s
opened up, and they really lit up the hill.
They sounded real good.
“So I ducked down in the turret, cut my
sleeve open and managed to stop the bleeding and put on a bandage. The firing kept increasing in intensity.
It was pinging off our humvee, and the windows were getting all
shot up ... parts of my 240 were falling in my lap; it was being
shot to pieces. Then I saw the boss fall. He went down hard, like
he was dropped. The firing was still very heavy. ‘Doc’ began to
creep the truck forward, looking for defilade so we could get out
and help the boss. We ended up pulling forward of where he was
lying by 20 to 30 yards.
ANDRE W LUBIN
“When the QRF rolled up, they grabbed
the boss, the wounded ANA, and us into
their humvees and brought us back to COP
[combat outpost] Lions Den. The medevac
birds were already in the air from J-bad
[Jalalabad], and they took the boss to Bagram.”
This short 15- to 20-minute action cost two Marine, two Army
and three ANA wounded. After-action intelligence indicates the
as-yet unidentified enemy suffered 30 or more killed and wounded
in the firefight, which is an excellent example of the brief and
vicious fighting in Afghanistan.
—Andrew Lubin
