The Soldier: Sudden Warrior

With 40 other soldiers and their 80-lb. rucksacks crammed into the rear of a Chinook helicopter--a space designed for 33--Randel Perez barely had room to breathe. As they thundered through the darkness toward the Shah-i-Kot Valley in eastern Afghanistan, the dim cabin lights cast pink and purple shadows on Perez and his fellow infantrymen from the U.S. Army's 10th Mountain Division. Some chattered about the fight to come, while others managed to catch a last-minute nap. Perez was far away, hugging a baby he had never met. It was early March, and the 30-year-old staff sergeant had seen only a grainy Internet picture of his only son, Ramiro, born just 10 weeks before. Perez wondered what Ramiro was doing. He wondered what would happen if he never got to see the boy, then stuffed that thought someplace way down deep.

The helicopter dropped into the southern end of the steep-sided valley, its rear ramp opening as it drew closer to the snow-patched ground. Perez knew that he had to let go of the baby. "I had to zone him out," he says. "The mission became the only thing on my mind." That's Perez--plainspoken and shaven-headed, a fireplug who wanted so badly to lead troops in combat that he had bailed out of the Army supply corps two years earlier and joined the frontline infantry. Before this day was over, he'd lead more troops through more combat than he'd ever dreamed possible.

As he and his fellow grunts clambered down the chopper's ramp, Perez realized that they had basically flown into a gigantic stadium and scrambled out, vulnerable and exposed, in the home team's end zone. From up in the grandstands--the half-mile-high mountains ringing them on three sides--an unknown number of al-Qaeda fighters began peppering the Americans with AK-47 fire. Operation Anaconda had just begun--and Perez and his comrades were already playing defense.

The U.S. Army, in its biggest assignment of the war, was sending in 1,411 men to seal off the valley while its Afghan allies tracked down the enemy and destroyed what was thought to be the last al-Qaeda and Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. But this time, unlike the fight nearly three months before in Tora Bora, Americans would not rely on Afghans to supply the combat troops. Perez and most of the other members of Task Force Rakkasan had flown in from the Soviet-era air base at Bagram, an hour away. Intelligence reports at the base, just outside Kabul, had hinted that Osama bin Laden and Taliban leader Mullah Omar might even be holed up in the sullen, beautiful valley. Perez liked the sound of that.

But now there were other sounds to contend with. No sooner had Perez's Chinook wheeled out of sight than the skies filled with the thunks, thuds and whistles of rocket-propelled grenades, 82-mm mortar rounds and heavy machine-gun bursts. "All hell broke loose," remembers Command Sergeant Major Frank Grippe, who was overseeing the action from a command post some 100 yards away. The U.S. troops returned fire with their short-barreled M-4 assault carbines and M-240 machine guns, but the enemy wasn't giving them much in the way of targets.