Battle in "the Evilest Place"

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Solloway's daydreams about Playboy bunnies are shattered when a humvee roars up to the firebase, and Gilstrap is pulled out. "I wanted to get those sons of bitches," says Solloway. His chance would come. The enemy usually retreats after firing off a few rounds. But this time the barrage holds steady, coming from several directions. That morning, radio surveillance picked up voices in Arabic — a sign that al-Qaeda was taking charge of the assault, according to Major Wille.

The reinforcements scramble into place. Solloway and other 1st Platoon men toss on their combat gear and are quickly bucking along the Chevy track in their humvees. The platoon heads to a hilltop overlooking the ridges that's wide enough for the humvees and, if needed, for a medevac helicopter to land. The hilltop also has a clean firing line. The vehicles pull up, and company commander Captain Ryan Worthan fans his men out into the scrub pines and along the wadis, to stalk the enemy. In one wadi, Sergeant Christopher McGurk sees footprints and the remains of a fire. He makes a decision that, in the end, probably saves 20 lives: sensing an ambush, he orders his men to advance parallel to the footprints along a nearby hill. Had they remained in the wadi, they would have blundered straight into the enemy's gunsights.

In the dirt his men find a long, half-buried wire. It leads in one direction to where the humvees are parked, and in the other, up a rough slope. Sergeant Allen Grenz begins following the wire. As he crests the hill, Grenz spots a rustle in underbrush. Crouched under a pine are three enemy fighters. It clicks in Grenz's brain that the wire, a blast cable, is leading straight up to the enemy. (Later the soldiers find that the wire was set to detonate five antitank mines buried under the humvees.) Grenz quickly absorbs the danger: one of the fighters is holding a detonator. Another is poised to hurl a grenade, and a third is leveling his weapon at Grenz. In the space of one, maybe two, seconds, Grenz squeezes off three shots with his M-16 rifle. He nails the first man in the forehead, the second in the right eye, the third in the stomach.

Suddenly, a northern ridge on the Pakistani side erupts in gunfire. Then from the south, inexplicably, a Pakistani militia unit occupying a border outpost on the hillside unleashes five rocket-propelled grenades at Grenz and his men. The Pakistanis are supposed to be helping the Americans. It's something the Americans will puzzle over later, when the fighting stops. "There were about 20 muzzle fires on the northern ridge," Captain Craig Mullaney later recalls. One was a sniper, who, from a distance of 600 yds., hits Private First Class Evan O'Neill, 19, twice precisely below his flak jacket, shearing a main artery. A third shot hits O'Neill as his buddies are dragging him behind a tree. Braving machine-gun and rocket fire, medic Christopher Couchot administers first aid and then helps carry O'Neill up the hillside to the humvees. A Black Hawk medevac helicopter circles but is driven away by gunfire. O'Neill, a self-mocking kid from Haverhill, Mass., who could make everybody in his platoon laugh, slips into a coma and dies.

By now, Captain Worthan can locate the enemy on the north, east and south sides of the ridge, just inside the border. U.S. spotters target at least 30 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. Worthan, while dodging sniper fire behind a boulder, orders up the full wrath of several Apache attack helicopters and an A-10 Warthog gunship. "The whole ridge was ripped up," Worthan later recalls. "It was like time stopped." The Americans estimate that more than 20 al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters were killed.

After the fighting, back inside the Shkin fort, the men collapse from fatigue inside their windowless hooches. Wille, the brawny, red-haired, soft-spoken major, visits his wounded men. Then he and Worthan review the battle. "The enemy did a good job anticipating what we'd do," Wille says. "They wanted us to take casualties and bring in a helicopter so they could shoot it down."

The big mystery is why the Pakistani militiamen fired on the Americans. And why the Pakistanis didn't do anything about the al-Qaeda gunners in plain view just a few hundred yards below the border post. After all, President Pervez Musharraf is an avowed ally in the Bush Administration's war on terrorism, and Pakistan has helped fill Guantanamo's jails with hundreds of al-Qaeda suspects. On the ground, however, the loyalty of Pakistani soldiers and intelligence officers is questionable. Afghan officials in Kabul claim that some military officers from Pakistan, which backed the Taliban prior to 9/11, are providing funds, arms and sanctuary to help the Taliban regroup. The goal: to keep Afghanistan neatly tethered to Pakistan.