Hot fight in icy place earns soldier medal

FORT BRAGG -- Local villagers stayed away from the tall mountain that straddled the Afghanistan-Pakistan border due south of Kabul. Bad men with guns were always there, they had told the American soldiers.

The 16 Fort Bragg paratroopers who went up Hill 2911 on Oct. 28, 2005, knew it was a dangerous place. Their unit had already been in one firefight there, and al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters often used it for launching rockets at a nearby U.S. post.

By daybreak, though, the worst enemies they had faced while waiting overnight for Taliban or al-Qaeda fighters infiltrating from Pakistan were the biting cold and thin air at an altitude of nearly two miles. The water in Staff Sgt. Patric L. Trattles' backpack drinking bladder had frozen, he noticed.

Then, as described Friday as Trattles was awarded the Silver Star, came one of the harshest short battles of the war.

About 7 a.m., a paratrooper eased up to Trattles and said that he had just spotted two men about 50 feet away, moving through the thick brush.

Trattles and eight other enlisted men were about 300 feet up the mountain from a smaller group that included the Bravo Company commander, Capt. Brandon Teague, and the unit's Humvees.

Staff Sgt. Travis Nixon, 24, called Teague on the radio and quietly asked whether there were supposed to be any friendly locals in the area. No, Teague said.

Nixon had barely signed off when there were several quick gunshots and two explosions. The other soldiers had seen that the intruders were carrying AK-47 assault rifles and were clearly maneuvering to attack Teague.

Trattles had tossed two grenades among them, an action that was later credited with killing several and halting the initial thrust of the attack.

Guerrillas all around

What the soldiers didn't know, though, was that there were more guerrillas, about 60 of them, all around.

"The whole mountain erupted with fire," Teague recalled Friday.

There were attackers to the west and others to the east, firing from Pakistan, the border was so close.

"We just hunkered down and went at it," said Trattles, 25, from Lubbock, Texas. "I was trying to get the men to lay down as much fire as possible because there were [bad] guys everywhere."

Some may have hunkered down, but not Trattles. He moved to "every major flashpoint" in the 45-minute firefight," according to the formal citation for the medal, which credits him with helping kill 14 enemy fighters and forcing the rest to retreat into Pakistan.

"I was just worried about my guys," Trattles said. "Taking care of as many guys as I could and making sure they came home safely was reward enough."

Throughout the fight, he and Nixon kept circling the paratroopers' position, firing, checking on their men, directing incoming howitzer and mortar fire, and making sure everyone had ammunition.

The unit's mortar teams, which were set up about half a mile away, fired more than 125 rounds that day, said Teague, who called them heroes.

"It was one of those Vietnam moments, where they're just feeding round after round into the tubes and the tubes are so hot they're steaming," he said.

Second group targeted

At first, the guerrillas only saw Teague's men and the Humvees, but when Trattles' group picked off some, they soon spotted the second group of paratroopers and turned a torrent of rifle, machine gun and rocket-propelled grenade fire on it.

The paratroopers fought the attackers on their western side until the fire from that direction seemed under control but found another group trying to circle around on the east to outflank Teague's position.

Trattles used hand grenades, his rifle and, at one point when the enemy mounted an assault on a weak point, he grabbed another soldier's machine gun and ran out by himself about 75 yards from his men.

Then he saw Nixon, his friend for five years, fall, shot in the side. Trattles dashed to his side and began administering CPR, ignoring heavy enemy fire from two locations.

When a medic said that Nixon had to be evacuated if he was going to have any chance of living, Trattles hoisted the wounded man onto his back and carried him 150 yards down the mountain to the Humvees.

'Vision I'll always see'

Teague and his men, too, had been fighting hard, and when he saw Trattles coming, with Nixon draped limply over his back, that was the first time he had seen either of them during the battle.

"When I think about that day,' Teague said, "that's the vision I'll always see."

Nixon died anyway. He was awarded the Silver Star, too, as was Teague, in an earlier ceremony.

Teague, like Trattles, waved away the idea that what he had done that morning stood out.

"Every single guy up there fought for their life," Teague said, "fought for their buddy, and every one of them was a hero."