Heroes 2011
'They just kind of had a bead on me'
It was a rainy afternoon in the Korengal Valley, the kind of weather that for Petty Officer 2nd Class Franco Ahumada usually meant the day would pass without incident.
But outside the wire, in the drizzle, unseen fighters were moving into position in the rugged and remote Afghanistan valley.
Ahumada was in his hooch when machine gun fire punched through the dreary afternoon.
The Afghan fighters, armed with Russian PKM machine guns, launched an offensive June 19, 2009, against Firebase Vegas, a desolate Korengal outpost shared by U.S. and Afghan troops.
In an instant, the corpsman’s slow day morphed into hard combat.
Ahumada would make a death-defying dash through the gunfire to retrieve a grenade launcher — an act of bravery that would help win the fight for the coalition force and earn him a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with “V.” He would receive a second commendation medal for valor while mentoring Afghan soldiers during the same deployment.
“It just takes one wrong step or just one good leading round” to be killed when running through gunfire, he said.
In the summer of 2009, the Korengal Valley was still one of Afghanistan’s fiercest battlegrounds. The U.S. pulled forces from the area in mid-2010 after five years of fighting without transformative gains.
Ahumada was an instructor with Embedded Training Team 5-4, which was part of the 201st Corps of the Afghan National Army, and fought beside each platoon of Afghan soldiers he trained at the small firebase during his 11 months in the valley.
“If you are in a firefight, you are depending on them and they are depending on you,” Ahumada said. “You have to develop that relationship.”
The attack on the base on that rainy afternoon became one of the worst battles Ahumada and his platoon of 22 Afghan soldiers would face together.
“As soon as I came out the door, there was a fixed position of anti-coalition forces,” Ahumada said.
He sprinted from the door to a position at the wire with both an Afghan National Army commander and an interpreter.
The U.S. Army platoon that occupied the opposite side of the small base opened fire into the valley. Ahumada’s platoon of Afghan soldiers was firing back from their side of the compound and using a Squad Automatic Weapon and a PKM machine gun as part of the effort to repel the attack.
Coalition mortars boomed along the insurgent positions.
“You could sense pauses after the impacts but they kept coming,” Ahumada said.
The SAW and PKM jammed, overheated and then ran out of ammo as the firefight wore on.
The coalition fire wasn’t getting to the enemy fighters hiding behind rocks.
“I knew I had to get on my target that was 100 to 150 meters out,” he said. “I knew the best way to get in there was an M203” grenade launcher.
The next moments could have ended badly.
But the battle depended on Ahumada getting across to the U.S. side of the firebase and bringing back a grenade launcher.
It depended on 165 feet of open ground, Ahumada’s luck and the accuracy of enemy machine gun fire.
With bullets kicking up dirt, he made the run.
“I guess they could see me because they just kind of had a bead on me the whole way,” he said.
On the other side, a servicemember was waiting with the grenade launcher.
“I said, ‘I need your 203 right now,’ ” Ahumada said. “He gave me his bandolier and I ran back through.”
He launched the first two rounds. Confirmation came back over the radio that the enemy positions were hit. Ahumada pumped another eight grenades out over the wire.
The Afghan attackers finally retreated from positions among the rocks under the barrage. Servicemembers on the U.S. side of the joint firebase continued the offensive until the firefight was won.
The ANA fighters under his mentorship had done well under fire, Ahumada said.
The violent encounter dissolved again into calm for the time being.
“It was just another day after that,” he said.
