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The Spartans decided to take the opportunity to move on.
“Get off your dead asses, get in your f---ing truck or we’re leaving you,” the Spartans yelled at their Afghan colleagues, according to the senior weapons sergeant. The ANA soldiers jumped up and ran to their vehicles. The convoy was on the move again.

The vehicles stopped in an open area just short of Andar, where the Spartans faced a decision: Go north to Deh Chopan or south to Marah. The team had been to Deh Chopan before and knew it was too big a town for their tiny force.
“It would take a division to clear,” the team leader said. But the Spartans felt good about heading to Marah, a village about 12 kilometers to the southeast, where they expected to find the enemy.

The convoy entered Andar, the first of several villages it would pass through on the mission. “It was a ghost town,” the team leader said. “No kids, no adults. It was like someone had come in and told them to leave.” It started to rain. Two Taliban commanders were on the radio. One was in Deh Chopan, the other in Marah. “We’ve got the fighters; we’re assembling in Marah,” the latter said. “Marah’s where the fight’s going to be. If they come through Marah, we’ll be ready for them.”

The U.S. team leader got on the radio to Task Force 31 headquarters at Kandahar airfield and discussed the possibility of getting a quick-reaction force sent to Marah, where he was certain the enemy was massing. That message was passed to Task Force Rock, built around 2nd Battalion (Airborne), 503rd Infantry Regiment, and headquartered in Qalat, the Zabul capital about 60 kilometers to the southeast. But by now, the Spartans’ battle was being monitored by the second-highest U.S. military headquarters in Afghanistan — Coalition and Joint Task Force-76 at Bagram air base, 360 kilometers to the northeast.

The message the Spartans’ “repeatedly” sent up the chain was simple, the team leader said: “If the QRF package was going to be sent in, we’d like for them to go to Marah, and we just push the enemy to them.”
As the QRF discussions went back and forth over the radio, the Spartan convoy continued south along a narrow road through rolling valleys dotted by isolated villages. Taliban units in the mountains, meanwhile, monitored their progress.
The Taliban commander in Marah again spoke over the radio: “Watch the Americans, tell us where they turn, but come meet us in Marah.”
But to the Spartans’ great frustration, at 2:56 p.m., when they had already driven 10 kilometers toward Marah, they received orders passed down from CJTF-76 to return to Andar, where TF Rock was to send a large QRF consisting of four CH-47 Chinooks and two UH-60 Black Hawks carrying an infantry company, plus four AH-64 Apache attack helicopters.

It appeared to the SF soldiers that the Rock staffers had not kept up with events on the battlefield. “I don’t want to knock our fellow brethren, but they made a decision to land in a place the enemy was not,” the team leader said. However, another officer monitoring events said the decision had been made in the CJTF-76 headquarters at Bagram, not by TF Rock.
Nervous the Taliban would shoot down a helicopter if the QRF was sent to Marah, CJTF-76 ordered the QRF and the Spartans to rendezvous in Andar, the officer said.

“It was the CJTF-76 staff that created the problems, that created the confusion, that created the delay on that day,” he added. A CJTF-76 spokesman declined to comment for this article.
Eating away at the Spartans as they drove back to Andar was the knowledge that the enemy fighters would now have more time to perfect the ambush they were preparing in Marah. The Spartans would later estimate that the additional time allowed the enemy to double or triple the force lying in wait for the convoy.

The Taliban around Andar had no intention of taking on the heliborne QRF.
“The Americans are too great,” a Taliban commander said over the radio. “They have all their mosquitoes [Apache helicopters]. Do not fight; they will shoot. Hide.” The QRF, which also included the Spartans’ company commander, was surprised to find no enemy in Andar. “They’re in Marah, like we told you,” the team leader told his company commander. (At no stage was the team leader able to communicate directly with the infantry chain of command). The QRF got back on the helicopters and returned to Qalat. To the team leader, unaware of the machinations at the higher headquarters, the infantry’s departure was infuriating.
“They basically didn’t take my word that there was a larger element waiting in Marah,” he said.

7:16 p.m.
Darkness was closing in as the Spartans headed south again. For the first time that day, the SF soldiers felt they had lost the initiative.
The enemy was indeed waiting — in a huge horseshoe-shaped rock-strewn mountainside position about 500 meters beyond the point the Spartans had reached when they were ordered to turn back. Boulders as big as Volkswagen Beetles were stacked on top of one another 100 to 200 meters from the road, providing cover and concealment. As the lead ANA pickup drove into the kill zone, the enemy again fired a few rounds to get the ANA troops to stop and dismount. When the first SF gun truck pushed up to see what was going on, the enemy opened up on it. The second and third GMVs advanced until there were 50-meter intervals between the three gun trucks.

The enemy unleashed automatic-weapons and RPG fire so intense that the team leader gave the order to break contact and pull back. But it was too late. Not only had the ANA troops disappeared, but as soon as the gun trucks got ready to move, enemy fighters at each end of the rock pile opened up, boxing in the convoy. The Spartans realized immediately that this enemy was more skilled than the Taliban fighters in the four previous engagements. They had dispersed into small groups around the boulder field so their fire could encompass the ANA and the SF contingent, “regardless of how far apart we were spread out,” the team leader said.

The GMV gunners swiveled to face the new threat and began to fire. But somewhere in the boulders a sniper put the cross hairs of his rifle scope on Staff Sgt. Christopher Falkel, the .50-cal gunner on the third GMV.
As Falkel, at 22 the youngest member of the team, poured lead into the enemy positions, the sniper pulled the trigger. A single bullet hit Falkel in the head, penetrating his helmet and killing him instantly. His lifeless body slumped in the turret.

A superb soldier whose professionalism was matched by his sense of humor, Falkel was what is known as an “SF baby,” having joined Special Forces straight from civilian life, but he had quickly earned the respect of his teammates.