They would make perfect bombs.

In a barrack just south of the fuel farm, a group of sergeants were sitting around watching Tupac Shakur’s classic film Juice and doing what they normally did at night: bullshitting. That was how you unwound on base, in the absence of booze, civilian women, fast food, pretty much whatever you enjoyed when you weren’t stuck in a camp surrounded by razor wire halfway around the world. Tonight’s topic: street fights back home, the punches they’d given and received. Staff Sergeant Gustavo Delgado, 27, was built like a bulldog and liked to fight like one, or at least he used to, growing up around Chicago’s Logan Square. That was before the Marines straightened him out, taught him to act like a professional.

None of the guys in the barracks were trigger-pullers or flyboys. They worked logistics, shipping parts and supplies to the other air-wing units in Afghanistan. But they were still at war, they were still doing something—that’s what made it worthwhile, all the rules and the long days and bunk beds and graffitied bathroom stalls. The point was that you weren’t back home getting drunk or married. You were doing something.

When they heard the first explosion, the sergeants walked outside and scanned the base. A few hundred yards to the north, the fuel farms were lit up with giant floodlights so sentries could keep an eye on them. As Delgado and his men looked on, an RPG suddenly streaked out of the darkness and slammed into one of the bladders. With a massive boom, the jet fuel ignited into a towering fireball, momentarily turning night into day.

Delgado could feel the blood pounding in his temples, a mix of fear and anger like he was back scrapping in Logan Square. Within minutes he’d mustered his unit and was down near the fuel farm, behind a blast barrier, exchanging fire with the insurgents. A series of explosions rocked their position, shrapnel screeching off the concrete. Someone was lobbing grenades. Delgado watched as a group of Marines at the northeast corner of the building started shouting and firing—they’d spotted an insurgent. Delgado ran to them and heard rounds slamming into the other side of the concrete barrier. Then he saw a figure in a U.S. Army uniform about thirty yards away. Delgado lined him up in his scope and fired, once, twice. He would later marvel at how calmly he had killed a man, yet at that moment there was only a kind of clarity, an imperative to act.

Farther out, near the cryo lab, he saw a machine gun open up, and he ducked down, the bullets ripping against the barrier. The insurgents were on top of them.

Back at the Harrier compound, things were getting ugly. The insurgents had taken cover behind one of the thick concrete walls and were unloading machine-gun fire and RPGs on the Marines. Earlier, hoping to outflank them, Raible and Chambless had launched a two-pronged counterstrike, with Raible leading a charge out one door of the maintenance building and Chambless taking a second team out another. But now Chambless’s crew was pinned down behind a Humvee, with no sign of Raible. We need a new plan, Chambless thought._ I’ve got to find Otis._ Suddenly there was the metallic clink of a grenade rolling under the truck, and Chambless flinched as the explosion blew one of the Marines into a ditch, lancing him with shrapnel. Chambless’s ears were ringing. The noise around them was intensifying. The Harriers, burning wildly, carried up to 11,000 pounds of jet fuel, and by now the 300 explosive rounds from their cannons were starting to cook off, punctuating the night with hammering booms. His Marines were low on ammunition, but the enemy seemed to have an arsenal. The Marine who’d been hit by the grenade was bleeding badly. Chambless dashed back toward the maintenance building, searching for Raible. "Otis!" he yelled. "Otis!" But there was no answer.

Ten thirty. Half an hour into the attack, and it was still chaos at the air wing. Marines fought in the darkness and confusion, each unit defending its own compound. An RPG took the life of Sergeant Bradley Atwell, the night’s first American death. It seemed like the attackers were everywhere. Fifteen men had cast thousands into turmoil.

The sound of a faraway explosion shook awake Major Robb McDonald. He opened his eyes and listened. He had a youthful, finely set face that typically bore a genial expression, one that belied the fact that he was an unusually talented specialist in violence. McDonald had spent three tours as a forward air controller with Marine special operations in Afghanistan. Now he’d returned as a pilot to work under the command of his old friend Raible.

Something was seriously wrong. McDonald, with the sinewy build of a distance runner, jumped out of bed, grabbed his Beretta, and, dressed only in a pair of green running shorts, sprinted down to the main barracks. As he emerged from the darkness, a group of Marines nervously pointed their weapons at him. Someone said that Raible had already gone down to the jets. Still half-naked, McDonald grabbed some body armor, and a Marine gave him a flight suit and a pair of boots several sizes too small, which would leave crippling blisters on his feet the next day.

McDonald jogged the mile to the maintenance building and walked in, passing tired-looking Marines hunkered down in the hallway. He spotted Chambless; his face looked stricken.

"Six is dead," he said, using the shorthand for his commanding officer, Raible.

McDonald stared at his fellow pilot. "Show me where he is."

They walked into the equipment room, where Raible was lying on his back, covered by a blanket. McDonald crouched down beside his friend and pulled the blanket back. He had been badly wounded in the neck by shrapnel from an RPG. McDonald put his finger into the wounds and checked for a pulse. Nothing. He looked into Raible’s open eyes, marveling for a last time at how blue they were. A hard blue, he thought. He took out Raible’s wallet for safekeeping and then pulled the blanket back over, crossing his arms and legs and binding them with duct tape to make him easier to carry.

After he had prepared his friend’s body, McDonald walked back into the hallway, where the demoralized Marines stared up at him. What the hell were they doing, all crammed in here like sitting ducks? He looked around at the thin aluminum walls of the hangar. If the insurgents wanted to, they could just walk up, empty their magazines, and smoke us all.

Five hundred feet above Camp Bastion, Lightfoot, the helo-squadron commander, pulled back on his control stick and brought the Cobra around in a slow loop over the base. The flying conditions were as wild as he had ever seen. Smoke from the flight line and fuel depots billowed up in impenetrable columns while blinding fires dotted the ground below. The night was so dark that even with his night-vision goggles he couldn’t see the horizon. It was instrument-only flying.

By 11 p.m., an hour after the battle had begun, the situation was beginning to come into focus for Lightfoot and the other commanders. The insurgents’ target was clearly the air wing and its military hardware. The Harrier compound was a mess of burning jets, and down by the fuel farm there was another confused gun battle where the Marines had encountered the two teams of Taliban. The British force had finally gotten into the action, too. (By now, Prince Harry had been stashed in a secure location.) Up to this point it had been a slugfest on the ground, a close-quarters struggle that could go on for hours. If the Marines were going to end this without taking a lot of casualties, Lightfoot knew he had to bring his choppers’ firepower to bear.

The trouble was distinguishing friend from foe. The attackers were wearing U.S. Army uniforms, and they were mid in with Marine positions. Lightfoot radioed for another one of his Cobra pilots, Major Robert Weingart, to swoop down and take a closer look.

With a Huey gunship flying on his tail, Weingart darted in and out of the columns of smoke, trying to decipher the pinpricks of light below in the green field of his night vision. Are those muzzle flashes, or rounds cooking off, or what? His wingman’s voice crackled over the radio: "Hey, we’ve got reports of insurgents in the cryogenics facility on the east side of the road." Weingart flew above the barren ground between the fence line and the airfield to take a look. There was definitely someone shooting from that position, but he couldn’t be sure, even with his night vision, who it was. He couldn’t risk strafing friendlies. Then he had an idea: He radioed the base operations center and directed the ground troops to fire in unison on the enemy’s position. He’d use the gunfire, glowing in his night vision, to point the way to the enemy. Within minutes the quick-reaction force unleashed a bright green string of tracers onto the cryo facility. Target confirmed. Weingart lined up the Cobra on an attack run and let loose a long burst of explosive twenty-millimeter cannon rounds.

On the ground below, Delgado and his men, still pinned down by machine-gun fire, heard the rush of a helicopter coming in, followed by the roar of a chain gun. God what a beautiful sound, Delgado thought. The cryo plant lit up with hundreds of small explosions as the rounds impacted.

The Marines around him erupted in cheers. "Fuck yeah!" Delgado yelled.

_Where the hell were the insurgents? And how many of them were out there? _McDonald had led the Marines out of the flimsy maintenance hangar into the relative safety of the squadron’s headquarters building. But he still didn’t have a fix on the enemy. So far, they’d located only a single injured attacker. McDonald spotted him through his rifle scope: a body lying flat about fifty yards away, against a concrete wall, wearing a U.S. Army uniform. The man looked gravely wounded. He had a beard, an AK-47, and some grenades and wore a pair of running sneakers. As McDonald watched through binoculars, the insurgent brought a can of spray paint to his face and, bizarrely, starting huffing it as an anesthetic. The guy was obviously messed up. Better to leave him for the quick-reaction team to capture. Maybe they could exploit him for intelligence.

McDonald had no idea how many attackers had slipped in, but he knew where he might find them: out on the flight line, looking for more aircraft to burn. He enlisted three Marines to have a look. "I’m gonna go count the jets," he quipped to a startled sentry on his way out.

McDonald took up a position behind a shipping container out on the tarmac. Set along the runway was a long line of blast barriers, designed to protect aircraft from incoming rockets and mortars. Leaving the three Marines to cover him, he sprinted up to the first barrier and came around it. And there, about thirty feet away, were four bearded Taliban in U.S. Army uniforms. The closest one was facing him, holding a huge belt-fed machine gun.