by Jake Tapper
“Roger,” Roller told him.
“Sweet OP,” said Bostick, referring to the observation post.
Roller agreed. They had a great position, overlooking the entire valley.
Dave Roller’s view of Saret Koleh, the Landay-Sin River, and the road. (Photo courtesy of Dave Roller)
With that piece of business done, Bostick sent the ANA troops into the hamlet to make the initial contact, then went in himself and approached a village elder. At thirty-seven, Bostick was considered aged for a captain in combat, but he had nothing on any of the Nuristani elders he’d met so far, with their decades-old white beards and craggy oaken faces. Bostick was fairly sure that neither this man nor any of the other residents of Saret Koleh had ever before met an American. He and the elder headed into a building for a shura while Fritsche, Wilson, and others from 2nd Platoon pulled security outside. Once again, Wilson made a suggestion to Fritsche, saying that he thought their position might be a tad too exposed, that maybe it would be better if they moved over and stood in the grove of trees instead. Fritsche rejected Wilson’s idea.
It wasn’t all unpleasantness between the two of them, however: they joked around a bit, then played and exchanged smiles with some village kids, to whom they gave candy. The presence of children was usually a good sign in situations such as this, indicating that the villagers weren’t aware of anything bad that was about to happen. A young girl with big, beautiful eyes appeared, reminding Wilson of the iconic Pashtun on the cover of the June 1985 issue of National Geographic. She started playing peekaboo with the soldiers from behind a house, granting them a rare moment of innocence and levity.
During the shura, Bostick tried his best, with the aid of his interpreter, to convey that the Americans were there to help. The United States, he explained, wanted to assist the Nuristanis with development, to help them succeed. The old man focused on something else: for months now, he said, mortars had been repeatedly exploding on the mountain next to the village—American mortars, targeting whomever. This needed to stop, he insisted. Bostick expressed concern about the explosions but noted that there were many insurgents in the area. He asked for more information, but the elder offered no additional details.
If Bostick needed further evidence of local insurgent activity, he was about to get it.
CHAPTER 17
“Bulldog-Six, Where Are You?”
Nothing happened, and then everything happened at once.
Per Lieutenant Meyer’s orders, Ryan Fritsche led a team out to set up an observation post from which they would watch over the valley. They would cross the bridge, make their way east on the road in the direction of Forward Operating Base Naray, wait for their cue, and then slog up the southern mountain.
“An OP site?” said Wilson, always questioning. “We don’t have any cover for it.”
“Let’s go,” Fritsche said. “We’re going to push down the road.”
Fritsche, Wilson, Private Barba, and their SAW gunner and rifleman, Privates First Class Nic Barnes and James Stevenson, walked over the bridge and then continued on a couple of hundred yards to the east, where, near a large boulder, they came upon two American snipers, Staff Sergeant Bryan Morrow and Specialist Matthew White. The sun was oppressively beating down upon them all, and Fritsche told his men to drop their packs and helmets; the additional weight was too much, he said.
“We saw two guys with AKs run up the hill,” Morrow reported. The snipers had been scouting ahead for the rest of the company, and as they were moving up the side of the mountain, they’d glimpsed a young male Nuristani, age eighteen or so, holding a rifle, along with a boy of about twelve, both running away from them.
Why would anyone with a weapon run away? wondered Wilson. He thought of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War and the concept of a baited ambush. The Chinese military strategist had described the tactic centuries before: “By holding out baits, he keeps him on the march; then with a body of picked men he lies in wait for him.”
“We’re going to recon the patrol base,” Morrow said, meaning they were going to scout out a place for an observation post.
Fritsche turned to his men, Wilson and Barnes, and explained the mission, adding that they would walk in single file because of the steep climb.
“We’re not supposed to go until we get word,” Wilson reminded him.
But Fritsche shrugged off Wilson’s protest. Barba and Stevenson stayed back at the rock while the others started up the hill. White took point, followed by his fellow sniper, Morrow. Fritsche, Wilson, and Barnes came next. After climbing about a hundred yards, they saw the two locals in the distance. All five men broke from their single file and spread out on the hill.
“We’re being led into an ambush!” Wilson yelled. “Stop following the kid!”
“Shut up!” Fritsche said through clenched teeth.
“Stick with me,” Wilson said to Barnes. “This is bad.”
Barnes said he would. Wilson was his team leader as well as his friend. And he shared Wilson’s concerns about Fritsche’s lack of experience in the field.
Bostick and his team finished up with the shura and left the village, crossing the bridge back to the road to Kamu. On hearing that Fritsche and the snipers were pursuing suspected insurgents up the mountain, Bostick pulled aside the medic, Fortner, and advised him, “Get ready.” The ANA troops who’d accompanied them on this operation thought they saw something odd going on at a house back across the bridge, one that had previously been used as a staging ground for an RPG attack. After Bostick gave them the okay to run back and check it out, they recrossed the Landay-Sin River and went into the house. Bostick now turned to his men and said, “Guys, let’s get off the road.” He, Johnson, Lape, Sultan, and the others headed up into the sloping woods. Bostick was just a few steps up the hill when he stopped.
“Wait,” he said.
Pausing, they listened to the radio: lots of enemy chatter. Sultan looked north, back across the river, to the hamlet of Saret Koleh. He saw a villager pick up her child and start running.
Bostick had instructed the ANA troops to rejoin the group once they’d checked out the house on the other side of the bridge, but after exiting the home—where they hadn’t found anything—they instead continued walking eastward, away from the bridge and toward a second home across the river.
Up on the southern mountain, Fritsche, Wilson, and Barnes followed the snipers, Morrow and White, as quickly as they could up the steep incline. They came into an open area. It was still and silent—until enemy guns began firing at them from some one hundred yards farther up the mountain. Bullets whizzed by, making a snapping sound. At first the U.S. soldiers weren’t sure which way to run, forward or backward, but then they swiftly pulled back and took cover behind some trees down the hill.
Insurgent fire aimed at Tom Bostick and Headquarters Platoon now also began exploding from the hills above—the same mountain that Fritsche’s patrol was on, but farther west. Bullets splashed into the Landay-Sin River.
The ANA troops ran back across the bridge toward the road, returning fire with their AK-47s and RPGs as they went. One ANA soldier fell, shot in the leg: it was Habibullah, on whose head Newsom had broken his hand weeks earlier. Since then, the Afghan had developed trusting relationships with many of the Americans. He’d been hit in the thigh; Rob Fortner met him and hustled him to safety in the trees. Nearby, Bostick, Johnson, Lape, and Sultan took cover in the woods behind some boulders.
Farther to the west on the southern mountain, from his observation post high in the hills, Dave Roller had been watching Bostick and his men and trying to figure out what the ANA troops were looking for. The insurgents now answered that question, as 1st Platoon, too, was hit by a shower of small-arms fire and RPGs.
The enemy had the high ground, attacking from the mountains above the platoon’s position and surrounding it from left to right, 270 degrees. Specialist Tommy Alford got his M240B machine gun, ran to the southern edge of 1st Platoon’s position, and laid d
own a streak of bullets. Then he realized that shots were coming from the east as well, so he began returning fire in that direction. A bullet hit him. Blood gushed from his neck. Alford kept firing until he collapsed.
“I’m hit!” he screamed. “Oh my God, I’m hit!”
Private First Class Miles Foltz grabbed his wounded comrade and pulled him behind a large rock, where he began administering first aid. The bullet had torn through the right side of Alford’s jaw and exited out his neck. Foltz bandaged up the exit wound; the stream of blood was forceful, as if springing from a bottomless source.
Roller, busy switching among the three radios he had, yelled for someone to pick up Alford’s machine gun. Every second spent on something other than coordinating bomb drops would be, for Roller, a second wasted. Specialist Eric Cramer responded to the lieutenant’s order, snatching up the M240B, and then he and Foltz took turns trying to save Alford’s life and trying to end the lives of a few insurgents with the machine gun. At one point, when Foltz replaced Alford’s saturated bandage, the blood began spilling out again.
“Oh, shit,” Foltz said. He plugged the hole in Alford’s neck with his hand, then rebandaged the wound and attempted to calm down his injured friend, talking to him as if he were confident that everything was going to be just fine.
Crouched behind a rock, Ryan Fritsche tried to reach to the rest of Bulldog Troop to report his patrol’s position and give its coordinates, but discovered that his radio wasn’t working properly; it kept cutting in and out. Wilson, who had been on guard a short distance away from the group, came back and offered to tinker with it, but once again, Fritsche turned him down.
Not long after that, word came crackling over the radio that Alford had been shot in the neck. All units were ordered to stay where they were until he’d been medevacked out.
Apaches now flew into the valley, and as they swept through, Fritsche, Morrow, White, Barnes, and Wilson could hear the enemy, just a few hundred yards above them, firing at the U.S. helicopters.
Tom Bostick and his patrol were farther down the mountain, to the west, closer to the road. The captain directed Kenny Johnson, his fire-support officer, to get the mortars firing and have them hit the ridge above them to the southwest, where the enemy now had Dave Roller and his men pinned down. They needed to beat back the insurgents so they could get a medevac in there. Johnson called it in, and seconds later, there was a faint boom off in the distance.
“That’s it?” asked Bostick. The mortars hadn’t landed even remotely close to where they needed to go.
The captain grabbed the radio from Sultan. “Why isn’t there fucking mortar fire?” he bellowed. “What the fuck is going on? Why don’t I have mortars?!”
He was told that the mortars were being adjusted; apparently the mortarmen were resetting the base plate, which had become unbalanced.
“Fuck this,” Bostick said, dropping the radio. He turned to Johnson and gave him an order: “Fix this.”
They needed the medevac to drop a Jungle Penetrator up at Roller’s observation post so that Alford could be strapped on to it, pulled up into the chopper, and whisked away—now.
Roller’s voice came over the radio: “Alford’s going to die,” he announced. “He got shot in the fucking neck—we need a medevac now, or he’s gone.”
Bostick turned to Johnson and urged him to encourage their friends in the medevac to hurry up and get into the valley. “Tell those pussies to stop being fucking pussies and get out here,” he said.
Back at Combat Outpost Kamu, Alex Newsom was still impatient to join the fight, but as the leader of the quick reaction force, he couldn’t take any of the men from 3rd Platoon into battle before the first American casualty was reported. Whenever shots were fired, he would radio Bostick to ask if he wanted the QRF to ride in, but he was repeatedly told to hold off. Then word came in of Alford’s wound, and the four Humvees in the QRF hit the gas, with Faulkenberry’s truck in the lead.
Newsom’s team made radio contact with Roller’s unit, and just as the QRF pushed east and passed beneath 1st Platoon’s position up in the hills, its Humvees took fire from across the river to the north. Faulkenberry’s gunner, Private First Class Michael Del Sarto, countered with his M240 machine gun, as did Newsom with both his M240 and his MK19 automatic grenade launcher. At the “casualty collection point”—a just-in-case prearranged spot on the road—3rd Platoon put on the brakes. Newsom and his men jumped out and began offloading boxes of water and ammo for the troops of 2nd Platoon, who had been moving east on the road when enemy fire began pummeling them from all sides, causing them to scatter into the hills to seek shelter and shoot back. Fortner, the medic from 2nd Platoon, was treating the wounded with little regard for his own safety. He sprinted from the injured ANA soldier to a mortarman who’d been shot, then ran down to help two others who’d been sprayed with shrapnel from an RPG. Calls came in that the mortarman wasn’t looking good, so Fortner headed back up the hill to check on him; in the minute or two it took him to get there, he felt as if every enemy fighter in the valley were shooting at him personally. The intimidating cracks of insurgents’ bullets terrified him as he scurried up the steep embankment; the ground kept slipping out from under him, and rounds that only barely missed him kicked up debris on all sides. I’m not going to make it through this day alive, Fortner thought to himself—and in that moment, he achieved a sort of clarity that caused the hyperactivity around him to slow down and made his task seem easier. He regained his footing and got up the rest of the hill. And then, after he’d done what he could about the mortarman’s internal bleeding, something that felt like a baseball bat hit his right elbow, spinning him 180 degrees and dropping him to the ground. His right shoulder had caught a bullet, which he quickly slid out of the wound, patching a piece of gauze into the hole. A bleeding Fortner then helped get the other four wounded men—Habibullah and Privates First Class Scott Craig, Stan Trapyline, and José Rodriguez—to Newsom’s Humvees. The medic himself refused to be evacuated. As the QRF pulled out, Fortner stood and yelled at the insurgents in the mountains. “You fucking pussies!” he screamed. “Your bullets feel like bee stings! I’m going to fuck all of you up!” He later wouldn’t remember doing it.
Newsom’s team drove these first four casualties to a nearby cornfield—maybe twenty-five feet by twenty-five feet—that the lieutenant had decided would serve as a landing zone. From there, a helicopter took them out. Bostick had told Newsom to return to Kamu afterward, but he didn’t do it. It was the first time in his career he’d ever disobeyed a direct order. He wanted to stay close to the fight.
Up on the mountain with 1st Platoon, Roller glanced over at Foltz, who was tending to Alford’s wounds. Foltz was a touch nerdy, Roller thought, but boy, was he a cool character at that moment. Collected and assured, Foltz gave him a thumbs-up. Roller looked at Alford. He was clearly in a daze, having lost a lot of blood, but he somehow managed to give his lieutenant a thumbs-up as well.
A medevac buzzed into the valley, drawing a cacophony of incoming fire. “Red-One,” the pilot radioed to Roller, “we cannot land.” Nor would the chopper be able to hover long enough to hoist Alford up on a Jungle Penetrator, he said; it was still too hot in the valley. Roller and the others on the ground would have to get more of the enemy cleared out first. The medevac turned around.
Roller gave the Apache pilots targeting grids so they could bomb and fire upon the insurgents. Twice, the Apaches flew so close that he could see right into their cockpits. It was still not enough. Roller and his Air Force communications officer also tried to get the French and Belgian pilots of some nearby Mirages to offer air support. Although English is the standard language for NATO, it took them all a while—too long—to overcome the considerable language barrier; one of the pilots even read back the instructions for a bomb drop and identified 1st Platoon’s position as the target. That mistake was quickly corrected by Roller and, several miles away, by Kolenda’s Air Force liaison. Kolenda, infuriated, dem
anded that Colonel Charles “Chip” Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne, see to it that in the future, his men be sent only U.S. aircraft.
On this day, though, the French bombs eventually began to hit their targets, as did the U.S. ordnance, and a credible path was cleared for the medevac. Under heavy fire as tracer rounds reached out from enemy positions throughout the valley, the Black Hawk lowered a medic, Staff Sergeant Peter Rohrs, on a Jungle Penetrator. To the men watching, it seemed nothing short of miraculous that Rohrs made it to the ground. He unhooked his cable and ran to Alford, whom he treated with an IV and more bandages. Rohrs was concerned not only about the specialist’s neck wound itself but also about making it worse by hoisting him sitting upright on the Jungle Penetrator—but there wasn’t much time to contemplate. He put a neck brace on the injured soldier; that would have to suffice. Amid furious incoming fire, the two men, wrapped around the rescue device, were hoisted into the belly of the Black Hawk. After a perilous rise, Rohrs and Alford entered the medevac, which then turned and sped out of the valley. As the enemy barrage continued, one of the Apache pilots got on the radio: “Hey, guys, I’m hit,” he said. “I’m heading back.”
Up with Fritsche’s patrol, Morrow had seen the shot that hit the Apache; ominously, it had come from right above their position.
Wilson was worried that the pilots might mistake them for insurgents. He expressed his concern to Fritsche, who tried to reassure him that their position had been relayed to the Apaches. Either way, Wilson found it terrifying to see the Apache pilots pointing their 30-millimeter chain guns at—or at least near—them, especially when the patrol’s radio wasn’t working reliably. It was easy to imagine, he thought, how friendly-fire incidents could happen. Before the radio died once and for all, Fritsche got the call that Bulldog Troop was waiting for him and his team to come down the mountain, and they needed to move now.
