by Jake Tapper
Then the second explosion came in to the camp, and this one shook the Bastards’ barracks.
“Nope, that’s incoming,” said Harder as he got up and threw on his gear. He was wearing only underwear and shorts, but he was sure he’d be up and down in twenty minutes. His sneakers were outside the barracks—they smelled pretty ripe—and he couldn’t find a clean pair of socks.
From the mountains came the staccato of heavy machine-gun fire. Harder knew he had to get outside and take care of whoever this was—and then, he thought, he could go back to bed. He pulled on a tan T-shirt and laced up his hiking boots.
“Hurry up and get your shit on!” Harder yelled to his men—Michael Scusa, Christopher Griffin, Specialist Jeremy Frunk, Specialist Mark Dulaney, and Specialist Jonathan Adams. They grabbed their ammunition and weapons. Harder opened the door and saw what was going on outside. He turned to Hill.
“This is a big one,” he said, though he had yet to realize just how bad it was.
The first thing John Breeding heard from his position in the mortar pit was a cacophony of RPG explosions, one after another after another. Everyone promptly got suited up. Thomson, his gear already on, was standing by the door, near the radios, and he ran out to remove the tarp from the M240 machine gun so he could fire it into the hills.
Thomson was ripping the poncho liner off the gun, about to run around and fire it, when Rodriguez arrived on the scene.
“Switchbacks!” Rodriguez yelled. “Switchbacks! Target sixty! Hit the Switchbacks!”81
But just as Thomson stepped in front of him, Rodriguez saw his face explode in a burst of red. A bullet fired from the high ground had found its mark in the private’s right cheek, going through his mouth and out his left upper back. He fell onto the ground.
Rodriguez went to him; Kevin Thomson was gurgling, but he couldn’t speak. His eyes were filigreed with burst vessels. A pool of blood and parts of his head were spilling into his helmet, into his body armor, onto the ground. The gore had the texture of soup. Rodriguez was at once horrified and nauseated by the sight. Thomson’s eyes glazed over and turned black and red.
“Thomson!” Rodriguez yelled. “THOMSON!”
The private was gone. That calm kid from Nevada didn’t make a sound; he didn’t move. Two minutes into their attack on Combat Outpost Keating, the Taliban had scored their first casualty.
The new guy, Barroga, poked his head out of the mortar pit to see what was going on.
“Get on the sixty!” Rodriguez told him, pointing him to the 60-millimeter mortar tube. But he saw Barroga hesitate. The kid was weighed down with fear, inexperience, and instant regret. There lay Thomson’s body.
Barroga thought he probably could have prevented Thomson’s death, could have said to him, “Hey, we’re getting shot at, wait two minutes before you run out to throw off the tarp,” but this was his first firefight, and he’d been at Camp Keating for only a few days, while Thomson had been there for months. And now…
“Get inside and take cover!” Rodriguez yelled. “Watch my back.”
He ran to the M240 machine gun and opened fire at RPG Rock. He saw about half a dozen insurgents there, and he angrily banged rounds at them until the belt was empty. Then, firing with his 9-millimeter, he stepped away and with his free hand tried to pull Thomson’s body into the mortar pit’s ops center, but the dead soldier’s foot was stuck in the steel pickets on which the machine gun was mounted. Rodriguez, significantly smaller than Thomson, couldn’t budge him.
Rodriguez ran inside. “Thomson’s dead!” he told the other two. “Thomson’s dead!”
“Are you sure?” asked Breeding. “Check his pulse!” But through the doorway, Breeding had seen Thomson get shot, and he knew from the limp way he’d fallen that he was dead; he had seen it too many times before.
Rodriguez acknowledged that yes, he had checked Thomson’s pulse—and there hadn’t been one. Barroga was meanwhile covering the other entrance and radioing to Bundermann in the operations center. With Captain Portis still stuck at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Bundermann was Keating’s acting commander.
“Tell them we’re receiving heavy fire directly into the pit from the Switchbacks and the Putting Green,” Breeding told Barroga.
An RPG landed on the plateau outside the door, blowing Rodriguez down; he landed on Breeding.
“You okay?” Rodriguez asked. Breeding was. They picked themselves back up. Rodriguez had taken some shrapnel in his neck. Any time either of them even poked his hand out the door, the mortar pit came under immediate machine-gun fire. The enemy had clearly been told to keep the mortarmen away from their big guns.
Breeding got on the radio. “I got one KIA,” he told Bundermann. “We’re receiving heavy fire.”
“Can you get out to the guns and put rounds down on the Switchbacks?” Bundermann asked.
“No way I can get out to the guns without killing everybody up here,” Breeding told him.
“Okay,” Bundermann said. “Hold tight.” Then the radio went dead.
Breeding looked at Barroga. It felt like the kid had arrived just hours before.
“Are all the TICs this bad?” Barroga asked, using the acronym for “troops in contact”—signifying any instance of enemy fire.
“No, dude,” Breeding said. “Not at all. Not at all.”
He looked into Barroga’s eyes. “I don’t know if we’re going to get out of this one,” he told him. “But we’re going to take some of these motherfuckers with us.”
Platoon Sergeant First Class Frank Guerrero was on leave, so Romesha had assumed his duties, sending Specialist Josh Dannelley and Private Chris Jones to the LRAS-1 Humvee/guard post to support Koppes.
Not even ten minutes earlier, Private Davidson had relieved Corporal Justin Gregory at his guard post in the turret of the tower of the shura building. Gregory had heard Ron Jeremy’s warning, but not believing it, he had headed back to the barracks to go to bed—and now he was throwing his gear back on and grabbing his Mk 46 squad automatic weapon. As he pushed open the front door of the barracks, he heard a din of bullets like he’d never heard before. He stepped back inside and bumped into Sergeant Kirk and Private First Class Kyle Knight, also on their way out.
“You can’t go out that door,” Gregory warned them. “You can’t go out that door—no way!”
Kirk stopped in his tracks. “Okay, we gotta find another way out,” he said.
The three of them headed toward the back door of the barracks. “Knight,” Kirk said, “grab that AT-.” Knight got the single-shot antitank weapon, and the trio went out the back, crept around the building, and started returning fire into the hills as they ran to the area of the shura building and entry control point to help back up Davidson. Kirk had an M203 grenade launcher, and he fired more than ten of the 40-millimeter projectiles while also discharging his M4 carbine. Kyle and Gregory fired their guns, too, and ran like hell.
At the first sound of the attack, Lieutenant Bundermann had run to the operations center, where he was told the base had contact from the Switchbacks. Contact? It seemed like much more than that. Bundermann called for a sitrep—a “situation report”—from all the guard posts and was informed that the outpost was taking RPG, sniper fire, and automatic-weapons fire from the Diving Board, the Northface, the Switchbacks, and the ANP Checkpoint some 125 yards to the west, in the direction of Urmul.
Yeah, that’d be contact, he thought.
“Get me air assets from Bostick,” Bundermann told Sergeant Ryan Schulz, the intelligence analyst. Air support was at least thirty-five minutes away.
The commander of the outpost, Stoney Portis, wasn’t there. The leader of Blue Platoon (the “Bastards”), Ben Salentine, wasn’t there. It was all on Bundermann.
Observation Post Fritsche was also under attack, the assault having begun at 6:00 a.m. on the dot with a mortar round that landed about fifteen feet behind the guard tower. Specialist Keith Stickney, the senior mortarman present at the observation post,
saw the muzzle flash, and then enemy mortars came pounding in. Quickly getting on his .50-caliber, Stickney went through three hundred rounds in his first minute of returning fire, after which he was relieved so he could run to Fritsche’s mortar pit.
At first, this one didn’t seem that different from all the other attacks. But within fifteen minutes, Stickney realized they were in for a long day. Walls of bullets were hitting the surrounding sandbags. Fire was coming in from every direction. At least a hundred insurgents had surrounded the observation post, as near as Stickney could tell.
White Platoon had only twenty-one U.S. troops up there.
Stickney ran down to the operations center to get the proper grid coordinates. White Platoon leader Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy was talking on the radio to Bundermann; it sounded as if things were even worse down at Combat Outpost Keating. Stickney ran back toward the mortar pit, but before he could reach it, the two other mortarmen—Private First Class Jassey Holmes and Private Second Class Jonathan Santana—screamed for him to get down. Stickney did, ducking behind a wall and narrowly escaping a barrage of RPGs and bullets.
Together, the three mortarmen headed back for the operations center. Spotting them, Bellamy yelled, “Get the fuck back in the mortar pit!”
“No, it’s getting torn up!” Stickney screamed back.
The enemy fighters were occupying the Afghan Security Guards’ observation post, which was located 150 yards away, between Observation Post Fritsche and the town of Kamdesh, at a fifty-foot elevation above the post. It was the perfect place from which to attack the mortar pit. The night before, Bellamy had noticed that the cameras the Americans had set up at the Security Guards’ post were no longer working. He’d sent Staff Sergeant Bradley Lee to find out what the problem was, but in the dark, Lee hadn’t been able to tell.
And now it didn’t really matter. The men at Observation Post Fritsche were stuck, with a report having come in from one of the guard towers that enemy fighters were within hand-grenade distance of the camp. And with the apparent cooperation of the Afghan Security Guards, the enemy also had the mortar pit pinned down.
The observation post had been set up to help protect Combat Outpost Keating, but for now, the troops down in the valley were on their own.
This is not a normal attack, Bundermann thought. We’ve got contact from Urmul, the Northface, the Switchbacks, the Diving Board, and everywhere in between. We’ve got contact from every direction. This is no joke. We need everything we can get, as fast as we can get it.
On the radio, he called Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy with White Platoon, up at Observation Post Fritsche. “I need your mortars,” he said, providing the relevant coordinates.
“I can’t give them to you,” Bellamy said. “We’re in some shit up here, too.”
While Bundermann and First Sergeant Ronald Burton barked out orders and information to relay to Forward Operating Base Bostick, Schulz and Private First Class Jordan Wong typed updates into the mIRC system.
Wong was “Black Knight_TOC” and Schulz was “Keating2OPS.”
6:03 am
6:03 am
The men did their jobs, focused on their work, but a tangible sense of dread and panic filled the operations center. This must be what it felt like before a massacre, they thought, a combination of impotence and terror—a doomed sense of being about to be overwhelmed, like sitting in sandcastle as a tidal wave suddenly drew to strength just yards away.
CHAPTER 31
GET SOMETHING UP!
The guard post at the LRAS-2 Humvee was parked on the southern side of the outpost, its gun aimed toward the Switchbacks. Specialist Stephan Mace had been relieved there by Sergeant Brad Larson, but when the firing started, Mace returned, along with Sergeant Justin Gallegos. Things had heated up even more since then. They were being hit with RPGs from three directions, and sniper fire was coming in, bouncing off both the turret and Larson’s .50-caliber itself. Larson had a thousand rounds linked and was firing furiously, but within fifteen minutes, the number of insurgent positions focused upon him seemed to have multiplied exponentially.
“Holy fuck,” he said.
Out of ammo, Larson got up, leaned over, and was reaching for more rounds when an RPG exploded, scattering pebbles of searing metal into his right arm and armpit. In tremendous pain, he kept shooting. He fired at snipers in the Urmul mosque to the west. He aimed at smoke plumes coming from the Switchbacks. He unloaded on every insurgent he could see. But he couldn’t see them all.
There were twenty Afghan National Army troops on the eastern side of the outpost, and they began spilling out of their barracks—most of them without gear on—to assume their battle positions. Within ten minutes, they were out of ammunition. The ineffective ANA commander lost control of the situation as the Afghan soldiers determined that they couldn’t withstand the assault, seeming to accept defeat. Cowardice feeds on itself, ravenously, and once the ANA commander gave up trying to convince his troops to fight, the ANA troops themselves simply gave up.
Some sprinted to the far eastern edge of the camp to hop the wire and flee. “This is your country!” yelled one of their Latvian trainers, Janis Lakis. “Hold your position! Hold your position!” They didn’t listen. Once outside the wire, some even handed their weapons to insurgents as they passed them.
Within fifteen minutes of the attack, the remainder of the ANA soldiers had completely retreated from their side of the camp. Some sought the protection of the Americans, while others hid in various buildings and barracks. The ANA platoon leader ran in to the operations center and screamed, “We need to get the choppers in here so we can get out of here!” He said his men were dying and couldn’t fight anymore. (There had also been approximately a dozen private contractors, Afghan Security Guards, employed at the camp; with one exception, they all fled as well.)
That the ANA commander would insist that choppers were needed for his men—who were cowering in corners around the camp—when the Americans couldn’t even account for all of their own infuriated those in the operations center.
“Sit the fuck down and shut up!” shouted Burton. But the Afghan commander was in a frenzy and wouldn’t listen.
“Choppers are on the way, but they’re not going to be able to land unless all of your ANA boys start helping us drive back the attackers!” Cady yelled.
Temperatures continued to rise until Cady finally threatened to kill the ANA commander if he didn’t either get his shit together or get the fuck out of the operations center. Cady wasn’t the only one whose hand had started inching toward his pistol.
Jonathan Hill had just returned from the operations center and was focused on making sure the battle stations were occupied and the ammo was free-flowing. The soldiers from Red Platoon were in charge of protecting the camp in the guard posts that day, so Hill and the Bastards, or Blue Platoon, needed to see to it that they had their gear and radios and a constant supply of ammunition. Their lieutenant, Salentine, was still stuck at Forward Operating Base Bostick.
Machine-gun fire was now coming from the ANA side of the camp, and the ANA barracks itself was on fire. Hill was still trying to get an assessment of where the main attack effort was coming from; no one at the operations center seemed to know. From what he could deduce, the enemy had surrounded them.
Hill opened the north-facing door of the barracks to take a look. Just then, an RPG hit the generator ten feet away, blowing him back into the barracks and onto his back.
“You okay?” Harder asked.
“That thing was close,” answered Hill.
“Let me check for shrapnel,” Ha
rder said. He patted Hill down, checking for wounds. There wasn’t any.
“Okay,” Hill told him, “go to the ASP”—the ammo supply point—“and get that ammo out to the battle stations.”
While troops had ammunition stashed all over the camp, most of the official supply was kept in the ASP, near the camp entrance. It was stored behind two doors, both of which had been locked in an effort to keep Afghans from stealing it. The locks had, in fact, just been reinforced.
Specialist Ty Carter took out his M4 rifle and put five rounds into the lock. But when he opened the door, he realized he’d picked the wrong one—this door led to the mortars and Claymore mines. He needed the door for rounds and bullets. As he exited into the open space, John Francis arrived at the entrance.
“What are you doing?” Francis asked Carter. “Get cover!”
Carter ducked down. “I need to get two-forty ammo for LRAS-two,” he said.
“It’s in there,” Francis replied, referring to the other ammo supply point door.
“It’s locked,” Carter said. “Can I shoot the other locks off?”
Francis seemed hesitant, but then he said yes; Carter put a round into the second lock and blasted it open. He ran inside, followed by Francis, and they started throwing ammo out to the other soldiers—including Sergeant Matthew Miller and Eric Harder—who now began running over to transport rounds and bullets to the guard posts: “Take this to LRAS-One. Now!” “Take this to LRAS-Two. Now! Go! Go! Go!”
An RPG hit the HESCO barrier across from the door of the ammo supply point. It knocked Carter and Francis down and blew Miller into the ammo building. Carter picked Miller up and pushed him out of the building, yelling at him to go back to the barracks.
