by Jake Tapper
When Eric Harder and Francis followed Miller a little while later, Hill noticed they’d both been peppered pretty well by shrapnel from the RPG. The fact that Harder was still wearing gym shorts didn’t help matters.
Sergeant Justin Gallegos’s panicked voice came on the radio, from LRAS-2. “We need ammo right now!” Gallegos said. “This is no bullshit!”
The messages from Wong and Schulz quickly turned from descriptive to desperate:
6:10 am
6:15 am
Sitting in the tower of the shura building, Nicholas Davidson aimed his M240 machine gun at the plume of smoke rising from the Putting Green. After quickly running through his ammo, he was just ducking to reload the gun when a sniper round ricocheted across the turret. Then another whizzed right by his head. “Oh, fuck,” Davidson said. He tried to climb down, but an Afghan Security Guard had found a safe harbor in that spot below the turret and was blocking his path.
When Kirk, Knight, and Gregory entered the shura building, it was thick with clouds of dirt and dust. They made their way to the ladder that led to the guard’s ledge. “Get the fuck out of there, you goddamn pussy!” Kirk yelled at the Afghan guard. He grabbed him and threw him out of the way. Davidson started to climb down. “Davidson, get back on that two-forty,” Kirk ordered.
“I have no ammo,” Davidson said.
“We gotta get more ammo,” Kirk announced. He turned to Knight, who was on the radio, trying to tell the operations center where to target the mortars. “Give me that AT-,” Kirk said, grabbing the antitank gun. “Cover me while I fire this,” he told Gregory.
Bullets, rockets, and mortars volleyed toward them like raindrops in a squall, the flashing and crash of explosions like lightning and thunder. The men had never seen anything like it. Kirk stood by the door and prepped the AT4 grenade launcher, pulling out the safety pin, pulling up the firing pin, opening up the sights. He took a step outside the shura building while Gregory raised his M249 light machine gun and took a knee at the door, half inside and half outside the door frame, aiming at the Putting Green, to the west of the camp. Resting the grenade launcher on his shoulder, Kirk looked into the sights to fire, but before he could press the red firing button, an RPG struck the side of the shura building. The explosion slapped Kirk onto the ground and flattened Gregory onto the building’s floor. Gregory took a second to get his bearings and then ran out to try to help Kirk, who was on his back with his feet facing the door, not moving. The RPG had been only part of it: there was also a gunshot wound to Kirk’s head. The bullet had gone through his right cheek and out the back of his skull. Blood was pouring from his face. As bullets crackled around his feet, Gregory grabbed Kirk by the shoulder straps of his vest and started pulling him. But Gregory was small, and the man whose limp body he was trying to move was not.
Seeing what was going on, Davidson came out to help. When the two had Kirk in the safety of the shura building, Gregory tried to wipe the blood from the sergeant’s face while Davidson called the operations center on the radio, pleading for help.
It was just instinct: when Cordova, Courville, and the other two medics—Sergeant Jeffrey Hobbs and Specialist Cody Floyd—heard the first blast, they immediately headed to the aid station, where they put on surgical gloves and began preparing for casualties.
They did this every three days or so—that is, every time there was an incoming attack—but it didn’t take them long to figure out that this one was much worse than anything they’d gone through before. For starters, there were more explosions than they’d ever heard at Camp Keating, and all of them were from enemy fire—the Americans weren’t firing back with mortars.
The first casualty call came over the radio: someone was severely wounded over by the shura building.
“Hey, Doc,” Courville said to Cordova, “I’m going out there.”
While Cordova spoke on the radio to the staff at the aid station at Forward Operating Base Bostick, he threw Courville his M9 aid bag, a slim backpack containing combat gauze, tourniquets, emergency airway devices, IV kits, and more. Out Courville ran, precisely at the moment when an enemy RPG landed in the aid station, spraying shrapnel. Floyd and Hobbs went down, as did Specialist Andrew Stone, a mechanic who had come to alert them about the casualty at the shura building.
Up on their feet again, Floyd and Hobbs took Stone into the back room. Shrapnel had taken out a piece of his calf and hit his chest plate. They treated his wounds, and as they did so, Floyd noticed that Hobbs was bleeding from his chest, and Hobbs noticed that Floyd was bleeding from his chest. They looked at each other, and then they briefly looked at themselves. There wasn’t much blood, so they kept working.
Over at the shura building, Courville ran to Kirk. He was as limp as a rag doll, but he was alive. Courville shook his shoulders and yelled his name. There was no response.
Courville checked Kirk’s body for wounds, doing a “blood sweep.” A massive amount of blood was still flooding out of his head and neck. Apart from the bullet wound, Kirk had also, it was clear, taken significant shrapnel to the back of his head. Courville wrapped his head with bandages, cut off his gear, and yelled for a stretcher team.
Davidson brought a stretcher he’d found in the Red Platoon barracks, and Rasmussen provided cover fire so that he, Courville, Stanley, and Vernon Martin could carry Kirk to the aid station. His blood left a crimson trail behind them. During their bumpy scramble, Kirk seemed to look up at Stanley, who couldn’t believe this indestructible ass-kicker was down. Kirk? He was a crazily courageous bastard, and now here he was, down—maybe for the count. Stanley had a hard time processing it.
In the aid station, Cordova and Courville got to work on the sergeant while Hobbs and Floyd treated five wounded ANA soldiers. Cordova examined Kirk, who was by now extremely pale. His first priority was to stop the bleeding, always tricky with a head wound. To expand Kirk’s blood volume and keep oxygen going to his brain, Cordova used a FAST1—a device that looked like a flashlight with a needle attached to one end—to introduce a small tube called a cannula into his sternum, or breastbone. He then hooked up an IV to pump fluid through the cannula into his bone marrow. The physician’s assistant tried to find a pulse in the sergeant’s wrists. None. He searched for a pulse in his groin area—none. Finally, he felt a very faint pulse in his neck.
Kirk was alive.
Suddenly, he began gasping for air. Cordova grabbed a tube to insert into his airway and began shooting air into his trachea. Courville ventilated oxygen into him. They both knew that even in a best-case scenario, given the distance and danger involved, the medevacs were hours away from landing at Camp Keating.
Cordova tried, but he couldn’t completely detach himself from the patient on his table. He and Kirk, Courville, Stanley, Gallegos, Thomson, and Rodriguez were all gym buddies, meeting every night to work out together. Kirk and Gallegos were two of the toughest SOBs he’d ever met, in the gym and outside it. They were strong, obnoxious loudmouths, and he loved them. Kirk, in particular, was fearless.
Cordova tried to resuscitate his friend, performing a series of chest compressions while Courville administered breaths through the airway tube. Kirk had stopped bleeding, but Cordova couldn’t tell if that was because he’d been bandaged well or because he had no more blood to give.
The Latvian trainers, Janis Lakis and Martins Dabolins, were furious when they found some of the ANA troops outside the operations center, huddled together and squatting, holding their knees and shaking uncontrollably. Among them was their commander, who had fled his post. Lakis—a big g
uy whom the Americans called Bluto because of his beard and immenseness—picked the man up.
“Where the fuck are your men? Are any of them manning their battle positions?” Lakis asked.
“The Taliban have taken that side,” he said.
“Get your me and go and retake your side of the camp!” Lakis told him.
“You are not my commander!” the Afghan exclaimed, and he ran off.
Specialist Zach Koppes was alone at LRAS-1, the guard post where he’d had some bad luck back in June, resulting in his self-inflicted head wound. It turned out that had been a good day, comparatively speaking.
The rockets and RPGs just kept coming and coming in to the camp. Koppes recalled hearing about two pickup trucks full of ordnance that had been stolen recently, and he wondered whether this hell being unleashed upon Keating might be connected to that. A sniper had begun targeting Koppes, his bullets hitting the Kevlar tarp covering the back of the truck with deadly accuracy; if the American had stood up, they would have gone through his head. The tarp was tough, but the bullets were shredding it. Fuck, Koppes thought to himself. This thing’s not going to last.
Joshua Dannelley ran over with his Mk 48, as did Christopher Jones with MK19 grenades to give to Koppes and several belts of M240 machine-gun ammo for the fighting position right next to the Humvee.
“Keep down! Keep down!” Koppes yelled. “There’s a sniper!” But soon it wasn’t just a sniper anymore; RPGs began showering down near them, one hitting fifteen feet away.
“My knee! My knee!” yelled Jones, falling to the ground. Dannelley inspected him but couldn’t find any external injuries.
Sergeant John Francis had been running ammo back and forth to guard posts for a while when he decided to check in back at the Bastards’ barracks. An RPG exploded behind him, lifting him up off the ground and throwing him against a pole. Next thing he knew, he was on his back on the ground, and Specialist Mark Dulaney was on top of him, shaking him.
“You good? You good? You all right?”
Francis opened his eyes.
“Sergeant, you good?”
“I don’t know, motherfucker,” Francis said. “You’re the one looking at me. You tell me if I’m good!”
“Can you get up?” Dulaney asked.
Francis tried, but his left side throbbed with pain.
“You all right?” Dulaney asked again.
“I think I’m all right,” Francis said. “I think I got some busted ribs.” He would later find out that five of his ribs had been fractured.
“Should we go to the aid station?” Dulaney wondered.
“Fuck, no,” Francis said. “We gotta keep fighting till this shit’s over.”
Sergeant Breeding and his men did everything they could to get the radio back up, but it wouldn’t work. They had no idea what was going on elsewhere in the camp; they were completely disconnected from the rest of the world.
“As long as we’re in the bunker, we’ll be okay,” Breeding told Rodriguez and Barroga.
But the bunker was precisely where the insurgents continued to shoot machine-gun and sniper fire—for good measure adding multiple RPGs to their onslaught, too. Breeding and Rodriguez returned fire with their M4 carbines. They didn’t think they had much of a chance of hitting their targets; they just wanted to throw down some lead to keep the bad guys from shooting at them.
Meanwhile, the men on the guard posts at Camp Keating were starting to run low on ammunition. The sheer volume of rounds they were putting out astounded Bundermann. And though some of the American bullets were finding their mark, the counterattack clearly wasn’t having much of an effect.
The RPG that had blown Hill onto his back also blew out their generator, and the satellite phone line went dead; the enemy seemed to know exactly what to target. The mIRC system, thankfully, was still online. Forward Operating Base Bostick’s ops center alerted Keating’s that a pair of F-15 Strike Eagles, the two of them together codenamed Dude 25, were on their way, courtesy of Task Force Palehorse.
6:12 am
6:13 am
6:14 am
Justin Gallegos, Brad Larson, and Stephan Mace were stuck at LRAS-2. “We’re getting attacked from the village,” Gallegos told Bundermann, referring to Urmul. “Do I have permission to fire back?”
“Absolutely,” Bundermann said. “Light it up.” At that point, everything was fair game.
6:14 am
6:18 am
6:20 am
6:21 am
All of twenty-three minutes had passed since the attack began.
Ty Carter ran in to the Bastards’ barracks and was greeted by a scene of chaos and shouting.
“Shut the fuck up!” Hill yelled. Everyone quieted down. “We need to find out who needs what.”
“Everyone needs everything,” Carter said, gasping for breath.
From Spokane, Washington, Carter had joined the Marines out of high school, but he’d been busted down to a lower rank for fighting. He’d then quit and spent five years as a civilian working aimlessly at a series of odd jobs. He hated that, felt like one in a herd of cattle. He wanted to fight for his fellow soldiers, not earn a paycheck without a sense of honor or direction. He reenlisted in the military in January 2008, opting this time for the Army, figuring the Marines probably wouldn’t take him back.
In civilian life, Carter had felt like something of an oddball and an outcast, but in the Army, he felt alive, with purpose. And on this day, he relished his role as the soldier trying to help his fellow troops.
Hill loaded up Specialists Michael Scusa and Jeremy Frunk with more ammunition to take to Gallegos at LRAS-2. “Okay, get the fuck out of here,” he told them. Harder stood by the door; he would join them. He opened the door as Scusa, Frunk, and Private First Class Daniel Rogers lined up to run.
“Are you ready?” Scusa asked Frunk. Echoes of incoming gunfire filled the barracks.
“Let’s go!” Frunk said.
They exited the barracks in earnest.
Hill watched them proudly. Men of valor. No questioning, no protest. He’d given them the order, and they’d run out into the fire.
In the hills of the Northface, a sniper was waiting. One of his bullets hit Scusa in the right side of his neck, lacerating two major blood vessels and the right jugular vein. It also penetrated a larger artery and cut across his spinal cord before exiting out his lower back.
Scusa’s head rocked back, and he went limp.
Frunk tried to grab the loop on the back of Scusa’s armored vest in order to drag him to the aid station. As he bent down, the sniper opened up with a dozen more rounds. A bullet went through the side of Frunk’s vest, slamming into his back; panicked, the soldier hit the ground and low-crawled back to the barracks, where the next troops were getting ready to run out and resupply those on guard.
“Don’t go out! Don’t go out! Scusa’s hit!” Frunk yelled. The other men lifted him up and brought him back to Hill. He was shaking and scared.
“You okay?” Hill asked.
“Sergeant Hill, I think I’ve been shot,” Frunk said. He’d never been shot before, so he thought his wound was worse than it was. He took off his vest and shirt.
“It’s just a graze,” Hill told him. “You’re okay. Is Scusa wounded?”
Frunk hung his head, shaking it no.
“Where was he hit?” Hill asked.
“I think he got shot in the face,” Frunk said.
Sergeant Franci
s tried to slowly open the door to the barracks to see where Scusa was, but the sniper fired rounds right at him. He shut the door, paused, then opened it again and ran out to Scusa.
Blood was pouring from the specialist’s neck. Francis attempted to find the exit wound with his hand, wiping the blood away and feeling for holes. Soon figuring out that the round had gone into Scusa’s neck, he probed the area, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to find the jugular. He finally found it and was working to pinch it closed when the sniper shot at him and hit the M203 grenade launcher attached to the M4 carbine that was slung around his arm. The weapon snapped, and the clip fell off.
Good Christ, that was close, Francis thought. “Harder!” he yelled. “I need cover! Harder! I need cover!”
Inside, Hill quickly assigned troops to cover the doors. The other men ransacked their barracks looking for smoke grenades. Hill found some and threw them to Eric Harder, near one of the doors. Harder poked his head outside; he had two grenades in the pouch of his vest. He lobbed one to Francis and held on to one for himself. After waiting but a moment, both men pulled the pins and threw their grenades, building enough billowing smoke to form a wall. Harder rushed out of the barracks, ran through the haze, and helped Francis drag Scusa to the aid station. The smoke did not deter the sniper, who simply fired through it, hitting a nearby Humvee. The bullet fragmented, hitting Francis’s arms and legs, but he and Harder kept going.
