by Jake Tapper
This is not good, this is not good, this is not good, the men thought. And it was about to get worse, because insurgents were now bounding down the southern wall toward the outpost.
Doc Cordova looked around the aid station and saw mayhem and devastation and blood everywhere. He and Courville were still working on Kirk, and yet another wounded ANA troop had staggered in, bringing the total number of Afghan WIAs to six. One had an eye hanging out of its socket, and another a serious abdominal wound—so bad that his guts were literally spilling out of him. The other four had gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Specialist Chris Chappell, peppered with shrapnel, had also briefly stopped in at the aid station; after Cordova treated him with oral antibiotics and pain relievers, he’d headed right back out to the fight.
Into this hell now came Harder and Francis, carrying Scusa. He was completely pale; he had no heartbeat, no pulse. Cordova checked his eyes and wasn’t able to provoke any neurological response. Cordova had known the specialist for two years, having first met him in Iraq, and he knew what a sweetheart he was. He also knew that Scusa and Floyd were close, and he wondered how the new medic, today dealing with his first serious casualties, would handle his friend’s death.
At 6:30 a.m., Scusa became the first person Cordova had ever pronounced dead. The young man was put in a body bag and carried back to Courville’s room.
Back at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Stoney Portis, Ben Salentine, and Kirk Birchfield were crawling out of their skin. These leaders of Black Knight Troop desperately wanted to be of some help, any help, to their brothers back at Camp Keating. But there wasn’t anything they could do except sit in the operations center at Naray. The surveillance aircraft hadn’t yet made it to the Kamdesh Valley, so they couldn’t see anything; they could only read Wong’s and Schulz’s messages and listen to Bundermann on the radio.
Salentine and Birchfield were conscience-stricken about not being alongside the men they had trained with for just such an event. Portis was new to Black Knight Troop, but as its absent commander, he, too, condemned himself. What leader in his right mind leaves his soldiers? he thought. Logic. at this point, had no case to make.
It felt as if they had to wait forever until they were able to catch a ride, yet the attack wasn’t yet an hour old when Portis, Salentine, and Birchfield grabbed backpacks full of ammunition and grenades and got on the first medevac along with Specialist Tim Kugler, a scout from Red Platoon, and two Air Force radio operators. The bird went up, circled over Forward Operating Base Bostick, and then flew up and down the Landay-Sin Valley, killing time, not heading directly for the outpost. Portis finally grew impatient and—because the helicopter’s rotors were so loud—began writing notes to the pilot, asking what was keeping them from leaving the area. The pilot wrote back that he was waiting to be told there was somewhere for him to land safely near the besieged outpost; right then, the battle zone was still too hot.
Inside the bird, a cold calm came over the men. They knew what their purpose was. Portis thought, I’m not going to come back from this mission. This is it. This is how I’m going to die. He had written his beloved wife, Alison, a farewell letter and given it to his brother to present to her should he not return. She would be taken care of. Portis got choked up for a second, and then he made his peace with what awaited him in the valley. This was what he had signed up for. He turned his attention to what they would do when they landed. Putting pen to paper, he drew a diagram and began planning with his men how they would exit the helicopter, run for cover, and then join the fight to save Combat Outpost Keating.
Outside the Red Platoon barracks, Clinton Romesha yanked Corporal Justin Gregory’s Mk 48 machine gun out of his hands. “Grab more ammo and follow me,” he told him.
“I’m moving a machine gun into position to cover you,” Romesha radioed Gallegos, who was still stuck at LRAS-2. “As soon as I can cover you, if you can, I need you to displace back to Red Platoon barracks.”
“I don’t know if you can lay down enough fire,” Gallegos said. “But if you can, roger.” Inside the Humvee, it seemed as if they were being submerged in an ocean of bullets and grenades: Gallegos, Mace, and Larson could only hope the car’s plating would hold up against the relentless battering. And however determined and skilled and ruthless a soldier Romesha might be, that he alone could provide enough cover fire with one lightweight machine gun seemed unlikely.
Romesha and Gregory scurried over to the generator by the mosque. There, Romesha set the machine gun atop the generator, and Gregory began linking up its ammunition. “I’m setting the machine-gun fire whenever you’re ready to move,” Romesha radioed to Gallegos.
“Roger,” Gallegos responded.
Romesha looked around at the myriad targets up at the Putting Green and throughout the Switchbacks. There were so many to choose from. He picked one enemy position and sent a twenty-to-thirty-round burst toward it. Then he moved to another. Then another. He quickly ran through the two-hundred-round belt.
While Gregory was loading another belt into the gun, Gallegos radioed. “We’re not able to move,” he said. “We’re not able to move.” The incoming fire was just too intense, coming from too many different locations.
Romesha had started firing the second belt when, from the blind side to his right, to the north of the camp, an insurgent burst through the entry control point and fired an RPG toward him and Gregory, hitting the generator instead. Romesha, sprayed with shrapnel, momentarily lost his bearings and fell on Gregory. The moment over, he got up and looked at him. “You all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Gregory said.
“Go back to the barracks, I’ll cover you,” Romesha instructed. He covered the other’s mad dash and then began firing into the hills again.
Gallegos came on the radio again. “You’re not being effective, it’s not working,” he told Romesha. “We’ll just hang tight here.”
Romesha exhaled, fired his last burst of ammo, and ran back down the hill. He found Gregory in a trench near a HESCO barrier, on the southern side of the camp near the Switchbacks. “Wait here, I’m going to get more guys,” Romesha told him, handing him back his machine gun. He ran back to the Red Platoon barracks, where he told Christopher Jones and Specialist Josh Dannelley to go help Gregory. Rasmussen looked at Romesha.
“Ro, dude,” he said. “You’re fucking hit. You’re fucking hit.”
Romesha looked down. His right forearm was a bloody mess.
“Let me dress that,” Rasmussen said, pulling Romesha’s pressure dressing from his pocket and then wrapping his friend’s forearm tightly with the specialized bandage.
“Where are they?” Jones asked Gregory when he reached him.
“Everywhere!” Gregory said. “Get the fuck down here in the ditch with me!”
As the private jumped in, an RPG blew up the COP Keating mosque. Snipers’ bullets, machine-gun fire, hand grenades, RPGs—the insurgents were unloading everything they had. “You need to stay down,” Gregory told Jones. “Snipers are targeting us.”
“We need to cover people running ammo,” said Jones.
As rounds hit right next to their heads, Gregory became convinced that he was going to die, but instead of panic, he felt a sort of peace fall over him like a blanket. He noticed how green the grass was, how blue the sky. He could no longer hear the gunfire and explosions, he no longer noticed the people shooting. He was comfortable with the idea of dying.
At the guard post at LRAS-2, Brad Larson had kept firing his .50-caliber until a well-aimed RPG detonated nearby and hit the gun off the stovepipe so he couldn’t shoot it anymore. The weapon now lay half in the turret and half out. Larson tried to get it to work, but it just wouldn’t function. Helpless to shoot back, he crawled down into the Humvee, where Gallegos and Mace were sitting and trying to fire their rifles out the windows. The snipers were moving closer to the camp, and anytime either of the men opened one of the Humvee’s bulletproof windows, he’d get shot at. The incoming was so ferocio
us, in fact, that when they stuck their guns out to fire, bullets hit and bounced off the barrels. Since it wasn’t particularly easy to aim out the Humvee’s windows anyway, they finally just rolled them up.
The snipers’ bullets kept pinging off the windshield; if it and the windows hadn’t been bulletproof, the Americans surely would have been dead by now. Still, every so often, someone had to stick his neck out, literally, to see what was going on. When Larson did so, a bullet from a PKM machine gun hit him in his Kevlar helmet. He ducked down from his turret and hopped into the driver’s seat. Gallegos was next to him. Mace sat in the back.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Carter arrived, He was surprised to see that they were all inside the Humvee, with no one in the turret manning the .50-caliber. The COP was under heavy attack, and this was a primary defensive position, but this post wasn’t returning fire.
“I got your two-forty ammo,” Carter said.
“Either get in or get the hell out of here,” Gallegos barked.
Carter climbed in behind him, next to Mace, who was doubled over in pain. He was wounded—he’d taken some shrapnel somewhere along the line—but when Gallegos asked him what was wrong and whether he was okay, Mace said only that he was fine.
“Do you have any M-four rounds?” Larson asked the new arrival. Carter did; he had one magazine left inside his M4 carbine rifle.
Abruptly, the door next to him swung open; it was Vernon Martin. “I heard you guys need ammo?” he asked.
“Get in or get the hell out of here,” Gallegos barked again.
Martin paused, so Carter seized him and pulled him into the Humvee. “Get the fuck in here,” he said. They found a place for Martin to sit on the gunner’s platform.
The bullets and RPGs now increased even more in intensity. An RPG exploded three feet from the turret, causing panic and confusion among the Humvee’s occupants. Carter was knocked unconscious; when he came to, a second later, his head ached, and his eyes were out of focus. Holy shit, he thought as he regained consciousness. Where am I? He began checking himself for holes and found what he’d hoped he wouldn’t—as did Larson, who was engaged in a similar investigation. Martin was the worst off of them, having taken a great deal of shrapnel all over his legs and hips, where soldiers typically have no protection from body armor. And now that he had returned to the moment, he felt it: “Motherfucker!” Martin yelled. “It burns! Holy shit, that fucking hurts!”
The men got their bearings, shook off their wounds as best they could, and started talking about what to do next; they knew there would be much worse in store for them if they didn’t put their heads together and figure out a way out. It was now clear that the insurgents had armor-piercing capabilities. The RPG had knocked the .50-caliber off its mount entirely, jamming the gun and exploding the primers for the rounds, rendering them useless. It was only a matter of time before the enemy onslaught got through and killed all five of them. They needed to get out of the Humvee. But the rounds were coming in so furiously now that a step outside meant certain death. What could they do?
They didn’t have much time. The troops and translators at Observation Post Mace who monitored enemy radio frequencies shared some alarming news over the mIRC system: the attackers were now actively talking about breaching the wire.
Staff Sergeant Kenny Daise ran into the shura building and slipped on Kirk’s blood.
Daise picked himself up. He didn’t have time to be revolted or saddened. He looked through all of the gear that had been left behind, then grabbed Kirk’s M203 grenade launcher and his M4 rounds. The enemy had kept on pounding the shura building with RPGs, and it was so dusty now that none of the soldiers with Daise could see much of anything. He told them to fall back.
“Come with me,” Daise said to Private First Class Kyle Knight. The two of them ran from the shura building to a position between the outpost mosque and the nearby generator. As Daise was reloading his M4 rifle, preparing to fire into the hills, he saw the barrel of an AK-47 coming around the corner, which he assumed must belong to either an Afghan Security Guard or one of the remaining ANA soldiers. As the man holding it rounded the corner, their eyes met. He was maybe seventy-five feet away, in his thirties, with a beard, wearing a dirty red overshirt and a white turban. Daise was stunned. This wasn’t an Afghan Security Guard; it was an insurgent.
It’s the fucking Taliban, thought Daise. Inside our camp.
The Taliban fighter was likewise surprised to see the American. They both raised their weapons, but the insurgent’s gun jammed. Daise fired as his target ran back around the corner.
Shit, Daise thought. Oh no. Oh God no.
He had a radio attached to his belt and a hand-mike hooked up to his collar. “Charlie in the wire!” he said, for some reason at first using old Army slang for the Viet Cong. He immediately corrected himself: “Enemy in the wire! Enemy in the wire!” On a different radio frequency, Wong repeated what Daise had called in: “We got enemy in the wire! We got enemy in the wire!”
Daise could hear the news repeated and echoed through the camp.
Enemy in the wire.
It was what everyone had dreaded, what every troop had known was possible since 2006. The Taliban fighters were inside Combat Outpost Keating.
CHAPTER 32
Into This Hell
6:49 am
6:50 am
6:51 am
6:52 am
Less than an hour into their assault on the Combat Outpost Keating, insurgents had breached the camp’s perimeter. They were coming from the southern wall, near the maintenance shed; they were coming from the ANA side of the outpost; they were even walking through the front entrance.
And as the enemy slithered into the outpost, the operations center took more incoming, and the mIRC system went down. Fortunately, Burton had set up a redundant satellite radio that allowed the ops center to provide news to troops at Forward Operating Base Bostick, one of whom recorded what he was being told so he could pass it on to others:
BOSTICK: Enemy in the wire at COP keating they breached from the ANA side of the COP to the West
The F-15s had arrived and dropped two GBUs, or “guided bomb units,” on the Switchbacks, but no one was sure if they’d hit anyone.
Hill was bandaging up Francis, whose ribs were cracked.
“Is it getting any better out there?” Hill asked.
“It’s crazy,” Francis replied. “The gates of hell just opened up on us. We’re running around, no shit, in the backyard of hell.”
“We’ve got to pull together,” Hill said.
The barracks became quiet for two minutes as the troops regrouped, gathering magazines and supplies. Francis was in his little area at the far end of the barracks, and the next thing he knew, an RPG had come through the door to his room, blowing up his entire hooch.
“Son of a bitch! Motherfucker!” he yelled. Thankfully, no one was hurt, but the RPG explosion started a fire that soon threatened to engulfed the north side of the Bastards’ barracks. Troops snatched up fire extinguishers to try to stop the conflagration, or at least contain it, but that proved to be a difficult task; the buildings on the outpost, mostly made of stone and wood and topped with plywood roofs secured with sandbags, had been built in close proximity to one another. The fire quickly spread, as did a separate conflagration at the Headquarters Platoon barracks. Leaving the blaze to his men for a moment, Hill headed for the aid station, seeking information about Scusa.
“What’s the condition of my soldier?” he asked.
Courville looked down and shook his head.
Soon Romesha, too, stopped in at the aid station. He looked at Courville and did a “Thumbs-up or thumbs-down?” motion. Which was it?
Courville silently responded: thumbs-down.
There were many
ANA soldiers there, and Romesha noticed that one of them had leaned his Soviet sniper rifle—a Dragunov—up against the wall. Preferring that to his own M4, Romesha took it and left.
Cordova and the other medics were tag-teaming with Kirk; Floyd had been treating him, but now Cordova was looking over him again. Kirk was now taking what medicine calls agonal breaths, labored gasps every ten or fifteen seconds (the colloquial term is “dying breaths”). Cordova gave him two shots of epinephrine and started chest compressions, then breathed for him using a squeeze bag that pushed air into his lungs every six seconds.
After many minutes of trying to keep the sergeant alive by breathing for him with the squeeze bag, Cordova looked down at the floor. They would have to perform CPR on him all day to keep him alive, taking two of the four medical staff out of commission. Any other day, they would have done it without question, but not today. The wounded were already stacked up, and more would be coming in. They would have to stop treating Kirk.
Floyd was torn up. He knew they could keep him alive. He also knew they didn’t have the manpower to do so. He understood intellectually that Cordova was making the right call, but he was still filled with fury.
At 6:45 a.m., Cordova pronounced Kirk dead.
Including Thomson, three members of Black Knight Troop had been killed this morning, and the attack was but three quarters of an hour old.
After their sniper picked off Scusa, the insurgents had turned their weapons on Zach Koppes at LRAS-1, relentlessly firing rockets at the Humvee. His radio had gone out, so at one point, Romesha braved the enemy fire and ran up to him.
“This doesn’t look good,” Romesha said. “We’re all going to die.” He laughed—he had a pretty dark sense of humor, Romesha. “You okay?”
