by Jake Tapper
Koppes looked at him. Bullets were ricocheting off the truck right next to him, but the staff sergeant just stood there looking back at Koppes, smiling the whole time. Holy shit, he’s lost his mind, the specialist thought.
“Yeah, I’m good,” Koppes finally replied. “I still got this sniper behind me.”
“Okay, stay low and hang tight,” Romesha told him.
At that moment, the sniper shot at Romesha, who then ducked behind the Humvee and began playing peekaboo with the enemy, trying to draw him out so he could see exactly where he was firing from. He decided that the Taliban fighter was midway up on the Northface, so he fired the Dragunov at the spot.
Then he turned and airily announced to Koppes, “All right, I’m going to head out.”
The smoke from the burning ANA building was becoming a problem for him; it stung his eyes and made it tough for him to breathe. And that fire was spreading.
A little later, Koppes saw four enemy fighters moving over the crest of the Diving Board, walking on a path to the Switchbacks. He fired his MK19 grenade launcher at them and watched all four go down. He was about to pull the trigger again when all of a sudden, Sergeant John Francis was running full steam toward him, screaming all the while in his thick Long Island, New York, accent.
Koppes was sure Francis was yelling, “Friendlies on the Diving Board! Friendlies on the Diving Board!” Holy shit, he thought, I killed four Americans who were trying to help us! In a flash, he figured they’d been Special Forces troops, dressed like locals and carrying AK-47s—and then he looked up and saw seven more men on the Diving Board, coming down the hill to the ANA side of the camp. Really alarmed now, he thought, Holy shit, I just shot their friends!
But then, as Francis got nearer, Koppes heard him yelling again. This time it was clearer—he wasn’t yelling “Friendlies,” he was yelling, “Enemy on the Diving Board! Enemy on the Diving Board!” So Koppes erased all his misgivings and guilt, pointed his grenade launcher at the insurgents headed down the hill—the one in front looked about fifteen years old—and went up through the line, taking them out one after another.
Bundermann was focused on the men stuck in the Humvee at LRAS-2. There were now five of them: Ty Carter, Justin Gallegos, Brad Larson, Stephan Mace, and Vernon Martin. They might not be able to wait until the Apaches and fixed-wing aircraft got there. The vehicle used as Stand-To Truck 186 had a .50-caliber mounted on it; Faulkner was in it and had been firing as much as he could. If someone joined him in that truck, they might be able to drive it closer to LRAS-2 and rescue the trapped soldiers.
Joshua Hardt and Clint Romesha began arguing about the best course of action. Hardt endorsed Bundermann’s plan to have someone run out to Stand-To Truck 1 and drive it over to LRAS-2 to provide cover fire—shooting at the enemy snipers and RPG teams in the hills—so the five men could get out of the Humvee and run for safety.
“That’s a bad idea,” Romesha said. “The fifty-cal is close to black on ammo. The fire up there is too intense—they’re telling everyone to keep away. They need to just hunker down and pray for the best.”
Hardt looked at Romesha. “I want to take the truck to them,” he said.
Romesha studied Hardt’s face. Hardt and Kirk—always the first ones out the door whenever there was enemy contact. You couldn’t stop them.
“Hardt, you can do this, but you need to be in an effective place to put fire at Urmul,” Romesha said. “Don’t put yourself in a position where you’re out there with your dick slapping in the wind.”
Hardt ran off. Romesha knew he wasn’t coming back.
Hardt and Specialist Chris Griffin sprinted to Private Ed Faulkner’s truck with as much .50-caliber ammunition as they could carry. Griffin got on the gun, Hardt fed it ammo, and Faulkner started driving the truck toward Gallegos and the other men trapped in the Humvee. Hardt radioed Romesha and told him that he’d reached the stand-to truck safely and they were on their way to LRAS-2.
“Call up Gallegos,” Romesha said. “You need to coordinate with him.”
Hardt did, letting Gallegos know they were coming for them, that they would provide them with cover so all of them could finally get out of there.
“Don’t!” Gallegos told Hardt. “Don’t bring the fucking Humvee over! You’re just going to die!”
But Hardt was determined to get there. Faulkner put his foot on the gas, and the Humvee lurched forward through small-arms fire, accelerating as rounds bounced off the windshield, then the turret. Griffin ducked down to avoid being hit, then sprang up to fire a couple of bursts. An RPG exploded, spraying shrapnel in his face. Faulkner tried to back up the truck to maneuver to LRAS-2, but the tires got stuck on a berm. He tried to go forward, but the Humvee wouldn’t move. He tried to go backward again, but it wouldn’t move in that direction, either. Insurgents were now targeting them with RPGs, several of which exploded near and then on the Humvee.
“Get out of here!” Gallegos yelled at Hardt over the radio, convinced that his would-be rescuers were on a suicide mission.
“Roger,” Hardt said.
“Hardt!” Gallegos screamed. “Will you get the fuck out of here?”
“Sorry we couldn’t help,” Hardt replied. “We’re leaving.”
Hardt told Faulkner and Griffin to get out of the Humvee. Griffin hopped out the rear passenger-side door and ran. He was dead within seconds. A bullet hit his left cheek, lacerating his brain before exiting through his left scalp. Another bullet entered his left lower jaw and passed through the base of his skull and the right side of his brain. A third entered his left thigh, traveled upward, and exited out the right side of his chest. A fourth entered his right buttock and exited from his lower back. Bullet after bullet hit Christopher Todd Griffin: his left forearm; his right thigh; the left side of his neck…. Griffin hit the ground, his ribs fractured, his brain and liver lacerated, his skull shattered.
Before Hardt could even close the door after Griffin, rounds flew in. Faulkner looked out to the COP and saw three Afghan Security Guards who didn’t look right. He alerted Hardt, who peered out the window, then suddenly pulled back into the truck.
“They’re shooting an RPG at us!” Hardt exclaimed. The RPG detonated on the driver’s-side windshield, spitting shrapnel into the truck, which sprayed the left side of Faulkner’s body—up and down his arm, his shoulder blade, and the inside of his thigh. He screamed in pain.
“You’re good, you’re good,” Hardt said, trying to reassure him.
Faulkner had no idea where his rifle was, but he and Hardt both knew they had to get out of the truck. They decided that Faulkner would get out the driver’s side, crouch down, and open Hardt’s door behind him. He did all of that and then ran toward the dining hall, where he took a left and made for the aid station. By the time he reached the barracks, his face was torn up and his left arm mangled.
“Where’s Hardt?” he was asked. “Where’s Griffin?!”
“I don’t know,” Faulkner said. “Hardt told us to abandon the Humvee. I don’t know where they are.”
Suddenly, Hardt’s voice came on the radio.
“Holy fuck,” he said. “They’ve got an RPG pointed right at me.”
Then his radio went dead.
Fifty yards in front of him, Gallegos saw an insurgent carrying an American weapon, an M249 light machine gun. The enemy fighter had come up through the trash pit and was making his way toward the main area of the camp. The troops in the Humvee knew they couldn’t stay there any longer.
Gallegos was the highest-ranking among them, so Larson asked him, “What the fuck should we do?”
Carter was always eager to talk. “We should use the rocks in front of the Humvee, and then the latrines, and then the laundry trailer for cover and run to the ECP,” he said, meaning the entry control point.
Gallegos paused for a second, then threw it to everyone else. “What do you think?” he asked.
“It’s not up to us,” Carter said. “You’re senior.”
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br /> “Okay,” Gallegos said. “That’s what we’ll do.”
Carter and Larson got out of the Humvee and began providing cover with their M4 carbine rifles. Gallegos helped Mace out of the Humvee and then, along with Martin, they tried to run for cover.
Carter crouched down by the sandbags to the front right of the truck. Sparks were exploding off the downed M240 a foot or so in front of him as the enemy targeted the weapons. Larson was to the back right of the vehicle, and he yelled and started shooting; Carter looked to his right and saw another insurgent inside the wire. He was maybe thirty yards away, and he dove behind a bush to avoid Larson’s fire. Carter, too, fired, five or six rounds, until he was rocked by another close explosion, from an RPG that detonated a few feet in front of Mace and knocked him down. The shock wave from the RPG had obviously caused Mace some serious internal injuries, but he was still alive. Carter looked back and saw him leaning against the Humvee. Vernon Martin, blood showing on his neck, ran down the hill toward the latrines. Carter continued to provide cover fire.
Gallegos went over to Mace and helped him up, and then he put his arm around him, and they scurried down the hill and around the corner toward the latrines. The area afforded the two soldiers no shelter as insurgents unloaded their weapons on them.
Carter was waiting for Larson to cue him, to tell him he could move, when he saw Gallegos come back around the corner, returning to the Humvee. Bullets were splashing all around his feet, and then one hit him. Gallegos turned around and fired; another round hit him. He kept firing. Mace, on the ground, on his elbows, was also struggling to get back toward the truck. He’d been hit with small-arms fire and RPG shrapnel. Both of his legs had been shredded with enemy metal, and thanks to two bullets in his back that had exited out his front torso, he was bleeding out of his abdomen.
Larson aimed his fire to try to provide cover for Mace, but almost instantly, a sniper round hit his helmet. Larson felt his head snap back, but the Kevlar worked: the bullet stuck in the helmet. He kept firing, yelling to Mace to follow Gallegos back to the Humvee. Mace turned and started crawling in the direction he’d indicated, but Gallegos was hit a third time now, in the head, by machine-gun fire. The bullets spun him around as if he—a man so enormous he was nicknamed Taco Truck—were practically weightless.
As Gallegos landed on the ground, Larson turned around and saw two insurgents coming toward the Humvee, one with an RPG, the other with a PKM machine gun. Larson snuck around the truck—apparently they hadn’t seen him—and waited until they were ten feet away, and then he stood and shot each one in the head. It was the first time he’d ever killed anyone.
“Gallegos is hit!” Carter yelled. “He’s down!”
“Get the fuck back in the truck!” Larson yelled back. “I just smoked two dudes back here! They’re in the wire! Get the fuck back here!” Carter scrambled back into the Humvee. The gunfire continued steadily showering down upon the camp; more RPGs fell on the truck.
“Gallegos was hit,” Carter told Larson. “I don’t know what happened to Mace or Martin.”
Then Carter saw Mace, ten to fifteen yards in front of the truck, crawling on his elbows, trying to reach them.
“Mace is there,” Specialist Carter said. “I’m going to get him.”
“No,” replied Sergeant Larson.
“I can see him; he’s right there,” Carter insisted.
“You’re no good to him dead,” Larson said.
They argued. Larson said it was senseless to try to get Mace. He made a crack about Carter’s wanting to earn a medal.
“Fuck the medals, he needs my help,” Carter said.
“No,” Larson repeated. The indestructible Gallegos had been killed, Mace was gravely wounded, and neither of them knew what had happened to Martin. Larson wasn’t about to let Carter be a fourth man down. It was just too hot out there.
Trapped once again inside the Humvee, the two men tried to secure what they knew could very well end up being their coffin. The turret was jammed, and they couldn’t close it. The radio wasn’t working. They wondered if any of the other Americans at the outpost were still alive.
Specialist Albert “Cookie” Thomas had just delivered ammunition to the troops near the generator when he saw a man in an Afghan Security Guard’s uniform pick up an RPG. Thomas didn’t think anything of it—he figured those guys were on the Americans’ side—so he kept running. Then he looked again and saw the man standing on top of the hill near the dining hall, aiming the RPG at him. It landed right in front of him, but he kept running as the blast went off. Feeling a distinct tingling sensation in his left leg, he looked down and saw that it was in bloody disarray, having been hit by a scattershot of shrapnel.
Realizing that the wire had been breached, Thomas didn’t know what to do, so he ran to his hooch in the Headquarters Platoon barracks. He hid in his little area, behind the curtains and shelves constructed to afford some semblance of privacy. Soon he heard noise and then words in a foreign language: Taliban fighters were in the barracks.
Terrified, Thomas looked down at his leg and the oozing blood. As quietly as he could, he reached into his vest and pulled out the tourniquet stored in his cargo pocket. He attached it to his thigh and tried to stem the bleeding. He then eased himself into another small room where computers had been set up. He slid the chair from that room into Private First Class Jordan Wong’s hooch. It was pitch black. He aimed his rifle at the curtain; if insurgents pulled it back, he would shoot.
Not a soul in the world knew he was there. Cookie Thomas was positive he wasn’t going to get any help. He would be killed by Taliban as he sat in the computer-room chair; he would die in Jordan Wong’s hooch. This was how it would end.
CHAPTER 33
Taking This Bitch Back
Forty-five minutes after taking off, shortly after 8:00 a.m., the medevac was still hovering over Forward Operating Base Bostick.
“It’s still too hot!” the pilot shouted about the area surrounding Camp Keating. “We’re going down to refuel!” They landed, and Stoney Portis returned to the Bostick operations center, where the intelligence officer had just finished making a map of Camp Keating. The whole eastern side of the outpost had been colored red, as had much of the western side. The red indicated Taliban control.
“Can you swim?” Carter asked Larson.
Larson thought about the question. He was a really bad swimmer.
“Enough to survive,” he finally said.
“Good enough for me,” responded Carter. “If this is as bad as we think it is, we should wait until dark, low-crawl to the river, and float down to Lowell.”
Larson was quiet; he’d been shot in the shoulder. They were surrounded and cut off, with no communications and little ammunition. Everyone friendly in sight was either wounded or dead, and they still had no idea how many Taliban fighters there were. Sure, he could swim.
Clint Romesha stood on the deck off the aid station, in a semiprotected space known as the Café.
He’d had enough. He’d been trying to find out what was going on at LRAS-2 when he spotted three Afghans by the shura building. Two had AK-47s, the third an RPG. One was wearing camouflage, as the ANA troops often did. He turned to the Latvians, Lakis and Dabolins, who were standing just outside the operations center.
“You don’t have ANA on that side of the camp,” Romesha confirmed.
“No,” said Lakis.
So that was the enemy.
This is a gimme shot, Romesha thought. I couldn’t ask for a better shot. The insurgents walked by Stand-To Truck 2, where they casually put down their weapons. They had entered Camp Keating unfettered, without being met by an ounce of resistance. One began adjusting his bandanna. They seemed to think the camp had been conquered.
They were wrong. Romesha fired and popped the fighter with the bandanna through his neck; he fell like a sack of potatoes. The other two insurgents ran behind the Humvee. Lakis and Dabolins joined Romesha in his position and began firing, Lak
is aiming his grenade launcher past the Humvee and dropping two grenades directly on the fighters.
Other invaders showed a similar confidence in their exploration of the outpost. When Gregory and Jones poked their heads up from their ditch, they saw two insurgents roughly twenty feet from them, just walking along nonchalantly as if the battle were over, as if they’d already won. One was wearing a gray overshirt, the other a golden-yellow one with a tan vest over it and a belt of RPK light machine-gun ammunition slung over his shoulder. He carried the RPK itself casually, as if it were a briefcase.
“They’re fucking up there,” Gregory said. “They’re in the wire, they’re near the showers.”
“We need to kill ’em, kill ’em, kill ’em!” exclaimed Jones.
Gregory and Jones fired, and both insurgents promptly fell to the ground dead. But other enemy fighters in the camp had seen it happen, and with grenades and sniper fire, they started targeting the two Americans. Gregory and Jones ducked back down again. Soon Daise and Dannelley came running over to them.
“It’s not looking good, man,” Dannelley told them, standing outside the ditch.
“We’re kinda pinned down here,” Jones said. “There are snipers everywhere.”
“Kirk and Scusa have already gotten killed,” reported Dannelley. “They’re not letting up, and air support’s not here.” Bullets were flying by to the left and right of his face, but he seemed blissfully unaware of them.
“Get the fuck down,” Jones said. “You’re getting shot at! You’re going to get shot in the fucking face!”
An RPG hit yet another generator, creating a forebodingly dark plume of smoke. The four men took the opportunity to use the cloud as cover, and they ran back to the Red Platoon barracks.
Back inside the LRAS-2 Humvee, Carter looked out the window to see, across the river, about a hundred yards away, a three-man enemy RPG team standing next to the Afghan National Police building. He opened his window and fired six rounds at them with his M4 rifle. Then he fired at another insurgent. And another one, a fighter dressed in dark brown with a ponytail.
