by Jake Tapper
Mace crawled out from behind Stand-To Truck 1. Carter opened the window to talk to him. Shots were still coming at them. “Mace, are you all right?” Carter asked.
Too dehydrated to cry, Mace wore his pain on his face. He didn’t seem to have the energy to yell. “Help me,” Mace said plaintively. “Help me.”
“I can get to him, he’s right there,” Carter told Larson.
“Tell him to stay where he is,” Larson said. “He’s got cover there.”
“Help me, please,” Mace pleaded.
“I will get to you as soon as I can,” Carter said. He was irate. When the horn on a nearby truck blared, he for some reason became convinced it was a distress call from a fellow solider. “Can I go to the truck?” he asked Larson. “There’s someone calling for help in there. What if I get out and get underneath the Humvee just to see the truck?”
“Fine,” Larson agreed.
There were still bursts of intense machine-gun rounds every fifteen seconds or so, but the enemy, having apparently shifted his attention to other targets, seemed no longer to be specifically focused on them. Carter jumped out of the Humvee on his recon mission, only to see that its tires were flat from bullet rounds and there was no way for him, with all his gear on, to fit underneath. He hopped back in with Larson.
“The truck is ten feet away, can I go check for survivors?” he asked.
“Yeah,” Larson said. Rounds were still being fired at them, but the enemy was now concentrating more closely on other parts of the camp. Carter jumped out again and ran to the truck. There was no soldier inside, so he recovered some ammunition that was in there and brought it back to the Humvee. He wasn’t sure where the sound of the horn had come from.
“Can I go to Mace?” asked Carter, back inside. He’d given Mace his word.
“What do you plan on doing when you get to him?” Larson asked.
“Give him first aid.”
“Where are you going to take him?” Larson asked.
They discussed the options and decided that the nearby concrete bridge—outside the camp—would provide the most cover.
“You plan on dragging him that far?” Larson wondered.
“Fuck, no,” said Carter. “I plan on carrying him.”
Larson rolled down his window so he could fire and cover Carter, who got out and ran to Mace. He was facedown. Carter gently shook him.
“Hey, Mace, you all right?”
Mace mumbled something, and Carter turned him over. He couldn’t distinguish between Mace’s uniform and his legs; they were all a dark-red mess, with just a stretch of skin and bone keeping his left foot attached to his leg.
“Where does it hurt?” Carter asked. “What should I do? Are you okay?” He applied a tourniquet to Mace’s shredded left leg, then used a tree branch he found to splint his ankle. He took out his special “Israeli” bandage—elasticized and fitted with a pressure bar, the invention of an Israeli medic—to stanch bleeding from the largest hole in Mace’s abdomen, which was roughly the size of a tangerine. Other cavities were smaller but still gruesome and troubling. One was in the shape of a teardrop, Carter noted. Turning to Mace’s bloody right leg, he took out the dagger that’d been a gift from a karaoke buddy back home and cut open Mace’s pants. Using tape and gauze, he then tried to plug the holes in that leg.
Mace was in shock and did not seem particularly aware of what was going on. He was pale, and his lips were turning blue.
“Don’t worry about your ankle,” Carter said. “It will be fine as soon as we can find it.” He thought he could discern the faintest chuckle from Mace.
Carter looked at Gallegos, who was lying facedown next to them.
“Sergeant Gallegos is dead,” Mace said.
“I believe you, but I need to check his pulse anyway,” Carter replied. He reached over and felt the carotid artery in the sergeant’s neck. There was no pulse.
“Okay,” Carter told Mace, “you play dead. I’m going to check with Larson about what we should do now.”
He ran back to the Humvee.
“I don’t think it’s safe to take him to the bridge, it’s too exposed,” Carter explained to Larson. “The truck’s the only safe place.”
Larson agreed and got out of the truck to provide cover for Carter. Carter scurried back to Mace and reached down to hoist him up. He thought about his lifeguard training and how he would’ve picked Mace up if instead of being shot up he were drowning in a swimming pool. Carter told Mace to wrap his hands around his neck, and then he slid his left arm around Mace’s back and under his arms, and his right arm under his legs. Cradling him that way, he carried the wounded soldier while bullets flew by them, tripping over ammo cans and pieces of generator wreckage as they went, until at last they reached the Humvee, where Carter carefully placed Mace in the front seat.
At the operations center, Bundermann was staring at Cason Shrode. Both of them wore grim expressions that said, This is actually happening. And yet Bundermann still looked as if he were headed for the beach, dressed in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt.
“Go get your kit,” he told Shrode. His own body armor was in the Bastards’ barracks, now on fire; he would need to borrow Shrode’s extra set. “Get your rifles,” Bundermann added. There was a very real chance that the insurgents would try to take the operations center, and they could not let that happen.
Shrode came back with the body armor. The former high school and West Point football star was a tad larger than Bundermann, so it was an awkward fit, but it was a hell of a lot better than shorts.
Then, some good news: the Apache pilots radioed, announcing that they would be there in a couple of minutes. Bundermann, fed information by others throughout the outpost, had already given Shrode targets for bomb drops to pass on to the pilots of the fixed-wing aircraft. Now he told Shrode to tell the helicopter pilots that anyone outside the wire should be considered the enemy.
Bundermann stepped outside to the Café and looked out. The whole camp was being lit up; insurgents were firing from everywhere. Shit, Bundermann said to himself. There was absolutely no way the Americans could defend themselves without air support. Since they no longer controlled the entire camp, the men would need to collapse and defend only the core—the operations center, the barracks buildings, and the aid station. Bundermann decided that Black Knight Troop needed to contract, to pull in. That left a dozen troops outside the new perimeter.
I’m not going to be able to keep that part of that camp right now, he thought, so I’m going to focus on keeping and securing this part instead, and then I’m going to kick some Taliban ass.
But it was a gut-wrenching decision.
The Outpost. (Taken from U.S. Army investigations)
After talking to Brown on the satellite radio that Burton had managed to rig, Bundermann turned to Romesha and Hill, who were at the entrance to the operations center. “We need to fight this out; we need to hold our ground,” Bundermann said.
“Fuck that,” replied Romesha. “We need to retake this fucking camp and drive the fucking Taliban out!”
“Let’s do it,” Hill added.
“All right,” said Bundermann.
The three men made a plan. Romesha would focus on the western portion of the camp, where the ammo supply point and the entry control point were. Hill would focus on the eastern side, the ANA side.
“I need a machine gun covering me from the south,” Romesha said.
Bundermann turned to Hill. “Whoever you’ve got, put a machine gun by the DFAC”—the dining hall—“looking to the west and north for Romesha.”
Hill nodded.
Romesha also suggested that the members of Black Knight Troop use a different frequency on their radios, since the enemy was now in the wire and could listen in. Then he took a second. He was losing the feeling in his right hand. He lifted it to his face and looked at it.
Burton came over to him. “You all right?” he asked.
“I can’t feel my hand anymore,�
�� Romesha said.
Burton began unwrapping the dressing bandage that Rasmussen had put on him earlier, and almost immediately, the feeling in his hand returned: that big oaf Rasmussen had just wrapped it too tightly, cutting off the circulation.
“Thanks for dressing me for school today, Dad,” Romesha said to Burton. “I’ll be good.”
Bundermann told them to wait to push out until the Apaches were nearby and could provide the distraction of air cover.
Inside the Red Platoon barracks, Knight was pointing an M240 machine gun at the door. Jones had been instructed to grab an Mk 48 lightweight machine gun and stand point inside the barracks as well.
Romesha ran in. “We’re about to take this bitch back,” he announced. “I need a fucking group of volunteers.” He told them he’d need a SAW gunner to handle the squad automatic weapon, a 556 machine gun.
Gregory was the only SAW gunner there. “I don’t think I can do it,” he admitted. He’d hit a wall. A wall of terror, a wall of fatigue—whatever it was, his fellow troops understood. Some had been there themselves.
“I’ll do it,” Chris Jones offered.
So Romesha had his group: Thomas Rasmussen, Mark Dulaney, Josh Dannelley, Chris Jones, and Sergeant Matthew Miller. Jones took the SAW, and everyone else had an M4 rifle. They knew they were going to be utterly and completely outgunned, but they had no other option.
As they left the barracks, Romesha and Dannelley ran to the hut next door. They kicked the door open and threw a grenade to clear the room. Earlier, Romesha had asked Bundermann to “confirm that there are no friendlies on the other side of the HESCOs here.” Bundermann had replied that that was the case, other than the men holed up in the LRAS-2 Humvee and the mortarmen at the mortar pit. As they made their way in to the western side of the camp, Romesha told his men that anybody in front of them not in a coalition uniform would be considered an enemy combatant whom they could shoot on sight.
CHAPTER 34
The Apaches
At Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, Chief Warrant Officer Third Class Ross Lewallen had just sat down to coffee and breakfast with his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Chad Bardwell, when the portable radio he carried with him sounded a familiar alarm: a medevac was needed.
Lewallen and Bardwell were not themselves medevac pilots, but they often flew along as an armed escort for the unarmed Army medevac helicopters. On this particular morning, as the two men rose from the table in the mess hall and headed to their Apache, they presumed they would be accompanying a bird with a big red cross on its side on a standard wartime medical mission. But during their walk out to the airfield, the radio offered additional information about the situation: Combat Outpost Keating was under intense attack, with small-arms fire and RPGs. The news was delivered matter-of-factly, like a traffic update or a stock-market ticker.
Within twelve minutes, they were in the air, as was another Apache flown by Chief Warrant Officer Third Class Randy Huff and Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Christopher Wright. They were about thirty minutes from Forward Operating Base Bostick, which normally would be their first stop, to refuel, but based on what they were hearing on the radio, Lewallen and Huff decided to go directly to Camp Keating instead. The valley was too dangerous for the medevac but not for the armed Apaches. This would mean they wouldn’t have as much fuel when they got there and therefore wouldn’t be able to stay as long, but it sounded like there wasn’t a minute to spare. They climbed to an altitude of ninety-five hundred feet along the mountain range, keeping an eye out for the enemy the whole time. One lucky shot, a single bullet that cost no more than a gumball, and it could all be over.
As the Apaches neared Forward Operating Base Bostick, the operations center at Jalalabad reported that Camp Keating was being overrun. Everyone not only outside the perimeter but also inside it could be considered hostile. “If this is as bad as you’re telling us, we’re going to need more Apache support,” Wright replied, knowing the message would be conveyed to his commanders.
The pilots knew that the insurgents were used to seeing the U.S. helicopters travel east to west through the valley to the camp, so they decided instead to fly directly over the top of the northern mountain. As they crossed the peak and came around, they could see nothing of Combat Outpost Keating beyond an orange fire and a billowing column of smoke. It looked as if every building at the camp were aflame. They radioed in to Keating’s operations center: “Black Knight seven-oh, Black Knight seven-oh, do you read?” The pilots had no idea that the men of Black Knight Troop had lost their generator and were having difficulty responding.
Lewallen felt a sinking feeling in his chest. The entire camp must have been overrun, he thought. Everyone was dead.
But then, all of a sudden, Camp Keating made contact on a different radio frequency.
“We’ve been compromised,” Bundermann announced. “We’ve got guys inside the wire.”
Out his window, Bardwell saw a long finger of roughly thirty Afghans walking down the southern mountain on a trail that ran along the river, heading toward the eastern side of the camp.
“Hey, Ross,” he told Lewallen, “I got a whole bunch of guys here.”
“Do they have weapons?” Lewallen asked.
“Yeah,” said Bardwell.
Lewallen looked. There were so many bad guys that he couldn’t believe they were all bad guys.
“We see guys on the road,” Lewallen over the radio. “Do you have friendlies on the road?”
“No!” said Bundermann. “Ice ’em!”
“That’s not an ANA patrol?” Lewallen said.
“No!” Bundermann reaffirmed.
Apaches can be outfitted with three weapons systems at the same time: up to sixteen Hellfire missiles, each a one-hundred-pound explosive with precision accuracy that follows an aimed laser to its target; unguided Hydra 2.75-inch rockets, propelled from the front of the aircraft; and a chain gun of 30-millimeter high-explosive detonating rounds that can fire at a speed of up to 640 rounds a minute, targeted at whatever the pilot is looking at, provided that the system is linked to his helmet.
At 7:10 a.m., both Apaches let loose with their 30-milllimeter chain guns, and the insurgents, who were by then trying to breach the wire, were all killed.
A medevac hovering over the camp was waved away; it was still way too hot for it to land. The two Apaches began trying to solve that problem, firing at insurgents on the Putting Green and the Switchbacks. But now, of course, the helicopters had become enemy targets as well.
Romesha led his team of five into the ammo supply point, where they grabbed grenades, three each. They’d need them to throw around blind corners. By now, the Latvians, Lakis and Dabolins, had joined them.
The arrival of the Apaches provided a welcome distraction as Romesha’s team made its way to the shura building. Bullets rebounded off the building, with RPGs and B-10 rounds shaking the walls. Bombs screeched as they were dropped from F-15s, a high-pitched whistle that ended with the deep rumble of explosion. Romesha and Rasmussen looked at each other. “I wonder if this is what it was like during World War Two,” Rasmussen said. They were always talking about how bad previous soldiers had had it—in the trenches of Europe, on the beaches of Normandy, in the jungles of Vietnam. Romesha grinned and said, “I’m sure this is just a small taste of what it was like, brother.”
Dulaney noticed five insurgents near the maintenance shed, to their south, and he sprayed them with his machine gun; the Latvians followed his lead, dropping grenades on them with their M203 grenade launcher.
Romesha realized that the machine gun in the south of the camp that he’d requested from Bundermann and Hill was still not in place. If it had been, they’d have had a great crossfire to kill those five insurgents, but as it was, they were just eight men trying to fight dozens, if not hundreds, of enemy fighters in three different positions—to the north, the west, and the south. Romesha called Bundermann, ready to let loose: no machine gun, no cov
er, what was the problem? Even more infuriating to Romesha was the attitude he felt he had picked up listening to his fellow soldiers on the radio: some of the guys from Black Knight Troop sounded as if they were giving up.
Fuck no, Romesha thought. We’re not going to sit here and roll over and fucking get killed. He could feel his adrenaline flowing. You fucking muj are not going to keep us down, we are going to take this fight to you!
But first he needed everyone to get on the same page. He got on the radio again. “Where the fuck is my machine gun?” he asked Bundermann. “I can’t fucking continue without it! You’re going to get me and fucking everybody with me trying to take this COP back fucking killed!”
While it didn’t feel that way to Romesha, Bundermann had in fact made it a priority to get a machine gun in place to provide him with cover. Problem was, the machine guns were all in use. Hill did find one not being used, in the possession of an Afghan soldier who had taken cover in a drainage ditch outside the operations center. But no matter how hard Hill tried to get the machine gun from him—through argument and brute force—he couldn’t do it; here, in the wrong place and at the wrong time, an ANA soldier was finally showing that he had some fight in him.
Finally giving up on the Afghan, Hill ran to the Café outside the aid station and found an M240 machine gun. He grabbed it and ran north. Better than nothing. His larger goal was to push north and then west from the operations center, to extend the perimeter of controlled territory. He assembled a team of men, and they all ran to the dining hall, where they found Private First Class Daniel Rogers looking fairly hunkered down. “What the fuck?” Hill asked. “How long you been here, Rogers?”
