by Jake Tapper
“I don’t know,” Rogers said. He was now part of Hill’s team.
They couldn’t push past the dining hall because every time they tried to make a move, bullets hailed down on them from the hills. Figuring it couldn’t hurt, Hill set up the M240 machine gun and, streaming a Z-pattern with the gun, unleashed several hundred rounds. He set up Gregory, Rogers, and Davidson in positions to help Romesha and his team, and then he ran back to the Café.
After forty-five minutes of sitting scared in Wong’s hooch, Cookie Thomas heard someone come into the barracks. Then he heard a most welcome language: Latvian. Dabolins and Lakis had come in to get more ammunition.
Thank God, Thomas thought. He cried out, and they came to him. The Latvians helped the cook get to the aid station, where Floyd, Hobbs, and Cordova started fixing up his leg.
“If the pain gets any worse, I’ll give you morphine,” Cordova told him.
“I don’t want any until I get out of here,” Thomas said. Until he was on a medevac and in the air, he wanted to be as alert as he could be.
At the Café, John Francis looked at Jonathan Hill. “It’s been nice fighting with you,” he said. “It’s been nice serving with you. In case we don’t make it out of here.”
“Same here,” Hill replied.
Chris Jones stood at the corner of the ammo supply point, from which vantage he could see the river and the road toward Urmul.
“We got dudes running outside the wire across the bridge,” Romesha said. Jones stood and aimed his rifle. He fired it, and the blast of metal took down one of the insurgents. Rasmussen did the same. Jones fired at a third insurgent and killed him as well. Rasmussen looked at Jones. The kid had a huge grin on his face, like it was the coolest thing he’d ever done.
“Stay here at this position,” Romesha said. “Anyone who comes up, kill ’em.” Jones was handed the Mk 48 light machine gun, and Dannelley was posted nearby to make sure no enemy snuck up on him.
Sure enough, Dannelley soon saw someone through the wall, on the road. “Hey, stop,” he yelled. “Fucking stop! Stop!” When the man turned around, Dannelley saw that he was holding an AK-47. “What are you doing?” Dannelley said, then shouted, “He’s got a gun!” He aimed his M4 rifle at the insurgent, but he had placed it on “safe,” so it didn’t work for a second; he ducked behind the wall.
“Fucking shoot him!” yelled Romesha.
“Shoot him!” echoed Rasmussen.
Dannelley clicked off the safety on his rifle and stood to fire, but he’d waited too long—the enemy fighter shot him twice in the arm, and he fell to the ground.
Jones fired his Mk 48 machine gun at the insurgent while Romesha, Rasmussen, and Miller threw grenades over the wall. As the grenades exploded, they looked up and saw the spray of a bloody mist and some scraps of the insurgent’s clothing rise into the air, then fall. In the craziness of it all, they laughed.
Romesha went over to Dannelley and inspected his injury; it was a sizable flesh wound to his left shoulder and left upper arm, but ultimately he’d be okay. The laughing over, Romesha was now mad. He’d put Dannelley in charge of just one thing: making sure no one snuck up on Jones in the middle of an intense firefight. The kid had seen the insurgent to stop and told him to stop, as if he were on guard duty back in Colorado or something. Romesha figured the Rules of Engagement were mostly to blame; these kids were taught they would go to jail if they overreacted even slightly. It was ridiculous, and it created situations like this one, he thought. Such, he mused bitterly, was the “politically correct” Army. But while the Rules of Engagement were whatever McChrystal said they were, Romesha always told his men that at the end of the day, “it’s better to be judged by twelve than carried by six.” He sent Dannelley to the aid station, and while the rest of them hunkered down, he told the Latvians to go back and help out Sergeant Hill.
Bundermann directed Ryan Schulz to replace Dannelley. Romesha liked Schulz—he was a cool guy and a hard charger—but he thought of him as being a desk jockey, not a front-line trigger-puller, and his reassignment seemed a sign of how desperate they were. They still had no cover from the south, so Romesha once again radioed Bundermann, who checked with Hill to see what the holdup was. Hill explained that they were still trying to get a machine gun down there, but he said his own men were busy with other tasks—namely, securing the eastern side of the camp and trying to put out several (literal) fires.
“Let the barracks burn,” Romesha said. “They’re just barracks.”
The staff sergeant decided that his request for cover fire from the south was just never going to be met; that fight was lost. He told Rasmussen, Dulaney, and Miller that the wait was over: it was time to take back the shura building. Jones and Schulz would cover them with grenades as best they could, paying special attention to their southern flank, where they would be completely exposed. It was a rash decision, but it needed to be done, and they couldn’t wait any longer. They were going to reclaim the entrance to the camp.
Romesha turned to the three men. “You guys trust me, right?” he said. “This could get bad.”
“We’ll follow you anywhere,” Rasmussen replied.
“You’re going to be the point man,” Romesha told Rasmussen.
“Roger,” Rasmussen said.
A wall made of rocks and sandbags led up to the entry control point building. They didn’t know who, if anyone, was in there.
“Let me put a two-oh-three in the building so we don’t get whacked,” Rasmussen proposed, referring to his M203 single-shot 40-millimeter grenade launcher.
“Cool,” said Romesha. “Do it.”
Rasmussen stepped around the corner and fired. The grenade shot right through the door and into the building, filling the room with a ball of fire. “Hell, yeah,” Rasmussen said.
They ran to the building, and Dulaney opened a whole drum of ammo into it before entering. Inside, they couldn’t breathe: the grenade had hit the fire extinguisher, filling the air with fire retardant. Rasmussen started vomiting and ran outside to get some air. At any rate, there weren’t any Taliban in there, though some of their weapons had been left behind, including a machine gun and a few AK-47s.
“We’ve secured the shura building,” Romesha called in to Bundermann. He still couldn’t see Gallegos or the other men pinned down at LRAS-2. “I can’t do anything until I get additional personnel out here.”
Romesha looked at one of his men; the battle seemed to be getting to him. He had started shaking and, in Romesha’s opinion, was acting a bit checked out and timid, precisely when the utmost courage and focus were demanded. This wasn’t so unexpected: endurance folds. But the timing was miserable. Romesha told the soldier to dodge the bullets and run back to the aid station to take a breather, adding that he needed an IV for treatment of dehydration.
Moving to the open doorway, Romesha suggested targets for the Apaches. The camp was receiving a tremendous amount of fire from a spot just above the Urmul mosque. “I need you to put as much firepower as you can in that area,” Romesha said. And Bundermann heard him. An F-16 dropped an immense bomb, the shock wave from which nearly lifted the roof off the shura building.
“I’m no structural engineer,” Romesha radioed in, “but I don’t know how much longer this building can last.”
“Do you want me to stop?” asked Bundermann.
“No,” Romesha said. “Keep going.”
Jordan Bellamy had called from Observation Post Fritsche with good news. Using their Claymores, hand grenades, and machine guns, he and his men had beaten back the enemy enough to get their mortars back up, and the 120-millimeter was ready for use in helping their fellow troops in the valley. Bundermann gave Bellamy a six-digit grid for his 120s to fire at the center of Urmul. “Use Willie Pete,” he specified. He wanted smoke blocking the village’s view of the outpost.
Bundermann instructed the Apache pilots to lay Hellfires into the Urmul mosque and to take out the Afghan National Police checkpoint. Ordering the destruction of a local mos
que and police station was an empirically extreme measure, but no one blinked an eye.
In the LRAS-2 truck, Mace’s wounds were so serious that Carter knew he would die if he didn’t receive medical attention soon.
“That settles it,” he told Larson. “I’m going on a recon. If I’m not back in ten minutes, either I made it or don’t worry about me.”
So much had happened, but in fact it had been only minutes earlier that the other three men in the truck had jumped into the maelstrom, resulting in Gallegos’s being killed, Mace gravely wounded, and Martin unaccounted for and vanished. Carter hopped out of the Humvee and sprinted to the corner of the latrines, where he took a knee. He’d made it. He gasped for air. Carter glimpsed Mace’s gun at the corner of the laundry room. That was as far as he’d gotten, Carter figured. He saw Gallegos’s radio and snagged it. “This is Blue Four Golf—is anyone still alive?” he asked. He heard some sort of response in English; he wasn’t sure exactly what was being said, but it was enough to send him on a sprint back to the Humvee to give the radio to Larson, who dialed up the operations center.
At the operations center, Bundermann got on the radio. “Red Dragon, what’s going on?” he asked Larson.
“I’m with Carter,” Larson said. “We got Mace. Mace is pretty jacked up. We need to get him to the aid station.” And then, with gratitude in his voice, he added, “We didn’t know if anyone else was still alive!”
There was a stretcher near their position—someone had brought it out earlier and leaned it up near the truck. Now Bundermann wanted to know if Larson and Carter could get Mace onto it. “We need some cover fire,” Larson replied.
Excited that the three of them, at least, were still breathing, Bundermann called Romesha, on the western side of the camp, and Hill, who was in charge of the men on the eastern side. “I’m going to launch mortar rounds from Fritsche,” he told them. “When that happens, Ro, anything you and your team can shoot, do it, at the Putting Green, Urmul, and the Northface. Hill, you shoot anything you can at the Diving Board and the Switchbacks. I want every weapons system on the site firing in one minute.”
Bundermann radioed Bellamy. “Give me fifteen rounds from the one-twenty and fifteen from the sixty into Urmul.” He picked up another radio and asked Larson, “If I lay down a fuck-ton of cover fire, can you guys get back on your own?”
“Fuck yeah,” said Larson.
The plan was this: a B-1 bomber would drop its explosives while OP Fritsche, Romesha and his men, and Hill and his men unleashed everything they had at every enemy position they could target—at which point Larson and Carter would grab Mace and make a mad dash to the aid station. Everyone got ready.
Carter scurried out to prepare the stretcher and clear the area, but within seconds, a mortar from OP Fritsche had hit Urmul, and Larson was yelling, “Go! Go! Go!” Prep work now short-circuited, Carter kicked the ammo cans out of the way and snatched up the stretcher. He opened the back door of the Humvee, where Mace was trying ease himself out.
“Mace, you need to shift your legs,” Larson said.
“You need to hold the fuck on, because we’re going to haul ass,” added Carter.
The aggressive fire echoed the morning’s earlier soundtrack, but this time, the bullets and mortars were outgoing, as the men of 3-61 Cav, together and all at once, began giving the enemy everything they had. Mace threw himself onto the stretcher, and Carter and Larson started moving, trying to achieve a balance of speed and smoothness. As they chugged toward the aid station, they passed by the bodies of the two dead insurgents Larson had killed. Not far from them lay a dead U.S. soldier: Chris Griffin. Carter had never been so exhausted; he was in so much pain, and so spent, that tears started streaking from his eyes. He was dehydrated and in agony. As soon as they reached the aid station, the docs grabbed Mace and got to work on him. Carter fell on the ground and started crawling. He had just enough breath to say “Help”—for himself and for all of them.
CHAPTER 35
The Fundamentals
Pushing from the operations center toward the eastern side of the camp, Harder and his team braved the blaze in the Bastards’ barracks as a means to escape detection. Lieutenant Stephen Cady was with them; normally Cady worked out of Forward Operating Base Bostick, but he’d flown in a couple of days before—the same day Portis’s chopper was hit—to bring the Afghan Security Guards and others their pay. Bad timing.
Exiting via the back door, the group headed toward the ANA barracks, inside of which they could see insurgents, though no one had a clear shot or a particularly good spot with any cover to shoot from.
“Fuck it,” Francis said. “Let’s start shooting.”
They did that, with their M4 rifles, and Francis fired, too, with his M203 grenade launcher, and Harder threw a couple of hand grenades. Some Taliban fell to the ground, direct hits, dead. Other insurgents started screaming. Francis didn’t know what they were saying, and he didn’t care. He kept shooting and reloading, shooting and reloading.
The seemingly endless supply of insurgents that Hardy and his men were seeing was confirmed in commentary from above: “We’re picking these guys off here, but they keep coming,” an Apache pilot radioed. “They’re fucking everywhere.”
No cover, no weapon—Rodriguez knew this might be his last run. But what choice did he have?
“Can you get out and shoot?” Bundermann had asked the guys at the mortar pit over the radio, now operative again.
Good question. For more than an hour, Breeding, Rodriguez, and Barroga had remained cut off from the rest of the camp, unable to make their radio function, unable to escape their corner. Rodriguez had fired his M240 machine gun at the enemy when he could—sticking the gun out the door and just firing without aiming it—but after sixty rounds, he’d run out of ammunition. From his position, he’d watched the drama unfold at LRAS-2—he’d seen Gallegos help Mace away from the Humvee after the RPG went off so close to him, then witnessed another RPG go off near both of them, knocking Mace to the ground near a gully where an insurgent stood. As he watched, the insurgent had begun firing at Mace.
Breeding had gotten the radio fixed in time for them all to hear Daise shout, “Enemy in the wire!” Hearing enemy fighters coming down the Switchbacks, right near him, Rodriguez had started throwing hand grenades at them over the wall of the mortar pit. He’d then tried to detonate the Claymore mines outside the camp. They didn’t work.
“We can’t shoot the big gun,” Breeding had reported, referring to the 120-millimeter. “We can’t get to it.” But Rodriguez was itching to lay hands on the 60-millimeter, so Breeding provided cover fire, spraying the hills with the M240 machine gun while his mortarman dashed out the door. Rodriguez got to the mortar pit, grabbed a can of ammo and tucked it under his arm, and with both hands grasped the 60-millimeter and prepared to shoot it at the Northface.
As he turned the weapon, he looked up at the Switchbacks and saw an insurgent retreating. An RPG exploded nearby, hitting ammo cans and sandbags and sending shrapnel into Rodriguez’s neck. He kept going. He squeezed the trigger. The 60-millimeter was set at the “Charge 1” level, which made firing it feel like operating a jackhammer; you could break your foot firing at that intensity. Rodriguez sent the explosives into the Northface and then toward the Afghan National Police compound across the bridge. Then he turned, calibrated his mortar tube, and fired at the eastern side of the camp, where he’d been told the enemy had entered and taken over the ANA barracks. There were no friendlies there, he’d been advised.
That last part was no longer true, however. Eric Harder and his team were there.
Harder and John Francis were just seconds away from heading in to the ANA side of the camp when Rodriguez’s mortars began destroying the buildings in front of them.
“Fuck it,” Harder concluded. “Let’s fall back. If those dudes aren’t dead already, they’re not going to survive this.”
“Good,” said Francis. They retreated. By now, the camp was l
ittered with the tiny metal fins that fell off RPGs before they hit their targets. The fire had leapt into the overflow barracks and the gym and was quickly spreading throughout the area around Harder and Francis. Rounds that had been left inside the barracks would cook and pop and zip by their heads, while abandoned mortars exploded in the ANA barracks. Physically drained and overcome by thirst, Harder ran into the Bastards’ barracks, snatched up the mop bucket, and gulped water from it.
By noon, other aircraft had joined the Apaches in the valley. F-15 Eagle fighter jets were screeching far above and had begun dropping two-thousand-pound bombs, causing the entire valley to shake.
Lewallen had done two tours in Iraq—one of them during the invasion—and on this Afghanistan tour had completed some tough missions in the Korangal Valley, but the firefight at Camp Keating was without question the worst he’d ever seen. He was grateful that the man on the other end of the radio—Bundermann—was so cool and collected, able calmly and dispassionately to single out for the pilots those areas from which the outpost was taking the heaviest incoming fire.
The Apaches had repeatedly been coming down, firing, clearing an area, and then floating back to safety. The pilots tried to stay high up when they weren’t engaged with the enemy, to avoid all of the small-arms fire that was showering down from the southeastern and southwestern hills. Acting on Bundermann’s request, he and Huff, in the other Apache, swooped down to launch a Hellfire missile at the Urmul mosque. Two enemy Dushkas had originally been placed higher up in the hills not far from the landing zone, positioned to shoot down any medevac choppers that tried to land. When the Apaches showed up, the insurgents brought the heavy machine guns downhill. The wisdom of that relocation became evident when one of the Dushkas got Ross Lewallen’s Apache, and then again when, within ninety seconds, Randy Huff’s bird was hit, too. The helicopters appeared to be okay, but they were both running low on fuel and ammo anyway, so it seemed an opportune—even necessary—time to head back to Forward Operating Base Bostick for a pit stop. Lewallen and Huff would go as quickly as they could, but the reality was that they would be out of pocket for at least an hour, leaving Camp Keating at a disadvantage at a fragile moment in the fight.
