The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  They had to stop the fire from spreading to the aid station via the burning pine tree. Someone had found a chainsaw, but not one of them had the first idea of how to use it.

  When the Bastards were up at Observation Post Fritsche, the enlisted guys had a game they played: Name an occupation that Carter has never tried. It was remarkable: during his wandering years—after his stint with the Marines but before he enlisted in the Army—Carter had done just about everything. He’d scrubbed the bottoms of yachts in the San Francisco Bay Area, been a projectionist at a movie theater in Antioch, California, and served as an armed security guard in Oakland, a seasonal sales associate at Home Depot, and a hot-tub transporter. He’d worked at a sawmill and a motorcycle shop; he’d driven a flatbed tow truck.

  And yes, he’d learned how to be a lumberjack for an excavating company.

  “Carter can do it,” said Private Second Class Kellan Kahn, a radio operator.

  Hill tracked down Carter, who had recovered from rescuing Mace.

  “With this chainsaw, can you cut down that tree?” Hill asked.

  “I don’t know,” Carter replied. “Let me check.” He grabbed the chainsaw and looked to see if it had fuel. He revved it, Leatherface-style, to find out if it worked. “Yeah,” he said.

  Smoke was now starting to emanate from the operations center. Carter knew he had to get this tree down, had to keep the aid station from going up in flames. The pine tree was tall, and he would have to angle the different cuts carefully to make sure it fell parallel to the Bastards’ barracks and not on top of the aid station. Carter had earlier lost his protective eyewear, and the blaze was throwing embers onto the back of his neck. That didn’t help his concentration.

  But he made contact, he made his cuts, and the pine tree started slowly to topple. Cool, Carter thought, taking a few steps back.

  Then the tree began spinning.

  Waitaminute, he thought. This never happens….

  The tree fell in the wrong direction, landing on the tactical operations center.

  “Oh, shit!” Carter yelled. “Oh shit, oh shit!”

  The roof of the operations center fell in, and the tree went with it, stopping the fire’s path to the aid station but redirecting the flames downward. Carter wondered whether the fire in the operations center might not have caused an updraft, but regardless, troops started cheering: a disaster had been avoided because the tree was no longer a threat to the aid station. Carter himself felt a little sheepish. I can’t believe they’re cheering, he thought. I totally messed that up.

  Carter climbed onto the tree with the chainsaw to clear some limbs that were blocking the walkway between the operations center and the Red Platoon barracks—potentially impeding a soldier’s path to the aid station. “You’re doing a good job, Carter,” Hill told him. “But you’re the most exposed person. You need to get down.”

  “I’m almost done,” Carter said. “Just a sec.”

  “Get the fuck down!” Hill said. The incoming wasn’t as bad as it had been, but it was still bad. This was no time for them to lower their guard.

  The two Apaches had made it back to Forward Operating Base Bostick, but they were seriously damaged. Two other Apaches sent to Camp Keating returned soon afterward with similar battle scars. One of the birds had to execute an emergency landing. None of this boded well for further missions.

  While the helicopters were being fixed up, Lieutenant Colonel Brown worked on a plan to air-assault a 150-man quick reaction force to Observation Post Fritsche, from which they would move down the mountain to help the men at Camp Keating. Here, too, there were complications. On September 10, First Lieutenant Tyler Parten, leader of the unit at Bostick that Brown would normally have been able to use as a QRF, had been killed in an ambush. Two other squad leaders had been badly wounded. As a result, it was decided that soldiers from the 1-32 Infantry Battalion would instead serve as the QRF. Two Black Hawks were launched to pick up those troops from bases in Kunar Province.

  Three years before, Combat Outpost Keating had been established in part to help out the 1-32 Infantry, by stemming the flow of weapons from Pakistan to insurgents fighting 1-32 troops in the Pech Valley and other locations. Now the 1-32 Infantry was being called to return the favor, to save their brothers in arms at the same outpost.

  As the troops prepared for this air assault, the sky filled with dark clouds bringing heavy rain, thunder, and lightning. The thunderstorm traveled through the Landay-Sin Valley, clinging to mountaintops and dumping water below. An MQ-1 Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle used for reconnaissance by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA, was dispatched to Kamdesh to conduct surveillance of the battles at Keating and Fritsche, but the wind and weather iced its wings and caused it to veer into the side of a mountain. It quickly became obvious that the bad weather was going to severely inhibit the QRF’s ability to fly into the valley.

  Back at the aid station, Cordova kept transfusing Mace with A-positive blood. After Floyd’s came Hobbs’s, then Cordova’s, Bundermann’s, and Stone’s. As he was in the process of draining the fifth and final bag from the kit, Cordova was informed that a medevac was en route. He put a blanket and an oxygen mask on Mace and strapped him down. The young specialist was going to pull through. He was talking, breathing. Amid the horror of the day, at least they could be confident of one small victory.

  Outside the aid station, Hill was focused on the stories that hadn’t ended well. “We have fallen heroes,” he said. “I need volunteers.” It didn’t matter that they were still encircled by what seemed to be hundreds of attackers intent on adding to the body count; this was what American soldiers did for one another: they left no one behind.

  Hill and Bundermann made a plan involving two teams that would bound toward LRAS-2 and then up to the mortar pit. They’d escort Breeding, Rodriguez, and Barroga back to the operations center, carrying Thomson with them, and then the unit would be consolidated. Hill knew that some of the troops huddling at the Café were probably comparatively well rested, having worked solely on communications since early in the morning; they might even be eager to help in the field. And so they were: among the volunteers were Specialist Damien Grissette, who was usually in charge of water purification, and radioman Kellan Kahn.

  Romesha looked up to see Hill and his men running toward him in the shura building; he didn’t think this was part of the retrieval plan, but there was no time to argue about it. Romesha and his team bounded to the general area where Gallegos, Hardt, and Martin had last been seen, near LRAS-2. Sergeant Armando Avalos and Hill provided cover fire.

  Rasmussen went around the laundry trailer. Underneath it was Martin, dead. It looked as if he’d tried to patch up some of his leg wounds and then low-crawl away from the enemy. He must have been spotted, because he’d been shot twice in the back of his head, at extremely close range.

  Avalos and Kahn grabbed Martin, hauled him out, and dragged his body about seventy yards toward the shura building. Grissette met them on the way. “I got him,” he said. He couldn’t believe it. Just a few hours before, he and Martin had been running ammo around the camp. Then Martin was missing. And now, the ugly reality. Grissette began dragging his friend’s corpse to the shura building. He felt it was the least he could do. He needed to do it. Once he’d made it there, Grissette broke down. “Man,” he said, crying, “not my boy!”

  “Stay with me, now,” Hill told him.

  “I’m good,” Grissette said, composing himself. “I’m good.”

  Rasmussen was standing near the latrines when suddenly a Nuristani came out of one of the stalls; he was on the verge of shooting the man when he realized it was Ron Jeremy, the interpreter who hours before had warned the Americans of the attack. Given all the adrenaline and rage he was feeling, Rasmussen was surprised he hadn’t just shot him on sight.

  “Is anyone else in there with you?” he yelled.

  “No,” said the Afghan. Rasmussen didn’t believe him, so he went in to check as Ron Jeremy ran of
f awkwardly, his legs stiff from hours of hiding from the enemy in the latrines, his knees pulled up to his chest.

  Romesha spotted Gallegos’s body from a distance as he ran to the LRAS-2 Humvee. Nearby, an insurgent lay on the ground; Rasmussen and James Stanley put more bullets into him, just to be safe. Then Romesha radioed to the others to take Gallegos to the aid station—he might still be alive, he thought. A few men would be needed for the task, since Gallegos was a big guy.

  Armando Avalos was the first one on the scene. Gallegos was facedown on a rock with his hand under his head, as if he were taking a nap and using his forearm as a pillow. His body was wedged into a ditch that was covered by rocks and weeds. At first, Avalos thought he was still alive, but when he shook him, his body was limp and vacant. Gallegos’s head fell to the side; his eyes were still open. Avalos was so shocked by the sight that he was all but oblivious to the RPGs exploding near him and the machine-gun fire that had picked up ever since he put himself out in the open.

  After a second, he snapped to and hunkered down under the rocks in the ditch, in which he now realized Gallegos’s leg was stuck. He used the sergeant’s body as a roof, a shield. Two minutes later, he picked his way out of the ditch and ran to the latrines.

  “Gallegos is stuck,” Avalos explained to Romesha. “We’ll need to lift him up to get him out.”

  With Hill, Romesha, and Dulaney providing cover, Kahn, Avalos, and Grissette ran to Gallegos and under fire lifted him toward the sky to release his leg from the ditch. Then they dragged him toward the shura building. Hill had a gear cutter—a small, sage-colored tool containing a razor blade—that he and Romesha used to slice off Gallegos’s gear and make him lighter to carry. Hill, Avalos, Grissette, and Kahn then placed their friend on a stretcher and bore him to the aid station. There, they put him in a body bag.

  “Don’t seal that body bag,” Courville told Hill. “We need Cordova to pronounce him dead.”

  “Why the fuck do we need a captain to pronounce him dead?” Hill asked. “He’s fucking dead.”

  He stormed off to go get Martin’s body and bring it to the aid station as well.

  It was 6:40 p.m. The situation report was grim: eleven Americans wounded, six killed.

  Kevin Thomson.

  Joshua Kirk.

  Michael Scusa.

  Chris Griffin.

  Vernon Martin.

  Justin Gallegos.

  All gone.

  And Joshua Hardt was missing. As was Larson, too, now.

  Where had Larson gone? Romesha wondered. He was supposed to link up with them in their bounding mission to LRAS-2, but after that plan fell apart, he vanished. A mystery.

  At Camp Keating, Larson had been mentoring Hardt, and in something of a manic sprint, he was now frantically running around the camp looking for his protégé. Larson’s body armor was weighing him down, so he took all his gear off. It wasn’t necessarily the wisest move, but he didn’t care—he thought speed was more important at this point than the added protection.

  In talking with Romesha, he’d learned that Hardt’s last transmission had been from one of the stand-to trucks. Larson tried to see the world as Hardt had seen it at that moment: If I were trying to get back to the shura building from that truck, what route would I take? he asked himself.

  Larson figured that he and Hardt, thinking a lot alike, would’ve sought the same escape. He explored a number of paths, running and running, from the shura building to the showers to the giant rock and back around to the shura building. He knew he was being reckless, but he didn’t care; he didn’t want the Taliban to get his friend. But he was coming up empty.

  CHAPTER 37

  The Long Walk Down

  By now, Romesha and his guys had secured both the entrance to the outpost and the northwest of the camp, while Hill and his group controlled the north, northeast, east, and south. They were spread thin, but they felt confident that they could hold down those pieces of land. The one sector they did not yet have control of was the southwestern corner of the camp, near the mortar pit. The space was too open, and the incoming enemy fire too intense, for Romesha and Red Platoon to make it there. “You’ve done enough,” Breeding told Romesha on the radio. “We’ll see you later.”

  “What do you think the odds are that Hardt was taken off the COP by the enemy?” Bundermann asked Romesha, also on the radio.

  “I’m eighty percent sure his body is not on the COP,” Romesha said.

  Bundermann told others in the operations center to start distributing night-vision goggles and thermal sights. They needed to prepare for nightfall.

  The members of the quick reaction force had only the sketchiest idea of where they were headed and what they would be facing when they got there. The intelligence officer at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Major Jack Kilbride, had pulled together a very detailed report to be passed on to the QRF, but because the ad hoc force was assembled so hastily, the information didn’t manage to filter down to them before they were picked up. They’d flown in from Kunar Province, two rifle platoons from the 1-32 Infantry, led by Lieutenants Jake Miraldi and Jake Kerr. The commander of the rescue effort for Combat Outpost Keating was Captain Justin Sax, whose troops had been in nearby Barg-e-Matal for most of the previous two months. Miraldi’s platoon had been the initial force to retake Barg-e-Matal after it was overrun; once they’d cleared the area, they were counterattacked and very nearly pushed out of the village by the enemy.

  That morning, at Combat Outpost Joyce in Kunar Province, Sax and the other officers had received what they considered to be a rather “skimpy” situational update—skimpy in the sense that it was apparent that no one in charge had any real idea of what was going on. Sax and Miraldi agreed that they could not even begin to plan a rescue based on the little information they had received.

  By 9:30 a.m., Sax and Miraldi were at Forward Operating Base Bostick, meeting with Brown, Portis, and other members of the leadership of 3-61 Cav. They were told that the men at Camp Keating had been forced into three concrete buildings in the center of the outpost, much of the rest of which was on fire. Enemy positions were constantly being identified and reported, and as they were plotted on the map in the Bostick operations center, Miraldi was taken aback: they were everywhere. Miraldi knew this would be a tough mission—and for some, very likely a final one: from what he now knew, he was sure he and Sax would lose men.

  The original plan had been to drop Portis, Salentine, Birchfield, and the QRF at the “link-up point” midway between Observation Post Fritsche and Combat Outpost Keating, nearest to the southern side of the camp, which would’ve been their fastest approach; but once it was confirmed that the proposed LZ had an active enemy presence, that seemed a foolhardy idea. An alternative would be to land the bird north of the outpost, near the Putting Green. They could clear that area, establish it as a firebase, move on to capture the Afghan National Police building, parts of Urmul, and the entry control point, and then, finally, retake the camp.

  But when the Apache pilots came in, they poured cold water over that plan. The insurgents at the Putting Green and on the northern side of the river in general were just too strong, their forces too deadly; the Black Hawks taking the QRF troops to the area would be at significant risk of being shot down. Portis suggested that the Black Hawks instead fly as many of the QRF troops as possible to Observation Post Fritsche. Bad weather was coming in; soon their options might be limited to none. Sax told everyone that he was “going to fly in, get on the ground, assess the situation, talk to the guys on the ground, and we’ll do a deliberate clearing on the way down to Keating, since we’ll probably have contact.” Portis, Salentine, and Birchfield would join him.

  Because the Black Hawks had to fly there in a roundabout way to avoid the insurgents’ powerful antiaircraft weapons, it took them forty-five minutes to get to the landing zone at Observation Post Fritsche. They flew so high they hit storm clouds and were drenched by a combination of snow and freezing rain—an ominou
s sign with terrible ramifications, as Sax well knew. Shit, this weather’s coming in, he thought. We’re not going to be able to get the next lift in. That would mean the QRF might have only thirty-five troops. They’d been told they’d need at least one more platoon’s worth of guys, up to an additional forty soldiers, to go down the mountain. There went that idea.

  They landed safely. The enemy fired a couple of mortar rounds at them, but they missed, and for the most part, the fighting at Observation Post Fritsche had died down.

  The troops at the observation post all looked terrified.

  The word from Forward Operating Base Bostick was, indeed, that the next flight wouldn’t be coming in for some time, given the rough weather. Sax preferred to wait until all the men from 1-32 Infantry arrived, but Portis didn’t want to hesitate another second before heading down the hill. They were receiving reports that some soldiers from Black Knight Troop were still getting hit, and others were looking for bodies. “We have enough guys,” Portis insisted. “We need to get down there.”

  “Come on, come on, come on,” Birchfield echoed, “let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

  Portis and Sax finally agreed that if the rest of Sax’s men didn’t get there by 2:00 p.m., they would move out without them. It was just before noon.

  “I need the best scout to lead us down,” Sax told Portis. “Who’s conducted this mission before?” Portis recommended Salentine and Birchfield. Portis also made sure that Stickney, the head mortarman at Observation Post Fritsche, had enough ammo to support the QRF, and Bellamy worked on grid coordinates with the team as well, just in case they ended up needing mortars during their hike down.

  “We’re not going to take any trails down,” Birchfield said. “They’ve been watching us.” He was certain that every known path was either booby-trapped or ready for an ambush. “We’ll be breaking bush,” he said, meaning they would be blazing their own trail.