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To my fallen comrades and their families, and to all of the soldiers of 3-61 who served with us in Afghanistan
Of comfort no man speak:
Let’s talk of graves, of worms, and epitaphs
—Shakespeare, Richard II
RED PLATOON
1st Platoon
B Troop 3-61 Cavalry,
4th Brigade Combat Team,
4th Infantry Division
Alpha Section
Bravo Section
1st Lt. Andrew Bundermann
Sgt. 1st Cl. Frank Guerrero
Staff Sgt. Clinton Romesha
Staff Sgt. James Stanley
Sgt. Joshua Hardt
Sgt. Justin Gallegos
Sgt. Bradley Larson
Sgt. Joshua Kirk
Spc. Nicholas Davidson
Spc. Kyle Knight
Spc. Justin Gregory
Spc. Stephan Mace
Spc. Zachary Koppes
Spc. Thomas Rasmussen
Spc. Timothy Kuegler
Spc. Ryan Willson
Pfc. Josh Dannelley
Pfc. Christopher Jones
Attachments
Sgt. Armando Avalos Jr., forward observer
Spc. Allen Cutcher, medic
BLACK KNIGHT TROOP
COP KEATING
HQ Platoon
Cpt. Stoney Portis
1st Sgt. Ron Burton
Red Platoon
White Platoon
Blue Platoon
1st Lt. Andrew Bundermann
1st Lt. Jordan Bellamy
1st Lt. Ben Salentine
Sgt. 1st Cl. Frank Guerrero
Sgt. 1st Cl. Jeff Jacops
Sgt. 1st Cl. Jonathan Hill
INTERNATIONAL SECURITY ASSISTANCE FORCE (ISAF)
AFGHANISTAN
May–October 2009
Bagram Airfield, Kabul
Gen. Stanley McChrystal, Commander, ISAF
Gen. David McKiernan, Commander, ISAF
FOB Fenty, Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar Province
Col. Randy George, Commander, 4th Brigade Combat Team
FOB Bostick, Kunar Province
Lt. Col. Robert Brown, Squadron Commander, 3-61 Cavalry
COP Keating, Nuristan Province
Cpt. Melvin Porter, Commander (outgoing), Black Knight Troop
Cpt. Stoney Portis, Commander (incoming), Black Knight Troop
Lt. Robert Hull, Executive Officer, Black Knight Troop
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Map
INTRODUCTION
It Doesn’t Get Better
PART I The Road to Nuristan
CHAPTER ONE
Loss
CHAPTER TWO
Stacked
CHAPTER THREE
Keating
CHAPTER FOUR
Inside the Fishbowl
CHAPTER FIVE
Everybody Dies
PART II Going Cyclic
CHAPTER SIX
“Let’s Go Kill Some People”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Heavy Contact
CHAPTER EIGHT
Combat Kirk
CHAPTER NINE
Luck
CHAPTER TEN
Tunnel Vision
PART III Overrun
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The Only Gun Left in the Fight
CHAPTER TWELVE
“Charlie in the Wire”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Alamo Position
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Light ’Em Up
PART IV Taking the Bitch Back
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Launch Out
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Not Gonna Make It
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Ox and Finch
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Alive!
CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Bone
PART V Saving Stephan Mace
CHAPTER TWENTY
“Go Get It Done”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mustering the Dead
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Conflagration
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Farewell to Keating
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Trailing Fires
Epilogue
In Memoriam
Notes on Sources
Acknowledgments
About the Author
INTRODUCTION
It Doesn’t Get Better
5:45 a.m., Red Platoon barracks
Combat Outpost Keating
Nuristan Province, Afghanistan
ZACH KOPPES lay in his bunk, half-awake with an ear tuned to the radio in the next hooch, a few feet down the hallway. In the predawn darkness, he was anticipating “the call,” the deeply unwelcome summons that usually arrived just a few minutes before he was slated to pull early-morning guard duty.
Sure enough, like clockwork, there it was:
“Hey, uh . . . could somebody tell my relief to get on out here?” came the static-charged voice over the combat network. “I really need to take a shit.”
Koppes sighed.
Every morning, it was the same deal. Josh Hardt, one of Red Platoon’s four team leaders—and therefore a man who outranked Koppe
s by a full grade and nearly five years of service—could never quite make it to the end of his early-morning shift without needing to ease the volcanic surge in his bowels. Hence the request, which was really more of an order, for whoever was relieving him to get up early and hoof it out to the armored Humvee known as LRAS1 on the eastern side of the outpost so that Hardt could make a dash for the latrines, which lay a hundred yards to the west.
Somehow, it seemed to Koppes, it was invariably him and never anyone else who was on the receiving end of that call. But as he reminded himself while he levered out of his bunk and threw on his kit, this day was different for a number of important reasons, one of which was lying right there on the bed beside him.
When he finished with his gear, he reached over and grabbed the newly arrived magazine that he was planning to read from the turret of the Humvee, rolled it up as tightly as possible, and prepared to shove the thing into a place where nobody would spot it.
Needless to say, a dude couldn’t just cruise out to the guard post swinging a magazine in his fist. That was the kind of infraction that would win you a full-on ass-chewing from our first sergeant, Ron Burton, who was a raging stickler when it came to even the smallest rules. But Koppes had a little hidey-hole, which he called his “go-to zone,” in his body armor, the ceramic plates we wore to protect our necks and torsos.
We hated those plates for their weight and for how hot they were, even though they had a couple of advantages—the chief one being their ability to prevent an AK-47 bullet from turning the contents of your chest into wet dog food. But in addition to that, right there in the front of the armor was a small pocket of dead space into which, Koppes had discovered, you could stuff a magazine to see you through to the end of your guard-duty shift.
This system had worked well enough that during our five months in-country, Koppes had taken to semiregularly bringing old Playboys with him when he went out to the Humvee. His buddy Chris Jones had a respectable stash that his older brother had been sending him in care packages. They featured women like Carmen Electra and Bo Derek and Madonna, which Jones and some of the other lower-ranking enlisted guys, after much discussion, had agreed offered up some compelling evidence that centerfold chicks from the unimaginably distant era of the 1980s were actually kind of hot.
On the morning of October 3, though, Koppes had something even better than vintage soft-core porn riding under his armor. The previous afternoon one of the Chinooks had made a supply drop-off, and by some miracle, we’d actually gotten our mail. Included was an almost-current issue of SportsPro with Peyton Manning on the cover, which offered a comprehensive rundown of the top one hundred NFL players for the 2009 fall season.
True, we were nearly seven thousand miles from the nearest sports bar. And yes, we’d be stuck here long past the end of the play-offs and the Super Bowl. But Koppes knew, like the rest of us did, that when he was finally allowed to go home he might be making that trip inside a metal coffin draped with an American flag. So the prospect of paging through the player stats and the team rankings, and thereby permitting his mind to travel far beyond the black walls of the Hindu Kush, which framed our world and restricted our movements and offered a perfect vantage for our enemies to smoke us—the mere idea of making an imaginary trip like that, no matter how brief—was enough to put him in an exceptionally positive frame of mind. Which is why, as he jammed the magazine inside his vest and trundled out to the Humvee—a journey of no more than fifty steps—Koppes muttered a phrase that we all liked to invoke in such moments. A mantra whose succinctness and sagacity summed up the many double-bladed paradoxes that dominated the thoughts of every American soldier who found himself stuck inside the most remote, precarious, and tactically screwed combat outpost in all of Afghanistan.
It doesn’t get better.
• • •
UP IN THE RAFTERS of our platoon’s plywood barracks just three cubicles down from Koppes’s bunk, there was a plank on which one of the previous tenants, a soldier who was part of the unit that had been deployed here before we arrived, had scrawled a little message to himself, a reminder about how life worked in Afghanistan.
Me and the rest of the guys in Red liked what was written on that board so much that by the end of our first week on station, we had adopted the thing as our informal motto. It epitomized precisely how we felt about having been shoved up the wrong end of a country so absurdly remote, so rabidly inhospitable to our presence, that some of the generals and politicians who were responsible for having stuck us there were referring to the place as the dark side of the moon.
Those words were so cogent that whenever something went off the rails—whenever we learned, say, that we were heading into yet another week without any hot chow because the generator had taken another RPG hit, or that last month’s stateside mail still hadn’t been delivered because the Chinook pilots were refusing to risk the enemy’s guns for anything but the most critical supplies—whenever news arrived of the latest thing to go wrong, we’d give one another a little half-joking smile, cock an eyebrow, and repeat:
“It doesn’t get better.”
To us, that phrase nailed one of the essential truths, maybe even the essential truth, about being stuck at an outpost whose strategic and tactical vulnerabilities were so glaringly obvious to every soldier who had ever set foot in that place that the name itself—Keating—had become a kind of backhanded joke. A byword for the army’s peculiar flair for stacking the odds against itself in a way that was almost guaranteed to blow up in some spectacular fashion, and then refusing to walk away from the table.
We took Keating’s flaws in stride, of course, because as soldiers we had no business asking questions so far above our pay grade—much less harboring opinions about the bigger picture: why we were there, and what we were supposed to be accomplishing. Our main job had a stark and binary simplicity to it: keep one another alive, and keep the enemy on the other side of the wire. But every now and then, one of my guys would find himself unable to resist the urge to ponder the larger mission and to ask what in God’s name the point was of holding down a firebase that so flagrantly violated the most basic and timeless principles of warfare.
Typically enough, the sharpest and most defiant response to those queries would come from Josh Kirk, one of the other sergeants and probably the biggest badass in the entire platoon. Kirk had grown up on a remote homestead in rural Idaho not far from Ruby Ridge, and he never backed down from any kind of confrontation, no matter how big or how small it might be.
“You wanna know why we’re here?” he’d asked us one evening as he was peeling back the plastic wrapping on his chow ration—a veggie omelet MRE, which was everyone’s least favorite item on the menu, because it looked like a brick fashioned from compressed vomit.
“Our mission at Keating,” he declared, “is to turn these MREs into shit.”
The real beauty of It doesn’t get better, however, was that it had a two-sided quality that enabled it to work like a coin. On its face, the phrase not only expressed but somehow managed to celebrate what Kirk was getting at, which was that Keating’s awfulness was both magnified and underscored by its pointlessness and futility—and that to a man who was prepared to adopt the necessary frame of mind, being stuck in such a place could instill a perverse but ferocious kind of pride.
On the other hand, if you took that phrase and flipped it around in your mind, you’d see that it could mean something completely different, and that this new meaning hinged on the fierce sense of purpose that young men sometimes embrace—especially young men who are permitted to carry extremely heavy weaponry—when they find themselves drop-kicked into a situation that is totally and incurably fucked up.
The main reason why life wouldn’t get any better at Keating, of course, was that it was so irremediably impossible to begin with. But in one of those odd little twists—the kind of irony that only a group of guys who pull time in a frontline infan
try unit can truly appreciate—we were convinced that we would all look back on our tour there, assuming we managed to survive the damn thing, as one of the most memorable times of our lives.
It stood as a point of considerable irritation among my guys that in Red Platoon, First Sergeant Burton, the highest-ranking enlisted man in our troop at Keating, wasn’t willing to try to wrap his head around any of this. Burton, who was a big admirer of formal military protocols that tend to work in a stateside garrison but make absolutely no sense in a free-fire zone, decided that our little slogan was an expression of “poor morale.” So whenever he heard one of us repeating those words, he’d make a point of going up to that guy and telling him to shut the hell up.
Inside Red Platoon barracks
What Burton never understood, however, was that it was categorically impossible to lay down a decree like that in a place like Keating. By the end of our first week on station, the outpost had already implanted It doesn’t get better deep within us, down in the dark, fertile layers of the mind where words take root and then sprout into conviction and belief. Weeding it out of us would have been like trying to weed the Taliban from the slopes and ridgelines that ringed every side of the outpost. And that would have been like trying to yank up every thornbush and poisonous little flower that had anchored itself to the flanks of the Hindu Kush.
As far as we were concerned, Keating not only wouldn’t get better, it couldn’t get better, because we were already doing our damnedest to make it, by sheer force of will, into the best thing going.
That was something we all grooved on, and a good example of how it worked was exactly what Koppes was doing as he strolled out to the gun truck with his magazine to relieve Hardt.
• • •
THE ARMORED HUMVEE where Koppes was headed was one of five such vehicles positioned along the perimeter of the outpost that served as part of our primary defense. It featured a steel turret mounted directly above the cab that was armed with a Mark 19, which is basically a machine gun that shoots 40-mm grenades instead of bullets. When fully engaged, the gun is capable of pumping out almost three hundred rounds per minute, an astonishing level of firepower. In less than three minutes, a Mark 19 is supposed to be capable of reducing a two-story building to a pile of rubble.
Red Platoon Page 1
