In between gambits like these, he’d brag to the rest of the platoon about the “awesome” results he was getting with ExtenZe, a penis-enlargement supplement that he’d discovered on the Internet. Then he’d earnestly suggest that some of the other guys might want to think about giving it a try because it was clear that they needed help in that department even more than he did.
Pulling crap like this could be dangerous, especially when it was directed at no-nonsense dudes like Larson, Kirk, and Gallegos. But whenever one of those guys was provoked to the point where he was ready to stick Mace’s head down a toilet, he was often forced to hold off because he found himself laughing too hard.
Which, of course, encouraged Mace even more.
Koppes had some of that same energy going for him, and this was probably a big part of why he and Mace quickly became inseparable. But the main thing that welded them together, I think, had more to do with Mace’s deepest and most appealing attribute, which was his willingness to go to any length in order to support a friend.
When Mace realized that Koppes was constitutionally incapable of waking up and getting himself out of bed each morning at five thirty for first formation and physical training, he developed a routine that involved coming down the hallway of their barracks and pounding on the door until Koppes opened up. Then Mace would stand there smoking a cigarette until Koppes got dressed and was ready to go.
He did that every morning without fail.
Later that spring, Koppes was brutally dumped by a woman he’d been dating. One night, when he tried to call the woman with the aim of begging her to get back together, Mace interrupted the call with a time-out sign.
“I know how upset you are,” he said gently. “Give me the phone and I’ll talk to her for you.”
“LISTEN, BITCH,” screamed Mace when Koppes handed him the phone, “STAY THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY FRIEND!”
Shortly after that incident, Koppes tore some ligaments in his ankle during a platoon-on-platoon basketball game. Mace immediately seized on this as opportunity to recruit a replacement girlfriend for Koppes by dragging him off to a party, where Mace started feeding every available woman a different lie about Koppes’s injury.
“Hey, would you mind going over and saying hi to my buddy?” he’d ask, pointing to Koppes. “He just got back from Afghanistan, where he got nailed by an IED, and he could really use some support.”
If that didn’t pan out, he’d move on to another woman.
“So, yeah: my friend over there hurt his ankle doing some training that involved jumping out of helicopters at night,” he’d say. “He’s kinda bummed out because he’s an awesome dancer, but maybe you could just go talk to him for a minute?”
By the end of the summer, Mace was orchestrating a nonstop campaign to either find Koppes a permanent girlfriend or, barring that, ensure that his friend got laid as often as possible before we deployed. In pursuit of these twin goals, they spent most of their free time that autumn running around Colorado Springs in mullet wigs, which they were convinced—despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary—made them irresistible to the women they were chasing.
Mace’s loyalty and generosity to Koppes weren’t especially unusual in the army, where friendships often take on an intensity that can be difficult to find in the civilian world. But what made Mace so singular was that his bond with Koppes didn’t prevent him from reaching out and forging new connections with other incoming recruits—including guys whom no one else would even talk to, like Jonesie.
• • •
WHEN CHRIS JONES was nine years old, his dad bought a small farm in the southwestern part of Virginia, right next to the Tennessee border, where he intended to make a go of raising chickens until Tyson backed out of a contract that they’d drawn up with the old man, leaving the family high and dry. From that point on, Jones had been not just poor, but dirt-poor. By the time he graduated from high school, joining the army looked like not only his best option but the only one.
After completing basic training at Fort Benning, he got transferred out of infantry in February of 2009 and was sent out to Fort Carson, where he was ordered to join our cavalry brigade, a move that left him totally mystified.
“Hey, what the fuck is cavalry?” he asked, turning in confusion to the only other guy from Benning who had been dispatched to Carson with him.
The answer he got was succinct and accurate:
“Cav basically does the same thing that we did in infantry,” came the reply. “They just do it with less fucking people.”
Well, all right, Jones muttered to himself. This keeps getting better and better.
Chris Jones
Thanks to his infantry background, none of us would even look at Jones when he got to Red Platoon—except, of course, Mace. On Jones’s very first day there, Mace bought a Monster energy drink and gave it to Jones, a gesture that was intended to welcome him to the platoon and make him feel a little bit at home. Then, to let him know that the rest of what followed wasn’t going to be easy, he hauled off and punched Jones directly in the balls.
That was a pretty decent preview of what awaited him.
During his second week, Jones showed up late for morning formation, and to make matters even worse, he arrived wearing a black fleece that had just been issued to him, but that was a different kind of black fleece—a jacket rather than a pullover—from what the rest of us were wearing.
Needless to say, both infractions caught the attention of Kirk.
“Jones,” barked Kirk, shaking his head in disgust, “you show up fucking fifteen minutes late, and when you get here, you have the fucking wrong clothes on.” Then Kirk stepped outside.
This ain’t gonna be good, Jones thought to himself.
When Kirk returned, he was carrying a long yellow stick. The stick was heavy, and at the very top Kirk had affixed a sign emblazoned with the words LATE STICK.
“See this stick?” said Kirk, handing the thing to Jones. “From now on, you will carry this with you everywhere you go.”
With that, we all headed off on a fifteen-mile training run.
For the next week, Jones obediently hauled the late stick with him no matter where he went: to PT, to the chow hall, to the bathroom. In addition to being exhausting, it also made him look ridiculous. Several times a day, some bemused NCO or officer would stop him and ask, “Why you got that stick, soldier?”
“This is my late stick, sir!” Jones would declare, reciting what he’d been told to say by Kirk while standing stiffly at attention. “I carry this stick with me everywhere I go!”
At the end of the week, Kirk came into Jones’s room, took the stick away, and mumbled something about how Jones hadn’t been a bitch or whined about his punishment. It wasn’t exactly a thank-you, but it was Kirk’s way of letting Jones know that he was doing okay.
From then on, Jones was one of us.
Kirk may or may not have known it at the time, and even if he did it’s hard to imagine that he would have cared, but this was exactly the right way to handle a guy like Jones. It earned Kirk a level of loyalty from Jones that was as fierce and pure as Tennessee moonshine. A loyalty that was matched only by Jones’s affection for Mace—the one guy in the platoon who had deigned to speak to him back when nobody else could give a fuck.
Although Koppes, Mace, and Jones weren’t necessarily cut from the same mold as the platoon’s hard men, they added something important to the mix, starting with the fact that all three of them were good dudes and that they always made the rest of us laugh. Sure, they often poured more effort into thinking about what their next prank was going to be than on doing their jobs. But they were eager to succeed. They would do anything they were ordered to do in a heartbeat. And what mattered even more, they would do what they were told with a cheerfulness that made it clear they would not allow their spirits to be broken by the sort of drudgery that is p
art of life at the bottom of the enlisted ranks.
In addition to all of that, they were incredibly earnest and genuine, a quality that came through in their eagerness to learn. What they absolutely loved more than anything else was when their team leaders—guys like Larson, Gallegos, and Kirk, who were only a couple of years older than them but who wielded heavy authority because of their previous combat experience—would sit them down and teach them things they would need to know when we got overseas, like how to clean a .240 machine gun so that it wouldn’t jam, or how to break down a Mark 19 grenade launcher.
With proper mentoring and discipline, it was clear to me and the rest of the NCOs that these three young guys had the potential to become excellent soldiers.
Plus, we liked them enormously—which helped buttress our sense of unity as the last members of our team showed up.
• • •
JOSH HARDT was a bit of an outsider from the get-go. After spending 2007 with a completely different infantry division in Iraq, where he’d formed some tight connections with the guys in his platoon, he was sent to Fort Carson and ordered to join Black Knight. In addition to missing his buddies from his old unit, he was also newly married, which meant that he tended to spend most of his downtime with his wife. But even so, we snatched him up at the first opportunity because we liked what we saw.
In the same way that Kirk meshed well with Gallegos, we saw Hardt as a ferociously aggressive-minded sergeant with the potential to form an effective partnership with Larson. Hardt had a fierce work ethic, which would help Larson reinforce the leadership of the platoon’s Alpha section. Also, he was something of a hotshot when it came to sports—particularly football. Finally, Bundermann was encouraged by the fact that Hardt chewed tobacco, which meant that he would always have someone to bum some Copenhagen off of (although Bundermann would eventually discover, to his intense annoyance, that most of the bumming went in the other direction).
Josh Hardt
In all of these ways, Hardt offered a striking contrast to the guy who showed up shortly after him: a man who, perhaps more than anyone else, would eventually come to represent the soul of Red Platoon because he embodied so many different aspects of each of us—which is to say, both our best and our worst qualities—while combining those elements together in a manner that was totally original.
When Thom Rasmussen was transferred to us in February, he’d just broken his wrist after plunging into a bar fight (something that happened quite frequently), and then later that same evening and outside the same bar, getting jumped by a bunch of Hispanic dudes, one of whom had beat him into the street with an expandable metal baton known as an asp. To avoid punishment, Rasmussen had concocted an elaborate story that involved getting drunk and punching out a window. From the way he successfully sold that lie to the sergeant major (who was normally nobody’s fool), it was evident that Rasmussen possessed a gift for projecting a rock-solid conviction that the course he’d chosen would yield exactly the result he was looking for, while at the same time making it clear that if things went totally south, he truly didn’t give a fuck—an attitude that would later make him someone in whom I had no hesitation about placing my trust in combat.
Raz, as we came to call him, was a hulking six-foot-five Minnesotan who had arms that looked like they were milled from bitternut hickory trunks, and whose no-bullshit forthrightness could be as rough as tree bark. If you asked him how he got into the army, he’d look you straight in the face and declare:
“I joined up because I never graduated from high school, was living in people’s basements, and used to be a fucking meth addict—that’s why.”
Because Raz was so huge, we initially assumed that he’d be really good at sports. As it turned out, he wasn’t—although he could be entertaining on the field, especially when he did something like borrow Mace’s mullet wig and wear it during softball games. But there was something about Raz that struck all of us as decent and cool, and perhaps that’s the reason why so many of the younger guys instantly took to him in a way that set up an interesting dynamic with Larson.
To those younger guys, Larson and Raz were like big brothers, but each in a different way. Larson was the stern older sibling who would show up in Koppes’s room on a Sunday night and drink fifteen beers while watching episodes of The Unit—thereby leading Koppes to assume that our physical training the next morning was going to be a cakewalk. Then he’d reappear at six a.m. and announce that even though we’d won our last football game against Blue Platoon, we hadn’t won by enough points, so everyone was going to do a twenty-mile warm-up run and spend the rest of the morning doing uphill wind sprints until at least half of us puked.
Larson was also a no-nonsense big brother in the sense that he was always teaching us stuff. Often, he’d come in the barracks and look around to see if he could spot somebody who wasn’t doing anything.
Thom Rasmussen
“Grab that .240 and meet me out back,” he’d say. Next thing that guy would know, he’d be in the middle of a three-hour machine-gun tutorial.
Raz, on the other hand, was the let’s-smooth-things-over big brother. If, say, you’d been dumped by your girlfriend—or if you’d just gotten done puking after Larson had smoked the entire platoon—Raz was the guy who would come up and give you a bear hug just to make you feel better. He was also the guy you would call when you wanted to get drunk, as well as the guy you called when you were trying to extract yourself from trouble after having gotten drunk. And he was the guy you’d turn to for the sort of favor that you’d never ask Larson for—like, say a ride to the airport when you were heading home on Thanksgiving—even though you knew that Raz might pick you up two hours late because he was, of course, drunk.
The bottom line was that Raz liked to drink almost as much as he liked to fight, but what he enjoyed even more than both of those things combined was being on good terms with almost everybody in the platoon. In the context of his tumultuous upbringing and the lost years that had preceded his time in the army, Red Platoon may have been the closest he’d ever come to having something that felt like a home and a family.
• • •
THROUGHOUT THE LATE WINTER of 2008, as the last of our new arrivals trickled in and everyone slowly found his place, the platoon started to gel. To be sure, there were a few weak links in our chain. Three of our recruits were too lazy to whip themselves into shape and constantly dragged their feet on the ruck marching that we were doing in the mountains outside of Colorado Springs. Another newcomer, a guy by the name of Josh Dannelley, developed a bad habit of dumping out the contents of his med pouch—the bandages and drugs that your buddies would use to save your life if you got hit—and filling the thing up with cheese and crackers so that he’d have something to munch on while he was pulling guard duty. And Ryan Willson was such a mess—not just on a symbolic level, but also literally—that one afternoon Kirk ordered him to pack up the entire contents of his barracks room, set everything up outside, and then stand there for several hours holding a poster that demonstrated how a clean and properly organized room should look.
Those examples may seem innocuous, but they illustrate a key point. Civilians often harbor the impression that a platoon consists of a “band of brothers,” but that’s almost never the case. Any time that you throw nineteen or twenty young men together, not all of them are going get along. And in the army, that tendency is further torqued by the fact that not everyone is a badass. The upshot is that you tend to wind up with a tight nucleus of insiders who like and trust one another, orbited by a scattered cluster of loners who never seem to fit in.
Nevertheless, by the following spring, I was starting to believe that we had built up a crack unit, a platoon that was cohesive and capable enough to qualify as stacked.
Across the spectrum and as a team, we had an extremely aggressive mind-set, whether it was playing football or going out and running a patrol. We didn’t
wait on anything, ever. We weren’t afraid to pull the trigger on any aspect of life, and we were unconcerned with the consequences, both good and bad, of going with what we thought was the right call.
Needless to say, those qualities don’t always work well in normal life. But Bundermann was nevertheless pleased with what he was seeing because on the battlefield, this type of mind-set is essential. What’s more, as we prepared to deploy overseas, it seemed like there was something about us that made us stand apart. And oddly enough, part of the proof—at least in my view—lay in our reluctance to fully participate in the kind of swagger that the army tends to foster at the platoon level, where virtually every unit is completely convinced that it’s God’s gift to the US military.
By this point, the guys in White Platoon, whose barracks were right next door to ours, had adopted “Warlords” as their call sign. Meanwhile, the guys over in Blue, one building down, were insisting on being referred to as the “Bastards.” Under different circumstances, we might have selected a comparable handle for ourselves. But somehow that didn’t strike us as classy.
We preferred to keep things simple. So instead of coming up with a jazzy moniker to trumpet what total badasses we were, we decided that we’d let our actions speak for us. We were just Red, and nothing more. But if you wanted something done, regardless of how messy or unpleasant it might be, all you needed to do was to call us up, and it would get handled.
If that offers a decent summary of how we rolled, it shouldn’t be taken to mean that we were always happy with our lot—a fact that is perhaps best illustrated by Kirk’s response when we finally got the news about where, exactly, we were headed in Afghanistan.
He was familiar with the spot, having been posted close enough not only to hear the rumors but also to talk directly to guys who had been there and seen it firsthand.
Red Platoon Page 5
