The place was called Bargi Matal, and at the request of the Afghan government, which was afraid not only of losing its foothold in the area but also of losing the upcoming elections, the US Army started sending in troops and equipment. That drew off most of the air support we would need in order to dismantle Keating and evacuate, so our departure dates kept getting pushed further and further back.
Meanwhile, Colonel Blackmon juggled his four Chinooks to deliver what they needed to the American soldiers at Bargi Matal while simultaneously continuing to supply all the American outposts in the Kamdesh Valley. When he ran out of aircraft, he somehow managed to keep both missions going by borrowing extra helicopters from Bagram Airfield. By this point, however, yet another wrench had been thrown into the works.
Sometime after midnight on June 30, 2009, a young American soldier from Hailey, Idaho, named Robert “Bowe” Bergdahl slipped off the remote outpost called Mest Malak in Paktika Province on the border with Pakistan. Bergdahl left behind his body armor, weapons, and a note saying he had become disillusioned with the army and was leaving to start a new life. Several hours later, when he was discovered to be missing, soldiers began a frantic search using drones, helicopters, and tracking dogs.
When word arrived that Bergdahl had been seized by the Taliban and that his captors were going to try to move him to Pakistan, orders came down for a full-court press to find and recover the missing American. The mission went to Task Force Attack, an aviation unit stationed at Salerno, a forward operating base in the southeastern part of Afghanistan. Throughout July and August, Attack was banging four and five targets a night, running down intel leads on where Bergdahl might be in the hopes of pulling him out. And that effort sucked up every last Chinook and Apache that Blackmon had borrowed from Bagram.
For me and the rest of Black Knight Troop, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back. The army simply didn’t have the resources to do more than handle Bargi Matal and Bergdahl, so Colonel George’s hope of shutting down our outpost and enabling us to get out of Keating was put on ice.
For the time being, we were stuck.
One could say that this boiled down to a cause-and-effect chain of lousy ideas, poor decisions, and flawed thinking. When it’s laid out that way, the logic of this argument seems to hold water. But most soldiers who have experienced combat understand that armchair quarterbacking is shallow and often misguided. It’s easy to second-guess decisions based on their ramifications, and then to assign blame. Considerably harder is accepting that in combat, things can and will often go wrong not because of bad decisions, but despite even the best decisions. That is the nature of war.
Of course, none of this changes the fact that, for those of us at Keating, things were about to truly go to hell.
• • •
TOWARD THE END of the summer the heat began to abate, which was a welcome change for everyone. As the weather cooled off, a few of the guys in the platoon got on Amazon and started ordering up hoodies. Pretty soon, everybody had one. The logo on the one that Koppes selected was Zoo York, the old-school skateboard-inspired brand that he imagined imbued him with a gritty, urban hip-hop vibe. Most of the other guys opted for their favorite colleges. When we’d get back from a patrol, we’d throw on our hoodies and settle in for another round on the Xbox. As evidenced by the smiles in the selfies we took, morale seemed to be improving.
In some ways, this was an outward manifestation of an inward trend. Despite the difficulties and challenges, we were finally hitting the point in the deployment where we felt marginally comfortable. Partly, this was because we now had a routine firmly in place. But the larger reason was that we were really starting to gel as a platoon in the field. Thanks to the patrols and the gym, we were all in the best shape of our lives. With a few exceptions, most of us liked one another and got along. Finally, we’d honed an impressive skill set, at both the individual and the collective levels, which enabled us to function together like a smooth, well-oiled machine.
If we had a major problem at this point—aside from our lingering security worries—it was keeping ourselves occupied. We were so bored when we were off duty that we were running out of things to say to one another. One afternoon, mostly to avoid just sitting around in silence, we got into an argument about waterboarding, which had been authorized as a legitimate interrogation technique by the Bush administration during our stints in Iraq, but was now off-limits. Was it torture or not? we wondered. To settle the matter, we decided to try it on four of our own guys. While I poured the water, one of the other sergeants held a shirt over their faces. No one lasted past four seconds except for Koppes, who made it to eight. (After it was over, everyone agreed that it was definitely torture.)
In the end, however, what we did more than anything else—the thing that pushed the Xbox and the gym, the silly tricks and the endless bullshitting to the backseat—was to try to get inside the heads of the guys on the other side of the wire and figure out how they were going to attempt to destroy us. Many an evening, me and the rest of Red Platoon’s leadership—a cast of about five guys that included Gallegos, Kirk, Larson, and Hardt—would gather at the café, the protected well just in front of our barracks, light up our cigarettes, and talk about how we’d plan for it to go down if we were staring into Keating from the ridgelines.
We all agreed that you’d want to come in just before dawn and start off by suppressing our mortar pit while simultaneously hitting OP Fritsche, which would silence our biggest guns. Then you’d lay down an impenetrable barrage of fire on all four of the armored Humvees—Truck 1, Truck 2, LRAS1, and LRAS2—with the goal of knocking out our .50-caliber machine guns and our Mark 19s, which would otherwise stop your assault cold. You’d also want to be certain to put an incredibly heavy volume of fire into the ammunition depot to make it impossible for us to resupply the gunners in those Humvees, who would then get picked off one by one as their ammo ran out.
Right after that, you’d start sending successive waves of men down the Switchbacks and directly at the Afghan Army barracks, getting as close as possible to our perimeter so that we’d be forced to hold off calling in our F-15s for fear of getting taken out by our own ordnance.
Your first wave of fighters would absorb the claymores below the Switchbacks and the machine-gun fire from the Afghan soldiers. But your second or your third wave would make it all the way to the wire and breach our perimeter. Once your guys were inside, it would be a turkey shoot. They could sweep through the entire camp, moving from hooch to hooch, eliminating us one pocket at a time down to the last man, whoever that might be.
We ran through variations on this scenario endlessly. When we’d strike. What we’d hit. How we’d coordinate. And no matter how hard we tried to come up with a solid plan to defend Keating, the outcome was always the same.
We’d get overrun and everybody would die.
Little did we realize how accurate those predictions would be when the Taliban decided that it was finally time to pull the trigger.
• • •
AFTER DINNER on the evening of the first Friday in October, Courville went up to the gym to work out with Kirk, Gallegos, and Larson. As they moved through their session, everyone noticed that Kirk, who was almost always a total loudmouth, was extremely quiet. Courville was bothered enough by his silence that just before he left, he turned to Gallegos.
“Is he all right?” he asked, nodding in Kirk’s direction.
“Yeah,” replied Gallegos, “as far as I know.”
“Is everything okay with him at home?” continued Courville.
“Yeah, as far as I know.”
“Well, okay, then,” said Courville.
Stepping through the door, he walked downhill to the aid station. When he got there, he headed straight for his bunk, popped an Ambien because he hadn’t been sleeping well, and went to bed.
Meanwhile, Gallegos was on his way back to our barra
cks, where Bundermann was preparing for bed with the knowledge that his responsibilities over the next few days would be heavier than normal.
Less than a month earlier, the widely disliked Captain Porter had finally been relieved of his command and sent home. His replacement, Stoney Portis, was a hard-charging captain from Texas who displayed promising signs of the aggressiveness and hands-on management that we had found so visibly lacking in his predecessor. As an example of that behavior, the previous morning Portis had hopped aboard a helicopter to catch a lift up to Fritsche, where he was hoping to meet with a group of Afghan elders from the neighboring village of Kamdesh.
He’d planned on returning later in the afternoon, but on the flight to Fritsche an insurgent had fired on the chopper, scoring a direct hit on the bird’s fuel line and forcing the pilot to divert to Bostick for repairs. This meant that until Portis could catch another helicopter ride back to Keating, Bundermann was in charge—the de facto commander of Keating.
While Bundermann racked out for the night, Gallegos padded down the hall in search of Raz, who was supposed to sit for a promotion board exam the following morning at nine. The exam would determine if Raz moved up to the rank of sergeant, something he very much wanted, which was why he’d asked for help from Gallegos, who had already passed.
The two men studied together until well past midnight, at which point most of the guys in the barracks were fast asleep. By the time they finally went to bed, it was approaching one a.m.
By two a.m., the only guys inside Keating who weren’t asleep were those on guard duty. One of these was Armando Avalos, our forward observer, who was stationed inside LRAS1, the gun truck just outside Blue barracks.
As he stared through his thermal optics from the turret of the Humvee, Avalos saw nothing out of the ordinary. There was no sign of any movement, nor was there any sound whatsoever. The night was as silent and as calm as one could wish.
Unbeknownst to Avalos or to anyone else inside Keating, however, a lot was happening along the slopes and ridgelines that ringed the outpost.
Somewhere out there, concealed by the terrain and cloaked in darkness, roughly three hundred Taliban fighters were moving into position around Keating while another hundred or so fighters climbed the slopes beyond the southern ridgelines to converge on Fritsche. Many of those men were from the surrounding villages, places that had names like Kamdesh and Agassi, Mandaghal and Agro, Gewi and Jalalah. Their numbers were reinforced by a smaller group of seasoned Afghan fighters who had been brought in from outside of Nuristan. It’s also likely that there were a handful of foreigners from places like Saudi Arabia and Chechnya.
Around three a.m., a group of these insurgents entered the little village of Urmul, on the opposite side of the river. They ordered the residents to pack their things, vacate their homes, and leave the area. Then they split up and began occupying the buildings, setting up machine guns in windows and doorways that would enable them to shoot directly into Keating.
Two hours later, when their entire force was in position, the insurgents settled behind their weapons and patiently waited for dawn to arrive.
PART II
Going Cyclic
CHAPTER SIX
“Let’s Go Kill Some People”
AT FIVE IN THE MORNING, the only frontline soldier at Keating who was awake but not on duty was Daniel Rodriguez, who was part of the four-man crew at the mortar pit. D-Rod, as we called him, had been drawn out of the pit by the chance to snatch a few minutes of online time at the aid station computer so that he could check his Facebook page and polish off the application papers for his upcoming leave in November, which he intended to spend surfing off the Gold Coast of Australia.
It was still dark as Rodriguez clomped down the metal set of stairs, fashioned from empty steel ammo cans, that led from the mortar pit and stepped onto the patch of high ground between the mechanics’ bay and the trash pit. As he started skirting past LRAS2, the gun truck on the far western end of camp, he caught the glow of a cigarette coming from inside the turret of the armored Humvee, and stopped to exchange a few words with Mace, who was counting down the remaining minutes of his guard shift until Larson showed up.
When Rodriguez left Mace, he headed across the long stretch of open ground leading toward the main cluster of buildings at the center of camp. Upon reaching the aid station, he padded through the dark room as quietly as possible to avoid waking up Courville and Cordova, who were asleep in their bunks, and spent the final minutes before dawn tapping away at the keyboard.
• • •
Brad Larson and Daniel Rodriguez
AT 5:49 A.M., the sun rose.
By this point, a few of the guards on the battle trucks were starting to move. Ed Faulkner, who had been on Truck 1’s gunner’s turret for more than an hour, wouldn’t be going anywhere for almost another two hours. The same was true of Truck 2, where a forward observer from Blue Platoon named Jonathan Adams was sitting quietly watching the first rays of light illuminate the Putting Green and the Switchbacks high above Urmul. But down at LRAS1, Hardt had already radioed for relief so that he could dash off to the latrines, and in response, Koppes was shuffling out with his copy of SportsPro stuffed into the go-to zone beneath his armor, anticipating a hot breakfast delivery as soon as Hardt finished taking his morning dump.
Out at the Shura Building, Nicholas Davidson and Justin Gregory were preparing a similar handoff inside the gun turret overlooking the front gate. Meanwhile, out at the western end of camp, Larson had just finished zipping up his fly and was retrieving his helmet and carbine from the hood of his Humvee before climbing into the cab of LRAS2.
The first rays of light were streaming off the tops of the mountains and into the valley when, at 5:50 a.m., Ron Jeremy, one of our Afghan interpreters, approached the front door of the command post to relay some disturbing news.
Shamsullah, the commander of the Afghan National Police station on the far side of the river just in front of Urmul, had sent word that enemy forces had moved into the village. In the middle of the night, according to Ron, the Taliban had begun ordering all the residents to vacate their homes and leave while small groups of fighters had moved in.
At 5:53 a.m., Sergeant Jayson Souter, who was with HQ Platoon, passed this info along to James Stanley, my other section sergeant in Red Platoon, who had just relieved Gallegos as sergeant of the guard and was standing out near the center of camp. Glancing around to see if he could spot anything strange, Stanley immediately caught sight of the commander of the Afghan Security Guards, a man who was normally armed with nothing more than a 9-mm pistol.
The guy was now carrying an AK-47 and several extra mags.
As Stanley made his way over to the command post to report what he’d seen and find out if he could learn more, he radioed the gun trucks to let the guys on guard know what was up. Chatter echoed across the net as, one by one, everyone on the perimeter began acknowledging.
Up inside the gun turret overlooking the front gate, Davidson was about to key his radio when he glanced toward Urmul, which was just emerging in the morning light, and noticed that dozens of armed men were dashing in and out of buildings all around the village.
Then he looked down, spotted the ASG commander with the AK-47 and the rack of extra ammo, and had the same thought as Stanley.
Weird . . .
It was 5:58 a.m. and Davidson was pressing the button on his radio transmitter when a loud bang sounded off to the west and an arrow-shaped missile came hurling toward the outpost with the distinctive trajectory of an RPG.
As the rocket approached, Davidson could see a plume of gray vapor that revealed the location of the shooter on the Putting Green, high on the spine overlooking Urmul. He lined up the M240’s gun-sights on the point from which the smoke trail originated, and was about to trigger a burst of return fire when, as if on queue, the mountains surrounding Keating erupted in flames.
Along the ridgelines and across the hillsides, concealed behind rocks and trees as well as the buildings of Urmul, roughly three hundred insurgents opened up with everything they had: RPGs and AK-47s, B-10 recoilless rifles, Russian 82-mm mortars, sniper rifles, and the powerful antiaircraft machine guns known as “dishkas.”
Whatever arms the Taliban recruits had managed to scrounge from the surrounding villages, purchase on the black markets of Nuristan, or haul in across the mountain passes from Pakistan were now being brought to bear, with shocking effect, directly on Keating.
• • •
TO SAY THAT the initial seconds of the attack were too much for a normal mind to process would be an understatement. From his vantage in the turret of LRAS1, it seemed to Koppes as if someone had seized hold of a fold in the sky, ripped a hole in the thing, and was now dumping all the ordnance and munitions in eastern Afghanistan directly on top of his head.
As Koppes scanned the eastern and southern ridgelines in front of him, he spotted orange-colored muzzle flashes in every direction. There were so many starbursts that he found it impossible to concentrate on firing back at one or two and then moving on to the others. The flickering of gunfire, and the cumulative impact that it was having all over the outpost, overwhelmed his senses and forced him to respond by instinct.
The rounds were now coming in so fast that at first Koppes didn’t even have a chance to key his radio and report what was going on. It was all he could do to concentrate on a few discreet flashes of light and try to get some grenades heading toward them.
The same was true sixty yards uphill where, inside the gun turret of Truck 1, Faulkner was hurling burst after burst from his .50-cal over the center of camp and across the river into the North Face.
Red Platoon Page 10
