Like Koppes, Faulkner was confused. Although he could see the smoke signatures of the incoming RPGs from within the tree line, there was no way for him to pinpoint the positions of the machine-gunners and snipers who had him in their crosshairs, and who were concealed by the rocks and vegetation. All he really knew was that it was his job to respond. And so, like Koppes, he furiously raked his gun across his sectors of fire, hoping that some of those rounds would find a target.
• • •
WITH THE GUYS on all four gun trucks fully engaged, Keating’s outgoing was making a serious bid at keeping up with the Taliban’s incoming. Granted, we weren’t exactly matching the enemy shot for shot, and unlike the Taliban, we didn’t have the luxury of being able to concentrate all of our fire in more or less the same place. Nevertheless, every heavy weapons system inside the outpost was immediately hot and rolling through ammo hard.
In addition to Faulkner and Koppes, Davidson had fully opened up from the turret above the front gate, and each of their guns had a distinctive sound. The sharp, piercing percussion of the M240 was underlaid with the bass growl of the slower and heavier .50-cal. Beneath all that, you could also hear the chug-chug-chug coming from the open area out near the latrines and the showers where Adams, assisted now by Hardt, was launching a storm of grenades toward the Switchbacks and the North Face from the Mark 19 on Truck 2.
Even amid all of that clatter, however, there was one sound that registered more distinctively than any other. It was the return fire coming from our most exposed battle position, as well as the one that was farthest from the command post: the gun truck on the far western end of camp that housed Keating’s second .50-caliber machine gun, the “Ma Deuce” on the turret of LRAS2.
Judging by the sound of that gun, which was a noise that resembled a chain saw tearing through sheet metal, Brad Larson—a man who less than a minute earlier had been standing helmetless in front of the truck with his weasel in his hand—had clawed his way into the turret, thrown back the charging handle, and gone absolutely bat-shit.
• • •
MA DEUCE is the nickname for an M2 .50-caliber machine gun, and the working end of the weapon features a pair of grips known as spade handles, each of which has a V-shaped trigger that’s called a “butterfly.” If a gunner pulls down on the butterflies with his thumbs and keeps the gun on full auto, a well-maintained .50-cal is capable, in theory, of punching out almost six hundred rounds a minute.
This is known as “going cyclic,” and it’s something you generally want to avoid, except in the most extreme situations. If a gunner maxes out his rate of fire in this manner, it’s likely he’ll ream out the bore on his weapon within a belt or two. But long before that, the rounds he’s sending through the breech can build up enough heat to literally melt the barrel. This is also an excellent way to jam your gun, creating the sort of problem that can be fixed only by climbing out of the turret, standing on the hood of the truck with your rear end exposed to whoever is trying to shoot you, and viciously kicking the loading arm until the thing finally decides to come unstuck, all the while hoping that you don’t get drilled in the ass.
For this reason, if you’re doing things by the book, you want to keep your cool and let off brief, accurate three-to-five-round bursts. That’s the way to maintain good fire discipline and let the weapon do the work. All of which was (more or less) what Faulkner was doing over at Truck 1.
Well, fuck that, thought Larson, who, at this particular moment, couldn’t have given a rat’s ass what the book said, much less what Faulkner was up to. The only thing Larson wanted was to establish some fire superiority, and the only prayer he had of making that happen was to start dumping as many rounds downrange as he possibly could right now.
Going cyclic, in his estimation, was the sanest and most effective response to the tsunami of shit that was being hurled in his face.
Larson’s gun truck had three separate sectors of fire that covered a 120-degree arc facing directly west. At the center of that arc lay Urmul, just 150 yards away on the other side of the Darreh-ye Kushtāz, whose tight cluster of flat-roofed, mud-walled buildings were nestled at the bottom of the massive, V-shaped declivity created by the Switchbacks to the left and the Putting Green to the right.
By Larson’s best guess—and it was a pretty decent guess because, unlike Koppes and Faulkner, he was meticulously counting muzzle flashes—he was now being targeted by no fewer than twelve separate weapons systems spread across the field of fire in front of him. He could see smoke trails from several RPG teams high in the Switchbacks, the Putting Green, the Waterfall area, and the north side of RPG Rock. He was also facing off against at least three machine-gun crews—one firing from the Waterfall, another working from somewhere up on the ridgeline directly above the Switchbacks, and a third from somewhere deep inside the mosque. Scattered throughout the school and several houses on the near side of Urmul, there were also dozens of guys spraying him with AK-47s. And in addition to all of that, he was sitting directly in the crosshairs of several snipers, each armed with a Russian-made Dragunov that fired a 7.62-mm round capable of blowing through Kevlar body armor as if it were made from the working end of a squeegee mop.
Those snipers were a particular problem for Larson because their rounds were so disturbingly accurate and so menacingly close. They thudded into the bulletproof windshield in front of his knees. They ricocheted around inside the turret that shielded his torso and chest. A bunch of them were even splintering off the plywood shade cover of the .50-cal itself. But what shook Larson more than how close those snipers were to drilling him through the forehead (a job they probably should have taken care of when he was still taking a piss), and more than the proximity of the enemy (he could now see dozens of them moving brazenly inside the village and along the river), more rattling than even the feeling that he simply could not shoot fast enough (the guys he was facing off against were fricking everywhere)—the thing that Larson found most sobering was the simple realization of how terribly alone he was in that moment.
To the west, north, and south were a couple hundred Afghans wearing turbans and Chinese sneakers.
Inside the gun truck? One lone dude from Nebraska.
A dude who was now kicking himself for having neglected to bring his chest rack out on guard duty with him that morning—an omission which meant that when Larson finished burning through his machine-gun rounds or when the .50-cal finally decided to lock up (whichever came first), he would have only his M4 assault rifle and seven thirty-round magazines’ worth of bullets with which to defend not just himself but the entire western sector of Keating.
Damn, he thought, I kinda need some help out here.
This was no time to call for help, though—nor was it the time to ring up the command post and deliver a crisply worded sitrep on precisely how much crap was flying through the air. No, this was the time for only one thing, which was to rock the Ma Deuce to her outer limits, and then see what she’d do when he took her past that point.
And so Larson rammed down the butterflies and sent an entire belt of three hundred rounds running through the gun while working the barrel back and forth in the hope that even if he wasn’t being completely accurate—which is to say, even if the spray-and-pray he was putting out didn’t find a single viable target—perhaps the demonic manner in which he was riding his gun on full auto would give the enemy a few seconds’ pause before they decided to bum-rush the Humvee.
He figured he had about fifteen hundred rounds, and as he neared the end of his first belt and found himself starting to ponder the question—which was an interesting one—of how the hell he was going to survive a reload, he also took note of the odd fact that there didn’t seem to be any return fire whatsoever coming from the mortar pit.
As Big John Breeding never tired of pointing out to anyone who would listen, the pair of guns in his pit, the 60-mm and 120-mm mortars, qualified as serious ra
inmakers. They were, by far, the heaviest casualty-producing assets that Keating had. What’s more, those guns were always laid onto specific targets where we knew the enemy liked to set up shop, and the mortar crew had someone awake and on radio watch twenty-four hours a day so that if called upon, they could start hanging rounds immediately.
The response time for Breeding’s crew to start getting rounds in the air should, in theory, add up to about two and a half nanoseconds. Which meant that by now, Breeding and his guys should already have started putting a deluge of hurt down on the enemy fighters who were trying to obliterate Keating.
Where the fuck are those mortars? Larson wondered.
Right about then, he caught sight of something moving off to his left.
It was Rodriguez, clad in nothing but a T-shirt and vest, gym shorts, and tennis shoes, running for the mortar pit as if his life depended on it.
Which, at that moment, it most definitely did.
• • •
WHEN D-ROD, sitting in front of the computer inside the aid station, had heard the first wave of rockets start to drop, he immediately started clipping on his vest while cursing himself for having failed to bring his carbine.
“What’s up?” asked Courville, who had just emerged from his bunk in the rear of the building.
“Gotta run, Doc,” replied Rodriguez as he shot out the door. “Wish me luck.”
Without his gear to slow him down, Rodriguez moved fast, zigzagging past the showers, the laundry trailer, and the piss tubes toward the western end of the outpost. Taking the open slope beyond at a dead sprint, he started to fire his 9-mm handgun toward the Switchbacks, where half a dozen enemy gunners were doing their best to nail him with their AK-47s.
Bullets were kicking up small stones and bits of dirt around his feet, but the gunners couldn’t get a bead on him. Then, as he drew near Larson’s gun truck, he heard bullets clanging off the armor and called out a warning.
“Mace! Mace!” he yelled—not realizing that Mace had been replaced by Larson. “Friendly coming!”
Rodriguez was planning to take a pause beside the Humvee before making his final push across the open stretch of ground leading to the ammo-can staircase. But just as he was about to veer over, the truck took a direct hit from an RPG. The rocket plowed into the fender just above one of the tires, exploding with enough force to knock Rodriguez to the ground while sending flames all along the south side of the Humvee.
“Maaaace!” he screamed as the figure behind the gun, which was actually Larson, flopped backward and disappeared inside the turret.
Getting no reply, Rodriguez got back on his feet and resumed his race for the pit. When he hit the bottom of the stairs, he emptied the rest of the fifteen-round magazine on his handgun.
Right then, nothing was more important to D-Rod than getting those mortars up.
• • •
AS RODRIGUEZ APPROACHED the top of the stairs, Breeding had just extracted himself from his fart sack (which was what he liked to call his sleeping bag) and was punching the keys on the laptop that cranked out the grid coordinates he’d need to lay the guns on a new set of targets.
Meanwhile, Kevin Thomson was already geared up—he’d been monitoring the radios all night while playing a video game on the PlayStation—and racing out the door, weapon in hand, into the pit. His aim was to get to the 60-mm gun tube and put out some suppressive fire with his assault rifle while Breeding determined what charges they would need to place on the rounds.
The mortar pit was protected by a single M240 Bravo machine gun that was mounted on a steel fence post with a pintle on top that cradled the gun while permitting it to swing. The mortar team liked to keep that gun covered with a poncho to protect it from rain and dust, and as Rodriguez came off the top of the stairs and into the pit, he grabbed hold of the poncho and yanked it to the side.
“RPG Rock!” yelled Thomson, shorthand to let Rodriguez know that the pit was taking fire from a massive boulder about two hundred feet above them that looked directly down into camp from the far corner of one of the switchbacks—and that D-Rod needed to lay some fire on it immediately.
Kevin Thomson
Rodriguez seized the gun and was bringing it on target when Thomson, who was standing an arm’s length away, let out a soft grunt as a Dragunov sniper round, fired from somewhere up in the Switchbacks, slammed straight into this face.
It’s an indication of the extreme angle of the Taliban’s plunging fire from the ridgelines surrounding us that the bullet pinholed through Thomson’s right cheek, then blew an exit hole beside his left shoulder blade. Along the way, it destroyed his jaw, his tongue, and two of his cervical vertebrae, along with a bunch of the soft tissue at the base of his neck.
Without uttering another sound, the big man with the quiet smile who loved to smoke weed crumpled to the ground, bleeding from the face and head like a steer felled to the floor of a slaughter chute.
Rodriguez, who watched the whole thing unfold in front of him, had already seen death dished out in any number of horrible ways during his time in Iraq. (He’d been on the cleanup team of an armored Humvee that had been blown up by an IED one morning in 2007, scrambling and cooking the contents so badly that the remains of the three American soldiers inside formed what he had described as a “human stew.”) Unlike those guys in the Humvee back in Baghdad, however, Thomson was Rodriguez’s closest friend. And seeing him cut down, from less than two feet away, cracked open a door in D-Rod’s mind that led to a stash of cold rage he didn’t even know was there.
Without a word, he put his shoulder into the gun, squeezed the trigger, and didn’t let off until he’d put more than three hundred rounds into the Switchbacks, where the shot that killed Thomson had come from. As he fired, the casings from his spent cartridges tumbled from the breech and partially buried the body of Thomson under a blanket of hot brass.
If you don’t let off, a 240 Bravo takes about thirty seconds to chew through three hundred rounds. As Rodriguez completed his payback fusillade, the sound of his weapon merged with the baseline sound track of the surrounding battle to form the thunderous, full-throated, symphonic fury that is the audible signature of no-quarters combat.
One hundred and fifty yards downhill to the northeast, inside the tight little cluster of stone-and-plywood barracks buildings at the very center of camp, that sound was now rousing me and the rest of Black Knight Troop from our bunks.
• • •
AS I CAME out of my rack in the third hooch from the south end of Red barracks and threw on my battle kit, I could hear that we were taking fire from every sector. What’s more, I could tell that the intensity was on a new and different order of magnitude from anything we’d yet encountered. Something about the way those rounds were coming in—I’m not sure exactly what it was, but we all heard it—signaled that this wasn’t just serious but nothing-like-we’ve-ever-seen-before serious.
This was no mere hit-and-run, guerrilla-style skirmish, and that awareness—the fact that the Taliban was meeting us in direct, toe-to-toe combat, an all-out assault into which they were funneling everything they could muster to wipe our presence off the map of Nuristan—brought every man to his feet knowing that we needed to throw every gun we had into this fight.
From every hooch, guys were strapping on gear and moving down the hall toward the weapons rack to grab their guns.
At the first cubicle from the north end, Kirk was snatching up his vest as he turned to Avalos at the far end of the hallway.
“They’re startin’ up early today,” said Kirk, stepping into the hall. “Let’s go kill some people.”
By this point in our deployment, we’d been attacked enough that most of us, especially the staff sergeants and the team leaders, knew exactly where they needed to be. Some of the younger guys, however, paused before heading out the door to take a quick look at the whiteboard to confi
rm which position they were supposed to man.
“Dannelley, you’re with me!” yelled Jones as he pulled one of his Mark 48 machine guns off the weapons rack, shoved it into Dannelley’s hands, and started draping hundred-round belts of ammo over his shoulders.
According to the battle roster, Jones and Dannelley were responsible for getting that machine gun out to support Koppes at his Humvee. As both men headed toward the north door of the barracks, Jones almost collided with Kirk.
“Hey, what time is it?” demanded Kirk.
“It’s 6:01,” replied Jones.
The Battle for COP Keating was exactly three minutes old.
Thomson was already dead. Larson had just gotten smoked. And those nine words that Kirk and Jones had just exchanged?
That would be the last thing those two dudes ever said to each other.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Heavy Contact
WHEN I SWITCHED on my handheld radio, reports were rolling in from every point along our perimeter defenses, and from those sitreps it was clear that each one of our battle positions was overwhelmed with fire from every possible direction.
Because Red Platoon was already on guard duty, it would be our job to man the heavy weapons systems and try to stop the assault. White Platoon would play no part in this effort because they were all up at Fritsche—but it was Blue Platoon’s job to support us by delivering ammo, a task that a few of them had already stepped up to by snatching up extra bags of ammo that had been stashed in their barracks and running them out to the gun trucks. The bulk of Blue, however, was now gathering in their barracks with the two sergeants who were their section leaders, Eric Harder and John Francis, and preparing to make a coordinated push out of the ammo supply point, the two rooms built into the Hesco wall on the east side of the Shura Building that contained our primary stash of munitions.
Red Platoon Page 11
