Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  Because Sergeant First Class Frank Guerrero was back in the States on leave, I was the acting platoon sergeant for Red. This meant that instead of jumping into the fight, my first job was to figure out where every man in the platoon was and find out what he needed, starting with my four team leaders: Hardt and Larson for Alpha section, Kirk and Gallegos for Bravo.

  One way of getting a head count is simply to monitor your radio and try to piece together an assessment based on what you’re hearing from the various sectors of the battlefield. But a more comprehensive picture of how a fight is shaping up can be gleaned by stepping into the command post. So that was where I headed first.

  While bullets snapped at the walls and plowed along the ground, I dashed across the fifteen-foot gap that separated Red barracks from our tactical operations center, yanked on the plywood door on the west side of the building, and flung myself inside.

  The interior of our command post was unapologetically functional and spartan. The lights were six-foot-long fluorescent tubes, and the place was devoid of any of the frills that you’d see in other buildings. There were no posters like the ones at the gym. No outdated Christmas and Fourth of July decorations like the stuff hanging from the walls of the chow hall. And certainly no Ziploc baggies with tennis-star panties.

  The windowless room was dominated by a pair of eight-foot-long tables fashioned from two-by-sixes and plywood, which ran almost the entire length of the room. The first table held several laptop computers, including one reserved for the commander. The second, which also supported several computers, sat directly in front of a bank of half a dozen flat-screen TV monitors mounted on the east wall. Several of those monitors displayed maps of Keating and the surrounding mountains. On the west wall, just a few feet from the door, hung another map that pinpointed the location of every major weapons system inside the outpost, along with its sectors of fire.

  The first thing to catch my eye were a bunch of guys attached to Headquarters Platoon, most of whom were sitting on metal folding chairs and hunched over their laptops at one of the two tables. Glaring into the biggest of the flat-screen computers were Private Jordan Wong, our radio operator, and Sergeant Ryan Schulz, our intelligence analyst. Standing behind them were Lieutenant Cason Shrode and Sergeant Jayson Souter, who were in charge of coordinating artillery and air support, along with First Sergeant Burton.

  In all, at least ten guys were jammed into the command post, and each of them was doing several things at once. Standing at the center of this mess was Bundermann, who was clad in a brown T-shirt, black shorts, and a pair of plastic Adidas flip-flops, an ensemble that made him look like he was getting ready for a game of beach volleyball. He had no helmet, no weapon, and no chest rack. (Far more problematic, in his view: he also did not have his can of chewing tobacco.)

  The second that Bundermann had been awakened by the torrent of incoming fire, he’d leaped from his rack and sprinted over to the command post without bothering to grab a single piece of his battle kit. But the fact that he was now so wildly out of uniform reflected something larger than an understandable lapse of attentiveness regarding his gear—which was that he wasn’t really supposed to be inside the command post at all.

  As the lieutenant in charge of Red Platoon, Bundermann’s normal battle position—the place to which he was accustomed to going and, in fact, the place where he felt that he truly belonged—was the LRAS2 gun truck. This was his go-to spot, the destination to which he’d raced at the start of virtually every engagement since the first day we’d arrived at Keating.

  LRAS2 was also where Bundermann preferred to be because, among other reasons, he was convinced that this was where we would win or lose a major battle like the one that was now unfolding. But like it or not, with Captain Portis still stranded at Bostick, the command post was where he belonged.

  From this moment forward, every tactical decision—where we funneled our remaining resources; which areas we defended and which sectors we ceded to the enemy; how we coordinated the assets we still had with those that were, hopefully, on their way—all of that responsibility, all of that burden, rested directly on Bundermann’s shoulders.

  He had neither asked for nor aspired to this role. But nevertheless, it was now his show. And the way that show played out would be determined, in large part, by how Bundermann handled the most potent and far-reaching weapons system at his fingertips.

  • • •

  KEATING’S PRIMARY MEANS of communication with the world outside the wire involved a military Internet-relay chat system that was known by its acronym, mIRC. In essence, mIRC functioned like an instant-messaging app on a cell phone, except that multiple users could hop onto and off of the net at the same time. During the heat of battle, this form of tactical chatting (or “tac-chat”) was more efficient than phone lines or even radios.

  Inside the command post, the way the tac-chat worked was that Bundermann would instruct Wong, his radio man, what to type under the call sign of Keating’s commander, which was “2BlackKnight.” As Wong pecked away at his keyboard, other members of HQ Platoon—Schulz, Shrode, Souter, and Bundermann himself—would also be weighing into the system under their own call signs. While that was happening, the system was also logging a stream of responses, orders, and questions from command posts at other bases that would be scrambling to get us help. This included not just Bostick, but also Jalalabad, Kandahar, and Bagram. The network even extended as far away as Ramstein, Germany, where a satellite relay station enabled air force specialists in Nevada and New Mexico to communicate—using the same tac-chat network—with armed Predator and Reaper drones that were patrolling the skies directly above Keating.

  If this instant-messaging system went down for any reason, we had SATCOM as a backup, which was essentially a phone with a satellite uplink. This was reliable, but unlike the tac-chat, there was a limit to how many people could be on the SATCOM line at the same time. So we tended to lean most heavily on tac-chat—a fact that was now evident on the forty-two-inch flat-screen on the east wall of the command post.

  Looking up at that monitor as I walked in, I could see the messages scrolling onto the screen as they were being logged. This provided a running record of the battle, starting with our initial call for help and including the first response we were just now receiving from Task Force Destroyer, the call sign of our immediate superiors in Bostick:

  6:02 a.m.

  <2BlackKnight_TOC>

  >>> Keating in heavy contact . . .

  >>> We have mortars pinned down and fire coming from everywhere . . .

  >>> We need something

  6:02 a.m.

 

  >>> We are working to get rotary wing and close air support.

  While Bundermann juggled these external communications with Bostick, Jalalabad, and beyond, he was also receiving a steady stream of reports from—and issuing orders to—the American soldiers inside the wire at Keating. To do that, he had five radio channels, or “nets,” each keyed to a separate frequency that was reserved for a particular group of soldiers. The Force Pro net, for example, connected Bundermann to his section leaders within each of the platoons inside Keating’s perimeter, while the Platoon net was restricted to platoon leaders such as myself and Jonathan Hill, who ran Blue. If Bundermann wanted to speak to anyone up at Fritsche, he had to switch over to the Troop net, while the Fires net was reserved for Keating’s mortar pit. Finally, there was a separate channel, the CAG net, which stood for “combat applications group.” This would patch him through to aircraft flying overhead, enabling him to speak directly to the pilots of any fixed-wing aircraft or helicopters that were within communication range of Keating.

  What made this especially challenging was that while Bundermann managed all of this internal and external talk, he was also making decisions—in many cases, split-second decisions—that would help to determine who among us survived, and who
did not.

  • • •

  WHEN I BURST into the command post and slammed the door, Bundermann was standing in front of the target-overlay map, which depicted the sectors of fire that corresponded to Keating’s defensive battle positions. He was holding a radio to one ear, his gaze was locked onto the map, and he was speaking into the SATCOM mike, which he held in his other hand. His remaining ear was cocked to a green speaker mounted on the east wall, which was broadcasting all the radio traffic coming across the Force Pro net.

  It wasn’t easy to make sense of the Force Pro net because everyone was trying to talk at once. Reports were tumbling in from all four gun trucks and the front gate, as well as from various other men who were on the move.

  Red Five: Truck One is almost black on ammo!

  Red Five-Delta: The ECP is taking heavy, accurate fire from the North Face, the Putting Green, the ANP Station, and north up the LOC!

  Red Six: Calling for immediate suppression on targets 4525 and 4526!

  Those voices on the radio were laid on top of the sounds of battle reverberating through the walls of the command post. The volume of fire and the varying pitches of the different weapons—the incoming PKM machine guns and RPGs; the outgoing M4s and Mark 48s—all of it rose to a level of intensity that to a civilian would have sounded like total chaos. But to Bundermann’s ear and mine, that multilayered cacophony made sense on several levels.

  The concussions that were rattling the walls and the roof of the command post told us that we were taking fire from every cardinal point of the compass, and that although the RPGs were coming in at a rate of roughly one every fifteen seconds, the machine-gun and small-arms fire was pretty much continuous.

  At the same time, the radio traffic was letting us know that Koppes’s truck was being hit by a torrent of fire, that Faulkner needed an immediate resupply of .50-cal ammo in order to keep his gun in action, and that Davidson’s turret above the front gate was now engulfed in smoke, and thus in danger of being overrun.

  When those two streams of information merged—the rockets and bullets slamming into the outside of the building, the increasingly agitated voices coming across the Force Pro net—it was evident that our return fire wasn’t having much effect, because the enemy was able to continue pouring it on without pause.

  The upshot was clear. If we didn’t get some help soon, we weren’t going to last much longer—which was why Bundermann was now ordering Wong to send out a series of requests for help, starting with an immediate call for air support.

  He wanted both fixed-wing jets and attack helicopters—in short, anything that army aviation in Jalalabad and the air force in Kandahar and Bagram were willing to send us. The urgency of those requests was reflected in the messages that were being logged into the system:

  6:03 a.m.

  <2BlackKnight_TOC>

  >>> We need air ASAP . . .

  >>> We need air assets . . .

  >>> HEAVY CONTACT

  While awaiting a response from Bostick, Bundermann turned to the next order of business.

  Big John Breeding was calling in on the Fires net with a report from the mortar pit.

  • • •

  “I GOT ONE KIA,” declared Breeding from his position inside the mortar team’s bunker, which was directly adjacent to the pit. “Thomson’s dead.”

  “Roger,” Bundermann replied. “Can you get out to the pit and get your guns up?”

  “Negative, we’re taking too much fire,” said Breeding. “The pit cannot come up.”

  “Okay, B,” said Bundermann, invoking his nickname for Breeding. “Stand by.”

  Another call was coming in on the Force Pro net—this time from Gallegos, who was standing out by the latrines on a piece of higher ground that gave him a good overview of what was happening at LRAS2, where Larson had popped back up in the turret after the RPG hit that Rodriguez had witnessed. (As it turned out, Larson had been struck in the neck, shoulder, and bicep by bullet fragments that had spalled off the top of the truck, but the turret shield had protected him from the worst of the blast.)

  While Gallegos watched, Larson was now attempting to reload the .50-cal—an awkward process that involved leaning forward to pry open the cover of the machine gun, feed in a new belt of ammo, and then close the cover—moves that left him dangerously exposed.

  Gallegos could see that if Larson didn’t get some help and get the gun working quickly, his gun truck was in danger of being overwhelmed. He also understood that in the absence of air support, the best way to assist Larson was by bringing the mortar pit’s guns up and targeting them on the Switchbacks—which was exactly what he was now demanding on the radio from Bundermann.

  Unfortunately, there was a bit of a catch-22 in meeting this request, because if the mortar pit was pinned down, the only gun truck that was positioned to provide suppressive fire to free up the mortars was, as luck would have it, LRAS2. In a nutshell, the mortar pit and Larson’s gun truck worked in tandem, sort of like the wings of an airplane: if one was taken out of action, the whole deal pretty much fell apart. Right now, each of the two battle positions required the very thing that the other could not provide.

  In response to Gallegos’s requests, which were getting more insistent with every second, Bundermann jumped back on the Fires net to find out if, by some miracle, anything had changed on Breeding’s end.

  “Hey, B, can you get to your guns?” he asked.

  Breeding glanced out the doorway into the pit.

  The incoming fire was so intense that Rodriguez, who was now inside the bunker with Breeding, couldn’t even pull Thomson’s body out of the field of fire and drag it into the mortar team’s hooch. Each attempt he made triggered a massive barrage of fire from RPG Rock. The entire pit was now a kill zone.

  John Breeding

  “Sir, we are straight-up pinned down,” replied Breeding. “Everything is exploding inside the pit. The only way I can get out there and get those guns up is if you ask me to kill everybody else up here. It can’t be done without us dying.”

  As Breeding spoke, Rodriguez was scrambling outside for one more attempt to retrieve Thomson. As he seized his friend’s legs, an RPG smashed into the top of the 120-mm mortar shack.

  The concussion caught D-Rod and hurled him through the air and straight through the open doorway of the hooch, where he crashed to the floor.

  “I want to help, sir,” Breeding said to Bundermann, “but I can’t do it without killing the rest of my men.”

  “Roger that,” said Bundermann. “Hold tight.”

  • • •

  BY THIS POINT, I’d learned as much as I could from inside the command post about where my guys were and how the battle was shaping up. It was now time for me to get outside. As I slipped out the door, Wong was still sending out pleas for help through the tac-chat:

  6:04 a.m.

  <2BlackKnight_TOC>

  >>> Still taking heavy contact. Need something. Our mortars can’t get up . . .

  >>> We are taking casualties . . .

  >>> GET SOMETHING UP!

  There was no mistaking those requests. But given how rapidly things seemed to be spinning out of control, Bundermann wanted to convey the seriousness of our situation directly to our superiors—and the best way to do that, it seemed to him, was by speaking one-on-one to Captain Portis at Bostick.

  Keying the mike on the SATCOM, he put a call through to the radio-telephone operator in Bostick’s command post. Upon hearing the request, the operator asked him to hold the line, explaining that Portis had just been woken up and would be there in a few seconds.

  As Bundermann waited, the line suddenly went dead.

  Outside the walls of the command post, the Taliban commanders had been directing a portion of their RPGs and their B-10 shells at our electrical generators, knowing that without those units, we had no powe
r—and that without power, we had no communications. It was a smart plan—conforming, almost to the letter, to the way we’d imagined the first phase of an all-out attack like this would play out. And now that strategy was paying some rich dividends. An RPG had just landed a direct hit on our 100kW generator, which sat next to the mosque and powered pretty much everything at Keating that ran on electricity, including almost every piece of equipment in the command post.

  First the big screens on the walls—the maps of the outpost and the tac-chat dialogue—winked out and went dark.

  Next, the video screens from the motion-sending cameras on the southern perimeter started blanking out, one by one.

  Finally, we lost the lights, the radios, and the coffeepot.

  Although we still had our battery-powered communications inside the outpost, we were now cut off from the outside.

  • • •

  UP AT THE MORTAR PIT, Breeding and his remaining men had taken up defensive positions just inside their hooch with their M4s pointed out the two doors, their eyes peeled for any sign of movement that would signal a Taliban assault.

  “Hey,” Rodriguez whispered to Breeding and Sergeant Janpatrick Barroga, the third member of their crew, “I think I hear something.”

  From above the concrete roof of their hooch, there were definite signs of movement. It sounded as if a group of enemy fighters was approaching the outer wire from the south, most likely from a large boulder directly behind the mortar pit.

  Then the men in the pit started hearing voices.

  As the enemy passed by, no more than fifteen or twenty feet from the pit, pushing east toward the mechanics’ bay and the shower trailers, they were laughing and cheering one another on.

  Judging by those voices, Breeding figured that there were probably two dozen men, far too many for the mortar crew to fight in close quarters. Breeding did, however, have one thing up his sleeve: the mines that were seeded at the edge of the wire about fifty yards away.