Those claymores could pack enough of a wallop to blow some holes in the line of attackers before they reached the concertina wire that formed the southern perimeter of the outpost. The only catch was that the mines had not been tested or replaced in more than a year, despite our repeated appeals to Captain Porter to let us do exactly that.
Moving quietly, Breeding reached for the clacker, an electronic triggering device that would detonate both mines, squeezed it together like the handles on a set of pliers, and . . .
Nothing.
Neither of the claymores blew.
As Breeding seethed at the incompetency of our former commander, Barroga—who had arrived at Keating only two days earlier, and had never before been in combat—turned to him with a question.
“Hey, Sergeant,” Barroga asked, “are these attacks always this bad?”
“No, dude, not at all,” Breeding declared emphatically. “They have never been this bad.”
“Well . . . is everything gonna be okay?” asked Barroga, unable to connect the dots.
In his eighteen years in the army, John Breeding had never been a dispenser of bullshit. He saw no need to change now.
“I don’t know if we’re going to get outta this one,” he replied, looking Barroga in the eye. “All I can tell you is that if we go, we’re taking some of these motherfuckers with us.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Combat Kirk
TO SAY THAT JOSH KIRK found the prospect of a let’s-take-the-motherfuckers-with-us gunfight less than intimidating would not, perhaps, be entirely accurate, because this was precisely the sort of standoff—desperate, outmatched, furious—that Kirk lived for. It was the thing that lit his fuse like nothing else.
As far as Kirk was concerned, we were finally getting a taste of the real deal. And as such, this moment marked the arrival of the kind of test that no true soldier could fail to embrace. Which is why Kirk’s primary aim—aside from venting the impulse to get the hell out of Red barracks as quickly as possible so that he could start returning some fire—was to race directly to one of the most vulnerable points in camp.
It’s hard to imagine anywhere more important to Keating’s defense than the Shura Building. While the east wall of that structure formed the ammo supply point where all of our munitions and explosives were stored, the Shura’s roof housed the machine-gun turret from which Davidson was desperately trying to protect the front gate. The building had already taken the brunt of the very first wave of RPGs. It was here, Kirk knew, that his particular brand of aggression was most needed now.
As it happened, the battle roster indicated that Gregory and Knight were also supposed to be heading to the Shura Building. But as all three men clustered at the front door of the barracks and Gregory, who was first in line, started to push the thing open, he was greeted with a storm of gunfire that raked the stairs, the roof, and the ground directly in front of him.
Leaping back, Gregory collided against Kirk.
“We gotta find another way out,” barked Kirk, heading for the back door on the east side of the building.
He peeked through the door to make sure it was clear, then turned to his team.
“Gregory, grab that AT4,” he ordered as they headed out.
The three of them clattered down the alley in front of the command post, hooked a sharp left at the corner of the barracks, and squeezed past a Bobcat, a small front-loader that had been abandoned on the corner of our ammunition supply shed, partially blocking the path to the aid station. Then they moved along the wall of Hescos that formed the northern perimeter of the outpost and turned toward the Shura Building, roughly ten yards away.
Instead of a flat-out sprint, they bounded—each man moving forward, in turns, while the others covered him. With every pause, Kirk shoved another round into the breech of his .203 and pumped a grenade across the river toward the North Face while simultaneously letting loose with his M4. It look less than two minutes for them to complete their maneuver.
When they came through the back door on the east side of the Shura Building, they couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead because the air inside was filled with dust created by the RPG rounds that were pounding into the outer walls. As Kirk approached the ladder on the west wall leading to the entrance to the turret where Davidson was manning the M240 machine gun, he peered through the haze and spotted an Afghan Security Guard who had abandoned his fighting position just beyond the front gate, and was now taking shelter in the turret entrance.
“Get out of there, you fucking coward,” yelled Kirk as he grabbed the Afghan and shoved him out of the way. Then Kirk stepped to the side of the doorway and ordered Gregory to cover him while he punched a round from the AT4 up into the Putting Green.
Both men stepped into the open doorway, and Kirk raised the barrel of the single-shot rocket launcher to his shoulder.
As he took aim and prepared to fire, an RPG plowed into the side of the building and exploded, spraying shrapnel everywhere. The concussion, which was immense, hurled Gregory into the wall while slapping Kirk to the ground. As Kirk went down, a Taliban sniper somehow managed to put a round straight through his face.
Horrified, Gregory and Davidson—who had climbed down the ladder to help—seized Kirk’s vest and dragged him inside. As Kirk’s head slid along the ground, the dust was smeared with a streak of crimson. Meanwhile, Knight clawed his way up into the turret with the intention of getting the machine gun back in action.
When he reached the top of the ladder, Knight seized the pistol grip on the M240 and raised himself up to take a look down the barrel. As his head cleared the top of the turret, hundreds of rounds began slamming the turret shield from several directions at once, fragmenting off the steel flanges and generating a shower of sparks and tiny shards of metal that struck him in the face like a shovelful of gravel.
Stunned by the intensity of the fire, Knight withdrew from the turret and scrambled back down the ladder. When he reached the opening at the bottom, he was pulled up short by the sight of Kirk’s feet, which were stretched out on the floor, and the alarmed voice of Davidson, who had snatched Kirk’s radio from his combat vest and was now putting out the call for help.
• • •
OVER AT THE AID STATION, Courville was listening to the combat radio, which was tuned to the Force Pro net, while he peeked out the door and observed continuous muzzle flashes flickering up and down the Switchbacks and across the entire North Face.
“Bro, it’s fucking bad out there,” Courville reported to Cordova, who was standing with the phone in his hand, having just had his connection to the aid station at Bostick—where he was trying to warn the medical team to prepare for mass casualties—severed by the destroyed generator.
The second they realized that someone had been hit in the Shura Building and needed help, Cordova seized the trauma bag, which was reserved for grab-and-go emergencies, and flung the thing straight at Courville.
Courville, who was already halfway to the door, caught the bag on the run and was gone in a flash. He was moving so fast that he didn’t even think to grab his gun.
Instead of proceeding cautiously as Knight, Gregory, and Kirk had done just a few minutes earlier, Courville flung himself into a headlong dash toward the Shura Building. As he ran, bullets pounded into the dirt around his feet.
When he reached his destination, he spotted Kirk lying on his stomach directly inside the front door. Courville rolled him onto his back and gently shook his shoulders.
“Kirk! Kirk!” he yelled. “Dude, can you hear me?”
Kirk’s eyes were closed, and he made no response. The sniper’s bullet had smashed through the cheekbone directly under his left eye, drilled through his head, and exited through the base of his skull. On the floor next to his head were small chunks of brain matter lying inside a shallow pool of dark, frothy-looking blood. He was bleeding profusely from his
nose as well as from the wound at the back of his neck. And yet, remarkably, his lungs were still working. Every few seconds his chest would heave, forcing out a short, choppy breath that sounded labored and wet.
Kirk was still alive.
The trauma bag that Courville had hauled with him was jammed with enough medical supplies—combat gauze, pressure dressings, needles, and airway openers—to set up what we called a “mass-casualty” center inside the Shura Building. The idea was that we would best be able to protect our wounded and our medical team by spreading them between two locations rather than concentrating everyone in the aid station.
That was the theory. But when Courville took a look around the room he was in, it was clear that the notion of collecting and treating patients in this space was ludicrous. The ceiling was made of plywood and it already had several bullet holes through it. Given that the enemy could fire almost directly down on the roof, no patient would be safe lying in the center of the room.
Even worse, now that the machine-gun turret that was supposed to be protecting the front gate had been abandoned, Courville knew that there was no way we could hold and defend this position. So he decided right there, on the spot, that there would be no secondary trauma center. Instead, he would have to get Kirk back to the aid station—which meant a reversal of the gauntlet he had just run. But this time he and three other men would have to haul, at full speed, the unconscious body of the second-biggest soldier at Keating.
Courville didn’t hesitate.
“Hey, Davidson, can you run back to the aid station?” he called out as he unfurled a thick roll of gauze, tucked a few pieces of Kirk’s brain back into the exit wound, and began wrapping his patient’s head.
“We’re gonna need a stretcher.”
• • •
WHILE DAVIDSON SET OFF, I was trying to prevent some additional casualties from happening about two hundred yards to the east.
After leaving the command post, my first goal was to get to Koppes’s gun truck, LRAS1, which was still being targeted by some incredibly intense fire from the Diving Board. It was distance of only sixty feet, and I arrived to find that Jones and Dannelley were already there, crouched in front of the gun truck and firing their M240 toward the Diving Board.
That was a bit strange.
The front of Koppes’s gun truck was pointed south so that he could shoot directly up at the Diving Board and the Waterfall, which meant that his back was exposed to the North Face. So Jones and Dannelley’s job was to set up their machine gun behind the truck and start laying down fire on any snipers or RPG teams to the north that tried to shoot Koppes from the rear.
As it turned out, that’s exactly where they’d posted up when they’d first reached Koppes’s truck. But the Taliban, who had done their homework, had been waiting for this exact moment, because about thirty seconds after Jones and Dannelley got in position, a massive barrage of rocket and small-arms fire started hitting the ground around them.
“Dude, this is not good,” exclaimed Dannelley, who was manning the gun while Jones fed him ammo. “We need to move now.”
As they muscled the gun to the front of the Humvee and prepared to resume laying down fire on the North Face, an RPG from the Diving Board plowed into the patch of dirt that they had just vacated, and exploded. If they’d stayed there, it would have pureed them both.
A half second later, Jones looked to his northeast and caught sight of a second RPG. It was heading directly toward a guard tower on the near corner of the Afghan National Army side of camp, less than fifteen yards away.
That tower, which was made of two-by-sixes and plywood, sat six feet above the ground and looked like a rickety gazebo. Perched on a chair inside the tower was one of the many ANA soldiers whose apathy and indifference had so infuriated Jones during the previous four months. Oddly enough, that man’s demeanor didn’t seem to have changed, despite that we were now facing an all-out assault. Kicking back in a casual pose and staring placidly away from the direction in which the RPG was arrowing, he displayed the kind of vapid stare that made Jones wonder if the man wasn’t stoned out of his mind.
If so, it was probably a blessing. When the rocket slammed into the guard tower with a ferocious pa-WOOOSH, the entire structure, along with the soldier inside, was blown to pieces.
Jones had no chance to even register the horror of that moment, because a second later another rocket exploded directly in front of him, sending a jagged piece of shrapnel into Dannelley’s helmet and a second one into Jones’s leg.
Both men were knocked to the ground, and Jones, who was now writhing in pain, screamed, “my knee, my knee!”
“Keep your heads down,” yelled Koppes from the turret, where he was launching one grenade after another toward the Diving Board while sniper rounds from the North Face struck the back of the turret and bounced around inside the gun shield, sending frags of hot lead into his hands.
That was when I showed up.
• • •
AS I POSTED up along the west side of the gun truck by the hood, I could see that neither Jones nor Dannelley had any cover whatsoever. And although Koppes was working his Mark 19 for all it was worth, he wasn’t stopping the incoming fire that was targeting those two guys. There was so much RPG and B-10 fire coming down on them from the Diving Board that a cloud of flying dirt and moondust completely surrounded the front of the Humvee.
In another minute or two, they’d both be dead.
“You and Dannelley—displace back to the barracks right now,” I ordered Jones, whose knee was tormenting him but still intact.
“Wait there until we can develop this situation a little better and figure out where we’re gonna flex you guys to next.”
As they grabbed their machine gun and took off, yet another RPG drilled into the top of Blue Platoon’s barracks and dropped a piece of the roof directly onto Jones, crumpling him to the ground.
“Jones!” screamed Koppes, who had caught the whole thing out of the corner of his eye and was sure that Jones was down for good this time. But a second later, Jonesie was back on his feet and staggering behind Dannelley through a shallow trench that ran along the north side of Blue’s barracks.
Pushing Jones and Dannelley back to the barracks seemed like the right move. I assumed that if we were going to suffer a massive breach in our perimeter, it would probably take place on the western side of camp at either the front gate or out at the furthermost gun truck, where I could still hear Larson’s lone .50-cal hammering away. If that happened, we’d need to send most of our extra men, including Jones and Dannelley, into that sector. What this meant, however, was that I was about to leave Koppes all by himself, which I hated to do in the middle of such an intense firefight.
Sometimes there are no good choices in combat.
Just before I followed Jones and Dannelley, I reminded Koppes that he was only thirty feet from the command post, and that the guys inside Blue barracks were even closer. I confirmed that his truck was fully stocked with ammo, and that there was a Kevlar blanket on the rear of the turret, which was designed to protect him from getting shot in the back. Finally, I told him that the Afghan National Army troops were holding up the eastern side of the camp, so he had friendlies in the area.
“Sorry I pulled your machine-gun team off of you,” I said, looking up at him in the turret one last time before I made my run for Red barracks.
As I took off, I could hear Jim Stanley over the radio letting Courville know that a stretcher was on the way to the Shura Building to assist with moving Kirk.
• • •
THE MOMENT WORD got out that Kirk needed help, several of our guys, including Stanley, Raz, and Francis, had all converged on the aid station to help form a litter team and make the run.
As Davidson laid the stretcher next to him, Courville and Raz started cutting off Kirk’s gear, leaving nothing but his T-shirt an
d his underpants. They stripped his boots, his vest, and his chest rack, setting those items next to his weapons and his helmet, which had been blown off his head when he was shot.
While they did this, the enemy continued pounding the Shura Building relentlessly, hammering at the walls with RPGs and bullets and blowing more holes in the roof. The reverberations made the air so thick with dust that they could taste it.
One of the unwritten rules of combat is that you don’t get to reflect on loss until it’s over. So as Courville and his team completed preparations for what they would do next, none of them paused to consider just how outrageous this was or how unthinkable they found it that Josh Kirk, one of the toughest and most fearless soldiers any of them had ever known—a man who was universally regarded by everyone with whom he had served as all but indestructible—lay gasping in a pool of his own blood.
And yet Raz, being Raz—which is to say, being a man who combined brutality and empathy in a way that we all found odd and endearing in equal measure—what Raz did, in that moment, was to permit himself a few seconds of reflection that boiled down, in essence, to a wish.
A wish that the fucker who had just drilled Kirk in the face with a single shot, and who was probably still wedged between some rocks somewhere up there on the North Face, had killed Kirk instantly so that those who cared most deeply about him, those who loved him best, did not have to watch him struggle to breathe as they hefted his body from the floor of the Shura Building and loaded it onto a stretcher while chunks of his brain lay marinating in the dirt.
• • •
WHEN THEY FINISHED prepping their patient and got him loaded on the litter, Raz and Francis stepped outside with their guns and hurled out a curtain of suppressive fire from an overwatch along the Hescos that the Afghan Security Guards had abandoned. Then the rest of the guys grabbed on to the handles and headed through the door with Kirk.
When you’re running with a stretcher, it’s generally a lousy idea to weave or zigzag or to try anything fancy. Moves like that are an excellent way to dump your patient onto the ground. What you want to do is to chart the simplest, most direct line to where you need to get him, and then haul ass at a dead-out sprint. Which was pretty much exactly what they did.
Red Platoon Page 13
