There were four men on the stretcher, and as they ran, the bullets of the enemy gunners who were trying to take them out thudded into nearby walls and kicked up small clods of dirt around their feet.
Courville, who was berating himself for having failed to bring his weapon, held on to one of the front straps, and the entire way he recited a little one-word prayer that he made up, right there on the spot, in the hopes of keeping them all safe. It went like this:
Fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck-fuck.
Kirk’s body was facing forward as they ran, with his shattered head lying at the front of the litter. He was completely limp, and the jostling of the litter team caused his arms and legs to flop over the sides of the stretcher and bounce crazily as they made a sharp left-hand turn and passed in front of the ammo supply point, then broke to the right to cross in front of John Deere’s room, then ran down the alley with the wall of Hescos off their left shoulders—and, abruptly, came up on the abandoned Bobcat.
With the Bobcat in the way, the passage was too narrow to allow two men to run through it abreast. So Knight, who was on the front right handle, was forced to let go, almost dumping Kirk onto the ground.
Somehow, Stanley seized the empty handle and took that corner of the stretcher the rest of the way in: past the west door of Red barracks, past the café, and straight through the front door of the aid station.
• • •
IT OFFERED a telling reflection of how the first few minutes of this battle were shaping up that when Kirk’s little team arrived, there was already a cluster of half a dozen wounded men on the porch in front of the aid station, with another half dozen or so inside.
Doc Cordova was juggling several injured Afghan soldiers plus a handful of Americans, all of whom had some combination of gunshot or shrapnel wounds to the head, chest, abdomen, or extremities. The sheer number of casualties was pretty startling. But what shocked Courville even more was that everyone who wasn’t laid out on the floor seemed to be crouched on their knees.
“What the fuck is wrong with you guys?!” he exclaimed as Kirk’s stretcher cleared the doorway.
“We just got hit,” explained Cody Floyd, the medic for Blue Platoon. “I got one in the armpit. Stone’s leg is pretty cut up. Hobbs has got shrapnel in his neck and his chest, and somehow he got himself nailed in the ear too.” (Specialist Andrew Stone was one of the mechanics, and Sergeant Jeffery Hobbs was the medic for Headquarters Platoon.)
As it turned out, shortly after Courville had departed for the Shura Building, an RPG had slammed into the aid station’s doorjamb, sending shrapnel spraying throughout the interior. Although the entire medical team except for Cordova had been hit, none of them was injured seriously—which was sort of hard to believe given that a piece of the RPG had whacked Stone’s combat vest with enough force to snap two of his magazines in half.
As Courville helped move Kirk to the middle of the room so that they could start working on him, he realized that most of the blast had been concentrated on the metal box on which Courville typically sat whenever they were waiting out an engagement. That was enough to make Courville pause for a moment. If he had been sitting there, his face would have been taken off by that blast.
In a very real sense, Kirk had probably saved his life.
Now it was time to try and return the favor.
When Doc Cordova performed his initial assessment, he could see that the sniper’s bullet had caused multiple fractures along the right side of the base of Kirk’s skull. Thanks to the RPG that had slammed into the wall of the Shura Building, Kirk also had multiple ballistic impact points on his right arm and the right side of his chest. Because his brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen, he was experiencing a form of respiratory distress known as agonal breathing, which would require one of the medics to respirate for him using a bag-valve mask to perform the work that his lungs no longer could. Finally, noted Cordova, Kirk was bleeding like a stuck pig.
While Courville worked to control the bleeding, Cordova was trying to get an IV into one of his veins. After several failed attempts, he turned to a device called a FAST1, which is designed to access a patient’s vascular system by driving a line directly into his sternum.
The FAST1, which looks like a flashlight, has ten needles protruding from the business end. When it is slammed home, the central needle punches all the way into the marrow of the chest bone. It’s a fairly brutal procedure, but once Cordova rammed the line through, the medics were able to start getting saline solution, blood expanders, and other fluids into Kirk’s body. Then they jammed a tube down his throat so they could get him on oxygen, and started chest compressions in an effort to keep blood moving through his body.
While all of this unfolded, Kirk’s eyes, which were now open, remained glazed and fixed on the ceiling while lungs continued to emit labored, gasping breaths.
Courville had no time to take any of this in, because more wounded men were already pouring through the door.
Almost all of these were Afghans, and one or two of them involved some horrific casualties, the worst being a soldier who no longer had his eyes. He appeared to have taken a blast directly to the face from either a hand grenade or an RPG. His right eyeball was dangling from its socket, still attached to a whitish-looking nerve. The other orb had been punctured, and its contents—a clear, gel-like fluid—were smeared down the side of the man’s face.
Even with all of the butchery he’d witnessed in Iraq, Courville had never seen anything quite like this. He didn’t even try to put the eyeball back in its socket, deciding instead to cup it gently in a bandage and then wrap the man’s head in gauze.
While he completed the job, a few more Afghans rolled in—men who, unlike the blind soldier, appeared to be suffering from only minor cuts and scratches or faking more serious injuries. Their aim, it seemed, was to take shelter in the aid station and hide from the enemy.
Courville and the rest of the medical team had no way of knowing that this onrush of frightened Afghans had been set in motion by a defensive collapse among our allies on opposite sides of Keating. Nor did the medics realize that in addition to sending some of those soldiers running for the aid station, this collapse had resulted in two groups of panicked men who were now racing across the camp in different directions.
Those human wave trains were about to come together within direct view of Zach Koppes, who, thanks to the fact that I’d pulled away his machine-gun team, was now all by himself.
• • •
ON THE MORNING of the attack, there were thirty-six Afghan National Army soldiers at Keating, including a platoon sergeant who was serving as the unit’s commander. When the ANA guard tower was blown to smithereens in front of Jones, that marked the moment that every one of these men ceased fighting and abandoned their posts on the east end of the camp.
We would not discover until much later that a number of these soldiers—somewhere between ten and fifteen—had thrown down their weapons and actually run through the breach in the concertina wire toward their attackers, presumably in the hopes of surrendering. Most of them were gunned down on the spot, although a few were captured or managed to disappear into the trees. Meanwhile, a larger group turned tail and started running as fast as they could toward the center of camp with the aim of seeking cover in whichever building looked most inviting: the barracks, the aid station, the command post.
At the same time that this rout was unfolding, the Afghan Security Guards who were responsible for holding the front gate on the opposite side of Keating also abandoned their post en masse and were now engaged in a similar stampede. While a handful of these men sought shelter in the buildings on the west side of the outpost—the mosque, the latrines, the showers—the bulk of them decided to run in the direction of the ANA encampment, having n
o clue that the defense of this entire sector had just collapsed.
Neither of these events came as a huge surprise to me or the rest of my guys. Not one of us believed the ANA or the ASG possessed either the will or the ability to hold and defend their ground. But no one had ever imagined that they might all bail out at the same time, then set off running toward one another—which was the spectacle that was now about to unfold before Koppes.
A couple of yards in front of his gun truck, these two groups of Afghans—the soldiers running from the east, and the security guards sprinting from the west—approached one another, converged . . .
. . . and kept right on going.
It was one of the strangest things Koppes had ever witnessed. Neither group of soldiers seemed to have the slightest effect on their counterparts. The two bands of men simply ran through each other like herds of cattle stampeding in opposite directions, each convinced that it was headed away from danger and toward a safer place.
As Koppes watched this cross-tracking, he realized two things: that the eastern side of camp was now wide-open, and that therefore the defense of that entire sector now consisted pretty much of himself and the Mark 19.
There was nobody else.
As bad as that was, Koppes was no less disturbed by what seemed to be taking place within the abandoned ANA compound to his left.
The half-dozen barracks buildings inside that compound had already absorbed some tremendous blows from the RPGs and B-10 rounds that had been raining down from the Diving Board. Most of those buildings, which were spaced close together and separated only by narrow footpaths, were composed of little more than sheets of plywood and scrap lumber. Inside this warren, the incoming ordnance now appeared to have ignited several fires, and flames were licking greedily at the wood and canvas. (According to a report published after the assault, the attackers employed gas-filled RPGs with the specific aim of setting Keating on fire.)
It wasn’t a conflagration, at least not yet. But it was gaining strength—and it seemed to be headed in Koppes’s direction.
• • •
AS FOR ME, the moment I’d left Koppes I headed directly for Red barracks because I’d heard that Kirk’s prognosis wasn’t looking good, and I knew that I’d need to provide his blood type in order to call for a medevac and get him headed toward the military hospital at Bagram, which was the only place that could handle his wounds.
As I darted through the alley between the gun truck and the barracks, I juked left and right in the hopes of throwing off the gunners who were trying to nail me.
The entire way, I could hear Bundermann going back and forth on the radio with Gallegos, who was now preparing to make a run from the latrines in the hope of assisting Larson.
“We need mortars, air support—anything—” Gallegos was yelling, “or we’re gonna die here!”
Gallegos was the kind of man who almost never lost his cool on the radio. So this could mean only one thing.
My best friend, Brad Larson, who was still stuck by himself out at the most vulnerable position in the entire battlespace, was in big trouble.
CHAPTER NINE
Luck
BY NOW, LARSON should have been dead several times over. Against some appalling odds, he’d managed to survive a fusillade of machine-gun fire, several snipers, at least one direct RPG hit, and perhaps most amazing of all, two reloads of the .50-cal. But as he started running through his third and final belt of linked machine-gun ammo, things seemed to be getting worse.
While there was still no sign that our mortars were up, the enemy fire was growing more intense and more accurate. The combined effect of it all was enough to make him think that his luck had finally turned and was now heading downhill in earnest, when two things happened that made him reconsider.
First, Mace showed up. About twenty seconds after that, Gallegos did too.
The front of Larson’s Humvee was shielded by a four-foot-high wall of gray-and-blue plastic sandbags. Tucked directly between this bulwark and the hood of the gun truck was an M240 machine gun, mounted atop a piece of steel pipe just like the one up at the mortar pit. When Mace arrived, a bit breathless from his run from the area near the latrines, he grabbed the machine gun and was racking back the charging handle when Gallegos, who had seniority, pulled him off and took his place.
Peering over the sandbags, Gallegos now had a direct view into Urmul, where he could see dozens and dozens of muzzle flashes exploding from the top of the mosque and the school, as well as from numerous windows and doorways in the houses along the near side of the village. Although Larson had already been firing into the village for more than ten minutes, Gallegos was a bit hesitant to start machine-gunning what he presumed to be the residents—Afghan civilians—without getting a green light from Bundermann.
“We’re getting attacked from the village,” he shouted into his ICOM radio. “Do I have permission to fire back?”
“Absolutely,” replied Bundermann. “Light it up.”
With that, Gallegos started pouring the 240’s entire three-hundred-round belt directly into Urmul while Mace took aim with his M4 at the fighters who were concentrated inside the Afghan National Police station, which was just outside the village and opposite our helicopter landing zone.
Adding two more guns to the fight certainly helped. With the extra firepower, Larson was able to focus more carefully on the individual RPG and machine-gun teams. But with no more than two thousand rounds for the 240, Gallegos knew that he could sustain fire for only another four minutes or so, and that Mace’s seven thirty-round magazines wouldn’t last any longer. After that, their guns would be useless.
“We need ammo right now,” he yelled into his radio. “This is no bullshit!”
As he spoke, you could hear explosion after explosion after explosion in the background. It sounded horrific and unrelenting.
• • •
ALTHOUGH THERE WERE a handful of ammo bags scattered in various different buildings around Keating, almost all of our munitions were stored in the ammo supply point, or ASP. This was actually two separate structures, both located on the east side of the Shura Building. Each was made out of Hescos arranged in the shape of a rectangle about twelve feet deep and twenty feet wide. Both rooms were protected by a roof made of heavy beams and plywood topped by three or four feet of sandbags, all covered by blue tarps for waterproofing.
The building on the north housed hard-case munitions that were fairly stable and therefore unlikely to blow up. This included all the ammo for our machine guns, as well as the bullets for our carbines and sidearms. The more volatile stuff—grenades, AT4s, and claymores, along with our entire stash of TNT and C4 explosives—was warehoused in the building next door. Inside both structures, crates were stacked to shoulder height and sat atop wooden pallets running along each wall, which left a pathway running down the middle of each room.
In many ways, these two buildings were the linchpin to Keating’s defense because they contained everything we needed to stay in the fight. If they were to fall into the enemy’s hands, our guns would soon go silent, at which point the battle would devolve into a hand-to-hand affair as the Taliban moved from building to building shooting us down point-blank until there was no one left.
When the radio calls for ammo started coming in from the perimeter, the section leaders of Blue Platoon gathered their men to form a team whose mission was to get out to the ammo supply point, grab whatever was required, then fan out to the battle positions that needed resupply.
Sergeant Eric Harder and Sergeant John Francis were poised to lead this group, which numbered seven guys, including themselves. And from the second they burst through the west door of Blue barracks and started their run, they started taking contact from every direction, both small-arms fire and RPGs.
Harder was in the lead, followed by Francis and then the rest of the team. They covered the distanc
e quickly, and thanks to the fact that a good portion of the route was partially concealed by leafy tree branches or camouflage netting strung between the buildings, they didn’t absorb a real hit until they took their first pause, between the command post and Red Platoon’s barracks.
As Harder peeked around a corner formed by the Hescos to confirm that the rest of the route was clear, an RPG exploded directly in front of him.
Although the concussion was powerful enough to knock Harder to the ground, the shrapnel missed him. Francis picked him up, and together they completed the final twenty-five yards of their rush and stacked up in a line along the wall of Hescos bisecting the camp. It was here that they ran into Ty Carter, a specialist from Blue Platoon who had arrived just a few seconds earlier and was preparing to enter the southern building.
Both structures had a plywood door framed with two-by-fours anchored into the Hescos. Each door was fronted with a crude wooden handle and a small metal clasp onto which one could place a lock. For the bulk of our stay at Keating, those doors had been unlocked. But just a few days earlier, First Sergeant Burton had ordered the locks fastened as part of the general effort to corral all of the weapons in camp prior to Keating’s impending shutdown. This wasn’t a popular move—and when Harder and Francis reached the ammo supply point, the reasons became obvious.
No one had thought to bring the keys, which were kept back at the command post.
Fortunately, the handles and metal clasps on the doors were flimsy enough that when Harder grabbed hold, he had no problem ripping the doors open with his bare hands.
As he pulled the lock off the door to the north building, yet another RPG hit the Hesco wall directly across from him and exploded, blowing Francis into the wall while flinging Harder through the open doorway, in the process peppering one of his legs with shrapnel.
Red Platoon Page 14
