A bit stunned, both men picked themselves up and got to work tearing into the crates and handing their contents off to the men behind them. Along with instructions to return to Blue’s barracks after he’d completed his run, each soldier was told what he was being given and where it needed to go:
Here’s two thousand rounds of 7.62 for the Mark 48. Get this to the Shura Building. Go!
Here’s a case of Mark 19 for Koppes. Get this to LRAS2 now!
Carter, here’s a crate of linked 7.62 for the 240. Get this out to Gallegos. GO-GO-GO!
When Francis and Harder finished passing out what was needed, they retraced their run back to the barracks. Once again, they found themselves under fire the entire way.
Although neither man was hit, the fact that bullets and rocks were kicking up so close to their feet left them convinced that the enemy had taken note of their initial run and anticipated their move. Next time they were ordered out to the ammo shed and the gun trucks, they might not be so lucky.
As bad as it was in the center of camp, however, things were even worse out at LRAS2.
• • •
ONE ODDITY OF LARSON’S .50-cal machine gun was that it wasn’t anchored securely to the turret of his gun truck. The weapon rested inside a steel yoke, which had a two-inch pin protruding from the bottom that fit loosely into a hole in the turret. As Larson got down to the last five linked rounds in his third belt of ammo, the drawbacks of this system were revealed when another well-aimed RPG came torpedoing in from Urmul, slammed into the sandbags in front of the truck, and exploded with enough force to lift the eighty-four-pound gun into the air and fling it off its mount while destroying its receiver housing and feed tray.
As an added bonus, the same RPG sent shards of metal into Larson’s right armpit.
By this point, the Taliban snipers were so fixated on Larson that it was impossible for him to lean out of the turret and retrieve the gun. As he took a final glance at it before ducking down into the Humvee, he saw a sniper’s bullet strike one of the last five rounds hanging from the breech, and cleanly take the head off the bullet’s casing.
Dropping from the turret and settling into the driver’s seat, Larson couldn’t help but feel like someone had just punched him in the gut. The loss of the .50-cal was a heavy blow, possibly even a game changer. But his run of bad luck was just getting started.
At this point Gallegos, who was still standing outside behind the M240 and firing for all he was worth, now became the focal point for much of the enemy’s attention as Taliban snipers, machine-gunners, and RPG teams from inside Urmul, up in the Waterfall area, and behind RPG Rock all began homing in on him. As the density of their fire increased, rounds from several snipers and AK-47 shooters punched past the sandbags shielding his gun. At least one of these scored a direct hit on the M240’s feed tray and foregrip, instantly rendering the weapon inoperable, which meant that Gallegos and Mace had no choice but to abandon their position in front of the Humvee and join Larson inside the truck.
LRAS2 had now lost both of its primary weapons systems, and the men inside had only their carbines to fight with.
This they tried to do, lowering their windows just enough to accommodate the barrels of their M4s and taking careful aim at their attackers. But when the snipers realized what was happening, they started placing rounds through the two-inch gaps at the tops of the windows, forcing the three men to pull their weapons back inside and close the windows up tight. The Taliban snipers then continued shooting directly into the bulletproof glass. The heavy 7.62 rounds from their Dragunovs couldn’t penetrate the three-inch-thick glass, but they left indentations the size of baseballs and created dozens of starburst patterns that made the windows almost impossible to see through.
“Holy shit, there’s a lot of them out there,” remarked Gallegos.
As they tried to take stock of where things stood and decide what to do next, the passenger door on the right side of the truck swung open to reveal Ty Carter, who had just made the seventy-five-yard sprint from the ammo supply point, and was now standing there holding two bags of ammo for the inoperable M240.
“I got your ammo!” Carter announced. He was surprised that no one was outside manning the machine guns.
“Either get in and shut the door, or get the hell out of here!” yelled Gallegos.
As Carter climbed in and shut the door, Larson asked if he had any M4 rounds. Carter was handing over his extra mags when the door swung open again.
It was Vernon Martin, a sergeant attached to HQ Platoon who was Keating’s chief mechanic, responsible for every motor-driven machine on the outpost.
“I heard you guys need ammo?” said Martin.
“Get in or get the hell out of here!” Gallegos yelled again.
Martin handed in the bags of ammo he’d been lugging, then climbed in straight over Carter and squeezed himself into the gunner’s platform underneath the turret, whose hatch was jammed open by the damaged .50-cal.
Mace was in the process of divvying up the magazines from Martin’s M4 when an RPG slammed directly into the turret, sending flames and shrapnel through the open hatch. Martin absorbed most of it: hot, jagged pieces of metal penetrated his legs and hips in numerous places.
While Martin screamed in pain, Gallegos keyed the pork chop, the handheld mike that controlled communications through the truck’s radio, to let Bundermann know that the mainspring defense on the entire western side of Keating was useless, and that the men inside his gun truck were now sitting ducks.
• • •
ALTHOUGH THE HEAVY WEAPONS systems on LRAS2 were out of action, the remaining battle trucks were still in the fight. But all three of those gunners—Faulkner, Koppes, and Hardt—were about to go “black on ammo” (which meant they were out) and were issuing urgent radio calls for a resupply. To the section leaders of Blue Platoon, whose men had only just returned to the barracks, it was clear that they needed to make another push to the ammo station. With that in mind, Harder and Francis started forming up a second team.
First on deck to go through the door were two young specialists: Michael Scusa, followed by Jeremy Frunk.
As with many of the younger soldiers in Blue Platoon who had spent the first month and a half of our deployment up at Fritsche, I knew little about Scusa other than the occasional remark one of my own guys dropped. If there was anything about him that stood out, it was that he seemed the opposite of what one imagines a warrior should look like.
Michael Scusa
With his glasses and the awkward, boyish smile that he wore, a lot of the guys said that Scusa looked like someone from the cast of Revenge of the Nerds—although Koppes (who had strong opinions about things like this) argued that he was instead a dead ringer for Ralphie Parker, the goofy nine-year-old kid in the movie A Christmas Story.
Regardless, the two points on which everyone agreed were that Scusa cared deeply about his wife, and that nothing could make him stop talking about their young son. It didn’t matter whether he was on guard duty, standing in line for chow, or burning poop out at the latrines, if you were there with Scusa, it was pretty much a guarantee that you’d be treated to a lengthy and excruciatingly detailed update on every aspect of his little boy’s world. How many naps he was taking each day. How far he’d been able to crawl. What he’d eaten for breakfast every morning since last Tuesday. These lectures could get so tedious that many of the guys had started making jokes behind Scusa’s back, and sometimes even to his face. But it said something about both them and about what they really thought of Scusa that although the teasing was often vulgar it was never mean or cruel. Unlike the rest of us, he seemed too decent for that.
Despite his gentle vibe, however, Scusa was a competent soldier, which was why he didn’t hesitate when Hill ordered him to make a push through the west door and get to the ammo station for another resupply.
He was r
unning the second he got outside, and he was moving fast enough that he got five steps down the alley before the Taliban sniper who was hidden somewhere along the North Face, and who had that doorway lined up in his crosshairs, managed to shoot him down. It happened right in front of LRAS1, where Koppes, who caught the whole thing, heard only a single sound—a sharp little expression of surprise that came out like “heh!”—as Scusa went to ground, hard.
The bullet, which had pierced the right side of his neck, severed his jugular vein and his brachiocephalic artery, then cut his spinal chord in two before blowing an exit hole in his back.
Frunk, who was only a step or two behind, was preparing to grab Scusa when a series of three separate shots were fired from the same location along the North Face.
The first round clipped the nylon sling on Frunk’s assault rifle. As he sensed the weapon starting to fall and lunged to catch it, the second shot passed directly over his neck and plowed into the wall behind his head. That sent him diving to the ground, where fragments of the third bullet drove into his arm and leg after clanging off the side of Koppes’s gun truck.
Frunk crawled back to the door, arriving just as Harder and Francis were about to head out.
“Scusa’s shot in the face,” reported Frunk as they dragged him inside.
With that, Harder and Francis each seized a smoke grenade, pulled the pin, and popped it into the alley—one in front of Scusa and the other behind.
When the grayish-white smoke was dense enough to cloak their movements, the two sergeants dashed outside, scooped Scusa’s body off the ground, and ran him to the aid station.
For the moment, there would be no more resupply runs going out to Hardt, Koppes, Faulkner, or the five men out at LRAS2. They would all have to make do with whatever they had left.
• • •
ALTHOUGH GALLEGOS was the sort of man who was driven by the darker forces at center of his soul, he also had a sense of humor. A lot of the younger guys initially found this surprising, but it was true. More than any of us, I think, he had a flair for staring misery and fear straight in the face, and laughing.
This was more than just an expression of Gallegos’s defiance (although that was surely another signature aspect of his character). Instead, the laughter arose directly from Gallegos’s appreciation for the way that the world can sometimes smash horror and levity together with such force that you can’t even tell them apart. And a good example of how that worked was right now, because as Gallegos took stock of how thoroughly and utterly fucked he and his four companions were, he found that he couldn’t stop giggling.
“Ho-ho-ho,” he chuckled as another sniper round tried to punch through the glass right next to his head. “WHOA . . . damn, was that close!”
In some ways, this was helpful. It lowered the tension inside the truck by a notch or two—especially, perhaps, for Martin, who was grimacing with pain as he pulled a piece of dressing from his aid pouch and tried to bind the shrapnel wounds on his leg. But it didn’t do a thing to change the fact that they were trapped inside an undrivable Humvee whose armor had been scalded by dozens of rockets, whose turret was wedged open by a useless machine gun, and whose windows were so smashed up that one could barely see out. But perhaps the most intolerable aspect of their plight was that there was absolutely nothing they could do other than sit there and listen to the Force Pro net, which was blaring over the speaker mounted up in the turret.
Although they had piled into the truck in no particular order, they were positioned in a manner that roughly reflected their relative authority. Gallegos, the senior soldier, was in the front passenger seat that’s typically reserved for the tactical commander, and was holding the pork chop. Larson was in the driver’s seat, and in the backseats were the two junior specialists—Mace behind Gallegos, and Carter behind Larson—with Martin, the mechanic, wedged between them.
In a testament to the importance of luck in combat, the places where each man was sitting would soon seal his fate—although they had no way of knowing this. All they really understood was that together they were confronting one of a soldier’s hardest and most frustrating predicaments, which was being forced to sit back passively while hoping that somebody was putting together a plan to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.
As it turned out, I was working on something along those lines. The only problem was that, given the way the odds had been stacked, I wasn’t sure that it had a prayer of working.
CHAPTER TEN
Tunnel Vision
IF YOU THINK of combat in terms of football—which is not a bad analogy—then the role played by a platoon sergeant is closest to an offensive coordinator, a guy who is in the game but not on the field. Instead, his job is to stand back, watch closely, and make sure his team has everything it needs to keep moving the ball toward the end zone.
Up to this point in the battle, that’s pretty much exactly what I was doing. My task was to figure out where my guys were, what they needed, and how to deliver those resources to them. This meant that despite all the running around I was doing, I wasn’t engaged in any actual fighting, much less figuring out how to stage a counterattack. Instead, I was simply monitoring the radio in an effort to get accountability: a head count and location for every member of the platoon. Which is why, during the twenty minutes that followed the initial attack, I never even fired my weapon.
One of the many ways in which combat is not like football, however, is that if things start heading downhill fast, a platoon leader needs to come off the sidelines, jump onto the field behind the center, and make a throw. This doesn’t happen often—and if it does, there’s no manual for when and how it occurs. More than anything else, it boils down to a gut instinct, an innate understanding that it’s time to transition out of one role and into another. And perhaps that’s why, looking back on that morning now, I have no memory of making a conscious decision to set aside my responsibilities as a platoon sergeant and take direct action. There wasn’t really any thought involved at all—nor, for that matter, was there any hesitation or second-guessing. All I can say for certain is that after leaving Koppes at his gun truck and dashing through the alley toward the back door of our barracks, something about what I was hearing on the radio—in particular, the increasingly strident requests for help coming from Gallegos—convinced me that I had to try to make something happen.
When I stepped inside the barracks, the first person I spotted was Gregory, who was standing in the center of the room holding a Mark 48.
Although the Mark 48 is classified as a light machine gun, it’s heavy enough that its nickname among the guys who have to carry the thing is “the pig.” It’s a devastating weapon capable of putting out eight hundred rounds per minute with extreme accuracy.
“Hey, gimme that,” I said, reaching over and grabbing the gun. “How much ammo have you got?”
“About two hundred rounds,” Gregory mumbled. His face displayed the kind of blank, dull-eyed expression, which suggested that events were happening too swiftly for him to process.
Two hundred rounds wasn’t even close to what I needed. And although Gregory was a perfectly nice young guy, he was about as far from A-Team material as you could get and still be in Red Platoon. But the Mark 48 was the right tool for what I had in mind, which was to throw out a lifeline to the guys who were trapped with Gallegos—and that was the only thing that mattered right then. The rest would just have to sort itself out.
“All right,” I said to Gregory. “Follow me.”
We went out the same door I had just come in, which looks directly onto the rear door of the command post. We were both running, so I had only a split second to absorb what was going on, but as Gregory and I hooked a sharp right and raced south toward the gym and the mosque, I could hear enraged shouts:
“Get back to your positions and defend your country!”
As I turned to look, the door of the comman
d post opened and the body of an ANA soldier was hurled into the alley.
Inside, I could see Janis Lakis, the enormous Latvian first sergeant who was in charge of training the Afghan Army soldiers, seizing hold of a second Afghan and flinging him outside, where he sprawled in the dirt next to his companion.
“Where are your weapons?!” Lakis yelled in an accent that made him sound like Arnold Schwarzenegger. “Get out and fight for your country!”
Jesus, I wondered, what the hell’s going on in there?
The answer to that question was something I was able to piece together only later, and understanding it requires knowing a bit about what had been taking place inside the command post since I’d left.
• • •
DURING THE FIFTEEN MINUTES that had elapsed since Keating’s main generator had been taken out, Andrew Bundermann had found himself dealing with a cascade of crises, each bigger and more unsolvable than its predecessor.
As soon as the command post had lost power, First Sergeant Burton scrambled to get the SATCOM back up and running by switching the system over to battery power. Then he brought the tac-chat system back online by shunting it through the feed to our satellite antenna.
These moves had restored our external communications. But right around this time, the Fires net had gone down as another antennae—one that was positioned on top of the mortar pit—was obliterated by an RPG. Without any way of speaking to the men at our mortar pit, Bundermann had no idea whether Big John Breeding and his team were simply cut off or if their position had been overrun and they were now dead.
Fortunately, the radio connection between the command post and Fritsche still worked, so Bundermann contacted Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy, his counterpart at White Platoon. Bellamy was now the acting commander at Fritsche, which was equipped with a pair of mortars exactly like those at Keating.
Red Platoon Page 15
