Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  What Bundermann didn’t yet know, however, was that the men at Fritsche had been subjected to an assault no less vicious than the one that had been unfolding at Keating. Just like us, they’d been awoken by a massive bombardment of rockets and machine-gun fire coming from all directions. And like us, they immediately understood that this was no mere hit-and-run, but a sustained effort to overwhelm them.

  OP Fritsche

  As Bellamy now explained to Bundermann, his post was being hit from all directions with massive fire, much of which was concentrated on the mortar pit in order to prevent Fritsche’s biggest guns from coming up to support Keating. The attackers, who were now within seventy-five yards of Fritsche’s perimeter—almost at the edge of their wire—had the pit under such intense fire that Bellamy’s men couldn’t even get within thirty feet of their mortar tubes.

  Once again, the Taliban were coordinating their attack in a manner that neatly conformed to what we all had anticipated, and the strategy was proving every bit as effective as we’d feared it would:

  6:17 a.m.

 

  >>> Fritsche and Keating taking heavy contact.

  >>> It is coming from everywhere: the Switchbacks, from Urmul, the Diving Board and North Face at Keating . . .

  >>> Fritsche is surrounded as well.

  With Fritsche’s mortars neutralized, at least for the moment, the enemy had not only robbed us of our most effective weapons system, but also cut off our plan B.

  • • •

  ALL OF THAT was bad enough—but just as disturbing, from Bundermann’s perspective, was that his initial requests for air support had yet to yield any results.

  When the attack broke out, the nearest Apache helicopters were on the tarmac in Jalalabad. Their crews were responding as fast as possible—indeed, the first sortie would be in the air within the next three minutes. But those aircraft, which were the army’s most effective tools for dealing with a crisis like this, would take almost an hour to reach us.

  While the choppers were scrambling to get airborne, Bundermann’s request for air support was relayed to Bagram Airfield just outside Kabul. A pair of the air force’s F-15E Strike Eagles were sitting at the end of the runway and preparing to launch when they were notified by satellite radio that their current mission had been scrapped.

  “Proceed directly to COP Keating,” said the call. “It’s being overrun.”

  As this pair of Bagram-based planes got airborne, two more F-15s that were just coming off of a night sortie, and thus already in the air, were also ordered to assist. All four of those fighters were armed with two five-hundred-pound laser-guided bombs, three five-hundred-pound GPS-guided bombs, and one two-thousand-pound GPS-guided bomb, plus 20-mm machine guns. Those planes wouldn’t be enough to stop the Taliban’s attack in its tracks. But they could slow the enemy down and buy Bundermann some time to regroup.

  That was all good news.

  The bad news was that it would be at least another ten minutes—maybe even fifteen—before the first of those aircraft was on the scene. And thanks to some additional communications complications that occur whenever the army and the air force are attempting to coordinate, it would take another five minutes to clear the airspace and provide positive ID on the targets before those fighters could drop their bombs or conduct a strafing run.

  That sounds like a short amount of time. And it is—unless you’re about to be overrun, in which case it feels like forever.

  • • •

  WITH BOTH KEATING’S and Fritsche’s mortar pits pinned down, with the first fighter jets still twenty minutes away, and with only two of our four battle trucks now returning fire, Bundermann knew that it was only a matter of minutes before the enemy breached the perimeter at Keating. And apparently the Afghan National Army soldiers who by now had abandoned their positions on the eastern side of camp understood that danger too—because it was right about then that nearly a dozen of these men burst through the door of the command post.

  “Where are the helicopters?” demanded the Afghan commander. “We need to leave!”

  At first, Bundermann was so shocked by the absurdity of this request that he didn’t know how to respond.

  “Uh, that’s not gonna happen,” he finally stammered. “You and your men need to get back out there and defend your side of the perimeter—immediately.”

  At this point, the Afghan commander started acting in a manner that would later be described in the official after-action documentation as “somewhat detrimental to the command and control of the troop.” What this translated into was that the dude totally lost his shit while Bundermann and the rest of the team inside the command post stared in amazement.

  In the midst of this rant, Lakis, the Latvian military advisor, burst through the door and urged the Afghan commander to get his men back into the positions that they had deserted.

  “Hey, we need to get out of here and do our job,” declared Lakis. “Let’s get outside and shoot some people!”

  This had no effect whatsoever on the ANA commander, who continued to call for helicopters to evacuate him and his men.

  Finally, with a nod from Bundermann, Lakis seized the Afghan soldier standing next to him, opened the door with his shoulder, and hurled the man outside into the alley—just as Gregory and I were exiting the barracks with the machine gun.

  When I saw that man land in the dirt, I knew nothing of what had just taken place inside the command post. But it didn’t take much for me to connect the dots and draw the obvious conclusion:

  If there was a way to turn this situation around in the next few minutes, no one—not even our supposed allies—was going to help. Instead, we were going to have to figure things out for ourselves.

  • • •

  WITH GREGORY AT my heels I raced south, moving along the alley between our barracks and the command post before heading uphill toward the chow hall. As we ran, we kept close to the walls and did our best not to draw attention to ourselves, because I was hoping to sneak into a place and set up our machine gun without being spotted by the enemy.

  As we approached the chow hall, we made a sharp right turn and hooked around the side of the mosque, at the far corner of which lay a drainage ditch that was about four feet deep and two feet wide. On the opposite side of the ditch was a concrete slab on which sat a rectangular metal structure that was four feet high and painted lime green. This was the diesel-operated 100kW generator that had already been disabled by rocket fire.

  Because it was wedged right next to the mosque and our toolshed, the generator was somewhat concealed from the north, the south, and the east. From the top of the generator, however, you had an unobstructed view of the entire western side of camp, all the way out to the gun truck where Larson, Gallegos, and their teammates were trapped. There was also a direct line of sight to the Switchbacks and the Waterfall on the left, the Putting Green on the right, and wedged between them, the village of Urmul.

  It wasn’t the perfect spot for a machine gun, but it was the best place I could think of—and hopefully it would fit the bill for what I had in mind.

  Gregory and I slithered on top of the generator and got busy setting up the Mark 48. As we worked to get the gun in place, I could hear Gallegos and Bundermann going back and forth on the radio: Gallegos still forcefully calling in his requests for mortar fire and close air support; Bundermann continuing to reply that the mortars at both Keating and Fritsche were suppressed, and that the fighter jets would not be on station for another ten minutes.

  When Gregory fed the first hundred-round belt of ammo into the left side of the gun’s feed tray, I stared down the barrel and got my first good look at what we were facing.

  There were several RPG teams along the Switchbacks and the Putting Green, along with at least one sniper team inside the Urmul mosque. The enemy also had one machine gun concealed behind a cl
ump of rocks at the Waterfall area, another team tucked behind the foliage in the Switchbacks above the mortar pit, a third one laying down fire from a house on the north side of Urmul, and a fourth team that was nestled behind a large boulder on the slope just above the subgovernor’s house, the highest structure in the village, directly beneath the Putting Green.

  Every one of those positions was hurling as much fire as they possibly could at the LRAS2 gun truck, which was being hit from so many directions that the Humvee was all but obscured by a haze of dust and smoke. As appalling as all of that was, however, what really took my breath away was just how many fighters there were moving around the hillsides. They were descending from the ridgelines in every direction, and as they moved through the rocks and the trees, clad in their loose-fitting robes and turbans and carrying their weapons, they looked like an army of ants coming down the mountain.

  There was so much noise coming from both the attackers and from our remaining two gun trucks—one explosion after another—that there was no need for me to keep my voice down as I keyed the mike on my radio to interrupt Bundermann and Gallegos.

  “Hey, G, I sneaked into a place where I’ve got a machine gun on pretty much every sector you’re taking fire from,” I said. “I’m gonna open up and start suppressing, and if I can lay on enough fire to keep their heads down, you and your guys can make a run for it. Can you do that?”

  It was clear to Gallegos and his team in LRAS2 that they needed to find a way to break contact and make their way back to the Shura Building. Their best chances of survival—as well as of keeping everybody else inside the wire alive—was to make a push to the Shura Building, secure the ammunition stored next door, and then fight from there.

  The plan that Gallegos had come up with—and which he’d already thrown out to the rest of the group for their reaction—was based on where they were sitting. Since Gallegos and Mace were positioned on the north side of the truck, they would open their doors and, together with Martin, who would join them, they’d make a direct run for the latrines while Larson and Carter, shielded on the south side of the truck, would provide cover fire.

  Once Gallegos, Mace, and Martin were in position behind the latrines, they would then lay down cover fire to enable Larson and Carter to make the run. Then they would repeat the same set of moves to reach the safety of the Shura Building.

  “Right now, we’re just taking too much fire to move,” replied Gallegos.

  “Okay, I’m gonna open up with the Mark 48,” I declared. “Move when you can—I’m engaging now.”

  With that, I took a deep breath, racked the bolt on the rear of the weapon and opened up.

  Back in Carson during our battle-drill training, one of the most important things I always tried to impress on my guys was that when you’re facing an attack from several directions, it’s important not to allow yourself to become locked on a single individual or group. Don’t get tunnel vision, I’d tell them. Even though you’ll be fighting against your instincts to finish the job, never allow yourselves to fixate on annihilating any one target. Send out an accurate burst toward each one, then move on to the next; otherwise you’ll get hit by someone coming at you from a direction you’re not even aware of.

  Doing my best to adhere to the advice that I’d dished out others, I started on my left and began punching rounds into pockets of men throughout the Switchbacks, then started worked my way toward the village in the center and eventually swept to the Putting Green on the right. Then I moved back to Urmul, then returned to the Putting Green, then jumped over to the Switchbacks.

  Urmul—Putting Green—Waterfall—mosque—Switchbacks—Urmul again—Putting Green—Urmul again.

  Some of this was effective. I was able to eliminate two machine-gun teams—one high on the Switchbacks, the other lower down on the slopes just above our mortar pit. But as fast as I suppressed fire from one pocket of insurgents, two or three others would resume, and with each new burst from the Mark 48, I was drawing more and more attention to myself. Also, there were so many targets—and so many additional fighters now taking aim at me—that there was no way for me to keep up. If I’d been able to put another gun in place and coordinate some crossfire, it might have been possible to shut them down hard. But one gun simply wasn’t enough.

  As I burned through our first belt of ammo and Gregory was loading up the second, I could hear Gallegos calling me on the radio.

  “You can’t lay down enough fire for us—you’re not being effective!” he shouted. “There’s just too many.”

  That wasn’t at all the message I wanted to hear, so I bore down tighter, focusing more intently with each additional burst in the hopes that I could tear some permanent holes in the Taliban line. And in the process of doing that, I totally forgot the advice that I’d pounded so relentlessly into my own guys, allowing myself to get zoned in too narrowly on a single target—a one-story mud house on the north side of Urmul whose windows were bright with continuous muzzle flashes—while losing sight of the bigger picture, until—

  Buh-WHAM!!!

  To my far right, about forty yards downhill, a Taliban RPG team had made it to Keating’s front gate—which was no longer protected by the machine-gun turret atop the Shura Building—unlimbered their weapon, and sent a rocket directly into middle of the generator. The rocket hit the main motor housing just a few feet to my right, and the blast—which was ferocious—picked me up, hurled me into Gregory, and dumped both of us together with the machine gun off the far side.

  I picked Gregory off the ground and confirmed that he hadn’t been hit.

  “Get back to the barracks, try to find some additional machine-gun ammo, and bring it back here,” I ordered. Then I scrambled on top of the generator with the Mark 48, got the gun back in place, and started cranking through my final hundred rounds on the last belt of ammo.

  “You’re not bringing enough firepower to allow us to move,” reported Gallegos. “They have too many guys—we can’t move. We just can’t move!”

  By now, the enemy gunners had a bead on me, and as I reached the end of my third burst, rockets and gunfire were striking the metal surface of the generator all around me.

  “Hey, G, I can’t hold this position any longer,” I radioed as my final rounds were expended. “I’m outta ammo, they know where I’m at, and I just can’t cover you. I’m sorry!”

  “Roger that—thanks for trying,” he replied. “I guess we’ll just hang out here for a bit longer.”

  As I climbed down from the generator, I had a horrible feeling that I’d just failed on two fronts. I’d been unable to deliver Gallegos, Larson, and the rest of their guys what I’d promised, while simultaneously doing absolutely nothing to relieve Bundermann and his team of the mess that they were trying to solve. A mess that, from what Bundermann could now see and hear back at the command post, only seemed to get worse with each passing second.

  • • •

  EVEN BEFORE the Afghan National Army soldiers had been booted into the alley outside the command post, Bundermann was already searching for another way to get Keating some artillery support. The person he turned to was Cason Shrode, his square-built, 220-pound fire-support officer.

  In addition to having been West Point’s lead tackler during his senior year, Shrode was exceptionally good at the intricate and technical challenges of coordinating air support, artillery, and mortars—in essence, anything that might be moving through the air around or above Keating.

  Bundermann and Shrode both knew that the fastest way to get some relief for Keating was to find a way of freeing up Fritsche’s mortar pit—and perhaps the best way of solving that problem was by turning to the massive gun emplacements at Bostick.

  Inside the center of Bostick were several howitzers, each of which was capable of hurling a 155-mm explosive shell well over ten miles. That was close enough to put a shell just outside the wire at Keating. But at tha
t range, the margin of error for Bostick’s artillery was eight hundred meters—which meant that any shell they fired was just as likely to obliterate us as to destroy whatever target we were asking them to hit.

  On the other hand, Fritsche was slightly closer to Bostick than Keating, and therefore within accurate range of those big guns—albeit just barely. So Shrode immediately started pulling up all the information we had on how to target Bostick’s howitzers onto Fritsche’s attackers. If the gun crew at Bostick could get some of their 155 shells close to those attackers, Fritsche’s mortar team might be able to lay their guns onto targets like the Putting Green, the North Face, the Diving Board, even Urmul itself—places from which we were getting hit the hardest—and thereby take some of the heat off Keating.

  While Shrode punched up the data and crunched the numbers, Bundermann turned to answer a series of calls that he’d been getting from the command post at Bostick, where Colonel George was monitoring the battle.

  Several minutes earlier, the colonel had awoken to the news that Keating was in danger of being overrun. When he stepped into the command post, his team already had a map of the outpost up on the board. Based on the information that was pouring in, they were filling in the sectors that the Taliban controlled with red markers. When George looked at the board, everything but the aid station, the command post, and Red Platoon’s barracks was colored in.

  For the first several minutes, while George’s battle captain and his second in command ran the fight, the colonel concentrated on ensuring that the requests for fixed-wing and rotary air support were given full priority as they went up the chain of command. Now, with a range of aircraft bearing down on Keating from several different directions, George took over the SATCOM to assure Bundermann that help was on the way, and then turned to the next item on his list of concerns.

  “Do you have accountability?” he asked.

  Accountability isn’t necessarily the first priority during an attack, but the moment that things are under control, it’s one of the first things that high command wants to know: