Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  Even if they are wounded or dead, have you figured out where all your people are at?

  Unfortunately, when that request came in from Colonel George, things at Keating were very much not under control. And so Bundermann’s first impulse—the thing that he most wanted to do, not only because it would have been the truth but also because it might have helped convey some of the balls-to-the-wall urgency that the situation demanded—was to repeat the question back to Colonel George—Do I have accountability?—and then explain that in light of the fact that our Afghan allies had just left two entire sectors of the outpost wide-open to anyone who might want to waltz through the wire, and given that two of his key battle positions were now completely cut off—one of which, the mortar pit, he had no communication with whatsoever, while the other involved five guys who were wedged into a toasted piece of armor on the far side of camp; and furthermore, given that his command post had just been bum-rushed by a dozen Afghan dudes whose only interest lay in finding out when they were getting chauffeured out of the place by private helicopter; and also given that the enemy’s fire was continuing to pour down from the ridgelines from every direction and that he’d just had three soldiers shot in the face—what Bundermann really wanted to tell George was that, Hell no, he did not have accountability. Absolutely not. No accountability whatsoever—and furthermore, if accountability was something that George wanted him to provide, then the colonel needed to find a way of getting some fucking air support on station right now.

  That’s what Bundermann wanted to say.

  His actual response was a simple no, delivered in a manner that was controlled and professional. But despite his best efforts, Bundermann couldn’t quite suppress the tone of his voice, which sounded increasingly desperate.

  Even if George had been the sort of commander who didn’t tune in to that sort of thing, Bundermann’s rising anxiety would have been obvious to him from the messages that were scrolling on the tac-chat system in front of his screen, which were reaching a level of stridency that is not often seen except when men are facing extremis:

  6:39 a.m.

  < BlackKnight_TOC >

  >>> We need something.

  >>> Trucks are pinned. RPGs are being taken every time we try something. Mortars can’t do shit. We are taking indirect fire.

  >>> We took another casualty!!!

  When the classified transcripts of these communications were eventually dumped onto the Internet by WikiLeaks, the New York Times would describe them as a “frightening record” that depicted a group of young American soldiers “isolated and overwhelmed on enemy turf.”

  I suppose that’s more or less true. What mattered at the time, however, was that the sense of desperation that is so clearly evident in those text messages was about to set off a chain of dominoes, the first of which was already toppling in my direction.

  • • •

  I WASN’T PRIVY to any of Bundermann’s communications with Colonel George, nor did I much care as I pulled the machine gun off the generator and told Gregory—who had returned with more ammunition—to take cover in the adjacent drainage trench. At that moment, I was primarily concerned with ensuring that Gregory could hold this position if the enemy started coming through the front gate and tried to cut us off from Gallegos and his crew out at LRAS2. And to do that, he’d need some additional help.

  “I’m gonna get some more guys,” I said, handing off the gun.

  Then I took off, tracing the same route alongside the mosque, then past the command post back to the barracks.

  Just as I got to the east door of the barracks, I was spotted by Raz, who had finished helping to deliver Kirk to the aid station and was now headed back to the barracks for more orders.

  “Ro, dude—you’re hit!” he exclaimed.

  One of the weirder aspects of combat is that it’s quite possible to get shot and not have the faintest idea. You get so amped up on adrenaline that you tend to focus on everything but yourself. As if to underscore how true this was, I didn’t have a clue what Raz was talking about until he pointed to my right arm, which had a hole on the outside of the forearm about the size of a silver dollar, courtesy of a piece of shrapnel from the rocket that had blown me off the generator.

  There didn’t seem to be much blood, perhaps because the wound had already been cauterized by the heat of the metal. The edges were raised and at the center was a small crater. It almost looked as if someone had taken a welding torch and shoved it into the skin.

  My main concern was assuaged when I wiggled my fingers to ensure that I still had the use of my hand. My second worry was relieved when I flipped my hand over, rotating the forearm, and saw that there wasn’t any blood coming out the bottom, which meant that it wasn’t a through-and-through.

  I was set to brush the whole thing off and keep moving, but Raz was insistent about wrapping it and had already reached into my aid pouch, on the nonshooting side of my left hip, grabbed a dressing, and was now winding it around my arm as if he were cinching down the girth strap on a pony. It felt far too tight, but I had bigger things on my mind as I rolled through the door, stepped into the barracks, and spotted Jones standing by the west door awaiting orders.

  “Jonesie, I need you to get up to the trench by the mosque and help out Gregory,” I told him, knowing that Jones was a much better machine-gunner than Gregory and would be far more effective at laying down suppressive fire.

  “Get on the Mark 48, hold that position, and don’t let them get any closer.”

  Then my attention was pulled over to the west door by the sound of a heated argument. Stanley, our platoon’s senior squad leader, was standing in a nose-to-nose face-off with Hardt.

  From the tone and volume of their voices, they’d been going at it pretty hard. Hardt looked angry, while Stanley appeared exasperated. When Stanley caught sight of me, he took a step back and pointed in my direction.

  “You need to go talk to Ro,” he barked.

  Hoo boy, I muttered to myself as Hardt headed in my direction.

  What he laid on me in the next minute or two was an idea whose flawed assumptions and tactical misguidedness were exceeded only by the fact that it was so incredibly brave.

  PART III

  Overrun

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The Only Gun Left in the Fight

  WHAT HARDT HAD IN MIND arose from his awareness that we had lost all momentum and initiative. Our force was now fragmenting—breaking into small, isolated pockets of resistance like the mortar pit, Gallegos’s gun truck, and Fritsche—which could no longer support one another. But instead of reversing that downhill slide, it looked like we were now about to pull back further and give up even more ground. Before that happened, Hardt was determined to go and get our guys at LRAS2.

  The key to his plan was Truck 1, where Faulkner was still manning the .50-cal from the gunner’s turret. What Hardt wanted was to start up the Humvee and drive the thing from its current location all the way over to the western end of camp, a distance of about sixty yards, in order to relieve Gallegos and his team.

  “That’s a bad idea—Truck 1 is almost out of ammo,” I declared after he laid it out. “We need to come up with a better plan than driving a Humvee that’s almost black on ammo right into the middle of heavy contact.”

  “We just found some more .50-cal ammo, and I’ve got two guys coming with me,” replied Hardt, pushing back. “We’ll run the Humvee over there, and we’ll either throw Gallegos and his guys in the truck, or they’ll run alongside and we’ll give them cover that way as we bring them back.”

  Part of the problem with arguing against this was that the idea actually had merit. If Hardt could get Truck 1 all the way over to Gallegos, he’d place another heavy weapon system back into the fight at the far end of camp. At that point, he and Gallegos could decide if they wanted to stay there and use the .50-cal to lay fire on the Switchba
cks in the hopes of enabling Breeding and his crew—assuming they were still alive—to bring their guns back up at the mortar pit. Or Gallegos and his team would have the option of falling back to the Shura Building under the protection of Truck 1. Either way, we’d be in a stronger position than where we were now.

  My concern wasn’t the idea itself, but the way it would be executed.

  As Hardt and his team made their way toward Gallegos, they would be partially protected on their left flank, where the Humvee would be screened by the trees and other vegetation along the southern perimeter of the outpost. His right flank, however, would be completely exposed to the enemy gunners on the North Face, plus any RPG teams that might be massing around the front gate. Hardt’s crew would have absolutely no protection from that sector, and even if his gunner on Truck 1’s .50-cal was lightning fast, it would still be impossible for that shooter to focus on all the targets directly in front of him—the Waterfall area and the Putting Green—while simultaneously swinging over to fend off an attack coming from his right. Finally, there was simply no way that I could put a machine gun in place to support Hardt, because I’d just been driven off the one spot from which we could do that.

  “Look, I can’t do anything to secure your right flank,” I explained. “The generator’s the only place where we can do that—and me and Gregory just got blown off of the thing. It’s a bad idea.”

  As I laid this out, I caught something coming off of Hardt—partly a look but also a vibe—that told me it was pointless to keep pressing my case because he had no intention of allowing himself to be talked out of his plan. He was determined to try something—anything—that might help Gallegos and his guys, and he wasn’t going to let anything stand in his way, not even chain of command or a direct order. The only way for me to stop him from going would have been to coldcock him to the ground.

  I also knew something else—something that, for lack of a better expression, boils down to what you might call the calculus of combat. I knew that despite the obvious risks, despite the very high likelihood that this would not end well, there was a slim chance that Hardt might be able to pull it off. Under normal conditions, I would never have sanctioned something so sketchy. But right now, given how much we were up against and how close we were to being overrun, it was a chance we might have to take.

  Hardt’s best bet, I knew, would be to drive the truck along the back side of the mechanics’ bay, which faced south. The building would shield him from the shooters along the North Face, as well as anyone trying to come at him through the front gate. So that’s the message I tried to drive home.

  “Look, if you’re gonna do this, then you have to use the mechanics’ bay as your shield,” I declared. “Whatever else you do, do not take the truck between the mechanics’ bay and the shower trailers and put yourself in a position where your dick is out there flappin’ in the wind. Got it?”

  “Roger.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Do it.”

  While Hardt took off to get his team together, I took a second to weigh my options. I assumed that the Shura Building and the front gate were still under our control—an assumption that I would soon discover was dead wrong. Not knowing that yet, however, I decided to use the next few minutes to dash over to the aid station to see how the medics were doing with Kirk.

  • • •

  BY THIS POINT, most of the Afghan soldiers who had sought admission to the aid station with fake injuries had been booted out of the building. The only exception that I could see as I came through the door was the ANA platoon sergeant, who was curled on the floor in the fetal position and refusing to move. Even without the malingerers, however, the place was still overflowing. Inside, there were seven Afghan patients who were suffering from a variety of gunshot wounds and lacerations, plus one man whose abdomen had been eviscerated. There were also several Americans with shrapnel or gunshot wounds. In fact, so many guys had been hit that the medics had started moving those with less severe injuries to other areas. The Americans who could still walk were being sent to the command post, while the Afghan soldiers were being placed outside on the café, the small deck on the west side of the aid station that was partially surrounded by sandbags.

  The patients left inside the building were taking up every square inch of the blue linoleum floor, which was covered with blood. Most of those men were sitting or lying quietly. But one soldier in particular—the Afghan who had been blinded by the blast to the face—was making things difficult by continuously getting up from his chair, despite repeated requests by the medics to stay put. Eventually, Courville had grown so frustrated that he’d seized the guy by the shoulders and shoved him into his seat while telling him to “sit the fuck down.” In response, the man had hauled off and kicked Courville in the leg. It’s a measure of how frustrated Courville was that he barely managed to restrain himself from punching the blind soldier in the face.

  Part of the reason Courville was so on edge was that the challenge of treating these patients was exacerbated by the fact that the medics didn’t have their supplies on hand. Just a few days earlier, as part of the preparation for shutting down Keating, Doc Cordova and his team had been ordered to start dismantling their operation. They’d bundled whatever wasn’t worth saving into trash bags, while packing anything of value inside more than a dozen plastic footlockers that could be loaded onto the Chinooks when the time came to evacuate. This meant that the shelves in the aid station were now all but empty, except for a cursory stash of the most essential supplies.

  Fortunately, the contents of each storage box had been carefully labeled. Those boxes, however, had all been stacked outside on the far side of the café. This meant that whenever the medics needed something—bandages, tourniquets, pressure dressings—Courville and Cordova would have to consult their list to figure out which box needed to be opened up, and then Courville would dash out the front door, race into the most exposed part of the café area, and frantically rummage through the correct box until he found what he was looking for while praying that he didn’t get picked off by a sniper or blown to pieces by an RPG.

  After Courville’s third or fourth retrieval trip, he started calling these missions “retard runs” because they were so terrifying and so stupid. At one point when Courville was rooting through a box looking for more bandages, he heard an ominous thunk-thunk. Looking up, he spotted a grenade rolling toward him along the ground and flung himself through the door of the aid station. He landed directly on top of the Afghan soldier with the abdominal evisceration.

  In the midst of these challenges, about ten minutes earlier Harder and Francis had burst through the door carrying Scusa. Cordova dropped what he was doing, examined the gunshot wound to Scusa’s throat, and felt for a pulse or a heartbeat. Finding neither, he pronounced Scusa dead—the first time that he’d ever done such a thing—and, with one of the other medic’s help, took Scusa into the sleeping area, where they zipped him into a body bag and placed him next to Courville’s bed.

  Meanwhile, as rockets continued striking the exterior of the aid station, the plastic smoke alarm on the wall blared incessantly, competing with the gunfire and all but drowning out the groans of the wounded. Eventually, things got bad enough that somebody had turned to Cordova and asked the inevitable:

  “Hey, Doc? Can we smoke in here?”

  “Only if you give me one,” replied Cordova, in total violation of his strict no-smoking-in-here-ever policy.

  “Hell yeah,” Courville sighed in relief as he lit up a Marlboro Red and inhaled deeply.

  It was right about then that I came through the door and spotted Cordova, standing at the head of the litter frame on which Kirk was stretched out, lying on his back.

  When Cordova looked up and spotted me, I raised my right fist and made a thumbs-up/thumbs-down motion to ask how Kirk was.

  Shaking his head, Cordova gave me a thumbs-down. Then he and Courville hefted Kirk’
s body and staggered toward the sleeping quarters to get him into a body bag and place him next to Scusa.

  Under different circumstances, I might have been able to go up to Kirk’s body and offer some sort of gesture—a hand on his shoulder, a word or two to bid him farewell. At that moment, however, such a thing didn’t even cross my mind. Instead, I was fully attuned to the radio calls coming through on the Force Pro, where Hardt was trying to report his movements to me.

  “You don’t need to be talking to me—you need to coordinate with the guy you’re heading toward,” I barked. “Talk to Gallegos!”

  Then I turned to the other radio call that was coming in for me, which demanded my immediate focus.

  Zach Koppes was in trouble.

  • • •

  DURING THE FEW MINUTES that had elapsed since I had taken away the machine-gun team that was supposed to protect his gun truck, Koppes had been hit with a lot. He had watched the exodus of fleeing Afghan soldiers running in opposite directions. He’d seen Scusa executed directly in front of him. He’d been subjected to unrelenting fire from the Diving Board throughout these events. And during this entire time, he’d been completely alone.

  He held up well to those challenges, in part because the Mark 19 was perhaps the ideal tool for dealing with his attackers, most of whom were hidden high above him behind rocks and trees, and moving like cats from one piece of cover to another. Thanks to that, it was especially challenging to shoot straight at them, which is what he would have been forced to do if the truck had been armed with a machine gun. With the grenade launcher, however, he’d been able to catapult his rounds over and behind the enemy. He was also helped by the killing-burst radius of his grenades, which could do serious damage to anyone within fifteen yards of their blast.

  The other thing that Koppes had going for him was plenty of ammo: the back of his Humvee was packed with boxes of Mark 19 grenades. He’d started out the morning with more than six hundred rounds, and although he was working through them at a steady clip, he was still in better shape than any other gun truck. Unfortunately, though, a problem had cropped up that he had no way of solving.