This was one of the few comic-relief moments in the day.
Down inside the trench, however, one man didn’t find this funny at all. Jones, who hadn’t known that Kirk was dead, was filled with an implacable rage over the news that the man he had most looked up to, the person who had taught him the most about being a soldier, had just gotten smoked.
It was the kind of rage that Kirk probably would have admired because, in addition to being all consuming, it refused to be corralled by prudence, instead demanding immediate release. And so, despite the fact that they were still pinned down, Jones rose up, laid down his machine gun, and started firing nonstop.
This probably wasn’t the smartest move in terms of conserving his shots for the inevitable moment when the Taliban decided to overwhelm the trench. But right then, Jones really didn’t give a flying fuck about fire discipline.
What’s more, the need to conserve ammo vanished a few seconds later when a Taliban RPG drilled into the generator alongside the trench and set the damn thing on fire, producing a dense, black column of smoke that provided a perfect screen for the entire group to break contact by low-crawling to the north end of the trench and making a run for the barracks buildings.
This fallback move, which they performed one at a time while covering one another, reflected a larger reality, which was that instead of pushing our lines out to retake the portions of the outpost that we’d lost during Hardt’s failed rescue attempt, we were doing the opposite and pulling farther in.
Needless to say, this isn’t the way you fight if you want to win. It’s what you do if you’re preparing to make a last stand.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Alamo Position
ONE OF THE strangest hallmarks of combat is that it is so chaotic that sometimes the turmoil it engenders in the mind never fully resolves. Soldiers can spend the rest of their lives trying to parse out a sense of exactly how a battle in which they participated unfolded: what came before, what happened after, and which events collided into one another simultaneously to create a tangled mishmash of confusion.
Another salient feature of war is that it is often impossible to go back and fit the pieces of what happened neatly together. The absence of a comprehensive record, the fallibility of human memory, and the fact that the most important eyewitnesses to key events may have been killed—all of these elements can make it extraordinarily difficult to call any subsequent rendition of events definitive.
It is my belief that this is the case with what unfolded at Keating, particularly during the initial attack. It’s quite possible that at the heart of this battle there’s a level of truth that is fundamentally unknowable.
In light of that, perhaps the best thing that I can do now, with the benefit of hindsight and the impressions that many of my fellow soldiers have shared with me, is to acknowledge that while I was dealing with my own challenges, a complex set of parallel events were unfolding—events that I had no knowledge of at the time, even though a number of them were about to smash up against me. In order to get to those events, I want to lay out a sense of what was happening beyond my immediate awareness. And perhaps the most effective way to do that is to take you into the mind of Andrew Bundermann, who, by virtue of his role in the command post, probably had the best overall picture of what was unfolding.
While my comrades and I were engaged in half a dozen separate duels all across the outpost, the members of HQ Platoon who were stationed inside the command post were caught up in their own whirlpool of challenges, many of which were swirling around a single urgent and overriding fact: if Bundermann didn’t figure out how to mobilize some assistance and swiftly hurl those assets against the enemy, our chances of surviving this ordeal were slim.
At the moment, this goal was being thwarted by two problems, the most glaring of which was that Fritsche’s mortars still weren’t functioning.
For the better part of the past forty minutes, the soldiers up at our OP had been withstanding withering machine-gun and RPG fire while contending with at least one sniper. The fact that none of those men had been killed offered a testament to the advantage of holding the high ground. But that advantage was unexpectedly undermined when Staff Sergeant James Clark, who was probably the sharpest soldier in White Platoon, was hit in the chest with a round that went straight through one of his magazines.
The bullet was stopped by Clark’s ceramic chest plate, but not before striking a tracer round inside the magazine and igniting his vest. Suddenly, Clark found himself dealing with an emergency he’d never even known was possible: he was on fire, and if he didn’t extinguish the flames immediately, they would ignite the remaining ammo on his chest and turn him into a Roman candle right there on the gun line.
As Clark furiously patted down his vest while continuing to return fire on the Mark 19 that he was manning, he realized that the round that was still lodged in his chest plate had come from the only place on top of the mountain that sat above Fritsche: a tiny auxiliary post that housed six members of the Afghan Border Patrol. Like the ANA soldiers down at Keating, these allies were supposed to provide additional support for Fritsche. And like their ANA counterparts, the Border Patrol soldiers had apparently abandoned their positions. In so doing, they had permitted their post to be commandeered by a group of enemy fighters who, as Clark could now see, were using the superior vantage to direct the bulk of their fire onto Fritsche’s mortar pit.
It also meant that Fritsche’s attackers were now less than fifty yards from the perimeter.
Clark, who was as competent and as cool-headed a man as you could wish for in a staff sergeant, called for the claymores on one side of Fritsche to be detonated while simultaneously pulling one of his 240B machine-gun teams off of his wall and sending them over to the mortar pit in the hopes of establishing some fire superiority in that sector.
When combined with the assistance that Fritsche was finally receiving from the 155 howitzers at Bostick, whose shells were now exploding thunderously across the open ground on the southeast side of Fritsche, Clark had hopes of being able to get his mortar pit up shortly and start sending some rounds downrange in support of Keating. But for the moment, his team was still too preoccupied with defense to provide anything in the way of offense—a state of affairs that Jordan Bellamy, Clark’s lieutenant who was in command of Fritsche, was now communicating to Keating.
“I still can’t get to my mortar pit,” Bellamy radioed to Bundermann.
“Okay, but the moment you guys can get there, I gotta have it,” replied Bundermann. “I gotta have it!”
With that, Bundermann turned to his second big problem, which was that although air support had finally arrived, the planes weren’t yet able to engage.
The first pair of F-15Es, the two Strike Eagles that had been ordered to Keating just as they were coming off of a night sortie, were now directly above the outpost. What’s more, a priority target package—the set of coordinates that would help direct the laser-guided and GPS-guided bombs on board those fighter jets onto the Putting Green and the Switchbacks—had already been selected by Bundermann and sent out to Bostick by Cason Shrode, who was in charge of artillery and air support. Unfortunately, however, moving this information from the army to the air force involved a delay that struck everyone inside the command post as understandable but nevertheless maddening. Thanks to the mountainous terrain, it was impossible for the fighter pilots to radio Bostick and receive clearance for their bomb drops while they were flying directly over Keating. So the F-15s were forced to make a detour to Bostick to confirm their targets via line-of-sight radio, and then return to Keating before they could release their ordnance.
In the midst of a battle when a few seconds can make a difference between men living and men dying, a lag of even a minute or two can seem interminable. For Bundermann, who was listening to one sector of Keating’s defense after another either collapse and fall back or go silent on the
radio, the nine minutes that passed between the arrival of the first two F-15s and the release of their first bombs seemed like an eternity.
When the bombs finally did land, the explosions were swallowed up by the roar on the enemy’s incoming fire and never even registered among myself and the other defenders who were outside. Within the walls of the command post, however, the knowledge that the jets were unloading ordnance offered some satisfaction to Bundermann and his team. But their relief disappeared a few seconds later as the Strike Eagles radioed that they would have to disengage and return to base (they were extremely low on fuel).
The handful of bombs that they’d managed to drop were in no way game changers. They’d done little to deter our attackers and virtually nothing to slow them down. And as if to underscore this fact, Kenny Daise was now sending out his radio alert to let everyone know that we had “Charlie in the wire,” confirming just how thoroughly we’d been compromised.
From the reports that Bundermann was receiving, he concluded that Keating had been breached in not one spot, but three. Somewhere between ten and fifteen Taliban had penetrated the eastern gate and were taking up positions inside the abandoned Afghan National Army barracks. On the opposite side of camp, a group of fighters had driven past the mortar pit, across the minefield of defunct claymores, and through the wall of concertina wire in the vicinity of the maintenance shed. And at more or less the same time, a third group had rushed the main gate and run past the Shura Building. Having destroyed Hardt’s team and then forced Jones’s team to fall back, elements from these latter two groups were now scurrying around the sector that we had just abandoned and, presumably, were preparing to attack the very center of camp.
It was at this point that Bundermann decided it might not be a bad idea for him to change clothes.
By now, he’d already taken the precaution of borrowing an extra set of armor from Shrode, whose bunk was at the back of the command post, and was wearing it over his shorts and T-shirt. But in addition to the fact that Shrode’s gear was three sizes too big for him, Bundermann was clomping around in this oversized outfit while still wearing his flip-flops. The entire getup struck him as ridiculous, so he asked one of the guys in the command post to go back to the barracks to grab his boots, helmet, and rifle.
When his kit arrived, Bundermann was still wildly out of uniform, but at least he was geared for what came next. While continuing to man his radios and the SATCOM, he ordered guards posted on both the west and south doors. It was time to prepare for the very real possibility that the insurgents were about to assault the command post.
In a situation like this, it turns out that the army has a special code you’re supposed to transmit that summons all available aircraft to drop whatever they’re doing and rush to wherever the code originates. This is known as a “broken arrow” call, and it’s reserved for a ground unit that finds itself surrounded and facing imminent destruction. When I later checked, I was surprised to learn that the call has been invoked only once—in November of 1965 when the US 7th Cavalry (ironically, the very same unit that had fought under Custer at the Battle of the Little Bighorn eighty-nine years earlier) was encircled by a regiment of North Vietnamese regulars in the Ia Drang Valley. Despite overwhelming odds, the commander of that unit, Colonel Hal Moore, and his men held out against repeated North Vietnamese assaults and managed to persevere.
The reason I had to look all that up is that I’d never heard of such a thing before. Nor had anybody else at Keating, including Bundermann. If there’d been a memo on what sort of announcement you’re supposed to send out just prior to having your teeth kicked through the back of your skull, nobody in Red Platoon had ever bothered to read the thing.
In real life, whenever a situation skids out of control and you’re a step or two away from getting totally shellacked—which was pretty much where we were headed in that moment—the kind of statement that goes out over the radio tends to be as blunt and as devoid of symphonic resonance as what Bundermann ordered sent up through the tac-chat:
6:50 a.m.
<2BlackKnight_TOC>
>>> ENEMY IN THE WIRE ENEMY IN THE WIRE!!!
As that call went out, virtually every soldier in the center of camp was preparing to do the prudent and sane thing, which was to batten the hatches and hunker down. The single exception to this strategy was LRAS2, the battered gun truck at the westernmost end of the outpost where Gallegos and his team were cut off from the rest of us and almost out of ammo. Instead of pulling further into their shell, they were about to do the opposite in the hopes of exploiting an odd opportunity that had arisen from Hardt’s failed rescue mission.
Because Hardt’s stricken gun truck had served as such a powerful a magnet for the fighters who were slithering through the concertina wire and the front gate, Gallegos’s battle position underwent a brief and fleeting lull. The Humvee was still taking fire from the surrounding ridgelines—but for the first time in nearly an hour, it seemed that it might be possible to open a door on either side of the vehicle and step outside without instantly being shot to pieces from six different directions.
Granted, this wasn’t much of a letup, and it clearly wasn’t going to last. But it was enough to make Gallegos think that this might be their moment to make a move. And then something happened that drove any remaining doubt from his mind.
Through the cracks and the bullet craters in the Humvee’s front windshield, Gallegos and Larson both spotted a quartet of Taliban slithering over the top of the Hescos roughly fifty yards to the west of them. These men had probably come up through the trash pit, and one of them was carrying an American M249 SAW, a weapon whose distinctive profile is unmistakable.
By the looks of them, all four of these men—who were sporting brown robes, chest racks loaded with bullets and hand grenades, and tennis shoes—were intent on pushing toward the center of camp, and there were undoubtedly more insurgents behind them.
Gallegos had already framed up their exit plan, the key to which was that Larson and Carter would dismount on the left side of the truck and use their M4s to provide cover fire while Gallegos, Mace, and Martin poured out of the right side of the truck and made a dash for the latrines. When they arrived, they’d immediately lay down enough fire to enable Larson and Carter to make the same run. From there, the team would split again and bound down to the Shura Building.
The other guys in the truck had all been polled to see if they were on board, and while everyone agreed that there was no way they could stay, nobody had been able to come up with a better idea for how to get out of the mess they were in. Hence, the only question was whether this was the time to launch.
“Hey, G,” Larson asked Gallegos, “do we need to go now?”
“Yeah,” replied Gallegos. “We gotta go.”
In addition to being the highest-ranking enlisted man in the truck, Gallegos had the most combat experience.
“Your call, dude,” said Larson.
“All right, guys, it’s now or never,” announced Gallegos, turning to the men in the backseat and giving everyone a hard look.
He received three crisp nods.
“Okay, let’s go.”
• • •
DURING THOSE FINAL moments inside the Humvee, everybody was reasonably convinced that the plan was actually going to work. Gallegos and Larson seemed especially confident, and the three guys in the backseat picked up that vibe and fed off it. Their attitude toward the situation they faced could best be described as: Right on, bro—let’s get this done and we’ll see each other on the other side.
The second the doors opened and they stepped out of the truck, that brittle sense of optimism shattered like glass.
Because Larson was in the driver’s seat, he posted up along the hood of the truck with the intention of engaging the snipers he’d spotted inside Urmul and along the Putting Green. At the same time, Carter was positioning himself between
the front of the truck and the wall of sandbags.
Alerted by their movements, the Taliban gunners who had been concentrating on Hardt and his team abruptly switched their focus away from Truck 1 and swung back onto the crew of LRAS2. The effect was immediate and devastating.
In the same moment that Larson and Carter started laying down cover fire, an RPG struck a steel shipping container next to the gun truck and exploded. The blast completely enveloped Mace and Martin, coating both men with smoke and dust. Mace, who also took a full load of shrapnel to his legs and abdomen, was slammed to the ground while Martin started running, scrambled over a drop-off, and disappeared around the far corner of the latrines.
“I don’t know what to do!” cried Mace as he lay on the ground.
“Follow Gallegos!” yelled Larson, who at this point had no idea that the impact from the rocket had all but demolished Mace’s legs.
As Mace struggled to obey Larson’s command, Gallegos stepped over, lifted his injured comrade to his feet, and stumbled with him around the far side of the latrines.
On the opposite end of the truck, Carter was poised and waiting for a signal from Larson to start his own run toward the latrines when he heard a series of shots coming from the same spot where Gallegos and Mace had just disappeared. The next thing Carter knew, Gallegos was rounding the corner by himself—Mace wasn’t anywhere in sight—and racing back to the truck as a Taliban gunner opened up on him from just above the mortar pit.
As Carter watched, Gallegos took multiple bursts of fire to his chest, stomach, left arm, and right foot. When the first shots hit, he tried to return fire. He kept shooting as he was drilled by the second volley. The third burst put him on the ground.
Meanwhile, one of the Taliban snipers inside Urmul drew a bead on Larson and shot him directly in the head.
Red Platoon Page 20
