Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  I have no idea what thoughts might have been going through Carter’s mind in that moment as he scrambled back into the truck. But if it had been me, I know of at least one thing that I’d have been asking myself:

  How much time is left before they roll through me?

  • • •

  THAT WAS ONE of the main questions that Bundermann was pondering as he stepped outside the command post for the first time that morning to get a firsthand view of what things looked like. The impression he got offered little more than a confirmation of the reports that he’d been receiving over the radio since the battle had kicked off: the entire camp was getting jackhammered from all sides, and that our perimeter was steadily compressing inward.

  Without massive air support, it was pointless for Bundermann to pretend that we could continue to defend our lines. As commander, he could therefore see that his only recourse was clear: allow the outer wire to collapse, pull back to the inner Hesco barrier, and concentrate on defending Keating’s core for as long as possible in the hopes that some robust air support would check on station before the Taliban ran us over.

  As it turns out, the army has a name for the final defensive posture that’s adopted by a unit which is facing the possibility of being overrun—and unlike the broken arrow call, most of us knew what this was. Fittingly, it’s called the Alamo Position.

  Bundermann was coldly aware that falling back to the Alamo Position would leave nearly ten men—a fifth of his command—to fend for themselves.

  He also knew that most of those men were probably already dead.

  • • •

  WITHIN EACH OF the three buildings where we would make our final stand, guys were now gathering up their remaining ammo, getting down on the floor, and aiming their guns at the doors as they prepared for a hand-to-hand fight for the final square feet of the outpost.

  Inside Red Platoon barracks, Raz turned to Kyle Knight—who had his machine gun aimed at the south door—and told him to kill anybody who tried to come through.

  Next door, the remaining members of Blue Platoon were gearing up to do the same in their barracks. But perhaps the most graphic indication of how far our backs were pressed against the wall was unfolding inside the aid station, where Shane Courville was ruefully casting his mind back to an exchange he’d recently had with First Sergeant Burton.

  Three or four days earlier, Courville had been part of a group of guys who were ordered to inventory all of the weapons in the arms room in preparation for Keating’s decommission. As they sorted through the mix of rockets and guns, Courville had stumbled across something unexpected: a footlocker stuffed full of shotguns.

  He had no idea how they’d gotten there, but there were more than ten of them, and they were pretty sweet—twelve-gauge pump-action Mossbergs with pistol grips and fourteen-inch barrels. And for no particular reason other than that they seemed cooler than hell, Courville decided right there, on the spot, that he really wanted to have one—despite the fact that in a place like Keating, a shotgun was about the most useless weapon you could possibly think of.

  “Hey, First Sergeant,” Courville had called out to Burton. “How about you let me grab one of these things?”

  “Negative,” Burton had replied, shaking his head. “If we ever get to where you actually need one of these motherfuckers, Doc, we’re all gonna be in a world of hurt.”

  As the medics grabbed their carbines and leveled them on both doors, the memory of that conversation came back to Courville.

  Damn, he thought to himself, wish I had me one of them Mossbergs right about now.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Light ’Em Up

  AS MY COMRADES were busy forting themselves up inside the trio of buildings within the Alamo perimeter, I was making a run from the café to the command post, the structure that would be the most heavily defended and thus the last to fall. When I burst through the door, I saw Bundermann standing there in the darkness—the generator was still down—with a battery-powered radio in each hand. Hovering next to him was Jonathan Hill, the sergeant who ran Blue Platoon. Both men were trying to make sense of the information that was pouring in from the radios, the SATCOM, and the tac-chat network.

  “We have no indirect fire,” Bundermann barked as soon as he saw me—which meant that neither our mortars nor Fritsche’s were up, “and we’re still waiting on full air support.”

  Given that we were still on our own, the three of us needed to make some quick decisions about what to do next. But first we had to resolve a fundamental disagreement over whether we were going to accept the mess we’d been shoved into, or start shoving back.

  “We need to hold our ground, dig in our heels, and wait for support,” declared Hill.

  I didn’t agree. In my estimation, hunkering down and waiting for whatever was coming at us might be seem like a smart move on the surface, but it felt like a lousy approach—especially if the goal was not simply to survive but to win. Plus, I didn’t like where that road led, because we’d be ceding all maneuverability to the enemy while consigning ourselves to a passive role. If help didn’t arrive in time, we’d be looking at hand-to-hand combat as the enemy systematically worked its way from one structure to the next, killing us off pocket by pocket. The last group of guys would wind up transmitting the grid lines for the center of camp and calling in a bomb drop on top of themselves with the hope that one of them might survive inside the rubble long enough to be able to tell the story of what happened.

  “Fuck that,” I told Hill. “We need to retake this camp.”

  “Okay,” said Bundermann, “what do we need to do?”

  That question wasn’t entirely necessary, because Bundermann already had a pretty good idea of what I was thinking. He was asking partly because doing so was in keeping with his inclusive style of leadership, and partly because he suspected—correctly—that he and I harbored slightly different notions of how to get to the goal that we shared.

  What we both had in mind was a counterattack spearheaded by a single squad that would halt the Taliban’s assault and set the stage for turning the tables on them. But while Bundermann wanted to go about this in a measured and methodical way, I was keen to get the first set of moves done in one go. Nevertheless, each of us harbored the same basic vision, at the heart of which lay a fairly simple idea that would require quite a bit of skill and a full shot of luck to pull off. Plus, each man who volunteered for this job would need a set of brass-plated balls.

  When Hill declared that he was game to give whatever I had in mind a try, the three of us then turned to the map of Keating on the west wall and started walking through how it would go down.

  First, Hill would need to send a team from Blue Platoon to lock down the east side of camp by either clearing all of the Afghan National Army barracks or, failing that, blocking the pathways leading into the center of camp with anything they could find in order to slow down the enemy. Meanwhile, a team from Red Platoon would launch west with the aim of taking back the ground we’d lost.

  We were almost out of ammo, and we needed that to stay in the fight. So the first thing the guys from Red would do was make a push to the Hesco wall, about thirty yards from the command post, and then use that wall for cover as we forced our way to the ammo supply depot and retook the thing.

  Once we did that, we’d start kicking ammo back to the center of camp. Then we’d set up a pair of machine guns—one pointing across the river toward the Afghan National Police station, the North Face, and the Putting Green; the other looking uphill toward the maintenance shed, the Waterfall and Switchbacks, and most important, the area just inside of the front gate. When those guns were in place, we’d start laying down some serious fire.

  Our next move would be to make a second push, this time from the ammo supply point to the Shura Building. We’d enter and kill whoever was inside. Then we’d retake the front gate, close it down,
and seal the thing off with claymores.

  “And after that?” asked Bundermann.

  “Well . . .” I replied, “we’ll figure out what comes next after we get all that done.”

  • • •

  AS PLANS GO, this wasn’t super sophisticated, nor was it wildly innovative. In fact, what it really boiled down to was one of the first maneuvers that every soldier is taught within his first few weeks of joining the army: reacting to contact by setting up a support-by-fire maneuver. That’s all it really was—although the “support” element was the key feature, which was the reason I then turned to Hill.

  “When we get near the ammo supply point, we’ll be rolling blind,” I said. “We won’t be able to tell if there are any fighters around the Shura Building or up by Gallegos’s gun truck, so I need you to set a machine gun on our left flank to watch out for us.”

  The machine-gun team I was asking Hill to provide would need to set up somewhere around the chow hall so that they could look into—and shoot up—the piece of ground that me and my team wouldn’t be able to see but would be charging toward during our two-part push to retake the ammo supply depot and the Shura Building. Once we wrested back control of those structures, one of my machine guns would then be able to fire uphill toward a section of camp—the area between the mechanics’ bay and the mortar pit—that would be invisible to Hill’s guys.

  Those two intersecting triangles of fire would transform the ground extending from our mortar pit to the front gate into a kill zone for any insurgent who tried to enter it. The crossfire would also enable the rest of my team to complete the final part of our move: hurling ourselves through the east door of the Shura Building, and seizing back control of the front gate.

  Hill and Bundermann nodded in agreement.

  “Split your team,” Bundermann ordered Hill, “and put a machine gun up by the chow hall to cover Ro and his guys.”

  As we confirmed that the plan was solid, Burton, who had been watching this exchange unfold, stepped over to our huddle.

  “Hey, are you all right?” he asked me.

  Burton had picked up on the fact that as we drew up our plan, I’d been shaking my wounded hand, the one that Raz had wrapped in a bandage a few minutes earlier, which now seemed to have gone numb.

  “Can’t feel my hand anymore,” I replied.

  “Let me see,” said Burton, who started unwrapping the pressure dressing. As the bandage came off, I realized that Raz, who was an excellent machine-gunner but a piss-poor medic, had basically put a tourniquet on my forearm, cutting off the blood supply to my hand. As the feeling returned, Burton reapplied the dressing.

  “Thanks for dressing me for school, Dad,” I quipped as I prepared to push through the door and head over to the barracks to see if I could find some volunteers for this mission. “I promise I’ll be good.”

  Just before heading out, however, there was one last detail I needed to take care of—something that connected back to Hardt and his final radio transmission.

  • • •

  ONE OF THE first things we teach young soldiers is that if you think you’re going to have to make a run for it and you’re gonna leave some gear behind, it’s critically important to make sure that your communications aren’t compromised. The best way to do that is either by destroying your radio or “zeroing it out,” which entails erasing all the data inside it. Thinking back on Hardt’s final words, I realized that it was doubtful he’d had the time to take care of his radio.

  I also knew that the men who had taken out Hardt had come through the front gate, where there was a second radio up in the guard tower—one that Davidson, the last guy who was manning that post, may not have managed to bring with him when he fled.

  Finally, I knew one other thing, which was that the guys who were doing their best to annihilate us had demonstrated intelligence at every stage of their attack. They had put together a complex and carefully choreographed assault. They had exploited every one of our weaknesses. They had exercised discipline and sound tactics. If they were smart enough to have done all of those things, they were certainly smart enough to grab hold of a radio and start monitoring the traffic in order to figure out what we were doing as we coordinated our next move. So we needed to cut them out of the communications loop—and the fastest way to do that was by calling for a net switch.

  When you transmit a net-switch call, everyone who is listening immediately changes frequencies by jumping to a different channel. Anyone who is trying to eavesdrop but fails to make the jump is dropped from the network. It’s an effective move, but it features one drawback.

  At this point, we had at least three separate groups of soldiers whose exact location and condition were unknown. Gallegos and his team were—I assumed—somewhere in the vicinity of their gun truck. Breeding’s team was probably still up at the mortar pit, although we’d heard nothing from them for almost an hour. And then there was Hardt and Griffin, about whom we also knew nothing.

  In total, there were almost a dozen of our comrades out there, and unless they were monitoring their radios carefully, they would have no way of knowing about the net switch—and once it had taken place, they’d be cut off. (We had never agreed on a prearranged frequency to jump to.) In other words, having failed to rescue these men, we would be severing their last line of connection to us.

  That sounds pretty brutal. But the possibility that the enemy might be able to listen to our plans and use that information against us was no less appealing. Plus, I reminded myself, any concerns about those guys getting booted off the net were negated by the fact that most of them were probably dead or in the process of dying.

  The choice was unpleasant but clear.

  “You need to call a net switch,” I told Bundermann.

  He did so without hesitating. And with that, we cut them off.

  Then Bundermann gave me a crisp nod that said, in effect, Go make something happen.

  • • •

  WHEN I LOOK back on this part of our story now, I’m struck by two things, the first of which is the harshness of some of the choices that confronted us, along with the speed and the cold sense of detachment with which we made them.

  It also gives me pause to take stock of the ferocity of our resolve during those moments. Odd as it may sound, I don’t remember being scared or worried about dying—or even, for that matter, contemplating those things as possibilities. What I do recall is a sense of pure and absolute focus—a kind of hypercompressed fixation on a single aim, which was putting together a set of specific moves, a running combination of plays, that would enable us to regain the ground we’d lost and take back our fucking house.

  I remember something else too, which was a sense that amid all the pandemonium and the confusion and the noise, it felt as if ten years of training and practice had fused together and coalesced into a single, laser-like sense of purpose.

  Finally, I had one other thought, a rogue idea hovering on the periphery of my mind, which was the notion that although we were girding to do what needed to be done all by ourselves, it sure would have been nice to have some help. More than anything else, it seemed to me, what we needed right now was an assist from the helicopter pilots in Jalalabad—the very same guys to whom, just a couple of weeks earlier, we’d been planning to mail out a giant consignment of elephant shit.

  I suppose it’s one of those poetic twists of fate that, as we were about to discover, they were doing everything possible to get to us. And, by God, they were almost there.

  • • •

  THE FIRST DISTRESS call from Keating had reached the command post of the 101st Airborne’s Task Force Pale Horse at the Jalalabad Airfield at 6:20 a.m. just as a group of Colonel Jimmy Blackwell’s Apache pilots were sitting down to breakfast in the chow hall. They had already completed their early-morning preflight briefing, and Ross Lewallen had a spoonful of biscuits and gravy in his
fist when the alert came through on a handheld radio that he carried with him. With that, everyone dumped their trays and headed for the door.

  There were four of them, and what was unusual was that each was a senior pilot with some very heavy combat experience under his belt. Lewallen was a redheaded bear of a man who combined off-duty jollity with a sense of unflappable cool in combat. He was currently on his third deployment, having arrived at the 101st just before Pale Horse deployed to Afghanistan, and he served as the task force’s master gunner. Together with his copilot, Chad Bardwell, Lewallen had been in almost every major air engagement since they’d arrived in Afghanistan. As impressive as that was, however, Randy Huff and Chris Wright, the other two-man team, had actually been in all of those battles.

  Under normal circumstances, you’d never have a foursome of the most seasoned pilots all working the same shift. But they had all just returned from the States (late summer being the time when the older men in the task force who had families preferred to take their one-month leaves), and they’d decided to give a break to their junior colleagues, who had been working nonstop in their absence.

  That morning, the weather in the skies above Keating seemed perfect. But at Jalalabad, a different picture was emerging on the radar screens inside the command post, where Blackmon and his team could see multiple fronts moving in from the west that would, over the next eight hours, usher thunderstorms, lightning, and a dense ceiling of low-hanging cloud cover into the surrounding mountains—first around Jalalabad, then at Lowell and Bostick, and finally over Keating itself.

  Their sortie consisted of two AH-64 Apaches. In an Apache, the senior pilot typically takes the backseat and is responsible for flying the aircraft, while his junior partner in the front seat is responsible for weapons and communications. (This is generally the arrangement, although these roles can—and often do—reverse: the front-seat man has a full set of flight controls, while the pilot in the backseat has complete access to the radio and the guns.) Lewallen would be piloting the first aircraft with Bardwell in the front seat; Huff would fly the second with Wright handling his weapons and radios.