The plan was for them to head to Bostick first in order to refuel, and proceed from there to Keating. But as they lifted of and started pushing their choppers up through the Kunar Valley, the radio updates they received on the developments at Keating made it clear to the pilots that things were rapidly getting worse.
“The perimeter’s been breached,” Colonel Brown radioed to Wright from the command post at Bostick about ten minutes later. “They’ve fired their final protective fire. You can expect to see enemy fighters intermixed with our guys on the outpost.”
With this news, the pilots decided on the spot that they would bypass Bostick and proceed directly to Keating by cutting straight over a series of high ridgelines to the southeast, which would bring them in on the back side of the outpost. The loss of their refueling stop would mean that they’d have less time to spend in the air once they arrived. But if they pushed their birds as fast as possible, this direct line would enable them to shave several minutes off of their flight time and get there sooner. As an added bonus, because this approach was outside their normal flight route, it might enable them to avoid the Taliban’s early-warning detection system (which consisted of spotters with cell phones on the valley floor) and perhaps surprise the attackers before they knew what hit them.
At 7:06 a.m., Wright contacted Brown for another update and was told that the Taliban were inside the camp.
“Anyone outside the wire is hostile,” Brown said. “You are clear to engage.”
• • •
THROUGHOUT THE FLIGHT, Bardwell—who was in charge of communicating with the American forces on the ground—was making repeated radio calls to Keating, and failing to raise a response. As frustrating as this was, it was nothing compared with the feeling he experienced when the Apaches cleared the final ridgeline at 7:10 a.m., and they saw the outpost splayed below.
“Oh, shit,” said Bardwell. “It’s burning.”
The bottom of the valley was obscured by dense, black smoke, while the outpost itself was in flames. From the air, the fire appeared so massive that it looked as if everything was burning.
As the Apaches circled above, Bardwell repeated his radio calls at five-second intervals while wondering if it was possible that Keating had already been overrun and that none of the defenders had survived. He and Lewallen both had a sinking feeling that they may have arrived too late.
Roughly ninety seconds later—an interval that Bardwell would later claim was one of the longest minutes (and a half) of his life—he finally got a response from Bundermann, who had just finished up his powwow with me and Hill over how to retake the ammo supply point and the Shura Building.
“Guns cold,” declared Bundermann, letting the pilots know that Keating’s artillery was still down. “Anyone outside the wire is hostile. We’re down to about two to three buildings. We have enemy inside the wire. We need you guys to work on taking care of people outside, and we’ll kill everybody inside.”
Layered over the sound of Bundermann’s voice, Bardwell could hear the roar of continuous gunfire. He was impressed by how calm Bundermann sounded.
“We need to know what building you’re in,” replied Bardwell.
“Can you recognize the front gate from where you are?” asked Bundermann.
At this point, the smoke from our fires was so thick that it obscured pretty much everything.
“Negative,” replied Bardwell, who was peering through a screen connected to the target-acquisition sensor mounted in the nose of his Apache. This device was essentially a black-and-white video feed, dubbed “Day TV,” that the pilots use to scan their targets on the ground. (The system can be switched to heat-sensing infrared at night.)
“Hey, we’re not shooting inside the COP,” barked Lewallen, breaking into the same channel. “We can’t see well enough, and I don’t know where they’re at.”
No sooner had Lewallen completed that sentence than Bardwell caught sight of movement on his Day TV video feed along the far eastern side of the outpost, just beyond the Afghan National Army barracks at the edge of camp.
A line of more than thirty fighters was winding down the trail that descended from the Diving Board. They were clad in man-jams, and they were heavily armed with RPGs, AK-47s, and PKM machine guns. It was clear that the entire force was heading toward the breach in the wire where the Afghan Army had abandoned their positions and left the camp wide-open to attack.
When the Apaches dropped down a bit lower, most of the insurgents halted in their tracks. Then, realizing they were caught, the bulk of them began running toward the outpost while a handful of others turned around and fled back in the direction they’d come.
“Hey, I got a full platoon-sized element moving toward your location,” said Bardwell, a bit stunned by how many Afghans he could see down there. He had never observed that many insurgents at one time on his screen. In fact, over the course of three deployments he’d never once seen such a large force attacking a single, static position. This wasn’t the way that the Taliban would normally hit a compound, and he wanted to be absolutely certain that these men weren’t Afghan allies who were helping to buttress Keating’s defense.
“Do you have any ANA out there?” asked Bardwell.
“No,” replied Bundermann. “Anyone outside the wire is hostile. Light ’em up.”
• • •
AN APACHE’S 30-MM CANNON has two handgrips: one that operates the trigger for a laser, and the other connected to an M230 chain gun that is mounted directly underneath the nose of the aircraft and moved by hydraulic actuators. It is a fearsome machine that can fire at a rate of 625 rounds per minute. Those rounds, each of which is almost half the length of a man’s forearm and twice as thick as his thumb, explode on impact, creating a lethal killing radius of more than ten feet. A single ten-round burst from the gun can cut down mature trees. Human beings don’t stand a chance. Flesh shreds. Limbs are torn off. Torsos, heads, and bits of unidentifiable remains are hurled into the air and thrown a long, long way.
At this point, both helicopters were circling the outpost in a left orbit, and separated by a lateral distance of about three thousand yards. Lewallen and Bardwell were flying roughly twelve hundred feet off the ground, while Huff and Wright were five hundred vertical feet above them.
Under normal conditions, Bardwell and Wright would have had a quick discussion about how to coordinate their respective sectors of fire—something along the lines of Chad, you start on the south side, I’ll start on the north, and we’ll meet in the middle. At that moment, however, there were so many enemy, and they were so close to the wire, that both gunners had the same thought, which was to obliterate them as quickly as possible, starting at the bottom with the fighters who were closest to the perimeter and methodically working up the side of the mountain to take out the rest. So Bardwell and Wright seized the handles of their 30-mm cannons and sent a series of bursts directly into the insurgents.
From their aircraft, neither gunner could discern what was happening, aside from seeing fist-sized clouds of dust erupting everywhere. But they could hear and feel the power of the chain guns, which were mounted directly underneath them, and which made their seats shake.
Some eighteen hundred feet down below, the effect was brutal and exceedingly violent. Men who moments earlier had cohesion and purpose were reduced to bits of meat and ragged strips of cloth.
There wasn’t a man left standing.
Each helicopter was carrying three hundred rounds, and at the end of half a dozen trigger pulls, they weren’t even close to going “Winchester,” which would mean they were black on ammo. Moreover, each chopper still had several 2.75-inch rockets packed with flechettes, along with its Hellfire missiles. So the pilots continued their orbits and scanned the ridge along the spur that ran from Fritsche to Keating, looking for muzzle flashes and tracer fire.
Spotting somewhere between forty and fifty sep
arate locations with two or three enemy fighters, they got to work targeting as many of those pockets as possible before they ran low on fuel and had to return to Bostick. But they had already accomplished perhaps their most effective stroke of the entire day. If those four pilots had arrived five minutes later, the second wave of fighters preparing to storm the eastern side of camp would almost certainly have overwhelmed us, and nobody would have survived.
Thanks to their ability to fly low and, when necessary, take a ferocious beating, the Apaches offer a level of support unequaled by any other aircraft. This would be the first of several times when they would save our bacon that day. But despite their marvelous advantages, the choppers were not capable of weeding out and eliminating the fighters who were already inside our wire. That task needed to be tackled by men who had their boots on the ground and were willing to engage in a direct, eyeball-to-eyeball gunfight, inch by inch and shot by shot, for this contested piece of dirt.
On that score, we were still very much on our own.
• • •
BY NOW, many members of Red Platoon who were not actively fighting on the perimeter or dead had holed up inside our barracks, where they were joined by some guys from Blue and HQ Platoons, plus a handful of extremely confused and frightened Afghan soldiers. It was an eclectic mix that included a number of our youngest and most traumatized soldiers, like Justin Gregory and Nicholas Davidson, along with some experienced hands like Kenny Daise and Jim Stanley, the staff sergeant from Red who had taken over as sergeant of the guard just before the attack kicked off. There were some aggressive badasses like Jones and Raz, and there were some guys like Kyle Knight, who fell closer to the timid end of the spectrum. Finally, there were also a few guys like Matthew Miller—a sergeant with Headquarters Platoon who had arrived at Keating less than forty-eight hours earlier—who were simply wondering how in the hell they’d gotten themselves into this fix.
For the last ten or fifteen minutes, these men had been trickling through the door from every direction, driven inside by the knowledge that our defenses were breached and that our perimeter could no longer hold. Some were clearly freaked out—stricken with fear or shuddering on the verge of all-out panic. All of them knew that things were getting worse, not better. And not one of them, if you’d asked at that moment, would have told you that he expected to live beyond the next thirty minutes.
“It’s pretty bad out there right now,” Raz said to Armando Avalos, one of our forward observers. “If you go out, you’re just gonna die.”
Most of these guys were lying on floor with either a machine gun or their carbines, and when I burst through the door, they all looked up at the same time.
Part of what defines an effective leader at the level of an infantry platoon is knowing that in difficult situations, actions carry greater weight than words. In that moment, I could not have asked these men to participate in a counterattack unless I demonstrated that I was willing to take part in it myself and run the show.
“We’re taking this bitch back,” I announced. “I need a group of volunteers. Who’s with me?”
During the pause that followed—the silent interval when the guys in that room stared up and took in what I’d just said—I’m pretty sure that each of them was convinced that I’d lost my marbles. Judging by the looks on their faces, their collective response seemed to amount to a single question:
Are you frickin’ kidding?
Then Raz, the former meth addict who had never finished high school and who had lived in people’s basements until he joined the army, stood up—all six and a half feet of him.
Half a second later, Dannelley, Jones, and Miller, the new arrival, rose as well. They were joined by Mark Dulaney, a short young guy who was known for being fast and light on his feet.
“We’ll follow you anywhere,” declared Raz. “What are we doing?”
Five guys. I had my team.
I gave them a quick sketch of the plan and where we’d be heading—the ammunition depot, the Shura Building, the front gate—and I explained that we’d have some crossfire cover from Hill’s machine-gun team.
“Any questions?” I asked.
“Uh . . . just one,” said Jones, who had no idea that the locks had already been ripped off the ammo supply point. “Do we need a key to get into the ammo shed?”
“Stupid question, Jonesie,” I replied, giving him the if you expect an answer, don’t ask me a dumb question glare that I reserved for my junior enlisted guys.
No more hands were raised, so we moved on to the business of gearing up.
By this point, we were out of ammo for the big machine guns, so most of us were down to our personal weapons. I’d handed the Dragunov off to Hill when I was inside the command post and now had an M4, which was what Jones, Dannelley, Miller, and Raz had, too—although Raz also had a .203 grenade launcher attached to his carbine.
The only person with anything bigger was Dulaney, who was holding a squad automatic weapon, whose chief advantage is its shockingly high rate of fire. (Touch the trigger and a SAW will send out such a dense torrent of rounds it feels like you’ve broken open the gate valve on a water main.)
Five M4s plus a SAW would be a normal load-out for a standard six-man fire team. But for this job, it was way too light. If I’d had my way, every man on the squad would have been carrying a machine gun. Lacking that, I wanted at least one more heavy weapon. And at the moment, the only other guy in the barracks who had a SAW was Gregory, who was sitting near the west door.
“Hey, Greg, we need an assault gunner,” said Raz, who’d read my thoughts. “You up for this?”
“Honestly? No,” replied Gregory, who seemed to be in a state of shock from the ordeals he had already endured. “I don’t know if I can do it.”
Then Jones stepped over to Gregory.
“Hey, dude—no worries at all,” he said softly. “Just swap out with me and we’re cool, okay?”
So Gregory and Jones traded weapons.
“One last thing, guys,” I said, pointing to the west door, where we’d make our exit. “There are no friendlies on the other side. Even if they’re wearing an American uniform, do not hesitate to shoot first. Anybody you see in front of you is hostile. Roger that?”
I got five nods in response.
“All right, then—let’s roll.”
As I moved toward the door, there was one thing left unsaid—a part of this mission that I hadn’t bothered to mention in the briefing I’d just given.
We were launching a counterattack for a range of reasons. To regain our ammo supply. To seal off our front gate. To push the Taliban back beyond the wire. To take back our house, and to unleash some intensely violent payback on the men who had slaughtered our comrades. But there was another objective as well—one that, in some ways, transcended everything else.
It was well known that the Taliban placed great value on American bodies, which they removed from the battlefield and filmed, then posted the resulting videos on the Internet. If that happened with Larson or any of the rest of my team, those of us who survived would spend the rest of our lives trying to get those YouTube images out of our heads.
For these reasons, we had to get our dead back too—even if the effort to retrieve them might entail losing more guys, me included. Given what we stood for and what we believed in, we really had no other choice.
PART IV
Taking the Bitch Back
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Launch Out
IT WAS PROBABLY somewhere just before eight a.m. when we stacked up at the east end of Red barracks, just behind the door facing the command post, and prepared to launch our counterattack. The battle was now nearly two hours old, and half a dozen of our men were dead, with another six still unaccounted for.
By this point, the entire eastern side of the outpost was burning furiously, generating dense streams of black smoke t
hat would help to conceal us as we made our run. My plan was for us to roll in a tightly packed mass, moving with an emphasis on speed rather than shooting accuracy. The order of the men—who was where and carrying which weapon inside the formation—was less important than violently closing the distance with the enemy and bull-charging them off of the ammo supply wall.
The only nuance to this strategy was to make sure that Raz would be the first person through the door. The reason I wanted him on point—and he knew it—was that if we were hit by a stream of fire, his massive frame would serve as a shield and hopefully enable the men behind him to stay alive long enough to complete this phase of the assault.
Here we go—doing it, Jones muttered to himself just before we pushed out. Lesseewhathappens . . .
If this were a battle drill, we would have either been bounding in teams or performing a move called a rolling cover fire, which entails shooting and running at the same time. Since this was not a drill, and thanks to the fact that we had to pull this move off by ourselves with no support by fire, there was nothing to do except charge en masse, which was pretty much the crudest and the least tactical maneuver one would care to imagine. To the extent that we even had a strategy, the theory was that if we encountered resistance, Raz would soak up most of the rounds, and as he died, the rest of us would throw his body into whoever was doing the shooting, then beat them to death with our carbines. From that standpoint, what we were doing wasn’t really a military move as much as a gangster-style football play.
It was also kind of awesome.
Instantly, we started taking heavy fire from the Switchbacks and the Diving Board. But the smoke, along with our speed, made it tough for those shooters to get a bead on us as we charged across the open area toward the Hescos that cut the camp in half along the edge of the ammo supply depot. When we hit that wall of Hescos, we banged a sharp right and followed the wall north until we got to the far corner, where we pulled up short.
Red Platoon Page 22
