After saturating the ridgeline with gunfire and making multiple passes over the site to scan for human heat signatures with their sensors, it was clear that they had obliterated all three gun crews. They weren’t quite so certain about the weapon systems, however, which appeared as if they might still be operative. If so, and if the Taliban were able to get fresh crews up onto the ridge, those guns could still pose a devastating threat, especially to a medevac attempting to fly into Keating or on its way from the outpost back to Bostick with wounded soldiers on board.
Although the two Apache crews would have preferred to keep hitting the dishkas until they were thoroughly destroyed, they were forced to break contact and begin making their way back to Bari Kowt, where the three Black Hawks, having now taken on their second load of soldiers at Bostick, were preparing to reenter the valley and needed an escort into Fritsche.
Just as they were about to turn away from Keating, Wright radioed down to let our command post know that he would be back as soon as possible. He was surprised to learn that whoever he was talking to—it was almost certainly Cason Shrode—still had his sense of humor.
“Oh, so the machine-gun fire stops and now we can’t get any love?!”
“Trust me, brother, we are only here for you guys,” replied Wright, chuckling as the two Apaches made a beeline toward the pass. “But right now we have to help the rest of your relief team get on the ground.”
This time the enemy knew they’d be coming, so when the Apaches linked up with the Black Hawks and headed back up the valley on their second approach, they had to weather an even heavier barrage of gunfire from the ground. Nevertheless, they managed to drop their loads safely at Fritsche. But now another problem arose.
As they pulled away, all five pilots could see that the clouds were closing in fast. They had just enough clear weather to make it back to Bostick. But once they arrived, this second wave of thunderheads would slam the door shut behind them and they’d be forced to cool their heels on the tarmac until another window appeared.
The chances of that next window opening up quickly were pretty much zero. Up at Mustang, an observation post that was perched on the ridges high above Bostick, the antennae were getting slammed by lighting. And several thousand feet above that, conditions were getting so bad that one of the surveillance drones, an MQ-1 Predator with the call sign “Kisling,” was accumulating so much ice on its wings that its pilot (who was based in Nevada) would soon be forced to crash it into the side of a mountain. Judging by the weather radar, the soonest anyone could hope for another opening was at least an hour away, maybe even two.
Until then, Justin Sax and his rescue team would be on their own.
• • •
IT WAS NOW coming up on one p.m. and Sax was confronting the sort of decision that no field commander relishes.
His superiors had agreed that he needed about 150 men in order to get safely down the mountain and relieve Keating. Right then, he had less than a third of that. The prudent move, therefore, was to wait until the weather cleared and the Black Hawks could deliver the rest of his team.
On the other hand, Sax was acutely aware that Keating’s defenders were hanging by a thread and that we badly needed his help. Even more sobering, perhaps, was that Sax held in his hands the lives of Keating’s wounded. There was simply no way to secure the outpost’s landing zone without the additional manpower provided by Sax’s rescue team, and until that landing zone was opened up, there would be no medevac.
Stoney Portis was set on departing immediately—an impulse that was fiercely supported by every member of White Platoon, who were horrified by the radio reports they’d been receiving and were crawling out of their skin with worry about their brothers down below in Red, Blue, and HQ Platoons. But Sax, who had the final call, had to weigh the urge to relieve Keating against the duty to avoid getting in over his head and creating a second crisis on top of the first.
Eventually, Sax and Portis agreed that if the weather didn’t improve and the rest of Sax’s men didn’t arrive by two p.m., they would move ahead without them and hope for the best.
• • •
THREE THOUSAND VERTICAL feet below Fritsche, inside the Shura Building on the north side of Keating, me and my team were anxiously awaiting word on when we could launch our next assault toward the mortar pit, and all too aware that each minute of delay lessened our chances of getting our guys back.
We weren’t privy to any of the details about the air assault that was taking place on the ridge above us or the challenges that Sax and Portis were up against. All we knew was that it seemed to be taking them forever.
Finally, just after two p.m., Bundermann radioed to let me know that the quick-reaction force had just left the wire at Fritsche and were on their way down the mountain.
“Red Two, QRF is leaving Fritsche,” he announced. “Prepare to launch, and tell me when you are ready.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Mustering the Dead
IF YOU WANTED to select the most likely place for an American soldier to get picked off by an enemy gunner from the ridges surrounding Keating, it would be hard to come up with a better spot than the thirty-yard stretch of bare dirt and loosely scattered pebbles that lay just beyond the south side of the Shura Building. Inside this zone the ground was open, the terrain sloped uphill, and the entire space was exposed to direct fire from virtually every sector. Nobody in his right mind would voluntarily step into that killing ground. Yet that’s exactly what was required of the men who would spearhead the push to recover our dead and rescue our team at the mortar pit.
Our right flank would be formed by Stanley and Dulaney, with Dulaney and his SAW on the far end because I wanted the weapon that could inflict the heaviest casualties to shield us, as much as possible, from the Taliban gunners who would be trying to take us down from across the river in Urmul and far up in the Switchbacks. Larson and Raz would take the left flank, while I’d be directly in the center. From there I could serve as command and control, directing our movements while simultaneously communicating with Bundermann back in the command post.
“Redcon One,” I radioed to Bundermann, a code that signaled we were ready to launch.
“Roger that,” replied Bundermann, who waited until Hill confirmed the same. Then Bundermann called the launch.
“Red—move,” he ordered.
“Go!” I yelled. And with that, the five of us burst through the west door of the Shura Building and moved out into the killing ground.
• • •
THE MOMENT the Taliban realized what we were doing, their gunners opened up and we began taking heavy fire. The first shots came in from Urmul and the Waterfall area. Then all of a sudden, the Switchbacks and the Putting Green kicked in, followed finally by the North Face. Hundreds of bullets ripped up the dirt around our feet while multiple RPGs snaked in, pulling their trails of white smoke behind them and exploding on all sides of us.
The incoming fire was dense and intimidating—but we had the jump on them, and before the enemy gunners could get a solid bead on any of us, we’d sprinted across the open ground and were stacked in a line against the first available cover. Directly to my left was Raz, and beyond him was Larson, who was crouched behind Truck 2 at the far left of our line. Stanley was to my immediate right, and beyond him, Dulaney was butted against the wall of Hescos that made up Keating’s outer perimeter. From there, Dulaney was unleashing wicked-sounding bursts from his SAW toward the Switchbacks. Each of us was spaced fifteen meters apart to ensure that an RPG could take out only one of us at a time.
From my position in the center, where I was huddled on the south side of the laundry trailer, I glanced to both sides to confirm that all four of my guys had secured solid cover before keying my radio.
“Set!” I yelled—alerting everyone on the combat net we were in position and that Hill’s team now had a green light to star
t their move. Then I glanced directly behind us and spotted something that left me disoriented and confused.
Thirty yards to our rear, Hill was standing in the west door of the Shura Building.
I spun and looked to my left, where a line of six men should have been charging uphill toward the chow hall.
They were nowhere to be seen.
Hill wasn’t even remotely close to where he was supposed to be, while the assault that he should have been leading seemed to have disappeared.
What in God’s name did he think he was doing?
The moment I raised that question in my mind, I understood that the answer, whatever it might be, simply didn’t matter. Perhaps Hill had failed to grasp how this maneuver was supposed to work. Maybe he thought he was doing some good by shooting directly over our heads rather than providing crossfire support, which was what we needed in order to keep moving forward. Or perhaps he was reluctant to order his men into the teeth of the same murderous barrage we had just run through and risk losing all of them now that the Taliban gunners were wise to what we were trying to pull off.
Regardless, it made no difference. The only thing that mattered was that me and my team were on our own with no supporting fire whatsoever, and highly exposed to the enemy’s guns from virtually every quadrant.
Right then, the prudent move—indeed, the only option that qualified as a smart play—would have been for us to withdraw. But if we pulled back to the Shura Building, it was unlikely that we could launch out a second time after having telegraphed our move so clearly. Having lost both momentum and surprise, we would have squandered our best chance of retrieving our dead. And that was a price I wasn’t willing to pay.
“Hey, we’re already committed,” I yelled out to the guys on either side of me, while deliberately avoiding any mention of the fact that we had no flank support on our left. “We can’t sit here, so we’re gonna do this in teams.”
Every man knew what this meant: we would split in half and execute the same maneuver that we’d been planning to conduct in tandem with Hill’s team, but within a narrower area and without nearly as much protection.
“We gotta push now,” I barked, turning back for one last glance at the Shura Building to confirm that Hill and his team weren’t moving—and it was then that something caught my eye.
Vernon Martin
It was the body of an American soldier, tucked underneath the east side of the laundry trailer.
We’d found our mechanic, Vernon Martin.
• • •
DUCKING UNDER THE TRAILER, I could see that Martin was lying on his stomach with his feet facing me. There was no sign of his weapon.
Reaching out with both hands, I grabbed the handle of his body armor, just below the back of his neck, pulled him out, and gave him a once-over. He’d been hit in the leg—probably shrapnel from the RPG that had exploded inside the turret of Gallegos’s gun truck—and he had placed a tourniquet over the wound with a strip of olive-colored cloth. That had slowed him down enough to prevent him from covering the final patch of open ground between the laundry trailer and the Shura Building, so he’d crawled underneath the trailer in the hopes of staying hidden. Once there, he’d had nowhere else to go as he succumbed to his wound, dying isolated and alone.
Glancing downhill toward the Shura Building, I keyed my radio, called up Avalos, and told him that he needed to launch out with his body-recovery team to collect Martin.
The job that we’d given Avalos and his helpers, Grissette and Kahn, was both dangerous and exceptionally unpleasant. Thanks to the massive effort that’s required to carry a dead body over uneven terrain, they would be forced to leave their weapons behind. What’s more, in order to move as fast as possible and hopefully avoid being shot, they also would not be bringing a stretcher with them.
Avalos and Kahn were the first to make the dash up to the laundry trailer. When they arrived, they took hold of Martin and immediately started running downhill as fast as they could, dragging his body through the dirt and rocks. It was an appalling way to treat anyone who had died, much less a person they both had known. But they had no choice—the Taliban gunners fired at them the entire way in the hopes of taking one or both men out.
As they reached the entrance to the Shura Building, they were met by Grissette, who was horrified by what he had just witnessed. As two of the few African-Americans at Keating, Grissette and Martin had been close friends; they’d leaned on each other for support and they’d confided in each other when they needed advice or a sympathetic ear. Now Grissette’s buddy was being yanked through the dirt like a tin can tied to the bumper of a car.
“Man,” he cried out to Avalos in anguish and disgust, “not my boy!”
Little did Avalos know that within the next few minutes, he would be treated to the very same horror with a fallen soldier whose friendship and support he had known.
• • •
WHILE ALL OF THIS was unfolding, I was yelling, “Go!” and my five-man squad was making our next push, which would take us uphill another forty yards from the laundry trailer to the latrines, where we would once again have some cover.
Larson and Raz went first, racing madly and followed by Stanley, Dulaney, and me.
When I arrived, Raz was moving toward the door to the latrines while pulling a grenade from his vest pouch.
“Raz,” I barked, “please don’t frag the shitter!”
He turned around and shot me a look of pure confusion.
“If you throw that grenade in there,” I explained, “the explosion’s gonna blast through the open space at the bottom of the building and probably kill us all.”
“Oh . . . roger that,” he said.
“Plus, we’re all gonna get covered in shit,” I added. “So just enter and clear, okay?”
“Thank God I’m not the one in charge here,” he muttered as he stepped up, yanked open the door with his weapon raised—and found himself staring down the barrel and directly into the face of an Afghan man.
It was Ron Jeremy, the interpreter (or “terp,” as we called him) who had tried to warn us, just before six a.m., that the Taliban were about to attack. Since then, he had been crouching inside one of the latrine stalls with his legs pulled up to his chest, which is why he could now barely walk.
One way of gauging the intensity of combat—a crude but revealing index of the psychic hold that it can take on those who are swept into its dark energy—is to consider what was going through Raz’s head in that instant. A part of his mind, of course, fully recognized Ron: a man whom we all knew and liked, and who had done his best to prevent us from being obliterated. But another part of his mind, the part that was connected to the hand that Raz now had wrapped around the trigger housing of his rifle, registered only one thing: the figure of a man from Afghanistan. And the main thing that Raz wanted to do right then, the only thing he wanted to do—was to shoot this fucker in the face and wallpaper the inside of the latrines with his brains.
Part of what made Raz such a superb soldier was that he maintained his violence of action during a firefight by refusing to pause or hesitate. That sort of momentum and focus is essential because sometimes it’s the only thing that can propel a man through a set of obstacles and bring him out on the other side. But for reasons that even Raz didn’t fully fathom—something that would later leave him puzzled and curious—he did hesitate just long enough to allow a mildly disturbing question to break the surface of his thoughts:
This dude standing in front of me is a terp, not a Taliban, so if I shoot him in the head . . . will I get in trouble for that?
Better to ask for permission first.
“Can I shoot him?” he begged me, still glaring down the barrel of the rifle at Ron.
“No, Raz!” I yelled.
“Well, I had to ask.” Raz sighed as he lowered his weapon, seized Ron by the shirt, and yan
ked him outside. “I really, really wanted to.”
“We’re not allowed to shoot the terp—at least not till we figure out what side he’s on,” I said, turning to face Ron.
“Where the fuck have you come from?!” I demanded.
“I was needing to take a shit at six a.m.,” he explained, “and since that time I am hiding inside!”
I paused, thought about that for a second or two, then looked downhill across the open ground toward the Shura Building.
“Well, if you survived this long, I’m pretty sure you can make it back on your own,” I told him. “You can’t stay here, and you can’t come with us. So you know what, Ron? You better start running, and you better run like hell.”
Like the porn star who bore his nickname, Ron was short and fat and covered with hair. As he took off at a furious waddle, he looked pretty much exactly like a hedgehog trying to run on its hind legs—a spectacle that caused all of us to start laughing.
We were still cackling, and Ron was still running, when I glanced around me on both sides and realized that we were missing somebody.
“Where the hell’s Larson?” I asked.
Everybody shot me a blank look and shook their heads.
“Red Dragon, come in!” I said, keying my radio. “Red Dragon—where are you at?”
No response.
Oh no, I thought to myself, we just lost our first guy on the assault.
Furiously scanning the ground around us, I suddenly caught sight of a figure in an American Army uniform crumpled in a ditch about twenty yards away on the south side of the latrines.
He was lying facedown and clearly dead.
“Get your team up here—we’ve got another body to bring down,” I radioed to Avalos. Then I resumed screaming for Larson.
My closest friend was still missing. But we’d found Gallegos.
• • •
Red Platoon Page 31
