BACK AT THE SHURA BUILDING, Grissette was still distraught over the savage manner in which Martin’s body had been treated. Seeing how upset he was, Avalos didn’t think that Grissette was in the right frame of mind to run back through the gunfire and subject Gallegos’s body to the same treatment.
“It’s just gonna be us,” Avalos said, turning to Kahn. “On the count of three, we go. One—two—”
This time, they faced an even longer sprint.
Within the first few yards, Avalos had left Kahn, who was somewhat overweight and out of shape, far behind. By the time Avalos made it to the corner of the latrines, where I pointed him toward Gallegos, he was on his own. (Kahn had been forced to pause and take cover on the north side of the latrines.)
When Avalos reached the body, he realized that Gallegos could not have picked a worse spot to die. Without any assistance, it would be virtually impossible for Avalos to heft the biggest man at Keating to the lip of the ditch. Complicating things still further, one of Gallegos’s legs had become wedged between some rocks at the base of the ditch in a manner that would make it even harder to extract him. Finally, the Taliban gunners on the Waterfall area and in the Switchbacks had now caught sight of Avalos and were directing a significant portion of their fire toward him.
Initially, Avalos was so shocked to see Gallegos dead that he barely noted the RPGs and the machine-gun fire because, just like Grissette and Martin, Gallegos and Avalos had some history between them that made this loss personal. As two of the only Hispanic guys at Keating, they shared a powerful bond at the ethnic and cultural level. But their connection went even deeper than that.
Back at Fort Carson when they were first getting to know each other, Gallegos had sort of taken Avalos under his wing in the way that an older brother or a cousin might. In the process, Avalos had seen a different side of the harsh and belligerent badass from Tucson, a side that the rest of us were barely aware of.
The November before we’d deployed to Afghanistan, Gallegos got word that Avalos, who was single, couldn’t afford to fly home to California to be with his family during Thanksgiving. So Gallegos had insisted that Avalos join him, his wife, Amanda, and their small son, Mac, at their home in Colorado Springs.
Toward the end of that evening, the family had showed Avalos a Christmas stocking that they’d made for him and were planning to hang above their fireplace. In Avalos’s mind, the unspoken message from Gallegos was: Hey, you don’t have to be here for Christmas—but if you don’t have anywhere else to go, there’s a place for you here, and you will be welcome.
Since then, they’d been tight enough that Gallegos had shared his feelings about some hard turns that his life had taken, which included a divorce from Amanda and being passed over for a promotion. Avalos had been there to listen, and the trust between the two men had grown even stronger. In fact, only about a week earlier when they were sitting in one of the gun trucks in the middle of the night pulling guard duty, they’d had a conversation about what might happen if Keating was overrun and one of them didn’t survive.
For reasons that seemed strange at the time but that now made Avalos wonder if his friend might not have had some sort of weird premonition about what was about to go down, Gallegos had tried to make a joke about how, if he was killed, he’d make absolutely certain that he died in the most difficult place for the rest of the platoon to get to him as a kind of final gesture of defiance. Upon hearing that, Avalos had decided that he didn’t find the joke very funny, and he’d resolved to make his friend a promise.
“No matter what happens, I’m gonna be there for you,” he pledged. “If I’m alive, regardless of where you’re at, I’m going to come get you, and I’m gonna bring you back.”
Now, as Avalos recalled those words, he realized that in order to keep his promise he was first going to have to survive by bunkering down and riding things out until the Taliban gunners turned to other targets. Which meant that he was going to have to call upon Gallegos for one last favor—something that neither of them could have anticipated.
Scrunching down on the ground next to his friend, Avalos hoisted Gallegos’s body and draped it over himself as a makeshift shield to protect him from the bullets and the jagged pieces of shrapnel that were now caroming off the rocks and drilling into the sides of ditch. It was an ugly thing to do, using your dead friend as body armor. But it was the only option he could think of to stay alive and complete his job.
Several minutes passed before the gunfire seemed to shift away from the ditch. When it did, Avalos shuffled out from beneath Gallegos and cautiously poked his head over the top of the ditch.
About twenty yards to his north he spotted Kahn, and motioned for him to lend a hand. Kahn raced over and jumped into the ditch, and together they were able to hoist Gallegos out. Then both men began dragging Gallegos down toward the Shura Building.
As they disappeared downhill, I was still crouched on the north side of the latrines and continuing, without success, to call out for Larson on the radio.
• • •
UNBEKNOWNST TO ME, Larson’s final bound had taken him to a point that was just a few yards below the mechanics’ bay, where he’d sought cover by ducking inside a connex that we had been planning to use to back-haul equipment to Bostick. As I called for him on my radio, I moved around to the east side of the latrines, which brought this connex into my field of vision and enabled me to look through its doors.
He was crouched inside with his gun in one hand and his radio in the other. From the earnest manner in which he was scanning the North Face while trying to talk into his radio, it was clear that he hadn’t considered the possibility that by placing himself inside a steel-sided structure like a connex, he’d cut himself off from all electronic communication.
“Get your ass over here!” I screamed, motioning furiously with my arm.
“What’s up?” he asked in confusion when he arrived, still oblivious to fact that his move inside the shipping container had left me convinced that he’d gone off and gotten himself smoked.
“What the fuck were you doing over there?” I demanded.
“I was trying to make our linkup with Blue Platoon,” he exclaimed. “Where the hell are those guys?”
“Don’t worry about them,” I replied. “We’re kind of on our own right now.”
By this point, me, Larson, Raz, Stanley, and Dulaney were tucked behind the north side of the latrines. For the moment, this offered some cover and we felt reasonably secure. But without any support by fire from Blue, we would be horribly exposed—and dangerously far from any assistance—as we tried to cover the final fifty yards of ground leading up to the mortar pit while simultaneously scanning for Hardt. Moreover, if we did find Hardt, it would be impossible for us to provide effective suppressing fire to protect Avalos and his recovery team as they made their way up from the Shura Building for a third time, and then attempted to drag Hardt back.
Knowing that we were stretched too thin and poised on the threshold of overcommitting ourselves, I keyed my radio and called up the mortar pit.
Just before we launched this assault, I’d spoken to Sergeant Breeding for the first time since the attack had kicked off. For the past eight hours, he and his crew had been hunkered down inside their concrete hooch, unable to reach their guns in the pit or even extract the body of Thomson, their slain comrade. During much of that time, they had also been cut off from all communication until Breeding managed to jury-rig an antenna and reestablish a working radio link. When he and I spoke, I’d urged Breeding to hang on because we were on our way, and I’d assured him that when we reached the mortar pit we’d get him, his men, and Thomson’s body back down to the center of camp.
Now it was time to have another talk with Big John.
“Look, I got some bad news,” I told him. “I’m sorry, brother, but we don’t have the manpower to complete this final push. We’re not g
onna make it to you.”
Breeding didn’t miss a beat.
“Don’t worry about it; you did what you could,” he replied evenly. “You do what you gotta do to take care of your team down there, and we’ll take care of ourselves up here. We can hang on a bit longer, and if they come for us, we’re gonna take a bunch of them out.”
Before we signed off, I reminded Breeding that the QRF was already on its way down from Fritsche and that their first stop upon reaching Keating’s outer perimeter would be the mortar pit. I also told him that as soon as we got back to the Shura Building, my squad would break a hole in the southwest wall of the building and set up a machine gun to look directly over the top of the pit so that we could waste anyone who even thought about trying to come at him or his guys.
I don’t know whether he appreciated those assurances. But as I heard the words coming out of my mouth, I could barely contain my disgust and shame. Earlier that morning, I’d failed to uphold a pledge to a fellow soldier when I’d been forced to retreat from the generator without giving Gallegos the cover fire that I’d promised him. That man’s corpse had just been used as a human shield, dragged the length of a football field, and was now lying on the floor of the Shura Building while I fumbled to explain to yet another soldier who needed my help why I was breaking my word.
The whole point of this mission—the thing that had justified the risks we’d taken—was that we were supposed to grab everybody and bring them all back. Instead, we’d managed to snatch only two bodies while leaving behind a trio of surviving soldiers, plus a third body. On top of that, we still didn’t have a clue where the fourth and last body might be.
I suppose I could have laid some of the blame for this on the shoulders of Sergeant Hill. But as I signed off with Breeding and ordered my team to begin displacing back to the Shura Building, the person I was most enraged at was myself.
In war, you play for keeps—and because of that, there are no second chances and no do-overs. The calculus of combat, at its most brutal essence, is binary: you either overcome the hurdles that are flung in front of you and you figure out a way to make things happen, or you don’t. It’s a zero-sum, win-or-lose game with no middle ground—and no points for trying hard.
The bottom line was that I’d failed. And when me and my team completed our withdrawal and stepped through the Shura Building, the knowledge of that failure added another layer of bitterness to the taste and smell of blood and gunpowder and death that clung to the air within that building.
• • •
ONCE WE WERE BACK inside the Shura Building, the first order of business was to break open a portal in the southwest wall and set up a SAW to keep watch over the mortar pit. As soon as that was taken care of, I radioed Breeding to let him know that the gun was in place. Then I made another dash back to the command post to let Bundermann know where things stood.
At this point, my main concern was the lingering question of what had happened to Hardt. After filling in Bundermann on where we’d searched and how much terrain we’d covered before falling back, I laid out what I thought we should do next.
“My guess is that there’s an eighty-percent probability that his body is no longer on station, but we need to be sure,” I said. “I want to put together one more recon push.”
“No way,” he replied, shaking his head. “We’ve pushed our luck out a little bit too far already.”
With that, Bundermann ordered me to get back to the Shura Building, make sure that the front gate was fully reinforced with concertina wire, and sit tight until the rescue team arrived from Fritsche. When they got down the mountain, he said, we could resume the search for Hardt.
It was a solid decision and probably the right one. But when I returned to the Shura Building, I wasn’t able to shake the feeling that there was something terribly wrong about the fact that we still didn’t have everyone accounted for. It was right about then that Larson buttonholed me with a request. He wanted to conduct a solo reconnaissance run to look for Hardt one last time, and he needed me to give the nod.
My first reaction was that this was a lousy idea. I was okay with sending out a squad of men who could support one another. But one guy all by himself? That sounded ludicrous.
Larson, however, had no interest in taking no for an answer. Hardt, he pointed out, was not only one of our own platoon—a compelling reason by itself—but he’d been lost while trying to rescue fellow members of Red, including Larson himself. Plus, there was the fact that Larson had been training up Hardt in the same way that I had once trained up Larson: by taking him under his wing and teaching him not only how to perform, but also how to think. Which meant that Larson had some insight into what was probably going through Hardt’s mind during his final moments: where he was trying to get to, how he intended to do that—and therefore, where he might now be.
On and on Larson went, relentlessly trotting out one point after another until finally (and ironically) he’d worn me down in much the same way that Hardt had done a few hours earlier when I’d reluctantly green-lighted the rescue mission that had cost him his life—and thereby set up the argument that Larson and me were having right now.
“All right, you can go,” I conceded. “But you need to make sure you get light—and you need to hustle.”
With that, he started stripping off all of his gear: weapons, ammo, rack, body armor, anything that might slow him down. When he was down to his T-shirt, pants, and boots, he stepped to the side of the door, waited a few seconds for the fire to abate, and broke west.
This wasn’t a dash-and-pause sort of venture but a full-on, all-out, heels-on-fire sprint in a massive loop that would take him all the way from the front gate to the laundry trailer, the latrines, and Gallegos’s gun truck before he cut east toward the mechanics’ bay, then headed back past the shower trailers and the piss tubes to finish of by darting through the east door of the Shura Building.
The assumption behind this planned route was that when Hardt had fled his immobilized gun truck, he was almost certainly headed toward the toolshed and the chow hall. If that was the case—and if Hardt’s body hadn’t yet been snatched away by the enemy, he was now probably somewhere west of the mechanics’ bay.
Larson started taking fire the second he hit the ground. But just like in those football games back in Iraq and at Fort Carson, he was unbelievably fast. So fast that the gunners who were trying to hit him never got him locked in their sights and thus never even came close to anticipating the way he cut and swerved and dodged.
He was lost from our sight the moment he passed the shower trailer, and from there we had no idea how he was faring. But three minutes later, he appeared around the defunct Afghan Army mortar pit and whipped back to us as bullets lamely kicked up dust several yards behind him.
When he came through the door, he fell to his knees, gasping for breath, and shook his head in answer to the unspoken question of whether he’d caught sight of Hardt.
Nothing.
Staring out toward the front gate and the river beyond, I shook my head in frustration. It was as if Hardt had vanished into thin air. Or, much more likely, the Taliban had swooped in, scooped him up, and were now spiriting his body into the hills. That prospect was horrifying enough that once he caught his breath, Larson started campaigning for permission to conduct a second run and do the whole thing all over again, but cutting an even wider circuit—and exposing himself to even more danger—on the slim chance that maybe Hardt was still out there somewhere.
“No way,” I said, and this time there would be no arguing.
Among the many low points we experienced that day, this was surely one of the lowest. After all the effort we’d expended and the risks we’d taken, Hardt was still missing, and Breeding and his team were still trapped at the mortar pit.
Meanwhile, one hundred yards to the east of the Shura Building, a separate struggle was still being fought
as Keating’s medics desperately battled to save the life of a gravely wounded Stephan Mace before the wildfire that had already consumed the entire eastern half of the outpost spread to the aid station itself, and burned the thing to the ground.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Conflagration
NOWADAYS, WHEN I cast my mind back to the Battle for Keating, I find myself increasingly convinced that the drive to save Mace, a campaign that was fought against almost insurmountable odds, amounted to a kind of separate and miniature war of its own—a small battle that unfolded inside the frame of a larger one and, by dint of how hard it was fought and how much Mace meant to all of us, would color the feelings of everyone who was there that day and survived.
More than anything else that took place inside that miserable outpost, the story of what happened to Mace would come to define our understanding of whether we lost, whether we won, or whether the final outcome fell through some weird crack leading to a dark space that partook of both victory and defeat while amounting, in the end, to neither.
Earlier that afternoon when word had first reached the aid station that Mace was still alive, Doc Chris Cordova and his trio of medics—Shane Courville, Cody Floyd, and Jeff Hobbs—were still dealing with multiple casualties, the most urgent of which was the Afghan National Army soldier we called RPG Guy, who had just been brought in with a severe gunshot wound to his left leg that had severed an artery. Floyd was applying a tourniquet to stop the bleeding when the news arrived over the radio that every gun inside Keating needed to go on target so that Mace could be run down to the aid station.
To prepare for Mace’s arrival, the medics immediately started moving some of the wounded outside to the protected space in the café area. Then everyone hunkered down and braced themselves as the ordnance from Justin Kulish’s B-1 bomber began striking the Putting Green.
To the men inside the aid station, the impact of that air strike was every bit as dramatic as it was within the Shura Building or the mortar pit. As the thunderous concussions reverberated across the battle space, the shock waves shook the walls of the building violently enough to rattle medical supplies off the shelves and even knock down the picture of the Hooters chick—although the Ziploc bag containing the Russian tennis star’s perfumed panties remained fixed to the west wall.
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