Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  “Fuck you!” he screamed at the bewildered Afghan soldier. “Don’t put that dirty fucking dirt on that man’s fucking blood, you motherfucking fuck. Clean that up now or I will fucking kill you!”

  While the Afghan prudently withdrew, Jones blinked a few times and took a deep breath, stunned by the heat of his own rage.

  Then he and Koppes got to work.

  Like the men whose bodies they were carrying through this final stage of their time at Keating, each trip from the Shura Building through the front gate and across the bridge over the river was different. Gallegos was so heavy that Jones, whose back was injured, had to strain himself to avoid letting the body bag drag over the rocks. Hardt was wrapped loosely enough that the prop wash from one of the helicopters peeled back the plastic and exposed his face. And Kirk was so cumbersome that one of Sax’s soldiers who was trying to lend a hand lost his grip as they were placing him on board and dropped one end—a mistake that so enraged Raz, who was also there to help with the loading, that he threatened to punch the guy in the face.

  The helicopters touched down and took off in a line. The first two removed our dead and our walking wounded. Then came the Afghan wounded and the Afghan dead. Each aircraft also dropped off a consignment of supplies—gear, water, ammo, fuel, and batteries—before taking on its load of passengers.

  This continuous shuttle of supplies in one direction and bodies—dead and wounded alike—in the other was confusing and exhausting for Jones and Koppes. It also made for some surreal moments, perhaps the strangest of which occurred when they looked out at the landing zone just after one of the helicopters had taken off and realized that there was a body bag sitting in the middle of it. Appalled by the possibility that one of his fellow soldiers had been left behind or, far worse, had somehow fallen out of the sky, Jones tentatively picked up one end of the bag and experienced a sense of horror as he realized that the contents were bending and shifting in a way that no human body should.

  When they pulled back the zipper, they discovered that the bag was filled with boxes of ammo. Apparently, the crew at Bostick was unloading the bodies, then repurposing the bags and sending them straight back to Keating without stopping to consider how this might look to someone on the receiving end.

  On and on it went, one chopper after another. And throughout the whole process as Koppes and Jones concentrated on their loading, Larson, Grissette, and I stood just beyond the landing zone, performing overwatch to make sure that the area was secured.

  As the evening wore on, we lost track of how many sorties came and went. It was draining to still be on duty, but in some ways we were grateful for the assignment. During the intervals between one chopper and the next, the three of us were able to sit there in the darkness, thinking about all that had happened that day and talking quietly about what had gone down and what lay ahead.

  The one subject to which we kept returning was revenge. We still had the better part of a year left in our deployment, and each of us seemed to draw comfort from the idea that this might offer enough time for us to pay those bastards back for what they had done to our friends.

  • • •

  AFTER THE LAST of the birds departed, we were finally able to stand down. Sax’s two rifle companies had already taken over Keating’s defensive positions so that none of us needed to stand guard. This meant that we were free to bed down for the night—although there was initially some confusion about where, exactly, we should do that.

  Most of the barracks buildings had been completely destroyed, while a sizable section of Red’s quarters were now serving as the new command post. So, with no better plan, each man headed off in whatever direction he thought best. A lot of the guys in Blue Platoon wound up on the café outside the aid station, where they did their best to keep warm by bundling into whatever extra clothing they could scrounge from the soldiers who hadn’t lost all of their possessions and gear to the fires. Meanwhile, my guys in Red scattered. Jones racked out on a shelf in the ammo supply room, just above Koppes. Larson leaned against the outer wall of our barracks, not even bothering to remove his body armor. Raz did the same up at the mortar pit, and I ended up crashing inside our barracks on top of the small card table on which we had played countless games of spades and dominoes.

  As the night deepened and the outpost settled down, one of the few places that still saw activity was the aid station, where Cordova and his medics, in an effort to prepare for a counterattack first thing in the morning, were doing their best to clean up and restock whatever supplies they might need to tend to a new flood of wounded. Thanks to the damage that had been done to the generators, there was neither electricity nor water, so they worked in the dark with their headlamps, picking up blood-soaked scraps of clothing and stuffing them into trash bags, then swabbing down the floor with Kerlix padding. They ended up smearing streaks of brownish-red blood all over the blue linoleum tiles. Illuminated in the flittering beams of their headlamps, the aid station looked as if a deranged artist had crept inside it to create a ghoulish fresco of death.

  Sometime after ten p.m., Cordova, who had now been up for more than thirty-six hours, went off to bed. Soon he was followed by Floyd, Cody, and Hobbs, which left Courville all by himself, sitting in the darkened room cleaning his rifle and listening to Shinedown on his headphones until the door swung open and Bundermann walked in.

  Some things never change, thought Courville. Even now, the aid station was the place where a guy came when he needed to get something off his chest.

  While Courville ignited two MRE heaters and made each of them a cup of coffee, Bundermann talked about what had happened. He talked about how Blue Platoon had lost two of its members while HQ and the mortar crew had lost one each, but that it was his platoon, Red, with three dead and one still fighting for his life on an operating table in Bostick, that had been hit the hardest. He talked about how his rightful place during the battle—the place where he always stood for every engagement, without exception, and where he should have been that day—was out at Gallegos’s gun truck in the center of the battlefield, the place with the finest visibility and vantage, where he could have seen what was going down while participating in the actual fight. He talked about how he should have led the counterassault to retake the ammo depot and the front gate and the Shura Building. And most of all, he talked about how truly sick he felt about holing up in the most heavily fortified building inside the wire running a bunch of radios, while fifty soldiers stood up and gave everything they had to ensure that, if it came to it, he would have been the last man to perish when what should rightly have happened, what he would have preferred, and what was his duty as the leader of his platoon, was for him to have died first.

  After taking all this in, Courville did what he could to remind Bundermann of the other side of the picture: the side that everyone else saw and knew to be true, which was that Bundermann had risen to the role that had been handed to him and that he’d performed with incandescent foresight and skill; that he had done far more good inside the command post than he ever could have out on the periphery of camp, because if it hadn’t been for his leadership in the command center, none of us would have made it through and all of Keating—including the room they were sitting in—would have been under the control of the Taliban.

  Courville said all of that knowing that the weight of its truth meant little to his lieutenant in comparison to the far greater weight of Bundermann’s conviction that he had failed to perform to the fullest measure of his calling as a leader and, in falling short of that mark, had also failed his men—men for whom he was responsible, men who were directly under his care and who were now dead.

  They talked far into the night until the magnitude of Bundermann’s exhaustion finally overtook his sense of guilt and self-recrimination, and he was forced to head off to get some sleep.

  That left Courville once again by himself. But instead of following Bundermann’s lead, h
e decided that he had one last thing to do, which was to pad around camp and make sure that every man in the troop had taken off his socks before going to bed so that his feet could dry out.

  Courville was loath to wake anybody up, so he did his best to slip everyone’s socks off while they were still asleep. Most of the guys were racked out deeply enough that they never even noticed. Indeed, a handful of them were so still that Courville found himself checking their breathing and their pulses to confirm that they were alive. But one or two sat bolt upright as soon as they realized that someone was messing with their feet.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” demanded Jones.

  “Just taking your socks off, Jonesie,” said Courville softly. “You can’t sleep with them on.”

  As Jones lay back, muttering to himself in confusion, it occurred to Courville how absurd it must seem to these men, after everything else that had happened since the attack broke out, for a medic to be obsessing about such a trivial detail. Courville himself wasn’t truly sure why he was performing this task—except, perhaps, as part of an effort to impose a tiny return to something resembling normalcy in what had otherwise been a day of virtually uninterrupted horror.

  Regardless of the reason, he kept at it, moving through the darkness and carefully placing the socks he removed next to each sleeping figure. As he worked his way through camp, he was vaguely aware that far above him, somewhere up there in the moonlit sky, there were aircraft moving about. He could hear the dull roar of jets, the sharp-edged clatter of helicopter rotors, and occasionally, the sound of something else: a metallic whir from the gun systems on Spooky, an AC-130H that was pinning down the coordinates of any handheld Taliban radio in the surrounding mountains and unleashing a burst from its 30-mm auto cannon with a chilling moan that sounded like waaaaahhhhhhhhhh.

  Unbeknownst to Courville or anyone else on the ground at Keating, something else was afoot too.

  Around one a.m., a sortie of four Chinooks loaded with 130 special forces soldiers—a combined unit of Americans and Afghans—headed from Bostick to Fritsche. There the commando team disembarked and melted into the hillsides, where they would spend the rest of that night and the next several days engaged in a cave-by-cave and village-to-village sweep looking for the men who were responsible for the attacks at Keating and Fritsche, and systematically eliminating them.

  Meanwhile, the four Chinooks returned to Bostick, where a pair of them were tasked with the final mission of the battle.

  When they lifted off the helipad at Bostick, they were carrying Keating’s dead to Bagram, the first in a series of journeys that would eventually take Josh Kirk and Justin Gallegos, Kevin Thomson and Michael Scusa, Vernon Martin and Chris Griffin and Josh Hardt all the way to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, where their bodies would be autopsied before being sent off to reunite with their families across the United States.

  But in addition to those Chinooks, there was another helicopter that was carrying one other body—although most of the guys at Keating, including me, wouldn’t hear about that until we awoke from our collective stupor.

  • • •

  ON THE MORNING of October 4, the sun rose at 5:51, just a few minutes later than it had come up on October 3, and for Zach Koppes, this event—the fact that the sun had actually decided to rise—was perhaps the only thing that those two mornings had in common with each other.

  At the combat outpost where Koppes awoke, there was no possibility of a hot breakfast, because the chow hall was now a crumbling pile of still-glowing ash and embers. There was no anticipation that he might be able to skim through the pages of a magazine—or do anything else, for that matter—from the turret of his gun truck, because his armored Humvee had been shot to pieces. And there would be no hot shower for himself or anybody else, because there was no water in camp and because the showers, along with the latrines and the command post and the gym and pretty much everything else, had all been destroyed.

  Nevertheless, Koppes did his best to rally his mood and brace for the day as he gathered his gear and prepared to head out to perform whatever duties the First Sergeant or anyone else might think up for him. And it was then that Armando Avalos, who was passing by on some task of his own, turned and remarked in the most casual way one could imagine:

  “Hey, I don’t know if you heard yet, but Mace didn’t make it last night.”

  And then, as if this were just any other piece of news, Avalos kept on walking and headed outside, leaving Koppes to stand there and stare at his boots and blink hard while trying to square this information up with everything else that he’d heard about Mace prior to that very second. About how things were looking good and how the medics were feeling so positive about his chances. About how, once Mace got into the operating room, everything was going to be good because it’s there, in the OR, where they can fix all your problems—and how it was the job of keeping him alive until he actually got there that was supposed to have been the hardest part. And most of all, he thought about how all of this information had enabled him, Koppes, to put his worries about Mace to rest and get some sleep in the knowledge that everything was going to be cool—and that all of this had underscored that Koppes had made absolutely the right call in opting not to say good-bye to the closest friend he’d ever had.

  A moment later, Jones walked in.

  “Hey, man, are you good?” he asked guardedly.

  Somehow, Koppes managed to stammer out that Mace had died.

  “Yeah,” Jones replied gently, “I know.”

  Then he walked out too.

  I am not going to tell you what happened to Koppes after that, not specifically, except to say that the information he was struggling to take in drove him to his knees—and that when he buckled to the floor, he stayed there for a very long time.

  In some ways, Koppes still hasn’t gotten up off that floor—and neither have the rest of us, because that’s what Mace meant, and continues to mean, to the guys who were his friends and who had tried harder and given more to save his life than we’d ever tried or given at anything in our own lives.

  Instead, I will tell you how things ended with Stephan Mace.

  • • •

  IT WAS JUST after nine thirty p.m. when the med team at Bostick carried Mace into surgery and put him under anesthesia. By this point, more than twelve hours had passed since he’d received his first wounds, and the effects of that delay were evident the moment that his surgeon, Major Brad Zagol, opened him up.

  Zagol, who had graduated from West Point and trained at Walter Reed, could see that much of the tissue in his bowel appeared to be dead—too much time had passed without a supply of oxygen-rich blood for the cells to survive. The left side of his colon and most of his small bowel were perforated with holes, and he was bleeding internally near his right kidney.

  Zagol got to work, doing his best to stop the bleeding and repair the damaged abdomen. But thirty minutes into the operation, Mace’s heart stopped beating.

  Zagol immediately performed CPR, which got his heart started again. But the beat was irregular and unsustained. So about forty-five minutes later, Zagol opened up the left side of Mace’s chest to try and confirm that there had been no damage to the heart muscle itself. Then he gently took Mace’s heart between the palms of his hands and tried to massage it back to life, a technique that rarely works but is used when there are no other options.

  Not long after that, Brendan McCriskin, the flight surgeon who had helped get Mace out of Keating—and who had since been called away to a different firebase on yet another evacuation—landed back at Bostick and immediately dashed toward the aid station.

  Like everyone else, McCriskin had high hopes that the surgery had gone well. In fact, he was fully expecting to pick up Mace, get him back on board his Black Hawk, and transport him straight to Bagram for advanced postop treatment. But as he pushed through the doors, McCriskin spotted an an
guished and exhausted-looking Zagol leaning in a doorway across the room. His face was streaked with tears.

  Choking with sorrow, Zagol told McCriskin that Mace had coded during surgery, and that once they’d lost him they couldn’t get him back.

  According to his official medical report, Mace died from massive blood loss resulting from multiple ballistic injuries to his torso, bowel, and adrenal gland. But those of us who fought with him at Keating know that the truth is somewhat different.

  We know that Mace had willed himself to stay alive for so long—so much longer than any ordinary person ever could have—because he wanted to be with his friends. And we knew that when he finally left Keating—when he was no longer with us, but had been told that we were okay—that he had stopped fighting and decided it was time to let go.

  Stephan Mace

  When Mace was pronounced dead at 10:35 that night, he brought the total number on our roster of the dead from seven to eight.

  That was the butcher’s bill for the defense of Combat Outpost Keating.

  • • •

  THE REST OF that day was pretty much a blur for all of us.

  As we awoke and took in the news about Mace, we found ourselves confronting a scene of devastation and ruin that mirrored similar feelings inside each of us. Everywhere we turned lay the wreckage and the detritus of battle: burned-out skeletons of armored vehicles; heaps of charred wood and rubble where our buildings had stood; trees that had been cut down by automatic gunfire; small, curled piles of human turds and dark, glutinous puddles of human blood. And in every direction, glittering layers of brass shell casings, interspersed with the bodies of dead Taliban soldiers.

  Keating after the battle

  There were dozens of them, the Taliban dead. One was sprawled in the middle of the open area between the Shura Building and the showers. Another was splayed out behind the latrines, and a third, who was wedged inside of a ditch just south of the mechanics’ bay, must have taken a direct hit with a grenade, judging by the way his legs had been folded up over his head.