We felt no pity for these men whatsoever, and if we demonstrated any respect for them at all, it was only to take stock of how well equipped they were—the ammo in their chest racks, the tennis shoes on their feet—and to acknowledge that what they had pulled off was impressive. To stage simultaneous attacks against two fortified outposts, each of them heavily defended with American firepower and backed up by American airpower, required organization, planning, and boldness. They had clearly demonstrated all three—although they had also paid a tremendous price.
The army would later estimate that Black Knight Troop and the aircraft that supported us killed somewhere between 100 and 150 militants in the process of repulsing their assault, a casualty rate somewhere between 25 and 35 percent.
On our side of the ledger, the toll was no less gruesome. Among the fifty Americans at Keating, twenty-seven had been wounded and eight were dead. That was bad, but when you took a closer look at the numbers, it was even worse, because only about thirty of our soldiers had been actually fighting. Among those who actively participated in the defense of the outpost, our casualty rate was directly comparable to what the Taliban had suffered.
And then there were our Afghan allies. Eight of the forty-eight soldiers were wounded, three soldiers and two security guards were killed, and fifteen soldiers had simply disappeared.
We had no idea what befell those missing men, but the ones who remained inside the wire became the targets of our disgust and outright hatred. It was bad enough that most of these men had abandoned their posts and spent the entirety of the battle hiding from the fight. What made things even worse was a discovery that took place later that morning as the Afghans were preparing to board a series of helicopters that would take them to Bostick.
When they were forced to empty out their bags because of weight restrictions, a trove of energy drinks, magazines, headphones, candy bars, and digital cameras came tumbling out. Recognizing that those items belonged to us, we realized that while we were busy defending the outpost, the Afghans had been looting our barracks and stealing our belongings.
To say that we were glad to see them go would be an understatement.
While the helicopters shuttled the Afghans to safety, we turned to the first order of business, which was to secure the village of Urmul.
• • •
WHILE I TOOK a small team of guys from Red Platoon up to the Switchbacks to find a spot where we could look down on the village and perform overwatch, a five-man squad from Blue Platoon headed out the front gate, across the bridge, and directly into Urmul. When they arrived, they encountered a level of devastation that rivaled the scene inside Keating.
The place was a shambles. Most of the buildings had been completely destroyed, and those that remained standing were so pockmarked with holes that it seemed only a matter of days before they too came tumbling down. The patrol saw only four living people—a woman who was working in her field and an old man with two young boys—but the dead were everywhere.
From the evidence, it was clear that the tiny police station in the village had been attacked first off, and that the officers who survived the initial strike had been herded together and executed by the fighters who occupied the place. There were plenty of bodies clad in the brown robes of the Taliban too, many of which lay where they had died.
While the team picked through the wreckage searching for anything that might offer useful intelligence—radios, photographs, written documents—a similar assessment was unfolding back inside Keating. There, Colonel Brown and Captain Portis were methodically pacing from one end of the outpost to the other in an effort to piece together what had happened: how our defenses had collapsed, where the enemy had breached the perimeter, how much damage there was, and whether anything that remained—supplies, ammunition, gear, or armor—could be hauled away and salvaged.
As the two officers moved about camp making their assessment and debating whether what was left of the outpost should be destroyed or simply abandoned, they were shadowed by a delegation of women from the surrounding villages who had come to retrieve the bodies of the Taliban soldiers for burial.
These women were clad in burkas, the indigo robes that cover the female figure from head to toe, and they seemed to float above the ground like blue ghosts, silent and wraithlike as they went about the business of gathering up the dead. Meanwhile, the members of Black Knight Troop who were still in camp were conducting their own desultory effort to sift through the debris and pull out anything that seemed like it might be worth saving.
It was sometime in the early afternoon when Ryan Schulz, the sergeant with HQ Platoon who was part of our intelligence unit, emerged from the wreckage of John Deere’s Haji Shop holding several of the Afghan commando T-shirts that the Afghan Army soldiers were so fond of.
“Hey,” he said, walking up to Jones and offering him a shirt. “Make sure that Mace gets this, okay?”
Clearly, word about what had happened had yet to spread through the entire camp.
“Mace isn’t ever gonna wear that shirt,” Jones said, and walked away.
And so it went for the rest of that afternoon, all through the next day, and well into the third: extracting things from the wreckage and packing up what we could for transport until our superiors finally passed down word that it was time to get the fuck out of Keating.
• • •
FITTINGLY, WE LEFT AT NIGHT, and with every intention of blowing the place sky-high as we departed.
By the evening of October 6, a team of combat engineers that had been flown in from Bostick had packed the entire camp with explosives and wired everything together with detonation chord connected to a triggering device that could be operated from the front gate. By this point, we had salvaged whatever equipment we could and sent it out by helicopter. All that remained was us.
The Chinooks were scheduled to arrive in waves, starting well after nightfall. Captain Sax’s relief force would be on the first flight out. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, the Chinooks would return to collect the members of Blue and Headquarters platoons, along with most of the medics. This would require several trips, and when it was done, the birds would come back one more time.
As usual, Red would be the last to leave.
The shuttles went like clockwork, each Chinook coming in, taking off for Bostick, and then coming back for its next load until the next-to-last flight ripped out and left about twenty of us standing together on the landing zone with just our weapons, radios, and a small supply of water.
We had stacked ourselves in a crescent formation along the west side of the landing zone, which would enable us to collapse back toward our helicopter in an orderly formation. Now that everyone else was gone, there was nothing left for us to do but sit there in silence, staring out toward the dark river in front of us and the even darker ridgelines above, and wait for our ride.
We waited for fifteen minutes, and then waited some more as we slid past twenty. It was around the twenty-five-minute mark that the doubts we’d all been wrestling with started to take hold and form words.
“They’re out there,” exclaimed Justin Gregory, who, as always, was the most jittery guy in the platoon—and who was now convinced that he was seeing enemy movement in the distance. “They’re coming to get us, I know it.”
“Dude, if you don’t shut the hell up, I’m gonna knock you out right now,” said Avalos, who was right next to him. “Let’s just wait for the Chinook to get back and get on it, and then we’ll be gone.”
Avalos was right—we all knew that. But we also knew that Gregory had given voice to fears that each man was wrestling with, all of which boiled down to a question:
Are they not coming back for us?
Finally, at well past the thirty-minute mark, we heard the sound of rotors and rose to our feet with weapons raised in case the Chinook started to take incoming fire.
When the b
ird landed, our line began folding toward the ramp at the rear of the chopper. Nick Davidson boarded first, followed by Koppes and everyone else.
As the loading neared completion, Colonel Brown, who had remained behind with us, paused to activate the timing device, which would trigger the explosive charges in twenty minutes. Then he stepped on deck. He was followed by First Sergeant Burton, who had been waiting for Brown to board so that he could claim bragging rights as the last to leave Keating. But Burton had failed to notice the two men who had been charged with rear security—and who were still on the ground standing in the shadows at either side of the ramp.
When Burton had boarded, Brad Larson and I locked eyes to make sure that we were in sync. And then, just as we had planned it, our boots left the ground at the exact same instant so that neither of us could claim the honor of being the last man out.
We both had cigars in our pockets, which we now stuck in our mouths and chewed on.
As the Chinook lurched into the air and started on its way toward Bostick, applause broke out, punctuated by a few yells of “Woo-hoo!” Then everyone turned to face the back hatch in the hopes of catching sight of the final explosions. But for whatever reason—either the timing device or the explosives had malfunctioned—the blast never came. Which, in a way, was kind of a symbolically perfect fuck-you from Keating.
• • •
WE SORT of had the last word anyhow.
Later that same night, a B-1 bomber made a pass over Nuristan, opened up its doors, and dropped several tons of smart bombs on a dozen grid coordinates inside Keating. The following morning, for good measure, a second B-1 came by and dropped another load.
Those air strikes should have been enough to level the entire outpost. But the next day, when a Predator drone was sent over to survey the damage, the images revealed that several structures were still standing, and that fourteen Taliban were strolling around the camp. So two more drones were dispatched, each of which loosed a pair of Hellfire missiles.
According to army records that were later released, the insurgents who were obliterated in that final blast included Abdul Rahman Mustaghni, the commander who had led the attack on Keating.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Trailing Fires
OUR ARRIVAL AT BOSTICK was a surreal experience not only for us but also for the soldiers who watched us emerge from the Chinook. Most of us were covered in dried blood, and aside from the weapons we toted and the clothes we wore, almost all of our possessions were gone. But each of us carried an odor on our skin and on our breath that was redolent of Keating and everything that place stood for: a stink that was composed in equal parts of rage and fear and death.
By now the Battle for Keating had made national news back in the States and it was widely reported that a bunch of us had been killed, so it was important to let our families know that we were alive. After the phone calls to our loved ones were complete, we spent the next couple of days trying to get ourselves squared away by requisitioning new uniforms and tending to our wounds.
While we went about that business, we wrestled with the memories of the men whose bodies were being autopsied inside the army’s mortuary at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. And no one felt the burden of those memories more than our platoon leader, who was still convinced that he had somehow failed us.
Needless to say, the rest of us didn’t see things that way, and we did our best to drive home the message that if not for our lieutenant, it was almost certain that none of us would have made it through. With him, we’d lost eight men. Without him, we would have lost everyone.
After the battle
Despite our best efforts, none of this ever seemed to sink in to the level where Bundermann was willing to let himself off the hook. He simply didn’t believe us. But when the army finally concluded its analysis of what had gone wrong and released the results during the first week of February 2010, the official report buttressed the message that we’d been trying to get across.
• • •
THE INVESTIGATION into the assault on Keating was led by Army Major General Guy Swan, who conducted interviews with 140 American soldiers and Afghan nationals who were either at the outpost or had information about the attack. Swan’s report offered conclusive proof that what had gone wrong at Keating had nothing to do with anyone who fought there that day.
According to the report, after repeatedly attacking the outpost in order to gather intelligence on our battle drills, the enemy had analyzed our response patterns, then used this information to create a detailed assault plan that would exploit the weaknesses they were able to observe. They had started by targeting our generators, our mortar pit, and our gun trucks with large numbers of RPGs, and they did not begin their ground assault until they achieved decisive fire superiority. The insurgents had also positioned snipers and machine guns to cover the doors in buildings and living quarters where they had observed reinforcements exit during previous attacks.
All of this, Swann’s analysis made clear, was made possible by the fact that the Taliban occupied the high ground and could see everything we did.
The investigation concluded that as the commander and senior officer at Keating from Black Knight’s arrival until the September 20 change of command, Captain Melvin Porter bore the greatest responsibility for what went wrong. Among the faults for which Porter was cited, he had “rejected recommendations from senior noncommissioned officers to execute additional protective measures, including the proposed emplacement of sniper teams and other small kill teams outside the perimeter to deny the enemy key terrain.” In addition, Porter had also “failed to adequately construct or reinforce defensive positions, though excess lumber and sandbags left by the previous units were available,” and he had repeatedly denied requests to check, reposition, or change out claymore mines that had been emplaced by the previous unit around the perimeter of the outpost.
Finally, the report stated that Porter had neglected to close and secure “a well-known gap in the perimeter at the ANA portion of the COP—an avenue of approach that was used by AAF forces to penetrate the COP on Oct. 3.”
• • •
AS WE MOVED through the days that immediately followed the battle, each of us grappled with his private feelings of loss in his own way, but we were united by one thing. Like it or not, we still had the better part of a year left in our deployment, and our jobs would not afford us the luxury of dwelling on grief or mourning the men who were no longer with us.
Aside from the handful of guys in Black Knight who were on their first deployment, we all knew the drill. Bottle your feelings inside, bury them deep, and if any of those emotions refuse to stay down, harness that energy and channel it into doing your job well until the deployment is complete and it’s time to head home. Then when you’re back in the States you can unlock the door to the room where all that pain has been stored and try to take stock of what it all means.
Or not.
We spent the next eight months providing security for the big military convoys that were responsible for pushing supplies north out of Jalalabad into the network of American outposts that were scattered through the valleys and ridgelines of Kunar Province. We also spent a lot of our time meeting with local Afghans in nearby villages to help provide them with roads and bridges, schools and water projects, until we received word, late in the spring of 2010, that it was time to wrap things up.
In the process of completing those duties, we suffered two more casualties. Kent Johnson, one of Red Platoon’s replacement soldiers, was shot in the ass during a firefight that took place in December. Later the following spring, another replacement soldier in White Platoon was badly wounded when he was riding inside an armored vehicle that was hit by an IED. He would later wind up losing one of his legs.
Other than those two incidents, everybody made it through safely until May, when we were finally sent home.
•
• •
IN APRIL OF 2011, almost a year after arriving back in the States, I ended my military career, moved my family from Colorado to North Dakota, and tried to put the army behind me by taking a job as a safety supervisor in the oil fields just outside the town of Minot. It was there, in the autumn of 2012, that I found myself sitting in the cab of a pickup truck next to an oil rig when a call arrived from a colonel who was stationed at the Pentagon. He was phoning to ask if I’d be willing to hop on a plane to DC and drop by his office.
I had no idea what this might be about, but I’d already used up my vacation time for the year, so it was another month before I could comply with the request. When I was finally able to make the trip, I was brought into a conference room and invited to join a group of colonels and generals who were sitting at a long table. It was at this point that I requested an explanation for why I was there.
“You don’t know?” someone asked.
When I shook my head, they explained that after conducting an extensive review of my actions during the Battle for Keating, I was slated to receive the Medal of Honor, the highest military award the country can bestow.
It would be an understatement to say that I found this news confusing. In fact, it made no sense whatsoever. Singling me out for such a superlative commendation struck me as both inappropriate and wrong. In my view, nothing that I’d done that day was any different from what my comrades had accomplished. What’s more, I could easily have picked half a dozen men—especially Gallegos, Kirk, Hardt, Mace, and Griffin—who truly deserved selection because they had given their lives in an effort to save others.
Red Platoon Page 36
