Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

But me? No way. The idea seemed to violate my sense of what was most important—and what deserved to be commemorated—about that day.

  Although I didn’t know it at the time, it turns out that most Medal of Honor recipients feel exactly the same way. It also turns out that this fact has had little impact on the way that I feel about the honor that I was selected to receive—and everything else that would later unfold from it.

  They picked the wrong guy.

  • • •

  IT WAS ANOTHER seven months before the ceremony could be scheduled, and when it finally took place at the White House on the morning of February 11, 2013, the event served as a reunion of sorts. Larson was there, along with six other surviving members of Red Platoon: Bundermann, Raz, Koppes, Jones, Avalos, and Knight.

  They all found the White House a strange experience. None among them felt comfortable greeting the president, so the rest of the guys forced Jonesie to go first.

  “First in, last out, dude,” said Koppes, reminding Jones of his place in the hierarchy as he pushed him toward the podium.

  “Nothing changes,” Jones muttered, shaking his head. “When the shit hits the fan, send in Jonesie.”

  Having no idea how to address the president, Jones found himself at a loss for words as he shook hands with Barack Obama. But later that night, he’d returned to his normal state of volubility.

  “The man had soft hands,” he reported, which was apparently his main impression from his brief encounter with the commander in chief. “I mean, real soft. In fact, I don’t think there’s any part of my body that’s that soft.”

  The other thing that struck Jones, along with a number of the other guys, was an unusual scent that was wafting off a woman in the audience. They all agreed that the aroma, which was heady and unmistakable, transported them directly back to Nuristan and the little Ziploc bag that once hung on the wall of Keating’s aid station.

  When Courville approached the woman and politely inquired what type of perfume she was wearing, we finally learned that before Maria Kirilenko, the Russian tennis star, had mailed her panties off to Afghanistan, she’d misted them with a spritz of Obsession.

  • • •

  AS FOR ME, most of my memories from that event are a blur, except for the things that I found truly important, and there were really only two of those.

  First, I was overwhelmed by the chance to see the guys—men I hadn’t connected with since we’d left Afghanistan. They are, all of them, the closest friends I will ever have. And because of that, the bond I share with them—and will always share—is bedrock: a thing that is as immutable as the Hindu Kush.

  In addition to that, I was deeply moved by a group of relatives who represented seven of the eight men we had lost that day at Keating. This was my first opportunity to meet these Gold Star families and bear witness to the pain they carry—a sentiment that was expressed with perhaps the greatest force and eloquence by Vanessa Adelson, Mace’s mother, in a letter she had written to the president, from which he quoted just before he presented the medal:

  “‘Mr. President,’” Obama said, reading from what she had written, “‘you wrote me a letter telling me my son was a hero. I just wanted you to know what kind of hero he was. My son was a great soldier. As far back as I can remember, Stephan wanted to serve his country.’”

  The letter, Obama explained, went on to speak of how deeply Mace had cared about us, his brothers in Black Knight Troop: how much we meant to him; how proud he was to serve alongside of us; and how he would do anything for us, including sacrificing his own life.

  “‘That sacrifice,’” the president concluded—still quoting from the letter—“‘was driven by pure love.’”

  Thirty minutes later as the ceremony wrapped up, I worked my way down the line of representatives from the Gold Star families, greeting each and giving them all hugs. At the end of the line stood Gallegos’s widow, Amanda, and his young son, Mac, who I scooped up in a huge embrace.

  He was just seven years old, and he and his mother had come all the way from Alaska.

  • • •

  ACCORDING TO the official citation that was read that day, I was directly responsible for killing more than ten enemy fighters with my machine gun and the Dragunov sniper rifle that I’d plucked from the hands of the wounded Afghan soldier who was awaiting treatment in the aid station. The report also stated that I was indirectly responsible for the elimination of more than thirty Taliban who were killed by Apache gunships and fighter jets using coordinates that I provided during the battle—and that the men I’d led in retaking the base had killed, at minimum, another five enemy soldiers.

  I don’t know about any of that. Such estimates are notoriously inaccurate, but the real reason I place little stock in them is that official accounts tend to possess a cleanness, a sense of order, that could not be more at odds with the reality of what unfolds during combat.

  In the end, only one set of numbers means anything to me: the lives that were lost, and that might have been saved if we—if I—had acted differently. It’s true that I did the best I could. What’s also true is that I could have done more. In the space between those two facts reside eight graves, the memories of the men whose names are etched on the stones that mark those graves, and my own deeply mixed feelings about receiving the highest medal this country can bestow.

  Medal of Honor ceremony, Washington, DC

  As for the medal itself, when I got back home, a question arose for which I didn’t really have an answer:

  What exactly do I do with this thing?

  I don’t know what most of the other recipients do, although I’ve asked a handful of them. A few have ordered up replacements so that they have something to wear and to show folks when they ask to see it, while they store the original in a safe-deposit box. Others keep the medal in a sock drawer or on their nightstand. As for me, I never bothered to get a duplicate and I eventually took to carrying the original around in my front pocket. As a result, it’s taken several accidental trips through the washing machine, so the gilded surface is a bit tarnished, and the blue ribbon has begun to fade. But that doesn’t bother me a bit. In fact, I kind of like it that way, perhaps—in part—because I don’t truly regard it as mine.

  Like it or not, there are eight other guys with whom I served to whom that medal rightly belongs, because heroes—true heroes, the men whose spirit the medal embodies—don’t ever come home. By that definition, I’m not a true hero. Instead, I’m a custodian and a caretaker. I hold the medal, and everything it represents, on behalf of those who are its rightful owners.

  That, more than anything, is the truth that now sustains me—along with one other thing too, which is a belief I hold in my heart.

  I know, without a shred of doubt, that I would instantly trade that medal and everything attached to it if it would bring back even one of my missing comrades in arms.

  Epilogue

  IF THERE ARE SOLDIERS who miss the fury of combat, who find themselves tortured by the desire to return to its flames, I cannot number myself in their company. I have no wish ever to return to Keating or to Afghanistan, and most of my men feel the same. However, the bond that kept us together as a unit, a team, is something that I long for and continue to cherish.

  It is also something that is very much alive.

  Shortly after our return from Afghanistan, Zach Koppes transitioned out of the army, moved into the basement of the house in which Mace’s mother lives, and put himself through college. He recently graduated and is hoping to get into local politics in Virginia.

  Chris Jones followed a similar path after he left the army, although he opted to pursue a hands-on trade and is intending to become a machinist. He prefers to keep his location under wraps, but we stay in touch.

  That’s also the case with Thom Rasmussen, who remains one of my closest friends and companions. Upon entering civilian li
fe, he found work in the oil fields along Colorado’s Front Range, and he spends as much of his free time as possible working with a veterans’ outreach group that offers a waterfowl-hunting program. He also moonlights as a duck-hunting guide around our old stomping grounds outside of Fort Carson.

  Before leaving the army, Andrew Bundermann was placed in charge of a Military Entrance Processing Station in Minneapolis, where he handled new recruits. He is currently living in the Twin Cities and working for a company that manufactures some of the bombs that were dropped on the Taliban during the Battle for Keating.

  As for Brad Larson, at the urging of Captain Stoney Portis, he was given a “direct-select” opportunity by General Curtis Scaparrotti to leapfrog over the normal vetting process and attend Officer Candidate School—an honor that is reserved for only the finest and most gifted rank-and-file soldiers. As a result, Larson has transitioned to the “dark side” on two counts.

  As a member of the aviation branch of the Nebraska National Guard, he is no longer an enlisted soldier, and his boots aren’t on the ground anymore. Instead, First Lieutenant Larson is currently completing yet another overseas deployment as the pilot of a Chinook helicopter.

  Me and the rest of the guys worry about him staying safe. But we’re even more concerned that he doesn’t lose his perspective and forget where he came from—which is why we’re toying with the notion of logging on to PoopSenders.com and ordering a consignment of elephant dung to be delivered to the base where he’s stationed.

  For the moment, we’re holding off on placing that order, because the signals we’ve been getting from Larson are reassuring. Just before he deployed, he told me that he’s refusing to follow the model of a West Point ring-knocker. Instead, he wants to be a leader just like Bundermann.

  As for the men of Black Knight who served in Blue and White Platoons, they are a bit more distant and I hear from most of them only occasionally—although much of the news is good.

  Eric Harder and Shane Courville are still in the army and continuing to serve. Jonathan Hill got out, but has been doing some tremendous work helping veterans deal with PTSD and integrate back into the workforce. And Daniel Rodriguez fulfilled a promise he made to Kevin Thomson, his closest friend at Keating, that he would try his best to fulfill a dream he had of one day playing professional football. He made it to Clemson, then was drafted by the Redskins and eventually traded to the Saint Louis Rams.

  And so it goes. We all do our best to stay in touch because we are welded together, and will remain so for the rest of our lives. We are united by the memory of battle, but our lives are also joined and consecrated by the knowledge that the eight men who lost their lives are with us still, because we carry them in our hearts.

  They will never leave us.

  In Memoriam

  Sergeant Justin Gallegos, Team Leader

  Specialist Chris Griffin, Scout

  Sergeant Josh Hardt, Team Leader

  Sergeant Josh Kirk, Team Leader

  Specialist Stephan Mace, Scout

  Sergeant Vernon Martin, Chief Mechanic

  Specialist Michael Scusa, Scout

  Private First Class Kevin Thomson, Mortarman

  Notes on Sources

  AT SOME POINT long after the shooting is over, almost every soldier who has survived combat feels himself caught between two conflicting impulses.

  On the one hand, there is the instinct to remain silent. Language is an imperfect tool, and anyone who has been through combat understands that words are incapable of conveying the real horror of battle. This is why the deepest truths of war can never be spoken, only understood, by men who have touched it and been touched by it.

  On the other hand, there remains the uneasy awareness that without language, without words, the experience of war and everything it entails—including the sacrifices made by both the living and the dead—can neither be preserved nor communicated to others.

  Somewhere between those two opposing truths lies a special zone, a kind of DMZ in which soldiers do what we have always done. In the absence of anything better, we tell one another stories, and we do so with the knowledge that while our stories may not be perfect, they are the closest we will ever come to transmitting a sense, and preserving the memory, of what we endured.

  The Battle for COP Keating was covered extensively by the American press, both in print and on television, in the days and weeks that followed the attack. Three years later, the journalist Jake Tapper published The Outpost, a book that investigated both the decision to establish Keating and the reasons why the army continued to maintain the firebase in the face of such immense tactical and strategic challenges.

  Tapper’s research was conducted with painstaking care. But the one thing that he could not do was to produce a chronicle of what unfolded during that final battle—an hour-by-hour account of the actions of the living, as well as roll call of the dead—in the words of someone who was there at the time and who participated directly in the fight. That is a thing that could come only from one of our own. And although I’m often described as a man of few words, this description is a thing whose importance and urgency has only seemed to grow with the passage of time.

  During the past two years, I conducted multiple trips across the United States in order to meet directly with key members of Black Knight Troop with whom I served at Keating, record their recollections of the battle, and then juxtapose those recollections against my own notes and memories of what unfolded that day. I also combed through hundreds of pages of eyewitness testimony, radio transcripts, and other materials that were amassed by General Swan in his official report.

  This book is the result of that labor, and while it is not intended to serve as an absolutely definitive account of the battle, I have done my best to accurately represent the events that I and the people I was closest to—the men of Red Platoon—either participated in or witnessed.

  I would like to make it clear that this is a work of nonfiction. Everything in quotation marks was said to me or by me, is part of an official transcript, or was later recounted to me directly by the person who is quoted. In instances where a man’s thoughts are laid out, those thoughts were shared with me by the soldier himself, and the text is set forth in italics.

  Although I entered into this project with some reluctance and hesitation, my sense of conviction burgeoned with each passing month. Eventually, I came to believe that telling this story—our story—was the only way to properly honor what we had done. Odd as it may sound, I also came to believe that this might enable me to fulfill the final part of my duty to those of my comrades from Keating who did not survive.

  It was the only way for me to bring them home.

  Acknowledgments

  I OWE A DEBT OF THANKS that can never fully be repaid to each and every member of Red Platoon, as well as to the men with whom I fought most closely during the Battle for COP Keating: Andrew Bundermann, Brad Larson, Shane Courville, Matthew Miller, Mark Dulaney, Christopher Jones, Zachary Koppes, and James Stanley. I am also deeply grateful to Armando Avalos, Damien Grissette, and Kellen Kahn, along with the rest of the men in Black Knight Troop, especially those who served in Blue, White, Headquarters, and Mortar Platoons.

  To the helicopter pilots of the 7th Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, including Ross Lewallen, Chad Bardwell, Randy Huff, and Chris Wright, and to the pilots of the fighter jets and other aircraft who supported Keating—especially Michal Polidor, Aaron Dove, and Justin Kulish—those of us on the ground never even knew most of your names, but we are alive today because of your skills and your courage. Thank you.

  I am grateful to the men of Chosin Company, 1-32 Infantry, who were led by Justin Sax and who formed the QRF that relieved COP Keating. I would also like to thank our brigade’s medical staff, including Chris Cordova, Cody Floyd, Jeffery Hobbs, and the entire medical team at Bostick.

 
During the course of putting this book together, many people were kind enough to sit down for extensive interviews in which they shared their insights and memories. I appreciate everyone who was part of this group, including Vanessa Adelson, Jimmy Blackmon, James Clark, Eric Harder, Brendan McCriskin, Jake Miraldi, and Stoney Portis.

  I would like to thank everyone at Dutton and Penguin Random House, especially Ben Sevier, Christine Ball, Amanda Walker, Carrie Swetonic, and Paul Deykerhoff. I am indebted to my agent, Jennifer Joel, as well as Madeleine Osborn, Sharon Green, Josie Freedman, and the rest of the team at ICM. And I’m grateful to the writer Kevin Fedarko for helping me find a way to tell this story.

  Finally, I would like to express my deepest thanks and extend my most profound condolences to the families of Justin Gallegos, Chris Griffin, Josh Hardt, Josh Kirk, Stephan Mace, Vernon Martin, Michael Scusa, and Kevin Thomson. You bear the heaviest burden of all.

  About the Author

  Former Staff Sergeant Clinton L. Romesha enlisted in the army in 1999. He deployed twice to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and once to Afghanistan in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. At the time of the attack on Combat Outpost (COP) Keating on October 3, 2009, Staff Sergeant Romesha was assigned as a section leader for Bravo Troop, 3-61st Cavalry, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division. He is the recipient of numerous awards and decorations, including the Medal of Honor. Romesha separated from the army in 2011. He lives with his family in North Dakota.

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