The Outpost An Untold Story Of American Valor Part 18

Del Sarto, the gunner, stuck by Faulkenberry's side, trying to rea.s.sure him. "Here comes the medevac, don't worry!" he fibbed as a helicopter buzzed in. But Faulkenberry was not so out of it that he couldn't see and hear, or even differentiate among the several kinds of birds.

"Shut up," he told Del Sarto. "I know that's an Apache." Medevacs were Black Hawks.

Soon a Black Hawk did arrive. The landing zone was so small that the pilots would have had every right to refuse to land, but they brought the bird down anyway. Faulkenberry and Sultan, the most seriously wounded of the men, were the last to be loaded on so that they would be the first off when they got to Forward Operating Base Naray. Pfeifer and another private put them in, banged the sh.e.l.l of the Black Hawk to give the all-clear, and watched as it flew them out of Nuristan forever.

Roller's view of the eastern side of Saret Koleh. (Photo courtesy of Dave Roller) (Photo courtesy of Dave Roller)

The battle was nearly over, but a new commander was finally on his way. Joey Hutto landed at Combat Outpost Kamu and updated Kolenda over the radio: most of the men were now rolling out of the valley, he reported, but Fritsche's body was still on the mountain; they'd have to send a team to go back and get it. Kolenda and Hutto decided that Roller and 1st Platoon should stay where they were, in a good position to call in bombs and cover whatever force went into the valley to recover the corpse. It was not uncommon for this enemy to ransack or even mutilate any bodies left on the battlefield, and the Americans couldn't let that happen to Ryan Fritsche.

Hutto headed to Camp Kamu's operations center, picked up a radio, and prepared formally to a.s.sume command.

He froze for a minute.

It was not pleasant, what he had to do: he needed to announce that he was replacing Tom Bostick, his close friend, because he'd been killed. Even though Hutto, as the new commander of Bulldog Troop, had inherited his predecessor's call sign, "Bulldog-6," he decided not to identify himself by that right now; he knew that many of Bostick's troops would be listening, and he was concerned that some of them might not have heard the news yet. It just felt wrong to him-as if by his use of the call sign, he would be not only usurping Bostick's place but also alerting the men to the loss of their leader in the cra.s.sest way possible.

Instead he said simply, "Captain Hutto is now on the ground." Kolenda, in his first subsequent transmission, welcomed his new troop commander and called him Joey. It wasn't protocol, but the lieutenant colonel was nothing if not empathetic. He then gave Hutto orders as "Bulldog-6," and that became Hutto's name from then on. And this was how many in the field, among them Nate Springer, learned that their friend and commander Tom Bostick had been killed.

In Martinsville, Indiana, Deputy Sheriff Volitta Fritsche, Ryan's mother, looked out her window and saw several sheriffs' cars in her driveway. She had taken some time off from her job due to her husband's illness and death, but she was scheduled to return to work just two days later, so she couldn't imagine why all her coworkers had shown up at her house.

Then she saw a man she didn't recognize get out of one of the patrol cars. He was dressed in an Army uniform. After he exited the car, he put on a beret. Her heart started pounding.

"This can't be happening," she said aloud.

One of her coworkers knocked on the door. Volitta Fritsche answered it but pointed at the soldier and said, "He can't come in here!"-hoping that somehow, by denying him entry, she might be able to prevent the inevitable.

The soldier, and another, entered anyway. The one she'd seen through the window informed her that her son had been reported missing in action. The news was devastating, but it also gave her a glimmer of hope.

"What does that mean?" she asked. "Does that mean he's still alive?"

"The only information I have, ma'am, is what I told you," said the soldier.

"He could be alive?"

"Yes, ma'am," he said.

"Was he taken prisoner?"

"I don't know, ma'am."

"These people have been beheading prisoners," she said. "Could he have crawled off and be hiding in a cave?"

"Yes, ma'am," the soldier said. "Anything's possible at this point."

After her visitors left, Volitta called her daughter-in-law, Brandi, who had been told the news by a different set of soldiers.

"Where could he be?" asked Brandi, crying.

"He's probably hiding somewhere in the mountains," Volitta suggested. "He's good at that kind of thing. Remember, land navigation is his forte."

"I know," Brandi said. "I'm just so scared."

A few hours later, the soldiers returned to Volitta Fritsche's home to tell her that they had some new information: Ryan was still MIA, but now they also knew that he had been wounded in action.

"Is he okay?" Volitta asked.

"I don't know, ma'am," the soldier replied. "They're reporting he was shot in the head."

"I don't understand," she said. "If they saw him take a hit, and they're back to safety, why don't they know Ryan's condition?"

"They can't find him, ma'am."

" 'Can't find him'? What do you mean, they can't find him? You mean they left him out there?"

"They said the fighting was so intense, they couldn't get him out," the soldier said. "I'm sorry."

"I thought you guys didn't leave anyone behind!" Volitta cried. "Ryan wouldn't have left one of his guys behind!"

The Landay-Sin Valley near Saret Koleh was now teeming with U.S. aircraft, bombing every location that the remaining men on the ground-Roller, primarily-called in. Hutto ordered that bombs be dropped in a circle around the spot where Fritsche had last been seen. Newsom wanted to head back into the valley, but he'd been told by Roller that the higher-ups wanted him to hold off for now; they were devising a plan.

Hutto weighted himself down with guilt over Fritsche's death. He was the one who'd sent the staff sergeant to 2nd Platoon; he'd even escorted him to the helicopter that would fly him to Combat Outpost Kamu. On that first night of his new command, Hutto got word to Newsom that he should send a quick reaction force to recover Fritsche's body. A reluctant Morrow went along on the mission, remaining in the Humvee and staying in radio contact with the members of the QRF as they hunted for the corpse.

The searchers couldn't see much by moonlight, and the bombardment had pulverized most of the rocks into loose gravel, which made climbing even more difficult. When they turned on their white lights, they saw further evidence of bombing and strafing runs from earlier in the day. They found several former fighting positions littered with empty water bottles and, in one case, a soft SAW ammo carrier. Morrow guided them over the radio to the location where Fritsche had been killed.

His body wasn't there.

Pfeifer, Newsom's driver that day, sat with the lieutenant in a second Humvee; he was so drained that he kept nodding off behind the wheel. Newsom nudged him every minute or so to wake him up. Each time, Pfeifer would open his eyes and smile: Good to go. The kid was just like that, Newsom thought.

The QRF troops walked down the mountain. Back in their Humvees, they stopped off at the former casualty collection point to pick up some a.s.sault packs that were supposed to be there but weren't. The evening, it seemed, had a theme.

The searchers did find some human remains-skull fragments, almost certainly from Bostick-which they collected in an ammunition can that Morrow held in his lap during the drive back to Combat Outpost Kamu. Otherwise, the QRF returned from the mission emptyhanded.

As the sun rose on the Landay-Sin Valley, Roller radioed to Hutto that 1st Platoon needed to head back to Combat Outpost Kamu. He and his men were spent, down to thirty seconds' worth of ammunition for the 240 machine gun and almost out of water. Hutto gave them permission, but this, too, added to his guilt over Fritsche: after sending him to the battlefield in the first place, he was now approving Roller's request to leave his body behind there, all alone. And while Hutto believed those who said the kid had been KIA, he hadn't seen it for himself.

In fact, the hunt for Fritsche's body had not been abandoned: Kolenda's boss, Colonel Chip Preysler, committed a different unit from his brigade, the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, to conduct another search the next night. Also known as the ROCK Battalion, the unit was led by a contemporary of Kolenda's, Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund, who gave the impression that he thought his men were tougher than those who'd already tried to find Fritsche-maybe tougher than anyone, period. Ostlund landed his tactical command post on Hill 1696, overlooking the staff sergeant's last known location; the ROCK's Chosen Company landed at Combat Outpost Kamu, where its members were briefed by Hutto and others from 1-91 Cav. Then the seventy or so troops from Chosen Company walked to Saret Koleh. Wilson, eaten up by guilt, joined them. As he hiked the mountain with the Chosen Company troops, the sergeant worried that they wouldn't be able to find Ryan Fritsche-that perhaps he'd never be found at all. He wondered what the insurgents had done to poor Fritsche's corpse. The worst thoughts possible ran through his mind.

But the Chosen Company troops did did find Fritsche, lying faceup in the very spot where he'd been killed; either he'd been taken away and then returned there by the enemy or the first search party had somehow missed seeing him. He had been stripped of his personal effects and military equipment: his body armor, weapon, and boots were gone. He was wearing just a s.h.i.+rt, pants, and socks. His arms were folded across his chest. His eyelids were closed. An entry wound blemished his left temple, and a matching exit wound showed behind his right ear. find Fritsche, lying faceup in the very spot where he'd been killed; either he'd been taken away and then returned there by the enemy or the first search party had somehow missed seeing him. He had been stripped of his personal effects and military equipment: his body armor, weapon, and boots were gone. He was wearing just a s.h.i.+rt, pants, and socks. His arms were folded across his chest. His eyelids were closed. An entry wound blemished his left temple, and a matching exit wound showed behind his right ear.

Fritsche was put on a Skedko plastic stretcher and carried down the hill. He was taken to Combat Outpost Kamu, where his remains were officially identified. Three days after Ryan Fritsche was killed, the soldier in his green uniform and Army beret pulled up to Volitta Fritsche's Indiana home for one final visit, this time to tell her that all hope was lost, and her beloved son-the Little Leaguer and high school basketball center with gifts of determination and beauty-was gone.

Dave Roller was distraught at the loss of Bostick; everyone in Bulldog Troop was. But for Roller, the hardest thing of all was his belief that even as he and his fellow soldiers were out there fighting for their lives, no one back home cared. Ninety percent of the American people would rather hear about what Paris Hilton did on a Sat.u.r.day night than be bothered by reports on that silly war in Afghanistan, Roller thought. Of this he was convinced. That the people they'd been fighting for would never even know their names made the death of soldiers such as Tom Bostick and Ryan Fritsche all the more tragic.

CHAPTER 18

Balloons

The U.S. Army had been moving Joey Hutto around since he was a boy. In the eighth grade, he had relocated from Enterprise, Alabama, when his mom, a single mother, married an Army sergeant who was being moved from Fort Rucker to a base in Missouri. Eventually the sergeant and Hutto's mom split up, and his stepfather faded out of his life, but the Army didn't. He signed up right out of high school, and his fitness and determination were so apparent to one recruiter that Special Forces brought him on board the following year. He spent the next decade running in and out of Central and South America, mostly training host nations' armies in Special Forces tactics-how to clear a building during a hostage situation, how to implement what was then the prevailing theory of counterinsurgency, how to provide security for VIPs, how to combat narcoterrorists. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant at Fort Benning Officer Candidate School in 2002 and ended up in Germany, where he and Bostick became fast friends. At Forward Operating Base Naray, he'd served as the a.s.sistant operations officer for 1-91 Cav's Headquarters Troop.

When Hutto touched down at the landing zone at Combat Outpost Keating, he was met by an officer who had just been in Bostick's hooch at the operations center, trying to separate the fallen troop leader's military gear from his civilian items. Hutto thanked him and took over. He entered Bostick's small room and closed the curtain.

Beyond that split-second embrace with Kennedy back at Forward Operating Base Naray, Hutto hadn't had a moment to focus on his dear friend: he'd been too involved in coordinating the response to the enemy presence, working to expedite the exit of Bulldog Troop from the battle, and then trying to recover Ryan Fritsche's body. He hadn't even had a chance to talk to his wife yet, because immediately after Bostick's death, the unit had been "blacked out"-meaning that no one could call or write home-for fear that Jennifer Bostick might hear the news through the grapevine and not via official Army channels. This moment behind the curtain of Tom Bostick's hooch was the first time in days that Hutto didn't have soldiers swarming around him, radios going off.

He paused and let himself mourn, allowed himself to cry. For Hutto, being here in Bostick's room was eerily reminiscent of that day five years before when he'd visited his late brother's Alabama home. These were haunted s.p.a.ces.

After a few minutes, he called the platoon sergeants and platoon leaders in to the operations center so he could start to get a sense of how they did business. He was now in charge of Bulldog Troop, and they all knew the insurgents were going to come at them hard. The enemy would soon see that a new officer was commanding the troops at Camp Keating. They would test him. And they would try to kill him as well.

When she got the news about her husband's potentially lethal wound, John Faulkenberry's wife, Sarah, was back living at home with her parents in Midland, Texas. While her husband was abroad, she was working as an event coordinator at the Petroleum County Club. That day, her main task was to make sure everything had been cleaned up after a party held at the club the night before. At around 2:00 p.m., she got in her car and checked the cell phone she'd left there, only to see that she had ten missed calls from Germany, where she and John had been stationed before he deployed.

It's a phone call, it's a phone call, it's a phone call, she told herself. A phone call means he's alive; a knock on the door means he's dead. This is a phone call. That was how Tom Bostick had explained it when he sat down with the Bulldog Troop wives before their husbands deployed. A phone call, a phone call, a phone call, she repeated. Still: her breath was taken away. She couldn't make international calls on her cell, so she zoomed back to her parents' house to place the call from there, running stoplights on the way, pa.s.sing her father on the road. She was terrified. She saw a note on the front door from afar and felt nauseated; then she got closer and realized that, thank G.o.d, it was something about a neighborhood barbecue. She ran inside and ransacked her brain trying to remember how to call Germany. Finally recalling, she dialed the number.

"Have you heard about your husband?" asked the representative for Bulldog Troop, Sergeant Troy Montalvo, over the phone.

"No," she said, panicked. "What the f.u.c.k is going on?"

"He's been wounded," Montalvo said. "Stay reachable-we'll know more in the next twelve to twenty-four hours, and we'll get in touch with you."

"Do you know what's wrong with him?" Sarah asked.

"No," he said.

"Was anyone else hurt?" she asked.

"I can't release that information," he said.

s.h.i.+t, she thought. That means someone was killed.

Sarah called her in-laws to relay what she'd been told about their son, and then at midnight she called Germany again. "Do you know anything else?" she asked Montalvo. He informed her that her husband's wounds were severe enough that he would have to be evacuated from Afghanistan.

At 4:00 a.m., she called a third time. Montalvo now told her that her husband had been severely wounded, was in critical condition, and was currently fully intubated-meaning that a tube had been inserted into his mouth to maintain an open airway. He was on his way to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

Sarah looked up the phone number for Landstuhl and somehow got patched through to the intensive-care-unit doctor in charge of her husband's case. He gave her more details: John had been shot in the leg. Part of his femur had been destroyed, and the bullet had severed his sciatic nerve and lacerated his femoral artery. The wound had caused pulmonary emboli, or clots in the blood vessels of his lungs, and because he had lost so much blood, his kidneys, pancreas, and other internal organs had started to shut down as his body focused on keeping his heart and lungs going.

"How long do you have to keep him there?" Sarah asked.

"Until Tuesday at the earliest," he said. It was Sat.u.r.day.

Sarah called American Airlines. A flight to Germany would cost three thousand dollars-money she didn't have.

"Okay," she told the agent, reading off her credit card number.

She arrived in Germany on Sunday. She walked into her husband's room.

"Hey, beautiful," he greeted her.

Heavily medicated, John fluctuated between knowing he was at Landstuhl and thinking he was still on the battlefield.

A few days later, the Army let Sarah fly with him on a medevac plane to Walter Reed Army Medical Center outside Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C. John was in so much pain that doctors there decided to put him into a medically induced coma.

Bulldog Troop consolidated itself at Combat Outpost Keating, which the enemy soon began attacking relentlessly. The Americans concluded that the insurgents, apprised of any such developments by local informants and collaborators, knew that the American commander was dead and that a replacement, unfamiliar with the terrain, had been thrown into the valley-meaning that this would be an opportune time to try to kill and chase away these latest occupiers.

Up to that point, there hadn't been much enemy contact at Combat Outpost Keating for Bulldog Troop; the fight had instead been focused almost solely around Combat Outpost Kamu, now overseen by Captain Page and Legion Company. There was a reason for that imbalance, it turned out. Chris Kolenda discovered that in the spring, before Bulldog arrived at Camp Keating, the Kamdesh elders had made a deal with the insurgents in the region: the elders agreed to support them in their attacks on the outpost at Kamu if they, in return, promised not to bring violence to the Kamdesh Village area. But then came the Saret Koleh battle, which took a deadly toll on the Americans but an even deadlier one on the enemy. The insurgents from nearby Combat Outpost Kamu were decimated and exhausted and needed a break to regroup (they would be unable to mount another significant attack for more than a year). That left their comrades up the road, the Kamdesh Village crew, as the only bad guys open for business. Since they knew their own turf far better than they did the environs of Combat Outpost Kamu, they chose the home-field advantage and reneged on their deal with the Kamdesh elders, resuming major attacks on Combat Outpost Keating.

At times, the enemy fighters would synchronize their attacks on the outpost, launching several all at once from different ridges-to the north, south, and southeast. At other times they'd phase them in, first from the north mountain, then from the southern wall, then from the northwest. Sometimes they would pepper the Americans with small-arms fire and nothing else; sometimes rockets rained down, and sometimes RPGs; and occasionally the U.S. outpost would be hit with everything the insurgents had. At one point, the soldiers from Bulldog Troop thought they'd detected a pattern-the attacks would quite often come at 8:30 a.m.-but every time there seemed to be some consistency developing, the enemy would try something new. They seemed to be pros, these insurgents. They were mission-oriented. They weren't just local village kids.

The roads kept on trying to kill the Americans as well. Staff Sergeant Zachary Crawford was commanding a Humvee armed with an MK19 grenade launcher as it made its way northwest on the road to Mandigal. When the truck came to a particularly unst.u.r.dy section of the road, Crawford told the driver, Specialist Tabajara DeSouza, to stop the vehicle, then ordered everyone else to hop out. DeSouza tried to drive past the weak patch, but it gave way, sending the Humvee tumbling into the river, where it landed upside down. DeSouza survived the wreck, but the incident gave Kolenda further pause. His troops had already experienced too many close calls in numerous places where the cliffside road was barely wide enough to hold a Humvee, or where it was flat-out untrafficable due to seasonal flooding and erosion. He'd heard how the namesake of Combat Outpost Keating lost his life. The math seemed clear: until the road could be repaired and widened, any benefit to be gleaned from resupplying Kamu and Keating via ground convoy from Naray just wasn't worth the risk involved.

Kolenda's decision was a controversial one, particularly infuriating to the 3-71 Cav vets who had fought so hard trying to secure the road for ground resupply to Keating-or at least trying to show the insurgents that they didn't own it outright. And of course, the location of Combat Outpost Keating had been picked only the previous year mainly because because of its proximity to that route. But Kolenda stood firm. of its proximity to that route. But Kolenda stood firm.

With the Americans no longer driving right into their ambushes, the enemy would be forced to come to them them. And Bulldog Troop would be prepared.

Lieutenant Alex Newsom had always been energetic-he'd worked his platoon hard back in Germany-but in the field, he became a man possessed, and even more so after Bostick and Fritsche were killed. He would hit the gym daily, running on the treadmill with a gas mask over his face to make his workout that much tougher. Determined to keep the enemy off balance, Hutto ordered Bulldog Troop out on constant patrols, varying their times and routes, but the patrols Newsom led were so physically challenging that his men started calling him Captain America. Officers who joined Captain America and his platoon on these workouts couldn't believe how strenuous they were. Newsom was nuts, they said, and they joked that "Alex's patrols will shrink your d.i.c.k." Relentless, Relentless, that was the word for them-maybe with a profane adjective or two in front. that was the word for them-maybe with a profane adjective or two in front.

Captain America was ready for action on the morning of August 17, 2007, as the radio buzzed with enemy chatter about an imminent attack. An attack in itself would be nothing unusual; practically every day brought one of those. By now, Newsom's men knew the drill. The Americans' strongest defensive positions and firepower were in the Humvees fitted with .50-caliber and 240 machine guns as well as MK19 grenade launchers, so Newsom, preparing for the enemy action, told his troops to man the trucks. Deciding that an additional defensive position was needed, he took a team up onto the roof of the barracks next to the operations center, where they all took cover behind a wall of sandbags. The men on duty fired into the hills in a short, controlled "recon by fire"-probing for a reaction, shooting at known enemy fighting positions, perhaps even indulging in a bit of chest-thumping.

There were only five of them on the roof-three from 2nd Platoon, plus Ben Barnes and Newsom from 3rd Platoon-so the lieutenant called for more volunteers. "Hey, I need guys up here," Newsom radioed to his men. "We're about to be attacked."

The always willing Chris Pfeifer put himself forward.

Pfeifer's wife was due to deliver their first child, a girl, in a little over a month, and he was-typically-jubilant about it. He didn't complain about missing his daughter's birth; instead he called his wife every single day and showed photos of the very pregnant Karen to anyone who would look at them. The couple had met in Job Corps in Chadron, Nebraska, gotten married in March 2006, and moved to the military base in Germany the following fall.

The troops on the roof fired around the outpost, trying to provoke a response, and they got one: from the Switchbacks up the southern mountain wall, insurgents. .h.i.t the rooftop with up to forty rounds of automatic small-arms fire. The Americans jumped down behind the sandbags. "Medic!" cried one of the men. "Medic!" Newsom crawled over and saw that Pfeifer had taken a round a couple of centimeters outside his chest plate, between his shoulder and his nipple.

As it turned out, the bullet had carved a path through his spinal cord, lungs, and bowel before entering one of his kidneys and exiting out his back.

Although those in charge of medical care on the front lines are more often than not nicknamed Doc, few of them are actually doctors.

It takes only sixteen weeks to become a medic. The average cla.s.s size at the Department of Combat Medic Training, at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, is 450. Every two weeks, the Army rotates in a new group of students. The first six or seven weeks offer trainees an introduction to basic medicine, much like that given to those studying to become emergency medical technicians. The lessons are fundamental, covering such topics as how to move patients, how to a.s.sess vital signs such as pulse and respiration, how to provide elementary trauma care, and how to control bleeding, as well as reviewing simple anatomy and physiology. In their second phase of training, medics-to-be learn limited primary care: how to perform a basic sick call on a soldier, how to treat headaches and diarrhea, how best to conduct an abdominal or respiratory examination, and how to determine whether a rash is serious. Students are also taught how to distinguish, in the field, between less serious illnesses and those that might require a medevac helicopter.

The third phase of training deals with battlefield medicine. Using historical data from previous wars, student medics learn how soldiers get wounded, the types of wounds they can incur, and what needs to be done to keep a patient alive long enough to get him to a physician's a.s.sistant or, even better, a doctor. Army studies indicate that if a wounded soldier arrives alive at a combat support hospital where surgeons and nurses can treat him, the chances of his surviving are extremely high-greater than 90 percent. "Surviving," of course, doesn't necessarily entail keeping arms or legs or retaining the ability to function independently back home.

The leading cause of preventable death on the battlefield is bleeding. Having a leg blown off by an IED, for instance, can be fatal if quick steps are not taken to control the blood loss. Even deadlier is internal bleeding, a problem for which medics generally don't have a good answer. A soldier who is bleeding internally needs to be evacuated and delivered to a surgeon immediately if he is to have any hope of survival.

The second-leading cause of preventable death is something called tension pneumothorax. If a bullet punctures a soldier's lung, air can leak from that hole into the "pleural s.p.a.ce," or cavity outside the lungs. That air can build up and eventually interfere with the functioning of the heart. This can be a relatively simple problem to correct: a medic can simply stick a big needle in the soldier's chest to relieve the pressure in the pleural s.p.a.ce.

Physician's a.s.sistants (PAs) receive much more training than medics-two years' worth versus the medics' four months' worth-but they are still not doctors. Forced to respond to dire situations with nothing more than a small kit of supplies, including tourniquets, IVs, and combat gauze (a cotton fabric impregnated with a substance that speeds up clotting), they can often work miracles, but there are severe limits to what they can do. The lack of refrigeration facilities at most smaller bases means that no blood can be stored there; instead, PAs have to learn how to do the "buddy transfusion," a risky procedure conducted under emergency conditions, whereby blood withdrawn from a donor-a battlefield volunteer-is pushed directly into the vein of the patient.

Pfeifer's eyes were open; he was conscious but delirious and obviously in great pain. Other members of the team immediately carried him from the roof down to the aid station as Newsom called the operations center to have a medevac ordered. At the aid station, Captain Bert Baker, a former Special Forces medic and the outpost's PA, treated Pfeifer as best he could, but it was clear that the soldier needed to be evacuated at once if he was to stand a chance. There was ma.s.sive bleeding from the exit wound in his lower back; Baker shoved a combat bandage into the hole. He twice inserted a needle into Pfeifer's chest to let out air that was building up in the cavity, a procedure that succeeded in getting Pfeifer's blood pressure up and his respiration rate down. Luckily, one of his lungs was still working. Baker had held people's lives in his hands before: he'd been a paramedic in St. Louis and a Special Forces medic in Haiti. But in both of those places, a hospital had usually been no more than ten minutes away. At Combat Outpost Keating, it was an hour-and-twenty-minute helicopter flight to the nearest hospital. Baker wasn't sure Chris Pfeifer would make it.