The Outpost An Untold Story Of American Valor Part 31

"Get inside and take cover!" Rodriguez yelled. "Watch my back."

He ran to the M240 machine gun and opened fire at RPG Rock. He saw about half a dozen insurgents there, and he angrily banged rounds at them until the belt was empty. Then, firing with his 9-millimeter, he stepped away and with his free hand tried to pull Thomson's body into the mortar pit's ops center, but the dead soldier's foot was stuck in the steel pickets on which the machine gun was mounted. Rodriguez, significantly smaller than Thomson, couldn't budge him.

Rodriguez ran inside. "Thomson's dead!" he told the other two. "Thomson's dead!"

"Are you sure?" asked Breeding. "Check his pulse!" But through the doorway, Breeding had seen Thomson get shot, and he knew from the limp way he'd fallen that he was dead; he had seen it too many times before.

Rodriguez acknowledged that yes, he had checked Thomson's pulse-and there hadn't been one. Barroga was meanwhile covering the other entrance and radioing to Bundermann in the operations center. With Captain Portis still stuck at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Bundermann was Keating's acting commander.

"Tell them we're receiving heavy fire directly into the pit from the Switchbacks and the Putting Green," Breeding told Barroga.

An RPG landed on the plateau outside the door, blowing Rodriguez down; he landed on Breeding.

"You okay?" Rodriguez asked. Breeding was. They picked themselves back up. Rodriguez had taken some shrapnel in his neck. Any time either of them even poked his hand out the door, the mortar pit came under immediate machine-gun fire. The enemy had clearly been told to keep the mortarmen away from their big guns.

Breeding got on the radio. "I got one KIA," he told Bundermann. "We're receiving heavy fire."

"Can you get out to the guns and put rounds down on the Switchbacks?" Bundermann asked.

"No way I can get out to the guns without killing everybody up here," Breeding told him.

"Okay," Bundermann said. "Hold tight." Then the radio went dead.

Breeding looked at Barroga. It felt like the kid had arrived just hours before.

"Are all the TICs this bad?" Barroga asked, using the acronym for "troops in contact"-signifying any instance of enemy fire.

"No, dude," Breeding said. "Not at all. Not at all."

He looked into Barroga's eyes. "I don't know if we're going to get out of this one," he told him. "But we're going to take some of these motherf.u.c.kers with us."

Platoon Sergeant First Cla.s.s Frank Guerrero was on leave, so Romesha had a.s.sumed his duties, sending Specialist Josh Dannelley and Private Chris Jones to the LRAS-1 Humvee/guard post to support Koppes.

Not even ten minutes earlier, Private Davidson had relieved Corporal Justin Gregory at his guard post in the turret of the tower of the shura building. Gregory had heard Ron Jeremy's warning, but not believing it, he had headed back to the barracks to go to bed-and now he was throwing his gear back on and grabbing his Mk 46 squad automatic weapon. As he pushed open the front door of the barracks, he heard a din of bullets like he'd never heard before. He stepped back inside and b.u.mped into Sergeant Kirk and Private First Cla.s.s Kyle Knight, also on their way out.

"You can't go out that door," Gregory warned them. "You can't go out that door-no way!"

Kirk stopped in his tracks. "Okay, we gotta find another way out," he said.

The three of them headed toward the back door of the barracks. "Knight," Kirk said, "grab that AT-." Knight got the single-shot ant.i.tank weapon, and the trio went out the back, crept around the building, and started returning fire into the hills as they ran to the area of the shura building and entry control point to help back up Davidson. Kirk had an M203 grenade launcher, and he fired more than ten of the 40-millimeter projectiles while also discharging his M4 carbine. Kyle and Gregory fired their guns, too, and ran like h.e.l.l.

At the first sound of the attack, Lieutenant Bundermann had run to the operations center, where he was told the base had contact from the Switchbacks. Contact? Contact? It seemed like much more than that. Bundermann called for a sitrep-a "situation report"-from all the guard posts and was informed that the outpost was taking RPG, sniper fire, and automatic-weapons fire from the Diving Board, the Northface, the Switchbacks, and the ANP Checkpoint some 125 yards to the west, in the direction of Urmul. It seemed like much more than that. Bundermann called for a sitrep-a "situation report"-from all the guard posts and was informed that the outpost was taking RPG, sniper fire, and automatic-weapons fire from the Diving Board, the Northface, the Switchbacks, and the ANP Checkpoint some 125 yards to the west, in the direction of Urmul.

Yeah, that'd be contact, he thought.

"Get me air a.s.sets from Bostick," Bundermann told Sergeant Ryan Schulz, the intelligence a.n.a.lyst. Air support was at least thirty-five minutes away.

The commander of the outpost, Stoney Portis, wasn't there. The leader of Blue Platoon (the "b.a.s.t.a.r.ds"), Ben Salentine, wasn't there. It was all on Bundermann.

Observation Post Fritsche was also under attack, the a.s.sault having begun at 6:00 a.m. on the dot with a mortar round that landed about fifteen feet behind the guard tower. Specialist Keith Stickney, the senior mortarman present at the observation post, saw the muzzle flash, and then enemy mortars came pounding in. Quickly getting on his .50-caliber, Stickney went through three hundred rounds in his first minute of returning fire, after which he was relieved so he could run to Fritsche's mortar pit.

At first, this one didn't seem that different from all the other attacks. But within fifteen minutes, Stickney realized they were in for a long day. Walls of bullets were hitting the surrounding sandbags. Fire was coming in from every direction. At least a hundred insurgents had surrounded the observation post, as near as Stickney could tell.

White Platoon had only twenty-one U.S. troops up there.

Stickney ran down to the operations center to get the proper grid coordinates. White Platoon leader Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy was talking on the radio to Bundermann; it sounded as if things were even worse down at Combat Outpost Keating. Stickney ran back toward the mortar pit, but before he could reach it, the two other mortarmen-Private First Cla.s.s Ja.s.sey Holmes and Private Second Cla.s.s Jonathan Santana-screamed for him to get down. Stickney did, ducking behind a wall and narrowly escaping a barrage of RPGs and bullets.

Together, the three mortarmen headed back for the operations center. Spotting them, Bellamy yelled, "Get the f.u.c.k back in the mortar pit!"

"No, it's getting torn up!" Stickney screamed back.

The enemy fighters were occupying the Afghan Security Guards' observation post, which was located 150 yards away, between Observation Post Fritsche and the town of Kamdesh, at a fifty-foot elevation above the post. It was the perfect place from which to attack the mortar pit. The night before, Bellamy had noticed that the cameras the Americans had set up at the Security Guards' post were no longer working. He'd sent Staff Sergeant Bradley Lee to find out what the problem was, but in the dark, Lee hadn't been able to tell.

And now it didn't really matter. The men at Observation Post Fritsche were stuck, with a report having come in from one of the guard towers that enemy fighters were within hand-grenade distance of the camp. And with the apparent cooperation of the Afghan Security Guards, the enemy also had the mortar pit pinned down.

The observation post had been set up to help protect Combat Outpost Keating, but for now, the troops down in the valley were on their own.

This is not a normal attack, Bundermann thought. We've got contact from Urmul, the Northface, the Switchbacks, the Diving Board, and everywhere in between. We've got contact from every direction. This is no joke. We need everything we can get, as fast as we can get it.

On the radio, he called Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy with White Platoon, up at Observation Post Fritsche. "I need your mortars," he said, providing the relevant coordinates.

"I can't give them to you," Bellamy said. "We're in some s.h.i.+t up here, too."

While Bundermann and First Sergeant Ronald Burton barked out orders and information to relay to Forward Operating Base Bostick, Schulz and Private First Cla.s.s Jordan Wong typed updates into the mIRC system.

Wong was "Black Knight_TOC" and Schulz was "Keating2OPS."

6:03 am FRITSCHE AND KEATING IN HEAVY CONTACT826:03 am Requesting Air Tic Be opened we need it now we have mortars pinned down and fire coming from everywhere fritsche is taking heavy machine gun fire as well wee need something fritche and keating still taking heavy contact

The men did their jobs, focused on their work, but a tangible sense of dread and panic filled the operations center. This must be what it felt like before a ma.s.sacre, they thought, a combination of impotence and terror-a doomed sense of being about to be overwhelmed, like sitting in sandcastle as a tidal wave suddenly drew to strength just yards away.

CHAPTER 31

GET SOMETHING UP!

The guard post at the LRAS-2 Humvee was parked on the southern side of the outpost, its gun aimed toward the Switchbacks. Specialist Stephan Mace had been relieved there by Sergeant Brad Larson, but when the firing started, Mace returned, along with Sergeant Justin Gallegos. Things had heated up even more since then. They were being hit with RPGs from three directions, and sniper fire was coming in, bouncing off both the turret and Larson's .50-caliber itself. Larson had a thousand rounds linked and was firing furiously, but within fifteen minutes, the number of insurgent positions focused upon him seemed to have multiplied exponentially.

"Holy f.u.c.k," he said.

Out of ammo, Larson got up, leaned over, and was reaching for more rounds when an RPG exploded, scattering pebbles of searing metal into his right arm and armpit. In tremendous pain, he kept shooting. He fired at snipers in the Urmul mosque to the west. He aimed at smoke plumes coming from the Switchbacks. He unloaded on every insurgent he could see. But he couldn't see them all.

There were twenty Afghan National Army troops on the eastern side of the outpost, and they began spilling out of their barracks-most of them without gear on-to a.s.sume their battle positions. Within ten minutes, they were out of ammunition. The ineffective ANA commander lost control of the situation as the Afghan soldiers determined that they couldn't withstand the a.s.sault, seeming to accept defeat. Cowardice feeds on itself, ravenously, and once the ANA commander gave up trying to convince his troops to fight, the ANA troops themselves simply gave up.

Some sprinted to the far eastern edge of the camp to hop the wire and flee. "This is your country!" yelled one of their Latvian trainers, Janis Lakis. "Hold your position! Hold your position!" They didn't listen. Once outside the wire, some even handed their weapons to insurgents as they pa.s.sed them.

Within fifteen minutes of the attack, the remainder of the ANA soldiers had completely retreated from their side of the camp. Some sought the protection of the Americans, while others hid in various buildings and barracks. The ANA platoon leader ran in to the operations center and screamed, "We need to get the choppers in here so we can get out of here!" He said his men were dying and couldn't fight anymore. (There had also been approximately a dozen private contractors, Afghan Security Guards, employed at the camp; with one exception, they all fled as well.) That the ANA commander would insist that choppers were needed for his men-who were cowering in corners around the camp-when the Americans couldn't even account for all of their own infuriated those in the operations center.

"Sit the f.u.c.k down and shut up!" shouted Burton. But the Afghan commander was in a frenzy and wouldn't listen.

"Choppers are on the way, but they're not going to be able to land unless all of your ANA boys start helping us drive back the attackers!" Cady yelled.

Temperatures continued to rise until Cady finally threatened to kill the ANA commander if he didn't either get his s.h.i.+t together or get the f.u.c.k out of the operations center. Cady wasn't the only one whose hand had started inching toward his pistol.

Jonathan Hill had just returned from the operations center and was focused on making sure the battle stations were occupied and the ammo was free-flowing. The soldiers from Red Platoon were in charge of protecting the camp in the guard posts that day, so Hill and the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds, or Blue Platoon, needed to see to it that they had their gear and radios and a constant supply of ammunition. Their lieutenant, Salentine, was still stuck at Forward Operating Base Bostick.

Machine-gun fire was now coming from the ANA side of the camp, and the ANA barracks itself was on fire. Hill was still trying to get an a.s.sessment of where the main attack effort was coming from; no one at the operations center seemed to know. From what he could deduce, the enemy had surrounded them.

Hill opened the north-facing door of the barracks to take a look. Just then, an RPG hit the generator ten feet away, blowing him back into the barracks and onto his back.

"You okay?" Harder asked.

"That thing was close," answered Hill.

"Let me check for shrapnel," Harder said. He patted Hill down, checking for wounds. There wasn't any.

"Okay," Hill told him, "go to the ASP"-the ammo supply point-"and get that ammo out to the battle stations."

While troops had ammunition stashed all over the camp, most of the official supply was kept in the ASP, near the camp entrance. It was stored behind two doors, both of which had been locked in an effort to keep Afghans from stealing it. The locks had, in fact, just been reinforced.

Specialist Ty Carter took out his M4 rifle and put five rounds into the lock. But when he opened the door, he realized he'd picked the wrong one-this door led to the mortars and Claymore mines. He needed the door for rounds and bullets. As he exited into the open s.p.a.ce, John Francis arrived at the entrance.

"What are you doing?" Francis asked Carter. "Get cover!"

Carter ducked down. "I need to get two-forty ammo for LRAS-two," he said.

"It's in there," Francis replied, referring to the other ammo supply point door.

"It's locked," Carter said. "Can I shoot the other locks off?"

Francis seemed hesitant, but then he said yes; Carter put a round into the second lock and blasted it open. He ran inside, followed by Francis, and they started throwing ammo out to the other soldiers-including Sergeant Matthew Miller and Eric Harder-who now began running over to transport rounds and bullets to the guard posts: "Take this to LRAS-One. Now!" "Take this to LRAS-Two. Now! Go! Go! Go!"

An RPG hit the HEs...o...b..rrier across from the door of the ammo supply point. It knocked Carter and Francis down and blew Miller into the ammo building. Carter picked Miller up and pushed him out of the building, yelling at him to go back to the barracks.

When Eric Harder and Francis followed Miller a little while later, Hill noticed they'd both been peppered pretty well by shrapnel from the RPG. The fact that Harder was still wearing gym shorts didn't help matters.

Sergeant Justin Gallegos's panicked voice came on the radio, from LRAS-2. "We need ammo right now!" Gallegos said. "This is no bulls.h.i.+t!"

The messages from Wong and Schulz quickly turned from descriptive to desperate:

6:10 am we are taking contact from diving board, switchbacks, putting green and b-10 position we are taking heavy small arms fire and rpgs rpgs from the north face still taking indirect fire6:15 am need something our mortors cant get upo we are taking casiltys GET SOMETHING UP!

Sitting in the tower of the shura building, Nicholas Davidson aimed his M240 machine gun at the plume of smoke rising from the Putting Green. After quickly running through his ammo, he was just ducking to reload the gun when a sniper round ricocheted across the turret. Then another whizzed right by his head. "Oh, f.u.c.k," Davidson said. He tried to climb down, but an Afghan Security Guard had found a safe harbor in that spot below the turret and was blocking his path.

When Kirk, Knight, and Gregory entered the shura building, it was thick with clouds of dirt and dust. They made their way to the ladder that led to the guard's ledge. "Get the f.u.c.k out of there, you G.o.dd.a.m.n p.u.s.s.y!" Kirk yelled at the Afghan guard. He grabbed him and threw him out of the way. Davidson started to climb down. "Davidson, get back on that two-forty," Kirk ordered.

"I have no ammo," Davidson said.

"We gotta get more ammo," Kirk announced. He turned to Knight, who was on the radio, trying to tell the operations center where to target the mortars. "Give me that AT-," Kirk said, grabbing the ant.i.tank gun. "Cover me while I fire this," he told Gregory.

Bullets, rockets, and mortars volleyed toward them like raindrops in a squall, the flas.h.i.+ng and crash of explosions like lightning and thunder. The men had never seen anything like it. Kirk stood by the door and prepped the AT4 grenade launcher, pulling out the safety pin, pulling up the firing pin, opening up the sights. He took a step outside the shura building while Gregory raised his M249 light machine gun and took a knee at the door, half inside and half outside the door frame, aiming at the Putting Green, to the west of the camp. Resting the grenade launcher on his shoulder, Kirk looked into the sights to fire, but before he could press the red firing b.u.t.ton, an RPG struck the side of the shura building. The explosion slapped Kirk onto the ground and flattened Gregory onto the building's floor. Gregory took a second to get his bearings and then ran out to try to help Kirk, who was on his back with his feet facing the door, not moving. The RPG had been only part of it: there was also a gunshot wound to Kirk's head. The bullet had gone through his right cheek and out the back of his skull. Blood was pouring from his face. As bullets crackled around his feet, Gregory grabbed Kirk by the shoulder straps of his vest and started pulling him. But Gregory was small, and the man whose limp body he was trying to move was not.

Seeing what was going on, Davidson came out to help. When the two had Kirk in the safety of the shura building, Gregory tried to wipe the blood from the sergeant's face while Davidson called the operations center on the radio, pleading for help.

It was just instinct: when Cordova, Courville, and the other two medics-Sergeant Jeffrey Hobbs and Specialist Cody Floyd-heard the first blast, they immediately headed to the aid station, where they put on surgical gloves and began preparing for casualties.

They did this every three days or so-that is, every time there was an incoming attack-but it didn't take them long to figure out that this one was much worse than anything they'd gone through before. For starters, there were more explosions than they'd ever heard at Camp Keating, and all of them were from enemy fire-the Americans weren't firing back with mortars.

The first casualty call came over the radio: someone was severely wounded over by the shura building.

"Hey, Doc," Courville said to Cordova, "I'm going out there."

While Cordova spoke on the radio to the staff at the aid station at Forward Operating Base Bostick, he threw Courville his M9 aid bag, a slim backpack containing combat gauze, tourniquets, emergency airway devices, IV kits, and more. Out Courville ran, precisely at the moment when an enemy RPG landed in the aid station, spraying shrapnel. Floyd and Hobbs went down, as did Specialist Andrew Stone, a mechanic who had come to alert them about the casualty at the shura building.

Up on their feet again, Floyd and Hobbs took Stone into the back room. Shrapnel had taken out a piece of his calf and hit his chest plate. They treated his wounds, and as they did so, Floyd noticed that Hobbs was bleeding from his chest, and Hobbs noticed that Floyd was bleeding from his his chest. They looked at each other, and then they briefly looked at themselves. There wasn't much blood, so they kept working. chest. They looked at each other, and then they briefly looked at themselves. There wasn't much blood, so they kept working.

Over at the shura building, Courville ran to Kirk. He was as limp as a rag doll, but he was alive. Courville shook his shoulders and yelled his name. There was no response.

Courville checked Kirk's body for wounds, doing a "blood sweep." A ma.s.sive amount of blood was still flooding out of his head and neck. Apart from the bullet wound, Kirk had also, it was clear, taken significant shrapnel to the back of his head. Courville wrapped his head with bandages, cut off his gear, and yelled for a stretcher team.

Davidson brought a stretcher he'd found in the Red Platoon barracks, and Rasmussen provided cover fire so that he, Courville, Stanley, and Vernon Martin could carry Kirk to the aid station. His blood left a crimson trail behind them. During their b.u.mpy scramble, Kirk seemed to look up at Stanley, who couldn't believe this indestructible a.s.s-kicker was down. Kirk? He was a crazily courageous b.a.s.t.a.r.d, and now here he was, down-maybe for the count. Stanley had a hard time processing it.

In the aid station, Cordova and Courville got to work on the sergeant while Hobbs and Floyd treated five wounded ANA soldiers. Cordova examined Kirk, who was by now extremely pale. His first priority was to stop the bleeding, always tricky with a head wound. To expand Kirk's blood volume and keep oxygen going to his brain, Cordova used a FAST1-a device that looked like a flashlight with a needle attached to one end-to introduce a small tube called a cannula into his sternum, or breastbone. He then hooked up an IV to pump fluid through the cannula into his bone marrow. The physician's a.s.sistant tried to find a pulse in the sergeant's wrists. None. He searched for a pulse in his groin area-none. Finally, he felt a very faint pulse in his neck.

Kirk was alive.

Suddenly, he began gasping for air. Cordova grabbed a tube to insert into his airway and began shooting air into his trachea. Courville ventilated oxygen into him. They both knew that even in a best-case scenario, given the distance and danger involved, the medevacs were hours away from landing at Camp Keating.

Cordova tried, but he couldn't completely detach himself from the patient on his table. He and Kirk, Courville, Stanley, Gallegos, Thomson, and Rodriguez were all gym buddies, meeting every night to work out together. Kirk and Gallegos were two of the toughest SOBs he'd ever met, in the gym and outside it. They were strong, obnoxious loudmouths, and he loved them. Kirk, in particular, was fearless.

Cordova tried to resuscitate his friend, performing a series of chest compressions while Courville administered breaths through the airway tube. Kirk had stopped bleeding, but Cordova couldn't tell if that was because he'd been bandaged well or because he had no more blood to give.

The Latvian trainers, Janis Lakis and Martins Dabolins, were furious when they found some of the ANA troops outside the operations center, huddled together and squatting, holding their knees and shaking uncontrollably. Among them was their commander, who had fled his post. Lakis-a big guy whom the Americans called Bluto because of his beard and immenseness-picked the man up.

"Where the f.u.c.k are your men? Are any of them manning their battle positions?" Lakis asked.