The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (87 page)

Cordova continued to focus on Mace; to him, nothing outside that room mattered.

First they needed to know Mace’s blood type. Cordova looked for his dog tag, but it wasn’t around his neck. This wasn’t unusual; because their Kevlar chest plates tended to press their dog tags into their breastbones, soldiers—especially the skinny ones—often tied them around their belt loops and stored them in their pants pockets. Indeed, that was where Mace’s dog tag was. He was A-positive—good news, because so were Cordova, Hobbs, and Floyd. Out of these three matches, Floyd was elected to be the donor because, as the lowest-ranked and least experienced among them, he was deemed the least “essential.” “Okay, Doc,” Floyd said. “Stick me.”

He rolled up his sleeve, and soon his dark-red blood began filling the collection bag, which contained an anticoagulant to keep it from clotting. After a struggle, Hobbs succeeded in plunging the receiving end of the system into Mace’s neck.

A nervous Cordova kept a close eye on his patient. Studies have shown that for reasons of bureaucratic tangle, dog tags carry unreliable information about blood type up to 11 percent of the time, so the physician’s assistant was on guard against any adverse reactions. There were none. Mace’s pulse improved and could now be found not only in his neck but also on the inside of his thigh.

Even more important, Mace himself went from dazed to conscious. He started to complain about the pain in his leg. He asked for a cigarette, a request that was denied with a smile. They all started to joke around. Floyd was tall but very skinny, and the other medics often teased him about his manhood. Now Mace would be less of a man, the medics suggested, because he’d received Floyd’s weak-ass blood. Others, too—most notably Rasmussen, one of Mace’s best friends and partners in crime—came in and chatted with him. But fifteen minutes after the bag of Floyd’s blood had been depleted, Mace’s eyes started to wander off again. They would need to give him a second bag. Hobbs rolled up his sleeve.

Bundermann had some good news for the Apache pilots as they arrived on station: the Americans had taken back some land inside the camp. But the troops at Combat Outpost Keating still weren’t sure where many of their guys were, so the pilots decided they would continue to avoid firing within the outpost.

For the next thirty minutes, Rasmussen fired smoke rounds at targets that Black Knight Troop wanted the Apaches to destroy in the hills and their environs. Bundermann would radio the pilots to tell them how close Rasmussen had come to the mark, and the pilots would saturate the relevant area with rockets and 30-millimeters rounds. Others joined Rasmussen in firing smoke rounds, one soldier marking where he thought an enemy Dushka team was hiding.

Bundermann had made it clear to the pilots that their top priority should be to kill the insurgents in the Afghan National Police station and the Urmul mosque, a source of clear and accurate machine-gun fire. Specifically, he requested that they drop as many Hellfire missiles on the mosque as they could.

It wouldn’t be easy. In this narrow valley, with one smaller hill blocking access to the mosque from the north, the only way for either Lewallen’s or Huff’s Apache to get a clean shot was to head to the east and then make a westbound pass. They would come through the valley in one long, straight run that they hoped would not be interrupted by a Dushka or a lucky shot. If they made it safely, Lewallen could put a Hellfire into the mosque, then Huff could follow up with a second missile, pulverizing the enemy sanctuary.

They flew two and a half miles away from the camp then turned around, zooming east-to-west toward Combat Outpost Keating. As they approached, two Dushka shots found their mark in Lewallen’s Apache.

“Shit,” said Lewallen. Luckily, the shot hadn’t seriously harmed the helicopter, but it had damaged its hydraulics and thus stopped it from firing its missiles. “I got a Hellfire malfunction,” he told Huff. “I can’t get my missile off the rail.”

From the second Apache, Huff radioed that he would go ahead and try to make the shot, so as Lewallen flew over Observation Post Fritsche and took a left-hand turn, Huff turned right, leveled the bird, and let Wright, his copilot, take his shot. The Hellfire missile hit the mosque from the eastern side. At the same time, Huff and Wright’s bird came under heavy machine-gun fire and lost the backup control system for its tail rotor. Lewallen had by now resolved the issue with his own Hellfire operating system, and he and Bardwell fired their missile, which hit the mosque from the south. Target successfully destroyed.

The two Apaches turned around and prepared to head back to Forward Operating Base Bostick for repairs. Other aircraft were now flying in and above the valley, dropping bombs. The walls of the shura building began to cave in. And something bigger was on its way: a B-1 bomber.

The B-1’s pilot, Captain Justin Kulish, called in to Romesha. “What do you need?” he asked.

“Get rid of Urmul,” Romesha replied. “Just level it.” There was slim chance that any civilians were left in the small community.

“All right,” the pilot said, “Get down, we’re bombs away.”

The first bomb hit the top of the Putting Green, straight above Urmul, and was then followed by a rapid succession of deep booms as the village was obliterated. Romesha could feel the bombs in his chest as their shock waves compressed his body and everything else in their path.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.

The shock waves hurt Romesha, but it was a good kind of hurt, a good pain. We have the upper hand now, he thought. Finally.

While bombs pummeled Urmul, Eric Harder passed the dining hall on his way to throw down more concertina wire on the southern side of the camp. On the radio, he heard someone—the B-1 pilot, he assumed—warn, “Hey, this one’s gonna be close,” and as he turned down to face the camp, he saw the impact of the shock wave shatter the glass windows on a bulldozer, and then he thought, Oh, shit, this is going to rip me to shreds. Harder ran to the side of the barracks to take cover from the succession of bombs. He sat there and listened to Urmul get destroyed.

A flock of U.S. aircraft now swarmed the valley, nineteen of them in all, all at different altitudes—A-10 Warthogs, Apaches, F-15Es, and a B-1 bomber. The sky was dark with rainclouds, and the air thick with a smell of explosives and chemicals that burned Harder’s nostrils.

Every once in a while, the insurgents remaining in the mountains would take pot shots at the camp, prompting the U.S. troops to shoot back a wall of bullets. Davidson was providing cover fire for Harder as he stretched the concertina wire.

“Do you think we’re going to make it out of here?” Davidson asked him.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Harder.

They had to stop the fire from spreading to the aid station via the burning pine tree. Someone had found a chainsaw, but not one of them had the first idea of how to use it.

When the Bastards were up at Observation Post Fritsche, the enlisted guys had a game they played: Name an occupation that Carter has never tried. It was remarkable: during his wandering years—after his stint with the Marines but before he enlisted in the Army—Carter had done just about everything. He’d scrubbed the bottoms of yachts in the San Francisco Bay Area, been a projectionist at a movie theater in Antioch, California, and served as an armed security guard in Oakland, a seasonal sales associate at Home Depot, and a hot-tub transporter. He’d worked at a sawmill and a motorcycle shop; he’d driven a flatbed tow truck.

And yes, he’d learned how to be a lumberjack for an excavating company.

“Carter can do it,” said Private Second Class Kellan Kahn, a radio operator.

Hill tracked down Carter, who had recovered from rescuing Mace.

“With this chainsaw, can you cut down that tree?” Hill asked.

“I don’t know,” Carter replied. “Let me check.” He grabbed the chainsaw and looked to see if it had fuel. He revved it, Leatherface-style, to find out if it worked. “Yeah,” he said.

Smoke was now starting to emanate from the operations center. Carter knew he had to get this tree down, had to keep the aid station from going up in flames. The pine tree was tall, and he would have to angle the different cuts carefully to make sure it fell parallel to the Bastards’ barracks and not on top of the aid station. Carter had earlier lost his protective eyewear, and the blaze was throwing embers onto the back of his neck. That didn’t help his concentration.

But he made contact, he made his cuts, and the pine tree started slowly to topple. Cool, Carter thought, taking a few steps back.

Then the tree began spinning.

Waitaminute, he thought. This never happens….

The tree fell in the wrong direction, landing on the tactical operations center.

“Oh, shit!” Carter yelled. “Oh shit, oh shit!”

The roof of the operations center fell in, and the tree went with it, stopping the fire’s path to the aid station but redirecting the flames downward. Carter wondered whether the fire in the operations center might not have caused an updraft, but regardless, troops started cheering: a disaster had been avoided because the tree was no longer a threat to the aid station. Carter himself felt a little sheepish. I can’t believe they’re cheering, he thought. I totally messed that up.

Carter climbed onto the tree with the chainsaw to clear some limbs that were blocking the walkway between the operations center and the Red Platoon barracks—potentially impeding a soldier’s path to the aid station. “You’re doing a good job, Carter,” Hill told him. “But you’re the most exposed person. You need to get down.”

“I’m almost done,” Carter said. “Just a sec.”

“
Get the fuck down!
” Hill said. The incoming wasn’t as bad as it had been, but it was still bad. This was no time for them to lower their guard.

The two Apaches had made it back to Forward Operating Base Bostick, but they were seriously damaged. Two other Apaches sent to Camp Keating returned soon afterward with similar battle scars. One of the birds had to execute an emergency landing. None of this boded well for further missions.

While the helicopters were being fixed up, Lieutenant Colonel Brown worked on a plan to air-assault a 150-man quick reaction force to Observation Post Fritsche, from which they would move down the mountain to help the men at Camp Keating. Here, too, there were complications. On September 10, First Lieutenant Tyler Parten, leader of the unit at Bostick that Brown would normally have been able to use as a QRF, had been killed in an ambush. Two other squad leaders had been badly wounded. As a result, it was decided that soldiers from the 1-32 Infantry Battalion would instead serve as the QRF. Two Black Hawks were launched to pick up those troops from bases in Kunar Province.

Three years before, Combat Outpost Keating had been established in part to help out the 1-32 Infantry, by stemming the flow of weapons from Pakistan to insurgents fighting 1-32 troops in the Pech Valley and other locations. Now the 1-32 Infantry was being called to return the favor, to save their brothers in arms at the same outpost.

As the troops prepared for this air assault, the sky filled with dark clouds bringing heavy rain, thunder, and lightning. The thunderstorm traveled through the Landay-Sin Valley, clinging to mountaintops and dumping water below. An MQ-1 Predator, an unmanned aerial vehicle used for reconnaissance by the U.S. Air Force and the CIA, was dispatched to Kamdesh to conduct surveillance of the battles at Keating and Fritsche, but the wind and weather iced its wings and caused it to veer into the side of a mountain. It quickly became obvious that the bad weather was going to severely inhibit the QRF’s ability to fly into the valley.

Back at the aid station, Cordova kept transfusing Mace with A-positive blood. After Floyd’s came Hobbs’s, then Cordova’s, Bundermann’s, and Stone’s. As he was in the process of draining the fifth and final bag from the kit, Cordova was informed that a medevac was en route. He put a blanket and an oxygen mask on Mace and strapped him down. The young specialist was going to pull through. He was talking, breathing. Amid the horror of the day, at least they could be confident of one small victory.

Outside the aid station, Hill was focused on the stories that hadn’t ended well. “We have fallen heroes,” he said. “I need volunteers.” It didn’t matter that they were still encircled by what seemed to be hundreds of attackers intent on adding to the body count; this was what American soldiers did for one another: they left no one behind.

Hill and Bundermann made a plan involving two teams that would bound toward LRAS-2 and then up to the mortar pit. They’d escort Breeding, Rodriguez, and Barroga back to the operations center, carrying Thomson with them, and then the unit would be consolidated. Hill knew that some of the troops huddling at the Café were probably comparatively well rested, having worked solely on communications since early in the morning; they might even be eager to help in the field. And so they were: among the volunteers were Specialist Damien Grissette, who was usually in charge of water purification, and radioman Kellan Kahn.

Romesha looked up to see Hill and his men running toward him in the shura building; he didn’t think this was part of the retrieval plan, but there was no time to argue about it. Romesha and his team bounded to the general area where Gallegos, Hardt, and Martin had last been seen, near LRAS-2. Sergeant Armando Avalos and Hill provided cover fire.

Rasmussen went around the laundry trailer. Underneath it was Martin, dead. It looked as if he’d tried to patch up some of his leg wounds and then low-crawl away from the enemy. He must have been spotted, because he’d been shot twice in the back of his head, at extremely close range.