Many of Michael Howard’s officers resented him. They thought the lieutenant colonel was all about his own image and his own accomplishments, all about building the northernmost camp in Afghanistan because that demonstrated what a warrior he was. In October, he made a decision that turned that resentment into downright fury, though the men under him never risked charges of insubordination by expressing it directly.
Although more than a quarter million dollars’ worth of work had been poured into repairing the road from Naray to Camp Kamdesh, it remained dangerous. A September 2006 analysis had revealed at least sixteen problems limiting, if not in fact precluding, the passage of any vehicle larger than an uparmored Humvee—about 7.5 feet wide, around 4 tons. A more detailed assessment by 3-71 Cav, undertaken little more than a month later, looked at just that part of the road which led from Kamdesh to Mirdesh, not even a tenth of the way to Naray. It identified twelve separate “high-risk” areas that would “greatly hinder trafficability to vehicles larger than a small jingle truck.”
And yet that same month, Howard informed his officers that he wanted to send a truck larger than that—8 feet wide, more than 8 tons—from Naray to Kamdesh. He wanted to make sure that 3-71 Cav was 100 percent self-sufficient by ground, he said.
“We’re going to drive an LMTV up there, and we’re going to get it done,” he told Captain Pete Stambersky, referring to a light medium tactical vehicle, a large truck that could carry cargo weighing more than two tons. Because enemy attacks on the road had been increasing, the lieutenant colonel suggested that they go at night. Stambersky laughed. He didn’t think his commander was serious.
“Fuck, Pete,” Howard said. “Are you with me? Are we going to get this done, or not?”
“Roger, sir,” Stambersky replied.
Jesus, Stambersky thought. He really wants to drive an LMTV up that road just to prove it can be done. It doesn’t make any sense.
Major Thomas Sutton, who had replaced Timmons as 3-71 Cav’s XO in June, shared Stambersky’s reservations, knowing that an LMTV weighed around nine tons all by itself, with just fuel and crew. And yet Sutton also understood Howard’s intentions. All of the Afghan contractors’ jingle trucks were getting shot up; the Army needed to put U.S. trucks, big military might, on the road for resupply. Indeed, it was to make such deliveries easier that Combat Outpost Kamdesh had been put near the road in the first place. Helicopters were getting fired upon, and pilots were increasingly reluctant to fly in the area. Now that repairs had been made to the road, Howard wanted to see if an LMTV could make it up there. Sutton assumed that another part of it was “power projection,” as the military called it—flexing muscle to impress the locals.
Captain Frank Brooks of the Barbarians was directed to provide security for the LMTV convoy. Brooks agreed with Stambersky that taking the immense truck to Kamdesh was a bad idea, but he had his orders, and he meant to follow them. Stambersky’s troops removed the vehicle’s grab rails, bed rails, and rearview mirrors to limit the number of parts that could snag on a rock. They made the eight-foot-wide truck as light and as lean as they could. They worked out a strategy for who would drive and when, as well as how to protect the personnel and equipment. Brooks and Stambersky decided that the trip would take place during the day, so the drivers would have maximum visibility when making their way over the most treacherous and narrow sections of the road. They briefed Sutton about their plan, then Howard.
“I don’t want you driving during daylight hours,” Howard told them. He was afraid the LMTV would provide the enemy with an irresistible target.
Stambersky later approached Howard near the squadron’s operations center.
“Hello, sir,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”
“Yeah, Pete,” Howard said. “What about?”
“I would be remiss if I didn’t talk to you about the dangers involved in driving an LMTV to Kamdesh,” Stambersky said. “Especially driving at night. Driving during the day is one thing, but driving that route in the LMTV for the first time at night is going to get somebody killed.”
“Pete, we can do it,” Howard insisted. “We’re going to get it done.”
“Sir, I don’t think it’s the safest thing to do to drive that thing at night,” Stambersky said.
“We’re going to get it done,” Howard repeated. And then he walked away.
Before sunrise on October 29, the convoy pulled out from Forward Operating Base Naray. Stambersky had assigned First Lieutenant David Heitner to command the group, Sergeant Jeffrey Williams to drive the LMTV, and Specialist Tim Martin to serve as its gunner.
Martin sat in the turret clutching an M240B machine gun. This was a smaller and lighter weapon than the options he normally would have gone with—an MK19 grenade launcher or a .50-caliber machine gun—because he didn’t want to add any more weight to the LMTV than he had to. He, Heitner, and Williams had limited the gear they packed for the same reason, though they had brought along some nonstandard infrared chemical lights just in case of a rollover—which they agreed was a pretty likely possibility. Still, Martin wasn’t nervous—on the contrary, the Kentuckian thought of himself as the most qualified gunner in Stambersky’s unit, and he hated to be left out of missions.
The first leg of the convoy was completed in pitch-black darkness, but the sun rose after they stopped at the bridge to Gawardesh. Howard had been upset that the entire mission wouldn’t be conducted as he wanted, at night, but ultimately he had given in to Stambersky’s insistence—and Brooks’s—that that would be an impossible challenge.
At the Gawardesh bridge, the convoy dropped off about a dozen troops to set up mortar tubes as protection for the convoy if the need arose. Williams didn’t think he could drive the LMTV any faster than ten miles per hour, not only because of the road’s instability but because numerous impediments—tree stumps, stacks of lumber—narrowed it in places. Williams was the most qualified driver in the squadron, with over fifteen years’ experience driving vehicles weighing two and a half tons or more, and more than a thousand hours’ driving in blackout conditions. If anyone could navigate this route, it was Williams. Even he wasn’t sure it was a route that could be navigated by anyone. Still, he had no option but to try.
The convoy pashed west, passing Bazgal, when Afghans with weapons were spotted in the mountains across the river. Martin laid down some fire, and the insurgents shot back with small arms and RPGs.
Specialist Jesse Steele, the gunner in the second-to-last Humvee in the convoy, fired his .50-caliber across the river, not realizing that rounds were also coming from directly above them, on the mountain to his left. An RPG hit the left side of Steele’s truck, momentarily knocking him unconscious. When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back, with his left leg twisted behind and under him. The Humvee was still moving. Specialist Javier Valdez tried to help the gunner up, but Steele had no feeling in that leg and couldn’t stand. No matter: straining, he hauled himself back into the turret and resumed fire across the river as the convoy continued west.
At a safe point in the road, Brooks stopped the group and took inventory, checking to see who was hurt and who wasn’t. The injuries meant that Brooks would have to reorganize his troops for the remainder of the trip. Since Steele couldn’t stand up on his own, Brooks took him out of the Humvee turret and had him trade places with Sergeant Justin Pellak, in the rearmost truck.
Forty-five minutes later, the convoy passed Kamu and stopped again. Williams was having difficulty negotiating the LMTV over the narrow road and had had to slow down to a crawl, no faster than three miles per hour. From across the river, two insurgents fired a Dushka at the Americans, their heavy machine gun letting fly piercing metal at the Humvees and the LMTV. Martin responded with his machine gun. From mountains on either side of the convoy, dozens of other insurgents now began firing AKs and other weapons. An RPG hit right in front of the LMTV, and rounds started tweaking off the Humvees’ roofs. The lead Humvee took an RPG to its front, knocking the gunner, Specialist Ryan Coulter, around in his turret and spraying his hands and face with shrapnel. Bleeding and in pain, Coulter returned fire across the river to his right with his .50-caliber, then grabbed his M249 SAW with his left arm and fired it up on the mountain to his left.
In the rear truck, Steele thought, Shit, here we go again. Just then the Humvee’s gunner, Specialist Cuong Vo, a slight Vietnamese-American, fell out of the turret and onto Steele’s lap, not moving, a bloody bullet hole in his helmet.
“Vo’s dead,” Steele said, lifting the gunner off his lap by his vest and pushing him over to the side as he pulled himself up into the turret and started shooting Vo’s 240.
In the LMTV, Martin heard the whistle of an RPG coming at him from above, from the closer mountain to his left. As he turned to look, the RPG exploded just in front of his gunner’s shield, peppering his face, neck, and shoulder with forty-seven pieces of shrapnel. He fell backward into the LMTV, unconscious and covered with blood.
“We got a KIA!” yelled Heitner.
But Martin had not in fact been killed in action, and a few seconds later he awoke, grabbed his helmet, and got back in his turret. He resumed firing at the enemy across the river.
Steele was firing, too, when he heard a terrible scream from inside his Humvee. He looked down and was surprised to see Vo looking right back at him.
“What’s going on?” Vo asked.
“Are you okay? You just got shot in the fucking head!”
“Yeah, I know,” Vo said. It turned out that the bullet had pierced only the outer layer of his Kevlar helmet and not actually penetrated his head.
The LMTV hit a narrow spot in the road where the route turned to the left. The rear passenger-side tire smashed off a portion of the road, and the LMTV wobbled but pushed forward. About two hundred yards farther on, the rear tire detached another chunk of road, but Williams kept the vehicle from rolling over and continued moving.
Finally, they reached the outpost. In total, six troops were wounded, including Martin, Coulter, Steele, and Vo. It was a bloody mess, an assignment that enraged officers and enlisted men alike—all of whom were convinced that Howard’s muscle flexing was not worth the risk to their lives and the lives of their brothers.
At Combat Outpost Kamdesh, Williams inspected the LMTV. The two front tires had been shot and needed to be replaced. Stambersky and Brooks decided to leave the LMTV where it was until the replacements could be delivered.
Williams was relieved; a return trip would be extremely dangerous, he thought. After heading back to Naray by Humvee, he told Command Sergeant Major Byers that there was no way the LMTV could come back until some serious repairs were made to those bad spots on the road.
Over the next few weeks, Williams drove a Humvee in several more convoys to and from Kamdesh, all in blackout conditions. On the second trip, a vehicle manned by maintenance personnel went off a cliff. On the fourth, another Humvee did the same thing in the exact same location. No one was seriously hurt on either occasion. On each successive trip, Williams saw the road get narrower and narrower due to rain. Boulders fell in the roadway; the mud caused vehicles to slide.
By now, his entire chain of command was asking Williams if the LMTV could make it back to Naray. Every time he was asked, he said, “No, the road needs to be fixed first.” But no matter how many times he said it, further repairs to that fragile road didn’t seem to be on anyone else’s agenda.
By November of 2006, there had already been two vehicle rollovers on the narrow road to Combat Outpost Kamdesh. (Photo courtesy of Ross Berkoff)
By the end of October, commanders at Forward Operating Base Naray and in Jalalabad were so concerned about enemy attacks in the Kamdesh Valley that the number of supply runs getting through to Combat Outpost Kamdesh had dwindled down to close to none. Pilots didn’t want to fly there, and the leaders of convoys didn’t want to drive there, either. It got to the point where Gooding and the soldiers from Able Troop had to ration their food and water: they were down to one “meal ready to eat” apiece per day.
On his return from R&R, Keating commanded a convoy from Naray to Kamdesh without getting ambushed. Not only was this great news in itself, but it also meant that a full complement of supplies reached the outpost: ammunition, food and water, and wood and other goods needed to build roofs for barracks. Troops cheered Keating as if he were Audie Murphy and Neil Armstrong rolled into one.
His misgivings about the war’s purpose remained, but Keating himself was experiencing something of a rebirth. During his R&R, his romance with Heather McDougal had intensified, and whereas at one point he had talked to Berkoff about joining Military Intelligence, he had now decided on a new career path: he would transfer to a U.S. Army base in South Korea to serve as a specialty platoon leader, an advanced position that would enable him once again to lead a platoon of troops, which he missed doing.
Back at Kamdesh, he led a very one-sided drubbing of some insurgents who were attempting to set up a rocket to fire upon U.S. helicopters. Keating and the platoon killed four enemy fighters and wounded at least ten more. The irony is that I was the catalyst for the fight, Keating thought. The same guy who couldn’t find a reason for this war anymore rallied a platoon of soldiers, coordinated the attack, and ran around like a wild man with machine guns shooting over his head. Even success was bittersweet. He couldn’t wait to leave Afghanistan.
His were not the only blue thoughts. All of Able Troop seemed to be in horrible spirits, as Keating saw it. Every soldier in Able believed he’d be killed the next time he rolled out of the gate—or if not killed, at least wounded in a way that would forever make life a miserable challenge. The men were fired upon nearly every time out, they took casualties regularly—they were like zombies. Leaving the outpost could sure feel like driving into Hell. Toward the end of October, First Lieutenant Candace Mathis and her team of military police were teamed up with Able Troop’s 3rd Platoon when they had to push through a complex ambush. In the United States, politicians sometimes speculated that female soldiers might not be strong enough for such duty, or that male soldiers might get too emotional when their female colleagues were attacked, but those notions didn’t match the reality of the experience of 3-71 Cav. Actually, with their AT4 rocket launchers, the MPs had stronger firepower than many in the scout platoon; everyone survived this attack relatively unharmed.
The same could not be said for Private First Class Jason Westbrook, who, on November 4, was a gunner in another ambushed convoy. Shrapnel from an RPG clipped off one of his hands, but he didn’t even know it until he climbed back into the turret, went to reach for the trigger—it was a butterfly trigger, needing two hands—and saw his right hand dangling from its wrist.
Specialist Steven Dorrell attempts to comfort Private First Class Jason Westbrook after Able Troop’s 3rd Platoon was ambushed on November 4, 2006. (Photo courtesy of Jeremiah Ridgeway)
When the call came in the next night that another team of insurgents was attempting to dig in a rocket, Ben Keating saw a chance not only to kill the enemy but also to motivate his men. He specifically chose Westbrook’s platoon to take with him, hoping that a successful mission might undo some of the damage of the previous day. His strategy seemed to work, though it didn’t do Westbrook himself much good: the wound would stay with him forever.
Keating had just finished reading The Afghan Campaign, a newly published historical novel by Steven Pressfield that tells the story of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Afghanistan, as seen through the eyes of a young Macedonian soldier named Matthias. It had a great impact on the lieutenant from Maine. Alexander the Great “speaks of will—our own and the enemy’s,” Matthias recalls. “The foe, he declares, has no chance of overcoming us in the field. But if he can sap our resolution by his doggedness, his relentlessness; if he can appall us by his acts of barbarity, he can, if not defeat us, then prevent us from defeating him. Our will must master the enemy’s. Our resolve must outlast his.”29
“We’ve been up here for less than seven months,” Keating told the journalist Matthew Cole when he visited the outpost. “We have a couple of thousand years of history against us,” he said, holding up his dog-eared copy of The Afghan Campaign. “You do the math.”
Still, that was as far as he’d go in public. All day long, Keating spent time with his fellow soldiers, telling them to stop feeling sorry for themselves, urging them to brainstorm more inventive ways of killing the insurgents. He pushed them to figure out how to defeat the enemy even as he thought to himself, You can’t! You can’t defeat this enemy! Yet he was willing to let them continue risking life and limb to try. It was his job, but he felt like a liar.
Upon his return, Keating had been stunned to find the immense LMTV, with two of its tires shot out, parked at the outpost. He was told the story about how Howard had demanded that it be driven up, how the convoy had been attacked twice on the way, how six soldiers had been wounded, including the gunner on the LMTV, Specialist Tim Martin, who was awarded a Purple Heart. Gooding was emphatic that the truck needed to go back to Naray; he didn’t have room to store it at the outpost, he said.
“Matt, there’s no reason for it to come back,” Stambersky told him. “Put it at the front gate. Use it as a firing position. Put a gunner in it.”
But Gooding needed the space. The whole outpost was only about an acre and a half in area, and the LMTV was taking up valuable territory, not to mention serving as an inviting target—symbolic as well as practical—for the enemy. The camp now housed some 250 soldiers—about a hundred from the Afghan National Army, another hundred American troops, and up to fifty military police, cooks, mechanics, and other support personnel—and there simply wasn’t enough room for everyone.
And in any case, Stambersky had been overruled at squadron command, so the message from Naray was clear: the LMTV had to come back for repair and recovery. It had been at Kamdesh too long already, it had to be fixed up, it was an expensive and useful piece of equipment that other troops could use. Squadron XO Sutton conveyed all of this to Able Troop XO Keating.
Ben Keating decided that he would take it back. He and Staff Sergeant Vernon Tiller, his most senior mechanic, would drive the LMTV to Naray, say, “Thanks for nothing, assholes,” and leave.
“Fuck it,” Netzel told Keating. “Don’t take it back.”
“No, they’re insisting, so me and Tiller are gonna do it,” Keating said. “I got a bad feeling about it, so no one else is going to take it back but me.”
“Want me to come with you?” Netzel asked.
“No, I just want two in the vehicle,” Keating said.
Tiller figured they would need extra protection, so he spent an entire day stripping a dead truck of its gunner’s protection kit and mounting it on the LMTV. “Who’s our gunner gonna be?” Tiller later asked Keating and Netzel. “I put a GPK on the truck, and a weapons mount. All we need is a gunner.”
“We can’t put a gunner up there,” Keating said. “If that vehicle rolls over, the gunner won’t make it, you and I both know that. We’ll take our chances without. If we get ambushed, we’ll ride out the storm.”
“This is retarded,” Cerezo said when Keating briefed the convoy team on the mission. “This vehicle’s not going to make it on this road. Humvees can’t even make it.”
“It is stupid,” Keating agreed. “And it’s dangerous. So I’m going to drive.”
This was no small decision. It was considered a general standing order that officers were not to drive vehicles while on an operation; they were supposed to focus instead on “commanding and controlling” the convoy and were responsible for navigation, security, speed, and maintaining continuous communication with every truck on the move. Keating didn’t seem to care.
Dusk had fallen when Lieutenant Vic Johnson from Able Troop’s 1st Platoon approached Keating. His hand was wrapped in bandages; just a few days prior, when he and his men were out making sure that no insurgents were hiding in caves, he’d fallen down the side of a steep hill. Needing X-rays, he’d hitched a ride back to the outpost on a D Troop Humvee that had then gotten too close to the edge of the road and flipped, tumbling down the hill and into the Landay-Sin River. He’d nearly drowned but somehow managed to swim to the riverbank while wearing his body armor and holding his weapon. Johnson didn’t know much about Keating’s mission other than that he was commanding a convoy back to Naray.
“What vehicle are you taking there?” Johnson asked.
“The LMTV,” Keating replied.
Johnson told Keating that was a bad idea; the road couldn’t even support Humvees, he said.
The two men moved their conversation next to a fire pit, and Johnson tried again.
“Someone is going to have to die before anyone admits these roads are really dangerous,” he said.
It had been raining off and on for three days straight when the convoy—five Humvees, four jingle trucks, and the LMTV—left Combat Outpost Kamdesh on the night of November 25.
Earlier that day, Keating had taken out a patrol to inspect his route. Although it had rained or snowed on seven out of the previous ten days, he thought the road was suitable for travel and told Gooding that after the recent construction, the section from Urmul to Kamu was in better shape than it had ever been. Tiller inspected the LMTV and pronounced it to be in good operating condition. He, Keating, and Gooding agreed that hauling an extra Humvee for their return trip would be too cumbersome; they would leave it behind. The truck was prepped, the radios checked. Keating briefed the convoy team on all possible hazards and conditions.
They left at night in order to avoid an enemy attack. The sky was clear, with a quarter slice of moon offering little luminescence. The LMTV and the Humvees had infrared spotlights, and the troops were wearing their night-vision goggles.
Back at Combat Outpost Kamdesh, Gooding assumed that Tiller was driving. That assumption was wrong.
Detailed to provide additional security for Keating’s convoy, 3-71 Cav’s sniper team, led by Cricket Cunningham, hiked to the high ground along the road to Naray to conduct surveillance. They were there to deal with whatever the night might bring. Wearing their night-vision goggles, they watched as the Humvees slowly made their way down the road to Naray, followed by the LMTV. The road curved slightly to the right, toward the mountain, and then sharply to the left, toward the river ledge. In anticipation of the second curve, Keating steered the LMTV close to the edge of the cliff. The ledge had been reinforced with rocks loosely stacked on top of a stone retaining wall. It was not strong enough for the LMTV, which at its lightest weighed more than eight tons. As their left rear tire passed over the shoulder, Keating and Tiller felt the road give out from under them. The LMTV slid to the left, down toward the river. And then it dropped.
The LMTV landed on its left side, crashing and tumbling, then rolling over and over.
Tiller felt himself roll about four times, and then all of a sudden he just stopped rolling and he wasn’t in the LMTV anymore: he was lying spread-eagle on a boulder, about thirty feet from the river. He didn’t remember being thrown from the vehicle, but there he was.
Keating, too, fell out of the LMTV before it splashed into the river and became almost entirely submerged.
Tiller was in unbearable pain, mostly from his back. Keating was worse off—much, much worse.
Cerezo was driving the last Humvee in the convoy. He saw a flash of lights from the LMTV.
He looked at Yagel.
“What was that?” Cerezo asked. He braked to a stop.
Specialist Brendan Snell ran up to them. “The LMTV just flipped off the cliff!” he exclaimed. “We got to go get them!”
“Oh, shit,” said Cerezo. He hopped out of his truck.
The area where the LMTV had fallen was too steep for them to climb down, Snell told Cerezo, so they tried to descend right there, to the left of Cerezo’s Humvee. But the gravel at that spot was too loose and the decline too severe. They quickly went to another location, but that was no good, either.
“Dude, show me where the LMTV went off,” Cerezo said.
They ran to the crumbling patch of road. Some of the other troops were now starting to congregate nearby.
“Show me how to get down there, take me,” Cerezo ordered an Afghan National Army soldier. The man didn’t really respond. Cerezo looked down and saw that the LMTV was underwater, with just one tire poking up from the surface of the river.
“Fuck this,” Cerezo said to Snell. “Dude, are you game?”
“I’m game if you’re game,” Snell said.
“Let’s do this,” Cerezo replied.
They jumped down onto the steeply descending mountain and started sliding down the gravel-covered slope.
Netzel was listening to it all from the operations center back at Combat Outpost Kamdesh.
Yagel had been leading the convoy. He now came on the radio, his voice loud: “The LMTV just fell down the cliff!”
Yelling from the road, Yagel had been able to speak with Tiller, who was growing more frantic with each passing minute. Tiller had reported to him that Keating was unconscious and out of his reach.
“We’re trying to go down and get them,” Yagel said. “We need some help!” Keating and Tiller were down a cliff and not easy to get to, and on this dark night, visibility was low. “I need help, please, get us more help,” Yagel repeated.
Able Troop responded immediately with two Cavalry sections and an MP platoon, all racing down the road to the site. Cunningham, who heard Yagel’s pleas over the radio, called in and requested permission to move down the mountain with his snipers. Permission was granted. He told Gooding and Netzel that he needed to have a Hilux truck, climbing ropes, a Skedco hard plastic stretcher, and a medical kit waiting for him and his team when they came down from their position.
“Okay,” said Gooding. “Hurry up, get down there.”
Cunningham ran down the hill, on the way selecting a team of troops who he thought could help him:
Matthew Gibson is an SAW gunner; great, take him for security.
John Garner took a course on combat injuries; good, pick him.
Cory Townsend is good with ropes; he went through air-assault training. Let’s go.
The four men ran back to Combat Outpost Kamdesh and met up with the ready Toyota, in which sat 3-71 Cav surgeon Major Christopher Martin. Garner hopped behind the wheel, and they sped down the road. The Toyota didn’t offer any protection from bullets, but it was the right size and weight for the road.
When Cerezo and Snell reached Tiller, he was leaning against a rock. Hurt, but alive.
“Don’t worry about me,” he told them. “Go help Keating.”
Ejected from the vehicle, Keating had landed between two rocks almost 150 feet down the cliffside, right near the Landay-Sin River. On its way down, the LMTV had rolled over him. He was wedged between the boulders, facing the rocks and the river. His pelvis was pinned down, and water was running over him.
“We have to flip him over,” Cerezo said. He, Snell, and Specialist David Mendez, who had joined them, pulled Keating from the rocks and laid him on his back.
Keating suddenly snapped awake and tried to lift himself up. “Get me the fuck out of here!” he cried, and then he blacked out again.
Cerezo identified multiple open fractures to both legs, open wounds on his thighs, open fractures of his left arm, a possible broken back, and head trauma. Keating also had excessive bleeding in his abdomen and groin. His face was banged up, and there was blood by his left eye and his nose. His left and right feet appeared to be almost completely severed from his legs at the ankles.
The medic cut Keating’s clothes off him and began packing his wounds with Kerlix gauze and wrapping him with bandages. The splints he had with him weren’t big enough for a guy like Keating, so he took a few of the boxes of MREs that had scattered all over the hillside when the LMTV fell, cut them apart, and fastened the sections together to serve as improvised splints. He got on the radio with Martin, the squadron surgeon, but their conversation kept getting interrupted by others.
“If you are not the fucking doc, or me, get the fuck off the net,” Cerezo barked, then went on to describe Keating’s condition to the physician.
The troops up the mountain had already ordered a medevac. Keating was still breathing, but it would be a race to get him to the operating room at Forward Operating Base Naray before it was too late.
Cunningham and Garner hooked up two 150-foot ropes to a Humvee and began rappelling down the cliff face. They didn’t know how strong the ropes were, but they figured they’d find out soon enough. Less than ten minutes later, the snipers were with Keating, Snell, Cerezo, and Mendez. They put Keating on the Skedco stretcher they’d brought with them. Keating was cold and soaking wet. Every so often he would start to moan a little, and the men would try to talk him up.
“You’re gonna make it home to see your girlfriend,” Garner said.
The medevac finally arrived, but there was no safe place for it to land, so it began lowering a hoist with a medic. The rotation of the chopper’s blades in that tight corridor created a considerable draft, however, and the medic oscillated wildly under the helicopter as he descended. Deciding that the situation was too hazardous, he signaled for the crewman to stop and lift him back into the bird. The medevac extraction was called off, and the bird flew on to Combat Outpost Kamdesh.
Cerezo had been lying on top of Keating to try to warm him up and shield him from the chopper’s wind. As soon as the helicopter was called away, he noticed that there was something much more serious going on with Keating than just a loss of consciousness.
“I don’t think he’s breathing anymore,” Cerezo said.
“You’ve got four minutes to get him breathing again,” Cunningham told him. After that, they would need to carry the lieutenant up the steep slope.
Cerezo and Garner, a former emergency medical technician, opened up the Skedco to which Keating had been fastened so they could begin CPR. As they were attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Keating started vomiting in their mouths: green and black crud burped up from inside him. This caused Garner to vomit in turn, and Cerezo to dry-heave. But they wouldn’t give up.
They could feel his life slipping away. They gave Keating as much air as they could from their lungs, trading off over and over. They counted chest compressions—1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14—screaming out the numbers so that the mountains echoed with their desperate cries. Cerezo inserted a King LT tube in Keating’s mouth in an effort to help air get into his lungs more easily. It worked: he started breathing again. They snapped him back into the Skedco, and Cunningham wrapped the stretcher around his waist. They all carried Keating the thirty feet up the hill to the bottom of the rope, which Cunningham then secured to both the stretcher and his own belt.
“We’re good to go!” Cunningham yelled up the hill. “Start pulling!”
Troops on the road began hauling the rope, and Cunningham started clawing his way up the cliff. Garner and Cerezo continued to breathe for Keating, who wasn’t able to do so on his own. The pull rope, rubbing against a rock’s sharp edge, snapped. Pushed back suddenly by gravity and Keating’s weight, Cunningham dug his feet into the ground while Garner pushed Keating up. Cunningham yelled for Townsend to lower the rope back down so he could fix it, then he hastily refastened it, tying a square knot with two half hitches.
Vehicle parts and MRE boxes were strewn about the slope. Rocks kept falling on the soldiers as they made their way up. When they were halfway up the cliff, Cerezo noted that Keating no longer had a pulse.
They kept pushing.
Cerezo saw that Keating’s pupils were fixed and dilated. He was showing no signs of life.
Other troops now began scaling down the cliff toward them, inadvertently knocking loose rocks that hit Garner, Cunningham, and Cerezo. For the most part, Cunningham’s helmet protected him, but Garner’s head and Cerezo’s hand started to bleed from cuts caused by the stones. As the stretcher passed the other troops, the medic and the EMT, both bleeding, continued to push on Keating’s chest and offer him their breaths.
Roughly two hours after the accident, Ben Keating at last reached the top of the cliff. Everyone helped the team get him past the ledge. Cory Townsend assisted with the mouth-to-mouth, taking over for Garner. Cerezo told the surgeon that Keating had no pulse, was not breathing on his own, and was cold.
“He’s not cold and dead until he’s warm and dead,” Martin replied.
Martin was quoting an old emergency-room saying, meaning that sometimes when a person’s body is cold due to hypothermia, a pulse may be present but not detectable. He was trying to say, in other words, that Keating might still be alive. Cerezo had no idea what the hell he was talking about.
Martin attached a respiratory bag over Keating’s nose and mouth and covered him with blankets to combat the hypothermia. Troops put him in the Humvee Ridgeway had been driving and rushed him back to the landing zone at the outpost, where the surgeon gave him a shot of epinephrine before the bird took him to Forward Operating Base Naray, a twenty-minute chopper ride away.
Back on the road, above the wreck of the LMTV, Yagel and Cerezo embraced.
“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” the medic said.
“I know,” said Yagel. “I know.”
Tiller was still at the bottom of the cliff.
“We gotta go back down there,” Cunningham told Cerezo, who seemed preoccupied with Keating’s fate. “C’mon, man, do your job, we gotta go down there.”
“Get your fucking ass up here, dude!” Cerezo yelled down to the mechanic, mistakenly thinking he wasn’t that badly hurt.
Cunningham climbed back down using the same rope. When he got to the bottom, he lay on top of Tiller, offering him his body heat, while waiting for the stretcher to be lowered to them. Once it reached them, Cunningham strapped Tiller into it with the belts of the other troops who had joined them down there, and then they hauled him up the hill. His condition seemed stable.
In the operating room at Forward Operating Base Naray, Keating’s body temperature was only 92 degrees. He had no pulse or heart rhythm.
The doctors spent forty minutes aggressively attempting to resuscitate him with an open cardiac massage.
He had bled out.
His heart was empty.
His abdomen became distended with blood.
The open-heart massage didn’t work. Keating had suffered too much damage, and it had taken too long to get him from the bottom of that cliff to the operating table.
First Lieutenant Ben Keating was declared dead at 12:20 a.m. ET on Sunday, November 26, 2006.
Ken and Beth Keating had just returned from a trip to Delaware to visit Ken’s brother and his family. Their son had called them there and spoken with each relative in turn. It had been a difficult phone call for both Ken and his son, with lots of pauses. Neither wanted to hang up the phone, but eventually there was nothing left for them to say.
On Sunday morning, at church, Beth saw Heather McDougal, whose dad had usher duty that month. McDougal told her that for the first time, she and Ben had used Instant Messenger to talk to each other. Their conversation had taken place before he left on his mission to drive the LMTV from Kamdesh to Naray:
bkeating6: sorry i missed you earlier
applegirl15: hi!
bkeating6: morning gorgeous
applegirl15: hey there…
applegirl15: so how much longer are you in kamdesh for
bkeating6: about 24 hours
bkeating6: [till] tomorrow night… they’re pretty much done with operations out here, so the danger isn’t too great
applegirl15: ok
bkeating6: just a really boring truck drive
applegirl15: is the weather too bad to fly
bkeating6: don’t worry… i’m coming back to you.…
The LMTV in the Landay-Sin River. (Photo from the accident report, U.S. Army)
That afternoon, Ken Keating watched the Chicago Bears lose to his beloved New England Patriots—a game that his son had said he was hoping to catch at Forward Operating Base Naray. Just in case Ben wasn’t able to see it, Ken typed up a synopsis of the Patriots’ win and emailed it to his son.
Ken headed to bed at around nine that night. Beth was already under the covers when they heard a car door slam, followed by a knock at the door. Ben Keating’s father put his jeans back on, went downstairs, and turned on the porch light. Two soldiers were standing there in their Class A uniforms.
“Beth!” Ken Keating called upstairs. “I think you’d better come down here.”