The mortar pit didn’t have a computer, so in these early-morning hours Daniel Rodriguez had to go elsewhere to work on the online correspondence course he was taking to earn points for a promotion. Since he was friends with Docs Cordova and Courville, he used the computer at the aid station. Cordova was studying calculus and physics online through Pikes Peak Community College, but this morning, he was slacking: he was in his bunk, having dozed off while reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Rodriguez spent a while on his correspondence course, then surfed the ’net looking for possible vacation options in Australia; he had some leave time coming.
The first RPG hit the aid station, and Rodriguez didn’t need any help identifying what the explosion was. He stopped what he was doing and put on his helmet and a non-Army-issued protective vest—one that actually didn’t contain any body armor but was much more comfortable than those that did—just in time for the next blast. Cordova and Courville were now awake; they came from the back of the aid station, where their bunks were.
Rodriguez usually carried an M4 carbine, but this morning he had opted instead for his lighter 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol. Now he cursed himself for that decision, which had been rooted entirely in sloth. Wearing a T-shirt, shorts, and sneakers, he headed for the door, stopping on the way to look back at Courville and Cordova. “Wish me luck,” Rodriguez said. He then went to the door, prepared his 9-millimeter to fire, and sprinted out into the open.
The bullets were coming in sporadically, punctuated by occasional RPG bursts, and Rodriguez zigzagged across the grounds to the laundry, then to the showers and the piss-tubes. His first, human instinct had been, of course, to stay in the aid station, but his sense of duty propelled him to the southwestern corner of the camp, to Mortaritaville, to his team: Breeding, Kevin Thomson, and a new guy just a few days into his tour at Camp Keating, Sergeant Janpatrick Barroga.
As Rodriguez ran to the right, he caught a glimpse of the incoming small-arms fire from the Switchbacks in front of him, sparks in the dawn’s dim gray. The bullets, shrapnel, and rocks on the ground sounded to him like popcorn kernels bursting. The gravel hit his legs as he ran at full speed; it felt like hail going in the wrong direction, from the ground toward the sky. He dreamed of being a college football player, but this was an altogether different kind of running for the end zone.
Rodriguez was near the Humvee/guard post known as LRAS-2 when he started firing back toward the Switchbacks with his pistol. He had only fifteen rounds, but he used every last one of them as he sprinted breathlessly toward his team and up the stairs to the mortar pit.
The first blast woke them up, but they remained in bed.
“Was that incoming or outgoing?” asked Hill.
“Outgoing,” said Harder. Neither of them opened his eyes. They were both exhausted from staying up late watching those DVDs, and one big explosion wasn’t all that odd a sound to hear as dawn broke at Camp Keating. They figured Breeding was just firing a mortar.
Then the second explosion came into the camp, and this one shook the Bastards’ barracks.
“Nope, that’s incoming,” said Harder as he got up and threw on his gear. He was wearing only underwear and shorts, but he was sure he’d be up and down in twenty minutes. His sneakers were outside the barracks—they smelled pretty ripe—and he couldn’t find a clean pair of socks.
From the mountains came the staccato of heavy machine-gun fire. Harder knew he had to get outside and take care of whoever this was—and then, he thought, he could go back to bed. He pulled on a tan T-shirt and laced up his hiking boots.
“Hurry up and get your shit on!” Harder yelled to his men—Michael Scusa, Christopher Griffin, Specialist Jeremy Frunk, and Specialist Mark Dulaney. They grabbed their ammunition and weapons. Harder opened the door and saw what was going on outside. He turned to Hill.
“This is a big one,” he said, though he had yet to realize just how bad it was.
The first thing John Breeding heard from his position in the mortar pit was a cacophony of RPG explosions, one after another after another. Everyone promptly got suited up. Thomson, his gear already on, was standing by the door, near the radios, and he ran out to remove the tarp from the M240 machine gun so he could fire it into the hills.
Thomson was ripping the poncho liner off the gun, about to run around and fire it, when Rodriguez arrived on the scene.
“Switchbacks!” Rodriguez yelled. “Switchbacks! Target sixty! Hit the Switchbacks!”83
But just as Thomson stepped in front of him, Rodriguez saw the private’s face explode in a burst of red. A bullet fired from the high ground had found its mark in the Thomson’s right cheek, going through his mouth and out his left upper back. He fell onto the ground.
Rodriguez went to him; Kevin Thomson was gurgling, but he couldn’t speak. His eyes were filigreed with burst vessels. A pool of blood and parts of his head were spilling into his helmet, into his body armor, onto the ground. The gore had the texture of soup. Rodriguez was at once horrified and nauseated by the sight. Thomson’s eyes glazed over and turned black and red.
“Thomson!” Rodriguez yelled. “THOMSON!”
The private was gone. That calm kid from Nevada didn’t make a sound; he didn’t move. Two minutes into their attack on Combat Outpost Keating, the Taliban had scored their first casualty.
The new guy, Barroga, poked his head out of the mortar pit to see what was going on.
“Get on the sixty!” Rodriguez told him, pointing him to the 60-millimeter mortar tube. But he saw Barroga hesitate. The kid was weighed down with fear, inexperience, and instant regret. There lay Thomson’s body.
Barroga thought he probably could have prevented Thomson’s death, could have said to him, “Hey, we’re getting shot at, wait two minutes before you run out to throw off the tarp,” but this was his first firefight, and he’d been at Camp Keating for only a few days, while Thomson had been there for months. And now…
“Get inside and take cover!” Rodriguez yelled. “Watch my back.”
Rodriguez 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 COP 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 motherfuckers with us.”
Platoon Sergeant First Class Frank Guerrero was on leave, so Romesha had assumed 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 to the Red Platoon barracks to go to bed—and now he was throwing his gear back on and grabbing his 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 bumped into Sergeant Kirk and Private First Class 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-Four.” Knight got the single-shot antitank 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 hell.
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? 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 assets from Bostick,” Bundermann told Sergeant Ryan Schulz, the intelligence analyst. Air support was at least thirty-five minutes away.
The commander of the outpost, Stoney Portis, wasn’t there. The leader of the Bastards, Ben Salentine, wasn’t there. It was all on Bundermann.
Observation Post Fritsche was also under attack, the assault 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 Class Jassey Holmes and Private Second Class 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 fuck 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 suspected 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 shit 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 Class Jordan Wong typed updates into the mIRC system.
Wong was “Black Knight_TOC” and Schulz was “Keating2OPS.”
6:03 am <Black Knight_TOC> FRITSCHE AND KEATING IN HEAVY CONTACT84
6:03 am <Black Knight_TOC> Requesting Air Tic Be opened
<Keating2OPS> we need it now we have mortars pinned down and fire coming from everywhere
<Keating2OPS> fritsche is taking heavy machine gun fire as well
<Black Knight_TOC> wee need something
<Black Knight_TOC> 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 massacre, they thought, a combination of impotence and terror—a doomed sense of being about to be overwhelmed, like sitting in a sand castle as a tidal wave suddenly drew to strength just yards away.