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 fuck,” 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 assume 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 assault, 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 passed 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 into 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 fuck 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 shit together or get the fuck 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 Bastards 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 assessment 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 weren’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 ASP 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 space, 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 HESCO barrier 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 bullshit!”
The messages from Wong and Schulz quickly turned from descriptive to desperate:
6:10 am <Keating2OPS> we are taking contact from diving board, switchbacks, putting green and b-10 position
<Keating2OPS> we are taking heavy small arms fire and rpgs
<Keating2OPS> rpgs from the north face
<Black Knight_TOC> still taking indirect fire
6:15 am <Black Knight_TOC> need something our mortors cant get upo
<Black Knight_TOC> we are taking casiltys
<Black Knight_TOC> 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, fuck,” 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 fuck out of there, you goddamn pussy!” 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-Four,” Kirk said, grabbing the antitank gun. “Cover me while I fire this,” he told Gregory.
Bullets, rockets, and mortars volleyed toward them as if part of a demonic storm. The men had never seen anything like it. Kirk stood by the door and prepped the AT4 rocket 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 rocket launcher on his shoulder, Kirk looked into the sights to fire, but before he could press the red firing button, 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 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 massive 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 bumpy scramble, Kirk seemed to look up at Stanley, who couldn’t believe this indestructible ass-kicker was down. Kirk? He was a crazily courageous bastard, 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 assistant 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 gave Kirk oxygen with a bag valve mask. 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 with a beard whom the Americans called Bluto—picked the man up.
“Where the fuck are your men? Are any of them manning their battle positions?” Lakis asked.
“The Taliban have taken that side,” he said.
“Get your men and go and retake your side of the camp!” Lakis told him.
“You are not my commander!” the Afghan exclaimed, and he ran off.
Specialist Zach Koppes was alone at LRAS-1, the guard post where he’d had some bad luck back in June, resulting in his self-inflicted head wound. It turned out that had been a good day, comparatively speaking.
The rockets and RPGs just kept coming and coming into the camp. Koppes recalled hearing about two pickup trucks full of ordnance that had been stolen recently, and he wondered whether this hell being unleashed upon Keating might be connected to that. A sniper had begun targeting Koppes, his bullets hitting the Kevlar tarp covering the back of the truck with deadly accuracy; if the American had stood up, they would have gone through his head. The tarp was tough, but the bullets were shredding it. Fuck, Koppes thought to himself. This thing’s not going to last.
Joshua Dannelley ran over with his Mk 48 machine gun, as did Christopher Jones with MK19 grenades to give to Koppes and several belts of M240 machine-gun ammo for the fighting position right next to the Humvee.
“Keep down! Keep down!” Koppes yelled. “There’s a sniper!” But soon it wasn’t just a sniper anymore; RPGs began showering down near them, one hitting fifteen feet away.
“My knee! My knee!” yelled Jones, falling to the ground. Dannelley inspected him but couldn’t find any external injuries.
Sergeant John Francis had been running ammo back and forth to guard posts for a while when he decided to check in back at the Bastards’ barracks. An RPG exploded behind him, lifting him up off the ground and throwing him against a pole. Next thing he knew, he was on his back on the ground, and Specialist Mark Dulaney was on top of him, shaking him.
“You good? You good? You all right?”
Francis opened his eyes.
“Sergeant, you good?”
“I don’t know, motherfucker,” Francis said. “You’re the one looking at me. You tell me if I’m good!”
“Can you get up?” Dulaney asked.
Francis tried, but his left side throbbed with pain.
“You all right?” Dulaney asked again.
“I think I’m all right,” Francis said. “I think I got some busted ribs.” He would later find out that five of his ribs had been fractured.
“Should we go to the aid station?” Dulaney wondered.
“Fuck, no,” Francis said. “We gotta keep fighting till this shit’s over.”
Sergeant Breeding and his men did everything they could to get the radio back up, but it wouldn’t work. They had no idea what was going on elsewhere in the camp; they were completely disconnected from the rest of the world.
“As long as we’re in the bunker, we’ll be okay,” Breeding told Rodriguez and Barroga.
But the bunker was precisely where the insurgents continued to shoot machine-gun and sniper fire—for good measure adding multiple RPGs to their onslaught, too. Breeding and Rodriguez returned fire with their M4 carbines. They didn’t think they had much of a chance of hitting their targets; they just wanted to throw down some lead to keep the bad guys from shooting at them.
Meanwhile, the men on the guard posts at Camp Keating were starting to run low on ammunition. The sheer volume of rounds they were putting out astounded Bundermann. And though some of the American bullets were finding their mark, the counterattack clearly wasn’t having much of an effect.
The RPG that had blown Hill onto his back also blew out their generator, and the satellite phone line went dead; the enemy seemed to know exactly what to target. The mIRC system, thankfully, was still online. Forward Operating Base Bostick’s ops center alerted Keating’s that a pair of F-15 Strike Eagles, the two of them together code-named Dude 25, were on their way, courtesy of Task Force Palehorse.
6:12 am <TF_DESTROYER_BTL_CPT> BK DUDE 25 enroute No eta yet
<TF_PALEHORSE_BTL_CPT> NEGATIVE, AH85 ARE BEING ALERTED TIME NOW
<TF_PALEHORSE_BTL_CPT> ITS A 40 MINUTE FLIGHT
6:13 am <Keating2OPS> whats the status of air
6:14 am <TF_DESTROYER_BTL_CPT> CLOSE AIR SUPPORT 5 minutes
Justin Gallegos, Brad Larson, and Stephan Mace were stuck at LRAS-2. “We’re getting attacked from the village,” Gallegos told Bundermann, referring to Urmul. “Do I have permission to fire back?”
“Absolutely,” Bundermann said. “Light it up.” At that point, everything was fair game.
6:14 am <Keating2OPS> we are taking fire from inside urmul village
6:18 am <Keating2OPS> our mortars are still pinned down unable to fire
6:20 am <Keating2OPS> we need cas86
<Keating2OPS> still taking heavy rpgs and machine gun fire
6:21 am <Keating2OPS> at both locations fritsche and keating taking heavy contact
All of twenty-three minutes had passed since the attack began.
Ty Carter ran into the Bastards’ barracks and was greeted by a scene of chaos and shouting.
“Shut the fuck up!” Hill yelled. Everyone quieted down. “We need to find out who needs what.”
“Everyone needs everything,” Carter said, gasping for breath.
From Spokane, Washington, Carter had joined the Marines out of high school, but he’d been busted down to a lower rank for fighting. He’d then quit and spent five years as a civilian working aimlessly at a series of odd jobs. He hated that, felt like one in a herd of cattle. He wanted to fight for his fellow soldiers, not earn a paycheck without a sense of honor or direction. He reenlisted in the military in January 2008, opting this time for the Army, figuring the Marines probably wouldn’t take him back.
In civilian life, Carter had felt like something of an oddball and an outcast, but in the Army, he felt alive, with purpose. And on this day, he relished his role as a soldier trying to help his fellow troops.
Hill loaded up Specialists Michael Scusa and Jeremy Frunk with more ammunition to take to Gallegos at LRAS-2. “Okay, get the fuck out of here,” he told them. Harder stood by the door; he would join them. He opened the door as Scusa, Frunk, and Private First Class Daniel Rogers lined up to run.
“Are you ready?” Scusa asked Frunk. Echoes of incoming gunfire filled the barracks.
“Let’s go!” Frunk said.
They exited the barracks in earnest.
Hill watched them proudly. Men of valor. No questioning, no protest. He’d given them the order, and they’d run out into the fire.
In the hills of the Northface, a sniper was waiting. One of his bullets hit Scusa in the right side of his neck, lacerating two major blood vessels and the right jugular vein. It also penetrated a larger artery and cut across his spinal cord before exiting out his lower back.
Scusa’s head rocked back, and he went limp, falling on the ground.
Frunk tried to grab the loop on the back of Scusa’s armored vest in order to drag him to the aid station. As he bent down, the sniper opened up with a dozen more rounds. A bullet went through the side of Frunk’s vest, slamming into his back; panicked, the soldier hit the ground and low-crawled back to the barracks, where the next troops were getting ready to run out and resupply those on guard.
“Don’t go out! Don’t go out! Scusa’s hit!” Frunk yelled. The other men lifted Frunk up and brought him back to Hill. He was shaking and scared.
“You okay?” Hill asked.
“Sergeant Hill, I think I’ve been shot,” Frunk said. He’d never been shot before, so he thought his wound was worse than it was. He took off his vest and shirt.
“It’s just a graze,” Hill told him. “You’re okay. Is Scusa wounded?”
Frunk hung his head, shaking it no.
“Where was he hit?” Hill asked.
“I think he got shot in the face,” Frunk said.
Sergeant Francis tried to slowly open the door to the barracks to see where Scusa was, but the sniper fired rounds right at him. He shut the door, paused, then opened it again and ran out to Scusa.
Blood was pouring from the specialist’s neck. Francis attempted to find the exit wound with his hand, wiping the blood away and feeling for holes. Soon figuring out that the round had gone into Scusa’s neck, he probed the area, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to find the jugular. He finally found it and was working to pinch it closed when the sniper shot at him and hit the M203 grenade launcher attached to the M4 carbine that was slung around his arm. The weapon snapped, and the clip fell off.
Good Christ, that was close, Francis thought. “Harder!” he yelled. “I need cover! Harder! I need cover!”
Inside, Hill quickly assigned troops to cover the doors. The other men ransacked their barracks looking for smoke grenades. Hill found some and threw them to Eric Harder, near one of the doors. Harder poked his head outside; he had two grenades in the pouch of his vest. He lobbed one to Francis and held on to one for himself. After waiting but a moment, both men pulled the pins and threw their grenades, building enough billowing smoke to form a wall. Harder rushed out of the barracks, ran through the haze, and helped Francis drag Scusa to the aid station. The smoke did not deter the sniper, who simply fired through it, hitting a nearby Humvee. The bullet fragmented, hitting Francis’s arms and legs, but he and Harder kept going.
This is not good, this is not good, this is not good, the men thought. And it was about to get worse, because insurgents were now bounding down the southern wall toward the outpost.
Doc Cordova looked around the aid station and saw mayhem and devastation and blood everywhere. He and Courville were still working on Kirk, and yet another wounded ANA troop had staggered in, bringing the total number of Afghan WIAs to six. One had an eye hanging out of its socket, and another a serious abdominal wound—his guts were literally spilling out of him. The other four had gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Specialist Chris Chappell, peppered with shrapnel, had also briefly stopped in at the aid station; after Cordova treated him with oral antibiotics and pain relievers, he’d headed right back out to the fight.
Into this hell now came Harder and Francis, carrying Scusa. He was completely pale; he had no heartbeat, no pulse. Cordova checked his eyes and wasn’t able to provoke any neurological response. Cordova had known the specialist for two years, having first met him in Iraq, and he knew what a sweetheart he was. He also knew that Scusa and Floyd were close, and he wondered how the new medic, today dealing with his first serious casualties, would handle his friend’s death.
At 6:30 a.m., Scusa became the first person Cordova had ever pronounced dead. The young man was put in a body bag and carried back to Courville’s room.
Back at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Stoney Portis, Ben Salentine, and Kirk Birchfield were crawling out of their skin. They desperately wanted to be of some help, any help, to their brothers back at Camp Keating. But there wasn’t anything they could do except sit in the operations center at Naray. The surveillance aircraft hadn’t yet made it to the Kamdesh Valley, so they couldn’t see anything; they could only read Wong’s and Schulz’s messages and listen to Bundermann on the radio.
Salentine and Birchfield were conscience-stricken about not being alongside the men they had trained with for just such an event. Portis was new to Black Knight Troop, but as its absent commander, he, too, condemned himself. What leader in his right mind leaves his soldiers? he thought. Logic, at this point, had no case to make.
It felt as if they had to wait forever until they were able to catch a ride, yet the attack wasn’t yet an hour old when Portis, Salentine, and Birchfield grabbed backpacks full of ammunition and grenades and got on the first medevac along with Specialist Tim Kugler, a scout from Red Platoon, and two Air Force radio operators. The bird went up, circled over Forward Operating Base Bostick, and then flew up and down the Landay-Sin Valley, killing time, not heading directly for the outpost. Portis finally grew impatient and—because the helicopter’s rotors were so loud—began writing notes to the pilot, asking what was keeping them from leaving the area. The pilot wrote back that he was waiting to be told there was somewhere for him to land safely near the besieged outpost; right then, the landing zone was still too hot.
Inside the bird, a cold calm came over the men. They knew what their purpose was. Portis thought, I’m not going to come back from this mission. This is it. This is how I’m going to die. He had written his wife, Alison, a farewell letter and given it to his brother to present to her should he not return. She would be taken care of. Portis got choked up for a second, and then he made his peace with what awaited him in the valley. This was what he had signed up for. He turned his attention to what they would do when they landed. Putting pen to paper, he drew a diagram and began planning with his men how they would exit the helicopter, run for cover, and then join the fight to save Combat Outpost Keating.
Outside the Red Platoon barracks, Clint Romesha yanked Corporal Justin Gregory’s Mk 48 machine gun out of his hands. “Grab more ammo and follow me,” he told him.
“I’m moving a machine gun into position to cover you,” Romesha radioed Gallegos, who was still stuck at LRAS-2. “As soon as I can cover you, if you can, I need you to displace back to Red Platoon barracks.”
“I don’t know if you can lay down enough fire,” Gallegos said. “But if you can, roger.” Inside the Humvee, it seemed as if they were being submerged in an ocean of bullets and grenades: Gallegos, Mace, and Larson could only hope the trunk’s plating would hold up against the relentless battering. And however determined and skilled and ruthless a soldier Romesha might be, that he alone could provide enough cover fire with one lightweight machine gun seemed unlikely.
Romesha and Gregory scurried over to the generator by the mosque. There, Romesha set the machine gun atop the generator, and Gregory began linking up its ammunition. “I’m setting the machine-gun fire whenever you’re ready to move,” Romesha radioed to Gallegos.
“Roger,” Gallegos responded.
Romesha looked around at the myriad targets up at the Putting Green and throughout the Switchbacks. There were so many to choose from. He picked one enemy position and sent a twenty-to-thirty-round burst toward it. Then he moved to another. Then another. He quickly ran through the two-hundred-round belt.
While Gregory was loading another belt into the gun, Gallegos radioed. “We’re not able to move,” he said. “We’re not able to move.” The incoming fire was just too intense, coming from too many different locations.
Romesha had started firing the second belt when, from the blind side to his right, to the north of the camp, an insurgent burst through the entry control point and fired an RPG toward him and Gregory, hitting the generator instead. Romesha, sprayed with shrapnel, momentarily lost his bearings and fell on Gregory. The moment over, he got up and looked at him. “You all right?” he asked.
“Yes,” Gregory said.
“Go back to the barracks, I’ll cover you,” Romesha instructed. He covered the other’s mad dash and then began firing into the hills again.
Gallegos came on the radio again. “You’re not being effective, it’s not working,” he told Romesha. “We’ll just hang tight here.”
Romesha exhaled, fired his last burst of ammo, and ran back down the hill. He found Gregory in a trench near a HESCO barrier, on the southern side of the camp near the Switchbacks. “Wait here, I’m going to get more guys,” Romesha told him, handing him back his machine gun. He ran back to the Red Platoon barracks, where he told Christopher Jones and Specialist Josh Dannelley to go help Gregory. Rasmussen looked at Romesha.
“Ro, dude,” he said. “You’re fucking hit. You’re fucking hit.”
Romesha looked down. His right forearm was a bloody mess.
“Let me dress that,” Rasmussen said, pulling Romesha’s pressure dressing from his pocket and then wrapping his friend’s forearm tightly with the specialized bandage.
“Where are they?” Jones asked Gregory when he reached him.
“Everywhere!” Gregory said. “Get the fuck down here in the ditch with me!”
As the private jumped in, an RPG blew up the COP Keating mosque. Snipers’ bullets, machine-gun fire, hand grenades, RPGs—the insurgents were unloading everything they had. “You need to stay down,” Gregory told Jones. “Snipers are targeting us.”
“We need to cover people running ammo,” said Jones.
As rounds hit right next to their heads, Gregory became convinced that he was going to die, but instead of panic, he felt a sort of peace fall over him like a blanket. He noticed how green the grass was, how blue the sky. He could no longer hear the gunfire and explosions, he no longer noticed the people shooting. He was comfortable with the idea of dying.
At the guard post at LRAS-2, Brad Larson had kept firing his .50-caliber until a well-aimed RPG detonated nearby and hit the gun off the stovepipe so he couldn’t shoot it anymore. The weapon now lay half in the turret and half out. Larson tried to get it to work, but it just wouldn’t function. Helpless to shoot back, he crawled down into the Humvee, where Gallegos and Mace were sitting and trying to fire their rifles out the windows. The snipers were moving closer to the camp, and anytime either of the men opened one of the Humvee’s bulletproof windows, he’d get shot at. The incoming was so ferocious, in fact, that when they stuck their guns out to fire, bullets hit and bounced off the barrels. Since it wasn’t particularly easy to aim out the Humvee’s windows anyway, they finally just rolled them up.
The snipers’ bullets kept pinging off the windshield; if it and the windows hadn’t been bulletproof, the Americans surely would have been dead by now. Still, every so often, someone had to stick his neck out, literally, to see what was going on. Larson ducked down from his turret and hopped into the driver’s seat. Gallegos was next to him. Mace sat in the back. “Holy shit, there’s a lot of them,” Gallegos said.
Seemingly out of nowhere, Carter arrived. He was surprised to see that they were all inside the Humvee, with no one in the turret manning the .50-caliber. The COP was under heavy attack, and this was a primary defensive position, but this post wasn’t returning fire.
“I got your two-forty ammo,” Carter said.
“Either get in or get the hell out of here,” Gallegos barked.
Carter climbed in behind him, next to Mace, who was doubled over in pain. He was wounded—he’d taken some shrapnel somewhere along the line—but when Gallegos asked him what was wrong and whether he was okay, Mace said only that he was fine.
“Do you have any M-four rounds?” Larson asked the new arrival. Carter did; he had one magazine left inside his M4 carbine rifle.
Abruptly, the door next to him swung open; it was Vernon Martin. “I heard you guys need ammo?” he asked.
“Get in or get the hell out of here,” Gallegos barked again.
Martin paused, so Carter seized him and pulled him into the Humvee. “Get the fuck in here,” he said. They found a place for Martin to sit on the gunner’s platform.
The bullets and RPGs now increased even more in intensity. An RPG exploded three feet from the turret, causing panic and confusion among the Humvee’s occupants. Carter was knocked unconscious; when he came to, a second later, his head ached, and his eyes were out of focus. Holy shit, he thought as he regained consciousness. Where am I? He began checking himself for holes and found some—as did Larson, who was engaged in a similar investigation. Martin was the worst off of them, having taken a great deal of shrapnel all over his legs and hips, where soldiers typically have no protection from body armor. And now that he had returned to the moment, he felt it: “Motherfucker!” Martin yelled. “It burns! Holy shit, that fucking hurts!”
The men got their bearings, shook off their wounds as best they could, and started talking about what to do next; they knew there would be much worse in store for them if they didn’t put their heads together and figure out a way out. It was now clear that the insurgents had armor-piercing capabilities. The RPG had knocked the .50-caliber off its mount entirely, jamming the gun and exploding the primers for the rounds, rendering them useless. It was only a matter of time before the enemy onslaught got through and killed all five of them. They needed to get out of the Humvee. But the rounds were coming in so furiously now that a step outside meant certain death. What could they do?
They didn’t have much time. The troops and translators at Observation Post Mace who monitored enemy radio frequencies shared some alarming news over the mIRC system: the attackers were now actively talking about breaching the wire.
Staff Sergeant Kenny Daise ran into the shura building and slipped on Kirk’s blood.
Daise picked himself up. He didn’t have time to be revolted or saddened. He looked through all of the gear that had been left behind, then grabbed Kirk’s M203 grenade launcher and his M4 rounds. The enemy had kept on pounding the shura building with RPGs, and it was so dusty now that none of the soldiers with Daise could see much of anything. He told them to fall back.
“Come with me,” Daise said to Private First Class Kyle Knight. The two of them ran from the shura building to a position between the outpost mosque and the nearby generator. As Daise was reloading his M4 rifle, preparing to fire into the hills, he saw the barrel of an AK-47 coming around the corner, which he assumed must belong to either an Afghan Security Guard or one of the remaining ANA soldiers. As the man holding it rounded the corner, their eyes met. He was maybe seventy-five feet away, in his thirties, with a beard, wearing a dirty red overshirt and a white turban. Daise was stunned. This wasn’t an Afghan Security Guard; it was an insurgent.
It’s the fucking Taliban, thought Daise. Inside our camp.
The Taliban fighter was likewise surprised to see the American. They both raised their weapons, but the insurgent’s gun jammed. Daise fired as his target ran back around the corner.
Shit, Daise thought. Oh no. Oh God no.
He had a radio attached to his belt and a hand-mike hooked up to his collar. “Charlie in the wire!” he said, for some reason at first using old Army slang for the Vietcong. He immediately corrected himself: “Enemy in the wire! Enemy in the wire!” On a different radio frequency, Wong repeated what Daise had called in: “We got enemy in the wire! We got enemy in the wire!”
Daise could hear the news repeated and echoed through the camp.
Enemy in the wire.