Pushing from the operations center toward the eastern side of the camp, Harder and his team braved the blaze in the Bastards’ barracks as a means to escape detection. Lieutenant Stephen Cady was with them; normally Cady worked out of Forward Operating Base Bostick, but he’d flown in a couple of days before—the same day Portis’s chopper was hit—to bring the Afghan Security Guards and others their pay. Bad timing.
Exiting via the back door, the group headed toward the ANA barracks, inside of which they could see insurgents, though no one had a clear shot or a particularly good spot with any cover to shoot from.
“Fuck it,” Francis said. “Let’s start shooting.”
They did that, with their M4 rifles, and Francis fired, too, with his M203 grenade launcher, and Harder threw a couple of hand grenades. Some Taliban fell to the ground, direct hits, dead. Other insurgents started screaming. Francis didn’t know what they were saying, and he didn’t care. He kept shooting and reloading, shooting and reloading.
The seemingly endless supply of insurgents that Harder and his men were seeing was confirmed in commentary from above: “We’re picking these guys off here, but they keep coming,” an Apache pilot radioed. “They’re fucking everywhere.”
No cover, no weapon—Rodriguez knew this might be his last run. But what choice did he have?
“Can you get out and shoot?” Bundermann had asked the guys at the mortar pit over the radio, now operative again.
Good question. For more than an hour, Breeding, Rodriguez, and Barroga had remained cut off from the rest of the camp, unable to make their radio function, unable to escape their corner. Rodriguez had fired his M240 machine gun at the enemy when he could—sticking the gun out the door and just firing without aiming it—but after sixty rounds, he’d run out of ammunition. From his position, he’d watched the drama unfold at LRAS-2—he’d seen Gallegos help Mace away from the Humvee after the RPG went off so close to him, then witnessed another RPG go off near both of them, knocking Mace to the ground near a gully where an insurgent stood. As he watched, the insurgent had begun firing at Mace.
Breeding had gotten the radio fixed in time for them all to hear Daise shout, “Enemy in the wire!” Hearing enemy fighters coming down the Switchbacks, right near him, Rodriguez had started throwing hand grenades at them over the wall of the mortar pit. He’d then tried to detonate the Claymore mines outside the camp. They didn’t work.
“We can’t shoot the big gun,” Breeding had reported, referring to the 120-millimeter. “We can’t get to it.” But Rodriguez was itching to lay hands on the 60-millimeter, so Breeding provided cover fire, spraying the hills with the M240 machine gun while his mortarman dashed out the door. Rodriguez got to the mortar pit, grabbed a can of ammo and tucked it under his arm, and with both hands grasped the 60-millimeter and prepared to shoot it at the Northface.
As he turned the weapon, he looked up at the Switchbacks and saw an insurgent retreating. An RPG exploded nearby, hitting ammo cans and sandbags and sending shrapnel into Rodriguez’s neck. He kept going. He squeezed the trigger. The 60-millimeter was set at the “Charge 1” level, which made firing it feel like operating a jackhammer; you could break your foot firing at that intensity. Rodriguez sent the explosives into the Northface and then toward the Afghan National Police compound across the bridge. Then he turned, calibrated his mortar tube, and fired at the eastern side of the camp, where he’d been told the enemy had entered and taken over the ANA barracks. There were no friendlies there, he’d been advised.
That last part was no longer true, however. Eric Harder and his team were there.
Harder and John Francis were just seconds away from heading into the ANA side of the camp when Rodriguez’s mortars began destroying the buildings in front of them.
“Fuck it,” Harder concluded. “Let’s fall back. If those dudes aren’t dead already, they’re not going to survive this.”
“Good,” said Francis. They retreated. By now, the camp was littered with the tiny metal fins that fell off RPGs before they hit their targets. The fire had leapt into the overflow barracks and the gym and was quickly spreading throughout the area around Harder and Francis. Rounds that had been left inside the barracks would cook and pop and zip by their heads, while abandoned mortars exploded in the ANA barracks. Physically drained and overcome by thirst, Harder ran into the Bastards’ barracks, snatched up the mop bucket, and gulped water from it.
By noon, other aircraft had joined the Apaches in the valley. F-15 Eagle fighter jets were screeching far above and had begun dropping two-thousand-pound bombs, causing the entire valley to shake.
Lewallen had done two tours in Iraq—one of them during the invasion—and on this Afghanistan tour had completed some tough missions in the Korangal Valley, but the firefight at Camp Keating was without question the worst he’d ever seen. He was grateful that the man on the other end of the radio—Bundermann—was so cool and collected, able calmly and dispassionately to single out for the pilots those areas from which the outpost was taking the heaviest incoming fire.
The Apaches had repeatedly been coming down, firing, clearing an area, and then floating back to safety. The pilots tried to stay high up when they weren’t engaged with the enemy, to avoid all of the small-arms fire that was showering down from the southeastern and southwestern hills. Acting on Bundermann’s request, he and Huff, in the other Apache, swooped down to launch a Hellfire missile at the Urmul mosque. Two enemy Dushkas had originally been placed higher up in the hills not far from the landing zone, positioned to shoot down any medevac choppers that tried to land. When the Apaches showed up, the insurgents brought the heavy machine guns downhill, which turned out to be a smart move. One of the Dushkas got Ross Lewallen’s Apache, and then again when, within ninety seconds, Randy Huff’s bird was hit, too. The helicopters appeared to be okay, but they were both running low on fuel and ammo anyway, so it seemed an opportune—even necessary—time to head back to Forward Operating Base Bostick for a pit stop. Lewallen and Huff would go as quickly as they could, but the reality was that they would be out of pocket for at least an hour, leaving Camp Keating at a disadvantage at a fragile moment in the fight.
Harder wanted to report to Jon Hill that the eastern side of the outpost was secure and then get an update on what else he could do. But the radios were going a bit berserk, so it seemed easier just to run over to his position and have the conversation in person. On his way, Harder ran into Ed Faulkner at the aid station. He was a bloody mess.
“What happened to you?” Harder asked him.
“Man, I don’t want to talk about it,” Faulkner replied. He showed Harder where he’d gotten hit, in the same arm he’d wounded in Iraq. “I’m going to have two fucking Purple Hearts and just one scar!” he said.
“You all right?” Harder asked.
“I’d be better if I had a cigarette,” Faulkner said. Harder threw him a couple.
Cordova and Courville were too focused on Mace to care that Faulkner was violating their no-smoking policy. Mace had been brought in awake and responsive, though pale, and in excruciating pain. As time passed, his level of consciousness ebbed. Cordova asked him if he knew where he was. Mace looked back at him with big wide eyes and mouthed something unintelligible.
The specialist had lost an extraordinary amount of blood. Shrapnel had ripped up his lower left abdomen and lower left back, leaving more than twenty entrance and exit wounds on both sides of his torso and causing internal injuries to his bowel and right adrenal gland, which in turn resulted in extensive bleeding into his abdominal cavity. His right arm had suffered four serious ballistic wounds and seven grazing and superficial wounds. He had nine bullet and shrapnel wounds to his right thigh and six in his left leg, from the thigh to the calf.
Carter had put a tourniquet on Mace’s left thigh, and Cordova left it there; it had been on for hours now, and he didn’t want to mess with it, though he added a second tourniquet for reinforcement. Cody Floyd held Mace’s left leg together—the foot was nearly coming off—while Jeff Hobbs wrapped it up and splinted it.
Once they’d controlled as much of Mace’s external bleeding as they felt they could, Cordova and Courville attempted to insert an IV to begin replenishing his lost blood. They had trouble finding a vein, however, because his vascular system was delivering blood to his most important organs and ignoring his arms and legs. At one point, the medics congratulated themselves on successfully planting an IV in their patient’s arm, only to watch him—or his reflexes—immediately yank it out.
Increasingly desperate, they opted to try a FAST1 intraosseous infusion, injecting fluids directly into the marrow of his sternum, just as they’d done with Josh Kirk. They jammed in the FAST1, which dripped with Hextend, a plasma substitute believed to be superior even to the real thing in the treatment of certain kinds of trauma. The solution was pushed into Mace’s blood vessels, delivering oxygen to his brain. The IV dripped slowly, but it dripped.
Courville and Cordova then searched again to find a vein, this time for another IV bag of Hextend. They tried Mace’s leg, but no luck. In the aid bag was an EZ-IO needle, which Cordova manually forced in just below the soldier’s right kneecap. Mindful of the injuries to his abdomen, and the propensity of wounds to the intestines and colon to cause easy infection, Cordova added yet another IV containing antibiotics.
Cordova placed a device on Mace’s fingertip to measure the oxygen saturation in his blood. A normal level would be somewhere between 95 and 97 percent; in Mace’s case, there was no reading at all. Cordova checked his wrist: no pulse. Then his neck: there was a faint beat there, from his carotid artery. This confirmed that his body was now sending all of his blood exclusively to his vital organs. His blood pressure was weak. He would need to get out of the valley soon if he was to have any hope of surviving.
Courville went to Bundermann to tell him about Mace. “He’s got maybe an hour, hour and a half to live if we don’t get a bird,” the medic reported.
“Doc,” Bundermann said. “I’m going to be honest. We’re not going to get a bird in here till nightfall.”
Courville’s heart sank. Before he could even reflect on the situation with Mace, however, there was another, even more pressing problem to address: the fire that was devouring the camp had jumped from the Bastards’ barracks to the operations center. At 2:14 p.m., Bundermann, Burton, and everyone else in Headquarters Platoon had to evacuate the building and set up a makeshift ops center in the Red Platoon barracks. Courville hastily helped cut the camouflage net that was attached to both the operations center and the aid station, to minimize the chances that the fire would pursue that route. Then he returned to the aid station and passed on Bundermann’s grim assessment.
Cordova, Courville, Hobbs, and Floyd huddled. They needed to try something radical to keep Mace alive for as long as they could. But what?
After getting checked out at the aid station, Larson joined Romesha’s team at the shura building.
“Man, I’d really like a Dr. Pepper right now,” he told Romesha. “I’m thirsty as hell.” That was their drink of choice, the two friends.
“I don’t have any on me at the moment,” Romesha said with a smile, “but I’ll get you some when we get back.”
They debriefed.
“Kirk got smoked in the face,” Romesha said. “So he’s dead.” Scusa, too. And Thomson up at the mortar pit. No one knew where Hardt was.
Romesha asked Larson what had happened to the other guys he’d been stuck with in the Humvee. Larson told him that Mace and Gallegos had been messed up pretty good by an RPG and a machine gun. Gallegos was dead, though he didn’t know where his body was, and Mace was in the aid station. He wasn’t sure where Martin was.
“When I ran Mace to the aid station, we passed by Griffin,” Larson added. “He was lying right in front of the shura building.” This building.
Romesha said they needed to go get Griffin. With all of the bomb drops, the rocks in the walls of the shura building were coming loose, and some of the troops poked holes through the wall so they could cover Rasmussen and Larson as they recovered the specialist’s body. They waited until the U.S aircraft were gunning down the insurgents on the Switchbacks, then Romesha, Dulaney, and Specialist Chris Chappell opened up with their guns into the hills. Dulaney almost shot Rasmussen in the head when Ras and Larson sprinted out with a stretcher, but the two men managed to get Griffin onto it and brought him back to the shura building. He was dead, with bullet wounds to his head. One of his legs flopped over the side of the stretcher, looking completely shattered.
“Hardt and Martin still aren’t accounted for,” Romesha reminded the others. The radios weren’t working, and the fire had let up a bit, so he decided to take his chances. Romesha stepped out and began to run to Bundermann, in the operations center.
When the Apaches landed, they were refueled, rearmed, and repaired. While all of that was being seen to, the pilots went into Forward Operating Base Bostick’s operations center, where Brown began peppering them with questions.
“Can we get a medevac in there to get these guys out?” Brown asked.
“You can’t,” said Lewallen.
John Francis was in the middle of telling Jon Hill that he was going to grab two dudes to secure another part of the camp when he heard that gunshot again, the same one echoing in his brain from when Scusa was killed, Frunk was grazed, and the sniper hit his grenade launcher. Francis heard the crack of the gun and stopped talking in midsentence.
“What?” Hill asked.
“That shot,” said Francis. “Listen.”
“Where’s it coming from?” asked Hill.
“Somewhere on the north side,” said Francis.
Dabolins had left his sniper rifle on the deck, so Hill grabbed it, and then he and Francis found a spot behind the Café wall where they could look up toward the Northface. The Afghan sniper kept firing at the camp, and every time he did, Hill came that much closer to figuring out where he was. After the fourth shot, he had him in the rifle’s sight.
“I got him,” Hill said.
“Where?” Francis asked. Hill let him look through the rifle sight. The sniper stood up from behind a boulder and started shooting again.
“Okay,” Hill said, “I’m gonna shoot at him.”
Hill pulled the trigger, but he’d aimed too high, and the sniper dropped down.
“You shot too high,” noted Francis, stating the obvious.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” said Hill.
The sniper moved to the left, and Hill fired a second shot. A burst of dirt in front of the boulder indicated that he was off his mark again.
“You shot too low,” Francis said.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
“Sergeant Hill!” Francis said, mimicking the way Hill himself gave orders as a drill sergeant. “Practice your fucking fundamentals!”
Hill looked at Francis, then returned his attention to the scope. The sniper once again started to stand, preparing to fire at the camp.
“Got him, got him, got him,” Hill muttered, and he pulled the trigger.
He blew off the lower left side of the sniper’s face.
“Holy fuck!” Francis said. “You got him!”
The fundamentals.