Hell has laid an egg and it hatched right here.
—ATLANTIAN DURING THE CIVIL WAR
The first call that came in to the TOC on October 3, 2009, was a medevac request for wounded soldiers at COP Keating, in the Kamdesh River Valley. By listening to the urgency of the radio calls we quickly deduced that the men at Keating were receiving much more than typical, daily enemy contact. This appeared to be a significant firefight with multiple casualties. Due to the historical threat in that area and ongoing enemy contact, the medevac mission required an Apache escort.
“Alert the QRF,” Jack said. “I’m going to get Lieutenant Colonel Blackmon.”
The Apache QRF team consisted of Chief Warrant Officer 3 Ross Lewallen, who served as the air mission commander, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Chad Bardwell, who flew as Ross’s front-seater/gunner. Ross and Chad’s wingmen were Chief Warrant Officer 3 Randy Huff and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Chris Wright. Having fought countless times in the Kamdesh and supporting operations at Barg-e Matal, all four men were very familiar with the terrain around COP Keating. Ross and his team had just sat down for an early breakfast when their handheld alert radio went off. Ross had a spoonful of biscuits and gravy in his hand when the call came.
“Let’s go,” Ross said.
They quickly put their food away and ran for the command post.
I was awakened by a knock at my door. “Yeah,” I yelled as the door opened and Jack Murphy stuck his head in, momentarily blinding me with a focused light beam from his Petzl headlamp.
“Sir, we’ve got a big fight at Keating. It looks like the enemy is trying to overrun the COP and the weather is crap up there,” he said.
I squinted and shielded my eyes with my hand. “I’ll be right there,” I said as I got up and began pulling my shorts on.
When I arrived at the TOC, the battle captain had just finished briefing the crews, and they were preparing to run out to the helicopters. I grabbed Ross before he left.
“What route do you plan to use?” I asked him.
“I don’t want to fly through the Kamdesh Valley,” he said. “The enemy will expect us to come that way. They’ll either hide in the rocks or they might have an aerial ambush set up waiting on us to respond. If that’s the case they’ll wear us out in that valley.”
“So what do you think? Loop around to the north?” I asked.
“I think so. We’ll circle around to the west. We might surprise them that way.”
“Okay, sounds good. Good luck,” I said as he jogged out the door to his Apache.
“Have the medevac follow them up the Kunar until they start turning west then just keep going to Bostic. Tell them to hold at Bostic until Ross calls for them to go to Keating,” I told the battle captain.
“Roger, sir.”
COP Keating sat in the bottom of a fishbowl. It was dominated by high terrain on every side. In order for the medevac—or any other helicopter, for that matter—to land they would have to fly slowly, then vertically descend to the tiny postage-stamp landing zone on the edge of the river.
The Apaches launched right at 6:00 A.M. When they reached the Pech River Valley they climbed up over the ridge north of the Watapur Valley. As they flew by the Pitigal Valley they called 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry at FOB Bostic to get an update on the situation. Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown, the squadron commander, spoke with Ross.
“The perimeter has been breached. They have fired their final protective fires,” he said, which is their last line of defense. “You can expect to see enemy fighters intermixed with our guys on the outpost.”
The enemy was inside the wire.
“Let’s go. Push it,” Ross told his lead Apache.
The crews pulled every ounce of power they had to get there as quickly as possible.
The medevac departed right on the heels of the Apaches with our flight surgeon, Captain Brendan McCriskin, on board. We never flew a single aircraft unless it was an emergency. We always flew in teams of two, so the medevac required a chase ship. Warren Brown, who had earned his cavalry spurs at Bari Ali, and Chief Warrant Officer 2 Ray Andrel flew a Black Hawk to chase the medevac that morning. When they arrived at FOB Bostic, Warren climbed up high and began to orbit around the FOB so that he could relay communications between Ross’s team in the Kamdesh and our TOC back at Jalalabad. Line-of-sight radios were useless in the mountainous terrain. Even satellite communication was spotty down in the deep valleys, but we had good satellite communications with Warren, so we were able to remain abreast of what was happening. 3-61 Cavalry prepared a five-man team, which they wanted Warren to fly into COP Keating as soon as possible.
As the Apaches approached the valley, Chad Bardwell tried repeatedly to raise the men at COP Keating over the radio, but only silence answered him. What he didn’t know was that the generators were shot up, so their radios didn’t work. Finally, they flew within sight of the COP.
“Ahh, shit, it’s burning,” Chad said. “Black Knight X-Ray, Weapon 1-6,” he called. His and Ross’s call sign was “Weapon 1-6.”
“Weapon 1-6, Black Knight X-Ray.” It was Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann, a platoon leader in Black Knight Troop, answering him on a handheld radio.
“Black Knight X-Ray, Weapon 1-6, you’ve got two weapons aircraft overhead at this time. Requesting ROZ and gun status, and a situation update,” Chad said.
If it weren’t for the machine gun fire rattling in the background Chad would have thought he had the wrong guy on the radio. The calm voice was out of place, considering the destruction Chad saw ahead. “Guns cold, anyone outside the wire is hostile. We are down to about two or three buildings. We have enemy inside the wire, over,” Bundermann said. Under the thermal system in the Apache, COP Keating was a glowing white blob with a black tail that streamed into the sky.
“Roger, I copy—anyone outside the wire is enemy and you are down to two or three buildings,” Chad answered.
“Roger.”
“Find out what buildings they are in,” Ross told Chad.
At that time twenty to thirty enemy fighters ran down the mountain on a switchback trail and onto the road that traversed the valley floor. They were going to try and assault the outpost through the front gate.
“Black Knight, we need to know what building you are in,” Chad said.
“Roger, we are in the TOC. Can you recognize the ECP [entry control point] from where you are?”
“Negative.” Due to the fire and smoke it was impossible to tell what was what inside the outpost. It appeared as though the entire COP was burning down.
“Hey, we are not shooting inside the friggin’ COP. It’s too close,” Ross told the other pilots.
“Hey! What are those dudes doing? There’s a bunch of dudes running around.” Ross saw the men scrambling down the switchback trail with rifles in their hands. Like a long line of ants on a summer picnic, they filed down the trail and into the road, glowing white under the thermal sighting system.
“Black Knight, we’ve got about twenty personnel running down the hill. Understand we are cleared to engage?” Chad asked to be sure.
“You are clear to engage,” Bundermann said.
“Confirm they don’t have ANA [Afghan National Army] outside the wire,” Ross told Chad.
“Confirm there are no ANA outside the wire?” Chad asked Bundermann.
“Negative, we have no ANA outside the wire,” Bundermann answered.
“I’ve got visual,” Chris Wright said, now using a more excited voice. The pilots had finally found enemy forces, and they were eager to turn the tide of the battle, to start killing those who had attacked our brothers on the ground.
“My video is out in the back. What do you need me to do, brother?” Ross asked Chad. His ability to see what Chad was looking at through the sight was gone. He’d have to take directions by voice.
“Come down and left a little bit,” Chad said.
“Are you guys shooting yet?” Bundermann asked, clearly eager to hear that they were killing the enemy.
Bundermann wasn’t the only one eager to hear the Apaches shooting. “The Apaches could not get to us quick enough,” Sergeant Clint Romesha later told me. “The Apache was the best weapon to have in those mountains,” he said. “When they showed up, you knew everything was going to be okay.”1
“Lazing,” Chad said, indicating that he was lazing the enemy to store a range in his system in order to compute a firing solution for the gun.
Suddenly, the 30-mm cannon echoed across the valley, and enemy fighters received the force of it all. Chad shot five- to fifteen-round bursts as they flew straight at the enemy.
“I’ve got a shot, call clear,” Chris said. He was in the trail aircraft but had a good shot at the enemy already.
“If you’ve got the shot and you can shoot past me, then take it.”
After Chris’s first burst the enemy dove off the side of the road by the river. They tried to seek cover in the bushes and trees between the road and the water, but that provided no refuge. The 30-mm rounds impacted all around them, exploding trees six inches in diameter. Shrapnel flew through the air, cutting through trees and flesh alike. After the first gun run, between Chad and Chris, only two fighters remained alive. Chris saw them and killed both on the second gun run. All that remained, looking under the thermal, were hot spots, the only evidence of men who moments before had planned to kill our men at COP Keating.
They had prevented what would have almost certainly been a final enemy assault to overrun the outpost. They had stopped the immediate threat, but the fight was far from over. They began searching the ridges, looking for groups of fighters. Ross felt in his gut that there were DShK teams somewhere, seeking the perfect shot. Jillian had told them that there were teams set up to shoot aircraft down and something told him she was right. They were out there and he needed to find them.
Slowly, they began to find and kill enemy fighters in groups of two to three. This lasted for over an hour, before they needed to leave the valley for more fuel and ammunition. It made all four men sick to their stomach to have to leave. They had no idea how many fighters still remained, but they knew there were a significant number of enemy forces still fighting. After an hour they had engaged so many groups of fighters that they could not accurately recount where they had shot. “They were everywhere!” Ross would later tell me. The ridges were literally crawling with enemy fighters. As they departed, promising they would “be right back,” Black Knight X-Ray updated the casualty count to eleven.
“No!” Sergeant Romesha shouted when he saw the Apaches leaving the valley. “My heart sank when I saw them flying away,” he later told me. “It seemed like they had only just arrived.”2
* * *
Back at FOB Fenty I realized that it was going to be a very long day of fighting. I called Colonel Lewis.
“Sir, it’s Jimmy.”
“Hey, Jimmy. I just got a battle update from my guys in the command post, but tell me how you’re seeing it.”
“All I know is that the perimeter is breached and they are holed up in a couple of buildings. I got Ross Lewallen on the radio as he was going back into Bostic for gas after their first turn. He said they have eleven casualties, but he also said the mountains are crawling with enemy.”
“How many do you think?”
“He said probably two hundred attacked them.”
“Wow. That’s not good, not good at all. What do you need? How can we help you out?” he asked.
“I need another Apache team for sure. I may need more later. We’ll just have to see how it plays out. I suspect we’ll reinforce with more ground forces, but we’re not there yet.”
“Okay, I’ll have Rob Dickerson send you an Apache team. I’ll tell them to check in with your guys before flying in there, and we’ll stand by to help with more when you know what you need.”
“Thanks, sir.”
“Okay, update me as often as you can.”
“Roger, sir.” I hung up the phone and walked back to the TOC.
While Chad Bardwell sat in the FARP filling the Apache up with gas and ammunition, Ross ran inside the 3-61 Cavalry TOC and called me on a secure phone. “Hey, sir, this is bad. The ridges are full of enemy and if we try and get that medevac in it’ll get shot down,” he said.
“Okay, well, you are the air mission commander, so kill the enemy, and as soon as you can get it in, do it,” I told him.
I had always believed that we had to train our air mission commanders, invest a lot of time in them before we deployed, and then, most important, we had to trust them. If we were making tactical decisions from the TOC then we had failed in training our mission commanders before we ever deployed. Ross and his team had the best situational awareness of anyone on the battlefield. I knew he wanted the medevac to go in as badly as anyone, but he also knew that if we got it shot down we would make an already difficult situation much worse. I trusted his judgment and knew he would make the right calls. “Okay, sir, I need to get back out there. I’ll call you on the next turn,” he said, and we hung up.
Meanwhile, I launched another single Apache flown by Chief Warrant Officer 2 Gary Wingert and Captain Matt Kaplan to go join the fight.
Warren Brown, who had been orbiting since arriving at FOB Bostic, landed and went inside the 3-61 TOC to call us. Jack spoke with him. “Work with those guys to refine a plan to air-assault reinforcements into Fritsche,” Jack told him. “The hills around Fritsche are covered with enemy so pick spots we can get into and out of as fast as possible,” Jack added.
“Roger that, sir,” Warren answered and began scouring maps for good landing zones.
Ross strapped himself back into his Apache and briefed his team on the plan. They had to destroy the DShKs and as many enemy fighters as possible so it would be safe enough to fly the medevac into Keating. Facing a DShK, potentially multiple DShKs, you’d think they were terrified. They had no idea where the guns were set up, but they were certain that they were there. But, they weren’t scared. All they could think about was how the men on COP Keating must feel. They knew that if we didn’t get a medevac in soon, more of the men on Keating might die. That sense of urgency to help their brothers on the ground drove them beyond fear for themselves. They had a DShK to destroy.
Chad checked in with Black Knight as soon as they entered the valley.
“Black Knight X-Ray, this is Weapon 1-6, situation report, over.”
“Weapon 1-6, Black Knight X-Ray, we’re taking a large volume of machine gun fire, DShKs and RPGs, from the mosque adjacent to the COP.”
Chad put their sight on the mosque and could see muzzle flashes sparking in window and door openings all over the building. Both crews prepared to shoot Hellfire missiles at the building.
“Black Knight X-Ray, Weapon 1-6, we see the mosque and see the enemy fire. We’re inbound with Hellfire missiles.”
“Roger.”
Flying lead, Chad shot first, but his missile didn’t fire, so he broke off the engagement. Chris prepared to put a missile into the mosque. Just as he squeezed the trigger to shoot the missile, Randy Huff transmitted over the team internal radio, “We’re hit.”
Their electrical system had shut down in their Apache. They had no idea how bad the damage really was or how many bullets had actually hit the helicopter, but they knew systems were shutting down. Ross quickly spun his aircraft back around and oriented on the mosque to give Chad another shot. This time the Hellfire worked, and the explosion silenced the enemy inside for good, but not before they too were hit. Ross saw the large-caliber flashes and recognized them. It was most certainly a DShK.
The DShK was set up somewhere on the ridge between OP Fritsche and COP Keating. Ross realized that the gun was incapable of shooting directly at the men on COP Keating from that position. They did not have line of sight from their position. He wondered if it had been set up specifically to ambush helicopters, which would have to pass directly in front of it to land at COP Keating. He knew that the enemy would expect us to rush to the fight with our helicopters. The enemy also knew that we would fly our medevac helicopters in to evacuate the wounded. The DShK was set up in a perfect position to shoot a medevac on approach to Keating. Our helicopters could withstand a few rounds of small-caliber machine gun fire, but the 12.7-mm rounds fired at a high rate of fire from a DShK was a completely different matter. If the enemy caught us slowing down on approach to the outpost they could easily chew a helicopter up with that gun. It had to be destroyed in order to get the medevac into Keating, but first Ross had an immediate issue to deal with. He and Chad had completely lost their hydraulics and Randy and Chris had an electrical failure in their helicopter. The team had to get out of the valley to see how badly their aircraft were damaged. They left Black Knight with a promise to return and headed for FOB Bostic.
The crews landed at the FARP and shut down just as the team of Apaches from TF Eagle Lift was arriving—call sign “Overdrive.” Ross explained the situation to the Overdrive crews.
“Don’t get below six thousand feet or that DShK will eat your lunch, and try not to fly directly over the valley,” he warned them.
With that in mind, the Overdrive team departed FOB Bostic and entered the battle while Ross ran inside the TOC and called me on a secure phone to explain the situation.
“Sir, the DShK is set up for an air ambush. They knew we’d come and they were prepared. They’re counting on us flying in to get our wounded out. We’ve got to kill those guys,” he explained.
“Okay, that makes sense. How bad is Keating?” I asked.
“Sir, it’s burning down. The buildings are on fire. They are holed up in the command post and I think their aid station. Most of them are wounded and it looks like several are dead. We got there just in time. You know that switchback trail that comes down the mountain from Fritsche to Keating?”
“Yeah.”
“There was a line of them running down that trail to the road when we got there.”
“Did you kill them?”
“Yes, sir, we got them all. Then we just started finding guys here and there and killing them. Then they had us shoot the mosque, which was filled with bad guys, and that’s when we got shot.”
“Okay, John Jones is on the way. Hopefully he can patch your airplanes up. Did the Overdrive team make it up there?”
“Yeah. They just launched to go up there. I told them where the DShK was, so hopefully they’ll kill it. I don’t think we can fly our airplanes back into the valley, but Gary Wingert just landed in an Apache, so we can take his and John’s and go back,” he said.
Gary Wingert and John Jones were both maintenance test pilots, so they could try and fix the shot-up Apaches and get them back into the fight.
“Okay, let John and Gary try and patch the airplanes up, and if you guys are comfortable with them, if they will fly safely and the weapons systems will work, then go back in, or you can fly the aircraft they flew up there. We have to get that medevac in as soon as possible. Good work, Ross.”
“Thanks, sir. I’ll get back with you when we know something.”
“Okay. Sounds good.”
Ross ran back out to his helicopter and asked the first soldier he saw for a cleaning rod, a long metal rod used for cleaning the barrel of machine guns. He took it over to his Apache and ran it through the hole that the DShK round had made in the helicopter. He knew exactly where he was when he got shot, so by determining the angle in which the bullet entered the helicopter he could visualize pretty darn close where the DShK was located. He told Randy, Chris, and Chad where he thought the DShK was set up. “We’ve got to get back out there. How bad is the damage?” Ross asked, meaning the damage to their two helicopters.
Both would require some repairs. Gary Wingert had already begun working on the hydraulics line that was damaged on Ross and Chad’s helicopter. Just then they heard the sound of rotors coming from the north. It was the Overdrive flight.
They haven’t been gone long enough to have fought very much, thought Ross apprehensively. Why on earth are they already coming back?
As the Overdrive crews landed, it was immediately apparent that their lead aircraft had taken significant battle damage. Ross could see the holes in it.
“It was that damned DShK!” he said out loud.
John Jones, who famously almost crash-landed on Scott Stradley after being shot up in the Watapur, approached from the south and landed. Ross ran to his aircraft and asked if they could take it back into the fight while he tried to fix the ones that were shot up. “Sure,” John said. “I’ll get to work fixing these. Hopefully, I can get them back in the battle,” he added.
John took a close look at all of the battle damage, then went into the command post and called me. He gave me an assessment and a list of parts he needed. We gathered everything he needed and flew them to FOB Bostic, along with an avionics technician and an electrician. Meanwhile, Ross, Chad, Randy, and Chris got in John and Gary’s Apaches and launched back into the fight.
The weather had been deteriorating all morning, but now thunderstorms were nearing and the sky grew dark over the Kamdesh. Our fear was that the weather would force the crews out of the mountains altogether. Time was not on our side. Ross and his team realized that they had to work fast. “We’ve got to find that DShK and kill it,” Ross reiterated to the team.
He told Randy and Chris to cover him as he and Chad began descending into the valley, all the while being careful not to get too close. They had to entice the DShK crew to fire on them so they could pinpoint their location. Within minutes the DShK team took the bait. They began shooting at Ross and Chad, and due to the darkening skies, Ross was able to see the muzzle flashes clearly. He immediately turned inbound.
“I see you, asshole,” he said. “We’ve got ’em. Cover us,” he told Randy and Chris.
“Roger,” Randy replied.
Ross planned to shoot them with rockets, which could be done from the backseat. Chad had not seen the muzzle flashes so he continued to scan the ridge trying to find them. Ross opened fire with a salvo of rockets, but Chad suddenly saw tracers coming at them from a different spot. Big tracers! He took control of the gun, so as soon as Ross stopped firing rockets Chad engaged another DShK with thirty-millimeter. As Ross was shooting rockets he had noticed his wingman out of the corner of his eye, creeping up on him and engaging the enemy as well. Ross thought, He’s not covering me, and what is he shooting at?
There were three DShKs set up on the ridge. The enemy wanted to make certain that they shot a helicopter down, and they certainly would have, if Ross and his crew had not found them. Randy and Chris had observed the second DShK and feared it would shoot Ross and Chad down, so they shot it. The enemy had set up all three weapons behind a fighting position that was made out of rocks stacked up in a half-moon shape. As Ross suspected, they had been positioned to cover the approach path to COP Keating. Now all three guns were silenced and their crews dead, and just in time. The weather closed in on the valley quickly. They had to get back to FOB Bostic. Everything had seemed like a racing blur so far. The team had been fighting for five and a half hours, yet it had happened so fast they had lost track of time.
The thunderstorms lasted for a couple of hours. Waiting was terribly painful for all of us. Everyone wanted to get back into the valley. There were wounded soldiers at Keating, men who desperately needed our help, yet there was nothing we could do but wait. It was a gut-wrenching couple of hours, but we used the time to move forces up to FOB Bostic.
While the weather was bad in the Kamdesh, it was suitable to fly in the Kunar, so we began moving soldiers from Mark O’Donnell’s TF Chosin to FOB Bostic. I spoke with both Colonel George and Colonel Lewis about how we might get them into Keating once the weather permitted. I wanted to use Black Hawks versus Chinooks because we could get in and out more quickly in Black Hawks. We could carry more soldiers in a Chinook, but it was a huge, slow target, and it would take longer in the landing zone to unload. We would have to make more turns in Black Hawks, but we could come in fast and unload very quickly. If we tried to take troops directly into COP Keating we could only land one helicopter at a time, and Ross had insisted that there were more DShKs in the area, so that was too much risk. The LZ at Fritsche was large enough for three Black Hawks to land simultaneously. Based on the number of soldiers we needed to get to Fritsche, it would take five turns of three Black Hawks.
Captain Justin Sax commanded headquarters and headquarters company. Mark O’Donnell had given him three platoons and treated him just like another infantry company. Justin’s company had only recently returned from Barg-e Matal, where they had spent a month fighting and training Afghans. Mark O’Donnell chose Justin to lead the rescue effort at Keating. The son of a Wyoming game warden, Justin had cut his teeth in the Rocky Mountains. Having grown up in Cody, at the eastern entrance to Yellowstone National Forest, Justin had a deep knowledge of the wild country.
This was his second deployment to Afghanistan with the 10th Mountain Division. Prior to his first deployment he had taken his platoon to Cody, so his father could teach them the ways of the Old West. He trained them how to lash supplies to donkeys, and most important, how to move in rugged terrain at high altitudes. Army life had come naturally to Justin. He graduated first in his ROTC class at the University of Wyoming and was designated a distinguished military graduate. Justin loved Wyoming. He really didn’t want to leave, but he knew in his heart that someday he’d return for good. Justin Sax quite simply joined the army looking for a physical and intellectual challenge. The problems he faced in Afghanistan certainly met his expectations.
We picked up two of Justin’s platoons, one at FOB Joyce and one at COP Monti, and flew them to FOB Bostic in order to prepare for the rescue operation. Lieutenant Jake Miraldi and Lieutenant Jake Kerr were the platoon leaders.
Once at Bostic, we loaded Jake Miraldi’s men on the Black Hawks and waited for a break in the weather. Justin Sax was in the first flight with Miraldi’s crew. At Fenty we watched the weather radar closely, praying for an opportunity to go. At Bostic, Warren Brown paced around his helicopter watching the sky. Finally, he called me. “I think we can get them in, sir. Worst case, we launch and have to turn back,” he said.
I had already spoken to Colonel George and he said to get them in as soon as we could. “Okay, Warren. Go get it done,” I told him.
The options to approach the LZs at OP Fritsche were very limited. The terrain and the winds that accompanied the storm dictated that we approach using a relatively open area on top of the ridge. The pilots flew as fast as they could, trying to reduce their exposure time. As soon as they hit the ridge south of COP Lowell they began taking fire. They weren’t even halfway up the valley, and the enemy was already shooting at them. The door gunners, Specialist Mick and Specialist Hatfield, suppressed the areas where they saw muzzle flashes. Everywhere the Apaches saw Mick and Hatfield shooting, they shot thirty-millimeter and rockets. The first two Black Hawks landed simultaneously. The third one sat down as the first two departed. Twenty-one soldiers were inserted on the first turn.
The terrain forced them to fly an egress route that almost mirrored the route they had used to fly in, but empty and much lighter, they could fly faster and more radically. They returned to FOB Bostic and loaded twenty-seven more soldiers on board, along with two speedball resupply bags filled with ammunition and water.
While the Black Hawks returned to pick up the second load of troopers, Sax debated whether to go ahead and begin down the mountain or wait for the rest of his men. Ultimately, he decided to take some of the men from OP Fritsche with him and begin the long descent down the mountain to COP Keating. We expected it to take them at least two hours to get to Keating. It was a long, painful wait monitoring their progress from the command post, but nothing like waiting for help to arrive in COP Keating itself.
The men on Keating knew that help was on the way, but it would take time for that help to get there. That’s what scared them most. They didn’t know how much time they truly had. Private First Class Stephan Mace had been shot multiple times early that morning. He had lost a lot of blood, and they had been giving him body-to-body, live blood transfusions to keep him alive. They weren’t sure how much longer he could hold on.
* * *
On the second turn the Black Hawks took heavy small-arms fire for the last three miles into Fritsche. Apaches engaged enemy fighters as the Black Hawks made it in and out once again, but as they departed after the second turn, the clouds closed in fast and sealed the passes behind them.
Warren’s team landed their Black Hawks at Bostic and shut down. He went to the TOC and called me. “Sir, the weather moved in as we were leaving after the second turn. We can’t get back in right now.”
“When do you think you might be able to go back in?” I asked.
“Talking to the air force weatherman, it looks like we might have a window in about an hour.”
At that point I wanted to move forward, go to Bostic personally, a natural reaction for a commander at such times, I suppose, but I had to be honest with myself. I was needed in my command post. I was in the best position to determine what assets we needed or would need in the next twenty-four hours and to coordinate for those assets. If I went forward I would limit my ability to communicate and coordinate while in a helicopter. In fact, I would most likely have less situational awareness in a Kiowa, and I would not fly a Kiowa to Keating. I had a team of Kiowas forward already, and they had called multiple times asking to go to Keating and help.
Chief Warrant Officer 2 Jeffrey Keown, a former infantry noncommissioned officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, was the air mission commander. Jeff had been in combat as an infantryman on previous deployments. An airborne ranger with a combat infantryman’s badge, he wanted to go to Keating as soon as it started, and he was more than pissed off at me for saying no.
The Apaches had been shot to pieces in the valley. I was amazed at how much damage they took and yet still flew out, but the Apache is a dual-engine airplane. The Kiowa is the army’s only remaining single-engine helicopter. The Kiowa could not handle the damage the Apaches had taken, and if one of them was shot down it would take the entire brigade to get it out. It was a very difficult decision, but if I let the teams go I would have been not only risking their lives, but the lives of countless ground soldiers who would have had to go and get them if anything bad happened.
These thoughts kept running through my mind, and I realized that if I were forward in a Kiowa I would not be able to think decisions through. I was where I needed to be—in my command post, weighing risks, coordinating for resources, and trying to forecast the next tactical move.
Warren called back after the hour passed. “Sir, I think we can get in,” he said.
“Okay, go!”
Turn three was on its way. Each turn, we received more and more enemy fire. It was clear that the enemy knew that we were putting soldiers into OP Fritsche, so they began scrambling up the ridge from COP Keating to try and hit us on the way in. All three Black Hawks landed simultaneously on the third turn, but as the lead aircraft was departing they were called back. A mortarman had left the base plate to his mortar on the aircraft. Lead quickly circled and came right back into the LZ, dropped the base plate, and rejoined the flight.
The Black Hawks loaded thirty more soldiers for the fourth turn. This time all three chalks got in without taking direct fire. On the way out Warren Brown saw four enemy fighters running toward a boulder to seek cover. He gave his door gunner, Specialist Mick, the direction and distance to the enemy, and Mick immediately saw them. The enemy, realizing they would not make it to the boulder, turned and started to shoot at the helicopter, but Mick beat them to it. He hit three of them on the opening burst with his M240 machine gun, and the Apaches took over from there.
The number of enemy fighters on top of the mountain seemed to continue to increase, so while the final group of thirty soldiers loaded the Black Hawks, the pilots discussed how they might get over the highest point on the ridge in order to fly a different route to Fritsche. The Apaches were not sure if they had the power to get up and over the ridge.
Fully loaded, four Black Hawks and two Apaches launched on the fifth and final turn. It was getting dark, we’d been fighting since dawn, and wounded men had been hanging on for medical help a long time. The Black Hawks departed Bostic and immediately began climbing. They were nearing the summit when the Apaches called on the radio, “We don’t have the power to get over the ridge. We can’t make it over.”
So, Warren Brown returned to the original route, and just as they made it to the ridgeline, enemy fighters shot at the lead Apache with an RPG and machine guns. The Apaches returned fire and the Black Hawk door gunners opened up with their machine guns. For the final time, they fought their way back into the LZ.
By that time in the fight, in command posts all over Regional Command–East, soldiers huddled around radios and stared at digital maps, trying to keep up with what was happening. Eleven men were reported wounded, six killed.
Meanwhile, Justin Sax had made his way down the mountain. He and his men made sporadic contact during their descent, killed a couple of enemy fighters, but made no significant contact, and they took no casualties on the way down. They walked into a destroyed outpost and linked up with the survivors. The commander of Black Knight troop, Captain Stoney Portis, had flown into Fritsche with Sax. “I’ll establish security. You take care of your men,” Sax told Portis, who agreed.
The remainder of Sax’s men had been delayed by weather but were now on their way down the mountain. Sax had chosen not to use the trail for fear of an enemy ambush. They had blazed a trail of their own, much as he had done in his formative years in Wyoming. With Sax and his lead elements having cleared the route on the way down, the follow-on forces were able to move much faster as they descended.
* * *
Meanwhile, back at FOB Bostic our flight surgeon, Captain Brendan McCriskin, was a nervous wreck. His day had begun when the original medevac request had come into our command post at daylight that morning. He had run to the TOC to receive a quick mission brief, then flew to FOB Bostic, only to be told that it was too dangerous to go in. But with Justin Sax’s men on the ground at Keating and darkness quickly swallowing the valley, it was finally time to go and get the wounded.
The medevac crew had been on edge all day, pacing around the pad at Bostic, hanging on every word of every radio transmission, hoping, praying, to get approval to launch. Once it came they were like a race horse out of the starting gates. They exploded off of the helo pad and flew the guts out of the Black Hawk to get there. Brendan expected a full load of wounded men to be hefted onto the aircraft when they arrived, but that wasn’t the case. As the helicopter touched down on the tiny island LZ, three soldiers were loaded onto the aircraft—one American and two Afghans. The two Afghans were stable. The flight medic attended to them, while Brendan focused on the young man whose status he had been monitoring throughout the day over the radio. His patient was Private First Class Stephan Mace.
Mace had been shot several times through the abdomen early in the morning. Shrapnel from RPG blasts had badly damaged his legs. Throughout the day the men on COP Keating had given him blood from their own bodies to keep him alive. When Mace was placed into the helicopter he had an oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, a tourniquet on his left leg and two on his right thigh, a pressure dressing was wrapped tightly around his belly, and an IV lay on his chest. “His PA and medic had done everything they possibly could, and they had done it well,” Brendan later recalled.
Later, reliving vivid, painful memories, memories that had not faded with time, Brendan stared into space and told me the story. “Working with a pin light in the dark, I hooked up our cardiac monitor, replaced his IV bags, which were nearly empty, and put him on our oxygen tank. His was empty. I checked his tourniquets to ensure that they were tight, and then he looked up at me, and spoke.”
“I’m not in pain, Doc,” he said. Mace had been given all of the appropriate antibiotics, every fluid available at Keating, and finally morphine, which had washed the pain away.
As they flew out of the dark valley that had literally been hell on earth throughout the day, Mace looked up at Brendan McCriskin and smiled. In the darkest hour of Stephan Mace’s young life Brendan McCriskin must have seemed like an angel of mercy flown in to rescue him. “I’m not in any pain,” he said again through a thin smile.
Suddenly, his vitals registered on the monitor beside Brendan. Red numbers glowed in the dark indicating the strength of life left within him. “His heart rate was in the 160s, and his blood pressure so low that I would not have believed it in almost any other patient. He was in hemorrhagic shock,” Brendan said. He had lost so much blood that his cells were dying due to lack of oxygen.
Despite shock, an elevated heart rate, and low blood pressure, Mace remained conscious throughout the flight. He answered every question Brendan asked him about his wounds, “but what he needed was far beyond anything I had to offer in flight,” Brendan recalled. As Brendan relived those memories, five years later, he was distant, as if he were there, seeing it all again in dramatic detail.
Stephan Mace needed more blood and a surgeon to stop the bleeding in his belly. The surgeon at FOB Bostic was Dr. Brad Zagol, a West Point graduate and general surgeon. He was “as good as any I’d seen,” Brendan later said.
The medevac landed on the pad at FOB Bostic, the same pad they had sat on all day, waiting to go. A team of medics rushed the helicopter, grabbed the litters, and hustled off toward the aid station. Brendan stumbled out of the helicopter and chased after them. He caught up to them in the trauma bay, where Brad began examining Mace. Brendan told Brad everything he had learned about Mace’s wounds in the short time he’d examined him in flight. As the medical team prepared Mace for anesthesia, he pushed the mask aside and asked Brendan, “How are the other guys doing? Have they been medevaced, Doc?”
Brendan knew the real answer but told him, “They are hanging in there, but they are worried about you.”
Mace smiled again. “Tell them I’m okay. I’m doing fine.”
Brendan took Stephan Mace’s hand in his. “I’m almost done over here. My tour is almost over, and I’m going home soon,” he told him. “Do you want to meet up when we get back to the States?” he asked. “I’ll buy you a beer. What kind of beer do you like?”
Mace seemed ashamed to answer. “Coors Light,” he said, as if Brendan might not approve.
With that, the anesthesia kicked in and Stephan Mace slowly closed his eyes. Having done all he could do and needing to return to Keating, Brendan ran to the helicopter and launched back into the blackness of the night.
An hour later Brendan landed back at FOB Bostic with another helicopter full of wounded but stable soldiers. He ran from the aircraft to the aid station, “expecting to pick up Stephan for transport to Bagram.”
It had been twelve hours from the time Mace was shot to the time that he entered surgery. Brendan thought he had a reasonable chance of making it, but as he blew through the doors he saw Dr. Brad Zagol leaning in a doorway across the room, drenched in sweat, tears running down his cheeks. “He looked devastated and exhausted,” Brendan recalled.
Stephan Mace had coded during surgery. There was too much damage to his bowel. Brad had opened his chest and tried to force his heart to beat again with his own hands. “I felt as if I had been kicked in the stomach. I tried to think of something to say to Brad, something that would console him, but I had nothing. Stephan was the eighth American to die at Keating that day,” he later said, almost in shock from the pain of the memory.
“He had his name, ‘MACE,’ tattooed across his belly. I’ll never forget his name as long as I live, having seen it written in ink on his stomach, overlying the wound that killed him,” Brendan later told me.3
* * *
In the days that followed we closed Keating and Fritsche. We hauled out everything that wasn’t destroyed with Chinooks, then air force bombers went to work. When they finished it was unrecognizable. There was nothing left but an imprint in the earth where an outpost once stood, and memories, powerful memories that will survive a lifetime in the minds of a handful of soldiers—survivors.
We inserted an Afghan special purpose force that went village to village searching for those responsible for the attacks at Keating and Fritsche. It was estimated that two hundred to three hundred enemy fighters attacked Keating on October 8. A large majority of them never saw another Afghan sunrise.
Eight American soldiers were killed and twenty-seven were wounded at Keating. Eight Afghan soldiers and two Afghan security guards were also wounded. Staff Sergeant Justin T. Gallegos of Tucson, Arizona; Specialist Christopher Griffin of Kincheloe, Michigan; Private First Class Kevin C. Thomson of Reno, Nevada; Specialist Michael P. Scusa of Villas, New Jersey; Sergeant Vernon W. Martin of Savannah, Georgia; Specialist Stephan L. Mace of Lovettsville, Virginia; Sergeant Joshua J. Kirk of South Portland, Maine; and Sergeant Joshua M. Hardt of Applegate, California, fell in battle that day. They were lost but will never be forgotten.
We didn’t ask permission to close Lowell—we assumed it was a given—so we immediately began planning.