by Jake Tapper
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 challenged 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 Apaches 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 in to 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 given 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.
The lower left side of the sniper’s face blew off.
“Holy fuck!” Francis said. “You got him!”
The fundamentals.
CHAPTER 36
Blood and Embers
Because aid stations at combat outposts such as Keating can’t depend on refrigeration, they don’t store blood. It seemed to Cordova, however, that fresh blood might be the only thing that could save Stephan Mace, by providing him with red blood cells that would offer greater oxygen-carrying capacity and more clotting factors than the artificial stuff. So Cordova decided that he and his staff would attempt a “buddy transfusion.”
Cordova had never done this procedure before, and he was scared of trying it now. Transfusions are almost always performed in a hospital or clinic, a controlled and sterile environment where donor’s blood can also be tested for disease before being given to the patient. Nevertheless, fresh whole blood has been successfully transfused under battlefield conditions since World War I, and Cordova, as a physician’s assistant, had been trained in the technique. A blood transfusion kit that had been left behind at the aid station by a previous unit would allow Black Knight Troop’s medical team to take blood from someone else’s arm and give it directly to Mace. The kit included five bags. It was risky, yes, but they had to do something, and there seemed to be no better options.
As the medics were starting to prepare for the procedure, Burton came to the aid station and announced, “If the fire keeps going, we’re going to have to evacuate.” To stay ahead of the blaze, Faulkner, Dannelley, Thomas, and Stone went outside to the Café, while most of the wounded ANA soldiers relocated to the Afghan Security Guard commanders’ building. Mace was too badly injured to be moved, as were two ANA troops, one with a mutilated abdomen, the other with a tourniquet on his leg. Courville went outside to assess the situation. How bad was this fire? And then he saw that the tall pine tree that stood between the operations center and the aid station was starting to burn.
Cordova continued to focus on Mace; to him, nothing outside that room mattered.
First they needed to know Mace’s blood type. Cordova looked for his dog tag, but it wasn’t around his neck. This wasn’t unusual; because their Kevlar chest plates tended to press their dog tags into their breastbones, soldiers—especially the skinny ones—often tied them around their belt loops and stored them in their pants pockets. Indeed, that was where Mace’s dog tag was. He was A-positive—good news, because so were Cordova, Hobbs, and Floyd. Out of these three matches, Floyd was elected to be the donor because, as the lowest-ranked and least experienced among them, he was deemed the least “essential.” “Okay, Doc,” Floyd said. “Stick me.”
He rolled up his sleeve, and soon his dark-red blood began filling the collection bag, which contained an anticoagulant to keep it from clotting. After a struggle, Hobbs succeeded in plunging the receiving end of the system into Mace’s neck.
A nervous Cordova kept a close eye on his patient. Studies have shown that for reasons of bureaucratic tangle, dog tags carry unreliable information about blood type up to 11 percent of the time, so the physician’s assistant was on guard against any adverse reactions. There were none. Mace’s pulse improved and could now be found not only in his neck but also on the inside of his thigh.
Even more important, Mace himself went from dazed to conscious. He started to complain about the pain in his leg. He asked for a cigarette, a request that was denied with a smile. They all started to joke around. Floyd was tall but very skinny, and the other medics often teased him about his manhood. Now Mace would be less of a man, the medics suggested, because he’d received Floyd’s weak-ass blood. Others, too—most notably Rasmussen, one of Mace’s best friends and partners in crime—came in and chatted with him. But fifteen minutes after the bag of Floyd’s blood had been depleted, Mace’s eyes started to wander off again. They would need to give him a second bag. Hobbs rolled up his sleeve.
Bundermann had some good news for the Apache pilots as they arrived on station: the Americans had taken back some land inside the camp. But the troops at Combat Outpost Keating still weren’t sure where many of their guys were, so the pilots decided they would continue to avoid firing within the outpost.
For the next thirty minutes, Rasmussen fired smoke rounds at targets that Black Knight Troop wanted the Apaches to destroy in the hills and their environs. Bundermann would radio the pilots to tell them how close Rasmussen had come to the mark, and the pilots would saturate the relevant area with rockets and 30-millimeters rounds. Others joined Rasmussen in firing smoke rounds, one soldier marking where he thought an enemy Dushka team was hiding.
Bundermann had made it clear to the pilots that their top priority should be to kill the insurgents in the Afghan National Police station and the Urmul mosque, a source of clear and accurate machine-gun fire. Specifically, he requested that they drop as many Hellfire missiles on the mosque as they could.
It wouldn’t be easy. In this narrow valley, with one smaller hill blocking access to the mosque from the north, the only way for either Lewallen’s or Huff’s Apache to get a clean shot was to head to the east and then make a westbound pass. They would come through the valley in one long, straight run that they hoped would not be interrupted by a Dushka or a lucky shot. If they made it safely, Lewallen could put a Hellfire into the mosque, then Huff could follow up with a second missile, pulverizing the enemy sanctuary.
They flew two and a half miles away from the camp then turned around, zooming east-to-west toward Combat Outpost Keating. As they approached, two Dushka shots found their mark in Lewallen’s Apache.
“Shit,” said Lewallen. Luckily, the shot hadn’t seriously harmed the helicopter, but it had damaged its hydraulics and thus stopped it from firing its missiles. “I got a Hellfire malfunction,” he told Huff. “I can’t get my missile off the rail.”
From the second Apache, Huff radioed that he would go ahead and try to make the shot, so as Lewallen flew over Observation Post Fritsche and took a left-hand turn, Huff turned right, leveled the bird, and let Wright, his copilot, take his shot. The Hellfire missile hit the mosque from the eastern side. At the same time, Huff and Wright’s bird came under heavy machine-gun fire and lost the backup control system for its tail rotor. Lewallen had by now resolved the issue with his own Hellfire operating system, and he and Bardwell fired their missile, which hit the mosque from the south. Target successfully destroyed.
The two Apaches turned around and prepared to head back to Forward Operating Base Bostick for repairs. Other aircraft were now flying in and above the valley, dropping bombs. The walls of the shura building began to cave in. And something bigger was on its way: a B-1 bomber.
The B-1’s pilot, Captain Justin Kulish, called in to Romesha. “What do you need?” he asked.
“Get rid of Urmul,” Romesha replied. “Just level it.” There was slim chance that any civilians were left in the small community.
“All right,” the pilot said, “Get down, we’re bombs away.”
The first bomb hit the top of the Putting
Green, straight above Urmul, and was then followed by a rapid succession of deep booms as the village was obliterated. Romesha could feel the bombs in his chest as their shock waves compressed his body and everything else in their path.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM.
The shock waves hurt Romesha, but it was a good kind of hurt, a good pain. We have the upper hand now, he thought. Finally.
While bombs pummeled Urmul, Eric Harder passed the dining hall on his way to throw down more concertina wire on the southern side of the camp. On the radio, he heard someone—the B-1 pilot, he assumed—warn, “Hey, this one’s gonna be close,” and as he turned down to face the camp, he saw the impact of the shock wave shatter the glass windows on a bulldozer, and then he thought, Oh, shit, this is going to rip me to shreds. Harder ran to the side of the barracks to take cover from the succession of bombs. He sat there and listened to Urmul get destroyed.
A flock of U.S. aircraft now swarmed the valley, nineteen of them in all, all at different altitudes—A-10 Warthogs, Apaches, F-15Es, and a B-1 bomber. The sky was dark with rainclouds, and the air thick with a smell of explosives and chemicals that burned Harder’s nostrils.
Every once in a while, the insurgents remaining in the mountains would take pot shots at the camp, prompting the U.S. troops to shoot back a wall of bullets. Davidson was providing cover fire for Harder as he stretched the concertina wire.
“Do you think we’re going to make it out of here?” Davidson asked him.
“I don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Harder.