Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  Koppes had never actually witnessed such a thing with his own eyes. But that little factoid afforded a certain measure comfort each time he clambered into the Humvee and was forced to ponder the truck’s many glaring vulnerabilities, starting with the fact that when he hunkered down behind the Mark 19, his legs, arms, and torso were shielded, but his head and shoulders were totally exposed. Equally disconcerting, the turret rotated along an arc of only 110 degrees, which made it impossible for him to return fire at anyone who was trying to shoot him in the back.

  Like almost everything else at Keating, this was decidedly not ideal, which was why we’d been planning to replace the gun truck with a properly reinforced guard tower. But those plans had recently been put on hold when we’d been told to prepare to dismantle the outpost, pack it up, and get the hell out of this part of Nuristan. That operation was actually scheduled to start within seventy-two hours, although most of the lower enlisted guys at Koppes’s level hadn’t been told about this yet.

  By the time Koppes reached the side of the truck, Hardt had already climbed down from the turret with the aim of getting over to the latrines as quickly as possible. He paused just long enough to update Koppes on the latest intel.

  According to the small network of Afghan informants who were supposed to keep Keating’s officers abreast of any developments in the surrounding area, a group of Taliban had been mustering in the village of Urmul, a tiny hamlet that lay less than a hundred yards to the west of the outpost on the far side of the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River.

  This hardly qualified as news. Since our arrival four months earlier, it seemed as if we’d received a warning along these lines every three or four days. Each time, the pattern was the same. The report would state that fifty or seventy-five enemy fighters were massing for a major attack. But when the attack finally arrived, it would turn out to involve four or five insurgents—or even more frequently, just one or two gunmen. Eventually, we’d started taking these warnings with a grain of salt.

  Which is not to say that we didn’t expect to get nailed. Throughout the summer and into the fall, we’d been getting hit, on average, at least four times a week. But for the men on guard duty, word of a massive impending assault was no longer capable of setting off alarm bells. And so when Hardt passed along the report, Koppes simply nodded and settled himself into the turret while concentrating on more immediate matters.

  For a soldier of Koppes’s rank and stature, the pleasures afforded by life at Keating were few and far between, so it was vital to savor any diversion, regardless of how small it might be. The new issue of SportsPro certainly qualified as one of those. Indeed, the magazine all by itself would have been more than enough to make Koppes’s entire morning. But there was an added bonus, because today was Saturday, which meant that every one of the fifty American soldiers at Keating was scheduled to get not one but two hot meals, an event whose importance was almost impossible to overstate.

  Ever since we first arrived at the outpost, we’d been receiving about one hot meal a week, and surviving for the rest of the time on MREs, liberally supplemented by Pop-Tarts and chocolate pudding that was so long past its expiration date it made you wonder if maybe the army wasn’t trying to give the Taliban an assist.

  Under these circumstances, two hot meals in the same day was almost beyond Koppes’s ability to imagine, especially considering that breakfast was supposed to be eggs and grits. What’s more, if Thomas, our cook, was in a generous mood, maybe there would be some bacon too. But even that wasn’t the whole story.

  The best thing about all of this, in Koppes’s mind, was that if you were on guard duty when Thomas started slinging breakfast at the chow hall, the guy you had just relieved was required to go up there and get your food, then bring it out to the truck and actually serve the stuff to you.

  To Koppes—whose name, fittingly, was pronounced just like the word “copacetic”—the confluence of these events was like the greatest thing on earth. He not only had his top-100-football-players magazine, but a hot breakfast was about to be hand-delivered as if he’d pulled the Humvee into a Sonic drive-in.

  It was true, of course, that this grub would be forked over by a guy who had just taken his morning dump. But did that matter? To a man like Koppes—a man who, thanks in part to the motto we all had adopted, was able to embrace the brighter side of pretty much anything, no matter how shitty it might be—the answer was an emphatic no, this did not matter one bit.

  You know what, Hardt? he told himself as he got behind the Mark 19 and his sergeant dashed off toward the latrines. You head on up to the shitter and do your thing.

  Everything here is absolutely cool.

  • • •

  AS KOPPES WAS SETTLING into position on the guard truck, another soldier, a private by the name of Stephan Mace, was counting down the final minutes of his own four-hour guard shift in one of our other gun trucks, which was positioned on the opposite end of camp, about 120 yards to the west. Known as LRAS2, that Humvee was the most remote and exposed guard position on the entire outpost. It sat just forty yards from the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River and faced directly toward the cluster of some three dozen mud-walled buildings that comprised the village of Urmul.

  Mace, who was Koppes’s best friend, was waiting to be relieved by a sergeant named Brad Larson, who happened to be my best friend. And just like Koppes and Hardt, Mace and Larson had a little ritual that they enacted on most mornings when they were trading off guard duty.

  Although Mace was one of the lowest-ranking soldiers at Keating, he was also one of the most entertaining characters inside the wire. Armed with razor-sharp wits and a wickedly inappropriate sense of humor, he generated a continuous stream of off-the-cuff jokes and smart-aleck remarks that could always take your mind off the surrounding miseries, even if it was just for a second or two. In short, Mace was the kind of guy who everybody enjoyed having around, and a measure of that enjoyment was that even Larson—a laconic and self-contained Nebraskan who rarely had more than two words to share with anyone, including me—would voluntarily get up a few minutes early and trundle out to the guard position just so that he could sit in the front seat of the Humvee and listen to Mace’s bullshit.

  What those two guys talked about spanned a wide spectrum. It could run the gamut, from heated debates about which animal you’d most want to shoot during a big-game hunting safari in Africa to minutely detailed descriptions of hot teachers they’d had back in grade school. But the substance of their conversations probably mattered less than the fact that they liked each other’s company enough that sometimes they’d simply sit in the cab of the gun truck, staring out the windshield in silence while Mace pulled on one of his Marlboro Lights and Larson took a dip from his can of chewing tobacco.

  On this particular morning, however, they’d skipped over their usual routine because Larson had some business to take care of first. Instead of climbing directly into the Humvee, he strode past the driver’s door toward the front of the truck, set his helmet and his gun on the hood, then spread his legs, unzipped his fly, and stood there, bareheaded and facing west, taking a long and much-needed wake-up piss.

  Technically speaking, Larson should have taken care of this back at the piss tubes, the row of four-inch-diameter pipes made of PVC that were sunk more than three feet into the ground just outside our shower trailer. The path out to the gun truck had taken him right by them, and normally he would have stopped there. But the tubes reeked worse than almost anything else in camp, and for whatever reason he’d decided that the odor of stale urine wasn’t something he was keen to inhale just then.

  Meanwhile, when Mace saw what Larson was up to, he climbed down from the gun truck and headed east across the outpost toward the barracks building, where the rest of our platoon was still fast asleep in our bunks.

  It was 5:50 a.m. and dawn had just broken as Larson went about his business while staring up at the scene before him.
The first rays of the morning sun were painting the mud walls of Urmul with a golden pinkish light, and his gaze was pulled toward the tallest structure in the village, which was its mosque.

  Unlike the masjids that graced the larger and more prosperous towns and cities of Afghanistan, Urmul’s mosque boasted neither a delicately tapered spire nor an onion-shaped dome. It was a square-sided tower, coarse and humble, that reflected not only the harshness and the austerity but also the humbleness of this impossibly distant and cut-off corner of Afghanistan.

  Closer at hand, Larson could see the river, frothy and bright as it churned beneath the single-span concrete bridge leading out to the small island that doubled as a landing zone for the massive, anvil-shaped Chinooks that served as Keating’s lifeline to the outside world, ferrying in everything from diesel fuel and ammunition to crates of Dr Pepper and plastic bottles filled with drinking water.

  On the far side of that river, a dense green wall of vegetation concealed the monkeys, the birds, and the other wild creatures that populated the sides of the impossibly narrow valley in which Keating was nestled. And soaring above all of that, Larson could see the features that dominated and defined our lives in that place, which were the mountains.

  Their cliffs rose up out of the river valley, straight-sided and steep, and high above those cliffs and far in the distance, he could see the snow-covered peaks that were now glittering with the orange tint of dawn against the backdrop of a sky that had taken on the deep and impenetrable color of cobalt.

  In another place, at another time, a view like the one laid out before Larson would have been nothing short of glorious. But here you could never allow a thing like glory to seduce you into forgetting that we were at war and that the men we’d been sent here to fight, the soldiers whose deepest desire was to kill as many of us as possible, lay concealed within that beauty.

  • • •

  LOOKING BACK on that moment now, I’ve tried to imagine the scene from the perspective of the three hundred Taliban fighters who had moved into position overnight, forced the civilians in the area to leave their homes, set up firing positions in the buildings and across the hillsides along all four cardinal points of the compass, and who were now counting down the final seconds to launching a coordinated attack on us from all sides with RPGs, mortars, machine guns, small arms, and recoilless rifle fire.

  The force they’d assembled outnumbered us by six to one, and the onslaught they were about to unleash would qualify as the largest, fiercest, and most sophisticated assault ever seen in the portion of Afghanistan that US high command referred to as Sector East.

  As impressive as all of that may sound, however, what is perhaps even more remarkable is the depth of our collective ignorance in that instant.

  Brad Larson had no clue, as he stood there with his dingus on display, absentmindedly registering the sound of splashing in the dirt just beyond the toes of his boots, that his head was framed in the crosshairs of at least ten snipers, each armed with a Russian Dragunov rifle and intent on putting a 7.62 cartridge through the front of his face.

  Zach Koppes had no idea that there would be no delivery of a hot breakfast, that his magazine would never be opened, and that within seconds he would be cut off inside his Humvee and squaring up against dozens of insurgents while more than three dozen Afghan Army soldiers who were supposed to be our allies and partners abandoned their positions and fled, allowing Keating’s eastern defensive perimeter to completely collapse.

  Josh Hardt didn’t have the faintest notion that within the hour, those insurgents would breach our wire, seize our ammunition depot, set fire to most of our buildings, and eventually be pointing an RPG at him with the aim of blowing his brains through the back of his head.

  As for me, as those final seconds ticked down before the Taliban’s hellfire was unleashed, I was racked out in my bunk, fast asleep and oblivious to the fact that within thirty minutes everyone inside our besieged outpost who was still alive would be falling back into what would later be called “the Alamo position” and preparing to make a final stand in the only two buildings that weren’t on fire, while ten of our comrades were stranded outside the line.

  Which brings me back to our little motto, the phrase that sustained us:

  It doesn’t get better.

  There were fifty Americans inside the wire at Keating that morning, including the men who were part of Red Platoon. Partly thanks to those words, we not only understood but also accepted, with total clarity, just how bad things were: how untenable our lines were, how impossible it would be to effectively defend our perimeter, how far we were from the nearest help. But in reality, not a single one of us had the faintest inkling of the sheer fury that was about to rain down on our heads.

  • • •

  WHAT FOLLOWS is not the story of one man, but of an entire platoon. It is a story that has the hair and the dirt still clinging to it: a saga whose characters, in ways both large and small, are less heroic than one might wish and yet far more human than the citations to the medals that this battle yielded might suggest.

  The men of Red Platoon were no pack of choirboys. Nor were we the sort of iron-willed, steely-eyed superheroes who seem to populate so many of the narratives that have emerged during the last decade of war. We were quite unlike the squadron of special forces hard men who had ridden across the plains of northern Afghanistan on horseback to capture the city of Mazar-i-Sharif in the weeks following 9/11. And we had almost nothing in common with the four-man team of American spec-ops assassins whose ordeal in the summer of 2005, just a few miles south of Keating, would later be chronicled in the book and the movie called Lone Survivor.

  If we qualified as heroes, then the heroism we displayed that day in the autumn of 2009 was cut from a more ragged grade of cloth—a fabric whose folds conceal the shortcomings and the failings of exceptionally ordinary men who were put to an extraordinary test. Men who were plagued by fears and doubts. Men who had bickered endlessly and indulged in all manner of pettiness. Men who had succumbed to—and in some cases, were still running from—a litany of weaknesses that included depression and addiction, apathy and aimlessness, dishonesty and rage.

  If we were a band of brothers bound together by combat, then it’s important to note that our brethren included a private who had once tried to commit suicide by drinking carpet cleaner, a soldier who was caught smoking hashish in a free-fire zone while standing guard duty, and me: a man so keen to go to war that he never even bothered to consult his wife before volunteering to be deployed to Iraq—and then later lied to her, declaring that he’d had no choice in the matter.

  But if all of that is true, what is also true is that we were soldiers who loved one another with a fierceness and a purity that has no analog in the civilian world.

  To fully understand how that worked, you need to know a bit about how my platoon came together, and the path that drew us to Afghanistan.

  PART I

  The Road to Nuristan

  CHAPTER ONE

  Loss

  I COME FROM an old Nevada ranching family with military traditions that date back to my grandfather Aury Smith, who took his brother’s place in the draft during the summer of 1943 and eventually wound up getting sent into Normandy as a combat engineer just a couple of days after D-day. Six months later, Aury got himself stuck inside the besieged perimeter of Bastogne with the 101st Airborne Division during the Battle of the Bulge. Somehow he made it through, then finished out his time in Europe helping to put on USO shows as a bareback rodeo rider.

  Almost thirty years later, my dad was sent to Vietnam. And although he never said a single word about either of the two tours that he pulled up near the Cambodian border with the 4th Infantry Division, which was known to have taken some horrendous casualties during that time, his silence carried enough weight that all three of his sons enlisted in the military.

  My oldest brother, Tra
vis, enlisted in the army right after high school, participated in the invasion of Haiti, then later transferred to the air force. Next in line was Preston, who hitched up with the marines. By the time I was a senior in Lake City, California, a town so tiny that our high school graduating class numbered only fifteen, my brothers assumed that I would join up too, despite my father’s hopes that I might break the mold and follow the path he’d laid out by enrolling me in the Mormon seminary I had been attending since ninth grade.

  My brothers were right. I joined the army in September of 1999, and was assigned to Black Knight Troop, a mechanized armor unit whose sixty-five men were spread across three platoons: Red, White, and Blue.

  In military jargon, Black Knight belonged to the four-thousand-man 4th Brigade Combat Team, which itself was part of the twenty-thousand-man 4th Infantry Division. In laymen’s terms, what that boiled down to was that I was a tiny cog nestled deep inside the world’s largest and most sophisticated war machine. It also meant that I was part of the very same infantry division in which my dad had served.

  My first deployment was to Kosovo, where we performed peacekeeping duties and saw very little action. But following the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, I volunteered to go to Iraq. After a fifteen-month detour through Korea, I found myself commanding an M1A1 armored tank in Habbaniyah, an area about fifty miles west of Baghdad that sits directly between Ramadi and Fallujah. There we spent the better part of 2004 battling hard-core Al Qaeda fighters who specialized in improvised explosives. We took an average of roughly one IED strike per day.