Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  At the end of that first Iraq deployment, we were sent back to Colorado and the entire unit was reclassified from heavy armor to light reconnaissance so that we could start preparing for the type of fighting we’d eventually be facing in Afghanistan. As part of that transition, I was shipped off to school to learn how to be a cavalry scout. Eleven months later, in June of 2006, we were back in Iraq, this time in a place called Salman Pak, about twenty miles south of Baghdad along a broad bend of the Tigris River and not far from a notorious military installation rumored to serve as a keystone of Saddam Hussein’s biological and chemical weapons program. It was also a hotbed of extremist militia, and they did their best to make our lives as miserable as possible.

  This was where my new training really began to kick in.

  A cavalry scout is generally thought to function as the eyes and ears of a commander during battle. But in fact, a scout’s role extends quite a bit further. We refer to ourselves as “jacks-of-all-trades, masters of none,” and we are trained to have a working familiarity with—quite literally—every job in the army. We are experts in reconnaissance, countersurveillance, and navigation, but we’re also extremely comfortable with all aspects of radio and satellite communications. We know how to assemble and deploy three-man hunter/killer teams. We’re pretty good at blowing things up using mines and high explosives. We can function as medics, vehicle mechanics, and combat engineers. And we have a thorough understanding of every single weapons system, from a 9-mm handgun to a 120-mm howitzer.

  Many soldiers find it challenging to master such an eclectic skill set. So it was odd that it all came so easily to me. Prior to the military, I found school to be quite difficult, especially when it came to abstract ideas. But these new disciplines came to me so instinctively that it was almost disturbing. Regardless of whether it was small-unit tactics or maneuvering an entire company’s worth of armor, the logic seemed inherently obvious. What’s more, I loved every aspect of being a scout—although I had a particular knack for something called “react-to-contact” drills, which involved coming up with a combat plan on the spur of the moment as the shit was hitting the fan.

  There were two things, however, that didn’t come easily at all.

  The first had to do with the position in which we found ourselves in Iraq, where we were consigned to a reactive role, and where we found ourselves bound by strict rules of engagement, or ROEs, that prevented us from shooting first—which meant that we were usually able to return fire only when attacked.

  I found this intolerable not only from a tactical standpoint but also at a psychological level. And to compensate, I developed an unorthodox style of leadership that hinged on provoking a reaction from the enemy. When I was leading an armored convoy, for example, I would often order my tank driver to abruptly switch lanes, taking the entire column down a city street directly against the flow of traffic, forcing oncoming vehicles to get out of the way or risk head-on collision. At the extreme end of things, I would even use myself as a decoy. To ferret out snipers, for example, I would climb onto the sponson box, a big rectangular storage compartment on the turret of our lead tank, pretend it was a surfboard, and balance myself out there as we clattered through the streets of Habbaniyah, daring any Iraqi marksmen to take a shot at me and expose their positions.

  Often these tactics worked well, although they never fully relieved my frustration with the rules of engagement. But as impossible as I found the ROEs, this challenge was dwarfed by a second problem, one that arose as an inevitable consequence of serving in a leadership position in a war zone.

  What I found harder than anything else, by far, was witnessing one of my guys get killed. The first time this happened to me was just outside of Sadr City, and it involved one of the finest soldiers I’ve ever known.

  • • •

  THE SUMMER AND FALL of 2007 was a bad time for all three frontline platoons in Black Knight Troop. By this point we were several months into a new strategy in which the administration of George W. Bush attempted to stabilize Iraq by sending in five additional brigades while extending the tour of almost every soldier who was already on deployment. While the surge did lead to a drop in overall violence, for reasons that remained mysterious (and which may simply have resulted from bad luck), our troop started getting hit harder and more often. In September, one of White Platoon’s team leaders got shot in the back, and although he survived, the bullet severed his spine and paralyzed him from the chest down. Not long after that, White lost two other men to a roadside bomb. And then, in September, Snell got hit.

  Eric Snell was a thirty-four-year-old scout when I first met him in Iraq, but even as a newly enlisted private he’d managed to stand out as something extraordinary. He had been drafted as an outfielder for the Cleveland Indians straight out of high school in Trenton, New Jersey, but he had decided to forgo a career in the major leagues and instead focus on academics. He got a degree in political science, then moved to South Africa to work as a project manager for AT&T. He could speak French and he’d lived in Italy. He was also good-looking enough that he’d been recruited as a male model, appearing in magazines like Mademoiselle, Modern Bride, and Vibe.

  Eric Snell

  Snell had the entire package, and he brought all of it to the task of being the type of soldier that did everything perfectly. You never had to give him an order or an instruction twice. He learned fast and he learned well. He showed initiative and he demonstrated leadership. In fact, that only thing that seemed even remotely off about the guy was the confusion he provoked among the rest of us over why he had signed on as an ordinary soldier in the first place.

  “For Chrissake, Snell, you got all this education and all these credentials,” we’d say to him. “Why the fuck did you come into the army as enlisted?”

  “Well, yeah, I’m gonna go and be an officer one day,” was his response. “But first I want to know what it’s like to be a soldier.”

  That impressed us too.

  He was promoted to sergeant two years after he enlisted, far ahead of his peers. Just over two weeks later, on September 18, 2007, me and him and two other guys were ordered to perform overwatch just outside of Sadr City on a group of Iraqi soldiers who were setting up concrete barriers to block suicide bombers. White Platoon had been on duty for most of that morning and our captain had ordered Red to relieve them—an idea that me and my platoon sergeant deemed unwise, because if there were any snipers in the area, they now knew our pattern of movement.

  Our objections were overruled, so me and Snell started setting up our perimeter security. I was leaning inside the Humvee, coordinating on the radio with another platoon on the other side of the battle space, and Snell was standing right beside me in back of the vehicle with just his head exposed, when a sniper from across the way got him. The bullet came in just beneath the lip of his helmet, went through his right eye, and blew out the back of his head. As soon as I looked down and saw him lying on the ground, I knew he was dead.

  It was the first time I’d seen one of my own guys get killed.

  Up to that point, I’d been convinced that there was some sort of connection between how good you were and what happened to you in the theater of battle. But after watching Snell get assassinated like that, I realized that one of the fundamental truths about war is that horrible things can—and often will—happen to anybody, even to a soldier who has everything dialed to perfection.

  In the days that followed, I found myself wrestling with the implications of this. While you could strive to be your best, and while you could demand that everyone under you adhered to those standards, the reality was that in the end, none of this might make a rat’s ass of difference—even for an ace like Snell.

  When you lose a man like that, it can fuel a sense of resignation that can be totally debilitating. If there is no causal link between merit and destiny—if everything on the battlefield boils down to nothing more than a lottery
—what’s the point of bothering to hone your skills or cultivate excellence?

  The loss can create a practical problem too. When a soldier as good as Snell gets drilled through the brain, even if you want to try to replace him, how could you ever find someone to fill his shoes?

  As it turned out, however, the rotten luck of losing Snell wound up having a silver lining to it because it triggered the arrival of a soldier who was destined to become my right-hand man in Afghanistan. A man who would provide the foundation of what Red Platoon was to become, and what it would later accomplish during its trial by fire in Afghanistan.

  • • •

  ABOUT A MONTH after Snell died, a batch of new replacements arrived in Iraq from Fort Carson, just outside of Colorado Springs, to fill the ranks of our dead.

  Whenever a surge of soldiers arrived, the sergeants from all three platoons would size up the new guys and then haggle over how to divvy them up. These assessment-and-bargaining sessions were often intense because the outcome would have a big impact on the quality of each platoon. And the criteria on which everything hinged basically boiled down to our greatest pastime: platoon-on-platoon football.

  Ray Didinger, a sportswriter who covered the NFL for more than twenty-five years, once said that football is the “truest” team game because nothing happens if all the players aren’t performing their roles to perfection. “Everyone has to contribute on every single play,” he argued. “You could have the guys up front all do everything exactly the way they’re supposed to; but if one guy breaks down—if he doesn’t get the play right or goes in the wrong direction—then the whole play falls apart.”

  That’s not a bad summary of small-unit military tactics either—especially when you consider that football is all about assaulting another team’s territory, then holding that ground against a series of counterassaults. Plus, and this is Didinger again, “football is also a violent game and the guys who play it have to accept that fact.” Maybe that’s why we bonded so deeply with the game—especially in Red Platoon, where we took it with such hyperseriousness that we literally went for years without losing a single platoon-on-platoon matchup.

  Brad Larson was a recruit from Chambers, Nebraska, a town whose population (288) was almost as tiny as the miniscule spot where I’d come from. He had jug-handle ears that kicked out from the sides of his head, cartoonishly thick eyebrows, and almost nothing to suggest that he possessed the sort of athletic prowess we were looking for in Red Platoon. So when we wound up getting stuck with him, I initially made a point of ignoring the guy and saying as little to him as possible, despite the fact that he was serving as the driver of my Humvee. Aside from “go left” and “turn right,” I don’t think I directed a single word to him for more than two weeks.

  Brad Larson

  As it turned out, Larson had played free safety at the junior college he’d attended in Nebraska before joining the army. But as we discovered after finally condescending to allow him on the field during one of our platoon-on-platoon games, he could play just about anywhere because he was so astonishingly fast. Even more impressive was his uncanny sense of vision. Whenever the quarterback drew back his arm to throw, Larson knew exactly where the ball was heading. Except for one guy who had a weird sidearm throw that was almost impossible to read, Larson could figure out where the ball was headed just by looking at the quarterback’s eyes and the angle of his forearm. And then, thanks to his ferocious speed, he was able to make a beeline for that spot and destroy whoever was the target.

  That made me sit up and take notice of him. It also served as the basis of the relationship that swiftly developed between us, because it didn’t take long for me to realize that when we were practicing combat maneuvers, Larson was taking the skills he exhibited on the football field and applying them to me.

  He was also unbelievably quick to adapt—so quick that I almost never had to sit down and explain anything to him. Instead, he would simply look at me as I was doing something and, just by the fact that he was concentrating so hard and that he was so fricking on it, he would absorb the lesson.

  As soon as I realized what was up, I started integrating him into the role that Snell had previously filled as my team leader. Like Snell, Larson did everything with ferocious precision and attention to detail. But what I valued even more was the way we connected.

  Within a few months, the two of us had built the kind of rapport where if we were out doing a platoon exercise—assaulting an objective, say, or trying to find a weapons cache—I would give my team the commander’s brief, sketch out the mission, and announce, “Larson, you’re on point.” Then we’d start walking on patrol: Larson in front, me in the rear, with two or three guys between us.

  As we came up on a place where we had to make a tactical pause and decide what to do next—whether to transition from high ground to low ground, or how we’d pass by an obstacle of some sort—Larson would turn around and look at me. We both had radios, but we wouldn’t need to use them. Our eyes would lock, I’d give him a nod, and whatever I was thinking, he would know exactly what to do. It was almost like each of us was an extra pair of eyes and a second set of hands for the other.

  In addition to that, our strengths and weaknesses overlapped in a way that complemented each other, so that together we were more than twice as good as we were alone. For example, I’m sort of an idiot when it comes to numbers and math, but this was something that came naturally to Larson. Whenever we were on patrol and I was in charge, I would often be deluged with information and struggle to write things down with a marker on either my gloves or on the window of my Humvee, which served as my notepads. If I couldn’t keep up, I’d lean over to Larson and say, “Hey, they’re calling up a target grid at 4S M6J 180 2245. Remember that.”

  Twenty minutes later when I’d ask him to give me the grid, he’d spit it right back from memory.

  Up to that point, I’d never experienced anything quite like this in the military. We synced. We clicked. And in doing all of those things, each of us made the other better.

  If there’s a term for this sort of connection, I’ve never come across it—perhaps because the mechanism is so hard to pin down that it resists encapsulation. I don’t know how we meshed, I just know that we did, and there was really no way of explaining it, except to acknowledge that it worked. In fact, it worked so well that it was soon obvious to the rest of the platoon too, where it provoked enough curiosity that our lieutenant finally pulled us aside and asked what was up.

  At a loss for a better answer, Larson and me fell back on the only explanation that made sense to us.

  “It’s kinda the same way that a Posi-Traction clutch works on the rear end of a Ford Mustang,” I said.

  “And how’s that?” asked the lieutenant.

  “One way to explain it,” I replied, “is that it’s a limited-slip differential gear that allows for some variance in the angular velocity of the output shaft.”

  “But the better way of explaining it,” Larson chimed in, “is to say that it just boils down to PFM.”

  “Okay, I’ll take the bait,” said the lieutenant. “What the hell is ‘PFM’?”

  “PFM is technology so advanced that it can’t be explained to the layperson as anything other than sorcery or witchcraft,” I replied. “It’s pure fucking magic.”

  “So there you go,” said Larson. “PFM.”

  • • •

  LIKE PFM, the intensity of combat can create a level of trust that you don’t get anywhere else. Which in turn can create some serious obligations—and that brings me back to the insight I drew from the manner in which we’d lost Eric Snell.

  Snell’s death forced me to acknowledge and accept that the dynamics of combat are impervious to human control. But in the wake of that revelation, I decided that there were at least two things worth concentrating on that I could control.

  The first involved stacking the
odds in the favor of my men and me by being very, very good. Snell and Larson embodied that principle.

  The second thing involved, for lack of a better way of putting it, the paramount importance of cultivating a sense of defiance about how we ended things.

  I may not have been able to control what happened during combat. But I had a lot to say about what happened after it. And given that, I decided that the follow-through and the finish mattered. Hugely.

  After we’d picked Snell up off the street, we had to get him back to our base—the first leg of a journey that would take him through the Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, home of the largest military mortuary in the United States, where the remains of those killed overseas are traditionally brought, and from there to Trenton, New Jersey, where he was buried. In a situation like this, the normal procedure was to place the body on the hood of your Humvee, but I didn’t want Snell riding out there and exposed for everyone to see. Because he was so incredibly tall, however, we couldn’t shut the rear door on the passenger side of the Humvee, even when we placed Snell across the two dismount seats in the back and bent his legs to get his knees up.

  Keeping a door open on an armored Humvee was a serious security violation, but I couldn’t have cared less. I sat in the commander’s seat with my right arm extended back and holding the strap on that four-hundred-pound door. And that’s how we rolled through the middle of Baghdad, taking turns as fast as we could without flipping the gun truck.

  This was the sort of gesture that may well sound pointless and perhaps even a little absurd. At the time, however, it seemed to me that the manner in which we brought Snell home was terribly important.

  Looking back on it now, I’ve never changed my mind.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Stacked

  DURING OUR TIME IN IRAQ, Black Knight Troop lost three men, including Snell. A half-dozen others were wounded, several of them horribly. But by the time we wrapped up the deployment and returned home to Colorado in March of 2008, our numbers had been whittled down even further by an attrition of a different sort.