Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  Thanks to a spate of transfers, retirements, and disciplinary relocations during the weeks immediately following our return, Red Platoon was quickly reduced to a faint shadow of its former self. Of the twenty men we’d had in Iraq, only three remained: myself, a guy who would soon get injured when a trailer fell on his hands, and the jug-eared Nebraskan with immense black eyebrows. Everybody else was gone.

  This meant that in addition to spending time with our families, as well as all the other things that we’d dreamed of doing back when we were choking on the heat and the dust of Iraq, we were going to have to rebuild ourselves from the ground up.

  That would entail quite a bit more than simply snatching up good guys by any means we could. We would also have to find a way of forging those newcomers into a cohesive unit. A band of men who could work well together, trust one another, and keep one another alive during our next deployment. And in the context of larger events that were unfolding around us, that was going to be one hell of a challenge.

  In the aftermath of 9/11, when America had committed itself to fighting two extended wars overseas, one in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan, it consigned a relatively small group of young soldiers to something relatively new, which was to send them abroad repeatedly and throw them into combat again and again and again.

  These overseas combat deployments were not restricted to one or two tours for each soldier, as was often the case during World War II, Korea, and Vietnam. Nor was the burden of those deployments shared across an entire generation. The brunt of our fighting during this time was performed by less than one percent of our population, and many of the folks who wound up on the front lines—especially the ground-pounders in the infantry—were guys just like me, men who joined up straight out of high school and had three or four deployments under their belts by the time their peers were finishing college. Some of us, especially those who became medics or aviators, or joined the special forces, had seven or eight combat hauls under their belts. By the late winter of 2008, almost a full decade into the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the toll that those multiple deployments had taken on the army were really starting to show.

  One of the clearest signs of the problem was the alarmingly high rate of PTSD, especially among enlisted soldiers. This wasn’t always easy to detect, at least not directly. But you could discern it in the rising incidents of suicide and drug abuse. Within a month or two, the brigade found itself wrestling with substance-abuse problems ranging from marijuana to cocaine and meth, as well as incidents of depression that would contribute to three suicides. At the same time, Fort Carson was also saddled with some of the highest crime rates of any military base in the country, including domestic violence, armed robbery, and assault, as well as rape and murder.

  Over the course of that year, six of our brigade’s soldiers would be charged with killing other soldiers or civilians. The most notorious of these was a specialist from Michigan named Robert Marko, who was part of Black Knight Troop. Marko suffered from the psychological delusion that he belonged to a species of alien dinosaur-like creatures known as the Black Raptor Tribe. Several months after we returned from Iraq, he was charged with raping and murdering a nineteen-year-old developmentally disabled woman he had met online. After confessing to the police that he had taken the woman into the mountains overlooking Colorado Springs, where he’d blindfolded her and slit her throat, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. (In February 2011, he was convicted of first-degree murder and is currently serving a life prison sentence, with no possibility of parole.)

  That was enough to make national news.

  In some ways, it may be unfair to mention Marko, because he was such an extreme aberration. But if Marko was an exception to the rule, he offered stark evidence of the unsettling fact that not all of the men who were being pulled into the army at this point represented the cream of the crop—and that the problems Marko brought with him, like everybody’s, were exacerbated by multiple combat deployments.

  Marko also provides an indication of what me and Larson were up against as we set about rebuilding the platoon with the best material we could find, a process known as “stacking.”

  As the longest-serving member of Red, I was afforded quite a bit of leverage when it came to selecting new personnel, and I knew exactly what I was looking for. But I had no influence whatsoever over one of the most important elements of all—because he would set the tone for the entire unit—which was who our new leader would be.

  • • •

  ANDREW BUNDERMANN WAS a history major from the University of Minnesota who’d made a serious (and extremely successful) effort to amass the absolute minimum number of credits necessary to graduate so that he could spend the rest of his college tenure “cocktailing,” which basically meant drinking and hanging out with his bros. In the midst of those pursuits, he also fulfilled his ROTC requirements with the goal of flying jets off of aircraft carriers, a dream that was deep-sixed when the navy flat-out turned him down. Which is how, in May of 2007, Bundermann came to find himself enrolled as a junior-grade lieutenant in the United States Army.

  He was sent through the usual officer’s tour of induction duty: first to Oklahoma for some basic training at Fort Sill that involved, among many other things, teaching him to assemble and take apart a .50-caliber machine gun in under ten minutes without embarrassing himself. That was followed by a stint in Kentucky at Fort Knox, where he got to cruise around in tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles blowing stuff up, which he thoroughly enjoyed.

  This progressive escalation of training and seriousness was partly designed to impart a baseline of military how-to knowledge. But its primary purpose was to expose Bundermann to the men upon whom he would most closely rely in combat: the first sergeants, staff sergeants, and line sergeants who would serve as his noncommissioned officers (NCOs) and who would bridge the gap between the orders that Bundermann passed down from his superiors and the enlisted grunts whose job it would be to make shit happen. And it was during this period that Bundermann began absorbing the first lesson for a newly minted officer who is not a ring-knocker from West Point—a lesson that not every lieutenant in Bundermann’s position chose to absorb—which is to listen to your NCOs and allow them, in a certain sense, to mold you into their leader.

  As it turns out, this was more complicated than Bundermann initially realized because the main message that his NCOs wanted to impart was always trust your NCOs. That advice was generally good; but as Bundermann soon discovered, it wasn’t always good. Sure, it was important for a young lieutenant to take his sergeants’ opinions seriously and make an effort to understand where they were coming from. But this didn’t mean that he should literally do everything they told him to do. In fact, doing that would get him screwed incredibly fast.

  Although a platoon’s sergeants often know far more than their lieutenant, at least from a technical standpoint, they don’t tend to think strategically. Instead, what they’re mostly doing is trying to make sure that things roll smoothly for them and the guys in their squads. And thus one of the key lessons that a lieutenant needs to absorb boils down to this: listen to the people who you’re leading so that they feel like they have a voice, even if they don’t actually have a voice, but never lose sight of the fact that your primary concern is not the men but the mission.

  Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann

  Sometimes it’s the case that the mission’s best interest aligns with that of the men. Sometimes it isn’t. Regardless, an officer’s primary concern starts and ends with the mission. So while it’s important to listen to your men, you’re not there to make friends, because you don’t always have their best interests front of mind.

  I was well versed in this mind-set when I was summoned into Black Knight’s office building in the early fall of 2008 to meet the man who would lead Red Platoon through its next deployment, so I had a decent grasp of the ideas that had been drummed into the new lieutenant’
s head. But I didn’t know the first thing about the man himself.

  The gangly-looking dude sitting before me in a metal chair was as thin as a beanpole, at the top of which someone had affixed a thatch of blondish-brown hair and a face framed by some exceptionally geekish wire-rim glasses.

  “All right, here’s the deal,” Bundermann announced by way of introduction. “I like to chew tobacco, I like to drink beer, and I don’t like to work very hard.”

  That was enough to get my attention.

  “You’re an NCO, which means you’re smarter than me and you have more experience than me,” he continued. “I will trust you one hundred percent to do whatever you think is necessary, and if you fuck up, I’ll take care of the paperwork and I’ll make sure that you have your shit straight.”

  Now he really had me.

  “All I ask in return is that you don’t make me look like an asshole, okay?”

  That was a surprise. It told me that the man I was talking to wasn’t your typical officer, and that if me and the other guys treated him right, we might have a good thing going.

  By this point, I’d already had a bunch of platoon leaders, but none who I truly liked. When I stepped out of that cubicle, I didn’t know if I liked Bundermann either. But I knew that I liked what he said—and it would soon become clear that the other NCOs felt the same.

  From that day forward, we had an unspoken quid pro quo deal with the lieutenant. On our side, we would take care of him by making sure that he always had an ample supply of chewing tobacco and beer, and we’d do our best to make him look like a rock star in the eyes of his superiors.

  In return, we understood that he’d leave us alone to do our jobs—especially our most important job at that moment, which was stacking the platoon by encouraging Black Knight’s first sergeant and the squadron’s sergeant major to take the strongest of the incoming soldiers who were being sent to beef up the troop, and steer them to us.

  • • •

  A TYPICAL PLATOON consists of sixteen frontline soldiers who are divided into two sections, designated “Alpha” and “Bravo.” Each of those sections has two squads composed of four men who are under the command of a sergeant known as a “team leader.” Justin Gallegos was a densely built Hispanic team leader from Tucson who I knew from back in 2005, when we’d both been sent to scout school in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Gallegos’s most obvious asset was his size. He wasn’t exceptionally tall—no more than five ten—but he weighed around 230 pounds and every ounce of it was muscle. He boasted so much bulk and brute strength that the lower enlisted guys called him “Taco Truck,” although that was something they would only do behind his back and never to his face because otherwise they knew they probably wouldn’t survive the beating he’d hand out.

  Justin Gallegos

  The quality that truly defined Gallegos, however, had nothing to do with size and everything to do with a high-voltage aggression he could flip on and off like a light switch. That had worked to his advantage when he was a young man moving through the gang scene in Tucson, and it had played an important role when he joined the army in the hopes of avoiding the fate that befell two of his older brothers (both of whom were rumored to have been killed in gang fights). When he arrived at Carson, he’d just finished pulling the second of his two Iraq deployments, and we scooped him up immediately, knowing that we were lucky to have a team leader who was thoroughly battle tested.

  Gallegos would spend the next couple of weeks in cruise-control mode, often showing up for our morning physical-training sessions with a Gatorade bottle laced with vodka. But we marked that kind of behavior down to his need to blow off some steam after returning from Baghdad. The bottom line was that he had his duties down cold.

  In addition to mastering every aspect of his job, Gallegos made sure that the men who were part of his squad in Bravo section knew their stuff too. He was an exceptionally competent team leader—and his strengths were augmented in a serious way when, just before Christmas, we managed to snag another sergeant named Josh Kirk, who would become Gallegos’s counterpart and companion in Bravo.

  Having recently returned home from his first Afghanistan deployment, where he had seen some significant combat in Kunar Province and been recommended for a medal of valor, Kirk was eligible to spend three or four months in the United States before he could be deployed again. Instead, he’d waived that privilege and put in a special request to be sent back overseas as soon as possible—a highly unusual move, as well as a blunt statement about his love for combat.

  Kirk brought a level of fervor and courage to the platoon that was so far off the charts it was almost crazy. He was all about getting them before they got us, and his energy was nothing short of demonic—attributes that were further magnified by his size and strength. He was taller than Gallegos, weighed at least 210 pounds, and had such powerful hands—they looked like shovel blades—that once, when he lost his temper during a wrestling match, he almost snapped all of his opponent’s fingers. But what put Kirk in a class by himself was his ardor for the tools of war.

  In pretty much any given combat situation, the men who serve in a cavalry platoon have an insane amount of firepower at their fingertips. Given the range of options available, most guys will tend to gravitate to their favorite piece of hardware. Some swear by Mark 19 grenade launchers, while others prefer to lay down the law behind .50-caliber machine guns. But Kirk could never restrict himself to just one weapons system, because he coveted and cherished them all.

  According to some of the men with whom he’d served in Afghanistan, Kirk had been like a kid in an arcade over there. At the start of a firefight, they told us, he’d grab hold of an AT4 rocket launcher and let loose, then jump on the .50-cal for a couple of long and deeply satisfying bursts before switching over to the Mark 19. It wasn’t unusual for him to finish out by having another go with the AT4. He so loved the shooting and the adrenaline rush it inevitably triggered that sometimes his commanders needed to reel the dude back in.

  “We’re not looking to pick a fight today,” they’d tell him, “so let’s calm down a bit.”

  Like Gallegos, Kirk was utterly fearless, although he preferred to allow his responses during battle to be driven by emotion rather than analysis, whereas Gallegos was more methodical and deliberate. In this way, they balanced each other out, and their combined fury made us considerably more formidable than we otherwise would have been.

  These were all things that Bundermann appreciated and valued, which enabled our lieutenant to overlook both men’s drawbacks: Gallegos’s drinking and volatile moods; Kirk’s arrogance and refusal to shut the hell up, along with the pleasure that he took in committing minor infractions like not keeping his hair cut or wearing a nonregulation special forces neck scarf under his uniform, which would drive our sergeant major nuts.

  In Bundermann’s estimation, Kirk’s and Gallegos’s skills and personalities dovetailed in a way that provided a rock-solid foundation for Bravo section. They knew what they were supposed to do, they took care of the people under them, and they were in absolute top-notch physical condition. (That last item may not sound super important, but it was a huge deal in Bundermann’s book because nothing brought more grief down on his head than a major or a captain strolling past the platoon and catching sight of some guy who appeared flabby or weak.)

  In short, Kirk and Gallegos reinforced a sense that our unit was in tune and humming—an impression that offered an effective counterweight when we found ourselves taking on a couple of new characters who were slightly less hard-core.

  Josh Kirk

  • • •

  ZACH KOPPES had grown up in the middle of Amish country in Ohio and attended a Mennonite school until he was booted for stealing the key to a test and trying to sell the answers to his fellow students. That was the beginning of a long slide that took Koppes through an ungodly amount of pot smoking, a dead-end gig at an Aunt
ie Anne’s pretzel stand in Colorado, and a trip to a Petco store—where he was hoping to apply for a job—that was waylaid when he passed by an army recruiter’s office, spotted a sign promising a twenty-thousand-dollar signing bonus, and decided that working with animals didn’t sound nearly as exciting as shooting people.

  At the end of that road, which ushered him through basic training and a stint in Korea, was our platoon. And there, shortly after arriving in June, he struck up a friendship with another new arrival: a guy who shared Koppes’s penchant for combining idiocy and humor with a wild streak that was spectacularly and uniquely his own.

  Zach Koppes

  Stephan Mace was from rural Virginia, and when he was growing up, he was so deeply into firearms that he’d apprenticed himself to a gunsmith in high school, fashioned a rifle from scratch, and given it to his dad for Christmas. He also had a taste for the kind of irreverence that involved stunts like pulling down his pants while riding in the passenger seat of his mom’s car in order to moon his football coach as they drove past.

  When Mace got to the army, that mischievousness started coming out in ways that were both maddening and endearing, often at the same time. If he was bored by what you were saying, he’d close his eyes and tilt his head to the side, then slump down in his chair and start snoring loudly, pretending that you’d put him to sleep. On the other hand, if he happened to walk by your bunk while you were asleep, he’d insistently tap you on the shoulder until you woke up and asked what was going on.

  Stephan Mace

  “Oh, I was just making sure you were sleeping,” he’d say innocently before walking away.