Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  For the better part of the past fifteen minutes, the sniper who had taken down Scusa had been doing his best to eliminate Koppes. The shooter was tucked somewhere up inside the steep and densely vegetated slopes along the North Face, directly behind Koppes, and his aim was to fire through the foliage of a clump of ash trees, located directly behind the truck, in the hopes of drilling Koppes in the back of the head.

  Although the rear of the turret was protected by a heavy piece of Kevlar tarp that was capable of absorbing shrapnel fragments and most small-arms rounds, Koppes had no way of turning around and returning fire. In addition to the fact that the turret of the Humvee could not rotate all the way to the rear, the lone tree directly behind him not only provided concealment but also prevented him from seeing where the sniper was shooting from. What troubled Koppes even more, however, was that the Kevlar tarp was coming to pieces.

  Each bullet that skipped off the top of the tarp would take off another piece of the fabric while sending a tiny puff of air against the back of Koppes’s neck. That was disconcerting enough, but the rounds that struck the tarp directly were now leaving tiny holes, through which the sunlight was boring. With each additional shot, another beam of light shot through the Kevlar. Koppes knew that it was only a matter of time before the sniper got lucky and put a bullet straight into his brainpan—and that the only way to turn the situation around was to get another sniper out to the gun truck.

  Catching Koppes’s message as I turned to exit the aid station, I glanced to my left and spotted the blind Afghan soldier who had been giving Courville such problems. He was now slumped in a chair that had been placed right next to the door, and his entire head was covered in thick strips of gauze that Courville had wrapped around his face to support his ruined eyeballs. The blood running down his cheeks from his eye sockets had soaked through the gauze and formed crimson-colored lines that made it appear as if he was shedding tears of blood. The scene was horrifying enough to make one want to look away. But something about him made me pause on my way to the door.

  Resting in his lap was a leather bandolier lined with copper-tipped bullets, and leaning against the wall directly to his left was a Dragunov sniper rifle.

  Looking back on that moment now, I’d like to say that my heart went out to the wounded soldier. But in truth, the only thing I registered was that his weapon, for which he no longer had any use, was exactly the thing I needed. And then there was another thought too:

  Cool—I’ve always wanted to shoot a Dragunov.

  I plucked the ammo belt out of the man’s lap, snatched hold of the sniper rifle, and headed out the door to make a run for Koppes’s truck.

  As I took off, I could hear Gallegos’s voice on my radio. He sounded agitated, and he was now barking at Hardt:

  “We do not need you. Get the hell out of here—it’s a death trap!”

  I had no idea what was taking place. But if Gallegos’s words were anything to judge by, things were not going well out on the far side of camp.

  • • •

  TO GRASP the full measure of what was about to befall Hardt and his team, it’s necessary to pause and take a step back to the moment just before Hardt and I got into our argument in the barracks—the moment when I ordered Chris Jones to head up to the trench by the mosque and lend a hand to Justin Gregory.

  As soon as Jones was given that command, he flung himself into a fifteen-yard uphill sprint toward the back side of the mosque, drawing fire the entire way. His run was interrupted by several rockets, one of which landed close enough to knock him on his butt.

  “Greg, what’s goin’ on, man?” he gasped as he’d finally arrived and slid into the shallow trench where Gregory was huddled. “Where are they at?”

  Although Gregory was a veteran with more than five years of experience, he’d spent most of his army stint in Fort Knox, Kentucky, where much of his nonduty time had been devoted to sharpening knives, which were something of an obsession with him. Unlike Jones, he was timid and often withdrawn. Prior to this deployment, he’d never even been shot at. And thanks to all of that, he wasn’t responding well at all to his current predicament. In short, he was flat-out terrified.

  “They’re fucking everywhere,” replied Gregory.

  “Well, yeah,” conceded Jones, who felt as if he’d stepped into the center of a circular firing squad. “You know, they are pretty much everywhere.”

  At that moment, an RPG slammed into the mosque, blowing out all the windows on the south side of the building and sending the pieces down on both men. The shower of shattered glass seemed to underscore just how cut off they were, and because neither of them had a radio, they didn’t have the faintest clue what was happening elsewhere. (To avoid the chaos that would be created by everyone attempting to communicate at once, we normally restricted radios to team leaders, who would communicate verbally with soldiers like Jones and Gregory.)

  Unlike Gregory, Jones understood that it wasn’t acceptable to simply keep their heads down and cower at the bottom of the trench in the hope that things would somehow improve. Whatever else might be happening, they needed to put up a fight and return some fire.

  “All right, Greg, let’s do this,” said Jones, taking hold of the much heavier Mark 48 while Gregory switched to a squad automatic weapon, which we referred to as a SAW. “On the count of three, we’re gonna jump up, and we’re gonna suppress.”

  The plan was for Jones to concentrate on the Switchbacks while Gregory focused on the front gate and the North Face.

  Jones jumped up, laid the Mark 48 along the top of the trench, and began spraying disciplined three- to five-round trigger bursts, taking aim at the myriad muzzle flashes he could see across the Switchbacks and the Waterfall area. As he fired, he also spotted something much closer at hand.

  Hardt and Chris Griffin, a young specialist from Blue Platoon, seemed to be in the midst of an ammo run. Both men were carrying boxes of .50-cal bullets, and they were racing as fast as they could for Truck 1.

  Jones tried his best to lay down cover fire for the two runners, who made it safely into the truck. Within seconds, however, Jones could see that he had drawn the attention of several enemy gunners, who were now zeroed in on him. It was at this moment that he also realized, to his frustration, that he was all by himself.

  Gregory had never even bothered to stand up.

  Disgusted, Jones flung himself back into the trench. He lay there for a moment, staring up at the sky, and was wondering what his next move should be when suddenly, Josh Dannelley’s head appeared over the lip of the trench.

  Dannelley and two other guys from Blue and HQ Platoons had been taking cover behind the toolshed, twenty yards away. Now they too were about to attempt to make a push up the hill to Truck 1.

  “We’re gonna run some ammo up to Faulkner,” Dannelley yelled as rounds snapped the air on both sides of his face. “We need you to guys to cover us.”

  To Jones, this seemed weird. Hadn’t Hardt and Griffin just pulled off that very job? Did Dannelley have a clue what the hell he was doing?

  Without a radio, there was no way to make sense of anything, so Jones figured it was best to do as he was told. When Dannelley and his guys started running for Truck 1, Jones popped back up with the machine gun—and this time, Gregory joined him.

  Because Gregory was facing in the direction of the front gate and the North Face, he missed what happened next. But Jones caught the whole thing.

  As Dannelley and his guys took off, they drew a ferocious amount of fire. By some miracle, none of them were hit. But within a few steps, they realized that Truck 1 was no longer there.

  Baffled by the empty space, they turned in confusion, raced downhill, and piled back into the trench with Jones and Gregory.

  Jones had no idea why the guys in Truck 1 had pulled the vehicle out of its established battle position. He knew nothing about where they might have he
aded, or why. But he did know one thing, which is that Hardt, Griffin, and Faulkner were now driving into the teeth of a ferocious shit storm that had enveloped the entire western half of the outpost.

  Where did they go, he wondered as he slammed himself back into the trench with Gregory, and what the hell are they trying to pull off?

  • • •

  WHEN HARDT AND GRIFFIN tumbled into the cab of Truck 1, Hardt took the front passenger seat while Faulkner dropped into the driver’s seat. As Griffin climbed into the turret and got behind the machine gun, Faulkner turned the ignition key and threw the truck into gear.

  Hardt ordered Faulkner to pull away from the side of the massive, potato-shaped boulder that protected the west flank of the gun truck, and drive toward the showers by cutting along the north side of the mechanics’ bay. Significantly, this was exactly the route I’d urged him not to take. Instead of snaking along the back side of the mechanics’ bay, which would have shielded his movements, he would be out in the open and visible. The right side of his vehicle would be completely exposed to rockets and gunfire coming off of the North Face, as well as from the direction of the front gate.

  I can’t say anything about why Hardt elected to take that route, except to speculate that he may have been lured by the desire to get to Gallegos and his team by the quickest and most direct line available. Regardless, the moment the gun truck left the protection of the rock and emerged into the open ground just beyond, which was now a kind of no-man’s-land, it became a fat target. All across the North Face, the Switchbacks, and the Putting Green, Taliban gunners started training their weapons on the truck and showering it with everything they had.

  As sniper rounds and sustained bursts of machine-gun fire struck the windshield and the turret, Griffin did his best to return fire. But he was hampered by the need to swing the weapon in three directions. Within a minute, he found himself forced repeatedly to duck down inside the turret.

  When Gallegos, who was communicating with Hardt on the radio, realized that the Humvee was moving along the most exposed and dangerous route, a new tone of stridency entered Gallegos’s voice as he ordered Hardt to turn back before it was too late. And it was now that Hardt’s strengths as a soldier—his stubbornness, his resiliency, his refusal to back down without having finished what he had set out to do—started working against him.

  Ignoring Gallegos, he told Faulkner to keep rolling.

  They crept along at five miles an hour as Faulkner methodically threaded between obstacles that arose in his path. Despite the heavy incoming fire, the truck made steady progress. In less than ten minutes, the front of Truck 1 had pulled to a stop about five yards behind the rear of LRAS2.

  There are so many blind spots from the cab of a fully up-armored Humvee that you can’t really see anything that isn’t directly in front or squarely off to the sides, so Gallegos had no way of observing Truck 1, even through his rearview mirror. Nevertheless, he knew exactly how much danger Hardt and his team were in—which is why he started flat-out screaming into the radio:

  “Get the fuck outta here,” he yelled. “Go now! Go-go-go-GO!”

  As if to drive home Gallegos’s order, an RPG scored a direct hit on the front windshield of Truck 1, engulfing the hood of the vehicle in a wall of flames while sending a torrent of shrapnel over the turret and into Griffin’s face and chest.

  Now, finally, Hardt fully understood that the firepower that was being brought to bear on this battle position was simply too intense to permit the men trapped inside LRAS2 to withdraw safely.

  “Sorry we couldn’t help,” Hardt radioed to Gallegos as he ordered Faulkner to back up and get them out of there. “We’re leaving.”

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be possible.

  • • •

  MONTHS EARLIER, the unit that was deployed at Keating prior to our arrival had begun erecting a new building directly to the west of the mechanics’ bay. The purpose of this structure had never been explained to any of us, and it didn’t really matter, because the walls were only partially finished when orders came to halt construction.

  One of those walls, which was less than ten feet behind Hardt’s gun truck, had started coming apart under the impact of the dozens of rockets that had landed in the area, crumpling to form a mound of rocks and rubble. In his haste to get out of the kill zone, Faulkner now proceeded to reverse Truck 1 directly into this berm, hitting the pile of debris with enough force that his vehicle shot all the way to the top of the mound before coming to an abrupt stop.

  Faulkner made repeated attempts to ram the truck backward and forward, but it wasn’t going anywhere. The chassis of the Humvee was high-centered and its wheels were no longer touching the ground. Firmly stuck, they were now little more than sitting ducks.

  “Hey, we can’t maneuver,” Hardt radioed to Gallegos. “Hold on.”

  Gallegos had been right. It was a death trap.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  “Charlie in the Wire”

  THE ROUTE THAT I TOOK to get from the aid station to Koppes’s gun truck led directly across the dirt alleyway where Scusa had already been killed. I’m not sure why that same sniper didn’t nail me too—perhaps some residual haze from the smoke grenades was still hanging over the roofs of the buildings. But regardless of the reason, I was able to dash across the fifteen-foot gap without incident and reach the side of Koppes’s Humvee.

  When I looked up, I could see that rounds were striking the turret and the doors from every direction. Hunched inside and trying to keep as low as possible, Koppes looked absolutely miserable.

  “Hey, dude,” I called out, trying to sound as casual as possible. “You doing okay?”

  “Not really,” he replied. “I’ve got this sniper at my back.”

  From the sound of his voice, it was clear that Koppes was deeply scared.

  “Oh, man, you don’t need to worry about that,” I joked. “We’re all gonna die today.”

  The expression on Koppes’s face suggested that he was weighing the possibility that I might have lost my mind in the heat of combat. (His impression of my sanity probably wasn’t helped by the fact that while getting blown off the generator by the RPG blast, I had apparently taken a knock to the front of my face, and my teeth were now covered in blood.)

  There was no point in trying to explain things, so I told him to just keep his head down and maintain his sector of fire while I got to work trying to weed out the sniper.

  I had only a crude knowledge of the weapon I’d pulled off the Afghan soldier, but my main concern was that its owner might not have zeroed in the scope, which meant that I couldn’t be sure of its accuracy. However, the Dragunov’s 7.62 round was significantly heavier than what my M4 fired, so I could reach out a lot farther and, even if I only clipped my target, do considerably more damage to him.

  I started off on the back side of the truck. Standing next to the bumper, I scanned the North Face through the scope, looking for spots that might conceal the sniper, mainly by trying to pick out positions that I knew I would use, while keeping an eye peeled for any sign of a muzzle flash. I picked a few areas where he might be hiding and placed a few rounds into those spots. Then I pulled back, moved to the front side of the truck, and repeated the process, darting back-and-forth between the bumper and the area where the windshield met the hood. It was strange game to play, and it was made doubly surreal because as I was conducting these moves, I could hear Gallegos still yelling at Hardt through the radio in my ear:

  “Get out of there. Do not come. Turn around. Go back!”

  It wasn’t long before I caught the shooter’s attention and we found ourselves involved in a deadly, high-stakes game of peekaboo. I’d dash to the back of the Humvee and fire off a few rounds. Then I’d sprint to the front and throw a couple of head fakes without actually firing before returning to the back and trying to pinpoint his location as he con
tinued shooting at the place where I’d just been. My aim was to stay on the move, vary my pattern, keep him guessing.

  After several minutes of this hide-and-seek routine, I’d gotten a reasonable bead on where I thought he was—a stack of rocks that was heavily concealed by foliage—and I put a series of seven shots directly into that spot. At no point did I see the sniper’s profile in the scope of the Dragunov—nor, after nailing those shots home, did I spot anything to indicate that I’d taken him out. All I can say for certain is that after unloading the better part of a magazine into the place where I thought he’d wedged himself, the gunfire subsided and Koppes’s tarp stopped absorbing rounds.

  With the job taken care of, at least for the moment, I looked up at Koppes, who appeared grateful for the help, even if he was still wondering about my sanity.

  “You good?” I asked him. “You got ammo?”

  “I’m good for now,” he called down.

  “Okay, dude, now listen to me,” I said. “The Afghan Army guys have abandoned their positions, so there’s just one thing blocking the Taliban from rolling in off the east side. Right now, you are the only gun in this fight, and the only guy who is watching our back door. Do you get that?”

  As he confirmed that he understood, our exchange was interrupted by a series of sharp concussions, one after the other, coming from beyond the aid station toward the western side of camp, where Hardt and his team were.

  My God, Hardt, what have you done? I wondered as I peeled away from Koppes’s gun truck and started running west with the Dragunov.

  • • •

  WHEN THE ENEMY realized that Truck 1 was immobilized, they directed every ounce of fire they had at Hardt’s Humvee. As the body of the vehicle was struck from all sides, Hardt realized that he and his team had very little time and almost zero options. Their best move, he decided, was that Faulkner and Griffin would make a run for it while he climbed into the turret and tried to lay down some cover fire for their escape.