Hardt was poised to get into the turret when Griffin opened the rear passenger door on the right side of the vehicle and jumped out. This exposed him to the enemy gunners who were preparing to storm the front gate, and they were on him so fast that several of the rounds they were firing at him went into the Humvee before Hardt could even shut the door.
As with Michael Scusa and many of the other junior enlisted guys in Blue Platoon, I barely knew the first thing about Chris Griffin. We had probably spoken directly on less than a dozen occasions. What little I’d seen had impressed me—unlike many of his peers, he didn’t complain, he never seemed to get rattled, and he was always where he was supposed to be. But other than that, he was a bit of an enigma.
Chris Griffin
Thanks to the predicament in which Griffin now found himself, neither I nor anyone else would ever be able to discover much about what happened during the final seconds of his life. But here’s what I can say.
Griffin’s body wound up roughly a hundred yards away from where he stepped down from the truck, lying in an open spot of ground right outside the Shura Building, which is the area where his killers were coming from—and therefore the last place toward which he should have been running. There’s no way of knowing whether he was killed right next to the truck and then was dragged down toward the Shura Building, or if he simply became so disoriented that he ended up running directly into the enemy. Those are details that we would never be able to assemble into anything that made sense—but we did piece together a picture of how he was killed. And, by God, it was brutal.
Griffin was shot twice in the face. The first bullet went through the left side of his temple and the other punched through the left side of his jaw. Both caused extensive skull fractures while tearing the inside of his brain into pieces. He took a third shot to his back, which shattered several of his ribs and blew out his liver. The fourth shot fractured his left forearm, while the fifth shattered his right femur. The sixth and seventh went through his left buttock, and the final round hit him in the left thigh.
In all, he was shot eight separate times. It was a horrible and violent death, and perhaps its only note of grace is that it may have purchased a few additional seconds of breathing space for his two companions—although this is questionable, given that the main threat that Faulkner and Hardt were now confronting was coming from the opposite side of the truck, where Faulkner had just spotted three Taliban by the laundry trailer.
They were clad in Afghan Security Guard uniforms, and one of them was taking aim with a rocket launcher.
“They’re shooting at us!” yelled Hardt as the rocket smacked directly into the driver’s-side windshield, penetrating the bulletproof glass and driving shards of shrapnel all along the left side of Faulkner’s body, from his arm and shoulder blade down to his thigh.
As Faulkner screamed in pain, Hardt did his best to reassure him. “You’re good, you’re good!” he yelled.
With the enemy now poised to swarm the truck, it was imperative that they evacuate. But there was no plan, other than the vague notion that Faulkner would exit on the driver’s side, crouch down, then open the rear door on that side, which would shield him from fire while enabling Hardt to get out.
Instead, Faulkner, who was now so disoriented that he couldn’t even figure out where his gun was, opened the door and simply started running.
He had no idea where he was going; all he knew was that he needed to move as rapidly as he could, and that he wanted to get as far away from the Humvee as possible. Without even turning around to confirm whether Hardt had made it out of the truck, he sprinted east as fast as his legs would carry him.
It’s hard now to imagine how Faulkner actually survived that mad dash, unarmed and blinded by pain, across the most exposed part of camp, around the mosque, down the alley between Red barracks and the command post, and through the front door of the aid station. When he stumbled inside, he looked as if he’d just been dragged through hell on a chain. His face was lacerated and absolutely covered in blood. Even worse was his left arm—an arm that had already been flayed open two years earlier in Iraq, and was now torn in the exact same places as before.
“They got me in the arm,” he kept saying. “They got me in my arm!”
While the medics set about patching him up, they tried to get Faulkner to share some information on what had happened, but he was so traumatized and confused that he wasn’t able to share any details that made sense. He had no idea what had become of Griffin. He seemed to be under the vague impression that Hardt might still be out there by himself and perhaps still in the fight, but he couldn’t offer a single coherent thought about where Hardt might actually be. Nor could he provide any info on how the guys from Gallegos’s team were faring.
Suddenly, a voice could be heard coming over the radio—
“Holy fuck!” cried Hardt.
Everyone in camp who was still alive and tuned to the Force Pro net heard what followed:
“They’ve got an RPG pointed right at me!”
Then the radio went dead.
• • •
IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to say whether the Taliban rocket team that Hardt was staring at was part of the same group of men who had slaughtered Griffin just a few minutes earlier. It’s also impossible to say whether Hardt managed to get any shots of his own off before they unleashed their RPG. All we really know is that the rocket that they fired at him was an armor-defeating round, and that it punched through the rear door on the right side of the truck, spewing shrapnel everywhere.
Somehow, Hardt survived that blast and made out of the truck, probably by scrambling through one of the two doors on the opposite side. Then he started running south in the direction of the maintenance shed, which was about five yards away from the truck.
At some point during that desperate race, he was shot twice in the left side of his chest. One bullet passed through his left lung, diaphragm, and spleen before exiting his back, while the second shot shattered his first three ribs. He was also shot once in the left arm, and once in the left leg.
While all of those wounds caused extensive damage and blood loss, they probably didn’t kill him. Instead, as we would later discover, he was finished off by three gunshots that were administered to the left side of his head.
• • •
WHEN I HEARD Hardt’s radio transmission, I knew nothing about what had happened to Griffin or Faulkner. My only goal, as I raced away from Koppes’s gun truck, was to get to someplace where I could see Hardt and support him—and the best place to do that was the café, which afforded a view of the western end of camp and might enable me to get a sense of what was going on.
When I posted up with the Dragunov at the café’s wall of sandbags, I could just barely see the back hatch of LRAS2, which looked like a scorched hunk of metal. There was no sign of any movement around it. As for Hardt’s gun truck, my line of sight to it was entirely blocked by a “hippo,” a huge water-holding tank that was located on the south side of the shower trailers.
As I took in the scene, a movement in the foreground caught my eye. A trio of heavily armed Taliban fighters was emerging from around the back of Truck 2, the Humvee from which Jonathan Adams had been laying down fire with an M-19 grenade launcher during the first several minutes of the battle before being forced to abandon his position.
It was a three-man rocket team, and it was clear that they had come through the front gate and around the corner of the Shura Building. The man in the front and the man in the rear both had chest rigs and were carrying AK-47s. The middle guy was toting an RPG on his shoulder, and he had a pack with his extra rounds strapped to his back. The RPG shooter was wearing a black headband with Arabic writing on it.
As I took in these details, Janis Lakis, the Latvian military advisor, moved into the café area and took a position by my left elbow. By this point, Lakis had abandoned his efforts
to get the Afghan Army soldiers under his supervision to help defend the camp. Instead, he’d concluded that the most effective thing he could do was link up with us and lend a hand. It was a decision that I welcomed because, in addition to his skills and experience, he’d brought along his H&K G-36 rifle, which was fitted with a .203 grenade launcher.
“Hey, Lakis,” I asked softly, “there’s no way that these three guys could be your Afghan Army dudes, is there?”
As Lakis shook his head, the man with the RPG rested his weapon on the back of the Humvee, leaned against the gun truck, and started making an adjustment to his headband.
What shocked me even more than the presence of an enemy fighter standing directly in the center of camp was the casual manner in which he was behaving. He and his companions were stopping for a little tactical pause to catch their breath and regroup before continuing their advance. It was clear that they weren’t expecting any resistance, and that they had no idea they were being observed.
Then it hit me:
This was probably the team that had just taken out Hardt.
From where I was standing, the insurgents were roughly fifty yards away. Through the scope of the Dragunov, however, the distance seemed to shrink to no more than about ten feet. The setup reminded me of what it used to be like at night back home on my dad’s ranch when you shined a spotlight on some jackrabbits and they just froze and let you line up your shot.
Damn, this is an absolute gimme, I thought as I exhaled to steady the gun and curled my finger around the trigger.
The man with the RPG had the biggest weapon, so my plan was to deal with him first, swing to the right to catch the second guy before he realized what was happening, then finish the job by picking off the third dude as he started his run.
At such close range, the sniper rifle would probably fire a notch or two high. So as the RPG shooter finished messing with his headband and straightened up to present a full-on silhouette, I put the crosshairs of the scope at the bottom of his sternum, directly on the bony nub known as the xiphoid process, and touched off the shot.
It turned out I was right—instead of nailing the center of his thorax, the bullet tore through the man’s left clavicle, just above his heart.
As his two companions registered what was happening and exchanged an oh, shit! look, I was already swinging right and dropping the front guy by punching him with two shots, one in the left lung and the second in the hip.
As he went down, I swung left and tried to pop the third member of the team just as he bolted around to the back of the truck, where I could see him trying to hide between the wheels.
Under normal circumstances, it would have been a simple matter to take him out by putting some rounds underneath the truck, which sat at least eighteen inches off the ground. However, most of this clearance was obscured by a short terrace of stacked rocks that ran around the front of the truck.
Knowing that I couldn’t peg the insurgent with a straight shot, I started skipping rounds, aiming at the ground just a few feet in front of the truck in the hope that one of the bullets would bounce up into him. As I fired repeatedly, I could see the Taliban shooter making frantic motions along the ground with his hand, beckoning back toward the front gate, where it seemed likely that his companions were massing.
“Lakis,” I called out, “hit him with your frickin’ grenade!”
“How far do you think?” Lakis asked as he opened the breech and threw in a .203 round.
“Dunno. Can’t be more than fifty meters.”
The grenade launcher gave off its distinctive doonk! and the snub-nosed projectile sailed across camp in a graceful little arc to land perfectly on the far side of the gun truck and detonate with a satisfying thump and crack.
The Taliban soldier vanished.
“Fifty meters!” exclaimed Lakis in his Schwarzenegger accent, nodding with approval. “Ja!”
• • •
LOOKING BACK ON that moment now, I suppose I should have been pleased at having taken out the guys who had probably nailed Hardt. But at the time I had more pressing things on my mind, chief among them the shocking realization that a team of enemy soldiers had just waltzed through our front gate.
Up until that moment, I don’t think I truly understood how compromised we were. The idea that we might be overrun was no longer just a dreadful possibility. It was actually happening.
And what’s more, the process had already started in earnest just uphill to my left, where an isolated little pocket of men that included Jones, Gregory, and Dannelley was struggling to hold the trench next to the mosque.
This group included some of the youngest and least experienced soldiers in the outpost. Thanks to the fact that they didn’t have a radio, they’d received no word of what was taking place elsewhere, including Hardt’s final transmission. And unbeknownst to me, they were about to confront an even bigger pack of Taliban.
• • •
PART OF THE IRONY of Hardt’s failed rescue attempt is that his mission may have inadvertently triggered the very thing that he was trying to prevent, which was a concerted bid on the part of the enemy to breach the western part of our camp. Hardt’s high-centered Humvee had presented such a compelling target that it had encouraged several groups of fighters to pour through the wire from both the north and the south. With Truck 1’s team now taken out of the picture, those enemy fighters saw no reason not to keep pushing directly toward the center of camp—which put a group of them on a collision course with Jones’s team in the trench.
During the past ten minutes, the situation confronting Jones and his guys had gone from bad to worse. There were now almost half a dozen men inside the ditch—Jones and Gregory, plus Dannelley and his companions—and all of them were pinned down. The moment that one of them would raise his head or the barrel of his weapon above the lip of the trench, the enemy gunners along the ridgelines would direct a furious burst of fire in their direction.
That was fearsome enough, but the grenades that had blown out the windows of the mosque next to them had also ignited a fire that was now consuming the building, and someone was evidently trapped inside. Jones and his companions had no idea who this might be. But judging from the wild, high-pitched screams that the man was emitting in either Pashto or Nuristani as he burned to death, he was an Afghan construction worker, an Afghan soldier, or perhaps even the imam himself.
Despite the risks, Jones and his companions had been popping out of the trench every couple of minutes to return fire—usually selecting a different spot in order to confuse the enemy gunners.
“Okay, guys,” Jones would say, “let’s pop up real quick and see what’s going on. No big deal.”
Up went their heads and their weapons. Sometimes they’d be able to put out some return fire; other times they’d be driven back down by sniper fire before they could get off a shot.
During one of these moments, Gregory spotted something.
“I see two dudes over by the showers!” he exclaimed as he ducked down again.
Jones had caught sight of them too. They were no more than fifteen feet away. Both men were clad in the brown “man-jam” robes that were standard-issue garb among civilians.
Jones’s first assumption was that they were Afghan workers who had somehow gotten trapped within the outpost. But they were so close that not only could he hear their voices—he could also detect the distinctive click/pop as they pulled the pins on the grenades they were preparing to throw.
“Holy shit, those are Taliban,” he thought. “Inside our wire.”
With that, Jones, Gregory, and Dannelley popped up in unison, weapons raised, and took them down. (Gregory fired almost fifty rounds from his SAW, emptying an entire belt of ammo). A beat of relief quickly gave way to the realization that there surely must be more—a fact that was confirmed by the arrival of Kenny Daise, a soldier with HQ Platoon, who brea
thlessly slid into the trench with Kyle Knight.
“We’ve got guys on the COP!” Daise reported breathlessly.
Daise just come from the Shura Building after failing to hold his position there and being forced to fall back. On the way up to the trench leading to the mosque, he had met and locked eyes with a bearded Taliban fighter clad in a dirty overshirt and a white turban who was carrying an AK-47. The man was no more than seventy-five feet away. Both he and Daise had raised their weapons to fire, but the Taliban’s gun had jammed, while Daise was too slow and didn’t get off a shot until his target ducked back around the corner.
Dude, of course we’ve got guys on the COP, thought Jones. Tell me something I don’t know.
That wasn’t the only news Daise had, however.
“Kirk didn’t make it—he’s dead,” he reported.
Then Daise reached for his radio, keyed the mike, and said something that none of us had ever expected to hear, except maybe in a movie:
“Charlie in the wire!” he yelled. “Charlie in the wire!”
• • •
ALL OVER THE OUTPOST, guys on the Force Pro net found themselves doing a double take and, despite the fact that the current state of battle represented a kind of nadir of direness, cracked a smile and shook their heads.
Staff Sergeant Daise had the less-than-stellar reputation of being a little slow—the kind of older guy who was, both literally and symbolically, perpetually a step or two behind everybody else.
Daise had been in the army for more than fifteen years, which was plenty long enough to earn him the label of a relic among most of the younger guys. And now, for reasons so unfathomable that it seemed pointless to even try to parse them, Daise had pounded that reputation home by invoking a phrase lifted from the jungles of Vietnam and applying the thing to a firefight in the mountains of Afghanistan.
Red Platoon Page 19