Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  With his gun raised, he leaned around the corner and punched a grenade through the middle of the door.

  As the plywood exploded and the room beyond it filled with a ball of fire, Dulaney hurled himself down the alley with me and Miller in tow. What happened next wasn’t the sort of thing you’d find in a military textbook, because it was more of a rugby play, except with guns.

  We rolled in a tightly linked mass, back-to-back and stride for stride. I had the rear handle of Dulaney’s body armor firmly in my left hand and was resting the barrel of my assault rifle on his right shoulder so that I could spray to the right as soon as I entered. Directly behind me, Miller was doing the same thing, but his weapon was resting on my left shoulder so that he could sweep in the opposite direction.

  The second Dulaney cleared the door frame, he started his sweep, and by the time he’d completed his rotation, he’d emptied an entire drum of ammo—two hundred rounds—into the room. Miller and I joined in as soon as we were inside. The noise we generated was defeaning, which was disorienting enough. But as we fired, the room filled up with a mysterious white smoke.

  We hadn’t anticipated the smoke.

  It was horrible stuff—blinding, impossible to breathe, harsh enough to make it feel as if we’d stormed into a factory that made pepper spray. By our second or third inhalation, it felt like our lungs had quit working. But we were fully committed and had no choice except to push through while we sputtered and gagged.

  “Keeping moving—KEEP MOVING!” I screamed at Dulaney as I shoved him from behind.

  “Can’t breathe,” gasped Dulaney. Can’t even see!”

  “I don’t care,” I yelled back. “Keep going till you hit the wall or someone shoots you. Move!”

  Finally, we made it to the west door at the far end of the room.

  There, just outside the door and less than an arm’s length away, a pair of AK-47s and a PKM heavy machine gun lay in the dirt. They had been abandoned just seconds earlier. The barrel of the machine gun, still cradled in its tripod, was pointed directly at the door we’d just come through.

  While Dulaney and Miller dragged the weapons inside, I marched back across the room, where Raz was supposed to have posted up with his gun leveled into the alleyway we’d just run through to ensure that nobody snuck up and took us out from behind. Instead, he was crouched with his hands over his knees and vomiting on the toes of his boots.

  “You motherfucker,” I yelled. “Did you fire a CS grenade through that door?!” (A CS grenade contains tear gas.)

  “No way—it was HE, guaranteed!” he yelled back, using the term for a high-explosive grenade, which was exactly what he was supposed to have used.

  By this point, the room was starting to clear out and we spotted the source of the smoke.

  By some weird combination of skill and dumb luck, Raz had managed not only to put his grenade through the door itself but to send the thing all the way to the far wall, where it had center-plugged a twenty-pound fire extinguisher that had been sitting just to the left of the west door.

  The secondary explosion from the extinguisher, and the acrid waves of smoke that it generated, must have been a nasty surprise to the insurgents inside that room, supplying the extra kick that drove them from the building.

  I paused just long enough to glance at the destroyed extinguisher and the PKM machine gun that was now lying next to it. If those fighters had chosen to hold their ground and turned the full force of that gun on my squad instead of fleeing, they would have cut us to pieces.

  Raz had just saved all of our lives.

  We didn’t have a chance to thank him, though, because the Taliban were about to turn things up another notch.

  • • •

  ENRAGED OVER HAVING been forced to give up such a key position, the insurgents now gave vent to their anger by shooting at the Shura Building with everything they had. As the four of us set up points of domination at the entryways—two men to a door—bullets began thudding off the outside walls with dull slaps while the entire structure shivered from the impact of dozens of exploding rockets. The intensity of this renewed engagement resembled the first few minutes of the initial attack. Crouched inside, it seemed as if the building was hit with some form of explosive every three seconds.

  It was dark inside that room—the wooden covers on the three windows on the north side of the building were fastened shut—and the air was thick with dust from the walls and the remnants of the smoke from the fire extinguisher. But as we huddled against the walls, holes began appearing as the plywood roof was shot to pieces. And with each new bullet hole, another pencil beam of sunlight appeared, cutting a line from the ceiling to the floor and illuminating the swirling dust particles that were suspended in the air and vibrating with each new shock wave.

  The room took on the appearance of a grotesque dance club whose walls and floor coruscated with the light of a devil’s disco ball. But even more striking—the thing that overrode both sight and sound—was the overpowering smell. It was an odor I’d never before encountered, an olfactory assault composed of several layers. There was the sulfuric tang of gunpowder from the exploding rockets. There was the chalky odor of the chemicals in the fire extinguisher. And there was the smell of Kirk’s blood, which had spread to form a dark and sticky pool on the plywood floor just inside the entryway of the west door. I could taste that combination of sulfur and chalk and copper on my tongue. It was sharp and heavy, and it grabbed the back of my jaws in a way that made me feel like I was about to gag. The pungency seemed to underscore how tenuous and uncertain our grip on the building was.

  At this point, we were extremely vulnerable. With the west door that led to the front gate wide-open, our standoff—the open stretch of ground in which we would be able to spot any attackers who were trying to rush us—was no more than fifteen feet. If the enemy decided to come at us with a dozen or more guys in a full-on sprint from the ASG checkpoint, just twenty feet away, they would be on top of us before we could react.

  In the hopes of slowing them down, we started tearing the room apart. The wooden benches, the chairs and tables, the raised area where the elders sat during our meetings with locals—we ripped all of it up with our bare hands and flung the scraps through the door into the open space leading to the front gate to create a makeshift barricade. At the corner of the gate, we also set up two claymores that we had brought from the ammunition depot: one facing toward the police checkpoint, the other pointing back up the road leading to the concrete bridge over the river.

  While the rest of the team finished strewing obstacles, I climbed the ladder to get a sense of what shape the tower was in, and see if I could get eyes on the front gate. The turret was pretty banged up—the armor was pitted and grooved from the intense fire, the wooden shade structure had been blown to pieces, and there were hundreds of empty shell casings strewn in all directions. But the M240 that Davidson had abandoned seemed in good order, and there was even a bit of ammo left, totaling roughly seventy rounds.

  I peeked over the turret shield. Off in the distance, I could see muzzle flashes inside Urmul and all across the Putting Green. On the road nearby were several trucks that had belonged to the police. All of them were burning. There were also a number of bodies lying along the road by the bridge.

  My main concern was making sure that none of the militants were moving through the front gate. I didn’t spot any live targets, but it was impossible to see if the enemy had stacked up along the wall directly beneath me without leaning out and exposing myself. Instead, I dropped a couple of grenades over the edge, then let off a quick burst with the M240 to confirm that it was still firing.

  Just before heading back down the ladder, I keyed my radio and called up Bundermann.

  “So, hey, we’re here at the front gate, and we got it closed down,” I reported. “I can’t do anything else until I get some additional personnel out here.�
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  “Roger that, Two,” he replied.

  Bundermann may not have been pleased by my behavior, which qualified as reckless and insubordinate. But he certainly wasn’t upset with the results. We had access to our ammo. We’d locked down the front entrance. And thanks to the west doorway of the Shura Building, which looked directly through the front gate and across the river, we now had a new and effective position from which to observe one of the enemy’s primary strongholds.

  By leaving that door open and standing back in the recessed shadows within the Shura Building, where the enemy could not see me, I could survey the entire Putting Green, and even more important, Urmul itself, where the Taliban had firmly dug themselves into the houses and were still using this vantage to devastating effect.

  From almost every window of every structure in the village, I could see the muzzle flashes from AK-47s and machine guns. Between those buildings, men were continuously darting in all directions as they delivered ammunition or scouted for a more effective angle of fire. There was so much activity that I found myself half-convinced that they were massing for an imminent assault on our western wall. But what made our present position so advantageous—and therefore part of the reason why the enemy was so furious—was that we could now provide grid coordinates for precise locations within the village, as well as additional feedback that would enable Bundermann to lay any form of ordnance directly on target.

  Given the intensity of the fire that was pouring out of Urmul, it was clear that there was only one way to handle the situation. Pulling out my map of the area, I noted the six-digit coordinates for the mosque and the mayor’s house, then relayed them to Bundermann.

  “Those grids are both located in the center of the village,” I said. “I need for you to level Urmul.”

  Under normal circumstances, a request like that would have provoked a heavy pause, followed by a barrage of questions. Nobody authorizes a direct strike on a population center without at least demanding confirmation that there are no civilians inside the drop zone.

  Bundermann didn’t even blink.

  “Roger,” he replied.

  Once again, it was time to call in the Apaches.

  • • •

  IT WAS NOW almost ten a.m., and for the better part of the past hour, the pilots and gunners of the attack helicopters had been busy. Shortly after eliminating the machine-gun nest near the Afghan National Police checkpoint, Ross Lewallen had called “bingo”—meaning that he had barely enough fuel to return to base—and both pilots had turned their aircraft back down the valley in the direction of Bostick.

  While their birds were being refueled, Lewallen and Randy Huff had raced into the command post to brief Colonel Brown and the rest of the operations team on what they’d seen from the air. Meanwhile, Chad Bardwell and Chris Wright helped the ground crew reload their chain guns with seventy-pound boxes of 30-mm ammo and affix another suite of Hellfire missiles to the rails of each helicopter.

  The moment everything was on board, the two choppers were in the air and on their way back to Keating.

  Both aircraft were once again orbiting overhead, with Bardwell and Wright scanning the ridgelines and the main road for targets, when they received Bundermann’s request to put a couple of Hellfires into the mosque and destroy it. They spent several minutes circling while they made certain that they had identified the target and determined how best to engage the structure. It would not be easy.

  Given the mosque’s location inside the narrow valley, the only way for the helicopters to get a clean shot was to make an east-to-west run, which would expose them to one of the biggest threats in the entire area. Somewhere along the high ground between Fritsche and Keating, the Taliban had placed a Soviet heavy machine gun known as a DShK. Nicknamed the dishka, the gun throws out 12.7-mm rounds at such a high rate that it can serve as an effective antiaircraft weapon. It’s more than enough to seriously mess up an Apache.

  Suspecting that they might actually be dealing with more than one dishka, but unable to figure out exactly where the weapons were located and eliminate them, Lewallen and his team tried in vain to come up with an alternate plan. When they finally realized there was no other way to get the job done, they set up by flying more than two miles to the east, then spun their birds around and embarked on a long, straight run that would take them down the valley, directly over Keating, and enable them to send several missiles directly through the east side of the mosque.

  Lewallen’s ship led the strike, and Bardwell, his gunner, would put the first missile on the mosque.

  As the Apache drew near the village, Bardwell spotted muzzle flashes sparking from virtually every window and doorway in the building.

  “We’re inbound with Hellfire missiles,” Bardwell radioed to Bundermann. “We see the mosque and see the enemy fire.”

  Huff was following directly behind, flying at a slightly higher altitude, and Wright, his gunner, was scanning for smoke from Bardwell’s missile strike when he heard Lewallen’s voice on his radio:

  “I got a Hellfire malfunction,” Lewallen reported over the team’s internal radio. “I can’t get my missile off the rail.”

  Both pilots reacted instantly. While Lewallen broke sharply to the left, Huff lined up so that Wright could take the shot. The bird was slightly less than two thousand yards away when Wright got the mosque squarely in his sights and squeezed the trigger. As the missile released, Huff pulled back on his run and held the profile of the mosque so that Wright could keep his laser range finder locked on the mosque and guide the missile into the target.

  When viewed through the sensors in the gunner’s seat of an Apache, a Hellfire strike is not especially dramatic. As the missile plowed into the east wall of the mosque, the only thing that Wright could discern was a small puff of white smoke. Far more impressive was the dishka round that, at the very same moment, slammed into the bottom of their Apache.

  The bullet struck directly under the pilot’s seat, where it penetrated the forward avionics bay, severing a bundle of wires and destroying the bird’s environmental control systems condenser. Inside the cockpit, Huff suddenly found himself staring at a bank of warning lights. He had multiple electrical system failures, and the Apache’s automatic stabilator had quit.

  “We’re hit,” Huff announced over the radio.

  Lewallen moved his aircraft closer to Huff’s to see if he could help assess the damage. In the meantime Bardwell, who was still scanning the mosque, noted that the structure had not been completely destroyed and could, in theory, still be used as a fighting position. Eliminating the threat completely would require another Hellfire.

  After radioing back and forth about the damage, both pilots agreed that Huff’s stricken bird could remain airborne while Lewallen took another shot with his second Hellfire. Then Lewallen would follow Huff back to Bostick for battle-damage assessment and repairs.

  While Huff peeled away, Lewallen lined up to enable Bardwell to take aim and fire.

  This time the Hellfire got off the rail. With Bardwell guiding the missile in via his laser, it punched through the southern wall and demolished the mosque.

  As Bardwell confirmed the hit, Lewallen was moving his bird behind Huff’s so that he could cover Huff during the flight back to Bostick. In that moment, Lewallen suddenly noticed a vibration in his pedals. A second or two later, his master warning system activated. The Apache was losing its utility hydraulics.

  Unbeknownst to Lewallen, his bird had been hit by the very same dishka that had already nailed Huff. One bullet had passed through a tail rotor blade, while a second had drilled into the driveshaft cover, severing one of his hydraulic lines.

  Both of the damaged aircraft now had to beeline for Bostick.

  As they headed out of the valley, Lewallen’s thoughts stayed with the dishka that had come close to taking out both Apaches. He wasn’t sure exactly where that gun
was, but he could see that the general area did not afford a direct line of sight down into Keating. This meant that the dishka had been emplaced not with the aim of shooting at Keating’s defenders, but instead to ambush any helicopters rushing in to the aid of the outpost.

  That machine gun, Lewallen realized with a chill, was also perfectly positioned to shoot down a medevac. There would be no way to get a chopper into Keating to extract the wounded, Lewallen realized, until they located and destroyed the dishka.

  While Lewallen mulled this over, Wright was on the radio advising the command post at Bostick that they were returning to base with two damaged airframes: one that no longer had any hydraulics, and another that was experiencing multiple electrical system failures. He requested that a repair team and two replacement helicopters be dispatched from Jalalabad to Bostick immediately.

  Several minutes later, both Apaches landed safely at Bostick. But it would be more than an hour before Lewallen and his team could get back in the air.

  • • •

  INSIDE THE SHURA BUILDING, my team and I weren’t privy to the drama that the helicopter pilots and their gunners had just endured. All we knew was that they were leaving.

  “The Apaches had to check off station again,” Bundermann informed me by radio. “I’m not sure when they’ll be back.”

  This news was not well received. Every time the Apaches showed up, it felt as if our guardian angels had arrived and perhaps the tide was about to turn in this fight. But the moment they peeled away, we couldn’t help but feel abandoned and vulnerable. Absent the reassuring sound of their guns, the same set of urgent questions flooded back into our minds:

  Why did they leave?

  Where are they going?

  When will they be back?

  As I wrestled with those unknowns from my position just inside the west door, I happened to glance over at Miller, who was slouched by the other doorway with his weapon in his lap, staring listlessly at the floor. He’d handled the stress of battle well up to this point. But judging by his body language and his demeanor, it was clear that he’d now exceeded his tolerance for combat.