• • •
THE AIR STRIKES that Avalos was calling in were impressive. Most of the targets on the Putting Green were more than six hundred yards away, but the bombs that landed on the Switchbacks and Urmul were far closer. About ten seconds before their impact, Avalos would give us a heads-up by yelling, “Splash out!” When the bombs hit, the sound of the concussion and the blast of dirt and pulverized rock were immense.
Those bombs were definitely having an impact—and not just on the Taliban. As the intensity of the air strikes increased, our confidence started to grow too. Granted, we were still in big trouble. Half of the outpost was on fire; we had dead men scattered across a wide area whom we couldn’t see or get to; and it still wasn’t possible to extract our wounded. But for perhaps the first time since the attack had started, it felt as if we were hitting the enemy at least as hard as they had been hitting us.
With Raz now concentrating on getting an IV line into Miller’s arm and Avalos continuing to call in fire, things were under control at the Shura Building. This freed me up for what I needed to do next, which involved dashing back to the other side of camp to put a special request in front of Bundermann.
What I had in mind could have been relayed over the radio. But it was important enough that I wanted to drive the point home in person.
• • •
WHEN I WALKED into the command post, I shot Jonathan Hill a harsh look while tossing up my hands in a what the fuck?! gesture. Then I let the matter drop. We had more important things to worry about than his missing machine-gun team—starting with the fact that we still had no idea where our lost comrades were.
Seven men were now missing: Gallegos, Larson, Mace, Martin, Carter, Griffin, and Hardt. Assuming that their bodies were still inside the wire, we had to find and retrieve them before they were taken by the Taliban.
“We need a plan,” I said, turning to Bundermann. “We have to figure out how me and my team are going to get those bodies back.”
At this point, I explained, there were only three men at the Shura Building on whom I could rely: Raz, Dulaney, and Avalos. In order to generate sufficient cover fire for my next move—which would entail pressing into the exposed sector on the far western end of camp, where I suspected that most of our dead were located—I would have to leave one of those men at the Shura Building with a machine gun. A three-man team wasn’t even close to what we needed to find seven dead and carry them back.
“I need more guys,” I said to Bundermann. “Who can you give me?”
Before I’d even completed the question, Bundermann was already shaking his head. He understood, probably better than anybody, just how far I’d pushed things by storming the Shura Building without any fire support. He was glad it was done, but he knew that I’d gone well past the bounds of acceptable risk, and that me and my squad were damn lucky to be alive. Sending a tiny group of us even farther into the kill zone beyond the Shura Building would be a bold move. But if we got wiped out and all of our gains were reversed, it would also prove to be a colossally stupid move.
“Get back to the Shura Building and hold your position until we can get a better handle on this situation,” he ordered. “I want you and your guys to hang tight and just keep calling fire.”
This wasn’t the time to argue—and in any case, he was right.
“Roger that,” I said, and raced back.
When I arrived, the Warthogs and the F-15s were still conducting bombing runs on the Switchbacks and the Putting Green. With the enemy gunners up there being subjected to such a heavy pounding, my concerns focused on the immediate standoff area surrounding the Shura Building. Our visibility was so limited that it would be a simple matter for a small team of gunmen to move right next to our walls and stack up without us knowing. To ensure that didn’t happen, we needed to start getting creative.
The north side of the Shura Building featured three small windows, each no bigger than two feet by two feet. There was no glass in any of these windows—they were simply rectangular holes in the wall, although each was protected by a wooden cover that swung inward and functioned as a kind of portal. Up to this point, we’d kept those shutters firmly latched, but now we started using them as part of a bizarre and deadly game conceived by Raz, Avalos, and me.
We each selected a window and crouched next to it with a pile of the grenades that we’d collected from the ammunition depot. Each grenade had a three- to five-second delay before it exploded. Under normal circumstances, you would pop the spoon and wait one or two seconds before making your throw.
The problem was that if anybody was on the other side of the wall, he’d have a few seconds to grab the grenade and try to hurl it back through the window or onto the roof. So every thirty seconds, one of us would pull the spoon and hold the live grenade in his hand for as long as he dared—three seconds, four seconds, 4.49999 seconds—prior to grabbing the latch, yanking open the shutter, then chucking the grenade through the opening and slamming the shutter closed before the concussion sounded.
We’d each select a window at random. Sometimes we’d open them in sequence. Other times we’d skip one. Occasionally one of us would toss two or even three grenades from the same window before we switched. But in every instance, one thing remained constant: the guy with the live grenade counted down the seconds in the knowledge that if he misjudged and waited too long, it would explode in his hand and kill everybody inside the room.
We called this “grenade chicken,” and I honestly can’t say how long we kept at it because the intensity robbed us of any sense of time. All I know is that we maintained the same rhythm—a new grenade once every thirty seconds—for what seemed like more than an hour while we waited for Bundermann to let us know that he was sending out some more guys and giving a green light for our body-recovery mission.
Finally, the call came through—and when it arrived, it wasn’t what any of us expected.
“Hey, Ro, you’re not gonna believe this,” Bundermann announced, “but I just heard from Red Dragon out at LRAS2.”
I was so stunned that I was at a loss for words.
If what he was saying was true, Brad Larson was within one hundred yards of where we were sitting—and he was still alive.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Alive!
SINCE SHORTLY BEFORE eight a.m., there had been no word from Larson’s gun truck. The last anybody had heard from that sector was just prior to the fatal exfil when Gallegos had tried to use the diversion created by Josh Hardt and his rescue team to stage a withdrawal to the Shura Building. As a result, none of us had any clue of what had happened when Gallegos, Martin, and Mace tried to make their break toward the latrines while Larson and Carter laid down cover fire:
We knew nothing about the RPG that had coated Martin in soot and destroyed Mace’s legs and abdomen. We knew nothing about how Gallegos had picked Mace up and disappeared behind the laundry trailer—only to come tearing back a few seconds later and get shot to pieces in full view of Carter, who, together with Larson, was trying to provide cover fire for their escape. Nor did we know that Larson had been drilled by a Taliban sniper. All we knew was that there had been no word from anyone on the western side of camp near that gun truck—and from that silence, we had assumed they were all dead.
Not true.
Unbeknownst to the rest of us, several members of that lost squad had managed to hang on, albeit just barely. The details of what they had endured were as dramatic and bloody as anything else that had happened so far, with the added twist that they were still in terrible straits and that one of them had been wounded so badly and in so many places that the mission to try and save him, in the midst of a battle whose final outcome still hung in the balance, would take a commitment by every soldier who was still alive at Keating along with the pilot of every fighter jet, helicopter, and support aircraft who was part of Michal Polidor’s stack in the sky above.
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br /> How all of this unfolded makes for quite a tale—but that’s getting ahead of things.
First, I need to tell you what happened after Larson, whose call sign was “Red Dragon,” got shot in the head.
• • •
THE BULLET THAT was fired at Larson as he stood behind the Humvee drove into the lip of his helmet, where the Kevlar stopped the thing cold, although it left an indentation just above his left eyebrow and snapped his noggin back as if he’d been clocked in the face with a nine iron.
It was a shockingly close call. Half an inch lower and the round would have blown straight through his left eyeball.
“Get back in the truck!” Larson yelled to Carter.
As both men moved toward the doors, Larson caught sight of a pair of Taliban gunners emerging from behind the generator that was attached to our cold-storage shipping container, no more than twenty feet away. The first man had an RPG balanced on his shoulder, while the second was carrying a PKM machine gun. Neither of them had spotted Larson.
He raised his carbine and shot both insurgents in the face. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat of the truck and slammed the door.
“Gallegos was hit,” Carter reported as bullets and RPGs continued to slam into the armored Humvee. “I don’t know what happened to Mace or Martin.”
Larson didn’t know what happened to Martin either. But he’d seen Mace absorb much of the blast from the RPG that had landed between the two men, and he’d also watched Gallegos drag Mace to his feet and hustle him behind the latrines. He was in the midst of explaining this when Carter, who was sitting in the tactical commander’s seat, spotted something moving on the far side of a pile of rocks less than fifty yards away from the truck.
It was Mace. He was crawling around the corner on his elbows and forearms, dragging his legs.
“I can see Mace—he’s still alive,” Carter exclaimed. “Let me go get him!”
“No,” Larson declared. “You’re no good to him dead.”
Unlike Carter, Larson had spent enough time in combat to know that one of the best ways to get killed was by rushing out to rescue a wounded comrade or retrieve the body of a buddy who had just gotten smoked. “Dead bodies attract more dead bodies” was one of the many mantras that he and I often traded back and forth during our time in Iraq.
Having seen this phenomenon unfold too many times with his own eyes, Larson had no intention of allowing Carter—whom he outranked—to step outside the truck and offer up another tempting target for the Taliban. Instead, he ordered Carter to make sure that the combat locks on the doors were engaged while he tried to raise Bundermann on the truck radio.
Getting no response, Larson switched to another channel and got nothing there either. He tried yet another channel, then two or three more.
Each attempt yielded the same result: static.
Larson had no way of knowing that while he and Carter had stood outside the truck trying to provide cover fire, the rest of us had jumped to a new frequency in order to ensure that our communications weren’t compromised. Having missed the signal to jump, and with no way of knowing the new frequency—which was passed around the Alamo Position by word of mouth—Carter and Larson were now out of the loop.
Baffled that the radio seemed to have stopped working, and realizing that neither he nor Carter had a handheld unit, Larson gave up and turned to their next problem.
The Taliban rockets had played havoc with the gunner’s turret above the cab of the Humvee, and the hatch to the turret was now wedged open by a tangled rat’s nest of wreckage that included the smashed .50-cal, a jagged piece of the housing that had been blown off of the cold-storage connex’s generator, and a bunch of electrical wiring. With RPGs continuing to slam into the wall of sandbags directly in front of the truck, it was imperative that they find a way of getting that hatch closed and locked.
Using Larson’s Gerber, Carter cut through the wiring, then put his shoulder to the hatch and managed to force it up just enough to be able to shove aside the machine gun and the wreckage of the generator. That enabled him to slam the hatch closed. The locks refused to turn, so he tied down the lid with nylon parachute cord.
With the hatch shut and the radio still refusing to work, there wasn’t much else they could do. They could hear gunfire coming from the center of camp, but they had no idea whether their fellow Americans or the Taliban were doing the shooting. Occasionally they could spot enemy soldiers moving around the Afghan Police guard shack about a hundred yards away, on the far side of the river. But the moment they cracked one of the windows to get off a shot, the snipers in Urmul would start putting rounds through the gap.
Even more worrisome, they were almost out of bullets. By this point, each man was down to less than half a magazine’s worth of M4 rounds, about seven shots apiece. Knowing that they needed to conserve the last of those bullets, there was little they could do except settle into their seats and try to take stock of what had happened.
Gallegos, perhaps the only member of Red Platoon whose size, strength, and fury rivaled Josh Kirk’s, was dead. Martin had vanished, and Mace lay beyond their reach. No one at the command post had any inkling that they were alive, and Larson had been hit in his right arm and right shoulder, as well as having received wounds to his face and neck. The enemy had them surrounded. And as an added bonus, both men loathed each other because, as it turned out, Larson and Carter had some history between them, and none of it was good.
The problem dated back to just before we’d deployed to Afghanistan when they had attended sniper school together in Fort Benning, Georgia. There, friction had arisen over radically different interpretations of the school’s rules and honor code, which Larson felt Carter had violated. The rancor engendered by this clash hadn’t been especially problematic during our time at Keating, because with Carter being in Blue Platoon and Larson being in Red, they’d had very little contact. But in light of how much the two men disliked each other, the irony of their current predicament wasn’t lost on Larson. If there was one person in the entire outpost, Afghans included, whom he least wanted to be trapped with inside a stricken gun truck that had no radio, no machine gun, and a turret hatch secured with string, it was Carter.
And yet, like it or not, there they were. But to Larson’s credit, as much as he might have despised Carter, he would later be the first to acknowledge that his teammate was about to rise above his reputation as an oily, smooth-talking douche bag and find his center as a soldier.
The transformation was swift, and it started when Carter glanced out his window and noticed, to his astonishment, that while they’d been fiddling with the radio and the hatch lid, Mace had somehow managed to drag himself from behind the rocks and was now lying about twenty yards away, close enough that they could actually hear one another. In fact, he was raising his head right now and saying something.
Carter cracked his window just enough to be able to catch the words.
“Help me,” cried Mace. “Help me—please!”
• • •
IN LARSON’S ESTIMATION, there was still no way for Carter to run from the gun truck to the area where Mace lay without getting shot to pieces. With Mace so damnably close, however, it was far harder for Larson to keep denying Carter’s repeated requests that he be allowed to at least try.
Things finally shifted when Carter announced that he was hearing something else through the crack in his window. It was the sound of a horn, and from what Carter could tell, it seemed to be coming from Truck 1, the Humvee that Hardt had used in his failed rescue mission, which was still high-centered on the berm of rubble about five yards from the back of the gun truck where he and Larson were sitting.
Was there a wounded man inside that truck—Martin, Hardt, maybe Griffin—who was trying to signal for help? They needed to find out. So when Carter suggested that he step outside and clamber under their gun truck to see if he c
ould spot anything, Larson gave him the nod.
The moment Carter got out, he could see that his idea wasn’t going to work. The tires on their Humvee had been riddled with bullets and shrapnel, and were completely flat. There wasn’t room for him to squeeze under the chassis.
“Under the truck’s no good,” he told Larson as he climbed back in. But Truck 1 was only fifteen feet away and its doors were open. Shouldn’t he dash back and do a check for survivors?
Larson had no idea that by now me and my team had reached the ammo supply sheds and were working with the Apache pilots to eliminate the enemy machine-gunners on the other side of the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River and inside Urmul. But it was clear that the Apaches had resumed making intermittent gun runs throughout the valley, and that the Taliban’s fire died down each time the helicopters conducted another sortie. So he told Carter that he had a green light to go, but that he had to wait for the birds to return.
When they heard one of the Apaches open up with its chain gun, Carter hopped out, dashed back to Truck 1, and jumped inside.
No one was there and the radio—along with most of the cab’s interior—had been smashed by an exploding RPG. There was nothing to explain what might have caused the horn to go off, except perhaps a short in the electrical system caused by the damage the truck had sustained. But Carter spotted a pair of items that could come in handy: an M4 and a SAW.
He grabbed both weapons and scurried back.
When he arrived, they opened the drum on the SAW and started delinking rounds. There weren’t many left, but they were the same caliber as their own rifles. Along with the bullets in the extra M4, they now had enough rounds to completely fill one magazine.
It wasn’t much, but it might be just enough to allow Larson to cover Carter while he retrieved Mace.
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