Red Platoon

by Clinton Romesha

  Within another hour, they’d reached the top of the Switchbacks, where they started encountering dead insurgents in large numbers—pockets of five or six men at a time, eventually totaling somewhere between fifty and a hundred.

  Here too they got their first glimpse of Keating, although the lower part of the mountain they were descending was obscured by the smoke and haze from the outpost’s still-burning buildings. At this point, Sax split his team in two: one rifle squad was ordered to keep watch at the top while the second proceeded the rest of the way. As the lead squad continued down, the men who were staying behind to perform overwatch were able to pick up the radio traffic inside Keating, including a call from Doc Cordova:

  “Anybody else got A-positive blood, I need to know,” announced Cordova. “Come to the aid station if you do.”

  It was shortly after dusk when the lead squad rounded the final switchback and came around the back side of the mortar pit, where Breeding and his men were waiting for them, having wrapped the body of Kevin Thomson in their poncho liners and placed him on a litter. Then everyone descended the ammo-can staircase and stepped into Keating proper.

  While Breeding and his team continued on to the aid station with Thompson, Sax’s squad gathered by the mechanics’ bay to meet with Eric Harder and work out how we would hand over our defensive positions to Sax’s team. That’s when Harder, in the gathering darkness, tripped over something on the ground and stepped closer to investigate.

  It was the body of Josh Hardt, lying facedown in the dirt next to the massive boulder where Truck 1 had sat before he’d climbed into the thing and launched his rescue bid.

  He had come full circle and arrived back at almost exactly the same spot from which he’d started his mission to save his comrades who were trapped in LRAS2.

  With the discovery of Hardt’s body, another circle was also complete. It was just before eight p.m., and for the first time in the fourteen hours that had passed since the attack began, we finally had full accountability on all of Keating’s soldiers: who was dead, who was alive, and where everyone was at.

  As they gathered up Hardt and prepared to take him down to the aid station to join his six fallen brethren, I found myself wishing that I could head up to the mechanics’ bay to pay my final respects.

  Unfortunately, that wasn’t going to be possible, because I had just been given the order to move out across the concrete bridge spanning the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River and secure the landing zone so that we could get Mace on his way to a proper medical facility before we lost him too.

  • • •

  INSIDE THE AID STATION, Mace, who was lying on the table under a blanket while the transfusion line continued feeding the blood of his comrades into his neck, was showered with so much attention that it seemed as if he’d become something of a celebrity. The medics were monitoring his condition continuously: every five minutes Floyd took his vitals and never left the patient’s side unless another medic was standing by. Meanwhile, any soldier whose business took him anywhere near the aid station made a point of popping through the door to say hi, ask how Mace felt, and tell him what a total badass he was.

  One of those well-wishers was Raz, who swung by to find out if Doc Cordova was still looking for A-positive blood and, if so, to donate some of his own. Cordova, who was standing right outside, told him they were doing good on blood—they’d just pulled a pint out of Bundermann, and the medevac would be on its way soon.

  “How’s he doing?” asked Raz.

  “He’s doing good, man,” replied Cordova brightly. “Go in there and talk to him—he wants to hear from you guys.”

  By now they’d started getting some morphine into him too, so Mace was feeling pretty dopey. He also had an oxygen mask over his face, which made his voice sound hollow and faraway. But despite that, and despite the horrific wounds that Raz knew were underneath the blanket, it was the same old Mace.

  “Hey, dude?” Mace said weakly. “Any chance you got a cigarette on you?”

  Raz was pretty sure that was the last thing Mace needed right now, so he shook his head and moved on to other topics: the lame bantering that soldiers trade among one another when the air between them is filled with things that are too serious and too heavy for anything else.

  Raz knew that as soon as the medevac arrived, Mace would be whisked off on the first leg in a series of flights that would take him through trauma centers and hospitals at Bostick, then Bagram, followed by a stop off in Germany before his final destination, which would almost certainly be Walter Reed in Bethesda, just outside of Washington, DC. Raz also knew that it would be a long time before they saw each other again—assuming, of course, that Raz managed to survive the remaining eight months of the deployment without getting killed. And he knew that, thanks to the extent of Mace’s injuries and the many obstacles on the long road of recovery that lay ahead—the pain and the surgeries, the physical therapy and the psychological challenges—Mace might not be quite the same person he had been when they met again.

  But one could always hope.

  “Hey, good luck, man,” said Raz as word arrived that the chopper was inbound. It was time to start getting the patient prepped for his flight and moved out to the landing zone. “Take it easy, and I’ll see you down the road.”

  “All right, dude,” replied Mace, clasping his hand. “I’m gonna miss your saggy balls.”

  Always the jokester, Raz thought to himself as he walked out, shaking his head. He’s sort of right about my balls, though. They do kinda sag more than they should.

  • • •

  THE HELICOPTER that was tasked to extract Mace was a UH-60 Black Hawk whose pilot, Carlos Hernandez, had served as a tank gunner before earning his wings with army airborne. Hernandez and his crew had been champing at the bit since word of the attack had first reached Jalalabad, where they were based, early that morning just after sunrise. The bird had launched immediately and made a beeline for Bostick, where Hernandez picked up a handful of soldiers including Stoney Portis, our stranded commander, who was desperate to get to Keating. But shortly after getting airborne again, he was denied permission to land at Keating and ordered to return to Bostick, where he and his crew sat on the helipad with the rotors spinning, waiting for clearance.

  While they waited they’d anxiously monitored the radio traffic as Doc Cordova called in one casualty report after another and submitted repeated requests for a medevac. Five or six times Hernandez received clearance, only to subsequently be ordered to shut down because the landing zone at Keating was taking too much fire or, later in the morning, because the Apaches were getting hit by dishka fire.

  Captain Brendan McCriskin, the flight surgeon on the medevac, was so infuriated by these repeated delays that at one point during the day he was on the verge of storming into the command post and pushing for clearance. McCriskin had backed away from that impulse only after speaking with his friend Ross Lewallen and learning that the Apache pilots were fully expecting to be shot out of the air each time they returned to Keating on their next sortie.

  Finally, after many hours on edge, the medevac received approval to launch and Hernandez got in the air, flying under night-vision capability, with two Apache gunships escorting them in.

  As they raced toward the outpost, McCriskin and his medic scrambled to set up IVs and get their equipment in order. Meanwhile, down on the ground at Keating, me and five other men, including Larson, moved through the front gate, sprinted across the concrete bridge over the river, and secured the landing zone.

  Hernandez pushed his Black Hawk as fast it would go, but as he neared the battle space he was ordered to hover at ten thousand feet while the Apaches swept in to confirm that the area was clear. Then Hernandez took them down, corkscrew fashion, while peering through the haze that the smoke from the fires created on his night-vision goggles.

  By now, Mace, who had been wrapped up with a hypot
hermia kit to keep him warm, had been moved on a litter to the Shura Building and then across the bridge to the LZ. The final bag of fresh blood, Bundermann’s, rode alongside him on the litter. Directly behind him were two other litters with the most gravely wounded of the Afghan soldiers.

  The medevac touched down at 8:07, and Hernandez kept the blades turning while the chopper was loaded. He was on the ground for less than four minutes as the litter teams carried the patients down a steep incline at the edge of the landing zone and placed them on board. Then Hernandez lifted off, put the hammer down, and started hauling ass toward Bostick.

  As we watched them go, our sense of relief at seeing Mace finally get on his way was mixed with something else—something that didn’t quite feel like victory, but was perhaps the next best thing in line.

  We’d lost seven men that day, not one of whom we’d had a prayer of saving. But Mace was different. We’d been allowed a small measure of control over what happened to him, and we’d used that in some extraordinary ways. Out of thin air we’d somehow managed to conjure a series of miracles that had involved plucking Mace from the battlefield, running him through a hail of gunfire, and perhaps most improbable of all, keeping him alive with our own blood using a tool that we’d retrieved from the trash. And despite the horrific odds that had been stacked against him surviving any one of those stages, much less all of them, he was in good hands now, with an excellent chance of making it.

  If Mace managed to pull through, his survival wouldn’t make up for having lost those seven men whose bodies were now awaiting transport out of Keating on the next set of choppers. But that loss was certainly colored and, to a certain extent, counterweighted by the fact that more than half of those men had perished while trying to save Mace, while the rest of them had given their lives to the larger defense of Keating and their fellow soldiers, Mace included.

  It was 8:11 when the Black Hawk lifted into a night sky filled with the smell of burning pine pitch and smoke wafting through the moonlight. Mace’s life wasn’t worth more than the men who died. But saving Mace helped to anchor their deaths with meaning and context in a way that mattered hugely.

  • • •

  IT’S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to overstate the difficulty of trying to provide trauma care to a gravely wounded soldier from the inside of a roaring Black Hawk when it’s pitch-dark. Nine months earlier, when McCriskin had arrived in Afghanistan and started flying missions as a flight surgeon, he’d assumed that this would be the most challenging environment he could imagine in which to practice medicine. What he’d discovered since then was that actually doing it was ten times harder than anything he’d conceived in his mind.

  Perhaps the biggest difficulty was simply seeing your patient and trying to figure out what he might need in order for you to keep him from dying before the chopper reached its destination. You were wearing your helmet and your night-vision goggles, plus almost fifty pounds of gear and protective clothing. You were maneuvering within an impossibly cramped space with only inches to spare as the helicopter threw itself through viciously tight turns and banks to avoid fire from the ground. Thanks to all the vibration and noise, it was almost impossible to feel your patient’s pulse, you couldn’t listen to his lungs, and you could barely hear what he was saying.

  McCriskin called this “sensory-deprived medicine,” and one of its most important tools, he’d found, was his pen light, which he gripped between his teeth and which provided a dime-sized speck of illumination that offered just enough light to assess Mace.

  McCriskin could see that Doc Cordova had done a stellar job of keeping his patient alive, and there wasn’t much in the way of additional service which he could now perform. Mace had a good IV line running through his neck, and three good tourniquets in place on his legs. He was getting oxygen, and the wounds in his belly were dressed. All McCriskin could really do as he crouched above Mace’s head in the dark was to hook him up to a cardiac monitor, replace his IV bags—which were nearly empty—and check his tourniquets to make sure they were secure.

  The one additional thing he was able to do was to talk with his patient. Mace was in the late stages of severe hemorrhagic shock from the amount of blood that he’d lost. While his heart was racing, his blood pressure was as low as McCriskin had ever seen in a person who was still alive. Nevertheless, Mace was conscious throughout the brief flight, and he was alert enough that he was able to pepper McCriskin with questions. He wasn’t concerned about himself—his wounds, his prognosis, or what would happen to him when they reached Bostick. The only thing he wanted to know was how we, his friends back at Keating, were doing—and if we were okay.

  When McCriskin assured him that we were all fine, Mace looked up at him with relief, and then offered a brief sitrep on himself.

  “I’m not in any pain, Doc,” he reported. “I’m not in any pain.”

  At 8:21, barely ten minutes after they’d left Keating, the Black Hawk touched down on the helipad at Bostick and the medical team flipped into overdrive.

  The trauma crew who grabbed Mace off the helicopter were so eager to get him into the aid station that they almost dropped his stretcher right there on the tarmac. Within sixty seconds, they had him inside the trauma tent and undergoing an initial evaluation by a nurse and his surgeon, Major Brad Zagol, who made the call to wheel him into surgery immediately.

  Within another two minutes McCriskin, who had trundled behind Mace at every stage, was helping to get him intubated and under anesthesia while the surgical team prepared to operate.

  Just before Mace went under, he seemed to experience one last period of lucidity and had a brief chat with McCriskin. Again, he wanted to confirm that the guys back at Keating were okay. When McCriskin assured him that we were doing great and mostly just worrying about him, Mace smiled and asked McCriskin to let us all know that he was doing fine.

  “I’m almost done over here—my tour’s almost over and I’m going home soon,” said McCriskin. “You wanna meet up when we get back to the States? I’ll buy you a beer.”

  Mace said that he would.

  “What kind of beer do you like?” asked McCriskin.

  “Coors Light,” replied Mace, somewhat sheepishly, and closed his eyes as the anesthesia pulled him under.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Farewell to Keating

  ODD AS IT MAY SOUND, one of the few members of Red Platoon who hadn’t made a specific point of dropping by the aid station before Mace departed from Keating in order to shake his hand and wish him luck was his very best friend. That’s the exact opposite of what you might expect. But as it turned out, there was some sound reasoning behind it.

  At 7:39 p.m., a solid half hour before Mace’s medevac arrived, Zach Koppes was finally relieved of his duty on the Mark 19 grenade launcher. At that point, he’d been standing inside the turret of LRAS2 almost continuously for more than thirteen hours. During that time, he’d been carefully monitoring the reports on Mace through his radio, so when he finally stepped down from his gun truck, he knew that the picture was looking pretty good. Good enough, in fact, that Koppes started having second thoughts about heading over to check in and say farewell.

  He wanted to, of course. But the more he thought about it, the more worried he became about the possibility that if he enacted some sort of good-bye ritual, he might wind up jinxing Mace’s chances. Plus, they would certainly see each other again—maybe even at Bostick, if Mace’s surgery went well enough that they decided to keep him there for a bit before sending him on to Bagram.

  So in the end, Koppes decided that the best thing for him to do was to avoid counterweighting Mace’s luck and his karma with any action that might suggest, however faintly, that he and his friend wouldn’t be meeting up, and soon. Instead, Koppes decided to focus on doing the one thing that, in his estimation, Mace would value more than having yet another dude drop by to ask how he was feeling, which was to gather up t
he personal effects that meant the most to him—his laptop, his iPod, his uniforms, and his pictures of his family—and make sure that all that stuff got onto the medevac so that it traveled with Mace, wherever he might be headed.

  With that in mind, the first place that Koppes headed after he climbed down from his gun truck was over to Red barracks, where he dropped by Mace’s hooch, grabbed his backpack, and started stuffing items into it. When he was through, he handed everything off to First Sergeant Burton—and it was then that he discovered that although he’d been relieved of his position on the LRAS2, his duties were far from finished.

  “Okay,” Burton said to Koppes and Chris Jones, who was standing nearby, “let’s get our heroes outta here.”

  The task that Jones and Koppes were being handed would involve hauling the bodies of the slain Americans out to the landing zone and getting them ready to be loaded onto a series of helicopters that would be arriving to take them to Bostick shortly after Mace’s helevac departed.

  By this point, Doc Cordova had formally pronounced death on all seven men, and his medics had packaged their bodies for transport by placing five of them in body bags and wrapping the remaining two, Thomson and Hardt, in plastic poncho liners because they didn’t have enough bags on hand to accommodate them. The corpses had then been shuttled from the aid station to the Shura Building by members of Blue Platoon. It would be up to Koppes and Jones, together with a few guys from Justin Sax’s rescue unit, to carry them the rest of the way out to the landing zone.

  When they got to the Shura Building, Koppes and Jones found the bodies piled alongside one wall. There was no way of telling who was who except for Thomson, who was so tall that his boots stuck out from the end the plastic wrapping. They also found something else: a large puddle of blood on the plywood floor, onto which an Afghan soldier was in the process of pouring fistfuls of dirt in an attempt to absorb it. Assuming that the blood belonged to Kirk, Jones suddenly felt himself overcome by a wild and implacable sense of fury.