The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (29 page)

“If you are not the fucking doc, or me, get the fuck off the net,” Cerezo barked, then went on to describe Keating’s condition to the physician.

The troops up the mountain had already ordered a medevac. Keating was still breathing, but it would be a race to get him to the operating room at Forward Operating Base Naray before it was too late.

Cunningham and Garner hooked up two 150-foot ropes to a Humvee and began rappelling down the cliff face. They didn’t know how strong the ropes were, but they figured they’d find out soon enough. Less than ten minutes later, the snipers were with Keating, Snell, Cerezo, and Mendez. They put Keating on the Skedco stretcher they’d brought with them. Keating was cold and soaking wet. Every so often he would start to moan a little, and the men would try to talk him up.

“You’re gonna make it home to see your girlfriend,” Garner said.

The medevac finally arrived, but there was no safe place for it to land, so it began lowering a hoist with a medic. The rotation of the chopper’s blades in that tight corridor created a considerable draft, however, and the medic oscillated wildly under the helicopter as he descended. Deciding that the situation was too hazardous, he signaled for the crewman to stop and lift him back into the medevac. The medevac extraction was called off, and the bird flew on to Combat Outpost Kamdesh.

Cerezo had been lying on top of Keating to try to warm him up and shield him from the chopper’s wind. As soon as the helicopter was called away, he noticed that there was something much more serious going on with Keating than just a loss of consciousness.

“I don’t think he’s breathing anymore,” Cerezo said.

“You’ve got four minutes to get him breathing again,” Cunningham told him. After that, they would need to carry the lieutenant up the steep slope.

Cerezo and Garner, a former emergency medical technician, opened up the Skedco to which Keating had been fastened so they could begin CPR. As they were attempting mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, Keating started vomiting in their mouths: green and black crud burped up from inside him. This caused Garner to vomit in turn, and Cerezo to dry-heave. But they wouldn’t give up.

They could feel his life slipping away. They gave Keating as much air as they could from their lungs, trading off over and over. They counted chest compressions—
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14
—screaming out the numbers so that the mountains echoed with their desperate cries. Cerezo inserted a King LT tube in Keating’s mouth in an effort to help air get into his lungs more easily. It worked: he started breathing again. They snapped him back into the Skedco, and Cunningham wrapped the stretcher around his waist. They all carried Keating the thirty feet up the hill to the bottom of the rope, which Cunningham then secured to both the stretcher and his own belt.

“We’re good to go!” Cunningham yelled up the hill. “Start pulling!”

Troops on the road began hauling the rope, and Cunningham started clawing his way up the cliff. Garner and Cerezo continued to breathe for Keating, who wasn’t able to do so on his own. The pull rope, rubbing against a rock’s sharp edge, snapped. Pushed back suddenly by gravity and Keating’s weight, Cunningham dug his feet into the ground while Garner pushed Keating up. Cunningham yelled for Townsend to lower the rope back down so he could fix it, then he hastily refastened it, tying a square knot with two half hitches.

Vehicle parts and MRE boxes were strewn about the slope. Rocks kept falling on the soldiers as they made their way up. When they were halfway up the cliff, Cerezo noted that Keating no longer had a pulse.

They kept pushing.

Cerezo saw that Keating’s pupils were fixed and dilated. He was showing no signs of life.

Other troops now began scaling down the cliff toward them, inadvertently knocking loose rocks that hit Garner, Cunningham, and Cerezo. For the most part, Cunningham’s helmet protected him, but Garner’s head and Cerezo’s hand started to bleed from cuts caused by the gravel. As the stretcher passed the other troops, the medic and the EMT, both bleeding, continued to push on Keating’s chest and offer him their breaths.

Roughly two hours after the accident, Ben Keating at last reached the top of the cliff. Everyone helped the team get him past the ledge. Cory Townsend assisted with the mouth-to-mouth, taking over for Garner. Cerezo told the surgeon that Keating had no pulse, was not breathing on his own, and was cold.

“He’s not cold and dead until he’s warm and dead,” Martin replied.

Martin was quoting an old emergency-room saying, meaning that sometimes when a person’s body is cold due to hypothermia, a pulse may be present but not detectable. He was trying to say, in other words, that Keating might still be alive. Cerezo had no idea what the hell he was talking about.

Martin attached a respiratory bag over Keating’s nose and mouth and covered him with blankets to combat the hypothermia. Troops put him in the Hilux truck and rushed him back to the landing zone at the outpost, where the surgeon gave him a shot of epinephrine before the bird took him to Forward Operating Base Naray, a twenty-minute chopper ride away.

Back on the road, above the wreck of the LMTV, Yagel and Cerezo embraced.

“I don’t think he’s going to make it,” the medic said.

“I know,” said Yagel. “I know.”

Tiller was still at the bottom of the cliff.

“We gotta go back down there,” Cunningham told Cerezo, who seemed preoccupied with Keating’s fate. “C’mon, man, do your job, we gotta go down there.”

“Get your fucking ass up here, dude!” Cerezo yelled down to the mechanic, mistakenly thinking he wasn’t that badly hurt.

Cunningham climbed back down using the same rope. When he got to the bottom, he lay on top of Tiller, offering him his body heat, while waiting for the stretcher to be lowered to them. Once it reached them, Cunningham strapped Tiller into it with the belts of the other troops who had joined them down there, and then they hauled him up the hill. His condition seemed stable.

In the operating room at Forward Operating Base Naray, Keating’s body temperature was only 92 degrees. He had no pulse or heart rhythm.

The doctors spent forty minutes aggressively attempting to resuscitate him with an open cardiac massage.

He had bled out.

His heart was empty.

His abdomen became distended with blood.

The open-heart massage didn’t work. Keating had suffered too much damage, and it had taken too long to get him from the bottom of that cliff to the operating table.

Lieutenant Ben Keating was declared dead at 12:20 a.m. ET on Sunday, November 26, 2006.

Ken and Beth Keating had just returned from a trip to Delaware to visit Ken’s brother and his family. Their son had called them there and spoken with each relative in turn. It had been a difficult phone call for both Ken and his son, with lots of pauses. Neither wanted to hang up the phone, but eventually there was nothing left for them to say.

On Sunday morning, at church, Beth saw Heather McDougal, whose dad had usher duty that month. McDougal told her that for the first time, she and Ben had used Instant Messenger to talk to each other. Their conversation had taken place the day before he left on his mission to drive the LMTV from Kamdesh to Naray:

bkeating6:
sorry i missed you earlier

applegirl15:
hi!

bkeating6:
morning gorgeous

applegirl15:
hey there…

applegirl15:
so how much longer are you in kamdesh for

bkeating6:
about 24 hours

bkeating6:
[till] tomorrow night… they’re pretty much done with operations out here, so the danger isn’t too great

applegirl15:
ok

bkeating6:
just a really boring truck drive

applegirl15:
is the weather too bad to fly

bkeating6:
don’t worry… i’m coming back to you,…

The LMTV in the Landay-Sin River.
(Photo from the accident report, U.S. Army)

That afternoon, Ken Keating watched the Chicago Bears lose to his beloved New England Patriots—a game that his son had said he was hoping to catch at Forward Operating Base Naray. Just in case Ben wasn’t able to see it, Ken typed up a synopsis of the Patriots’ win and emailed it to his son.

Ken headed to bed at around nine that night. Beth was already under the covers when they heard a car door slam, followed by a knock at the door. Ben Keating’s father put his jeans back on, went downstairs, and turned on the porch light. Two soldiers were standing there in their Class A uniforms.

“Beth!” Ken Keating called upstairs. “I think you’d better come down here.”

CHAPTER 13

The 7-31

F
ittingly, a brutal winter descended over Camp Kamdesh. Gooding had made sure the outpost was prepared, and with firewood burning in potbelly stoves that a local man had purchased in Pakistan and hauled across the border, the troops tried to stay warm. By December, three stone barracks had been constructed at the camp, and two more up at Observation Post Warheit.

The different platoons would rotate onto OP Warheit for two weeks at a time. Not long after Keating died, Able Troop’s 2nd Platoon was assigned to the observation post. There, a stray dog made her way into the good graces of Moises Cerezo, the medic who had tried to save Ben Keating and whose hungry soul was grateful for the companionship.

“Dude, we need to give her a bath,” Cerezo said to Sergeant Michael Hendy. “She has fleas.”

“You’re going to freeze her,” Hendy cautioned. It was winter, after all, and the only available water was bone-chilling cold. Nonetheless, the two men gave the puppy a bath in a frigid stream that ran nearby. She whimpered and shook. She looked as if she might die at any moment.

Cerezo had his fleece on, and he picked her up and drew her to his body. He held her tightly like that for more than an hour. Her shakes eventually lessened into shivers, which soon calmed to nothing. She began playing with Cerezo. He named her Kelly, but everyone else called her Cali. Cerezo slept the first few nights with her in his bunk, zipped in behind the safety of the mosquito netting that kept out the freaky insects that were always dropping on soldiers at night—immense spiders, glow-in-the-dark centipedes, creatures seemingly from another, horrifying dimension.

Then one night Cerezo saw a flea on his fleece, and that was it for his bunkmate. It was too late, however: fleas had infested the barracks at Observation Post Warheit, leaving some soldiers, including Adam Sears, so badly bitten that they looked as if they had chicken pox. There simply weren’t enough flea collars to go around.

Amid subzero temperatures, punishing mountaintop winds, and three feet of snow, Cali’s bugs had ruined the only warm and comfortable spot in Cerezo’s world: his sleeping bag, which, needless to say, he couldn’t wash anywhere. Cali would come in to the barracks in the middle of the night, pushing the door open and causing an already cold room to turn into a meat locker.

One morning, Sears awoke to find that the fire in the furnace had gone out. As he grabbed the ax to split some of the chopped firewood, his hand landed in a pile of feces that Cali had deposited on the ax handle. It was the final straw; he snatched up his M16 rifle and chased Cali all over the post. He fired at her, grazing her neck, but she got away, and finally Sears gave up. “I guess it learned its lesson,” he said to himself. Sears felt better, at any rate. Cali soon rejoined her new “owners,” acting as if nothing had happened, as if Sears hadn’t just tried to kill her.