The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (41 page)

Up on the mountain with 1st Platoon, Roller glanced over at Foltz, who was tending to Alford’s wounds. Foltz was a touch nerdy, Roller thought, but boy, was he a cool character at that moment. Collected and assured, Foltz gave him a thumbs-up. Roller looked at Alford. He was clearly in a daze, having lost a lot of blood, but he somehow managed to give his lieutenant a thumbs-up as well.

A medevac buzzed into the valley, drawing a cacophony of incoming fire. “Red-One,” the pilot radioed to Roller, “we cannot land.” Nor would the chopper be able to hover long enough to hoist Alford up on a Jungle Penetrator, he said; it was still too hot in the valley. Roller and the others on the ground would have to get more of the enemy cleared out first. The medevac turned around.

Roller gave the Apache pilots targeting grids so they could bomb and fire upon the insurgents. Twice, the Apaches flew so close that he could see right into their cockpits. It was still not enough. Roller and his Air Force communications officer also tried to get the French and Belgian pilots of some nearby Mirages to offer air support. Although English is the standard language for NATO, it took them all a while—too long—to overcome the considerable language barrier; one of the pilots even read back the instructions for a bomb drop and identified 1st Platoon’s position as the target. That mistake was quickly corrected by Roller and, several miles away, by Kolenda’s Air Force liaison. Kolenda, infuriated, demanded that Colonel Charles “Chip” Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne, see to it that in the future, his men be sent only U.S. aircraft.

On this day, though, the French bombs eventually began to hit their targets, as did the U.S. ordnance, and a credible path was cleared for the medevac. Under heavy fire as tracer rounds reached out from enemy positions throughout the valley, the Black Hawk lowered a medic, Staff Sergeant Peter Rohrs, on a Jungle Penetrator. To the men watching, it seemed nothing short of miraculous that Rohrs made it to the ground. He unhooked his cable and ran to Alford, whom he treated with an IV and more bandages. Rohrs was concerned not only about the specialist’s neck wound itself but also about making it worse by hoisting him sitting upright on the Jungle Penetrator—but there wasn’t much time to contemplate. He put a neck brace on the injured soldier; that would have to suffice. Amid furious incoming fire, the two men, wrapped around the rescue device, were hoisted into the belly of the Black Hawk. After a perilous rise, Rohrs and Alford entered the medevac, which then turned and sped out of the valley. As the enemy barrage continued, one of the Apache pilots got on the radio: “Hey, guys, I’m hit,” he said. “I’m heading back.”

Up with Fritsche’s patrol, Morrow had seen the shot that hit the Apache; ominously, it had come from right above their position.

Wilson was worried that the pilots might mistake them for insurgents. He expressed his concern to Fritsche, who tried to reassure him that their position had been relayed to the Apaches. Either way, Wilson found it terrifying to see the Apache pilots pointing their 30-millimeter chain guns at—or at least near—them, especially when the patrol’s radio wasn’t working reliably. It was easy to imagine, he thought, how friendly-fire incidents could happen. Before the radio died once and for all, Fritsche got the call that Bulldog Troop was waiting for him and his team to come down the mountain, and they needed to move now.

As the fight lulled for about ninety minutes, Bostick, Johnson, and Lape walked down toward the road, leaving Sultan behind to cover them. The trio stopped next to two big boulders. Lape climbed up onto a rock to better position his radio. He lit a cigarette. Bostick meanwhile got on the radio to try to find out why the mortars had been so ineffective at helping out Roller and his men; multitasking while doing that, he also directed his platoons into position and cracked a few jokes to relieve the tension. Sultan, who had been providing cover from some yards up the hill, now sucked up an MRE pack. He was facing downhill, toward the north, watching Bostick, Johnson, and Lape. Beyond them was the road, and beyond that the Landay-Sin River, then more mountains.

Without any warning, an RPG exploded between Sultan’s position and Bostick’s. None of the men was sure which direction it had come from: south, up the hill? north, across the road? Sultan grabbed his rifle and ran downhill. Believing the RPG had been launched from somewhere behind him, uphill to the south, he ducked under a holly oak tree, turned around, and slid into a firing position right near Bostick, Johnson, and Lape, by the two large boulders.

Bullets rained down on the rocks. Shrapnel hit Johnson’s chest plate.

“Sir,” Johnson said to Bostick, stating the obvious, “they’re shooting at us.”

“Shoot back,” Bostick told him.

An insurgent sniper fired a rifle shot disturbingly close to their position, which was soon followed by an RPG blast near the same spot. The sniper fired again, closer this time. Another RPG followed. Bostick and his team realized that the sniper was showing the enemy RPG team exactly where they were.

“We’re taking fire, we don’t know where from,” Bostick radioed in. “We’re going to have to move. We need cover, suppressive fire.”

“We should break contact and link up with the rest of Second Platoon,” suggested Johnson. Bostick agreed and prepared to lay down suppressive fire to cover their move. Lape got ready to throw a smoke grenade as Bostick stepped out from behind the boulders and fired his rifle. But then suddenly Johnson lost his footing and began sliding down the steep hill.

“We need cover!” Bostick yelled. “I think they’re coming from the ea——”

At that moment, an RPG came right at them from up on the mountain to the southeast. It exploded and sent off a shock wave that threw all four men into the air.

West of and up the mountain from Bostick’s position, Roller witnessed the RPG explosion and watched as, amid a plume of smoke, Johnson flew downhill some thirty feet, landing near the road.

“Bulldog-Six, Bulldog-Six, where are you?” Roller called on the radio for Bostick. “Bulldog-Six, Bulldog-Six, come in.” There was no response.

Alex Newsom’s call sign was “Bulldog 3-6,” but Roller, worried that something had happened to their captain, didn’t think military protocol conveyed what he needed to express at that moment. “Alex, it’s Dave,” he told Newsom over the radio. “I need you back in the valley.”

Newsom knew that Roller’s call sign was “Bulldog Red-1,” but he followed his friend’s lead. “Okay, Dave,” he said.

As Newsom and his platoon motored into the danger zone from their spot down the road, not far from the casualty collection point, Faulkenberry turned to the lieutenant.

“Can I look for him?” he asked.

“Let’s go,” said Newsom.

They roared back into the fight with guns blazing, picking out enemy positions and obliterating them with their big weapons. Newsom yelled to Specialist Andrew Bluhm, the gunner on the MK19 grenade launcher, “Keep shooting! Keep shooting!”

Bluhm didn’t need to be told twice.

As Fritsche and his patrol worked to get down the mountain, Newsom and the QRF sped by on the road below, heading west toward Tom Bostick. The battle had started up again.

John Wilson was a native of Littleton, Colorado, so he knew mountains, and he had done a lot of trail running. He led the way as the enemy fired on them from the mountain across the river. While the others—Fritsche, Morrow, and White—returned fire, trying to provide cover, Wilson and Nic Barnes would run from behind a tree, dart diagonally down the steep decline of the mountain, then jump behind another tree. From there, Wilson and Barnes would provide cover as the others ran down to where they were. They did that over and over, trading tasks, with each team covering the other so both could make incremental progress—a strategy known as bounding. Enemy bullets rained down on the covering troops, shredding leaves, bark, and everything else in their vicinity, but the enemy’s focus on them meant that the others could crisscross and run down the mountain as well.

The pattern they established had Wilson and Barnes starting their next sprint just before the other three landed safely behind cover. On one relay, Wilson, pausing to hide, looked down and thought he saw tracks on the ground in front of him. He stopped beside a boulder and gingerly walked around it. About twenty feet east of their position, near a dent in the rock wall, three Afghans were looking down the mountain toward the river. Two of them were wearing new ANA battle-dress uniforms and holding AKs. The third looked like an Afghan policeman, complete with police radio and pistol.

Barnes came up on Wilson’s right, Morrow on his left.

“What do we do with these guys?” they whispered to one another.

Morrow and Fritsche weren’t sure who the men were—they could be ANA, they thought—but Wilson and Barnes were convinced they were insurgents. The Afghans were excited, jubilant—not the sort of behavior to be expected from ANA soldiers in the middle of an ambush. Indeed, to Barnes, the Afghans seemed to be laughing as they watched the Americans below them in the valley being attacked, wounded, and killed.

The debate ended when the Americans noticed that one of the Afghans had a black facemask rolled up on his head that he could pull down to obscure his features. Another held a facemask in his hand.

Wilson turned to Barnes. “Fuck these guys,” he said. “Morrow and I will take the two guys on the left,” he whispered, referring to the Afghans. “You aim at that one on the right. Let’s just mow them down.”

Barnes, Morrow, and Wilson fired at their assigned targets. White and Fritsche fired from behind them as well. The three insurgents fell—and for a brief moment, at least, that seemed to be that. The men’s relief quickly dissolved, however, when a fourth insurgent with a facemask popped up from behind a nearby group of rocks and sprayed a full magazine at them from his AK, then took cover again. The Americans were already shielded by trees and boulders, so they hunkered down. Bombs now began dropping from a U.S. aircraft, two five-hundred-pounders that whistled angrily on their way down. They landed danger close and interrupted the firefight. Wilson ran to check the rear—there had been, after all, dozens of insurgents shooting at them as they moved. Fritsche took cover next to a rock, returned fire, and began trying to work the radio again; he wanted to call Bostick to make sure the pilots dropping the bombs knew where his squad was.

Wilson, higher up on the hill, could see Fritsche’s shorn, helmetless head poking up above the boulder. He shouted for Fritsche to crouch down even further, but at the very moment the staff sergeant looked up and their eyes locked, the fourth insurgent fired—and the enemy bullet found its target above Ryan Fritsche’s left eyebrow, exploding out the back of his head.

To their west, Jonathan Sultan woke up from the RPG explosion.

He wondered if he was dead. He had seen the explosion, had seen the RPG hit Captain Bostick. He didn’t know where his captain was now.

Sultan could see only out of his right eye; his left was hanging out of its socket. His left hand, which had flash-burned when the RPG detonated, was charred black. He could hear nothing but a loud ringing. Then he could just make out someone—Lape?—shouting, “Run! Run! RUN!”

Sultan managed to stand. A piece of shrapnel roughly the size of a baseball had torn through his left shoulder, ripped through his collarbone, and exited out his back. He started running down the hill. He knew that if he stopped, he would die. He wanted to yell out, “Where are you?” to the men of 2nd Platoon, who he believed were down the mountain, but the word
where
kept coming out as “wheer.” He stopped for a second.
Wheer. Wheer.
What was wrong with him? Why couldn’t he talk? He thought, This is it. A sniper’s going to get me. And then he heard, to his left, “Over here, over here, get over here,” and Lape pulled him aside and rushed him down to the casualty collection point.

Johnson watched as Lape escorted Sultan down the hill to cover, near a rock by the river. Half of Sultan’s face was charred; he reminded Johnson of the Batman villain Two-Face.

Dazed, Sultan thought to himself, If I run into the river, I’ll sink. And then he was lying on his back, feeling the cool mist of the Landay-Sin River on his destroyed face.

Morrow checked Fritsche’s pulse. “He’s dead,” the sniper said.

“No shit,” replied Wilson. He’d just seen the back of Fritsche’s head explode. Blood and gray matter lay on the rock behind him. He wasn’t moving. He wasn’t breathing. He wasn’t bleeding.

They were still pinned down by the fourth insurgent, who by now had been joined by several others. Wilson threw a grenade at them, but it took forever to go off.

One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, one thousand four, one thousand five
, BOOM.

No way had it gotten the insurgent, thought Wilson; he’d had too much time to run away, and the explosive had rolled down the mountain. The sergeant grabbed another grenade. He pulled the pin and let it cook off for two seconds.

One thousand one, one thousand two.
Throw.
One thousand three,
BOOM.

It went off a second and a half early: Got him, Wilson thought. For once, the Americans’ unreliable equipment had worked to their advantage.

“We need to get down the hill,” Morrow said. Soldiers are taught never to leave fellow troops behind on the battlefield, including fallen ones, but. Morrow was convinced that any attempt on their part to bring Fritsche’s corpse down the mountain just then would result in even more casualties. Instead, they’d link up with the rest of their company at the bottom and then return for the staff sergeant. That was the plan, anyway. That was what they told themselves as they ran down the mountain.