The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (42 page)

When Faulkenberry pulled up in his Humvee at the casualty control point by the river, he saw Rob Fortner working on someone whose face was so mushed up and bloody that he couldn’t even tell who it was. It turned out to be Sultan.

“Thank God, it’s the Cavalry,” the medic managed to crack as he heard the trucks pull up. They sounded as if they were bringing hell with them: the QRF troops were firing their machine guns full-auto nonstop, and a grenade launcher was sending thundering explosions one after another against the enemy across the river. “Where’s Captain Bostick at?” Faulkenberry asked Lape and Johnson, who were sitting near Fortner and now looked at him with big doe eyes, shaken up.

They pointed up the hill.

From the road, Faulkenberry could see antennae poking up from the rucksack Johnson and Lape had left behind. He headed up toward the radios and came across a decapitated corpse in a U.S. Army uniform. Flesh was missing from the soldier’s right elbow and right knee, and there were marks from several bullet and shrapnel impacts on his body armor. Faulkenberry opened up the armor to check the nametag:

BOSTICK, it said.

All U.S. troops have unique battle-roster IDs—the first letter of their last names followed by the last four digits of their Social Security numbers—but Faulkenberry didn’t feel the need to pull the list out of his pocket and consult it. He walked down to his Humvee and got on the radio: “Bulldog-Six KIA,” he said. Then he went back up the hill again and began dragging Bostick’s body to the road, pulling him by his arms. One of the arms started to come off, so Faulkenberry dragged him by his other arm and his belt. Newsom came over, and the two of them, horrified by their task but determined to see it through, grasped Bostick under his hips and by his clavicle and lifted him into the back of Newsom’s truck.

Back at Forward Operating Base Naray, it was all seeming backward.

The commanders had originally thought the real action would be around the other element of the operation, to the east, in Bazgal. Lieutenant Colonel Kolenda had air-assaulted with a Legion Company platoon to a nearby mountain to watch over that area as Command Sergeant Major Vic Pedraza, Nathan Springer, and their men made their way to the Gawardesh Bridge—a mission they accomplished completely unchallenged.

When they heard about the firefight at Saret Koleh, a number of the officers and men at Gawardesh wanted to drive over there to help out Bulldog Troop; Springer and his .50-caliber gunner, Specialist Josh Kirk, were particularly desperate to push west. But part of the road near the Bazgal Bridge had been washed out and was now impassable, so there was nothing any of them could do beyond listening on the radio. Their feeling of impotence tore them up as they followed the unfolding nightmare.

Word that Bulldog-6 was down struck those back at Forward Operating Base Naray like a thunderbolt. With Kolenda in the field, the operations center at Naray was being run by Sergeant Major Ted Kennedy. Before deployment, Kennedy, Bostick, Joey Hutto, First Sergeant Nuuese Passi, and their wives and children had all gone to Egypt together on vacation. The four men and their families were very close. Major Chris Doneski, who was in the operations center when the tragic news came in, quietly approached Kennedy and asked if he could speak with him. They walked into Kolenda’s office. The major shut the door.

“We lost Tom,” a stunned Doneski said.

Kennedy doubled over. He made his way to a chair and sat down, speechless. Kennedy and Bostick had been Rangers together, and close friends for years.

After a few minutes, Doneski found operations officer Major Darren Fitz Gerald and told him the same news. The three men huddled and talked about what to do next. Dozens of troops were engaged in battle in a dangerous valley, without a commander.

Joey Hutto was scheduled to relieve Bostick at the end of the year anyway, they noted. “We need to get him up there now,” the men agreed.

Hutto happened to be out in the hall just then, looking for Kennedy. The battle had clearly gotten tough, and he wanted to get the big picture, which he knew Kennedy could give him. He was beckoned into Kolenda’s office, where a grim-faced Doneski stood, by himself, waiting for him. Doneski looked at Hutto: he obviously had no idea what had happened to his close friend.

“Hey, Joey,” Doneski said, “I can’t believe I’m telling you this, but Tom’s down. We lost Tom.”

If Hutto’s reaction was less physical than Kennedy’s had been, it was still visible: he looked as if he’d been smacked by a wave that had knocked him back, disorienting him.

Soldiers are trained always to finish the job. In the chaos of battle, they’re not given time to reflect. When they hear that a comrade has been killed, the loss cannot be about those still alive; it’s about that other soldier, one of their own, who has made the ultimate sacrifice.

And yet.

In that moment, Hutto felt the same numbness he’d experienced five years earlier when he lost his oldest brother, Jimmy, his best friend and role model. When his wife told him that his brother was dead—an Alabama game warden, he’d been shot during a drug raid—Joey Hutto had shut down for just a second, and then he’d immediately begun focusing on how the death would affect his thirteen-year-old niece, Hailey, Jimmy’s daughter. Now, standing in front of Doneski on this grim afternoon, Hutto went through the exact same process: he became numb, and then all he could think about was Jennifer Bostick and their two girls. Where was Jenn? Did she know yet? Who would be there for her? Were the girls with her?

Doneski gave Hutto twenty seconds to grieve. Then he said, “Joey, I need you to get out there. I need you to take over Bulldog and keep the men together.”

Hutto stayed silent.

“Are you okay?” Doneski asked him.

“I’m fine,” Hutto said. “When do you want me to go?”

“Get your equipment, I need you to get on an aircraft in about twenty minutes,” Doneski told him.

Hutto stepped out of Kolenda’s office. He ran into Kennedy, and the two men embraced. “You let me know what you need,” Kennedy said.

Hutto jogged to his small bedroom, or hooch, to grab his essentials. He knew he had to focus on Bulldog Troop and help its surviving leaders get control of a devastating situation; they and their men were trapped in hell. But he couldn’t stop thinking about Jennifer Bostick and her two daughters. The world seemed a far darker place than it had been just ten minutes before.

Newsom, Faulkenberry, and the other squad leader, Staff Sergeant Ben Barnes, made three trips to the rocks where Bostick had been killed, gathering rucksacks, radios, and GPS equipment. Newsom spotted something shiny in a nearby tree: Bostick’s dog tags, hanging from a branch six feet off the ground. He pulled them down and shoved them in his pocket.

Another exclamation of gunfire rang from across the river, and Faulkenberry staggered forward. He’d been shot. He looked down: his left leg was fine—he was standing up straight on it—but his right had been lacerated and had twisted around, so that his foot was facing almost backward. The leg had essentially been cut in half at the thigh. Faulkenberry’s pants began to fill up with blood, like a sack being filled with water.

“I’m hit,” he announced. He seemed so nonchalant about it that neither Newsom nor Barnes believed him at first. Then Faulkenberry slumped down onto the ground, twisting his leg with him. He was now facing the river.

Newsom and Barnes came over to him. Barnes pulled out his tourniquet and combat bandages and did what he could while Newsom tried to find a vein for an IV in Faulkenberry’s skinny arm. It took him four tries, but finally he got it. RPGs exploded and bullets kicked up all around them, though they didn’t even realize it at the time, so focused were they on patching up their wounded colleague, hooking him up to the IV, and feeding him the “pill pack” of three medications that every soldier carries: a Tylenol-strength painkiller, an anti-inflammatory drug, and a general antibiotic. Faulkenberry’s sciatic nerve—running from his lower back down his leg—had been severed, so the leg was completely numb except for a throbbing pain. Once they’d gotten him relatively stable, Newsom and Barnes helped him hop down the mountain to the convoy and the other troops.

Down on the road, the insurgents were getting closer and the explosions growing louder, and some of the ANA soldiers started to run away. “Hey, motherfucker!” Newsom yelled at one of the fleeing men, “get back over here!” The Afghan stopped and sheepishly looked back at the American officer.

Newsom’s magazines were filled with tracer rounds so he could mark targets for his troops and the low-flying Apaches. “You see what I’m shooting at?” Newsom asked the ANA soldier as he fired into the northern hills. “Shoot there!” He then heard something behind where they were standing, up the mountain to the south and southeast: more insurgents. Time to go, Newsom thought: We have a KIA and WIAs, and those WIAs will soon turn into KIAs if we don’t haul ass.

Enemy fire swarmed around them, the bullets as frenzied and chattering as invading locusts. As wounded American and ANA troops fell to the left and right of him, Newsom told all of those still standing to aim their weapons up the mountain, toward the south, and he himself did the same, crouching and walking back toward the vehicles as he pulled the trigger. Fire was also coming from across the river, to the north, the explosions relentless from that quarter as well.

Morrow, White, Wilson, and Nic Barnes had by now arrived at the Humvees on the road; they were yelling that Fritsche had been killed. Faulkenberry heard them as he sat, calm and conscious, in the backseat of a Humvee. His gunner, Private First Class Michael Del Sarto, adjusted the bandages that Fortner had applied to the staff sergeant’s wound. Faulkenberry’s mangled right leg was dangling outside the Humvee, and other soldiers, oblivious to his injury and panicking under fire, kept bumping his knee with the armored door. Finally, fed up, he reached out, grabbed his own leg, pulled it and twisted it inside the Humvee, and slammed the door shut. Let’s go, let’s go, I’m going to bleed out, he thought. But the trucks weren’t budging. They couldn’t: bullets and RPGs were peppering the Humvees, seemingly from all sides, and the Americans had little choice but to use the two trucks for cover as they returned fire. (The other two Humvees belonging to the QRF had earlier pushed down the road to conduct overwatch.) Faulkenberry’s head started feeling heavier. His men kept talking to him, trying to keep him awake. He took off his chest rig, packed with ammo and plates of bulletproof Kevlar, to let up some of the pressure on his body.

“We need to go get Fritsche,” Newsom announced. He attempted to corral several other guys to come with him.

“Fritsche’s dead, sir,” Wilson said. “If we go get him, someone else is going to get killed.” Wilson knew that what he was proposing they do—or rather,
not
do—was a violation of military protocol, and he hated the notion of leaving anyone behind, but he couldn’t stand the thought of losing another soldier in a recovery effort. Maybe if it’d been some other soldier dead up on that hill—Nic Barnes, for instance—then Wilson would have led the charge to get the body and bring it back… or maybe not. He had all sorts of complicated feelings about his short relationship with Ryan Fritsche, about their time together on that mountain, and about how Fritsche had died. The bottom line was that Wilson just wanted to get the hell out of there, and he wanted the men who were still living to keep on living. Military funerals had protocols, too.

Fortner, meanwhile, had been worrying about what might happen to Faulkenberry if they didn’t get him medevacked out soon; the tourniquet was having only a limited effect. Then the medic heard about Fritsche’s being MIA, and he felt torn. Should he volunteer to mount a recovery effort for a fallen brother? It might come at the expense of Faulkenberry’s life. “We need to leave now, or John is going to die,” Fortner finally told his platoon sergeant.

The Apache attack helicopters continued to work over the enemy positions. The lush forests and rocky landscape made it hard to identify insurgent locations and just as hard to get bombs on top of them, but Roller and his radio man kept feeding coordinates to the pilots of the F-15s and A-10 Warthogs, while the rest of 1st Platoon kept the road clear from their observation post.

The convoy at last began rolling forward.

Newsom ran ahead of the Humvees to keep the momentum going. They were on a road where no cover existed, so there was no sense in their trying to find any: the troops could either shoot and move or stay and die.

Newsom heard a snap and turned to see Private Barba holding his chin, with blood pouring from a hole in his face.

“Sir, I’m shot,” Barba said.

“You’ll be fine,” Newsom said flatly.

As the convoy edged forward–some troops in the trucks, others walking alongside them—a number of soldiers began vomiting, overcome by a combination of dehydration and exhaustion. Along the way, the wounded were dropped off at the landing zone, which offered a modicum of cover from the enemy fire. Private First Class Chris Pfeifer ran up to Faulkenberry’s Humvee with a stretcher. “It’s going to be okay, Sergeant,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.” The kid had a way of projecting eternal optimism, even in the midst of battle and bloodshed.

Del Sarto, the gunner, stuck by Faulkenberry’s side, trying to reassure him. “Here comes the medevac, don’t worry!” he fibbed as a helicopter buzzed in. But Faulkenberry was not so out of it that he couldn’t see and hear, or even differentiate among the several kinds of birds.