The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (88 page)

Avalos and Kahn grabbed Martin, hauled him out, and dragged his body about seventy yards toward the shura building. Grissette met them on the way. “I got him,” he said. He couldn’t believe it. Just a few hours before, he and Martin had been running ammo around the camp. Then Martin was missing. And now, the ugly reality. Grissette began dragging his friend’s corpse to the shura building. He felt it was the least he could do. He needed to do it. Once he’d made it there, Grissette broke down. “Man,” he said, crying, “
not my boy!
”

“Stay with me, now,” Hill told him.

“I’m good,” Grissette said, composing himself. “I’m good.”

Rasmussen was standing near the latrines when suddenly a Nuristani came out of one of the stalls; he was on the verge of shooting the man when he realized it was Ron Jeremy, the interpreter who hours before had warned the Americans of the attack. Given all the adrenaline and rage he was feeling, Rasmussen was surprised he hadn’t just shot him on sight.

“Is anyone else in there with you?” he yelled.

“No,” said the Afghan. Rasmussen didn’t believe him, so he went in to check as Ron Jeremy ran off awkwardly, his legs stiff from hours of hiding from the enemy in the latrines, his knees pulled up to his chest.

Romesha spotted Gallegos’s body from a distance as he ran to the LRAS-2 Humvee. Nearby, an insurgent lay on the ground; Rasmussen and James Stanley put more bullets into him, just to be safe. Then Romesha radioed to the others to take Gallegos to the aid station—he might still be alive, he thought. A few men would be needed for the task, since Gallegos was a big guy.

Armando Avalos was the first one on the scene. Gallegos was facedown on a rock with his hand under his head, as if he were taking a nap and using his forearm as a pillow. His body was wedged into a ditch that was covered by rocks and weeds. At first, Avalos thought he was still alive, but when he shook him, his body was limp and vacant. Gallegos’s head fell to the side; his eyes were still open. Avalos was so shocked by the sight that he was all but oblivious to the RPGs exploding near him and the machine-gun fire that had picked up ever since he put himself out in the open.

After a second, he snapped to and hunkered down under the rocks in the ditch, in which he now realized Gallegos’s leg was stuck. He used the sergeant’s body as a roof, a shield. Two minutes later, he picked his way out of the ditch and ran to the latrines.

“Gallegos is stuck,” Avalos explained to Romesha. “We’ll need to lift him up to get him out.”

With Hill, Romesha, and Dulaney providing cover, Kahn, Avalos, and Grissette ran to Gallegos and under fire lifted him toward the sky to release his leg from the ditch. Then they dragged him toward the shura building. Hill had a gear cutter—a small, sage-colored tool containing a razor blade—that he and Romesha used to slice off Gallegos’s gear and make him lighter to carry. Hill, Avalos, Grissette, and Kahn then placed their friend on a stretcher and bore him to the aid station. There, they put him in a body bag.

“Don’t seal that body bag,” Courville told Hill. “We need Cordova to pronounce him dead.”

“Why the fuck do we need a captain to pronounce him dead?” Hill asked. “He’s fucking dead.”

He stormed off to go get Martin’s body and bring it to the aid station as well.

It was 6:40 p.m. The situation report was grim: eleven Americans wounded, six killed.

Kevin Thomson.

Joshua Kirk.

Michael Scusa.

Chris Griffin.

Vernon Martin.

Justin Gallegos.

All gone.

And Joshua Hardt was missing. As was Larson, too, now.

Where
had
Larson gone? Romesha wondered. He was supposed to link up with them in their bounding mission to LRAS-2, but after that plan fell apart, he vanished. A mystery.

At Camp Keating, Larson had been mentoring Hardt, and in something of a manic sprint, he was now frantically running around the camp looking for his protégé. Larson’s body armor was weighing him down, so he took all his gear off. It wasn’t necessarily the wisest move, but he didn’t care—he thought speed was more important at this point than the added protection.

In talking with Romesha, he’d learned that Hardt’s last transmission had been from one of the stand-to trucks. Larson tried to see the world as Hardt had seen it at that moment: If I were trying to get back to the shura building from that truck, what route would I take? he asked himself.

Larson figured that he and Hardt, thinking a lot alike, would’ve sought the same escape. He explored a number of paths, running and running, from the shura building to the showers to the giant rock and back around to the shura building. He knew he was being reckless, but he didn’t care; he didn’t want the Taliban to get his friend. But he was coming up empty.

CHAPTER 37

The Long Walk Down

B
y now, Romesha and his guys had secured both the entrance to the outpost and the northwest of the camp, while Hill and his group controlled the north, northeast, east, and south. They were spread thin, but they felt confident that they could hold down those pieces of land. The one sector they did not yet have control of was the southwestern corner of the camp, near the mortar pit. The space was too open, and the incoming enemy fire too intense, for Romesha and Red Platoon to make it there. “You’ve done enough,” Breeding told Romesha on the radio. “We’ll see you later.”

“What do you think the odds are that Hardt was taken off the COP by the enemy?” Bundermann asked Romesha, also on the radio.

“I’m eighty percent sure his body is not on the COP,” Romesha said.

Bundermann told others in the operations center to start distributing night-vision goggles and thermal sights. They needed to prepare for nightfall.

The members of the quick reaction force had only the sketchiest idea of where they were headed and what they would be facing when they got there. The intelligence officer at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Major Jack Kilbride, had pulled together a very detailed report to be passed on to the QRF, but because the ad hoc force was assembled so hastily, the information didn’t manage to filter down to them before they were picked up. They’d flown in from Kunar Province, two rifle platoons from the 1-32 Infantry, led by Lieutenants Jake Miraldi and Jake Kerr. The commander of the rescue effort for Combat Outpost Keating was Captain Justin Sax, whose troops had been in nearby Barg-e-Matal for most of the previous two months. Miraldi’s platoon had been the initial force to retake Barg-e-Matal after it was overrun; once they’d cleared the area, they were counterattacked and very nearly pushed out of the village by the enemy.

That morning, at Combat Outpost Joyce in Kunar Province, Sax and the other officers had received what they considered to be a rather “skimpy” situational update—skimpy in the sense that it was apparent that no one in charge had any real idea of what was going on. Sax and Miraldi agreed that they could not even begin to plan a rescue based on the little information they had received.

By 9:30 a.m., Sax and Miraldi were at Forward Operating Base Bostick, meeting with Brown, Portis, and other members of the leadership of 3-61 Cav. They were told that the men at Camp Keating had been forced into three concrete buildings in the center of the outpost, much of the rest of which was on fire. Enemy positions were constantly being identified and reported, and as they were plotted on the map in the Bostick operations center, Miraldi was taken aback: they were everywhere. Miraldi knew this would be a tough mission—and for some, very likely a final one: from what he now knew, he was sure he and Sax would lose men.

The original plan had been to drop Portis, Salentine, Birchfield, and the QRF at the “link-up point” midway between Observation Post Fritsche and Combat Outpost Keating, nearest to the southern side of the camp, which would’ve been their fastest approach; but once it was confirmed that the proposed LZ had an active enemy presence, that seemed a foolhardy idea. An alternative would be to land the bird north of the outpost, near the Putting Green. They could clear that area, establish it as a firebase, move on to capture the Afghan National Police building, parts of Urmul, and the entry control point, and then, finally, retake the camp.

But when the Apache pilots came in, they poured cold water over that plan. The insurgents at the Putting Green and on the northern side of the river in general were just too strong, their forces too deadly; the Black Hawks taking the QRF troops to the area would be at significant risk of being shot down. Portis suggested that the Black Hawks instead fly as many of the QRF troops as possible to Observation Post Fritsche. Bad weather was coming in; soon their options might be limited to none. Sax told everyone that he was “going to fly in, get on the ground, assess the situation, talk to the guys on the ground, and we’ll do a deliberate clearing on the way down to Keating, since we’ll probably have contact.” Portis, Salentine, and Birchfield would join him.

Because the Black Hawks had to fly there in a roundabout way to avoid the insurgents’ powerful antiaircraft weapons, it took them forty-five minutes to get to the landing zone at Observation Post Fritsche. They flew so high they hit storm clouds and were drenched by a combination of snow and freezing rain—an ominous sign with terrible ramifications, as Sax well knew. Shit, this weather’s coming in, he thought. We’re not going to be able to get the next lift in. That would mean the QRF might have only thirty-five troops. They’d been told they’d need at least one more platoon’s worth of guys, up to an additional forty soldiers, to go down the mountain. There went that idea.

They landed safely. The enemy fired a couple of mortar rounds at them, but they missed, and for the most part, the fighting at Observation Post Fritsche had died down.

The troops at the observation post all looked terrified.

The word from Forward Operating Base Bostick was, indeed, that the next flight wouldn’t be coming in for some time, given the rough weather. Sax preferred to wait until all the men from 1-32 Infantry arrived, but Portis didn’t want to hesitate another second before heading down the hill. They were receiving reports that some soldiers from Black Knight Troop were still getting hit, and others were looking for bodies. “We have enough guys,” Portis insisted. “We need to get down there.”

“Come on, come on, come on,” Birchfield echoed, “let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

Portis and Sax finally agreed that if the rest of Sax’s men didn’t get there by 2:00 p.m., they would move out without them. It was just before noon.

“I need the best scout to lead us down,” Sax told Portis. “Who’s conducted this mission before?” Portis recommended Salentine and Birchfield. Portis also made sure that Stickney, the head mortarman at Observation Post Fritsche, had enough ammo to support the QRF, and Bellamy worked on grid coordinates with the team as well, just in case they ended up needing mortars during their hike down.

“We’re not going to take any trails down,” Birchfield said. “They’ve been watching us.” He was certain that every known path was either booby-trapped or ready for an ambush. “We’ll be breaking bush,” he said, meaning they would be blazing their own trail.

At 2:00 p.m., with no additional troops having arrived, they set off. The hike would take at least four hours, and the decline was so steep that Sax told his men to empty their packs of everything other than ammo and water.

Miraldi briefed the platoon. Birchfield would guide them down from Observation Post Fritsche to an outcropping of rocks, from which they would follow some defunct power lines to the top of the Switchbacks. They would clear the Switchbacks, establish fire support and overwatch, and move in to Camp Keating. They would almost surely be ambushed along the way, Miraldi acknowledged; what the QRF lacked in numbers, it would have to make up for with its speed and ability to mass and coalesce as a single, brute force.

The instant they left the wire of Observation Post Fritsche, enemy machine-gun fire began blasting them. Miraldi’s troops returned fire while air support was called in. An A-10 Warthog zoomed in on the enemy in a strafing run, and then the QRF continued down the hill. The men slowly made their way through the mountain’s rough terrain. Above them, they could see nearly every kind of aircraft that they knew existed. Sometimes the A-10 Warthogs and F-15 fighter jets flew so close that they knocked the soldiers off their feet.

By 4:00 p.m., the QRF had reached the rocky outcropping, which afforded a good strategic view of the valley. While the men rested, Portis and Salentine relayed grids to the Air Force radio operators,
⁸⁷
who coordinated with the pilots to drop bombs at targets on the mountains below them and across the valley. The QRF troops would spot groups of anywhere from twenty-five to fifty fighters trying to reconvene to attack the camp again, and they’d radio the guys in the sky.

“Two above the Switchbacks, one above the Diving Board.”

BOOM, dead.

After half an hour, they moved on. In places, the ground was slick and challenging to negotiate. At one point, Specialist Kyle Barnes, a twenty-year-old soldier from 1-32 Infantry, slipped. Barnes hated this journey. The footing was slick, the descent was steep, and the M240B machine gun slung around his neck didn’t make it any easier. As Barnes picked himself up, he pivoted on his right foot and—from the bizarre angle he’d fallen into—saw, right off the trail, a dead insurgent. Five feet to the corpse’s left was another enemy fighter crouched down with a walkie talkie in his hand, wearing a white hat and looking away from the trail. His head was moving.