The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (90 page)

After supplies were flown in, other wounded men from 3-61 Cav would be flown out that night, including Cookie Thomas, Ed Faulkner, Josh Dannelley, and Andrew Stone. First Sergeant Burton insisted that anyone with any kind of an injury needed to leave that night, but many of the wounded—including Eric Harder and John Francis—refused. They would leave when everyone else did. They would leave when Combat Outpost Keating was shut down.

When Stephan Mace was fifteen, his mother had let him spend the summer in South Africa with his best friend, whose family was originally from there and who returned seasonally to help run hunting safaris. Mace’s mother worried about him, especially about his pending five-hour layover in England. She fretted that he would miss his connecting flight, that he would lose his passport, that something would go dreadfully wrong. And once he arrived in South Africa, she was equally concerned about her precious Stephan and what might happen there. Surely something horrific would befall him on safari, some horrible incident with a lion or a rhinoceros.

So Stephan Mace’s mother bought him a Saint Christopher’s medal, which she attached to a dog-tag chain, knowing of his desire to enlist someday. It would keep him safe, she told him, since Saint Christopher was the patron saint of travelers. Fifteen-year-old Stephan rolled his eyes, but he put it around his neck and from that moment only rarely took it off.

When Mace landed at Forward Operating Base Bostick that night, he was met by Command Sergeant Major Rob Wilson, who noticed the medal and commented on it. Mace asked him to hold on to it for him.

“You hang on to it,” Wilson told him. “You’re in good hands. Trust the doc.”

“Okay,” Mace said, looking up at Wilson.

Major Brad Zagol, M.D., a surgeon trained at West Point and Walter Reed, examined Mace, who had tourniquets on both legs and multiple penetrating wounds to his abdomen.

“I don’t want to die,” Mace told Zagol.

He didn’t sound panicked, but he was clearly scared. Mace looked Zagol in the eye. They were in the aid station, fifty feet off the tarmac.

“I just don’t want to die,” he said again.

Zagol looked at Mace. “I’m going to get you home,” he promised him.

The nurse administered a sedative to calm the soldier down, and the surgical team began giving him blood. Zagol was worried; even though parts of Mace’s body that his heart had deprived of blood—his bowel, for example—were now receiving red blood cells, the legacy of his physiological shutdown was grim. Too many of his blood-starved organs, too much of his tissue, had already died. Medics in war zones talk about that first “golden hour”: if they can start treating a patient within the first sixty minutes after he’s wounded, the odds of his survival will be greater than 90 percent. It had been more than twelve hours now since Mace was wounded. His blood pressure was weak. And Zagol wasn’t sure what to do with the tourniquets; he figured for now he’d leave them on until Mace got to Bagram, where he could get even finer medical care.

The surgeon opened up his patient’s abdomen. The bowel looked dead. There were holes through the left side of the colon and most of the small bowel. Mace was bleeding near his left kidney. Zagol inserted cotton packs to stem the blood flow. As he did so, roughly thirty minutes into the operation, Mace’s heart stopped.

Zagol began performing CPR. Mace’s heart started beating again. But the beat wasn’t sustained; it would come back for fifteen or thirty seconds at a time and then vanish. The surgeon inserted a tube into each side of Mace’s chest to release any air or blood that had gathered in the chest cavity and might be interfering with his heart. Air began to flow out of the tubes.

An hour had passed. Mace’s heartbeat had not returned in any real way. Zagol opened the left side of Mace’s chest and cut open his ribs to make sure he hadn’t missed a wound to the heart. Reaching inside Mace’s body, he massaged his heart, clapping his hands together. He had used this technique once before, during his residency. Such massaging was a last-ditch measure, one that rarely worked. But Zagol would not give up on this soldier. He had told him he would get him home.

Ninety minutes into the operation, Zagol knew that Stephan Lee Mace, twenty-one years old, wasn’t going to make it. He had been without a steadily beating heart for almost an hour. Zagol stepped away from the table and pronounced him dead. A second group of wounded soldiers had now come in from Keating, and twenty to thirty more would soon be on their way with various wounds.

Zagol walked outside. For three minutes, he threw trash and cursed. It was the first time he’d ever been responsible for losing a patient. Several years later, he would still be questioning himself, wondering whether, if he had been a better doctor, he might have been able to save that young patient who had clung to life for so long and against such great odds, only to slip away once he’d finally been delivered to a safe place.

Mace had ended up entrusting his Saint Christopher’s medal to Robert Hull, who had been promoted to captain and was presently stationed at Forward Operating Base Bostick. The medal now needed to be returned to Mace.

When the announcement came over the FOB Bostick loudspeaker summoning Hull to the operating room, he was tending to some of the other wounded Black Knight troops who had been medevacked in. Hull was crushed to hear that Mace hadn’t survived the operation. The captain took a step toward the O.R., intending to put the chain around Mace’s neck, but Wilson stopped him. He wanted to protect Hull from the tragic scene.

“Sir,” Wilson said, “I’ll give it back to him. He tried to give it to me—it’d be better if I did it.”

Hull handed Wilson the medal, and the command sergeant major walked through the swinging doors of the operating room to return the medallion honoring Christopher the martyr to its place around the neck of Stephan Mace.

Cordova wanted to find out about Mace, so he tracked down First Sergeant Burton at the Red Platoon barracks. He knew Mace had gotten to Forward Operating Base Bostick alive. Had he made it through surgery?

Burton didn’t say a word, nor did he need to. He looked at Cordova with pain in his eyes.

Cordova walked away, shattered. He couldn’t bring himself to tell Courville, Floyd, and Hobbs—maybe later, but not now, not now. He went into a small side room to be by himself.

Miraldi’s platoon was assigned the eastern half of the outpost, and the troops took up residence in the one ANA barracks that was still standing. Afghan soldiers began trickling in after Lakis and Dabolins found them in their hiding places; they had not fought, not defended the outpost. The 1-32 Infantry troops had them stay in a separate room. Not only had the Americans seen Afghan security forces run away from battle before, but for all they knew, these particular guys could all be Taliban in stolen ANA uniforms. Eventually, Sax’s men forcibly took the weapons from the Afghans and posted a guard outside their room.

Having heard about the ANA troops’ weak, cowardly, and in some cases treasonous performance the day before, as well as the rising tensions that had followed, Brown decided that they would be first to be shipped out the next day. Before their flight left, Lakis informed the assembled Afghans that due to weight constraints on the helicopter, they could bring along only one bag each. He looked at the congregated ANA troops and noticed one with an especially large satchel. He tried to grab it to see how much it weighed, but the ANA soldier pulled it away from him, and his fellow troops responded in a hostile manner. Lakis talked outside with the ANA commander about the incident. The ANA commander walked up to the soldier with the large bag, snatched it away from him, and dumped out its contents. Out spilled all sorts of objects pillaged from the U.S. troops, from digital cameras to protein-drink mixes.

The Bastards’ barracks at Combat Outpost Keating during the October 3, 2009 attack.
(Taken from U.S. Army investigations)

One of the Humvees at Combat Outpost Keating after the October 3, 2009, attack.
(Taken from U.S. Army investigations)

On Sunday, October 4, Brown and Portis walked the grounds of the outpost with Romesha, Hill, and Larson to get a grasp on what had happened. They assessed the damage, trying to figure out which entrances the insurgents had used to enter the camp, which buildings and trucks had been damaged and how. Dead Taliban remained inside the wire, gruesome and gray. The Americans were also trying to figure out what could be salvaged and what they would need to destroy before the camp was abandoned.

Salentine led a team into Urmul to make sure all the enemy fighters had cleared out. When he came back, he told Portis, “If you think Keating looks bad, go check out Urmul. It’s Armageddon.”

Enemy radio traffic indicated that the insurgents would try again to overrun the outpost, so Miraldi’s platoon was on full guard duty late into the night. Luckily, there was no new attack, just small firefights as Black Knight Troop shipped out men and equipment over the next two days. Harder was assigned the task of securing the video camera that had been placed atop the maintenance shack for surveillance; an insurgent in the mountains fired at him, and he slid down the roof, nearly breaking his leg. But compared to what had transpired but a few days ago, this was almost the stuff of comedy.

The day after the battle brought ten local leaders from Kamdesh, Mandigal, and Urmul to the gates of Combat Outpost Keating. They asked for Portis, who came out to meet them. Were they there to apologize? To offer their condolences? To offer to help? No, they wanted to know if they could collect the bodies of the insurgents in and around the camp.

Portis seethed. He told them they could send elders and women to collect the dead, but the appearance of any fighting-age males would be considered a threat.

The elders from Urmul said they had been hiding in Agro since the Taliban told them to flee. Could they return to their homes now?

No, Portis said. The outpost was still being fired upon, and the United States Army would continue to bomb the Switchbacks and Urmul in response. Those spots and the surrounding mountains would not be safe for the next forty-eight hours. Portis wrote in his journal that night: “They walked away upset. I walked away pissed off.”

Portis wasn’t the only one seething. The night before, he’d sent troops into the original, burning operations center to retrieve classified equipment and documents. Cady was tasked with securing any Afghan currency that was still intact from the two safes—Portis wanted him to finish his task of paying the contractors. Cady could barely contain his contempt as he handed over a small fortune to the head Afghan Security Guard, just a day after he and his men had proved worse than useless.

George and Brown had long discussed the best way to close Combat Outpost Keating. They had debated whether it was better to leave it intact or destroy it. This had been an ongoing discussion, and they again went over the options. Leaving it standing for Afghan forces or local authorities to use could be problematic; they recalled how 6-4 Cav left Combat Outpost Lybert, only to have insurgents falsely claim to have taken it by force.

George and Brown decided that they would remove everything they could and then they would bomb the hell out of the outpost, leaving nothing behind. Even if they had wanted to undertake a major salvage job, there wouldn’t be weren’t going to be enough helicopters to haul all of the equipment, and they weren’t going to spend the money and effort to remove the Humvees that had been shot up or the tons of stockpiled ammunition. The brigade flew in a team of engineers. Crater charges were placed in each of the Humvees, and detonation cord wrapped around all the damaged ammunition. Explosives were attached to anything that an enemy fighter could possibly use for either fighting or shelter. U.S. Air Force observers were given just under a dozen grid points on which to drop their bombs.