The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (80 page)

Francis opened his eyes.

“Sergeant, you good?”

“I don’t know, motherfucker,” Francis said. “You’re the one looking at me. You tell me if I’m good!”

“Can you get up?” Dulaney asked.

Francis tried, but his left side throbbed with pain.

“You all right?” Dulaney asked again.

“I think I’m all right,” Francis said. “I think I got some busted ribs.” He would later find out that five of his ribs had been fractured.

“Should we go to the aid station?” Dulaney wondered.

“Fuck, no,” Francis said. “We gotta keep fighting till this shit’s over.”

Sergeant Breeding and his men did everything they could to get the radio back up, but it wouldn’t work. They had no idea what was going on elsewhere in the camp; they were completely disconnected from the rest of the world.

“As long as we’re in the bunker, we’ll be okay,” Breeding told Rodriguez and Barroga.

But the bunker was precisely where the insurgents continued to shoot machine-gun and sniper fire—for good measure adding multiple RPGs to their onslaught, too. Breeding and Rodriguez returned fire with their M4 carbines. They didn’t think they had much of a chance of hitting their targets; they just wanted to throw down some lead to keep the bad guys from shooting at them.

Meanwhile, the men on the guard posts at Camp Keating were starting to run low on ammunition. The sheer volume of rounds they were putting out astounded Bundermann. And though some of the American bullets were finding their mark, the counterattack clearly wasn’t having much of an effect.

The RPG that had blown Hill onto his back also blew out their generator, and the satellite phone line went dead; the enemy seemed to know exactly what to target. The mIRC system, thankfully, was still online. Forward Operating Base Bostick’s ops center alerted Keating’s that a pair of F-15 Strike Eagles, the two of them together codenamed Dude 25, were on their way, courtesy of Task Force Palehorse.

6:12 am BK DUDE 25 enroute No eta yet

NEGATIVE, AH
⁸³
ARE BEING ALERTED TIME NOW

ITS A 40 MINUTE FLIGHT

6:13 am whats the status of air

6:14 am CLOSE AIR SUPPORT 5 minutes

Justin Gallegos, Brad Larson, and Stephan Mace were stuck at LRAS-2. “We’re getting attacked from the village,” Gallegos told Bundermann, referring to Urmul. “Do I have permission to fire back?”

“Absolutely,” Bundermann said. “Light it up.” At that point, everything was fair game.

6:14 am we are taking fire from inside urmul village

6:18 am our mortars are still pinned down unable to fire

6:20 am we need cas
⁸⁴

still taking heavy rpgs and machine gun fire

6:21 am at both locations fritsche and keating taking heavy contact

All of twenty-three minutes had passed since the attack began.

Ty Carter ran in to the Bastards’ barracks and was greeted by a scene of chaos and shouting.

“Shut the fuck up!” Hill yelled. Everyone quieted down. “We need to find out who needs what.”

“Everyone needs everything,” Carter said, gasping for breath.

From Spokane, Washington, Carter had joined the Marines out of high school, but he’d been busted down to a lower rank for fighting. He’d then quit and spent five years as a civilian working aimlessly at a series of odd jobs. He hated that, felt like one in a herd of cattle. He wanted to fight for his fellow soldiers, not earn a paycheck without a sense of honor or direction. He reenlisted in the military in January 2008, opting this time for the Army, figuring the Marines probably wouldn’t take him back.

In civilian life, Carter had felt like something of an oddball and an outcast, but in the Army, he felt alive, with purpose. And on this day, he relished his role as the soldier trying to help his fellow troops.

Hill loaded up Specialists Michael Scusa and Jeremy Frunk with more ammunition to take to Gallegos at LRAS-2. “Okay, get the fuck out of here,” he told them. Harder stood by the door; he would join them. He opened the door as Scusa, Frunk, and Private First Class Daniel Rogers lined up to run.

“Are you ready?” Scusa asked Frunk. Echoes of incoming gunfire filled the barracks.

“Let’s go!” Frunk said.

They exited the barracks in earnest.

Hill watched them proudly. Men of valor. No questioning, no protest. He’d given them the order, and they’d run out into the fire.

In the hills of the Northface, a sniper was waiting. One of his bullets hit Scusa in the right side of his neck, lacerating two major blood vessels and the right jugular vein. It also penetrated a larger artery and cut across his spinal cord before exiting out his lower back.

Scusa’s head rocked back, and he went limp.

Frunk tried to grab the loop on the back of Scusa’s armored vest in order to drag him to the aid station. As he bent down, the sniper opened up with a dozen more rounds. A bullet went through the side of Frunk’s vest, slamming into his back; panicked, the soldier hit the ground and low-crawled back to the barracks, where the next troops were getting ready to run out and resupply those on guard.

“Don’t go out! Don’t go out! Scusa’s hit!” Frunk yelled. The other men lifted him up and brought him back to Hill. He was shaking and scared.

“You okay?” Hill asked.

“Sergeant Hill, I think I’ve been shot,” Frunk said. He’d never been shot before, so he thought his wound was worse than it was. He took off his vest and shirt.

“It’s just a graze,” Hill told him. “You’re okay. Is Scusa wounded?”

Frunk hung his head, shaking it no.

“Where was he hit?” Hill asked.

“I think he got shot in the face,” Frunk said.

Sergeant Francis tried to slowly open the door to the barracks to see where Scusa was, but the sniper fired rounds right at him. He shut the door, paused, then opened it again and ran out to Scusa.

Blood was pouring from the specialist’s neck. Francis attempted to find the exit wound with his hand, wiping the blood away and feeling for holes. Soon figuring out that the round had gone into Scusa’s neck, he probed the area, trying to stop the bleeding, trying to find the jugular. He finally found it and was working to pinch it closed when the sniper shot at him and hit the M203 grenade launcher attached to the M4 carbine that was slung around his arm. The weapon snapped, and the clip fell off.

Good Christ, that was close, Francis thought. “Harder!” he yelled. “I need cover! Harder! I need cover!”

Inside, Hill quickly assigned troops to cover the doors. The other men ransacked their barracks looking for smoke grenades. Hill found some and threw them to Eric Harder, near one of the doors. Harder poked his head outside; he had two grenades in the pouch of his vest. He lobbed one to Francis and held on to one for himself. After waiting but a moment, both men pulled the pins and threw their grenades, building enough billowing smoke to form a wall. Harder rushed out of the barracks, ran through the haze, and helped Francis drag Scusa to the aid station. The smoke did not deter the sniper, who simply fired through it, hitting a nearby Humvee. The bullet fragmented, hitting Francis’s arms and legs, but he and Harder kept going.

This is not good, this is not good, this is not good, the men thought. And it was about to get worse, because insurgents were now bounding down the southern wall toward the outpost.

Doc Cordova looked around the aid station and saw mayhem and devastation and blood everywhere. He and Courville were still working on Kirk, and yet another wounded ANA troop had staggered in, bringing the total number of Afghan WIAs to six. One had an eye hanging out of its socket, and another a serious abdominal wound—so bad that his guts were literally spilling out of him. The other four had gunshot and shrapnel wounds. Specialist Chris Chappell, peppered with shrapnel, had also briefly stopped in at the aid station; after Cordova treated him with oral antibiotics and pain relievers, he’d headed right back out to the fight.

Into this hell now came Harder and Francis, carrying Scusa. He was completely pale; he had no heartbeat, no pulse. Cordova checked his eyes and wasn’t able to provoke any neurological response. Cordova had known the specialist for two years, having first met him in Iraq, and he knew what a sweetheart he was. He also knew that Scusa and Floyd were close, and he wondered how the new medic, today dealing with his first serious casualties, would handle his friend’s death.

At 6:30 a.m., Scusa became the first person Cordova had ever pronounced dead. The young man was put in a body bag and carried back to Courville’s room.

Back at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Stoney Portis, Ben Salentine, and Kirk Birchfield were crawling out of their skin. These leaders of Black Knight Troop desperately wanted to be of some help, any help, to their brothers back at Camp Keating. But there wasn’t anything they could do except sit in the operations center at Naray. The surveillance aircraft hadn’t yet made it to the Kamdesh Valley, so they couldn’t see anything; they could only read Wong’s and Schulz’s messages and listen to Bundermann on the radio.

Salentine and Birchfield were conscience-stricken about not being alongside the men they had trained with for just such an event. Portis was new to Black Knight Troop, but as its absent commander, he, too, condemned himself. What leader in his right mind leaves his soldiers? he thought. Logic. at this point, had no case to make.

It felt as if they had to wait forever until they were able to catch a ride, yet the attack wasn’t yet an hour old when Portis, Salentine, and Birchfield grabbed backpacks full of ammunition and grenades and got on the first medevac along with Specialist Tim Kugler, a scout from Red Platoon, and two Air Force radio operators. The bird went up, circled over Forward Operating Base Bostick, and then flew up and down the Landay-Sin Valley, killing time, not heading directly for the outpost. Portis finally grew impatient and—because the helicopter’s rotors were so loud—began writing notes to the pilot, asking what was keeping them from leaving the area. The pilot wrote back that he was waiting to be told there was somewhere for him to land safely near the besieged outpost; right then, the battle zone was still too hot.

Inside the bird, a cold calm came over the men. They knew what their purpose was. Portis thought, I’m not going to come back from this mission. This is it. This is how I’m going to die. He had written his beloved wife, Alison, a farewell letter and given it to his brother to present to her should he not return. She would be taken care of. Portis got choked up for a second, and then he made his peace with what awaited him in the valley. This was what he had signed up for. He turned his attention to what they would do when they landed. Putting pen to paper, he drew a diagram and began planning with his men how they would exit the helicopter, run for cover, and then join the fight to save Combat Outpost Keating.

Outside the Red Platoon barracks, Clinton Romesha yanked Corporal Justin Gregory’s Mk 48 machine gun out of his hands. “Grab more ammo and follow me,” he told him.

“I’m moving a machine gun into position to cover you,” Romesha radioed Gallegos, who was still stuck at LRAS-2. “As soon as I can cover you, if you can, I need you to displace back to Red Platoon barracks.”

“I don’t know if you can lay down enough fire,” Gallegos said. “But if you can, roger.” Inside the Humvee, it seemed as if they were being submerged in an ocean of bullets and grenades: Gallegos, Mace, and Larson could only hope the car’s plating would hold up against the relentless battering. And however determined and skilled and ruthless a soldier Romesha might be, that he alone could provide enough cover fire with one lightweight machine gun seemed unlikely.

Romesha and Gregory scurried over to the generator by the mosque. There, Romesha set the machine gun atop the generator, and Gregory began linking up its ammunition. “I’m setting the machine-gun fire whenever you’re ready to move,” Romesha radioed to Gallegos.