The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (84 page)

“Fuck that,” replied Romesha. “We need to retake this fucking camp and drive the fucking Taliban out!”

“Let’s do it,” Hill added.

“All right,” said Bundermann.

The three men made a plan. Romesha would focus on the western portion of the camp, where the ammo supply point and the entry control point were. Hill would focus on the eastern side, the ANA side.

“I need a machine gun covering me from the south,” Romesha said.

Bundermann turned to Hill. “Whoever you’ve got, put a machine gun by the DFAC”—the dining hall—“looking to the west and north for Romesha.”

Hill nodded.

Romesha also suggested that the members of Black Knight Troop use a different frequency on their radios, since the enemy was now in the wire and could listen in. Then he took a second. He was losing the feeling in his right hand. He lifted it to his face and looked at it.

Burton came over to him. “You all right?” he asked.

“I can’t feel my hand anymore,” Romesha said.

Burton began unwrapping the dressing bandage that Rasmussen had put on him earlier, and almost immediately, the feeling in his hand returned: that big oaf Rasmussen had just wrapped it too tightly, cutting off the circulation.

“Thanks for dressing me for school today, Dad,” Romesha said to Burton. “I’ll be good.”

Bundermann told them to wait to push out until the Apaches were nearby and could provide the distraction of air cover.

Inside the Red Platoon barracks, Knight was pointing an M240 machine gun at the door. Jones had been instructed to grab an Mk 48 lightweight machine gun and stand point inside the barracks as well.

Romesha ran in. “We’re about to take this bitch back,” he announced. “I need a fucking group of volunteers.” He told them he’d need a SAW gunner to handle the squad automatic weapon, a 556 machine gun.

Gregory was the only SAW gunner there. “I don’t think I can do it,” he admitted. He’d hit a wall. A wall of terror, a wall of fatigue—whatever it was, his fellow troops understood. Some had been there themselves.

“I’ll do it,” Chris Jones offered.

So Romesha had his group: Thomas Rasmussen, Mark Dulaney, Josh Dannelley, Chris Jones, and Sergeant Matthew Miller. Jones took the SAW, and everyone else had an M4 rifle. They knew they were going to be utterly and completely outgunned, but they had no other option.

As they left the barracks, Romesha and Dannelley ran to the hut next door. They kicked the door open and threw a grenade to clear the room. Earlier, Romesha had asked Bundermann to “confirm that there are no friendlies on the other side of the HESCOs here.” Bundermann had replied that that was the case, other than the men holed up in the LRAS-2 Humvee and the mortarmen at the mortar pit. As they made their way in to the western side of the camp, Romesha told his men that anybody in front of them not in a coalition uniform would be considered an enemy combatant whom they could shoot on sight.

CHAPTER 34

The Apaches

A
t Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, Chief Warrant Officer Third Class Ross Lewallen had just sat down to coffee and breakfast with his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Chad Bardwell, when the portable radio he carried with him sounded a familiar alarm: a medevac was needed.

Lewallen and Bardwell were not themselves medevac pilots, but they often flew along as an armed escort for the unarmed Army medevac helicopters. On this particular morning, as the two men rose from the table in the mess hall and headed to their Apache, they presumed they would be accompanying a bird with a big red cross on its side on a standard wartime medical mission. But during their walk out to the airfield, the radio offered additional information about the situation: Combat Outpost Keating was under intense attack, with small-arms fire and RPGs. The news was delivered matter-of-factly, like a traffic update or a stock-market ticker.

Within twelve minutes, they were in the air, as was another Apache flown by Chief Warrant Officer Third Class Randy Huff and Chief Warrant Officer Second Class Christopher Wright. They were about thirty minutes from Forward Operating Base Bostick, which normally would be their first stop, to refuel, but based on what they were hearing on the radio, Lewallen and Huff decided to go directly to Camp Keating instead. The valley was too dangerous for the medevac but not for the armed Apaches. This would mean they wouldn’t have as much fuel when they got there and therefore wouldn’t be able to stay as long, but it sounded like there wasn’t a minute to spare. They climbed to an altitude of ninety-five hundred feet along the mountain range, keeping an eye out for the enemy the whole time. One lucky shot, a single bullet that cost no more than a gumball, and it could all be over.

As the Apaches neared Forward Operating Base Bostick, the operations center at Jalalabad reported that Camp Keating was being overrun. Everyone not only outside the perimeter but also inside it could be considered hostile. “If this is as bad as you’re telling us, we’re going to need more Apache support,” Wright replied, knowing the message would be conveyed to his commanders.

The pilots knew that the insurgents were used to seeing the U.S. helicopters travel east to west through the valley to the camp, so they decided instead to fly directly over the top of the northern mountain. As they crossed the peak and came around, they could see nothing of Combat Outpost Keating beyond an orange fire and a billowing column of smoke. It looked as if every building at the camp were aflame. They radioed in to Keating’s operations center: “Black Knight seven-oh, Black Knight seven-oh, do you read?” The pilots had no idea that the men of Black Knight Troop had lost their generator and were having difficulty responding.

Lewallen felt a sinking feeling in his chest. The entire camp must have been overrun, he thought. Everyone was dead.

But then, all of a sudden, Camp Keating made contact on a different radio frequency.

“We’ve been compromised,” Bundermann announced. “We’ve got guys inside the wire.”

Out his window, Bardwell saw a long finger of roughly thirty Afghans walking down the southern mountain on a trail that ran along the river, heading toward the eastern side of the camp.

“Hey, Ross,” he told Lewallen, “I got a whole bunch of guys here.”

“Do they have weapons?” Lewallen asked.

“Yeah,” said Bardwell.

Lewallen looked. There were so many bad guys that he couldn’t believe they were all bad guys.

“We see guys on the road,” Lewallen over the radio. “Do you have friendlies on the road?”

“No!” said Bundermann. “Ice ’em!”

“That’s not an ANA patrol?” Lewallen said.

“No!” Bundermann reaffirmed.

Apaches can be outfitted with three weapons systems at the same time: up to sixteen Hellfire missiles, each a one-hundred-pound explosive with precision accuracy that follows an aimed laser to its target; unguided Hydra 2.75-inch rockets, propelled from the front of the aircraft; and a chain gun of 30-millimeter high-explosive detonating rounds that can fire at a speed of up to 640 rounds a minute, targeted at whatever the pilot is looking at, provided that the system is linked to his helmet.

At 7:10 a.m., both Apaches let loose with their 30-milllimeter chain guns, and the insurgents, who were by then trying to breach the wire, were all killed.

A medevac hovering over the camp was waved away; it was still way too hot for it to land. The two Apaches began trying to solve that problem, firing at insurgents on the Putting Green and the Switchbacks. But now, of course, the helicopters had become enemy targets as well.

Romesha led his team of five into the ammo supply point, where they grabbed grenades, three each. They’d need them to throw around blind corners. By now, the Latvians, Lakis and Dabolins, had joined them.

The arrival of the Apaches provided a welcome distraction as Romesha’s team made its way to the shura building. Bullets rebounded off the building, with RPGs and B-10 rounds shaking the walls. Bombs screeched as they were dropped from F-15s, a high-pitched whistle that ended with the deep rumble of explosion. Romesha and Rasmussen looked at each other. “I wonder if this is what it was like during World War Two,” Rasmussen said. They were always talking about how bad previous soldiers had had it—in the trenches of Europe, on the beaches of Normandy, in the jungles of Vietnam. Romesha grinned and said, “I’m sure this is just a small taste of what it was like, brother.”

Dulaney noticed five insurgents near the maintenance shed, to their south, and he sprayed them with his machine gun; the Latvians followed his lead, dropping grenades on them with their M203 grenade launcher.

Romesha realized that the machine gun in the south of the camp that he’d requested from Bundermann and Hill was still not in place. If it had been, they’d have had a great crossfire to kill those five insurgents, but as it was, they were just eight men trying to fight dozens, if not hundreds, of enemy fighters in three different positions—to the north, the west, and the south. Romesha called Bundermann, ready to let loose: no machine gun, no cover, what was the problem? Even more infuriating to Romesha was the attitude he felt he had picked up listening to his fellow soldiers on the radio: some of the guys from Black Knight Troop sounded as if they were giving up.

Fuck no, Romesha thought. We’re not going to sit here and roll over and fucking get killed. He could feel his adrenaline flowing. You fucking muj are not going to keep us down, we are going to take this fight to you!

But first he needed everyone to get on the same page. He got on the radio again. “Where the fuck is my machine gun?” he asked Bundermann. “I can’t fucking continue without it! You’re going to get me and fucking everybody with me trying to take this COP back fucking killed!”

While it didn’t feel that way to Romesha, Bundermann had in fact made it a priority to get a machine gun in place to provide him with cover. Problem was, the machine guns were all in use. Hill did find one not being used, in the possession of an Afghan soldier who had taken cover in a drainage ditch outside the operations center. But no matter how hard Hill tried to get the machine gun from him—through argument and brute force—he couldn’t do it; here, in the wrong place and at the wrong time, an ANA soldier was finally showing that he had some fight in him.

Finally giving up on the Afghan, Hill ran to the Café outside the aid station and found an M240 machine gun. He grabbed it and ran north. Better than nothing. His larger goal was to push north and then west from the operations center, to extend the perimeter of controlled territory. He assembled a team of men, and they all ran to the dining hall, where they found Private First Class Daniel Rogers looking fairly hunkered down. “What the fuck?” Hill asked. “How long you been here, Rogers?”

“I don’t know,” Rogers said. He was now part of Hill’s team.

They couldn’t push past the dining hall because every time they tried to make a move, bullets hailed down on them from the hills. Figuring it couldn’t hurt, Hill set up the M240 machine gun and, streaming a Z-pattern with the gun, unleashed several hundred rounds. He set up Gregory, Rogers, and Davidson in positions to help Romesha and his team, and then he ran back to the Café.

After forty-five minutes of sitting scared in Wong’s hooch, Cookie Thomas heard someone come into the barracks. Then he heard a most welcome language: Latvian. Dabolins and Lakis had come in to get more ammunition.

Thank God, Thomas thought. He cried out, and they came to him. The Latvians helped the cook get to the aid station, where Floyd, Hobbs, and Cordova started fixing up his leg.

“If the pain gets any worse, I’ll give you morphine,” Cordova told him.

“I don’t want any until I get out of here,” Thomas said. Until he was on a medevac and in the air, he wanted to be as alert as he could be.

At the Café, John Francis looked at Jonathan Hill. “It’s been nice fighting with you,” he said. “It’s been nice serving with you. In case we don’t make it out of here.”

“Same here,” Hill replied.

Chris Jones stood at the corner of the ammo supply point, from which vantage he could see the river and the road toward Urmul.

“We got dudes running outside the wire across the bridge,” Romesha said. Jones stood and aimed his rifle. He fired it, and the blast of metal took down one of the insurgents. Rasmussen did the same. Jones fired at a third insurgent and killed him as well. Rasmussen looked at Jones. The kid had a huge grin on his face, like it was the coolest thing he’d ever done.

“Stay here at this position,” Romesha said. “Anyone who comes up, kill ’em.” Jones was handed the Mk 48 light machine gun, and Dannelley was posted nearby to make sure no enemy snuck up on him.

Sure enough, Dannelley soon saw someone through the wall, on the road. “Hey, stop,” he yelled. “Fucking stop!
Stop!”
When the man turned around, Dannelley saw that he was holding an AK-47. “What are you doing?” Dannelley said, then shouted, “He’s got a gun!” He aimed his M4 rifle at the insurgent, but he had placed it on “safe,” so it didn’t work for a second; he ducked behind the wall.

“Fucking shoot him!” yelled Romesha.

“Shoot him!” echoed Rasmussen.

Dannelley clicked off the safety on his rifle and stood to fire, but he’d waited too long—the enemy fighter shot him twice in the arm, and he fell to the ground.