Red Platoon Read online

  Hescos forming the perimeter of the COP

  The tower and two of those trucks were also equipped with sophisticated but highly finicky electronic sensors that, in theory, would enable us to detect any enemy movements within the vicinity, and lay target grids over them. Known as LRAS (which stood for “long-range advanced scout surveillance system”), these devices were rarely operative and therefore all but useless. To really get a sense of what surrounded the outpost, you had to actually get outside the wire on patrol. When we did that on our second day, I was able to start familiarizing myself with the geographic features that would dominate life at Keating.

  An armored Humvee mounted with a Mark 19, which composed the battle position known as Truck 2

  Keating was nestled on the south side of the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River and situated at the base of two mountains. On the southwestern side—at the rear of the outpost and directly behind you if you were facing the river—a huge escarpment rose more than a thousand feet. A zigzagging trail, known as the Switchbacks, ascended that escarpment from our outer perimeter all the way up to the ridge, which stretched in an unbroken line to the southeast, where a massive rock, which was known as the Diving Board, protruded into the sky. The flanks of this massif were approximately sixty degrees steep, and the ridgeline afforded superb cover for enemy gunners to look—and shoot—directly into camp.

  The Switchbacks leading down to Keating

  View of the Diving Board, as seen from the armored Humvee known as battle position LRAS1

  On the opposite side of the river—which was spanned by a small footbridge that marked the spot where Captain Yllescas, Keating’s former commander, was assassinated—an even larger hulk directly faced the outpost. This feature, which was known as the North Face, was so steep that in places it approached dead vertical—which is why one of the previous units had placed ropes along it. The only way to reach the top was by old-school Batman-style moves, going hand over hand directly up the cliff. In the most vulnerable spots, a single slip or gunshot could send you straight to the bottom, fifteen hundred feet below.

  In addition to the northern and southern walls, there was a third significant feature. Directly to the west and looming over the little village of Urmul was a massive fifteen-hundred-foot-high spur known as the Putting Green. Like the northern and southern walls, this terrain was steep, heavily vegetated with thick trees and shrubs, and boasted numerous crevices and rocky outcroppings.

  Together, these walls and ridgelines virtually ringed the outpost while providing superb cover and concealment for the forces that were watching over us.

  All of this would have been disturbing enough by itself. But what truly rattled me, Bundermann, and the rest of our advance party was the placement of our observation post.

  Most firebases like Keating are protected by a small, heavily fortified encampment that is separate from the main outpost. Known as an observation post, or “OP,” it is typically perched on the highest ground and has a direct line of sight to the main base so that the tiny group of soldiers who are stationed inside it can provide defensive cover with their machine guns and mortars.

  Thanks to the surrounding mountains, however, the highest ground at Keating sat back beyond the ridgelines running across the top of the Switchbacks. This meant that our observation post, which was known as Fritsche (pronounced “Fritch-ee”) and was manned by a single platoon of roughly twenty-five men, had no direct line of sight linking it to Keating.

  Fritsche was crucial to Keating’s security because the OP was armed with 60- and 120-mm mortars that were capable of bringing some serious hurt down on any enemy position for which we could provide ten-digit grid coordinates. So as long as we had radio contact—and as long as Fritsche’s guns were operational—the chances of the fifty Americans inside the wire down at Keating surviving an all-out assault were significantly increased. But there was also a zone of dead space between Fritsche and Keating, inside of which we simply could not see a damn thing. Within this blind spot, which was immense, the enemy could move anywhere they wanted, any time they wanted, without our knowledge. It was yet another tactical weakness that the enemy understood perfectly and knew exactly how to exploit.

  View of the Putting Green, as seen from the armored Humvee known as battle position LRAS2

  To say that this terrain was disorienting would be an understatement. Even Larson, who was one of the best scouts I’ve ever known, never felt as if he truly had a firm grasp on direction and was continuously confusing east and west. As absurd as it may sound, there was something about being at the bottom rather than the top of those mountains that made it exceptionally difficult for us to keep our compass points straight. Eventually, most of us would orient ourselves off of the North Face and use it as a kind of running cheat sheet because the direction was embedded in the name itself.

  View of Keating from the Putting Green; our helicopter landing zone is visible in the lower left corner outside the perimeter of the COP across the river

  In addition to all of this, there was also the tactical and strategic pièce de résistance on the Keating smorgasbord, which was our helicopter landing zone, or LZ.

  One of the details that we’d missed when the Chinook dropped us down in the middle of the night was that the LZ, which was nothing more than a flat stretch of dirt about the size of a basketball court, was located at the end of a concrete bridge on the far side of the Darreh-ye Kushtāz River, which ran along the western side of the outpost outside our wire. This meant that every time a helicopter was preparing to touch down, we would be required, in effect, to retake our own LZ.

  This posed an enormous security risk while making our logistics challenges immensely harder. Everything that came into that LZ would need to be carried by us across the bridge and through our front gate while exposed to enemy gunners. Even worse, if we found ourselves under siege and unable to secure the landing zone, it would be impossible for a helicopter to bring in supplies or ammunition, or evacuate our wounded.

  We didn’t know it at the time, but this would emerge as a critical issue during the battle that awaited us, imposing limitations that would ultimately prevent us from helping one of our wounded in a way that would haunt Keating’s survivors for the rest of our lives.

  But that is getting ahead of the story.

  • • •

  KEATING’S LIABILITIES were glaring enough that we were able to spot most of them within the very first day. But there was one more vulnerability that wasn’t quite so obvious, at least not at first glance.

  The main entry point to the outpost consisted of a swing-leaf gate, which was located at the point where the road that ran along the bottom of the river valley passed by the northwest corner of the outpost. The flimsy protection afforded by that metal gate arm, which you were supposed to raise to allow vehicles to pass into the camp, was further compromised by the fact that its hinges had long since broken off. Fortunately, the entire entryway lay directly beneath the armored guard tower and a machine gun that was manned night and day, which meant that it would be difficult for the enemy to storm the gate.

  Keating’s back door, however, was an entirely different matter.

  The center of camp was defined by a cluster of buildings that included, among other structures, our command post, barracks, aid station, and dining hall, plus small pieces of infrastructure like our tool shed and electric generators, as well as a mosque. Directly to the east of this area and extending all the way to the perimeter was a cluster of small shacks that housed our allies from the Afghan National Army, or ANA, who were supposed to provide additional manpower.

  These men were a real problem. They hailed from the 6th Kandak, a battalion-sized unit that had perhaps the worst reputation and performance record in the entire Afghan Army. Created just one year earlier, the unit was poorly disciplined and badly led, and in addition to that, they refused to allow themselves t
o be integrated into our command structure. Although they were supposed to number around forty men, it was impossible to know how many Afghan soldiers were inside Keating at any given time, because they tended to disappear on unauthorized leave whenever they felt the need to go home, especially during the month of Ramadan at the end of the summer.

  These men had almost no interest in training with us and they often refused to join us on patrol, preferring instead to huddle within their living area taking naps and smoking hashish. We viewed them as lazy and incompetent, but what made them truly dangerous was that they refused to use the main latrines, which would have entailed walking an extra fifty yards to the west. Instead, they trampled down the concertina wire on the east side of Keating’s perimeter, enabling them to duck into and out of camp whenever they needed to relieve themselves. So in addition to the front gate, which featured security procedures and ID checks beneath the watchful eye of whoever was on the heavy machine gun in the guard tower, the camp also had a rear entry through which anyone could come and go any time he pleased.

  As bad as the Afghan Army soldiers were, at least they had one thing going for them, which was a pair of highly experienced NATO soldiers from Latvia who had been assigned to train and keep tabs on them. The Latvians were competent, resilient, and did everything they could to boost the Afghans’ discipline and skills. This meant that despite their many faults, the ANA were marginally better than two other groups of locals: a small contingent of Afghan Security Guards (ASG) who were supposed to help guard the front gate, and a team of Afghan National Police (ANP) who maintained a tiny checkpoint on the road just outside of it. These two groups could not be counted on for anything whatsoever, aside from falling asleep at their posts in the middle of the day.

  The ANA, the ASG, the ANP: we never really understood how this confusing array of groups was supposed to link into our larger mission. And a giant part of that confusion stemmed from the fact that the larger mission was itself something of a mystery, at least to us.

  If I had to explain why we’d been sent to Keating and what we were supposed to accomplish there, what it apparently boiled down to was that we were helping the Afghan government beef up security just enough to kick-start commerce in the region. This would enable local people to start making money, which they could then use to buy a bunch of DVD players and toasters and other sweet stuff for themselves and their families, thereby magically transforming Nuristan into a hub of vibrant economic development. At this point, the government could hold elections, which would enable folks to race off to the ballot box and vote to shut down the Taliban—whereupon everybody could kick back in front of their new TV sets, break out some cocktails, and enjoy themselves.

  Needless to say, this is a poor representation of the US military’s strategy at the time, which was to use Keating and other remote combat outposts to tie up the insurgents’ resources in the hopes of preventing them from attacking larger towns and cities to the south. But, this is what we thought we were being asked to do as the remaining members of Black Knight Troop were shuttled into the landing zone over the next week.

  It’s also probably worth noting that we didn’t spend a lot of time and energy thinking about the bigger picture, because we were focused on smaller but far more urgent challenges, the main one being to figure out how the hell we were going to survive until it came time to shut this place down.

  That was pretty much the first question that ran through the minds of the new arrivals over the next several days as they stepped out of the Chinook. You could see the dismay playing across their faces during those initial moments when they took it all in and realized just how stuck we were.

  By the end of that week, the last members of Red Platoon arrived in a group that included Jones and Koppes. When they landed it was so dark that they had to hold on to each other and blindly feel their way through the little maze around the barracks.

  The next morning, when I took them on a field trip to introduce them to the outpost, Jones summed up their reaction with his usual eloquence.

  “Oh yeah, absolutely,” he muttered to himself while hitting Koppes with a knowing look. “We are so fucked.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Inside the Fishbowl

  WHEN WE FINALLY COMPLETED our handoff with the unit we were replacing, Black Knight had three frontline platoons at Keating: Blue, White, and Red. We also had a Headquarters Platoon on station that included our commanding officers, medics, forward observers, and radio operators, along with our mortar crew, plus a cluster of mechanics, cooks, and other support personnel.

  The plan was that HQ Platoon would stay inside the perimeter while each of the three frontline platoons rotated through Fritsche for stints of about a month at a time, providing overwatch for the rest of us down inside the perimeter. These tours at Fritsche were highly coveted because there was so little supervision at the observation post. Once a platoon was up there, they pretty much got to run their own show. Blue was lucky enough to get the first stint, and Red would have loved to have been ordered to replace them when they came down. The job was given to White, however, because Captain Melvin Porter, Keating’s commander, didn’t really trust me and my guys in Red.

  This was understandable because we were the most arrogant and unruly platoon in the entire troop, and therefore the biggest pain in the ass. As Captain Porter grudgingly admitted, however, we also qualified, by a significant margin, as the best trained and the most aggressive soldiers under his command. That mind-set was reflected in the eagerness with which we flung ourselves into the self-appointed mission of correcting Keating’s many security vulnerabilities—an effort to which Porter did not respond well at all.

  By the end of our first two weeks, we had drawn up a long list of improvements that we wanted to make. This included everything from repairing the front gate to replacing the claymore mines buried just outside the concertina wire on the southern perimeter. Porter responded by issuing denials on almost every one of our requests. That was frustrating, but what we found even harder to swallow was his refusal to go on the offensive. He continuously berated us for using up too much ammunition when we were attacked, and he gave the go-ahead for our mortar pit to fire rounds so infrequently that we started calling him “No-Mortar Porter.”

  Porter’s behavior, which amounted in our view to a failure to grasp the severity of our situation, struck many of us as outrageous—and on some levels, I suppose it was. But it’s worth mentioning that, as in most combat situations, the picture was far more complicated than it may seem from the outside. Porter was balancing directives from his superiors that we didn’t even know about—directives that included orders to avoid devoting too many resources to an outpost that was slated to be dismantled, and not to antagonize the local Afghan population by saturating the sector with overly aggressive patrols or unnecessary gunfire.

  On top of those demands, Porter himself was now on his third deployment and burned out far beyond his limits. In retrospect, although I found him a poor commander, I must acknowledge that many of the decisions he was forced to make during our time in Nuristan probably stemmed from far larger problems, including an army that was depleted and exhausted by two wars, multiple deployments, and inadequate resources.

  Nevertheless, we still had to deal with the fact that we were stuck inside a poorly placed outpost surrounded by an enemy bent on killing us—a situation that me and my guys counteracted by the only means at our disposal. At the slightest hint of provocation, we would burn through entire cases of ammo, unleashing the heavy machine guns and grenade launchers for longer and more sustained bursts than all the other platoons combined until we finally received a direct order from Porter to cease fire.

  In the end, however, that didn’t stop the Taliban from doing pretty much exactly what they wanted.

  • • •

  FROM JUNE THROUGH SEPTEMBER, the enemy attacked relentlessly, nailing us at least every other
day, sometimes for multiple sessions in the same day. At the time, it seemed as if their main purpose behind these strikes was simply to screw with us. Occasionally, for example, they’d hit us early in the morning with no more than a single burst of small-arms fire—the kind of “spray and pray” that appeared devoid of any tactical or strategic purpose other than harassment. More often than not, however, these attacks were serious: a sustained barrage from the boulder looming over our mortar pit that we had dubbed RPG Rock; or a well-placed round from their Russian B-10 recoilless rifle, which was hidden somewhere high in the slopes off to the east in a place that we couldn’t ever seem to pinpoint.

  That B-10 was a crude piece of junk: a two-wheeled, Soviet-era cannon with an explosive shell whose design had barely changed since World War II. It said something about the Taliban, though, that they were able to get results from it. When they fired the thing off it sounded like a freight train was dropping down on top of us, and the damage it could inflict was fearsome.

  Just a few days after we arrived, Jeff Jacobs—the platoon sergeant, and therefore the senior enlisted soldier in White Platoon—caught a couple of pieces of shrapnel in the face. It broke his jaw, shattered most of his teeth, and got him a plane ticket to Walter Reed, where the doctors had to patch up the hole in his right cheek with a metal plate. (It said something about us, I suppose, that before the end of that year, Jacobs would be back in Afghanistan.)

  Eventually, we would come to understand that the Taliban’s primary aim with these attacks was to suck up information. Each time they provoked a response from us, they were able to refine their analysis by observing our patterns of movement and teasing out our weaknesses.