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  The hooch in Red Platoon barracks shared by Raz and Larson

  Nevertheless, we did our best to make the barracks feel like home. If you entered through the west door, walked down the hall, and peeked into the little sleeping cubicles known as “hooches,” most of which featured a single set of bunk beds that accommodated a pair of roommates, you could almost always spot a detail or two which revealed something about the personality of the occupants.

  Kirk and Gallegos’s zone was relatively clean, reasonably well ordered, and absolutely chock-full of ammunition. While it was true that we all liked to stash what Jones called “a little somethin’-somethin’” in our bunks in case the base was attacked while we were asleep, Kirk and Gallegos took this practice to the extreme. In addition to an impressive assortment of guns, Gallegos had ammo belts hanging from virtually every surface. Kirk, meanwhile, had pulled several raids on our ammo-supply depot and managed to snatch up five AT4s and something like eighteen claymore mines. Together, they were probably hoarding the most impressive stash of munitions and weapons outside of the arms room.

  A few feet down the hall was the hooch where Larson and Raz slept. If the curtain wasn’t closed, it was best to avert one’s eyes because Raz, who detested wearing clothing except when it was absolutely necessary, was almost always naked—a situation that Larson accepted, as he did most things, with his trademark silence.

  Just beyond was the cubicle where Jones roomed with Kyle Knight, a specialist from Michigan who was so messy that trash was literally rolling out of his bunk, onto the floor, and into the hall—a state of affairs that earned both Knight (who fully deserved it) and Jones (who was deemed guilty by proximity) the distinction of being “the dirty birds.”

  Finally, there was the little space that Hardt shared with Mace, who won himself both envy and derision for the impressive collection of tasty snack goodies that his family kept sending him in care packages. When Mace let it be known that his packets of beef jerky and his cans of Chef Boyardee stew were off-limits to anybody who wasn’t willing to at least ask before scarfing them down, Kirk—who prided himself on never letting anyone tell him what to do or not do—made a point of barging inside whenever Mace wasn’t around, selecting something to eat, and ostentatiously leaving the wrapper behind just to let Mace know that he’d stopped by.

  Later on when Mace would return and spot whatever Kirk had left behind, he’d pad down the hall, peel back the curtain to Kirk and Gallegos’s hooch, and retaliate by farting into their cubicle. Given how much gas the occupants were already putting out, this gesture was both pointless and ineffective. But it seemed to offer Mace some satisfaction because he always returned to his bunk with a canary-eating grin.

  Given how close we were living inside those barracks, it didn’t take much for us to get on one another’s nerves. To relieve some of that tension, me and the other sergeants were constantly offering miniature training seminars in everything from land navigation and radio operation to emergency medicine. We also held what we called “family night,” in which the entire platoon would gather around a tiny table in the entryway of the barracks so that we could all watch a movie together.

  Those things certainly helped. But to fully relax, it was necessary to step outside the barracks and head over to perhaps the only place in Keating where everyone, regardless of rank or seniority, truly felt at ease—which was odd because it was also the place where we gathered our wounded and dead.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Everybody Dies

  ALTHOUGH OUR MEDICAL FACILITY was tucked up against the wall of Hescos at the periphery of camp, it nevertheless served as the center of the outpost—the place, more than any other, that was the heart and soul of Keating. It wasn’t much bigger than a kitchen in a modest suburban house, and there were no windows, just a plywood door that the medics propped open whenever we got into a firefight so the wounded could be brought directly inside.

  The floor was an ugly blue linoleum. The walls were bare and gray. And above the rafters was a storage area that held large quantities of Kerlix for stanching arterial wounds, plus plenty of extra saline and drugs. Toward the back were two sets of bunks for the medics, Chris Cordova and Shane Courville, each of whom slept with a pair of fragmentation grenades next to him in his bed.

  Cordova, a captain, was a former X-ray technician from the Washington, DC, area who had become a physician’s assistant before joining the army. In addition to being a fitness addict who was deeply into triathlons and CrossFit training, he had the most extensive medical training of anybody at Keating. Courville, a staff sergeant who served as his assistant, was from a town in Vermont so small that he’d had thirteen people in his high school graduating class. In addition to a previous stint in Afghanistan, he’d done two hauls in Iraq, where he’d seen some horrific wounds inflicted on soldiers who were stationed inside the insurgents’ haven between Mahmudiyah, Yusufiyah, and Latifiyah, an area that was known as the “triangle of death.” This would be his fourth deployment.

  Doc Courville, Doc Hobbs, Captain Cordova, and Doc Floyd

  Courville’s time in Iraq was important because it had exposed him to so much trauma. By the time he got to Keating, he had dealt with somewhere around fifteen hundred injuries, a mixture of Americans and Iraqis with the balance tipped toward the Iraqis. From the perspective of a medic, however, there was one thing that made Afghanistan fundamentally different from Iraq, which was that you couldn’t simply stanch a wounded man’s bleeding and expect that a helicopter would appear from out of nowhere to whisk your patient off to a hospital. The battle theaters of Afghanistan were too remote for that. Instead, many medics would have had to wait, on average, at least an hour and a half for a chopper to fly out their casualties. At Keating, it could take far longer, which is why Courville and Cordova knew that they needed not simply to offer effective triage treatment, but also to keep their patients alive long enough for the helevac to show up.

  Chaplin Weathers, Courville, and Cordova in the aid station

  The aid station was set up to handle three wounded men at a time. The worst case would be taken directly inside, where there was a wooden frame designed to hold a stretcher at waist height. The other two casualties would typically be carried out to the “café,” a wooden deck extending off the west wall of the building. This area was partially covered by a tin roof and camo netting, and it was further protected by a double-stacked wall of sandbags, about four and a half feet high.

  The medics had oxygen tanks, a ventilator, and a defibrillator that we never used. To administer saline and intravenous drugs, they would suspend bags from nails on the rafters in the ceiling. The walls also featured two whiteboards. The one by the litter frame kept track of the patients’ vital signs. The other board was supposed to display the phone numbers of other buildings, such as the command post and the mortar pit. But instead we used it to run Keating’s daily “incoming fire” betting pool.

  The betting board kept track of the daily wagers everyone placed on when and where we were going to get hit next. The majority of those bets were logged on Fridays and Saturdays because those were the days the Taliban most liked to nail us. The board also kept track of side bets on more nuanced wagers, like, for example, whether the attack would involve small-arms fire or the B-10, or which gun trucks would get hit, and how many times. There was never money riding on these bets, because most of us didn’t have any cash, so the stakes usually involved cigarettes or brass .50-caliber machine-gun cartridges, which could be used as currency to purchase cigarettes.

  The aid station was pretty sweet for a number of important reasons, starting with the fact that the medics almost always had electricity because they were connected into the command post’s backup generator. This meant that they not only had air-conditioning, but also their own phone as well as Internet with a DSN line, which meant that you could call back home to the States or set up a Skype chat on the computer.r />
  Cordova and Courville were extremely generous with both the phone and the computer, and the guys who were married tended to lean on that generosity pretty heavily even though—in a reflection of how much stress we were all under—their calls home would often lead to absurd and pointless arguments. One night, one of them found himself in a furious dustup with his wife about the placement of a chandelier. Later, another dude got into a screaming match over where his wife had left the remote control to the TV.

  “Jesus,” muttered Koppes, who had inadvertently overheard part of that call, “please tell me you are not fighting with your old lady about where she left the clicker . . . from Afghanistan.”

  • • •

  DESPITE THOSE minor unpleasantries, the aid station offered an escape to which anyone who wanted could retreat to bullshit, hang out, drink coffee, smoke cigarettes, and tell stories. Sometimes Courville and Cordova would prop the computer on the litter frame so that everyone could sit around and watch shows like The Wire or The Office. At other times, Courville would give classes on basic medicine or on how to use PowerPoint, while Cordova, who was deeply into stocks and investing, would offer miniseminars on financial planning. But as nice as all of those things were, what really drew us into the aid station was the tone and vibe of the place.

  Because it was neutral ground, and because the medics floated inside a bubble that belonged neither to the world of the enlisted ranks nor to the realm of the officers, the aid station served, in effect, as Keating’s de facto therapy shack. This was where NCOs like me would come in order to bitch to Courville about the dumb moves that our officers were trying to pull, and we knew that he’d listen with a willing and sympathetic ear. Those same officers, in turn, would come talk to Cordova about whatever it was that bothered them about the NCOs.

  In essence, the medics provided a one-stop shop for both physical and emotional treatment. And, of course, the other draw of the aid station was that it was where we kept perhaps the most important item in the entire outpost, aside from the poster featuring a Hooters waitress from back in Colorado Springs: the pair of lace panties that had belonged to the Russian tennis star.

  Her name was Maria Kirilenko, and that summer she would make it to the second round at Wimbledon before later going on to win a bronze medal at the 2012 London Olympics. Even more noteworthy, she had appeared in the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition with two other female tennis players in a pictorial titled “Volley of the Dolls.”

  Our connection to Maria was first formed when a member of Red Platoon who must remain nameless sent her an e-mail whose message more or less said: “You might be able to kick my ass in tennis, but I could whip your ass in Ping-Pong,” along with a comment about being stuck in the mountains of Afghanistan, which “you Russians should know all about.”

  A few days later, a reply showed up that read: “If you guys ever need someone to talk to, you know, I’m always here.”

  We ignored that, presuming it was either fake or had been sent by one of her handlers. But then a couple of weeks later, a package showed up in the mail whose return address was a house outside of London where female professional tennis players were supposed to live. Inside was a pair of white lace panties, carefully folded into a Ziploc bag. There was also a signed photo.

  The arrival of these two objects provoked a massive amount of Googling in an effort to confirm the address and authenticate the signature on the back of the photo. When we concluded that, to the best of our knowledge, the items were legit, we affixed the Ziploc bag to the whiteboard and established a policy that everyone agreed was fair. Anybody who wanted could come by at any time, open up the bag, and take a sniff—as long as he didn’t touch the panties with his fingers, and was careful to reseal the plastic.

  Those panties had the most amazing smell, a perfume that was, to us, as beguiling as it was mysterious and unknowable. As it would turn out, years later and through a strange twist of fate stemming directly from the outcome of the battle that we were about to fight, we would eventually track down and confirm the name of that scent.

  But this too is getting ahead of the story.

  • • •

  AS WE APPROACHED the end of the summer, the Taliban attacks slowly increased to the point where Keating was in total lockdown except for the helicopters that were flying in diesel fuel and ammo. When those supplies arrived, the pace could be intense. The Chinooks would land in the middle of the night and dump their loads as fast as possible before dusting off. We’d bring the forklift or the Bobcat across the bridge and onto the landing zone to haul the heaviest items back into camp. But the rest of the stuff would have to be carried by hand, which could take hours. Then the bird would return and we’d load it up with whatever we were sending out.

  There were plenty of times when we got done unloading a shipment just as the sun was about to come up and decided that there was no point in even going to sleep because we’d have to head out on patrol within the hour. But what we found even more frustrating than the lost sleep was that we weren’t getting our mail.

  Sometime in August, after a delay of almost an entire month, we finally did receive one mail pouch—but the helicopter crew was in such a rush to dump the package that they accidentally dropped the thing in the river. After scrambling around in the dark, we managed to retrieve it, but the soaking upset some of the guys enough that a bunch of us decided that it was time to send a message out to the Chinook pilots.

  Submitting a formal complaint would have done nothing, so instead we tromped into the aid station, fired up the computer, and found a website called PoopSenders.com. For a modest fee, they would deliver to any address in the world a quart- or gallon-sized package of dung from a variety of animals, including deer, rabbit, moose, cow, gorillas, and elephants, while keeping the identity of the sender anonymous.

  After much discussion, we decided to go with elephant dung, which would be delivered to the Chinooks’ home base in Jalalabad. We never quite managed to pull the trigger on actually placing that order. But the idea of responding to the shit we’d been taking from these pilots by sending them a consignment of actual, honest-to-God shit struck us as brilliant and hilarious.

  At the time, we had absolutely no idea how ignorant we were about what was really going on: how brave those men were, the challenges that they were up against, or how important they would be to our survival.

  • • •

  THE HELICOPTER PILOTS of Jalalabad were far more than just airborne delivery boys; they also flew attack helicopters armed with a fearsome array of missiles, machine guns, and cannonry with which they could, quite literally, drench the enemy in hellfire from virtually any position. These men and women were game changers, the undisputed knights of the air. Without them, we would have been sitting ducks.

  Those pilots were led by Jimmy Blackmon, a lieutenant colonel from Georgia who had an impressive armada of choppers on the tarmac just beyond his headquarters at Jalalabad Airfield. Task Force Pale Horse, which Blackmon was in charge of, consisted of sixteen Kiowas, six Apaches, six Black Hawks, four Chinooks, and three medevac helicopters, plus a trio of Hunter unarmed aerial vehicles for surveillance. The task force was staffed by almost six hundred soldiers, and on any given week, the demands that were placed on them would be difficult for a civilian to comprehend.

  Courville, Kirk, Gallegos, and Raz

  Each night, regardless of weather or moonlight, Blackmon’s pilots were moving people, equipment, and munitions around the battlefields along the Kamdesh, Korengal, and Kunar Valleys. This meant that there was a finite limitation on resources, and the decisions about how that limit was managed stemmed entirely from our brigade’s priorities.

  If the brigade’s commanders wanted to stage an air assault at Restrepo, one of the most vulnerable outposts in the Korengal, this meant that half a dozen other outposts might not get resupplied for forty-eight hours. When the resupply was f
inally carried out, the first priority would be ammunition: mortars, small arms, and .50-cal rounds. After that would come water and fuel. Rations for the men was bumped behind those things, and all the way at the tail end of the line was mail—the item that, as it turns out, has the greatest influence on soldiers’ morale.

  The reality, which I didn’t appreciate until years later, was that this constantly shifting alignment of priorities played havoc with the intricate task of sequencing a small number of aircraft beset by an endlessly exploding array of demands and flown by pilots who accepted appalling dangers.

  For a fully loaded Chinook that was carrying ten thousand pounds of cargo, there was one way in and one way out of Keating, and it was right down the Kamdesh Valley, where the Taliban, fully aware of this necessity, made a point of shooting up the helicopters. On almost every mission the pilots launched, they found themselves in the airborne equivalent of a knife fight.

  All of this was more than enough for Blackmon and his team to juggle, so receiving a shipment of elephant feces from a bunch of ground-pounders at Keating would not have been appreciated. But late in the summer, a series of events in eastern Afghanistan pushed Pale Horse even further into the red zone in a way that would have made our little prank totally unacceptable.

  • • •

  FROM THE FIRST DAY that we arrived in Afghanistan, our superiors—Colonel Randy George, the brigade commander, and Lieutenant Colonel Robert “Brad” Brown, our squadron commander—had been pushing aggressively to have Keating shut down as quickly as possible. By midsummer, a plan to dismantle not only Keating but also a few other exceptionally vulnerable outposts had been signed off on by General Stanley McChrystal, who was in charge of all US forces in Afghanistan, and there were hopes that we might be pulled out in the early autumn. Unfortunately, those plans were shoved to the back burner in the middle of the summer, when hundreds of insurgents and foreign fighters tried to seize a remote village just to the north of Keating.