The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (18 page)

“What are you going to do when you get home on leave?” one asked him. “Will you drink a beer with me?”

“Tell my mom and dad I love them,” Monti said, his voice fading.

“You’ll tell them yourself!” yelled Hawes.

Cunningham could hear an enemy commander shouting out orders to his men.

“Tell them I made my peace with God,” Monti said.

He begged for the release of death, and finally it came.

From afar, the fire-support soldiers kept sending mortars that exploded on the ridgeline above the kill team, and as the sun set, Grzecki directed planes that began dropping five-hundred- and two-thousand-pound bombs about five hundred feet away. That was enough to abate the enemy fire.

Cunningham moved up and provided cover, firing his M203 grenade launcher. Hawes reached Lybert and—after confirming that he was dead—gathered up his ammo and threw it back behind the boulders. Insurgents fired at him; Hawes shot back with an M16 rifle that he found near Lybert, then threw a grenade. Next he scurried over to Monti. Also dead. He took and tossed his ammo, too.

Hawes then moved on to Bradbury, where Smitty met him. Bradbury was still alive, though the RPG blast had done serious damage to his arm. Together Hawes and Smitty carried him toward the boulders. Along the way, they passed Monti’s body.

“Who’s that?” asked Smitty. The fire had been so loud, and the fight so all-consuming, that Smith hadn’t been aware of everything that was happening, even just a few yards away.

“Monti,” grunted Hawes.

They passed the stone wall.

“Who’s that?” asked Smitty.

“Lybert,” Hawes answered.

Noble, the medic, immediately started working on Bradbury. His arm was so badly mangled that Noble had to wrap the tourniquet around his shoulder since there wasn’t any place left to put it on the limb itself. The medic showed Garner where to hold the special quick-clotting combat gauze on Bradbury’s wounds. The gauze burned a bit as its embedded chemical did its work, sealing the skin and flesh.

“You get to go home now,” Garner reassured him. “You get to see your baby early.”

More rounds came toward them, and Hawes got Garner’s attention and pointed to Bradbury’s weapon.

“Get to it,” Hawes said.

Garner ran back to Bradbury’s SAW and started firing. Smitty joined him. Grzecki radioed back to the base: they needed to get a medevac in there, he told them. By now, darkness had fallen upon the mountain.

The enemy retreated, and the kill team assumed a 360-degree posture, ready to fire outward in all directions.

Monti and Lybert lay side by side. Troops pulling guard duty could look through the thermal sights of their rifles and see the remaining heat leave the bodies of their fallen comrades. Viewed through infrared goggles, the two corpses slowly eased from a light shade of gray into the same inky black as everything else around them.

There was nowhere for the medevac helicopter to land, so one of the birds lowered a hoist carrying a combat medic, Staff Sergeant Heathe Craig, of the 159th Medical Company. Just hours before, Craig had been on his computer, using an Internet chat service to play peekaboo with his daughter, Leona, who was just thirteen days shy of her first birthday. His wife, Judy, and their four-year-old son, Jonas, had giggled because Craig’s webcam wasn’t functioning properly—to his family, in their off-post apartment close to Wiesbaden, Germany, their husband and father appeared upside down and green.

It was in the middle of that happy interlude that Craig had gotten the call, and now here he was, doing one of his least favorite things in the world: sitting on a Jungle Penetrator, the drill-shaped device lowered from a chopper to extract troops, balancing himself as he descended into hostile territory on the side of a mountain. He’d volunteered to be a flight medic after concluding that being a regular scout medic wasn’t enough: treating cases of athlete’s foot at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, didn’t leave him feeling as if he were really contributing. But
this
—well, this was terrifying.

Craig was lowered into an opening in the trees, just above a boulder on a steep decline to the west of the mountain ridge. Garner lit a strobe light, and Cunningham, standing on the boulder, grabbed the medic, losing his wedding ring in the process. Over the din of the choppers, Craig tried to reassure everyone that the ordeal was over.

“We’re going to get you guys out of here!” Craig yelled. “Everyone’s going to be okay.”

The plan was for the two wounded men both to be choppered to an aid station on the same helicopter. Bradbury was supposed to get in the hoist first, but he had started bleeding again and was slipping in and out of consciousness, so Derek James was first to be strapped into the seat. Craig tied himself to the Jungle Penetrator, so that he was facing James around the upright metal stem, and twirled his finger as a signal for the chopper crewman to pull them up. Upon lifting off, the Jungle Penetrator swung from the boulder over the steep decline and started spinning around. Craig controlled the oscillations as he’d been trained to do, and the two men were quickly yanked into the bird.

Craig went right back down again for Bradbury. They got him onto the seat and strapped in, but he was going to be tougher to hoist up because of his wound. Craig twirled his finger again. The Jungle Penetrator swung out and started spinning again, and as they got closer to the helicopter, the oscillating increased in speed.

Unable to hold himself upright, Bradbury was leaning back, making it more difficult for Craig to manage the rotation. The chopper crewman tried to pull the two men up as fast as he could, but the Jungle Penetrator suddenly began spinning out of control. As the crewman frantically worked, the hoist’s cable twisted and turned, rubbing against the sharp edge of the chopper’s floor.

Because it was dark, Craig had fastened a small light to his gear. On Hill 2610, Matt Chambers stood and watched the light spin around until it was a blur.

Then the cable snapped. Chambers kept watching as the light stopped spinning into a blur and instead began falling, flying down. Craig and Bradbury plummeted some one hundred feet, onto the western side of the ridge, and landed on rocks.

Oh no, the men thought as they saw it happen.
God,
no.

Cunningham ran down to where they’d fallen, as did Chambers and Noble. Craig and Bradbury were both unconscious and clearly in bad shape, drawing shallow breaths. Cunningham checked Bradbury for spinal injuries, and Chambers did the same for Craig, as the medevac flew away. Cunningham told Chambers to hand him the emergency flight radio attached to Craig’s gear. “They’re still alive!” he yelled into it. “Get that medevac back here!” There was no response, only static. Because it wasn’t his own radio, Cunningham didn’t know if it was even working, or if the chopper pilots had heard him.

Chambers could barely see anything, but he could feel that Craig was bleeding profusely. He cradled the medic’s head between his legs, trying to hold it and his neck as straight as possible while also making sure that Craig didn’t choke on the blood that seemed to be pouring from his nose. Chambers did the best he could, but ultimately he realized that he couldn’t do much more than provide the dying man with some small measure of comfort. He cursed his own powerlessness as he heard the last breaths issue from Heathe Craig’s mouth.

Hawes came down and tried to help Bradbury, but he was in the same condition as Craig—mortally wounded, being held by a fellow soldier who was unable to do anything to ward off death’s inevitable touch.

Cunningham meanwhile ran up the mountain and told Grzecki to call back to command and tell anyone who would listen to send that medevac back. Noble followed him up the hill.

“They’re dead,” Noble said.

In the operations center at Forward Operating Base Naray, Howard was intensely aware of everything that had gone down on Hill 2610. Four men were dead, and one wounded soldier—Derek James—had been successfully medevacked to the aid station at Naray. Everyone else was accounted for and would likely be okay for the night. Additional food drops were not needed.

Howard went in to his commander’s office. Then he came back out to the operations center.

It was time to cut their losses. Howard had decided it wasn’t worth it to send a helicopter into an area where an insurgent with an RPG could get lucky and inflict yet another tragedy on 3-71 Cav. There would be no more helicopters that night, he said. He made sure to put plans in place for the spent team to safely walk off the mountain the next day.

“Those guys are just going to have to hold up,” he said.

Cunningham, Hawes, and Woods moved the four bodies away from their camp.

As dawn broke, Cunningham saw the look on the faces of his men. He had seen it before: the huge, wide eyes, the result of a lifetime’s worth of horror and loss packed into a few hours. The look of men who’d had some part of themselves taken away forever. The look of men who had been hollowed out.

The next medevac brought in hard plastic stretchers, referred to by troops as “Skedcos.” The bodies were removed from the mountain, as was the four men’s gear. The thirteen surviving members of the kill team walked back down the mountain toward Forward Operating Base Naray.

A few days later, Captain Michael Schmidt and two Cherokee Company platoons air-assaulted into the Gremen Valley. The men of Cherokee Company watched the buildings where the enemy lurked. They took grids and called in bombs. Not much was left by the time it was all over.

Also demolished as a result of this engagement was Howard’s village-hopping idea. It was decided that U.S. forces would come back to deal with Bazgal, Kamu, and Mirdesh at a later date. As happened in every military operation, the enemy got a vote.

Still, even with 3-71 Cav reeling now from two major calamities, Nicholson continually reminded Howard of the need to get the Kamdesh PRT established as soon as possible. Winter was guaranteed to be brutal. It had to be done, Nicholson felt, and it had to be done quickly—and so it would be.

CHAPTER 9

“This Will Happen to You”

T
he establishment of the PRT in Kamdesh District was delayed for several weeks so that 3-71 Cav could concentrate on eliminating the enemy presence operating in and around Gawardesh—that is, the insurgents responsible for the deaths of Monti, Lybert, Bradbury, and Craig. Once that task had been completed, the leaders of the squadron refocused on building the outpost. As a first step, they made plans to begin sending supplies to the Afghan National Police station adjacent to the site. That mission was derailed, however, by a mudslide that blocked a portion of the Landay-Sin River, flooding the road with five feet of water. The overflow washed away large chunks of land, leaving behind a temporary lake about one hundred feet across and five to six feet deep. Local entrepreneurs soon took to lashing together anything inflatable—black inner tubes, animal hides—to ferry people and supplies from one side of the road to the other. For a hefty fee, of course.

Captain Dennis Sugrue, the Headquarters Troop commander, had an engineering background, so he sought to take charge of the situation. Sugrue already had a good idea of the sorts of problems he’d be facing, having joined Howard in the convoy to Forward Operating Base Naray the previous month. As was very often the case in Afghanistan, the most dangerous part of the trip was the drive. An uparmored M1114 Humvee had a standard weight of ninety-eight hundred pounds, and steering one on an exceptionally narrow and poorly constructed road was a life-or-death proposition; among other challenges, the edges of the Humvee tires would skirt along the cliffs, causing already suspect retaining walls to crumble further, so that sometimes there was only a few centimeters’ margin between continued advance and a fatal plummet.

Since the road was too unstable to support a bulldozer, Sugrue devised a plan utilizing a hydraulic shovel. After troops detonated explosives to blow through the mud, they could use the shovel to dig a channel, through which the water ought then to be able to drain from the road. When that didn’t succeed, 3-71 Cav troops began literally floating supplies upriver. In the end, Sugrue cut into the mountain, elevating the road; that solution finally worked. But his chore didn’t end there, because huge rocks were constantly tumbling down and blocking the way, obliging Sugrue to hire local men to patrol the future thoroughfare and clear it of debris. There was more: when boulders weren’t rolling down onto the road, they were shifting underneath it. On two consecutive days in June, Humvees rolled over off the crumbling side of the road and down the cliff. Thankfully, no one was seriously hurt. To those involved in this civil-engineering nightmare, it became clear that just setting conditions for the birth of the Kamdesh PRT would be close to impossible.

And then one day the order was given: PRT Kamdesh was a go.

Back at Jalalabad Airfield, Jacob Whittaker, the intelligence analyst with the Idaho National Guard, awoke and was told that while he was sleeping, helicopters had landed and dropped off three platoons of soldiers at what would become the new Kamdesh outpost. His jokes about Custer, his alarmist pleas—all of those were now scattered to the wind like so much Afghan dust.

They landed in a cornfield.