The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (79 page)

Machine-gun fire was now coming from the ANA side of the camp, and the ANA barracks itself was on fire. Hill was still trying to get an assessment of where the main attack effort was coming from; no one at the operations center seemed to know. From what he could deduce, the enemy had surrounded them.

Hill opened the north-facing door of the barracks to take a look. Just then, an RPG hit the generator ten feet away, blowing him back into the barracks and onto his back.

“You okay?” Harder asked.

“That thing was close,” answered Hill.

“Let me check for shrapnel,” Harder said. He patted Hill down, checking for wounds. There wasn’t any.

“Okay,” Hill told him, “go to the ASP”—the ammo supply point—“and get that ammo out to the battle stations.”

While troops had ammunition stashed all over the camp, most of the official supply was kept in the ASP, near the camp entrance. It was stored behind two doors, both of which had been locked in an effort to keep Afghans from stealing it. The locks had, in fact, just been reinforced.

Specialist Ty Carter took out his M4 rifle and put five rounds into the lock. But when he opened the door, he realized he’d picked the wrong one—this door led to the mortars and Claymore mines. He needed the door for rounds and bullets. As he exited into the open space, John Francis arrived at the entrance.

“What are you doing?” Francis asked Carter. “Get cover!”

Carter ducked down. “I need to get two-forty ammo for LRAS-two,” he said.

“It’s in there,” Francis replied, referring to the other ammo supply point door.

“It’s locked,” Carter said. “Can I shoot the other locks off?”

Francis seemed hesitant, but then he said yes; Carter put a round into the second lock and blasted it open. He ran inside, followed by Francis, and they started throwing ammo out to the other soldiers—including Sergeant Matthew Miller and Eric Harder—who now began running over to transport rounds and bullets to the guard posts: “
Take this to LRAS-One. Now!” “Take this to LRAS-Two. Now! Go! Go! Go!”

An RPG hit the HESCO barrier across from the door of the ammo supply point. It knocked Carter and Francis down and blew Miller into the ammo building. Carter picked Miller up and pushed him out of the building, yelling at him to go back to the barracks.

When Eric Harder and Francis followed Miller a little while later, Hill noticed they’d both been peppered pretty well by shrapnel from the RPG. The fact that Harder was still wearing gym shorts didn’t help matters.

Sergeant Justin Gallegos’s panicked voice came on the radio, from LRAS-2. “We need ammo right now!” Gallegos said. “This is no bullshit!”

The messages from Wong and Schulz quickly turned from descriptive to desperate:

6:10 am we are taking contact from diving board, switchbacks, putting green and b-10 position

we are taking heavy small arms fire and rpgs

rpgs from the north face

still taking indirect fire

6:15 am need something our mortors cant get upo

we are taking casiltys

GET SOMETHING UP!

Sitting in the tower of the shura building, Nicholas Davidson aimed his M240 machine gun at the plume of smoke rising from the Putting Green. After quickly running through his ammo, he was just ducking to reload the gun when a sniper round ricocheted across the turret. Then another whizzed right by his head. “Oh, fuck,” Davidson said. He tried to climb down, but an Afghan Security Guard had found a safe harbor in that spot below the turret and was blocking his path.

When Kirk, Knight, and Gregory entered the shura building, it was thick with clouds of dirt and dust. They made their way to the ladder that led to the guard’s ledge. “Get the fuck out of there, you goddamn pussy!” Kirk yelled at the Afghan guard. He grabbed him and threw him out of the way. Davidson started to climb down. “Davidson, get back on that two-forty,” Kirk ordered.

“I have no ammo,” Davidson said.

“We gotta get more ammo,” Kirk announced. He turned to Knight, who was on the radio, trying to tell the operations center where to target the mortars. “Give me that AT-,” Kirk said, grabbing the antitank gun. “Cover me while I fire this,” he told Gregory.

Bullets, rockets, and mortars volleyed toward them like raindrops in a squall, the flashing and crash of explosions like lightning and thunder. The men had never seen anything like it. Kirk stood by the door and prepped the AT4 grenade launcher, pulling out the safety pin, pulling up the firing pin, opening up the sights. He took a step outside the shura building while Gregory raised his M249 light machine gun and took a knee at the door, half inside and half outside the door frame, aiming at the Putting Green, to the west of the camp. Resting the grenade launcher on his shoulder, Kirk looked into the sights to fire, but before he could press the red firing button, an RPG struck the side of the shura building. The explosion slapped Kirk onto the ground and flattened Gregory onto the building’s floor. Gregory took a second to get his bearings and then ran out to try to help Kirk, who was on his back with his feet facing the door, not moving. The RPG had been only part of it: there was also a gunshot wound to Kirk’s head. The bullet had gone through his right cheek and out the back of his skull. Blood was pouring from his face. As bullets crackled around his feet, Gregory grabbed Kirk by the shoulder straps of his vest and started pulling him. But Gregory was small, and the man whose limp body he was trying to move was not.

Seeing what was going on, Davidson came out to help. When the two had Kirk in the safety of the shura building, Gregory tried to wipe the blood from the sergeant’s face while Davidson called the operations center on the radio, pleading for help.

It was just instinct: when Cordova, Courville, and the other two medics—Sergeant Jeffrey Hobbs and Specialist Cody Floyd—heard the first blast, they immediately headed to the aid station, where they put on surgical gloves and began preparing for casualties.

They did this every three days or so—that is, every time there was an incoming attack—but it didn’t take them long to figure out that this one was much worse than anything they’d gone through before. For starters, there were more explosions than they’d ever heard at Camp Keating, and all of them were from enemy fire—the Americans weren’t firing back with mortars.

The first casualty call came over the radio: someone was severely wounded over by the shura building.

“Hey, Doc,” Courville said to Cordova, “I’m going out there.”

While Cordova spoke on the radio to the staff at the aid station at Forward Operating Base Bostick, he threw Courville his M9 aid bag, a slim backpack containing combat gauze, tourniquets, emergency airway devices, IV kits, and more. Out Courville ran, precisely at the moment when an enemy RPG landed in the aid station, spraying shrapnel. Floyd and Hobbs went down, as did Specialist Andrew Stone, a mechanic who had come to alert them about the casualty at the shura building.

Up on their feet again, Floyd and Hobbs took Stone into the back room. Shrapnel had taken out a piece of his calf and hit his chest plate. They treated his wounds, and as they did so, Floyd noticed that Hobbs was bleeding from his chest, and Hobbs noticed that Floyd was bleeding from
his
chest. They looked at each other, and then they briefly looked at themselves. There wasn’t much blood, so they kept working.

Over at the shura building, Courville ran to Kirk. He was as limp as a rag doll, but he was alive. Courville shook his shoulders and yelled his name. There was no response.

Courville checked Kirk’s body for wounds, doing a “blood sweep.” A massive amount of blood was still flooding out of his head and neck. Apart from the bullet wound, Kirk had also, it was clear, taken significant shrapnel to the back of his head. Courville wrapped his head with bandages, cut off his gear, and yelled for a stretcher team.

Davidson brought a stretcher he’d found in the Red Platoon barracks, and Rasmussen provided cover fire so that he, Courville, Stanley, and Vernon Martin could carry Kirk to the aid station. His blood left a crimson trail behind them. During their bumpy scramble, Kirk seemed to look up at Stanley, who couldn’t believe this indestructible ass-kicker was down. Kirk? He was a crazily courageous bastard, and now here he was, down—maybe for the count. Stanley had a hard time processing it.

In the aid station, Cordova and Courville got to work on the sergeant while Hobbs and Floyd treated five wounded ANA soldiers. Cordova examined Kirk, who was by now extremely pale. His first priority was to stop the bleeding, always tricky with a head wound. To expand Kirk’s blood volume and keep oxygen going to his brain, Cordova used a FAST1—a device that looked like a flashlight with a needle attached to one end—to introduce a small tube called a cannula into his sternum, or breastbone. He then hooked up an IV to pump fluid through the cannula into his bone marrow. The physician’s assistant tried to find a pulse in the sergeant’s wrists. None. He searched for a pulse in his groin area—none. Finally, he felt a very faint pulse in his neck.

Kirk was alive.

Suddenly, he began gasping for air. Cordova grabbed a tube to insert into his airway and began shooting air into his trachea. Courville ventilated oxygen into him. They both knew that even in a best-case scenario, given the distance and danger involved, the medevacs were hours away from landing at Camp Keating.

Cordova tried, but he couldn’t completely detach himself from the patient on his table. He and Kirk, Courville, Stanley, Gallegos, Thomson, and Rodriguez were all gym buddies, meeting every night to work out together. Kirk and Gallegos were two of the toughest SOBs he’d ever met, in the gym and outside it. They were strong, obnoxious loudmouths, and he loved them. Kirk, in particular, was fearless.

Cordova tried to resuscitate his friend, performing a series of chest compressions while Courville administered breaths through the airway tube. Kirk had stopped bleeding, but Cordova couldn’t tell if that was because he’d been bandaged well or because he had no more blood to give.

The Latvian trainers, Janis Lakis and Martins Dabolins, were furious when they found some of the ANA troops outside the operations center, huddled together and squatting, holding their knees and shaking uncontrollably. Among them was their commander, who had fled his post. Lakis—a big guy whom the Americans called Bluto because of his beard and immenseness—picked the man up.

“Where the fuck are your men? Are any of them manning their battle positions?” Lakis asked.

“The Taliban have taken that side,” he said.

“Get your me and go and retake your side of the camp!” Lakis told him.

“You are not my commander!” the Afghan exclaimed, and he ran off.

Specialist Zach Koppes was alone at LRAS-1, the guard post where he’d had some bad luck back in June, resulting in his self-inflicted head wound. It turned out that had been a good day, comparatively speaking.

The rockets and RPGs just kept coming and coming in to the camp. Koppes recalled hearing about two pickup trucks full of ordnance that had been stolen recently, and he wondered whether this hell being unleashed upon Keating might be connected to that. A sniper had begun targeting Koppes, his bullets hitting the Kevlar tarp covering the back of the truck with deadly accuracy; if the American had stood up, they would have gone through his head. The tarp was tough, but the bullets were shredding it. Fuck, Koppes thought to himself. This thing’s not going to last.

Joshua Dannelley ran over with his Mk 48, as did Christopher Jones with MK19 grenades to give to Koppes and several belts of M240 machine-gun ammo for the fighting position right next to the Humvee.

“Keep down! Keep down!” Koppes yelled. “There’s a sniper!” But soon it wasn’t just a sniper anymore; RPGs began showering down near them, one hitting fifteen feet away.

“My knee! My knee!” yelled Jones, falling to the ground. Dannelley inspected him but couldn’t find any external injuries.

Sergeant John Francis had been running ammo back and forth to guard posts for a while when he decided to check in back at the Bastards’ barracks. An RPG exploded behind him, lifting him up off the ground and throwing him against a pole. Next thing he knew, he was on his back on the ground, and Specialist Mark Dulaney was on top of him, shaking him.

“You good? You good? You all right?”