Realizing that the wire had been breached, Thomas didn't know what to do, so he ran to his hooch in the Headquarters Platoon barracks. He hid in his little area, behind the curtains and shelves constructed to afford some semblance of privacy. Soon he heard noise and then words in a foreign language: Taliban fighters were in the barracks.

Terrified, Thomas looked down at his leg and the oozing blood. As quietly as he could, he reached into his vest and pulled out the tourniquet stored in his cargo pocket. He attached it to his thigh and tried to stem the bleeding. He then eased himself into another small room where computers had been set up. He slid the chair from that room into Private First Cla.s.s Jordan Wong's hooch. It was pitch black. He aimed his rifle at the curtain; if insurgents pulled it back, he would shoot.

Not a soul in the world knew he was there. Cookie Thomas was positive he wasn't going to get any help. He would be killed by Taliban as he sat in the computer-room chair; he would die in Jordan Wong's hooch. This was how it would end.

CHAPTER 33

Taking This b.i.t.c.h Back

Forty-five minutes after taking off, shortly after 8:00 a.m., the medevac was still hovering over Forward Operating Base Bostick.

"It's still too hot!" the pilot shouted about the area surrounding Camp Keating. "We're going down to refuel!" They landed, and Stoney Portis returned to the Bostick operations center, where the intelligence officer had just finished making a map of Camp Keating. The whole eastern side of the outpost had been colored red, as had much of the western side. The red indicated Taliban control.

"Can you swim?" Carter asked Larson.

Larson thought about the question. He was a really bad swimmer.

"Enough to survive," he finally said.

"Good enough for me," responded Carter. "If this is as bad as we think it is, we should wait until dark, low-crawl to the river, and float down to Lowell."

Larson was quiet; he'd been shot in the shoulder. They were surrounded and cut off, with no communications and little ammunition. Everyone friendly in sight was either wounded or dead, and they still had no idea how many Taliban fighters there were. Sure, he could swim.

Clint Romesha stood on the deck off the aid station, in a semiprotected s.p.a.ce known as the Cafe.

He'd had enough. He'd been trying to find out what was going on at LRAS-2 when he spotted three Afghans by the shura building. Two had AK-47s, the third an RPG. One was wearing camouflage, as the ANA troops often did. He turned to the Latvians, Lakis and Dabolins, who were standing just outside the operations center.

"You don't have ANA on that side of the camp," Romesha confirmed.

"No," said Lakis.

So that was the enemy.

This is a gimme shot, Romesha thought. I couldn't ask for a better shot. The insurgents walked by Stand-To Truck 2, where they casually put down their weapons. They had entered Camp Keating unfettered, without being met by an ounce of resistance. One began adjusting his bandanna. They seemed to think the camp had been conquered.

They were wrong. Romesha fired and popped the fighter with the bandanna through his neck; he fell like a sack of potatoes. The other two insurgents ran behind the Humvee. Lakis and Dabolins joined Romesha in his position and began firing, Lakis aiming his grenade launcher past the Humvee and dropping two grenades directly on the fighters.

Other invaders showed a similar confidence in their exploration of the outpost. When Gregory and Jones poked their heads up from their ditch, they saw two insurgents roughly twenty feet from them, just walking along nonchalantly as if the battle were over, as if they'd already won. One was wearing a gray overshirt, the other a golden-yellow one with a tan vest over it and a belt of RPK light machine-gun ammunition slung over his shoulder. He carried the RPK itself casually, as if it were a briefcase.

"They're f.u.c.king up there," Gregory said. "They're in the wire, they're near the showers."

"We need to kill 'em, kill 'em, kill 'em!" exclaimed Jones.

Gregory and Jones fired, and both insurgents promptly fell to the ground dead. But other enemy fighters in the camp had seen it happen, and with grenades and sniper fire, they started targeting the two Americans. Gregory and Jones ducked back down again. Soon Daise and Dannelley came running over to them.

"It's not looking good, man," Dannelley told them, standing outside the ditch.

"We're kinda pinned down here," Jones said. "There are snipers everywhere."

"Kirk and Scusa have already gotten killed," reported Dannelley. "They're not letting up, and air support's not here." Bullets were flying by to the left and right of his face, but he seemed blissfully unaware of them.

"Get the f.u.c.k down," Jones said. "You're getting shot at! You're going to get shot in the f.u.c.king face!"

An RPG hit yet another generator, creating a forebodingly dark plume of smoke. The four men took the opportunity to use the cloud as cover, and they ran back to the Red Platoon barracks.

Back inside the LRAS-2 Humvee, Carter looked out the window to see, across the river, about a hundred yards away, a three-man enemy RPG team standing next to the Afghan National Police building. He opened his window and fired six rounds at them with his M4 rifle. Then he fired at another insurgent. And another one, a fighter dressed in dark brown with a ponytail.

Mace crawled out from behind Stand-To Truck 1. Carter opened the window to talk to him. Shots were still coming at them. "Mace, are you all right?" Carter asked.

Too dehydrated to cry, Mace wore his pain on his face. He didn't seem to have the energy to yell. "Help me," Mace said plaintively. "Help me."

"I can get to him, he's right there," Carter told Larson.

"Tell him to stay where he is," Larson said. "He's got cover there."

"Help me, please," Mace pleaded.

"I will get to you as soon as I can," Carter said. He was irate. When the horn on a nearby truck blared, he for some reason became convinced it was a distress call from a fellow solider. "Can I go to the truck?" he asked Larson. "There's someone calling for help in there. What if I get out and get underneath the Humvee just to see the truck?"

"Fine," Larson agreed.

There were still bursts of intense machine-gun rounds every fifteen seconds or so, but the enemy, having apparently shifted his attention to other targets, seemed no longer to be specifically focused on them. Carter jumped out of the Humvee on his recon mission, only to see that its tires were flat from bullet rounds and there was no way for him, with all his gear on, to fit underneath. He hopped back in with Larson.

"The truck is ten feet away, can I go check for survivors?" he asked.

"Yeah," Larson said. Rounds were still being fired at them, but the enemy was now concentrating more closely on other parts of the camp. Carter jumped out again and ran to the truck. There was no soldier inside, so he recovered some ammunition that was in there and brought it back to the Humvee. He wasn't sure where the sound of the horn had come from.

"Can I go to Mace?" asked Carter, back inside. He'd given Mace his word.

"What do you plan on doing when you get to him?" Larson asked.

"Give him first aid."

"Where are you going to take him?" Larson asked.

They discussed the options and decided that the nearby concrete bridge-outside the camp-would provide the most cover.

"You plan on dragging him that far?" Larson wondered.

"f.u.c.k, no," said Carter. "I plan on carrying him."

Larson rolled down his window so he could fire and cover Carter, who got out and ran to Mace. He was facedown. Carter gently shook him.

"Hey, Mace, you all right?"

Mace mumbled something, and Carter turned him over. He couldn't distinguish between Mace's uniform and his legs; they were all a dark-red mess, with just a stretch of skin and bone keeping his left foot attached to his leg.

"Where does it hurt?" Carter asked. "What should I do? Are you okay?" He applied a tourniquet to Mace's shredded left leg, then used a tree branch he found to splint his ankle. He took out his special "Israeli" bandage-elasticized and fitted with a pressure bar, the invention of an Israeli medic-to stanch bleeding from the largest hole in Mace's abdomen, which was roughly the size of a tangerine. Other cavities were smaller but still gruesome and troubling. One was in the shape of a teardrop, Carter noted. Turning to Mace's b.l.o.o.d.y right leg, he took out the dagger that'd been a gift from a karaoke buddy back home and cut open Mace's pants. Using tape and gauze, he then tried to plug the holes in that leg.

Mace was in shock and did not seem particularly aware of what was going on. He was pale, and his lips were turning blue.

"Don't worry about your ankle," Carter said. "It will be fine as soon as we can find it." He thought he could discern the faintest chuckle from Mace.

Carter looked at Gallegos, who was lying facedown next to them.

"Sergeant Gallegos is dead," Mace said.

"I believe you, but I need to check his pulse anyway," Carter replied. He reached over and felt the carotid artery in the sergeant's neck. There was no pulse.

"Okay," Carter told Mace, "you play dead. I'm going to check with Larson about what we should do now."

He ran back to the Humvee.

"I don't think it's safe to take him to the bridge, it's too exposed," Carter explained to Larson. "The truck's the only safe place."

Larson agreed and got out of the truck to provide cover for Carter. Carter scurried back to Mace and reached down to hoist him up. He thought about his lifeguard training and how he would've picked Mace up if instead of being shot up he were drowning in a swimming pool. Carter told Mace to wrap his hands around his neck, and then he slid his left arm around Mace's back and under his arms, and his right arm under his legs. Cradling him that way, he carried the wounded soldier while bullets flew by them, tripping over ammo cans and pieces of generator wreckage as they went, until at last they reached the Humvee, where Carter carefully placed Mace in the front seat.

At the operations center, Bundermann was staring at Cason Shrode. Both of them wore grim expressions that said, This is actually happening. And yet Bundermann still looked as if he were headed for the beach, dressed in flip-flops, shorts, and a T-shirt.

"Go get your kit," he told Shrode. His own body armor was in the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds' barracks, now on fire; he would need to borrow Shrode's extra set. "Get your rifles," Bundermann added. There was a very real chance that the insurgents would try to take the operations center, and they could not let that happen.

Shrode came back with the body armor. The former high school and West Point football star was a tad larger than Bundermann, so it was an awkward fit, but it was a h.e.l.l of a lot better than shorts.

Then, some good news: the Apache pilots radioed, announcing that they would be there in a couple of minutes. Bundermann, fed information by others throughout the outpost, had already given Shrode targets for bomb drops to pa.s.s on to the pilots of the fixed-wing aircraft. Now he told Shrode to tell the helicopter pilots that anyone outside the wire should be considered the enemy.

Bundermann stepped outside to the Cafe and looked out. The whole camp was being lit up; insurgents were firing from everywhere. s.h.i.t, Bundermann said to himself. There was absolutely no way the Americans could defend themselves without air support. Since they no longer controlled the entire camp, the men would need to collapse and defend only the core-the operations center, the barracks buildings, and the aid station. Bundermann decided that Black Knight Troop needed to contract, to pull in. That left a dozen troops outside the new perimeter.

I'm not going to be able to keep that part of that camp right now, he thought, so I'm going to focus on keeping and securing this part instead, and then I'm going to kick some Taliban a.s.s.

But it was a gut-wrenching decision.

The Outpost. (Taken from U.S. Army investigations) (Taken from U.S. Army investigations)

After talking to Brown on the satellite radio that Burton had managed to rig, Bundermann turned to Romesha and Hill, who were at the entrance to the operations center. "We need to fight this out; we need to hold our ground," Bundermann said.

"f.u.c.k that," replied Romesha. "We need to retake this f.u.c.king camp and drive the f.u.c.king 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 b.i.t.c.h back," he announced. "I need a f.u.c.king 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

At Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, Chief Warrant Officer Third Cla.s.s Ross Lewallen had just sat down to coffee and breakfast with his copilot, Chief Warrant Officer Second Cla.s.s 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.