Red Platoon by Clinton Romesha

Author:Clinton Romesha
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-07-21T14:02:25+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The Alamo Position

ONE OF THE strangest hallmarks of combat is that it is so chaotic that sometimes the turmoil it engenders in the mind never fully resolves. Soldiers can spend the rest of their lives trying to parse out a sense of exactly how a battle in which they participated unfolded: what came before, what happened after, and which events collided into one another simultaneously to create a tangled mishmash of confusion.

Another salient feature of war is that it is often impossible to go back and fit the pieces of what happened neatly together. The absence of a comprehensive record, the fallibility of human memory, and the fact that the most important eyewitnesses to key events may have been killed—all of these elements can make it extraordinarily difficult to call any subsequent rendition of events definitive.

It is my belief that this is the case with what unfolded at Keating, particularly during the initial attack. It’s quite possible that at the heart of this battle there’s a level of truth that is fundamentally unknowable.

In light of that, perhaps the best thing that I can do now, with the benefit of hindsight and the impressions that many of my fellow soldiers have shared with me, is to acknowledge that while I was dealing with my own challenges, a complex set of parallel events were unfolding—events that I had no knowledge of at the time, even though a number of them were about to smash up against me. In order to get to those events, I want to lay out a sense of what was happening beyond my immediate awareness. And perhaps the most effective way to do that is to take you into the mind of Andrew Bundermann, who, by virtue of his role in the command post, probably had the best overall picture of what was unfolding.

While my comrades and I were engaged in half a dozen separate duels all across the outpost, the members of HQ Platoon who were stationed inside the command post were caught up in their own whirlpool of challenges, many of which were swirling around a single urgent and overriding fact: if Bundermann didn’t figure out how to mobilize some assistance and swiftly hurl those assets against the enemy, our chances of surviving this ordeal were slim.

At the moment, this goal was being thwarted by two problems, the most glaring of which was that Fritsche’s mortars still weren’t functioning.

For the better part of the past forty minutes, the soldiers up at our OP had been withstanding withering machine-gun and RPG fire while contending with at least one sniper. The fact that none of those men had been killed offered a testament to the advantage of holding the high ground. But that advantage was unexpectedly undermined when Staff Sergeant James Clark, who was probably the sharpest soldier in White Platoon, was hit in the chest with a round that went straight through one of his magazines.

The bullet was stopped by Clark’s ceramic chest plate, but not before striking a tracer round inside the magazine and igniting his vest.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.