Red Platoon

I just finished reading Red Platoon by Clinton Romesha.  It is an excellent, detailed account of the Battle of COP (Command Outpost) Keating in October of 2009 in Northern Afghanistan.

Clint Romesha is a great writer.  Reading Red Platoon is like watching Blackhawk Down (2001):  intense, blood-and-guts realism and vivid description of scene.  Actually, Red Platoon is Blackhawk Down on steroids.  What a firefight.  

I have never met Clint Romesha, but I did meet his dad.  I was working for John and Susie Bunyard in Cedarville, California at the time.  John and I had to drive north of Cedarville to a place called Sand Creek.  We were going to repair a windmill on some property that he had leased.  John called up Clint's dad and the three of us worked on that windmill.

I shook the hand of Clint's dad and said, "I have never shaken the hand of the father of a Medal of Honor recipient."  Clint's dad smiled and laughed.

Here are a couple of excerpts from Red Platoon:

Page 201:  "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."

Page 360:  "We sort of had the last word anyhow.

"Later that same night, a B-1 bomber made a pass over Nuristan, opened up its doors, and dropped several tons of smart bombs on a dozen grid coordinates inside Keating.  The following morning, for good measure, a second B-1 came by and dropped another load.

"Those air strikes should have been enough to level the entire outpost.  But the next day, when a Predator drone was sent over to survey the damage, the images revealed that several structures were still standing, and that fourteen Taliban were strolling around the camp.  So two more drones were dispatched, each of which loosed a pair of Hellfire missiles.

"According to Army records that were later released, the insurgents who were obliterated in that final blast included Abdul Rahman Mustaghni, the commander who led the attack on Keating."

Clinton Romesha Earns Medal of Honor

The Battle of Kamdesh