I jumped to my feet, realizing that we still had no understanding of what or where the threat was. At that point, another squad from our platoon arrived and we began preparing to stage on the room where Barraza’s body was still lying motionless. The only portion of the room we couldn’t see was the far back left quadrant, so the front member of our team tossed his flash bang in that direction. Boom. I followed him and another team member in. As the white lights of our weapons intersected, we saw a man lying underneath prayer mats, trying to hide, holding an AK-47 in his hand.
We all engaged with a flurry of gunfire, killing him immediately, although he may have already been mortally wounded.
With the immediate threat neutralized, we turned back to our wounded. We had two Rangers down. Two of our leaders. Two guys who gave everything they had to every mission and would give their lives to protect every man in their command. We needed to get them on a medevac as soon as possible. As this reality began to sink in, I let my emotions get the best of me.
“You motherfucker!” I yelled as I began to pummel the dead body of the insurgent with my fists. “You fucking piece of shit!”
I was wearing my carbon fiber gloves, and they began fracturing every part of the dead combatant’s face. I could feel his orbital bones caving back into the soft tissue of his head. It was a feeling unlike any I had felt, before or since.
“Best, that’s fucking enough, let’s go,” a squad member yelled at me.
I wish I could sit here and tell you, all these years later, that I should have been able to keep it together in that moment, that I should have understood that my desire to kill these dickheads was reciprocated by their desire to kill me, and that this was just the nature of war. But you know what? Fuck that. If I could travel back in time, I would change the course of that night just to make him feel every punch while he was still alive.
As my platoon began to regroup, we prepped Brehm and Barraza for the medevac. The Black Hawks were ten minutes out. We needed to pre-stage the casualties and get them to an open field about three hundred meters away that we’d designated as the HLZ. One team loaded Brehm on a stretcher and began moving him. Barraza wasn’t so simple.
Twenty-four-year-old Staff Sergeant Ricardo Barraza was six-foot-two, 220 pounds, and a PT (physical training) stud of the highest order. Whatever the Spanish for “brick shithouse” is, he was that. Several weeks earlier, our base had held a giant flag football tournament. Our Ranger platoon fielded two twelve-man teams, one of which was led by Barraza. The rest of the teams in the tournament came from the four companies’ worth of Marines, about six hundred men total, stationed there along with us. Barraza was not going to let a bunch of Marine infantrymen outperform Rangers. In his mind, it wasn’t even an option. So he did what he always did: He went balls-out and won the whole fucking thing. He was an animal. He played with his team until 3 P.M. or so, then got some rest, got some chow, and was ready to go out on a mission by 10 that same night.
Now that unstoppable, immovable force of a man was lying at our feet. Like Brehm, he was unconscious and nonresponsive. It took a group of us to hoist him off the deck and get him onto a stretcher. As we began to make our way outside to the HLZ, I bumped into my best friend in the unit, Trey Bullock.
“I thought you were fucking dead, dude,” he said gravely.
“Naw, man, it’s Brehm and Barraza. They got hit, but we’re going to get them out of here.”
“You guys need extra security?” Trey said as he positioned his SAW (squad automatic weapon) toward the HLZ.
“We could use it, brother.”
Trey tapped my helmet as if to say, “Good, because you’re not going alone.” Just ten minutes earlier, amidst the chaos of a close quarters gun battle, I struggled to understand what was happening, but now, in the swirl of a different kind of uncertainty, it was clear as day what I was in the middle of: true brotherhood. Live or die, now and forever.
With Trey at my side, we made it out to the HLZ just as the Black Hawks were landing. The dust off the rotor wash kicked dirt all over us, so we shielded Barraza with our bodies to protect him from the debris. As the wheels touched down, we sprinted to load him up, positioning him in the cabin of the helo with the help of the flight crew. Our medic relayed the medical information to the flight medic, and as soon as the helo landed it was wheels up and headed back to the FOB (forward operating base). An uncomfortable sense of relief set in as Brehm and Barraza disappeared into the night and Trey and I started running back to help clear and button this thing up so we could all get the fuck out of there.
That’s when we heard a large explosion rip through the second target building, obliterating our brief sense of relief. We sprinted back and made it to the entrance in under a minute, though it felt like forever. When we pushed open the front door, we found members of our platoon laid out and bloody on the floor of the same living room I’d pulled Brehm from about fifteen minutes earlier. This fucking room was really starting to piss me off.
Here’s what had happened. As our teams prepped and moved Brehm and Barraza to the HLZ, other teams were performing secondary clears, a process by which you move through a building room by room, checking any and all hiding spots for people, weapons caches, rigged explosives, you name it. Hidden inside an armoire in the room where Brehm and Barraza had been shot, my platoon sergeant ███████████████████████████████████████ █████████████████████████████ discovered a boy who looked about fourteen years old. They demanded that he put his hands up, reluctant to engage the unarmed boy. Seconds later, the boy detonated a suicide vest. All five team members in the room at the time—three Rangers, the █████████, and a Navy SEAL EOD (explosive ordnance disposal) tech—were wounded as the suicide vest packed with ball bearings exploded through them. Barely forty minutes into our time on target, 20 percent of our platoon had been wounded, some of them badly. We desperately needed to exfil off this patch of blood-stained dirt. But first we had to get these newly wounded brothers medevac’d.
As we gathered medical supplies to triage the wounded as best we could, we assessed the severity of their injuries. Two were only moderately wounded, including my platoon sergeant, who had taken shrapnel to the face and arms. While ugly, most of the lacerations were superficial, so he didn’t miss a beat maintaining command and control of the platoon. Immediately he called in another medevac for the three others in the room who were more severely hurt. That’s when we realized that we didn’t have enough stretchers to get them off target and out to the HLZ.
The ground force commander instructed the incoming helos to adjust: They were to hover above the target building and drop off more stretchers before making their way to the HLZ to pick up the wounded. It wasn’t long before the sound of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter churned through the air. I sprang up the stairs to the rooftop of the building and joined an element already pulling security as the massive, hulking twin-rotor bird hovered ten feet off the deck. The crew chief signaled a thumbs-up and dropped two stretchers onto the rooftop.