countless days and nights pondering a taliban strike on the base. we ve taken three rounds up here. the most logical. the most effective ways to hit it. the possibilities weighed on romesha and his friend sergeant tom rasmussen. we talked about how we would do it if we were going to overrun an outpost like that. just before sunrise on october 3, 2009, the inevitable happened. the same plan we came up with is exactly how the enemy hit us. over the previous few months, combat outpost keating had seen small attacks before, but this one was different. when the attack fist happened, i was asleep. i had just gotten to bed a couple of hours before that, and i had woken up to some explosions going off and machine gun fire outside. so i ran our usual defense