The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (16 page)

B
efore he left on the mission with Cherokee Company’s kill team, twenty-eight-year-old Sergeant Patrick Lybert called his younger brother, Noah, back in Ladysmith, Wisconsin, to coordinate a different operation altogether. Lybert was scheduled to return to Fort Drum on leave the following month, July 2006, to visit his fiancée, Carola Hubbard. He had secretly paid for plane tickets for Noah and their mother so they could come to the upstate New York Army base for a surprise wedding.

Because nineteen-year-old Noah was a special-needs kid, Lybert had to make sure he fully comprehended that this was a secret he was supposed to keep not only from Carola but from their mother as well. (Noah understood.) Lybert had always been protective of his younger brother. One classmate in the fourth grade had ended up with a black eye after he suggested that Patrick was something less than a full brother to Noah, who technically had a different father, their mother having divorced and remarried. After graduating from high school, Lybert had told his mother, Cheryl Lee Nussberger, “Don’t worry, Ma, I’ll take care of Noah.” He said he wanted to become Noah’s guardian after she passed away.

“Well, Pat, you may have a wife who feels differently,” his mother pointed out.

“Nobody will ever be part of my life who doesn’t accept Noah,” Lybert replied. And Carola fulfilled that prophecy: once Patrick got out of the Army, the two of them intended to move back to Ladysmith. It was all part of the plan and the promise.

When Patrick was home on leave that past January, before being deployed to Afghanistan, his mother had noticed that he seemed to have a new weight on his shoulders. He was due to become a recon team leader, and he took his leadership responsibilities seriously. He couldn’t be a pal to his troops, he knew; he had to be tough on them so they would be prepared. “Some of these guys are so green, they’re going to get themselves killed,” he fretted to Cheryl. “Mom, if any of those guys I’m responsible for get killed, I will never be able to live with myself.” So, like any good mother who saw her child worrying, she worried, too.

Lybert joked around a lot—he gave the impression of being a fun-loving, outdoorsy type—but he went into the Army with grief in his soul, Cheryl always thought. It predated the Army. Two of his high school friends had died in freak accidents shortly after graduation. Later, when he was working as a “loss-prevention specialist” for the midwestern retail chain Shopko, in charge of preventing the theft of merchandise, he’d twice caught young men stealing from the store, and both times they’d ended up killing themselves. One, a seventeen-year-old fellow employee, was videotaped setting goods outside the back door for coconspirators to pick up. Lybert confronted him because that was his job, but then a couple of days later, the boy’s aunt called and asked him if he was happy to know that the kid had taken his own life. The other was a foreign exchange student whom Lybert caught shoplifting. The student got on his hands and knees and begged him for mercy, but there was nothing the loss-prevention specialist could do—he was supposed to stop thefts, and this kid, too, was on video. The student was later found floating in a lake. These incidents haunted Lybert.

He’d joined the Army in 2002, done a tour in Iraq, come back, and jumped from 1-32 Infantry to do recon for a new squadron that was being formed at Fort Drum, 3-71 Cav. He loved the Army and had just reupped in March, though he was also eager now to start a family. More immediately, he was looking forward to returning to Fort Drum on leave, to seeing Carola, his mom, and his brother.

“I got the tickets booked,” he told his mother, referring to the flight she and Noah would take to upstate New York to meet him.

“I told you not to do that—I’ll pay!” she protested.

“I already bought the tickets, Mom,” he said. “Hey, I’m going out on this mission. I’ll call you when I get back. I love ya, Ma.”

The phone went dead.

“I love you, too,” Cheryl said into the silence. “Patrick, I love you.”

Patrick Lybert didn’t normally work with the kill team, but because three soldiers from Cunningham’s regular group weren’t available—two were on leave, and the third was recuperating from a hernia—he and three others went along on this mission. On the night of June 19, Cunningham and Monti led fourteen soldiers in a convoy to a mortar position south of Bazgal, near the Gawardesh Bridge. From there, they began their ascent up the ridge. Because it was crucial that no one see them, they took the most difficult route. Heading up to a ridgeline overlooking the Gremen Valley, they climbed until sunrise. During the day, they rested and conducted surveillance.

The slopes were steep, and their rucksacks were jammed with sixty to a hundred pounds of gear apiece. The men had to tread carefully for fear they might trigger a Soviet-era landmine, fall down the mountain, or, at the very least, sprain an ankle. It was June in Afghanistan, so the temperature shot up to close to 100 degrees Fahrenheit, and the rough terrain sapped every bit of their energy. They didn’t talk—they had to keep quiet—and Sergeant Chris Grzecki, for one, spent much of his time just praying for the torturous mission to be over.

On the second day of their trek, the troops saw two Toyota Hilux pickup trucks drive into the valley, each loaded with men. After the sun set, the Americans watched headlights flow along the road. It seemed suspicious to them, all of that driving during late hours of the night and through the early morning.

At dawn, they continued their ascent. Specialist John Garner served as point man for the kill team, which meant that he blazed the trails, and he always chose routes that were preposterously far off the beaten path. Sometimes this annoyed those traveling with him, Garner knew, but that was okay with him: he was point, and he would be the first one to get shot or blown up if he made the wrong choice. The others could go where
he
wanted to go.

Garner and Specialist Franklin Woods led the way up the mountain and into a thicket of Afghan pines, the rest of the team following twenty yards behind. Garner was heartened to see the untrammeled pine needles spread across the steep mountainside, covering the ground like a thick carpet, giving no sign that the enemy had been here. And then he noticed a pattern of indentations in the needles, with the ground visible underneath in places.

Footprints.

He called his team leader—John Hawes, the good shot who’d scored his first kill during the Kotya Valley mission—and showed him the evidence of the path, in a steep area where only someone trying to go undetected would walk. The coordinated pattern of broken needles and patches of dirt suggested a group of people walking in single file, Garner thought. Hawes looked and nodded.

“Push forward,” he told Garner. “Keep your eyes open.”

Garner did so, his sniper rifle pointed out in front of him, his finger on the trigger, the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention. Finally, the team arrived at the top of Hill 2610, where they set up camp in a small clearing on a flat but narrow ridgeline that reminded Hawes of a knife’s edge. At an elevation of roughly eighty-five hundred feet, the area measured approximately 160 feet long by 65 feet wide; it sloped downward from north to south and had a tiny goat trail running along its eastern edge. Some of the men set up on the northern side, behind some trees and heavy brush. A few smaller trees, several large boulders, and the remains of a stone wall marked the southern end of their position. Using their scopes, they watched the valley to the east, beyond the steep slope. Normally, the members of the kill team would carry enough food and water to last them for five to seven days, but by the time they all got to the summit, on the third day of their trek, they were almost out of—or “black on”—water. Cunningham called that status in to the base.

About an hour after the team set up camp, Garner saw six men through his spotting scope. They were about two and a half miles away, heading toward them from the Pakistan border. He alerted his chain of command, and soon Cunningham came over to take a look. Were they insurgents? Friendlies? Afghans? No one knew. From the observation point, the Americans could see a suspected HIG safehouse and Haji Usman’s home.

Cunningham and Monti were pleased. This, they felt, was a good location.

At Forward Operating Base Naray, Howard called in Brooks and Captain Michael Schmidt, the new commander of Cherokee Company (replacing Swain, who’d been transferred to Peshawar, Pakistan, to work at the U.S. Consulate).

The squadron was supposed to launch into Gawardesh that night or early the next morning, helicoptering in troops from Barbarian Troop and Cherokee Company and entering the village. Were they square? Howard wanted to know. Were they good to go?

Brooks said yes; Schmidt said no. One of his men had just been seriously wounded by an IED, and Cherokee Company needed about twenty-four hours to get things straight.

Years later, the fact that this whole mission was delayed because one man had been wounded would gnaw at Jared Monti’s father, Paul. More than once, Jared had complained to his dad that the United States didn’t have enough troops in Afghanistan. There weren’t enough resources, he said; there weren’t enough helicopters.

Paul Monti, a public high school science teacher, was already incensed by what he saw as a near dereliction of duty by President George W. Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who for some reason had focused all their attention and the great majority of their available manpower on the war in Iraq. In doing so, Paul Monti believed, they shortchanged his son and all the other troops who were fighting in the very country where those responsible for 9/11 had laid out their sinister plans. Why would Bush and Rumsfeld, Paul Monti wondered, send these kids into war without making sure they had enough support and supplies? Why would they create a dynamic that allowed the wounds of one man to jeopardize an entire mission?

On Hill 2610, Cunningham was informed that the mission would be delayed up to forty-eight hours, but he wasn’t told why—and it didn’t matter why, really. Soldiers did as they were told. But he made it clear to the commanders back at Forward Operating Base Naray that given the change in circumstances, his men would need a resupply of food and water as soon as possible—420 bottles of water and 160 MREs if they were going to have to last four to five more days on the ridge, as was now the plan. A resupply would unquestionably alert the enemy to their presence, but they had no choice. (They had previously been scheduled for a resupply in conjunction with the pending “air assault,” during which troops would be choppered in to the area.) All Cunningham could do was request that the chopper drop the supplies as far as it could from their observation post, and in an area not visible to any insurgents in the Gremen Valley.

At about 2:00 p.m. local time, a Black Hawk helicopter dropped the speedball—a container packed with supplies, designed to withstand a fall—around five hundred feet north of Hill 2610, above a ridge on a different mountain.

This is making a bigger signature than I wanted, Cunningham thought. It’s too close to us, drawing too much attention. He decided that he would lead eleven soldiers over there to recover the supplies. It might be something of a hike, Cunningham warned them; they should be sure to conserve their water.

Four men stayed behind to keep watch, including Grzecki and Specialist Max Noble, a medic. Through his scope, Noble saw an Afghan with military-style binoculars standing in the valley near a large house, seemingly looking right at them. Although he was carrying a large bag, he didn’t have a weapon visible, so the Rules of Engagement prevented Noble from doing much more than noting his location and assigning a target reference point to the building, which he did.

The expeditionary party, led by Cunningham and Monti, now returned with the dropped supplies. Everyone guzzled down water. Noble told Cunningham what he’d seen and then pointed out where the man with the binoculars had been standing.

An hour or so later, on the goat trail adjacent to the team’s position, two Afghan women in blue burqas appeared, carrying bags of wheat. They slowly approached the Americans. All that Cunningham, Monti, and the other men could see of them was their eyes, whereas those same eyes could see everything about
them:
the number of U.S. troops; where the heavy guns were positioned; where they’d placed the rectangular Claymore mines that they’d scattered around the camp, set to detonate against any enemy attackers who got too close.

The soldiers looked at one another. What should they do? Should they detain them? For what? For walking in their own country? Garner stood on a boulder above the women, peering down at them. One woman signaled with her hand to ask if she and her companion could pass by. She pointed at a Claymore. The mine was hidden, but when you lived in a country littered with explosives, you learned to watch where you walked.

Garner signaled for her to pass on the trail; she shook her head no and gestured to indicate that she wanted to take another route, circling around their makeshift camp, hugging the cliff, and then heading off into a thick cluster of woods. The soldiers allowed the women to go that way.

As the sun set on the valley, Cunningham, Monti, and Hawes stood behind a big rock and began talking about moving to a different spot. If they did that, they would have to travel on a new path, which was always a risk. That’s how the enemy slays U.S. soldiers, Cunningham thought: he waits until we’re in a vulnerable position. And there was no guarantee they’d be able to find a better, more defensible post—this area of the ridgeline was wider than others, and there were a few big boulders here that they could use for cover.