The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (35 page)

Staff Sergeant Adam Sears provides medical assistance to a mortally wounded ANA soldier on May 14, 2007. The Afghan soldier died on his way back to the closest U.S. base.
(Photograph by John D McHugh, Getty Images)

Best’s Afghan soldiers now began the grim task of stacking corpses in their Ford Rangers. Two of the pickup trucks that the new ANA company had driven from Naray were in the river. Their drivers had been shot and killed where they sat, behind the wheel. Someone would have to go into the river to get them so they could be given a proper Muslim burial.

Whoever did this was efficient, Best thought. These guys were marksmen.

The ANA soldiers looked around for other wounded or slain colleagues. They kept finding corpses.

The Ford Ranger pickup trucks in the river had been packed with enough supplies to last fifty men for four months: ammunition, food, weapons. Best and Sears talked about blowing them up so the enemy couldn’t use the goods or, more important, the ammunition. A few minutes later, shots rang out. Sears was northeast of his Humvee, closer to the river. Best and Clark were to the southwest of him, about a hundred yards away, and they scampered to find cover behind the only large rock around. Insurgents fired upon them from both sides of the river. Best’s ANA troops started returning fire with their RPK and PK machine guns and their Dushka. Sears and his gunner, Private First Class Dustin Kittle, tried to suppress the enemy fire with the .50-caliber in their Humvee. Behind the boulder, Clark turned to Best and announced, “Dude, we have to go.”

“We can’t go,” Best replied. “When we leave this rock, they’ll kill us!” They had to plan their escape, Best said; they couldn’t just sprint and hope for the best. He radioed for both the Afghan soldiers and Kittle to target the hills again with suppressive fire. After they finished a burst, Clark fired to the south and Best to the north, and then they both raced toward Sears’s position. Clark ducked between the Humvee and a boulder that he thought might shield him from any shots coming from the southern ridgeline. From across the river, a shot drilled directly into his chest plate. The bullet ricocheted off it and hit his arm.

“Shit,” said Best. An enemy sniper—a good one. At Sears’s location, Nick Anderson applied a tight bandage to Clark’s forearm and then called up on the radio to report his injury. Sears couldn’t call for artillery because the antenna of his radio had been shot off, so Best did, asking for mortars. The Americans would be “danger close,” but there was no other option. They were targets, and there was an expert marksman—likely a foreign fighter, maybe even the same one who’d killed Hughie—training his sights on them.

In the midst of all this commotion, before the Americans could do anything to further protect the photographer embedded with them, McHugh took a bullet to his chest. It went through his intestine and out his lower back. He had never before felt such pain.

Sears jumped up, grabbed McHugh by the back of his belt, and dragged him behind the rock where Clark had been hit. He couldn’t identify right away where McHugh’s wound was, so Anderson began lifting up the photographer’s body armor and at last found the hole in his lower back. They began administering first aid. Best called for the Humvee to move to the rock; he loaded Clark and McHugh into it. Anderson was worried about McHugh: “We need to get out of here,” he told Sears. “John’s going to bleed out.” Kittle just then fell from his turret into the Humvee and let out a bloodcurdling scream. He’d been shot in the collarbone.

The Apaches returned from refueling and began suppressing the enemy while Best and his ANA soldiers, plus Sears and Anderson and their troops, got out of there quickly, rolling back toward Kamu. As they sped away, the Americans saw one of the dead ANA drivers from the first ambush, still stuck behind the wheel of his partially sunken Ford Ranger. They’d have to come back for him.

Once they were safely back at Kamu, and the wounded Clark, Kittle, and McHugh were being treated—they would all survive—Best and Sears hugged each other, their eyes tearing up. They were both shaken and emotionally raw. They’d seen dead bodies everywhere and heard the wounded Kittle screaming out in pain on the way back. It had been hell.

Then, like a storm rolling in, Best’s mood shifted.

“I need to find out what the fuck was going through their minds,” he said. He went looking for the Barbarian troops who had left the ANA casualties on the road. They were in the hunting lodge. Best approached Pearsall.

“What the fuck is your problem?” he asked. “Why the fuck would you leave those guys behind?”

Pearsall tried to explain that they’d been explicitly told to push through any kill zone: “You don’t stop the damn vehicles and jump out,” he said. Pearsall was convinced that he and his troops had done everything they could that day to protect both the ANA troops and themselves. If they had acted differently, he said, the day’s body count could easily have included fifteen Americans as well.

Best was furious. This is why Afghans and Americans don’t get along, he thought. You really think you wouldn’t stop to take cover if
you
were in an open pickup truck taking fire? It was pure instinct.

For Best’s own wellbeing, Sears pulled him away and escorted him out.

Fifty ANA soldiers had been sent to Combat Outpost Keating to relieve Best’s ANA troops. Sixteen had been killed, and five wounded. In a matter of minutes, the unit had been rendered combat-ineffective.

The insurgents threw a number of the Afghans’ bodies into the river, preventing them from being buried within one day. This concerned Berkoff and others in American intelligence because to them, it suggested that some of the killers might have been not local Nuristanis but rather foreign—Chechen, Arab, Pakistani—or “out of area” fighters, perhaps Pashtuns from other parts of Afghanistan who hated the Tajik- and Hazara-filled ANA. Days later, the bodies of dead ANA soldiers would be reported as having washed up on the banks of the Kunar River as far south as Asadabad.

Gooding heard about the episode, but he didn’t blame Pearsall. Pearsall’s patrol had been an afterthought, a mission that wasn’t planned and that had gone uncommunicated to those who needed to know about it. No one at either Combat Outpost Keating or the Kamu base had had a clue that Barbarian Troop’s 2nd Platoon was on its way with the new ANA troops. More than half of the squadron’s combat power was in Upper Kamdesh, with most of the men focused on Governor Nuristani’s wild goose chase. Until Pearsall came on the radio asking for the mortars at Kamu to fire on established targets, Gooding hadn’t even known he was out there.

While Gooding sympathized with Best’s reaction, he also understood that Pearsall had been thrown out the gate with an ANA force that he had never patrolled with or rehearsed contact drills with. It had been a rush to failure, a massacre as predictable as it was tragic. And now more graves were required.

And the commando raid? Nothing had come of it aside from renewed ill will among the residents of Kamdesh toward Governor Nuristani. In the meantime, the Eastern Nuristan Security Shura had essentially died along with Fazal Ahad. Ahad’s deputy on the Security Shura, a cleric named Abdul Raouf, told the 3-71 Cav leaders that he had no interest in succeeding his departed friend. “I don’t know who killed Ahad,” he declared to a reporter. “His number was up. Tomorrow or the next day, my number will come up. They will kill us one by one.”

Before Ross Berkoff left Forward Operating Base Naray, the man who would soon take command of Combat Outpost Keating, Captain Tom Bostick of Bulldog Troop, from 1-91 Cav, 173rd Airborne, approached to ask him a favor: could Berkoff brief him and his team about the insurgency? So Berkoff told them everything he’d learned: who the enemy’s key leaders were, where the different cells lurked, which areas to avoid. Berkoff showed Bostick a map and pointed out the specific spots from which the insurgents always attacked.

“Why are you guys driving down the same road every day?” Bostick asked. “You know you’re going to get hit.”

“We don’t have a choice,” Berkoff told his fellow captain. “There’s only one road.”

“You guys gotta get out of your Humvees,” Bostick said. “Walk the ridgelines. Talk to villagers.”

Berkoff didn’t say anything. His brigade had lost forty soldiers and had more than three hundred wounded. Since he first arrived at Forward Operating Base Naray, he’d seen countless others come and go. There had been three different Special Forces detachments, three ANA units, three provincial reconstruction teams. All he wanted to do now was get out of there.

He wished Captain Bostick good luck and left the briefing room.

Gooding had thought he would never leave Combat Outpost Keating, never get out of there alive. But finally, escape was at hand. Able Troop headed to Bagram, but Gooding and First Sergeant Yerger stayed behind for a few days to help mentor Captain Bostick of 1-91 Cav. And that was that.

As he got on the supply helicopter that would take him away from the outpost forever, Gooding thought again about how he’d hesitated before naming the camp after Keating. How long would this outpost be here? How ephemeral was this memorial? He had every confidence that 1-91 Cav would keep the camp running, but he knew its success would ultimately depend upon how good the ANA was.

Someday we’re going to hand over Combat Outpost Keating, Gooding thought as the bird lifted and he looked down upon the acre and a half of land for which so many men had given their lives. And it’s not going to last.

As luck would have it, the chopper was on a supply run, so Gooding got a tour of the area. It stopped at Combat Outpost Lybert, near Gawardesh. It went to the Korangal Valley. It touched down at the observation posts around Naray. The trip was excruciating, like a victory lap but without the victory. At last, hours later, the bird landed at Bagram, which felt so big and safe it might as well have been in Nebraska. Gooding sat there on the tarmac with a bunch of luggage. He was angry about the whole experience—angry about being sent up to the Kamdesh Valley without a campaign plan, angry that what was supposed to be a forty-five-day rotation had ended up being ten months of hell, angry because no one had had it worse than his team, certainly not any of these soft “POGs”
³³
—these rear-echelon folks at Bagram with their air-conditioning, their three hot meals a day and ice cream, their steak-and-lobster Fridays.

He and his troops had done more than most, Gooding thought. They’d kept their heads up the whole time—never said no to a mission, never failed, and executed all with great pride in and support for one another. They’d lost their commander, their XO, many of their friends. They’d been there for longer than anyone, and they’d never gotten the credit they deserved.

That night, Gooding tried to relax. He was going home. To his wife and kids. Everything was going to be okay.

As he walked around the base, he saw a Special Forces unit in full rucksacks on a night run. He thought about how even the guys in Special Forces—badasses, all of them—hadn’t liked staying at Combat Outpost Keating. Too dangerous.

Gooding could see the Special Forces troops, but one enlisted man among their ranks apparently didn’t see him. He almost ran into Gooding.

“Get the hell out of the way, you POG!” the kid yelled at the weathered captain.

Perfect, Gooding thought.

BOOK TWO

Two in the Chest, One in the Head

ROLL CALL

International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) May 2007–July 2008

At Forward Operating Base Fenty, Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar Province:

Colonel Chip Preysler, Commander, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team (“173rd Airborne”), 10th Mountain Division

At Forward Operating Base Naray, Kunar Province:

Lieutenant Colonel Chris Kolenda, Squadron Commander, 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment (“1-91 Cav”), 173rd Airborne, 10th Mountain Division

Captain Nathan Springer, 1-91 Cav Headquarters Troop Commander

Captain Joey Hutto, 1-91 Cav Assistant Operations Officer

At Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Warheit, Nuristan Province:

Bulldog Troop, 1-91 Cav, 173rd Airborne, 10th Mountain Division

Captain Tom Bostick, Commander

Captain Joey Hutto, Commander

Second Lieutenant Ken Johnson, Fire Support Officer

1st Platoon

First Lieutenant Dave Roller, Leader

First Lieutenant Hank Hughes, Leader

2nd Platoon

First Lieutenant John Meyer, Leader

First Lieutenant Kyle Marcum, Leader

Staff Sergeant Ryan Fritsche

Sergeant John Wilson

Private First Class Alberto Barba

3rd Platoon

First Lieutenant Alex Newsom, Leader

Sergeant First Class Rodney O’Dell

Staff Sergeant John Faulkenberry

Private First Class Chris Pfeifer

Private First Class Michael Del Sarto

Private First Class Jonathan Sultan

On the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kala Gush, Nuristan Province: