The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (58 page)

Separately, before daybreak, Safulko and some of the men from Blue Platoon had moved to an elevated position to the east of the outpost, from which they could watch the Afghan National Police checkpoints up the road. There was a lot of foot traffic that day, but only about five pickup trucks for the Afghan police to inspect. Small groups of villagers came down from the mountains to gather firewood, bring livestock to the market, or visit with friends and family nearby. The women of Nuristan did much of the manual labor, and a fair number of them carried large bundles of firewood on their backs. Some men were down by the river gathering rocks that they would use to build modest one- or two-story structures.

The Blackfoot troops watched everything intently; something unusual seemed to be afoot. In their chatter over the enemy radio frequency, the insurgents were being particularly cryptic, and the translations subsequently fed to the Americans were poor. At one point, a man walked in front of a woman down the Kamdesh trail, his arms folded. At one of the turning points, he ducked down behind a large rock; after a moment, he resurfaced. He looked suspicious, the soldiers agreed, but he had no weapon. Maybe he had just relieved himself. The couple continued down the trail all the way into Urmul.

A bit later, Safulko spotted two men traveling east on the road, coming toward Keating from the direction of Mandigal. As they approached the checkpoint run by the ANA in front of Camp Keating, they separated and began to walk several hundred feet apart. This struck Safulko as odd—it was as if they were trying to dissociate themselves from each other before they reached the checkpoint. Safulko called the operations center and told Mazzocchi what he’d seen. Mazzocchi radioed the gate and spoke with Staff Sergeant Kris Carroll. ANA troops stopped the two men, who claimed to be on their way to get voter ID cards from the district center down the road. Mazzocchi ran down to the gate to check out the pair himself, but by the time he got there, the ANA soldiers had already released them.

Shortly after noon, the Afghan police up the road called it a day. Around the same time, Yllescas, Briley, Tucker, Staff Sergeant Nicholas Bunch, Sergeant Al Palmieri, and about six ANA troops began walking back to camp. Safulko radioed them and confirmed that he had full observation of them as they prepared to cross the bridge.

Yllescas liked to tease Safulko about his time at Camp Lowell, where the lieutenant and his men had spent much of the summer undersupplied, hanging on by a thread, and getting mortared every day. The mortars had turned life nocturnal for the troops at Kamu: everything they did outside was done at night.

“Hey, Chris,” Yllescas radioed back, “I bet you guys never did shit like this at Lowell.”

They crossed the bridge one at a time: Briley first, followed by his interpreter, then Bunch, who stood guard when he reached the other side. Then Tucker. As Yllescas crossed, Briley called out to him, “Do you want me to call down the over——”

The Marine didn’t get to finish his sentence before a pulverizing explosion knocked him to the ground. When he opened his eyes, he saw Rob Yllescas falling from the sky.

Safulko turned to the bridge and saw a smoke plume billowing upward as the span crumbled into the river. Yllescas—easy to spot even from a distance, with his scarf and his short, stocky frame—was lying faceup on the helicopter landing zone. His legs looked as if they’d been shredded. “Contact!” Tucker yelled into his radio. “Six is down!”
⁵⁵
rang out over the command net.

Initially, they all thought Yllescas had taken an RPG or a mortar round—the explosion was so large, and his wounds seemingly so severe. But Safulko had never known the insurgents to be quite that accurate. It would be a while before everyone realized that Yllescas must have been hit by a radio-controlled IED. He’d been singled out and targeted.

Two groups of insurgents on the southern side of the outpost—on the Switchbacks—now opened up on Safulko’s platoon with small-arms fire, AK-47s, and PKM machine guns. Some of the fire came from the large rock behind which, not long before, Blue Platoon troops had seen that Nuristani man duck.

Briley had a head injury, but he struggled to make his way over to Yllescas. He felt as if he were swimming; everything was blurry and slower than normal. It sounded as if enemy rounds were coming in, but he couldn’t be sure. When he finally got to the captain, Briley gasped. No way was Yllescas alive. His hands were mangled. His legs were mutilated. His head had been smashed into his helmet. Briley tried to pull him away from the scene, but pieces of him began falling off, so he stopped. The Marine wondered why he was the only one there. It mystified him.

Disoriented, Briley couldn’t physically function the way he wanted to; he found himself on his knees, trying to get to a safer place. He noticed another soldier nearby, behind a rock. “Come help me,” Briley pleaded, “come help me.” But the soldier wouldn’t get out from behind the rock. No one would come out. They all thought the explosion had been an RPG, and their experience with RPGs was that they came in bunches. So everyone on the patrol had immediately taken cover. “Get out of there!” Tucker now yelled at Briley. One casualty was bad enough.

Briley, in emotional shock and experiencing a traumatic brain injury, was at once furious and confused. He couldn’t believe what had happened to Yllescas, what they had done. Yllescas had dedicated himself to improving the lives of these people. The Marine turned to the southern mountains, aimed his two middle fingers as if they were weapons, and screamed at the top of his lungs. “FUCK YOU!” he yelled to Kamdesh, to Nuristan, to Afghanistan. “FUCK YOU!”

There was nowhere for Safulko’s platoon to go; while the Putting Green was an excellent observation point, it left troops exposed with few options for escape. All they could really do was hunker down. The Afghan Security Guards who were with the Americans began running up the mountain into a cluster of trees. These local contractors tended to wait and see who they thought was likely to win before they took any action.

“Tell them to take cover and stay put,” a nervous Safulko told the interpreter.

Safulko could see the muzzle flashes from the Switchbacks and farther east. Troops at Camp Keating began returning fire, and the enemy shooting ceased. The troops at the outpost held their fire to observe the enemy response, and insurgents to the east of the Switchbacks shot at Safulko’s platoon. U.S. mortars shut them right up.

At the operations center, Mazzocchi ordered the mortarmen and troops on guard to suppress any enemy fire while a stretcher was taken out to pick up Yllescas. Meshkin radioed to Forward Operating Base Bostick and asked for a medevac, then told Safulko, “I need you guys to hold your position until the medevac clears out.” A call came in to the ops center that a civilian had been spotted near the Switchbacks, a woman out gathering firewood who had unfortunately been caught in the crossfire.

“Continue firing,” Meshkin said.

After hearing the explosion, Captain Steven Brewer, a physician’s assistant who was the senior medical officer at Camp Keating, grabbed his gear and aid bag and headed for the landing zone, where he found soldiers standing, disorganized, around Yllescas. A small group carefully lifted the captain, put him on the stretcher Mazzocchi had sent out, and carried him into the camp. Brewer ran alongside the stretcher. Yllescas was unresponsive but making gurgling sounds. He would need an airway. His left eye was fixed and dilated. The troops laid him on the table in the aid station. “Doc” Brewer realized that his senior medic, Staff Sergeant George Shreffler, wasn’t there—he was still out with Safulko’s patrol. Brewer thought he heard someone tell him that the medevac was an hour and twenty minutes away. It was one of the many costs of being at a remote outpost.

But it was a cost Meshkin would not tolerate. He sent up an “urgent surgical medevac” request to the 6-4’s squadron XO, Major Thomas Nelson, at Forward Operating Base Bostick. They couldn’t wait for a Black Hawk from Jalalabad, Meshkin told Nelson, who agreed. But pulling a helicopter out of established protocol was no trivial matter. A Chinook and an Apache were just then refueling and about to leave the base to conduct resupply missions in Kunar. In order to commandeer them to try to save Yllescas’s life, Nelson had to get permission from Lieutenant Colonel Markert, who held the birds for a minute while he requested permission to use them from Colonel Spiszer, who then phoned the aviation brigade commander for a final signoff. “Go to the aid station and grab Doc Cuda,” Markert told Nelson, referring to Captain Amanda Cuda, a physician on base at Naray. “You have three minutes to be on that Chinook.”

In the meantime, Brewer was trying to get an oral airway down Yllescas’s throat to help with his breathing, but Yllescas gagged on it. That was a good sign, that he still had a gag reflex. The PA instead put in a nasal trumpet to make respiration easier. Yllescas’s legs had sustained massive injuries. The major bones of both lower legs had been shattered, and blood was spilling out of the wounds, so Brewer ordered the soldiers helping him to tie tourniquets above each knee and then make splints to try to stabilize the captain’s legs. His arms were relatively uninjured, except for his left thumb, the skin on which had been pulled back like a banana peel. Brewer inserted the lines for two large IV’s containing Hextend—an electrolyte solution that assists in restoring blood volume—into the veins on Yllescas’s inner elbows. His airway was obviously still a problem, so Brewer put a mask on the captain’s face and started pumping oxygen into his lungs.

Brewer worked for roughly half an hour on Yllescas—stabilizing him, trying to help his breathing and stop his bleeding—before the Chinook carrying Nelson and Doc Cuda arrived. Yllescas was stable by that point, but not by much. At no time did he ever respond to any of Brewer’s questions or acknowledge any pain. Landing while the firefight was still sputtering, the Chinook set down so hard that it bounced six feet before stopping on the landing zone. The waiting stretcher crew rushed forward with Yllescas and placed him in the aircraft, where Cuda and Staff Sergeant Dave Joslin, a medic, began working once again to stabilize him as the Chinook took off and flew back toward Forward Operating Base Bostick.

He was in bad shape. Cuda was trained not to think about patients’ not surviving—there was no time for anything but effort—but it was clear that at a minimum, Yllescas would certainly lose his legs, which were a mess of muscle, flesh, blood, and bone. Best-case scenario.

Back at Keating, at the LZ, Brewer turned to Briley, who had a head injury and was clearly psychologically traumatized. Brewer escorted him to the aid station and injected him with 10 milligrams of diazepam, better known as Valium. The PA gave the order to evacuate Briley on the next bird.
⁵⁶

Villagers came to the entry control point carrying a stretcher on which lay someone completely covered by a blanket. Mazzocchi—now in charge of the outpost—was nervous about letting the stretcher inside the wire. He worried that it might be another IED. It wasn’t. The wounded woman who’d been hit while collecting firewood had been brought to the outpost for medical attention. While Brewer worked to get her stabilized, Mazzocchi spoke to her husband, trying to make the quick transition from soldier to diplomat, as he’d learned from Yllescas. He extended his sincere apologies to the man, who was quite upset—largely, it seemed to Mazzocchi, because his wife was a source of revenue for him. Without her, he would have only three people to work his farm. Until he found another wife, he said, his harvest would be delayed. And it was harvest season.

Mazzocchi asked him how much money the woman’s wounds might cost him.

Four hundred U.S. dollars, he said.

Mazzocchi gave him five hundred from Blackfoot Troop funds. The man seemed content with that. Brewer worked on his wife for about ninety minutes, after which she was medevacked out for higher-level care; when she returned to the area, she was missing one leg below the knee. After that day, whenever Mazzocchi was on patrol and saw him, the woman’s husband was always friendly toward him. It disgusted Mazzocchi. He wondered if he could have saved Yllescas if he’d given a thousand dollars to the Kamdesh shura.

On one level, the man had merely been anxious about his subsistence and his family’s survival—since in Nuristan, women are responsible for all agricultural work—but Mazzocchi would nonetheless come to see him as representing all men. Not just in Kamdesh, not just in Afghanistan. His concern for the wellbeing of his wife was entirely about her labor and productivity. He wanted the money because money equaled power and influence.

War, Mazzocchi came to think, was always about money and power and never about anything else. Everyone was out for himself. Mazzocchi would quote from
Leviathan,
the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s treatise arguing for a strong government to combat man’s inherent evil, referring to the “general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Without the constraints of government, human beings would do whatever they wanted, Mazzocchi believed; they were anarchical at their core and concerned only with their own benefit. That was what had motivated Al Qaeda, that was what motivated this Nuristani, and that was what motivated the United States to send thousands of soldiers like himself to this remote corner of the world. He’d joined the Army to find out why 9/11 had happened. He would come to feel that he’d learned why on that October day, when he handed over taxpayers’ money to prevent yet another man from becoming an enemy who would try to kill Americans, while his friend and commander Rob Yllescas lay dying on a medevac.