The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (61 page)

Then a second trip flare went off. The enemy was coming down the southern mountain from the direction of Kamdesh Village.

Safulko ran to the dining hall to grab some water, after which he intended to make a beeline for the barracks to pick up his patrol. He quickly snatched a couple of bottles out of the refrigerator, stashed them in his backpack, and was just opening the door when—at precisely 6:30 a.m.—the enemy opened up on the outpost with small arms, PKM machine guns, and a volley of RPGs. When the fire hit, the ANA soldiers who’d been milling about on the U.S. side of the base scattered, firing back sporadically in multiple directions before stumbling into the waist- and knee-deep trench systems that wound around the buildings. One RPG went through the wall above the dining-hall door, through the refrigerator, and out the other wall, its shrapnel spraying both cooks, Sergeant Jason Judice and Specialist Jason Pace. Another RPG then exploded through the roof of the operations center, knocking out the generator and landing in Mazzocchi’s workspace, polluting the air with its acrid copper smell. All forms of communication were temporarily lost.

The enemy clearly knew the outpost.

Insurgents began peppering a Humvee on which sat a .50-caliber machine gun and an LRAS surveillance device. One round went through the lens of the LRAS and out the other side of the scope, disabling the machine. A soldier carrying both ammunition and an M203 grenade launcher ran to the Humvee; an enemy round knocked the M203 right off his rifle. It was a direct hit from an expert marksman.

Mazzocchi’s men returned fire from the northern mountain while he and Staff Sergeant Matthew Crane called in for close air support as well as for 120-millimeter mortars from both Camp Keating and Observation Post Fritsche. Pecha used a backup radio to call Mazzocchi. “You and Crane will be in charge of all indirect fire and air support,” he told him. “Our generator’s out.”

Bullets showered down on Mazzocchi and his men, forcing them to take cover, while Johnson and his troops were pummeled by RPGs. The enemy knew the precise locations of both Mazzocchi’s and First Sergeant Johnson’s patrols. Mazzocchi saw a group of insurgents, around half a dozen men, on the road. They looked as if they were on their way to the eastern side of the outpost, probably to try to breach the wire near the ANA compound; crossing would be much easier there than elsewhere because in places the wire was jammed down into the dirt, from ANA soldiers’ regularly hopping over it to take a shortcut into and out of camp. Mazzocchi and his troops fired on the insurgents while Crane redirected the mortar fire, shifting the target from the southern mountain to the enemy on the road. The insurgents heading for the wire retreated.

By then, close air support had arrived, and now the Apaches began hitting the enemy in the mountains with Hellfire missiles, ending the assault. They next provided cover for the U.S. troops as they moved down the northern mountain. On one of their passes, the pilots were at about eye level with the men from 6-4 Cav, and Victorino held up his hands in a University of Texas Hook-’em-Horns gesture as thanks.

The cooks insisted that they were okay and, after some quick treatment for their shrapnel wounds, could stay at Combat Outpost Keating. They even made dinner for the troops that night.

After Mazzocchi returned to the outpost, he surveyed the camp and was surprised to see how hard it had been hit, though he knew the damage could have been much worse if the enemy had managed to breach the wire. “They had us suppressed pretty heavily,” Safulko explained to him. “They were spot on.” Mazzocchi’s seeing the team of insurgents on the road at the eastern side of the outpost had been key to the successful defense. “There’s no way we would have been able to detect them if you hadn’t been there,” Safulko acknowledged. The troops of 6-4 Cav had for the most part made it through in good shape, but that belied how close they had come to catastrophe during this attack.

Two days later, the enemy tried again, firing at the outpost from five surrounding positions. That the insurgents were attacking on a Monday and not a Saturday, and two or three hours into the day instead of at dawn, indicated that they understood the importance of switching up their tactics. Caught off guard, the officers of Blackfoot Troop did not have anyone outside the outpost on patrol. A 107-millimeter rocket crashed into the camp, followed by small-arms fire as a platoon of enemy fighters came from the high ground to the southeast, pinning down the ANA soldiers at their guard posts and in their barracks. Insurgents fired at a U.S. Humvee equipped with an MK19 grenade launcher, but they kept overshooting, spraying the tree behind the truck and causing its leaves to flutter to the ground.

Mazzocchi and Safulko had left the operations center and were standing around the corner from the Humvee. At this point, they expected the insurgents to breach the wire. Safulko called in to Sergeant First Class Curry: “The ANA are pinned down,” he told him. Curry led a ready-to-go 240 machine-gun team to a corridor near the ANA’s end of the outpost, to prepare for an enemy takeover of the eastern side. If the wire got breached, they would contain the insurgents there.

That turned out not to be necessary. Sergeant Nathan Wagner—a normally quiet kid from the Midwest—ran out of the operations center seeming possessed, armed with an AT4 shoulder-launched rocket. He fired it right at the enemy fighters in the southeast corner of the camp, and they retreated. But in the end, what allowed Blackfoot Troop to keep all of the insurgents at bay—and probably saved the day—was the sheer volume of rounds fired by air support, including two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped by an A-10 Warthog on an enemy position on the Northface, as well as two 30-millimeter gun runs on the same spot.

It was obvious to all, however, that the insurgents had made it their priority to overrun the outpost, and twice now they had come close to succeeding. Once they were inside the wire, there was no telling what damage they could do.

Dena Yllescas put the laptop computer by her husband’s hospital bed. She’d downloaded songs from their wedding and others that had meaning for them both: “The Keeper of the Stars” by Tracy Byrd, the Rascal Flatts version of “Bless the Broken Road,” “You Save Me” by Kenny Chesney. A slide show of photographs of their two little girls appeared on the screen, each image fading in and then fading out again to make way for the next.

“It’s amazing how you can speak right to my heart,” sang Keith Whitley.

Without saying a word, you can light up the dark

Try as I may I could never explain

What I hear when you don’t say a thing.

Dena saw tears in Rob’s eyes. She wasn’t sure if they were because of the music, the pictures, or the pain—or all three. He wasn’t able to speak. She cried, too, mourning the loss of the past, terrified of the future.

It had been a good day, as good days went in her new world. The nurse had told her that if she asked Rob to grip her hand, it might just provoke a reflex action. Or, the nurse suggested, she could try to get him to make a thumbs-up sign. Dena asked him to do that, and she could see him trying, stiffening his arm in an effort to lift it. At another point, when the doctor was there, she told Rob to blink once if he was in pain and twice if he wasn’t. He blinked once. The doctor said he was positive that Rob was responding directly to her command.

It had been surgery after surgery over the previous two weeks, each good sign counterbalanced by a setback. His leg wounds kept bleeding, his fever required a cooling blanket, his blood pressure kept spiking, he had acute kidney failure, he was jaundiced, his blood wasn’t clotting well. Rob was in such pain, and his body had suffered such severe trauma, that the doctors often kept him sedated. Dena took pleasure in any indication that he was there with her. She hooked up a radio and turned on conservative talk-radio giant Rush Limbaugh’s show, Rob’s favorite, and he squeezed her hand tightly as they listened—she hoped he was listening, at any rate. “You’ll be fine,” she would tell him. “You have to keep working on responding to commands. You’re a fighter; you’re a Ranger. You finished Ranger school when you didn’t think you could go on anymore, and you can use that fight in you to get through this.” He had two little girls who were waiting to welcome their daddy back, she said. They could still go ahead with all their plans, including the one to buy an RV and follow Eva and Julia to college so their daughters would never be out of their sight….

Dena, her mother, and her mother-in-law did a lot of praying. At one point, the doctor told them that for some “unknown reason,” Rob’s bilirubin count had come down, which meant that his jaundice was improving—the doctor wasn’t sure why. All three women said at the same time, “
We
know why!” It was the power of prayer, they knew—indeed, they’d been praying specifically for his liver to start working properly.

Yllescas was supposed to receive skin grafts on his leg wounds on November 24, but the plastic surgeon was concerned that given the condition he was in, the grafts wouldn’t take—so instead the doctors did a “purse cinch” on his wounds, threading the tissue and cinching it up to make the wound smaller. The next day, Julia and Eva came to visit. Eva, still a baby, was too physically vulnerable to risk exposure to her dad—who was now suffering from a fungal infection, among other things—but Julia, after hesitating for a second in the hallway, put on her gown and bravely went into his room. She seemed scared of him at first but then gradually warmed to him. It was Daddy, she could see that now. And Rob could see Julia, of this Dena was sure.

After Julia’s visit, Rob Yllescas started going downhill fast, as if he’d been waiting to see her before saying good-bye. A CAT scan showed fluid in his left lung and his right leg. His breathing became labored. His temperature rose, and his respiration and heart rate increased.

“Last year, Thanksgiving wasn’t good for me because I couldn’t eat anything,” Dena reminded her husband, referring to the gestational diabetes she’d been diagnosed with in 2007, while carrying Eva. “And this year
you
can’t eat anything, but next year we will have the best Thanksgiving together with our girls, pigging out!”

On Friday, November 28, Yllescas’s pulse was low, and his blood pressure high. Another CAT scan revealed the presence of a large blood clot in the main part of his brain. His doctors gave Dena a choice: either she could let her husband die a peaceful death, or they could attempt an emergency craniotomy. The odds of his dying on the operating table were high, they said. And even if he did survive, he wasn’t likely to have much quality of life.

It was the toughest decision of her life. Rob had told her that he didn’t want to be a vegetable. But she couldn’t believe that a loving God would get him this far and then allow him to die or, worse, live out the rest of his life oblivious to the world around him. Dena talked it over with her mother and her in-laws and decided to ask the doctors to perform the craniotomy. She figured the odds had been against Rob’s surviving the IED blast, and yet he’d done that, so he would survive this, too, and somehow emerge cognitively sound. God was working through the doctors, she thought. God knew that Rob had two little daughters who needed him very much.

In a craniotomy, a neurosurgeon removes a section of the patient’s skull in order to access his or her brain. The patient’s head is locked into position with a three-pin Mayfield skull clamp that will keep it completely immobile while the delicate procedure is performed. First the surgeon cuts into the patient’s head, folds back the skin and muscles, and removes a flap of bone to reveal the brain’s protective covering. That covering, named the dura mater, is itself then folded back, exposing the brain. The surgeon can then get to work on trying to correct whatever the problem is—a blood clot, an aneurysm, a tumor, a bullet, or whatever. When that’s done, the bone flap is usually put back in place with small titanium plates and screws, though if the brain swells, that step may be omitted.

During Yllescas’s surgery, his wife prayed with a fierce intensity. If he’s not going to have any quality of life, God, please just take him home, she asked.

He survived. When the neurosurgeon cut out the bone flap on the right side of Yllescas’s skull, however, his brain bulged out. It shrank somewhat after the blood clot was removed, but the trauma of the surgery caused it to start swelling again, and a small section of it had to be excised so that Yllescas could be closed back up. The surgeon didn’t know what repercussions this might have. He wasn’t able to restore the bone flap; he said that could be replaced down the line with a titanium plate.

Dena was informed that there was a 90 percent chance her husband wouldn’t make it to the next morning. A crash cart sat in his room all night. But as the first rays of sun crept through the hospital window shades, Rob was still alive. His vital signs and brain-pressure measurements held steady. Dena saw his eyes moving underneath his eyelids. “I hope you understand why I made the decision I did,” she told him.

She saw good signs. When the medical team cleaned out his mouth, he clenched his jaw. When his tracheostomy breathing tube was suctioned, he coughed and moved his shoulders. His brain stem is working, she thought. She held on to that. God got him through the surgery, she said to herself. Why would He do that if He didn’t have a plan for Rob?

She heard Julia praying that night. “God, please heal my daddy so he can wrestle with me,” said the little girl.

O Lord, please hear my daughter’s prayers, Dena asked. They come from this most innocent of children, whose passion and love for her father are unwavering. Lord, please heal my husband. Make him your miracle man. You are the Master Healer.