The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (70 page)

The Black Knight Troop soldiers had a relatively high rate of positive urinalysis at Fort Carson in Colorado after they returned from Iraq—an issue that Captain Porter put a lot of effort into addressing. Faulkner and Nelson were at the center of it. Faulkner was disciplined for using meth, and Brown gave him a shot at rehab. Nelson completed his own six-week resident program, but on January 8, 2008, he was found dead in his room at Fort Carson, having overdosed on a combination of prescription drugs and heroin. Out of rehab for less than a week, he left behind a son named Karson. His death was tough enough on Faulkner in the safe and secure environment of Colorado; it didn’t get any easier once he deployed to Kamdesh. A few months later, up on Observation Post Fritsche with Blue Platoon—they called themselves the Bastards—Faulkner tried to deal with the pain of his life and the pain of losing Blake the only way he knew how: he scored some hashish, which was, to say the least, not that difficult to do in Afghanistan.

John Francis—an older, no-nonsense sergeant at thirty-five, from Lindenhurst on Long Island, New York—tried to look out for Faulkner. The kid didn’t always make that easy. Francis, a team leader for the Bastards, was sergeant of the guard one night, in charge of calling all the troops at the guard posts, and Faulkner’s tower didn’t answer when he radioed. The operations center at OP Fritsche had a small camera that could provide a 360-degree view of the entire observation post, so Francis focused the camera on Faulkner’s tower and clicked on the night vision. It was pitch black, with no moonlight. Francis pushed the view toward the tower even more and saw some tiny flashes of light. Both wary and curious, Francis grabbed his portable radio and night-vision goggles and walked up to Faulkner’s tower post. He quietly proceeded up the stairwell made out of ammo cans, strode onto the dirt platform in the darkness, and paused to watch Faulkner and another private use a cigarette lighter for illumination as they tried to break up a small brick of hash. There was no mistaking what it was; its aroma alone filled the guard tower. For four minutes or so, Francis stood just mere inches from the two and watched them prepare to smoke hash while on guard duty.

“What’s up, guys?” Francis finally said, surprising the two enlisted men, who panicked and dropped everything onto the ground.

“Nothing, Sergeant,” Faulkner said.

“I called you on the radio,” Francis said. “You guys never answered me.”

“Oh, check the radio,” said Faulkner, “maybe something’s wrong with the radio.”

Francis went back to the operations center and spent ten minutes deciding what to do. He felt he had no choice. He knew that Faulkner had demons and addiction issues, so he’d made it his mission to try to keep him out of trouble. He watched over the kid as much as he could. But smoking hash on guard duty in the middle of a war zone was unforgivable.

Sergeant First Class Jonathan “Dad” Hill was in the operations center with Lieutenant Ben Salentine monitoring enemy radio chatter, when Francis walked in. He told them what he’d seen, and they discussed what to do. It was tough: Faulkner would be severely punished, they knew, and maybe even removed from duty. But they felt they had to report it because the platoon’s integrity was on the line.

Francis and Hill confronted Faulkner and the other private, who both admitted what they’d almost done. Specialist Faulkner was busted down to private but not discharged.

Private Ed Faulkner, Jr.
(Photo courtesy of Jon Hill)

And then they got back to work.

Ever since their arrival at OP Fritsche in May, Lieutenant Ben Salentine had been pushing the Bastards to turn the observation post into a fortress. Sure, they’d all heard that Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown wanted to shut the place down, along with Camp Keating, but until that happened, it would make sense to harden their positions by filling sandbags, improving machine-gun locations, whatever. Salentine gave the order, Hill assigned the men to get it done, and Staff Sergeant Kirk Birchfield, the senior scout, and team leaders and Sergeants Francis and Eric Harder organized the creation of the new positions and fortifications. Daily they labored to make Fritsche as impenetrable as possible.

The men of Black Knight Troop tried to enjoy themselves as best they could, but it wasn’t always easy. Helicopters would now fly into the area only rarely for resupply, in the blackest night during “Red Illume,”
⁷³
so there were periods when the men had to go without hot meals or mail. It was horrible for morale, but mail was not a priority compared with ammunition, MREs, and water. That’s what happens when you’re living on the Pakistan border, Salentine thought. All he cared about getting was sustenance and bullets and home to his wife.

Salentine understood that morale was important, and he knew it was tough for troops to blow off steam when they were penned up in a compound all day like livestock. At OP Fritsche, as at Camp Keating, there were plenty of practical jokes played. On Salentine’s twenty-eighth birthday, for example, his troops packed his room with balloons filled with baby powder. (Only one exploded, hitting Birchfield.) On other occasions, they replaced his shampoo with “fancy sauce,” the ketchup-and-mayonnaise mixture referenced in the Will Ferrell comedy
Step Brothers,
and substituted coffee creamer for his talcum powder. John Francis sliced off the bristles of Salentine’s toothbrush bit by bit each day until it was bare. Then there were the group activities. On July 4, 2009, the Bastards invited all of the ANA troops and some of the locals to a barbecue. The Afghans cooked up goat, rice, and flatbread while the Americans grilled chicken, hamburgers, and steak. Another project: with his small digital video camera, Sergeant Jory Brown filmed the Bastards dancing, one by one or in small groups, soundtracked it to “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga (the girliest song he could find), and uploaded the clip to YouTube. The footage was a big hit among the men themselves as well as with their families back home, who could find reassurance in the goofiness. After the video-sharing Web site removed the clip’s audio because of copyright infringement, Brown’s wife ended up posting the uncensored version on her Facebook page.

Not everyone got into the act. Private First Class Dan Rogers came from a religious family—his father, a former Marine, was a full-time pastor—and he didn’t mesh well socially with the rest of the platoon. Rogers looked askance at the cursing and practical jokes and spent his free time playing video games or reading the book of Romans or Christian fiction. Rogers thought that the only other one in the unit who seemed active in his faith was Specialist Cody Floyd, a medic, and in hope of further salvation, Rogers tried to minister to the other men. He spoke with Specialist Michael Scusa and urged to get him to get right with Jesus Christ. Scusa was polite about it, noting that his wife went to church, but not all that interested. When Rogers was on guard duty with ANA troops or Afghan Security Guards, he would take advantage of the captive audience and try to save them, too, though usually as soon as he uttered the word
Jesus,
they’d shut down pretty quickly. He never gave up; Bible in hand, he’d ask the Afghans about Islam, and then they’d open up a bit, after which he’d ask them if they’d mind if he shared something about his own beliefs. He’d describe miracles—how Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fish, for instance. He’d share the Parable of the Sower of Seeds, discuss the Crucifixion. Rogers never worried about getting in trouble for trying to promote his beliefs; he was pretty sure his commanding officers knew he was doing it. They didn’t.

Sergeant First Class Hill for sure hadn’t heard about Rogers’s proselytizing, but he was concerned enough about what he
did
know: Rogers kept falling asleep on guard duty, which was unacceptable—or in Hill’s vernacular, “garbage.” Called Dad by his men because of his age—thirty-seven—and gruff manner, Hill had been born on an Air Force base in Oklahoma. After high school in Virginia, he’d wasted a year drinking and working at Hardee’s; the Army was a ticket out. Hill had the weary manner of a man who’d seen it all, and after two tours through the mass graves and skeleton-riddled roads of booby-trapped Bosnia, maybe he had.

Sergeant First Class Jon Hill.
(Photo courtesy of Jon Hill)

In early August, the Bastards rotated down to Camp Keating. As soon as Salentine and Hill laid eyes on the outpost, they looked at each other.

“This place is a fucking dump,” Hill said. “We need to fortify it like we did at Fritsche.”

“You’re right, we need to,” Salentine concurred.

In their first two days at the outpost, Salentine and Hill brainstormed ways to improve the security at their new home, just as they’d done at Observation Post Fritsche. They wanted to add HESCO barriers, string more wire around the whole camp, place more Claymore mines in more areas, and add two more towers, one facing the Northface and the other by that southern wall. Needing an official okay, they poked their heads in to the operations center, and Salentine made his pitch. Porter didn’t think the reinforcement was necessary. And anyway, they would all be leaving soon enough. He wouldn’t budge.

“It’s a no-go,” Salentine reported back to Hill as they left the operations center. Salentine was a bit stunned by his captain’s obstinance. Being at Combat Outpost Keating is like deer hunting, he thought, but we aren’t the ones in the tree stand.

“Why are you here?” asked the journalist.

Captain Porter chuckled and said, “My boss told me to come here.”

Porter was sitting in the operations center as Nick Paton Walsh, the Asia correspondent for the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 News, threw questions at him, all of it being recorded by cameraman Stuart Webb. The two Brits had come to the outpost to report on the security preparations being taken before the August 20 elections. Webb noticed that sitting prominently on Porter’s desk were two books:
The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam
and
Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan.

Walsh and Webb both knew this would be a trip with some risks. Before leaving Forward Operating Base Bostick, they’d spoken with one pilot who’d flown to Camp Keating and turned right around after a near miss by an RPG. When the journalists flew to the camp, they did so in the dead of night in a bird accompanied by two Apaches, one of which fired a Hellfire missile at the mountain to scare off any would-be attackers. The mountain itself was so close to the landing zone that it looked as if an insurgent could casually stand somewhere nearby and hit any helicopter with a rock. The pilots were concerned that their blades might hit the hillsides as they began their descent. It was the most dangerous flight Webb had even been on, and insurgents weren’t even firing. And that was about the least of it, they realized when the morning revealed to them just how vulnerable the entire camp was: it was under constant threat of fire from the surrounding hills. A few days before, they were told, an Afghan soldier had been shot in the back as he used the piss-tubes. It was that easy. Webb and Walsh had been to their share of war zones around the world, but in terms of location, Combat Outpost Keating was a new low.

The Americans were reluctant to let the Brits join them outside the wire—it was too risky, they said—so the journalists arranged to meet the camp’s Latvian ANA trainers and the Afghan troops by the river, to the northeast of Camp Keating, as they returned to the outpost after a patrol. As Webb began filming, shots rang out. No one was sure which mountain the bullets were coming from, so nobody knew where to take cover. Walsh dove to the ground and jammed his knee so badly he couldn’t walk on it. A stray bullet ricocheted into the thigh of one of the Latvians, who let out a shout and fell on top of Webb.