The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (72 page)

To Brown, Kolenda’s success seemed evidence that a gifted American commander could make himself a “viceroy” in Afghanistan, at least for a while. But that history was almost irrelevant to the immediate needs of 3-61 Cav: Brown, with an insufficient number of troops, was now confronted by a major Taliban surge in Kunar Province. In late June, some of his soldiers with C Troop were out on a mission with ANA soldiers when they were ambushed. The ANA commander—without question the best officer in the 6th Kandak, or Afghan National Army battalion—was sprayed by shrapnel from an RPG. Evacuated from Forward Operating Base Bostick, he never came back. A couple of weeks after that, a platoon from C Troop was ambushed in the same spot; the twenty-nine-year-old platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Jay Fabrizi of Seffner, Florida, was killed
⁷⁴
, and several others wounded. In August, Brown sent troops to meet up with a convoy of twenty-three fuel tankers headed to Naray from Forward Operating Base Fenty, but by the time the convoy reached the linkup point where 3-61 Cav would assume security, only one tanker was left; the rest either had refused to leave Combat Outpost Monti, which lay in between Forward Operating Bases Fenty and Bostick, or had been attacked and burned on the way. During the next convoy security mission, Fabrizi’s replacement, Sergeant First Class Johnny Weaver, was wounded by RPG shrapnel, as were two other men, one of whom ended up losing a leg.

By the middle of August, Forward Operating Base Bostick was running terrifyingly low on fuel for its helicopters. Colonel George authorized the closure of Observation Post Hatchet, in Kunar Province, to free up a platoon, and he and the Support Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Law, agreed to start running convoys at night, with air support, surveillance drones, and U.S. military accompaniment.

All of this—the ambushes, the casualties, the extraordinary risk—meant that Brown was even more anxious to close the smaller outposts, including Combat Outpost Keating, whose closure would allow Black Knight Troop to come to Kunar to join his fight. It also meant that throughout the summer, he focused on the areas where his men were dying, and not on Combat Outpost Keating.

There had been little preparation made at Camp Keating for the August 20 elections beyond receiving the ballots by air a few days beforehand and planning patrols to keep the enemy from attacking the voting location at the Afghan National Police station. The Bastards left early in the morning and set up at the Northface, high and low, to watch over the camp and the police station. Red Platoon guarded the perimeter. The Americans didn’t see a single person visit the voting booths. Not one.

Truth was, they didn’t really care. Troops from 3-61 Cav were more interested in the enemy’s B-10 recoilless rifle than they were in this anemic version of the free and fair exercise of democracy. As the sun began to set, the polling station closed. The troops figured that about four people had voted, yet somehow, as they were later told, all of the ballots had been filled out. Even fishier were the numbers in Barg-e-Matal, where U.S. forces counted only 128 voters, though around twelve thousand votes were said to have been “cast.”

The initial results had Karzai winning with 54 percent of the vote, though the election was immediately assailed as being fraught with fraud. In what was now familiar Afghan fashion, the organization charged with keeping the process clean and fair—the Independent Elections Commission—was itself accused of corruption. An American diplomat working for the United Nations in Kabul, Peter Galbraith, would be fired by U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki Moon after he later accused his boss, U.N. special envoy Kai Elde, of covering up Karzai’s rampant fraud; Galbraith estimated that almost a third of the votes for Karzai were phony. Karzai was hardly alone: Brown heard that allies of Karzai’s opponent Abdullah Abdullah had stuffed ballot boxes as well, and paid off elders in Naray to deliver thousands of votes for him. (As was their wont, the Naray elders were said to have taken the cash from Karzai’s opponents but then actually voted for Karzai, who subsequently began an expensive construction project to build a three-story mosque in Naray.)

The election fraud meant less to the men of Combat Outpost Keating than did the further evidence provided by the ANA soldiers, around this time, that they were worthless—or, as per Jonathan Hill, “garbage.” They refused to follow orders during an election-day mission to take care of that recoilless rifle, though this was merely the latest angry note in the cacophonous earful Brown would get every time he talked to most of his captains: the Afghan troops wouldn’t patrol, they wouldn’t share information, and when pushed by the Americans, they would say “You’re not my commander!” and walk off in a huff. The Afghans’ weaknesses were exacerbated during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which in 2009 began on Friday, August 21 and would end on the evening of Monday, September 21. During Ramadan, Muslims attempt to achieve spiritual rejuvenation by reading the Quran and abstaining from food and drink during daylight hours. Hungry and thirsty, hot in the late-summer sun, the ANA troops were exhausted and irritable. They would refuse to patrol, making an already inferior platoon completely combat-ineffective. Their attrition and AWOL rates were disastrously high through the summer and got even worse during Ramadan. However much the ANA troops endeared themselves to God, or Allah, during that period, they did not win any friends among the Americans at the outpost.

“So what are you doing there?” Amanda Gallegos asked Sergeant Justin Gallegos over the phone. “Are you building schools?”

Gallegos laughed. His ex-wife was so naive sometimes.

They were from two different worlds. When they met, she was a student at the University of Arizona, an Alaskan transplant–turned–sorority girl with a Honda. He was a big, brash local employed by a water vending-machine company, who had lost two older brothers, both killed while engaged in gang-related activity. He did not care a lick what others thought of him, his decisions, or his behavior. Justin showed Amanda a side of Tucson that excited her, took her to parties full of drugs and violence. They clicked. However tough he acted toward the rest of the world, he was soft and sweet with her. Yet as soon as it became clear that they were going to stay together, Amanda tried to whip him into shape. She told him he had a choice, boots or books—the Army or college. He chose the former. And right around then, Amanda got pregnant. Their son, Macaidan, was almost five now.

Sergeant Armando Avalos and Sergeant Justin Gallegos.
(Photo courtesy of Amanda Marr)

Gallegos returned from his second deployment to Iraq with posttraumatic stress disorder. He had always been aggressive, sometimes a jerk, but this was something else. If anyone looked at Amanda “wrong,” he’d become irate. He promised her he’d take a mood stabilizer, told her a physician’s assistant had prescribed him Zoloft, but that was a lie; instead he drank too much, became destructive, went to jail for fighting. Every night ended in violence of some sort. Amanda barely recognized him anymore; he was like a pit bull locked in a basement, and all anyone had to do was open the door to unleash the fury.

Gallegos was a loyal friend, but he was a nasty drunk and enjoyed causing trouble, and his Army buddies—fellow Red Platoon soldiers Tom Rasmussen and Stephan Mace, sometimes Sergeant Eric Harder from the Bastards—weren’t the kind of friends who helped a guy stay on the straight and narrow. One night, while drinking at a bar before the unit’s deployment to Afghanistan, Gallegos clumsily spilled his beer. The waitress came over, bent down to wipe up the mess, and got the rest of Gallegos’s beer poured on her head for her trouble. The bouncers escorted him to the parking lot, but he made his way back through the kitchen, sat back down at the same table, and had another beer. It took probably twenty minutes for the bouncers to figure out that he had made it back in; they threw him out again.

Harder had his own crooked story. Growing up in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, he never knew who his father was. He was raised by his mother, with his grandpa Jerry Carlson—his mother’s stepdad, a Korean War veteran—teaching him how to be a man. When Eric was thirteen, Grandpa Carlson died of throat cancer. That was the teenager’s first encounter with death before he joined the Army. It wouldn’t be his last.

When he was eighteen, Harder talked about joining the military with his close friend Matt Logan. One summer’s day, the two of them decided to jump into the St. Croix River, separating Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was illegal to jump in on the Minnesota side, but driving the ten minutes to get to the Wisconsin side was a hassle, and once there, you had to pay for parking—so the Minnesota side it was. Harder jumped first—it was about a thirty-five-foot drop—and began swimming. Logan followed him. The undertow was strong, and it pulled on both of them, but Harder managed to escape it and swim to the Wisconsin side. When he clambered out and looked back, he saw that Logan was only halfway across the river.

“I’m fucking drowning,” Logan called. Harder thought he was joking at first, but then he realized his friend was legitimately having difficulty keeping his head above water. Harder jumped back in and swam to him, but it was too late: Logan had been sucked under. His body was found three days later. Harder had a motorcycle—a blue-and-white Ninja 500—and on the way back from Logan’s funeral, distracted, he hit the back corner of a car and messed up his knee. He did stucco work for the next five years. Then he snapped out of his stupor and joined the Army in 2005.

Physically, Gallegos and Harder were men, but emotionally, they were something else. Was it because of the PTSD, the camaraderie, their youth? Amanda didn’t know, but after a while she didn’t care. She divorced Justin, though she sometimes hoped it might be just a temporary thing, until he got his act together.

Then his orders came in to go to Afghanistan.

“You know that I’m not coming home from this one, right?” Gallegos said to her.

Amanda would laugh; it was ridiculous. But Gallegos would say things to Macaidan, preparing him to be the man of the house, and not just for the year of his deployment. “When I’m not here, you take care of your mother,” he’d say to his four-year-old son.

“This is not going to go well,” Gallegos told his ex-wife. “We’re going to be in a fucking valley.”

She’d laugh. They tried to have a sense of humor about things; it was the only way they’d gotten through his two previous deployments. “It sounds like a horrible idea,” she said.

“Yeah, it’s awesome,” he replied.

And then he went there. He’d email her photos of the fishbowl he now called home. “Doesn’t this look like the perfect situation?” he’d write. But it wasn’t funny. When he used to call from Iraq, there were times when he’d seemed perfectly relaxed. This was different. At Combat Outpost Keating, he was always on edge. Gallegos told Amanda that he’d had a lot of bad days in Iraq, “but here,” he added, “it’s
all
bad days.”

Sergeant Vernon Martin was stressed out, and Specialist Damien Grissette didn’t really understand why. They were on guard duty together, and Martin was trying to explain to him about something deep and powerful, something incredibly important that was going on in his life, but at the same time, he wouldn’t say precisely what it was.

“I need to get right with the man upstairs,” Martin kept saying to Grissette, over and over.

The two men had first bonded at Bagram Air Base; they were on their way to Combat Outpost Keating and saw a number of caskets on their way out. Inside were the remains of the Americans killed at Bari Alai on May 1. Martin, Grissette, Specialist Ian MacFarlane, and Specialist Andrew Stone were all support staff—mechanics, water, and maintenance. The sight of those caskets badly spooked them. “We’re all going to get out of here together,” they pledged to one another.