The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (76 page)

None of this information reached Gilberto and the others at the outpost because at the time, all of these truths were scattered among bushels of lies, gossip, nonsense, misunderstandings, and plans that were never carried out. At the higher levels, largely due to concerns about information oversaturation, such intelligence reports were not widely disseminated: since nobody had the time or the expertise to sift through the bycatch, blanket decisions had to be made that kept intelligence from reaching the field. Too much information can be as worthless as none—that was a lesson of 9/11, and it would soon be a lesson of Combat Outpost Keating as well.

Faruq’s father, a sheep and goat herder in the community of Lowluk, had died when his son was eight. The boy’s maternal uncle took him under his wing and sent him to a local madrassa, where clerics who subscribed to fundamentalist Salafi Islam instructed him in the Quran and how to be a good Muslim. Many of these clerics had been trained in special camps that were funded with money from Saudi Arabia and at the very least tolerated by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency and its military. Part of the camps’ purpose was to create holy warriors who would wage war against the Indians in Kashmir. But after the United States attacked Afghanistan in October 2001, mullahs at Faruq’s mosque began preaching that the infidels had now arrived in their homeland to impose their beliefs on and divide the Afghan people. They were not to be trusted, Faruq was told: when they invaded your country, you were obligated to defend yourself and Islam, to help your Muslim brothers.

In 2007, when he was eighteen, Faruq had traveled to the Waygal Valley, where he met Mullah Abdul Rahman Mustaghni, the local Taliban commander whom the 6-4 Cav had referred to as “Bad” Abdul Rahman. Rahman told Faruq that a Taliban fighter’s only job was to attack Americans, then to sleep, then to wake and attack Americans again. He operated under the command of the “shadow governor” of Nuristan, the Taliban leader Mullah Dost Mohammad.

Faruq had been following Rahman for two years. Barg-e-Matal was their home base, but they traveled throughout the area. Every week, sometimes every day, they would fire at Americans, with rockets, with guns, with RPGs. Eventually, they were given more powerful weapons by their friends across the border in Pakistan, including heavy machine guns and mortars.

Among Faruq’s fellow fighters was one from the local village of Pitigal. Ishranullah’s father had been killed years before, in a tribal dispute. At the age of ten, Ishranullah, like Faruq, was sent to a madrassa, this one across the border in Peshawar, a major transit zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan. There he became devout and learned about the “injustices” committed by foreigners. As a Taliban fighter, he also came to hate the Afghan National Army, believing its soldiers to be just as treacherous as the infidels, guilty of spilling the blood of other Muslims while claiming to believe in Allah.

Faruq and Ishranullah were just two out of hundreds of local fighters in an insurgency that was gaining strength in Nuristan. They fought the Americans in Barg-e-Matal and fired upon them at Camp Keating and Observation Post Fritsche. Many came from Kamdesh Village and nearby settlements such as Mandigal, Agasi, and Agro. They did what they were told. And in September 2009, their commanders and Nuristan’s Taliban “shadow governor, Dost Mohammed, began planning something truly catastrophic for the Americans, something that would put the Taliban in Nuristan on the map.

By this point, President Obama and White House officials thought they had successfully wrested control of the Afghanistan debate from the men with the bars and stars—McChrystal, Mullen, and Petraeus. Come the end of September, the public and the media would focus on a series of meetings the president had with his “war council”—a large deliberative body made up of top national security advisers, military and civilian, who were to help guide Obama’s decision-making about what to do next in Afghanistan and Pakistan. McChrystal was a member of the team, beamed in from Kabul on secure video teleconference, but he was just one of many.

On October 1, McChrystal spoke at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London, about the options in Afghanistan. His written speech had been approved through all the proper channels. During the question-and-answer period, he made it clear that he favored sending more troops to that country and maintaining a long-term presence there. The general was asked if he would be happy if within two years, Afghanistan could be handled through a counterterrorist approach, with drone missile strikes and smaller Special Forces teams—which, everyone knew, was the approach favored by Vice President Biden and other top presidential advisers. “The short, glib answer is ‘No,’ ” McChrystal replied. “A strategy that does not leave Afghanistan in a stable position is probably a shortsighted strategy.”

McChrystal’s remark was immediately seized upon by reporters as yet another shot fired in the Obama-versus-McChrystal troop showdown. White House officials were divided on the question of whether McChrystal was somewhat naive or downright manipulative. This wasn’t some offhand comment made to a reporter who happened to catch him in a mess hall at Bagram; McChrystal had flown to London, delivered a speech, and taken questions. And all the while, he was enjoying a spate of positive media: a profile on
60 Minutes
had just aired, and a major story for the
New York Times Magazine
was in the works. The truth was that media coverage of the speech unfairly inflamed the matter, portraying McChrystal as having personally gone after Vice President Biden, and incorrectly reporting that he had referred to Biden’s plan as a proposal for “Chaos-istan,” when in fact the general had used that term specifically in reference to another study altogether.

McChrystal had gone to London to help bolster Britain’s support for the war. When later asked about his comments at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, he said that he’d intended to fully endorse President Obama’s stated policy as well as the deliberative process the president had commenced, and after the event, he’d felt he had succeeded in doing that. He was shocked when his remarks were interpreted as criticism of the vice president—in some reports, falsely so. But at this stage in the story, the truth was almost an afterthought: in politics, be they parochial or international, perception generally becomes reality.

During his predecessor’s term, President Obama had heard members of the Bush administration say, again and again, that they were listening to the commanders in the field. He didn’t much care for that. First, it wasn’t true: the Bush administration had constantly overruled generals’ requests for more troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Second, President Obama firmly believed that the commander in chief had to be the one who set the mission. Now he was getting fed up with what was coming his way from the generals across the Potomac River and in Kabul. Their campaign was impeding a deliberative process, and the president would not be rolled.

On October 2, President Obama flew to Denmark to try to help his adopted hometown of Chicago win its bid for the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. (His effort failed; the nod went to Rio de Janeiro instead.) He summoned McChrystal to meet with him on Air Force One as it sat on the tarmac at Copenhagen Airport. For twenty-five minutes, one on one, the President made it clear to the general: We’re going to do this through our process, not via speeches or public relations. He told McChrystal that it looked untoward for him to be out there running an active media campaign while his commander in chief was attempting to make a resource decision. He also described the process that he wanted to pursue, in which he—the commander in chief—would review the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the nation’s objectives in those two hot spots, and overall U.S. strategy. The general responded that he was entirely dedicated to the mission at hand. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe McChrystal as contrite, but the president believed McChrystal left their meeting more on the same page with him—and determined to keep a lower profile.
⁸⁰

The degree to which the prickliness between the two men over the previous six months had affected the American evacuation of Camp Keating can’t be precisely determined. McChrystal’s remark to Colonel George, about not wanting to close the bases in Nuristan prematurely for fear of getting ahead of the president, indicated that he was sensitive to the uncomfortable perceptions that had arisen. By the time of McChrystal’s London speech, plans were finally under way to close the camp, but the withdrawal date had already been postponed by some months. The damage had been done.

CHAPTER 29

Elevator Ride

I
t was a dilemma: Radio Kamdesh’s transmission tower and broadcasting devices were expensive pieces of equipment, but shipping them out would require even more helicopter sorties, draining even more resources. Portis was in favor of either abandoning or destroying it all. Brown and George wanted to reuse the apparatus, concerned that if it was left behind, the Taliban would commandeer it and utilize it for their own propaganda.

On September 29, the argument was resolved by God: lightning struck the radio tower and blew it apart.

On October 1, Portis and the leaders of the Bastards—Lieutenant Salentine and Staff Sergeant Kirk Birchfield—hopped on a helicopter headed for Observation Post Fritsche. The men at Camp Keating called such quick journeys to the top of the southern mountain elevator rides. The attack that Afghan National Police chief Shamsullah had warned of had not happened, but Portis still wanted to find out whatever he could, and he thought some of the folks in Kamdesh Village might be able to help him. He was also hoping to meet with some Kamdesh elders so he could learn more about the HIG–Taliban agreement to cooperate. But his main reason for this elevator ride was inventory: he was looking for equipment, knowing what sticklers Army bureaucrats were.

The men had originally planned to walk up the mountain, but then Salentine noted that the chopper was going up to Fritsche anyway, so what the hell, why
shouldn’t
they just take an elevator ride? It was hard to argue with that logic. Portis walked in to the operations center and told Bundermann and Shrode where he was going; while he was gone, Bundermann would be in charge of ground forces, and Shrode would supervise the implementation of close air support and mortars.

The trip from Keating to Fritsche normally took just a matter of seconds, but on this occasion, an insurgent fired on the bird. He scored a direct hit.

“The fuel line’s been shot out,” said the pilot, who immediately took evasive action and left the valley in the rearview mirror, taking with him Portis, Salentine, and Birchfield. They soon enough landed at Forward Operating Base Bostick, safe but disconcertingly far from their troops. Whether or not he meant to do so, the enemy had succeeded in once again depriving the men of Camp Keating of their commander.

“Bad” Abdul Rahman had wanted to attack Combat Outpost Keating on September 30, but he knew that spies had tipped off the Americans. So he waited.

Hundreds of Taliban warriors had been living in the mountains, watching and waiting to pounce. They saw that despite having been tipped off, the Americans did not bring in more troops or equipment to fortify the base.

Rahman noticed, too, and decided that no more patience was required. They would attack before dawn on Saturday, October 3.

On the night of October 2, Jonathan Hill and Eric Harder zoned out in the barracks, watching a Time-Life documentary about World War II. The Bastards complained a lot, but God, it would have been awful to be in World War II, they agreed. Down in the dirt, with no shoes, the Americans got shredded by German artillery as they stormed the beaches of Normandy. “Those guys basically walked into the valley of hell,” Hill said.

They made similar observations about Vietnam after they popped in a bootleg DVD of
Apocalypse Now
. It was a little trippier than the actual footage from World War II, of course, especially the part where the deranged Lieutenant Colonel Bill Kilgore told his men it was safe to surf in the Nung River, even as they were taking artillery rounds from the Viet Cong.

After watching both DVDs from start to finish, Hill and Harder called it a night.

Specialist Michael Scusa and Specialist Mark Dulaney were up until about 2:00 a.m., shooting the breeze and talking about their plans. Per usual, Scusa wouldn’t stop gabbing about his son, Connor, and how big he was getting. Sometimes the guys would tell Scusa to shut up about his wife and son already, but he wouldn’t.