The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (93 page)

So I can’t get into Nuristan at this time—not to Urmul or Kamdesh Village or the former location of Combat Outpost Keating—because no one will take me. Schachman jokes that in the Wolfhounds’ area of operations, you can do anything once. So theoretically, we
could
make our way to Kamdesh to see the former site of Combat Outpost Keating. The problem would be getting back.

“I could put on my PT’s
⁹¹
and jog down to Asadabad,” Schachman says with a smile. “Once.”

The hard work here in northeastern Afghanistan continues. The Wolfhounds devote much of their time and energy to maintaining the security of a section of the road from Asadabad to Naray, the same road that Lieutenant Colonel Brown and some of his men worked on securing two years ago. They try to get the village elders to assume responsibility for parts of the road. They offer assurances to villagers that they will benefit from contracts to pour the asphaltlike substance on the still-unpaved swath. They, like the other soldiers whose stories I have attempted to tell in these pages, are trying to do their very best in an impossible corner of the world, both to help the Afghan people and to eliminate the bad guys. They are paid modestly and have endured years away from those whom they love most. They are generally ignored by the American people and the American media.

Days before I get to Forward Operating Base Bostick, a B-10 recoilless rifle round hit the center of the camp, not far from Schachman’s hooch. When I share this information on Facebook—where I’ve accumulated a fair number of friends and acquaintances from 3-71, 1-91, 6-4, and 3-61 Cavs—troops and former troops speculate that it must have been the same B-10 that haunted Camp Keating in 2009, the one that badly wounded Sergeant Shane Scherer
⁹²
and, to a lesser extent, First Sergeant Ronald Burton.

Some of the Wolfhounds tell me that in Kamdesh District, Mullah Sadiq and HIG are fighting it out with the Taliban. Other interesting developments: before 3-61 Cav left Afghanistan in 2010, Kamdesh elder Abdul Rahman had become the district administrator for Kamdesh, and “Big” Gul Mohammed has since been assigned to serve as the local chief of the Afghan National Police.

Major Dominic Edwards is, when I land at Forward Operating Base Bostick, in charge of the entire area of operations while his commander is on leave. A North Carolina native, Edwards is forty-one and has a devoted wife and three children back home in Hawaii. He’s reasonably confident that the Afghan National Army and National Police will be able to assume control of the area within the next couple of years.

There has been little apparent study of what happened at Combat Outpost Keating. The scope of the 15-6 investigation was limited largely to the matter of whether there was adequate force protection at the outpost, not addressing tougher questions such as whether those troops should have been in that valley at all, or whether the military had even larger issues to resolve. When I mention the Wolfhounds’ nine fallen soldiers to Edwards and ask him if their lives were worth the infrastructure constructed, or even the enemy killed, he quite candidly admits he doesn’t know. That will be for history to judge, he says.

Specialist Brian Casey of 3-61 Cav was on his way back to Camp Keating from R&R when his friends were attacked on October 3, 2009. His three best friends at the outpost were Michael Scusa, Chris Griffin, and Ed Faulkner.

Casey wasn’t there for that one battle, but he, too, carries the scars from being in Afghanistan. There have been times when he has scared his family. One morning after a bender, he woke up to find the whole downstairs of his house trashed. He thought his dogs had gotten into a fight. They hadn’t—
he’d
done it.

Casey has since pursued help. But still, some nights, if he hears an odd noise, he will go load his shotgun and patrol his house for a few minutes before he realizes how frightening and strange his actions are.

Of all the troops who served at Combat Outpost Keating, Faulkner suffered the most immediately consequential case of PTSD. Some of his friends think his overdose was purposeful, though there’s no evidence of that. “He took the easy way out,” says Casey.

A 2008 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that almost 20 percent of service members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan reported some signs of either PTSD or major depression. By now, more than two million Americans have served in those two wars, meaning that the number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from those particular long-term effects is somewhere around four hundred thousand. The RAND study indicated that only about half sought treatment. How effective that treatment may prove to be is obviously an open question; Faulkner, for example, was in treatment.

Alex Newsom returned to Afghanistan. Based at Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, Newsom—formerly of 1-91 Cav, now with Special Forces—worked with Afghan National Army commandos to fight the Taliban. As I was working on this book, I heard from him periodically via email and on the phone. He was always cryptic about what exactly he was doing, but he wanted me to know—he wanted me to tell you—that all was not lost in Nuristan, that troops had not died in vein.

In April 2012, the U.S. military posted pictures from a Special Forces mission to Kamdesh Village. The Taliban were on the verge of overrunning Upper Kamdesh, threatening to slaughter the inhabitants if they didn’t side with them. For two weeks, the Taliban had been deliberately and methodically attacking locals in the middle of the night. Then, in early April, ISAF special operations troops and 120 ANA commandos entered the area under the cover of darkness. They were there for five days, fighting and beating back up to three hundred insurgents.

“The people that we supported kept up the fight long after we left,” Newsom reported to me, referring to his time with 1-91 Cav. He had a joyful reunion with Mawlawi Abdul Rahman—“I heard you guys needed some help,” Newsom told the new district administrator. Then, at a district center in Upper Kamdesh, he saw former HIG leader Mullah Sadiq. “He looked pretty ill, but he’s on our side,” he confided.

“Our relationships that we established years ago were paramount in the success of the liberation of that particular village,” Newsom insisted. “Without any American presence for two and a half years, these people we supported, they kept the fight up. All they needed was equipment. These are good people. There is hope.” For Captain America, still running through the mountains of Nuristan, the fight goes on.

On May 21, 2012, President Obama and the NATO allies announced that in the summer of 2013, Afghan government forces—ready or not—would take the lead on providing security throughout the country, and that U.S. combat forces would see their mission end come midnight, December 31, 2014. (It seems likely, nevertheless, that Special Forces units such as Newsom’s will remain in country beyond that date, conducting counterterrorism missions.)

Captain Alex Newsom of U.S. Special Forces with Mawlawi Abdul Rahman (
to his right
) and others as U.S. forces and Afghan commandos fought back against Taliban insurgents in Kamdesh Village in April 2012.
(Photo courtesy of Alex Newsom)

At the NATO summit, in Chicago, the president took questions from reporters. I had solicited suggestions from the troops you’ve met in these pages as well as from their families, and I’d selected two, both from members of 3-61 Cav.

Asked now-Captain Stephen Cady: “If this handoff and withdrawal prove premature, what plans are in place for dealing with an Afghanistan that’s fallen apart or is, possibly, again, under Taliban rule?”

“I don’t think that there’s ever going to be an optimal point where we say, ‘This is all done, this is perfect, this is just the way we wanted it, and now we can… wrap up all our equipment and go home,’ ” the president said, speaking more from the heart than usual—probably because he felt he was conveying something directly to the fighting men, instead of just to a White House reporter. “There’s a process, and it’s sometimes a messy process, just as it was in Iraq. But think about it. We’ve been there now ten years… the Afghan security forces themselves will not ever be prepared if they don’t start taking that responsibility” for their own security.

The president continued, “The large footprint that we have in Afghanistan, over time, can be counterproductive…. No matter how much good we’re doing and how outstanding our troops and our civilians and diplomats are doing on the ground, ten years, in a country that’s very different, that’s a strain, not only on our folks but also on that country, which at a point is going to be very sensitive about its own sovereignty. So I think that the timetable that we’ve established is a sound one, it is a responsible one. Are there risks involved in it? Absolutely. Can I anticipate that over the next two years there are going to be some bad moments along with some good ones? Absolutely.”

But, he said, “I think it is the appropriate strategy whereby we can achieve a stable Afghanistan that won’t be perfect, we can pull back our troops in a responsible way, and we can start rebuilding America.”

I then relayed a question from Eric Harder: “Do you feel that the reporting you receive from the Pentagon fully represents what the on-ground commanders assess? Is there any disconnect between what leaders feel the public and the president want to hear versus what is actually occurring on the ground?”

“I can’t afford a whitewash,” the president said. “I can’t afford not getting the very best information in order to make good decisions…. The danger a lot of times is not that anybody’s purposely trying to downplay challenges in Afghanistan. A lot of times it’s just the military culture is, ‘We can get it done.’ And so their thinking is, How are we going to solve this problem? not Boy, why is this such a disaster? That’s part of the reason why we admire our military so much and we love our troops, because they’ve got that can-do spirit.”

The president said that he thought he had “set up a structure that really tries to guard against that, because even in my White House, for example, I’ve got former officers who have been in Afghanistan, who I will send out there as part of the national security team of the White House, not simply the Pentagon, to interact and to listen and to go in and talk to the captains and the majors and the corporals and the privates, to try to get a sense of what’s going on. And I think the reports we get are relatively accurate in the sense that there is real improvement in those areas where we’ve had a significant presence.”

Harder was at that moment in Afghanistan, unsure that the president was really getting the full story.

In the course of my conversations and interviews for this project, I was told by one recently retired general with experience in Afghanistan that he hoped this book might have an impact on the nation in wars going forward.

How so? I asked.

“The wars of the twenty-first century have been outsourced by the American people to our government in D.C. and to our military,” he said. “With an all-volunteer force, the American people are no more connected to our armed forces than the Roman citizens were to the legionnaires. And now we even pay for wars with tax cuts. So, whose war and whose Army is it?”

The general hoped that at least some members of the public would, through reading this book, come to a greater understanding of just what war entails, just what the sacrifices mean. “I worry it is becoming too easy for the United States to use force,” he added. “There are not enough domestic constraints.”

Colonel Shamsur Rahman, of the Afghan Border Police, tells me that most of the fighters who attacked COP Keating were local, from the surrounding area.

Did the Americans do any good while they were there? I ask him.

“There was progress there,” he says, “but when the progress was about to be completed, the bad guys would come and burn it down. The intentions were good, but the insurgents wouldn’t allow it.” And the locals were terrified. “If they participated, the bad guys would target them, kill them. Many people died that way.”

Colonel Rahman also points a finger at the power player present throughout this book, the enemy that neither the American troops nor the ANA can go after: he says that Pakistan’s intelligence services played a role in the attack. “The ISI told the fighters, ‘The Americans are leaving, make a statement,’ ” he tells me. “ ‘Make sure damage is done.’ ”

Many U.S. troops have found the way their government is waging war in Afghanistan simply farcical, given the immense role played by that country to the east, and the official policy of denying that reality. Sure, myriad American drones are buzzing about in Pakistan killing bad guys (and, inevitably, some innocents), remotely piloted by Americans thousands of miles away, in places such as New Mexico. And yes, when the time came to do away with Osama bin Laden, President Obama gave the go order, and American Special Forces went to Abottabad and killed the leader of Al Qaeda. But it’s worth noting that in this book—about the bad guys who killed Americans, ANA soldiers, Nuristanis, and other Afghans who fought for their country—Pakistan is mentioned far more often than are bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That fact, however, is so inconvenient for policymakers as to be, within the larger scheme of war planning, almost ignored.