Part 9 (1/2)

He sought out First Sergeant Todd Yerger, took a breath, and started going over what had happened. None of his soldiers had been killed, he said, but the enemy had found ways to exploit the Americans' reluctance to risk injuring local villagers, and had taken advantage of the high ground and a better knowledge of the terrain. The whole incident might have turned out far worse had the kids not warned them about the insurgents, and had Dwyer not spotted the ambush seconds before it began.

Yerger took out a cigarette.

”Hey, Top,” Johnson said, using Army slang for first sergeants, ”gimme one of those.”

Yerger handed over the pack and a lighter.

It was the first cigarette Johnson had ever had. And the last-it was disgusting, he thought.

Many of the enlisted men did not know about everything that had gone down on the mountain that day, and quite honestly, they didn't care. In their opinion, Vic Johnson had handled things poorly and gotten a bunch of them shot up. They thought he was more interested in a.s.s-kissing the captains than in listening to his men.

That wasn't how Johnson's superiors saw it, however. They saw a lieutenant who'd led a patrol that was ambushed, and who'd responded aggressively while also being cautious about harming the local populace. None of his men had been killed, and no civilians had been, either. ”No battle goes down cleanly, like the Xs and Os in a football playbook,” one captain would later say.

Larson, Araujo, and Howe were taken from the Kamdesh PRT to Forward Operating Base Naray, then to Jalalabad Airfield, then to Bagram. They had their wounds treated and two days later were told they were being sent to the military hospital in Germany. Larson had planned on having a career in the military, but he was eventually discharged early for medical reasons: there was just too much metal in his shoulder.

A few days after their arrival, Ben Keating and Todd Yerger led Matt Netzel and his platoon on a mission to patrol and clear the mountain across the Landay-Sin River from and to the north of the PRT, a task that was supposed to take just a day or two but ended up taking six.

The valley was still new to them, and they hadn't antic.i.p.ated that the terrain would be so challenging. Neither Command Sergeant Major Byers nor any of the other head honchos now at the camp had gone up via this route, so no one realized how steep it was. Keating's platoon had to maneuver around and up cliff faces, climbing nearly sheer walls without the benefit of the equipment or the slower pace that might have made such ascents and descents both safer and more tranquil. They didn't see the enemy on this trip, but they did find a rocket pointed at the U.S. camp. (They blew it up with C-4.) They also found the remnants of campfires, which helped them pinpoint some of the locations the insurgents used.

Keating and Netzel talked a lot during this patrol. Keating told Netzel about his new girlfriend back home: he was planning on taking her to Ireland, he said, and thinking seriously about proposing marriage when they got there. Keating also spoke of his doubts about the war effort. He was losing his faith in the cause, he confessed. The sh.e.l.ls of the Soviet personnel carriers were constant reminders of the historical determination of the enemy.

”We're here, we have thirty or forty men, and we're expected to hold off this force that destroyed the Soviet Army?” he marveled, shaking his head.

During the period between the end of Operation Mountain Lion and the push to stand up PRT Kamdesh, Keating and Able Troop had been in southern Afghanistan, in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. Such wide-range roving was the kind of thing made necessary by the fact that the United States had only one full fighting brigade in Afghanistan. Keating's time in the south had been dispiriting. On the first night after his convoy left Kandahar Airfield, the U.S. troops at the front of the line-not from 3-71 Cav-had shot an Afghan man on a motorcycle who they thought was getting too close to them. The man was innocent, and to Keating, it seemed clear that it had been a bad shooting. He'd tried to console the motorcyclist's father while his son writhed in agony on the ground, full of bullet holes, and they waited three hours for a medevac to arrive. The motorcyclist died two days later. That sort of incompetence might kill me, too, Keating thought.

Again and again, Keating felt that some of his peers, his fellow officers, were failing their men. He'd witnessed an instance of friendly fire, from a unit made up of what he judged to be terrible soldiers with no training. During another mess, after U.S. troops were attacked by Taliban forces in a small village, Keating and nine of his men had trapped the insurgents in a copse of trees by a small river; when he called in Apaches to bring h.e.l.lfire missiles, one overeager pilot put a h.e.l.lfire about 125 feet in front of him and his crew-way, way too close. The explosion reminded Keating of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan Saving Private Ryan, ”where everything was ringing and we were all trying to talk with our hands-except for the radio, into which I was very much communicating with my voice,” as he later told his father in an email.

His misgivings were complicated. Keating didn't doubt that the insurgents the United States was battling in Afghanistan were evil; in Kandahar, when given a chance to kill the enemy, he was aggressive. He thought of those allied against his country as murderers and rapists, and he believed in the rightness of killing them. It had seemed weird at first to be the leader who had to give the final go to pummel insurgents with mortars, Keating admitted, though it was made a lot easier than he might have expected by the knowledge that the insurgents were trying to kill him and his troops.

He also was coming to recognize the humanity of the Afghan people. He enjoyed his interactions with the local populace, as when he shared tea with an elder who regaled him with stories about being a soldier in the 1960s and confided his hopes for the future for his four-year-old grandson.

But at the end of the day, Keating felt, the American ”experiment” in Afghanistan would fail, just as surely as earlier American efforts in Iraq, Haiti, and Somalia had done. The Afghan people just would not stick their necks out far enough to side with the United States and their own government against the insurgency-and he didn't blame them. Their reluctance was part of their DNA, after centuries of occupation by various powers.

Keating had joined the military because he wanted to know what it was like to serve before he-as a future congressman, senator, president-sent others off to fight. What his time in Afghanistan was teaching him was that there needed to be better reasons, stronger threats to national security, before the United States deployed its sons and daughters. The abstract threat of terror was not enough, Keating thought. Having lost his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Fenty, and colleagues such as Monti and Lybert, he couldn't stand the thought of losing one more guy over here. And now here he was, in a place that seemed even more hopeless and futile than Helmand and Kandahar Provinces.

”What the h.e.l.l are we doing at the base of three mountains?” he asked Netzel.

His friend didn't have an answer.

CHAPTER 11

The Enemy Gets a Vote

The significance of the date-September 11, 2006-didn't cross Sergeant Dennis Cline's mind as he awoke in one of the bunkers that served as the troops' living quarters. He arose and stood in his makes.h.i.+ft house, whose roof was fas.h.i.+oned from timber covered with sandbags and whose walls were made of HEs...o...b..rriers packed with dirt. For the twenty-seven-year-old Cline, it was just another day. You get up in the morning, you do your job, and hopefully you go to bed with the stars in the sky above you and your body parts all in one place.

The infantryman from Staunton, Illinois, had done a tour in western Iraq, but he preferred Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was all IEDs and cheap sniper fire, from where you could never be sure. At least here in Afghanistan, the men who considered themselves holy warriors, or mujahideen, would actually engage you in a pitched fight instead of just staging cowardly confrontations, setting roadside bombs and then running away. Yes, IEDs were a problem here, and suicide bombers, too. But usually the insurgents would stay and fight until they were either all dead or out of ammunition, unless they had a very good, very b.l.o.o.d.y reason for retreating.

Many other troops did contemplate the meaning of 9/11 that morning. Some thought about where they had been five years before. Others debated whether they should leave camp at all that day; maybe it was an anniversary to respect by being extra cautious. Specialist Shawn Pa.s.sman, a twenty-one-year-old gunner from Hickory, North Carolina, believed the exact opposite.

Today would be a good day to go out and kill a few of 'em for what happened, he thought. Fingers crossed.

On R&R at Fort Drum, Captain Matt Gooding paid a visit to Niagara Falls with his wife, then took in a BillsBrowns game before heading across the ocean and back to business. Stopping at Forward Operating Base Naray en route to Kamdesh PRT, he met with Michael Howard in the lieutenant colonel's office to learn more about the mission Able Troop had already started pursuing in Kamdesh. He was expecting to learn the plan for the squadron's further deployment and get Howard's guidance on Able Troop. Instead, he felt like he was getting quizzed.

”Are you familiar with the term 'COIN'?” Howard inquired. A draft of the Army's counterinsurgency manual had just been updated and pushed out. ”What do you know about information operations?”

Gooding thought for a minute about his time in Kosovo, but before he could answer, Howard was talking to him about the weekly newspaper and daily radio programming that 3-71 Cav troops were producing there in Naray.

The test continued. ”Do you have any experience overseeing development projects?” Howard asked. ”Do you know which funds to use?” Again, Gooding thought about the nation-building projects his unit had worked on years earlier in the war-torn Balkans, but again Howard began describing the myriad efforts undertaken in Kunar and Nuristan by 3-71 Cav. His commander seemed to be enjoying giving him this lecture, so Gooding just listened and let Howard share his knowledge and experiences.

Gooding walked away from the meeting feeling a year behind the squadron and the other leaders in his understanding and execution of the counterinsurgency policy. He didn't know much about the culture of Nuristan, the projects, even which pot of money he was supposed to use. He would have to get his own information operation program up and running. But that was all civil engineering-literally. Howard had never even acknowledged the success of Able Troop's intense combat operations in Helmand Province that summer. While the rest of the squadron was still licking the wounds it had sustained during Operation Mountain Lion, processing the May 5 helicopter crash, and recovering equipment and personnel at Naray, Gooding's troops had spent a grueling summer fighting in some of the most dangerous places in the Taliban's stronghold.

Gooding's briefing with Howard was fairly short, since Howard and the Barbarians were about to head north to a new outpost near Gawardesh. Built high in the mountains, within sight of Hill 2610 and the Pakistan border, it would be called Combat Outpost Lybert.

With Gooding back in Afghanistan, Keating was no longer in charge of Able Troop. Gooding had not yet been to the Kamdesh outpost, so Keating commanded a convoy of Humvees that pulled out from the PRT to link up with him on the morning of September 11, 2006. Keating was driving with two of Berkoff's human-intelligence collectors, Specialist Jessica Saenz and Sergeant Adam Boulio, whom the locals called Adam Khan in a nod to a local song and folktale about a popular bachelor who dies heartbroken. That morning, Saenz and Boulio had met with one of their sources, an Afghan who was plugged in to the local insurgency. He told them that the enemy was setting up on the mountains south of the road and warned them to expect an attack.

Sergeant Dennis Cline was in the fifth of the convoy's five Humvees, sitting in the right rear next to a medic, Specialist Moises Cerezo, from Brooklyn, New York. Shawn Pa.s.sman sat in the turret with his gun facing backward, aiming behind them. Sergeant First Cla.s.s Milt Yagel was riding shotgun in front of Cline. Specialist John Barnett drove. It was a gorgeous day in a beautiful land. Pa.s.sman had joined the Army because he'd never really been anywhere outside of Louisiana and North Carolina, and now here he was, in one of the most breathtakingly scenic corners of the world.

Just a few minutes into their ride, RPGs started sailing toward them. Some of the troops regarded them with nonchalance; for many, the rockets had become part of the everyday ecosystem, like some exotic bird that was native to Afghanistan. Boulio, for his part, was not so relaxed: this was not where they'd antic.i.p.ated the enemy would be, which made him worry that he and Saenz had either missed some information or been deliberately misled.

Their gunner started firing toward the south as Keating looked back at the other Humvees in the convoy. ”Hold on,” he said to no one in particular. ”Let's see what's going on.”

In the back of the convoy, Pa.s.sman saw an RPG hit a rock wall to the right of the truck, fired from the mountain to the north, on the truck's left, beyond the river. He turned his Mark 19, a 40-millimeter belt-fed automatic grenade launcher, toward the river and fired at the mountain. As he did, he saw two RPGs. .h.i.t the water. He could hear insurgent AK fire from the mountains to the south, too, on the truck's right.

This is pretty cool, Pa.s.sman thought. He felt indestructible, as if nothing would or could happen to him. Just try to f.u.c.k with me, he thought.

As he drove, Barnett reached his hand back to shake Cerezo's.

”Congrats, Doc, this is your first firefight!” Barnett declared. Just then a bullet pinged off the bulletproof winds.h.i.+eld, ricocheting at eye level.

”Oh, s.h.i.+t,” Barnett said, turning serious and returning his attention to the task at hand. The convoy stopped. The instructions were to engage with the enemy when fired upon-which was now. As the rest of the convoy seemed to focus on the fire coming from the mountain to the right, Pa.s.sman fired about a dozen rounds toward the dust cloud on the left. After pummeling the area the RPGs had been fired from, he paused to see if there was any movement there. Cline had a 60-millimeter mortar gun, but one of the insurgents was. .h.i.tting the truck with small-arms fire, preventing him from opening his door and getting out safely while carrying the bulky weapon. As Yagel leaned forward to look at the southern ridgeline to their right, Cline s.h.i.+fted his body to the right and prepared to open the door. His left hand was on the back of Yagel's seat. Cline turned to the right to look out the window, getting ready to pinpoint the enemy, roll out with his M4 rifle-leaving the 60-millimeter mortar behind-and start firing. At that moment, an RPG hit the right side of the truck, flying through the side wall and exploding on impact.

Everything went black and white and nearly silent. For a moment, each soldier in the Humvee retreated into himself, hearing only his own breathing, the thumping of his heart. That pause was followed by a high-pitched whine that slowly rose as the men revived from the force of the impact and their concussions and became conscious of the world again. The vehicle had an internal Halon fire-protection system that reacted to any spark with an instantaneous emission of chemicals to smother the fire; the resulting fog of r.e.t.a.r.dant added to the soldiers' disorientation. In the haze, all that Cerezo could see at first was Pa.s.sman's legs in the turret; he thought the gunner had been ripped in half.

Looking again, Cerezo ascertained that the rest of Pa.s.sman was in fact still there. Cerezo's ears were ringing now. Turning, he saw a big hole in the back of Yagel's seat. He thought Yagel must have been completely obliterated.

As Cline went to reach for his M4, he noticed that his left hand was mangled, shredded, with his pinkie and ring finger hanging off by their tendons. The Humvee was still full of dust and debris.

”Hey, Doc! Doc!” Cline said.

Cerezo looked to his right.

”What, motherf.u.c.ker?”

”I'm hit,” Cline said.

”Where you hit?” asked Cerezo.