Part 26 (1/2)
In the wake of the attack, Markert was eager to learn the truth. He didn't expect the same professionalism from Afghan troops that he demanded from his own men and women, but this latest ANA battalion was without question inferior to its predecessors. Days later, a rescue mission dubbed Operation King's Ransom brought more than a hundred U.S. Special Forces soldiers and elite Afghan commandos into the Hel Gal Valley. Coalition forces broadcast a radio message demanding the release of the ANA hostages, who were ultimately freed. At first, the soldiers appeared to be in suspiciously good condition, but then closer examination by physician's a.s.sistants and medics revealed some serious wounds. Only after six days of interrogation were the ANA troops finally returned to their brigade. Spiszer and Markert eventually concluded that the POWs had not in fact been part of a conspiracy to attack Bari Alai. The insurgents had merely gotten some breaks, the investigation indicated, and taken a lucky shot that blew up a bunker and ignited a fire.
A couple more breaks had been given to them by Afghan security forces. An eight-man Afghan National Police post protecting one of the approaches to Bari Alai was abandoned just a few days prior to the attack. There was also supposed to be a full platoon of twenty-eight ANA troops at the Bari Alai outpost, but the company commander had repositioned a dozen of his soldiers at the bottom of the mountain the night before the raid, in preparation for a troop swap. He'd done it because it would make things easier for him and his men.
As Markert often said, ”If you're doing something in war because it's easier, you're probably doing the wrong thing.”
Had the eleven Afghan troops who were captured surrendered too quickly? In all likelihood, Markert felt, the answer was yes-these were not good soldiers. Indeed, the members of this new battalion of ANA troops in Nuristan and Kunar were quickly becoming notorious But their actions in this case were evidence of incompetence, not of treachery.
This was of little comfort.
In late May 2009, Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown of 3-61 Cav were preparing to s.h.i.+p out to Forward Operating Base Fenty at Jalalabad and Forward Operating Base Bostick at Naray, respectively. From those locations, they hoped to shut down Combat Outpost Keating, Observation Post Fritsche, and Camp Lowell in Nuristan Province, as well as Observation Posts Mace and Hatchet in Kunar Province. The troops from these outposts would be sent to other areas of the country that, in George's view, would better support the overall campaign. Forward Operating Base Bostick would thereby become the northernmost U.S. base in northeastern Afghanistan.
Their visit to Nuristan and Kunar the previous December had reinforced the commanders' resolve to pull out of the region. George and Brown believed that Blackfoot Troop had, for the most part, lost its connection to the local population. The officers of 6-4 Cav seemed to them to have little direct knowledge of most of the projects they'd been funding, nor did they have the freedom of maneuver to a.s.sess those projects. ”In short,” Brown wrote to Kolenda after his visit, ”6-4 did not appear to be conducting COIN at all.”66 (This was not, of course, how Pecha and his lieutenants saw things.) (This was not, of course, how Pecha and his lieutenants saw things.) The colonel whom Randy George would be replacing, Spiszer, had described Blackfoot Troop as the ”cork in the bottle,” the roadblock that prevented HIG or the Taliban from traveling from Pakistan through Nuristan to the Waygal and Pech Valleys and possibly beyond. But Brown just didn't see the enemy that way. The insurgents weren't lined up on some Maginot Line, he felt certain; warfare in Afghanistan was much more complex than that. The term ”cork in the bottle” a.s.sumed that the enemy had only one route in or out, whereas evidence suggested that many insurgents were simply walking around around the few isolated American outposts in the area. When George arrived at Forward Operating Base Fenty, he was pleasantly surprised to find Spiszer amenable to his realignment plan. Getting supplies up to Nuristan was difficult, Spiszer confided, and imposed an increasing burden on helicopter and other a.s.sets-resources that could be better used elsewhere. The troops up there didn't seem to be getting much of anywhere with the locals anyway, and critically, there had been no progress made on securing and building up the road. It was all too deadly to do on foot, and too wasteful by air. Spiszer was on board. Lieutenant Colonel Markert's staff had in fact already twice proposed closing Combat Outpost Keating, but both times the determination had been made-with input from the brigade level-that Blackfoot Troop wouldn't be able to commandeer the eighty Chinook trips it would take to remove all the soldiers and gear. On their second try, the 6-4 Cav planners were told that their troops could either go home on time or close Combat Outpost Keating, but not both: there weren't enough aircraft in the area. the few isolated American outposts in the area. When George arrived at Forward Operating Base Fenty, he was pleasantly surprised to find Spiszer amenable to his realignment plan. Getting supplies up to Nuristan was difficult, Spiszer confided, and imposed an increasing burden on helicopter and other a.s.sets-resources that could be better used elsewhere. The troops up there didn't seem to be getting much of anywhere with the locals anyway, and critically, there had been no progress made on securing and building up the road. It was all too deadly to do on foot, and too wasteful by air. Spiszer was on board. Lieutenant Colonel Markert's staff had in fact already twice proposed closing Combat Outpost Keating, but both times the determination had been made-with input from the brigade level-that Blackfoot Troop wouldn't be able to commandeer the eighty Chinook trips it would take to remove all the soldiers and gear. On their second try, the 6-4 Cav planners were told that their troops could either go home on time or close Combat Outpost Keating, but not both: there weren't enough aircraft in the area.
Spiszer's brigade had already learned some hard lessons about how to close down a base. Combat Outpost Lybert had been built only in 2006, near the Pakistan border, but it didn't have a particularly good view of the mountain pa.s.s that it had been set up to watch over. The troops were needed elsewhere, and the local Afghan Border Police battalion had no interest in a.s.suming control of COP Lybert, so Spiszer ordered that it be shut down. Before the troops could move out, however, word of their pending exit spread throughout the nearby villages. Half of the Afghan Security Guards who worked at the camp up and quit. The locals were suddenly far more eager to accommodate the enemy fighters-letting them use their homes, for example, to launch attacks on the camp. After all, in a few weeks, the Americans wouldn't be there any longer, but the insurgents surely would. Combat Outpost Lybert went from being tranquil to being a target. One of the enemy bullets killed Private Second Cla.s.s Michael Murdock, twenty-two years old and from Chocowinity, North Carolina. When the U.S. troops at last pulled out of Camp Lybert, the insurgents claimed to have driven them out. It wasn't true, but propaganda needn't be. Pat Lybert's mom saw YouTube videos of insurgents victoriously parading through the camp named after her late son, and it ripped her apart inside.
Spiszer told the incoming commander of Regional Command East, Major General Curtis Scaparrotti, as well as the ISAF commander, that he believed George's proposal to shut down Keating and Lowell was a good one. He thought the generals seemed receptive to the idea.
CHAPTER 25
Pericles in Kamdesh
Under the cover of complete darkness, the men of 3-61 Cav's 1st Platoon arrived at Camp Keating. Led by Lieutenant Andrew ”Bundy” Bundermann, this company would be the last one stationed at the outpost.
By May 2009, choppers were refusing to venture out to Combat Outpost Keating in anything but the blackest night. It was a surreal experience for these soldiers who were new to the region to be flown from Forward Operating Base Bostick over the mountains and deep into the valleys. The pilots could just see the faint outlines of peaks, but everything else was just ink. And then suddenly they were landing, and Bundermann could hear the rus.h.i.+ng rapids of the Landay-Sin.
Soldiers from Blackfoot Troop were excited to greet the new arrivals. The handoff meant they could go home.
Bundermann and the others were ushered across the bridge and into the outpost. Ma.s.sive, jagged silhouettes stretching up to the sky surrounded them. This is bizarre, the lieutenant thought. At daybreak, Safulko briefed him and showed him around the place. Bundermann wasn't happy about the location, about its complete and utter vulnerability. The others came in here to set up this PRT and then left, he thought, and now we're stuck holding this bag of s.h.i.+t.
In the barracks that morning, Safulko kept looking at one of the new guys, 3-61 Cav Sergeant Josh Kirk. He knew him from somewhere. Safulko racked his brain trying to figure out where their paths might have crossed.
”Have I met you before?” Kirk asked him.
”I was thinking the exact same thing,” Safulko said, somewhat relieved. ”Were you in a different unit before this one?”
It turned out that Kirk had been Captain Nathan Springer's gunner in 1-91 Cav. In 2007, after Tom Bostick was killed, when 1-91 Cav was still beating back that ambush, he and Springer were stuck on a road near Bazgal and couldn't make it to Saret Koleh; they could only listen to it all unfold on the radio. Now, Safulko and Kirk realized that at the end of Kirk's last deployment, as 6-4 was transferring into Afghanistan, he had helped guide Safulko and his men around Checkpoint Delta at the Pakistan border. Kirk was back in Afghanistan pretty quickly, Safulko noted: he'd been ent.i.tled under Army ”stabilization” rules to have twelve months at home. He had returned to Afghanistan before he was required to. ”I wasn't going to let my soldiers come here without me,” Kirk, a team leader, explained.
Kirk's return to Nuristan made Safulko think, later, of something said by the ancient Athenian general Pericles, in his funeral oration for the war dead:
Usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hards.h.i.+p and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger.67
Sometimes courage is rooted in ignorance, as when men who don't know what they're about to face rise to the occasion. Joshua Kirk had ample knowledge about how dangerous it was in Nuristan, and yet he had hurried back. The palm of courage.
The arrival of their replacements made the soldiers of Blackfoot Troop even more eager to get home. Sergeant Shane Scherer was chief among them; he was scheduled to get married in about a month.
Dusk came earlier in the valley than in places outside the mountains' muscular shadows. Scherer and some others were milling about outside the communications shack, waiting for Specialist James Witherington to finish his phone call home so they, too, could alert their loved ones to their pending return. Scherer had just finished working out at the camp gym and was in a T-s.h.i.+rt and shorts, casually holding his rifle. He was a big, athletic guy who'd joined the Army two years before, sick of his suit-and-tie job as a parking supervisor for the San Diego convention center.
Specialist Andrew Miller hopped in the Humvee right near them for guard duty. Miller was one of the shorter men at the outpost; the other guys called him Combat Wombat. Dinner had just concluded, and Safulko walked by. He spotted Scherer on a bench, patiently awaiting his turn to use the phone so he could call his fiancee, who was in Texas setting up their apartment.
”Those of you leaving soon, I'd lay low,” Safulko said to the group waiting for the phone.
”I'm only going to be out here a minute,” Scherer replied. ”I'm just calling home.”
Scherer understood Safulko's concern. His first reaction upon his arrival at Camp Keating had been disbelief. He, too, had been incredulous that the Army could have established a base at the bottom of a ravine. He'd also felt a nagging worry that there weren't nearly enough troops there, that if a serious enough a.s.sault was ever mounted against Camp Keating, the troops wouldn't be able to fend off the enemy before air support arrived. Scherer had asked about it and was told that the guys from the 10th Mountain Division had been there before them, and nothing bad had happened to them them. The way the military was set up, Scherer figured, once you got an answer, you weren't supposed to keep pus.h.i.+ng. And after a while, he got used to being in the fishbowl.
Safulko turned to head back to the barracks. He'd taken three steps when he heard an explosion and the harsh, shredding sound of a B10 recoilless rifle round tearing through Miller's Humvee.
The B10 is an immense piece of machinery, an obsolete Soviet-era weapon usually carried on the back of a truck. The ordnance from a B10 was designed to destroy tanks; in this case, it sliced through Miller's Humvee like a cold knife through warm b.u.t.ter, just missing his legs, exploding on the ground near the men who were waiting for the phone, spraying molten copper everywhere. Everyone nearby was knocked down, and a number of troops were hit by the shrapnel-from Miller in the turret of the Humvee to Safulko on the ground to Witherington in the comms shed-but no one was hurt more seriously than Scherer, in the back of whose head a hunk of that hot copper landed and stuck, penetrating into his brain right behind his right ear. His right arm was nearly severed.
The physician's a.s.sistant for the incoming 3-61 Cav, Captain Chris Cordova, was in the aid station, chatting with one of his medics, Staff Sergeant Shane Courville, and the outgoing docs, Lieutenant Colonel Rob Burnett (who had replaced Brewer some months before) and George Shreffler. Cordova and Courville had been at the outpost for scarcely half a day. The explosion was followed by PKM machine-gun fire. Don Couch and First Sergeant Howard Johnson carried Scherer into the aid station; Couch was gripping tightly above Scherer's arm to try to stanch the bleeding. Scherer was conscious and kept trying to curl up into the fetal position.
Cordova examined the sergeant's head wound first. He had an inch-deep hole in the back of his skull.
”What happened to me?” Scherer said. ”My head f.u.c.king hurts.”
After examining all of Scherer's other injuries, Cordova decided he needed to focus on stopping the bleeding from his head. Wounds in other parts of the body can be treated with pressure and tourniquets, but-as Cordova knew-that can't be done with vessels right outside the brain. The physician's a.s.sistant grabbed some combat gauze, put it over the hole, and prayed to G.o.d the clotting agent would make the bleeding stop. Thankfully, it did.
Cordova now needed to check Scherer's neurological status. The pupil in his right eye was dilated; pressure from inside his skull was building up and preventing the eye from functioning properly. His breathing was fast and shallow. He had significant brain trauma and, to judge from the fact that the muscles in his arms were locking up, significant neurological damage as well.
Cordova was told that the medevac was going to take at least forty-five minutes to get to them.
This is going to be a long year, he thought.
BOOK THREE
Enemy in the Wire: The End of Combat Outpost Keating
ROLL CALL
International Security a.s.sistance Force (ISAF) MayOctober 2009.
At International Security a.s.sistance Force (ISAF) Headquarters, Kabul: General Stanley McChrystal, Commander, ISAF At Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar Province: Colonel Randy George, Task Force Mountain Warrior / 4th Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 4th Infantry Division At Forward Operating Base Naray, Kunar Province: Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown, Squadron Commander, 3-61 Cavalry Squadron (”3-61 Cav”), 4th BCT, 4th Infantry Division At Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Fritsche, Nuristan Province: Black Knight Troop, 3-61 Cav, 4th BCT, 4th Infantry Division Captain Melvin Porter, outgoing Commander Captain Stoney Portis, incoming Commander Lieutenant Robert Hull, Executive Officer First Sergeant Ronald Burton Captain Chris Cordova, outpost medical officer Red Platoon Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann, Leader Sergeant Justin Gallegos, Team Leader Sergeant Josh Hardt, Team Leader Sergeant Josh Kirk, Team Leader Sergeant Brad Larson, Team Leader Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha, Senior Scout Specialist Stephan Mace, scout Specialist Zach Koppes, scout Specialist Tom Rasmussen, scout Private First Cla.s.s Chris Jones, scout White Platoon Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy, Leader Specialist Keith Stickney, mortarman Blue Platoon, ”The b.a.s.t.a.r.ds”