The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (49 page)

Holy shit, he thought.

The bird descended onto the landing zone, at the bottom of the fishbowl, and Hughes’s dreadful astonishment continued. This is really not what a base is supposed to be, he said to himself. This is not what they trained me for. He wondered if the guns on the base could even shoot high enough to reach insurgents at the upper elevations.

Dave Roller greeted Hughes out at the landing zone, noting with approval the Army Ranger tab on the new arrival’s left sleeve. The two men were a lot alike in their temperament, confidence, politics (both leaned somewhat left), and stubbornness—which meant, of course, that they didn’t particularly get along, at first. Roller was anxious about how the men of his former platoon would fare under the newcomer; perhaps he was even a little jealous of Hughes, who was now their leader, running around on missions with them while Roller himself had to keep inventory. For his part, Hughes found the officers at Combat Outpost Keating a tough crowd: they had come together in battle, in blood, over the loss of their captain and fellow soldiers, and now here he was, this new guy, flying in after Christmas for the remaining seven months of their rotation. Hutto and Marcum, relative newcomers themselves, were reasonably friendly toward him. But Roller—man, he was a very different story.

They clashed about everything. Their more consequential conflicts had to do with tactical decisions. Once, Roller saw Hughes preparing to set up an observation post near Naray and—in Roller’s opinion—carrying too much gear with him. With memories of the fateful mission to Saret Koleh still fresh in his mind, he explained to his replacement that redundant equipment would increase his risk of being pinned down. Roller himself, after all,
had
been pinned down before. He advised Hughes that water was more important than extra radios—he could always send a runner or even give hand signals if he ended up needing those. Hughes flat-out told Roller he was wrong, then said he was going to do things his own way. An epic argument commenced. The disagreement was resolved only by the (unrelated) cancellation of the mission.

They fought just as hard about more trivial issues, too. One day, in the gym, the two lieutenants got into a heated argument about the rapper Lil Wayne, who at that point in his career seemed to some to be coasting a bit, maintaining his fan base largely through guest appearances in others’ songs and raps and through popular mix tapes. Was Lil Wayne a great rapper? That was open to debate, evidently. Roller asserted that his meteoric record sales meant that the question had been asked and answered. Hughes disagreed: quantity did not indicate quality, he insisted. Referring to Aristotle’s
Poetics,
which declared tragic poems superior to epic poems, he dove into the notion of empirical quality. Well, rebutted Roller, getting angrier, Lil Wayne’s art had obviously touched a lot of people, so there was clearly something that attracted them to him. How should art be defined? After twenty minutes, the volume increasing with each advance of the minute hand—and Kenny Johnson watching it all, bemused and bewildered—a furious Roller stormed out of the gym, his workout only half done, his heart rate nevertheless well above the fat-burning level.

Later, Hughes talked with Newsom about it: “Why is Dave such a dick to me?” he asked.

Newsom smiled. Hughes had come to Camp Keating full of piss and vinegar, and Roller’s immediate reaction had been to hate the new guy, especially because he missed going on missions with his platoon. But even more than that, it was the fact that they were so similar. “Imagine if you were here and then another one of you showed up,” Newsom said. “Wouldn’t
you
hate you?”

The first real test of the Commitment of Mutual Support between the Hundred-Man Shura and Bulldog Troop came when bullets were fired at Observation Post Warheit.

They were just sporadic rounds coming from somewhere south of Camp Keating—Urmul or, a little farther south, Agro, it wasn’t clear which. Either way, they needed to stop. Hutto called for the relevant representatives from the Hundred-Man Shura, Said Amin from Urmul and Hjia Jamo from Agro. He escorted them to the large tent that had been set up for shuras at Camp Keating and invited them to sit down on the carpets. Hutto didn’t consider these two to be bad guys, but he didn’t treat them as well as he did, say, his buddy Abdul Rahman. They had yet to prove themselves to him. Maybe this would be their chance.

“Where are these rounds coming from?” Hutto asked them through an interpreter. “Who’s responsible?”

Amin, from Urmul, said the shots were coming from Agro. Jamo, from Agro, said the insurgents had been firing from Urmul and then running into his settlement.

“Okay,” Hutto said. “Until we settle this, you won’t get any humanitarian assistance, and funding for your projects will be cut off. You need to figure out who did it, and you need to make it stop.”

About a week later, Jamo returned to Combat Outpost Keating and asked to meet with Hutto. “We know who the person is who fired on your camp,” he told the American. “But he’s not from our village—he’s from outside Agro and came in. What do we do?”

“Even if outsiders come in from outside your area, you’re responsible,” Hutto said. “If you can’t control him, tell the ANA or the Afghan National Police.”

Not long after that, rounds were fired at Observation Post Warheit from Kamdesh Village. This time, a member of the Hundred-Man Shura knew the identity of the guilty party—but the thing was, the insurgent was the nephew of a
different
member of the Hundred-Man Shura, who was also a contractor. Not only would this second shura member not do anything to stop the shooting, but he wouldn’t give the insurgent’s precise location to Hutto so that the Americans could take action against him.

Hutto convened several meetings with the leaders of the Kamdesh Village shura—Mawlawi Abdul Rahman and Gul Mohammed Khan—but no information was forthcoming. “You’re going to be responsible for our stopping all projects in Kamdesh Village,” Hutto told them.

Luckily for the villagers of Kamdesh, the insurgent was arrested near Gawardesh, and the problem went away. The ultimate test of the Commitment of Mutual Support had been avoided—for now. But it all left a bad taste in Hutto’s mouth. The Hundred-Man Shura had not yet proven itself.

Winter came to Combat Outpost Keating. Major General David Rodriguez, the commander of Combined Joint Task Force 82, a subordinate division of ISAF, announced that Observation Post Warheit would be renamed Observation Post Fritsche.

Marcum and 2nd Platoon were assigned to the observation post when a three-day snowstorm hit the mountain in January. At first it was fun—snowball fights, giant snowmen, snow caves—but the weather quickly lost its appeal once the troops realized they were slowly, steadily being buried in up to seven feet of snow.

The local insurgency had been more or less quelled, which Kolenda considered a direct result and reflection of the success of the Hundred-Man Shura. In January, representatives of the shura left for Kabul to meet with President Karzai and tell him that the people of Kamdesh now supported his government. With the enemy seemingly hibernating for the winter, the troops—when not on guard duty, patrolling, or on missions to visit local villages—spent their time sleeping, watching movies, reading, and trying not to get on one another’s nerves.

While most of the region was quiet, some anti-American groups remained active, including the one led by the Gawardesh insurgent/gangster Haji Usman, whom 3-71 Cav had been targeting from Hill 2610 in June 2006 when his militia attacked, killing Patrick Lybert and Jared Monti. Usman and his gang would regularly bypass the legal border crossing into Pakistan, near Barikot, instead using a mountain pass and the Gawardesh Bridge to shuttle lumber and gems east and weapons and insurgents west, into Kunar and Nuristan Provinces. Usman regarded the bridge as the “Gate to Nuristan” and deemed it worth fighting in order for to keep his supply lines open. Camp Lybert had been built almost exclusively to guard this mountain pass and border crossing point.

On January 25, 2008, a team of Green Berets led by Captain Robert Cusick was accompanying an Afghan Border Police and Afghan National Army security patrol near the bridge. Before the patrol passed Checkpoint Delta, a lookout spotted ten armed men crossing the Gawardesh Bridge and then entering a large house nearby. Cusick and the Afghans crossed the bridge themselves to get in position. A platoon from 1-91 Cav Headquarters Troop, now commanded by Captain John Williams, set up nearby. When some two dozen insurgents left the compound and began heading east, toward the Pakistan border, Williams and Cusick and their men opened up on the group. A-10 Warthogs fired their 30-millimeter cannons and sent bombs raining down from above. The insurgent force was cut to pieces in an instant.

Cusick and the ANA platoon were moving forward to gather intelligence from the dead fighters when up to sixty other insurgents who’d been hiding on the hillside began firing at them. Williams and his troops returned fire, and the Warthogs resumed their bombing and 30-millimeter runs. Cusick was shot through his left lung; the bullet just missed his collarbone. At first he could still give orders, but soon he drifted into shock. Staff Sergeant Robby Miller took command, firing his SAW, throwing grenades, and telling his fellow Special Forces to “Bound back!” as he walked directly toward the enemy fire, giving his brothers in arms a chance to retreat and get Cusick to a medevac.

It was the last time they saw Robby Miller alive. When a quick reaction force arrived on scene an hour later—to assist in extracting Cusick’s team and the Afghans and to recover Miller’s body—the fight was over.

Despite the tragedy for the Special Forces, the battle produced evidence that the Americans were making progress in the region. Intelligence came in to 1-91 Cav indicating that during the fight, Usman’s forces had asked the district HIG commander, Mohammed Jan, to lend them some assistance in combating the Americans. Jan refused; ultimately, he would sign an agreement with the Hundred-Man Shura pledging to stop fighting. Subsequent reports indicated that Haji Usman was no longer welcome in Gawardesh or Bazgal, then later hinted that he was reaching out to Taliban elements in Pakistan. He was going to have to find support from a different group.

A somewhat similar scenario played out with an insurgent leader named Shabbaz, from Lower Kamdesh, who had orchestrated the August attacks on Camp Keating, stolen money from contractors, and destroyed their work, burning buildings, shooting up micro-hydroelectric plants, and blowing up bridges. At times, it was unclear whether Shabbaz was really with HIG or whether he was just an opportunistic local criminal. Hutto instructed the elders to pass along a message to the troublemaker: “What is it you want to accomplish for the people of Nuristan?” But by the fall, it had become clear that any attempt at outreach would be futile, and the shura seemed incapable of getting rid of him on its own.

That changed after the elders returned from their meeting in Kabul with President Karzai, during which they had presented him with a letter stating that the jihad was over and they were on the side of the government, peace, and stability. Karzai had in turn agreed to support the shura with funding and community police. By late February, the newly empowered elders had kicked Shabbaz and other insurgent leaders out of Kamdesh.
⁴¹
Shabbaz found refuge in the mountains, where he would, however, be far more vulnerable and less easily able to stage attacks on the Americans.

Special Forces are a rare breed of soldiers. The Army has no troops better trained, and none deadlier, than its Green Berets. They are usually deployed in small, tight-knit groups of a dozen or fewer men. Their strong bonds—which can date back years—often make for exceptional battlefield collaboration and solidarity. They also make the death of a team member an extremely emotional experience for his comrades. All combat losses are tragedies, but for these men, the tragedies are almost always profoundly familial.

Extreme discipline is required of and by Special Forces troops, perhaps even more than is the case for other soldiers. The combination of power, lethality, and, in some ways, a lack of accountability—Special Forces generally don’t report to the regular chain of command in the location where they’re based—can create a volatile dynamic. It’s the captain’s job to keep testosterone in check and to mitigate any tension between his Special Forces and other, conventional troops. The men under Robert Cusick’s command had no captain to do those things for them during the last two months of their deployment.

In March, the Green Berets at Forward Operating Base Naray concocted a plan that they called Operation Commando Vengeance. They soon thought better of their blunt nomenclature and changed its name to Operation Commando Justice. The mission’s purpose was to capture or kill Haji Usman, HIG district commander Mohammed Jan, and HIG leader Mullah Sadiq. The Special Forces were going to set up blocking positions and then conduct a “deep clear,” searching all the homes in Bazgal, Pitigal, and the surrounding area.

Kolenda understood the anger—the impulse toward “commando vengeance”—that the Green Berets felt. Their captain had been wounded, and a brother in arms killed trying to protect him. Their acting on that rage, however, was another matter entirely. HIG fighters were now joining the good guys. Mullah Sadiq was a target for reconciliation, not assassination; his former student Mawlawi Abdul Rahman, the Kamdesh shura and Hundred-Man Shura leader, was fully on board. And Mohammed Jan had refused to help Haji Usman in the fight in which Miller was killed.