The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor
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“Pete, we can do it,” Howard insisted. “We’re going to get it done.”
“Sir, I don’t think it’s the safest thing to do to drive that thing at night,” Stambersky said.
“We’re going to get it done,” Howard repeated. And then he walked away.
Before sunrise on October 29, the convoy pulled out from Forward Operating Base Naray. Stambersky had assigned First Lieutenant David Heitner to command the group, Sergeant Jeffrey Williams to drive the LMTV, and Specialist Tim Martin to serve as its gunner.
Martin sat in the turret clutching an M240B machine gun. This was a smaller and lighter weapon than the options he normally would have gone with—an MK19 grenade launcher or a .50-caliber machine gun—because he didn’t want to add any more weight to the LMTV than he had to. He, Heitner, and Williams had limited the gear they packed for the same reason, though they had brought along some nonstandard infrared chemical lights just in case of a rollover—which they agreed was a pretty likely possibility. Still, Martin wasn’t nervous—on the contrary, the Kentuckian thought of himself as the most qualified gunner in Stambersky’s unit, and he hated to be left out of missions.
The first leg of the convoy was completed in pitch-black darkness, but the sun rose as they reached Gawardesh, and the troops removed their night-vision goggles. Howard had been upset that the entire mission wouldn’t be conducted as he wanted, at night, but ultimately he had given in to Stambersky’s insistence—and Brooks’s—that that would be an impossible challenge.
At Gawardesh, the convoy dropped off about a dozen troops to set up mortar tubes as protection for the convoy if the need arose. Williams didn’t think he could drive the LMTV any faster than ten miles per hour, not only because of the road’s instability but because numerous impediments—tree stumps, stacks of lumber—narrowed it in places. Williams was the most qualified driver in the squadron, with over fifteen years’ experience driving vehicles weighing two and a half tons or more, and more than a thousand hours’ driving in blackout conditions. If anyone could navigate this route, it was Williams. Even he wasn’t sure it was a route that could be navigated by anyone. Still, he had no option but to try.
The convoy had just passed Bazgal when Afghans with weapons were spotted in the mountains across the river. Martin laid down some fire, and the insurgents shot back with small arms and RPGs.
Specialist Jesse Steele, the gunner in the second-to-last Humvee in the convoy, fired his .50-caliber across the river, not realizing that rounds were also coming from directly above them, on the mountain to his left. An RPG hit the left side of Steele’s truck, momentarily knocking him unconscious. When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back, with his left leg twisted behind and under him. The Humvee was still moving. Specialist Javier Valdez tried to help the gunner up, but Steele had no feeling in that leg and couldn’t stand. No matter: straining, he hauled himself back into the turret and resumed fire across the river as the convoy continued west.
At a safe point in the road, Brooks stopped the group and took inventory, checking to see who was hurt and who wasn’t. The injuries meant that Brooks would have to reorganize his troops for the remainder of the trip. Since Steele couldn’t stand up on his own, Brooks took him out of the Humvee turret and had him trade places with Sergeant Justin Pellak, in the rearmost truck.
Forty-five minutes later, the convoy passed Kamu and stopped again. Williams was having difficulty negotiating the LMTV over the narrow road and had had to slow down to a crawl, no faster than three miles per hour. From across the river, two insurgents fired a Dushka at the Americans, their heavy machine gun letting fly piercing metal at the Humvees and the LMTV. Martin responded with his machine gun. From mountains on either side of the convoy, dozens of other insurgents now began firing AKs and other weapons. An RPG hit right in front of the LMTV, and rounds started tweaking off the Humvees’ roofs. The lead Humvee took an RPG to its front, knocking the gunner, Specialist Ryan Coulter, around in his turret and spraying his hands and face with shrapnel. Bleeding and in pain, Coulter returned fire across the river to his right with his .50-caliber, then grabbed his M249 SAW with his left arm and fired it up on the mountain to his left.
In the rear truck, Steele thought, Shit, here we go again. Just then the Humvee’s gunner, Specialist Cuong Vo, a slight Vietnamese-American, fell out of the turret and onto Steele’s lap, not moving, a bloody bullet hole in his helmet.
“Vo’s dead,” Steele said, lifting the gunner off his lap by his vest and pushing him over to the side as he pulled himself up into the turret and started shooting Vo’s 240.
In the LMTV, Martin heard the whistle of an RPG coming at him from above, from the closer mountain to his left. As he turned to look, the RPG exploded just in front of his gunner’s shield, peppering his face, neck, and shoulder with forty-seven pieces of shrapnel. He fell backward into the LMTV, unconscious and covered with blood.
“We got a KIA!” yelled Heitner.
But Martin had not in fact been killed in action, and a few seconds later he awoke, grabbed his helmet, and got back in his turret. He resumed firing at the enemy across the river.
Steele was firing, too, when he heard a terrible scream from inside his Humvee. He looked down and was surprised to see Vo looking right back at him.
“What’s going on?” Vo asked.
“Are you okay? You just got shot in the fucking head!”
“Yeah, I know,” Vo said. It turned out that the bullet had pierced only the outer layer of his Kevlar helmet and not actually penetrated his head.
The LMTV hit a narrow spot in the road where the route turned to the left. The rear passenger-side tire smashed off a portion of the road, and the LMTV wobbled but pushed forward. About two hundred yards farther on, the rear tire detached another chunk of road, but Williams kept the vehicle from rolling over and continued moving.
Finally, they reached the outpost. In total, six troops were wounded, including Martin, Coulter, Steele, and Vo. It was a bloody mess, an assignment that enraged officers and enlisted men alike—all of whom were convinced that Howard’s muscle flexing was not worth the risk to their lives and the lives of their brothers.
At Combat Outpost Kamdesh, Williams inspected the LMTV. The two front tires had been shot and needed to be replaced. Stambersky and Brooks decided to leave the LMTV where it was until the replacements could be delivered.
Williams was relieved; a return trip would be extremely dangerous, he thought. After heading back to Naray by Humvee, he told Command Sergeant Major Byers that there was no way the LMTV could come back until some serious repairs were made to those bad spots on the road.
Over the next few weeks, Williams drove a Humvee in several more convoys to and from Kamdesh, all in blackout conditions. On the second trip, a vehicle manned by maintenance personnel went off a cliff. On the fourth, another Humvee did the same thing in the exact same location. No one was seriously hurt on either occasion. On each successive trip, Williams saw the road get narrower and narrower due to rain. Boulders fell in the roadway; the mud caused vehicles to slide.
By now, his entire chain of command was asking Williams if the LMTV could make it back to Naray. Every time he was asked, he said, “No, the road needs to be fixed first.” But no matter how many times he said it, further repairs to that fragile road didn’t seem to be on anyone else’s agenda.
By November of 2006, there had already been two vehicle rollovers on the narrow road to Combat Outpost Kamdesh. (Photo courtesy of Ross Berkoff)
By the end of October, commanders at Forward Operating Base Naray and in Jalalabad were so concerned about enemy attacks in the Kamdesh Valley that the number of supply runs getting through to Combat Outpost Kamdesh had dwindled down to close to none. Pilots didn’t want to fly there, and the leaders of convoys didn’t want to drive there, either. It got to the point where Gooding and the soldiers from Able Troop had to ration their food and water: they were down to one “meal ready to eat” apiece per day.
His misgivings about the war’s purpose remained, but Keating himself was experiencing something of a rebirth. During his R&R, his romance with Heather McDougal had intensified, and whereas at one point he had talked to Berkoff about joining Military Intelligence, he had now decided on a new career path: he would transfer to a U.S. Army base in South Korea to serve as a specialty platoon leader, an advanced position that would enable him once again to lead a platoon of troops, which he missed doing.
Back at Kamdesh, he led a very one-sided drubbing of some insurgents who were attempting to set up a rocket to fire upon U.S. helicopters. Keating and the platoon killed four enemy fighters and wounded at least ten more. The irony is that I was the catalyst for the fight, Keating thought. The same guy who couldn’t find a reason for this war anymore rallied a platoon of soldiers, coordinated the attack, and ran around like a wild man with machine guns shooting over his head. Even success was bittersweet. He couldn’t wait to leave Afghanistan.
His were not the only blue thoughts. All of Able Troop seemed to be in horrible spirits, as Keating saw it. Every soldier in Able believed he’d be killed the next time he rolled out of the gate—or if not killed, at least wounded in a way that would forever make life a miserable challenge. The men were fired upon nearly every time out, they took casualties regularly—they were like zombies. Leaving the outpost could sure feel like driving into Hell. Toward the end of October, First Lieutenant Candace Mathis and her team of military police were teamed up with Able Troop’s 3rd Platoon when they had to push through a complex ambush. In the United States, politicians sometimes speculated that female soldiers might not be strong enough for such duty, or that male soldiers might get too emotional when their female colleagues were attacked, but those notions didn’t match the reality of the experience of 3-71 Cav. Actually, with their AT-4 grenade launchers, the MPs had stronger firepower than many in the scout platoon; everyone survived this attack relatively unharmed.
The same could not be said for Private First Class Jason Westbrook, who, on November 4, was a gunner in another ambushed convoy. Shrapnel from an RPG clipped off one of his hands, but he didn’t even know it until he climbed back into the turret, went to reach for the trigger—it was a butterfly trigger, needing two hands—and saw his right hand dangling from its wrist.
Specialist Steven Dorrell attempts to comfort Private First Class Jason Westbrook after Able Troop’s 3rd Platoon was ambushed on November 4, 2006. (Photo courtesy of Jeremiah Ridgeway)
When the call came in the next night that another team of insurgents was attempting to dig in a rocket, Ben Keating saw a chance not only to kill the enemy but also to motivate his men. He specifically chose Westbrook’s platoon to take with him, hoping that a successful mission might undo some of the damage of the previous day. His strategy seemed to work, though it didn’t do Westbrook himself much good: the damage would stay with him forever.
Keating had just finished reading The Afghan Campaign, a newly published historical novel by Steven Pressfield that tells the story of Alexander the Great’s invasion of Afghanistan, as seen through the eyes of a young Macedonian soldier named Matthias. It had a great impact on the lieutenant from Maine. Alexander the Great “speaks of will—our own and the enemy’s,” Matthias recalls. “The foe, he declares, has no chance of overcoming us in the field. But if he can sap our resolution by his doggedness, his relentlessness; if he can appall us by his acts of barbarity, he can, if not defeat us, then prevent us from defeating him. Our will must master the enemy’s. Our resolve must outlast his.”28
“We’ve been up here for less than seven months,” Keating told the journalist Matthew Cole when he visited the outpost. “We have a couple of thousand years of history against us,” he said, holding up his dog-eared copy of The Afghan Campaign. “You do the math.”
Still, that was as far as he’d go in public. All day long, Keating spent time with his fellow soldiers, telling them to stop feeling sorry for themselves, urging them to brainstorm more inventive ways of killing the insurgents. He pushed them to figure out how to defeat the enemy even as he thought to himself, You can’t! You can’t defeat this enemy! Yet he was willing to let them continue risking life and limb to try. It was his job, but he felt like a liar.
Upon his return, Keating had been stunned to find the immense LMTV, with two of its tires shot out, parked at the outpost. He was told the story about how Howard had demanded that it be driven up, how the convoy had been attacked twice on the way, how six soldiers had been wounded, including the gunner on the LMTV, Specialist Tim Martin, who was awarded a Purple Heart. Gooding was emphatic that the truck needed to go back to Naray; he didn’t have room to store it at the outpost, he said.
“Matt, there’s no reason for it to come back,” Stambersky told him. “Put it at the front gate. Use it as a firing position. Put a gunner in it.”
But Gooding needed the space. The whole outpost was only about an acre and a half in area, and the LMTV was taking up valuable territory, not to mention serving as an inviting target—symbolic as well as practical—for the enemy. The camp now housed some 250 soldiers—about a hundred from the Afghan National Army, another hundred American troops, and up to fifty military police, cooks, mechanics, and other support personnel—and there simply wasn’t enough room for everyone.
And in any case, Stambersky had been overruled at squadron command, so the message from Naray was clear: the LMTV had to come back for repair and recovery. It had been at Kamdesh too long already, it had to be fixed up, it was an expensive and useful piece of equipment that other troops could use. Squadron XO Sutton conveyed all of this to Keating.
Ben Keating decided that he would take it back. He and Staff Sergeant Vernon Tiller, his most senior mechanic, would drive the LMTV to Naray, say, “Thanks for nothing, assholes,” and leave.
“Fuck it,” Netzel told Keating. “Don’t take it back.”
“No, they’re insisting, so me and Tiller are gonna do it,” Keating said. “I got a bad feeling about it, so no one else is going to take it back but me.”
“Want me to come with you?” Netzel asked.
“No, I just want two in the vehicle,” Keating said.
Tiller figured they would need extra protection, so he spent an entire day stripping a dead truck of its gunner’s protection kit and mounting it on the LMTV. “Who’s our gunner gonna be?” Tiller later asked Keating and Netzel. “I put a GPK on the truck, and a weapons mount. All we need is a gunner.”
“We can’t put a gunner up there,” Keating said. “If that vehicle rolls over, the gunner won’t make it, you and I both know that. We’ll take our chances without. If we get ambushed, we’ll ride out the storm.”
“This is retarded,” Cerezo said when Keating briefed the convoy team on the mission. “This vehicle’s not going to make it on this road. Humvees can’t even make it.”
“It is stupid,” Keating agreed. “And it’s dangerous. So I’m going to drive.”
This was no small decision. It was considered a general standing order that officers were not to drive vehicles while on an operation; they were supposed to focus instead on “commanding and controlling” the convoy and were responsible for navigation, security, speed, and maintaining continuous communication with every truck on the move. Keating didn’t seem to care.
Dusk had fallen when Lieutenant Vic Johnson from Able Troop’s 1st Platoon approached Keating. His hand was wrapped in bandages; just a few days prior, when he and his men were out making sure that no insurgents were hiding in caves, he’d fallen down the side of a steep hill. Needing X-rays, he’d hitched a ride back to the outpost on
a D Troop Humvee that had then gotten too close to the edge of the road and flipped, tumbling down the hill and into the Landay-Sin River. He’d nearly drowned but somehow managed to swim to the riverbank while wearing his body armor and holding his weapon. Johnson didn’t know much about Keating’s mission other than that he was commanding a convoy back to Naray.
“What vehicle are you taking there?” Johnson asked.
“The LMTV,” Keating replied.
Johnson told Keating that was a bad idea; the road couldn’t even support Humvees, he said.
The two men moved their conversation next to a fire pit, and Johnson tried again.
“Someone is going to have to die before anyone admits these roads are really dangerous,” he said.
It had been raining off and on for three days straight when the convoy—five Humvees, four jingle trucks, and the LMTV—left Combat Outpost Kamdesh on the night of November 25.
Earlier that day, Keating had taken out a patrol to inspect his route. Although it had rained or snowed on seven out of the previous ten days, he thought the road was suitable for travel and told Gooding that after the recent construction, the section from Urmul to Kamu was in better shape than it had ever been. Tiller inspected the LMTV and pronounced it to be in good operating condition. He, Keating, and Gooding agreed that hauling an extra Humvee for their return trip would be too cumbersome; they would leave it behind. The truck was prepped, the radios checked. Keating briefed the convoy team on all possible hazards and conditions.
They left at night in order to avoid an enemy attack. The sky was clear, with a quarter slice of moon offering little luminescence. The LMTV and the Humvees had infrared spotlights, and the troops were wearing their night-vision goggles.
Back at Combat Outpost Kamdesh, Gooding assumed that Tiller was driving. That assumption was wrong.