The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  The “sandbag” in the road turned out to be a dead chicken, and that wasn’t the only thing the eyes in the sky got wrong. When the convoy got around the second bend, three shots were fired from across the river, to their right, followed by the best-coordinated ambush 3-71 Cav had ever seen. Dozens of insurgents, up to a hundred of them, opened up on the vehicles with small arms, AK-47s, half a dozen or more PKM machine guns, and RPGs. The fire came from ridgelines on both sides of the road, from up to a dozen different covered fighting positions. The enemy fighters were firing from as little as fifty yards away and with an alarming degree of accuracy.

  In the turret of Pearsall’s Humvee, Jesse Steele was alternating between guns, firing his .50-caliber across the river and his SAW light machine gun up the near side of the valley. Then all of a sudden he was on his back in the truck.

  “Are you okay?” Pearsall asked. He was still focused on the enemy fire.

  “What happened?” Steele wondered. His jaw felt funny, as if it had been pushed to the left. He couldn’t talk well; his tongue was swelling.

  “You got hit,” Pearsall said.

  “Where?”

  “Looks like it nicked you here and here,” Pearsall said, pointing to Steele’s lower jaw and neck. He saw that the gunner’s wounds were serious, but he didn’t want to alarm him.

  “Okay,” Steele said. He started to prop himself up on his elbows.

  “You’re not getting back in the turret,” Pearsall told him.

  Steele turned to Specialist Lorenzo Best.32 “You gotta get up there,” he declared. Best did so. Steele put his hand to his face; when he pulled it away again, it was covered with blood.

  Shit, this is more than a nick, Steele thought. He began to administer first aid to himself. It turned out that a round—fired from above, up on the mountain to his left—had gone through his jaw and shattered it before exiting out the left side of his neck. Another round had entered his shoulder, ending up in his chest. Pearsall now pulled out his own first aid bandage and applied pressure to Steele’s two wounds.

  “Lieutenant, are we going to make it out of this?” Steele asked.

  “I don’t know, man,” Pearsall said. No matter how quickly they sped down the road, and how far they got, it seemed as if the ambush would never end. The enemy was spread out along the road for more than a mile and a half.

  “It hurts when I talk,” Steele told Pearsall.

  “Then stop talking,” the lieutenant advised.

  Steele put his head down and prayed as RPGs exploded near their truck.

  While Pearsall had been clear enough in instructing the Afghans not to stop if the convoy came under attack, that plan was easier to stick to for those in Humvees. For the ANA soldiers, vulnerable in the cabs and beds of open pickup trucks, the first impulse was to pull over and try to take cover—which was exactly what most of them did now. The ANA truck in front of Pearsall’s Humvee, and others ahead and behind, stopped dead in the middle of the road as their cargoes of Afghan soldiers jumped out and scrambled for whatever meager shelter they could find—rocks or trees, anything—in the absence of any real cover for them to get behind. That segment of the road was framed by a wall on the uphill side and a cliff dropoff on the downhill; with the enemy shooting from both sides, there was nowhere for the ANA soldiers to hide once they left their vehicles. As the bullets continued to hammer the convoy, Pearsall got out of his Humvee and tried to round up the Afghans, yelling for them to get back in their trucks. He told his own driver to bump the Ford Ranger in front of them to make the point; the ANA driver behind the wheel finally got the message, and the pickup started moving.

  While the lead Humvee, the only one in the clear, had continued to speed down the road, the rest of the Barbarians were still stuck behind parked ANA Ford Rangers, as well as a jingle truck that was now in flames from an RPG strike. Pearsall got back in his Humvee and called command, telling the operations center at Forward Operating Base Naray that he needed the 120-millimeter mortars to hit both sides of the road, as close as possible. The incoming fire remained intense: small-arms bullets pinged into and off every truck and Humvee. One ANA driver was shot, and the Ford Ranger he was steering started to roll off the road and into the river to their right. The Marine trainer assigned to the ANA troops got hit in the hand.

  Pearsall radioed his acting platoon sergeant, Jason Guthrie, in the rear Humvee. Guthrie reported that he and the other American trucks in the rear were pushing forward, trying to force the ANA through the ambush while they also worked to gather the wounded and dead Afghan soldiers, laying some of the bodies on the hoods and in the beds of trucks. Two specialists with the Barbarians—driver Evan Morales and medic Jonathan Landers—had been struck by RPG shrapnel when Landers braved the enemy fire to rescue a wounded ANA soldier lying by the side of the road. Landers applied a tourniquet to himself, then continued working on the Afghan.

  Finally, 120-millimeter mortars fired from near Gawardesh began hitting both sides of the river, dropping disconcertingly close to the convoy but providing a brief moment of respite from enemy fire, during which Pearsall and the others were able to make a break for it. But it was only after the American platoon pulled in to the base at Kamu that the lieutenant had his first real chance to survey the damage to his men and equipment. Steele, Landers, Morales, and the Marine embedded trainer were wounded; an unknown number of ANA troops had been wounded or killed. Every one of the Barbarians’ trucks had suffered significant damage, with doors blown off, frames cracked, tires spent. It took more than an hour for the Afghans to figure out how many of their own men were missing—first it was three, then eight, then twelve.

  Terry Best and ANA Commander Shamsullah Khan were at the bottom of the mountain, awaiting news about the commando raid up the hill, when a Nuristani interpreter approached them. He’d been listening in on the radio used to scan for enemy chatter and had picked up word of an attack down the road to the east, on the way toward Naray. Best heard on a different radio that the Barbarians had been hit near Saret Koleh and had pushed through, leaving ANA troops behind.

  Best was enraged. This was all too typical of the Americans’ attitude toward the ANA troops with whom they were theoretically partnering, he thought. In battle, they were supposed to treat the ANA soldiers just as they would Americans—as Buddy Hughie had done. Instead, the Barbarians had left the Afghans behind. To die.

  Best got on the radio and called back to Combat Outpost Keating.

  “Request permission to change my mission to go and support the ANA,” he said.

  “Permission denied,” he was told, but he went anyway.

  Because he would be passing Kamu on the way, he called two Able Troop NCOs he was close to who were posted there—Staff Sergeant Adam Sears and the recently promoted Staff Sergeant Nick Anderson—and told them where he and his ANA troops were headed.

  “I’m going with you, brother,” Sears said on the radio. They couldn’t just leave the ANA soldiers out there.

  When Best reached Kamu, Sears and Anderson were waiting for him in Humvees with some others. They’d heard what had happened; Pearsall and the Barbarians had already arrived at the Kamu outpost with the surviving soldiers from the new ANA company. The Able Troop men followed Best toward the site of the ambush. As they got nearer, they saw that the road was increasingly covered with debris from the attack and objects that had fallen off the trucks: propane tanks, bedding, a Humvee door. Soon they passed the ANA Ford Ranger that had plunged into the Landay-Sin River and was partially submerged. Then they started coming upon the bodies of ANA soldiers, some lying prone on their weapons, others in the middle of the road.

  The men got out of their Humvees. Best sent Sergeant Marshall Clark, Hughie’s replacement, to join ANA Commander Khan on the high ground. Then Best, Sears, and a squad of ANA troops crossed the footbridge from the road to Saret Koleh, where they would sweep the houses and stables on the north side of the river for insurgents. Two Apaches that had been sent to t
he area hovered above, ready to provide air support. McHugh, the embedded Irish photographer, accompanied them, snapping away.

  When Best and his ANA troops checked out the houses, they found many women and children but almost no fighting-age men. Best looked across the river to the site of the attack and saw six dead Afghan soldiers, obviously laid out by the enemy. He radioed the information to Clark and began walking back over the bridge.

  Before he reached the six dead ANA troops, Best skirted the southern mountainside, where he came across the body of the new Afghan company’s first sergeant. He’d been shot in the head, execution-style. Best and Sears then happened upon another ANA soldier with multiple wounds at the base of his neck, alive but in deep shock. He muttered a prayer as Sears evaluated him, so the staff sergeant knew he had a decent airway. Several others soon gathered around to try to help him, and they carried him to a truck to get him some medical attention.

  Staff Sergeant Adam Sears provides medical assistance to a mortally wounded ANA soldier on May 14, 2007. The Afghan soldier died on his way back to the closest U.S. base. (Photograph by John D McHugh, Getty Images)

  Best’s Afghan soldiers now began the grim task of stacking corpses in their Ford Rangers. Two of the pickup trucks that the new ANA company had driven from Naray were in the river. Their drivers had been shot and killed where they sat, behind the wheel. Someone would have to go into the river to get them so they could be given a proper Muslim burial.

  Whoever did this was efficient, Best thought. These guys were marksmen.

  The ANA soldiers looked around for other wounded or slain colleagues. They kept finding corpses.

  The Ford Ranger pickup trucks in the river had been packed with enough supplies to last fifty men for four months: ammunition, food, weapons. Best and Sears talked about blowing them up so the enemy couldn’t use the goods or, more important, the ammunition. A few minutes later, shots rang out. Sears was northeast of his Humvee, closer to the river. Best and Clark were to the southwest of him, about a hundred yards away, and they scampered to find cover behind the only large rock around. Insurgents fired upon them from both sides of the river. Best’s ANA troops started returning fire with their RPK and PK machine guns and their Dushka. Sears and his gunner, Private First Class Dustin Kittle, tried to suppress the enemy fire with the .50-caliber in their Humvee. Behind the boulder, Clark turned to Best and announced, “Dude, we have to go.”

  “We can’t go,” Best replied. “When we leave this rock, they’ll kill us!” They had to plan their escape, Best said; they couldn’t just sprint and hope for the best. He radioed for both the Afghan soldiers and Kittle to target the hills again with suppressive fire. After they finished a burst, Clark fired to the south and Best to the north, and then they both raced toward Sears’s position. Clark ducked between the Humvee and a boulder that he thought might shield him from any shots coming from the southern ridgeline. From across the river, a shot drilled directly into his chest plate. The bullet ricocheted off it and hit his arm.

  “Shit,” said Best. An enemy sniper—a good one. At Sears’s location, Nick Anderson applied a tight bandage to Clark’s forearm and then called up on the radio to report his injury. Sears couldn’t call for artillery because the antenna of his radio had been shot off, so Best did, asking for mortars. The Americans would be “danger close,” but there was no other option. They were targets, and there was an expert marksman—likely a foreign fighter, maybe even the same one who’d killed Hughie—training his sights on them.

  In the midst of all this commotion, before the Americans could do anything to further protect the photographer embedded with them, McHugh took a bullet to his chest. It went through his intestine and out his lower back. He had never before felt such pain.

  Sears jumped up, grabbed McHugh by the back of his belt, and dragged him behind the rock where Clark had been hit. He couldn’t identify right away where McHugh’s wound was, so Anderson began lifting up the photographer’s body armor and at last found the hole in his lower back. They began administering first aid. Best called for the Humvee to move to the rock; he loaded Clark and McHugh into it. Anderson was worried about McHugh: “We need to get out of here,” he told Sears. “John’s going to bleed out.” Kittle just then fell from his turret into the Humvee and let out a bloodcurdling scream. He’d been shot in the collarbone.

  The Apaches returned from refueling and began suppressing the enemy while Best and his ANA soldiers, plus Sears and Anderson and their troops, got out of there quickly, rolling back toward Kamu. As they sped away, the Americans saw one of the dead ANA drivers from the first ambush, still stuck behind the wheel of his partially sunken Ford Ranger. They’d have to come back for him.

  Once they were safely back at Kamu, and the wounded Clark, Kittle, and McHugh were being treated—they would all survive—Best and Sears hugged each other, their eyes tearing up. They were both shaken and emotionally raw. They’d seen dead bodies everywhere and heard the wounded Kittle screaming out in pain on the way back. It had been hell.

  Then, like a storm rolling in, Best’s mood shifted.

  “I need to find out what the fuck was going through their minds,” he said. He went looking for the Barbarian troops who had left the ANA casualties on the road. They were in the hunting lodge. Best approached Pearsall.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” he asked. “Why the fuck would you leave those guys behind?”

  Pearsall tried to explain that they’d been explicitly told to push through any kill zone: “You don’t stop the damn vehicles and jump out,” he said. Pearsall was convinced that he and his troops had done everything they could that day to protect both the ANA troops and themselves. If they had acted differently, he said, the day’s body count could easily have included fifteen Americans as well.

  Best was furious. This is why Afghans and Americans don’t get along, he thought. You really think you wouldn’t stop to take cover if you were in an open pickup truck taking fire? It was pure instinct.

  For Best’s own wellbeing, Sears pulled him away and escorted him out.

  Fifty ANA soldiers had been sent to Combat Outpost Keating to relieve Best’s ANA troops. Sixteen had been killed, and five wounded. In a matter of minutes, the unit had been rendered combat-ineffective.

  The insurgents threw a number of the Afghans’ bodies into the river, preventing them from being buried within one day. This concerned Berkoff and others in American intelligence because to them, it suggested that some of the killers might have been not local Nuristanis but rather foreign—Chechen, Arab, Pakistani—or “out of area” fighters, perhaps Pashtuns from other parts of Afghanistan who hated the Tajik- and Hazara-filled ANA. Days later, the bodies of dead ANA soldiers would be reported as having washed up on the banks of the Kunar River as far south as Asadabad.

  Gooding heard about the episode, but he didn’t blame Pearsall. Pearsall’s patrol had been an afterthought, a mission that wasn’t planned and that had gone uncommunicated to those who needed to know about it. No one at either Combat Outpost Keating or the Kamu base had had a clue that Barbarian Troop’s 2nd Platoon was on its way with the new ANA troops. More than half of the squadron’s combat power was in Upper Kamdesh, with most of the men focused on Governor Nuristani’s wild goose chase. Until Pearsall came on the radio asking for the mortars at Kamu to fire on established targets, Gooding hadn’t even known he was out there.

  While Gooding sympathized with Best’s reaction, he also understood that Pearsall had been thrown out the gate with an ANA force that he had never patrolled with or rehearsed contact drills with. It had been a rush to failure, a massacre as predictable as it was tragic. And now more graves were required.

  And the commando raid? Nothing had come of it aside from renewed ill will among the residents of Kamdesh toward Governor Nuristani. In the meantime, the Eastern Nuristan Security Shura had essentially died along with Fazal Ahad. Ahad’s deputy on the Security Shura, a cleric named Abdul Raouf, told the 3-71 Cav lea
ders that he had no interest in succeeding his departed friend. “I don’t know who killed Ahad,” he declared to a reporter. “His number was up. Tomorrow or the next day, my number will come up. They will kill us one by one.”

  Before Ross Berkoff left Forward Operating Base Naray, the man who would soon take command of Combat Outpost Keating, Captain Tom Bostick of Bulldog Troop, from 1-91 Cav, 173rd Airborne, approached to ask him a favor: could Berkoff brief him and his team about the insurgency? So Berkoff told them everything he’d learned: who the enemy’s key leaders were, where the different cells lurked, which areas to avoid. Berkoff showed Bostick a map and pointed out the specific spots from which the insurgents always attacked.

  “Why are you guys driving down the same road every day?” Bostick asked. “You know you’re going to get hit.”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Berkoff told his fellow captain. “There’s only one road.”

  “You guys gotta get out of your Humvees,” Bostick said. “Walk the ridgelines. Talk to villagers.”

  Berkoff didn’t say anything. His brigade had lost forty soldiers and had more than three hundred wounded. Since he first arrived at Forward Operating Base Naray, he’d seen countless others come and go. There had been three different Special Forces detachments, three ANA units, three provincial reconstruction teams. All he wanted to do now was get out of there.

  He wished Captain Bostick good luck and left the briefing room.

  Gooding had thought he would never leave Combat Outpost Keating, never get out of there alive. But finally, escape was at hand. Able Troop headed to Bagram, but Gooding and First Sergeant Yerger stayed behind for a few days to help mentor Captain Bostick of 1-91 Cav. And that was that.