by Jake Tapper
As he got on the supply helicopter that would take him away from the outpost forever, Gooding thought again about how he’d hesitated before naming the camp after Keating. How long would this outpost be here? How ephemeral was this memorial? He had every confidence that 1-91 Cav would keep the camp running, but he knew its success would ultimately depend upon how good the ANA was.
Someday we’re going to hand over Combat Outpost Keating, Gooding thought as the bird lifted and he looked down upon the acre and a half of land for which so many men had given their lives. And it’s not going to last.
As luck would have it, the chopper was on a supply run, so Gooding got a tour of the area. It stopped at Combat Outpost Lybert, near Gawardesh. It went to the Korangal Valley. It touched down at the observation posts around Naray. The trip was excruciating, like a victory lap but without the victory. At last, hours later, the bird landed at Bagram, which felt so big and safe it might as well have been in Nebraska. Gooding sat there on the tarmac with a bunch of luggage. He was angry about the whole experience—angry about being sent up to the Kamdesh Valley without a campaign plan, angry that what was supposed to be a forty-five-day rotation had ended up being ten months of hell, angry because no one had had it worse than his team, certainly not any of these soft “POGs”33—these rear-echelon folks at Bagram with their air-conditioning, their three hot meals a day and ice cream, their steak-and-lobster Fridays.
He and his troops had done more than most, Gooding thought. They’d kept their heads up the whole time—never said no to a mission, never failed, and executed all with great pride in and support for one another. They’d lost their commander, their XO, many of their friends. They’d been there for longer than anyone, and they’d never gotten the credit they deserved.
That night, Gooding tried to relax. He was going home. To his wife and kids. Everything was going to be okay.
As he walked around the base, he saw a Special Forces unit in full rucksacks on a night run. He thought about how even the guys in Special Forces—badasses, all of them—hadn’t liked staying at Combat Outpost Keating. Too dangerous.
Gooding could see the Special Forces troops, but one enlisted man among their ranks apparently didn’t see him. He almost ran into Gooding.
“Get the hell out of the way, you POG!” the kid yelled at the weathered captain.
Perfect, Gooding thought.
BOOK TWO
Two in the Chest, One in the Head
ROLL CALL
International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) May 2007–July 2008
At Forward Operating Base Fenty, Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar Province:
Colonel Chip Preysler, Commander, 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team (“173rd Airborne”), 10th Mountain Division
At Forward Operating Base Naray, Kunar Province:
Lieutenant Colonel Chris Kolenda, Squadron Commander, 1st Squadron, 91st Cavalry Regiment (“1-91 Cav”), 173rd Airborne, 10th Mountain Division
Captain Nathan Springer, 1-91 Cav Headquarters Troop Commander
Captain Joey Hutto, 1-91 Cav Assistant Operations Officer
At Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Warheit, Nuristan Province:
Bulldog Troop, 1-91 Cav, 173rd Airborne, 10th Mountain Division
Captain Tom Bostick, Commander
Captain Joey Hutto, Commander
Second Lieutenant Ken Johnson, Fire Support Officer
1st Platoon
First Lieutenant Dave Roller, Leader
First Lieutenant Hank Hughes, Leader
2nd Platoon
First Lieutenant John Meyer, Leader
First Lieutenant Kyle Marcum, Leader
Staff Sergeant Ryan Fritsche
Sergeant John Wilson
Private First Class Alberto Barba
3rd Platoon
First Lieutenant Alex Newsom, Leader
Sergeant First Class Rodney O’Dell
Staff Sergeant John Faulkenberry
Private First Class Chris Pfeifer
Private First Class Michael Del Sarto
Private First Class Jonathan Sultan
On the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Kala Gush, Nuristan Province:
Navy Commander Sam Paparo, team head
Trainer of the Afghan National Army (ANA) Troops at Combat Outpost Keating, Nuristan Province:
Marine Master Sergeant Scott Ingbretsen
On the Home Front:
Sarah Faulkenberry, wife of Staff Sergeant John Faulkenberry
Karen Pfeifer, wife of Private Chris Pfeifer
June 2008–June 2009
At Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar Province:
Colonel John Spiszer, Commander, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division
At Forward Operating Base Naray, Kunar Province:
Lieutenant Colonel James Markert, Squadron Commander, 6th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment (“6-4 Cav”) of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division
At Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Fritsche:
Blackfoot Troop, 6th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment (“6-4 Cav”) of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division
Captain Robert Yllescas, Troop Commander
First Lieutenant Joseph Mazzocchi, Executive Officer
Specialist Rick Victorino, Intelligence Officer
First Lieutenant Kyle Tucker, Fire Support Officer
First Lieutenant Kaine Meshkin, Red Platoon Leader
First Lieutenant Chris Safulko, Blue Platoon Leader
Trainer of the ANA Troops at Combat Outpost Keating:
Marine Lieutenant Chris Briley
On the Home Front
Dena Yllescas, wife of Captain Rob Yllescas
CHAPTER 16
“There’s Not Going to Be Any Ice Cream”
First Lieutenant Dave Roller couldn’t believe his eyes, couldn’t help but grin.
Two dozen naked young women?
Are you kidding me?
Roller and his platoon were on a ridgeline overlooking the hamlet of Saret Koleh, east of Combat Outpost Keating. They had camped there to watch over the area, to try to discern whether the Nuristanis had any idea that the next day, July 27, 2007, Captain Tom Bostick, the leader of Bulldog Troop, would be coming to the village for a shura. The nearby road was a popular site for insurgent attacks, so there had been occasional sweeps of the hamlet, but until now, no U.S. troops had ever made an official visit. For more than a day, Roller and 1st Platoon had been reporting atmospherics back to Bostick, their commander, at the base: “Trucks are rolling through here,” they would say, or, “The weather looks good for tomorrow.” Now, through the magnifying scope on his rifle, Roller was finally seeing something really noteworthy.
“Bulldog-Six, this is Red-One,” he had murmured over his radio to Bostick a few minutes before, using both of their call signs. “Looks like some women are leaving the village right now.”
He’d watched as more than twenty women made their way from Saret Koleh to a stream that fed into the Landay-Sin River. Then kept watching as they started to disrobe.
“Looks like they’re about to jump in the creek,” Roller whispered.
They ranged in age from about sixteen to thirty. The sun was pounding the mountains on this hot July day, and after jumping into the stream, they splashed one another playfully as they bathed in the cool water.
It was, to say the least, jarring: Roller had seen only about five local women in total during his first two months in Afghanistan, and all of them had been covered from head to toe in burqas. It looks like a goddamn sorority pool party, he thought. He was two thousand feet above the Nuristani women, looking at them from eight hundred yards away, so couldn’t see any real details, just general shapes and colors. Still, there was intelligence to be had here: their romping made him fairly certain that no one in the hamlet of Saret Koleh had any idea that 1st Platoon was watching from just up the hill.
“Red-One, this is Bulldog-Six,” Bostick said. “What’s going on?”
“Sir, you’re not going to believe this,” Roller replied. “I got about twenty to twenty-five women here, naked, taking a bath.”
It was a comic overture, but a fleeting one, to a day that would end up being the worst of their lives.
First Lieutenant Alex Newsom and his 3rd Platoon were with Bostick at Combat Outpost Kamu that momentous July day, ready to serve as a quick reaction force. Both Roller and Newsom hailed from soft, privileged worlds that they had essentially rejected for lives of blood and muck. Roller had grown up in Coral Gables, Florida, and Newsom in Beverly Hills. Both were handsome: Roller had a tousle-haired all-American look to him, while Newsom was swarthy, with a devilish charm. They were the sort of guys the Army used to great success in recruiting videos, the Army Of One soldiers who were Being All They Can Be.
The two had briefly been classmates at U.S. Army Ranger School, the intense two-month combat leadership course in Fort Benning, Georgia, but they hadn’t connected in any meaningful way until they were each assigned a platoon in Bulldog Troop, 1-91 Cavalry Squadron, part of the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team, in Schweinfurt, Germany. After four weeks in Germany, Roller and Newsom had flown back to Fort Benning for a reconnaissance-and-surveillance course focused on conducting operations in small teams and on foot. They’d bonded then, coming to see foot patrols and Vietnam-era tactics as the way to go in Afghanistan. Their commanders in Germany seemed to want to drive everywhere, while Roller and Newsom pictured themselves as badasses humping through the wooded hills.
It hadn’t taken them much time at all to become best friends. They were confident, even cocky, and as mere lieutenants, perhaps a bit too comfortable in their dealings with superior officers. On their way back to Germany after the recon course, having been upgraded to First Class, the two of them drank all the Woodford Reserve bourbon on the plane.
Then Captain Tom Bostick, Jr., came into their lives to kick that silliness out of them.
Bostick, as the cliché went, had been bred to serve. His paternal grandfather, Bill, was an Army sergeant at Pearl Harbor when the Japanese bombs hit. One of Bill’s brothers survived the Bataan Death March. The family could trace its military service all the way back to James Bostick of North Carolina, who’d fought the Redcoats during the American Revolution; through him, Captain Bostick was related to the Texas Revolutionary War hero Sion Bostick, who as a seventeen-year-old Texas Army scout had been one of three soldiers responsible for capturing Mexican President Antonio López de Santa Anna. Bostick’s father, Tom senior, did an eighteen-month tour in Vietnam with the Marines, after which he came back, married Brenda Keeler in 1968, and got on with his life. A year later, at the naval base in San Diego, Brenda gave birth to Tommy junior.
Tommy Bostick, Jr., had joined the Army Reserves while still in high school in Llano, Texas. He went to Panama as a Ranger with Operation Just Cause, the mission against Manuel Noriega; served as an instructor at Fort Benning; and worked in Kuwait at Special Operations Command during Operation Desert Thunder, the international military buildup that responded to Saddam Hussein’s threat to violate the international no-fly zone over Iraq. Bostick fell in love with a fellow soldier named Jennifer Dudley, who was in Military Intelligence and had a baby daughter named Jessica from a previous marriage. In September 1991, he got a four-day pass, flew to Fort Meade in Maryland, and married Jennifer. Their daughter Ashlie was born a year later. In 1998, after ten years as an enlisted man, Tom Bostick applied to Officer Candidate School at Fort Benning and got in on his second try. He became an officer and did a tour in Iraq, then another in Afghanistan.
Bostick was one of the company commanders in Vicenza, Italy, with the 173rd Airborne when, in 2006, he first caught the eye of General Frank Helmick, commander of the Southern European Task Force (Airborne). Helmick needed an aide de camp, and Bostick was the obvious choice. It would have been a comfortable job, but Bostick turned it down: he wanted to command troops in the field, even though he had already done that in Iraq and Afghanistan. Helmick admired him for making that decision, and he set it up so that soon Bostick and his girls had moved to Germany, where he was assigned to 1-91 Cav. The squadron had only a handful of experienced Infantry leaders, including Operations Sergeant Major Michael “Ted” Kennedy and Captain Joey Hutto, the squadron’s plans officer. Bostick would join that coterie.
The first time the troops of 1-91 Cav met Bostick, they were standing in formation at the motor pool for the change-of-command ceremony. Bostick explained that they were all a family now. He spoke with compassion and empathy, but what impressed the rank and file most was the knowledge that he had started out as one of them and worked his way up, from enlisted man to officer. He hadn’t just joined ROTC in college and then gone right into the military as a lieutenant, without ever putting in any time as a lowly grunt.
It meant a lot to Private First Class Jonathan Sultan of 3rd Platoon that the new commander understood what it was to be a joe. The nineteen-year-old Sultan had enlisted in the Army the year before. He hated his platoon leader, Newsom, who he thought had the energy of a hummingbird—“hated” him, that was, in the way any private would hate a tough lieutenant who rode his men hard and held them to impossible standards. Newsom was constantly pushing the members of his platoon to run and do sit-ups, pushups, and pull-ups, but the drill they dreaded most was when he’d force them to exercise wearing full body armor and gas masks—the goal being to increase their lung capacity and get them comfortable with the oxygen deprivation they would experience in the mountains of Afghanistan. The more his troops bitched, the harder Newsom pushed—but there was nothing he made them do that he wasn’t also doing himself.
As far as Newsom was concerned, Captain Bostick was the hardass: he’d let you fall on your face and learn whatever the lesson was for yourself, and if you still didn’t learn it, he’d make damn sure you knew you were failing. Bostick emphasized communications above all. He wanted everyone talking, everyone sharing, not just the radio guy. And he didn’t care one bit about rank when cracking down. In the middle of one exercise, he approached Newsom and yanked him out of his truck: “You’d better have the fucking hand mike glued to your fucking helmet, or I’ll do it myself,” the captain said. Embarrassing though it’d been, Newsom for sure wouldn’t make that mistake again: he now knew that the most powerful weapon he had was his radio.
The 173rd Airborne had originally been destined for Iraq, but in February 2007, the Pentagon opted to send the brigade to Afghanistan instead. This change of plans was no small matter, since at the time, the troopers were already training in Germany for urban, not mountain, combat. The brigade quickly revised its mission rehearsal exercises, and the senior officers canceled all Iraq-oriented language and cultural preparation, including advanced courses for Arabic-speaking intelligence officers. Amazingly, six years after 9/11, there were no Pashto speakers on hand to take their place. The timeline for the brigade’s departure was also moved up by six weeks.
Lieutenant Dave Roller, for one, was happy about the change. He had trouble justifying the war in Iraq to himself both morally and legally and had been worried about how he would explain the Why? to his men. He called his father with the news: he was going to fight the “good” war. Moreover, since there were only two brigades in Afghanistan—compared to what would be almost ten times that many in Iraq during the 2007 surge of troops—Roller was able to suggest to his soldiers that they were headed somewhere “unique” and “special.” Bostick had been there before, so that added to his confidence.
The troopers of 1-91 Cav flew from Germany to Kyrgyzstan to Bagram to Jalalabad to Naray, and then Bulldog Troop broke off and moved to Camp Keating. At each stop along the way, conditions became more austere. When they sat down for a meal at Bagram Air Base, Tom Bostick turned to his fire-support officer, Second Lieutenant Kenny Johnson.
“You gonna eat that ice cream?” Bostick asked him.
“No,” replied Johnson.
“You should,” Bostick said
. “Because at Keating there’s not going to be any fucking ice cream.”
Lieutenant Colonel Mike Howard had handed over command of the area to Lieutenant Colonel Chris Kolenda on May 31, 2007. Kolenda lost his first man two days later.
Kolenda was an unconventional officer with a good heart, a deep belief in the potential of the Afghan people, and often the highest IQ in the room. He was in Jalalabad for a brigade-level meeting, sitting in a commanders’ conference, when he was handed a note informing him that there had been a firefight in his area of operations. He excused himself and went to the operations center, where he called back to Forward Operating Base Naray and was told that one of his men was KIA. Kolenda had been in the Army for almost twenty years, and this was the first time—ever—that a soldier under his command had been killed. Private First Class Jacob Lowell, twenty-two, was a big teddy bear of a guy, a football enthusiast who’d been something of a problem child before finding his direction in the Army. That day, a patrol to Gawardesh was ambushed from the high ground; Lowell, the gunner on a Humvee, was shot in the leg. He managed to get back in the turret and kept firing his .50-caliber, but a second bullet—this one to the chest—ended his life.
Although Kolenda hadn’t known Lowell personally,—a feeling of intense anger, combined with a deep sense of loss, came over him. He told himself he needed to remain calm. He needed to get more troops, more resources, into the fight. He needed to focus on the living, on winning the next battle and then setting conditions that would make it easier to capitalize on future successes. It was not easy. Later, Kolenda and Captain John Page, the 1-503 Infantry Legion Company34 commander who had led the patrol, analyzed what had happened. This ambush was different from the enemy attacks that 3-71 Cav had experienced during its time in Nuristan. Until the previous month, when all of those ANA troops were slaughtered, nearly every firefight had occurred across a considerable distance, and the insurgents had appeared poorly trained. But in this latest incident, the enemy fighters had been willing to come close to their targets—to venture a “near” ambush, as such an action was known. They hid on the high ground just above the road, behind features of the terrain that kept them well concealed. And as had been the case with the ambush of the ANA and Pearsall’s platoon, this was a well-planned attack conducted by trained and disciplined fighters.
