by Jake Tapper
The Americans seemed to be facing a different enemy in 2007 than they had faced in 2006.
Officers from 3-71 Cav had every good intention when they planned the grand opening of the Naray water-pipe project: they timed it to occur after their own departure, so that their replacements—and most specifically, Captain Nathan Springer of 1-91 Cav’s Headquarters Troop—would get a quick success under their belt and earn some goodwill among the locals. Like many of the best-laid plans in Afghanistan, this one made perfect sense on paper.
The project itself wasn’t the problem. The contractor had tapped into a spring above and to the east of Naray, which sent clean, potable water flowing down the mountain, through a pipe, to several spots in Naray Village. The problem was this: about halfway down the mountain, between the spring and Naray, sat the hamlet of Shali Kot, which was completely bypassed by the pipe. It was an honest mistake on the part of the United States, if most likely not so on the part of the Naray elders, with whom the contractor had worked in designing the project.
Springer didn’t know about any of this before he went to the opening ceremony. There, while inspecting the pipe, he was approached by a Shali Kot elder named Mohammed Ayoub, who made it clear that he thought the omission of his village from the water project was insulting and unfair. He and the other Shali Kot elders claimed that the project not only threatened their own water supply but also violated a previous agreement between them and the elders of Naray regarding water rights. Ayoub let Springer have it—Springer’s interpreter could barely keep up with his tirade—and concluded the conversation by calling the American an infidel, an intense pejorative in this part of the world. Hearing this, the head of Naray District, Shamsur Rahman—a six-foot-three behemoth of a man—stepped in and slapped Ayoub several times with the back of his hand for the disrespect he had shown Springer. That ended the ceremony.
There was a lot that the Americans still had to learn about Afghanistan. Maybe they would never learn what they needed to in order to win this war. But Springer knew that to insult (however unintentionally) a village elder who then called you an infidel was not good—not good at all.
Springer told the story to Kolenda, who agreed to budget additional funds to include Shali Kot in the pipe scheme. More important, however, was the larger lesson to be drawn from the episode: money and development projects were a double-edged sword. Zar, zan, zamin, Kolenda thought. It was an Afghan saying, the Dari words for “gold, women, land”—the driving forces of conflict in the area, and here land also meant “water,” and water also meant “gold.” These were ancient reasons for strife that hadn’t gone out of style in Naray and Shali Kot. If the Americans weren’t careful, their generosity could create more problems for them than solutions.35
Nothing about this country was simple. The population of Kolenda’s total area of operations in northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan included at least four of Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups, including Pashtuns and Nuristanis. And then there were the political divisions. The villages of Barikot and Naray had ties to the National Islamic Front, a mujahideen party that had been active during the Soviet war, while the Kamdesh elders had long-established links to the rival HIG. The local leader of the National Islamic Front loathed HIG’s founder, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, and the feeling was mutual. Thus, even more than a decade after the Soviets’ withdrawal, the Kom Nuristanis living in Naray and the Kom Nuristanis in Kamdesh District were stuck in the clutch of a blood feud. Of course, the religious differences were complicated as well—the several strains of Sunni Islam in the region, for instance, disagreed about the relative importance of certain texts and the role to be played by the mullahs. At the far end of the spectrum was the fanatical Islam being pushed by the Taliban and some of the more extreme seminaries, or madrassas.
Kolenda considered it his duty to understand all of this. He studied the distinctions and the similarities among the various groups and sects, keeping in his head a sort of Venn diagram that looked like a spilled case of Slinkys—which he knew could ultimately make the difference between life and death for his men.
The 3-71 Cav staff officers, immediately impressed with Kolenda during their overlap in May, had referred to him as “The Big Brain.” They found his calm demeanor and inquisitive nature a refreshing change from the personal qualities of the man he was replacing, their own squadron leader, whom they called, behind his back, Howard the Tyrant. Kolenda, a Nebraska native, hadn’t been satisfied with just an undergraduate degree from the United States Military Academy, so he’d gone on to earn master of arts degrees in modern European history, from the University of Wisconsin, and in national security and strategic studies, from the U.S. Naval War College.
In 2001, the Army War College Foundation Press had published a book he’d edited, Leadership: The Warrior’s Art, which contained essays by military thinkers, including Kolenda himself, on lessons of leadership gleaned throughout the ages. “The most effective leaders are able to motivate people… not by appealing to fear and interest alone (the ‘transactional’ approach), but by appealing to ideas more lasting, more meaningful, and ultimately more human,” he wrote. In another essay, he examined ideas articulated on the topic by Aristotle, Cicero, Plato, and Xenophon, arguing that the best leaders were those who valued independent thought and individual initiative. In a third piece, he took a critical look at Alexander the Great.
And now here Kolenda was, literally following in Alexander’s footsteps, though this was his first time ever commanding on the field of battle. It was a hell of a place for him to make the transition from the world of theory to brutal reality.
Alex Newsom would have been happy to leave the men of departing 3-71 Cav alone, but he and his 3rd Platoon had been posted to Combat Outpost Kamu and needed some guidance on the terrain and the people. The thing was, the 3-71 troops had been at Kamu for only a few weeks themselves and thus didn’t have much to offer. What they did know, they shared, but by now they were running on fumes. Indeed, Newsom had never seen American soldiers more burnt out, emotionally and physically, than the guys from 3-71 Cav at Camp Kamu. They’d lost friends and leaders, including Ben Keating, Jared Monti, and Joe Fenty; they’d had their tour extended to almost sixteen months; they were dead-eyed and pale.
After the men of 3rd Platoon were dropped off by chopper on May 18, their seats were occupied by members of 3-71 Cav on their way out. Newsom had with him his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Rodney O’Dell, Staff Sergeant John Faulkenberry, and a couple of dozen others. It was ridiculous: they hadn’t even been issued maps for their new area of operations. The day before, Newsom had frantically dashed around the office buildings at Bagram Air Base, eventually prevailing upon a private to hand over his own rather shabby map indicating the location of Combat Outpost Kamu. Such was the level of preparedness they had going in.
The residents of Kamdesh Valley were still growing accustomed to the idea of having an American presence in their midst. Many locals seemed confused by the new cast of characters, and a number approached Newsom to ask for money that they felt was owed them—for fields ruined by chopper landings, for rental fees for King Zahir’s former hunting lodge (now used as part of Combat Outpost Kamu), and on and on. Newsom had no funds to hand over, so he had to do some talking—“Give me some time, and we’ll figure this out,” he pleaded—but that got him only so far. Soon some of the locals began making veiled threats: if they didn’t get paid, bad things would happen. One elder lifted the veil and said straight up to Newsom, “You are going to be ambushed very soon.”
Combat Outpost Keating was spartan when Tom Bostick took command in May 2007. The bunkers were bare-bones. There was a junkyard on the grounds, and at the southern edge of the outpost were a burn pit for refuse and a tent that served as the maintenance bay. Nearby, troops urinated in “piss-tubes” and defecated in latrines built over fifty-five-gallon drums cut in half, whose contents would each day be burned using JP-8, the military’s kerosene-based fuel. The ignited l
atrines smelled horrid, fouling the air. Walking in through the front gate, the new arrivals would see, off in the distance to their right, in the southwestern corner of the camp, a small wooden structure; that was the gym. Turning left, or east, as they entered the grounds, they’d pass a bunker on their left, with the mortar pit on their right. The aid station and sleep quarters for 1st Platoon had been constructed adjacent to the former Afghan Department of Forestry building. To their right sat the bunks for 2nd and 3rd Platoons, alongside a site designated for a future morale, welfare, and recreation center, with space for storage on the upper floor and sleeping quarters for transient personnel on the lower.
A view of Combat Outpost Keating from the east, May 2007. (Photo courtesy of Bulldog Troop)
Continuing east, next came a newly constructed command post and sleep quarters for Headquarters Platoon, followed by the old Afghan National Police station, and then finally, at the far eastern edge of the outpost, right by the road, some huts for the Afghan National Army company.
Inevitably, new troops would tilt their heads back and take in the peaks looming over them. The southern mountain rose almost right from the border—or “wire”—of Combat Outpost Keating. Somewhere up there were Observation Post Warheit and Kamdesh Village, though neither was visible from the outpost. Those on the base could see, to the west on that southern mountain, the “Switchbacks,” as the path running back and forth up the steep slopes was known, from whose track insurgents would sometimes fire.
On the other side of the Landay-Sin River from the camp stood two mountains, one to the northwest, closer to Urmul, and one more directly to the north. The enemy lurked in specific spots there as well, ones so frequently used that the troops of 3-71 Cav had come up with nicknames for them, which they passed on to their successors with 1-91 Cav: the Putting Green was a patch of grass on the mountain to the northwest, and the Northface was straight north. A Marine serving with 1-91 Cav, training ANA troops at the camp, dubbed an area southwest of the outpost the Diving Board. Bostick ordered that construction continue on two additional “hard-stand” buildings, made of concrete and rock and able to withstand a blast. He also directed that a mosque be built on the base.
In early June, Captain Bostick drove the six miles from Camp Keating to Combat Outpost Kamu to check the place out. Newsom had briefed him on 3rd Platoon’s activities there: patrols that were generally uneventful, a few shura meetings held with elders in Mirdesh and Kamu. The chief elder in Kamu was a retired Afghan Army colonel named Jamil Khan, a man in his late sixties with a huge white cloud of a beard and a significantly disabled arm, who could nonetheless outpace any of the nineteen- or twenty-year-old U.S. troops when they hiked up and down the mountain trails with him. Newsom liked Khan, who eschewed the typical “You’re an American, give me money” school of Afghan leadership. He seemed to have a real sense of military pride and patriotism. He also had a checkered past, according to many: as a colonel in the Afghan Communist Army, Khan had fought against and been defeated by members of the local Kom community, who viewed him as a turncoat. There were various stories floating around about what had happened to his arm: some said he’d been wounded in combat, others that he’d been caught in bed with another man’s wife. The one thing the Americans were fairly sure of, in June 2007, was that Jamil Khan was just about the only friend they had in the area.
When he met with his new commander, Newsom had a makeshift cast around his right hand, which he had fractured but not told anyone about. He was supposed to inform Bostick about such things, it was true, but in this instance there was good reason for his reticence: he’d broken his hand on the head of Habibullah, an ANA soldier, with whom he’d gotten into a scuffle one evening when the Afghan was stoned out of his mind and became confrontational. Now, however, Newsom had even worse news to impart: he had heard from the Kamu elders that the school the Americans had built for the kids of Kamu and Mirdesh was a nonstarter, since the parents from each village refused to allow their children to be in class with the children from the other village. The residents of Kamu and Mirdesh had each wanted their own school, and they all felt the Americans hadn’t delivered. Moreover, in spite of the poverty of the region, the United States hadn’t hired locals to build the new facility. In what might have been the only example of coordinated activity between the two villages in decades, insurgents from Kamu and Mirdesh had been taking turns vandalizing and attacking the building. And this was far from the only evidence of local displeasure with Americans in general. The officers of 3-71 Cav had done their best to make sure their replacements knew what promises they’d made, but the Nuristanis invented many additional ones. These allegedly broken promises fueled a mounting sense of insult and inspired additional threats of revenge.
So Newsom’s broken hand was nothing, really—the other breaks were bigger.
The Americans had many names for the insurgents. Officers called them ACMs, short for “anticoalition militias,” but that was just the latest acronym circulating on memos from the Pentagon, soon to be replaced by “AAFs,” for “anti-Afghan forces.” Some officers blandly spoke of them as just “the enemy” or “fighters.” Another word sometimes used was dushman, a noun of Persian origin meaning, again, “enemy.” “Bad guys” was often the shorthand translation; there was almost a comic quality to that term, implying a return to a simpler, childlike, black-and-white view of a world that didn’t bear much resemblance to the Americans’ new home in Nuristan. The Cavalry officers instructed their troops to avoid using religious nicknames, forbidding them from calling the enemy hajis, which in Islam is a term of reverence for those who have made the pilgrimage to Mecca. Also prohibited were muj, short for mujahideen, and jihadi, from the same root. In Afghanistan, those words were used to refer to the revered mujahideen who had fought the Soviets (and who at the time had been funded by the United States). Calling the insurgents mujahideen would also imply that they had some religious justification for their attacks. It cannot be said that no one ever used these names, or worse, but such language was officially not permitted.
Many soldiers just called them fuckers.
Bostick had intended to return to Combat Outpost Keating after his visit, taking Newsom’s platoon back with him and leaving the platoon from Legion Company (to which the late Jacob Lowell had belonged) at Kamu in its place, but a flurry of new intelligence reports suggesting that the enemy was planning to overrun Combat Outpost Kamu put an end to that plan. The captain needed to stay.
On June 6, the lone local worker at the Kamu outpost failed to show up for work. Bostick radioed Kolenda in Naray, and they discussed the need to prepare for an attack; they planned to send out two platoons. Bostick then briefed his men and listened as Newsom and his platoon sergeant, Rodney O’Dell, both eager to get in the fight, spent half an hour bickering like brothers about which one of them would lead 3rd Platoon into the mountains. Ultimately, O’Dell won out. Newsom would help command from the base with half of the platoon, which would be at the ready as a reserve force.
O’Dell and his half platoon left for the mountain, with orders both to watch over the area and to find a mountain path from Combat Outpost Kamu to Camp Keating so they and the rest of 3rd Platoon could avoid the dangerous road if need be. The platoon from Legion Company moved to take the lower ground. Newsom and Bostick sat on the rooftop of the hunting lodge with their interpreter and other officers, monitoring enemy traffic on the radio. The insurgents were speaking in Nuristani and Pashto and a third language that none of them could discern. For a time, the chatter was fairly vague. Then, in an instant, it got specific.
“We see them in position,” an insurgent announced.
Newsom radioed O’Dell and passed on the translation.
“When the Americans get here, we will attack them, and they will fall off this cliff,” another insurgent said.
Bostick ordered Sergeant Mark Speight, in charge of the mortars at Combat Outpost Kamu, to have his men fire their 120-millimeter mortars into the hil
ls, targeting the suspected general area where the enemy fighters might be, partly in hopes of learning more about their position: the incoming fire would cause the insurgents to talk, Bostick reasoned, and possibly to reveal some information about their location. (They didn’t seem to realize that the Americans could listen in to their radio transmissions.)
The mortarmen fired, and Legion Platoon, on the low ground, assessed where the ordnance had landed. O’Dell and his troops, on the high ground, fired with their M4 carbine rifles in the general direction of where the mortars had landed. Enemy gunfire erupted as a large element of forty or so fighters began conducting a complex maneuver that brought the whole force down the hill toward O’Dell’s patrol, with smaller groups providing cover for one another. O’Dell and his troops took cover, returning fire with their M4 carbines. One enemy shot found its mark, hitting a rifleman, Sergeant Wayne Baird; the bullet entered Baird’s forearm, traveled through his arm, and blew out his tricep as it exited his body.
O’Dell radioed in the WIA—the soldier “wounded in action.” The bullet had hit an artery, and Baird was bleeding out; he would need a medevac. Other of O’Dell’s troops stabilized the injured sergeant, trying to calm him down and prepare him for the move down the hill. In a valley—a disorienting, vulnerable, echoing space,—it can be hard to tell where enemy fire is coming from, but it seemed clear that the enemy was firing upon the patrol from the hillsides to the south and southwest of the base. “We need to reinforce the platoon element up in the hills,” Bostick told Newsom.
