The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Newsom and Barnes came over to him. Barnes pulled out his tourniquet and combat bandages and did what he could while Newsom tried to find a vein for an IV in Faulkenberry’s skinny arm. It took him four tries, but finally he got it. RPGs exploded and bullets kicked up all around them, though they didn’t even realize it at the time, so focused were they on patching up their wounded colleague, hooking him up to the IV, and feeding him the “pill pack” of three medications that every soldier carries: a Tylenol-strength painkiller, an anti-inflammatory drug, and a general antibiotic. Faulkenberry’s sciatic nerve—running from his lower back down his leg—had been severed, so the leg was completely numb except for a throbbing pain. Once they’d gotten him relatively stable, Newsom and Barnes helped him hop down the mountain to the convoy and the other troops.

  Down on the road, the insurgents were getting closer and the explosions growing louder, and some of the ANA soldiers started to run away. “Hey, motherfucker!” Newsom yelled at one of the fleeing men, “get back over here!” The Afghan stopped and sheepishly looked back at the American officer.

  Newsom’s magazines were filled with tracer rounds so he could mark targets for his troops and the low-flying Apaches. “You see what I’m shooting at?” Newsom asked the ANA soldier as he fired into the northern hills. “Shoot there!” He then heard something behind where they were standing, up the mountain to the south and southeast: more insurgents. Time to go, Newsom thought: We have a KIA and WIAs, and those WIAs will soon turn into KIAs if we don’t haul ass.

  Enemy fire swarmed around them, the bullets as frenzied and chattering as invading locusts. As wounded American and ANA troops fell to the left and right of him, Newsom told all of those still standing to aim their weapons up the mountain, toward the south, and he himself did the same, crouching and walking back toward the vehicles as he pulled the trigger. Fire was also coming from across the river, to the north, the explosions relentless from that quarter as well.

  Morrow, White, Wilson, and Nic Barnes had by now arrived at the Humvees on the road; they were yelling that Fritsche had been killed. Faulkenberry heard them as he sat, calm and conscious, in the backseat of a Humvee. His gunner, Private First Class Michael Del Sarto, adjusted the bandages that Fortner had applied to the staff sergeant’s wound. Faulkenberry’s mangled right leg was dangling outside the Humvee, and other soldiers, oblivious to his injury and panicking under fire, kept bumping his knee with the armored door. Finally, fed up, he reached out, grabbed his own leg, pulled it and twisted it inside the Humvee, and slammed the door shut. Let’s go, let’s go, I’m going to bleed out, he thought. But the trucks weren’t budging. They couldn’t: bullets and RPGs were peppering the Humvees, seemingly from all sides, and the Americans had little choice but to use the two trucks for cover as they returned fire. (The other two Humvees belonging to the QRF had earlier pushed down the road to conduct overwatch.) Faulkenberry’s head started feeling heavier. His men kept talking to him, trying to keep him awake. He took off his chest rig, packed with ammo and plates of bulletproof Kevlar, to let up some of the pressure on his body.

  “We need to go get Fritsche,” Newsom announced. He attempted to corral several other guys to come with him.

  “Fritsche’s dead, sir,” Wilson said. “If we go get him, someone else is going to get killed.” Wilson knew that what he was proposing they do—or rather, not do—was a violation of military protocol, and he hated the notion of leaving anyone behind, but he couldn’t stand the thought of losing another soldier in a recovery effort. Maybe if it’d been some other soldier dead up on that hill—Nic Barnes, for instance—then Wilson would have led the charge to get the body and bring it back… or maybe not. He had all sorts of complicated feelings about his short relationship with Ryan Fritsche, about their time together on that mountain, and about how Fritsche had died. The bottom line was that Wilson just wanted to get the hell out of there, and he wanted the men who were still living to keep on living. Military funerals had protocols, too.

  Fortner, meanwhile, had been worrying about what might happen to Faulkenberry if they didn’t get him medevacked out soon; the tourniquet was having only a limited effect. Then the medic heard about Fritsche’s being MIA, and he felt torn. Should he volunteer to mount a recovery effort for a fallen brother? It might come at the expense of Faulkenberry’s life. “We need to leave now, or John is going to die,” Fortner finally told his platoon sergeant.

  The Apache attack helicopters continued to work over the enemy positions. The lush forests and rocky landscape made it hard to identify insurgent locations and just as hard to get bombs on top of them, but Roller and his radio man kept feeding coordinates to the pilots of the F-15s and A-10 Warthogs, while the rest of 1st Platoon kept the road clear from their observation post.

  The convoy at last began rolling forward.

  Newsom ran ahead of the Humvees to keep the momentum going. They were on a road where no cover existed, so there was no sense in their trying to find any: the troops could either shoot and move or stay and die.

  Newsom heard a snap and turned to see Private Barba holding his chin, with blood pouring from a hole in his face.

  “Sir, I’m shot,” Barba said.

  “You’ll be fine,” Newsom said flatly.

  As the convoy edged forward–some troops in the trucks, others walking alongside them—a number of soldiers began vomiting, overcome by a combination of dehydration and exhaustion. Along the way, the wounded were dropped off at the landing zone, which offered a modicum of cover from the enemy fire. Private First Class Chris Pfeifer ran up to Faulkenberry’s Humvee with a stretcher. “It’s going to be okay, Sergeant,” he said. “You’re going to be all right.” The kid had a way of projecting eternal optimism, even in the midst of battle and bloodshed.

  Del Sarto, the gunner, stuck by Faulkenberry’s side, trying to reassure him. “Here comes the medevac, don’t worry!” he fibbed as a helicopter buzzed in. But Faulkenberry was not so out of it that he couldn’t see and hear, or even differentiate among the several kinds of birds.

  “Shut up,” he told Del Sarto. “I know that’s an Apache.” Medevacs were Black Hawks.

  Soon a Black Hawk did arrive. The landing zone was so small that the pilots would have had every right to refuse to land, but they brought the bird down anyway. Faulkenberry and Sultan, the most seriously wounded of the men, were the last to be loaded on so that they would be the first off when they got to Forward Operating Base Naray. Pfeifer and another private put them in, banged the shell of the Black Hawk to give the all-clear, and watched as it flew them out of Nuristan forever.

  Roller’s view of the eastern side of Saret Koleh. (Photo courtesy of Dave Roller)

  The battle was nearly over, but a new commander was finally on his way. Joey Hutto landed at Combat Outpost Kamu and updated Kolenda over the radio: most of the men were now rolling out of the valley, he reported, but Fritsche’s body was still on the mountain; they’d have to send a team to go back and get it. Kolenda and Hutto decided that Roller and 1st Platoon should stay where they were, in a good position to call in bombs and cover whatever force went into the valley to recover the corpse. It was not uncommon for this enemy to ransack or even mutilate any bodies left on the battlefield, and the Americans couldn’t let that happen to Ryan Fritsche.

  Hutto headed to Camp Kamu’s operations center, picked up a radio, and prepared formally to assume command.

  He froze for a minute.

  It was not pleasant, what he had to do: he needed to announce that he was replacing Tom Bostick, his close friend, because he’d been killed. Even though Hutto, as the new commander of Bulldog Troop, had inherited his predecessor’s call sign, “Bulldog-6,” he decided not to identify himself by that right now; he knew that many of Bostick’s troops would be listening, and he was concerned that some of them might not have heard the news yet. It just felt wrong to him—as if by his use of the call sign, he would be not only usurping Bostick’s place but also alerting the me
n to the loss of their leader in the crassest way possible.

  Instead he said simply, “Captain Hutto is now on the ground.” Kolenda, in his first subsequent transmission, welcomed his new troop commander and called him Joey. It wasn’t protocol, but the lieutenant colonel was nothing if not empathetic. He then gave Hutto orders as “Bulldog-6,” and that became Hutto’s name from then on. And this was how many in the field, among them Nate Springer, learned that their friend and commander Tom Bostick had been killed.

  In Martinsville, Indiana, Deputy Sheriff Volitta Fritsche, Ryan’s mother, looked out her window and saw several sheriffs’ cars in her driveway. She had taken some time off from her job due to her husband’s illness and death, but she was scheduled to return to work just two days later, so she couldn’t imagine why all her coworkers had shown up at her house.

  Then she saw a man she didn’t recognize get out of one of the patrol cars. He was dressed in an Army uniform. After he exited the car, he put on a beret. Her heart started pounding.

  “This can’t be happening,” she said aloud.

  One of her coworkers knocked on the door. Volitta Fritsche answered it but pointed at the soldier and said, “He can’t come in here!”—hoping that somehow, by denying him entry, she might be able to prevent the inevitable.

  The soldier, and another, entered anyway. The one she’d seen through the window informed her that her son had been reported missing in action. The news was devastating, but it also gave her a glimmer of hope.

  “What does that mean?” she asked. “Does that mean he’s still alive?”

  “The only information I have, ma’am, is what I told you,” said the soldier.

  “He could be alive?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “Was he taken prisoner?”

  “I don’t know, ma’am.”

  “These people have been beheading prisoners,” she said. “Could he have crawled off and be hiding in a cave?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the soldier said. “Anything’s possible at this point.”

  After her visitors left, Volitta called her daughter-in-law, Brandi, who had been told the news by a different set of soldiers.

  “Where could he be?” asked Brandi, crying.

  “He’s probably hiding somewhere in the mountains,” Volitta suggested. “He’s good at that kind of thing. Remember, land navigation is his forte.”

  “I know,” Brandi said. “I’m just so scared.”

  A few hours later, the soldiers returned to Volitta Fritsche’s home to tell her that they had some new information: Ryan was still MIA, but now they also knew that he had been wounded in action.

  “Is he okay?” Volitta asked.

  “I don’t know, ma’am,” the soldier replied. “They’re reporting he was shot in the head.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “If they saw him take a hit, and they’re back to safety, why don’t they know Ryan’s condition?”

  “They can’t find him, ma’am.”

  “ ‘Can’t find him’? What do you mean, they can’t find him? You mean they left him out there?”

  “They said the fighting was so intense, they couldn’t get him out,” the soldier said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I thought you guys didn’t leave anyone behind!” Volitta cried. “Ryan wouldn’t have left one of his guys behind!”

  The Landay-Sin Valley near Saret Koleh was now teeming with U.S. aircraft, bombing every location that the remaining men on the ground—Roller, primarily—called in. Hutto ordered that bombs be dropped in a circle around the spot where Fritsche had last been seen. Newsom wanted to head back into the valley, but he’d been told by Roller that the higher-ups wanted him to hold off for now; they were devising a plan.

  Hutto weighted himself down with guilt over Fritsche’s death. He was the one who’d sent the staff sergeant to 2nd Platoon; he’d even escorted him to the helicopter that would fly him to Combat Outpost Kamu. On that first night of his new command, Hutto got word to Newsom that he should send a quick reaction force to recover Fritsche’s body. A reluctant Morrow went along on the mission, remaining in the Humvee and staying in radio contact with the members of the QRF as they hunted for the corpse.

  The searchers couldn’t see much by moonlight, and the bombardment had pulverized most of the rocks into loose gravel, which made climbing even more difficult. When they turned on their white lights, they saw further evidence of bombing and strafing runs from earlier in the day. They found several former fighting positions littered with empty water bottles and, in one case, a soft SAW ammo carrier. Morrow guided them over the radio to the location where Fritsche had been killed.

  His body wasn’t there.

  Pfeifer, Newsom’s driver that day, sat with the lieutenant in a second Humvee; he was so drained that he kept nodding off behind the wheel. Newsom nudged him every minute or so to wake him up. Each time, Pfeifer would open his eyes and smile: Good to go. The kid was just like that, Newsom thought.

  The QRF troops walked down the mountain. Back in their Humvees, they stopped off at the former casualty collection point to pick up some assault packs that were supposed to be there but weren’t. The evening, it seemed, had a theme.

  The searchers did find some human remains—skull fragments, almost certainly from Bostick—which they collected in an ammunition can that Morrow held in his lap during the drive back to Combat Outpost Kamu. Otherwise, the QRF returned from the mission emptyhanded.

  As the sun rose on the Landay-Sin Valley, Roller radioed to Hutto that 1st Platoon needed to head back to Combat Outpost Kamu. He and his men were spent, down to thirty seconds’ worth of ammunition for the 240 machine gun and almost out of water. Hutto gave them permission, but this, too, added to his guilt over Fritsche: after sending him to the battlefield in the first place, he was now approving Roller’s request to leave his body behind there, all alone. And while Hutto believed those who said the kid had been KIA, he hadn’t seen it for himself.

  In fact, the hunt for Fritsche’s body had not been abandoned: Kolenda’s boss, Colonel Chip Preysler, committed a different unit from his brigade, the 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, to conduct another search the next night. Also known as the ROCK Battalion, the unit was led by a contemporary of Kolenda’s, Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund, who gave the impression that he thought his men were tougher than those who’d already tried to find Fritsche—maybe tougher than anyone, period. Ostlund landed his tactical command post on Hill 1696, overlooking the staff sergeant’s last known location; the ROCK’s Chosen Company landed at Combat Outpost Kamu, where its members were briefed by Hutto and others from 1-91 Cav. Then the seventy or so troops from Chosen Company walked to Saret Koleh. Wilson, eaten up by guilt, joined them. As he hiked the mountain with the Chosen Company troops, the sergeant worried that they wouldn’t be able to find Ryan Fritsche—that perhaps he’d never be found at all. He wondered what the insurgents had done to poor Fritsche’s corpse. The worst thoughts possible ran through his mind.

  But the Chosen Company troops did find Fritsche, lying faceup in the very spot where he’d been killed; either he’d been taken away and then returned there by the enemy or the first search party had somehow missed seeing him. He had been stripped of his personal effects and military equipment: his body armor, weapon, and boots were gone. He was wearing just a shirt, pants, and socks. His arms were folded across his chest. His eyelids were closed. An entry wound blemished his left temple, and a matching exit wound showed behind his right ear.

  Fritsche was put on a Skedko plastic stretcher and carried down the hill. He was taken to Combat Outpost Kamu, where his remains were officially identified. Three days after Ryan Fritsche was killed, the soldier in his green uniform and Army beret pulled up to Volitta Fritsche’s Indiana home for one final visit, this time to tell her that all hope was lost, and her beloved son—the Little Leaguer and high school basketball center with gifts of determination and beauty—was gone.

  D
ave Roller was distraught at the loss of Bostick; everyone in Bulldog Troop was. But for Roller, the hardest thing of all was his belief that even as he and his fellow soldiers were out there fighting for their lives, no one back home cared. Ninety percent of the American people would rather hear about what Paris Hilton did on a Saturday night than be bothered by reports on that silly war in Afghanistan, Roller thought. Of this he was convinced. That the people they’d been fighting for would never even know their names made the death of soldiers such as Tom Bostick and Ryan Fritsche all the more tragic.

  CHAPTER 18

  Balloons

  The U.S. Army had been moving Joey Hutto around since he was a boy. In the eighth grade, he had relocated from Enterprise, Alabama, when his mom, a single mother, married an Army sergeant who was being moved from Fort Rucker to a base in Missouri. Eventually the sergeant and Hutto’s mom split up, and his stepfather faded out of his life, but the Army didn’t. He signed up right out of high school, and his fitness and determination were so apparent to one recruiter that Special Forces brought him on board the following year. He spent the next decade running in and out of Central and South America, mostly training host nations’ armies in Special Forces tactics—how to clear a building during a hostage situation, how to implement what was then the prevailing theory of counterinsurgency, how to provide security for VIPs, how to combat narcoterrorists. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant at Fort Benning Officer Candidate School in 2002 and ended up in Germany, where he and Bostick became fast friends. At Forward Operating Base Naray, he’d served as the assistant operations officer for 1-91 Cav’s Headquarters Troop.

  When Hutto touched down at the landing zone at Combat Outpost Keating, he was met by an officer who had just been in Bostick’s hooch at the operations center, trying to separate the fallen troop leader’s military gear from his civilian items. Hutto thanked him and took over. He entered Bostick’s small room and closed the curtain.