The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Beyond that split-second embrace with Kennedy back at Forward Operating Base Naray, Hutto hadn’t had a moment to focus on his dear friend: he’d been too involved in coordinating the response to the enemy presence, working to expedite the exit of Bulldog Troop from the battle, and then trying to recover Ryan Fritsche’s body. He hadn’t even had a chance to talk to his wife yet, because immediately after Bostick’s death, the unit had been “blacked out”—meaning that no one could call or write home—for fear that Jennifer Bostick might hear the news through the grapevine and not via official Army channels. This moment behind the curtain of Tom Bostick’s hooch was the first time in days that Hutto didn’t have soldiers swarming around him, radios going off.

  He paused and let himself mourn, allowed himself to cry. For Hutto, being here in Bostick’s room was eerily reminiscent of that day five years before when he’d visited his late brother’s Alabama home. These were haunted spaces.

  After a few minutes, he called the platoon sergeants and platoon leaders in to the operations center so he could start to get a sense of how they did business. He was now in charge of Bulldog Troop, and they all knew the insurgents were going to come at them hard. The enemy would soon see that a new officer was commanding the troops at Camp Keating. They would test him. And they would try to kill him as well.

  When she got the news about her husband’s potentially lethal wound, John Faulkenberry’s wife, Sarah, was back living at home with her parents in Midland, Texas. While her husband was abroad, she was working as an event coordinator at the Petroleum County Club. That day, her main task was to make sure everything had been cleaned up after a party held at the club the night before. At around 2:00 p.m., she got in her car and checked the cell phone she’d left there, only to see that she had ten missed calls from Germany, where she and John had been stationed before he deployed.

  It’s a phone call, it’s a phone call, it’s a phone call, she told herself. A phone call means he’s alive; a knock on the door means he’s dead. This is a phone call. That was how Tom Bostick had explained it when he sat down with the Bulldog Troop wives before their husbands deployed. A phone call, a phone call, a phone call, she repeated. Still: her breath was taken away. She couldn’t make international calls on her cell, so she zoomed back to her parents’ house to place the call from there, running stoplights on the way, passing her father on the road. She was terrified. She saw a note on the front door from afar and felt nauseated; then she got closer and realized that, thank God, it was something about a neighborhood barbecue. She ran inside and ransacked her brain trying to remember how to call Germany. Finally recalling, she dialed the number.

  “Have you heard about your husband?” asked the representative for Bulldog Troop, Sergeant Troy Montalvo, over the phone.

  “No,” she said, panicked. “What the fuck is going on?”

  “He’s been wounded,” Montalvo said. “Stay reachable—we’ll know more in the next twelve to twenty-four hours, and we’ll get in touch with you.”

  “Do you know what’s wrong with him?” Sarah asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Was anyone else hurt?” she asked.

  “I can’t release that information,” he said.

  Shit, she thought. That means someone was killed.

  Sarah called her in-laws to relay what she’d been told about their son, and then at midnight she called Germany again. “Do you know anything else?” she asked Montalvo. He informed her that her husband’s wounds were severe enough that he would have to be evacuated from Afghanistan.

  At 4:00 a.m., she called a third time. Montalvo now told her that her husband had been severely wounded, was in critical condition, and was currently fully intubated—meaning that a tube had been inserted into his mouth to maintain an open airway. He was on his way to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

  Sarah looked up the phone number for Landstuhl and somehow got patched through to the intensive-care-unit doctor in charge of her husband’s case. He gave her more details: John had been shot in the leg. Part of his femur had been destroyed, and the bullet had severed his sciatic nerve and lacerated his femoral artery. The wound had caused pulmonary emboli, or clots in the blood vessels of his lungs, and because he had lost so much blood, his kidneys, pancreas, and other internal organs had started to shut down as his body focused on keeping his heart and lungs going.

  “How long do you have to keep him there?” Sarah asked.

  “Until Tuesday at the earliest,” he said. It was Saturday.

  Sarah called American Airlines. A flight to Germany would cost three thousand dollars—money she didn’t have.

  “Okay,” she told the agent, reading off her credit card number.

  She arrived in Germany on Sunday. She walked into her husband’s room.

  “Hey, beautiful,” he greeted her.

  Heavily medicated, John fluctuated between knowing he was at Landstuhl and thinking he was still on the battlefield.

  A few days later, the Army let Sarah fly with him on a medevac plane to Walter Reed Army Medical Center outside Washington, D.C. John was in so much pain that doctors there decided to put him into a medically induced coma.

  Bulldog Troop consolidated itself at Combat Outpost Keating, which the enemy soon began attacking relentlessly. The Americans concluded that the insurgents, apprised of any such developments by local informants and collaborators, knew that the American commander was dead and that a replacement, unfamiliar with the terrain, had been thrown into the valley—meaning that this would be an opportune time to try to kill and chase away these latest occupiers.

  Up to that point, there hadn’t been much enemy contact at Combat Outpost Keating for Bulldog Troop; the fight had instead been focused almost solely around Combat Outpost Kamu, now overseen by Captain Page and Legion Company. There was a reason for that imbalance, it turned out. Chris Kolenda discovered that in the spring, before Bulldog arrived at Camp Keating, the Kamdesh elders had made a deal with the insurgents in the region: the elders agreed to support them in their attacks on the outpost at Kamu if they, in return, promised not to bring violence to the Kamdesh Village area. But then came the Saret Koleh battle, which took a deadly toll on the Americans but an even deadlier one on the enemy. The insurgents from nearby Combat Outpost Kamu were decimated and exhausted and needed a break to regroup (they would be unable to mount another significant attack for more than a year). That left their comrades up the road, the Kamdesh Village crew, as the only bad guys open for business. Since they knew their own turf far better than they did the environs of Combat Outpost Kamu, they chose the home-field advantage and reneged on their deal with the Kamdesh elders, resuming major attacks on Combat Outpost Keating.

  At times, the enemy fighters would synchronize their attacks on the outpost, launching several all at once from different ridges—to the north, south, and southeast. At other times they’d phase them in, first from the north mountain, then from the southern wall, then from the northwest. Sometimes they would pepper the Americans with small-arms fire and nothing else; sometimes rockets rained down, and sometimes RPGs; and occasionally the U.S. outpost would be hit with everything the insurgents had. At one point, the soldiers from Bulldog Troop thought they’d detected a pattern—the attacks would quite often come at 8:30 a.m.—but every time there seemed to be some consistency developing, the enemy would try something new. They seemed to be pros, these insurgents. They were mission-oriented. They weren’t just local village kids.

  The roads kept on trying to kill the Americans as well. Staff Sergeant Zachary Crawford was commanding a Humvee armed with an MK19 grenade launcher as it made its way northwest on the road to Mandigal. When the truck came to a particularly unsturdy section of the road, Crawford told the driver, Specialist Tabajara DeSouza, to stop the vehicle, then ordered everyone else to hop out. DeSouza tried to drive past the weak patch, but it gave way, sending the Humvee tumbling into the river, where it landed upside down. DeSouza survived the wr
eck, but the incident gave Kolenda further pause. His troops had already experienced too many close calls in numerous places where the cliffside road was barely wide enough to hold a Humvee, or where it was flat-out untrafficable due to seasonal flooding and erosion. He’d heard how the namesake of Combat Outpost Keating lost his life. The math seemed clear: until the road could be repaired and widened, any benefit to be gleaned from resupplying Kamu and Keating via ground convoy from Naray just wasn’t worth the risk involved.

  Kolenda’s decision was a controversial one, particularly infuriating to the 3-71 Cav vets who had fought so hard trying to secure the road for ground resupply to Keating—or at least trying to show the insurgents that they didn’t own it outright. And of course, the location of Combat Outpost Keating had been picked only the previous year mainly because of its proximity to that route. But Kolenda stood firm.

  With the Americans no longer driving right into their ambushes, the enemy would be forced to come to them. And Bulldog Troop would be prepared.

  Lieutenant Alex Newsom had always been energetic—he’d worked his platoon hard back in Germany—but in the field, he became a man possessed, and even more so after Bostick and Fritsche were killed. He would hit the gym daily, running on the treadmill with a gas mask over his face to make his workout that much tougher. Determined to keep the enemy off balance, Hutto ordered Bulldog Troop out on constant patrols, varying their times and routes, but the patrols Newsom led were so physically challenging that his men started calling him Captain America. Officers who joined Captain America and his platoon on these workouts couldn’t believe how strenuous they were. Newsom was nuts, they said, and they joked that “Alex’s patrols will shrink your dick.” Relentless, that was the word for them—maybe with a profane adjective or two in front.

  Captain America was ready for action on the morning of August 17, 2007, as the radio buzzed with enemy chatter about an imminent attack. An attack in itself would be nothing unusual; practically every day brought one of those. By now, Newsom’s men knew the drill. The Americans’ strongest defensive positions and firepower were in the Humvees fitted with .50-caliber and 240 machine guns as well as MK19 grenade launchers, so Newsom, preparing for the enemy action, told his troops to man the trucks. Deciding that an additional defensive position was needed, he took a team up onto the roof of the barracks next to the operations center, where they all took cover behind a wall of sandbags. The men on duty fired into the hills in a short, controlled “recon by fire”—probing for a reaction, shooting at known enemy fighting positions, perhaps even indulging in a bit of chest-thumping.

  There were only five of them on the roof—three from 2nd Platoon, plus Ben Barnes and Newsom from 3rd Platoon—so the lieutenant called for more volunteers. “Hey, I need guys up here,” Newsom radioed to his men. “We’re about to be attacked.”

  The always willing Chris Pfeifer put himself forward.

  Pfeifer’s wife was due to deliver their first child, a girl, in a little over a month, and he was—typically—jubilant about it. He didn’t complain about missing his daughter’s birth; instead he called his wife every single day and showed photos of the very pregnant Karen to anyone who would look at them. The couple had met in Job Corps in Chadron, Nebraska, gotten married in March 2006, and moved to the military base in Germany the following fall.

  The troops on the roof fired around the outpost, trying to provoke a response, and they got one: from the Switchbacks up the southern mountain wall, insurgents hit the rooftop with up to forty rounds of automatic small-arms fire. The Americans jumped down behind the sandbags. “Medic!” cried one of the men. “Medic!” Newsom crawled over and saw that Pfeifer had taken a round a couple of centimeters outside his chest plate, between his shoulder and his nipple.

  As it turned out, the bullet had carved a path through his spinal cord, lungs, and bowel before entering one of his kidneys and exiting out his back.

  Although those in charge of medical care on the front lines are more often than not nicknamed Doc, few of them are actually doctors.

  It takes only sixteen weeks to become a medic. The average class size at the Department of Combat Medic Training, at Fort Sam Houston in Texas, is 450. Every two weeks, the Army rotates in a new group of students. The first six or seven weeks offer trainees an introduction to basic medicine, much like that given to those studying to become emergency medical technicians. The lessons are fundamental, covering such topics as how to move patients, how to assess vital signs such as pulse and respiration, how to provide elementary trauma care, and how to control bleeding, as well as reviewing simple anatomy and physiology. In their second phase of training, medics-to-be learn limited primary care: how to perform a basic sick call on a soldier, how to treat headaches and diarrhea, how best to conduct an abdominal or respiratory examination, and how to determine whether a rash is serious. Students are also taught how to distinguish, in the field, between less serious illnesses and those that might require a medevac helicopter.

  The third phase of training deals with battlefield medicine. Using historical data from previous wars, student medics learn how soldiers get wounded, the types of wounds they can incur, and what needs to be done to keep a patient alive long enough to get him to a physician’s assistant or, even better, a doctor. Army studies indicate that if a wounded soldier arrives alive at a combat support hospital where surgeons and nurses can treat him, the chances of his surviving are extremely high—greater than 90 percent. “Surviving,” of course, doesn’t necessarily entail keeping arms or legs or retaining the ability to function independently back home.

  The leading cause of preventable death on the battlefield is bleeding. Having a leg blown off by an IED, for instance, can be fatal if quick steps are not taken to control the blood loss. Even deadlier is internal bleeding, a problem for which medics generally don’t have a good answer. A soldier who is bleeding internally needs to be evacuated and delivered to a surgeon immediately if he is to have any hope of survival.

  The second-leading cause of preventable death is something called tension pneumothorax. If a bullet punctures a soldier’s lung, air can leak from that hole into the “pleural space,” or cavity outside the lungs. That air can build up and eventually interfere with the functioning of the heart. This can be a relatively simple problem to correct: a medic can simply stick a big needle in the soldier’s chest to relieve the pressure in the pleural space.

  Physician’s assistants (PAs) receive much more training than medics—two years’ worth versus the medics’ four months’ worth—but they are still not doctors. Forced to respond to dire situations with nothing more than a small kit of supplies, including tourniquets, IVs, and combat gauze (a cotton fabric impregnated with a substance that speeds up clotting), they can often work miracles, but there are severe limits to what they can do. The lack of refrigeration facilities at most smaller bases means that no blood can be stored there; instead, PAs have to learn how to do the “buddy transfusion,” a risky procedure conducted under emergency conditions, whereby blood withdrawn from a donor—a battlefield volunteer—is pushed directly into the vein of the patient.

  Pfeifer’s eyes were open; he was conscious but delirious and obviously in great pain. Other members of the team immediately carried him from the roof down to the aid station as Newsom called the operations center to have a medevac ordered. At the aid station, Captain Bert Baker, a former Special Forces medic and the outpost’s PA, treated Pfeifer as best he could, but it was clear that the soldier needed to be evacuated at once if he was to stand a chance. There was massive bleeding from the exit wound in his lower back; Baker shoved a combat bandage into the hole. He twice inserted a needle into Pfeifer’s chest to let out air that was building up in the cavity, a procedure that succeeded in getting Pfeifer’s blood pressure up and his respiration rate down. Luckily, one of his lungs was still working. Baker had held people’s lives in his hands before: he’d been a paramedic in St. Louis and a Special Forces medic in Haiti. But in both
of those places, a hospital had usually been no more than ten minutes away. At Combat Outpost Keating, it was an hour-and-twenty-minute helicopter flight to the nearest hospital. Baker wasn’t sure Chris Pfeifer would make it.

  The PA did what he could for the wounded private and then waited for the bird; each passing second was excruciating.

  Sarah Faulkenberry left her husband’s bedside on August 15 to attend Tom Bostick’s funeral at Arlington National Cemetery. She was worried about John, who was still in the intensive care unit. It seemed as though every other day, he had to have some surgery or other to close up his leg wounds. He still had some circulation at the bottom of his right leg, so the doctors were hoping they’d be able to save it.

  Then, two days later, Karen Pfeifer, Chris’s wife, called her.

  Karen was in Germany, on post. She’d just left the mail room after dropping off a huge care package for her husband—containing cashews, baby wipes, sunscreen, short pants, and T-shirts—when she was beckoned in to the commander’s office and informed that Chris had been shot. He was still alive, she was told, but he’d been critically wounded and had to be evacuated to Forward Operating Base Naray, where he’d undergone surgery. He’d lost a lot of blood, so the command post at Naray had put out a loudspeaker call for O-negative donors, and troops had immediately begun lining up to donate.

  Several hours and some forty units of blood later, Pfeifer had been stable enough to be flown to Bagram, where he’d had more surgery and received another forty pints of blood. The commander didn’t have much more information to give his wife. The doctors at Bagram, he said, weren’t sure when or even if Chris would be able to return to Germany.