by Jake Tapper
Hutto looked at Mohammed. “I’m sorry that those things happened to you,” he said. “I can’t change the past. But what we can do is work together on how we interact with one another to support the needs of the people.” Such apologies could—and that night, did—completely change a meeting’s dynamics. In a culture in which pride and respect were paramount, deference and remorse could go a long way.
On September 6, Hutto and Johnson hosted a shura at Camp Keating. In attendance were district administrator Anayatullah, Afghan National Police commander Abdul Jalil, local ANA commander Lieutenant Noorullah, and a large group of elders from nearby villages and settlements. Anayatullah began the meeting by reading from the Quran and making a passionate plea for cooperation. Security was a big problem, he said. The members of the Eastern Nuristan Security Shura were supposed to have established a security plan, but they hadn’t gotten it done. Everyone knew that insurgents lived in the villages; some of the fighters were even related to members of the gathered shura. Indeed, Anayatullah noted, the primary mullah of Kamdesh had a son who was an insurgent.
Anayatullah then asked the elders, “Before the Americans came to Kamdesh, had you ever heard of a development project?” Of course not, he said. The insurgents were making no effort to build a stronger Afghanistan, whereas the United States was trying to help. “So,” he announced, “we need to help the Americans.” Two days before, insurgents had fired a PKM machine gun into the Camp Keating mosque, which was used primarily by the ANA soldiers and the outpost’s Afghan Security Guards. Firing into a mosque? “These are not Muslims,” Anayatullah declared, “they are terrorists. If you help the bad guys, we will destroy you. If the local people help the enemy fighters, they are not helping the government; they are considered to be Al Qaeda.” Others weighed in, expressing similar sentiments.
Meetings proceeded in this same manner over the next couple of months. Sometimes they took place at Combat Outpost Keating, but it was preferable to hold them in the villages, because “forcing” the Americans to travel to them enhanced the elders’ credibility in the eyes of their people. Kolenda and Hutto noticed, in fact, that there seemed to be a direct correlation between their participation in these shuras and a decline in violence. By the end of September, attacks on Camp Keating and OP Warheit, as well as on Bulldog Troop patrols and missions, had ceased.
Shuras generally involved food. A typical meal served by the elders would include goat, rice, and fresh flatbread. Occasionally potatoes or a seasonal cauliflower-like vegetable would be offered. It would be hard to overstate how much Hutto hated eating goat; while chewing the tough, gamey meat, he’d often think to himself that he’d truly rather eat dog—but he’d swallow and take another bite anyway.
Another Nuristani delicacy was ghee, a clarified butter cooked slowly so it would separate, with the residue dropping to the bottom. The Americans found that Nuristan cheese fried in ghee didn’t taste bad at all, and the locals liked the stuff so much they sometimes had contests to determine who could chug the most.37
Soon, on their own initiative, elders from the different settlements that made up Kamdesh Village were meeting among themselves and with elders from other villages and hamlets. They reaffirmed that each settlement was responsible for its own security and the security of its portion of the road. They also resolved that the elders of every village would try to persuade the insurgents in their area to lay down their arms and work with them on security and development. Fighters who agreed to do so could expect complete amnesty and acceptance from their communities; fighters who didn’t would be banned from their villages. Accomplishing all of that was easier said than done, but it was a lofty goal nonetheless.
The elders also discussed how to distribute humanitarian aid from the United States, how to settle the Kom–Kushtozi dispute, and how to ensure that laborers from each village were hired to work on development projects. There was no resolution of any of these issues, but as far as Kolenda and Hutto were concerned, mere conversation about them could be counted as progress.
As the Chinook bore down at Combat Outpost Keating, Second Lieutenant Kyle Marcum’s first reaction was confusion: he thought the pilot was going to land in the river.
Marcum was being brought in to lead 2nd Platoon. (Meyer had transferred to become the XO of Crazyhorse Troop at Combat Outpost Monti, in Kunar Province.) He didn’t know any of the guys. He’d found out he was headed to Bulldog Troop on July 27, the day Bostick and Fritsche died. Just that part in itself was tough enough—being told he was joining a company whose commander had been killed only hours before.
And then the bird landed. Marcum got off, looked around, and tilted his head back to gaze up at the mountains, which shot upward on every side.
He was low-key, not an alarmist, a mellow guy from Denver whose path to Kamdesh had begun with ROTC at Montana State University. But now he felt a bit of panic. This is not good, he thought. He stared at the mountains, then looked around again. He simply could not get the topography of it all. An outpost? Here?
Mawlawi Abdul Rahman. (Photo courtesy of Bulldog Troop)
The physicians at Brooke Army Medical Center kept Chris Pfeifer heavily drugged to help with the pain. Then, for almost three weeks in that hospital in San Antonio, Chris Pfeifer was conscious. It wasn’t constant—he faded in and out—but when he was awake, he would talk to Karen, ask about their as yet unborn baby girl, and tell her over and over that he loved her.
The bullet had not only damaged many of his internal organs but also, as it exited out his back, paralyzed him. When the doctors at Brooke finally got him stable enough that they could operate on him, they found a huge pocket of infection in his spine that had spread throughout his body. Again and again, Chris’s white blood cell count began falling. His heart would slow down, his breathing would stop. The doctors would rush in with the crash cart and bring him back.
Each time he went in for yet another round of surgery—and he had a lot of procedures—he would tell Karen that she needed to be there when he woke up.
On September 22, Sarah Faulkenberry’s mother—who had driven from her home in Midland, Texas, to be with Karen and Chris in San Antonio—called her daughter to report, “It doesn’t look good.” By then, John Faulkenberry was in much better shape, having been transferred from the ICU at Walter Reed Army Medical Center to ward 57, the orthopedic wing, where combat troops were often sent to recuperate from amputations. John told Sarah to go to Texas to be with Karen Pfeifer, who seemed so very alone except for the baby in her womb. The morning Sarah arrived from Bethesda, Chris Pfeifer crashed again. Doctors shocked his heart repeatedly and brought him back.
Sarah and Karen took shifts, with Sarah sitting at Chris’s bedside and holding his hand while Karen, who was mere days away from delivering their baby girl, slept. Sarah would talk to Chris, telling him how John was doing, creating a fantasy world in which she and John moved to San Antonio so they could hang out with Chris and Karen. The men could recover together; their dogs would frolic. Everything would be fine.
The odds of Chris’s surviving kept dropping with his white blood cell count. His doctors said they had one last shot: they could try giving him a transfusion of white blood cells from someone who was a match. Chris Pfeifer’s blood type was A-positive, and as luck would have it, so was Sarah Faulkenberry’s. She, Chris’s sister, Nicole Griffiths, and a hospital chaplain were all A-positive, and they all volunteered to donate.
Karen desperately wanted to do something to help. But she was A-negative, and even if she had been a match, her pregnancy would have prevented her from giving blood. So she would wipe Chris’s wounds down, assist the nurses, anything.
On September 25, the doctors began the process of transfusion. Chris crashed again. The doctors told Karen and Chris’s parents that while they would keep trying everything they could, they seemed to be nearing the point where they might not be able to do anything more for him. They were also worried that even if he did survive, he wouldn’t
have much quality of life left because of how long it was taking them to revive him after each crash. Every time it happened, his brain was deprived of oxygen for a significant interval.
Karen sat in her husband’s room and watched the doctors work. They were trying hard, but it all seemed futile.
Soon the medical team ushered Karen and Chris’s parents into a separate room. They had reached that point, the doctors said. There wasn’t anything more they could do for Chris short of putting him on life support, which he had specifically noted in his living will he did not want. Karen asked them to put him on life support for fifteen minutes, just long enough to let Sarah, Nicole, and the chaplain—who were at that moment donating their white blood cells for him—get back to his room in the ICU.
Karen was stronger than Sarah had ever seen her. Days before, the first time Chris crashed, his wife had said to him, “If you can’t fight no longer, if your body can’t take it no longer, it’s okay with me if you go. I don’t want you to, but if you can’t take it no longer, no one will be mad at you.” Now, as the medical staff turned off Chris’s machines and his life flowed out of him, she told him again that she understood he had to leave. She understood that he would be around to watch over their daughter.
“You’ve fought long and hard,” she told her husband, “but now it’s time for you to go. I don’t want you to hurt anymore.”
Chris was in a medically induced coma, but to his doctors’ astonishment, as the life-support machines were being shut down, he reached out for Karen’s hand.
They held hands as he slowly stopped breathing.
“He’s gone,” one doctor finally said.
Karen fled from the room—she didn’t want to witness what death would do to Chris’s body—and headed to see her obstetrician-gynecologist. She was scheduled for induction the next morning. After almost a full day of labor, she still wasn’t delivering, so the ob-gyn performed a C-section. Peyton Pfeifer was born on September 27, two days after her father died. She was silent, almost reverentially so, throughout his funeral on October 10, at Saint Michael’s Catholic Church in Spalding, Nebraska. She didn’t even cry when the guns were fired at his graveside.
Sarah was there with a wheelchair-bound John Faulkenberry, having been shown how to administer his IV and give him shots. Other members of 1-91 Cav were also in attendance, including a few who were still recuperating from their own injuries, such as Wayne Baird, who served as a pallbearer, and Jonathan Sultan.38 Although the total population of Spalding was only 502, more than 700 people crowded into the church and gathered in the streets to honor the community’s first fallen soldier since 1951. Some of Pfeifer’s comrades from Bulldog Troop talked about how funny Chris would have found it to see them all there, in his small town.
That afternoon, the schoolchildren of Spalding released dozens of balloons into the air, a colorful bloom that rose to the heaven that was Chris Pfeifer’s beloved Nebraska sky.
CHAPTER 19
If You’re the Enemy, Please Stand Up
Dave Roller and Alex Newsom loved the way Joey Hutto would just shoot the breeze with Mawlawi Abdul Rahman, head of the Kamdesh Village shura, as if he were talking to a pal at the local bar. Part of it was Hutto’s casual, “Hey, man, let’s work out a deal here” style of negotiation and bonding, but it went beyond that, too: the two men would joke around, buddy-buddy, covering a range of topics, often rather bawdy. “You get lucky with your wife last night?” Hutto would ask Rahman, without any fear of giving offense. Sometimes—usually—Hutto’s language was even earthier than that, but Rahman’s response was always the same: first he’d laugh, then he’d come back at the American captain with the same question.
“I never see her,” Hutto would reply. “I’m here!”
In early October, the elders and Anayatullah informed Hutto and Kolenda that they had scheduled a “mega-shura” for the end of the month. The locals were very excited: this council would include representatives from all the major villages in Kamdesh District, from as far east as Gawardesh and as far north as Paprok. The elders selected as the site an old school building five hundred yards or so east of Combat Outpost Keating, and they held planning sessions to map out every last detail: talking points and desired outcomes; seating, food, sound system, pictures, and posters; and—working with Afghan security forces—protection and crowd control.
As Hutto conducted security walkthroughs and rehearsals, he realized that the Kamdesh elders—Mawlawi Abdul Rahman, Gul Mohammed Khan, and others—were completely prepared to handle the meeting on their own. He spoke with Kolenda, and they decided that not only should they let the elders take the lead in this, but they themselves shouldn’t even attend unless they were specifically invited. The more evident it was that this process was being driven entirely by Nuristanis, the more successful it would be.
More than eight hundred Nuristanis from all over the district attended the mega-shura. Elders and mullahs from various villages spoke. The basic theme, repeated over and over, was that the elders had to take responsibility for bringing peace and prosperity to their district—and needed, to that end, to form a district shura like the one they’d had in the old days, to govern themselves, to end the violence and foster economic development. Echoing Anayatullah’s earlier argument, the elders agreed that those who were trying to kill the Americans were actually harming other Muslims through their false jihad, and therefore were not true Muslims themselves.
The elders referred to the American presence at Combat Outpost Keating as the “PRT,” a term that perplexed Kolenda and Hutto when they received reports about the meeting. The force now posted at Camp Keating, 1-91 Cav, was not a provincial reconstruction team; it was a combat unit. But as the two commanders would later learn, “PRT” was the label the elders used to distinguish between those Americans who helped with development and those who caused civilian casualties and searched villagers’ homes.
The elders elected one hundred members to serve on the new shura, which was meticulously designed to proportionally represent all of the villages and tribes and clans in Kamdesh District. Thus was born the “Hundred-Man Shura.” Rahman was chosen as its head, and an executive committee was appointed to assist him. Anayatullah handed out a list of development projects to the hundreds of assembled Nuristanis. “It’s your responsibility to secure your own villages,” he reminded them.
The mega-shura continued for a second day and then into a third. While most of the elders returned to their villages after the second day, seventy or so remained behind to try to hammer out a comprehensive security plan, detailing each village’s responsibilities and the consequences for violating a pending mega-shura agreement.
Kolenda was delighted. He asked Rahman and Gul Mohammed Khan if the elders might persuade insurgent leaders such as Mohammed Jan—the HIG commander for Kamdesh District—to tell their fighters to lay down their arms. Rahman looked at Kolenda and smiled.
“No, that is not how things work here,” he said. “Right now the militant leaders are too powerful. They have control of the young men. Our plan is to go from village to village and talk with the people about the future. We will convince the elders and the parents of the fighters, and convince the fighters as well. Once we have enough of them on our side, then we will have the power to persuade the leaders to join us.”
From November through the following January, representatives from the Hundred-Man Shura toured Kamdesh District, going from village to village, discussing the way forward, explaining why the Americans were in the area, and talking about how they would all work together. “Jihad is over,” the elders said on their journeys. “Stop fighting.” To further combat the skepticism of a highly insular people who intensely distrusted outsiders, the Hundred-Man Shura asked the Americans and the Afghan government to draft written agreements regarding peace and cooperation. The shura wanted Karzai and the United States, first, to commit to coordinating with its members on all issues affecting their villages and the district at larg
e, and second, to acknowledge the governance role of the shura itself. (Part of the elders’ motivation for both demands, it must be said, was the desire to get more directly involved in the development projects, in order to wield power and disburse money.) Called the Commitment of Mutual Support, the agreement with the United States stipulated that in exchange for the villagers’ assuming greater responsibility for the development contracts and taking the lead in expelling insurgents, U.S. troops would refrain from entering mosques or homes uninvited, unless there was an imminent threat. If a home had to be searched, Bulldog Troop was to confer with local elders and the ANA, and then ANA officers alone would conduct the actual search. If the Americans received intelligence on an insurgent weapons cache, they and the ANA would work with the elders to track it down and seize it. Only if the elders refused to help would the ANA and the Americans be free to take matters into their own hands.
The reaction among some officers and soldiers in the squadron was shock: We’re fighting a fucking war, these guys are killing us, and we’re supposed to politely ask permission before searching for bad guys? they wondered. But even before this, Chris Kolenda had been diligent about demanding that his officers and NCOs educate all of their troops on the many nuances of counterinsurgency, and after a while, most troops understood why it wasn’t always smart to just start kicking down doors, unless the goal was to piss off more people and create more insurgents. As a general rule, the men of Bulldog Troop already knew not to enter a village without first coordinating with its elders, because culturally, it was inappropriate just to show up. American and ANA troops were supposed to wait at the edge of the village while the women withdrew into their homes, and to go in only after the elders told them they could. But such cultural sensitivities hadn’t always been a priority. Now they would be, unless there was an “imminent threat.”
