The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  The tip from the Afghan Border Police commander almost certainly saved some lives that early morning; for Kolenda, it was further evidence that having friends among the villagers could be of use. And yet counterweighting that, there was also Chris Briley’s haunting suspicion that someone had tipped off the insurgents to his departure.

  Later that same day, mortars began raining down again. This team—Urdu-speaking, based on the radio chatter—was clearly well trained, able to make skilled adjustments to its fire. The terrain and position of Combat Outpost Keating made it almost impossible for troops there to tell specifically where the explosive volleys were coming from. The men of Bulldog Troop tried different methods—triangulating enemy radio intercepts, translating radio chatter and trying to interpret what the insurgents said they were seeing, crater analysis—but at best, they ended up with educated guesstimates.

  Lacking a more specific target, the Americans decided to return fire at what they deemed to be likely enemy locations, using mortars, grenades, unmanned Predator drones, and piloted choppers and planes. Still the enemy mortars continued to fall. The insurgents’ skill, their professionalism, unnerved everyone. After Marcum heard translations of some of the insurgents’ corrections to previous shots as they bracketed for greater accuracy, he thought to himself, That is literally the exact same correction I would’ve made. One mortar overshot the outpost by about fifty yards; the next round hit right in the middle of the camp, ripping through the stairs of the morale, welfare, and recreation building; the one after that landed just five yards from the operations center. Newsom was only about five seconds ahead of it and almost got a permanent suntan on his head courtesy of white phosphorous. Indeed, the only reason there were no casualties from the mortars was that the insurgents were firing some kind of smoke round as opposed to a high-explosive round. If it’d been a different kind of mortar, some of the guys from Bulldog Troop would surely have been killed, just days before they were supposed to go home.

  A total of sixteen mortars were fired at Combat Outpost Keating that day and into the evening. One blast after another, one escape after another—the barrage left the men both slap-happy and vacant. At one point, Marcum was traipsing around on the hill at the back of the outpost when another mortar almost got him.

  “Hey, Kyle, glad you’re not dead,” Newsom radioed him.

  “Yeah, Alex, same,” Marcum casually replied.

  Eventually the insurgents stopped firing, presumably because they ran out of munitions. By then, many of the troops at Combat Outpost Keating looked like zombies. The next day, another sixteen mortar rounds were fired at them by the enemy, until Bulldog Troop located and killed the spotters who were calling in the grids to the insurgent mortar team. Kolenda was very worried, particularly about the havoc the enemy fighters might be able to wreak if they got their hands on high-explosive rounds.

  The mortars took their toll at Observation Post Fritsche as well.

  The ANA soldiers had a special affection for one of their Marine trainers, Corporal Adam Laman, a stocky, sweet, and smart guy who’d picked up the local language fairly quickly and well. During the intense mortar attacks of June 22, Laman had accompanied an ANA platoon to a position from which they could better observe and suppress the enemy. The insurgents spotted them and began hitting them with small-arms fire and RPGs, one of which exploded right near Laman, showering shrapnel across his body and partially ripping off his left foot. An ANA leader, Nek Mohammed, ran over to try to help him. “Don’t worry about me, take care of your own soldiers!” Laman admonished him.

  Laman was medevacked to Forward Operating Base Naray, where Roller—who as Bulldog Troop’s XO was often up there—went to see him at the aid station.

  The room was thick with the ferric scent of blood. Laman was delirious, on painkillers and in shock, when Roller first approached him. Half of his foot was missing, and what was left looked like a mixture of ground beef and spaghetti. Roller grabbed his hand; the Marine seemed relieved to be able to tell someone what had happened. Under the influence of medication, Laman tried to joke around, but after about fifteen minutes, he closed his eyes and stopped talking.

  “You’re gonna be okay,” Roller told him.

  When 3-71 Cav handed over Combat Outpost Keating to 1-91 Cav, the soldiers of Able Troop also bequeathed their dog, Cali, to the men of Bulldog Troop, who likewise came to love her. Cali would come out on patrol with them as often as she was allowed to, and even sometimes when she wasn’t. She seemed to know instinctively where the men were headed and always ran in front to clear a path. When they slept out on patrol, she was a vigilant guard, helping to put them at ease. If she ran off in a certain direction with an air of purpose, the troops would call the operations center and have someone ask those standing guard to scan that area with thermal sights.

  June didn’t bring only bad news; Cali delivered yet another litter of puppies. (Photo courtesy of Bulldog Troop)

  Cali’s first litter of puppies had been born around the time Pfeifer was shot. Each platoon was given one, and the rest were divvied out to individual soldiers. Newsom’s men called their puppy Franklin, which had been Pfeifer’s middle name. The dog soon took on the aggressive personality of 3rd Platoon. He was loyal to the men, fought with other dogs for no discernible reason, stole food, and gorged himself to the point of vomiting.

  Just ten seconds of petting a dog, a minute or two of playing with Franklin, would provide soldiers with a brief respite from the tension inherent in this place where danger and death hung in the air like a noose. When it got cold at night, the troops would build a fire in the pit and smoke cigars and pet their dogs as if they were on an extended camping trip with the boys. In the winter, they’d let them in to the barracks to sleep with them. (By now the dogs were treated for fleas and wore flea collars, so the men didn’t have to.)

  They were lifesavers in less theoretical ways as well. The puppies began patrolling as their mother did. If the troops tied them up to keep them from accompanying a patrol, they would break free of their restraints and track the men down. On several night patrols, the dogs scurried past the troops and chased away Nuristan vipers. More often, however, they attacked goats and chickens, and the troops would have to pay the local farmers for their losses—but it was no big deal, really, just an annoyance.

  Cali didn’t like the locals, and the feeling was mutual—Nuristanis didn’t think much of feral dogs as pets. Whenever the shura convened at Keating, Bulldog Troop would lock up Cali and her puppies, who shared their mother’s animus.

  The wild dogs in the area did not enjoy the same affection from Bulldog Troop. Hutto, for one, put out a hit on a nasty three-legged mongrel that was a constant menace; the payoff was three packs of Marlboro Lights for a shot and four packs for a knife kill. Tommy Alford had come back to the troop after recuperating from his July 2007 wound, and he collected: three packs of smokes.

  That wasn’t the only worthwhile kill of the summer. On July 1, an unmanned Predator drone picked up what officers believed to be the foreign insurgents who had been firing mortars at Camp Keating. The drone’s pilots consulted with the men of Bulldog Troop and decided to drop a five-hundred-pound bomb and a two-thousand-pound bomb on the insurgent crew. That was the end of that problem. Shortly thereafter, Abdul Rahman and the Kamdesh shura wrote a letter to a local Taliban leader who was also named Abdul Rahman. (U.S. troops referred to the latter as “Bad” Abdul Rahman to differentiate him from the former.) The letter said that the people of Kamdesh were now “awake,” and they wanted him to leave their district for good.

  Once the enemy mortarmen had been taken care of, Lieutenant Marcum and 2nd Platoon set out to investigate the attack on Observation Post Fritsche that had ended with Marine Corporal Laman’s losing his foot. At first light, Marcum led a patrol to the spot on the hill where Laman had been wounded, about three hundred yards southwest of Fritsche’s landing zone. It was a natural fighting position, with a grand view of the valleys and enough
cover to get some shots off; it had probably been set up during one of the many Kom–Kushtozi battle periods. Marcum snapped a few pictures.

  Lieutenant Kyle Marcum took this photograph right before disaster struck. (Photo courtesy of Kyle Marcum)

  Nothing really to see here, we might as well keep moving, Marcum thought to himself. He bent over to pick up his M4 rifle, which he’d leaned up against a rock. As he reached for the gun, he pivoted his foot. There was a blast—not a big blast, but an explosion nonetheless. No one was really sure what had caused it. Intelligence reports had been coming in that the Taliban was using different weapons systems, and for some reason, Marcum initially thought that his position had been fired upon with a recoilless rifle. Then he realized that he’d been hit, and that the explosion had come from underneath him: a landmine. Sometimes mines went off not at the first step but at a change in contact. It must have been when he pivoted his now-bleeding foot, he reasoned.

  Two of Marcum’s troops from 2nd Platoon ran toward him, but the lieutenant held up his hand to stop them. For all any of them knew, they were in the midst of a minefield. Afghanistan is one of the most heavily landmine-laden countries in the world, with cluster munitions, IEDs, and various other lethal remnants of war buried everywhere throughout the land, dating back to the 1970s. It was only common sense to worry that there might be more mines lurking nearby.

  Marcum looked down. The landmine had blown off some of his toes, and his foot was throbbing with pain. A medevac was called, and Marcum was flown out of the Kamdesh Valley, never to return. He would end up losing his leg.

  In July, 1-91 Cav held a dedication ceremony to change the name of Forward Operating Base Naray. “He died while saving the lives of his paratroopers against a numerically superior foe,” Kolenda said of Tom Bostick. “Let all who enter this base, and all who write or speak the name of it, be reminded that freedom is not free.”

  And then, at the newly christened Forward Operating Base Bostick, the troopers of the 1-91 Cav began transferring command to the 6th Squadron, 4th Cavalry Regiment of the 3rd Brigade, 1st Infantry Division, also known as 6-4 Cav.

  It was a distressing time for a handover. That same month, southwest of Kamdesh, in the Waygal Valley in Nuristan, a new American outpost that was being established by Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund’s battalion of the 173rd Airborne was attacked by approximately two hundred insurgents. Ostlund’s men ultimately repelled the attack, but with nine U.S. troops killed, it would end up being the deadliest day for the United States in Afghanistan since the ill-fated Operation Redwing, in June 2005.

  The men of 2nd Platoon, Chosen Company, had less than two weeks left in their fourteen-month rotation, so they were less than thrilled when the order came for them to set up a new combat outpost.

  Theirs had been an eventful and difficult deployment. Soon after effecting the recovery of Ryan Fritsche’s body near Saret Koleh in late July of the previous year, Chosen Company had beaten back the August attack on the Ranch House. Ostlund, the unit’s commanding officer, had eventually made the decision to abandon that vulnerable and isolated outpost, which was turned over to local elders on October 2, 2007. Predictably, the enemy seized on the Americans’ departure, producing a video that showed insurgents “capturing” and occupying the Ranch House—a propaganda victory.

  Then, on November 9, 2007, after a shura in Aranas, near the former Ranch House, Chosen Company’s 1st Platoon was ambushed on its way back to Combat Outpost Bella in Kunar Province. Six Americans44—including Lieutenant Ferrara, from the Ranch House battle—and two ANA troops were killed, and another eight U.S. and three ANA soldiers were wounded. The significance of the November 9 attack would be disputed, but some experts who have studied what happened to Chosen Company think that day changed everything, with the unit shifting its focus from counterinsurgency to fighting from that point on.

  Ostlund was a Nebraskan and former enlisted Ranger who’d earned a master’s degree from the Fletcher School at Tufts University with a thesis on the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. He granted that counterinsurgency certainly had its place, but he thought its success in Nuristan was overstated. The lieutenant colonel believed that much of the local populace was deceptive and dishonest, and he felt that for that reason, a more conventional, fighting mindset was more appropriate to the area. But Ostlund was not entirely dismissive of the Waygal Valley,——so he decided to relocate Chosen Company to a new outpost to be built near the hamlet of Wanat.45 The new site made more sense because it was accessible from a decent road that led from Camp Blessing,46 in the Pech District of Kunar Province, to Wanat—which, as Waygal’s district center, boasted a handful of shops, teahouses, and clinics as well as the district headquarters of the Afghan National Police and a recently completed district administrative building. Wanat had also benefited from more than a million dollars’ worth of United States–funded construction projects that were in the works nearby. It was in the least hostile sector of Ostlund’s entire area of operations.

  Captain Matthew Myer of Chosen Company was told to prepare a platoon to move to—and build—the new camp. He and Ostlund met with some Wanat elders on May 26, 2008. The meeting didn’t go well: the start of the shura was delayed by an hour, the elders took an atypical hourlong break in the middle, and the overall conversation was less than friendly. The elders then insisted that Ostlund and Myer stay for lunch—though they refused to actually eat with the Americans. On its way back to Camp Blessing, just about a mile outside of Wanat, Chosen Company was once again ambushed. Two men were seriously wounded. Ostlund and Myer suspected they’d been set up, speculating that the insurgents didn’t want the new base to be built and that the villagers had kept quiet about the ambush because they were intimidated.

  A little more than a month later, on July 3, insurgents attacked Combat Outpost Bella, launching an assault that carried into the next day. During that second day, the Americans saw two pickup trucks that they thought were fleeing from the spot from which the insurgents had been firing their mortars. Captain Myer radioed to have two Apaches hit the trucks, which they did; the vehicles and most of their seventeen passengers were obliterated. Unbeknownst to Myer or the Apache pilots, among the casualties were a number of civilians, some of them children and staff from Bella’s medical clinic. Governor Nuristani was enraged by the killings and told the Al Jazeera television network that the dead had included doctors, women, and children—all of whom had, moreover, been trying to get away from the fighting, at the behest of the Americans themselves. “The Americans told people around the base to leave, and they left. About seven hundred meters from the district office, they were bombed,” Nuristani said, calling the bombing “inexcusable because [the Americans] knew that these civilians were leaving the area.” When the U.S. commanders heard of the governor’s accusations, they made their displeasure known to President Karzai, who within a matter of hours fired Nuristani. If Karzai truly wanted to persuade the people of Nuristan Province that he was interested in strengthening the government’s relationship with them and bettering their lives, then firing the governor probably wasn’t the right move for him to make. And if he wanted to demonstrate to the Afghan people that he wasn’t a marionette controlled by the Americans, it was definitely the wrong move.

  Some Afghans would later claim that the deaths of the innocent civilians and aid workers had further hardened the hearts of locals against the Americans.47 Exacerbating their anger were the initial claims by the United States that those killed had all been insurgents, when that was clearly not the case.

  After closing the base at Bella, Myer returned to Camp Blessing, where he had to remain for a few days to provide testimony for an investigation into the July 4 incident that had killed those innocent civilians. The task of command at the new outpost therefore fell to First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom, the leader of Chosen Company’s 2nd Platoon. The lieutenant would be in charge of securing the camp’s location before the heavy engineering equipment was brought in t
o improve the access road and then construct the outpost itself.

  Brostrom was worried. Before leaving for Wanat, back at Camp Blessing, he shared his concerns with his best friend, First Lieutenant Brandon Kennedy. The two men preferred talking about what they were going to do in a few weeks, after they got out of Afghanistan; they thought they might get an apartment together in Italy and take a postdeployment cruise on the Mediterranean. But obstructing their view of this vacation was the unsettling assignment: first Brostrom had to get through this mission.

  “What do you think about going up to Wanat?” Kennedy asked him.

  “I don’t like it,” Brostrom admitted. “We’re going to get fucked up.” The last couple of times that members of Task Force ROCK had driven up there, he said, they’d run into ambushes or IED attacks; he showed Kennedy a smashed window on a Humvee.

  But Brostrom never shared these concerns with Ostlund, his commanding officer, even though they had several conversations about the assignment. He did tell Myer and others above him that he was worried he had too few men to meet the challenge of setting up an outpost in a hostile area; Ostlund and Myer tried to assuage his fears by providing him with a twenty-four-man ANA platoon, gun trucks, mortars, a Predator drone for the first three days he was there, and more. Brostrum didn’t think the ANA platoon would make much of a difference. More generally, he thought Nuristan itself was “almost a lost cause” thanks to the way the war was being fought—on the cheap and undermanned, as he told a military historian at Camp Blessing. “There needs to be a lot more than just a platoon [in Nuristan] if you want to make a big difference,” he said.48