by Jake Tapper
Hutto had advised Yllescas to push the elders. There were reports of insurgents’ being as close as Mandigal, and yet the village leaders still claimed not to know where the assailants were. Yllescas threatened to cut off funding for local projects, but that didn’t have the immediate effect he’d hoped for. The soldiers of Blackfoot Troop had been at the outpost for only a few weeks when they got their first evidence that the enemy fighters were finding shelter in Kamdesh Village.
The first attack on Blackfoot Troop occurred early in the morning on Saturday, July 27, and was over almost before anyone knew it. Most of the troops were sleeping when an RPG and small-arms fire came in. The U.S. guards and mortarmen returned fire, but it was likely that the attackers had scurried off before their rockets even hit dirt. Hutto, Newsom, and Briley had each told Yllescas to expect something like this—an enemy probing exercise—and here it was. “They wanted to see exactly how you guys would react,” Briley reminded Yllescas.
And to Briley, that reaction hadn’t been pretty. It was the first time a lot of the guys from 6-4 Cav had ever been under fire, so they were excited, and everyone ran around frantically, Briley felt, not demonstrating the most coherent response. Blackfoot Troop had a long way to go, he thought, and not much time to do it in. And indeed, intelligence soon came in that another attack was scheduled for the following Saturday.
Yllescas tried to put himself in the insurgents’ shoes: in that first assault, they’d seen Blackfoot Troop holed up in the outpost, hiding, not pursuing the enemy. So next time, he decided, he’d surprise them by having his troops leave the compound. “We’ll have two elements overwatching the outpost,” Yllescas told his lieutenants. One patrol would be led by Lieutenant Kaine Meshkin and his men from Red Platoon, including some expert marksmen. The other patrol, made up of ANA soldiers, would be led by Briley, with Red Platoon’s Staff Sergeant Juan Santos tagging along. The insurgents would have a rude awakening, Yllescas hoped.
His full name, on his birth certificate, was Kaine Meshkin Ghalam Tehrani, the latter three words being Farsi for “the black pen of Tehran.” It was a surname that his grandfather had chosen back in Iran after the shah instituted a census, though no one in the family truly understood what it meant. In America, they went by just the “Meshkin” part.
Born in Arlington, Texas, Meshkin had gone to high school in a small town in South Dakota. His father, who was in the Iranian Air Force before the shah fell, had come to the United States in a military exchange program and fallen in love with the country—and with the American woman whom he would eventually marry, in violation of Iranian military law. That act of love, combined with political statements he made about the brutality of the shah and the Iranian secret police, landed Meshkin senior in an Iranian prison for two years; once he was released, the couple fled back to the States.
Lieutenant Kaine Meshkin hadn’t joined the Army because his father was a military man; he’d joined to honor his father’s love of America.
Before dusk on Saturday, August 2, 2008, Meshkin led Red Platoon to the Putting Green while Briley and the ANA went to the Northface. Across the valley, one of Meshkin’s scouts, Staff Sergeant Ian Boone, spotted a three-man enemy RPG team approaching Camp Keating on the trail from Lower Kamdesh. The insurgents didn’t seem to have any idea that the Americans were expecting them. Meshkin called the operations center, and Yllescas gave the order for the squad’s designated marksman, Private First Class Marco Maldonado, to shoot.
Maldonado peered through the scope and pulled the trigger. An insurgent fell to the ground. Briley, peering through an infrared sight, saw at least fifteen others walking at the top of the Switchbacks, and he, too, fired.
Immediately after those rounds, the entire mountainside opened up with muzzle flashes. In an eyeblink, the Americans realized that up to a hundred insurgents were in the mountains and the woods, ready to overrun the outpost. The Americans’ patrols had indeed surprised the enemy—but that number meant that the surprise went both ways.
The camp was now more heavily fortified than it had been just a few weeks before, thanks to First Lieutenant Joseph Mazzocchi, the XO of Blackfoot Troop. The son of Joseph Salvatore Mazzocchi, a New York City cement mason who’d worked his way up to be the vice president of his union, NYC Local 780, and Arline Julia Mazzocchi, a high school teaching assistant, Joseph junior had been born in Queens, and for the first couple of decades of his life, his horizons never extended far beyond the Manhattan skyline. Until his senior year of high school, it never occurred to him to join the military. He didn’t want to cut his hair or wear a uniform. He didn’t want to be told what to do.
He’d been sitting in high school psychology class when he learned about the attacks on September 11, 2001. No one was able to get through to his dad, who was working in Lower Manhattan. His mom was worried sick. Thankfully, Mazzocchi’s father made it home that night, accompanied by about six of his fellow masons, all of them covered in dust and ash from the towers.
The grief was international, but for those actually in the areas attacked, it was tangible, a black cloak draped over the lives of residents of those towns and cities. Five of the 343 firefighters killed when the towers fell were from Mazzocchi’s small town outside New York City. Mazzocchi didn’t understand any of it: the death, the evil, the chasm between Americans and others in the world. His high school graduation was less than a year away, and his parents had offered to take out loans to pay for him to go to college, but Mazzocchi had worked throughout high school and bought himself a car when he was seventeen, so he declined his folks’ offer, knowing he could earn his tuition money on his own. He also heard the drumbeat of war, and he found himself marching to it. An ROTC scholarship took him to the University of Scranton, where he majored in history and political science to try to understand the Why? of 9/11.
At Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 2006, he met and befriended Meshkin and another young officer named Christopher Safulko. One winter’s day, Mazzocchi and Safulko were in the back of a Humvee, shivering and waiting for the “go / no-go” in a training exercise, when they heard some chatter about a new unit that was being formed in Texas: 6-4 Cav. They called the personnel management office on their cell phones, then called Meshkin and told him to do the same. Within thirty-six hours, they all had their orders to report to Fort Hood. They wanted to go to war, and they wanted to fight together.
And then their orders came in. Safulko would be the XO of Apache Troop and was headed to Combat Outpost Lowell at Kamu. Meshkin and Mazzocchi were in Blackfoot Troop, bound for Combat Outpost Keating.
Mazzocchi was one of the first members of 6-4 Cav to arrive in Kamdesh. He landed at Observation Post Fritsche in late June and stayed there for a few days, then hiked down to Camp Keating. He enjoyed the breathtaking vistas but was stunned by how exposed the trail was: descending the mountain, he thought, was like taking a scenic tour of spots where it would be easy for an insurgent to kill several American soldiers and vanish again before anyone could react. From a distance, it looked as if the trails on the other two mountains were no better.
Few soldiers assigned to a new combat outpost ever seem to feel that their predecessors have sufficiently secured their new home, and Mazzocchi, at Camp Keating, was no exception. The guard positions were on Humvees, which made sense to him since it allowed increased mobility and kept the insurgents from ever being sure of the guards’ exact location. But the mesh HESCO barriers on the outpost’s northern and eastern borders appeared to be in disarray. The southern and western borders, meanwhile, were protected by concertina wire—but not enough of it, Mazzocchi thought. When he returned to Forward Operating Base Bostick in early July, he ordered thousands of pounds of lumber, more HESCOs and concertina wire, and pickets for force protection at Camp Keating. He also began working on making Observation Post Fritsche more livable. Camp Keating was the Ritz-Carlton compared to OP Fritsche, which had no kitchen, no hot meals, no showers, and no phones or computers or any other means for soldiers to co
ntact home. The troops of 1-91 Cav had rotated through Fritsche every month because the conditions were so harsh, but Mazzocchi knew that for Yllescas, that practice was unacceptable—OP Fritsche was so close to Upper Kamdesh that it was essential, the new commander believed, for troops to stay up there for longer than just a month at a time, in order to build more enduring relationships with local elders. So Mazzocchi ordered new kitchen supplies, freezers, Internet capability, extra generators, and showers for the observation post. Instead of rotating for one-month stints up at Fritsche, as the members of Bulldog Troop had done, the soldiers of Blackfoot Troop would man the high-ground post in three- to four-month shifts, and no longer would life up there be a short-term hardship to be endured.
Red Platoon, led by Meshkin, was simultaneously improving Camp Keating. Under the supervision of Sergeant First Class William “Wild Bill” Loggins, the men reinforced all the guard positions, relocated some of the heavy weapons, sealed off the entire perimeter of the outpost with the exception of two entry-control points, and encircled the southern and eastern sides of the camp with two layers of triple-strand concertina wire. The added fortification seemed to do its job when the insurgents attacked on August 2, targeting the relatively vulnerable southwestern corner of the outpost, near the Switchbacks. The enemy fighters couldn’t get through, and with the help of air support, the Americans massacred them. And yet Mazzochhi was unnerved by the insurgents’ sophistication. During the battle, Sergeant First Class Dominic Curry had radioed that the enemy was bounding down the Switchbacks; that the insurgents were aware of this maneuver—the same one used by Ryan Fritsche’s team at Saret Koleh—suggested a worrisome level of coordination and complexity.
After the battle, up at Observation Post Fritsche, Sergeant First Class Donald “The Don” Couch led some of his White Platoon troops out to investigate the bodies of the insurgents killed by the Apaches. One of the dead had jammed a pear from a nearby tree into the gaping gunshot wound in his neck. The only explanation the men could come up with was that it had been a feeble attempt to stop the bleeding, an act so desperate that it would later haunt many of the American troops.
The true significance of the August 2 fight was revealed only afterward, when elders from the Kamdesh Village shura asked Yllescas for permission to recover the bodies of some of the fighters who had been killed so they could give them a Muslim burial. The request raised a red flag, especially since several members of Blackfoot Troop were convinced that during the fight, they’d seen a 14.5-millimeter round from a Soviet antitank rifle being fired from a house in Kamdesh Village. That, combined with the fact that Meshkin and his Red Platoon had spotted some insurgents walking on a path from Lower Kamdesh, persuaded the leadership of Blackfoot Troop that it was no longer just a matter of the locals’ shielding foreign fighters—some of the insurgents were actually their neighbors or even their family members.
So Yllescas cancelled all payments to contractors.
Hutto had told his successor to push the elders, and now Yllescas did so—hard. A shura was convened at Combat Outpost Keating on August 20, 2008. The Kamdesh elders seemed eager to resolve matters as they arrived to meet with Yllescas and his fire-support and intel officers, Lieutenant Kyle Tucker and Specialist Rick Victorino,52 along with new ANA commander Jawed,53 and the local chief of the Afghan National Police, Ibrahim. Afghan troops prepared food as dozens of elders sauntered into the outpost. After an opening prayer, Mawlawi Abdul Rahman spoke, addressing the issue at hand, the August 2 attack.
Dena Yllescas and President George W. Bush. (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)
Rahman denied that the guilty parties were from Kamdesh Village; he claimed that the enemy forces in Barg-e-Matal had told insurgents to enter the village in order to target the Americans. “The insurgents come and go as they please,” he said. “We cannot stop them. They have good suppliers of weapons and money, and no one stops them.”
After an all-too-familiar and all-too-time-consuming back-and-forth between the Americans and the Kamdeshis, the session broke for afternoon prayer. Afterward, Rahman, Ibrahim, Yllescas, and Commander Jawed all went in to the ANA commander’s office for a private talk. Yes, Rahman finally admitted to Yllescas: the insurgents who’d attacked Camp Keating, some of them were from Kamdesh.
Lower Kamdesh, he made sure to specify; Rahman himself was from Upper Kamdesh. Younger guys, he further noted, adding that the shura was truly trying to get them to cooperate with the Afghan government and the Afghan security forces—the police and the military.
After Rahman left, Yllescas and other officers remarked on his candor. Yllescas’s strategies of withholding contracting funds and then challenging the shura had worked. Even the more radical members of the shura were loath to lose American dollars, and Rahman had realized that he needed to show this new guy, Captain Yllescas, that he understood his responsibilities. In this instance, money had talked—and so had Rahman.
There was nothing funny about the war to Rick Victorino, but sometimes the way it was being fought seemed a bit comical—if darkly so.
Stretched thin and facing a shortage of new soldiers, the U.S. Army had begun lowering its standards for new recruits a few years earlier. Since 2005, the Army had been accepting high school dropouts and people who scored on the lower end of its mental qualification tests. In 2007, the Army brass lowered the bar once again, admitting recruits with criminal records and handing out “moral character” waivers more freely. For Victorino, it wasn’t especially difficult to figure out which troops had slipped in under the new rules; there was one guy in 6-4 Cav who everyone was convinced was autistic.
Below par seemed par for the course around here. Eighty Afghan National Police officers were paid for standing their post, but Victorino estimated that there were only really about twenty local policemen who actually showed up for work.
Even more of a problem for Victorino, in his job as an intelligence analyst, was that the Army seemed clueless when it came to institutional knowledge. There was no real information at Combat Outpost Keating about the surrounding area, no historical data about the people or any record of the two previous companies’ experiences during their deployments. It took Victorino a few months to realize, for example, that there was more than one “Mandigal,” because several towns cloistered nearby had that word as part of their names: Mandigal Bande, Mandigal Sofia, Mandigal Koleh, Mandigal Olya. The intel analyst had to figure this out on his own; there was no way to quickly and reliably reach out to any of his predecessors from 1-91 Cav or 3-71 Cav to seek advice.
And then there were the helicopters.
Pilots were increasingly reluctant to fly into Nuristan or Kunar Provinces, as well as other dangerous parts of Afghanistan, so ISAF had taken to hiring private contractors to carry out resupply runs. The pilots were a motley crew, some of whom—the Eastern Europeans in particular—appeared to be drunk more often than not. These private helicopters, nicknamed Jingle Air, carried no passengers, only cargo, but either way, the sight of the choppers plunking down onto Camp Keating’s landing zone, and the pilots, seemingly tanked, rushing out to urinate in the Landay-Sin River, underscored quite a bit that was off about this war—most notably, the thrift, the bizarreness, and the Halfway-Down-the-Trail-to-Hell quality of their location.
At the end of August 2008, one of these contractor’s helicopters was hit by enemy fire in the Korangal, causing the aircraft to crash on a landing pad. Two of the crew members were rescued, while a third burned to death inside the bird. It was a complete disaster—and utterly predictable. Victorino didn’t laugh about it, but his rotation in Kamdesh certainly gave him a better understanding of why so many dramas about war, such as Catch-22 and M*A*S*H,—shared the same warped sense of humor.
Even before he got to Camp Keating, Marine Lieutenant Briley had heard reports of complaints from ANA soldiers that something fishy was going on with their salaries. Once at the outpost, he found that his trainees were at their wits’ end because they hadn
’t been paid in months. Many refused to patrol until the money was in their hands.
ANA commanders had discretion over how funds were allocated, and Commander Jawed offered nearly every excuse in the book as to why he didn’t have enough money to pay his troops. At one point, he insisted that the soldiers had eaten too much food the month before and that their salaries therefore needed to be directed toward the relevant contractors. Another time he swore that he hadn’t received enough funds himself. After a couple of incidents like this, Briley brought the problem up with his boss at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Ty Edwards. On the night the next bag of ANA pay was to be flown to Combat Outpost Keating, Edwards made sure to count the cash personally before it was loaded onto the bird. When the helicopter arrived at Combat Outpost Keating, Briley watched Commander Jawed sprint to the landing zone to grab the bag; he claimed that if he didn’t, his troops would pilfer the bills. Surprise, surprise: the next morning, Jawed announced that they’d been shortchanged again.
Briley decided to take action. He called a meeting of the ANA troops and told them that their commander had asked him to teach them all how to do basic accounting, in the name of transparency and education. From now on, he said, their salaries would go through this new system. The first part was a lie, of course; Jawed had asked him to do no such thing, but Briley, while hoping to solve this problem, didn’t want the Afghan commander to lose face with his men. The truth was, he was stuck with Jawed, for better or for worse, and he needed to put on a show of solidarity. He also figured the concept of “skimming” was so ingrained in Afghan culture that there was nothing he could do to change it. Suggesting that Jawed had taken the initiative empowered him, in a way, and reassured the ANA troops.
