The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Yllescas squabbled with Commander Jawed fairly regularly about an entrance the ANA commander had created at the eastern side of Combat Outpost Keating to allow people to come and see him more easily. That his visitors were mostly contractors or their representatives only reinforced Yllescas’s suspicion that Jawed was stealing, taking money off the top, however adamantly he denied it when confronted about it. In any case, the extra entrance made the outpost less secure; Mazzocchi and Briley often felt compelled to check on it to make sure it was closed.

  Despite the challenges he faced, Yllescas was pleased about the impact he and Blackfoot Troop seemed to be making on the locals. And more was in store: there was talk of creating a local radio station to combat the insurgents’ propaganda. “When I first took command people told me that there will be a ‘burden of command’ but I can honestly say I have yet to experience the burden and to the contrary it has been exciting,” Yllescas wrote in an email to his family and friends.

  By at least one measure, the counterinsurgency program started by Hutto and 1-91 Cav and continued by Yllescas and 6-4 Cav was working. In the surrounding area of operations, between September 2006 and September 2007, more than thirty U.S. troops and Afghan security forces—police and army—h—ad been killed. Between September 2007 and September 2008, the number was down to three.

  On guard duty one day at Observation Post Fritsche, Specialist Nathan Nash saw some wild dogs entering and exiting from a nearby bandah, one of the small huts used by mountain herders. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that a bitch had delivered and then abandoned a litter of puppies, which other wild dogs were now coming into the bandah to eat. Nash gave a dollar to a local Afghan boy to bring whatever puppies were left back to the outpost. There was only one, a furry little bag of bones that the men of 3rd Platoon named Doback, after a character in the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers.

  Christopher Safulko had been transferred from Camp Lowell to head Blue Platoon at Camp Keating, and he, for one, spent hours playing with Doback in the mud. The Buffalo, New York, native had been a delinquent youth; his guidance counselor had told his parents that despite his high scores on standardized tests, it was unlikely that young Chris would attend college. But then, on September 11, 2001, Safulko was changing for his high school physical education class when the gym teacher came in to the locker room and told the students that planes had hit the World Trade Center. That night, Safulko’s mom hugged him tight, weeping and saying over and over, “All of those people, all of those people.” The attacks of 9/11 and subsequent photos of the noble 10th Mountain Division troops fighting during Operation Anaconda had called Safulko to duty.

  But nothing had turned out to be so black and white in Afghanistan—except perhaps Doback. Safulko became quite attached to the pup. Maybe it was because Doback’s intentions were pure, he mused. Or maybe it was because he was so loyal.

  Doback and the rest of the dogs, however, were like so many other things the men cared for, things they loved and would have to sacrifice. One day, Meshkin was leading a patrol of Red Platoon soldiers to Observation Post Fritsche. Yllescas had come along to check up on the White Platoon troops, who were at OP Fritsche at the time. The usual contingent of canines from the outpost accompanied them, including the shaggy brown one named Franklin—once the puppy that 1-91 Cav named after Pfeifer—who sometimes seemed just one moon cycle away from being a wolf. The platoon was halfway to Fritsche when something triggered the dogs to go after an old woman who was working in a small field. The dogs began barking at the woman and then surrounded her; she was clearly terrified. Yllescas fired his gun into the air to scare them off. His plan worked, and the dogs returned to the patrol.

  The interpreter, though, had bad news for Yllescas: the old woman had been bitten by the “brown dog,” he said.

  Franklin.

  Yllescas and Meshkin huddled. They agreed to shoot Franklin—right then, right there—so the woman and her family would know that they found what he’d done unacceptable. Meshkin went over to Franklin and pushed him down with one hand. Franklin submitted to him, collapsing and lying on his side as if he knew what was coming. Meshkin put the barrel of his rifle to the dog’s head and fired.

  “I didn’t like doing that,” he told Yllescas.

  To show the locals that he was trying to set things right, Yllescas then pumped three more rounds into Franklin’s body. Meshkin wasn’t expecting it and was startled by it.

  “Goddammit, he’s already dead!” Meshkin exclaimed.

  Yllescas’s sister-in-law was a veterinarian. “She would kill me if she found out about this,” he confided to Meshkin. But she’d want him home in one piece, and if a dog was going to get between him and the locals, then the dog had to go.

  CHAPTER 22

  After He Finished Washing the Blood Off

  Thank you for coming,” Rob Yllescas told the members of the Kamdesh shura on October 13. “It makes me happy to come and speak about issues, to resolve them through words and not violence. It is an honor to be with such great men.”

  They were sitting outside, near the old Afghan National Police station, now used by the ANA company stationed at the outpost. It was a crisp and sunny day.

  “Thank you for bringing peace to this area,” Yllescas said. “There has not been a large attack against Camp Keating in over two months, and I am very proud of the shura for that. Now we need to expand the peace. We need to go to areas such as Kamu and protect the people.”

  Anayatullah spoke as well, urging that Kamdeshis obtain voter registration cards so they could have a voice in the presidential and parliamentary elections, scheduled for the following summer. “If we want the right political support, everyone has to participate,” the district administrator explained. “Every male eighteen and over has to register.” The Nuristanis would get to choose five representatives to Parliament.

  There were still many unresolved issues on the agenda—one elder from Paprok, for example, complained that the “security” imposed on his village by the Americans blocked food from getting through to residents—but Yllescas felt good about his progress so far and was looking to extend it. He persuaded the ANA and Afghan National Police commanders to start visiting Kamdesh Village at least once a week, with the goal of establishing a permanent Afghan security presence there, thus denying the enemy any safe haven.

  Five days later, on October 18, Yllescas, Anayatullah, Jawed, and about fifty others walked up to Kamdesh. Various platoons were conducting overwatch, but the journey there and back was completed without incident, and the visit itself was a smashing success: Jawed and Anayatullah interacted with the Kamdeshis, more villagers pledged to try to resolve their conflicts through government mediation, and a number of residents expressed interest in acquiring voter ID cards for the upcoming election.

  The enemy obviously didn’t like any of this. Yllescas, back at Combat Outpost Keating, planned to return to Kamdesh Village the next week, on October 25. But on that day, twenty fighters were spread out in several positions along his path, ready to effect a linear ambush to kill him. In retrospect, it would come to seem that the insurgents might have been focused not just on ambushing Americans in general but on stopping—and killing—Rob Yllescas in particular.

  The Americans were ready: Meshkin and a platoon had headed out early to set up an overwatch. They spotted some of the insurgents, fired, and got into a fierce battle. Meshkin called in 120-millimeter mortars, but the rounds were not enough to do the trick, as evidenced by the ongoing fire—from AK-47 assault rifles and a PKM machine gun—that pinned down the lieutenant and two others. Briley and his ANA patrol, on their way to Meshkin’s position, were also pinned down, in their case by a large-caliber rifle, likely a powerful PTRD—a single-shot Soviet antitank gun. The Taliban were bringing in their deadliest weapons, ones they could use to fire extremely lethal shots from afar.

  The Blackfoot Troop officers wanted to mortar the insurgents, but they couldn’t figure out exactly where th
ey were, so back at the operations center, Mazzocchi called in Apaches. The only air support available, however, was some “fixed-wing” aircraft—meaning planes, not choppers—and Yllescas, also at the operations center, didn’t want to deal with what could be the long process of getting a bomb drop approved, in order to ensure that no civilians or infrastructure would be harmed. Even if everything happened as quickly as possible, the process would still take as long as fifteen minutes, a lifetime in a firefight.

  In the meantime, the Americans had figured out that one of the enemy locations lay to the east, on the other side of a small, rocky spur that jutted off the mountain. Briley grabbed an MK19—a belt-fed machine gun that fired 40-millimeter grenade cartridges—and started shooting grenades up over the spur. Meshkin called in adjustments from his overwatch position.

  “Move the barrel one inch down.”… BOOM.

  “Now one inch to the left.”… BOOM.

  The collaboration seemed to work: the screams of insurgents began to echo in the valley. But the PTRD antitank rifle continued to keep Meshkin and his troops from Red Platoon pinned down. “Grab some guys from Blue Platoon and push out,” Yllescas told Safulko. “Go down the main supply route between Meshkin and the enemy. Draw them out.”

  Safulko led about a dozen troops down the road to Urmul. Under fire there, and tipped off by a villager that the enemy was hiding behind a pomegranate tree off in the distance, Safulko—looked at the map and called the grid in to Meshkin. Believing that the enemy targeting his own patrol was in the same spot, Meshkin called it in to the fire-support officer, Kyle Tucker, and his 120-millimeter mortars.

  Yllescas told Mazzocchi to take two gun trucks to the district center: “Destroy that enemy position,” he ordered. Mazzocchi led two Humvees outfitted with heavy guns into Urmul to do just that, and Briley and his ANA team followed with a four-foot-long, thirty-pound M240B fully automatic machine gun. Once in place, the gun trucks unleashed more than three hundred .50-caliber rounds and almost four hundred MK19 grenade rounds into the enemy positions.—Soon the fight concluded, and the enemy retreated.

  “Allahu Akbar, you can kill us,” one insurgent taunted on the enemy radio frequency. “We don’t care!”

  Many of the surviving fighters, it was later reported, returned to their homes in Kamdesh Village. When Yllescas told him about the incident, Markert figured, The Hundred-Man Shura has lost control. No one in Blackfoot Troop had even been wounded. The Americans had won the battle—killing five or more insurgents and wounding at least three others—but the enemy had won the strategic fight. The fighters had kept Yllescas and his men out of Kamdesh Village; that had been the point of their attack, and in that, they had succeeded. And they had far worse in store.

  Up until July, troops had crossed the Landay-Sin River via a solid wooden bridge that linked Combat Outpost Keating to a piece of land in front of a farmer’s house on the other side. But right after Hutto and 1-91 Cav left, the farmer suddenly tore it down. “He can no longer guarantee our safety on this bridge,” Briley’s interpreter told him after chatting with the man. The farmer had said that “people”—he didn’t specify who—didn’t like his allowing the American soldiers to use it.

  A new bridge was then built on the quick, a wooden one made of one-by-four-inch beams laid one after the other, with about an inch of space left between each beam. It was rickety and constructed without nails; pressure and weight kept everything in place. As soldiers crossed it, they could look down and see the river rushing by beneath their feet.

  The bridge was a hazard. Troops were forced to cross it one at a time; it was a chokepoint where a soldier could easily be trapped. And even without insurgents’ trying to pick off those crossing, merely walking on the bridge would cause it to rock and swing violently. A number of troops had seen a little girl drown in the Landay-Sin River after she slipped off the unstable span and was swept away by the rapids. If that could happen to an eighty-pound child, what might befall a two-hundred-pound man lugging another hundred pounds of gear?

  The crossing became even more dangerous at the end of October, after someone removed the first six or so boards from the bridge, on the camp side. Meshkin and Red Platoon had to leap across the two-and-a-half-foot gap. This was more than an annoyance.

  On October 28, Yllescas and Briley led a joint U.S./ANA patrol north of the outpost. Yllescas was wrapped in his scarf and carrying his own personal knapsack—classic Yllescas, Briley thought, completely confident and reveling in his work. They walked to the bridge. The missing beams had been replaced, surprisingly, with one solid piece of wood, approximately five feet long. No one knew who had done the replacing.

  I fucking hate this shit, Briley said to himself. I can’t see what’s underneath the bridge now.

  Kyle Tucker had come along on this patrol for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to check on the micro-hydroelectric plant that was being set up for Kamdesh and several other nearby settlements; not unexpectedly, even though he had sent an interpreter that morning to alert the contractor that they would be coming to inspect the project, neither the contractor nor his workers were there. The second thing the fire-support officer hoped to be able to do was figure out his mortar targets. Because Blackfoot Troop, unlike Bulldog, hadn’t had to deal much with attacks from the north, Tucker carried some of Kenny Johnson’s old grids with him so he could conduct target practice. His mortarman, Sergeant Peter Gaitan, was standing by at Camp Keating. Tucker called in the grids, and Gaitan fired up the mortars, but the exercise didn’t work all that well: the mortars kept missing their marks.

  While Tucker was keeping busy with that, Yllescas and Briley saw a lone man acting suspiciously, walking by the riverbank and looking under rocks. “If we were in Iraq, I would shoot this guy just for cause,” Yllescas said. “He’s looking for a place to put an IED.” But this was a different war, with a different set of rules. Plus, there weren’t really many IEDs in this part of Afghanistan.54 At least not yet.

  Separately, before daybreak, Safulko and some of the men from Blue Platoon had moved to an elevated position to the east of the outpost, from which they could watch the Afghan National Police checkpoints up the road. There was a lot of foot traffic that day, but only about five pickup trucks for the Afghan police to inspect. Small groups of villagers came down from the mountains to gather firewood, bring livestock to the market, or visit with friends and family nearby. The women of Nuristan did much of the manual labor, and a fair number of them carried large bundles of firewood on their backs. Some men were down by the river gathering rocks that they would use to build modest one- or two-story structures.

  The Blackfoot troops watched everything intently; something unusual seemed to be afoot. In their chatter over the enemy radio frequency, the insurgents were being particularly cryptic, and the translations subsequently fed to the Americans were poor. At one point, a man walked in front of a woman down the Kamdesh trail, his arms folded. At one of the turning points, he ducked down behind a large rock; after a moment, he resurfaced. He looked suspicious, the soldiers agreed, but he had no weapon. Maybe he had just relieved himself. The couple continued down the trail all the way into Urmul.

  A bit later, Safulko spotted two men traveling east on the road, coming toward Keating from the direction of Mandigal. As they approached the checkpoint run by the ANA in front of Camp Keating, they separated and began to walk several hundred feet apart. This struck Safulko as odd—it was as if they were trying to dissociate themselves from each other before they reached the checkpoint. Safulko called the operations center and told Mazzocchi what he’d seen. Mazzocchi radioed the gate and spoke with Staff Sergeant Kris Carroll. ANA troops stopped the two men, who claimed to be on their way to get voter ID cards from the district center down the road. Mazzocchi ran down to the gate to check out the pair himself, but by the time he got there, the ANA soldiers had already released them.

  Shortly after noon, the Afghan police up the road called it a day. Around the same t
ime, Yllescas, Briley, Tucker, Staff Sergeant Nicholas Bunch, Sergeant Al Palmieri, and about six ANA troops began walking back to camp. Safulko radioed them and confirmed that he had full observation of them as they prepared to cross the bridge.

  Yllescas liked to tease Safulko about his time at Camp Lowell, where the lieutenant and his men had spent much of the summer undersupplied, hanging on by a thread, and getting mortared every day. The mortars had turned life nocturnal for the troops at Kamu: everything they did outside was done at night.

  “Hey, Chris,” Yllescas radioed back, “I bet you guys never did shit like this at Lowell.”

  They crossed the bridge one at a time: Briley first, followed by his interpreter, then Bunch, who stood guard when he reached the other side. Then Tucker. As Yllescas crossed, Briley called out to him, “Do you want me to call down the over——”

  The Marine didn’t get to finish his sentence before a pulverizing explosion knocked him to the ground. When he opened his eyes, he saw Rob Yllescas falling from the sky.

  Safulko turned to the bridge and saw a smoke plume billowing upward as the span crumbled into the river. Yllescas—easy to spot even from a distance, with his scarf and his short, stocky frame—was lying faceup on the helicopter landing zone. His legs looked as if they’d been shredded. “Contact!” Tucker yelled into his radio. “Six is down!”55 rang out over the command net.