by Jake Tapper
Initially, they all thought Yllescas had taken an RPG or a mortar round—the explosion was so large, and his wounds seemingly so severe. But Safulko had never known the insurgents to be quite that accurate. It would be a while before everyone realized that Yllescas must have been hit by a radio-controlled IED. He’d been singled out and targeted.
Two groups of insurgents on the southern side of the outpost—on the Switchbacks—now opened up on Safulko’s platoon with small-arms fire, AK-47s, and PKM machine guns. Some of the fire came from the large rock behind which, not long before, Blue Platoon troops had seen that Nuristani man duck.
Briley had a head injury, but he struggled to make his way over to Yllescas. He felt as if he were swimming; everything was blurry and slower than normal. It sounded as if enemy rounds were coming in, but he couldn’t be sure. When he finally got to the captain, Briley gasped. No way was Yllescas alive. His hands were mangled. His legs were mutilated. His head had been smashed into his helmet. Briley tried to pull him away from the scene, but pieces of him began falling off, so he stopped. The Marine wondered why he was the only one there. It mystified him.
Disoriented, Briley couldn’t physically function the way he wanted to; he found himself on his knees, trying to get to a safer place. He noticed another soldier nearby, behind a rock. “Come help me,” Briley pleaded, “come help me.” But the soldier wouldn’t get out from behind the rock. No one would come out. They all thought the explosion had been an RPG, and their experience with RPGs was that they came in bunches. So everyone on the patrol had immediately taken cover. “Get out of there!” Tucker now yelled at Briley. One casualty was bad enough.
Briley, in emotional shock and experiencing a traumatic brain injury, was at once furious and confused. He couldn’t believe what had happened to Yllescas, what they had done. Yllescas had dedicated himself to improving the lives of these people. The Marine turned to the southern mountains, aimed his two middle fingers as if they were weapons, and screamed at the top of his lungs. “FUCK YOU!” he yelled to Kamdesh, to Nuristan, to Afghanistan. “FUCK YOU!”
There was nowhere for Safulko’s platoon to go; while the Putting Green was an excellent observation point, it left troops exposed with few options for escape. All they could really do was hunker down. The Afghan Security Guards who were with the Americans began running up the mountain into a cluster of trees. These local contractors tended to wait and see who they thought was likely to win before they took any action.
“Tell them to take cover and stay put,” a nervous Safulko told the interpreter.
Safulko could see the muzzle flashes from the Switchbacks and farther east. Troops at Camp Keating began returning fire, and the enemy shooting ceased. The troops at the outpost held their fire to observe the enemy response, and insurgents to the east of the Switchbacks shot at Safulko’s platoon. U.S. mortars shut them right up.
At the operations center, Mazzocchi ordered the mortarmen and troops on guard to suppress any enemy fire while a stretcher was taken out to pick up Yllescas. Meshkin radioed to Forward Operating Base Bostick and asked for a medevac, then told Safulko, “I need you guys to hold your position until the medevac clears out.” A call came in to the ops center that a civilian had been spotted near the Switchbacks, a woman out gathering firewood who had unfortunately been caught in the crossfire.
“Continue firing,” Meshkin said.
After hearing the explosion, Captain Steven Brewer, a physician’s assistant who was the senior medical officer at Camp Keating, grabbed his gear and aid bag and headed for the landing zone, where he found soldiers standing, disorganized, around Yllescas. A small group carefully lifted the captain, put him on the stretcher Mazzocchi had sent out, and carried him into the camp. Brewer ran alongside the stretcher. Yllescas was unresponsive but making gurgling sounds. He would need an airway. His left eye was fixed and dilated. The troops laid him on the table in the aid station. “Doc” Brewer realized that his senior medic, Staff Sergeant George Shreffler, wasn’t there—he was still out with Safulko’s patrol. Brewer thought he heard someone tell him that the medevac was an hour and twenty minutes away. It was one of the many costs of being at a remote outpost.
But it was a cost Meshkin would not tolerate. He sent up an “urgent surgical medevac” request to the 6-4’s squadron XO, Major Thomas Nelson, at Forward Operating Base Bostick. They couldn’t wait for a Black Hawk from Jalalabad, Meshkin told Nelson, who agreed. But pulling a helicopter out of established protocol was no trivial matter. A Chinook and an Apache were just then refueling and about to leave the base to conduct resupply missions in Kunar. In order to commandeer them to try to save Yllescas’s life, Nelson had to get permission from Lieutenant Colonel Markert, who held the birds for a minute while he requested permission to use them from Colonel Spiszer, who then phoned the aviation brigade commander for a final signoff. “Go to the aid station and grab Doc Cuda,” Markert told Nelson, referring to Captain Amanda Cuda, a physician on base at Naray. “You have three minutes to be on that Chinook.”
In the meantime, Brewer was trying to get an oral airway down Yllescas’s throat to help with his breathing, but Yllescas gagged on it. That was a good sign, that he still had a gag reflex. The PA instead put in a nasal trumpet to make respiration easier. Yllescas’s legs had sustained massive injuries. The major bones of both lower legs had been shattered, and blood was spilling out of the wounds, so Brewer ordered the soldiers helping him to tie tourniquets above each knee and then make splints to try to stabilize the captain’s legs. His arms were relatively uninjured, except for his left thumb, the skin on which had been pulled back like a banana peel. Brewer inserted the lines for two large IV’s containing Hextend—an electrolyte solution that assists in restoring blood volume—into the veins on Yllescas’s inner elbows. His airway was obviously still a problem, so Brewer put a mask on the captain’s face and started pumping oxygen into his lungs.
Brewer worked for roughly half an hour on Yllescas—stabilizing him, trying to help his breathing and stop his bleeding—before the Chinook carrying Nelson and Doc Cuda arrived. Yllescas was stable by that point, but not by much. At no time did he ever respond to any of Brewer’s questions or acknowledge any pain. Landing while the firefight was still sputtering, the Chinook set down so hard that it bounced six feet before stopping on the landing zone. The waiting stretcher crew rushed forward with Yllescas and placed him in the aircraft, where Cuda and Staff Sergeant Dave Joslin, a medic, began working once again to stabilize him as the Chinook took off and flew back toward Forward Operating Base Bostick.
He was in bad shape. Cuda was trained not to think about patients’ not surviving—there was no time for anything but effort—but it was clear that at a minimum, Yllescas would certainly lose his legs, which were a mess of muscle, flesh, blood, and bone. Best-case scenario.
Back at Keating, at the LZ, Brewer turned to Briley, who had a head injury and was clearly psychologically traumatized. Brewer escorted him to the aid station and injected him with 10 milligrams of diazepam, better known as Valium. The PA gave the order to evacuate Briley on the next bird.56
Villagers came to the entry control point carrying a stretcher on which lay someone completely covered by a blanket. Mazzocchi—now in charge of the outpost—was nervous about letting the stretcher inside the wire. He worried that it might be another IED. It wasn’t. The wounded woman who’d been hit while collecting firewood had been brought to the outpost for medical attention. While Brewer worked to get her stabilized, Mazzocchi spoke to her husband, trying to make the quick transition from soldier to diplomat, as he’d learned from Yllescas. He extended his sincere apologies to the man, who was quite upset—largely, it seemed to Mazzocchi, because his wife was a source of revenue for him. Without her, he would have only three people to work his farm. Until he found another wife, he said, his harvest would be delayed. And it was harvest season.
Mazzocchi asked him how much money the woman’s wounds might cost him.
Four hundred U.S. dollars, he said.
Mazzocchi gave him five hundred from Blackfoot Troop funds. The man seemed content with that. Brewer worked on his wife for about ninety minutes, after which she was medevacked out for higher-level care; when she returned to the area, she was missing one leg below the knee. After that day, whenever Mazzocchi was on patrol and saw him, the woman’s husband was always friendly toward him. It disgusted Mazzocchi. He wondered if he could have saved Yllescas if he’d given a thousand dollars to the Kamdesh shura.
On one level, the man had merely been anxious about his subsistence and his family’s survival—since in Nuristan, women are responsible for all agricultural work—but Mazzocchi would nonetheless come to see him as representing all men. Not just in Kamdesh, not just in Afghanistan. His concern for the wellbeing of his wife was entirely about her labor and productivity. He wanted the money because money equaled power and influence.
War, Mazzocchi came to think, was always about money and power and never about anything else. Everyone was out for himself. Mazzocchi would quote from Leviathan, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes’s treatise arguing for a strong government to combat man’s inherent evil, referring to the “general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” Without the constraints of government, human beings would do whatever they wanted, Mazzocchi believed; they were anarchical at their core and concerned only with their own benefit. That was what had motivated Al Qaeda, that was what motivated this Nuristani, and that was what motivated the United States to send thousands of soldiers like himself to this remote corner of the world. He’d joined the Army to find out why 9/11 had happened. He would come to feel that he’d learned why on that October day, when he handed over taxpayers’ money to prevent yet another man from becoming an enemy who would try to kill Americans, while his friend and commander Rob Yllescas lay dying on a medevac.
Specialist Rick Victorino was posted at Camp Lowell that day, so another soldier from the intelligence element, “Red” Walker,57 took the lead in trying to figure out who’d been responsible for the remote-controlled IED attack on Captain Yllescas.
Walker went to talk to an Afghan Security Guard commander stationed by the front gate of the outpost, which was now locked down. “This happened within four hundred feet of the front gate of our camp,” Walker said to him. “That’s not good. You need to find out what’s going on.” The commander showed Walker a voter ID card that one of his guards had found by the rocks near the bridge. The photo on the card was of a man in his midtwenties who had some facial hair. Walker had never seen him before. He asked some of the Afghan Security Guards, but they didn’t recognize him, either.
Around that time, three Afghan men walked by on the road. Walker stopped them and showed them the ID. “You seen this guy?” Walker asked. “No,” they all said, and they walked away. But then one of them came back. “Can I see that picture again?” he asked. Walker showed him the card. “That guy is in the hotel right now,” the Afghan said.
The “hotel” was a local inn/restaurant in Urmul, and Walker, along with the Afghan Security Guard commander, headed right for it. As soon as they walked in, they spotted the young Afghan whose picture was on the ID. Walker’s eyes locked onto his for a moment, and then the young Afghan ran out a door. Before he could make it very far, though, the Afghan Security Guards caught him and then brought him back to the front gate at the base.
Staff Sergeant Carroll thought he recognized the man from earlier that day—maybe this was the guy who had been walking with another guy and then suddenly wasn’t anymore, the one the ANA had cleared before Mazzocchi could talk to him? They sat him on a bench, and Walker, through an interpreter, began asking him questions.
“What’s your name?”
“Amin Shir.”
“Where are you from?”
“Paprok.”
“What are you doing here?”
“I came to Kamdesh to get my voter ID card.”
“Who do you know here?”
“Nobody.”
“How long have you been here?”
“Three days.”
Walker knew that the insurgent group in the Paprok area, which attacked Camp Keating every now and then, was headed by the local Taliban leader named Abdul Rahman—the other, “bad” Abdul Rahman.
“Do you know Abdul Rahman?” Walker asked.
“No,” the Afghan said, which Walker knew had to be a lie since everyone in Paprok knew him.
Walker now decided to try out the Expray explosive-detection spray,—a three-part, aerosol-based field test kit. He sprayed the contents of the first can onto Shir’s hand, wiped it with a collection paper, and waited to see if the paper turned pink, which would indicate the presence of a specific class of explosives that included TNT. Negative. The intel officer then sprayed the second can on the suspect’s hand and wiped it with a new collection paper. If this one turned orange, it would mean that Shir had recently come in contact with dynamite or another, similar type of explosive.
Walker was in the middle of spraying the third can when the second paper lit up orange.
“Have you handled a weapon or any explosive within the last forty-eight hours?” Walker asked Shir.
“No,” he said. “I’ve never touched a gun, I’ve never touched explosives. I don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m just a farmer.”
The U.S. Rules of Engagement prevented the Americans at Combat Outpost Keating from detaining Amin Shir for longer than seventy-two hours. But the ANA had no such restrictions; its soldiers could hold him for as long as they needed to, and then, if and when they ascertained his guilt, they could give him back to Blackfoot Troop to transfer to the detention facility at Bagram. The ANA troops flex-cuffed Shir, searched and took pictures of him, and placed him in custody.
Walker ordered that Shir first be taken to the aid station, so that Doc Brewer could examine him and attest that he hadn’t been physically abused or mistreated in any way. Brewer wasn’t happy about that; he’d just finished washing Yllescas’s blood off, and he didn’t want to examine the insurgent responsible for mutilating him. But he did it anyway, verifying that Shir had no broken bones or even any bruises.
Walker next took Shir to the outdoor space between the aid station and the operations center, where he questioned him again. Shir’s story had changed: now he said he’d come to Urmul to buy more goats to take back home, because he was a farmer. A little later, he said he’d come to borrow some money to take back home to buy more goats.
Shir also added that he actually did know someone in the area by the name of Hamid,58 a laborer who worked at Camp Keating. Walker asked Sergeant First Class Shawn Worrell, who was in charge of the day laborers, if he knew a Hamid. Worrell said yes, and he went off to find him. Walker then had Shir blindfolded and brought Hamid in to see him. “Do you know this man?” he asked him.
“I’ve never seen him before in my life,” Hamid said.
Walker handed Amin Shir over to the ANA soldiers, who put him in a cell while the intel specialist contacted his chain of command to commence the process of taking an Afghan detainee into an American holding facility. Then he went back to ask Worrell if he could talk to Hamid again. “Of course,” Worrell said. But it turned out that Hamid was no longer at the outpost: he had vanished and was gone forever.
Walker eventually theorized that Shir had come to Urmul and linked up with Hamid three days before he set the explosive. At some point, Hamid described Yllescas to him. The day before the attack, Shir was seen loitering on the concrete bridge near the entrance to Camp Keating (not an uncommon practice for locals), where he confirmed Yllescas’s identity by his headscarf, body size, stature, and gait. That night, with the moon at low illumination, Shir crouched by the northern side of the landing zone and then walked around to the wooden bridge.
Based on the size of the area destroyed, and judging from the firsthand accounts of the soldiers w
ho had witnessed the blast, the IED might have contained ten pounds of explosive material. Walker speculated that Shir might have been able to store an IED that small in his pocket, and that when he took it out by the northern side of the landing zone, his voter ID also fell out. It was dark enough that he didn’t notice it.
This was all theory, circumstantially buttressed by some eyewitness accounts, but Walker became entirely convinced that Amin Shir had targeted for assassination the man who’d become the greatest threat to the insurgents’ influence in Kamdesh.
It was noon in Killeen, Texas, when Dena Yllescas’s cell phone rang. She had just finished nursing their baby girl, Eva.
It was the rear detachment notification captain calling. “Your husband has been injured,” he said.
For some reason, Dena didn’t believe him. She thought he was joking. “Are you serious?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m serious.”
He began giving Dena some phone numbers. She was numb, and her hand was shaking. “Rob was hit by an IED,” he told her. He was in critical condition at Bagram Air Force Base. She was stunned. She hadn’t even known there were IEDs in that part of Afghanistan. The captain began listing her husband’s injuries, a litany that seemed never-ending and that caused Dena to deeply desire that he shut up: she didn’t want to know.
Within hours, Dena’s home was overflowing with friends who had heard the news. Another friend had picked up Rob and Dena’s daughter Julia from school and taken her to play with her own kids. Dena’s sister-in-law Angie had meanwhile volunteered to fly to Texas from Nebraska to get Julia and Eva and bring them back to her home, where she would take care of them while Dena went to be with Rob, wherever that ended up being.
When Julia finally got home, Dena pulled her into her bedroom. “Daddy’s been hurt,” she told her. “But doctors are taking very good care of him. We need to say lots of prayers for him.”
