The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Kaine Meshkin was home on leave in Fort Hood, Texas, when he got the news.

  Dena Yllescas requested that he escort her late husband’s body from Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland to the funeral in Nebraska. Meshkin immediately agreed, and the Pentagon arranged for him to serve as an escort officer, which required official training in the position’s duties and obligations.

  The night after he attended the training, Meshkin was sitting at his kitchen table with his wife, Ali, as they went over the details of how each of them would get to Nebraska. He was aware that he had become emotionally numb in Afghanistan. Over there, there wasn’t any point in giving in to sorrow or depression, or at least it had seemed that way at the time. Those emotions—as opposed to, say, anger—just weren’t practical in an environment in which you had to worry constantly about your own and your comrades’ survival. Self-pity could get you killed.

  But being back in Texas with Ali and their friends had brought all those pent-up emotions to the fore. Right there at the kitchen table, looking at the handbook detailing his duties as an escort officer for Yllescas’s corpse, Meshkin broke down sobbing. He wept uncontrollably, in a way he hadn’t done since college, when his mother died of cancer. That had been different, though: that time, he’d felt not only grief but also relief that his mother would no longer be in pain. This was something else. In this moment, all of his pain, frustration, sorrow, anger, and desire for vengeance had finally boiled to the surface.

  “I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he told Ali as his body heaved.

  The next day, he flew to Washington, D.C., and was taken to the funeral home where Yllescas’s corpse lay. Meshkin was supposed to verify that his former commander’s uniform had been put on properly and that he was wearing the right medals and ribbons. He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. The morticians were doing everything they could to make Yllescas presentable, but there were clear limits to what they could accomplish. It was the darkest and most solemn moment of the war for Kaine Meshkin. It didn’t make any sense, but, enraged and heartbroken, he was seized by a sudden desire to hurt the morticians who were messing with Yllescas’s body. I want to beat the shit out of these guys, he thought—though again, he didn’t understand why.

  Meshkin made sure the captain’s uniform, ribbons, and awards were correct. Afterward, he was driven to a hotel and instructed not to drink any alcohol. He’d be picked up in the morning.

  Stay cooped up by myself in a hotel, after seeing Rob that way? Meshkin thought. Are you fucking kidding me?

  He went to an Irish pub and drank—a lot—then stumbled back to his hotel and passed out. He woke up the next morning and went to the funeral home to stay with Yllescas until they boarded the small plane designed especially for escort flights. Meshkin sat up near the cockpit, right next to his friend’s casket. Upon landing in Nebraska, he tried to prepare Dena Yllescas for what she was about to see at the funeral home. Her husband’s body had deteriorated badly, he told her. Dena insisted on seeing Rob anyway. Afterward, she agreed with Meshkin that an open casket wouldn’t be a good idea.

  Rob Yllescas was laid to rest at the back end of the Osceola Cemetery, in a peaceful spot near a cornfield. He’d come home.

  The view of Upper Kamdesh from Observation Post Fritsche. (Photo courtesy of Rick Victorino)

  Soon after Yllescas’s funeral, Meshkin returned to the Kamdesh Valley, where it turned out that this winter, in contrast to the previous two, the enemy had decided not to take a vacation. The insurgents didn’t stage any major attacks on Camp Keating but instead mainly lobbed harassment rounds from a distance: small-arms fire, RPGs, an occasional blast from an antitank PTRD (most likely the same one from October 25). Still, this was a change for the worse.

  In accordance with a not-unusual custom whereby officers rotate their responsibilities, Lieutenants Meshkin and Mazzocchi switched jobs, Meshkin becoming the XO while Mazzocchi took control of Red Platoon.

  In his new role, Mazzocchi led a patrol to the Northface to try to locate and kill the enemy RPG team that had been firing on the camp from the north. No dice—they didn’t find it. Meshkin greeted the platoon upon its return, wanting to talk to his colleague about where the enemy team might be shooting from. As the two lieutenants were speaking, Meshkin saw a puff of smoke from the mountain and heard the launch of an RPG. He cringed. The rocket flew about a foot over their heads and detonated on a HESCO barrier right behind them. The blast was deafening. Mazzocchi was knocked unconscious. Meshkin had taken cover—instinctively, he supposed—and now began firing toward the area where he’d seen the smoke. His head felt as if it’d been walloped by a baseball bat; all he could hear was a high-pitched ringing in his right ear. In a state of mental disarray, he emptied a magazine to the north, but the enemy had already escaped behind a ridge. He would have headaches and a ringing in his ear for more than a year afterward.

  In December 2008, at Fort Carson, Colorado, Colonel Randy George and Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown were preparing for the following summer, when they were scheduled to assume control of an area of operations in eastern Afghanistan that included Combat Outpost Keating. More precisely, they were planning to close the outpost.

  In six months, George would replace Spiszer, and Brown would take over for Markert. George commanded the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division; Brown was in charge of the 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment—or “3-61 Cav”—which was part of George’s brigade.

  For months, Brown had been reaching out via email to Markert and Kolenda, asking for guidance. Markert recommended that the 3-61 Cav troops practice shooting moving targets on a hill up to seven hundred yards above them; shooting uphill and downhill; and adjusting their aim points—all skills that were critical to surviving at Camp Keating. Make those targets move quickly, Markert wrote. You wouldn’t believe how fast the enemy here is.

  Kolenda offered similar advice. The mountains are brutal, he noted, and you’re in Colorado, so take advantage. Everyone should be able to run twelve miles in full gear in less than four hours. And five miles without gear in forty minutes. That will give the men a foundation, at least, for what awaits them in Nuristan. And pick up a copy of Robertson’s 1896 volume The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, Kolenda added.

  But beyond the practical preparation, there were bigger issues that Brown just couldn’t wrap his head around, the same ones that had flummoxed nearly everyone who’d had anything at all to do with Combat Outpost Keating. The outpost had been put near the road because the troops would need it for travel and resupply, but by 2007, road collapses and frequent ambushes had altered that plan, rendering Camp Keating completely dependent on helicopters for transportation and supply runs. Indeed, the outpost was named after an officer whose very death had highlighted just how unusable the roads were.

  It was a familiar chorus, and for George, it was merely a different verse from the same dreadful songbook. The energy invested in counterinsurgency had been extensive, but George didn’t think the results had been proportional. The United States had gotten itself in the middle of a variety of blood, land, and tribal feuds, Brown believed, and the government of Afghanistan itself had very little, if any, interest in making serious efforts in that region. The insurgency was actually gaining strength, especially in the remote rural areas of eastern Afghanistan. According to one U.S. Army tabulation, the yearly number of attacks against the combat outposts in Kamdesh District had risen dramatically since their establishment, from a few dozen in 2006 (though the United States was there for only part of that year), to 109 in 2007, to 136 by the end of 2008.

  As George and Brown came to see it, the Army was committing an inordinate number of troops to try to secure a relatively small percentage of the Afghan population. Moreover, the particular ethos of Kamdesh District in Nuristan Province and the Korangal Valley in Kunar Province—with their geographical isolation, traditional local hostilities, and lack of any real Afghan government presence—meant that the Americans were more
irritant than balm to the locals, and more incitement than deterrent to the enemy. Finally, providing air support and making resupply runs for those outposts and observation posts took up time that choppers and their pilots might otherwise be spending on missions in parts of the country more vital to the overall U.S. aims.

  Colonel George sent a number of his noncommissioned officers to the outposts so they could see for themselves why they needed to push their soldiers to be fit and able to shoot, move, and communicate in difficult mountainous terrain. This fight would be quite different from what the brigade had gone through during its fifteen-month deployment to Baghdad during the surge. George and Brown, for their part, paid their first visit to Combat Outpost Keating on Saturday, December 6, 2008—the same day the brigade held a memorial service for Yllescas. The leadership of Blackfoot Troop objected to the memorial’s being held on the day of the week when the enemy was likeliest to attack, but headquarters insisted.

  Once on the ground, George and Brown got out of the bird and looked up and around at the steep mountains—just as Kyle Marcum and virtually everyone else who had been at the outpost over the past two and a half years had done on first arriving.

  “What the hell are they doing here?” George asked.

  “I don’t know,” Brown replied.

  CHAPTER 24

  The Puppies

  Pecha returned from leave in mid-January. He, Meshkin, and Mazzocchi were sitting on the small enclosed deck right off the aid station, smoking cigars, when a sniper’s bullet passed right between them and knocked out a light above Mazzocchi’s head. That they had been targeted there suggested to them that locals were telling insurgents that the deck was a good place at which to randomly fire, that American soldiers often hung out there. Or maybe the enemy had just seen the cigar smoke.

  Either way, for Pecha, the bullet was yet another reminder that he had to try to improve relations with the locals—a challenge, since the elders from the Kamdesh shura had begun offering excuse after excuse for not visiting Camp Keating: “So-and-so is too old to make the walk,” they would say, or “That one doesn’t have any shoes,” or “The weather is bad.” Meanwhile, the outpost continued to provide a significant amount of humanitarian assistance to local villages—blankets, jackets, shoes, and food—and the “Radio Kamdesh” idea was finally starting to come together. Taliban propagandists had been airing clandestine radio broadcasts warning locals that the Americans were planning to kill innocent people, steal their land, and kidnap their children. The enemy radio hosts would stay up all night singing the poetry of jihad; Safulko called these recitations Taliban death jams. Victorino suspected that the broadcasts originated in Kamdesh Village itself, from hand-held radios, the transmissions carrying throughout the area because the village was at such a high elevation. The Americans wanted to mount a counterinformation campaign in Kamdesh District, and to that end, Master Sergeant Ryan Bodmer, a U.S. Army Reserves civil-affairs NCO, was posted to Combat Outpost Keating from the PRT in Kala Gush to oversee the project.

  With Markert’s support, Bodmer had $130,000 worth of equipment, including a thirty-foot radio tower, shipped to Camp Keating. The goal was to broadcast news and miscellaneous music. Just as Dennis Sugrue of 3-71 Cav had done to promote Radio Naray, Bodmer made sure to distribute hundreds of small, Chinese-made hand-cranked transistor radios to the local populace. The locals, as they did with the humanitarian aid, bickered over the gifts.

  At the White House, on January 23, a newly inaugurated President Barack Obama made his way to the Situation Room to talk about Afghanistan.

  The commander of international forces in Afghanistan, General McKiernan, had an outstanding request for thirty thousand additional U.S. troops. While the new president had campaigned on the promise to withdraw American soldiers from Iraq, he had pledged to send more men—at least ten thousand, or two brigades’ worth—to Afghanistan. But Obama was reluctant to send more troops there without taking a harder look at the overall plan for that war, which he regarded as a mess lacking a clear strategy. During his presidential transition, one of President Bush’s top advisers on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Army Lieutenant General Douglas Lute, had briefed the president-elect with a PowerPoint presentation that frankly spelled out for him that there was no strategy in Afghanistan that anyone could either articulate or achieve.61 There were some thirty-six thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan already, and the president wasn’t about to grant McKiernan’s request and nearly double that number without undertaking a more comprehensive review of what the United States was doing there—and why this war was in its eighth year, with no end in sight.

  Having impressively advanced through the ranks, General David Petraeus, leader of the group that had rewritten the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, published in 2006, now headed U.S. Central Command, covering the twenty countries that comprised the European, Pacific, and African commands, including Afghanistan. Petraeus wanted the president to send in more troops and put even more emphasis on counterinsurgency in the Afghanistan war. He was backed in this call by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.62

  Almost a month later, President Obama announced that he would commit an additional seventeen thousand U.S. troops to Afghanistan. “The Taliban is resurgent in Afghanistan, and Al Qaeda supports the insurgency and threatens America from its safe haven along the Pakistani border,” he explained. The president said he would be sending a brigade of Marines and a brigade of Army troops “to meet urgent security needs.” He meanwhile asked a former CIA official and National Security Council staffer named Bruce Riedel to conduct a sixty-day review of the war and its strategy. The previous year, Riedel had published a book entitled The Search for Al Qaeda, in which he suggested that the real threat lay in Pakistan.

  Another issue was percolating beyond McKiernan’s troop request, and that was McKiernan himself. Mullen and Robert Gates, Obama’s (and Bush’s) secretary of defense, both had doubts about his leadership and wondered if he was really the right man for the job. To them he seemed too cautious and conventional.

  Radio Kamdesh, once it was up and running, featured clerics who preached messages of peace and decried the other voices on the airwaves that were rallying locals to attack Americans. Similar monologues were delivered by the local Afghan National Police chief and ANA commander. After President Obama announced the surge of troops to Afghanistan, the Americans co-opted the information and began broadcasting the falsehood that all of the nearly twenty thousand new troops were headed straight for Kamdesh District. (The other broadcasts reaching the valley, from BBC and Voice of America, never specified where, precisely, the U.S. soldiers were to be posted.) The insurgents pulled back from the area around Combat Outpost Keating for a few weeks, until it became obvious that two new brigades weren’t being squeezed in to the modest camp.

  Forty-four elders came to Camp Keating on February 15 to learn more about Radio Kamdesh and to discuss other topics. They represented all four settlements in Kamdesh Village, plus Mirdesh, Urmul, and Agro. The elders from Paprok couldn’t make it due to poor road conditions. The Mandigal elders weren’t there, either; the consensus seemed to be that they were protesting the shura because Afghan security forces had killed two insurgents from their village, one of whom had been detained the previous summer for distributing pamphlets near Urmul on how to make bombs. (Yllescas had released him after the Mandigal elders promised to monitor him and keep him out of trouble. They hadn’t done either of those things, apparently: according to several Nuristanis, the man had constantly peppered the main entrance to Combat Outpost Keating with small-arms fire.)

  During the shura itself, ANA Commander Jawed compared the elders from Mandigal to the thugs from Tora Bora. Anayatullah, the district administrator for Kamdesh, talked up the Americans’ new radio station and its benefits for the area. Anyone who wanted to be a journalist, he said, would be welcome to travel around and collect information for broadcasts, with the shura assuming responsibility
for correspondents’ safety. No matter what issue was brought up during this meeting, the discussion always got snagged in the thicket of security and its insufficiency—as, for example, when Gul Mohammed Khan asked why the Afghan government had promised to bring wheat to their district but then stopped in Barikot.

  “The driver would not drive all the way into Kamdesh District due to the security issues,” Anayatullah replied.

  “There were supposed to be forty-five hundred blankets for Kamdesh District,” another elder noted. “Where have they gone?”

  “You have to trust us,” Anayatullah said. “There were three hundred and thirty blankets, but they were unable to bring them because there were illegal checkpoints past Barikot. The shura needs to do more to provide security.”

  “Security is the government’s responsibility,” Abdul Rahman protested. “Providing it is the job of the Afghan National Police and the Afghan National Army.”

  Anayatullah insisted that he had brought up the matter of security within Kamdesh District several times with the new governor of Nuristan,63 Jamaluddin Badr, and promised that he would send Governor Badr yet another letter requesting assistance.

  “All the other districts have electricity, hospitals, and roads,” noted Afghan National Police commander Jalil. “We need to come together for construction in Kamdesh District.”

  The next day, at a meeting that Camp Keating hosted for all the contractors, Anayatullah spoke bluntly. “Security has been bad in Kamdesh for many years now,” he said. “As contractors, you were aware of that when you took on these projects, so you need to stop using it as an excuse for why the projects are not getting done. From now on, you should factor in the cost of hiring security guards before you submit bids. And stop lying about how close the projects are to completion.” Kyle Tucker, in charge of development funds for Combat Outpost Keating, informed the seventeen contractors present that they would need to finish the projects they were currently working on before they could be awarded any new contracts.