The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Christopher Jones had a guitar with him, so when he wasn’t pulling guard duty at the entry control point—scanning the mountains and watching people on the road—he’d write and sing songs about the platoon. Among these was the mocking ditty known as “The Davidson Song,” about Private First Class Nicholas Davidson of Humboldt County, California:

  Stutters when he talks

  Stumbles when he walks

  Trying to find the phone

  So he could call back home….

  Another Jones number, about his immediate supervisor, team leader Joshua Kirk, included Specialist Zachary Koppes’s free-style rapping:

  Whatchoo you hearing

  Whatchoo heard

  Motherfucker got killed by Combat Kirk…

  Only man who could turn a kitchen

  Into a fighting position….

  The lyrics had some truth to them: Kirk’s men saw him as being unafraid, unthreatened, and, at times, unrestrained. During firefights, he would tell them, “If you think you need to shoot something, shoot it. It doesn’t matter how much ammo you might waste. If you need to kill it, kill it.”

  Kirk had been born at home in Thomaston, Maine, the son of a Vietnam veteran who transformed himself from the dope-smoking head of a motorcycle gang into a born-again Christian carpenter. When Josh was five, the family moved to fifteen acres of land not far from Bonners Ferry, Idaho, a small town best known for U.S. law enforcement’s siege of a compound at nearby Ruby Ridge in 1992. The Kirks had running water but no electricity; their closest neighbors were five miles away. The kids’ entertainment was entirely self-created: building forts, sleeping in tents, playing flashlight tag, and, when they were teenagers, engaging in elaborate games of war. One such game, invented by Josh, came to be called Test of Courage; it basically consisted of devising terrifying tasks and daring the other players to attempt them. The challenges started out harmless enough but then quickly escalated to really dangerous stuff like exploring an abandoned silver mine, walking on top of the old Eileen Dam, and body-surfing fierce river rapids. In retrospect, it seemed astonishing that no one had ever gotten lost or hurt.

  After high school, Kirk returned to Maine with his father and brother to do some construction work and ended up taking classes at Southern Maine Community College, where, in September 2004, he met Megan Gavin. Holding down a construction job and going to school at the same time soon proved impossible, so the following spring, Kirk enlisted in the Army, attracted by promise of the G.I. Bill. He was a persistent guy, and he asked Megan to marry him three times before she finally said yes; they were married a few days after got out of basic training in 2005. Three months before he deployed with 1-91 Cav in 2007, their little girl was born. And now here he was, back in Nuristan.

  From: Joshua Kirk

  To: Megan Kirk

  Sent: Sunday, July 12, 2009

  Hey sweetie, just wanted to say that I love you tons! Little pricks have been hitting us all day with B-10 and rpg fire. Lovely and then some!!!! Of course they wont let us patrol more so we can secure this place. instead lets just sit here and take it in the ass. Working on the patroling way more so we can secure it. I would rather hit these dudes out in the brush then wait here, its really driving us nuts, oh well… TTYL Love you XOXOOXOXOXOXOXOXOX JK

  Sergeant Joshua Kirk. (Photo courtesy of Megan Gavin Kirk)

  The frequency of firefights at Camp Keating increased significantly, from 136 in 2008 to 212 throughout 2009. When the men of 3-61 Cav took incoming fire, Kirk was a machine: he’d hop on the AT4 rocket launcher, then switch to the .50-caliber, then the M203 grenade launcher, then he’d get back on the .50-caliber and shoot that again. Most of the guys at the outpost were pretty tough, but Kirk, he was crazy brave—fearless, thought Jones. Absolutely.

  Growing up in Winesburg, Ohio, home of the world’s largest Amish community, Specialist Zach Koppes—who’d attended a private Mennonite school—had never pictured himself landing in a place like Combat Outpost Keating.

  His path from Winesburg to Kamdesh District had been blazed by his troublemaking ways. He was kicked out of high school for breaking into a file cabinet and stealing (then selling) answers to a test, and then, for far worse infractions, he was kicked out of his family’s house. He moved to Colorado to work in landscaping with his uncle Mike but wasn’t particularly good at it. Burnt out, he found himself twisting dough behind the counter of an Auntie Anne’s Pretzels at a Walmart, embarrassed by what he’d become.

  At first, Koppes was just trying to impress a cute girl with talk of joining the military: a commercial came on the TV for the U.S. Navy SEALs, depicting the fierce warriors jumping out of choppers and parachuting into the jungle, and Koppes made an off-the-cuff remark about signing up. But the comment had a weird sort of cling. Joining up would, he figured, solve all his problems. His mother would respect him again, as would his friends. His life’s demerits would be erased; he would no longer be twisting pretzels at Walmart. So one day he smoked a bushel of pot and then headed to an Army recruiter’s office.

  From there, he and five others were driven in a van to a classroom where they took a four-hour test. Afterward, a staff sergeant told him that he’d scored in the top tenth percentile. After basic training, Koppes went back to Ohio before shipping out to Korea. Instead of spending any time with his family—including his thirteen-year-old sister, Eva, who had cystic fibrosis—all Koppes did was smoke pot, hang out with his friends, and hit on girls. He fought with his mom. He fought with his dad. He hadn’t changed at all. The problems remained because the real problem was him.

  Three months later, Koppes was drinking with his Army buddies at his new home, a base in South Korea, when his commanding officer knocked on the door and took him to the chaplain. “We got a call from the Red Cross about Eva,” the chaplain told him. “They don’t think she has much time left. We’re going to put you on the next plane.”

  The two of them had been close, though of course Koppes hadn’t been around much in the previous few years. He flew to her and ran to her hospital bed. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here more,” he said to her. “I’m sorry I didn’t spend more time with you.” He told her how much he loved her. “I love you, too,” she replied. She died two days later. Koppes was convinced she’d been hanging on just to say good-bye to him.

  Back in South Korea, Koppes straightened up. He worked harder. He earned awards. He took classes. His guilt and grief over Eva melted his rebellious, juvenile shell, revealing a humanity he’d all but forgotten was there. After his rotation on the Korean Peninsula, he transferred to 3-61 Cav—then training at Fort Carson, Colorado—so he could spend more time with his girlfriend, Kaila, who attended the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. She ended up dumping him three months later, and that was when Zach Koppes became best friends with Specialist Stephan72 Mace.

  He was Koppes’s first friend in the squadron. Mace was good-looking, with boundless energy and a wicked sense of humor. He and his brothers had grown up in a small community named Purcellville, in Virginia, where they learned patriotism from their maternal grandfather, an Air Force veteran. Mace loved guns growing up, not just to hunt with but also for the craft of their manufacture. He became an apprentice to a gunsmith and built a rifle for his father for Christmas. After 9/11—Stephan was thirteen at the time—the Army just seemed to make sense.

  Everyone in 3-61 Cav seemed to know everyone else from the previous deployment in Iraq; Mace and Koppes were the new guys, and they started hanging out together. They were walking through a Colorado mall together one afternoon when Kaila texted Koppes her official end-of-relationship message. He started to cry.

  “I’m not here to hear you cry,” Mace said. “Let’s go get some booze and party.”

  After that, they became inseparable; their bond was wild and fierce. When Koppes decided to try to win Kaila back, it was Mace who—intoxicated—drove him to her house. They had purchased mullet wigs and wore them everywhere, and Mace had his on tha
t night. As Koppes and Kaila sat down on a stoop to talk, a wigged Mace humped the campus’s giant statue of a mountain lion. Each man’s effort proved fruitless.

  Koppes got back in the car. “Don’t worry about it,” Mace said as he revved the motor and drove off with his friend to another adventure. Koppes knew that as long as Mace was around, he would be okay.

  Specialist Stephan Mace. (Photo courtesy of Vanessa Adelson)

  During one of their first firefights at Combat Outpost Keating, Koppes took shrapnel to his head.

  He was in the Humvee that was parked on the ANA side of the camp—the eastern side, facing the Diving Board to the northeast. After tearing through his rounds, Koppes had begun reloading his M240 machine gun when a round from the old belt—one that had been dented but not fired—cooked off and fired into the ground. Called a hang-fire, this delay between the trigger’s being pulled and the bullet’s being discharged can be deadly. In this case, the bullet, hot from the gun, fired into the ground, and a piece of the metal ricocheted and went right for Koppes, slipping under his helmet and grazing his head. Bleeding and in pain, he was convinced he had been shot by the enemy and started freaking out. Romesha, who’d seen the whole thing happen, grabbed him and took him to the aid station.

  Before 3-61 Cav left Colorado, Koppes had promised that any man who saved his life could have anything he wanted to tattooed on Koppes’s back. So later that day, his head bandaged from the grazing wound, Koppes came in to the Red Platoon barracks and said to Romesha, “Ro, you saved my life, what do you want on my back?”

  Romesha thought it was hilarious. Saved his life? Not only was Koppes going to be fine, but clearly he still didn’t realize that his had technically been a self-inflicted wound. Trying hard not to laugh, his “savior” suggested that he make plans to have “ROMESHA” indelibly recorded across his shoulder blades.

  Command Sergeant Major Rob Wilson, visiting from Forward Operating Base Bostick, had visited Koppes at the aid station and seen for himself that his injuries were minor. In the operations center later that day, Wilson noticed Romesha and Bundermann talking with a suspicious degree of discretion—so he pressed them until Romesha admitted that Koppes’s injury had been caused by a hang-fire. There wouldn’t be any Purple Heart for a self-inflicted wound, Wilson said.

  Eventually, Romesha let the cat out of the bag and told Koppes about the hang-fire. It was a good news/bad news situation: there would be no Purple Heart—but to his own relief and Romesha’s perpetual regret, the young ex-Mennonite had been stopped before self-inflicting yet another wound, this one in ink.

  CHAPTER 27

  The Deer Hunters

  Even to close members of his family, Ed Faulkner, Jr., had never seemed comfortable in his own skin, so it might not have been so surprising that he smoked pot in high school and was twice cited for underage possession of alcohol. He was living at home in Burlington, North Carolina, and working at a driving range when he joined the Army in 2005 to get away from the bad influences in his world. His father and both of his grandfathers had served.

  In Iraq on January 20, 2007, Faulkner was shot by a sniper in his left arm. He got sent home, had some surgeries, and quickly became addicted to painkillers. One of his best friends from Iraq, Specialist Thomas Blakely “Blake” Nelson, was also addicted—he’d had lower back pain after his deployment—and at some point, heroin entered the picture.

  The Black Knight Troop soldiers had a relatively high rate of positive urinalysis at Fort Carson in Colorado after they returned from Iraq—an issue that Captain Porter put a lot of effort into addressing. Faulkner and Nelson were at the center of it. Faulkner was disciplined for using meth, and Brown gave him a shot at rehab. Nelson completed his own six-week resident program, but on January 8, 2008, he was found dead in his room at Fort Carson, having overdosed on a combination of prescription drugs and heroin. Out of rehab for less than a week, he left behind a son named Karson. His death was tough enough on Faulkner in the safe and secure environment of Colorado; it didn’t get any easier once he deployed to Kamdesh. A few months later, up on Observation Post Fritsche with Blue Platoon—they called themselves the Bastards—Faulkner tried to deal with the pain of his life and the pain of losing Blake the only way he knew how: he scored some hashish, which was, to say the least, not that difficult to do in Afghanistan.

  John Francis—an older, no-nonsense sergeant at thirty-five, from Lindenhurst on Long Island, New York—tried to look out for Faulkner. The kid didn’t always make that easy. Francis, a team leader for the Bastards, was sergeant of the guard one night, in charge of calling all the troops at the guard posts, and Faulkner’s tower didn’t answer when he radioed. The operations center at OP Fritsche had a small camera that could provide a 360-degree view of the entire observation post, so Francis focused the camera on Faulkner’s tower and clicked on the night vision. It was pitch black, with no moonlight. Francis pushed the view toward the tower even more and saw some tiny flashes of light. Both wary and curious, Francis grabbed his portable radio and night-vision goggles and walked up to Faulkner’s tower post. He quietly proceeded up the stairwell made out of ammo cans, strode onto the dirt platform in the darkness, and paused to watch Faulkner and another private use a cigarette lighter for illumination as they tried to break up a small brick of hash. There was no mistaking what it was; its aroma alone filled the guard tower. For four minutes or so, Francis stood just mere inches from the two and watched them prepare to smoke hash while on guard duty.

  “What’s up, guys?” Francis finally said, surprising the two enlisted men, who panicked and dropped everything onto the ground.

  “Nothing, Sergeant,” Faulkner said.

  “I called you on the radio,” Francis said. “You guys never answered me.”

  “Oh, check the radio,” said Faulkner, “maybe something’s wrong with the radio.”

  Francis went back to the operations center and spent ten minutes deciding what to do. He felt he had no choice. He knew that Faulkner had demons and addiction issues, so he’d made it his mission to try to keep him out of trouble. He watched over the kid as much as he could. But smoking hash on guard duty in the middle of a war zone was unforgivable.

  Sergeant First Class Jonathan “Dad” Hill was in the operations center with Lieutenant Ben Salentine monitoring enemy radio chatter, when Francis walked in. He told them what he’d seen, and they discussed what to do. It was tough: Faulkner would be severely punished, they knew, and maybe even removed from duty. But they felt they had to report it because the platoon’s integrity was on the line.

  Francis and Hill confronted Faulkner and the other private, who both admitted what they’d almost done. Specialist Faulkner was busted down to private but not discharged.

  Private Ed Faulkner, Jr. (Photo courtesy of Jon Hill)

  And then they got back to work.

  Ever since their arrival at OP Fritsche in May, Lieutenant Ben Salentine had been pushing the Bastards to turn the observation post into a fortress. Sure, they’d all heard that Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown wanted to shut the place down, along with Camp Keating, but until that happened, it would make sense to harden their positions by filling sandbags, improving machine-gun locations, whatever. Salentine gave the order, Hill assigned the men to get it done, and Staff Sergeant Kirk Birchfield, the senior scout, and team leaders and Sergeants Francis and Eric Harder organized the creation of the new positions and fortifications. Daily they labored to make Fritsche as impenetrable as possible.

  The men of Black Knight Troop tried to enjoy themselves as best they could, but it wasn’t always easy. Helicopters would now fly into the area only rarely for resupply, in the blackest night during “Red Illume,”73 so there were periods when the men had to go without hot meals or mail. It was horrible for morale, but mail was not a priority compared with ammunition, MREs, and water. That’s what happens when you’re living on the Pakistan border, Salentine thought. All he cared about getting was sustenance and bull
ets and home to his wife.

  Salentine understood that morale was important, and he knew it was tough for troops to blow off steam when they were penned up in a compound all day like livestock. At OP Fritsche, as at Camp Keating, there were plenty of practical jokes played. On Salentine’s twenty-eighth birthday, for example, his troops packed his room with balloons filled with baby powder. (Only one exploded, hitting Birchfield.) On other occasions, they replaced his shampoo with “fancy sauce,” the ketchup-and-mayonnaise mixture referenced in the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers, and substituted coffee creamer for his talcum powder. John Francis sliced off the bristles of Salentine’s toothbrush bit by bit each day until it was bare. Then there were the group activities. On July 4, 2009, the Bastards invited all of the ANA troops and some of the locals to a barbecue. The Afghans cooked up goat, rice, and flatbread while the Americans grilled chicken, hamburgers, and steak. Another project: with his small digital video camera, Sergeant Jory Brown filmed the Bastards dancing, one by one or in small groups, soundtracked it to “Just Dance” by Lady Gaga (the girliest song he could find), and uploaded the clip to YouTube. The footage was a big hit among the men themselves as well as with their families back home, who could find reassurance in the goofiness. After the video-sharing Web site removed the clip’s audio because of copyright infringement, Brown’s wife ended up posting the uncensored version on her Facebook page.