The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Days before I get to Forward Operating Base Bostick, a B-10 recoilless rifle round hit the center of the camp, not far from Schachman’s hooch. When I share this information on Facebook—where I’ve accumulated a fair number of friends and acquaintances from 3-71, 1-91, 6-4, and 3-61 Cavs—troops and former troops speculate that it must have been the same B-10 that haunted Camp Keating in 2009, the one that badly wounded Sergeant Shane Scherer92 and, to a lesser extent, First Sergeant Ronald Burton.

  Some of the Wolfhounds tell me that in Kamdesh District, Mullah Sadiq and HIG are fighting it out with the Taliban. Other interesting developments: before 3-61 Cav left Afghanistan in 2010, Kamdesh elder Abdul Rahman had become the district administrator for Kamdesh, and “Big” Gul Mohammed has since been assigned to serve as the local chief of the Afghan National Police.

  Major Dominic Edwards is, when I land at Forward Operating Base Bostick, in charge of the entire area of operations while his commander is on leave. A North Carolina native, Edwards is forty-one and has a devoted wife and three children back home in Hawaii. He’s reasonably confident that the Afghan National Army and National Police will be able to assume control of the area within the next couple of years.

  There has been little apparent study of what happened at Combat Outpost Keating. The scope of the 15-6 investigation was limited largely to the matter of whether there was adequate force protection at the outpost, not addressing tougher questions such as whether those troops should have been in that valley at all, or whether the military had even larger issues to resolve. When I mention the Wolfhounds’ nine fallen soldiers to Edwards and ask him if their lives were worth the infrastructure constructed, or even the enemy killed, he quite candidly admits he doesn’t know. That will be for history to judge, he says.

  Specialist Brian Casey of 3-61 Cav was on his way back to Camp Keating from R&R when his friends were attacked on October 3, 2009. His three best friends at the outpost were Michael Scusa, Chris Griffin, and Ed Faulkner.

  Casey wasn’t there for that one battle, but he, too, carries the scars from being in Afghanistan. There have been times when he has scared his family. One morning after a bender, he woke up to find the whole downstairs of his house trashed. He thought his dogs had gotten into a fight. They hadn’t—he’d done it.

  Casey has since pursued help. But still, some nights, if he hears an odd noise, he will go load his shotgun and patrol his house for a few minutes before he realizes how frightening and strange his actions are.

  Of all the troops who served at Combat Outpost Keating, Faulkner suffered the most immediately consequential case of PTSD. Some of his friends think his overdose was purposeful, though there’s no evidence of that. “He took the easy way out,” says Casey.

  A 2008 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that almost 20 percent of service members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan reported some signs of either PTSD or major depression. By now, more than two million Americans have served in those two wars, meaning that the number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from those particular long-term effects is somewhere around four hundred thousand. The RAND study indicated that only about half sought treatment. How effective that treatment may prove to be is obviously an open question; Faulkner, for example, was in treatment.

  Alex Newsom returned to Afghanistan. Based at Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, Newsom—formerly of 1-91 Cav, now with Special Forces—worked with Afghan National Army commandos to fight the Taliban. As I was working on this book, I heard from him periodically via email and on the phone. He was always cryptic about what exactly he was doing, but he wanted me to know—he wanted me to tell you—that all was not lost in Nuristan, that troops had not died in vein.

  In April 2012, the U.S. military posted pictures from a Special Forces mission to Kamdesh Village. The Taliban were on the verge of overrunning Upper Kamdesh, threatening to slaughter the inhabitants if they didn’t side with them. For two weeks, the Taliban had been deliberately and methodically attacking locals in the middle of the night. Then, in early April, ISAF special operations troops and 120 ANA commandos entered the area under the cover of darkness. They were there for five days, fighting and beating back up to three hundred insurgents.

  “The people that we supported kept up the fight long after we left,” Newsom reported to me, referring to his time with 1-91 Cav. He had a joyful reunion with Mawlawi Abdul Rahman—“I heard you guys needed some help,” Newsom told the new district administrator. Then, at a district center in Upper Kamdesh, he saw former HIG leader Mullah Sadiq. “He looked pretty ill, but he’s on our side,” he confided.

  “Our relationships that we established years ago were paramount in the success of the liberation of that particular village,” Newsom insisted. “Without any American presence for two and a half years, these people we supported, they kept the fight up. All they needed was equipment. These are good people. There is hope.” For Captain America, still running through the mountains of Nuristan, the fight goes on.

  On May 21, 2012, President Obama and the NATO allies announced that in the summer of 2013, Afghan government forces—ready or not—would take the lead on providing security throughout the country, and that U.S. combat forces would see their mission end come midnight, December 31, 2014. (It seems likely, nevertheless, that Special Forces units such as Newsom’s will remain in country beyond that date, conducting counterterrorism missions.)

  Captain Alex Newsom of U.S. Special Forces with Mawlawi Abdul Rahman (to his right) and others as U.S. forces and Afghan commandos fought back against Taliban insurgents in Kamdesh Village in April 2012. (Photo courtesy of Alex Newsom)

  At the NATO summit, in Chicago, the president took questions from reporters. I had solicited suggestions from the troops you’ve met in these pages as well as from their families, and I’d selected two, both from members of 3-61 Cav.

  Asked now-Captain Stephen Cady: “If this handoff and withdrawal prove premature, what plans are in place for dealing with an Afghanistan that’s fallen apart or is, possibly, again, under Taliban rule?”

  “I don’t think that there’s ever going to be an optimal point where we say, ‘This is all done, this is perfect, this is just the way we wanted it, and now we can… wrap up all our equipment and go home,’ ” the president said, speaking more from the heart than usual—probably because he felt he was conveying something directly to the fighting men, instead of just to a White House reporter. “There’s a process, and it’s sometimes a messy process, just as it was in Iraq. But think about it. We’ve been there now ten years… the Afghan security forces themselves will not ever be prepared if they don’t start taking that responsibility” for their own security.

  The president continued, “The large footprint that we have in Afghanistan, over time, can be counterproductive…. No matter how much good we’re doing and how outstanding our troops and our civilians and diplomats are doing on the ground, ten years, in a country that’s very different, that’s a strain, not only on our folks but also on that country, which at a point is going to be very sensitive about its own sovereignty. So I think that the timetable that we’ve established is a sound one, it is a responsible one. Are there risks involved in it? Absolutely. Can I anticipate that over the next two years there are going to be some bad moments along with some good ones? Absolutely.”

  But, he said, “I think it is the appropriate strategy whereby we can achieve a stable Afghanistan that won’t be perfect, we can pull back our troops in a responsible way, and we can start rebuilding America.”

  I then relayed a question from Eric Harder: “Do you feel that the reporting you receive from the Pentagon fully represents what the on-ground commanders assess? Is there any disconnect between what leaders feel the public and the president want to hear versus what is actually occurring on the ground?”

  “I can’t afford a whitewash,” the president said. “I can’t afford not getting the very best information in order to make good decisions…. The dange
r a lot of times is not that anybody’s purposely trying to downplay challenges in Afghanistan. A lot of times it’s just the military culture is, ‘We can get it done.’ And so their thinking is, How are we going to solve this problem? not Boy, why is this such a disaster? That’s part of the reason why we admire our military so much and we love our troops, because they’ve got that can-do spirit.”

  The president said that he thought he had “set up a structure that really tries to guard against that, because even in my White House, for example, I’ve got former officers who have been in Afghanistan, who I will send out there as part of the national security team of the White House, not simply the Pentagon, to interact and to listen and to go in and talk to the captains and the majors and the corporals and the privates, to try to get a sense of what’s going on. And I think the reports we get are relatively accurate in the sense that there is real improvement in those areas where we’ve had a significant presence.”

  Harder was at that moment in Afghanistan, unsure that the president was really getting the full story.

  In the course of my conversations and interviews for this project, I was told by one recently retired general with experience in Afghanistan that he hoped this book might have an impact on the nation in wars going forward.

  How so? I asked.

  “The wars of the twenty-first century have been outsourced by the American people to our government in D.C. and to our military,” he said. “With an all-volunteer force, the American people are no more connected to our armed forces than the Roman citizens were to the legionnaires. And now we even pay for wars with tax cuts. So, whose war and whose Army is it?”

  The general hoped that at least some members of the public would, through reading this book, come to a greater understanding of just what war entails, just what the sacrifices mean. “I worry it is becoming too easy for the United States to use force,” he added. “There are not enough domestic constraints.”

  Colonel Shamsur Rahman, of the Afghan Border Police, tells me that most of the fighters who attacked COP Keating were local, from the surrounding area.

  Did the Americans do any good while they were there? I ask him.

  “There was progress there,” he says, “but when the progress was about to be completed, the bad guys would come and burn it down. The intentions were good, but the insurgents wouldn’t allow it.” And the locals were terrified. “If they participated, the bad guys would target them, kill them. Many people died that way.”

  Colonel Rahman also points a finger at the power player present throughout this book, the enemy that neither the American troops nor the ANA can go after: he says that Pakistan’s intelligence services played a role in the attack. “The ISI told the fighters, ‘The Americans are leaving, make a statement,’ ” he tells me. “ ‘Make sure damage is done.’ ”

  Many U.S. troops have found the way their government is waging war in Afghanistan simply farcical, given the immense role played by that country to the east, and the official policy of denying that reality. Sure, myriad American drones are buzzing about in Pakistan killing bad guys (and, inevitably, some innocents), remotely piloted by Americans thousands of miles away, in places such as New Mexico. And yes, when the time came to do away with Osama bin Laden, President Obama gave the go order, and American Special Forces went to Abottabad and killed the leader of Al Qaeda. But it’s worth noting that in this book—about the bad guys who killed Americans, ANA soldiers, Nuristanis, and other Afghans who fought for their country—Pakistan is mentioned far more often than are bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That fact, however, is so inconvenient for policymakers as to be, within the larger scheme of war planning, almost ignored.

  Soldiers die in war. Sometimes troops are lost in battle, and sometimes they’re killed by the terrain. Sometimes they die because of carelessness or accidents, and sometimes because of wind and trees, random twists of fate, the nature of life. Aircraft carriers that haven’t seen any action at all may nevertheless return to port with fewer sailors on board: some fell overboard, some contracted illnesses.

  The ephemeral desires of generals for control of specific territories—the drive to claim particular plots of land that will soon enough lose their importance, if indeed they ever had any to begin with—inform a mindset that is long-established. Its existence doesn’t make casualties any less tragic, of course; it simply makes them unsurprising to any soldier.

  And yet, there is no sugar-coating the tragedy of Combat Outpost Keating. In 2006, the U.S. Army went into this particularly dangerous part of Afghanistan and set up, throughout the region, small combat outposts, observation posts, and provincial reconstruction teams that quickly became ripe targets for a strengthening insurgency. The bases were frequently small, generally difficult to defend, and sometimes quite far from any available air support. The troops who fought there often felt as if they were on their own. And in some ways, they were.

  Once Colonel Nicholson committed to sending troops into Nuristan, the Army had an obligation to make sure they received enough support to accomplish their mission. I do not see evidence that the men of Camp Keating, throughout the lifespan of the outpost, ever got that level of support. From the outset, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not send enough troops or resources—not even close—to succeed at the counterinsurgency, the “nation building,” that was becoming the goal in the Afghanistan war. (President Bush has since admitted as much, however little attention that part of his legacy—his reluctance to listen to the generals who suggested that the war would cost more money, and require more manpower, than predicted in initial projections—may get in his presidential library and in the history books.) Then, when President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates finally did surge troops and increase resources in Afghanistan, General McChrystal was still forced to ration critical assets. The closure of Combat Outpost Keating was delayed because most of the available helicopters in country were devoted to Barg-e-Matal. Squadrons and battalions were chronically undermanned; while the Pentagon investigation pronounced Melvin Porter of 3-61 Cav “weak” as a leader, we might do well to recall that his commanders were themselves so understaffed when it came to captains that they kept him in place for three extra months because they had no one to replace him with.

  By October 3, 2009, President Obama had been commander in chief for eight months, during which period top officials in his White House had been consumed by the politics of their squabbles with the Pentagon, with both the politicians and the Pentagon brass feeding a beast of dysfunction that did not serve U.S. troops with the professionalism and urgency they deserved. The generals, for their part, were confused as to precisely what the president wanted them to do in Afghanistan and how he saw this war upon which he’d pledged to place a renewed focus. President Obama’s first national security adviser, Jim Jones, would ultimately leave his post in 2010 amid grumblings from senior officials over his lack of success in improving relations between the White House and the Pentagon.

  That said, no president—neither President Obama nor President Bush before him—could be expected to focus on battle maps of Kunar and Nuristan in order to discern what might be best for the troops in a specific area of operations. The Ranch House, Wanat, Bari Alai—all of these disasters preceded the assault on Combat Outpost Keating, and all followed the same pattern, in which an overwhelming Taliban force attacked a small, remote U.S. base. It has been said that the United States did not fight a ten-year war in Vietnam; rather, it fought a one-year war ten times in a row. Perhaps the same will one day be said of Afghanistan.

  It is not only with the benefit of hindsight that McChrystal’s lack of urgency about closing Combat Outpost Keating might seem tragic. George and Brown had been planning for the withdrawal for nearly a year, but McChrystal refused to take the request as seriously as he should have. And while the lack of air assets would become an obstacle by July, McChrystal’s initial considerations were political: he was worried about getting ahead of President Obama, and then
about upsetting President Karzai. Realpolitik is not an ideal; it is, instead, the absence of one.

  I did not write this book to convey lessons to be learned. I wrote it so that you as a reader (and I as a reporter) might better understand what it is that our troops go through, why they go through it, and what their experience has been like in Afghanistan. There are far superior military minds that can judge what went wrong and what policies might be formulated to guard against future disasters, future Combat Outpost Keatings. But one conclusion I cannot escape is that the saga of Combat Outpost Keating illustrates, above all else, the deep-rooted inertia of military thinking. Instead of seriously reconsidering the camp’s location, the Army defaulted to its usual mindset: We’re already there, let’s just fortify the camp a little more. That might be a fine way to go about establishing, say, a new Starbucks in a sketchy neighborhood, but it’s beyond glib in this context.

  It was easier for me to get to Forward Operating Base Bostick than it was to get back. The military system is more interested in moving men to the enemy quickly, less interested in pulling them out. Such thinking—“easy to advance, difficult to retreat”—is burned into the military brain. Hence, the outpost was originally put in its precarious location so it would be near the road to facilitate resupply, but it stayed there even after the troops all but stopped using the road, within months of Lieutenant Ben Keating’s death. This was a symptom of what President Obama, in May 2012, would refer to as the “How are we going to solve this problem?” mindset, the one that avoids asking instead, “Boy, why is this such a disaster?”

  Unfortunately, the military doesn’t have much concept of irony, since the actual definition is so often the opposite of the literal definition of so many actions (a dynamic perfectly captured by Joseph Heller). But naming an outpost after a soldier whose very death exemplified why the outpost should not have been there in the first place? That would seem to qualify.