“That place,” he announced, “is a fucking death trap.”
CHAPTER THREE
Keating
THE PROVINCE OF NURISTAN is so isolated and poor that US soldiers who have logged time there often refer to it as the Appalachia of Afghanistan. Like Appalachia, this region on the southern side of the Hindu Kush is home to a population of fiercely independent people who have a reputation for insularity and backwardness, and who take a dim view of outsiders. They also know how to fight.
These are the direct descendants of tribes that went up against the armies of invading emperors like Tamerlane and Babur and even Alexander the Great. More recently, their fathers and grandfathers were the first Mojahedin guerrilla fighters to rise up against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The revolt they kicked off inspired other parts of the country to join the rebellion, which bled the Russians for the better part of a decade until the last Red Army units finally limped back across the northern border in the winter of 1989. Within a few months a series of revolutions in Eastern Europe, triggered in part by the disaster that the Russians had endured in Afghanistan, would culminate in the fall of the Berlin Wall and, soon thereafter, the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.
If you’re not from this part of the world, you should think very carefully before you decide to fuck with the people of Nuristan.
When the US government decided to fling itself into Afghanistan following the attacks of 9/11, it encountered a problem in the eastern part of the country that would have made every Russian commander who had served time in the region back in the 1970s nod in recognition. By the summer of 2005, American forces and their NATO allies found themselves confronting a sharp increase in insurgent activity along the Pakistan border, right where Nuristan sits.
Here, in a forbidding sector of impossibly steep mountains pierced by rushing rivers of snowmelt, Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters were employing a network of secluded valleys as transportation corridors to move fighters and weapons between the two countries. (There were rumors that this corridor system may have also been used to smuggle Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan sometime after US forces drove him from his fortress of caves in the mountains of Tora Bora.) If you sat down in front of a map and plotted out those routes, they looked exactly like the supply lines that the Afghan Mojahedin had used to funnel men and arms against the Soviets back in the eighties.
In the summer of 2006, the American military decided to tackle this problem by making a firm push into Nuristan and Kunar, the province directly to the south, with the aim of establishing a string of forward bases deep inside both provinces. The idea was that these bases would enable us to disrupt the enemy’s supply lines while simultaneously winning over suspicious local villagers by providing them with things they lacked. New roads. Clean drinking water. Schools.
The initial phase of this thrust was known as Operation Mountain Lion, and most of the donkey work was performed by units from the army’s 10th Mountain Division. The operation took roughly three months, and by the end of this period, they had established almost a dozen outposts, including a handful of very small bases along an extremely narrow road that winds next to the Kunar River and one of its main tributaries.
Each of those outposts seemed more remote and inaccessible than the last. But the final one, which would eventually come to be called Keating, was in a class all by itself.
• • •
“WARS,” observed the writer Sebastian Junger during a year that he spent with a small unit of American soldiers in Kunar Province, “are fought with very heavy machinery that works best on top of the biggest hill in the area and used against men who are lower down. That, in a nutshell, is military tactics.”
In two sentences, Junger nailed the most elementary principle of small-arms combat, a concept that dates back to when the cutting edge of military technology was catapults and war elephants. In the face of that truth—which represents a distillation of roughly four thousand years of martial wisdom—it’s not unreasonable to ask why, when they sat down to draw up the plans for Keating in the summer of 2006, the intelligence analysts at the 10th Mountain Division thought that this principle could be tossed out the window.
In one form or another, that question continues to haunt every soldier who later served there.
The location the analysts selected was unacceptable by almost any yardstick you’d care to measure it with. Positioned only fourteen miles from the Pakistan border, the site was ensconced in the deepest valley of Nuristan’s Kamdesh District at a spot that resembled the bowl of a toilet. It was surrounded by steep mountains whose summits went as high as twelve thousand feet and whose ridgelines would enable an enemy to pour fire down on the outpost while remaining concealed behind a thick scrim of trees and boulders. To mount an attack, the Taliban needed only to scramble along its ratlines—the foot trails lining the backsides of the ridges that the enemy used to bring in supplies and ammunition—set up, and start shooting directly into the compound.
In military parlance, this is known as “plunging fire” and it is extremely difficult to suppress, because whenever the defenders started returning fire in earnest, the enemy had only to disappear down the far side of the ridges. The moment the defense let up, the enemy was free to return and resume work. This pattern of strike and dodge would continue until the Americans called in their attack helicopters from Jalalabad (eighty miles away), its fighter jets and Spectre gunships from Bagram Airfield just outside of Kabul (two hundred miles), or, when things really got bad, the long-range B-1 bombers in Qatar, more than thirteen hundred miles away.
View of the North Face from COP Keating
View down into COP Keating from the North Face
The village of Urmul
This enormous tactical disadvantage was obvious to anybody inside the base who took the trouble to tilt his head and look up. But that was only the start of Keating’s liabilities.
In addition to the fact that it was ringed by mountains, it was flanked by rivers: the Darreh-ye Kushtāz on the west, which separated the outpost from its helicopter landing zone, and the Landay-Sin to the north. It also sat adjacent to Urmul, home to about twenty families whose mud-brick homes—and in particular, their mosque—offered additional cover for enemy fighters. And as a final grace note, the closest US base, which was located in the little village of Naray and would eventually come to be known as Bostick, was a six-hour drive along the only road in, which was barely thirteen feet wide and often skirted the edge of impossibly steep cliffs.
In short, the site was remote, isolated, virtually impossible to supply, and so breathtakingly open to plunging fire that massive amounts of artillery and airpower would be required to defend it. Those flaws were so glaringly evident that that the young specialist who was ordered to draw up the initial plans dubbed it “Custer.”
If you wanted to find an illustration of the worst possible place to build a firebase, a site that violated every morsel of wisdom that had been pounded into the heads of the soldiers who would be ordered to defend COP Keating, it would be hard to come up with a better example than this. And yet that’s exactly what the army did in the summer of 2006.
The problems started surfacing almost immediately.
• • •
WITHIN THREE WEEKS of the first troopers’ arrival, the camp was assaulted in force—not once, but twice. The second time involved a three-pronged attack that demonstrated how exposed the soldiers inside the new location were to enemy surveillance and fire.
Meanwhile, the overland supply line turned out to be unusable. Armed convoys met heavy resistance on the narrow mountain road from Bostick, and the resulting firefights also prevented Afghan construction workers from improving the road. To further terrorize the locals, insurgents set up fake checkpoints, then began cutting off the ears and noses of Afghan truck drivers who worked for the Americans.
The perils of tha
t road, which by now everyone was calling “Ambush Alley,” were demonstrated most graphically that autumn when a young American soldier, a bright and energetic lieutenant from Maine, attempted to drive a massive armored supply truck—one that never should have been taken up the road to begin with—back to Bostick. When the berm collapsed under the weight of the nine-ton vehicle, the truck was sent plummeting over a three-hundred-foot cliff toward the Landay-Sin River. The officer was flung from the cab, and when his comrades climbed down to him, they found him broken in so many places they barely knew where to begin. His legs had multiple open fractures. Both of his feet appeared to have been almost severed at the ankles. His back was broken and he was bleeding profusely from the head, abdomen, and groin.
After applying tourniquets and splints, his rescuers placed him on a stretcher and began pulling him back toward the road. Halfway up, his pulse disappeared. By the time he reached the top, he was obviously dead. Still, they flew him to Bostick by helicopter, where the doctors spent forty minutes attempting to resuscitate him with open cardiac massage.
His name was Ben Keating, and in addition to ending the use of the road, his death gave the outpost its official name.
That was November of 2006. During the next two years, the regular drumbeat of attacks took an increasing toll on each succeeding unit of soldiers until, in October of 2008, a targeted assassination attempt was made on Keating’s then commander, Captain Robert Yllescas, who later died from his wounds. This meant that two of the outpost’s four American commanders had now been killed.
By this point, it was obvious to everyone that Keating was simply too isolated to defend. And so, plans were finally set in motion to shut the base down—a decision that actually compromised Keating’s security even further, because now no additional effort or resources would be invested into improving the fortifications.
This didn’t bode well for Keating’s final group of soldiers, the unlucky cavalry troopers who would be tasked with one of the most unenviable missions one can imagine. Because the only thing worse than being ordered to defend an outpost that never should have been built is having to dismantle the thing and take it down.
That, in a nutshell, is what me and the rest of Black Knight Troop were told to prepare for as we boarded the first of a series of flights that would take us from the airstrip at Fort Carson through Germany, Kyrgyzstan, and eventually to Jalalabad Airfield, where we spent several days on the tarmac awaiting the final set of helicopter rides that would drop us into Bostick, Keating’s main source of support and supplies, as well as the final jumping-off point in the journey to our new home.
• • •
IN THE HINDU KUSH, pilots often say that the weather is “valley-to-valley.” What that means is that on any given morning, especially in the fall, one drainage can be bright and clear while its neighboring sector just a few miles away can be shrouded in storm. Depending on the wind, the temperature, and a host of other variables, you might be able to fly up and down the entire Kunar Valley without a second thought while the Kamdesh Valley is buttoned down tight enough to make even the shortest flight unthinkable.
For military aviators, especially those who pilot the low-flying helicopters that were responsible for providing transportation and close air support to American ground troops in the spring of 2009, this made for one of the most challenging flying environments on earth.
The helicopter pilots of the 7th Squadron, 17th Cavalry Regiment, 159th Combat Aviation Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division were the bread-and-butter backbone of the war effort in those mountains, and one of the machines they flew, the CH-47 Chinook, served as flying delivery trucks that hauled everything imaginable, from hand grenades and claymore mines to Pop-Tarts, air conditioners, and incoming groups of soldiers like us.
By this point, things had gotten so bad that the Chinook pilots from Jalalabad were wary of flying into Keating for anything other than to deliver diesel fuel, food, and ammo. Even then, they would make their runs only during “low illume,” the portion of the month when there was little or no moonlight to paint a chopper into a fat target for the Taliban gunners. So it wasn’t until May 27 that we had a night dark enough for them to bring in our advance party, a group that included me, Bundermann, and First Sergeant Burton, plus two of our medics and half a dozen other guys.
By the time we hit the landing zone, it was well after midnight. We could barely see a thing as we helped shove crates out the back of the double-bladed bird. Then we were ushered up to the chow hall for a quick bite to eat.
It was confusing in the dark, and despite our night-vision goggles, we couldn’t see much. Every major feature of what was about to become our home—the twenty-odd small buildings clustered haphazardly inside an area the size of a football field—was shrouded in shadow. As for the terrain beyond the wire, it was completely invisible.
The soldiers who would be turning the place over to us didn’t show us much that first night before we hit our racks and bedded down—mainly just the piss tubes and the latrines. And then, very first thing the next morning, we were under attack.
We hadn’t even awoken when the Taliban started blasting us with small-arms fire from places in the surrounding slopes whose names would soon become way too familiar. The North Face. The Putting Green. The Diving Board. The Switchbacks. They also punched us with a couple of 84-mm explosive rounds from a B-10 recoilless rifle, rounds that came in with a whoosh and a roar that left us stunned.
In the middle of this attack, a soldier who belonged to the unit we would be relieving ducked into the barracks and told us that one of their sergeants had just taken a nasty shot to the head. To prevent additional casualties, he said, it would probably be best if us new guys refrained from running around and instead stayed put inside the barracks. As he left, we all agreed that we were being offered an extremely useful gut check: the sort of reminder that drove home not only how dangerous this place was, but also how vulnerable we would be.
A few minutes later, when the incoming fire died down, we stepped outside to take stock of our surroundings. That was when we got our real gut check.
• • •
I LEANED BACK and gasped in amazement as I gazed up at the mountains and ridgelines shooting into the sky in every direction—steep-sided escarpments studded with exposed granite and blanketed with trees that made the trails running through them completely invisible.
“Man,” I said to myself, “I’m gonna build some strong neck muscles in this place over the next year.”
That was followed by a more sobering realization.
The placement of the outpost not only made no sense—anyone could shoot into the perimeter from almost any position you’d care to imagine—but it violated everything I’d ever been taught. Almost without realizing it, I started running through a checklist of broken rules:
A large, diffuse perimeter too big for defenders to man a sufficient number of guard posts?
Check.
Nowhere to hide, aside from a few low-slung buildings and a couple of armored Humvees?
Yep.
A helicopter landing zone on the far side of a river?
Roger that.
“This is like being in a fishbowl,” I muttered. “Those fuckers can see everything we do.”
My final thought that morning was of Kirk and his warnings about what a terrible position this was.
Kirk really liked to embellish things, so most of us, me included, had brushed him off. But now that I was here, I could see that for once, he hadn’t been blowing smoke up our butts.
“Kirk, you bastard, you were right,” I said. “This place is a total shithole.”
• • •
THAT VERY FIRST DAY, those of us in the advance party spent most of our time walking around the outpost in an effort to get a sense of how the place was laid out.
The primary structures at Keating were fashio
ned from stone and wood, and most of them had plywood roofs reinforced with sandbags. The walls of the command post and those of the barracks for each platoon were more than a foot thick. The roofs of these structures were also reinforced with up to five inches of concrete, plus a layer of sandbags on top, which meant that they were capable of sustaining direct hits from rockets or mortars.
The other location that enjoyed heavy protection was the mortar pit, a small niche tucked beneath an overhanging rock on the southwestern corner of the outpost. This is where the 120-mm and 60-mm mortars were located, along with a concrete barracks for the four-man crew who served those guns. But most of the other buildings inside the wire, including the latrines, the showers, and the chow hall, were much more vulnerable. Slapped together with plywood and two-by-sixes, they had no protection whatsoever from direct or indirect fire.
Some of the structures at Keating
The buildings were also arranged haphazardly, with little or no sense of a larger plan. There were narrow alleyways running between some of them, while others were connected by shallow trenches. A handful of them simply sat out in the open with nothing to shield or protect them other than some camo netting and a few trees.
There were also a total of 577 Hescos—five-foot-high, seven-foot-wide wire-mesh containers filled with dirt, which offered an effective shield against explosions and small-arms fire. The Hescos were strung together to form Keating’s outer walls on the east, north, and west sides of camp, plus one major wall that ran directly through the center of the outpost on a north-to-south axis.
The southern perimeter was protected only by triple-strand concertina wire.
To supplement those barriers, the camp maintained five main battle positions from which we could lay down heavy defensive fire and hopefully stop an attack. Four of these were armored Humvees, each of which featured a gun turret on top of the cab. The fifth position was a tower built into a building that overlooked the front gate on the northwest side of camp. The weapons systems on the gun trucks and the tower included three .50-caliber machine guns, a pair of Mark 19 grenade launchers, and two M240 heavy machine guns.
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