The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Berkoff’s briefing was for the benefit of only a select few officers, not the entire squadron; the great majority of the troops had no clue as to what HIG was or how deep ran its fanaticism. They also had no idea that soon enough, members of this group they’d never heard of would be trying to kill them.

  As Fenty’s team pushed north, the terrain became lusher and more scenic, with raging rivers and tall mountains. Along the way, the convoy traversed the infamous Khost–Gardez Pass, where Soviet troops had been regularly ambushed two decades before, a tradition now extended to include Americans. Upon reaching Forward Operating Base Gardez, Fenty and his men stopped for the night.

  On day two, Fenty’s convoy traveled from Gardez to the outskirts of Kabul and then headed toward Jalalabad Airfield, about a hundred miles away. It was not an easy trip. Berkoff was told that a section of the main road was out between Kabul and Jalalabad, near the Surobi Dam. Not damaged, not under repair, just… out. No further explanation was forthcoming or even needed. This was Afghanistan; this was how it was. So the next day, the convoy set off on a long alternate route, switchbacking over mountains, back and forth, back and forth. It took eighteen hours, but everyone made it to Jalalabad alive.

  Afghanistan was not a nation known for its robust infrastructure. Summer rainstorms could wash roads out, and even under optimal conditions, a road might be so narrow that a convoy would have to take detours via riverbeds just to get through. If staying dry was a priority, the only other option was to brave the steep cliffs, but that involved no small risk. On the same day that Fenty’s convoy left Khost, a Marine was killed in one of the provinces they would be stopping in—Nangarhar—when his Humvee accidentally rolled over the edge.10

  In Nangarhar, at Jalalabad Airfield, Fenty and his men linked up with a battalion from the 10th Mountain that was headquartered there, the 1-32 Infantry, led by Lieutenant Colonel Chris Cavoli—he of the scrambled running shoes. Loud and gregarious, Cavoli was yin to the reserved Fenty’s yang. Fenty could go for hours without speaking; Cavoli was as restless as a hyperactive child at Mass. During their assignment in war-torn Yugoslavia, Fenty had considerately played country music at low volume, whereas Cavoli had blasted the Clash and Springsteen. And now both men were in Afghanistan. Cavoli and his best friend were excited to see each other, but Cavoli was most interested in the wellbeing of Fenty’s wife, Kristen.

  For years, Kristen Fenty had been unable to conceive a child. That had been okay with her husband: the two of them moved around a lot, and their life style wasn’t conducive to parenthood. They were pretty satisfied with things the way they were. All of that changed in the summer of 2005, however, when Kristen Fenty—at the age of forty—got pregnant. Their little girl was due in April.

  From: Joe Fenty

  Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006

  To: Kristen Fenty

  Dear, hope all is well. I’m traveling but sure would like to get a note from you. Please let me know how you’re feeling. The timing is awful. I’m going to be at the most remote place on the due date….

  Miss you and love you,

  Joseph

  From: Kristen Fenty

  Sent: Friday, March 17, 2006

  To: Joseph Fenty

  Dear, did you get the note I sent you yesterday and in the middle of the night before?…

  As part of the book club, [we’re] going to hold a “kite run” in May in recognition of the Taliban ban on kite festivals and their resurgence after the U.S. liberation of Kabul. We’re going to try to hold a “build a kite for your soldier” craft day and then hold the festival on the parade field….

  The house is now spotless and I’m ready to pack for the hospital. I don’t want to go through labor, though. I think I’ll opt for drugs. Do you have any thoughts?

  Do you like Lauren as well as Kelly? I think it will need to be Kelly if she’s born today (St. Patrick’s Day)—our twentieth anniversary since our hookup….

  Love you—

  Kristen

  On their runs, Fenty would confide to Del Byers that he was worried about how old a dad he would soon be. He was already forty-one.

  “Shit, Joe,” Byers would say to him, “you can already outrun ninety percent of the U.S. Army—what are you worried about?”

  Byers reminded his friend that nothing was easy in the Army, including parenting. Byers’s own kids were teenagers, and he was missing most of their high school years.

  “You’ll get to see her grow up,” Byers told Fenty.

  In the 1-32 Infantry briefing room, Cavoli introduced Fenty to his staff and commanders. “Give him and his team all the support they need while they’re here,” he instructed.

  Before moving on to their final destination, Fenty and his team took the opportunity afforded by this brief pit stop in Jalalabad—the new headquarters for the brigade in charge of this area of operations—to begin face-to-face planning for a pending operation in Kunar Province, the one that would put Joe Fenty in “the most remote place on the due date.” Troops from 3-71 Cav, 1-32 Infantry, and the 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marines, would all participate in what was being called Operation Mountain Lion, after which Fenty and 3-71 Cav would move with full force into Nuristan. On March 19, Fenty’s convoy pulled out of Jalalabad.

  The road they took followed the Kunar River, which bestowed life on the surrounding terrain, transforming it from a dusty brown into a lush green. They stopped at Camp Wright—an outpost that was on their way—and hiked eight hundred feet up to a former mujahideen observation post. From there they saw the ancient Nawa Pass leading into Pakistan. It was the same corridor used by Alexander’s cavalry twenty-three hundred years before, Berkoff said. Again, the uncomfortable history of empires in this land hung like a noose.

  CHAPTER 3

  Like Just Another Day on the Range

  The ultimate destination of the 3-71 Cav convoys was a small Special Forces base established in 2004 in Naray District, Kunar Province, near the provincial border with Nuristan. Fenty’s men were tasked with building the camp into a fully functioning forward operating base. They would be the first conventional troops to be stationed there.

  Soon after their arrival, the 3-71 Cav troops moved into barracks just vacated by what were called ASGs, or Afghan Security Guards—locally hired contractors who were not directly affiliated with either the Afghan National Army or the Afghan National Police. Special Forces Captain Steve Snyder,11 whose team had been the only U.S. military force at Naray until 3-71 Cav got there, had ordered the Afghans to move into tents, but the locals had left their mark: the barracks reeked of body odor, rotting food, and what smelled like feces. One of the 3-71 Cav officers, Captain Pete Stambersky, smeared Vicks VapoRub under his nose just so he could breathe. Snyder knew it stank in there, but the sting from the enemy rockets in the area was far worse. Better to have a roof over your head, he thought.

  Berkoff found the sparse conditions demoralizing. It wasn’t just here at Naray; throughout their tour of U.S. bases in Afghanistan, from Khost to Jalalabad, he and others in 3-71 Cav had been stunned by the enforced austerity whereby soldiers could be simply jammed against one another in rows of green cots. The Iraq veterans among them couldn’t believe how grim their Afghanistan quarters were compared to U.S. bases in Iraq—especially since Iraq was the more recent of the two wars, with the United States’ having gone into that country more than a year after entering Afghanistan. But then again, the officers reminded themselves, Iraq had long been the favored war of their commander in chief, and Afghanistan the one that would be fought on the cheap.

  Snyder had been running his twelve-man Special Forces team out of Naray since January. He conducted his operations with a palpable intensity, haunted by the ghosts of nineteen Americans—fellow special-operations troops—who’d been killed before he even arrived.

  In June 2005, as part of a mission designated Operation Redwing, a four-man team of Navy SEALs on the trail of an enemy leader named Ahmad Shah was dropped into the mountains of
Kunar. There the Americans were attacked by insurgents, who killed three of the four team members and also shot down a Chinook helicopter, killing even more SEALs as well as the special-operations Nightstalker crew and pilots, for a total of nineteen U.S. casualties in all. For the men of Naval Special Warfare, that day marked the largest single loss of life since World War II.12

  By mid-2005, the commander of special operations in Afghanistan was considering shutting down the base at Naray. Instead, U.S. military leaders went the other way, sending in conventional forces—3-71 Cav—in part to help Snyder, who welcomed the arrival of Fenty and his squadron.

  Snyder’s task was to disrupt and kill what were then called ACMs, or anticoalition militias—in short, anyone who didn’t like the U.S.-led coalition. He knew that the Taliban had been using Pakistan as a safe haven, so his team’s first operation was to trek to a length of border reputed to be particularly porous. Dukalam, Afghanistan, was adjacent to Arandu, Pakistan. It was clear that the Afghan Border Police and Pakistani border guards were turning a blind eye on those seeking passage; anyone who wanted to cross could do so anywhere he liked. That changed only when the Afghan Border Police became aware that the Americans were watching. Then the gates suddenly closed, and everyone got to work.

  As they made the rounds in their area of operations, Snyder and his men visited hamlets and communities so isolated they could be reached only on foot. The mountain peaks here were more than twelve thousand feet high; even the mountain passes were at ten to eleven thousand feet. When the Americans reached each village, they would ask the elders if they could enter; unfailingly, the locals would welcome the big men with guns, just as they and their forefathers had welcomed so many other men with superior weapons before them. To Snyder, they did not seem of the twenty-first century. Many of them initially mistook the U.S. troops for Soviets, returning after the USSR’s withdrawal nearly a generation before. Some were evidently unaware that the USSR had ceased to exist; others hadn’t heard about 9/11; still other locals thought 9/11 had been a retaliation for the American invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. Most of them didn’t know how to read; few knew anything of modern medicine. One Afghan came to the base needing medical attention after trying to use wet concrete as a salve for a wound. Snyder noted that the Afghans appeared to have no comprehension of time; they didn’t even seem to know how old they were. He would inquire about a certain insurgent, and the Afghans would say they hadn’t seen him in two or three days, two or three weeks, two or three years. Everything was in twos or threes.

  Snyder and his men were being asked to operate in a world they could not fathom.

  Snyder and his intel officer briefed the 3-71 Cav troops on their new home and its nearby settlements. Residing in the village of Kamdesh was a local HIG commander who had gone underground but was believed to shuttle back and forth routinely between Afghanistan and Pakistan. A Taliban leader lived in Pitigal, and another HIG leader in Bazgal; the hamlet of Sedmashal was reportedly home to a bomb-maker known as the Engineer—a nickname often bestowed, in that region, on anyone thought to be educated. In Gawardesh, a local timber smuggler–cum–HIG commander reigned.

  And then, in the Kotya Valley,13 there were the Ayoub brothers. In June 2004, a group of Marines had returned to their small firebase after thirty-six hours on observation patrol. When he checked his gear, one Marine realized he was missing his night-vision goggles. The next day, word came from higher up that he had to go back to the makeshift observation post with the other two members of his fire team to recover the goggles. They didn’t find them there, but on their way back, the Marines stumbled across a group of Afghans who were preparing to ambush a U.S. convoy. The Afghans instead attacked the three Marines, killing two of them.14 The Ayoub brothers—Daoud, Sardar, Mohammed, and others—were presumed to be responsible for the deaths, Snyder said.

  As the new commanding officer of the base at Naray, Fenty decided to make getting rid of the Ayoub brothers his first priority. In order to do this, however, he needed to secure the cooperation of the elders of Kotya, so he invited them to Naray to participate in a shura—a consultation with village elders that is an important aspect of governance in majority Muslim countries. The elders accepted the invitation and came to the base, but they were not receptive to Fenty’s overtures; indeed, they asked him to stay away from the valley. They also claimed not to know anything about the Ayoubs.

  One U.S. official would later suggest that the Kotya elders had acted cooperatively just in coming to the U.S. base at Fenty’s request. “It is not a trivial thing from the perspective of Afghans to respond like a dog when someone whistles,” the official explained. “That’s especially true for prominent individuals in a community. To look like they’re responding as servants to the foreign occupier diminishes their stature in their peers’ eyes. So it’s not a small thing that they came. That we don’t see it and instead get upset when they don’t behave in ways that reflect our interests is shortsighted.” But to Snyder, it seemed like more of the same “see no evil, hear no evil” bullshit he’d been dealing with for the past three months. They come in, they lie, they want money for projects, he thought. “Get out of here,” he told them. He was disgusted.

  The sun had yet to rise on the morning of March 29 when roughly one hundred members of 3-71 Cav piled into Humvees and light medium tactical vehicles (LMTVs) and began driving north. Fenty was accompanied on this expedition by Command Sergeant Major Del Byers; Captain Matt Gooding and Able Troop; a kill team—snipers and reconnaissance officers—from Cherokee Company; and a smaller group called a quick reaction force, or QRF, which would stay on the periphery as an emergency reinforcement should more military might be needed.

  Before they left, Berkoff handed out photographs of the Ayoubs to the snipers and scouts. He figured the odds were slim that the brothers would show their faces, but you never knew.

  Cherokee Company15 commander Captain Aaron Swain was at the head of the twenty-five-truck convoy on its forty-minute trip to the mouth of the valley, a drive that would be followed by a four-hour hike from the road up to the village of Kotya. The floor of the valley itself was only half as wide as a football field; the stream that ran through it was about the width of a two-lane road. On the second leg of the journey, Snyder and his team led the way on foot, ready to fire at any enemy threat at any moment. It was a show of U.S. force such as the valley had never seen before.

  Whereas Snyder was there to capture or kill the Ayoub brothers, Fenty also hoped to befriend the people of Kotya and convince them to partner with 3-71 Cav and the Afghan government. If those two missions seemed at odds—helping some Afghans while killing others—that was just a reflection of the complicated nature of the U.S. mission, not to mention the sometimes contradictory relationship between Special Forces and conventional troops.

  As Fenty and Byers finished climbing the path and arrived at the edge of the village, atop a steep mountain, they were greeted by elders. Other village leaders were summoned. Fenty and Byers whispered to each other, agreeing that it had all been too easy. Four hours walking through the Kotya Valley, and they hadn’t seen a single person. Now, here at the village, they saw only elders and children. The women were obviously indoors, hiding—or more to the point, being hidden—out of religious modesty, but where were the fighting-age men? Were they all out working, tending to their animals? Were they just staying out of sight of the Americans? Or was something more nefarious going on?

  The elders sat with Fenty and Byers, who had a translator with them. They briefly chatted. No, the Afghan men said, they didn’t know of any insurgent forces in the area. No, there wasn’t any intimidation. The Ayoubs? They hadn’t been seen in the village for a long time. It was “see no evil, hear no evil” all over again.

  For Fenty, there was something discomfiting about the whole situation. Byers had the same feeling. The two thanked the elders for their time and prepared to go. Fenty told the leaders of a Cherokee Company security team, Staff S
ergeants Matt Cusson and Nicholas Platt, and a sniper attached to them, Sergeant John Hawes, to mingle with the rest of the 3-71 Cav troops as they left the village and started walking eastward back to the road. Once they all got around the bend and appeared to be on their way out, Fenty said, the security team should split off, stealthily scramble up the mountain on the other side of the valley, take cover, and keep watch on everything.

  Fenty picked up his radio and gave his orders: they were leaving. The ruse commenced. Cusson, Platt, Hawes, and the other members of the security team made the turn and then disappeared into the southern mountainside. Once he’d ascended, Hawes hid in a bush. He had grown up shooting in competitions in upstate New York, where his family regularly hunted deer, turkey, and small game. He had won local competitions and coached a junior rifle team, and by his senior year of high school, he was shooting four or five days a week. But he had never actually shot a person, never killed a man. Now he held his sniper rifle with its powerful scope and prepared to do just that.