The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  PETER: “No, Lord, I’m not good enough to have you wait on me!”

  JESUS: “If you do not let me serve you, Peter, you will have no place in my kingdom.”

  After Jesus has washed all of the disciples’ feet, he sits down at the table again.

  JESUS: “If I, your lord and master, have served you, you should do the same for one another. The servant is not greater than his master.”

  And that was Ben Keating. “You don’t ever ask your soldiers to do anything you wouldn’t do,” he would say. “You have to serve them to get the best leadership out of them.” Other soldiers might have come to the same conclusion in their own ways, but it was a safe bet that Keating was the only member of the 10th Mountain Division who’d brought with him to Afghanistan a copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine—in Latin.

  Keating had a true sense not only of service but of mission as well—and not the small kind, either. During college, after one young woman made it clear that her feelings for him were more like those of a sibling than those of a potential wife, Keating talked it over with his mother. He was very close to both of his parents.

  “So how are you with that?” Beth Keating asked him.

  They were walking in the woods behind his parents’ house.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” Keating said. “I think I’m supposed to be doing something bigger with my life anyway.

  “I need to do this,” he went on, referring to his military commitment. “So I guess this isn’t the time for me to be thinking of a long-term relationship anyway.”

  What Keating was now doing in eastern Afghanistan wasn’t what he’d had in mind when he talked about serving his troops. All the paperwork made his head hurt, and he’d be in a bad mood all day as he solved problems for people who seemed to him incapable of doing anything for themselves. He would personally sign for some four to five million dollars’ worth of equipment daily—money he could never possibly pay back if something got irresponsibly damaged or mislaid. This man whose knowledge and devoutness rivaled those of a cleric was being consumed by work almost entirely clerical.

  Now Fenty had ordered him to look into whether Willie Smith and Jake McCrae should have their pay docked for the loss of the LRAS. Keating found the very idea maddening; he saw this as one more instance of the typically myopic Army-brass sensibility that got underneath his skin and irritated him like a rash. He emailed his father, seeking guidance. The maximum pecuniary charge that Smith and McCrae faced was forfeiture of two months’ pay. Keating figured that penalty would add up to about one fiftieth of the cost of the LRAS, barely enough to buy one of the system’s power cables. He also reasoned that if the Army hit the two men that hard, neither would be likely to reenlist. Taxpayers had every right to seek an accounting for the lost LRAS, but was it really worth losing these two soldiers over? Had there truly been gross negligence? They were at the end of the Earth here, and for the love of God, the mountains of the Hindu Kush were windy. He was inclined to give the soldiers letters of reprimand—still a slap in the face, but one that might keep them in uniform.

  Keating discussed his investigation and his thinking with Fenty, who pushed him to make a tougher ruling. Keating suspected that part of what motivated the squadron commander was a desire to impress his bosses, and he resented Fenty for putting him in that position. He resented him even more when he overheard him telling Major Richard Timmons—the squadron XO, and thus the middleman between Fenty and Keating—that he wondered if Keating had the “moral courage” to render such a judgment.

  It would be hard to imagine a remark that could have insulted Keating more.

  CHAPTER 5

  “This Whole Thing Is a Bad Idea”

  They set us up, Captain Frank Brooks thought to himself.

  On April 29, Brooks had led the Barbarians into Chalas, a village in the Chowkay Valley. They’d been inserted at dawn a few days before, near some colorful poppy fields, their bright flowers all ready for the opium harvest. After surveilling the area for a couple of days, the Barbarians were ready to engage with the elders. Netzel and his men from Able Troop were watching their backs, having trudged half a mile east of the Barbarians’ observation post to get a better view of the village.

  Brooks and a handful of men from his headquarters element—fire-support officer Lieutenant Erik Jorgensen, his radio man, and two troops who were pulling security—walked down from the observation post to the edge of the hillside village. An Afghan man met them there and took them to the middle level of Chalas, where the buildings were on stilts and looked like oversized steps, to see the seven or so elders. They were all so weatherbeaten and sunburned that it was impossible to guess which of them might be forty years old and which seventy. Sitting on logs and chairs in a spot where a pair of trails converged, the two groups talked for about two hours with the aid of an interpreter. The elders provided some basic history of their village.

  “Are you Soviets?” one of the villagers finally asked.

  The Barbarians looked at one another.

  “No,” they explained, “we’re Americans, and we’re here on behalf of the government of Afghanistan.”

  “The government of Afghanistan?” the elders remarked. “What is that?”

  The Barbarians spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes going over everything from the Soviets’ withdrawal from Afghanistan to the 9/11 attacks to the Northern Alliance to the new Kabul government. After that, they moved on to the topic of the cultivation of poppy, used in opium production. The village elders denied growing any poppy, even though the surrounding hillsides were blanketed with it. The Americans noted that there was nothing wrong with their eyesight, and they weren’t idiots. The Chalas elders ultimately admitted that they grew the stuff but insisted they didn’t sell it to the Taliban—just to “normal” narco-traffickers, they said.

  The Americans accepted this.

  They next talked about the insurgents in the valley. The elders took the general party line: “Security is good here, we keep the fighters out ourselves, we don’t need your help.”

  Before leaving, Brooks had his interpreter ask one of the elders if he could recommend a better route for them to take up the mountain to return to their camp. The trip down had taken them three hours. The elder told them to follow a drainage ditch up the hill and even offered to guide them. They ended up sucking wind up the trail as they watched the elder, who looked to be about sixty years old, churn along as if he were out on a Sunday stroll. The ditch turned out to lead almost directly back to their observation post. When they arrived there, they thanked the old man, who quickly disappeared.

  Home again in their temporary digs, Brooks and his men started to unwind. They put down their weapons, removed their gear, took off their shoes, guzzled water, and lit up their smokes. Erik Jorgensen peeled off the T-shirt he’d been wearing for four days straight. It was pretty ripe.

  Jorgensen had been drawn to military service in high school, after reading Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers. When he signed his ROTC contract in 2000 at Northeastern University in Boston—obligating him to complete four years of active duty following graduation, in exchange for having his tuition paid—he was hoping he’d get lucky and be deployed to Kosovo or Bosnia so he could see some “action.” He now chuckled whenever he recalled his gung-ho pre-9/11 naïveté.

  As dusk began to settle over the Chowkay Valley, Jorgensen tried to relax, yet he kept thinking that something felt a little off—like that old movie cliché about its being “quiet out there, almost too quiet.” And then, as if right on cue, there came a series of explosions, followed by yelling. A salvo of rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, had been fired at the Barbarians. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

  Right away, Brooks noticed one thing about these RPGs: they were aimed just south of their position, hitting the path they’d used earlier in the day to walk down to Chalas. The enemy had assumed they were going to take the same route back. Brooks suspected that the elders had known that he and his men would
be targeted—except for, perhaps, the one who had escorted them home.

  The bangs of the RPGs were immediately succeeded by the rapid DADADADADADA of machine-gun fire. Hollywood has conditioned audiences to think that firepower should sound spectacular, maybe even otherworldly, like the lasers in Star Wars. But in truth, the sound of armaments is industrial and mechanical, underlining the factory nature of war and armies: this machine kills that worker, a new worker replaces him; this worker uses his machine to destroy that machine; a new machine needs to take its place.

  Shit, thought Brooks. That was no ordinary machine-gun fire; it was from a Russian Dushka,19 a heavy antiaircraft machine gun, belt-fed with a tripod. This was no small thing, the fact that the enemy had a Dushka: it meant that besides having the advantage of the terrain, they might be able to outgun the Americans, too. The Barbarians had M240s but no .50-caliber machine guns, the only real match for the Dushka’s rate of fire and its 12.7-millimeter round, which could be propelled almost three quarters of a mile and through any type of body armor.

  The Dushka raked the entire hillside with bullets, the rounds hitting the building that the Barbarians used for cover with a deadly thud. Jorgensen and the rest scrambled for safety, though they had no idea at first where the fire was coming from.

  Before the shooting began, Netzel and four others from Able Troop—Sergeant Michael Hendy, Private First Class Levi Barbee, Private First Class Taner Edens, and Private First Class Brian Bradbury—had been sitting at the tip of a ridgeline overlooking the Barbarians’ outpost. They were chatting about how best to prepare for night operations when Netzel looked below them—down to where Brooks and his team had just been breaking down for the night—and saw rocks the size of basketballs exploding.

  Everyone dove for cover.

  For many of the troops, this was their first experience of having someone actually try to kill them. It wasn’t clear who their antagonists were, what group they were affiliated with, what was motivating them. Frankly, none of those things mattered.

  The platoon from Able Troop and the Barbarians determined that the position the enemy was firing from was about half a mile away, on a parallel ridgeline to their west. They were slightly higher up than the Americans, maybe a hundred yards or so. Netzel and his men began firing back at the enemy, as did Brooks and his troops, using their M4 carbine assault rifles and M240 machine guns. The M240s were their only major weapon system, and the insurgents were just outside its effective range. The M240 gunners did their best to put fire on the larger Dushka, but it just wasn’t working out. Jorgensen was charged with coordinating outside firepower—artillery, mortars, helicopters, or jets—if it was needed. It was. Some two miles away from their position, 3-71 Cav had set up a 120-millimeter mortar team, and Jorgensen now radioed the mortarmen to give them an update, but he was unable to see the target and so couldn’t provide a grid coordinate for the enemy’s location.

  In the middle of the observation post was an abandoned house that Brooks had designated as Barbarian Troop’s command post. The lower floor was vile, coated with filth and insects and infested with rats, so the men used only the roof. They called the building Chateau Barbarian.

  First Lieutenant Erik Jorgensen atop Chateau Barbarian. (Photo courtesy of Erik Jorgensen)

  A rickety ladder led up to Chateau Barbarian’s roof, and Jorgensen now scaled up to the top and tried to get into a position from which he could better see the valley. He was followed by Specialist Kraig Hill, whose classification as a “forward observer” meant that he was responsible for serving as the eyes on the ground for gunners, telling pilots, artillerymen, and mortarmen where to fire. Vulnerable, the two men crawled to a spot where they had a view of the Dushka’s location.

  It was dusk. Jorgensen and Hill called up to an adjacent ledge where others from Able Troop had camped and were using a laser to pinpoint the enemy position. (Some others from Netzel’s patrol, including Brian Moquin, had relocated there as well.) They called back down, giving Jorgensen and Hill a grid coordinate, which they then called in to the mortarmen. Jorgensen looked toward the mortars, saw lights flash as the rounds left the tubes, and watched them crash near the Dushka’s position. The troops on the ledge could see more than a dozen figures on the mountain moving back and forth from the Dushka to a nearby shelter of some sort—perhaps a cave?—presumably hauling out ammo. The Dushka fired again.

  Netzel was about to call in corrections to the rounds when on the radio he heard his lieutenant calling for a grid correction that would have dropped the rounds right on top of him and his men. Few officers had much confidence in this lieutenant.

  “Stay the fuck off the radio!” Netzel barked, then offered the correct adjustments. The mortars fired again. The Dushka went silent, though other enemy fire continued.

  Night fell on the Chowkay. Two Apache helicopter pilots checked in with Jorgensen and Kraig Hill, who gave them the relevant grid. Almost simultaneously, a call came in over the radio instructing all friendly positions to turn on their infrared strobe lights so that the

  Apaches would know which spots to avoid. Netzel and his four troops didn’t have a strobe, so he told his men to get behind cover, and he stood, exposed, pointing his rifle at the ground and hitting the button on its laser in a strobe pattern, hoping that this would be visible to the pilots. His heart was pounding out of his chest. Ultimately, whether the idea worked or they just got lucky, the Apaches avoided them, opening fire on the Dushka position and the enemy shelter.

  Low clouds slid into the area, restricting what the crews of the Apaches could see and where they could safely fly. The last thing they needed was to have a helicopter plow into a hillside, so the Apaches left. The troops on the ledge, using an LRAS to track the heat signatures of the insurgents, reported that some of the enemy fighters were still moving in and out of the cave, while others were heading down the back side of the parallel ridgeline.

  Now the A-10 Warthogs rolled in. The Warthog is a single-seat straight-wing jet aircraft with superior maneuverability at low speeds and low altitudes. It was designed specifically to provide close air support for troops on the ground. Jorgensen had one crew put a five-hundred-pound bomb right into the enemy’s cave. Then came another American plane with a two-thousand-pound bomb aimed at the same spot.

  The fight was over.

  Jorgensen suddenly realized he was freezing. He looked down and saw that under his gear, he was wearing only an undershirt. The enemy had caught him in midchange.

  “We were lucky,” said Brooks to his men. During that four-hour firefight, the Barbarians had not sustained even a single injury. If the enemy had hit them earlier, when they were on their way down to Chalas, or if they had come back from the village using the same route, things would have gone down quite differently.

  The next day, a Barbarian patrol cleared that parallel ridgeline and found blood trails, bits of bone and flesh, and bloody bandages. The insurgents’ refuge, whatever it had been—shelter or cave—no longer existed. Intelligence would later report that radio intercepts of the enemy’s communications from that day indicated that the fighters were foreign, possibly Chechen, based on a voice analysis.20

  Brooks and his crew returned to the village days later, wanting to know why the elders hadn’t warned them of the attack. The villagers insisted they hadn’t known a thing about it. Gooding then went down to meet with the Chalas elders a third time. He wanted to explain to them that the Americans were there to help, but that they could rid the area of the extremists only with the aid of the village. The men served Gooding rice and goat. There were more black flies than grains of rice on the plates. Gooding left the meeting with food poisoning and not much else.

  In early May, Colonel Nicholson directed Fenty to begin extracting his troops from the Korangal and Chowkay Valleys. Operation Mountain Lion was complete; now 3-71 Cav’s mission to push into Nuristan was to begin. On May 3, Fenty ordered his staff to come up with a plan for Operation Deep Strike, comprising five
helicopter extractions of his troops from the Chowkay: eighty-two soldiers waiting with their equipment to be picked up at five different makeshift landing zones by one large helicopter, accompanied by two Apaches, making several trips and dropping off troops and equipment at the temporary base Timmons had set up. The mission would be a go on May 5; the troops were already running out of water and food.

  The presence of the Dushka machine gun in the Chowkay Valley had unsettled Fenty, Berkoff, and others at headquarters. Because the Chowkay was so remote, Berkoff had anticipated that the Taliban fighters there would be armed at most with assault rifles, RPG launchers, and a few light machine guns—certainly not with a seventy-five-pound heavy machine gun that could take down a Chinook. In addition to the Dushka attack in the Chowkay Valley, insurgents had shot at three Black Hawk helicopters in the same area just days earlier with small-arms fire and RPGs. Fenty decided that this level of enemy aggression dictated that the Americans should fly only after sundown, since U.S. troops and their night-vision goggles still owned the night. But nighttime flight in the mountains, of course, carried its own set of significant risks.

  Fenty had other misgivings about this mission. The air-support group Task Force Talon, based at Jalalabad, was the most familiar with Kunar Province, but it had been scheduled for a safety stand-down day—a mandated twenty-four-hour period on the ground, to be spent reviewing policy and procedures and conducting safety training or briefings. Task Force Centaur, headquartered at Bagram Airfield, had been assigned to Operation Deep Strike instead. The fact that its personnel didn’t know the area worried Fenty. Some within Task Force Centaur had their own doubts as well. One officer felt that the Army had done Centaur’s men “an injustice by sending them to war before they were ready,” adding that the “proficiency of crew members is not up to standards.” Task Force Centaur, the same officer concluded, was “at best marginally prepared to conduct air operations” in Afghanistan.