The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Now Berkoff got angry. He cursed God.

  What the fuck, is this some sort of sick joke? he thought. The man just had his first baby only four weeks ago, and he’s never even met her.

  Never would.

  CHAPTER 6

  Maybe That’s Just the Wind Blowing the Door

  The wreckage of the helicopter, spread all over the side of an eight-thousand-foot-high mountain, was still smoldering the next morning, when Colonel Nicholson and other members of the brigade and squadron leadership arrived.

  Thermal imaging had measured the temperature of the crash site at more than 5,400 degrees Fahrenheit.

  Nicholson looked at his men, tirelessly combing over the hillside. They were filthy from weeks of combat and hours of rooting around in the residue of a burnt Chinook, covered with dirt and ash and the stink of aviation fuel, their eyes bloodshot, the black grime on their faces carved with streaks of sweat and tears.

  It took hours before all ten body bags were laid out on the side of the hill, holding the remains of Joe Fenty, Brian Moquin, Jr., Justin O’Donohoe, and David Timmons, Jr., from 3-71 Cav, and Eric Totten, Christopher Donaldson, Christopher Howick, Bryan Brewster, John Griffith, and Jeffery Wiekamp from Task Force Centaur.

  “Which one is Joe?” Nicholson asked.

  Someone pointed to his friend. Nicholson put his hand on Fenty’s body, prayed, and cried.

  From a nearby mountaintop, Timmons phoned his wife, Gretchen, on his Iridium satellite phone. He was choking up. Nicholson had given him permission to violate protocol and tell Gretchen about Joe Fenty’s death in order to get her to Kristen Fenty’s side as soon as possible. Military spouses were required to fill out “Family Readiness Group” forms on which they listed their closest friends. Gretchen Timmons, Andrea Bushey, and Christina Cavoli—the wife of the 1-32 Infantry commander—were Kristen’s contacts.

  “We’ve had a terrible accident,” Timmons informed his wife, through tears. “Joe’s dead.” He told her that he needed her to be strong. He needed her help.

  Gretchen was staying with their two small children at Timmons’s parents’ house in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania; they had just returned from Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. It was the middle of the night.

  Timmons told his wife that she needed get back home to Fort Drum as soon as possible. She had to be there for Kristen.

  Early the next morning, Gretchen jumped into her car with her kids and her mother-in-law and drove the five hours to Fort Drum. After dropping off her family at home, she headed over to the Fentys’. She was shaking as she rang the doorbell.

  Kristen answered the door cheerily, holding her month-old baby girl, Lauren. She was surprised to see Gretchen there; she knew she was supposed to be helping her in-laws with a yard sale in Pennsylvania, and then going to a wedding.

  “What’s up?” Kristen asked, friendly, happy.

  Gretchen was stunned: Kristen didn’t know.

  “Um… I don’t know, hey,” Gretchen fumbled.

  They were close friends, so Gretchen made up an excuse about needing to have some time away from her family after their vacation, and the two women spent the rest of the day together. Kristen was putting together care packages for her husband, placing toiletries, snacks, and some athletic gear—elbow pads and jockstraps—in boxes that would never reach their intended recipient.

  Gretchen seemed distracted. She wouldn’t look Kristen in the eye. She picked up a pen and doodled on a notepad. At one point, Gretchen herself began to wonder if that conversation with her husband the night before had really happened or if she had just dreamt it.

  They took care of the baby, talked about their families, and drank some wine. No one came to the door to tell Kristen what Gretchen couldn’t tell her, the information that it would be a violation of military protocol for her to share with her friend.

  They watched cable news. A helicopter had gone down in Afghanistan, and all ten soldiers aboard had been killed. A U.S. military spokesman said that the crash had not been the result of an enemy attack. Gretchen kept her mouth shut.

  Kristen began to suspect something. She called the rear-detachment commander, Captain Al Goetz, to find out more about the helicopter crash. Goetz’s wife answered; she seemed hesitant to talk, but Kristen still wouldn’t let herself make the leap.

  Around midnight, Gretchen left Kristen’s house, drove home, and woke up her mother-in-law. “She still doesn’t know,” she told her.

  Gretchen Timmons got up early the next morning—before seven—and went over to Kristen’s again. Kristen was in her pajamas, holding Lauren, when she answered the door. She still didn’t know.

  “Hey! How’re you doing? I got biscotti, but I don’t have any coffee,” Gretchen explained.

  For Kristen, that didn’t add up: Gretchen never forgot anything. And while having coffee with a friend before seven wasn’t that unusual for military wives, Gretchen always hit the gym first thing in the morning. But again Kristen pushed her suspicions away, figuring her friend was nervous about the news of the crash. She let her in; a pot was already brewing.

  Official notification had been delayed because the recovery and identification of the men’s bodies had taken some time; Fenty’s remains were among the last to be found. He had been strapped into the inner cockpit area, which had burned red-hot for hours after the crash. There wasn’t much of him left.

  “Gretchen, I know I’m not supposed to ask this, but was it Joe?” Kristen asked.

  “Hey, I’m just a wife,” Gretchen said.

  Kristen heard something at the screen door.

  Maybe that’s just the heater clicking on, she thought.

  Through the top panes of the glass-and-wood door, she saw that the screen door was swinging open.

  Maybe that’s just the wind blowing the door, thought Kristen.

  No, someone was at the door. She opened it.

  Two men were standing there: an Army chaplain and Lieutenant Colonel Michael Howard, a neighbor and friend of Joe’s.

  Everything that she had been trying to push out of her mind was true.

  Howard grimaced and shook his head.

  Kristen began to wail. Gretchen came over, lifted the baby from her arms, and carried her into the kitchen.

  For Ben Keating, who had been arguing with Fenty about whether the Army should hold two joes responsible for the wind’s having destroyed an expensive piece of reconnaissance equipment, the commander’s death was a tragedy cloaked in an ugly irony.

  On May 5, Keating had emailed his father, insisting that he was not going to seek the toughest punishment for the soldiers. “Misguided or not, I think it requires some courage to refuse to fry these guys for LTC Fenty, even though he’s intimated that that is what he wants,” Keating wrote, “simply so that he can show his superiors that we play hardball in 3-71 CAV.”

  Just after he hit Send, Keating was called to the operations center, where he heard of his commander’s fate. The man he was so angry at was now dead.

  Three days later, he sent out another email, this one to his friends and family:

  From: Ben Keating

  8 May 2006

  All,

  I want to thank you for the kind words, thoughts and prayers that you offered in the last seventy-two hours. I would have called or written sooner, but there was a mandatory blackout period that is just being lifted for our soldiers now….

  As you probably also know, our Troop suffered the loss of three great young men and the Squadron is struggling with the loss of our Commander, LTC Fenty. It has been a difficult few days; we’ve been blessed with the exceptional leadership of the Squadron XO, MAJ Timmons, and the Command Sergeant Major, CSM Byers. That these two have held up in the face of losing one of their best friends and mentors is a testament to God’s presence here.

  This is a surreal environment under typical circumstances; it’s an absolutely impossible place to process emotions and feelings in a time like this. Grief will come for most in
the days and weeks ahead. The real issue we deal with now is a sort of awakening to the danger here. For three months we’ve traversed this country’s most historied IED routes and patrolled in towns with known enemy threat without incident. The realization that we are mortal and operating in a high-risk area has hit home hard.

  We placed our soldiers on a C-1722 this afternoon; I served as a pallbearer for the Commander’s casket. Again, an experience that you’ve seen played out on the news many times; not an experience you ever expect to find yourself in. Even as we took the flag-draped containers off the trucks and began our slow procession in front of a thousand soldiers, I was emotionally detached. As we climbed the ramp, however, and placed the ten coffins in the cargo hold, the tremendous loss swept over every one of us in the plane’s belly. It is certainly a moment I’ll never forget, and one I pray never to repeat.

  I can tell you that the certain knowledge that I was in your thoughts and prayers was a great feeling. I have [drawn] and continue to draw strength from the relationships I share with you all. I look forward to renewing each of them on my return, and that too will give me the strength I need to lead my Troop through this difficult period. Thank you all so much,

  With Love—

  Ben

  Keating remained irked by Fenty’s “moral courage” comment, even after Timmons reassured him that it had not been made with the degree of seriousness that Keating had projected onto it. The truth was that Fenty had been legitimately concerned that the lieutenant’s affection for his men might cloud his judgment. Empathy could be a good thing, but a successful leader did not let emotion get in the way of hard decisions.

  In another email to his father, Keating delved into his complicated feelings about the loss of his commander, noting that he had

  struggled with where my relationship with LTC Fenty was at the moment he died. There have been a lot of things going on inside this head and I’ve had to work hard to make sense of it all. I was undeniably angry with him; I was writing an email to you, the first paragraph of which was pretty scathing of the man, at the moment he was losing his life. I was hurt, because I still respected the man a great deal and I honestly believe that at some level he meant what he’d said—to some degree, he questioned my integrity. I was frustrated because in my mind he had become nothing short of some diabolical mastermind who had created a problem set with too many impossible conditions and then beaten up those underneath him for being unable to solve it, all the while refusing to change any of the conditions though it was well within his power to do so.

  Ultimately, I never did make sense of it all, and I’m not sure I’m meant to. I do know that my relationship with the man was a rocky one. We very rarely saw eye to eye on anything from personnel to investigations. But I respected the man, and I would think that he appreciated and respected my abilities as well. I learned a great deal from him and perhaps that is all I am supposed to take away from this. I am not going to feel guilt over where we were at when he died—it wouldn’t do any good. Nor am I going to harbor any ill will towards him—and expect he would provide me the same if the roles were reversed.

  He continued:

  I honestly haven’t felt any dread as this incident forced us all to inspect our own mortality. I feel as though the Lord fully intends to bring me home safe and put me to work someplace else.

  He signed off by telling his father that he would call home soon. In an email to his mother, Keating contemplated the death of Brian Moquin, who had found a home in the Army:

  From a discussion I had with him before he went out on that mission, I think he was a long way from having Christ in his heart. But there is no doubt in my mind that the Holy Spirit was at work in a young man with an awful lot of potential during the trials of his final week. What I do know is that he died as a member of a family that loved him very much.

  CHAPTER 7

  Monuments to an Empire’s Hubris

  The administrator for Kamdesh District, Gul Mohammed Khan, seemed stoned.

  Could that be right? Could he be high?

  Captain Aaron Swain, commander of Cherokee Company, stood at the Afghan National Police station near Urmul, in Nuristan, talking to the local leader, whose eyes were glazed like pastries. Swain knew that smoking hashish was a fairly common form of recreation in eastern Afghanistan, but he was still surprised, since it was early in the morning.

  It was June 2006, and 3-71 Cav had a new commander: Mike Howard, the man who had broken the news of her husband’s death to Kristen Fenty. From Atlanta, Georgia, he’d been commissioned from ROTC at Mercer University in Macon and joined the Army as a poor kid looking for a way to contribute to his country. Ross Berkoff and Staff Sergeant Jared Monti had both served under Howard during their previous 10th Mountain tour and, upon learning who their new leader would be, had joked with each other that the rest of their unit was in for a rude awakening. Howard was a brilliant tactician with a deep understanding of counterinsurgency, they thought, but in terms of “command presence” and “command philosophy,” he was the polar opposite of the man he would be replacing. Joe Fenty might have been stringent, but in demeanor he had been laconic, sometimes even Zen. Howard was irascible, with a quick temper that could turn in a blink from cold to downright predatory.

  Howard had served in Afghanistan twice before, but this would be an especially trying assignment. The dynamic of taking over for a commander who had been killed was frequently difficult, and for Howard, Joe Fenty had not been just another officer. To nearly all who’d served with him, Fenty had been an inspiring leader, and to Howard he’d also been an across-the-street neighbor and friend. Howard consulted with senior officers and decided to follow through with what Fenty had been working on, having concluded that it wasn’t the right time to come barging in with grand new ideas. Joe Fenty’s vision, then, would become Howard’s own.

  What Fenty and his team—Byers, Timmons, Berkoff, and others—had been helping plan was the establishment of a U.S. presence in Nuristan. Howard now ordered Swain to search around the Nuristan village of Kamdesh for a location where a provincial reconstruction team, or PRT, could set up shop. PRTs were a key component of America’s counterinsurgency strategy, one singularly focused on economic development. Distributed throughout district centers and in other key locales throughout Afghanistan, the teams were made up of service members, foreign service officers, and construction experts who would work with locals to help their regions grow through jobs, roads, and other projects—thus, the theory went, winning over hearts and minds. Among military officers, PRTs were trendy, a status that had been cemented when one PRT leader, Navy Commander Kimberly Evans, sat in the First Lady’s box at President Bush’s State of the Union address earlier that year. The new outpost in Nuristan seemed a fitting base for a PRT.

  There was a road that ran between Naray and Kamdesh Village, but it was narrow, and Swain doubted it would be strong enough to withstand the weight and width of Humvees. Thus, in order to scout out a site for the regional PRT, he rented a few Toyota Hilux pickup trucks, which were relatively plentiful in the area, and some all-terrain vehicles, or ATVs.

  The first time Swain and his team rolled out of Forward Operating Base Naray, they made it only a dozen miles up the road, to the village of Barikot, before half of the trucks broke down. They went back to Naray to regroup and try again. This time they used just the ATVs—Polaris Sportsman MV7s, painted Army green. As the sun set, Swain and around a dozen troops put on their night-vision goggles and began motoring north, then west. Snyder and his Special Forces team, who were on a separate mission, also joined them, likewise driving ATVs. Two platoons of Afghan National Army (ANA) troops—some thirty Afghans in total—and about six U.S. mortarmen followed in Ford pickup trucks.

  They stopped briefly at Barikot, which was on their way, s, swh o Swain could ask the deputy head of the Afghan Border Police, Shamsur Rahman, to come along. Rahman and Swain had developed a strong relationship during a previous operation and had pa
rticipated together in shuras with the Kotya elders. Rahman was well connected and hailed from Lower Kamdesh Village. He would be an asset on a trip like this.

  Rahman wasn’t at the station in Barikot—he was on leave—but his boss, Afghan Border Police Commander Ahmed Shah, was there, and Swain considered him a friend as well. Shah cautioned Swain not to go up to Kamdesh Village. “It’s a bad place,” he said. The road was dangerous; insurgents had tried to blow up his jeep on a recent tour. Swain thanked his friend for the warning, and the team took off again. It was dark by now, so the enemy, presumed not to have night-vision goggles, would be at a disadvantage.

  They stopped near the hamlet of Kamu to drop off one of the ANA platoons, under orders to keep watch on a known IED-maker who had a home there. That section of the road was a prime place to hide an IED, and Swain wanted to take precautions to make sure his expedition wouldn’t get hit on its way back.

  By 2:00 a.m. local time, Swain, Snyder, and their teams had arrived at the hamlet of Urmul, northwest of and down the mountain from Kamdesh Village. They set up security and tried to grab some sleep. After an hour or two, Snyder shook Swain awake. Snyder thought the plan was for both of their teams to hike up the mountain together to Kamdesh Village, and he wanted to get going before it got too hot. A groggy Swain didn’t quite understand what Snyder was talking about; he informed him that while his mortarmen would turn the tubes in that direction and offer fire support if needed, Cherokee Company was going to stay at the bottom of the mountain. The 3-71 Cav troops were there, after all, to find a new location close to the road for a U.S. base and a provincial reconstruction team, not to take a four-hour mountain hike. Snyder said that he and his men were going to head out. Swain told his fire-support officer, Sergeant Dennis Cline, where to aim his mortars if the Special Forces troops needed them. He checked the perimeter and then tried to go back to sleep, worrying that the Special Forces troops would mess up his mission to make nice with the locals, as had been known to happen before.