The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  From the American point of view, roads would link this backward, remote area to the Afghan government, to commerce, to progress. For many Kamdeshis, however, roads were a disruption. They would bring government officials to tax them, and modernizers from Kabul to instruct them on how to treat their women.

  Within a few months, 3-71 Cav had approved $1.33 million worth of projects in Kamdesh District—a staggering sum in the impoverished context of Nuristan.

  Mike Howard had an idea.

  Bullets and mortars could get him and his men only so far here. They needed also to fight an information war, to convince the Nuristanis that the Americans and the Afghan government were the good guys, offering them development, education, and a better life, whereas the insurgents were leading Nuristan down a path of nihilism and bloodshed.

  “Dennis,” Howard said to Sugrue at Forward Operating Base Naray, “I want you to start a radio station.”

  Oh, shit, Sugrue thought. “All right, sir,” he said, though he had absolutely no idea how to go about doing it.

  Some AM radio equipment was already sitting unused in a room at Forward Operating Base Naray, left over from a rather modest Special Forces team initiative involving prerecorded messages. Sugrue bought some FM equipment from the local market and approached elders in Naray to ask if they knew of anyone who might be interested in helping with the radio station—maybe someone who had worked on the previous Special Forces project? Soon a man named Gul Rahim showed up at the gate. In his forties, with a strong chin, Rahim was hired to run the station.

  Radio Naray started out with a broadcast radius of something like a mile and a half. Some local Afghans had windup radios, and the few Nuristanis who could afford them had small shortwave radios. Locals could listen to programs from the BBC as well as stations in Iran and Pakistan; broadcasts were generally in Dari and Pashto. Sugrue felt there weren’t enough radios in the hands of the locals to justify the great effort he was undertaking, so he ordered hundreds more to be distributed throughout the region. Every subsequent patrol would leave the base with windup radios to hand out.

  Sugrue’s broadcast began at around 10:00 a.m., with fifty minutes of Afghan and Pakistani music from locally purchased CDs. That would be followed by approximately ten minutes of “news”—a script written by Sugrue and his men. A local interpreter would translate it into Pashto (the language spoken by the people of Naray), and a boy from Naray would read it. A typical report would include information about suspected IEDs, bulletins about recent gunfire, and construction updates on various local projects. The recorded broadcast would be repeated hourly, with the last repeat ending at about 3:00 p.m.

  They were largely winging it, Sugrue and his team, but slowly they expanded. Sugrue brought in Lieutenant Joseph Lang from Able Troop to head the operation, and by June they were producing around an hour of original programming, including music and readings from the Quran. The boy was replaced by Gul Rahim and another local man. Next, Sugrue bought new equipment, had a tower erected, and fastened an antenna to it to extend the station’s reach. Soon Radio Naray was running eight hours of original programming every day, in Pashto and a Nuristani dialect, featuring news, Quran readings (peaceful ones, they made sure!), music, and poetry. If an influential elder stood up and condemned the insurgency at a shura, Lang would see to it that word of it traveled far beyond the room.

  They hired a couple of correspondents, including a retired officer from the old Afghan Army who now lived in Pitigal, who became Radio Naray’s security reporter. The former colonel would report from the field, then return to the base and write stories for the broadcasters to read; these would eventually also appear in a new, free four-page newspaper that the base began to publish, called The Light of Naray. One thousand copies of the paper were distributed each week in the Naray area and Kamdesh District. Given the estimated literacy rates of 17.7 percent in Nuristan Province and 32.6 percent in Kunar Province,24 the hope was that locals would gather around as one of their fellow villagers read items aloud to them.

  Howard would say that he wanted Radio Naray to replicate the “car-bomb effect,” but in a positive way. Whenever a car bomb was detonated in Iraq, everyone would learn about it within minutes. Radio Naray’s aim was to ensure that good news—about the construction of a road, say, or a water pipeline—would spread just as quickly.

  The staff at the station never knew how well they were doing at actually reaching the local populace. David Katz, a U.S. State Department official and expert on the region, would later question the timing of the broadcast, observing that Nuristanis tended to listen to the radio only very early in the morning and then again after dark, when they were sitting around with nothing else to do. Radio Naray wasn’t on during those hours.

  In the distance, from somewhere outside the Kamdesh PRT, came the sound of an explosion. Schmidt prepared himself for the worst: a mortar? an IED? an attack?

  Within minutes, residents of Urmul started running toward the PRT that Cherokee Company was constructing. Schmidt was alarmed. In the short time the Americans had been there, they’d already destroyed some of the locals’ crops—not only the original cornfield but also, by now, some valuable walnut and fruit trees felled during the construction of the base. Moreover, they had occupied the locals’ land and no doubt had been the subject of an aggressive insurgent propaganda campaign. Schmidt braced himself.

  It turned out the villagers were coming to them for help.

  It was August 1, 2006, and a young girl from Kamdesh Village had been tending a field when she stepped on a landmine, a remnant of either the conflict between the Kom and the Kushtozis or possibly even—though this was far less likely—the Soviet occupation. Her feet had essentially been blown off. Her family brought her straight to the Americans. A medic applied tourniquets to control the bleeding and stabilized her. Schmidt secured permission to order a medevac to take her and a family member to Jalalabad. She survived.

  While the cause of the girl’s injury horrified Schmidt, the fact that her family had come to the U.S. troops for assistance reassured him. Had the accident happened at any point before the Americans arrived, the child might very well have died. But she lived, and it was because the locals sought out help from 3-71 Cav; they were pragmatists, and they knew that American medical treatment would give the child her best—if not her only—chance of survival. Lieutenant Colonel Howard made sure that the Radio Naray broadcasters recounted the story over and over.

  Nor was this the first such incident. One night less than a week before, an old man had caught his arm in a flour mill. Terrified, wailing in pain, he was brought to the Kamdesh PRT, where he repeatedly begged the interpreter to tell the soldiers to “just kill” him. The Americans wanted him dead anyway, he insisted. The medic on duty, Private First Class Kevin Jonathan “Johnny” Araujo, put on a tourniquet, and he and Vic Johnson stayed by the man’s side throughout the night, at one point foiling his attempt to grab the lieutenant’s 9-millimeter handgun and kill himself. At first light, the old man was medevacked out and ultimately flown to Bagram, where he had his arm amputated below the elbow. But he, too, lived.

  For other Kamdeshis, however, associating with the Americans brought less fortunate results.

  To Sugrue’s mind, the most important development-project priority was the establishment of a system that would distribute potable water in Kamdesh Village. The village was the cultural capital of Nuristan, the elders had told Sugrue. (This claim stretched the truth a tad; in fact, Barg-e-Matal was far more sophisticated.) So if the Americans wanted to reach the Nuristanis, they said, Kamdesh was the place to start. Sugrue’s plan was to tap into a spring a little over a mile up the mountain, on an adjacent peak, and use gravity to move the water down to each of the four hamlets that made up Kamdesh. As one of the bigger projects being planned for the area, it was to cost an estimated eighty thousand dollars.

  To supervise the initiative, Sugrue hired Haji Akhtar Mohammed, a local man recommended by the powe
rful district administrator for Kamdesh, Gul Mohammed Khan. Within a few weeks, some other Afghans were trying to get a piece of the water project for themselves, arguing that more than one person should be in charge of the money the Americans were doling out. Sugrue resisted. If they wanted to see their influence increase, he told them, they should get behind this effort and help make it happen, and then they could talk about other projects.

  Such was one of the immediate side effects of counterinsurgency: Americans arriving with bags of money for development projects garnered appreciation among those benefiting (though how much loyalty was fostered in the long term was another question) but also, inevitably, prompted jealousy and resentment among those individuals who did not benefit directly, even if their village as a whole stood to gain. In villages that were passed over entirely, the resentment could evolve into uglier emotions such as anger, rage, and fury. When village, tribal, and other rivalries were thrown into the mix, the situation could become downright combustible.

  For Haji Akhtar Mohammed and others like him, the association with the United States became a double-edged sword. Keeping a certain distance from these patrons was often critical to avoiding being called a lackey, or worse. The Americans, for their part, had to be mindful that what seemed innocuous to one party might feel profound to another. One afternoon, for example, Sugrue stopped Akhtar Mohammed outside a Kamdesh mosque to check on the progress of the water project. Sugrue saw it as a friendly encounter, but the Nuristani felt emasculated by his public association with the U.S. Army. Seeing him as both a supplicant and a profiteer, some of the villagers concluded that Akhtar Mohammed had been the one responsible for bringing the Americans to Kamdesh in the first place, and thus for provoking the increase in insurgent attacks along the main road from Naray. Many villagers subsequently refused to work for Akhtar Mohammed on the water project.

  And that was one of the milder reactions. In August, a group of Afghans working with the United States were attacked by approximately fifteen members of the Taliban during a meeting with Afghan National Police in the hamlet of Kamu. In a separate incident, insurgents killed three people from the village of Gawardesh, including the police chief, and wounded four other Afghan policemen. The Gawardeshis were on their way to see the district administrator, Gul Mohammed Khan, to get a contract stamped for a new micro-hydroelectric plant and gravity-pipe scheme, when their chief elder, Haji Yunus, was kidnapped and dragged into the hills. This latter act of violence particularly horrified Sugrue: to him, Haji Yunus was the Wyatt Earp of Gawardesh’s wild, wild West. Sugrue would later learn that Yunus had been led into a heavily wooded area of the highlands, roughly seven thousand feet up, known as the Jungle. Intelligence reports over the next few days indicated that he was being moved from village to village, safehouse to safehouse. Three days after Yunus’s kidnapping, his mutilated corpse was dumped near the Pakistan border. His throat had been cut. A note was attached to the body: “Don’t work with coalition forces. This will happen to you.” It was signed by the Taliban leader Mullah Omar.

  Yunus’s murder further fed into Lieutenant Ben Keating’s skepticism. The more time he spent in Afghanistan, the more convinced he became that there was nothing the United States could do to change the dynamics there. Yunus had in fact been kidnapped and killed not by the Taliban but by HIG insurgents, U.S. intelligence reported, but because Mullah Omar was far better known and more feared, HIG allowed him to take credit for the murder. It was all in the service of their larger goal: terrorizing anyone who cooperated with the Americans or the Afghan government. Yunus himself had had HIG ties, as had the Gawardesh police chief who’d been shot and killed, but such relationships were worthless, it seemed, under these circumstances. “And guess what?” Keating wrote to his father. “We created, trained and equipped HIG. They were northern Afghanistan’s heroes of the Russian War and had heavy ties to the CIA even when we moved in to help kick-start the Northern Alliance at the beginning of this war.” This was all true.

  Keating wondered: if both the Gawardesh police chief and Haji Yunus had maintained connections to HIG even as they were working with the Americans, what did that suggest about the Afghan National Police commander with whom they were so closely allied, “who is supposedly giving us all of this great intel, but appears to move among these HIG-infested villages with complete immunity”?

  The word futility kept cropping up in Ben Keating’s calls and letters home. “Looking at young men harden under a hail of bullets, and age before my eyes, is heartbreaking,” he wrote. He was on edge, more impatient and more prone to anxiety than ever before. Nonetheless, he was thankful that his parents had equipped him to handle such experiences. “I know that when I get home, these stories are from just one chapter in a life that I will continue to use in meaningful ways,” he noted.

  CHAPTER 10

  The Abstract Threat of Terror

  On August 8, insurgents staged their first major, well-coordinated attack on the Kamdesh PRT.

  Captain Frank Brooks and the Barbarians had relieved Schmidt and Cherokee Company a week earlier. Brooks was even less impressed with the location of the new PRT than Schmidt had been—it was tactically indefensible, he thought—but he had no choice in the matter: orders were orders. Dropped at Landing Zone Warheit, he felt it would have made much more sense to site the outpost up there, where personnel could defend themselves on the high ground even as they concentrated on building a road up the southern mountain and into Kamdesh Village. Observation Post Warheit was closer to Upper Kamdesh, after all.

  Enemy fire on the PRT down in the valley had been slowly but steadily increasing, though there had as yet been no injuries. Mostly the enemy was poking the U.S. troops, seeing what they would do, how they would react, but the ominous prodding was bound to end badly in one way or another. Enemy chatter and walk-in reports from villagers about an imminent attack confirmed what the Americans all knew was coming.

  On one of his first few days at Observation Post Warheit, Brooks tried to have the squadron fire-support officer (FSO), who was down in the valley at the PRT, orient him to the area via radio. For roughly ten minutes, Brooks struggled to pinpoint the parts of the mountain that the FSO was insisting were right there, to his right and to his left. And then Brooks realized that the FSO had never actually been up the mountain and thus didn’t understand that what from his view appeared to be the top of the southern mountain was in reality a false summit not even halfway up to OP Warheit.

  Oh my God, they don’t even know where the top of the mountain is, Brooks thought.

  It wasn’t that the fire-support officer down at the PRT was unprepared. It was that he was… well, ignorant wasn’t a fair word, Brooks knew, but it rang true. The gaps in the FSO’s knowledge weren’t really his fault; the valley was so disorienting, and the mountains so steep. One peak could obscure everything behind it, and the Army’s topographical maps fell short of capturing the terrain in any comprehensible way: lines drawn close together on a piece of paper just couldn’t capture the myriad elevations, notches, and contours of the area, severe and sharp and unforgiving. Troops would either fly in at night or drive in on the valley road; with minimal time on the ground and little situational awareness, they could hardly help it if their sense of the place was limited to what was visible to them. There was no way any of the troops at PRT Kamdesh could have understood the landscape without spending four or five days just walking around in it—which they didn’t have the luxury of being able to do.

  So Brooks didn’t blame the FSO; probably everyone down there thought the top of that false summit was the top of mountain. But it was an unsettling revelation for the troop commander, the realization that everything he and his officers had worked out was based on inaccuracies.

  “Shit,” he said to himself, “we need to start again.” All of the predetermined reference points were wrong.

  At 9:00 p.m. on August 8, Brooks was just settling in for the night at Observation Post Warheit’s headquarters a
rea, a tarp covering a pit walled by HESCOs, when insurgents unleashed a lightning storm of RPGs at his colleagues down at Kamdesh PRT. The attack came from all three surrounding mountains, to the north, the northwest, and the south. The mortarman at Observation Post Warheit jumped to it—“Get up! Get up!” Brooks shouted at everyone, in case the explosions themselves hadn’t done the trick—and the rest of the Barbarians prepared to help in whatever way they could. They couldn’t see the PRT itself, but they saw the intermittent glow from the RPGs as they detonated in the valley. The troops at the Kamdesh PRT used their machine guns, rifles, and mortars to try to fend off the insurgents surrounding them, then began calling in the grids to Observation Post Warheit so the mortarmen up there could target the enemy positions. The insurgents seemed to have anticipated this move, however, and started attacking OP Warheit’s mortar positions from the observation post’s south and west. The Americans at both locations pushed back with suppressive fire, and soon enough a team of A-10 Warthog airplanes rolled in and dropped a few five-hundred-pound bombs that devastated the opposition. The Barbarians continued firing even after the enemy retreated; the Warthog pilots targeted insurgents as they attempted to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades, which according to Islamic tradition must be buried within twenty-four hours.

  After almost three hours, the engagement was over. Somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty RPGs had landed inside the PRT wire. Remarkably, just as in the Chowkay Valley, none of the Barbarians had been wounded, though there were some minor injuries down at the PRT.