The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Holy crap, Brooks thought. I can’t believe we just took all of this and walked out without a scratch—again.

  For Brooks and other leaders of 3-71 Cav, the fact that the insurgents had been able to get so close to the PRT further illustrated the major flaw of Observation Post Warheit: there was an entire mountainside below them that the troops at the observation post simply could not see. Clearly the Kamdesh PRT would have to expand its perimeter and keep a more aggressive watch.

  The larger lesson, Brooks was convinced, lay in the confirmation that this had been an awful place to put a base. He hoped that the attack would make obvious to command the inadequacies of the location, and that the PRT would be moved up the mountain. When Mike Howard visited a couple of days later, Brooks tried to raise the issue with him, but Howard shut him down, indicating that the PRT was going to stay where it was. It needed to be adjacent to the road, period. Able Troop showed up to relieve the Barbarians in late August, and Brooks was happy to pack up and go. It almost didn’t matter to him where he was headed next, just so long as he got off that mountain.

  The Kamdesh PRT was built at the bottom of three mountains. To its immediate southwest was a mountain wall on which “Switchbacks”—paths back and forth—had been blazed. (Photo courtesy of Kaine Meshkin)

  Constant patrolling was crucial for survival, and daily, one platoon from Able Troop—there were three in all—would hike one of the mountains surrounding the PRT. On August 27, Lieutenant Vic Johnson led 1st Platoon halfway up the southern mountain, on the way to Observation Post Warheit. Lieutenant Colonel Howard and Lieutenant Colonel Tony Feagin—head of the PRT in Laghman Province—had gone up to the observation post earlier that day, as had Able Troop’s 2nd Platoon; Johnson and his men were taking a different route.

  Out of the blue, some young Nuristani boys ran toward Johnson’s troops, yelling something about “bad guys.” Johnson, senior scout Staff Sergeant Aaron Jongeneel, and the interpreter tried to figure out what the children were talking about. The boys said they had been leading their donkeys up the trail, loaded with food and water, when some insurgents confronted them, stole their packages, and stabbed the animals. The insurgents had guns, the boys reported, their faces stunned with fear. There were other kids and villagers up the hill, they said.

  “Hey, Lieutenant,” Jongeneel said, “I’ll take a recon team farther up the mountain to see if we can find anything.”

  Johnson got on the radio as he walked with the recon team. He suspected this might be a trick planned by the enemy, maybe even an ambush, though the kids’ fright had looked sincere enough. “We have a report of some bad guys up the hill,” he radioed to Howard. “These kids seem pretty scared. We’re going to check this out.” Johnson relayed the plan to his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Terry Raynor, who said he’d stand by with the rest of the group.

  “Red-One,” Howard called in to Johnson, “don’t go toe to toe with them. Drop mortars.”

  Vic Johnson thought about this order. He envisioned having his mugshot broadcast around the world on CNN International, suddenly infamous for calling in bombs that slaughtered a group of innocent schoolboys. Moreover, practically speaking, he didn’t know where exactly to drop the mortars, since he had no specific intel on the insurgents’ location—if there were any insurgents, that was.

  “Sir, I have civilians in front of me,” Johnson said. “We’re told other kids are there. I don’t think we can drop mortars.”

  “Fine,” Howard said. “Be careful.”

  At Johnson’s direction, one soldier escorted the young Nuristanis down the hill a bit and onto a ledge off to the side, where they would be reasonably safe. Johnson left most of 1st Platoon in place while he and a few others went up the hill to investigate the boys’ story. In the brush they found debris and blood, which Johnson assumed must have come from the donkeys. He was starting to think the kids really were telling the truth.

  Private First Class Kevin Dwyer piped up: “I see ’em,” he said. “They got weapons.”

  “Then shoot ’em,” Johnson ordered.

  Jeremy Larson and his immediate crew had discovered the enemy presence in a different manner: by being shot at. Insurgents fired their AK assault rifles25 at them, and Larson, Private First Class Levi Barbee, and Specialist Matthew Wilhelm all dropped to a fighting position. Barbee peered up toward the source of the fire through the scope of his M16 rifle.

  “They’re looking down at us,” he said. “I got one in my sight.”

  “Go ahead and take a shot,” Larson said.

  Barbee fired, and the insurgents ducked and scattered.

  Larson figured the others from 1st Platoon would swing into a flank to help them, so he stayed where he was and told Barbee and Wilhelm to do the same.

  About six insurgents had gathered by a tree, offering Larson’s squad a rare opportunity to end the conflict almost before it began. Wilhelm had the SAW—the “squad automatic weapon,” or M249 light machine gun. He took a bead on the pack of insurgents, aimed his SAW, and… nothing happened.

  The SAW had jammed.

  As the firefight snapped into a greater intensity, Johnson told his interpreter, “Take the kids, the donkeys, whatever, and get them back to the PRT. Get the hell out of here. Tell them you were with Lieutenant Johnson’s patrol—they’ll know what to do. Make sure everyone gets there. Don’t stop for anything.”

  Johnson grabbed one of his scouts and returned to where Dwyer was firing at the moving group of insurgents. The lieutenant emptied half a magazine of 5.56-millimeter rounds into one insurgent while Jongeneel and his recon team pushed other enemy fighters back with their fire.

  At the back of the patrol, Wilhelm took apart the jammed SAW and put it back together. Enemy fire continued to shower down upon the three Americans. The pack of insurgents near the tree dispersed. Larson and Barbee continued to shoot, but they were running out of ammo.

  Where the fuck is the rest of the platoon? Larson wondered.

  “I need a fucking two-oh-three!” he yelled. “I need a SAW! Can I get some fucking backup?”

  Some from 1st Platoon had stayed on the trail; others had headed into the brush. Specialist Clinton Howe now ran up with his M203 grenade launcher. “Hey, man,” he said, diving by Larson’s side as he fired from behind a bush. “I heard you’re looking for a two-oh-three.”

  They made a plan. The enemy had been trying to work on their right flank, so Howe would launch a grenade from the left side of the bush toward the approaching insurgents, Larson would throw one from the right, and then they would pray to God that Wilhelm’s SAW worked.

  As Howe stood up to shoot the M203 grenade launcher, Larson rose to his knees to throw his grenade. He hadn’t even had a chance to pull the pin when he saw the white puff of smoke from an RPG launcher, its lethal explosive coming right at them. Howe and Wilhelm scooted away. Barbee rolled. Larson dropped down and put his left arm over his face as the RPG landed barely three feet away from him.

  Howe woke up in a pool of his own blood, under a tree. “Medic!” he yelled, but a voice told him that the medic was down, so he wiggled out from under the tree, only to promptly fall into a ravine. He took a second to try to clear his head, then got up and made his way over to the voices.

  When Larson came to, he couldn’t see anything. Both the left side of his face and his left arm had been peppered with shrapnel. Blood was spilling into his eye from a cut on his forehead, and there were holes in his hand and shoulder. He could hear a high-pitched ringing as he crawled toward a tree. Reaching it, he paused to lean against the trunk and then staggered back to the bush where he’d originally been. There he found Howe and Barbee, who had also been hit with shrapnel, as well as Wilhelm.

  “Medic!” Larson yelled. He knew that Johnny Araujo, the medic, had been down the mountain, prepared to help if needed, but now he heard Araujo in the distance, yelling that he himself was down. Larson quickly descended the hill and found the medic lying on the ground, cover
ed with blood. Another RPG had gone off near him, sending a big piece of shrapnel into the right side of his neck; he was now plugging the hole with the fingers of his right hand. Two of the fingers on his left hand had been nearly taken off.

  “Dude, are you okay?” Larson asked.

  “No, dude,” Araujo answered, looking up at Larson. “Are you okay?”

  Araujo said he was going to pull his fingers out of the hole in his neck for a minute, and then he wanted Larson to describe the blood that started flowing: What color was it? Was it bubbling? Larson agreed to tell him and watched closely as blood started spurting from the hole. It was the same bright crimson that was on Larson’s own chest, from where his wounds had bled onto his shirt. Araujo knew that color meant the injury was to an artery, not a vein, indicating that this was a more serious wound. He struggled to wrap bandages around his neck, but he wasn’t able to seal the hole. He wasn’t sure how badly he was hurt or even how long they had been out there. “Hey, man,” Araujo said. “I need to get down the mountain.”

  Johnson, Jongeneel, and the others at the front of the platoon had been granted the rare advantage of getting in the first shot. With the fight now seemingly almost over, Johnson grudgingly walked toward the spot where someone had been calling his name. Raynor’s voice came over the radio: “We need a medevac,” he said. With his men spread out all over the mountain, Johnson hadn’t known until that moment that the platoon had suffered casualties.

  As he hurried down the mountain, he thought about the lessons he’d learned in Ranger School, weighing what he ought to do now. Johnson knew that at all costs, his scouts had to maintain an offensive posture. If they cowered and retreated, the insurgents might further exploit their terrain advantage—they had the high ground—and kill them all.

  Larson suddenly appeared in front of him. To Johnson, he seemed a bit disoriented—that was the polite term for it, anyway. “What the fuck are you doing?” Larson asked him. “Where’s the medevac? We need to get a medevac, Johnny’s bleeding out his neck!”

  In fact, Raynor had called for a medevac, but the leadership of 3-71 Cav had nixed it. The hill was too steep and sloping to allow a safe landing, the commanders felt, so the pilots would have had to use a Jungle Penetrator to extract any wounded men. The recent disasters involving tricky helicopter extractions and Jungle Penetrators added an extra layer of hesitation to any decisions to order more such rescue missions.

  “Dude, you need to get the fucking mortars launched!” Larson continued. “Don’t let them get away!”

  Johnson didn’t feel the need to explain himself to Larson, who was known to have a certain attitude, a problem with authority. He’d already made the call not to have mortars fired onto the mountain, given the civilian presence. Moreover, at this point, any mortar fired might hit one of the scattered U.S. troops.

  “Just give him the fucking grid and get a goddamn medevac!” Larson yelled. He knew he was approaching insubordination, but he didn’t care. He was covered in blood and had been hit by flying shards of metal. Johnson understood that between the adrenaline and his injury, Larson was not in his normal state of mind, so he let it slide.

  “I think I’m going to lose my eye. How bad am I hit?” Larson now asked.

  Johnson looked at him. “It’s not that bad. You’re cut above your eye. The blood is streaming in. We’re going to have to walk back to the base.”

  “Let’s get out of here,” Larson said. “We need to leave now, L.T.”

  “Jongeneel’s team is still out there,” Johnson explained. “We don’t leave soldiers behind.”

  A voice came back over Johnson’s radio: “Red-One, Titan X-ray, CAS”—close air support—“is coming on station. ETA is five minutes. There are two A-tens coming onto station.”

  After the A-10 Warthogs flew over their heads, launching flares as a show of force, the troops found one another and consolidated. The fight’s over, Johnson thought to himself. By now the insurgents had probably already ditched their weapons and disappeared back into the local populace.

  Larson walked back down and organized a 360-degree guard station around Araujo as the men of 1st Platoon continued to gather in their last known location. Squadron headquarters ordered the platoon to walk the casualties back to the PRT. Raynor began setting up teams with stretchers to carry the casualties off the mountain, but he was told it would take at least forty-five minutes for help to arrive. He was furious, but all he could do was try to figure out how to move the wounded as far down the hill as possible, as quickly as possible, without assistance.

  One of the boys’ donkeys had survived but managed to tangle its lead rope around a nearby tree. Johnson had an idea: why not put Araujo on the donkey and usher the beast down the hill? Every time they tried to get Araujo on its back, however, the animal bucked him off onto the ground. The medic was in no shape to hold on to the donkey himself, so after a few attempts, they all decided just to head down on foot. The men took turns carrying Araujo.

  This image of Araujo (in the background), Howe, and Larson after the ambush became a Time magazine Photo of the Year. (Photo 2006 Robert Nickelsberg of Getty Images)

  As he arrived back at the Kamdesh PRT, Johnson saw the rest of the surviving donkeys at the gate. He smiled, reassured that the interpreter had made it back safely with the children.

  He sought out First Sergeant Todd Yerger, took a breath, and started going over what had happened. None of his soldiers had been killed, he said, but the enemy had found ways to exploit the Americans’ reluctance to risk injuring local villagers, and had taken advantage of the high ground and a better knowledge of the terrain. The whole incident might have turned out far worse had the kids not warned them about the insurgents, and had Dwyer not spotted the ambush seconds before it began.

  Yerger took out a cigarette.

  “Hey, Top,” Johnson said, using Army slang for first sergeants, “gimme one of those.”

  Yerger handed over the pack and a lighter.

  It was the first cigarette Johnson had ever had. And the last—it was disgusting, he thought.

  Many of the enlisted men did not know about everything that had gone down on the mountain that day, and quite honestly, they didn’t care. In their opinion, Vic Johnson had handled things poorly and gotten a bunch of them shot up. They thought he was more interested in ass-kissing the captains than in listening to his men.

  That wasn’t how Johnson’s superiors saw it, however. They saw a lieutenant who’d led a patrol that was ambushed, and who’d responded aggressively while also being cautious about harming the local populace. None of his men had been killed, and no civilians had been, either. “No battle goes down cleanly, like the Xs and Os in a football playbook,” one captain would later say.

  Larson, Araujo, and Howe were taken from the Kamdesh PRT to Forward Operating Base Naray, then to Jalalabad Airfield, then to Bagram. They had their wounds treated and two days later were told they were being sent to the military hospital in Germany. Larson had planned on having a career in the military, but he was eventually discharged early for medical reasons: there was just too much metal in his shoulder.

  A few days after their arrival, Ben Keating and Todd Yerger led Matt Netzel and his platoon on a mission to patrol and clear the mountain across the Landay-Sin River from and to the north of the PRT, a task that was supposed to take just a day or two but ended up taking six.

  The valley was still new to them, and they hadn’t anticipated that the terrain would be so challenging. Neither Command Sergeant Major Byers nor any of the other head honchos now at the camp had gone up via this route, so no one realized how steep it was. Keating’s platoon had to maneuver around and up cliff faces, climbing nearly sheer walls without the benefit of the equipment or the slower pace that might have made such ascents and descents both safer and more tranquil. They didn’t see the enemy on this trip, but they did find a rocket pointed at the U.S. camp. (They blew it up with C-4.) They also found the remnants of campfires, wh
ich helped them pinpoint some of the locations the insurgents used.

  Keating and Netzel talked a lot during this patrol. Keating told Netzel about his new girlfriend back home: he was planning on taking her to Ireland, he said, and thinking seriously about proposing marriage when they got there. Keating also spoke of his doubts about the war effort. He was losing his faith in the cause, he confessed. The shells of the Soviet personnel carriers were constant reminders of the historical determination of the enemy.

  “We’re here, we have thirty or forty men, and we’re expected to hold off this force that destroyed the Soviet Army?” he marveled, shaking his head.

  During the period between the end of Operation Mountain Lion and the push to stand up PRT Kamdesh, Keating and Able Troop had been in southern Afghanistan, in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. Such wide-range roving was the kind of thing made necessary by the fact that the United States had only one full fighting brigade in Afghanistan. Keating’s time in the south had been dispiriting. On the first night after his convoy left Kandahar Airfield, the U.S. troops at the front of the line—not from 3-71 Cav—had shot an Afghan man on a motorcycle who they thought was getting too close to them. The man was innocent, and to Keating, it seemed clear that it had been a bad shooting. He’d tried to console the motorcyclist’s father while his son writhed in agony on the ground, full of bullet holes, and they waited three hours for a medevac to arrive. The motorcyclist died two days later. That sort of incompetence might kill me, too, Keating thought.

  Again and again, Keating felt that some of his peers, his fellow officers, were failing their men. He’d witnessed an instance of friendly fire, from a unit made up of what he judged to be terrible soldiers with no training. During another mess, after U.S. troops were attacked by Taliban forces in a small village, Keating and nine of his men had trapped the insurgents in a copse of trees by a small river; when he called in Apaches to bring Hellfire missiles, one overeager pilot put a Hellfire about 125 feet in front of him and his crew—way, way too close. The explosion reminded Keating of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan, “where everything was ringing and we were all trying to talk with our hands—except for the radio, into which I was very much communicating with my voice,” as he later told his father in an email.