by Jake Tapper
F15 fighter jets zoomed by above, joining in the orchestra of machine-gun fire and drowning out Johnson’s voice as he tried to radio for a medic to help Hughie. No one responded, so he quickly decided he’d have to run back to get somebody, through the terrifying downpour of bullets and possible RPG fire he’d made it through once before. It was Hughie’s only chance.
So he did exactly that: he ran back to the American trucks, where he found a 3-71 Cav medic, Specialist Gil Montanez, and then the two of them again raced through the bullet storm to Hughie.
Montanez located the wound; the news was not good. In reaching for his medic bag to treat Adel, Hughie had lifted his arm, and the bullet had found a path to his heart, bypassing his protective breastplate.
“KIA,” Johnson said into the radio. Those letters were followed by Hughie’s identification code: “Hotel” for Hughie and the last four digits of his Social Security number. As Johnson relayed that information, the medic went over to check out Adel. By this point, the Americans were pounding the ridgeline with 120-millimeter mortars, a 60-millimeter mortar that a 1st Platoon soldier had brought along with him, and bombs dropped from the fighter jets. The enemy had gone relatively silent. Gooding got on the radio and asked Johnson if he wanted him to send in a medevac for Hughie and Adel. Johnson didn’t think they could afford to risk it; he wasn’t sure if the hills were clear of the enemy. It was the kind of situation no leader ever wanted to be in: he would have to make a decision that could cost the life of a dying soldier—Adel—in order to prevent the possible loss of an aircraft and crew.
“No, sir,” he told Gooding.
They packed up the trucks with the wounded and the dead. As they were pulling out, Johnson got a quick look at Adel, who was lying in the back of a pickup, being treated by an Afghan medic. Adel saw him and smiled, flashing him a thumbs-up.
Half an hour later, as Johnson’s convoy pulled in to Combat Outpost Keating, a medic pulled up to meet it. He was carrying a pair of body bags. It took Johnson a few seconds to process why there were two bags, and then he realized: one was for Hughie, and the other was for Adel, for whom Hughie had given his life. Adel hadn’t made it, either.
As Hall had reported, the kidnapped boy had been found—alive—near Barikot. He was sent to Forward Operating Base Naray and from there returned to his father.
That night in Johnson’s barracks, no one made a sound.
On his way back to Combat Outpost Keating, Gooding was told that an Afghan policeman had been heard on the radio congratulating the enemy for killing Hughie and Adel. Gooding reported this to the Afghan interpreters, who went to the local Afghan police station. The police chief insisted that that particular officer hadn’t been there at all that day, that he was away on vacation.
Bullshit, Gooding thought.
Gooding was later informed that the police officer had never returned to work.
“Good job today,” Howard said to Gooding, also offering his condolences on the loss of Hughie.
Gooding was spent. Even though Hughie hadn’t technically been part of 3-71 Cav, he’d been out there with them because of an order Howard had given—one that Gooding hadn’t thought wise but had carried out anyway. Now Hughie was gone.
Howard had another order for Gooding.
“You need to open up an outpost at Kamu tomorrow,” he told him. This wasn’t entirely a surprise: having read between the lines of previous comments his commander had made, Gooding had been preparing for just this possibility. Near the hamlet of Kamu sat a former hunting lodge that had once belonged to Zahir Shah, the last king of Afghanistan, who’d been deposed in 1973. The lodge itself, or the Palace, as the troops called it, was seamlessly integrated with a large boulder that formed part of its structure, and also incorporated rock features in its landscaping as steps and multitiered terraces. A nearby stream, too, featured in the building’s design. The whole thing almost looked as if it had been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.
Gooding had already hired a contractor to widen the trail from the road to the lodge. His men spent the next day clearing boulders. Soon forty U.S. soldiers were packed into the Palace like cordwood.
On March 17, some Afghan drivers hauled supplies in their jingle trucks from Naray to the new base at Kamu. As the drivers were heading home after dropping off their cargo, around fifty insurgents, dressed as ANA soldiers and Afghan police, stopped them at a fake checkpoint. The insurgents then fired on the three jingle trucks, destroying them, and left them burning in the road. For good measure, they sliced off the drivers’ ears.
Best and his forty-two ANA troops were stationed at the Kamu base; they’d been isolated there for weeks, since mudslides had blocked the road to Combat Outpost Keating and floods washed out the road to Naray. When he heard that the truck drivers had been attacked, Best thought of something that had happened the previous summer in the Tagab Valley: he’d bought three sheep to feed to his troops, and the next day, he learned that the merchant who’d sold them to him had been killed for the crime of helping the “infidels.” Since then he had always tried to be as discreet as he could about buying bread and meat, and he felt an extra responsibility for any Afghans whose lives were threatened as a result of their helping him and his troops.
Best and his ANA platoon now rushed down the road, through small-arms fire, to help the jingle-truck drivers. Although they had no air support, they were successful in getting through and pulling out the men. The Afghan soldiers even managed to locate the three ears that had been cut off, so after their speedy return to the base at Kamu, the drivers were medevacked out along with their removed appendages, which surgeons were able to reattach.
There were other, similarly motivated attacks, some of them deadlier, including one on an Afghan Security Guard for the outpost, a young man from Mandigal, who was killed on his way to work. Such ambushes belied the progress that Fazal Ahad was making with the Security Shura. Elders and other villagers seemed to be responding to his pleas for Nuristanis to take responsibility for their own security so as to hasten the exit of the Americans. His own background notwithstanding, Ahad was disgusted by what the insurgents were doing in the region.
On April 29, a “night letter” was hammered onto the door of the Upper Kamdesh mosque. Besides listing the names of the Nuristanis who worked as Afghan Security Guards at Combat Outpost Keating, it issued a chilling warning in Pashto:
By the name Allah:
Announcement for the respected Muslims around the world:
The devil is hated by Allah, denied by Allah, denied by the prophet, denied by religion, and denied of the Day of Judgment for Americans.
They change humans from humanity to barbarians. These people are hated by Allah and are trying to turn the world into nonbelievers.
These dirty Americans have killed thousands of children, men, women, religious scholars, true believers, and Arab fighters. They have destroyed Islamic society centers.
At the present time for those who work and obey the American devils by taking contracts for building schools, roads, and power plants; also those who work as police, district administrators, and commanders as well as sold-out mullahs who deny Allah’s orders and holy war and deny the holy Quran:
We are telling you that we are continuing our holy war in Allah’s will…. Soon we will start our operations.
These infidels are searching street by street and house by house. At the present time these atheists are showing up in the great mujahideen villages. You have every right to kill these atheists if they come back into the village.
Now you know we will not tolerate anyone’s complaints.
From,
Mujahideen
Long Live the Islamic Emirate
On the following day, April 30, Fazal Ahad was accompanying two Kushtozi elders to Kamdesh Village to try to help resolve their tribe’s longstanding conflict with the Kom. Six insurgents in woodland camouflage uniforms—again disguised as ANA soldiers or Afghan police—stopped the Kushtozis�
� cab at a fake checkpoint. They pulled Ahad out of his car. The two elders and their driver were given a choice: Leave now and live, or come with us and die. The three fled east to Mirdesh.
Nicholson, Howard, Berkoff, and other officers were near Barg-e-Matal, in a stone compound that they were thinking of turning into yet another combat outpost, when troops at Forward Operating Base Naray radioed to give them the news that Ahad had been kidnapped. About an hour later, Governor Nuristani called Howard to tell him that Ahad’s dead body had been found. His captors had shot him in the face at point-blank range.
Members of the Security Shura were outraged, the governor said, and had already come to confront him. “We have supported you and the coalition; now is the time for you to support us,” they’d told him. Nuristani said that he wanted to do something to avenge Ahad’s death. The governor—himself from the Kata community—was convinced that at the very least, the Kom elders in Kamdesh Village knew who was behind Ahad’s murder. Nuristani intended personally to deliver an ultimatum to the villagers of Kamdesh: Hand over the killers, or ANA commandos will search from house to house until they find them. Implicit in this plan to use ANA commandos was that American troops would be with them. The United States never allowed any ANA unit to conduct uniliteral operations; every mission had to be partnered.
Nuristani also asked Howard if the U.S. Army would be willing to send a Black Hawk helicopter to pick up Ahad’s corpse at Combat Outpost Keating and deliver it to Barg-e-Matal, near his home village of Badmuk, for burial. The governor worried that the poor condition of the road from Kamdesh to Barg-e-Matal—which was washed out in many spots from melted snow and spring rains—might prevent Ahad’s family from honoring the Islamic tradition that called for burial within one day. Howard asked Nicholson for permission, which Nicholson granted.
The Black Hawk landed in a large, flat field next to the stone compound that Nicholson, Howard, and the others were using. Fazal Ahad’s body was cloaked in a white sheet through which his fresh blood had soaked. The corpse was offloaded from the helicopter and placed in a Ford Ranger, which drove down the road running parallel to the river and then up the hill toward the mosque. Hundreds of villagers came out to join the procession, crying and wailing; some men lifted Ahad’s body onto a board and carried it part of the way.
John McHugh, an Irish freelance photographer embedded with Best and his ANA troops, was standing at the edge of the village, watching the procession. Almost without warning, McHugh and those around him were caught up in the swarm as it moved toward the mosque. The Irishman felt the piercing glares of the Afghans; he knew from experience that mourning could become violent in a split second. Ahad had been killed for working with the Americans and the Afghan government, and now here were other representatives of those same entities, right in the villagers’ midst. McHugh made his way over to Best. “We should get out of here,” he said. A local Afghan policeman approached them and anxiously offered the same advice: Get out of here.
They did.
President Bush had mentioned Joe Fenty in a Memorial Day address he delivered at Arlington Cemetery in May 2006, not long after Fenty died. The president noted that only hours before the crash, Fenty “had spoken to his wife, Kristen, about their newborn daughter he was waiting to meet. Someday she will learn about her dad from the men with whom… he served. And one of them said this about her father: ‘We all wanted to be more like Joe Fenty. We were all in awe of him.’ ”
Just under a year later, on May 5, 2007, the first anniversary of his death, the base at Jalalabad was renamed Forward Operating Base Fenty.
“It was out of this gate and onto that airfield that Joe walked a year ago today, to board that Chinook to extract his soldiers from a dangerous spot in the Chowkay Valley,” Nicholson said during the renaming ceremony. “It’s back to this place that our fallen comrades are brought for their trip home. So this is an important place, a place of honor and respect, a place worthy of being named after Lieutenant Colonel Joseph J. Fenty.”
Command Sergeant Major Del Byers said during the ceremony that Fenty “represented everything that I love about being a soldier. He never asked another soldier to do anything that he was not prepared to do or had not done himself. As busy as our commanders are, he always found time to talk to every soldier regardless of rank or position.”
In addition to FOB Fenty at Jalalabad and Camp Keating near Kamdesh, there were two other U.S. bases named after fallen 3-71 Cav troops who had served in Nuristan: Combat Outpost Lybert, near Gawardesh, and Combat Outpost Monti, located in an old Afghan Army compound in Kunar Province. Patrick Lybert and Jared Monti, too, had come to the region to die. They would not be the last.
CHAPTER 15
“Don’t Go Down That Way”
To those around him, Howard seemed torn between, on the one hand, his duty to support Governor Nuristani and the government of Afghanistan and, on the other, his concern over what he knew was Nuristani’s ill-advised push for an Afghan commando raid of Kamdesh Village. Howard asked the new senior officer at PRT Kala Gush, Navy Commander Sam Paparo, who’d arrived in March, to try to talk him out of it.
Paparo walked outside his operations center at PRT Kala Gush to get better reception on his Thuraya satellite phone as he dialed the governor. He could never be sure where Nuristani was at any given moment; the Afghan roamed around the country unpredictably, spending a lot of time in Kabul, at his family’s ancestral home. Fortunately, he had three different kinds of phones—one satellite and two cell phones—so he was usually reachable.
“What’s your overall goal in going to Kamdesh?” Paparo asked the governor. It wasn’t likely, the American explained, that Nuristani would be able to find those responsible for Fazal Ahad’s assassination through military means. The type of house-to-house search he wanted to undertake yielded virtually no leads 99.99 percent of the time, but it was 100 percent guaranteed to anger the population and turn them against the United States and the Afghan government.
Nuristani, however, was adamant.
Jesus, Paparo thought. This is a huge mistake.
If he insisted on doing it, Paparo said, he ought to instruct the commandos to search only those homes where such intrusion was justified, since indiscriminate searching would be interpreted as mass punishment of a largely neutral population. He further warned Nuristani to make sure every search was conducted with local leaders present as witnesses.
On May 14, ANA soldiers and commandos choppered onto Observation Post Warheit. They were joined there by Tennessee National Guard Lieutenant Matt Hall and some thirty of his ANA troops, Michael Schmidt and Cherokee Company, and Matt Gooding and Able Troop. With the Americans following close behind, the Afghan troops swept through the various sectors of Kamdesh, talking to any Kamdeshis who were out and about, asking them if they knew anything about who had killed Fazal Ahad.
As part of the raid, Best, his trainers, and his forty-two ANA soldiers established a blocking position down the mountain to ensure that anyone who tried to flee the commandos’ sweep through Kamdesh would be unable to escape into the ether. It was to be one of their last local tasks: that same day, the Barbarians were to escort a new company of ANA soldiers from Forward Operating Base Naray to relieve Best’s team. These fresh Afghan troops had never been to Nuristan before; they were Tajiks and Hazaras, other non-Pashtuns who had only ever served in the western part of the country.
To avoid an ambush, First Lieutenant Aaron Pearsall, leader of the Barbarians’ 2nd Platoon, had originally planned to roll very early in the morning; the Americans had been ambushed often on that road, and he wanted to get the ANA troops to Kamu before daylight. But the Afghan soldiers weren’t ready to leave until at least an hour after sunup. Pearsall, like his men, had a bad feeling about this mission—a last-minute assignment to escort a new ANA unit they’d never worked with through one of the most dangerous sections of their area of operations—and the late start didn’t help. Some of Pearsall’s platoon had already
left the country to help prepare for the squadron’s pending return home, so the lieutenant was down to fourteen soldiers in four Humvees. Rounding out the convoy, in addition to the fifty or so ANA troops in eight Ford Rangers, were three jingle trucks loaded down with supplies like Gypsy caravans.
Pearsall huddled with the trainers and the ANA leaders before they rolled out. His message was simple: This area is one where we’ve been ambushed many times before. If we get attacked, do not stop. The cliff to the south is too steep, and the dropoff to the river to the north too precipitous—there is nowhere to maneuver. If we get hit, push through. We will do our best to help you, but you must keep driving, no matter what.
And off they went. Pearsall’s men had interspersed the ANA vehicles among their own: Humvee, Ford Ranger, Ford Ranger, Humvee, Ford Ranger, and so on, with the jingle trucks near the middle of the pack. The Marine captain and embedded trainers assigned to this ANA company were riding in one of the middle Humvees.
As they passed by Bazgal, an Afghan policeman waved them down.
“Don’t go down that way,” he warned.
Pearsall stopped the convoy and called command to request an assessment of the road ahead. Could a drone or a plane take a look to make sure no ambush was lying in wait for them? Yes, he was told, and soon a report came in that the only thing up ahead was a sandbag in the road.
Pearsall was skeptical—had the assets looked in the hills? He asked for more planes and/or drones to check it out, but they were all committed to the mission under way at Kamdesh Village, involving the ANA commandos and others from 3-71 Cav. Pearsall made the call to push on.