The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Roller didn’t think that was so much to give up. He was more than willing to trade his infrequent patrols through villages sans permission for the locals’ pledge to keep the bad guys out themselves. And most of those he served with understood that this war wasn’t like the one in Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers: there would be no surrender by a uniformed enemy army. Second- and third-order effects could metastasize.

  Working with the elders, Kolenda and Hutto carved out another exception to the agreement: U.S. troops also had an open invitation to enter a village to inspect a project that the United States was paying for. If the village’s shura equivocated on this, or failed to welcome the Americans into the village, the United States would cut off the money or even cancel the project until the elders came into line. Moreover, if insurgents vandalized or destroyed a project, American funding would be stopped until the village elders identified those responsible and worked with Afghan security forces to hold them accountable. If the Nuristanis truly wanted to take ownership of their own affairs, their role couldn’t be confined to just managing the cash and handing out the contracts; they would have to do the hard work of self-policing as well.

  The district shura also agreed to use its size to enforce a sort of nonviolent resistance against members who broke their word. If any village proved uncooperative and refused to abide by the agreement, the Hundred-Man Shura would drop in en masse and squat there. The village would then have to feed the picketing elders—a very expensive proposition—until the situation was resolved to their satisfaction.

  Bulldog Troop signed off on the Commitment of Mutual Support, and Hutto began enforcing it—often with some choice language when he thought a village was slacking or violating the terms.

  Hutto and Ingbretsen, the ANA trainer, felt they’d made some headway with elders throughout the district and were eager to expand their range. Hutto requested a shura in Mandigal, and the elders selected a date in November. This exchange was soon followed by radio chatter from insurgents in the area, suggesting that they wouldn’t allow the Americans to enter the village—and in any case certainly wouldn’t let them leave it alive. As the date neared, Hutto sent his men out on patrols to secure the road leading to Mandigal, and then he devised a plan to fend off an attack: he asked members of the Hundred-Man Shura to swing by Combat Outpost Keating, pick up Ingbretsen and him, and join them at the Mandigal shura. They agreed.

  Accompanied by former district administrator Gul Mohammed Khan, Kamdesh Village shura head Abdul Rahman, Afghan National Police commander Jalil, and ANA commander Lieutenant Noorullah, the Americans walked breezily into the village. Seats had been set out in a big open space just south of the village mosque, and Hutto and Ingbretsen sat with the elders on a platform in front of a stone wall by the road. The meeting was led by Abdul Hanan, a respected Mandigal elder. Hanan served as a sort of master of ceremonies for the shura, calling upon each man in turn to give his presentation.

  Hutto made his usual pitch about the benefits to be had from their all working together: peace, development, prosperity. “I’m not asking you to turn in insurgents,” he said. “But I want you to ask the bad guys what future they envision for Kamdesh District.”

  Lieutenant Noorullah came next, informing the elders that a planned project to build a road north to Barg-e-Matal could be subcontracted so that each village along the way would be responsible for its own section, if it wanted. But, he explained, until the fighting ended, Nuristan would not be able to receive the economic-development funding it desired. And that meant that the elders of Mandigal would need to talk to local insurgents and get them to turn in their weapons and cease hostilities.

  Noorullah had connections in the village—his wife was from there—and he had been working them before this meeting. (His own family sold gems in the Kabul area, and his wife’s was involved in the same trade, but on the mining side.) Drawing upon his sources, he had assembled a list of names of insurgents from Mandigal. And right then and there, he called those men out and told them to stand up—right in front of their fathers.

  Ingbretsen’s interpreter was feeding translations into his earpiece. Ingbretsen and Hutto looked at each other. What was this?

  And then the first insurgent stood. He was just a few feet in front of them.

  Nervously, Hutto and Ingbretsen whispered to each other, “What are we going to do now?” Since they first entered the village, they’d been hearing enemy chatter on the radio, some of it coming from inside Mandigal. Apart from their interpreters and a couple of Army medics, including Rob Fortner, who were off to one side tending to ailing children, the two Americans were essentially alone, facing a crowd of hundreds of Nuristanis, many of whom were carrying AKs. Sure, there were Afghan police and ANA troops there, as well as the elders who had accompanied them to the shura, but who knew what would happen if bullets started flying?

  Hutto looked out into the crowd: some two dozen men were now standing, identifying themselves as enemy fighters. Hutto and Ingbretsen, talking under their breath, quickly came up with a contingency plan. Straight ahead of them was a big wooden arch decorated with intricate patterns. That would be considered twelve o’clock, the two men decided. If the bad guys started shooting, Ingbretsen, on the left, would return fire and clear from ten to twelve o’clock, and Hutto would do the same from twelve to two o’clock. Then they’d turn, drop the fifteen feet down the wall to the gravel road, and run out of town.

  The enemy fighters, however, didn’t make any moves. Noorullah told the insurgents that they must stop their attacks. “I know who you are,” he said. “You need to join the government of the Republic of Afghanistan. Next time I see you, if you are fighting the government or the Americans, I will kill you.”

  The insurgents took their seats. It was as strong a message as Hutto and Ingbretsen could have hoped for.

  Every officer in the 173rd Airborne was on record as supporting the new counterinsurgency strategy set forth by the Petraeus–Mattis group, but each one had his own take on it, and some thought Kolenda was taking the notion too far. Kolenda felt as if he were being constantly second-guessed by his boss, Colonel Chip Preysler, and by the brigade staff at Forward Operating Base Fenty at Jalalabad. The pushback never came in the form of a denial of development funds; it was more a matter of constant badgering and even condescension: What are you doing? Why aren’t you planning another kinetic39 operation? What’s with all of the backslapping and handholding? Despite the fact that 1-91 Cav had obliterated hundreds of insurgents throughout the summer and fall, one brigade staff officer still quipped that Kolenda’s men weren’t killing enough people.

  This frustrated Kolenda no end. It was true that violence was down in his area of operations, but that wasn’t because his men had gone soft. As Kolenda saw it, none of what he was doing had anything to do with being warmhearted. In his opinion, counterinsurgency was a pretty damned cold-blooded strategy, all about being out there with specific goals—establishing stability and defeating the insurgency—and intelligently using the full range of available leverage, from cash, clean water, and education for local children to bullets, when appropriate, to get the desired results. There was an element of manipulation involved. Sure, he wanted the Afghans to have better lives—how could anyone not, after seeing that kind of impoverishment? But there was also something transactional about American promises of clean water, construction jobs, and a brighter future for Afghan kids. This wasn’t charity; the bottom line was, these offers were made to save American lives and help destroy anyone who hoped to hurt ISAF troops. Kolenda could never understand why some folks viewed the carrots as being somehow inferior to the sticks.

  Preysler, for his part, didn’t see himself as pushing back against Kolenda’s efforts. As the man in charge of the four provinces in this area of operations, with eleven commands at the lieutenant colonel level under him, each with its own challenges and demands, he had a different perspective on matters. His men in the Korangal Valley were gett
ing attacked up to five times a day, every day.40 Maybe the shuras and promises had helped, but how much? Even if violence was down in 1-91 Cav’s zone, all over the rest of its area of operations, the 173rd Airborne was still filling body bags.

  This was Preysler’s fourth time in combat: he’d been in Afghanistan at the beginning of the war and then again during Operation Anaconda, as well as in Iraq at the beginning of that war. As a battalion commander, Preysler had been featured in Sean Naylor’s Not a Good Day to Die, the book that Ben Keating gave to his father before he headed overseas. By contrast, this was Kolenda’s first time deployed into battle.

  Preysler believed that the deaths of Jacob Lowell, Tom Bostick, and Ryan Fritsche, combined with the challenges of the terrain, had—understandably—led Kolenda to conclude that conventional tactics wouldn’t work in Nuristan, and prompted him to put a great deal of energy into other, nonkinetic courses of action. And while he knew Kolenda might not think he was on board, Preysler felt that in fact, he was—it was just that he was constantly pushing for further analysis.

  Kolenda didn’t talk with his subordinates about what he viewed as Preysler’s skeptical, sometimes even unsupportive attitude, but his troopers readily picked up on that attitude from the brigade leaders during their occasional visits to the area. As Kolenda saw it, many of his fellow officers did not understand the situation in Kamdesh, and many seemed to think of counterinsurgency as a simple matter of attrition warfare, with fig leaves of self-governance and development—as if counterinsurgency were just a big show being put on by Kolenda and others, a way of distracting the locals while the “real” Americans tackled the real job of killing bad guys.

  At the end of December 2007, Second Lieutenant Hank Hughes, a former Army brat who’d gone to Boston University on an ROTC scholarship, met up with Hutto at Forward Operating Base Naray. The two hitched a ride on a chopper to Camp Keating. “You’d better be ready,” Hutto warned him in his odd, speedy Southern twang.

  Hughes was flying in to replace Dave Roller as leader of 1st Platoon—Roller was being promoted to Bulldog Troop’s XO, Hutto’s second in command—and the green lieutenant had never before been deployed into a war zone. Hughes looked out the window of the Black Hawk and gulped. He’d been briefed on the terrain, but actually seeing it was another matter.

  Holy shit, he thought.

  The bird descended onto the landing zone, at the bottom of the fishbowl, and Hughes’s dreadful astonishment continued. This is really not what a base is supposed to be, he said to himself. This is not what they trained me for. He wondered if the guns on the base could even shoot high enough to reach insurgents at the upper elevations.

  Dave Roller greeted Hughes out at the landing zone, noting with approval the Army Ranger tab on the new arrival’s left sleeve. The two men were a lot alike in their temperament, confidence, politics (both leaned somewhat left), and stubbornness—which meant, of course, that they didn’t particularly get along, at first. Roller was anxious about how the men of his former platoon would fare under the newcomer; perhaps he was even a little jealous of Hughes, who was now their leader, running around on missions with them while Roller himself had to keep inventory. For his part, Hughes found the officers at Combat Outpost Keating a tough crowd: they had come together in battle, in blood, over the loss of their captain and fellow soldiers, and now here he was, this new guy, flying in after Christmas for the remaining seven months of their rotation. Hutto and Marcum, relative newcomers themselves, were reasonably friendly toward him. But Roller—man, he was a very different story.

  They clashed about everything. Their more consequential conflicts had to do with tactical decisions. Once, Roller saw Hughes preparing to set up an observation post near Naray and—in Roller’s opinion—carrying too much gear with him. With memories of the fateful mission to Saret Koleh still fresh in his mind, he explained to his replacement that redundant equipment would increase his risk of being pinned down. Roller himself, after all, had been pinned down before. He advised Hughes that water was more important than extra radios—he could always send a runner or even give hand signals if he ended up needing those. Hughes flat-out told Roller he was wrong, then said he was going to do things his own way. An epic argument commenced. The disagreement was resolved only by the (unrelated) cancellation of the mission.

  They fought just as hard about more trivial issues, too. One day, in the gym, the two lieutenants got into a heated argument about the rapper Lil Wayne, who at that point in his career seemed to some to be coasting a bit, maintaining his fan base largely through guest appearances in others’ songs and raps and through popular mix tapes. Was Lil Wayne a great rapper? That was open to debate, evidently. Roller asserted that his meteoric record sales meant that the question had been asked and answered. Hughes disagreed: quantity did not indicate quality, he insisted. Referring to Aristotle’s Poetics, which declared tragic poems superior to epic poems, he dove into the notion of empirical quality. Well, rebutted Roller, getting angrier, Lil Wayne’s art had obviously touched a lot of people, so there was clearly something that attracted them to him. How should art be defined? After twenty minutes, the volume increasing with each advance of the minute hand—and Kenny Johnson watching it all, bemused and bewildered—a furious Roller stormed out of the gym, his workout only half done, his heart rate nevertheless well above the fat-burning level.

  Later, Hughes talked with Newsom about it: “Why is Dave such a dick to me?” he asked.

  Newsom smiled. Hughes had come to Camp Keating full of piss and vinegar, and Roller’s immediate reaction had been to hate the new guy, especially because he missed going on missions with his platoon. But even more than that, it was the fact that they were so similar. “Imagine if you were here and then another one of you showed up,” Newsom said. “Wouldn’t you hate you?”

  The first real test of the Commitment of Mutual Support between the Hundred-Man Shura and Bulldog Troop came when bullets were fired at Observation Post Warheit.

  They were just sporadic rounds coming from somewhere south of Camp Keating—Urmul or, a little farther south, Agro, it wasn’t clear which. Either way, they needed to stop. Hutto called for the relevant representatives from the Hundred-Man Shura, Said Amin from Urmul and Hjia Jamo from Agro. He escorted them to the large tent that had been set up for shuras at Camp Keating and invited them to sit down on the carpets. Hutto didn’t consider these two to be bad guys, but he didn’t treat them as well as he did, say, his buddy Abdul Rahman. They had yet to prove themselves to him. Maybe this would be their chance.

  “Where are these rounds coming from?” Hutto asked them through an interpreter. “Who’s responsible?”

  Amin, from Urmul, said the shots were coming from Agro. Jamo, from Agro, said the insurgents had been firing from Urmul and then running into his settlement.

  “Okay,” Hutto said. “Until we settle this, you won’t get any humanitarian assistance, and funding for your projects will be cut off. You need to figure out who did it, and you need to make it stop.”

  About a week later, Jamo returned to Combat Outpost Keating and asked to meet with Hutto. “We know who the person is who fired on your camp,” he told the American. “But he’s not from our village—he’s from outside Agro and came in. What do we do?”

  “Even if outsiders come in from outside your area, you’re responsible,” Hutto said. “If you can’t control him, tell the ANA or the Afghan National Police.”

  Not long after that, rounds were fired at Observation Post Warheit from Kamdesh Village. This time, a member of the Hundred-Man Shura knew the identity of the guilty party—but the thing was, the insurgent was the nephew of a different member of the Hundred-Man Shura, who was also a contractor. Not only would this second shura member not do anything to stop the shooting, but he wouldn’t give the insurgent’s precise location to Hutto so that the Americans could take action against him.

  Hutto convened several meetings with the leaders of the Kamdesh Village shura—Maw
lawi Abdul Rahman and Gul Mohammed Khan—but no information was forthcoming. “You’re going to be responsible for our stopping all projects in Kamdesh Village,” Hutto told them.

  Luckily for the villagers of Kamdesh, the insurgent was arrested near Gawardesh, and the problem went away. The ultimate test of the Commitment of Mutual Support had been avoided—for now. But it all left a bad taste in Hutto’s mouth. The Hundred-Man Shura had not yet proven itself.

  Winter came to Combat Outpost Keating. Major General David Rodriguez, the commander of Combined Joint Task Force 82, a subordinate division of ISAF, announced that Observation Post Warheit would be renamed Observation Post Fritsche.

  Marcum and 2nd Platoon were assigned to the observation post when a three-day snowstorm hit the mountain in January. At first it was fun—snowball fights, giant snowmen, snow caves—but the weather quickly lost its appeal once the troops realized they were slowly, steadily being buried in up to seven feet of snow.

  The local insurgency had been more or less quelled, which Kolenda considered a direct result and reflection of the success of the Hundred-Man Shura. In January, representatives of the shura left for Kabul to meet with President Karzai and tell him that the people of Kamdesh now supported his government. With the enemy seemingly hibernating for the winter, the troops—when not on guard duty, patrolling, or on missions to visit local villages—spent their time sleeping, watching movies, reading, and trying not to get on one another’s nerves.