The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Many of his men disagreed with this. One time, Private First Class Christopher Jones, armed with an M240 machine gun, was standing guard in the turret atop the shura building while Specialist Thomas Rasmussen manned the .50-caliber at the LRAS-2 guard post (one of two Humvees outfitted with LRAS devices, both of which were used as guard stations). When the camp began taking fire from the Putting Green, Jones and Rasmussen both returned fire, but it didn’t seem to accomplish much. At LRAS-2 with Rasmussen, Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha, the sergeant of the guard that day, decided that they needed John Breeding at the mortar pit to fire the 120-millimeter mortars. He called Breeding to make the request, but suddenly the voice of their commander came on the radio.

  “Negative,” said Porter.

  “We have sniper fire, we have movement up on the Putting Green,” Romesha protested.

  “Do you see weapons?” Porter asked.

  “Negative,” Romesha admitted.

  “Do you have a PIT?” Porter asked, meaning a “positive identified threat”—that is, an enemy with a weapon.

  “I see dudes where we’re getting sniped at from,” Romesha replied. Meaning: No.

  “Negative,” Porter said.

  In a case study in a class at West Point, that would have been the right call. But to troops being fired upon in a remote valley in northeastern Afghanistan, it felt overly cautious. When the enemy sniper stopped shooting, Romesha ran to the mortar pit to speak with Breeding in person so Porter couldn’t hear them. Get the 120s ready, he told Breeding. The guns were already laid on, Breeding replied—adding, “Just tell me when you want me to shoot.”

  Clint Romesha was an intense guy, short and wiry, the son of a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Cedarville, California. His parents had hoped he would follow his father into the church leadership, and Romesha had in fact gone to seminary for four years during high school—from five till seven every morning—but ultimately, it just wasn’t for him. He didn’t even go on a mission, a regular rite for young Mormon men.

  Romesha was better suited to this kind of mission, with guns and joes under his command. Leaving the mortar pit at Combat Outpost Keating, he ran back to LRAS-2, and soon enough, the enemy started firing again. Romesha and Rasmussen looked up at the spot. Did they have a “positive identified threat”? Did they see weapons? Well, maybe they saw some muzzle flashes….

  “We have a PIT,” Romesha said on the radio, once more requesting that Breeding fire the 120s. Told that his men had positive identification, Porter now okayed the mortars. Breeding fired. About twenty minutes later, Rasmussen saw movement again in the same spot. “Fire ’em up again,” Romesha told Breeding. “We have movement.”

  “You have a PIT?” Porter asked.

  “No,” Romesha confessed.

  “That’s probably just the enemy picking up their dead,” Porter said. “Hold your fire. Let them recover their dead.”

  Behind his back, the soldiers of Black Knight Troop began calling their commander No Mortar Porter. Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown would later judge Captain Porter’s actual decision-making in this instance—and others like it—to have been solid, though they would see a leadership failure in his refusal to explain why he wasn’t granting permission to fire. Part of Porter’s charge, of course, came straight from the top: the U.S. Rules of Engagement dictated that troops needed to see a weapon or, at the very least, a radio in the enemy’s hand in order to shoot. On July 6, McChrystal issued a directive underlining this point, urging troops to be even more cautious. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories—but suffering strategic defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people,” he wrote. “I recognize that the carefully controlled and disciplined employment of force entails risks to our troops… [b]ut excessive use of force resulting in an alienated population will produce far greater risks.” McChrystal also instructed U.S. forces to limit their use of close air support. He added, moreover, that the use of “indirect fires against residential compounds is only authorized under very limited and prescribed conditions.” Porter took these commands to heart.

  From Forward Operating Base Bostick, Brown kept tabs on Porter, and he remained concerned about his troop leader. True, McChrystal had spoken, but Porter seemed even more reluctant than other commanders to use force when he could. Brown also believed that during the troop overlap, some of the guys from the 6-4 Cav had filled the captain’s head with horror stories about how every commander at Camp Keating was a marked man. While it was almost certainly the case that Captain Yllescas had been targeted for assassination, Captain Bostick’s death in Saret Koleh appeared more random, and Ben Keating—not a commander but an XO—had died in the rollover of an LMTV. Nonetheless, Porter seemed spooked. Brown surmised that the knowledge that he would likely change command and be transferred to a safer post within ninety days had made Porter go to ground; he spent most of his time in the tactical operations center at Keating—the place, the captain himself argued, from which he could best command and control any fight. Porter’s radio call sign was “Black Knight–6,” but because of his proclivity for holing up in the operations center, his troops also referred to him as “Bunker-6.” Porter maintained that he walked around and talked with his troops on a regular basis. But some of them would claim that they seldom saw their commander at all.

  On the morning of June 28, Sergeant First Class Jeff Jacops was serving as sergeant of the guard, supervising the other troops from White Platoon who were pulling overnight guard duty. As his shift ended, Jacops headed to the barracks to wake up Staff Sergeant Bradley Lee. Suddenly, he heard the unmistakable crack of a recoilless rifle round. Jacops had begun running toward the camp’s entry control point when a second round landed ten feet in front of him, hitting a wall, blowing him backward, and knocking him momentarily unconscious. Shrapnel splattered the right side of his face and neck, ripping them open, and exacted a chunk out of his left forearm. When he came to, dazed, he wiggled the fingers on his left hand. Then he realized he was spitting out teeth.

  Jacops ran to Doc Cordova at the aid station. His face was bloody and messy; one of his eyes was no longer in the right place, its orbital floor having been shredded. Cordova could see, even through the gore, how terrified the sergeant was as he hit Jacops with morphine, put pressure on his face, and bandaged up his arm. There wasn’t much more that could be done for him at Camp Keating beyond waiting for the medevac. The good news was Jacops’s fears outpaced the reality of his injuries: he would have some lasting damage to his face—scarring, mainly—but he would be okay.70 Cordova mopped up Jacops’s blood from the floor using the wounded sergeant’s T-shirt.

  “You’re very lucky,” Cordova told him. He knew how important reassurance could be to a patient in this situation, especially one who looked so scared.

  “I don’t feel so lucky,” Jacops replied.

  “No, man, you really were lucky,” Cordova said. It was remarkable what qualified as good fortune at a place like Camp Keating.

  With other troops securing the landing zone, a medevac soon landed, and Jacops was quickly deposited onto it; he jokingly flipped his middle finger to First Sergeant Burton as the chopper took off.

  At Forward Operating Base Bostick, the surgeon told Jacops he was going to put him under so he could take a good look at his wounds. Prepping for the anesthesia, he asked his patient, “What did you have for breakfast?”

  “A fucking rocket,” Jacops replied.

  On July 5, at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Brown made his “realignment” presentation to Brigadier General William Fuller, deputy commanding general for operations at Regional Command East. Soon afterward, he made the same pitch to General Mayville. Both men seemed to be on board. Getting the ball rolling, Brown started pulling nonessential gear from Combat Outpost Lowell: spare parts for old vehicles, excess generators, extra air-conditioners, and gym equipment.

  As part of his battlef
ield circulation, McChrystal visited Kunar Province at the end of June. At Forward Operating Base Bostick, Brown personally made the case to him for shutting down Camp Keating, Camp Lowell, Observation Post Fritsche, and other posts in Kunar Province by July or August at the latest. The bases were defensive in nature, he pointed out, and not mutually supporting; they had minimal value for counterinsurgency efforts and were remote from the population; they could be resupplied and reinforced only by air; and they lacked sufficient troop strength to do anything but defend themselves. They were vulnerable, ineffective, and a poor use of manpower and aviation resources. Moreover, Brown said, the presence of the camps had actually worsened the security situation in Nuristan.

  McChrystal seemed attentive and thoughtful, though perhaps a bit taken aback by Brown’s presentation—he had come here to get a lay of the land, not to be pressed for a major decision. The general politely told Brown and George that he agreed with their logic and, in principle, their tactical assessment. But there were larger strategic issues involved, McChrystal explained. First, the Afghan presidential election, scheduled for August 20, was fast approaching, and President Karzai and the provincial governors were opposed to any withdrawal of American forces before that; Karzai feared that such a pullout might be taken as a sign of a lack of support for the Afghan government, which could deter turnout, especially among his supporters. And regardless of Karzai’s feelings, McChrystal had orders to make sure that ISAF forces maximized voter access in as many areas of the country as possible; pulling U.S. soldiers out of Nuristan and parts of Kunar would undermine that aim.

  Karzai also believed that if the United States pulled its troops out of certain discrete districts in Afghanistan, the Taliban would claim a great propaganda victory and make him look weak in front of his people. McChrystal shared his concern about potential Taliban claims and felt it was important for the United States to show that it stood behind the government of Afghanistan—or, more specifically, behind Karzai and his government.

  The political situation back home was also thorny. In August, McChrystal was supposed to present his recommendations regarding Afghanistan, after which President Obama would make a decision about what to do next there. McChrystal’s swooping down into the country and shutting down a bunch of bases in Nuristan and Kunar Provinces could be interpreted as presumptuous or, at the very least, premature. “I don’t want to get ahead of the president,” McChrystal said to George. Anytime generals started pulling out troops, it created at least the perception that a big decision had been made, McChrystal thought.

  Other considerations would further impede the plan to close the outposts. On June 30, Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl angrily left his base in Paktika Province and was captured by insurgents, prompting a substantial push of planes, helicopters, and surveillance drones to the area in an effort to find him—which proved futile.71 Shortly thereafter came a major U.S. initiative up in northern Nuristan, at Barg-e-Matal. These two developments would effectively tie up the air assets that would be needed to shut down Combat Outpost Keating and the other remote camps.

  Resigned, Brown sent the gym equipment back to Kamu.

  Master Sergeant Ryan Bodmer had come to Combat Outpost Keating to run a radio station when Captain Pecha and 6-4 Cav were in charge, and he was shocked by how different things were under Captain Porter and 3-61 Cav. The whole mentality had changed, Bodmer thought. He tried to explain to the leaders of 3-61 Cav how important assertive counterinsurgency was, how the development projects were the only thing keeping the U.S. troops alive—or at the very least, keeping fighting-age Afghan men gainfully occupied—but he didn’t get anywhere with them.

  Some of the projects then in progress were funded by Bodmer and the PRT at Kala Gush, and others by 3-61 Cav through special commander’s funds. The PRT projects included a micro-hydroelectric plant, two roads (one of which connected Kamdesh to Agro), a bridge across the Landay-Sin River (as much for the U.S. troops as it was for the locals), and Radio Kamdesh—now called Amman Radio, amman being the Nuristani word for “peace.” Based on how frequently the Taliban threatened to destroy the radio station and kill its programmers, Bodmer believed he had succeeded in making the station a thorn in their side. Porter wasn’t interested; he was on a different page, talking instead about how the United States had no intention of sticking around, saying that any project he couldn’t see with his own eyes was going to be canceled—and maybe some of those that he could see, too. Ultimately, with Brown’s blessing, Porter decided to cancel almost all of the remaining projects funded by 3-61 Cav.

  For his part, Brown believed that apart from the few Afghan contractors who were making money from the projects, the locals didn’t have much of a connection at all to the Americans, and vice versa. He respected Bodmer and thought he was working hard, but he felt he was running a one-man show, disconnected from any broader purpose. That wasn’t his fault, but it was the reality.

  In Bodmer’s view, this change of direction was a disaster; as the few remaining projects were canceled, he saw the locals grow despondent and angry over their lost wages.

  “This is a huge mistake,” Bodmer told Lieutenant Carson Shrode, the 3-61 Cav officer in charge of the development projects; the squadron needed to keep at least four or five projects going through the commander’s funds, he insisted. Shrode’s bosses disagreed, saying they weren’t in the payoff business. Over the past couple of years, the United States had unwisely, they believed, spent boatloads of cash in Afghanistan. If all of those projects were doing any good, then why had the situation deteriorated? Frankly, Brown thought, if you have to bribe people to convince them not to shoot at you, you’re losing.

  On July 7, the Taliban violently seized Barg-e-Matal, a remote village in northern Nuristan, up the road from Combat Outpost Keating, with a population of roughly fifteen hundred people. The village sat in a politically important location and was a tempting sanctuary for insurgent groups that were being driven out of Pakistan. President Karzai demanded that General McChrystal send U.S. troops there. The Afghan Border Police who had jurisdiction wouldn’t be enough, he said; American forces would be required to retake the town. Karzai and his advisers feared that the loss of Barg-e-Matal, a significant thoroughfare, would suggest to the rest of the world that they were losing control of their country.

  Barg-e-Matal was located in the area of operations commanded by Colonel Randy George, and he was afraid of stepping into this tar pit. Once he sent U.S. troops, how would he get them out again? Would dispatching these guys into yet another remote, sparsely populated district—even for just a few days—be worth it? Barg-e-Matal was even more isolated than Camp Keating and other, similar outposts that the brigade was already struggling to maintain. How would sending U.S. soldiers there affect brigade operations elsewhere? To what extent would it deprive other companies of medevacs, Apaches, fixed-wing aircraft, drones, and other needed resources? There were no satisfying answers to these questions.

  George’s skepticism was met by a direct order from McChrystal to get moving. The message was clear: Karzai wants to do this, it’s important to him, and we’re going to support him.

  On the morning of July 12, coalition forces—specifically, the 1-32 Infantry—and Afghan troops launched Operation Mountain Fire in Barg-e-Matal. The fighting was intense. Army Staff Sergeant Eric Lindstrom, twenty-seven, was killed. A police officer from Flagstaff, Arizona, Lindstrom left behind a wife and seven-month-old twins named Olivia and Riley. That night, when the shooting was done, the American and Afghan forces had regained control of the Barg-e-Matal district center and the surrounding area. Karzai was happy. But the 1-32 Infantry troops, scheduled to leave Barg-e-Matal within four days of the initial assault, would not actually be able to depart until over two months later.

  With so many assets—helicopters, drones—pushed north and counterinsurgency efforts in the region down to few or none, life at Camp Keating and up at Observation Post Fritsche involved a decent amount of hanging
out. In between patrols and basic maintenance operations—the burning of the contents of the latrines, for instance—uncountable games of Hearts and Spades were played and stacks of DVDs repeatedly viewed. Specialist Stephan Mace had returned from leave with an Xbox, enabling hours of video gaming. Daily workouts were nothing new for soldiers at the outpost, but the men of Black Knight Troop had so much time on their hands that some began lifting weights twice a day, drinking protein shakes, and taking supplements to jack themselves up.

  A few troops experimented with less traditional pursuits. The Bush administration had authorized the use of the interrogation technique known as waterboarding, which was classified throughout the world as torture; upon taking office in 2009, President Obama had banned its use. Some Red Platoon troops, trying to burn time, decided to see what all the fuss was about. In their barracks, Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann, Specialist Tom Rasmussen, Sergeant Justin Gallegos, and Specialist Zach Koppes were all voluntarily waterboarded. Sergeant Brad Larson held a shirt over their faces while Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha poured the water. No one could get past four seconds until Koppes tried; he made it to eight. As far as Koppes was concerned, there was no debate about it: this was torture.

  Much less sobering were the inevitable practical jokes. Goats roamed freely across the outpost, so one day Larson lassoed one and with the help of some fellow pranksters shoved it into Bundermann’s hooch while he was napping. Another time, Red Platoon super-glued the lieutenant’s items to the floor, a feat one-upped by Tom Rasmussen’s low-crawling into his hooch and spreading flypaper underfoot.