The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

by Jake Tapper

  Not everyone got into the act. Private First Class Dan Rogers came from a religious family—his father, a former Marine, was a full-time pastor—and he didn’t mesh well socially with the rest of the platoon. Rogers looked askance at the cursing and practical jokes and spent his free time playing video games or reading the book of Romans or Christian fiction. Rogers thought that the only other one in the unit who seemed active in his faith was Specialist Cody Floyd, a medic, and in hope of further salvation, Rogers tried to minister to the other men. He spoke with Specialist Michael Scusa and urged to get him to get right with Jesus Christ. Scusa was polite about it, noting that his wife went to church, but not all that interested. When Rogers was on guard duty with ANA troops or Afghan Security Guards, he would take advantage of the captive audience and try to save them, too, though usually as soon as he uttered the word Jesus, they’d shut down pretty quickly. He never gave up; Bible in hand, he’d ask the Afghans about Islam, and then they’d open up a bit, after which he’d ask them if they’d mind if he shared something about his own beliefs. He’d describe miracles—how Jesus fed the multitudes with five loaves and two fish, for instance. He’d share the Parable of the Sower of Seeds, discuss the Crucifixion. Rogers never worried about getting in trouble for trying to promote his beliefs; he was pretty sure his commanding officers knew he was doing it. They didn’t.

  Sergeant First Class Hill for sure hadn’t heard about Rogers’s proselytizing, but he was concerned enough about what he did know: Rogers kept falling asleep on guard duty, which was unacceptable—or in Hill’s vernacular, “garbage.” Called Dad by his men because of his age—thirty-seven—and gruff manner, Hill had been born on an Air Force base in Oklahoma. After high school in Virginia, he’d wasted a year drinking and working at Hardee’s; the Army was a ticket out. Hill had the weary manner of a man who’d seen it all, and after two tours through the mass graves and skeleton-riddled roads of booby-trapped Bosnia, maybe he had.

  Sergeant First Class Jon Hill. (Photo courtesy of Jon Hill)

  In early August, the Bastards rotated down to Camp Keating. As soon as Salentine and Hill laid eyes on the outpost, they looked at each other.

  “This place is a fucking dump,” Hill said. “We need to fortify it like we did at Fritsche.”

  “You’re right, we need to,” Salentine concurred.

  In their first two days at the outpost, Salentine and Hill brainstormed ways to improve the security at their new home, just as they’d done at Observation Post Fritsche. They wanted to add HESCO barriers, string more wire around the whole camp, place more Claymore mines in more areas, and add two more towers, one facing the Northface and the other by that southern wall. Needing an official okay, they poked their heads in to the operations center, and Salentine made his pitch. Porter didn’t think the reinforcement was necessary. And anyway, they would all be leaving soon enough. He wouldn’t budge.

  “It’s a no-go,” Salentine reported back to Hill as they left the operations center. Salentine was a bit stunned by his captain’s obstinance. Being at Combat Outpost Keating is like deer hunting, he thought, but we aren’t the ones in the tree stand.

  “Why are you here?” asked the journalist.

  Captain Porter chuckled and said, “My boss told me to come here.”

  Porter was sitting in the operations center as Nick Paton Walsh, the Asia correspondent for the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 News, threw questions at him, all of it being recorded by cameraman Stuart Webb. The two Brits had come to the outpost to report on the security preparations being taken before the August 20 elections. Webb noticed that sitting prominently on Porter’s desk were two books: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Islam and Bear Went Over the Mountain: Soviet Combat Tactics in Afghanistan.

  Walsh and Webb both knew this would be a trip with some risks. Before leaving Forward Operating Base Bostick, they’d spoken with one pilot who’d flown to Camp Keating and turned right around after a near miss by an RPG. When the journalists flew to the camp, they did so in the dead of night in a bird accompanied by two Apaches, one of which fired a Hellfire missile at the mountain to scare off any would-be attackers. The mountain itself was so close to the landing zone that it looked as if an insurgent could casually stand somewhere nearby and hit any helicopter with a rock. The pilots were concerned that their blades might hit the hillsides as they began their descent. It was the most dangerous flight Webb had even been on, and insurgents weren’t even firing. And that was about the least of it, they realized when the morning revealed to them just how vulnerable the entire camp was: it was under constant threat of fire from the surrounding hills. A few days before, they were told, an Afghan soldier had been shot in the back as he used the piss-tubes. It was that easy. Webb and Walsh had been to their share of war zones around the world, but in terms of location, Combat Outpost Keating was a new low.

  The Americans were reluctant to let the Brits join them outside the wire—it was too risky, they said—so the journalists arranged to meet the camp’s Latvian ANA trainers and the Afghan troops by the river, to the northeast of Camp Keating, as they returned to the outpost after a patrol. As Webb began filming, shots rang out. No one was sure which mountain the bullets were coming from, so nobody knew where to take cover. Walsh dove to the ground and jammed his knee so badly he couldn’t walk on it. A stray bullet ricocheted into the thigh of one of the Latvians, who let out a shout and fell on top of Webb.

  This is fucking serious, Webb said to himself. He started to run toward the Afghan National Police posting, just outside the camp to the northwest, expecting to be shot in the back at any moment. He wasn’t. Still, no one knew where to return fire. Then someone saw a muzzle flash, and for the next thirty minutes, the troops at Camp Keating fired into that spot in the hills.

  It was roughly the thirty-fifth attack on the camp in just under three months, since the arrival of 3-61 Cav.

  “Do you ever think to yourself, Why am I here?” Walsh later asked Lieutenant Bundermann.

  “Not really,” Bundermann replied. Tall and thin, with a sardonic sense of humor, the lieutenant had graduated from the University of Minnesota two years before was and been commissioned as a second lieutenant shortly thereafter. From Michigan, the son of a maintenance mechanic and a nurse, Bundermann had pursued an ROTC scholarship to pay for college, which was about half the reason he was in the Army and standing there right now talking to a journalist at Godforsaken Combat Outpost Keating. The other half of the reason was that he’d needed to do something after graduation, and his older brother was already in the Navy.

  “That’s not my job to ask that question,” Bundermann said. He turned to a fellow soldier on guard, Sergeant Joshua Hardt, a team leader from Red Platoon. “Right, Hardt?”

  “What?” asked Hardt.

  “Ask the question ‘Why I’m here’—we don’t ask that question, right?”

  “Fuck, no,” said Hardt. “We don’t ask any questions. We get in trouble for asking questions.”

  Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann. (Photo courtesy of Jon Hill)

  The mess hall at Combat Keating used purified river water for cooking and heating bulk meals, but the water purifier was in a constant state of dysfunction, and getting it fixed entailed making a special request for a mechanic from the Support Battalion to fly to Combat Outpost Keating. That was difficult to do, given the dearth of birds available. Before the mechanic could even make the journey, he would have to put in an order for whatever new parts might be needed, and then once the parts had arrived, he’d have to risk getting shot down on the way to or from Keating for the service call. Dying for a water purifier, that would be quite a thing—and yet some troops gave their lives for less.

  Porter, mindful of the supply problems, didn’t want the cook to use bottled water for making or heating bulk meals. The troops thus lived for periods on cold cuts and sandwiches instead of hot meals. The restricted diet was more of a morale issue than anything else, especially for troops’ wives,
girlfriends, parents, and siblings, who saw them wasting away, becoming skinnier and skinnier, in each successive photograph sent home or Skype appearance. Many of the families of 3-61 Cav soldiers became convinced that the Army was neglecting their loved ones. In fact, many of the troops did feel neglected and abandoned, and they griped about the conditions in emails and calls home. “We barely have food,” Sergeant Joshua Hardt told his wife on the phone. “We’re lucky to get one hot meal every other day. We have to go out and fight on an empty stomach, while the higher-ups are kicking back and milking it.” This was a way for troops to complain without going into detail about what was really on their minds.

  Sergeant Joshua Hardt and Olivia Hardt. (Photo courtesy of Olivia Hardt)

  Joshua Hardt and Olivia Guevara had met in the back row of high school English class and gotten married one week before he deployed to Iraq in 2007. While he was there, they’d talked three times a day, emailed, and chatted via Yahoo! Messenger. Some couples limited their conversations to maybe once a week, perhaps even just once a month, but the Hardts found that too difficult. They needed daily contact—indeed, more than that. Then Joshua came home, but it felt like no more than a blink of an eye before he was off to get in harm’s way again, this time in Afghanistan.

  Before he left for Kamdesh, back in May, Olivia had been slouched in the passenger’s seat as they drove home from a friend’s house after a night of card games and long good-byes. They were both quiet, the fact of his imminent departure an unwelcome presence in the car with them.

  “Liv, we need to talk,” he said, and she swallowed, and that horrible fear in the pit of her stomach grew stronger. “And this time you have to hear me out, because it’s important for us to talk about this before I leave.”

  “That’s fine, Joshua, but you have ten minutes,” she said. “The thought of you dying makes me sick to my stomach.”

  He sighed and rubbed his temples with one hand, the other hand on the steering wheel. “Liv, if I don’t come home—which won’t happen, but if I don’t make it—all I want is for you to be happy,” he said, speaking slowly. “That’s all I want. I don’t want you to be sad without me. And you are going to have to be strong, honey.

  “And one day I want you to have kids, live in a nice home,” he told her. “Don’t wait too long to have kids. Because I know you, honey, you will wait till you’re in your thirties, and then you’ll be too old. More importantly, I want you to find someone who will treat you better than I do and better than I ever have, because you deserve that, Liv,” he said. “You deserve someone who is going to treat you like a queen, baby, and if he doesn’t, then he doesn’t deserve you. But most of all, Liv, I just want you to be happy, baby. As long as you’re happy, then I’ll be happy.”

  Olivia was stunned. He’d obviously given this speech a great deal of thought. Hardt had been just an infant when his own parents got divorced, and he’d always wanted to have the family—a mom, a dad, a kitchenful of kids—that he personally had never experienced. But even more than that, he wanted Olivia to have all of that. The only response she could think of was to correct him. “First of all, I don’t want kids right away,” she said, “and I definitely won’t want a husband or a boyfriend for a long time!” She paused. Was she really contemplating a world without her husband? She was only twenty-two; he was twenty-three. She found it utterly impossible to imagine herself simply moving on, starting over. “I really hate talking about this,” Olivia declared. But he wouldn’t let it go: he kept repeating how much he wanted her to be happy, how he wanted her to have the family he’d never gotten to have.

  Hardt had joined the military only because he couldn’t figure out what else to do with his life, and Olivia’s mother was encouraging him to find a way to support his wife—not a particularly surprising suggestion for a mother-in-law to make. As it turned out, though, he liked the action and the thrills, and he was an excellent soldier. Whenever the action started, he and Josh Kirk were always the first ones suited up and out the door. But Hardt didn’t like Afghanistan, and it was a tougher deployment for him than Iraq. He and Kirk might be quick to action, but the truth was that Joshua Hardt was scared on this tour, and fundamentally less gung-ho than he had been in the past. He didn’t like Captain Porter; he didn’t like Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown. He was a Red Platoon team leader, and he felt that his troops were being neglected. It made life difficult for him, and it made him long for his wife in a desperate way. Right now, he just wanted to go home and be a normal husband and have a nine-to-five job.

  To: Olivia Fr: Joshua

  hi baby i miss you so much, im so bored and going insane here i just want to be home with you. i think about you all the time and cant wait to see you. we just filled out our leave time and im still on for feb. it might change but for now thats when i will be able to see your beautiful face. i love you so much, i was trying to sleep but i couldnt stop thinking of you. i want to do something when i come home something with just me and you and mean it we always talk about doing something but we never do so this time we will. god i had so much to say but now im drawing a blank. i just miss you so much baby your my world honey and all i want to do is wake up to your beautiful body and that unbelievable smile of yours. that smile has gotten me since the day i met you and will never go away. anyways i miss you so much and hope your doing alright and dont worry we will be together soon

  Afghanistan had consumed Joshua Hardt’s selflessness, the best part of him. He didn’t have as much access to phones and computers. His insecurities feasted on his psyche. Once, he called Olivia and she didn’t answer—she’d left on vacation to spend some time with her parents. He had trouble understanding how her world could go on without him there. Intellectually, Hardt knew that she needed a break from working full time as a preschool teacher while also attending school at Colorado State University at Pueblo. But even so, he felt resentful that she could even think of relaxing without him. “You have it easy,” he told her in a surly voicemail in which he chastised her for not answering his call when she knew he was in a war zone, knew that he could die at any moment. “You don’t give a shit about me,” he said in another of the many nasty messages he left her while she was away with her parents. “I’m busting my ass, and you’re having fun.”

  “Baby we just got [off] the phone tonight after patching up another argument, which of course was my fault,” he wrote her by hand on July 24, 2009.

  I love you so much and I always worry about you. It’s hard to explain, baby. I had guard tonight and it felt like time stood still for me…. Please don’t get any ideas about leaving because I need you so much…. I truly want you to have fun. I just get nervous and really weird and become this jerk. I’m trying to control it but it’s hard it’s something that will work in time…. I love you so much honey. Your my angel. An angel that keeps me safe and watches over me and protects me.

  Joshua and Olivia Hardt were far from alone in their struggle to keep a marriage alive with one spouse in a war zone. But sometimes it sure felt that way.

  By the time Brown and 3-61 Cav arrived in country, the Taliban didn’t just control the road near Combat Outpost Keating; they also owned the one around Forward Operating Base Bostick at Naray. The jingle trucks that had once made their way north every two weeks in a relatively casual convoy, unarmed, now had to run a much more sinister gauntlet, laid down by an unholy alliance of insurgents and local gangsters who stopped the convoys at random checkpoints to exact “tolls.” Often the drivers would simply flee, leaving their vehicles to be picked apart like dying cattle in a desert. Fuel trucks were a particularly coveted target. Contractors began paying the Taliban not to attack them as they delivered their goods, but locals ultimately refused to drive to Forward Operating Base Bostick without a U.S. escort them both ways.

  Brown felt besieged. His home base, FOB Bostick, was itself rarely attacked—it was an island of security—but his squadron was fighting for its life whenever its men went beyond the wire. In Naray, h
e had only one platoon of eighteen guys and a single company commander—and that area was the only one in his larger area of operations with any prospect of success, any likelihood of being worth the fight. Trying to determine how best to manage the situation, Brown reached out via email to previous commanders. Officers from 1-91 Cav insisted that everything had been great until 6-4 Cav replaced them and screwed it all up; the officers of 6-4 Cav said that things had been going to hell anyway, and that 1-91 Cav had just gotten out when the getting was good.

  It didn’t really matter to Brown whose fault it was, and anyway, he imagined that the truth lay somewhere in the middle. An influx of American development funds intended to help locals pave the main road had ended up in the hands of Taliban fighters who “taxed” local contractors through extortion. With that source of income, combined with the proceeds from an alliance with timber gangsters, the Taliban was offering young local men a fairly lucrative way of life. Brown certainly admired the work Kolenda had done with the Hundred-Man Shura, but ultimately that coalition had been a fragile one and would not survive Kolenda’s departure. The Afghan authorities had made no meaningful effort to take over his role or to empower a capable government official to try.

  To Brown, Kolenda’s success seemed evidence that a gifted American commander could make himself a “viceroy” in Afghanistan, at least for a while. But that history was almost irrelevant to the immediate needs of 3-61 Cav: Brown, with an insufficient number of troops, was now confronted by a major Taliban surge in Kunar Province. In late June, some of his soldiers with C Troop were out on a mission with ANA soldiers when they were ambushed. The ANA commander—without question the best officer in the 6th Kandak, or Afghan National Army battalion—was sprayed by shrapnel from an RPG. Evacuated from Forward Operating Base Bostick, he never came back. A couple of weeks after that, a platoon from C Troop was ambushed in the same spot; the twenty-nine-year-old platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Jay Fabrizi of Seffner, Florida, was killed74, and several others wounded. In August, Brown sent troops to meet up with a convoy of twenty-three fuel tankers headed to Naray from Forward Operating Base Fenty, but by the time the convoy reached the linkup point where 3-61 Cav would assume security, only one tanker was left; the rest either had refused to leave Combat Outpost Monti, which lay in between Forward Operating Bases Fenty and Bostick, or had been attacked and burned on the way. During the next convoy security mission, Fabrizi’s replacement, Sergeant First Class Johnny Weaver, was wounded by RPG shrapnel, as were two other men, one of whom ended up losing a leg.