by Jake Tapper
By the middle of August, Forward Operating Base Bostick was running terrifyingly low on fuel for its helicopters. Colonel George authorized the closure of Observation Post Hatchet, in Kunar Province, to free up a platoon, and he and the Support Battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bob Law, agreed to start running convoys at night, with air support, surveillance drones, and U.S. military accompaniment.
All of this—the ambushes, the casualties, the extraordinary risk—meant that Brown was even more anxious to close the smaller outposts, including Combat Outpost Keating, whose closure would allow Black Knight Troop to come to Kunar to join his fight. It also meant that throughout the summer, he focused on the areas where his men were dying, and not on Combat Outpost Keating.
There had been little preparation made at Camp Keating for the August 20 elections beyond receiving the ballots by air a few days beforehand and planning patrols to keep the enemy from attacking the voting location at the Afghan National Police station. The Bastards left early in the morning and set up at the Northface, high and low, to watch over the camp and the police station. Red Platoon guarded the perimeter. The Americans didn’t see a single person visit the voting booths. Not one.
Truth was, they didn’t really care. Troops from 3-61 Cav were more interested in the enemy’s B-10 recoilless rifle than they were in this anemic version of the free and fair exercise of democracy. As the sun began to set, the polling station closed. The troops figured that about four people had voted, yet somehow, as they were later told, all of the ballots had been filled out. Even fishier were the numbers in Barg-e-Matal, where U.S. forces counted only 128 voters, though around twelve thousand votes were said to have been “cast.”
The initial results had Karzai winning with 54 percent of the vote, though the election was immediately assailed as being fraught with fraud. In what was now familiar Afghan fashion, the organization charged with keeping the process clean and fair—the Independent Elections Commission—was itself accused of corruption. An American diplomat working for the United Nations in Kabul, Peter Galbraith, would be fired by U.N. secretary-general Ban Ki Moon after he later accused his boss, U.N. special envoy Kai Elde, of covering up Karzai’s rampant fraud; Galbraith estimated that almost a third of the votes for Karzai were phony. Karzai was hardly alone: Brown heard that allies of Karzai’s opponent Abdullah Abdullah had stuffed ballot boxes as well, and paid off elders in Naray to deliver thousands of votes for him. (As was their wont, the Naray elders were said to have taken the cash from Karzai’s opponents but then actually voted for Karzai, who subsequently began an expensive construction project to build a three-story mosque in Naray.)
The election fraud meant less to the men of Combat Outpost Keating than did the further evidence provided by the ANA soldiers, around this time, that they were worthless—or, as per Jonathan Hill, “garbage.” They refused to follow orders during an election-day mission to take care of that recoilless rifle, though this was merely the latest angry note in the cacophonous earful Brown would get every time he talked to most of his captains: the Afghan troops wouldn’t patrol, they wouldn’t share information, and when pushed by the Americans, they would say “You’re not my commander!” and walk off in a huff. The Afghans’ weaknesses were exacerbated during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which in 2009 began on Friday, August 21 and would end on the evening of Monday, September 21. During Ramadan, Muslims attempt to achieve spiritual rejuvenation by reading the Quran and abstaining from food and drink during daylight hours. Hungry and thirsty, hot in the late-summer sun, the ANA troops were exhausted and irritable. They would refuse to patrol, making an already inferior platoon completely combat-ineffective. Their attrition and AWOL rates were disastrously high through the summer and got even worse during Ramadan. However much the ANA troops endeared themselves to God, or Allah, during that period, they did not win any friends among the Americans at the outpost.
“So what are you doing there?” Amanda Gallegos asked Sergeant Justin Gallegos over the phone. “Are you building schools?”
Gallegos laughed. His ex-wife was so naive sometimes.
They were from two different worlds. When they met, she was a student at the University of Arizona, an Alaskan transplant–turned–sorority girl with a Honda. He was a big, brash local employed by a water vending-machine company, who had lost two older brothers, both killed while engaged in gang-related activity. He did not care a lick what others thought of him, his decisions, or his behavior. Justin showed Amanda a side of Tucson that excited her, took her to parties full of drugs and violence. They clicked. However tough he acted toward the rest of the world, he was soft and sweet with her. Yet as soon as it became clear that they were going to stay together, Amanda tried to whip him into shape. She told him he had a choice, boots or books—the Army or college. He chose the former. And right around then, Amanda got pregnant. Their son, Macaidan, was almost five now.
Sergeant Armando Avalos and Sergeant Justin Gallegos. (Photo courtesy of Amanda Marr)
Gallegos returned from his second deployment to Iraq with posttraumatic stress disorder. He had always been aggressive, sometimes a jerk, but this was something else. If anyone looked at Amanda “wrong,” he’d become irate. He promised her he’d take a mood stabilizer, told her a physician’s assistant had prescribed him Zoloft, but that was a lie; instead he drank too much, became destructive, went to jail for fighting. Every night ended in violence of some sort. Amanda barely recognized him anymore; he was like a pit bull locked in a basement, and all anyone had to do was open the door to unleash the fury.
Gallegos was a loyal friend, but he was a nasty drunk and enjoyed causing trouble, and his Army buddies—fellow Red Platoon soldiers Tom Rasmussen and Stephan Mace, sometimes Sergeant Eric Harder from the Bastards—weren’t the kind of friends who helped a guy stay on the straight and narrow. One night, while drinking at a bar before the unit’s deployment to Afghanistan, Gallegos clumsily spilled his beer. The waitress came over, bent down to wipe up the mess, and got the rest of Gallegos’s beer poured on her head for her trouble. The bouncers escorted him to the parking lot, but he made his way back through the kitchen, sat back down at the same table, and had another beer. It took probably twenty minutes for the bouncers to figure out that he had made it back in; they threw him out again.
Harder had his own crooked story. Growing up in the Twin Cities, Minnesota, he never knew who his father was. He was raised by his mother, with his grandpa Jerry Carlson—his mother’s stepdad, a Korean War veteran—teaching him how to be a man. When Eric was thirteen, Grandpa Carlson died of throat cancer. That was the teenager’s first encounter with death before he joined the Army. It wouldn’t be his last.
When he was eighteen, Harder talked about joining the military with his close friend Matt Logan. One summer’s day, the two of them decided to jump into the St. Croix River, separating Minnesota and Wisconsin. It was illegal to jump in on the Minnesota side, but driving the ten minutes to get to the Wisconsin side was a hassle, and once there, you had to pay for parking—so the Minnesota side it was. Harder jumped first—it was about a thirty-five-foot drop—and began swimming. Logan followed him. The undertow was strong, and it pulled on both of them, but Harder managed to escape it and swim to the Wisconsin side. When he clambered out and looked back, he saw that Logan was only halfway across the river.
“I’m fucking drowning,” Logan called. Harder thought he was joking at first, but then he realized his friend was legitimately having difficulty keeping his head above water. Harder jumped back in and swam to him, but it was too late: Logan had been sucked under. His body was found three days later. Harder had a motorcycle—a blue-and-white Ninja 500—and on the way back from Logan’s funeral, distracted, he hit the back corner of a car and messed up his knee. He did stucco work for the next five years. Then he snapped out of his stupor and joined the Army in 2005.
Physically, Gallegos and Harder were men, but emotionally, they were something else. Was it because of the PTS
D, the camaraderie, their youth? Amanda didn’t know, but after a while she didn’t care. She divorced Justin, though she sometimes hoped it might be just a temporary thing, until he got his act together.
Then his orders came in to go to Afghanistan.
“You know that I’m not coming home from this one, right?” Gallegos said to her.
Amanda would laugh; it was ridiculous. But Gallegos would say things to Macaidan, preparing him to be the man of the house, and not just for the year of his deployment. “When I’m not here, you take care of your mother,” he’d say to his four-year-old son.
“This is not going to go well,” Gallegos told his ex-wife. “We’re going to be in a fucking valley.”
She’d laugh. They tried to have a sense of humor about things; it was the only way they’d gotten through his two previous deployments. “It sounds like a horrible idea,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s awesome,” he replied.
And then he went there. He’d email her photos of the fishbowl he now called home. “Doesn’t this look like the perfect situation?” he’d write. But it wasn’t funny. When he used to call from Iraq, there were times when he’d seemed perfectly relaxed. This was different. At Combat Outpost Keating, he was always on edge. Gallegos told Amanda that he’d had a lot of bad days in Iraq, “but here,” he added, “it’s all bad days.”
Sergeant Vernon Martin was stressed out, and Specialist Damien Grissette didn’t really understand why. They were on guard duty together, and Martin was trying to explain to him about something deep and powerful, something incredibly important that was going on in his life, but at the same time, he wouldn’t say precisely what it was.
“I need to get right with the man upstairs,” Martin kept saying to Grissette, over and over.
The two men had first bonded at Bagram Air Base; they were on their way to Combat Outpost Keating and saw a number of caskets on their way out. Inside were the remains of the Americans killed at Bari Alai on May 1. Martin, Grissette, Specialist Ian MacFarlane, and Specialist Andrew Stone were all support staff—mechanics, water, and maintenance. The sight of those caskets badly spooked them. “We’re all going to get out of here together,” they pledged to one another.
Sergeant Vernon Martin. (Photo courtesy of Brittany Martin)
Grissette was unaware of Martin’s secret—two secrets, really. The chief mechanic at Camp Keating had a wife, Brittany, and three children, ages six, four, and two. He also had a mistress, Specialist Cashet Burks, a logistics expert with 3-61 Cav who lived at Fort Carson, Colorado. The relationship had started out as a friendship, then turned into a fling, and then grown into something deeper still. Martin and Cash had discussed his leaving his wife, but he’d never actually said he would do it. Burks told him that she’d stick with him either way. The day before Thanksgiving in 2008, Burks informed Martin that she was pregnant. He told her he didn’t believe in abortion, and he’d support her in whatever decision she made. That August, she had given birth to a baby girl, Haniyah. Martin was worried about how he was going to break the news to his wife and his other children. He wasn’t a particular fan of the Army; he’d joined only because he had a family to support. Now he had two.
Martin was a kindhearted jokester who loved to make people laugh. At Camp Keating, he tried to call Cashet every day. He frequently emailed her as well.
From: Vernon Martin
To: Cashet Burks
Subject: wut up
hey wut up? im a call in a lil bit but yea da civilian came out here to fix our shit so its in the process. i been busy so havent been able to call u. im tired as fuk i do alot of shit out here. me and my two soldiers. shits tiring but oh well. i cant wait to leave dis cop hopefully they move us or close dis mofo. Wut i told u bout that before is starting to come tru. im hearing it on dis end so its inevitable. Thnx for sending me sum stuff. I appreciate u doing things for me and im approaching the position financially to be able to do stuff for u lol so i will. I appreciate ur kindness and luv it. neva take it for granted so jus know that. anyway im a hit u up n a lil bit before i take a nap cuz i got a long nite ahead well luv u chat with u soon.
Among the few in whom Martin confided was Specialist Albert “Cookie” Thomas, Camp Keating’s new cook. They knew each other from a deployment in South Korea two years before. The men of Camp Keating hadn’t much liked their previous cook or his meager offerings, so soon after the more industrious Thomas arrived for a four-week rotation, they’d essentially kidnapped him. By making the bland foodstuffs edible, even tasty, Cookie single-handedly boosted every soldier’s morale.
For Martin, Cookie was a sounding board, and they discussed his predicament over and over. Martin would never leave his wife, he said, though he was afraid she might leave him when he told her about Cashet. Like Martin, Thomas had grown up without a father, so he understood his friend’s vow that there was no way he would ever abandon any of his children.
A couple of months into the deployment, a worried Lieutenant Colonel Brown tried to figure out what to do about Captain Porter. By now, Porter had strained relationships with nearly all of his subordinate leaders—Lieutenants Bundermann, Salentine, Bellamy, and Cady; First Sergeant Burton; and his XO, Lieutenant Robert Hull. To a man, they all felt they had an obligation to help out in those areas where they saw Porter as failing, but upon hearing their recommendations, he consistently told them, point blank, that he was the commander, not they.
In one incident, Hull wanted to fire mortars on locations from which the enemy had been repeatedly attacking the camp. Porter said no. “We’re getting hit from there,” Hull said to him. “It’s a pattern we’re seeing.”
“People live near there,” Porter replied. “They don’t want to hear explosions in the middle of the night.” Thought Hull, Fuck that—these people are trying to kill us. Get off your ass and help us figure out who these people are. But he didn’t say it out loud.
As the nation headed into Labor Day weekend, McChrystal’s report about the way forward in Afghanistan landed on President Obama’s Resolute desk with a thud on Wednesday, September 2. The sixty-six-page document warned of “serious and deteriorating” conditions in the country and starkly declared that the war was “underresourced”—meaning, in other words, that McChrystal needed more troops, more funding, more intelligence support, and a vast array of other items. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next twelve months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” the report suggested. McChrystal did not specify how many troops he needed; he would separately present the president with a number of options (and associated risks), one of which would be to send an additional forty-five thousand U.S. troops to join the sixty-two thousand already in country. A hundred and seven thousand troops would be more than triple the number in Afghanistan when President Obama put his hand on the Bible and swore to protect the nation.
The report’s arrival punctuated the failure of national security adviser James Jones to help manage the president’s relationship with the generals across the river in Virginia. The mistrust between the White House and the Pentagon that summer was palpable. For their part, White House officials believed that McChrystal had surrounded himself with advisers who’d decided to play the Washington game, by leaking information, chatting up reporters, and trying to curry favor with various insiders.75 To the White House, it seemed that McChrystal’s men, so admiring of the modern “celebrity-general” model that Petraeus embodied (the “surge” of troops in Iraq, undertaken on his recommendation, was now widely credited with having helped rescue that war from disaster), were seeking to anoint another celebrity savior for this war. Indeed, sometimes it looked as though McChrystal and his team were engaged in two wars: one on the ground in Afghanistan, and the other, a separate war of public relations and politics, in Washington, D.C.
Colonel Chris Kolenda was not among this group of press whisperers, but h
e had become a strategic adviser to McChrystal in June. The new undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, had brought Kolenda into the Pentagon in February, as her adviser on counterinsurgency and her uniformed lead for the Reidel Report. When McChrystal (who had met the former 1-91 Cav squadron leader at the Pentagon) became commander in Afghanistan, he brought Kolenda with him to lead the strategic assessment and implementation strategy (the main parts of the initial assessment requested by Gates), as well as to develop counterinsurgency guidance for all of ISAF.