The Outpost An Untold Story Of American Valor Part 3

Most terrifying of all, though, were the enormous camel spiders, which were technically not spiders17 and really didn't look as if they were even from this planet. They were typically the size of a soldier's hand, sometimes even bigger, brown in color and with metallic, helmetlike bodies and hairy legs on which they could run as fast as ten miles per hour. Camel spiders were fully capable of eating lizards, scorpions, or birds for dinner. Although not venomous, they could inspire quite a jolt by falling on a soldier in his tent or deciding to seek shade in his sleeping bag. To pa.s.s the time during dull stretches, some of the troops would put two of them in a box together and watch them fight. and really didn't look as if they were even from this planet. They were typically the size of a soldier's hand, sometimes even bigger, brown in color and with metallic, helmetlike bodies and hairy legs on which they could run as fast as ten miles per hour. Camel spiders were fully capable of eating lizards, scorpions, or birds for dinner. Although not venomous, they could inspire quite a jolt by falling on a soldier in his tent or deciding to seek shade in his sleeping bag. To pa.s.s the time during dull stretches, some of the troops would put two of them in a box together and watch them fight.

A few days later, Netzel and his men finally arrived at their destination. Those troops not pulling security were allowed to eat and rest. Netzel and Moquin made small talk about their small-town pasts. Moquin had moved to Worcester from Shrewsbury, Ma.s.sachusetts, and had to switch high schools, eventually obtaining his GED from a local community college. His parents had split when he was just a year old, he said, and his dad, who wasn't a part of his life, had spent time in prison because of his problems with drugs. Moquin himself had wrestled with drugs; he had been hooked on heroin at one point, before he joined the Army. He had tried it for a simple reason: "I wanted to see why my father loved it more than he loved me," he said.

Originally the plan had been for the 2nd Platoon to watch over the valley from its post for two days and then return, but over the radio, Sergeant First Cla.s.s Milton Yagel told Netzel that his orders now were to push to the next mountaintop and head down the side to link up with Frank Brooks and the Barbarians, who were planning to meet with the elders at Chalas.

This would end up being a twenty-six-mile haul. During the day, the sun would beat down on the troops oppressively, but after dark, it was bone-chilling cold. One night, Netzel and Moquin shared a hollowed-out tree in which they slept standing up. Before drowsing off, they talked about Moquin's girlfriend; just before arriving at the base at Naray, he'd changed his life insurance policy to make her his beneficiary.

"Hey, Sarge," Moquin said. "What do you think about this?"

Netzel grunted. He was exhausted.

Moquin went on about how, on R&R, he was going to surprise his girlfriend.

"Surprise her with what?"

"I'm going to ask her to marry me," Moquin explained. The plan was that he would buy an engagement ring, slip it onto a dog collar, put the collar on a puppy, and give her the pet as a sort of double surprise.

Fenty was focused on his men, focused on their missions, but there was something else that occupied his thoughts as well. His wife, Kristen, was one week overdue with their baby. In the green commander's notebook he carried with him everywhere, in the midst of his penciled notations about intel-"New personality in Waygal18: Diyan.... Has supplies to equip 10X Suicide Bombers"-he had highlighted in black Sharpie "Kristen's Contact Info," with phone numbers for the Samaritan Medical Center near Fort Drum, including Daytime Triage and Evening Maternity, as well as his wife's friends.

"Don't you want to go back for the birth of your child?" Colonel Nicholson had asked him.

"Kristen and I talked about it," Fenty replied. "Right after the baby's born, she'll be tired and off her feet." It'd be better if he waited just a little bit, giving her some time to recuperate. "I'll fly back after Mountain Lion," he said. "My mom's there for her."

As her due date got closer, and then pa.s.sed, he would call Kristen for news-also speaking to his mother, Charlee Miller, who had driven up to Fort Drum from New York City-but each time the answer was the same: nothing yet. On Friday, April 7, Kristen paid an ambitious visit to a midwife who, hoping to speed things up, expanded her cervix in an attempt to bring on labor.

Early on the morning of April 8, through the unofficial but often far more efficient lines of communication run by military wives, Fenty, in a tiny broom closet of an office at Jalalabad Airfield, heard the news via emails and other messages: Kristen was in labor and about to deliver their baby girl. Her water had broken, and with the aid of her mother-in-law and Andrea Bushey-the wife of Lieutenant Colonel Dave Bushey, also in Afghanistan-she had gotten into a car, in which the three women had then driven through a blinding upstate New York snowstorm to get to the hospital.

Heart racing, Fenty called her cell phone. Kristen answered.

"They said it's going to be a long time," she informed him. They spoke for a little bit before he told her he'd call again as soon as he could. It was after midnight her time.

At 8:09 a.m. on April 8, the phone rang again in Fort Drum. Fenty was calling back.

"I'm going to take this," Charlee Miller told the nurse.

"Joe," she said as she answered Kristen's phone.

"Mom," he said, obviously desperate for any news.

"Joe, your baby is going to be born right now!" she told him.

At that moment, Kristen let out a bellowing scream, and Lauren was born.

"Stand by," Fenty's mother said. "You're going to hear your baby cry."

Within seconds of the medical team's suctioning baby Lauren's windpipe, she started screaming, and her skin flushed with a beautiful pinkish hue.

"Is she all right?" Fenty asked.

"She's all right," his mother told him.

"Is that the father on the phone?" asked the doctor. "From Afghanistan?"

"Yes, Doctor," Charlee Miller said.

"She's beautiful!" the doctor shouted to Fenty.

"How much does she weigh?" asked Fenty.

"I don't know yet," said his mother.

"I'm going to lose you," Fenty said. "I only have seven seconds left."

The line went dead.

He got through to Kristen herself later in the day. She was weepy. She was worried about him; he was worried about her.

"What's wrong with you?" he asked her, unaware of how difficult childbirth could be and used to his wife's being lucid-not exhausted, hormonal, and recovering from an epidural. Kristen explained her condition.

"What does she look like?" he asked.

"She's beautiful," Kristen said.

On April 19, Staff Sergeant Willie Smith led three other soldiers from Bravo Troop to the Korangal Valley's Abbas Ghar Ridge, where they were put under operational control of the 1-32 Infantry Battalion. Their job was to watch the valleys, the villages, and those sections of the road that were considered particularly vulnerable to insurgent attacks.

They were using a long-range advance scout surveillance system, or LRAS, which allowed thermal-optical surveillance up to fifteen miles, meaning that troops not only could see bodies from a long distance away but also could use the device to confirm enemy deaths, watching bodies lose life as heat from them was slowly-or not so slowly-released into the air. The LRAS in and of itself made obsolete other systems that required scouts to position themselves within the range of enemy fire. This technological advance came with strings attached: it was a terribly expensive and unwieldy machine, weighing about 120 pounds and difficult to haul across inhospitable terrain. The sight-through which scouts would look for the enemy-was as bulky as a medium-sized safe or a 1980s-era living-room television set, at seventeen inches high, twenty-seven inches wide, and thirty-one inches deep. And yet, by 2006, the Raytheon Corporation was closing in on selling its thousandth unit to the Pentagon.

There were just two spots where the LRAS could be set up to cover the first "named area of interest" to which these soldiers from Bravo Troop, 3-71 Cav, had been a.s.signed. One was on a ledge above a steep precipice. The other option would put the LRAS on more stable ground, but trees and other vegetation would interfere with its field of view. Staff Sergeant Smith and his team concluded that the ledge was the only feasible choice.

On April 21, Sergeant Jake McCrae had been scanning the a.s.signed area as instructed for about half an hour when the LRAS's batteries began to die. As he was in the process of replacing them, a gust of wind hit the LRAS, pus.h.i.+ng it over the cliff. McCrae tried to hold on to the right-side handle, but there was no stopping the one-hundred-plus-pound machine once physics became involved. The half-million-dollar piece of equipment crashed at the bottom of the cliff.

In the larger scheme of possible disasters in a war zone, the loss of an LRAS meant very little. But the Pentagon bureaucracy did not see it that way: soldiers were routinely required to account for every tax dollar spent, and the threat of having the cost of any lost equipment docked from their paychecks could loom large. The subsequent investigation into the loss of this LRAS would cause strife among the leaders.h.i.+p of 3-71 Cav and, in the end, beget a tragic irony.

It began at 3-71 Cav's new logistical base in Kunar, where Fenty a.s.signed Ben Keating to figure out what had gone wrong and whom to punish for it.

Keating did not want this job. He wasn't eager to punish enlisted men. He identified with them; he felt like he was there to serve them. As a member of the youth leader corps in his parents' church, Keating had taken to heart the notion of leading as a servant, as Jesus had done. He would tell his mother that he'd learned more about how to lead a platoon from youth leader corps than from any of the training he'd gotten at boot camp.

Keating's easygoing veneer masked a complicated mix of self-righteousness and actual righteousness. The intensity of his religious faith was of such an order that even his parents, both of whom were Baptist ministers, sometimes found it jarring. When he was a child, they'd joked that he knew more about the Old Testament than they did. Keating had been something of an odd kid, to be sure, spending hours reading his David C. Cook Picture Bible, Picture Bible, a 766-page comic-book version of all the texts from Genesis through Revelation. He was particularly taken with the stories of King David and the tale of Jesus' was.h.i.+ng the feet of his disciples, as rendered in the comic book: a 766-page comic-book version of all the texts from Genesis through Revelation. He was particularly taken with the stories of King David and the tale of Jesus' was.h.i.+ng the feet of his disciples, as rendered in the comic book: PETER: "No, Lord, I'm not good enough to have you wait on me!"

JESUS: "If you do not let me serve you, Peter, you will have no place in my kingdom."

After Jesus has washed all of the disciples' feet, he sits down at the table again.

JESUS: "If I, your lord and master, have served you, you should do the same for one another. The servant is not greater than his master."

And that was Ben Keating. "You don't ever ask your soldiers to do anything you wouldn't do," he would say. "You have to serve them to get the best leaders.h.i.+p out of them." Other soldiers might have come to the same conclusion in their own ways, but it was a safe bet that Keating was the only member of the 10th Mountain Division who'd brought with him to Afghanistan a copy of The Confessions of Saint Augustine The Confessions of Saint Augustine-in Latin.

Keating had a true sense not only of service but of mission as well-and not the small kind, either. During college, after one young woman made it clear that her feelings for him were more like those of a sibling than those of a potential wife, Keating talked it over with his mother. He was very close to both of his parents.

"So how are you with that?" Beth Keating asked him.

They were walking in the woods behind his parents' house.

"I'm okay, Mom," Keating said. "I think I'm supposed to be doing something bigger with my life anyway.

"I need to do this," he went on, referring to his military commitment. "So I guess this isn't the time for me to be thinking of a long-term relations.h.i.+p anyway."

What Keating was now doing in eastern Afghanistan wasn't what he'd had in mind when he talked about serving his troops. All the paperwork made his head hurt, and he'd be in a bad mood all day as he solved problems for people who seemed to him incapable of doing anything for themselves. He would personally sign for some four to five million dollars' worth of equipment daily-money he could never possibly pay back if something got irresponsibly damaged or mislaid. This man whose knowledge and devoutness rivaled those of a cleric was being consumed by work almost entirely clerical.

Now Fenty had ordered him to look into whether Willie Smith and Jake McCrae should have their pay docked for the loss of the LRAS. Keating found the very idea maddening; he saw this as one more instance of the typically myopic Army-bra.s.s sensibility that got underneath his skin and irritated him like a rash. He emailed his father, seeking guidance. The maximum pecuniary charge that Smith and McCrae faced was forfeiture of two months' pay. Keating figured that penalty would add up to about one fiftieth of the cost of the LRAS, barely enough to buy one of the system's power cables. He also reasoned that if the Army hit the two men that hard, neither would be likely to reenlist. Taxpayers had every right to seek an accounting for the lost LRAS, but was it really worth losing these two soldiers over? Had there truly been gross negligence? They were at the end of the Earth here, and for the love of G.o.d, the mountains of the Hindu Kush were windy. He was inclined to give the soldiers letters of reprimand-still a slap in the face, but one that might keep them in uniform.

Keating discussed his investigation and his thinking with Fenty, who pushed him to make a tougher ruling. Keating suspected that part of what motivated the squadron commander was a desire to impress his bosses, and he resented Fenty for putting him in that position. He resented him even more when he overheard him telling Major Richard Timmons-the squadron XO, and thus the middleman between Fenty and Keating-that he wondered if Keating had the "moral courage" to render such a judgment.

It would be hard to imagine a remark that could have insulted Keating more.

CHAPTER 5

"This Whole Thing Is a Bad Idea"

They set us up, Captain Frank Brooks thought to himself.

On April 29, Brooks had led the Barbarians into Chalas, a village in the Chowkay Valley. They'd been inserted at dawn a few days before, near some colorful poppy fields, their bright flowers all ready for the opium harvest. After surveilling the area for a couple of days, the Barbarians were ready to engage with the elders. Netzel and his men from Able Troop were watching their backs, having trudged half a mile east of the Barbarians' observation post to get a better view of the village.

Brooks and a handful of men from his headquarters element-fire-support officer Lieutenant Erik Jorgensen, his radio man, and two troops who were pulling security-walked down from the observation post to the edge of the hillside village. An Afghan man met them there and took them to the middle level of Chalas, where the buildings were on stilts and looked like oversized steps, to see the seven or so elders. They were all so weatherbeaten and sunburned that it was impossible to guess which of them might be forty years old and which seventy. Sitting on logs and chairs in a spot where a pair of trails converged, the two groups talked for about two hours with the aid of an interpreter. The elders provided some basic history of their village.

"Are you Soviets?" one of the villagers finally asked.

The Barbarians looked at one another.

"No," they explained, "we're Americans, and we're here on behalf of the government of Afghanistan."

"The government of Afghanistan?" the elders remarked. "What is that?"

The Barbarians spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes going over everything from the Soviets' withdrawal from Afghanistan to the 9/11 attacks to the Northern Alliance to the new Kabul government. After that, they moved on to the topic of the cultivation of poppy, used in opium production. The village elders denied growing any poppy, even though the surrounding hillsides were blanketed with it. The Americans noted that there was nothing wrong with their eyesight, and they weren't idiots. The Chalas elders ultimately admitted that they grew the stuff but insisted they didn't sell it to the Taliban-just to "normal" narco-traffickers, they said.

The Americans accepted this.

They next talked about the insurgents in the valley. The elders took the general party line: "Security is good here, we keep the fighters out ourselves, we don't need your help."

Before leaving, Brooks had his interpreter ask one of the elders if he could recommend a better route for them to take up the mountain to return to their camp. The trip down had taken them three hours. The elder told them to follow a drainage ditch up the hill and even offered to guide them. They ended up sucking wind up the trail as they watched the elder, who looked to be about sixty years old, churn along as if he were out on a Sunday stroll. The ditch turned out to lead almost directly back to their observation post. When they arrived there, they thanked the old man, who quickly disappeared.

Home again in their temporary digs, Brooks and his men started to unwind. They put down their weapons, removed their gear, took off their shoes, guzzled water, and lit up their smokes. Erik Jorgensen peeled off the T-s.h.i.+rt he'd been wearing for four days straight. It was pretty ripe.

Jorgensen had been drawn to military service in high school, after reading Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers Band of Brothers. When he signed his ROTC contract in 2000 at Northeastern University in Boston-obligating him to complete four years of active duty following graduation, in exchange for having his tuition paid-he was hoping he'd get lucky and be deployed to Kosovo or Bosnia so he could see some "action." He now chuckled whenever he recalled his gung-ho pre-9/11 navete.

As dusk began to settle over the Chowkay Valley, Jorgensen tried to relax, yet he kept thinking that something felt a little off-like that old movie cliche about its being "quiet out there, almost too too quiet." And then, as if right on cue, there came a series of explosions, followed by yelling. A salvo of rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, had been fired at the Barbarians. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM. quiet." And then, as if right on cue, there came a series of explosions, followed by yelling. A salvo of rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs, had been fired at the Barbarians. BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.

Right away, Brooks noticed one thing about these RPGs: they were aimed just south of their position, hitting the path they'd used earlier in the day to walk down to Chalas. The enemy had a.s.sumed they were going to take the same route back. Brooks suspected that the elders had known that he and his men would be targeted-except for, perhaps, the one who had escorted them home.

The bangs of the RPGs were immediately succeeded by the rapid DADADADADADA of machine-gun fire. Hollywood has conditioned audiences to think that firepower should sound spectacular, maybe even otherworldly, like the lasers in Star Wars Star Wars. But in truth, the sound of armaments is industrial and mechanical, underlining the factory nature of war and armies: this machine kills that worker, a new worker replaces him; this worker uses his machine to destroy that machine; a new machine needs to take its place.

s.h.i.+t, thought Brooks. That was no ordinary machine-gun fire; it was from a Russian Dushka, thought Brooks. That was no ordinary machine-gun fire; it was from a Russian Dushka,19 a heavy antiaircraft machine gun, belt-fed with a tripod. This was no small thing, the fact that the enemy had a Dushka: it meant that besides having the advantage of the terrain, they might be able to outgun the Americans, too. The Barbarians had M240s but no .50-caliber machine guns, the only real match for the Dushka's rate of fire and its 12.7-millimeter round, which could be propelled almost three quarters of a mile and through any type of body armor. a heavy antiaircraft machine gun, belt-fed with a tripod. This was no small thing, the fact that the enemy had a Dushka: it meant that besides having the advantage of the terrain, they might be able to outgun the Americans, too. The Barbarians had M240s but no .50-caliber machine guns, the only real match for the Dushka's rate of fire and its 12.7-millimeter round, which could be propelled almost three quarters of a mile and through any type of body armor.

The Dushka raked the entire hillside with bullets, the rounds. .h.i.tting the building that the Barbarians used for cover with a deadly thud. Jorgensen and the rest scrambled for safety, though they had no idea at first where the fire was coming from.

Before the shooting began, Netzel and four others from Able Troop-Sergeant Michael Hendy, Private First Cla.s.s Levi Barbee, Private First Cla.s.s Taner Edens, and Private First Cla.s.s Brian Bradbury-had been sitting at the tip of a ridgeline overlooking the Barbarians' outpost. They were chatting about how best to prepare for night operations when Netzel looked below them-down to where Brooks and his team had just been breaking down for the night-and saw rocks the size of basketb.a.l.l.s exploding.

Everyone dove for cover.

For many of the troops, this was their first experience of having someone actually try to kill them. It wasn't clear who their antagonists were, what group they were affiliated with, what was motivating them. Frankly, none of those things mattered.

The platoon from Able Troop and the Barbarians determined that the position the enemy was firing from was about half a mile away, on a parallel ridgeline to their west. They were slightly higher up than the Americans, maybe a hundred yards or so. Netzel and his men began firing back at the enemy, as did Brooks and his troops, using their M4 carbine a.s.sault rifles and M240 machine guns. The M240s were their only major weapon system, and the insurgents were just outside its effective range. The M240 gunners did their best to put fire on the larger Dushka, but it just wasn't working out. Jorgensen was charged with coordinating outside firepower-artillery, mortars, helicopters, or jets-if it was needed. It was. Some two miles away from their position, 3-71 Cav had set up a 120-millimeter mortar team, and Jorgensen now radioed the mortarmen to give them an update, but he was unable to see the target and so couldn't provide a grid coordinate for the enemy's location.

In the middle of the observation post was an abandoned house that Brooks had designated as Barbarian Troop's command post. The lower floor was vile, coated with filth and insects and infested with rats, so the men used only the roof. They called the building Chateau Barbarian.

First Lieutenant Erik Jorgensen atop Chateau Barbarian. (Photo courtesy of Erik Jorgensen) (Photo courtesy of Erik Jorgensen)

A rickety ladder led up to Chateau Barbarian's roof, and Jorgensen now scaled up to the top and tried to get into a position from which he could better see the valley. He was followed by Specialist Kraig Hill, whose cla.s.sification as a "forward observer" meant that he was responsible for serving as the eyes on the ground for gunners, telling pilots, artillerymen, and mortarmen where to fire. Vulnerable, the two men crawled to a spot where they had a view of the Dushka's location.

It was dusk. Jorgensen and Hill called up to an adjacent ledge where others from Able Troop had camped and were using a laser to pinpoint the enemy position. (Some others from Netzel's patrol, including Brian Moquin, had relocated there as well.) They called back down, giving Jorgensen and Hill a grid coordinate, which they then called in to the mortarmen. Jorgensen looked toward the mortars, saw lights flash as the rounds left the tubes, and watched them crash near the Dushka's position. The troops on the ledge could see more than a dozen figures on the mountain moving back and forth from the Dushka to a nearby shelter of some sort-perhaps a cave?-presumably hauling out ammo. The Dushka fired again.

Netzel was about to call in corrections to the rounds when on the radio he heard his lieutenant calling for a grid correction that would have dropped the rounds right on top of him and his men. Few officers had much confidence in this lieutenant.

"Stay the f.u.c.k off the radio!" Netzel barked, then offered the correct adjustments. The mortars fired again. The Dushka went silent, though other enemy fire continued.

Night fell on the Chowkay. Two Apache helicopter pilots checked in with Jorgensen and Kraig Hill, who gave them the relevant grid. Almost simultaneously, a call came in over the radio instructing all friendly positions to turn on their infrared strobe lights so that the Apaches would know which spots to avoid. Netzel and his four troops didn't have a strobe, so he told his men to get behind cover, and he stood, exposed, pointing his rifle at the ground and hitting the b.u.t.ton on its laser in a strobe pattern, hoping that this would be visible to the pilots. His heart was pounding out of his chest. Ultimately, whether the idea worked or they just got lucky, the Apaches avoided them, opening fire on the Dushka position and the enemy shelter.

Low clouds slid into the area, restricting what the crews of the Apaches could see and where they could safely fly. The last thing they needed was to have a helicopter plow into a hillside, so the Apaches left. The troops on the ledge, using an LRAS to track the heat signatures of the insurgents, reported that some of the enemy fighters were still moving in and out of the cave, while others were heading down the back side of the parallel ridgeline.

Now the A-10 Warthogs rolled in. The Warthog is a single-seat straight-wing jet aircraft with superior maneuverability at low speeds and low alt.i.tudes. It was designed specifically to provide close air support for troops on the ground. Jorgensen had one crew put a five-hundred-pound bomb right into the enemy's cave. Then came another American plane with a two-thousand-pound bomb aimed at the same spot.

The fight was over.

Jorgensen suddenly realized he was freezing. He looked down and saw that under his gear, he was wearing only an unders.h.i.+rt. The enemy had caught him in midchange.