The Outpost An Untold Story Of American Valor Part 9

He sought out First Sergeant Todd Yerger, took a breath, and started going over what had happened. None of his soldiers had been killed, he said, but the enemy had found ways to exploit the Americans' reluctance to risk injuring local villagers, and had taken advantage of the high ground and a better knowledge of the terrain. The whole incident might have turned out far worse had the kids not warned them about the insurgents, and had Dwyer not spotted the ambush seconds before it began.

Yerger took out a cigarette.

"Hey, Top," Johnson said, using Army slang for first sergeants, "gimme one of those."

Yerger handed over the pack and a lighter.

It was the first cigarette Johnson had ever had. And the last-it was disgusting, he thought.

Many of the enlisted men did not know about everything that had gone down on the mountain that day, and quite honestly, they didn't care. In their opinion, Vic Johnson had handled things poorly and gotten a bunch of them shot up. They thought he was more interested in a.s.s-kissing the captains than in listening to his men.

That wasn't how Johnson's superiors saw it, however. They saw a lieutenant who'd led a patrol that was ambushed, and who'd responded aggressively while also being cautious about harming the local populace. None of his men had been killed, and no civilians had been, either. "No battle goes down cleanly, like the Xs and Os in a football playbook," one captain would later say.

Larson, Araujo, and Howe were taken from the Kamdesh PRT to Forward Operating Base Naray, then to Jalalabad Airfield, then to Bagram. They had their wounds treated and two days later were told they were being sent to the military hospital in Germany. Larson had planned on having a career in the military, but he was eventually discharged early for medical reasons: there was just too much metal in his shoulder.

A few days after their arrival, Ben Keating and Todd Yerger led Matt Netzel and his platoon on a mission to patrol and clear the mountain across the Landay-Sin River from and to the north of the PRT, a task that was supposed to take just a day or two but ended up taking six.

The valley was still new to them, and they hadn't antic.i.p.ated that the terrain would be so challenging. Neither Command Sergeant Major Byers nor any of the other head honchos now at the camp had gone up via this route, so no one realized how steep it was. Keating's platoon had to maneuver around and up cliff faces, climbing nearly sheer walls without the benefit of the equipment or the slower pace that might have made such ascents and descents both safer and more tranquil. They didn't see the enemy on this trip, but they did find a rocket pointed at the U.S. camp. (They blew it up with C-4.) They also found the remnants of campfires, which helped them pinpoint some of the locations the insurgents used.

Keating and Netzel talked a lot during this patrol. Keating told Netzel about his new girlfriend back home: he was planning on taking her to Ireland, he said, and thinking seriously about proposing marriage when they got there. Keating also spoke of his doubts about the war effort. He was losing his faith in the cause, he confessed. The sh.e.l.ls of the Soviet personnel carriers were constant reminders of the historical determination of the enemy.

"We're here, we have thirty or forty men, and we're expected to hold off this force that destroyed the Soviet Army?" he marveled, shaking his head.

During the period between the end of Operation Mountain Lion and the push to stand up PRT Kamdesh, Keating and Able Troop had been in southern Afghanistan, in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. Such wide-range roving was the kind of thing made necessary by the fact that the United States had only one full fighting brigade in Afghanistan. Keating's time in the south had been dispiriting. On the first night after his convoy left Kandahar Airfield, the U.S. troops at the front of the line-not from 3-71 Cav-had shot an Afghan man on a motorcycle who they thought was getting too close to them. The man was innocent, and to Keating, it seemed clear that it had been a bad shooting. He'd tried to console the motorcyclist's father while his son writhed in agony on the ground, full of bullet holes, and they waited three hours for a medevac to arrive. The motorcyclist died two days later. That sort of incompetence might kill me, too, Keating thought.

Again and again, Keating felt that some of his peers, his fellow officers, were failing their men. He'd witnessed an instance of friendly fire, from a unit made up of what he judged to be terrible soldiers with no training. During another mess, after U.S. troops were attacked by Taliban forces in a small village, Keating and nine of his men had trapped the insurgents in a copse of trees by a small river; when he called in Apaches to bring h.e.l.lfire missiles, one overeager pilot put a h.e.l.lfire about 125 feet in front of him and his crew-way, way too close. The explosion reminded Keating of the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan Saving Private Ryan, "where everything was ringing and we were all trying to talk with our hands-except for the radio, into which I was very much communicating with my voice," as he later told his father in an email.

His misgivings were complicated. Keating didn't doubt that the insurgents the United States was battling in Afghanistan were evil; in Kandahar, when given a chance to kill the enemy, he was aggressive. He thought of those allied against his country as murderers and rapists, and he believed in the rightness of killing them. It had seemed weird at first to be the leader who had to give the final go to pummel insurgents with mortars, Keating admitted, though it was made a lot easier than he might have expected by the knowledge that the insurgents were trying to kill him and his troops.

He also was coming to recognize the humanity of the Afghan people. He enjoyed his interactions with the local populace, as when he shared tea with an elder who regaled him with stories about being a soldier in the 1960s and confided his hopes for the future for his four-year-old grandson.

But at the end of the day, Keating felt, the American "experiment" in Afghanistan would fail, just as surely as earlier American efforts in Iraq, Haiti, and Somalia had done. The Afghan people just would not stick their necks out far enough to side with the United States and their own government against the insurgency-and he didn't blame them. Their reluctance was part of their DNA, after centuries of occupation by various powers.

Keating had joined the military because he wanted to know what it was like to serve before he-as a future congressman, senator, president-sent others off to fight. What his time in Afghanistan was teaching him was that there needed to be better reasons, stronger threats to national security, before the United States deployed its sons and daughters. The abstract threat of terror was not enough, Keating thought. Having lost his commander, Lieutenant Colonel Fenty, and colleagues such as Monti and Lybert, he couldn't stand the thought of losing one more guy over here. And now here he was, in a place that seemed even more hopeless and futile than Helmand and Kandahar Provinces.

"What the h.e.l.l are we doing at the base of three mountains?" he asked Netzel.

His friend didn't have an answer.

CHAPTER 11

The Enemy Gets a Vote

The significance of the date-September 11, 2006-didn't cross Sergeant Dennis Cline's mind as he awoke in one of the bunkers that served as the troops' living quarters. He arose and stood in his makes.h.i.+ft house, whose roof was fas.h.i.+oned from timber covered with sandbags and whose walls were made of HEs...o...b..rriers packed with dirt. For the twenty-seven-year-old Cline, it was just another day. You get up in the morning, you do your job, and hopefully you go to bed with the stars in the sky above you and your body parts all in one place.

The infantryman from Staunton, Illinois, had done a tour in western Iraq, but he preferred Afghanistan. The war in Iraq was all IEDs and cheap sniper fire, from where you could never be sure. At least here in Afghanistan, the men who considered themselves holy warriors, or mujahideen, would actually engage you in a pitched fight instead of just staging cowardly confrontations, setting roadside bombs and then running away. Yes, IEDs were a problem here, and suicide bombers, too. But usually the insurgents would stay and fight until they were either all dead or out of ammunition, unless they had a very good, very b.l.o.o.d.y reason for retreating.

Many other troops did contemplate the meaning of 9/11 that morning. Some thought about where they had been five years before. Others debated whether they should leave camp at all that day; maybe it was an anniversary to respect by being extra cautious. Specialist Shawn Pa.s.sman, a twenty-one-year-old gunner from Hickory, North Carolina, believed the exact opposite.

Today would be a good day to go out and kill a few of 'em for what happened, he thought. Fingers crossed.

On R&R at Fort Drum, Captain Matt Gooding paid a visit to Niagara Falls with his wife, then took in a BillsBrowns game before heading across the ocean and back to business. Stopping at Forward Operating Base Naray en route to Kamdesh PRT, he met with Michael Howard in the lieutenant colonel's office to learn more about the mission Able Troop had already started pursuing in Kamdesh. He was expecting to learn the plan for the squadron's further deployment and get Howard's guidance on Able Troop. Instead, he felt like he was getting quizzed.

"Are you familiar with the term 'COIN'?" Howard inquired. A draft of the Army's counterinsurgency manual had just been updated and pushed out. "What do you know about information operations?"

Gooding thought for a minute about his time in Kosovo, but before he could answer, Howard was talking to him about the weekly newspaper and daily radio programming that 3-71 Cav troops were producing there in Naray.

The test continued. "Do you have any experience overseeing development projects?" Howard asked. "Do you know which funds to use?" Again, Gooding thought about the nation-building projects his unit had worked on years earlier in the war-torn Balkans, but again Howard began describing the myriad efforts undertaken in Kunar and Nuristan by 3-71 Cav. His commander seemed to be enjoying giving him this lecture, so Gooding just listened and let Howard share his knowledge and experiences.

Gooding walked away from the meeting feeling a year behind the squadron and the other leaders in his understanding and execution of the counterinsurgency policy. He didn't know much about the culture of Nuristan, the projects, even which pot of money he was supposed to use. He would have to get his own information operation program up and running. But that was all civil engineering-literally. Howard had never even acknowledged the success of Able Troop's intense combat operations in Helmand Province that summer. While the rest of the squadron was still licking the wounds it had sustained during Operation Mountain Lion, processing the May 5 helicopter crash, and recovering equipment and personnel at Naray, Gooding's troops had spent a grueling summer fighting in some of the most dangerous places in the Taliban's stronghold.

Gooding's briefing with Howard was fairly short, since Howard and the Barbarians were about to head north to a new outpost near Gawardesh. Built high in the mountains, within sight of Hill 2610 and the Pakistan border, it would be called Combat Outpost Lybert.

With Gooding back in Afghanistan, Keating was no longer in charge of Able Troop. Gooding had not yet been to the Kamdesh outpost, so Keating commanded a convoy of Humvees that pulled out from the PRT to link up with him on the morning of September 11, 2006. Keating was driving with two of Berkoff's human-intelligence collectors, Specialist Jessica Saenz and Sergeant Adam Boulio, whom the locals called Adam Khan in a nod to a local song and folktale about a popular bachelor who dies heartbroken. That morning, Saenz and Boulio had met with one of their sources, an Afghan who was plugged in to the local insurgency. He told them that the enemy was setting up on the mountains south of the road and warned them to expect an attack.

Sergeant Dennis Cline was in the fifth of the convoy's five Humvees, sitting in the right rear next to a medic, Specialist Moises Cerezo, from Brooklyn, New York. Shawn Pa.s.sman sat in the turret with his gun facing backward, aiming behind them. Sergeant First Cla.s.s Milt Yagel was riding shotgun in front of Cline. Specialist John Barnett drove. It was a gorgeous day in a beautiful land. Pa.s.sman had joined the Army because he'd never really been anywhere outside of Louisiana and North Carolina, and now here he was, in one of the most breathtakingly scenic corners of the world.

Just a few minutes into their ride, RPGs started sailing toward them. Some of the troops regarded them with nonchalance; for many, the rockets had become part of the everyday ecosystem, like some exotic bird that was native to Afghanistan. Boulio, for his part, was not so relaxed: this was not where they'd antic.i.p.ated the enemy would be, which made him worry that he and Saenz had either missed some information or been deliberately misled.

Their gunner started firing toward the south as Keating looked back at the other Humvees in the convoy. "Hold on," he said to no one in particular. "Let's see what's going on."

In the back of the convoy, Pa.s.sman saw an RPG hit a rock wall to the right of the truck, fired from the mountain to the north, on the truck's left, beyond the river. He turned his Mark 19, a 40-millimeter belt-fed automatic grenade launcher, toward the river and fired at the mountain. As he did, he saw two RPGs. .h.i.t the water. He could hear insurgent AK fire from the mountains to the south, too, on the truck's right.

This is pretty cool, Pa.s.sman thought. He felt indestructible, as if nothing would or could happen to him. Just try to f.u.c.k with me, he thought.

As he drove, Barnett reached his hand back to shake Cerezo's.

"Congrats, Doc, this is your first firefight!" Barnett declared. Just then a bullet pinged off the bulletproof winds.h.i.+eld, ricocheting at eye level.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," Barnett said, turning serious and returning his attention to the task at hand. The convoy stopped. The instructions were to engage with the enemy when fired upon-which was now. As the rest of the convoy seemed to focus on the fire coming from the mountain to the right, Pa.s.sman fired about a dozen rounds toward the dust cloud on the left. After pummeling the area the RPGs had been fired from, he paused to see if there was any movement there. Cline had a 60-millimeter mortar gun, but one of the insurgents was. .h.i.tting the truck with small-arms fire, preventing him from opening his door and getting out safely while carrying the bulky weapon. As Yagel leaned forward to look at the southern ridgeline to their right, Cline s.h.i.+fted his body to the right and prepared to open the door. His left hand was on the back of Yagel's seat. Cline turned to the right to look out the window, getting ready to pinpoint the enemy, roll out with his M4 rifle-leaving the 60-millimeter mortar behind-and start firing. At that moment, an RPG hit the right side of the truck, flying through the side wall and exploding on impact.

Everything went black and white and nearly silent. For a moment, each soldier in the Humvee retreated into himself, hearing only his own breathing, the thumping of his heart. That pause was followed by a high-pitched whine that slowly rose as the men revived from the force of the impact and their concussions and became conscious of the world again. The vehicle had an internal Halon fire-protection system that reacted to any spark with an instantaneous emission of chemicals to smother the fire; the resulting fog of r.e.t.a.r.dant added to the soldiers' disorientation. In the haze, all that Cerezo could see at first was Pa.s.sman's legs in the turret; he thought the gunner had been ripped in half.

Looking again, Cerezo ascertained that the rest of Pa.s.sman was in fact still there. Cerezo's ears were ringing now. Turning, he saw a big hole in the back of Yagel's seat. He thought Yagel must have been completely obliterated.

As Cline went to reach for his M4, he noticed that his left hand was mangled, shredded, with his pinkie and ring finger hanging off by their tendons. The Humvee was still full of dust and debris.

"Hey, Doc! Doc!" Cline said.

Cerezo looked to his right.

"What, motherf.u.c.ker?"

"I'm hit," Cline said.

"Where you hit?" asked Cerezo.

"My f.u.c.king hand's gone!"

"What?"

"My f.u.c.king hand's gone!" He held it up.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," said Cerezo.

The medic grabbed his aid bag and hopped out of the Humvee. Only then did he realize that the truck was still moving, with no driver behind the wheel: Barnett wasn't there.

The adrenaline rush that nearly every soldier experiences in battle affects each differently. When the hormone adrenaline, or epinephrine, is released, it can constrict air pa.s.sages and blood vessels, increase the heart rate, cause tunnel vision, relax the bladder, and prompt the nervous system's fight-or-flight response. Adrenaline is such a powerful chemical that people often become quite literally addicted to it, pursuing extreme sports, riding motorcycles, and engaging in other live-on-the-edge activities to feed the addiction. Postdeployment, many soldiers become thrill-seekers for the same reason.

In some individuals, adrenaline excites a self-preservation instinct that can quickly turn into cowardice. In others, it creates clarity and inspires courage. In Keating's Humvee, the gunner's legs were shaking so much that the lieutenant joked, "What the h.e.l.l are you doing up there, dancing? Keep shooting!"

Barnett had jumped out the driver's door of the last Humvee in the convoy. Cerezo found him behind the vehicle, with his hands on the trunk. "Doc, I'm bailing out," Barnett explained, suffering the effects not only of an adrenaline reaction but also of a head injury: it was apparent that he wasn't quite right. "No, motherf.u.c.ker!" Cerezo screamed. "Get into the vehicle and stop the truck before it goes off the cliff!"

"Oh, okay," Barnett said, snapping out of it. He climbed into the Humvee and stepped on the brake. Then he grabbed his SAW light machine gun, got out of the truck again, and ran over to a small stone wall on the right side of the road, from whose cover he began firing up at the mountain.

Cerezo meanwhile opened the right rear door of the Humvee, pulled Cline out, and flung him onto the ground, next to the wall. He heard bullets pinging off the Humvee. As the rest of the convoy remained locked in a firefight with the insurgents, Cerezo tied a tourniquet on Cline's forearm and began to a.s.sess his other wounds, checking his arteries, ripping off his sleeve.

"Oh, s.h.i.+t," Cerezo exclaimed.

"All right," insisted Cline, "just tell me what the h.e.l.l's going on! If I'm going to die, I want to know!"

"You're not going to die," Cerezo a.s.sured him. But in truth, he wasn't so sure. Shrapnel had taken off Cline's left bicep, and he was bleeding out. Cerezo took the tourniquet off the sergeant's forearm and refastened it around his shoulder area. He put Kerlix gauze in the hole in his arm and wrapped it with Israeli trauma dressing, a multipurpose bandage that applied pressure and sterilized wounds.

Back in the Humvee, Pa.s.sman saw that Yagel was in the truck and fine, having dodged the RPG by leaning forward toward the winds.h.i.+eld. He was on the radio, talking to his first sergeant. Pa.s.sman now noticed that his own right leg felt wet, and suddenly his back started throbbing.

"Sergeant Yagel, am I bleeding?" he asked.

Yagel himself had chunks of shrapnel in his right shoulder and back. He grabbed Pa.s.sman's pants, then pulled his hand away. It was covered with blood.

"You're okay," Yagel said. "It's Cline's blood."

From his perch in the turret, Pa.s.sman began firing at the enemy again. He watched as the senior medic, Sergeant Billy Stalnaker from West Virginia, ran from Humvee to Humvee, taking cover each time and making sure everyone was okay. Todd Yerger followed behind at an unhurried pace, looking as if he were out on a leisurely stroll, with rounds bouncing around him as if they were raindrops.

"Is CAS coming?" Pa.s.sman asked Yagel, referring to close air support.

"No," Yagel told him. They would have to get out on their own, with no cover.

Next to the stone wall, Cerezo was wondering to himself, What the f.u.c.k do I do with Cline's fingers? As he was wrapping them into Cline's hand, Stalnaker ran over to them and hit the wounded man with some morphine. After a minute, Cline got up on his own and stumbled back to the truck.

A sergeant handed Cerezo his M16. "I got one of them," he told the medic. "A kid. Had a gun."

Once all were accounted for and back in the Humvees, the convoy pulled forward a couple of hundred yards, made a U-turn, and headed back toward the Kamdesh PRT. On the way, Cline felt something dripping down his neck. He mentioned it to Cerezo, who checked and saw that some shrapnel had hit the left side of his jugular.

"Don't lose my wedding ring," Cline told him.

After they pulled in to Kamdesh, Cline was put on a stretcher. Netzel ran over to help Pa.s.sman out of the truck; he was obviously having trouble walking. Netzel touched his leg and came up with a handful of blood. "I think that's Cline's," Pa.s.sman said. "I think I'm okay." He went to lie down, and Cerezo hurried over. The medic could now see that the gunner had a three-inch gash in his back. Cerezo began to cut off Pa.s.sman's pants and belt so he could find out what was going on with his leg.

"No, dude, this is a brand-new belt," Pa.s.sman objected. Cerezo cut it off anyway. The RPG had peppered the gunner's leg with shrapnel from the top of his hip to the bottom of his knee, the fragments ranging from the size of BBs to the size of quarters.

Pa.s.sman and Cline were medevacked to Forward Operating Base Naray. Amid the haze of his pain, Pa.s.sman asked a doctor about Cline: "Were you able to save his hand?" "No," the doctor said, in the tone of someone announcing a baseball score. Cline's left hand had been amputated at the elbow.

On their subsequent chopper ride to Bagram, Pa.s.sman and Cline were placed next to each other. Cline said he wanted to hold Pa.s.sman's hand with his surviving right hand. He asked Pa.s.sman about his injuries, about his life. Pa.s.sman, for his part, couldn't stop looking at Cline's missing arm. They were separated upon landing.

When Gooding was on R&R, Keating had sent him an email: "My puppy is barking," it said.

This was a reference to a statement made by a guest speaker at Fort Drum who had counseled troops on how to prevent posttraumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. The lecturer had likened the typical symptoms of raging emotions, central nervous system reactions, and panicky breathing to "a puppy's barking." Keating's email was his way of signaling that he had hit his limit of combat fatigue and needed to be relieved of command. The timing of Gooding's return would be good, too: Keating was looking forward to his own R&R in October. It would let him clear his head, steady his heart, and come back recharged and ready to lead again.

Howard had told Keating that he wanted him to switch Able Troop's focus from strictly fighting the enemy to counterinsurgency work: more meeting with local leaders and a.s.sisting on development projects, less driving around trying to find insurgents. That wasn't so easy: "n.o.body told them them," Keating would quip about the enemy. "The little b.a.s.t.a.r.ds keep shooting at us every day."

Some of the chatter picked up over the radio indicated that the HIG insurgents were not planning on heading to Pakistan for the winter this year. Putting a hopeful spin on it, Army a.n.a.lysts interpreted this as a sign that the enemy was worried that the United States might make progress with its counterinsurgency program during the interim, and that the insurgents might return to a Kamdesh that no longer afforded them refuge; HIG was determined, the a.n.a.lysts believed, to prevent that from happening. Keating felt good about the Americans' chances, but he was also certain that Kamdesh wouldn't be the end of it.

"Ultimately," he wrote to his father, "I think we are going to dismantle this organization"-referring to HIG. "But one thing we're still a little slow on the uptake about is that in this tribal culture, another group will replace them. A group that is just as vulnerable to greed, infighting and murder as the last. We can change the faces and names, [but] we will never change the values and the vision for the future that these people have spent five thousand years developing, perfecting and perpetuating through their common law, religion and teaching."

"I can't wait for you to get here," Keating had emailed Gooding.

The counterinsurgency efforts commenced. Keating, Saenz, and Boulio traveled to the village of Mandigal, to the north of Kamdesh on the way to Barg-e-Matal. Keating planned to join up there with Lieutenant Colonel Tony Feagin to conduct a shura with the village elders, while Saenz and Boulio were hoping to find some locals who might become intelligence sources. Feagin headed the provincial reconstruction team in Mehtar Lam, Laghman Province, and was responsible for all of Nuristan as well. In August, he'd moved into the Kamdesh PRT. While Able Troop was in charge of security at Kamdesh, Feagin was the overall senior mission commander, with a staff of about thirty-five people under him focused on the development of the area, including a civil affairs team, a military engineer officer, and two Army Corps of Engineers civilians.

Saenz and Boulio knew that the best pools of candidates to serve as sources were, first, elders looking to plead their case for a project to be undertaken in their village; and second, twenty- to twenty-five-year-old unemployed, semieducated males, literate and with maybe with some high school under their belts but not much more. The likeliest members of this latter group often had something a bit off about them and seemed a touch desperate-perhaps they'd been picked on, or they needed cash to get married or to support a large family. Saenz and Boulio used such weaknesses to persuade these men to work with the United States, offering them a way to feel better about themselves while also helping their nation.

Mandigal was a medium-sized village, typical for the area, with log-and-stone homes stacked one on top of another up the hillside. As the Americans entered the settlement, their eyes were drawn to a wooden overhang resembling a covered bridge, its huge wooden pillars decorated with intricate and ornate carvings, a craft for which the Nuristanis were renowned. Keating and Feagin were met by the elders and escorted to the shura room, in a building next to the main road. Served gla.s.ses of scalding tea saturated with sugar and presented with cookies and bowls of raisins, nuts, and jujubes, the U.S. officers and the elders discussed the need for everyone to work together and then went over a prioritized list of projects for the village, the most important of which was a micro-hydroelectric plant.

As Saenz and Boulio, accompanied by First Sergeant Yerger and four of his headquarters soldiers, walked down the main road, villagers gathered on rooftops and in doorways to stare at them. The intelligence collectors made small talk with anyone who seemed even remotely friendly, asking basic questions about the village and the lives of its people, trying to loosen everyone up.

One of the local Afghan policemen told Saenz that he would take her to meet the women of his family if she wanted. Saenz immediately accepted the invitation.

The twenty-five-year-old Saenz had been a student at Texas State University when she watched the second plane hit the tower. Her brother was in an Army Ranger battalion, and her first thought was, What's going to happen to him? In the weeks after 9/11, the two of them often spoke about what she could do next. Saenz wanted to help plan missions, to collect information that would prepare soldiers like her brother for the battlefield. With this in mind, she joined the Army.

Sitting in what appeared to be a biblical-era log and stone house in Mandigal, Saenz was a long way from Texas. The villagers gave off the odor of poverty, of dirt and sweat. There was even a faint whiff of urine in the air. The children had distended bellies. They were all very tiny.

"Here," one Afghan woman said to Saenz through her interpreter. "Take my child." She handed her baby to the American.

They were beautiful, the five Afghan women before Saenz-the young mother, her mother and grandmother, her sister and sister-in-law. Their skin tones ranged from fair to deeply tanned, and their eyes were piercing greens and blues. Often when Saenz went out on her intelligence-gathering operations, the locals would tell her that they were descended from Alexander the Great, and these women sure looked it, though experts would have dismissed such claims as folklore.

They were friendly, even warm, these women-hence the young mother's offer to let her hold her baby, Saenz thought. She explained to them what the PRT was all about, how the Americans were there to develop the area and make the Nuristanis' lives better with water-pipe schemes, wells, and schools.

She thought to herself, Sweet! Female sources. Maybe some of them will get upset with their husbands and give me information.

"I work directly for the commander at the camp, on security issues," she told the women. "If you ever see anyone causing problems, let me know."

"Take my child," the young mother said again, though Saenz was already holding her baby.

And then she realized what the woman meant.