The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (15 page)

Snyder and his Special Forces troops were up the mountain, eating lunch with the elders of Upper Kamdesh. Snyder told them about the PRT that Swain was planning on setting up down the mountain, and the elders did not like the idea one bit. Kamdesh was too small, they said. They didn’t want U.S. troops nearby.

That’s interesting, Snyder thought. It wasn’t what the elders had been telling his second in command, or the leaders of 3-71 Cav, over the previous few weeks during shuras at Forward Operating Base Naray, when plans for the PRT were being discussed.

Snyder and his team finished their meal and left their host’s house.

“You know, they can’t attack us now for three days,” Snyder’s engineer told him.

“Why not?” Snyder asked.

“We just broke bread with them,” the engineer explained, repeating a myth about the region.

As they walked, the children of the village followed them, chanting and yelling, all the way to the edge of Upper Kamdesh. Snyder found this odd. “What are they saying?” he asked his interpreter.

“I can’t understand it,” the man replied. “They’re saying it in Nuristani.” The language was incomprehensible to most Afghan interpreters, who were conversant in Pashto and Dari but not in the specific dialect used by these particular hill people. Nuristanis spoke five different languages in all, and within those five, there were a number of discrete dialects.

Adding to Snyder’s unease was the behavior of a Kamdesh elder who’d announced that he would join them on their walk down the mountain. The man suddenly turned away from the Americans and proceeded to take a different path. A little farther down the mountain, one of the Kamdesh policemen who were accompanying Snyder and his troops told the interpreter, in Pashto, that he and his men were now out of their jurisdiction, so they, too, were going to break off.

Weird, thought Snyder. And then, a few yards later, tracer rounds started streaming past them: they’d been ambushed.

At first, the bullets did little more than kick up dust. The Special Forces were trained to turn to face their attackers in such situations, orienting their breastplates toward the enemy fire and pushing forward, firing their weapons, to gain dominance.

The insurgents had an answer for this, though: as the Special Forces troops came forward, the enemy fighters sent out small children to stand between them and the Americans.

The Americans held their fire, and the insurgents scrambled away.

One of the Afghan Security Guards with Snyder’s group had been shot in the leg. The bullet had hit an artery, and he was bleeding profusely. Snyder and his troops took him into a nearby building and radioed Swain, who in turn called Forward Operating Base Naray and ordered a medevac. One of the Special Forces medics tried to keep the Afghan guard alive, but he soon bled out and died. Sometimes it happened that fast.

Down the mountain from Snyder, Swain unfolded his map and tried to figure out where the insurgents who had ambushed the Special Forces would run. Guessing that they might go southeast of him on the road, past the medical clinic and the school, he ordered Platoon Sergeant Steven Brock to head down there with a mix of American and Afghan troops to head them off. He would meet them there in a few minutes, he said. Meanwhile, a few angry Special Forces troops had returned to Kamdesh Village and detained some elders, demanding answers—an action that embarrassed the Kamdeshis in front of their community.

Special Forces scouts conducting surveillance from surrounding mountains saw a number of Afghan men darting around, and they called this intel in to Snyder, who also began getting similar reports from Apache pilots in the area. Could be innocent, he thought. But likely not.

“We kicked a hornet’s nest,” Snyder radioed to Cherokee Company. “We’re getting out of here.” They got on their ATVs and headed back toward Naray. Swain and his men followed suit not long after.

The Americans had been on the road for only a few minutes when Swain saw an RPG coming right at him.

Swain swerved to avoid the incoming rocket and kept driving. It exploded safely behind him. But the battle had commenced.

The glorious Landay-Sin River flowed to their left as they headed downstream, running for their lives. To the north, beyond the river, was a ridge from which insurgents were shooting at them. The 3-71 Cav troops braked their ATVs with a screech, took cover, and began firing back. Sergeant David Fisher—who’d fixed the laser on Daoud Ayoub in the Kotya Valley—had mounted a machine gun on his ATV, and now he yanked it off, ran up the hill to his right, and started firing at the enemy. Swain crouched behind a rock wall and called Forward Operating Base Naray on his radio: “Tell the Apaches to come back,” he said. Cline’s mortar team fired their tubes in hand-held mode, aiming for the hillside.

After a few minutes, Swain received bad news about the Apaches: they couldn’t come back because they were already engaged in another mission. It was the nature of the beast—there were never enough aircraft in Afghanistan.

“We need to get out of here,” Swain told his men. “We can’t get air cover.” So Fisher provided the only cover available, firing up the mountainside as the rest of the team sped away. He kept shooting even as he jumped on the ATV bringing up the rear, driven by Brock, and zoomed off. Luckily, the insurgents were far away—and they weren’t particularly good shots.

Just another day at the Afghanistan office.

After the Marines landed on Guadalcanal and the Solomon Islands during World War II, General Douglas MacArthur and Admiral Chester Nimitz led a charge toward Japan by “island hopping” in the Pacific Ocean, hitting New Guinea, the Gilbert Islands, the Marshalls, the Marianas, Guam, Tinian, the Palaus, and the Philippines. They bypassed some of the enemy’s stronger points on their way to Emperor Hirohito, but they built up momentum and eliminated possible threats by taking that path.

Michael Howard now wanted to attempt a version of that strategy—village hopping, Berkoff called it—by clearing out the enemy from communities on the way from Forward Operating Base Naray to the new outpost that 3-71 Cav would be setting up in Kamdesh to support the PRT. In their village hopping, the 3-71 Cav troops would first hit Gawardesh and then proceed westward to chase away and/or kill the enemy, it was hoped, in Bazgal, Kamu, and Mirdesh.

Gawardesh, a border village, was home to Haji Usman, a timber smuggler and HIG commander. His two jobs were not unrelated. In 2006, President Karzai, worried about deforestation—more than 50 percent of the country’s forests had disappeared since 1978—banned logging and timber sales within Afghanistan. Instead of ending these practices, however, the ruling merely drove them underground, pushing timber gangsters into the arms of insurgent groups such as HIG and the Taliban. There was only one “official” border crossing point in this region, near Barikot, so insurgents used the mountain pass leading into Gawardesh from the Chitral District in Pakistan to illicitly funnel in supplies and men. Karzai’s lumber ban set the conditions for consolidation: trucks and donkeys would transport timber into Pakistan and come back bearing guns and RPGs.

According to standard procedure, before 3-71 Cav pushed into Gawardesh to meet with the elders there, a smaller group from the squadron would go up to make sure no traps had been set for the Americans. Howard ordered Staff Sergeant Chris “Cricket” Cunningham, the twenty-six-year-old leader of Cherokee Company’s kill team, to join up with Jared Monti in running a squad of forward observers. Their snipers and scouts would take two days to hike to a ridge overlooking Haji Usman’s house near Gawardesh. Only after Cunningham gave the go-ahead would the rest of 3-71 Cav roll in.

After high school, Cunningham had been looking for a way out of Whitingham, Vermont, when one of his older brothers suggested that he join the Army. “Don’t sign any papers until they give you one that says ‘Ranger’ on it,” his brother told him—advice that Cunningham followed. Like Byers and Fenty, Cunningham was a rare member of 3-71 Cav who wore the coveted Ranger scroll on his right shoulder, indicating that he had actually served with the Ranger Regiment rather than merely gone through the course.

For a few months now, Cunningham had been angling to partner with Monti on a mission. He respected the skills of the forward observers on Monti’s team, and the two men had become friends. At the end of each day back at Forward Operating Base Naray, they would sit together on a bench in a garden, drinking coffee and shooting the breeze. Missions, commanders, family—they talked about them all. After they got out of the Army, both were thinking about enrolling in the Troops to Teachers program, a joint initiative between the Pentagon and the U.S. Department of Education that helped eligible soldiers start new careers as public school teachers in high-poverty areas.

Monti, a fellow New Englander, came from the working-class town of Raynham, Massachusetts, where he’d been a champion wrestler who always had a smile on his face. That changed after the Army sent him to his first deployment, in Kosovo, where he was given a crash course in what had once been, to him, unimaginable barbarism. He would regularly see a townful of Christian adults throwing garbage at Muslim children as they walked to school. To Monti, doing what was morally right was far more important than observing Army rules, so he started driving the kids to school himself, in his Humvee. But there was too much horror there for him to have any real impact on it—too much hatred, too much killing, too many neighbors turned into murderers. He came back from the Balkans a different man, a haunted one.

Jared Monti had always been an innately altruistic person, but it almost seemed as if the more he was exposed to the worst of humanity, the more he lived for his men. One Christmas, he signed over his leave to a soldier who hadn’t seen his immigrant wife in two years. That was pure Monti. Returning to his barracks after hitting the mess hall on a separate deployment, in South Korea, Monti had witnessed one private sadistically beating another. He tried to break up the fight verbally, but that didn’t work, so he grabbed the aggressor and threw him against a wall. The next day, he got called into the sergeant major’s office, where he was chewed out—he was of higher rank than the private, and laying hands on someone of lower rank was a violation of Army rules. He was demoted as a result of the incident. So be it, he’d thought.

Jared Monti in Afghanistan.
(Photo courtesy of the Monti family)

Monti was just as excited about their teaming up on a mission as his buddy Cricket Cunningham was. Monti would lead the forward observers and artillerymen, while Cunningham would be in charge of the shooters. They met and discussed the operation. The United States had never battled Usman or his fighters before, so they would be operating mostly on hunches. Usman could probably muster up to about fifty fighters, Berkoff told them; he and his men would be able to use their knowledge of the terrain to their advantage and would try to outflank the Americans’ positions, but Berkoff did not expect they would pose much of a threat in terms of firepower.

Chris Cunningham and Jared Monti planning for their mission to Gawardesh.
(Photo courtesy of Chris Cunningham)

In his tent at Forward Operating Base Naray, Monti told one of his ranking noncommissioned officers, Sergeant Chris Grzecki, about the mission. “We’re going to this area, to overwatch this other area,” he said, referring to a map. “This is the mountain we think is best.”

He pointed to Hill 2610.

CHAPTER 8

Hill 2610