The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (21 page)

Enemy fire on the PRT down in the valley had been slowly but steadily increasing, though there had as yet been no injuries. Mostly the enemy was poking the U.S. troops, seeing what they would do, how they would react, but the ominous prodding was bound to end badly in one way or another. Enemy chatter and walk-in reports from villagers about an imminent attack confirmed what the Americans all knew was coming.

On one of his first few days at Observation Post Warheit, Brooks tried to have the squadron fire-support officer (FSO), who was down in the valley at the PRT, orient him to the area via radio. For roughly ten minutes, Brooks struggled to pinpoint the parts of the mountain that the FSO was insisting were right there, to his right and to his left. And then Brooks realized that the FSO had never actually
been
up the mountain and thus didn’t understand that what from his view appeared to be the top of the southern mountain was in reality a false summit not even halfway up to OP Warheit.

Oh my God, they don’t even know where the top of the mountain is, Brooks thought.

It wasn’t that the fire-support officer down at the PRT was unprepared. It was that he was… well,
ignorant
wasn’t a
fair
word, Brooks knew, but it rang true. The gaps in the FSO’s knowledge weren’t really his fault; the valley was so disorienting, and the mountains so steep. One peak could obscure everything behind it, and the Army’s topographical maps fell short of capturing the terrain in any comprehensible way: lines drawn close together on a piece of paper just couldn’t capture the myriad elevations, notches, and contours of the area, severe and sharp and unforgiving. Troops would either fly in at night or drive in on the valley road; with minimal time on the ground and little situational awareness, they could hardly help it if their sense of the place was limited to what was visible to them. There was no way any of the troops at PRT Kamdesh could have understood the landscape without spending four or five days just walking around in it—which they didn’t have the luxury of being able to do.

So Brooks didn’t blame the FSO; probably everyone down there thought the top of that false summit was the top of mountain. But it was an unsettling revelation for the troop commander, the realization that everything he and his officers had worked out was based on inaccuracies.

“Shit,” he said to himself, “we need to start again.” All of the predetermined reference points were wrong.

At 9:00 p.m. on August 8, Brooks was just settling in for the night at Observation Post Warheit’s headquarters area, a tarp covering a pit walled by HESCOs, when insurgents unleashed a lightning storm of RPGs at his colleagues down at Kamdesh PRT. The attack came from all three surrounding mountains, to the north, the northwest, and the south. The mortarman at Observation Post Warheit jumped to it—“Get up! Get up!” Brooks shouted at everyone, in case the explosions themselves hadn’t done the trick—and the rest of the Barbarians prepared to help in whatever way they could. They couldn’t see the PRT itself, but they saw the intermittent glow from the RPGs as they detonated in the valley. The troops at the Kamdesh PRT used their machine guns, rifles, and mortars to try to fend off the insurgents surrounding them, then began calling in the grids to Observation Post Warheit so the mortarmen up there could target the enemy positions. The insurgents seemed to have anticipated this move, however, and started attacking OP Warheit’s mortar positions from the observation post’s south and west. The Americans at both locations pushed back with suppressive fire, and soon enough a team of A-10 Warthog airplanes rolled in and dropped a few five-hundred-pound bombs that devastated the opposition. The Barbarians continued firing even after the enemy retreated; the Warthog pilots targeted insurgents as they attempted to recover the bodies of their fallen comrades, which according to Islamic tradition must be buried within twenty-four hours.

After almost three hours, the engagement was over. Somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty RPGs had landed inside the PRT wire. Remarkably, just as in the Chowkay Valley, none of the Barbarians had been wounded, though there were some minor injuries down at the PRT.

Holy crap, Brooks thought. I can’t believe we just took all of this and walked out without a scratch—again.

For Brooks and other leaders of 3-71 Cav, the fact that the insurgents had been able to get so close to the PRT further illustrated the major flaw of Observation Post Warheit: there was an entire mountainside below them that the troops at the observation post simply could not see. Clearly the Kamdesh PRT would have to expand its perimeter and keep a more aggressive watch.

The larger lesson, Brooks was convinced, lay in the confirmation that this had been an awful place to put a base. He hoped that the attack would make obvious to command the inadequacies of the location, and that the PRT would be moved up the mountain. When Mike Howard visited a couple of days later, Brooks tried to raise the issue with him, but Howard shut him down, indicating that the PRT was going to stay where it was. It needed to be adjacent to the road, period. Able Troop showed up to relieve the Barbarians in late August, and Brooks was happy to pack up and go. It almost didn’t matter to him where he was headed next, just so long as he got off that mountain.

The Kamdesh PRT was built at the bottom of three mountains. To its immediate southwest was a mountain wall on which “Switchbacks”—paths back and forth—had been blazed.
(Photo courtesy of Kaine Meshkin)

Constant patrolling was crucial for survival, and daily, one platoon from Able Troop—there were three in all—would hike one of the mountains surrounding the PRT. On August 27, Lieutenant Vic Johnson led 1st Platoon halfway up the southern mountain, on the way to Observation Post Warheit. Lieutenant Colonel Howard and Lieutenant Colonel Tony Feagin—head of the PRT in Laghman Province—had gone up to the observation post earlier that day, as had Able Troop’s 2nd Platoon; Johnson and his men were taking a different route.

Out of the blue, some young Nuristani boys ran toward Johnson’s troops, yelling something about “bad guys.” Johnson, senior scout Staff Sergeant Aaron Jongeneel, and the interpreter tried to figure out what the children were talking about. The boys said they had been leading their donkeys up the trail, loaded with food and water, when some insurgents confronted them, stole their packages, and stabbed the animals. The insurgents had guns, the boys reported, their faces stunned with fear. There were other kids and villagers up the hill, they said.

“Hey, Lieutenant,” Jongeneel said, “I’ll take a recon team farther up the mountain to see if we can find anything.”

Johnson got on the radio as he walked with the recon team. He suspected this might be a trick planned by the enemy, maybe even an ambush, though the kids’ fright had looked sincere enough. “We have a report of some bad guys up the hill,” he radioed to Howard. “These kids seem pretty scared. We’re going to check this out.” Johnson relayed the plan to his platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Terry Raynor, who said he’d stand by with the rest of the group.

“Red-One,” Howard called in to Johnson, “don’t go toe to toe with them. Drop mortars.”

Vic Johnson thought about this order. He envisioned having his mugshot broadcast around the world on CNN International, suddenly infamous for calling in bombs that slaughtered a group of innocent schoolboys. Moreover, practically speaking, he didn’t know where exactly to drop the mortars, since he had no specific intel on the insurgents’ location—if there
were
any insurgents, that was.

“Sir, I have civilians in front of me,” Johnson said. “We’re told other kids are there. I don’t think we can drop mortars.”

“Fine,” Howard said. “Be careful.”

At Johnson’s direction, one soldier escorted the young Nuristanis down the hill a bit and onto a ledge off to the side, where they would be reasonably safe. Johnson left most of 1st Platoon in place while he and a few others went up the hill to investigate the boys’ story. In the brush they found debris and blood, which Johnson assumed must have come from the donkeys. He was starting to think the kids really were telling the truth.

Private First Class Kevin Dwyer piped up: “I see ’em,” he said. “They got weapons.”

“Then shoot ’em,” Johnson ordered.

Jeremy Larson and his immediate crew had discovered the enemy presence in a different manner: by being shot at. Insurgents fired their AK assault rifles
²⁵
at them, and Larson, Private First Class Levi Barbee, and Specialist Matthew Wilhelm all dropped to a fighting position. Barbee peered up toward the source of the fire through the scope of his M16 rifle.

“They’re looking down at us,” he said. “I got one in my sight.”

“Go ahead and take a shot,” Larson said.

Barbee fired, and the insurgents ducked and scattered.

Larson figured the others from 1st Platoon would swing into a flank to help them, so he stayed where he was and told Barbee and Wilhelm to do the same.

About six insurgents had gathered by a tree, offering Larson’s squad a rare opportunity to end the conflict almost before it began. Wilhelm had the SAW—the “squad automatic weapon,” or M249 light machine gun. He took a bead on the pack of insurgents, aimed his SAW, and… nothing happened.

The SAW had jammed.

As the firefight snapped into a greater intensity, Johnson told his interpreter, “Take the kids, the donkeys, whatever, and get them back to the PRT. Get the hell out of here. Tell them you were with Lieutenant Johnson’s patrol—they’ll know what to do. Make sure everyone gets there. Don’t stop for anything.”

Johnson grabbed one of his scouts and returned to where Dwyer was firing at the moving group of insurgents. The lieutenant emptied half a magazine of 5.56-millimeter rounds into one insurgent while Jongeneel and his recon team pushed other enemy fighters back with their fire.

At the back of the patrol, Wilhelm took apart the jammed SAW and put it back together. Enemy fire continued to shower down upon the three Americans. The pack of insurgents near the tree dispersed. Larson and Barbee continued to shoot, but they were running out of ammo.

Where the fuck is the rest of the platoon? Larson wondered.

“I need a fucking two-oh-three!” he yelled. “I need a SAW! Can I get some fucking backup?”

Some from 1st Platoon had stayed on the trail; others had headed into the brush. Specialist Clinton Howe now ran up with his M203 grenade launcher. “Hey, man,” he said, diving by Larson’s side as he fired from behind a bush. “I heard you’re looking for a two-oh-three.”

They made a plan. The enemy had been trying to work on their right flank, so Howe would launch a grenade from the left side of the bush toward the approaching insurgents, Larson would throw one from the right, and then they would pray to God that Wilhelm’s SAW worked.

As Howe stood up to shoot the M203 grenade launcher, Larson rose to his knees to throw his grenade. He hadn’t even had a chance to pull the pin when he saw the white puff of smoke from an RPG launcher, its lethal explosive coming right at them. Howe and Wilhelm scooted away. Barbee rolled. Larson dropped down and put his left arm over his face as the RPG landed barely three feet away from him.

Howe woke up in a pool of his own blood, under a tree. “Medic!” he yelled, but a voice told him that the medic was down, so he wiggled out from under the tree, only to promptly fall into a ravine. He took a second to try to clear his head, then got up and made his way over to the voices.

When Larson came to, he couldn’t see anything. Both the left side of his face and his left arm had been peppered with shrapnel. Blood was spilling into his eye from a cut on his forehead, and there were holes in his hand and shoulder. He could hear a high-pitched ringing as he crawled toward a tree. Reaching it, he paused to lean against the trunk and then staggered back to the bush where he’d originally been. There he found Howe and Barbee, who had also been hit with shrapnel, as well as Wilhelm.

“Medic!” Larson yelled. He knew that Johnny Araujo, the medic, had been down the mountain, prepared to help if needed, but now he heard Araujo in the distance, yelling that he himself was down. Larson quickly descended the hill and found the medic lying on the ground, covered with blood. Another RPG had gone off near him, sending a big piece of shrapnel into the right side of his neck; he was now plugging the hole with the fingers of his right hand. Two of the fingers on his left hand had been nearly taken off.