The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (22 page)

“Dude, are you okay?” Larson asked.

“No, dude,” Araujo answered, looking up at Larson. “Are
you
okay?”

Araujo said he was going to pull his fingers out of the hole in his neck for a minute, and then he wanted Larson to describe the blood that started flowing: What color was it? Was it bubbling? Larson agreed to tell him and watched closely as blood started spurting from the hole. It was the same bright crimson that was on Larson’s own chest, from where his wounds had bled onto his shirt. Araujo knew that color meant the injury was to an artery, not a vein, indicating that this was a more serious wound. He struggled to wrap bandages around his neck, but he wasn’t able to seal the hole. He wasn’t sure how badly he was hurt or even how long they had been out there. “Hey, man,” Araujo said. “I need to get down the mountain.”

Johnson, Jongeneel, and the others at the front of the platoon had been granted the rare advantage of getting in the first shot. With the fight now seemingly almost over, Johnson grudgingly walked toward the spot where someone had been calling his name. Raynor’s voice came over the radio: “We need a medevac,” he said. With his men spread out all over the mountain, Johnson hadn’t known until that moment that the platoon had suffered casualties.

As he hurried down the mountain, he thought about the lessons he’d learned in Ranger School, weighing what he ought to do now. Johnson knew that at all costs, his scouts had to maintain an offensive posture. If they cowered and retreated, the insurgents might further exploit their terrain advantage—they had the high ground—and kill them all.

Larson suddenly appeared in front of him. To Johnson, he seemed a bit disoriented—that was the polite term for it, anyway. “What the fuck are you doing?” Larson asked him. “Where’s the medevac? We need to get a medevac, Johnny’s bleeding out his neck!”

In fact, Raynor had called for a medevac, but the leadership of 3-71 Cav had nixed it. The hill was too steep and sloping to allow a safe landing, the commanders felt, so the pilots would have had to use a Jungle Penetrator to extract any wounded men. The recent disasters involving tricky helicopter extractions and Jungle Penetrators added an extra layer of hesitation to any decisions to order more such rescue missions.

“Dude, you need to get the fucking mortars launched!” Larson continued. “Don’t let them get away!”

Johnson didn’t feel the need to explain himself to Larson, who was known to have a certain attitude, a problem with authority. He’d already made the call not to have mortars fired onto the mountain, given the civilian presence. Moreover, at this point, any mortar fired might hit one of the scattered U.S. troops.

“Just give him the fucking grid and get a goddamn medevac!” Larson yelled. He knew he was approaching insubordination, but he didn’t care. He was covered in blood and had been hit by flying shards of metal. Johnson understood that between the adrenaline and his injury, Larson was not in his normal state of mind, so he let it slide.

“I think I’m going to lose my eye. How bad am I hit?” Larson now asked.

Johnson looked at him. “It’s not that bad. You’re cut above your eye. The blood is streaming in. We’re going to have to walk back to the base.”

“Let’s get out of here,” Larson said. “We need to leave now, L.T.”

“Jongeneel’s team is still out there,” Johnson explained. “We don’t leave soldiers behind.”

A voice came back over Johnson’s radio: “Red-One, Titan X-ray, CAS”—close air support—“is coming on station. ETA is five minutes. There are two A-tens coming onto station.”

After the A-10 Warthogs flew over their heads, launching flares as a show of force, the troops found one another and consolidated. The fight’s over, Johnson thought to himself. By now the insurgents had probably already ditched their weapons and disappeared back into the local populace.

Larson walked back down and organized a 360-degree guard station around Araujo as the men of 1st Platoon continued to gather in their last known location. Squadron headquarters ordered the platoon to walk the casualties back to the PRT. Raynor began setting up teams with stretchers to carry the casualties off the mountain, but he was told it would take at least forty-five minutes for help to arrive. He was furious, but all he could do was try to figure out how to move the wounded as far down the hill as possible, as quickly as possible, without assistance.

One of the boys’ donkeys had survived but managed to tangle its lead rope around a nearby tree. Johnson had an idea: why not put Araujo on the donkey and usher the beast down the hill? Every time they tried to get Araujo on its back, however, the animal bucked him off onto the ground. The medic was in no shape to hold on to the donkey himself, so after a few attempts, they all decided just to head down on foot. The men took turns carrying Araujo.

This image of Araujo (
in the background
), Howe, and Larson after the ambush became a
Time
magazine Photo of the Year.
(Photo 2006 Robert Nickelsberg of Getty Images)

As he arrived back at the Kamdesh PRT, Johnson saw the rest of the surviving donkeys at the gate. He smiled, reassured that the interpreter had made it back safely with the children.

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 ass-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 anticipated 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 shells 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 Hellfire missiles, one overeager pilot put a Hellfire 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
, “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 hell 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