The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (23 page)

T
he 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 makeshift house, whose roof was fashioned from timber covered with sandbags and whose walls were made of HESCO barriers 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 bloody 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 Passman, 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 Bills–Browns 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 Passman sat in the turret with his gun facing backward, aiming behind them. Sergeant First Class Milt Yagel was riding shotgun in front of Cline. Specialist John Barnett drove. It was a gorgeous day in a beautiful land. Passman 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 anticipated 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, Passman 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 hit the water. He could hear insurgent AK fire from the mountains to the south, too, on the truck’s right.

This is pretty cool, Passman thought. He felt indestructible, as if nothing would or could happen to him. Just try to fuck 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 windshield, ricocheting at eye level.

“Oh, shit,” 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, Passman 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 hitting 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 shifted 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 retardant added to the soldiers’ disorientation. In the haze, all that Cerezo could see at first was Passman’s legs in the turret; he thought the gunner had been ripped in half.

Looking again, Cerezo ascertained that the rest of Passman 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, motherfucker?”

“I’m hit,” Cline said.

“Where you hit?” asked Cerezo.

“My fucking hand’s gone!”

“What?”

“My fucking hand’s gone!” He held it up.

“Oh, shit,” 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 passages 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 hell 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, motherfucker!” 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 assess his other wounds, checking his arteries, ripping off his sleeve.

“Oh, shit,” Cerezo exclaimed.

“All right,” insisted Cline, “just tell me what the hell’s going on! If I’m going to die, I want to know!”

“You’re not going to die,” Cerezo assured 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, Passman saw that Yagel was in the truck and fine, having dodged the RPG by leaning forward toward the windshield. He was on the radio, talking to his first sergeant. Passman 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 Passman’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, Passman 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?” Passman 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 fuck 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.