The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (24 page)

“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 Passman 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,” Passman 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 Passman’s pants and belt so he could find out what was going on with his leg.

“No, dude, this is a brand-new belt,” Passman 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.

Passman and Cline were medevacked to Forward Operating Base Naray. Amid the haze of his pain, Passman 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, Passman and Cline were placed next to each other. Cline said he wanted to hold Passman’s hand with his surviving right hand. He asked Passman about his injuries, about his life. Passman, 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 assisting on development projects, less driving around trying to find insurgents. That wasn’t so easy: “Nobody told
them
,” Keating would quip about the enemy. “The little bastards 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 analysts 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 analysts 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 glasses 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.

“ ‘Take my child with you,’ ” the translator elaborated. “Take him with you and raise him in America.”

Saenz tried to explain how important it was that the baby be raised by his own parents, how life in the village would improve someday soon, but she wasn’t sure even
she
believed that.

Those who write romantically about the military often refer to bands of brothers. But as anyone who has had a sibling knows, brothers fight, sometimes quite a bit. Keating had been looking forward to Gooding’s arrival. The two were roughly the same age—Keating was twenty-seven, Gooding was thirty—and had attended rival high schools in Maine. Their parents knew many of the same people.

Matt Gooding came from a family steeped in military service. Both of his grandfathers were veterans of World War II, and both of his parents were Vietnam veterans—his dad a Cavalry officer who’d done eighteen months in Da Nang, his mother an Army nurse. In his sophomore year at Ohio University, Gooding, then a criminology major thinking about a career with the DEA, the FBI, or the U.S. Marshals, had looked around and seen a hundred or so other students on the same exact track. So instead he’d taken the road less traveled, at least at Ohio University: he’d joined ROTC, and then he’d just kept on going. On September 11, 2001, Gooding had been in Kosovo with the 3rd Infantry Division. He’d decided to stay in the military beyond his four-year commitment so he could lead a company in combat against those responsible for the attack.

Keating thought Gooding was a good storyteller and a decent guy, fun to talk to one on one, but when it came to combat decisions, his captain drove him crazy. “We fight over every aspect of leadership and the direction of the troop,” Keating complained to his father. He was convinced that Gooding was too conservative when it came to using American force.

The truth was, Gooding never really felt comfortable in the mountains. Up here, you never know who you’re shooting at, he mused. Even before his immersion in COIN doctrine, he had been cautious about authorizing his troops to fire or to initiate any “show of force” that might end up killing civilians. He and his men were there, he felt, to win over the local populace.

The problem was, the PRT kept getting attacked: by the fall of 2006, enemy strikes were coming three times a week on average. A rocket missed Command Sergeant Major Byers’s helicopter one day by a matter of only seconds—a close call that led command at Forward Operating Base Naray to require more planning before any helicopters were sent in to the Kamdesh PRT, and also to encourage night flights. The PRT was getting lit up, and troops were getting maimed and killed; as far as a lot of the men were concerned, civilians who turned a blind eye toward the insurgency were the enemy as well. Many of the officers felt they had to do something, and Keating was all about doing.

In Gooding’s view, Keating personified what troop commanders often referred to as “the Fighting XO”—the second-in-command who was continually exasperated by the “failings” of his immediate superior, a not-uncommon type in any walk of life. Whenever an opportunity arose that would allow him to rally troops and lead them on a convoy or to recon a road, Keating was always the first to volunteer. He didn’t seem to be able to get over the fact that he was no longer a platoon leader of men but instead an executive officer in charge of logistics and maintenance, a job that seemed to bore him no end.

Keating’s eagerness could, Gooding believed, get the better of him. Within a week of the captain’s return, an Afghan with a flashlight was spotted one night on the mountain above the camp. Keating rushed to the command post. “Request permission to engage the enemy,” he said to Gooding.

Gooding thought Keating was overreacting because of the large firefight the Barbarians had experienced in August—and it wasn’t just Keating, either; many of the troops seemed to be on edge, waiting for the next big attack. Gooding himself, however, was decidedly
not
on edge, having just arrived back in country from his R&R, and he told Keating to hold fire until the Afghan with the flashlight could be definitively identified as a threat. No weapon was ever observed on that occasion, so Gooding never gave permission to engage.

Gooding was abiding by the Rules of Engagement, following what he thought of as the steady example of the late Lieutenant Colonel Fenty. He knew he was more conservative in some of his decisions than Keating himself would have been, but he saw his subordinate as still having the young soldier’s “I am invincible” attitude, with a dash of the teenage rebel thrown in for good measure.

On another night, a Special Forces team was departing from the camp under the cover of darkness. A guard post witnessed several Afghans moving into a position above the road leading back to Naray. It looked as if they were setting an ambush. Keating organized a patrol and asked Gooding for permission to fire on the Afghans to clear them out. From the road, Keating could not identify any specific weapons or any hostile intent, so Gooding, once again observing the Rules of Engagement, denied him permission to fire. Keating’s annoyance was clear in his voice—and Gooding didn’t like it. He wasn’t fond of making decisions like this, but he also didn’t want to kill the members of some family out looking for their lost goat.