The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (27 page)

Captain Frank Brooks of the Barbarians was directed to provide security for the LMTV convoy. Brooks agreed with Stambersky that taking the LMTV to Kamdesh was a bad idea, but he had his orders, and he meant to follow them. He and Stambersky removed the vehicle’s grab rails, bed rails, and rearview mirrors to limit the number of parts that could snag on a rock. They made the truck as light and as lean as they could. They worked out a strategy for who would drive and when, as well as how to protect the personnel and equipment. Brooks and Stambersky decided that the trip would take place during the day, so the drivers would have maximum visibility when making their way over the most treacherous and narrow sections of the road. They briefed Sutton about their plan, then Howard.

“I don’t want you driving during daylight hours,” Howard told them. He was afraid the LMTV would provide the enemy with an irresistible target.

Stambersky later approached Howard near the squadron’s operations center.

“Hello, sir,” he said. “Can I talk to you?”

“Yeah, Pete,” Howard said. “What about?”

“I would be remiss if I didn’t talk to you about the dangers involved in driving an LMTV to Kamdesh,” Stambersky said. “Especially driving at night. Driving during the day is one thing, but driving that route in the LMTV for the first time at night is going to get somebody killed.”

“Pete, we can do it,” Howard insisted. “We’re going to get it done.”

“Sir, I don’t think it’s the safest thing to do to drive that thing at night,” Stambersky said.

“We’re going to get it done,” Howard repeated. And then he walked away.

Before sunrise on October 29, the convoy pulled out from Forward Operating Base Naray. Stambersky had assigned First Lieutenant David Heitner to command the group, Sergeant Jeffrey Williams to drive the LMTV, and Specialist Tim Martin to serve as its gunner.

Martin sat in the turret clutching an M240B machine gun. This was a smaller and lighter weapon than the options he normally would have gone with—an MK19 grenade launcher or a .50-caliber machine gun—because he didn’t want to add any more weight to the LMTV than he had to. He, Heitner, and Williams had limited the gear they packed for the same reason, though they had brought along some nonstandard infrared chemical lights just in case of a rollover—which they agreed was a pretty likely possibility. Still, Martin wasn’t nervous—on the contrary, the Kentuckian thought of himself as the most qualified gunner in Stambersky’s unit, and he hated to be left out of missions.

The first leg of the convoy was completed in pitch-black darkness, but the sun rose as they reached Gawardesh, and the troops removed their night-vision goggles. Howard had been upset that the entire mission wouldn’t be conducted as he wanted, at night, but ultimately he had given in to Stambersky’s insistence—and Brooks’s—that that would be an impossible challenge.

At Gawardesh, the convoy dropped off about a dozen troops to set up mortar tubes as protection for the convoy if the need arose. Williams didn’t think he could drive the LMTV any faster than ten miles per hour, not only because of the road’s instability but because numerous impediments—tree stumps, stacks of lumber—narrowed it in places. Williams was the most qualified driver in the squadron, with over fifteen years’ experience driving vehicles weighing two and a half tons or more, and more than a thousand hours’ driving in blackout conditions. If anyone could navigate this route, it was Williams. Even he wasn’t sure it was a route that
could
be navigated by anyone. Still, he had no option but to try.

The convoy had just passed Bazgal when Afghans with weapons were spotted in the mountains across the river. Martin laid down some fire, and the insurgents shot back with small arms and RPGs.

Specialist Jesse Steele, the gunner in the second-to-last Humvee in the convoy, fired his .50-caliber across the river, not realizing that rounds were also coming from directly above them, on the mountain to his left. An RPG hit the left side of Steele’s truck, momentarily knocking him unconscious. When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back, with his left leg twisted behind and under him. The Humvee was still moving. Specialist Javier Valdez tried to help the gunner up, but Steele had no feeling in that leg and couldn’t stand. No matter: straining, he hauled himself back into the turret and resumed fire across the river as the convoy continued west.

At a safe point in the road, Brooks stopped the group and took inventory, checking to see who was hurt and who wasn’t. The injuries meant that Brooks would have to reorganize his troops for the remainder of the trip. Since Steele couldn’t stand up on his own, Brooks took him out of the Humvee turret and had him trade places with Sergeant Justin Pellak, in the rearmost truck.

Forty-five minutes later, the convoy passed Kamu and stopped again. Williams was having difficulty negotiating the LMTV over the narrow road and had had to slow down to a crawl, no faster than three miles per hour. From across the river, two insurgents fired a Dushka at the Americans, their heavy machine gun letting fly piercing metal at the Humvees and the LMTV. Martin responded with his machine gun. From mountains on either side of the convoy, dozens of other insurgents now began firing AKs and other weapons. An RPG hit right in front of the LMTV, and rounds started tweaking off the Humvees’ roofs. The lead Humvee took an RPG to its front, knocking the gunner, Specialist Ryan Coulter, around in his turret and spraying his hands and face with shrapnel. Bleeding and in pain, Coulter returned fire across the river to his right with his .50-caliber, then grabbed his M249 SAW with his left arm and fired it up on the mountain to his left.

In the rear truck, Steele thought, Shit, here we go again. Just then the Humvee’s gunner, Specialist Cuong Vo, a slight Vietnamese-American, fell out of the turret and onto Steele’s lap, not moving, a bloody bullet hole in his helmet.

“Vo’s dead,” Steele said, lifting the gunner off his lap by his vest and pushing him over to the side as he pulled himself up into the turret and started shooting Vo’s 240.

In the LMTV, Martin heard the whistle of an RPG coming at him from above, from the closer mountain to his left. As he turned to look, the RPG exploded just in front of his gunner’s shield, peppering his face, neck, and shoulder with forty-seven pieces of shrapnel. He fell backward into the LMTV, unconscious and covered with blood.

“We got a KIA!” yelled Heitner.

But Martin had not in fact been killed in action, and a few seconds later he awoke, grabbed his helmet, and got back in his turret. He resumed firing at the enemy across the river.

Steele was firing, too, when he heard a terrible scream from inside his Humvee. He looked down and was surprised to see Vo looking right back at him.

“What’s going on?” Vo asked.

“Are you okay? You just got shot in the fucking head!”

“Yeah, I know,” Vo said. It turned out that the bullet had pierced only the outer layer of his Kevlar helmet and not actually penetrated his head.

The LMTV hit a narrow spot in the road where the route turned to the left. The rear passenger-side tire smashed off a portion of the road, and the LMTV wobbled but pushed forward. About two hundred yards farther on, the rear tire detached another chunk of road, but Williams kept the vehicle from rolling over and continued moving.

Finally, they reached the outpost. In total, six troops were wounded, including Martin, Coulter, Steele, and Vo. It was a bloody mess, an assignment that enraged officers and enlisted men alike—all of whom were convinced that Howard’s muscle flexing was not worth the risk to their lives and the lives of their brothers.

At Combat Outpost Kamdesh, Williams inspected the LMTV. The two front tires had been shot and needed to be replaced. Stambersky and Brooks decided to leave the LMTV where it was until the replacements could be delivered.

Williams was relieved; a return trip would be extremely dangerous, he thought. After heading back to Naray by Humvee, he told Command Sergeant Major Byers that there was no way the LMTV could come back until some serious repairs were made to those bad spots on the road.

Over the next few weeks, Williams drove a Humvee in several more convoys to and from Kamdesh, all in blackout conditions. On the second trip, a vehicle manned by maintenance personnel went off a cliff. On the fourth, another Humvee did the same thing in the exact same location. No one was seriously hurt on either occasion. On each successive trip, Williams saw the road get narrower and narrower due to rain. Boulders fell in the roadway; the mud caused vehicles to slide.

By now, his entire chain of command was asking Williams if the LMTV could make it back to Naray. Every time he was asked, he said, “No, the road needs to be fixed first.” But no matter how many times he said it, further repairs to that fragile road didn’t seem to be on anyone else’s agenda.

By November of 2006, there had already been two vehicle rollovers on the narrow road to Combat Outpost Kamdesh.
(Photo courtesy of Ross Berkoff)

By the end of October, commanders at Forward Operating Base Naray and in Jalalabad were so concerned about enemy attacks in the Kamdesh Valley that the number of supply runs getting through to Combat Outpost Kamdesh had dwindled down to close to none. Pilots didn’t want to fly there, and the leaders of convoys didn’t want to drive there, either. It got to the point where Gooding and the soldiers from Able Troop had to ration their food and water: they were down to one “meal ready to eat” apiece per day.

On his return from R&R, Keating commanded a convoy from Naray to Kamdesh without getting ambushed. Not only was this great news in itself, but it also meant that a full complement of supplies reached the outpost: ammunition, food and water, and wood and other goods needed to build roofs for barracks. Troops cheered Keating as if he were Audie Murphy and Neil Armstrong rolled into one.

His misgivings about the war’s purpose remained, but Keating himself was experiencing something of a rebirth. During his R&R, his romance with Heather McDougal had intensified, and whereas at one point he had talked to Berkoff about joining Military Intelligence, he had now decided on a new career path: he would transfer to a U.S. Army base in South Korea to serve as a specialty platoon leader, an advanced position that would enable him once again to lead a platoon of troops, which he missed doing.

Back at Kamdesh, he led a very one-sided drubbing of some insurgents who were attempting to set up a rocket to fire upon U.S. helicopters. Keating and the platoon killed four enemy fighters and wounded at least ten more. The irony is that
I
was the catalyst for the fight, Keating thought. The same guy who couldn’t find a reason for this war anymore rallied a platoon of soldiers, coordinated the attack, and ran around like a wild man with machine guns shooting over his head. Even success was bittersweet. He couldn’t wait to leave Afghanistan.

His were not the only blue thoughts. All of Able Troop seemed to be in horrible spirits, as Keating saw it. Every soldier in Able believed he’d be killed the next time he rolled out of the gate—or if not killed, at least wounded in a way that would forever make life a miserable challenge. The men were fired upon nearly every time out, they took casualties regularly—they were like zombies. Leaving the outpost could sure feel like driving into Hell. Toward the end of October, First Lieutenant Candace Mathis and her team of military police were teamed up with Able Troop’s 3rd Platoon when they had to push through a complex ambush. In the United States, politicians sometimes speculated that female soldiers might not be strong enough for such duty, or that male soldiers might get too emotional when their female colleagues were attacked, but those notions didn’t match the reality of the experience of 3-71 Cav. Actually, with their AT-4 grenade launchers, the MPs had stronger firepower than many in the scout platoon; everyone survived this attack relatively unharmed.

The same could not be said for Private First Class Jason Westbrook, who, on November 4, was a gunner in another ambushed convoy. Shrapnel from an RPG clipped off one of his hands, but he didn’t even know it until he climbed back into the turret, went to reach for the trigger—it was a butterfly trigger, needing two hands—and saw his right hand dangling from its wrist.