The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (34 page)

If he insisted on doing it, Paparo said, he ought to instruct the commandos to search only those homes where such intrusion was justified, since indiscriminate searching would be interpreted as mass punishment of a largely neutral population. He further warned Nuristani to make sure every search was conducted with local leaders present as witnesses.

On May 14, ANA soldiers and commandos choppered onto Observation Post Warheit. They were joined there by Tennessee National Guard Lieutenant Matt Hall and some thirty of his ANA troops, Michael Schmidt and Cherokee Company, and Matt Gooding and Able Troop. With the Americans following close behind, the Afghan troops swept through the various sectors of Kamdesh, talking to any Kamdeshis who were out and about, asking them if they knew anything about who had killed Fazal Ahad.

As part of the raid, Best, his trainers, and his forty-two ANA soldiers established a blocking position down the mountain to ensure that anyone who tried to flee the commandos’ sweep through Kamdesh would be unable to escape into the ether. It was to be one of their last local tasks: that same day, the Barbarians were to escort a new company of ANA soldiers from Forward Operating Base Naray to relieve Best’s team. These fresh Afghan troops had never been to Nuristan before; they were Tajiks and Hazaras, other non-Pashtuns who had only ever served in the western part of the country.

To avoid an ambush, First Lieutenant Aaron Pearsall, leader of the Barbarians’ 2nd Platoon, had originally planned to roll very early in the morning; the Americans had been ambushed often on that road, and he wanted to get the ANA troops to Kamu before daylight. But the Afghan soldiers weren’t ready to leave until at least an hour after sunup. Pearsall, like his men, had a bad feeling about this mission—a last-minute assignment to escort a new ANA unit they’d never worked with through one of the most dangerous sections of their area of operations—and the late start didn’t help. Some of Pearsall’s platoon had already left the country to help prepare for the squadron’s pending return home, so the lieutenant was down to fourteen soldiers in four Humvees. Rounding out the convoy, in addition to the fifty or so ANA troops in eight Ford Rangers, were three jingle trucks loaded down with supplies like Gypsy caravans.

Pearsall huddled with the trainers and the ANA leaders before they rolled out. His message was simple: This area is one where we’ve been ambushed many times before. If we get attacked, do not stop. The cliff to the south is too steep, and the dropoff to the river to the north too precipitous—there is nowhere to maneuver. If we get hit, push through. We will do our best to help you, but you must keep driving, no matter what.

And off they went. Pearsall’s men had interspersed the ANA vehicles among their own: Humvee, Ford Ranger, Ford Ranger, Humvee, Ford Ranger, and so on, with the jingle trucks near the middle of the pack. The Marine captain and embedded trainers assigned to this ANA company were riding in one of the middle Humvees.

As they passed by Bazgal, an Afghan policeman waved them down.

“Don’t go down that way,” he warned.

Pearsall stopped the convoy and called command to request an assessment of the road ahead. Could a drone or a plane take a look to make sure no ambush was lying in wait for them? Yes, he was told, and soon a report came in that the only thing up ahead was a sandbag in the road.

Pearsall was skeptical—had the assets looked in the hills? He asked for more planes and/or drones to check it out, but they were all committed to the mission under way at Kamdesh Village, involving the ANA commandos and others from 3-71 Cav. Pearsall made the call to push on.

The “sandbag” in the road turned out to be a dead chicken, and that wasn’t the only thing the eyes in the sky got wrong. When the convoy got around the second bend, three shots were fired from across the river, to their right, followed by the best-coordinated ambush 3-71 Cav had ever seen. Dozens of insurgents, up to a hundred of them, opened up on the vehicles with small arms, AK-47s, half a dozen or more PKM machine guns, and RPGs. The fire came from ridgelines on both sides of the road, from up to a dozen different covered fighting positions. The enemy fighters were firing from as little as fifty yards away and with an alarming degree of accuracy.

In the turret of Pearsall’s Humvee, Jesse Steele was alternating between guns, firing his .50-caliber across the river and his SAW light machine gun up the near side of the valley. Then all of a sudden he was on his back in the truck.

“Are you okay?” Pearsall asked. He was still focused on the enemy fire.

“What happened?” Steele wondered. His jaw felt funny, as if it had been pushed to the left. He couldn’t talk well; his tongue was swelling.

“You got hit,” Pearsall said.

“Where?”

“Looks like it nicked you here and here,” Pearsall said, pointing to Steele’s lower jaw and neck. He saw that the gunner’s wounds were serious, but he didn’t want to alarm him.

“Okay,” Steele said. He started to prop himself up on his elbows.

“You’re not getting back in the turret,” Pearsall told him.

Steele turned to Specialist Lorenzo Best.
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“You gotta get up there,” he declared. Best did so. Steele put his hand to his face; when he pulled it away again, it was covered with blood.

Shit, this is more than a nick, Steele thought. He began to administer first aid to himself. It turned out that a round—fired from above, up on the mountain to his left—had gone through his jaw and shattered it before exiting out the left side of his neck. Another round had entered his shoulder, ending up in his chest. Pearsall now pulled out his own first aid bandage and applied pressure to Steele’s two wounds.

“Lieutenant, are we going to make it out of this?” Steele asked.

“I don’t know, man,” Pearsall said. No matter how quickly they sped down the road, and how far they got, it seemed as if the ambush would never end. The enemy was spread out along the road for more than a mile and a half.

“It hurts when I talk,” Steele told Pearsall.

“Then stop talking,” the lieutenant advised.

Steele put his head down and prayed as RPGs exploded near their truck.

While Pearsall had been clear enough in instructing the Afghans not to stop if the convoy came under attack, that plan was easier to stick to for those in Humvees. For the ANA soldiers, vulnerable in the cabs and beds of open pickup trucks, the first impulse was to pull over and try to take cover—which was exactly what most of them did now. The ANA truck in front of Pearsall’s Humvee, and others ahead and behind, stopped dead in the middle of the road as their cargoes of Afghan soldiers jumped out and scrambled for whatever meager shelter they could find—rocks or trees, anything—in the absence of any real cover for them to get behind. That segment of the road was framed by a wall on the uphill side and a cliff dropoff on the downhill; with the enemy shooting from both sides, there was nowhere for the ANA soldiers to hide once they left their vehicles. As the bullets continued to hammer the convoy, Pearsall got out of his Humvee and tried to round up the Afghans, yelling for them to get back in their trucks. He told his own driver to bump the Ford Ranger in front of them to make the point; the ANA driver behind the wheel finally got the message, and the pickup started moving.

While the lead Humvee, the only one in the clear, had continued to speed down the road, the rest of the Barbarians were still stuck behind parked ANA Ford Rangers, as well as a jingle truck that was now in flames from an RPG strike. Pearsall got back in his Humvee and called command, telling the operations center at Forward Operating Base Naray that he needed the 120-millimeter mortars to hit both sides of the road, as close as possible. The incoming fire remained intense: small-arms bullets pinged into and off every truck and Humvee. One ANA driver was shot, and the Ford Ranger he was steering started to roll off the road and into the river to their right. The Marine trainer assigned to the ANA troops got hit in the hand.

Pearsall radioed his acting platoon sergeant, Jason Guthrie, in the rear Humvee. Guthrie reported that he and the other American trucks in the rear were pushing forward, trying to force the ANA through the ambush while they also worked to gather the wounded and dead Afghan soldiers, laying some of the bodies on the hoods and in the beds of trucks. Two specialists with the Barbarians—driver Evan Morales and medic Jonathan Landers—had been struck by RPG shrapnel when Landers braved the enemy fire to rescue a wounded ANA soldier lying by the side of the road. Landers applied a tourniquet to himself, then continued working on the Afghan.

Finally, 120-millimeter mortars fired from near Gawardesh began hitting both sides of the river, dropping disconcertingly close to the convoy but providing a brief moment of respite from enemy fire, during which Pearsall and the others were able to make a break for it. But it was only after the American platoon pulled in to the base at Kamu that the lieutenant had his first real chance to survey the damage to his men and equipment. Steele, Landers, Morales, and the Marine embedded trainer were wounded; an unknown number of ANA troops had been wounded or killed. Every one of the Barbarians’ trucks had suffered significant damage, with doors blown off, frames cracked, tires spent. It took more than an hour for the Afghans to figure out how many of their own men were missing—first it was three, then eight, then twelve.

Terry Best and ANA Commander Shamsullah Khan were at the bottom of the mountain, awaiting news about the commando raid up the hill, when a Nuristani interpreter approached them. He’d been listening in on the radio used to scan for enemy chatter and had picked up word of an attack down the road to the east, on the way toward Naray. Best heard on a different radio that the Barbarians had been hit near Saret Koleh and had pushed through, leaving ANA troops behind.

Best was enraged. This was all too typical of the Americans’ attitude toward the ANA troops with whom they were theoretically partnering, he thought. In battle, they were supposed to treat the ANA soldiers just as they would Americans—as Buddy Hughie had done. Instead, the Barbarians had left the Afghans behind. To die.

Best got on the radio and called back to Combat Outpost Keating.

“Request permission to change my mission to go and support the ANA,” he said.

“Permission denied,” he was told, but he went anyway.

Because he would be passing Kamu on the way, he called two Able Troop NCOs he was close to who were posted there—Staff Sergeant Adam Sears and the recently promoted Staff Sergeant Nick Anderson—and told them where he and his ANA troops were headed.

“I’m going with you, brother,” Sears said on the radio. They couldn’t just leave the ANA soldiers out there.

When Best reached Kamu, Sears and Anderson were waiting for him in Humvees with some others. They’d heard what had happened; Pearsall and the Barbarians had already arrived at the Kamu outpost with the surviving soldiers from the new ANA company. The Able Troop men followed Best toward the site of the ambush. As they got nearer, they saw that the road was increasingly covered with debris from the attack and objects that had fallen off the trucks: propane tanks, bedding, a Humvee door. Soon they passed the ANA Ford Ranger that had plunged into the Landay-Sin River and was partially submerged. Then they started coming upon the bodies of ANA soldiers, some lying prone on their weapons, others in the middle of the road.

The men got out of their Humvees. Best sent Sergeant Marshall Clark, Hughie’s replacement, to join ANA Commander Khan on the high ground. Then Best, Sears, and a squad of ANA troops crossed the footbridge from the road to Saret Koleh, where they would sweep the houses and stables on the north side of the river for insurgents. Two Apaches that had been sent to the area hovered above, ready to provide air support. McHugh, the embedded Irish photographer, accompanied them, snapping away.

When Best and his ANA troops checked out the houses, they found many women and children but almost no fighting-age men. Best looked across the river to the site of the attack and saw six dead Afghan soldiers, obviously laid out by the enemy. He radioed the information to Clark and began walking back over the bridge.

Before he reached the six dead ANA troops, Best skirted the southern mountainside, where he came across the body of the new Afghan company’s first sergeant. He’d been shot in the head, execution-style. Best and Sears then happened upon another ANA soldier with multiple wounds at the base of his neck, alive but in deep shock. He muttered a prayer as Sears evaluated him, so the staff sergeant knew he had a decent airway. Several others soon gathered around to try to help him, and they carried him to a truck to get him some medical attention.