The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (52 page)

Marcum looked in the direction in which Newsom was pointing: someone carrying a flashlight appeared to be darting along on the side of the mountain, scurrying from one spot to another, back and forth. They called in the grid to Hutto, back at the operations center at Camp Keating. Hutto checked: it was a location that intelligence officers had already identified as a possible enemy position.

“But why would this guy be running back and forth?” Marcum and Newsom asked each other. Having fired mortars themselves, they figured the most logical explanation was that an insurgent was resupplying the mortar tube from a hidden cache somewhere in the mountain, stockpiling a supply.

Marcum and Newsom called Observation Post Fritsche and asked 1st Platoon to fire the 120-millimeter mortars, giving them the grids. But it was dark, and this wasn’t a matter of firing from one end zone to another; the terrain was jagged. The U.S. mortarmen tried, but their mortars ended up missing their target.

Choppers were seldom
where
they were needed
when
they were needed—Combat Outpost Keating was just too remote, and the resources in Afghanistan were spread too thin—but as luck would have it, Marcum was able to pull in an Apache that was on its way to their base for a resupply. He explained the situation to the pilot while Newsom used his infrared laser to point precisely to the insurgent’s location. The Apache let loose. Nothing and no one was left standing.

As he settled in for the night—they’d pull out come daybreak—Marcum felt his conscience gnawing at him. He wasn’t sure whether they’d sent that Apache to kill an insurgent who was part of a mortar team or just some innocent Afghan out walking with a flashlight. It was an anxious, sickening feeling. The next day he’d know for sure if what he and Newsom had done was right: either the locals would be lined up weeping and complaining, filing financial grievances and perhaps even shredding the Hundred-Man Shura compact, or they would be quiet, and the mortars would stop.

It was a tough night for Kyle Marcum.

The sun rose slowly, and then quickly, and then it began beating down on Marcum, Newsom, and their patrol as they hiked back to Combat Outpost Keating. No villagers ever came to complain about the Americans’ having killed an innocent man. In this case, no news really was good news.

The mortar attacks stopped. Just a few more weeks and they could all go home.

“Why aren’t they here?” Kolenda asked Abdul Rahman.

It was June 21, and Kolenda had come to Combat Outpost Keating to meet with the Hundred-Man Shura, as he’d been doing every three to four weeks since February. As the elders entered Combat Outpost Keating or Forward Operating Base Naray, Kolenda would check off the villages represented. The absence of a given village’s representative would likely have indicated that something was not quite right there, but there had been full attendance—no absences—at all previous meetings. This time, though, the elders from Bazgal and Pitigal were nowhere to be seen, and Kolenda wanted to know why.

“I don’t know,” Rahman said. He said that he had spoken to both of them just a few days earlier and was expecting them to be there.

Kolenda found that troubling. It might mean that large groups of insurgents from Pakistan or somewhere else had entered those villages and were preventing the elders from attending the shura. Pitigal in particular was easily accessible from Pakistan.

After the meeting, quietly, Lieutenant Colonel Shamsur Rahman, an Afghan Border Police commander from Upper Kamdesh who had very close ties to the villagers, reported that a big Taliban action was scheduled for the next morning. Several hundred insurgents planned to attack the brand-new Afghan Border Police outpost at the Gawardesh Bridge, Camp Kamu, and Combat Outpost Keating—all at once.

At about 2:00 a.m. on June 22, a soldier at a new observation post called Mace,
⁴³
located on a mountaintop overlooking the Gawardesh Bridge, was startled to see more than seventy insurgents moving along a ridgeline. Radio chatter confirmed their intentions. These men were speaking languages other than Nuristani, but even without that clue, the Americans would have known they weren’t locals by the way they hiked atop the mountain: Nuristani insurgents would never walk in formation along a ridgeline because it would make them too conspicuous.

Aircraft rolled in—a combination of F-15s, Apaches, A-10 Warthogs, and even the heavily armed AC-130 gunships. Bombs were dropped, and the large force of insurgents was wiped out. The main attack had been annihilated before the Taliban fired even a single shot.

Their being spotted so early on threw off the insurgents’ plan to synchronize their various attacks. They next tried Combat Outpost Kamu—now called Combat Outpost Lowell, after Jacob Lowell—but thanks to Shamsur Rahman’s tip, all of the Americans were on high alert, and a patrol got the jump on the attackers. Close air support eliminated a second enemy force spotted south of Kamu.

Kolenda and Hutto were likewise on alert at the operations center at Camp Keating through the early morning, guzzling coffee, radioing troops, and reading Instant Message–like chat on the mIRC system used for battlefield communications.

Newsom staggered into the operations center at about 5:00 a.m., bleary-eyed and confused as to why Kolenda and Hutto were there. (The lieutenant had been briefed in a general way about the warning, but his platoon was not standing guard that night, so he was less intensely focused on the situation than the others were.) Hutto started to fill him in, but his update was cut short by a call from a guard who’d seen some movement up on the northwest mountain, near the spot nicknamed the Putting Green. Hutto beckoned Marine Lieutenant Chris Briley, the new ANA trainer who’d assumed Ingbretsen’s job a couple of months before, in to the operations center.

“Chris,” Hutto said, “we’ve got a couple of guys we picked up moving around the Putting Green area.”

“Really?” Briley asked. “Because I was going to take an Afghan patrol up there.” If he were to do that, his team might be ambushed.

“Why don’t you go to the opposite side?” Hutto suggested, referring to the Northface. From the northern mountain, Briley and his troops would be able to see what the enemy was up to on the Putting Green.

The night had yet to fully lift, so Briley and his ANA platoon were still under the cover of darkness when they left the wire, walking through and past the landing zone. Just outside the LZ, a loud explosion shook them. At first, Briley thought a U.S. mortar must’ve accidentally misfired, but then he made out the telltale smoke of an RPG blast: launched from the Putting Green, the grenade had missed them by only about fifty yards. Because it was dark—too dark for the enemy to have seen them from the Putting Green, he thought—Briley became convinced that someone must have alerted the insurgents when the patrol left the outpost, giving them a general area of where to target. Briley and the Afghans ran up to the Northface and began firing their machine guns at the small group of insurgents on the Putting Green. There were fewer than ten enemy fighters there, steadily aiming small arms and RPGs at Combat Outpost Keating. Briley called in the information to Newsom, who relayed it to Kenny Johnson. Seeing where Briley was firing—he was using the same weapon his Afghan soldiers used, a PKM, and every fifth round he fired was a tracer round—Johnson hit the enemy location with mortars. Close air support soon arrived; A-10 Warthogs strafed the enemy, a bomber dropped a two-thousand-pounder, and that attack, too, was over.

The tip from the Afghan Border Police commander almost certainly saved some lives that early morning; for Kolenda, it was further evidence that having friends among the villagers could be of use. And yet counterweighting that, there was also Chris Briley’s haunting suspicion that someone had tipped off the insurgents to his departure.

Later that same day, mortars began raining down again. This team—Urdu-speaking, based on the radio chatter—was clearly well trained, able to make skilled adjustments to its fire. The terrain and position of Combat Outpost Keating made it almost impossible for troops there to tell specifically where the explosive volleys were coming from. The men of Bulldog Troop tried different methods—triangulating enemy radio intercepts, translating radio chatter and trying to interpret what the insurgents said they were seeing, crater analysis—but at best, they ended up with educated guesstimates.

Lacking a more specific target, the Americans decided to return fire at what they deemed to be likely enemy locations, using mortars, grenades, unmanned Predator drones, and piloted choppers and planes. Still the enemy mortars continued to fall. The insurgents’ skill, their professionalism, unnerved everyone. After Marcum heard translations of some of the insurgents’ corrections to previous shots as they bracketed for greater accuracy, he thought to himself, That is literally the exact same correction I would’ve made. One mortar overshot the outpost by about fifty yards; the next round hit right in the middle of the camp, ripping through the stairs of the morale, welfare, and recreation building; the one after that landed just five yards from the operations center. Newsom was only about five seconds ahead of it and almost got a permanent suntan on his head courtesy of white phosphorous. Indeed, the only reason there were no casualties from the mortars was that the insurgents were firing some kind of smoke round as opposed to a high-explosive round. If it’d been a different kind of mortar, some of the guys from Bulldog Troop would surely have been killed, just days before they were supposed to go home.

A total of sixteen mortars were fired at Combat Outpost Keating that day and into the evening. One blast after another, one escape after another—the barrage left the men both slap-happy and vacant. At one point, Marcum was traipsing around on the hill at the back of the outpost when another mortar almost got him.

“Hey, Kyle, glad you’re not dead,” Newsom radioed him.

“Yeah, Alex, same,” Marcum casually replied.

Eventually the insurgents stopped firing, presumably because they ran out of munitions. By then, many of the troops at Combat Outpost Keating looked like zombies. The next day, another sixteen mortar rounds were fired at them by the enemy, until Bulldog Troop located and killed the spotters who were calling in the grids to the insurgent mortar team. Kolenda was very worried, particularly about the havoc the enemy fighters might be able to wreak if they got their hands on high-explosive rounds.

The mortars took their toll at Observation Post Fritsche as well.

The ANA soldiers had a special affection for one of their Marine trainers, Corporal Adam Laman, a stocky, sweet, and smart guy who’d picked up the local language fairly quickly and well. During the intense mortar attacks of June 22, Laman had accompanied an ANA platoon to a position from which they could better observe and suppress the enemy. The insurgents spotted them and began hitting them with small-arms fire and RPGs, one of which exploded right near Laman, showering shrapnel across his body and partially ripping off his left foot. An ANA leader, Nek Mohammed, ran over to try to help him. “Don’t worry about me, take care of your own soldiers!” Laman admonished him.

Laman was medevacked to Forward Operating Base Naray, where Roller—who as Bulldog Troop’s XO was often up there—went to see him at the aid station.

The room was thick with the ferric scent of blood. Laman was delirious, on painkillers and in shock, when Roller first approached him. Half of his foot was missing, and what was left looked like a mixture of ground beef and spaghetti. Roller grabbed his hand; the Marine seemed relieved to be able to tell someone what had happened. Under the influence of medication, Laman tried to joke around, but after about fifteen minutes, he closed his eyes and stopped talking.

“You’re gonna be okay,” Roller told him.

When 3-71 Cav handed over Combat Outpost Keating to 1-91 Cav, the soldiers of Able Troop also bequeathed their dog, Cali, to the men of Bulldog Troop, who likewise came to love her. Cali would come out on patrol with them as often as she was allowed to, and even sometimes when she wasn’t. She seemed to know instinctively where the men were headed and always ran in front to clear a path. When they slept out on patrol, she was a vigilant guard, helping to put them at ease. If she ran off in a certain direction with an air of purpose, the troops would call the operations center and have someone ask those standing guard to scan that area with thermal sights.

June didn’t bring only bad news; Cali delivered yet another litter of puppies.
(Photo courtesy of Bulldog Troop)