The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (54 page)

Brostrum wasn’t alone in his misgivings about the mission. “No one in the company wanted to do this Wanat thing,” one sergeant, Jesse Queck, later recalled. “We all knew something bad was going to happen.” Queck heard that some guys posted on their Facebook pages asking for their friends and families to pray for them. “They felt like this mission was the one they weren’t coming back from,” he added. One soldier told the sergeant that on his Facebook page, he’d written, “Updated my DD93, ready to go….” The DD93 was the document in which troops provided the names of those to be notified should they be wounded or killed, along with a list of their death-gratuity beneficiaries.

From July 8 through 12, 2008, the men of 2nd Platoon, supervised by Brostrom, began building their new camp, which they unofficially named after Sergeant First Class Matthew Ryan Kahler. (Kahler, a fellow member of Chosen Company, had been killed the previous January by an Afghan Security Guard who supposedly shot him by accident.) Local men watched them from the mountains. The local Afghan National Police chief told them that Americans were not welcome in the area.

Thousands of pounds’ worth of construction materials were due to be delivered, including wood and concrete that 2nd Platoon would use to build bunkers and defensive positions. But first the contracted Afghan drivers had mechanical problems, and then they were held up because the ROCK Battalion team whose responsibility it was to make sure the roads were clear of IEDs had to deal with a KIA in another area. After that, the IED clearing team had mechanical problems of its own.

The delays meant that the Americans at Camp Kahler had little cover. Water deliveries were also not made because of a scarcity of aircraft. The troops had filters and iodine to purify the local water, but the shortage of bottled water seriously inhibited their ability to work as the hot July sun beat down upon them. With no sense of any imminent threat, and a need to conserve his soldiers’ energy, Brostrom did not order any security patrols.

Myer arrived at Combat Outpost Kahler on July 12. At 4:20 a.m. on July 13, hundreds of insurgents began bombarding the camp with what seemed like thousands of RPGs. In addition to rocket-propelled grenades, the enemy had AK rifles and both PKM and RPK light machine guns. The insurgents first targeted the Americans’ weapons—their gun trucks, antitank missile system, mortar tubes, and light machine guns. They also attacked the observation post, named Topside, about a hundred yards up a terraced hill.

Myer immediately radioed to Camp Blessing: “Whatever you can give me, I’m going to need,” he said. “This is a Ranch House–style attack.”

But the camp—like so many others throughout Regional Command East—was remote, and the only support Myer could get, at first, was mortars and field artillery fire from Camp Blessing (roughly five miles away as the crow flew) and artillery fire from Camp Wright at Asadabad (some sixteen miles away), none of which was particularly accurate or effective. In the first two hours of the attack, nine American soldiers were killed,
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including Lieutenant Brostrom. By the time the smoke finally cleared and the enemy had been beaten back, a total of twenty-seven U.S. troops were wounded, with sixteen of them needing evacuation—the largest number of U.S. casualties in any Afghanistan battle to date.
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The night after the Camp Kahler disaster, back at Combat Outpost Keating, Alex Newsom was listening to translations of enemy chatter. It was about 2:00 a.m., and local insurgents were crowing about the victory at Wanat.

“Did you hear about our brothers’ victory a couple of valleys over?” one of them asked.

“Yes, it was glorious,” said another.

“We will go to Kamdesh next,” an enemy fighter pledged.

The attack on Wanat, coming just nine days after his arrival in Afghanistan, had a profound effect on Lieutenant Colonel James Markert, the squadron commander of 6-4 Cav. The forty-year-old Markert was hardly new to battle, having served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991 and then again in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003–2004. But compared with Afghanistan, those tours had been well manned and well supplied. There were, at this point, approximately thirty-three thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan, only one third of whom were combat troops. Markert’s boss—Colonel John Spiszer, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division—had allowed him to bring more soldiers than he was authorized to have, so his command was technically “over-strength,” as Army gobbledygook put it. But no matter how you spun the numbers, the cold, hard fact was that he would have fewer men than the guy he was replacing at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Chris Kolenda.

It was all so different from the other war. There was a saying among the Americans: “If you’re in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it. If you’re in Afghanistan and you need something, you learn how to do without it.”

The new commander of ISAF, General David McKiernan, had visited Afghanistan in April and concluded that there were nowhere near enough troops to deal with the Taliban’s burgeoning insurgency. But when the general told President Bush that the United States needed at least thirty thousand more soldiers on the ground—-some of whom would be sent to the south, others to the east—the administration’s response was instead to ask its NATO allies to send more troops. Ultimately, that request would go largely unanswered, as leaders of European countries—having already expressed serious misgivings about the U.S. strategy in, and the rising body count from, the war—refrained from increasing their forces. Such reservations were manifest in the rules imposed by these nations on their own soldiers, who were proscribed from serving in combat roles. No, they wouldn’t be sending any more of their men and women into Afghanistan.

When the military looked within its own ranks to explain tragedies such as the one at Wanat, colonels, lieutenant colonels, and captains almost always paid the price. But officers at that level, and above, tended to gripe to one another that the real culprits were more often than not the Pentagon generals, defense secretary, vice president, and president who had assigned the U.S. troops a daunting task while irresponsibly undermanning and underequipping the mission. Nine Americans had perished at Camp Kahler, and there were dozens of other little outposts just like it all over Regional Command East. Now Markert was in charge of some of them. At Wanat, the enemy had demonstrated ambition and boldness. The men of 6-4 Cav couldn’t let that stand. “We need to have the initiative, not the enemy,” Markert told his officers. He instructed Captain Rob Yllescas,
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who would run Combat Outpost Keating, to make sure that every one of his troops knew to learn from the failure at Wanat, and then he turned to his XO, Major Thomas Nelson, and directed him to order all the wire, sandbags, and HESCO barriers he could get his hands on so that 6-4 Cav could start improving defensive positions across its entire area of operations.

Hutto and Newsom were the last two members of Bulldog Troop to leave the outpost. Newsom spent much of his final two weeks taking Yllescas and the rest of Blackfoot Troop, from 6-4 Cavalry, on patrols, showing them the area. “The enemy’s going to attack you in the first four to six weeks to try you out,” Hutto cautioned the new guys. “They’re going to want to see how good you are. So be ready.”

On his farewell visit to Keating, Kolenda went with Hutto and their replacements, Markert and Yllescas, to attend a shura with the Kamdesh elders. The Afghans looked sad, seeming to realize this was the last time they’d ever see the departing officers.

“We want them to go home to their families for a while and then come back,” Gul Mohammed Khan said of Hutto and Kolenda. The other elders nodded in agreement, and then, as they bid adieu to the men from 1-91 Cav, they offered the Nuristanis’ symbol of affection, extending their right hands to the Americans’ hearts.

To: Family and Friends

From: Dave Roller

July 27, 2008

To All,

I am at an air base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan, waiting for a flight back to Germany. We should be there sometime tomorrow. The deployment is over and there is a lot of reminiscing going on. Today is the one-year anniversary [of the day] my Commander, MAJ Thomas G. Bostick, and one of our Squad Leaders, SSG William R. Fritsche, were killed in what turned out to be the worst firefight B Troop experienced during our fifteen-month deployment. PFC Christopher F. Pfeifer was shot a few weeks later and died September 25th, 2007. His wife gave birth to their first child two days after he passed away. We’re all excited to be coming home, but in many ways it’s bittersweet.

The war in Afghanistan seems to be getting a lot of press lately, but it’s been our lives for the past fifteen months. It seems like people are just now realizing that we need more soldiers here, but anyone who’s lived on a 100m × 100m camp with just twenty other guys with the closest Americans 15km away has known that for some time. Iraq has twenty combat brigades, Afghanistan has two. There’s no telling what we could have gotten done if we had more people.

Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us over the last fifteen months. The care packages and the emails and the prayers have made life over here just a little bit easier. But remember, there are still American soldiers in harm’s way.

Take care,

David

CHAPTER 21

Chess with No Rules

D
ena Yllescas had been holding her twelve-day-old baby girl, Julia, when the phone rang at her home in Nebraska. It was her husband, Rob, who had entered active duty in the U.S. Army the day before, September 10, 2001. “Are you watching TV?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

“Turn it on,” he said.

She did. Two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers.

“I think we’re under attack, Dena,” Robert Yllescas said.

Robert José Yllescas had been born and raised in Guatemala, his father’s native country. His mother had met his father at the University of Nebraska–—Lincoln, married him, and moved back to Guatemala with him. Rob was born there and lived there until he relocated to his mother’s home state at eighteen to attend college, where he met Dena. Their first date was at the county fair; they were engaged a year later.

Yllescas’s goal, for as long as he could remember, had been to be an American soldier: he joined the National Guard as an agronomy major at the University of Nebraska, was commissioned as an officer, and did two tours in Iraq. There he saw things he wished he hadn’t seen, among them a close friend’s getting blown up by an IED. Thankfully, although the friend had lost an arm and leg, he’d lived.

After Yllescas returned from Iraq in 2006, he headed with his growing family to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he enrolled in the Captain’s Career Course. Hearing about a new Cavalry unit that was being formed, he reached out to the colonel who’d been tasked with creating it; following his completion of the captain’s course and U.S. Army Ranger School, Yllescas was assigned to the new unit, 6-4 Cav, and given command of Blackfoot Troop. He had a feeling he’d be sent to Afghanistan—and lo and behold, his orders came in.

A few days before he shipped out, in late June 2008, Yllescas invited some of his friends over to his and Dena’s house in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood. Dena overheard one of the men saying, “Boy, I’m sure glad I’m not getting put where Rob’s going. COP Keating is frickin’ dangerous.” She brought it up with Rob later, but he said she shouldn’t worry: he was going to be careful, he promised.

He was confident, moreover, that the cause was just. Yllescas told his wife, “You know, people can argue over whether or not we should’ve went to war against Iraq. But no one can argue our war with Afghanistan. Bin Laden is the reason for nine-eleven. We will hunt him down, and we will find him.” Yet beyond that justification, something felt different about this deployment, Dena thought; she sensed a heaviness and dread in her husband. Before he left, she couldn’t help but notice how gloomy both he and their daughter Julia—now almost seven—seemed, as if they both knew something she didn’t. Rob held Julia’s sister, Eva, who was just five months old, as if he were never going to hold her again. “If something happens to me, I know where I’m going,” he confided to Dena. “I can live without limbs; I just can’t be a vegetable.” The declaration stood between them, sensible and honest but with a terrible sense of possibility.

His worries extended to his men. The responsibilities of his pending command in the field weighed greatly on Yllescas. “I know someone’s not going to come home alive,” he said. “I just hope it’s not one of my soldiers. I won’t be able to handle it if I lose someone under my command.”

Kolenda could always tell who “got it” regarding counterinsurgency and who didn’t—who understood that the way to win this war was to show Afghans the better path, and who didn’t think the people could be shown anything at all. Yllescas was one of those who got it, Kolenda thought to himself as he handed off his area of operations in northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan to Markert, and Camp Keating to the man from Guatemala. Rob Yllescas at the outpost was like a pig in slop, deeply immersed and excited. He started wearing a headscarf and very much enjoyed his meetings with the villagers, the “shuras.” Within days, he believed he’d mastered the entire philosophy of counterinsurgency. He focused more closely on the Kamdesh and Urmul shuras than he did on the Hundred-Man Shura representing the entire area; he wanted to drill down and influence these nearby villages first and then expand outward. “It’s like a chess game,” Yllescas emailed to his friends and family in July.