The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (60 page)

One of the elders from the Mandigal shura, an ancient man with a thick white beard, had been staring right into Tucker’s eyes as he spoke. Tucker could feel his piercing glare; the old man was looking at him with an expression that seemed to him to be saying, Look at this stupid fucking kid yelling at us. The twenty-four-year-old lieutenant could only imagine the war and poverty that had marked this man’s life, only guess how little he must care about being barked at by some young pup in yet another occupier’s foreign tongue.

“We’re here for only a short time,” Tucker said. “Then we’re going to return to America, where we have happy lives—where our roads are paved, our children go to school, and our police protect us. You, however, will continue to struggle with violence, as will your children and their children. If you want to make a difference, let us know. We’re here to help.”

The Americans left Urmul and returned to the outpost.

At 7:30 in the morning at Camp Blessing, in Kunar Province, Captain Dan Pecha was summoned to the operations center to answer a call from Major Keith Rautter, the brigade chief of operations back in Jalalabad.

“You’ve got two hours to pack up all your gear,” Rautter told him. “The chopper’s on the way.”

The thirty-three-year-old Pecha, an assistant operations officer with the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, had been waiting for his opportunity to command a company, likely somewhere in Kunar Province. His wait was over, but he wouldn’t be in Kunar. Before lunchtime, Pecha was at Forward Operating Base Bostick, meeting with Markert to talk about his new job: he was moving to 6-4 Cav to command Blackfoot Troop at Combat Outpost Keating.

Pecha would come to think of himself as the polar opposite of the charismatic Yllescas—more low-key and unemotional than his predecessor, more calculated and deliberate. The men of Blackfoot seemed timid around him at first; the troops had been together for almost two years by that point, and they had become close. Pecha had never met Yllescas, but he immediately gathered that he’d been a dynamic leader, and instrumental in bonding together the tight-knit Blackfoot Troop lieutenants. It wouldn’t be easy to replace this beloved wounded warrior, but Pecha was confident that his own relationships with Meshkin, Mazzocchi, Safulko, Tucker, and the rest of Blackfoot Troop would develop.

Bonding between the Americans and the locals would be another matter entirely, Pecha knew. Developing such ties required patience and prolonged exchange; when the leader of the effort kept departing, whether through transfer or casualty, the clock was inevitably wound backward. In just two years, the locals in the Kamdesh Valley had gone through seven designated American leaders: Swain, Brooks, and Gooding with 3-71 Cav; Bostick and Hutto with 1-91 Cav; Yllescas and now Pecha himself with 6-4 Cav. And this most recent departure was unprecedented: an attempted assassination of the commander of the outpost. His lieutenants found it incredible that none of the elders knew anything about the plot to kill Yllescas. Someone had housed the culprit, they pointed out; someone had fed him; he must have prayed at a local mosque. Even to Pecha, new on the scene, the apologies that the local powerbrokers were offering sounded insincere.

As surely as the enemy fighters had targeted Yllescas, they now tried to take advantage of his absence. There was an uptick in direct- and indirect-fire attacks, with much larger assaults often coming on Saturdays. (Friday was the Muslim Sabbath, and because the “holy warriors,” as they thought of themselves, believed that their cause was in accordance with their faith, they would frequently launch attacks the following morning.) To counteract any insurgent momentum, the Americans significantly stepped up their patrolling. Mazzocchi had ordered that the bridge be rebuilt—troops needed to be able to get to the Northface somehow—but the process further darkened the mood at the outpost. Most of the soldiers were now convinced that at least some of their “allies” in the construction project were gathering information and passing it on to the enemy. Whatever mistrust the U.S. soldiers already had of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police was magnified. Reports came in of ANA troops’ selling the bullets out of their own guns to the enemy. Day laborers were observed standing behind U.S. fighting positions within Camp Keating and looking up at the mountains, as if they were doing a “reverse sector sketch”—memorizing what the Americans could see from such locations. American troops began following the day laborers around the outpost. One man was caught with a soldier’s notebook; it was confiscated, and he was sent away.

At Forward Operating Base Bostick, Markert began wondering if any American in Nuristan or Kunar could ever truly have the support of the locals. And whether it was promised to Hutto, Kolenda, or Yllescas, how much did pledged “support” from elders matter anyway if they were unable to prevent their young men from attacking U.S. troops and bases? To Markert, it seemed that Kolenda’s much-touted Hundred-Man Shura was worthless. But at this point, did the shura even have any meaning? Was its backing important? He asked himself, Can it get us
enough
peace? Even if we have people who are behind us in any of the areas north of Naray, they don’t have the mass to be—and the United States can’t generate the security needed to
make
them—the voice of authority. Markert knew there were some good people in this part of the world, people who would love for it to be a peaceful place. He also knew they weren’t the ones with the machine guns and the RPGs.

With the insurgency seemingly gaining strength, the members of the Hundred-Man Shura appeared to be losing interest in talking to the Americans. To some ISAF troops, such a disengagement seemed inevitable. Camp Keating had been attacked a few times with the evident complicity of the local villagers, and Camp Lowell at Kamu had been under fire since 6-4 Cav first arrived in country. Not only Markert but also Mazzocchi believed that Kolenda and Hutto might have been pushing for too much, too soon.
⁶⁰
They suspected that however loudly the 1-91 Cav officers may have tooted their own bugle about their counterinsurgency accomplishments, their fifteen months’ worth of effort wasn’t about to undo decades’, if not centuries’, worth of habits and traditions of self-preservation.

Robert Yllescas’s face was so swollen that when his wife, Dena, walked through the door of his hospital room at Landstuhl on November 1, she barely recognized him. He was wearing a neck brace, was hooked up to a ventilator, and had a tracheostomy tube inserted in his neck. She lifted his sheet: his abdomen was so bruised that it was almost black, and so swollen that he looked nine months pregnant. Since the explosion, he had not regained consciousness.

Dena clutched his hand, intertwining their fingers while she, her mother, and her mother-in-law all talked to him and told him stories—about Julia and Eva, about all the friends and family members who were thinking of him and praying for him. Soon the grandmothers left to buy him some clothes. Dena read her husband the letters Julia had written to him. She kissed his hand and told him how much she loved him. She wished she could have a snapshot of the future; she wanted to know where they would be a year from that moment, because right then, everything seemed so hopeless.

And Dena wept.

Nine days later, President George W. Bush gave her a big hug.

“I’m so sorry,” the president said. He had tears in his eyes.

They were standing in Rob Yllescas’s hospital room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, wearing hospital gowns and surgical masks. Yllescas remained in bad shape, unconscious, with his jaw wired shut and his legs amputated.

It was November 10, 2008. Yllescas was one of 2,561 U.S. service members who’d been wounded in action in Afghanistan since the war started in October 2001; 621 more had been killed there. In Iraq, 30,764 U.S. troops had been wounded in action, and 4,180 killed.

Less than a week before the president paid this bedside visit, Rob and Dena Yllescas had flown to the United States from Germany on the very day that the nation was electing as its next commander in chief a young, inexperienced freshman senator from Illinois, a liberal Democrat named Barack Obama. Public weariness with President Bush’s two wars was one of the reasons for Obama’s victory over the decorated Vietnam veteran John McCain, a conservative Republican senator from Arizona. Obama seemed less bellicose than McCain. He’d talked about ending the war in Iraq and focusing instead on winning the one in Afghanistan.

President Bush awarded Yllescas the Purple Heart, the medal given to troops wounded in action. Dena tried desperately to wake her husband up. She felt sick, she wanted so badly for him to be awake.

President Bush kept hugging her. “Rob will wake up, and when he does, I will meet him in person again,” he said as he held her.

She and the president left the room and removed their gowns and masks. The president signed a 1st Infantry baseball cap of Yllescas’s and told Dena about Staff Sergeant Christian Bagge, whose convoy had been hit by IEDs in Iraq. Bush had met Bagge at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. From the hospital bed where he lay with no legs, Bagge had told the president, a famous jogger, “I want to run with you.” In June 2006, Bagge and Bush had done just that together, on the South Lawn of the White House.

“When Rob’s ready and able, maybe you can go wakeboarding with us,” Dena said, referring to the water sport that’s a combination of snowboarding, waterskiing, and surfing.

The president laughed. “I’m too old to wakeboard,” he said.

Eva Yllescas, Memorial Day 2009.
(Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)

CHAPTER 23

What Was Wrong with Kaine Meshkin

B
y November 2008, the enemy fighters had evidently decided it was no longer enough merely to attack Camp Keating; now they were going to try to overrun it.

The information came in to Blackfoot Troop piece by piece, through intercepted radio transmissions, tips that locals shared with Rick Victorino, and simple observation: tripwires outside the outpost were cut, insurgent chatter suddenly went silent. Blackfoot Troop’s leaders assumed, based on recent history, that the attack would come on a Saturday.

On Friday, November 21, Captain Pecha huddled with Safulko, Victorino, Tucker, and Mazzocchi. Meshkin was on leave. There were two easy ways for insurgents to enter the outpost: through the main entrance and through the ANA’s side entrance, adjacent to the road on the east-southeast corner. They had to think like the enemy: which route would the insurgents prefer, and why? After running through a series of scenarios, the men concocted a plan.

Well before dawn on Saturday, Mazzocchi and a patrol snuck up the slope of the northern mountain. Once they were on the Northface, the lieutenant divided his team into two parts, each containing six U.S. troops and two ANA soldiers. He led one group while First Sergeant Howard Johnson took charge of the other. Meanwhile, Pecha, Safulko, and Blue Platoon prepared to patrol the southern wall. That had been Pecha’s idea; he’d been at Camp Keating for only a few weeks, but from his conversations with the lieutenants, he’d gathered that the unit had historically stayed away from the southern wall on Saturdays due to the increased likelihood of an attack there. His intent was to have Mazzocchi’s troops provide overwatch while he and his team took the fight to the enemy on the other side.

Mazzocchi and Safulko both thought Pecha’s plan was a particularly bad one. He and his platoon would be walking uphill and directly into a potentially intense firefight with a larger force. They respected Dan Pecha as a leader, and they knew he wasn’t afraid of much, but he was also, now, a symbol in that valley. They had to protect that symbol. The last thing Blackfoot Troop needed was another commander carried off the field of battle, never to return.

First light came. Up at Observation Post Fritsche, White Platoon’s Don Couch called in to the operations center to alert command that he’d heard automatic-weapons fire in the distance. That didn’t necessarily mean anything; it could be a domestic dispute, a new salvo in the Kom–Kushtozi war, or even just an accidental discharge—such was the Afghanistan soundtrack. Then one of the guards near the southern wall at Camp Keating reported that he’d seen movement up in the Switchbacks. He wasn’t sure, but he thought he’d spotted someone peeking out from behind a rock.

Mazzocchi, on the northern mountain, saw a trip flare go off across the way. Tripwires had been set up on the southern mountain, and someone—almost certainly an insurgent, Mazzocchi felt in his gut, and not one of the monkeys or other wild animals that roamed the area—had disturbed the wire, igniting a smoking flare. Mazzocchi had Tucker tell the mortarmen at Camp Keating and Observation Post Fritsche to prepare to fire.