The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (62 page)

Two days after his craniectomy, on December 1, Rob Yllescas had a massive stroke. Another clot had interrupted the blood flow to his brain. A CAT scan afforded no hope. There was nothing more for Dena Yllescas to hold on to. She decided to let him go. She promised him that she and the girls would be okay.

Captain Robert Yllescas, age thirty-one, was removed from life support and died quickly.

Mazzocchi sat at a picnic table in the dining hall with Chris Safulko, snacking on Pop-Tarts and talking for hours. He offered Safulko some water from the refrigerator that had been completely blown out by the RPG. (Tongue in cheek, they called it Freedom Water.) Meshkin was still on leave, and Pecha was about to take some R&R, which would leave Mazzocchi in charge of the outpost.

Winter was coming, likely meaning a respite from attacks. No longer did the U.S. forces think this was because the enemy was returning to Pakistan; no, they now realized that most of the insurgents were local, even if they did have Taliban leaders from outside of Kamdesh District. The reason for the seasonal break in hostilities, they suspected, was that excessive amounts of snow and ice made it dangerous for the enemy to traverse the mountains to stage serious assaults. They hoped that would be the case this winter, at any rate.

In early November, snow fell on the highest peaks of the surrounding mountains, prompting sighs of relief. Finally, a break, the Americans thought.

A break from attacks, at least—there was still plenty of work to do. The construction quality of the buildings at the outpost was shoddy, and by now every structure leaked. Through the whole winter, soldiers had to set out buckets to catch the drips in nearly every room, then empty them once a day or more—yet another fight just to keep day-to-day operations going. Then, more seriously, the leaders of Blackfoot Troop had to fortify the outpost even further, taking advantage of the bad weather to strengthen fighting positions. This could be accomplished by a few different means, including chopping down surrounding trees and destroying rock outcroppings that the enemy used for cover. Along these same lines, Pecha and his lieutenants decided that they ought to send the insurgents some emphatic messages.

First, if the enemy wanted the outpost, he would have to suffer for it. American troops cleared the entire area around Combat Outpost Keating; if the insurgents tried to breach the wire again, they would have to cross the last fifty to one hundred yards in open terrain, under U.S. fire. Every yard the enemy fighters gained, they would have to bleed for. Second, the American officers would make it understood that the enemy could no longer move freely in the area. Resuming their aggressive patrols, they would show the insurgents that Blackfoot Troop was always watching.

There was also another, more perplexing challenge facing the Americans: they had to reengage with the locals and reunite with the shura. The IED had destroyed both the trust between the two sides and the troops’ sense of security. The officers of Blackfoot Troop figured that the locals had decided the Americans weren’t so strong after all: if they couldn’t secure their own camp, couldn’t protect their own commander, how could they make the valley safe for the Kamdeshis?

Although more skeptical about counterinsurgency than those before him, Pecha nevertheless realized that he had to do whatever he could to restore the trust between his men and the local elders. The insurgents had calculated that by killing Yllescas, they could put an end to the progress that 1-91 Cav, and then 6-4, had made in Kamdesh. One of Yllescas’s early dreams had been to turn the shura tent at Keating into a heated building so that Blackfoot Troop could host gatherings there during the winter; by the time he was wounded, however, the building was only 80 percent completed. Now, as part of Pecha’s version of a counterinsurgency program, Blackfoot Troop would finish it. The Americans bought the inn where Amin Shir had been found and tore it down; the materials were salvaged to finish the heated shura building. Doc Brewer opened the doors of the aid station, welcoming locals in need of medical care. Mazzocchi, as Pecha’s XO, placed orders with headquarters for as many humanitarian-assistance supplies as could be spared. In some ways, the men could never match their earlier efforts, haunted as they were by what had happened to their former commander—yet they were determined to keep trying.

On the night of December 1, First Sergeant Johnson came into the plans room, where all of the officers were assembled.

“Captain Yllescas passed,” he said. Everyone fell silent. Within a few minutes, they all went their separate ways, to their bunks or out into the dark.

Kaine Meshkin was home on leave in Fort Hood, Texas, when he got the news.

Dena Yllescas requested that he escort her late husband’s body from Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland to the funeral in Nebraska. Meshkin immediately agreed, and the Pentagon arranged for him to serve as an escort officer, which required official training in the position’s duties and obligations.

The night after he attended the training, Meshkin was sitting at his kitchen table with his wife, Ali, as they went over the details of how each of them would get to Nebraska. He was aware that he had become emotionally numb in Afghanistan. Over there, there wasn’t any point in giving in to sorrow or depression, or at least it had seemed that way at the time. Those emotions—as opposed to, say, anger—just weren’t practical in an environment in which you had to worry constantly about your own and your comrades’ survival. Self-pity could get you killed.

But being back in Texas with Ali and their friends had brought all those pent-up emotions to the fore. Right there at the kitchen table, looking at the handbook detailing his duties as an escort officer for Yllescas’s corpse, Meshkin broke down sobbing. He wept uncontrollably, in a way he hadn’t done since college, when his mother died of cancer. That had been different, though: that time, he’d felt not only grief but also relief that his mother would no longer be in pain. This was something else. In this moment, all of his pain, frustration, sorrow, anger, and desire for vengeance had finally boiled to the surface.

“I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” he told Ali as his body heaved.

The next day, he flew to Washington, D.C., and was taken to the funeral home where Yllescas’s corpse lay. Meshkin was supposed to verify that his former commander’s uniform had been put on properly and that he was wearing the right medals and ribbons. He wasn’t prepared for what he saw. The morticians were doing everything they could to make Yllescas presentable, but there were clear limits to what they could accomplish. It was the darkest and most solemn moment of the war for Kaine Meshkin. It didn’t make any sense, but, enraged and heartbroken, he was seized by a sudden desire to hurt the morticians who were messing with Yllescas’s body. I want to beat the shit out of these guys, he thought—though again, he didn’t understand why.

Meshkin made sure the captain’s uniform, ribbons, and awards were correct. Afterward, he was driven to a hotel and instructed not to drink any alcohol. He’d be picked up in the morning.

Stay cooped up by myself in a hotel, after seeing Rob that way? Meshkin thought. Are you fucking
kidding
me?

He went to an Irish pub and drank—a lot—then stumbled back to his hotel and passed out. He woke up the next morning and went to the funeral home to stay with Yllescas until they boarded the small plane designed especially for escort flights. Meshkin sat up near the cockpit, right next to his friend’s casket. Upon landing in Nebraska, he tried to prepare Dena Yllescas for what she was about to see at the funeral home. Her husband’s body had deteriorated badly, he told her. Dena insisted on seeing Rob anyway. Afterward, she agreed with Meshkin that an open casket wouldn’t be a good idea.

Rob Yllescas was laid to rest at the back end of the Osceola Cemetery, in a peaceful spot near a cornfield. He’d come home.

The view of Upper Kamdesh from Observation Post Fritsche.
(Photo courtesy of Rick Victorino)

Soon after Yllescas’s funeral, Meshkin returned to the Kamdesh Valley, where it turned out that this winter, in contrast to the previous two, the enemy had decided
not
to take a vacation. The insurgents didn’t stage any major attacks on Camp Keating but instead mainly lobbed harassment rounds from a distance: small-arms fire, RPGs, an occasional blast from an antitank PTRD (most likely the same one from October 25). Still, this was a change for the worse.

In accordance with a not-unusual custom whereby officers rotate their responsibilities, Lieutenants Meshkin and Mazzocchi switched jobs, Meshkin becoming the XO while Mazzocchi took control of Red Platoon.

In his new role, Mazzocchi led a patrol to the Northface to try to locate and kill the enemy RPG team that had been firing on the camp from the north. No dice—they didn’t find it. Meshkin greeted the platoon upon its return, wanting to talk to his colleague about where the enemy team might be shooting from. As the two lieutenants were speaking, Meshkin saw a puff of smoke from the mountain and heard the launch of an RPG. He cringed. The rocket flew about a foot over their heads and detonated on a HESCO barrier right behind them. The blast was deafening. Mazzocchi was knocked unconscious. Meshkin had taken cover—instinctively, he supposed—and now began firing toward the area where he’d seen the smoke. His head felt as if it’d been walloped by a baseball bat; all he could hear was a high-pitched ringing in his right ear. In a state of mental disarray, he emptied a magazine to the north, but the enemy had already escaped behind a ridge. He would have headaches and a ringing in his ear for more than a year afterward.

In December 2008, at Fort Carson, Colorado, Colonel Randy George and Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown were preparing for the following summer, when they were scheduled to assume control of an area of operations in eastern Afghanistan that included Combat Outpost Keating. More precisely, they were planning to close the outpost.

In six months, George would replace Spiszer, and Brown would take over for Markert. George commanded the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division; Brown was in charge of the 3rd Squadron, 61st Cavalry Regiment—or “3-61 Cav”—which was part of George’s brigade.

For months, Brown had been reaching out via email to Markert and Kolenda, asking for guidance. Markert recommended that the 3-61 Cav troops practice shooting moving targets on a hill up to seven hundred yards above them; shooting uphill and downhill; and adjusting their aim points—all skills that were critical to surviving at Camp Keating. Make those targets move quickly, Markert wrote. You wouldn’t believe how fast the enemy here is.

Kolenda offered similar advice. The mountains are brutal, he noted, and you’re in Colorado, so take advantage. Everyone should be able to run twelve miles in full gear in less than four hours. And five miles without gear in forty minutes. That will give the men a foundation, at least, for what awaits them in Nuristan. And pick up a copy of Robertson’s 1896 volume
The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush,
Kolenda added.

But beyond the practical preparation, there were bigger issues that Brown just couldn’t wrap his head around, the same ones that had flummoxed nearly everyone who’d had anything at all to do with Combat Outpost Keating. The outpost had been put near the road because the troops would need it for travel and resupply, but by 2007, road collapses and frequent ambushes had altered that plan, rendering Camp Keating completely dependent on helicopters for transportation and supply runs. Indeed, the outpost was named after an officer whose very death had highlighted just how unusable the roads were.

It was a familiar chorus, and for George, it was merely a different verse from the same dreadful songbook. The energy invested in counterinsurgency had been extensive, but George didn’t think the results had been proportional. The United States had gotten itself in the middle of a variety of blood, land, and tribal feuds, Brown believed, and the government of Afghanistan itself had very little, if any, interest in making serious efforts in that region. The insurgency was actually
gaining
strength, especially in the remote rural areas of eastern Afghanistan. According to one U.S. Army tabulation, the yearly number of attacks against the combat outposts in Kamdesh District had risen dramatically since their establishment, from a few dozen in 2006 (though the United States was there for only part of that year), to 109 in 2007, to 136 by the end of 2008.

As George and Brown came to see it, the Army was committing an inordinate number of troops to try to secure a relatively small percentage of the Afghan population. Moreover, the particular ethos of Kamdesh District in Nuristan Province and the Korangal Valley in Kunar Province—with their geographical isolation, traditional local hostilities, and lack of any real Afghan government presence—meant that the Americans were more irritant than balm to the locals, and more incitement than deterrent to the enemy. Finally, providing air support and making resupply runs for those outposts and observation posts took up time that choppers and their pilots might otherwise be spending on missions in parts of the country more vital to the overall U.S. aims.