The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (65 page)

Spiszer’s brigade had already learned some hard lessons about how to close down a base. Combat Outpost Lybert had been built only in 2006, near the Pakistan border, but it didn’t have a particularly good view of the mountain pass that it had been set up to watch over. The troops were needed elsewhere, and the local Afghan Border Police battalion had no interest in assuming control of COP Lybert, so Spiszer ordered that it be shut down. Before the troops could move out, however, word of their pending exit spread throughout the nearby villages. Half of the Afghan Security Guards who worked at the camp up and quit. The locals were suddenly far more eager to accommodate the enemy fighters—letting them use their homes, for example, to launch attacks on the camp. After all, in a few weeks, the Americans wouldn’t be there any longer, but the insurgents surely would. Combat Outpost Lybert went from being tranquil to being a target. One of the enemy bullets killed Private Second Class Michael Murdock, twenty-two years old and from Chocowinity, North Carolina. When the U.S. troops at last pulled out of Camp Lybert, the insurgents claimed to have driven them out. It wasn’t true, but propaganda needn’t be. Pat Lybert’s mom saw YouTube videos of insurgents victoriously parading through the camp named after her late son, and it ripped her apart inside.

Spiszer told the incoming commander of Regional Command East, Major General Curtis Scaparrotti, as well as the ISAF commander, that he believed George’s proposal to shut down Keating and Lowell was a good one. He thought the generals seemed receptive to the idea.

CHAPTER 25

Pericles in Kamdesh

U
nder the cover of complete darkness, the men of 3-61 Cav’s 1st Platoon arrived at Camp Keating. Led by Lieutenant Andrew “Bundy” Bundermann, this company would be the last one stationed at the outpost.

By May 2009, choppers were refusing to venture out to Combat Outpost Keating in anything but the blackest night. It was a surreal experience for these soldiers who were new to the region to be flown from Forward Operating Base Bostick over the mountains and deep into the valleys. The pilots could just see the faint outlines of peaks, but everything else was just ink. And then suddenly they were landing, and Bundermann could hear the rushing rapids of the Landay-Sin.

Soldiers from Blackfoot Troop were excited to greet the new arrivals. The handoff meant they could go home.

Bundermann and the others were ushered across the bridge and into the outpost. Massive, jagged silhouettes stretching up to the sky surrounded them. This is bizarre, the lieutenant thought. At daybreak, Safulko briefed him and showed him around the place. Bundermann wasn’t happy about the location, about its complete and utter vulnerability. The others came in here to set up this PRT and then left, he thought, and now we’re stuck holding this bag of shit.

In the barracks that morning, Safulko kept looking at one of the new guys, 3-61 Cav Sergeant Josh Kirk. He knew him from somewhere. Safulko racked his brain trying to figure out where their paths might have crossed.

“Have I met you before?” Kirk asked him.

“I was thinking the exact same thing,” Safulko said, somewhat relieved. “Were you in a different unit before this one?”

It turned out that Kirk had been Captain Nathan Springer’s gunner in 1-91 Cav. In 2007, after Tom Bostick was killed, when 1-91 Cav was still beating back that ambush, he and Springer were stuck on a road near Bazgal and couldn’t make it to Saret Koleh; they could only listen to it all unfold on the radio. Now, Safulko and Kirk realized that at the end of Kirk’s last deployment, as 6-4 was transferring into Afghanistan, he had helped guide Safulko and his men around Checkpoint Delta at the Pakistan border. Kirk was back in Afghanistan pretty quickly, Safulko noted: he’d been entitled under Army “stabilization” rules to have twelve months at home. He had returned to Afghanistan before he was required to. “I wasn’t going to let my soldiers come here without me,” Kirk, a team leader, explained.

Kirk’s return to Nuristan made Safulko think, later, of something said by the ancient Athenian general Pericles, in his funeral oration for the war dead:

Usually decision is the fruit of ignorance, hesitation of reflection. But the palm of courage will surely be adjudged most justly to those, who best know the difference between hardship and pleasure and yet are never tempted to shrink from danger.
⁶⁷

Sometimes courage is rooted in ignorance, as when men who don’t know what they’re about to face rise to the occasion. Joshua Kirk had ample knowledge about how dangerous it was in Nuristan, and yet he had hurried back. The palm of courage.

The arrival of their replacements made the soldiers of Blackfoot Troop even more eager to get home. Sergeant Shane Scherer was chief among them; he was scheduled to get married in about a month.

Dusk came earlier in the valley than in places outside the mountains’ muscular shadows. Scherer and some others were milling about outside the communications shack, waiting for Specialist James Witherington to finish his phone call home so they, too, could alert their loved ones to their pending return. Scherer had just finished working out at the camp gym and was in a T-shirt and shorts, casually holding his rifle. He was a big, athletic guy who’d joined the Army two years before, sick of his suit-and-tie job as a parking supervisor for the San Diego convention center.

Specialist Andrew Miller hopped in the Humvee right near them for guard duty. Miller was one of the shorter men at the outpost; the other guys called him Combat Wombat. Dinner had just concluded, and Safulko walked by. He spotted Scherer on a bench, patiently awaiting his turn to use the phone so he could call his fiancée, who was in Texas setting up their apartment.

“Those of you leaving soon, I’d lay low,” Safulko said to the group waiting for the phone.

“I’m only going to be out here a minute,” Scherer replied. “I’m just calling home.”

Scherer understood Safulko’s concern. His first reaction upon his arrival at Camp Keating had been disbelief. He, too, had been incredulous that the Army could have established a base at the bottom of a ravine. He’d also felt a nagging worry that there weren’t nearly enough troops there, that if a serious enough assault was ever mounted against Camp Keating, the troops wouldn’t be able to fend off the enemy before air support arrived. Scherer had asked about it and was told that the guys from the 10th Mountain Division had been there before them, and nothing bad had happened to
them
. The way the military was set up, Scherer figured, once you got an answer, you weren’t supposed to keep pushing. And after a while, he got used to being in the fishbowl.

Safulko turned to head back to the barracks. He’d taken three steps when he heard an explosion and the harsh, shredding sound of a B10 recoilless rifle round tearing through Miller’s Humvee.

The B10 is an immense piece of machinery, an obsolete Soviet-era weapon usually carried on the back of a truck. The ordnance from a B10 was designed to destroy tanks; in this case, it sliced through Miller’s Humvee like a cold knife through warm butter, just missing his legs, exploding on the ground near the men who were waiting for the phone, spraying molten copper everywhere. Everyone nearby was knocked down, and a number of troops were hit by the shrapnel—from Miller in the turret of the Humvee to Safulko on the ground to Witherington in the comms shed—but no one was hurt more seriously than Scherer, in the back of whose head a hunk of that hot copper landed and stuck, penetrating into his brain right behind his right ear. His right arm was nearly severed.

The physician’s assistant for the incoming 3-61 Cav, Captain Chris Cordova, was in the aid station, chatting with one of his medics, Staff Sergeant Shane Courville, and the outgoing docs, Lieutenant Colonel Rob Burnett (who had replaced Brewer some months before) and George Shreffler. Cordova and Courville had been at the outpost for scarcely half a day. The explosion was followed by PKM machine-gun fire. Don Couch and First Sergeant Howard Johnson carried Scherer into the aid station; Couch was gripping tightly above Scherer’s arm to try to stanch the bleeding. Scherer was conscious and kept trying to curl up into the fetal position.

Cordova examined the sergeant’s head wound first. He had an inch-deep hole in the back of his skull.

“What happened to me?” Scherer said. “My head fucking hurts.”

After examining all of Scherer’s other injuries, Cordova decided he needed to focus on stopping the bleeding from his head. Wounds in other parts of the body can be treated with pressure and tourniquets, but—as Cordova knew—that can’t be done with vessels right outside the brain. The physician’s assistant grabbed some combat gauze, put it over the hole, and prayed to God the clotting agent would make the bleeding stop. Thankfully, it did.

Cordova now needed to check Scherer’s neurological status. The pupil in his right eye was dilated; pressure from inside his skull was building up and preventing the eye from functioning properly. His breathing was fast and shallow. He had significant brain trauma and, to judge from the fact that the muscles in his arms were locking up, significant neurological damage as well.

Cordova was told that the medevac was going to take at least forty-five minutes to get to them.

This is going to be a long year, he thought.

BOOK THREE

Enemy in the Wire: The End of Combat Outpost Keating

ROLL CALL

International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) May–October 2009

At International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) Headquarters, Kabul:

General Stanley McChrystal, Commander, ISAF

At Jalalabad Airfield, Nangarhar Province:

Colonel Randy George, Task Force Mountain Warrior / 4th Brigade Combat Team (BCT), 4th Infantry Division

At Forward Operating Base Naray, Kunar Province:

Lieutenant Colonel Brad Brown, Squadron Commander, 3-61 Cavalry Squadron (“3-61 Cav”), 4th BCT, 4th Infantry Division

At Combat Outpost Keating and Observation Post Fritsche, Nuristan Province:

Black Knight Troop, 3-61 Cav, 4th BCT, 4th Infantry Division

Captain Melvin Porter, outgoing Commander

Captain Stoney Portis, incoming Commander

Lieutenant Robert Hull, Executive Officer

First Sergeant Ronald Burton

Captain Chris Cordova, outpost medical officer

Red Platoon

Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann, Leader

Sergeant Justin Gallegos, Team Leader

Sergeant Josh Hardt, Team Leader

Sergeant Josh Kirk, Team Leader

Sergeant Brad Larson, Team Leader

Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha, Senior Scout

Specialist Stephan Mace, scout

Specialist Zach Koppes, scout

Specialist Tom Rasmussen, scout

Private First Class Chris Jones, scout

White Platoon

Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy, Leader

Specialist Keith Stickney, mortarman

Blue Platoon, “The Bastards”

Lieutenant Ben Salentine, Leader

Sergeant First Class Jonathan Hill

Staff Sergeant Kirk Birchfield

Sergeant John Francis, Team Leader

Sergeant Eric Harder, Team Leader

Specialist Ty Carter, scout

Specialist Ed Faulkner, Jr., scout

Specialist Chris Griffin, scout

Specialist Michael Scusa, scout

Mortar Section

Sergeant First Class John Stephen Breeding, Jr.

Specialist Dan Rodriguez, mortarman

Private First Class Kevin Thomson, mortarman

Latvian Trainers

First Sergeant Janis Lakis

Corporal Martins Dabolins

CHAPTER 26

The General’s Competing Considerations

T
he Greek philosopher Heraclitus once wrote, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it is not the same river, and he is not the same man.”

Sergeant Joshua Kirk was stepping again into Nuristan, and it was clear that neither the U.S. Army nor the local populace was the same. Kirk—strapping and strong, with a booming voice and an intimidating self-confidence—had been in Nuristan from 2007 through 2008, when 1-91 Cav was making progress with the locals, particularly in Kamdesh District. Stationed in Kamdesh District once again in 2009, he wrote to friends from his earlier deployment that this was a different world. The security situation had deteriorated significantly since 2007, and the leaders of Bravo Troop from 3-61 Cav—also called Black Knight Troop—did almost no counterinsurgency work, he said. They held only a few shuras, and except for local security patrols, the troops seldom strayed outside the wire. Maybe once or twice a week, the entire troop would stay awake all night to manage the resupply flights from Forward Operating Base Bostick, with one platoon securing the Camp Keating landing zone and the other standing guard and grabbing the supplies. (The third platoon, Blue Platoon—whose men called themselves the Bastards—was up at Observation Post Fritsche.) Occasionally, a platoon would head into the local hamlet of Urmul or go out on a short patrol around OP Fritsche, but the commander of Combat Outpost Keating, Captain Melvin Porter, told his men that there weren’t enough of them to safely explore the surrounding area, so patrols generally inspected only historical ambush points. The thirty-seven-year-old Porter struck many of the departing leaders of Blackfoot Troop as being burnt out. He’d already done two tours in Iraq and had seen a fair share of action and death while there. Even back in the States, Porter had seemed spent, at least to his immediate chain of command and those who served under him. Before the unit deployed to Afghanistan, as his lieutenants were running field exercises to prepare for missions, Porter had appeared irritated when they expressed a desire for him to lead them, to give them orders. The three platoon leaders—Lieutenant Andrew Bundermann, twenty-four, of Red Platoon, Lieutenant Jordan Bellamy, twenty-five, of White Platoon, and Ben Salentine, twenty-seven, of Blue Platoon—were so concerned about Porter’s ability to command that they resolved to stick together and confide any worries they might have to one another. If Porter wouldn’t lead the men of 3-61 Cav, then, if push came to shove, one—or all—of them would.