The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (67 page)

The whole team was aware that from the highest general to the lowliest private, members of the military were extremely reluctant to see any base that troops had fought for, that men had died for, shut down. Indeed, to some it was tantamount to surrender, and all the more so when the base bore the name of one of their brothers: Ben Keating, Jacob Lowell, Ryan Fritsche. But the doctrine of counterinsurgency made it fairly clear to George, Brown, and their team that there was no longer any good reason for Americans to be at those bases. No need for more fallen heroes, more names to honor.

The team presented a preliminary proposal to their commanders in February 2009, at division headquarters at Fort Bragg. George, along with other aides, met with Major General Curtis Scaparrotti and Brigadier General William Mayville, Jr., and laid down the framework for their realignment plans. To many attendees, Scaparrotti seemed lukewarm, but Mayville—the deputy commanding general for operations—was wholly in favor.

They agreed that they would try to close Camp Keating by July 6 or 7, 2009. The exit—or exfil, in military lingo, short for “exfiltration”–would by necessity be by air: forty full helicopter loads over several weeks, rotated in and out, one after another, until everyone and everything was gone. Weapons, ammunition, batteries, fuel—these would go in the last six to ten loads.

Yet while Mayville continued to send George and his team positive feedback, as did others, the official go-ahead was never given. George could do nothing without the signoff of the commanding general of ISAF. The firing of McKiernan and subsequent appointment of McChrystal would make getting that approval more complicated.

Sergeant First Class John Breeding, thirty-eight, from Amarillo, Texas, had been in the Army for twenty-one years and had witnessed terrible things in that time—all of them in the previous five years. In September 2004, he’d been in Ramadi, Iraq, for only three days when the Humvee he was in was blown up by an IED. Three pieces of shrapnel went through his calf, though luckily none of them hit bone. He was laid up for eight weeks, at the end of which, with his wounds bandaged up and gauze in the holes, he took his antibiotics and painkillers and went back to work. Then, in March 2005, during a clearance operation outside Ramadi, one of his company’s scout trucks got hit by an IED that had been planted underground. All four guys on the truck were killed.
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A soldier in Breeding’s unit later found one of the victim’s heads in a nearby pond.

You couldn’t train for that kind of thing, and you couldn’t know how you’d handle it until you lived it, Breeding believed. The more carnage he witnessed, the more he felt himself becoming numb to it all.

Breeding was the platoon sergeant for Black Knight Troop’s mortar team, and like everyone else in the company, he had been flown to Combat Outpost Keating in darkest night. At first light the next morning, he opened the barracks door and couldn’t believe what he was seeing: there was nothing but high ground surrounding the base. Being at the bottom of a fishbowl meant the guns would be less effective—instead of being able to reach a distance of 7,800 yards, they’d fire only up to about 5,500 yards. Whoever was in charge of putting the base here is the dumbest officer in the world, Breeding thought. And lo and behold, within ten minutes of his walking up to the mortar pit, the men of Black Knight Troop were engaged in their first enemy contact.

That was May 27. Throughout that summer, some weeks they’d been attacked once or twice, other weeks every day, and sometimes even twice daily. To be sure, the attacks were all fairly minor ones: Breeding suspected that the enemy was probing, seeing how the Americans would react.

His team had a concrete bunker in the mortar pit with two bunk beds, and that was where they lived, a tight group made up of Breeding, Private First Class Kevin Thomson, and Specialist Daniel Rodriguez. Breeding also had four more men and 120- and 60-millimeter mortars up the mountain at Observation Post Fritsche.

Breeding had served with Rodriguez in Iraq and considered him to be an outstanding soldier. He didn’t know much about Thomson, just that he seemed like a nice kid from Nevada, a hard worker who hadn’t had an easy life. A substantial six foot four, Thomson had been overweight when he first tried to enlist; the recruiter told him he had to lose a hundred pounds before the Army would take him. So that was what Thomson did, running and panting until he weighed just under two hundred pounds—determined to make something of himself, to prove himself to the ne’er-do-well father who had abandoned him when he was a child, a local policeman who’d impregnated three women in town virtually simultaneously.

Private First Class Kevin Thomson and Sergeant First Class John Breeding at the mortar pit.
(Photo courtesy of Debbie Routson)

At fourteen, Kevin had tried to commit suicide by drinking carpet cleaner, which he thankfully vomited out in the kitchen sink. His suicidal tendencies were subsequently replaced by self-mutilation; he would cut himself, then lie to his mother about it, saying the carvings were scratches he’d gotten from some bushes. One night, he finally told her that he needed help. She took him to the hospital, where doctors diagnosed him with manic depression. He was prescribed Paxil, but he took himself off it when he turned eighteen and decided the Army offered him a better, disciplined path out of his misery.

He was calm, Thomson. Rodriguez always joked with him that he was too dumb to be scared.

The mortar pit—or “Mortaritaville,” as they called it, in homage to Jimmy Buffet’s “wastin’ away” locale—was not a fun place to be. Its occupants were often fired upon from the relatively close high ground of the Switchbacks and from the looming boulder they dubbed RPG Rock. In a constant state of agitation, the mortarmen would hit golf balls or shag baseballs into Urmul, just to screw with the locals. Their boss, Lieutenant Stephen Cady, was sent a water-balloon launcher by his father, which he then gave to his men for fun; they’d use it to bombard the Afghan National Police station, the villagers, and U.S. soldiers standing guard. Their commander, Captain Porter, didn’t know about all of this; as far as the men could remember, he’d been to the mortar pit only once.

The doubts about and resentment toward Captain Porter that had begun during predeployment were exacerbated at the outpost. Some of the animus was unfair. Porter, for instance, ordered the men of 3-61 Cav to wear full gear every time they stepped outside. The troops found this inconvenient and cumbersome—a helmet weighed roughly three pounds, the full armored vest about ten times that—but given the constant threat of indirect fire, it was a wise measure to take. Porter wasn’t alone in enforcing this rule; First Sergeant Ronald Burton, who’d been hit by some of the same shrapnel that had so seriously wounded Shane Scherer
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in May, was perhaps its most ardent enforcer.

Some of the hostile feelings toward Porter were based on strategic differences. The captain was not a strong proponent of the “show of force,” whereby mortars, for example, were fired into the hillside to remind everyone in the neighborhood that the United States had superior weaponry. Porter believed there were at least two issues with such displays. First, they were antithetical to the aims of counterinsurgency. If Black Knight Troop were to constantly drop mortars around local homes, killing goats and possibly even residents, it would only reinforce the Kamdeshis’ perception of the Americans as hostile occupiers and turn the valley against them even more. Second, whenever the United States used deadly force, there ought to be a reason behind it. The unit was in a location that was very hard to resupply with anything, let alone a pallet of 120-millimeter mortar rounds weighing forty pounds apiece, and Porter didn’t want to expend ordnance for show when it might well be needed for real at a later date.

Many of his men disagreed with this. One time, Private First Class Christopher Jones, armed with an M240 machine gun, was standing guard in the turret atop the shura building while Specialist Thomas Rasmussen manned the .50-caliber at the LRAS-2 guard post (one of two Humvees outfitted with LRAS devices, both of which were used as guard stations). When the camp began taking fire from the Putting Green, Jones and Rasmussen both returned fire, but it didn’t seem to accomplish much. At LRAS-2 with Rasmussen, Staff Sergeant Clint Romesha, the sergeant of the guard that day, decided that they needed John Breeding at the mortar pit to fire the 120-millimeter mortars. He called Breeding to make the request, but suddenly the voice of their commander came on the radio.

“Negative,” said Porter.

“We have sniper fire, we have movement up on the Putting Green,” Romesha protested.

“Do you see weapons?” Porter asked.

“Negative,” Romesha admitted.

“Do you have a PIT?” Porter asked, meaning a “positive identified threat”—that is, an enemy with a weapon.

“I see dudes where we’re getting sniped at from,” Romesha replied. Meaning: No.

“Negative,” Porter said.

In a case study in a class at West Point, that would have been the right call. But to troops being fired upon in a remote valley in northeastern Afghanistan, it felt overly cautious. When the enemy sniper stopped shooting, Romesha ran to the mortar pit to speak with Breeding in person so Porter couldn’t hear them. Get the 120s ready, he told Breeding. The guns were already laid on, Breeding replied—adding, “Just tell me when you want me to shoot.”

Clint Romesha was an intense guy, short and wiry, the son of a leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Cedarville, California. His parents had hoped he would follow his father into the church leadership, and Romesha had in fact gone to seminary for four years during high school—from five till seven every morning—but ultimately, it just wasn’t for him. He didn’t even go on a mission, a regular rite for young Mormon men.

Romesha was better suited to this kind of mission, with guns and joes under his command. Leaving the mortar pit at Combat Outpost Keating, he ran back to LRAS-2, and soon enough, the enemy started firing again. Romesha and Rasmussen looked up at the spot. Did they have a “positive identified threat”? Did they see weapons? Well,
maybe
they saw some muzzle flashes….

“We have a PIT,” Romesha said on the radio, once more requesting that Breeding fire the 120s. Told that his men had positive identification, Porter now okayed the mortars. Breeding fired. About twenty minutes later, Rasmussen saw movement again in the same spot. “Fire ’em up again,” Romesha told Breeding. “We have movement.”

“You have a PIT?” Porter asked.

“No,” Romesha confessed.

“That’s probably just the enemy picking up their dead,” Porter said. “Hold your fire. Let them recover their dead.”

Behind his back, the soldiers of Black Knight Troop began calling their commander No Mortar Porter. Colonel George and Lieutenant Colonel Brown would later judge Captain Porter’s actual decision-making in this instance—and others like it—to have been solid, though they would see a leadership failure in his refusal to explain
why
he wasn’t granting permission to fire. Part of Porter’s charge, of course, came straight from the top: the U.S. Rules of Engagement dictated that troops needed to see a weapon or, at the very least, a radio in the enemy’s hand in order to shoot. On July 6, McChrystal issued a directive underlining this point, urging troops to be even more cautious. “We must avoid the trap of winning tactical victories—but suffering strategic defeats—by causing civilian casualties or excessive damage and thus alienating the people,” he wrote. “I recognize that the carefully controlled and disciplined employment of force entails risks to our troops… [b]ut excessive use of force resulting in an alienated population will produce far greater risks.” McChrystal also instructed U.S. forces to limit their use of close air support. He added, moreover, that the use of “indirect fires against residential compounds is only authorized under very limited and prescribed conditions.” Porter took these commands to heart.

From Forward Operating Base Bostick, Brown kept tabs on Porter, and he remained concerned about his troop leader. True, McChrystal had spoken, but Porter seemed even more reluctant than other commanders to use force when he could. Brown also believed that during the troop overlap, some of the guys from the 6-4 Cav had filled the captain’s head with horror stories about how every commander at Camp Keating was a marked man. While it was almost certainly the case that Captain Yllescas had been targeted for assassination, Captain Bostick’s death in Saret Koleh appeared more random, and Ben Keating—not a commander but an XO—had died in the rollover of an LMTV. Nonetheless, Porter seemed spooked. Brown surmised that the knowledge that he would likely change command and be transferred to a safer post within ninety days had made Porter go to ground; he spent most of his time in the tactical operations center at Keating—the place, the captain himself argued, from which he could best command and control any fight. Porter’s radio call sign was “Black Knight–6,” but because of his proclivity for holing up in the operations center, his troops also referred to him as “Bunker-6.” Porter maintained that he walked around and talked with his troops on a regular basis. But some of them would claim that they seldom saw their commander at all.