The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (73 page)

Sergeant Vernon Martin.
(Photo courtesy of Brittany Martin)

Grissette was unaware of Martin’s secret—two secrets, really. The chief mechanic at Camp Keating had a wife, Brittany, and three children, ages six, four, and two. He also had a mistress, Specialist Cashet Burks, a logistics expert with 3-61 Cav who lived at Fort Carson, Colorado. The relationship had started out as a friendship, then turned into a fling, and then grown into something deeper still. Martin and Cash had discussed his leaving his wife, but he’d never actually said he would do it. Burks told him that she’d stick with him either way. The day before Thanksgiving in 2008, Burks informed Martin that she was pregnant. He told her he didn’t believe in abortion, and he’d support her in whatever decision she made. That August, she had given birth to a baby girl, Haniyah. Martin was worried about how he was going to break the news to his wife and his other children. He wasn’t a particular fan of the Army; he’d joined only because he had a family to support. Now he had two.

Martin was a kindhearted jokester who loved to make people laugh. At Camp Keating, he tried to call Cashet every day. He frequently emailed her as well.

From: Vernon Martin

To: Cashet Burks

Subject: wut up

hey wut up? im a call in a lil bit but yea da civilian came out here to fix our shit so its in the process. i been busy so havent been able to call u. im tired as fuk i do alot of shit out here. me and my two soldiers. shits tiring but oh well. i cant wait to leave dis cop hopefully they move us or close dis mofo. Wut i told u bout that before is starting to come tru. im hearing it on dis end so its inevitable. Thnx for sending me sum stuff. I appreciate u doing things for me and im approaching the position financially to be able to do stuff for u lol so i will. I appreciate ur kindness and luv it. neva take it for granted so jus know that. anyway im a hit u up n a lil bit before i take a nap cuz i got a long nite ahead well luv u chat with u soon.

Among the few in whom Martin confided was Specialist Albert “Cookie” Thomas, Camp Keating’s new cook. They knew each other from a deployment in South Korea two years before. The men of Camp Keating hadn’t much liked their previous cook or his meager offerings, so soon after the more industrious Thomas arrived for a four-week rotation, they’d essentially kidnapped him. By making the bland foodstuffs edible, even tasty, Cookie single-handedly boosted every soldier’s morale.

For Martin, Cookie was a sounding board, and they discussed his predicament over and over. Martin would never leave his wife, he said, though he was afraid she might leave
him
when he told her about Cashet. Like Martin, Thomas had grown up without a father, so he understood his friend’s vow that there was no way he would ever abandon any of his children.

A couple of months into the deployment, a worried Lieutenant Colonel Brown tried to figure out what to do about Captain Porter. By now, Porter had strained relationships with nearly all of his subordinate leaders—Lieutenants Bundermann, Salentine, Bellamy, and Cady; First Sergeant Burton; and his XO, Lieutenant Robert Hull. To a man, they all felt they had an obligation to help out in those areas where they saw Porter as failing, but upon hearing their recommendations, he consistently told them, point blank, that he was the commander, not they.

In one incident, Hull wanted to fire mortars on locations from which the enemy had been repeatedly attacking the camp. Porter said no. “We’re getting hit from there,” Hull said to him. “It’s a pattern we’re seeing.”

“People live near there,” Porter replied. “They don’t want to hear explosions in the middle of the night.” Thought Hull, Fuck that—these people are trying to kill us. Get off your ass and help us figure out who these people are. But he didn’t say it out loud.

As the nation headed into Labor Day weekend, McChrystal’s report about the way forward in Afghanistan landed on President Obama’s
Resolute
desk with a thud on Wednesday, September 2. The sixty-six-page document warned of “serious and deteriorating” conditions in the country and starkly declared that the war was “underresourced”—meaning, in other words, that McChrystal needed more troops, more funding, more intelligence support, and a vast array of other items. “Failure to gain the initiative and reverse insurgent momentum in the near term (next twelve months)—while Afghan security capacity matures—risks an outcome where defeating the insurgency is no longer possible,” the report suggested. McChrystal did not specify how many troops he needed; he would separately present the president with a number of options (and associated risks), one of which would be to send an additional forty-five thousand U.S. troops to join the sixty-two thousand already in country. A hundred and seven thousand troops would be more than triple the number in Afghanistan when President Obama put his hand on the Bible and swore to protect the nation.

The report’s arrival punctuated the failure of national security adviser James Jones to help manage the president’s relationship with the generals across the river in Virginia. The mistrust between the White House and the Pentagon that summer was palpable. For their part, White House officials believed that McChrystal had surrounded himself with advisers who’d decided to play the Washington game, by leaking information, chatting up reporters, and trying to curry favor with various insiders.
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To the White House, it seemed that McChrystal’s men, so admiring of the modern “celebrity-general” model that Petraeus embodied (the “surge” of troops in Iraq, undertaken on his recommendation, was now widely credited with having helped rescue that war from disaster), were seeking to anoint another celebrity savior for this war. Indeed, sometimes it looked as though McChrystal and his team were engaged in two wars: one on the ground in Afghanistan, and the other, a separate war of public relations and politics, in Washington, D.C.

Colonel Chris Kolenda was not among this group of press whisperers, but he had become a strategic adviser to McChrystal in June. The new undersecretary of defense for policy, Michele Flournoy, had brought Kolenda into the Pentagon in February, as her adviser on counterinsurgency and her uniformed lead for the Reidel Report. When McChrystal (who had met the former 1-91 Cav squadron leader at the Pentagon) became commander in Afghanistan, he brought Kolenda with him to lead the strategic assessment and implementation strategy (the main parts of the initial assessment requested by Gates), as well as to develop counterinsurgency guidance for all of ISAF.

Kolenda was too focused on his work to pay attention to the very public signals being sent to the president by other McChrystal advisers, but they were unmistakable. On September 18, 2009, reporter Nancy Youssef of McClatchy Newspapers published a story under the headline “Military Growing Impatient with Obama on Afghanistan.” Wrote Youssef: “In Kabul, some members of McChrystal’s staff said they don’t understand why Obama called Afghanistan a ‘war of necessity’ but still hasn’t given them the resources they need to turn things around quickly. Three officers at the Pentagon and in Kabul told McClatchy that the McChrystal they know would resign before he’d stand behind a faltering policy that he thought would endanger his forces or the strategy. ‘Yes, he’ll be a good soldier, but he will only go so far,’ a senior official in Kabul said. ‘He’ll hold his ground. He’s not going to bend to political pressure.’ ” That official added, “Dithering is just as destructive as ten car bombs.”

Dithering:
this one word summed up so much of the ill will between the president and his top general in Afghanistan. But beyond those two men, it also expressed what many other military leaders thought of this president and his decision-making process. Its utterance by a McChrystal aide to a reporter, however, was the kind of insubordination that made the president’s top advisers seethe.

In September, someone leaked the general’s report to Bob Woodward, and on September 20, 2009, the
Washington Post
published a redacted version of it. Woodward’s story was entitled “McChrystal: More Forces or ‘Mission Failure.’ ” The leak was seen at the White House as the ultimate attempt to force the president’s hand. How could this very green chief executive refuse his top general’s request for more troops to fight a war that Obama himself had pledged to win?

In Kabul, McChrystal expressed frustration to Kolenda and other aides about the leaks, as well as about public characterizations of him as being ready to resign if he didn’t get what he wanted. The general would subsequently dismiss the latter claim as a complete fabrication; resignation was something he had never even discussed with any of his top aides, he said. As to how Woodward had gotten his hands on a copy of the strategic assessment, McChrystal would maintain that he knew nothing about it: it hadn’t come from his team, he insisted, and it was only after the report had been transmitted to Washington, D.C., that the leak had occurred—and very quickly so.

McChrystal’s protests notwithstanding, senior White House officials had little doubt that the Pentagon was pushing the president. On one point, however, everyone could agree: all of this was significantly damaging to the United States’ strategic interests.

Now that the Afghan presidential elections were over and the White House could assess where to go next, President Obama began holding a series of meetings with his national security team—Gates, Jones, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and many others–to review, again, the entire Afghanistan strategy. His top aides were convinced that the president had to regain control of the decision-making process. This was just a mess.

By September, attacks had become so frequent at Camp Keating that many pilots refused to land their helicopters there at all—not at night, not during Red Illume, just… never. Some excuse was always found not to go. Moreover, though the mission at Barg-e-Matal was supposed to end just days after the July 12 air assault, U.S. troops were still there in September, and air assets continued to be diverted to assist them. The overall problem of resupplying missions got worse, with the result that the troops at Combat Outpost Keating and OP Fritsche started running even shorter on supplies. They refrained from using electricity during daylight hours and showered just once a week. They were not alone in their scarcity: the paucity of resupply missions throughout Brown’s area of operations had reached a crisis point.

Eric Harder didn’t like it, but he understood the pilots’ reluctance to land at Keating. Helicopters were
loud
—about ten minutes before the Chinooks arrived, you could hear them coming in. Even waiting until the moon was hiding didn’t make it safe enough to fly in the valley, thought Harder. The Taliban could down a bunch of choppers if they planned it right.

ISAF intended to withdraw from Barg-e-Matal at the end of September, so Brown started preparing, once again, for the opportunity to shut down Camps Keating and Lowell. General Scaparrotti had made it clear that when the U.S. troops departed from Nuristan, they couldn’t leave a vacuum in their wake; there would need to be some kind of security presence, an Afghan one, to prevent the area from becoming a Taliban safe haven.

Brown had tried to host a district-wide shura meeting upon his arrival that spring, but the key leader of the Kamdesh Village shura, Abdul Rahman, was away in Pakistan. When Rahman returned that summer, Brown tried again. In July, invitations were sent out to the elders, but the RSVP’s came back with regrets—the roads weren’t secured, the Nuristani elders said, so they didn’t feel they could risk the trip to Forward Operating Base Bostick. In August, immediately after the elections, at the start of Ramadan, Brown tried again. This time, the shura would be held at Combat Outpost Keating. The elders were receptive to the idea.

It was Brown’s first shura in the Kamdesh area. “We’re not going to stay here forever,” he told the elders. “So we’ve been talking about what will be here in terms of security for you and your people after we leave.” He described a plan to create a new Afghan Border Police battalion staffed by Kamdesh locals to protect the area. Brown also made a pitch for Abdul Rahman to become the district administrator for Kamdesh, but Rahman himself rejected the offer: he didn’t think the police-force idea would work, he said, and he didn’t want to be responsible for it. No one in Kamdesh had enough power to organize and maintain a standing force to keep them safe, he said, and the Afghan government wasn’t providing them with the security they needed.

Brown left the shura dejected. He had hoped something good could come out of what seemed to be a Sisyphean process; it might mean that his men would return home safely and not in caskets. He talked about the disappointing meeting with Colonel Shamsur Rahman of the Afghan Border Police, who had good sources of intelligence in the area. How could they fill the power vacuum in preparation for the Americans’ leaving? Colonel Rahman suggested that it might make sense to reach out to the long-exiled HIG leader Mullah Sadiq. Sadiq was living in Pakistan, where he’d fled after U.S. Special Forces began pursuing him, likely in 2006;
⁷⁶
he was considered at the time to be a high-value target to be captured or killed. But HIG’s leadership had since reconsidered the group’s participation in the insurgency, and Colonel Kolenda and 1-91 Cav had worked on Sadiq as a possible candidate for reconciliation.