The Outpost An Untold Story Of American Valor Part 22

"I don't like it," Brostrom admitted. "We're going to get f.u.c.ked up." The last couple of times that members of Task Force ROCK had driven up there, he said, they'd run into ambushes or IED attacks; he showed Kennedy a smashed window on a Humvee.

But Brostrom never shared these concerns with Ostlund, his commanding officer, even though they had several conversations about the a.s.signment. He did tell Myer and others above him that he was worried he had too few men to meet the challenge of setting up an outpost in a hostile area; Ostlund and Myer tried to a.s.suage his fears by providing him with a twenty-four-man ANA platoon, gun trucks, mortars, a Predator drone for the first three days he was there, and more. Brostrum didn't think the ANA platoon would make much of a difference. More generally, he thought Nuristan itself was "almost a lost cause" thanks to the way the war was being fought-on the cheap and undermanned, as he told a military historian at Camp Blessing. "There needs to be a lot more than just a platoon [in Nuristan] if you want to make a big difference," he said.48 Brostrum wasn't alone in his misgivings about the mission. "No one in the company wanted to do this Wanat thing," one sergeant, Jesse Queck, later recalled. "We all knew something bad was going to happen." Queck heard that some guys posted on their Facebook pages asking for their friends and families to pray for them. "They felt like this mission was the one they weren't coming back from," he added. One soldier told the sergeant that on his Facebook page, he'd written, "Updated my DD93, ready to go...." The DD93 was the doc.u.ment in which troops provided the names of those to be notified should they be wounded or killed, along with a list of their death-gratuity beneficiaries.

From July 8 through 12, 2008, the men of 2nd Platoon, supervised by Brostrom, began building their new camp, which they unofficially named after Sergeant First Cla.s.s Matthew Ryan Kahler. (Kahler, a fellow member of Chosen Company, had been killed the previous January by an Afghan Security Guard who supposedly shot him by accident.) Local men watched them from the mountains. The local Afghan National Police chief told them that Americans were not welcome in the area.

Thousands of pounds' worth of construction materials were due to be delivered, including wood and concrete that 2nd Platoon would use to build bunkers and defensive positions. But first the contracted Afghan drivers had mechanical problems, and then they were held up because the ROCK Battalion team whose responsibility it was to make sure the roads were clear of IEDs had to deal with a KIA in another area. After that, the IED clearing team had mechanical problems of its own.

The delays meant that the Americans at Camp Kahler had little cover. Water deliveries were also not made because of a scarcity of aircraft. The troops had filters and iodine to purify the local water, but the shortage of bottled water seriously inhibited their ability to work as the hot July sun beat down upon them. With no sense of any imminent threat, and a need to conserve his soldiers' energy, Brostrom did not order any security patrols.

Myer arrived at Combat Outpost Kahler on July 12. At 4:20 a.m. on July 13, hundreds of insurgents began bombarding the camp with what seemed like thousands of RPGs. In addition to rocket-propelled grenades, the enemy had AK rifles and both PKM and RPK light machine guns. The insurgents first targeted the Americans' weapons-their gun trucks, ant.i.tank missile system, mortar tubes, and light machine guns. They also attacked the observation post, named Topside, about a hundred yards up a terraced hill.

Myer immediately radioed to Camp Blessing: "Whatever you can give me, I'm going to need," he said. "This is a Ranch Housestyle attack."

But the camp-like so many others throughout Regional Command East-was remote, and the only support Myer could get, at first, was mortars and field artillery fire from Camp Blessing (roughly five miles away as the crow flew) and artillery fire from Camp Wright at Asadabad (some sixteen miles away), none of which was particularly accurate or effective. In the first two hours of the attack, nine American soldiers were killed,49 including Lieutenant Brostrom. By the time the smoke finally cleared and the enemy had been beaten back, a total of twenty-seven U.S. troops were wounded, with sixteen of them needing evacuation-the largest number of U.S. casualties in any Afghanistan battle to date. including Lieutenant Brostrom. By the time the smoke finally cleared and the enemy had been beaten back, a total of twenty-seven U.S. troops were wounded, with sixteen of them needing evacuation-the largest number of U.S. casualties in any Afghanistan battle to date.50 The night after the Camp Kahler disaster, back at Combat Outpost Keating, Alex Newsom was listening to translations of enemy chatter. It was about 2:00 a.m., and local insurgents were crowing about the victory at Wanat.

"Did you hear about our brothers' victory a couple of valleys over?" one of them asked.

"Yes, it was glorious," said another.

"We will go to Kamdesh next," an enemy fighter pledged.

The attack on Wanat, coming just nine days after his arrival in Afghanistan, had a profound effect on Lieutenant Colonel James Markert, the squadron commander of 6-4 Cav. The forty-year-old Markert was hardly new to battle, having served in Operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm in 1991 and then again in Operation Iraqi Freedom in 20032004. But compared with Afghanistan, those tours had been well manned and well supplied. There were, at this point, approximately thirty-three thousand U.S. troops in Afghanistan, only one third of whom were combat troops. Markert's boss-Colonel John Spiszer, commander of the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Infantry Division-had allowed him to bring more soldiers than he was authorized to have, so his command was technically "over-strength," as Army gobbledygook put it. But no matter how you spun the numbers, the cold, hard fact was that he would have fewer men than the guy he was replacing at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Chris Kolenda.

It was all so different from the other war. There was a saying among the Americans: "If you're in Iraq and you need something, you ask for it. If you're in Afghanistan and you need something, you learn how to do without it."

The new commander of ISAF, General David McKiernan, had visited Afghanistan in April and concluded that there were nowhere near enough troops to deal with the Taliban's burgeoning insurgency. But when the general told President Bush that the United States needed at least thirty thousand more soldiers on the ground--some of whom would be sent to the south, others to the east-the administration's response was instead to ask its NATO allies to send more troops. Ultimately, that request would go largely unanswered, as leaders of European countries-having already expressed serious misgivings about the U.S. strategy in, and the rising body count from, the war-refrained from increasing their forces. Such reservations were manifest in the rules imposed by these nations on their own soldiers, who were proscribed from serving in combat roles. No, they wouldn't be sending any more of their men and women into Afghanistan.

When the military looked within its own ranks to explain tragedies such as the one at Wanat, colonels, lieutenant colonels, and captains almost always paid the price. But officers at that level, and above, tended to gripe to one another that the real culprits were more often than not the Pentagon generals, defense secretary, vice president, and president who had a.s.signed the U.S. troops a daunting task while irresponsibly undermanning and underequipping the mission. Nine Americans had perished at Camp Kahler, and there were dozens of other little outposts just like it all over Regional Command East. Now Markert was in charge of some of them. At Wanat, the enemy had demonstrated ambition and boldness. The men of 6-4 Cav couldn't let that stand. "We need to have the initiative, not the enemy," Markert told his officers. He instructed Captain Rob Yllescas,51 who would run Combat Outpost Keating, to make sure that every one of his troops knew to learn from the failure at Wanat, and then he turned to his XO, Major Thomas Nelson, and directed him to order all the wire, sandbags, and HEs...o...b..rriers he could get his hands on so that 6-4 Cav could start improving defensive positions across its entire area of operations. who would run Combat Outpost Keating, to make sure that every one of his troops knew to learn from the failure at Wanat, and then he turned to his XO, Major Thomas Nelson, and directed him to order all the wire, sandbags, and HEs...o...b..rriers he could get his hands on so that 6-4 Cav could start improving defensive positions across its entire area of operations.

Hutto and Newsom were the last two members of Bulldog Troop to leave the outpost. Newsom spent much of his final two weeks taking Yllescas and the rest of Blackfoot Troop, from 6-4 Cavalry, on patrols, showing them the area. "The enemy's going to attack you in the first four to six weeks to try you out," Hutto cautioned the new guys. "They're going to want to see how good you are. So be ready."

On his farewell visit to Keating, Kolenda went with Hutto and their replacements, Markert and Yllescas, to attend a shura with the Kamdesh elders. The Afghans looked sad, seeming to realize this was the last time they'd ever see the departing officers.

"We want them to go home to their families for a while and then come back," Gul Mohammed Khan said of Hutto and Kolenda. The other elders nodded in agreement, and then, as they bid adieu to the men from 1-91 Cav, they offered the Nuristanis' symbol of affection, extending their right hands to the Americans' hearts.

To: Family and FriendsFrom: Dave RollerJuly 27, 2008 To All,I am at an air base in Manas, Kyrgyzstan, waiting for a flight back to Germany. We should be there sometime tomorrow. The deployment is over and there is a lot of reminiscing going on. Today is the one-year anniversary [of the day] my Commander, MAJ Thomas G. Bostick, and one of our Squad Leaders, SSG William R. Fritsche, were killed in what turned out to be the worst firefight B Troop experienced during our fifteen-month deployment. PFC Christopher F. Pfeifer was shot a few weeks later and died September 25th, 2007. His wife gave birth to their first child two days after he pa.s.sed away. We're all excited to be coming home, but in many ways it's bittersweet.The war in Afghanistan seems to be getting a lot of press lately, but it's been our lives for the past fifteen months. It seems like people are just now realizing that we need more soldiers here, but anyone who's lived on a 100m 100m camp with just twenty other guys with the closest Americans 15km away has known that for some time. Iraq has twenty combat brigades, Afghanistan has two. There's no telling what we could have gotten done if we had more people.Thank you so much to everyone who has supported us over the last fifteen months. The care packages and the emails and the prayers have made life over here just a little bit easier. But remember, there are still American soldiers in harm's way.Take care,David

CHAPTER 21

Chess with No Rules

Dena Yllescas had been holding her twelve-day-old baby girl, Julia, when the phone rang at her home in Nebraska. It was her husband, Rob, who had entered active duty in the U.S. Army the day before, September 10, 2001. "Are you watching TV?" he asked.

"No," she said.

"Turn it on," he said.

She did. Two planes had crashed into the World Trade Center towers.

"I think we're under attack, Dena," Robert Yllescas said.

Robert Jose Yllescas had been born and raised in Guatemala, his father's native country. His mother had met his father at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, married him, and moved back to Guatemala with him. Rob was born there and lived there until he relocated to his mother's home state at eighteen to attend college, where he met Dena. Their first date was at the county fair; they were engaged a year later.

Yllescas's goal, for as long as he could remember, had been to be an American soldier: he joined the National Guard as an agronomy major at the University of Nebraska, was commissioned as an officer, and did two tours in Iraq. There he saw things he wished he hadn't seen, among them a close friend's getting blown up by an IED. Thankfully, although the friend had lost an arm and leg, he'd lived.

After Yllescas returned from Iraq in 2006, he headed with his growing family to Fort Benning, Georgia, where he enrolled in the Captain's Career Course. Hearing about a new Cavalry unit that was being formed, he reached out to the colonel who'd been tasked with creating it; following his completion of the captain's course and U.S. Army Ranger School, Yllescas was a.s.signed to the new unit, 6-4 Cav, and given command of Blackfoot Troop. He had a feeling he'd be sent to Afghanistan-and lo and behold, his orders came in.

A few days before he shipped out, in late June 2008, Yllescas invited some of his friends over to his and Dena's house in Killeen, Texas, near Fort Hood. Dena overheard one of the men saying, "Boy, I'm sure glad I'm not getting put where Rob's going. COP Keating is frickin' dangerous." She brought it up with Rob later, but he said she shouldn't worry: he was going to be careful, he promised.

He was confident, moreover, that the cause was just. Yllescas told his wife, "You know, people can argue over whether or not we should've went to war against Iraq. But no one can argue our war with Afghanistan. Bin Laden is the reason for nine-eleven. We will hunt him down, and we will find him." Yet beyond that justification, something felt different about this deployment, Dena thought; she sensed a heaviness and dread in her husband. Before he left, she couldn't help but notice how gloomy both he and their daughter Julia-now almost seven-seemed, as if they both knew something she didn't. Rob held Julia's sister, Eva, who was just five months old, as if he were never going to hold her again. "If something happens to me, I know where I'm going," he confided to Dena. "I can live without limbs; I just can't be a vegetable." The declaration stood between them, sensible and honest but with a terrible sense of possibility.

His worries extended to his men. The responsibilities of his pending command in the field weighed greatly on Yllescas. "I know someone's not going to come home alive," he said. "I just hope it's not one of my soldiers. I won't be able to handle it if I lose someone under my command."

Kolenda could always tell who "got it" regarding counterinsurgency and who didn't-who understood that the way to win this war was to show Afghans the better path, and who didn't think the people could be shown anything at all. Yllescas was one of those who got it, Kolenda thought to himself as he handed off his area of operations in northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan to Markert, and Camp Keating to the man from Guatemala. Rob Yllescas at the outpost was like a pig in slop, deeply immersed and excited. He started wearing a headscarf and very much enjoyed his meetings with the villagers, the "shuras." Within days, he believed he'd mastered the entire philosophy of counterinsurgency. He focused more closely on the Kamdesh and Urmul shuras than he did on the Hundred-Man Shura representing the entire area; he wanted to drill down and influence these nearby villages first and then expand outward. "It's like a chess game," Yllescas emailed to his friends and family in July.

You have so many moves and options any one person can move. Now when we think of the game of chess we know the rules, p.a.w.ns move one s.p.a.ce, queen anywhere, etc. Now imagine the game with no rules, you don't get to see the other person's move and he may move several times and you don't know and you play it in the dark. To top it all off the board can be turned around at any given time. That is what it is like out here and I have to crack the code and hope I have the right information to make the best decision.

He sent photos home:

"This is a picture from one of the mountains we have to patrol weekly. It is about a 2,500-foot climb almost straight up." (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas) (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)

"This is the ONLY way we get re-supplied." (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas) (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)

"Marine LT Chris Briley (works and trains with the Afghan National Army [ANA]) and myself providing overwatch for a friendly platoon. Marines work a lot with the ANA and having Chris out here is a definite multiplier. He has the ANA in great operational shape." (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas) (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)

Two ANA troops with "Chris Briley and one of my Platoon Leaders Kaine Meshkin enjoying a fish fry. They caught the fish from the river and fried them up for us. It was actually pretty good." The fish for the fish fry were acquired by Blackfoot Troop soldiers' throwing hand grenades into the Landay-Sin River, followed by ANA troops' jumping in to collect the dead catch. (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas) (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)

The specter of Wanat haunted Yllescas. He conducted regular spot checks on soldiers who were on guard duty, examining their weapons, making sure they were awake. Intelligence came in from the CIA indicating that the local insurgent leadership was planning a similar strike on Combat Outpost Keating, using the same fighters who had attacked Chosen Company earlier that month. One night, after catching a soldier not paying attention while on guard, Yllescas summoned all of his officers to the operations center and let loose. "You better tighten things up!" he screamed at them. "I will not have the next Wanat on my watch!"

When Marine Lieutenant Chris Briley had arrived at Camp Keating months before, in March 2008, his first impression of Joey Hutto had been that he was somewhat bitter and harsh. But over time, Briley had begun to realize that the captain's p.r.i.c.kly demeanor was a result of his taking his job so seriously, and he'd come to look up to the man, to admire him.

Hutto's replacement, Yllescas, couldn't have been more different from him. Whereas Hutto had been rigid and sometimes contemptuous of what he deemed to be nonsense or stupidity, Yllescas was respectful of everything and everyone and always willing to listen to advice and suggestions from others. Briley appreciated that Yllescas knew what he didn't know, and that wasn't too proud to take lessons from a junior officer. Yllescas let Briley, as the trainer of the ANA company, take the lead in the shuras for those first few weeks, and Briley made flashcards for Yllescas bearing the names and faces of important local figures, supplying politically incorrect mnemonic devices so the new commander of the outpost could learn and remember which Nuristani was which.

While it might very well have been an unfair comparison, since Briley was around the men of Bulldog Troop at the end of their rotation and the Blackfoot Troop soldiers at the beginning of theirs, it nevertheless seemed to him that the companies, too, were night and day at their core. Bulldog was tightly wound, Type A; Briley thought Hutto and Newsom would have to be dragged away from the outpost on their last day. Blackfoot, by contrast, seemed a little green and something of a hodgepodge, having been formed right before deployment. The Blackfoot guys were in nowhere near the physical condition of their predecessors. The first time Briley-happy to help 6-4 Cav raise its game-took Yllescas on a patrol through the mountains, five minutes hadn't pa.s.sed before the company commander was so winded it looked as if someone had kicked him in the abdomen. Beyond needing to overcome the combination of thin air and a heavy load, Yllescas was a tad chubby, which didn't help.

Hutto had advised Yllescas to push the elders. There were reports of insurgents' being as close as Mandigal, and yet the village leaders still claimed not to know where the a.s.sailants were. Yllescas threatened to cut off funding for local projects, but that didn't have the immediate effect he'd hoped for. The soldiers of Blackfoot Troop had been at the outpost for only a few weeks when they got their first evidence that the enemy fighters were finding shelter in Kamdesh Village.

The first attack on Blackfoot Troop occurred early in the morning on Sat.u.r.day, July 27, and was over almost before anyone knew it. Most of the troops were sleeping when an RPG and small-arms fire came in. The U.S. guards and mortarmen returned fire, but it was likely that the attackers had scurried off before their rockets even hit dirt. Hutto, Newsom, and Briley had each told Yllescas to expect something like this-an enemy probing exercise-and here it was. "They wanted to see exactly how you guys would react," Briley reminded Yllescas.

And to Briley, that reaction hadn't been pretty. It was the first time a lot of the guys from 6-4 Cav had ever been under fire, so they were excited, and everyone ran around frantically, Briley felt, not demonstrating the most coherent response. Blackfoot Troop had a long way to go, he thought, and not much time to do it in. And indeed, intelligence soon came in that another attack was scheduled for the following Sat.u.r.day.

Yllescas tried to put himself in the insurgents' shoes: in that first a.s.sault, they'd seen Blackfoot Troop holed up in the outpost, hiding, not pursuing the enemy. So next time, he decided, he'd surprise them by having his troops leave the compound. "We'll have two elements overwatching the outpost," Yllescas told his lieutenants. One patrol would be led by Lieutenant Kaine Meshkin and his men from Red Platoon, including some expert marksmen. The other patrol, made up of ANA soldiers, would be led by Briley, with Red Platoon's Staff Sergeant Juan Santos tagging along. The insurgents would have a rude awakening, Yllescas hoped.

His full name, on his birth certificate, was Kaine Meshkin Ghalam Tehrani, the latter three words being Farsi for "the black pen of Tehran." It was a surname that his grandfather had chosen back in Iran after the shah inst.i.tuted a census, though no one in the family truly understood what it meant. In America, they went by just the "Meshkin" part.

Born in Arlington, Texas, Meshkin had gone to high school in a small town in South Dakota. His father, who was in the Iranian Air Force before the shah fell, had come to the United States in a military exchange program and fallen in love with the country-and with the American woman whom he would eventually marry, in violation of Iranian military law. That act of love, combined with political statements he made about the brutality of the shah and the Iranian secret police, landed Meshkin senior in an Iranian prison for two years; once he was released, the couple fled back to the States.

Lieutenant Kaine Meshkin hadn't joined the Army because his father was a military man; he'd joined to honor his father's love of America.

Before dusk on Sat.u.r.day, August 2, 2008, Meshkin led Red Platoon to the Putting Green while Briley and the ANA went to the Northface. Across the valley, one of Meshkin's scouts, Staff Sergeant Ian Boone, spotted a three-man enemy RPG team approaching Camp Keating on the trail from Lower Kamdesh. The insurgents didn't seem to have any idea that the Americans were expecting them. Meshkin called the operations center, and Yllescas gave the order for the squad's designated marksman, Private First Cla.s.s Marco Maldonado, to shoot.

Maldonado peered through the scope and pulled the trigger. An insurgent fell to the ground. Briley, peering through an infrared sight, saw at least fifteen others walking at the top of the Switchbacks, and he, too, fired.

Immediately after those rounds, the entire mountainside opened up with muzzle flashes. In an eyeblink, the Americans realized that up to a hundred insurgents were in the mountains and the woods, ready to overrun the outpost. The Americans' patrols had indeed surprised the enemy-but that number meant that the surprise went both ways.

The camp was now more heavily fortified than it had been just a few weeks before, thanks to First Lieutenant Joseph Mazzocchi, the XO of Blackfoot Troop. The son of Joseph Salvatore Mazzocchi, a New York City cement mason who'd worked his way up to be the vice president of his union, NYC Local 780, and Arline Julia Mazzocchi, a high school teaching a.s.sistant, Joseph junior had been born in Queens, and for the first couple of decades of his life, his horizons never extended far beyond the Manhattan skyline. Until his senior year of high school, it never occurred to him to join the military. He didn't want to cut his hair or wear a uniform. He didn't want to be told what to do.

He'd been sitting in high school psychology cla.s.s when he learned about the attacks on September 11, 2001. No one was able to get through to his dad, who was working in Lower Manhattan. His mom was worried sick. Thankfully, Mazzocchi's father made it home that night, accompanied by about six of his fellow masons, all of them covered in dust and ash from the towers.

The grief was international, but for those actually in the areas attacked, it was tangible, a black cloak draped over the lives of residents of those towns and cities. Five of the 343 firefighters killed when the towers fell were from Mazzocchi's small town outside New York City. Mazzocchi didn't understand any of it: the death, the evil, the chasm between Americans and others in the world. His high school graduation was less than a year away, and his parents had offered to take out loans to pay for him to go to college, but Mazzocchi had worked throughout high school and bought himself a car when he was seventeen, so he declined his folks' offer, knowing he could earn his tuition money on his own. He also heard the drumbeat of war, and he found himself marching to it. An ROTC scholarship took him to the University of Scranton, where he majored in history and political science to try to understand the Why? Why? of 9/11. of 9/11.

At Fort Knox, Kentucky, in 2006, he met and befriended Meshkin and another young officer named Christopher Safulko. One winter's day, Mazzocchi and Safulko were in the back of a Humvee, shivering and waiting for the "go / no-go" in a training exercise, when they heard some chatter about a new unit that was being formed in Texas: 6-4 Cav. They called the personnel management office on their cell phones, then called Meshkin and told him to do the same. Within thirty-six hours, they all had their orders to report to Fort Hood. They wanted to go to war, and they wanted to fight together.

And then their orders came in. Safulko would be the XO of Apache Troop and was headed to Combat Outpost Lowell at Kamu. Meshkin and Mazzocchi were in Blackfoot Troop, bound for Combat Outpost Keating.

Mazzocchi was one of the first members of 6-4 Cav to arrive in Kamdesh. He landed at Observation Post Fritsche in late June and stayed there for a few days, then hiked down to Camp Keating. He enjoyed the breathtaking vistas but was stunned by how exposed the trail was: descending the mountain, he thought, was like taking a scenic tour of spots where it would be easy for an insurgent to kill several American soldiers and vanish again before anyone could react. From a distance, it looked as if the trails on the other two mountains were no better.

Few soldiers a.s.signed to a new combat outpost ever seem to feel that their predecessors have sufficiently secured their new home, and Mazzocchi, at Camp Keating, was no exception. The guard positions were on Humvees, which made sense to him since it allowed increased mobility and kept the insurgents from ever being sure of the guards' exact location. But the mesh HEs...o...b..rriers on the outpost's northern and eastern borders appeared to be in disarray. The southern and western borders, meanwhile, were protected by concertina wire-but not enough of it, Mazzocchi thought. When he returned to Forward Operating Base Bostick in early July, he ordered thousands of pounds of lumber, more HESCOs and concertina wire, and pickets for force protection at Camp Keating. He also began working on making Observation Post Fritsche more livable. Camp Keating was the Ritz-Carlton compared to OP Fritsche, which had no kitchen, no hot meals, no showers, and no phones or computers or any other means for soldiers to contact home. The troops of 1-91 Cav had rotated through Fritsche every month because the conditions were so harsh, but Mazzocchi knew that for Yllescas, that practice was unacceptable-OP Fritsche was so close to Upper Kamdesh that it was essential, the new commander believed, for troops to stay up there for longer than just a month at a time, in order to build more enduring relationships with local elders. So Mazzocchi ordered new kitchen supplies, freezers, Internet capability, extra generators, and showers for the observation post. Instead of rotating for one-month stints up at Fritsche, as the members of Bulldog Troop had done, the soldiers of Blackfoot Troop would man the high-ground post in three- to four-month shifts, and no longer would life up there be a short-term hardship to be endured.

Red Platoon, led by Meshkin, was simultaneously improving Camp Keating. Under the supervision of Sergeant First Cla.s.s William "Wild Bill" Loggins, the men reinforced all the guard positions, relocated some of the heavy weapons, sealed off the entire perimeter of the outpost with the exception of two entry-control points, and encircled the southern and eastern sides of the camp with two layers of triple-strand concertina wire. The added fortification seemed to do its job when the insurgents attacked on August 2, targeting the relatively vulnerable southwestern corner of the outpost, near the Switchbacks. The enemy fighters couldn't get through, and with the help of air support, the Americans ma.s.sacred them. And yet Mazzochhi was unnerved by the insurgents' sophistication. During the battle, Sergeant First Cla.s.s Dominic Curry had radioed that the enemy was bounding down the Switchbacks; that the insurgents were aware of this maneuver-the same one used by Ryan Fritsche's team at Saret Koleh-suggested a worrisome level of coordination and complexity.

After the battle, up at Observation Post Fritsche, Sergeant First Cla.s.s Donald "The Don" Couch led some of his White Platoon troops out to investigate the bodies of the insurgents killed by the Apaches. One of the dead had jammed a pear from a nearby tree into the gaping gunshot wound in his neck. The only explanation the men could come up with was that it had been a feeble attempt to stop the bleeding, an act so desperate that it would later haunt many of the American troops.

The true significance of the August 2 fight was revealed only afterward, when elders from the Kamdesh Village shura asked Yllescas for permission to recover the bodies of some of the fighters who had been killed so they could give them a Muslim burial. The request raised a red flag, especially since several members of Blackfoot Troop were convinced that during the fight, they'd seen a 14.5-millimeter round from a Soviet ant.i.tank rifle being fired from a house in Kamdesh Village. That, combined with the fact that Meshkin and his Red Platoon had spotted some insurgents walking on a path from Lower Kamdesh, persuaded the leadership of Blackfoot Troop that it was no longer just a matter of the locals' shielding foreign fighters-some of the insurgents were actually their neighbors or even their family members.

So Yllescas cancelled all payments to contractors.

Hutto had told his successor to push the elders, and now Yllescas did so-hard. A shura was convened at Combat Outpost Keating on August 20, 2008. The Kamdesh elders seemed eager to resolve matters as they arrived to meet with Yllescas and his fire-support and intel officers, Lieutenant Kyle Tucker and Specialist Rick Victorino,52 along with new ANA commander Jawed, along with new ANA commander Jawed,53 and the local chief of the Afghan National Police, Ibrahim. Afghan troops prepared food as dozens of elders sauntered into the outpost. After an opening prayer, Mawlawi Abdul Rahman spoke, addressing the issue at hand, the August 2 attack. and the local chief of the Afghan National Police, Ibrahim. Afghan troops prepared food as dozens of elders sauntered into the outpost. After an opening prayer, Mawlawi Abdul Rahman spoke, addressing the issue at hand, the August 2 attack.

Dena Yllescas and President George W. Bush. (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas) (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)

Rahman denied that the guilty parties were from Kamdesh Village; he claimed that the enemy forces in Barg-e-Matal had told insurgents to enter the village in order to target the Americans. "The insurgents come and go as they please," he said. "We cannot stop them. They have good suppliers of weapons and money, and no one stops them."

After an all-too-familiar and all-too-time-consuming back-and-forth between the Americans and the Kamdeshis, the session broke for afternoon prayer. Afterward, Rahman, Ibrahim, Yllescas, and Commander Jawed all went in to the ANA commander's office for a private talk. Yes, Rahman finally admitted to Yllescas: the insurgents who'd attacked Camp Keating, some of them were were from Kamdesh. from Kamdesh.

Lower Kamdesh, he made sure to specify; Rahman himself was from Upper Kamdesh. Kamdesh, he made sure to specify; Rahman himself was from Upper Kamdesh. Younger Younger guys, he further noted, adding that the shura was truly trying to get them to cooperate with the Afghan government and the Afghan security forces-the police and the military. guys, he further noted, adding that the shura was truly trying to get them to cooperate with the Afghan government and the Afghan security forces-the police and the military.

After Rahman left, Yllescas and other officers remarked on his candor. Yllescas's strategies of withholding contracting funds and then challenging the shura had worked. Even the more radical members of the shura were loath to lose American dollars, and Rahman had realized that he needed to show this new guy, Captain Yllescas, that he understood his responsibilities. In this instance, money had talked-and so had Rahman.

There was nothing funny about the war to Rick Victorino, but sometimes the way it was being fought seemed a bit comical-if darkly so.

Stretched thin and facing a shortage of new soldiers, the U.S. Army had begun lowering its standards for new recruits a few years earlier. Since 2005, the Army had been accepting high school dropouts and people who scored on the lower end of its mental qualification tests. In 2007, the Army bra.s.s lowered the bar once again, admitting recruits with criminal records and handing out "moral character" waivers more freely. For Victorino, it wasn't especially difficult to figure out which troops had slipped in under the new rules; there was one guy in 6-4 Cav who everyone was convinced was autistic.

Below par seemed par for the course around here. Eighty Afghan National Police officers were paid for standing their post, but Victorino estimated that there were only really about twenty local policemen who actually showed up for work.

Even more of a problem for Victorino, in his job as an intelligence a.n.a.lyst, was that the Army seemed clueless when it came to inst.i.tutional knowledge. There was no real information at Combat Outpost Keating about the surrounding area, no historical data about the people or any record of the two previous companies' experiences during their deployments. It took Victorino a few months to realize, for example, that there was more than one "Mandigal," because several towns cloistered nearby had that word as part of their names: Mandigal Bande, Mandigal Sofia, Mandigal Koleh, Mandigal Olya. The intel a.n.a.lyst had to figure this out on his own; there was no way to quickly and reliably reach out to any of his predecessors from 1-91 Cav or 3-71 Cav to seek advice.

And then there were the helicopters.

Pilots were increasingly reluctant to fly into Nuristan or Kunar Provinces, as well as other dangerous parts of Afghanistan, so ISAF had taken to hiring private contractors to carry out resupply runs. The pilots were a motley crew, some of whom-the Eastern Europeans in particular-appeared to be drunk more often than not. These private helicopters, nicknamed Jingle Air, carried no pa.s.sengers, only cargo, but either way, the sight of the choppers plunking down onto Camp Keating's landing zone, and the pilots, seemingly tanked, rushing out to urinate in the Landay-Sin River, underscored quite a bit that was off about this war-most notably, the thrift, the bizarreness, and the Halfway-Down-the-Trail-to-h.e.l.l quality of their location.

At the end of August 2008, one of these contractor's helicopters was. .h.i.t by enemy fire in the Korangal, causing the aircraft to crash on a landing pad. Two of the crew members were rescued, while a third burned to death inside the bird. It was a complete disaster-and utterly predictable. Victorino didn't laugh about it, but his rotation in Kamdesh certainly gave him a better understanding of why so many dramas about war, such as Catch-22 Catch-22 and and M*A*S*H, M*A*S*H,-shared the same warped sense of humor.

Even before he got to Camp Keating, Marine Lieutenant Briley had heard reports of complaints from ANA soldiers that something fishy was going on with their salaries. Once at the outpost, he found that his trainees were at their wits' end because they hadn't been paid in months. Many refused to patrol until the money was in their hands.

ANA commanders had discretion over how funds were allocated, and Commander Jawed offered nearly every excuse in the book as to why he didn't have enough money to pay his troops. At one point, he insisted that the soldiers had eaten too much food the month before and that their salaries therefore needed to be directed toward the relevant contractors. Another time he swore that he hadn't received enough funds himself. After a couple of incidents like this, Briley brought the problem up with his boss at Forward Operating Base Bostick, Marine Lieutenant Colonel Ty Edwards. On the night the next bag of ANA pay was to be flown to Combat Outpost Keating, Edwards made sure to count the cash personally before it was loaded onto the bird. When the helicopter arrived at Combat Outpost Keating, Briley watched Commander Jawed sprint to the landing zone to grab the bag; he claimed that if he didn't, his troops would pilfer the bills. Surprise, surprise: the next morning, Jawed announced that they'd been shortchanged again.