The Outpost An Untold Story Of American Valor Part 23

Briley decided to take action. He called a meeting of the ANA troops and told them that their commander had asked him to teach them all how to do basic accounting, in the name of transparency and education. From now on, he said, their salaries would go through this new system. The first part was a lie, of course; Jawed had asked him to do no such thing, but Briley, while hoping to solve this problem, didn't want the Afghan commander to lose face with his men. The truth was, he was stuck with Jawed, for better or for worse, and he needed to put on a show of solidarity. He also figured the concept of "skimming" was so ingrained in Afghan culture that there was nothing he could do to change it. Suggesting that Jawed had taken the initiative empowered him, in a way, and rea.s.sured the ANA troops.

Yllescas squabbled with Commander Jawed fairly regularly about an entrance the ANA commander had created at the eastern side of Combat Outpost Keating to allow people to come and see him more easily. That his visitors were mostly contractors or their representatives only reinforced Yllescas's suspicion that Jawed was stealing, taking money off the top, however adamantly he denied it when confronted about it. In any case, the extra entrance made the outpost less secure; Mazzocchi and Briley often felt compelled to check on it to make sure it was closed.

Despite the challenges he faced, Yllescas was pleased about the impact he and Blackfoot Troop seemed to be making on the locals. And more was in store: there was talk of creating a local radio station to combat the insurgents' propaganda. "When I first took command people told me that there will be a 'burden of command' but I can honestly say I have yet to experience the burden and to the contrary it has been exciting," Yllescas wrote in an email to his family and friends.

By at least one measure, the counterinsurgency program started by Hutto and 1-91 Cav and continued by Yllescas and 6-4 Cav was working. In the surrounding area of operations, between September 2006 and September 2007, more than thirty U.S. troops and Afghan security forces-police and army-h-ad been killed. Between September 2007 and September 2008, the number was down to three.

On guard duty one day at Observation Post Fritsche, Specialist Nathan Nash saw some wild dogs entering and exiting from a nearby bandah, one of the small huts used by mountain herders. Upon closer inspection, he discovered that a b.i.t.c.h had delivered and then abandoned a litter of puppies, which other wild dogs were now coming into the bandah to eat. Nash gave a dollar to a local Afghan boy to bring whatever puppies were left back to the outpost. There was only one, a furry little bag of bones that the men of 3rd Platoon named Doback, after a character in the Will Ferrell comedy Step Brothers. Step Brothers.

Christopher Safulko had been transferred from Camp Lowell to head Blue Platoon at Camp Keating, and he, for one, spent hours playing with Doback in the mud. The Buffalo, New York, native had been a delinquent youth; his guidance counselor had told his parents that despite his high scores on standardized tests, it was unlikely that young Chris would attend college. But then, on September 11, 2001, Safulko was changing for his high school physical education cla.s.s when the gym teacher came in to the locker room and told the students that planes had hit the World Trade Center. That night, Safulko's mom hugged him tight, weeping and saying over and over, "All of those people, all of those people." The attacks of 9/11 and subsequent photos of the n.o.ble 10th Mountain Division troops fighting during Operation Anaconda had called Safulko to duty.

But nothing had turned out to be so black and white in Afghanistan-except perhaps Doback. Safulko became quite attached to the pup. Maybe it was because Doback's intentions were pure, he mused. Or maybe it was because he was so loyal.

Doback and the rest of the dogs, however, were like so many other things the men cared for, things they loved and would have to sacrifice. One day, Meshkin was leading a patrol of Red Platoon soldiers to Observation Post Fritsche. Yllescas had come along to check up on the White Platoon troops, who were at OP Fritsche at the time. The usual contingent of canines from the outpost accompanied them, including the s.h.a.ggy brown one named Franklin-once the puppy that 1-91 Cav named after Pfeifer-who sometimes seemed just one moon cycle away from being a wolf. The platoon was halfway to Fritsche when something triggered the dogs to go after an old woman who was working in a small field. The dogs began barking at the woman and then surrounded her; she was clearly terrified. Yllescas fired his gun into the air to scare them off. His plan worked, and the dogs returned to the patrol.

The interpreter, though, had bad news for Yllescas: the old woman had been bitten by the "brown dog," he said.

Franklin.

Yllescas and Meshkin huddled. They agreed to shoot Franklin-right then, right there-so the woman and her family would know that they found what he'd done unacceptable. Meshkin went over to Franklin and pushed him down with one hand. Franklin submitted to him, collapsing and lying on his side as if he knew what was coming. Meshkin put the barrel of his rifle to the dog's head and fired.

"I didn't like doing that," he told Yllescas.

To show the locals that he was trying to set things right, Yllescas then pumped three more rounds into Franklin's body. Meshkin wasn't expecting it and was startled by it.

"G.o.ddammit, he's already dead!" Meshkin exclaimed.

Yllescas's sister-in-law was a veterinarian. "She would kill me if she found out about this," he confided to Meshkin. But she'd want him home in one piece, and if a dog was going to get between him and the locals, then the dog had to go.

CHAPTER 22

After He Finished Washing the Blood Off

Thank you for coming," Rob Yllescas told the members of the Kamdesh shura on October 13. "It makes me happy to come and speak about issues, to resolve them through words and not violence. It is an honor to be with such great men."

They were sitting outside, near the old Afghan National Police station, now used by the ANA company stationed at the outpost. It was a crisp and sunny day.

"Thank you for bringing peace to this area," Yllescas said. "There has not been a large attack against Camp Keating in over two months, and I am very proud of the shura for that. Now we need to expand the peace. We need to go to areas such as Kamu and protect the people."

Anayatullah spoke as well, urging that Kamdeshis obtain voter registration cards so they could have a voice in the presidential and parliamentary elections, scheduled for the following summer. "If we want the right political support, everyone has to partic.i.p.ate," the district administrator explained. "Every male eighteen and over has to register." The Nuristanis would get to choose five representatives to Parliament.

There were still many unresolved issues on the agenda-one elder from Paprok, for example, complained that the "security" imposed on his village by the Americans blocked food from getting through to residents-but Yllescas felt good about his progress so far and was looking to extend it. He persuaded the ANA and Afghan National Police commanders to start visiting Kamdesh Village at least once a week, with the goal of establishing a permanent Afghan security presence there, thus denying the enemy any safe haven.

Five days later, on October 18, Yllescas, Anayatullah, Jawed, and about fifty others walked up to Kamdesh. Various platoons were conducting overwatch, but the journey there and back was completed without incident, and the visit itself was a smashing success: Jawed and Anayatullah interacted with the Kamdeshis, more villagers pledged to try to resolve their conflicts through government mediation, and a number of residents expressed interest in acquiring voter ID cards for the upcoming election.

The enemy obviously didn't like any of this. Yllescas, back at Combat Outpost Keating, planned to return to Kamdesh Village the next week, on October 25. But on that day, twenty fighters were spread out in several positions along his path, ready to effect a linear ambush to kill him. In retrospect, it would come to seem that the insurgents might have been focused not just on ambushing Americans in general but on stopping-and killing-Rob Yllescas in particular.

The Americans were ready: Meshkin and a platoon had headed out early to set up an overwatch. They spotted some of the insurgents, fired, and got into a fierce battle. Meshkin called in 120-millimeter mortars, but the rounds were not enough to do the trick, as evidenced by the ongoing fire-from AK-47 a.s.sault rifles and a PKM machine gun-that pinned down the lieutenant and two others. Briley and his ANA patrol, on their way to Meshkin's position, were also pinned down, in their case by a large-caliber rifle, likely a powerful PTRD-a single-shot Soviet ant.i.tank gun. The Taliban were bringing in their deadliest weapons, ones they could use to fire extremely lethal shots from afar.

The Blackfoot Troop officers wanted to mortar the insurgents, but they couldn't figure out exactly where they were, so back at the operations center, Mazzocchi called in Apaches. The only air support available, however, was some "fixed-wing" aircraft-meaning planes, not choppers-and Yllescas, also at the operations center, didn't want to deal with what could be the long process of getting a bomb drop approved, in order to ensure that no civilians or infrastructure would be harmed. Even if everything happened as quickly as possible, the process would still take as long as fifteen minutes, a lifetime in a firefight.

In the meantime, the Americans had figured out that one of the enemy locations lay to the east, on the other side of a small, rocky spur that jutted off the mountain. Briley grabbed an MK19-a belt-fed machine gun that fired 40-millimeter grenade cartridges-and started shooting grenades up over the spur. Meshkin called in adjustments from his overwatch position.

"Move the barrel one inch down."... BOOM.

"Now one inch to the left."... BOOM.

The collaboration seemed to work: the screams of insurgents began to echo in the valley. But the PTRD ant.i.tank rifle continued to keep Meshkin and his troops from Red Platoon pinned down. "Grab some guys from Blue Platoon and push out," Yllescas told Safulko. "Go down the main supply route between Meshkin and the enemy. Draw them out."

Safulko led about a dozen troops down the road to Urmul. Under fire there, and tipped off by a villager that the enemy was hiding behind a pomegranate tree off in the distance, Safulko-looked at the map and called the grid in to Meshkin. Believing that the enemy targeting his own patrol was in the same spot, Meshkin called it in to the fire-support officer, Kyle Tucker, and his 120-millimeter mortars.

Yllescas told Mazzocchi to take two gun trucks to the district center: "Destroy that enemy position," he ordered. Mazzocchi led two Humvees outfitted with heavy guns into Urmul to do just that, and Briley and his ANA team followed with a four-foot-long, thirty-pound M240B fully automatic machine gun. Once in place, the gun trucks unleashed more than three hundred .50-caliber rounds and almost four hundred MK19 grenade rounds into the enemy positions.-Soon the fight concluded, and the enemy retreated.

"Allahu Akbar, you can kill us," one insurgent taunted on the enemy radio frequency. "We don't care!"

Many of the surviving fighters, it was later reported, returned to their homes in Kamdesh Village. When Yllescas told him about the incident, Markert figured, The Hundred-Man Shura has lost control. No one in Blackfoot Troop had even been wounded. The Americans had won the battle-killing five or more insurgents and wounding at least three others-but the enemy had won the strategic fight. The fighters had kept Yllescas and his men out of Kamdesh Village; that had been the point of their attack, and in that, they had succeeded. And they had far worse in store.

Up until July, troops had crossed the Landay-Sin River via a solid wooden bridge that linked Combat Outpost Keating to a piece of land in front of a farmer's house on the other side. But right after Hutto and 1-91 Cav left, the farmer suddenly tore it down. "He can no longer guarantee our safety on this bridge," Briley's interpreter told him after chatting with the man. The farmer had said that "people"-he didn't specify who-didn't like his allowing the American soldiers to use it.

A new bridge was then built on the quick, a wooden one made of one-by-four-inch beams laid one after the other, with about an inch of s.p.a.ce left between each beam. It was rickety and constructed without nails; pressure and weight kept everything in place. As soldiers crossed it, they could look down and see the river rushing by beneath their feet.

The bridge was a hazard. Troops were forced to cross it one at a time; it was a chokepoint where a soldier could easily be trapped. And even without insurgents' trying to pick off those crossing, merely walking on the bridge would cause it to rock and swing violently. A number of troops had seen a little girl drown in the Landay-Sin River after she slipped off the unstable span and was swept away by the rapids. If that could happen to an eighty-pound child, what might befall a two-hundred-pound man lugging another hundred pounds of gear?

The crossing became even more dangerous at the end of October, after someone removed the first six or so boards from the bridge, on the camp side. Meshkin and Red Platoon had to leap across the two-and-a-half-foot gap. This was more than an annoyance.

On October 28, Yllescas and Briley led a joint U.S./ANA patrol north of the outpost. Yllescas was wrapped in his scarf and carrying his own personal knapsack-cla.s.sic Yllescas, Briley thought, completely confident and reveling in his work. They walked to the bridge. The missing beams had been replaced, surprisingly, with one solid piece of wood, approximately five feet long. No one knew who had done the replacing.

I f.u.c.king hate this s.h.i.t, Briley said to himself. I can't see what's underneath the bridge now.

Kyle Tucker had come along on this patrol for a couple of reasons. First, he wanted to check on the micro-hydroelectric plant that was being set up for Kamdesh and several other nearby settlements; not unexpectedly, even though he had sent an interpreter that morning to alert the contractor that they would be coming to inspect the project, neither the contractor nor his workers were there. The second thing the fire-support officer hoped to be able to do was figure out his mortar targets. Because Blackfoot Troop, unlike Bulldog, hadn't had to deal much with attacks from the north, Tucker carried some of Kenny Johnson's old grids with him so he could conduct target practice. His mortarman, Sergeant Peter Gaitan, was standing by at Camp Keating. Tucker called in the grids, and Gaitan fired up the mortars, but the exercise didn't work all that well: the mortars kept missing their marks.

While Tucker was keeping busy with that, Yllescas and Briley saw a lone man acting suspiciously, walking by the riverbank and looking under rocks. "If we were in Iraq, I would shoot this guy just for cause," Yllescas said. "He's looking for a place to put an IED." But this was a different war, with a different set of rules. Plus, there weren't really many IEDs in this part of Afghanistan.54 At least not yet. At least not yet.

Separately, before daybreak, Safulko and some of the men from Blue Platoon had moved to an elevated position to the east of the outpost, from which they could watch the Afghan National Police checkpoints up the road. There was a lot of foot traffic that day, but only about five pickup trucks for the Afghan police to inspect. Small groups of villagers came down from the mountains to gather firewood, bring livestock to the market, or visit with friends and family nearby. The women of Nuristan did much of the manual labor, and a fair number of them carried large bundles of firewood on their backs. Some men were down by the river gathering rocks that they would use to build modest one- or two-story structures.

The Blackfoot troops watched everything intently; something unusual seemed to be afoot. In their chatter over the enemy radio frequency, the insurgents were being particularly cryptic, and the translations subsequently fed to the Americans were poor. At one point, a man walked in front of a woman down the Kamdesh trail, his arms folded. At one of the turning points, he ducked down behind a large rock; after a moment, he resurfaced. He looked suspicious, the soldiers agreed, but he had no weapon. Maybe he had just relieved himself. The couple continued down the trail all the way into Urmul.

A bit later, Safulko spotted two men traveling east on the road, coming toward Keating from the direction of Mandigal. As they approached the checkpoint run by the ANA in front of Camp Keating, they separated and began to walk several hundred feet apart. This struck Safulko as odd-it was as if they were trying to dissociate themselves from each other before they reached the checkpoint. Safulko called the operations center and told Mazzocchi what he'd seen. Mazzocchi radioed the gate and spoke with Staff Sergeant Kris Carroll. ANA troops stopped the two men, who claimed to be on their way to get voter ID cards from the district center down the road. Mazzocchi ran down to the gate to check out the pair himself, but by the time he got there, the ANA soldiers had already released them.

Shortly after noon, the Afghan police up the road called it a day. Around the same time, Yllescas, Briley, Tucker, Staff Sergeant Nicholas Bunch, Sergeant Al Palmieri, and about six ANA troops began walking back to camp. Safulko radioed them and confirmed that he had full observation of them as they prepared to cross the bridge.

Yllescas liked to tease Safulko about his time at Camp Lowell, where the lieutenant and his men had spent much of the summer undersupplied, hanging on by a thread, and getting mortared every day. The mortars had turned life nocturnal for the troops at Kamu: everything they did outside was done at night.

"Hey, Chris," Yllescas radioed back, "I bet you guys never did s.h.i.t like this at Lowell."

They crossed the bridge one at a time: Briley first, followed by his interpreter, then Bunch, who stood guard when he reached the other side. Then Tucker. As Yllescas crossed, Briley called out to him, "Do you want me to call down the over--"

The Marine didn't get to finish his sentence before a pulverizing explosion knocked him to the ground. When he opened his eyes, he saw Rob Yllescas falling from the sky.

Safulko turned to the bridge and saw a smoke plume billowing upward as the span crumbled into the river. Yllescas-easy to spot even from a distance, with his scarf and his short, stocky frame-was lying faceup on the helicopter landing zone. His legs looked as if they'd been shredded. "Contact!" Tucker yelled into his radio. "Six is down!"55 rang out over the command net. rang out over the command net.

Initially, they all thought Yllescas had taken an RPG or a mortar round-the explosion was so large, and his wounds seemingly so severe. But Safulko had never known the insurgents to be quite that accurate. It would be a while before everyone realized that Yllescas must have been hit by a radio-controlled IED. He'd been singled out and targeted.

Two groups of insurgents on the southern side of the outpost-on the Switchbacks-now opened up on Safulko's platoon with small-arms fire, AK-47s, and PKM machine guns. Some of the fire came from the large rock behind which, not long before, Blue Platoon troops had seen that Nuristani man duck.

Briley had a head injury, but he struggled to make his way over to Yllescas. He felt as if he were swimming; everything was blurry and slower than normal. It sounded as if enemy rounds were coming in, but he couldn't be sure. When he finally got to the captain, Briley gasped. No way was Yllescas alive. His hands were mangled. His legs were mutilated. His head had been smashed into his helmet. Briley tried to pull him away from the scene, but pieces of him began falling off, so he stopped. The Marine wondered why he was the only one there. It mystified him.

Disoriented, Briley couldn't physically function the way he wanted to; he found himself on his knees, trying to get to a safer place. He noticed another soldier nearby, behind a rock. "Come help me," Briley pleaded, "come help me." But the soldier wouldn't get out from behind the rock. No one would come out. They all thought the explosion had been an RPG, and their experience with RPGs was that they came in bunches. So everyone on the patrol had immediately taken cover. "Get out of there!" Tucker now yelled at Briley. One casualty was bad enough.

Briley, in emotional shock and experiencing a traumatic brain injury, was at once furious and confused. He couldn't believe what had happened to Yllescas, what they had done. Yllescas had dedicated himself to improving the lives of these people. The Marine turned to the southern mountains, aimed his two middle fingers as if they were weapons, and screamed at the top of his lungs. "f.u.c.k YOU!" he yelled to Kamdesh, to Nuristan, to Afghanistan. "f.u.c.k YOU!"

There was nowhere for Safulko's platoon to go; while the Putting Green was an excellent observation point, it left troops exposed with few options for escape. All they could really do was hunker down. The Afghan Security Guards who were with the Americans began running up the mountain into a cl.u.s.ter of trees. These local contractors tended to wait and see who they thought was likely to win before they took any action.

"Tell them to take cover and stay put," a nervous Safulko told the interpreter.

Safulko could see the muzzle flashes from the Switchbacks and farther east. Troops at Camp Keating began returning fire, and the enemy shooting ceased. The troops at the outpost held their fire to observe the enemy response, and insurgents to the east of the Switchbacks shot at Safulko's platoon. U.S. mortars shut them right up.

At the operations center, Mazzocchi ordered the mortarmen and troops on guard to suppress any enemy fire while a stretcher was taken out to pick up Yllescas. Meshkin radioed to Forward Operating Base Bostick and asked for a medevac, then told Safulko, "I need you guys to hold your position until the medevac clears out." A call came in to the ops center that a civilian had been spotted near the Switchbacks, a woman out gathering firewood who had unfortunately been caught in the crossfire.

"Continue firing," Meshkin said.

After hearing the explosion, Captain Steven Brewer, a physician's a.s.sistant who was the senior medical officer at Camp Keating, grabbed his gear and aid bag and headed for the landing zone, where he found soldiers standing, disorganized, around Yllescas. A small group carefully lifted the captain, put him on the stretcher Mazzocchi had sent out, and carried him into the camp. Brewer ran alongside the stretcher. Yllescas was unresponsive but making gurgling sounds. He would need an airway. His left eye was fixed and dilated. The troops laid him on the table in the aid station. "Doc" Brewer realized that his senior medic, Staff Sergeant George Shreffler, wasn't there-he was still out with Safulko's patrol. Brewer thought he heard someone tell him that the medevac was an hour and twenty minutes away. It was one of the many costs of being at a remote outpost.

But it was a cost Meshkin would not tolerate. He sent up an "urgent surgical medevac" request to the 6-4's squadron XO, Major Thomas Nelson, at Forward Operating Base Bostick. They couldn't wait for a Black Hawk from Jalalabad, Meshkin told Nelson, who agreed. But pulling a helicopter out of established protocol was no trivial matter. A Chinook and an Apache were just then refueling and about to leave the base to conduct resupply missions in Kunar. In order to commandeer them to try to save Yllescas's life, Nelson had to get permission from Lieutenant Colonel Markert, who held the birds for a minute while he requested permission to use them from Colonel Spiszer, who then phoned the aviation brigade commander for a final signoff. "Go to the aid station and grab Doc Cuda," Markert told Nelson, referring to Captain Amanda Cuda, a physician on base at Naray. "You have three minutes to be on that Chinook."

In the meantime, Brewer was trying to get an oral airway down Yllescas's throat to help with his breathing, but Yllescas gagged on it. That was a good sign, that he still had a gag reflex. The PA instead put in a nasal trumpet to make respiration easier. Yllescas's legs had sustained ma.s.sive injuries. The major bones of both lower legs had been shattered, and blood was spilling out of the wounds, so Brewer ordered the soldiers helping him to tie tourniquets above each knee and then make splints to try to stabilize the captain's legs. His arms were relatively uninjured, except for his left thumb, the skin on which had been pulled back like a banana peel. Brewer inserted the lines for two large IV's containing Hextend-an electrolyte solution that a.s.sists in restoring blood volume-into the veins on Yllescas's inner elbows. His airway was obviously still a problem, so Brewer put a mask on the captain's face and started pumping oxygen into his lungs.

Brewer worked for roughly half an hour on Yllescas-stabilizing him, trying to help his breathing and stop his bleeding-before the Chinook carrying Nelson and Doc Cuda arrived. Yllescas was stable by that point, but not by much. At no time did he ever respond to any of Brewer's questions or acknowledge any pain. Landing while the firefight was still sputtering, the Chinook set down so hard that it bounced six feet before stopping on the landing zone. The waiting stretcher crew rushed forward with Yllescas and placed him in the aircraft, where Cuda and Staff Sergeant Dave Joslin, a medic, began working once again to stabilize him as the Chinook took off and flew back toward Forward Operating Base Bostick.

He was in bad shape. Cuda was trained not to think about patients' not surviving-there was no time for anything but effort-but it was clear that at a minimum, Yllescas would certainly lose his legs, which were a mess of muscle, flesh, blood, and bone. Best-case scenario.

Back at Keating, at the LZ, Brewer turned to Briley, who had a head injury and was clearly psychologically traumatized. Brewer escorted him to the aid station and injected him with 10 milligrams of diazepam, better known as Valium. The PA gave the order to evacuate Briley on the next bird.56 Villagers came to the entry control point carrying a stretcher on which lay someone completely covered by a blanket. Mazzocchi-now in charge of the outpost-was nervous about letting the stretcher inside the wire. He worried that it might be another IED. It wasn't. The wounded woman who'd been hit while collecting firewood had been brought to the outpost for medical attention. While Brewer worked to get her stabilized, Mazzocchi spoke to her husband, trying to make the quick transition from soldier to diplomat, as he'd learned from Yllescas. He extended his sincere apologies to the man, who was quite upset-largely, it seemed to Mazzocchi, because his wife was a source of revenue for him. Without her, he would have only three people to work his farm. Until he found another wife, he said, his harvest would be delayed. And it was harvest season.

Mazzocchi asked him how much money the woman's wounds might cost him.

Four hundred U.S. dollars, he said.

Mazzocchi gave him five hundred from Blackfoot Troop funds. The man seemed content with that. Brewer worked on his wife for about ninety minutes, after which she was medevacked out for higher-level care; when she returned to the area, she was missing one leg below the knee. After that day, whenever Mazzocchi was on patrol and saw him, the woman's husband was always friendly toward him. It disgusted Mazzocchi. He wondered if he could have saved Yllescas if he'd given a thousand dollars to the Kamdesh shura.

On one level, the man had merely been anxious about his subsistence and his family's survival-since in Nuristan, women are responsible for all agricultural work-but Mazzocchi would nonetheless come to see him as representing all men. Not just in Kamdesh, not just in Afghanistan. His concern for the wellbeing of his wife was entirely about her labor and productivity. He wanted the money because money equaled power and influence.

War, Mazzocchi came to think, was always about money and power and never about anything else. Everyone was out for himself. Mazzocchi would quote from Leviathan, Leviathan, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes's treatise arguing for a strong government to combat man's inherent evil, referring to the "general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." Without the constraints of government, human beings would do whatever they wanted, Mazzocchi believed; they were anarchical at their core and concerned only with their own benefit. That was what had motivated Al Qaeda, that was what motivated this Nuristani, and that was what motivated the United States to send thousands of soldiers like himself to this remote corner of the world. He'd joined the Army to find out why 9/11 had happened. He would come to feel that he'd learned why on that October day, when he handed over taxpayers' money to prevent yet another man from becoming an enemy who would try to kill Americans, while his friend and commander Rob Yllescas lay dying on a medevac. the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes's treatise arguing for a strong government to combat man's inherent evil, referring to the "general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." Without the constraints of government, human beings would do whatever they wanted, Mazzocchi believed; they were anarchical at their core and concerned only with their own benefit. That was what had motivated Al Qaeda, that was what motivated this Nuristani, and that was what motivated the United States to send thousands of soldiers like himself to this remote corner of the world. He'd joined the Army to find out why 9/11 had happened. He would come to feel that he'd learned why on that October day, when he handed over taxpayers' money to prevent yet another man from becoming an enemy who would try to kill Americans, while his friend and commander Rob Yllescas lay dying on a medevac.

Specialist Rick Victorino was posted at Camp Lowell that day, so another soldier from the intelligence element, "Red" Walker,57 took the lead in trying to figure out who'd been responsible for the remote-controlled IED attack on Captain Yllescas. took the lead in trying to figure out who'd been responsible for the remote-controlled IED attack on Captain Yllescas.

Walker went to talk to an Afghan Security Guard commander stationed by the front gate of the outpost, which was now locked down. "This happened within four hundred feet of the front gate of our camp," Walker said to him. "That's not good. You need to find out what's going on." The commander showed Walker a voter ID card that one of his guards had found by the rocks near the bridge. The photo on the card was of a man in his midtwenties who had some facial hair. Walker had never seen him before. He asked some of the Afghan Security Guards, but they didn't recognize him, either.

Around that time, three Afghan men walked by on the road. Walker stopped them and showed them the ID. "You seen this guy?" Walker asked. "No," they all said, and they walked away. But then one of them came back. "Can I see that picture again?" he asked. Walker showed him the card. "That guy is in the hotel right now," the Afghan said.

The "hotel" was a local inn/restaurant in Urmul, and Walker, along with the Afghan Security Guard commander, headed right for it. As soon as they walked in, they spotted the young Afghan whose picture was on the ID. Walker's eyes locked onto his for a moment, and then the young Afghan ran out a door. Before he could make it very far, though, the Afghan Security Guards caught him and then brought him back to the front gate at the base.

Staff Sergeant Carroll thought he recognized the man from earlier that day-maybe this was the guy who had been walking with another guy and then suddenly wasn't anymore, the one the ANA had cleared before Mazzocchi could talk to him? They sat him on a bench, and Walker, through an interpreter, began asking him questions.

"What's your name?"

"Amin Shir."

"Where are you from?"

"Paprok."

"What are you doing here?"

"I came to Kamdesh to get my voter ID card."

"Who do you know here?"

"n.o.body."

"How long have you been here?"

"Three days."

Walker knew that the insurgent group in the Paprok area, which attacked Camp Keating every now and then, was headed by the local Taliban leader named Abdul Rahman-the other, "bad" Abdul Rahman.

"Do you know Abdul Rahman?" Walker asked.

"No," the Afghan said, which Walker knew had to be a lie since everyone in Paprok knew him.

Walker now decided to try out the Expray explosive-detection spray,-a three-part, aerosol-based field test kit. He sprayed the contents of the first can onto Shir's hand, wiped it with a collection paper, and waited to see if the paper turned pink, which would indicate the presence of a specific cla.s.s of explosives that included TNT. Negative. The intel officer then sprayed the second can on the suspect's hand and wiped it with a new collection paper. If this one turned orange, it would mean that Shir had recently come in contact with dynamite or another, similar type of explosive.

Walker was in the middle of spraying the third can when the second paper lit up orange.

"Have you handled a weapon or any explosive within the last forty-eight hours?" Walker asked Shir.

"No," he said. "I've never touched a gun, I've never touched explosives. I don't know what you're talking about. I'm just a farmer."

The U.S. Rules of Engagement prevented the Americans at Combat Outpost Keating from detaining Amin Shir for longer than seventy-two hours. But the ANA had no such restrictions; its soldiers could hold him for as long as they needed to, and then, if and when they ascertained his guilt, they could give him back to Blackfoot Troop to transfer to the detention facility at Bagram. The ANA troops flex-cuffed Shir, searched and took pictures of him, and placed him in custody.

Walker ordered that Shir first be taken to the aid station, so that Doc Brewer could examine him and attest that he hadn't been physically abused or mistreated in any way. Brewer wasn't happy about that; he'd just finished washing Yllescas's blood off, and he didn't want to examine the insurgent responsible for mutilating him. But he did it anyway, verifying that Shir had no broken bones or even any bruises.

Walker next took Shir to the outdoor s.p.a.ce between the aid station and the operations center, where he questioned him again. Shir's story had changed: now he said he'd come to Urmul to buy more goats to take back home, because he was a farmer. A little later, he said he'd come to borrow some money to take back home to buy more goats.