The Outpost An Untold Story Of American Valor Part 24

Shir also added that he actually did know someone in the area by the name of Hamid,58 a laborer who worked at Camp Keating. Walker asked Sergeant First Cla.s.s Shawn Worrell, who was in charge of the day laborers, if he knew a Hamid. Worrell said yes, and he went off to find him. Walker then had Shir blindfolded and brought Hamid in to see him. "Do you know this man?" he asked him. a laborer who worked at Camp Keating. Walker asked Sergeant First Cla.s.s Shawn Worrell, who was in charge of the day laborers, if he knew a Hamid. Worrell said yes, and he went off to find him. Walker then had Shir blindfolded and brought Hamid in to see him. "Do you know this man?" he asked him.

"I've never seen him before in my life," Hamid said.

Walker handed Amin Shir over to the ANA soldiers, who put him in a cell while the intel specialist contacted his chain of command to commence the process of taking an Afghan detainee into an American holding facility. Then he went back to ask Worrell if he could talk to Hamid again. "Of course," Worrell said. But it turned out that Hamid was no longer at the outpost: he had vanished and was gone forever.

Walker eventually theorized that Shir had come to Urmul and linked up with Hamid three days before he set the explosive. At some point, Hamid described Yllescas to him. The day before the attack, Shir was seen loitering on the concrete bridge near the entrance to Camp Keating (not an uncommon practice for locals), where he confirmed Yllescas's ident.i.ty by his headscarf, body size, stature, and gait. That night, with the moon at low illumination, Shir crouched by the northern side of the landing zone and then walked around to the wooden bridge.

Based on the size of the area destroyed, and judging from the firsthand accounts of the soldiers who had witnessed the blast, the IED might have contained ten pounds of explosive material. Walker speculated that Shir might have been able to store an IED that small in his pocket, and that when he took it out by the northern side of the landing zone, his voter ID also fell out. It was dark enough that he didn't notice it.

This was all theory, circ.u.mstantially b.u.t.tressed by some eyewitness accounts, but Walker became entirely convinced that Amin Shir had targeted for a.s.sa.s.sination the man who'd become the greatest threat to the insurgents' influence in Kamdesh.

It was noon in Killeen, Texas, when Dena Yllescas's cell phone rang. She had just finished nursing their baby girl, Eva.

It was the rear detachment notification captain calling. "Your husband has been injured," he said.

For some reason, Dena didn't believe him. She thought he was joking. "Are you serious?" she asked.

"Yes, I'm serious."

He began giving Dena some phone numbers. She was numb, and her hand was shaking. "Rob was. .h.i.t by an IED," he told her. He was in critical condition at Bagram Air Force Base. She was stunned. She hadn't even known there were were IEDs in that part of Afghanistan. The captain began listing her husband's injuries, a litany that seemed never-ending and that caused Dena to deeply desire that he shut up: she didn't want to know. IEDs in that part of Afghanistan. The captain began listing her husband's injuries, a litany that seemed never-ending and that caused Dena to deeply desire that he shut up: she didn't want to know.

Within hours, Dena's home was overflowing with friends who had heard the news. Another friend had picked up Rob and Dena's daughter Julia from school and taken her to play with her own kids. Dena's sister-in-law Angie had meanwhile volunteered to fly to Texas from Nebraska to get Julia and Eva and bring them back to her home, where she would take care of them while Dena went to be with Rob, wherever that ended up being.

When Julia finally got home, Dena pulled her into her bedroom. "Daddy's been hurt," she told her. "But doctors are taking very good care of him. We need to say lots of prayers for him."

Lieutenant Colonel Markert called Dena a couple of times that day to give her updates and answer any questions she might have. At about 11:30 p.m. in Texas, he called again, and she asked him if she could speak with the doctor who was caring for her husband. "I'll have him call you as soon as he can," Markert said.

On the first night that Amin Shir was being held at Camp Keating, Mazzocchi went to talk to an angry Commander Jawed, who felt responsible for what had happened.

"I'm going to avenge Yllescas," Jawed bitterly declared, "by drowning Shir in the river."

Mazzocchi told him to calm down. "Shedding more blood won't accomplish anything," he said. "We should honor Yllescas by trying to pursue our goals in the valley just as he did."

Jawed remained upset, however, and he insisted on talking to Shir. Mazzocchi accompanied him to make sure he didn't do anything stupid. He was also curious to see what Jawed might get out of the man. Most U.S. Army soldiers-Mazzocchi included-were prohibited from directly questioning enemy prisoners of war.

After Jawed had finished yelling at the prisoner, Mazzocchi fed him questions to ask Shir: "Why did you do it? Was it because you wanted to defend the valley? Was it because you wanted to defend your family? Why?"

"I don't have any money," Amin Shir said. "They paid me a lot of money for one day's work. I just wanted to make some money."

"Who paid you?" Jawed asked him.

Shir paused.

"Bad people from the Mandigal shura," he said.

So Shir wasn't an insurgent mastermind-he was just a dumb kid trying to make a little cash in a land of scant opportunity. Hobbes had been proven right yet again.

Shortly after midnight, the surgeon called Dena Yllescas. "How much detail do you want?" he asked.

Everything, she told him. Her imagination had been getting the best of her.

Rob Yllescas had arrived at Bagram approximately four hours after the explosion, he said. He had already had his third surgery. His right leg had been amputated just below the knee, and his left leg had been taken off at the knee. He also had a fracture in his left femur, at the hip. More information came in the next day: Rob was in stable condition and would be flown that day to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and from there to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Markert called and told Dena that some of his colleagues had seen him and said he looked 100 percent better. When Dena explained to Julia that they'd be staying at Walter Reed for a while, the seven-year-old said, "That means daddy has an injury." Julia seemed to connect Walter Reed with Yllescas's friend Ryan, who had been injured in Iraq, spent time at Walter Reed, and had an arm and a leg amputated.

"Yes, Daddy has had an injury," Dena said.

"Did Daddy's legs get chopped off?" Julia asked.

"Yes, baby," Dena told her. "Daddy lost his legs, but he is still Daddy, and he loves you very, very much."

Tears welled up in Julia's eyes. "Is Daddy still going to be able to wrestle with me?" she asked.

"Yes, baby," Dena said, "he will be able to do all of the things he used to do with you. But it will take a while before he can do them again."

Julia thought for a second.

"But Mommy, Eva won't know Daddy," she said.

"You mean, she won't know him without his legs?" Dena asked.

"Yes, Mommy."

"Baby, Eva won't know any different, and Daddy will love you both just like he did before," Dena said. "You know how Ryan has a metal leg? Well, Daddy will have two metal legs."

Julia scrunched up her face. "Well, I'll be painting those legs peach," she declared.

The mood at the outpost was bleak. Feelings of rage, sorrow, loathing, xenophobia, inadequacy, depression-every possible emotion came over the men of Blackfoot Troop. Everyone knew that the best-case scenario was that Yllescas would lose both legs, and that the worst-case scenario was far more probable. Members of Task Force Paladin, formed to combat the growing threat of IEDs, flew in from Bagram. The newcomers transferred Amin Shir to Forward Operating Base Bostick and then to the detainee holding center at Bagram.59 The day after the attack on Yllescas, Mazzocchi and Meshkin demanded to meet with the Kamdesh shura; there were a lot of questions that the elders needed to answer, they thought. The elders said they were too scared to come to Camp Keating, but eventually a large group of locals met with the Americans at the Afghan National Police station in Urmul.

Meshkin and Mazzocchi took the lead: What was going on in Kamdesh? Who had organized the attack? Why hadn't the Americans been warned?

The elders said they were sorry the attack had occurred, but they insisted they had no information to share, and the more they were pressed, the quieter they got. To Mazzocchi, their response was telling-an admission of guilt. They clearly had had known that something was going to happen and hadn't done anything to stop it, but they also wanted to make sure they would keep receiving development funds. known that something was going to happen and hadn't done anything to stop it, but they also wanted to make sure they would keep receiving development funds.

"Captain Yllescas had been calling for you to meet with us for weeks," Tucker said. "It's comical to me that you have agreed to come down here only now that something bad has happened. As of now, all projects are on hold. We give you all this money and get nothing in return. We know you have the ability to stop the violence, the madness, the chaos. But you don't care! And if you you don't care, it makes it hard for don't care, it makes it hard for us us to care." to care."

One of the elders from the Mandigal shura, an ancient man with a thick white beard, had been staring right into Tucker's eyes as he spoke. Tucker could feel his piercing glare; the old man was looking at him with an expression that seemed to him to be saying, Look at this stupid f.u.c.king kid yelling at us. The twenty-four-year-old lieutenant could only imagine the war and poverty that had marked this man's life, only guess how little he must care about being barked at by some young pup in yet another occupier's foreign tongue.

"We're here for only a short time," Tucker said. "Then we're going to return to America, where we have happy lives-where our roads are paved, our children go to school, and our police protect us. You, however, will continue to struggle with violence, as will your children and their children. If you want to make a difference, let us know. We're here to help."

The Americans left Urmul and returned to the outpost.

At 7:30 in the morning at Camp Blessing, in Kunar Province, Captain Dan Pecha was summoned to the operations center to answer a call from Major Keith Rautter, the brigade chief of operations back in Jalalabad.

"You've got two hours to pack up all your gear," Rautter told him. "The chopper's on the way."

The thirty-three-year-old Pecha, an a.s.sistant operations officer with the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry, had been waiting for his opportunity to command a company, likely somewhere in Kunar Province. His wait was over, but he wouldn't be in Kunar. Before lunchtime, Pecha was at Forward Operating Base Bostick, meeting with Markert to talk about his new job: he was moving to 6-4 Cav to command Blackfoot Troop at Combat Outpost Keating.

Pecha would come to think of himself as the polar opposite of the charismatic Yllescas-more low-key and unemotional than his predecessor, more calculated and deliberate. The men of Blackfoot seemed timid around him at first; the troops had been together for almost two years by that point, and they had become close. Pecha had never met Yllescas, but he immediately gathered that he'd been a dynamic leader, and instrumental in bonding together the tight-knit Blackfoot Troop lieutenants. It wouldn't be easy to replace this beloved wounded warrior, but Pecha was confident that his own relationships with Meshkin, Mazzocchi, Safulko, Tucker, and the rest of Blackfoot Troop would develop.

Bonding between the Americans and the locals would be another matter entirely, Pecha knew. Developing such ties required patience and prolonged exchange; when the leader of the effort kept departing, whether through transfer or casualty, the clock was inevitably wound backward. In just two years, the locals in the Kamdesh Valley had gone through seven designated American leaders: Swain, Brooks, and Gooding with 3-71 Cav; Bostick and Hutto with 1-91 Cav; Yllescas and now Pecha himself with 6-4 Cav. And this most recent departure was unprecedented: an attempted a.s.sa.s.sination of the commander of the outpost. His lieutenants found it incredible that none of the elders knew anything about the plot to kill Yllescas. Someone had housed the culprit, they pointed out; someone had fed him; he must have prayed at a local mosque. Even to Pecha, new on the scene, the apologies that the local powerbrokers were offering sounded insincere.

As surely as the enemy fighters had targeted Yllescas, they now tried to take advantage of his absence. There was an uptick in direct- and indirect-fire attacks, with much larger a.s.saults often coming on Sat.u.r.days. (Friday was the Muslim Sabbath, and because the "holy warriors," as they thought of themselves, believed that their cause was in accordance with their faith, they would frequently launch attacks the following morning.) To counteract any insurgent momentum, the Americans significantly stepped up their patrolling. Mazzocchi had ordered that the bridge be rebuilt-troops needed to be able to get to the Northface somehow-but the process further darkened the mood at the outpost. Most of the soldiers were now convinced that at least some of their "allies" in the construction project were gathering information and pa.s.sing it on to the enemy. Whatever mistrust the U.S. soldiers already had of the Afghan National Army and the Afghan National Police was magnified. Reports came in of ANA troops' selling the bullets out of their own guns to the enemy. Day laborers were observed standing behind U.S. fighting positions within Camp Keating and looking up at the mountains, as if they were doing a "reverse sector sketch"-memorizing what the Americans could see from such locations. American troops began following the day laborers around the outpost. One man was caught with a soldier's notebook; it was confiscated, and he was sent away.

At Forward Operating Base Bostick, Markert began wondering if any American in Nuristan or Kunar could ever truly have the support of the locals. And whether it was promised to Hutto, Kolenda, or Yllescas, how much did pledged "support" from elders matter anyway if they were unable to prevent their young men from attacking U.S. troops and bases? To Markert, it seemed that Kolenda's much-touted Hundred-Man Shura was worthless. But at this point, did the shura even have any meaning? Was its backing important? He asked himself, Can it get us enough enough peace? Even if we have people who are behind us in any of the areas north of Naray, they don't have the ma.s.s to be-and the United States can't generate the security needed to peace? Even if we have people who are behind us in any of the areas north of Naray, they don't have the ma.s.s to be-and the United States can't generate the security needed to make make them-the voice of authority. Markert knew there were some good people in this part of the world, people who would love for it to be a peaceful place. He also knew they weren't the ones with the machine guns and the RPGs. them-the voice of authority. Markert knew there were some good people in this part of the world, people who would love for it to be a peaceful place. He also knew they weren't the ones with the machine guns and the RPGs.

With the insurgency seemingly gaining strength, the members of the Hundred-Man Shura appeared to be losing interest in talking to the Americans. To some ISAF troops, such a disengagement seemed inevitable. Camp Keating had been attacked a few times with the evident complicity of the local villagers, and Camp Lowell at Kamu had been under fire since 6-4 Cav first arrived in country. Not only Markert but also Mazzocchi believed that Kolenda and Hutto might have been pushing for too much, too soon.60 They suspected that however loudly the 1-91 Cav officers may have tooted their own bugle about their counterinsurgency accomplishments, their fifteen months' worth of effort wasn't about to undo decades', if not centuries', worth of habits and traditions of self-preservation. They suspected that however loudly the 1-91 Cav officers may have tooted their own bugle about their counterinsurgency accomplishments, their fifteen months' worth of effort wasn't about to undo decades', if not centuries', worth of habits and traditions of self-preservation.

Robert Yllescas's face was so swollen that when his wife, Dena, walked through the door of his hospital room at Landstuhl on November 1, she barely recognized him. He was wearing a neck brace, was hooked up to a ventilator, and had a tracheostomy tube inserted in his neck. She lifted his sheet: his abdomen was so bruised that it was almost black, and so swollen that he looked nine months pregnant. Since the explosion, he had not regained consciousness.

Dena clutched his hand, intertwining their fingers while she, her mother, and her mother-in-law all talked to him and told him stories-about Julia and Eva, about all the friends and family members who were thinking of him and praying for him. Soon the grandmothers left to buy him some clothes. Dena read her husband the letters Julia had written to him. She kissed his hand and told him how much she loved him. She wished she could have a snapshot of the future; she wanted to know where they would be a year from that moment, because right then, everything seemed so hopeless.

And Dena wept.

Nine days later, President George W. Bush gave her a big hug.

"I'm so sorry," the president said. He had tears in his eyes.

They were standing in Rob Yllescas's hospital room at Bethesda Naval Hospital, wearing hospital gowns and surgical masks. Yllescas remained in bad shape, unconscious, with his jaw wired shut and his legs amputated.

It was November 10, 2008. Yllescas was one of 2,561 U.S. service members who'd been wounded in action in Afghanistan since the war started in October 2001; 621 more had been killed there. In Iraq, 30,764 U.S. troops had been wounded in action, and 4,180 killed.

Less than a week before the president paid this bedside visit, Rob and Dena Yllescas had flown to the United States from Germany on the very day that the nation was electing as its next commander in chief a young, inexperienced freshman senator from Illinois, a liberal Democrat named Barack Obama. Public weariness with President Bush's two wars was one of the reasons for Obama's victory over the decorated Vietnam veteran John McCain, a conservative Republican senator from Arizona. Obama seemed less bellicose than McCain. He'd talked about ending the war in Iraq and focusing instead on winning the one in Afghanistan.

President Bush awarded Yllescas the Purple Heart, the medal given to troops wounded in action. Dena tried desperately to wake her husband up. She felt sick, she wanted so badly for him to be awake.

President Bush kept hugging her. "Rob will wake up, and when he does, I will meet him in person again," he said as he held her.

She and the president left the room and removed their gowns and masks. The president signed a 1st Infantry baseball cap of Yllescas's and told Dena about Staff Sergeant Christian Bagge, whose convoy had been hit by IEDs in Iraq. Bush had met Bagge at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas. From the hospital bed where he lay with no legs, Bagge had told the president, a famous jogger, "I want to run with you." In June 2006, Bagge and Bush had done just that together, on the South Lawn of the White House.

"When Rob's ready and able, maybe you can go wakeboarding with us," Dena said, referring to the water sport that's a combination of s...o...b..arding, waterskiing, and surfing.

The president laughed. "I'm too old to wakeboard," he said.

Eva Yllescas, Memorial Day 2009. (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas) (Photo courtesy of Dena Yllescas)

CHAPTER 23

What Was Wrong with Kaine Meshkin

By November 2008, the enemy fighters had evidently decided it was no longer enough merely to attack Camp Keating; now they were going to try to overrun it.

The information came in to Blackfoot Troop piece by piece, through intercepted radio transmissions, tips that locals shared with Rick Victorino, and simple observation: tripwires outside the outpost were cut, insurgent chatter suddenly went silent. Blackfoot Troop's leaders a.s.sumed, based on recent history, that the attack would come on a Sat.u.r.day.

On Friday, November 21, Captain Pecha huddled with Safulko, Victorino, Tucker, and Mazzocchi. Meshkin was on leave. There were two easy ways for insurgents to enter the outpost: through the main entrance and through the ANA's side entrance, adjacent to the road on the east-southeast corner. They had to think like the enemy: which route would the insurgents prefer, and why? After running through a series of scenarios, the men concocted a plan.

Well before dawn on Sat.u.r.day, Mazzocchi and a patrol snuck up the slope of the northern mountain. Once they were on the Northface, the lieutenant divided his team into two parts, each containing six U.S. troops and two ANA soldiers. He led one group while First Sergeant Howard Johnson took charge of the other. Meanwhile, Pecha, Safulko, and Blue Platoon prepared to patrol the southern wall. That had been Pecha's idea; he'd been at Camp Keating for only a few weeks, but from his conversations with the lieutenants, he'd gathered that the unit had historically stayed away from the southern wall on Sat.u.r.days due to the increased likelihood of an attack there. His intent was to have Mazzocchi's troops provide overwatch while he and his team took the fight to the enemy on the other side.

Mazzocchi and Safulko both thought Pecha's plan was a particularly bad one. He and his platoon would be walking uphill and directly into a potentially intense firefight with a larger force. They respected Dan Pecha as a leader, and they knew he wasn't afraid of much, but he was also, now, a symbol in that valley. They had to protect that symbol. The last thing Blackfoot Troop needed was another commander carried off the field of battle, never to return.

First light came. Up at Observation Post Fritsche, White Platoon's Don Couch called in to the operations center to alert command that he'd heard automatic-weapons fire in the distance. That didn't necessarily mean anything; it could be a domestic dispute, a new salvo in the KomKushtozi war, or even just an accidental discharge-such was the Afghanistan soundtrack. Then one of the guards near the southern wall at Camp Keating reported that he'd seen movement up in the Switchbacks. He wasn't sure, but he thought he'd spotted someone peeking out from behind a rock.

Mazzocchi, on the northern mountain, saw a trip flare go off across the way. Tripwires had been set up on the southern mountain, and someone-almost certainly an insurgent, Mazzocchi felt in his gut, and not one of the monkeys or other wild animals that roamed the area-had disturbed the wire, igniting a smoking flare. Mazzocchi had Tucker tell the mortarmen at Camp Keating and Observation Post Fritsche to prepare to fire.

Then a second trip flare went off. The enemy was coming down the southern mountain from the direction of Kamdesh Village.

Safulko ran to the dining hall to grab some water, after which he intended to make a beeline for the barracks to pick up his patrol. He quickly s.n.a.t.c.hed a couple of bottles out of the refrigerator, stashed them in his backpack, and was just opening the door when-at precisely 6:30 a.m.-the enemy opened up on the outpost with small arms, PKM machine guns, and a volley of RPGs. When the fire hit, the ANA soldiers who'd been milling about on the U.S. side of the base scattered, firing back sporadically in multiple directions before stumbling into the waist- and knee-deep trench systems that wound around the buildings. One RPG went through the wall above the dining-hall door, through the refrigerator, and out the other wall, its shrapnel spraying both cooks, Sergeant Jason Judice and Specialist Jason Pace. Another RPG then exploded through the roof of the operations center, knocking out the generator and landing in Mazzocchi's works.p.a.ce, polluting the air with its acrid copper smell. All forms of communication were temporarily lost.

The enemy clearly knew the outpost.

Insurgents began peppering a Humvee on which sat a .50-caliber machine gun and an LRAS surveillance device. One round went through the lens of the LRAS and out the other side of the scope, disabling the machine. A soldier carrying both ammunition and an M203 grenade launcher ran to the Humvee; an enemy round knocked the M203 right off his rifle. It was a direct hit from an expert marksman.

Mazzocchi's men returned fire from the northern mountain while he and Staff Sergeant Matthew Crane called in for close air support as well as for 120-millimeter mortars from both Camp Keating and Observation Post Fritsche. Pecha used a backup radio to call Mazzocchi. "You and Crane will be in charge of all indirect fire and air support," he told him. "Our generator's out."

Bullets showered down on Mazzocchi and his men, forcing them to take cover, while Johnson and his troops were pummeled by RPGs. The enemy knew the precise locations of both Mazzocchi's and First Sergeant Johnson's patrols. Mazzocchi saw a group of insurgents, around half a dozen men, on the road. They looked as if they were on their way to the eastern side of the outpost, probably to try to breach the wire near the ANA compound; crossing would be much easier there than elsewhere because in places the wire was jammed down into the dirt, from ANA soldiers' regularly hopping over it to take a shortcut into and out of camp. Mazzocchi and his troops fired on the insurgents while Crane redirected the mortar fire, shifting the target from the southern mountain to the enemy on the road. The insurgents heading for the wire retreated.

By then, close air support had arrived, and now the Apaches began hitting the enemy in the mountains with h.e.l.lfire missiles, ending the a.s.sault. They next provided cover for the U.S. troops as they moved down the northern mountain. On one of their pa.s.ses, the pilots were at about eye level with the men from 6-4 Cav, and Victorino held up his hands in a University of Texas Hook-'em-Horns gesture as thanks.

The cooks insisted that they were okay and, after some quick treatment for their shrapnel wounds, could stay at Combat Outpost Keating. They even made dinner for the troops that night.

After Mazzocchi returned to the outpost, he surveyed the camp and was surprised to see how hard it had been hit, though he knew the damage could have been much worse if the enemy had managed to breach the wire. "They had us suppressed pretty heavily," Safulko explained to him. "They were spot on." Mazzocchi's seeing the team of insurgents on the road at the eastern side of the outpost had been key to the successful defense. "There's no way we would have been able to detect them if you hadn't been there," Safulko acknowledged. The troops of 6-4 Cav had for the most part made it through in good shape, but that belied how close they had come to catastrophe during this attack.

Two days later, the enemy tried again, firing at the outpost from five surrounding positions. That the insurgents were attacking on a Monday and not a Sat.u.r.day, and two or three hours into the day instead of at dawn, indicated that they understood the importance of switching up their tactics. Caught off guard, the officers of Blackfoot Troop did not have anyone outside the outpost on patrol. A 107-millimeter rocket crashed into the camp, followed by small-arms fire as a platoon of enemy fighters came from the high ground to the southeast, pinning down the ANA soldiers at their guard posts and in their barracks. Insurgents fired at a U.S. Humvee equipped with an MK19 grenade launcher, but they kept overshooting, spraying the tree behind the truck and causing its leaves to flutter to the ground.

Mazzocchi and Safulko had left the operations center and were standing around the corner from the Humvee. At this point, they expected the insurgents to breach the wire. Safulko called in to Sergeant First Cla.s.s Curry: "The ANA are pinned down," he told him. Curry led a ready-to-go 240 machine-gun team to a corridor near the ANA's end of the outpost, to prepare for an enemy takeover of the eastern side. If the wire got breached, they would contain the insurgents there.

That turned out not to be necessary. Sergeant Nathan Wagner-a normally quiet kid from the Midwest-ran out of the operations center seeming possessed, armed with an AT4 shoulder-launched rocket. He fired it right at the enemy fighters in the southeast corner of the camp, and they retreated. But in the end, what allowed Blackfoot Troop to keep all of the insurgents at bay-and probably saved the day-was the sheer volume of rounds fired by air support, including two five-hundred-pound bombs dropped by an A-10 Warthog on an enemy position on the Northface, as well as two 30-millimeter gun runs on the same spot.

It was obvious to all, however, that the insurgents had made it their priority to overrun the outpost, and twice now they had come close to succeeding. Once they were inside the wire, there was no telling what damage they could do.

Dena Yllescas put the laptop computer by her husband's hospital bed. She'd downloaded songs from their wedding and others that had meaning for them both: "The Keeper of the Stars" by Tracy Byrd, the Rascal Flatts version of "Bless the Broken Road," "You Save Me" by Kenny Chesney. A slide show of photographs of their two little girls appeared on the screen, each image fading in and then fading out again to make way for the next.

"It's amazing how you can speak right to my heart," sang Keith Whitley.

Without saying a word, you can light up the dark Try as I may I could never explain What I hear when you don't say a thing.

Dena saw tears in Rob's eyes. She wasn't sure if they were because of the music, the pictures, or the pain-or all three. He wasn't able to speak. She cried, too, mourning the loss of the past, terrified of the future.

It had been a good day, as good days went in her new world. The nurse had told her that if she asked Rob to grip her hand, it might just provoke a reflex action. Or, the nurse suggested, she could try to get him to make a thumbs-up sign. Dena asked him to do that, and she could see him trying, stiffening his arm in an effort to lift it. At another point, when the doctor was there, she told Rob to blink once if he was in pain and twice if he wasn't. He blinked once. The doctor said he was positive that Rob was responding directly to her command.