The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (4 page)

Your dedication as a faithful father and pastor taught me to extend my definition of family to my men. I assure you that my men are the answers to the questions you so often ask. I have felt called to this job and blessed by the challenges. I am continually rewarded when I see eighteen-year-old boys bear up under pressure and carry themselves with the newfound pride of men. They fully understand that they are the face of America in the world.

For the men in my command, I have worked very hard to make that your face. Because it is the one that has always represented respect, integrity and love for me. Thank you for all you have given me. I am confident that it will see me through this next challenge as faithfully as all those in the past.

With love and continued admiration,

Ben

Ben Keating was destined for greatness, of this he was sure. After finishing ROTC at the University of New Hampshire, where he was president of the Young Republicans, he had joined the military because he expected someday to be a U.S. senator from Maine, charged with voting on whether or not to send American troops into harm’s way, and he didn’t think it would be right to ask those future troops to fight if he had never done so himself.

Assigned to something of a ragtag platoon at the Army post at Fort Drum, New York, home of the 10th Mountain Division, Lieutenant Keating had thrown himself into his job, putting overweight soldiers on diets, counseling service members who were having marital problems, and mediating disputes with landlords for those of his troops who didn’t live on base. He loved leading his men, and he wasn’t particularly happy about being taken away from them when he was promoted to be the executive officer, or “XO,” of Able Troop, responsible for administration, logistics, and millions of dollars’ worth of equipment. Platoons consist of anywhere from sixteen to forty soldiers, and Keating missed his joes; he preferred mentoring them to serving in what was often an administrative job, even if the paper-pushing was done on the front lines.

As 3-71 Cav’s resident warrior-poet, Ben Keating seized any opportunity he could to lecture, and he spent part of the convoy’s northward journey teaching the troops about the history of this land they were in and the foreign forces that had invaded it over the centuries. He’d brought along a number of books to Afghanistan that he’d read for college history classes. He was thrilled to be in the country where Alexander the Great had taken an arrow to the leg and almost died, but he was concerned, too, by the stories of how challenging this place had been for both Alexander and Genghis Khan—to say nothing of the USSR, which had withdrawn ignominiously in 1989 after nearly a decade of bloody battle with fierce Afghan warriors, having suffered an estimated fifteen thousand casualties.

Nomadic, self-contained, and agile, the enemies whom 3-71 Cav would face were similar in many ways to the people Alexander had tried to put down here. Because they didn’t have much of an organizational structure for him to exploit—unlike the Persians, whom he had decapitated at a stroke by attacking their king, Darius the Great—Alexander believed that the only way to defeat them was to trap them with overwhelming force and either kill or capture them. There was no jugular in their decentralized society. One academic
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has noted that in Bactria (part of modern-day Afghanistan), Alexander found to his dismay that “allies and enemies were often indistinguishable until it was too late.” The confusion worked both ways: Alexander’s troops were asked to juggle “awkwardly the jobs of conquerer, peace-keeper, builder and settler. One minute they were asked to kill with ruthless and indiscriminate intensity, the next they were expected to show deference to the survivors.” Then as now, moreover, the difficult terrain provided the natives with a significant home-field advantage, allowing a rebel force of just 10 percent of the population to pose a serious threat to a better-armed and much larger occupying force.

The nickname that the 3rd Infantry Brigade Combat Team (to which 3-71 Cav belonged) had adopted—the Spartans, after the legendary Greek fighters—was used by the unit’s officers to build up their men and themselves, likening them to the fierce warriors of yore. They’d even co-opted as their motto “With your shield or on it,” which was said to have been a directive from Spartan mothers to their sons, an order to fight to the death in battle, a reminder that dying was preferable to retreating. Beyond that tenuous historical link, however, the direct relevance of Alexander the Great’s experience to Ben Keating’s mission was debatable, and the problem was, there weren’t many people in the Pentagon or the State Department who were capable of engaging in that debate. The military had been focused on hunting down Osama bin Laden, Al Qaeda, and the Taliban for almost five years now, and yet the enemy was still thriving. Some Pentagon leaders were beginning to worship at the altar of COIN, shorthand for “counterinsurgency,” a strategy designed to divide the general population from the insurgents through cooperation with local leaders. Under such a program, U.S. troops would offer economic assistance, implement development projects, and expand local government and security forces. The thinking behind COIN had been around for decades, but as a military theory, this population-based approach had only recently begun to regain momentum. Although the Army’s Counterinsurgency Field Manual was still being revamped, by a team headed by Army Lieutenant General David Petraeus and Marine Lieutenant General Jim Mattis, ideas about this new way of looking at war in general and at the Afghanistan war in particular had already started to flow throughout the command structure.

The 3rd Brigade commander, Colonel Nicholson, was a believer. Step one, he would say, was to separate the enemy from the people. Step two: link the people to their government. Step three: transform Afghanistan. Because the 3rd Brigade Combat Team was an entirely new command, formed from scratch back at Fort Drum in 2004, its leaders—Nicholson and Lieutenant Colonel Joe Fenty—wanted counterinsurgency to be a part of whatever they, and it, did.

Even as the Americans pushed into Kunar and Nuristan Provinces, though, they knew astonishingly little about the region. The citations for the briefing written by one intelligence officer for 3-71 Cav included Wikipedia, from which he drew heavily. As another officer later put it, while there were smart individuals throughout 3-71 Cav, in eastern Afghanistan, “we might as well have been going to the moon.”

Few had any doubt that Mick Nicholson would soon make general. He was intelligent, devoted to his troops, and carrying on the family business. His father, Brigadier General John “Jack” Nicholson, was a 1956 graduate of West Point and had spent two and a half years in Vietnam several decades before serving as an undersecretary of Veterans Affairs for President George W. Bush; Jack’s brother Jim, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee, was Bush’s secretary of Veterans Affairs. By 2006, there were four from Mick’s own generation of Nicholsons on active duty, three in the Army and one in the Air Force. Three of them were deployed to the same region simultaneously, in Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Afghanistan.

Jack hadn’t been too happy when his son left West Point after two years to pursue premed studies at Georgetown University, but after graduation Mick changed his mind and returned to the Academy to finish his degree. Since then he had served in Grenada and Sarajevo, among other hotspots. He was working for the chief of staff of the Army when that hijacked plane hit the Pentagon on September 11, 2001; given the location of his office, he almost certainly would have been killed if he’d been at his desk, but he and his wife were moving into their new house that morning, so he hadn’t yet gone in to work.

Nicholson was aware that it took an average of fourteen years for a counterinsurgency program to succeed. After five years of war, the United States had just started to expand its presence in this part of Afghanistan. And though he would never say it out loud, Nicholson knew that the whole country was being shortchanged on troops and resources.

If the concept of counterinsurgency was nothing new, it was nevertheless new to this particular administration. Before being elected president, George W. Bush had expressed disdain for “nation building”: “I would be very careful about using our troops as nation builders,” the then-governor said in the first presidential debate of 2000. The goal of the military was to fight and win wars, he asserted, and U.S. troops had been spread too thin policing conflicts in the Balkans, Somalia, and Haiti. But then came 9/11, and, as Bush said after leaving office, “I changed my mind.”

In a speech he gave in April 2002 at the Virginia Military Institute, Bush laid out the new mission: “Peace will be achieved by helping Afghanistan develop its own stable government.” He believed the United States had a moral obligation “to leave behind something better,” as he later wrote in his memoir. The U.S. “had a strategic interest in helping the Afghan people build a free society. The terrorists took refuge in places of chaos, despair, and repression. A democratic Afghanistan would be a hopeful alternative to the vision of the extremists.”

The president’s idealism would not, however, immediately be matched by overwhelming success. In the view of many generals, this was due to the fact that he sent fewer than twenty thousand troops into a country the size of Texas, after which both he and his administration began focusing on a new war, in Iraq. By 2006, the Pentagon was still working on establishing a minimal presence in parts of the mountainous country, trying to expand into areas where even the Afghan government was barely visible—especially those regions in which insurgents were able to thrive or at least travel unhindered, such as Nuristan.

And that was where 3-71 Cav would come in.

“This is going to be tough,” Keating told his men as they pushed north in the convoy. “It’s going to be a struggle and a long fight. But we’re going to do it because it’s our job.”

Keating reveled in both learning and sharing the history of the land. He enjoyed a brief stop he made at the U.S. base at Jalalabad, located on the former site of a Rest-and-Relaxation “resort” built and used by the Soviets during their invasion—though it didn’t escape his notice that the swimming pool he walked past on the way to chow had once served as an execution ground for Taliban firing squads. Jalalabad had also once been home to Osama bin Laden: the Al Qaeda leader moved into a mud-and-brick structure there in 1996 with his three wives and their children, but he was long gone by the time an American missile destroyed the residence in October 2001.

Accompanied by an interpreter, Keating headed to a bazaar, where he delighted in parrying the aggressive sales pitches of the merchants. The salesmen all but fell over themselves to get their items—whatever they happened to be—into the American officer’s hands.

“Mister,” one said, “very nice jewelry, very good. Good knives, mister. Great blankets, sir, good price.”

“Is that from Afghanistan?” Keating asked, pointing. “Did you make it?”

Reliably, the merchant would offer almost frantic confirmation or, even better, insist with a look of shocked reproach, “Oh, no, sir, this very old—given me by my father, who got it from his grandfather….”

Keating bought his own father an old brass Kelvin & Hughes sextant, used for navigation. In change, he was handed a Russian five-ruble bill from 1908. After purchasing some chalices, he received in change some coins that might have been older than the country for which he was fighting.

“Roman, sir, this one and this one,” the seller said. “Greek, this one, and this one, and that one.” Such remnants were charming, yet they might also inspire foreboding: many empires had been here before.

CHAPTER 2

“Major Joe Fenty, Hard Worker”

B
efore their convoy pulled out, intelligence officer Captain Ross Berkoff briefed Lieutenant Colonel Joe Fenty on the incidents that had just taken place along their route: the U.S. troops killed in Kunar, the Afghan politician attacked in Kabul, the convoy of Afghan soldiers hit in Ghazni. It wasn’t Fenty’s style to show fear or even concern, so to Berkoff, his reaction seemed to be, “Okay, so the country is swarming with enemy fighters who are trying to kill Americans. Well, that’s why we’re here.” That was classic Fenty: not glib, not nonchalant, just all business.

Beyond Fenty, the other senior officers of 3-71 Cav tried to seem likewise unconcerned. Their private emotions, however, were another matter. Berkoff felt as if they were driving through the valleys encased in a big tin train emblazoned with the words “IED Me.” Early on in the journey, as Fenty’s twelve-truck convoy was pulling out from Forward Operating Base Salerno, the local Afghan intelligence chief was targeted by a remote-controlled bomb fitted on a bicycle. He survived, but two children were wounded in the attack.

As an eight-year-old boy growing up in Ronkonkoma, Long Island, Joseph Fenty had made mock dog tags for himself that read “Major Joe Fenty, hard worker.” He was forty-one now, and while he was no longer a major, that second part still held. In 3-71 Cav, he was widely admired and considered a true gentleman, though he was perhaps best known for his fanatical physical discipline—the supermarathons he ran, his 3 percent body fat. Earlier in his career, when he was stationed in Alaska, he had become a cross-country skier, and was eventually approached by one of the coaches of the 1992 Olympic team, who asked if he wanted to try out. In Bosnia, he would get off work at three in the morning and go hit the treadmill; it was how he relaxed.