The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor (55 page)

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, pawns move one space, 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)

“This is the ONLY way we get re-supplied.”
(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)

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)

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 prickly 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 passed 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 assailants 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 Saturday, 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 Saturday.

Yllescas tried to put himself in the insurgents’ shoes: in that first assault, 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 instituted 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 Saturday, 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 Class 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 assistant, 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 class 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?
of 9/11.