The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor Read online

  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 academic7 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 Afghanist
an?” 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”

  Before 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.

  Fenty was relentlessly focused, even compulsive. As part of his continuing education after college, he had studied exercise physiology and kinesiology, the science of human movement, at Troy State University, where he’d learned that wearing a different pair of shoes every day could help guard against lower-leg injuries. When he was in Bosnia, he had a dozen pairs of size 9½ ASICS running shoes, all lined up and rotated daily. This habit amused his roommate, Chris Cavoli, who routinely shuffled Fenty’s shoes out of order to mess with the mind of his anal-retentive friend.

  He never stopped running, whether back at the home of the 10th Mountain Division, at Fort Drum, New York, where he and Command Sergeant Major Del Byers had run five to ten miles together daily, or on this deployment in Afghanistan, where the two men took advantage of any opportunity to do the same on U.S. bases.

  Fenty always tried to work his brain as much as he did his muscles. He made a great effort to educate himself, reading three newspapers a day when he was at home, taking graduate courses, ordering professional journals, attending lecture series, reading books on military history and critical thinking. He was the kind of self-made man and commander whom a general could trust to assemble a new unit from scratch, as he’d done with 3-71 Cav.

  As the convoy slowly traveled the hundreds of miles from Forward Operating Base Salerno, Fenty sat in the front truck commander’s seat of his Humvee, with Berkoff behind him.

  Lieutenant Colonel Joe Fenty in his Humvee, March 2006. (Photo courtesy of Ross Berkoff)

  Fenty made it his job to know about his troops and their lives. As they rolled closer to their final destination, he asked Berkoff about his new girlfriend, Rebekah. How had they met?

  Actually, Berkoff replied somewhat sheepishly, they’d met online. She was at Syracuse, and he’d been an hour away at Fort Drum, but they both wanted to marry someone Jewish, so they were introduced through J-Date, a website for Jewish singles.

  Fenty smiled. He’d met his wife, Kristen, during a spring break in college, he told Berkoff, at a campfire on the beach in St. Petersburg. Fenty and his friends had lost their car keys in the sand, so Kristen and her friend gave them a ride back to where they were staying. She sat on his lap during the drive. Both were students at Belmont Abbey College, and they officially became an item shortly thereafter, on Saint Patrick’s Day. Within two weeks, they knew they would be husband and wife. That’d been twenty years ago.

  Fenty talked to his troops to get their minds off the forbidding landscape they were entering. Berkoff described the scene in an email home: “Imagine if you can, driving the road distance equal to driving from Richmond to NYC, but instead of 95 North, you are switch-backing over landscape similar in size to our own Rocky Mountains the entire way, oh yeah, not to mention there are no barriers on the roads keeping your truck from tipping over the cliff.”

  Fenty’s chatter also served another purpose: it got his own mind off what he was seeing. This was his second deployment here; in 2002, he had been stationed in northern Balkh Province, where, among other challenging tasks, he’d helped put down a Taliban riot in a detention facility. He knew that some of his soldiers wouldn’t make it home; he accepted that, too. He was all business, yes, but in this place, nobody could be all business all the time.

  The Special Forces troops who’d been operating in these provinces since 2002 hadn’t found any of the senior leaders of Al Qaeda, though they had killed or rounded up some lower-level facilitators. The enemy fighters here belonged primarily to three different groups: the Haqqani network from Pakistan, Mullah Omar’s Taliban, and an entity called HIG.8 Five years earlier, when the Pentagon was planning to attack the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11, HIG wasn’t on anyone’s radar. Even just one year before this deployment, when Fenty heard the term being bandied about, he didn’t really know what it signified: “HIG”? he thought. Huh? During a May 2005 meeting with 3-71 staff, Fenty—probing his team for information relating to operations and intelligence—bluntly asked his intelligence officer, “Can you tell me exactly what HIG is?” The man—whom Berkoff would soon replace—stared back at his commander. It wasn’t an unreasonable question, especially to ask of an intel officer. But the fact that no one in that room knew what HIG was, almost four years into the war, indicated how poor a job the U.S. Army was doing of preparing its officers for the enemy they would soon have to face.

  Berkoff was from Fair Lawn, New Jersey, and had gone through ROTC at Tulane; he was the expert in the room. Indeed, he had learned everything he could about HIG. After all, the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin led insurgent operations in the region 3-71 Cav was headed for—Kunar and Nuristan Provinces—and Berkoff figured he and his fellow officers, at least, should know who was going to try to kill them.

  For Berkoff, working in intelligence provided not only an intellectual challenge but also something of a rush. Deciding where to bring the fight to the enemy, setting his brain to the problem—it could feel like a more muscular exercise than doing a bench press or a curl. Yes, sometimes he felt as though he might as well be throwing darts at a map or shaking a Magic 8 Ball. But if the intel was good, it would mean that shortly thereafter, far fewer insurgents would be hunting him and his friends.

  Berkoff explained to Fenty that HIG was an extremist group formed more than a decade before Al Qaeda, during the chaotic years of internal struggle for control of Afghanistan, beginning in the 1970s. After the Afghan government started arresting and executing Islamists i
n 1974, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a young extremist who had been part of the Muslim Youth organization at Kabul University, fled to Pakistan and founded an Islamist group called Hezb-e-Islami, while also establishing ties with the Pakistani intelligence service ISI. By 1979, Hezb-e-Islami had split into several factions, including Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, or HIG.9

  HIG was among the many groups of mujahideen, or Islamist holy warriors, that had received aid from the U.S. government for their fight against the USSR. Hekmatyar’s faction had in fact evolved into one of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s favorite Soviet-killing proxies, receiving more money from the U.S. government than any other single group during that period. The funds were not spent on lollipops; the Soviets considered Hekmatyar to be “the bogeyman behind the most unspeakable torture of their captured soldiers,” as George Crile would later write in Charlie Wilson’s War. “Invariably his name was invoked with new arrivals to keep them from wandering off base unaccompanied, lest they fall into the hands of this depraved fanatic whose specialty, they claimed, was skinning infidels alive.”

  If the mujahideen groups shared a common Soviet enemy, they often fought one another just as fiercely. After the Taliban seized control of Kabul in 1996, the country became unsafe for Hekmatyar, and he fled to Iran. Although he wasn’t invited to join the interim Afghan government after the fall of the Taliban in 2001, the Iranians kicked him out, so he returned to Afghanistan anyway. Hamid Karzai and Hekmatyar were longstanding enemies, but Hekmatyar initially extended an olive branch to the new Afghan leader. Within weeks, however, Afghan officials claimed to have uncovered a plot by HIG to overthrow Karzai’s government, and more than three hundred fighters loyal to Hekmatyar were arrested. That was the end of the rapprochement. Soon Hekmatyar was targeted—unsuccessfully—by one of the first CIA Predator drone attacks, in May 2002. He subsequently issued a statement: “Hezb-e-Islami will fight our jihad until foreign troops are gone from Afghanistan and Afghans have set up an Islamic government.” In December 2003, tipped off that Hekmatyar and one of his top aides were in a small hamlet in the Waygal Valley in Nuristan, U.S. warplanes pounded the area. Six civilians were killed, including three children. Hekmatyar had left the village hours before.