The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor Read online

  And then they came.

  Just as Fenty had anticipated, about half an hour after the American troops had departed, the fighting-age men of the village started popping up on ridgelines all over the hills and heading back to the settlement. Hawes’s radio line was promptly abuzz with the voices of scouts reporting locals jumping out everywhere in front of them—or behind them: the new arrivals were all over both the southern and northern ridgelines. None had weapons. While a local carrying either a weapon or a radio was considered to be a “positive identified threat” and could thereby constitute a legitimate target, the U.S. Rules of Engagement prohibited soldiers from firing upon anyone simply for acting in a suspicious manner. For now, all Hawes and the others could do was stay focused and wait for trouble.

  About an hour after the 3-71 Cav troops had left the village, three men started walking along the trail heading east. One carried an AKM—a Russian Kalashnikov assault rifle, an upgraded version of the AK-47—under his arm. They entered a four-building complex across the valley from where Hawes was hiding.

  The security team radioed to the other 3-71 Cav troops to make sure there weren’t any Afghan Security Guards who had stayed behind in the valley. There weren’t.

  Four reconnaissance troops from the security team quietly moved about fifty yards east to check out a vacant building. As they did so, the man who’d been carrying the AKM suddenly appeared on a roof within the housing complex. He was talking on a radio whose antenna was extended. Not spotting the Americans, the man went back inside, only to emerge from another building lower down in the complex. Now he had the AKM and the radio.

  Cusson placed a call to the squadron’s operations center, asking for permission to shoot. “Sounds like PIT to me,” Berkoff said—meaning a “positive identified threat.” Permission was granted.

  The word came back to Cusson: Take him out.

  The man with the AKM went over to a rock wall and removed a stone, behind which he had evidently hidden something.

  A scout with the security team, Sergeant David Fisher, projected an infrared laser on the man. He was 167 yards away.

  Hawes set his scope.

  He pulled the trigger. The first shot hit the Afghan in his right pectoral and spun him around. Hawes put two more rounds in his chest, and the man fell down on his back.

  There it was: his first kill. To Hawes, it felt like just another day on the range.

  Nuristanis ran from the house. A boy sprinted west, back toward the village, followed by an older man. Other young men now bolted out of the complex and began scrambling over the mountain. Some members of the security team were already on their way to check out the man Hawes had shot when a woman rushed out of the house, snatched the radio and the AKM off the body, and ran back into the complex.

  The security team members photographed the dead insurgent and recovered the AKM from inside the house. One of the Americans heard an Afghan man’s voice talking over the radio, but because the team didn’t have an interpreter along, there was no way of knowing what was being said. Just then, on a different frequency, in English, came word from the scouts in the valley that dozens of men were heading their way from the village. This wasn’t good.

  While the leaders of the security team had been able to radio their commanders before Hawes took his shot, once the men moved down to the valley floor, communication became intermittent at best. Fenty and Swain both tried to tell the team leaders to find a piece of terrain to defend so Swain could lead the quick reaction force into the valley to support them and start a fight; he had mortars and attack helicopters at the ready and was eager to use them. But they could never get that message through to the team leaders, and then it began to get dark and hence too dangerous for two friendly forces to try to link up without good communication. The QRF ran to watch over the valley, while the security team leaders decided on their own that it was time for their troops to leave.

  All of the members of the team got out safely, with no exchange of fire. It wasn’t clear whether the insurgents just gave up or the security team outran them, but soon enough, the chase had ended. The next day, the local Afghan police would confirm that U.S. troops had killed Daoud Ayoub, the leader of the insurgent cell.

  Thus, in a sense, the first-ever operation by conventional U.S. forces in this part of the country had been a success. But the bigger picture was not reassuring. The insurgents hadn’t seemed to care that the Americans had them outmanned and outequipped; they’d hidden from them and then brazenly planned an ambush on them. After their leader was shot, his family’s first impulse had been to try to grab his weapon and his radio for future use. They didn’t seem afraid of the U.S. troops.

  And what of the elders of the Kotya Valley? They had demonstrated how their ancestors had survived for centuries in these mountains: by being practical, saying what they needed to say to whoever happened to be in front of them at any given moment.

  Berkoff worked with translators to craft a message to be sent to the remaining members of Ayoub’s gang: Reconcile or die. The threat was apparently of limited value: a week or so later, intel came in that the Ayoub brothers’ cell had returned. Fenty had Cherokee Company commander Swain fire repeated illumination rounds—basically giant flares–into the valley from the base at Naray. It was his way of letting the Kotya elders know that he knew the enemy fighters were back.

  At the base itself, meanwhile, Fenty ordered the buildup of showers, laundry facilities, flush toilets, and new picnic benches. A hot meal was served once a day. Resupply air drops began, though not without a glitch: the first ones missed the mark and ended up in the adjacent Kunar River. Locals looking to make a quick dollar jumped into the water, hauled the goods out, and delivered them to the front gate.

  A couple of days after Swain began firing the illumination rounds, about a dozen Kotya elders came to Naray and asked to talk to Fenty. He wasn’t there, so Swain, the ranking 3-71 Cav officer on the base at the time, met them at the gate.

  “Please stop firing the flares,” the elders asked. “The rounds are scaring our children and animals.”

  “I’ll stop firing,” Swain said. “But I don’t want to hear about you guys’ supporting the Ayoub brothers anymore.”

  About a week later, the elders returned to Naray. “We’ve thrown them out of the valley,” they told Swain.

  When Aaron Swain graduated from West Point, in 1998, the idea that he would one day find himself devoting much of his time and energy to tending to the needs of a band of Afghan elders in an obscure valley would have struck him as being highly improbable. His training had been focused not on dealing with civilians but rather on killing bad guys, and back in the 1990s, the threat of a U.S. war in Afghanistan had seemed slight.

  But Swain was now essentially the U.S. ambassador to the Kotya Valley. Deciding he would take an approach different from that adopted by Snyder, whose impatience often manifested itself as hostility, he invited all of the elders to Naray. When they arrived at the base, Swain showed them deference by ordering up a banquet for them.

  When they all sat down, he thanked them for throwing the Ayoub brothers out of the valley. “I’m grateful,” he said. “I want to get a road built for you, into the valley, to make it easier for you to get in and out.”

  More than a month later, when reports came in that the bomb-maker known as the Engineer was in the Kotya Valley, Swain lit up the flares again.

  The experience of 3-71 Cav in the Kotya Valley would be repeated time and time again across Nuristan as American troops tried to establish a foothold through the policy of counterinsurgency.

  Even within a country that could sometimes seem to U.S. troops to be far removed from the twenty-first century, Nuristan’s valleys and villages were truly in a class of their own. More than 99 percent of the population of the province was ethnically Nuristani, a profound distinction in Afghanistan, where elsewhere Nuristanis made up only a tiny minority—just 1 percent or so—of the total population. (Some Nuristanis ha
d blue eyes and/or red hair, and a number had physiognomic features that made them look European, feeding the long-discredited myth that as a people, they were descended from the Greeks and Macedonians left behind by Alexander the Great’s army.) Even in the hardscrabble context of Afghanistan, those who lived in Nuristan were legendarily tough. All that most Afghans knew about them was that their ancestors had been non-Muslims who were brave and determined warriors, famed for their lethal raids on Muslims in the lowlands. This had inspired the Nuristanis’ reputation as mountain-dwelling fighters—tough, effective, and uncivilized. Whether that reputation was still accurate or up to date in 2006 was almost beside the point.

  Berkoff had studied Nuristan before he deployed and noted that rebellion seemed to be an important part of its culture. Fenty gave him a copy of an out-of-print book about the region, The Kafirs of the Hindu Kush, written by an English army major named George Scott Robertson after he visited there in 1890–91. Because at that point they were the only ethnic group in Afghanistan that had refused to convert to Islam, instead practicing a religion that seemed to have ties to a primitive form of Hinduism, the Nuristanis were known as Kafirs, or “infidels,” and Nuristan was called Kafiristan—literally, the “land of the infidels.”

  In 1896, however—just five years after Robertson’s visit—the Kafirs finally accepted Islam, many at knifepoint. Kafiristan then became Nuristan, or the “land of the enlightened.” Many Nuristanis became quite devout, even as they maintained their reputation for fanatic rebelliousness. They were said to have been among the first to take up arms against the Communists who brought down the Afghan government in 1978. Some Nuristanis told stories of dramatic and bloody attacks on these intruders, though what was reality and what was myth could be difficult to discern.

  During the time of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, part of eastern Nuristan became a semiautonomous state referred to as the Dawlat,16 or the Islamic Revolutionary State of Afghanistan. Adhering to extremist Salafi Islam, and officially recognized by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, the Dawlat was run by an especially fearsome warlord who chased off or killed his rivals. Among those rivals were fellow Nuristanis.

  Northern Kunar and eastern Nuristan were home to at least four major ethnic groups—Mushwani Pashtuns, Salarzai Pashtuns, Nuristanis, and Gujjars—all of whom had argumentative histories with one another and among themselves. Just about the only matter the first three groups could agree upon, in fact, was their disdain for the fourth, the Gujjars, a destitute population of migrant workers whom the others often characterized as thieving squatters.

  Each group was further split into subdivisions that carried their own potent political implications. The Nuristanis consisted of Kom, Kata, Kushtoz, and Kalasha communities. These four subgroups were themselves given to feuding, and each subdivision had its separate subpopulations, with accompanying disputes and rivalries. The Kom people, for instance, saw themselves as being organized by different lineages, with each claiming descent from a distant ancestor. They did not count themselves part of the Dawlat. Significant religious differences also divided the populace, as each group practiced a type of Islam that varied in important ways from the next group’s. Even within a single group, there might be multiple divisions. The Kamdeshis observed an Islam that differed from others in that its mullahs—the Muslim clergymen—were expected to interpret the holy text and were, therefore, much more apt to introduce their own political bias.

  For Nuristanis to take up arms against one another was not uncommon. The Kom had historical tensions with the nearby Kushtozis, and the spark was reignited in the 1990s when the two clans began battling over water rights, among other issues—a clash that inspired such acts of aggression as the planting of landmines on enemies’ property. In 1997, the Kom burned down a Kushtoz village, displacing at least five hundred families.

  Considering all of this, it perhaps wasn’t surprising that these villagers, while welcoming enough to visitors, didn’t immediately cooperate much with the Americans. They were survivors, and they continued to do what had worked for them in the past: withholding information and playing both sides. They had learned long ago from the British, and from the Soviets more recently (though still before many troops from 3-71 Cav were even born), that intruders always, eventually, left. A presentation by the Foreign Military Studies Office at Fort Leavenworth about the decade-long occupation of the area by the USSR noted some “eternal truths” about Afghanistan. One of them was “Switching sides is common.” Another was “Loyalty can be rented for a small bag of gold.”

  CHAPTER 4

  War, Fate, and Wind

  Private Nick Pilozzi gasped.

  Oh my God, I can’t breathe, he thought.

  It was April 2006, and Pilozzi and others from 3-71 Cav’s Able Troop, led by Captain Gooding, had choppered in and been dropped atop a twelve-thousand-foot snow-capped mountain on the southern slope of the Hindu Kush for Operation Mountain Lion. The air was so thin he felt as if he were being slowly, almost subtly, strangled.

  Pilozzi, who was eighteen, came from Tonawanda, New York, not far from Buffalo, so he knew from cold. But there was something devastating about the combination of the deep snow, the chill, and the lack of oxygen to be found here on the roof of these mountains. His driving skills were not needed up here; there were no cars or trucks. There wasn’t anything except for rocks and snow—anywhere from two to six feet of it. Most of the snow was packed, so the troops were able to walk on it, but they exhausted themselves digging down to rock to position their mortar tube—the cannon from which they would aim and fire explosive rounds—lest the weapon sink into the powder.

  The Americans had had no idea it was going to be so cold—just one more indication that they didn’t know much about the land they were supposed to be controlling. The troops hadn’t packed appropriate cold-weather gear and had just fifteen sleeping bags for thirty men, including the handful of Marines who had joined them. They ended up dividing the bags—some got the Gore-Tex outer layer, others the thick black inner layer—and laying them atop the rock formations that jutted out of the snow. Troops clung to one another for body heat. Everyone survived, but it was the roughest night many of them had ever known. And that was how Private Pilozzi met the Korangal Valley.

  (Photo courtesy of Nick Pilozzi)

  The Korangal Valley was tough to get into and even tougher to get out of. The region was home to roughly twenty-five thousand Afghans, an insular community with its own particular dialect. Some Korangalis trafficked in illegal timber, selling lumber from the Himalayan cedars that grew in the valley; such traffickers were sufficiently ruthless that their influence far exceeded their numbers. The combination of this criminal culture with its geographic, cultural, and linguistic isolation had made the Korangal an inviting sanctuary for insurgents fighting the USSR in the 1980s, and then later again for those fighting the United States in the 2000s. (The Korangal was close to where those nineteen SEALs and Nightstalker pilots and crewmen had been killed in 2005, during Operation Redwing.)

  Now 3-71 Cav had been diverted to the region because Colonel Nicholson wanted to take advantage of the temporary overlap, in Kunar Province, of 3-71 Cav (commanded by Fenty), 1-32 Infantry (led by Cavoli), and the 1st Battalion, 3rd Marines, which unit was scheduled to leave the country in late May.

  Nicholson, who commanded the parent brigade, ordered 3-71 Cav to flank around the valley to the east while 1-32 Infantry blocked the valley from the north. The Marines, along with the brigade tactical command post—Nicholson, the ANA brigade commander, and a small staff—would be dropped by chopper onto mountaintops and were to clear the enemy down into the valley. Their ultimate goal was to set up the Korangal outpost, reach out to the villagers, help establish an Afghan government presence, and kill the enemy: intelligence sources claimed that the insurgent leader Ahmad Shah, thought to be behind the Operation Redwing disaster, plus a known Al Qaeda operative named Abu Ikhlas were in the immediate area.

  Fen
ty had sent Gooding and Able Troop to watch over the southern Korangal Valley while Captain Franklin Brooks and Bravo Troop—who called themselves the Barbarians—moved south into the adjacent Chowkay Valley. Most of Cherokee Company remained back at the base at Naray, with the exception of the kill team, which was also ordered into the Chowkay Valley to patrol for enemy fighters.

  The Chowkay Valley was the most popular exit route used by the Korangali Taliban to escape over the border into Pakistan; indeed, Berkoff had briefed Fenty and the 3-71 Cav troop commanders that when confronted by the consistent presence of U.S. troops, the local Taliban leader was likely to “squirt” into Pakistan, after first pushing his team of insurgent fighters into the Chowkay to clear the way for him. The Americans hoped to be waiting there for him.

  After they all almost froze to death at twelve thousand feet, Gooding sent Staff Sergeant Matthew Netzel and more than a dozen soldiers from Able Troop’s 2nd Platoon down the Korangal to watch over a lumberyard. Among the troops with Netzel was Private First Class Brian Moquin, Jr., a nineteen-year-old from Worcester, Massachusetts, whom Netzel had kept an eye on since the beginning of their deployment.

  When Moquin first arrived at 3-71 Cav, it was clear to Netzel that the private had been a problem child growing up—just like half the Army, in Netzel’s estimation. Back at Fort Drum, Moquin was late to formation one morning at 0630, so Netzel went to his room and banged on his door.

  “What’s up, Sergeant?” Moquin said after he finally came to the door, rubbing sleep from his eyes.

  “You’re fucking not at formation, that’s what’s up,” Netzel said. “Get your uniform on and get in fucking formation.”