Four days later, Black Knight Troop was back in action. Taliban insurgents attacked members of the Afghan Border Police and attempted to overrun Checkpoint Delta. Portis ordered White Platoon to take four Humvees out to the area, where they had never been before. Before they left, Portis bought the platoon a case of Red Bull energy drink for forty dollars.

Back to work.

Ed Faulkner, Jr., was sent to recuperate at Fort Carson, in Colorado, where his wounds were treated and he was promoted to private second cla.s.s. He was initially encouraged to rejoin the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds at Forward Operating Base Bostick. "Don't you want to be a real man and return to Afghanistan with your unit?" an officer asked him.

Faulkner admitted that he didn't think he was capable of going back there. He had too much going on in his head, he said-too many voices, too many nightmares. An Army physician told him he had posttraumatic stress disorder. Already in a precarious and unstable place emotionally, he had been tipped into a chasm by the battle for Combat Outpost Keating. The loss of his friends Michael Scusa and Chris Griffin had left him racked with guilt. He, Griffin, and Hardt had been in that stand-to truck trying to save Gallegos, Mace, Martin, Larson, and Carter. Five out of the eight of them were now dead.

Faulkner's commander at Fort Carson suspected he'd gone back to using meth, which he believed was contributing to his paranoia and manic behavior. He decided it would be better to discharge the private before he got into so much legal trouble that the Army had to court-martial him.

At Forward Operating Base Bostick, Jonathan Hill heard about what the officers at Fort Carson were pushing on Faulkner. It didn't surprise him. Before 3-61 Cav deployed to Afghanistan, Faulkner had come to him and told him he wanted to admit himself for treatment of a drug problem. Hill respected him for it, but others thought he was playing games and just trying to avoid heading into combat. After being wounded on October 3, Hill thought, Faulkner had needed someone in his chain of command to look after him. While the injury itself might have been new, it had hit the old scar, both physically and psychologically, and reconjured old pains and ghosts. He had shown that when given attention and cared for by Salentine, Birchfield, and Hill, he was able to straighten up and become a decent soldier. "Please look after Faulkner," Hill told a member of their Family Readiness Group back at Fort Carson. "He's going to really struggle." But to his commanders, including Lieutenant Colonel Brown, what mattered was the seemingly inescapable fact that Faulkner would not abide by the Army's rules. Hill saw the young man as a falling leaf that the Army wanted to rake up and dispose of.

Faulkner was told he would need to put in for a discharge. From the perspective of the commanders of 3-61 Cav, the Army was giving him the opportunity to end his service under honorable conditions. A date was picked: April 1, 2010.

The decision incensed Faulkner's father, Ed senior, who reached out to his congressman. Sure, his son had messed up by possessing hashish at the observation post in Afghanistan, but he had paid for his mistake, having been busted down from specialist to the lowest level of private, and forfeiting four months' pay in the process. He needed psychological therapy, not humiliation, said his father. The congressman reached out in turn, and Lieutenant Colonel Dan Chandler responded that Private Faulkner's "abuse of illegal drugs placed the lives of his comrades in serious danger." Ed senior pointed out that his son had never actually been accused of being under the influence of the hashish and had performed honorably until he was injured during the attack on Combat Outpost Keating. Back at Fort Carson, he'd even been promoted. But as far as the Army was concerned, this was the end of the line for Ed Faulkner, Jr. So Ed Faulkner, Sr., boarded a plane for Colorado and accompanied his son home on the date agreed.

As soon as Faulkner got back to Burlington, North Carolina, he retreated into his own head, keeping in touch with friends mainly through his Facebook page. Faulkner was haunted. He dreamt about Iraqis' coming to his family's door, ringing the doorbell, and bringing him their dead babies. He lamented to his father that he could have done something to save Chris Griffin's life as they ran from the truck. When the sun was in the sky, he would have flashbacks; when the moon was out, he was constantly being scared awake by nightmares. Michael Scusa had once comforted Faulkner by saying, "It's all good, man. It's all good." But Scusa wasn't able to say that anymore.

Later in April, Faulkner started in a carpet-cleaning job, for which he had to get up at 6:00 a.m. every day. His boss was showing him how to use the cleaning system on his van when Faulkner stepped into a bucket of scalding hot water. The blistering that resulted hurt worse than his bullet wound, he said.

The outpost never left him. Faulkner would stay up late at night watching insurgents' videos on YouTube. He told a friend from 3-61 Cav, Brian Casey, that he heard gunfire and saw Taliban on a daily basis. His father took him to a Greensboro Gra.s.shoppers minor league baseball game. As they left the game, the stadium's management started shooting off fireworks. Faulkner hit the ground as if he were under attack.

Once, in the middle of the night, Faulkner's mother, Sharon, couldn't find her son. He wasn't in his bed, but his truck was still in the driveway. He didn't answer his cell phone. She got in her car and drove around the neighborhood looking for him. He wasn't anywhere. When she returned, as she pulled into the driveway, she saw a shadow in the bushes in front of the house. She walked over and found her son crouched down, acting as if he had a rifle and were looking through its scope at an enemy across the street. He picked up an invisible radio and started talking into it, as if in combat.

Faulkner's mother guided him to his bed. The next morning, he remembered none of it.

At the end of July, Ed Faulkner, Jr., ran naked into the street, yelling that the end of the world was coming. He stopped cars and asked drivers if they'd been saved and accepted Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior. He was picked up by local police, who called his sister, Sarah Faulkner Minor. She told them that her brother had recently been discharged from the Army and had two Purple Hearts, one earned in Iraq and the other in Afghanistan. He had shrapnel injuries and was suffering from PTSD, she said.

"I knew it," said the police officer on the other end of the phone. "When we detained him, he was talking on the radio to fellow soldiers who weren't there." Both were imaginary, of course-the soldiers and and the radio. the radio.

The officer said that the police didn't want to arrest Faulkner, but they would commit him. Sarah agreed; she didn't want him to hurt himself or anyone else. When she visited him in the psychiatric wing of Alamance Medical Center, she at first walked right past his room-with its mattress thrown to the floor and its occupant covered from head to toe by a sheet, the room clearly belonged to someone else, someone unhinged, she thought. Whoever that is, bless his heart, she said to herself before realizing it was Ed. She walked in and tried to make conversation, but it didn't sound like his voice when he spoke. Something had taken him over. He scared her.

"I can't sit in this nuthouse," he told her.

The realization took the wind out of her: My brother is very mentally ill right now.

"This is the end for me," he said. "You have no idea how I feel, I'm so stressed out, I don't know why I did what I did, I don't know why it happened."

She tried to tell him to give his life over to G.o.d, that only He, not drugs, could save him, but her brother seemed beyond saving.

"There's all this noise in my mind," he told her. "It won't stop. It won't quiet down."

Faulkner was transferred to a local veterans hospital for a couple of days, a.s.signed a social worker, and then discharged. His parents were not impressed by the quality of care their son received, which seemed casual and oblivious, when clearly he needed serious help. "If you're out in a storm, you seek shelter," Ed senior would say. "He has a storm going on in his brain." But his government, his country, provided his son with no such cover.

Faulkner met Charline89 in August. She told him she was bipolar and suffered from manic depression. For the first time in a long while, Faulkner didn't feel alone: Charline knew how he felt. She had a young daughter, whom he helped with her homework-a normal life, or almost. He moved into Charline's two-bedroom apartment within weeks of meeting her. in August. She told him she was bipolar and suffered from manic depression. For the first time in a long while, Faulkner didn't feel alone: Charline knew how he felt. She had a young daughter, whom he helped with her homework-a normal life, or almost. He moved into Charline's two-bedroom apartment within weeks of meeting her.

Charline was on government a.s.sistance and lived in subsidized housing provided through the Burlington Housing Authority. Prescribed a.s.sorted medications, including methadone and Xanax, she'd been investigated a few times by the local police for selling her narcotics. To his family, all of this seemed cause for alarm, but Faulkner was unyielding. "I don't have to live in the biggest house," he said to his sister. "I don't need life's finest. So what if she's on welfare? So what if she's in government housing? Those people are closest to G.o.d."

Charline got on the phone. "I love your brother," she told Sarah, in a s.p.a.ced-out and rambling fashion.

"I can tell you're on drugs," Sarah replied. "Lock them up. My brother was addicted to pain pills-keep them out of his reach." Charline promised she would. After all, she had a little girl and had to keep her medications out of her hands as well.

On the night of September 15, Charline found Faulkner drifting off to sleep in his parked truck. When she asked him what was wrong, he didn't answer. She helped him stumble out of the vehicle and into her bed.

The next morning, Charline woke up and got her daughter ready for school. She took her to the bus stop. When she came back, she was surprised to see that Faulkner hadn't moved an inch. She realized he wasn't breathing. She called 911 and tried to revive him. The fire department arrived and took over the CPR.

The first responders noticed that there were several buckets of murky water in the hallway. It wasn't clear whether the apartment had functioning electricity or plumbing. The mattress on which Faulkner was lying was riddled with cigarette burns. The apartment was packed with piles of clothes and trash. The bathroom was appalling.

The police and an ambulance got there at the same time. The emergency medical technicians ran in and confirmed what the firefighters had already ascertained: Faulkner was dead. They put him on a stretcher and wheeled him out, placed him in the back of the ambulance, and sped off to the emergency room. An autopsy indicated that his cause of death was acute methadone toxicity.

A few days later, a Veterans Administration office worker called Ed Faulkner, Sr. "Would you please let your son know that he's late for his appointment?" he asked.

As word of Faulkner's death spread, Hill-who by then had transferred out of 3-61 Cav-called Carter at Fort Carson to discuss how thoroughly the Army had turned its back on their friend.

"I kinda think he was the ninth victim of Keating," Carter said. "And I honestly don't think he'll be the last."

Epilogue

The mountains of northeastern Afghanistan are more foreboding than words can express-magisterial, with breathtaking peaks and narrow valleys. During helicopter rides, I see little villages, hamlets, single homes nestled in obscure nooks. Anyone might be living there.

I arrive at Forward Operating Base Bostick in October 2011. The officers of the 2-27 Infantry, the "Wolfhounds," have lost nine troops by this point in their deployment. Captains Tim Blair and Matthew Schachman take me to the entrance of the lieutenant colonel's office, where seven photos hang from the wall, troops killed mainly by IEDs on the treacherous roads. Four of them90 were in a Humvee targeted because the enemy mistakenly thought Blair was in it, he tells me. were in a Humvee targeted because the enemy mistakenly thought Blair was in it, he tells me.

The eighth photo, of Staff Sergeant Houston Taylor, isn't up yet; he was killed just a few days before my visit, at a cell-phone tower several hundred meters below a brand-new observation post. They won't be hanging a photograph of the ninth soldier who died here, Private First Cla.s.s Jinsu Lee, who took his own life at Forward Operating Base Bostick on August 5, 2011.

It boggles the mind that just five years ago, Captain Aaron Swain and his team can have left this base on ATVs to scout the location for what would become Combat Outpost Keating. The Wolfhounds don't leave the wire or walk down the road without intense preparation and full body armor; most often, they are also ensconced in enormous mine-resistant trucks. Northern Kunar Province is no less dangerous.

Kabul doesn't seem any safer: just after my arrival on this trip, my second to Afghanistan, insurgents staged their deadliest attack yet on Americans in that city, using a car bomb to target a military convoy. I will also spend a few nights in the confines of Forward Operating Base Fenty; whereas Ben Keating once wandered freely through the markets of Jalalabad, troops must now fly in helicopters to travel just a few miles down the road, to Forward Operating Bases Hughie or Finley-Shields. The roads are too dangerous.

I've come here to get as close to Camp Keating as I can, but the U.S. military has all but ceded Nuristan, deciding that, as then-Colonel Donahue suggested back in 2005, there isn't any reason for U.S. forces to be there. "Nuristan has no strategic value," says one public-affairs officer at Forward Operating Base Fenty. "The Afghan forces run it now." There is one remaining base in the province, at Kala Gush.

So I can't get into Nuristan at this time-not to Urmul or Kamdesh Village or the former location of Combat Outpost Keating-because no one will take me. Schachman jokes that in the Wolfhounds' area of operations, you can do anything once. So theoretically, we could could make our way to Kamdesh to see the former site of Combat Outpost Keating. The problem would be getting back. make our way to Kamdesh to see the former site of Combat Outpost Keating. The problem would be getting back.

"I could put on my PT's91 and jog down to Asadabad," Schachman says with a smile. "Once." and jog down to Asadabad," Schachman says with a smile. "Once."

The hard work here in northeastern Afghanistan continues. The Wolfhounds devote much of their time and energy to maintaining the security of a section of the road from Asadabad to Naray, the same road that Lieutenant Colonel Brown and some of his men worked on securing two years ago. They try to get the village elders to a.s.sume responsibility for parts of the road. They offer a.s.surances to villagers that they will benefit from contracts to pour the asphaltlike substance on the still-unpaved swath. They, like the other soldiers whose stories I have attempted to tell in these pages, are trying to do their very best in an impossible corner of the world, both to help the Afghan people and to eliminate the bad guys. They are paid modestly and have endured years away from those whom they love most. They are generally ignored by the American people and the American media.

Days before I get to Forward Operating Base Bostick, a B-10 recoilless rifle round hit the center of the camp, not far from Schachman's hooch. When I share this information on Facebook-where I've acc.u.mulated a fair number of friends and acquaintances from 3-71, 1-91, 6-4, and 3-61 Cavs-troops and former troops speculate that it must have been the same B-10 that haunted Camp Keating in 2009, the one that badly wounded Sergeant Shane Scherer92 and, to a lesser extent, First Sergeant Ronald Burton. and, to a lesser extent, First Sergeant Ronald Burton.

Some of the Wolfhounds tell me that in Kamdesh District, Mullah Sadiq and HIG are fighting it out with the Taliban. Other interesting developments: before 3-61 Cav left Afghanistan in 2010, Kamdesh elder Abdul Rahman had become the district administrator for Kamdesh, and "Big" Gul Mohammed has since been a.s.signed to serve as the local chief of the Afghan National Police.

Major Dominic Edwards is, when I land at Forward Operating Base Bostick, in charge of the entire area of operations while his commander is on leave. A North Carolina native, Edwards is forty-one and has a devoted wife and three children back home in Hawaii. He's reasonably confident that the Afghan National Army and National Police will be able to a.s.sume control of the area within the next couple of years.

There has been little apparent study of what happened at Combat Outpost Keating. The scope of the 15-6 investigation was limited largely to the matter of whether there was adequate force protection at the outpost, not addressing tougher questions such as whether those troops should have been in that valley at all, or whether the military had even larger issues to resolve. When I mention the Wolfhounds' nine fallen soldiers to Edwards and ask him if their lives were worth the infrastructure constructed, or even the enemy killed, he quite candidly admits he doesn't know. That will be for history to judge, he says.

Specialist Brian Casey of 3-61 Cav was on his way back to Camp Keating from R&R when his friends were attacked on October 3, 2009. His three best friends at the outpost were Michael Scusa, Chris Griffin, and Ed Faulkner.

Casey wasn't there for that one battle, but he, too, carries the scars from being in Afghanistan. There have been times when he has scared his family. One morning after a bender, he woke up to find the whole downstairs of his house trashed. He thought his dogs had gotten into a fight. They hadn't-he'd done it. done it.

Casey has since pursued help. But still, some nights, if he hears an odd noise, he will go load his shotgun and patrol his house for a few minutes before he realizes how frightening and strange his actions are.

Of all the troops who served at Combat Outpost Keating, Faulkner suffered the most immediately consequential case of PTSD. Some of his friends think his overdose was purposeful, though there's no evidence of that. "He took the easy way out," says Casey.

A 2008 study by the RAND Corporation concluded that almost 20 percent of service members who served in Iraq and Afghanistan reported some signs of either PTSD or major depression. By now, more than two million Americans have served in those two wars, meaning that the number of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans suffering from those particular long-term effects is somewhere around four hundred thousand. The RAND study indicated that only about half sought treatment. How effective that treatment may prove to be is obviously an open question; Faulkner, for example, was in treatment.

Alex Newsom returned to Afghanistan. Based at Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, Newsom-formerly of 1-91 Cav, now with Special Forces-worked with Afghan National Army commandos to fight the Taliban. As I was working on this book, I heard from him periodically via email and on the phone. He was always cryptic about what exactly he was doing, but he wanted me to know-he wanted me to tell you-that all was not lost in Nuristan, that troops had not died in vein.

In April 2012, the U.S. military posted pictures from a Special Forces mission to Kamdesh Village. The Taliban were on the verge of overrunning Upper Kamdesh, threatening to slaughter the inhabitants if they didn't side with them. For two weeks, the Taliban had been deliberately and methodically attacking locals in the middle of the night. Then, in early April, ISAF special operations troops and 120 ANA commandos entered the area under the cover of darkness. They were there for five days, fighting and beating back up to three hundred insurgents.

"The people that we supported kept up the fight long after we left," Newsom reported to me, referring to his time with 1-91 Cav. He had a joyful reunion with Mawlawi Abdul Rahman-"I heard you guys needed some help," Newsom told the new district administrator. Then, at a district center in Upper Kamdesh, he saw former HIG leader Mullah Sadiq. "He looked pretty ill, but he's on our side," he confided.

"Our relationships that we established years ago were paramount in the success of the liberation of that particular village," Newsom insisted. "Without any American presence for two and a half years, these people we supported, they kept the fight up. All they needed was equipment. These are good people. There is hope." For Captain America, still running through the mountains of Nuristan, the fight goes on.

On May 21, 2012, President Obama and the NATO allies announced that in the summer of 2013, Afghan government forces-ready or not-would take the lead on providing security throughout the country, and that U.S. combat forces would see their mission end come midnight, December 31, 2014. (It seems likely, nevertheless, that Special Forces units such as Newsom's will remain in country beyond that date, conducting counterterrorism missions.)

Captain Alex Newsom of U.S. Special Forces with Mawlawi Abdul Rahman (to his right) and others as U.S. forces and Afghan commandos fought back against Taliban insurgents in Kamdesh Village in April 2012. (Photo courtesy of Alex Newsom) (Photo courtesy of Alex Newsom)

At the NATO summit, in Chicago, the president took questions from reporters. I had solicited suggestions from the troops you've met in these pages as well as from their families, and I'd selected two, both from members of 3-61 Cav.

Asked now-Captain Stephen Cady: "If this handoff and withdrawal prove premature, what plans are in place for dealing with an Afghanistan that's fallen apart or is, possibly, again, under Taliban rule?"

"I don't think that there's ever going to be an optimal point where we say, 'This is all done, this is perfect, this is just the way we wanted it, and now we can... wrap up all our equipment and go home,' " the president said, speaking more from the heart than usual-probably because he felt he was conveying something directly to the fighting men, instead of just to a White House reporter. "There's a process, and it's sometimes a messy process, just as it was in Iraq. But think about it. We've been there now ten years... the Afghan security forces themselves will not ever be prepared if they don't start taking that responsibility" for their own security.

The president continued, "The large footprint that we have in Afghanistan, over time, can be counterproductive.... No matter how much good we're doing and how outstanding our troops and our civilians and diplomats are doing on the ground, ten years, in a country that's very different, that's a strain, not only on our folks but also on that country, which at a point is going to be very sensitive about its own sovereignty. So I think that the timetable that we've established is a sound one, it is a responsible one. Are there risks involved in it? Absolutely. Can I antic.i.p.ate that over the next two years there are going to be some bad moments along with some good ones? Absolutely."

But, he said, "I think it is the appropriate strategy whereby we can achieve a stable Afghanistan that won't be perfect, we can pull back our troops in a responsible way, and we can start rebuilding America."

I then relayed a question from Eric Harder: "Do you feel that the reporting you receive from the Pentagon fully represents what the on-ground commanders a.s.sess? Is there any disconnect between what leaders feel the public and the president want to hear versus what is actually occurring on the ground?"

"I can't afford a whitewash," the president said. "I can't afford not getting the very best information in order to make good decisions.... The danger a lot of times is not that anybody's purposely trying to downplay challenges in Afghanistan. A lot of times it's just the military culture is, 'We can get it done.' And so their thinking is, How are we going to solve this problem? not Boy, why is this such a disaster? That's part of the reason why we admire our military so much and we love our troops, because they've got that can-do spirit."

The president said that he thought he had "set up a structure that really tries to guard against that, because even in my White House, for example, I've got former officers who have been in Afghanistan, who I will send out there as part of the national security team of the White House, not simply the Pentagon, to interact and to listen and to go in and talk to the captains and the majors and the corporals and the privates, to try to get a sense of what's going on. And I think the reports we get are relatively accurate in the sense that there is real improvement in those areas where we've had a significant presence."

Harder was at that moment in Afghanistan, unsure that the president was really getting the full story.

In the course of my conversations and interviews for this project, I was told by one recently retired general with experience in Afghanistan that he hoped this book might have an impact on the nation in wars going forward.

How so? I asked.

"The wars of the twenty-first century have been outsourced by the American people to our government in D.C. and to our military," he said. "With an all-volunteer force, the American people are no more connected to our armed forces than the Roman citizens were to the legionnaires. And now we even pay for wars with tax cuts. So, whose war and whose Army is it?"

The general hoped that at least some members of the public would, through reading this book, come to a greater understanding of just what war entails, just what the sacrifices mean. "I worry it is becoming too easy for the United States to use force," he added. "There are not enough domestic constraints."

Colonel Shamsur Rahman, of the Afghan Border Police, tells me that most of the fighters who attacked COP Keating were local, from the surrounding area.

Did the Americans do any good while they were there? I ask him.

"There was progress there," he says, "but when the progress was about to be completed, the bad guys would come and burn it down. The intentions were good, but the insurgents wouldn't allow it." And the locals were terrified. "If they partic.i.p.ated, the bad guys would target them, kill them. Many people died that way."

Colonel Rahman also points a finger at the power player present throughout this book, the enemy that neither the American troops nor the ANA can go after: he says that Pakistan's intelligence services played a role in the attack. "The ISI told the fighters, 'The Americans are leaving, make a statement,' " he tells me. " 'Make sure damage is done.' "

Many U.S. troops have found the way their government is waging war in Afghanistan simply farcical, given the immense role played by that country to the east, and the official policy of denying that reality. Sure, myriad American drones are buzzing about in Pakistan killing bad guys (and, inevitably, some innocents), remotely piloted by Americans thousands of miles away, in places such as New Mexico. And yes, when the time came to do away with Osama bin Laden, President Obama gave the go order, and American Special Forces went to Abottabad and killed the leader of Al Qaeda. But it's worth noting that in this book-about the bad guys who killed Americans, ANA soldiers, Nuristanis, and other Afghans who fought for their country-Pakistan is mentioned far more often than are bin Laden and Al Qaeda. That fact, however, is so inconvenient for policymakers as to be, within the larger scheme of war planning, almost ignored.

Soldiers die in war. Sometimes troops are lost in battle, and sometimes they're killed by the terrain. Sometimes they die because of carelessness or accidents, and sometimes because of wind and trees, random twists of fate, the nature of life. Aircraft carriers that haven't seen any action at all may nevertheless return to port with fewer sailors on board: some fell overboard, some contracted illnesses.

The ephemeral desires of generals for control of specific territories-the drive to claim particular plots of land that will soon enough lose their importance, if indeed they ever had any to begin with-inform a mindset that is long-established. Its existence doesn't make casualties any less tragic, of course; it simply makes them unsurprising to any soldier.

And yet, there is no sugar-coating the tragedy of Combat Outpost Keating. In 2006, the U.S. Army went into this particularly dangerous part of Afghanistan and set up, throughout the region, small combat outposts, observation posts, and provincial reconstruction teams that quickly became ripe targets for a strengthening insurgency. The bases were frequently small, generally difficult to defend, and sometimes quite far from any available air support. The troops who fought there often felt as if they were on their own. And in some ways, they were.

Once Colonel Nicholson committed to sending troops into Nuristan, the Army had an obligation to make sure they received enough support to accomplish their mission. I do not see evidence that the men of Camp Keating, throughout the lifespan of the outpost, ever got that level of support. From the outset, President Bush and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld did not send enough troops or resources-not even close-to succeed at the counterinsurgency, the "nation building," that was becoming the goal in the Afghanistan war. (President Bush has since admitted as much, however little attention that part of his legacy-his reluctance to listen to the generals who suggested that the war would cost more money, and require more manpower, than predicted in initial projections-may get in his presidential library and in the history books.) Then, when President Obama and Defense Secretary Gates finally did surge troops and increase resources in Afghanistan, General McChrystal was still forced to ration critical a.s.sets. The closure of Combat Outpost Keating was delayed because most of the available helicopters in country were devoted to Barg-e-Matal. Squadrons and battalions were chronically undermanned; while the Pentagon investigation p.r.o.nounced Melvin Porter of 3-61 Cav "weak" as a leader, we might do well to recall that his commanders were themselves so understaffed when it came to captains that they kept him in place for three extra months because they had no one to replace him with.

By October 3, 2009, President Obama had been commander in chief for eight months, during which period top officials in his White House had been consumed by the politics of their squabbles with the Pentagon, with both the politicians and the Pentagon bra.s.s feeding a beast of dysfunction that did not serve U.S. troops with the professionalism and urgency they deserved. The generals, for their part, were confused as to precisely what the president wanted them to do in Afghanistan and how he saw this war upon which he'd pledged to place a renewed focus. President Obama's first national security adviser, Jim Jones, would ultimately leave his post in 2010 amid grumblings from senior officials over his lack of success in improving relations between the White House and the Pentagon.

That said, no president-neither President Obama nor President Bush before him-could be expected to focus on battle maps of Kunar and Nuristan in order to discern what might be best for the troops in a specific area of operations. The Ranch House, Wanat, Bari Alai-all of these disasters preceded the a.s.sault on Combat Outpost Keating, and all followed the same pattern, in which an overwhelming Taliban force attacked a small, remote U.S. base. It has been said that the United States did not fight a ten-year war in Vietnam; rather, it fought a one-year war ten times in a row. Perhaps the same will one day be said of Afghanistan.

It is not only with the benefit of hindsight that McChrystal's lack of urgency about closing Combat Outpost Keating might seem tragic. George and Brown had been planning for the withdrawal for nearly a year, but McChrystal refused to take the request as seriously as he should have. And while the lack of air a.s.sets would become an obstacle by July, McChrystal's initial considerations were political: he was worried about getting ahead of President Obama, and then about upsetting President Karzai. Realpolitik is not an ideal; it is, instead, the absence of one.

I did not write this book to convey lessons to be learned. I wrote it so that you as a reader (and I as a reporter) might better understand what it is that our troops go through, why they go through it, and what their experience has been like in Afghanistan. There are far superior military minds that can judge what went wrong and what policies might be formulated to guard against future disasters, future Combat Outpost Keatings. But one conclusion I cannot escape is that the saga of Combat Outpost Keating ill.u.s.trates, above all else, the deep-rooted inertia of military thinking. Instead of seriously reconsidering the camp's location, the Army defaulted to its usual mindset: We're already there, let's just fortify the camp a little more. That might be a fine way to go about establishing, say, a new Starbucks in a sketchy neighborhood, but it's beyond glib in this context.

It was easier for me to get to to Forward Operating Base Bostick than it was to get back. The military system is more interested in moving men to the enemy quickly, less interested in pulling them out. Such thinking-"easy to advance, difficult to retreat"-is burned into the military brain. Hence, the outpost was originally put in its precarious location so it would be near the road to facilitate resupply, but it stayed there even after the troops all but stopped using the road, within months of Lieutenant Ben Keating's death. This was a symptom of what President Obama, in May 2012, would refer to as the "How are we going to solve this problem?" mindset, the one that avoids asking instead, "Boy, why is this such a disaster?" Forward Operating Base Bostick than it was to get back. The military system is more interested in moving men to the enemy quickly, less interested in pulling them out. Such thinking-"easy to advance, difficult to retreat"-is burned into the military brain. Hence, the outpost was originally put in its precarious location so it would be near the road to facilitate resupply, but it stayed there even after the troops all but stopped using the road, within months of Lieutenant Ben Keating's death. This was a symptom of what President Obama, in May 2012, would refer to as the "How are we going to solve this problem?" mindset, the one that avoids asking instead, "Boy, why is this such a disaster?"

Unfortunately, the military doesn't have much concept of irony, since the actual definition is so often the opposite of the literal definition of so many actions (a dynamic perfectly captured by Joseph h.e.l.ler). But naming an outpost after a soldier whose very death exemplified why the outpost should not have been there in the first place? That would seem to qualify.

Why, then, did the camp remain where it was? One reason was that the commander who stopped using the roads for resupply, Lieutenant Colonel Chris Kolenda, led an effective force in the region. Although he and his lieutenants discussed moving the outpost up the mountain to a more secure location-as Observation Post Fritsche was; no one was killed there either on October 3, 2009, or before-Kolenda ultimately ruled that the relocation would have rendered his men more vulnerable than they already were. Perhaps that was a fair judgment at that juncture, given the command with which 1-91 Cav controlled its area of operations, but for a different unit, at a different time, under different leadership, the ruling could be second-guessed.

So why did the successful efforts of the 1-91 Cav ultimately prove so ephemeral? In part because, as is true of politics anywhere in the world, the tides of history in Nuristan were turned by individual leaders-men such as Fazal Ahad, who was killed in 2007; Lieutenant Colonel Kolenda and Captain Joey Hutto, who left Afghanistan in 2008; and Captain Rob Yllescas, who was killed later that same year. The vacuum Ahad left behind took time to be filled. Yllescas was never truly replaced; however hard Pecha may have worked, his predecessor's a.s.sa.s.sination had an impact on the way he led. It also, and perhaps even more significantly, drove a larger wedge between the troops of 6-4 Cav and the citizens of the surrounding area. As one Kamdesh resident told me in November 2011, Kamdeshis always felt stuck between the Americans and the insurgents; the one thing they knew for sure was that the latter would be there long after the former were gone.

And here, Lieutenant Colonel Brown's question becomes salient: Where was the Afghan government in all of this? Why didn't it at least try to fill the shoes of Ahad, the Hundred-Man Shura, Kolenda, Hutto, or Yllescas? And if there really was no Afghan capable of a.s.suming a leadership role in Nuristan, then was America always destined to fail there, no matter how many Rob Yllescases were sacrificed at the altar of counterinsurgency?

All that I can tell you with cert.i.tude is that the men and women of 3-71 Cav, the 1-91 Cav, 6-4 Cav, and especially 3-61 Cav deserved better. They are heroes, and they have my appreciation and eternal grat.i.tude. I wish they had a command structure and a civilian leadership that were always worthy of their efforts.

-Jake Tapper July 2012

Acknowledgments

[TK 2 Pages]