The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor by Jake Tapper

the end of the Earth here, and for the love of God, the mountains of the Hindu Kush were windy. He was inclined to give the soldiers letters of reprimand—still a slap in the face, but one that might keep them in uniform.
    Keating discussed his investigation and his thinking with Fenty, who pushed him to make a tougher ruling. Keating suspected that part of what motivated the squadron commander was a desire to impress his bosses, and he resented Fenty for putting him in that position. He resented him even more when he overheard him telling Major Richard Timmons—the squadron XO, and thus the middleman between Fenty and Keating—that he wondered if Keating had the “moral courage” to render such a judgment.
    It would be hard to imagine a remark that could have insulted Keating more.

“This Whole Thing Is a Bad Idea”
     
    T hey set us up, Captain Frank Brooks thought to himself.
    On April 29, Brooks had led the Barbarians into Chalas, a village in the Chowkay Valley. They’d been inserted at dawn a few days before, near some colorful poppy fields, their bright flowers all ready for the opium harvest. After surveilling the area for a couple of days, the Barbarians were ready to engage with the elders. Netzel and his men from Able Troop were watching their backs, having trudged half a mile east of the Barbarians’ observation post to get a better view of the village.
    Brooks and a handful of men from his headquarters element—fire-support officer Lieutenant Erik Jorgensen, his radio man, and two troops who were pulling security—walked down from the observation post to the edge of the hillside village. An Afghan man met them there and took them to the middle level of Chalas, where the buildings were on stilts and looked like oversized steps, to see the seven or so elders. They were all so weatherbeaten and sunburned that it was impossible to guess which of them might be forty years old and which seventy. Sitting on logs and chairs in a spot where a pair of trails converged, the two groups talked for about two hours with the aid of an interpreter. The elders provided some basic history of their village.
    “Are you Soviets?” one of the villagers finally asked.
    The Barbarians looked at one another.
    “No,” they explained, “we’re Americans, and we’re here on behalf of the government of Afghanistan.”
    “The government of Afghanistan?” the elders remarked. “What is that?”
    The Barbarians spent the next fifteen or twenty minutes going over everything from the Soviets’ withdrawal from Afghanistan to the 9/11 attacks to the Northern Alliance to the new Kabul government. After that, they moved on to the topic of the cultivation of poppy, used in opium production. The village elders denied growing any poppy, even though the surrounding hillsides were blanketed with it. The Americans noted that there was nothing wrong with their eyesight, and they weren’t idiots. The Chalas elders ultimately admitted that they grew the stuff but insisted they didn’t sell it to the Taliban—just to “normal” narco-traffickers, they said.
    The Americans accepted this.
    They next talked about the insurgents in the valley. The elders took the general party line: “Security is good here, we keep the fighters out ourselves, we don’t need your help.”
    Before leaving, Brooks had his interpreter ask one of the elders if he could recommend a better route for them to take up the mountain to return to their camp. The trip down had taken them three hours. The elder told them to follow a drainage ditch up the hill and even offered to guide them. They ended up sucking wind up the trail as they watched the elder, who looked to be about sixty years old, churn along as if he were out on a Sunday stroll. The ditch turned out to lead almost directly back to their observation post. When they arrived there, they thanked the old man, who quickly disappeared.
    Home again in their temporary digs, Brooks and his men started to unwind.