Matt's Reviews > The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“This new camp in the Kamdesh District would…be surrounded by higher ground…in a cup within the valley’s deepest cleft, ringed by three steep mountains that formed part of the five-hundred-mile-long Hindu Kush mountain range. Blocked off on its northern western, and southern sides by rivers and mountains, it would moreover be a mere fourteen miles distant from the official Pakistan border – a porous boundary that meant little to the insurgents who regularly crossed it to kill Americans and Afghan government officials before taking refuge in caves or in the mountains or returning to their haven across the border. [Combat Outpost Keating] would be one of the most remote outposts in this most remote part of a country that was itself cut off from much of the rest of the world, and the area all around it would be filled with people who wanted to kill those stationed there…”
- Jake Tapper, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor

“They’re the bottom of the barrel, and they know it. Maybe that’s why they call themselves grunts, because a grunt can take it, can take anything. They’re the best I’ve ever seen…The heart and soul.”
- Charlie Sheen as Chris in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986)

When I first heard of Jake Tapper’s The Outpost I was more than a little wary. After all, I thought – perhaps uncharitably – what does a White House correspondent with perfect hair know about crafting a compelling account of a recent battle? These kinds of projects are too easy to get made simply by dint of an author’s name recognition, and I was frankly uninterested in what I suspected might be a television talking-head’s glib, hurriedly-produced, rah-rah portrayal of outnumbered heroes in a mountain outpost.

Well, I can admit when I’m wrong.

The first time I laid hands on a physical copy of The Outpost, I knew there was nothing glib or hurriedly-produced about it. It is, to the contrary, an ambitious work, 614-pages in length, and covers not simply a single battle in the mountains of Afghanistan, but an entire three-year period in the Kamdesh Valley. While the combat scenes are riveting – and occasionally gruesome – this is also an effective, non-preachy case study of America’s forgotten war in Afghanistan, focused on the distant Nuristan Province. The conclusions that are derived from the narrative come not from Tapper – or at least, not wholly from Tapper – but from the men who lived it, the soldiers, from captain on down, at the low end of the military food chain.

The Outpost is divided into three separate sections, corresponding to the outfits who variously manned the base that ultimately came to be called Compat Outpost Keating. This involves a large cast of characters spread among four Army units (3-71 Cav; 1-91 Cav; 6-4 Cav; and 3-61 Cav). For the most part, Tapper does a good job of introducing you to these men, and providing enough backstory for the reader to become invested in their individual stories. Unfortunately, however, Tapper frequently does a poor job with the transitions. While each of the three individual sections are strong, the segues are weak, and many of the officers and soldiers that we meet – and come to care about – end up disappearing from the story via parentheticals or footnotes.

With that said, Tapper’s overall ability to control a sprawling narrative is commendable, as is his ability to distill the lessons to be learned from the lives that were lost.

The tale of Combat Outpost Keating reminded me a lot of Dien Bien Phu in miniature. Like the French in Indochina, the American Army put CO Keating in an unfavorable, hard-to-supply location, nevertheless certain that it could be sustained without problem.

There were, in fact, many problems.

For one, the base outpost was at the bottom of a mountain, surrounded by high ground. It was built in this unfavorable position to be close to the road, but that road soon proved to be useless for purposes of resupply. Instead of moving the enterprise, the Army just kept it where it was, a victim of bureaucratic inertia. With the road unusable, helicopters had to be used to keep food, medicine, and ammunition flowing. However, a base’s placement at the bottom of a mountain in Afghanistan is not conducive to easy helicopter runs. Help – whether that was more men, more ammo, or a medevac – were not close by.

Added to this was a chronic shortage of air support, as helicopters and fix-winged aircraft where shipped to Iraq.

Despite these odds, and despite the fact that CO Keating was always a dangerous place – it was named for a promising young officer killed in a truck accident on the soon-to-be-abandoned road – there were periods when the soldiers garrisoning the base seemed to make real inroads with the local civilian population. Always, though, there were setbacks. A stretch of tranquility could quickly erupt into a flash of violence, leaving desperate American soldiers way out on a limb.

The Outpost covers a three-year, nine-month period from January 2006 to October 2009. Trying to capture the experience of this intimate epic involves a lot of repetition. Reading this can feel like a slog, not because the writing is bad – Tapper’s prose is clear and well-paced, and mostly avoids stretching for grandiloquence – but because that was the reality. These troopers were not unlike Sisyphus, rolling a boulder uphill, only to see it tumble back down. The end of CO Keating came on October 3, 2009, with a dawn attack by hundreds of insurgent fighters. Tapper gives an extremely good, minutely-detailed account of this frenzied battle, where the base was actually overrun for a time. This might not be as good, in the end, as Black Hawk Down, but there are moments when it comes close.

It is clear from the level of detail, the excerpted emails, the personal photographs, that Tapper did a great deal of work with the participants, including over two hundred interviews. Despite this impressive research, the Afghani perspective is almost entirely missing. I don’t say this as a criticism, since it’s not hard to imagine the difficulty of securing face-time with members of a heavily-damaged Nuristan village, much less chatting with anti-American and anti-government forces who are still engaged in an ongoing conflict.

Nonetheless, the result is a solely American story. At times – and not inappropriately – Tapper presents it almost as a memorial. For instance, whenever there is a skirmish or firefight, he always includes – often in a footnote – the names and hometowns of all the fatalities. This bare biographical information is not so different from what you’d see on a cross at Arlington.

The Outpost is most notable for its ability to bring some coherence to the chaos of a mountain gun-battle, the thin air filled with bullets and RPGs and screams of pain. To Tapper’s credit, though, he also bakes a credible critique of the War in Afghanistan into the proceedings. On this front, no one is really spared. The Bush Administration is faulted – often by the soldiers themselves, vehemently – for taking their eye off the ball by deciding to invade Iraq. Whatever the merits of that venture, it certainly cannibalized American forces, leaving the most advanced military force in history short of necessities in the Kamdesh Valley. The Obama Administration is taken to task for promising to make Afghanistan a priority, but then getting distracted by public fights with the Pentagon.

In the end, Tapper’s final point is well taken: We owe the men and women of America’s military better decision-making. When a democracy goes to war, there has to be a worthy, well-defined goal, and that goal has to be attainable. By the time that CO Keating fell, it is arguable that neither of those preconditions were present. As America’s lingering experience in Afghanistan limps to its now-foregone conclusion, it is worth reading about and remembering the experiences of CO Keating, in the hope that maybe, just maybe, we’ll ask the vital question before starting the next war.

The question, of course: Is this worth dying for?

In other words, before we send troops into harm’s way, we need to make very sure that they are doing so for a cause that is worthy of their sacrifice. It does no disservice to the men who gave their lives – or who had their lives changed – to say that clinging to CO Keating was not worth the price that was paid.