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

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 had 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,