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The
Outpost
Like many habitues of antiwar.com,
I generally do not find much time for sitting down and reading a book since I
have become accustomed to obtaining most of my information in easily digestible
bites over the internet. This year for Christmas I received a
copy of The Outpost by ABC’s White
House correspondent Jake Tapper, which was particularly daunting as it is nearly
700 meticulously researched pages in length. I was given the book by my daughter
because it tells the tale, among many others, of a friend of hers from high
school who went to Afghanistan with the Fourth Infantry Division and was killed
there. My daughter had seen her friend on his last home leave and he had
described the base in Nuristan province that he was posted to as a death trap
where he and his comrades were attacked every day with little ability to defend
themselves. He predicted that he would not be coming home again. He was
twenty-one years old when he died.
The book jacket’s
subtitle is "An Untold Story of American Valor," which I presume to be a
marketing blurb originating with the publisher, because the book is much more
nuanced in its message than that would suggest. It is, in fact, one of the most
powerful antiwar books that I have ever read precisely because it does not wrap
itself into an explicit antiwar theme. Tapper explains in an epilogue that he
set out to "better understand what our troops go through, why they go through
it, and what their experience has been like in Afghanistan." He tells his tale
dispassionately, inexorably demonstrating the human cost of a war that need not
have been fought on a small stage where blunder after blunder killed quite
ordinary Americans who under other circumstances, in another place and time,
might have been our next door neighbors. The book describes in detail the
devastating wounds that kill and maim a succession of soldiers posted to the
indefensible Combat Outpost Keating, located inexcusably in a depression
overlooked by mountains on three sides. He follows the wounded through their
hospitalizations, writes about their grieving families, and chronicles the Post
Traumatic Stress Disorder and even suicides that afflict many of them when they
try unsuccessfully to return to civilian life.
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