Jake Tapper, the journalist and CNN news anchor, was anxious. “What did you think?” he asked. “Did we do right by your son? Did we do right by your husband?” He was speaking with the mothers and wives of the men who lost their lives at the Battle of Kamdesh after the families gathered to watch a screening of the film, The Outpost, based on the nonfiction book he wrote that resolutely captures the turmoil of modern warfare.
They assured him the film did right by their loved ones, a relief for the journalist.
Tapper’s obsession with telling their story began more than a decade ago, on Oct. 3, 2009. That day, a small unit of American soldiers were isolated at the vulnerable Combat Outpost Keating, a remote post surrounded by the Hindu Kush Mountains in eastern Afghanistan. They were swarmed by Taliban soldiers in the hundreds — it became the bloodiest engagement of the 19-year ongoing war in Afghanistan.
The unit of men who fought that day remains one of the most decorated units of the Afghan War.
“My son Jack was born Oct. 2, 2009, and the attack was the next day,” Tapper explained. “So sometime in the haze of that week, in the recovery room at the hospital, I was sitting there holding my son and watching the news on a hospital TV and hearing about eight other sons taken from this planet.”
“Even though I had covered the war in Iraq, I had done a little time in Baghdad, and even though I had covered the war in Afghanistan from the South Lawn of the White House, I didn’t really have a personal connection to any of that,” Tapper said. “There was something poignant in that moment: I had my son now. I had a son. Who are these eight sons that were just taken from this Earth? That realization set me on a journey to try and find out who they were and why they perished.”
Telling the story became a fixation for him. “I look back on it now, and I can’t even believe how understanding my wife was about the fact that I would come home from being White House correspondent for ABC News, and I would immediately start working on this book. And I would work on it all night, and then, I would work on it on weekends and holidays. It became an obsession because I wanted to share these stories of these men and women,” he explained. The book, The Outpost: An Untold Story of American Valor, was published in 2012.
Tapper said that in his reporting and talking with countless soldiers who had given up careers and pampered lives to enlist, he began to question his sense of purpose. After one particular interview session with soldiers who had served at Keating, Tapper said, “I came back home, and I said to my wife, ‘I am so selfish. Everything I do, I do for the advancement of my career. Everything I do is in the service of me. That’s the opposite of these guys.’”
Tapper continued, “She said something that was so meaningful to me then, and I quote her to her all the time today: ‘You can tell their stories. You can tell their stories.’ And that became a very important moment in my life because then it became, ‘Yeah, I have this platform, and I can do whatever I want to do.’ It’s important that one of the things I do with it is tell these stories because, otherwise, people won’t know them.”
Tapper’s story of the outpost has become a deeply moving, vivid film. The dialogue between the soldiers as you get to know them is raw and authentic.
The battle scenes, which begin before dawn and go well into the evening, are heart-stopping and brutal. Hundreds of Taliban fighters swarm down the mountains and breach the command post.
Everything about the film is real, from the cruelty of war to the soldiers’ imperfect relationships and flaws (that disappear the moment the battle begins) to how these men, outnumbered five to one, fight to hold their post. The cast includes Orlando Bloom as Capt. Ben Keating, Milo Gibson as Capt. Robert Yllescas, Cory Hardrict as Sgt. Vernon Martin, and Scott Eastwood as Staff Sgt. Clint Romesha.
Despite the star cast, the central character is the outpost itself. The place immerses you when you’re first introduced to it. You experience what the soldiers who served there experienced as they lay in the dark, only to wake up, look around, and find themselves surrounded by three vast mountains where the enemy will be able to have the high-ground advantage at all times.
Throughout the film, you feel an eerie sense of foreboding and doom with everything that has to do with the outpost. It is the very real, very raw story of the war in Afghanistan.
“The odds were so against this [film] being anything successful. I mean, there’s kind of this impression in Hollywood, no one wants to see a war movie. People are over the war in Afghanistan,” Tapper said. Ultimately, they were wrong. It immediately shot up to the No. 1 film slot on iTunes for its first few weeks. It is also critically acclaimed, holding an incredible 92% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie will stream on Netflix beginning Oct. 1.
It’s an incredible story, one that deserves to be told and must be told. Tapper has done right by these soldiers in the telling of their amazing story.
