We asked if they have a nickname for it: COP Keating, an American outpost trapped in the middle of a hostile valley in Nuristan province.
They didn’t, they replied – didn’t need to. The word Keating (the surname of a first lieutenant who died near here) told them what it was about.
Then Captain Porter interjected: “It’s a little slice of heaven”. That was after a day of about four separate Taliban attacks.
We spent four days on COP Keating, a tiny base close to the village of Kamdesh. It’s sunk next to the most beautiful of valleys, not far from the Pakistani border.
But all around are the hills. And in the hills are the Taliban. When I say Taliban, I am probably wrong. The men who take regular pot shots at Captain Porter and his few dozen men are probably mostly locals. Some might get a few dollars from the Taliban for getting out of bed.
But they never attack when the villagers who work for the Americans are on their base, as – the Americans surmised – they don’t want to hurt people they might know.
It’s safe there, more or less, between 9am and 4pm. Seriously. Life on the base is an agonising wait. There’s little the men can actually do apart from protect themselves. The locals don’t come to them. It’s too dangerous for them to go to the locals.
I kept asking the question: “Why are you here?” and never got an answer that even seemed to convince the respondents themselves.
There are many reasons why they are there: the first is that a civilian provincial reconstruction team decided it was a nice spot, many years ago, for a base. That was when the valley was friendlier and the US was about reconstruction.
Times have changed, and now the soldiers do little bar “force protection” – look after themselves. They say they’re there, sometimes, to interrupt traffic on the road. “It pisses the bad guys off,” one soldier insisted, as militants use it to move weapons.
But there is another, slightly more obtuse reason: if they leave, they hand a propaganda victory to the Taliban. So they stay, and they endure.
A rocket-propelled grenade into the canteen. One into the roof of the barracks. One into the barriers. Taking a piss is dangerous: the tubes that act as urinals are in full view of one of the hills from which insurgents fire, and an Afghan soldier was shot dead there by a sniper.
COP Keating gives you a bleak window onto America’s future in Afghanistan. There is – in all honesty, most soldiers there admit – no real point to the base other than having a base there.
They can’t interact with the people and they can’t do much against the insurgency other then fire a few thousand rounds at it when they think they see its muzzle flash in the hills.
But they are still there, facing local anger, knowing they must magically win over people they can barely ever talk to if they are to achieve much more than a dignified retreat in a few years.
The only other option is to leave, and that is apparently something they are considering at “higher levels”.
We got a very small glimpse at the sort of violence meted out here. One Afghan patrol was returning from a morning patrol when several shots rang out. They passed close: one hit the floor next to our cameraman Stuart Webb, causing fragments of rock to fly up into the leg of a Latvian soldier next to him, who was training the Afghans. He fell over, onto Stuart.
Being on COP Keating makes you careful what you wish for. This is the problem with embeds. It’s not real journalism: you don’t wake up and decide where you want to go, what you want to scrutinise. It’s about putting yourself with a unit and seeing what happens. It’s their wave, you ride it.
And then you have to be honest about why you’re there. People want to watch gunfire and war. They just do. Even the soldiers admit that – admit they watch news most attentively when there’s violence involved.
And if you want to explain to people some of the more complex points about a very tired eight-year-long conflict, you need some exciting footage.
The net result is a very messed up barometer for success: you are spending a lot of time with soldiers, with the basic recognition that you actually need something bad to happen, and knowing the bad things may happen to them.
COP Keating has seen 35 attacks in about two and a half months. That’s one every two to three days. They don’t seem to follow much of a pattern, but they will increase, everyone felt, ahead of Thursday’s election.
We got to leave, but the soldiers do not. And the villagers still have to endure the constant ringing out of gunfire in their idyllic valley.