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We want to welcome to VeteransRadio today Travis Harmon, Staff Sergeant in the Army
National Guard, wrote an interesting story, a remote outpost fighting with the U.S. Army
in Afghanistan.
But it's more than just his story, it's also a bit of his father's story.
Travis, welcome to VeteransRadio.
Thank you for having me.
Well, this is a bit of an unusual story and a number of fronts.
You weren't the prototypical recruit the Army was looking for.
I think you're a self-described young skater punk at the time.
So tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up in Pennsylvania and this
decision about joining the Army.
Okay, I grew up in Central Pennsylvania around Williamsport, known for the Little League
World Series.
So there's a lot of farming communities around Williamsport and I grew up from one in Hughesville.
Basically, 9-11 happened.
My father had joined in the 80s and got out when I was born.
So I always had a family tradition of military service.
My grandfather was in, a few of my uncles were in.
My older brother joined the Air Force when I was around 10.
So I had a lot of family influence in joining and once 9-11 happened, I was only in eighth
grade, but I hoped that one day I would be able to go and fight and my dream came true.
Well it was not only yours, but talk to us about your relationship with your father,
Dean, and how sort of all those family influences led you to say, hey, I'm going to enlist.
Right.
So my father joined the Marines in the 80s and like I said, he ETF'd out after I was
born.
He joined the Army NAFTA, PA Army National Guard in the early 90s while I was a little
kid.
So I grew up seeing this military service and we would watch war movies together and
that made it even more exciting for me.
So as time grew on, I kind of lost interest in it, but my dad would talk to me at random
about it.
Then once 9-11 happened, he enlisted in the PA National Guard again.
And I saw that as my opportunity to kind of, we never had a really close relationship while
I was growing up, so that was kind of my way of earning his acceptance by enlisting with
him.
And you then enlisted in the Pennsylvania Army National Guard.
Correct.
It's kind of, that's a whole different process after 9-11.
People who are familiar with the Guard pre 9-11, you know, it's a different training
tempo, it's a different op tempo.
As you got in, this wasn't the National Guard that your dad was in in the 90s.
Did he talk to you about, hey, this is a whole different op tempo here?
Right.
Yeah, so I initially wanted to go active duty Army, and he talked to me and was like, you
know, maybe you should go PA Guard for a little bit.
It's one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer.
If you like it, you could go active duty.
If you don't, then you're stuck with your one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer.
But like you said, the op tempo was completely different.
My unit had not, they had deployed to Germany in, I believe it was 04, and then the PA Army
Guard 2nd Brigade deployed to Ramadi, Iraq in 06, and my father went with them.
And a lot of the guys from my unit went with them as well.
So they got back and while I was in basic training and advanced training, and once
I got home, within a week's time, I got orders to go to Afghanistan.
So you did some of your training at Fort Benning and Fort Gordon in Georgia, a whole
lot different than Hughesville, Pennsylvania, wasn't it?
Oh, absolutely.
I, I would prior to that, I'd never flown.
I'd only left the state once to go to New Jersey to the beach.
So it was definitely an experience for me.
And was this, did you feel like this is part of what my dad wanted me to experience, maybe
wanted me to grow up a bit?
Because I'm sure everybody who goes in goes through this and goes, I'm not the same kid
I was a year ago.
Right.
Yeah.
So like any son and father, he was trying to give me advice, you know, pull your head
out of your butt.
We've all got that one.
Yeah.
Or given it.
Yeah.
So once I did that, you know, he talked to me about joining and I decided it was probably
for the best because I had no, you know, aspirations or anything I wanted to do.
So yeah, he talked me into it.
And then at the time, band of brothers had come out on HBO and my grandfather fought
in World War II.
So I was very interested in that.
And I watched that and that was kind of my deciding factor of joining.
I, you know, I said, I want to have a band of brothers like that.
I want to go into combat.
I want to serve my country.
Well, as you say, you go through your training and then, you know, like a week later, you
get orders to go to Afghanistan.
How did that impact you, the family, your dad, Dean?
So my parents had divorced when I was 10.
But as far as my grandmother, his mother and that side of the family, they were very worried
for both of us.
They were happy that he was going with me because he also received orders to deploy.
We were in the same battalion.
He was in Alpha Company.
I was in the headquarters element of the Hunter and Third Armour.
And yeah, so the family was worried, but at the same time, my mom came to me and said,
I'm glad he's going with you.
It's really an unusual situation where one deploys, even with a family member, a brother
or a sister, a mother or a father, really unusual.
Did you know anybody else who was doing that type of deployment?
Not so much parent-child relationships, but brother, brother, brother, sister, sister,
sister, you know, relationship, sibling relationships.
That was more common.
I think we came across one other father-son duo that was over there at the same time we
were.
So this is what, 2009 when you were in Afghanistan?
2008.
Tell us about the conditions of fighting in Afghanistan at that point.
So when I first got there, it wasn't too bad.
Things were pretty light as far as attacks.
Once the old unit ripped out of the outpost we were on, it progressively got worse and
worse.
The month of April, we were hit pretty much every day, whether it be mortars, attacks,
you know, IEDs, what have you.
Yeah, so, and the interesting part was my father was stationed at Bagram and he could
go into the talk and see what was going on at my outpost while I was getting attacked.
What was happening at the time?
So let's expand on that.
And the title of the book is Remote Outpost, Fighting with the US Army in Afghanistan.
And we're talking to Travis Arman.
Travis, explain to us the outpost you were at and give our veteran radio listeners a
little bit of insight of what that was about.
Okay.
So the outpost was called Combat Outpost Nigel and it was in the, I believe it was at the
top of the Alashang Valley.
It was at the top or the bottom where the Alashang and Alangar valleys met.
We were put there to kind of stop Taliban traffic coming back and forth through Mederlam.
Because Fah Mederlam was our main base that we operate out of, but 90% of the time we
were at the outpost.
So generally we would see combat while deployed on the outpost, not so much outside the wire.
It became, it started to become pretty heavy where we would get fire outside the wire,
but the majority of it was they were trying to overrun us.
And talk about, again, there are a lot of people who are listening, Travis, who don't
understand what these outposts were in Afghanistan.
This is not a big formal base.
There's not a lot of people.
And give us some sense of the size and the protection that is available in these remote
outposts.
Okay.
So we had one guard tower initially.
It was called Punisher Base or Punisher Tower and it oversaw a village that sat right across
the road from us.
There was a road and then a little bit of a creek.
And across that was the village.
I can't remember the name of it.
I'll top my head.
But yeah, so the outpost itself was encircled with three rows of Constantine wire and then
claymore mines and trip flayers.
There were some Hesco barriers that, you know, the barriers filled with rocks and dirt to
try and stop bullets and shrapnel.
But we had very limited sources up on the outposts.
In terms of manpower, we had a platoon of about 20 guys ourselves.
And then the Afghan army had about 20 soldiers as well.
I mean, this time when you're in this rotation, that platoon is made up of all Pennsylvania
National Guard members?
Yes.
Now, the unique part about our platoon, we were an infantry platoon.
I joined as a radio operator and I was assigned to this infantry platoon as their RTO.
But the unique thing about our platoon was it was a thrown together platoon.
So we were infantry on paper, but realistically our jobs were, you know, we had cooks, we
had mechanics, we had artillery guys and a handful of infantry guys.
But the majority of us were from different, you know, occupational specialties.
And that was fairly common, I think, as the war wore on and they kept kind of having to
put units together to man up.
And so these weren't guys that you necessarily drilled with on a regular basis.
Right.
I would say only about two of them were from my actual unit that I drilled with.
The rest were from throughout the state.
So now you find yourself in Afghanistan at this remote outpost.
What's going on through your mind between that image that you had prior to joining up
and the reality that you're now facing?
So it didn't really hit me until about the first weekend and I was at the main base of
Bob Mederlam.
And I saw a Medevac helicopter was landing and they were pulling body bags off of Afghan
troops.
And they were refueling, re-arming the kaih was that were coming in the Blackhawks.
And you know, that's when it really sunk in that this is real.
This isn't some movie that I've watched growing up.
Like I need to keep my stuff together.
I need to keep my head on a swivel, you know.
And once the first time outside the wire, I thought I was going to be dead within seconds
because I was just not ready for what was to come.
And I think that's the point at which fear, questioning, do I have the stuff to do what
needs to be done for my buddies?
All that's playing hard on you, isn't it?
Right, yeah.
So it's a lot of stress, obviously.
You don't want to let your team down.
You want to make it home yourself.
You want to make sure your buddies make it home with you and you want to accomplish your
mission at the same time.
And you know, as it wore on or went on, I kind of just wrote myself off as dead already.
And that took away a lot of the fear for me.
Just mentally saying, hey, this is going to happen, so quit worrying about it?
Exactly, yes.
And the horrific realities of warfare did it come to this outpost?
Tell us about that.
The warfare at the outpost?
Yes.
So it was pretty, like I said, in the beginning, it wasn't so bad.
A couple of pop shots here and there, maybe an RPG fired at us.
But as this time passed, it became, we would have to start flying up to the outpost versus
taking humvees because the IEDs were so thick.
And there's so many of them planted along our route.
We only had about one or two routes we could take by humvee to get there.
So they began to fly us in.
Well, when they began to fly us in, they'd be waiting for it to land on the helipad.
And they would start shooting at the helicopter.
I came back from pass in Qatar in the beginning of July.
And our helicopter couldn't land on the outpost because it was taking fire and the outpost
was taking fire.
So we had to circle around a couple of times.
And we did a combat landing and got off just in time to get attacked again.
Tell us a little bit about some of the injuries and casualties associated with the 20 guys
and the Afghan troops up there at Outpost Najil.
So we had one of our soldiers, the PA Guard soldiers, take some shrapnel from, I believe
it was a Chinese rocket, came in and hit the entry control point that he was manning.
Because at this point we had built up a couple other towers to basically secure the outpost
a little better because it was getting to the point where they were getting pretty close
to getting inside the wire.
So we decided to push back the perimeter.
And in doing so they started figuring us out even more.
And it seemed like we had somebody, one of the Terps, or not one of the Terps, but one
of the Afghan workers on the outpost was an insider working for the Taliban.
But in terms of other casualties, usually the Afghan soldiers took the brunt of it.
It seemed there were multiple casualties there.
Some killed, some wounded, shot through the legs, shot other places.
It was just they seemed to be bullet magnets in my eyes.
Well, they certainly probably were from the Taliban's viewpoint too that those were the
traitors, if you will.
As the radio operator at the outpost, again, give the civilian listening here some understanding
of what you're doing during these attacks and what the role for the radio operator is.
So if we were on the outpost and we would be attacked, it was my job.
I was also a UAV operator, a drone operator, a handheld drone drone.
And it was my job when we started getting attacked to set this drone up, get it in the
air to see where the Taliban is.
So that was one of my duties as the operator, the radio operator.
But generally on a daily basis, I would have to go around and check every radio in the
morning, check all the radios before patrol, make sure they had the right, you know, frequent
season whatnot, they were encrypted the right way.
And then I would go out on patrol with everyone and take my, you know, my radio with the giant
antenna that you see in like the Vietnam movies.
And that's what that reminded me of a lot was Vietnam.
Like, obviously, I'm too young to have fought in Vietnam, but the landscape and just the
patrols on foot reminded me a lot of movies I watched as a kid.
When you're over in Afghanistan, how old are you?
When I'm there, I'm 20.
And how old is your dad about?
He is at that time he would be 40.
And he had a different job.
You mentioned he was back at Bagram.
The whole time you're up at the outpost, is he down at Bagram?
Yeah.
So he was the unit movement officer for the battalion.
He was the NTO in charge, not the actual officer, but he was in charge of all the helicopter
routes for our battalion and our supply movements and troop movements.
So you know, he, I used to joke with him and say, you have a cushy desk job because he
had a desk and he was in a building with air conditioning and there I was sleeping in a
tent with 10 other guys on the side of a mountain.
Remember, you're 20 years younger too.
So let me ask this part of your getting involved here was to demonstrate something to your dad
or to create a different relationship with your dad.
How did this experience over in Afghanistan that you both experienced in a different way
ultimately impact the relationship?
If anything, it brought us closer together.
Not only were we father and son in a closer relationship, but we were now brothers, that
band of brotherhood that I wanted.
And I never thought I would find it was my father, but it turned out that it did.
And even when we came home, we would swap war stories.
And you know, he was in Iraq and prior to Afghanistan, I would ask him how did it compare
to my deployment versus your deployment, the combat and different scenarios that we had
been in.
And yeah, so it actually brought us really close.
I asked this of a lot of guys.
As you know, the military Travis is having a hell of a recruiting problem, right?
Military branches.
But your dad would have encouraged you to join up and participate and some of that's
family history, some of it's his own experience from being in the Marines.
As you reflect back and when it's time for you to have a son or a daughter, a niece or
a nephew, come ask Uncle Trav, hey, I'm thinking of joining in.
What do you think about that?
What's your view on it now?
My thoughts now are my first thought would be no, please don't.
But then that would retract and you know, it's a great career if you make it one, you get
out of it, what you put into it, they're great benefits, you know, it's hard to navigate
the VA afterwards.
But you know, once you figure it out or find somebody that can figure it out for you, you
know, all the benefits are there for you.
It's great in that aspect.
What I would say as a word of advice is be careful what job you pick or know the job
you're going into.
And you know, I think that's good advice for anything in life, right?
Do you do a little more study, do a little more due diligence, look into things, you
know, see what might be useful if you only spend two or four or six years in what might
be useful afterwards, right?
I think that's what you're kind of saying.
Yeah, so in my entire 13 years in the PA Guard, I did four different jobs.
I was a radio operator, a signal support NCO, an infantryman and a supply sergeant when
I was medically retired in 2018.
You know, I hated being a supply sergeant and I loved being an RTO and an infantryman.
So I mean, it's a hard life and it's hard on your body and your mind, but it's very
rewarding.
Well, and you developed that band of brothers that you were looking for, you probably still
have a bunch of guys who you're connected with that shared your experiences in a way
that nobody else can really relate, I suppose.
Oh yeah, they're my family, everyone I served with.
And like I said, even though my father was on the outpost with me, I still consider him
a brother in a sense.
And you know, we have a bond that I feel can never be broken.
While we're talking to Travis Harman, he wrote remote outposts fighting with the US Army
in Afghanistan.
It's published by CaseMate.
Travis, if people want to read the book and learn more, how do they do that?
So there's several ways.
You can go to my website, www.travisharman.com.
It's spelled H-A-R-M-A-N.
Or you can go to CaseMate Publishers and Google, or search remote outposts.
You can just Google my name.
You can Google remote outposts, Travis Harman.
It'll pop up.
It's on Amazon, Barnes & Noble.
It's available pretty much everywhere.
Well we really appreciate not only your service, but taking some time to spend with us here
on Veterans Radio today.
Travis, really a great job and we're glad that we got a chance to speak.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me.
And I want to thank everybody for listening to Veterans Radio today.
I am Jim Fawcone.
It's been a pleasure to be your host.
I'm a Veterans Disability Lawyer at Legal Help for Veterans and you can reach us at
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And until next time, you are dismissed.
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