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> > > EAGER FOR WAR

Twilight gathered across the live-fire training range in Germany as Chosen Company prepared for war. Paratroopers fired their weapons in a simulated combat exercise. A bank of fog rolled in out of nowhere, obscuring what they could see. Matt Myer watched as the pall drifted over the training range.

The paratroopers sensed that the drill would be ending because the weather had turned bad. But Myer instructed them to keep going. This is important training. The enemy they would face in Afghanistan could attack at any time, any place. The soldiers would not have the luxury of choosing the weather or the terrain where they would fight. So they couldn’t let it matter now.

You fight where you have to, and the paratroopers must learn to adapt.

As the training for combat progressed, the new captain leading Chosen Company, twenty-eight-year-old Matt Myer, felt lucky. The virtue of serving in the 173rd Brigade meant that commanders virtually had their pick of leading West Point graduates and experienced noncommissioned officers. One of his new lieutenants, Matt Ferrara, had graduated near the top of his class. His company sergeant, Scott Beeson, had jumped into Panama in 1989 and then did a second combat jump during the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The reality was that Myer felt spoiled as Chosen’s company commander. Every sergeant first class leading a platoon in his company had earned a coveted Ranger tab. A lot of his sergeants and specialists already had combat experience. In fact, probably half of Chosen Company had been to combat at least once before this deployment. As a result Myer felt like he commanded a high-caliber group of soldiers going into the vital training cycle. Myer himself had seen combat while leading a platoon for the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq. He and his men were working the fringes of an operation that led to the capture of the fugitive Iraqi president, Saddam Hussein, near Tikrit, Iraq, in December of 2003—one of the high points for a war that within a year or two would begin spinning out of control.

But Myer’s personal journey into the Army was different from a lot of his peers. In some ways the slender six-foot Army brat was kind of an accidental soldier, although he certainly had the pedigree as the child of an Army colonel, grandson of an Army general who served in Vietnam, and great-grandson of an Army 1st sergeant who fought in World War I. Matt’s father and grandfather were both West Point Military Academy graduates. Matt was born in an Army hospital at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

But for all the lineage, Myer was never passionate about the Army as a child. He neither dreamed of joining nor felt pressure to carry on any kind of military family tradition, although that heritage certainly shaped his formative years. He and his two older sisters and younger brother moved frequently with their father’s changing Army duties, living in North Carolina, California, New York, Missouri, and Virginia. Like other Army children, he learned to easily make and shed friends.

Lacrosse was his favorite sport in high school, where Matt earned B-pluses and A-minuses and was a pretty easygoing adolescent. He entered his sophomore year largely clueless about where his life might go until his father gently suggested West Point.

For Matt it seemed like something to try, and it was, after all, a world he had known since childhood. But it proved to be an academic stretch at first because of his less-than stellar SAT scores. Matt was placed on a waiting list, using an Army scholarship to attend a Virginia state school for a year before starting his four full years at the Academy. The vaunted institution overlooking the Hudson River pulsed with an intensity and rigor that challenged the young cadet who was by nature restrained and nonconfrontational. And the legendary setting where the likes of Grant, Patton, and Eisenhower had studied was lost on the freshman—Matt didn’t really care about any of that.

But he adjusted, built a coterie of friends, grew more disciplined in his studies, and saw his performance improve. Just as importantly, he appreciated how his future was being shaped, his career guaranteed. He took solace in the knowledge that top-of-the-class excellence didn’t always equate to good leadership. Some of the Army’s biggest stars, Grant and Patton among them, struggled at the Academy. Matt left in spring of 2001 with an academic rating in the bottom two-thirds of his class.

When he arrived in Vicenza with his wife, Laura, who was four months pregnant, he accepted a job as operations officer for the battalion. Within three months he was in command of Chosen Company.

Myer was a quiet, unflappable leader. There would be times in the months of deployment ahead when his effort to radiate toughness wore thin for some of the soldiers. But the Chosen Few largely grew to respect him as their company commander, and he would prove fearless in combat.

In the waning months of 2006, Chosen Company focused on basic principles of infantry—fire and maneuver. Putting out a wall of steel toward the enemy to keep them pinned down and occupied as paratroopers advanced on the battlefield.

The concept of “bounding” was a vital part of infantry tactics. A group of three or four soldiers lays down relentless fire as a second group of roughly the same size maneuvers—bounds—forward to gain advantage. The rushing element then takes up position to unleash more accurate fire so the first group can move. The first one bounds forward, then the other. Back and forth. Each fueling the other’s advance, feeding off the other’s aggression until they close in and destroy the enemy.

The battalion would pile into a convoy of buses for the long trip through Austria and into Germany and four weeks of live-fire training at the Joint Multinational Training Command in Grafenwöhr, Germany, northwest of Nuremburg, where they would fire at pop-up silhouette targets while they negotiated different courses. Or they would do four weeks of training exercises against other soldiers playing the role of enemy forces at an old Nazi military training site in Hohenfels southwest of Nuremberg. On the way up to Germany the troops would always stop at a world-famous McDonald’s in the Austrian Alps with a spectacular view.

The trips were during the fall and winter of 2006–2007, and during the first two training periods at Grafenwöhr, when they were preparing to go to the more urban Iraq, the training largely revolved around operating and fighting out of armored Humvees or practicing how to clear enemy forces out of buildings. They would do drills on procedures if a convoy of trucks came under attack. They’d call in helicopters and learn to coordinate air support with vehicles on the ground. It was military operations in city terrain.

Bill Ostlund put a high premium on live-fire training—drills conducted with live ammunition. He and his command sergeant major, Bradley Meyers, constantly critiqued technique and compared unit performances. Matt Myer pushed the live-fire drills even further with Chosen Company. Through the winter of 2006–2007 he had his men train from early morning into the night every day, six days a week.

Myer wanted the weapon that each man carried to eventually feel like a natural extension of the body, as if muscle and sinew flowed directly into the rifle so that wielding it came as easily and naturally as a handshake. He wanted the firing of a gun to be done without a shred of hesitation.

In the fight that lay ahead an enemy could not be permitted to gain advantage in the moments before aircraft or artillery support arrived. The enemy must immediately pay a price, be set back on their heels. It meant meeting enemy gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades with American gunfire and grenade launchers, standing and fighting as a group, rapidly pouring out a deadly volume of controlled fire in the first “mad minute” after being attacked. Matt Myer talked about creating a “lane of violence,” quickly drawing blood for blood.

Ostlund likewise demanded company commanders instill this concept in their men.

We have to make the men very comfortable shooting their weapon very quickly. Your job is to know when to pull the trigger. Your job is to bring violence upon the enemy.

So Myer and Beeson prowled the assault lanes during the live-fire exercises at Grafenwoehr using handheld controls to trigger pop-up targets so they could assess each soldier’s split-second decisions. Myer would scribble his assessments down in a personal journal: 2nd Platoon’s 1st Squad, “Look at what you are shooting”; 2nd Platoon’s 2nd Squad, “Shoot, don’t talk”; 2nd Platoon’s 1st Squad again, “Bounds too long.”

He did the same with platoon leaders: 2nd Platoon’s Lieutenant Devon George: “Good insert… cover!… take control”; 1st Platoon’s Lieutenant Matt Ferrara: “Practice more initiative… provide your platoon energy/be proactive… build platoon cohesion, always ‘we,’ not ‘you guys.’”

Parachute training was carried out at NATO’s Aviano Air Base about ninety miles northwest of Vicenza. The paratroopers were also trained in battlefield medicine that was a notch higher than rank-and-file US Infantry soldiers. Not only were they instructed in assessing wounds, applying field dressings, and using tourniquets, but they also learned how to administer intravenous fluids and, in fact, carried needles and IV fluids with them at all times in a small field medical kit. Always the crucial lesson was to control bleeding and replenish lost fluids, the two keys to keeping a wounded soldier alive long enough to be medevacked to a field hospital.

Even after returning to Vicenza from Germany, lessons continued without the guns. Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale would take 1st Platoon’s 1st Squad down to the athletic field on the base in Vicenza, a place they called the North Forty, popular for tackle football games. They would do walk-throughs, reacting to enemy contact. The focus was always on laying down suppressive fire immediately. Silvernale became impressed with how willing and focused his soldiers were about the lessons, sergeants like James Takes or privates like Justin Kalenits, Scott Derry, Joe Lancour, or Ananthachai Nantakul. Nantakul, twenty-two, was half African American, half Thai, and spoke fluent German; the soldiers called him “Nanny” or “Nancy” for short. Silvernale was proud to see that some of his men—Takes, Kalenits, and Lancour—were proving to be excellent marksmen.

Kyle Silvernale was born in Spokane, Washington, but when he was in junior high, the family moved to Alaska, which proved to be a land of adventure for a teenager. He joined the Army in part as a patriotic response to the 9/11 attacks, chose Airborne, and then was sent to South Korea, where he served with the only US Army platoon working inside the Demilitarized Zone between North and South Korea. When he re-enlisted and couldn’t get assigned to Fort Richardson in Alaska near his family, he chose the 173rd Airborne. Silvernale was a big man, at six-feet-three, 210 pounds, and his squad members loved him.

Physical conditioning was another area of intense focus, pushing soldiers to the brink of exhaustion, a real “ass whoopin’,” as Scott Beeson would say. In Vicenza they ran twenty-five miles a week, taking various routes through the city to the top of Mount Berico, where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to a peasant six centuries before. On the summit there was a magnificent Baroque chapel more than three hundred years old.

To keep disruption of the Italian neighborhood streets to a minimum, the paratroopers would head out in small running groups beginning around six in the morning. Scott Derry, for all of his prowess on the baseball field in high school, was never much of a long-distance runner and would fall back as 1st Squad headed out for a run. It could make him a prime target for an angry harangue from a team leader. But that was never Sergeant James Takes’s style; instead, Takes would begin running side-by-side with Derry, the team sergeant pounding along with this five-feet-eight protégé, making conversation about anything, about life in general. It was as if the problem wasn’t lack of stamina for Derry but rather some other issue on the private’s mind. All they had to do was talk it out and he’d run better.

James Takes was another one of Chosen Company’s lost boys. Like so many others, he came from a broken home and struggled as a teenager growing up in Danville, Virginia, never finishing high school. When the Marines told him they had filled their monthly quota of applicants who had only a high school graduation equivalency certificate, Takes walked into an Army recruiting office and signed up. A trim six feet tall and handsome, with a strong score on his military entrance exam, Takes was accepted into the Old Guard, the Army’s 3rd Infantry Regiment based outside Washington, DC, most notably tasked with guarding the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery, providing military funeral escorts, and serving as the official ceremonial unit and escort for the president. Takes was one of the soldiers who conducted the rifle-fire salutes during the funeral proceedings. He remembers being severely hung over during the George W. Bush inauguration when he and other members of the regiment were called on to sit in their dress blue uniforms directly behind the Bush family during the swearing-in ceremony. Sweat was pouring off Takes, and he was just praying no one would notice.

But Takes loved the Army and found it to be a world where he could excel. He took every course and strived for every badge he could find. He earned the Old Guard’s black and tan buff strap, went to Airborne school, sniper school, and even barber school. The one thing he hadn’t earned was combat duty. He was serving on a burial detail for soldiers who had died in combat and felt it was his time to experience war. After three years in the Old Guard he transferred to the 173rd Airborne Brigade and Chosen Company in 2006 as a sergeant.

As the time to go to war grew near, commanders found themselves wrestling with issues that were never a factor for the generations of warfighters who came before them.

Company First Sergeant Scott Beeson was shocked to find out perhaps half of Chosen Company was on antidepressants or anti-anxiety drugs, often prescribed for depression or posttraumatic stress disorder. He was particularly upset that he didn’t know this.

There were advances in technology that had never before been a factor for commanders. The new iPhone would go on the market in June. Digital cameras and editing software made it easy for soldiers to create videos. When it became clear that paratroopers were embracing all of this technology, their commander, Bill Ostlund, at first tried to tamp it down. But he finally gave up. The result was that soldiers would be able to assemble footage of anything they pleased with their digital cameras and laptops. There would be hundreds of videos that captured Chosen Company at war.

When word arrived during training in Germany that their deployment was unexpectedly shifting from Iraq to Afghanistan, Ostlund switched up the training that very night in an effort to replicate conditions in Afghanistan, ordering a battalion-wide assault on three objectives.

A lot of them hadn’t been too crazy about going to Iraq anyway. Too many roadside bombs in that country were taking off legs and arms or worse, and that was just for driving down the road. A good many of them had already been to Afghanistan, and a sense of confidence rippled through the ranks of the veterans that essentially said, “We got this.”

One of those who felt good about going to Afghanistan was Staff Sergeant David Dzwik, a stocky twenty-nine-year-old from Traverse City, Michigan, who grew up deer hunting with his father. Dzwik had been with Chosen Company during the last tour in Afghanistan and didn’t mind going back.

The only hesitation came when their battalion commander gave them a PowerPoint presentation. Some of the slides were images of mountainous terrain the men hadn’t seen before in Afghanistan. One picture showed a combat outpost called Ranch House during the winter, covered in snow. At more than seven thousand feet, it was possibly the highest US base in Afghanistan, and some of Chosen’s men would have to defend it, Ostlund told them.

Dzwik leaned over to his platoon sergeant, Shane Stockard, during the presentation and whispered, “Wow, I hope that’s not me.”

One of the last to join Chosen before the paratroopers completed training and prepared to head overseas was a soldier whose reputation preceded him. By the time Erich Phillips showed up in Vicenza he had already achieved more than most soldiers accomplish in a lifetime.

He had earned the coveted black and yellow Ranger tab by successfully completing a punishing nine weeks of mental and physical torture in one of the US military’s most grueling training courses. He had already been to war three times, twice to Iraq and once to Afghanistan. In Iraq he led an attack by a scout team against insurgents who had been intimidating voters during one of Iraq’s first elections. Phillips had quickly risen to the rank of staff sergeant, the equivalent of a squad leader.

All this, and when he showed up at Chosen, he had just turned twenty-three.

Chosen’s paratroopers would come to look upon the boyishly handsome Phillips as the closest thing to a true warrior they’d ever seen. Brian Hissong would describe Phillips—Phil to his friends—as something that belonged behind glass with a hammer and a sign that read, “Break in the Event of War.”

All of five-feet-seven and 180 pounds, Phillips seemed to always carry this aura into combat. The men just knew that Phillips—like the light-imbued Colonel Kilgore in the film Apocalypse Now—“wasn’t gonna get so much as a scratch.” Some primordial set of instincts could always be counted on to drive his physical movements—where he stepped or how he turned and fired his weapon—or the split-second decisions he made in the heat of the moment to frustrate foes trying to kill him or to help comrades desperately in need of assistance.

Phillips was a mortar man by training and assigned to the 82nd Airborne out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, when one of his buddies, Stephen Simmons, called from Afghanistan. Simmons was part of Chosen Company, and the call home came during a 2005–2006 combat tour. Simmons sounded stressed by some of the tough fighting the unit had been through in Afghanistan’s southwest province of Zabul. Phillips was worried about his friend. So, facing the end of an enlistment period, he promptly paid a visit to a re-enlistment officer and told him he’d stay in the Army but only if they sent him to the 173rd in Italy.

There was a slot open for a mortar section staff sergeant. Phillips was on his way.

Army life, especially during war, had a way of working out for Erich Phillips like that, balancing the scales for a young man who had such a disadvantaged past. “Shit,” was how Erich summarized his boyhood. If there were truly lost boys for whom the Army and, particularly, Chosen Company became the family they never had, Erich Phillips was first in line. It began the night he was born in Salem, New Jersey, when his father, exhausted after standing vigil over a long labor, evidently nodded off on his way home and slammed into a telephone pole. His death led to a childhood for Erich of second-hand clothes, food stamps, and nomadic shifting from one low-income neighborhood to another across four states. Erich got in fights, was expelled, and fell into trouble with the police—once ending up with a felony arrest in high school when he was with a friend who was stealing a speaker.

An epiphany came when he was seventeen, bagging groceries at a Fry’s in Tucson, Arizona, and trying to date a girl named Stephanie, whose retired military father sat Erich down and told him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t good enough for his daughter. Had he ever considered the military?

A few days later Erich was at a strip mall recruiting office where the Marines rejected him for the felony arrest but the Army didn’t care. His basic-training performance and math scores earned him an assignment as a mortar man, mastering azimuth, deflection, tracking the latitude and longitude of targets, setting a base plate, and handling 60- and 120mm rounds. Even his disapproving stepfather was proud. He turned nineteen in Ranger school and headed the next year to Afghanistan for the first of three deployments. By late September 2006 he was in Italy with the Rock Battalion, running the mortars team for Chosen Company.

To keep Chosen Company, the Rock Battalion, and the entire 173rd Airborne Brigade at full strength, commanders ordered an involuntary extension of some of the soldiers’ service under their enlistment contracts, a process that became famously known as stop-loss. The extensions affected at least a handful of soldiers in the company, Ryan Pitts among them. He shrugged it off, in large part because he felt such a deep connection with the other soldiers of Chosen that it seemed right that they should remain together in the fighting that lay ahead.

But stop-loss was a problem for Mike Santiago. He grew up in South Florida and joined the Army with some buddies after he got tired of changing tires in the auto shop at a Sam’s Club warehouse in Port Charlotte, Florida. He had been with Chosen Company since 2004, fought in Afghanistan during the 2005–2006 tour, and was slated to get out of the Army in August 2007, just two months after the company was to arrive in Afghanistan. Under stop-loss he had to remain in the Army for more than a year until the deployment ended. He wasn’t happy about it and had a tough time explaining it to his wife, Ella.

In the months and weeks leading up to their deployment scheduled for late May, there was a mix of excitement and apprehension among the paratroopers. Some of them thought long and hard about what should be done in the event they didn’t come home alive.

Twenty-year-old Joe Lancour gave considerable thought to his own funeral and planned the arrangements with exquisite detail. When the deployment grew near, Joe explained to his mother exactly what he wanted done in the event he was killed. He wanted a wooden casket with a white silk lining, he listed the photographs to be placed inside the casket, and he wanted a white rose to be placed in his hands.

Sergeant Israel Garcia had been to war twice before and was, by any standard, a hardened combat veteran. But for some reason he worried about this deployment. Garcia found himself oddly moved to tears on occasion and struggled to interpret the feelings.

“You don’t understand,” the twenty-three-year-old soldier told his wife, Lesly. “This is my third deployment. I’m messing with fire, and you never know. I might get burned.”

He began discussing where he might be buried, assuring his wife that she could take the liberty of interring him anywhere that was convenient for her. He didn’t need to be buried in the vaunted Arlington National Cemetery a continent away from their home in Long Beach.

Lesly hated this kind of talk. It frightened her, and each time he brought it up, she told him to stop it. Several weeks before he left for Afghanistan, Lesly was cooking in the kitchen and could hear Israel crying in the living room. She rushed out and found him writing a letter, something to be opened in the event of his death.

“I can’t leave without writing something.”

She went back to the kitchen, but they both lost their appetites that night.

For many if not most of the Chosen Few, the upcoming deployment was an adventure to meet head on. Many were eager to finally experience combat. All had trained hard for this moment. They acquired deadly skills that were about to be put into play. They were young, healthy, and full of piss and vinegar.

One freezing night in Vicenza, Sean and Jessica Langevin, James Takes, Chuck Bell, and Jon Albert were walking back to the Langevin crash pad after a night of drinking. Per custom, they stopped at a Greek restaurant down the street. Everybody was starving, and they wolfed down gyro sandwiches. Then someone suggested that Sean wouldn’t have the guts to run naked back to the apartment.

That was all it took. In seconds Langevin, Takes, and Bell were stripped to their socks, reduced to three white figures streaking down a darkened Italian avenue. Jessica trotted after them, her arms burdened with clothing and shoes. They paused long enough in the cold for someone to take a photo, ultimately to be posted on the Internet—three alabaster backsides for all the world to see.