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> > > GOOD MORNING, AFGHANISTAN

The mountains took you and held you, even if you were high in the air above in a helicopter and not struggling for footing on the broken rock and shale of the unforgiving slopes. The walls of the canyons rose up on every side and closed in for a Blackhawk carrying paratroopers deafened by the pounding of rotating blades digging into an ever-thinning atmosphere.

The sharply etched terrain left the impression that this was not a welcoming land. The rippling valleys falling off into folds of darkness seemed to hold violent secrets better left untouched, much less reckoned with face to face. The topography stretching to the horizon with peaks as high as twenty thousand feet belonged to the Hindu Kush mountain range that flowed northwest into the Himalayas and the roof of the world.

The destination of Chosen Company’s 1st Platoon as it arrived on May 23, 2007, was the combat outpost called Ranch House, which they had seen in Matt Myer’s presentation. Splayed out on a broad ridge two-thirds of the way up an eighty-four-hundred-foot mountain, it was arguably the most remote US combat outpost in Afghanistan.

The base rested high up the north flank of an east-west-running gorge, an offshoot of a larger valley to the west called the Waigal. The Waigal Valley was a major southern gateway into the vast and fiercely ungovernable Nuristan Province, a place roughly the size of Connecticut but with fewer people than Pasadena, California, with maybe one paved road. It shared a long, unrestricted border with Pakistan.

Nuristan and neighboring Kunar Province to the south together formed a historical smuggling route known colloquially as the Muj Highway. The Mujahedeen were Muslim fighters who drove the Soviets from Afghanistan in 1989 after launching a die-hard resistance precisely from these valleys. The Muj Highway extended from Pakistan’s western frontier to the Afghan capital of Kabul and, with the US-led invasion after 9/11, became a crucial infiltration route for the insurgency.

Jihadist radicals, mercenaries, and rank-and-file gunmen for some of the most violent terrorist organizations on the planet streamed back and forth through this corridor, forming lasting bonds with the mountain residents, marrying into their families, and finding pockets of sanctuary in their remote valleys.

The organizations were a rogue’s gallery of international mayhem carefully tracked by the US National Counterterrorism Center created just a few years earlier. The most infamous was Al Qaeda, its operatives usually well financed. There might be a few Afghan Taliban, although their territory typically ran farther to the south.

More importantly, there were vicious organized groups that were quickly earning international reputations. Chief among them was Lashkar-e-Tayyiba—LET, or the Army of the Righteous—created in the 1990s to battle the Indians over the disputed states of Jammu and Kashmir. They were savage fighters who, in 2008, would shock the world with brazen, coordinated attacks on several sites in Mumbai, India, including a luxury hotel, a historic rail station, and a Jewish outreach center, leaving more than 160 dead. Lashkar-e-Tayyiba members were skilled at training local fighters in tactical skills, including zeroing in mortar fire and ambush organization.

There was also Jaish-e-Mohammed—known as JEM, or the Army of Mohammed—equally dedicated to expelling not only Indians from Kashmir but also foreign troops from Afghanistan. JEM had openly declared war on the United States, and a member was involved in the abduction and murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002.

Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, known by its initials HIG, was dedicated to transforming Afghanistan into an Islamic State and would, in years to come, prove sophisticated in using car bombs against Americans in Kabul.

Other groups included Tehrik-e Taliban, or the Pakistan Taliban, that in 2012 would try to kill fifteen-year-old education activist and future Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, and the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, which had allied itself with Al Qaeda and the Taliban and would ultimately pledge allegiance to the Islamic State.

These were the elements operating in eastern Afghanistan when Chosen Company arrived in May of 2007. From where the paratroopers touched down at the Ranch House combat outpost, the canyon below wound westward four miles before intersecting with the Waigal Valley. At that crossroads rock walls formed a cavernous natural bowl hundreds of feet deep. At the bottom was a small Nuristani settlement called Bella, which was little more than a hotel, bazaar, and medical clinic. And next to that was a second US military combat outpost built in part to support the more far-flung Ranch House. This base was called Bella, and it too was accessible only by helicopter, on foot, or by small Toyota pickup trucks, which some local residents favored.

From Bella the Waigal ran straight south until crossing into Kunar Province and opening into a broader valley stretching east and west, known as the Pech. Forward Operating Base Blessing was located there, ten miles south of Bella. It was headquarters for Chosen Company and the entire Rock Battalion, a place of warm showers, hot meals, protective walls, and reinforced concrete barracks.

From there the pathway to civilization ran east another eighteen miles until the Pech River Valley, through which a paved highway was under construction when the Rock Battalion arrived, connected with the Kunar River Valley. At the confluence of the Pech and Kunar rivers was Asadabad, a city of fifty thousand that was the capital of Kunar Province. The Kunar River Valley ran southeast from there along the Pakistan border before opening into a broad alluvial plain that held Afghanistan’s fifth-largest city of Jalalabad, population two hundred thousand, astride Highway 1, the crucial eastern corridor of Afghanistan. The highway, which traced the course of the ancient Silk Route traversed by caravans going back two millennia, stretched from Jalalabad east through the Khyber Pass into Pakistan and west eighty miles to the Afghan capital of Kabul.

Far back up into the Hindu Kush Mountains where the two squads of Chosen Company’s 1st Platoon paratroopers arrived on that day in May, the Ranch House outpost sat above the village of Aranas, where about six thousand locals lived. The largest of eight isolated communities in these deeply slotted valleys of Nuristan Province, it was different from any place these young Americans soldiers had ever seen.

There were no main streets, town squares, or commercial districts. Aranas existed as a vertical village—mud homes standing for generations nearly one on top of another, staircasing their way up the steep valley walls. To round a corner and see a town in this valley for the first time was to view it all at once, arrayed up and down like an abstract painting.

For the paratroopers, things horizontal were only a memory in these up-and-down Afghan wilds. Living here meant climbing up or climbing down. For a rifleman it meant burning thighs and breathless lungs under sixty-eight pounds of body armor, helmet, rifle, 270 rounds of 5.56mm ammo filling nine magazines, an assault pack, at least a half gallon of water in a Camelback pouch, frag grenades, smoke grenades, and sundry necessaries such as protective eyewear, gloves, knee pads, knife, weapon-cleaning kit, and a bottle of oil. If you were a grenadier, it meant a heavier weapon and more grenades, another twenty pounds if you were hauling an M249 squad automatic weapon or SAW, and thirty to forty-five pounds more if you were part of an M240 machine gun team.

It meant wearing out the ass of your fatigues or split and tattered combat boots from sliding down steep, broken shale, requiring you to Internet shop and spend a few hundred dollars of your own money on a set of Garmont T8 Extremes or maybe even Danners. Not regulation wear, but commanders didn’t seem to mind—after all, the men were ordering the boots themselves.

Erich Phillips watched the panorama of this challenging terrain unfold from the windows of a Blackhawk helicopter approaching Ranch House.

This is going to suck.

The landing zone, or LZ, was the roof of one of the few original structures on the base—a broad, low-slung mud and wood-beamed building that bore a passing resemblance to the ranch house on the 1960s Ponderosa television series. So soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division, who created the outpost the previous year, started calling it Ranch House—the irony of a name suggesting relaxation and leisure not lost on them.

The altitude here was about a mile and a half above sea level. Surrounding mountains towered to fourteen thousand feet, so arriving helicopters flew up valleys, ascending to where they would touch down. Blackhawk helicopter pilots only pretended to land. The Ranch House roof, though offering the only area flat and serviceable enough for a landing zone, couldn’t hold the six tons of a helicopter at rest. So arriving or departing aircraft kept their engines spun up to maintain a margin of lift as human or other cargo was dropped off or taken aboard. Larger CH47 Chinook copters could only deliver supplies slung under their bellies.

From the landing zone the Ranch House combat outpost was all uphill, laid out across a large spur running downhill roughly from east to west. The spur was on the southward-facing side of the valley. Above the base the ground just kept rising ever higher. The Ranch House perimeter was a rough oval of razor wire laid out with stakes. The key defensive features were plywood and sandbag huts that served as guard posts or towers, each of them essentially firing platforms for machine guns or MK19 (pronounced “mark nineteen”) 40mm automatic grenade launchers. The plywood was fortified on the outside with layers of sandbags, with more sandbags piled up on the roof. There were four of these small, fortress-like guard posts manned by US troops. They numbered, clockwise from the landing zone, one through four. A fifth fortified hut far on the eastern end of the base was assigned to local Afghans hired as security guards—fighting-age men issued fatigues and rifles with the hope of dissuading them from enlisting with the insurgency. Mud and wood cottages on that eastern end of the base served as living quarters for the Afghan National Army.

On the steep terrain, near vertical in some places, the combat outposts looked like sand-bagged chalets perched on the mountain. Post Three was the highest point on the base, about three hundred yards uphill from the landing zone and another three hundred feet of altitude.

A series of Claymore mines surrounded the perimeter, augmenting defenses. They were curved, rectangular boxes that were eight and a half inches wide and three and a quarter inches high connected by several feet of wire to a hand “clacker.” When detonated, the side of the box, printed with the words “Front Toward Enemy,” unleashed seven hundred steel balls like a giant shotgun shell. Two 155mm howitzers at Blessing down in the Pech Valley and a 120mm mortar at Bella over in the Waigal were close enough to provide artillery support if necessary.

The angular terrain across the base was thick with tall grass, bushes, and twisting oak trees. It was like living in a slanted forest. Large rock outcroppings emerged at the margins of the camp. The entire base was riven with dirt pathways or steps made of stone or sandbags. Brown lizards skittered across boulders, and black scorpions and camel spiders lurked in dark, cool spaces.

Rope lines crisscrossed the base on the steepest sections so soldiers loaded with gear could pull their way higher. Even in the driest conditions their boots slipped and their ankles twisted on broken rocky surfaces. The stones shed a kind of glitter dust that found its way onto their clothes, into their huts, and caked on their computer laptops, resisting efforts to be wiped away.

To the southwest toward the valley the land dropped off so sharply that the village of Aranas and the stream down below were completely out of sight. The men felt as if they were as far on the edge of the world as possible.

But the view was spectacular.

The horizon was a panoply of intersecting ridge lines running as far as the eye could see. The air was crisp, and cool breezes on their skin, slick with sweat from exertion, air conditioned the body against the summer heat. A common refrain among soldiers here—usually framed around a sentence that began like, “If the Afghans could ever get their act together…”—was of the fortunes and pleasures to be had by creating ski resorts or river-rafting adventures in this land of lush valleys and frothing waters.

From Ranch House soldiers could watch storm clouds forming miles away, see vertical walls of advancing rain, and track how they broke apart and then reformed as they marched across the Hindu Kush. Weather might sweep in and settle below where the paratroopers were based, or clouds might envelop Ranch House, or a sudden downpour could turn every pathway into a running mountain stream. Snow stayed on the distant peaks well into summer.

Bad weather increased the sense of isolation because, for the duration, rotary aircraft could not reach them, even if the worst happened.

The heavens at night were a canopy of shimmering stars. And on the dry, bright days when soldiers climbed high into the mountains, the clouds seemed so close that it was as if a GI could reach up and snag a fistful of them like cotton candy. “Life among the clouds,” David Dzwik said in a video he sent to his parents.

Except that the soldiers of the 10th Mountain Division who were waiting for the Chosen Few to replace them at Ranch House were more than finished with all of it. They were filthy from weeks without a decent shower and smelled worse. Erich Phillips could see the exhaustion in their faces.

They are done. They don’t want to be there no more.

Small surprise.

If the Ranch House base—and, three miles down the valley, the Bella combat outpost—were new settlements in hostile Indian territory, then the pioneers carving them out of wilderness were the men now heading home: the light infantry soldiers of the 1st Battalion, 32nd Infantry Regiment (1/32), 10th Mountain Division.

The 1/32 Battalion commander, Princeton graduate Chris Cavoli, had sent his Bravo Company deep into the Waigal Valley in July 2006, led by six-feet-four Michigan native Doug Sloan, who was the arm-wrestling champion of the brigade.

Lieutenant Colonel Chris Cavoli’s battalion was part of a brigade led by Colonel John “Mick” Nicholson that arrived in these eastern provinces in early 2006 with the goal of extending the Afghan government’s reach into these rugged areas that had barely seen any signs of the fledgling Afghan democracy. By establishing a government presence here, they hoped that a deeply entrenched insurgency could be defeated. Nicholson and Cavoli would figure out ways to accomplish this mission that would advance the understanding of counterinsurgency and capture the imagination of a leading guru in irregular warfare, David Kilcullen, then the chief strategist for counterterrorism in the Bush administration’s State Department. Kilcullen later applied the lessons he learned in these eastern Afghan provinces to the surge of US troops in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, when he served as a senior counterinsurgency advisor to General David Petraeus, then commander of all coalition forces in Iraq.

In 2006 Nicholson introduced the theory of “separate, connect, and transform”—separate the population from the insurgency, connect the people with the government, and transform their lives with the services that only a functioning government could provide.

A fundamental way of achieving these goals was simply to build roads—paved highways that would link otherwise remote villages to each other and the outside world, promoting commerce and providing military forces a rapid means of ground maneuver. Such projects would take time and, thus, demonstrate long-term commitment. They would provide employment, and they would require a persistent security presence that could double as a means of safeguarding villages along the highway.

Key projects included a highway from Jalalabad to Asadabad through the Kunar River Valley and another through the Pech Valley, both part of the area of operations for Cavoli’s battalion and, later, for Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund and the Rock Battalion. Cavoli constructed a string of combat outposts through the more volatile Pech Valley designed to provide security “bubbles” that would allow road building to proceed unhindered and keep the insurgency from threatening or subverting local villages.

Most valley residents rallied to the plans. They clamored for even more government assistance to improve their lives—schools, wells, medical care, and flood control. Cavoli would later write in an unpublished memoir about how the road projects offered a means for establishing a bond with these remote villages: “It gives us something we both want more than anything else. It gives us something to do together. It gives the people a reason for us to fight.”

And it also provided opportunities for fighting—and for killing. By seeding the highway routes with quickly assembled combat outposts manned by small numbers of US ground troops and a contingent of Afghan Army soldiers, the insurgency was compelled to respond. Each encampment was a thumb in the eye of the rebellion, an affront to Al Qaeda or other terrorist group efforts to influence villagers. Out of frustration, the only option was to attack, to send fighters up onto the nearest ridgeline and open fire on one of the new US outposts set outside the villages.

This set the conditions that allowed Cavoli and his men to kill insurgents. The 10th Mountain troopers could immediately fix the attackers in their ambush site with a fusillade of rifle and machine gun fire or shoulder-fired rockets and portable wire-guided missiles. Once they had them pinned down, the Americans could rain destruction down on them with a barrage of 120mm mortars or 155mm artillery. They would bring an apocalyptic mix of shells; white phosphorous that would boil the air over hunkered enemy gunmen to five thousand degrees, forcing them into the open; and high-explosive rounds with delayed fuses detonating in the air to crush anyone in the open. Apache attack helicopters could join in, as could F16 fighters, A10 Warthog attack jets, or big Special Operation AC130 Spectre gunships. A B1 bomber might be available to drop a precision-guided two-thousand-pound bomb that could annihilate every living creature across a four-hundred-yard expanse of open ground.

“The enemy is like a moth to light—he has to come fight you,” Cavoli told Kilcullen in 2006. Those fights, in turn, “leave the enemy away from populated areas and subject to all our ‘toys.’”

Kilcullen would later write from his observations in the Pech Valley that “it is now possible to see what an effective Afghanistan strategy probably looks like.”

There was only one hitch: although this strategy denied insurgents a presence in the Pech Valley, they could continue to stage attacks from the more rugged capillary valleys north and south of the Pech. It would be in these more inaccessible areas that Cavoli and, later, Ostlund would learn the limits of “separate, connect, and transform.” People up in these mountains had chosen isolation, and now it came with a price.

Running south from the Pech was the six-mile-long Korengal Valley. It was virtually a microstate all to itself, inhabited by a clan of ten thousand who spoke an obscure dialect for which there was no written form. The people were geographically isolated, although there were a handful of elders enriched by the illicit harvesting and exporting of prized Himalayan cedars in defiance of government regulations on this lumber trade. For decades the valley had offered sanctuary to some of the toughest anti-Soviet combatants to enter Afghanistan during that nine-year war that ended in 1989.

During this time the Korengalis were introduced to Wahhabism, a form of Islam that dictates a literal and conservative interpretation of the Koran and brands more moderate interpretations as blasphemous. The valley people embraced these teachings. Their willingness to resist the central government and welcome violent outsiders who shared their brand of Islam left the geographically isolated valley a waystation for international terror organizations slipping across the border from Pakistan.

It was Korengali fighters in late 2005 who killed all but one of a four-man SEAL sniper team and then shot down a rescue helicopter, killing sixteen more Americans, the battle made famous in the 2013 film Lone Survivor.

In the years to come, as journalists embedded with paratroopers under Ostlund’s command in the Korengal, the valley would earn a reputation as the most dangerous place in Afghanistan, the Valley of Death, the Heart of Darkness. The well-received 2010 documentary Restrepo, directed by writer Sebastian Junger and cameraman Tim Hetherington, would immortalize the Korengal Valley as a place of unremitting violence committed by a determined insurgency.

Yet it would be ten miles to the north, on the other side of the Pech Valley in a capillary called the Waigal, a narrow fold running deep into Nuristan Province, where some of the most desperate fighting of the war would occur largely out of sight of the media and the world.

It would be where the Chosen Few waged war—or, more accurately, had it waged upon them.

Nicholson and Cavoli saw something sinister in the Waigal Valley, especially at its crucial focal point, the village of Aranas, which was located along an eastern tributary. They knew from intelligence reports that Al Qaeda, LET, JEM, and HIG, along with Uzbek terrorists, moved freely through Aranas.

A kind of mirror image of what the US Army worked to accomplish in the Pech Valley the terrorists had already achieved in Aranas and many of the nearby communities. The terror groups had formed strong bonds with much of the Aranas leadership, creating an oasis in the wilderness where insurgents could meet, plan, and strategize violence against the Americans and the Afghan government, whom they labeled the apostates or slaves of the Western cultures. From the Waigal Valley US Army leaders were convinced these enemy fighters were supporting attacks against US forces in the Korengal Valley to the south. And Nicholson and Cavoli worried that the threat might even be much larger, that this area around Aranas was becoming a nerve center for operations potentially beyond the borders of Afghanistan.

Aranas fell within Cavoli’s area of operation, and Nicholson believed it had to be targeted, if only to curb the free reign these very dangerous international terrorist organizations enjoyed. In the summer of 2006 Nicholson ordered Cavoli to take control of Aranas, and Bravo Company, under Doug Sloan, was given the task. The area was too rugged for an air assault by helicopter, so the soldiers hiked in on foot and, after positioning themselves outside the village, opened negotiations with those Aranas leaders receptive to the benefits and money that might flow in from the Americans. Cavoli’s soldiers began breaking ground on the Bella and Ranch House outposts.

There were divisions among the elders and the people of Aranas over whether the security promised by the new American outpost being built on the ridge above the village was really necessary. Some of the same infrastructure changes brought to the Pech Valley down below were also promised here—a new school, a small hydroelectric plant, and the possibility of a road linking the remote valley to the world. But the terror groups, particularly Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, had formed bonds with the people, taking wives and sharing a strict interpretation of Islamic beliefs. There were rumors of an LET training base in the Aranas area. Cavoli began to understand throughout the fall of 2006 that Aranas and the other villages of the Waigal region would not turn his way as readily as had the villages along the Pech Valley below.

Meanwhile establishing Ranch House was proving a logistical nightmare, without road access or even a landing zone for helicopters. Supplies had to be brought up by air drops, helicopter sling loads, and even on the backs of donkeys. A column of American soldiers along a cliff-side trail into Aranas was ambushed in August of 2006. Three were killed and three wounded; one of those who died earned a Silver Star for single-handedly holding off attackers with a light machine gun until a counterassault could be launched that killed a dozen of the enemy.

Attacks on US forces picked up in September. In an eighteen-day period there were fifteen attacks. Negotiations resumed the next month and seemed to make progress. But at the end of October Doug Sloan was killed with two of his soldiers in a roadside bomb attack outside Wanat that engulfed their Humvee in flames.

Cavoli and his men diligently reopened discussions with those village elders they believed remained receptive as they worked to build a helicopter landing zone at the Ranch House base.

They continued to work hard to win over the people of Aranas by following through on promises to build a small hydroelectric plant and a school. They gave jobs to local men as security guards or day laborers at the combat outpost. There were plans for a paved road from the Pech Valley as far as Bella and, perhaps one day, all the way to Aranas. Through the winter attacks on the soldiers dropped off, and they hoped that violent factions within the village had been pressured to leave.

By the time Ostlund and the Rock Battalion arrived to replace Cavoli and the 10th Mountain soldiers in May of 2007, the Waigal appeared to be more peaceful. Cavoli had left a network of outposts stretching from the Korengal clear up to Aranas. If it was far reaching and a challenge to maintain, Cavoli believed it was necessary. He was playing a game of Jenga to keep the insurgency and the terrorist groups at bay. Remove any part of the interdependent web of security and expanded government control, and you threatened too much of what had been achieved.

Except that when Ostlund arrived in the spring of 2007 he didn’t quite see it that way. When Ostlund took over Cavoli’s area of operations, he had his own ideas about how to fight the enemy. One of them concerned the Waigal Valley outposts: they didn’t need to be there. Or at the very least they didn’t need to be so far removed up the valley at Ranch House and Bella that their only lifeline was a resupply by air.

Ostlund came to that view weeks before his battalion arrived, when he traveled to Afghanistan to tour Cavoli’s area of operation. By the time the battalions switched out on June 7, the decision had already been made to close Ranch House. And without Ranch House, Bella—which was farther down the valley but still in a precarious position accessible only by helicopter—would necessarily have to close as well.

Under Ostlund’s analysis any effort to extend the Afghan government’s reach into the Waigal and prevent insurgent attacks into the broader population centers of the Pech Valley could be done from the village of Wanat, located farther down, near the mouth of the valley and connected by road to Blessing, the battalion headquarters.

Ostlund’s only problem as Rock Battalion operations got underway in the late spring of 2007 was when he would get permission to close Ranch House and Bella. Because the bases were so inaccessible, this would require air assets that were constantly in demand elsewhere. It would also require high command, working with Afghan leaders as far away as the government in Kabul, to approve what was technically a withdrawal.

Getting approval would lead to interminable—and fateful—delays.

Meanwhile Ostlund was rapidly concluding that the Waigal Valley should not be the primary focus of his battalion’s campaign. The officer was a data-driven guy, and as the deployment got underway, statistics plainly showed that the valley where Chosen Company was operating was unusually quiet.

The Rock Battalion command was constantly crunching figures, tracking the number of patrols, the number of artillery or mortar rounds fired, bombs dropped, rockets launched. Ostlund’s staff built spreadsheets filled with data on TICs, or troops in contact—any episode of violent contact with the enemy, whether it be a few shots fired or a full-on battle. They’d turn the data into graphs on a briefing slide that tracked the ebb and flow of combat for all sectors of battalion operations. Always out front in the numbers was the Korengal Valley, where it seemed there was shooting going on almost every day. In the Waigal Valley, by sharp contrast, the first few months of the battalion’s deployment registered almost no violence at all.

While other areas of the battalion operation were heating up, there were ongoing concerns about how remote and inaccessible Ranch House and Bella were. But so far as where the action was, Chosen Company was at the end of a long line of American war priorities, particularly when it came to resources and what mattered to commanders. Within the Rock Battalion the Waigal Valley operations lived in the shadow of Ostlund’s stubborn fight in the Korengal. Across eastern Afghanistan, where the 173rd Airborne Brigade was engaged, the Rock Battalion fight in Kunar and Nuristan provinces was a second-tier priority to protecting the more populated Nangarhar Province to the south, where the city of Jalalabad was located. For all of Afghanistan US military efforts in the east were less of a priority than the mission in the southern provinces, which were historic homelands for the Taliban. And globally the Afghanistan war was a bit player to the Bush administration’s surge in Iraq.

Not only was Iraq siphoning off troops, aircraft, and spy drones, but it was also dominating the news cycles. Americans were barely aware there was still a war going on in Afghanistan.

“It seems like a common problem that there is no war news at home,” 2nd Platoon sergeant Matt Kahler would write to his grandparents later in the year. “I have had lots of guys go on leave already. They talk about people not even knowing that we have troops in Afghanistan, or they believe that we’re not really fighting here and that Iraq is much worse.… Iraq has more casualties cuz we only have 10 percent of the soldiers here, compared to what they have.”

Chosen Company commander Matt Myer eagerly endorsed Ostlund’s decision to work toward closing down Ranch House and Bella. He felt that operating in this remote area was tactically a dead end. The people living up in those rookeries chose the inaccessible for a reason: they clearly wanted no part of the outside world. Myer understood there was some strategic significance to Aranas because leaders or members of global terror groups sometimes lived in or frequented the town, but he believed it would be nearly impossible to drag these mountain people of Aranas into the broader Afghan society.

What is the purpose of our being here? I’m assuming risk for something I can’t control and don’t see has a lot of benefit.

He knew he certainly didn’t have the force for it. He’d already lost 3rd Platoon, which shifted over to Destined Company to help patrol a valley along the Pakistan border on the far side of the battalion’s operational area. That left 1st Platoon under Lieutenant Matt Ferrara and 2nd Platoon led by Lieutenant Devon George. Chosen Company headquarters was next to the battalion command center at Forward Operating Base Blessing in the Pech Valley.

One of Myer’s two remaining platoons would have to work out of Blessing with a double assignment—patrolling the far western reaches of the Pech Valley and north to the village of Wanat and serving as a quick-reaction force that could be sent at a moment’s notice to any battalion hotspot.

That really only left Myer with one platoon, supplemented by battalion scouts and company mortar crews, to handle the Waigal Valley where there were at least eight villages or hamlets, including Aranas. He would also have a little more than a platoon of Afghan National Army soldiers and several dozen local men hired as security guards; their effectiveness in combat was always subject to question.

Nearly all the villages in the valley system were a day or more hike from either Bella or Ranch House. The idea of visiting and working with elders for each of these communities to achieve the separate-stabilize-and-transform strategy goals Ostlund outlined in his PowerPoints seemed too much to ask.

Even before leaving Italy Myer had decided how to array his shrunken force. He would give 1st Platoon the tougher assignment of Bella and Ranch House. Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips, in charge of Chosen Company’s mortar section, would go to Ranch House with two members of his team and a 60mm mortar tube. The rest of his mortar team would remain at Blessing, operating a 120mm mortar there. A second 120mm mortar was already set up at Bella, capable of reaching out to provide support for Ranch House if necessary.

Myer would be replacing roughly thirty to thirty-five soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division at Ranch House with only twenty to twenty-five of his own. It was all he could spare. He planned to alternate 1st and 2nd Platoons during the deployment, allowing soldiers to take advantage of Blessing’s warm showers and hot meals.

The 1st Platoon commander, Lieutenant Matt Ferrara, would work out of Ranch House. He and his platoon sergeant, Shane Stockard, decided the mountain post would be manned by the two 1st Platoon squads that were led by staff sergeants who had combat experience from the previous deployment, David Dzwik and Conrad Begaye.

Begaye was a full-blooded Navajo Indian with a round face, mischievous eyes, and brows that danced up and down when he was prankish or pestering. He was born on a reservation in Shiprock, New Mexico, and spoke only Navajo until grade school. He grew up in Tucson and Phoenix, but he enjoyed most of his summers working with livestock on his grandparents’ ranch back on the reservation, where he learned to ride on a quarter-horse name Cherry Coke. A lot of Begaye’s family had served in the US military, and he would never forget his Uncle Rick, a veteran of Vietnam and the 173rd Airborne.

Begaye was the oldest of three. Both parents were employed by aerospace companies, and his father was a computer engineer. Conrad’s first job out of high school was working the red-eye shift as a disc jockey for an Indian-owned country western radio station on the Navajo reservation. He loved it and even had his own on-air moniker, Mad Lad. That led to a better-paying job as a broadcast technician for a country western station in Phoenix.

It was after lunch one day at an Applebee’s in Phoenix that Begaye strolled over to an Army recruiter’s office and saw a video of soldiers jumping out of airplanes. He was hooked. He enlisted and qualified to join the elite 75th Army Ranger Regiment. Two years later, when it came time to re-enlist, Begaye sought an airborne assignment and was happily sent to Italy to join the 173rd, following in his uncle’s footsteps.

By the time he arrived at Ranch House in May of 2007 he was thirty and had already deployed to war twice with Chosen Company, first to Iraq and then Afghanistan. From childhood Begaye had been raised in the beliefs and ways of the Navajo. He carried with him at all times an arrowhead symbolizing the power of the warrior as well as a medicine pouch to give him an aura of protection in battle.

After each of his deployments Begaye participated in cleansing ceremonies on the Navajo reservation, days of fasting and sweat-lodge gatherings designed to restore his body and soul after the damage done by war. He believed in this process and felt it made a difference.

Stockard would set up at Bella with the platoon’s third squad.

Chosen Company’s 1st Platoon leader, Matt Ferrara, would be at Ranch House. He was twenty-three, fresh out of West Point, and headed into combat for the first time. His senior noncommissioned officer, Shane Stockard, was nine years older and beginning his third combat deployment. By any measure Stockard was far more experienced. Yet Ferrara was in charge. This was how the Army grew leaders: the young officer developing the skills of command with the assistance of a seasoned veteran. At its best the relationship is almost like a dance—in both behavior and language, one side respects rank while the other defers to experience. The officer gives the orders, but the senior sergeant can advise and urge in ways that shape the decision making. The commissioned leader, if smart, absorbs the lesson and improves as a commander. The noncommissioned counterpart can take credit for shaping and developing a fine new officer, an accomplishment that will burnish a résumé for advancement in the ranks. Both sides win.

When it came to Ferrara and Stockard running 1st Platoon, the dance seemed to work. Ferrara was smart, discerning, and a quick study; he respected what Stockard had to offer. The platoon sergeant, for his part, tried to guide Ferrara in his leadership decisions. Upper echelons in Chosen Company joked about them being the “tiny platoon,” with Ferrara all of five-feet-five and Stockard two inches shorter.

The thirty-three-year-old platoon sergeant was born in Amarillo, Texas; his parents divorced when he was five. As a young man Shane took jobs managing restaurants, and joining the Army was the furthest thing from his mind. It was almost as an afterthought that he finally enlisted in 1999 at the age of twenty-four, something he figured might be an interesting new experience. He chose the 101st Airborne Division as his first assignment and signed up for grueling Ranger School as a private first-class. When he re-enlisted four years later, he asked for 173rd Airborne Brigade and jumped into Iraq in 2003. Stockard had an imposing personality and fiery red hair to match, though many of the men didn’t know it because he always kept his head shaved. One of his team sergeants, James Takes, thought he’d never met such a “big little man.” Younger soldiers like Jon Albert found Stockard to be one of those people he would never forget, someone who led by example.

Where Stockard’s leadership was more instinctive—he was blunt in his methods and direct in his style—2nd Platoon sergeant Matthew Kahler’s approach was more studied. He researched the concept of leadership, reading extensively about the lives of military leaders he admired and observing how those he knew personally conducted themselves. Kahler wanted to understand how they earned respect from the soldiers they led. He concluded that a loud, berating style was not a good way to go. He came to see his men as volunteers and professionals who had earned the right to be treated with dignity. His style was to frame orders in the form of a request, “Could you…” “Would you mind…”

Nobody else did that.

Kahler pored over his soldiers, wanting to know where they were from, what their interests were, how they saw their futures in the Army. When a replacement showed up, the platoon sergeant would seek him out and spend time getting to know him, asking thoughtful questions about the soldier’s family, exploring how he might help him meet his goals, all the while scribbling notes.

For years Kahler had made a study of how soldiers should be treated, as if he were preparing a doctoral thesis. He had learned compassion as a boy growing up with a younger brother, Brian, who suffered from Down’s syndrome, and was often the only one in the family who could calm him during emotional meltdowns.

When they were in Vicenza, Chosen Company commander Matt Myer had worried that Kahler was a little too easy on his men and might be seen as soft. But the captain came to reassess his 2nd platoon sergeant when they moved into the war zone. The strength of his leadership, Myer soon realized, was in the devotion he had to his men. They wanted to measure up to his expectations. They didn’t want to let him down, and it was making them better soldiers.

Matt Kahler (pronounced KAY-lor) was born in Iowa, but his parents, both school teachers, moved to western Minnesota when he was a baby. They divorced when he was eight, and the breakup was tough on Matt. Growing up, the military was a lifelong dream, a way to be part of something greater than himself. He fell in love with his high school sweetheart, Vicki, and married her after he enlisted. He had gone through airborne training and then Ranger school before joining the 82nd. Four months before 9/11 he and Vicki moved to Italy after he transferred to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. They got an apartment in Grosse di Gazzo, a village east of Vicenza, and their next-door neighbor was Shane Stockard. Matt and Shane became best friends. They both jumped into Iraq in 2003, served in Afghanistan in 2006, and became platoon sergeants for Chosen Company before deploying in 2007.

Slender, five-feet-eleven, with sandy blond hair and striking green eyes, Kahler had an easygoing banter with his men. They teased him about his taste in music and how the hard-driving American Celtic punk band Dropkick Murphys really got his juices flowing. They needled him about his Minnesota roots with Fargo-isms like “Oh, yahh” or “Don’tcha know.” They could hear him in his quarters at night reading Curious George or some other children’s book into a tape recorder for his four-year-old daughter, Ally—not the sort of thing a GI usually expects from a tough platoon sergeant.

His men wanted nothing more than to earn Kahler’s approval. When they fell short, his disappointment alone was enough to make them try harder. The implied message from Kahler was always very simple:

You and I both know you’re better than that.

“You know, sometimes all you got to do is let people know that they let you down,” he told Ryan Pitts once. “That’s enough of a punishment.”

It was a warm, uneventful summer after Ferrara and his men moved into Ranch House, so slow that the West Point economics graduate, worried about how his men were handling their personal expenses, once gathered them together with an easel and a grease board for a lesson in finances.

They listened politely, even if their minds were elsewhere. Their time up in the mountains had been marked by periods of boredom broken only by the arrival of mail. The paratroopers could go days or weeks without receiving anything from home because of bad weather or other demands on the small fleet of Army helicopters. Between patrols and all-night stakeouts there was a lot of nervous energy to burn.

One day during the summer of 2007 Specialist Jason Baldwin came up with the idea of a zip line across the base’s vertical terrain, using a webbed belt draped over a slung rope as something to hold onto at least temporarily until they were flung to the ground. The soldiers launched themselves amid hooting and hollering and actually managed to gather some speed before tumbling onto a surface of what was basically rock thinly veiled with a layer of dirt. Bruised and bleeding limbs and heads were the payoff, but no one seemed to care. Philippine-born Lester Roque, a senior medic, became a star of the event largely because of the little jig he danced while waiting for the pain in his tailbone to subside.

Kain Schilling emerged smiling but with blood streaming down the front of his left leg. He was one of Chosen’s forward observers, the guys who call in the artillery and air support. Slender and with a shy smile, the twenty-year-old Schilling was born in the little Iowa town of Shueyville on the outskirts of Cedar Rapids. He first joined the Army National Guard and later the active-duty Army. Movies like Blackhawk Down and Saving Private Ryan made him want to experience everything a wartime Army could offer. And like a lot of them, Band of Brothers, the HBO series about a company of paratroopers fighting their way across World War II Europe, convinced him to join Airborne.

Up at Ranch House commanders would occasionally fly in steaks for the troopers to broil. But the same erratic helicopter flights that held up the mail held up the food too, so the basic food staple remained military meals ready to eat, or MREs, served cold unless a GI wanted to use a foul-smelling, chemically activated heating pouch to warm one up. The self-contained food rations were designed for durability and a shelf life of years. Somehow, though, the Chosen Few got a spoiled batch that summer, and many of them got violently ill.

For Baldwin, it was like a scene from the Exorcist, only out of both ends. It temporarily got him out of guard duty, much to the annoyance of his comrades. Baldwin was another of the Chosen Few from a broken home. Born in Santa Ana, California, he was nine months old when his parents divorced, and he grew up in Colorado and Nevada, shuttling between two households and barely graduating from high school. Band of Brothers made him want to jump out of airplanes, and he got his mother to sign the enlistment papers when he was seventeen.

Baldwin deployed to Zabul Province in Afghanistan with Chosen Company during the unit’s first Afghanistan tour in 2005–2006. He was a mortar man and took quickly to the skills of rapid positioning, elevation, and right-and-left deflection. But there was also a restless, undisciplined streak running through him. Baldwin was a smartass. The edges on that attitude began to round off when a new mortars section leader arrived in the spring of 2007, Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips. Phillips had been told the Army specialist was a little wild, and when the two met, Baldwin would never forget the look on Phillips’s face when the staff sergeant fixed eyes on him and said, “Well, we’re not going to have that problem, are we?” Baldwin could only stammer a response, “No, no, no, negative.”

Baldwin had developed a healthy loathing for his previous section leader. But from the moment he met Phillips, something about the staff sergeant’s bearing, confidence, and knowledge left the wild kid wanting nothing more than to earn his approval.

I want to be his favorite soldier.

Baldwin became the fastest mortar man in the battalion for the 60mm, able to adjust settings and fire a round quicker than anyone else. He had volunteered to accompany Phillips to Ranch House because all expectations were that this would be the tip of the spear for Chosen Company. And when nothing happened for weeks—while Able Company in the Pech Valley and Battle Company in Korengal were seeing action almost daily—some of the younger soldiers started getting pissed. They had trained hard for this and felt cheated; they wanted a taste of combat. But it wasn’t only that: this was the enemy that had brought violence to American shores, and the paratroopers were ready for some payback. For Jason Baldwin, who had seen limited combat during the 2005–2006 deployment and was eager for more, it was that simple.

I want to kill Haj.

They couldn’t know it just then, but the boredom that Chosen Company troopers felt was misplaced. At some point during that summer a group of jihadist fighters had gathered under a tree high up on the mountain. One of them was Hazrat Omar, an Aranas native and a dedicated insurrectionist who intelligence suggested was an Al Qaeda devotee. A slender man with a calm and steady demeanor, Omar wore a full beard but left his upper lip shaved clean. He had a hand-drawn map spread out on a rock and, with a long pointer in his right hand, was guiding his listeners through the stages of a planned attack. The meeting was captured on a digital camera, and it was unclear whether it was an actual strategy session or a scene staged for a future propaganda film.

“This is the map of the American base in Aranas Village,” Omar says in Pashto, as the other men in military fatigues and ammo vests follow along intently. “There were three groups of the enemies of Islam stationed in this base. The first group is the American soldiers. Second group is the apostate soldiers of the Afghan National Army. And the third group is the local militia.”

The hand-drawn map is filled with symbols and scratchings that, assembled together, closely approximate the actual layout of Ranch House, showing American guard posts, living quarters, and the tactical operations center. “The commander lives there in the most secured place,” Omar says, pointing to a spot on the map. He even indicates where the soldiers get on the Internet. “God willing, the Mujahedeen will conquer this base,” he says. “With the help of God they will first subdue the militias.” Then he explains, step by step, guard post by guard post, how the base must fall.

To Omar’s left is a stocky, bearded man in dark sunglasses who says he prays they breach the defenses and reach the interior of the base. “With the help of God, it is not that difficult.”

The Chosen Few would later brood over who betrayed them with detailed information about the base layout. Given the number of day laborers and locally hired security guards on the grounds, the list of suspects was substantial. Later in the year, when two enemy fighters were killed during an attack on Bella, the Chosen Few would recognize one of the bodies as that of a former Ranch House day worker, someone personable they’d grown to like and trust.

Three weeks after the Chosen Few took over Ranch House Dzwik drafted a memorandum to his company commander with an assessment of weaknesses in the base defenses. On balance, the staff sergeant didn’t see too many risks. Without roads, much less vehicles, there was no real threat of improvised explosive devices or IEDs, or roadside bombs. He felt certain the enemy would refrain from using indirect fire such as mortars or rockets to attack, primarily because the outpost was so close to Aranas and a wayward missile could kill villagers, angering and alienating the local population.

When 10th Mountain troops were posted there, the most common avenue of attack was from the west with rifles, machine guns, and rocket-propelled grenades. There was harassing fire usually directed at Posts One and Two, Dzwik noted. In that direction the ground fell sharply away from the base into a draw, and there were places, because of that geography, where the concertina wire was only thirty yards from the American guard posts. Dzwik believed that kind of threat still existed for Posts One and Two because enemy fighters could sneak up close to the base from the draw, fire at the Americans, and then escape.

Dzwik told Myer in his memo that he was toughening defenses in that sector with Claymore mines and early-warning trip flares in the low ground as well as more sandbags on the guard posts. Soldiers on duty there were told to peer down into the dead zone now and again to check for infiltrators.

On August 22, 2007, there were twenty-two Americans defending Ranch House, almost all of them Chosen Company paratroopers. A few Marines were on base acting as training advisors for twenty-two Afghan National Army soldiers assigned to the post. And finally, there were forty-five local men hired as security guards.

Dzwik wrote in his memorandum that with the precautions he had taken, the risks for Ranch House would be acceptable. Ferrara largely agreed. Always the optimist, he saw the defense of Ranch House as a ledger of pros and cons. It was good they were up so high because they had a spectacular vista laid out below. But Ferrara knew there was also a hazard in the dead spaces that were, in some cases, only yards from some of the guard posts where the ground dropped off in a way that could conceal an enemy fighter. The twisting oaks that populated the grounds blocked a lot of what they could see within the fort’s perimeter. The villagers placed a high premium on the hardwood trees and demanded hefty compensation if even one of them was cut down, a lesson their predecessors, the 10th Mountain troops, had learned. “One tree is worth one cow,” Ferrara had been told. So Chosen Company built a series of secondary positions made with walls of sandbags to further supplement the defenses. Ferrara believed the defenses were as good as could be expected.

Ranch House is the best fighting position in a bad place.