6

> > > GIVING GROUND

First there were the initial sprinklings of jet fuel from water bottles, and then it was just a matter of putting a match to it. On a shirt-sleeve fall evening in September Chosen Company torched Ranch House, the white smoke billowing northeast in the direction from where the assault had come weeks before.

The paratroopers loved it, watching the hooches burn, flames eating up the inside of each bunker and barracks until breaking through the outside walls in long, yellow tongues that rippled thirty feet into the sky. They set fire to the structures one by one. The popping, the cracking, the wood-burning smell. Outer shells of stacked sandbags had been left in place around the buildings so that when the plywood walls and ceilings burned away, it looked like some giant snake had shed its skin and slithered off across the mountain.

By nightfall it was a glorious bonfire, dozens of upturned soldier faces cast in the glow. “Fuckin’ weird,” said Erich Phillips, a big wad of dip bulging out of his lower lip as he squatted on his haunches nearby and shook his head, watching the flames swallow up the aid station that had been home for nearly five months.

“I burned it,” he played to David Dzwik’s camera in a moonshiner’s drawl, “to the ground.”

Chosen Company was pulling back in the Waigal Valley, and it had been a long time coming. For months Bill Ostlund had kept up a steady drumbeat with his immediate commanders and any senior leader who made a trip into the Rock Battalion’s area of operation. Shut it down, Ostlund would say, arguing that the Waigal Valley could be dealt with more effectively from the southern end of the valley, closer to Blessing.

I need to get these guys out of there. I know there’s a lot of bad guys, and I know I can’t get there in a hurry if something goes wrong. It makes no sense to me as a commander to have people I can’t reinforce.

His bosses were ready to approve the withdrawal, but the August 22 attack actually had the effect of further delaying matters. The brigade commander for the 173rd, Colonel Charles “Chip” Preysler, didn’t want to hand the enemy an immediate propaganda victory. How would it look to leave the base so soon after it was nearly overrun?

Don’t want to make it look like the enemy’s gaining ground.

So it meant delaying the closure for another month or two and pushing back a timetable of plans already under discussion for closing down Bella and putting a new base near the district center in a small village called Wanat.

In the weeks immediately after the battle Captain Matt Myer flew additional troops to Ranch House, shifting two squads from 2nd Platoon to bolster the mountain base defenses while decisions about its future were made. Those soldiers would also provide the manpower and muscle necessary to tear it down. Even before the August attack Myer had planned to have 2nd Platoon replace 1st Platoon in staffing Ranch House and Bella late into 2007 and give Ferrara’s men a chance to live with hot meals and showers at Blessing and take over patrolling the western reaches of the Pech Valley down below. The switch-over was still in the works, but it would involve trading places only between Blessing and Bella now that Ranch House was being closed down.

The Afghan security guards at Ranch House had been fired for their cowardice or complicity, whichever was the case, and 2nd Platoon troopers took over security at their positions, reinforcing the burned-out buildings there with sandbag defenses. Paratroopers lived in and around the charred ruins and learned the hard way that the area that had been staffed by the local Afghans was infested with fleas.

The final move to put a match to the hard-luck mountain base came in late September. After that, 2nd Platoon pulled back to Blessing for a few months and 1st Platoon consolidated at Bella. With Ranch House now history, Myer felt he had a certain measure of freedom in the Waigal Valley. He could staff Bella with a full platoon, and that would allow him enough people to defend that base and also send out squads more frequently to extend Chosen Company’s presence.

When an Army military historian, Major Dave Hanson, showed up at Blessing in late summer to talk about the Ranch House battle, Myer spoke encouragingly about his revamped operations: “[It] allows us to be somewhere where the enemy might not know we are instead of being at the Ranch House where they do know where we are.”

Ferrara dutifully began leading patrols to villages in the Waigal Valley, including a November 2 trip to Muladish, a village southeast of Bella. The patrol was on its way back from there, approaching the ridgeline above Bella, when they came under mortar attack. The column altered direction, and the rounds just kept following them. It was clear they were being watched, and enemy spotters were adjusting the mortar fire. Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale ordered his soldiers to take cover near any tree they could find, and they started scanning to find the insurgents’ version of forward observers. Private First Class Joe Lancour was the first to spot them on the opposite side of the Waigal Valley, two men perhaps twelve hundred yards away, a distance that pushed the effective range of his SAW. Lying prone near a tree, Lancour opened up. Silvernale stood over him with a small pair of binoculars, giving direction, “walking” tracer fire closer to the two insurgents in the distance.

“Yeah, right there. Fucking light ’em up.”

Lancour started pouring out rounds. He loved his M249 squad automatic weapon and had nicknamed it Reese Witherspoon. Silvernale could see one of the insurgents down on one knee and then he saw the man collapse. The second fighter just seemed to disappear. The mortar fire ended, and the patrol returned to Bella.

In many respects Bella was even less defensible than Ranch House. Stockard, for one, hated it from the beginning. It was really only a small crossroads hamlet with an inn, a bazaar, and a medical clinic. A small valley shot off to the northwest from the location, and farther up the Waigal River there was the canyon that ran northeast to Aranas. Chris Cavoli and his 10th Mountain troops had built the base next to the Bella hamlet and used its central location in southern Nuristan Province as a nexus for gathering information.

Still, it was a tough sell as a place to build a fort. Mountains on both sides of the river rose several hundred feet, creating a geographical setting they likened to being in the bottom of a Dixie Cup. There was a narrow mountain road heading south down the Waigal Valley that was navigable only by small pickup trucks at least as far as Wanat, about five miles down the river, where the road broadened enough for military vehicles. So supplies were delivered primarily by helicopters that had to thread between the mountains, making them vulnerable to anyone with an RPG launcher standing on a ridge. The river itself frothing past the Bella operating base on its way south toward the Pech Valley offered perpetual white noise that gave the area a touch of the wilderness.

The key to defending the bottom of the Dixie Cup was an aerie brimming with guns that sat on a ridge two hundred feet above the Bella base and had a sweeping view of valleys and ridgetops to the north, east, and south. It was simply designated OP1 (Observation Post One).

Throughout much of Chosen Company’s time in the Waigal Valley Army Specialist Gabriel Green—the soldier who had fallen in love at first sight on a city bus back in Vicenza—was the denizen of OP1. The place was perfectly suited for his skills as a forward observer trained to call in artillery and air support. Other squads would rotate in and out. But twenty-six-year-old Green always stayed, climbing down to Bella once a week to call his new bride, Addy. The soldiers started calling him the Mountain Man. He was at OP1 when Ranch House was nearly overrun in August. From OP1 he could see for miles across the Hindu Kush and down the Waigal Valley as it wound its way south. Green would snap pictures of the graceful, intersecting lines of ridges stretching off into the distance with those cotton candy clouds nestled in the valleys or capture the image of a Chinook helicopter flying in for a landing at Bella hundreds of feet below. He would send a video stream of these images back home to Addy, interspersed with photos of himself staring pensively into the lens while standing in his barracks holding up a piece of paper with a message: “Cuando vamos a tener una nena?” (When are we having a baby?) “Te amo, bebe.” (I love you, baby).

He learned every crevasse, every corner of the outpost constructed high above Bella. It was half fortification, half man cave. Like other forts for the Americans, it followed the pattern of plywood hut barracks—“cribs” GIs called them—with a shell layer of sandbags buttressed with HESCO bastions. HESCOs were ubiquitous fortifications for US military outposts across Afghanistan and Iraq of simple design—a steel wire-mesh basket several feet high lined with fabric and filled with rock, dirt, or sand. The kitchen was a U-shaped pile of flagstones with a grill set over burning logs. An outdoor “living room” was an Army cot set out on a platform rimmed with sandbags under a canopy of camouflage netting where troopers could sit on ammo cans and play spades or poker. A light machine gun on a swivel stand was close by in case they needed to go to work. One level down was the “love shack,” where a soldier could indulge carnal thoughts with the right magazines or videos and not be bothered.

One level up was an ammo bunker with a sandbag wall through which Green had proudly inserted a defunct grenade-launching tube that soldiers could use to piss through so they didn’t have to go far in the middle of a fight.

One more level up was the “penthouse,” the highest observation post, a square-shaped hut made out of wood and sandbags that afforded a broad view of the surrounding country. It sprouted heavy weapons, including the outpost’s .50-caliber machine gun. A fortified sniper’s nest nearby overlooked the Waigal Valley and held the automatic grenade launcher. Directly adjacent was the “tanning salon,” an open-air platform surrounded by sandbags where a soldier could sun himself sans clothing without worrying about getting shot.

We’re ready for war.

In the winter the climb up to OP1 was so steep and icy that soldiers ordered crampons to wear on their boots. In the warmer months Afghan children would climb up to visit the Americans and sell them quartz or other precious stones as souvenirs. For a few dollars Green purchased a black and tan puppy he would call Peanut. The dog was adorable, and Green used the excuse that he would be a security investment, barking at any unfamiliar human smells wafting in from the dark. They kept Peanut in an ammo can during firefights so the noise wouldn’t make him run away. An old man visited each morning with his goat, and Green let him graze the animal around the concertina wire to keep the grass low. The old man spoke perfect English and would bring Chai tea and sugar bread to share with the Mountain Man each morning. Green paid him five rupees for the pleasure.

Down below at Bella the living conditions were not quite as austere as at Ranch House, but it was only a difference of a few degrees. Trays of food were brought and heated, and that was a notch above the packaged MREs. A delivery of fresh produce occasionally arrived by helicopter. There was a shower that worked intermittently. Otherwise soldiers bathed in the frigid eddies of the Waigal River, shivering even in the summer. Paratroopers would wade in two or three at a time where boulders diverted some of the white water, while buddies stood guard.

The recombining of all four squads of 1st Platoon at Bella made for something akin to a big family reunion. Soldiers got a chance to reconnect. Long hours of guard duty provided an opportunity for some serious reflection on a twentysomething’s military life—where it was headed and where it might go. Gabriel Green would muse to Joe Lancour about his dream of having a baby with Addy. It always all made perfect sense to Joe, and that was all Gabe really needed to hear. James Takes and Sean Langevin, who ran naked together through the streets of Vicenza before their deployment, now spent hours discussing what would really matter when they put the guns and uniforms away. Langevin was exuberant about soon becoming a father—Zoe was due in a couple of months. Takes listened quietly, a little envious about how his subordinate seemed to have life all figured out.

Man, this guy’s got his shit together. He knows what he wants. He has a wife and a child on the way. He’s an old soul.…

Meanwhile there would be a change of command for 2nd Platoon, with Lieutenant Devon George moving up to become Chosen Company executive officer, replaced by a young lieutenant who had been pushing paper at Battalion headquarters at Blessing, Jonathan Brostrom.

Brostrom had just turned twenty-four and was a graduate of the University of Hawaii, earning his commission through the ROTC program there. He was a true Army brat, raised in a dozen different places as the eldest son of an Army officer, David Brostrom, who had moved his family twenty-two times in thirty years.

The elder Brostrom had joined the Army as an infantryman, earning his Ranger tab. But he eventually switched to flying helicopters and rose in the ranks to command a combat aviation brigade, finishing his career at Fort Drum in upstate New York. Jonathan was born in an Army hospital in Germany. The toughest move growing up was the last one when the Brostroms shifted from Fort Drum to Hawaii, and Jonathan was enrolled in a Catholic school in Honolulu. One of a minority of white children, he got into a few dozen scrapes his first year and was a frequent guest in the dean’s office.

In his senior year of high school Jonathan began thinking about the Army and won an ROTC scholarship to the University of Hawaii. He wanted infantry, and when his father suggested the aviation track he had followed, the son rejected it out of hand. “I don’t want to be a wimp,” he said. When Jonathan saw cadets attending a Navy scuba-diving school in the pool where he was a lifeguard, he got his father to pull strings to get him into the course to earn the badge. He went through airborne training and then, after graduation, enrolled in Ranger school, where he finally earned his black and yellow tab after retaking portions of the course two times. Jonathan had his heart set on joining the 173rd Airborne Brigade in Italy, even though he had orders for the 1st Cavalry Division at Fort Hood. Once again he turned to his career-officer dad to make it happen. It turned out the brigade commander for the 173rd, Colonel Chip Preysler, once worked under Dave Brostrom. So the retired colonel gave Preysler a call, and Jonathan was soon on his way to Vicenza.

Dave Brostrom had been worried about his son’s safety from the moment Jonathan chose infantry. But by the time he reached out to Preysler, the 173rd was committed to Afghanistan, and Dave felt that had to be safer than war-torn Iraq, with the infamous surge underway.

Jonathan headed off to Afghanistan, leaving behind a five-year-old son, Jase, whose mother was Jonathan’s high school sweetheart. The couple’s relationship had been stormy.

Brostrom liked the physicality of soldiering. He lifted weights with his troopers in a makeshift gym at Bella, and they admired how he looked like he was in perfect physical condition. Brostrom could be serious when circumstances warranted, and his tactical decisions seemed smart. But he had a playful side and was utterly unpretentious, a big kid with a grin that seemed to fill up half his face.

When 2nd Platoon was assigned to Bella, Sgt. Ryan Pitts brought his sewing machine, a little table-top model that came in handy for sewing on patches. He used it one day to sew shut Brostrom’s T-shirt sleeves, then sat in the early-morning darkness watching him fight with his underwear. “Did you fuckin’ do this, Sergeant Pitts?!” That was Brostrom, a Joe who was also an officer. His soldiers loved that about him.

Downtime at Bella or Blessing or any of the tiny outposts and guard shacks that ringed those bases was a contest between imagination and boredom. Humor was a high art practiced in strange and glorious ways.

Jacob Walker did a send-up of the popular MTV Cribs program where celebrities give tours of their resplendent homes, except Walker’s tour was of battle-damaged Ranch House in the weeks after the fight there. It would produce one of the oddest videos of the entire deployment. Walker was already a man built for comedy, gangly with a paunch that he would push out on occasion to make himself look even less like the member of an elite airborne unit. In the video Walker strikes a kind of karate pose outside the former Afghan security compound at Ranch House renamed Post 5. He’s wearing only tight black underpants, combat boots, a skull cap, a face bandana, sunglasses, and an Army T-shirt; for some reason there’s a gas mask container strapped to his left leg.

“This is Post Five! This is where it goes down! Okay? Good and bad.” Walker says at the start of the footage. He’s looking offstage and not at the camera. “My identity, my name, has been withheld for reasons of homeland security. You’ll find out later why, okay? We’re going to give you a little tour of the place, and you’ll find that Post Five is the SHIT.” Then he starts doing a jig.

There were countless days of exhaustion from all-night patrols or day-long mountain hikes. But these were young men in the finest condition of their lives, and every idle moment was a gauntlet thrown down before the gods of mirth and mischief.

They’d spray paint “Chosen Few” on a wall of Post Three at Ranch House, stencil “Welcome to Thunderdome” on a wooden crossbeam at OP1 high above Bella, and scrawl “Deposit in Osama’s Ass” or “Have a Nice Day” across fragmentation grenades.

They’d trap scorpions and giant camel spiders in MRE boxes before mashing them up and marveling at the result, ride a village burro in full battle gear until falling with a clatter to the ground, or use helmeted heads to butt a farmer’s billy goat, the animal responding by rearing up on its hind legs and meeting Kevlar with a set of curled horns.

You might find the powerfully built Pruitt Rainey pinning the skinniest and youngest member of 2nd Platoon, Gunnar Zwilling, to the floor of the Camp Blessing barracks, twisting him into a painful pretzel to force the phrase “I’m a bitch” out of the twenty-year-old paratrooper. Zwilling never did say it.

Zwilling was born in California but raised in Nashville and St. Louis. He had a gift for mimicry, loved playing the guitar, and was a huge Metallica fan. When he was a teenager and his parents divorced, Zwilling turned rebellious and dropped out of high school. He joined the Army after earning a high school diploma equivalency certificate and was one of the Chosen Few’s youngest, entering the Army at eighteen in early 2006. When he came home from Italy to see his family, Zwilling could hardly wait to get back to his buddies in Chosen Company. His mother died halfway through the deployment from a medication overdose, and he was allowed to go home for her funeral. An older brother, Alex, was in the Air Force serving in the United Arab Emirates as a flight mechanic while Gunnar was in Afghanistan, and they kept in steady contact by e-mail, signing off missives with nicknames from a favorite movie, Top Gun. Alex was Dude and Gunnar was Maverick.

Spare time in the combat zone was how James Takes wound up posing nude up at OP1 with nothing but bandoliers wrapped around his body for a photo portrait. Or why Staff Sergeant David Dzwik videotaped a large marijuana patch near a schoolhouse built with American dollars in Aranas, all the while joking about drug-free school zones. Or why Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale captured footage of Specialist Shane Burton on shit-burning duty at Bella, stirring a big steel receptacle filled with smoldering feces. Everybody had to take their turn. “It looks like the cafeteria’s sloppy joe,” Burton says to the camera.

Bathroom humor was always big. It inspired Conrad Begaye to sneak up on the latrine at Ranch House and peer with his camera under the door to film a straight-up shot of Erich Phillips taking care of business while reading a magazine. Phillips spots the intruder and breaks into a broad grin that says, “What the fuck.”

When a platoon rotated back to Camp Blessing for vehicle patrols through the Pech Valley, they’d throw scotch candies out the windows of Humvees to giddy Afghan boys skittering along the roadway, muttering “You little bastards… don’t be a Taliban when you grow up!”

At Bella there were jackals who came out of the woods at night to rummage through garbage for any scraps they could find. Their cries in the dark—which sounded like human babies wailing—were just another element of alien weirdness that was Afghanistan. The men hated it.

Contests were part of the fabric of barracks life—shot-gunning near-beer through a funnel to see who could guzzle the fastest or who could stuff the greatest number of lighted cigarettes or the biggest dip of Copenhagen into his mouth. It was like endless fraternity rituals, only with assault weapons sitting around. Often it wasn’t over until people started throwing up. They might capture a scorpion and put it in a box with a camel spider and watch the creatures battle to the death.

There were hours spent in the conventional pastimes made possible with laptops brought to the war. The men of 2nd Platoon for some reason were fascinated with the MTV reality show The Hills, which tracked the personal and professional lives of Lauren, Heidi, Audrina, and Whitney, young women in Los Angeles. The show had launched the year before the Chosen Few deployed. During downtime it wasn’t unusual to see a cluster of young warriors with shaved heads huddled around a laptop, fixated on the tangled personal relationships of blond twentysomethings half a world away.

Platoon sergeant Matt Kahler would hike to OP1 to spend a day or so with his men up there, barbecuing cheeseburgers on the grill or cooking up some risotto. Kahler would warm up this cheese ramen dish his family sent him that his soldiers thought was really stinky.

“Sergeant Kahler, that smells like straight ass,” Pitts told him.

But Kahler would ignore him and spoon it up while watching the HBO series Rome, with Pitts in the tiny barracks up at the outlook post.

Like most Americans, the paratroopers—when they could establish an Internet connection to the outside world—relied for their virtual interaction on what was then the leading social networking site on the planet, MySpace.

Poker was huge, Texas Hold ’Em mostly. And there was real money at stake, hundreds of dollars in some games. The undisputed champion, hands down, was 2nd Platoon’s Pruitt Rainey.

They called him “The Big Polar Bear.” Rainey was muscular and physically intimidating. He was a champion wrestler in high school and during a short stint in college, and he would sometimes prowl the barracks looking for someone to take down or put in a headlock. But it was never malicious, and beneath his tough exterior was a vein of compassion. He had earned a reputation as a good soldier, technically proficient, knowledgeable.

Rainey was yet another example of one of the lost boys of Chosen Company. His mother got pregnant dating a college boy from South Georgia. They never married, and Pruitt was raised by his grandmother in Haw River, North Carolina. He joined the Army in 2005 when he was nineteen and went to Chosen Company early the next year. Before heading off to war Rainey called his father, Frankie Gay, and tried to reconnect with the man he had seen only a few weeks a year, at most, during his childhood. Gay was a competitive gambler, a talent his son inherited. During Chosen Company’s deployment the sergeants refused to let Rainey in their games because he took all their money.

He told them they were gay.

Access to software for splicing and synching digital video was an opportunity for the more creative—or obsessive—soldiers to practice amateur filmmaking. Begaye assembled a sort of stream-of-consciousness footage, a mindless blend of inane skits, stunts, and life scenes at Ranch House. He labeled his creative efforts “Meow Meow Productions and Manic Hispanic Pictures.” They made very little sense. He’d do miniplots where he’d shoot a close-up of his round face earnestly consulting a medical-treatment guide before pretending to stick his index finger into Kain Schilling’s eye. A second version has him emerging from the book proclaiming, “Anus! I got it!” and then lubing a long, plastic prod apparently bound for some GI’s naked backside appearing in the left side of the image frame.

There was footage of sweaty hikes up the mountain, shirtless rave dances with glow sticks in the barracks, and a long sequence of soldiers trying unsuccessfully to build a potato gun using a length of PVC pipe and a hunk of high explosive. Fortunately it never went off. Throughout a twenty-minute video Begaye would keep showing the same three seconds of Erich Phillips spinning around, dropping his pants, and mooning the camera.

But when it came to filmmaking, Chosen Company’s uncontested virtuoso was 2nd Platoon’s Jason Bogar, a Seattle native who arrived as a replacement late in the year and displayed a true passion for capturing what life was like there. Everybody else collected the requisite footage of mountains and rivers or bullet holes and blood trails, but Bogar was fascinated by people. He’d take his camera up to OP1 during guard duty and start filming the soldiers working with him, waiting for something interesting to happen.

He was enchanted by Afghan children and loved to zoom in on a cluster of tiny faces with huge eyes staring up into his lens. He did still-life portraits of belted machine gun rounds glistening in the sun. He had an artful skill for setting videos of weapon fire at Bella to music. Even as a kid his art was how he coped. The son of a Baptist minister, Jason was seven when his parents divorced; his mother left the church and took her children with her. He expressed himself through drawing, videos, and photography and dreamed of being a photojournalist but wound up in the National Guard.

Bogar was an exception in Chosen Company in a way that really annoyed him when he first arrived. He wasn’t a paratrooper. He had not yet been through airborne school when he was suddenly shipped off to Afghanistan as a replacement. It didn’t matter that he’d seen more combat than many of the Chosen Few, having served in Iraq and Afghanistan as a member of the Washington National Guard. The fact that he was sent overseas without the chance to earn his wings was the subject of endless razzing when he arrived at Blessing.

Unlike many other soldiers who grew indifferent or resentful or worse toward Iraqi or Afghan people, Bogar went to war a true believer who honestly felt he was a part of something that was helping people improve their lives while safeguarding America. “Mom, I really believe that I’m supposed to go to Afghanistan and help the women and children,” he told his mother, Carlene Cross.

But he had also learned some of the hard lessons of war and passed them on to other replacements, like Chris McKaig, for whom it was all new. He schooled McKaig about one crucial truth: anytime violence was unleashed there were no guarantees—the training, the equipment, being in the right place at the right time—none of it mattered. The bedlam could still find you and kill you. There was no staying safe.

Nevertheless Bogar loved being 2nd Platoon’s designated videographer. He even took to wearing a helmet cam, stubbornly focusing on his brothers until they did something strange or hilarious or flashed the universal symbol for fuck off. Mostly they gave him what he wanted—Michael Denton and Jason Hovater would launch into their well-rehearsed version of a classic Saturday Night Live sketch, the one where Will Ferrell and Cheri Otari play Craig and Ariana, the Spartan High School cheerleading duo. Hovater was Ariana, his fists on his hips screeching in falsetto, “Who’s that Spartan in my teepee?” Denton behind him would crouch down on all fours and pop his head out from under Hovater’s crotch squealing, “It’s me! It’s me!” The bit ended when Hovater launched himself into Denton’s arms in a frozen, toe-pointed cheerleader pose.

In the barracks Denton and Gunnar Zwilling would start busting dance moves with a kind of crazed synchronicity while Bogar, filming from the top of a bunkbed, egged them on like a thrilled Hollywood director, “You’re scuba diving.… You’re mowing the lawn.… You’re in the turret, you’re gunning.… You’re cleaning out earwax and throwing away the Q-tip.… You’re having dirty, dirty anal sex.… ”

A star attraction for Bogar videos and for many other soldiers with cameras in 2nd Platoon was Jason Hovater. The paratroopers adored the Tennessee native with his blue eyes, all-American good looks, and wickedly funny comic timing. Hovater was a complicated young man who lived in two very different worlds—the profane, harsh reality of the combat grunt and the deeply spiritual, highly consecrated life of a born-again Christian.

He wasn’t one to proselytize. But if the listener was curious and open to a discussion, Hovater could inspire. He had a profound influence on Mike Denton after a conversation they once had about religion. Denton was impressed with his friend’s strong set of beliefs and knowledge of the Bible. They began to pray together regularly, and the relationship strengthened Denton’s faith.

Jason Hovater was raised in the tiny town of Dylis just west of Oak Ridge on twenty-five acres of land, where he helped his father build a house and a barn and where Jason, an older sister, Jessica, and younger brothers, Joe and Jesse, were homeschooled. They led lives dedicated to Christ, with morning devotions of prayer, singing, Bible reading, a Bible lesson, and then time alone for communing with God. They attended Pentecostal churches and performed like a religious Von Trapp family, all lined up before a congregation singing contemporary Christian music. The children would sometimes be filled with the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues. Jason rededicated himself to Christ with his two younger brothers at a church when he was fifteen.

Jason was also a huge Arnold Schwarzenegger fan and became immersed in body building, sending off pictures of himself to Flex magazine when he was thirteen.

A strong influence was his grandfather, Francis Michael “Hank” Sullivan, who served as a ball turret gunner on a B17 that was shot down over Germany during World War II and spent a harrowing ten months as a prisoner of war. Jason, inspired by his grandfather’s war stories, shocked his family when he enlisted a few years after high school. By that time Jason had fallen in love with a young woman he met at church and married her six months before he deployed.

Hovater’s impressions of people were a hoot during the months Chosen Company was at war, particularly his drop-dead imitation of the squared-away battalion commander, Bill Ostlund. Troopers would pester him to do his Ostlund, and all eyes—and often Bogar’s camera—would turn toward Hovater, who would sit for a moment as if waiting for a muse to inspire, then transform himself before their eyes—the muscled bearing, the grin so wide it put dimples in his cheeks, the gung-ho Army idioms.

Hooah!

He’d stiffen the corners of his Army cap so it sat on his head like a small box and push his ears out to mimic Ostlund’s jug handles, and the other soldiers would pull out their iPhones and cameras to capture a few seconds of comedy footage for families back home.

Even Ostlund had to hand it to him—it was spot on.

As Bogar’s camera recorded rituals like the birthday takedowns—a cloud of shaved heads moving through the barracks, muscling the birthday boy to the floor and delivering the requisite number of open-handed whacks to his exposed belly—it sometimes offered a glimpse of what it meant to be one of them.

Matthew Phillips—the soldier who had spent his bachelor party before the deployment pub-crawling through Vicenza dressed in a wedding gown—turned twenty-seven the spring of 2008 and got mobbed. At the end of all the torture Phillips climbed back to his feet, his belly covered in welts, as the men herded past him out the door, many of them wrapping him in a congratulatory birthday bear hug. Bogar’s camera captured the look on Phillips’s face with each one—pure, unabashed joy.

They love me.

To be sure, there were still resentments and rivalries among some of the men, but ill will was often leavened by the reality that every one of them depended on the other to stay alive. Jeff Mersman came to terms with an old adversary in this way. He and James Takes had always clashed: two sergeants—one battle hardened, the other a veteran of the flashy honor guard in the nation’s capital.

This was Mersman’s fourth deployment since 2003. The twenty-three-year-old team leader, tall and fair complexioned with a heavy build, had gone to Iraq the first three times with the 82nd Airborne Division and, on his last time to war, had been shot by a sniper, although his armored vest stopped the round.

Mersman was born and raised in the flatlands of Kansas south of Kansas City amid fields of corn, soybeans, and oats. He also came from a broken home and was raised by his mother in Parker, Kansas. As a little boy he idolized his grandfather, Marvin Mersman, who had served in the Marine Corps, and they spent hours fishing for bass and bluegill on the elder Mersman’s ranch where there was a lake. Jeff Mersman enlisted right out of high school.

He married while serving with the 82nd Airborne, and his wife, Lynn, already had four children. The ready-made family moved to Italy when Mersman transferred to the 173rd Airborne in August of 2006.

What frustrated Mersman was watching James Takes, who had no combat experience, move ahead of him on the promotion ladder. Takes was approved during the deployment to become a staff sergeant. Takes sensed major resentment from Mersman, but in fact, the combat veteran was smarter than to let things fester. As soon as Takes returned from his promotional board at Blessing and dropped his bags in his barracks, Mersman pulled him aside.

“You’re a sergeant promotable now, and you’re going to be a staff sergeant,” Mersman told him. “You’re going to be a squad leader, and I want to be your team leader. I’m going to be the best I can do for you. I don’t like it, but I’m going to do it.”

They shook hands on it. Takes respected him for putting aside their past differences.

In these austere settings on the far rim of Afghanistan’s war—where young men who were really only boys with a few years tacked on lived with guns and Claymores and concertina wire—lives became so folded into each other that it was sometimes hard to see where one left off and another began. There was, to begin with, zero privacy. All modesty and introversion was sandpapered away, the hard edges of personal space erased. Each became an expert on the other’s personality quirks, speech patterns, even body smells. Soldiers would likely live out their entire lives never knowing or being quite so utterly relaxed around anyone else, not even a wife or a girlfriend.

Any one of them could die in the next attack. Nobody had a leg up on good fortune. There was no logic in this place. Afghanistan was the great leveler. When they arrived at Ranch House or Bella or, later, at a place called Wanat, they were reborn as equals.

They were absorbing the great lessons of war every generation had to relearn—no matter what the training or the equipment, no matter what army they belonged to or what high-minded aspirations lay behind the mission. Once the violence started, there was something new and terrifying to be discovered. As Shane Stockard so often liked to say, “It would not end well.”

So they only had each other. They actually grew toward each other, becoming this multiheaded organism prone to farting and belching and the orgiastic release of gunfire and grenades, and that was perfectly okay. The timeworn metaphor was that they had morphed into a family, one they had chosen.

One day at Bella 1st Platoon squad leader Kyle Silvernale hauled out his camera to shoot some goofy footage of some of his men bouncing up and down, toboggan style, on a fuel blivet, trying to drain every drop out of it.

“What are you fucking ferret faggots doing?” Silvernale says teasingly.

As the blivet flattens, the row of five soldiers—Shane Burton, Scott Derry, James Takes, Justin Kalenits, and Andrew Hagerty—dissolve into a tangled mass of legs and arms, like a pool of young boys reveling in a pile of leaves on a fall afternoon. Specialist Gabriel Green shows up to drop himself on top. One other soldier, Stephen Johnson, hesitates.

“What’s wrong, Johnson? You want none of that?” Silvernale says.

Johnson pauses and then opens his arms wide, grins, and falls face-forward into the jumble of brothers.

By early November the Rock Battalion was nearly halfway through its fifteen-month deployment and losing soldiers at the rate of about one every other week, a pace just about as bloody as the 10th Mountain Battalion it had replaced. The peak fighting season of warm months was coming to a close, and winter was approaching, a period when enemy operations historically slowed down until spring.

Nine Rock paratroopers and a Navy corpsman assigned to the battalion had been killed since the unit arrived in late May. The very first to die was nineteen-year-old Private First Class Timothy Vimoto, who was killed in the Korengal Valley just a few weeks after the Afghanistan deployment began. It was his first firefight, and he died instantly from a gunshot to the head. The loss was stunning in so many ways. Not only was Vimoto the youngest member of the Rock Battalion, he was also the oldest son of the senior enlisted man for the entire 173rd Airborne Brigade, Command Sergeant Major Isaia Vimoto.

Although half the Chosen Company soldiers at the Ranch House battle were wounded, all had survived. A month after Vimoto died, Able Company, while patrolling the Pech Valley, lost two soldiers. A Destined Company first lieutenant was killed a little more than three weeks after that.

But the hardest hit up to that point was Battle Company. All of the others killed in action through early November were part of that beleaguered fighting unit in the Korengal Valley. All had died or been mortally wounded in a series of intense firefights or long-distance shooting exchanges that seemed to occur almost every day for weeks on end. The catchphrase for Battle Company paratroopers was a simple “Damn the Valley.” They scratched it on the walls of firebases, wrote it on their helmets, and shouted it during firefights—or a variation like “Damn the motherfucking Valley!” They even tattooed it on their bodies, sometimes signified with just three letters: DTV. Many of the Battle Company dead had close personal ties throughout the Rock Battalion, including among the Chosen Few.

One evening in September up at Ranch House a hail storm had struck the base, and Chosen soldiers were outside waging a snowball fight when news about a casualty in the Korengal Valley arrived. Sergeant Brian Hissong saw Sergeant Ryan Pitts approach him with a dark expression on his face. The casualty was one of their best friends in Battle Company, Sergeant First Class Matthew Blaskowski, and he was dead. The three had a long history together. They’d all attended Pathfinder school in Europe before the deployment, a three-week course in setting up landing zones and directing aircraft. Pitts walked away, and Hissong found a quiet place to himself and wept. He would write a eulogy for Blaskowski’s memorial service.

Blaskowski had earned a Silver Star during the battalion’s previous deployment to Afghanistan in 2005 when he led a weapons squad that killed seventeen of the enemy, and he pulled a wounded paratrooper to safety even after being shot in the leg. He had since risen to the rank of platoon sergeant and was killed on September 23, shot through the neck by a sniper.

A month later, during a massive six-day operation that Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund launched in the Korengal Valley aimed at driving a stake through enemy resistance there, almost the entire Rock Battalion was put into action. The mission was called Rock Avalanche, and it essentially used almost all of his force to clear the east and west ridgelines of the north-south-running Korengal, flush out all enemy fighters from their havens, and then kill them from the air and ground. There were periods of vicious fighting. Battle Company lost three paratroopers in four days. Ostlund would later estimate that they succeeded in killing anywhere from three hundred to five hundred enemy fighters during those six days, and he scored it as an overwhelming American battlefield victory.

With their backs against the wall in some sectors, the militants displayed flashes of increasingly sophisticated tactics. They overran a fighting position manned by a battalion scout and two Battle Company paratroopers on October 23, killing one American and wounding the other two before escaping with two assault rifles, two sets of night-vision goggles, and an M240 machine gun.

Two days later eighteen Battle Company paratroopers were coming down a narrow mountain trail from Honcho Hill in the Korengal Valley after manning a lookout position all night when they walked into a textbook L-shaped ambush. There were enemy fighters armed with automatic rifles and arrayed in hidden positions across the paratroopers’ path, and there were more along the left flank with machine guns and RPG launchers.

In his book Living with Honor, Battle Company Staff Sergeant Salvatore Giunta, who was among those caught in the ambush, described the tactics as laden with “shocking efficiency and precision. To this day, I still have trouble believing it happened.” Giunta, who was twenty-three at the time, displayed uncommon valor that day by charging forward through enemy fire to find the mortally wounded point man on the US patrol, Sergeant Josh Brennan, tied hand and foot and being carried away by two Islamist fighters. Giunta shot and killed one of the insurgents and wounded the other, who managed to escape down a cliff. Giunta dragged Brennan back; he later died in surgery. Also killed that day was Specialist Hugo Mendoza, a twenty-nine-year-old medic who was shot and bled to death before he could be evacuated.

For his extraordinary heroism in his effort to save Brennan, Giunta would later become the first living recipient of the Medal of Honor for battlefield actions since the Vietnam War. A day later, shaken by the death of the friend he tried desperately to rescue, Giunta bitterly expressed to New York Times reporter Elizabeth Rubin, “The richest, most-trained army got beat by dudes in man-jammies and AKs.”

Word of the improved enemy tactics quickly spread through Rock Battalion. Chosen Company soldiers would talk among themselves about how a fighting position manned by their Battle Company brothers had been overrun. They would put considerable thought into how that ambush of Giunta’s unit had been carried out, particularly the part that made it clear that the enemy was intent on dragging away an American soldier alive or dead.

That reality would influence decisions to come. But for the meantime Ostlund believed he had dealt a stunning blow to militant operations south of the Pech Valley with his Avalanche campaign. In fact, almost all of Rock Battalion unknowingly passed a milestone in their 2007–2008 deployment when Mendoza and Brennan were killed during that October fight. Although there would still be soldiers from the 2/503 who would fall wounded on the battlefield in the remaining months before everybody went home, nearly every company in the battalion would be spared the death of another paratrooper.

The only exception would be Chosen Company.