9

> > > “IT MIGHT BE DANGEROUS”

Chris McKaig felt cast adrift as he stood alone in the Venice Marco Polo Airport. It was November, and he had just arrived as a replacement for the hard-hit Rock Battalion, assigned right out of airborne training at Fort Benning and sent by commercial flight to Europe. But he had no idea how to get to Camp Ederle in Vicenza. By recruitment standards he was an old man, having turned thirty-three the previous July. But he still had his boyish looks, and most of the paratroopers he met and formed friendships with didn’t realize initially he was a dozen years their senior. McKaig was from New Jersey, the older of two sons of a mail carrier and his wife. Chris idolized his father, Patrick, an Army veteran who started taking him bow hunting when he was just eight years old. The father dreamed of moving out west to the broad, green valley region of La Grande, Oregon, and that wish finally came true when his boys were in high school. The family fell in love with northeastern Oregon.

All Chris ever wanted to be was a soldier. He soaked up the war stories of relatives and family friends who served; he watched everything he could find about the military on television. At night he even had dreams of being in combat, and sometimes those dreams turned into nightmares.

Still, he felt the Army was his destiny, and Chris enlisted right out of high school, serving four years, including a stint in South Korea. But it was peacetime, the military was downsizing, and he was denied his request to go through airborne training and become a paratrooper—there were no available slots. So McKaig mustered out and went back to La Grande. He pumped gas, worked in a factory that made trailers, and served in a volunteer fire department. And when the country went to war in 2001 McKaig began a long internal struggle with whether to serve again. When George W. Bush launched the surge in 2007, McKaig couldn’t sit out any longer. He went back to the same recruiting office in La Grande he had visited in high school.

Now, finally, he was at war. But standing in an Italian international airport, McKaig wasn’t exactly sure how to get to it, at least not until a soldier from the 173rd Airborne Brigade approached. The soldier and his wife had just flown in and were driving back to Vicenza. They offered McKaig a lift.

It was a forty-minute drive, and the soldier, who was behind the wheel, seemed like a tough character—calloused, like he’d seen some things. McKaig never did get his name or rank, but he could tell by the way the man carried himself that he was a noncommissioned officer. He asked McKaig which battalion he was joining. The 2/503, McKaig told him, not yet knowing he was headed for Chosen.

The driver started filling him in on what to expect in Afghanistan, what a tough time the Rock Battalion had endured. A new replacement would be tested, he said. From the backseat McKaig could see the guy was studying him in the rearview mirror. “You’re going to either get killed or wounded,” he blurted out all of a sudden. “Definitely wounded. High possibility of getting killed.”

McKaig thought the guy was joking, maybe messing with him. He looked over at the wife, expecting to see her chuckling. But she was as stone-faced as her husband. They were serious.

You gotta be fucking kidding me.

A memorial service for the six who died in the November 9 ambush was held on a sun-dappled courtyard back at Camp Blessing, the survivors of 1st Platoon barely filling two rows of folding chairs. Six combat crosses were arrayed before the somber attendees, the arrangement combining a muzzle-down M4, with a helmet perched on the butt end, and a pair of the dead man’s boots. One by one, people walked to a podium for a few words. Specialist Gregg Rauwolf said, “Most of us knew and loved Corporal Langevin.” An Army medical captain praised Lester Roque’s quiet professionalism. Gabe Green recalled the way Jeff Mersman spoke so often about his mom and dad and how Lancour “always tried to make you feel better when you were down.” A Marine lieutenant said Phil Bocks “had more initiative than anyone I ever met.” Matt Myer read prepared remarks about the unpredictability of war and “how we never truly know what will happen on the next night or the next patrol.”

The most touching eulogy came when Shane Stockard walked up before the group, his head and shoulders barely clearing the podium. Fighting back tears, he memorialized his dead platoon leader in plain-spoken remarks made even more poignant by Stockard’s Texas twang. “Matt Ferrara was a true friend and a fearless leader.… I knew the first time I saw him. I saw how short he was, and I thought, ‘Man, it’s going to be awesome to have a short platoon leader like myself.’… Matt never got worked up over anything. He was as calm as anyone could ever be.… He was more hard-headed than me.

“Matt, rest in peace, and watch over the rest of the platoon. God bless you.”

In the opaque world of the insurgency in the Waigal Valley, it never became clear exactly who led the ambush on November 9. The only certainty was that it was an unusually well-planned attack. Even Bill Ostlund admired its execution.

Somebody with very good military training did that ambush. It was exactly what we would do in our operations.

The only intelligence on enemy activity had surfaced seven weeks earlier with reports that a crucial militant leader in the valley, Mullah Maulawi Muhammad Osman, was assembling hundreds of fighters from villages throughout the area and planning an attack on Bella. Whether Osman viewed the Ferrara mission to Aranas as a target of opportunity that fell into his lap may never be known. To the extent he may have been involved, the success was evidence of skills that Osman, his lieutenants, or his accomplices could bring against Chosen Company in the Waigal Valley. Given the volume of enemy fire and the many locations it came from, as many as fifty to seventy insurgents may have been involved. There was no indication that the enemy had suffered any casualties in what proved to be a lopsided fight.

Battle-damage assessments were always extremely hard. When artillery missions were carried out, it was often difficult to go and see the results of a bombardment because of the vertical terrain. It could take a day or two to reach the place where shells landed. And these jihadist fighters were highly disciplined at recovering their dead and wounded. It often amazed the Americans how a battlefield could be swept clean except for blood trails.

Chosen Company First Sergeant Scott Beeson was growing to admire the caliber of enemy fighters they faced, their physical toughness and skill at moving so effortlessly in harsh terrain. They weren’t weighed down by the heavy body armor the Americans wore, and Beeson knew this made them faster and more nimble in a fight.

Those guys are awesome. I think if you put two of my soldiers with all their gear that they wear against two of their soldiers, I’m not sure who would come out on top.

One thing was sure: the level of combat in the Waigal Valley was defying its data-driven evaluation. In counting the number of troops in contact, or TICs, Ostlund’s staff gave every incident equal weight. So an exchange of gunfire for several minutes over several hundred yards of territory was counted the same way as an incident where six service members were killed. By that measurement the Waigal Valley still showed very little combat. The battalion was still counting eight times more TICs in the Korengal Valley than in the Waigal Valley. Yet with the November 9 ambush alone Chosen Company had suffered nearly as many troops killed in action as Battle Company in the Korengal.

It was becoming increasingly clear that there were very different enemy command styles between the two valleys. Whoever was running the insurgency in the Waigal was more disciplined and patient, biding their time, assembling forces and carefully planning attacks over weeks, with the idea of not just harassing the Americans but annihilating them. Ostlund could see now that the fight in the Korengal was largely more mercenary. Moneyed interests—whether they were Al Qaeda or wealthy businessmen who felt cheated out of their timber profits—were paying local young men $5 a day to go shoot at the Americans, and this was enough to maintain a steady drumbeat of attacks. But north of the Pech Valley, in places like the Waigal, the enemy seemed more fanatical in Ostlund’s view. True believers. A committed enemy who was better trained than in the Korengal, more deliberate, pragmatic, and willing to wait for the right opportunity to cause the greatest harm.

The analysis added even greater urgency to Ostlund’s now-six-month-old push to pull back out of Ranch House and Bella and set up a new base in Wanat. They had finally burned down Ranch House and left it. But they were still in Bella with no firm commitment from higher-ups for the necessary air assets and approval to abandon that base.

Colonel Chip Preysler, commander of the 173rd airborne Brigade, showed up to celebrate Thanksgiving with the 2nd Platoon paratroopers at Bella and kept remarking with an air of astonishment how they could be defending such an inaccessible base—“What are we doing here?” It rankled Ostlund.

Motherfucker, you’re the one who allocates resources. I’ve been advocating to get them the hell out of here for months. Just do it.

He actually pulled Preysler aside and pressed him politely not to make such observations in front of soldiers who would be more than happy to leave this place behind if the command would make it happen.

A week after Thanksgiving the now-emboldened enemy resistance, coming off the US closure of Ranch House and the November 9 ambush, began probing the defenses of Bella. For three straight days beginning November 29, Chosen Company’s 2nd Platoon—now having shifted out there from Blessing—fought off incoming-fire attacks, the enemy pausing now and again only to refit, regroup, and continue to attack. In addition to rifle and machine gun fire as well as RPGs, insurgents began targeting Bella with Chinese-made 107mm rockets. One of the deadly workhorses of low-tech militia around the world, the rocket is nearly a yard in length and a little more than four inches wide—a lunatic’s idea of a July 4 bottle rocket, but one that can travel five miles with three pounds of explosive. It is designed to be fired from a wheeled launcher. But in truth it could be launched from almost anything. It could be propped up on a mound of dirt or against a stone. The enemy in the Waigal would rig one up pointed at Bella with a bottle of water hanging from the fuse, and then they’d leave it there. The water would eventually evaporate and lighten the bottle so that the fuse would ignite and launch the rocket with no one around to catch any counterfire. During those three days one rocket managed to explode inside Bella just ten feet from the front door of the base headquarters, but no one was hurt.

The three days of fighting began when militants positioned south of Bella tried to shoot down a Chinook helicopter negotiating the narrow canyon as it flew out of Bella. They missed, although one RPG nearly struck the aircraft’s tail section. Return fire erupted from the paratroopers at Bella and from the weapons-bristling observation post the soldiers called OP1, which sat high on a western ridge two hundred feet above the main base. It went on like this for two days. When the platoon leader, Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom, led a patrol south of Bella on Friday, November 30, he came under attack, and when he and other soldiers were climbing down from OP1 on Saturday, December 1, they came under fire. Each time Bella and OP1 would erupt with return fire as paratroopers tried to pin the attacking militants long enough to destroy them with 120mm mortar fire or air support. Combat grew so intense that even Bella’s cook managed to get behind a .50-caliber machine gun and lay down fire. The sole casualty during the three days of fighting was an Afghan security guard who suffered a gunshot wound to the stomach. Brostrom was certain they had killed several enemy fighters during the exchanges and was particularly proud of his forward observer, a tall New Hampshire native, Sergeant Ryan Pitts, who would stand out in the open up at OP1 to better spot targets and direct artillery and air support.

“Pitts ignored bullets impacting around him,” Brostrom wrote in an after-action report, adding that the soldier “was personally responsible for causing most of the enemy casualties through his effective employment of indirect fires.”

Another trooper who distinguished himself was Sergeant Brian Hissong, who directed much of the soldiers’ return fire from OP1, even grabbing an AT4 on occasion—kind of a modern-day bazooka developed for defeating tanks—and cutting loose with a round at suspected enemy positions.

Hissong was a fair-haired farm boy from central Illinois. His family owned three hundred acres in St. Joseph, not far from the University of Illinois in Champagne, where they grew corn and beans. Brian was the youngest of two and had dreamed of joining the Army since he was thirteen, and seeing the destruction of 9/11 made him even more certain. He enlisted at nineteen in early 2004 and found himself headed for Italy. The following year he deployed with Chosen Company to Zabul Province in the south, where there were moments of intense combat. Hissong was among the Chosen paratroopers who charged into a basement where their friend, Staff Sergeant Michael Schafer, had been killed so they could finish off the Taliban fighters responsible. He killed one who was only a few feet away by managing to get off the first shot. And Hissong was on a detail assigned to recover five burned bodies of Americans killed when a Chinook helicopter was shot down. After returning to Vicenza he couldn’t stop thinking about Schafer and the burned bodies, and he was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder. He discreetly visited a counselor at Camp Ederle and entertained thoughts of leaving the Army. But Hissong, by then a sergeant and team leader, stayed on for the Waigal Valley.

During the winter of 2007–2008 enemy operations in the valley didn’t stop. Reports were coming in that insurgents had set up a roadblock near a bridge south of Bella on a road that ran east to the village of Muladish and was used to tax locals passing through. Brostrom saw a chance to take the fight to the enemy.

By January the weather was freezing, with snow and ice on the ground. He devised a pincer-like movement to trap the enemy fighters at the roadblock. He’d lead about two dozen of the Chosen Few south of Bella along the western bank of the Waigal River, approaching the enemy checkpoint from the northwest, while sending a half dozen other soldiers across the river and up over the heights southeast of Bella in a blocking maneuver.

It would be a night-long mission in the cold so they could have their ambush positions set up as the sun was rising. Platoon Sergeant Matt Kahler tapped Brian Hissong to accompany the six-man element. But Hissong was exhausted and asked if he could beg off.

“I’m fine,” Kahler said. “I’ll just go instead.”

Brostrom led his twenty-two Afghan Army soldiers and fourteen US troops south out of Bella shortly before 3:30 A.M. on January 26, a Saturday, as Kahler took his six-man element across the bridge and hiked the switchbacks up to the ridgetop. The platoon sergeant was with a group of scouts led by Sergeant Anthony Stamper and Specialist Mike Denton of 1st Squad. They needed to pass through Speedbump, a fortified outpost manned by Afghan security guards (ASGs) that sat atop the east valley ridge opposite the river from OP1.

The nine Afghan guards on duty didn’t know they were coming. That was on purpose. Brostrom increasingly worried these local hired men couldn’t be trusted. Moreover, they were undisciplined, known to fall asleep at their post or, worse, smoke hashish during long work hours.

The whole point of hiring local guards, a practice begun by the 10th Mountain troops nearly two years before, was to provide fighting-age men in the community jobs as an incentive to keep them from working for or cooperating with the enemy. But particularly after the attack on Ranch House in August, Chosen Company had grown increasingly suspicious of these men.

Certainly they weren’t going to give these local men advance notice of missions. They would ask the security guard commander down at Bella to radio Speedbump when the paratroopers reached the outpost. Except that when Specialist Jacob Walker roused the commander shortly after 4 A.M., the man didn’t have a radio to call his men. He’d loaned it to an ANA soldier. Walker found a different radio, but the commander said he couldn’t connect with Speedbump. The guards couldn’t be alerted.

Kahler and Stamper debated whether to just climb around the outpost and continue on. But the ice was so treacherous on the mountain that they didn’t think that was a good idea. The outpost had three structures—two guard posts and a living quarters. Kahler led the men to within fifty yards of the outpost, and they started flashing lights and calling out.

“ASG, we’re Americans!”

No response. Scout member Brenton Jones, a private first class, was in the lead and started moving toward the concertina wire surrounding Speedbump. Kahler stopped him.

“It might be dangerous,” the platoon sergeant told Jones, and he went ahead on his own.

Kahler crossed the wire and moved closer, calling out, “ASG, we’re American!” over and over. Approaching from the south, he walked past the first guard post and got within about twenty feet east of the structure, still loudly calling out that he was an American. There was almost a full moon, and the twenty-nine-year-old Kahler was standing behind a rock visible from the hips up when someone in or near the bunker opened fire with an AK47. There were three shots, and one of them struck Kahler in the upper right side of his head and exited out the back of his skull. He slumped to the ground.

The other paratroopers took cover behind rocks and began yelling, “Americans! Americans! Don’t shoot!” They called out to Kahler, who didn’t move, and started pressing forward when another three or four shots rang out. More yells and angry screams followed until a voice inside finally responded.

“Okay, okay, Americans.”

Stamper reached Kahler first and could see right away the platoon sergeant wasn’t moving. He had Jones and another scout, Specialist Ryan Schwarz, try to revive Kahler. Jones performed CPR, but there would be no response.

The paratroopers found the gunman, a man they knew as Mohammed Din, a short, light-skinned Afghan with close-cropped hair and a trim beard. He and five others were rounded up and disarmed. Three others stayed hidden inside the sleeping bunker. As the paratroopers worked to gather up the guards’ weapons and disable them, Din kept edging over to get a closer look at what he’d done to Kahler. Denton, armed with his squad automatic weapon, walked up and shoved the security guard away. When Din and another guard took off running, Denton raised his weapon and was ready to shoot them down, but Stamper called out, “Denton, don’t fire!”

They needed to get their platoon sergeant back down to Bella. It was a long and difficult descent; the snow was deep and icy. They first tried carrying Kahler’s body in a tarp, but it was awkward, and the soldiers kept slipping. Stamper finally just lifted the body over his shoulder and took it down that way. Soldiers from Bella met them about halfway and helped carry Kahler’s body the rest of the way. A group of soldiers went back up the mountain to gather some of the platoon sergeant’s equipment that had been left behind or fallen as he was brought down the steep slope. All they had to do was follow the blood trail back up.

Back at Bella a distraught Hissong returned to his quarters and began smashing personal belongings in anger and anguish over Kahler’s death. He had come to a decision: no way was he staying in the Army.

If they could kill Kahler, they could kill any of us.

Kahler’s death devastated Jonathan Brostrom. Waiting with the body for the medevac helicopter, he called home. He just needed to talk with someone, to vent. He was upset, tears were beginning to flow, and when his mother, Mary Jo, answered the phone, Jonathan asked to speak with his father. Dave Brostrom listened as his son poured out a story of deception and murder.

At Camp Blessing, when word arrived that Kahler was dead, Matt Myer felt his knees buckling and had to sit down. Myer had spent long days with the platoon sergeant on patrols out of Blessing and during stints at Bella. He had come to know Kahler well, and now he was gone.

When the news circulated through the base, Ryan Pitts was up at OP1. He climbed back down a day or two later, and when he walked inside the perimeter, the place immediately felt empty, like a death in the family had changed everything, even the way the physical surroundings appeared. He was feeling rage and loss all at once, and he walked through the headquarters without making eye contact. Brostrom offered solace, but Pitts wouldn’t have it.

Captain Myer and First Sergeant Beeson came to Ryan’s hooch to check in on him. Pitts finally couldn’t hold back any longer and openly wept. They stayed with him for a time, Beeson offering his own form of rough-edged condolence.

Like a lot of them, Pitts and Myer were convinced Kahler’s death was murder.

An Army investigation quickly wrapped up in a few days without definitive findings. Two guards had been on duty at the time of the shooting, including one in the first bunker, where the gunman had emerged. The seven other guards were asleep. The security guard identified as the gunman reportedly had a reputation for falling asleep on duty and, when roused, grabbing for his gun to open fire. There were also unconfirmed intelligence reports that the enemy had engineered the shooting.

As part of the investigation, sound tests were done at Speedbump, and an investigator concluded that if the suspected security guard had been huddling near a wood-burning stove inside the bunker—which many of them did while on duty to keep warm—it would have been harder to hear Kahler calling out. “It is inconclusive whether the shooting was accidental or intentional,” the report said.

By dawn the morning after Kahler was killed, a medevac helicopter arrived to pick up his body. Brian Hissong was among a small clutch of soldiers who carried the remains to the aircraft. Before stepping away, Hissong placed his hand on Kahler’s head. A farewell.

On the Blackhawk helicopter was thirty-three-year-old Justin Madill, an emergency medicine doctor and flight surgeon new to Afghanistan and flying his first medevac mission. Madill had always wanted to be a physician, and the Army paid for his medical degree. By the time he was sent overseas Madill was a captain with the 101st Airborne Division.

As he pulled Kahler’s body into the helicopter, Madill was moved by the grief-stricken young faces of the soldiers who had brought their slain leader to the aircraft. Most were ten years younger than Madill. Images from this small event stayed with the captain long after: how the dead soldier’s hand had spilled out of the body bag, plainly showing the wedding band on his finger, and how one paratrooper who had helped carry the body laid a hand on the dead platoon sergeant’s head. It was Madill’s introduction to war.

This is real. Here I am. In Afghanistan.

The soldiers of 2nd Platoon wanted revenge and fantasized about how they would deal with the gunman, Mohammed Din, if they had the chance. Jason Bogar, for one, was sure he would never forget him.

If I ever see him, I will do everything in my power to kill him, even if it takes my life.

The same month Matt Kahler died, the hearts-and-minds campaign in the Waigal, already on life support, took a deeper hit when a man named Ziaul Rahman became the new Waigal District governor operating out of the district headquarters in Wanat. The Americans quickly assessed him as a weak, incompetent leader who could bend easily to the pressure of the insurgency. Within a few months Rahman had made the battalion’s “negative influencers” watch list.

In March, 2nd Platoon shifted back to Blessing, and 1st Platoon took its place at Bella. First Lieutenant Brostrom returned to Chosen Company headquarters dispirited and convinced that counterinsurgency efforts out of Bella were a lost cause. “That area pretty much turned to crap,” he told a military historian a few months after he got back.

They had been able to kill some bad guys, and that was a good thing, Brostrom felt. But little else was accomplished. They certainly weren’t bonding with the population. The terrain was too difficult, the area too vast, the people too receptive to the enemy. It took twelve hours to hike to the nearest village from Bella. An ambush on the way or back was not uncommon. And once the paratroopers reached the village, persuading the elders to work against the insurgency and with the Americans and Afghan government just wasn’t happening.

Every village had its own culture and even its own dialect. Communicating was a chore, the entire exercise of dissecting each minisociety a huge “pain in the ass.” And the young lieutenant was still simmering over Kahler’s death. “There was no doubt in my mind it was foul play,” he told the historian.

It was amid these frustrations that Matt Myer recommended the next step for withdrawing farther from the Waigal Valley. Ranch House had from the very beginning been seen as too risky. The way he saw it, operating deep within the valley to frustrate the influence of terror groups such as Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Tayyiba was not worth the risk.

Even NATO’s broad, counterinsurgency goal of extending the Afghan government’s reach into these remote areas seemed like a nonstarter in the Waigal Valley because the local government representatives were so ineffective, Myer concluded. He felt like he was spinning his wheels. The only plan that made sense going forward was the one Bill Ostlund had pushed from almost the moment they arrived in Afghanistan: pull back and build a new base. The best location would be the Waigal District headquarters in Wanat, a village near the mouth of the valley that was connected by a gravel road to Blessing just over five miles to the south. Unlike the mountain hamlet of Bella and the town of Aranas, Wanat actually had some semblance of government structure with the district center and its own police department.

They would finally jettison the strategy advanced by Chris Cavoli and the 10th Mountain Division soldiers the year before of setting up outposts deep in the valley system and pulling roads, services, and governance to places like Aranas. Instead, Ostlund and Myer thought it was better to push those resources—roads and so forth—out to these hinterlands from a base closer and theoretically safer to operate from, like Wanat.

Here they had a strong ally in Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, who commanded all ground forces in eastern Afghanistan. Schloesser had taken over in April for David Rodriguez, who had allowed the rescue helicopters that responded to the November 9 ambush to work extraordinarily long hours pulling wounded paratroopers out of that battlefield.

The fifty-three-year-old Schloesser had actually flown into Ranch House the year before and visited Bella. He was shocked at how remote and inaccessible both bases were. He could see that they lay along access routes the enemy relied upon for movement from Pakistan to Kabul. Since 2006, when 10th Mountain troops established them, the character of the war had changed. Attacks across the country had increased, including directly into Kabul. Within a few months of taking command, Schloesser would be pushing hard for more reinforcements across eastern Afghanistan. The flow of enemy fighters and materiel toward the capital was only increasing. He knew Chosen Company was operating in a dangerous place along the famed Muj Highway from Pakistan to Kabul.

But Schloesser was learning that closing down bases was a difficult political pill to swallow. Every month he was meeting with top Afghan officials—the minister of defense, the head of the military, the minister of the interior—and they were arguing that these bases should not be abandoned. Nor was withdrawal necessarily palatable with the American high command.

The United States and NATO don’t pull back from things. They move into things.

The result would be delay in approving resources for the withdrawal from far-forward bases in the Waigal Valley. This would jam the mission to close Bella and open a base in Wanat into the final months of the Rock Battalion deployment. Brigade commander Chip Preysler was adamantly opposed to leaving that tough job to incoming troops of the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment out of Fort Hood. They wouldn’t have the battle chops that Rock Battalion had earned. His boss, Schloesser, agreed. He thought Preysler’s people were the most experienced US troops fighting in Afghanistan.

The village of Wanat sat along a bend in the Waigal River where the valley widened ever so slightly and mountains rose to ten thousand feet on either side. Some fifty families lived there, about two hundred people. There was a nearly impassable dirt road running south from Bella about five miles to Wanat, hugging the western bank of the river. As the road reached the outskirts of Wanat it crossed a bridge that the Americans built in 2006. The roadway then cut south again, this time along the eastern side of the Waigal. There was a driveway off to the right that led to the Waigal District Center and police station located on an isthmus, gifts from the United States. It was a picturesque spot right along the river.

The road from Bella continued south, crossing a second bridge over the Wayskawdi Creek—yet another American bequest, built like everything else to promote commerce and tug these remote people into the twenty-first century. From there the roadway ascended up a short hill to the village center made up primarily of a mosque, a two-story hotel, and a long bazaar that paralleled the road as it continued out of Wanat and south toward the Pech Valley. The bazaar was really just a series of connected, single-story structures where shop owners sold wares during the day. There was a collection of tables and chairs out front for folks to relax under an awning in the steamy summer heat. Directly across the street from the bazaar a new sellers’ market was under construction—single-story, mud-brick buildings arranged in a diamond shape. Behind the old bazaar and east of the roadway was a series of agricultural terraces rising several hundred feet before giving way to trees and scrub brush blanketing the rising slopes of the eastern flank of the valley. Here and there along those hillsides were private homes, cottages, and other structures looking down on Wanat.

To the west, between the village center and the river, was a bluff on which sat several relatively lavish homes built for a few of the more prominent members of the community. Haji Juma Gul was one of the wealthier people of the hamlet, moneyed enough to afford a trip to Mecca in Saudi Arabia for the annual hajj. There was a large, flat area of ground that looked like a big dirt parking lot that sat south of the village center, between the road and the bluff of mansions. This stretch of ground was where Rock Battalion chose to build a new base of operations in the Waigal Valley. The base would be in the center of Wanat with the bluff to the west, the mosque and a two-story hotel and restaurant complex immediately north, and the bazaar along the eastern flank.

For the Chosen Company commander, Captain Matt Myer, it would be the first time in his career he had set up a combat outpost from scratch. The Americans made several trips up from Camp Blessing by road to Wanat in March of 2008. On a straight line the distance between Wanat and Blessing was only about four and a half miles. By winding road it was upward of six miles. The highway was narrow, and there were places where rock outcroppings on the uphill side of the road came close to scraping the side of the gun trucks. Soldiers had to pull in their side mirrors to avoid having them ripped off. The journey could be a one- to two-hour trek, given the slow process of checking for roadside bombs. Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund led a trip to Wanat with Matt Myer and Chosen Company paratroopers, handing out stuffed beanie toys, blankets, and little Etch A Sketches to children. One of the troopers snapped a photo of a sober-looking boy holding a couple of stuffed toys in his arms, and Ostlund saved the picture in his files under the heading, “The future.”

Wanat had once been a slice of hope for the US military efforts to defeat the insurgency in the Waigal Valley. When Chris Cavoli of the 10th Mountain Division sent his soldiers up to Aranas and Bella in 2006, the only way to link those communities with the world was to build a road up the Waigal Valley, and that meant bridging the river and the Wayskawdi Creek at Wanat. So Cavoli sent an Army engineer company to Wanat to set up a temporary base and ford the waterways. The young West Point lieutenant leading the engineers, Andrew Glenn, worked hard to connect with the population—holding shuras, taking time to share tea, and urging people to visit the work sites. There were a handful of insurgent attacks to try to disrupt these efforts, but they failed. By the time the bridges were finished, Cavoli noticed the residents had a growing affection for the engineers and the work they’d done. When Cavoli visited Wanat, he walked the streets without his body armor.

But times had changed since 2006. Battle lines in the valley were drawing closer to Wanat, with Ranch House closed and a growing number of attacks on Bella five miles up the road. People in Wanat increasingly felt squeezed between the insurgency and the American plan to build a military base in their backyard.

Ostlund and his officers wanted to settle leasing arrangements for the flat land in Wanat, the last hurdle before the new firebase could be constructed, and they journeyed up to the village on May 26 for an 8:20 A.M. shura at the district center. The Americans received a rude reception. The shady district governor, Ziaul Rahman, and other elders held Ostlund and his officers off as they huddled separately for several minutes, something they’d never done before. Their behavior when they emerged was arrogant and hostile. Village elders said they were unhappy about the prospects of a US installation in their town, a clear departure from previous sentiments. They invited Ostlund to stay for lunch. But when he did, the elders left him alone to dine with the police chief and they ate separately—an absolute slight.

When the six-vehicle convoy finally departed for Blessing shortly before 2 P.M., everyone was on high alert. Afghan National Army troops back at Blessing were tipped off that a couple of dozen enemy fighters would be lying in wait for the convoy on the return trip. Meanwhile Wanat was conspicuously empty. Children who always came around for candy or toys were nowhere to be seen, and the shops were all closed.

About a mile south of Wanat, the convoy of Humvees found itself in a crossfire from both sides of the valley as the vehicles entered a deep bend in the road. An IED (improvised explosive device) blew up in front of the truck carrying Matt Myer. Gunmen up in the hills and off the edge of the roadway to the east opened fire with Kalashnikovs, machine guns, and RPG launchers while others engaged from the west side of the valley. Enemy rounds pock-marked the armored shielding on the trucks and cracked layers of bullet-proof windows while paratroopers in the truck gun turrets opened fire with machine guns and automatic grenade launchers.

The firefight went on for another forty minutes. Myer was in the right front passenger seat and saw an RPG that seemed to be flying almost in slow motion right toward the windshield. It fell short, and the explosion blew more dirt into the air. The gunner in Myer’s truck, Specialist Ananthachai Nantakul, said his MK19 grenade launcher up in the turret was down, clogged with dust from the explosions. As Nantakul worked frantically to clear the weapon, Myer and his radio operator, Sergeant Erik Aass (pronounced Awes), got out of the truck and opened fire with their M4 rifles. An RPG explosion knocked Aass to his knees, and a small piece of shrapnel struck him in his left forearm. Nantakul took shrapnel in his hand.

The convoy finally began to move slowly to a point farther down the road, and the soldiers now directed their fire back toward the ambush site. Matt Myer was back out of the truck and this time saw something he had never witnessed in more than a year of deployment: two enemy fighters in plain view making their way up a trail away from the ambush site perhaps three hundred yards away.

That’s the first time I’ve actually seen the enemy.

He felt a stab of excitement. Finally a chance to shoot and kill these elusive enemy fighters. But there was a Humvee right in his line of fire, and Myer could neither shoot at the militants nor use his tracer rounds to direct others to target them. Before long the two had disappeared around a bend in the trail. Mortar and artillery rounds from Blessing shook the hillsides around the ambush, and before long the shooting was over.

A battalion intelligence analysis later concluded that Mullah Maulawi Muhammad Osman, a militant leader from the village of Waigal—who apparently was seen as a kind of overall commander of enemy forces gathering in the Waigal Valley—was increasingly concerned about American intentions to open a base at Wanat, particularly given the widespread knowledge that Chosen Company was planning to evacuate Bella.

Erik Aass, who was thirty-one, had one of the most unusual backgrounds in Chosen Company. He was Norwegian by birth, born in the capital city of Oslo, the son of a diplomat. His mother was Indonesian and the daughter of a diplomat. Erik grew up attending schools for the children of American envoys in France, Indonesia, and Norway, and he lived for a time with his family in Washington, DC. From early adolescence on, he identified most closely with American culture and a desire to become a US citizen. Unlike virtually every other enlisted soldier in Chosen, Aass had earned a college degree, acquiring a bachelor’s in economics and history from Fordham University in New York City. He signed up for ROTC in college and even went through Airborne training, but he was ineligible to receive a commission for lack of US citizenship. When 9/11 happened, Aass watched thousands of lower-Manhattan evacuees streaming north on foot from the area around the World Trade Center. He finally enlisted in 2002 and became a US citizen while serving in the Army.

During Chosen Company’s deployment to Afghanistan in 2005–2006, he was shot in the left hand and right knee trying to recover the body of Staff Sergeant Michael Schafer at the bottom of a basement staircase. Aass came down the steps, firing a squad automatic weapon, or light machine gun. He was awarded a Bronze Star for valor. He later served as driver for the 173rd Airborne Brigade’s commander, Colonel Chip Preysler. But Aass never liked being apart from Chosen and, prior to the 2007–2008 deployment to Afghanistan, convinced Matt Myer to take him on as company radio man and clerk. His last name was predictably the target of banter in the Army, and it didn’t help that Chosen Company’s inimitable first sergeant, Scott Beeson, would sometimes summon Aass by calling out, “Aass…” and then after a pause, “… hole.”

Ostlund, Myer, and the others returned to Wanat for a second shura on June 8, once again with the bearded elders and Rahman in the red-carpeted district center. The elders didn’t volunteer anything about another ambush but, when asked, admitted there might be militants waiting on the return trip. Rahman was pointedly told that bombers and spy planes would be watching as the Americans drove back to Blessing. This time when the convoy rolled south and gunfire erupted, there was swift, prepared retaliation, with artillery and a B1 bomber pounding the hillsides. The attack petered out quickly. By the end of June the leasing arrangements for the new base were finalized.

Each soldier earned eighteen days of leave during the long deployment, and as the casualty numbers mounted for Rock Battalion and, specifically, Chosen Company, that brief visit home was a time to take stock of lives and, in a few cases, make a major course correction.

Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom took his leave and surprised his mother, Mary Jo, back in Hawaii for Mother’s Day. He brought videos of their combat in Bella, which he excitedly showed his father, who in turn was shocked by a level of violence he hadn’t expected in that theater of war. On Jon’s return to Afghanistan, there was a stopover at a US airbase in Kuwait, and he spotted a woman, a young officer, wearing a 173rd Airborne Brigade patch on her shoulder. Blond and blue eyed—and female—Amanda Wilson was attracting a lot of attention in an ocean of idle men. She was miserable. Wilson was a new captain and company commander. She had gone home on leave to California to celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday and, while there, received news that three of her soldiers were killed in an attack by a suicide car bomber in Jalalabad. She was riven with guilt for being away when it all happened. When Jon Brostrom walked up and introduced himself, it wasn’t long before they realized how much they had in common. He had lost Kahler just a few months before and understood what she was going through. The two officers connected over snow cones on the tarmac while waiting for a flight to Bagram. He bought her a cherry-flavored cone and teased her about how it made her lips red. She thought he was handsome and uncomplicated with his kooky aphorisms—“Big players make big plays.” His empathy was exactly what she needed. Brostrom, for his part, was smitten, and when he got back to Blessing, he dug up Wilson’s email and they started a war-zone relationship by message and phone.

Mike Denton went home in December and screwed up enough courage to call a young woman he knew from high school and ask her out on a date. Christina said yes and stole the paratrooper’s heart when she agreed to see the movie American Gangster with Denzel Washington.

Sean Samaroo, a squad leader in 2nd Platoon, had dated back in Vicenza a young woman hired as a liaison to assist troops and their families get medical care at an Italian hospital near the base. Her name was Natasha. She had two children from a previous marriage, and Sean had a son. He had given Natasha a promise ring before leaving for Afghanistan. Now, with the dangers of the deployment becoming all too real, Samaroo wanted to get married. Then if the worst happened, Natasha would receive all the benefits he’d earned. During his leave in January they held a ceremony back in Arkansas where her parents lived.

Jacob Sones arrived home in March to marry his girlfriend, Nicole, down at the courthouse in Plano, Texas. He too was driven by the fear of war and its consequences. It was a rushed affair. She was wearing ripped jeans, and he had wine stains on his shirt.

A third soldier in Chosen Company did the same during his leave, only in secret, without so much as a word about it to their parents. His fiancée had witnessed his nightmares during that break from war and worried about what might happen when he returned—whether he would survive at all. Shortly before the leave was ending, they decided to tie the knot down at the courthouse. They had a full ceremony months later when he was home for good. But they never told their families that they were already married by then.

Sergeant Israel Garcia and his wife, Lesly, planned a romantic getaway in Cabo San Lucas during his leave over Valentine’s Day in February. They both wanted to start a family and long debated the right time. He didn’t want to miss seeing the baby start to walk, so both leaned toward Lesly getting pregnant upon his return. But Israel decided that during his leave they should just start trying. Lesly knew full well how dangerous the deployment had become. A devout Catholic, she made a pact with God and didn’t even tell Israel. If she got pregnant, it was a sign that God might intend to take Israel from her and was leaving a part of him back on earth. If she did not become pregnant, she would take that as evidence that Israel would be coming home safely.

When the leave was over and Garcia returned to war, Lesly wasn’t pregnant.

There were changes afoot for the men of Chosen Company. David Dzwik, who had fought at Ranch House and diligently manned the radio at Bella during the ambush, was elevated from squad leader in 1st Platoon to platoon sergeant for 2nd Platoon. It was a delicate move replacing Matt Kahler. Dzwik knew this full well and told his soldiers he was no substitute for the popular slain leader. But Dzwik said he had his own way of doing things and the men would have to accept this. The transition went remarkably well.

Jason Baldwin, who had been awarded a Silver Star for his heroism at Ranch House, had grown disenchanted since then. With Ranch House closed and a battalion mortar crew operating the 120mm launcher at Bella, the Chosen Company mortar team was split between Blessing and a forward operating base in the Pech Valley called Michigan. Baldwin was eager to see more combat, he was upset that he wasn’t yet getting promoted, and he was loud and brash about wanting a change, wishing he was with Battle Company in the war-ravaged Korengal Valley. Erich Phillips was soon fed up with his protégé’s complaints and engineered a transfer.

In return for Baldwin, Phillips got Specialist Sergio Abad from Battle Company. If anyone epitomized the lost boys of Chosen Company, it was Sergio. As a little boy of Cuban heritage, he grew up with a mother who became suicidal and a drug addict after losing an older son in a car accident. Sergio longed to get away from the world of his childhood and join the Army. With his mother abusing heroin, Sergio went to live with his grandparents when he was six. He later changed homes again, this time taken in by his great aunt, Sorangel Herrara, when he was twelve. Schoolwork was a struggle. But the military was his dream, and Sergio joined junior ROTC at South Miami Senior High School and became a distance runner, running the two and a half miles home from school rather than wait for the bus.

One day when he was fourteen, he solemnly asked his great aunt to look into his eyes. “This is serious,” Sergio told her. “I’m going to die young, and when I do, you need to promise me you’re going to bury me at Arlington National Cemetery.”

That kind of talk frightened her.

Sergio dropped out of high school in tenth grade and earned a high school equivalency credential through Job Corps before entering the Army in January 2006. He deployed with Battle Company, and about the time of his transfer to Chosen Abad went on leave to see his high school sweetheart. He returned to war only to find out that he had left her pregnant, later learning it would be a girl. Abad was ecstatic and began referring to the unborn child as his gummy bear.

Meanwhile the plan to evacuate Bella and build a new base in Wanat continued to be delayed. It was finally slated for July, literally within weeks of when Chosen Company would go home in August. It was a complicated mission set to occur at a time when Chosen Company—and the battalion as a whole—was in a period of high activity. Preparations were underway for shipping personal belongings—and eventually the troops themselves—back home, and there was the task of familiarizing the incoming replacement battalion with its new area of operation. That meant going out on vehicle patrols with the new soldiers and riding side by side with them as they visited villages and met with elders.

First Sergeant Scott Beeson thought it was the worst possible time to take on an assignment like setting up an entirely new base, and he hammered Matt Myer about it.

“This is fucked up and a bad idea. And I would really appreciate it if you would talk to your commander, Colonel Ostlund, and tell him that that is a jacked-up idea. Not very smart. I’ll do what the hell I’m told to do. But I don’t think this is the right thing to do.”

Myer listened to his company first sergeant’s impassioned argument and always came back with the same logic: How could they leave this unfinished task for their replacements who would be arriving without any experience fighting in the Waigal Valley? Just because the deployment is nearing an end doesn’t mean the responsibilities go away, he told Beeson. The Army way is to finish whatever job is front and center.

It’s part of our culture.

Undeterred, Beeson went to the sergeant major of the battalion, Bradley Meyers, and repeated his complaint. “I hope you know that someone’s going to get hurt, because we’re very vulnerable right now.” Meyers heard him out but explained that the move was Ostlund’s idea, and the brigade commander, Chip Preysler, was on board with it. He told Beeson to drop it.

Beeson, meanwhile, was catching grief about the mission from within the ranks of 2nd Platoon. David Dzwik, 2nd Platoon sergeant, told him his men were very unhappy about it. It was Beeson’s turn to listen. He privately agreed with Dzwik, but already had his orders.

“We’re on this tour for fifteen months, not fourteen. Not fourteen and a half. So you do what you got to do and bring everything you need to make it successful. I’ve voiced my opinion to highers, Sergeant Dzwik, and basically they told us we have a job to do and we need to do it, and that, in turn is what I’m telling you. Your job is not to bitch and whine and complain about something that could happen. Your job is to make your soldiers feel secure.”

There were several weeks during the late spring of 2008 when it was never clear to the paratroopers of 2nd Platoon whether the Wanat mission was on or off. That they were so close to going home only made it worse.

Matt Myer finally laid it out for them and told them it was a definite. It was June. They were out in the smoking area at Blessing, and the captain acknowleged the risks in the mission. It was possible the enemy was preparing for a fight. But Myer said he was intent on making their position as defensible as possible. There would be Afghan Army soldiers supplementing their numbers. They would take along a 120- and a 60mm mortar, and there would be artillery support at Blessing. A TOW-mounted Humvee (a tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided missile launcher attached to the roof of the Humvee) from Destined Company would go along. The high-tech missile was the one the enemy hated most and nicknamed the “Finger of God.” The TOW missile had been designed in the 1960s as an antitank weapon. But the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan found it was devastating against enemy fighters.

The battalion intelligence officer, Captain Benjamin Pry, was hoping to get access to a surveillance drone with video cameras to watch for enemy movements. But the US military’s conventional forces fighting in Afghanistan had only two Predator drones for the entire war effort in the country, one in the south and one in the east. And there were competing demands—in the Tangi Valley of Wardak Province southwest of Kabul insurgents had tortured, killed, and mutilated three American National Guard soldiers June 26, and there was an operation underway to find those responsible.

What bothered 2nd Platoon most, however, was intel about the enemy digging in around Wanat, and as the weeks wore on, imaginations began to burn bright with ideas of a great, cinematic final Armageddon awaiting the Chosen Few. This naturally evolved into a discussion of how they would one day all be memorialized in some big Hollywood production they would all go see at the nearest Cineplex. The next important consideration: who’s going to play whom in the movie.

Up went a grease board with casting decisions listed for the movie about their last battle with the working title: “Too Short for This Shit.” The actor Benicio del Toro, who played a drunken bad boy in the neo-noir action film Sin City, would play Jacob Sones, who was once roused from a drunken slumber on the grounds of Camp Ederle by Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund only to tell his battalion commander to “fuck off.”

Tom Sizemore, who played a stocky, tough Army sergeant in Saving Private Ryan, would portray Platoon Sergeant David Dzwik. The list went on from there. Napoleon Dynamite star Jon Heder was to be cast as Lieutenant Jon Brostrom. Gunnar Zwilling got Brad Pitt. Mike Denton got American Idol host Ryan Seacrest. An eclectic mix of comedians would be drafted for the movie. Stand-up comics Colin Quinn and Dane Cook would play, respectively, Jason Bogar and Ryan Pitts. And Tonight Show host Jay Leno would be cast as Jason Hovater.

Still, the silver-screen fantasy couldn’t disguise an undercurrent of bitterness over the mission. It was a real pisser to get stuck with this right before going home, and Captain Myer confirmed rumors about how dangerous it might be. But it was Army. All the bitching in the world never changes anything. There would be a grudging acceptance as the same two words rolled around in everyone’s head.

Fuck it.