10

> > > UNDER SIEGE

One morning Sergeant Zaccery Johnston and Specialist Gabriel Green were enjoying mugs of coffee at OP1, with its spectacular view of the Waigal Valley and surrounding mountains, when, with heat and a flash, a 107mm rocket blew past them and exploded just yards away. It felt like it missed them by inches. They looked at each other, clinked their coffee cups, and let out a cheer. But the enemy was definitely getting a closer bead on the ridge-top outpost.

Reports from the dwindling number of friendly locals and intercepted radio chatter all pointed to plans by the insurgent leader Mullah Osman to launch an attack on Bella and overrun it, much as militants had attempted at Ranch House the previous summer. Only this time Osman was enlisting scores of men from villages throughout the Waigal Valley river system and summoning fighters from the Korengal Valley. He was collaborating with Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, or LET, the Army of the Righteous that would launch the deadly attacks in Mumbai, India, in November of 2008. LET was adept at training local fighters in tactical skills, including zeroing in mortar fire and ambush organization.

LET’s growing influence in the Waigal Valley, along with Al Qaeda and other terror groups, was one of the key reasons Chris Cavoli had pushed his 10th Mountain troopers so far up into Nuristan and built Ranch House above Aranas: he wanted to derail their leverage in southern Nuristan. Now, as Chosen Company continued its tactical withdrawal from the Waigal Valley, planning its next move back to Wanat, whatever gains had been made against these violent groups in 2006 and 2007 were gone. Intelligence reports indicated LET was bringing in Arabs, Chechnyans, and Pakistanis to fight in the Waigal. Something very big was in the works. Chosen Company was receiving information that anywhere from one hundred to three hundred fighters were being assembled, along with a half dozen men willing to strap on suicide bombs and sacrifice themselves to breach the base defense perimeter. Planning had been underway since May. They were staging out of villages like Nisha to the far west or Muladish to the southeast, where Chosen Company patrols had visited the previous year, providing medical and other support for villagers.

From Bella Matt Ferrara’s replacement as 1st Platoon leader, Lieutenant Aaron Thurman, sent Afghan security guards out to surrounding villages, inviting elders to come down for a series of meetings, or shuras. But little came of them. Aranas village leaders arrived at Bella for one session. Thurman hoped to reconnect with them and to build a relationship again, but it turned into a shouting match when the Afghans denied any responsibility for the attack that killed Ferrara and five of his men on November 9.

Not every town was cooperating with the surge in militants, but there were enough to provide a logistical support network. The insurgency was distributing DVDs in the Waigal Valley showing the attack on Ranch House the previous August as they ratcheted up their propaganda campaign. And there was more: unconfirmed reports of heavy armaments in the area, an anti-aircraft gun north of Bella, and heavy machine guns near Nisha and one near Muladish. There was even word about 75mm recoilless rifles implanted near the villages around Bella. The Americans could glean a sense of the enemy morale by using electronic surveillance to capture snatches of radio communications, listening to battle-damage assessments of Bella after attacks, discussing whether they managed to hurt or kill any of the Americans they called “infidels,” listing the number of their own wounded and dead, and even grousing about the strain of combat like every other soldier in the annals of warfare: “We are tired. Want a break,” one of them muttered over the radio one day.

Bella was peaceful during the latter part of May and the first week of June. On Monday morning, June 9, there would be some good news for the 1st Platoon defenders. A Russian-made Mi17 helicopter was arriving with fresh fruits and vegetables. An American defense contractor called Supreme Air operated the aircraft using a Russian crew. The produce they delivered was always a tasty departure from processed Army fare, but flying into Bella was becoming more and more of a risk.

Any rotary wing aircraft were forced to navigate between mountain walls that soared three thousand to five thousand feet on both sides of a narrow approach in Bella—into the bottom of the Dixie Cup. Anyone with a rocket or an RPG launcher could set up on a ridge top and fire down as a helicopter carefully approached. American military aircraft at least had the option of arriving under the cover of darkness using night-vision goggles—the Russian crew didn’t have that choice. On this day they came in shortly after dawn, and almost as soon they touched down, with the engines still running, enemy fighters unleashed a volley of 107mm rockets from ridgelines to the east and north. The aircraft was hit by shrapnel from a missile that exploded into the landing zone less than ten feet away. Shards punctured the outside skin, and a fountain of fuel started to spew onto the ground as the three-man crew scrambled toward one of the surrounding buildings. Miraculously there was no explosion, but smoke belched from the helicopter. The crew was in such a panic that they hadn’t even bothered to turn off the engine, and the rotary wings were still spinning.

During the same attack another rocket struck near the TOC at Bella, exploding against a HESCO bastion built to protect the headquarters. The HESCOs around Bella were largely filled with rocks, and a piece of the rocket somehow managed to deflect off one of them and blow a hole through the plywood wall of the headquarters. It flew across the room and cut a bloody groove across the top of Sergeant First Class Stockard’s shaved head as the platoon leader was tapping away on a satellite communications laptop. A dust cloud filled the headquarters, and Matt Ferrara’s replacement, First Lieutenant Thurman, who was seated nearby, went diving for the floor. James Takes, who was on a radio, stood there, mic in hand, with a stunned expression that said, “What the hell just happened?” Stockard, bleeding from the scalp and red faced with anger over the audacious attack, didn’t miss a beat as he stared at the lieutenant on the floor.

“Get up, sir.”

Then he blew the dust and wood particles off his keyboard and went back to typing. There was much speculation later about how that episode might have ended if the diminutive Stockard had been just a shade taller. Artillery rocketed in from the cannons at Blessing along with an Air Force A10 jet aircraft with the sky-ripping sound of its nose cannon. Apache helicopters pounded the surrounding hillsides with rockets.

Meanwhile there was a touch of slapstick going on outside as Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale searched frantically for the missing Russians. Their helicopter was still smoking and leaking a pool of fuel onto the landing zone, and the rotors were spinning. Paratroopers were scattered around in their bunkers returning fire at enemy gunmen and waiting for the aircraft to start coming apart, sending rotary blades flying everywhere. Silvernale suddenly had a mission.

Someone needs to turn the damn thing off.

He and Sergeant Zaccery Johnston finally found the three crew members huddling in one of the last huts they searched as the valley gunfight continued. The Russians were shaken up and not about to budge. But with a smattering of broken English, they managed to communicate something about two red switches that needed to be flipped to shut down the engine.

Silvernale and Johnson headed back outside, and as the staff sergeant provided covering fire, Johnston sprinted to the crippled helicopter and assumed the role of Russian flight engineer. He found the switches, flipped them, and the smoke-belching rotary beast shuddered and fell silent. Two days later the wrecked aircraft was lifted out of Bella slung under an Army Chinook helicopter. Bella enjoyed air cover the entire time. Still, the next day a militant up in the hills took pot shots at a Chinook flying in supplies to Bella, even with an Apache riding escort firing back.

In the hours immediately after the Monday morning attack Chosen Company intercepted enemy radio traffic discussing the need for a doctor to treat casualties—good news to paratroopers. But they also overheard another, more defiant—and more ominous—message go out: “We have them surrounded, and they don’t have the capacity to fight us.”

There were eight attacks on Bella through the month of June as the incoming enemy mortar and rocket fire grew more accurate. Intel officers were guessing that local insurgents were getting assistance from groups like LET in laying down more precise mortar rounds. The mortar attacks were another deadly game of chance for the Chosen Few, who never could be certain whether, where, or when a round would explode inside the base.

A battalion intel report noted that the deadly enemy mortar firing will “continue to be used until discovered or destroyed. As Bella is broken down, insurgents can be expected to increase the number of attacks.”

All the while Matt Myer’s evacuation plans were underway, with essential equipment getting packed up and built into sling loads to be airlifted out. The base was essentially under siege during the day, so loads had to be prepared and flown out at night. Soldiers were becoming sleep deprived, fighting all day and building loads all night.

What was most maddening was their inability to spot the enemy mortar tube so they could destroy it and its crew. There would be several rounds fired, and then it was as if the launcher vanished. One theory was that it was somehow mobile, maybe set up in the back of a pickup truck or quickly broken down and stored in the vehicle, which would then be driven away along the mountain road leading south from Bella. Crater analyses of the shape and length of mortar impacts on the base suggested the shells were fired from the direction of the roadway.

Shortly before 4:30 P.M. on Wednesday, July 2, the militants’ siege of Bella finally drew blood. It was up at OP1. Another attack was underway, and paratroopers manning the ridgetop bastion opened up with their array of weaponry. Mortar teams down in Bella started dropping rounds from their launchers. Artillery fired from Blessing, and an Apache gunship and Air Force F15s flew up to assist.

Up at OP1 Gabriel Green was firing grenades at enemy fighters from a launcher attached to his M4. He had stepped into his barracks to grab a belt filled with ammunition when an enemy mortar round slammed into the wall behind him and blew shrapnel directly into his back, pieces passing clear through his chest. There were more explosions nearby, and a dazed Green nearly walked in front of automatic fire from the outpost’s M240 machine gun before Private First Class Kevin Coons grabbed him and pulled him back. Green’s chest started filling up with blood; he was straining to breathe. Stockard, down below in Bella, got word about the wounded soldier. He alerted the medics to follow him, and raced up the steep incline to OP1—a climb that could take newbies unaccustomed to the altitude forty-five minutes; Stockard did it in less than ten. Scott Derry was in a bunker at Bella and watched in amazement as the platoon sergeant raced up the mountain under enemy fire.

God, this guy’s a machine.

As a medic treated him up at OP1, Green begged not to be hoisted out by medevac helicopter. There was still shooting going on, and Green couldn’t forget how a medevac crew had dropped Lancour’s body during the ambush battle the previous November. But a Blackhawk was quickly on scene, and Stockard told him he needed medical treatment immediately. A flight medic placed Green in a Skedco, a kind of stretcher that wraps around a patient like a taco, and the hoist began like a high-wire act, with the wounded soldier suspended hundreds of feet above the valley floor. With the Skedco spinning and bullets whizzing past, Green was hauled inside the aircraft. Helping to pull him aboard was Captain Justin Madill, the flight surgeon whose first mission in Afghanistan during his deployment was to collect the remains of 2nd Platoon sergeant Matthew Kahler the previous January. Green was struggling to breathe, and on the flight to a military clinic in Asadabad, Madill performed a pneumothorax decompression, inserting a needle into Green’s chest cavity to release air collecting there that was crushing his damaged lungs. The process worked, and Green immediately began to breathe easier. He was flown out of Afghanistan to an Army hospital in Germany, where his lung collapsed more than once during treatment. Several pieces of shrapnel had passed through his upper chest and left arm. Surgeons later removed most of his left lung.

On the day Green was wounded, the leader of the Afghan security guards working at Bella, a man named Abdullah Hamid, demanded his monthly payment then walked off the base, taking fourteen guards with him and further creating a growing sense of alienation between Chosen Company and the local population. They left with an assortment of weapons, their uniforms, and security badges, and there were reports later of Hamid collaborating with militants, turning over the guns and advising them that it was a good time to attack the Americans.

Tensions were rising at Bella. The fact that Green was nearly killed demonstrated that enemy mortar operators could strike with precision. Intel reports were flowing in that Mullah Osman would launch his attack to overrun the base any day. A battalion intelligence analysis fleshed out what was believed to be Osman’s strategy—he wanted to take advantage of the planned American withdrawal to make it appear as if his assault on the base, even if it failed, had forced the US military to flee. It would be a propaganda coup. The report even outlined a potential coordinated attack plan that would begin with 107mm rocket fire on Bella from the north, mortar fire from the northeast and west, and an assault with RPGs to destroy OP1 from the southwest. A separate group of militants would try to concentrate gunfire on the Speedbump outpost to keep paratroopers there pinned down, allowing fighters to approach Bella from the south and lay down automatic weapons suppressive fire directly on the fort while a ground force attempted to sweep in from the opposite side, stepping off from the Bella bazaar just across a stream to the west of the base.

Matt Myer went into Bella to manage final arrangements before evacuating the base. He worked on setting up air transport, and once the necessary number of helicopters was locked in, the plan was simple: fly everybody out under the cover of darkness while simultaneously sending 2nd Platoon north from Blessing to occupy the flat ground in Wanat so engineers and contractors could begin building the new base there. They’d call it Combat Outpost Kahler in honor of 2nd Platoon’s beloved sergeant killed in January.

The new base was an exposed piece of ground. The valley walls on each side rose ten thousand feet. But the hope was that by building the base virtually inside the village, they could effectively interact with the population and draw them within the influence of the central government. Rock Battalion had succeeded at this with bases farther west in the Pech Valley.

Now if the move to simultaneously evacuate Bella and occupy Wanat went off according to plan, the militant leader Osman and his forces would have no one to attack in Bella, and Chosen Company would have occupied Wanat, all in one fell swoop.

Events were speeding up.

The day after Green was wounded, 1st Platoon’s leader, Lieutenant Aaron Thurman, ordered the remaining Afghan security guards to leave Bella. He met with local elders, who told him they were worried about the battle to come and thought it wise to get their families out now. That afternoon mortar fire from Bella, artillery from Blessing, and an Air Force B1 unloading nearly a dozen laser-guided bombs pounded the hills to the east of Bella following reports of enemy movement in the area. According to intel, as many as fourteen insurgents were killed and nine wounded. Thurman agreed with the elders and urged them to spread the word that all residents should temporarily vacate the hamlet. Chosen Few soldiers watched them leave town early the next day.

Mullah Osman’s attack was expected as soon as Saturday, July 5. But on Independence Day the actions of the Chosen Few made unexpected international news. It began in the early afternoon when a spectacular round of enemy mortar shells loaded with white phosphorous hit around Bella and OP1 just as Matt Myer and two squads of reinforcements from Battle Company disembarked from Blackhawk helicopters and the aircraft began to take off. It was the same burning material the Americans used against insurgents in the Pech Valley and elsewhere to force them out of their hiding places during barrages. These enemy rounds fell too far from the Americans to cause any harm, but the dramatic sight of the explosions and the smoky tendrils arcing into the sky were sobering nonetheless. They had never seen the enemy use the burning chemical before.

This time, though, Staff Sergeant Joshua Salazar up at OP1 spotted a pickup truck speeding south along the valley road and could almost swear he saw two men in the back of it with a mortar tube—the mobile mortar team they’d long suspected was harassing Bella; Sergeant Jackie Lofton saw it too. Salazar opened fire on the truck as it sped off down the road and disappeared. Apache helicopters were called in to attack, and by the time they arrived, the pilots could see a truck heading south at a point about a mile and a half farther down the road from where the OP1 paratroopers had lost sight of the vehicle with the mortar tube. An Apache pilot saw about five men come out of the bed of the truck as he hammered it with 30mm rounds from a chain gun under the nose of his aircraft.

Then the pilots spotted a second truck on the road. Matt Myer approved a second strike, and cannon fire also raked that vehicle. The pilots didn’t see anyone in the bed of that truck.

In the hours after the attack eight wounded men were brought to an aid station at Camp Blessing for treatment. One died; two others tested positive for gun residue on their hands, evidence that they were enemy combatants. Even more intriguing to the Americans were enemy radio messages intercepted immediately after the Apache attack. The voices sounded panicked; “Situation is fucked—six dead, ten wounded… two martyrs died in the trucks… Marwan [Mullah Osman] is injured.”

Within twenty-four hours the district governor at Wanat, Ziaul Rahman, who Rock Battalion leaders were already convinced was colluding with the enemy, was telling reporters that the United States had killed twenty-one innocent people in a helicopter airstrike, including women and children. Associated Press and Reuters broke the story. “The civilians were evacuating the district as they were told by the US-led troops because they wanted to launch an operation against the Taliban,” Rahman was quoted in the International Herald Tribune on Sunday, July 6. Stone-throwing demonstrators gathered outside the base at Blessing. The narrative of innocents slain by errant US bombing raids was only just becoming a sticking point between the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and NATO forces operating in his country. It would escalate in years to come, with Karzai making ever-greater demands to restrict bombing operations. But Karzai had not quite reached that point of frustration in 2008, and when the Nuristan provincial governor, Tamin Nuristani, repeated claims on Al Jazeera Arabic television that civilians were targeted in the Apache attack, the president summarily removed him from office. Karzai did, however, call for an investigation into the attack, which the New York Times reported in a story the next Monday.

The NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, which was running the war in Afghanistan, put out word that the strike killed fifteen enemy fighters and no civilians. The Rock Battalion launched an immediate investigation, and efforts were made to interview Ziaul Rahman, but he refused to meet with investigating officers. The results were a mixed bag. The brigade deputy commander who ran the probe, Colonel Mark Johnstone, said there wasn’t enough evidence to verify that innocent civilians were killed, but it couldn’t be discounted either. Moreover, there had been a failure to maintain continuous observation of the target from the moment it was first spotted until the Apaches attacked. If the 173rd Brigade had Predator drones assigned to it for observing the enemy, Johnstone complained, they could have tracked those trucks all the way from Bella and been in a better position to know whether there were civilian victims. “Unlike all the combat brigades in Iraq, the brigade does not have its own Predator,” Johnstone wrote in a report finished in late July, highlighting the battalion’s lack of resources and support in the valley.

The same day the New York Times story ran, final approval came down from the US forces command for eastern Afghanistan to evacuate Bella and build a new base at Wanat. The go-ahead was ordered by Brigadier General Mark Milley, who served as deputy commander for operations under Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, the overall commander of US forces in eastern Afghanistan.

Following the destruction of the fleeing trucks, with the exception of a few RPG rounds fired over the next few days, enemy attacks at Bella fell to zero. Rock leaders felt certain that between the precision bombing runs on July 3 and the Apache air strikes on July 4, Mullah Osman’s plans to hit Bella may very well have been frustrated, at least temporarily.

The much-delayed double-axle mission to withdraw from Bella and occupy Wanat had originally been set for Wednesday, July 2. But the battalion couldn’t line up all the air assets, so it was delayed one more time to the July 8–9 time frame. For the men of 2nd Platoon the longer the delay, the less sense it made to do it at all. They were literally on the verge of going home. Some members of 1st Platoon would start flying out of the country by the middle of July. Orders had come through to pack up personal belongings so foot lockers could be shipped back to Vicenza. They would each take only an assault bag filled with personal items with them to Wanat.

Much as the men of Matt Ferrara’s patrol had done before their November 8 mission the previous year, 2nd Platoon soldiers began calling home to speak with loved ones before they were to move out to Wanat, particularly since they wouldn’t be able to make any calls for days or weeks as they established the new base there.

Specialist Jason Hovater called his best friend—his sister, Jessica—to say good-bye. The usually charismatic soldier was in a very dark place. His young marriage had faltered under the strain of a long separation, and he and his wife, Jenna, were talking about a divorce. And now he felt certain he wouldn’t survive Wanat.

“I want you to know how much you mean to me and how good of a sister you are,” he told Jessica. “Please make sure you tell Mom and Dad how much I love them.”

Jon Brostrom couldn’t stop thinking about Amanda Wilson. They had agreed to start seeing each other outside of war and even made plans for a Mediterranean cruise with friends. Before that, though, they would grab some one-on-one time together. Amanda would come to Vicenza for a few days. “Bring your A-game,” he wrote in an e-mail. The day he left for Wanat Brostrom knew Wilson was in Bagram, and he left a message for her at the brigade office there. She called back. Brostrom told her the Wanat mission was a definite go and that either he’d call her first thing when he got out of it, “before I even get my hands on a bar of soap,” or she’d get a Red Cross message with bad news. It was dark humor and she didn’t like it, and there was an unmistakable note of fatalism that was troubling.

Specialist Jonathan Ayers called Georgia and spoke with his mother, Suzanne, to let her know there was a mission coming up that was dangerous and that none of them wanted to go. “We don’t have a choice,” Ayers told his mother.

The six-foot-one Georgian was one of the quietest members of the weapons squad. He was born in Atlanta, the younger of two sons in a family that could trace its roots back to the Revolutionary War. As a child, he had a beautiful singing voice and performed with a choral group called the Young Singers of Callanwolde; he also played the cello in a middle school orchestra. Ayers joined the Air Force Junior ROTC in high school and in drill competitions was named commander of the year for the state of Georgia in 2002. But he dropped out of college after about a year and a half and drifted. His parents thought he was trying to find himself. Ayers got a commercial driver’s license and drove long, lonely tractor-trailer routes for a trucking firm.

He finally joined the Army in 2006, finished Airborne training, and headed to Italy. He was only twenty-three when Chosen Company deployed, but with rugged looks and an early receding hairline, most of the guys saw him as the “old man” of 2nd Platoon. It was so unfair because his M240 machine gun teammate, Chris McKaig, was ten years older—in the ballpark for truly earning the label “old man”—but looked so much younger that few of the soldiers realized McKaig was in his midthirties. It really bugged Ayers that he was already showing some age.

I look like I’m thirty and have a really hard time picking up girls my age.

Others in the platoon shared Ayers’s trepidations about the Wanat mission, but for Jason Bogar, twenty-five, it bordered on an obsession. He called his mother, but he didn’t say much. It was a strange, one-sided conversation with Jason mostly listening to news of the family. Somewhat abruptly, he said he had to go. “But I want you to know that I love you, Mom.”

Rather than alarm her, Jason chose to pour his feelings into a letter he stored on the desktop of his computer. “I feel my days are numbered, so I want to say this while I still can,” he began typing on his laptop. “I pray to God no one will ever have to read this. But as death is all around me, if it falls upon me, you will understand my recent feelings on this madness we call life.”

He wrote that he believed he was in the right place doing the right thing and that, as a result, death was “easier to accept.” He was a young man confident in the choices he’d made and at peace with the fate he sensed awaited him. “Being back here in Afghanistan is exactly where I was supposed to be and where I wanted to be,” he said. “Know that you all are the reason I am here, and to give my life for that is nothing to me.”

There were preparations for the hereafter, and then there was the more immediate task of preparing for the fight to come—small, busying, hands-on chores that actually were therapeutic. Meticulously cleaning the M4 rifle. Stocking twelve magazines, thirty rounds each, of 5.56mm ammunition. Ensuring fragmentation grenades—four of them—were secured with the safety pins in place and duct tape around the safely lever. Restocking the night-vision goggles and laser sites with batteries. Topping off the canteens and CamelBaks. Breaking down the MREs and singling out favorite meals and snacks—the M&Ms, if you could find them, or maybe Reese’s Pieces.

Bogar and McKaig, both in the weapons squad, checked one another’s gear because they were close friends. McKaig’s team leader, Pruitt Rainey, swung by to do his own review and ensure his two men, McKaig and Ayers, were good to go.

McKaig actually found the whole process relaxing. He laid a rag out on his bed and broke down his rifle, oiling each of the individual parts and carefully fitting everything back together so it operated with that reassuring, smooth action. He took the RJ Martin fighting knife his father had given him, with the four-inch fixed blade, clamped it into the small vice from his Lansky tool-sharpening kit, ran the rod connected to the sharpening stone into the 25-degree slot on the vice setting, and, putting oil on the blade and stone, started wearing down that edge. He worked the stone back and forth, almost lovingly, for a half hour or more and then turned the knife over to do the other side of the blade.

This would be his weapon of last resort. He’d keep it hidden in the webbing of his vest. It felt very good to be ready.

The night before they left was Chris McKaig’s thirty-fourth birthday, and that made him the subject of one of their ritual birthday beat-downs. They caught him in a lower bunk in the barracks, a horde of young, muscled paratroopers in GI-tan T-shirts and shaved heads descending to twist the birthday boy like a pretzel, expose his belly, and start smacking. Platoon Sergeant David Dzwik yelled out a mock caution to the attackers: “We need him for Wanat.”

Twenty-four hours later, on Tuesday evening, July 8, Bogar captured the frustration over the Wanat mission when his squad was packing up for the road trip out there. Sitting up in the turret of a Humvee, he flipped on his camera and turned the lens on himself: “Here we are getting ready to go to Wanat. It’s the last two weeks of our tour that we’ve got left in Afghanistan, and from the intel there should be… over a hundred [enemy]. They got fighting positions set up. We’re going there. We got two weeks left. It’s bullshit.”

It was misery sitting in the five gun trucks that pulled into the field southeast of the village center at 9:30 P.M. It was pouring rain and water washed into the gun turrets of each vehicle and soaked everyone inside. Whoever was on duty in the turret wore a poncho to keep water from streaming down the back of his neck and soaking his clothes. They tried to cover the turret hole with the poncho, but it inevitably shifted at some point, dumping a bucketful of collected water down on an unlucky comrade, who responded with a torrent of obscenities.

One of the vehicles was from Destined Company—the Humvee with the TOW missile launcher that Matt Myer had told his men was so vital for augmenting their defenses, the one the enemy called the “Finger of God.” Part of the equipment included the Improved Target Acquisition System (ITAS), a thermal imaging system that could be used to scan territory for enemy movements and generate targeting grids.

Destined Company was the heavy weapon element of the Rock Battalion, and much of it had been assigned to the Kunar River Valley on the far southeast edge of the battalion’s area of operation along the Pakistan border. But one platoon—the soldiers in it called themselves the Dragon Platoon—was left in the Pech Valley, operating out of a base called Michigan. The three paratroopers manning the TOW Humvee heading to Wanat were from the Dragon Platoon, and their weapon had been used to destroy at least one hundred enemy fighters over the course of their deployment. It was a surgically precise and elegantly simple killing tool. Once fired, an explosive charge launched the missile out of the tube, and then wings popped out and solid-rocket fuel ignited, driving the missile forward. The missile was guided by signals along a wire connecting it to a launcher, unwinding as the projectile flew. All a soldier had to do was keep crosshairs on the target, much like a video game.

Staff Sergeant Justin Grimm led the three-man element. He was twenty-four and from Mattawan in southwest Michigan. Justin made Eagle Scout in high school and was an avid reader of the nineteenth-century science fiction master Jules Verne, as well as military fiction. When he was a kid he would draw an image of a paratrooper on his forearm with an indelible magic marker. Grimm turned eighteen just five weeks after 9/11 and was determined to enlist. By the time he deployed with Destined Company, he’d already done two combat tours with the 82nd Airborne to Iraq and Afghanistan. But he saw more combat in his first week in Afghanistan with the 173rd Airborne than in both the other deployments combined.

Also in the TOW Humvee with Grimm on the trip to Wanat were two Army specialists, Mathew May and Aaron Davis. When the convoy reached the village, a few paratroopers got out and worked in the downpour. Erich Phillips and his men set up the 60mm mortar, and up on the terraces Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom, Sergeant Ryan Pitts, and Specialist John Hayes struggled in the deluge to erect a spiraling communications antenna. Platoon Sergeant David Dzwik sent some of his men out for rain-soaked guard duty.

At sunup on Wednesday, July 9, as paratroopers unfolded themselves from the cramped quarters of the Humvees, the job of staking out Combat Outpost Kahler began. The battalion had made plans, once heavy construction equipment arrived, to build out the fort with a stone-wall perimeter, an interior line of HESCOs, billets, a landing zone, guard towers, and a potable water system with a pump house, showers, and laundry facilities. All the necessary building material was stacked down at Blessing. But because the mission date had been pushed back, the Afghan contractor who would haul the material to Wanat, along with the heavy equipment necessary to construct the fort, couldn’t reschedule until July 13.

This had complicated the mission because to conduct the night helicopter flights for extracting 1st Platoon from Bella required lunar illumination, and the cycles of the moon made July 9 the best shot. The whole point was to abandon Bella and position troops in Wanat all at the same time. Despite this new delay in the heavy equipment, Ostlund chose to have 2nd Platoon go ahead and arrive on July 9. He knew infantrymen were needed to secure the engineers’ move to Wanat, improve the road to Wanat, and build up the base. Ostlund believed the paratroopers could manage their defenses until construction work was underway. His intel people said that any enemy movement on Wanat would likely be a gradual escalation of violence as happened at Bella, allowing time to improve defenses.

For now, what constituted a new Combat Outpost Kahler remained largely a muddy, dirty parking lot where the paratroopers would begin building fighting positions here and there and eventually stake out rows of razor-wire coils along the perimeter.

The weapons squad slogged up the slurried terraces northeast of where the trucks were parked to find a good place for an observation post overlooking the new base. Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom hashed out locations with the other troopers who would man it: Sergeant Matthew Gobble and Sergeant Ryan Pitts, the forward observers; Specialist Pruitt Rainey and the two specialists on his M240 gun crew, Chris McKaig and Jonathan Ayers; and three other Army specialists—the unofficial company videographer Jason Bogar, Tyler Stafford, and Gunnar Zwilling. The platoon sniper, Specialist Matthew Phillips—who had bachelor partied his way through Vicenza before the deployment wearing a used wedding dress—was there too, also assigned to the observation post.

There were a lot of factors to consider. It was always a good idea to have an observation post on the highest vantage point so the enemy couldn’t fire down into it. But here, where there were a series of gradually sloping agricultural terraces before escarpments rose sharply, that would require setting up a location several hundred yards up the ridge and isolated from the main base. They all remembered that fight in the Korengal the previous fall when the enemy bound up the mortally wounded Sergeant Josh Brennan and tried to drag him away. If the observation post were too remote, the rest of 2nd Platoon would be too far away to come to their aid in case of an attack. Building the OP closer would make it far easier to reinforce, but it would also lose the advantage of elevation. The rising ridges to the east were dotted with mud-brick buildings that looked down on the location, some of them only several hundred feet away. Even the two-story hotel in the town center rose higher, though no one viewed that as a threat. There was even thought of placing the observation post on the roof of the hotel, but that was jettisoned as too intrusive on the local residents.

So making the OP defensible was crucial. A small Bobcat bulldozer that was being flown up to Wanat that day to help fill HESCOs would not be able to make the climb up the terraces to the observation post site. Without HESCOs, one possible alternative was a cropping of large boulders northeast of the new base under the shade of some trees, including a large mulberry. The rocks could be tied together with sandbag walls to form a small fort. There were also trees there to provide shade and concealment. The only downside was that about thirty feet to the northwest was a deep ravine where Wayskawdi Creek ran west to the Waigal River. From the lip of the ravine down toward the creek the ground was thick with trees and brush. This was dangerous dead space—ground that was lost from view, allowing the enemy to approach with stealth. That risk had to be weighed against the advantage of the rocks as defensive walls. There was simply no perfect solution.

It was almost a communal choice. Brostrom seemed open to hearing what the men had to say. They would build at the boulder site and call it Topside, after the high point on the Philippine island of Corregidor where paratroopers of the 2nd Battalion of the 503rd Parachute Infantry Regiment dropped in 1945. For these latter-day paratroopers Topside would at least be a temporary choice for an observation post until they had time to scout out a better and higher location.

The decision these troopers weighed in the mud on the agricultural terraces above Wanat would be pivotal in the days ahead. Even more remarkable, given what would play out for Chosen Company, was how the placement of Topside—and of the entire base, for that matter—would be studied and debated by military scholars and young officers in training for years to come. The events about to unfold for 2nd Platoon not only would be fodder for classroom discussion, but also mapping software would allow military instructors to take ROTC classrooms from universities across the country on a virtual tour of where the Chosen Few were encamped and where the weapons squad debated an observation post. Just as military teachers for decades strolled with students across the battlefields of Gettysburg, Shiloh, and other famous engagements to learn the art of war, they would also virtually tour Wanat in the years ahead. Because what would happen here was such an accessible example of contemporary warfare and the kind of small-unit action distinctive to American combat in the twenty-first century, the virtual tour of the violence that was about to be unleashed in Wanat—along with side-trip discussions of the Ranch House battle, the ambush of November 9, and the siege of Bella—would become the most popularly requested battlefield tour by ROTC programs across the country.

But that was not on their minds as they considered the options that morning.

In early July of 2008 the men of the weapons squad did the best they could with their decision on Topside, stringing a single strand of coiled razor wire around a portion of the outpost—they couldn’t get more of it—and two sets of Claymore mines to the southeast where the terraces continued to step up the hill, with two more to the north facing into the draw. They also stocked up well with fragmentation grenades they could lob into that dead space.

They wanted some trip flares to put down into the draw, but they couldn’t get those either. They continually improved their defenses, raising sandbag walls two or three bags wide. Topside was spread across three farming terraces, each about five feet higher than the next. The lowest terrace was where the men set up their sleeping bags with pop-up mosquito netting. The only protection was a giant boulder ten feet high on the northeast edge of the terrace. A tall, spindly communications antenna was set up there.

The main part of Topside was one terrace up. There the paratroopers built positions between three large boulders, tying the rocks together with sandbag walls. They set up an M240 machine gun on the northeast end, oriented toward the ravine and the structures built farther up the hillside. The boxy Long Range Advance Scout Surveillance System, or LRAS3, was positioned there on a tripod. Through that Raytheon device Pitts or Gobble could scan the hillsides for thousands of yards, looking for enemy movement during the day and with heat-sensor equipment at night.

On the southwest end was Bogar with his SAW; Phillips was nearby with his sniper rifle. A kind of communal area was in between the two fighting positions. Each machine gun nest was sectored off with sandbag walls so that shrapnel from any incoming grenades would theoretically be confined. That was Bogar’s idea.

The final gun position was one more terrace up—a half-moon of sandbag walls where another M240 machine gun was oriented to the southeast. Rainey and his gun crew, Ayers and McKaig, were positioned there. Troopers called it the Crow’s Nest.

At the base of the terraces below Topside, between the observation post and the main base, was the single-story row of shops that constituted the town bazaar, a place where young men gathered to sip tea and watch the Americans work so hard in the heat and sun.

When Matt Myer stepped aboard a Chinook at Bella in the dark midweek, he became the last man off that base. The decision had been made to leave Bella largely intact, and it was now completely empty. There was no fanfare of plywood hooches set on fire for all the world to see, as had happened at Ranch House. This time they just left it all. To hell with it. Myer knew there was no way to avoid handing the militants a propaganda coup, allowing them to video a triumphant march into the vacated operating base. But when he lifted off from Bella, the captain felt a wave of relief wash over him. Certainly what seemed the riskiest part of this double-hinged operation—the evacuation of Bella and the occupation of Wanat—was now behind them. They had escaped the siege of Bella and could start clean with the new Combat Outpost Kahler.

By Thursday morning, July 10, the rough outlines of a new military base at Wanat were beginning to take shape. A mortar position and ammunition depot were fashioned along the western border. It would be surrounded by HESCOs. Just across the perimeter were dense trees and shrubs running north and south. On the bluff behind the trees was a large structure the troops called the blue house because of its color, and to the southwest was the home of wealthy local resident Haji Juma Gul.

Clockwise from the mortar position following the base periphery were three sandbagged positions along the northern end of Kahler where Afghan National Soldiers were dug in. Their Marine Corps mentors, three enlisted men, were nearby.