Directly behind the Afghans, 3rd Squad started digging in. Sergeant Israel Garcia—who had wanted so badly to conceive a child with his wife, Lesly, during his leave in February—was the acting squad leader. Right across from them and just outside the edge of the base was a single-story, unadorned structure that served as the village mosque. Following the base perimeter around to the east Staff Sergeant Jonathan Benton’s 2nd Squad was building a fighting position directly opposite the bazaar. Both Garcia’s and Benton’s bunkers were crude efforts consisting of a shoveled-out fighting hole big enough for several men that was surrounded by sandbags or stunted HESCOs. None of it was ideal considering the potential enemy vantage points high on the rising hillsides to the east and west. In the 3rd Squad position several four-foot-high HESCOs were laid out in an L-shape to the north and west of the position. None of them was filled to the brim with dirt and rocks because the Bobcat had run out of fuel. The dozer couldn’t be refueled because of a missing adapter that didn’t arrive until later. An armored Humvee with a 40mm automatic grenade launcher protected the east side of the bunker and a modest sandbag wall along the southern edge. The ground was rock hard, and the soldiers were able to dig it eighteen inches deep at best. Sergeant Mike Santiago hated the position and their inability to make it secure against enemy fire from higher elevations. The 2nd Squad position was in similar straits, although it had a retaining wall as part of its defense, and its HESCOs were six feet high.

Almost all the HESCOs in the fort were smaller because the little Bobcat bulldozer wasn’t big enough to lift up dirt to the standard size of eight feet. That could be remedied quickly once the heavy equipment to build the fort arrived. It would take several weeks to construct all of Kahler, but one task that could be done immediately would be filling up full-size HESCOs to improve security right away.

All the fighting positions had camouflage netting stretched over the top to obscure views from the surrounding hills and to serve as shade in the oppressive heat. But there was no hard, overhead cover for any of the positions. Dzwik had found some lumber in the new bazaar under construction and was willing to pilfer it, but they decided it would only aggravate their new neighbors.

Staff Sergeant Sean Samaroo, who had just gotten married in January while on leave, had his 1st Squad set up a traffic control post across the street from the eastern entrance to the base along the road running north and south. Their Humvee, armed with a .50-caliber machine gun, was parked on the road oriented south. The 1st Squad bunker was made up of sandbags and small HESCOs and was constructed up off the road on the first agricultural terrace running uphill. There was a second traffic control point on the road about 150 yards south, manned by ten Afghan soldiers.

Known as Sergeant Sam to his men, at thirty-four, Samaroo was one of the older enlisted men in Chosen Company. Born to a mother who was Puerto Rican and a father who was from Guyana in South America, Samaroo grew up—of all places—in Oklahoma. Sean graduated from high school and took a series of jobs. But he was bored with his life, and inspired by the Army slogan of that era, “Be All You Can Be,” he enlisted, choosing to be a paratrooper. He served in Iraq with Chosen Company in 2003 and later in Afghanistan.

Samaroo was furious that 2nd Platoon had been handed this mission in Wanat amid reports that as many as three hundred insurgents were filtering down to attack them. But he played down those worries during his last phone call with Natasha before leaving Blessing: “Don’t worry about it. I’m going to do what I do best—come home to you and the boys, safe.”

The entrance to the new base was just a gap in the razor wire. To the right of the opening was Benton and his team, and to the left was the new bazaar under construction, a diamond-shaped market square with unfinished stalls and one side open to the road. It had a wall around the outside, and along one edge facing the interior of the fort was the base-command post. It really was just a space of dirt with the bazaar wall constituting one side, a Humvee on the opposite side, and HESCOs and sandbags tying everything together. A couple of foxholes were dug in the center. The Humvee was mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun.

The armored Humvees at the Benton and Garcia locations were each armed with an automatic grenade launcher in the turret. A flat area on the south side of the base was designated a helicopter landing zone, and a fifth Humvee from Destined Company armed with the TOW launcher was positioned just north of there. The truck was moved at various times. Six Army engineers were on hand to help build the first set of defensive works. They used the Bobcat to fashion a small ramp to elevate the TOW-mounted Humvee and make it easier to fire at higher elevation targets in the surrounding hills.

For the next few days the 2nd Platoon paratroopers captured with their video cameras images of comrades in the fetid July heat, miserable under their body armor and helmets, wretched even when they were only sitting in a foxhole, worse when they were digging holes and filling sandbags. “Fucking hot, we’re in a dirt hole,” said Private First Class James Schmidt, with a listless look and clammy skin. Hovater pointed Sergeant Jacob Walker’s camera at the townspeople standing near the bazaar just across the roadway. They had gathered there every day, sipping tea and watching the paratroopers. “See these people up here? They want to shoot at us,” he said, standing over a foxhole at 2nd Squad’s position next to other soldiers who were digging deeper. “Basically, this is the most sucky thing to do.”

The paratroopers were quickly running out of water. Dzwik made sure the trucks arriving Tuesday night, July 8, carried as much as possible, but that was only enough for a few days at best. When helicopters delivered the balance of troops and equipment Wednesday, there was a pallet of water included that provided each trooper a box of sixteen half-liter bottles. In the heat soldiers were going through it fast. The original plan was to have ample supplies arrive slung under Chinook helicopters—twelve trips with two or three slings each. But with all the other demands for air support in the region, that request was slashed. They only received six helicopter supply trips, and those were dedicated to necessary defense-building supplies such as HESCOs, sandbags, and stakes for nailing down the razor wire. The paratroopers had iodine pills and hand-pump filters to purify local well water, but many of the men didn’t want to bother with that and just rationed what they had. Brostrom and Dzwik let them rest during the hottest part of the day and use the mornings and evenings to fortify their fighting positions. But this slowed down the work, a problem made worse because they were also running out of sandbags.

During one of those midday breaks not long after they arrived, Bogar panned his camera across Topside for some day-in-the-life footage. The men were largely motionless in the 90-plus-degree heat. Bogar’s lens lingers for a moment on each member of the team, just long enough to capture the mood. The ever-confident Sergeant Ryan Pitts seems most relaxed, even vigilant, up on his feet and scanning with binoculars.

“Got your fuckin’ camera working, videotaping this?” he says, grinning at Bogar.

Specialist Tyler Stafford, sprawled nearby, complains about heat rash in his crotch, digging with his fingers. Specialist Gunnar Zwilling sits opposite, waving shyly into the camera with a tight grin. The typically overanimated young private, who so often played the role of platoon jester, reflects the skittishness many felt.

“How’s it goin’? Keeping alive. Want to go home.”

Over in the southwestern fighting position Sergeant Matthew Gobble and Specialist Matthew Phillips try to relax under the camouflage netting. Each is leaning up against boulders on opposite sides of the position, Gobble twirling a pink fly swatter and ignoring the camera. Phillips, looking exhausted, lolls his head back and stares into the lens.

“Been up for thirty-six hours,” Phillips says.

Bogar pans over to the higher fighting position facing southeast, the Crow’s Nest. Chris McKaig, recently promoted to specialist, answers the camera with a “caw-caw!” His profile fills the lens, and he offers up his usual bravado: “Kill.” Specialist Jonathan Ayers to his left says, “Crow’s Nest is where it’s at, baby.”

The big man, Specialist Pruitt Rainey, lounges opposite the camera, his back against a sandbag wall, looking utterly relaxed, squeezing peanut butter out of an MRE pouch onto an MRE cracker.

“You know what’s better than Outback? Peanut butter and crackers from an MRE,” Rainey says in his North Carolina twang, adding a cheerful, “Eleven days and a wake-up.”

That’s how long they estimated before they could all finally go home. Bogar pans away.

“All we got to do is survive Wanat,” he says.

It was wrenching scud work in the scorching heat, scraping out foxholes in the rock-strewn earth with small, Army-issued, folding-shovel e-tools. Water was growing scarce. It wasn’t until Friday, July 11—four days after they arrived—that hired pickup trucks delivered fifteen cases of water. The plastic shrink-wrapped cases were broken open all over the new base.

The paratroopers held only resentment and suspicion for the Nuristani people of the Waigal Valley—even outright hatred—in the wake of the Ranch House attack, the ambush, and the death of Matt Kahler at the hands of a local security guard, all in the span of less than a year. Now those feelings were reaching a crescendo. They were particularly wary of the fighting-age men who lounged in the bazaar watching the soldiers labor in the burning sun.

Matt Myer was back at Blessing building a case for how these people couldn’t be trusted. The Army had quickly launched an investigation into the Apache attack after all the bad press, and the Chosen Few commander was on the list to be interviewed. His words to the investigator, Colonel Mark Johnstone, were like a sad list of bitter regrets after fourteen months of trying to make things work. He complained of how the valley people “undoubtedly [had] linked closely with the enemy” over the last year. The plans by Chosen Company and the 10th Mountain troopers before them to pull people away from the insurgency by hiring local men to be security guards or day laborers had utterly failed, Myer told him.

Rather than gravitate to the Americans, the locals they hired “would report on the layout of our bases, patrol movements, and directions of patrol.” He ticked off a litany of actions to prove his point: how security guards fled their post during the Ranch House attack; how the commander of that enemy assault, Hazrat Omar, had acquired a detailed map of the base; how the ambush on November 9 occurred even after Matt Ferrara’s good-faith effort to meet with Aranas elders; and how Matt Kahler was gunned down by a security guard at the Speedbump outpost. “I am convinced from other intel reporting that [the guard’s] intent was to murder him,” Myer said.

“Seven of my soldiers have died because of the reporting and actions of local people that are linked to and work for the enemy,” he told Johnstone.

By Saturday, July 12, a sense of alienation from the townspeople was palpable. Elders and the local police chief had walked over to the new base to make a show of complaining about its presence. There was a pervasive feeling of being continuously watched. And then word arrived that the district governor, Ziaul Rahman, and the town fathers were holding a shura without inviting Brostrom to attend—an unmistakable slap in the face. The lieutenant and Staff Sergeant Benton took five paratroopers; Alex, the interpreter; and some Afghan soldiers. They hiked about 150 yards over to the police station on the other side of the small town center and found the gathering of elders. Rahman presented the Americans with a “night letter” that had been circulating in the bazaar. It was from the insurgency, threatening to kill any civilians cooperating with the Americans. Brostrom was livid about the snub and, when he got back to Kahler, stormed into the command post and threw down his helmet.

“These motherfuckers were doing a meeting without inviting us over there, and when I walked in there they just shut up and ended the meeting,” he said to Dzwik.

Early that afternoon Captain Matt Myer and his radio operator, Sergeant Erik Aass, arrived aboard a Chinook helicopter with a fuel pump and fuel blivets. They were the only two passengers aboard. Climbing to Topside, the captain checked the defenses and suggested moving the position higher up on the hill, but Brostrom and the men felt that his suggested location was too exposed; they wanted to tie the boulders into their current defenses. Myer said he wanted it moved once a prefabricated bunker was airlifted in from Jalalabad. The Chosen Company commander planned to stay in Wanat until they all went home, which he expected to be about mid-August, although the command was preparing plans for them to leave earlier, by the end of July.

Myer spotted Haji Juma Gul during the day and later received an invitation to dinner at his home up on the small bluff overlooking the new base. The captain headed over that night, and while Chosen Few paratroopers stood security outside, Myer, Brostrom, Aass, Specialist John Hayes, the platoon radio operator, and Myer’s translator sat down on the floor with Gul and enjoyed an evening snack of chicken, naan, and sweet tea. Gul was welcoming, and his demeanor struck Aass as not unlike a small-town politician, a man with perhaps competing agendas. Gul warned that there were insurgents in the nearby villages. He told Myer to expect an attack in Wanat at some point—he just didn’t know when.

“That’s obviously going to happen,” Gul said of the attack, through the translator.

At battalion headquarters in Blessing intelligence officers continued to receive reports from spies within the Waigal Valley saying Mullah Osman, the field commander for enemy forces in the area, had devoted some of his fighters to Bella and sent others to Wanat, worried about the coalition plans to build a base there. “The future construction of a base in Wanat was a significant concern for Mullah Osman because a base established at this location would severely disrupt the AAF’s [Anti-Afghanistan Force’s] freedom of movement throughout the valley,” according to an analysis written a few weeks later. Throughout the day, Saturday, July 12, bits and pieces of information kept coming in from the field that Osman was planning to attack the base within a week after construction started. A key spy for the Coalition forces was an Afghan they’d nicknamed Rudy, who operated north of Wanat. Up through Saturday Rudy reported in twice, and he sounded agitated. He was surprised enemy fighters had not yet attacked 2nd Platoon.

The battalion intelligence officer, Captain Benjamin Pry, would debate Matt Myer about what kind of attack Osman might throw at Wanat. Myer seemed convinced it would be harassing fire and probing attacks. That didn’t make sense to Pry because of how close the town bazaar and the mosque were to the new base: Why would the enemy risk damaging those buildings and alienating the residents? Osman liked large, unexpected attacks, Pry thought. He had a hand in the effort to nearly overrun Ranch House the previous August. Some intelligence suggested his men were involved in the ambush on Lieutenant Ferrara’s patrol on November 9. Osman’s attacks were always well planned and deadly, Pry knew.

The Rock Battalion had managed to win use of one of the US military’s few surveillance drones in Afghanistan to watch for enemy troop movements around Wanat. But it was for only part of the time—about half of each day during the first three days 2nd Platoon was building Kahler. Even when a Predator drone was spying from overhead, it could be hit and miss. The aperture for watching for people on the ground was limited, like “looking through a soda straw,” a surveillance officer would later say. Spotting small groups of men moving stealthily through the hills would be tough, and what surveillance they received showed no enemy movement in the days after 2nd Platoon arrived in Wanat. It had been quiet in the Waigal Valley since 2nd Platoon arrived in the village, and there were plenty of other demands on the surveillance aircraft in east Afghanistan. By Saturday, July 12, higher command pulled the Predator out and sent it elsewhere. Pry complained angrily about losing the surveillance, but it was to no avail.

Back at Blessing Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund sat down to type out some candid thoughts after nearly a year and a half of fighting in northeastern Afghanistan. He was drafting a memorandum for General David Petraeus, whom he had known for years and who would soon take over Central Command, which would include Afghanistan. He wanted to tell the four-star what he’d learned.

“I have a history of being straightforward and opinionated,” Ostlund tapped out on the keys of his laptop. He began by saying he didn’t feel the circumstances in Afghanistan were as dire as the media portrayed. “I am not sure who is selling the doom and gloom,” Ostlund wrote, adding that the bad press over the Apache attacks in the Waigal Valley should not cause leadership to restrict how the war was waged.

“We fight a close, consistent, brutal fight. True light infantry mountain warfare. We need the tools to fight this fight,” he wrote. “There are enemies in these remote valleys who would never negotiate a peace and have to be destroyed as they won’t be defeated.”

Ostlund ticked off what wasn’t working and needed to be improved: “Aviation assets are incredibly lacking in numbers and ability.” The brigade had six Apache attack helicopters, and at times as many as four were down for maintenance. It was taking way too long to get the wounded off the battlefield.

US forces shouldn’t shrink from using more devastating tools in the American arsenal to defeat the enemy. Right now two-thousand-pound bombs were at their disposal, and the battalion had used them often. But if authorized, there were fifteen-thousand-pound “daisy cutters” available to level real estate and rapidly produce more landing zones. The key problem was the enemy’s skill at using the harsh terrain to their advantage and burrowing under rocks and boulders to protect themselves against conventional munitions. They could and should employ napalm-like bombs, Ostlund argued. “If it is legal, we should be using it in this terrain,” he told Petraeus. “It would transform areas of our battle space, further pushing the [enemy] to irrelevancy.”

Ostlund was willing to use almost anything to kill every last one of them—the hardcore fighters, the dead-enders, the fanatics who refused to give up.

On Saturday evening, July 12, Specialist Sergio Abad from the mortar crew was taking a turn at the Destined Company missile truck, scanning the hillsides with the thermal-imaging ITAS device. Suddenly he got excited. He could see a small crowd of men walking up on the ridge to the west, and he alerted Specialist Aaron Davis, who took a look and counted as many as fifteen. He’d never seen that many before while doing surveillance with the ITAS. He thought they might be carrying weapons, but at that distance, he wasn’t 100 percent certain. Still, it was a terrific target.

Oh my God, we’re about to catch these motherfuckers with their pants down.

Davis was the only African American soldier on the base, a twenty-one-year-old native of East Texas who grew up in the oil town of Kilgore, about an hour west of Shreveport, Louisiana. He decided to enlist after a recruiter working the hallways of Kilgore High School, where Davis was a senior, stopped him for a chat. Davis bunked next to Mike Denton during basic training, and they got to be close buddies. Both wound up in the Rock Battalion, but in separate companies. Staff Sergeant Grimm thought Davis was the best soldier he’d ever had.

Word of the sighting that night was passed along to the sergeant of the guard, Israel Garcia, who alerted the commanders. The decision came back to hold off. Garcia was pissed and Davis was surprised.

People don’t climb mountains at night for leisure.

An odd thing had happened at Topside that afternoon. A small irrigation ditch that ran along the northern edge of the outpost suddenly began to flow with water. The men joked that maybe it was the enemy trying to cover the sounds of their movement in that deep draw.

That aside, the men had finished much of their work to improve their defenses, and Pitts offered to spring for dinner so the troopers had something other than MREs. One of the interpreters went into the village with cash to buy lamb and rice, with some naan bread from the locals. While a few at Topside stood guard, the rest settled in around the sleeping terrace and ate hot food. The topic of conversation turned to favorite foods and which gastronomic craving they would satisfy first when they got home. There would be money to burn after fifteen months at war, and they talked about motorcycles to be purchased and Las Vegas excesses to be enjoyed when they got home. It was a combat version of the family gathering around the table for what they couldn’t know would be one last meal together.

The moon had been setting within an hour or so after midnight every night that week, leaving the sky brilliant with stars and the valleys black with darkness. Sometime after midnight on the Sunday morning of July 13, Ryan Pitts walked the perimeter near the concertina wire and shined his infrared flashlight down into the ravine—the dead space they always worried about. He saw nothing.

About 2 A.M., down below on the main base, Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips roused Specialist Derek Christophersen from sleep; it was time for guard duty over at the command post. Christophersen was one of six Army engineers at the new Kahler combat base. He had been operating the Bobcat every day, filling HESCOs. He and Specialist Joshua Morse had been bunking at the mortar pit with Phillips and his team mostly because they seemed like a tough crew and there was a good chance a fight was coming. In the wee hours of this Sunday morning Christophersen made his way across the base and climbed into the turret of a Humvee behind the .50-caliber machine gun. The sky was completely clear, even beautiful. Marking time for the next two hours until his shift ended, Christophersen counted fourteen shooting stars.