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> > > COMBAT OUTPOST KAHLER

They were up there on the ridgeline again.

This time it was Specialist Mathew May with the Destined Company TOW truck crew who spotted them. He was surveying the hills with the thermal-imaging ITAS device and saw three figures at 3:30 A.M., tracked them, and saw five total about twenty minutes later. The figures looked like they were carrying assault packs, and this time it seemed very possible they had weapons. At the command post Matt Myer had been sleeping fitfully in one of the foxholes during his first night on the new base and awoke shortly before 4 A.M. to the news of the sighting. Myer walked over to the TOW missile truck, where Staff Sergeant Justin Grimm explained that the figures were a little less than a mile away in an area high on the ridge where villagers had said no one should be.

They are definitely not sheep herders.…

May was ready to fire the wire-guided missile, but the captain was worried that the target was too high on the ridge for the TOW truck to reach and thought it would be wiser to do a simultaneous double strike with both the missile and the 120mm mortar. Erich Phillips’s mortar crew started working up targeting coordinates for the big launcher.

The entire base had come to alert status as they did every morning by 4 A.M. It was called stand-to, and it had been protocol since the Ranch House attack showed how these predawn minutes were the most likely time for an enemy assault. All across the new post were the small sounds of men assembling themselves with body armor and weapons as the sky, just less than an hour before sunrise, went from dark to a deep cobalt blue. Some paratroopers were queueing up for a patrol to scout out locations for a new Afghan National Army outpost up in the hills. At Topside the guys started warming up the big green LRAS3 surveillance box to get their own eyes on the insurgents, but it was taking forever. Sergeant Ryan Pitts was impatient and told the missile-truck soldiers to give him coordinates so he could work up the fire mission for Erich Phillips’s team at the 120mm mortar position.

Back at the mortar pit, as they readied the mortar tube, the men were excited about leaving soon. This would be the mortar team’s last day living in the dirt in this wretchedly hot weather. A new team was coming in by helicopter, and Phillips’s people would ride the same aircraft back to Blessing. Abad, whose girlfriend was expecting a baby girl—his “gummy bear”—was actually supposed to leave Blessing on a helicopter, fly to the sprawling US military installation over at Bagram north of Kabul, and take a jet home. He would be the first team member to head back to the States. Phillips reminded him that as soon as they touched down in Blessing he needed to grab his gear and get ready for the helicopter flight to Bagram.

Staff Sergeant Sean Samaroo wanted to wash up after four days of heat and muck. He was tired of “whore baths,” where they just sponged out their crotches and back sides. He wanted to get clean finally. There was a town water pump right next to 1st Squad’s position at the traffic control point. During the water shortage soldiers had drawn from the well and used iodine tablets to purify the water, even if it tasted like something out of a swimming pool. Now Samaroo asked one of his team leaders, Sergeant Brian Hissong, to stand guard so Samaroo could scrub and get a decent shave. Hissong was annoyed that the order hadn’t yet been given to attack the men spotted up on the hillside to the west.

“We’d better fucking kill these guys before we get hit,” Hissong told his squad leader.

As the two men strolled to 1st Squad’s position, they and the entire force of forty-nine American troops and twenty-four Afghan soldiers were being watched. In the darkness of the night scores of enemy fighters had all but surrounded Combat Outpost Kahler. They had set up machine gun nests, piles of RPGs, and teams of fighters with automatic weapons, boxing every point on the compass except due south. They were in the hills and ridges that surrounded Kahler like an amphitheater.

And they had also succeeded in co-opting the entire village. The perfidy was breathtaking. Villagers who had gone about their business, albeit in ever-decreasing numbers in the days since the Chosen Few arrived—tilling fields, selling food to the soldiers, inviting them to dinner—were now gone, almost all of them fleeing as militants came into their bedrooms and onto their balconies and rooftops, taking up firing positions. Insurgents had filtered into the area from the north along the Waigal River and from the village of Qal’eh-ye Gal two miles east, using the Wayskawdi Creek ravine. There was a machine gun set up in the home of Haji Juma Gul, and men with RPGs and AK47 rifles were in the trees and hedgerows right along the western perimeter of Kahler. There were even gunmen at the police station a few hundred yards to the northwest along the river. Militants were posted in the mosque just across from 3rd Squad’s bunker and in the two-story hotel structure in the village center. They were in buildings high up on terraces to the northeast and the southeast looking down on Topside and Kahler. And they had reached the base of the draw directly adjacent to the observation post in the dead space where the soldiers couldn’t see them. They had shown extraordinary discipline in fanning out to their sectors without making any noise or disturbance that might betray their strategy.

An analysis of the battle completed two years later by the US Army Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, offered high praise for the enemy, describing its leadership and the core of its fighting force as “professional and experienced. That attack displayed considerable planning, effective intelligence, and accurate knowledge regarding the capabilities and effectiveness of American weapons systems and observation equipment.”

It started with a single burst of gunfire at 4:20 A.M. A signal. And then the entire valley erupted. Samaroo and Hissong ran the last few steps to their bunker and dived in.

Amid this rain of bullets and RPG rounds, Afghan soldiers at a traffic control point along the road running south soon abandoned their positions and fled into Kahler. But across the rest of the base, Chosen paratroopers’ first instinct—as happened during the Ranch House assault in August and the ambush of Matthew Ferrara’s patrol in November—was to stand and fight.

They moved like performers on a stage to their assigned places. Specialist Jonathan Ayers took up the M240 machine gun in the Crow’s Nest up at Topside. Jason Bogar readied his light machine gun from the southwest bunker. When the very first shots were fired, Specialist Tyler Stafford crouched behind the M240 machine gun in the northeast end of Topside and turned his head toward Specialist Gunnar Zwilling, his assistant gunner coming up behind him, to ask, “Where’s it coming from?” Then his world blew apart.

Ryan Pitts was just a few feet away inside the center portion of the post, scanning the western ridge with his binoculars, and was turning his head in the direction of the gunfire when he was suddenly thrown off his feet. Sergeant Matthew Gobble, who was close to Pitts, had just swiveled from the LRAS3 toward the southwest position where he was heading when the force of a blast struck him.

Multiple grenades had slammed into Topside almost simultaneously.

Stafford was thrown back over a rear wall of sandbags into the center of the outpost. The thrust of the explosion against the outside of their post had shoved the M240 machine gun into his face, smashing in his lower three front teeth. But that was the least of it. He had burning shrapnel layered down his body, along both arms, and all the way down to his knees. Zwilling, behind him, caught the force of it and was thrown, winding up on his back, dazed.

A separate explosion had hurled all six-feet-two-inches and 185 pounds of Pitts to the ground, his legs riddled with shrapnel. A hunk of steel drilled into the back of his left foot, nearly severing his Achilles tendon. Gobble, near Pitts, caught a cloud of smaller pieces from his left heel all the way up to the side of his face, and it slammed him to the ground. It felt like someone had taken a sheet of plywood and smacked his entire body on that side.

Yet another RPG blew up against the front sandbag wall of the Crow’s Nest, the displaced air knocking Chris McKaig against the rear of the position. He could feel the heat and pressure. Ayers stayed hunkered down at the M240, rode out the blast wave, and began firing back.

Stafford thought he was in flames from the heat of the blast and hot metal pieces in his body, and he started screaming, “I’m on fire! I’m on fire!” until he realized he wasn’t.

Pitts found he couldn’t move his legs. He stared down at the bloody limbs as a voice in his head shouted “MOVE!” But nothing.

Shrapnel wounds from exploding grenades, if a soldier survives it, are like some kind of medieval torture. Not only did they shatter bones and tear open flesh, but they also laced the wounds with sharp pieces of twisted, burning steel ranging from pepper-sized bits to shards inches long. Pressure placed on an injury site—whether from rolling on the ground or getting bandaged up—wasn’t simply a matter of pressing on an open sore; it meant pressing pieces of steel into muscle or bone. Writhing in that kind of pain, Stafford looked over and saw Zwilling on his back, a stunned expression on his face. And then there was another explosion. This one threw Stafford clear out of Topside and onto the sleeping terrace, and his helmet was blown off his head; he saw it laying a few feet away and crawled over to retrieve it.

Gobble dragged himself the rest of the way into the southwest bunker. His wounds were widespread but largely superficial. Still, it felt like his head was scrambled, and he couldn’t focus.

Nearby Bogar was blasting away at the enemy with his light machine gun.

The first thing Matt Myer saw was an RPG whooshing in from near Gul’s house and exploding against the TOW-mounted Humvee. It was one of at least three launched at the vehicle during the first thirty seconds. He knew immediately that this was a complex, coordinated assault, and he radioed Blessing. Bill Ostlund was in the headquarters when Myer contacted him. The Chosen Company commander knew one way to quickly communicate the gravity of what was unfolding.

“This is a Ranch House–style attack,” he told his boss.

The missile truck crew were all inside their vehicle during the opening salvos, and Grimm, in the right front passenger seat, was screaming at Specialist Aaron Davis, who was behind the wheel, to start the engine and get the truck moving.

“Back the fucking truck up! Move! Move! Move!”

The vehicle was facing west. Davis got it running and slammed it into reverse. But before he could move the truck, two RPGs from the east hit the driver’s door and the engine compartment; a third from the west exploded against the side where Grimm was sitting. Armor protected the men inside. May had dropped down from the turret as the firing began. But the engine, without armor, started burning.

“TOWs are going to cook off!” May yelled.

Grimm didn’t need persuading.

“Get the fuck out of the truck!”

Down at the mortar pit, in the minutes before the fight started, Army engineer Derek Christophersen—who had counted fourteen falling stars just hours before—was running the Bobcat, trying to dig a ditch to drain water that had collected during the night near the 120mm mortar. He didn’t even hear the opening enemy salvos over the sound of the Bobcat engine until another engineer, Specialist Joshua Morse, yelled at him to get down and take cover. Christophersen was in such a rush to reach cover that he left the miniature bulldozer sitting there with the engine running.

The 120mm mortar could do some real damage to the enemy, but Erich Phillips and his crew needed to feed coordinates into the targeting system. He didn’t have those coordinates, and there was no one to provide them. The Islamist fighters had shut down Topside. There just hadn’t been time since they arrived for Phillips to gather some preset targets as he had done at Ranch House. The mortar was currently set for a location far up the ridge where the TOW truck soldiers had earlier spotted people that morning, so Phillips dropped some rounds there. But that did nothing about the militants attacking them from right outside the base perimeter. He cranked the mortar tube higher to blindly bring rounds in closer, but this was almost wishful thinking. And then the gunfire grew so intense that Phillips finally had to back off the tube. He could see his men putting out rounds, throwing grenades. They were fighting back in unison even without his direction.

David Dzwik, the 2nd Platoon sergeant, had been nearby when the shooting started and raced in to join the defense. In fact all across Kahler, from the Afghan Army fighting positions and the bunker for their Marine advisors in the north to the dug-in locations of 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Squads and the command center, troops were returning fire. But Phillips could see they weren’t putting a dent in the volume of enemy shooting.

We’re not even near fire superiority. We’re losing this battle.

At the TOW missile truck flames from the engine were burning back over the driver’s side doorway and were clearly out of control. Smoke was filling the inside of the vehicle. The three soldiers inside climbed out the right side of the truck. Grimm ordered Davis and May to head for the command post even as enemy rounds exploded in the dirt along the thirty yards of open ground they had to cover. Both men took off at a sprint. Davis tripped and fell, and Grimm could only hold his breath, waiting for an enemy bullet to cut his soldier down. But Davis got back on his feet and ran, reaching the command center with May. Grimm followed, shocked that he managed to cover the distance unharmed.

Behind him, flames engulfed the missile truck.

Back in the center of Topside Ryan Pitts lay in the dirt, surveying his wounds. Even after the bone-crushing attack of RPGs, Pitts was comforted—and surprised, frankly—that he could hear his comrades going about the grim task of fighting back. An M240 machine gun was unleashing rounds up in the Crow’s Nest, and there was the sound of Bogar’s light machine gun firing. Pitts could see the meat of his upper left thigh was riven with shrapnel and gushing blood. He worried that a femoral artery in there could rupture and kill him in minutes. With his left hand damaged by shrapnel, Pitts began dragging himself into the southwest fighting position.

Gobble was laying there bloody and shell shocked. At the sight of Pitts crawling in, Bogar didn’t miss a beat when he saw how badly Pitts was wounded and turned from his weapon. “What do you need me to do?”

First thing Pitts wanted was to stop losing blood, and Bogar reached for the little medical kit strapped to his left leg to retrieve a tourniquet. Pitts almost instinctively corrected him. Use mine, he said. Procedure was to save your own tourniquet—you might need it. Bogar wrapped the Velcro sleeve high up on Ryan’s right leg and tightened it down with the windless. Neither bothered with bandaging just then.

“You good?” Bogar asked. He had to get back to his gun.

“I’m good,” Pitts responded, and Bogar turned to resume laying down rounds. They had built a gun portal in the center of the sandbagged wall, and Bogar was on his knees there, firing away. There was a building to the southwest high on the terraces where militants were pouring down fire onto Topside. Ryan couldn’t help but notice in all the chaos that the young video artist—the platoon’s eternal optimist—was now a portrait of focused concentration on the task of killing the enemy.

Down on the sleeping terrace where Stafford had recovered his helmet, he worked to get his bearings. He didn’t see Zwilling anywhere. But there was Matthew Phillips over behind a sandbagged wall that tied in the huge boulder to the northwest to the fighting position where Stafford’s M240 machine gun was located. Phillips was on his knees priming a grenade.

“Phillips, I’m hit, man. I need help. I’m hit,” Stafford called over.

Phillips looked at his friend with a half-smile and nodded as if to say, “I’ll get to you in a second,” and then he rose up to lob his bomb just as another enemy RPG exploded close by. A tail fin from that rocket ricocheted over and struck Stafford’s helmet, leaving him stunned and struggling to refocus. When Stafford finally turned to find Phillips, it looked like someone had released the air out of him. He was collapsed on his knees, his chest on the ground, arms askew, a gaping wound in his right side. Phillips, twenty-seven, was clearly dead.

Stafford could feel with his hand that there was blood pooling beneath his body armor. His friends were dying. His body was wrecked. And the explosions just kept coming. A wave of panic washed over him. He had to concentrate and force himself to calm down. Then he pulled out his 9mm, the only weapon he had left, and crawled back into the northeast fighting position.

Up in the Crow’s Nest it seemed like blind firing over the top of the wall was the only alternative, and even then the battle could bite back hard. McKaig was shooting without aiming over the sandbags when another RPG struck, throwing him back a second time and leaving both hands laced with shrapnel. He tried to use his teeth to pull a piece of steel out of one of his knuckles, but the metal was white hot, and he burned his tongue and lips. It was chaos. Some of the assault bags stacked up in the rear of their foxhole caught fire. There was no firing portal in the Crow’s Nest. The idea of rising up over the top of the sandbags to take careful aim was terrifying. Incoming rounds were shredding the uppermost sandbags. McKaig had this inescapable fear of taking a bullet to the face. There were stretches when Ayers was firing his weapon so long that Specialist Pruitt Rainey, who left the Crow’s Nest to help coordinate defense of Topside down below, yelled back at his soldier to watch his rate of fire. One of the times Ayers rose up to fire he cried out: “I’m hit! I’m hit!”

McKaig looked him over, trying to find blood, but there wasn’t any. Ayers said the round struck his helmet, and so McKaig scanned the Kevlar cover.

“Holy shit.”

A bullet had grazed the top left side of the helmet, ripping through the outer fabric cover, but failing to penetrate. McKaig told him he was okay—he was a lucky man.

Down below, Stafford reached the northeast fighting position where he was originally poised to fire the M240 machine gun when the battle began. Now he lifted the 9mm over the top of the waist-high wall of sandbags and, like McKaig in the Crow’s Nest, fired blindly for a few seconds. Then Stafford recalled how Phillips had tried to lob a grenade at the enemy. If they’re within grenade range, they’re very close.

The Claymores.

Both Claymores were designed to blast a cloud of steel balls in a shotgun fashion right down into the draw. He reached one clacker and squeezed it again and again, but there was nothing. Stafford assumed the electrical line to the mine had been severed, maybe by the RPG blasts. He reached over for the other detonator and clacked it. This time there was an explosion. But the blast seemed like it was throwing shrapnel in the wrong direction, back over Topside. Stafford wasn’t hit, but he wondered whether the insurgents had turned the mine around.

He found Zwilling’s M4 and fired the rifle blindly over the sandbag wall. In seconds there was another RPG that struck the outside of the wall and exploded. Again, as happened with McKaig, shrapnel raked Stafford’s hands, nearly blowing off his left index finger.

The soldier now lay there on the ground, bleeding from his wounds and feeling spent. The sound of incoming enemy fire had reached a crescendo, hitting the top of the sandbag walls around him. Stafford began crawling into the southwest fighting position, certain the enemy would come plunging into the outpost any moment to kill them all. He found Pitts and Gobble laid out with their wounds and Bogar firing the SAW gun.

“Sergeant Pitts, I’m hit in the stomach. They’re on the northern side. They’re coming,” Stafford said.

Stafford saw trickles of blood running down the front of Pitts’s face and watched his expression as the sergeant grew angry. Still unable to use his legs, Pitts proceeded to crawl out of their position and push back up to the northeast end of Topside by himself.

In the opening minutes of the attack at the mortar pit Specialist Sergio Abad fell with a wound to the shoulder. It was unclear whether he was shot or struck down by shrapnel. The incoming fire on this bunker at the western perimeter of Kahler was getting worse. Another mortar team member, Staff Sergeant Jesse Queck, moved to help Abad, but the wounded soldier was conscious and his injury seemed manageable, so the staff sergeant told Abad to bandage himself and went back to the fight. Abad even helped pass ammunition to other soldiers. The mortar crew, with David Dzwik fighting from behind the partially filled HESCOs, tried in vain to match the heavy volume of enemy fire, to effectively set the militants back on their heels as infantry doctrine dictated. But there were just so many of them firing at the positions from both sides of Kahler. Dzwik noticed one insurgent behind the trees outside the western perimeter of the base. The man would fire his RPG launcher, and nearly every time the projectile would be deflected off into the wrong direction by some errant tree branch. Sergeant Hector Chavez could see enemy fighters up even in the trees just outside the perimeter and Chavez was certain he’d managed to shoot some of them out of the branches. Queck picked up a shoulder-fired rocket launcher, stepped outside the mortar pit to avoid hurting anyone with the back-blast, and cut loose with it even as bullets impacted close by. He aimed into the foliage along the west side of the base where he saw muzzle flashes.

A few RPGs that missed the bunker flew across the base and exploded into the village bazaar across the street to the east, setting some of the buildings on fire. But one finally whooshed into the bunker and detonated near Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips, who was thrown to the ground. Some boosting charges for the mortar shells caught on fire. The place was stacked with phosphorous and high-explosive mortar rounds, and Phillips and Queck didn’t hesitate. They started yelling at everyone to get out. Dzwik, the mortar team, and the two Army engineers in the bunker started out across 100 to 150 feet of open ground toward the command post.

Abad, who was wounded, was struggling. Chavez and Joshua Morse, one of the engineers, fell back to help him, but it was slow going. Enemy gunmen zeroed in with rifle or machine gun fire. Chavez was struck in both legs, and Abad suffered a second wound, this time to one of his legs. Morse started by himself to drag Abad until Sergeant Erik Aass, the company radio operator who was in the front passenger seat of the armored Humvee at the command post, left the vehicle and ran over to help. Together they dragged Abad into the headquarters area. Chavez, despite his wounds, managed to make it almost the rest of the way on his own before he fell, and Erich Phillips stepped out to pull him in. Grimm moved over to treat Chavez, cutting off the wounded paratrooper’s pants to examine where he’d been hit on the inside of his upper thighs. The wounded Chavez lay there with only one question.

“Is my junk still there?”

Grimm assured Chavez everything in that department was fine.

The enemy was clearly targeting every major weapons system on the base, all the powerful add-ons that Myer had insisted on bringing to ensure security—they were being destroyed one by one. The strategy was working. A deadly shroud of RPGs wreaked havoc at Topside. Destruction of the most feared weapon on the new base—the TOW mounted on the Destined Company’s Humvee—was absolute. And the mortars had been neutralized under a relentless deluge of small arms fire and RPGs that threatened a massive explosion and drove Phillips and his men to abandon the mortar pit. Now an enemy shooting from multiple quadrants was concentrating on the remaining big weapons in the turrets of the Humvees.

Over at the traffic control bunker overlooking the main road where 1st Squad was hunkered down, the paratroopers watched in amazement as enemy rounds from hundreds of feet away struck with precision the turret shields around Specialist Adam Hamby, who was manning the .50-caliber machine gun. Sparks erupted as the bullets impacted. The sheer volume of incoming rounds paid off. Hamby, who had been forced at one point to duck when the firing grew hottest, opened the feed tray on the gun to reload it, and the lid was damaged by an enemy round. When Hissong moved over to the truck to try to get the weapon working, a round exploded in the chamber, blowing off the feed tray cover. The gun was now useless.

Enemy bullets also disabled the automatic grenade launcher in the Humvee at 3rd Squad’s position, and the other MK19 over at 2nd Squad’s position near the entrance continued to jam. The only major gun still functioning with persistence was a .50-caliber machine gun in the Humvee at the command post, manned by a teenager.

Private First Class Will Krupa, not yet twenty, had arrived in January as a replacement and was the youngest member of 2nd Platoon. He graduated from boot camp at Fort Benning around the time Ranch House was nearly overrun. Krupa shook off the intensity of incoming enemy rounds to keep his gun operating, and before long he was almost knee deep in spent brass shells and belt linkage.

Myer wanted very badly to break up the enemy attack with artillery fire from the battalion’s pair of 155mm howitzers at Blessing and kept feeding gunners the grid coordinates. But the rounds were so large that he could only employ them at distances of several hundred yards from Kahler, and the enemy was literally at the gates of his combat base. He wanted to use the 60mm to fire on those close targets, but it stood out on the bullet-swept open ground of Kahler like some lone sentry without any fortifications around it. All the work up to that point had gone into securing the 120mm in a bunker, and when Phillips and his men tried venturing out to retrieve the 60mm, the enemy gunfire was just too intense.

Ostlund was on the radio at the outset, promising a B1 bomber in twenty minutes, and told Myer to start sending grids for the laser-guided bombs the aircraft could dispense. He also said that Apache and medevac helicopters were “spinning up” at Jalalabad, and Air Force F15s were on the way. But they could take anywhere up to an hour to get over to Wanat.

Up at Topside from the southwest bunker Stafford looked over and spotted Pruitt Rainey for the first time. The big man was in the center of the outpost, leaning up against the terrace wall, using the radio. He was trying to provide the command post with a casualty report, explaining that they had three wounded in urgent need of evacuation—Pitts, Stafford, and Gobble. Stafford yelled over an update to Rainey. “Phillips is dead!” he shouted. Rainey couldn’t hear him, and Stafford repeated it.

McKaig left his position in the Crow’s Nest at one point and came down to the southwest bunker, but Rainey yelled at him to get back up and support Ayers.

Fifty miles southeast at the large US military installation in Jalalabad, twelve-hour crew shifts for the Apache AH64 attack helicopters had just ended. Aviators were back at what functioned as both their headquarters and lounge, discussing the previous work stretch. One of the senior pilots, Chief Warrant Officer 3 James Morrow III, had just volunteered to work an additional six hours because another aviator wasn’t ready to start. At 4:37 A.M. the alert phone in the room started ringing, followed by beeping sounds from the portable radios aviators carried with them at all times. Crew members ran the 150 yards to the tactical operations center and found it already bustling with commotion over something happening up in the Waigal Valley. Pilots for Apaches and Blackhawk medevac helicopters, along with other support personnel, filled the room. A new base at Wanat was under a coordinated enemy attack and at risk of being overrun. The base was so new that it wasn’t even on the maps.

Morrow was twenty-nine and from Worcester, Massachusetts, where his family for decades owned Guertin’s Café on Grand Street. He joined the Army as a helicopter mechanic and later became a pilot. He and his Apache crews were with Alpha Company, the “Spectres,” of the 1st Battalion, 101st Aviation Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. It was Morrow’s third combat deployment flying the attack helicopters since joining the regiment eight days after 9/11. The battalion motto was “Expect No Mercy.”

Alpha Company flew six Apache helicopters out of Jalalabad, and in the months since they’d arrived they had learned to scramble faster with each mission. It was almost like a ballet. Morrow would be the senior aviator on this mission, and because he’d already been flying for twelve hours, he thought it wiser to be copilot and gunner rather than pilot. While he was getting briefed on the mission, his pilot, Chief Warrant Officer 3 John Gavreau, was already spinning up the rotors and an off-duty airman was in Morrow’s seat, warming up all the weapons systems.

By the time Morrow ran out to climb into his cockpit and take off, armed with his usual two water bottles, a can of caffeinated Rip It energy drink and an empty Gatorade bottle to piss in, they were ready to lift off, and with two Blackhawk medevac helicopters were in the air by 4:53 A.M.—sixteen minutes after the alert came.

The bread-and-butter mission for Apache helicopters in Afghanistan, in short order, was to save the day—any day that troops were in trouble on the ground. The enemy called the helicopter the “Angel of Death” or simply “The Monster.” A defense industry publication would write about how a Taliban lookout once spotted an incoming Apache and shrieked a warning over the radio: “The Monster is above my head now! Do not move or you will die!” The exquisitely maneuverable aircraft tended to end fights when it showed up. The attacking militants would break off and flee at the sight of them. The only problem was that in 2008 there were never enough Apaches to go around. The other Apache helicopter flying with them this day was piloted by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Brian Townsend, who was working with Chief Warrant Officer 2 Thieman Lee Watkins Jr. as copilot and gunner. The call sign for the two aircraft was Hedgerow.

Morrow loved the Apache—its sparing, sleek design, the way the cockpit fit around him like a glove, and how it struck fear in the enemy. The helicopter looked like a giant dragonfly. The crew was just two people arrayed in stadium seating with the gunner in front and pilot behind and slightly elevated. It was designed in the 1980s as a tank killer, but its capacity for surgically annihilating enemy combatants on the messy battlefields of Afghanistan, where friendly forces or civilians could be in close proximity to a target, made the aircraft indispensable.

And it had so many ways of killing. It had thirty-eight rockets of the point-and-shoot variety and at least two laser-guided Hellfire missiles. And then there was the chain gun slung under the nose of the aircraft. It was armed with three hundred 30mm cannon shells. They were like the ones fired out of the nose of an Air Force A10 jet plane, but with less propellant, so they made a slightly smaller splash. The beauty of the weapon was that it could be digitally directed from any of an array of video screens in the gunner’s cockpit. It could even be operated by a screen attached to his helmet. The thermal sighting system keyed on body heat. Wherever the gunner or pilot turned his head, the chain gun would point, and then it was just a matter of pulling the trigger. He effectively could kill people by looking at them.

Rainey up at Topside was making it clear they were in trouble. It was a moment of truth for Jonathan Brostrom. His worst nightmare was unfolding up there. The observation post was on the brink of being overrun. It was precisely this scenario that led Brostrom to settle on locating Topside only fifty to seventy yards from Kahler—to be able to reinforce it quickly. The only difference here was the ferocity of the threat. Everybody had expected at least harassing fire from the ridges above Wanat. No one anticipated the enemy would have Kahler and Topside in a vice.

Now the lieutenant had dead and wounded platoon members up at the observation post, and it was time to act. Myer had control of the air and artillery support and was in overall command. Across the grounds of the new base he could see his men pinned down but fighting back. Right there in the Humvee at the command post Private First Class Will Krupa was up in the turret, blasting away at enemy insurgents along the bluff to the west with the big, 50-caliber machine gun.

Brostrom was convinced he needed to get to Topside. Myer stood next to the driver’s seat of the Humvee with the door open, talking on the radio. The closest air support they had, a B1 bomber, was still fifteen minutes away. Myer would ask the plane to drop five-hundred-pound bombs on the flat land on the opposite side of the bluff to the west. They couldn’t see into that area, and Myer thought it likely the enemy was using it as a means of reaching the west perimeter of his base.

At some point the captain turned from the radio to see Brostrom trying to tell him something about Topside.

“We need to get up there.”

Myer could see his platoon leader was determined.

“Okay, just hold on a second.”

He was juggling tasks and just needed time to think. There were a multitude of risks. It was unclear just how bad circumstances were at Topside. But Brostrom was insistent.

“I need to get to the OP,” he said to Myer. “I think that’s where I need to go.”

Myer couldn’t deny the logic.

“Okay, you can go.”

And the lieutenant was gone, running across open ground to 2nd Squad’s position near the entrance of the base to find someone to take with him.

Four miles to the south at Blessing, Chosen Company First Sergeant Scott Beeson was assembling a quick-reaction force with 1st Platoon leader Lieutenant Aaron Thurman and Platoon Sergeant Shane Stockard. Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale, who had led troops up to the ambush site the previous November to find his dead comrades, would also go. They pulled together nineteen paratroopers, gathered as much ammunition as they could grab, climbed aboard four Humvees, and headed up the road to Wanat. There was no time for the arduous process of clearing the roadway of any IEDs. They’d have to gamble the enemy hadn’t planted any. Moreover, to head off any ambushes along the way, Beeson instructed the gunners in each vehicle to open fire into the draws along the twisting roadway and just keep blasting as they drove through them. The result was a convoy of armored vehicles barreling toward Wanat like a scene out of Mad Max, with weapons blazing at every turn.

Ryan Pitts crawled from where Stafford and Gobble lay and where Bogar was fighting and through Topside to the bunker on the northeast end. Enemy hand grenades and RPGs had ravaged all of that area. Equipment was wrecked. The knowledge that Matt Phillips, who was married only last year, was dead, and Zwilling, the soldier they called their “little brother,” might be killed as well infuriated him. The enemy was trying to slaughter them all. Two can play the grenade game, Pitts was thinking. He had plenty of the round Army fragmentation grenades right there in the bunker. Sitting with his back against the northern wall of the fighting position, he took one of them, pulled the safety pin, released the spoon, and counted in his head as the fuse burned, “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand, four one-thousand,” and he lobbed it in the direction of the draw to the northwest, where it exploded. He had never concentrated so hard on the simple act of counting.

Longest four seconds of my life.

He threw another, and another, “cooking” each like that to ensure an enemy so close couldn’t pitch them back. They detonated somewhere in the dead space. Then he turned his attention to the M240 machine gun that had been thrown back by an explosion in the initial phase of the attack and busted out Stafford’s front teeth. Still unable to move his legs, Pitts pulled himself into a kneeling posture and, with both hands, dragged his right knee up so he was kind of in a lunging-forward stance, braced against the sandbagged wall. This gave him the leverage to push the machine gun up into position and start blind firing toward the enemy. But the gun kept jamming. The ammo belt was coming out of a bag where lengths of the belt were folded. As each fold unwound, the belt grew taut and the resistance jammed the weapon. What he needed was an assistant gunner. It was, after all, a crew-served weapon. But Pitts was alone. So with each snag, a painful cycle began of bringing the weapon back down, clearing the malfunction, and then lifting himself back up to resume firing. Meanwhile, down in the draw, to the extent that Pitts’s grenades and gunfire didn’t stop or slow them down, enemy fighters were preparing to assault.

The most shielded troops at Kahler at the outset of the battle were those at the 3rd Squad fighting position on the north end. This was due entirely to Sergeant Mike Santiago’s decision every morning at stand-to to have his soldiers climb inside the armored Humvee at their position and be ready to fire through the windows. He thought their fighting position was wholly inadequate. So this morning, as usual, he directed Private First Class Jacob Sones—Chosen Company’s Article 15 champion—and Specialist James Schmidt to climb into the armored Humvee. Sergeant Israel Garcia, the acting squad leader, was already in position behind the 40mm automatic grenade launcher in the turret. They were all in the truck when the shooting started and enemy rounds began pelting the outside of the vehicle and the shielding around the turret.

But Sones, who relished the action, wouldn’t stay put. He got out of the truck at one point, and Schmidt followed him. They gathered up more equipment and ammo to bring inside the vehicle. Sones spotted Schmidt’s sunglasses and snatched them up so his comrade could fight in style. It was aggravating Santiago, who was concerned for their safety and wanted them to stay inside the truck. When the automatic grenade launcher stopped firing, Sones assumed it was out of shells and once again jumped out to help load the weapon. He hefted one of the large cans filled with grenades onto the hood and then climbed up there in full view of the enemy to hoist the can into position for Garcia to reload. All the while Santiago kept yelling at Sones to get back inside the truck. He could see Sones’s legs through the bullet-proof windshield. Sones had one thought in his head during all of that.

I’m going to get shot in the ass.

Over at 2nd Squad’s position near the entrance to Kahler a soldier in fact did get shot in the ass. Specialist Michael Tellez, one of the engineers, took a round through the fleshy part of his backside. That bunker suffered three casualties in swift succession. The first to be wounded was Sergeant Jacob Walker, the former Mormon missionary who spoke Italian and had helped his close friend Matt Phillips and his buddy Tyler Stafford negotiate Italy. Walker had a light machine gun propped up on the hood of the Humvee and was pouring rounds to the northwest. He had fired about eight hundred rounds when an enemy sniper shot him through the left wrist, shattering bones. Tellez was next.

And then Brostrom showed up on his mission to Topside. He stepped into the bunker and dropped down next to the squad leader, Staff Sergeant Jonathan Benton. The two were close. Benton, who was a month short of his twenty-eighth birthday, was easily the biggest soldier in Chosen Company at six-feet-six inches and 275 pounds. He was an Army brat born in an Army hospital in Hawaii and raised outside Fort Carson, Colorado, where his father retired from the service. Like James Takes over in 1st Platoon, Benton had served in the Old Guard at Fort Myer, Virginia, just outside Washington, DC, after enlistment. Benton had actually been part of the historical Alpha Company patterned after George Washington’s personal guard. During ceremonial events the soldiers wore Revolutionary War uniforms and marched with flintlock muskets. He was shipped out to Italy in 2006, and this was his first combat deployment.

Brostrom wanted to take the platoon’s medic, Specialist William Hewitt, up to Topside and needed one other soldier to go along. Benton tapped Specialist Jason Hovater, the resident Chosen Company comic who did such a dead-on impersonation of the battalion commander. Hovater, wearing a stone-faced expression, hustled out of the bunker to follow Brostrom out of the base entrance. Hewitt got up to go but was just then struck by an enemy bullet through his right arm, leaving a ragged wound, and then an RPG exploded nearby, throwing him back into the pit. He was in no condition to head up to Topside.

With Hewitt out of action, Combat Outpost Kahler was without a medic. The only alternative was a SAW gunner with medical training, Specialist Jeffrey Scantlin, a replacement assigned to 2nd Squad. Scantlin, who had just turned twenty-four, was a native of Alaska and the son of an electrician who worked for the city of Anchorage. Jeff had dropped out of first one and then a second college before enlisting in the Army and signing up to be a Green Beret medic, part of the Army’s Special Forces. But he failed an advanced casualty treatment exam twice—in one instance by accidentally putting a tourniquet over a wound that he’d missed on a simulated patient. He was then dropped out of the course and shipped off to Italy and the 173rd Airborne Brigade. Scantlin joined 2nd Platoon at a difficult time, shortly after Matt Kahler was killed, and the soldiers were in a bitter and foul mood. It had taken months before Scantlin finally felt accepted by his comrades. Now, as casualties piled up in the 2nd Squad position, over at the command post and up at Topside, they suddenly needed him more than ever.

Enemy videographers scattered throughout insurgent positions were capturing footage of the battle. Much of it was blurred by camera movement or was out of focus—useless imagery. But some of what they filmed shows, perhaps unintentionally, that the battle wasn’t entirely one-sided. From a half-dozen vantage points around the valley the focus is always on the desolate miasma of smoke and dust that is Combat Outpost Kahler, where through the haze can be seen boxy images of the armored Humvees, each marking an American fighting position. Here and there flashes of light signal another RPG explosion. The sounds of weapons firing on both sides bleed together and—amplified and echoed by the valley walls—become a seamless roar that waxes and wanes but never dies down.

In the foreground of each frame is an enemy fighter, often a bare-headed young man clutching a Kalashnikov, lying on a rooftop or amid boulders, taking aim without exposing himself too much or for too long. Commanders on radios or with loud speakers issue encouragements and orders. And then the shaky camera work pulls back at times to reveal the cost of shooting at the outnumbered paratroopers: militants with blood-gushing face wounds or through-and-through bullet holes in a shoulder. Some of the Jihadist fighters nervously stand back out of sight, waiting for a break in the American gunfire. At one point a camera lingers on a scene in the riverbed out of the line of fire. There is the enemy equivalent of an ambulance: one fighter—a man either dead or gravely wounded—draped over the back of another man; the bearer has one of the casualty’s arms over each shoulder and is dragging him from the fight. The image helps explain the enemy’s discipline when it came to collecting dead and wounded from the battlefield.

The film also shows how thick with bullets the air was where the Americans were fighting. At times paratroopers had no idea from which direction the latest volley of gunfire was coming. Sergeant Brian Hissong was fighting from 1st Squad’s position when a bullet traveling right to left in front of his face brushed so close that it literally raised the skin on his nose. He spun and fell to the ground, realizing he was unhurt, then he uttered a short prayer: “If it’s my time, make it quick. I don’t want to fuckin’ die slow.”

When Jonathan Brostrom and Jason Hovater ran out of the front entrance of Kahler a few minutes before sunrise at 4:48 A.M., they did something that shocked anyone watching, not the least of which was the enemy: they ran right through the middle of the attacking forces.

There were basically two ways to reach Topside from Kahler, both dictated by the location of the town bazaar, a row of interconnected single-story shops running north and south along the west side of the road separating the main base from the observation post. The quickest route to Topside was a left turn out of Kahler and then a few dozen yards to go around the north end of the bazaar and then across an open field in front of a two-story hotel structure and up a few terraces. A longer route was to turn right out of the base entrance, jog around the south end of the bazaar, and then climb the agricultural terraces. Brostrom, leading Hovater, chose the quicker route around the north end. Benton, who had thrown a smoke grenade in that direction to cover their egress, was stunned when he saw them do it. There were enemy gunmen in those hotel windows, including some manning a machine gun, and the two American GIs would literally be running right in front of them.

Brostrom and Hovater sprinted even as bullets flew and RPGs exploded nearby. They cut around the north end of the bazaar and were lost from sight. It’s possible the brazen maneuver so stunned the enemy that they failed to react quickly enough to get a clear shot.

Not far away Pitts was still struggling with the M240 machine gun when, to his left, over the sandbags, a head popped up. It was so sudden that it startled the sergeant. Seemingly out of nowhere Jonathan Brostrom had reached the sleeping terrace. He was wearing that familiar goofy grin that seemed to fill up half his face.

“Sergeant Pitts, what’s up? What are you doing here? Where they at?”

Pitts recovered from the surprise and felt a sense of relief wash over him.

How did he get here?

He gave his lieutenant a quick rundown of their plight. He said there almost certainly were enemy fighters down in the draw to the northwest. And he warned that some of them might even be behind the huge boulder to Brostrom’s left that sat on one end of the sleeping terrace. The two paratroopers had to yell at each other to be heard over the gunfire. The air was almost suffocating from the smoke and dust of explosions.

Now briefed, Brostrom disappeared down behind the sandbags and went about organizing a defense, realizing almost immediately that he needed more men. He radioed Staff Sergeant Sean Samaroo at the 1st Squad position down at the base of the terraces. “Sergeant Sam, get your ass up here quick!” Samaroo said he’d try. Rainey made contact with Brostrom and began organizing their remaining heavy weapons. He dropped into the southwest fighting position where Stafford and Gobble lay wounded and Bogar was on his SAW. Rainey wanted Gobble’s M4, with its attached grenade launcher. The sergeant handed over the rifle along with the ammo rack he wore loaded down with magazines and a dozen or more of the brass-covered grenades for the launcher. Gobble was still struggling to focus. With the outpost constantly under fire, this battle had become terrifyingly different from anything they’d been through before. In the past any shooting exchanges with insurgents usually ended in a matter of minutes. But there was no break in the fight this time. No moment even to gather your thoughts and catch your breath.

I really want this to just be over.…

Rainey kept moving. He made his way over to Pitts and told him Brostrom wanted the M240 machine gun down on the sleeping terrace. Pitts handed it over, along with bags and cans of extra ammunition, maybe twelve hundred rounds. The big soldier, in turn, gave Pitts the M4 with the grenade launcher attached—the one he took from Gobble. Then Rainey gathered up the machine gun and ammunition and headed down to the sleeping terrace. After all the chaos and death, Pitts was feeling better.

Somebody’s taking charge. We might get out of here alive.

After treating Walker, Tellez, and Hewitt at 2nd Squad’s cramped bunker, Scantlin knew he was needed elsewhere. He consigned his SAW gun to another soldier and took a medical bag with extra supplies from Hewitt. The medic still had the bag strapped to him, so rather than wrestle it off, Scantlin just took his knife and cut the straps. Staff Sergeant Benton offered Scantlin an M4 rifle so he’d have at least some weapon, but Scantlin waved it off.

“Everybody else is shooting. I think we have that part of it covered. I need to see what’s wrong with people, and I need both hands to do it,” Scantlin said, and then he took off for the headquarters compound where there were other wounded soldiers—Abad and Chavez.

In fact two other medics were on their way to the battle: Specialist Nikhil Shelke, who would hitch a ride on the first medevac helicopter headed for Wanat, and 1st Platoon’s medic, Specialist Jonathan Kaderli, who was riding along on the furious gun-run convoy driving up from Blessing, blasting into every draw to discourage ambushes. But they were both still a long way off.

Scantlin ran to the command post. Abad, who had tried to get to his feet at one point, was now sitting up with an IV solution that Erik Aass had managed to establish. Abad seemed to be okay, so Scantlin turned his attention to Chavez, placing additional tourniquets on both of his damaged legs over the ones already in place and starting an IV for him too.

Then it felt like the earth moved.

Flames from the burning TOW truck some thirty yards away began cooking off the missiles loaded inside, and the entire vehicle erupted in an explosion. For some it sounded like a series of blasts. A shockwave of displaced air traveling at sixteen hundred feet per second rocketed out in all directions with the unifying effect of focusing every mind. The battle seemed to be going from bad to worse. In a bunker close to the explosion were three Marines who were advisors for the Afghan soldiers. The blast wave walloped all three, leaving them flat on their backs.

No one, thankfully, appeared injured by the explosion, although some were deafened for several seconds. But debris started raining down, and there was the whoop-whoop sound of an object flying end over end, followed by the collapse of the camouflage netting draped over the headquarters. A heavy missile warhead that had been part of the TOW truck’s arsenal crashed into the command post. It was packaged in a three-and-a-half-foot tube and weighed about sixty-five pounds—and was smoking. A humming noise was coming from inside. Everyone had the same thought.

This is going to blow up.

Some moved instinctively to flee. Others simply braced themselves for the explosion. Aass threw himself across Abad. Only Erich Phillips chose to do something about it.

It can take everyone, or it can take me.

He grabbed two empty sandbags and, using them like mittens, picked up the heavy warhead, ran outside the command post, and flung it as far as he could. Scantlin, who by that time had run back to 2nd Squad position, thought it was the craziest thing he’d ever seen.

In fact the warhead never detonated. One terrifying crisis was suddenly over, only to be replaced by another.

Scantlin came back to Chavez then realized Abad was in trouble. The soldier was struggling to breathe and turning blue. Scantlin felt certain Abad’s lungs were being pressured either by air or liquid building up in his chest. Effectively, he was suffocating. Scantlin performed a pneumothorax decompression. He pushed a long needle into Abad’s side to release any accumulated air. Then he did a second one for good measure. But neither worked, which meant the problem wasn’t air, but liquid, probably blood building up internally. Abad would need the surgical insertion of a drainage tube, and Scantlin didn’t have the tools for the job.

What he needed was a medevac.

Up at Topside Jonathan Ayers and Chris McKaig huddled together in the Crow’s Nest, feeling utterly outnumbered. Ayers with his M240 machine gun and McKaig with his rifle were trying to keep up a steady drumbeat of returned fire. But it seemed as if the entire hillside—from several yards away to far up the ridge—was covered in militants firing down at them. When both soldiers had risen high enough to aim over the sandbags they could see muzzle flashes going off like malevolent twinkling lights. Sometimes they’d catch a glimpse of a figure moving in the brush—an arm or part of a shoulder exposed for just a fraction of a second before it was gone. It was hard to get a bead on anyone.

Ayers brought the machine gun up yet again, and this time an enemy round struck him right above his body armor plate. It burrowed through his upper body and exited out his back. Ayers slouched forward with his weight on the machine gun so that the barrel see-sawed upward, pointing at nothing in the sky. His head rested on the gun with his face turned to the left so McKaig could look right into it. He saw his buddy gently cough as blood spilled out of his mouth. His eyes went blank, and McKaig reached up with his fingers to feel a pulse, but there was nothing.

“Ayers is hit! He’s dead!” McKaig screamed. They could hear him down below over the sound of the battle. Panic, like bile, flooded up through Chris McKaig. He’d never seen a soldier die before. From the way the machine gun went cockeyed, the enemy must have realized they had a kill, and the incoming rounds only seemed to intensify.

We’re losing.

McKaig was now alone in the Crow’s Nest, and it felt like a whole hillside full of enemy troops would be headed his way. He even thought he could hear them coming. McKaig wanted to use everything he could get his hands on to stop them. With Ayers still draped over part of the gun, McKaig fired the weapon to shoot the last remaining round on a nearly spent belt of ammo. His mind was racing. He didn’t think to open up one of the boxes of additional M240 ammo in the bunker and reload. Instead, he grabbed his rifle and opened fire, pulling the trigger so fast that the gun seized up and he couldn’t chamber another round. Then he grabbed Ayers’s rifle, but there was bullet damage to the magazine and McKaig only got off a few shots.

What else to do?

He threw two grenades, one to the southeast and the other toward the draw in the northeast. Enemy fighters were throwing rocks hoping they could frighten the Americans into believing these were grenades and jumping out of their sand-bagged position to become targets. McKaig remembered the Claymores and clacked the detonators, setting them both off. He couldn’t resist peaking over the edge of the sandbag wall to have a look. Sure enough, the enemy had been advancing. When one of the Claymores exploded, the blast caught a militant trying to climb across the concertina wire thirty yards away. The man was wearing a blue shalwar kameez—or man-jammies, as the GIs called them—over a military vest. The explosion blew his shoes off, and McKaig saw what looked like sparks flying off the man’s chest. His body lay on the wire.

That done, McKaig turned and headed out of the Crow’s Nest.

At the command post Scantlin was struggling to keep blood pumping through Abad. The father-to-be had stopped breathing and now Scantlin was performing cardio-pulmonary resuscitation in the vain hope that he might live if a medevac arrived in time. Every time he blew into Abad’s lungs, he could hear the fluid gurgling down there.

“We got to get a medevac in here now!” Scantlin kept yelling.

The message was always the same from someone on the radio. “Another five minutes out.” It fact, it would be half an hour before a medevac finally touched down on the base landing zone. Long before then Scantlin would give up administering CPR, accepting that Abad was dead and covering him with a poncho.

The enemy had learned hard lessons fighting Chosen Company in the Waigal Valley for fifteen months. To prove the insurgency had a future, they had to succeed, first and foremost, in killing Americans. Nothing would get the American public’s attention or foment misgivings about the war as much as the sight of American bodies coming home.

The young paratroopers with their body armor and their helmets and the heavy weapons they carried through the mountains and employed with such swift and precise fire had proven stubbornly difficult to kill. Their American aircraft—the Apache helicopters and fighter planes and gunships—could be devastating. There was a window of perhaps several minutes to an hour or more before these flying monsters would arrive to end the battle in the Americans’ favor. If fighters could find the courage to close in on the US Army positions, the pilots might hesitate to shoot for fear of killing their own people.

From the enemy’s perspective, there had been a good opportunity the previous summer when the militants massed against the small US Army mountain outpost above the village of Aranas, a place the Americans called Ranch House. The allies of the paratroopers—Afghan soldiers and locally hired Afghan security guards—had melted away at the opening shots and Jihadist gunmen had fought their way into the center of the base.

Only twenty-two Americans opposed them. And yet despite overwhelming superiority of numbers, despite a deluge of RPGs, rifles, and machine gun fire, the Americans had fought back fiercely, even calling down a strafing mission on their own base, and militants failed to kill a single one of them.

An even better opportunity had presented itself four months later in the valley southwest of Aranas. It was a perfect trap—a narrow, cliff-side trail with almost no place to hide. The militants were waiting in positions surrounding the narrow column of fourteen Americans walking the trail. It was excellent killing ground. Other fighters were positioned to block reinforcements from the nearest US base at Bella.

And yet once again the paratroopers had bitterly resisted, even after many of them were forced to jump off a cliff. The Jihadist fighters kept shooting for hours at soldiers crouched along the trail or seeking cover among rocks and trees after tumbling into the valley below. And most of them survived, in many cases relentlessly returning fire.

The Americans had slipped through the enemy’s grasp seven months later, despite hundreds of militants closing in on them at the valley crossroads outpost near the hamlet of Bella. The US Army evacuated their people under the cover of darkness using helicopters.

So the enemy fighters had followed them to Wanat for a last chance at killing them.

To succeed, they knew they would have to get very close, close enough for a sure kill. A few weeks before the attack on Wanat and more than a hundred miles to the west in Wardak Province, insurgents had ambushed an American convoy and tortured, killed, and mutilated three American National Guard soldiers. In Wanat the terrain might just let them repeat that success. From where the Americans had built their outpost, the ground to the northeast fell sharply into a tree-filled ravine where the Wayskawdi Creek ran east to west. Fighters could work their way from the east down the creek bed at the base of that ravine and remain totally out of sight. They could climb up the draw several dozen feet through thick vegetation to a point only several feet from a huge boulder near the observation post.

From there an attack of grenades followed by close-quarter rifle fire could surprise and annihilate any Americans on that terrace behind the boulder. An enemy fighter behind the rock could merely cut left and flank the north side of the terrace where there was a sandbag wall. From that range they might kill the paratroopers, even with all their body armor, helmets, and guns.

When the enemy attack came, Brostrom and Hovater were already on the sleeping terrace near that large boulder and below the limbs of a tall mulberry tree towering over that end of the outpost. It was under the branches of that tree in the days before the battle where the paratroopers took their siestas, sitting cross-legged in the dirt or sprawled with their backs against the boulder or the mulberry. Tyler Stafford, Pruitt Rainey, Gunnar Zwilling, Ryan Pitts, Matthew Phillips, and the others would smoke cigarettes and talk about going home.

Now Phillips lay dead there. Rainey stepped down onto the terrace carrying the M240 machine gun by a strap over his shoulder, his arms loaded with ammunition given to him by Pitts.

Suddenly enemies came face to face. Rainey was the first to see them. “They are right behind the fucking rock!” he yelled. “They are right behind the fucking sandbags, right behind the fucking sandbags!”

The sleeping terrace erupted with AK47 fire and explosions, possibly from grenades.

More gunfire. More explosions.

Bogar over in the southwest position had been hunched over, trying to clear a jam in his light machine gun, working with his Leatherman tool. When he heard the violence he moved instinctively. Slinging the weapon, he jumped the sandbagged wall to reach the sleeping terrace and moved toward what was obviously a breach in Topside’s defenses.

Rainey was shot several times. One was a gut wound. Another hit him in the upper back and smashed into his spine. Other bullets or pieces of shrapnel also tore into his body, including one that blew a hole through his left jaw. He had just turned twenty-two in February and died with a Chosen Company Punisher tattoo on his right elbow.

Hovater, less than a month from his twenty-fifth birthday, was killed instantly by a bullet that hit the bottom of the night-vision mount on his helmet and deflected into nearly the center of his face. The pathway of the round suggests he was lying prone on the ground in a fighting position. His rifle had no magazine in it, and some soldiers later surmised he was in the process of reloading when he was killed.

Bogar, who chronicled the life of Chosen Company with his ever-ready camera, stepped into the middle of a slaughter. A bullet struck him in the right side of his head and he fell dead. He was twenty-five.

Several feet away Brostrom, the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant, was struck down and killed by a single round that hit him just above his right temple. He might not even have even seen it coming.

All the bodies had cuts and penetrating wounds that could have come from grenade explosions. Their shouts and screams amid the blasts and gunfire could be heard fifty yards away at 1st Squad’s traffic-control bunker near the base of the agricultural terraces.

From that position Staff Sergeant Sean Samaroo strained to see what was happening at Topside and spotted an enemy fighter crouched on top of the large boulder on the sleeping terrace. The man had an AK47 and was firing bullets into the outpost as he yelled, “Allahu Akbar!” Samaroo was stunned that the enemy was that close to Topside.

How is he fucking right there? How did he get inside the wire?

The staff sergeant took aim and dropped the fighter with four rounds from his M4 rifle.

Ryan Pitts was still alive. A sandbag wall separated him from the fighting on the terrace below and he was using the grenade launcher attached to the M4 that Rainey had given him to drop grenades as close to the draw as he could. He held the rifle almost vertical in the hope that the grenades would not land too far away. The first one he launched looked almost as if it would drop back down on him.

On the opposite end of Topside McKaig slid into the southwest bunker to find Stafford and Gobble lying against boulders, facing each other, their legs intertwined. He looked over their wounds. Stafford was covered in blood and looked like he had been blasted by a giant shotgun. McKaig noticed how some of Stafford’s front teeth were bashed in.

Bullets were hitting inside their position. McKaig, Gobble, and Stafford were not yet aware that four of their friends had been slaughtered on the sleeping terrace a few feet away. McKaig found another rifle, but it was dicey trying to raise up and fire. He peeked over in the direction of the sleeping terrace and caught sight of an insurgent just behind the left side of the large boulder. The man was holding an AK47 in his right hand and reaching around the rock to fire blindly into Topside, spraying bullets.

Their corner of the observation post was taking rounds from opposite directions, including from a building far up on the terraces about 100 to 150 yards to the southeast. This, McKaig thought, he could deal with. There was a light antitank weapon, a kind of modern bazooka, hanging from the branch of a tree right in the corner of their position. The weapon was a one-shot rocket launcher made up of two tubes, one inside the other. McKaig extended the tubes, pulled the safety pin—or thought he had—and then leaned out around a rock that protected one side of their position and took aim at a window of the structure.

But the launcher wouldn’t fire.

The fighting position was cramped—McKaig was on his knees near Stafford and Gobble. Gobble started yelling at McKaig.

“Pull the fucking safety, McKaig! Pull it!”

“I pulled the fucking safety!”

But of course he hadn’t. This time he yanked hard and the weapon was armed. He leaned out again, focused where he could see five or six muzzle flashes coming from the building, and fired. The missile was dead on; it exploded against the bondeh, and the gunfire from there stopped.

But they were huddled so tightly together that the back-flash from the launcher scorched Gobble and Stafford. They looked like characters from a Warner Brothers cartoon, with little bits of their uniforms smoking and their faces blackened with soot. Except they didn’t sound like a Warner Brothers cartoon.

“You motherfucker!” Gobble said.

“You piece of shit!” Stafford chimed in.

Down below in Kahler the one remaining major weapons systems still hammering the enemy was the .50-caliber machine gun in the armored Humvee that was part of the command post defense. Will Krupa was firing it, and the weapon was quickly becoming his all-time favorite gun. He knew he was abusing the hell out of it, putting so many rounds through the barrel that it was red hot. But the gun didn’t break down.

Krupa had grown up in New Hampshire, the oldest of two boys. His dad worked for the state, assisting veterans, and his mom managed physical therapists. Will had been a cheerleader at Bishop Brady High School in Concord, New Hampshire, during the basketball season when he wasn’t playing football or baseball—he thought it was fun. He joined the Army as soon as he graduated in June of 2007, just weeks after Chosen Company had reached Afghanistan. He chose Airborne, finished training, and was sent to Vicenza. While waiting to join Chosen in Afghanistan, Krupa was assigned the sobering task of helping widows from 1st Battalion pack up their belongings for the trip home to the United States. Like Scantlin, Krupa arrived in Bella to join 2nd Platoon in the days right after Matt Kahler was killed and went through the same difficult period of winning acceptance from the other paratroopers. But also like Scantlin, Krupa finally felt a part of the team by the time they arrived in Wanat. He had been tapped that morning to man the .50-caliber at the command post. The type of heavy machine gun he was using had been a part of the US arsenal longer than almost any other weapon, with origins in its design dating back to World War I. It was efficient and massively deadly, firing rounds nearly four inches long at a muzzle velocity of twenty-nine hundred feet per second to a range of more than a mile.

Krupa was running through dozens of hundred-round ammo cans, loading the rounds and throwing the empty containers out of the turret. He could churn through one hundred bullets in fewer than fifteen seconds. Soldiers kept bringing him more ammo, taking it from the 1st Squad Humvee, where their .50-caliber was disabled. The barrel of Krupa’s machine gun needed to be changed out, but it was too dangerous to climb outside the vehicle to make that switch. Krupa tried to stagger his rate of fire so the barrel wouldn’t turn white hot and begin to warp.

He was shooting the big gun into the trees and foliage all along the western perimeter of Combat Outpost Kahler and could see branches and leaves disintegrate under the onslaught. Specialist John Hayes gave directions where to fire and Krupa stitched rounds into the far hillside across the river and at the buildings just outside the base that militants were using as gun positions. One of them was the home of Haji Juma Gul, the town father who had begged Matt Myer to spare his house in the event of violence. Now Krupa was putting fist-sized holes in the walls. He saw a figure holding an RPG launcher behind some foliage suddenly disappear under the chug-chug-chug of his machine gun.

I like the way this feels.

And the brass just kept piling up.

For the first time Topside had fallen silent, and there were decisions to be made. The rocket McKaig had launched at the mud hut high on the terrace seemed to give them a reprieve in enemy fire from that direction. McKaig only had two magazines left. He and Gobble and Stafford needed to do something now—perhaps even get the hell out of there. He looked back at Gobble, the senior man.

“Do you want to fall back, or do you want us to get more ammo?” McKaig asked.

Gobble still seemed out of it. He managed only to nod at McKaig, who had asked an either-or question.

“Who’s going to get more ammo?” McKaig asked.

No reaction.

“Okay now, don’t all volunteer to go down,” he said. “I guess it’s going to be me.”

Then he was gone. He threw himself through the gun portal built for Bogar’s light machine gun, causing some of the sandbags to collapse. McKaig wriggled free and took off running down the terraces, making a beeline for 1st Squad’s bunker, zig-zagging as much as possible.

Gobble watched McKaig go and looked at Stafford.

“We got to get out of here, man.”

He pushed more of the sandbags out of the way so that he and Stafford could climb out. As Stafford waited by the terrace wall to the left, Gobble crept around the boulder to the right and peered onto the sleeping terrace. For the first time, he realized the awfulness of what had happened down on the sleeping terrace—he could see bodies of dead American soldiers everywhere. An enemy fighter on the west side of the large boulder took a shot at him, and Gobble pulled back.

Were any Americans alive?

“Is anybody out there?” Gobble yelled.

No one answered, and he turned back to Stafford. “They’re all dead. They’re all gone. We got to go.” Stafford agreed, and both men took off south, using the terrace wall to their left as cover until they crossed the concertina wire perimeter, and then they turned west down the terraces.

Stafford got caught in the razor wire and, for a moment, saw a gunman in the window of the hotel to the northwest. He thought any next second would be his last, and he kept kicking furiously until he finally managed to free himself and keep going.

At 1st Squad’s position Staff Sergeant Samaroo, who shot an insurgent off the boulder near Topside, assembled a small relief force of himself and two of his specialists, Adam Hamby and Tyler Hanson. They started moving up the terraces when they suddenly saw McKaig coming down to them and, in short order, Stafford and Gobble, looking like bloody, stumbling refugees fleeing some horror. Gobble fell before he reached the bunker, and Samaroo pulled him in.

All three tumbled into the bunker or were dragged inside. Gobble told Samaroo that everyone else up at Topside was dead. McKaig, the only one of the three with a weapon, immediately took a position against the terrace wall facing Topside. He warned everyone to expect an enemy attack at any moment.

“They’re coming! They’re coming!”

Ryan Pitts also noticed the silence over Topside. There was no incoming fire, and even more disconcerting, there was nothing going out. He crawled to investigate, first looking into the sleeping terrace to see the bodies down there. Their sleeping bags, looking like twisted rectangular mounds with their pop-up mosquito netting, had tumbled down to the terrace below. Pitts continued crawling through the position. He snatched a look up into the Crow’s Nest where Ayers’s body lay. With each new piece of evidence that he was alone, Pitts edged toward panic. Then he reached the southwest position and saw it was empty.

He was all by himself and could now hear enemy fighters calling out to one another just yards away. Why they didn’t just come charging in was a mystery. Pitts dragged himself back to the northwest position, trying to contain his fear. He was too badly wounded to flee. There were people just a stone’s throw away eager to kill or capture him. They’d already slaughtered his friends.

He keyed the handset on the radio and whispered the call signs for Dzwik, the platoon sergeant; Captain Myer; and his buddy, John Hayes, the platoon radioman: “Chosen six, two-five, two-six-Romeo, this is nine-two.” The voice transmission could be heard at all the fighting positions below.

Myer picked up. Pitts told him he was alone and couldn’t move. Pitts said he could hear the enemy talking just a few dozen feet away, and John Hayes, the radio operator at the command post, could actually hear those voices in the background as Pitts was whispering. It was one more crisis that Myer couldn’t do anything about. He had dead and wounded around him in the operations center. Brostrom had already headed up to Topside with a team, and Myer had no idea what had happened with them. He had no one else to spare just then and told Pitts as much. Pitts knew he couldn’t make himself any clearer about how dire it was. He told the Chosen Company commander that Topside would fall without reinforcements and that this was his last transmission.

Others who heard those words down below couldn’t stand by, however. Two Marines named Jason, fighting in the north part of the base, were galvanized by Pitts’s words. Corporal Jason Oakes and Corporal Jason Jones had been busy. One of the Afghan soldiers they mentored had been wounded out in the open, and they had left their bunker to drag him behind cover and treat him. Now the Marines heard Pitts over the radio and started preparing to head across the base to offer their services.

Nearby, at the 3rd Squad bunker, enemy fire had disabled the automatic grenade launcher, and Santiago was in the turret, firing a squad automatic weapon he got from one of the engineers. That’s when the radio crackled with Pitts whispering his dire circumstances. Sones knew he had to act. Armed with his SAW gun, he and Garcia ran toward 1st Squad’s position, moving in the direction of Topside. It all happened so fast that Santiago, who couldn’t hear the radio, wasn’t even sure at first why the two soldiers were suddenly gone, leaving him and Schmidt behind.

Jimmy Morrow and his Apache helicopter crews had opted to take a direct route from Jalalabad to Blessing. A common pattern was to fly northeast through the Kunar Valley and swing due west through the Pech Valley. But this crisis didn’t allow time for that, so they went into the clouds at ten thousand feet to clear the mountains north of Jalalabad and then cross the deadly Korengal Valley. The medevacs took a more circuitous route to avoid the clouds, but they generally kept to the same bearing. By the time everyone converged over Blessing, the air traffic was hectic. The soldiers manning the artillery were preparing to hold their fire to make way for the Apaches, which had been orbiting briefly.

Soon the medevacs showed up and proceeded to land in order to top off their fuel tanks. The twin Blackhawks were part of a platoon that, like the Apaches, was with the 101st Aviation Regiment. After arriving in Afghanistan in January, the medevac pilots and crew members decided the platoon needed a motto to boost its image, and several possibilities were tossed around. There was, “The louder you scream, the faster we come,” but that was an unmistakable double entendre. “We don’t come until you bleed” was rejected out of hand as unintentionally misogynistic. Being based in Jalalabad, they thought about “Jalala-Bastards,” but finally agreed on “Burning gas to save your ass,” even managing to find someone who could draw a cartoon for an emblem showing a muscle-bound Blackhawk hoisting a donkey.

At Topside Pitts was growing increasingly lightheaded from the loss of blood. The tourniquet on his leg was causing blood to accumulate in his upper right thigh above the bind, and it hurt. The sergeant nonetheless tried to clear his thoughts. He’d be goddamned if the enemy was going to take him alive. He knew what Al Qaeda was capable of. No one could forget the cold-blooded, theatricality of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl’s execution by the terror group in 2002 or how the Al Qaeda henchman Abu Musab al-Zarqawi personally beheaded freelance American worker Nick Berg in Iraq in 2004. That wasn’t going to happen to Pitts. He still had 40mm grenades and raised the rifle again to almost vertical to start lobbing the explosives somewhere near those voices he heard. What else to do? He radioed 1st Squad, and Brian Hissong picked up. Pitts told him to lay down fire directly over the observation post.

“If you see my position, shoot over the top of the sandbags.”

That way any insurgents trying to charge in and kill Pitts might be cut down by a canopy of lead. Hissong obliged and sent a stream of rounds over Topside. Captain Myer came up on the radio again to tell Pitts that the Apache attack helicopters were just minutes away. He asked for guidance on where those aircraft should lay their rounds. Pitts urged that they attack from west to east and concentrate on the draw to his northwest.

For Pitts the news was encouraging. But it was a solution minutes away or more. He was living in the moment, and right now there were no other options but to prepare to be overrun. Still in the northeast bunker under the limbs of the big mulberry tree, he sat with his back propped against the earth wall of the terrace to the east. He held the M4 with the launcher in his lap. With any luck, the enemy wouldn’t know exactly where he was when they came. If they climbed up from the sleeping terrace, it might take them a second to see him tucked in the corner.

I want to kill at least two or three of them before they finally kill me.

So this would be the end.

Fifty yards away Garcia and Sones reached 1st Squad’s bunker, and with no immediate enemy assault as McKaig had feared, Samaroo was ready to finally try to reach Topside. This time the team would be him, Garcia, Sones, and Denton. Suddenly drafted for the mission, Denton was ready but convinced they were headed into a nightmare.

I’m scared shitless.

They chose to climb the terraces by using a series of cut-throughs, or drainage sluices, carved into each wall of dirt. This way they wouldn’t have to scale each terrace wall and the cut-throughs might offer cover from enemy fire. In short order they reached the same terrace level as Topside and turned north toward the outpost. Samaroo got there first. Garcia vaulted the concertina wire where Stafford had gotten stuck several minutes before and then lifted the coil for Sones and Denton to crawl under.

Pitts heard voices. Samaroo was calling his name. His buddies had come. They were climbing into the southwest position. Sones, unsettled by the sight of his dead comrades on the lower terrace to his left, pushed through the small fort until he reached Pitts. Garcia was right behind him. Sones fell to his knees and immediately began working to treat Topside’s last survivor. He saw the tourniquet on Pitts’s right leg and started to cut away his trousers to get a better look at his wounds.

“You didn’t have to get shot for me to take your pants off,” Sones said.

The sergeant smiled back at him. More and more, Pitts’s ability to focus was slipping, his head was swimming, and he was tiring of Army protocol bullshit. He took off his helmet.

Fuck this.

But Sones wouldn’t have it. “Sergeant Pitts, you gotta put your helmet on. The Apaches are coming.”

Fine.

Pitts obliged. Denton had jumped down to the sleeping terrace, and from where he stood among his fallen friends, he could read the battlefield, how the enemy must have assaulted from the low ground behind the boulder. For good measure he stepped around the west corner of the big rock and started shooting down into the draw. They’d have to get ready for another assault, and Denton turned to the difficult task of gathering spare ammo from the dead. He first went to Hovater, the friend whose religious counsel had helped strengthen Denton’s faith.

“I love you,” Denton said out loud, tears in his eyes.

Then he policed up his friend’s M4 magazines and a belt of 40mm grenades Denton could use because he was carrying a rifle with a grenade launcher attached. He took more rifle ammunition and a radio off of Brostrom’s body and gave the radio to Samaroo. Then Denton made his way up to the Crow’s Nest and found Ayers, still slumped over the M240 machine gun there. He gently lifted Ayers off the gun, apologizing out loud about having to move him like so much baggage in the way.

“I am sorry, buddy.”

Denton oiled the weapon, looped in a new belt of ammunition, and opened fire on the upper windows of the same structure that McKaig had targeted with the light antitank weapon. Insurgents were back there again, firing from the building. Denton paused long enough to lob grenades with the launcher attached to his M4 into the draw to the northeast.

He was looking in that direction when he saw the orange flash of an RPG coming straight at him. It wasn’t the only one. Another volley was descending on Topside; the enemy was attacking once again. Denton could only manage to turn his head at the last second as the RPG exploded, launching the big man out of the Crow’s Nest and down into the main portion of Topside, where he hit the ground head first. A hunk of steel had blasted into his right hand, causing a compound fracture; he could see the bone sticking out the back. Other large pieces of shrapnel struck him in the right foot and left hip, leaving his entire left side numb. Small pieces of steel raked much of his body. The pain was excruciating.

Sones was thrown back within the bunker. A large piece of shrapnel blew clear through his left shoulder, in one side and out the other. Another hunk of metal was lodged in his right calf, and there was shrapnel layered down his left thigh. It felt for a moment like his left leg had been blown off, and Sones didn’t even want to look at what his mind’s eye told him was a bloody stump. Pieces of steel peppered the length of his left arm all the way down his hand, and his left wrist was broken. Shrapnel had actually penetrated a bracelet he wore in honor of Matt Kahler, the twisted edges sticking into his wrist.

Samaroo had been on the radio giving Myer a status report that only Pitts was found alive. “I’m not a fucking medic. But I’m pretty sure everyone else is dead,” he told the captain. Then Samaroo’s world seemed to evaporate around him, lost in a white-hot explosion. When his senses refocused, Samaroo heard himself screaming. Blood was spurting from an open head wound to his right temple, and he was sure he was dying. The radio he’d been using was stuck on voice transmission—it was hot micing—sending his anguished cries to radios across Kahler, where stunned Chosen Company soldiers could hear Samaroo bawling that he loved his wife, Natasha, and his son, Dylan. Brian Hissong, who felt helpless down at 1st Squad’s position where he had three wounded men who couldn’t be left behind, finally couldn’t stand listening any longer and switched the radio to a different channel.

The worst of the attack was what happened to Garcia. An RPG hit him straight on. The rocket impacted the soldier’s pelvis just above his left thigh and exploded, blowing a hole through his body nearly a foot wide. His entire backside was gone. The son of immigrants, who had worked to become an American citizen in time to volunteer to fight his new nation’s wars, had been nearly cut in two.

He was thrown over the rear wall of the northwest fighting position and landed in the center of the outpost, where his insides spilled into the dirt. Pitts caught some bits of shrapnel but managed to shake it off and immediately crawled into the center of the post. He was horrified by the physical damage Garcia had suffered. His friend was on his stomach with his head turned to the side.

And he was still alive.