12

> > > “PRAY TO JESUS”

By the time the twin medevac flights were busy refueling at Blessing, waiting for the green light to fly to Wanat, dire word had come through about more casualties. Combat Outpost Kahler was reporting ten wounded and eight dead. Even though the battle still raged, given the volume of wounded, the first medevac lifted off and headed directly for Kahler at 5:45 A.M. with orders to touch down on the new landing zone despite the danger and collect the wounded.

The second helicopter was piloted by Chief Warrant Officer 3 Chris Hill and his copilot, Captain Ben Seipel. On board was the crew chief, Sergeant William Helfrich, and the flight medic, Staff Sergeant Matthew Kinney. A fifth man with them was a flight surgeon, Captain Justin Madill, whose first mission the previous January was to help pick up the body of 2nd Platoon sergeant Matt Kahler. Now Madill would be flying up to a new base named in honor of that slain soldier.

At the Kahler command post Matt Myer realized he had a disaster on his hands up at Topside. The original garrison for the outpost had been all but destroyed and two successive relief forces annihilated, or nearly so. His men knew the savagery of the attacks all too well. They heard the horrors on the open mic. But there was only one thing to do—send yet another team.

Myer turned to the men huddled in the command post.

“We need to get up there.”

Nothing. No one said anything. No one moved. The captain understood the hesitation. He could hardly blame them. Nevertheless, he repeated it twice more.

People were stirring. A group began to form. Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips would lead them. Sergeant First Class David Dzwik would go, along with Staff Sergeant Grimm and Specialist Davis from the blown-up TOW truck; Sergeant Erik Aass from platoon headquarters; Staff Sergeant Jonathan Benton, the 2nd Squad leader; the two Marine Jasons, Oakes and Jones; and two more men from the mortar team, Staff Sergeant Queck and Sergeant Jared Gilmore.

Gilmore was a twenty-five-year-old former high school track star from Mandeville, Louisiana, just across Lake Pontchartrain from New Orleans. He was a state champion in the mile and two-mile as a freshman at Northlake Christian School until a damaged Achilles tendon ended his competitive running. He was raised on family crawfish broils and, while deployed, sorely missed such Louisiana cuisine as jambalaya, crawfish étouffée, and deep-fried alligator. Gilmore enlisted in 2003 and went to Afghanistan the first time in 2005–2006 with the 173rd Airborne Brigade. On this July morning in Wanat he was in the biggest battle of his life, and by the time he and the other mortar team members were forced to flee their bunker, Gilmore was fairly certain he would not survive the day.

Smoke grenades were thrown to obscure their movement as the group reached Hissong and his men in the traffic control point bunker. Gobble by now had completely regained his faculties and was furious to learn that he had left Pitts behind. With his pants cut away by soldiers trying to treat him, Gobble demanded to go with this next relief force, but he was told to stay put.

As the Apache helicopters approached Kahler at 5:22 A.M., Matt Myer came up on the radio.

“Be advised, we are in a bad situation,” he told the pilots. “There’s an OP that is just east of my location.… They should have smoke out and [you should] continue gun-runs outside of their location to get the enemy pushed back.”

The first order of business was getting those attack aircraft up to Topside.

“I need you to come in hot immediately,” Myer told them.

Brian Townsend, at the controls of one of the Apache aircraft, already had a sense of how bad things were because the battalion commander, Bill Ostlund, was on the radio minutes before telling them how close the enemy was to overrunning Topside. “They’re within hand grenade range at this time,” Ostlund had said.

Townsend’s nickname was Tizzle, and his Indiana twang gave his voice a sense of authority and confidence over the radio. Brian got his airplane pilot license at eighteen and, after graduating from Purdue University with a degree in aviation administration, wanted to fly helicopters for a living. He settled on Army Aviation and picked the Apache. This tour in Afghanistan was his second combat deployment.

As the Apaches rounded a bend on the Waigal River, the pilots came onto a landscape of ruin. There was a dark haze blanketing the valley floor, and an oily column of smoke churned out of the flames from the burning remains of a Humvee. Civilian buildings were on fire and a stack of HESCO liners was in flames. There was very little discernible US military structure down there. The sun had come up just a half-hour before, and the morning rays made it difficult to distinguish details with the naked eye.

“Damn, it’s hard to see,” Townsend said to Watkins, a six-feet-five-inch member of the Texas Army National Guard who had volunteered to go along on this mission.

A fear swept over Townsend, not for his own safety but for the safety of the Americans on the ground. He and the other aviators were flying into a battlespace where they had almost no idea where friends were versus foes, and Townsend was terrified that he might kill the wrong people. Enemy gunmen along the perimeter and in the ridgelines were firing, and their muzzle flashes looked like fireflies blinking on and off.

“Tiz, oh fuck, there’s muzzle flashes all over the place,” Watkins told his pilot.

The air crews could get a general sense of the main base because they could see Humvees set out on a flat field adjacent to what looked like bunkered positions under camouflage netting. But there was radio chatter about an outpost somewhere to the northeast that was in deep trouble. People were giving them lines of attack based on billowing clouds from colored smoke grenades, but in the slanted rays of dawn it was hard to recognize the colors. And certain key reference points kept cropping up on the radio, like a hotel and bazaar, as if the pilots could recognize those buildings from the air. Everything down there looked like a mud hut.

And there was no time to waste. They already had the grid location for Topside.

“All right, Jimmy,” Townsend radioed Morrow, “we’re on the west-hand side, left-hand side of the valley approaching Wanat. We’re going to look for the green smoke, and we’re going to lay some fucking thirty down.”

Townsend decided to take control of the 30mm chain gun on this first pass and almost immediately had a brush with his worst nightmare. Searching through the haze for Topside, Watkins mistakenly fixed on 1st Squad’s position at the traffic control point. The bunker sat up on an agricultural terrace just as they were told, and they could see figures inside. There was also a figure running along the eastern edge before disappearing under a tree canopy.

“Hey, right there,” Watkins said.

“Where?”

“I’m trying to make sure he’s not in the OP. There’s a guy just on the other side of those trees.”

The crew could not have known that the figure Watkins saw was actually Sergeant Brian Hissong just outside 1st Squad’s position, trying to find a place to fire in support of Topside. Fortunately Townsend’s attention was fixed elsewhere as he hammered at enemy positions to the northeast with cannon shells.

Up at the observation post the second rescue team led by Garcia and Samaroo had been reduced to a writhing mass of very bloody young men. Somehow Denton and Samaroo found each other and wound up outside of the observation post to the south. Samaroo had a head wound and blood all over his upper legs. Denton worried Samaroo might have a slashed femoral artery, something that could kill him quickly. But the staff sergeant was more concerned about his genitals and wanted Denton to check him out.

“Dude, I’m not worried about your dick—I’m worried about your arteries,” Denton said.

Samaroo insisted, and as Denton cut open his pants to survey the wounds, he finally reached in with his hand and checked the vitals. “Okay, man, you’re all right.” Denton explored the wounds and concluded that no major artery was cut. Then he searched around for a weapon and found a jammed M4. Because his right hand was fractured, Denton moved awkwardly to clear the weapon with his left hand, with the rifle tucked under his right arm. He managed to get it working, then helped Samaroo back inside the southwest fighting position, which seemed a good stronghold with two boulders on opposite sides. Sones had already made his way in there.

Pitts still lay in the center of Topside next to Garcia, holding his hand. There was nothing Pitts felt he could do to treat his friend. He was almost afraid to touch Garcia, fearing he would only make the soldier’s agony worse. Garcia wanted to get his face up off the dirt, and Pitts tried to help, rolling him slightly and attempting to prop him up with a rock under his body armor. But it was causing too much pain, and Pitts pulled the rock away. Samaroo caught Pitts’s eye, trying to get a sense of how Garcia was doing. Pitts looked over at the squad leader and just shook his head. Samaroo felt Pitts and Garcia were too exposed to enemy fire in that center section of the outpost. They didn’t feel they could move Garcia, so they pulled Pitts inside their southern position. There were Apache helicopters overhead by then firing into enemy positions, and medevac helicopters were entering the far side of the valley.

Samaroo, Pitts, Denton, and Sones felt helpless about Garcia; words of encouragement were all they could offer. “Just hang on, brother,” Denton said. Samaroo told him to “pray to Jesus.” Now and then they heard Garcia say, “Yeah.” Samaroo was certain he could see Garcia hold his hands in front of his face, as if to begin praying.

Pitts took Samaroo’s open-mic radio and fixed it. Denton got to his feet and, with his rifle, kept an eye on the area around the huge boulder to the northwest where the enemy might attack.

For Sones the wrenching wounds he’d suffered, along with the sight of Garcia, had drained away much of the fight and spirit that had driven him to volunteer for this mission. Stunned and bleeding, he tried to watch for anything coming from the south when he spotted a crouching figure moving across the terrace. Sones recognized Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips moving with vigor and determination toward their position. The sight instantly filled Sones with relief.

He looks like a fucking war god.

“It’s our guys!” Sones started yelling.

Phillips climbed into the southwest bunker, the others following behind, and took stock of the bloody survivors.

“Garcia is pretty messed up,” Samaroo said. “You need to get him first.”

When Phillips reached him, Garcia was still in agony and just kept repeating how much he hurt. The physical carnage shocked Phillips. With help from others who arrived, Garcia was gently moved out of the south end of Topside.

Phillips turned back to the fight. Others filed into the post, moving past Garcia and reflexively turning to look at him. It was jarring for Aaron Davis.

God, let him go. He’s suffering.

Dzwik paused with Garcia for a moment and could hear him murmuring a prayer in Spanish. “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou amongst women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”

Garcia lost consciousness and died not long after.

At the command post during a lull in the fighting Matt Myer decided to see for himself what happened at Topside. He had given Aaron Davis his M4 because the paratrooper had left his rifle in the burning missile truck. Armed now with only his 9mm pistol, Myer took the quickest route, which was the way Brostrom and Hovater had gone. By that time Apaches had been hammering the bazaar and hotel structures with 30mm fire, but enemy fighters would keep using the buildings for fighting positions. Still, running as fast as he could, Myer managed to reach Topside unscathed.

The first thing he saw were the bodies of his men on the sleeping terrace. The sight of them became a kind of information overload for the company commander, triggering a cloudy, half-formed logic that made Myer feel like he somehow needed to make things right. He started to drag the body of Jason Bogar, but then stopped and just stood there, a figure of despair in a state of semishock.

What am I doing? Why am I trying to move him? He’s not alive!

As if to refocus his thoughts, Myer reached over and felt for a pulse on Bogar. There was nothing. He saw Brostrom and was struck by how different the platoon leader looked in death, though Myer didn’t know exactly how or why. He could see Jason Hovater, the terrible wound in the middle of his face, and he flashed on the graphic image of old Civil War battlefield tintypes and the carnage those communicated, except that this was right here, right now.

Myer let loose with a kind of primal shriek.

“FUCK!”

He said it a few more times.

Aass was right there. He was surprised to see his company commander suddenly show up and asked Myer how he got there. The captain turned and pointed his 9mm toward the hotel complex. Then he told Aass to take the weapons and equipment off the dead so they would be ready for evacuation. Myer heard the voice of Staff Sergeant Samaroo, who was nearby, a strangely calm admonition in all the madness.

“Hey, sir, you’re on the wrong side.” He meant that Myer was standing on the less-defensible sleeping terrace. “That’s the side they’re coming from.”

The captain moved inside the bastion. Aass collected the M240 machine gun he found slung over Rainey’s shoulder and took Bogar’s SAW. It was clear from the shell casings all around that both men had fought to the last. As the troopers tried to clear debris, someone spotted an enemy grenade that had failed to detonate. Myer reached down, picked it up, and lobbed it into the draw. Then he headed back down to the command post to coordinate the air missions.

Meanwhile a few soldiers started caring for the wounded while others took up fighting positions. Erich Phillips tried to organize a defense. Benton made Denton sit down so he could be treated. Samaroo was on his feet refusing him, ignoring his wounds, telling people not to worry about him, “storming around,” as Aass saw it. But he was weakening and finally lay down while Queck cut his pants to examine the damage. As Staff Sergeant Benton held Denton still in a kind of octopus grip, Grimm started stuffing battle dressings into the large wound in Denton’s hip. Grimm did the same with the hole in Sones’s right leg. Scantlin, who had assumed the vital role of platoon medic, made his way up to Topside and moved from Pitts to Samaroo to Denton to Sones, checking to see if they were alert and responsive, if the bandages and tourniquets were working and adequate.

Marine Jason Jones joined Jared Gilmore to crew an M240 machine gun. The other Marine, Jason Oakes, took the position where Pitts had been ready to make his last stand and opened up with a light machine gun. Topside was back in business.

Back at Blessing, after some confusion about whether to load up a medevac with ammunition supplies for the battle, the helicopter piloted by Chris Hill was ready to lift off for Kahler. The crew was nervous. Their mission was to use their hoist to retrieve casualties from Kahler’s embattled outpost, Topside. Such missions were dangerous enough when not under fire, and it was clear from radio transmissions that this battle was far from over.

Even before leaving Blessing they could hear how their sister ship had reached Kahler and was forced to abort its first landing attempt when they came under enemy fire. The Blackhawk had circled around and touched down, taking on paratroopers Tyler Stafford, Hector Chavez, Jake Walker, and William Hewitt as well as Michael Tellez, an engineer.

Chris Hill’s helicopter finally took off shortly before 6 A.M., and Seipel, the copilot, established radio contact with Matt Myer, who sounded exasperated. The copilot, who turned twenty-six the week before, had grown up on a Missouri farm and graduated from West Point in 2005. One of the top students in his class was a Californian named Matt Ferrara. Seipel was fully aware that his classmate had died fighting in the Waigal Valley region the previous November. On the radio as he spoke with Myer, Seipel could hear Krupa’s .50-caliber machine gun blasting away in the background. The copilot said they’d need to have the observation post marked by colored smoke. Myer told him it was already being done.

The aircraft entered the valley and began searching for Topside. They could see both Apache helicopters firing at targets northeast of the base. They spotted the signal smoke, and Chris Hill flew one pass over Topside before noticing a flat area on one of the terraces to the southwest, just outside the coil of concertina wire.

“Chris, I think we can sit on that terrace,” said Seipel, who spotted the same location.

“That’s exactly what I’m going to try to do.”

They wouldn’t have to take on a dangerous hoist mission after all. As the aircraft swooped in for a landing, Madill, who was in the back, suddenly caught sight of an Afghan squatting on a boulder up on the hillside where enemy fire had been reported. The man was maybe six hundred feet away, and the surgeon could actually make out what he was wearing—a light-colored shalwar kameez with a brown vest overtop. He was watching the helicopter approach and had no weapon, though Madill felt somehow certain he was an enemy fighter. At the last second, as if in some gesture of defiance, the Afghan rose to his feet and locked eyes with Madill. Then he passed out of view as the helicopter touched down, sending up a cloud of dust. On the right side its rotors were only a few feet from the next higher farming terrace. Right in front of where the helicopter came to rest, almost under its nose, was the perimeter razor wire for Topside. There were two levels of terraces below that separated the helicopter from the outpost. Lying adjacent to Topside were Americans’ dead bodies, and the pilots could see one of them was horribly mangled, looking as if his lower body was gone.

The paratroopers in Topside were ecstatic to see the medevac unexpectedly land so close to them. It was 6:05 A.M., more than ninety minutes since Ryan Pitts had been wounded. He had lost a lot of blood since then and was growing pale and weak. His right leg was raked with shrapnel from hip to boot. One hole in the back of his leg was slightly smaller than his fist. His left Achilles tendon was partially severed. His ass was in terrible pain. A hunk of metal had somehow embedded up into his crotch, into the perineum, narrowly missing all the male vitals.

The flight medic, Kinney, was quickly out of the helicopter and over the coiled wire on his way to the outpost. Helfrich, the crew chief, had stepped out with his headset still wired to the aircraft, as protocol required, to assist in loading the medevac while remaining in contact with the pilots. But Seipel could see the wounded and those soldiers helping them—specters caked with black dirt and blood, all wearing body armor—already struggling to climb the terraces. He told Helfrich to go help. The crew chief immediately disconnected and was on his way. Seipel said the same to Madill.

Madill disconnected and left. Soldiers were working to get Pitts, Samaroo, Sones, and Denton to the aircraft. Aaron Davis was assisting Denton. Both had gone through basic training together and were longtime friends. In Denton’s mind the two of them—Denton is white, Davis is black—reminded him of a scene from the movie Forrest Gump, where Forrest carries his wounded battle buddy, Buford “Bubba” Blue, off the Vietnam battlefield. Only in this battle of Wanat it was the other way around—Davis helping Denton.

Aass was trying to get Sones to the aircraft, but the wounded soldier hesitated: “Wait—where’s Pitts?” The sergeant was, after all, the reason they’d fought their way up to this wrecked place. He sure as hell didn’t want to get on the medevac without him.

“He’s right behind you,” Aass said.

Pitts at first insisted he could make it to the aircraft on his own, even though he knew this was just foolish pride—he couldn’t even walk. Two soldiers had to half-carry, half-drag him with his arms around their shoulders. Climbing the terraces was a challenge. They were five to six feet high, and everyone was reduced to clawing, pushing, and pulling up the loose dirt and rock walls.

Madill made his way toward the outpost. He was stunned to see a single coil of razor wire as their only perimeter defense.

That’s it? Wow, these guys are really exposed.

Madill could see a soldier and a Marine—it was Gilmore and Jones—down on or below the sleeping terrace manning an M240 machine gun. A stocky senior noncommissioned officer approached him—Dave Dzwik—and Madill asked if there were any other wounded. Dzwik told him no. Madill pointed at the bodies lying outside the outpost.

“Are they dead?”

They were talking into each other’s ears over the background noise.

“They’re gone!”

“Are you okay?”

Dzwik said he was. Madill turned and, with Kinney, helped the wounded finally reach the medevac. The pilots could hear enemy rounds snapping overhead. Dzwik, back near the bodies, motioned to the pilots to be sure to come back and pick them up. Chris Hill revved up the engines, lifted off the terrace, and banked hard to the left. As the helicopter made a sweeping turn over the base, the four wounded paratroopers inside watched the smoking, burning panorama flow past.

It was a cramped area for Madill to work in. He leaned down and yelled a question to Pitts about morphine. Ryan told him he’d already had one shot. The injection had been below his tourniquet, however, and seemed to have no effect. He remained in great pain.

“Do you want morphine!?” Madill repeated.

“Yeah!”

For Pitts the shot felt like butter melting in a skillet. Warm relief pulsed through his body.

This is good.

The four-truck Mad Max convoy from Blessing made the trip that normally would take two to three hours in fifty minutes. By 5:30 A.M., approximately an hour and fifteen minutes after the attack began, the reinforcements from Chosen Company’s 1st Platoon rolled up from the south.

When the column of trucks rounded the last bend, the smoky pall cast over the valley ahead told the whole story; the images only got worse as they got closer. There was a lull in the fighting just then, and Kyle Silvernale thought maybe the battle was over. His truck pulled up to the traffic control point where 1st Squad was bunkered down, and Brian Hissong stood there waiting to meet them, his face pale and his features drained of expression.

“Hey, where they at?” Silvernale asked him about the enemy.

Hissong’s voice was flat. “They’re everywhere.”

Silvernale needed him to snap out of it and start making some sense, so he smacked Hissong in the shoulder with his hand and repeated the question.

“They’re fucking everywhere!”

“Well, where do you need me?”

“I don’t know.”

Silvernale could see that the road ahead led to a cluster of buildings a hundred yards to the north. “Is there a blocking position to the north? Is there anyone to the north?”

Hissong said there weren’t any paratroopers positioned there. So after Silvernale checked in briefly at the command post and left two soldiers with Hissong to help defend that bunker, he led the first two trucks up the road where insurgents almost immediately opened fire.

As Silvernale and his men pushed into the village, Beeson and Stockard reported to Myer, who said he wanted them at Topside. Both headed up there.

Beeson arrived and could see that one of the sergeants who had come up to relieve the outpost was in tears and almost hysterical. He believed the Apache helicopters had made a terrible mistake.

“They killed everybody. The birds came in, the helicopters, they came in and they shot through the thing. They killed everybody,” the sergeant said.

Beeson couldn’t let this go on.

“Whoa! Whoa! What are you doing, brother? You’re the fuckin’ leader! You chill out. Number one, no birds fired in here. They fired close. I heard the radio transmission. They fired close. And they may have zipped along through here. But none of their rounds hit our guys.

“Look around here, brother. There’s all kinds of your soldiers looking at you right now, freaking out ’cause you’re freakin’ out.”

The admonishment stopped the sergeant cold. He turned to see the faces staring at him.

“Sorry. Sorry, First Sergeant. I gotcha.”

Stockard brought along Sergeant Zaccery Johnston, who had braved enemy fire during an attack on Bella the month before. Specialist Jonathan Kaderli, the first platoon medic, and Private Second Class Matthew Young went up as well. Meanwhile another medic from Blessing, Specialist Nikhil Shelke, had arrived on a medevac flight into the landing zone at Kahler and also made his way up to Topside. Suddenly 2nd Platoon had plenty of medics.

The look of the embattled outpost was almost too much for Beeson to bear. The dead bodies, the wounded, the blood-smeared gear. The look in the eyes of those who were alive and manning Topside. Everyone seemed emotional.

Stockard reached Erich Phillips, complimented his defense efforts, and asked how he could best help. Phillips wanted men up in the Crow’s Nest. Johnston and Young headed up there. Ayers’s body was removed and brought with the others. The M240 that Denton had used had been ruined by the RPG that wounded him, and Johnston needed another gun. Phillips passed him a second M240. Johnston started firing on a building up on the terraces to the northeast and was certain he managed to kill an enemy fighter who was preparing to launch an RPG from one of the windows.

At one point Stockard and Dzwik were on the sleeping terrace among the bodies of the dead. The 1st Platoon sergeant was curious whether his 2nd Platoon counterpart had any idea where his leader, Brostrom, was. In all the confusion Dzwik had lost track of the lieutenant and wasn’t even aware he had headed up to Topside to help reinforce the position.

“Do you know where the hell your PL is?” Stockard asked.

Dzwik said he didn’t. Stockard reached over with his boot and turned one of the bodies. It was Brostrom. Dzwik was shocked and knelt down beside his platoon leader. He studied the eyes that were expressionless and saw that his mouth was open. Dzwik flashed on how many times he had poked fun at Brostrom for being a mouth breather, always with his mouth open, even when he wasn’t saying anything. He reached over and gently closed Brostrom’s mouth, told him he’d stay and protect him as the fight continued—“I got your back one last time”—and then took up a position nearby to return fire.

The arrival of 1st Platoon reinforcements buoyed Erich Phillips.

Fuck, this might be over.

Between the gun-runs near Topside the Apache helicopters were constantly hunting enemy fighters in the surrounding hills. It was tough work; the daytime warmed up the rocks in their thermal sights, and militants using them as cover sometimes blended with rocks into a single shape on the screens in the Apaches. Much of the time the pilots or gunners simply fired weapons aiming with the naked eye.

The skies over the narrow valley teemed with aircraft: Apaches, medevac helicopters, an Air Force B1 bomber, and Air Force F15 Eagle jet fighters. Later Air Force A10 jets would show up, along with a Predator drone, and by early the following morning an AC130 gunship. Townsend had already complained about one of the F15 Eagles dropping down to his altitude when they should have been no lower than eight thousand feet.

The sleek jet fighters, unable to conduct attacks with all the helicopters working below them, were performing “show of force” flights with the idea of intimidating the enemy. Townsend chuckled about that over his intercom, skeptical that this enemy—who had already defied convention by continuing to attack even after the Apaches showed up—was paying attention to the fighter planes.

“We’ve been shooting the shit out of them,” Watkins said, “and they don’t care about it. They’re not going to care about a plane at eight thousand feet.”

Minutes later Townsend and Watkins were rolling up the left side of the valley when Watkins spotted three figures on their bellies along a ridge overhanging the west bank of the Waigal River.

“Make sure that’s not the OP, bro,” Townsend warned.

“That should be too far away.”

“Are you on ’em?”

“Roger,” Watkins says.

“Hit ’em.”

At the last second the three figures appeared to turn away from their fighting position, perhaps after realizing the Apache coming up from behind them was closing in. But it was too little too late, and they were consumed in fountains of 30mm explosions.

A new battle was being waged inside the village of Wanat. Silvernale and Specialist Tyler Kuhlman had followed the trucks on foot, using one of them as a shield until they took up a position in front of the one-story mosque that was on the west side of the road. There was clear evidence from the spent brass shells all over the front entryway of the mosque that enemy insurgents had used it as a fighting position.

It was there that they fired on 3rd Squad’s position where Garcia, Santiago, Sones, and Schmidt were hunkered down when the battle started. Silvernale waved through the first truck, and as the second one drove up, RPGs exploded between the two vehicles. The trucks moved on, and now Silvernale and Kuhlman were pinned down by enemy fire in front of the mosque. An insurgent with an RPG launcher stepped out from between the hotel and the bazaar about fifty yards away.

The man fired, and the rocket exploded along the side of the mosque about a dozen feet from the two paratroopers. Suddenly a quick-draw contest was underway. Silvernale, shaken by the blast, was down on a knee trying to slam in another magazine and come up ready to kill that fighter when he ventured out again. But by the time Silvernale rose up with his rifle, the man was already standing there with another loaded RPG launcher pointed at the mosque.

Oh shit.

This time the RPG whooshed in and exploded only a few feet around the corner of the building, knocking Silvernale to the ground with a four-inch-long piece of shrapnel sticking out of the back of his left hand. Kuhlman was hit by flying glass from a mosque window. Silvernale tried to pull the steel out with his fingers, but the pain was too much, and he couldn’t get a good grip. He reached for his Gerber hand tool, grasped onto the hunk of steel with it, and gave a good yank, pulling it free. Then he bandaged up his hand.

Now there were a dozen or more soldiers defending Topside, and for several minutes it seemed as if the worst was over. Dzwik, set up near the large boulder, wanted a dip and called over to Phillips for some of his Copenhagen. The staff sergeant tossed over his can.

Gilmore, armed with an M240 machine gun given to him by Corporal Jones, moved to a couple of different fighting positions before setting up the gun in one of the most exposed sites—just on or below the sleeping terrace where at least five soldiers had died. From there Gilmore could fire directly into the hotel and other two-story buildings at the center of Wanat less than fifty yards away. The enemy fighters, in turn, could plainly see the paratrooper and the Marine with him, prone with the M240 machine gun. Rounds whizzed past the pair. Gilmore concentrated his fire on the upper windows.

When others at Topside saw what he was doing, they directed their weapons at the same location. Gilmore was certain he was wounding or killing enemy fighters. The rate of fire from the militants was slackening off.

Stockard was throwing grenades from the Crow’s Nest down into the ravine, and he wanted to venture out and set up new Claymore mines. Beeson wouldn’t let him risk it. Private Second Class Matthew Young, who had just turned nineteen, offered to go. He said he was “expendable,” and Stockard looked at him.

“What the hell do you mean, expendable?”

He told Young to stay put.

The enemy had begun firing RPGs into the branches of the mulberry tree with the idea of showering the defenders with shrapnel. Both Marine Corporal Oakes and Army Specialist Davis caught bits of metal; both kept fighting.

Gilmore’s machine gun was overheating. Erich Phillips came to assist and started sprinkling water down the barrel from a plastic bottle punched with holes. It was an air-cooled gun, and doing this could crack the barrel, but they were in a hurry and it worked—they got the weapon back in service.

Beeson worked with Aass on the radio to call in targets for artillery and air support, taking direction from Stockard, who wanted that large compound on the terraces three hundred yards to the northeast, from where enemy fighters relentlessly kept pouring fire into Topside, reduced to rubble. It looked like it was about three stories high.

“Tell them to make it one story,” Stockard yelled.

Grimm, fighting from Pitts’s last position, was amazed the enemy continued to attack, even with American air support overhead. He had never seen that before. The fighting at Topside now took on a kind of rhythm. The paratroopers and Marines behind the sandbags blasted away at the hotel, or down into the draw, or toward the building on the terraces across the creek that Stockard wanted demolished. When the enemy responded with machine guns and RPGs, the paratroopers would duck down and start throwing grenades. Then they would rise up to open fire once more. When the Apaches started coming in close to target the draw, someone would be alerted and tell everyone to get down while the earth shook. It was always stunning how close the Apaches could fire without hurting any of the Chosen Few.

At one point Grimm tried to detonate a Claymore mine set up to explode down into the ravine. It was the same mine that Stafford had tried to set off. Now Grimm wanted to see if he could repair it and, during a lull in enemy fire, jumped over the sandbag wall and crawled several feet out in the open to inspect the wired connection. He found it in shreds and pulled back into the outpost. Benton looked at him.

“You feel stupid now?”

“Yes, I feel pretty fucking stupid now. That was the dumbest thing I ever tried to do.”

The two men got a brief respite from the combat when they spotted a pack of Camel Light cigarettes amid all the used bandages, blood, and spent brass. There were two cigarettes inside, and Benton had a lighter. They both took long, luxurious drags, and it felt like the heavens had opened up and the angels were singing.

Scantlin had set up medic shop just outside the southwest gun position where every so often Hayes and Hanson showed up with more ammunition. At one point there was a lull in the fighting, and he suggested they both take a break and have some water. Enemy fire started up again, and they both begged off, heading back down to Kahler. Almost the moment after they left, an RPG exploded where they had been standing, and Scantlin was left briefly unconscious, although the shrapnel somehow missed him entirely.

Meanwhile Phillips kept moving around the base, directing fire, shooting his own weapon, and delivering ammunition. Gilmore, down on the exposed sleeping terrace with Jones, kept hammering the hotel windows with the M240. He was cranking out thousands of rounds and had to keep shoveling away the spent brass shells. Someone delivered an extra barrel that allowed him to finally change out when the weapon got too hot.

An RPG exploded in the branches of the mulberry tree and Dzwik caught a piece of shrapnel in his left arm. He screamed out for a medic. Nikhil Shelke came to his aid. Everybody could hear Dzwik cry out when he got hit, and Phillips couldn’t resist the opening.

“Dzwik, you scream like a bitch when you get hit.”

“The joke’s on you,” Dzwik replied. “I got blood in your Copenhagen.”

“Keep it.”

At one point an RPG fired from the hotel slammed into a boulder near where Beeson had taken cover and knocked him onto his knees. At the sight of the first sergeant going down, it was almost as if the entire force of defenders gasped at once.

“Hey, First Sarge, you okay? I thought they killed you!” Benton yelled.

But Beeson was only stunned and straightened himself back up.

“The fuck they did!”

Chris Hill was flying four of the wounded from Topside to a base at Asadabad, which was close and had a small treatment clinic. But while in route word arrived that the Asadabad clinic was already overflowing with casualties, and Hill diverted to his home base in Jalalabad, arriving there at 6:40 A.M. The wounded paratroopers were offloaded and Hill and his crew started toward Blessing, but before they got there, news came of another casualty back at Topside, and they headed back to the battlefield. Seventy minutes had passed since the medevac left Topside, and yet clearly the battle there was still raging. This time, as the medevac touched down on the terrace, the fighting looked even more intense than before. The pilots could see an Apache only about 150 feet overhead firing rockets into buildings north of the outpost. The rockets were loaded with phosphorous that exploded and sent up large plumes of white smoke. The panoply of images reminded Seipel of old Vietnam combat footage.

The medevac had carried up a load of ammunition from Blessing, and the crew dropped the ammo and took on the casualty. Kaderli and Shelke, the two medics, helped Dzwik to the helicopter. Seipel was surprised to see it was the same soldier who had motioned to him about the dead bodies during the last trip. Madill was shocked as well. This was the man he had spoken with the last time, the guy who told him he was okay. Now Dzwik was being evacuated. He lay down inside the aircraft, and Madill came over to check his bandages. The intensity of all the fighting and dying finally caught up with Dzwik, and he became emotional. Madill took his hand.

Minutes after Hill’s Blackhawk helicopter lifted off from the terrace above Topside with Dzwik aboard a new volley of RPGs descended on the position. Aaron Davis was firing Bogar’s light machine gun from a corner of the southwest bunker. Aass was next to him, tucked against a sandbagged wall and talking on the radio, and Queck was close by. A rocket passed right over Beeson’s head—the first sergeant was between them and the Crow’s Nest—and exploded right near Davis, blowing pieces of shrapnel through his body. It was the second time he had been wounded in several minutes. The first time he refused to be evacuated; now he lay there coughing up blood. Shrapnel blanketed his entire left side. One hunk passed clear through his left arm, a shard was embedded in his left leg, a small piece struck him above his upper lip, and another grazed his right cornea, ruining much of the vision in that eye. Bogar’s SAW gun was destroyed.

Staff Sergeant Queck, from the mortar team, was bleeding from his shoulder and lower right leg. Aass was shocked to see that he himself had come through without a scratch. Another explosion nearby wounded Shelke, the medic. He was left with a badly hemorrhaging wound to his right leg. Comrades quickly moved to treat the three of them.

The 1st Platoon medic, Jonathan Kaderli, started working on Davis. Scantlin bandaged Queck. Marine Corporal Jones used his belt as a tourniquet for Shelke, with Grimm arriving to assist. Grimm reached under Shelke’s right leg and it felt like someone had popped a balloon full of warm water, there was so much blood.

Shelke told them they should start an IV on him. Grimm went to work on it, but the medic kept offering backseat-driver directions for his own medical care until Grimm finally lost patience.

“Doc, just shut up. I know what to do.”

For Matt Myer down at the command post it had been an exhausting three hours or more since the battle began, and the enemy was still tearing up his men at Topside—even after sending up four waves of reinforcements. He wanted the Apaches to come in and stop this once and for all and asked them to fire as close as ten meters—or thirty feet—from the outpost.

He gave his initials to approve another danger-close mission.

“I know it’s high risk. But we need to get these guys off of us,” the Chosen captain told Jimmy Morrow in the Apache attack helicopter overhead.

Morrow and his pilot, John Gavreau, were very uncomfortable about it.

“Ten meters?” Morrow said to his pilot.

“You got to be kidding me.”

Morrow gave Gavreau explicit directions on where to fly, keying off the big boulder at the north end of the sleeping terrace.

“Just to the left of that from our position is a tree line. If you go right, that’s where the friendlies are. So you need to go slightly left of that.”

They did three consecutive runs, their cannon fire churning the earth just along the draw. The soldiers inside Topside hugged the ground and could hear shrapnel from the attack landing just outside their sandbagged walls.

Down below in the village Silvernale’s two trucks had pushed all the way through to the north side of town. The paratroopers could see up the draw where enemy fighters had filtered down in the days or hours before the attack to close in on Topside. They could see structures several hundred yards up on the terraces from where gunmen had raked the outpost. Silvernale spotted muzzle flashes coming from the far east end of the hotel. He pulled out a grenade Scott Derry had given him. It was Derry’s “lucky grenade,” the one he had carried around for months after it was damaged by rifle fire during the ambush the previous November. Derry had bequeathed it to Silvernale when he left for home, and now the staff sergeant decided to put it to good use. He pulled the pin and lobbed it in the direction of the enemy gunman.

It was a dud.

The fighters in the draw and up in the structures on the hill began focusing their gunfire and RPGs on Silvernale and his men. The soldiers were shocked at how the insurgents seemed to absorb the Apache helicopter attacks and keep fighting.

In the turret of Silvernale’s Humvee was Specialist Ananthachai Nantakul, the soldier they called Nanny, who had fought in the ambush of Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund’s convoy as it left Wanat on May 26. In the other turret was Staff Sergeant Joshua Salazar, who had led the paratroopers up at OP1 during the November 9 ambush of Lieutenant Ferrara’s patrol. Soldiers poured out of the trucks and took up firing positions with their light machine guns and M4 rifles as Nantakul chugged away with his automatic grenade launcher and Salazar opened up with the .50-caliber in the other truck.

Even as the Americans poured fire into the draw, a ravine, and the buildings up on the terraces, enemy fire was stemmed only momentarily. Paratroopers stepped out from behind cover to unleash rockets from shoulder-fired launchers, and still it didn’t finish the fight. Over and over enemy gunmen dressed in battle gear or man-jammies, their heads swathed in scarves, rose up to fire at the Americans.

Nantakul switched to his M4 at one point, holding the gun steady for two minutes, putting a bead on a point along the trench where he’d seen a militant pop up to take shots. His patience paid off. The man showed himself again, and Nantakul put a bullet right over his right eye, throwing him back into the trench. Two Army specialists, Shane Burton and Tyler Kuhlman, ran all the way through the bazaar back to Kahler to retrieve ammunition for Nantakul’s grenade launcher. The ammo cans were heavy and unwieldy, and Nantakul had to climb outside the turret to load the gun, each time with Silvernale screaming at him to get back inside.

Desperate to bring in the Apaches, first Silvernale and then Burton ran out into the open far enough to lob yellow smoke grenades toward the enemy, marking targets. The Apaches followed the smoke and started lighting up enemy fighting positions.

It finally gave Silvernale a chance, with Burton and Kuhlman, to clear the bazaar and the hotel room by room, using a shotgun to blow off hinges and then an axe Silvernale had found. They saw plenty of evidence the enemy had used the hotel as a fighting center.

But the militants had fled.

The battle was finally beginning to wind down. It was 8:30 A.M. The fighting had raged for more than four hours.

The two Apache helicopters had flown twice back to Blessing during the fight to rearm and refuel. Each of the aircraft had four radios going at all times, and snatches of communications from all quadrants of the battlefield flowed in continuously. The crews caught a piece of one report on efforts to recover all the American dead from Wanat.

“Nine KIA,” the voice over the radio said.

Townsend absorbed this news for a moment.

“Goddamn it.”

The bodies of seven of the eight Americans killed at Topside had been lined up on a terrace in preparation to be airlifted out. Soldiers ran a grim gauntlet to deliver ammunition to Topside during the latter stages of the fight, among them Sergeant Brian Hissong, Specialist Tyler Hanson, Specialist John Hayes, and even Chris McKaig for one trip before he was medevacked out. They tried to avert their eyes when they passed the dead, but it was hard to do. Many recognized Hovater only by his name tag. Hissong for a while mistook Brostrom’s body for a soldier on his team, Mike Denton. It was a terribly emotional blow for Hissong to think he’d lost one of his own men; it wasn’t until later that someone finally corrected him.

They couldn’t find Gunnar Zwilling until after the fighting eased up and Sergeant Zaccery Johnston located the body down about three terraces from Topside in the direction of the hotel. Some thought he might have fought his way down there. Others, like Scott Beeson, believed the enemy might have tried to drag his body away and gave up because of the Apache gun-runs or maybe Silvernale’s counterattack through the village. There was a wound in Zwilling’s left side, and his left leg was horribly mangled from his thigh to the top of his boot.

A medevac finally evacuated Zwilling’s remains late in the morning. Justin Madill had switched helicopters earlier and was aboard the Blackhawk that touched down near Topside for the last of the fallen.

At the 3rd Squad fighting position during the battle, from where Israel Garcia and Jacob Sones had headed off to save Ryan Pitts, the two soldiers who remained there fighting were Sergeant Mike Santiago and Specialist James Schmidt. They had no idea what happened to their comrades until Specialist John Hayes—who had seemingly been all over the battlefield directing air cover, carrying casualties, delivering ammunition, and marking helicopter landing zones with smoke grenades—showed up looking for supplies. He told them Sones was hurt badly but would likely pull through. When asked about Garcia, Hayes just shook his head.

Santiago couldn’t believe it. He never expected that when his friend suddenly took off running in the middle of the battle, he was heading to his death. The two were like brothers, and now Garcia was gone. Just like that. Santiago had hated this mission, coming so near the end of the deployment. He had hated the location, so exposed at the bottom of the valley. He had even hated the hard, rocky ground that made it impossible to dig a decent foxhole.

When the shooting died down and they started cleaning up their site, they found bullet holes in everything. The truck tires were flat. The soldiers’ rucksacks were riddled. Sleeping bags were shredded. Someone even found a nearly pristine AK47 bullet resting inside his packed underwear. The aluminum poles for a sun shade were shot through, and for one mad moment all the hardship came crashing down on Santiago. He picked up one of the baseball-bat-sized poles and just started whaling on things. It was a commotion. Heads turned. People stared.

The US military that could only manage a reinforced platoon for the mission to Wanat now had resources to spare just as the battlefield grew quiet. In addition to the fleet of aircraft overhead, a convoy of six Humvees carrying thirty soldiers arrived from Able Company; another thirty-three soldiers, most of them from Battle Company, flew in by helicopter; and later one hundred Afghan National Army commandoes came in along with twenty-one US Special Forces troops. The Special Forces commander wanted to seize the village of Qal’eh-ye Gal two miles east from where many of the attackers had infiltrated into Wanat. His plan would cut their means of escape. But Rock Battalion operations officer Major Scott Himes, who had arrived to assume overall command at Wanat, rejected the plan as too risky.

Battle analysts would later conclude that the attacking enemy forces under the control of Mullah Maulawi Muhammad Osman numbered as many as three hundred fighters. But they were not all on hand when the fight started early that morning; rather, they kept flowing into the area as the morning progressed, and these fresh fighters loaded with rockets and automatic weapons were fed into the battle as wounded and slain militants were carried away. As Americans were re-reinforcing their defenders, the insurgents were doing the same from their side of the battlefield.

As the soldiers from Battle and Able companies entered Wanat on Sunday, their leaders were astonished at Combat Outpost Kahler’s location and how valley ridgelines rose above it, with many buildings at higher elevations. Platoon Sergeant Jeremiah Smith of Able Company, drafting a report five days later, said the base “was being built in the worst of locations. The OP provided no tactical advantage in that area.”

It seemed painfully clear that if the US Army was going to stay in Wanat, they would need to move the entire base to a higher, more defensible location. Matt Myer would start the process. Eighteen elite Army Pathfinders, kind of super-combat engineers trained to drop into enemy territory to set up landing zones, were brought in to begin clearing trees. They worked in an area high on the eastern ridge. Some heavy construction equipment finally arrived late on Sunday and was put to use building a road up to that higher ground.

That same day soldiers eventually made their way down to the district police station northwest of the village center along the Waigal River. There they found clear evidence of collusion. For a twenty-man police force, the Americans found a trove of six dozen AK47s, fourteen machine guns, and a half-dozen RPGs—far more weaponry than a department this size would ever need. Most of the weapons appeared to have been recently fired. There were spent shell casings on the grounds. The twenty police officers at the station raised even more suspicions; they had on clean uniforms, and many of them looked like they had just shaved. Some even had razor cuts as if they’d been in a hurry to look like clean-cut policemen. The paratroopers were seething. They knew they were looking at men who had just been shooting at them. It was all they could do not to gun them down. The district police chief was later arrested and his police force disbanded.

As scores of additional troops arrived and fanned out into the hills to secure a large area around Wanat, Sergeant Brian Hissong felt for the first time in hours that he could finally relax. He sat down in the bunker and smoked a cigarette as the depth of the tragedy washed over him. Hissong started to weep. Company First Sergeant Scott Beeson walked over and sat down beside him.

“You know, it’s all right, Brother Hissong,” Beeson said to him, “You’ve done well.”

The battle was already shaping up as among the bloodiest engagements in the history of the Afghanistan War. In addition to nine soldiers killed in action, sixteen wounded were airlifted off the battlefield. The last of them was Marine Corporal Jason Oakes, who insisted on remaining at Topside until the fighting died down. There were eleven other wounded who were either not evacuated by medevac or refused to go, among them Company 1st Sergeant Beeson, who had shrapnel injuries to the left side of his neck and his left knee.

The original forty-nine Americans at Kahler when the fight started had suffered an astonishing casualty rate of 67 percent.

Army investigators found at least thirteen enemy fighting positions scattered around Kahler when the battle began. How many of the enemy were killed was anybody’s guess. Just one body was found on the battlefield, the fighter who died in the concertina wire up at Topside when Chris McKaig detonated a Claymore mine. The Afghan National Army troops thought he might have been an Arab. Intelligence officers sifting through intercepted messages and talking with their contacts in the field felt certain that at least twenty-one fighters died, perhaps as many as fifty-two. They concluded that the artillery bombardment called in by Myer killed fifteen militants, gun-runs by the Apache helicopters and AC130 gunship killed six more and one of the $70,000, laser-guided Hellfire missiles launched from a Predator drone that showed up in the early afternoon of July 13 left three more fighters dead. Intel officers also estimated that forty-five of the enemy had been wounded, possibly including Osman, although that could not be confirmed. They intercepted communications that some of the aid stations set up by the enemy were “overwhelmed” with casualties. And there was even a report that a suicide bomber who was to be used in the attack was wounded before he could try to detonate himself among the Americans.

On the evening of the day of the battle Ostlund and Myer walked the grounds of the base Chosen Company had defended. They could see the ruined bazaar, scorched and collapsed in places. Fires still burned in some of the stalls, and the aluminum garage-style doors covering them were twisted and glistening in the sun. The hotel was riddled with damage from the intense fighting. A mud hut high up on a northeast ridge had been reduced—just as Stockard had demanded—to a single-story hulk by relentless Apache attacks with rockets and Hellfire missiles. Trees near Topside were sheered open. The mulberry bore scars up and down its trunk. At the center of the military base, like the smoking remains of some religious sacrificial pyre, was the blackened, crushed metal skeleton of the TOW truck that burned all the way to the ground. Other Humvees used as part of the defenses for each squad sat lopsided because shrapnel or bullets had flattened some of the tires. A bright red Kellogg’s Fruit Loops cereal box lay on the floor of one shot-up bunker, a strange flash of color amid brown detritus. Here and there exhausted paratroopers, each face a mask of sweat-caked dirt, were curled up in deep slumber in whatever piece of shade they could find.

Myer and Ostlund discussed where all of this would go from here. Moving the physical footprint of the base to higher ground would help to defend it. But the whole point had been to connect with the people there. The Americans had intended to lavish $1.4 million in infrastructure improvements—much of it for road building—from Wanat northward as a way of securing alliances with the Afghan central government and alienating the insurgency. But as Ostlund and Myer surveyed the damage around them, they realized that exactly the opposite had taken place. The people of Wanat, even the local police and district governor, had apparently sold their souls to the enemy, allowing them to use their homes and businesses, their fields and creek beds, as fighting positions to utterly surprise the paratroopers and kill them in record numbers.

Setting up a new base on higher ground farther from the village would leave the Americans isolated and looking more like an occupation force than a cooperative partner with the local population—a population that gave no hint that it wanted to cooperate.

Moreover, it was clear to Matt Myer that defending the base would require more people—an entire company rather than just a reinforced platoon. It was unlikely that the unit replacing the Rock—the 1st Battalion, 26th Infantry Regiment out of Fort Hood, Texas—could spare the troops. The Texas unit actually had fewer soldiers than the Rock Battalion.

“You know, sir, this totally changes things,” Myer said to his commander.

Ostlund absolutely agreed. Myer said it might be better if they simply closed this operation down and gave up on Wanat for now and tried their best to influence the Waigal Valley from outside of it—from Blessing.

It would be a controversial recommendation to take up to Chip Preysler, commander of the 173rd. They had just lost nine men defending this ground, and now they wanted to leave it. Asked about the decision three days later during the Army’s initial investigation into the battle, Ostlund tried to articulate how a war that defies traditional goals of capturing territory can be fraught with ambiguity.

“What is the calculus used to determine what is worth the lives of one or nine troopers? How is that determined?” Ostlund wrote. “I don’t know if I can articulate or justify anything at the tactical level worth risking nine paratroopers’ lives.”

That same evening Ostlund got an e-mailed response to the state-of-the-war assessment memorandum he had drafted and sent to General Petraeus just the day before. By this time Petraeus had heard about the heavy losses at Wanat and acknowledged the “tough fight” Ostlund just had. He offered solace by quoting Ulysses Grant in 1862 after the Union commander suffered massive casualties during the battle of Shiloh. General William Tecumseh Sherman had remarked to Grant how it was a bad day.

“Yep,” Grant responded, “lick ’em tomorrow though.”

At about 4 A.M. that morning at the US base in Bagram, Amanda Wilson was jarred awake by an intense feeling of dread. A few hours later, when word spread across the base about major US casualties in Wanat, she raced to the brigade office and pressed an officer there to show her the list of dead. Brostrom was on it. The man she thought might have been a future for her was suddenly gone. In shock, Wilson made her way back to her tent, sat down, and tapped out an e-mail to her lost friend.

She called him Jon Boy and asked for a message, a sign, anything at all.

Over the next three days, as if to deliver a final insult, all the reinforcements left. Everyone was allowed to go except 2nd Platoon. They stayed there in the heat on that miserable battlefield where so many of their brothers had died until the base was completely shut down. Santiago, who had mourned his friend Garcia so deeply when the fighting stopped, was seething; sometimes he would just sit alone in the truck at the 3rd Squad position with the door open. Someone even snapped a picture, a shadowy figure in battle gear consumed with grief and rage.

Chosen Company finally finished packing up the remaining gear, and on the evening of Tuesday, July 15, headed down the road back to Blessing.

In the years to come there would be extensive investigations into the battle. But in the first routine Army probe, 2nd Platoon sergeant David Dzwik said he never anticipated the scale of the attack.

“I did not think the village itself would let the AAF [anti-Afghanistan forces or the enemy] turn their village into a battle zone,” he wrote.

“My men fought heroically,” Dzwik wrote on. “The closeness of the members of the platoon caused them to act in ways that would seem above and beyond that required of a soldier. They defended each other and fought with honor.”

Erich Phillips went back to the base called Michigan where the Dragon Platoon of Destined Company was located. He would be there for two weeks before heading home. Phillips had just finished fifteen grueling months—the Ranch House and Wanat battles and then crushing news that his wife had met someone else and the marriage was headed for divorce.

He was more than ready to leave Afghanistan and was inside the headquarters at Michigan, sitting at a computer, when a conversation behind him caught his attention. A noncommissioned officer with the replacement unit, 1st Battalion, had walked in and was talking about Combat Outpost Kahler.

“So whatever happened with this Wanat thing?” the soldier asked. “I heard they came in and everybody was asleep, and that’s why they got their asses handed to them.”

Phillips couldn’t listen to another word. He spun his swivel chair around.

“Look, motherfucker, I was there! That was not the fucking case. We were at stand-to,” Phillips said. “And I’ll put that group of men up against any other fucking group in the rest of the whole god-damned Army.”

For his actions during the battle of Wanat Sergeant Ryan Pitts, in a 2015 White House ceremony, became the ninth living recipient of the Medal of Honor from the Afghanistan War. Fourteen Silver Stars were awarded for actions in that battle. The recipients were Specialist Aaron Davis, Specialist Michael Denton, Sergeant Jared Gilmore, Staff Sergeant Justin Grimm, Specialist John Hayes, Marine Corporal Jason Jones, Captain Matthew Myer, Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips, Staff Sergeant Sean Samaroo, and Specialist Jeffrey Scantlin; they were posthumously awarded to Specialist Jonathan Ayers, Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom, Sergeant Israel Garcia, and Specialist Jason Hovater. Sixteen Bronze Stars for valor were awarded. The recipients were Sergeant Erik Aass, Sergeant Hector Chavez, Sergeant Matthew Gobble, Specialist Adam Hamby, Specialist Tyler Hanson, Sergeant Brian Hissong, Specialist Chris McKaig, Marine Corporal Jason Oakes, Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale, Specialist Tyler Stafford, Private First Class Jacob Sones, Private First Class Scott Stenoski, and Lieutenant Aaron Thurman; they were posthumously awarded to Specialist Jason Bogar, Specialist Matthew Phillips, and Specialist Pruitt Rainey. A Distinguished Flying Cross was awarded to Chief Warrant Officer 3 James Morrow III and another to Chief Warrant Officer 3 Brian Townsend.