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> > > COMING HOME

Lesly Garcia was hysterical back in Long Beach, California, when news arrived that Israel was dead. She was angry. Angry at the world. Angry at God. When Israel’s leave had ended in February and she was still not pregnant, that was supposed to be a divine signal that her husband would return safely to her.

What happened? Did you not hear me!? I had a pact. I got down on my knees and I prayed.

Lesly ultimately would come to peace with her faith and strengthen her connection with God. But she would remain single, mourning Israel for many years to come.

When David and Mary Jo Brostrom learned of their son’s death, they quietly grieved. But Brostrom grew distressed and ultimately consumed with questions after Preysler came to Hawaii to brief his old friend about the battle. It was the beginning of a slow burn as Brostrom pored through the Army’s initial investigation and read all of the after-action reports. He wasn’t angry at the world or with God—he was angry at the United States Army. He launched his own determined insurgency to bring to justice those he felt were truly responsible for the death of his son and the other soldiers in Wanat, plying a career’s worth of contacts to achieve his ends. He argued to reporters who would eventually write his story that he worried about the lives of other young American soldiers fighting in Afghanistan who might suffer the same fate as his son.

There may have been deep guilt there as well. David Brostrom had helped engineer Jonathan’s assignment to the 173rd Airborne Brigade. But he said he had acted out of trust in the institution and faith that commanders in the field would take care of their troops. All of that trust drained away the more he examined the facts of the battle, and Brostrom concluded that the Army’s official examination was nothing more than a whitewash to cover up mistakes. He enlisted one of his old friends to help. Lieutenant General William Caldwell IV commanded the Army’s training centers and schools and, at Brostrom’s urging, directed the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to research the battle. A draft of an investigative study by contract historian Douglas Cubbison—leaked to the media—laid blame squarely on feckless leadership that left the 2nd Platoon dangerously exposed to an enemy assault. By the summer of 2009 Brostrom filed a complaint with the Inspector General’s Office of the Defense Department, accusing commanders who led the troops in the field—his old friend, Chip Preysler, and Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund—of negligence.

“I didn’t start out looking to go after anyone’s career,” Brostrom told reporter Greg Jaffe of the Washington Post that year, but the Cubbison draft report and the Army’s handling of the investigation “made it personal.” Other family members of those Chosen Few killed in Wanat began to share Brostrom’s anger and coalesced around him and the case he was making. The most crucial ally Brostrom enlisted was US Senator James Webb, a decorated Vietnam veteran, who took the issue before Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Mullen urged that action be taken by General David Petraeus, the head of Central Command that oversees operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. In September of 2009 Petraeus appointed Marine Lieutenant General Richard Natonski to investigate Wanat. Natonski was a veteran field commander who had led troops during fierce fighting in the Iraqi city of Fallujah in December 2004. After nearly four months of investigation Natonski and his team sent findings to General Petraeus, who recommended letters of reprimand for Captain Matthew Myer, Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund, and Colonel Chip Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade.

Army Secretary Pete Geren appointed one of his most senior commanders, General Charles “Hondo” Campbell, the head of US Army’s Forces Command at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to review the entire case and take appropriate action. By March Campbell had issued letters of reprimand for Preysler, Ostlund, and Myer. The findings were devastating: poor planning and execution for the construction of Kahler and inattentiveness to a lack of resources that left 2nd Platoon ill-equipped to build adequate defenses and send out monitoring patrols.

“Your actions fell below the high standard expected,” Campbell wrote in letters to the officers that went out in March of 2010.

If the reprimands were made final, they would destroy the three officers’ careers. Myer had been promoted to major and was facing allegations of dereliction for the same battle where he had been singled out for heroism with a Silver Star. Ostlund had since been promoted to colonel and would lose that rank if the findings stood. Before directing that the reprimands be made a permanent part of personnel records, Campbell said he would consider any additional information the officers wanted to provide him. All three responded, but Ostlund’s defense was exhaustive. He assembled thick, spiral-bound binders stuffed with PowerPoint slides, data tables and graphs, diagrams, maps, and a multitude of other military records. It was persuasive. Campbell would write in his final analysis that with the additional contextual information provided by the three officers he came to a broader understanding of challenges faced by the brigade, the battalion, and Chosen Company.

Campbell drew some fine distinctions between how he chose to handle the examination versus what Natonski did.

“[Natonski] focused principally on specific actions directly related to the movement to and occupation of” Wanat, Campbell wrote in his findings letter to Ostlund on May 13, 2010. “My review focused on the totality of circumstances that included and affected actions at Wanat.”

Far from being feckless, the officers had been burdened with operating in a large and busy war sector with limited resources. The decisions they made under those conditions were reasonable, Campbell said.

“You, Captain Myer and Colonel Preysler were neither negligent or dereliction [sic] in the performance of their duties, exercising a degree of care that a reasonably prudent person would have exercised under the same or similar circumstances. To criminalize command decisions in a theater of complex combat operations is a grave step indeed.”

Campbell was also clearly impressed by the two-, three-, and four-star generals who wrote letters of endorsement and support for Ostlund.

Brostrom and other family members assembled for what turned out to be an emotional and widely reported meeting where Natonski laid out his condemnations and the reasons behind them. Then Campbell stunned the families, telling them that after reviewing the evidence, he was revoking the letters of reprimand and clearing the officers.

In a 2011 Vanity Fair article writer Mark Bowden quoted Campbell as telling the families: “[They] exercised due care in the performance of their duties. These officers did not kill your sons. The Taliban did.”

Brostrom became angry and loud, and other family members applauded when he challenged Campbell’s remarks. He repeated Natonski’s findings that there had not been enough resources, troops, and supervision for the mission to Wanat.

“Nobody had the balls to say, ‘Don’t do it!’” Brostrom shouted. “There is no excuse. Things were going wrong. Nobody took any action.… They left those kids out there to be slaughtered!”

“I can absolutely understand your emotion,” Campbell said.

“You can’t. You didn’t lose a son.”

Later that year the Army’s Combat Studies Institute came out with its final report on the Wanat battle, and key conclusions had changed from the Cubbison draft version that was leaked the year before.

Nevertheless, there were still career casualties from the controversy. Colonel Chip Preysler, who was commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade and Ostlund’s boss, opted to retire and left the Army on July 31, 2010. Major General Jeffrey Schloesser, one level above Preysler as overall commander for US forces in eastern Afghanistan, saw his nomination to receive a third star placed on hold pending the investigation. He too chose to retire, taking full responsibility for what happened in Wanat, adding that he didn’t think Preysler, Ostlund, or Myer should be found guilty of negligence or dereliction of duty. When the reprimands were reversed, Schloesser said he was contacted by the office of Defense Secretary Robert Gates about reconsidering his retirement decision. But Schloesser declined, hoping that by accepting responsibility he might deflect lasting damage to the careers of Ostlund and Myer.

“I’m a man of integrity,” he later explained. “I’m a guy who when he says, ‘I’m going to do something,’ I’m going to do it.”

As the drama played out in the media many of the Chosen Few were busy reassembling their lives, and the controversy was little more than white noise. Some were recovering from wounds both physical and emotional. A few were wrestling with substance abuse. Many were just moving on. The investigation did manage, however, to divide some of the men, particularly those from 2nd Platoon. There were soldiers angered by the Army’s decision to abandon Wanat after so much loss of life. They hadn’t wanted to go there in the first place. But they went. They fought desperately for that ground and, at the end of the day, held it, and then commanders gave it up. It was galling for paratroopers like Jared Gilmore who had earned a Silver Star for defending Topside.

“We lose all these people. All these guys wounded. All this, two weeks before going home. All for nothing. Those guys should be sitting at home, drinking beers with their families,” Gilmore said years later.

There were those who felt officers might have made poor decisions, but very few believed they were derelict and deserved reprimands. Many disagreed entirely with the decision to investigate Ostlund and Myer. They felt it diminished them all. Chief among those in this camp was Ryan Pitts.

“I don’t like the narrative it created that we were victims, that we had incompetent or negligent leadership, because that wasn’t the case. I didn’t want it framed like that.”

He and others who agreed with him, like Michael Denton, said they understood the grief of the families and what motivated them to want reprimands. But the soldiers didn’t see the facts the way Natonski did. Both Pitts and Denton wrote letters of endorsement for Ostlund and Myer.

After retaining his rank as colonel, Ostlund eventually rose to become an executive officer on the staff of General Joseph Votel, appointed head of Special Operations Command in 2014. Votel had been a deputy commanding general for the Army task force overseeing operations in eastern Afghanistan when the Rock Battalion was fighting there.

In the years following the Wanat battle Ostlund came to the conclusion that despite his success in tamping down the insurgency in the Korengal Valley, safeguarding the villages, and growing commercial activity in the Pech Valley, the enemy had beaten him in the Waigal Valley. It was not a defeat that would influence the course of the war in any way, but Ostlund knew that when he left, the valley was in the hands of the insurgency.

“At the end of the day we held the ground. But at the end of the deployment they held the valley,” Ostlund said. He had offered to improve the lives of the valley people with new roads and other infrastructure improvements, but they had rejected it all. As he saw it, they were no longer worthy of further sacrifice.

“The definition of defeat is either you destroy the enemy or influence them to no longer carry on their objectives,” Ostlund said years later. “Well, they influenced me to no longer carry on with my objectives because I was done with them.”

At the time of this book’s publication, the Waigal River Valley remains in the hands of the insurgency.

Ostlund came to believe the legacy of Chosen Company’s war in the Waigal Valley would not be about who controlled it in the end but rather about the heroism of soldiers who repeatedly held their ground against overwhelming odds at Ranch House, during the November ambush, and in Wanat. The way Chosen Company fought always reminded him of a line from the movie Gladiator when the Roman general-turned-slave told his fellow combatants before entering the arena, “Brothers, what we do in life echoes in eternity.”

“Chosen Company did everything I asked, and much more. The greatest honor is to be called a brother and share, in some small way, in their legacy which will truly echo in eternity.”

Tyler Stafford spent a month at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, recovering from shrapnel wounds to both legs and arms. His index finger had to be stitched back together and his bottom teeth capped. In the years that followed, he switched from infantry to Army aviation and achieved his dream of flying. He became an Apache helicopter pilot.

What lingered for Stafford, who is married with two children, was a feeling similar to what many Chosen Company brethren share—that they should have done more when the bullets were flying. “I carry a lot of guilt for leaving Pitts up there,” Stafford said years after the battle. “It beat me up for a long, long time.”

Guilt is a wound like any other. Chosen Company 1st Sergeant Scott Beeson could see it in the men years after they came home. It showed itself when they gathered to unwind stories at the Sheraton Hotel near the Pentagon during the Medal of Honor ceremonies for Kyle White and, later, Ryan Pitts.

Beeson could almost smell guilt, like some kind of feral beast prowling the hotel, living and breathing inside the young veterans whose only crime had been to volunteer for war. Despite the courage they showed through all the months of unimaginable violence, for most of them it would all boil down to some decision they made in a moment of chaos, frozen forever in a recurring memory.

Among the guilt stricken was Matthew Gobble, who also refused to forgive himself for leaving Pitts. Ever since he was a child Gobble had been fascinated by stories of heroism and wanted to serve in the military. But when his time came in the battle of Wanat, Gobble believed he had failed to measure up.

“I’m not saying that I’m looking for glory,” Gobble said long after that battle. “But the one chance that comes for me to actually be a hero, I don’t feel that I did everything I could have done. I didn’t realize that my wounds were as superficial as they were.”

He would later apologize to Pitts for leaving him behind, and the response Gobble received was gracious. “He said, I’ll go to war with you any day.” It made Gobble feel better in the moment, but it didn’t cure his shame in the long run. “I didn’t react the same way he did. I didn’t react the same way that Sergeant Samaroo, that Sergeant Phillips, that Sergeant Garcia did,” Gobble said. “I felt that I had failed everybody and to, I guess, a certain extent secretly, I still kind of feel that way.”

As the years passed, a single point in time—some decision made reflexively in the heat of battle—took on so much meaning, it became the sum total of everything they had lived to that moment and colored everything they would be from then on. Beeson saw how this guilt made them weep when they talked about their experiences. It was unjust, and more importantly, it was unhealthy. But it was undeniable.

Brian Hissong—who would leave the Army, marry, have two children, and become a police officer in his home state of Illinois—never stopped thinking that if he had agreed to go along with Matt Kahler that January night, he could have changed the outcome and the platoon sergeant would be alive today. And when so many of his friends died at Wanat months later, Hissong regretted that he survived.

“For years after Wanat I wished I would have died there,” he said. “I just wished that while I was there I would have been one of those killed so I wouldn’t have to live with the fact that I lived through it.”

Through his stature as a Medal of Honor recipient, Ryan Pitts became a kind of ad hoc leader for Chosen Few veterans. (“If it’s okay with Ryan, it’s okay with the rest of us,” Stafford once said about discussing the battle.) Pitts also saw in his friends the burden of surviving.

“We talk about it. There’s nothing I can do to take that away,” Pitts said. “I tell them hopefully we’ll see them again someday, and they’ll say, ‘Hey, don’t worry about it.’”

Jason Baldwin, who earned a Silver Star at the Ranch House battle, regretted for years that he left Chosen Company searching for more glory in the Korengal, only to miss the biggest fight of the deployment.

Mike Santiago left the Army shortly after returning home from war. But the one moment he can never forget was when he watched Garcia and Sones head up to Topside. He has replayed it countless times, always with himself going in place of Sones. That’s how it should have been, Santiago believes. Maybe it would have ended differently, he keeps thinking. Maybe Garcia would be alive.

Beeson himself is tormented by what he saw as his failure to protect his men at Wanat. “I let them die,” he said. “You don’t know how many times I went over this in my mind. Why I did not focus 100 percent on security for that location and getting the right equipment out there.… We asked them to go do it, and we told them we’d protect them. And we didn’t.”

When the broken body of Joe Lancour—so terribly damaged after being dropped from the medevac helicopter after the November 9 ambush—arrived home in Michigan in the fall of 2007, his family settled for a private viewing with the soldier’s remains wrapped almost entirely in gauze. His mother, Starla Owens, was able to identify him only by two tattoos on his right arm. But she faithfully followed the explicit directions Joe had provided for his burial, right down to the white rose placed in his hand.

Sergio Abad’s girlfriend, Christina Parra, gave birth to a baby girl. The child Abad called his gummy bear was named Lorilei. The death benefits from the US government—a sum routinely in the six figures—were placed in a special fund for her to use when she comes of age. As Abad had asked, his body was cremated and interred in the location he requested when he was still a boy and told his aunt about how he would die young—Arlington National Cemetery.

Jonathan Brostrom also had made special requests in the event of his death. He was buried at the Hawaii State Veterans Cemetery in Kaneohe in his favorite board shorts, T-shirt, and flip-flops.

Dave Brostrom would eventually launch an effort to have his son’s Silver Star upgraded to a Medal of Honor, employing a sworn statement by Tyler Stafford, who believes that his platoon leader died fighting the enemy in hand-to-hand combat, although acknowledging that he could not witness any of this from his vantage point lying in the southern bunker of Topside. As of the fall of 2016, the effort to upgrade the medal was still pending.

In the intervening years after Chosen Company came home, children in the United States were named after men killed or wounded thousands of miles away virtually in another world. Chuck Bell, who fought to stay alive at the battle of Ranch House, named his son Sean Albert Bell after Sean Langevin and Jon Albert. Erich Phillips’s firstborn child, a boy, was also named Sean in honor of Langevin. Kyle Silvernale gave his firstborn son the middle name of Lancour.

Jeddah Deloria, who had been left behind in the wreckage of Post Three during the Ranch House battle, remained at Walter Reed Army Medical Center for two years in recovery. He later became an account manager and works with veterans for Oracle Corporation, the multinational computer technology company.

Jon Albert, wounded in the November 9 ambush, was at Walter Reed for a year and a half. His mother, Chele Albert, stayed in Washington, DC, for three months helping her son learn to walk again. When she finally had to return home, he fell into a depression and eventually became addicted to narcotic pain relievers. He moved back home to Iowa, where the drug abuse continued until he was admitted to a detoxification center for twenty-eight days in 2010 and broke the abuse cycle. He eventually took a security job with Kyle Schilling at a nuclear power plant.

Schilling, who Kyle White worked so desperately to save during the ambush, recovered slowly from wounds to his right arm and left leg. He lost muscle mass in his arm and had limited movement. His leg injury left him unable to run. He got married in a 2015 ceremony with Kyle White as his best man and many of the Chosen Few in attendance.

Justin Kalenits, who waved at all of his comrades and told them he loved them as he was hoisted from the ambush battlefield, recovered from his wounds. To help deal with the emotional aftermath of war and at the urging of a therapist, Kalenits started a band back in Cleveland, a heavy metal group called Sykosis. The members wear big, gruesome horror masks and have built an underground following, making enough money to pay travel fare for concert tours.

Aaron Davis, the Destined Company paratrooper who was twice wounded at Topside, was left with only peripheral vision in his right eye. He was diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder and has only a spotty memory of the actions he took that earned him a Silver Star. He received a medical retirement from the Army and lost his dream of becoming a Texas state trooper. He decided to become a firefighter.

Mike Johnson, who volunteered for the ambush mission to calm the fears of his friend, Sean Langevin, recovered in a period of weeks from being shot three times and struck by shrapnel. The tough sergeant actually returned to Afghanistan to finish out the deployment with 1st Platoon, and his team provided security at Blessing during the Wanat battle. He stayed in the Army and has five children. He became a sergeant first class and was put in charge of the sexual assault and prevention office at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska.

Many other members of Chosen Company or those who fought with them forged on to fulfill old aspirations or find new ones.

Brian Townsend, whose nickname was Tizzle, left the Army in 2010 and joined the family business at Townsend Aviation in Monticello, Indiana, with his father, John, and does crop-dusting from a Bell helicopter. James Morrow III, or Jimmy Jam, as Townsend called him, became a chief warrant officer 4 and instructs pilots in a master gunnery course at Fort Rucker, Alabama, where he still flies Apaches.

Chris Ryan, the medevac pilot who fought the buffeting rotor wash of another helicopter while he hovered to pick up Chosen Few casualties at the ambush, saw his life change for the better. Five months before the ambush battle Ryan had flown a mission to recover the remains of an Able Company soldier who was killed in combat, Specialist Christopher Honaker. A forward operating base built by the Rock Battalion was named after Honaker and Specialist Joseph Miracle, another Able Company soldier who was killed. In 2011, when Chris Ryan returned to Afghanistan on another medevac tour, a flight medic with the Army who was Honaker’s sister, Charlene, was serving in-country and was eager to visit the base named in honor of her brother and talk with the medevac crew who recovered his body. She met Chris Ryan at Bagram Air Base. They stayed in touch through Facebook and fell in love, marrying in 2013.

Erik Aass, the Chosen Company clerk who fought at Wanat, left the Army on his birthday in 2008 and spent two years in the Maryland National Guard. More recently he has been working for the global professional services giant KPMG as a consultant in their Chicago office. Matt Myer attended Aass’s wedding in April 2012. That same year Aass legally changed his name to Haass.

James Takes, who received a Distinguished Service Cross for his valor at the ambush, nearly lost his life in a motorcycle accident after coming home. He recovered and got married on the anniversary of the ambush, November 9, 2013. He and his wife, Lauren, who had two children from a previous marriage, live in South Carolina, where James runs his own heating and air conditioning service company. He and Lauren had their first child together in 2013, a boy they named Sullivan Joseph Takes. The child’s middle name, Joseph, is for the second name of Jeddah Joseph Pama Deloria.

Chris McKaig, a survivor of Topside, and Jeffrey Scantlin, the ad hoc medic who treated so many wounded at Wanat, remained with Chosen Company through another deployment to Afghanistan. McKaig stayed on in the Army after that and took a job training snipers at Fort Benning. Scantlin transferred to the Army Reserve in 2011 and became a medic and later a nurse. In 2014 he joined the Texas National Guard, where he trains soldiers to become medics.

David Dzwik, still in the Army, became a senior military instructor for ROTC students at the University of Akron.

Shane Stockard graduated from the Army’s sergeant major academy at Fort Bliss, Texas, in the spring of 2016 and became the senior noncommissioned officer for 2nd Battalion of the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. He wanted to stay with paratroopers.

Sean Samaroo, who led the relief team that saved Ryan Pitts, suffered physically and emotionally in the years after Wanat. He lives with bits of shrapnel embedded throughout his lower body and his arms and legs. There’s a piece of metal buried in his right temple. He developed depression, and the posttraumatic stress disorder that had begun after an earlier deployment grew more intense after Wanat. Like others of the Chosen Few, Samaroo turned to alcohol and ultimately wound up in a rehabilitation center. He finally received a medical discharge from the Army in 2012. His marriage to Natasha fell on hard times, but the two have tried to work through it. Only in early 2016 could Samaroo begin to talk about his combat experience in Wanat.

“It’s been a rocky road,” he said.

Mike Denton, who was part of Samaroo’s team, recovered well from his wounds at Wanat. His relationship with the young woman he took on a date during his leave from that deployment blossomed into a romance, and Mike and Christina married in 2009. The couple had a daughter, and Denton works today as a police officer in Florida.

“I try to live each day so that the guys who didn’t come home would be proud of me,” he said.

While the shrapnel wounds Jacob Sones suffered up at Topside healed, his marriage to Nicole struggled and they separated. Sones was in a dark place suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and abusing alcohol. But then he spent three months in an Army detoxification program and began to pull his life together. He and his wife reunited. They had a son, Gavin, and Sones began working on a degree in instrumentation and electrical programming at Texas State Technical College.

He remembers his time with Chosen Company as the best period of his life.

“I’m absolutely and completely humbled that I can say that I was one of them,” Sones said. “I never laughed harder in my life than I did with them. Just this feeling that life was right. I was where I wanted to be, where I was supposed to be.”

Staff Sergeant Kyle Silvernale, who led soldiers in driving militants out of the center of Wanat, left the Army to become a ship captain up in Alaska in 2011. He owns a boat and works with a marine company managing the dispensing of seismic devices on the ocean floor for oil companies searching for new reserves under the sea.

“Anybody who asks me about what I did in the Army, the first thing I’m going to say is, ‘I was part of Chosen Company,’” Silvernale said. “I’m very proud of it, to the point where I put it on my side. I tattooed it on my side. I put crosses for every guy we lost. I’m proud of that. I wouldn’t change that for nothing.… It’s a humbling experience to be part of that group of men, to me some of the greatest, the best men of their generation, and some of the greatest in our country’s history.”

Erich Phillips, who received a Distinguished Service Cross in the Ranch House battle and a Silver Star at Wanat, stayed in the Army and became a platoon sergeant, serving another tour of duty in Afghanistan. His first marriage did indeed end, but while on leave with a couple of buddies traveling to Barcelona he met and fell in love with a hotel clerk, Sonia Barrioneuvo. They married in 2010 and have a boy and a girl. Phillips rose to the rank of sergeant first class and joined the elite Army Green Berets in 2011.

Phillips said that when he served in Chosen Company he finally found the family he never had growing up.

“There are grown-ass men and I tell them I love them. And I got no problem with it. And I got no problem saying I do. I’ll do anything for them. Call me right now and say I need you here, I’d jump in my damn car and drive away,” Phillips said. “If it’s in the middle of the night, call me, man. I’m here for you.”

Scott Beeson also remained in uniform. In December of 2014 he lost his only son, Todd, who idolized his father and followed him into the Army and the airborne. Todd was stabbed to death trying to help a woman who was being beaten by her boyfriend. The tragedy nearly destroyed Beeson’s marriage to his wife, Giselle. But they pulled through. Three of their daughters also followed their father into the service; the fourth planned to do the same.

In the fall of 2015 Scott and Giselle drove from Anchorage, Alaska, to Washington, DC, where Beeson became command sergeant major of the Old Guard the following spring. They guard the Tomb of the Unknowns at Arlington National Cemetery and carry out the ceremonial burials on that sacred ground.

Kyle White, who would receive the nation’s highest honor for bravery, eventually realized that he’d had enough of war.

“Something changed that day,” he said about the ambush.

White was allowed to go back to the United States for several weeks to attend the funerals of his friends Langevin and Lancour. Returning to Afghanistan, he served with 1st Platoon at Bella. But before the siege of Bella he was sent to Blessing for a promotion board to become a sergeant. The command declined to send him back to Bella because the operation to abandon that base was already in the works. Soon he was rotating out of the war zone and did not deploy again, leaving the Army in 2011.

“I didn’t feel like I had my whole life in it anymore. I had passed the board and was chosen to be a team leader. But actually after that day I didn’t have the drive to keep doing that,” he said, referring to the ambush where he earned the Medal of Honor. “I figured if I didn’t have my entire head in the game, it’s not very fair for the mission or for the guys that would be following me. So I made the decision to move on.”

Doctors at the Department of Veterans Affairs later diagnosed White with mild traumatic brain injury and posttraumatic stress disorder from his combat experiences. For a time he considered going into business with James Takes selling outdoor power equipment, but decided against that. Instead he went to school, earning a degree in finance from the University of North Carolina. He took a job as an investment analyst for a bank in Charlotte and later as a vice president for fixed-income sales and trading at a Merrill Lynch, also in Charlotte. White married and divorced and then married again in November of 2015.

Ryan Pitts had a scary moment at the military hospital in Bagram after the Wanat battle when doctors thought they might have to amputate his right leg below the knee. But they managed to save it, and he eventually regained use of both legs. Pitts spent a month as an inpatient at Walter Reed and then another ten months in physical therapy. He started seeing a young woman he knew from his youth back in New Hampshire, Amy Guilbeault. They married in 2012 and have two children. After being medically retired from the Army, Pitts earned a business degree from the University of New Hampshire.

Pitts said he reached a level of personal fulfillment serving with Chosen Company that he will never know again. “It’s crazy to say, but I had some of the best times in my life with those guys in Afghanistan.”

It was a feeling shared by many of the Chosen Few.

“It’s a struggle to not be living in the past anymore and accept that this was a great thing, but it’s gone. It’s hard to let go. But you need to move on,” Ryan said. “I still struggle with it. You want to find it again. You know you won’t. But that’s also what made it so special. If we could find that all over the place, then it wouldn’t be any different than any other part of my life.”

Matt Myer saw the foundations of his belief in God and Christianity shaken to the core after the horrors of Wanat. He had been raised with the faith that Jesus died for everyone’s sins and believing in Him was an avenue to paradise. There was a contract with God which held that a good person doing good deeds would see blessing and favor. But he knew that Jason Hovater lived this kind of life, and Myer could not forget the image of that young soldier’s destruction. It would be years of thought and contemplation, part of that time spent working with an Army chaplain, before Myer began to reconcile those religious contradictions. He found solace in the book When God Weeps, by Joni Eareckson Tada, a woman confined for decades to a wheelchair who discusses how a loving God allows suffering and the opportunity to appreciate unexpected blessings. Myer decided the silver lining from the Waigal Valley ordeal was the indestructible, self-sustaining bonds built with those who survived—Ryan Pitts, Scott Beeson, Erik Haass, Brian Hissong, and others.

“We’ve gone through this shared hardship, and now we have this really deep, caring interest in one another,” Myer said.

Bill Ostlund is hoping that many of the veterans come together again during a Rock Battalion ten-year reunion in 2017, which he believes will offer not only a chance to reconnect but also a tonic for long-term emotional health. He worried that the difficult feelings so many still carry—not being there when the worst happened or surviving when others didn’t—don’t get better with time. They get worse.

“The reunion will be important. The message is clear: Hey, don’t go crazy on us,” Ostlund said.

Conrad Begaye, who fought in the Ranch House battle, never came back to Chosen Company after he was medically evacuated to Europe for wounds he suffered during the ambush. He struggled emotionally with the experience, with his ambivalence about returning to his unit, and with alcohol. An Army counselor eventually helped him. He went on to become an instructor for the mountain training phase of the Army’s Ranger School. More recently he was named a company first sergeant for 101st Airborne Division, heading back to Afghanistan, his first time there since the ambush of November 9, 2007.

For all the years since, Conrad Begaye has felt certain that the medicine pouch he kept in the front pocket of his shirt saved his life that day. He believed it provided some kind of shield against the volley of bullets that killed or gravely wounded so many of his comrades. He also believed the spirits of his Navajo ancestors watched over him and that he was spared for a reason—to train other soldiers in the best practices of war.

After the battle, when Begaye was delivered to a forward surgical hospital and his shirt was removed so doctors could treat him, his medicine pouch went missing. Somehow his platoon sergeant, Shane Stockard, found it, knew it was important, and returned it to Begaye.

It was just another way of bringing his men home.