The Three Battles of Wanat Page 3

  Specialist Matthew Phillips, the platoon’s marksman, was on his knees below a wall of sandbags nearby.

  “Hey, Phillips, man, I’m hit!” shouted Stafford. “I’m hit! I need help!”

  Phillips smiled over at him, as if to say he would be there in a moment. He then stood to throw a grenade just as another RPG exploded. Stafford ducked and felt something smack hard against the top of his helmet, denting it. When the dust settled he looked up. Phillips was still on his knees, only slumped over forward, arms akimbo.

  “Phillips! Phillips!” shouted Stafford, but his buddy did not stir. He was dead.

  Stafford crawled back up to Topside’s southernmost fighting position, where he found Staff Sergeant Ryan Pitts, the platoon’s forward observer, severely wounded in the arms and legs. Alongside, Specialist Jason Bogar and Corporal Jonathan Ayers were putting up a heroic fight. Bogar had his Squad Automatic Weapon (SAW) on cyclic, just loading and spraying, loading and spraying, until it jammed. The barrel was white-hot. Ayers was working an M240 machine gun from the terrace overhead until he ran out of ammo. He and Specialist Chris McKaig were also struggling to put out a fire inside their small fighting position. When Ayers’s machine-gun ammo was gone, they fought back with their M-4s, popping up at intervals to shoot short bursts until Ayers was shot and killed. McKaig’s weapon overheated, so he picked up Ayers’s, only to find that it had been disabled by the shot that killed him.

  The remaining men at Topside fought back with small arms, throwing grenades, and detonating the Claymore mines they had laid around the perimeter. Bogar tied a tourniquet around Pitts’s bleeding leg.

  Meanwhile, under heavy fire, Brostrom and Hovater raced uphill along one wall at the lower portion of the bazaar, and then to the outer wall of a small hotel before scrambling up the first terrace. The lieutenant stood there, partly shielded by a big rock, and called up to the wounded Pitts, telling him to hand down the machine gun that Ayers had been using.

  Stafford could not see Brostom and Hovater, but he heard the lieutenant shouting back and forth with a third soldier who had joined them there, Specialist Pruitt Rainey. Then he heard one of them shout, “They’re inside the wire!”

  There was a crescendo of gunfire and shouting. It was surmised later that Brostrom and Rainey had been trying to set up the machine gun, with Hovater providing covering fire, when they were surprised by Taliban fighters who emerged from behind the big rock, inside the perimeter. All three were shot from the front, and killed.

  The lieutenant’s battle was over. He died fully engaged. His bravery had little impact on the course of the fight. He could not rescue most of the men on Topside, and those who survived may have done so without the terrible sacrifice he and Hovater made. As it is with all soldiers who die heroically in battle, his final act would define him emphatically, completely, and forever. In those loud and terrifying minutes he had chosen to leave a place of relative safety, braving intense fire, and had run and scrambled uphill toward the most perilous point of the fight. A man does such a thing out of loyalty so consuming that it entirely crowds out consideration of self. In essence, Jon Brostrom had cast off his own life the instant he started running uphill, and only fate would determine if it he would be given it back when the shooting stopped. He died in the full heat of that effort, living fully his best idea of himself.

  The remaining wounded soldiers at Topside fought on. Eventually all but one, Staff Sergeant Pitts, managed to tumble and crawl their way back downhill to the platoon’s easternmost fighting position. Although wounded so severely in the legs and arms that he could not shoot his machine gun, Pitts managed to hurl grenade after grenade into the dead space alongside the perimeter, and stayed in radio contact with the command post (he would receive the Medal of Honor) until reinforcements finally came.

  There was still an eternity of minutes for the living members of the platoon, fighting off a determined enemy until air support arrived, but the worst for them was over when a B-1 dropped heavy bombs to the north, and then, not long afterward, Apache gunships began raining fire on the attackers. At roughly the same time the quick reaction force arrived from Camp Blessing, having blazed up the dangerous and still uncleared road north in record time. The fight would rage on for hours, but the attackers bore the brunt of it now, as the reinforced outpost and choppers flushed them out and chased them down, exacting a heavy toll. Later inquiries would estimate that at least a third of the attacking force of two hundred to three hundred had been either killed or wounded. With the sun still behind the peaks above them to the east, Sergeant Dzwik organized nine men to follow him up to Topside.

  They were still under fire as they retraced the path taken by Brostrom and Hovater. As Dzwik crested the terrace he saw bodies. For a few minutes, the shooting stopped. The scene was eerily calm. As the others fanned out to reman the observation post defenses and tend to the wounded, Dzwik took grim inventory. Eight of the day’s toll of nine killed lay here. Seven were dead. Another was mortally wounded; the sergeant’s men were busy working on him. There was a dead Taliban fighter hanging from the razor wire, and there were other bodies farther out.

  Brostrom and Hovater were by the boulder. Dzwik noted that Brostrom’s mouth was open. It was a habit, one the platoon sergeant had nagged him about, telling him it made him look juvenile, or stupid. Brostrom had a comical way of carrying himself, sometimes deliberately presenting himself as the strong but dim ranger. He made people laugh. He and Dwzik were often together during briefings or meetings, and they got into trouble because the lieutenant would make him laugh and then the two of them would be giggling like high school kids in the back of the classroom. Dzwik enjoyed his role as mentor and scold. Whenever he would catch Brostrom openmouthed he was on him.

  “Why is your mouth open?” he would ask. “You look retarded.”

  “Shut up, man, that’s just how I am,” the lieutenant would say.

  “Well, sir, I’m here to help you with that.”

  Dzwik now reached down and closed the lieutenant’s mouth for him.

  “I got your back, sir,” he told him.

  And when the enemy fire kicked up again, Dzwik made a point of holding his ground over his fallen friend, even when an RPG exploded in the tree right above him. A piece of shrapnel tore a hole through his arm. He looked down at it, telling himself, It’s not too bad; but when a stream of blood shot out of it, he screamed.

  Later, when he had been patched up, he said to his wounded comrades, “Man, I screamed like a bitch, didn’t I?”

  The sun was just sliding over the surrounding peaks as word of what had happened in this isolated valley raced around the world. Nine Americans killed, thirty-one wounded (twenty-seven Americans and four allied Afghans). The Battle of Wanat was at that point the army’s worst single day in the seven-year Afghan conflict, and it would cause waves of anger and recrimination that would last for years. For nine American families in particular, the pain would last a lifetime.

  The sad tidings were reported on the radio by one of the returning Apache pilots.

  “I have a total of nine KIA,” he said, then added, “Godamn it!”

  2. The Father’s Battle

  It was a Sunday morning in Aiea, Hawaii, so Mary Jo and Dave Brostrom went to Mass. Their home is perched high on a green hillside, and in the back the ground plunges into a verdant valley of palm branches and you can gaze down on the flight of brightly colored birds. When a sudden storm sweeps through like a blue-gray shade, it will often leave behind rainbows that arch over the distant teal inlet of Pearl Harbor.

  White monuments far below mark this as a military neighborhood, past and present. Camp HM Smith, headquarters for the U.S. Pacific Command, is just down the hill. The Brostroms are a military family. Dave is a retired colonel, an army aviator, who served nearly thirty years with helicopter units. Their two sons, Jonathan and Blake, had gone the same way. Jonathan was a first lieutenant and Blake was in college with the ROTC program. So when Mary Jo, a p
etite woman with dark brown hair and hazel eyes, saw a military van parked on Aiealani Place, their narrow residential street, she thought that somebody was misusing a government vehicle—the vans were not authorized for private use, and, on Sunday, would ordinarily have been parked on the base. They drove past it, turned down their steep driveway, and entered the house.

  Dave answered the knock on the front door minutes later. There were two soldiers in full uniform.

  “What’s up?” she heard him ask.

  Then, “Mary Jo, you need to come here.”

  She knew immediately why they had come, and she collapsed on the spot.

  Dave Brostrom is a very tall, sandy-haired man with a long, lean face, a slightly crooked smile, and small deep-set blue eyes under a shock of blond eyebrows. When he talks about Jonathan, sadness seems etched in the lines around those small eyes. He moves with an athletic slouch, and his fair skin is weathered from years of island sun. In his flip-flops, flowery silk shirt, sunglasses, and worn blue jeans he doesn’t look like a military man, but the army has defined his life. He works today for Boeing, helping to sell helicopters to the units he once served.

  Jonathan used to tease him about having been an aviator. There was a spirited competition between father and son, whether on surfboards—Dave had taught his sons on a tandem board—or the golf course. Jonathan was competitive by nature. He was a good golfer and an early stickler for the course rules. If Mary Jo moved a ball a few inches from behind a tree, he would announce, “One,” noting the penalty point. She didn’t like to play with him. He had golfed once, as a teenager, with his father and a general, and complained when the general tried to improve his lie.

  “Sir, you can’t do that,” Jonathan said. “It’s a stroke.”

  “Just go along,” counseled the veteran colonel.

  “No,” Jonathan insisted. “Either he plays right or he doesn’t play at all!”

  When Jonathan decided in his junior year of high school to join the army, the goal was not just to imitate his father, but to surpass him. He was determined to prove himself more of a soldier, to accumulate more badges, more decorations. He would qualify as a paratrooper, something his father had not done, and then complete air assault training. Then came Ranger school and dive school—two more elite achievements. Apart from its overt hierarchy of rank, the army has an elaborate hierarchy of status, the pinnacle of which is “special operator,” the super soldiers of its covert counterterror units. The surest path there was through an elite infantry unit. That was where Jonathan aimed. He viewed his father’s career in aviation dismissively, as a less manly pursuit than foot-soldiering. He volunteered to enlist for two extra years in order to guarantee that path. Ordinarily, ROTC officers in training will opt for the extended commitment in order to avoid the infantry, where the work is dirty and hard and the hazards are immediate, in order to steer themselves into a cushier specialty … like, say, aviation.

  “You volunteered to spend two extra years in the army to go into infantry?” his incredulous father had asked. “That’s stupid!”

  “No, it’s not,” said Jon. “I don’t want to be a wimp like you. Damn aviator.”

  Dave enjoyed this kind of banter with Jonathan, but in this case the stakes were higher. He cautioned his son. It was one thing to want to show up your old man and prove you were not a wimp, but frontline infantry in wartime was not a step to be taken lightly.

  “You have to understand you are going to be at the point of the spear,” said Dave. “There’s a war on.”

  But Jonathan was driven. The danger was the point. His parents worried about it, but they would support their son’s ambition. Dave did more than that. He helped land his son an immediate berth with the elite airborne unit. He called his old friend Colonel Charles “Chip” Preysler, commander of the 173rd Airborne Brigade, one of the regular army’s frontline fighting units, and collected a favor. This was in 2007, just as Jonathan was completing Ranger school … on his third try. He had been assigned to the First Cavalry Division out of Fort Hood, a heavy armored unit that was slated for another tour in Iraq. Dave saw that the 173rd had recently been assigned a second tour in Afghanistan. So the maneuver actually satisfied both of the father’s objectives: he had helped move his son closer to his goal and also swing him away from Iraq, then the more treacherous of the army’s two theaters of war. After a two-week stint at the 173rd’s home base in Vicenza, Italy, Jonathan joined the deployed brigade in Afghanistan. His first assignment was as an assistant at Camp Blessing on the staff of Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund’s Second Battalion, Task Force Rock. Within months he was a platoon leader, commanding the outpost at Bella, and exchanging fire with the enemy. He called home excitedly after he was awarded a combat infantry badge, the army’s official recognition that a soldier has been personally engaged in ground combat.

  “Is Dad home?” he asked his mother.

  “No, he’s not here right now,” she said.

  “Well, I need to talk to him. When will he be home? I got my combat infantry badge.”

  Just then Dave walked in the door. Mary Jo handed him the phone.

  “Jonathan needs to talk to you,” she said.

  “I got mine!” he told his father. “I got mine!” Rubbing it in. In all his decades of service, Dave had never been in combat. Jonathan would from then on take every opportunity to remind his father of it, and Dave was happy and proud of him for it.

  But the father felt another emotion. He worried about what his son had gotten himself into … what he had helped get his son into. There are subtleties to the ideal of courage that occur more readily to older men than young ones, more readily especially to fathers than sons. The two great errors of youth were to trust too little, and to trust too much. A man did what he had to do if necessary. To do less was cowardice. But to rush headlong toward danger? Wisdom whispered: Better then passing the test is not being put to the test. A wise man avoids the occasion of danger, as capable as he might be of meeting it. He does not risk all for too little. To the extent that he trusted in his mission and his leadership, what Jonathan was doing in seeking combat was not foolish. Danger was part of the job. The U.S. Army was in the business of managing risk and was good at it. In the modern age, it brought the men, equipment, tactics, and training to a fight with such authority that it all but guaranteed mission success, and mission success, especially in America in the modern age, meant, at least in part … no casualties. Well, zero casualties would be unrealistic. Death and injury were part of the job—that’s what made Jonathan’s combat infantry badge a coveted decoration. But minimal casualties. In modern war, compared with previous eras, earlier wars, death and severe injury had become blessedly rare. At the very least a soldier trusted that his commanders would not treat his existence lightly. Dave Brostrom, as much as he believed in the army, as much as he loved his country, was not so ready as his son to believe that whatever prize was to be had in a godforsaken combat outpost in the Hindu Kush was worth one’s very life. A combat ribbon lent critical authenticity to any infantry officer’s career, but what career would there be if a Taliban bullet found his boy?

  A bullet had found Jonathan’s platoon sergeant and friend Matt Kahler in January, not long after he took over Second Platoon. The death of a platoon sergeant is not just a personal tragedy; it’s an organizational blow. It had shaken everyone in the brigade, up and down the ranks. The Brostroms got a phone call first from the wife of Colonel Preysler in Germany. She told them that Jonathan would be calling home, and when he had called, hours later, it was clear to Mary Jo that he had been crying. He said he had to prepare a eulogy, and she wondered, How does a twenty-four-year-old prepare a eulogy?

  When Dave spoke to his friend Preysler, he asked if Preysler had been to the outpost to talk with Jonathan and the other men. Preysler said he had been unable to get there. Dave knew enough about informal army protocol to know that when someone as senior as a platoon sergeant went down, the commanders came calling to reassur
e the troops. Preysler hadn’t gone to the outpost, not because he didn’t care, but because his brigade was stretched too thin. He was being pulled in too many directions at once.

  It cast an ominous shadow. Jonathan would call them by satellite phone every two or three weeks. The conversations were short, usually coming early in the morning. He would assure them he was all right, and then tell them he had to go. It was clear he and his men were under a lot of pressure, and were taking regular casualties. Dave and Mary Jo found it hard to picture where exactly Jonathan was, and what he was doing.

  The picture came into clearer focus, along with his parents’ misgivings, after Jon surprised them by showing up at home for a Mother’s Day party. He appeared at the door that day in May with a bouquet of flowers for Mary Jo, and was bubbling with enthusiasm for his command at Bella. He steered his parents straight to his laptop and called up pictures of his guys, and some video clips from Vanity Fair’s website, which had featured a series months earlier by writer Sebastian Junger and the late photographer Tim Hetherington, “Into the Valley of Death,” about soldiers in a sister company manning outposts in the same region. Jonathan was excited. “Here’s where I work,” he said. It was all new and very cool to him. Dave looked at the videos and had a completely different reaction. He thought, This is some bad shit.

  He saw young soldiers squatting in makeshift forts in distant mountains, risking their lives for reasons he could not fathom. The military side of him came out. He knew all about COIN, the army’s counterinsurgency doctrine, which had been employed to such marked effect in the previous year by General David Petraeus in Iraq. It centered on protecting and winning over a population, turning people against the violent extremists in their midst, and it called for soldiers to leave the comfort and safety of large bases to mingle with the people where they lived. It was the only rationale Dave Brostrom could see for the risks Jonathan and his platoon were taking.