The Three Battles of Wanat Read online

  Ostlund considered the findings false, from first to last. For an ambitious career army officer, the memo’s conclusion was brutal: “You are reprimanded. Your actions fell below the high standard expected of an experienced, senior officer commanding an infantry battalion in the unforgiving combat environment of Afghanistan. They raise legitimate questions about your judgment, professionalism, leadership, and tactical competence. In a word, they were unacceptable.”

  His promotion to full colonel would be withdrawn. He would most likely never lead men into combat again. Campbell noted that he would consider any matters that Ostlund chose to submit “before filing a final decision.” The colonel had fourteen days to respond.

  It seemed futile to resist. The resignations of Schloesser and Preysler suggested that after three separate reviews the final word on the battle had been pronounced. The chain of command had been found wanting and was bowing to that harsh verdict—Schloesser without having been reprimanded. It seemed time for good soldiers to go away quietly.

  But Ostlund was not about to go quietly. He regarded the finding as not just a slur on his reputation, but a slur on Chosen Company, which had served so valiantly and at such cost. His company commander, Matt Myer, who had also been reprimanded and reduced in rank, faced the end of his career and a lifelong stain on his judgment and character. The verdict would be felt not just by Ostlund, but by his wife and three sons. It was one thing to retire as a general or a full colonel; most careers were finished then anyway. Ostlund was still in his early forties. His career was in full and rapid stride. He was not about to fall on his sword.

  Dave Brostrom had picked a fight with a fighter—a professional fighter. Ostlund is from Nebraska, is partly of Cherokee descent, and joined the army in a delayed-entry enlistment program when he was still a junior in high school. It is all he ever wanted to do. He served four years as an enlisted soldier and two more as a National Guard soldier as he set his sights on becoming an officer. He took advantage of an ROTC program to attend the University of Omaha, determined to earn a degree faster and with a higher GPA than anyone else ever did. He loved the army. As an enlisted man he had observed leaders in uniform who inspired him like no other, and he wanted to be one of them. The speed and excellence with which he “rangered” through college caught the eye of Petraeus, who worked to spot and nurture ambitious officers who shared his scholarly bent. He was selected, on Petraeus’s recommendation, to join the faculty at West Point, which included attendance at the Fletcher School at Tufts University, where he earned a master’s degree in international security studies. The young officer from Omaha seemed destined for the army’s highest ranks.

  Part of his path included combat command. He helped lead the 101st Airborne Brigade into Iraq in 1991, served there again with the 173rd after the 2003 invasion, and eventually took command of Task Force Rock in Afghanistan. Ostlund was highly regarded, indefatigable, with a reputation for pushing himself as hard as his men, for being a “fighting” commander, and for tackling the toughest missions. He appeared to be on a smooth trajectory toward general officer when he was blindsided by Wanat. Now, reprimanded and defrocked, he did not seem bitter, angry, or even frustrated. He seemed focused. The energy, intelligence, and experience he had brought to his career and to the fight against the Taliban were turned toward defending himself and his men. He filled an enormous footlocker with thick binders stuffed with thousands of pages of documentation—maps, interviews, memos, articles, passages from pertinent army manuals concerning doctrine and practice—as though marshaling data for a doctoral thesis. He regarded the effort as “an obligation.”

  Early on, when word of Brostrom’s campaign had first reached him, Ostlund had sought advice from a longtime mentor.

  “Bill, all your life, you’ve clung to facts and truth, and that’s kind of been your mantra, your drumbeat,” his friend said. “But this battle’s not about truth and facts. It’s about politics and perception. And when you realize that, you’ll be more effective in the fight. So, beating your head against the wall about truth and facts at the wrong time is going to send the wrong perception and wrong message to those involved.”

  So he had held his fire. How do you fight back against the grieving father of a soldier killed under your command? Ostlund put his faith in the institution, in the army, believing that in the end his fellow officers would not accept Brostrom’s take on what happened. He calmly collected copies of the insulting comments about him that showed up in the various critical news stories and programs. He did not answer them. He did not consent to be interviewed. He reassured Captain Myer that the truth would win out in the end. But once Campbell’s memo arrived, with its invitation to respond, the footlocker came out. He showed up with it for all the interviews demanded by the various investigating teams, and repeated his version of events again and again. He could not compete with Brostrom’s grief in the court of public opinion, but inside the army he believed he would prevail “with the facts and the truth.”

  Ostlund is a portrait in contained, channeled energy. He is an extremely fit man with short, curly black hair; pale blue eyes; and a square, tightly muscled jaw. His manner is ferociously serious … contents under pressure. You want to open a window in case there is an explosion. Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom was one of twenty-six men he lost commanding Task Force Rock in Afghanistan. He says he feels every day the loss of each soldier. It’s an emotional issue with him, he says, a reminder of the unbearably high price war exacts, but the colonel shows little emotion about it. It is, he will tell you bluntly—and one senses a conviction here that runs deeper than sorrow—“a fact of combat.” Those who have been there understand, he says. Those who have not … cannot.

  Downrange he shaves his head. He has commanded troops in three wars, and he prides himself on doing it well. Task Force Rock under his command was the most decorated unit to serve in the Afghan war. He had over a thousand men scattered in fifteen combat outposts in the Hindu Kush, spread over an area the size of Connecticut. Its high mountains and deep valleys made transportation a nightmare, by ground or air. It was the most difficult terrain and the most violent sector of the war. There were four or five attacks every day in his area of command, often attacks that required battalion assistance—artillery, airpower, reinforcements—which in turn required Ostlund’s active participation. Among his outposts was Restrepo, famous because of a documentary film of the same name made by Junger and Hetherington, in which Ostlund appears briefly (as a tough, eloquent, passionate, smart commander). Junger, in a book he subsequently wrote about the fifteen-month deployment, called War, had this to say of Ostlund: “He had such full-on enthusiasm about what he was doing that sometimes when I was around him I caught myself feeling bad that there wasn’t an endeavor of equivalent magnitude in my own life.” Junger wrote that Ostlund seemed to work eighteen-hour days for the entire time. The film and the book helped define that period of the Afghan war experience for most Americans as a bloody, grueling, and lonely campaign. These accounts showed that the men of Task Force Rock were not just fighting occasionally; they were living combat, day after day, week after week, month after month, in a way few American soldiers have done in generations. The lieutenant colonel moved constantly in helicopters and Humvees through the mountains from outpost to outpost. His master sergeant told me that he would hand preset firing grids to the choppers’ gunners on those trips, because they grew so used to taking fire from the same places—“The enemy is a creature of habit,” he growled, with professional scorn.

  Even as Ostlund was leading his men, he was constantly meeting with village elders throughout his territory, negotiating, listening, settling disputes, organizing humanitarian aid programs, building goodwill, arguing America’s case, and pleading for their support. Attending each local shura was not just a polite gesture, but a major priority. The army, for instance, had adopted regulations that barred its troops from simply seizing land for outposts. Land must be purchased. In the case of Wanat, it
had taken months of negotiations. If Afghans were regarded as partners in the war, as allies, and if under the COIN doctrine maintaining that relationship was considered the key to winning the war, then attending the shura was an obligation critical to mission success. Sometimes this was a pressing priority, as when an Apache helicopter attack on two fleeing pickup trucks just weeks before the Battle of Wanat killed a local doctor and workers from a medical clinic. The task force had taken mortar fire from the fleeing group, who may have been taken hostage by Taliban fighters, but the fallout from that event had turned many in the Waygul Valley against the entire American effort. Such disputes cut to the core of Ostlund’s mission.

  Since Afghanistan in 2008 was an “economy of force” effort, Task Force Rock faced constant shortages of engineers, aircraft, humanitarian dollars—everything. Iraq was still draining the nation’s military resources. For Ostlund, this affected his entire command. He was shorthanded. Some of his outposts were manned by half platoons, commanded by a sergeant, because the platoon leader, a lieutenant, could be in only one place at a time. Ostlund was constantly shuffling things between outposts—TOW firing platforms, mortars, artillery, surveillance drones—moving them to be where they were most needed, trying to anticipate where the enemy, a cunning and mostly invisible force, would next strike. His intelligence staff carefully plotted the daily attacks, noting the size of the enemy force, the kinds of weapons and tactics used. The staff had developed templates—like the command sergeant’s preset firing grids—of enemy movements and tactics. But the enemy was smart, too. When Ostlund arrived in country in the spring of 2007, one of his first decisions was to pull back and consolidate. He collapsed Ranch House and Bella to Wanat, a move designed to close two of the farthest-flung outposts, which could be reached only by helicopter and were, as Jonathan Brostrom had told his father, too vulnerable and understaffed to conduct community outreach. Wanat was chosen because it was a district center and because it was close enough to Camp Blessing to be reinforced by road. These advantages were judged to outweigh the danger of residing in the bottom of the bowl.

  This calculation took into account the fact that Wanat, and the entire Waygul Valley, was one of the least violent sectors in Ostlund’s battle theater. Over the entire deployment, the task force experienced only forty-four clashes with the enemy there. It had over five hundred in the Korengal. The same parcel of ground where COP Kahler was to be built had been occupied earlier in the war by an American engineering unit that encountered little or no hostility. The engineering unit had completed a bridge that was considered a boon to the village, and while there had provided a small boom in employment and commerce. There was reason to believe that this new outpost would enjoy a similar experience. Planning for the outpost had included detailed maps and construction schedules, including predetermined fields of fire and potential locations for observation posts on the high ground. After purchasing the land, Ostlund, Myer, and Brostrom had visited Wanat in April for a shura with the village elders. None expressed objections to the outpost. The American officers had together walked the grounds. Two days before the move from Bella, Ostlund had met with Brostrom to further discuss the move. He said he found the lieutenant eager to proceed.

  Intelligence reports predicted that COP Kahler would be particularly vulnerable in the first few days, before effective defensive measures were established. So Ostlund took steps to beef up Brostrom’s platoon, reallocating the TOW missile vehicle, the 120-millimeter mortars, and multiple surveillance systems from other outposts. These weapons added five vehicles to the fighting position, which included two fifty-cal machine guns, forty-nine U.S. soldiers, and two dozen Afghan soldiers. According to intelligence estimates and aerial surveillance reports, a series of light probing Taliban attacks would be likely, and the force deployed was more than capable of defending itself. This may have figured into Lieutenant Brostrom’s calculations when he was willing to sacrifice some situational awareness in the first days by using his men to build instead of patrol.

  On the day of the move from Bella—a complicated effort, which had to be orchestrated on land and in the air—two of Ostlund’s other outposts were attacked. Aerial surveillance was withdrawn from Wanat, over the task force’s objections, because there was judged to be more pressing need elsewhere.

  The day before the platoon rolled into Wanat, a Task Force Rock soldier was killed in the Chowkay Valley. That day, Ostlund attended a shura with district leaders where the incident occurred, and visited the men at the outpost that suffered the loss. When the arrival of combat engineers and supplies was delayed because of threats along the road from Camp Blessing, arrangements were made to deliver additional supplies to Brostrom by air. Two or more attacks on Task Force Rock outposts came in each of the following days. At the same time Ostlund was supervising from afar the move to Wanat, he was coordinating a visit to his area of operations by Admiral Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The lieutenant colonel was present with Mullen when an outpost they were visiting was attacked. Scheduled to visit Wanat in the days before the battle, he was prevented from doing so because the road from Camp Blessing had not been cleared—the same problem stranding the engineers—and the chopper he ordinarily had at his disposal was grounded. Nevertheless, reports from Brostrom indicated that the work was proceeding as planned, despite the setbacks. Myer arrived on the afternoon of the twelfth day to assume direct command, and his reports confirmed that all was quiet. In the larger context of his command, Ostlund was working overtime to manage his battle space with limited resources. There was no reason to judge that the troops at Wanat were in imminent danger of a large-scale attack. In the larger picture, the move to Wanat might have been the battalion’s “main priority,” but clearly there were urgent demands elsewhere.

  The attack that began on the morning of July 13, and that ended so tragically, came as a surprise and constituted a betrayal. Later investigations showed that the same villagers who had received Ostlund, Myer, and Brostrom in a friendly way just weeks earlier had helped Taliban fighters gather the weapons, ammunition, and men to sustain the assault. Ostlund argued consistently that it is a commander’s duty to prepare for likely threats. An all-out coordinated attack like the one at Wanat had happened only once before during his command, at Ranch House, and had been repelled by the half platoon based there. The ability of the enemy to enlist village support, amass stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, and gather hundreds of fighters for such a concentrated and sustained assault was highly unlikely, which is why the forces attacking Wanat had achieved surprise and were able to inflict such damage. In other words, the enemy was a capable force. It had the sense to occasionally act unpredictably … a fact American forces had encountered often in the seven-year conflict. In war, defeat and death also come to those who do everything right.

  To respond to Campbell’s letter of reprimand, Ostlund dug back into the same trunk of facts he had presented to Natonski’s investigators, only this time he carefully marshaled that evidence to address, point by point, the report’s findings. In retrospect, Ostlund said, he believes that the sheer volume of information may have detracted from the CENTCOM investigators’ understanding of Wanat. He presented little to Campbell that he had not presented earlier, but he delivered it more effectively. He believed that anyone who weighed the evidence fairly could reach only one conclusion: that he and his fellow officers had been wrongly chastised. “Either the decision would be made on the basis of the facts, or it would be politically driven,” he said. He met with Campbell for an hour and a half on April 14, 2010. The general also heard from Preysler and Myer. And two months later, Campbell completely reversed himself.

  Ostlund’s reprimand was revoked, utterly, as were Preysler’s and Myer’s. The second memo to Ostlund from the general is a study in throwing a speeding train violently into reverse.

  “I withdraw, cancel, and annul the reprimand because it does not reflect the totality of the facts as now known,” he wrote. Cam
pbell found that the earlier probe had focused too narrowly on the events of the battle itself, and had failed to adequately consider the context of Ostlund’s command. He found, “My review led me to believe that you, Captain Myer, and Colonel Preysler … [exercised] a degree of care that a reasonably prudent person would have exercised under the same or similar set of circumstances. To criminalize command decisions in a theater of complex combat operations is a grave step indeed. It is also unnecessary, particularly in this case.”

  Campbell’s was the last word on the investigation. Probably the best that the reprimanded officers could hope from him was leniency, that he would weigh the errors of Wanat against the entirety of their careers and decide that the charge of dereliction was too harsh. But Campbell went way past that. He erased and debunked every single criticism of Preysler, Ostlund, and Myer.

  Citing the complete evidence and testimony offered by the officers, and particularly by Ostlund—all of which had been made available to earlier investigators—Campbell wrote, “You can say that my interpretation of your decisions and actions evolved…. There is no such thing as a perfect decision in war, where complexity, friction, uncertainty, the interlocking effects of the actions of independent individuals, and the enemy all affect the outcome of events.” He went on, “That U.S. casualties occurred at Wanat is true. However, they did not occur as a result of deficient decisions, planning, and actions of the entire chain of command…. In battle, casualties are inevitable. Regrettably, they are often the price of victory.”