The Three Battles of Wanat Page 6

  4. Aftermath

  Major Matt Myer didn’t do much to defend himself. When he saw the extraordinary effort Ostlund was making, he put his faith in his commander … and in the army.

  Myer has a taciturn self-assurance that struck some of his inquisitors as smug, but he is the son of an infantry officer, and in the last decade he has seen far more combat than most of the officers judging him. He is inclined to let his conduct speak for itself. He was not ashamed of his actions at Wanat. His heroism in the fight itself had been officially recognized. If the army was going to fault him for things outside his control … well, that said more about the institution than it said about him.

  He had personally supervised Second Platoon’s hazardous move from Bella, and had been the last man to leave. Instead of immediately joining Brostrom and the men at Wanat, he had flown on to Camp Blessing, where he had been directed to answer the questions of army investigators looking into the Apache attacks of July 4 that had caused such a stir. Myer was not just a “witness” to that incident, as the original reprimand had pointedly stated—he was its central figure. He had cleared the targets for attack. The deaths had colored perceptions of the American effort throughout the Waygul, so getting the facts out was an urgent battalion priority—indeed, later critiques of the Battle of Wanat pointed to the July 4 Apache attacks as a possible cause of the local hostility that apparently aided the Taliban attackers. When he had finished testifying, he left for Wanat on the first available transport, bringing water and supplies with him. He had arrived the afternoon before the battle. He had been, in the words of Sergeant Dzwik, “Exactly where he was supposed to be when he was supposed to be there.”

  He told General Campbell in their one-on-one interview, “This is very humbling. I’m not just conversing with you to try to get out of something. I looked at this very critically, and here are the reasons why I was doing what I was doing, which I think are well within the scope of my duties.”

  He didn’t say much more.

  In June 2010, at about the same time that Ostlund, Myer, and Preysler were receiving their letters from Campbell—the letters that withdrew the reprimands—family members of the men killed in the battle gathered at Fort McPherson in Georgia to be briefed by both Natonski and Campbell about the CENTCOM investigation. The families knew nothing of Campbell’s about-face. They were expecting something grimly ceremonial—expecting to hear a detailed account of the mistakes the CENTCOM investigation had documented, and then to have, as it were, the heads of the three officers most directly responsible for the deaths of their sons and husbands handed to them on a plate. The event was heavy with grief, but electric with anger and indignation.

  Natonski went first, and did not disappoint. He walked the families through the details of the battle and the supposed failings of its commanders. He noted the good intentions of everyone involved, but pronounced his detailed, damning judgments of Preysler, Ostlund, and Myer. It was as though the U.S. Army, through this retired Marine general, was humbling itself before them, admitting that its leadership errors had contributed to their losses … in a sense, apologizing. It went on for more than two hours, and the family members found it cathartic.

  Brostrom felt as though he and the others had finally achieved some “closure,” although Natonski’s pronouncements seemed to stimulate in him and some of the others a desire for still more official mortification. There was talk immediately afterward about possibly bringing criminal charges. The effort had felled the chain of command from brigade down to company level. At one point, Brostrom remarked, “The division got off scot-free,” suggesting that blame for the episode now ought to reach even higher up.

  Then, after a short break, Campbell appeared. He told the audience that this was going to be yet another a “difficult day” for them, and then stunned them with his verdict, overturning every finding Natonski had just presented. The audience sat in silence as he explained the authority he had been given by the secretary of the army to pronounce judgment, walked them through the procedure he followed, and explained his decision.

  “The officers listed in the report exercised due care in the performance of their duties,” he said. “These officers did not kill your sons. The Taliban did.”

  The silence lasted for a few moments more. Then Brostrom erupted. He made an effort to control his anger, but his voice rose to a shout, “Nine soldiers dead and twenty-seven wounded!” He repeated the findings in the report that had just been officially presented—lack of resources, of manpower, of equipment, of supervision—and when things had started to go wrong, “No risk mitigation!” he shouted. “You tell me what the battalion commander did to mitigate those risks! … If he was too busy taking care of thirteen other outposts, then why in the hell did they go to [Wanat] in the first place?”

  He was interrupted by applause from other family members.

  “It’s because nobody had the balls to say don’t do it!” said Brostrom. “… 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,” said Campbell.

  “You can’t,” answered Brostrom. “You didn’t lose a son.”

  Campbell held his ground. General Casey had advised him when he took the assignment to make sure before deciding that he was firmly convinced, “because however you decide you are going to piss somebody off.” The session devolved further. Brostrom remarked to one of the other shocked family members, “This is a nightmare.” He went on to accuse Campbell, who had in fact bucked the findings of the entire chain of command with his opinion, of acting as a toady for the army.

  “You were told to soften this for the U.S. Army, and that’s exactly what happened here,” he said. “You went out and did your own investigation and came up with totally 180 degree out findings…. I didn’t send my son to Afghanistan to be executed!”

  His wrath toward Ostlund boiled over. Beneath his polished and very savvy campaign to expose leadership failures, beneath all of the charges of inadequate supplies and support, there was a simple desire to hurt those who had put his son and the other dead in jeopardy. His hatred was now in the open. Brostrom’s opinion of the battalion commander, once glowing, was now dark. Colonel Ostlund not only had led their sons “to slaughter,” but had set back the American effort in that part of Afghanistan “two or three years.” Ostlund was a “narcissist,” a war-lover, and a coward, who stayed safely behind the defenses of his command post while pushing his men to take unnecessary risks in order to win his unit medals and glory—indeed, Chosen Company had recently received a Presidential Unit Citation. He accused Ostlund of inappropriately using white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon that burns so fiercely that it can destroy enemy munitions, and that has been linked to war crimes.

  Campbell countered that the record showed just the opposite, that Task Force Rock had been superbly led. He cited several indicators of efficiency, noted his own thirty years of experience in command, and said he had rarely seen a battalion so well led.

  “I know this guy and he is going to do it again,” said Brostrom.

  In fact, the two men have never met. They spoke on the phone several times soon after his son’s death, after Ostlund offered to answer any questions about the episode, and during that same period they had exchanged several e-mails. But the contacts had ended when Brostrom had begun his campaign.

  The Battle of Wanat became the most exhaustively examined incident of Afghan war. Whatever lessons can be learned from it have been learned. Ostlund has been fully reinstated, and recently returned from a second tour in Afghanistan as commander of the Joint Special Operations unit responsible for covert raids on the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders. It was a central leadership post at a very high level in the Afghan campaign, serving directly with Petraeus, so the Wanat episode has not hobbled his standing in the army. In the long run it probably will. Any ambition Ostlund may have had for general officer is gone. The
re are scores of eligible colonels for every such slot, and the cloud raised by Brostrom’s charges will linger despite the official vindication. Ostlund is currently completing a fellowship at Tufts University, and has hopes of rejoining the special operations command.

  “I will continue to serve until the army tells me to go home,” he told me, “as it very nearly did two years ago!”

  He is disappointed, he said, that the fallout from Wanat will continue to distort perceptions of Task Force Rock’s service in Afghanisan.

  “No one had even come close to replicating our success,” he said wistfully, “and yet that tour’s actions are continually being called into question, and will be forever.”

  Matt Myer was inspired by this whole bruising experience to stay in the army, despite whatever shadow it casts over his reputation.

  “Look, the army could’ve flicked me away easily,” he said. “Nobody would have even said anything. They would’ve been like, ‘Yeah, who was that guy again? I don’t know.’ Because the army’s just this huge machine. I would be replaced handily. Yet hours and hours of time were put into [evaluating the charges against] Captain Myer and Colonel Ostlund, because I think leaders cared about us. Their values point to doing what is right, not just what is easy.” He aspires to that himself, he said, and if someone like him gets discouraged and leaves, disenchanted by the difficulty of the process, then “that’s one less person who is going to do things the right way.”

  For Brostrom, the story got worse. When the CSI released the final version of its history of the battle, it substantially rewrote Cubbison’s first draft. Gone were the criticisms of the command decisions to locate and resource the outpost at Wanat, and gone were suggestions that the brigade command had botched the operation. If any American officer had made fatal mistakes at Wanat, the final version now concluded, it was Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom. In the final CSI study, instigated by his father, Jon Brostrom is faulted, always indirectly—the report uses the term “platoon leadership”—for the placement of Topside, and for failing to utilize the Afghan soldiers at the outpost to conduct patrols. It noted the sour opinion Second Platoon had of its Afghan allies, based on experience—Afghan troops had fled during the Ranch House attack, and the outpost under construction was named for a beloved comrade killed by “friendly” Afghan fire. In this battle, all the studies found that the Afghan soldiers at Wanat performed well, held their ground, and contributed critical fire in the base’s defense. Using them to patrol might have alerted the platoon to massing enemy forces. Senior officers who pored over details of the battle believe the lieutenant’s most serious mistake may have been not complaining about Second Platoon’s vulnerability. He did not, as an infantry officer would say, “shoot up the red star cluster,” demanding more help from his company commander when things had started to go wrong. Lieutenant Brostrom had chosen to work with the men and equipment he had and make the best of it, an understandable and even commendable decision, but in retrospect one that proved fatally wrong.

  So the train Dave Brostrom set in motion has ended by tarnishing the memory of his son’s leadership. Brostrom is now battling the CSI to again amend its report. And he has not given up his pursuit of Bill Ostlund. This summer he filed a motion seeking the colonel’s personal correspondence from the period in question. Ostlund has refused to provide it.

  No one has been left unsullied by the protracted and painful effort to dissect what happened at Wanat. Who, apart from a determined enemy, is to blame for the nine American soldiers dead and twenty-seven wounded? Do we blame the lieutenant who, working with limited resources, opted to build defenses instead of mounting patrols? Do we blame the captain who obeyed orders to answer questions in an important investigation instead of hurrying to supervise work at the new outpost? Do we blame the lieutenant colonel who was forced to constantly shuffle men and mortars and missile systems and observation drones among fifteen widely scattered outposts in an ever-changing landscape of threat? Do we blame the generals who accepted this seemingly impossible mission and tried to achieve it with forces and resources stretched thin? Or do we blame the Bush administration for trying to do too many things at the same time? Do we blame an ever-hopeful America for its historic tendency to overreach?

  Brostrom, for one, feels strongly where the blame should go. He is convinced that Campbell’s about-face was a cover-up, pure and simple, an instance of the army closing ranks around its own. “The fix was in,” he says, referring back to the comments General Casey made to him at the ceremony in Hawaii, the conversation Casey remembers differently. The Brostroms’ anger and suspicion continue, even as their second son, Blake, serves as an army helicopter pilot. Casey, who retired in April, remains troubled by Wanat. He said that he has been asked several times at speaking engagements to name something that he regrets from his service as chief of staff. Each time he has mentioned Wanat. He feels the army bungled its responsibility to the families of those killed after the battle, and “lost” some of them. He says “some,” but he is thinking particularly of Dave Brostrom.

  There is one thing that about the Battle of Wanat that will remain forever beyond reproach. At the worst of the fight, Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom ran to the point of greatest danger and died to help his men.

  * Tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided.

  The Ploy

  Atlantic, May 2007

  1. The Body

  It was a macabre moment of triumph. At a closed compound within Balad Air Base in Iraq, behind Jersey barriers thirty feet high, the men and women of the interrogation mill crowded around a stark display: two freshly dead men, bare and supine on the floor.

  The audience members were expert interrogators, most of them young, some of them military, others civilian contract workers. They called themselves “gators,” and they were the intelligence arm of Task Force 145, the clandestine unit of Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs who hunt down terrorists on America’s most-wanted list. For years, their primary target had been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of the grandly named Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the gloating, murderous author of assassinations, roadside bombings, and suicide attacks. Together, living and working inside this “battlefield interrogation facility,” the gators had produced leads for the Task Force to chase. They had put in thousands of hours probing, threatening, flattering, browbeating, wheedling, conning, and questioning, doing what Major General William B. Caldwell IV, in his press conference the next day, would call “painstaking intelligence gathering from local sources and from within Zarqawi’s network.” It was, as Caldwell would put it, “the slow, deliberate exploitation of leads and opportunities, person to person,” all striving to answer just one critical question: Where is Zarqawi right now?

  This day, June 7, 2006, had finally produced the answer.

  And so here he was, stretched out on the floor, stiff, pale, gray, and swollen in death, his “spiritual adviser,” Sheikh al-Rahman, lying alongside him. The men had been killed, along with two women and two small children, when an American F-16 had steered first one and then another five-hundred-pound bomb into the house they occupied in a palm grove in the village of Hibhib. Task Force operators had recovered the men’s bodies and carried them as trophies to Balad. Both now had swaths of white cloth draped across their midsections, but were otherwise naked. Zarqawi’s face—wide, round, and bearded; his big eyes closed; a lurid smear of blood across his left cheek—was unmistakable from his frequent videotaped boasts and pronouncements. He had been more sought-after than Osama bin Laden, and in recent years was considered the greater threat.

  No more. The mood was one of subdued celebration. President Bush would call that day to congratulate the Task Force’s boss, the Joint Special Operations Commander Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. For many, the satisfaction was tempered by photos of the dead children. They were hard to look at.

  The unit’s female J2, or chief intelligence officer, embraced a young woman in a T-shirt and khaki cargo pa
nts who was part of the two-person gator team that had produced what is known in the trade as “lethal information.”

  “I am so glad I chose you for this,” she said.

  McChrystal himself came by. A tall, slender, very soldierly looking man, he was an army briefer during the Persian Gulf war, but has been infrequently seen or photographed in recent years because of his clandestine post. He and his top commanders stared down at Zarqawi with evident satisfaction. Everyone leaned in to listen.

  “Yep,” said one of the colonels, “that’s one dead son of a bitch.”

  Early the next morning, the terrorist’s demise was revealed to the rest of the world at the Combined Press Information Center, in Baghdad.

  “Today is a great day in Iraq,” said General Caldwell, the spokesman for the Multi-National Force in Iraq. “Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is dead, no longer able to terrorize innocent Iraqi civilians…. Today, Iraq takes a giant step forward—closer to peace within, closer to unity throughout, and closer to a world without terror.”

  Perhaps. Like so much else about the Iraq war, it was a feel-good moment that amounted to little more than a bump on the road to further mayhem. Today, Iraq seems no closer to peace, unity, and a terror-free existence than it did last June. If anything, the brutal attacks on civilian targets that Zarqawi pioneered have worsened.

  Still, the hit was without question a clear success in an effort that has produced few. Since so much of the “war on terror” consists of hunting down men like Zarqawi, the process is instructive. In the official version of how it happened, which is classified, the woman embraced by McChrystal’s J2, and her two male interrogation partners, received primary credit for the breakthrough. All three were duly decorated. But like the whole war in Iraq, the real story is more complicated, and more interesting.