![]() Looking south down the gently sloping ground was the TOW Humvee, parked on the ramp. The command post was a sunken space about two feet deep, no larger than a big conference table, framed by Dzwik’s Humvee, a line of HESCOs, and the outer mud wall of a structure built to house the village bazaar. ![]() When Captain Myer arrived, on the fourth day, he was impressed by what had been accomplished but could see that the position was far from secure.Īll of the fighting positions were makeshift. Gradually, as the stunted HESCOs were filled and as shallow excavations were chipped out, the position improved and Dzwik found himself hating it a little less. ![]() There were just too many places for the enemy to hide.ĭespite the precarious position the platoon now occupied, Dzwik had been forced to slow construction of defenses because of the extreme heat and limited water supplies. It was as if Wanat were staring right down at them. Where the land sloped uphill to the northeast there was a bazaar and a mosque, together with other village buildings. The battalion headquarters could not provide the Wanat outpost with steady, overhead visual surveillance because of weather and limited availability of drones. The ground dipped down just outside the perimeter, to a creek and to the road. There were also dead zones all around it where you couldn’t see. It wasn’t just that the outpost sat at the bottom of a giant bowl. The men had felt vulnerable in these first days. In the interim, the platoon itself had begun building the outpost’s preliminary defenses, toiling in 100-degree-plus heat with limited water and resources, hacking away at the baked, stubborn soil with picks and shovels, stringing razor wire, and filling the HESCOs as best they could-the Bobcat could not reach high enough to dump earth into the frames, so they had been cut down to just four feet. A small force of Afghan contractors with heavy equipment were to handle most of the construction, but they had been delayed, awaiting the completion of a road-clearing mission. After consultations with Myer and the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund, Brostrom had drawn up detailed maps of the new outpost on whatever scraps of paper he could find so that he could show his men sectors of fire for all of the vehicles, the placement of the claymore mines, and the location of fighting positions, the latrine, and everything else. He wore his dark-brown hair, as other soldiers did, in a buzz cut high and tight. He had sketched out a basic plan for the outpost, and then left supervision of the construction to First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom, a cocky, muscular, and popular 24-year-old platoon leader from Hawaii. They had first occupied it in darkness, in a driving rain, just three days earlier. Second Platoon was part of Myer’s Chosen Company, the “Chosen Few,” who wore patches on their uniforms displaying a stylized skull fashioned after the insignia of the Marvel-comic-book character “Punisher.” Twenty-first-century America had staked its claim to this combat outpost in Wanat, punctiliously negotiating the lease of a piece of ground from village landlords. You needed something like a graduate degree in geopolitics and strategy to have any idea why it was worth dying for. In Wanat it was easy to feel that you were hunkered down on the far edge of nowhere, fighting the only people in the world who seemed to badly want the place. This battalion HQ was just five miles away in the fish-eye lens of a high-flying drone, but on the ground it was a perilous journey of about an hour-perilous because ambushes and improvised explosives were common. ![]() A single partially paved road wound south toward Camp Blessing, the headquarters for Task Force Rock, Second Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade. It was home to about 50 families, who carved out a spare existence on a series of green, irrigated terraces. Wanat was at the confluence of the Waygal River and a small tributary. Jagged mountains, reaching as high as 25,000 feet, tower over V-shaped valleys that angle sharply down to winding rivers. Wanat lies high in the Hindu Kush at the southern edge of Nuristan Province, in Afghanistan’s rugged Northeast. Myer and Second Platoon, one of three platoons under his command scattered in these mountains, were at war in a place as distant from America’s consciousness as it was simply far away. It was 20 minutes after four in the morning.
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