The Three Battles of Wanat
Mark Bowden
Also by Mark Bowden
Doctor Dealer
Bringing the Heat
Black Hawk Down
Killing Pablo
Finders Keepers
Road Work
Guests of the Ayatollah
The Best Game Ever
Worm
The Finish
The Three
Battles of
Wanat
and Other True Stories
Mark Bowden
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Bowden
Jacket design by Marc Cohen
Author photograph © Pascal Perich
“The Three Battles of Wanat” (originally published as “Echoes from a Distant Battlefield”), “The Inheritance,” and “The Bright Sun of Juche” (originally published as “Understanding Kim Jong Un, the World’s Most Enigmatic and Unpredictable Dictator”) originally appeared in Vanity Fair
“The Ploy,” “The Last Ace,” “The Killing Machines,” “Jihadists in Paradise,” “Just Joe” (originally published as “The Salesman”), “The Angriest Man in Television,” “The Measured Man,” “The Hardest Job in Football,” “The Man Who Broke Atlantic City,” “The Story Behind the Story,” “The Great Guinea Hen Massacre,” “Rebirth of the Guineas,” “Cry Wolfe,” “Abraham Lincoln Is an Idiot” (originally published as “‘Idiot,’ ‘Yahoo,’ ‘Original Gorilla’: How Lincoln Was Dissed in His Day”), “Dumb Kids’ Class,” and “Zero Dark Thirty Is Not Pro-Torture” originally appeared in the Atlantic
“Attila’s Headset” originally appeared in the New Yorker
“Saddam on Saddam” originally appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer
“The Silent Treatment” originally appeared in Sports Illustrated
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Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
FIRST EDITION
ISBN 978-0-8021-2411-1
eISBN 978-0-8021-9066-6
Atlantic Monthly Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
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16 17 18 19 20 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For John Hersey
Contents
Cover
Also by Mark Bowden
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
WAR
The Three Battles of Wanat
The Ploy
The Last Ace
The Killing Machines
Jihadists in Paradise
PROFILES
Just Joe
The Inheritance
The Bright Sun of Juche
Defending the Indefensible
The Angriest Man in Television
The Measured Man
SPORTS
The Silent Treatment
The Hardest Job in Football
The Man Who Broke Atlantic City
Attila’s Headset
ESSAYS
The Story Behind the Story
The Great Guinea Hen Massacre
Rebirth of the Guineas
Cry Wolfe
Abraham Lincoln Is an Idiot
Dumb Kids’ Class
Saddam on Saddam
Zero Dark Thirty Is Not Pro-Torture
Acknowledgments
Back Cover
Introduction
I am particularly grateful to Vanity Fair and the Atlantic for supporting not just me, but so many other journalists intent on treating ideas and stories in depth. In my early work as a newspaper reporter I often felt that my finished stories had just scratched the surface. Like many reporters, I was in a running battle with my editors for more time and more space. Fortunately, I have had very sympathetic editors. Deeper investment usually resulted in a richer story.
Take, for example, Wanat, the title story of this collection. When my editor at Vanity Fair, Cullen Murphy, first suggested it to me in August 2010, I envisioned it as a detailed account of a tragic 2008 battle in Afghanistan that had left nine American soldiers killed and twenty-seven wounded. I had not written a story about combat since Black Hawk Down ten years earlier. This new one concerned a mountain combat outpost under construction that had been attacked by a large Taliban force and nearly overrun. When I began I imagined a story much like the one I told in that book.
But true stories are never alike. The more you stir, the thicker the stew. I was surprised to discover, when I started reporting, that there had been not one but several detailed investigations of what had happened at Wanat. The one that had received the greatest attention was a preliminary draft of a study by the U.S. Army Combat Studies Institute. Written by Douglas Cubbison, a contract military historian, it was sharply critical of the army units involved, placing blame for inadequate defenses at Wanat on poor command decisions.
Cubbison’s draft had inspired detailed stories by the Washington Post, by NBC News, and by the noted military affairs blogger Tom Ricks. It was indeed rare for a study from that source to be controversial, and especially for it to be so sharply critical of officers still serving. One of the things that made Cubbison’s take on Wanat so attractive to reporters was the poignant human story behind it. The institute’s study had been instigated by Dave Brostrom, the father of Jonathan Brostrom, a young lieutenant who had been killed in the fight. Dave Brostrom, a retired army colonel, had examined detailed reports about the incident, and had become convinced that the death of his son and the others at Wanat had resulted from incompetent or reckless leadership. When I spoke with Cubbison it became clear that Dave Brostrom not only had requested the report but had played an important role in shaping it. The story of a career army officer determined to hold his peers accountable was irresistible.
But after meeting Dave Brostrom; Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund, the officer who bore the brunt of his criticism; and others involved up and down the command chain, I found a story far more complex than that. It involved a grieving father troubled not only by command decisions in Afghanistan but also by his own role in placing his son at that vulnerable combat outpost. It involved commanders struggling to fulfill a difficult mission with limited men and resources at a time when the primary American military focus had shifted to Iraq. The string of reports and findings ended, ironically, by faulting, of all people, Jonathan Brostrom. Vanity Fair published my account in December 2011, nearly a year and a half after Cullen first suggested it to me. Without the time and editorial support to fully explore all of these branches of the story, and to travel and meet personally with those directly involved, I would never have been able to arrive at my own fuller understanding of what happened.
However my own use of the opportunity is judged, magazines (now also websites) that encourage long-form reporting and writing are carrying on one of the great traditions in American journalism. From the work of a
bolitionists who recorded the brutal practices of slave owners; Nellie Bly’s famous trip to a madhouse for the New York World; Ida Wells’s courageous documentation of lynching; the powerful exposés of Lincoln Steffens, Ida Tarbell, Upton Sinclair, and the other great contributors to McClure’s in the early twentieth century; and the work of John Hersey, Gay Talese, and Truman Capote to the flamboyant New Journalists of Rolling Stone, Ramparts, Harper’s, and Esquire who so inspired me as a college student, journalists free to explore every branch of a complex story have produced a body of work every bit as important to the canon of American literature as that of novelists, poets, playwrights, and screenwriters.
I see more of it today than ever, even as print publications dwindle. The Internet affords, if anything, a superior platform for every kind of journalism, and I have no doubt that long-form narratives will remain essential. Prose is the most subtle and precise form of communication: the language of thought itself. No other medium is capable of so deeply exploring and explaining human experience. At the same time that headlines and images flash around the world on cell phones instantaneously, time and again we learn that our initial take on a story is incomplete and often wrong. Whether it’s social media prominently fingering an innocent man in the days after the Boston Marathon bombing, or early reports of a “trench coat Mafia” from the scene of the Columbine High School shootings, until an independent reporter is turned loose to dig deeper and write longer, we don’t understand what really happened. This is true of the stories we think we know, and also of those we would never hear if journalists were not encouraged to follow their own noses. We would never, for instance, have heard the story of Henrietta Lacks, whose fatal tumor was used to create the cell line for cancer research worldwide, or of a quirky investor like Steve Eisman, who famously foresaw the clay feet of Wall Street’s collateralized debt obligations, and cashed in when the stock market crashed in 2007. In both of these cases, it was the professional curiosity and unique talents of Rebecca Skloot and Michael Lewis that uncovered stories essential to our understanding of the modern world.
And I don’t buy for a moment the notion that people don’t read these stories. My own experience directly contradicts it. I regard as entirely bogus the popular theory that young people, in particular, have a declining attention span or are unwilling to read anything longer than a sound bite. My children, my students, and my readers are better informed at a young age than I ever was, and are every bit as receptive as I am to a story that grabs them and won’t let them go. I also think that writers have a responsibility not to bore people. If the story is long, it had damn well better be fun to read.
I have in some cases restored these stories to the form I gave them prior to editing for publication. The demands of fitting them into magazines sometimes required making cuts I would rather not have made. I have also made corrections suggested by helpful readers, some kindly, others less so, but I am always happy to get things right.
WAR
The Three Battles of Wanat
Published as “Echoes from a Distant Battlefield,” Vanity Fair, December 2011
1. The Lieutenant’s Battle
One man on the rocky slope overhead was probably just a shepherd. Two men were suspicious, but might have been two shepherds. Three men were trouble. When Second Platoon spotted four, then five, the soldiers prepared to shoot.
Dark blue had just begun to streak the sky over the black peaks that towered on all sides of their position. The day was July 13, 2008. Captain Matthew Myer stood at the driver’s-side door of a Humvee parked near the center of a flat, open expanse about the length of a football field where the platoon was building a new combat outpost, known as a COP. The vehicle was parked on a ramp carved in the rocky soil by the engineering squad’s single Bobcat, with its front wheels high so that its TOW* missiles could be more easily aimed up at the sheer slopes to the west. The new outpost was hard by the tiny Afghan village of Wanat, at the bottom of a stark natural bowl; and the forty-nine American soldiers who had arrived just days earlier felt dangerously exposed.
Myer gave the order for an immediate coordinated attack with the platoon’s two heaviest weapons—the TOW system and a 120-millimeter mortar—which sat in a small dugout a few paces west of the ramp surrounded by HESCO barriers, canvas and wire frames that are filled with dirt and stone to create temporary walls. The captain was walking back to his command post about fifty yards north when the attack started.
It was twenty minutes past four in the morning. 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. Wanat was legendarily remote, high in the Hindu Kush, at the southern edge of Konar Province in Afghanistan’s rugged northeast. It shared a long border with the equally forbidding territories of north Pakistan. Here was the landscape where Rudyard Kipling in 1888 had set his cautionary tale, The Man Who Would Be King, about British soldiers with ill-fated dreams of power and conquest. Little had changed. It is one of the most mountainous regions of the world, with steep gray-brown peaks reaching as high as twenty-five thousand feet. Its jagged mountains towered over V-shaped valleys that angled sharply down to winding rivers. Wanat was at the confluence of the Waygul River and a small tributary. It was home to about fifty families, who carved out a spare existence on a series of green irrigated terraces that rose like graceful stairsteps to the foot of the stony eastern slopes. A single partly paved road wound south toward Camp Blessing, the headquarters for Task Force Rock—Second Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade. 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 almost an hour—perilous because improvised explosives and ambushes were common. 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. You needed something like a graduate degree in geo politics and strategy to have any idea why it was worth dying for.
Yet killing and dying—mostly killing—were what Task Force Rock was doing here on the front lines of America’s forgotten war. In army parlance, Afghanistan had become an “economy of force” action, which meant, in so many words, “Make do.” The hopeful infrastructure and cultural development projects that had arrived with the first wave of Americans seven years earlier had dried to a trickle. Ever since President Bush had followed up rapid military success in Afghanistan with a massive invasion of Iraq in 2003, the nation’s attention had been riveted there. But the war against the Taliban, Al Qaeda, and like-minded local militias had never ended in these mountains. Small units of American soldiers were dug into scores of isolated tiny combat posts, perched high on promontories, crouched behind HESCO walls and barriers of concrete and sand, ostensibly projecting the largely theoretical Afghan central government into far-flung valleys and villages where politics and loyalties had been stubbornly local and tribal since long before Kipling.
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 patch of ground, punctiliously negotiating its purchase from village landlords. The platoon had occupied it in darkness, in a driving rain, just three days earlier.
Myer had arrived only the day before. 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, popular twenty-four-year-old platoon leader from Hawaii. Brostrom had a long, slender face, and dark brown hair worn, like the other soldiers’, in a buzz cut, high and tight. His body had been sculptured by daily weight lifting over the fourteen months of this deployment. After consultations with Myer and the battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Bill Ostlund, the lieutenant had drawn up detailed maps of the new outpo
st on whatever scraps of paper he could find, so that he could show his men sectors of fire for all of the vehicles, placement of the Claymore mines, fighting positions, latrine, and everything else. A small force of Afghan engineers with heavy equipment were to handle most of the construction, but they had been delayed at Camp Blessing, awaiting the completion of a road-clearing mission that would enable them to make the trip safely. In the interim, the platoon itself had begun digging out and building the outpost’s preliminary defenses, toiling through hundred-degree-plus days with limited water and resources, hacking away at the baked, stubborn soil with picks and shovels, building sandbag walls, stringing razor wire, and filling the HESCOs as well as 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.
The men of the platoon had felt particularly vulnerable in these first days, expecting to be attacked. It was particularly unsettling because they had nearly completed their hazardous tour. They were just two weeks away from heading home. Platoon Sergeant David Dzwik had rallied them as best he could to complete this dangerous assignment before leaving, pointing out that they had signed on to fight for the whole fifteen-month tour, and how they were better equipped to handle the danger than the inexperienced troops who would replace them. But down deep Dzwik shared their misgivings. He hated both the task and the location.
It wasn’t just that the outpost sat at the bottom of a giant bowl. There were dead zones all around it where you couldn’t see. The ground dipped down just outside the perimeter, down to the creek, which ran to the west, and to the road that ran bordered it to the southeast. The battalion could not provide them with steady, overhead visual surveillance because of weather and limited availability of drones. So they lacked a clear eye on the terrain. Where the land sloped uphill to the northeast there were the bazaar and the mosque and other buildings. It was as though the Afghan village—and Dzwik was a long way from trusting even the Afghans whom he knew—were staring right down at them. There were just too many places for the enemy to hide. In the preceding weeks, he had heard reports of Taliban by the hundreds gathering for an attack on Bella, the outpost they had evacuated to move here. They had managed to clear out before that attack came, but Bella was only four or five miles north. And even though the terrain was formidable, the enemy was skilled at moving rapidly and silently through it. Worse, everybody in the Waygul Valley knew exactly where the Americans had purchased property and planned to resettle.
