by Mark Bowden
Dzwik was a puckish, solid, career soldier from Michigan who enlisted after starring on the gridiron in high school and realizing that he would never be able to sit still long enough to finish college. He was fit and full of youthful energy, and after a boyhood spent hunting, fishing, and camping he took readily to the rigors of military life. He had been in the army now for thirteen years and planned to stay until retirement, even though the job meant spending precious little time at home with the wife and three kids. This was his second tour in Afghanistan. He had inherited the position of platoon sergeant when his predecessor, the man for whom this COP was named, Sergeant First Class Matthew Kahler, had been killed by a shot fired by a “friendly” Afghan soldier. The army had ruled it an accident, but Dzwik, like many in the platoon, wasn’t convinced. They considered the tragedy of Matt Kahler’s death somehow emblematic of the whole Afghan conflict.
Despite the precarious position they now occupied, Dzwik had been forced to slow construction of defenses because of the extreme heat and limited water supplies. Gradually, as the stunted HESCOs were filled and as shallow excavations were chipped out, their position improved, and Dzwik found himself hating it a little less. When Myer arrived on the fourth day, the captain was impressed by all that had been accomplished, but he could see that the COP was still far from secure.
All of the fighting positions were makeshift. 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’s bazaar. Southward down the gentle sloping ground were the TOW Humvee, parked on the ramp; two mortar positions similarly excavated and surrounded by HESCO walls; and, farther south toward the road, two more positions, the closer one marked by a Humvee, and beyond it an Afghan army position, placed there to man the outer checkpoint on the road. There were several more dugout fighting positions to the north, and two larger positions toward the northern edge manned by the Afghan troops, with two Humvees armed with M-19 grenade launchers. The Bobcat was already at work that morning digging a trench around one of the mortar positions to drain off water that had pooled in it the day before.
The biggest problem was obvious: the platoon did not control the high ground. Every outpost on this frontier had observation posts high in the hills to spot approaching enemy troops, and sent out regular foot patrols to make contact with the locals and to discourage hostile approaches. Lacking enough men for both construction and patrolling, Brostrom had chosen to concentrate on construction. He had sent several perfunctory patrols just to scout the immediate vicinity, but that was it. And the platoon had yet to establish a useful observation post.
It was a pressing priority. As Myer was giving the order to fire that morning, Brostrom was busy assembling a thirteen-man patrol to look for a suitable location in the hills to the south. As was the daily practice, the entire platoon had all been up for almost an hour, all the men dressed in full battle gear and “standing-to” their small fighting positions.
They did have one elevated position, which they called Top side, and it was visible to the northeast over the rooftops of the bazaar. The nine men there had two machine guns and a grenade launcher in three fighting positions behind a maze of low sandbag walls and a loose perimeter of unstaked razor wire. Topside was midway up the lazy terrace steps, and was set against three large boulders. Myer was not happy with it. It was not high enough to be very useful, and the men there were dangerously isolated from the main force. But he could understand Brostrom’s thinking. Any farther away, Topside would have been impossible to quickly reinforce. Until the promised engineering group arrived and freed up more men to patrol, it was about as far away as the platoon dared to put it. As it was, it would be hard to defend if it came under attack.
Which it did, suddenly, on this morning. Two long bursts of machine-gun fire were followed immediately by a crashing wave of rocket-propelled grenades, or RPGs. It felt and sounded as if a thousand came at them at once, deafening blasts and fiery explosions on all sides, from close range and continuing without letup. Myer judged that the first had come from behind the homes looking down on them from Wanat, but soon enough they were zeroing in from everywhere. The TOW and mortar teams had not yet fired; they had still been checking grid numbers when the onslaught began.
Myer ran the rest of the way to the command post, ducking behind cover and standing in the open door of his Humvee beside his radio operator Sergeant John Hayes, who had two FM radios, one tuned to the platoon’s internal net and the other to the battalion headquarters at Camp Blessing.
“Whatever you can give me, I’m going to need,” Myer told headquarters calmly, the sound of intense gunfire and explosions in the background lending all the emphasis his words needed. “This is a Ranch House-style attack,” he said, referring to the worst single assault his men had experienced months earlier at an outpost by that name farther north.
No one at Wanat expected this level of intensity to continue for long. Often a single big show of force—an artillery volley or a bomb dropped from an aircraft—would be enough to end things. The enemy would typically scatter. But Wanat was too remote to get help fast. The closest air assets were at the Forward Operating Base Fenty in Jalalabad, and it would be nearly an hour before planes or choppers would arrive. Reinforcements by road would take at least forty-five minutes. The big guns at Blessing had to be pointed nearly straight up to lob shells over the mountains; this diminished their effectiveness, especially when the enemy was so close to the outpost. Some Taliban were shooting from the newly dug latrine, right on the western perimeter.
Myer directed artillery to fire on the riverbed that ran near the latrine ditch along the western edge of the village. It might not hit anyone, but the blast alone might make the enemy think twice.
“Hey, shoot these three targets,” he said; “then we can adjust them as needed.”
Before he had time to finish that order, the main source of enemy fire had shifted to the northeast, toward Topside, which was getting hammered. Grenade explosions could be heard.
“We have to do something,” said Brostrom. The men were too pinned down to assemble a large group, but the lieutenant knew Topside was outgunned. “We have to get up there,” he said.
“OK, go,” said Myer.
It was like the lieutenant to insist on joining the firing line. It had been an issue between him and the captain. Myer was six years older than Brostrom, with five long years of experience in warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan. He saw in Brostrom a tendency shared by many talented young officers; they became too chummy with their men. Brostrom was always hanging around with them, lifting weights, joking; he had joined the army out of ROTC at the University of Hawaii, and, with his every-present Oakley shades and his surfer nonchalance, he wore the burdens of command lightly. He had once signed an e-mail to Myer, “Jon-Boy,” and that struck Myer—a West Point grad—as characteristically off-key. Of a piece, as Myer saw it, was Brostrom’s inclination to wade forward into a fight alongside his men. Much as that endeared him to the platoon, it was sometimes unwise. There were times Myer had needed him at the command post in a fight and couldn’t find him. The captain would be juggling urgent requests for artillery and air support, and calculating grids, while Brostrom, who might have helped him, was instead off shooting a rifle.
“That’s not what your role is,” the captain had explained later. “You need to be able to bring more than an M-4 to the fight. You have all these other assets that you bring, which is more firepower than the rest of the platoon combined.”
Brostrom had acknowledged it, and was working on it, but this situation was different. The need was dire, and both officers knew it.
The lieutenant ran to the fighting position of the platoon’s second squad. After a short consultation there, he took off with Specialist Jason Hovater and the platoon’s medic, Private William Hewitt. No sooner did they emerge from cover than Hewitt was hit by a roun
d that blew a hole as big as a beer can out of the back of his arm. He crawled back toward cover and began bandaging himself. Brostrom and Hovater, the fastest runner in the platoon, continued up toward Topside.
It was not immediately obvious—too much was happening at once—but the enemy’s attack was cunning and well orchestrated. The Taliban were primarily targeting the platoon’s crew-served weapons. The Humvee with the TOW missile system had been hit hard right at the outset—it hadn’t gotten off a shot. Two RPGs hit the driver’s side, one setting the engine ablaze and the other exploding against the driver’s-side rear. A third RPG exploded against the rear of the passenger side. The engine was destroyed, and the vehicle caught fire. The three-man TOW team fled to take cover in the command post, leaving nine unfired missiles trapped in the inferno.
Dzwik had been walking over to the horseshoe-shaped 120-millimeter mortar pit when the shooting started. He was at the entrance when he heard the first shots, and in front of him Specialist Sergio Abad was hit by a round that clipped the back side of his body armor and entered his chest. He was still talking and breathing, but the wound was severe, and would prove mortal. As Dzwik dived for cover, he dropped his radio mike into the pool of water inside the pit. That effectively removed him from the command loop. He was just another rifleman now. Attackers were firing into the pit from the roofs of village dwellings and from a clump of trees just beyond the perimeter wire.
The platoon was used to exchanging fire with the enemy, but for many this was the first time they could actually see who they were shooting at—and who was shooting at them. Some of the enemy fighters wore masks. They were dressed in various combinations of combat fatigues and traditional Afghan flowing garments. Dzwik watched one enemy fighter, high in the trees with a grenade launcher, who had a perfect bead down on their flooded pit. But every time the shooter launched a grenade, its fins would clip leaves and branches and spin off wildly. Others were firing from the rooftops of the village dwellings, from behind the bazaar, and from the cover afforded by the terrain on all sides. This was clearly a well-planned, well-supplied, coordinated assault.
The mortar crew fought back with grenades and small arms, with the engineering squad feeding them ammo. They managed to fire off four mortars before machine-gun rounds began pinging off the tube. One RPG flew right through an opening in the HESCO wall, passing between Staff Sergeant Ryan Phillips, the crew leader, and Private Scott Stenowski, then on across the outpost to explode against the bazaar wall, setting it on fire. When an RPG exploded inside the pit, injuring two more soldiers and sending sparks from the store of mortar rounds, Phillips ordered everyone out. Carrying Abad, they ran to the now jammed command post.
Dzwik felt as if he were moving in slow motion, rounds crackling across the empty space and kicking up dust at his feet.
It was hard to believe the enemy had so many grenades to shoot. Everyone kept waiting for a lull, but it didn’t come. The village had clearly been in on the attack, stealthily stockpiling RPGs for days, if not weeks. There had been clues: unoccupied young men just sitting and watching the post under construction over the last few days, as if measuring distances, observing routines, counting men and weapons. The men of the platoon had sensed that they were being sized up, but what could they do? They couldn’t shoot people for just standing and watching. There had been a few warnings that an attack was coming, one just the night before, but they believed on the basis of long experience that they had time. Ordinarily the enemy would work up to a big attack, preceding it with a small unit assault on one position, a lobbed grenade, or a few mortars from the distance. This is what experience had taught them to expect. Not a massive attack completely out of the blue.
Inside the crowded command post, Myer worked the radio furiously, trying to guide Camp Blessing’s artillery crews. Communications were spotty, because the destruction of the TOW Humvee had taken out the platoon’s satellite antenna. He was working up grids for aircraft and artillery, trying to figure out exactly what was going on, and hoping to land a few big rounds to end this thing. He was struggling to stay calm and think methodically. He knew Lieutenant Colonel Ostlund would have already dispatched a reaction force, and would be steering in air support—bombers and Apache gunships. Myer took stock of his remaining assets, and where the enemy was concentrated. He guessed that the Taliban leaders believed they were too close to the perimeter for artillery rounds to be used effectively. If he could just drop a few shells close enough to disabuse them of this notion, maybe they would break off.
At that point the captain was relying on his men to do what they had been trained to do. He left cover briefly to check in at the two closest firing positions, moving with rounds snapping nearby and the chilling sight of RPGs homing in—he could actually see them approaching, arcing in eerily from the distance. He was back inside the command post when the burning TOW Humvee exploded, throwing missiles in all directions. Two landed inside the command post, one with its motor still running. Phillips grabbed one, using empty sandbags to protect his hands from the hot shell, and carried it out of the crowded command post under heavy fire, depositing it a safe distance away and then returning miraculously unharmed. Myer grabbed the other one and hurled it up and over the sandbag wall. A flap of fabric from the HESCO wall began to smolder, filling the crowded space with black smoke.
At the same time, six minutes into the fight, the howitzer shells began to fall, beginning with four big blasts on the southern and western sides of the outpost. Ostlund had delayed firing until he was able to confirm, with Myer, the location of every member of the platoon. He had the crews perform a mandatory recheck before each 155-millimeter shell was fired. Out of concern, again, for their own comrades, the howitzer battery had armed the shells with delay fuses, which gave those on the ground a chance to dive for cover, an advantage that also helped the enemy. Nevertheless, the barrage became a steady, slow, loud drumbeat. It did little to check the assault.
All of the fighting positions at the post were heavily and continually engaged at this point. The Afghan contingent, with their three U.S. Marine trainers, were firing from their bunkers to the eleven o’clock and five o’clock positions with small arms and M-240 machine guns. The two Humvees with M-19 grenade launchers were unable to use them because the enemy was within the weapon’s minimum arming distance. The last of the platoon’s Humvees, at the lower position, had its fifty-cal taken out early on. Specialist Adam Hamby had been pouring rounds at a spot where he had seen an RPG launched. Amazingly, fire increased from that spot. As he ducked down to reload, the inside of his turret exploded from the impact of bullets, one of which hit the weapon’s feed tray cover, which he had raised to reload. The hit had disabled the weapon.
So, minutes into the fight, the platoon was left to defend the main outpost with small arms, shoulder-fired rockets, hand-thrown grenades, the fifty-cal machine gun mounted on Myer’s Humvee at the command post, and the M-240s. The weapons systems that Ostlund had freed up to give the platoon some additional firepower, the mortars and TOW system, were destroyed. Much of the incoming fire now was concentrated on the command post and its big machine gun. The Humvee was taking a pounding. Moving from point to point on the outpost was dangerous, but there were now occasional lulls, which enabled Myer and Dzwik to maneuver men along the perimeter as the fight shifted. Mostly the besieged platoon remained hunkered into its fighting positions, returning fire ferociously, and waiting for help or for the enemy to back off.
“Where is my PO [platoon officer]?” shouted Dzwik. “Where’s Lieutenant Brostrom?”
The veteran platoon sergeant and the laid-back lieutenant from Hawaii had been inseparable for months. Theirs was a familiar army relationship, the older, experienced sergeant charged with mentoring a younger, college-educated newbie who outranked him, and it was rarely frictionless. But Dzwik and Brostrom had clicked. They got along like brothers, with the platoon sergeant feeling both a personal and a professional responsibility for his lieutenant. S
ometimes he felt he was keeping Brostrom on a leash. When Myer had chewed out the lieutenant for leaving the radio in a firefight to shoot his weapon, Dzwik had been chewed out at the same time by the company’s first sergeant.
“Why the hell are you letting the PO get away from the radio?” the first sergeant asked. “You need to stop him from doing stupid stuff like that.”
But Brostrom was fun, and brought out Dzwik’s playful streak, whether it was by means of video games or lifting weights or watching movies. Dzwik had taken him on as a friend and as a project. He was alarmed now to find him absent from the command post, and relieved to hear that he was absent this time with the captain’s permission.
“He went up to the OP,” said Myer.
Bad as things were on the main outpost, they were much worse at the observation post. After the battle, the battalion intel officer would surmise that the assault had been designed to wipe out the smaller force at Topside. The heavy fire would pin down the bulk of the platoon and disable its big weapons while the smaller position was overrun. Brostrom had intuited this weakness quickly, and had raced to help his men.
They were in big trouble. All nine men had been either killed or wounded. Specialist Tyler Stafford was blown backward by the blast, losing his helmet. Bits of hot shrapnel cut into his legs and belly, and at first, because of the burning sensation, he thought he was on fire. He rolled and screamed before he realized that there was no fire, just pain. He pulled his helmet on again and called for help to his buddy, Specialist Gunnar Zwilling, who looked stunned. Then Zwilling disappeared in a second blast that blew Stafford down to the bottom terrace.