by Mark Bowden
“How often do you relate to the population?” he asked. “What kind of humanitarian assistance do you give them?”
“Nope, we don’t do that anymore,” said Jonathan. “We just try to kill them before they kill us. When we go outside, it’s serious business. We’re on a kill mission patrol.”
It scared Dave. There was one picture Jonathan showed them, proudly, which drove it home. It showed him attending a shura, a conference of elders, with local villagers. The Afghan men around him were old and wizened, with long gray beards and leathery skin. They were survivors, men who had carved out a life for half a century or more in those austere mountains. Through famine, pestilence, and war. And here, apparently presiding, was his Jonathan, twenty-four years old, fresh out of army ROTC at the University of Hawaii, the little boy he had taught to surf not too long ago, with his high-and-tight haircut, a wad of tobacco stuffed in his cheek, wearing his cool sunglasses, trying to look tough. He knew that Jonathan’s transition to Afghanistan, partly because of his own intervention, had meant he had missed any kind of specialized training for the Afghan mission. He was there just weeks out of Ranger school! He didn’t speak the language. He knew nothing of Afghan history or culture. He knew bubkes about the loyalties or motivations of those tough old men around him, members of tribes isolated in those Hindu Kush valleys for centuries. Dave could readily imagine how they saw his boy. To Dave the picture showed Jonathan out of his element, and not realizing it.
“You have got to get the hell out of there,” said Dave. “You know, this is stupid. You are spread too thin. Why are you doing this? These guys are just taking potshots at you every day.”
Jonathan explained that they would soon move from Bella. Task Force Rock had inherited the outposts when it arrived in country, and Ostlund had recognized that some of the distant ones made little sense. They would be moving closer to Camp Blessing, to a new outpost that could be supplied and reinforced by ground as well as air. So it at least sounded to Dave as though the men in charge shared his concerns. But Jonathan also told him that the enemy at Bella would surely follow them south to the new place, called Wanat.
“They’re going to come after me,” he said. “They’ve threatened me.”
Jonathan was in Hawaii for two great weeks in May. Dave spent a lot of time with his son. They surfed. The Sunday before Jonathan left, the priest at their church blessed him before the congregation.
Six weeks later he was back in the same church in a coffin. Some of the grieving father’s worries about the mission came out in an interview with a local reporter, but he had nothing but praise for his son’s commanders. He told a local reporter: “His leadership at the brigade and below were probably the best you will ever find, the best in the world. But they were put in a situation where they were underresourced.”
Along with the families of the other soldiers killed, as a courtesy the Brostroms got a copy of the “15-6” investigation of the incident. Army Regulation 15, Section 6 is the standard for official inquiries. It included a detailed account of the fight and the events that had led up to it. It emphasized the correctness of the decision to relocate the outpost to Wanat, and the heroism of the men who fought, but also noted the decision to vacate the unfinished outpost three days later. It noted the likely complicity of the village in the attack, and recommended that the Afghan district governor and chief of police be dismissed, “if not arrested and tried.” It recommended that plans to purchase or lease land for future outposts be streamlined, and that the road north from Camp Blessing be repaired.
“I would not characterize this as anything more than the standard fighting that happens in this area in good weather that the summer provides,” wrote Dave’s friend Colonel Preysler.
And that, apparently, as far as the army was concerned, was that. The brave soldiers of Second Platoon, along with their Afghan counterparts and marine advisers, had tenaciously defended the outpost from hundreds of attackers. They had prevented it from being overrun. First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom was posthumously awarded a Silver Star for valor, along with eight others who were decorated for their actions that day, among them Captain Myer, Sergeant First Class Dzwik, and Staff Sergeant Pitts.
The battlefield honor, which he knew his son would have cherished, did nothing to ease Dave Brostrom’s anguish. Beyond the grief, he felt a heart-crushing mix of anger, guilt, and betrayal. The anger was unfocused, but it was rooted in his earlier suspicion that his son’s platoon had been inadequately supported and directed. The guilt was more insidious and ran deep. He felt terrible about how the lifetime of macho competition between him and Jonathan had fed his son’s ambition to follow in his footsteps, and then upped the game to odds that had proved fatal. He felt guilty about having pulled strings to get Jonathan into the 173rd, even though, at the time, he believed steering him away from the First Cavalry and its Iraq mission was sending him to a safer place. That was where the sense of betrayal was rooted. Dave had done his homework before approaching Preysler. In 2007, all of the official reports from Afghanistan had been rosy. The fighting there was all but over, the assessments read; the work was all humanitarian projects and nation-building. Brostrom now saw that as propaganda, and was furious that he had fallen for it.
His anger crystallized after a careful reading of the 15-6 report. Preysler gave his old friend a redacted version, along with hundreds of pages of documentation. The deeper Brostrom dug into the source material, the more convinced he became that report was a whitewash. All of his ill-formed misgivings about his son’s mission were tragically affirmed, and here in the interviews and documents of the inquiry was the machinery of a true fiasco. The new outpost had been located in a natural kill zone. The engineers who were tasked with building its defenses never showed up. In the first days water ran low; the HESCOs had to be cut in half to accommodate the limited reach of the single Bobcat; the platoon was stretched so thin it could not conduct essential security patrols. The day before the attack, the drones were pulled. There had been direct warnings of a surprise attack. And yet his son had been left out there to run the show. Where was his company commander? Where was the battalion commander? What priorities would have kept them away? Yet there was no hint of mistake in the report itself.
His overall distress was distilled into something personal. Dave no longer saw the officers who had led his son to his death as “the best in the world.” They were directly responsible and they had not been paying attention. The mission to Wanat had gone off the rails well before Second Platoon was attacked. Studying what he saw as the mismatch between the documentation and findings in the 15-6, he grew convinced that the army, left to its own devices, wasn’t even going to learn anything from its mistakes, or from his son’s sacrifice. Colonel Preysler, Lieutenant Colonal Ostund, Captain Myer, and the rest of the command chain were going to skate away unscathed. Their careers would continue to prosper, leading them to higher commands where they would have more power over young men’s lives.
Anger and second-guessing are common among the families and friends of fallen soldiers. After the flag-draped burial ceremony, after the initial shock wears off, many grief-stricken parents and spouses find themselves left with anger and disbelief, and come to blame the army itself for their tragedy. But Dave Brostrom was a special case. His rage, his pain and that of Mary Jo and their family, was not destined to remain a private torment. The retired colonel was formidable. He was smart, passionate, angry, and driven. Because of his long military career, he knew exactly what questions to ask, and where to ask them. He knew how to move in the army’s intimidating bureaucracy. He had accumulated a lifetime of friends and valued colleagues, in and out of the army, and in the summer of 2008 he began working those levers with a will that would leave no one associated with Wanat untouched.
When Dave’s old friend General Bill Caldwell called to offer condolences, and asked, as a friend, if there was anything he could do, Brostrom had a request ready. He asked Caldwell to look into the m
atter further. Jonathan had cut Caldwell’s lawn when his father had served with him at Fort Drum years earlier. The general was now leading the Combined Arms Center, at Fort Leavenworth, which includes the Command and General Staff College, the military’s graduate school; and the Combat Studies Institute (CSI), which collects and publishes contemporary historical studies.
“Write about this,” Brostrom urged him. “It’s the worst battle in Afghanistan. Nothing makes sense here.”
Caldwell honored his old friend’s request. He invited Brostrom to visit Fort Leavenworth to brief the officers at CSI, who were given the redacted 15-6 report along with audio and video recordings made by the Apache gunships when they arrived on-site, an hour into the battle. Brostrom shared his misgivings with Douglas Cubbison, a military historian who was assigned to write a report of the incident. The two consulted throughout the months of research, and Cubbison showed Brostrom an early draft. This report was not going to be, as Cubbison would later put it to me, “the nice safe hero story” the institute might have imagined at the outset.
When Cubbison’s meticulously researched draft—not yet the official CSI report—was leaked early in 2009, it caused a stir. The institute is known for its attention to tactical and strategic theory, the kind of stuff that keeps military graduate students up all night drinking strong coffee, but is rarely of interest to outsiders. Here was a highly critical study of ongoing operations, dramatically written, scathingly critical of the decisions made by officers currently serving in frontline command positions. Any questions about the propriety of Cubbison’s tone were trumped by General Caldwell’s strong endorsement.
It was a genuine in-house army scandal. The draft report made a formidable case for Brostrom’s take on the battle. It implicated the elite brigade’s entire chain of command in what was characterized as a boondoggle. Second Platoon was portrayed as a victim not just of the Taliban, but of its own leadership. It had been pushed into a precarious outpost without proper supervision, defensive precautions, or logistical support, as part of a badly botched and underresourced counterinsurgency effort that had succeeded only in antagonizing the local population. The report portrayed the platoon as sitting ducks. The ten-month negotiation for the land at Wanat had given enemy forces throughout the Waygul Valley ample time to plan a coordinated assault. Cubbison’s interviews with the survivors and their families and friends showed that the men themselves suspected they were likely to be hit hard at the site, just as Jonathan had told his father. Lack of overhead surveillance; an inadequate force; delays in construction crews, equipment, and water supplies; absence of community outreach; the fact that Captain Myer had been too busy to take direct command of the operation until the day before the attack … all of it suggested distracted and complacent leadership. Even the mission’s basic goal was miscalculated: “A single platoon in the open field near the bazaar lacked the capability of holding Wanat,” the draft report concluded.
That line would be quoted by Tom Ricks, the influential military journalist, who got a copy of Cubbison’s draft and wrote a series of blogs based on it in early 2009. This rekindled critical attention on the incident. Drawn into the emerging story by sources familiar with Brostrom’s campaign, Ricks had already written critically of the 15-6 inquiry, which he saw as the worst kind of self-congratulatory claptrap. He was bothered by what he would term the “fuck-you-edness” of it. He characterized it to me as dismissive, a “thank-you-very-much-for-your-interest-in-national-defense” kind of report, “unusually poor.” He would eventually post Cubbison’s entire draft, which, as we shall see, was not the CSI’s final word on the subject.
The draft report and Ricks’s pointed critique meant that Brostrom’s complaints could no longer be dismissed as the isolated ravings of a bereaved father. Dave now filed a formal complaint with the Department of Defense, with the inspector general’s office, accusing the 173rd’s entire chain of command, including his old friend Chip Preysler, of dereliction of duty. He enlisted the help of Robert “Skip” Orr, the president of Boeing Japan, who had met Jonathan on his last visit home. Orr helped put Brostrom in touch with Senator Jim Webb of Virginia, a decorated marine veteran. The senator remarked that the incident reminded him of the scandalous cover-up of events surrounding the death of Pat Tillman, the NFL star who gave up his football career to fight in Afghanistan, only to be killed, as the story eventually emerged, by friendly fire. Webb took the questions about Wanat directly to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen. The savvy senator also advised Brostrom to take his story to the press, which he did to great effect.
It made a wrenching and powerful story—the furious father of a martyred American hero, a retired colonel taking on the army, turning on his former colleagues—and it attracted a lot of attention. Reporters cannot resist a story about military incompetence. There was a complete airing in the Washington Post by reporter Greg Jaffe, and the newspaper built a state-of-the-art multimedia presentation of the story online, complete with excerpts from the Apache gunship video of the battle. From there the story aired on CBS, and then NBC’s Dateline came calling. It would eventually air a powerful, award-winning, hour-long presentation of Brostrom’s take on Wanat, narrated by Richard Engel, called “A Father’s Mission.”
In this episode, the grieving family members talked about the young men lost, and accused the officers who led them of “pure recklessness” and of using their loved ones as “cannon fodder.”
“Nothing made sense here,” Brostrom told NBC. “Even if you look at the terrain, they were trying to establish a combat outpost in a natural kill zone.”
No one in the TV report spoke for the officers who stood accused. The train of research, publicity, and pressure eventually drove the army, in September 2009, to order an official reassessment of the battle, under the auspices of General David Petraeus, then CENTCOM commander. A retired Marine Corps lieutenant general, Richard Natonski, was asked to lead the investigation. Four months later Natonski dropped a bomb.
He affirmed most of the findings of Cubbison’s report. He recommended that Colonel Ostlund and Captain Myer be cited for dereliction of duty—which would mean citing Myer for both valor and incompetence in the same engagement. General Petraeus went further in signing off on the recommendations. He personally amended the findings to include Preysler among those to receive reprimands.
If the reprimands stood, then the careers of Preysler, Ostlund, and Myer were effectively over. Since the battle, Ostlund and Myer had been promoted, to colonel and to major, respectively. Those promotions were now to be reconsidered. Preysler, Brostrom’s old friend who had done him a favor by getting Jonathan assigned to his brigade, would resign before the reprimands were issued. General Jeffrey J. Schloesser, who had commanded all U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, and who was officially cleared of wrongdoing in the report, would resign as well, choosing to share responsibility with his subordinates.
The howl of pain from the slain lieutenant’s father threatened to topple the entire command structure of the 173rd. The last step was to forward the findings and recommendations for final disposition to General Charles C. “Hondo” Campbell, the soon-to-retire head of the U.S. Army Forces Command.
Before that final step was taken, Brostrom remembers attending an event in Hawaii in February 2010, an interment ceremony for a former army chief of staff. He ran into General George W. Casey, who then held that position. As Brostrom remembers it, the conversation went like this:
“Listen, I’m so sorry for your family’s loss,” said Casey.
“I’m sorry about all this stuff,” he told Casey.
The general stiffened.
“Whatever makes you happy,” he said.
“It doesn’t make me happy,” Brostrom protested.
As Brostrom remembered it, the army chief of staff then leaned in closer, pointed a finger at his chest, and confided cryptically, “Hondo Campbell is going to fix all of this.”
Casey remembers the meet
ing, but says he never heard Brostrom apologize for his role in scrutinizing and assigning blame for the losses at Wanat.
“I would not have expected him to apologize,” Casey told me. “I really felt for him. I saw him standing there—he’s a striking guy, tall, sandy hair—and I recognized him from some of the reporting I had seen about the incident. I walked up to him to express my sorrow over his loss. I could certainly understand his desire to better understand what happened.”
Casey said he would “never” have said, “Whatever makes you happy,” because he took no umbrage at the ongoing investigation. He had agreed with the decision to order it, and had called Petraeus himself to ask that CENTCOM place the official probe with Natonski, a marine, to ensure its independence, and to avoid the appearance of the army investigating itself. He said he has no memory of mentioning Campbell, who had just taken up Natanski’s findings and would soon issue letters of reprimand to Ostlund and Myer. If he had said anything like what Brostrom remembered regarding Campbell, he would have meant only to reassure a grieving father that “Hondo was going to get to the bottom of it.”
3. The Colonel’s Battle
The letter of reprimand Colonel Bill Ostlund received on March 5, 2010, was a hard slap in the face.
“As battalion commander, you failed in several major respects,” General Campbell’s memo began.
He went on to itemize four specific and damning findings from the Natonski report. (1) A failure of planning and execution: “You did not not provide your soldiers with the guidance, support, and supervision to which they were entitled.” (2) Permitting the company commander, Captain Myer, to remain at Camp Blessing for the first four days of the Wanat construction, in order to participate in a 15-6 investigation “in which he was only a witness.” (3) Not inspecting Wanat himself during those days, but instead attending a shura (a council of Afghan elders), visiting a community center, and preparing a lessons learned document—a long memo to General Petraeus outlining the battalion’s experiences over the previous fourteen months. (4) Inadequately assessing the risk at Wanat.
