between the eyes but it isn’t cocked. It’s tempting to calm myself with the idea that everything is in God’s hands, but
Across the battalion units are getting ready for the handoff and trying to create enough white space so the new guys don’t get killed as soon as they get there. The biggest effort is happening about ten miles to the north in the Waygal Valley, where Chosen Company will simultaneously abandon Outpost Bella and build a new one in the town of Wanat. Bella was the sister base to Ranch House, which almost got overrun the previous August, and after the Americans abandoned Ranch House it was only a matter of time before Bella went as well. There was no passable road up to Bella so everything had to come in by air, and the mountains were so high and steep that the Chinooks had a hard time even dropping off sling loads. They can’t abandon the Waygal altogether, though, because it was a major infiltration route for fighters moving from sanctuaries in Pakistan toward Kabul and the interior. The enemy knew Bella was being abandoned, and there was intel that a force of two hundred fighters were going to launch an attack in order to make it appear as if they’d actually driven the Americans out.
Within hours of pulling out of Bella, Chosen Company’s Second Platoon was going to convoy the eight kilometers from Blessing to the town of Wanat to build a permanent base next to the police station and the district center. They would be going home in less than two weeks, and building the outpost would be their last mission in Afghanistan. They had already sent most of their gear back to Vicenza. A spot for the base had been picked out in a field just south of the town, near the intersection of two rivers that had been bridged the year before by 10th Mountain. It was a crucial piece of terrain that The Rock had spent nearly a year negotiating for; unfortunately, that also gave the enemy plenty of time to prepare. The base would be named Combat Outpost Kahler, after a platoon sergeant who had been killed by an Afghan security guard in a highly suspect friendly-fire incident six months earlier.
There was a bad feeling about the mission from the beginning. Days beforehand someone had written “Wanat: the movie” on the mission board, and the men were joking about which actors would play them. An Afghan heavy equipment contractor never showed up on the job, and the Americans’ one Bobcat had a bulldozer blade but no bucket. That meant it could only fill Hescos to a height of about four feet; everything else would have to be done by hand. Men were spotted moving along the upper ridges but couldn’t be killed because they weren’t carrying weapons, and on the third night an estimated two hundred foreign and local fighters managed to move into positions around Outpost Kahler. They set up heavy machine guns on the ridges and put a Dishka in a nearby building, aimed point-blank into the base, and riddled the bazaar with more fighters who were mobile inside the innumerable stalls and alleyways. Finally they positioned cadres of men whose job it was to run forward and breach the wire, or die trying.
The Taliban plan was to suppress the base with massive firepower, breach the wire, and drag off dead and wounded American soldiers. There was a small outpost a hundred yards outside the base, and that was particularly vulnerable to being overrun. The Taliban knew that once they were close in they couldn’t be hit by artillery, and that Apaches would take at least an hour to get there. That meant it would be a fair fight until then. With luck they could get inside the wire, kill groups of soldiers as their guns jammed, and possibly take over the entire base. It was exactly the nightmare scenario that the men at Restrepo went to sleep dreading; it was exactly the nightmare scenario that few Americans back home even understood could happen. The fact that it didn’t happen at Wanat was nothing short of a miracle.
The signal to attack was two long bursts from a heavy machine gun. That was immediately followed by waves of rocket-propelled grenades that took out or suppressed every heavy weapon at the base. There was so much fire coming in that the mortar tubes were sparkling with bullet strikes and no one could get near them. A grenade hit the missile truck almost immediately and set it on fire. The Americans were instantly outnumbered and outgunned and shooting so much that the barrels of their guns were melting. A sergeant named Hector Chaves, who had already been through Ranch House, saw a Taliban fighter climbing a tree outside the wire so he shot him. Another fighter started climbing the tree so Chavez shot him too. After Chavez shot his third man they finally abandoned the tree and tried something else.
An RPG hit near the mortar pit and tore up a mortarman named Sergio Abad with shrapnel. Abad had transferred out of Battle Company several months earlier, and the last time I’d seen him, he was relaxing at Camp Blessing, just waiting to go home. Now Abad found himself lying wounded in the mortar pit handing ammo to Chavez, who was busy firing over the tops of the sandbags. The 120 mm mortars, which have a killing radius of seventy yards, caught fire, and Chavez and another man grabbed Abad and started pulling him to safety. Halfway across the base they took a burst of machine-gun fire and Chavez went down, shot in both legs. He continued crawling toward cover, pulling Abad behind him, until several men at the command post ran out and rescued them.
Abad died quickly in the command post lying next to Chavez and several other wounded. Chavez was worried he’d been hit in the balls and so in the middle of the firefight he made Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips pull his pants down and make sure everything was okay. It was. The blazing missile truck finally exploded, engulfing an Afghan soldier in flames and sending antitank missiles tumbling across the base. One landed in the command post, and as it sat there the men could hear the motor spinning up and the weapon arming itself. Chavez just lay there, waiting. “I was in so much pain I couldn’t move,” he told me. “I just said ‘Fuck it, I’m done.’ Then Sergeant Phillips came over, picked the motherfucker up, walked it out somewhere, and tossed it.”
Meanwhile, a hundred yards outside the wire, the outpost was getting overrun. The first barrage of grenades had slammed into the position and wounded or incapacitated every man there. The grenades kept coming and blowing men out of their positions and the weapons out of their hands and even the helmets off their heads. A specialist named Matthew Phillips stood up to throw a hand grenade and was killed before he could pull the pin. Specialist Jason Bogar was ignoring the rounds that were sparking off the boulder in front of him and going cyclic on his SAW. It finally jammed when the barrel turned white-hot and started to melt.
Enemy fighters were swarming toward the position, and the only way to keep them back was to keep up a constant barrage of fire. The weapons couldn’t sustain it, though. If a machine gun could shoot forever, one man could hold off a whole battalion, but they jam. That’s how positions get overrun. After Bogar’s SAW went down the 240 ran out of ammo and the men were reduced to shooting with their rifles and throwing grenades. Almost every man was wounded by this point, some badly. There was so much gunfire that, psychologically, it was very hard for the men to expose their heads above the tops of the sandbags in order to shoot. Specialists Chris McKaig and Jonathan Ayers decided to pop up in unison, shoot a burst, and then duck down again. They did that several times until Ayers was hit in the face and fell over, dead.
Sergeant Ryan Pitts, the platoon forward observer, was pinned down and badly wounded in the northernmost position. He’d gotten a tourniquet onto his shattered leg and started throwing hand grenades over the top of the sandbags. Between explosions he got through to the command post by radio and told them that they were getting overrun. A three-man team led by First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom left the base and ran through heavy fire carrying weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies. One of them got hit almost immediately. Brostrom and Specialist Jason Hovater made it to the outpost and began fighting with the help of another specialist named Pruitt Rainey. They grabbed the 240 from Pitts — he was too badly wounded to use it — and moved to an adjacent fighting position. At one point a specialist named Stafford heard one of the men scream, “They’re inside the wire!” followed by a long burst of gunfire. Then, “He’s right behind the fucking sandbag!” and another burst. After that came silence, and Brostrom, Rainey, and Hovater were dead.
By this time there were almost no functioning weapons at the outpost. Three wounded men, unaware that Pitts was lying wounded in the northern position, crawled through the outpost making sure everyone was dead and then started staggering toward the relative safety of the base. They made it amid a hail of gunfire and Pitts, who by now had run out of ammo, realized he was alone up there. Enemy fighters were so close that when he radioed for help he had to whisper. Another relief team was organized and four men left the wire at a run and headed for the outpost. One of them was a private first class named Jacob Sones: “No one wanted to go up there because the way they were shooting, whatever angle they had, it was perfect,” Sones told me. “They were laying that place down,
