Mark Bowden article on the Wanat fight

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Echoes from a Distant Battlefield
When First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom was killed by Taliban fighters in 2008, while attempting a heroic rescue in a perilously isolated outpost, his war was over. His father's war, to hold the U.S. Army accountable for Brostrom's death, had just begun. And Lieutenant Colonel William Ostlund's war to defend his own record as commander was yet to come. With three perspectives on the most scrutinized engagement of the Afghanistan conflict, one that shook the military to its foundations, Mark Bowden learns the true tragedy of the Battle of Wanat.

I. The Lieutenant's Battle
One man on the rocky slope overhead was probably just a shepherd. Two men was suspicious but might have been two shepherds. Three men was trouble. When Second Platoon spotted four, then five, they 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 beside 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 49 American soldiers who had arrived days earlier felt dangerously exposed.
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