Bravo Company

Kesling Ben Kesling

Description

A timely and searing account of the American war in Afghanistan In Bravo Company, journalist and combat veteran Ben Kesling tells the story of the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of the men of one unit, part of a combat-hardened parachute infantry regiment in the 82nd Airborne Division. A decade ago, the soldiers of Bravo Company deployed to Afghanistan for a tour in Kandahar's notorious Arghandab Valley. By the time they made it home, three soldiers had been killed in action, a dozen more had lost limbs, and an astonishing half of the company had Purple Hearts. In the decade since, two of the soldiers have died by suicide, more than a dozen have tried, and others admit they've considered it. Declared at "extraordinary risk" by the Department of Veterans Affairs, Bravo Company was chosen as test subjects for a new approach to the veteran crisis, focusing less on isolated individuals and more on the group. Written with an insider's eye and ear, and drawing on extensive interviews and original reporting, Bravo Company follows the men from their initial enlistment and training, through their deployment and a major shift in their mission, and then on to what has happened in the decade since; as they returned to combat in other units or moved on with their lives as civilians, or struggled to. This is a powerful, insightful, and memorable account of a war that didn't end for these soldiers just because Bravo Company came home.

Sujets

• Histoire
• Military history
• Veteran

Informations

• Publié par: ABRAMS BOOKS
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781647001407
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

ADDITIONAL ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
BRAVO COMPANY
Bravo Company is not your average book about the military or men at war. The book, brilliantly told through the lens of one company, perfectly captures the true cost of the decades-long war in Afghanistan. We meet young men who dreamed of life and adventure in the US Army, only to be broken physically and mentally by the toll of combat. For anyone who ever wanted to know about the cost of war, this is the book.
-Ron Nixon, global investigations editor, Associated Press
The men of Bravo Company are captivating, raw, salty-and above all real. Ben Kesling knows of what he writes and does us a service to bring home their stories of war and the battles afterward.
-Quil Lawrence, NPR correspondent and former bureau chief in Baghdad and Kabul
If you want to understand the fingerprints of American military culture and the terrible human consequences of bad policy decisions, this excellent book by Ben Kesling is the way.
-Kori Schake, director of foreign and defense policy at the American Enterprise Institute
In Bravo Company , Ben Kesling searingly transports readers first into the lush valley at the heart of President Barack Obama s surge, where paratroopers saddled with an unsustainable mission rolled the dice with every step they took, and then into their lives back home as they wrestle with grievous injuries and the loss of friends in a war America ultimately lost.
-Wesley Morgan, author of The Hardest Place: The American Military Adrift in Afghanistan s Pech Valley

Copyright 2022 Ben Kesling
Cover 2022 Abrams
Published in 2022 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022933888
ISBN: 978-1-4197-5115-8 eISBN: 978-1-64700-140-7
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ABRAMS The Art of Books 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007 abramsbooks.com
For Kate, Gus, Lewis, and Alice. And Mara.
CONTENTS
Prologue
Part I: Before
Part II: Deployment
Part III: After
Author s Note
Acknowledgments
PROLOGUE
LEAVING AFGHANISTAN BEHIND
NOVEMBER 2021
It s annoying that ten years after losing his legs in Afghanistan, Alex Jauregui still loses them.
Jauregui- Sergeant J to the men of Bravo Company-was swimming in a creek near his house a while back, and damned if one of his prosthetics didn t come off in the water. Those things go straight to the bottom, they re all carbon fiber and metal. He should have known better, but he wasn t wearing a sleeve over his stump, so the prosthetic just slipped off when it got wet. Bloop! To the bottom.
Really the only time he wears a sleeve like he s supposed to is when he s doing something like skydiving. A leg could come off pretty easily up there in the air, and good luck finding it after that.
When J s not losing his legs, he s breaking them. He broke his foot the other day, snapped the carbon fiber. He s got a passel of legs, so he can get by on spares if he needs to, but that s like driving a car around on one of those tiny spare tires, the donut. It just isn t right.
After he lost that leg in the creek and cracked a foot, he was down to spares. It s no good trying to get new ones from the local VA hospital-it can take weeks to get a new leg, sometimes more than a month. It takes even longer to fine-tune it and get it properly adjusted. It s not the local VA s fault, there s only so much demand for new legs out there where he lives in Woodland, California, away from a big city like LA.
So in times like that J just goes ahead and books a trip direct to Walter Reed, where the prosthetic clinic gets things done quickly. That place is the premier spot for veterans to get new limbs. Jeez, it s like a factory showroom for fake legs. A couple of days there and he gets new legs, sleeves, liners. Everything.
When he first left Walter Reed, years ago, he had five sets of legs: primaries and spares and swimming legs and some fancy blades for running. But running hurts his back like hell, so the blades didn t get a lot of use.
Some adjustments he can do himself, little tweaks here and there, but for major adjustments he goes to the VA. Every time he gets a new pair of shoes, the tiny difference in soles will throw off his balance, and he has to get a tune-up so he doesn t trip all over the place.
And man, you can forget about dress shoes-those things call for a complete overhaul. Nowadays he rarely wears anything but his regular old work shoes with a suit-when he has to wear a suit. Maybe it s worth going through the tune-up hassle to wear dress shoes with a tuxedo, but how often does a guy need a tux?
As far as shoes go, he does miss the pleasure of caring about them. He was once a sneakerhead. He d spring for the latest, greatest models. Jordans. But not now. A few years ago he dropped a couple hundred dollars on a new pair of basketball sneakers, real sharp. But he tripped and fell and that carbon-fiber foot of his ripped right through the shoe.
Fuuuuck, he said to himself. I m going to Ross.
And so he went to the discount clothing store for some beaters. He gets utilitarian shoes now. He buys them at Ross and wears them until the sole is gone.
* * *
Nowadays, being with his family gives J peace, yes, but a different kind of peace came for him with the bees. It started with seventy-five hives a few years ago, in 2015. When he first got his bees, he was hardly prepared. He d jump if a bee landed on his hand. But he s got 1,200 hives now.
The apiary business-beekeeping-is a dream now that he s out of the Army.
The Army was his dream, a career as an infantryman his plan, but once his legs were taken off by a booby trap in Afghanistan he had to shift gears. For a fellow like Jauregui, the loss of his legs was just an unfortunate byproduct of his choice of profession, so he dealt with it.
He s out there in California now, him and his wife and their three kids. Out where farmers have to rent truckloads of bees to pollinate their crops. It s mostly almond-tree orchards. Pollination is done the old-fashioned way, with bees flying flower to flower. People keep approaching him about starting a honey business, but he s focused on pollination.
For a pollination job, he moves a few hundred crates of beehives out to a farm, then comes and picks up those crates a few weeks later once the bees have done their thing and returned to their hives, sated and happy. After he got started in the business, a nonprofit gave him a forklift adapted for a man with carbon-fiber feet instead of flesh and blood. That lets him really make time when loading and unloading hives.
No joke, though, business is stressful out there in California. There are assholes who will sneak into the fields and steal your bees if you re not careful. It s not like you can brand a bee s rump the way you can with cattle. But it s no combat zone-it s a dream life. And now he spends his days tending the pollination cycle, among the gnarled branches of almond trees that have been arranged into militarily precise rows. It s a good setup.
Sergeant J had a few deployments, fought the Taliban, and was forced to leave Afghanistan and never return. And in late 2021, like almost every other Afghanistan veteran, Sergeant J watched the news as the Taliban retook province after province. As the Taliban consolidated their gains. As the Taliban officially defeated the American juggernaut.
He had watched, perplexed, months earlier as negotiations for peace ramped up. He wanted peace-he wasn t against having talks with the Taliban. After all, peace does come. But he was confused and frustrated that the United States was unmooring itself, forcing the Afghan government at the time to release Taliban prisoners. That s not the way things should be done, he remembers thinking.
Some veterans were furious about the end of the war, that their sacrifices and efforts were seemingly erased. Not Sergeant J. Yes, he was mad about the way the withdrawal happened, how America seemed to turn tail and run at the very end. He was mad that the United States abandoned the place and jacked it all up at the end. What a mess.
But his time in uniform and what he did as an individual entity in the American military system was not degraded. The war effort, writ large, is beyond his scope to think about and out of his hands to direct or influence. But what he did as a soldier, what the men around him did: He knows that and can consider it often. And it brings him pride.
We were there to do a job, and we did a job, he says.
Some days they did a fine job of it, and other days the Taliban did better. Some days the US Army might kill the bad guys while befriending and assisting civilians. Other days, a soldier like Sergeant Alex Jauregui might step on a bomb that blows off both legs. It s just the ebb and flow of war. And the withdrawal from Afghanistan, well, that s much the same thing writ large.
Sergeant J can have a bee land on his hand now, no sweat. Sometimes hundreds crawl all over him. No big deal. He s happy to be at the center of all these tiny creatures struggling to live, to thrive, and to find their life s purpose.
They take a lot of attention, too, the bees. He can t just let them alone or things quickly go south. They die off or get sick. It s nerve-racking because the tiniest problem with the hive can cause the bees to up and leave, just like that. Sometimes mites get in there and feast on the bees themselves, ruini