![]() ![]() In Wanat it was easy to feel that you were hunkered down on the far edge of nowhere, fighting the only people in the world who seemed to badly want the place. This battalion HQ was just five miles away in the fish-eye lens of a high-flying drone, but on the ground it was a perilous journey of about an hour-perilous because ambushes and improvised explosives were common. A single partially paved road wound south toward Camp Blessing, the headquarters for Task Force Rock, Second Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, 173rd Airborne Brigade. It was home to about 50 families, who carved out a spare existence on a series of green, irrigated terraces. Wanat was at the confluence of the Waygal River and a small tributary. Jagged mountains, reaching as high as 25,000 feet, tower over V-shaped valleys that angle sharply down to winding rivers. Wanat lies high in the Hindu Kush at the southern edge of Nuristan Province, in Afghanistan’s rugged Northeast. Myer and Second Platoon, one of three platoons under his command scattered in these mountains, were at war in a place as distant from America’s consciousness as it was simply far away. It was 20 minutes after four in the morning.
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