B Company, Second Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment served in the Arghandab District of Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, in 2009-10. Those were two of the deadliest years in the United States’s war in Afghanistan. Along with Helmand and Kunar provinces, Kandahar was among the deadliest places in that country, and the Arghandab was the most dangerous place within Kandahar.
A paratroop company numbers about 130 men. During its tour, “Bravo” Company lost three soldiers killed in action, and twelve others became amputees among many more wounded. Add to this grim total two suicides, two homicides, and over a dozen suicide attempts by that tour’s survivors. What was it about that tour that caused so much bloodshed, even after the unit returned from war? Ben Kesling grapples with that difficult question in Bravo Company, perhaps the best book yet to emerge from the U.S. military experience in Afghanistan.
Kesling’s book is marked by its sensitive consideration of Bravo Company’s men and how several, of different ranks, changed during and after deployment. He has a pitch-perfect ear for the hypersexualized and vulgar (to politically correct sensibilities) patois of an all-male, elite combat arms unit. The author explains the incomparably vivid, powerful feeling of being a well-armed and trained servicemember on a combat operation with trusted teammates. And he writes accurately and reverently about waiting for soldiers’ remains to return home for burial. This is no doubt because of Kesling’s own experiences as a Marine infantry officer in Afghanistan and Iraq, and a keen eye further developed as a Wall Street Journal reporter.
I served briefly in Kandahar in 2010, including a couple of uneventful, mostly mounted patrols through the Arghandab. Bravo Company captures the unique menace of that terrain. It was eerily scary. Canals and thick vegetation, including lush orchards, limited mobility and visibility. This led the Taliban to reasonably conclude that its best course of action was to seed the district with innumerable crude — yet deadly effective — improvised explosive devices. These wreaked havoc on dismounted infantry such as Bravo Company, just as they did on the mechanized unit that preceded them, and the Canadian soldiers responsible for the province before the Americans arrived. The Taliban’s tactical decision was wise given the publicly announced time limit to the Obama administration’s halfhearted Afghan “surge.”
Bravo Company’s paratroopers mostly came, like so many who served in the War on Terror, from small towns in middle America and good working-class families with some preexisting connection to the military. Kesling has a good grasp of classical literature and therefore knows that, like all young soldiers since ancient times, those who have not yet seen combat yearn for the validation among their peers that comes from serving honorably in battle. Yet for all their bravery and skill, because of the Afghan war’s unique nature, Bravo Company’s tour consists far more of stepping on buried bombs than closing with and destroying the enemy through fire and maneuver.
Kesling’s graphic descriptions of the awful wounds that explosives inflict on young men are difficult to read, both for civilians unaware of war’s realities and for veterans struggling to forget them. In my view, it’s important to discuss such things unstintingly, so that all citizens understand what’s demanded of those they send to war: not just the dead but the disabled who, along with their families, deal with those realities for years afterward. He also recognizes the hidden pain of stoic servicemembers who quietly bore injuries that do not qualify for Purple Hearts, perceptively comparing their humility to that of Saint Bernadette.
While taking nothing away from their courage and stubborn professionalism, after the Trump and Biden administrations’ surrender to the Taliban in 2020-21, it’s harder to understand in hindsight what strategic ends policymakers sought to accomplish by the means of Bravo Company’s patrolling bomb-ridden rural Kandahar in 2009-10. Through no fault of their own, the unit engaged in little counterinsurgency, and less counterterrorism.
Perhaps this is among the reasons many of its veterans struggled with alcohol and suicide upon their return. Kesling lays out the manifold failures of the Department of Defense and Veterans Administration in their care for service members’ well-being. Why, for example, must American soldiers endlessly rotate from base to base, breaking up cohesive units whose members care for and understand one another? Why don’t Defense Department medical records simply transfer to the VA when a soldier retires?
Bravo Company sympathetically describes the symptoms of post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury, and modern efforts to treat them. However insufficient these may still be, it gives a reader pause to consider how much worse earlier generations of servicemembers suffered from PTS and TBI, with no treatments available to them except for the comfort of a larger cohort of empathetic fellow veterans.
Bravo Company ends on a hopeful note. “Big Army” and the VA having failed, despite their best efforts to help them reintegrate into civilian life, the unit’s veterans turn to one another for help. Led by their former company commander, first sergeant, and other non-commissioned officers, these old soldiers lovingly do for one another as individuals that bureaucracies could not do for them as faceless numbers. It’s an example of the Catholic social doctrine principle of subsidiarity: smaller societies do humane things better than large institutions.
Veterans Day has just passed, but this book is a meditation on what some service members and their families cope with every day. In a moving passage about a proud, wounded paratrooper fouling his hospital bed, Kesling writes that while this was for that soldier an embarrassment, “For the rest of us, it was and will ever remain an attestation, an exemplification, and even a holy tribute. Do not look away from him in his apparent shame. That this strong rock and steady timber of American youth should be cracked and broken … is beyond what we can ever hope to understand about what it means to go to war.”
Without going to Afghanistan, a dignified transfer at Dover Air Force Base, or a recovery ward at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Bravo Company is an excellent way to begin to try.
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Kevin Carroll served with the U.S. Army in Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Yemen.
