“The whole camp was covered in blood,” said First Lt. Shah Fahim, another platoon leader. On Sunday night, speaking by phone, he wept and worried he would be killed in the night. On top of that, the family of the dead company commander, Capt. Sayid Azam, kept calling him, asking for news of the captain.

“I couldn’t tell them,” Lieutenant Fahim said. “I told them I would tell him to call them back later.”

Lieutenant Fahim and a squad of five men were assigned to one of the outposts around the camp on Sunday night. On Monday morning, all six surrendered to the Taliban, Lieutenant Reza said. He knew that because some soldiers taken prisoner began calling their friends still on the base at the Taliban’s urging.

“They kept asking us to go with them.”

Throughout the morning, groups of five or six soldiers at a time began disappearing from the base and the outposts.

“Finally, the 40 of us who were left decided to surrender, too,” he said.

At American urging, the Afghan military has been shifting its strategy to concentrate on holding population centers instead of territory. That previous territory-based strategy left numerous small bases scattered around rural Afghanistan highly vulnerable when the insurgents mass against them, as happened in Ghormach.

But giving up Ghormach District to the Taliban would hand them a coup in a part of the country where the insurgents were weak only a couple of years earlier. So Company A was sent to Chinese Camp a year ago.

Before he was killed, the company’s captain expressed concern that even without a Ghazni, the Afghan military’s priorities were skewed at the expense of troops in the field. Politicians commandeered badly needed military helicopters for their own use at times when bases like his were struggling for resupply.