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The base was built when British forces were fighting a resurgent Taliban that had slowly reformed in the years after the initial American invasion in 2001. The American military had not yet committed to the volatile province. It was a bloody campaign, and Dwyer was a small outpost. It wasn’t until the spring of 2008 that United States Marines started to show up in force. Before this, American Army units visited only sporadically for brief missions. With a few tents, most American Marines and soldiers would sleep outside. Some armored vehicles couldn’t fit inside the perimeter. They were the first of what would turn into the next iteration of the Afghan strategy, in which tens of thousands of American troops spread across the country, building small outposts and expanding the ones that already existed.

In 2009, Dwyer grew, and the Marines started a spat of offensives. The base changed from Forward Operating Base Dwyer to Camp Dwyer. Engineers plowed the dirt and paved a new airfield. Troops bled and died in the surrounding farmland. By 2010, the number of American service members in Afghanistan climbed toward 100,000; a few laps around Camp Dwyer’s perimeter could easily equal 10 miles. There were two mess halls staffed by foreign contractors, a phone center with computers and a trailer where soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen could use phone cards to call home. A line of medical evacuation helicopters sat on Dwyer’s tarmac. There white and red crosses silhouetted on their black airframes.

In 2012, when the British started its slow withdrawal from the country, the memorial cross was sent back to England as a token of remembrance for James Dwyer’s unit. By then, the text at the bottom had faded. American troops began their departure too. Dwyer stopped growing. In 2014, as the Pentagon euphemistically declared that it had ended combat operations in Afghanistan, larger bases like Camp Leatherneck shut down. Camp Dwyer remained, turning into a detached hub of contractors, Special Operations soldiers and American advisers.

Dwyer’s perimeter was most mostly unchanged by 2016, but the buildings within it had slowly been torn down. Tents where troops lived were replaced with air-conditioned trailers. The medical helicopters remained mostly idle, reserved almost entirely for the Western troops relegated to advising from behind the frontlines. But the Afghan soldiers, fighting the war with limited support and air power, died in extraordinary numbers in the countryside. With the addition of roughly 4,000 troops under the Trump administration in 2017, the Marines returned to Camp Dwyer. Army soldiers patrolled the perimeter. At night, mortars fired illumination rounds into the air.

On Oct. 4, 2018, around 9:30 a.m., an Army patrol hit a roadside bomb seven miles southeast of Camp Dwyer, immobilizing one of its vehicles. Specialist Slape hopped into an armored truck and drove out of the base’s gate. He was an explosive-ordnance disposal expert, and the ground around the blast needed to be cleared. Around 1:30 that afternoon, he stepped on the bomb that killed him.