This is not a war where soldiers are taken prisoner; if a position were to be overrun, virtually every American in it would be killed during the firefight. The wounded would probably be executed where they lay, or worse. The Taliban would take astronomic casualties, but they may have calculated that one or two such incidents would cause the American public to demand an end to the small-base strategy in Afghanistan. With roughly 30,000 troops in the country—there are more police in New York City—the U.S. command would never be able to reinforce those small bases. They would have to withdraw to larger ones instead, and swathes of territory between these bases would become open to infiltration by the Taliban.

In early July, American military intelligence learned that a force of 300 foreign and local fighters had massed around another remote base, named Bella, but the Americans completed a planned pullout before they could be attacked. Bella had been occupied by Chosen Company, part of the Second Battalion of the 503rd Infantry, and Chosen had just finished a 15-month deployment in one of the most rugged and dangerous parts of Afghanistan. Like the rest of their brigade, they were literally days from going home. Chosen had acquired a bit of a reputation in the battalion, however. The previous August they had nearly been overrun at a 22-man outpost named Ranch House; at one point the enemy was so close that Chosen asked the A-10 pilots to strafe their own position. And several months later, 14 men from Chosen—along with 14 Afghan soldiers—were ambushed along a mountain trail in the same valley. Within minutes, every single man on the patrol was dead or wounded. An American unit hasn’t suffered a casualty rate of 100 percent in a firefight since Vietnam.

Maulawi Usman helped lead both of those attacks. The assault on Wanat began just before dawn with a barrage of rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-gun fire. There were 45 American and 25 Afghan soldiers at Wanat—a relatively large force—but they had erected almost no fortifications around themselves. Instead, they were relying on concertina wire and a ring of armored Humvees to keep them safe. Judging by the sequence of targets in the first few minutes, the American military believes that the Taliban probably had a detailed plan of the base; it also believes that both local police and a district governor were complicit in the attack. First the insurgents hit the mortar pit, which deprived the Americans of their most potent weapon; then they took out a $400,000 long-range surveillance device called an lras; finally they destroyed a devastating weapon called a tow missile. The tow is mounted on a Humvee and fitted with multiple tracking systems that would have made it extremely effective in the pre-dawn darkness.

Once those targets had been destroyed, the attackers turned their attention on a small observation post 50 yards outside the wire. The post was manned by nine American soldiers, and within 30 minutes most of them were dead. The survivors crouched behind sandbags and fired blindly, unable to even stick their heads up to aim. They fired until their weapons jammed, and then some kept firing with the weapons of their dead friends. Branches fell on their heads from trees that were getting shot to pieces. At one point a soldier emptied his service pistol over the top of the sandbags because he heard someone on the other side.

Three times, teams of men from the main base ran through intense gunfire to resupply the post with ammunition and to drag back the wounded and the dead. They held the position, but barely: the attackers had breached the wire and were dodging among the sandbags, trying to grab American weapons and equipment. They were communicating with whistles instead of radios so that the Americans couldn’t listen in, and at one point they started throwing rocks. It is thought that they hoped the Americans would mistake the rocks for hand grenades and jump out of their positions.