RENEE MONTAGNE, Host:
NPR's Rachel Martin tells us how the history was written and how the father of one fallen soldier is trying to change it.
MONTAGNE: My name is Dave Brostrom, and I'm the father of 1st Lt. Jonathan Brostrom that was killed in action in the Battle of Wanat on 13 July, 2008.
RACHEL MARTIN: Dave Brostom is a retired Army colonel. He's spent the last two and a half years consumed with the details of that battle.
MONTAGNE: It's very rare to have an infantry platoon totally rendered combat-ineffective, almost decimated by insurgents. Nothing made sense about what happened.
MARTIN: Here are the rough facts: Lt. Jonathan Brostrom and other members of his platoon were building a small outpost in a village in the eastern part of Afghanistan. The area was known to be hostile to American forces but Brostrom's commanders were hoping he could win over the locals. After four days on the ground, Brostrom, who's the platoon leader, hadn't had much luck and then in the early morning hours of the fifth day, the outpost was attacked. Apache helicopters arrived about 30 minutes later to help. This is gun camera video from those Apaches, provided to NBC News.
U: Is it clear?
U: I'm looking. Cross to the left. (Unintelligible) Romeo.
U: Firing.
U: I do not have that (unintelligible).
MARTIN: After about four hours, it was all over. Nine American soldiers had been killed.
MONTAGNE: It was a Sunday morning. We were doing our ritual, coming back from church and planning to go out to the beach.
MARTIN: Dave Brostrom remembers that day clearly.
MONTAGNE: And the doorbell rang and there was two people there at the front door - a captain chaplain and a major - who told us that our son had been killed by small arms fire in Afghanistan.
MARTIN: Several investigations have tried to answer those questions with different conclusions. One found that three of Brostrom's commanding officers were derelict in their duties. Then a few months later, another one reversed that decision. Now finally there's the Army's official history of the battle, which Dave Brostrom says puts too much blame on his son.
MONTAGNE: And this book will be put on the shelf for students and junior officers to pull out to try to get lessons learned on what went wrong in Afghanistan. And I just want the Army to get it right.
MARTIN: He's meeting today with top military officials at Fort Leavenworth to try to get it changed.
MONTAGNE: It really focuses on the platoon level and it's quick to blame the platoon leadership for the majority of the mistakes that the company and battalion made during the planning and execution of Wanat.
MARTIN: Brostrom thinks more senior officers should be held responsible because as he reads the history, he thinks his son is being singled out.
MONTAGNE: You know, at the end of the day, I think he did a pretty damn good job with what he had. Unfortunately, it cost him his life and those of eight other soldiers but it wasn't his fault. They were put in an untenable situation and the Army has refused to acknowledge that.
D: It is not our purpose to adjudicate blame.
MARTIN: Dr. William Robertson is the director of the Combat Studies Institute at Fort Leavenworth and is one of the officials Brostrom will meet today. His team's history never explicitly blames Lieutenant Brostrom but it does raise questions about his judgment - where he decided to build an observation post and why he wasn't conducting patrols in the village. Still, Robertson says the Army's history is accurate and fair.
MONTAGNE: No one said this is who you blame, this is who you exonerate. It's simply the result of several professional historians trying to work in their craft to try to tell a very sad but a very heroic story.
MARTIN: Dave Brostrom says he wants the Army to be able to learn from its mistakes and that means holding the right people accountable. But he admits this is personal.
MONTAGNE: Part of this is making sure the record's straight. My grandson thinks his father was a hero, which he was.
MARTIN: Rachel Martin, NPR News.
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MONTAGNE: This is NPR News.