Bravo Company: An Afghanistan Deployment and Its Aftermath

Journalist and Marine Corps veteran Kesling’s gut-wrenching debut documents the physical and psychological tolls of the war in Afghanistan through the story of one U.S. Army unit’s deployment. In 2009, the 82nd Airborne’s Bravo Company went to Afghanistan’s Arghandab Valley to conduct foot patrols against the Taliban. Kesling draws empathetic yet incisive profiles of the unit’s officers and grunts, many of whom enlisted after the 9/11 attacks: “It’s a simple truth that men who go to war want an orgasm of violence for the sake of violence itself,” he writes. “Don’t let them tell you any different.” Setting up their combat outpost in a radish field, Bravo Company began patrolling in December 2009 and sustained its first fatality from a Taliban IED the day after Christmas. Kesling conveys the visceral horror of such deaths (“With an IED it’s not dust to dust. It’s to pink mist, the result of a violent and horrible cancellation of a person’s parts and pieces”) and their long-term effects: three soldiers dead, dozens with life-altering dismemberments, two suicides, and dozens of attempted suicides. He also reports on the soldiers’ difficult reintegration into civilian life, the unique challenges of traumatic brain injuries, and the 2019 launch of Operation Resiliency, a program that organizes unit reunions with an explicit focus on mental well-being. Devastating yet cautiously hopeful, this is an essential study of combat trauma. Agent: Rafe Sagalyn, ICM/Sagalyn. (Nov.)