Before Brostrom moved to Wanat, he went home on leave to see his parents in Hawaii, where they had settled after his father retired from the Army. One evening, he showed his father videos from Afghanistan. Most of the clips were of Brostrom and his troops under fire at the Bella outpost.

In one video, Brostrom's battalion fired artillery and white phosphorus, an incendiary weapon, at a distant campfire in the mountains where it had killed insurgents earlier that day. Someone had come to collect the bodies. The soldiers were determined to kill them.

"Here comes a mighty big explosion on this little candlelight ceremony that the Taliban is having for their buddies that died there earlier," one of the soldiers says on the video. "This is going to be glorious. It is going to be a bloodbath."

A few seconds later, the mountainside exploded with fire, and the soldiers let up a raucous cheer.

Human rights groups have criticized the United States for employing white phosphorus to kill enemy fighters, but this type of use is permitted under military rules. The elder Brostrom weighed his words carefully before he spoke. "How do you know those people dragging the bodies away weren't villagers coming to get their relatives?" he asked.

"They are all [expletive] Taliban up there," the son replied.

The father continued to press his doubts. The son maintained that the hard-nosed approach was the only thing keeping him alive in a hopeless corner of Afghanistan. Finally, the young lieutenant snapped. "You don't understand," he said.

"You're right, son. I don't," the father replied. "I don't understand it. But I am worried. I am really worried."

Nothing as Planned

A few days later, Brostrom returned to Afghanistan. His platoon didn't get its final order to establish the Wanat base until early July. The battalion was only two weeks from returning home, but Ostlund and his superiors wanted to make sure that the outpost was in place for the next unit.

The day before he left, Brostrom confessed his doubts about the mission to Lt. Brandon Kennedy, his closest friend in the Army. Brostrom worried he didn't have enough men to hold off an enemy attack and complained that the proposed base's location, surrounded by mountains, would make it hard to defend, Kennedy wrote in a statement for Army investigators.

"He said he knew he was going to get [expletive] up, because the last four times he had gone up there, he had been ambushed every time, often with very good effects," Kennedy wrote.