Veteran writes about 82nd Airborne Division deployment to Afghanistan in 2009-10

More than 10 years ago, William “Will” Yeske deployed to a corner of the world known as the Arghandab River Valley of Afghanistan.

For Yeske and his fellow 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers in 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, nicknamed 2 Fury, “the valley” holds memories.

Some memories about deploying during the height of the Afghanistan War at a time that claimed the lives of paratroopers part of the 4th Brigade Combat Team are ones Yeske and his comrades will never forget.

Other memories are tucked away in diaries known as green books or on receipts. Still others are unspoken.

Yeske is a combat veteran who served more than 11 years in the Army, joining the regular Army in March 2008, then enlisting in the Reserves in October 2015 and remaining there until getting out as a sergeant in October 2018.

He is also a founding member of the veteran nonprofit, Rally for the Troops, which is part of Racing for Heroes, a nonprofit that connects veterans to resources and encourages veteran outreach through racing.

Yeske never intended to add the title of author to his resume and even joked with fellow paratrooper Sgt. Robert Musil when leaving the Arghandab River Valley that others in his unit would write a book before he would.

“I also knew how much this portion of history meant to the guys who were there,” Yeske said. “I didn’t want to be the one challenging their memories, bringing old wounds to the surface and possibly getting some of the facts wrong.”

However, participating in another book project a few years ago led Yeske to write his own book.

Damn the Valley

Yeske’s book, “Damn the Valley,” is a response to Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Kesling’s book “Bravo Company: An Afghanistan Deployment and its Aftermath,” which focused on Yeske's company’s 2009-10 deployment, Yeske said during a phone interview Wednesday.

He said portion of paratroopers in the unit felt that Kesling’s book focused more on Staff Sgt. Allen Thomas, who was medically evacuated from the Arghandab River Valley after a suicide bomber attack in March 2010.

While paratroopers in the unit saved Thomas, he later succumbed to suicide in September 2013, Yeske said.

"Guys thought it was only a small portion of the story,” Yeske said.

Their main concern, he said, was they felt the book wasn't a good representation of everything that happened in the valley while on the deployment.

“So, I ended up calling the author and told him about the concerns of the guys and asked him if he thought it was worth putting my collection of stories into a book form."

Emulating books written by Vietnam veterans that told the story from the viewpoint of enlisted soldiers without “pulling punches," Yeske said, he drafted a manuscript.

His book, he said, focuses on his unit’s 2009 to 2010 deployment to Afghanistan.

He said his book was reviewed by the Department of Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review to ensure it doesn’t contain any operational security or classified information.

He spoke to more than a dozen former comrades and paratroopers for different perspectives of their time serving in the valley, including the platoon sergeant who provided Yeske with notes from his diary, and others who scribbled notes on receipts.

Yeske said some he spoke to were happy to hear from him, while he could hear the dread in the voices of others and one former soldier angrily cursed at him, before calling him back three months later.

Others declined to be mentioned because “they are in a place in life that they don’t want these memories brought back up to haunt them again,” Yeske said.

“One person keeps stating that ‘You’re not the ‘keeper of the story,’ and he’s right,” Yeske wrote in the author’s notes of the book. “We all are, and I want the various guys that were there to bring it forward … The one certainty is that anyone who spent any amount of time within that valley during those years was affected in one way or another.”

He reached out to Casemate Publishers, a publisher and distributor of military history books that specializes in nonfiction.

“An editor got back to me and said she wanted to pitch it at a roundtable discussion the following week, and here we are a year later,” Yeske said.

Yeske said the title comes from a phrase he heard soldiers saying a lot toward the end of their deployment.

“They started saying, 'Damn the valley and the lives that it’s taking,'” Yeske said. “It got to the point that our (Family Readiness Group) asked us to stop putting DTV on social media posts, but this is for the guys we’ve lost.”

In addition to the Americans lost there, the valley has claimed soldiers going back to the troops of Alexander the Great and the British Empire, to most recently, the Russian army, he said.

Three paratroopers in Yeske’s company were killed in action, while a dozen more “suffered life-changing injuries,” he said.

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Yeske said while there was pushback from the publisher on the book’s title, he explained the meaning, which he said is depicted in the cover photo, taken by Sgt. Rodney Garcia immediately after a roadside bomb flattened their combat outpost.

“The guys were pulling out other guys who had been buried alive and Afghan children who did not make it, and the photo is of them pulling a flag from the rubble,” Yeske said. “The guys lifted the American flag from the debris as dirt, dust, and stones. It was an emotional picture that summed up our experience in the valley as we were constantly hit and would have to refit, regroup, and be right back at it hours later.”

He said that when he sought permission to use the photo, he learned the person who recovered it, Brian Errickson, still had it.

It is on display at the Airborne and Special Operations Museum in downtown Fayetteville where Yeske will host his book launch at 1 p.m. Nov. 11.

The book is scheduled for release Oct. 31, which Yeske said coincidentally happens to be the anniversary of his unit’s first firefight in the Helmand Province of Afghanistan.

Endorsements

Yeske’s book has received an endorsement from retired Gen. David Petraeus, former commander of U.S. Central Command and NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and others.

Petraeus said the book captures the “tense dynamics and relationships in the brotherhood of the close fight in the toughest imaginable conditions.”

The foreword of the book is written by retired Lt. Gen. Ben Hodges, who was director of operations for Regional Command-South in 2010 while in Kandahar.

“Even contending with mistakes at the strategic and political level in Afghanistan, our soldiers fought with courage and honor ...The men that served with Bravo Company were some of the best I ever saw... real All-Americans that fought relentlessly to deny the enemy movement through or establish a stronghold within the Arghandab Valley,” Hodges wrote.

In the afterword written by retired Command Sgt. Maj. Bert Puckett, Puckett said the Arghandab valley will “go down in the history next to other places infamous within military history, like the A Shau valley in Vietnam, the valley of death in Crimea, and the Shenandoah valley.”

Puckett wrote that soldiers moved into the valley and established themselves within a day.

“But then they were required to hold it. After a year of sustaining weekly casualties, they had succeeded, but no one that had entered that valley left unchanged,” he wrote. “We all left a piece of ourselves there … This story is timeless. It is the story of soldiers on the pointy end of a nation’s will ... It is a ‘soldier’s eye view’ of what the ground looked like when the ground was exploding around them.”

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Who the book is for

The book is described as a “non-fiction biography,” according to the publisher’s news release.

“It follows the story from the narrator’s perspective, but there are sections where it jumps to another guy telling a story from his point of view,” Yeske said.

There’s a portion of the book about Spc. Jason Johnston, who died a day after Christmas in 2009.

The section of the book about Johnston, Yeske said,  is told “from multiple perspectives,” because it was a mass casualty incident.

Yeske said that while he didn’t see what happened, he was in the compound and walked on the same portion of dirt where the blast was and was about 50 feet away when it went off.

Yeske, who had medic training, said he sprung into action, while a lieutenant called in their positions to officials and notified them there were causalities.

The book is dedicated to the memory of the soldiers in Yeske’s platoon and others in the brigade’s platoon who he didn’t know were killed in action until the end of his deployment.

They are:

•  Spc. Jason Johnston, 24, of Albion, New York, who died Dec. 26, 2009.

•  Staff Sgt. Scott Brunkhorst,25, of Bridgewater, New Jersey, who died March 30, 2010.

•  Spc. Joseph Caron,21, of Roy, Washington, who died April 11, 2010.

•  Spc. Christopher Moon, 20, of Tuscon, Arizona, who died July 13, 2010.

•  Staff Sgt. Allen Thomas, 29, of Fayetteville, who died Sept. 28, 2013.

•  Sgt. Derek Hill, 36, of Woodlawn, Virginia, who died Sept. 11, 2018.

•  Sgt. Jason Spottedhorse, 29, of Moore, Oklahoma, who died May 29, 2019.

Yeske said he wants others to understand that the book is not about him —it’s about those he served with.

“This was a book that was written for and with the men of Bravo Company 2/508 to establish a record of their deeds and actions on the battlefield over 10 years ago,” Yeske wrote in its final pages. “It is a sensitive book for some and a chapter of some people’s lives that they would rather forget than carry with them any further. Such is the way of war sometimes.”

Yeske said he hopes it’ll get others to share their stories, or at least reach out to each other

“I hope that the guys within (the) division get ahold of this book and realize that we need to not only honor our past but learn from it as well,” he said. “We need to take the good with the bad.”

“Damn the Valley” can be preordered on sites like Barnes & Noble or Amazon.

Updates can also be found on https://damnthevalleybook.com/.

Staff writer Rachael Riley can be reached at rriley@fayobserver.com or 910-486-3528.

This article originally appeared on The Fayetteville Observer: Why former paratrooper wrote a book about 2009-10 Afghanistan deployment