Inside the kitchen drawer of his home, Beau Wise keeps two pairs of dog tags. One belonged to his older brother Ben, a Green Beret who died from gunshot wounds after a firefight in northern Afghanistan. The second pair belonged to his oldest brother Jeremy, a former Navy SEAL-turned-CIA contractor, who was one of seven Langley operatives killed when a suicide bomber blew himself up at an agency base in southeastern Afghanistan.
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These are the small but weighty totems of a sole survivor, the World War II-era designation for Beau, 37, a former Marine sergeant who also deployed to the Afghanistan war — but lived.
One family, two sacrifices
Beau’s status — and his family’s as one of a tiny number to lose two service members in Iraq and Afghanistan — has also endowed him with a distinct perspective on the cost of the longest war in U.S. history and the way it is ending.
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He said watching the Taliban seize control of Afghanistan again has been “an absolute horror. A gut punch. The Taliban is now more powerful than what they were before the Sept. 11 attacks. I am terrified watching television, not just by what’s happened, but also by what’s inevitable.”
“But regardless of this outcome,” Beau said in an interview, “I believe Jeremy and Ben would have done it again — and so would I. We felt a duty to each other.”
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His brothers are buried side by side in a veterans cemetery in Suffolk, Va. Beau said they wanted to protect Afghanistan from becoming a haven for terrorists, prevent another attack against the U.S. and stabilize a war-ravaged country. Now, he worries the Taliban’s swift return to power has emboldened their movement, and even more terrifying outcomes might lie ahead.
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“What’s the Taliban’s next move? They’re not just going to stay in Afghanistan. They’ll go to Yemen. Baghdad. Who knows,” Beau said.
The Wise family’s combat service after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks was remarkable: All three brothers — Jeremy, Ben, and Beau — deployed to war zones in Iraq or Afghanistan or both. From 2003 to 2012, the siblings served at various points for more than 1,600 days fighting for the Army, Marines, the Navy, plus the CIA.
Beau deployed twice to Afghanistan, often serving as the lead gunner in the turret of an armored vehicle. He said he never faced any immediate threats to his life in the more than 300 days he spent in the war zone. At one point, in early 2010, he remembers having to patrol a road that led straight into a Taliban-controlled city to ensure no one planted roadside bombs. “The closest my life came into danger was when rounds impacted a nearby vehicle,” he recalled, “or another time when a round cracked over my head and I was in the turret.”
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Beau said he’s always known his brothers didn’t die in vain, and that feeling was solidified recently when he interviewed his brothers’ friends for a memoir he and co-author Tom Sileo just published.
“I heard it over and over. My brothers inspired other people and saved other people. There are people walking the earth today because of Jeremy and Ben,” Beau said. “All of those testimonials, that’s what I am clinging to these days.”
When they were growing up in the small city of El Dorado, Ark., a little more than a 100 miles south of Little Rock, their parents, Mary Wise, a stay-at-home mother, and the late Jean Wise, a head-and-neck surgeon, were always puzzled by their sons’ swagger and military interests. The oldest, Jeremy, graduated from college but dropped out of medical school to become a SEAL. Ben and Beau also enrolled in college, but the undergraduate life didn’t suit them, so they left and enlisted. The Wise’s fourth child, a daughter, Heather Wise, was the only one who didn’t join the military.
Eventually, all three Wise brothers saw combat. Ben was the first to go. He served in Iraq from November 2003 to late 2004. Then, Jeremy left for Iraq with the SEALs, once in 2005, then again from 2006 to 2007. The two older brothers overlapped in Iraq during separate deployments in 2008 and 2009.
By September 2009, Jeremy left the SEALs and was hired by Xe Services, the security contracting company formerly known as Blackwater that had been founded by Erik Prince.
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Just a few months into his new position, Jeremy was providing security for CIA officers at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, when a car carrying a prized asset, a Jordanian doctor, rumbled toward the entrance on Dec. 30, 2009. All of the CIA officers were lined up outside ready to greet him. The agency believed he was a “golden source” who’d infiltrated al-Qaeda’s upper command and was willing to spill valuable secrets.
But when Humam al-Balawi stepped out, he detonated a suicide vest concealed under his kameez tunic. Jeremy, 35, one other Xe Services contractor and five agency officers were killed.
He left behind a 28-year-old wife, Dana, and a stepson, Ethan, 6. It was the CIA’s worst tragedy in more than two decades and would later be the subject of a book, “The Triple Agent” by Washington Post reporter Joby Warrick, and dramatized in the 2012 film, “Zero Dark Thirty.”
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A little more than two years later, on Jan. 9, 2012, Ben, 34, a medic in the Green Berets, volunteered for a mission in northern Balkh province with about 50 Afghan commandos targeting a senior Taliban official. He was three weeks from returning home to Washington state to be with his wife, their young son, and his two stepchildren. Early that morning, Ben engaged with enemies hiding out in a cave. He got hit multiple times, in his legs, pelvis and abdomen.
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Ben was evacuated and eventually flown to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. Beau, who’d just completed his second deployment to Afghanistan, quickly flew to Germany with Ben’s wife, Traci. But when they arrived, Ben’s condition was grave. His legs were amputated, his kidneys were failing and his blood had turned septic. The doctors told them there was little they could do. He and Traci stood over Ben’s body, and as a chaplain prayed, they watched him pass away.
Then, he flew with his brother’s remains to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. He’d been there before — when Jeremy’s remains were flown home two years earlier.
Now, a host of military officials arrived for Ben’s ritual, including Beau’s boss, Marine Commandant Gen. James F. Amos. Amos greeted the family and approached Beau’s mother, Mary. He apologized to her. Then he vowed Beau would never see another day of combat again.
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Beau, who actually wanted to return to the war zone, remained on active-duty until 2016 as an instructor and then joined the reserves. In 2020, he let his military contract expire.
He eventually moved with his wife Amber, to Oklahoma, where he co-owns a liquor store, and tends to their two small children, Zach, 4, and Sarah, 2. In January, he and Sileo published a memoir about the family’s sacrifices, “Three Wise Men.”
As part of the book tour, Beau wound up doing interviews with Jake Tapper of CNN and Martha Raddatz of ABC. In May, for the first time ever, he visited the CIA’s headquarters, where he met the new director William J. Burns and visited its revered Memorial Wall, where he could view rows of black stars signifying agency operatives who have died in the line of duty, including Jeremy. He also got to throw out the first pitch at a Washington Nationals baseball game.
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While Beau supports the Biden administration’s decision to withdraw troops, he believes the government should have agreed to leave behind a minimum number of military personnel to fend off Taliban assaults. He also wishes the U.S. government had kept at least some of its military bases operational until everyone — American diplomats and Afghan civilians who aided the military, State Department and CIA — had gotten out of the country safely.
“The [special immigrant visa] applicants should have been made citizens a long time ago,” Beau said. “So many guys I know who served are getting contacted by Afghan interpreters and people they worked with. Their Afghan contacts are writing goodbye letters.”
When he deployed to Afghanistan, he could tell that installing a modern democracy in a country so riven with internal factions was a near impossible task. It was a struggle, he added, even trying to explain to Afghans in the countryside why U.S. forces were occupying their soil in the first place.
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“When I got to Helmand province, you would tell local civilians we were there because ‘two planes struck towers in Manhattan’ and they didn’t know what Manhattan was,” Beau said.
He wishes the Afghan army had stood their ground and fought back harder, but he also recognizes that their fear of the Taliban might have been more profound than he could fathom.
“They were bringing their gear to the Taliban and bartering for their lives. They realized they could have been beheaded,” he said. “So, yes, in many respects, I have sympathy for the Afghan army.”
Beau is not the only member of the Wise family who has been reflecting this week on what the war cost them. Dana Bernhardt has been thinking a lot about her late husband, Jeremy.
“Part of Jeremy is still in Afghanistan,” said Bernhardt, who is 40 and lives in Virginia Beach. “His wedding ring is somewhere, pieces of it in the dirt.”
Nearly three years after Jeremy died, Dana remarried. Her husband, Matt Bernhardt, a former Navy explosive ordnance disposal technician, works as a fireman. The couple has two daughters together, Isabel, 7, and Vivian, almost 3. She also has a son, Ethan, from a previous relationship who viewed Jeremy as a father. Ethan is now 18 and enlisting in the Marines next month. He was always inspired by Jeremy, she said.
In no way, Dana said, does the Taliban’s rise negate Jeremy’s or Ben’s sacrifices or those of anyone else who served. “We have lived without another Sept. 11 attack for 20 years. Who knows what some of these terrorists who were eradicated would have done,” she said. “My husband was a part of that. Jeremy and Ben fought the good fight.”
But their absence hurts. Beau feels the loss every time he pulls out the baseball he threw at the Washington Nationals game.
“I twirl the baseball around in my hands at work. I fidget with it. It helps calm me down,” Beau said. “I just wish I had someone to play catch with.”
Read more:
He was a baby when his dad died in Afghanistan. He’s 18 now, and the war still isn’t over.
Children of the fallen: What it’s like losing a parent in America’s longest war
For CIA family, a deadly suicide bombing leads to painful divisions
The frantic effort to save lives after a deadly attack on the CIA