An Aiea man who believes his son was killed in Afghanistan as a result of Army negligence now says the Army is trying to whitewash the history of the 2008 battle that killed nine Americans and wounded 27 others.

David Brostrom’s son, Jonathan, was a 24-year-old first lieutenant in charge of a platoon that was ambushed by an overwhelming force of about 200 enemy fighters in the village of Wanat on July 13, 2008, in eastern Afghanistan.

A seesaw series of conflicting investigations into the battle — the deadliest excluding helicopter crashes since the war started in 2001 — has since been produced by some of the senior-most members of the U.S. military.

The latest report to surface is a 274-page "lessons learned" analysis from the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., which itself diverges from a previous draft that was highly critical of command decisions leading up to the battle.

Brostrom said the final report unjustly removes blame from senior Army commanders and places it on his relatively low-ranking son. Forty-nine Americans and 24 Afghan soldiers had arrived just days before the attack to set up a new outpost in Wanat and were low on water and other supplies in 100-degree heat.

Brostrom, a retired Army colonel, said the report is an attempt by the Army to avoid command responsibility.

"We can argue all day long where my son placed the machine guns in the observation post and the mortar pit — and it wouldn’t have made a difference," Brostrom said. "The bottom line is the Army refuses to acknowledge the facts that (two senior U.S. military leaders) brought out saying, ‘Hey, the platoon did everything they could given the limited resources they had.’ The problem is you gave them a mission that was too big, and then you forgot about them."

Lt. Col. Robert Whetstone, a Combined Arms Center spokesman, said he does not believe that the Army rewrote history with the report, which will be used to educate soldiers about the battle and does not seek to assign blame.

"It was strictly a factual-based (study) of what happened in this particular battle," Whetstone said.

Military historian Douglas Cubbison wrote the controversial draft, which was leaked to the press. Other historians developed the final report.

Criticism of senior command decisions that was prevalent in Cubbison’s 248-page draft is absent from the final report.

Cubbison concluded that the 173rd Airborne Brigade Combat Team command failed at its given counterinsurgency mission and failed the soldiers who were sent to Wanat.

After 14 months in Afghanistan, the American commanders "had grown complacent," Cubbison said. "In their hubris, they forgot that a new position is most vulnerable in the early days of its formation."

The single U.S. platoon was "insufficient combat power" to establish a new outpost while also maintaining security, he wrote.

The final report strikes a much different tone.

Although the battalion and brigade commanders did not visit Wanat, and the company commander arrived the day before the attack, "this was hardly an example of command neglect," the final version states.

The commanders had "busy schedules" and multiple operations going on in the days leading up to the battle.

The report singles out Jonathan Brostrom’s selection of a location for an observation post — where he and eight others were killed — as "potentially fatally vulnerable" because of obstructed space to one side.

Brostrom, a Damien Memorial School and University of Hawaii graduate, chose the location because he felt that if attacked, the observation post had to be close enough to the main camp to provide easy reinforcement.

Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Richard Natonski, tasked with investigating the lead-up to the battle, last January found battalion commander Lt. Col. William Ostlund and company commander Matthew Myer neglectfully derelict of their duties to properly supervise the Wanat move, and brigade commander Charles Preysler derelict through "culpable inefficiency" for failing to maintain sufficient knowledge of the plan.

Later that month, Gen. David Petraeus, then-head of U.S. Central Command, endorsed Natonski’s investigation, and the three 173rd Brigade officers received letters of reprimand.

The matter took another twist when Army Gen. Charles Campbell issued a memorandum May 13 saying he had interviewed the three officers and that he was overturning the findings and rescinding the discipline.

"That U.S. casualties occurred at Wanat is true," Campbell wrote. "However, they did not occur as a result of deficient decisions, planning and actions of the chain of command."

Army Secretary John McHugh wrote to David Brostrom in October saying that Campbell had reviewed 800 pages of "additional materials and relevant evidence developed during the course" of Campbell’s inquiry, and he determined that Campbell’s findings were "valid and well founded."

David Brostrom said he has asked for, but has not received, the 800 pages of information McHugh references to see what additional information they contain.

Brostrom said at the least, the "lessons learned" Wanat report should have included Petraeus’ and Natonski’s findings.

At worst, the Combined Arms Center let the Army down, he said.

"To repeatedly blame a dead 1LT (Jonathan Brostrom) while exonerating everyone else with lame excuses is embarrassing," said David Brostrom, a 30-year Army veteran. "The lessons learned in this report are veiled to say the least."