I was to spend weeks at a time up on that hilltop, and it soon became clear that if I were to get killed over the course of the next year, Restrepo was almost certainly the place it would happen. It wasn"t was to spend weeks at a time up on that hilltop, and it soon became clear that if I were to get killed over the course of the next year, Restrepo was almost certainly the place it would happen. It wasn"t likely likely but it was possible, so I had the strange experience of knowing the location of my fate in advance. That made Restrepo an easy focus for all my fears, a place where the unimaginable had to be considered in detail. Once while leaning against some sandbags I was surprised to feel some dirt fly into my face. It didn"t make any sense until I heard the gunshots a second later. How close was that round? Six inches? A foot? When the implications of that kind of thing finally sink in you start studying the place a little more carefully: the crows that ride the thermals off the back side of the ridge, the holly oaks shot to pieces first by the Americans and then by the enemy, and the C-wire and the sandbags and shantytown hooches clinging to the hillsides. It certainly isn"t beautiful up there, but the fact that it might be the last place you"ll ever see does give it a kind of glow. but it was possible, so I had the strange experience of knowing the location of my fate in advance. That made Restrepo an easy focus for all my fears, a place where the unimaginable had to be considered in detail. Once while leaning against some sandbags I was surprised to feel some dirt fly into my face. It didn"t make any sense until I heard the gunshots a second later. How close was that round? Six inches? A foot? When the implications of that kind of thing finally sink in you start studying the place a little more carefully: the crows that ride the thermals off the back side of the ridge, the holly oaks shot to pieces first by the Americans and then by the enemy, and the C-wire and the sandbags and shantytown hooches clinging to the hillsides. It certainly isn"t beautiful up there, but the fact that it might be the last place you"ll ever see does give it a kind of glow.
For some reason my worry about dying took the form of planning the attack that would kill me - kill us all - in the most minute detail. Some of the men thought the place was impregnable, but I had other ideas. You"d want to hit Restrepo at four in the morning, I decided, while everyone was asleep or groggy from sleeping pills. (They took them to keep from jerking awake at night from imaginary gunfire.) First you"d hit the south-facing guard tower and take out the Mark 19, a belt-fed grenade machine gun that could stop almost any a.s.sault in its tracks. After that you"d rake the gun ports with small-arms fire from the south and west and send successive waves of men up the draw. The first wave would absorb the Claymores and the second probably wouldn"t make it either, but by the third or fourth, you"d be inside the wire fighting hooch to hooch.
"It would start with RPGs and seventy-five to a hundred guys rushing the wire," Jones said when I asked him how it would go down. "And they don"t take prisoners. The guys are killed next to you, you got to defend to the last man because n.o.body"s gonna help you. The KOP is a thousand meters away but it might as well be in a different country because they"re not getting to you. So you"d either have to make up your mind to fight until you die, or you"d just say, "Okay, everyone is dead around me, I"m just gonna go, I"m just gonna leave this place." And the problem is that all these weapons can be moved, we can set up the .50 and light up the KOP. Then you"ve got problems in the whole valley. And if they overran it they"re gonna kill soldiers, so there"s still gonna be bodies of soldiers up here. You wouldn"t be able to recover those bodies if you dropped a bomb on it. For them to fully overrun us? It would definitely definitely be a bad day." be a bad day."
That was Jones"s take. At night I put my vest and helmet at my feet and kept my boots tied loosely so that I could jam my feet into them but not trip over the laces. Waking up to them doing a "Ranch House" on us was by far the most terrifying thing I could imagine, and arranging my things so that I could be out the door in thirty seconds was how I coped with those fears. It didn"t work very well. I"d lie awake at night amazed by the idea that everything could change - could, in fact, end - at any moment. And even after I went to sleep those thoughts would just continue on as dreams, full-blown combat sequences that I wallowed through like a bad action movie. In those dreams the enemy was relentless and everywhere at once and I didn"t have a chance.
As a civilian among soldiers I was aware that a failure of nerve by me could put other men at risk, and that idea was almost as mortifying as the very real dangers up there. The problem with fear, though, is that it isn"t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy - anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding - and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another. Before the firefights everyone got sort of edgy, glancing around with little half-smiles that seemed to say, "This is what we do - crazy, huh?" and those moments never really bothered me. I trusted the guys I was with and usually just concentrated on finding cover and getting the video camera ready. The fights themselves went by in a blur; if I remembered even half of what happened I was doing well. (I always watched the videotape afterward and was amazed by how much dropped out.) I truly froze only once when we got hit unexpectedly and very hard. I didn"t have my body armor or camera near me - stupid, stupid - and endured thirty seconds of paralyzed incomprehension until Tim darted through fire to grab our gear and drag it back behind a Hesco.
Combat jammed so much adrenaline through your system that fear was rarely an issue; far more indicative of real courage was how you felt before the big operations, when the implications of losing your life really had a chance to sink in. My personal weakness wasn"t fear so much as the antic.i.p.ation of it. If I had any illusions about personal courage, they always dissolved in the days or hours before something big, dread acc.u.mulating in my blood like some kind of toxin until I felt too apathetic to even tie my boots properly. As far as I could tell everyone up there got scared from time to time, there was no stigma to it as long as you didn"t allow it to affect the others, and journalists were no exception. Once I got completely unnerved when Second Platoon was standing by as a quick-reaction force for Firebase Vegas, which was about to get attacked. This was my last trip, I was days from leaving the Korengal forever, and there was a chance that in the next few hours a Chinook would drop us off in the middle of a ma.s.sive firefight on the Abas Ghar. I was getting my gear ready for the experience - extra water, extra batteries, take the side plates off my vest to save weight - but I guess my face betrayed more anxiety than I realized. "It"s okay to be scared," Moreno said to me, loud enough for everyone else to hear, "you just don"t want to show show it..." it..."
There are different kinds of strength, and containing fear may be the most profound, the one without which armies couldn"t function and wars couldn"t be fought (G.o.d forbid). There are big, tough guys in the Army who are cowards and small, feral-looking dudes, like Monroe, who will methodically take apart a SAW while rounds are slapping the rocks all around them. The more literal forms of strength, like carrying 160 pounds up a mountain, depend more obviously on the size of your muscles, but muscles only do what you tell them, so it still keeps coming back to the human spirit. Wars are fought with very heavy machinery that works best on top of the biggest hill in the area and used against men who are lower down. That, in a nutsh.e.l.l, is military tactics, and it means that an enormous amount of war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.
I was always amazed at the sheer variety of body shapes in the platoon, the radically different designs for accomplishing the same thing. Donoho was six-three and built like an ironing board but carried a full SAW kit, 120 pounds. Walker was an ample, good-natured kid who just sort of trudged along but was essentially unstoppable. (Once the guys quietly filled his ruck with an extra fifty pounds of canned food on top of the eighty he was already carrying; he just hoisted it onto his shoulders and walked to Restrepo without even commenting.) Bobby Wilson was a 240 gunner from Georgia with fingers like sausages and feet that were literally square: size 6, quadruple-E. He straight up described himself as fat but had some kind of crazy redneck strength that was more like hydraulics than musculature. He was known for not even bothering to duck punches when he got into bar fights, he just walked straight into whatever the other guy had for him until he got close enough to clinch. Once the platoon needed to get something called an LRAS down from Restrepo and there were no helicopters to sling it out. An LRAS is a thermal-optical device the size of a filing cabinet that weighs well over a hundred pounds. They just strapped it to Bobby and off he went with a bottle of water in one hand and his 9 mil in the other.
On and on the list went, scrawny guys like Monroe or Pemble carrying as much as big, rangy guys like Jones or the outright mules like Wilson or Walker. The only man who was truly in his own category was Vandenberge, a specialist in Weapons Squad who stood six foot five and arrived in the Korengal weighing three hundred pounds. His hands were so big I was told he could palm sandbags as if they were basketb.a.l.l.s. He could pick up a SAW one-handed - twenty-three pounds plus ammo - and shoot it like a pistol. I saw him throw Kim over his shoulder, ford a stream, and then climb halfway up Honcho Hill without even seeming to notice. Once someone wondered aloud whether Vandenberge could ready-up the .50, meaning put it to his shoulder and fire it like a rifle. The .50 weighs almost a hundred pounds and is never fired off its tripod or carried by less than two men. Vandenberge wrapped his huge paws around it, brought it to his shoulder, and sighted down the barrel like he was shooting squirrels with a .22. He rarely spoke but had a shy smile that would emerge from time to time, particularly when men were talking about just how d.a.m.n big he was. "Vandenberge you big b.a.s.t.a.r.d," someone said to him in pa.s.sing once. Vandenberge was sitting on a cot doing something. "My bad," he said without even looking up.
O"Byrne wasn"t big but it was like he was made out of sc.r.a.p metal, scars here and there, and nothing seemed to hurt him. Walking point on patrols he had to slow himself down so that he didn"t outwalk the rest of the platoon. Once they were clawing their way up Table Rock after a twenty-hour operation and a man in another squad started falling out. "He can"t can"t be smoked here," I heard O"Byrne seethe to Sergeant Mac in the dark, "he doesn"t have the be smoked here," I heard O"Byrne seethe to Sergeant Mac in the dark, "he doesn"t have the right right to be." The idea that you"re not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succ.u.mb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you"re not prepared to walk for someone you"re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon. to be." The idea that you"re not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succ.u.mb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you"re not prepared to walk for someone you"re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.
There was no way to overhear a comment like O"Byrne"s without considering one"s own obligation to keep up. You slow down a patrol, the enemy has time to get into position and then someone gets shot. Trying to imagine being the cause of that scenario was like trying to imagine crashing in a Chinook: at some point my mind just refused to partic.i.p.ate in the experiment. I rea.s.sured myself with the thought that I was twice the age of the soldiers but carried half the weight they did, so in some ways it was a fair fight. I also ran track and cross-country in college, and, twenty-five years later, I still remembered how to negotiate the long, horrible process of physical collapse. It starts with pain, of course, but that pain is at the edge of what I thought of as a deep, dark valley. At the bottom of the valley is true incapacitation, but it might take hours to get down there, working your way through strata of misery and dissociation until your muscles simply stop obeying and your mind can"t even be trusted to give commands that make sense. The most valuable thing I knew from all that running was that when you start hurting you"re not even close close to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don"t panic at the first agonies there"s much, much more of yourself to give. to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don"t panic at the first agonies there"s much, much more of yourself to give.
I wore a body armor vest like the soldiers did - they called it an "IBA" - and a helmet, which they called a "Kevlar." Together those weighed around thirty pounds. I had a five-pound video camera, five pounds of water in a CamelBak, and maybe another twenty pounds of food and clothing if we were going out overnight. I could walk all day with fifty or sixty pounds on my back but I couldn"t run more than a hundred yards at a time - no one could - and few people could run uphill more than a few steps. I carried my camera on a strap but it got destroyed swinging into rocks on a nighttime operation, so I hooked the new one onto a carabiner that hung off my left shoulder. That way it swung less and was easier to put my hands on quickly. I had extra batteries and tapes in my vest as well as a medical kit, and on patrols I strapped a CamelBak directly to it so that I could ditch my pack and still be okay. I had my blood type, "O POS," written on my boots, helmet, and vest, and I had my press pa.s.s b.u.t.toned into a pants pocket along with a headlamp, a folding knife, and notebook and pens. Everything I needed was on me pretty much all the time.
Patrols on hot days came down to water versus distance: you didn"t want to go dry, but neither did you want to carry ten extra pounds if you were going to have to run anywhere. I"d try to have drunk three-quarters of my water by the turnaround point of a patrol, and then at the bottom of the steep climb to Restrepo I"d sip at it steadily so I was light and hydrated when we were most likely to get hit. I"d find myself doing a body check all the way up: "Legs okay, breathing labored, mouth dry but not too bad," various internal levels that had been calibrated during races in college and never forgotten. (It didn"t matter how badly off I was as long as some other soldier was worse; I just didn"t want to be the one holding things up.) I never went on a patrol that hurt more than an even moderately hard college race, and I"ve never run a race that held anything close to the implications of the most mundane task a hundred meters outside the wire.
Giving in to fear or exhaustion were the ways in which a soldier could fail his platoon, but there were ways a reporter could screw things up as well. Tim broke his ankle on a nighttime operation on the Abas Ghar, but the medic told him it was only sprained so that, mentally, Tim would think he could walk on it. And he did. There was no other way to get him out of there, and if the platoon were still on the mountain at dawn they were going to get hammered. He walked all night on a fractured fibula with only Motrin as a painkiller, and they didn"t tell him it was broken until he got to the KOP. They put a steel plate and a bunch of screws into his leg and a few months later he was back in business.
Several years earlier in Zabul I had asked the battalion commander how discreet I had to be on my satellite phone when calling home, and he just said, "Big-boy rules, I hope I don"t have to explain what that means." Tim was playing by big-boy rules up there, which essentially means making your interests secondary to those of the group no matter how much it costs you.
"There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate hate each other," O"Byrne told me one morning. We were sitting in ambush above the village of Bandeleek listening to mortars shriek over our heads, and there wasn"t much to do but flinch and talk about the platoon. "But they would also die for each other. So you kind of have to ask, "How much could I really hate the guy?"" each other," O"Byrne told me one morning. We were sitting in ambush above the village of Bandeleek listening to mortars shriek over our heads, and there wasn"t much to do but flinch and talk about the platoon. "But they would also die for each other. So you kind of have to ask, "How much could I really hate the guy?""
Around midmorning a squad of Scouts comes walking in through the wire, uniforms plastered to their bodies and sweat running off the ends of their noses. Second Platoon has been hacking away at the hillside all morning and the men pause at their shovels and pickaxes to greet them. Guttie was MEDEVACed last night without incident and it has been quiet all morning, which may simply mean the enemy is out of ammunition. The Scouts have a different vibe from the regular line soldiers, leaner and quieter, and they seem to carry a little less gear. Their job is to patrol beyond anywhere line infantry would go and then report back what they see. Sometimes they"ll set in for days at a time and just watch. They"re not supposed to get into firefights, and when they do engage, it"s often just a single shot from a sniper rifle.
The squad leader is a short, strong-looking man with dark eyes and jet-black hair named Larry Rougle. Rougle has done six combat tours in six years and is known in Battle Company as a legendary bada.s.s and some kind of ultimate soldier. Once Phoenix got hit and Rougle and his men grabbed their weapons at the KOP and ran down there so fast that Piosa was still on the radio calling in the attack when they walked in the wire. You couldn"t even get there that fast in a Humvee. Rougle talks to Piosa in the bunker while his men pour bottled water down their throats and half an hour later they form up and Tim and I grab our packs and follow them out of the wire. We contour around the draw until we reach OP 1, which sits on a promontory west of the KOP. It"s only manned by four men at a time and it"s almost impossible to attack, so there"s nothing for the men to do up there but wave away the flies and think about how many months they have left. When we arrive Rougle stands on a bunker and looks eastward toward the Abas Ghar.
"Everything you can see," he says to me, "I"ve walked on."
6.
DAWN AT THE KOP: KOP: ONE LAST PLANET LIKE A PINHOLE ONE LAST PLANET LIKE A PINHOLE in the sky, crows rising on the valley thermals. The sun about to crack open the day from beyond the Abas Ghar. I"m sitting on the broken office chair outside the hooch waiting to see what will happen. Kearney has ordered stand-to at zero hundred hours - 4:30 a.m. local - because there"s intel the enemy may attack the KOP and try to breach the wire. Men are shuffling around, fumbling for their weapons. Stand-to means you get dressed and geared up and if you don"t get attacked you can go back to sleep. The men sleep as much as they can, every chance they get, far beyond the needs of the human body. "If you sleep twelve hours a day it"s only a seven-month deployment," one soldier explained. in the sky, crows rising on the valley thermals. The sun about to crack open the day from beyond the Abas Ghar. I"m sitting on the broken office chair outside the hooch waiting to see what will happen. Kearney has ordered stand-to at zero hundred hours - 4:30 a.m. local - because there"s intel the enemy may attack the KOP and try to breach the wire. Men are shuffling around, fumbling for their weapons. Stand-to means you get dressed and geared up and if you don"t get attacked you can go back to sleep. The men sleep as much as they can, every chance they get, far beyond the needs of the human body. "If you sleep twelve hours a day it"s only a seven-month deployment," one soldier explained.
The day broadens and no attack comes. I walk up to the operations center to talk to Kearney, who is half asleep at his desk. Third Platoon will be going onto the Abas Ghar in a couple of days and Tim and I are going with them. (Jones: "Personally, I wouldn"t follow them into a Dairy Queen.") Around midafternoon a sniper on the ridge above Restrepo starts shooting into the KOP; it"s not the attack that was expected but it"s enough to get everyone"s attention. When the men move around the base they sprint the open sections until, ka-SHAAH ka-SHAAH, another round cracks past and they stop behind a Hesco. (Soldiers spend a good deal of time trying to figure out how to reproduce the sound of gunfire verbally, and "ka-SHAAH" was the word Second Platoon seemed to have settled on.) I"m sitting in the broken office chair outside the hooch, which has pretty good cover, watching Tim make his way to the burn-s.h.i.tters. He runs to a tree, lurks there for a moment, and then runs to the next tree. If you didn"t know about the sniper you"d think he was doing some comic routine of an Englishman gone completely mad in the noonday sun.
Snipers have the power to make even silence unnerving, so their effectiveness is way out of proportion to the number of rounds they shoot. The KOP"s mortars eventually start up, great explosions that crash through the base and then rumble back to us from the mountaintops. They may have killed the guy, but I doubt it, and in the end it doesn"t even matter; it"s just one man with a rifle and ten dollars" worth of ammunition. He doesn"t even need need to hit anyone to be effective: helicopters aren"t flying into the valley and thirty or forty men spend the afternoon behind sandbags trying to figure out whether they"re getting shot at by a Russian-made Dragunov or an old Enfield .308. Once I was at the operations center when single shots started coming in, and First Sergeant Caldwell headed for the door to deal with it. On his way out I asked him what was going on. "Some jacka.s.s wastin" our time," he said. to hit anyone to be effective: helicopters aren"t flying into the valley and thirty or forty men spend the afternoon behind sandbags trying to figure out whether they"re getting shot at by a Russian-made Dragunov or an old Enfield .308. Once I was at the operations center when single shots started coming in, and First Sergeant Caldwell headed for the door to deal with it. On his way out I asked him what was going on. "Some jacka.s.s wastin" our time," he said.
That jacka.s.s was probably a local teenager who was paid by one of the insurgent groups to fire off a magazine"s worth of ammo at the KOP. The going rate was five dollars a day. He could fire at the base until mortars started coming back at him and then he could drop off the back side of the ridge and be home in twenty minutes. Mobility has always been the default choice of guerrilla fighters because they don"t have access to the kinds of heavy weapons that would slow them down. The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound - even defeat - a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on what amateurs you"re talking about - or what empires - but it does does mean that you can"t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers. mean that you can"t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.
For every technological advantage held by the Americans, the Taliban seemed to have an equivalent or a countermeasure. Apache helicopters have thermal imaging that reveals body heat on the mountainside, so Taliban fighters disappear by covering themselves in a blanket on a warm rock. The Americans use unmanned drones to pinpoint the enemy, but the Taliban can do the same thing by watching the flocks of crows that circle American soldiers, looking for sc.r.a.ps of food. The Americans have virtually unlimited firepower, so the Taliban send only one guy to take on an entire firebase. Whether or not he gets killed, he will have succeeded in gumming up the machine for yet one more day. "Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult," the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the 1820s. "The difficulties acc.u.mulate and end by producing a kind of friction friction."
That friction is the entire goal of the enemy in the valley; in some ways it works even better than killing. Three days later we"re in the mechanics" bay waiting for the Pech resupply to come in, two Chinooks that run a slow route through the northeast every four days picking up men and dropping off food and ammo. Tim and I are leaving the valley, and the Pech is our way out. The men are on edge because the sniper has been at it all morning, and when the first Chinook comes in, it immediately takes fire from across the valley. A bullet goes up the gunner"s sleeve without breaking his skin and exits through the fuel tank. It was supposedly his first combat mission. After a while a Black Hawk makes it in and drops off the battalion commander, Colonel Ostlund, who strides across the LZ flanked by several officers and two Al Jazeera journalists in powder-blue ballistic vests. One of the officers sees us crouched behind the Hescos and realizes that something must be up. "DO WE HAVE A SITUATION HERE?" he shouts over the rotor noise.
Once again, a couple of guys with rifles have managed to jam up an entire company"s worth of infantry. Ostlund and his staff get back on the Black Hawk and head across the valley for Firebase Vegas. I"m standing next to a tall Marine named Cannon who tells me that the war here is way more intense than most people understand. While we"re talking the shooting starts up again, a staccato hammering that I now recognize as the .50 out at Vegas. Cannon is wearing a radio and gets a communication on the company net that I can"t quite understand.
"Vegas is in a TIC," he says.
The mortars start firing and an A-10 tilts into its dive and starts working the Abas Ghar with its chain guns. A minute later Cannon"s radio squawks again. "One wounded at Vegas," he repeats for me, and then, "The platoon sergeant was shot in the neck, he"s not breathing."
Hunter, who is standing near us, overhears this and walks away. He"s a team leader in First Platoon and knows the sergeant well. His name is Matt Blaskowski, and he"s already received a Silver Star for dragging a wounded comrade to safety during a six-hour firefight in Zabul. A while later Cannon gets another radio update.
"He died on the MEDEVAC bird," he says.
Neither of us could know this, of course, but Cannon himself would be dead in a couple of weeks, shot through the chest during an ambush outside Aliabad. I was already in New York when I heard the news, and I know this is a stupid point, and obvious, but for some reason that was when I realized how easy it was to go from the living to the dead: one day you hear about some guy getting killed out at Vegas and the next day you"re that same guy for someone else.
Apaches finally come in and clear the upper ridges. Two days later I"m at the Delhi airport waiting for a flight home.
BOOK TWO.
KILLING.
We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.- Winston Churchill (or George Orwell)
1.
SQUAD AND PLATOON LEADERS GATHER IN AN unfinished brick-and-mortar at the top of the KOP, tense and quiet in the hours before the operation. It"s called Rock Avalanche - a play on the battalion nickname - and will probably be the biggest operation of the deployment. The men will be going into some of the most dangerous places in the valley looking for weapons caches and infiltration routes, and what happens over the course of the next week could well determine the level of combat in the valley for the coming year. The men sit on a low bench next to an orange Atika cement mixer under steel rafters that do not yet have a roof and wait for Kearney to begin the meeting. In the front row is Rougle, the Scout leader, and then Stichter and Patterson and Rice and McDonough and Buno, all from Second Platoon. Men from the other two platoons stand and squat along the walls. They"re in their body armor and most of them have wads of chew under their lower lip. They"re so clean and well-shaven, they could almost pa.s.s for rear-base infantry. unfinished brick-and-mortar at the top of the KOP, tense and quiet in the hours before the operation. It"s called Rock Avalanche - a play on the battalion nickname - and will probably be the biggest operation of the deployment. The men will be going into some of the most dangerous places in the valley looking for weapons caches and infiltration routes, and what happens over the course of the next week could well determine the level of combat in the valley for the coming year. The men sit on a low bench next to an orange Atika cement mixer under steel rafters that do not yet have a roof and wait for Kearney to begin the meeting. In the front row is Rougle, the Scout leader, and then Stichter and Patterson and Rice and McDonough and Buno, all from Second Platoon. Men from the other two platoons stand and squat along the walls. They"re in their body armor and most of them have wads of chew under their lower lip. They"re so clean and well-shaven, they could almost pa.s.s for rear-base infantry.
Kearney stands before them with a rake in one hand and a sheaf of papers in the other and reading gla.s.ses jammed crookedly under the rim of his helmet. At his feet is a sandbox that has been sculpted into a rough three-dimensional model of the Korengal. Cardboard cutouts of Chinooks dangle from strings where the air a.s.saults will go in. The first phase of the operation is a sweep of Yaka Chine, one of the centers of armed resistance in the Korengal. Much of the weaponry that comes into the valley pa.s.ses through Yaka Chine, as do most of the local commanders, and there is every reason for the men of Battle Company to think they"ll wind up in the fight of their lives. Second Platoon will get dropped off at a landing zone code-named Toucans and move in from the south. First Platoon will get dropped east of town and hook up with Second Platoon near a building complex nicknamed the "Chinese Restaurant." From a distance, through binoculars, the building"s cornices are ornate and seem to curve upward in a way that suggests the Far East. It"s supposed to be the location of a major weapons depot.
"The other area we"re going to have to focus some of our efforts on is going to be the lumberyard," Kearney says, pointing with his rake. "The lumberyard is where we believe that there is a lot of the caches, and it"s kind of the battle handover spot for the guys coming from the Chowkay Valley into the Korengal and then pushin" it through Yaka Chine, where they end up divvying it up to the different subcommanders."
Piosa comes forward and explains what Second Platoon"s task and purpose will be, then calls on Rice and McDonough and Buno to go into more detail for each squad. Rougle stands up and walks around to the top of the sandbox and points where the Scouts will come in and what their role will be in the operation. The radio call sign for the Scouts is "Wildcat," and Rougle tells the rest of the company what the Wildcat element will be doing: "We"ll be occupying somewhere in this vicinity," he says, gesturing with a pointer. "We"ll find a good place where we can set up the Barrett and the twenty-five. We"ll also be holding overwatch on the lumberyard."
The Yaka Chine operation is expected to take twenty-four hours, and then the men will be picked up by helicopter and dropped on the upper slopes of the Abas Ghar and an intersecting ridge called the Sawtalo Sar. There"s intel about cave complexes up there and weapons caches and supply routes that cross over to the Shuryak and then on into Pakistan. The largest cave is supposed to have electricity and finished walls and a boulder at the entrance that can be moved into position with a car jack. When the fighters want to disappear, they supposedly jack the boulder into place from the inside and wait until the danger has pa.s.sed. Chosen Company will be blocking enemy movement in the Shuryak Valley, to the east, and Destined will be in the Chowkay, to the south. The men of Battle Company will be on unfamiliar terrain with enormous loads on their backs chasing a fluid and agile enemy, and almost every advantage enjoyed by a modern army will be negated on the steep, heavily timbered slopes of the Abas Ghar.
Caldwell tells the men that if there"s no air they"ll be walking, but no one laughs because they"re not sure it"s a joke. Could the Army be dumb enough to make them walk the entire valley and then climb the Abas Ghar with 120 pounds on their backs? Each man will carry enough food, water, and ammo for a day or two, and after that they"ll be resupplied by "speedball": body bags of supplies thrown out of moving helicopters. There will be two full platoons on the mountain as well as Kearney and his entire headquarters element, a squad of scouts, and a couple of platoons of ANA. There will be long-range bombers and F-15s and -16s from Diego Garcia, in the Indian Ocean, as well as Apache helicopters flying out of JAF and A-10 Warthogs and an AC-130 Spectre gunship based at Bagram. It"s a huge, weeklong operation, and it"s virtually certain that some men who are alive at this moment will be dead or injured by the time it"s over. Even without an enemy it"s hard to move that many men and aircraft around a steep mountain range and not have something bad happen.
The men spend the last hours of daylight packing their gear and making sure their ammo racks are correctly rigged. Chuck Berry is playing on someone"s laptop inside the brick-and-mortar. Donoho helps Rice adjust his rack, cinching it down in the back until it"s balanced and snug. Rice"s a.s.sault pack weighs seventy pounds and his weapon, ammo, and body armor will be at least another forty or fifty on top of that. Buno has a pack that looks so heavy, Rueda can"t resist coming over and trying to lift it. Moreno bets Hijar ten bucks that Hoyt can"t do twenty pull-ups on one of the steel girders in their barracks. He does, barely. The men paint their faces with greasepaint but Patterson makes them wipe it off and then they just sit and talk and go through the slow, tense countdown until the birds arrive. Some men listen to music. Some just lie on their cots staring at the ceiling. In some ways the antic.i.p.ation feels worse than whatever may be waiting for them down in Yaka Chine or up on the Abas Ghar, and every man gets through it in his own quietly miserable way.
Shortly after eight o"clock the first Chinooks come clattering into the KOP from the north, rotors ablaze with sparks from the dust that they kick up as they land. First Platoon hustles on with their gear and the huge machines lift off and make the run south with their Apache escorts and then they come back to the KOP for the next load. At 8:41 p.m. the men of Second Platoon file into the back of their Chinook and sit facing each other on web seats with their night vision scopes down. The infrared strobes on the outside of the aircraft pump light out into the night in a long slow heartbeat. The aircraft fights its way up into the sky and tilts south and puts down ten minutes later at LZ Toucans. The men move out, grabbing their packs as they go, and a minute later they"re on the mountainside listening to the wind in the trees and the occasional squelp of the radios. Yaka Chine is three or four clicks away. The men fall into line and start walking north.
Kearney has signal intelligence teams scattered around the valley, three LRAS devices watching the town, and surveillance drones circling overhead. He is directing everything by radio from the summit of Divpat, a flat-topped mountain to the east. Almost immediately, drones spot two fighters moving toward Kearney"s position and a Spectre gunship, circling counterclockwise overhead, drills them with 20 mm rounds. That begins a game of cat-and-mouse where American airpower tries to prevent fighters from crossing open ground and gaining the protection of the houses in town. Later that night a group of fighters make it to a house outside Yaka Chine, and Kearney is granted permission by the brigade commander to destroy it with cannon fire from a Spectre gunship. Later, a B-1 bomber drops 2,000 pounds of high explosive on a ridgeline, where more insurgents had been observed positioning themselves for an attack.
The men of Second Platoon walk most of the night to the rip and boom of ordnance farther up the valley, and at dawn they find themselves close enough to human habitation to hear roosters crowing. A surveillance drone motors endlessly overhead. The men move slowly and awkwardly along the hillsides under their heavy loads but eventually come out onto a corduroy road built of squared-off timbers that serves as a skidway for the enormous trees that get cut on the upper ridges. The walking is easy but they"re wide open and after a while they leave the road and climb a brutally steep hillside to a gra.s.sy upland plateau. First Platoon comes into contact from a farm complex above town and they return fire, and then Second Platoon clears the buildings and waits in the bright fall sunlight while chickens peck past them in the dirt and cows groan from the alleyways.
Eventually a delegation of village elders tracks down Piosa and his men and leads them to a house with three children with blackened faces and a woman lying stunned and mute on the floor. Five corpses lie on wooden pallets covered by white cloth outside the house, all casualties from the airstrikes the night before. Medics start treating the wounded while Piosa"s men continue sweeping the village for weapons. They find eight RPG rounds and a shotgun and an old German pistol and some ammo and a pair of binoculars and an old Henri-Martin rifle - all contraband, but not the huge cache they were expecting. Prophet picks up radio traffic of one Taliban fighter asking another, "Have they found it, have they found it?" Obviously, they have not.
The civilian casualties are a serious matter and will require diplomacy and compensation. Second Platoon spends the night at a hilltop compound overlooking Yaka Chine, and the next morning Apaches come in to look around and then a Black Hawk lands on a rooftop inside the village. Ostlund jumps out like a strange camouflaged G.o.d and climbs down a wooden ladder to the ground. With him is a member of the provincial government - the first time a representative of any government, past or present, has made it past the mouth of the valley. Kearney arrives with Ostlund and quickly moves to the front of twenty or thirty locals with the weapons arrayed at his feet. There are old men with their beards dyed orange and eyes like small black holes and young men who don"t smile or talk and are clearly here to see, up close, the men they"re trying to kill from a distance, and young boys who dart around the edges, seemingly unmindful of the seriousness of things. Kearney is unshaven and shadowed with dirt from two nights on Divpat. The Americans are by far the dirtiest men there.
The locals sit with their backs against a stone wall and Kearney crouches in front of them to speak but soon stands back up. "I"m here to tell you guys why I did what I did. I"m Captain Kearney, the U.S. commander for the Korengal," he says, and waits for the translator to finish. "When I come into villages and I find RPGs and weapons that are shot at myself and at the ANA, that indicates that there"s bad people in here. Good people don"t carry these weapons."
Every few sentences Kearney stops to let the translator catch up, and spends the time pacing back and forth, getting more and more heated. "I can walk into Aliabad and not get shot at and not find any weapons... and I come into your village and I find RPGs." He picks one up and waves it at the elders. "I bet I could give this RPG to any one of these younger kids and they"d know how to fire it - and they probably don"t even know how to read."
He points to a young man seated in front of him. "You know how to shoot this thing?"
The kid shakes his head.
"Yeah, right."
Kearney looks around. "You guys have insurgents here that are against myself and against the ANA and against the government. And they"re going to cause you guys to be hurt if you don"t help me out. I was able to pinpoint fifty insurgents that were in and around your village. The first building I engaged, the next morning when I get there I find five RPGs in it. So I know there"s not only good people in the building, there"s also bad people."
Hajji Zalwar Khan, the wealthy and dignified leader of the valley, sits cross-legged on the ground directly in front of Kearney. He"s got a white beard and a handsome face and a narrow, aquiline nose that would easily pa.s.s for French at a Paris cafe. Kearney finishes by asking him point-blank for help: he wants Zalwar Khan to bring representatives from Yaka Chine to the weekly shura shura at the KOP. The old man says that Kearney will have to supply the fuel for the trip, and Kearney is about to agree but catches himself. at the KOP. The old man says that Kearney will have to supply the fuel for the trip, and Kearney is about to agree but catches himself.
"I already told you: one Dishka and I"ll pay for your fuel," he says. "When you tell me where a Dishka is, I"ll give you fuel for every single Friday for as long as I"m here."
Zalwar Khan laughs. Kearney pinches the bridge of his nose and shakes his head.
"Hajji, I trust you," he says. "I trust you."
Ostlund is up next. He stands there bareheaded and clean-shaven, looking more like a handsome actor in a war movie than a real commander in the worst valley in Afghanistan. His style is respectful and earnest and he appeals to the men before him as husbands and fathers rather than as potential enemies.
"We came here with a charter from the U.S. government with direction from the Afghan government and the Afghan national security forces," he says. The translator delivers the sentence in Pashto and then stops and looks over. "And we were asked to bring progress to every corner of Afghanistan. Somehow miscreants have convinced some of your population that we want to come here and challenge Islam and desecrate mosques and oppress Afghan people. All of those are lies. Our country supports all religions."
The translator catches up. None of the expressions change.
"All of my officers are trained and educated enough that they could teach at a university," Ostlund goes on. "I challenge you elders to put them to work; put them to work building your country, fixing your valley. That"s what they"re supposed to do - that"s what I want want them to do - but they can"t until you help us with security." them to do - but they can"t until you help us with security."
The translator is good; he delivers Ostlund"s points with nuance and feeling and looks around at the old men like he"s delivering a sermon. They stare back unmoved. They"ve seen the Soviets and they"ve seen the Taliban, and no one has made it in Yaka Chine more than a day or two. The name means "cool waterfall," and it"s a truly lovely place where you"re never far from the gurgle of water or the quiet shade of the oak trees, but it"s no place for empires.
"You can be poisoned by miscreants and they can tell you that America is bad, that the government"s bad, but I ask you this: what have the people who run around with this stuff" - Ostlund waves a hand at the weapons - "done for your families? Have they provided you an education? Have they provided you a hospital? I don"t think so. I would say, shame on you, if you follow foreign leaders that leave their beautiful homes in Pakistan and come here and talk you into fighting against your own country, and they do nothing for you."
He stops so that the translator will get every word, then goes on: "The ACM that comes in and gives you five dollars to carry this stuff around the mountains and tells you you"re doing a jihad, is doin" nothing for you except making you a slave for five dollars. These foreigners won"t fight my soldiers; they hide on a mountain in a cave under a rock and talk on the radio and pay your your sons a small amount of money to go ahead and shoot at my soldiers. And my soldiers end up killing your sons." sons a small amount of money to go ahead and shoot at my soldiers. And my soldiers end up killing your sons."
ACM means "Anti-Coalition Militia" - essentially, the Taliban. It"s a good speech and delivered with the force of conviction. That night a dozen or so fighters are spotted moving toward Kearney"s position on Divpat, and an unmanned drone fires a h.e.l.lfire missile at them. They scatter, but the Apaches won"t finish them off because they can"t determine with certainty that the men are carrying weapons. The Americans fly out of Yaka Chine, and valley elders meet among themselves to decide what to do. Five people are dead in Yaka Chine, along with ten wounded, and the elders declare jihad against every American in the valley.
2.
DAWN ON THE A ABAS G GHAR, SOLDIERS CURLED ON THE ground wrapped in poncho liners or zipped into sleeping bags. The platoon has made a cold camp in a forest of small spruce after walking most of the night chasing heat signatures on the upper ridges. The signatures turned out to be embers that were still burning from artillery strikes days earlier. When the men kick out of their bags the sun is already over the eastern ridge and the Afghans have started a twig fire in a patch of bare open ground to warm their hands. There are stumps of huge trees cut down years earlier and hillsides of chest-high brush now blaze-yellow in the late season and dirt trails packed so hard they"ll barely take a footprint. The men change their socks and lace up their boots and smoke the day"s first cigarette and line up with their rifles balanced sideways on their ammo racks. Then they move out. ground wrapped in poncho liners or zipped into sleeping bags. The platoon has made a cold camp in a forest of small spruce after walking most of the night chasing heat signatures on the upper ridges. The signatures turned out to be embers that were still burning from artillery strikes days earlier. When the men kick out of their bags the sun is already over the eastern ridge and the Afghans have started a twig fire in a patch of bare open ground to warm their hands. There are stumps of huge trees cut down years earlier and hillsides of chest-high brush now blaze-yellow in the late season and dirt trails packed so hard they"ll barely take a footprint. The men change their socks and lace up their boots and smoke the day"s first cigarette and line up with their rifles balanced sideways on their ammo racks. Then they move out.
The men walk slowly and deliberately under their heavy loads, stopping when the line accordions and then starting up again without a word. Walking point is a four-man team from Mac"s First Squad, and their job is to clear the terrain ahead of the main group and trip any ambushes. First Squad is the lead element for the platoon, which is spearheading the effort for the entire company, which represents the main thrust of the battalion. It"s a significant honor and a huge responsibility. The men are sweating now and moving uphill toward the rising sun through burned-over logging slash and quiet dense stands of spruce and fir. Off to the south the mountains are still smoking from the airstrikes above Yaka Chine. Around midmorning Piosa calls a halt because Prophet has picked up enemy fighters discussing American troop movements, and then a possible bunker is spotted on a ridge to the southwest. Rougle"s sniper puts three rounds into it but nothing happens, so Piosa sends First Squad to clear the structure and get a grid coordinate, and then they move on.
It"s as if they"re alone on the mountain, but they"re almost certainly not. Prophet picks up radio chatter that insurgents have caught an Afghan soldier and are going to cut his head off. The Americans conduct a furious personnel count and determine that it"s just a bit of psychological warfare to throw them off their game. Kearney finally calls mortars down on a ridgeline to the south - a suspected enemy position - but even that fails to stir anything up. At one point, a shepherd wanders through the position with a herd of goats; later, Prophet picks up radio traffic of men whispering. The insurgents have never whispered on their radios before and no one gives it any thought until much later, when the reasons are all too clear.
The second night is spent again in thick spruce forests high up on a spur of the Abas Ghar called the Sawtalo Sar. Second Platoon orients themselves toward the north, with the ANA to the south, headquarters to the west, and Rougle and his Wildcat element to the east. Rice and his gun team - Jackson, Solowski, and Vandenberge - are up there with Wildcat as well, on a hill that has been designated 2435, for its alt.i.tude in meters. From their positions some of the men can see the remains of the Chinook that was shot down in 2005. That night the shadow people arrive, weird hallucinations that occur after too many nights without sleep. The men have slept a total of eight or ten hours in the past hundred and their judgment couldn"t be more impaired if they were p.i.s.s-drunk. Trees turn into people and bushes shift around on the ridgelines as if preparing to attack; it"s all the men on guard can do to keep from opening fire.
Dawn of the second day: a raw wind sawing across the ridgetops and the ground frozen like rock. On a trail above the camp the men line up and eat MREs while waiting for orders to move out. "We eat our boredom," Jones says while watching Stichter put cheese spread on a chocolate energy bar. They"ve got four days" growth on their chins and their faces are dark with dirt and it"s so cold that everyone is wearing ski caps under their helmets. Enemy fighters are still whispering on their radios, but they haven"t fired a shot since Yaka Chine and the men are just starting to think this isn"t going to happen. Chosen Company will be clearing villages in the Shuryak, and Battle"s job is to support them by making sure no fighters cross the Abas Ghar in either direction. They"ll spend another night in this area and then probably start their exfil the following day.
That"s more or less what the men are thinking about when the first smattering of gunfire comes in.
At first no one knows where it"s coming from, and then bullets start clipping branches over people"s heads and smacking the tree trunks next to them. The men jump off the trail into a steeply sloped spruce forest and Jones gets his 240 going and Donoho starts popping 203s across the draw to their south. They"re taking heavy, accurate fire from an adjacent ridgeline and it"s so effective that much of Second Platoon is having trouble even getting their guns up. It"s during these first few minutes of confusion that Buno comes sprinting down the line with a strange look on his face. It occurs to Hijar that he"s never seen Buno look scared before.
"An American position is getting overrun," Buno tells him.
Hijar grabs a LAW rocket and starts running up the line with the rest of his fire team. Piosa is on the radio to Kearney and Stichter is calculating grid coordinates for mortars and the men are crawling around in the forest trying to find cover. Pemble is behind a tree stump and he looks to his right and sees rounds chopping the branches off a tree next to him. "s.h.i.t, it"s really close," he thinks. Bullets are coming from so many directions that there"s no way to take cover from everything. Upslope toward Wildcat someone starts screaming for a medic and Pemble pa.s.ses word down the line, but nothing comes back up so he and Cortez start running up there. They sprint through heavy fire, keeping to the treeline as long as they can and then breaking across an open patch right below Wildcat"s position. The first man they see is Vandenberge, who"s sitting on the ground holding his arm. Blood is welling out between his fingers. "I"m bleeding out, you gotta save me," he says. "I"m dying."
He"s been hit in the artery and will be dead in minutes without medical help. Pemble kneels down and starts unpacking his medical kit, and while he"s doing that he asks Vandenberge where the enemy is.
"The last guy I saw was about twenty feet away," Vandenberge says.
Pemble starts stuffing the wound with Kerlix until he"s knuckle-deep in Vandenberge"s huge arm. Vandenberge is soaked with blood from his boots to his collar and soon Pemble is too, and when he cuts the sleeve off Vandenberge"s uniform another two or three cups of blood spill out. "You could see it in his face that he"s slowly dying," Pemble said. "He was turning really ghost-looking. His eyes started sinking into his head, he started to get real brown around his eyes. And he kept saying, "I"m getting really dizzy, I want to go to sleep." That"s some rough s.h.i.t to hear, coming from one of your best friends and you"re watching him die right in front of you, that"s some f.u.c.king s.h.i.t. All I did was block everything he was saying out except what I needed to hear, like where the Taliban was at and checking for all his wounds."
Jackson shows up with nothing but a rifle in his hand - no helmet or vest. He"d been pushed off the hilltop along with Solowski, who"d emptied a whole magazine at the enemy and then fallen back under continuous heavy fire. By now Cortez has made it to Rice, who"s sitting in some brush holding his gut. He"s taken a bullet through the back of his shoulder that ricocheted strangely inside him and came out his abdomen, just below the ballistic plate of his vest. The last thing he remembers was a Taliban fighter aiming an RPG at him from forty yards away. He had time to think that it was the last thing he"d ever see, but now Cortez is kneeling in front of him asking where he"s wounded. He"s already done a quick a.s.sessment on himself - which more or less consists of realizing that if he hasn"t died yet he probably isn"t going to - and he knows the enemy has just overrun a critical hill in the middle of the American line. If they get set in up there they can shred any Americans coming to help.
"Just take back the hill," he says.
Cortez, Jackson, and Walker a.s.sault up the hill but the enemy has already retreated and there"s no one to fight, no one to kill. Cortez goes to one knee behind cover with his rifle up and glances to the right and sees a body lying facedown - an American. Walker runs to him and shakes him to see if he"s all right and finally rolls him over. It"s Staff Sergeant Rougle, shot through the forehead and his face purple with trauma. "I wanted to cry but I didn"t - I was shocked," Cortez said. "I just wanted to kill everything that came up that wasn"t American. I actually didn"t care who came up - man, woman, child, I still would"ve done something."
They"re joined by Hijar, Hoyt, and Donoho. Someone has thrown a poncho liner over Rougle, but it"s clear from the boots protruding at the bottom that it"s an American soldier. Rougle was. .h.i.t multiple times on one side of his body in a way that made Kearney think he was caught midstride and had turned to meet a sudden threat from behind. Cortez worried that Rougle was still alive when the enemy overran the position and that they had executed him where he lay, but there was no evidence to support that. Nevertheless, the thought was to torment Cortez in the coming months. Every night he"d dream he was back on the mountain trying to run fast enough to make things turn out differently. They never would. "I"d prefer to not sleep and not dream about it," Cortez said, "than sleep with that picture in my head."
Rougle"s men arrive minutes later. Shortly before the attack Rougle left their position to talk to Staff Sergeant Rice and his men have no idea what happened to him. There was so much gunfire that they thought they were about to get overrun, so a Scout named Raeon broke down the Barrett sniper rifle and scattered the pieces around the position so the enemy couldn"t use it against American forces. Now the Scouts come running forward looking for their commander and all they find is blood and gear all over the hilltop and a body covered by a poncho liner. Next to the body is an empty MRE packet and a water bottle. "Is Rougle and them up?" a Scout named Clinard asks. Hoyt glances at him and looks away.
"What?" Clinard says. No one says anything and Hoyt walks over to him and just cups his hand on the back of Clinard"s neck.
"Who"s over there?" Clinard says, voice rising in panic.
"It"s Rougle," Hoyt says quietly.