War.

Chapter 4

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"All right, keep it good right now," Thyng tells the gunner as we roll into a draw on the far side of the ridge. Creeks run down the creases of the draws, and where the road pa.s.ses there, the dirt is always moist and easy to dig into. And some of the draws are too deep to observe from any of the American outposts in the valley, so they are a natural spot for an ambush. "Once we get into that lip I want you to scan high, all right?" Thyng continues telling the gunner. "The first thing that will come in on this b.i.t.c.h will be f.u.c.kin" RPGs, okay?"

"Roger," the gunner says.

"If that happens they"re going to miss, so just look where they came from and f.u.c.k it up, all right?"

"Roger."

I concentrate on running the camera. That is the easiest way to avoid thinking about the fact that what you"re filming could kill you.

"All right, you stay in there," Captain Thyng tells the gunner. "We"re going to pull up around that corner - "

And that"s as far as he gets.

The idea that there are rules in warfare and that combatants kill each other according to basic concepts of fairness probably ended for good with the machine gun. A man with a machine gun can conceivably hold off a whole battalion, at least for a while, which changes the whole equation of what it means to be brave in battle. In World War I, when automatic weapons came into general use, heavy machine gunners were routinely executed if their position was overrun because they caused so much death. (Regular infantry, who were thought to be "fighting fairly," were often spared.) Machine guns forced infantry to disperse, to camouflage themselves, and to fight in small independent units. All that promoted stealth over honor and squad loyalty over blind obedience.

In a war of that nature soldiers gravitate toward whatever works best with the least risk. At that point combat stops being a grand chess game between generals and becomes a no-holds-barred experiment in pure killing. As a result, much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be ma.s.sacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it"s not. It"s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.

There are two ways to tilt the odds in an otherwise fair fight: ambush the enemy with overwhelming force or use weapons that cannot be countered. The best, of course, is to do both. I had a lot of combat nightmares at Restrepo - I think everyone did - and they were invariably about being helpless: guns were jamming, the enemy was everywhere, and no one knew what was going on. In military terms, that"s a perfect ambush. Once I watched an Apache helicopter corner a Taliban fighter named Hayatullah on an open hillside and kill him. He had nowhere to run and on the second burst he was. .h.i.t by a 30 mm round and exploded. There was nothing fair about it, but Hayatullah was the leader of a cell that detonated roadside bombs in the valley, and one could argue there wasn"t much fair about his line of work either. I later asked O"Byrne if he could imagine what it must feel like to be targeted by an Apache, and he just shook his head. We were talking about combat trauma, and I said that anyone who survived something like that had to have some pretty horrific nightmares. "I G.o.dd.a.m.n hope so," O"Byrne said.

Taliban fighters in the Korengal switched to roadside bombs because they were losing too many men in firefights. And it was also creating problems with the locals: when Taliban fighters first started attacking American patrols, the Americans didn"t necessarily know where to shoot back. By the end of the summer, locals were pointing enemy positions out to the Americans just so they would aim in the right direction. Roadside bombs avoided those problems. They were cheap, low-risk, and didn"t get civilians killed. I doubt many villagers actually wanted wanted Americans to get blown up, but few of them cared enough to walk up to the KOP and tell the soldiers where bombs had been dug in. This fight was between the Taliban and the Americans and the villagers more or less stayed out of it. Americans to get blown up, but few of them cared enough to walk up to the KOP and tell the soldiers where bombs had been dug in. This fight was between the Taliban and the Americans and the villagers more or less stayed out of it.

The first major bomb strike in the Korengal came two days after Christmas. Destined Company had mounted units scattered throughout the battalion firebases, and four of these trucks had taken up positions to support a foot patrol that had come down from Restrepo. One of the Humvees was in the middle of a three-point turn when an ant.i.tank mine detonated beneath it and blew the turret gunner, Jesse Murphree, so far down the hill that at first no one even realized he was gone. The rest of the crew suffered concussions and broken bones. The Humvee was immediately swallowed by flames, and while they tried to put it out Hijar and Buno and Richardson of Second Platoon climbed downslope to look for Murphree. They found him several hundred feet away, semiconscious and both his legs turned to jelly. They put tourniquets on him so he wouldn"t bleed out and helped carry him up to the road and slide him into a Humvee. Murphree knew he was badly hurt but didn"t yet realize his legs were gone. He kept asking his squad leader, Staff Sergeant Alcantara, if he could still go to the Alcantaras" wedding after they all got back to Italy.

The enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a twisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you"d ever have that you hadn"t been blown up the moment before. And if you were were blown up, you"d probably never know it and certainly wouldn"t be able to affect the outcome. Good soldiers died just as easily as sloppy ones, which is pretty much how soldiers define unfair tactics in war. Halfway through the deployment, Battle Company took over Destined"s trucks and ran mounted patrols out of the KOP in support of their own men. It was a sensible way to do it, but it put men who were used to foot patrols into cramped steel boxes where there wasn"t much to do during firefights except scream at the turret gunner and pray. The trucks reduced war to a kind of grim dice game that was impossible to learn from or get good at; you just had to hope your luck lasted until it was time to go home. blown up, you"d probably never know it and certainly wouldn"t be able to affect the outcome. Good soldiers died just as easily as sloppy ones, which is pretty much how soldiers define unfair tactics in war. Halfway through the deployment, Battle Company took over Destined"s trucks and ran mounted patrols out of the KOP in support of their own men. It was a sensible way to do it, but it put men who were used to foot patrols into cramped steel boxes where there wasn"t much to do during firefights except scream at the turret gunner and pray. The trucks reduced war to a kind of grim dice game that was impossible to learn from or get good at; you just had to hope your luck lasted until it was time to go home.

The guy who blows us up is a hundred feet away behind a rock. He touches two wires to a double-A battery and sends an electrical charge to a pressure cooker filled with fertilizer and diesel that has been buried in the road the night before. His timing is off by ten feet or so and the bomb detonates under the engine block rather than directly beneath us, which saves us from being wounded or killed. The explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then a sudden darkening. The darkening is from dirt that lands on the windshield and blocks the sun. The gunner drops out of his turret and sits next to me, stunned. Someone comes up over the net saying, "WE JUST HIT AN IED, OVER!" That is followed by another man screaming for the convoy to keep moving.

Now it"s gray and m.u.f.fled inside the Humvee, and for a moment my mind makes the odd a.s.sociation of being home during a blizzard when I was young. The power would go out and the windows would drift over with snow and produce a similar quiet darkness. That doesn"t last long. "GET ON THAT GUN!" Thyng starts yelling at the gunner. "GET ON THAT GUN AND START FIRING INTO THAT f.u.c.kIN" DRAW!"

The gunner is either too frightened or too disoriented to function, but a Humvee behind us opens up with a grenade machine gun - blap-kachunk blap-kachunk, blap-kachunk blap-kachunk - and Thyng yells, "WHO THE f.u.c.k IS THAT?" I tell him it"s ours, not theirs, and our gunner finally stands up in the turret and starts returning fire toward the east and then toward the west. Big, hot .50 cal sh.e.l.ls clatter into the interior of the Humvee. - and Thyng yells, "WHO THE f.u.c.k IS THAT?" I tell him it"s ours, not theirs, and our gunner finally stands up in the turret and starts returning fire toward the east and then toward the west. Big, hot .50 cal sh.e.l.ls clatter into the interior of the Humvee. Shot, eight o"clock Shot, eight o"clock, a computer voice in the cabin informs us. The detection system is picking up gunfire from other vehicles in our convoy and reporting it as if it were coming from the enemy.

There"s a lot of shooting out there and I"m not looking forward to running through it, but the cabin is filling with toxic gray smoke and I know we"re going to have to bail out eventually. I keep waiting for something like fear to take hold of me but it never does, I have a kind of flatlined functionality that barely raises my heart rate. I could do math problems in my head. It occurs to me that maybe I"ve been injured - often you don"t know right away - and I pat my way down both legs until I reach my feet, but everything is there. I get my gear in order and find the door lever with my hand and wait. There is a small black skeleton hanging from the rearview mirror and I notice that it"s still rocking from the force of the blast. I just sit there watching it. Finally Thyng gives the order and we all throw ourselves into the fresh cool morning air and start to run.

War is a lot of things and it"s useless to pretend that exciting isn"t one of them. It"s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It"s just not something that many people want acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could sc.r.a.pe together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn"t where you might die - though that does happen - it"s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don"t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don"t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.

The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years. Once in Paris I caught sight of two men carrying a mattress across the street and went straight into full-blown panic: eyes wide, heart pounding, hands gripping my chair. I"d just come out of Liberia, where I"d seen a lot of dead and wounded people carried that way, and at the time I"d had no reaction at all, zero. I was too terrified by the violence around me, and too amped by the magnitude of the story I was covering, to pay much attention to anything else. Then a sagging mattress in Paris triggered a three-week backlog of trauma and shame.

We drive into the KOP late that afternoon, our destroyed Humvee chained to the one ahead of us and getting dragged through the mud like some kind of stubborn farm animal. The place has changed since I was last here, the men are cleaner and less wild-eyed and don"t have to wear body armor all the time. It"s strange to see them walking around as if this were just any old place in the world and the hills weren"t crawling with enemy fighters who wanted them all to die. There"s a new brick-and-mortar for the command center and there are shower curtains on the s.h.i.tter doors and there are seven or eight new laptops with a high-speed satellite Internet connection. I"m told to sleep in one of the new buildings, so I carry my gear up and drop it on an empty cot. There"s only one other man in the room, a Third Platoon soldier named Loza who"s been in Italy for three months recovering from a shoulder wound. He sits quietly on a cot listening to music on his laptop and rigging out his gear. He ties his night vision scope to his helmet with green "550 cord" and attaches a nylon sling to his rifle and tries on his new boots and then puts them, heels together, against the cement wall.

Loza was shot up at Restrepo on the second day and his return to the KOP was mildly controversial because he still can"t lift his arm higher than his shoulder. He wanted to come back to be with his friends and someone behind a desk basically did him a favor. He pulls an X-ray out of his pack and shows it to me and at first I don"t even understand what I"m looking at. It looks like a black-and-white photo of a suspension bridge in the fog, until I realize that the spans and cables are actually pieces of metal screwed into his bone. I ask him if it hurt to get shot.

"No," he said. "I just thought I"d been slapped."

I"ve been on some kind of high-amplitude ride all day since the bomb went off, peaks where I can"t sit still and valleys that make me want to catch the next resupply out of here. Not because I"m scared but because I"m used to war being exciting and suddenly it"s not. Suddenly it seems weak and sad, a collective moral failure that has tricked me - tricked us all - into falling for the sheer drama of it. Young men in their terrible new roles with their terrible new machinery arrayed against equally strong young men on the other side of the valley, all dedicated to a kind of canceling out of each other until replacements arrive. Then it starts all over again. There"s so much human energy involved - so much courage, so much honor, so much blood - you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place. Nothing could convince this this many people to work many people to work this this hard at something that wasn"t necessary - right? - you"d catch yourself thinking. hard at something that wasn"t necessary - right? - you"d catch yourself thinking.

That night I rewind the videotape of the explosion and try to watch it. My pulse gets so weird in the moments before we get hit that I almost have to look away. I can"t stop thinking about the ten feet or so that put that bomb beneath the engine block rather than beneath us. That night I have a dream. I"m watching a t.i.tanic battle between my older brother and the monsters of the underworld, and my brother is killing one after another with a huge shotgun. The monsters are cartoonlike and murderous and it doesn"t matter how many he kills because there"s an endless supply of them.

Eventually he"ll just run out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.

I DON"T LEAVE THE VALLEY DON"T LEAVE THE VALLEY, I STAY, AND AFTER A FEW STAY, AND AFTER A FEW days the war becomes normal again. We go on patrol and I focus on the fact that one foot goes in front of the other. We get ambushed and the only thing I"m interested in is what kind of cover we"ve got. It"s all very simple and straightforward, and it"s around this time that killing begins to make a kind of sense to me. It"s tempting to view killing as a political act because that"s where the repercussions play out, but that misses the point: a man behind a rock touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me - to kill days the war becomes normal again. We go on patrol and I focus on the fact that one foot goes in front of the other. We get ambushed and the only thing I"m interested in is what kind of cover we"ve got. It"s all very simple and straightforward, and it"s around this time that killing begins to make a kind of sense to me. It"s tempting to view killing as a political act because that"s where the repercussions play out, but that misses the point: a man behind a rock touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me - to kill us. us. There are other ways to understand what he did, but none of them overrides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I"d ever done in my life or might ever do. It felt malicious and personal in a way that combat didn"t. Combat theoretically gives you the chance to react well and survive; bombs don"t allow for anything. The pressure cooker was probably bought in Kandigal, the market town we pa.s.sed through half an hour earlier. The bomber built a campfire in the draw to keep himself warm that night while waiting for us. We could see his footprints in the sand. The relationship between him and me couldn"t be clearer, and if I"d somehow had a chance to kill him before he touched the wires together I"m sure I would have. As a civilian, that"s not a pretty thought to have in your head. That"s not a thought that just sits there quietly and rea.s.sures you about things. There are other ways to understand what he did, but none of them overrides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I"d ever done in my life or might ever do. It felt malicious and personal in a way that combat didn"t. Combat theoretically gives you the chance to react well and survive; bombs don"t allow for anything. The pressure cooker was probably bought in Kandigal, the market town we pa.s.sed through half an hour earlier. The bomber built a campfire in the draw to keep himself warm that night while waiting for us. We could see his footprints in the sand. The relationship between him and me couldn"t be clearer, and if I"d somehow had a chance to kill him before he touched the wires together I"m sure I would have. As a civilian, that"s not a pretty thought to have in your head. That"s not a thought that just sits there quietly and rea.s.sures you about things.

It was the ten feet that got me; I kept thinking about Murphree and then looking down at my legs. The idea that so much could be determined by so little was sort of intolerable. It made all of life look terrifying; it made the walk to the chow hall potentially as bad as a night patrol to Karingal. (The American contract worker who got shot at the KOP took a bullet to the leg instead of the head only because he happened to change directions on his cot that day.) The only way to calm your nerves in that environment was to marvel at the insane amount of firepower available to the Americans and hope that that changed the equation somehow. They have a huge shoulder-fired rocket called a Javelin, for example, that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it"s fired by a guy who doesn"t make that in a year at a guy who doesn"t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable. And the roar of a full-on firefight could be so rea.s.suring that you wanted to run around hugging people afterward. That roar was what was keeping you alive, and it created an appreciation for firepower so profound that it bordered on the perverse.

"Oh, yeah, everyone"s got their favorite weapon," Jones told me. "There are Mark guys and .50 guys. Walker"s a Mark guy. The Mark is an automatic grenade launcher that shoots a 40 mike-mike round that explodes on impact. I"m a .50 guy. I don"t know if it"s true, but they say the round only has to come within eighteen inches of you to sear flesh. That"s bada.s.s. It doesn"t have to hit you and it can still tear you open. It"s just a s.e.xy weapon. It"s the ultimate machine gun. It has the ability to shoot through walls. It"s fun to shoot during a test fire but it"s twice as fun during a firefight."

The one absolute impossibility at Restrepo - you could even get booze if you wanted - was s.e.x with a woman, and the one absolute impossibility back home was combat. Whether the men realized it or not, they had made a rough trade where one risked becoming a stand-in for the other. The potential for humor was enormous, but even when no one was joking, things could still sound awfully funny. "It doesn"t need much oil but if you give it too much it"ll rock that much more," I overheard O"Byrne telling Vaughn about the .50 cal. "If your s.h.i.t gets sluggish in a firefight just pour oil all over the bolt and it"ll pick right back up."

If you"re nineteen and haven"t gotten laid in a year, a sentence like that - meant in all sincerity about a very serious matter - can resonate through your psyche in ways you don"t even understand. (There was a hill across the valley that the men referred to as "Nipple Rock," and all I can say is that you"d have to have spent a G.o.dd.a.m.n long time in the valley to see a woman"s nipple in that thing.) There was so much s.e.xual energy up at Restrepo that it might as well have been a Miami nightclub, except that the only outlet for it was combat, so that"s what the men spent their time thinking about. Once a firefight kicked off and I watched Hoyt and Alcantara race into the east bunker to claim the .50. Hoyt had the lead but Alcantara threw him out of the way and got there first and started firing. They took turns on the gun until the firefight died down and then they settled back in the bunker with cigarettes. They"d shot through so much ammo that the barrel was smoking and they had to pour oil on it to cool it down. Suddenly another burst came in. "Yes!" Hoyt whooped as he got back on the gun. "I knew knew this s.h.i.t wasn"t over yet..." this s.h.i.t wasn"t over yet..."

Most of the fighting was at four or five hundred yards, so no one ever got to see - or had to deal with - the effects of all that firepower on the human body. There were exceptions, though. One day Prophet called in saying they"d overheard enemy fighters discussing how they wouldn"t shoot at the Americans unless a patrol crossed to the east side of the valley. Soon afterward, Afghan soldiers at OP 3 spotted armed men in the riverbed and started shooting at them. The men fled up the flanks of the Abas Ghar and Third Platoon sent a patrol out of the KOP to give chase. The Americans took contact as soon as they crossed the river and found themselves badly pinned down behind a rock wall, and within seconds every American position in the valley opened up on the guys who were shooting at them. The KOP started dropping mortars and OP 3 engaged with a .50 cal and a Barrett sniper rifle, and the trucks opened up from above Babiyal, and Restrepo swung its 240s around and poured gunfire across the valley for almost an hour.

It was a hot day and there hadn"t been much fighting lately, so when the men jumped on the guns most of them were only wearing flip-flops and shorts. They joked and laughed and called for cigarettes between bursts. Once in a while a round would crack past us, but mostly it was just a turkey shoot at a wide-open mountainside where the enemy had nowhere to hide. Hot bra.s.s was filling up the fighting positions and more was cascading down out of the weapons every second. At one point I watched a sh.e.l.l drop into Pemble"s untied shoe and he slipped it off, wiggled the sh.e.l.l out, and then slipped his shoe back on without ever stopping firing. The lieutenant was shirtless on the ammo hooch calling coordinates into the KOP and some of the Afghans were firing from the hip even though they didn"t stand a chance of hitting anything that way and Jackson was up on the guard position unloading one of the SAWs. Restrepo alone had to be putting out a thousand rounds a minute and the Abas Ghar was sparkling with bullet strikes even though it was broad daylight. Finally Hog showed up - Hog was the radio call sign for the A-10s - and dropped a couple of bombs on the mountain for good measure.

At some point a call came in over the radio that the Scouts were watching a guy crawl around on the mountainside without a leg. They watched until he stopped moving and then they called in that he"d died. Everyone at Restrepo cheered. That night I couldn"t sleep and I crept out of my bunk and went and sat on the roof of the ammo hooch. It was a nice place to watch the heat lightning out along the Pech or to lie back on the sandbags and look up at the stars. I couldn"t stop thinking about that cheer; in some ways it was more troubling than all the killing that was going on. Stripped of all politics, the fact of the matter was that the man had died alone on a mountainside trying to find his leg. He must have been crazed with thirst and bewildered by the sheer amount of gunfire st.i.tching back and forth across the ground looking for him. At one point or another every man in the platoon had been pinned down long enough to think they were going to die - bullets. .h.i.tting around them, bodies braced for impact - and that"s with just one or two guns. Imagine a whole company"s worth of firepower directed at you. I got the necessity for it but I didn"t get the joy. It seemed like I either had to radically reunderstand the men on this hilltop or I had to acknowledge the power of a place like this to change them.

"You"re thinking that this guy could have murdered your friend," Steiner explained to me later. "The cheering comes from knowing that that"s someone we"ll never have to fight again. Fighting another human being is not as hard as you think when they"re trying to kill you. People think we were cheering because we just shot someone, but we were cheering because we just stopped someone from killing us. That person will no longer shoot at us anymore. That"s where the fiesta comes in."

Combat was a game that the United States had asked Second Platoon to become very good at, and once they had, the United States had put them on a hilltop without women, hot food, running water, communication with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that the men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. Society can give its young men almost any job and they"ll figure how to do it. They"ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. In a very crude sense the job of young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile-long valley in Kunar Province needs to be brought under military control. Nearly fifty American soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I"m not saying that"s a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged. Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders. get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. In a very crude sense the job of young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile-long valley in Kunar Province needs to be brought under military control. Nearly fifty American soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I"m not saying that"s a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged. Soldiers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

There are other costs to war as well - vaguer ones that don"t lend themselves to conventional math. One American soldier has died for every hundred yards of forward progress in the valley, but what about the survivors? Is that territory worth the psychological cost of learning to cheer someone"s death? It"s an impossible question to answer but one that should keep getting asked. Ultimately, the problem is that they"re normal young men with normal emotional needs that have to be met within the very narrow options available on that hilltop. Young men need mentors, and mentors are usually a generation or so older. That isn"t possible at Restrepo, so a twenty-two-year-old team leader effectively becomes a father figure for a nineteen-year-old private. Up at Restrepo a twenty-seven-year-old is considered an old man, an effeminate Afghan soldier is seen as a woman, and new privates are called "cherries" and virtually thought of as children. Men form friendships that are not at all s.e.xual but contain much of the devotion and intensity of a romance. Almost every relationship that occurs in open society exists in some compressed form at Restrepo, and almost every human need from back home gets fulfilled in some truncated, jury-rigged way. The men are good at constructing what they need from what they have. They are experts at making do.

As for a sense of purpose, combat is it - the only game in town. Almost none of the things that make life feel worth living back home are present at Restrepo, so the entire range of a young man"s self-worth has to be found within the ragged ch.o.r.eography of a firefight. The men talk about it and dream about it and rehea.r.s.e for it and a.n.a.lyze it afterward but never plumb its depths enough to lose interest. It"s the ultimate test, and some of the men worry they"ll never again be satisfied with a "normal life" - whatever that is - after the amount of combat they"ve been in. They worry that they may have been ruined for anything else.

"I like the firefights," O"Byrne admitted to me once. We"d been talking about going home and whether he was going to get bored. "I know," he added, probably realizing how that sounded. "Saddest thing in the world."

We walk the steep hill from the KOP up to OP 1 at the end of the day, kicking through patches of crusty snow near the top and sweating heavily in our winter clothes. I"m with Lieutenant Steve Gillespie, the former leader of Third Platoon who has been switched to Second Platoon after a group of his soldiers were caught drinking at the KOP. (Family members were sending them care packages with bottles of mouthwash filled with vodka.) The switch wasn"t punishment so much as an attempt to shake things up. The men at the outpost are dirty and unshaved and have been freezing up there quietly since they ran out of heating oil a week ago. In summer the post is overrun with camel spiders and scorpions but now it"s just cold and silent and lifeless, four men with nothing to do but stare at the mountains and recalculate how much of the deployment they still have left.

A patrol comes in from Obenau with a detainee who is dressed in nothing but a thin cotton shalwar kameez. He"s shaking with cold but for some reason keeps looking around and laughing. Maybe he can"t believe how rough the Americans are living. The patrol takes him on down to the KOP and we continue on the high trail to Restrepo with the wind picking up at the end of the day and monkeys screaming their outrage from the peaks. We don"t bother running the last stretch of road because there hasn"t been any shooting in the valley in weeks, and with snow-covered mountains all around us it"s hard not to think we"re just on some weird camping trip. Restrepo now has plywood bee huts fastened crookedly to the mountainside and a guard tower with a Mark 19 in it and a tiny two-man outpost a hundred yards outside the wire. The outpost is called Columbus and covers the draw below Restrepo. An all-out attack would probably take Columbus without difficulty, but the position would buy the men at Restrepo enough time to grab their guns and roll out the door.

We walk into Restrepo and drop our packs in a pile. The sun has fired the Abas Ghar with a red glow and a few of the brighter planets are already infiltrating the afternoon sky. The men are standing around in dirty fleeces and their pants unbelted smoking cigarettes and watching another day come to an end. They"re dirty in their pores and under their nails and their skin has burnished to a kind of sheen at the wrists and neck where the uniforms rub. Dirt collects in the creases of the skin and shows up as strange webs at the corners of the eyes and their lifelines run black and unmistakable across the palms of their hands. It"s a camp of homeless men or hunters who have not reckoned with a woman in months and long since abandoned the niceties. They belch and fart and blow their noses on their sleeves and wipe their mouths on their shirtfronts and pack every sentence with enough profanity to last most civilians a week. After the fighting ended last fall they got so bored that they started prying boulders out of the hillside and rolling them into the valley. They were trying to get one inside the wire at Firebase Phoenix just to keep Third Platoon on their toes. Caldwell finally told them to knock it off.

Gillespie takes command immediately. Patterson, the platoon sergeant, delivers a short, sharp speech making it clear that the problems with Third Platoon are no reflection on Gillespie and then hands it over to him. Everything about Gillespie is long: his torso, his legs, his neck, and he"s slightly pigeon-toed in a way that belies how tough he really is. Now he stands that way, lanky and awkward, in the dying gray light, taking command of arguably the most combat-intensive outpost in the entire U.S. military. "I"ve been down there with Third Platoon for the past five months so you guys have probably been seeing me around," he says. "Pretty laid-back guy, like Sergeant Patterson says. I"ll watch you guys and we"ll go from there. You guys got any questions for me?"

Jones raises his hand. There"s a strange expectation in the air, the men seem to be trying to not catch each other"s eyes. Gillespie has his hands jammed into his pockets so there"s nothing he could possibly do about what"s about to happen. "You ever seen the movie Blood In Blood Out Blood In Blood Out, sir?" Jones asks.

Pause.

"Get him!" someone yells, and First Lieutenant Steve Gillespie disappears beneath a scrum of enlisted men. They quickly rack him out on the ground, pull up his shirt, and take turns smacking his abdomen as hard as they can. Donoho spits on his palm first so it will hurt more. Every man takes a turn and Patterson is offered a hit, though he declines, and then they help Gillespie back to his feet. Gla.s.ses askew, he slaps the dirt off himself and shakes his head, trying to laugh. I"ve just watched an officer in the U.S. military get overpowered and beaten by his men at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, and it occurs to me that not only is this not happening in other armies, it probably isn"t even happening at other outposts outposts. The previous fall, O"Byrne and Sergeant Mac were trying to figure out how to welcome someone back after leave and the only thing they could think of was to beat the s.h.i.t out of him, which is what they did. That started a tradition that even other platoons in Battle Company weren"t interested in emulating. "The guys I love the most I beat the worst," O"Byrne explained. "It"s a sign of affection in the weirdest possible way. It"s the hard hard way, that"s what it is. They beat Lieutenant Piosa down so badly his face looked like he was getting tortured." way, that"s what it is. They beat Lieutenant Piosa down so badly his face looked like he was getting tortured."

Gillespie was taking command of Second Platoon and it prompted a lot of talk up on the hill; it was serious business up here and the men knew a bad leader could easily get them killed. They weren"t that familiar with Gillespie beyond the fact that he bore a pa.s.sing resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite, and a collective decision was made that fell so far outside of Army protocol no one even wanted to claim ownership of it. "Third Platoon wasn"t doing so hot," O"Byrne told me months later, "so we had our doubts already - you know? So we said, "We"re going to beat the s.h.i.t out of him and if he doesn"t take it, well f.u.c.k it - then we just won"t listen to the motherf.u.c.ker. If he can"t take a beating then he"s not part of Second Platoon anyway. He"s not part of what we"re about.""

It was a lot of tough talk but the truth was that the men respected Gillespie enormously, and roughing him up was their way of demonstrating that. A lesser officer would never have rolled with that situation, and lesser troops would never have even thought of it. It was about brotherhood, not discipline, and the command was smart enough to understand that and stay out of the way. "Man"s natural instinct is to survive," Kearney said about Second Platoon. (Tim had just asked him whether they had "demons.") "The boys don"t go out there and fight for freedom, they don"t fight for patriotism - they fight because they know that if they go out there alone and walk into Aliabad they"re going to get killed."

Margins were so small and errors potentially so catastrophic that every soldier had a kind of de facto authority to reprimand others - in some cases even officers. And because combat can hinge on the most absurd details, there was virtually nothing in a soldier"s daily routine that fell outside the group"s purview. Whether you tied your shoes or cleaned your weapon or drank enough water or secured your night vision gear were all matters of public concern and so were open to public scrutiny. Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened suddenly - and out there, everything happened suddenly - the guy with the loose laces couldn"t be counted on to keep his feet at a crucial moment. It was the other other man"s life he was risking, not just his own. Another time a couple of squads were lying in ambush outside Karingal and a man rolled to the side to urinate. You could smell it ten feet away, which meant he wasn"t well hydrated, and when Patterson caught a whiff he chewed the man out in an irritated growl. If you"re not hydrated you"re that much closer to being a heat casualty, and that could slow a patrol down long enough to get cornered and overrun. There was no such thing as man"s life he was risking, not just his own. Another time a couple of squads were lying in ambush outside Karingal and a man rolled to the side to urinate. You could smell it ten feet away, which meant he wasn"t well hydrated, and when Patterson caught a whiff he chewed the man out in an irritated growl. If you"re not hydrated you"re that much closer to being a heat casualty, and that could slow a patrol down long enough to get cornered and overrun. There was no such thing as personal personal safety out there; what happened to you happened to everyone. safety out there; what happened to you happened to everyone.

The attention to detail at a base like Restrepo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not f.u.c.king up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences. Once I attended a shura at the KOP with a cast-off Army shirt that Anderson had given me, and when I left the building I forgot to take it with me. A few hours later I realized I couldn"t find it and went into a controlled panic: if one of the elders picked it up and gave it to an enemy fighter, that man would be able to use it to pa.s.s himself off as an American soldier. Potentially someone could get killed. Eventually I found the shirt, but it was clear from the looks I was getting that I"d f.u.c.ked up pretty badly and that it had better not happen again.

Frontline soldiers have policed their own behavior at least since World War II and probably a lot longer than that. In a study of bravery conducted by the U.S. military in the forties, the author, Samuel Stouffer, had this to say about personal responsibility: "Any individual"s action which had conceivable bearing on the safety of others became a matter of public concern for the group as a whole. Isolated as he was from contact with the rest of the world, the combat man was thrown back on his outfit to meet the various affectional needs... that he would normally satisfy with his family and friends. The group was thus in a favored position to enforce its standards on the individual."

In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circ.u.mstances can play out - can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose a sense of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don"t even make the connection; at Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore. It was tedious but it gave the stuff of one"s existence - the shoelaces and the water and the lost shirt - a riveting importance. Frankly, after you got used to living that way it was hard to go home.

There was carelessness and then there were real mistakes, and once it crossed that line, discipline came down from above and was relentless. Once I woke up in the middle of the night to grunts and shouting and went outside to find Staff Sergeant Alcantara smoking his entire squad. Whoever was on guard duty had let the batteries run down on a thermal sight called a PAS-13 that allowed them to scan the hillsides at night. On a dark night the PAS-13 was the only way they could see if the enemy was creeping close for a surprise attack, and dead batteries could literally put the base at risk of getting overrun. The best way to ensure that no one f.u.c.ked up was to inflict collective punishment on the entire squad, because that meant everyone would be watching everyone else. Al had them out there in stress positions lifting sandbags and essentially eating dirt for so long that I finally just went back inside and went to sleep. The next morning I asked him if the punishment had wiped the slate clean - or was there some residual stigma that would take longer to erase?

"There are no hard feelings after everyone gets smoked," he said. "They"re more p.i.s.sed that they all let each other down. Once it"s over it"s over."

With dark the cold comes down like some kind of court sentence and the men drift inside to sit around the diesel stoves until it"s time to go to sleep. Each squad built their own hooch from plywood and two-by-fours slung in by Chinook and the construction is straight ghetto: uninsulated plywood and gaps in the walls and strange patchwork solutions to elementary problems. Some colonel upstream decided that Restrepo would be an "outpost" rather than a "base," so Second Platoon was restricted to using tools and materials that would barely have been adequate for a ten-year-old making a tree fort. They cut their wood with a four-inch folding Gerber saw and pulled nails out of old pieces of wood to reuse on new pieces of wood and leveled floors by guess and plumbed walls by eye. Third Squad didn"t dig out the hillside enough, so their hooch, nicknamed "the Submarine," wound up so narrow that there was no room for the stove. It was stuck in a drafty alcove and barely raised the inside temperature above freezing. Weapons Squad built their hooch on an angle and then overcompensated with the angle of the bunks, which in turn were angled differently from the shelving and the roof. The result was an optical illusion that left you disoriented and not entirely sure where the horizon line was. You could put a marble on one of the bunks and swear to G.o.d it was rolling upward.

I"m staying with O"Byrne and the rest of First Squad. The bunks are plywood and stacked two high and the aisle between them is just wide enough for two men to pa.s.s turning sideways. Lying on your bunk you could reach out and touch three other men without much trouble. Weapons and full ammo racks hang from nails pounded into the walls and socks dry on "550 cord" that has been strung between rafters, and combat packs and boots and packages from home are stuffed under the bunks. Most of the men have photographs of women nailed to the walls - magazine photos, not personal ones; you wouldn"t really want to subject your girlfriend to that kind of scrutiny - and a few have blankets nailed over their bunk for privacy. Others simply escape with sleeping pills.

I take a lower bunk near the stove and unpack my gear. Around me the men are eating MREs and talking about their plans in the military, about the troubles in Third Platoon, about how everything fell apart once the fighting stopped. Friends started arguing and a sour discontent crept through the company that was almost as threatening to their mission as the enemy. The lull was much harder on group dynamics than combat and caught everyone by surprise, even the commanders. Prophet recently picked up radio chatter that a hundred men had come into the valley with the intention of overrunning Restrepo, but that almost seemed too good to be true.

"I hope they try it," one guy told me; it was a common sentiment. "I hope they try it because if they do, they"re all going to die."

One day a patrol goes down to Loy Kalay, searches the bazaar, and returns without even generating radio chatter. A squad-plus sets in an ambush on a south-facing hill just outside the wire but all they see are women collecting firewood. Another patrol turns up wires running to a 107 mm rocket hidden in a wood pile and an explosives team comes in by helicopter to blow it up. The men at Restrepo work slowly at odd jobs around the base and lift weights while the sun is still high and then break at the end of the day to sit on the ammo hooch smoking. At eight o"clock the generator cuts out and everyone goes to their bunks; after that, the only men awake are the ones at the guardposts. Sometimes it would occur to me how incredible - how very close to the experience of childhood - it is to be watched over by others while you slowly float off into sleep.

One evening Steiner and I are sitting around the heater and he"s telling me about his efforts to understand women. He wants to understand them so that he can sleep with them more easily. He has read everything he can on the topic, including books on feminism, and he favors what he calls the "c.o.c.ky-funny" routine when talking to them, which is explained in one of his books. Steiner was a wrestler in high school and has sandy blond hair and a big wide-open smile and looks like he could easily carry a kitchen sink up a mountain. "He"s too pretty for himself," was how First Sergeant Caldwell described him to me once. Steiner arrived in the Korengal a few months late, having spent the beginning of the deployment as a driver for the battalion sergeant major. He and I discuss women for a while and eventually Lambert shuffles in and looks around. Lambert"s new to the platoon and is from the South and has a slight stammer that he claims women fall for. He says he killed his first deer at age ten, and his father made him gut it and then take a bite of the raw heart (" - and I"ve been stuttering ever since," someone else jokingly finished the story for him).

Lambert says he"s going to start a landscaping business when he gets home and then he"s going to buy a backhoe and dig graves in cemeteries. "It"s guaranteed work because people die every day," he says. "People die and it"s, like, five hundred dollars a grave and you can dig five or six graves in a day."

I watch Steiner frown and consider this plan. It seems like there should be a catch but maybe there"s not; maybe earning a living really is that simple. Steiner is still thinking about it when Jackson and Monroe walk in. The first nickname Jackson got in the platoon was "Jacko," but that was quickly changed to "Wacko." Wacko made an impression early on by completing a twelve-mile road march on blisters that were so bad his boots filled with blood. Monroe"s nickname is "Money." Money will barely speak for days at a time but looks around in ways that suggest he knows something no one else has figured out yet. Maybe he has. He"s lean and a little feral-looking and very tough. He makes a kind of bleating sound from time to time, a cross between a goat and a machine gun, and for a while he was hiding behind things at Restrepo and jumping out at unsuspecting men screaming, "WHAT"S UP MOTHERf.u.c.kER?" The sudden boredom after fighting season ended affected everyone differently.

Lambert is still talking about gravedigging when O"Byrne walks in. He has his cap pulled low over his eyes and a quilted parka liner b.u.t.toned with just the top b.u.t.ton and his face is smudged with dirt and his pants are ripped in three different places. O"Byrne arrived in the Army with a mustache and a full head of hair but by the time he got to the Korengal he"d shaved both off. During his two years in the service much of his hair had disappeared anyway. ("The Army stole my hair," he liked to say. "But who needs f.u.c.king hair?") He leans against one of the bunks and announces that he"s going to write a book about his life one day. Someone asks him why.

"Because of all the interesting s.h.i.t that"s happened," he says.

"Like what?"

"Like for starters, I was shot by my father."

No one says a word.

"When I was a kid me and my dad liked to drink a lot," O"Byrne continues, and someone laughs. O"Byrne"s head swivels around.

"That"s just not a sentence you hear very often," Steiner explains.

That seems to satisfy O"Byrne, who goes on to explain how his father came to shoot him. "But everything happens for a reason, I surely do believe that," he concludes. "If my dad hadn"t shot me I wouldn"t have joined the Army - and wouldn"t be where I am right now."

He says this without a trace of irony. There is a complicated silence in the room.

"Well, I"m not buyin" your f.u.c.kin" book," Money finally says.

Months later, O"Byrne told me the whole terrible story. I already knew he"d grown up in a small town, and I asked if he"d ever hunted as a kid. He said once he killed a salamander and felt so guilty he never killed anything again.

"But I"ve always had guns... my dad always had guns," O"Byrne said. "He raised me - which is f.u.c.king weird, but we"ll get to that - he raised me to respect weapons and never point them at anybody. Both of us failed that that f.u.c.king miserably. I was a bad kid in high school, I was a f.u.c.king punk - I did f.u.c.king miserably. I was a bad kid in high school, I was a f.u.c.king punk - I did not not know how to be a nice kid. My dad just drank and drank and drank. So one night, for my buddy"s birthday, this girl came over and we got a gallon of vodka. Vodka is not good for me, it makes me violent as s.h.i.t. I drank probably half a gallon, I was f.u.c.king obliterated, I was smashed. I get home and the first thing I see is my dad. I walk through the door and he"s f.u.c.king screaming at me. He swings. I swing. We start fighting. This fight goes on and on - I mean we fought for a long time. All my friends were trying to hold me back. Someone hit me with a two-by-four just trying to calm me down." know how to be a nice kid. My dad just drank and drank and drank. So one night, for my buddy"s birthday, this girl came over and we got a gallon of vodka. Vodka is not good for me, it makes me violent as s.h.i.t. I drank probably half a gallon, I was f.u.c.king obliterated, I was smashed. I get home and the first thing I see is my dad. I walk through the door and he"s f.u.c.king screaming at me. He swings. I swing. We start fighting. This fight goes on and on - I mean we fought for a long time. All my friends were trying to hold me back. Someone hit me with a two-by-four just trying to calm me down."

The fight eventually broke up and O"Byrne went to his room. After a while he heard his father yelling again, so he went back downstairs and started walking back and forth in front of his father"s bedroom door, screaming at him. Suddenly his hip gave out and the next thing he knew he was lying in the hallway and his leg didn"t work. He didn"t hear gunshots or feel any pain and he thought he"d somehow dislocated his hip. Then his father came out of the bedroom and pointed a rifle at his head. It was...o...b..rne"s favorite gun, a semiautomatic Ruger with a folding stock, and O"Byrne said, "So you"re going to shoot me when I"m down?" and his father said, "I already did."

"I was too drunk to realize what was going on, so I go upstairs, I walk up two flights of stairs and I start playing video games and then I go lay down because I"m losing blood. I"m crying now because I realize what"s going on and I"m in some f.u.c.king trouble now, I have two f.u.c.king bullets in me. This is not good. This is not a good situation."

An ambulance finally arrived and O"Byrne was taken to a hospital in Scranton. He had one bullet in his hip and another in the small of his back less than an inch from his spinal column. After doctors finished operating on him a cop showed up and asked for a statement. O"Byrne thought about it: whatever his father"s problems, he"d always held down a job and provided for the family, and if he went to prison, there"d be no one to take care of the family. That would compound an already terrible situation. "It was my fault," O"Byrne told the cop. "He did it in self-defense."

"My father wouldn"t have made it through jail - he"s not a violent person. The situation situation was violent but he"s not. So I was three days in the hospital and then they sent me to lockup - no rehab, nothing. I was charged with simple a.s.sault. I was a p.u.s.s.y in there, man, like, I didn"t try to fight was violent but he"s not. So I was three days in the hospital and then they sent me to lockup - no rehab, nothing. I was charged with simple a.s.sault. I was a p.u.s.s.y in there, man, like, I didn"t try to fight anyone anyone. It was the best thing - but the worst thing - that ever happened to me. My father and I put ourselves in that position to be f.u.c.king evil to each other. It"s a tough story but it"s a good one, too. How dare I hit my father - even if he hit me? If he popped me in my nose right now I"d look at him and I"d be like, "All right, I"m going downstairs and I"ll give you time to cool off." I"ll never hit that man again. That That was my fault - you know? I didn"t have the respect. It"s a story of triumph. It"s a story of going through some hard s.h.i.t and making out really good. I know bullets can"t stop me now. f.u.c.king bullets are okay." was my fault - you know? I didn"t have the respect. It"s a story of triumph. It"s a story of going through some hard s.h.i.t and making out really good. I know bullets can"t stop me now. f.u.c.king bullets are okay."

I GO TO SLEEP ONE NIGHT MENTALLY PREPARED FOR GO TO SLEEP ONE NIGHT MENTALLY PREPARED FOR a twenty-four-hour operation called Dark City, but at three in the morning Donoho comes through the hooch announcing that it"s been canceled because of the weather. Third Platoon was going to cross over to the far side of the valley, and Second Platoon was going to support them from Table Rock with a lot of firepower. We all roll over and go back to sleep and the next time I wake up it"s full light and Jones is sitting on a bunk eating an MRE. Jones ordinarily sleeps in the Submarine, but last night was so cold that he moved in with us. He"s picking the mushrooms out of his Thai Chicken and muttering to no one in particular, "Not a big fan of mushrooms. Only people you ever see eating mushrooms are white folks. "What you want on your pizza, sir?" "Mushrooms." "What else do you want on your pizza?" "More mushrooms."" a twenty-four-hour operation called Dark City, but at three in the morning Donoho comes through the hooch announcing that it"s been canceled because of the weather. Third Platoon was going to cross over to the far side of the valley, and Second Platoon was going to support them from Table Rock with a lot of firepower. We all roll over and go back to sleep and the next time I wake up it"s full light and Jones is sitting on a bunk eating an MRE. Jones ordinarily sleeps in the Submarine, but last night was so cold that he moved in with us. He"s picking the mushrooms out of his Thai Chicken and muttering to no one in particular, "Not a big fan of mushrooms. Only people you ever see eating mushrooms are white folks. "What you want on your pizza, sir?" "Mushrooms." "What else do you want on your pizza?" "More mushrooms.""

The door opens and O"Byrne walks in. He"s looking for Money, who"s still asleep in his bunk. O"Byrne sits next to him and puts him in a headlock. "I just don"t understand," he says. "If you were Hajj, why would you want to wake up in the morning and shoot at us?"

Money doesn"t answer. He"s not interested in this conversation. "Money, why would Hajj want to do that? Why would he climb up onto the hilltops to start shooting at us?"

The immediate answer was that we built a firebase in their backyard, but there was more to the question than that. Once in a while you"d forget to think of the enemy as the enemy the enemy and would see them for what they were: teenagers up on a hill who got tired and cold just like the Americans and missed their families and slept poorly before the big operations and probably had nightmares about them afterward. Once you thought about them on those terms it was hard not to wonder whether the men themselves - not the American and Taliban commanders but the actual guys behind the guns - couldn"t somehow sit down together and work this out. I"m pretty sure the Taliban had a healthy respect for Second Platoon, at least as fighters, and once in a while I"d hear someone in Second Platoon mumble a kind of grudging approval of the Taliban as well: they move like ghosts around the mountains and can fight all day on a swallow of water and a handful of nuts and are holding their own against a brigade of U.S. airborne infantry. As a military feat that"s nothing to sneeze at. The sheer weirdness of this war - of any war - can never entirely be contained and breaks through at odd moments: and would see them for what they were: teenagers up on a hill who got tired and cold just like the Americans and missed their families and slept poorly before the big operations and probably had nightmares about them afterward. Once you thought about them on those terms it was hard not to wonder whether the men themselves - not the American and Taliban commanders but the actual guys behind the guns - couldn"t somehow sit down together and work this out. I"m pretty sure the Taliban had a healthy respect for Second Platoon, at least as fighters, and once in a while I"d hear someone in Second Platoon mumble a kind of grudging approval of the Taliban as well: they move like ghosts around the mountains and can fight all day on a swallow of water and a handful of nuts and are holding their own against a brigade of U.S. airborne infantry. As a military feat that"s nothing to sneeze at. The sheer weirdness of this war - of any war - can never entirely be contained and breaks through at odd moments: "I went out to use the p.i.s.s tubes one night," O"Byrne admitted to me once, "and I was like, "What am I doing in Afghanistan?" I mean literally, "What am I doing here?" "What am I doing here?" I"m trying to kill people and they"re trying to kill me. It"s crazy..." I"m trying to kill people and they"re trying to kill me. It"s crazy..."

The enemy had to have their p.i.s.s-tube moments as well - how could they not? In January, Prophet overheard two Taliban commanders discussing the American presence in the valley by radio. One of them was making the point that if the Americans were willing to build roads and clinics in the valley, maybe they shouldn"t be attacked. The other guy didn"t quite agree, but at least someone was asking the question. The number of firefights in the battalion area of operation had dropped from five a day to one a day, the number of shuras with local leaders had quadrupled, and the Americans hadn"t been shot at from inside a village in the Korengal since the end of October. That was an important gauge of local sentiment because it meant that the villagers were telling the fighters to take their insurgency elsewhere. There was even a story going around that one of the valley elders had slapped a Taliban commander across the face for refusing to leave the area, and the commander didn"t dare retaliate. The human terrain in the Pech and the Korengal was changing so fast that Colonel Ostlund felt confident a little more development money would allow NATO forces and the Afghan government to absolutely "overrun" the area. "The arguments I"ve heard against the American presence here are all economically based," he told me. "Which is the good news, because economic arguments are arguments we can win."

Kearney is convinced that in the spring the fight is going to move northward, out of the Korengal and into the Pech, which would allow him to create a little breathing room for the incoming unit. As far as he knows that will be Viper Company of the First Infantry Division, which is a mechanized unit, and the new soldiers will probably be out of shape and used to riding in trucks. They"ll be faced with foot patrols on some of the steepest terrain in the entire war, and Kearney wants to make sure that at least the northern half of the valley has bought into the idea of government control. He"s going to build another outpost, called Dallas, more or less at the spot where Murphree lost his legs last month. That will extend American firepower deep into the central Korengal and prevent the enemy from digging bombs into a crucial section of road. He"s going to put Third Platoon down at Dallas and hand Phoenix over to the Afghan National Army, which is coming into the valley with two full companies - 300 men. The idea is to have the ANA start conducting their own patrols in the safer villages, like Babiyal and Aliabad, which would free up the Americans to push farther down-valley.

"We"re still gonna take casualties, unfortunately," Kearney says. "We"ll probably lose another soldier, if not more, but I think the kinetic activity will drop. The people of the valley will hopefully start seeing some changes, and we"ll hopefully have a food distribution center set up. That way I can bring the local villagers in and empower them them rather than the elders, who are working with the Taliban." rather than the elders, who are working with the Taliban."

Kearney wants to start issuing ident.i.ty cards so that locals can come to the KOP and pick up food and other types of humanitarian aid. Until now those supplies have been distributed through village elders who make huge profits by taking most of it for themselves. Ident.i.ty cards will also enable the S-2, the intelligence officer, to conduct a crude census of the valley, and the food pickups will give locals an opportunity to tip the Americans off to upcoming attacks without the Taliban knowing about it. Kearney also wants to buy three or four jingle trucks, put benches in the back, and start running a bus service up and down the valley. Right now it costs around a hundred dollars in fuel to drive a truck from Babiyal, at the center of the valley, up to the nearest market town and back. A bus service would allow commerce to start flowing more freely into and out of the valley, which would take control out of the hands of the village elders and put it into the hands of ordinary people.

"The villagers are almost like indentured servants," Kearney says. "I got to bri

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