War.

Chapter 7

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COFFEE AT R RESTREPO WAS A PROBLEM BECAUSE NO ONE drank it so you were more or less on your own in that regard. Certain MREs include packets of coffee, powdered milk, and sugar, but I always found it hard to remember which ones they were - as opposed to, say, the breakfast tea or cider mix - and that meant pawing through the garbage to find enough ingredients for a good cup. Once the precious powders were in hand I"d go to the command center and empty a bottle of water into the electric kettle and plug it in. The command center was a dark, secure bunker next to Gillespie"s bunk where the radios were stacked, and there was usually so little light that finding the kettle required some feeling around. drank it so you were more or less on your own in that regard. Certain MREs include packets of coffee, powdered milk, and sugar, but I always found it hard to remember which ones they were - as opposed to, say, the breakfast tea or cider mix - and that meant pawing through the garbage to find enough ingredients for a good cup. Once the precious powders were in hand I"d go to the command center and empty a bottle of water into the electric kettle and plug it in. The command center was a dark, secure bunker next to Gillespie"s bunk where the radios were stacked, and there was usually so little light that finding the kettle required some feeling around.

While the water was heating I"d scout a place to sit. Pretty much everything was uncomfortable at Restrepo - there was one chair but it was almost always taken, the sandbags were hard as rocks, and the round plastic Javelin case next to First Squad hooch made your a.s.s numb in minutes - but finding a good seat was important. You"d only get one cup of coffee a day, and considering what"s not not available at Restrepo, that cup was pretty much the most pleasurable thing that was going to happen to you until you got home. I liked to drink my coffee sitting with my back against a Hes...o...b..neath the south-facing SAW position. Nothing random could hit you there, and you were inside the courtyard looking north up the valley. In front of me was a pile of sandbags holding up a fibergla.s.s pole for the concealment netting, and I could brace my legs on the sandbags and use my knees to write against. The netting broke up the direct sunlight and gave things a mottled, wobbly feel that could make you dizzy if you stared at the shadows for too long. available at Restrepo, that cup was pretty much the most pleasurable thing that was going to happen to you until you got home. I liked to drink my coffee sitting with my back against a Hes...o...b..neath the south-facing SAW position. Nothing random could hit you there, and you were inside the courtyard looking north up the valley. In front of me was a pile of sandbags holding up a fibergla.s.s pole for the concealment netting, and I could brace my legs on the sandbags and use my knees to write against. The netting broke up the direct sunlight and gave things a mottled, wobbly feel that could make you dizzy if you stared at the shadows for too long.

I usually put together my coffee around midmorning and then settled into my spot to work on my notes, but one morning Gillespie sends out a patrol to Obenau and we don"t come back until midday. We come walking into the wire to word from Prophet that we"re about to get hit. For weeks there"s been intel about ammo coming into the valley - mortars, rockets, crates of Dishka rounds - the kinds of things you"d use against a fortified position rather than men on foot. The attack is supposed to come around 12:30 that afternoon, but the hour comes and goes without a shot, and the men sink back into their slow-motion heat trance. It"s one of those dead afternoons in the Korengal where nothing moves and you barely have the energy to wave the flies off your face. I mix up my coffee and settle into my spot to talk to Gillespie. Richardson is brushing his teeth. A few Afghan soldiers are standing around the ammo hooch. Most of the Americans are in their bunks. Airborne is asleep in the shade near the muddy spot created by the water bladder.

I"m just raising the mug to my lips for a first sip when the air around us compresses with a WHUMP WHUMP. Gillespie and I just look at each other - could it be? Then comes a flurry of sick little snaps and the inevitable staccato sound in the distance. That first burst, I find out later, hit the guard tower and splintered plywood a few inches from Pemble"s head. Richardson is on the SAW so fast that he has to spit out his last mouthful of toothpaste between bursts. Gillespie jumps up and runs into the radio room, and everywhere men are grabbing their vests and sprinting for their positions. My cup of coffee gets knocked over almost immediately. On the radio I can hear Kearney yelling, "ALL BATTLE ELEMENTS THIS IS BATTLE-SIX THIS IS THE TIC WE WERE TALKIN" ABOUT THE KOP IS TAKING INDIRECT, OVER."

"Indirect" means mortars. They"re shot upward out of a tube and come down from above, which makes them harder to take cover from. (They"re also harder to suppress because, unlike guns, mortars can be completely out of sight behind a ridge. All the mortarman needs is a spotter calling in corrections to walk the rounds onto the target.) The KOP is essentially the Mothership, and without her, every outpost in the valley would be indefensible. The job of the outposts is to keep the KOP from getting attacked so that the KOP, in return, can support the outposts. Grenades and mortars start coming in and detonating against our own fortifications and we"re taking gunfire from three different directions to the south. Gillespie is out on the ammo hooch trying to see where the grenades are coming from and shouting into his radio and the Afghans are standing around reluctant and confused and the Americans are running shirtless and whooping to their guns. During the lulls they put wads of chew under their lips or light cigarettes. Olson"s on the .50 alternating bursts with Jones, who"s above him on the 240, and Pemble is so upset about almost getting killed that he empties a whole can of linked grenades into the ridges to the south.

The fight lasts ten or fifteen minutes and then the A-10s show up and tilt into their dives. Ninety rounds a second the size of beer cans unzipping the mountainsides with a sound like the sky ripping. The men look up and whoop when they hear it, a punishment so unnegotiable it might as well have come from G.o.d.

One night a few weeks later I"m sitting on the ammo hooch listening to the monkeys in the peaks. A temperature inversion has filled the valley with mist and the mist is silver in the moonlight and almost liquid. Airborne is asleep but keeps popping his head up to growl at some threat impossibly far below us in the valley. There"s been a big fight over by the Pakistan border and F-15s and -16s have been powering overhead all evening looking for people to kill. O"Byrne wanders out and we start talking. His head is shaved but dirt sticks to the stubble so you can see where his hair ought to be. He says he signed a contract with the Army that"s almost up, and he has to figure out whether to reenlist.

"Combat is such an adrenaline rush," he says. "I"m worried I"ll be looking for that when I get home and if I can"t find it, I"ll just start drinking and getting in trouble. People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that"s not true... we drink because we miss the good stuff."

O"Byrne is also worried about being alone. He hasn"t been out of earshot of his platoonmates for two years and has no idea how he"ll react to solitude. He"s never had to get a job, find an apartment, or arrange a doctor"s appointment because the Army has always done those things for him. All he"s had to do is fight. And he"s good at it, so leading a patrol up 1705 causes him less anxiety than, say, moving to Boston and finding an apartment and a job. He has little capacity for what civilians refer to as "life skills"; for him, life skills literally keep you alive. Those are far simpler and more compelling than the skills required at home. "In the Korengal, almost every problem could get settled by getting violent faster than the other guy," O"Byrne told me. "Do that at home and it"s not going to go so well."

It"s a stressful way to live but once it"s blown out your levels almost everything else looks boring. O"Byrne knows himself: when he gets bored he starts drinking and getting into fights, and then it"s only a matter of time until he"s back in the system. If that"s the case, he might as well stay stay in the system - a better one - and actually move upward. I suggest a few civilian jobs that offer a little adrenaline - wilderness trip guide, firefighter - but we both know it"s just not the same. We are at one of the most exposed outposts in the entire U.S. military, and he"s crawling out of his skin because there hasn"t been a good firefight in a week. How do you bring a guy like that back into the world? in the system - a better one - and actually move upward. I suggest a few civilian jobs that offer a little adrenaline - wilderness trip guide, firefighter - but we both know it"s just not the same. We are at one of the most exposed outposts in the entire U.S. military, and he"s crawling out of his skin because there hasn"t been a good firefight in a week. How do you bring a guy like that back into the world?

Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like a profanity. And yet throughout history, men like Mac and Rice and O"Byrne have come home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power. These men come home and quickly find themselves getting berated by a rear-base major who"s never seen combat or arguing with their girlfriend about some domestic issue they don"t even understand. When men say they miss combat, it"s not that they actually miss getting shot at - you"d have to be deranged - it"s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.

It"s such a pure, clean standard that men can completely remake themselves in war. You could be anything back home - shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular - and it won"t matter because it"s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore of no consequence, period. The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. That is why the men say such impossibly vulgar things about each other"s sisters and mothers. It"s one more way to prove nothing can break the bond between them; it"s one more way to prove they"re not alone out there.

War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly. These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive alive - that you can get skydiving - but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can"t. So here sits Sergeant Brendan O"Byrne, one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up. - that you can get skydiving - but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can"t. So here sits Sergeant Brendan O"Byrne, one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up.

"I prayed only once in Afghanistan," O"Byrne wrote me after it was all over. "It was when Restrepo got shot, and I prayed to G.o.d to let him live. But G.o.d, Allah, Jehovah, Zeus or whatever a person may call G.o.d wasn"t in that valley. Combat is the devil"s game. G.o.d wanted no part. That"s why our prayers weren"t answered: the only one listening was Satan."

In November 1943, ten rifle companies from the First Infantry Division arrived in England to prepare for the invasion of n.a.z.i-occupied France. The men had fought their way across North Africa and Italy and were now poised to spearhead the biggest and most decisive action of World War II. (The men had seen so much combat that a sour refrain had begun to make the rounds: "The Army consists of the First Infantry Division and eight million replacements.") As these men prepared for the invasion, they were asked to fill out questionnaires prepared by a new ent.i.ty known as the Army Research Branch. The goal of the study was to determine whether mental att.i.tude among soldiers was any predictor of combat performance. Similar questionnaires were also given to new units who had just arrived from the United States - "cherries," as they were already known back then.

Several months later these men sprinted into the artillery and machine-gun fire that was plowing up the beaches of Normandy, overran the German positions, and eventually went on to liberate Paris. Combat losses over the course of those two months were around 60 percent, and even higher for officers. What interested sociologists at the Research Branch, however, were non non-combat losses - men who went mad from trauma and fear. For every four men felled by bullets there was, on average, one removed from the battlefield for psychological reasons. Such losses varied from unit to unit and were thought to closely reflect the fighting ability of those groups. The Army wanted to know whether that ability could be determined beforehand beforehand, simply by asking questions.

It could, as it turned out. The Research Branch - which went on to publish its findings in a cla.s.sic volume called The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath The American Soldier: Combat and Its Aftermath, edited by sociologist Samuel Stouffer - found that in ten out of twelve regiments, companies with poor att.i.tudes were far more likely than others to suffer noncombat casualties. Stouffer calculated that the chance of that happening randomly, with no statistical connection between the two, was less than 2 percent. The study went on, questionnaire after questionnaire, to attempt to pry from the minds of thousands of soldiers what exactly enabled them to function in an environment as h.e.l.lish and confusing as modern combat. All things being equal, some men make better soldiers than others, and some units perform better than others. The traits that distinguish those men, and those units, could be called the Holy Grail of combat psychology. They could be called the basis for what people loosely refer to as "courage."

An Israeli study during the 1973 Yom Kippur War found that high-performing soldiers were more intelligent, more "masculine," more socially mature, and more emotionally stable than average men. Moreover, attack divers who exhibited behavioral problems in tightly run kibbutz communities turned out to be far better fighters than "conformist" divers who never got in trouble. At the other end of the spectrum, eight out of ten men who suffered psychological collapse in combat had a problem at home: a pregnant wife, a financial crisis, a recent death in the family. Those collapses were most likely to be caused not by a near-death experience, as one might expect, but by the combat death of a close friend. That was certainly true at Restrepo as well. Nearly every man had missed death by a margin of inches, but those traumas were almost never discussed. Rather, it was the losses in the unit that lingered in men"s minds. The only time I saw a man cry up there was when I asked Pemble whether he was glad the outpost had been named after Doc Restrepo. Pemble nodded, tried to answer, and then his face just went into his hands.

Cortez was another man who struggled with the loss of Restrepo. "His death was a bit hard on us," he told me, months later, with typical understatement. "We loved him like a brother. I actually saw him as an older brother, and after he went down, there was a time I didn"t care about anything. I didn"t care about getting shot or if I died over there. I"d run into the open and not care and I"d be getting chewed out by a team leader and not care. I wasn"t scared, honestly, but I just didn"t care. I didn"t care if I died or not."

Someone finally pointed out to Cortez that if he got hit, someone else was going to have to run through gunfire to save him, and the idea that he might get one of his brothers killed was enough to get him to knock it off. His reaction points to an irony of combat psychology, however - the logical downside of heroism. If you"re willing to lay down your life for another person, then their death is going to be more upsetting than the prospect of your own, and intense combat might incapacitate an entire unit through grief alone. Combat is such an urgent business, however, that most men simply defer the psychological issues until later. "A tired, cold, muddy rifleman goes forward with the bitter dryness of fear in his mouth into the mortar bursts and machine-gun fire of a determined enemy," Stouffer wrote in The American Soldier The American Soldier. "A tremendous psychological mobilization is necessary to make an individual do this, not just once but many times. In combat, surely, if anywhere, we should be able to observe behavioral determinants of great significance."

Some of those behavioral determinants - like a willingness to take risks - seem to figure disproportionately in the characters of young men. They are killed in accidents and homicides at a rate of 106 per 100,000 per year, roughly five times the rate of young women. Statistically, it"s six times as dangerous to spend a year as a young man in America than as a cop or a fireman, and vastly more dangerous than a one-year deployment at a big military base in Afghanistan. You"d have to go to a remote firebase like the KOP or Camp Blessing to find a level of risk that surpa.s.ses that of simply being an adolescent male back home.

Combat isn"t simply a matter of risk, though; it"s also a matter of mastery. The basic neurological mechanism that induces mammals to do things is called the dopamine reward system. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that mimics the effect of cocaine in the brain, and it gets released when a person wins a game or solves a problem or succeeds at a difficult task. The dopamine reward system exists in both s.e.xes but is stronger in men, and as a result, men are more likely to become obsessively involved in such things as hunting, gambling, computer games, and war. When the men of Second Platoon were moping around the outpost hoping for a firefight it was because, among other things, they weren"t getting their accustomed dose of endorphins and dopamine. They played video games instead. Women can master those skills without having pleasure centers in their brains - primarily the mesocorticolimbic center - light up as if they"d just done a line of c.o.ke.

One of the beguiling things about combat and other deep games is that they"re so complex, there"s no way to predict the outcome. That means that any ragtag militia, no matter how small and poorly equipped, might conceivably defeat a superior force if it fights well enough. Combat starts out as a fairly organized math problem involving trajectories and angles but quickly decays into a kind of violent farce, and the randomness of that farce can produce strange outcomes. "Every action produces a counteraction on the enemy"s part," an American correspondent named Jack Belden wrote about combat during World War II. (Belden"s observations were so keen that he was quoted in The American Soldier The American Soldier.) "The thousands of interlocking actions throw up millions of little frictions, accidents and chances, from which there emanates an all-embracing fog of uncertainty."

Combat fog obscures your fate - obscures when and where you might die - and from that unknown is born a desperate bond between the men. That bond is the core experience of combat and the only thing you can absolutely count on. The Army might screw you and your girlfriend might dump you and the enemy might kill you, but the shared commitment to safeguard one another"s lives is unnegotiable and only deepens with time. The willingness to die for another person is a form of love that even religions fail to inspire, and the experience of it changes a person profoundly. What the Army sociologists, with their clipboards and their questions and their endless meta-a.n.a.lyses, slowly came to understand was that courage was was love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing. According to their questionnaires, the primary motivation in combat (other than "ending the task" - which meant they all could go home) was "solidarity with the group." That far outweighed self-preservation or idealism as a motivator. The Army Research Branch cites cases of wounded men going AWOL after their hospitalization in order to get back to their unit faster than the military could get them there. A civilian might consider this an act of courage, but soldiers knew better. To them it was just an act of brotherhood, and there probably wasn"t much to say about it except, "Welcome back." love. In war, neither could exist without the other, and that in a sense they were just different ways of saying the same thing. According to their questionnaires, the primary motivation in combat (other than "ending the task" - which meant they all could go home) was "solidarity with the group." That far outweighed self-preservation or idealism as a motivator. The Army Research Branch cites cases of wounded men going AWOL after their hospitalization in order to get back to their unit faster than the military could get them there. A civilian might consider this an act of courage, but soldiers knew better. To them it was just an act of brotherhood, and there probably wasn"t much to say about it except, "Welcome back."

Loyalty to the group drove men back into combat - and occasionally to their deaths - but the group also provided the only psychological refuge from the horror of what was going on. It was conceivably more rea.s.suring to be under fire with men you trusted than to languish at some rear base with strangers who had no real understanding of war. It"s as if there was an intoxicating effect to group inclusion that more than compensated for the dangers the group had to face. A study conducted in the mid-1950s found that jumping out of a plane generated extreme anxiety in loosely loosely bonded groups of paratroopers, but tightly bonded men mainly worried about living up to the standards of the group. Men were also found to be able to withstand more pain - in this case, electric shocks - when they were part of a close group than when they were alone. bonded groups of paratroopers, but tightly bonded men mainly worried about living up to the standards of the group. Men were also found to be able to withstand more pain - in this case, electric shocks - when they were part of a close group than when they were alone.

In the early 1990s, an English anthropologist named Robin Dunbar theorized that the maximum size for any group of primates was determined by brain size - specifically, the size of the neocortex. The larger the neocortex, he reasoned, the more individuals with whom you could maintain personal relationships. Dunbar then compared primate brains to human brains and used the differential to predict the ideal size for a group of humans. The number he came up with was 147.8 people. Rounded up to 150, it became known as the Dunbar number, and it happened to pop up everywhere. A survey of ethnographic data found that precontact hunter-gatherers around the world lived in shifting communities that ranged from 90 to 221 people, with an average of 148. Neolithic villages in Mesopotamia were thought to have had around 150 people. The Roman army of the cla.s.sical period used a formation of 130 men - called a maniple, or a double century - in combat. Hutterite communities in South Dakota split after reaching 150 people because, in their opinion, anything larger cannot be controlled by peer pressure alone.

Dunbar also found that the size of human hunter-gatherer communities was not spread evenly along a spectrum but tended to clump around certain numbers. The first group size that kept coming up in ethnographic data was thirty to fifty people - essentially a platoon. (Unlike hunter-gatherer communities, platoons are obviously single-s.e.x, but the group identification may still function the same way.) Those communities were highly mobile but kept in close contact with three or four other communities for social and defensive purposes. The larger these groups were, the better they could defend themselves, up until the point where they got so big that they started to fracture and divide. Many such groups formed a tribe, and tribes either fought each other or formed confederacies against other tribes. The basic dichotomy of "us" versus "them" happened at the tribal level and was reinforced by differences in language and culture.

The parallels with military structure are almost exact. Battle Company had around 150 men, and every man in the company knew every other man by face and by name. The molten core of the group bond was the platoon, however. A platoon - with a headquarters element, a radio operator, a medic, and a forward observer for calling in airstrikes - is the smallest self-contained unit in the regular army. Inserted into enemy territory and resupplied by air, a platoon could function more or less indefinitely. When I asked the men about their allegiance to one another, they said they would unhesitatingly risk their lives for anyone in the platoon or company, but that the sentiment dropped off pretty quickly after that. By the time you got to brigade level - three or four thousand men - any sense of common goals or ident.i.ty was pretty much theoretical. The 173rd had an unmanned observation blimp tethered over Asadabad, for example, and one night a thunderstorm caused it to crash. When the men at Restrepo heard that, they broke into a cheer.

Self-sacrifice in defense of one"s community is virtually universal among humans, extolled in myths and legends all over the world, and undoubtedly ancient. No community can protect itself unless a certain portion of its youth decide they are willing to risk their lives in its defense. That sentiment can be horribly manipulated by leaders and politicians, of course, but the underlying sentiment remains the same. Cheyenne Dog Soldiers wore long sashes that they staked to the ground in battle so that they couldn"t retreat from the spot unless released by someone else. American militiamen at the Alamo were outnumbered ten to one and yet fought to the last man rather than surrender to Mexican forces trying to reclaim the territory of Texas. And soldiers in World War I ran headlong into heavy machine-gun fire not because many of them cared about the larger politics of the war but because that"s what the man to the left and right of them was doing. The cause doesn"t have to be righteous and battle doesn"t have to be winnable; but over and over again throughout history, men have chosen to die in battle with their friends rather than to flee on their own and survive.

While Stouffer was trying to figure this phenomenon out among American troops, the Psychological Warfare Division was trying to do the same thing with the Germans. One of the most astounding things about the last phase of the war wasn"t that the German army collapsed - by the end that was a matter of simple math - but that it lasted as long as it did. Many German units that were completely cut off from the rest of their army continued resisting the prospect of certain defeat. After the war, a pair of former American intelligence officers named Edward Shils and Morris Janowitz set about interviewing thousands of German prisoners to find out what had motivated them in the face of such odds. Their paper, "Cohesion and Disintegration in the Wehrmacht in World War II," became a cla.s.sic inquiry into why men fight.

Considering the extreme nationalism of the n.a.z.i era, one might expect that territorial ambition and a sense of racial superiority motivated most of the men on the German line. In fact, those concepts only helped men who were already part of a cohesive unit; for everyone else, such grand principles provided no motivation at all. A soldier needs to have his basic physical needs met and needs to feel valued and loved by others. If those things are provided by the group, a soldier requires virtually no rationale other than the defense of that group to continue fighting. Allied propaganda about the moral wrongfulness of the n.a.z.i government had very little effect on these men because they weren"t really fighting for that government anyway. As the German lines collapsed and the German army, the Wehrmacht, began to break up, the concerns of fighting began to give way to those of pure physical survival. At that point, Allied propaganda campaigns that guaranteed food, shelter, and safety to German deserters began to take a toll.

But even then, Shils and Janowitz found, the men who deserted tended to be disgruntled loners who had never really fit into their unit. They were men who typically had trouble giving or receiving affection and had a history of difficult relations with friends and family back home. A significant number had criminal records. The majority of everyone else either fought and died as a unit or surrendered as a unit. Almost no one acted on their own to avoid a fate that was coming to the whole group. When I asked Hijar what it would mean to get overrun, he said, "By a brave man"s definition it would mean to fight until you died." That is essentially what the entire German army tried to do as the Western Front collapsed in the spring of 1945.

The starkest version of this commitment to the group is throwing yourself on a hand grenade to save the men around you. It"s courage in its most raw form, an instantaneous decision that is virtually guaranteed to kill the hero but stands a very good chance of saving everyone else. (Most acts of heroism contain at least an outside chance of survival - and a high chance of failure.) When Giunta ran into heavy fire to save Brennan from getting dragged off by the enemy, I doubt he considered his own safety, but somewhere in his mind he may have thought he had a chance of surviving. That would not be true with a hand grenade. Throwing yourself on a hand grenade is a deliberate act of suicide, and as such it occupies a singular place in the taxonomy of courage.

It is a particularly hard act to understand from an evolutionary point of view. The driving mechanism of human evolution is natural selection, meaning that genes of individuals who die before they have a chance to reproduce tend to get weeded out of a population. A young man who throws himself on a grenade is effectively conceding the genetic compet.i.tion to the men he saves: they will go on to have children whereas he won"t. From that, it"s hard to imagine how a gene for courage or altruism could get pa.s.sed forward through the generations. Individuals in most species will defend their young, which makes genetic sense, and a few, like wolves, will even defend their mates. But humans may be the only animal that practices what could be thought of as "suicidal defense": an individual male will rush to the defense of another male despite the fact that both are likely to die. Chimpanzees share around 99 percent of human DNA and are the only primate species yet observed to stage raids into neighboring territory and to kill the lone males they encounter. Raid after raid, kill after kill, they"ll wipe out the male population of a rival troop and take over their females and their territory. When these attacks happen, other males in the area flee rather than come to their comrade"s defense. Researchers have never once observed a chimpanzee turn around to help another male who is getting beaten to death by outsiders.

By that standard, courage could be thought of as a uniquely human trait. Courage would make even more evolutionary sense if it were also followed by some kind of social reward, like access to resources or to females. The glory heaped upon heroes in almost all societies might explain why young men are so eager to send themselves to war - or, if sent, to fight bravely. That would only work in a species that is capable of language, however; acts of bravery can"t follow a chimp home from the battlefield any more than acts of cowardice. Without language, courage just becomes suicidal foolishness. But once our ancestors escaped the eternal present by learning to speak, they could repeat stories that would make individuals accountable for their actions - or rewarded for them. That would create a strong incentive not to turn and flee while others fought off the enemy. Better to fight and die than to face ostracism and contempt back home.

Genetic material gathered from contemporary hunter-gatherers suggests that for much of prehistory, humans lived in groups of thirty to fifty people who were loosely related to one another. They married into other groups that spoke the same language and shared the same territory. If you were a young male in that era, dying in defense of your group would make good genetic sense because even if you didn"t have children, your relatives would, and it would be your nieces and nephews who pa.s.sed your genes on to future generations. Our evolutionary past was not not peaceful: archaeological evidence indicates that up to 15 percent of early humans died in battles with rival tribes. (By comparison, the carnage of the twentieth century produced a civilian casualty rate of less than 2 percent.) Because of our violent past, evolution may have programmed us to think we"re related to everyone in our immediate group - even in a platoon - and that dying in its defense is a good genetic strategy. Groups that weren"t organized like that may have had a hard time competing with groups that were, so in that way a propensity for bravery and self-sacrifice could have spread through human culture. I once asked Cortez whether he would risk his life for other men in the platoon. peaceful: archaeological evidence indicates that up to 15 percent of early humans died in battles with rival tribes. (By comparison, the carnage of the twentieth century produced a civilian casualty rate of less than 2 percent.) Because of our violent past, evolution may have programmed us to think we"re related to everyone in our immediate group - even in a platoon - and that dying in its defense is a good genetic strategy. Groups that weren"t organized like that may have had a hard time competing with groups that were, so in that way a propensity for bravery and self-sacrifice could have spread through human culture. I once asked Cortez whether he would risk his life for other men in the platoon.

"I"d actually throw myself on the hand grenade for them," he said. I asked him why.

"Because I actually love my brothers," he said. "I mean, it"s a brotherhood. Being able to save their life so they can live, I think is rewarding. Any of them would do it for me."

EARLY MORNING, THE MEN ASLEEP LIKE HOUNDS IN every conceivable position and dressed in everything from gym shorts to full camo and boots. Some seem to lie where they fell and others are curled up like children with blankets dragged up to their chins. They"re surrounded by guns and radios and ammo and tube-launched rockets and, here and there, magazine photos of girls in bikinis. (If those girls only knew where they"d wound up; if they only knew they"d been nailed to a six-by-six between old fly strips and belts of SAW ammo.) Early one morning we take half a magazine of AK from the ridge above us and I wake up thinking it"s just another bad dream until everyone figures it out all at once, men falling over each other grabbing rifles and grenades and piling out the door to stand around half-naked in the gray light. every conceivable position and dressed in everything from gym shorts to full camo and boots. Some seem to lie where they fell and others are curled up like children with blankets dragged up to their chins. They"re surrounded by guns and radios and ammo and tube-launched rockets and, here and there, magazine photos of girls in bikinis. (If those girls only knew where they"d wound up; if they only knew they"d been nailed to a six-by-six between old fly strips and belts of SAW ammo.) Early one morning we take half a magazine of AK from the ridge above us and I wake up thinking it"s just another bad dream until everyone figures it out all at once, men falling over each other grabbing rifles and grenades and piling out the door to stand around half-naked in the gray light.

"That"s it?" someone asks. "One burst?"

"Weak," Moreno says, walking away.

It"s the first contact in over two weeks, and no one can figure out whether the Americans are actually winning or if the enemy just decided not to fight for a while. Sometimes the war could look utterly futile - empires almost never win these things - and other times you"d remember that the enemy doesn"t have it so good either. They rarely get closer than five hundred yards, they rarely hit anyone, and they usually lose five or ten fighters in the ensuing airstrikes. Worse still, the locals seem to be souring on the whole concept of jihad. On one patrol an old man gives Patterson the names of the three insurgent leaders in Yaka Chine because their fighters come into Loy Kalay after dark to hara.s.s the inhabitants. He says the fighters wear uniforms and night vision gear and always leave town before dawn. "They took my son from the mosque and almost killed him for using tobacco and not having a beard," the old man says. "It"s the old Taliban rules."

Stichter asks him what the chances are of us getting shot at on the way out of town, and the old man just shrugs. "Only G.o.d knows," he says.

"I"d say it"s about seventy-five percent," Stichter tells me as we turn to go.

As it turns out we walk back unmolested. A few days later we"re all sitting around the courtyard at Restrepo when word comes over company net that a force of Pakistani Taliban just attacked a border outpost manned by a special unit of Afghan soldiers. The Taliban were shooting across the border from positions held by the Pakistani Frontier Corps, so the Afghans called in airstrikes on the Frontier Corps positions. Colonel Ostlund then ordered four more bombs to be dropped on another group of attackers that had just fled back across the border. They were all killed. "If we go to war with Pakistan, I"ll reenlist," O"Byrne says. He"s shirtless in the late-afternoon heat and sitting in a folding chair that someone stole from a sergeant first cla.s.s in Kuwait. The sergeant"s name - Elder - is written in Magic Marker on the back of the chair, and now it"s sitting up at Restrepo getting shot at. The chair even has a drink holder in the armrest.

The men know Pakistan is the root of the entire war, and that is just about the only topic they get political about. They don"t much care what happens in Afghanistan - they barely even care what happens on the Pech - but day after day they hear intel about fresh fighters coming in from Pakistan and wounded ones going out. Supposedly there"s a medical clinic in Pakistan entirely devoted to treating insurgents. Somewhere in the valley there"s a boulder painted with jihadist graffiti, but it"s in Arabic instead of Pashto because locals aren"t as enthused about the war as the outsiders. You didn"t have to be in the Army to notice that Pakistan was effectively waging war against America, but the administration back home was refusing to even acknowledge it, much less take any action. Now an American colonel is bombing Pakistani troops inside their own country and the feeling at Restrepo is, Finally... Finally...

Advance personnel for Viper Company will start arriving in weeks, and the men have already started talking. They considered Viper Company to be a mechanized unit, meaning they ride around in Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and the word is that their mountain-warfare training back home didn"t go so well. The men at Restrepo are convinced that Viper will arrive fat and out of shape, and it will be Second Platoon"s job to make sure that they suffer appropriately. When a new unit arrives in theater they undergo a week or so of what is known as "right-seat left-seat" patrols. First the old unit leads the patrols, pointing out all the salient features of the area, and the new unit just follows. Then the new unit leads and the old unit follows. That takes about a week, and then the old unit gets on a helicopter and flies away forever and the new guys are on their own.

Right-seat left-seat is how tactical knowledge - the little details that save men"s lives - gets pa.s.sed from one unit to the next. From a combat vet"s point of view, right-seat left-seat is also a chance to walk cherries into the ground and demonstrate their staggering weakness. (It actually worked too well: one Viper Company soldier literally wound up on his hands and knees on the last hill to Restrepo.) Most casualties occur in the first few months of a deployment because the new men don"t know where they"re getting shot at from and the mortar teams don"t know what hilltops to hit. The job of Kearney and his soldiers was to explain all this so that the new unit wouldn"t have to learn by trial and error at the cost of men"s lives.

A crucial part of the handoff is pushing the enemy back so that there is some "white s.p.a.ce" on the battlefield, and Kearney came up with a fairly radical plan for doing that: he was going to sweep Yaka Chine. Third Platoon would get dropped onto the ridges west of town, Second Platoon would clear from the south, and Kearney and his headquarters element would direct everything from Divpat. Locals had said that there were foreign fighters in Yaka Chine walking around openly in military camouflage with weapons over their shoulders. Apparently they"d conceded the northern half of the valley to the Americans but considered themselves immune to attack in the southern half. It was only three miles from Restrepo, but there were so many draws and caves in the hills above town, and so many fighting positions on the high ground, that it would take a brigade-wide effort to get in and out of there safely.

The entire plan hinged on airpower because there was no way to walk down there fast enough to catch the enemy by surprise. Air was now conducted by the 101st Aviation Wing, which had arrived in country only a couple of months earlier, but they"d already crashed so many helicopters that they were reluctant to fly into any landing zones that hadn"t been cleared. Kearney was going to use the same two landing zones that he"d used on Rock Avalanche - code-named Grant and Cubs - but they were just small bare patches on the sides of mountains. If a rotor blade so much as clipped a treetop, the helicopter would crash.

The men of Second Platoon are down at the KOP cl.u.s.tered behind the blast wall packing and repacking their gear for the mission: ammo, radio batteries, water, everything you"d need for a forty-eight-hour Armageddon. Yaka Chine is crawling with insurgents; they"ve got no farther place to go and it"s an almost guaranteed firefight. Almost guaranteed casualties. Mace walks up carrying a crate of Claymore mines, which are set up around any static position and detonate outward rather than upward to blunt any ground attack. The men are discussing how much water to bring and how much sleeping gear they"ll need and whether to use small a.s.sault packs or full rucks. After a while Gillespie wanders up and announces that there"s limited s.p.a.ce on the birds, so Solowksi won"t be going - though I will. It"s not exactly that Solowski"s getting pulled for for me, but that"s the result. That means not only will the gun team be down a man but the others will have to carry that much more ammo. Later I catch Gillespie by himself and tell him I"d be happy to carry 500 rounds if that would make things easier. me, but that"s the result. That means not only will the gun team be down a man but the others will have to carry that much more ammo. Later I catch Gillespie by himself and tell him I"d be happy to carry 500 rounds if that would make things easier.

"Let me talk to the gun team," he says. "You might have to."

The medic gives me extra rehydration salts and an IV bag in case I get hit. I"ve already got a tourniquet and an Israeli bandage in my vest, and a pack of Kerlix. In my chest my heart is slamming. There are times when all of this - the helicopters and the guns and the Afghans and the steep beautiful mountains - just feels like some awesome and dramatic game. And then there are moments when you suddenly understand how real it all is: no way to control what happens next, no way to rewind things back to a better place if it all goes wrong. There"s intel about four SA-18 rockets in the valley, the kind that track heat signatures and blow aircraft out of the sky. We could lift off from the KOP and all be dead in minutes. I don"t have to go on this mission, I don"t even have to be in this valley. Right now I have everything - my life, my safety, my friends and family back home - and I might be allowed one moment of regret before those things are taken from me. One moment of crazy downward acceleration in a Chinook; one moment of dirt unzipping toward me faster than I can get out of its way. "The quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity," as Melville called it; the last impossible phase shift from being a person to being nothing at all.

I finish packing my gear. The stress is getting to everyone and things are noticeably strange. The men are creeping around the KOP trying to avoid Bobby and Jones or lying inert on their bunks as if they"re in some kind of morgue for the semiconscious. I watch one guy pull out his 9 mil and put it to another man"s forehead. Right between the eyes but it isn"t c.o.c.ked. It"s tempting to calm myself with the idea that everything is in G.o.d"s hands, but I"m I"m the one deciding whether or not to get on the helicopter - not G.o.d - so it"s hard to see what He has to do with it. The other men don"t have a choice so they"re spared that particular torment, though of course they have others. Either way, this will be settled - done with, nothing more to worry about - in forty-eight hours. That"s the closest you"re going to get to rea.s.surance without grasping at some kind of religious help. G.o.d let Restrepo die and Rougle die and forty other guys die in this valley - not to mention dozens of civilians - so as a source of comfort He"s not that tempting. Maybe O"Byrne had it right: prayers don"t get answered because G.o.d isn"t even the one deciding whether or not to get on the helicopter - not G.o.d - so it"s hard to see what He has to do with it. The other men don"t have a choice so they"re spared that particular torment, though of course they have others. Either way, this will be settled - done with, nothing more to worry about - in forty-eight hours. That"s the closest you"re going to get to rea.s.surance without grasping at some kind of religious help. G.o.d let Restrepo die and Rougle die and forty other guys die in this valley - not to mention dozens of civilians - so as a source of comfort He"s not that tempting. Maybe O"Byrne had it right: prayers don"t get answered because G.o.d isn"t even in in this valley. this valley.

Across the battalion units are getting ready for the handoff and trying to create enough white s.p.a.ce so the new guys don"t get killed as soon as they get there. The biggest effort is happening about ten miles to the north in the Waygal Valley, where Chosen Company will simultaneously abandon Outpost Bella and build a new one in the town of Wanat. Bella was the sister base to Ranch House, which almost got overrun the previous August, and after the Americans abandoned Ranch House it was only a matter of time before Bella went as well. There was no pa.s.sable road up to Bella so everything had to come in by air, and the mountains were so high and steep that the Chinooks had a hard time even dropping off sling loads. They can"t abandon the Waygal altogether, though, because it was a major infiltration route for fighters moving from sanctuaries in Pakistan toward Kabul and the interior. The enemy knew Bella was being abandoned, and there was intel that a force of two hundred fighters were going to launch an attack in order to make it appear as if they"d actually driven the Americans out.

Within hours of pulling out of Bella, Chosen Company"s Second Platoon was going to convoy the eight kilometers from Blessing to the town of Wanat to build a permanent base next to the police station and the district center. They would be going home in less than two weeks, and building the outpost would be their last mission in Afghanistan. They had already sent most of their gear back to Vicenza. A spot for the base had been picked out in a field just south of the town, near the intersection of two rivers that had been bridged the year before by 10th Mountain. It was a crucial piece of terrain that The Rock had spent nearly a year negotiating for; unfortunately, that also gave the enemy plenty of time to prepare. The base would be named Combat Outpost Kahler, after a platoon sergeant who had been killed by an Afghan security guard in a highly suspect friendly-fire incident six months earlier.

There was a bad feeling about the mission from the beginning. Days beforehand someone had written "Wanat: the movie" on the mission board, and the men were joking about which actors would play them. An Afghan heavy equipment contractor never showed up on the job, and the Americans" one Bobcat had a bulldozer blade but no bucket. That meant it could only fill Hescos to a height of about four feet; everything else would have to be done by hand. Men were spotted moving along the upper ridges but couldn"t be killed because they weren"t carrying weapons, and on the third night an estimated two hundred foreign and local fighters managed to move into positions around Outpost Kahler. They set up heavy machine guns on the ridges and put a Dishka in a nearby building, aimed point-blank into the base, and riddled the bazaar with more fighters who were mobile inside the innumerable stalls and alleyways. Finally they positioned cadres of men whose job it was to run forward and breach the wire, or die trying.

The Taliban plan was to suppress the base with ma.s.sive firepower, breach the wire, and drag off dead and wounded American soldiers. There was a small outpost a hundred yards outside the base, and that was particularly vulnerable to being overrun. The Taliban knew that once they were close in they couldn"t be hit by artillery, and that Apaches would take at least an hour to get there. That meant it would be a fair fight until then. With luck they could get inside the wire, kill groups of soldiers as their guns jammed, and possibly take over the entire base. It was exactly the nightmare scenario that the men at Restrepo went to sleep dreading; it was exactly the nightmare scenario that few Americans back home even understood could happen. The fact that it didn"t happen at Wanat was nothing short of a miracle.

The signal to attack was two long bursts from a heavy machine gun. That was immediately followed by waves of rocket-propelled grenades that took out or suppressed every heavy weapon at the base. There was so much fire coming in that the mortar tubes were sparkling with bullet strikes and no one could get near them. A grenade hit the missile truck almost immediately and set it on fire. The Americans were instantly outnumbered and outgunned and shooting so much that the barrels of their guns were melting. A sergeant named Hector Chaves, who had already been through Ranch House, saw a Taliban fighter climbing a tree outside the wire so he shot him. Another fighter started climbing the tree so Chavez shot him too. After Chavez shot his third man they finally abandoned the tree and tried something else.

An RPG hit near the mortar pit and tore up a mortarman named Sergio Abad with shrapnel. Abad had transferred out of Battle Company several months earlier, and the last time I"d seen him, he was relaxing at Camp Blessing, just waiting to go home. Now Abad found himself lying wounded in the mortar pit handing ammo to Chavez, who was busy firing over the tops of the sandbags. The 120 mm mortars, which have a killing radius of seventy yards, caught fire, and Chavez and another man grabbed Abad and started pulling him to safety. Halfway across the base they took a burst of machine-gun fire and Chavez went down, shot in both legs. He continued crawling toward cover, pulling Abad behind him, until several men at the command post ran out and rescued them.

Abad died quickly in the command post lying next to Chavez and several other wounded. Chavez was worried he"d been hit in the b.a.l.l.s and so in the middle of the firefight he made Staff Sergeant Erich Phillips pull his pants down and make sure everything was okay. It was. The blazing missile truck finally exploded, engulfing an Afghan soldier in flames and sending ant.i.tank missiles tumbling across the base. One landed in the command post, and as it sat there the men could hear the motor spinning up and the weapon arming itself. Chavez just lay there, waiting. "I was in so much pain I couldn"t move," he told me. "I just said "f.u.c.k it, I"m done." Then Sergeant Phillips came over, picked the motherf.u.c.ker up, walked it out somewhere, and tossed it."

Meanwhile, a hundred yards outside the wire, the outpost was getting overrun. The first barrage of grenades had slammed into the position and wounded or incapacitated every man there. The grenades kept coming and blowing men out of their positions and the weapons out of their hands and even the helmets off their heads. A specialist named Matthew Phillips stood up to throw a hand grenade and was killed before he could pull the pin. Specialist Jason Bogar was ignoring the rounds that were sparking off the boulder in front of him and going cyclic on his SAW. It finally jammed when the barrel turned white-hot and started to melt.

Enemy fighters were swarming toward the position, and the only way to keep them back was to keep up a constant barrage of fire. The weapons couldn"t sustain it, though. If a machine gun could shoot forever, one man could hold off a whole battalion, but they jam. That"s how positions get overrun. After Bogar"s SAW went down the 240 ran out of ammo and the men were reduced to shooting with their rifles and throwing grenades. Almost every man was wounded by this point, some badly. There was so much gunfire that, psychologically, it was very hard for the men to expose their heads above the tops of the sandbags in order to shoot. Specialists Chris McKaig and Jonathan Ayers decided to pop up in unison, shoot a burst, and then duck down again. They did that several times until Ayers was. .h.i.t in the face and fell over, dead.

Sergeant Ryan Pitts, the platoon forward observer, was pinned down and badly wounded in the northernmost position. He"d gotten a tourniquet onto his shattered leg and started throwing hand grenades over the top of the sandbags. Between explosions he got through to the command post by radio and told them that they were getting overrun. A three-man team led by First Lieutenant Jonathan Brostrom left the base and ran through heavy fire carrying weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies. One of them got hit almost immediately. Brostrom and Specialist Jason Hovater made it to the outpost and began fighting with the help of another specialist named Pruitt Rainey. They grabbed the 240 from Pitts - he was too badly wounded to use it - and moved to an adjacent fighting position. At one point a specialist named Stafford heard one of the men scream, "They"re inside the wire!" followed by a long burst of gunfire. Then, "He"s right behind the f.u.c.king sandbag!" and another burst. After that came silence, and Brostrom, Rainey, and Hovater were dead.

By this time there were almost no functioning weapons at the outpost. Three wounded men, unaware that Pitts was lying wounded in the northern position, crawled through the outpost making sure everyone was dead and then started staggering toward the relative safety of the base. They made it amid a hail of gunfire and Pitts, who by now had run out of ammo, realized he was alone up there. Enemy fighters were so close that when he radioed for help he had to whisper. Another relief team was organized and four men left the wire at a run and headed for the outpost. One of them was a private first cla.s.s named Jacob Sones: "No one wanted to go up there because the way they were shooting, whatever angle they had, it was perfect," Sones told me. "They were laying that place down, they were blowing the s.h.i.t out of it. We got up there and they were all dead except for Pitts, but at the time you"re just like, "We have to get this done or everybody"s everybody"s going to die."" going to die.""

As soon as they got there they took another tremendous barrage of grenades. One hit Sergeant Israel Garcia dead on. He died within seconds, Pitts holding his hand and telling him they were going to get him home. The blast "hot-miked" his radio and jammed the platoon frequency. Within minutes everyone on the relief team was dead or wounded. They fought on, picking up jammed weapons and trying to shoot them and throwing them down and looking for more. Sones remembers seeing Specialist Phillips and another man lying dead, embracing each other. Ayers was slumped over a 240, and they had to pull him off to use the gun, which was jammed anyway. The Taliban were even throwing rocks at them, hoping the Americans would think they were grenades and jump out of their positions, where they could be shot.

Sones made his way to Pitts, who was blacking out from blood loss, and together they started trying to crawl back to the main base. Right around then - about an hour into the fight - the first Apaches arrived. They hunted men in the treeline and did gun runs that plowed up the earth thirty yards outside the sandbags. The Apaches finally managed to tilt the battle back in favor of the defenders. Nine Americans were killed and twenty-seven wounded - over half the American force at the base. It was the single costliest firefight of the war. It was the single costliest firefight since Mogadishu. At some point the enemy supposedly managed to drag two dead Americans down several agricultural terraces before abandoning them. They hadn"t overrun an American base, but they"d penetrated a position and put their hands on American soldiers. It wasn"t a good sign.

Back at the KOP, Battle Company was following the events over the battalion net as they unfolded, and Third Platoon was mobilized to fly in by helicopter and reinforce the position. After Third Platoon left, Kearney gathered the rest of his men around the command center at the KOP and told them what had happened. He stood in a brown T-shirt, twenty-seven years old, all the youth in his face gone, unshaved and grim and angry.

"Proctor, why did you join the Army?" he said, pointing to one of the men.

"To fight for my country, sir."

"Did you expect there was a chance you might get injured or that you might die?"

"Absolutely, sir."

"Anybody join not knowing that might be an option?"

The men shook their heads.

"Okay, the country"s at war and you"re the ones stepping up and doing it," Kearney went on. "It"s like one percent of the whole d.a.m.n nation is out there doing it. What do you guys think would have happened if we had just stopped at Vimoto, didn"t go out there doing our aggressive patrolling, didn"t go out there and build OP Restrepo? You guys want to know what would happen? The same s.h.i.t that happened today up at Chosen Company."

The men are looking down and avoiding each other"s gazes. Many are smoking cigarettes and others look close to tears. Kearney repeats the information he has - nine dead, nine wounded - and then tells them that one of the dead is Abad.

"I guarantee you that if he hadn"t been doing his job when he died, there"d probably be more soldiers out there dead right now," Kearney says. "So take honor in the fact that you guys trained up one h.e.l.l of a f.u.c.king soldier."

Kearney holds a moment of silence for the dead and then dismisses the men. "Carry me," Jones says to Stichter quietly as he walks past.

BATTLE C COMPANY"S LAST BIG MISSION GOES OFF AT dusk, lines of men moving down the slope to the landing zone and piling into Black Hawks. The 101st refused to fly into Grant and Cubs so the mission got scaled back to Third Platoon flying onto Divpat along with some Scouts and a unit of Pathfinders. The job of the Pathfinders is to clear the top of Divpat so that the next unit can land Chinooks up there. That way Viper Company could pick up where Battle Company left off. Battle will not be sweeping Yaka Chine; Battle will not go out of the valley with one last monster firefight. Most of the men seem relieved. A few are clearly disappointed. Someone who was probably going to get shot will now be going home alive and whole. dusk, lines of men moving down the slope to the landing zone and piling into Black Hawks. The 101st refused to fly into Grant and Cubs so the mission got scaled back to Third Platoon flying onto Divpat along with some Scouts and a unit of Pathfinders. The job of the Pathfinders is to clear the top of Divpat so that the next unit can land Chinooks up there. That way Viper Company could pick up where Battle Company left off. Battle will not be sweeping Yaka Chine; Battle will not go out of the valley with one last monster firefight. Most of the men seem relieved. A few are clearly disappointed. Someone who was probably going to get shot will now be going home alive and whole.

We"re there in minutes, the slopes of Divpat rising up fast and then suddenly becoming hard ground right beneath us. Men tumble out of the bird, hitting heavily with their full rucks and immediately going p.r.o.ne in the heavy brush, rifles aimed outward in case we take contact and uniforms rattling in the rotor wash. Then the bird rises up and pounds off to the west, dropping fast off the ridge and then carving back northward for the KOP. It"s almost dark by the time everyone is there, and the men wallow through the chest-high brush to set up fighting positions in the cardinal directions. I stay with Kearney, who finds a central place for himself near the 60 mm mortar. The enemy chatter starts almost immediately: "It"s very important to talk to Mullah Nasrullah for permission to go to work tomorrow," one commander says over the radio. "Let"s give them a good welcome on Divpat."

Prophet is picking up information that the enemy has a Dishka and a mortar tube and that there are thirty fighters ready to a.s.sault up the slopes in the morning. Kearney kneels in the brush studying a laminated map and talking to Ostlund on the radio. His mission is to clear the landing zone for later use, but he and Ostlund have come up with a plan to lure the fighters onto the hill to kill them. The birds are going to come back for what"s known as a "false extraction" - they land and take off again, as if picking up men - but the Americans remain in place. When the fighters come up the slopes to check out what the Americans were up to they"ll walk straight into the Claymores and the guns.

The illume is a 100 percent and the fighters will be moving into position all nigh

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