Gunmetal is the radio call sign for Apache helicopters. Kearney wants the Apaches to chew up the mountains above Landigal to keep the enemy penned in or to get out of the way so his own mortars can do it. The terrain is extremely steep there, and dropping mortars onto the known routes off the mountain might slow the enemy down enough that they can be trapped and killed. If the fighters get into Landigal they’ll be able to hide the weapons and disappear into the populace. Anyone moving on the mountain south of the American position now has a shoot-to-kill classification unless they’re clearly civilian.
The men immediately start comparing impressions of the attack and putting together an idea of how the enemy pulled it off. Between Rice’s and Wildcat’s positions is a low hill with a cliff that faces south. When the Americans first saw it they considered the cliff to be “impassable terrain,” so they didn’t incorporate it into their defensive positions. The enemy fighters that overran Rice’s team must have spent the previous twenty-four hours creeping through the woods to the base of the cliff and then waited until their comrades attacked from the south. They were whispering on their radios because they were so close that otherwise the Americans would have heard them. They must have climbed the cliff with their weapons over their shoulders and then started pouring heavy fire into Rice’s and Wildcat’s positions; they were only fifty yards away, so their fire was deadly accurate. Once they had the Americans suppressed they overran Rice’s men and turned Vandenberge’s 240 around and started using it against the other American positions. The hilltop was sprinkled with American brass. Once they’d stripped Rougle of his weapon and gear they fled the hilltop before the Americans could counterattack.
Rice was sitting down when he got hit and the force of the bullet sent him face-forward down the hill. Moments later he looked up and saw an enemy fighter shoot an RPG at him, which exploded very close and sent shrapnel throughout his body. He kept rolling downhill into some brush and then just lay there trying to figure out what had happened. He put his hand to his stomach and when he took it away it was covered with blood, so he knew he was wounded, but he was far more concerned about his men. He had no idea what had happened to them or whether they were even alive. Vandenberge had been hit in the left arm, and he stumbled off the hilltop away from his gun and into the cover of some rocks. Solowski took cover as well and then circled around the hill and tried to move up the far side. He came face-to-face with an enemy fighter who dropped out of sight off the back side of the hill. The experience left him in such a state of shock, and so pale, that when Raeon saw him a few minutes later he thought Solowski had been hit.
Vandenberge knew he was dying and started calling for a medic even though enemy fighters were only forty or fifty yards away; Cortez and Pemble may well have arrived in time to prevent the enemy from walking down the hill and finishing him off. Rougle probably started running back toward his men when he heard gunfire. His Scouts tried to assault the hill the enemy had just taken because they knew their squad leader was in that area, but the volume of fire was so intense that they were repeatedly pushed back. It’s likely that the enemy simply dropped back off the hilltop once they’d grabbed all the weapons they could carry.
Within an hour or so artillery starts working the far ridgeline where Wildcat thinks they see enemy movement. Kearney lies prone on the hill making marks on his map and calling in artillery strikes along enemy escape routes. He wants helicopters to pick up First Platoon and drop them along the five-nine gridline south of Landigal so that they can block enemy movement into the inaccessible southern end of the valley. Meanwhile, Second Platoon will push down from the north. While Kearney is on the radio Hijar yells that he’s found an enemy blood trail coming off the hilltop. “After we get the KIA out of here I want Gunmetal to search directly to my west,” Kearney shouts to Stichter. “Hijar believes he has a blood trail, it’s likely that where we find this son of a bitch, we’ll find everybody else.”
The Apaches come in and start rocketing the next ridge over and then working it with gun runs. The rounds explode in the treetops with sharp flashes and they come so close together that the detonations sound like one long crackle. The men watch the Apaches do their work and then scrutinize the area through their rifle scopes, looking for enemy fighters trying to flee. Raeon has a suppressed M14 sniper rifle and he sits with his knees up and sweeps it across the ridgelines searching for the men who killed his commander. He is covered in Rougle’s blood from his trouser cuff to his collar as if he rolled in red paint. After a while he puts the rifle down and lights a cigarette.
“He was a good dude, man,” Raeon says. Stichter is kneeling next to him under a pine tree looking west into the draw. His hands are caked in Vandenberge’s blood.
“Sergeant Rougle?”
Raeon nods.
“You want a real cigarette?”
“Yeah.”
Stichter hands him a Marlboro.
“I worry about the rest of the guys,” Raeon says. “Some of them are takin’ it real bad, kind of blamin’ it on themselves because we couldn’t push over the top. But the thing they got to understand is he was dead instantly — there’s just nothin’ you could do right there.”
Raeon lights his cigarette and exhales.
“I go on leave in like two weeks,” he says. “It’s not how I wanted to go, though.”
3
THAT NIGHT THE MEN SLEEP WITH A HAND GRENADE in one hand and their 9 mil in the other. Instead of one man pulling guard while two men sleep, it’s the other way around, two-and-one. All night long enemy fighters have been observed walking from Yaka Chine to Landigal and then on up the mountain, and Kearney finally requests a bomb drop. The request is denied, and Kearney radios back, ‘The other night we let eight guys get away, and now we have one dead and two wounded. If we don’t drop now, I guarantee more will die.’ Brigade gives permission, and a B-1 comes in and drops a bomb on a house where the fighters have taken shelter. The bomb misses, but Apaches come in to clean up the “squirters” — survivors who are trying to get away.
The next morning everyone wakes up tense and exhausted. Prophet starts picking up radio chatter that the enemy is closing in again, and around midmorning several fighters are spotted moving along a nearby ridge. The entire American line opens up on them: mortars, 240s, LAWs, even First Sergeant Caldwell on his M4. Pemble alone shoots forty grenades out of his 203. The enemy fighters duck over the far side of the ridge and Apaches come in to do gun runs up and down the mountainside trying to catch them as they flee. Radio chatter indicates that fifteen are killed. All day long bombs and 155s crump into the mountainsides and the men sit behind cover on Rougle’s hill waiting for the enemy to come at them again. By midafternoon it’s clear they’re not going to and the men get a little rest and then move out around midnight. Second Platoon works their way down the mountainside toward Landigal on terrain so steep that they take much of it by simply sliding downhill on their asses. Their pants are shredded by the time they get to the bottom.
First Platoon had already returned to the KOP the previous night, and the next day at dusk they head back out with half of Third Platoon. There is intel that the enemy is planning to attack either Phoenix or Restrepo — the bases were left with only a dozen or so American soldiers during the operation — but the valley remains quiet except for the buzz of surveillance drones overhead and the occasional bump and thud of mortars. First Lieutenant Brad Winn leads First Platoon past Phoenix and Aliabad and then across the Korengal River and up a series of terraces to the top of the Gatigal spur. To their north is a pretty little valley with Landigal nestled into it and to their south is the rest of the Korengal — wild, unknown country so thick with fighters that it would take a whole battalion to get in and out of there safely. Winn sets his men up along the Gatigal and overwatches Second Platoon as they clear through the town looking for weapons. Kearney, Caldwell, and the rest of company headquarters are to the north and men at OP Restrepo watch from the west.
Winn and his men spend a long day on the ridgetop overwatching Landigal while Ostlund, a lieutenant colonel from the Afghan National Army, and the governor of Kunar fly in by Black Hawk to talk to the elders. It is the first time that a governor from any government has ever stood in the southern Korengal. One of their primary aims is to recover the weapons that were taken the day before, but the talks don’t progress very far. Around nine o’clock that night, Winn gets word that Second Platoon has moved out of Landigal, and First Platoon gets ready to move out themselves. There’s been radio chatter all day long about an attack on the Americans — one Taliban commander even said, ‘If they’re not leaving by helicopter they’re in trouble’ — but no one pays much attention. Kearney has so many air assets flying around the valley — surveillance drones, two Apaches, a B-1 bomber, and even a Spectre gunship — that an enemy attack would seem to be an act of suicide.
The soldiers walk single file along the crest of the spur spaced ten or fifteen yards apart. The terrain falls off steeply on both sides into holly forests and shale scree. The moon is so bright that they’re not even using night vision gear. Unknown to Winn and his men, three enemy fighters are arrayed across the crest of the ridge below them, waiting with AK-47s. Parallel to the trail are ten more fighters with belt-fed machine guns and RPGs. In the U.S. military, this is known as an “L-shaped ambush.” Correctly done, a handful of men can wipe out an entire platoon. Walking point is Sergeant Josh Brennan, an alpha team leader. He’s followed by a SAW gunner named Eckrode and then Staff Sergeant Erick Gallardo and then Specialist Sal Giunta, bravo team leader. Giunta is from Iowa and joined the Army after hearing a radio commercial while working at a Subway sandwich shop in his hometown.
“Out of nothing — out of taking your next step — just rows of tracers, RPGs, everything happening out of nowhere with no real idea of how it just fucking happened — but it happened,” Giunta told me. “Everything kind of slowed down and I did everything I thought I could do, nothing more and nothing less.”
The Apache pilots watch this unfold below them but are powerless to help because the combatants are too close together. At the bottom of the hill, Second Platoon hears an enormous firefight erupt, but they too just hold their fire and hope it turns out well. At first, the sheer volume of firepower directed at Brennan’s squad negates any conceivable tactical response. A dozen Taliban fighters with rockets and belt-fed machine guns are shooting from behind cover at a distance of fifteen or twenty feet; First Platoon is essentially inside a shooting gallery. Within seconds, every man in the lead squad takes a bullet. Brennan goes down immediately, wounded in eight places. Eckrode takes rounds through his thigh and calf and falls back to lay down suppressive fire with his SAW. Gallardo takes a round in his helmet and falls down but gets back up. Doc Mendoza, farther down the line, takes a round through the femur and immediately starts bleeding out.
After months of fighting an enemy that stayed hundreds of yards away, the shock of facing them at a distance of twenty feet cannot be overstated. Giunta gets hit in his front plate and in his assault pack and he barely notices except that the rounds came from a strange direction. Sheets of tracers are coming from his left, but the rounds that hit him seemed to come from dead ahead. He’s down in a small washout along the trail where the lip of packed earth should have protected him, but it didn’t. “That’s when I kind of noticed something was wrong,” Giunta said. “The rounds came right down the draw and there are three people — all friends — in the same vicinity. It happened so fast, you don’t think too hard about it, but it’s something to keep in mind.”
Much later, a military investigation will determine that the enemy was trying to throw up a “wall of lead” between the first few men and the rest of the unit so that they could be overrun and captured. Gallardo understands this instinctively and tries to push through the gunfire to link up with his alpha team, Brennan and Eckrode. Twenty or thirty RPGs come sailing into their position and explode among the trees. When Gallardo goes down with a bullet to the helmet, Giunta runs over to him to drag him behind cover, but Gallardo gets back on his feet immediately. They’re quickly joined by Giunta’s SAW gunner, PFC Casey, and the three men start pushing forward by throwing hand grenades and sprinting between the blasts. Even enemy who are not hit are so disoriented by the concussion that they have trouble functioning for a second or two. The group quickly makes it to Eckrode, who’s wounded and desperately trying to fix an ammo jam in his SAW, and Gallardo and Casey stay with him while Giunta continues on his own. He throws his last grenade and then sprints the remaining ground to where Brennan should be. The Gatigal spur is awash in moonlight, and in the silvery shadows of the holly forests he sees two enemy fighters dragging Josh Brennan down the hillside. He empties his M4 magazine at them and starts running toward his friend.
• • •
The Army has a certain interest in understanding what was going through Giunta’s mind during all of this, because whatever was going through his mind helped save the entire unit from getting killed. A year or so later, several squads of American soldiers conducted an identical L-shaped ambush at night on the Abas Ghar and wiped out a column of Taliban fighters — nearly twenty men. The reason First Platoon did not get wiped out had nothing to do with the Apaches flying overhead or the 155s at Blessing; it was because the men reacted not as individuals but as a unit. Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it’s much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that choreographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win.
That choreography — you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up — is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is choreography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for him, but on what’s best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.
Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don’t even remember making; they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it. When Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy was asked why he took on an entire company of German infantry by himself, he replied famously, “They were killing my friends.” Wars are won or lost because of the aggregate effect of thousands of decisions like that during firefights that often last only minutes or seconds. Giunta estimates that not more than ten or fifteen seconds elapsed between the initial attack and his own counterattack. An untrained civilian would have experienced those ten or fifteen seconds as a disorienting barrage of light and noise and probably have spent most of it curled up on the ground. An entire platoon of men who react that way would undoubtedly die to the last man.
Giunta, on the other hand, used those fifteen seconds to assign rates and sectors of fire to his team, run to Gallardo’s assistance, assess the direction of a round that hit him in the chest, and then throw three hand grenades while assaulting an enemy position. Every man in the platoon — even the ones who were wounded — acted as purposefully and efficiently as Giunta did. For obvious reasons, the Army has tried very hard to understand why some men respond effectively in combat and others just freeze. “I did what I did because that’s what I was trained to do,” Giunta told me. “There was a task that had to be done, and the part that I was gonna do was to link alpha and bravo teams. I didn’t run through fire to save a buddy — I ran through fire to see what was going on with him and maybe we could hide behind the same rock and shoot together. I didn’t run through fire to do anything heroic or brave. I did what I believe anyone would have done.”
/> During World War II, the British and American militaries conducted a series of studies to identify what makes men capable of overcoming their fears. A psychiatrist named Herbert Spiegel, who accompanied American troops on the Tunisia campaign, called it the “X-factor”: “Whether this factor was conscious or unconscious is debatable,” he wrote for a military journal in 1944, “but this is not so important. The important thing was that it is influenced greatly by devotion to their group or unit, by regard for their leader and by conviction for their cause. In the average soldier, which most of them were, this factor… enabled men to control their fear and combat their fatigue to a degree that they themselves did not believe possible.”
The U.S. military found that, to a great degree, fearfulness was something they couldn’t do much about. A fearful man is likely to remain that way no matter what kind of training he undergoes. During one experiment, completely untrained airborne candidates were told to jump off a thirty-four-foot tower. They jumped in a harness that allowed them to fall about twelve feet and then ride a 400-foot cable to the ground. As easy as it sounds, more than half of a group of qualified paratroopers said that jumping off the tower was more frightening than jumping out of a real airplane. The military tested roughly thirteen hundred candidates on the tower and then tracked their success through airborne school. They found that the men who were “slow” to jump off the tower were more than twice as likely to fail out of the program as “fast” jumpers, and those who refused to jump at all were almost guaranteed to fail.
One of the most puzzling things about fear is that it is only loosely related to the level of danger. During World War II, several airborne units that experienced some of the fiercest fighting of the war also reported some of the lowest psychiatric casualty rates in the U.S. military. Combat units typically suffer one psychiatric casualty for every physical one, and during Israel’s Yom Kippur War of 1973, frontline casualty rates were roughly consistent with that ratio. But Israeli logistics units, which were subject to far less danger, suffered three psychiatric cases for every physical one. And even frontline troops showed enormous variation in their rate of psychological breakdown. Because many Israeli officers literally led from the front, they were four times more likely to be killed or wounded than their men were — and yet they suffered one-fifth the rate of psychological collapse. The primary factor determining breakdown in combat does not appear to be the objective level of danger so much as the feeling — even the illusion — of control. Highly trained men in extraordinarily dangerous circumstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger.