The division between those who feel in control of their fate and those who don’t can occur even within the same close-knit group. During World War II, British and American bomber crews experienced casualty rates as high as 70 percent over the course of their tour; they effectively flew missions until they were killed. On those planes, pilots reported experiencing less fear than their turret gunners, who were crucial to operations but had no direct control over the aircraft. Fighter pilots, who suffered casualty rates almost as high as bomber crews, nevertheless reported extremely low levels of fear. They were both highly trained and entirely in control of their own fate, and that allowed them to ignore the statistical reality that they had only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving their tour.
Among men who are dependent on one another for their safety — all combat soldiers, essentially — there is often an unspoken agreement to stick together no matter what. The reassurance that you will never be abandoned seems to help men act in ways that serve the whole unit rather than just themselves. Sometimes, however, it effectively amounts to a suicide pact. During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. (A fifth team member, the top turret gunner, was not part of the pact.) The aircraft was hit by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plane hit the ground and exploded. They all died.
One of the Taliban fighters falls to the ground, dead, and the other releases Brennan and escapes downhill through the trees. Giunta jams a new magazine into his gun and yells for a medic. Brennan is lying badly wounded in the open and Giunta grabs him by the vest and drags him behind a little bit of cover. He cuts the ammo rack off his chest and pulls the rip cord on his ballistic vest to extricate him from that and then cuts his clothing off to look for wounds. Brennan’s been hit multiple times in the legs and has a huge shrapnel wound in his side and has been shot in the lower half of his face. He’s still conscious and keeps complaining that there’s something in his mouth. It’s his teeth, though Giunta doesn’t tell him that.
The B-1 flying overhead drops two bombs on Hill 1705, and that stuns the enemy enough that the Americans are able to consolidate their position. The Third Platoon medic arrives and gives Brennan a tracheotomy so he can breathe better, and then they get him ready for the MEDEVAC. A Spectre gunship and a couple of Apaches are finally able to distinguish Americans from the enemy and start lighting up the hillsides with cannon and gunfire, and half an hour later the MEDEVAC comes in and they start hoisting casualties off the ridge. When they’re done, the rest of First Platoon shoulder their gear and resume walking home.
“We waited for First Platoon for hours,” Hijar told me about that night, “and once we linked up with them it was still two and a half hours’ walk back to the KOP. You could just tell on the guys’ faces, it wasn’t the right time to ask. You already knew what the answer was going to be. Some of them were walking around with bullet holes in their helmets.”
Brennan doesn’t survive surgery. Mendoza is dead before he even leaves the ridge. Five more men are wounded. Then there’s Rougle from the day before, as well as Rice and Vandenberge. It’s been a costly week. It’s been the kind of week that makes people back home think that maybe we’re losing the war.
4
O’BYRNE MISSED ROCK AVALANCHE BECAUSE HIS younger sister, Courtney, had been badly burned in a house fire and he rushed home to be with her. He left the Korengal with the understanding that she would probably not survive. He arrived in Syracuse, New York, and found the rest of his family in the hospital waiting room. He said he wanted to see her alone and then walked into her room and sat down by her bed. Courtney was semiconscious and had a tube down her throat and was hooked up to a respirator that had swelled her belly with air. The sight was too much for O’Byrne, and he broke down and started crying. He squeezed her hand and said, ‘Courtney, I love you, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.’ And she squeezed his hand back. And he said, ‘Squeeze my hand three times if you love me back,’ and she squeezed his hand once, twice, three times.
Her lungs were badly damaged by the fire and the doctors told the family that if she didn’t improve by a certain date she was almost certainly going to die. O’Byrne visited her in the hospital every day and tried to let the days tick by without going crazy. It was during that awful time that he got a call from a friend that something bad had happened on Rock Avalanche. It took some digging but he finally found out that Rougle, Brennan, and Mendoza were dead. Courtney was being treated at the VA hospital at the University of Syracuse, and he wandered around campus until he found a bar and then he sat down and started drinking. Someone asked him why he was getting drunk and he said, ‘I have a few friends who need a drink,’ and then he drank a pitcher of beer for each man who had died.
He headed back to the Korengal about a week later. Courtney was out of immediate danger, but it tormented O’Byrne that if he got killed, her last memory of him would be from a hospital bed. He passed through New York, and on a whim he called me from a bar where he was having dinner with two friends. It was strange to see him in civilian clothes and without a gun, and when I walked up he stood and shook my hand and then gave me a hug. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and a blue ghetto-style cap sideways and couldn’t focus his eyes.
“My boys got messed up,” he said. “Brennan got killed. Rougle got killed.”
We sat down and he asked me to tell him everything. All he knew were the names of the dead, and I asked him what kind of detail he wanted this in.
“Everything,” O’Byrne said. “Tell me everything you know.”
O’Byrne was most of the way through a bottle of red wine and his friends were drinking beers and shots of tequila. I apologized to them for taking the conversation back to the war and they said please, go ahead, and I told O’Byrne about how the enemy had opened up from one ridgeline and then snuck up another side and overran the hilltop. I told him about Rice and Vandenberge and how First Platoon had walked straight into an ambush on the Gatigal spur. It took O’Byrne a while to absorb this.
“And Mendoza’s a fuckin’ hero, right?” he said. “He’s an American hero, right?”
“Yeah, he’s a hero.”
“And Brennan was dead, right?” O’Byrne said. “I mean, they weren’t dragging him off alive, were they?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Soldiers can seem pretty accepting of the idea that they might die in combat, but being taken alive is a different matter. “No, he didn’t die until later,” I said. “He was alive at the time.”
O’Byrne looked around the room. I tried to think what I should do if he started crying. He concentrated and gathered himself and finally asked how many enemy fighters were killed.
“They killed a lot,” I told him. “Like fifty. Thirty of them were Arabs. The A-10s really messed them up.”
“Yeah, kill those fuckers,” O’Byrne said. He repeated that a few times and took another drink. I asked him how he felt about going back.
“I got to get back there,” he said. “Those are my boys. Those are the best friends I’ll ever have.”
He was gripping my arm and trying to look at me, but his eyes kept needing to refocus. They never got it quite right. I got up to go, and O’Byrne stood up as well and hugged me several times. I wished him luck and told him I’d see him back out there in a month or two. On the way out I told Addie, the bar manager, that I’d like to pick up their check. Later she told me she had to shut them off after the next drink because O’Byrne fell out of his chair and the girl could hardly talk.
“He was so polite, though,” Addie said. “I mean, drunk as he was, he still took off his hat whenever I walked up.”
5
FORWARD OPERATING BASES ARE A SPECIAL KIND OF hell, none of the excitement of real war but all the ugliness: rows of plywood bee huts and weapons everywhere and Apaches jolting you awake at all hours running the flight line ten feet off the ground. Journalists usually moved around the theater on scheduled resupply flights, but even minor problems can ripple outward through the logistics web and leave you stuck at a FOB for days. At least Bagram had decent food and a huge PX; Jalalabad had absolutely nothing. In winter the wind drove you mad with the rattling of tent flaps and in summer it got so hot — 130 in the shade — that you almost couldn’t make it across the parade ground without drinking water. I stayed in the VIP tent, all the journalists did, and one afternoon I tried to escape the flamethrower heat by lying down on my bunk and going to sleep. I woke up so disoriented from dehydration that someone had to help me to another tent with better air-conditioning. There was nothing to do at JAF but hit your mealtimes and pray that if the enemy somehow mustered the nerve to attack it would be while you were stuck there and could report on it.
In the Korengal the soldiers never talked about the wider war — or cared — so it was hard to get a sense of how the country as a whole was faring. And the big bases had the opposite problem: since there was almost no combat, everyone had a kind of reflexive optimism that never got tested by the reality outside the wire. The public affairs guys on those bases offered the press a certain vision of the war, and that vision wasn’t wrong, it just seemed amazingly incomplete. There was real progress in the country, and there was real appreciation among the Afghans for what America was trying to do, but the country was also coming apart at the seams, and press officers didn’t talk about that much. During the year that I was in the Korengal, the Taliban almost assassinated Afghan president Hamid Karzai, blew up the fanciest hotel in Kabul, fought to the outskirts of Kandahar, and then attacked the city prison and sprang scores of fellow insurgents from captivity. More American soldiers were killed that year than in any year previous, but if you pointed that out, you were simply told that it was because we were now “taking the fight to the enemy.” That may well have been true, but it lacked any acknowledgment that the enemy was definitely getting their shit together.
I thought of those as “Vietnam moments.” A Vietnam moment was one in which you weren’t so much getting misled as getting asked to participate in a kind of collective wishful thinking. Toward the end of my year, for example, the Taliban attacked an American base north of the Pech and killed nine American soldiers and wounded half the survivors. When I asked American commanders about it, their responses were usually along the lines of how it was actually an American victory because forty or fifty enemy fighters had also died in the fight. Since the Army had already admitted that this was not a war of attrition, using enemy casualties as a definition of success struck me as a tricky business.
And we reporters had our own issues. Vietnam was our paradigm as well, our template for how not to get hoodwinked by the U.S. military, and it exerted such a powerful influence that anything short of implacable cynicism sometimes felt like a sellout. Most journalists wanted to cover combat — as opposed to humanitarian operations — so they got embedded with combat units and wound up painting a picture of a country engulfed in war. In fact, most areas of the country were relatively stable; you had to get pretty lucky to find yourself in anything even vaguely resembling a firefight. When you did, of course, other journalists looked at you with a kind of rueful envy and asked how they could get in with that unit. Once at a dinner party back home I was asked, with a kind of knowing wink, how much the military had “censored” my reporting. I answered that I’d never been censored at all, and that once I’d asked a public affairs officer to help me fact-check an article and he’d answered, “Sure, but you can’t actually show it to me — that would be illegal.”
That wasn’t a story anyone really wanted to hear, and I almost felt like a bit of a patsy for telling it. Vietnam was considered a morally dubious war that was fought by draftees while the rest of the nation was dropping acid and listening to Jimi Hendrix. Afghanistan, on the other hand, was being fought by volunteers who more or less respected their commanders and had the gratitude of the vast majority of Americans back home. If you imagined that your job, as a reporter, was to buddy up to the troops and tell the “real” story of how they were dying in a senseless war, you were in for a surprise. The commanders would realize you were operating off a particular kind of cultural programming and would try to change your mind, but the men wouldn’t bother. They’d just refuse to talk to you until you left their base.
Once in a while you’d meet a soldier who didn’t fit into any clear category, though. These were men who believed in the war but also recognized the American military’s capacity for self-delusion. “We’re not going to win the war until we admit we’re losing it,” one of these guys told me in the spring of 2008. He was in a position of moderate influence in the U.S. military, and his pessimism was so refreshing that it actually made me weirdly optimistic. And then there was the sergeant from Third Platoon whom I recognized at the Bagram air terminal while waiting for a flight. I said something vague about the progress in the valley and he didn’t even bother masking his disgust. “What are you talking about, it’s a fucking quagmire,” he said. “There’s no progress with the locals, it’s just not happening, and I don’t even trust the S-2 — he’s full of shit. I was at an intel briefing and the S-2 was talking about how the Iranians were funding the Taliban. I asked about all the money coming from Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, and he said that those are private donations that are harder to trace. Harder to trace than money sent by the Iranian government?”
S-2 is the designation for a military intelligence officer. There were a lot of soldiers around us, mostly new recruits who had just arrived in country, and by the time the sergeant got to the part about the Iranians they were giving us some pretty hard stares. Sometimes it was the new guys, the guys who’d never seen combat, who were the most hostile to any questioning of the war, the most belligerent about a supposed American prerogative. To change the subject I asked the sergeant how he would fight the U.S. military if he was an insurgent in the Korengal. He’d clearly given it some thought:
“I’d put a shooter above Vegas with a low MOA rifle and I’d take single shots to the groin,” he said. “MOA means ‘minute of angle’ — the bullet doesn’t drop more than an inch per hundred yards. Every shot sends a guy home in a helicopter. We’d get so frustrated we’d just charge up the hill. So you’d have a couple of guys to the side with machine guns. The guy with the rifle keeps shooting, and the machine guns wipe us out.”
The battalion commander was an insanely fit lieutenant colonel of Cherokee descent named Bill Ostlund who graduated from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and wrote a thesis on the Soviet military’s defeats in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Ostlund would look you straight in the eye while crushing the bones of your hand in a handshake and launch straight into, say, the latest about the new trade school in Asadabad. He had such full-on enthusiasm for what he was doing that when I was around him I sometimes caught myself feeling bad that there wasn’t an endeavor of equivalent magnitude in my own life. It wasn’t the war, per se, that he was so fired up about so much as the whole idea — a truly radical one when you thought about it — that America was actually over here trying to put a country like this back together. Not many nations have the resources to attempt a project on this scale or the inclination to try. And Ostlund was exactly the kind of guy you’d want to have do it: seemingly immune to heartbreak, way more knowledgeable than most of the press corps that came through and capable of working eighteen hours a day for fifteen months straight.
Ostlund often referred to the Taliban as “miscreants” and spoke of them in the singular, as in, “We cornered the enemy and destroyed him.” The third-person singular lent the war a vaguely gentlemanly feel, as if there were no hard feelings and all this was just an extraordinarily violent lawn sport.
In fact, I don’t think Ostlund felt any particular animosity toward the men he was fighting, and I know for a fact that he made repeated offers to grant temporary immunity to any Taliban leaders who would meet with him at a local shura. (“If they put together a meeting with all my close friends, I promise they will not be detained and that I will respect the tradition that shuras are not deceitful,” he told me.) As far as I know none of them took him up on it, but I always liked that he operated that way. He was the highest-ranking officer to spend the night at Restrepo, and the men told me that instead of taking an empty bunk he just curled up on the ground and went to sleep. They said he didn’t even take off his body armor.
Ostlund’s base was Camp Blessing, which overlooked the Pech River Valley just a few miles west of the Korengal. It was a random conglomeration of brick-and-mortar buildings that climbed unevenly up a mountainside, the newest buildings at the top and still smelling of fresh cement. The market town of Nagalam was a mile to the east and boasted a “men’s club,” whatever that meant; at night something akin to Christmas lights flashed weirdly over the rooftops. Blessing was the stopping-off point for supply convoys going into the Korengal because that way they could make it in and out in a single day. (Spending a night at the KOP was suicide: there was only one road out of the valley, which gave the enemy a whole night to dig in bombs.) The convoys were called CLPs and were the responsibility of Fusion Company, which made the run up the Pech every few weeks and got attacked almost every time. A CLP was usually composed of a dozen armored Humvees and twenty or so local “jingle” trucks driven by Afghans. The road to Blessing was newly paved, which meant the convoys moved too fast to be ambushed, but the last few miles into the Korengal were dirt and considered to be the most dangerous stretch of road in the country. Army mechanics bolted a .50 cal to the top of the wrecking truck because even the salvage and repair guys were expected to return fire. I was told it was the only armed wrecking truck in the entire U.S. Army.