I manage to avoid CLPs until halfway through the tour, when a series of winter storms grounds flights for a couple of weeks. We roll out of the base on a miserable January day with high-level clouds filtering out a weak sun and the wind shrieking down off the Hindu Kush completely unchecked. The night before, Able Company had spotted twenty or thirty fighters in the Watapor Valley and wiped them out with artillery and airpower, and most of the dead turned out to be Korengalis. The morning we head out a public affairs officer takes me aside and tells me he has information that a Taliban cell in the valley knows that our convoy is coming and is going to attack it. It’s the kind of news that journalists are eager to hear as long as everything turns out okay. Of course, there’s no way to know that except to take a deep breath and find out.
I have a spot in the second Humvee of the convoy with Captain John Thyng, the commander of Fusion Company. Thyng had been hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq and seemed more or less resigned to that happening in Afghanistan as well. He sits next to the driver and I sit diagonally across from him in the back, and then there’s another soldier next to me and a gunner up in the turret with a .50 cal. I’ve been told that it will be up to me to pass him more ammo if he needs it. As soon as our wheels cross the wire the gunner racks his weapon and we grind slowly through Jalalabad and then head north on new black pavement that ribbons smoothly along the river. There are rice paddies along the floodplain and, here and there, clusters of jagged slate gravestones shoved into the ground like spades. Green prayer flags toil around them in the wind. The winter sun glances off the wide braidings of the river and makes the water look dull and heavy as mercury, and beyond that, rank after rank of mountains fall off toward the east: Pakistan. An old man stands in a field of stones watching us go by.
“The thing about the military is, every unit thinks they’re the coolest,” Thyng says as we roar past. We’re all wearing headsets so we can hear each other over the engine and communicate with the other trucks. “I mean, the BSB guys think they’re cool, but they’re obviously not. And they don’t even know it, which is the most tragic thing about that situation.”
The old man is well behind us now and we’re coming up on a police checkpoint that has been shot to pieces by previous Taliban attacks. Behind it on the river, two men paddle a crude inner-tube raft toward our shore, stroking hard into the current. Thyng grabs a pair of binoculars and glasses them as we go by.
“But in their hearts I think they know,” he adds after a while.
We reach the Korengal the morning of the following day. We’d spent the night at Blessing listening to the apocalyptic thunder of the 155s calibrating new rounds and left just after dawn so the convoy could make it out of the valley before dark. “I think we’re going to get hit today,” the driver of my Humvee says as he climbs into his seat. We jolt through Nagalam and then cross the Pech on a narrow bridge and enter the mouth of the Korengal. The road is excruciatingly narrow and if you look out the window you can see straight down to the bottom of the canyon several hundred feet below. It’s easier to just look straight ahead and think about something else. After half an hour Thyng points to a ridge up ahead and says that after we pass that, things are going to get interesting.
“All right, keep it good right now,” Thyng tells the gunner as we roll into a draw on the far side of the ridge. Creeks run down the creases of the draws, and where the road passes there, the dirt is always moist and easy to dig into. And some of the draws are too deep to observe from any of the American outposts in the valley, so they are a natural spot for an ambush. “Once we get into that lip I want you to scan high, all right?” Thyng continues telling the gunner. “The first thing that will come in on this bitch will be fuckin’ RPGs, okay?”
“Roger,” the gunner says.
“If that happens they’re going to miss, so just look where they came from and fuck it up, all right?”
“Roger.”
I concentrate on running the camera. That is the easiest way to avoid thinking about the fact that what you’re filming could kill you.
“All right, you stay in there,” Captain Thyng tells the gunner. “We’re going to pull up around that corner — ”
And that’s as far as he gets.
• • •
The idea that there are rules in warfare and that combatants kill each other according to basic concepts of fairness probably ended for good with the machine gun. A man with a machine gun can conceivably hold off a whole battalion, at least for a while, which changes the whole equation of what it means to be brave in battle. In World War I, when automatic weapons came into general use, heavy machine gunners were routinely executed if their position was overrun because they caused so much death. (Regular infantry, who were thought to be “fighting fairly,” were often spared.) Machine guns forced infantry to disperse, to camouflage themselves, and to fight in small independent units. All that promoted stealth over honor and squad loyalty over blind obedience.
In a war of that nature soldiers gravitate toward whatever works best with the least risk. At that point combat stops being a grand chess game between generals and becomes a no-holds-barred experiment in pure killing. As a result, much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.
There are two ways to tilt the odds in an otherwise fair fight: ambush the enemy with overwhelming force or use weapons that cannot be countered. The best, of course, is to do both. I had a lot of combat nightmares at Restrepo — I think everyone did — and they were invariably about being helpless: guns were jamming, the enemy was everywhere, and no one knew what was going on. In military terms, that’s a perfect ambush. Once I watched an Apache helicopter corner a Taliban fighter named Hayatullah on an open hillside and kill him. He had nowhere to run and on the second burst he was hit by a 30 mm round and exploded. There was nothing fair about it, but Hayatullah was the leader of a cell that detonated roadside bombs in the valley, and one could argue there wasn’t much fair about his line of work either. I later asked O’Byrne if he could imagine what it must feel like to be targeted by an Apache, and he just shook his head. We were talking about combat trauma, and I said that anyone who survived something like that had to have some pretty horrific nightmares. “I goddamn hope so,” O’Byrne said.
Taliban fighters in the Korengal switched to roadside bombs because they were losing too many men in firefights. And it was also creating problems with the locals: when Taliban fighters first started attacking American patrols, the Americans didn’t necessarily know where to shoot back. By the end of the summer, locals were pointing enemy positions out to the Americans just so they would aim in the right direction. Roadside bombs avoided those problems. They were cheap, low-risk, and didn’t get civilians killed. I doubt many villagers actually wanted Americans to get blown up, but few of them cared enough to walk up to the KOP and tell the soldiers where bombs had been dug in. This fight was between the Taliban and the Americans and the villagers more or less stayed out of it.
The first major bomb strike in the Korengal came two days after Christmas. Destined Company had mounted units scattered throughout the battalion firebases, and four of these trucks had taken up positions to support a foot patrol that had come down from Restrepo. One of the Humvees was in the middle of a three-point turn when an antitank mine detonated beneath it and blew the turret gunner, Jesse Murphree, so far down the hill that at first no one even realized he was gone. The rest of the crew suffered concussions and broken bones. The Humvee was immediately swallowed by flames, and while they tried to put it out Hijar and Buno and Richardson of Second Platoon climbed downslope to look for Murphree. They found him several hundred feet away, semiconscious and both his legs turned to jelly. They put
tourniquets on him so he wouldn’t bleed out and helped carry him up to the road and slide him into a Humvee. Murphree knew he was badly hurt but didn’t yet realize his legs were gone. He kept asking his squad leader, Staff Sergeant Alcantara, if he could still go to the Alcantaras’ wedding after they all got back to Italy.
The enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a twisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you’d ever have that you hadn’t been blown up the moment before. And if you were blown up, you’d probably never know it and certainly wouldn’t be able to affect the outcome. Good soldiers died just as easily as sloppy ones, which is pretty much how soldiers define unfair tactics in war. Halfway through the deployment, Battle Company took over Destined’s trucks and ran mounted patrols out of the KOP in support of their own men. It was a sensible way to do it, but it put men who were used to foot patrols into cramped steel boxes where there wasn’t much to do during firefights except scream at the turret gunner and pray. The trucks reduced war to a kind of grim dice game that was impossible to learn from or get good at; you just had to hope your luck lasted until it was time to go home.
• • •
The guy who blows us up is a hundred feet away behind a rock. He touches two wires to a double-A battery and sends an electrical charge to a pressure cooker filled with fertilizer and diesel that has been buried in the road the night before. His timing is off by ten feet or so and the bomb detonates under the engine block rather than directly beneath us, which saves us from being wounded or killed. The explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then a sudden darkening. The darkening is from dirt that lands on the windshield and blocks the sun. The gunner drops out of his turret and sits next to me, stunned. Someone comes up over the net saying, “WE JUST HIT AN IED, OVER!” That is followed by another man screaming for the convoy to keep moving.
Now it’s gray and muffled inside the Humvee, and for a moment my mind makes the odd association of being home during a blizzard when I was young. The power would go out and the windows would drift over with snow and produce a similar quiet darkness. That doesn’t last long. “GET ON THAT GUN!” Thyng starts yelling at the gunner. “GET ON THAT GUN AND START FIRING INTO THAT FUCKIN’ DRAW!”
The gunner is either too frightened or too disoriented to function, but a Humvee behind us opens up with a grenade machine gun — blap-kachunk, blap-kachunk — and Thyng yells, “WHO THE FUCK IS THAT?” I tell him it’s ours, not theirs, and our gunner finally stands up in the turret and starts returning fire toward the east and then toward the west. Big, hot .50 cal shells clatter into the interior of the Humvee. Shot, eight o’clock, a computer voice in the cabin informs us. The detection system is picking up gunfire from other vehicles in our convoy and reporting it as if it were coming from the enemy.
There’s a lot of shooting out there and I’m not looking forward to running through it, but the cabin is filling with toxic gray smoke and I know we’re going to have to bail out eventually. I keep waiting for something like fear to take hold of me but it never does, I have a kind of flatlined functionality that barely raises my heart rate. I could do math problems in my head. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve been injured — often you don’t know right away — and I pat my way down both legs until I reach my feet, but everything is there. I get my gear in order and find the door lever with my hand and wait. There is a small black skeleton hanging from the rearview mirror and I notice that it’s still rocking from the force of the blast. I just sit there watching it. Finally Thyng gives the order and we all throw ourselves into the fresh cool morning air and start to run.
War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t where you might die — though that does happen — it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.
The core psychological experiences of war are so primal and unadulterated, however, that they eclipse subtler feelings, like sorrow or remorse, that can gut you quietly for years. Once in Paris I caught sight of two men carrying a mattress across the street and went straight into full-blown panic: eyes wide, heart pounding, hands gripping my chair. I’d just come out of Liberia, where I’d seen a lot of dead and wounded people carried that way, and at the time I’d had no reaction at all, zero. I was too terrified by the violence around me, and too amped by the magnitude of the story I was covering, to pay much attention to anything else. Then a sagging mattress in Paris triggered a three-week backlog of trauma and shame.
We drive into the KOP late that afternoon, our destroyed Humvee chained to the one ahead of us and getting dragged through the mud like some kind of stubborn farm animal. The place has changed since I was last here, the men are cleaner and less wild-eyed and don’t have to wear body armor all the time. It’s strange to see them walking around as if this were just any old place in the world and the hills weren’t crawling with enemy fighters who wanted them all to die. There’s a new brick-and-mortar for the command center and there are shower curtains on the shitter doors and there are seven or eight new laptops with a high-speed satellite Internet connection. I’m told to sleep in one of the new buildings, so I carry my gear up and drop it on an empty cot. There’s only one other man in the room, a Third Platoon soldier named Loza who’s been in Italy for three months recovering from a shoulder wound. He sits quietly on a cot listening to music on his laptop and rigging out his gear. He ties his night vision scope to his helmet with green “550 cord” and attaches a nylon sling to his rifle and tries on his new boots and then puts them, heels together, against the cement wall.
Loza was shot up at Restrepo on the second day and his return to the KOP was mildly controversial because he still can’t lift his arm higher than his shoulder. He wanted to come back to be with his friends and someone behind a desk basically did him a favor. He pulls an X-ray out of his pack and shows it to me and at first I don’t even understand what I’m looking at. It looks like a black-and-white photo of a suspension bridge in the fog, until I realize that the spans and cables are actually pieces of metal screwed into his bone. I ask him if it hurt to get shot.
“No,” he said. “I just thought I’d been slapped.”
I’ve been on some kind of high-amplitude ride all day since the bomb went off, peaks where I can’t sit still and valleys that make me want to catch the next resupply out of here. Not because I’m scared but because I’m used to war being exciting and suddenly it’s not. Suddenly it seems weak and sad, a collective moral failure that has tricked me — tricked us all — into falling for the sheer drama of it. Young men in their terrible new roles with their terrible new machinery arrayed against equally strong young men on the other side of the valley, all dedicated to a kind of canceling out of each other until replacements arrive. Then it starts all over again. There’s so much human energy involved — so much courage, so much honor, so much blood — you could easily go a year here without questioning whether any of this needs to be happening in the first place. Nothing could convince this many people to work this hard at something tha
t wasn’t necessary — right? — you’d catch yourself thinking.
That night I rewind the videotape of the explosion and try to watch it. My pulse gets so weird in the moments before we get hit that I almost have to look away. I can’t stop thinking about the ten feet or so that put that bomb beneath the engine block rather than beneath us. That night I have a dream. I’m watching a titanic battle between my older brother and the monsters of the underworld, and my brother is killing one after another with a huge shotgun. The monsters are cartoonlike and murderous and it doesn’t matter how many he kills because there’s an endless supply of them.
Eventually he’ll just run out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.
6
I DON’T LEAVE THE VALLEY, I STAY, AND AFTER A FEW days the war becomes normal again. We go on patrol and I focus on the fact that one foot goes in front of the other. We get ambushed and the only thing I’m interested in is what kind of cover we’ve got. It’s all very simple and straightforward, and it’s around this time that killing begins to make a kind of sense to me. It’s tempting to view killing as a political act because that’s where the repercussions play out, but that misses the point: a man behind a rock touched two wires to a battery and tried to kill me — to kill us. There are other ways to understand what he did, but none of them overrides the raw fact that this man wanted to negate everything I’d ever done in my life or might ever do. It felt malicious and personal in a way that combat didn’t. Combat theoretically gives you the chance to react well and survive; bombs don’t allow for anything. The pressure cooker was probably bought in Kandigal, the market town we passed through half an hour earlier. The bomber built a campfire in the draw to keep himself warm that night while waiting for us. We could see his footprints in the sand. The relationship between him and me couldn’t be clearer, and if I’d somehow had a chance to kill him before he touched the wires together I’m sure I would have. As a civilian, that’s not a pretty thought to have in your head. That’s not a thought that just sits there quietly and reassures you about things.