“I went out to use the piss tubes one night,” O’Byrne admitted to me once, “and I was like, ‘What am I doing in Afghanistan?’ I mean literally, ‘What am I doing here?’ I’m trying to kill people and they’re trying to kill me. It’s crazy…”
The enemy had to have their piss-tube moments as well — how could they not? In January, Prophet overheard two Taliban commanders discussing the American presence in the valley by radio. One of them was making the point that if the Americans were willing to build roads and clinics in the valley, maybe they shouldn’t be attacked. The other guy didn’t quite agree, but at least someone was asking the question. The number of firefights in the battalion area of operation had dropped from five a day to one a day, the number of shuras with local leaders had quadrupled, and the Americans hadn’t been shot at from inside a village in the Korengal since the end of October. That was an important gauge of local sentiment because it meant that the villagers were telling the fighters to take their insurgency elsewhere. There was even a story going around that one of the valley elders had slapped a Taliban commander across the face for refusing to leave the area, and the commander didn’t dare retaliate. The human terrain in the Pech and the Korengal was changing so fast that Colonel Ostlund felt confident a little more development money would allow NATO forces and the Afghan government to absolutely “overrun” the area. “The arguments I’ve heard against the American presence here are all economically based,” he told me. “Which is the good news, because economic arguments are arguments we can win.”
Kearney is convinced that in the spring the fight is going to move northward, out of the Korengal and into the Pech, which would allow him to create a little breathing room for the incoming unit. As far as he knows that will be Viper Company of the First Infantry Division, which is a mechanized unit, and the new soldiers will probably be out of shape and used to riding in trucks. They’ll be faced with foot patrols on some of the steepest terrain in the entire war, and Kearney wants to make sure that at least the northern half of the valley has bought into the idea of government control. He’s going to build another outpost, called Dallas, more or less at the spot where Murphree lost his legs last month. That will extend American firepower deep into the central Korengal and prevent the enemy from digging bombs into a crucial section of road. He’s going to put Third Platoon down at Dallas and hand Phoenix over to the Afghan National Army, which is coming into the valley with two full companies — 300 men. The idea is to have the ANA start conducting their own patrols in the safer villages, like Babiyal and Aliabad, which would free up the Americans to push farther down-valley.
“We’re still gonna take casualties, unfortunately,” Kearney says. “We’ll probably lose another soldier, if not more, but I think the kinetic activity will drop. The people of the valley will hopefully start seeing some changes, and we’ll hopefully have a food distribution center set up. That way I can bring the local villagers in and empower them rather than the elders, who are working with the Taliban.”
Kearney wants to start issuing identity cards so that locals can come to the KOP and pick up food and other types of humanitarian aid. Until now those supplies have been distributed through village elders who make huge profits by taking most of it for themselves. Identity cards will also enable the S-2, the intelligence officer, to conduct a crude census of the valley, and the food pickups will give locals an opportunity to tip the Americans off to upcoming attacks without the Taliban knowing about it. Kearney also wants to buy three or four jingle trucks, put benches in the back, and start running a bus service up and down the valley. Right now it costs around a hundred dollars in fuel to drive a truck from Babiyal, at the center of the valley, up to the nearest market town and back. A bus service would allow commerce to start flowing more freely into and out of the valley, which would take control out of the hands of the village elders and put it into the hands of ordinary people.
“The villagers are almost like indentured servants,” Kearney says. “I got to bring these people up so they’re not reliant on the elders, so they’re taking some ownership of themselves and their families. Right now the elders are the only ones getting out to Asadabad, they own gas stations on the A-bad-J-bad road. They don’t let the people out because then they’ll lose their free labor.”
As the most exposed base in the Korengal, Restrepo is exquisitely attuned to social changes in the valley. If the price of wheat goes up because of a bad harvest, the amount of fighting drops because the fighters have less money to spend on ammo. Second Platoon hasn’t been shot at in weeks, they can walk into Loy Kalay without any problem, and old men are stopping patrols to tip them off about Taliban movements. Everything is starting to shift. One night I find O’Byrne sitting on one of the lower bunks framed in blinking Christmas lights slowly picking out “Paint It Black” on his guitar. He says he’s trying to imagine Restrepo as some kind of ski lodge and health spa. The locals could be ski instructors — it would pay better than fighting the Americans. Hijar and Underwood could run the gym. They could shoot blank rounds over the outpost once in a while, just so people would get a feel for what it was like during the war. You could make it down to Phoenix on a snowboard in about sixty seconds and take a ski lift back up.
I ask O’Byrne if he’ll get bored without any fighting this spring and he stops playing guitar and looks upward, searching for how to put this. “All right, this is how it goes,” he says. “This is the thought process in my head: if we never get shot at again, I won’t mind. But if we do.” He gives me a look. “I… won’t… mind. Ha-ha-ha!”
It’s early morning and I’m down at Phoenix with Anderson and the rest of Third Squad. Operation Dark City is finally under way but I’ve passed on the chance to go out on it. (An all-night walk with Third Platoon and almost no chance of contact — even Second Platoon guys were telling me it wasn’t worth the night’s sleep.) The sun is warm and I’m up at the guardpost scanning the ridgelines with binoculars. After a while I can pick out Third Platoon on Honcho Hill and a squad from Second Platoon at Table Rock. Near me, Anderson and a medic named LeFave talk down the morning. They have a two-hour guard shift and then they can go back to sleep. Anderson wants to know whether LeFave would sew his finger back on if it got shot off. LeFave doesn’t even look up.
“You can’t just sew a finger back on, you have to reattach all the nerves and shit.”
“Well, if my finger gets shot off I want you to try to save it,” Anderson says. He’s a saxophone player so his request makes sense.
“If your finger gets shot off, I’ll find it and put it in your cargo pouch.”
“Suppose I don’t want it in my cargo pouch?”
“I’ll put it anywhere you want.”
Silence for five or ten minutes. “Maybe it would be cool to be a homicide detective,” Anderson finally says.
“Why?”
“Well, it’s not like we haven’t seen enough dead bodies out here.”
“Yeah, but you have to be all creepy and shit,” LeFave answers. “You’d have to think like a killer.”
“Well,” Anderson says, “that sure as hell wouldn’t be hard.”
Daylight only lasts six or seven hours but there’s so little work at Restrepo that even that feels endless. The men fill up their time as best they can. One morning Gillespie conducts a “law of war” class in which he goes over what is and isn’t legal in terms of killing people. (“As much as you hate the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they’re still people. Napalm? If you can get away without using it, so much the better.”) There are a lot of squad brawls, and one man clears his hooch instantly by pulling out a hand grenade and waving it around. Steiner, Lambert, and Donoho put on “Touch Me,” by Gunther and the Sunshine Girls, and briefly turn the First Squad hooch into a gay disco. Mace toboggans through the outpost on a flexible Skedco litter after a particularly heavy snowfall. O’Byrne receives a random care package from a high school girl that contains two hundred toothbrushes — more than enough for an
entire company. She also sent pink plastic soap dishes. (“Are you serious? We make fun of each other out here enough as it is.”) One morning O’Byrne walks past me muttering, “Fuckin’ pervert,” about a platoonmate he accidentally caught committing a private act in his bunk. Jones wanders around the outpost wearing a fake afro with a purple plastic pick jammed in the back. He says he’s going on patrol that way, helmet balanced on the top of all that hair, until O’Byrne points out it’ll only aggravate the local rednecks.
The guys are experts, of a sort, at being funny, and they seem to go out of their way to be. Maybe it’s the only way to stay sane up there. Not because of the combat — you’re never saner than when your survival is in question — but because of the unbelievable, screaming boredom. “Okay, who’s going to die today?” was a standard one-liner before patrols. (“Hey, Anderson, what do you want on your tombstone?” I heard someone ask before we all headed down to Karingal. “Now that’s fucked up,” Anderson muttered as he put on his helmet.) Before patrols, guys promised their laptops to each other or their new boots or their iPods. One pair of friends had a serious agreement that if one of them should die, the other would erase all the porn on his laptop before the Army could ship it back to his mom. Mothers were an irresistible source of humor. “If I start bangin’ your mom when we get home, will that mean I’m your dad?” — or some version of that — was pretty much boilerplate humor at Restrepo. Once I watched O’Byrne grab someone’s ass and give it a good, deep squeeze. When the man demanded an explanation O’Byrne said, “Just trying to get an idea what your mom’s ass is gonna feel like when we get home.” Only wives and girlfriends are off-limits because the men are already so riddled with anxiety over what’s going on back home that almost nothing you could say would be funny. Anything else — mothers, sisters, retarded nephews — is fair game.
Not all the humor involved gutting your best friend’s personal dignity. Donoho would pretend to see obstacles on night patrols and climb over them so he could watch the next guy in line try to do the same thing. Money ate a two-pound bag of tuna in one sitting just to see what would happen. O’Byrne and Sergeant Al fashioned a tarantula out of pipe cleaners to slip into my sleeping bag. (They giggled like schoolgirls while they were making it so I knew something was up.) Some of the men were deeply, intentionally funny, others — like Money — were inadvertently funny, and a few seemed to act as fulcrums for a sick hilarity that could well up from almost anywhere. Jones was one of those. He was the only black guy in the platoon, and that alone made him an irresistible source of humor. That was also true of Kim, the only Asian, and Rueda, who looked awfully Indian. (He had no idea whether he really was or not, but O’Byrne called him “Apache” anyway.)
Not only was Jones the only black guy in the platoon, he was one of only five in the entire company and he’d clearly given the matter some thought. “Black people don’t jump out of planes,” he told me when I asked him why there weren’t more blacks in the unit. The platoon was on ambush west of Restrepo and we had a lot of time to kill. “Black people don’t want to come out here and get shot at. It’s not what they do. Most times black folks join the Army because they’re trying to get a skill set to do something else with their life. I get plenty of shit around here for being the only black dude, but ninety-eight percent of the time it’s all in good fun. You’re gonna run across some guys out there who don’t like me, I guaran-god-damn-tee it, but at the same time I bet there’s not one of ’em that would say, ‘I wouldn’t take him in a firefight.’ And that’s what I’m looking for. I don’t need you to like me, but I need you to respect me. I need you to want to go to war with me.”
Jones had a kind of rangy muscularity that made him seem capable of going to the Olympics in virtually anything. He roamed Restrepo like some kind of alpha predator, and if you caught his attention, you didn’t know whether he was going to jump you, look right through you, or drape an arm over your shoulder and ask how you were doing. He exuded a strange, sullen anger that never quite came to the surface but instead wound up getting slid between your ribs as a casual observation that was devastating because it was so accurate. He dubbed one officer “Chinless the Fearless” and probably wouldn’t have even bothered except that the guy really was fearless. He was fond of giving someone a dismissive look and saying, “Just a mess. A soup sandwich. Just a goddamn mess.” I liked him tremendously. I think it took most of the year for him to say more than two words to me.
“Personally, I don’t give a fuck, you know what I mean?” he went on to tell me about his life before the Army. “I’ll tell anyone who will listen: I smoked a lot of weed, I sold a lot of drugs, I don’t care who knows it, it’s the way it was. I never got caught, my choice was pretty much on the streets dead, or in jail. I didn’t want either so I joined the Army. And now it’s dead or back home, but I guess the jail thing is out of the fucking equation. My mom raised me better than that, plain and simple. She just raised me better than to be selling drugs. She was the realest person in my life.”
If humor wasn’t enough to get you through the week you could always talk about the exploits of the men on leave. By mid-tour there was a steady trickle of men coming and going, and the things that happened to them provided a minor amount of spiritual sustenance for the others. Leave lasts eighteen days and starts when your feet touch American soil. It seems to consist mostly of getting drunk with friends and trying to meet, impress, and seduce women who won’t care that the association will be measured in days, if not hours. When Pemble went home on leave he had to change planes in Texas, and as he was walking through the first-class section on his flight to Oregon a man jumped up, grabbed Pemble’s boarding pass, and told him they were trading seats. Pemble’s uniform was ripped and filthy, and he sat in first class for the first time in his life reeking of combat and drinking champagne. He took a commuter train from the airport to Beaverton and walked into a Hooters restaurant and ordered a beer. The waitress saw him in his uniform and sat down next to him and started asking questions. At one point she wanted to know what he’d done to get his combat infantry badge.
‘I just had to get shot at,’ Pemble answered.
Her next question was whether or not he had a girlfriend.
Pemble’s parents didn’t know he was coming home on leave — he wanted to surprise them — so he walked several miles from the train station with an assault pack over his shoulder and people staring at him as they drove by. His parents were both at work and the house was locked so he got a ladder out of the garage, put it to a second-story window, and climbed in. After a while he got bored sitting home alone so he went out and knocked at the house of a Vietnam vet who lived next door. The vet understood without having to ask and pulled some whiskey out of the cabinet and they spent the rest of the afternoon drinking. When Pemble’s parents finally came home he was asleep on their couch, filthy and exhausted and drunk.
Everyone reacts differently to going home. The first time Hijar sat down to a hot meal he burst into tears. Cortez didn’t know whether he should act like a man or a boy when he saw his mom at the airport, but it didn’t matter because it was his brother-in-law who picked him up and they just went out and got drunk. Jones thought the rattling of the pipes when he ran the water sounded just like the .50 and stood there listening to it for so long that his wife finally asked what was wrong. Everyone jerked at loud noises and dreamed about combat, and everyone worried about their brothers back in the Korengal. It was the kind of combat where one man could make all the difference, but you couldn’t be that man if you were home partying with your friends.
And then there were the questions. Moreno went home to Beeville, Texas, and got into a conversation with a stranger who finally asked what he’d wanted to ask all along, which was whether Moreno had killed anyone. Moreno just looked at him. “Keep in mind I’ve never met this guy,” Moreno said. “I’m like, ‘Yo, we don’t like talking about that.’ And he was like, ‘If I killed someone I’d let you know.’ His eyes
were rolling toward the back of his head and this and that and I was like, ‘Dude, it’s different when you see your best friend laying there dead. You think you’re a badass until you’ve seen a fallen soldier laying there not breathing anymore and then it’s a different fucking story.’”
Moreno thought of leave primarily as eighteen days when he didn’t have to worry about getting shot. He was one of those rare things, a good soldier who didn’t like combat, and as far as he was concerned if they never got into another firefight it was fine with him. Once we got hit pretty hard and an RPG came in and exploded against the sandbags right next to where Moreno was standing. There were only a few weeks to go in the deployment and Moreno dropped into a hole and came back up shaking his head in disgust. Meanwhile Steiner was running around with a big grin on his face. “It’s like crack,” he yelled, “you can’t get a better high.” I asked him how he was ever going to go back to civilian life.
He shook his head. “I have no idea.”
8
THE MISSION EVERYONE’S BEEN GETTING NERVOUS about is Karingal. They’ve never gone there without getting shot at and the fact that there hasn’t been a TIC in weeks only means the enemy has saved up plenty of ammo. Karingal is only a few clicks south of Loy Kalay but the approach is wide open to enemy positions on 1705 and the inhabitants are hard-core Taliban — the guys say they can tell by the looks in their eyes. The town’s only saving grace is that there’s supposed to be one very beautiful girl there, Moreno caught a glimpse of her once (right before they got lit up from the south). Otherwise all the hot girls are in Upper Obenau.
Patrols never leave at the same time or follow the same routes, and the mission to Karingal is set for midafternoon with the sun just starting to throw cold blue shadows across the valley. We leave the wire through the southern gate and contour across the draw, moving quickly through the open spots and only stopping behind trees so the patrol is harder to spot. You never walk up on the man in front of you because clusters get targeted, and you never speak over a whisper. If you step carelessly and knock stones down the slope, heads turn and men stare. We cross over the high road and continue southward into a pretty little valley above a creek slotted deeply into a draw. The creek comes down from the high peaks muttering between boulders and over rock shelves and we have to walk way up the valley before we can cross over and double back on the other side. Snow is lying deep in the northern exposures and melting busily on the south-facing slopes as if winter weren’t happening there, and if you stopped to feel the sun on your face, you could imagine the war wasn’t either.