We exit the draw somewhere north of Karingal and move quickly down the road, boots crunching double-time in the snow and the men silent and tense. The sounds of village life rise to meet us, children shouting and the cry of a baby and once in a while a rooster or the patient agonies of livestock. We’re moving on the village single file as fast as we can and sweating heavily in our body armor, trying to get close before the local men can get up to their fighting positions. Gillespie pauses briefly before turning the ridgeline outside town and we start down the last stretch with 1705 looming above us like the hull of a huge gray battleship. No cover except six inches of frozen mud if you squeezed yourself down into the tire ruts in the road.
The village has gone silent now except for one dog, then another furiously baying our arrival. We clamber down the final slope into town to find every door closed and every window shuttered tight. I follow O’Byrne to the edge of the village and he takes up a position behind some trees and watches the ridgeline to our south. That’s where it will come from if it comes at all. A family is clustered on the back porch of a house, children crying and a woman trying to pull everyone indoors. A chicken wanders through it all pecking the ground. A mortar booms in the distance, something must be going on up-valley. O’Byrne spots an old man moving fast through the lower village hoping we won’t see him and O’Byrne shouts and the old man looks up and nods and starts making his way toward us. He’s using an ax as a walking stick and moves impossibly fast up the steep slopes. He must be at least sixty, and moments after O’Byrne calls to him he’s standing before us not even breathing hard. An Afghan soldier relieves him of his ax. Through an interpreter the man says he’s visiting from Yaka Chine because his son has a wounded leg. Gillespie tells him to take us there and we start off through the village doing our best to keep up with him.
The son is about ten and faces us bravely while Doc Old peels the bandage off his leg. Old has written “I’ll fuck your face” in Magic Marker on the front of his ammo rack, but whatever that means, it doesn’t seem to impede his concern for the boy. He’s been shot in the shin but the wound is months old and has turned gelatinous and brown. I can see the white of his shinbone and a small hole in front where a bullet went in. “Looks like one of ours,” Old says, meaning the hole is so small it’s probably from an American M4. AK rounds are a lot bigger and do considerably more damage. The father claims the boy got his wound by falling down, but that’s clearly absurd and the boy looks like he’d rather lose his leg than stand here any longer with these soldiers gathered around him. Doc Old kneels in front of him to put on a new bandage and when he’s done he looks up and says he should get it checked out at the KOP. To me it looks like he’s going to lose his leg at the knee. The old man glances around apologetically and shakes his head.
“All we’re going to do is help his son,” Gillespie tells the translator. “He needs to tell me a good reason why he shouldn’t go back to the KOP.”
The translator asks the man a long question and gets a long answer back. “He is tired right now and this is the praying time.”
“How long does it take to pray?” Gillespie says. “Because if he needs to pray he can pray right now. It’s just the right thing for us to do. I mean just ’cause you’re tired… it’s your son.”
In retrospect the old man’s reluctance made perfect sense — he knew what was going to happen and didn’t want to be around us when it did — but eventually Gillespie convinces him to come with us. The old man ducks into his house and comes out with a blanket and knots it over his shoulders and puts his son inside it. He falls in line and we leave the village like we came in, fast and single file, and the first burst of AK comes before the men have even gotten to the road. I’m walking behind Gillespie in the gray-dark and I hear him say, “Fuck,” and we flatten ourselves against a stone wall. There are three or four detonations and I can feel the bottom drop out of my stomach, this is my first contact since getting blown up and somehow all the fight’s gone out of me, I have no interest in any of this. I crouch against the wall and watch the men I’m with try to figure out what to do.
“Anyone got contact with Two-One, over?” Gillespie says into his radio. “Two-One” means First Squad — Sergeant Mac’s men. They’re at the top of the village covering our movement.
“Two-One, Two-One, just call,” someone repeats.
“Fuck,” Gillespie says for the second time and starts moving toward the top of the town. Stichter starts calling mortars down on Kilo Echo 2205, one of the preset targets on a ridgeline to our south, and we churn through town at a dead run, the SAW gunners gasping under their loads. Halfway up the hill Pemble reports he’s established communication with Two-One and that the detonations were outgoing 203 rounds: everything’s fine. Later we find out that a bullet splintered some wood just above O’Byrne’s head, but that’s nothing new, and we form up outside the village and move out along the road we came in on.
The old man walks bent forward with his arms clasped behind his back to support the injured boy and I have the impression he could outwalk all of us straight up a mountain if he had to. The plan is to move back to Loy Kalay along the road and deliver the old man and the boy to a Destined Company patrol that has rolled down there in Humvees. It takes the gun team a while to climb down to the road, though, so by the time we start north it’s been a good hour since the shooting. First Platoon walked straight into a night ambush on Rock Avalanche, and it seems like it would be an incredibly easy thing to do to us as well — just get a little bit ahead on the road and take out the whole lead squad with machine guns and RPGs.
While we’re waiting for the gun team to join us I have time to decide where I want to be in the line. O’Byrne is up front with the rest of his fire team — Money and Steiner and Vaughn. If we walk into an ambush they’re going to take the brunt of it, but they’re the guys I’ve been bunking with and know best. When you’re entirely dependent on other men for your safety you find yourself making strange unconscious choices about otherwise very mundane things: where to walk, where to sit, who to talk to. You don’t want to be anywhere near the ANA on patrol because they’re almost as likely to kill you by accident as they are to kill the enemy on purpose. You don’t want to be near the new guys in case they freeze or shoot so much they draw fire or jam their guns. You don’t want to be near the cowboys, either, or the guys who have to glance over at their team leader before they dare do anything. It’s subtle, what you want — I’m not sure there are even words for it — but at night on a frozen road outside an enemy village the choices you make reflect something real. I pick up my pack and move forward.
Thirty feet between Steiner and me, thirty feet between me and Vaughn. O’Byrne walking point, as usual. No sound but the scrape of boots on frozen dirt and occasionally a dog barking in the villages below. God knows how, but they sense strange men are moving through their valley and they don’t like it. There’s no moon but the stars are fierce and leak just enough light to see a bit of the road and the shapes of the men ahead. I try to avoid walking through puddles because the skim ice shatters with a disastrous clarity in the frozen air. The wind shifts heavily through the holly trees around us. I run scenarios in my mind about where I’ll go if we suddenly get lit up, but most stretches of road have no cover so my best option is to just lie down so I don’t get hit by gunfire from the men behind me.
We pass quietly below the dark masses of the mountains and occasionally we see a porch light burning down in the valley like a lone planet in an inverted sky. A long time later we’re still on the road when a sick, hollow little whistle passes overhead. A few minutes later it happens again. No one knows what it is but later I find out they were sniper rounds fired from way down-valley — off-target but still boring fiercely through the darkness bearing their tiny loads of death.
• • •
"Those rounds hit pretty close to you in Karingal?” I overhear someone ask O’Byrne after the patrol.
“Yeah, they were pret
ty fucking close.”
“When you didn’t radio back we thought you might have been hit. But we didn’t hear any screaming, so we figured you were okay.”
“Yeah — ”
“ — or he was hit in the mouth,” someone else offers.
Even O’Byrne has to laugh.
BOOK THREE
LOVE
The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death.
— J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors
1
THAT SPRING STEINER GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILE pinned down at the Aliabad cemetery. Third Platoon was putting in a new outpost on the spot where Murphree lost his legs and Second Platoon’s job was to set up on the crest of Hill 1705 and overwatch them while they worked. They were going to go in at dusk and work all night and hope to be done by dawn. Since the site was accessible by road they used prepoured concrete barriers trucked down on flatbeds and unloaded by bulldozer, and the next morning Gillespie decided to move his men off the mountain because the job was done. There was airpower in the next valley over and it was as good a time as any, but some of the team leaders wanted to wait until dark. “That’s why we have night vision gear,” O’Byrne said, “so that we can walk at night when the enemy can’t see us.”
O’Byrne tried to raise the point with the lieutenant, but Sergeant Mac finally told him to stop being a bitch. ‘If I was a bitch I wouldn’t have joined the Army in the first place,’ O’Byrne answered. The other side of the coin was that they were deep in enemy territory without much cover, and if they stayed where they were all day, they’d probably get attacked as well. It was a shitty deal all the way around. The men started down the steep slopes of 1705 and as soon as they moved out of position, a single gunshot cracked through the valley. “Right then we should have fucking held back and stopped moving,” O’Byrne told me later. “It wasn’t our first day. We all knew what the fuck that shot meant.”
The road north of 1705 has no cover at all and is exposed to almost every enemy position in the southern half of the valley; it’s the kind of place soldiers literally have bad dreams about. When everyone got down to the road, O’Byrne told the men behind him that he was simply going to run, and then he turned and headed for the next bit of cover three hundred yards away. O’Byrne made it to a low rock wall south of Aliabad without taking fire and took a knee to cover everyone else. The rest of his team came tumbling in after him and then Gillespie and Patterson gasped past and finally Weapons Squad came into view. They were staggering under their loads and still strung along the road when the first burst came in. That was followed by a massive barrage from virtually every enemy position in the southern valley, and O’Byrne watched the rock wall he was hiding behind start to disintegrate from the impacts. He was still furious they hadn’t waited until dark. ‘This is the day I’m going to die,’ he thought.
The rest of O’Byrne’s team was pinned down just as badly. Steiner was lying flat on the ground next to Stichter, and when he tried to get up a burst from a PKM rattled into the wall in front of him and lacerated his face with stone shards. He dropped down to regain his composure and then sat up again just in time to catch the next burst. A round drilled straight into his helmet and snapped his head back so hard that he hit Stichter in the face and almost broke his nose. Stichter screamed for a medic and someone else yelled that Steiner had taken a round in the head, and Steiner slumped to the ground with a hole in his helmet and blood running down his face.
Steiner lay there unable to see or move, wondering whether the things he was hearing were true. Had he been hit in the head? Was he dead? How would he know? The fact that he could hear the men around him should count for something. After a while he could see a little bit and he sat up and looked around. The bullet had penetrated his helmet to the innermost layer and then gone tumbling off in another direction, looking for someone else to kill. (The blood on his face turned out to be lacerations from stone fragments that had hit him.) The other men glanced at Steiner in shock — most of them thought he was dead — but kept shooting because they were still getting hammered and firepower was the only way out of there. Steiner was in a daze and he just sat there with a bullet hole in his helmet, grinning. After a while he got up and started laughing. He should be dead but he wasn’t and it was the funniest thing in the world. “Get the fuck down and start returning fire!” someone yelled at him. Steiner laughed on. Others started laughing as well. Soon every man in the platoon was howling behind their rock wall, pouring unholy amounts of firepower into the mountainsides around them.
“It was to cover up how everyone was really feeling,” Mac admitted to me later.
Three Humvees drove down from the KOP to pick up Steiner, but he refused to go with them — he wanted to stay with his squad. When the platoon finally started running up the road toward Phoenix, Steiner found himself floating effortlessly ahead of the group despite carrying sixty pounds of ammo and a twenty-pound SAW. It was one of the best highs he’d ever had. It lasted a day or two and then he sank like a stone.
“You start getting these flashes of what could’ve been,” Steiner said. “I was lying in bed like, ‘Fuck, I almost died.’ What would my funeral have been like? What would the guys have said? Who’d have dragged me out from behind that wall?” Steiner was doing something known to military psychologists as “anxious rumination.” Some people are ruminators and some aren’t, and the ones who are can turn one bad incident into a lifetime of trauma. “You can’t let yourself think about how close this shit is,” O’Byrne explained to me later. “Inches. Everything is that close. There’s just places I don’t allow my mind to go. Steiner was saying to me, ‘What if the bullet — ’ and I just stopped him right there, I didn’t even let him finish. I said, ‘But it didn’t. It didn’t.’”
In some ways the incident took more of a toll on O’Byrne than on Steiner himself. O’Byrne thought he could protect his men, but behind that rock wall in Aliabad he realized it was all beyond his control. “I had promised my guys none of them would die,” he said. “That they would all go home, that I would die before they would. No worries: you’re going to get home to your girl, to your mom or dad. So when Steiner got shot I realized I might not be able to stop them from getting hurt, and I remember just sitting there, trembling. That’s the worst thing ever: to be in charge of someone’s life. And then if you lose them? I could not imagine that. I could not imagine that day.”
It wasn’t even fighting season, and the men at Restrepo were having one close call after another. Olson was on overwatch with the 240 when a round hit a branch above his head and the next one smacked into the dirt next to his cheek. He thought it was from the sniper rifle that the enemy took off Rougle on Rock Avalanche. A round splintered wood next to Jones’s head in the south-facing SAW position. O’Byrne was leaning over to help an Afghan soldier who’d just taken a sniper round through the stomach — he died — when a second one came in and missed him by inches. Buno was doing pull-ups when a Dishka round went straight through the hooch he was in. On and on it went, lives measured in inches and seconds and deaths avoided by complete accident. Platoons with a 10 percent casualty rate could just as easily have a 50 percent casualty rate; it was all luck, all God. There was nothing to do about it except skate through on prayers and good timing until the birds came in and took them all home.
The men had been out there talking on the radios for almost a year and found themselves saying “break” and “over” while on the KOP phones to their girlfriends and wives. Relationships frayed and ground to an end and old pickup lines were dusted off and evaluated for future use. The men would never say they were in the Army when they met women; far better to go with “dolphin trainer” or “children’s book writer.” One guy had a lot of success claiming he was Alec Baldwin’s son. Every time Cantu rotated down to the
KOP, men would come in to get inked up in ever more outlandish ways. Vengeful dragons started to curl around men’s torsos and bombs and guns sprouted from their biceps. “Living to die/Dying to live”; “Soldier for God”; “Soldier of Fortune.” A new private nicknamed Spanky overreached a bit and tattooed his left arm with a face that was half angel, half devil. When Sergeant Mac saw it he demanded to know what the fuck it meant.
“It represents the angels and devils I have to wake up to every morning, Sar’n,” Spanky said.
After the laughter died down Mac told him he was better off saying he got really fucked up one night and doesn’t remember getting it. “Now repeat that a few times so it sounds believable,” Mac said.
The rains come in late March and the Pech quickly gets so big and violent that enemy fighters can’t cross it on foot. Nothing but combat aircraft can fly out of Bagram and logistics backs up days and then weeks. I pass through Bagram in early April and spend a few days waiting for the clouds to lift enough to see the mountains. No mountain, no flight, but I’d usually hang out at the rotary terminal just in case. No matter how many times you’ve heard it, you always turn toward the flight line when the 15s and 16s take off, a sound so thunderous and wrong that it would seem to be explainable only by some kind of apocalypse. Then the deltoid shape rising with obscene speed into the Afghan sky, its cold-blue afterburners cutting through the twilight like a welder’s torch.