One day I meet a man in civilian clothes who never moves a foot or two from a long black carrying case. We’re in a plywood building filled with bored soldiers watching women’s college basketball, and when I ask him what he does, he just nods toward the case and says, “We identify guys in the mafia and take them off the battlefield one at a time.” A day later at Jalalabad I catch a Black Hawk headed to Camp Blessing that has just dropped off an Afghan soldier in handcuffs and another one in a body bag. Blessing’s 155s are going full bore supporting a valley-wide firefight in the Korengal — every position engaged, mortars ranged in on Restrepo and the KOP — and I walk down to the batteries to watch. The great dark barrels are jacked high in the air and snort smoke sideways out their muzzle brakes every time they shoot. They pound the Korengal for an hour and then fall silent with a kind of reluctance and I walk back up the hill to lie back down on my bunk and wait for the weather to clear. Rear-base limbo: an ill blend of apprehension and boredom that is only relieved by going forward where things are even worse.
"I killed my first bear with a bow and arrow in Alaska,” Lambert says.
After days of waiting around air bases I’ve finally made it out to Restrepo. It’s a slow, hot day — the storm systems have been pushed out to the west — and the talk has turned to hunting.
“Do you have a sidearm with you when you hunt like that?” Patterson asks.
“Fuck yeah.”
Lambert says that when he was a kid he’d get up early to go duck hunting and would show up at school covered in duck blood.
“You ever go frog gigging?” Patterson asks.
“Fuck yeah,” says Lambert.
“You ever go squirrel hunting?”
“Fuck yeah. With a little four-ten?”
“You ever go cow hunting?”
“Come on…”
Patterson tells a story about a cow that got caught in the crotch of a tree and no one could get it out. “We tried shooting it out but that didn’t work either,” he says.
The topic of cow hangs heavily in the air. A few weeks earlier the men spotted a lone cow wandering along the ridge and chased it into the concertina wire that’s strung around the base. Once the cow was tangled up they didn’t have much choice but to gaffer-tape a combat knife to some tentpoles and kill it caveman-style. By coincidence — or not — a black kid named Lackley, who works full-time as a cook down at the KOP, had just made the trek up to Restrepo to get into a firefight and claim his combat action badge. (It worked.) Once the cow was dead Lackley and Murphy gutted it and cut the head off with a Christmas tree saw and then Lackley prepared a recipe that became known as “same-day cow.” He cut strips of meat off the haunches and wrapped them around onions that he got from the Afghan soldiers and then grilled them up on a bonfire outside the Weapons Squad hooch. He used Hesco siding stripped of its liner as a grill. Aside from a couple of frozen steaks they carried up from the KOP it was the first red meat the men had had at Restrepo in almost a year.
The meal was some kind of Lord of the Flies turning point — there were only four months to go and standards were starting to slip — but there were consequences. One afternoon soon after I arrive, three old men come walking in from Obenau and stop at the front gate. At first Patterson is pleased — this is the first time elders have made the trip to Restrepo, which can only mean good things about the hearts-and-minds campaign — but not everyone is convinced. “I think this is about the cow,” O’Byrne tells me in a low voice as we walk over to where the meeting is going to happen. The elders sit on a row of sandbags by the ANA hooch and Patterson and Abdul, the interpreter, sit facing them. The elders don’t take long to get to the point.
“The cow?” says Patterson. “The reason why we killed it was because it ran into our concertina wire and, uh, it was mangled inside the concertina wire, so we had to kill it to put it out of its misery. That’s why we killed it.”
“They are asking because it’s illegal,” says Abdul.
“Illegal?”
“Yeah, illegal.”
“Like, it was caught in the wire and it was already dead in the wire, so that’s, I mean, there was nothing else that we could really do.”
“The owner of the cow is a poor person, he is a poor guy,” says Abdul, “so what is your opinion about the cow? What do you want to do? Just tell them.”
“Like how much does a cow cost?” says Patterson.
“Like five hundred bucks.”
“Five hundred bucks? Is that Afghani or American?”
“Of course, American.”
Patterson says he has to check with his commander and he gets up and walks into the radio hooch. He gets Kearney on the line and the first thing Kearney wants to know is whether or not his men killed the cow.
“It was tangled up in our wire pretty much dead,” Patterson answers. “Two-four ended up cuttin’ it up, over.”
Kearney says that as long as his soldiers didn’t actually kill the cow he doesn’t owe any money, but the owners can claim as much HA — “humanitarian aid” — as they want: rice, beans, flour, cooking oil, blankets. Patterson goes back to the elders and delivers the verdict. All they want is money. Patterson says it’s HA or nothing, and they ask how much of it they could get.
“Whatever the weight of the cow was, will be the weight of HA,” says Patterson.
It’s an inspired bit of Old Testament justice, and one of the Afghan soldiers laughs when he hears it. Even the elders smile. After a while they stand up and shake hands and make their way up the steep slopes of the outpost to the southern gate. It’s not clear what they’re going to do but I’m pretty sure we haven’t heard the last of the cow. Later I point out to O’Byrne that they actually did kill the cow.
“Well, it was pretty badly tangled up in the wire,” he says.
“It was tangled up in the wire because you guys chased it in there.”
“Okay,” he says, “it’s a gray area.”
A few days later we leave the hilltop after midnight and go creeping into Karingal with so little illume that even the soldiers have trouble seeing with their night vision gear. There are puddles in the road and stars are reflected in them as if we’re walking through fragments of sky. A valley dog barks and another picks it up and by the time we arrive in Karingal the town is deserted except for one teenage boy who produces a sullen evasiveness that is unmistakable even without a common language. We get hit on the way out just as everyone expected — “Another well-timed patrol so we can get lit the fuck up,” as Moreno once said — and we come back at a run up a pretty creekbed with mortars shrieking over our heads and Restrepo’s .50 hammering away protectively. At one point someone fires two or three bursts from behind a rock wall and Alcantara wants to know what the man is shooting at.
“I don’t know, I just figure one of us should fucking return fire,” comes the answer.
We make it back to the base an hour later, sprinting the last stretch where Kim got pinned down weeks earlier and staggering in the south gate drenched like we’d all just jumped in a pond. The shooting has died down but starts up again half an hour later and then gets firmly settled by a pair of Apaches that come buzzing into the Korengal like angry insects. The men sit around shirtless, smoking cigarettes and watching the Apaches do their work against the flanks of 1705. “You thought that shit was funny this morning, huh?” someone yells after a long groan of 30 mike-mike into the mountainside. “Shoot at us again, bitch.”
Prophet has been picking up a lot of chatter about moving weapons and ammo around the valley and the enemy keeps talking about “the thing” and “the big machine.” The men assume it’s a Dishka. Kearney has a plan to air-assault Third Platoon onto the Sawtalo Sar ridge to try to find it, and Second Platoon’s job will be to man Phoenix and some of Third’s other positions while they’re on the mountain. That’s planned for the end of April, which leaves Restrepo a couple of weeks to conduct their own patrols before they get sucked into the larger mechanics of a compa
ny-level operation. The villagers in Loy Kalay have been complaining about Taliban fighters that move into their village after dark and harass them, and Patterson comes up with a plan to set up an ambush outside Karingal and surprise them on their way back. It will mean walking down-valley at night, hiding outside the village, and not moving a muscle until it gets dark again. The site for the ambush will be a low rock wall across a small valley outside Karingal. The stakes are high: if we’re spotted there, fighters in town can keep us pinned down behind the wall while their brothers in Darbart come down on us through the holly forests of 1705.
The mission is scheduled to go out shortly before midnight, and after dinner I start assembling my gear: a CamelBak full of water, one MRE, a rain poncho, a fleece jacket, and a handful of coffee crystals to pour into my drinking water to get me through the wake-up. Anderson wanders over and watches me for a while without saying anything and finally asks if I want to borrow an old uniform he has. I ask him why.
“It would be a lot better if we didn’t get spotted,” he says.
When soldiers use understatement it’s generally worth paying attention, but I turn him down because wearing military clothing seems like such a blatant erosion of journalistic independence. I doubt I’m more visible than the soldiers anyway — I’m dressed in muted colors that long ago turned Korengal-gray — but as I continue packing I realize that that’s not really the point. If we get compromised I’ll be the only guy in civilian clothes, and suppose someone gets hit? Suppose someone gets killed? Like every other reporter out there I’m eating Army food, flying on Army helicopters, sleeping in Army hooches, and if I were in the Korengal on my own, I’d probably be dead in twenty-four hours. Whatever boundaries may have blurred between me and the Army, the blurring didn’t start with a shirt.
I finish packing and find Anderson in his bunk and tell him I’ll take the clothes after all. He tosses them to me without a glance.
2
I’M ON MY BACK BEHIND A LOW ROCK WALL WITH A man ten feet to the left of me and another ten feet to the right. It’s so dark in the shadows I have no idea who they are. Holly oaks are bent over us like malevolent old people and moonlight turns the hillsides to pewter. It’s very cold and I wrap myself in an Army poncho and try to think myself off the mountain to someplace nice. I delay putting on my jacket because the cold is more bearable knowing that I’ve still got something in reserve. After a few hours a thin gray light finally infiltrates the world and begins reassembling the rocks and the trees around me. We’re on a steep hill facing Karingal with every man propped against his ruck and more men above and behind and below. The Claymores are out and no one speaks. Everyone is watching the valley emerge from the safety of night toward whatever’s going to happen next.
Karingal is a few hundred yards away. There is a stream at the base of our hill and then a series of wheat terraces and finally the first houses of town. People stir as soon as it’s light enough to see: voices, the cries of children, an ax smacking into wood. Teenage boys chase their family’s goats up the steep dry slopes west of town to graze the higher elevations. Two girls, little dabs of color against the green terraces, make their way to the stream below us and crouch to wash themselves. They can’t be fifty yards away. One old woman walks into the fields to relieve herself and others shuffle along a trail with bundles of firewood on their heads. No one has any idea we’re here. Finally there’s a man in olive drab moving fast along the high road toward Loy Kalay. He looks around continually and is soon joined by two other men on the same road. One has a shaved head. Next to me, Pemble studies them through binoculars and writes things down in a notebook. If he sees a gun or a radio they’ll be killed.
“We’ve seen about ten pax — fighting-age males — moving from Karingal to Loy Kalay and back,” Pemble tells me in a whisper. I can barely hear him over the rushing of the stream below us. “Two of them were wearing BDU jackets and they seem to be pulling security — one guy will come out, scan around, there’s another guy just chillin’ on a rooftop.”
BDUs are what the Army calls foliage-based camouflage. O’Byrne is whispering into his radio that wearing them is a killable offense, just like carrying a radio or a gun, but Patterson isn’t sure. (Patterson is the platoon sergeant, but he’s leading the patrol because Gillespie is away on leave.) After a few minutes the fighters disappear from sight and I watch the expression on O’Byrne’s face go foul. He’s lost his chance to kill those guys and — I know exactly what he’s thinking — they might be the very guys who kill an American next week or next month. There are other considerations, though. The enemy has observation posts as well, and they know exactly where the Americans go in the valley. This is one of the first times that a patrol has set up in their backyard and not been spotted. Enemy fighters are walking back and forth on an otherwise hidden road without any idea that infidels are watching them from two hundred yards away. Patterson could kill two guys now, or he could come back with a better plan and kill ten later.
By midmorning young boys start to play along the banks of the stream, and when I close my eyes, all I can hear are their shouts and the steady wash of the rapids. The only way to know I’m at war is to open my eyes and look around at all the men with their guns. The sun finally reaches our hillside and spreads over us like warm oil and I close my eyes again and listen to the children, and a while later I wake up to silence and cumulus clouds sliding across a pale blue sky. Hoyt has a pinch of dip in his mouth and dribbles methodically into the dirt beside him. Pemble stares placidly at the mountainside. Patterson studies the village through binos and checks what he sees against the entries in Pemble’s notebook.
Once in a while a man in the village looks in our direction and then looks away. It’s inconceivable that he could see us — dirty, unmoving faces in a chaos of rocks and foliage — but still, I have to fight the urge to duck behind the rock wall. No motion at all: roll to the side to piss and if you need to stretch, do it one limb at a time and very slowly. Cumulus clouds drag their shadows across the flat geometry of the terraces and then up into the hills and OP Dallas test-fires their .50 and the sun seems to stall around the noon point and then start its slide toward the western ridges. The valley colors deepen and by midafternoon Karingal contracts back in on itself: goatherds coming down off the hillsides and old men making their way across the terraces and women and children collecting on the rooftops. We leave our wall at the last blue tones of dusk and creep north off the hill and toward safety. We’re undetected except for the valley dogs that almost choke with outrage as we pass them in the dark.
Midafternoon and we’re sitting in the shade of concealment netting that’s been draped over the courtyard. There hasn’t been a firefight in weeks and the men are getting a little weird: disputes with a strange new edge to them and a sullen tension that doesn’t bode well for the coming months. April is supposed to be the start of fighting season, and the fact that nothing has happened yet produces a cruel mix of boredom and anxiety. If the men were getting hammered they’d at least have something to do, but this is the worst of both worlds: all the dread and none of the adrenaline. A visiting combat medic named Doc Shelke is talking about the Hindu religion and Abdul, the Afghan interpreter, happens to overhear him.
“Hindu is bullshit,” he says.
Shelke looks like he might be from India. He maintains his calm. “The last time a terp said something like that, I talked shit about Islam until he cried,” he says.
It was a stupid thing for Abdul to say and he doesn’t speak English well enough to make this a fair fight, or even interesting. In an attempt to head off another hour of boredom O’Byrne weighs in with his own religious views. “I don’t believe in heaven or hell and I don’t want an afterlife,” he says. “I believe in doing good in your life, and then you die. I don’t believe in God and I’ve never read the Bible. I don’t believe in that shit because I don’t want to.”
An awkward silence. Another sergeant says something irrelevant about an u
pcoming patrol.
“What — the conversation gets serious and you change the subject?” O’Byrne says. “We’re talking about religion. You can’t have a half-assed conversation about religion.”
More silence. No one knows what to say. “Mommy hit Daddy and then Daddy hit Mommy,” a private finally tries.
The mood eases when Airborne, a puppy that Second Platoon took from the Afghan soldiers, wanders into the courtyard. They named him Airborne because the soldiers who are going to take over in July — Viper Company of the First Infantry Division — are just regular infantry, and the idea was to remind them of their inferiority every time they called for the dog. (It backfired: I was told someone from Viper just took Airborne out to the burn pit and shot him.) Airborne usually hangs around the base barking whenever anything moves outside the wire, but a few days ago he went missing and eventually turned up at the KOP. Someone tied him up with 550 cord, but he quickly chewed through that and followed the next switch-out up to Restrepo.
Now Airborne wanders from man to man, chewing on their boots and getting rolled in the dust by rough hands. “So you think you’re tough, huh?” Moreno says, cuffing him in with quick boxer jabs. “Take that, you little bastard.” Company net suddenly intrudes from the radio room: “Be advised that they dropped a thirty-one and a thirty-eight in Pakistan,” a voice says. Everyone stops watching Airborne and looks up: thirty-ones and thirty-eights are bombs. They’re not supposed to land in other countries.