The men ran out of things to say about three months ago, so they just sit around in a mute daze. One day I watch Money come out of the hooch, look around, grunt, and go back inside for another three hours’ sleep. A summer shower comes through, briefly turning the air sweet and pungent, but the raindrops are small and sharp as needles and do almost nothing for the heat. “I used to live a thousand feet above sea level, and we’d find seashells in the rocks along the side of the road,” O’Byrne finally says. No one answers for about five minutes.
“You ever go to military school?” Murphy finally asks.
“Fuck no, my parents couldn’t afford that shit,” O’Byrne says. “Getting locked up was my military school.”
Boredom so relentless that the men openly hope for an attack. One crazy-hot morning Lieutenant Gillespie wanders by muttering, “Please, God, let’s get into a firefight.” I think it was Bobby who finally came up with the idea of sending Tim and me down to Darbart wearing burkas made out of American flags. (Surely that would kick something off.) Every American sniper in the valley would cover us from the hilltops.
“That’s a weird image,” Tim finally says, shaking his head.
Bobby is a 240 gunner from Georgia and Jones’s best friend: one black guy and one unreconstructed Georgia redneck wandering around Restrepo looking for trouble like a pair of bad guys in a spaghetti western. Bobby has a tattoo of a sunburst around one nipple and a massive branding scar in the shape of a heart above the other. The heart has an arrow through it. He says he joined the Army because his girl left him while he was on a bender, which sent him on another bender, which eventually put him unconscious on his father’s front lawn. When he woke up he and his father got drunk, and then Bobby went down to the recruiter’s office and tried to join the Marines. The Marines wouldn’t take him so he walked down the hall and joined the Army instead.
Bobby’s scene was so far out there that even his fellow soldiers had trouble wrapping their minds around it. “Just a pile of fuck, a big stupid redneck,” as Jones described him, except that he wasn’t: his aunt had adopted a black child and Bobby — slow-speaking, foul-mouthed, and outrageous — was one of the smartest and most capable guys in the entire company. One day the generator wouldn’t start and Bobby told O’Byrne to kick it halfway up the side, just above the fuel filter. The machine started immediately. “He had what I call ‘man knowledge,’” O’Byrne told me. “He wasn’t very polished but he had all the knowledge a man needs to get by in the world.”
The trick to understanding Bobby was to understand that he was so clear about who he was that he could, for example, spout the most egregious racist bullshit and not come across as a true bigot. (It was, quite possibly, his way of making fun of people who really did talk that way.) Before the deployment, Bobby said some unforgivable things to a black MP who was trying to arrest him for drunk and disorderly, but you had to reconcile that with the fact that the only black guy in the platoon was his best friend. It was about authority, not race, but you’d have to know Bobby pretty well to even bother understanding that. “There ain’t a racist bone in his body,” Jones said. “You call me nigger and Bobby’s standing around, and I’d be surprised if I could hit you first.”
There were plenty of guys in the platoon who were as brave as Bobby, but none exuded quite the same sense of just not caring. He’d sit cross-legged behind the 240, stubby fingers barely able to fit inside the trigger guard, grinning like a fiend just waiting to get into it. That bought him a lot of slack in other, more confusing aspects of his character. Bobby claimed a kind of broad-spectrum sexuality that made virtually no distinction between anything, and as the months went by that expressed itself in increasingly weird ways. He would take someone down with a quick headlock and create a kind of prison-yard sense of violation without actually crossing some ultimate line. He had thick limbs and crazy farmhand strength and when he teamed up with Jones — which was most of the time — you’d need half a squad to defend yourself. Ultimately, it made me think that if you deprive men of the company of women for too long, and then turn off the steady adrenaline drip of heavy combat, it may not turn sexual, but it’s certainly going to turn weird.
And weird it was: strange pantomimed man-rapes and struggles for dominance and grotesque, smoochy come-ons that could only make sense in a place where every other form of amusement had long since been used up. Bobby wasn’t gay any more than he was racist, but a year on a hilltop somehow made pretending otherwise psychologically necessary. And it wasn’t gay anyhow: it was just so hypersexual that gender ceased to matter. Someone once asked Bobby whether, all joking aside, he would actually have sex with a man up here. “Of course,” Bobby said. “It would be gay not to.”
“Gay not to?” O’Byrne demanded. “What the fuck does that mean?”
Bobby launched into a theory that “real” men need sex no matter what, so choosing abstinence can only mean you’re not a real man. Who you have sex with is of far lesser importance. The men knew it made no sense — Bobby’s weird brilliance — but no one could quite formulate a rebuttal. The less fighting there was, the weirder things got until men literally moved around in pairs in case they ran into Bobby and Jones. “One day that shit’s gonna go too far and someone’s actually going to get raped,” O’Byrne said to me one night. “Like literally, raped. They won’t know when to stop and then it’s gonna be too late.”
Bobby told me that after the deployment he was planning on visiting his wife, buying a motorcycle, and then driving south into Mexico. He was going to live out some south-of-the-border fantasy for a while and then decide whether to go AWOL or return home. The last I heard he was at Fort Bragg, challenging assumptions in the 82nd Airborne.
I pass through Bagram in late May when the first replacement units are starting to come in. I get space-blocked on a flight that requires showing up at the terminal at four in the morning, just as the sky is getting light. A dozen soldiers are watching NASCAR on a big flat-screen and the room slowly fills with more men in clean uniforms carrying new guns. They’re headed to the firebases to the east and south and they look ten years younger than the men they’ll be replacing. They’re combat infantry, the ultimate point of all this, the most replaceable part of the whole deadly show. (Two years earlier a story made the rounds about a MEDEVAC pilot who disobeyed direct orders, turned off his radio, and landed in heavy ground fire to pick up a wounded Battle Company soldier. The man lived, but the incident gave some soldiers the feeling that if the military had to choose between a grunt and a Black Hawk, they’d probably go with the Black Hawk.) The men take a perverse pride in this, cultivate a certain disdain for anyone who has it better, which is basically everyone. Combat infantry carry the most, eat the worst, die the fastest, sleep the least, and have the most to fear. But they’re the real soldiers, the only ones conducting what can be considered “war” in the most classic sense, and everyone knows it. I once asked someone in Second Platoon why frontline grunts aren’t more admired.
“Because everyone just thinks we’re stupid,” the man said.
“But you do all the fighting.”
“Yeah,” he said, “exactly.”
Out east, I’m told, the war is tipping very slightly toward improvement. Kunar is now such a deadly place for insurgents that the cash payment for fighting there has gone from five dollars a day per man to ten. The “PID and engage” rate — where the enemy is spotted and destroyed before he can attack — has gone from 4 percent of all engagements to almost half. Battle Company trucks hit an IED in the northern Korengal but no one was hurt, and the Taliban have been painting Pakistani cell phone numbers on rocks, trying to enlist fighters. They took out the LRAS with a sniper round and grabbed an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy who worked at the KOP and cut their throats a few hundred yards outside the wire. Men on base could hear them screaming as they died. Public affairs will tell you that the Taliban are getting more brutal because they’re losing the war, but pretty much everyone else will
tell you they started out brutal and aren’t losing shit.
I catch a flight to Blessing and fly into the Korengal on a Chinook filled with Chosen Company soldiers. They’ll be in the valley for a few days to cover for elements of Battle who are going for a “rest-and-refit.” Third Platoon is planning an early morning operation to clear the town of Marastanau, across the valley, and the lieutenant invites me along, but in the interest of getting a real night’s sleep I turn him down. We’re woken up by gunfire anyway: Third Platoon hit from three directions and pinned down behind a rock wall with plunging fire coming in from the ridges and U.S. .50 cal shrieking over their heads in the other direction. The battle goes on for an hour, white phosphorus rounds flashing and arcing out over the mountainsides like enormous white spiders. The Apaches and A-10s show up and do some work and finally it’s over and everyone shuffles back to the fly-crazed darkness of their hooches to get a few more hours of sleep.
A few days after I arrive, Kearney puts together a shura of valley elders, and the provincial governor flies in for it. The meeting starts in what must have been a rather incredible way for the locals: a young American woman from USAID speaking in Pashto about plans for the valley. After that, the governor gives a passionate speech about what this area could be if the locals stopped fighting and accepted government authority. He’s dressed in a suit and vest, and it’s quite possibly the first suit and vest the locals have ever seen. When he’s done a young man stands up, eyes bright with hate, and says that the Americans dropped a bomb on his brother’s house in Kalaygal and killed thirteen people. “If the Americans can’t bring security with their guns and bombs, then they should just leave the valley,” he shouts. “Otherwise there will be jihad!”
The governor is having none of it. “We’ve all done jihad and lost family members,” he says. “But the Taliban are shooting at Afghan soldiers. Why? They are Muslims too. If you’re not man enough to keep the Taliban out of the valley, then I’m sorry, you’re going to get bombed.”
For a minute the young man is too stunned to respond. Then there’s a sudden knocking of gunfire from down-valley and Kearney rushes out of the room to direct the mortars. Second Platoon has gotten hit on their way back from Loy Kalay, pinned down in the open stretch just outside the base. They make it into the wire behind a curtain of high explosives and the shura lurches on to the rumble of explosions and A-10 gun runs. After an hour or so the elders gather themselves up and walk back out the front gate, and Tim and I catch a switch-out that’s headed up to Restrepo.
We come walking in the south gate late that afternoon and drop our packs in front of First Squad hooch. Nothing has changed except that Airborne is now big enough to go out on patrols. I’ve been coming to this hilltop for almost a year, and to my amazement the place has started to carry the slight tang of home.
4
COFFEE AT RESTREPO WAS A PROBLEM BECAUSE NO ONE drank it so you were more or less on your own in that regard. Certain MREs include packets of coffee, powdered milk, and sugar, but I always found it hard to remember which ones they were — as opposed to, say, the breakfast tea or cider mix — and that meant pawing through the garbage to find enough ingredients for a good cup. Once the precious powders were in hand I’d go to the command center and empty a bottle of water into the electric kettle and plug it in. The command center was a dark, secure bunker next to Gillespie’s bunk where the radios were stacked, and there was usually so little light that finding the kettle required some feeling around.
While the water was heating I’d scout a place to sit. Pretty much everything was uncomfortable at Restrepo — there was one chair but it was almost always taken, the sandbags were hard as rocks, and the round plastic Javelin case next to First Squad hooch made your ass numb in minutes — but finding a good seat was important. You’d only get one cup of coffee a day, and considering what’s not available at Restrepo, that cup was pretty much the most pleasurable thing that was going to happen to you until you got home. I liked to drink my coffee sitting with my back against a Hesco beneath the south-facing SAW position. Nothing random could hit you there, and you were inside the courtyard looking north up the valley. In front of me was a pile of sandbags holding up a fiberglass pole for the concealment netting, and I could brace my legs on the sandbags and use my knees to write against. The netting broke up the direct sunlight and gave things a mottled, wobbly feel that could make you dizzy if you stared at the shadows for too long.
I usually put together my coffee around midmorning and then settled into my spot to work on my notes, but one morning Gillespie sends out a patrol to Obenau and we don’t come back until midday. We come walking into the wire to word from Prophet that we’re about to get hit. For weeks there’s been intel about ammo coming into the valley — mortars, rockets, crates of Dishka rounds — the kinds of things you’d use against a fortified position rather than men on foot. The attack is supposed to come around 12:30 that afternoon, but the hour comes and goes without a shot, and the men sink back into their slow-motion heat trance. It’s one of those dead afternoons in the Korengal where nothing moves and you barely have the energy to wave the flies off your face. I mix up my coffee and settle into my spot to talk to Gillespie. Richardson is brushing his teeth. A few Afghan soldiers are standing around the ammo hooch. Most of the Americans are in their bunks. Airborne is asleep in the shade near the muddy spot created by the water bladder.
I’m just raising the mug to my lips for a first sip when the air around us compresses with a WHUMP. Gillespie and I just look at each other — could it be? Then comes a flurry of sick little snaps and the inevitable staccato sound in the distance. That first burst, I find out later, hit the guard tower and splintered plywood a few inches from Pemble’s head. Richardson is on the SAW so fast that he has to spit out his last mouthful of toothpaste between bursts. Gillespie jumps up and runs into the radio room, and everywhere men are grabbing their vests and sprinting for their positions. My cup of coffee gets knocked over almost immediately. On the radio I can hear Kearney yelling, “ALL BATTLE ELEMENTS THIS IS BATTLE-SIX THIS IS THE TIC WE WERE TALKIN’ ABOUT THE KOP IS TAKING INDIRECT, OVER.”
“Indirect” means mortars. They’re shot upward out of a tube and come down from above, which makes them harder to take cover from. (They’re also harder to suppress because, unlike guns, mortars can be completely out of sight behind a ridge. All the mortarman needs is a spotter calling in corrections to walk the rounds onto the target.) The KOP is essentially the Mothership, and without her, every outpost in the valley would be indefensible. The job of the outposts is to keep the KOP from getting attacked so that the KOP, in return, can support the outposts. Grenades and mortars start coming in and detonating against our own fortifications and we’re taking gunfire from three different directions to the south. Gillespie is out on the ammo hooch trying to see where the grenades are coming from and shouting into his radio and the Afghans are standing around reluctant and confused and the Americans are running shirtless and whooping to their guns. During the lulls they put wads of chew under their lips or light cigarettes. Olson’s on the .50 alternating bursts with Jones, who’s above him on the 240, and Pemble is so upset about almost getting killed that he empties a whole can of linked grenades into the ridges to the south.
The fight lasts ten or fifteen minutes and then the A-10s show up and tilt into their dives. Ninety rounds a second the size of beer cans unzipping the mountainsides with a sound like the sky ripping. The men look up and whoop when they hear it, a punishment so unnegotiable it might as well have come from God.
One night a few weeks later I’m sitting on the ammo hooch listening to the monkeys in the peaks. A temperature inversion has filled the valley with mist and the mist is silver in the moonlight and almost liquid. Airborne is asleep but keeps popping his head up to growl at some threat impossibly far below us in the valley. There’s been a big fight over by the Pakistan border and F-15s and -16s have been powering overhead all evening looking for people to
kill. O’Byrne wanders out and we start talking. His head is shaved but dirt sticks to the stubble so you can see where his hair ought to be. He says he signed a contract with the Army that’s almost up, and he has to figure out whether to reenlist.
“Combat is such an adrenaline rush,” he says. “I’m worried I’ll be looking for that when I get home and if I can’t find it, I’ll just start drinking and getting in trouble. People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that’s not true… we drink because we miss the good stuff.”
O’Byrne is also worried about being alone. He hasn’t been out of earshot of his platoonmates for two years and has no idea how he’ll react to solitude. He’s never had to get a job, find an apartment, or arrange a doctor’s appointment because the Army has always done those things for him. All he’s had to do is fight. And he’s good at it, so leading a patrol up 1705 causes him less anxiety than, say, moving to Boston and finding an apartment and a job. He has little capacity for what civilians refer to as “life skills”; for him, life skills literally keep you alive. Those are far simpler and more compelling than the skills required at home. “In the Korengal, almost every problem could get settled by getting violent faster than the other guy,” O’Byrne told me. “Do that at home and it’s not going to go so well.”
It’s a stressful way to live but once it’s blown out your levels almost everything else looks boring. O’Byrne knows himself: when he gets bored he starts drinking and getting into fights, and then it’s only a matter of time until he’s back in the system. If that’s the case, he might as well stay in the system — a better one — and actually move upward. I suggest a few civilian jobs that offer a little adrenaline — wilderness trip guide, firefighter — but we both know it’s just not the same. We are at one of the most exposed outposts in the entire U.S. military, and he’s crawling out of his skin because there hasn’t been a good firefight in a week. How do you bring a guy like that back into the world?