For some reason my worry about dying took the form of planning the attack that would kill me — kill us all — in the most minute detail. Some of the men thought the place was impregnable, but I had other ideas. You’d want to hit Restrepo at four in the morning, I decided, while everyone was asleep or groggy from sleeping pills. (They took them to keep from jerking awake at night from imaginary gunfire.) First you’d hit the south-facing guard tower and take out the Mark 19, a belt-fed grenade machine gun that could stop almost any assault in its tracks. After that you’d rake the gun ports with small-arms fire from the south and west and send successive waves of men up the draw. The first wave would absorb the Claymores and the second probably wouldn’t make it either, but by the third or fourth, you’d be inside the wire fighting hooch to hooch.
“It would start with RPGs and seventy-five to a hundred guys rushing the wire,” Jones said when I asked him how it would go down. “And they don’t take prisoners. The guys are killed next to you, you got to defend to the last man because nobody’s gonna help you. The KOP is a thousand meters away but it might as well be in a different country because they’re not getting to you. So you’d either have to make up your mind to fight until you die, or you’d just say, ‘Okay, everyone is dead around me, I’m just gonna go, I’m just gonna leave this place.’ And the problem is that all these weapons can be moved, we can set up the .50 and light up the KOP. Then you’ve got problems in the whole valley. And if they overran it they’re gonna kill soldiers, so there’s still gonna be bodies of soldiers up here. You wouldn’t be able to recover those bodies if you dropped a bomb on it. For them to fully overrun us? It would definitely be a bad day.”
That was Jones’s take. At night I put my vest and helmet at my feet and kept my boots tied loosely so that I could jam my feet into them but not trip over the laces. Waking up to them doing a “Ranch House” on us was by far the most terrifying thing I could imagine, and arranging my things so that I could be out the door in thirty seconds was how I coped with those fears. It didn’t work very well. I’d lie awake at night amazed by the idea that everything could change — could, in fact, end — at any moment. And even after I went to sleep those thoughts would just continue on as dreams, full-blown combat sequences that I wallowed through like a bad action movie. In those dreams the enemy was relentless and everywhere at once and I didn’t have a chance.
As a civilian among soldiers I was aware that a failure of nerve by me could put other men at risk, and that idea was almost as mortifying as the very real dangers up there. The problem with fear, though, is that it isn’t any one thing. Fear has a whole taxonomy — anxiety, dread, panic, foreboding — and you could be braced for one form and completely fall apart facing another. Before the firefights everyone got sort of edgy, glancing around with little half-smiles that seemed to say, “This is what we do — crazy, huh?” and those moments never really bothered me. I trusted the guys I was with and usually just concentrated on finding cover and getting the video camera ready. The fights themselves went by in a blur; if I remembered even half of what happened I was doing well. (I always watched the videotape afterward and was amazed by how much dropped out.) I truly froze only once when we got hit unexpectedly and very hard. I didn’t have my body armor or camera near me — stupid, stupid — and endured thirty seconds of paralyzed incomprehension until Tim darted through fire to grab our gear and drag it back behind a Hesco.
Combat jammed so much adrenaline through your system that fear was rarely an issue; far more indicative of real courage was how you felt before the big operations, when the implications of losing your life really had a chance to sink in. My personal weakness wasn’t fear so much as the anticipation of it. If I had any illusions about personal courage, they always dissolved in the days or hours before something big, dread accumulating in my blood like some kind of toxin until I felt too apathetic to even tie my boots properly. As far as I could tell everyone up there got scared from time to time, there was no stigma to it as long as you didn’t allow it to affect the others, and journalists were no exception. Once I got completely unnerved when Second Platoon was standing by as a quick-reaction force for Firebase Vegas, which was about to get attacked. This was my last trip, I was days from leaving the Korengal forever, and there was a chance that in the next few hours a Chinook would drop us off in the middle of a massive firefight on the Abas Ghar. I was getting my gear ready for the experience — extra water, extra batteries, take the side plates off my vest to save weight — but I guess my face betrayed more anxiety than I realized. “It’s okay to be scared,” Moreno said to me, loud enough for everyone else to hear, “you just don’t want to show it…”
There are different kinds of strength, and containing fear may be the most profound, the one without which armies couldn’t function and wars couldn’t be fought (God forbid). There are big, tough guys in the Army who are cowards and small, feral-looking dudes, like Monroe, who will methodically take apart a SAW while rounds are slapping the rocks all around them. The more literal forms of strength, like carrying 160 pounds up a mountain, depend more obviously on the size of your muscles, but muscles only do what you tell them, so it still keeps coming back to the human spirit. Wars are fought with very heavy machinery that works best on top of the biggest hill in the area and used against men who are lower down. That, in a nutshell, is military tactics, and it means that an enormous amount of war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.
I was always amazed at the sheer variety of body shapes in the platoon, the radically different designs for accomplishing the same thing. Donoho was six-three and built like an ironing board but carried a full SAW kit, 120 pounds. Walker was an ample, good-natured kid who just sort of trudged along but was essentially unstoppable. (Once the guys quietly filled his ruck with an extra fifty pounds of canned food on top of the eighty he was already carrying; he just hoisted it onto his shoulders and walked to Restrepo without even commenting.) Bobby Wilson was a 240 gunner from Georgia with fingers like sausages and feet that were literally square: size 6, quadruple-E. He straight up described himself as fat but had some kind of crazy redneck strength that was more like hydraulics than musculature. He was known for not even bothering to duck punches when he got into bar fights, he just walked straight into whatever the other guy had for him until he got close enough to clinch. Once the platoon needed to get something called an LRAS down from Restrepo and there were no helicopters to sling it out. An LRAS is a thermal-optical device the size of a filing cabinet that weighs well over a hundred pounds. They just strapped it to Bobby and off he went with a bottle of water in one hand and his 9 mil in the other.
On and on the list went, scrawny guys like Monroe or Pemble carrying as much as big, rangy guys like Jones or the outright mules like Wilson or Walker. The only man who was truly in his own category was Vandenberge, a specialist in Weapons Squad who stood six foot five and arrived in the Korengal weighing three hundred pounds. His hands were so big I was told he could palm sandbags as if they were basketballs. He could pick up a SAW one-handed — twenty-three pounds plus ammo — and shoot it like a pistol. I saw him throw Kim over his shoulder, ford a stream, and then climb halfway up Honcho Hill without even seeming to notice. Once someone wondered aloud whether Vandenberge could ready-up the .50, meaning put it to his shoulder and fire it like a rifle. The .50 weighs almost a hundred pounds and is never fired off its tripod or carried by less than two men. Vandenberge wrapped his huge paws around it, brought it to his shoulder, and sighted down the barrel like he was shooting squirrels with a .22. He rarely spoke but had a shy smile that would emerge from time to time, particularly when men were talking about just how damn big he was. “Vandenberge you big bastard,” someone said to him in passing once. Vandenberge was sitting on a cot doing something. “My bad,” he said without even looking up.
O’Byrne wasn’t big but it was like he was made out of scrap metal, scars here and there, and nothing seemed to hurt him. Walking point on p
atrols he had to slow himself down so that he didn’t outwalk the rest of the platoon. Once they were clawing their way up Table Rock after a twenty-hour operation and a man in another squad started falling out. “He can’t be smoked here,” I heard O’Byrne seethe to Sergeant Mac in the dark, “he doesn’t have the right to be.” The idea that you’re not allowed to experience something as human as exhaustion is outrageous anywhere but in combat. Good leaders know that exhaustion is partly a state of mind, though, and that the men who succumb to it have on some level decided to put themselves above everyone else. If you’re not prepared to walk for someone you’re certainly not prepared to die for them, and that goes to the heart of whether you should even be in the platoon.
There was no way to overhear a comment like O’Byrne’s without considering one’s own obligation to keep up. You slow down a patrol, the enemy has time to get into position and then someone gets shot. Trying to imagine being the cause of that scenario was like trying to imagine crashing in a Chinook: at some point my mind just refused to participate in the experiment. I reassured myself with the thought that I was twice the age of the soldiers but carried half the weight they did, so in some ways it was a fair fight. I also ran track and cross-country in college, and, twenty-five years later, I still remembered how to negotiate the long, horrible process of physical collapse. It starts with pain, of course, but that pain is at the edge of what I thought of as a deep, dark valley. At the bottom of the valley is true incapacitation, but it might take hours to get down there, working your way through strata of misery and dissociation until your muscles simply stop obeying and your mind can’t even be trusted to give commands that make sense. The most valuable thing I knew from all that running was that when you start hurting you’re not even close to the bottom of the valley, and that if you don’t panic at the first agonies there’s much, much more of yourself to give.
I wore a body armor vest like the soldiers did — they called it an “IBA” — and a helmet, which they called a “Kevlar.” Together those weighed around thirty pounds. I had a five-pound video camera, five pounds of water in a CamelBak, and maybe another twenty pounds of food and clothing if we were going out overnight. I could walk all day with fifty or sixty pounds on my back but I couldn’t run more than a hundred yards at a time — no one could — and few people could run uphill more than a few steps. I carried my camera on a strap but it got destroyed swinging into rocks on a nighttime operation, so I hooked the new one onto a carabiner that hung off my left shoulder. That way it swung less and was easier to put my hands on quickly. I had extra batteries and tapes in my vest as well as a medical kit, and on patrols I strapped a CamelBak directly to it so that I could ditch my pack and still be okay. I had my blood type, “O POS,” written on my boots, helmet, and vest, and I had my press pass buttoned into a pants pocket along with a headlamp, a folding knife, and notebook and pens. Everything I needed was on me pretty much all the time.
Patrols on hot days came down to water versus distance: you didn’t want to go dry, but neither did you want to carry ten extra pounds if you were going to have to run anywhere. I’d try to have drunk three-quarters of my water by the turnaround point of a patrol, and then at the bottom of the steep climb to Restrepo I’d sip at it steadily so I was light and hydrated when we were most likely to get hit. I’d find myself doing a body check all the way up: “Legs okay, breathing labored, mouth dry but not too bad,” various internal levels that had been calibrated during races in college and never forgotten. (It didn’t matter how badly off I was as long as some other soldier was worse; I just didn’t want to be the one holding things up.) I never went on a patrol that hurt more than an even moderately hard college race, and I’ve never run a race that held anything close to the implications of the most mundane task a hundred meters outside the wire.
Giving in to fear or exhaustion were the ways in which a soldier could fail his platoon, but there were ways a reporter could screw things up as well. Tim broke his ankle on a nighttime operation on the Abas Ghar, but the medic told him it was only sprained so that, mentally, Tim would think he could walk on it. And he did. There was no other way to get him out of there, and if the platoon were still on the mountain at dawn they were going to get hammered. He walked all night on a fractured fibula with only Motrin as a painkiller, and they didn’t tell him it was broken until he got to the KOP. They put a steel plate and a bunch of screws into his leg and a few months later he was back in business.
Several years earlier in Zabul I had asked the battalion commander how discreet I had to be on my satellite phone when calling home, and he just said, “Big-boy rules, I hope I don’t have to explain what that means.” Tim was playing by big-boy rules up there, which essentially means making your interests secondary to those of the group no matter how much it costs you.
“There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other,” O’Byrne told me one morning. We were sitting in ambush above the village of Bandeleek listening to mortars shriek over our heads, and there wasn’t much to do but flinch and talk about the platoon. “But they would also die for each other. So you kind of have to ask, ‘How much could I really hate the guy?’”
Around midmorning a squad of Scouts comes walking in through the wire, uniforms plastered to their bodies and sweat running off the ends of their noses. Second Platoon has been hacking away at the hillside all morning and the men pause at their shovels and pickaxes to greet them. Guttie was MEDEVACed last night without incident and it has been quiet all morning, which may simply mean the enemy is out of ammunition. The Scouts have a different vibe from the regular line soldiers, leaner and quieter, and they seem to carry a little less gear. Their job is to patrol beyond anywhere line infantry would go and then report back what they see. Sometimes they’ll set in for days at a time and just watch. They’re not supposed to get into firefights, and when they do engage, it’s often just a single shot from a sniper rifle.
The squad leader is a short, strong-looking man with dark eyes and jet-black hair named Larry Rougle. Rougle has done six combat tours in six years and is known in Battle Company as a legendary badass and some kind of ultimate soldier. Once Phoenix got hit and Rougle and his men grabbed their weapons at the KOP and ran down there so fast that Piosa was still on the radio calling in the attack when they walked in the wire. You couldn’t even get there that fast in a Humvee. Rougle talks to Piosa in the bunker while his men pour bottled water down their throats and half an hour later they form up and Tim and I grab our packs and follow them out of the wire. We contour around the draw until we reach OP 1, which sits on a promontory west of the KOP. It’s only manned by four men at a time and it’s almost impossible to attack, so there’s nothing for the men to do up there but wave away the flies and think about how many months they have left. When we arrive Rougle stands on a bunker and looks eastward toward the Abas Ghar.
“Everything you can see,” he says to me, “I’ve walked on.”
6
DAWN AT THE KOP: ONE LAST PLANET LIKE A PINHOLE in the sky, crows rising on the valley thermals. The sun about to crack open the day from beyond the Abas Ghar. I’m sitting on the broken office chair outside the hooch waiting to see what will happen. Kearney has ordered stand-to at zero hundred hours — 4:30 a.m. local — because there’s intel the enemy may attack the KOP and try to breach the wire. Men are shuffling around, fumbling for their weapons. Stand-to means you get dressed and geared up and if you don’t get attacked you can go back to sleep. The men sleep as much as they can, every chance they get, far beyond the needs of the human body. “If you sleep twelve hours a day it’s only a seven-month deployment,” one soldier explained.
The day broadens and no attack comes. I walk up to the operations center to talk to Kearney, who is half asleep at his desk. Third Platoon will be going onto the Abas Ghar in a couple of days and Tim and I are going with them. (Jones: “Personally, I wouldn’t follow them into a Dairy Queen.”) Around midafternoon a sniper on the ridge above Restre
po starts shooting into the KOP; it’s not the attack that was expected but it’s enough to get everyone’s attention. When the men move around the base they sprint the open sections until, ka-SHAAH, another round cracks past and they stop behind a Hesco. (Soldiers spend a good deal of time trying to figure out how to reproduce the sound of gunfire verbally, and “ka-SHAAH” was the word Second Platoon seemed to have settled on.) I’m sitting in the broken office chair outside the hooch, which has pretty good cover, watching Tim make his way to the burn-shitters. He runs to a tree, lurks there for a moment, and then runs to the next tree. If you didn’t know about the sniper you’d think he was doing some comic routine of an Englishman gone completely mad in the noonday sun.
Snipers have the power to make even silence unnerving, so their effectiveness is way out of proportion to the number of rounds they shoot. The KOP’s mortars eventually start up, great explosions that crash through the base and then rumble back to us from the mountaintops. They may have killed the guy, but I doubt it, and in the end it doesn’t even matter; it’s just one man with a rifle and ten dollars’ worth of ammunition. He doesn’t even need to hit anyone to be effective: helicopters aren’t flying into the valley and thirty or forty men spend the afternoon behind sandbags trying to figure out whether they’re getting shot at by a Russian-made Dragunov or an old Enfield .308. Once I was at the operations center when single shots started coming in, and First Sergeant Caldwell headed for the door to deal with it. On his way out I asked him what was going on. “Some jackass wastin’ our time,” he said.
That jackass was probably a local teenager who was paid by one of the insurgent groups to fire off a magazine’s worth of ammo at the KOP. The going rate was five dollars a day. He could fire at the base until mortars started coming back at him and then he could drop off the back side of the ridge and be home in twenty minutes. Mobility has always been the default choice of guerrilla fighters because they don’t have access to the kinds of heavy weapons that would slow them down. The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound — even defeat — a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on what amateurs you’re talking about — or what empires — but it does mean that you can’t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.