The translator is good; he delivers Ostlund’s points with nuance and feeling and looks around at the old men like he’s delivering a sermon. They stare back unmoved. They’ve seen the Soviets and they’ve seen the Taliban, and no one has made it in Yaka Chine more than a day or two. The name means “cool waterfall,” and it’s a truly lovely place where you’re never far from the gurgle of water or the quiet shade of the oak trees, but it’s no place for empires.
“You can be poisoned by miscreants and they can tell you that America is bad, that the government’s bad, but I ask you this: what have the people who run around with this stuff” — Ostlund waves a hand at the weapons — “done for your families? Have they provided you an education? Have they provided you a hospital? I don’t think so. I would say, shame on you, if you follow foreign leaders that leave their beautiful homes in Pakistan and come here and talk you into fighting against your own country, and they do nothing for you.”
He stops so that the translator will get every word, then goes on:
“The ACM that comes in and gives you five dollars to carry this stuff around the mountains and tells you you’re doing a jihad, is doin’ nothing for you except making you a slave for five dollars. These foreigners won’t fight my soldiers; they hide on a mountain in a cave under a rock and talk on the radio and pay your sons a small amount of money to go ahead and shoot at my soldiers. And my soldiers end up killing your sons.”
ACM means “Anti-Coalition Militia” — essentially, the Taliban. It’s a good speech and delivered with the force of conviction. That night a dozen or so fighters are spotted moving toward Kearney’s position on Divpat, and an unmanned drone fires a Hellfire missile at them. They scatter, but the Apaches won’t finish them off because they can’t determine with certainty that the men are carrying weapons. The Americans fly out of Yaka Chine, and valley elders meet among themselves to decide what to do. Five people are dead in Yaka Chine, along with ten wounded, and the elders declare jihad against every American in the valley.
2
DAWN ON THE ABAS GHAR, SOLDIERS CURLED ON THE ground wrapped in poncho liners or zipped into sleeping bags. The platoon has made a cold camp in a forest of small spruce after walking most of the night chasing heat signatures on the upper ridges. The signatures turned out to be embers that were still burning from artillery strikes days earlier. When the men kick out of their bags the sun is already over the eastern ridge and the Afghans have started a twig fire in a patch of bare open ground to warm their hands. There are stumps of huge trees cut down years earlier and hillsides of chest-high brush now blaze-yellow in the late season and dirt trails packed so hard they’ll barely take a footprint. The men change their socks and lace up their boots and smoke the day’s first cigarette and line up with their rifles balanced sideways on their ammo racks. Then they move out.
The men walk slowly and deliberately under their heavy loads, stopping when the line accordions and then starting up again without a word. Walking point is a four-man team from Mac’s First Squad, and their job is to clear the terrain ahead of the main group and trip any ambushes. First Squad is the lead element for the platoon, which is spearheading the effort for the entire company, which represents the main thrust of the battalion. It’s a significant honor and a huge responsibility. The men are sweating now and moving uphill toward the rising sun through burned-over logging slash and quiet dense stands of spruce and fir. Off to the south the mountains are still smoking from the airstrikes above Yaka Chine. Around midmorning Piosa calls a halt because Prophet has picked up enemy fighters discussing American troop movements, and then a possible bunker is spotted on a ridge to the southwest. Rougle’s sniper puts three rounds into it but nothing happens, so Piosa sends First Squad to clear the structure and get a grid coordinate, and then they move on.
It’s as if they’re alone on the mountain, but they’re almost certainly not. Prophet picks up radio chatter that insurgents have caught an Afghan soldier and are going to cut his head off. The Americans conduct a furious personnel count and determine that it’s just a bit of psychological warfare to throw them off their game. Kearney finally calls mortars down on a ridgeline to the south — a suspected enemy position — but even that fails to stir anything up. At one point, a shepherd wanders through the position with a herd of goats; later, Prophet picks up radio traffic of men whispering. The insurgents have never whispered on their radios before and no one gives it any thought until much later, when the reasons are all too clear.
The second night is spent again in thick spruce forests high up on a spur of the Abas Ghar called the Sawtalo Sar. Second Platoon orients themselves toward the north, with the ANA to the south, headquarters to the west, and Rougle and his Wildcat element to the east. Rice and his gun team — Jackson, Solowski, and Vandenberge — are up there with Wildcat as well, on a hill that has been designated 2435, for its altitude in meters. From their positions some of the men can see the remains of the Chinook that was shot down in 2005. That night the shadow people arrive, weird hallucinations that occur after too many nights without sleep. The men have slept a total of eight or ten hours in the past hundred and their judgment couldn’t be more impaired if they were piss-drunk. Trees turn into people and bushes shift around on the ridgelines as if preparing to attack; it’s all the men on guard can do to keep from opening fire.
Dawn of the second day: a raw wind sawing across the ridgetops and the ground frozen like rock. On a trail above the camp the men line up and eat MREs while waiting for orders to move out. “We eat our boredom,” Jones says while watching Stichter put cheese spread on a chocolate energy bar. They’ve got four days’ growth on their chins and their faces are dark with dirt and it’s so cold that everyone is wearing ski caps under their helmets. Enemy fighters are still whispering on their radios, but they haven’t fired a shot since Yaka Chine and the men are just starting to think this isn’t going to happen. Chosen Company will be clearing villages in the Shuryak, and Battle’s job is to support them by making sure no fighters cross the Abas Ghar in either direction. They’ll spend another night in this area and then probably start their exfil the following day.
That’s more or less what the men are thinking about when the first smattering of gunfire comes in.
At first no one knows where it’s coming from, and then bullets start clipping branches over people’s heads and smacking the tree trunks next to them. The men jump off the trail into a steeply sloped spruce forest and Jones gets his 240 going and Donoho starts popping 203s across the draw to their south. They’re taking heavy, accurate fire from an adjacent ridgeline and it’s so effective that much of Second Platoon is having trouble even getting their guns up. It’s during these first few minutes of confusion that Buno comes sprinting down the line with a strange look on his face. It occurs to Hijar that he’s never seen Buno look scared before.
‘An American position is getting overrun,’ Buno tells him.
Hijar grabs a LAW rocket and starts running up the line with the rest of his fire team. Piosa is on the radio to Kearney and Stichter is calculating grid coordinates for mortars and the men are crawling around in the forest trying to find cover. Pemble is behind a tree stump and he looks to his right and sees rounds chopping the branches off a tree next to him. ‘Shit, it’s really close,’ he thinks. Bullets are coming from so many directions that there’s no way to take cover from everything. Upslope toward Wildcat someone starts screaming for a medic and Pemble passes word down the line, but nothing comes back up so he and Cortez start running up there. They sprint through heavy fire, keeping to the treeline as long as they can and then breaking across an open patch right below Wildcat’s position. The first man they see is Vandenberge, who’s sitting on the ground holding his arm. Blood is welling out between his fingers. ‘I’m bleeding out, you gotta save me,’ he says. ‘I’m dying.’
He’s been hit in the artery and will be dead in minutes without medical help. Pemble kneels down and starts unpacking his medical kit, an
d while he’s doing that he asks Vandenberge where the enemy is.
‘The last guy I saw was about twenty feet away,’ Vandenberge says.
Pemble starts stuffing the wound with Kerlix until he’s knuckle-deep in Vandenberge’s huge arm. Vandenberge is soaked with blood from his boots to his collar and soon Pemble is too, and when he cuts the sleeve off Vandenberge’s uniform another two or three cups of blood spill out. “You could see it in his face that he’s slowly dying,” Pemble said. “He was turning really ghost-looking. His eyes started sinking into his head, he started to get real brown around his eyes. And he kept saying, ‘I’m getting really dizzy, I want to go to sleep.’ That’s some rough shit to hear, coming from one of your best friends and you’re watching him die right in front of you, that’s some fucking shit. All I did was block everything he was saying out except what I needed to hear, like where the Taliban was at and checking for all his wounds.”
Jackson shows up with nothing but a rifle in his hand — no helmet or vest. He’d been pushed off the hilltop along with Solowski, who’d emptied a whole magazine at the enemy and then fallen back under continuous heavy fire. By now Cortez has made it to Rice, who’s sitting in some brush holding his gut. He’s taken a bullet through the back of his shoulder that ricocheted strangely inside him and came out his abdomen, just below the ballistic plate of his vest. The last thing he remembers was a Taliban fighter aiming an RPG at him from forty yards away. He had time to think that it was the last thing he’d ever see, but now Cortez is kneeling in front of him asking where he’s wounded. He’s already done a quick assessment on himself — which more or less consists of realizing that if he hasn’t died yet he probably isn’t going to — and he knows the enemy has just overrun a critical hill in the middle of the American line. If they get set in up there they can shred any Americans coming to help.
‘Just take back the hill,’ he says.
Cortez, Jackson, and Walker assault up the hill but the enemy has already retreated and there’s no one to fight, no one to kill. Cortez goes to one knee behind cover with his rifle up and glances to the right and sees a body lying facedown — an American. Walker runs to him and shakes him to see if he’s all right and finally rolls him over. It’s Staff Sergeant Rougle, shot through the forehead and his face purple with trauma. “I wanted to cry but I didn’t — I was shocked,” Cortez said. “I just wanted to kill everything that came up that wasn’t American. I actually didn’t care who came up — man, woman, child, I still would’ve done something.”
They’re joined by Hijar, Hoyt, and Donoho. Someone has thrown a poncho liner over Rougle, but it’s clear from the boots protruding at the bottom that it’s an American soldier. Rougle was hit multiple times on one side of his body in a way that made Kearney think he was caught midstride and had turned to meet a sudden threat from behind. Cortez worried that Rougle was still alive when the enemy overran the position and that they had executed him where he lay, but there was no evidence to support that. Nevertheless, the thought was to torment Cortez in the coming months. Every night he’d dream he was back on the mountain trying to run fast enough to make things turn out differently. They never would. “I’d prefer to not sleep and not dream about it,” Cortez said, “than sleep with that picture in my head.”
Rougle’s men arrive minutes later. Shortly before the attack Rougle left their position to talk to Staff Sergeant Rice and his men have no idea what happened to him. There was so much gunfire that they thought they were about to get overrun, so a Scout named Raeon broke down the Barrett sniper rifle and scattered the pieces around the position so the enemy couldn’t use it against American forces. Now the Scouts come running forward looking for their commander and all they find is blood and gear all over the hilltop and a body covered by a poncho liner. Next to the body is an empty MRE packet and a water bottle. “Is Rougle and them up?” a Scout named Clinard asks. Hoyt glances at him and looks away.
“What?” Clinard says. No one says anything and Hoyt walks over to him and just cups his hand on the back of Clinard’s neck.
“Who’s over there?” Clinard says, voice rising in panic.
“It’s Rougle,” Hoyt says quietly.
A strange animal noise starts coming up out of Clinard and he breaks away from Hoyt and backs up in horror. Solowski comes up and asks if Rice is alive. He’s crying as well.
“Yeah, he’s good,” Hoyt says.
“He’s alive?”
“He’s gonna make it, dude.”
The men are taking cover and aiming their weapons southward off the top of the hill and Clinard is roaming around the position shrieking with grief. He finally comes to a stop near Hijar and sits down, sobbing. Hijar is behind a tree stump scanning the draw. “We got friendlies over there we tried to push through and they lit us the fuck up,” Clinard says, trying to explain why they didn’t get to Rougle faster.
“Let’s go brother, come on,” Hoyt says, beckoning Clinard with one hand. Clinard just sits there shaking his head. “That ain’t Sergeant Rougle — you’re lyin’ right, man?” he says.
“I ain’t lyin’ — why would I lie about something like that?”
Clinard gets up but stays stooped with grief. “Where’d he get hit? — I got to see.”
“Don’t look at him.”
“Is it bad?”
“It was quick.”
Clinard stays bent double as if he’s just finished a race and moans again in his strange animal way. He says something about how Rougle’s death was their fault. The men around him are prepping hand grenades and getting ready to repel another attack and Piosa finally makes it up to the hilltop with Donoho as his radioman. Donoho’s eyes are wide and he’s swallowing hard. “Battle Six Romeo this is Two-Six, I’ve pushed to the site of the KIA, break,” Piosa says into the radio. (Battle Six refers to Kearney and Two-Six refers to Piosa himself. “Six” generally follows the unit name and means “leader” or “commander.”) “Right now we have the hilltop, we’re going to move the wounded-in-action, there’s two of them, up to LZ Eagles. I’m also going get my KIA there, break.”
Mortars start hitting the enemy ridge with a sound like a huge oak door slamming shut. Rougle lies alone under the poncho liner off in the brush and finally two of his men and an Afghan soldier bend over him and start stripping the ammo out of his rack. When they’re done, six Afghan soldiers put him on a poncho and start carrying him downhill toward the landing zone, but they’re not carrying him well and he keeps touching the ground. The Scouts scream at them to stop, and Raeon puts Rougle over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry but that doesn’t work either. Finally the Scouts zip him into a body bag and carry him down that way. The sight is particularly upsetting to Donoho, who is still coping with what he saw when Vimoto was shot in the head. Rice and Vandenberge are making their way down the hill as well, having both decided that they’re too big for anyone to try to carry. Stichter and the medic got an IV into Vandenberge’s arm just in time — a few minutes later and he’d have been dead — and now he’s stumbling white-faced down the mountain with a soldier supporting him under each arm. Rice walks unaided with his shirtfront covered in blood and a fentanyl lollipop in his mouth for the pain.
They walk half a mile through a blasted landscape of burned-over tree stumps and powdery dust and arrive at the LZ to find Kearney waiting for them. He tells them about Rougle and then the MEDEVAC comes in and they climb on board. “There was still fighting going on — guys were still being engaged throughout our positions,” Rice told me later. “Part of you doesn’t want to leave the fight, but then just a kind of overwhelming joy came across both me and Specialist Vandenberge because, you know, he was in pretty rough shape and just kind of knowing that we’re okay now. I remember laying there on my back and the flight medic asked something and I remember kind of reaching over and me and Vandenberge grabbed hands. We’ve been through the tough part, we’re gonna get help, and we’re gonna make it out of this alive.”
Kearney cl
imbs from the LZ to the site of Rougle’s death and arrives so winded he can barely speak. From there one can look across the valley to OP Restrepo — at this distance just another nameless ridgeline in the tumble of mountains falling off toward the west. Kearney leans on his M4 and gulps water from a plastic bottle while Piosa briefs him. He points to where they took fire from and how the enemy came out of a compound farther down the mountain and outflanked them from an unexpected direction. “Okay, where’s this fucking compound I want destroyed?” Kearney asks Stichter. He spits and doesn’t wait for an answer. “Stichter, destroy it now.”
As fire support officer, Stichter is in charge of calling in artillery and air attacks, and he rushes off to direct a bomb strike on the compound. The most serious problem is that after the enemy overran Rice’s position they grabbed American weapons and gear. They made off with Vandenberge’s 240, two assault packs, Rice’s M14 sniper rifle, Rougle’s M4 — equipped with a silencer — and two sets of night vision gear. They also grabbed ammunition for all the weapons. Not only is that dangerous equipment for them to have, but it makes for excellent propaganda. They could show off a suppressed M4 or an assault pack with a dead American’s nametag on it and claim that the Americans are getting slaughtered in Kunar. Operation Rock Avalanche abruptly goes from a search-and-destroy mission to a desperate attempt to get the gear back.
“Battle Base this is Battle Six, break,” Kearney says into his radio. He has to yell because an Apache is making slow passes overhead looking for enemy movement. “Right now I believe the enemy exfilled to the vicinity of Kilo Echo 2236 and 2237. I’d like to get Gunmetal to engage or push off-station so that I can drop 120s down there and prevent these guys from getting back into the village of Landigal, break. I’m looking at a plan so I can go into Landigal and clear it and find weapons and NODS, break. We will consolidate our forces on the Sawtalo Sar spur and focus our efforts on Landigal.”