War Read online

  Journalistic convention holds that you can’t write objectively about people you’re close to, but you can’t write objectively about people who are shooting at you either. Pure objectivity — difficult enough while covering a city council meeting — isn’t remotely possible in a war; bonding with the men around you is the least of your problems. Objectivity and honesty are not the same thing, though, and it is entirely possible to write with honesty about the very personal and distorting experiences of war. I worked with a British photographer named Tim Hetherington, who had seen a huge amount of combat while covering the Liberian civil war in 2003 but had no experience with American soldiers. He undoubtedly thought that the level of combat in the Korengal would be nothing compared to the violence and chaos of West Africa. I’d briefly been “embedded” in Battle Company a couple of years earlier in Afghanistan’s Zabul Province, but we’d gotten into contact only once, and very briefly. Afghanistan had turned a corner since then, and Tim and I were utterly unprepared for the level of violence we were about to experience.

  After the Chinooks lift off I shoulder my pack and walk up the slope to the operations building to meet Captain Kearney. He’s six foot four and moves with a kind of solid purpose that I associate with athletes. Some part of him is always moving — usually a leg, which jams up and down so fast that it sends strange vibrations out across the bee-hut floor. He has dark eyes and a heavy brow and gives the impression that he’d barely fit inside a room, much less behind a desk. I ask him who is pushed the farthest out into the valley and he doesn’t hesitate.

  “Second Platoon,” he says. “They’re the tip of the spear. They’re the main effort for the company, and the company is the main effort for the battalion, and the battalion is the main effort for the brigade. I put them down there against the enemy because I know they’re going to get out there and they’re not going to be afraid.”

  I tell Kearney those are the guys I want to be with.

  Second Platoon is based at Firebase Phoenix, half a mile south into the valley. One hot summer night I bring my gear to the LZ and join a switch-out that is headed down there on foot. It’s a half-hour walk on a dirt road that closely follows the contours of the hill. The base is a dusty scrap of steep ground surrounded by timber walls and sandbags, one of the smallest, most fragile capillaries in a vascular system that pumps American influence around the world. Two Americans have already lost their lives defending it. Rockets and ammo hang from pegs in the timber walls, and the men sleep on cots or in the dirt and an adopted Afghan dog sleeps in the dirt with them. The dog walks point and takes cover during firefights and sets to barking whenever anything moves outside the wire. The base hasn’t been attacked in days, but there’s intel that it will happen early the next morning. I lie down in my clothes and boots, and the last thing I hear before drifting off is Staff Sergeant Rice saying, “I hosey the .50 cal if we get hit tomorrow…”

  We don’t get hit but it happens soon enough. The men are coming out of Aliabad at dusk and suddenly there’s a disorganized tapping sound in the distance that could be someone working on their car. The first tracer goes by the lieutenant’s head and he turns around almost in annoyance, and then the rest of the burst comes in so tight everyone practically falls to the ground. The lieutenant’s name is Matt Piosa, the first of three who will lead Second Platoon. We knew we were going to get hit — Prophet had already called us up with the news — but on some level it’s always shocking that someone out there actually wants you dead. “Prophet” is the call sign for the American eavesdropping operation in the valley; they listen in on enemy radio communications and have Afghans translate them into English. That gets sent to commanders and rebroadcast across the company radio net. This can take place in minutes, seconds.

  Piosa had gone to Aliabad to talk to the elders about a water pipe project. The project was left over from 10th Mountain Division’s time in the valley and clearly isn’t going to happen this year either, though no one dared admit that. Piosa broke off the meeting when Prophet called — the elders knew exactly what was going to happen; you could tell they couldn’t wait to get out of there — and the men started bounding up the trail by squad. Bounding means one group runs while the next group covers them, then the first group covers while the second one runs. It’s a way of making sure there’s always someone in a position to shoot back. It’s a way of making sure you don’t lose the entire patrol all at once.

  I’m carrying a video camera and running it continually so I won’t have to think about turning it on when the shooting starts; it captures everything my memory doesn’t. We’re behind a rock wall that forms part of the village school when we get hit. “Contact,” Piosa says, and a squad leader named Simon adds, “I’m pushing up here,” but he never gets the chance. Rounds are coming straight down the line and there’s nothing to do but flatten yourself against the wall and grit your teeth. The video jerks and yaws, and soldiers are popping up to empty magazines over the top of the wall and someone is screaming grid coordinates into a radio and a man next to me shouts for Buno. Buno doesn’t answer.

  Every man in the patrol is standing up and shooting, and later, on the video, I can see incoming rounds sparking off the top of the wall. I keep trying to stand up and shoot video but psychologically it’s almost impossible; my head feels vulnerable as an eggshell. All I want to do is protect it. It’s easier to stand up if I’m near someone, particularly if they’re shooting, and I put myself next to Kim, and every time he pops up to shoot I pop up with him. He goes down, I go down. Below us is the Korengal River and across the valley is the dark face of the Abas Ghar. The enemy owns the Abas Ghar. Tracer fire is arcing out of American positions up and down the valley and converging on enemy positions along the ridge, and mortars are flashing silently on the hilltops, and then long afterward the boom goes galloping past us up the valley. Dusk is closing down the valley fast. O’Byrne is above us with his gun team, and tracer fire from their 240 streaks reassuringly overhead. Every fifth round is a tracer and there are so many that they form continual streams that waver and wobble across the valley and disappear into the dark maw of the mountains.

  It’s almost full night before we leave the safety of the wall, moving one by one at a run with the machine-gun fire continuing overhead. The men are laboring under the weight of their body armor and ammo and sweating like horses in the thick summer heat. The SAW gunners carry 120 pounds and the shortest runs leave them doubled over and gasping. One man shouts and stumbles and I think he’s been hit — everyone does — but he’s just twisted his ankle in the dark. He limps on. The last stretch is an absurdly steep climb through the village of Babiyal that the men call “the Stairmaster.” Locals build their villages on the steepest hillsides so that everything else can be devoted to agriculture. Pathways are cut out of the rock like ladders, front doors give out onto neighbors’ rooftops; in places you could literally fall to the bottom of town.

  The men grind their way up the Stairmaster and file through the wire into Phoenix, dark shapes in the hot night staggering in circles, unlimbering their loads. Mortars are still thudding into the Abas Ghar and rivulets of white phosphorus burn their way down the slopes like lava. The fires they start will smolder for days. The men collect at the mortar pit to smoke cigarettes and go over what happened. After a while we see lights moving on the slopes of the Abas Ghar, almost certainly Taliban fighters gathering up their wounded and dead. A soldier radios that in and suggests dropping artillery on them. Battalion is worried the lights might be shepherds up in the high pastures and denies the request.

  “Put the .50 all over it, we just had a fucking TIC, fuck those people,” someone says.

  A TIC means “troops in contact” — a firefight. The “.50” is a .50 caliber machine gun. After a while the lights go out; whoever it is has probably disappeared over the back side of the ridge. “Dude, that’s it, they’re leaving,” someone says. A little while later a soldier walks up and tells me to hold out my hand. I do, and
he drops something small and heavy into it: an AK round that smacked into a rock next to him during the fight.

  “That,” he says, “is how you know it was close.”

  The enemy fighters were three or four hundred yards away, and the bullets they were shooting covered that distance in about half a second — roughly two thousand miles an hour. Sound doesn’t travel nearly that fast, though, so the gunshots themselves arrived a full second after they were fired. Because light is virtually instantaneous, illuminated rounds — tracers — can be easily perceived as they drill toward you across the valley. A 240 gunner named Underwood told me that during the ambush he saw tracers coming at him from Hill 1705 but they were moving too fast to dodge. By the time he was setting his body into motion they were hitting the cedar log he was hiding behind. The brain requires around two-tenths of a second just to understand simple visual stimuli, and another two-tenths of a second to command muscles to react. That’s almost exactly the amount of time it takes a high-velocity round to go from 1705 to Aliabad.

  Reaction times have been studied extensively in controlled settings and have shown that men have faster reaction times than women and athletes have faster reaction times than nonathletes. Tests with soccer players have shown that the “point of no return” for a penalty kick — when the kicker can no longer change his mind about where to send the ball — is around a quarter of a second. In other words, if the goalkeeper waits until the kicker’s foot is less than a quarter second from the ball and then dives in one direction, the kicker doesn’t have enough time to adjust his kick. Given that quarter-second cutoff, the distance at which you might literally be able to “dodge a bullet” is around 800 yards. You’d need a quarter second to register the tracer coming toward you — at this point the bullet has traveled 200 yards — a quarter second to instruct your muscles to react — the bullet has now traveled 400 yards — and half a second to actually move out of the way. The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap. That’s the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.

  Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there was no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with bullets. The amygdala can process an auditory signal in fifteen milliseconds — about the amount of time it takes a bullet to go thirty feet. The amygdala is fast but very limited; all it can do is trigger a reflex and wait for the conscious mind to catch up. That reaction is called the startle, and it is composed of protective moves that would be a good idea in almost any situation. When something scary and unexpected happens, every person does exactly the same thing: they blink, crouch, bend their arms, and clench their fists. The face also sets itself into what is known as a “fear grimace”: the pupils dilate, the eyes widen, the brow goes up, and the mouth pulls back and down. Make that expression in front of a mirror and see not only how instantly recognizable it is, but also how it seems to actually produce a sense of fear. It’s as if the neural pathways flow in both directions, so the expression triggers fear as well as being triggered by it.

  The videotape I shot during the ambush in Aliabad shows every man dropping into a crouch at the distant popping sound. They don’t do this in response to a loud sound — which presumably is what evolution has taught us — but in response to the quieter snap of the bullets going past. The amygdala requires only a single negative experience to decide that something is a threat, and after one firefight every man in the platoon would have learned to react to the snap of bullets and to ignore the much louder sound of men near them returning fire. In Aliabad the men crouched for a second or two and then straightened up and began shouting and taking cover. In those moments their higher brain functions decided that the threat required action rather than immobility and ramped everything up: pulse and blood pressure to heart-attack levels, epinephrine and norepinephrine levels through the roof, blood draining out of the organs and flooding the heart, brain, and major muscle groups.

  “There’s nothing like it, nothing in the world,” Steiner told me about combat. “If it’s negative twenty degrees outside, you’re sweating. If it’s a hundred and twenty, you’re cold as shit. Ice cold. It’s an adrenaline rush like you can’t imagine.”

  The problem is that it’s hard to aim a rifle when your heart is pounding, which points to an irony of modern combat: it does extraordinarily violent things to the human body but requires almost dead calm to execute well. Complex motor skills start to diminish at 145 beats per minute, which wouldn’t matter much in a swordfight but could definitely ruin your aim with a rifle. At 170 beats per minute you start to experience tunnel vision, loss of depth perception, and restricted hearing. And at 180 beats per minute you enter a netherworld where rational thought decays, bowel and bladder control are lost, and you start to exhibit the crudest sorts of survival behaviors: freezing, fleeing, and submission.

  To function effectively, the soldier must allow his vital signs to get fully ramped up without ruining his concentration and control. A study conducted by the Navy during the Vietnam War found that F-4 Phantom fighter pilots landing on aircraft carriers pegged higher heart rates than soldiers in combat and yet virtually never made mistakes (which tended to be fatal). To give an idea of the delicacy of the task, at one mile out the aircraft carrier is the size of a pencil eraser held at arm’s length. The plane covers that distance in thirty-six seconds and must land on a section of flight deck measuring seven yards wide and forty-five yards long. The Navy study compared stress levels of the pilots to that of their radar intercept officers, who sat immediately behind them but had no control over the two-man aircraft. The experiment involved taking blood and urine samples of both men on no-mission days as well as immediately after carrier landings. The blood and urine were tested for a hormone called cortisol, which is secreted by the adrenal gland during times of stress to sharpen the mind and increase concentration. Radar intercept officers lived day-to-day with higher levels of stress — possibly due to the fact that their fate was in someone else’s hands — but on mission days the pilots’ stress levels were far higher. The huge responsibility borne by the pilots gave them an ease of mind on their days off that they paid for when actually landing the plane.

  The study was duplicated in 1966 with a twelve-man Special Forces team in an isolated camp near the Cambodian border in South Vietnam. The camp was deep in enemy territory and situated to disrupt the flow of arms along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. An Army researcher took daily blood and urine samples from the men while they braced for an expected attack by an overwhelming force of Vietcong. There was a serious possibility that the base would be overrun, in which case it was generally accepted that it would be “every man for himself.”

  The two officers saw their cortisol levels climb steadily until the day of the expected attack and then diminish as it failed to materialize. Among the enlisted men, however, the stress levels were exactly the opposite: their cortisol levels dropped as the attack drew near, and then started to rise when it became clear that they weren’t going to get hit. The only explanation the researchers could come up with was that the soldiers had such strong psychological defenses that the attack created a sense of “euphoric expectancy” among them. “The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-reliance, often to the point of omnipotence,” they wrote. “These subjects were action-oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension.”

  Specifically, the men strung C-wire and laid additional mines around the perimeter of the base. It was something they knew how to do and were good at, and the very act of doing it calmed their nerves. In a way that few civilians could understand, they were more at ease facing a known
threat than languishing in the tropical heat facing an unknown one.

  3

  THE KOP DOMINATED THE CENTER OF THE VALLEY, BUT halfway up the slopes of the Abas Ghar was a small firebase named Vegas. Its purpose was to control access to the Korengal from the east. Vegas was a five-hour walk from the KOP and almost never got into contact, so journalists only went out there if they could catch a resupply from the KOP. Vegas was manned by First Platoon and had a small HLZ — helicopter landing zone — but for a while lacked phone or Internet, and the men were stuck there for weeks at a time. “I guarantee you, half of First Platoon is going to be divorced by the time this is over,” Kearney told me early on in the tour. The cook started talking to a finger puppet as a way of coping, but that unnerved the other men so much that one of them finally destroyed it.

  I never went out to Vegas, but once in a while I’d get to know First Platoon guys who were rotating through the KOP for a hot shower and a call home. One was a sergeant named Hunter, who managed to be both very cynical about the Army and also a very good soldier. I was under fire with him once, he was leaning back against some sandbags saying things that made everyone laugh while sniper rounds went schlaaack over our heads. “We call him Single-Shot Freddy,” his sniper rap went. “We believe he is a blind Afghan man between the ages of sixty-five and seventy…”