War Page 6
“For a long time I hated God,” O’Byrne told me. “Second Platoon fought like animals after that.”
The Black Hawk gunners bang out half a dozen rounds into the stone hillsides to clear their guns and we bank so hard that I can practically look out the bay door straight down to the ground below. Two Apaches trail us a quarter mile back, low-slung with weaponry and prowling from side to side like huge dark wasps. Neat green fields slide by a thousand feet beneath us, and here and there I can see men bathing in the river or washing pickup trucks that they’ve driven into the shallows like workhorses. One farmer waves at us as we pass by, which surprises me until I realize that maybe he’s just trying to keep from getting shot. I waved at an Apache once; I was by myself on a hillside above the KOP and since I was not dressed like a soldier I was worried what this might look like from the air. The pilot had come down for a closer look and I thought I’d seen the .30 mm chain gun under the nose swing in my direction. It may have all been my imagination but it was not a nice feeling.
We pass the American base at Asadabad and swing west up the Pech. We’re flying at ridgetop level and the valley has narrowed so that I can look straight out at Afghanistan’s terrible geology. Everything is rock and falls off so steeply that even if you survived the crash your helicopter would just keep bouncing downhill until it reached the valley floor. Soldiers, as far as I can tell, don’t think about such things. I’ve seen them fall asleep on Chinooks like they’re on the Greyhound coming back from an all-nighter at Atlantic City. They don’t even wake up when the helicopter gets spiked downward by the convection cells above the valleys.
We climb over a ridgeline, the rotors laboring like jackhammers, and then drop into the Korengal. From the air the KOP looks smaller than I remember and more vulnerable, a scattering of Hescos clinging to a hillside with camo net strung between some of them and a landing zone that looks way too small to land on. Red smoke is streaming off the ground, which means the KOP is taking fire, and we get off the bird fast and run for cover behind the Hescos. I find Kearney in the command center looking tired and ten years older than two months ago. He says that as bad as things had been earlier in the summer, they’ve fallen off a cliff since then. Last week Battle Company got into thirteen firefights in one day. Eighty percent of the combat for the entire brigade is now happening in the Korengal Valley. After firefights the outposts are ankle-deep in used brass. Restrepo was killed and Padilla lost his arm and Loza got hit in the shoulder and a Kellogg, Brown and Root contract worker was shot in the leg while taking a nap in his tent. “We built another outpost, though,” Kearney says. “We named it Restrepo, after Doc Restrepo who was killed. It gets hit all the time, but it’s taken the heat off Phoenix. The whole battle has shifted south.”
In the dead of night a week earlier, Third Platoon walked up the spur above Table Rock and started digging. Second Platoon went as well to protect them. They set up fighting positions west of the new outpost and on the hillside above it and then all night long listened to the dink, dink, dink of pickaxes hitting shelf rock. Third Platoon was desperately digging in so that when dawn came they’d have some cover. The new outpost was on top of a position the enemy had used for months to shoot down into Firebase Phoenix and there were still piles of brass up there from their weapons. (Pemble found a round that had misfired and carried it for the rest of the deployment. He considered it good luck on the theory that, had it actually fired, it might have been the bullet that killed him.) From that hilltop the Americans controlled most of the high ground around Phoenix and the KOP, which meant that those bases could no longer be attacked effectively. It was, as Kearney told me, a huge middle finger pointed at the Taliban fighters in the valley.
Dawn brought fusillades of grenades and wave after wave of machine-gun fire. Third Platoon hacked away at the mountain and shoveled the results into sandbags that they could then pile up around them to provide more cover. The Taliban attacked every hour or so from every position they had all day long. The men of Third Platoon worked until the next firefight, rested while firing back, and then resumed work once it quieted down again. Second Platoon shot through so much ammunition that the guns started to jam. “Once I was shooting and I look over and bullets are fucking pinging all around Monroe and he’s not firing,” O’Byrne remembered. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck, Monroe, get the fucking SAW fucking firing, why the fuck aren’t you firing?’”
Monroe shouted that the weapon had jammed and then he methodically started taking it apart. Bullets were smacking the dirt all around him but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. He wiped the weapon down and oiled it and reassembled it, and when he was done he slid an ammo belt into the feed tray and started returning fire.
After the initial build-out, Third Platoon walked back down to the KOP and Second Platoon took over. Temperatures over a hundred and the men working in full combat gear because they never knew when they were going to get hit. Some men swung pickaxes to break up the rock and other men shoveled the rubble into ammo cans and still others hoisted the cans over their heads and dumped them into an empty Hesco. Hescos are wire baskets with a moleskin lining that the U.S. military uses to build bases in remote areas. They measure eight feet cubed and can contain roughly twenty-five tons of rock or sand. It would take the men of Second Platoon an entire day to fill one to the top, and the plans called for thirty or so Hescos laid out in the shape of a big fishhook facing the enemy. Every time they filled a Hesco their world got a little bigger and every time they got into a firefight they realized where the next Hesco should go. They used plywood and sandbags to build a bunker for the .50 cal and ranged their cots against the southern wall because that was the only place that couldn’t get hit. When it rained they stretched tarps over the cots or just got wet and when it was sunny they crouched in the coolness of the .50 cal pit smoking cigarettes and telling their endless grim soldier jokes.
I once asked O’Byrne to describe himself as he was then.
“Numb,” he said. “Wasn’t scared, wasn’t happy, just fucking numb. Kept to myself, did what I had to do. It was a very weird, detached feeling those first few months.”
“You weren’t scared of dying?”
“No, I was too numb. I never let my brain go there. There were these boundaries in my brain, and I just never let myself go to that spot.”
I walk out to Restrepo a couple of weeks after the outpost was started, climbing two hours up the hill with Captain Kearney and a guy from headquarters who keeps throwing up because he’s not used to the heat. One soldier bets another twenty-five dollars that we’ll get hit with machine-gun fire on the last stretch before the outpost, which is wide open to Taliban positions to the south. We take that part one by one at a sprint and the guy loses his bet. Restrepo sits on a ridge and rides up the mountainside like freighter on a huge wave, the bow in the air and the stern, filled with the bunkers and communications gear, sitting heavily in the trough. There is a wall of Hescos facing south and a burn-shitter enclosed by a supply-drop parachute and pallets of bottled water and MREs and of course stacks and stacks of ammunition: Javelin rockets and hand grenades and 203s and cases of linked rounds for the .50 and the 240 and the SAW. It seemed like there was enough ammo at Restrepo to keep every weapon rocking for an hour straight until the barrels have melted and the weapons have jammed and the men are deaf and every tree in the valley has been chopped down with lead.
When we arrive the men of Second Platoon are sitting on their cots behind the Hescos smoking cigarettes and slitting open pouches of MREs. There is no electricity at Restrepo, no running water, and no hot food, and the men will be up here for most of the next year. Propped above them is a plywood cutout of a man that Second Platoon uses to draw fire. The cutout is eight feet tall and has a phallus practically big enough to see from across the valley. The talk turns to an American base called Ranch House. Two weeks ago — right around the time Second Platoon was building Restrepo — eighty Taliban snipped the wires to the Claymores around the posi
tion, overran three guardposts, and were inside the wire practically before anyone knew what was happening. A platoon of Chosen Company soldiers was manning the base, and they’d gone through the first three months without getting into a single major firefight. They came spilling out of their hooches in their underwear throwing hand grenades and trying to put on their body armor. The Taliban were so close that the platoon mortarman had to shoot nearly straight up into the air to hit them; at one point he thought he’d miscalculated and mortared himself. A badly wounded specialist named Deloria found himself unarmed behind enemy lines and picked up a rock so that he could die fighting.
Video shot by a Taliban cameraman during the battle shows heavily armed fighters walking around the base as calmly as if they were organizing a game of cricket. The A-10s finally showed up and the platoon leader asked for a gun run straight through the base but the pilots balked. ‘You might as well because we’re all going to die anyway’ — or something to that effect — the lieutenant yelled into the radio. The gun runs saved the base, but half the twenty American defenders were wounded in the fight, and the command started discussing how fast they could close the base down without having it look like a retreat. Word quickly got around that not only was the enemy unafraid to fight up close, they were willing to absorb enormous casualties in order to overrun an American position. There are small bases like Ranch House all over Afghanistan — they’re a cornerstone of the American strategy of engaging with the populace — but most of them are manned by only a couple of squads. Tactically speaking, that is not an insurmountable obstacle to a Taliban commander who has a hundred men and is willing to lose half of them taking an American position. Restrepo was the most vulnerable base in the most hotly contested valley of the entire American sector. It seemed almost inevitable that, sooner or later, the enemy was going to make a serious try for it.
5
“GET HIS WAIST GET HIS WAIST!”
The workmanlike hammering of the 240, the terrible snap and buzz of bullets.
“UP ON THE FUCKIN’ RIDGE!”
Everyone is yelling but I only hear the parts between the bursts. This is it, full-on contact from fifty meters outside the wire and my head is swiveling around like some kind of berserk robot. A Second Squad PFC named Gutierrez is down and no one knows if he took a round or broke his leg jumping off a Hesco; the medic is bent over him now and the outpost is working every gun it has. The .50 labors away inside the bunker and Toves is taking fire from the east and trying to unjam his SAW and Olson is pouring fire into enemy positions to our south. Toves told me earlier that he joined the Army because he was tired of partying and living at his mother’s house, and now he’s behind sandbags on a hilltop in Afghanistan getting absolutely rocked. Shells arc out of the weapons and scatter into the dust and men scream information in their weird truncated war language and I’m more or less frozen behind a Hesco watching little gouts of dirt erupt from the ground in front of me. It takes me a moment to understand that those are incoming rounds and that I probably don’t want to go there.
“HOW MANY ROUNDS YOU GOT?”
“HE’S IN THE DRAW!”
We’re getting hit from the east and the south and the west and the guy to the west is putting rounds straight through the position. They’ve got another guy below us in the draw and Olson is trying to deal with that but the SAW won’t angle low enough to hit him. “TOUGH LOVE!” one man shouts; I’m pretty sure another starts singing. My brain has sought refuge in some slow-motion default that doesn’t allow for much decision-making, but after half a minute things regain their normal speed and I’m able to follow Kim as he sprints for the front gate. We stick close to the Hescos because incoming rounds are still doing their nasty thing to the air above our heads. Kim and Rudy lean out from the last Hesco, one high one low, shooting into the draw until Rice walks up with a sour expression on his face and unloads three or four bursts from his SAW. Rice is the head of Weapons Squad and once described himself to me as “one of those goofy guys who just loves combat.” After he’s done with the SAW he calls for a 203 and Kim hands him a loaded tube and he steps into the open and shoots one down into the draw. He turns away and steps back behind the Hescos before it has even exploded. The gunfire dies down except for the sound of mortars hitting the ridge. Whoever was shooting at us is either dead or out of ammo.
Gutierrez suffered complete fractures of both the tibia and fibula, offsetting his foot from his leg so badly that I found it hard to even look in his direction. He and a Third Squad PFC named Moreno were up on the Hescos dumping ammo cans of dirt when they were targeted by a Taliban gunner on the ridge. O’Byrne says that bullets sound like a rubber band being snapped against plastic when they pass close to you, and that’s the sound both men heard all around them before throwing themselves off the Hesco. Moreno landed fine but Guttie caught a foot on the way down and hit with the full weight of his body plus thirty pounds of protective gear.
Moreno put his hands on him and started to pull him out of the gunfire. A Third Squad team leader named Hijar ran forward to help, and he and Moreno managed to drag Guttie behind cover before anyone got hit. By that time the medic, Doc Old, had gotten to them and was kneeling in the dirt trying to figure out how badly Guttie was hurt. Later I asked Hijar whether he had felt any hesitation before running out there. ‘No,’ Hijar said, ‘he’d do that for me. Knowing that is the only thing that makes any of this possible.’
That’s my memory of what he said, at any rate; I was still too amped to write anything down. It was our third firefight of the day and there was no reason to think they were done with us yet. Rice sends First Squad out to clear the draw but they come back without making contact and now they’re busy reinforcing the position at the front gate with sandbags. Guttie’s on his back in the bunker while Doc Old slides a needle into his arm. Guttie already has an IV drip in his arm, a cigarette in one side of his mouth, a fentanyl lollipop in the other side, and he’s listening to music on his iPod. A moment later the morphine hits.
“Even my neighborhood dealer had better shit than this,” Guttie says.
A soldier named Stichter walks past. He’s a tall, good-looking kid from Iowa who has “INFIDEL” tattooed across his chest and keeps a photo of his sister inside his helmet. (That way, he says, she’s the last thing he sees before going out on patrol.) He looks down at Guttie and shakes his head. “Personally, I find it funny that an airborne-qualified soldier jumps five feet and breaks his ankle,” he says.
The workday is over and the men start to gather in the bunker, joking and reading magazines and sneaking glances at Guttie. He’s lying on a stretcher listening to music with his hands clasped across his chest and a beatific look on his face. He’s not even here. I’m sitting on a cot next to Jones, the only black guy in the platoon and one of five in the entire company. He’s from Reno, Nevada, but lived in Colorado for a while, where he says he had the highest PT score in the state. He benched 385 and burned the forty in 4.36 seconds. An athletic scholarship to the state university fell through and he wound up selling drugs in Reno before joining the Army to avoid getting killed or doing time. “I’d been shot at plenty back in the civilian world, so I already knew how I’d react under fire,” he told me. “I mean I ain’t stupid — I’ll take cover — but there ain’t no bitch in me, either.”
Now he’s morosely smoking a cigarette while other men joke and chatter around him. Solowski is flipping through a surfing magazine. Kim is in the bunker reading a Harry Potter book. The sun sits low in the west and has laid planks of light across the valley from the western ridges to the dark slopes of the Abas Ghar. I can hear animals — wolves? monkeys? — yapping from the crags above us. Patterson takes a radio call from headquarters and learns that Prophet has overheard the enemy talking about twenty hand grenades in the valley. Rice is standing next to him and says something quietly about Ranch House. “I know,” Patterson answers. He walks out of the bunker and repeats the news to the men. No one responds.
I was to spend weeks at a time up on that hilltop, and it soon became clear that if I were to get killed over the course of the next year, Restrepo was almost certainly the place it would happen. It wasn’t likely but it was possible, so I had the strange experience of knowing the location of my fate in advance. That made Restrepo an easy focus for all my fears, a place where the unimaginable had to be considered in detail. Once while leaning against some sandbags I was surprised to feel some dirt fly into my face. It didn’t make any sense until I heard the gunshots a second later. How close was that round? Six inches? A foot? When the implications of that kind of thing finally sink in you start studying the place a little more carefully: the crows that ride the thermals off the back side of the ridge, the holly oaks shot to pieces first by the Americans and then by the enemy, and the C-wire and the sandbags and shantytown hooches clinging to the hillsides. It certainly isn’t beautiful up there, but the fact that it might be the last place you’ll ever see does give it a kind of glow.