Holy shit. The realization suddenly hit me. McGurk’s squad hadn’t been the object of the initial ambush earlier in the afternoon—our vehicles were the target. A mine designed to destroy a Soviet tank would have lifted our up-armored Humvee off the ground and killed all five soldiers inside. In fact, when we later returned to Losano Ridge, we found not one but five antitank mines, daisy-chained together so that one initiator could blow five Humvees to little chunks of scrap metal. Captain Worthan surmised that the ambush they had planned was even more complex. Perhaps, he said, the plan had been to force an American casualty in the wadi and then trigger all five mines on top of Losano Ridge as the medevac helicopter arrived in a spectacular, deadly explosion. In any case, Grenz’s quick thinking had saved us all.
NIGHT FELL. WE LOADED up the Humvees and made slow progress down Losano Ridge and back toward the base. An hour later our fleet of vehicles pulled into the motor pool as if we had completed any other routine mission. Drivers backed the Humvees into their parking spaces so they would be ready to go at a moment’s notice. Soldiers began shuffling back into the compound. Amid otherwise subdued voices rang one command: “Alpha Company. Fall in around me.”
Soldiers hurried back to the motor pool. Covered in blood and dust, the company clustered together in front of First Sergeant Woodworth, the senior sergeant in Alpha Company. He began the company roll call.
“Adams, Howard.”
“Present.”
“Grenz, Allen Scott.”
“Present.”
He continued in the same even tone through the first half of the alphabet, including McGurk and Mullaney in the M section.
“O’Neill.”
No answer.
“Evan W. O’Neill.”
A long pause without an answer.
“Private First Class Evan W. O’Neill. Second Squad, First Platoon, Alpha Company.”
A minute later Story responded according to custom.
“Private O’Neill is no longer with us.”
Tears welled in my eyes. There were few dry eyes around the company, although all strained to hold the tears back until safe in their sleeping bags. I should have tempered my grief with some satisfaction from the mission. Headquarters estimated that we had killed more than sixty al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters. The platoon had fought its first sustained firefight with impressive skill on unfamiliar terrain. My men had run into walls of lead and repelled multiple ambushes. Right now, none of that mattered. With my head hung low, I stumbled back to my cot. I tossed my helmet onto a pile of clothes in the corner and draped my webbed vest on a hook in the wall. My bones ached from exhaustion as I unlaced my left boot. I reached to unlace the other boot, but my fingers wouldn’t obey, making it impossible to undo the tight knot of nylon cord. I shivered slowly.
I slipped my journal from under my pillow and opened to a fresh page. Tears fell as I wrote, smudging my confession. I lost a soldier today. I barely knew him, but I was responsible for him. His parents had entrusted me with his life, and I failed.
No excuse, sir.
30
Taps
There will be time, there will be time,
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days of hands
That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions.
T. S. ELIOT, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
I AWOKE THE NEXT DAY IN THE LATE MORNING. FOR a minute, I believed my memory of Losano Ridge had been a nightmare—imagined, reversible. My body told me otherwise. I was exhausted even after twelve hours of uninterrupted sleep, and my muscles ached fiercely. I still had my right boot on, and my journal was open to a tear-smudged page.
I took a long shower. Alone in the bathhouse, I washed away the crust of dust and sweat caking my scalp, changed into a fresh set of fatigues, and shaved. As I looked in the mirror, I forced a serious, unshaken composure. Be the tough leader. That’s what I had been taught at West Point, in the Shakespeare verses we memorized. “Yet, in reason, no man should possess him with any appearance of fear, lest he, by showing it, should dishearten the army.” I laced my boots up tightly and bloused my pant cuffs around the top. Okay, I said to myself, time to face the platoon. No tears.
As I walked across the compound from the chow hall, I caught my breath. Against the mud wall of a building were two boots, a rifle bayoneted into the ground, and a wide-brimmed camouflage hat with the distinctive chevron and rocker of Private First Class Evan William O’Neill. O’Neill’s dog tags hung from the trigger well of the rifle, a morbid wind chime in the breeze. I clutched my own tags beneath my shirt and shut my eyes.
Someone had left a folding chair in front. I sat down, propped my elbows on my knees, and gripped my ears as I sunk my head and sobbed. I closed my eyes and said the Our Father. But where was my father now? Who was going to tell me I had done my duty? What would he have done in my boots? He never answered my letter. Did he even care anymore what happened to me? Would he be there, like O’Neill’s father, to accept my casket?
“Sir,” said McGurk, standing behind me.
No tears, I reminded myself, and put my sunglasses on. “I was just on my way to your hooch. I’ll walk with you.”
We ducked into the low-lit room. Grenz was leaning back against the wall, staring at nothing at all. I wanted to find something inspirational to say. If I could say it, maybe I could believe it myself. There were no words. I wasn’t a coach at halftime in a losing game. This dejection was so much more complete. Everyone, including me, wanted to end the game; it wasn’t fun anymore. We had all lost that cocky sense of invincibility. I said nothing and sat down on a cot. It was better to be with my men than alone. We grieved together silently. Under our helmets and armor, we were still men.
Later that afternoon a helicopter arrived with a chaplain and a pair of psychiatrists from division headquarters. Story and I were asked to join McGurk’s squad and the team that had carried O’Neill to the helicopter. I was skeptical of the shrinks. What did they know about what we had just been through? The psychiatrists introduced themselves to the group and explained their backgrounds. Both had been in combat themselves. They reassured us that they didn’t think we were crazy. They asked me to reconstruct the day’s events.
There was so much I couldn’t retrieve from my memory. McGurk interrupted to recall what had happened beyond my blurry vision in the wadi below. Grenz argued with McGurk although they had been barely twenty feet apart for most of the fight. Story sat as silent as a stone, clearly perturbed to be there at all. After an hour and a half of debate and discussion, I was more confused than before. What were facts to me conflicted with the certainty of others’ recollections. Distances and directions were jumbled. The sequence was out of order. Time was elastic: Some experienced events happening in a blink, whereas others experienced a sense of excruciating slow motion. The only thing that was clear was that none of us had been in the same battle.
At some point the tone of the discussion changed. Slowly, McGurk’s men expressed their anger, frustration, and fear.
“Why were we being shot at from the Pakistani observation post?”
“Why couldn’t we shoot back?”
“I was scared at first,” said one soldier, “when I couldn’t tell where we were being shot from.”
Heads nodded in agreement. I was surprised. I assumed I was the only one who had been terrified.
The litter team talked about how hard it was to move O’Neill up the hill, how someone had to hold on to his bloody uniform in order to keep him from sliding off the litter. McGurk blamed himself for not being able to stop the bleeding. Grenz was angry because he had left O’Neill on an exposed flank. He thought he had let his guard down toward the end of the sweep. According to Grenz,
before O’Neill went unconscious from his wounds, his last words were a question: “Is everybody else okay?”
Everyone had tearstains on their cheeks, including Story and me. So much for no tears. On this day what my men needed most was compassion. Our session ended with the shuffle of boots outside announcing dinner. The psychiatrists asked me to stay. “Keep them talking,” they reminded me. “You are each other’s strongest support system.”
They were right. Who else were they going to share their fears with? Yet I thought to myself, “Who am I going to talk to?” Leadership was a damned lonely place. Talking about fear just wasn’t something leaders did, especially with the men they were trying to lead. Who would want to follow a petrified jumpmaster out of an aircraft? Who would want a guide who was himself lost? But I had to talk to someone or I was going to fold. There was too much to keep inside.
The counseling session left me deeply conflicted. On one hand, the tears and anger of my men troubled me. They hurt badly. They were shaken hard by O’Neill’s death and the conclusion that his loss meant they had failed in their first test of combat. No matter how many dozen enemy we killed, the only statistic that mattered in their calculations and mine was the one KIA on our side. I weighed their combined sufferings on one scale with nothing to counterbalance it. I wondered whether I would be able to pull the team together for the missions left on our docket.
On the other hand, knowing that my men shared my self-doubt, fear, and anxiety about our remaining weeks at Shkin made it less isolating. They cried, too. And I was relieved in a way to know that they saw how hard O’Neill’s death had hit me. They knew I cared. I hoped they knew how far I would go to protect them, even as they comprehended the limits of that protection.
THE NEXT DAY, CHAIRS formed neat rows in front of Evan’s display. I had a seat next to the podium, facing the crowd. There was no chatter, not even the usual greetings between soldiers. I read the memorial pamphlet over and over again, but my eyes kept returning to the photo of O’Neill in full battle gear. It was recent. I bowed my head so that my red eyes were less obvious. I wiped them with my sleeve, making it look as if I was mop-ping a runny nose.
I stood and read from the Gospel of John: “Greater love has no man than this, to lay down his life for his friends.” I tried to read more but couldn’t. I choked up but bit my lower lip hard and sat down without shedding a tear. First Sergeant Woodworth repeated the roll call. One by one we stood to attention. At “O’Neill. Evan W. O’Neill,” I swallowed hard. We turned to face seven soldiers standing above us on the western parapet. Crack. Crack. Crack. They fired three volleys in perfect unison. They were the first shots anyone had heard in two days. At the first note of taps, two hundred hands snapped, edging sharp salutes. A tear rolled down my face. With the final unsung verse, “God is nigh,” I walked out of the compound.
31
Hallowed Ground
We made our way along that lonely plain like men who seek the right path they have lost, counting each step a loss till it is found.
DANTE, Purgatorio
UNFORTUNATELY, THERE IS NO PAUSE BUTTON IN combat. The company spent the day after O’Neill’s memorial service rehearsing for the return to Losano Ridge. The officers in the company agreed that we had telegraphed our punches too often, alerting our prey by long and loud vehicle approaches. Yet we couldn’t think our way out of the box. The futility of finding al-Qaeda by trial and error was by now clear to almost everyone. It was like throwing darts in a dark room. Sometimes we hit the bull’s-eye, but we didn’t deserve to. Without helicopters, without real roads, there was simply no way to act quickly and covertly in response to intelligence of short shelf life. Captain Worthan wasn’t satisfied with our cynicism. “We’re going to be the hunters, not the hunted.” Together we planned an audacious night infiltration near Losano Ridge for the following evening. By sending several platoons along different routes, we hoped to mask our combat power and trap fighters who might have returned after licking their wounds.
AT 3 A.M. OUR CONVOY proceeded with blacked-out lights down the one paved road in Shkin, toward the border. We dismounted a few hundred yards south of the border control post and stayed kneeling beside the trucks as the other two platoons disappeared from the range of our night vision goggles. To my left, Captain Worthan towered above a retinue of radio operators, watching his company evaporate into the mist.
Captain Worthan’s fighting spirit was genuine. He must have had an inexhaustible reservoir of energy to keep pushing. In his command of Alpha Company, his earnestness to pursue our adversaries was genuine. My men and I were weary. We didn’t want to hunt or be hunted; we wanted to go home. We began to weigh survival more heavily than the mission. It was like the end of Ranger School, counting down the days, anxious not to risk graduation by twisting an ankle in a midnight ambush. I was unenthusiastic and afraid.
We walked in a wide wedge through waist-high grass down into Losano Ridge’s moon shadow. I flipped up my night vision to watch my men in the moonlight. They moved as one body, in perfect synchronization, parting the tall grass with unbelievable grace. I smiled and tightened my chin strap across the stubble on my jaw.
Despite the nervous anticipation, the mission was uneventful. No Taliban popped out of hidden caves. No caches of rockets were discovered. Each member of the platoon marched on that ground with an eye cast back four days to his actions on Losano. I matched the ground truth with my incomplete recollections, searching for the distant ridges from which we had been fired upon, correcting distances and directions in my head. I found the tailfin of a Chinese mortar where I had thought an RPG had impacted near Chuck, Howe, and me. I stared at the Pakistani observation post where the round had originated and shoved the rusting metal into my cargo pocket to take home. I assumed the Pakistanis were watching me, so I flipped them a middle-finger salute.
On the small hill between Losano Ridge and the border, Grenz showed me the tree where he had shot the three men with the detonator. He noted the Snapple bottle on the ground, no doubt stolen from our firebase by a local worker and sold to the local Taliban cell. Another one of my soldiers pointed out half a torso and part of a foot. Flies buzzed about the dried blood. As he retrieved a camera to take a photo, I pulled his arm down. “We don’t photograph dead bodies.” He looked at me incredulously and then moved downhill.
This—5.56 millimeters—was how a bullet plowed through a human torso. I had never seen a dead body up close. There were other bodies like this in the hills, bodies shredded by machine-gun fire and artillery I directed. I suddenly felt heavy, as if the pull of gravity was stronger where I stood. Back at West Point, where I had taken my first shots at plastic “Ivan” targets, they always bounced back up. These bodies weren’t bouncing back. Neither would we.
I looked up from the scraps of tissue in the dirt. Around the knoll were trees scarred black from grenade blasts and impaled with shards of metal. White phosphorous had stripped their foliage. As a cadet I had read a poem by a French World War I veteran. He asked how much fire it took “to roast a human corpse.” Now I knew.
Before we concluded the mission, we detonated the remaining mines on Losano Ridge. Even from a half mile away, the explosion was impressive—five new craters deep enough for foxholes. I hoped we would never have to use them. The explosion was a fitting cap to a mission whose value lay largely in vanquishing our ghosts.
The mission restored a degree of confidence after our shared tragedy. We were able to confront danger again without cringing. We were back in the fight. I recognized a difference in my men and in me. Where before our conviction grew out of enthusiasm and a measure of naïveté, our resolve now originated elsewhere.
Veterans often call their first taste of combat a “baptism.” Unlike the religious sacrament, we were cleansed not of sin but of innocence. We no longer had the ability to pretend we were on a stage acting out a drama with blank rounds and fake wounds. O’Neill forever eliminated our ability to wish away terror and unce
rtainty. Real blood doesn’t always stop. O’Neill wasn’t going to come back on the next helicopter. The battalion commander wasn’t going to call an end to the training exercise and gently critique our technique. This wasn’t a video game, a training scenario, or a scene from Platoon. Our return to Losano Ridge made this painfully obvious.
One must learn to endure what one cannot avoid. Lacking the superficial enthusiasm of the apprentice, I developed a deeper resolve. I accepted that our missions would be dangerous and that our planning and training could shape but never eliminate the risk. I shuddered, thinking I would likely lose another soldier. But the road home ran through the Valley of Death. We would have to face fear on every patrol, stare it in the eye, and continue the mission. I owed my men resolve, and they owed it to one another. It simply did not matter whether I was scared.
The Unforgiving Minute: A Soldier's Education Page 32