* * *
Staff Sergeant Pamela Paquet, a flight medic, was on the ground at Bagram when the call came in. She was a crew member in Dustoff 31, one of two pairs of Black Hawks on the base dedicated that afternoon to medevac flights. Her aircraft had just returned with an Afghan soldier who had been wounded by gunfire. She had worked furiously on him throughout the flight back, performing CPR. She could not resuscitate the man. Not long after litter bearers at the hospital had lifted him from the Black Hawk and run him inside, she heard he had been pronounced dead. She was drained, drenched in sweat, and soiled with the man’s blood. I just want to get this off me, she thought.
But she was still on shift and had to keep working. She restocked her medical bag. The summer had been horrible. Call after call had come in. The next call could come in a minute or an hour. Paquet could not expect a break. She returned to the aircraft as radio chatter began.
“We’ve got a nine-line in progress,” someone said, using the terminology for a medevac request. It came from way out—from Najil.
Najil? Paquet had never flown there. Few pilots had.
Chief Warrant Officer Matt Cole, the pilot of the chase aircraft, which would accompany the medevac Black Hawk, checked the grid on the map. It was far up the Alishang Valley, in the boonies.
“Why the fuck are we going all the way out there?” he said, as they ran for the aircraft. Cole was known for flying hard, and not one to give up a flight to someone else. But he wondered why the mission was not being assigned to aircraft from Jalalabad. The map showed it was much closer to the wounded man.
The day was busy. Americans and Afghans were being wounded across the operations area. The two other Dustoff aircraft from Bagram were on a mission. The Black Hawk Paquet was assigned to would take this one. In the aircraft the blood from her last patient had not yet been rinsed away.
More information came in. “We’ve received word it was a downed pilot,” she heard.
Almost immediately her aircraft was in the air, nose down, flying fast.
* * *
The news moved quickly. Woehlert and Cela were working out in the airfield gym. A captain rushed in. Mike had been shot in the leg, he said, and everyone needed to head to the command post. The captain seemed agitated, but there were hints in the way he spoke that the situation was not dire. Slebodnik was going to be flown to Bagram. “He gets to go home early and see his family,” he said.
The information that reached Robert Minton, another senior Kiowa pilot, sounded the same. He walked the short distance uphill, to the airfield’s coffee shop, and bought an iced tea. Slebodnik liked his tea. Minton planned to give his standardization pilot a hard time. He’d greet him with an insult—You fucking pussy, this is how you get out of the deployment?—and hand him his favorite drink.
* * *
The duty of manning Combat Outpost Najil on September 11, 2008, fell to a platoon from Headquarters and Headquarters Company of Third Battalion, 103rd Armor Regiment, the unit from the Pennsylvania National Guard that called itself Joker.
Living in a tiny outpost, and facing guerrilla-warfare tactics on the few roads nearby, the soldiers felt a special gratitude to the Army’s scout and attack pilots, who were the most visible form of support they saw. When the voice of Captain Meyer came over the net saying Close Combat had been hit and was heading their way for medical aid, the soldiers ran to their places.
“We got a bird coming in!” one of the sergeants shouted.
The outpost had no doctor. It was outfitted with only a small aid station. If the Kiowa was heading to them, and not to Mehtar Lam or Jalalabad, the situation must be grave. The wounded pilot was too badly wounded for the flight down the valley.
He needed lifesaving steps now.
With a patrol out, there were few soldiers present—several men on guard duty and radio watch, others performing menial tasks. Many were in shorts and T-shirts. They huddled at the landing zone with a stretcher as the Kiowa appeared.
The aircraft was on their radio frequency. They heard one pilot imploring another to stay alive.
“Hey, man, you’re good,” the voice said. “Just stay awake.”
Corporal James M. Adams looked up at the Kiowa descending. The left-seat pilot was flying. The pilot on the right seat was hunched over, unconscious. He looked waxen.
The aircraft landed at such high speed that it skidded and overshot the waiting soldiers. They squinted into grit and bolted forward. Meyer, with his left hand, spun the throttle on the collective clockwise, putting the rotors in idle. He reached over and released Slebodnik from his belt.
Soldiers swarmed around. Slebodnik slouched in his seat, eyes open, pale. Blood pooled at his feet and coated the aircraft’s pedals. Adams wore only his workout clothes. He had no first-aid kit. He shouted to their platoon sergeant, who was in uniform.
“Belt! Belt! Belt!”
The sergeant slipped off his belt and handed it over. Adams looped it around Slebodnik’s upper leg and cinched it tight, pulling with all of his strength.
Slebodnik gasped.
Maybe he’s alive, Adams thought. He felt a flash of hope.
The soldiers lifted Slebodnik, settled him onto their stretcher, and rushed him to the aid station, running so hard that one of the lead soldiers slammed into the door frame as they entered.
Adams tried keeping his fist pressed down on the wound to prevent further loss of blood.
Inside the aid station, the soldiers laid the litter onto a pair of sawhorses. The medic cut away the lower section of the flight suit and examined the wound. Adams loosened Slebodnik’s chest rig and vest.
The wound was near the pelvis, a place where no tourniquet could stem blood flow. Slebodnik’s pulse was weak and erratic.
Adams slid the helmet off Slebodnik’s head and heard a second gasp.
I gotta talk to him, Adams thought.
“Hey, you’re going to be okay,” he said. “We got you, man, you’re good.”
The medic started CPR.
Adams and the medic made eye contact. Adams understood. It’s not good.
“We got you,” Adams said. “Doc’s a good doc. We got you.”
Soldiers stood outside, unsure what to do. Someone ordered that all the local Afghans visiting the base be escorted off. After a few minutes the word went around that any soldier with an O-negative blood type, the universal donor, should be ready to donate. Soldiers lined up. But this was the Afghan wilderness. There was no means for a transfusion.
Joker Platoon looked down the valley. Soldiers strained their ears, listening for the distinctive sound of Black Hawks.
Minutes passed like days. And then they heard it—aircraft engine noise.
“Go!” the soldiers shouted, and began carrying Slebodnik back to the landing zone.
One of the Black Hawks broke toward the outpost. The other circled as the first aircraft touched down.
Staff Sergeant Paquet leapt clear and met the men running toward her with the patient. She looked down at him and thought he had the most brilliantly blue eyes she had ever seen. His pupils were fixed and dilated. He was pale. She reached for him. His skin felt tacky.
Even if you know what death looks like, she thought, you still work it.
Soldiers were relaying the case information. Someone said Slebodnik had no pulse and was unresponsive to CPR. Then they were in the air, turning, gaining speed. She was with a flight surgeon, a captain she admired. The two instantly were at work. She did a pulse check. Nothing. She looked at the entrance and exit wounds near his groin and knew that no tourniquet would have worked and that he must have lost an enormous volume of blood. Catastrophic, she thought.
They administered epinephrine and continued the CPR.
Bagram was a long way off, more than half an hour. She did not like the math.
* * *
Far downstream, in the operations center at Jalalabad, Colonel Lynch monitored the radio traffic and watched the movement of aircraft on his dig
ital board. The Black Hawks pulled away from Najil. Slebodnik was on his way to the best hospital in the region. At last his vital signs were read off. Lynch wondered if he had heard the numbers right.
I thought he was hit in the leg, he thought. Holy cow What’s going on?
* * *
Captain Emmitt Furner II, an Army chaplain assigned to the aviation brigade, was working on Bagram Airfield when his cellular flip phone rang. The medevac commander was asking for him at the base hospital.
Furner regularly tended to patients there, and he also tried to check in on medevac pilots and flight crews. These soldiers, he knew, had some of the most difficult duties in Afghanistan. They rushed every day into the most traumatic scenes in the country and into others’ gunfights, in which they and their aircraft were targets for Taliban fire. Then they picked up the dead and the wounded. Their peers sometimes died in their arms. The work was as emotionally freighted as any in the war.
Furner hurried to the medevac hangar, wondering why he had been summoned this time. An officer told him that Slebodnik had been hit and it did not look good, and that Paquet, the medic working on him in flight, had lost a patient earlier in the day.
He rushed to the emergency room and found Slebodnik had already arrived. He was on a table, surrounded by the medical staff. Paquet was in the room, wearing bloody latex gloves and shouting at the doctors, telling them the patient history and what she and the flight surgeon had done for Slebodnik in flight.
The trauma doctors and nurses were giving him a cardiac massage. The room was noisy. The staff called out instructions. Monitors beeped. Furner heard Slebodnik had been given transfusions.
Doctors were shocking his heart to restart it. Other doctors and nurses, and several soldiers from the aviation brigade, stood silently on the edge of the activity. Some held hands. A few were crying.
Paquet looked over at Furner and felt deflated. Their eyes met. She interpreted his look; it said what she knew. She understood why he was there. My gut was right, she thought. She quietly left, stepping outside to cry.
The noises became fewer.
Furner prayed softly.
After about fifteen minutes, the activity around the table ceased. The room fell silent. They were declaring Slebodnik dead.
A doctor spoke.
“Chaplain,” he said.
Furner stepped forward and took Slebodnik’s hand. He found his voice and began to speak in a free-flowing Southern Baptist prayer. He thanked Slebodnik for his service, and thanked his family for their service and sacrifice, and expressed sorrow for the grief they would soon feel. He thanked the medics, nurses, and doctors for their efforts. He prayed for perhaps a minute, then stopped and held Slebodnik’s hand while the staff disconnected him, cleaned him, and covered him with a cloth.
Head bowed, praying, Furner stayed with the man. He did not release his hand until the soldiers from the mortuary had wheeled Slebodnik to their truck, the first leg of his journey home.
* * *
I. Lieutenant Colonel Joseph J. Fenty, killed with nine other soldiers on May 5, 2006, in Kunar Province.
II. Campaign speech by Senator Obama, July 15, 2008, Washington.
III. Psalm 121:1–2:
I will lift up my eyes to the mountains; from where shall my help come?
My help comes from the LORD, who made heaven and earth.
President Barack Obama took office in 2009 declaring that he would refocus the foreign policy establishment on the Afghan war. By the spring, American troop numbers had climbed past 50,000 in Afghanistan, and were continuing to rise. Violence in Iraq had stayed relatively low. Official optimism for a turnaround in Afghanistan was high. But as troops moved from large NATO bases into smaller rural outposts, they were unable to quell the fighting or the Taliban’s campaigns against Afghans who collaborated with them. The military, saying it had not reached the troop density required to stabilize the country, was also expanding its efforts to recruit and train Afghan police and army forces. As it had in Iraq, it moved with a haste that limited the vetting and training of its partners. American casualties were climbing.
NINE
* * *
* * *
“WE’RE HERE BECAUSE WE’RE HERE”
Specialist Robert Soto and the Ghosts of Korengal Valley
“Tell my family that I love them and this is probably going to be the end for me.”
APRIL 10, 2009
On a West-Facing Slope over the Korengal River, Kunar Province, Afghanistan
Second Platoon did not hide its attitude. It was early in the afternoon and its soldiers had just waded across the swollen Korengal River to begin a long climb. They were thirty men in all, a rifle platoon reinforced with a team of scouts, a mix of original platoon members and replacements who filled gaps in the squads left by the wounded and dead. Their mission was to ascend the lower face of this mountain and lie in wait at a foot trail to ambush the Taliban at night. Many of the soldiers thought the plan was foolish, a draining and dangerous waste of time, another example of a frustrated Army unit trying to show activity for the brass. Some were in dark moods as they walked. But Second Platoon was experienced and well trained, not paralyzed by its unhappiness. Its soldiers moved steadily, striding toward their mission with the sinewy, late-deployment fitness of infantry squads seasoned by war.
Specialist Robert Soto had been haunted by dread as he left the relative safety of the company’s base, the Korengal Outpost, or KOP, and trudged downhill to the water. He cursed repeatedly. His low morale was tied in part to the fact that Second Platoon was tired, and not because its soldiers had not slept enough as they prepared for the patrol. Theirs was a deeper weariness—the mind-numbing exhaustion of being worn down by a sustained and bloody combat tour. The platoon had been in the valley nearly nine months, one of three platoons in Bravo Company, First Battalion of the Twenty-Sixth Infantry. It had started with three squads but suffered so many casualties, including the death of Soto’s squad leader and two of his closest friends, that even with replacements filling in for those the medevac helicopters had carried way, it now mustered at about two-thirds of its original strength.
With attrition came knowledge. Soto understood the many ways the Korengal undermined American plans. He knew his platoon’s war did not resemble the cheerful and carefully considered national project the generals and their spokespeople relayed to the American people in the news. For him the Afghan war was a matter of surviving each day as the days cohered into a tour—a malleable unit of military time that could give a year a higher degree of order than it possessed in fact. He was doubtful. One more high-risk day, he thought, in the service of public affairs and waste. There’s no fucking way this works.
Some of it was the topography. The valley was a curved chasm, with almost all the Americans arrayed on the slopes of the western side. The river flowed beneath them, cold and swift. In places the valley floor was less than one hundred yards wide. From the eastern side, which the soldiers considered hostile territory, the residents of multiple villages gazed from primitive stone homes directly at the American outpost. By day they could see the soldiers’ movements, mocking any hope that a platoon might pass undetected in the light. Some of it was the villagers’ prevailing attitude. A mountain people, the Korengalis had fought Soviet soldiers and their Afghan proxies in the 1980s, and had remained suspicious of outside authority after their communist occupiers left. Why the Americans believed they would be received differently was not clear. Senior officers spoke of Afghans who could be coaxed toward allegiance to the government in Kabul. To Soto, the valley felt like a network of watchers who set up his platoon. The trails were busy with Korengalis tending sheep and harvesting wood. Many of them doubled as spotters for the Taliban, relaying word of the Americans’ activities to those who were laying traps. Goat herders, farmers, gatherers of firewood. All were suspect.
The platoon stepped out of the rushing water and began the uphill climb. Soto walked on, scrambling
and moving higher, sensing eyes following the platoon, expecting the worst.
Everybody can see us.
Soto was nineteen years old, but at 160 pounds and barely needing to shave, he could pass for someone two years younger. He’d joined the Army at seventeen—a drama major from the Bronx who wanted to punish those who carried out the World Trade Center attacks. He was nobody’s archetype of a fighter. He had an enormous smile, which came to him almost unprompted. He liked to sing, and he sang often. His memory had at its command a vast repertoire of lyrics—R&B, rap, hip-hop, the blues, his personal collection of gems—which he would sing, no matter what anyone else thought. Robbie Soto joined the Army upbeat, fast with that grin, the guy who made others feel good. He planned to become an actor if he survived the war—a dream that sounded like a fantasy to some of his peers but that he was not afraid to share. All of this made him popular in the platoon.
On this day his smile was less bright. The soldiers of his platoon were adjusting to the Army’s latest surprise. A new platoon leader had turned up at the outpost: Second Lieutenant Justin Smith, a freshly minted officer straight from Ranger School. Smith had been placed in charge of Second Platoon. He was a former staff sergeant, which lent him a degree of credibility new lieutenants do not usually get. But he had not previously served in the infantry. The platoon was not inclined to give him a pass.
Smith had led them on three patrols so far, an insufficient sampling from which to measure a wartime boss. Many of his soldiers were wary. They did not know his motivations or have a firm sense of his character. All they knew was that he was confident and fit, and exuded enthusiasm for infantry tactics. Such traits were not unusual in new officers. They also were not enough. Second Platoon had no idea how Smith would behave under fire or how much he would stand up for his soldiers—the things that matter most in an infantry unit, and that in too many officers were in short supply.
The Fighters Page 21