Like a horse unsure of its new rider, the platoon bristled and flexed.
Smith prepared his soldiers for the ambush by issuing a by-the-book operations order in front of a terrain model in the company’s gym, a small stone-walled room with an assortment of weights. Someone had written on a wall with a black Sharpie, declaring the only two reasons for a man to work out: TO LOOK GOOD NAKED AND TO PUNCH A HOLE IN ANOTHER MAN’S HEAD. This was not officers’ school. It was their place more than his.
After the op order, Smith took them to the outpost’s landing zone and walked them through the rehearsals for each phase of his plan: the foot movement across the river and up the hill; the leader’s reconnaissance of the ambush site on the ridge; the triangle-shaped patrol base they would occupy astride the militants’ trail; the placement of the automatic weapons and the establishment of the listening post that would give the patrol warning of the approach of its foes; the signal initiating the killing. The soldiers listened politely. Some liked what they saw. Smith knew his tactics and was giving this patrol his all. Others went along with the latest as best they could. Viper Company, as Bravo Company called itself, had set many ambushes in the valley. Not once had the Taliban walked headlong into the traps.I
“All right, men,” Smith said, “it’s just like Ranger School.”
This was too much for Specialist Steven Halase, the platoon’s radio operator, who would walk alongside the lieutenant on the patrol. He was the radio voice of Second Platoon, Viper Two.
“Yeah, except at Ranger School you don’t get shot in the face,” he said.
For a moment no one knew what would happen. Second Platoon tensed. Halase figured he deserved it if he got written up.
The lieutenant let it pass.
Soto watched, not saying a word. He was willing to respect Smith, but only so far. He liked Halase and agreed with him. Smith was a bit too much. I get that you’re new I get that you’ve got fresh legs and you’re fresh out of Ranger School. We’re just trying to get out of here in two months. And I don’t want to lose another friend, or lose my own life, because you’re trying to look cool.
* * *
It would be difficult to trace a more direct route from childhood to the grunts than Robert Soto’s. He was ten years old on September 11, 2001, sitting in social studies class in Middle School 118 in the Bronx, when his teacher unexpectedly left the classroom. She returned and told the students that an aircraft had hit one of the World Trade Center towers. Soto was not sure what this meant. Then came news of another aircraft, and of a second burning tower.
The rest of the morning was a slow-motion evacuation in a rising nervous pitch. Parents streamed to the school. Name by name, Soto’s classmates were announced over the intercom. Soto’s turn came after most of the others had left. His father, who had spent nearly a decade in the National Guard, was in the corridor. The man was his role model, a rock of stability. His parents had never married and lived apart. Soto’s mother was mostly not present in his life—she was a “dancer,” he would politely say. He saw her only occasionally. His father had custody of him and his brother, and worked as a doorman at the Milford Plaza hotel in Midtown Manhattan. He and Soto’s grandmother held the family together. They were examples of clean living and hard work. Now his father sat in the car, explaining that the United States had come under attack. Soto knew his father had served in the Army, a background that added stature to the man. But he sensed fear, something he had never seen in his father before.
A few months later, Soto took the subway to Manhattan to visit the pile of rubble where the towers had been. It was an overpowering sight, this mountain of concrete, ash, and steel. Soto felt solemnity in the air. He listened to a man who stopped passersby for impromptu tours, telling them how tall each tower had stood, the square footage, the number of windows, detail after detail of symbols destroyed and lives lost. Soto felt a desire to participate in whatever the United States was doing to prevent another attack. He made up his mind while standing at Ground Zero. When he was old enough, he would enlist.
The neighborhood outside his home was rough. During adolescence Soto watched friends drift into crime. By thirteen they were smoking marijuana. Some joined the street gang Dominicans Don’t Play, or DDP. Their local crew was in a bitter rivalry with another Latin gang, the Trinitarios. The two sides clashed with fists and knives.
Soto kept his friends. They’d grown up playing Wiffle ball together, and over the years he had eaten many meals in their homes. Loyalty mattered. But his father and grandmother were strict. He did not want to disappoint them. He was not interested in gangs or drugs.
He began at the Professional Performing Arts School in Manhattan in September of 2003, not long after the United States invaded Iraq. He majored in drama but was disoriented, not part of the school’s mainstream. His classmates were neither skirting gang involvement nor inclined to serve in the military. Everyone, it seemed to him, planned on attending college. They were different from him, somehow able to disassociate themselves from the memory of New York City being attacked. Soto tried following the path the school’s ethos presumed. When he graduated in June 2007, at age seventeen, he enrolled in summer classes at Lehman College, telling himself he would work toward a bachelor’s degree. But he felt unsettled. Weeks before he started class, his closest friend was hurt in a machete attack by the Trinitarios. And he still felt drawn to the Army. There were two wars on. What was he doing, sitting around?
Shortly after starting his college coursework, Soto walked out of math class and strolled into the Army recruiting station at the Grand Concourse. He told the first soldier he saw that he wanted to sign up.
Too young to enlist without parental consent, he went home and showed his father the papers the recruiter had given him. His father looked ashen. The news from Iraq had been grim for years, and the surge was just beginning to have an effect.
“No,” he said. “I don’t want you to do this. The war is getting completely crazy.”
The calendar gave Soto leverage. He used it. “We can do this now, or we can do this in a few months when I turn eighteen,” he said. “But that makes no sense.”
His father signed the forms.
The path to the ranks was short. Soto passed his physical at the Military Entrance Processing Station at Fort Hamilton in Brooklyn the same month, and volunteered for the infantry. He accepted a slot in basic training for August, allowing himself only a few weeks to train. He tipped the scale at 140 pounds when he arrived at Fort Benning for One Station Unit Training, a pipeline to the combat divisions that combined indoctrination and basic infantry skills, molding replacement grunts quickly and at low cost. His transition was jarring. He was still a few months shy of eighteen. Every other recruit but one seemed much older. Soto was cut off from the world, surrounded by men, and given the simplest label a human being can have: Roster Number 242, written on a strip of tape on his plain green Kevlar helmet.
Emotionally, he shut himself down and focused on passing requirements and meeting standards. Several sergeants who trained him had been to Iraq and Afghanistan. To Soto, they were the most impressive people he had ever met. As the weeks continued, he began to realize that much of what he thought he knew about toughness was wrong. He saw strong and cocky men falter and grow timid. He watched less physically impressive men excel. The instruction moved past the rudiments of military life to the technical and tactical fundamentals of American war: the basics of machine gunnery and of patrolling and ground combat tactics. He approached each lesson seriously.
If you are not prepared, he told himself, you are preparing to fail.
Soto returned home in the late fall, a soldier with orders to report to Fort Hood, Texas, after the new year and join the First Infantry Division. The Bronx seemed different. He could not relate to many of his old friends, with their poor discipline and neighborhood lives. He was part of something larger, something he believed would help keep America safe. He stayed home through Christmas morn
ing. That afternoon his father walked with him to the Metro-North station, where he took a train to Connecticut to meet another new soldier who had been assigned to the same base. The two drove to Texas together.
Soto was given his place in Bravo Company’s Second Platoon and greeted by the Second Squad leader, Staff Sergeant Nathan Cox. Cox was lanky, with graying hair and an easygoing confidence. He welcomed Soto with a smile and a straightforward Midwestern manner. The contrast between him and the sergeants at Fort Benning was drastic. The platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Thomas Wright, had the graceful bearing of an athlete, and did not seem to be impressed with his own rank. He told Soto to expect a difficult period of prewar preparations and put him in a weapons squad as an ammunition bearer in a machine-gun team, a position for a FNG—“fucking new guy.” He told him the battalion was traveling soon to Fort Irwin, California, for a brigade exercise in the desert, and would be deploying to Afghanistan later in the year.
Soto was on the fast track to war. He was relieved to have landed in a solid unit.
Viper Company’s winter and spring were busy. By May rumor circulated that the company was being sent to the Korengal Outpost, an American foothold in a place with a chilling nickname, the Valley of Death. Vanity Fair had published an account of the fighting in the valley. A few of Viper’s young soldiers passed around a copy. Soto was not interested. He told himself to tune out distraction. He’d be there soon enough.
It doesn’t make sense to read and to worry.
Noise. Always block out the noise.
The article still had its effect. The mood of the company shifted. Viper was headed to one of the most violent spots on the Afghan map, a place of minor notoriety. Haranguing became routine. Warnings were constant. “You guys better start paying attention, because these guys get mortared every night,” a sergeant would say. “Wake the fuck up, because that place is no joke.” Harsh climate, punishing terrain, an isolated outpost harassed by a persistent enemy who chose carefully when to fight. The works.
Soto tried to keep Viper’s anxiety from infecting him. He had signed up to fight, and was doing his best. I’m already paying attention.
As more FNGs joined the unit, thickening the ranks, Soto was transferred to a rifle squad, taking up duties as a squad automatic weapon gunner in one of Sergeant Cox’s fire teams. His duties increased. Wright chose him to attend an emergency medical technician course, for training in trauma care. Soto was to be one of the platoon’s backup medics.
In July, the soldiers flew to Manas International Airport, in Kyrgyzstan, where the Air Force operated a transit center, part of a logistical wheel moving people and material into and out of Afghanistan. Within days the platoon was flown to Bagram, the main American base in Afghanistan, and settled onto bunks in a transient tent. Soto’s stay was short. The unit Viper Company was replacing—Bravo Company of the Second Battalion, 503rd Infantry Regiment, known as Battle Company—was completing its tour. It was impossible to replace them all at once. The military organized a sequential swap, known as a relief in place, in which small groups of Viper Company’s soldiers would fly in and small groups of Battle Company’s soldiers would fly out. Soto was assigned to one of Viper’s first groups in, part of his platoon’s advance party. He boarded a CH-47 for the trip.
The helicopter pounded up the Kunar River valley, wide and green, between forested slopes. When the aircraft turned left up the Pech Valley, the world seemed to shrink, narrowing between peaks. At the final turn, into the Korengal Valley, Soto’s heart beat fast. The valley was magnificent, a beautiful zone of ancient forest bisected by a cascading mountain stream, a place beyond the experience of a young man from the Bronx. There was almost no sign of modernity except the helicopter he sat inside. Soto was sweating. The stories of the Korengal had had an effect.
The aircraft banked. Soto looked down upon the outpost’s perimeter. Dirt-filled walls and bunkers surrounded small stone buildings and plywood shacks. The aircraft touched down. Soto and the other soldiers charged out to the first barrier wall. He reached it, noticed the grim faces of his sergeants, and went down to one knee, rifle in hand, face beading sweat, waiting for instructions. Soldiers from Battle Company laughed.
Viper.
Viper Two.
The name sounded impressive. They were FNGs now.
* * *
Soto learned the lay of the land. The Korengal Outpost was the main American position in the valley, part of a terrain grab that in retrospect had been unwise. American Rangers, Special Forces soldiers, and Marines occasionally ventured up the Korengal River after forcing the Taliban from power in Kabul in 2001, typically on patrols or brief operations. The valley did not gain larger notoriety until 2005, after Operation Red Wings, when three SEALs were killed in an ambush and a helicopter that came to their aid was shot down, claiming sixteen more American lives. In 2006 an American brigade situated the more permanent outpost on a low ridge with a gently sloping crest, downstream of most of the valley’s population. On a tactical level this could seem to make good sense. The place was both supportable and classically defensible—a position overlooking the river and local trails that also had enough space on its crest for helicopters to land. With time the limits of such thinking became clear. On a social level the siting of the KOP could not have been much worse. The buildings and the ridge the soldiers occupied happened to be the grounds of a sawmill and lumberyard operated by Haji Mateen, the valley’s timber baron. The Americans had seized a local source of income and employment, putting many of the valley’s toughest and most able-bodied men out of work.
Military minds had chosen the place. Standard military tactics would have to defend it. To protect the outpost as the inevitable fighting flared, troops built other, smaller posts so their occupants could support each other with machine-gun and mortar fire and watch over more of the riverbed. In Kabul, NATO officials spoke of forging alliances in the rural badlands. But the American presence in Korengal felt more like a crude fortress than a diplomatic outpost. On the ridges upstream, troops erected two bulwarks, Observation Post Dallas and Firebase Restrepo. A small team of fresh Marines who worked with Afghan soldiers occupied Firebase Vimoto, a third position built beside the river-hugging dirt road in the village of Babeyal. Across the valley, the Americans established two more positions in the hills, Combat Outpost VegasII and Observation Post Rock. Taken together, they worked as a network of besieged and interlocking bunkers that did not align with the official message of courting Afghan hearts and minds.
By the time Soto arrived in 2008, the place had sunk into stalemate. The early briefings were bleak. The Americans and the Afghan unit partnered with them were capable of limited ground movement. Haji Mateen, formerly of the sawmill, commanded many of the valley’s fighters, most of whom fought under the banner of the Taliban. Other groups fought here, too, and al Qaeda’s operational chief in Kunar Province, Abu Ikhlas al Masri, an Egyptian, circulated through the action.III The Americans met with village elders, urging them to help calm the valley down. The shura, a local leadership council, was ostensibly led by Haji Zalwar Khan, who brought complaints to Battle Company, discussed the Americans’ initiatives, and played the role of local sounding board. The Americans considered him dual-hatted. He led the shura, but also served as the emissary of Nasrullah, the Taliban’s local political leader and, as far as the Americans knew, the shura’s shadow leader, too.
Second Platoon’s advance party took it all in. The riverbed, roughly 4,500 feet above sea level, formed a green stripe of cropland beside a snowmelt stream that twisted its way down from the peaks. Terraces of stacked stones climbed in stair-step fashion up to the bottoms of the hills. From there the ground rose steeply in mud-and-gravel slopes dotted with small trees. Impoverished villages clung to ledges overlooking the riverbed, each comprising stone houses and livestock sheds. Farther up the mountains rose, sheer and uninhabitable escarpments of stone, buffeted by wind.
At first Soto found it breathtaking
, a valley locked in former times. As he learned more, he saw it through military eyes. The outpost and observation posts were ringed with heavy machine guns, including MK19 automatic grenade launchers, which could fire bursts of high-explosive 40-millimeter projectiles across the valley. This seemed formidable, but was only a fraction of the firepower that could be brought to bear. Inside the outpost’s operations center, computers showed a topographical overlay by which this terrain was more fully unpacked. Using aerial photographs and global-positioning satellites, the Americans had charted and numbered every building in the Korengal Valley. Their maps showed numbers on each structure’s roof. The main buildings of Aliabad, a midsized village south of the outpost, were labeled 1 to 75. Labels superimposed on the other villages worked the same way: Chichal’s list went to 103, Darbat’s to 88, Dokalbat’s to 31, Donga’s to 69, Karangal’s to 47, Laneyal’s to 25, Laui Kalay’s to 105, and so on. The numbers were a part of a fire-support overlay that covered hundreds of structures in all, a targeting template overwritten upon homes. The Korengal Valley, Soto saw, was no longer a land that time forgot. It was a tiny space that was intricately mapped and closely watched by layers of surveillance equipment and weaponry. Around the homes, the hilltops and ridges were also labeled and marked, each a precise spot on the earth that the American weapons were ready to hit. Viper Company kept two 120-millimeter mortars at the KOP, and one 60-millimeter mortar each at Vegas and Restrepo. When these weapons were not sufficient, the same targets were registered with 155-millimeter howitzers at Forward Operating Base Blessing, at the valley’s mouth, and Asadabad. They could also be struck by Apache gunships and attack jets, including F/A-18s from aircraft carriers in the North Arabian Sea, by B-1s flying from outside Afghanistan, or by drones remotely piloted from the United States, along with more locally maintained A-10s and F-15s. The machine had done its homework. Looking up over the battle-scarred walls of their outposts, the soldiers saw an almost primeval wonder. Looking down at the computers in the operations center, they saw targets.
The Fighters Page 22