The Fighters

by C. J. Chivers

  * * *

  Two days after stepping off the helicopter, the soldiers of Second Platoon’s advance party participated in their first combat patrol. Battle Company was sending soldiers across the river to Laui Kalay. Soto was told that patrols there often came under fire, so Battle Company had developed standard tactics, posting other soldiers along a road near the outpost. This was overwatch. It provided soldiers walking into Laui Kalay a modicum of protection against attackers from higher ground. To learn the routine, Second Platoon’s newly arrived troops were provided a Humvee with a .50-caliber machine gun and assigned their spot. Soto took his place in the turret. Staff Sergeant Cox was the vehicle commander. Another young soldier, Kyle Stephenson, drove.

  The patrol began quietly. The soldiers on overwatch picked their way along the mountain road to their places. Soto’s truck stopped on a perch where he could readily fire at the eastern side. He had been shown the target reference points from where the Taliban typically opened fire.

  It was a beautiful day, bright and dry. The mountains were almost bewitching. Soto was stern with himself, telling himself to concentrate.

  Pay attention.

  He scanned the valley, facing the expected threat. He was amped, a young soldier on his first patrol in a war.

  Stay alert.

  Gunfire broke out. Soto heard it but saw nothing suspicious—just the hillsides and villages to his front.

  A bullet whizzed past and thudded into the dirt behind the truck. Radio noise filled the air. A voice said there was a sniper. More bullets came by, single shots. Each was followed by a pause, then another. Whoever was shooting was taking time to aim.

  A bullet passed closer, making a sharp crack.

  Cox shouted up to him from inside the truck.

  “Hey, you okay?”

  Soto was traversing the machine gun, looking for targets. He saw no one to shoot.

  “I’m okay, I’m okay!” he shouted back.

  “Can you see where it’s coming from?” Cox asked.

  Soto could not. The hill across the valley was vegetated, offering many places for a man to stay concealed. Their attackers were firing from under the trees or behind rocks. There were villages, too, with windows beyond counting. Gunmen could be firing from most any of them. Soto was annoyed. His machine gun was useless.

  Where the fuck are they?

  Another bullet cracked past.

  Soto returned fire, aiming bursts at spots he had been shown before the patrol. Suppressive fire, the Army called it; it was a widely accepted way of shooting, a practice almost as old as automatic weapons. The machine gun bucked. Heavy bullets flew out in tight groups. But Soto felt strange. For all he knew, he was shooting at nothing.

  The shooting stopped.

  The Taliban switched off its attack. Its fighters were too experienced to remain in place as the Americans massed fire.

  The valley was quiet. Soto was not sure how long the firing lasted. He thought it might have been five minutes. He was unharmed and flushed with energy, experiencing, at age eighteen, the dizzying joy of surviving a gunfight. Sweat poured down his face. Inside the truck, Stephenson was singing a lyric from a rap song.IV

  Many men wish death upon me

  Blood in my eye, dawg, and I can’t see.

  It was 50 Cent. Soto smiled. He could finish that song in his head.

  He laughed and followed Stephenson’s lead, changing the original lyrics as he sang. Soto’s turret was his club.

  Many men wish death upon me

  Sweat in my eye, dawg, and I can’t see.

  The machine-gun barrel was warm. Half a can of ammunition was gone. Soto sang. The patrol was over. A voice on the radio told them to head back. Soto’s first firefight was behind him. Adrenaline pulsed through him, like a drug.

  * * *

  More of Viper Company’s soldiers arrived as July passed. Battle Company’s numbers dwindled until they were gone. Viper Company was granted no break-in period. Soon Soto was back on the same road, looking across the river to the village of Donga. Again the militants attacked. A rocket zipped across the open space and struck beside his truck. The explosion’s blast wave shook the truck and peppered its side with rocks and shrapnel.

  Soto spun the turret and watched a small cloud of dust rising from the opposite slope.

  He shouted down to the driver. “Move!”

  The vehicle lurched into motion.

  Soto opened up, pouring out .50-caliber bullets, aiming just below the dust. He fired an entire can, then half of another. Like the first time, he could not see anyone there.

  Ghosts, he thought. Motherfuckers are sneaky.

  The Taliban and Viper clashed repeatedly. Viper’s officers examined the patterns and saw the rate of violence had risen sharply since Battle Company left.V It was as if the militants considered the new American unit to be green—easier to fight in their first weeks than they would be later. They also seemed to have a thorough grasp of American response times. Often the Taliban fought hard and with clear coordination for several minutes, firing from multiple positions simultaneously. Then they would stop and move away before the artillery responded. They had studied the Americans’ way of war, and fought within its seams.

  Soon after Viper settled in, Soto was temporarily reassigned from Second to Third Squad. Third Squad was being sent to Observation Post Dallas, the smallest and southernmost post, and had no medic or soldier with medical training. Soto was to be its provisional medic. Dallas was a machine-gun position with a commanding view and a crude environment. Only the small latrine and noisy generator made life there anything more than camping. About a dozen soldiers alternated between shifts on the radio and behind the guns. They slept on cots under a sandbagged ledge.

  At first Soto disliked the place. The routine was dulling. Soldiers had little way to wash. They grew filthy and were swarmed by fleas. They urinated and defecated in a barrel, which attracted flies that buzzed around the bored soldiers. But as he spent more time there, Soto saw the post had certain qualities. Soldiers at Dallas were away from most supervisors and the endless work of soldiering. It offered young grunts freedom from patrol duties, a chance to slow down and talk.

  Soto was drawn to Specialist Marques Knight, a soldier with a previous tour in Iraq. In the States, Soto had thought Knight was dismissive of FNGs. But the two had spent time together at Bagram and discovered they had similar taste in rap. At Dallas, Knight loosened up more. He confided in Soto, telling him of a difficult past and an unsettled family life and about noncommissioned officers he did not like or fully trust—a subject that would have been untouchable before Afghanistan, when Soto was new. Knight was thin as a rake. He wanted to pack on muscle. He worked out every day and scrounged for extra rations, trying to build his body. Soto saw a more complete and sensitive soldier than the taciturn veteran at Fort Hood. Knight eventually shared a plan to which he clung. When his time came for leave, he said, he was going to visit Brazil. Brazil, Soto thought. Knight wanted to see more of the world than Iraq and Afghanistan, and be someone other than an occupying soldier among a people who did not want him and wished him dead.

  * * *

  The Taliban capitalized on Viper Company’s isolation. The outpost was out on a string, reachable by a single dirt road that climbed out of the Pech Valley. Supplies had to be flown or trucked in. American units had used the same path intermittently for more than a year, sending convoys of contracted Afghan cargo trucks about once a month. Often they were accompanied by attack helicopters and armored Humvees. A route-clearance platoon frequently led the drive, looking for bombs. But the road had to be driven slowly so soldiers could search for IEDs. These were the conditions under which the Americans were forced to operate. They allowed ambushers hours to prepare. One spot on the road, which was out of view of all their posts, was especially dangerous, and given a designation used repeatedly by Americans on occupation duty in Afghanistan and Iraq: Ambush Alley. Soldiers hated going there. The Army, given t
o tone-deaf messaging, even internally, called the road by a groan-worthy official name, Route Victory.

  The battalion dispatched Afghan trucks up Route Victory with a lighter-than-usual escort on August 16.

  A Taliban trap was waiting.

  As the convoy neared the Korengal Outpost, in the heart of Ambush Alley, the last Humvee was stopped by an explosion caused by a pair of stacked antitank mines that had been rigged to be detonated remotely. The explosion killed Staff Sergeant Kristopher D. Rodgers and wounded two other soldiers.

  Both Viper Company, in the Korengal Outpost, and Charlie Company, in the Pech Valley at Forward Operating Base Blessing, sent quick-reaction forces to the convoy’s aid.

  The militants were a step ahead. They began a determined assault against Combat Outpost Vegas, the Americans’ main position on the east side of the river. It was the largest attack Viper had seen, involving as many as fifty fighters. Viper Company’s mortar section fired 194 high-explosive 120-millimeter rounds. Artillery outside the valley fired another seventy shells, including a handful of incendiary white phosphorus rounds, which set the hills ablaze. Two American machine guns jammed. The attackers drew so close that an American sergeant was throwing hand grenades.

  The outpost held.

  The message to Viper was unmistakable: We do not fear you, and we know your patterns.

  Two days later Third Platoon waited in an ambush site near the outpost. They were ten heavily armed soldiers hidden along a trail. They used camouflage netting to cover themselves, and set four claymore mines along the path they thought the Taliban might take. They were in place by darkness, ready to kill.

  No one came before sunrise, and during the day the militants bypassed the ambush site and attacked the outpost the soldiers had left three times. As Viper Company fought off the final attack, two of its high-explosive and two white phosphorus rounds sailed more than a kilometer away from their intended target and struck a home in Kandlay. No one knew whether the explosions had killed or wounded civilians. The next morning, elders from Kandlay came to the gate to complain, saying the ordnance had damaged property and nearly killed women and children. Viper Company sent a patrol to survey the damage.

  Soto’s first rotation at Dallas had ended. He had returned to the outpost and rejoined Second Squad. That day his entire platoon headed to Aliabad. In this way, as Third Platoon walked back from Kandlay, the valley would be covered.

  Not everyone was acclimated to the thin air and terrain. One team, including Staff Sergeant David L. Paquet, lagged behind. Paquet was struggling for breath. Another sergeant carried his pack and then took his rifle. Paquet fell to the ground.

  Other soldiers rushed to him. He was lifeless, without a pulse.

  Word traveled quickly. In Aliabad, Soto heard the talk over the radio. There was a soldier down.

  A Black Hawk medevac helicopter rushed up the valley. There was no place to land in the riverbed. The crew winched Paquet aboard and turned away, headed to Jalalabad.

  It rounded the turn, passing out of sight and then out of earshot, leaving Viper Company and its scattered soldiers to their thoughts. Huddled with other soldiers in Aliabad, Soto momentarily felt disoriented. Paquet had no history, as far as he knew, of being weak. Soto pushed his questions from his mind. Ignore the noise.

  Second Platoon had to make its way back to the outpost. Soto was expecting to be attacked. He chastened himself, told himself that now was not time to grieve. Block, he thought. Block, block, block. Shut down emotions. You can’t dwell. You can think about this now or we can get back safe and you can think about it later.

  Soto chose later. He was eighteen years old. He had learned how to switch himself off.

  * * *

  With his first rotation at Dallas complete, Soto’s Korengal Outpost routine resumed. The days were a series of walks to the valley’s villages, efforts to ambush militants along their trails, long shifts on post watching and waiting to be attacked. The attacks could proceed as if according to a guerrilla handbook. The Taliban would fire from hiding. The soldiers faced the threat and fired back. Then the attackers withdrew—as the Americans massed their mortars and artillery, before an aircraft strafed the hills or dropped bombs. Both sides moved as if by choreography. Patrols had a practiced feel, too. Afghans in the Korengal were against the Americans. The indicators were everywhere—from cold looks to villages empty of fighting-age men. It could seem that the Korengal was a valley of women, children, and old men. Everyone knew where the local men were. They were hiding in the mountains. The only time the Americans could expect to reliably see them was on Friday, when many Taliban fighters set aside weapons to visit the little mosque in Babeyal for prayer. Sometimes the Americans and Afghan National Army soldiers stood outside the place and watched their foes file past.

  After prayers, the Afghan men would stroll back out, faces expressionless, walk by the loitering Americans, and return to the hills.

  Little about this sat well with Soto. He had joined the Army to protect America. He was unsure how the Korengal Outpost served that end. The circumstances in the valley, and many of the missions his platoon was ordered to perform, caused him to wonder what the Army was thinking. In an outpost with a purpose that felt poorly conceived, Soto reduced the mission to its most basic rationale. We’re here because we’re here. If nothing else, the soldiers could fight for one another. That was something worth fighting for, and with a tangible purpose and a defined end.

  One type of patrol seemed to him particularly ill-conceived: the sweeps of the road toward Combat Outpost Blessing. The company had no visibility on Ambush Alley. Its means of preventing traps from being laid was to go look for them on patrols called counter-IED (CIED) missions. They were the least popular missions in the company. Soto rode in the backseat of Staff Sergeant Cox’s Humvee on a few of them, with his aid bag, listening to noncommissioned officers grouse. Why drive into an ambush site as a way to prevent an ambush? Why the fuck are we going out to find IEDs that way? The only way we are going to find an IED is with our bodies.

  Soto shared this view. What’s the point of this? I thought CIED was to prevent IEDs from hurting us. This will get us killed.

  Other patrols were not much safer. On September 6, Second Squad walked from the outpost to Donga, across the river, and up a steep tree-shaded hill. Third Squad set up a support-by-fire position on the west side, in the same place where Soto had come under sniper fire within two days of arriving in the valley.

  Soto and the rest of Second Squad crossed the river and reached the village. As was often the case, the homes they reached in Donga were mostly abandoned. Above them, in the hills, the militants opened fire.

  The bullets were not coming Soto’s way. Second Squad was safe. The Taliban were trying to hit Third Squad, on the opposite side. There was nothing for Soto to do. He could see no targets or positions to rush. The Taliban fighters were on another ridge.

  More fighting was raging on a hilltop, between First Platoon and another group of Taliban. Viper Company was being attacked in two places.

  The gunfire stopped.

  Soto sensed something was wrong.

  He watched Cox listen to the radio, hunched over with another sergeant. Their faces were harsh. They shook heads and swore and clenched their fists. They told the squad to get ready for the return walk.

  It was late afternoon. The Taliban had the high ground. Second Squad crossed the river under the shadow of Aliabad and climbed toward the road. Third Squad had already left. Helicopters were swarming overhead, a mix of Black Hawks and Apaches.

  Soto was growing angry. There’s a lot going on and we’re not hearing it.

  He thought he knew why.

  Someone was dead.

  The squad reached the Marine and Afghan National Army position at Firebase Vimoto and filed inside. Once Soto was safe within the wire, freed from the mental demands of patrolling, his anger surged to fury. He confronted a sergeant.

  “Tell me,” he dema
nded. “Fucking tell me! Who got hit?”

  “It was Knight,” the sergeant said.

  The words hit Soto like a punch. He remembered all Knight had told him at Dallas. The sergeant said there was more. First Platoon had also taken casualties. Its platoon leader, its radio operator, one of its squad leaders, and a medic had been wounded, along with three other soldiers, one of whom, Michael R. Dinterman, an eighteen-year-old private first class, was killed. First Platoon was on a hillside when it was attacked, and unable to move all of its casualties. Sergeant John M. Penich, a team leader, took charge of the fight, and organized the evacuation.VI The helicopters had come to hoist them away. An Apache had been shot up and forced to make an emergency landing in Asadabad.

  The sky opened up soon after Soto heard the news, splattering the valley with rain and hail. It was about a fifteen-minute patrol from Vimoto to the outpost in the dark. Soto walked forcefully, soaked and cold, alternating between numbness and lucidity, driven to pay respects to his friend.

  Knight was in a body bag in the mechanics’ bay, waiting to be flown to the morgue. Soto stood over the bag, speaking softly. He was thinking of the trip to Brazil that Knight would never take, of the family Knight would never have.

  Others soldiers had told Soto that Knight had been killed in a vehicle turret, behind a machine gun. Soto heard he had died instantly. The soldiers inside the truck simply saw his legs slump. He never moved again.

  Soto unzipped the top of the bag.

  Knight’s face was clean and looked calm, and his eyes were open. Someone had washed him, giving him the care he deserved. Knight was a fastidious, self-conscious man, and Soto was glad he had been cared for in this way. He leaned in tight to say good-bye. “Damn, I love you,” he muttered, and fell into a soft stream-of-consciousness riff, unsure whether he was praying, singing, or babbling.