War

by Sebastian Junger

  It was the ten feet that got me; I kept thinking about Murphree and then looking down at my legs. The idea that so much could be determined by so little was sort of intolerable. It made all of life look terrifying; it made the walk to the chow hall potentially as bad as a night patrol to Karingal. (The American contract worker who got shot at the KOP took a bullet to the leg instead of the head only because he happened to change directions on his cot that day.) The only way to calm your nerves in that environment was to marvel at the insane amount of firepower available to the Americans and hope that that changed the equation somehow. They have a huge shoulder-fired rocket called a Javelin, for example, that can be steered into the window of a speeding car half a mile away. Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable. And the roar of a full-on firefight could be so reassuring that you wanted to run around hugging people afterward. That roar was what was keeping you alive, and it created an appreciation for firepower so profound that it bordered on the perverse.

  “Oh, yeah, everyone’s got their favorite weapon,” Jones told me. “There are Mark guys and .50 guys. Walker’s a Mark guy. The Mark is an automatic grenade launcher that shoots a 40 mike-mike round that explodes on impact. I’m a .50 guy. I don’t know if it’s true, but they say the round only has to come within eighteen inches of you to sear flesh. That’s badass. It doesn’t have to hit you and it can still tear you open. It’s just a sexy weapon. It’s the ultimate machine gun. It has the ability to shoot through walls. It’s fun to shoot during a test fire but it’s twice as fun during a firefight.”

  The one absolute impossibility at Restrepo — you could even get booze if you wanted — was sex with a woman, and the one absolute impossibility back home was combat. Whether the men realized it or not, they had made a rough trade where one risked becoming a stand-in for the other. The potential for humor was enormous, but even when no one was joking, things could still sound awfully funny. “It doesn’t need much oil but if you give it too much it’ll rock that much more,” I overheard O’Byrne telling Vaughn about the .50 cal. “If your shit gets sluggish in a firefight just pour oil all over the bolt and it’ll pick right back up.”

  If you’re nineteen and haven’t gotten laid in a year, a sentence like that — meant in all sincerity about a very serious matter — can resonate through your psyche in ways you don’t even understand. (There was a hill across the valley that the men referred to as “Nipple Rock,” and all I can say is that you’d have to have spent a goddamn long time in the valley to see a woman’s nipple in that thing.) There was so much sexual energy up at Restrepo that it might as well have been a Miami nightclub, except that the only outlet for it was combat, so that’s what the men spent their time thinking about. Once a firefight kicked off and I watched Hoyt and Alcantara race into the east bunker to claim the .50. Hoyt had the lead but Alcantara threw him out of the way and got there first and started firing. They took turns on the gun until the firefight died down and then they settled back in the bunker with cigarettes. They’d shot through so much ammo that the barrel was smoking and they had to pour oil on it to cool it down. Suddenly another burst came in. “Yes!” Hoyt whooped as he got back on the gun. “I knew this shit wasn’t over yet…”

  Most of the fighting was at four or five hundred yards, so no one ever got to see — or had to deal with — the effects of all that firepower on the human body. There were exceptions, though. One day Prophet called in saying they’d overheard enemy fighters discussing how they wouldn’t shoot at the Americans unless a patrol crossed to the east side of the valley. Soon afterward, Afghan soldiers at OP 3 spotted armed men in the riverbed and started shooting at them. The men fled up the flanks of the Abas Ghar and Third Platoon sent a patrol out of the KOP to give chase. The Americans took contact as soon as they crossed the river and found themselves badly pinned down behind a rock wall, and within seconds every American position in the valley opened up on the guys who were shooting at them. The KOP started dropping mortars and OP 3 engaged with a .50 cal and a Barrett sniper rifle, and the trucks opened up from above Babiyal, and Restrepo swung its 240s around and poured gunfire across the valley for almost an hour.

  It was a hot day and there hadn’t been much fighting lately, so when the men jumped on the guns most of them were only wearing flip-flops and shorts. They joked and laughed and called for cigarettes between bursts. Once in a while a round would crack past us, but mostly it was just a turkey shoot at a wide-open mountainside where the enemy had nowhere to hide. Hot brass was filling up the fighting positions and more was cascading down out of the weapons every second. At one point I watched a shell drop into Pemble’s untied shoe and he slipped it off, wiggled the shell out, and then slipped his shoe back on without ever stopping firing. The lieutenant was shirtless on the ammo hooch calling coordinates into the KOP and some of the Afghans were firing from the hip even though they didn’t stand a chance of hitting anything that way and Jackson was up on the guard position unloading one of the SAWs. Restrepo alone had to be putting out a thousand rounds a minute and the Abas Ghar was sparkling with bullet strikes even though it was broad daylight. Finally Hog showed up — Hog was the radio call sign for the A-10s — and dropped a couple of bombs on the mountain for good measure.

  At some point a call came in over the radio that the Scouts were watching a guy crawl around on the mountainside without a leg. They watched until he stopped moving and then they called in that he’d died. Everyone at Restrepo cheered. That night I couldn’t sleep and I crept out of my bunk and went and sat on the roof of the ammo hooch. It was a nice place to watch the heat lightning out along the Pech or to lie back on the sandbags and look up at the stars. I couldn’t stop thinking about that cheer; in some ways it was more troubling than all the killing that was going on. Stripped of all politics, the fact of the matter was that the man had died alone on a mountainside trying to find his leg. He must have been crazed with thirst and bewildered by the sheer amount of gunfire stitching back and forth across the ground looking for him. At one point or another every man in the platoon had been pinned down long enough to think they were going to die — bullets hitting around them, bodies braced for impact — and that’s with just one or two guns. Imagine a whole company’s worth of firepower directed at you. I got the necessity for it but I didn’t get the joy. It seemed like I either had to radically reunderstand the men on this hilltop or I had to acknowledge the power of a place like this to change them.

  “You’re thinking that this guy could have murdered your friend,” Steiner explained to me later. “The cheering comes from knowing that that’s someone we’ll never have to fight again. Fighting another human being is not as hard as you think when they’re trying to kill you. People think we were cheering because we just shot someone, but we were cheering because we just stopped someone from killing us. That person will no longer shoot at us anymore. That’s where the fiesta comes in.”

  Combat was a game that the United States had asked Second Platoon to become very good at, and once they had, the United States had put them on a hilltop without women, hot food, running water, communication with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that the men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. Society can give its young men almost any job and they’ll figure how to do it. They’ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it will get done. That only means that society should be careful about what it asks for. In a very crude sense the job of young men is to undertake the work that their fathers are too old for, and the current generation of American fathers has decided that a certain six-mile-long valley in Kunar Province needs to be brought under military control. Nearly fifty American soldiers have died carrying out those orders. I’m not saying that’s a lot or a little, but the cost does need to be acknowledged. Sold
iers themselves are reluctant to evaluate the costs of war (for some reason, the closer you are to combat the less inclined you are to question it), but someone must. That evaluation, ongoing and unadulterated by politics, may be the one thing a country absolutely owes the soldiers who defend its borders.

  There are other costs to war as well — vaguer ones that don’t lend themselves to conventional math. One American soldier has died for every hundred yards of forward progress in the valley, but what about the survivors? Is that territory worth the psychological cost of learning to cheer someone’s death? It’s an impossible question to answer but one that should keep getting asked. Ultimately, the problem is that they’re normal young men with normal emotional needs that have to be met within the very narrow options available on that hilltop. Young men need mentors, and mentors are usually a generation or so older. That isn’t possible at Restrepo, so a twenty-two-year-old team leader effectively becomes a father figure for a nineteen-year-old private. Up at Restrepo a twenty-seven-year-old is considered an old man, an effeminate Afghan soldier is seen as a woman, and new privates are called “cherries” and virtually thought of as children. Men form friendships that are not at all sexual but contain much of the devotion and intensity of a romance. Almost every relationship that occurs in open society exists in some compressed form at Restrepo, and almost every human need from back home gets fulfilled in some truncated, jury-rigged way. The men are good at constructing what they need from what they have. They are experts at making do.

  As for a sense of purpose, combat is it — the only game in town. Almost none of the things that make life feel worth living back home are present at Restrepo, so the entire range of a young man’s self-worth has to be found within the ragged choreography of a firefight. The men talk about it and dream about it and rehearse for it and analyze it afterward but never plumb its depths enough to lose interest. It’s the ultimate test, and some of the men worry they’ll never again be satisfied with a “normal life” — whatever that is — after the amount of combat they’ve been in. They worry that they may have been ruined for anything else.

  “I like the firefights,” O’Byrne admitted to me once. We’d been talking about going home and whether he was going to get bored. “I know,” he added, probably realizing how that sounded. “Saddest thing in the world.”

  We walk the steep hill from the KOP up to OP 1 at the end of the day, kicking through patches of crusty snow near the top and sweating heavily in our winter clothes. I’m with Lieutenant Steve Gillespie, the former leader of Third Platoon who has been switched to Second Platoon after a group of his soldiers were caught drinking at the KOP. (Family members were sending them care packages with bottles of mouthwash filled with vodka.) The switch wasn’t punishment so much as an attempt to shake things up. The men at the outpost are dirty and unshaved and have been freezing up there quietly since they ran out of heating oil a week ago. In summer the post is overrun with camel spiders and scorpions but now it’s just cold and silent and lifeless, four men with nothing to do but stare at the mountains and recalculate how much of the deployment they still have left.

  A patrol comes in from Obenau with a detainee who is dressed in nothing but a thin cotton shalwar kameez. He’s shaking with cold but for some reason keeps looking around and laughing. Maybe he can’t believe how rough the Americans are living. The patrol takes him on down to the KOP and we continue on the high trail to Restrepo with the wind picking up at the end of the day and monkeys screaming their outrage from the peaks. We don’t bother running the last stretch of road because there hasn’t been any shooting in the valley in weeks, and with snow-covered mountains all around us it’s hard not to think we’re just on some weird camping trip. Restrepo now has plywood bee huts fastened crookedly to the mountainside and a guard tower with a Mark 19 in it and a tiny two-man outpost a hundred yards outside the wire. The outpost is called Columbus and covers the draw below Restrepo. An all-out attack would probably take Columbus without difficulty, but the position would buy the men at Restrepo enough time to grab their guns and roll out the door.

  We walk into Restrepo and drop our packs in a pile. The sun has fired the Abas Ghar with a red glow and a few of the brighter planets are already infiltrating the afternoon sky. The men are standing around in dirty fleeces and their pants unbelted smoking cigarettes and watching another day come to an end. They’re dirty in their pores and under their nails and their skin has burnished to a kind of sheen at the wrists and neck where the uniforms rub. Dirt collects in the creases of the skin and shows up as strange webs at the corners of the eyes and their lifelines run black and unmistakable across the palms of their hands. It’s a camp of homeless men or hunters who have not reckoned with a woman in months and long since abandoned the niceties. They belch and fart and blow their noses on their sleeves and wipe their mouths on their shirtfronts and pack every sentence with enough profanity to last most civilians a week. After the fighting ended last fall they got so bored that they started prying boulders out of the hillside and rolling them into the valley. They were trying to get one inside the wire at Firebase Phoenix just to keep Third Platoon on their toes. Caldwell finally told them to knock it off.

  Gillespie takes command immediately. Patterson, the platoon sergeant, delivers a short, sharp speech making it clear that the problems with Third Platoon are no reflection on Gillespie and then hands it over to him. Everything about Gillespie is long: his torso, his legs, his neck, and he’s slightly pigeon-toed in a way that belies how tough he really is. Now he stands that way, lanky and awkward, in the dying gray light, taking command of arguably the most combat-intensive outpost in the entire U.S. military. “I’ve been down there with Third Platoon for the past five months so you guys have probably been seeing me around,” he says. “Pretty laid-back guy, like Sergeant Patterson says. I’ll watch you guys and we’ll go from there. You guys got any questions for me?”

  Jones raises his hand. There’s a strange expectation in the air, the men seem to be trying to not catch each other’s eyes. Gillespie has his hands jammed into his pockets so there’s nothing he could possibly do about what’s about to happen. “You ever seen the movie Blood In Blood Out, sir?” Jones asks.

  Pause.

  “Get him!” someone yells, and First Lieutenant Steve Gillespie disappears beneath a scrum of enlisted men. They quickly rack him out on the ground, pull up his shirt, and take turns smacking his abdomen as hard as they can. Donoho spits on his palm first so it will hurt more. Every man takes a turn and Patterson is offered a hit, though he declines, and then they help Gillespie back to his feet. Glasses askew, he slaps the dirt off himself and shakes his head, trying to laugh. I’ve just watched an officer in the U.S. military get overpowered and beaten by his men at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, and it occurs to me that not only is this not happening in other armies, it probably isn’t even happening at other outposts. The previous fall, O’Byrne and Sergeant Mac were trying to figure out how to welcome someone back after leave and the only thing they could think of was to beat the shit out of him, which is what they did. That started a tradition that even other platoons in Battle Company weren’t interested in emulating. “The guys I love the most I beat the worst,” O’Byrne explained. “It’s a sign of affection in the weirdest possible way. It’s the hard way, that’s what it is. They beat Lieutenant Piosa down so badly his face looked like he was getting tortured.”

  Gillespie was taking command of Second Platoon and it prompted a lot of talk up on the hill; it was serious business up here and the men knew a bad leader could easily get them killed. They weren’t that familiar with Gillespie beyond the fact that he bore a passing resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite, and a collective decision was made that fell so far outside of Army protocol no one even wanted to claim ownership of it. “Third Platoon wasn’t doing so hot,” O’Byrne told me months later, “so we had our doubts already — you know? So we said, ‘We’re going to beat the shit out of him and if he doesn’t take it, well
fuck it — then we just won’t listen to the motherfucker. If he can’t take a beating then he’s not part of Second Platoon anyway. He’s not part of what we’re about.’”

  It was a lot of tough talk but the truth was that the men respected Gillespie enormously, and roughing him up was their way of demonstrating that. A lesser officer would never have rolled with that situation, and lesser troops would never have even thought of it. It was about brotherhood, not discipline, and the command was smart enough to understand that and stay out of the way. “Man’s natural instinct is to survive,” Kearney said about Second Platoon. (Tim had just asked him whether they had “demons.”) “The boys don’t go out there and fight for freedom, they don’t fight for patriotism — they fight because they know that if they go out there alone and walk into Aliabad they’re going to get killed.”