Margins were so small and errors potentially so catastrophic that every soldier had a kind of de facto authority to reprimand others — in some cases even officers. And because combat can hinge on the most absurd details, there was virtually nothing in a soldier’s daily routine that fell outside the group’s purview. Whether you tied your shoes or cleaned your weapon or drank enough water or secured your night vision gear were all matters of public concern and so were open to public scrutiny. Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened suddenly — and out there, everything happened suddenly — the guy with the loose laces couldn’t be counted on to keep his feet at a crucial moment. It was the other man’s life he was risking, not just his own. Another time a couple of squads were lying in ambush outside Karingal and a man rolled to the side to urinate. You could smell it ten feet away, which meant he wasn’t well hydrated, and when Patterson caught a whiff he chewed the man out in an irritated growl. If you’re not hydrated you’re that much closer to being a heat casualty, and that could slow a patrol down long enough to get cornered and overrun. There was no such thing as personal safety out there; what happened to you happened to everyone.
The attention to detail at a base like Restrepo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences. Once I attended a shura at the KOP with a cast-off Army shirt that Anderson had given me, and when I left the building I forgot to take it with me. A few hours later I realized I couldn’t find it and went into a controlled panic: if one of the elders picked it up and gave it to an enemy fighter, that man would be able to use it to pass himself off as an American soldier. Potentially someone could get killed. Eventually I found the shirt, but it was clear from the looks I was getting that I’d fucked up pretty badly and that it had better not happen again.
Frontline soldiers have policed their own behavior at least since World War II and probably a lot longer than that. In a study of bravery conducted by the U.S. military in the forties, the author, Samuel Stouffer, had this to say about personal responsibility: “Any individual’s action which had conceivable bearing on the safety of others became a matter of public concern for the group as a whole. Isolated as he was from contact with the rest of the world, the combat man was thrown back on his outfit to meet the various affectional needs… that he would normally satisfy with his family and friends. The group was thus in a favored position to enforce its standards on the individual.”
In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out — can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose a sense of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don’t even make the connection; at Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore. It was tedious but it gave the stuff of one’s existence — the shoelaces and the water and the lost shirt — a riveting importance. Frankly, after you got used to living that way it was hard to go home.
There was carelessness and then there were real mistakes, and once it crossed that line, discipline came down from above and was relentless. Once I woke up in the middle of the night to grunts and shouting and went outside to find Staff Sergeant Alcantara smoking his entire squad. Whoever was on guard duty had let the batteries run down on a thermal sight called a PAS-13 that allowed them to scan the hillsides at night. On a dark night the PAS-13 was the only way they could see if the enemy was creeping close for a surprise attack, and dead batteries could literally put the base at risk of getting overrun. The best way to ensure that no one fucked up was to inflict collective punishment on the entire squad, because that meant everyone would be watching everyone else. Al had them out there in stress positions lifting sandbags and essentially eating dirt for so long that I finally just went back inside and went to sleep. The next morning I asked him if the punishment had wiped the slate clean — or was there some residual stigma that would take longer to erase?
“There are no hard feelings after everyone gets smoked,” he said. “They’re more pissed that they all let each other down. Once it’s over it’s over.”
With dark the cold comes down like some kind of court sentence and the men drift inside to sit around the diesel stoves until it’s time to go to sleep. Each squad built their own hooch from plywood and two-by-fours slung in by Chinook and the construction is straight ghetto: uninsulated plywood and gaps in the walls and strange patchwork solutions to elementary problems. Some colonel upstream decided that Restrepo would be an “outpost” rather than a “base,” so Second Platoon was restricted to using tools and materials that would barely have been adequate for a ten-year-old making a tree fort. They cut their wood with a four-inch folding Gerber saw and pulled nails out of old pieces of wood to reuse on new pieces of wood and leveled floors by guess and plumbed walls by eye. Third Squad didn’t dig out the hillside enough, so their hooch, nicknamed “the Submarine,” wound up so narrow that there was no room for the stove. It was stuck in a drafty alcove and barely raised the inside temperature above freezing. Weapons Squad built their hooch on an angle and then overcompensated with the angle of the bunks, which in turn were angled differently from the shelving and the roof. The result was an optical illusion that left you disoriented and not entirely sure where the horizon line was. You could put a marble on one of the bunks and swear to God it was rolling upward.
I’m staying with O’Byrne and the rest of First Squad. The bunks are plywood and stacked two high and the aisle between them is just wide enough for two men to pass turning sideways. Lying on your bunk you could reach out and touch three other men without much trouble. Weapons and full ammo racks hang from nails pounded into the walls and socks dry on “550 cord” that has been strung between rafters, and combat packs and boots and packages from home are stuffed under the bunks. Most of the men have photographs of women nailed to the walls — magazine photos, not personal ones; you wouldn’t really want to subject your girlfriend to that kind of scrutiny — and a few have blankets nailed over their bunk for privacy. Others simply escape with sleeping pills.
I take a lower bunk near the stove and unpack my gear. Around me the men are eating MREs and talking about their plans in the military, about the troubles in Third Platoon, about how everything fell apart once the fighting stopped. Friends started arguing and a sour discontent crept through the company that was almost as threatening to their mission as the enemy. The lull was much harder on group dynamics than combat and caught everyone by surprise, even the commanders. Prophet recently picked up radio chatter that a hundred men had come into the valley with the intention of overrunning Restrepo, but that almost seemed too good to be true.
“I hope they try it,” one guy told me; it was a common sentiment. “I hope they try it because if they do, they’re all going to die.”
One day a patrol goes down to Loy Kalay, searches the bazaar, and returns without even generating radio chatter. A squad-plus sets in an ambush on a south-facing hill just outside the wire but all they see are women collecting firewood. Another patrol turns up wires running to a 107 mm rocket hidden in a wood pile and an explosives team comes in by helicopter to blow it up. The men at Restrepo work slowly at odd jobs around the base and lift weights while the sun is still high and then break at the end of the day to sit on the ammo hooch smoking. At eight o’clock the generator cuts out and everyone goes to their bunks; after that, the only men awake are the ones at the guardposts. Sometimes it would occur to me how incredible — how very close to the experience of childhood — it is to be watched over by others while you slowly float off into sl
eep.
One evening Steiner and I are sitting around the heater and he’s telling me about his efforts to understand women. He wants to understand them so that he can sleep with them more easily. He has read everything he can on the topic, including books on feminism, and he favors what he calls the “cocky-funny” routine when talking to them, which is explained in one of his books. Steiner was a wrestler in high school and has sandy blond hair and a big wide-open smile and looks like he could easily carry a kitchen sink up a mountain. “He’s too pretty for himself,” was how First Sergeant Caldwell described him to me once. Steiner arrived in the Korengal a few months late, having spent the beginning of the deployment as a driver for the battalion sergeant major. He and I discuss women for a while and eventually Lambert shuffles in and looks around. Lambert’s new to the platoon and is from the South and has a slight stammer that he claims women fall for. He says he killed his first deer at age ten, and his father made him gut it and then take a bite of the raw heart (“ — and I’ve been stuttering ever since,” someone else jokingly finished the story for him).
Lambert says he’s going to start a landscaping business when he gets home and then he’s going to buy a backhoe and dig graves in cemeteries. “It’s guaranteed work because people die every day,” he says. “People die and it’s, like, five hundred dollars a grave and you can dig five or six graves in a day.”
I watch Steiner frown and consider this plan. It seems like there should be a catch but maybe there’s not; maybe earning a living really is that simple. Steiner is still thinking about it when Jackson and Monroe walk in. The first nickname Jackson got in the platoon was “Jacko,” but that was quickly changed to “Wacko.” Wacko made an impression early on by completing a twelve-mile road march on blisters that were so bad his boots filled with blood. Monroe’s nickname is “Money.” Money will barely speak for days at a time but looks around in ways that suggest he knows something no one else has figured out yet. Maybe he has. He’s lean and a little feral-looking and very tough. He makes a kind of bleating sound from time to time, a cross between a goat and a machine gun, and for a while he was hiding behind things at Restrepo and jumping out at unsuspecting men screaming, “WHAT’S UP MOTHERFUCKER?” The sudden boredom after fighting season ended affected everyone differently.
Lambert is still talking about gravedigging when O’Byrne walks in. He has his cap pulled low over his eyes and a quilted parka liner buttoned with just the top button and his face is smudged with dirt and his pants are ripped in three different places. O’Byrne arrived in the Army with a mustache and a full head of hair but by the time he got to the Korengal he’d shaved both off. During his two years in the service much of his hair had disappeared anyway. (“The Army stole my hair,” he liked to say. “But who needs fucking hair?”) He leans against one of the bunks and announces that he’s going to write a book about his life one day. Someone asks him why.
“Because of all the interesting shit that’s happened,” he says.
“Like what?”
“Like for starters, I was shot by my father.”
No one says a word.
“When I was a kid me and my dad liked to drink a lot,” O’Byrne continues, and someone laughs. O’Byrne’s head swivels around.
“That’s just not a sentence you hear very often,” Steiner explains.
That seems to satisfy O’Byrne, who goes on to explain how his father came to shoot him. “But everything happens for a reason, I surely do believe that,” he concludes. “If my dad hadn’t shot me I wouldn’t have joined the Army — and wouldn’t be where I am right now.”
He says this without a trace of irony. There is a complicated silence in the room.
“Well, I’m not buyin’ your fuckin’ book,” Money finally says.
Months later, O’Byrne told me the whole terrible story. I already knew he’d grown up in a small town, and I asked if he’d ever hunted as a kid. He said once he killed a salamander and felt so guilty he never killed anything again.
“But I’ve always had guns… my dad always had guns,” O’Byrne said. “He raised me — which is fucking weird, but we’ll get to that — he raised me to respect weapons and never point them at anybody. Both of us failed that fucking miserably. I was a bad kid in high school, I was a fucking punk — I did not know how to be a nice kid. My dad just drank and drank and drank. So one night, for my buddy’s birthday, this girl came over and we got a gallon of vodka. Vodka is not good for me, it makes me violent as shit. I drank probably half a gallon, I was fucking obliterated, I was smashed. I get home and the first thing I see is my dad. I walk through the door and he’s fucking screaming at me. He swings. I swing. We start fighting. This fight goes on and on — I mean we fought for a long time. All my friends were trying to hold me back. Someone hit me with a two-by-four just trying to calm me down.”
The fight eventually broke up and O’Byrne went to his room. After a while he heard his father yelling again, so he went back downstairs and started walking back and forth in front of his father’s bedroom door, screaming at him. Suddenly his hip gave out and the next thing he knew he was lying in the hallway and his leg didn’t work. He didn’t hear gunshots or feel any pain and he thought he’d somehow dislocated his hip. Then his father came out of the bedroom and pointed a rifle at his head. It was O’Byrne’s favorite gun, a semiautomatic Ruger with a folding stock, and O’Byrne said, ‘So you’re going to shoot me when I’m down?’ and his father said, ‘I already did.’
“I was too drunk to realize what was going on, so I go upstairs, I walk up two flights of stairs and I start playing video games and then I go lay down because I’m losing blood. I’m crying now because I realize what’s going on and I’m in some fucking trouble now, I have two fucking bullets in me. This is not good. This is not a good situation.”
An ambulance finally arrived and O’Byrne was taken to a hospital in Scranton. He had one bullet in his hip and another in the small of his back less than an inch from his spinal column. After doctors finished operating on him a cop showed up and asked for a statement. O’Byrne thought about it: whatever his father’s problems, he’d always held down a job and provided for the family, and if he went to prison, there’d be no one to take care of the family. That would compound an already terrible situation. ‘It was my fault,’ O’Byrne told the cop. ‘He did it in self-defense.’
“My father wouldn’t have made it through jail — he’s not a violent person. The situation was violent but he’s not. So I was three days in the hospital and then they sent me to lockup — no rehab, nothing. I was charged with simple assault. I was a pussy in there, man, like, I didn’t try to fight anyone. It was the best thing — but the worst thing — that ever happened to me. My father and I put ourselves in that position to be fucking evil to each other. It’s a tough story but it’s a good one, too. How dare I hit my father — even if he hit me? If he popped me in my nose right now I’d look at him and I’d be like, ‘All right, I’m going downstairs and I’ll give you time to cool off.’ I’ll never hit that man again. That was my fault — you know? I didn’t have the respect. It’s a story of triumph. It’s a story of going through some hard shit and making out really good. I know bullets can’t stop me now. Fucking bullets are okay.”
7
I GO TO SLEEP ONE NIGHT MENTALLY PREPARED FOR a twenty-four-hour operation called Dark City, but at three in the morning Donoho comes through the hooch announcing that it’s been canceled because of the weather. Third Platoon was going to cross over to the far side of the valley, and Second Platoon was going to support them from Table Rock with a lot of firepower. We all roll over and go back to sleep and the next time I wake up it’s full light and Jones is sitting on a bunk eating an MRE. Jones ordinarily sleeps in the Submarine, but last night was so cold that he moved in with us. He’s picking the mushrooms out of his Thai Chicken and muttering to no one in particular, “Not a big fan of mushrooms. Only people you ever see eating mushrooms are white folks. ‘What you w
ant on your pizza, sir?’ ‘Mushrooms.’ ‘What else do you want on your pizza?’ ‘More mushrooms.’”
The door opens and O’Byrne walks in. He’s looking for Money, who’s still asleep in his bunk. O’Byrne sits next to him and puts him in a headlock. “I just don’t understand,” he says. “If you were Hajj, why would you want to wake up in the morning and shoot at us?”
Money doesn’t answer. He’s not interested in this conversation. “Money, why would Hajj want to do that? Why would he climb up onto the hilltops to start shooting at us?”
The immediate answer was that we built a firebase in their backyard, but there was more to the question than that. Once in a while you’d forget to think of the enemy as the enemy and would see them for what they were: teenagers up on a hill who got tired and cold just like the Americans and missed their families and slept poorly before the big operations and probably had nightmares about them afterward. Once you thought about them on those terms it was hard not to wonder whether the men themselves — not the American and Taliban commanders but the actual guys behind the guns — couldn’t somehow sit down together and work this out. I’m pretty sure the Taliban had a healthy respect for Second Platoon, at least as fighters, and once in a while I’d hear someone in Second Platoon mumble a kind of grudging approval of the Taliban as well: they move like ghosts around the mountains and can fight all day on a swallow of water and a handful of nuts and are holding their own against a brigade of U.S. airborne infantry. As a military feat that’s nothing to sneeze at. The sheer weirdness of this war — of any war — can never entirely be contained and breaks through at odd moments:
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