The only men I ever saw pray at Restrepo were Afghans, and the topic of religion came up only once the entire time I was out there. It was a beautiful evening in the spring and we were sitting on the ammo hooch smoking cigarettes and talking about a recent TIC. One by one the men left until I was alone with Sergeant Alcantara, who decided to tell me about a recent conversation he’d had with the battalion chaplain. Heat lightning was flashing silently over the valley and we could hear Apaches working something farther north along the Pech.
‘Father, basically God came down to earth and in the form of Christ and died for our sins — right?’ Al asked.
The chaplain nodded.
‘And he died a painful death, but he knew he was going to heaven — right?’
Again the chaplain nodded.
‘So how is that sacrifice greater than a soldier in this valley who has no idea whether he’s going to heaven?’
According to Al, the chaplain had no useful response.
Religion gives a man enough courage to face the overwhelming, and there may have been so little religion at Restrepo because the men didn’t feel particularly overwhelmed. (Why appeal to God when you can call in Apaches?) You don’t haul your cook up there just so that he can be in his first firefight unless you’re pretty confident it’s going to end well. But even in the early days, when things were definitely not ending well, the nearly narcotic effect of a tightly knit group might have made faith superfluous. The platoon was the faith, a greater cause that, if you focused on it entirely, made your fears go away. It was an anesthetic that left you aware of what was happening but strangely fatalistic about the outcome. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever.
Heroism is hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self — you’re prepared to lose your own life for the sake of others — so in that sense, talking about how brave you were may be psychologically contradictory. (Try telling a mother she was brave to run into traffic to save her kid.) Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered “bravery.” Soldiers see it the other way around: either you’re doing your duty or you’re a coward. There’s no other place to go. In 1908, five firemen died in a blaze in New York City. Speaking at the funeral, Chief Ed Croker had this to say about their bravery: “Firemen are going to get killed. When they join the department they face that fact. When a man becomes a fireman his greatest act of bravery has been accomplished. What he does after that is all in the line of work.”
You don’t have to be a soldier to experience the weird comfort of that approach. Courage seems daunting and hard to attain, but “work” is mundane and eminently doable, a collective process where everyone takes their chances. My work was journalism, not war, but the same principles applied. I was constantly monitoring my fear levels because I didn’t want to freeze up at the wrong moment and create a problem, but it never happened, and after a couple of trips I felt my fear just kind of go away. It wasn’t that I was less afraid of dying; it was that dying made slightly more sense in the context of a group endeavor that I was slowly becoming part of. As a rule I was way more scared in my bunk at night, when I had the luxury of worrying about myself, than on some hillside where I’d worry about us all.
Because I didn’t carry a gun I would always be relegated to a place outside the platoon, but that didn’t mean I was unaffected by its gravitational pull. There was a power and logic to the group that overrode everyone’s personal concerns, even mine, and somewhere in that loss of self could be found relief from the terrible worries about what might befall you. And it was pretty obvious that if things got bad enough — and there was no reason to think they couldn’t — the distinction between journalist and soldier would become irrelevant. A scenario where I found myself stuffing Kerlix into a wound or helping pull someone to safety was entirely plausible, and that forced me to think in ways that only soldiers usually have to. When Chosen got hit at Aranas they suffered a 100 percent casualty rate in a matter of minutes, and the firefight went on for another three hours. The idea that I wouldn’t start helping — or fighting — in that situation was absurd.
The offers of weapons started on my first trip and continued throughout the entire year. Sometimes it was a hand grenade “just in case.” Other times it was an offer to jump on the 240 during the next contact. (“We’ll just show you where to shoot.”) Once I told Moreno that if I weren’t married I’d have been out there the full fifteen months, and he laughed and said that in that case, they’d definitely have me carrying a weapon. The idea of spending long stretches in the Korengal without shooting anything made as little sense to the soldiers as, say, going to a Vicenza whorehouse and just hanging out in the lobby. Guns were the point, the one entirely good thing of the whole shitty year, and the fact that reporters don’t carry them, shoot them, or accept the very generous offers to “go ahead and get some” on the .50 just made soldiers shake their heads. It was a hard thing to explain to them that maybe you could pass someone a box of ammo during a firefight or sneak 100 rounds on a SAW down at the firing range, but as a journalist the one thing you absolutely could not do was carry a weapon. It would make you a combatant rather than an observer, and you’d lose the right to comment on the war later with any kind of objectivity.
To refuse a weapon was one thing, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t know anything about them. One hot, boring afternoon in the middle of the spring fighting season, Sergeant Al decided that Tim and I should be able to load and shoot every weapon at the outpost, and clear them if they jammed. We went over to the Afghan hooch and started with an AK. It was light and cheap-feeling, as if it were made out of tin, and Al said it has no internal recoil, so the entire force of the discharge goes straight into your shoulder. That makes it highly inaccurate after the first shot in a burst but mechanically so simple that it requires virtually no maintenance. You could hide it under a rock and come back six months later and it would still shoot.
The M4 fires a much smaller bullet, which means you can carry more ammunition for the same weight, but it’s not accurate over distance and tends to jam. Several times I’ve been in firefights where the man next to me was swearing and desperately trying to clear his weapon. The SAW was the smallest belt-fed weapon at Restrepo and had such a simple design that a monkey could have operated it. You pop open the feed-tray cover, lay the ammo belt into the receiver, slap the cover closed, and pull back the charging bolt; now you’re ready to fire 900 rounds a minute. The 240 is almost identical but larger and slower and the .50 is larger still, a barrel you could stick your thumb down and rounds the size of railroad spikes. With the .50 you could hit virtually anything in the valley you could see. During the Vietnam War, an American gunner supposedly attached a telescopic sight to his .50 and, with a single shot, knocked a messenger off a bicycle at two miles. It’s such a perfect weapon that the design has not changed in any meaningful way since World War I.
As a reporter it was hard to come to any kind of psychological accommodation with the weapons because they were everywhere — you couldn’t sit on someone’s bunk without moving an M4 or some grenades — and they only got more compelling as time went on. They had a kind of heavy perfection that made them impossible to ignore. What you really wanted to do was use them somehow, but that was so wildly forbidden that it took you a while to even admit you’d had the thought. After that you’d find yourself trying to imagine situations where it might be permissible without the obvious ethical problems. The only one I could come up with was a scenario that was so desperate and out of control — a hundred Taliban fighters coming up the draw and through the wire — that picking up a gun would be simply a matter of survival. That was too horrific to actually hope for, so I didn’t, but I’d find myself thinking that
if it were to happen, I hoped I’d be there for it.
It’s a foolish and embarrassing thought but worth owning up to. Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they’re looking for. Not killing, necessarily — that couldn’t have been clearer in my mind — but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you’ve been exposed to it, there’s almost nothing else you’d rather do. The only reason anyone was alive at Restrepo — or at Aranas or at Ranch House or, later, at Wanat — was because every man up there was willing to die defending it. In Second Platoon Tim and I were the only ones who benefited from that arrangement for “free,” as it were, and it’s hard to overstate the psychological significance of that. (Once Tim found himself throwing ammo to a couple of guys who were stuck behind a Hesco during a fight, but that was as close as we ever got to actually doing anything.) There was a debt that no one registered except the men who owed it.
Collective defense can be so compelling — so addictive, in fact — that eventually it becomes the rationale for why the group exists in the first place. I think almost every man at Restrepo secretly hoped the enemy would make a serious try at overrunning the place before the deployment came to an end. It was everyone’s worst nightmare but also the thing they hoped for most, some ultimate demonstration of the bond and fighting ability of the men. For sure there were guys who re-upped because something like that hadn’t happened yet. After the men got back to Vicenza, I asked Bobby Wilson if he missed Restrepo at all.
“I’d take a helicopter there tomorrow,” he said. Then, leaning in, a little softer: “Most of us would.”
3
NOTHING FOR WEEKS BUT THE OMINOUS BUILDUP of ammo in the valley and enemy commanders saying strange, enigmatic things into their radios. “I’ll bring the Dishka and the milk,” a commander radioed once, though no one knew whether that was code for something or he was actually bringing real milk somewhere. According to the radio chatter there are a dozen mortar rounds in the valley, ammo for an 88 mm recoilless, and even some Katyusha rockets. In 2000 I’d gone through a Taliban rocket attack with a group of Tajik fighters in the north, and it was nothing I ever wanted to repeat. The rockets came in with a shrieking whistle that made me weird about teakettles and subway brakes for years.
One morning Patterson leads a patrol along the high road and then up the western spur through sweet-smelling sage and past an enemy fighting position littered with old brass. From there we could see over the tops of the Hescos straight into Restrepo. Patterson calls in the grid numbers to the KOP so the mortars hit it next time they take fire from that direction, and we continue climbing. We come out on a summit known as Peak One that the Americans and the Taliban more or less share. “When we’re up here it’s ours and as soon as we leave it’s theirs,” Mac says. There are American fighting positions facing south toward Yaka Chine and Taliban positions facing north toward the KOP. All of them are filled with garbage.
A monkey watches us at a safe distance from a rock, and someone says that if it’s holding a radio we can shoot it. We sit for a while looking south toward Yaka Chine and eventually we descend to a little plateau where the enemy has set up more fighting positions. Nothing moves in the valley and we continue off the plateau and down the spur back to Restrepo. It’s not even noon when we walk in the south gate and drop our gear and strip off our shirts. We sit on the ammo hooch drinking Gatorade and playing with Airborne, and after a while a single boom rolls through the valley.
“Road construction,” Patterson says.
I’m already lunging for my vest and helmet and I sit back down a little sheepishly. Another boom rolls past and everyone looks at each other. A third boom.
“That’s not road construction,” someone says.
Vegas is getting shelled and Dallas is getting hit and the KOP starts taking fire from the north. I crawl up to the LRAS position to watch mortars drop into the northern Abas Ghar and I’m up there for a few minutes with Cantu when rounds start snapping above our heads. Soon Mac scrambles up alongside us with a 240 and starts lighting up the Donga and Marastanau spurs and then Olson brings up another one to hit the ridges to the south and finally Bone arrives to start dropping bombs. Bone is the radio call sign for the B-1 bombers; they fly so high you can’t see or hear them, but the forward observer will say something like “bombs incoming,” and then you become aware of a strange, airy, rushing sound. Then a flash, a boil of smoke unfolding like a dirty flower across the valley, and finally a shuddering compression of air that reaches you seconds later.
Bone drops bombs to the south and east and the shooting stops and the men sit around smoking cigarettes and waiting to see what will happen. Most of them went through the firefight shirtless and a few didn’t even bother putting on their helmet or armor. After a while Lambert pokes his head up through the cutout to the .50 cal pit and says, “They just got radio chatter saying, ‘Go back to your positions and fire again.’”
Mac’s made himself comfortable against the sandbags and doesn’t even bother getting up. “Apparently we didn’t do enough damage to them and they want some more,” he says. “They want their seventy-two virgins.”
Prophet says a group of foreign fighters has just come into the valley, and local commanders wanted to provide them with a good fight. And once the foreigners use up their ammo they’ll have to pay locals to carry more from Pakistan, so there’s even a financial incentive to keep shooting. Sometimes the fight in the valley could seem like a strange, slow game that everyone — including the Americans — were enjoying too much to possibly bring to an end.
Half an hour later another convulsion of firepower sweeps through the American positions. Olson pins someone down with his 240 on Spartan Spur and I can stand directly behind him, his shoulder vibrating with the recoil, and watch tracers arc and wobble across the draw and finger their way around the ridge. Now it’s dusk and the men sit in the courtyard, faces still dirt-streaked from the patrol, talking about the TIC. It’s the best thing that’s happened in weeks, and there probably won’t be another like it for at least that long. Murphy starts wondering aloud which side the sherbet spoon goes on at a formal table setting. He is a forward observer and is still amped from having spent the afternoon calling in corrections to 2,000-pound bomb strikes. He’s from a well-off family and had already made the mistake of telling the others that he’d gone to etiquette school.
“Sherbet spoons? Are you fucking kidding me?” Moreno says. Moreno grew up in Beeville, Texas, and worked as a corrections officer at a state prison.
“Like when you go to a country club or something,” Murphy says.
“Well that explains it.”
Murphy ignores him and tells a story about how his grandfather built him a train set when he was young. It’s hard to know if this is a misguided attempt to impress or some strange eruption of post-TIC openness.
“Well, my grandfather was shot in a bar fight,” Moreno says. “Different fuckin’ lives.”
Mefloquine dreams, the unwelcome glimpses into your psyche that are produced by the malaria medication everyone takes. The medic distributes the pills every Monday, and that night is always the worst: I’m sawing someone in half with a carpentry saw for no reason that I can explain; I’m choking with sorrow and remorse over something that ended twenty-five years ago; I’m preparing for combat and the men around me are glancing at each other, like, “This is it, brother, see you on the other side.” I always wake up without moving, my eyes suddenly wide open in the darkness. Men snoring softly around me and the generator thumping in some kind of frantic heartbeat. The side effects of mefloquine include severe depression, paranoia, aggression, nightmares, and insomnia. Those happen to be the side effects of combat as well. I go back to sleep and wake up the next morning edgy and weird.
There are two months left to the deployment and the men devise all k
inds of ways to quantify that: number of patrols, number of KOP rotations, number of mefloquine Mondays. It’s starting to dawn on them that they’ll probably never walk to the top of Honcho Hill again or get dropped onto the Abas Ghar. When they’re down at the KOP they use the communal laptops to try to arrange girlfriends for themselves when they get back. The men who already have girlfriends arrange to have them stock up on beer, steak, whatever they’ve been craving for the past year. The men will fly into Aviano Air Base, take a two-hour bus ride to Vicenza, turn in their weapons, and then form up on a parade ground called Hoekstra Field. As soon as they’re discharged they can do whatever they want. The drinking starts immediately and continues until unconsciousness and then resumes whenever and wherever the men wake up. They find themselves at train stations and on sidewalks and in police stations and occasionally at the medical facilities. In past years one drunken paratrooper was struck by a train and killed and another died of an overdose. They’d made it through the dangers of combat and died within sight of their barracks in Vicenza.
“Y’all will only be remembered for the last thing you ever did,” Caldwell warned them one warm spring night. He’d hiked up to Restrepo to make sure the men were all squared away for the return home, and he left them with his own story about why he quit drinking. (“My kids were upset, my wife wasn’t talking to me… I just told her, ‘Don’t worry, it’s taken care of,’ and I never drank again.”)
With summer come the twin afflictions of heat and boredom. A poor wheat harvest creates a temporary food shortage in the valley, which means the enemy has no surplus cash with which to buy ammo. Attacks drop to every week or two — not nearly enough to make up for the general shittiness of the place. The men sleep as late as they can and come shuffling out of their fly-infested hooches scratching and farting. By midmorning it’s over a hundred degrees and the heat has a kind of buzzing slowness to it that alone almost feels capable of overrunning Restrepo. It’s a miraculous kind of antiparadise up here: heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait. It’s so hot that the men wander around in flip-flops and underwear, unshaved and foul. Airborne panting in the shade, someone burning shit out back, a feeble breeze making the concealment netting billow and subside like a huge lung.
War Page 18