War

was playing by big-boy rules up there, which essentially means making your interests secondary to those of the group no matter how much it costs you.

“There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other,” O’Byrne told me one morning. We were sitting in ambush above the village of Bandeleek listening to mortars shriek over our heads, and there wasn’t much to do but flinch and talk about the platoon. “But they would also die for each other. So you kind of have to ask, ‘How much could I really hate the guy?’”

Around midmorning a squad of Scouts comes walking in through the wire, uniforms plastered to their bodies and sweat running off the ends of their noses. Second Platoon has been hacking away at the hillside all morning and the men pause at their shovels and pickaxes to greet them. Guttie was MEDEVACed last night without incident and it has been quiet all morning, which may simply mean the enemy is out of ammunition. The Scouts have a different vibe from the regular line soldiers, leaner and quieter, and they seem to carry a little less gear. Their job is to patrol beyond anywhere line infantry would go and then report back what they see. Sometimes they’ll set in for days at a time and just watch. They’re not supposed to get into firefights, and when they do engage, it’s often just a single shot from a sniper rifle.

The squad leader is a short, strong-looking man with dark eyes and jet-black hair named Larry Rougle. Rougle has done six combat tours in six years and is known in Battle Company as a legendary badass and some kind of ultimate soldier. Once Phoenix got hit and Rougle and his men grabbed their weapons at the KOP and ran down there so fast that Piosa was still on the radio calling in the attack when they walked in the wire. You couldn’t even get there that fast in a Humvee. Rougle talks to Piosa in the bunker while his men pour bottled water down their throats and half an hour later they form up and Tim and I grab our packs and follow them out of the wire. We contour around the draw until we reach OP 1, which sits on a promontory west of the KOP. It’s only manned by four men at a time and it’s almost impossible to attack, so there’s nothing for the men to do up there but wave away the flies and think about how many months they have left. When we arrive Rougle stands on a bunker and looks eastward toward the Abas Ghar.

“Everything you can see,” he says to me, “I’ve walked on.”

6

DAWN AT THE KOP: ONE LAST PLANET LIKE A PINHOLE in the sky, crows rising on the valley thermals. The sun about to crack open the day from beyond the Abas Ghar. I’m sitting on the broken office chair outside the hooch waiting to see what will happen. Kearney has ordered stand-to at zero hundred hours — 4:30 a.m. local — because there’s intel the enemy may attack the KOP and try to breach the wire. Men are shuffling around, fumbling for their weapons. Stand-to means you get dressed and geared up and if you don’t get attacked you can go back to sleep. The men sleep as much as they can, every chance they get, far beyond the needs of the human body. “If you sleep twelve hours a day it’s only a seven-month deployment,” one soldier explained.

The day broadens and no attack comes. I walk up to the operations center to talk to Kearney, who is half asleep at his desk. Third Platoon will be going onto the Abas Ghar in a couple of days and Tim and I are going with them. (Jones: “Personally, I wouldn’t follow them into a Dairy Queen.”) Around midafternoon a sniper on the ridge above Restrepo starts shooting into the KOP; it’s not the attack that was expected but it’s enough to get everyone’s attention. When the men move around the base they sprint the open sections until, ka- SHAAH, another round cracks past and they stop behind a Hesco. (Soldiers spend a good deal of time trying to figure out how to reproduce the sound of gunfire verbally, and “ka-SHAAH” was the word Second Platoon seemed to have settled on.) I’m sitting in the broken office chair outside the hooch, which has pretty good cover, watching Tim make his way to the burn-shitters. He runs to a tree, lurks there for a moment, and then runs to the next tree. If you didn’t know about the sniper you’d think he was doing some comic routine of an Englishman gone completely mad in the noonday sun.

Snipers have the power to make even silence unnerving, so their effectiveness is way out of proportion to the number of rounds they shoot. The KOP’s mortars eventually start up, great explosions that crash through the base and then rumble back to us from the mountaintops. They may have killed the guy, but I doubt it, and in the end it doesn’t even matter; it’s just one man with a rifle and ten dollars’ worth of ammunition. He doesn’t even need to hit anyone to be effective: helicopters aren’t flying into the valley and thirty or forty men spend the afternoon behind sandbags trying to figure out whether they’re getting shot at by a Russian- made Dragunov or an old Enfield .308. Once I was at the operations center when single shots started coming in, and First Sergeant Caldwell headed for the door to deal with it. On his way out I asked him what was going on. “Some jackass wastin’ our time,” he said.

That jackass was probably a local teenager who was paid by one of the insurgent groups to fire off a magazine’s worth of ammo at the KOP. The going rate was five dollars a day. He could fire at the base until mortars started coming back at him and then he could drop off the back side of the ridge and be home in twenty minutes. Mobility has always been the default choice of guerrilla fighters because they don’t have access to the kinds of heavy weapons that would slow them down. The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound — even defeat — a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history. Whether that is a good thing or not depends on what amateurs you’re talking about — or what empires — but it does mean that you can’t predict the outcome of a war simply by looking at the numbers.

For every technological advantage held by the Americans, the Taliban seemed to have an equivalent or a countermeasure. Apache helicopters have thermal imaging that reveals body heat on the mountainside, so Taliban fighters disappear by covering themselves in a blanket on a warm rock. The Americans use unmanned drones to pinpoint the enemy, but the Taliban can do the same thing by watching the flocks of crows that circle American soldiers, looking for scraps of food. The Americans have virtually unlimited firepower, so the Taliban send only one guy to take on an entire firebase. Whether or not he gets killed, he will have succeeded in gumming up the machine for yet one more day. “Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult,” the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the 1820s. “The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction.”

That friction is the entire goal of the enemy in the valley; in some ways it works even better than killing. Three days later we’re in the mechanics’ bay waiting for the Pech resupply to come in, two Chinooks that run a slow route through the northeast every four days picking up men and dropping off food and ammo. Tim and I are leaving the valley, and the Pech is our way out. The men are on edge because the sniper has been at it all morning, and when the first Chinook comes in, it immediately takes fire from across the valley. A bullet goes up the gunner’s sleeve without breaking his skin and exits through the fuel tank. It was supposedly his first combat mission. After a while a Black Hawk makes it in and drops off the battalion commander, Colonel Ostlund, who strides across the LZ flanked by several officers and two Al Jazeera journalists in powder-blue ballistic vests. One of the officers sees us crouched behind the Hescos and realizes that something must be up. “DO WE HAVE A SITUATION HERE?” he shouts over the rotor noise.

Once again, a couple of guys with rifles have managed to jam up an entire company’s worth of infantry. Ostlund and his staff get back on the Black Hawk and head across the valley for Firebase Vegas. I’m standing next to a tall Marine named Cannon who tells me that the war here is way more intense than most people understand. While we’re talking the shooting starts up again, a staccato hammering that I now recognize as the .50 out at Vegas. Cannon is wearing a radio and gets a communication on the company net that I can’t quite understand.

“Vegas is in a TIC,” he says.

The mortars start firing and an A-10 tilts into its dive and starts working the Abas Ghar with its chain guns. A minute later Cannon’s radio squawks again. “One wounded at Vegas,” he repeats for me, and then, “The platoon sergeant was shot in the neck, he’s not breathing.”

Hunter, who is standing near us, overhears this and walks away. He’s a team leader in First Platoon and knows the sergeant well. His name is Matt Blaskowski, and he’s already received a Silver Star for dragging a wounded comrade to safety during a six-hour firefight in Zabul. A while later Cannon gets another radio update.