was still two and a half hours’ walk back to the KOP. You could just tell on the guys’ faces, it wasn’t the right time to ask. You already knew what the answer was going to be. Some of them were walking around with bullet holes in their helmets.”
Brennan doesn’t survive surgery. Mendoza is dead before he even leaves the ridge. Five more men are wounded. Then there’s Rougle from the day before, as well as Rice and Vandenberge. It’s been a costly week. It’s been the kind of week that makes people back home think that maybe we’re losing the war.
4
O’BYRNE MISSED ROCK AVALANCHE BECAUSE HIS younger sister, Courtney, had been badly burned in a house fire and he rushed home to be with her. He left the Korengal with the understanding that she would probably not survive. He arrived in Syracuse, New York, and found the rest of his family in the hospital waiting room. He said he wanted to see her alone and then walked into her room and sat down by her bed. Courtney was semiconscious and had a tube down her throat and was hooked up to a respirator that had swelled her belly with air. The sight was too much for O’Byrne, and he broke down and started crying. He squeezed her hand and said, ‘Courtney, I love you, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.’ And she squeezed his hand back. And he said, ‘Squeeze my hand three times if you love me back,’ and she squeezed his hand once, twice, three times.
Her lungs were badly damaged by the fire and the doctors told the family that if she didn’t improve by a certain date she was almost certainly going to die. O’Byrne visited her in the hospital every day and tried to let the days tick by without going crazy. It was during that awful time that he got a call from a friend that something bad had happened on Rock Avalanche. It took some digging but he finally found out that Rougle, Brennan, and Mendoza were dead. Courtney was being treated at the VA hospital at the University of Syracuse, and he wandered around campus until he found a bar and then he sat down and started drinking. Someone asked him why he was getting drunk and he said, ‘I have a few friends who need a drink,’ and then he drank a pitcher of beer for each man who had died.
He headed back to the Korengal about a week later. Courtney was out of immediate danger, but it tormented O’Byrne that if he got killed, her last memory of him would be from a hospital bed. He passed through New York, and on a whim he called me from a bar where he was having dinner with two friends. It was strange to see him in civilian clothes and without a gun, and when I walked up he stood and shook my hand and then gave me a hug. He was wearing a blue T-shirt and a blue ghetto-style cap sideways and couldn’t focus his eyes.
“My boys got messed up,” he said. “Brennan got killed. Rougle got killed.”
We sat down and he asked me to tell him everything. All he knew were the names of the dead, and I asked him what kind of detail he wanted this in.
“Everything,” O’Byrne said. “Tell me everything you know.”
O’Byrne was most of the way through a bottle of red wine and his friends were drinking beers and shots of tequila. I apologized to them for taking the conversation back to the war and they said please, go ahead, and I told O’Byrne about how the enemy had opened up from one ridgeline and then snuck up another side and overran the hilltop. I told him about Rice and Vandenberge and how First Platoon had walked straight into an ambush on the Gatigal spur. It took O’Byrne a while to absorb this.
“And Mendoza’s a fuckin’ hero, right?” he said. “He’s an American hero, right?”
“Yeah, he’s a hero.”
“And Brennan was dead, right?” O’Byrne said. “I mean, they weren’t dragging him off alive, were they?”
I wasn’t sure what to say. Soldiers can seem pretty accepting of the idea that they might die in combat, but being taken alive is a different matter. “No, he didn’t die until later,” I said. “He was alive at the time.”
O’Byrne looked around the room. I tried to think what I should do if he started crying. He concentrated and gathered himself and finally asked how many enemy fighters were killed.
“They killed a lot,” I told him. “Like fifty. Thirty of them were Arabs. The A-10s really messed them up.”
“Yeah, kill those fuckers,” O’Byrne said. He repeated that a few times and took another drink. I asked him how he felt about going back.
“I got to get back there,” he said. “Those are my boys. Those are the best friends I’ll ever have.”
He was gripping my arm and trying to look at me, but his eyes kept needing to refocus. They never got it quite right. I got up to go, and O’Byrne stood up as well and hugged me several times. I wished him luck and told him I’d see him back out there in a month or two. On the way out I told Addie, the bar manager, that I’d like to pick up their check. Later she told me she had to shut them off after the next drink because O’Byrne fell out of his chair and the girl could hardly talk.
“He was so polite, though,” Addie said. “I mean, drunk as he was, he still took off his hat whenever I walked up.”
5
FORWARD OPERATING BASES ARE A SPECIAL KIND OF hell, none of the excitement of real war but all the ugliness: rows of plywood bee huts and weapons everywhere and Apaches jolting you awake at all hours running the flight line ten feet off the ground. Journalists usually moved around the theater on scheduled resupply flights, but even minor problems can ripple outward through the logistics web and leave you stuck at a FOB for days. At least Bagram had decent food and a huge PX; Jalalabad had absolutely nothing. In winter the wind drove you mad with the rattling of tent flaps and in summer it got so hot — 130 in the shade — that you almost couldn’t make it across the parade ground without drinking water. I stayed in the VIP tent, all the journalists did, and one afternoon I tried to escape the flamethrower heat by lying down on my bunk and going to sleep. I woke up so disoriented from dehydration that someone had to help me to another tent with better air-conditioning. There was nothing to do at JAF but hit your mealtimes and pray that if the enemy somehow mustered the nerve to attack it would be while you were stuck there and could report on it.
In the Korengal the soldiers never talked about the wider war — or cared — so it was hard to get a sense of how the country as a whole was faring. And the big bases had the opposite problem: since there was almost no combat, everyone had a kind of reflexive optimism that never got tested by the reality outside the wire. The public affairs guys on those bases offered the press a certain vision of the war, and that vision wasn’t
I thought of those as “Vietnam moments.” A Vietnam moment was one in which you weren’t so much getting misled as getting asked to participate in a kind of collective wishful thinking. Toward the end of my year, for example, the Taliban attacked an American base north of the Pech and killed nine American soldiers and wounded half the survivors. When I asked American commanders about it, their responses were usually along the lines of how it was actually an American
And we reporters had our own issues. Vietnam was
