War

the valley before dark. “I think we’re going to get hit today,” the driver of my Humvee says as he climbs into his seat. We jolt through Nagalam and then cross the Pech on a narrow bridge and enter the mouth of the Korengal. The road is excruciatingly narrow and if you look out the window you can see straight down to the bottom of the canyon several hundred feet below. It’s easier to just look straight ahead and think about something else. After half an hour Thyng points to a ridge up ahead and says that after we pass that, things are going to get interesting.

“All right, keep it good right now,” Thyng tells the gunner as we roll into a draw on the far side of the ridge. Creeks run down the creases of the draws, and where the road passes there, the dirt is always moist and easy to dig into. And some of the draws are too deep to observe from any of the American outposts in the valley, so they are a natural spot for an ambush. “Once we get into that lip I want you to scan high, all right?” Thyng continues telling the gunner. “The first thing that will come in on this bitch will be fuckin’ RPGs, okay?”

“Roger,” the gunner says.

“If that happens they’re going to miss, so just look where they came from and fuck it up, all right?”

“Roger.”

I concentrate on running the camera. That is the easiest way to avoid thinking about the fact that what you’re filming could kill you.

“All right, you stay in there,” Captain Thyng tells the gunner. “We’re going to pull up around that corner — ”

And that’s as far as he gets.

• • •

The idea that there are rules in warfare and that combatants kill each other according to basic concepts of fairness probably ended for good with the machine gun. A man with a machine gun can conceivably hold off a whole battalion, at least for a while, which changes the whole equation of what it means to be brave in battle. In World War I, when automatic weapons came into general use, heavy machine gunners were routinely executed if their position was overrun because they caused so much death. (Regular infantry, who were thought to be “fighting fairly,” were often spared.) Machine guns forced infantry to disperse, to camouflage themselves, and to fight in small independent units. All that promoted stealth over honor and squad loyalty over blind obedience.

In a war of that nature soldiers gravitate toward whatever works best with the least risk. At that point combat stops being a grand chess game between generals and becomes a no-holds-barred experiment in pure killing. As a result, much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.

There are two ways to tilt the odds in an otherwise fair fight: ambush the enemy with overwhelming force or use weapons that cannot be countered. The best, of course, is to do both. I had a lot of combat nightmares at Restrepo — I think everyone did — and they were invariably about being helpless: guns were jamming, the enemy was everywhere, and no one knew what was going on. In military terms, that’s a perfect ambush. Once I watched an Apache helicopter corner a Taliban fighter named Hayatullah on an open hillside and kill him. He had nowhere to run and on the second burst he was hit by a 30 mm round and exploded. There was nothing fair about it, but Hayatullah was the leader of a cell that detonated roadside bombs in the valley, and one could argue there wasn’t much fair about his line of work either. I later asked O’Byrne if he could imagine what it must feel like to be targeted by an Apache, and he just shook his head. We were talking about combat trauma, and I said that anyone who survived something like that had to have some pretty horrific nightmares. “I goddamn hope so,” O’Byrne said.

Taliban fighters in the Korengal switched to roadside bombs because they were losing too many men in firefights. And it was also creating problems with the locals: when Taliban fighters first started attacking American patrols, the Americans didn’t necessarily know where to shoot back. By the end of the summer, locals were pointing enemy positions out to the Americans just so they would aim in the right direction. Roadside bombs avoided those problems. They were cheap, low-risk, and didn’t get civilians killed. I doubt many villagers actually wanted Americans to get blown up, but few of them cared enough to walk up to the KOP and tell the soldiers where bombs had been dug in. This fight was between the Taliban and the Americans and the villagers more or less stayed out of it.

The first major bomb strike in the Korengal came two days after Christmas. Destined Company had mounted units scattered throughout the battalion firebases, and four of these trucks had taken up positions to support a foot patrol that had come down from Restrepo. One of the Humvees was in the middle of a three-point turn when an antitank mine detonated beneath it and blew the turret gunner, Jesse Murphree, so far down the hill that at first no one even realized he was gone. The rest of the crew suffered concussions and broken bones. The Humvee was immediately swallowed by flames, and while they tried to put it out Hijar and Buno and Richardson of Second Platoon climbed downslope to look for Murphree. They found him several hundred feet away, semiconscious and both his legs turned to jelly. They put tourniquets on him so he wouldn’t bleed out and helped carry him up to the road and slide him into a Humvee. Murphree knew he was badly hurt but didn’t yet realize his legs were gone. He kept asking his squad leader, Staff Sergeant Alcantara, if he could still go to the Alcantaras’ wedding after they all got back to Italy.

The enemy now had a weapon that unnerved the Americans more than small-arms fire ever could: random luck. Every time you drove down the road you were engaged in a twisted existential exercise where each moment was the only proof you’d ever have that you hadn’t been blown up the moment before. And if you were blown up, you’d probably never know it and certainly wouldn’t be able to affect the outcome. Good soldiers died just as easily as sloppy ones, which is pretty much how soldiers define unfair tactics in war. Halfway through the deployment, Battle Company took over Destined’s trucks and ran mounted patrols out of the KOP in support of their own men. It was a sensible way to do it, but it put men who were used to foot patrols into cramped steel boxes where there wasn’t much to do during firefights except scream at the turret gunner and pray. The trucks reduced war to a kind of grim dice game that was impossible to learn from or get good at; you just had to hope your luck lasted until it was time to go home.

• • •

The guy who blows us up is a hundred feet away behind a rock. He touches two wires to a double-A battery and sends an electrical charge to a pressure cooker filled with fertilizer and diesel that has been buried in the road the night before. His timing is off by ten feet or so and the bomb detonates under the engine block rather than directly beneath us, which saves us from being wounded or killed. The explosion looks like a sheet of flame and then a sudden darkening. The darkening is from dirt that lands on the windshield and blocks the sun. The gunner drops out of his turret and sits next to me, stunned. Someone comes up over the net saying, “WE JUST HIT AN IED, OVER!” That is followed by another man screaming for the convoy to keep moving.

Now it’s gray and muffled inside the Humvee, and for a moment my mind makes the odd association of being home during a blizzard when I was young. The power would go out and the windows would drift over with snow and produce a similar quiet darkness. That doesn’t last long. “GET ON THAT GUN!” Thyng starts yelling at the gunner. “GET ON THAT GUN AND START FIRING INTO THAT FUCKIN’ DRAW!”

The gunner is either too frightened or too disoriented to function, but a Humvee behind us opens up with a grenade machine gun — blap-kachunk, blap-kachunk — and Thyng yells, “WHO THE FUCK IS THAT?” I tell him it’s ours, not theirs, and our gunner finally stands up in the turret and starts returning fire toward the east and then toward the west. Big, hot .50 cal shells clatter into the interior of the Humvee. Shot, eight o’clock, a computer voice in the cabin informs us. The detection system is picking up gunfire from other vehicles in our convoy and reporting it as if it were coming from the enemy.

There’s a lot of shooting out there and I’m not looking forward to running through it, but the cabin is filling with toxic gray smoke and I know we’re going to have to bail out eventually. I keep waiting for something like fear to take hold of me but it never does, I have a kind of flatlined functionality that barely raises my heart rate. I could do math problems in my head. It occurs to me that maybe I’ve been injured — often you don’t know right away — and I pat my way down both legs until I reach my feet, but everything is there. I get my gear in order and find the door lever with my hand and wait. There is a small black skeleton hanging from the rearview mirror and I notice that it’s still rocking from the force of the blast. I just sit there watching it. Finally Thyng gives the order and we all throw ourselves into the fresh cool morning air and start to run.