the valley that the men referred to as “Nipple Rock,” and all I can say is that you’d have to have spent a goddamn long time in the valley to see a woman’s nipple in that thing.) There was so much sexual energy up at Restrepo that it might as well have been a Miami nightclub, except that the only outlet for it was combat, so that’s what the men spent their time thinking about. Once a firefight kicked off and I watched Hoyt and Alcantara race into the east bunker to claim the .50. Hoyt had the lead but Alcantara threw him out of the way and got there first and started firing. They took turns on the gun until the firefight died down and then they settled back in the bunker with cigarettes. They’d shot through so much ammo that the barrel was smoking and they had to pour oil on it to cool it down. Suddenly another burst came in. “
Most of the fighting was at four or five hundred yards, so no one ever got to see — or had to deal with — the effects of all that firepower on the human body. There were exceptions, though. One day Prophet called in saying they’d overheard enemy fighters discussing how they wouldn’t shoot at the Americans unless a patrol crossed to the east side of the valley. Soon afterward, Afghan soldiers at OP 3 spotted armed men in the riverbed and started shooting at them. The men fled up the flanks of the Abas Ghar and Third Platoon sent a patrol out of the KOP to give chase. The Americans took contact as soon as they crossed the river and found themselves badly pinned down behind a rock wall, and within seconds every American position in the valley opened up on the guys who were shooting at them. The KOP started dropping mortars and OP 3 engaged with a .50 cal and a Barrett sniper rifle, and the trucks opened up from above Babiyal, and Restrepo swung its 240s around and poured gunfire across the valley for almost an hour.
It was a hot day and there hadn’t been much fighting lately, so when the men jumped on the guns most of them were only wearing flip-flops and shorts. They joked and laughed and called for cigarettes between bursts. Once in a while a round would crack past us, but mostly it was just a turkey shoot at a wide-open mountainside where the enemy had nowhere to hide. Hot brass was filling up the fighting positions and more was cascading down out of the weapons every second. At one point I watched a shell drop into Pemble’s untied shoe and he slipped it off, wiggled the shell out, and then slipped his shoe back on without ever stopping firing. The lieutenant was shirtless on the ammo hooch calling coordinates into the KOP and some of the Afghans were firing from the hip even though they didn’t stand a chance of hitting anything that way and Jackson was up on the guard position unloading one of the SAWs. Restrepo alone had to be putting out a thousand rounds a minute and the Abas Ghar was sparkling with bullet strikes even though it was broad daylight. Finally Hog showed up — Hog was the radio call sign for the A-10s — and dropped a couple of bombs on the mountain for good measure.
At some point a call came in over the radio that the Scouts were watching a guy crawl around on the mountainside without a leg. They watched until he stopped moving and then they called in that he’d died. Everyone at Restrepo cheered. That night I couldn’t sleep and I crept out of my bunk and went and sat on the roof of the ammo hooch. It was a nice place to watch the heat lightning out along the Pech or to lie back on the sandbags and look up at the stars. I couldn’t stop thinking about that cheer; in some ways it was more troubling than all the killing that was going on. Stripped of all politics, the fact of the matter was that the man had died alone on a mountainside trying to find his leg. He must have been crazed with thirst and bewildered by the sheer amount of gunfire stitching back and forth across the ground looking for him. At one point or another every man in the platoon had been pinned down long enough to think they were going to die — bullets hitting around them, bodies braced for impact — and that’s with just one or two guns. Imagine a whole company’s worth of firepower directed at you. I got the necessity for it but I didn’t get the joy. It seemed like I either had to radically reunderstand the men on this hilltop or I had to acknowledge the power of a place like this to change them.
“You’re thinking that this guy could have murdered your friend,” Steiner explained to me later. “The cheering comes from knowing that that’s someone we’ll never have to fight again. Fighting another human being is not as hard as you think when they’re trying to kill you. People think we were cheering because we just shot someone, but we were cheering because we just stopped someone from killing us. That person will no longer shoot at us anymore. That’s where the fiesta comes in.”
Combat was a game that the United States had asked Second Platoon to become very good at, and once they had, the United States had put them on a hilltop without women, hot food, running water, communication with the outside world, or any kind of entertainment for over a year. Not that the men were complaining, but that sort of thing has consequences. Society can give its young men almost any job and they’ll figure how to do it. They’ll suffer for it and die for it and watch their friends die for it, but in the end, it
There are other costs to war as well — vaguer ones that don’t lend themselves to conventional math. One American soldier has died for every hundred yards of forward progress in the valley, but what about the survivors? Is that territory worth the psychological cost of learning to cheer someone’s death? It’s an impossible question to answer but one that should keep getting asked. Ultimately, the problem is that they’re normal young men with normal emotional needs that have to be met within the very narrow options available on that hilltop. Young men need mentors, and mentors are usually a generation or so older. That isn’t possible at Restrepo, so a twenty-two- year-old team leader effectively becomes a father figure for a nineteen-year-old private. Up at Restrepo a twenty- seven-year-old is considered an old man, an effeminate Afghan soldier is seen as a woman, and new privates are called “cherries” and virtually thought of as children. Men form friendships that are not at all sexual but contain much of the devotion and intensity of a romance. Almost every relationship that occurs in open society exists in some compressed form at Restrepo, and almost every human need from back home gets fulfilled in some truncated, jury-rigged way. The men are good at constructing what they need from what they have. They are experts at making do.
As for a sense of purpose, combat is it — the only game in town. Almost none of the things that make life feel worth living back home are present at Restrepo, so the entire range of a young man’s self-worth has to be found within the ragged choreography of a firefight. The men talk about it and dream about it and rehearse for it and analyze it afterward but never plumb its depths enough to lose interest. It’s the ultimate test, and some of the men worry they’ll never again be satisfied with a “normal life” — whatever that is — after the amount of combat they’ve been in. They worry that they may have been ruined for anything else.
“I like the firefights,” O’Byrne admitted to me once. We’d been talking about going home and whether he was going to get bored. “I know,” he added, probably realizing how that sounded. “Saddest thing in the world.”
We walk the steep hill from the KOP up to OP 1 at the end of the day, kicking through patches of crusty snow near the top and sweating heavily in our winter clothes. I’m with Lieutenant Steve Gillespie, the former leader of Third Platoon who has been switched to Second Platoon after a group of his soldiers were caught drinking at the KOP. (Family members were sending them care packages with bottles of mouthwash filled with vodka.) The switch wasn’t punishment so much as an attempt to shake things up. The men at the outpost are dirty and unshaved and have been freezing up there quietly since they ran out of heating oil a week ago. In summer the post is overrun with camel spiders and scorpions but now it’s just cold and silent and lifeless, four men with nothing to do but stare at the mountains and recalculate how much of the deployment they still have left.
A patrol comes in from Obenau with a detainee who is dressed in nothing but a thin cotton shalwar kameez. He’s shaking with cold but for some reason keeps looking around and laughing. Maybe he can’t believe how rough the Americans are living. The patrol takes him on down to the KOP and we continue on the high trail to Restrepo with the wind picking up at the end of the day and monkeys screaming their outrage from the peaks. We don’t bother running the last stretch of road because there hasn’t been any shooting in the valley in weeks, and with snow-covered mountains all around us it’s hard not to think we’re just on some weird camping trip. Restrepo now has plywood bee huts fastened crookedly to the mountainside and a guard tower with a Mark 19 in it and a tiny two-man outpost a hundred yards outside the wire. The outpost is called Columbus and covers the draw below Restrepo. An all-out attack would probably take Columbus without difficulty, but the position would buy the men at
