Restrepo enough time to grab their guns and roll out the door.
We walk into Restrepo and drop our packs in a pile. The sun has fired the Abas Ghar with a red glow and a few of the brighter planets are already infiltrating the afternoon sky. The men are standing around in dirty fleeces and their pants unbelted smoking cigarettes and watching another day come to an end. They’re dirty in their pores and under their nails and their skin has burnished to a kind of sheen at the wrists and neck where the uniforms rub. Dirt collects in the creases of the skin and shows up as strange webs at the corners of the eyes and their lifelines run black and unmistakable across the palms of their hands. It’s a camp of homeless men or hunters who have not reckoned with a woman in months and long since abandoned the niceties. They belch and fart and blow their noses on their sleeves and wipe their mouths on their shirtfronts and pack every sentence with enough profanity to last most civilians a week. After the fighting ended last fall they got so bored that they started prying boulders out of the hillside and rolling them into the valley. They were trying to get one inside the wire at Firebase Phoenix just to keep Third Platoon on their toes. Caldwell finally told them to knock it off.
Gillespie takes command immediately. Patterson, the platoon sergeant, delivers a short, sharp speech making it clear that the problems with Third Platoon are no reflection on Gillespie and then hands it over to him. Everything about Gillespie is long: his torso, his legs, his neck, and he’s slightly pigeon-toed in a way that belies how tough he really is. Now he stands that way, lanky and awkward, in the dying gray light, taking command of arguably the most combat-intensive outpost in the entire U.S. military. “I’ve been down there with Third Platoon for the past five months so you guys have probably been seeing me around,” he says. “Pretty laid-back guy, like Sergeant Patterson says. I’ll watch you guys and we’ll go from there. You guys got any questions for me?”
Jones raises his hand. There’s a strange expectation in the air, the men seem to be trying to not catch each other’s eyes. Gillespie has his hands jammed into his pockets so there’s nothing he could possibly do about what’s about to happen. “You ever seen the movie
Pause.
“Get him!” someone yells, and First Lieutenant Steve Gillespie disappears beneath a scrum of enlisted men. They quickly rack him out on the ground, pull up his shirt, and take turns smacking his abdomen as hard as they can. Donoho spits on his palm first so it will hurt more. Every man takes a turn and Patterson is offered a hit, though he declines, and then they help Gillespie back to his feet. Glasses askew, he slaps the dirt off himself and shakes his head, trying to laugh. I’ve just watched an officer in the U.S. military get overpowered and beaten by his men at a remote outpost in Afghanistan, and it occurs to me that not only is this not happening in other armies, it probably isn’t even happening at other
Gillespie was taking command of Second Platoon and it prompted a lot of talk up on the hill; it was serious business up here and the men knew a bad leader could easily get them killed. They weren’t that familiar with Gillespie beyond the fact that he bore a passing resemblance to Napoleon Dynamite, and a collective decision was made that fell so far outside of Army protocol no one even wanted to claim ownership of it. “Third Platoon wasn’t doing so hot,” O’Byrne told me months later, “so we had our doubts already — you know? So we said, ‘We’re going to beat the shit out of him and if he doesn’t take it, well fuck it — then we just won’t listen to the motherfucker. If he can’t take a beating then he’s not part of Second Platoon anyway. He’s not part of what we’re about.’”
It was a lot of tough talk but the truth was that the men respected Gillespie enormously, and roughing him up was their way of demonstrating that. A lesser officer would never have rolled with that situation, and lesser troops would never have even thought of it. It was about brotherhood, not discipline, and the command was smart enough to understand that and stay out of the way. “Man’s natural instinct is to survive,” Kearney said about Second Platoon. (Tim had just asked him whether they had “demons.”) “The boys don’t go out there and fight for freedom, they don’t fight for patriotism — they fight because they know that if they go out there alone and walk into Aliabad they’re going to get killed.”
Margins were so small and errors potentially so catastrophic that every soldier had a kind of de facto authority to reprimand others — in some cases even officers. And because combat can hinge on the most absurd details, there was virtually nothing in a soldier’s daily routine that fell outside the group’s purview. Whether you tied your shoes or cleaned your weapon or drank enough water or secured your night vision gear were all matters of public concern and so were open to public scrutiny. Once I watched a private accost another private whose bootlaces were trailing on the ground. Not that he cared what it looked like, but if something happened suddenly — and out there, everything happened suddenly — the guy with the loose laces couldn’t be counted on to keep his feet at a crucial moment. It was the
The attention to detail at a base like Restrepo forced a kind of clarity on absolutely everything a soldier did until I came to think of it as a kind of Zen practice: the Zen of not fucking up. It required a high mindfulness because potentially everything had consequences. Once I attended a shura at the KOP with a cast-off Army shirt that Anderson had given me, and when I left the building I forgot to take it with me. A few hours later I realized I couldn’t find it and went into a controlled panic: if one of the elders picked it up and gave it to an enemy fighter, that man would be able to use it to pass himself off as an American soldier. Potentially someone could get killed. Eventually I found the shirt, but it was clear from the looks I was getting that I’d fucked up pretty badly and that it had better not happen again.
Frontline soldiers have policed their own behavior at least since World War II and probably a lot longer than that. In a study of bravery conducted by the U.S. military in the forties, the author, Samuel Stouffer, had this to say about personal responsibility: “Any individual’s action which had conceivable bearing on the safety of others became a matter of public concern for the group as a whole. Isolated as he was from contact with the rest of the world, the combat man was thrown back on his outfit to meet the various affectional needs… that he would normally satisfy with his family and friends. The group was thus in a favored position to enforce its standards on the individual.”
In the civilian world almost nothing has lasting consequences, so you can blunder through life in a kind of daze. You never have to take inventory of the things in your possession and you never have to calculate the ways in which mundane circumstances can play out — can, in fact, kill you. As a result, you lose a sense of the importance of things, the gravity of things. Back home mundane details also have the power to destroy you, but the cause and effect are often spread so far apart that you don’t even make the connection; at Restrepo, that connection was impossible to ignore. It was tedious but it gave the stuff of one’s existence — the shoelaces and the water and the lost shirt — a riveting importance. Frankly, after you got used to living that way it was hard to go home.
There was carelessness and then there were real mistakes, and once it crossed that line, discipline came down from above and was relentless. Once I woke up in the middle of the night to grunts and shouting and went outside to find Staff Sergeant Alcantara smoking his entire squad. Whoever was on guard duty had let the batteries run down on a thermal sight called a PAS-13 that allowed them to scan the hillsides at night. On a dark night the PAS-13 was the only way they could see if the enemy was creeping close for a surprise attack, and dead batteries could literally put the base at risk of getting overrun. The best way to ensure that no one fucked up was to inflict collective punishment on the entire squad, because that meant everyone would be watching everyone else. Al had them out there in stress positions lifting sandbags and essentially eating dirt for so long that I finally just went back inside and went to sleep. The next morning I asked him if the punishment had wiped the slate clean — or was there some residual stigma that would take longer to erase?
“There are no hard feelings after everyone gets smoked,” he said. “They’re more pissed that they all let each other down. Once it’s over it’s over.”
With dark the cold comes down like some kind of court sentence and the men drift inside to sit around the diesel stoves until it’s time to go to sleep. Each squad built their own hooch from plywood and two-by-fours slung in
