The old man walks bent forward with his arms clasped behind his back to support the injured boy and I have the impression he could outwalk all of us straight up a mountain if he had to. The plan is to move back to Loy Kalay along the road and deliver the old man and the boy to a Destined Company patrol that has rolled down there in Humvees. It takes the gun team a while to climb down to the road, though, so by the time we start north it’s been a good hour since the shooting. First Platoon walked straight into a night ambush on Rock Avalanche, and it seems like it would be an incredibly easy thing to do to us as well — just get a little bit ahead on the road and take out the whole lead squad with machine guns and RPGs.
While we’re waiting for the gun team to join us I have time to decide where I want to be in the line. O’Byrne is up front with the rest of his fire team — Money and Steiner and Vaughn. If we walk into an ambush they’re going to take the brunt of it, but they’re the guys I’ve been bunking with and know best. When you’re entirely dependent on other men for your safety you find yourself making strange unconscious choices about otherwise very mundane things: where to walk, where to sit, who to talk to. You don’t want to be anywhere near the ANA on patrol because they’re almost as likely to kill you by accident as they are to kill the enemy on purpose. You don’t want to be near the new guys in case they freeze or shoot so much they draw fire or jam their guns. You don’t want to be near the cowboys, either, or the guys who have to glance over at their team leader before they dare do anything. It’s subtle, what you want — I’m not sure there are even words for it — but at night on a frozen road outside an enemy village the choices you make reflect something real. I pick up my pack and move forward.
Thirty feet between Steiner and me, thirty feet between me and Vaughn. O’Byrne walking point, as usual. No sound but the scrape of boots on frozen dirt and occasionally a dog barking in the villages below. God knows how, but they sense strange men are moving through their valley and they don’t like it. There’s no moon but the stars are fierce and leak just enough light to see a bit of the road and the shapes of the men ahead. I try to avoid walking through puddles because the skim ice shatters with a disastrous clarity in the frozen air. The wind shifts heavily through the holly trees around us. I run scenarios in my mind about where I’ll go if we suddenly get lit up, but most stretches of road have no cover so my best option is to just lie down so I don’t get hit by gunfire from the men behind me.
We pass quietly below the dark masses of the mountains and occasionally we see a porch light burning down in the valley like a lone planet in an inverted sky. A long time later we’re still on the road when a sick, hollow little whistle passes overhead. A few minutes later it happens again. No one knows what it is but later I find out they were sniper rounds fired from way down-valley — off-target but still boring fiercely through the darkness bearing their tiny loads of death.
'Those rounds hit pretty close to you in Karingal?” I overhear someone ask O’Byrne after the patrol.
“Yeah, they were pretty fucking close.”
“When you didn’t radio back we thought you might have been hit. But we didn’t hear any screaming, so we figured you were okay.”
“Yeah—”
“—or he was hit in the mouth,” someone else offers.
Even O’Byrne has to laugh.
Book Three
LOVE
The coward’s fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to participate in others’ lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death.
1
THAT SPRING STEINER GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILE pinned down at the Aliabad cemetery. Third Platoon was putting in a new outpost on the spot where Murphree lost his legs and Second Platoon’s job was to set up on the crest of Hill 1705 and overwatch them while they worked. They were going to go in at dusk and work all night and hope to be done by dawn. Since the site was accessible by road they used prepoured concrete barriers trucked down on flatbeds and unloaded by bulldozer, and the next morning Gillespie decided to move his men off the mountain because the job was done. There was airpower in the next valley over and it was as good a time as any, but some of the team leaders wanted to wait until dark. “That’s why we have night vision gear,” O’Byrne said, “so that we can walk at night when the enemy can’t see us.”
O’Byrne tried to raise the point with the lieutenant, but Sergeant Mac finally told him to stop being a bitch. ‘If I was a bitch I wouldn’t have joined the Army in the first place,’ O’Byrne answered. The other side of the coin was that they were deep in enemy territory without much cover, and if they stayed where they were all day, they’d probably get attacked as well. It was a shitty deal all the way around. The men started down the steep slopes of 1705 and as soon as they moved out of position, a single gunshot cracked through the valley. “Right then we should have fucking held back and stopped moving,” O’Byrne told me later. “It wasn’t our first day. We all knew what the fuck that shot meant.”
The road north of 1705 has no cover at all and is exposed to almost every enemy position in the southern half of the valley; it’s the kind of place soldiers literally have bad dreams about. When everyone got down to the road, O’Byrne told the men behind him that he was simply going to run, and then he turned and headed for the next bit of cover three hundred yards away. O’Byrne made it to a low rock wall south of Aliabad without taking fire and took a knee to cover everyone else. The rest of his team came tumbling in after him and then Gillespie and Patterson gasped past and finally Weapons Squad came into view. They were staggering under their loads and still strung along the road when the first burst came in. That was followed by a massive barrage from virtually every enemy position in the southern valley, and O’Byrne watched the rock wall he was hiding behind start to disintegrate from the impacts. He was still furious they hadn’t waited until dark. ‘This is the day I’m going to die,’ he thought.
The rest of O’Byrne’s team was pinned down just as badly. Steiner was lying flat on the ground next to Stichter, and when he tried to get up a burst from a PKM rattled into the wall in front of him and lacerated his face with stone shards. He dropped down to regain his composure and then sat up again just in time to catch the next burst. A round drilled straight into his helmet and snapped his head back so hard that he hit Stichter in the face and almost broke his nose. Stichter screamed for a medic and someone else yelled that Steiner had taken a round in the head, and Steiner slumped to the ground with a hole in his helmet and blood running down his face.
Steiner lay there unable to see or move, wondering whether the things he was hearing were true. Had he been hit in the head? Was he dead? How would he know? The fact that he could hear the men around him should count for something. After a while he could see a little bit and he sat up and looked around. The bullet had penetrated his helmet to the innermost layer and then gone tumbling off in another direction, looking for someone else to kill. (The blood on his face turned out to be lacerations from stone fragments that had hit him.) The other men glanced at Steiner in shock — most of them thought he was dead — but kept shooting because they were still getting hammered and firepower was the only way out of there. Steiner was in a daze and he just sat there with a bullet hole in his helmet, grinning. After a while he got up and started laughing. He should be dead but he wasn’t and it was the funniest thing in the world. “Get the fuck down and start returning fire!” someone yelled at him. Steiner laughed on. Others started laughing as well. Soon every man in the platoon was howling behind their rock wall, pouring unholy amounts of firepower into the mountainsides around them.
“It was to cover up how everyone was really feeling,” Mac admitted to me later.
Three Humvees drove down from the KOP to pick up Steiner, but he refused to go with them — he wanted to
