stay with his squad. When the platoon finally started running up the road toward Phoenix, Steiner found himself floating effortlessly ahead of the group despite carrying sixty pounds of ammo and a twenty-pound SAW. It was one of the best highs he’d ever had. It lasted a day or two and then he sank like a stone.
“You start getting these flashes of what could’ve been,” Steiner said. “I was lying in bed like, ‘Fuck, I almost died.’ What would my funeral have been like? What would the guys have said? Who’d have dragged me out from behind that wall?” Steiner was doing something known to military psychologists as “anxious rumination.” Some people are ruminators and some aren’t, and the ones who are can turn one bad incident into a lifetime of trauma. “You can’t let yourself think about how close this shit is,” O’Byrne explained to me later. “Inches. Everything is
In some ways the incident took more of a toll on O’Byrne than on Steiner himself. O’Byrne thought he could protect his men, but behind that rock wall in Aliabad he realized it was all beyond his control. “I had promised my guys none of them would die,” he said. “That they would all go home, that I would die before they would. No worries: you’re going to get home to your girl, to your mom or dad. So when Steiner got shot I realized I might not be able to stop them from getting hurt, and I remember just sitting there, trembling. That’s the worst thing ever: to be in charge of someone’s life. And then if you lose them? I could not imagine that. I could not imagine that day.”
It wasn’t even fighting season, and the men at Restrepo were having one close call after another. Olson was on overwatch with the 240 when a round hit a branch above his head and the next one smacked into the dirt next to his cheek. He thought it was from the sniper rifle that the enemy took off Rougle on Rock Avalanche. A round splintered wood next to Jones’s head in the south-facing SAW position. O’Byrne was leaning over to help an Afghan soldier who’d just taken a sniper round through the stomach — he died — when a second one came in and missed him by inches. Buno was doing pull-ups when a Dishka round went straight through the hooch he was in. On and on it went, lives measured in inches and seconds and deaths avoided by complete accident. Platoons with a 10 percent casualty rate could just as easily have a 50 percent casualty rate; it was all luck, all God. There was nothing to do about it except skate through on prayers and good timing until the birds came in and took them all home.
The men had been out there talking on the radios for almost a year and found themselves saying “break” and “over” while on the KOP phones to their girlfriends and wives. Relationships frayed and ground to an end and old pickup lines were dusted off and evaluated for future use. The men would never say they were in the Army when they met women; far better to go with “dolphin trainer” or “children’s book writer.” One guy had a lot of success claiming he was Alec Baldwin’s son. Every time Cantu rotated down to the KOP, men would come in to get inked up in ever more outlandish ways. Vengeful dragons started to curl around men’s torsos and bombs and guns sprouted from their biceps. “Living to die/Dying to live”; “Soldier for God”; “Soldier of Fortune.” A new private nicknamed Spanky overreached a bit and tattooed his left arm with a face that was half angel, half devil. When Sergeant Mac saw it he demanded to know what the fuck it meant.
“It represents the angels and devils I have to wake up to every morning, Sar’n,” Spanky said.
After the laughter died down Mac told him he was better off saying he got really fucked up one night and doesn’t remember getting it. “Now repeat that a few times so it sounds believable,” Mac said.
The rains come in late March and the Pech quickly gets so big and violent that enemy fighters can’t cross it on foot. Nothing but combat aircraft can fly out of Bagram and logistics backs up days and then weeks. I pass through Bagram in early April and spend a few days waiting for the clouds to lift enough to see the mountains. No mountain, no flight, but I’d usually hang out at the rotary terminal just in case. No matter how many times you’ve heard it, you always turn toward the flight line when the 15s and 16s take off, a sound so thunderous and wrong that it would seem to be explainable only by some kind of apocalypse. Then the deltoid shape rising with obscene speed into the Afghan sky, its cold-blue afterburners cutting through the twilight like a welder’s torch.
One day I meet a man in civilian clothes who never moves a foot or two from a long black carrying case. We’re in a plywood building filled with bored soldiers watching women’s college basketball, and when I ask him what he does, he just nods toward the case and says, “We identify guys in the mafia and take them off the battlefield one at a time.” A day later at Jalalabad I catch a Black Hawk headed to Camp Blessing that has just dropped off an Afghan soldier in handcuffs and another one in a body bag. Blessing’s 155s are going full bore supporting a valley-wide firefight in the Korengal — every position engaged, mortars ranged in on Restrepo and the KOP — and I walk down to the batteries to watch. The great dark barrels are jacked high in the air and snort smoke sideways out their muzzle brakes every time they shoot. They pound the Korengal for an hour and then fall silent with a kind of reluctance and I walk back up the hill to lie back down on my bunk and wait for the weather to clear. Rear-base limbo: an ill blend of apprehension and boredom that is only relieved by going forward where things are even worse.
'I killed my first bear with a bow and arrow in Alaska,” Lambert says.
After days of waiting around air bases I’ve finally made it out to Restrepo. It’s a slow, hot day — the storm systems have been pushed out to the west — and the talk has turned to hunting.
“Do you have a sidearm with you when you hunt like that?” Patterson asks.
“Fuck yeah.”
Lambert says that when he was a kid he’d get up early to go duck hunting and would show up at school covered in duck blood.
“You ever go frog gigging?” Patterson asks.
“Fuck yeah,” says Lambert.
“You ever go squirrel hunting?”
“Fuck yeah. With a little four-ten?”
“You ever go cow hunting?”
“Come on…”
Patterson tells a story about a cow that got caught in the crotch of a tree and no one could get it out. “We tried shooting it out but that didn’t work either,” he says.
The topic of cow hangs heavily in the air. A few weeks earlier the men spotted a lone cow wandering along the ridge and chased it into the concertina wire that’s strung around the base. Once the cow was tangled up they didn’t have much choice but to gaffer-tape a combat knife to some tentpoles and kill it caveman-style. By coincidence — or not — a black kid named Lackley, who works full-time as a cook down at the KOP, had just made the trek up to Restrepo to get into a firefight and claim his combat action badge. (It worked.) Once the cow was dead Lackley and Murphy gutted it and cut the head off with a Christmas tree saw and then Lackley prepared a recipe that became known as “same-day cow.” He cut strips of meat off the haunches and wrapped them around onions that he got from the Afghan soldiers and then grilled them up on a bonfire outside the Weapons Squad hooch. He used Hesco siding stripped of its liner as a grill. Aside from a couple of frozen steaks they carried up from the KOP it was the first red meat the men had had at Restrepo in almost a year.
The meal was some kind of
“The cow?” says Patterson. “The reason why we killed it was because it ran into our concertina wire and, uh, it was mangled inside the concertina wire, so we had to kill it to put it out of its misery. That’s why we killed it.”
“They are asking because it’s illegal,” says Abdul.
“Illegal?”
“Yeah, illegal.”
“Like, it was caught in the wire and it was already dead in the wire, so that’s, I mean, there was nothing else that we could really do.”
“The owner of the cow is a poor person, he is a poor guy,” says Abdul, “so what is your opinion about the
