War

deprive men of the company of women for too long, and then turn off the steady adrenaline drip of heavy combat, it may not turn sexual, but it’s certainly going to turn weird.

And weird it was: strange pantomimed man-rapes and struggles for dominance and grotesque, smoochy come-ons that could only make sense in a place where every other form of amusement had long since been used up. Bobby wasn’t gay any more than he was racist, but a year on a hilltop somehow made pretending otherwise psychologically necessary. And it wasn’t gay anyhow: it was just so hypersexual that gender ceased to matter. Someone once asked Bobby whether, all joking aside, he would actually have sex with a man up here. “Of course,” Bobby said. “It would be gay not to.”

“Gay not to?” O’Byrne demanded. “What the fuck does that mean?”

Bobby launched into a theory that “real” men need sex no matter what, so choosing abstinence can only mean you’re not a real man. Who you have sex with is of far lesser importance. The men knew it made no sense — Bobby’s weird brilliance — but no one could quite formulate a rebuttal. The less fighting there was, the weirder things got until men literally moved around in pairs in case they ran into Bobby and Jones. “One day that shit’s gonna go too far and someone’s actually going to get raped,” O’Byrne said to me one night. “Like literally, raped. They won’t know when to stop and then it’s gonna be too late.”

Bobby told me that after the deployment he was planning on visiting his wife, buying a motorcycle, and then driving south into Mexico. He was going to live out some south-of-the-border fantasy for a while and then decide whether to go AWOL or return home. The last I heard he was at Fort Bragg, challenging assumptions in the 82nd Airborne.

I pass through Bagram in late May when the first replacement units are starting to come in. I get space- blocked on a flight that requires showing up at the terminal at four in the morning, just as the sky is getting light. A dozen soldiers are watching NASCAR on a big flat-screen and the room slowly fills with more men in clean uniforms carrying new guns. They’re headed to the firebases to the east and south and they look ten years younger than the men they’ll be replacing. They’re combat infantry, the ultimate point of all this, the most replaceable part of the whole deadly show. (Two years earlier a story made the rounds about a MEDEVAC pilot who disobeyed direct orders, turned off his radio, and landed in heavy ground fire to pick up a wounded Battle Company soldier. The man lived, but the incident gave some soldiers the feeling that if the military had to choose between a grunt and a Black Hawk, they’d probably go with the Black Hawk.) The men take a perverse pride in this, cultivate a certain disdain for anyone who has it better, which is basically everyone. Combat infantry carry the most, eat the worst, die the fastest, sleep the least, and have the most to fear. But they’re the real soldiers, the only ones conducting what can be considered “war” in the most classic sense, and everyone knows it. I once asked someone in Second Platoon why frontline grunts aren’t more admired.

“Because everyone just thinks we’re stupid,” the man said.

“But you do all the fighting.”

“Yeah,” he said, “exactly.”

Out east, I’m told, the war is tipping very slightly toward improvement. Kunar is now such a deadly place for insurgents that the cash payment for fighting there has gone from five dollars a day per man to ten. The “PID and engage” rate — where the enemy is spotted and destroyed before he can attack — has gone from 4 percent of all engagements to almost half. Battle Company trucks hit an IED in the northern Korengal but no one was hurt, and the Taliban have been painting Pakistani cell phone numbers on rocks, trying to enlist fighters. They took out the LRAS with a sniper round and grabbed an old man and a fifteen-year-old boy who worked at the KOP and cut their throats a few hundred yards outside the wire. Men on base could hear them screaming as they died. Public affairs will tell you that the Taliban are getting more brutal because they’re losing the war, but pretty much everyone else will tell you they started out brutal and aren’t losing shit.

I catch a flight to Blessing and fly into the Korengal on a Chinook filled with Chosen Company soldiers. They’ll be in the valley for a few days to cover for elements of Battle who are going for a “rest-and-refit.” Third Platoon is planning an early morning operation to clear the town of Marastanau, across the valley, and the lieutenant invites me along, but in the interest of getting a real night’s sleep I turn him down. We’re woken up by gunfire anyway: Third Platoon hit from three directions and pinned down behind a rock wall with plunging fire coming in from the ridges and U.S. .50 cal shrieking over their heads in the other direction. The battle goes on for an hour, white phosphorus rounds flashing and arcing out over the mountainsides like enormous white spiders. The Apaches and A-10s show up and do some work and finally it’s over and everyone shuffles back to the fly-crazed darkness of their hooches to get a few more hours of sleep.

A few days after I arrive, Kearney puts together a shura of valley elders, and the provincial governor flies in for it. The meeting starts in what must have been a rather incredible way for the locals: a young American woman from USAID speaking in Pashto about plans for the valley. After that, the governor gives a passionate speech about what this area could be if the locals stopped fighting and accepted government authority. He’s dressed in a suit and vest, and it’s quite possibly the first suit and vest the locals have ever seen. When he’s done a young man stands up, eyes bright with hate, and says that the Americans dropped a bomb on his brother’s house in Kalaygal and killed thirteen people. “If the Americans can’t bring security with their guns and bombs, then they should just leave the valley,” he shouts. “Otherwise there will be jihad!”

The governor is having none of it. “We’ve all done jihad and lost family members,” he says. “But the Taliban are shooting at Afghan soldiers. Why? They are Muslims too. If you’re not man enough to keep the Taliban out of the valley, then I’m sorry, you’re going to get bombed.”

For a minute the young man is too stunned to respond. Then there’s a sudden knocking of gunfire from down-valley and Kearney rushes out of the room to direct the mortars. Second Platoon has gotten hit on their way back from Loy Kalay, pinned down in the open stretch just outside the base. They make it into the wire behind a curtain of high explosives and the shura lurches on to the rumble of explosions and A-10 gun runs. After an hour or so the elders gather themselves up and walk back out the front gate, and Tim and I catch a switch-out that’s headed up to Restrepo.

We come walking in the south gate late that afternoon and drop our packs in front of First Squad hooch. Nothing has changed except that Airborne is now big enough to go out on patrols. I’ve been coming to this hilltop for almost a year, and to my amazement the place has started to carry the slight tang of home.

4

COFFEE AT RESTREPO WAS A PROBLEM BECAUSE NO ONE drank it so you were more or less on your own in that regard. Certain MREs include packets of coffee, powdered milk, and sugar, but I always found it hard to remember which ones they were — as opposed to, say, the breakfast tea or cider mix — and that meant pawing through the garbage to find enough ingredients for a good cup. Once the precious powders were in hand I’d go to the command center and empty a bottle of water into the electric kettle and plug it in. The command center was a dark, secure bunker next to Gillespie’s bunk where the radios were stacked, and there was usually so little light that finding the kettle required some feeling around.

While the water was heating I’d scout a place to sit. Pretty much everything was uncomfortable at Restrepo — there was one chair but it was almost always taken, the sandbags were hard as rocks, and the round plastic Javelin case next to First Squad hooch made your ass numb in minutes — but finding a good seat was important. You’d only get one cup of coffee a day, and considering what’s not available at Restrepo, that cup was pretty much the most pleasurable thing that was going to happen to you until you got home. I liked to drink my coffee sitting with my back against a Hesco beneath the south-facing SAW position. Nothing random could hit you there, and you were inside the courtyard looking north up the valley. In front of me was a pile of sandbags holding up a fiberglass pole for the concealment netting, and I could brace my legs on the sandbags and use my knees to write against. The netting broke up the direct sunlight and gave things a mottled, wobbly feel that could make you dizzy if you stared at the shadows for too long.

I usually put together my coffee around midmorning and then settled into my spot to work on my notes, but one morning Gillespie sends out a patrol to Obenau and we don’t come back until midday. We come walking into the