War

wire to word from Prophet that we’re about to get hit. For weeks there’s been intel about ammo coming into the valley — mortars, rockets, crates of Dishka rounds — the kinds of things you’d use against a fortified position rather than men on foot. The attack is supposed to come around 12:30 that afternoon, but the hour comes and goes without a shot, and the men sink back into their slow-motion heat trance. It’s one of those dead afternoons in the Korengal where nothing moves and you barely have the energy to wave the flies off your face. I mix up my coffee and settle into my spot to talk to Gillespie. Richardson is brushing his teeth. A few Afghan soldiers are standing around the ammo hooch. Most of the Americans are in their bunks. Airborne is asleep in the shade near the muddy spot created by the water bladder.

I’m just raising the mug to my lips for a first sip when the air around us compresses with a WHUMP. Gillespie and I just look at each other — could it be? Then comes a flurry of sick little snaps and the inevitable staccato sound in the distance. That first burst, I find out later, hit the guard tower and splintered plywood a few inches from Pemble’s head. Richardson is on the SAW so fast that he has to spit out his last mouthful of toothpaste between bursts. Gillespie jumps up and runs into the radio room, and everywhere men are grabbing their vests and sprinting for their positions. My cup of coffee gets knocked over almost immediately. On the radio I can hear Kearney yelling, “ALL BATTLE ELEMENTS THIS IS BATTLE-SIX THIS IS THE TIC WE WERE TALKIN’ ABOUT THE KOP IS TAKING INDIRECT, OVER.”

“Indirect” means mortars. They’re shot upward out of a tube and come down from above, which makes them harder to take cover from. (They’re also harder to suppress because, unlike guns, mortars can be completely out of sight behind a ridge. All the mortarman needs is a spotter calling in corrections to walk the rounds onto the target.) The KOP is essentially the Mothership, and without her, every outpost in the valley would be indefensible. The job of the outposts is to keep the KOP from getting attacked so that the KOP, in return, can support the outposts. Grenades and mortars start coming in and detonating against our own fortifications and we’re taking gunfire from three different directions to the south. Gillespie is out on the ammo hooch trying to see where the grenades are coming from and shouting into his radio and the Afghans are standing around reluctant and confused and the Americans are running shirtless and whooping to their guns. During the lulls they put wads of chew under their lips or light cigarettes. Olson’s on the .50 alternating bursts with Jones, who’s above him on the 240, and Pemble is so upset about almost getting killed that he empties a whole can of linked grenades into the ridges to the south.

The fight lasts ten or fifteen minutes and then the A-10s show up and tilt into their dives. Ninety rounds a second the size of beer cans unzipping the mountainsides with a sound like the sky ripping. The men look up and whoop when they hear it, a punishment so unnegotiable it might as well have come from God.

One night a few weeks later I’m sitting on the ammo hooch listening to the monkeys in the peaks. A temperature inversion has filled the valley with mist and the mist is silver in the moonlight and almost liquid. Airborne is asleep but keeps popping his head up to growl at some threat impossibly far below us in the valley. There’s been a big fight over by the Pakistan border and F-15s and -16s have been powering overhead all evening looking for people to kill. O’Byrne wanders out and we start talking. His head is shaved but dirt sticks to the stubble so you can see where his hair ought to be. He says he signed a contract with the Army that’s almost up, and he has to figure out whether to reenlist.

“Combat is such an adrenaline rush,” he says. “I’m worried I’ll be looking for that when I get home and if I can’t find it, I’ll just start drinking and getting in trouble. People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that’s not true… we drink because we miss the good stuff.”

O’Byrne is also worried about being alone. He hasn’t been out of earshot of his platoonmates for two years and has no idea how he’ll react to solitude. He’s never had to get a job, find an apartment, or arrange a doctor’s appointment because the Army has always done those things for him. All he’s had to do is fight. And he’s good at it, so leading a patrol up 1705 causes him less anxiety than, say, moving to Boston and finding an apartment and a job. He has little capacity for what civilians refer to as “life skills”; for him, life skills literally keep you alive. Those are far simpler and more compelling than the skills required at home. “In the Korengal, almost every problem could get settled by getting violent faster than the other guy,” O’Byrne told me. “Do that at home and it’s not going to go so well.”

It’s a stressful way to live but once it’s blown out your levels almost everything else looks boring. O’Byrne knows himself: when he gets bored he starts drinking and getting into fights, and then it’s only a matter of time until he’s back in the system. If that’s the case, he might as well stay in the system — a better one — and actually move upward. I suggest a few civilian jobs that offer a little adrenaline — wilderness trip guide, firefighter — but we both know it’s just not the same. We are at one of the most exposed outposts in the entire U.S. military, and he’s crawling out of his skin because there hasn’t been a good firefight in a week. How do you bring a guy like that back into the world?

Civilians balk at recognizing that one of the most traumatic things about combat is having to give it up. War is so obviously evil and wrong that the idea there could be anything good to it almost feels like a profanity. And yet throughout history, men like Mac and Rice and O’Byrne have come home to find themselves desperately missing what should have been the worst experience of their lives. To a combat vet, the civilian world can seem frivolous and dull, with very little at stake and all the wrong people in power. These men come home and quickly find themselves getting berated by a rear-base major who’s never seen combat or arguing with their girlfriend about some domestic issue they don’t even understand. When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at — you’d have to be deranged — it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.

It’s such a pure, clean standard that men can completely remake themselves in war. You could be anything back home — shy, ugly, rich, poor, unpopular — and it won’t matter because it’s of no consequence in a firefight, and therefore of no consequence, period. The only thing that matters is your level of dedication to the rest of the group, and that is almost impossible to fake. That is why the men say such impossibly vulgar things about each other’s sisters and mothers. It’s one more way to prove nothing can break the bond between them; it’s one more way to prove they’re not alone out there.

War is a big and sprawling word that brings a lot of human suffering into the conversation, but combat is a different matter. Combat is the smaller game that young men fall in love with, and any solution to the human problem of war will have to take into account the psyches of these young men. For some reason there is a profound and mysterious gratification to the reciprocal agreement to protect another person with your life, and combat is virtually the only situation in which that happens regularly. These hillsides of loose shale and holly trees are where the men feel not most alive — that you can get skydiving — but the most utilized. The most necessary. The most clear and certain and purposeful. If young men could get that feeling at home, no one would ever want to go to war again, but they can’t. So here sits Sergeant Brendan O’Byrne, one month before the end of deployment, seriously contemplating signing back up.

“I prayed only once in Afghanistan,” O’Byrne wrote me after it was all over. “It was when Restrepo got shot, and I prayed to god to let him live. But God, Allah, Jehovah, Zeus or whatever a person may call God wasn’t in that valley. Combat is the devil’s game. God wanted no part. That’s why our prayers weren’t answered: the only one listening was Satan.”

In November 1943, ten rifle companies from the First Infantry Division arrived in England to prepare for the invasion of Nazi-occupied France. The men had fought their way across North Africa and Italy and were now poised to spearhead the biggest and most decisive action of World War II. (The men had seen so much combat that a sour refrain had begun to make the rounds: “The Army consists of the First Infantry Division and eight million replacements.”) As these men prepared for the invasion, they were asked to fill out questionnaires prepared by a new entity known as the Army Research Branch. The goal of the study was to determine whether mental attitude among soldiers was any predictor of combat performance. Similar questionnaires were also given to new units who had just arrived from the United States — “cherries,” as they were already known back then.

Several months later these men sprinted into the artillery and machine-gun fire that was plowing up the beaches of Normandy, overran the German positions, and eventually went on to liberate Paris. Combat losses over the course of those two months were around 60 percent, and even higher for officers. What interested sociologists at the Research Branch, however, were non-combat losses — men who went mad from trauma and fear. For every four men felled by bullets there was, on average, one removed from the battlefield for