War

5

EARLY MORNING, THE MEN ASLEEP LIKE HOUNDS IN every conceivable position and dressed in everything from gym shorts to full camo and boots. Some seem to lie where they fell and others are curled up like children with blankets dragged up to their chins. They’re surrounded by guns and radios and ammo and tube-launched rockets and, here and there, magazine photos of girls in bikinis. (If those girls only knew where they’d wound up; if they only knew they’d been nailed to a six-by-six between old fly strips and belts of SAW ammo.) Early one morning we take half a magazine of AK from the ridge above us and I wake up thinking it’s just another bad dream until everyone figures it out all at once, men falling over each other grabbing rifles and grenades and piling out the door to stand around half-naked in the gray light.

“That’s it?” someone asks. “One burst?”

“Weak,” Moreno says, walking away.

It’s the first contact in over two weeks, and no one can figure out whether the Americans are actually winning or if the enemy just decided not to fight for a while. Sometimes the war could look utterly futile — empires almost never win these things — and other times you’d remember that the enemy doesn’t have it so good either. They rarely get closer than five hundred yards, they rarely hit anyone, and they usually lose five or ten fighters in the ensuing airstrikes. Worse still, the locals seem to be souring on the whole concept of jihad. On one patrol an old man gives Patterson the names of the three insurgent leaders in Yaka Chine because their fighters come into Loy Kalay after dark to harass the inhabitants. He says the fighters wear uniforms and night vision gear and always leave town before dawn. “They took my son from the mosque and almost killed him for using tobacco and not having a beard,” the old man says. “It’s the old Taliban rules.”

Stichter asks him what the chances are of us getting shot at on the way out of town, and the old man just shrugs. “Only God knows,” he says.

“I’d say it’s about seventy-five percent,” Stichter tells me as we turn to go.

As it turns out we walk back unmolested. A few days later we’re all sitting around the courtyard at Restrepo when word comes over company net that a force of Pakistani Taliban just attacked a border outpost manned by a special unit of Afghan soldiers. The Taliban were shooting across the border from positions held by the Pakistani Frontier Corps, so the Afghans called in airstrikes on the Frontier Corps positions. Colonel Ostlund then ordered four more bombs to be dropped on another group of attackers that had just fled back across the border. They were all killed. “If we go to war with Pakistan, I’ll reenlist,” O’Byrne says. He’s shirtless in the late-afternoon heat and sitting in a folding chair that someone stole from a sergeant first class in Kuwait. The sergeant’s name — Elder — is written in Magic Marker on the back of the chair, and now it’s sitting up at Restrepo getting shot at. The chair even has a drink holder in the armrest.

The men know Pakistan is the root of the entire war, and that is just about the only topic they get political about. They don’t much care what happens in Afghanistan — they barely even care what happens on the Pech — but day after day they hear intel about fresh fighters coming in from Pakistan and wounded ones going out. Supposedly there’s a medical clinic in Pakistan entirely devoted to treating insurgents. Somewhere in the valley there’s a boulder painted with jihadist graffiti, but it’s in Arabic instead of Pashto because locals aren’t as enthused about the war as the outsiders. You didn’t have to be in the Army to notice that Pakistan was effectively waging war against America, but the administration back home was refusing to even acknowledge it, much less take any action. Now an American colonel is bombing Pakistani troops inside their own country and the feeling at Restrepo is, Finally…

Advance personnel for Viper Company will start arriving in weeks, and the men have already started talking. They considered Viper Company to be a mechanized unit, meaning they ride around in Humvees and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, and the word is that their mountain-warfare training back home didn’t go so well. The men at Restrepo are convinced that Viper will arrive fat and out of shape, and it will be Second Platoon’s job to make sure that they suffer appropriately. When a new unit arrives in theater they undergo a week or so of what is known as “right-seat left-seat” patrols. First the old unit leads the patrols, pointing out all the salient features of the area, and the new unit just follows. Then the new unit leads and the old unit follows. That takes about a week, and then the old unit gets on a helicopter and flies away forever and the new guys are on their own.

Right-seat left-seat is how tactical knowledge — the little details that save men’s lives — gets passed from one unit to the next. From a combat vet’s point of view, right-seat left-seat is also a chance to walk cherries into the ground and demonstrate their staggering weakness. (It actually worked too well: one Viper Company soldier literally wound up on his hands and knees on the last hill to Restrepo.) Most casualties occur in the first few months of a deployment because the new men don’t know where they’re getting shot at from and the mortar teams don’t know what hilltops to hit. The job of Kearney and his soldiers was to explain all this so that the new unit wouldn’t have to learn by trial and error at the cost of men’s lives.

A crucial part of the handoff is pushing the enemy back so that there is some “white space” on the battlefield, and Kearney came up with a fairly radical plan for doing that: he was going to sweep Yaka Chine. Third Platoon would get dropped onto the ridges west of town, Second Platoon would clear from the south, and Kearney and his headquarters element would direct everything from Divpat. Locals had said that there were foreign fighters in Yaka Chine walking around openly in military camouflage with weapons over their shoulders. Apparently they’d conceded the northern half of the valley to the Americans but considered themselves immune to attack in the southern half. It was only three miles from Restrepo, but there were so many draws and caves in the hills above town, and so many fighting positions on the high ground, that it would take a brigade-wide effort to get in and out of there safely.

The entire plan hinged on airpower because there was no way to walk down there fast enough to catch the enemy by surprise. Air was now conducted by the 101st Aviation Wing, which had arrived in country only a couple of months earlier, but they’d already crashed so many helicopters that they were reluctant to fly into any landing zones that hadn’t been cleared. Kearney was going to use the same two landing zones that he’d used on Rock Avalanche — code-named Grant and Cubs — but they were just small bare patches on the sides of mountains. If a rotor blade so much as clipped a treetop, the helicopter would crash.

The men of Second Platoon are down at the KOP clustered behind the blast wall packing and repacking their gear for the mission: ammo, radio batteries, water, everything you’d need for a forty-eight-hour Armageddon. Yaka Chine is crawling with insurgents; they’ve got no farther place to go and it’s an almost guaranteed firefight. Almost guaranteed casualties. Mace walks up carrying a crate of Claymore mines, which are set up around any static position and detonate outward rather than upward to blunt any ground attack. The men are discussing how much water to bring and how much sleeping gear they’ll need and whether to use small assault packs or full rucks. After a while Gillespie wanders up and announces that there’s limited space on the birds, so Solowksi won’t be going — though I will. It’s not exactly that Solowski’s getting pulled for me, but that’s the result. That means not only will the gun team be down a man but the others will have to carry that much more ammo. Later I catch Gillespie by himself and tell him I’d be happy to carry 500 rounds if that would make things easier.

“Let me talk to the gun team,” he says. “You might have to.”

The medic gives me extra rehydration salts and an IV bag in case I get hit. I’ve already got a tourniquet and an Israeli bandage in my vest, and a pack of Kerlix. In my chest my heart is slamming. There are times when all of this — the helicopters and the guns and the Afghans and the steep beautiful mountains — just feels like some awesome and dramatic game. And then there are moments when you suddenly understand how real it all is: no way to control what happens next, no way to rewind things back to a better place if it all goes wrong. There’s intel about four SA-18 rockets in the valley, the kind that track heat signatures and blow aircraft out of the sky. We could lift off from the KOP and all be dead in minutes. I don’t have to go on this mission, I don’t even have to be in this valley. Right now I have everything — my life, my safety, my friends and family back home — and I might be allowed one moment of regret before those things are taken from me. One moment of crazy downward acceleration in a Chinook; one moment of dirt unzipping toward me faster than I can get out of its way. “The quick chaotic bundling of a man into eternity,” as Melville called it; the last impossible phase shift from being a person to being nothing at all.

I finish packing my gear. The stress is getting to everyone and things are noticeably strange. The men are creeping around the KOP trying to avoid Bobby and Jones or lying inert on their bunks as if they’re in some kind of morgue for the semiconscious. I watch one guy pull out his 9 mil and put it to another man’s forehead. Right