War. Part 3

A strange animal noise starts coming up out of Clinard and he breaks away from Hoyt and backs up in horror. Solowski comes up and asks if Rice is alive. He's crying as well.

"Yeah, he's good," Hoyt says.

"He's alive?"

"He's gonna make it, dude."

The men are taking cover and aiming their weapons southward off the top of the hill and Clinard is roaming around the position shrieking with grief. He finally comes to a stop near Hijar and sits down, sobbing. Hijar is behind a tree stump scanning the draw. "We got friendlies over there we tried to push through and they lit us the f.u.c.k up," Clinard says, trying to explain why they didn't get to Rougle faster.

"Let's go brother, come on," Hoyt says, beckoning Clinard with one hand. Clinard just sits there shaking his head. "That ain't Sergeant Rougle - you're lyin' right, man?" he says.

"I ain't lyin' - why would I lie about something like that?"

Clinard gets up but stays stooped with grief. "Where'd he get hit? - I got to see."

"Don't look at him."

"Is it bad?"

"It was quick."

Clinard stays bent double as if he's just finished a race and moans again in his strange animal way. He says something about how Rougle's death was their fault. The men around him are prepping hand grenades and getting ready to repel another attack and Piosa finally makes it up to the hilltop with Donoho as his radioman. Donoho's eyes are wide and he's swallowing hard. "Battle Six Romeo this is Two-Six, I've pushed to the site of the KIA, break," Piosa says into the radio. (Battle Six refers to Kearney and Two-Six refers to Piosa himself. "Six" generally follows the unit name and means "leader" or "commander.") "Right now we have the hilltop, we're going to move the wounded-in-action, there's two of them, up to LZ Eagles. I'm also going get my KIA there, break."

Mortars start hitting the enemy ridge with a sound like a huge oak door slamming shut. Rougle lies alone under the poncho liner off in the brush and finally two of his men and an Afghan soldier bend over him and start stripping the ammo out of his rack. When they're done, six Afghan soldiers put him on a poncho and start carrying him downhill toward the landing zone, but they're not carrying him well and he keeps touching the ground. The Scouts scream at them to stop, and Raeon puts Rougle over his shoulder in a fireman's carry but that doesn't work either. Finally the Scouts zip him into a body bag and carry him down that way. The sight is particularly upsetting to Donoho, who is still coping with what he saw when Vimoto was shot in the head. Rice and Vandenberge are making their way down the hill as well, having both decided that they're too big for anyone to try to carry. Stichter and the medic got an IV into Vandenberge's arm just in time - a few minutes later and he'd have been dead - and now he's stumbling white-faced down the mountain with a soldier supporting him under each arm. Rice walks unaided with his s.h.i.+rtfront covered in blood and a fentanyl lollipop in his mouth for the pain.

They walk half a mile through a blasted landscape of burned-over tree stumps and powdery dust and arrive at the LZ to find Kearney waiting for them. He tells them about Rougle and then the MEDEVAC comes in and they climb on board. "There was still fighting going on - guys were still being engaged throughout our positions," Rice told me later. "Part of you doesn't want to leave the fight, but then just a kind of overwhelming joy came across both me and Specialist Vandenberge because, you know, he was in pretty rough shape and just kind of knowing that we're okay now. I remember laying there on my back and the flight medic asked something and I remember kind of reaching over and me and Vandenberge grabbed hands. We've been through the tough part, we're gonna get help, and we're gonna make it out of this alive."

Kearney climbs from the LZ to the site of Rougle's death and arrives so winded he can barely speak. From there one can look across the valley to OP Restrepo - at this distance just another nameless ridgeline in the tumble of mountains falling off toward the west. Kearney leans on his M4 and gulps water from a plastic bottle while Piosa briefs him. He points to where they took fire from and how the enemy came out of a compound farther down the mountain and outflanked them from an unexpected direction. "Okay, where's this f.u.c.king compound I want destroyed?" Kearney asks Stichter. He spits and doesn't wait for an answer. "Stichter, destroy it now."

As fire support officer, Stichter is in charge of calling in artillery and air attacks, and he rushes off to direct a bomb strike on the compound. The most serious problem is that after the enemy overran Rice's position they grabbed American weapons and gear. They made off with Vandenberge's 240, two a.s.sault packs, Rice's M14 sniper rifle, Rougle's M4 - equipped with a silencer - and two sets of night vision gear. They also grabbed ammunition for all the weapons. Not only is that dangerous equipment for them to have, but it makes for excellent propaganda. They could show off a suppressed M4 or an a.s.sault pack with a dead American's nametag on it and claim that the Americans are getting slaughtered in Kunar. Operation Rock Avalanche abruptly goes from a search-and-destroy mission to a desperate attempt to get the gear back.

"Battle Base this is Battle Six, break," Kearney says into his radio. He has to yell because an Apache is making slow pa.s.ses overhead looking for enemy movement. "Right now I believe the enemy exfilled to the vicinity of Kilo Echo 2236 and 2237. I'd like to get Gunmetal to engage or push off-station so that I can drop 120s down there and prevent these guys from getting back into the village of Landigal, break. I'm looking at a plan so I can go into Landigal and clear it and find weapons and NODS, break. We will consolidate our forces on the Sawtalo Sar spur and focus our efforts on Landigal."

Gunmetal is the radio call sign for Apache helicopters. Kearney wants the Apaches to chew up the mountains above Landigal to keep the enemy penned in or to get out of the way so his own mortars can do it. The terrain is extremely steep there, and dropping mortars onto the known routes off the mountain might slow the enemy down enough that they can be trapped and killed. If the fighters get into Landigal they'll be able to hide the weapons and disappear into the populace. Anyone moving on the mountain south of the American position now has a shoot-to-kill cla.s.sification unless they're clearly civilian.

The men immediately start comparing impressions of the attack and putting together an idea of how the enemy pulled it off. Between Rice's and Wildcat's positions is a low hill with a cliff that faces south. When the Americans first saw it they considered the cliff to be "impa.s.sable terrain," so they didn't incorporate it into their defensive positions. The enemy fighters that overran Rice's team must have spent the previous twenty-four hours creeping through the woods to the base of the cliff and then waited until their comrades attacked from the south. They were whispering on their radios because they were so close that otherwise the Americans would have heard them. They must have climbed the cliff with their weapons over their shoulders and then started pouring heavy fire into Rice's and Wildcat's positions; they were only fifty yards away, so their fire was deadly accurate. Once they had the Americans suppressed they overran Rice's men and turned Vandenberge's 240 around and started using it against the other American positions. The hilltop was sprinkled with American bra.s.s. Once they'd stripped Rougle of his weapon and gear they fled the hilltop before the Americans could counterattack.

Rice was sitting down when he got hit and the force of the bullet sent him face-forward down the hill. Moments later he looked up and saw an enemy fighter shoot an RPG at him, which exploded very close and sent shrapnel throughout his body. He kept rolling downhill into some brush and then just lay there trying to figure out what had happened. He put his hand to his stomach and when he took it away it was covered with blood, so he knew he was wounded, but he was far more concerned about his men. He had no idea what had happened to them or whether they were even alive. Vandenberge had been hit in the left arm, and he stumbled off the hilltop away from his gun and into the cover of some rocks. Solowski took cover as well and then circled around the hill and tried to move up the far side. He came face-to-face with an enemy fighter who dropped out of sight off the back side of the hill. The experience left him in such a state of shock, and so pale, that when Raeon saw him a few minutes later he thought Solowski had been hit.

Vandenberge knew he was dying and started calling for a medic even though enemy fighters were only forty or fifty yards away; Cortez and Pemble may well have arrived in time to prevent the enemy from walking down the hill and finis.h.i.+ng him off. Rougle probably started running back toward his men when he heard gunfire. His Scouts tried to a.s.sault the hill the enemy had just taken because they knew their squad leader was in that area, but the volume of fire was so intense that they were repeatedly pushed back. It's likely that the enemy simply dropped back off the hilltop once they'd grabbed all the weapons they could carry.

Within an hour or so artillery starts working the far ridgeline where Wildcat thinks they see enemy movement. Kearney lies p.r.o.ne on the hill making marks on his map and calling in artillery strikes along enemy escape routes. He wants helicopters to pick up First Platoon and drop them along the five-nine gridline south of Landigal so that they can block enemy movement into the inaccessible southern end of the valley. Meanwhile, Second Platoon will push down from the north. While Kearney is on the radio Hijar yells that he's found an enemy blood trail coming off the hilltop. "After we get the KIA out of here I want Gunmetal to search directly to my west," Kearney shouts to Stichter. "Hijar believes he has a blood trail, it's likely that where we find this son of a b.i.t.c.h, we'll find everybody else."

The Apaches come in and start rocketing the next ridge over and then working it with gun runs. The rounds explode in the treetops with sharp flashes and they come so close together that the detonations sound like one long crackle. The men watch the Apaches do their work and then scrutinize the area through their rifle scopes, looking for enemy fighters trying to flee. Raeon has a suppressed M14 sniper rifle and he sits with his knees up and sweeps it across the ridgelines searching for the men who killed his commander. He is covered in Rougle's blood from his trouser cuff to his collar as if he rolled in red paint. After a while he puts the rifle down and lights a cigarette.

"He was a good dude, man," Raeon says. Stichter is kneeling next to him under a pine tree looking west into the draw. His hands are caked in Vandenberge's blood.

"Sergeant Rougle?"

Raeon nods.

"You want a real cigarette?"

"Yeah."

Stichter hands him a Marlboro.

"I worry about the rest of the guys," Raeon says. "Some of them are takin' it real bad, kind of blamin' it on themselves because we couldn't push over the top. But the thing they got to understand is he was dead instantly - there's just nothin' you could do right there."

Raeon lights his cigarette and exhales.

"I go on leave in like two weeks," he says. "It's not how I wanted to go, though."

3.

THAT NIGHT THE MEN SLEEP WITH A HAND GRENADE in one hand and their 9 mil in the other. Instead of one man pulling guard while two men sleep, it's the other way around, two-and-one. All night long enemy fighters have been observed walking from Yaka Chine to Landigal and then on up the mountain, and Kearney finally requests a bomb drop. The request is denied, and Kearney radios back, 'The other night we let eight guys get away, and now we have one dead and two wounded. If we don't drop now, I in one hand and their 9 mil in the other. Instead of one man pulling guard while two men sleep, it's the other way around, two-and-one. All night long enemy fighters have been observed walking from Yaka Chine to Landigal and then on up the mountain, and Kearney finally requests a bomb drop. The request is denied, and Kearney radios back, 'The other night we let eight guys get away, and now we have one dead and two wounded. If we don't drop now, I guarantee guarantee more will die.' Brigade gives permission, and a B-1 comes in and drops a bomb on a house where the fighters have taken shelter. The bomb misses, but Apaches come in to clean up the "squirters" - survivors who are trying to get away. more will die.' Brigade gives permission, and a B-1 comes in and drops a bomb on a house where the fighters have taken shelter. The bomb misses, but Apaches come in to clean up the "squirters" - survivors who are trying to get away.

The next morning everyone wakes up tense and exhausted. Prophet starts picking up radio chatter that the enemy is closing in again, and around midmorning several fighters are spotted moving along a nearby ridge. The entire American line opens up on them: mortars, 240s, LAWs, even First Sergeant Caldwell on his M4. Pemble alone shoots forty grenades out of his 203. The enemy fighters duck over the far side of the ridge and Apaches come in to do gun runs up and down the mountainside trying to catch them as they flee. Radio chatter indicates that fifteen are killed. All day long bombs and 155s crump into the mountainsides and the men sit behind cover on Rougle's hill waiting for the enemy to come at them again. By midafternoon it's clear they're not going to and the men get a little rest and then move out around midnight. Second Platoon works their way down the mountainside toward Landigal on terrain so steep that they take much of it by simply sliding downhill on their a.s.ses. Their pants are shredded by the time they get to the bottom.

First Platoon had already returned to the KOP the previous night, and the next day at dusk they head back out with half of Third Platoon. There is intel that the enemy is planning to attack either Phoenix or Restrepo - the bases were left with only a dozen or so American soldiers during the operation - but the valley remains quiet except for the buzz of surveillance drones overhead and the occasional b.u.mp and thud of mortars. First Lieutenant Brad Winn leads First Platoon past Phoenix and Aliabad and then across the Korengal River and up a series of terraces to the top of the Gatigal spur. To their north is a pretty little valley with Landigal nestled into it and to their south is the rest of the Korengal - wild, unknown country so thick with fighters that it would take a whole battalion to get in and out of there safely. Winn sets his men up along the Gatigal and overwatches Second Platoon as they clear through the town looking for weapons. Kearney, Caldwell, and the rest of company headquarters are to the north and men at OP Restrepo watch from the west.

Winn and his men spend a long day on the ridgetop overwatching Landigal while Ostlund, a lieutenant colonel from the Afghan National Army, and the governor of Kunar fly in by Black Hawk to talk to the elders. It is the first time that a governor from any any government has ever stood in the southern Korengal. One of their primary aims is to recover the weapons that were taken the day before, but the talks don't progress very far. Around nine o'clock that night, Winn gets word that Second Platoon has moved out of Landigal, and First Platoon gets ready to move out themselves. There's been radio chatter all day long about an attack on the Americans - one Taliban commander even said, 'If they're not leaving by helicopter they're in trouble' - but no one pays much attention. Kearney has so many air a.s.sets flying around the valley - surveillance drones, two Apaches, a B-1 bomber, and even a Spectre guns.h.i.+p - that an enemy attack would seem to be an act of suicide. government has ever stood in the southern Korengal. One of their primary aims is to recover the weapons that were taken the day before, but the talks don't progress very far. Around nine o'clock that night, Winn gets word that Second Platoon has moved out of Landigal, and First Platoon gets ready to move out themselves. There's been radio chatter all day long about an attack on the Americans - one Taliban commander even said, 'If they're not leaving by helicopter they're in trouble' - but no one pays much attention. Kearney has so many air a.s.sets flying around the valley - surveillance drones, two Apaches, a B-1 bomber, and even a Spectre guns.h.i.+p - that an enemy attack would seem to be an act of suicide.

The soldiers walk single file along the crest of the spur s.p.a.ced ten or fifteen yards apart. The terrain falls off steeply on both sides into holly forests and shale scree. The moon is so bright that they're not even using night vision gear. Unknown to Winn and his men, three enemy fighters are arrayed across the crest of the ridge below them, waiting with AK-47s. Parallel to the trail are ten more fighters with belt-fed machine guns and RPGs. In the U.S. military, this is known as an "L-shaped ambush." Correctly done, a handful of men can wipe out an entire platoon. Walking point is Sergeant Josh Brennan, an alpha team leader. He's followed by a SAW gunner named Eckrode and then Staff Sergeant Erick Gallardo and then Specialist Sal Giunta, bravo team leader. Giunta is from Iowa and joined the Army after hearing a radio commercial while working at a Subway sandwich shop in his hometown.

"Out of nothing - out of taking your next step - just rows of tracers, RPGs, everything happening out of nowhere with no real idea of how it just f.u.c.king happened - but it happened," Giunta told me. "Everything kind of slowed down and I did everything I thought I could do, nothing more and nothing less."

The Apache pilots watch this unfold below them but are powerless to help because the combatants are too close together. At the bottom of the hill, Second Platoon hears an enormous firefight erupt, but they too just hold their fire and hope it turns out well. At first, the sheer volume of firepower directed at Brennan's squad negates any conceivable tactical response. A dozen Taliban fighters with rockets and belt-fed machine guns are shooting from behind cover at a distance of fifteen or twenty feet; First Platoon is essentially inside a shooting gallery. Within seconds, every man in the lead squad takes a bullet. Brennan goes down immediately, wounded in eight places. Eckrode takes rounds through his thigh and calf and falls back to lay down suppressive fire with his SAW. Gallardo takes a round in his helmet and falls down but gets back up. Doc Mendoza, farther down the line, takes a round through the femur and immediately starts bleeding out.

After months of fighting an enemy that stayed hundreds of yards away, the shock of facing them at a distance of twenty feet cannot be overstated. Giunta gets. .h.i.t in his front plate and in his a.s.sault pack and he barely notices except that the rounds came from a strange direction. Sheets of tracers are coming from his left, but the rounds that hit him seemed to come from dead ahead. He's down in a small washout along the trail where the lip of packed earth should have protected him, but it didn't. "That's when I kind of noticed something was wrong," Giunta said. "The rounds came right down the draw and there are three people - all friends - in the same vicinity. It happened so fast, you don't think too hard about it, but it's something to keep in mind."

Much later, a military investigation will determine that the enemy was trying to throw up a "wall of lead" between the first few men and the rest of the unit so that they could be overrun and captured. Gallardo understands this instinctively and tries to push through the gunfire to link up with his alpha team, Brennan and Eckrode. Twenty or thirty RPGs come sailing into their position and explode among the trees. When Gallardo goes down with a bullet to the helmet, Giunta runs over to him to drag him behind cover, but Gallardo gets back on his feet immediately. They're quickly joined by Giunta's SAW gunner, PFC Casey, and the three men start pus.h.i.+ng forward by throwing hand grenades and sprinting between the blasts. Even enemy who are not hit are so disoriented by the concussion that they have trouble functioning for a second or two. The group quickly makes it to Eckrode, who's wounded and desperately trying to fix an ammo jam in his SAW, and Gallardo and Casey stay with him while Giunta continues on his own. He throws his last grenade and then sprints the remaining ground to where Brennan should be. The Gatigal spur is awash in moonlight, and in the silvery shadows of the holly forests he sees two enemy fighters dragging Josh Brennan down the hillside. He empties his M4 magazine at them and starts running toward his friend.

The Army has a certain interest in understanding what was going through Giunta's mind during all of this, because whatever was going through his mind helped save the entire unit from getting killed. A year or so later, several squads of American soldiers conducted an identical L-shaped ambush at night on the Abas Ghar and wiped out a column of Taliban fighters - nearly twenty men. The reason First Platoon did not get wiped out had nothing to do with the Apaches flying overhead or the 155s at Blessing; it was because the men reacted not as individuals but as a unit. Stripped to its essence, combat is a series of quick decisions and rather precise actions carried out in concert with ten or twelve other men. In that sense it's much more like football than, say, like a gang fight. The unit that ch.o.r.eographs their actions best usually wins. They might take casualties, but they win.

That ch.o.r.eography - you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up you lay down fire while I run forward, then I cover you while you move your team up - is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is ch.o.r.eography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The ch.o.r.eography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for - is so powerful that it can overcome enormous tactical deficits. There is ch.o.r.eography for storming Omaha Beach, for taking out a pillbox bunker, and for surviving an L-shaped ambush at night on the Gatigal. The ch.o.r.eography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what's best for him him, but on what's best for the group. If everyone does that, most of the group survives. If no one does, most of the group dies. That, in essence, is combat.

Most firefights go by so fast that acts of bravery or cowardice are more or less spontaneous. Soldiers might live the rest of their lives regretting a decision that they don't even remember making; they might receive a medal for doing something that was over before they even knew they were doing it. When Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Audie Murphy was asked why he took on an entire company of German infantry by himself, he replied famously, "They were killing my friends." Wars are won or lost because of the aggregate effect of thousands of decisions like that during firefights that often last only minutes or seconds. Giunta estimates that not more than ten or fifteen seconds elapsed between the initial attack and his own counterattack. An untrained civilian would have experienced those ten or fifteen seconds as a disorienting barrage of light and noise and probably have spent most of it curled up on the ground. An entire platoon of men who react that way would undoubtedly die to the last man.

Giunta, on the other hand, used those fifteen seconds to a.s.sign rates and sectors of fire to his team, run to Gallardo's a.s.sistance, a.s.sess the direction of a round that hit him in the chest, and then throw three hand grenades while a.s.saulting an enemy position. Every man in the platoon - even the ones who were wounded - acted as purposefully and efficiently as Giunta did. For obvious reasons, the Army has tried very hard to understand why some men respond effectively in combat and others just freeze. "I did what I did because that's what I was trained to do," Giunta told me. "There was a task that had to be done, and the part that I was gonna do was to link alpha and bravo teams. I didn't run through fire to save a buddy - I ran through fire to see what was going on with him and maybe we could hide behind the same rock and shoot together. I didn't run through fire to do anything heroic or brave. I did what I believe anyone anyone would have done." would have done."

During World War II, the British and American militaries conducted a series of studies to identify what makes men capable of overcoming their fears. A psychiatrist named Herbert Spiegel, who accompanied American troops on the Tunisia campaign, called it the "X-factor": "Whether this factor was conscious or unconscious is debatable," he wrote for a military journal in 1944, "but this is not so important. The important thing was that it is influenced greatly by devotion to their group or unit, by regard for their leader and by conviction for their cause. In the average soldier, which most of them were, this factor... enabled men to control their fear and combat their fatigue to a degree that they themselves did not believe possible."

The U.S. military found that, to a great degree, fearfulness was something they couldn't do much about. A fearful man is likely to remain that way no matter what kind of training he undergoes. During one experiment, completely untrained airborne candidates were told to jump off a thirty-four-foot tower. They jumped in a harness that allowed them to fall about twelve feet and then ride a 400-foot cable to the ground. As easy as it sounds, more than half of a group of qualified paratroopers said that jumping off the tower was more frightening than jumping out of a real airplane. The military tested roughly thirteen hundred candidates on the tower and then tracked their success through airborne school. They found that the men who were "slow" to jump off the tower were more than twice as likely to fail out of the program as "fast" jumpers, and those who refused to jump at all were almost guaranteed to fail.

One of the most puzzling things about fear is that it is only loosely related to the level of danger. During World War II, several airborne units that experienced some of the fiercest fighting of the war also reported some of the lowest psychiatric casualty rates in the U.S. military. Combat units typically suffer one psychiatric casualty for every physical one, and during Israel's Yom Kippur War of 1973, frontline casualty rates were roughly consistent with that ratio. But Israeli logistics units, which were subject to far less danger, suffered three three psychiatric cases for every physical one. And even frontline troops showed enormous variation in their rate of psychological breakdown. Because many Israeli officers literally led from the front, they were four times more likely to be killed or wounded than their men were - and yet they suffered one-fifth the rate of psychological collapse. The primary factor determining breakdown in combat does not appear to be the objective level of danger so much as the feeling - even the illusion - of control. Highly trained men in extraordinarily dangerous circ.u.mstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger. psychiatric cases for every physical one. And even frontline troops showed enormous variation in their rate of psychological breakdown. Because many Israeli officers literally led from the front, they were four times more likely to be killed or wounded than their men were - and yet they suffered one-fifth the rate of psychological collapse. The primary factor determining breakdown in combat does not appear to be the objective level of danger so much as the feeling - even the illusion - of control. Highly trained men in extraordinarily dangerous circ.u.mstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger.

The division between those who feel in control of their fate and those who don't can occur even within the same close-knit group. During World War II, British and American bomber crews experienced casualty rates as high as 70 percent over the course of their tour; they effectively flew missions until they were killed. On those planes, pilots reported experiencing less fear than their turret gunners, who were crucial to operations but had no direct control over the aircraft. Fighter pilots, who suffered casualty rates almost as high as bomber crews, nevertheless reported extremely low levels of fear. They were both highly trained and entirely in control of their own fate, and that allowed them to ignore the statistical reality that they had only a fifty-fifty chance of surviving their tour.

Among men who are dependent on one another for their safety - all combat soldiers, essentially - there is often an unspoken agreement to stick together no matter what. The rea.s.surance that you will never be abandoned seems to help men act in ways that serve the whole unit rather than just themselves. Sometimes, however, it effectively amounts to a suicide pact. During the air war of 1944, a four-man combat crew on a B-17 bomber took a vow to never abandon one another no matter how desperate the situation. (A fifth team member, the top turret gunner, was not part of the pact.) The aircraft was. .h.i.t by flak during a mission and went into a terminal dive, and the pilot ordered everyone to bail out. The top turret gunner obeyed the order, but the ball turret gunner discovered that a piece of flak had jammed his turret and he could not get out. The other three men in his pact could have bailed out with parachutes, but they stayed with him until the plane hit the ground and exploded. They all died.

One of the Taliban fighters falls to the ground, dead, and the other releases Brennan and escapes downhill through the trees. Giunta jams a new magazine into his gun and yells for a medic. Brennan is lying badly wounded in the open and Giunta grabs him by the vest and drags him behind a little bit of cover. He cuts the ammo rack off his chest and pulls the rip cord on his ballistic vest to extricate him from that and then cuts his clothing off to look for wounds. Brennan's been hit multiple times in the legs and has a huge shrapnel wound in his side and has been shot in the lower half of his face. He's still conscious and keeps complaining that there's something in his mouth. It's his teeth, though Giunta doesn't tell him that.

The B-1 flying overhead drops two bombs on Hill 1705, and that stuns the enemy enough that the Americans are able to consolidate their position. The Third Platoon medic arrives and gives Brennan a tracheotomy so he can breathe better, and then they get him ready for the MEDEVAC. A Spectre guns.h.i.+p and a couple of Apaches are finally able to distinguish Americans from the enemy and start lighting up the hillsides with cannon and gunfire, and half an hour later the MEDEVAC comes in and they start hoisting casualties off the ridge. When they're done, the rest of First Platoon shoulder their gear and resume walking home.

"We waited for First Platoon for hours," Hijar told me about that night, "and once we linked up with them it was still two and a half hours' walk back to the KOP. You could just tell on the guys' faces, it wasn't the right time to ask. You already knew what the answer was going to be. Some of them were walking around with bullet holes in their helmets."

Brennan doesn't survive surgery. Mendoza is dead before he even leaves the ridge. Five more men are wounded. Then there's Rougle from the day before, as well as Rice and Vandenberge. It's been a costly week. It's been the kind of week that makes people back home think that maybe we're losing the war.

4.

O'BYRNE MISSED ROCK ROCK AVALANCHE BECAUSE HIS AVALANCHE BECAUSE HIS younger sister, Courtney, had been badly burned in a house fire and he rushed home to be with her. He left the Korengal with the understanding that she would probably not survive. He arrived in Syracuse, New York, and found the rest of his family in the hospital waiting room. He said he wanted to see her alone and then walked into her room and sat down by her bed. Courtney was semiconscious and had a tube down her throat and was hooked up to a respirator that had swelled her belly with air. The sight was too much for O'Byrne, and he broke down and started crying. He squeezed her hand and said, 'Courtney, I love you, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.' And she squeezed his hand back. And he said, 'Squeeze my hand three times if you love me back,' and she squeezed his hand once, twice, three times. younger sister, Courtney, had been badly burned in a house fire and he rushed home to be with her. He left the Korengal with the understanding that she would probably not survive. He arrived in Syracuse, New York, and found the rest of his family in the hospital waiting room. He said he wanted to see her alone and then walked into her room and sat down by her bed. Courtney was semiconscious and had a tube down her throat and was hooked up to a respirator that had swelled her belly with air. The sight was too much for O'Byrne, and he broke down and started crying. He squeezed her hand and said, 'Courtney, I love you, squeeze my hand if you can hear me.' And she squeezed his hand back. And he said, 'Squeeze my hand three times if you love me back,' and she squeezed his hand once, twice, three times.

Her lungs were badly damaged by the fire and the doctors told the family that if she didn't improve by a certain date she was almost certainly going to die. O'Byrne visited her in the hospital every day and tried to let the days tick by without going crazy. It was during that awful time that he got a call from a friend that something bad had happened on Rock Avalanche. It took some digging but he finally found out that Rougle, Brennan, and Mendoza were dead. Courtney was being treated at the VA hospital at the University of Syracuse, and he wandered around campus until he found a bar and then he sat down and started drinking. Someone asked him why he was getting drunk and he said, 'I have a few friends who need a drink,' and then he drank a pitcher of beer for each man who had died.

He headed back to the Korengal about a week later. Courtney was out of immediate danger, but it tormented O'Byrne that if he got killed, her last memory of him would be from a hospital bed. He pa.s.sed through New York, and on a whim he called me from a bar where he was having dinner with two friends. It was strange to see him in civilian clothes and without a gun, and when I walked up he stood and shook my hand and then gave me a hug. He was wearing a blue T-s.h.i.+rt and a blue ghetto-style cap sideways and couldn't focus his eyes.

"My boys got messed up," he said. "Brennan got killed. Rougle got killed."

We sat down and he asked me to tell him everything. All he knew were the names of the dead, and I asked him what kind of detail he wanted this in.

"Everything," O'Byrne said. "Tell me everything you know."

O'Byrne was most of the way through a bottle of red wine and his friends were drinking beers and shots of tequila. I apologized to them for taking the conversation back to the war and they said please, go ahead, and I told O'Byrne about how the enemy had opened up from one ridgeline and then snuck up another side and overran the hilltop. I told him about Rice and Vandenberge and how First Platoon had walked straight into an ambush on the Gatigal spur. It took O'Byrne a while to absorb this.

"And Mendoza's a f.u.c.kin' hero, right?" he said. "He's an American hero, right?"

"Yeah, he's a hero."

"And Brennan was dead, right?" O'Byrne said. "I mean, they weren't dragging him off alive, were they?"

I wasn't sure what to say. Soldiers can seem pretty accepting of the idea that they might die in combat, but being taken alive is a different matter. "No, he didn't die until later," I said. "He was alive at the time."

O'Byrne looked around the room. I tried to think what I should do if he started crying. He concentrated and gathered himself and finally asked how many enemy fighters were killed.

"They killed a lot," I told him. "Like fifty. Thirty of them were Arabs. The A-10s really messed them up."

"Yeah, kill those f.u.c.kers," O'Byrne said. He repeated that a few times and took another drink. I asked him how he felt about going back.

"I got to get back there," he said. "Those are my boys. Those are the best friends I'll ever have."

He was gripping my arm and trying to look at me, but his eyes kept needing to refocus. They never got it quite right. I got up to go, and O'Byrne stood up as well and hugged me several times. I wished him luck and told him I'd see him back out there in a month or two. On the way out I told Addie, the bar manager, that I'd like to pick up their check. Later she told me she had to shut them off after the next drink because O'Byrne fell out of his chair and the girl could hardly talk.

"He was so polite, though," Addie said. "I mean, drunk as he was, he still took off his hat whenever I walked up."

5.

FORWARD OPERATING BASES ARE A SPECIAL KIND OF h.e.l.l, none of the excitement of real war but all the ugliness: rows of plywood bee huts and weapons everywhere and Apaches jolting you awake at all hours running the flight line ten feet off the ground. Journalists usually moved around the theater on scheduled resupply flights, but even minor problems can ripple outward through the logistics web and leave you stuck at a FOB for days. At least Bagram had decent food and a huge PX; Jalalabad had absolutely nothing. In winter the wind drove you mad with the rattling of tent flaps and in summer it got so hot - 130 in the shade - that you almost couldn't make it across the parade ground without drinking water. I stayed in the VIP tent, all the journalists did, and one afternoon I tried to escape the flamethrower heat by lying down on my bunk and going to sleep. I woke up so disoriented from dehydration that someone had to help me to another tent with better air-conditioning. There was nothing to do at JAF but hit your mealtimes and pray that if the enemy somehow mustered the nerve to attack it would be while you were stuck there and could report on it. h.e.l.l, none of the excitement of real war but all the ugliness: rows of plywood bee huts and weapons everywhere and Apaches jolting you awake at all hours running the flight line ten feet off the ground. Journalists usually moved around the theater on scheduled resupply flights, but even minor problems can ripple outward through the logistics web and leave you stuck at a FOB for days. At least Bagram had decent food and a huge PX; Jalalabad had absolutely nothing. In winter the wind drove you mad with the rattling of tent flaps and in summer it got so hot - 130 in the shade - that you almost couldn't make it across the parade ground without drinking water. I stayed in the VIP tent, all the journalists did, and one afternoon I tried to escape the flamethrower heat by lying down on my bunk and going to sleep. I woke up so disoriented from dehydration that someone had to help me to another tent with better air-conditioning. There was nothing to do at JAF but hit your mealtimes and pray that if the enemy somehow mustered the nerve to attack it would be while you were stuck there and could report on it.

In the Korengal the soldiers never talked about the wider war - or cared - so it was hard to get a sense of how the country as a whole was faring. And the big bases had the opposite problem: since there was almost no combat, everyone had a kind of reflexive optimism that never got tested by the reality outside the wire. The public affairs guys on those bases offered the press a certain vision of the war, and that vision wasn't wrong wrong, it just seemed amazingly incomplete. There was real progress in the country, and there was real appreciation among the Afghans for what America was trying to do, but the country was also coming apart at the seams, and press officers didn't talk about that much. During the year that I was in the Korengal, the Taliban almost a.s.sa.s.sinated Afghan president Hamid Karzai, blew up the fanciest hotel in Kabul, fought to the outskirts of Kandahar, and then attacked the city prison and sprang scores of fellow insurgents from captivity. More American soldiers were killed that year than in any year previous, but if you pointed that out, you were simply told that it was because we were now "taking the fight to the enemy." That may well have been true, but it lacked any acknowledgment that the enemy was definitely definitely getting their s.h.i.+t together. getting their s.h.i.+t together.

I thought of those as "Vietnam moments." A Vietnam moment was one in which you weren't so much getting misled as getting asked to partic.i.p.ate in a kind of collective wishful thinking. Toward the end of my year, for example, the Taliban attacked an American base north of the Pech and killed nine American soldiers and wounded half the survivors. When I asked American commanders about it, their responses were usually along the lines of how it was actually an American victory victory because forty or fifty enemy fighters had also died in the fight. Since the Army had already admitted that this was not a war of attrition, using enemy casualties as a definition of success struck me as a tricky business. because forty or fifty enemy fighters had also died in the fight. Since the Army had already admitted that this was not a war of attrition, using enemy casualties as a definition of success struck me as a tricky business.

And we reporters had our own issues. Vietnam was our our paradigm as well, paradigm as well, our our template for how not to get hoodwinked by the U.S. military, and it exerted such a powerful influence that anything short of implacable cynicism sometimes felt like a sellout. Most journalists wanted to cover combat - as opposed to humanitarian operations - so they got embedded with combat units and wound up painting a picture of a country engulfed in war. In fact, most areas of the country were relatively stable; you had to get pretty lucky to find yourself in anything even vaguely resembling a firefight. When you did, of course, other journalists looked at you with a kind of rueful envy and asked how they could get in with that unit. Once at a dinner party back home I was asked, with a kind of knowing wink, how much the military had "censored" my reporting. I answered that I'd never been censored at all, and that once I'd asked a public affairs officer to help me fact-check an article and he'd answered, "Sure, but you can't actually template for how not to get hoodwinked by the U.S. military, and it exerted such a powerful influence that anything short of implacable cynicism sometimes felt like a sellout. Most journalists wanted to cover combat - as opposed to humanitarian operations - so they got embedded with combat units and wound up painting a picture of a country engulfed in war. In fact, most areas of the country were relatively stable; you had to get pretty lucky to find yourself in anything even vaguely resembling a firefight. When you did, of course, other journalists looked at you with a kind of rueful envy and asked how they could get in with that unit. Once at a dinner party back home I was asked, with a kind of knowing wink, how much the military had "censored" my reporting. I answered that I'd never been censored at all, and that once I'd asked a public affairs officer to help me fact-check an article and he'd answered, "Sure, but you can't actually show show it to me - that would be illegal." it to me - that would be illegal."

That wasn't a story anyone really wanted to hear, and I almost felt like a bit of a patsy for telling it. Vietnam was considered a morally dubious war that was fought by draftees while the rest of the nation was dropping acid and listening to Jimi Hendrix. Afghanistan, on the other hand, was being fought by volunteers who more or less respected their commanders and had the grat.i.tude of the vast majority of Americans back home. If you imagined that your job, as a reporter, was to buddy up to the troops and tell the "real" story of how they were dying in a senseless war, you were in for a surprise. The commanders would realize you were operating off a particular kind of cultural programming and would try to change your mind, but the men wouldn't bother. They'd just refuse to talk to you until you left their base.

Once in a while you'd meet a soldier who didn't fit into any clear category, though. These were men who believed in the war but also recognized the American military's capacity for self-delusion. "We're not going to win the war until we admit we're losing it," one of these guys told me in the spring of 2008. He was in a position of moderate influence in the U.S. military, and his pessimism was so refres.h.i.+ng that it actually made me weirdly optimistic. And then there was the sergeant from Third Platoon whom I recognized at the Bagram air terminal while waiting for a flight. I said something vague about the progress in the valley and he didn't even bother masking his disgust. "What are you talking about, it's a f.u.c.king quagmire," he said. "There's no progress with the locals, it's just not happening, and I don't even trust the S-2 - he's full of s.h.i.+t. I was at an intel briefing and the S-2 was talking about how the Iranians were funding the Taliban. I asked about all the money coming from Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia, and he said that those are private donations that are harder to trace. Harder to trace than money sent by the Iranian government? Harder to trace than money sent by the Iranian government?"

S-2 is the designation for a military intelligence officer. There were a lot of soldiers around us, mostly new recruits who had just arrived in country, and by the time the sergeant got to the part about the Iranians they were giving us some pretty hard stares. Sometimes it was the new guys, the guys who'd never seen combat, who were the most hostile to any questioning of the war, the most belligerent about a supposed American prerogative. To change the subject I asked the sergeant how he would fight the U.S. military if he was an insurgent in the Korengal. He'd clearly given it some thought: "I'd put a shooter above Vegas with a low MOA rifle and I'd take single shots to the groin," he said. "MOA means 'minute of angle' - the bullet doesn't drop more than an inch per hundred yards. Every shot sends a guy home in a helicopter. We'd get so frustrated we'd just charge up the hill. So you'd have a couple of guys to the side with machine guns. The guy with the rifle keeps shooting, and the machine guns wipe us out."

The battalion commander was an insanely fit lieutenant colonel of Cherokee descent named Bill Ostlund who graduated from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy and wrote a thesis on the Soviet military's defeats in Afghanistan and Chechnya. Ostlund would look you straight in the eye while crus.h.i.+ng the bones of your hand in a handshake and launch straight into, say, the latest about the new trade school in Asadabad. He had such full-on enthusiasm for what he was doing that when I was around him I sometimes caught myself feeling bad that there wasn't an endeavor of equivalent magnitude in my own life. It wasn't the war, per se, that he was so fired up about so much as the whole idea - a truly radical one when you thought about it - that America was actually over here trying to put a country like this back together. Not many nations have the resources to attempt a project on this scale or the inclination to try. And Ostlund was exactly the kind of guy you'd want to have do it: seemingly immune to heartbreak, way more knowledgeable than most of the press corps that came through and capable of working eighteen hours a day for fifteen months straight.

Ostlund often referred to the Taliban as "miscreants" and spoke of them in the singular, as in, "We cornered the enemy and destroyed him." The third-person singular lent the war a vaguely gentlemanly feel, as if there were no hard feelings and all this was just an extraordinarily violent lawn sport. In fact, I don't think Ostlund felt any particular animosity toward the men he was fighting, and I know for a fact that he made repeated offers to grant temporary immunity to any Taliban leaders who would meet with him at a local shura. ("If they put together a meeting with all my close friends, I promise they will not be detained and that I will respect the tradition that shuras are not deceitful," he told me.) As far as I know none of them took him up on it, but I always liked that he operated that way. He was the highest-ranking officer to spend the night at Restrepo, and the men told me that instead of taking an empty bunk he just curled up on the ground and went to sleep. They said he didn't even take off his body armor.

Ostlund's base was Camp Blessing, which overlooked the Pech River Valley just a few miles west of the Korengal. It was a random conglomeration of brick-and-mortar buildings that climbed unevenly up a mountainside, the newest buildings at the top and still smelling of fresh cement. The market town of Nagalam was a mile to the east and boasted a "men's club," whatever that meant; at night something akin to Christmas lights flashed weirdly over the rooftops. Blessing was the stopping-off point for supply convoys going into the Korengal because that way they could make it in and out in a single day. (Spending a night at the KOP was suicide: there was only one road out of the valley, which gave the enemy a whole night to dig in bombs.) The convoys were called CLPs and were the responsibility of Fusion Company, which made the run up the Pech every few weeks and got attacked almost every time. A CLP was usually composed of a dozen armored Humvees and twenty or so local "jingle" trucks driven by Afghans. The road to Blessing was newly paved, which meant the convoys moved too fast to be ambushed, but the last few miles into the Korengal were dirt and considered to be the most dangerous stretch of road in the country. Army mechanics bolted a .50 cal to the top of the wrecking truck because even the salvage and repair guys were expected to return fire. I was told it was the only armed wrecking truck in the entire U.S. Army.

I manage to avoid CLPs until halfway through the tour, when a series of winter storms grounds flights for a couple of weeks. We roll out of the base on a miserable January day with high-level clouds filtering out a weak sun and the wind shrieking down off the Hindu Kush completely unchecked. The night before, Able Company had spotted twenty or thirty fighters in the Watapor Valley and wiped them out with artillery and airpower, and most of the dead turned out to be Korengalis. The morning we head out a public affairs officer takes me aside and tells me he has information that a Taliban cell in the valley knows that our convoy is coming and is going to attack it. It's the kind of news that journalists are eager to hear as long as everything turns out okay. Of course, there's no way to know that except to take a deep breath and find out.

I have a spot in the second Humvee of the convoy with Captain John Thyng, the commander of Fusion Company. Thyng had been hit by a roadside bomb in Iraq and seemed more or less resigned to that happening in Afghanistan as well. He sits next to the driver and I sit diagonally across from him in the back, and then there's another soldier next to me and a gunner up in the turret with a .50 cal. I've been told that it will be up to me to pa.s.s him more ammo if he needs it. As soon as our wheels cross the wire the gunner racks his weapon and we grind slowly through Jalalabad and then head north on new black pavement that ribbons smoothly along the river. There are rice paddies along the floodplain and, here and there, cl.u.s.ters of jagged slate gravestones shoved into the ground like spades. Green prayer flags toil around them in the wind. The winter sun glances off the wide braidings of the river and makes the water look dull and heavy as mercury, and beyond that, rank after rank of mountains fall off toward the east: Pakistan. An old man stands in a field of stones watching us go by.

"The thing about the military is, every unit thinks they're the coolest," Thyng says as we roar past. We're all wearing headsets so we can hear each other over the engine and communicate with the other trucks. "I mean, the BSB guys think they're cool, but they're obviously not. And they don't even know know it, which is the most tragic thing about that situation." it, which is the most tragic thing about that situation."

The old man is well behind us now and we're coming up on a police checkpoint that has been shot to pieces by previous Taliban attacks. Behind it on the river, two men paddle a crude inner-tube raft toward our sh.o.r.e, stroking hard into the current. Thyng grabs a pair of binoculars and gla.s.ses them as we go by.

"But in their hearts I think they know," he adds after a while.

We reach the Korengal the morning of the following day. We'd spent the night at Blessing listening to the apocalyptic thunder of the 155s calibrating new rounds and left just after dawn so the convoy could make it out of the valley before dark. "I think we're going to get hit today," the driver of my Humvee says as he climbs into his seat. We jolt through Nagalam and then cross the Pech on a narrow bridge and enter the mouth of the Korengal. The road is excruciatingly narrow and if you look out the window you can see straight down to the bottom of the canyon several hundred feet below. It's easier to just look straight ahead and think about something else. After half an hour Thyng points to a ridge up ahead and says that after we pa.s.s that, things are going to get interesting.