War. Part 5

"Well, if my finger gets shot off I want you to try to save it," Anderson says. He's a saxophone player so his request makes sense.

"If your finger gets shot off, I'll find it and put it in your cargo pouch."

"Suppose I don't want it in my cargo pouch?"

"I'll put it anywhere you want."

Silence for five or ten minutes. "Maybe it would be cool to be a homicide detective," Anderson finally says.

"Why?"

"Well, it's not like we haven't seen enough dead bodies out here."

"Yeah, but you have to be all creepy and s.h.i.+t," LeFave answers. "You'd have to think like a killer."

"Well," Anderson says, "that sure as h.e.l.l wouldn't be hard."

Daylight only lasts six or seven hours but there's so little work at Restrepo that even that feels endless. The men fill up their time as best they can. One morning Gillespie conducts a "law of war" cla.s.s in which he goes over what is and isn't legal in terms of killing people. ("As much as you hate the Taliban and Al Qaeda, they're still people. Napalm? If you can get away without using it, so much the better.") There are a lot of squad brawls, and one man clears his hooch instantly by pulling out a hand grenade and waving it around. Steiner, Lambert, and Donoho put on "Touch Me," by Gunther and the Suns.h.i.+ne Girls, and briefly turn the First Squad hooch into a gay disco. Mace toboggans through the outpost on a flexible Skedco litter after a particularly heavy snowfall. O'Byrne receives a random care package from a high school girl that contains two hundred toothbrushes - more than enough for an entire company. She also sent pink plastic soap dishes. ("Are you serious? We make fun of each other out here enough as it is.") One morning O'Byrne walks past me muttering, "f.u.c.kin' pervert," about a platoonmate he accidentally caught committing a private act in his bunk. Jones wanders around the outpost wearing a fake afro with a purple plastic pick jammed in the back. He says he's going on patrol that way, helmet balanced on the top of all that hair, until O'Byrne points out it'll only aggravate the local rednecks.

The guys are experts, of a sort, at being funny, and they seem to go out of their way to be. Maybe it's the only way to stay sane up there. Not because of the combat - you're never saner than when your survival is in question - but because of the unbelievable, screaming boredom. "Okay, who's going to die today?" was a standard one-liner before patrols. ("Hey, Anderson, what do you want on your tombstone?" I heard someone ask before we all headed down to Karingal. "Now that's that's f.u.c.ked up," Anderson muttered as he put on his helmet.) Before patrols, guys promised their laptops to each other or their new boots or their iPods. One pair of friends had a serious agreement that if one of them should die, the other would erase all the p.o.r.n on his laptop before the Army could s.h.i.+p it back to his mom. Mothers were an irresistible source of humor. "If I start bangin' your mom when we get home, will that mean I'm your dad?" - or some version of that - was pretty much boilerplate humor at Restrepo. Once I watched O'Byrne grab someone's a.s.s and give it a good, deep squeeze. When the man demanded an explanation O'Byrne said, "Just trying to get an idea what your mom's a.s.s is gonna feel like when we get home." Only wives and girlfriends are off-limits because the men are already so riddled with anxiety over what's going on back home that almost nothing you could say would be funny. Anything else - mothers, sisters, r.e.t.a.r.ded nephews - is fair game. f.u.c.ked up," Anderson muttered as he put on his helmet.) Before patrols, guys promised their laptops to each other or their new boots or their iPods. One pair of friends had a serious agreement that if one of them should die, the other would erase all the p.o.r.n on his laptop before the Army could s.h.i.+p it back to his mom. Mothers were an irresistible source of humor. "If I start bangin' your mom when we get home, will that mean I'm your dad?" - or some version of that - was pretty much boilerplate humor at Restrepo. Once I watched O'Byrne grab someone's a.s.s and give it a good, deep squeeze. When the man demanded an explanation O'Byrne said, "Just trying to get an idea what your mom's a.s.s is gonna feel like when we get home." Only wives and girlfriends are off-limits because the men are already so riddled with anxiety over what's going on back home that almost nothing you could say would be funny. Anything else - mothers, sisters, r.e.t.a.r.ded nephews - is fair game.

Not all the humor involved gutting your best friend's personal dignity. Donoho would pretend to see obstacles on night patrols and climb over them so he could watch the next guy in line try to do the same thing. Money ate a two-pound bag of tuna in one sitting just to see what would happen. O'Byrne and Sergeant Al fas.h.i.+oned a tarantula out of pipe cleaners to slip into my sleeping bag. (They giggled like schoolgirls while they were making it so I knew something was up.) Some of the men were deeply, intentionally funny, others - like Money - were inadvertently funny, and a few seemed to act as fulcrums for a sick hilarity that could well up from almost anywhere. Jones was one of those. He was the only black guy in the platoon, and that alone made him an irresistible source of humor. That was also true of Kim, the only Asian, and Rueda, who looked awfully Indian. (He had no idea whether he really was or not, but O'Byrne called him "Apache" anyway.) Not only was Jones the only black guy in the platoon, he was one of only five in the entire company and he'd clearly given the matter some thought. "Black people don't jump out of planes," he told me when I asked him why there weren't more blacks in the unit. The platoon was on ambush west of Restrepo and we had a lot of time to kill. "Black people don't want to come out here and get shot at. It's not what they do. Most times black folks join the Army because they're trying to get a skill set to do something else with their life. I get plenty of s.h.i.+t around here for being the only black dude, but ninety-eight percent of the time it's all in good fun. You're gonna run across some guys out there who don't like me, I guaran-G.o.d-d.a.m.n-tee it, but at the same time I bet there's not one of 'em that would say, 'I wouldn't take him in a firefight.' And that's what I'm looking for. I don't need you to like me, but I need you to respect me. I need you to want to go to war with me."

Jones had a kind of rangy muscularity that made him seem capable of going to the Olympics in virtually anything. He roamed Restrepo like some kind of alpha predator, and if you caught his attention, you didn't know whether he was going to jump you, look right through you, or drape an arm over your shoulder and ask how you were doing. He exuded a strange, sullen anger that never quite came to the surface but instead wound up getting slid between your ribs as a casual observation that was devastating because it was so accurate. He dubbed one officer "Chinless the Fearless" and probably wouldn't have even bothered except that the guy really was was fearless. He was fond of giving someone a dismissive look and saying, "Just a fearless. He was fond of giving someone a dismissive look and saying, "Just a mess mess. A soup sandwich. Just a G.o.dd.a.m.n mess." I liked him tremendously. I think it took most of the year for him to say more than two words to me.

"Personally, I don't give a f.u.c.k, you know what I mean?" he went on to tell me about his life before the Army. "I'll tell anyone who will listen: I smoked a lot of weed, I sold a lot of drugs, I don't care who knows it, it's the way it was. I never got caught, my choice was pretty much on the streets dead, or in jail. I didn't want either so I joined the Army. And now it's dead or back home, but I guess the jail thing is out of the f.u.c.king equation. My mom raised me better than that, plain and simple. She just raised me better than to be selling drugs. She was the realest person in my life."

If humor wasn't enough to get you through the week you could always talk about the exploits of the men on leave. By mid-tour there was a steady trickle of men coming and going, and the things that happened to them provided a minor amount of spiritual sustenance for the others. Leave lasts eighteen days and starts when your feet touch American soil. It seems to consist mostly of getting drunk with friends and trying to meet, impress, and seduce women who won't care that the a.s.sociation will be measured in days, if not hours. When Pemble went home on leave he had to change planes in Texas, and as he was walking through the first-cla.s.s section on his flight to Oregon a man jumped up, grabbed Pemble's boarding pa.s.s, and told him they were trading seats. Pemble's uniform was ripped and filthy, and he sat in first cla.s.s for the first time in his life reeking of combat and drinking champagne. He took a commuter train from the airport to Beaverton and walked into a Hooters restaurant and ordered a beer. The waitress saw him in his uniform and sat down next to him and started asking questions. At one point she wanted to know what he'd done to get his combat infantry badge.

'I just had to get shot at,' Pemble answered.

Her next question was whether or not he had a girlfriend.

Pemble's parents didn't know he was coming home on leave - he wanted to surprise them - so he walked several miles from the train station with an a.s.sault pack over his shoulder and people staring at him as they drove by. His parents were both at work and the house was locked so he got a ladder out of the garage, put it to a second-story window, and climbed in. After a while he got bored sitting home alone so he went out and knocked at the house of a Vietnam vet who lived next door. The vet understood without having to ask and pulled some whiskey out of the cabinet and they spent the rest of the afternoon drinking. When Pemble's parents finally came home he was asleep on their couch, filthy and exhausted and drunk.

Everyone reacts differently to going home. The first time Hijar sat down to a hot meal he burst into tears. Cortez didn't know whether he should act like a man or a boy when he saw his mom at the airport, but it didn't matter because it was his brother-in-law who picked him up and they just went out and got drunk. Jones thought the rattling of the pipes when he ran the water sounded just like the .50 and stood there listening to it for so long that his wife finally asked what was wrong. Everyone jerked at loud noises and dreamed about combat, and everyone worried about their brothers back in the Korengal. It was the kind of combat where one man could make all the difference, but you couldn't be that man if you were home partying with your friends.

And then there were the questions. Moreno went home to Beeville, Texas, and got into a conversation with a stranger who finally asked what he'd wanted to ask all along, which was whether Moreno had killed anyone. Moreno just looked at him. "Keep in mind I've never met this guy," Moreno said. "I'm like, 'Yo, we don't like talking about that.' And he was like, 'If I killed someone I'd let you know.' His eyes were rolling toward the back of his head and this and that and I was like, 'Dude, it's different when you see your best friend laying there dead. You think you're a bada.s.s until you've seen a fallen soldier laying there not breathing anymore and then it's a different f.u.c.king story.'"

Moreno thought of leave primarily as eighteen days when he didn't have to worry about getting shot. He was one of those rare things, a good soldier who didn't like combat, and as far as he was concerned if they never got into another firefight it was fine with him. Once we got hit pretty hard and an RPG came in and exploded against the sandbags right next to where Moreno was standing. There were only a few weeks to go in the deployment and Moreno dropped into a hole and came back up shaking his head in disgust. Meanwhile Steiner was running around with a big grin on his face. "It's like crack," he yelled, "you can't get a better high." I asked him how he was ever going to go back to civilian life.

He shook his head. "I have no idea."

8.

THE MISSION EVERYONE'S BEEN GETTING NERVOUS about is Karingal. They've never gone there without getting shot at and the fact that there hasn't been a TIC in weeks only means the enemy has saved up plenty of ammo. Karingal is only a few clicks south of Loy Kalay but the approach is wide open to enemy positions on 1705 and the inhabitants are hard-core Taliban - the guys say they can tell by the looks in their eyes. The town's only saving grace is that there's supposed to be one very beautiful girl there, Moreno caught a glimpse of her once (right before they got lit up from the south). Otherwise all the hot girls are in Upper Obenau. about is Karingal. They've never gone there without getting shot at and the fact that there hasn't been a TIC in weeks only means the enemy has saved up plenty of ammo. Karingal is only a few clicks south of Loy Kalay but the approach is wide open to enemy positions on 1705 and the inhabitants are hard-core Taliban - the guys say they can tell by the looks in their eyes. The town's only saving grace is that there's supposed to be one very beautiful girl there, Moreno caught a glimpse of her once (right before they got lit up from the south). Otherwise all the hot girls are in Upper Obenau.

Patrols never leave at the same time or follow the same routes, and the mission to Karingal is set for midafternoon with the sun just starting to throw cold blue shadows across the valley. We leave the wire through the southern gate and contour across the draw, moving quickly through the open spots and only stopping behind trees so the patrol is harder to spot. You never walk up on the man in front of you because cl.u.s.ters get targeted, and you never speak over a whisper. If you step carelessly and knock stones down the slope, heads turn and men stare. We cross over the high road and continue southward into a pretty little valley above a creek slotted deeply into a draw. The creek comes down from the high peaks muttering between boulders and over rock shelves and we have to walk way up the valley before we can cross over and double back on the other side. Snow is lying deep in the northern exposures and melting busily on the south-facing slopes as if winter weren't happening there, and if you stopped to feel the sun on your face, you could imagine the war wasn't either.

We exit the draw somewhere north of Karingal and move quickly down the road, boots crunching double-time in the snow and the men silent and tense. The sounds of village life rise to meet us, children shouting and the cry of a baby and once in a while a rooster or the patient agonies of livestock. We're moving on the village single file as fast as we can and sweating heavily in our body armor, trying to get close before the local men can get up to their fighting positions. Gillespie pauses briefly before turning the ridgeline outside town and we start down the last stretch with 1705 looming above us like the hull of a huge gray battles.h.i.+p. No cover except six inches of frozen mud if you squeezed yourself down into the tire ruts in the road.

The village has gone silent now except for one dog, then another furiously baying our arrival. We clamber down the final slope into town to find every door closed and every window shuttered tight. I follow O'Byrne to the edge of the village and he takes up a position behind some trees and watches the ridgeline to our south. That's where it will come from if it comes at all. A family is cl.u.s.tered on the back porch of a house, children crying and a woman trying to pull everyone indoors. A chicken wanders through it all pecking the ground. A mortar booms in the distance, something must be going on up-valley. O'Byrne spots an old man moving fast through the lower village hoping we won't see him and O'Byrne shouts and the old man looks up and nods and starts making his way toward us. He's using an ax as a walking stick and moves impossibly fast up the steep slopes. He must be at least sixty, and moments after O'Byrne calls to him he's standing before us not even breathing hard. An Afghan soldier relieves him of his ax. Through an interpreter the man says he's visiting from Yaka Chine because his son has a wounded leg. Gillespie tells him to take us there and we start off through the village doing our best to keep up with him.

The son is about ten and faces us bravely while Doc Old peels the bandage off his leg. Old has written "I'll f.u.c.k your face" in Magic Marker on the front of his ammo rack, but whatever that means, it doesn't seem to impede his concern for the boy. He's been shot in the s.h.i.+n but the wound is months old and has turned gelatinous and brown. I can see the white of his s.h.i.+nbone and a small hole in front where a bullet went in. "Looks like one of ours," Old says, meaning the hole is so small it's probably from an American M4. AK rounds are a lot bigger and do considerably more damage. The father claims the boy got his wound by falling down, but that's clearly absurd and the boy looks like he'd rather lose his leg than stand here any longer with these soldiers gathered around him. Doc Old kneels in front of him to put on a new bandage and when he's done he looks up and says he should get it checked out at the KOP. To me it looks like he's going to lose his leg at the knee. The old man glances around apologetically and shakes his head.

"All we're going to do is help his son," Gillespie tells the translator. "He needs to tell me a good reason why he shouldn't go back to the KOP."

The translator asks the man a long question and gets a long answer back. "He is tired right now and this is the praying time."

"How long does it take to pray?" Gillespie says. "Because if he needs to pray he can pray right now. It's just the right thing for us to do. I mean just 'cause you're tired... it's your son son."

In retrospect the old man's reluctance made perfect sense - he knew what was going to happen and didn't want to be around us when it did - but eventually Gillespie convinces him to come with us. The old man ducks into his house and comes out with a blanket and knots it over his shoulders and puts his son inside it. He falls in line and we leave the village like we came in, fast and single file, and the first burst of AK comes before the men have even gotten to the road. I'm walking behind Gillespie in the gray-dark and I hear him say, "f.u.c.k," and we flatten ourselves against a stone wall. There are three or four detonations and I can feel the bottom drop out of my stomach, this is my first contact since getting blown up and somehow all the fight's gone out of me, I have no interest in any of this. I crouch against the wall and watch the men I'm with try to figure out what to do.

"Anyone got contact with Two-One, over?" Gillespie says into his radio. "Two-One" means First Squad - Sergeant Mac's men. They're at the top of the village covering our movement.

"Two-One, Two-One, just call," someone repeats.

"f.u.c.k," Gillespie says for the second time and starts moving toward the top of the town. Stichter starts calling mortars down on Kilo Echo 2205, one of the preset targets on a ridgeline to our south, and we churn through town at a dead run, the SAW gunners gasping under their loads. Halfway up the hill Pemble reports he's established communication with Two-One and that the detonations were outgoing 203 rounds: everything's fine. Later we find out that a bullet splintered some wood just above O'Byrne's head, but that's nothing new, and we form up outside the village and move out along the road we came in on.

The old man walks bent forward with his arms clasped behind his back to support the injured boy and I have the impression he could outwalk all of us straight up a mountain if he had to. The plan is to move back to Loy Kalay along the road and deliver the old man and the boy to a Destined Company patrol that has rolled down there in Humvees. It takes the gun team a while to climb down to the road, though, so by the time we start north it's been a good hour since the shooting. First Platoon walked straight into a night ambush on Rock Avalanche, and it seems like it would be an incredibly easy thing to do to us as well - just get a little bit ahead on the road and take out the whole lead squad with machine guns and RPGs.

While we're waiting for the gun team to join us I have time to decide where I want to be in the line. O'Byrne is up front with the rest of his fire team - Money and Steiner and Vaughn. If we walk into an ambush they're going to take the brunt of it, but they're the guys I've been bunking with and know best. When you're entirely dependent on other men for your safety you find yourself making strange unconscious choices about otherwise very mundane things: where to walk, where to sit, who to talk to. You don't want to be anywhere near the ANA on patrol because they're almost as likely to kill you by accident as they are to kill the enemy on purpose. You don't want to be near the new guys in case they freeze or shoot so much they draw fire or jam their guns. You don't want to be near the cowboys, either, or the guys who have to glance over at their team leader before they dare do anything. It's subtle, what you want - I'm not sure there are even words for it - but at night on a frozen road outside an enemy village the choices you make reflect something real. I pick up my pack and move forward.

Thirty feet between Steiner and me, thirty feet between me and Vaughn. O'Byrne walking point, as usual. No sound but the sc.r.a.pe of boots on frozen dirt and occasionally a dog barking in the villages below. G.o.d knows how, but they sense strange men are moving through their valley and they don't like it. There's no moon but the stars are fierce and leak just enough light to see a bit of the road and the shapes of the men ahead. I try to avoid walking through puddles because the skim ice shatters with a disastrous clarity in the frozen air. The wind s.h.i.+fts heavily through the holly trees around us. I run scenarios in my mind about where I'll go if we suddenly get lit up, but most stretches of road have no cover so my best option is to just lie down so I don't get hit by gunfire from the men behind me.

We pa.s.s quietly below the dark ma.s.ses of the mountains and occasionally we see a porch light burning down in the valley like a lone planet in an inverted sky. A long time later we're still on the road when a sick, hollow little whistle pa.s.ses overhead. A few minutes later it happens again. No one knows what it is but later I find out they were sniper rounds fired from way down-valley - off-target but still boring fiercely through the darkness bearing their tiny loads of death.

"Those rounds. .h.i.t pretty close to you in Karingal?" I overhear someone ask O'Byrne after the patrol.

"Yeah, they were pretty f.u.c.king close."

"When you didn't radio back we thought you might have been hit. But we didn't hear any screaming, so we figured you were okay."

"Yeah - "

" - or he was. .h.i.t in the mouth," someone else offers.

Even O'Byrne has to laugh.

BOOK THREE.

LOVE.

The coward's fear of death stems in large part from his incapacity to love anything but his own body. The inability to partic.i.p.ate in others' lives stands in the way of his developing any inner resources sufficient to overcome the terror of death. - J. Glenn Gary, - J. Glenn Gary, The Warriors The Warriors

1.

THAT SPRING STEINER GOT SHOT IN THE HEAD WHILE pinned down at the Aliabad cemetery. Third Platoon was putting in a new outpost on the spot where Murphree lost his legs and Second Platoon's job was to set up on the crest of Hill 1705 and overwatch them while they worked. They were going to go in at dusk and work all night and hope to be done by dawn. Since the site was accessible by road they used prepoured concrete barriers trucked down on flatbeds and unloaded by bulldozer, and the next morning Gillespie decided to move his men off the mountain because the job was done. There was airpower in the next valley over and it was as good a time as any, but some of the team leaders wanted to wait until dark. "That's why we have night vision gear," O'Byrne said, "so that we can walk at night when the enemy can't see us." pinned down at the Aliabad cemetery. Third Platoon was putting in a new outpost on the spot where Murphree lost his legs and Second Platoon's job was to set up on the crest of Hill 1705 and overwatch them while they worked. They were going to go in at dusk and work all night and hope to be done by dawn. Since the site was accessible by road they used prepoured concrete barriers trucked down on flatbeds and unloaded by bulldozer, and the next morning Gillespie decided to move his men off the mountain because the job was done. There was airpower in the next valley over and it was as good a time as any, but some of the team leaders wanted to wait until dark. "That's why we have night vision gear," O'Byrne said, "so that we can walk at night when the enemy can't see us."

O'Byrne tried to raise the point with the lieutenant, but Sergeant Mac finally told him to stop being a b.i.t.c.h. 'If I was a b.i.t.c.h I wouldn't have joined the Army in the first place,' O'Byrne answered. The other side of the coin was that they were deep in enemy territory without much cover, and if they stayed where they were all day, they'd probably get attacked as well. It was a s.h.i.+tty deal all the way around. The men started down the steep slopes of 1705 and as soon as they moved out of position, a single gunshot cracked through the valley. "Right then we should have f.u.c.king held back and stopped moving," O'Byrne told me later. "It wasn't our first day. We all knew what the f.u.c.k that shot meant."

The road north of 1705 has no cover at all and is exposed to almost every enemy position in the southern half of the valley; it's the kind of place soldiers literally have bad dreams about. When everyone got down to the road, O'Byrne told the men behind him that he was simply going to run, and then he turned and headed for the next bit of cover three hundred yards away. O'Byrne made it to a low rock wall south of Aliabad without taking fire and took a knee to cover everyone else. The rest of his team came tumbling in after him and then Gillespie and Patterson gasped past and finally Weapons Squad came into view. They were staggering under their loads and still strung along the road when the first burst came in. That was followed by a ma.s.sive barrage from virtually every enemy position in the southern valley, and O'Byrne watched the rock wall he was hiding behind start to disintegrate from the impacts. He was still furious they hadn't waited until dark. 'This is the day I'm going to die,' he thought.

The rest of O'Byrne's team was pinned down just as badly. Steiner was lying flat on the ground next to Stichter, and when he tried to get up a burst from a PKM rattled into the wall in front of him and lacerated his face with stone shards. He dropped down to regain his composure and then sat up again just in time to catch the next burst. A round drilled straight into his helmet and snapped his head back so hard that he hit Stichter in the face and almost broke his nose. Stichter screamed for a medic and someone else yelled that Steiner had taken a round in the head, and Steiner slumped to the ground with a hole in his helmet and blood running down his face.

Steiner lay there unable to see or move, wondering whether the things he was hearing were true. Had he been hit in the head? Was he dead? How would he know? The fact that he could hear the men around him should count for something. After a while he could see a little bit and he sat up and looked around. The bullet had penetrated his helmet to the innermost layer and then gone tumbling off in another direction, looking for someone else to kill. (The blood on his face turned out to be lacerations from stone fragments that had hit him.) The other men glanced at Steiner in shock - most of them thought he was dead - but kept shooting because they were still getting hammered and firepower was the only way out of there. Steiner was in a daze and he just sat there with a bullet hole in his helmet, grinning. After a while he got up and started laughing. He should be dead but he wasn't and it was the funniest thing in the world. "Get the f.u.c.k down and start returning fire!" someone yelled at him. Steiner laughed on. Others started laughing as well. Soon every man in the platoon was howling behind their rock wall, pouring unholy amounts of firepower into the mountainsides around them.

"It was to cover up how everyone was really feeling," Mac admitted to me later.

Three Humvees drove down from the KOP to pick up Steiner, but he refused to go with them - he wanted to 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, 'f.u.c.k, 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 s.h.i.+t is," O'Byrne explained to me later. "Inches. Everything is that that close. There's just places I don't allow my mind to go. Steiner was saying to me, 'What if the bullet - ' and I just stopped him right there, I didn't even let him finish. I said, 'But it didn't. It close. There's just places I don't allow my mind to go. Steiner was saying to me, 'What if the bullet - ' and I just stopped him right there, I didn't even let him finish. I said, 'But it didn't. It didn't didn't.'"

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 G.o.d. 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. Relations.h.i.+ps 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 G.o.d"; "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 f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.ked 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 pa.s.s 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. 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.

"f.u.c.k 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.

"f.u.c.k yeah," says Lambert.

"You ever go squirrel hunting?"

"f.u.c.k 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 Lord of the Flies Lord of the Flies turning point - there were only four months to go and standards were starting to slip - but there were consequences. One afternoon soon after I arrive, three old men come walking in from Obenau and stop at the front gate. At first Patterson is pleased - this is the first time elders have made the trip to Restrepo, which can only mean good things about the hearts-and-minds campaign - but not everyone is convinced. "I think this is about the cow," O'Byrne tells me in a low voice as we walk over to where the meeting is going to happen. The elders sit on a row of sandbags by the ANA hooch and Patterson and Abdul, the interpreter, sit facing them. The elders don't take long to get to the point. turning point - there were only four months to go and standards were starting to slip - but there were consequences. One afternoon soon after I arrive, three old men come walking in from Obenau and stop at the front gate. At first Patterson is pleased - this is the first time elders have made the trip to Restrepo, which can only mean good things about the hearts-and-minds campaign - but not everyone is convinced. "I think this is about the cow," O'Byrne tells me in a low voice as we walk over to where the meeting is going to happen. The elders sit on a row of sandbags by the ANA hooch and Patterson and Abdul, the interpreter, sit facing them. The elders don't take long to get to the point.

"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 cow? What do you want to do? Just tell them."

"Like how much does a cow cost?" says Patterson.

"Like five hundred bucks."

"Five hundred bucks? Is that Afghani or American?"

"Of course, American."

Patterson says he has to check with his commander and he gets up and walks into the radio hooch. He gets Kearney on the line and the first thing Kearney wants to know is whether or not his men killed the cow.

"It was tangled up in our wire pretty much dead," Patterson answers. "Two-four ended up cuttin' it up, over."