War. Part 6

Kearney says that as long as his soldiers didn't actually kill the cow he doesn't owe any money, but the owners can claim as much HA - "humanitarian aid" - as they want: rice, beans, flour, cooking oil, blankets. Patterson goes back to the elders and delivers the verdict. All they want is money. Patterson says it's HA or nothing, and they ask how much of it they could get.

"Whatever the weight of the cow was, will be the weight of HA," says Patterson.

It's an inspired bit of Old Testament justice, and one of the Afghan soldiers laughs when he hears it. Even the elders smile. After a while they stand up and shake hands and make their way up the steep slopes of the outpost to the southern gate. It's not clear what they're going to do but I'm pretty sure we haven't heard the last of the cow. Later I point out to O'Byrne that they actually did did kill the cow. kill the cow.

"Well, it was pretty badly tangled up in the wire," he says.

"It was tangled up in the wire because you guys chased it in there."

"Okay," he says, "it's a gray area."

A few days later we leave the hilltop after midnight and go creeping into Karingal with so little illume that even the soldiers have trouble seeing with their night vision gear. There are puddles in the road and stars are reflected in them as if we're walking through fragments of sky. A valley dog barks and another picks it up and by the time we arrive in Karingal the town is deserted except for one teenage boy who produces a sullen evasiveness that is unmistakable even without a common language. We get hit on the way out just as everyone expected - "Another well-timed patrol so we can get lit the f.u.c.k up," as Moreno once said - and we come back at a run up a pretty creekbed with mortars shrieking over our heads and Restrepo's .50 hammering away protectively. At one point someone fires two or three bursts from behind a rock wall and Alcantara wants to know what the man is shooting at.

"I don't know, I just figure one one of us should f.u.c.king return fire," comes the answer. of us should f.u.c.king return fire," comes the answer.

We make it back to the base an hour later, sprinting the last stretch where Kim got pinned down weeks earlier and staggering in the south gate drenched like we'd all just jumped in a pond. The shooting has died down but starts up again half an hour later and then gets firmly settled by a pair of Apaches that come buzzing into the Korengal like angry insects. The men sit around s.h.i.+rtless, smoking cigarettes and watching the Apaches do their work against the flanks of 1705. "You thought that s.h.i.+t was funny this morning, huh?" someone yells after a long groan of 30 mike-mike into the mountainside. "Shoot at us again, b.i.t.c.h."

Prophet has been picking up a lot of chatter about moving weapons and ammo around the valley and the enemy keeps talking about "the thing" and "the big machine." The men a.s.sume it's a Dishka. Kearney has a plan to air-a.s.sault Third Platoon onto the Sawtalo Sar ridge to try to find it, and Second Platoon's job will be to man Phoenix and some of Third's other positions while they're on the mountain. That's planned for the end of April, which leaves Restrepo a couple of weeks to conduct their own patrols before they get sucked into the larger mechanics of a company-level operation. The villagers in Loy Kalay have been complaining about Taliban fighters that move into their village after dark and hara.s.s them, and Patterson comes up with a plan to set up an ambush outside Karingal and surprise them on their way back. It will mean walking down-valley at night, hiding outside the village, and not moving a muscle until it gets dark again. The site for the ambush will be a low rock wall across a small valley outside Karingal. The stakes are high: if we're spotted there, fighters in town can keep us pinned down behind the wall while their brothers in Darbart come down on us through the holly forests of 1705.

The mission is scheduled to go out shortly before midnight, and after dinner I start a.s.sembling my gear: a CamelBak full of water, one MRE, a rain poncho, a fleece jacket, and a handful of coffee crystals to pour into my drinking water to get me through the wake-up. Anderson wanders over and watches me for a while without saying anything and finally asks if I want to borrow an old uniform he has. I ask him why.

"It would be a lot better if we didn't get spotted," he says.

When soldiers use understatement it's generally worth paying attention, but I turn him down because wearing military clothing seems like such a blatant erosion of journalistic independence. I doubt I'm more visible than the soldiers anyway - I'm dressed in muted colors that long ago turned Korengal-gray - but as I continue packing I realize that that's not really the point. If we get compromised I'll be the only guy in civilian clothes, and suppose someone gets. .h.i.t? Suppose someone gets killed? Like every other reporter out there I'm eating Army food, flying on Army helicopters, sleeping in Army hooches, and if I were in the Korengal on my own, I'd probably be dead in twenty-four hours. Whatever boundaries may have blurred between me and the Army, the blurring didn't start with a s.h.i.+rt.

I finish packing and find Anderson in his bunk and tell him I'll take the clothes after all. He tosses them to me without a glance.

2.

I'M ON MY BACK BEHIND A LOW ROCK WALL WITH A man ten feet to the left of me and another ten feet to the right. It's so dark in the shadows I have no idea who they are. Holly oaks are bent over us like malevolent old people and moonlight turns the hillsides to pewter. It's very cold and I wrap myself in an Army poncho and try to think myself off the mountain to someplace nice. I delay putting on my jacket because the cold is more bearable knowing that I've still got something in reserve. After a few hours a thin gray light finally infiltrates the world and begins rea.s.sembling the rocks and the trees around me. We're on a steep hill facing Karingal with every man propped against his ruck and more men above and behind and below. The Claymores are out and no one speaks. Everyone is watching the valley emerge from the safety of night toward whatever's going to happen next. man ten feet to the left of me and another ten feet to the right. It's so dark in the shadows I have no idea who they are. Holly oaks are bent over us like malevolent old people and moonlight turns the hillsides to pewter. It's very cold and I wrap myself in an Army poncho and try to think myself off the mountain to someplace nice. I delay putting on my jacket because the cold is more bearable knowing that I've still got something in reserve. After a few hours a thin gray light finally infiltrates the world and begins rea.s.sembling the rocks and the trees around me. We're on a steep hill facing Karingal with every man propped against his ruck and more men above and behind and below. The Claymores are out and no one speaks. Everyone is watching the valley emerge from the safety of night toward whatever's going to happen next.

Karingal is a few hundred yards away. There is a stream at the base of our hill and then a series of wheat terraces and finally the first houses of town. People stir as soon as it's light enough to see: voices, the cries of children, an ax smacking into wood. Teenage boys chase their family's goats up the steep dry slopes west of town to graze the higher elevations. Two girls, little dabs of color against the green terraces, make their way to the stream below us and crouch to wash themselves. They can't be fifty yards away. One old woman walks into the fields to relieve herself and others shuffle along a trail with bundles of firewood on their heads. No one has any idea we're here. Finally there's a man in olive drab moving fast along the high road toward Loy Kalay. He looks around continually and is soon joined by two other men on the same road. One has a shaved head. Next to me, Pemble studies them through binoculars and writes things down in a notebook. If he sees a gun or a radio they'll be killed.

"We've seen about ten pax - fighting-age males - moving from Karingal to Loy Kalay and back," Pemble tells me in a whisper. I can barely hear him over the rus.h.i.+ng of the stream below us. "Two of them were wearing BDU jackets and they seem to be pulling security - one guy will come out, scan around, there's another guy just chillin' on a rooftop."

BDUs are what the Army calls foliage-based camouflage. O'Byrne is whispering into his radio that wearing them is a killable offense, just like carrying a radio or a gun, but Patterson isn't sure. (Patterson is the platoon sergeant, but he's leading the patrol because Gillespie is away on leave.) After a few minutes the fighters disappear from sight and I watch the expression on O'Byrne's face go foul. He's lost his chance to kill those guys and - I know exactly what he's thinking - they might be the very guys who kill an American next week or next month. There are other considerations, though. The enemy has observation posts as well, and they know exactly where the Americans go in the valley. This is one of the first times that a patrol has set up in their backyard and not been spotted. Enemy fighters are walking back and forth on an otherwise hidden road without any idea that infidels are watching them from two hundred yards away. Patterson could kill two guys now, or he could come back with a better plan and kill ten later.

By midmorning young boys start to play along the banks of the stream, and when I close my eyes, all I can hear are their shouts and the steady wash of the rapids. The only way to know I'm at war is to open my eyes and look around at all the men with their guns. The sun finally reaches our hillside and spreads over us like warm oil and I close my eyes again and listen to the children, and a while later I wake up to silence and c.u.mulus clouds sliding across a pale blue sky. Hoyt has a pinch of dip in his mouth and dribbles methodically into the dirt beside him. Pemble stares placidly at the mountainside. Patterson studies the village through binos and checks what he sees against the entries in Pemble's notebook.

Once in a while a man in the village looks in our direction and then looks away. It's inconceivable that he could see us - dirty, unmoving faces in a chaos of rocks and foliage - but still, I have to fight the urge to duck behind the rock wall. No motion at all: roll to the side to p.i.s.s and if you need to stretch, do it one limb at a time and very slowly. c.u.mulus clouds drag their shadows across the flat geometry of the terraces and then up into the hills and OP Dallas test-fires their .50 and the sun seems to stall around the noon point and then start its slide toward the western ridges. The valley colors deepen and by midafternoon Karingal contracts back in on itself: goatherds coming down off the hillsides and old men making their way across the terraces and women and children collecting on the rooftops. We leave our wall at the last blue tones of dusk and creep north off the hill and toward safety. We're undetected except for the valley dogs that almost choke with outrage as we pa.s.s them in the dark.

Midafternoon and we're sitting in the shade of concealment netting that's been draped over the courtyard. There hasn't been a firefight in weeks and the men are getting a little weird: disputes with a strange new edge to them and a sullen tension that doesn't bode well for the coming months. April is supposed to be the start of fighting season, and the fact that nothing has happened yet produces a cruel mix of boredom and anxiety. If the men were getting hammered they'd at least have something to do, but this is the worst of both worlds: all the dread and none of the adrenaline. A visiting combat medic named Doc Shelke is talking about the Hindu religion and Abdul, the Afghan interpreter, happens to overhear him.

"Hindu is bulls.h.i.+t," he says.

Shelke looks like he might be from India. He maintains his calm. "The last time a terp said something like that, I talked s.h.i.+t about Islam until he cried," he says.

It was a stupid thing for Abdul to say and he doesn't speak English well enough to make this a fair fight, or even interesting. In an attempt to head off another hour of boredom O'Byrne weighs in with his own religious views. "I don't believe in heaven or h.e.l.l and I don't want an afterlife," he says. "I believe in doing good in your life, and then you die. I don't believe in G.o.d and I've never read the Bible. I don't believe in that s.h.i.+t because I don't want want to." to."

An awkward silence. Another sergeant says something irrelevant about an upcoming patrol.

"What - the conversation gets serious and you change the subject?" O'Byrne says. "We're talking about religion religion. You can't have a half-a.s.sed conversation about religion."

More silence. No one knows what to say. "Mommy hit Daddy and then Daddy hit Mommy," a private finally tries.

The mood eases when Airborne, a puppy that Second Platoon took from the Afghan soldiers, wanders into the courtyard. They named him Airborne because the soldiers who are going to take over in July - Viper Company of the First Infantry Division - are just regular infantry, and the idea was to remind them of their inferiority every time they called for the dog. (It backfired: I was told someone from Viper just took Airborne out to the burn pit and shot him.) Airborne usually hangs around the base barking whenever anything moves outside the wire, but a few days ago he went missing and eventually turned up at the KOP. Someone tied him up with 550 cord, but he quickly chewed through that and followed the next switch-out up to Restrepo.

Now Airborne wanders from man to man, chewing on their boots and getting rolled in the dust by rough hands. "So you think you're tough, huh?" Moreno says, cuffing him in with quick boxer jabs. "Take that, you little b.a.s.t.a.r.d." Company net suddenly intrudes from the radio room: "Be advised that they dropped a thirty-one and a thirty-eight in Pakistan," a voice says. Everyone stops watching Airborne and looks up: thirty-ones and thirty-eights are bombs. They're not supposed to land in other countries.

The only men I ever saw pray at Restrepo were Afghans, and the topic of religion came up only once the entire time I was out there. It was a beautiful evening in the spring and we were sitting on the ammo hooch smoking cigarettes and talking about a recent TIC. One by one the men left until I was alone with Sergeant Alcantara, who decided to tell me about a recent conversation he'd had with the battalion chaplain. Heat lightning was flas.h.i.+ng silently over the valley and we could hear Apaches working something farther north along the Pech.

'Father, basically G.o.d came down to earth and in the form of Christ and died for our sins - right?' Al asked.

The chaplain nodded.

'And he died a painful death, but he knew he was going to heaven - right?'

Again the chaplain nodded.

'So how is that sacrifice greater than a soldier in this valley who has no idea no idea whether he's going to heaven?' whether he's going to heaven?'

According to Al, the chaplain had no useful response.

Religion gives a man enough courage to face the overwhelming, and there may have been so little religion at Restrepo because the men didn't feel particularly overwhelmed. (Why appeal to G.o.d when you can call in Apaches?) You don't haul your cook up there just so that he can be in his first firefight unless you're pretty confident it's going to end well. But even in the early days, when things were definitely not not ending well, the nearly narcotic effect of a tightly knit group might have made faith superfluous. The platoon ending well, the nearly narcotic effect of a tightly knit group might have made faith superfluous. The platoon was was the faith, a greater cause that, if you focused on it entirely, made your fears go away. It was an anesthetic that left you aware of what was happening but strangely fatalistic about the outcome. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever. the faith, a greater cause that, if you focused on it entirely, made your fears go away. It was an anesthetic that left you aware of what was happening but strangely fatalistic about the outcome. As a soldier, the thing you were most scared of was failing your brothers when they needed you, and compared to that, dying was easy. Dying was over with. Cowardice lingered forever.

Heroism is hard to study in soldiers because they invariably claim that they acted like any good soldier would have. Among other things, heroism is a negation of the self - you're prepared to lose your own life for the sake of others - so in that sense, talking about how brave you were may be psychologically contradictory. (Try telling a mother she was brave to run into traffic to save her kid.) Civilians understand soldiers to have a kind of baseline duty, and that everything above that is considered "bravery." Soldiers see it the other way around: either you're doing your duty or you're a coward. There's no other place to go. In 1908, five firemen died in a blaze in New York City. Speaking at the funeral, Chief Ed Croker had this to say about their bravery: "Firemen are going to get killed. When they join the department they face that fact. When a man becomes a fireman his greatest act of bravery has been accomplished. What he does after that is all in the line of work."

You don't have to be a soldier to experience the weird comfort of that approach. Courage seems daunting and hard to attain, but "work" is mundane and eminently doable, a collective process where everyone takes their chances. My work was journalism, not war, but the same principles applied. I was constantly monitoring my fear levels because I didn't want to freeze up at the wrong moment and create a problem, but it never happened, and after a couple of trips I felt my fear just kind of go away. It wasn't that I was less afraid of dying; it was that dying made slightly more sense in the context of a group endeavor that I was slowly becoming part of. As a rule I was way more scared in my bunk at night, when I had the luxury of worrying about myself, than on some hillside where I'd worry about us all.

Because I didn't carry a gun I would always be relegated to a place outside the platoon, but that didn't mean I was unaffected by its gravitational pull. There was a power and logic to the group that overrode everyone's personal concerns, even mine, and somewhere in that loss of self could be found relief from the terrible worries about what might befall you. And it was pretty obvious that if things got bad enough - and there was no reason to think they couldn't - the distinction between journalist and soldier would become irrelevant. A scenario where I found myself stuffing Kerlix into a wound or helping pull someone to safety was entirely plausible, and that forced me to think in ways that only soldiers usually have to. When Chosen got hit at Aranas they suffered a 100 percent casualty rate in a matter of minutes, and the firefight went on for another three hours. The idea that I wouldn't start helping - or fighting - in that situation was absurd.

The offers of weapons started on my first trip and continued throughout the entire year. Sometimes it was a hand grenade "just in case." Other times it was an offer to jump on the 240 during the next contact. ("We'll just show you where to shoot.") Once I told Moreno that if I weren't married I'd have been out there the full fifteen months, and he laughed and said that in that case, they'd definitely have me carrying a weapon. The idea of spending long stretches in the Korengal without shooting anything made as little sense to the soldiers as, say, going to a Vicenza wh.o.r.ehouse and just hanging out in the lobby. Guns were the point point, the one entirely good thing of the whole s.h.i.+tty year, and the fact that reporters don't carry them, shoot them, or accept the very generous offers to "go ahead and get some" on the .50 just made soldiers shake their heads. It was a hard thing to explain to them that maybe you could pa.s.s someone a box of ammo during a firefight or sneak 100 rounds on a SAW down at the firing range, but as a journalist the one thing you absolutely could not could not do was carry a weapon. It would make you a combatant rather than an observer, and you'd lose the right to comment on the war later with any kind of objectivity. do was carry a weapon. It would make you a combatant rather than an observer, and you'd lose the right to comment on the war later with any kind of objectivity.

To refuse a weapon was one thing, but that didn't mean you couldn't know anything about them. One hot, boring afternoon in the middle of the spring fighting season, Sergeant Al decided that Tim and I should be able to load and shoot every weapon at the outpost, and clear them if they jammed. We went over to the Afghan hooch and started with an AK. It was light and cheap-feeling, as if it were made out of tin, and Al said it has no internal recoil, so the entire force of the discharge goes straight into your shoulder. That makes it highly inaccurate after the first shot in a burst but mechanically so simple that it requires virtually no maintenance. You could hide it under a rock and come back six months later and it would still shoot.

The M4 fires a much smaller bullet, which means you can carry more ammunition for the same weight, but it's not accurate over distance and tends to jam. Several times I've been in firefights where the man next to me was swearing and desperately trying to clear his weapon. The SAW was the smallest belt-fed weapon at Restrepo and had such a simple design that a monkey could have operated it. You pop open the feed-tray cover, lay the ammo belt into the receiver, slap the cover closed, and pull back the charging bolt; now you're ready to fire 900 rounds a minute. The 240 is almost identical but larger and slower and the .50 is larger still, a barrel you could stick your thumb down and rounds the size of railroad spikes. With the .50 you could hit virtually anything in the valley you could see. During the Vietnam War, an American gunner supposedly attached a telescopic sight to his .50 and, with a single shot, knocked a messenger off a bicycle at two miles. It's such a perfect weapon that the design has not changed in any meaningful way since World War I.

As a reporter it was hard to come to any kind of psychological accommodation with the weapons because they were everywhere - you couldn't sit on someone's bunk without moving an M4 or some grenades - and they only got more compelling as time went on. They had a kind of heavy perfection that made them impossible to ignore. What you really really wanted to do was use them somehow, but that was so wildly forbidden that it took you a while to even admit you'd had the thought. After that you'd find yourself trying to imagine situations where it might be permissible without the obvious ethical problems. The only one I could come up with was a scenario that was so desperate and out of control - a hundred Taliban fighters coming up the draw and through the wire - that picking up a gun would be simply a matter of survival. That was too horrific to actually hope for, so I didn't, but I'd find myself thinking that if it wanted to do was use them somehow, but that was so wildly forbidden that it took you a while to even admit you'd had the thought. After that you'd find yourself trying to imagine situations where it might be permissible without the obvious ethical problems. The only one I could come up with was a scenario that was so desperate and out of control - a hundred Taliban fighters coming up the draw and through the wire - that picking up a gun would be simply a matter of survival. That was too horrific to actually hope for, so I didn't, but I'd find myself thinking that if it were were to happen, I hoped I'd be there for it. to happen, I hoped I'd be there for it.

It's a foolish and embarra.s.sing thought but worth owning up to. Perfectly sane, good men have been drawn back to combat over and over again, and anyone interested in the idea of world peace would do well to know what they're looking for. Not killing, necessarily - that couldn't have been clearer in my mind - but the other side of the equation: protecting. The defense of the tribe is an insanely compelling idea, and once you've been exposed to it, there's almost nothing else you'd rather do. The only reason anyone was alive at Restrepo - or at Aranas or at Ranch House or, later, at Wanat - was because every man up there was willing to die defending it. In Second Platoon Tim and I were the only ones who benefited from that arrangement for "free," as it were, and it's hard to overstate the psychological significance of that. (Once Tim found himself throwing ammo to a couple of guys who were stuck behind a Hesco during a fight, but that was as close as we ever got to actually doing doing anything.) There was a debt that no one registered except the men who owed it. anything.) There was a debt that no one registered except the men who owed it.

Collective defense can be so compelling - so addictive, in fact - that eventually it becomes the rationale for why the group exists in the first place. I think almost every man at Restrepo secretly hoped the enemy would make a serious try at overrunning the place before the deployment came to an end. It was everyone's worst nightmare but also the thing they hoped for most, some ultimate demonstration of the bond and fighting ability of the men. For sure there were guys who re-upped because something like that hadn't happened yet. After the men got back to Vicenza, I asked Bobby Wilson if he missed Restrepo at all.

"I'd take a helicopter there tomorrow," he said. Then, leaning in, a little softer: "Most of us would."

3.

NOTHING FOR WEEKS BUT THE OMINOUS BUILDUP of ammo in the valley and enemy commanders saying strange, enigmatic things into their radios. "I'll bring the Dishka and the milk," a commander radioed once, though no one knew whether that was code for something or he was actually bringing real milk somewhere. According to the radio chatter there are a dozen mortar rounds in the valley, ammo for an 88 mm recoilless, and even some Katyusha rockets. In 2000 I'd gone through a Taliban rocket attack with a group of Tajik fighters in the north, and it was nothing I ever wanted to repeat. The rockets came in with a shrieking whistle that made me weird about teakettles and subway brakes for years. of ammo in the valley and enemy commanders saying strange, enigmatic things into their radios. "I'll bring the Dishka and the milk," a commander radioed once, though no one knew whether that was code for something or he was actually bringing real milk somewhere. According to the radio chatter there are a dozen mortar rounds in the valley, ammo for an 88 mm recoilless, and even some Katyusha rockets. In 2000 I'd gone through a Taliban rocket attack with a group of Tajik fighters in the north, and it was nothing I ever wanted to repeat. The rockets came in with a shrieking whistle that made me weird about teakettles and subway brakes for years.

One morning Patterson leads a patrol along the high road and then up the western spur through sweet-smelling sage and past an enemy fighting position littered with old bra.s.s. From there we could see over the tops of the Hescos straight into Restrepo. Patterson calls in the grid numbers to the KOP so the mortars. .h.i.t it next time they take fire from that direction, and we continue climbing. We come out on a summit known as Peak One that the Americans and the Taliban more or less share. "When we're up here it's ours and as soon as we leave it's theirs," Mac says. There are American fighting positions facing south toward Yaka Chine and Taliban positions facing north toward the KOP. All of them are filled with garbage.

A monkey watches us at a safe distance from a rock, and someone says that if it's holding a radio we can shoot it. We sit for a while looking south toward Yaka Chine and eventually we descend to a little plateau where the enemy has set up more fighting positions. Nothing moves in the valley and we continue off the plateau and down the spur back to Restrepo. It's not even noon when we walk in the south gate and drop our gear and strip off our s.h.i.+rts. We sit on the ammo hooch drinking Gatorade and playing with Airborne, and after a while a single boom rolls through the valley.

"Road construction," Patterson says.

I'm already lunging for my vest and helmet and I sit back down a little sheepishly. Another boom rolls past and everyone looks at each other. A third boom.

"That's not road construction," someone says.

Vegas is getting sh.e.l.led and Dallas is getting hit and the KOP starts taking fire from the north. I crawl up to the LRAS position to watch mortars drop into the northern Abas Ghar and I'm up there for a few minutes with Cantu when rounds start snapping above our heads. Soon Mac scrambles up alongside us with a 240 and starts lighting up the Donga and Marastanau spurs and then Olson brings up another one to hit the ridges to the south and finally Bone arrives to start dropping bombs. Bone is the radio call sign for the B-1 bombers; they fly so high you can't see or hear them, but the forward observer will say something like "bombs incoming," and then you become aware of a strange, airy, rus.h.i.+ng sound. Then a flash, a boil of smoke unfolding like a dirty flower across the valley, and finally a shuddering compression of air that reaches you seconds later.

Bone drops bombs to the south and east and the shooting stops and the men sit around smoking cigarettes and waiting to see what will happen. Most of them went through the firefight s.h.i.+rtless and a few didn't even bother putting on their helmet or armor. After a while Lambert pokes his head up through the cutout to the .50 cal pit and says, "They just got radio chatter saying, 'Go back to your positions and fire again.'"

Mac's made himself comfortable against the sandbags and doesn't even bother getting up. "Apparently we didn't do enough damage to them and they want some more," he says. "They want their seventy-two virgins."

Prophet says a group of foreign fighters has just come into the valley, and local commanders wanted to provide them with a good fight. And once the foreigners use up their ammo they'll have to pay locals to carry more from Pakistan, so there's even a financial incentive to keep shooting. Sometimes the fight in the valley could seem like a strange, slow game that everyone - including the Americans - were enjoying too much to possibly bring to an end.

Half an hour later another convulsion of firepower sweeps through the American positions. Olson pins someone down with his 240 on Spartan Spur and I can stand directly behind him, his shoulder vibrating with the recoil, and watch tracers arc and wobble across the draw and finger their way around the ridge. Now it's dusk and the men sit in the courtyard, faces still dirt-streaked from the patrol, talking about the TIC. It's the best thing that's happened in weeks, and there probably won't be another like it for at least that long. Murphy starts wondering aloud which side the sherbet spoon goes on at a formal table setting. He is a forward observer and is still amped from having spent the afternoon calling in corrections to 2,000-pound bomb strikes. He's from a well-off family and had already made the mistake of telling the others that he'd gone to etiquette school.

"Sherbet spoons? Are you f.u.c.king kidding me?" Moreno says. Moreno grew up in Beeville, Texas, and worked as a corrections officer at a state prison.

"Like when you go to a country club or something," Murphy says.

"Well that explains it."

Murphy ignores him and tells a story about how his grandfather built him a train set when he was young. It's hard to know if this is a misguided attempt to impress or some strange eruption of post-TIC openness.

"Well, my grandfather was shot in a bar fight," Moreno says. "Different f.u.c.kin' lives."

Mefloquine dreams, the unwelcome glimpses into your psyche that are produced by the malaria medication everyone takes. The medic distributes the pills every Monday, and that night is always the worst: I'm sawing someone in half with a carpentry saw for no reason that I can explain; I'm choking with sorrow and remorse over something that ended twenty-five years ago; I'm preparing for combat and the men around me are glancing at each other, like, "This is it, brother, see you on the other side." I always wake up without moving, my eyes suddenly wide open in the darkness. Men snoring softly around me and the generator thumping in some kind of frantic heartbeat. The side effects of mefloquine include severe depression, paranoia, aggression, nightmares, and insomnia. Those happen to be the side effects of combat as well. I go back to sleep and wake up the next morning edgy and weird.

There are two months left to the deployment and the men devise all kinds of ways to quantify that: number of patrols, number of KOP rotations, number of mefloquine Mondays. It's starting to dawn on them that they'll probably never walk to the top of Honcho Hill again or get dropped onto the Abas Ghar. When they're down at the KOP they use the communal laptops to try to arrange girlfriends for themselves when they get back. The men who already have girlfriends arrange to have them stock up on beer, steak, whatever they've been craving for the past year. The men will fly into Aviano Air Base, take a two-hour bus ride to Vicenza, turn in their weapons, and then form up on a parade ground called Hoekstra Field. As soon as they're discharged they can do whatever they want. The drinking starts immediately and continues until unconsciousness and then resumes whenever and wherever the men wake up. They find themselves at train stations and on sidewalks and in police stations and occasionally at the medical facilities. In past years one drunken paratrooper was struck by a train and killed and another died of an overdose. They'd made it through the dangers of combat and died within sight of their barracks in Vicenza.

"Y'all will only be remembered for the last thing you ever did," Caldwell warned them one warm spring night. He'd hiked up to Restrepo to make sure the men were all squared away for the return home, and he left them with his own story about why he quit drinking. ("My kids were upset, my wife wasn't talking to me... I just told her, 'Don't worry, it's taken care of,' and I never drank again.") With summer come the twin afflictions of heat and boredom. A poor wheat harvest creates a temporary food shortage in the valley, which means the enemy has no surplus cash with which to buy ammo. Attacks drop to every week or two - not nearly enough to make up for the general s.h.i.+ttiness of the place. The men sleep as late as they can and come shuffling out of their fly-infested hooches scratching and farting. By midmorning it's over a hundred degrees and the heat has a kind of buzzing slowness to it that alone almost feels capable of overrunning Restrepo. It's a miraculous kind of antiparadise up here: heat and dust and tarantulas and flies and no women and no running water and no cooked food and nothing to do but kill and wait. It's so hot that the men wander around in flip-flops and underwear, unshaved and foul. Airborne panting in the shade, someone burning s.h.i.+t out back, a feeble breeze making the concealment netting billow and subside like a huge lung.

The men ran out of things to say about three months ago, so they just sit around in a mute daze. One day I watch Money come out of the hooch, look around, grunt, and go back inside for another three hours' sleep. A summer shower comes through, briefly turning the air sweet and pungent, but the raindrops are small and sharp as needles and do almost nothing for the heat. "I used to live a thousand feet above sea level, and we'd find seash.e.l.ls in the rocks along the side of the road," O'Byrne finally says. No one answers for about five minutes.

"You ever go to military school?" Murphy finally asks.

"f.u.c.k no, my parents couldn't afford that s.h.i.+t," O'Byrne says. "Getting locked up was my military school."

Boredom so relentless that the men openly hope for an attack. One crazy-hot morning Lieutenant Gillespie wanders by muttering, "Please, G.o.d, let's get into a firefight." I think it was Bobby who finally came up with the idea of sending Tim and me down to Darbart wearing burkas made out of American flags. (Surely that that would kick something off.) Every American sniper in the valley would cover us from the hilltops. would kick something off.) Every American sniper in the valley would cover us from the hilltops.

"That's a weird image," Tim finally says, shaking his head.

Bobby is a 240 gunner from Georgia and Jones's best friend: one black guy and one unreconstructed Georgia redneck wandering around Restrepo looking for trouble like a pair of bad guys in a spaghetti western. Bobby has a tattoo of a sunburst around one nipple and a ma.s.sive branding scar in the shape of a heart above the other. The heart has an arrow through it. He says he joined the Army because his girl left him while he was on a bender, which sent him on another bender, which eventually put him unconscious on his father's front lawn. When he woke up he and his father got drunk, and then Bobby went down to the recruiter's office and tried to join the Marines. The Marines wouldn't take him so he walked down the hall and joined the Army instead.

Bobby's scene was so far out there that even his fellow soldiers had trouble wrapping their minds around it. "Just a pile of f.u.c.k, a big stupid redneck," as Jones described him, except that he wasn't: his aunt had adopted a black child and Bobby - slow-speaking, foul-mouthed, and outrageous - was one of the smartest and most capable guys in the entire company. One day the generator wouldn't start and Bobby told O'Byrne to kick it halfway up the side, just above the fuel filter. The machine started immediately. "He had what I call 'man knowledge,'" O'Byrne told me. "He wasn't very polished but he had all the knowledge a man needs to get by in the world."

The trick to understanding Bobby was to understand that he was so clear about who he was that he could, for example, spout the most egregious racist bulls.h.i.+t and not come across as a true bigot. (It was, quite possibly, his way of making fun of people who really did did talk that way.) Before the deployment, Bobby said some unforgivable things to a black MP who was trying to arrest him for drunk and disorderly, but you had to reconcile that with the fact that the only black guy in the platoon was his best friend. It was about authority, not race, but you'd have to know Bobby pretty well to even bother understanding that. "There ain't a racist bone in his body," Jones said. "You call me n.i.g.g.e.r and Bobby's standing around, and I'd be surprised if I could hit you first." talk that way.) Before the deployment, Bobby said some unforgivable things to a black MP who was trying to arrest him for drunk and disorderly, but you had to reconcile that with the fact that the only black guy in the platoon was his best friend. It was about authority, not race, but you'd have to know Bobby pretty well to even bother understanding that. "There ain't a racist bone in his body," Jones said. "You call me n.i.g.g.e.r and Bobby's standing around, and I'd be surprised if I could hit you first."

There were plenty of guys in the platoon who were as brave as Bobby, but none exuded quite the same sense of just not caring not caring. He'd sit cross-legged behind the 240, stubby fingers barely able to fit inside the trigger guard, grinning like a fiend just waiting to get into it. That bought him a lot of slack in other, more confusing aspects of his character. Bobby claimed a kind of broad-spectrum s.e.xuality that made virtually no distinction between anything, and as the months went by that expressed itself in increasingly weird ways. He would take someone down with a quick headlock and create a kind of prison-yard sense of violation without actually crossing some ultimate line. He had thick limbs and crazy farmhand strength and when he teamed up with Jones - which was most of the time - you'd need half a squad to defend yourself. Ultimately, it made me think that if you deprive men of the company of women for too long, and then turn off the steady adrenaline drip of heavy combat, it may not turn s.e.xual, but it's certainly going to turn weird.

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

"Gay not not to?" O'Byrne demanded. "What the f.u.c.k does that mean?" to?" O'Byrne demanded. "What the f.u.c.k does that mean?"

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

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

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

"Because everyone just thinks we're stupid," the man said.

"But you do all the fighting."

"Yeah," he said, "exactly."

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

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

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

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

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

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

4.