War

by Sebastian Junger

An American patrol hasn’t taken 100 percent casualties in a firefight since Vietnam.

O’Byrne has been quiet most of the interview. “Did anyone bring up the issue of walking at night?” he finally says. “On the way out, did anyone bring that up?” I know why he’s asking: Second Platoon left a hilltop position during the daytime once and got badly ambushed outside a town called Aliabad. A rifleman named Steiner took a round in the helmet, though he survived. “No—the lieutenant said, ‘We’re leaving now,’” Kalenits answers. “What are you going to say to him?” “Fuck off?” O’Byrne offers.

Inexperienced soldiers are known as “cherries,” and standing up in a firefight is about as cherry as it gets. So is this: the first night at the KOP, O’Byrne heard a strange yammering in the forest and assumed the base was about to get attacked. He grabbed his gun and waited. Nothing happened. Later he found out it was just monkeys that came down to the wire to shriek at the Americans. It was as if every living thing in the valley, even the wildlife, wanted them gone.

When O’Byrne turned fourteen he and his father started fighting a lot, and O’Byrne immediately got into trouble at school. His grades plummeted and he began drinking and smoking pot and getting arrested. His father was a plumber who always kept the family well provided for, but there was tremendous turmoil at home—a lot of drinking, a lot of physical combat—and one night things got out of hand and O’Byrne’s father shot him twice with a .22 rifle. From his hospital bed, O’Byrne told the police that his father had shot him in self-defense; that way he went to reform school for assault rather than his father going to prison for attempted murder.

‘You can’t replace combat with training,’ a black E7 at Fort Bragg told him. ‘You can’t do it. You can’t replace that fucking experience. Get deployed, and if you want to come back, come back after that.’

I know that all the guys that were bad in garrison were perfect fucking soldiers in combat. They’re troublemakers and they like to fight. That’s a bad garrison trait but a good combat trait—right? I know I’m a shitty garrison soldier, but what the fuck does it matter? Okay, I got to shine my fucking boots. Why do I care about shining my goddamn boots?”

“We’re lovin’ life and getting ready to go to war,” Restrepo said, his arm around O’Byrne’s neck. His face was so close to the camera there was almost a fish-eye effect. “We’re goin’ to war. We’re ready. We’re goin’ to war…we’re goin’ to war.”

The KOP is surrounded by high ground, and to mount an attack local fighters only had to scramble up the back sides of the ridges and pour machine-gun fire down into the compound. This is called “plunging fire,” and it is hard to suppress or take cover from. The only way to fix the problem was to take over the high ground with small outposts, but those positions then also became vulnerable to attack.

Lieutenants have a lot of theoretical knowledge but not much experience, so they are paired with a platoon sergeant who has probably been in the Army for years.

The Army has a lot of regulations about how soldiers are required to dress, but the farther you get from the generals the less those rules are followed, and Second Platoon was about as far from the generals as you could get. As the deployment wore on and they got pushed farther into enemy territory it was sometimes hard to tell you were even looking at American soldiers. They wore their trousers unbloused from their boots and tied amulets around their necks and shuffled around the outpost in flip-flops jury-rigged from the packing foam used in missile crates. Toward the end of their tour they’d go through entire firefights in nothing but gym shorts and unlaced boots, cigarettes hanging out of their lips. When the weather got too hot they chopped their shirts off below the armpit and then put on body armor so they’d sweat less but still look like they were in uniform. They carried long knives and for a while one guy went on operations with a small samurai sword in his belt. The rocks ripped their pants to shreds and they occasionally found themselves more or less exposed on patrol. A few had “INFIDEL” tattooed in huge letters across their chests. (“That’s what the enemy calls us on their radios,” one man explained, “so why not?”) Others had tattoos of angel wings sprouting from bullets or bombs. The men were mostly in their early twenties, and many of them have known nothing but life at home with their parents and war.

The moral basis of the war doesn’t seem to interest soldiers much, and its long-term success or failure has a relevance of almost zero. Soldiers worry about those things about as much as farmhands worry about the global economy, which is to say, they recognize stupidity when it’s right in front of them but they generally leave the big picture to others.

We knew we were going to get hit—Prophet had already called us up with the news—but on some level it’s always shocking that someone out there actually wants you dead.

A 240 gunner named Underwood told me that during the ambush he saw tracers coming at him from Hill 1705 but they were moving too fast to dodge. By the time he was setting his body into motion they were hitting the cedar log he was hiding behind. The brain requires around two-tenths of a second just to understand simple visual stimuli, and another two-tenths of a second to command muscles to react. That’s almost exactly the amount of time it takes a high-velocity round to go from 1705 to Aliabad.

Reaction times have been studied extensively in controlled settings and have shown that men have faster reaction times than women and athletes have faster reaction times than nonathletes. Tests with soccer players have shown that the “point of no return” for a penalty kick—when the kicker can no longer change his mind about where to send the ball—is around a quarter of a second. In other words, if the goalkeeper waits until the kicker’s foot is less than a quarter second from the ball and then dives in one direction, the kicker doesn’t have enough time to adjust his kick. Given that quarter-second cutoff, the distance at which you might literally be able to “dodge a bullet” is around 800 yards. You’d need a quarter second to register the tracer coming toward you—at this point the bullet has traveled 200 yards—a quarter second to instruct your muscles to react—the bullet has now traveled 400 yards—and half a second to actually move out of the way. The bullet you dodge will pass you with a distinctive snap. That’s the sound of a small object breaking the sound barrier inches from your head.

Humans evolved in a world where nothing moved two thousand miles an hour, so there was no reason for the body to be able to counter that threat, but the brain still had to stay ahead of the game. Neurological processes in one of the most primitive parts of the brain, the amygdala, happen so fast that one could say they compete with bullets. The amygdala can process an auditory signal in fifteen milliseconds—about the amount of time it takes a bullet to go thirty feet. The amygdala is fast but very limited; all it can do is trigger a reflex and wait for the conscious mind to catch up. That reaction is called the startle, and it is composed of protective moves that would be a good idea in almost any situation. When something scary and unexpected happens, every person does exactly the same thing: they blink, crouch, bend their arms, and clench their fists. The face also sets itself into what is known as a “fear grimace”: the pupils dilate, the eyes widen, the brow goes up, and the mouth pulls back and down. Make that e...

The two officers saw their cortisol levels climb steadily until the day of the expected attack and then diminish as it failed to materialize. Among the enlisted men, however, the stress levels were exactly the opposite: their cortisol levels dropped as the attack drew near, and then started to rise when it became clear that they weren’t going to get hit. The only explanation the researchers could come up with was that the soldiers had such strong psychological defenses that the attack created a sense of “euphoric expectancy” among them. “The members of this Special Forces team demonstrated an overwhelming emphasis on self-reliance, often to the point of omnipotence,” they wrote. “These subjects were action-oriented individuals who characteristically spent little time in introspection. Their response to any environmental threat was to engage in a furor of activity which rapidly dissipated the developing tension.”

Vegas was manned by First Platoon and had a small HLZ—helicopter landing zone—but for a while lacked phone or Internet, and the men were stuck there for weeks at a time. “I guarantee you, half of First Platoon is going to be divorced by the time this is over,” Kearney told me early on in the tour. The cook started talking to a finger puppet as a way of coping, but that unnerved the other men so much that one of them finally destroyed it.

The fact was that the men got an enormous amount of psychiatric oversight from the battalion shrink—as well as periodic “vacations” at Camp Blessing or Firebase Michigan—but combat still took a toll. It was unrealistic to think it wouldn’t. Anderson sat on an ammo crate and gave me one of those awkward grins that sometimes precede a confession. “I’ve only been here four months and I can’t believe how messed up I already am,” he said. “I went to the counselor and he asked if I smoked cigarettes and I told him no and he said, ‘Well, you may want to think about starting.’” He lit a cigarette and inhaled. “I hate these fuckin’ things,” he said.

It has been suggested that one Taliban strategy is to lure NATO forces into accidentally killing so many civilians that they lose the fight for the human terrain.

The American rules of engagement generally forbid soldiers to target a house unless someone is shooting from it, and discourage them from targeting anything if civilians are nearby. They can shoot people who are shooting at them and they can shoot people who are carrying a weapon or a handheld radio. The Taliban know this and leave everything they need hidden in the hills; when they want to launch an attack they just walk out to their firing positions emptyhanded and pick up their guns. They also make children stand near them when they use their radios. The Americans don’t dare shoot because, other than the obvious moral issues involved, killing civilians simply makes the war harder. The Soviet military, which invaded Afghanistan in 1979, most emphatically did not understand this. They came in with a massive, heavily armored force, moved about in huge convoys, and bombed everything that moved. It was a textbook demonstration of exactly how not to fight an insurgency, and 7 percent of the prewar population was killed. A truly popular uprising eventually drove the Soviets out.

Luttrell and his men soon found themselves surrounded and catastrophically outnumbered by Shah’s fighters. The battle went on all afternoon, spilling down off the upper ridges toward the Shuryak Valley east of the Korengal. The SEALs finally used their satellite phone to inform headquarters that they were in contact, and a Chinook helicopter with eight more SEALs and eight other commandos scrambled from Bagram Airfield and thundered off toward Kunar. Chinooks must always be escorted by Apache gunships that can provide covering fire if necessary, but for some reason this one came in on its own. It was immediately hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed onto the upper ridges of the Abas Ghar. Everyone on board probably died on impact, but Shah’s fighters allegedly put two bullets in the head of every American soldier just to make sure. They then picked through the wreckage and walked away with several “suppressed M4s”—that is, M4s with silencers—night vision goggles, helmets, GPS devices, hand grenades, and a military laptop. It would make the fight in the Korengal that much more difficult for those who were to follow.

Reporters often think that taking cover from small-arms fire is the same as getting pinned down, but it’s not. Getting pinned down means you literally can’t move without getting killed.

Apaches have a 30 mm chain gun slaved to the pilot’s helmet that points wherever he looks; if you shoot at an Apache, the pilot turns his head, spots you, and kills you.

The men just never knew, which meant that anything they did was potentially the last thing they’d ever do. That gave rise to strange forms of magical thinking. One morning after four days of continuous fighting I said that things seemed “quiet,” and I might as well have rolled a live hand grenade through the outpost; every man there yelled at me to shut the fuck up. And then there were Charms: small fruit-flavored candies that often came in the prepackaged meals called MREs. The superstition was that eating Charms would bring on a firefight, so if you found a pack in your MRE, you were supposed to throw it off the back side of the ridge or burn it in the burn pit. One day Cortez got so bored that he ate a pack on purpose, hoping to bring on a firefight, but nothing happened.

A combat medic once told me what to do to save a man who’s bleeding out. (He then gave me a combat medical pack—mainly, I suspect, so I wouldn’t have to take one from another soldier if I ever got hit.) First you grind your knee into the limb, between the wound and the heart, to pinch off the artery and stop the blood flow. While you’re doing that you’re getting the tourniquet ready. You take pressure off the limb long enough to slide the tourniquet onto the limb and then you tighten it until the bleeding stops. If the medic still hasn’t gotten there—maybe he’s treating someone else or maybe he’s wounded or dead—you pack the wound cavity with something called Kerlix and then bandage it and stick an intravenous drip into the man’s arm.

The combat medic’s first job is to get to the wounded as fast as possible, which often means running through gunfire while everyone else is taking cover. Medics are renowned for their bravery, but the ones I knew described it more as a terror of failing to save the lives of their friends. The only thing they’re thinking about when they run forward to treat a casualty is getting there before the man bleeds out or suffocates; incoming bullets barely register.

To move a body around that’s just not moving was really odd. He was almost…foreign. That kind of thing gets put someplace deep, to be dealt with later.”

“We built another outpost, though,” Kearney says. “We named it Restrepo, after Doc Restrepo who was killed. It gets hit all the time, but it’s taken the heat off Phoenix. The whole battle has shifted south.”

Later I asked Hijar whether he had felt any hesitation before running out there. ‘No,’ Hijar said, ‘he’d do that for me. Knowing that is the only thing that makes any of this possible.’

Wars are fought with very heavy machinery that works best on top of the biggest hill in the area and used against men who are lower down. That, in a nutshell, is military tactics, and it means that an enormous amount of war-fighting simply consists of carrying heavy loads uphill.

“There are guys in the platoon who straight up hate each other,” O’Byrne told me one morning. We were sitting in ambush above the village of Bandeleek listening to mortars shriek over our heads, and there wasn’t much to do but flinch and talk about the platoon. “But they would also die for each other. So you kind of have to ask, ‘How much could I really hate the guy?’”

Snipers have the power to make even silence unnerving, so their effectiveness is way out of proportion to the number of rounds they shoot. The KOP’s mortars eventually start up, great explosions that crash through the base and then rumble back to us from the mountaintops. They may have killed the guy, but I doubt it, and in the end it doesn’t even matter; it’s just one man with a rifle and ten dollars’ worth of ammunition. He doesn’t even need to hit anyone to be effective: helicopters aren’t flying into the valley and thirty or forty men spend the afternoon behind sandbags trying to figure out whether they’re getting shot at by a Russian-made Dragunov or an old Enfield .308. Once I was at the operations center when single shots started coming in, and First Sergeant Caldwell headed for the door to deal with it. On his way out I asked him what was going on. “Some jackass wastin’ our time,” he said. That jackass was probably a local teenager who was paid by one of the insurgent groups to fire off a magazine’s worth of ammo at the KOP. The going rate was five dollars a day. He could fire at the base until mortars started coming back at him and then he could drop off the back side of the ridge and be home in twenty minutes.

The fact that networks of highly mobile amateurs can confound—even defeat—a professional army is the only thing that has prevented empires from completely determining the course of history.

“Everything in war is simple, but the simplest thing is difficult,” the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz wrote in the 1820s. “The difficulties accumulate and end by producing a kind of friction.”

We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm. —Winston Churchill (or George Orwell)

There was so much gunfire that they thought they were about to get overrun, so a Scout named Raeon broke down the Barrett sniper rifle and scattered the pieces around the position so the enemy couldn’t use it against American forces.

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 assault 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 assault pack with a dead American’s nametag on it and claim that the Americans are getting slaughtered in Kunar.

The choreography always requires that each man make decisions based not on what’s best for 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.

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.”

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 circumstances are less likely to break down than untrained men in little danger.

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 reassurance 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 hit 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.

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.

A Vietnam moment was one in which you weren’t so much getting misled as getting asked to participate in a kind of collective wishful thinking.

“We’re not going to win the war until we admit we’re losing it,”

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 idea that there are rules in warfare and that combatants kill each other according to basic concepts of fairness probably ended for good with the machine gun.

much of modern military tactics is geared toward maneuvering the enemy into a position where they can essentially be massacred from safety. It sounds dishonorable only if you imagine that modern war is about honor; it’s not. It’s about winning, which means killing the enemy on the most unequal terms possible. Anything less simply results in the loss of more of your own men.

I later asked O’Byrne if he could imagine what it must feel like to be targeted by an Apache, and he just shook his head. We were talking about combat trauma, and I said that anyone who survived something like that had to have some pretty horrific nightmares. “I goddamn hope so,” O’Byrne said.

War is a lot of things and it’s useless to pretend that exciting isn’t one of them. It’s insanely exciting. The machinery of war and the sound it makes and the urgency of its use and the consequences of almost everything about it are the most exciting things anyone engaged in war will ever know. Soldiers discuss that fact with each other and eventually with their chaplains and their shrinks and maybe even their spouses, but the public will never hear about it. It’s just not something that many people want acknowledged. War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen in it, but for a nineteen-year-old at the working end of a .50 cal during a firefight that everyone comes out of okay, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of. In some ways twenty minutes of combat is more life than you could scrape together in a lifetime of doing something else. Combat isn’t where you might die—though that does happen—it’s where you find out whether you get to keep on living. Don’t underestimate the power of that revelation. Don’t underestimate the things young men will wager in order to play that game one more time.

Eventually he’ll just run out of ammo, I realize. Eventually the monsters will win.