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.
