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Each Javelin round costs $80,000, and the idea that it’s fired by a guy who doesn’t make that in a year at a guy who doesn’t make that in a lifetime is somehow so outrageous it almost makes the war seem winnable.
“Oh, yeah, everyone’s got their favorite weapon,” Jones told me. “There are Mark guys and .50 guys. Walker’s a Mark guy. The Mark is an automatic grenade launcher that shoots a 40 mike-mike round that explodes on impact. I’m a .50 guy. I don’t know if it’s true, but they say the round only has to come within eighteen inches of you to sear flesh. That’s badass. It doesn’t have to hit you and it can still tear you open. It’s just a sexy weapon. It’s the ultimate machine gun. It has the ability to shoot through walls. It’s fun to shoot during a test fire but it’s twice as fun during a firefight.”
“You’re thinking that this guy could have murdered your friend,” Steiner explained to me later. “The cheering comes from knowing that that’s someone we’ll never have to fight again. Fighting another human being is not as hard as you think when they’re trying to kill you. People think we were cheering because we just shot someone, but we were cheering because we just stopped someone from killing us. That person will no longer shoot at us anymore. That’s where the fiesta comes in.”
“I like the firefights,” O’Byrne admitted to me once. We’d been talking about going home and whether he was going to get bored. “I know,” he added, probably realizing how that sounded. “Saddest thing in the world.”
“Not a big fan of mushrooms. Only people you ever see eating mushrooms are white folks. ‘What you want on your pizza, sir?’ ‘Mushrooms.’ ‘What else do you want on your pizza?’ ‘More mushrooms.’”
“The arguments I’ve heard against the American presence here are all economically based,” he told me. “Which is the good news, because economic arguments are arguments we can win.”
As the most exposed base in the Korengal, Restrepo is exquisitely attuned to social changes in the valley. If the price of wheat goes up because of a bad harvest, the amount of fighting drops because the fighters have less money to spend on ammo.
“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 shit 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-god-damn-tee it,
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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
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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 fuck 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.
(Why appeal to God when you can call in Apaches?)
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.
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.”
Guns were the point, the one entirely good thing of the whole shitty 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 pass 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 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
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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.
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.
Boredom so relentless that the men openly hope for an attack. One crazy-hot morning Lieutenant Gillespie wanders by muttering, “Please, God, 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 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.
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.”
Someone once asked Bobby whether, all joking aside, he would actually have sex with a man up here. “Of course,” Bobby said. “It would be gay not to.” “Gay not to?” O’Byrne demanded. “What the fuck does that mean?” Bobby launched into a theory that “real” men need sex no matter what, so choosing abstinence can only mean you’re not a real man. Who you have sex with is of far lesser importance. The men knew it made no sense—Bobby’s weird brilliance—but no one could quite formulate a rebuttal. The less fighting there was, the weirder things got until men literally moved around in pairs in case
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(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.)
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 classic 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.”
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 shit.
“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.”
The fight lasts ten or fifteen minutes and then the A-10s show up and tilt into their dives. Ninety rounds a second the size of beer cans unzipping the mountainsides with a sound like the sky ripping. The men look up and whoop when they hear it, a punishment so unnegotiable it might as well have come from God.
“Combat is such an adrenaline rush,” he says. “I’m worried I’ll be looking for that when I get home and if I can’t find it, I’ll just start drinking and getting in trouble. People back home think we drink because of the bad stuff, but that’s not true…we drink because we miss the good stuff.”
“In the Korengal, almost every problem could get settled by getting violent faster than the other guy,” O’Byrne told me. “Do that at home and it’s not going to go so well.”
When men say they miss combat, it’s not that they actually miss getting shot at—you’d have to be deranged—it’s that they miss being in a world where everything is important and nothing is taken for granted. They miss being in a world where human relations are entirely governed by whether you can trust the other person with your life.
“I prayed only once in Afghanistan,” O’Byrne wrote me after it was all over. “It was when Restrepo got shot, and I prayed to god to let him live. But God, Allah, Jehovah, Zeus or whatever a person may call God wasn’t in that valley. Combat is the devil’s game. God wanted no part. That’s why our prayers weren’t answered: the only one listening was Satan.”
Most casualties occur in the first few months of a deployment because the new men don’t know where they’re getting shot at from and the mortar teams don’t know what hilltops to hit.
