War. Sebastian Junger

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СКАЧАТЬ American soldiers were actually Russians who had simply stayed after the Soviet army pulled out in 1989.

      The people aren’t the only problem, however; the war also diverged from the textbooks because it was fought in such axle-breaking, helicopter-crashing, spirit-killing, mind-bending terrain that few military plans survive intact for even an hour. The mountains are sedimentary rock that was compressed into schist hundreds of millions of years ago and then thrust upward. Intrusions of hard white granite run though the schist like the ribs on an animal carcass. Even the trees are hard: knotted holly oaks with spiny leaves and branches that snag your clothing and won’t let go. Holly forests extend up to around eight thousand feet and then give over to cedar trees that are so enormous, the mind compensates for their size by imagining them to be much closer than they are. A hilltop that looks a few hundred yards away can be a mile or more.

      The locals cut the trees for export to Kabul and Pakistan, but the lumber is actually brokered by criminal groups that control their export. Korengali timber cutters are dependent on these groups to bribe police at border checkpoints and to connect them to buyers who are willing to violate the national ban on timber export. By some accounts, war came to the Korengal when timber traders from a northern faction of the Safi tribe allied themselves with the first U.S. Special Forces that came through the area in early 2002. When the Americans tried to enter the Korengal they met resistance from local timber cutters who realized that the northern Safis were poised to take over their operation.

      Because of the timber ban there were stockpiles of logs throughout the valley that made perfect fighting positions for the insurgents. American soldiers can blow up enemy bunkers when they find them, but there’s nothing they can do to squared-off cedar timbers that measure three or four feet across and are stacked by the dozen. The trees are felled on the upper slopes of the Abas Ghar and then skidded into the valley down luge runs made of other timbers greased with cooking oil. In the spring the logs get tipped into the river at flood stage and shepherded all the way down the valley to the Pech and then on to Asadabad. For sport, young men put themselves in the riverbed when the floodwaters come down and try to run fast enough to stay ahead of the logs. One soldier shot a video that shows a young man losing the race and simply disappearing into the logs. You never see him again.

      The head of the Korengali timber cutters was a man named Hajji Matin, who owned a fortified house in the town of Darbart, on the top of Hill 1705. Matin allied himself with an Egyptian named Abu Ikhlas, who had fought jihad against the Russians in that area during the 1980s and wound up marrying a local woman. It wasn’t known for sure that Ikhlas was affiliated with Al Qaeda, but he might have fled on the assumption that the Americans wouldn’t trouble themselves about the details. Around that time, the Americans allegedly bombed Hajji Matin’s house and killed several members of his family. If true, that pretty much guaranteed war for as long as Matin remained alive. Fighting in the Korengal escalated further during the summer of 2005, when another local commander named Ahmad Shah arrested three men and accused them of being informers for the American military. Shah was a midlevel Taliban operative who ran a bomb-making cell in the area and was responsible for a number of attacks on American convoys. He was reported to have close ties with Al Qaeda leadership across the border in Pakistan and with the radical Islamic commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.

      Shah executed the three men and waited for the Americans to arrive. It didn’t take long: days later a four-man Navy SEAL team was dropped by helicopter onto the Abas Ghar. Their mission was to track the activity of Shah’s men so that other American forces could keep them from disrupting upcoming elections. SEALs are the most highly trained commandos in the U.S. military, but nevertheless they were compromised eighteen hours later when a goatherd and two teenage boys walked past their position. The Americans agonized over whether to kill them or not and in the end decided to let them go. Marcus Luttrell, the only survivor of his team, later explained that it was his concern over the liberal American press that kept him from executing the three Afghans.

      That wouldn’t have saved them, however. The Taliban are well known to use shepherds as scouts, and on a mountain that big it was almost inconceivable that the shepherds stumbled onto the SEALs by accident. The Taliban knew exactly where the SEAL team was, in other words. And there were other, more serious problems. The radio barely worked but the SEALs did not use their satellite phone to abort the mission or call in reinforcements. No quick-reaction force had been put on standby at nearby American bases in Asadabad or Jalalabad, and insufficient intelligence had been gathered from inside the valley. No one knew that for the past eighteen hours an enemy force of several hundred fighters had been converging on four SEALs who had no working radio, no body armor, and just enough water and ammo for a couple of hours of combat. It was not a fair fight, and some in the U.S. military questioned why the SEALs were even up there.

      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.

      Luttrell, meanwhile, had shot his way off the mountain and made it to the village of Sabray, where he was taken in by the locals. Everyone else on his team was dead; one man was found with twenty-one bullets in him. The people of Sabray were obligated to protect Luttrell under an honor code called lokhay warkawal, which holds that anyone who comes to your doorstep begging for help must be cared for no matter what the cost to the community. Taliban forces surrounded the village and threatened to kill everyone in it, but the villagers held out long enough for American forces to arrive.

      The American response to the debacle on the Abas Ghar was swift and furious. B-52 bombers dropped two guided bombs on a residential compound in the village of Chichal, high above the Korengal Valley. They apparently missed Ahmad Shah by minutes but killed seventeen civilians in the compound, including women and children. Over the next twelve months American firebases were pushed deeper into the Pech River Valley and three miles into the Korengal itself. The Korengal was a safe haven from which insurgents could attack the Pech River corridor, and the Pech was the main access route to Nuristan, so a base in the Korengal made sense, but there was something else going on. The valley had enormous symbolic meaning because of the loss of nineteen American commandos there, and some soldiers suspected that their presence in the valley was the U.S. military’s way of punishing locals for what had happened on the Abas Ghar. For both sides, the battle for the Korengal developed a logic of its own that sucked in more and more resources and lives until neither side could afford to walk away.

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      SUMMER GRINDS ON: A HUNDRED DEGREES EVERY DAY and tarantulas invading the living quarters to get out of the heat. Some of the men are terrified of them and can only sleep in mesh pup tents, and others pick them up with pliers and light them on fire. The timber bunkers at Phoenix are infested with fleas, and the men wear flea collars around their ankles but still scratch all day long. First Squad goes thirty-eight days without taking a shower or changing their clothes, and by the end their uniforms are so impregnated with salt that they can stand up by themselves. The men’s sweat reeks of ammonia because they’ve long since burned off all their fat and are now breaking down muscle. There are wolves up СКАЧАТЬ