War. Sebastian Junger

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СКАЧАТЬ 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. Each platoon has a medic, and when Second Platoon arrived in the valley, their medic was Juan Restrepo—O’Byrne’s friend from their last trip to Rome. Restrepo was extremely well liked because he was brave under fire and absolutely committed to the men. If you got sick he would take your guard shift; if you were depressed he’d come to your hooch and play guitar. He took care of his men in every possible way.

      On the afternoon of July 22 a foot patrol left Firebase Phoenix and moved south to the village of Aliabad under a light rain. Much of Second Platoon had already left for a month at Firebase Michigan, which saw so little combat that it practically qualified as summer camp, but there were still men left who had to conduct one last patrol. Restrepo was among them. On the way back they passed an open spot in the road just outside of the Aliabad cemetery and began to take fire. There were enemy gunners east of them above Donga and Marastanau and south of them on Honcho Hill and west of them at Table Rock. It was the first time the Americans had taken fire while inside a village—the enemy was usually too worried about civilian casualties—and the men took cover behind gravestones and holly trees and piles of timber stacked by the road.

      Restrepo was the only man hit. He took two rounds to the face and fell to the ground, bleeding heavily. There was so much fire coming from so many different directions that at first no one even dared to run out to get him. When they finally pulled him to safety they didn’t know what to do with such a bad wound, and he struggled to tell them how to save his life. Within minutes three Humvees roared out of the KOP and a MEDEVAC flight lifted off from the air base in Asadabad, twenty miles away. A valley-wide firefight kicked off but they got Restrepo back to the KOP in less than twenty minutes. He was breathing but he was drifting in and out of consciousness, and they brought him to the aid station and ran an oxygen tube down his throat. Some of the oxygen went into his stomach, though, and made him throw up.

      “It was the first time I’d seen one of ours like that,” Sergeant Mac told me. “Besides Padilla, it was the first time I’d seen one of ours jacked up. When I helped get him into the truck I could see the life was gone. 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.”

      The MEDEVAC pilot had been circling the valley, unwilling to land while a firefight was still going on, but he finally put down at the KOP and Restrepo was loaded on.

      The radio call came in three hours later. O’Byrne had already written in his journal that Restrepo was too good a man for God to let him die—wrote that despite the fact that he didn’t even believe in God—and he and Mac were in the Second Platoon tent cleaning the blood off Restrepo’s gear. They had to use baby wipes because the blood had combined with dirt to cement into the cracks of his M4. They also had to take all the bullets out of his magazines and wipe off the blood so that they could be distributed to the other men. They were almost done when a sergeant named Rentas stepped into the tent and grabbed O’Byrne by the shoulders. ‘He didn’t make it, man,’ Rentas said. O’Byrne almost punched him for lying.

      “For a long time I hated God,” O’Byrne told me. “Second Platoon fought like animals after that.”

      

      The Black Hawk gunners bang out half a dozen rounds into the stone hillsides to clear their guns and we bank so hard that I can practically look out the bay door straight down to the ground below. Two Apaches trail us a quarter mile back, low-slung with weaponry and prowling from side to side like huge dark wasps. Neat green fields slide by a thousand feet beneath us, and here and there I can see men bathing in the river or washing pickup trucks that they’ve driven into the shallows like workhorses. One farmer waves at us as we pass by, which surprises me until I realize that maybe he’s just trying to keep from getting shot. I waved at an Apache once; I was by myself on a hillside above the KOP and since I was not dressed like a soldier I was worried what this might look like from the air. The pilot had come down for a closer look and I thought I’d seen the .30 mm chain gun under the nose swing in my direction. It may have all been my imagination but it was not a nice feeling.

      We pass the American base at Asadabad and swing west up the Pech. We’re flying at ridgetop level and the valley has narrowed so that I can look straight out at Afghanistan’s terrible geology. Everything is rock and falls off so steeply that even if you survived the crash your helicopter would just keep bouncing downhill until it reached the valley floor. Soldiers, as far as I can tell, don’t think about such things. I’ve seen them fall asleep on Chinooks like they’re on the Greyhound coming back from an all-nighter at Atlantic City. They don’t even wake up when the helicopter gets spiked downward by the convection cells above the valleys.

      We climb over a ridgeline, the rotors laboring like jackhammers, and then drop into the Korengal. From the air the KOP looks smaller than I remember and more vulnerable, a scattering of Hescos clinging to a hillside with camo net strung between some of them and a landing zone that looks way too small to land on. Red smoke is streaming off the ground, which means the KOP is taking fire, and we get off the bird fast and run for cover behind the Hescos. I find Kearney in the command center looking tired and ten years older than two months ago. He says that as bad as things had been earlier in the summer, they’ve fallen off a cliff since then. Last week Battle Company got into thirteen firefights in one day. Eighty percent of the combat for the entire brigade is now happening in the Korengal Valley. After firefights the outposts are ankle-deep in used brass. Restrepo was killed and Padilla lost his arm and Loza got hit in the shoulder and a Kellogg, Brown and Root contract worker was shot in the leg while taking a nap in his tent. “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.”

      In the dead of night a week earlier, Third Platoon walked up the spur above Table Rock and started digging. Second Platoon went as well to protect them. They set up fighting positions west of the new outpost and on the hillside above it and then all night long listened to the dink, dink, dink of pickaxes hitting shelf rock. Third Platoon was desperately digging in so that when dawn came they’d have some cover. The new outpost was on top of a position the enemy had used for months to shoot down into Firebase Phoenix and there were still piles of brass up there from their weapons. (Pemble found a round that had misfired and carried it for the rest of the deployment. He considered it good luck on the theory that, had it actually fired, it might have been the bullet that killed him.) From that hilltop the Americans controlled most of the high ground around Phoenix and the KOP, which meant that those bases could no longer be attacked effectively. It was, as Kearney told me, a huge middle finger pointed at the Taliban fighters in the valley.

      Dawn brought fusillades of grenades and wave after wave of machine-gun fire. Third Platoon hacked away at the mountain and shoveled the results into sandbags that they could then pile up around them to provide more cover. The Taliban attacked every hour or so from every position they had all day long. The men of Third Platoon worked until the next firefight, rested while firing back, and then resumed work once it quieted down again. Second Platoon shot through so much ammunition that the guns started to jam. “Once I was shooting and I look over and bullets are fucking pinging all around Monroe and he’s not firing,” O’Byrne remembered. “I’m like, ‘What the fuck, Monroe, get the fucking SAW fucking firing, why the fuck aren’t you firing?’”

      Monroe shouted that the weapon had jammed and then he methodically started taking it apart. Bullets were smacking the dirt all around him but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. He wiped the weapon down and oiled it and reassembled it, and when he was done he slid an ammo belt into the feed tray and started returning fire.

      After the initial build-out, Third Platoon walked back down СКАЧАТЬ