War

“The Koran offers us two choices, revenge and forgiveness,” he said. “But the Koran says that forgiveness is better, so we will forgive. We understand that it was a mistake, so we will forgive. The Americans are building schools and roads, and because of this, we will forgive.”

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.

The Korengalis are originally from Nuristan, an enclave of mostly Persian- and Pashai-speaking tribesmen who practiced shamanism and believed that the rocks and trees and rivers around them had souls. The Nuristanis didn’t convert to Islam until the armies of King Abdur Rahman Khan marched in and forced them to around 1896. The people who are now known as the Korengalis settled in their present location around the time of the great conversion, bringing with them both their newfound Islamic faith and their wild, clannish ways. They terraced the steep slopes of the valley into wheat fields and built stone houses that could withstand earthquakes (and, it turned out, 500-pound bombs) and set about cutting down the cedar forests of the upper ridges. The men dye their beards red and use kohl around their eyes, and the women go unveiled and wear colorful dresses that make them look like tropical birds in the fields. Most Korengalis have never left their village and have almost no understanding of the world beyond the mouth of the valley. That makes it a perfect place in which to base an insurgency dedicated to fighting outsiders. One old man in the valley thought the 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.

4 (#ulink_52249bb2-f1c1-57ff-96e2-043cb3bea941)

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 in the high peaks that howl at night and mountain lions that creep through the KOP looking for food and troops of monkeys that set to screeching from the crags around the base. One species of bird sounds exactly like incoming rocket-propelled grenades; the men call them “RPG birds” and can’t keep themselves from flinching whenever they hear them.

One day I’m in the mess tent drinking coffee when three or four soldiers from Third Platoon walk in. It’s early morning and they look like they’ve been up all night and are getting some breakfast before going to bed. “I jerked off at least every day for an entire CONOP,” one guy says. A CONOP is a mission dedicated to a specific task. I sit there waiting to see where this is headed.

“That’s nothing—I jerked off while pulling guard duty above Donga,” another man answers.

Donga is an enemy town on the other side of the valley. “Illume is key,” a squad leader weighs in, referring to the lunar cycle. “You know, you get that fifteen to twenty percent illume and it’s so dark you can’t see five feet in front of you. I did it in the tent with all the guys around, and afterward I thought, ‘That’s kind of fucked up.’ But I asked the guys if they saw me and they said no, so I thought, ‘That’s cool.’”

Someone raises the question of whether it’s physiologically possible to masturbate during a firefight. That is, admittedly, the Mount Everest of masturbation, but the consensus is that it can’t be done. Another man mentions a well-known bunker on the KOP and mimes a blur of hand movement while his head swivels back and forth, scanning for intruders. Someone finally notices me in the corner.

“Sorry, sir,” he says. “We’re like monkeys, only worse.”

The attacks continue almost every day, everything from single shots that whistle over the men’s heads to valley-wide firefights that start on the Abas Ghar and work their way around clockwise. In July, Sergeant Padilla is cooking Philly cheesesteaks for the men at Firebase Phoenix and has just yelled, “Come and get it before I get killed,” when an RPG sails into the compound and takes off his arm. Pemble helps load him into a Humvee, and for weeks afterward he has dreams of Padilla standing in front of him with his arm missing. Battle Company is taking the most contact of the battalion, and the battalion is taking the most contact—by far—of any in the U.S. military. Nearly a fifth of the combat experienced by the 70,000 NATO troops in Afghanistan is being fought by the 150 men of Battle Company. Seventy percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan are dropped in and around the Korengal Valley. American soldiers in Iraq who have never been in a firefight start talking about trying to get to Afghanistan so that they can get their combat infantry badges.

In July, before switching over to First Squad, O’Byrne gets pinned down with the rest of his 240 team on the road above Loy Kalay. They’re providing overwatch for a foot patrol that has gone down-valley when rounds suddenly start smacking in all around them. 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. Once the enemy has you pinned down, they drop mortars or grenades on you. There’s no way to hide from mortars or grenades; they come shrieking down out of the sky and after a couple of correction rounds you’re dead.

“We picked a dumb spot, it was all our fucking fault,” O’Byrne told me later. I’d asked him when was the first time he thought he was going to get hit. “We were fucking very dumb. We were in the wide open, you know, but we were laying down so we thought we were good. Seventeen-oh-five was right there, we were fucking idiots. We started getting shot at and me and Vandenberge didn’t even pick up our weapons, they were shooting right at us, I mean the fucking rocks were kicking up right in front of us, this is in fractions of a second, you know? And we get behind this fucking log and I hear the fucking wood splintering, the wood pile is just crackling, the bullets hitting the wood and shit. They start closing in on us and there’s a sniper and my squad leader raised his head and two or three inches above his head a fucking bullet hit the wood so Jackson throws him down says, ‘Get down they’re fucking shooting right above your head.’ The only reason we’re alive is the Apaches came in.”

The enemy couldn’t hope to inflict real damage on the Americans as long as they were in their bases, and the Americans couldn’t hope to find the enemy and kill them unless they left their bases. As a result, a dangerous game started to evolve over the course of the summer in the Korengal Valley. Every few days the Americans would send out a patrol to talk to the locals and disrupt enemy activity, and they’d essentially walk until they got hit. Then they’d call in massive firepower and hope to kill as many of the enemy as possible. For a while during the summer of 2007 almost every major patrol in the Korengal Valley resulted in a firefight.

The trick for the Americans was to get behind cover before the enemy gunners ranged in their rounds, which usually took a burst or two. The trick for the enemy was to inflict casualties before the Apaches and the A-10s arrived, which often took half an hour or more. 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 A-10’s weapons are worse yet: Gatling guns that unload armor-piercing rounds at the rate of nearly 4,000 per minute. The detonations come so close together that a gun run just sounds like one long belch from the heavens.

Pretty much everyone who died in this valley died when they least expected it, usually shot in the head or throat, so it could make the men weird about the most mundane tasks. Only once did I know beforehand that we were going to get hit, otherwise I was: about to take a sip of coffee, talking to someone, walking about a hundred meters outside the wire, and taking a nap. 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. He never told the others what he’d done.

When a man is hit the first thing that usually happens is someone yells for a medic. Every soldier is trained in combat medicine—which can pretty much be defined as slowing the bleeding enough to get the man onto a MEDEVAC—and whoever is nearest to the casualty tries to administer first aid until the medic arrives. If it’s a chest wound the lungs may have to be decompressed, which means shoving a fourteen-gauge angiocatheter into the chest cavity to let air escape. Otherwise, air can get sucked into the pleural cavity through the wound and collapse the lungs until the man suffocates. A man can survive a bullet to the abdomen but die in minutes from a leg or an arm wound if the round hits an artery. A man who is bleeding out will be pale and slow-speaking and awash in his own blood. A staggering amount of blood comes out of a human being.

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. If you’re wounded and there’s no one else around, you have to do all this yourself. And you want to make sure you can do it all one-handed. When a soldier told me that, I unthinkingly asked him why. He didn’t even bother answering.

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. 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 to the KOP and Second Platoon took over. Temperatures over a hundred and the men working in full combat gear because they never knew when they were going to get hit. Some men swung pickaxes to break up the rock and other men shoveled the rubble into ammo cans and still others hoisted the cans over their heads and dumped them into an empty Hesco. Hescos are wire baskets with a moleskin lining that the U.S. military uses to build bases in remote areas. They measure eight feet cubed and can contain roughly twenty-five tons of rock or sand. It would take the men of Second Platoon an entire day to fill one to the top, and the plans called for thirty or so Hescos laid out in the shape of a big fishhook facing the enemy. Every time they filled a Hesco their world got a little bigger and every time they got into a firefight they realized where the next Hesco should go. They used plywood and sandbags to build a bunker for the .50 cal and ranged their cots against the southern wall because that was the only place that couldn’t get hit. When it rained they stretched tarps over the cots or just got wet and when it was sunny they crouched in the coolness of the .50 cal pit smoking cigarettes and telling their endless grim soldier jokes.

I once asked O’Byrne to describe himself as he was then.

“Numb,” he said. “Wasn’t scared, wasn’t happy, just fucking numb. Kept to myself, did what I had to do. It was a very weird, detached feeling those first few months.”

“You weren’t scared of dying?”

“No, I was too numb. I never let my brain go there. There were these boundaries in my brain, and I just never let myself go to that spot.”

I walk out to Restrepo a couple of weeks after the outpost was started, climbing two hours up the hill with Captain Kearney and a guy from headquarters who keeps throwing up because he’s not used to the heat. One soldier bets another twenty-five dollars that we’ll get hit with machine-gun fire on the last stretch before the outpost, which is wide open to Taliban positions to the south. We take that part one by one at a sprint and the guy loses his bet. Restrepo sits on a ridge and rides up the mountainside like freighter on a huge wave, the bow in the air and the stern, filled with the bunkers and communications gear, sitting heavily in the trough. There is a wall of Hescos facing south and a burnshitter enclosed by a supply-drop parachute and pallets of bottled water and MREs and of course stacks and stacks of ammunition: Javelin rockets and hand grenades and 203s and cases of linked rounds for the .50 and the 240 and the SAW. It seemed like there was enough ammo at Restrepo to keep every weapon rocking for an hour straight until the barrels have melted and the weapons have jammed and the men are deaf and every tree in the valley has been chopped down with lead.

When we arrive the men of Second Platoon are sitting on their cots behind the Hescos smoking cigarettes and slitting open pouches of MREs. There is no electricity at Restrepo, no running water, and no hot food, and the men will be up here for most of the next year. Propped above them is a plywood cutout of a man that Second Platoon uses to draw fire. The cutout is eight feet tall and has a phallus practically big enough to see from across the valley. The talk turns to an American base called Ranch House. Two weeks ago—right around the time Second Platoon was building Restrepo—eighty Taliban snipped the wires to the Claymores around the position, overran three guardposts, and were inside the wire practically before anyone knew what was happening. A platoon of Chosen Company soldiers was manning the base, and they’d gone through the first three months without getting into a single major firefight. They came spilling out of their hooches in their underwear throwing hand grenades and trying to put on their body armor. The Taliban were so close that the platoon mortarman had to shoot nearly straight up into the air to hit them; at one point he thought he’d miscalculated and mortared himself. A badly wounded specialist named Deloria found himself unarmed behind enemy lines and picked up a rock so that he could die fighting.

Video shot by a Taliban cameraman during the battle shows heavily armed fighters walking around the base as calmly as if they were organizing a game of cricket. The A-10s finally showed up and the platoon leader asked for a gun run straight through the base but the pilots balked. ‘You might as well because we’re all going to die anyway’—or something to that effect—the lieutenant yelled into the radio. The gun runs saved the base, but half the twenty American defenders were wounded in the fight, and the command started discussing how fast they could close the base down without having it look like a retreat. Word quickly got around that not only was the enemy unafraid to fight up close, they were willing to absorb enormous casualties in order to overrun an American position. There are small bases like Ranch House all over Afghanistan—they’re a cornerstone of the American strategy of engaging with the populace—but most of them are manned by only a couple of squads. Tactically speaking, that is not an insurmountable obstacle to a Taliban commander who has a hundred men and is willing to lose half of them taking an American position. Restrepo was the most vulnerable base in the most hotly contested valley of the entire American sector. It seemed almost inevitable that, sooner or later, the enemy was going to make a serious try for it.