Sebastian Junger - War

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.